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teacupfulofstarshine · 3 years

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LOVELY, DARK, AND DEEP CHAPTER 10

PLEASE HEED THE CONTENT WARNINGS!!! this chapter features Evil Scientist Lady and her Fucked Up WorldView a LOT, and there are also some Major Plot Events that involve Violence. i will put a summary in the end notes if you decide at any point that this particular chapter is too much - that's super valid! i will also mention here that no main characters are going to die in this story and no one dies in this chapter either.

huge huge thanks to @flamingfawkes for beta’ing!

CW: extreme disregard for human life, mentioned human and animal cruelty, toxic workplace environment, violence (both imagined and actual, mildly graphic), gun mention, minor blood, death threats, extremely unethical character, unethical science, stalking

chapter 1 // chapter 2 // chapter 3 // chapter 4 // chapter 5 // chapter 6 // chapter 7 // chapter 8 // chapter 9 // read it on ao3!

“This is the same result we’ve gotten the last twenty times -”

“I don’t care, Steven, run it again!”

Steven sighs, punching at the keyboard to run the statistical analysis sequence again. “This is ridiculous! I’ve run this sequence so many times it feels like my eyes are going to bleed. Why can’t we just turn in the results we have and -”

“Because she’ll behead us,” James snaps, “and then she’ll destroy our reputations and our families and they’ll get no severance. I have three young children at home, Steven, I need this money.” Steven softens a little, fingers running smoothly over the keys as he combs the data again. Next to him, James has a computer screen full of frame-by-frame stills of what little data they recovered from the probe before it was destroyed; Penny across the room is surrounded by ancient texts a mile high and at least three laptops.

“Why is she so interested in this, anyway?”

“It’s beyond me. Since when do we question the whims of what we’re told to do?”

Steven squints at the screen, pushing his chair back and rubbing at his eyes. “If I have to stare at these numbers for one more second, my brain is going to explode. I feel like my eyeballs are going to melt out of my skull. I wanna scream.”

James pulls up another image, staring at the blurry image of the merman before him. Steven pushes away from his own screen and squints at James’s. The merman in the photo looks young, not much older than his kid brother, but they don’t know anything about the lifespan of these creatures. He looks confused, squinting at the camera. As James flicks through the stills, the merman transitions from confused to angry to enraged, and then he attacks.

“He’s not happy about the camera.”

“Would you be happy about someone spying on you and your family?” James says, switching to the next still.

“I wouldn’t be happy if I thought someone was doing anything we do in this lab to me or my family.” James elbows Steven, but luckily no one else seems to have heard.

“This lab isn’t the most ethical place I’ve ever worked, but it pays the bills,” James mutters. “And we’re not even in the experimentation lab. We just do data analysis. We’re removed from the situation.”

Are we? Steven wonders. He sees James reach out and touch the framed picture of his daughters, and keeps his mouth shut. He turns back to his computer, watching the little spinning color wheel of his mouse as the program calculates the same numbers again and again. The results come up identical to the previous ones, and Steven clicks “Run Program” again wordlessly.

They work in silence for a while, the three of them, broken only by James’s muttering and the occasional thud of one of Penny’s books and the clicks of keyboards and mice. If they weren’t so reliant on technology, Steven thinks, there would be an enormous corkboard spanning three of the four walls, covered in pushpins and handwriting and red string connecting images. He debates actually building one, if only to increase the levity in the room, but decides against it.

He’s seen people punished or fired or who-knows-what-else for far less, after all.

Instead, after his program tells him for the twenty-third time that his results are the same (and didn’t someone say insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results?), Steven scrubs at his eyes with the heels of his palms and opens the data entry window. Maybe the problem with the results has to do with the entry of the data; did he input something wrong? It’s possible . . .

Here he goes again, he supposes. He stands up, stretches, and leans back to crack some vertebrae. “I’m gonna grab a coffee, take a short screen break, and go back to the beginning. Maybe there’s something in the input that I missed. You want anything?”

James groans, thunking his head against the desk. “I want something with enough caffeine to kill three elephants, please.” Steven nods, looking over at Penny. She shakes her head, and he heads for the shitty coffee machine a few doors down.

Several floors below, a young woman pulls her lab goggles up to rest on top of her head with her perfectly-pinned protocol-compliant bun. “The latest round of tests is completely done, ma’am. I think you’ll find the efficacy . . . striking.”

She takes the clipboard, glossy perfectly-painted nails pinching the sheets of thin paper and flicking between them. “I’m afraid I don’t do so well with the scientific side of things - Kathleen, was it? Explain this to me, would you?”

“Certainly, ma’am. As you know, the kill time for the most effective neurotoxin currently available, tetrodotoxin, varies from thirty minutes to four hours. Average time for symptoms to manifest is seventeen minutes, and from there the symptoms progress through tingling of the lips and tongue, headache, vomiting, muscle weakness, ataxia, et cetera. Death occurs as a result of respiratory or heart failure, and the poison is nearly undetectable if you do not specifically test for it.”

“The untraceability is a plus, but that is far too wide a range of times, and too slow a time even at its fastest.”

“Of course, ma’am, but as far as naturally-occurring marine poisons go - actually, as far as naturally-occurring poisons go, full stop - it is the most effective. Until now, that is.”

“Oh? What are your findings?”

“Which trials would you like to start with, ma’am?”

“The human trials, Kathleen. The only ones that matter. I hardly intend to go around killing mice and hoping that no one traces their deaths to a novel neurotoxin.” She laughs airily, and Kathleen nods along.

“Certainly, ma’am. The most recent data points indicate an average efficacy time of thirteen minutes for our compound neurotoxin, with a full range between nine and seventeen minutes passing before subject death. Subjects began to show symptoms around five minutes, give or take twenty-five seconds.”

“And those symptoms were?”

Kathleen flips through the document. “Seizures, vital organ failure, blindness, painful muscle spasms, suffocation from the inside out.”

She hums, tapping a manicured finger against the report. “Well, Kathleen, that is certainly impressive, especially for a preliminary human subject trial. These results . . . I must say, they are not nearly as disappointing as I anticipated when I came down here.”

“Ma’am?”

“How long have you worked for this company, Kathleen?”

“Almost five years, ma’am, but I’ve always been an assistant. This is my first time as lead researcher and biochemist on a project, ever since you . . . laid off the previous lead researcher.”

“Kathleen, let me be frank. These results are not what I hoped for. The efficacy time and symptom onset times are both far too long for my liking, and the range of efficacy time is too broad. By all accounts, I should consider this a failure.” Kathleen swallows, but remains poised. “However, you’ve managed to shave off a considerable amount of time from the tetrodotoxin readings. The range of symptom onset time is an acceptable breadth, and your results are far beyond anything your predecessor ever accomplished for me. This is truly impressive, all things considered.”

“Thank you, ma’am. How should I proceed?”

“I want the efficacy doubled - tripled - I want it upped by anywhere between four and five hundred percent. I want the pain increased, too. Feel free to increase your requests for test subjects, but get me the results I want. You said the original tetrodotoxin was untraceable?”

“That’s correct, ma’am.”

“Can you keep that feature intact?”

“As of right now, it is intact, ma’am. I will endeavor to keep it so in future experiments.”

“That’s what I like to hear. Welcome to your new position as head of this research division. Don’t let me down.” She holds out a slender hand, and Kathleen takes it, trying not to seem too eager.

“I won’t, ma’am.”

“How soon can you start this experiment up again?”

“The cleaners should be finished by tomorrow morning, ma’am, and I can tweak chemical formulas until then.”

“Excellent.” Her watch beeps, and she lifts it, pursing her bright lips as she examines the message she’s just received. “If you’ll excuse me, I have another matter to attend to. Someone will drop off your master access key for Lab Three within the hour.”

She steps into the elevator and lifts her watch up to her face, swiping through the messages from her secretary. One finger reaches out to press the button for the digital analysis labs floor, and the other taps away at her watch.

When she steps off the elevator, her secretary is waiting. “Ma’am.”

“What do they have for me?”

“Unclear. They said it was something they wanted to report directly to you and you alone, but it seems to be something big.”

“Hopefully it’s a big step in the right direction, or they’ll be taking a big step out of a job.” She relishes in the way the employees she passes all unfailingly flinch and then snap to perfect attention when they hear the sharp echo of her heels against the floor. She lifts her head and walks faster, striking the tiles with her heels like a gavel, sharp and precise against a judge’s desk.

The computer labs are disorganized when she enters, but there is a string of promising-looking numbers on the main display monitor. There is a woman surrounded by books and a man pulling up photos on his computer, and there is a third man standing in front of her like a toy soldier. She focuses on that one.

“I hear you have news for me? Make it swift, and make it good.”

He swallows, hard, and her eyes idly trace the line of his throat. If he disappoints her, perhaps she will drive her heel through it, to make an example of him. That would be far too messy; perhaps his dominant hand will do.

“I have narrowed down the location of the missing net, ma’am. I believe it to have washed up somewhere around these general GPS coordinates.” He fiddles with a remote in his hand, and the image on the screen changes. It shows an aerial satellite view of a secluded strip of beach, framed by rocky cliffs with larger rocks studded out into the open water. “It should have washed up somewhere in this one-point-three-seven-mile strip of beach. The whole area is property of one Doctor Thomas Sanders.”

She snarls. “That man. He won’t let us on that beach willingly until hell freezes over.”

The other man, the one scanning through photo stills and video footage, jumps up, knocking his chair backwards. “I found something!”

She turns towards him, and his excitement freezes and sputters into something much more controlled and terrified. “Show me.” He clicks something and pulls up video footage from one of their surveillance drones, zooming in on a particular patch of ocean along the stretch of Sanders’ beach. Her eyes widen when she sees what he’d noticed - a hump of red-and-white tail arcing above the waves before a pattern of ripples streaks off towards the cliff. He pauses the footage, rewinds it, uses a laser pointer to show an opening concealed in the cliff face.

“There’s some kind of grotto in there, hidden by the cliff. It’s on Sanders’ property, he has to know it’s there. And it looks like the merman from the destroyed drone knows it’s there too. Which means -”

“That must be where he’s keeping them.” Something burns in her chest, brilliant and terrifying and all-encapsulating, like wildfire. “We’ve found them, at long last.”

“What would you have me do?” her secretary asks. “I can arrange for a recovery squad at your earliest possible convenience, ma’am.”

“Assemble the squad, but do not have them move out. They will wait for my orders. When they go, you are to go with them.” Her secretary nods, once, sharp and sure. “Dispatch a crew to Lab One and clear it out. I want it prepped for containment, vivisection, chemical tests - the works. Get at least three tanks set up and one strap-down human table.”

“A human table, ma’am?”

“Yes. We have to deal with Sanders once and for all to ensure that he does not ruin any future experiments.”

“Will we be taking him as well?”

She hums thoughtfully. “No. Pull up the file we have on his known associate?”

A few swift clicks and flicks and a photo appears on the large screen: a young man with brown-and-purple hair, sleeves rolled up, carefully lowering a perfectly viable specimen into the ocean and letting it go, like some kind of fool. “His doctoral student, ma’am. The longest one he’s ever kept - this one has been with him a few years.”

“Excellent. When you raid the lab, take him.”

“Should we kill Sanders?”

“No. Rough him up a little, but leave him alive. Taking his protégé and leaving him alone, helpless to rescue him, will be the highest form of torture for such an insufferable person. The agony will eat him alive until his dying day.”

Her secretary nods, taking the notes down dutifully. The other employees look vaguely horrified, but she pays them no mind. No sacrifice is too great to be made in the name of progress, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a weakling who will never get anywhere in life.

She refuses to be one of those weaklings.

*~*~*~*~*

Logan wakes up confused.

He’s warm, warmer than he thinks he’s ever been in his whole life. When he stirs, he moves farther than he meant to - he must not be underwater. That’s enough to send a jolt of concern through his sleep-addled brain. Why isn’t he underwater? Why was he sleeping if he was above the surface? There’s no way his dad is here, and Roman hates surfacing, where are they? Where is he? But he’s so comfortable . . .

Someone shifts beside him, an arm draping across his waist, and Logan forces his eyes open. He shifts his lower half, confused when two things move instead of one, and there are layers upon layers of thin, flat, soft things wrapping around him. What is happening?

Slowly, slowly, his mind clears, and he remembers the events of last night. He grew legs - he was a human, once, before he was mer - he couldn’t sleep underwater with Dad and Roman - Virgil was teaching him to walk - Virgil put “clothes” on him - Virgil was embarrassed that he didn’t have those “clothes” on him - Virgil took him out of the lab to sleep - Virgil agreed to cuddle him since his pod couldn’t -

Logan feels the strange burning in his face again as he shifts. He can’t see well in this new human form, but when things are close enough to his face they’re relatively clear. And Virgil, still sleeping, is close enough that Logan can smell him - he smells like salt water mixed with something sharp and something sweet and something else that Logan can’t quite identify but finds addicting nonetheless. Sunlight streams in and pools around Virgil’s face, illuminating the tangled mess of hair spread around him and flopping into his face, the small puddle of water leaking out from his open mouth onto the soft thing he’s resting his head on, the way his chest moves slowly with every breath. His arm is wrapped around Logan, pulling him close. Logan thinks he might explode if he focuses on this any more, so he rolls from his side to his back as carefully as he can, not wanting to wake Virgil. Virgil tightens his arm around Logan and mutters something indecipherable in his sleep, but he doesn’t wake.

Rather than focusing on his very confusing feelings for the very pretty man next to him, Logan focuses on what he can see of the room around him. He makes a list in his mind of things that he plans to ask Virgil about later today, including:

1: There are many draws attached to the small, smooth cliffs surrounding them. How do they stay there?

2: There are lots of “clothes” scattered all around the floor, and there were several on the bed, too. Is that normal for humans?

3: Last night, Virgil did something that made the room light up with trapped sunlight! How did he do that?

4: How did Virgil get ice to stay in those big frozen sheets in such a warm place to let the sunlight in?

5: How did Virgil make ice into that weird shape that he filled with water and drank last night?

6: How did Virgil get the water to come into this place?

7: Do all humans have a specific area set aside for sleeping? Logan and his pod usually just sleep wherever they can, but Virgil seems to have this soft slab set aside with all of these soft things to be comfortable and sleep in every night. Is this a Human Thing or strictly a Virgil Thing?

Logan looks out through the sheet of ice that protects Virgil’s area from the outside and gasps. He can’t see well, but there’s a glittering expanse of blue that shifts and moves and oh, is that the ocean?

He’s spent his whole life (well, his whole remembered life, anyways) in the ocean, and he’s seen some truly wondrous things. He travels around the world with his pod, he knows the ocean is big, but seeing it spread out like this is . . . awe-inspiring. Logan has never seen the ocean like this, and now that he has he doesn’t think he can ever not see it like this again. It’s like a perfect sheet of sea-glass, rippling and unbroken but dynamic in a way that he never really gets a sense of when he’s beneath it.

He knows that there are waves, of course. There are smaller swells out on the open ocean, and larger ones when the Second Goddess dips her fingers down from the Upper Ocean and swirls the storms to a thundering burst. There are waves along the shoreline, ones that he frolics in with Roman and batter him against the shoreline. There are waves created when he or his pod members surface. But watching the movement of the ocean from up here is . . .

Even with his imperfect vision, he is completely at a loss for words as he stares at the ocean.

Eventually, Virgil stirs next to him, and Logan turns away from the ocean to stare at him. Virgil is close to him, arms wrapped tightly around him, face pressed against him. Logan’s eyesight is not great, but Virgil is close enough that he can pick out little details of his face. There are brown face scales scattered all over him, but they seem to cluster on his nose and his cheeks. Logan has wanted to touch them for a substantial amount of time, and he can’t stop himself from gently settling the tips of his fingers over Virgil’s cheek.

His face doesn’t feel like Logan was expecting. The scales don’t give texture to his face the way that Logan’s do; the skin is smooth and flat. There are little bumps all over, but the brown scales aren’t raised off the skin like Logan expected. He lets his fingers trail along Virgil’s face. His bone structure seems to be exceedingly similar to Logan’s, at least in regards to his head. Logan’s finger rests gently on the curve of bone under Virgil’s eye, and Virgil exhales warm breath onto his palm.

Logan wonders what it would be like to have this for longer than just his recovery period. He wonders what it would be like to wake up next to Virgil all the time, to get to run his hands over Virgil’s face and arms and chest and examine the differences between their anatomy. He wonders what it would be like to learn to walk without falling over, and he feels a sharp, unexpected twinge in his chest as he realizes that getting better at walking means no more closeness to Virgil.

His chest feels strange, like there’s a school of small fish swarming around and tickling his insides and making him feel all foamy, like the froth churned up by a windswept sea. He feels like he does when he’s underwater - free, weightless, mobile, limited by nothing except his own imagination. He feels unstoppable.

Virgil makes a sudden, sharp inhale, blinking his eyes open slowly. Logan thinks that, perhaps, he might not appreciate being studied unknowingly - he hadn’t appreciated Virgil doing it, before he understood what was happening, when all he knew was the loss of his pod aching like a scraped-out seashell. As Virgil wakes up, Logan shifts, turning his gaze to the rest of the room.

Virgil makes a sleepy grumbling noise, opening one eye. Logan chances another quick glance at him, and when his eye slides open Logan is struck by its beauty. He doesn’t get much of a chance to admire it, however, before Virgil is jolting backwards like Logan’s struck him with lightning. Logan is confused, reaching out and gently touching his shoulder. “Virgil?”

“Wassat?! Wait . . . L’gan?”

“It is me,” Logan says softly. “Are - are you upset with me?”

Virgil yawns, jaw dropping to his chest, revealing a flash of teeth and a soft pink tongue. (Logan wants to lick it. Why does Logan want to lick it? Why is Logan thinking about Virgil’s tongue licking his tongue - why is Logan thinking about Virgil - what in the Seven Oceans is happening to him.) “Wh - no, no, ‘m okay, I just - woke up, forgot I had you with me, got confused about another person in my bed.” Before Logan can start to feel bad, Virgil adds, “S’okay if it’s you, though,” and the foamy, floaty feeling is back.

“Did you sleep well?”

Virgil laughs, low and rumbling, and Logan can feel it in his fingers where he touches Virgil’s skin. “I never sleep well.” He sits up, and the fabric of his pajamas shifts to let Logan see stretches of soft, supple skin that he usually doesn’t. Logan wants to touch it. He very determinedly keeps his hand on Virgil’s shoulder. “Gotta admit, though, last night was . . . better than usual.”

This appears to be the point where Virgil first notices their position - pressed together, arm slung over Logan, basically cuddling the way that Logan normally would with his pod. (No tangle with his pod has ever felt this . . . electric, this charged, this important to Logan before.) His face flares a brilliant red, and he shifts like he wants to move away but -

“I’m sorry,” Virgil says. “Am I making you uncomfortable?”

“No!” Logan blurts out. Virgil blinks at him a little, and maybe he was a little overly enthusiastic, but - “I sleep in a tangle with Dad and Roman all the time. I have extreme difficulty sleeping without contact with someone else. It . . . helped me greatly.”

“Oh,” Virgil says, face turning redder still, smiling shyly. “That - makes me feel better. Thanks, Lo.”

Logan smiles, and Virgil smiles too, reaching up to gently move a piece of hair away from his face. Logan thinks that, as far as deaths go, his chest exploding (which seems to be getting more and more likely every fifteen seconds he spends in Virgil’s presence, only accelerated by all this skin-on-skin contact they’re having right now) seems to be the most pleasurable.

Virgil opens his mouth to say something, but whatever it was is interrupted by a Ping! noise from across the room. “What is that?” Logan asks. Virgil, sadly, untangles himself from Logan and the blankets, sliding out of bed and heading over to one of the other structures in the room (what did he call it last night? Dex?) and picking up a flat glowing rectangle.

“Is everything alright?”

“What? Yeah, yeah, I - Thomas sent me a text, it’s a little weird.”

“What is a text?”

“It’s a kind of human messaging system, it allows us to communicate when we’re far away from each other.”

“Like a pod call?” “Kind of? I’ll explain more later, I promise, I just - I gotta go down to the lab real quick.”

“I’ll come with -”

“No!” Virgil snaps. Logan flinches, and Virgil softens, crossing the room and gently touching his shoulder. “Hey, no, Logan, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to snap at you. I just - this message, there’s something off. I think something might be wrong, and I don’t want to put you in any unnecessary danger. Just - wait here, okay? Wait in my room, where it’s safe. It’s probably nothing, he’s probably fine, but on the off chance that he’s not, I want you to stay hidden safely up here.”

Logan isn’t sure why this makes his face heat up slightly, but it does. “Okay. I accept your apology, and I . . . trust you.”

Virgil smiles, soft and heartwarming, and Logan is beginning to give more credence to his “chest explosion is fine, actually” theory. “Wait for me here, okay? I’ll be right back. I promise.”

He leaves, shutting the door firmly behind him, and the foamy feeling in Logan’s chest dissipates a little. He can’t quite put his finger on it, but there’s something . . . off. If Logan didn’t know better, he’d think that he was sensing a predator approaching.

But that can’t be right, he isn’t underwater. His danger senses are likely just overreacting to his disappointment at Virgil’s absence.

. . . Right?

*~*~*~*~*

Thomas is beginning to regret letting Roman and Patton (specifically, Roman) out of the large tank before finishing his first coffee of the morning.

“I want some!” Roman complains.

“Do you even know what it is?” Thomas says. Roman pouts sulkily at him.

“. . . No,” he mutters, rolling his eyes. Thomas gives him the deadpan, no-nonsense, I-am-your-direct-superior-take-the-damn-samples-Virgil stare that he has perfected over the past few years. Roman wilts a little more, and Thomas feels slightly bad.

“It’s called coffee,” he says. “It’s a hot drink that lots of people have in the morning. Some people drink it plain, and some people add things to it to change the way it tastes. It helps me wake up more and get focused to start my day, and sometimes I drink it late at night to help keep me awake.”

Roman looks less like a kicked puppy and more like Logan, eyes wide and curious. “I want some!”

Thomas, taking a sip of his own two-seconds-of-cream-five-cubes-of-sugar coffee, nearly spits it out. He looks at Roman, eyes the very sharp, very detachable, very toxic spines covering his body, and says, “No.”

Roman’s demeanor changes entirely, switching from “curious toddler” to “toddler about to throw a temper tantrum” in a heartbeat. “Why not?!”

“Because when people drink coffee without being used to it, sometimes it makes them a little crazy.”

“I’m not crazy!”

“Do I need to recount to you how many times you’ve threatened me and my assistant since we met you?” Thomas says, raising an eyebrow. “I’m not giving you coffee until I know I can trust you not to stab me with your poisonous spines that cover your entire body and can be fired at people.”

Roman pouts more, dropping under the water and letting out a gratingly harmonious string of mer that Thomas is pretty sure translates to Roman bitching about the coffee situation to his dad. Based on the pattern of Patton’s response, he’s pretty sure Patton is laughing at Roman.

More sulky chalkboard-violin music, and then Roman resurfaces grumpily. “Dad agrees with you and says no consuming strange human foods.”

“Did he laugh at you?”

Roman squints suspiciously at him. “You can’t speak our language.”

“Yeah, but I know what it sounds like when a dad laughs at his kid.” Roman, continuing to pout, sinks back into the tank, presumably to sulk some more. Thomas takes another very long sip of coffee that is definitely too hot for his mouth and turns back to his desk.

Virgil should definitely be awake and in the lab at this point. The samples he’s supposed to be analyzing are sitting in their little tubes, each neatly labelled with locations and dates and times and what, specifically, Virgil is supposed to be looking for. Thomas considers going upstairs and waking up Virgil, who’s almost never been late for work in this way, but he decides against it. Virgil is upstairs with Logan, and Thomas knows that there’s something building between them. He’s not sure how advisable that something is, but he trusts Virgil to make his own decisions.

Besides, he could probably use some practice. His water sample analysis skills are pretty rusty, he’s had Virgil doing them for years. “Virgil, you owe me big time for what I’m doing for you.” He carefully shifts the samples over to his own desk, slides his earbuds in, picks up a pipette, and gets to work analyzing the bacterial and algal concentrations for any abnormalities.

Thomas accomplishes about forty-five minutes’ worth of work before Roman interrupts him by flicking water at him and soaking the back of his neck. “Hey!”

“I tried your name, but your little ear bug things were keeping you from hearing me,” Roman says smugly. Thomas, not for the first time, considers retreating to the closet and throwing beakers until he feels better.

“Can I help you?”

“Dad wants to go hunting and bring back breakfast, but we can’t leave without you.”

“Are you not going hunting?”

“I’m going to stay here and observe you,” Roman says.

Thomas blinks. “Do I . . . need observing?”

“How do I know you won’t sell us out to your little human friends the second you get a chance? If I’m here, I can stop you. Plus, what if you do something to Logan while we’re not here to protect him? No, no, I’m staying right where I am and you can’t make me leave.” His spines ripple; Thomas steps closer to a whiteboard in case he needs to duck.

“I’m not going to do that, and I don’t want you to stab me.”

“Still! I’m staying here! Also, Dad’s bigger than me, and he’s a better hunter cause he’s faster and he’s been hunting longer.

“Does he need something to help him carry all those fish?” Thomas asks. Roman opens his mouth like he’s going to say something snarky, pauses, and stops.

“I . . . usually we just eat what we catch when we catch it. We make a pile of prey and take turns guarding it while the other two hunt. Then we make a sacrifice to the Seven Mother Goddesses and eat what’s left.”

After some debate, Thomas is able to fashion a sling of sorts from some waterproof tarps and leftover anchor rope to tie around Patton’s body. “You can put the fish in this pouch and carry them back here. Will you be able to navigate your way back to the grotto?”

“He will,” Roman says. “Dad knows more about the ocean than any human possibly could.” Another discordant song from the tank, chastising, and Roman huffs. “Dad wants me to reassure you that he’ll be fine.”

Patton settles into the mobile tank easily, and Thomas gets him down to the grotto leading towards the sea. “When you come back, let out one of your pod calls and Virgil or I will come and collect you and your catch. Take as much time as you need, okay?”

Patton reaches up and gently pats Thomas’s arm with one large, damp hand, and Thomas takes that to mean an agreement. “Alright, off you go.” There’s a whoosh and a rush of water as it flows from the tank into the grotto in a clean arc, carrying Patton with it. Thomas waits for a moment, letting Patton disappear into the open ocean, before returning to the laboratory.

Roman, for the most part, ignores Thomas. He asks the occasional question, which Thomas tries to answer in a way that he’ll understand, and leans over the edge of his touch tank, eyes guarded. Every time Thomas sneaks a glance, when he thinks Roman isn’t looking, his expression is wide-eyed and wondrous, like Logan’s usually are, but the moment he realizes Thomas is watching him his entire face closes up like a clamshell.

Thomas wonders what it’ll take to get Roman to trust him, trust Virgil, trust any human. Granted, he doesn’t know Roman’s history with humans, but he and Patton are both fairly scarred, and Thomas might not know the whole story but he’d bet a not-insignificant amount of his monthly income that the giant starburst scar taking up the majority of Patton’s chest isn’t the result of a clash with a marine creature.

He works quietly, fielding the occasional question, keeping one ear on the grotto tunnel for Patton’s return. He’s not sure how long he expected Patton to be gone, but he hears movement in the grotto tunnel far sooner than he’d expected.

“Thomas, what’s -”

“Shhhh,” Thomas says. He stands up, pushing away from his desk, but before he can say anything else, there’s a flood of movement coming from the tunnel. Bodies pour into the lab, swift and strong and carrying weapons that they immediately train on Thomas and Roman.

“What is this?” Roman snaps, bristling. He sounds betrayed, like he thinks Thomas is behind this. Thomas picks up a heavy glass beaker, fully prepared to shatter it upside someone’s skull if necessary, but something heavy and hard strikes the back of his skull and he feels his knees crumple. Roman cries out, and Thomas struggles to push himself up. A hand fists itself in his hair and yanks him upright, sharply. Thomas exhales sharply through his teeth, but before he can start struggling, something cool and round rests against the back of his neck, shutting him up and shutting his brain down.

Roman is puffed up like a hedgehog, apparently fully prepared to defend Thomas despite his strong and inherent mistrust. Before he can begin to attack, Thomas hears the click-click-click of shoes on the hard stone floor. Whoever’s holding his head yanks him back again, and he is forced to watch as a woman walks into his laboratory.

(It sounds like the beginning of a bad joke - a sick, horrible, twisted joke.)

She has black heels, black tights, a black pencil skirt, a black blazer, and a blood-red blouse. Her hair is scraped back into a tight bun, pulled so taut it must hurt, and is held in place with a pitch black stick. She carries a - clipboard? tablet? Unclear - held against her chest, and there’s a sleek silver weapon in her right hand.

“The one from the video?” she asks.

“Affirmative, ma’am,” says the person holding Thomas’s head. The woman nods, lifting her weapon, and fires at Roman. Thomas tries to scream a warning, earning himself another painful yank from his captor, but the projectile lodges itself in Roman’s shoulder anyway.

It isn’t a bullet, but something that looks like a small syringe. Roman swats it out of his shoulder, swaying a little, but it doesn’t stop him from swiping at the - mercenary, they must be - who tries to grab him with his elbow spines. The woman frowns, lifts the weapon - some kind of tranquilizer gun? - and fires again.

Roman screams, inhuman and animal, and tears the newest dart from his arm, throwing himself out of his tank and clinging to the nearest mercenary. His teeth tear into the man’s shoulder, spines piercing through his camouflage clothing and flooding him with neurotoxin. The man collapses against the concrete, alive but unconscious, and Roman snarls at the next man as though daring him to approach. He sways, weakened but awake, and bares his teeth.

“Of course,” the woman says, tapping something on her tablet. “His naturally produced neurotoxin must be providing him with some level of natural resistance. Unexpected, but not a limitation.”

It takes three more tranquilizer darts before Roman finally slumps down into his tank, unconscious. The mercenaries look hesitant to approach him, but the woman reaches for her tablet and they scramble to action at once.

“No - no, stop, let him go, he’s not an animal for you to cart off to your lab -” Thomas starts. The man holding him knees him sharply in the back and he cries out, coughing.

They wrap Roman in thick leather bands, roughly shoving his spines flat and binding them against his skin so that he can’t attack them again. The woman nods, once, short and sharp, and they drag Roman away, letting his head bang mercilessly on the ground. Thomas catches a glimpse of a logo - emblazoned on the back of the jackets, on the back of the woman’s tablet, on the side of her tranquilizer gun - and commits it to memory. He’s going to need it, if he gets out of here alive.

“- your phone,” the woman says, and oh, when did she get in front of him.

“My what?”

His mouth runs dry as she places the tranquilizer gun under his chin, barrel pressing against his throat, and tips his chin up. “I said, give me your phone.”

Thomas blinks. “My - the desk. It’s on the desk.”

She sets her tablet down, picks up his phone, and shoves it in his face. “Open it.”

“I - wh -”

“Unlock your phone, Dr. Sanders. Must I repeat myself a third time?” She rolls her eyes. “Doctorates are wasted on people like you.”

Thomas numbly punches in his passcode, and she swipes through to his messages app, frowning before turning the screen towards his face to reveal a message thread with Virgil. “Is this your assistant?”

Thomas glares at her, he’s not going to give her what she wants, he’s not going to just give her Virgil but then the - gun, it must be a gun, what else would they be holding against his neck like this - pushes into him harder, and it’s probably bruising, and he can’t get himself killed here because then he definitely won’t be able to take care of Virgil and -

“Yes,” Thomas says, hating himself for giving in so easily. “What do you -”

She turns away from him, nails clicking against his phone screen as she sends a text message - to Virgil, presumably, and that makes his heart sink like a stone - before dropping it on the floor and stepping on it to shatter it. “I have a message for you.”

“A - what?”

“Did they really hit you that hard, or were you this stupid before we came here?” she says coldly, picking up the tablet again and tapping at the screen. Thomas groans as the man yanks him to his feet, shoving him onto his chair and pulling a roll of duct tape out of one of his multiple pants pockets. He tapes Thomas’s wrists and ankles to the chair, keeping his weapon trained on Thomas’s temple at all times, before pressing it roughly against his head and gripping his hair again.

The woman sets the tablet on his lab table, and the screen flickers to life, and then there’s a woman in front of a dark black backdrop, smiling at him like a cat who’s caught a canary. “Thomas Sanders. How long I’ve waited for this day.”

Thomas recognizes her. He knows he recognizes her. She used to be his classmate, before . . .

His head hurts, so badly that he can barely keep his eyes open, and the memory slips away. “You . . . why are you doing this?”

“Why? Because I am a real scientist, unlike you. You refuse to do what is necessary, what must be done for the progression of the species. The sacrifice of some worthless animals is necessary for humanity to reach its zenith. You would really hinder the entire human race for the preservation of lower life forms?”

“Wh - I -”

“You think that ‘preserving the ecosystem’ and ‘keeping animals alive’ makes you a good scientist, but it makes you weak. You are weak, Thomas Sanders, and if the world was left in the hands of people like you, the human race as we know it would die out in a few centuries. Fortunately, there are people like me, who understand what must be done.”

“Caring about other people and things - it doesn’t - it doesn’t make you weak,” Thomas says, chest heaving, and the woman just laughs.

“One of many logical fallacies to which you subscribe, Thomas. They really gave you a doctorate? Of course caring makes you weak. All emotions make you weak. They corrupt your data and make your experiments worthless. You must be ruthless. You must be willing to do whatever it takes to pursue your goals and achieve the height of success. But no.” She rolls her eyes, face hardening, twirling a pen in her fingers. “You insist on ethics and principles and letting emotions cloud your judgement, and that makes you a failure as a scientist. It makes you weak. Your attachments will be your downfall.”

Thomas’s eyes slide shut, head pounding, and the man behind him yanks at his hair so sharply that he knows some has been ripped out. He forces his eyes open in time to see a smile slide across the woman’s face like a knife, teeth gleaming white as sun-bleached bone.

“You won’t - get away with this,” Thomas manages. He grinds his teeth together and curls his hands into fists, digging his nails into his palms to keep himself awake. “If you leave me alive -” Thomas, stop talking, why are you reminding her that she has the option to fucking kill you “- I will not rest until I find you. I’ll - you can’t -”

“You’ll what, Thomas? If you call the police, you’ll expose those creatures you’re so intent on protecting to the world. Are you really willing to take that chance?” Before Thomas can even begin formulating a response, she steamrolls him. “It doesn’t matter. Even if you were, I’m going to take some . . . insurance, shall we say.”

“Why not just kill me?” Thomas spits. Excellent idea, Doc, poke the murderous lady with a stick like a god damn hornet’s nest, the tiny Virgil in his brain hisses. Her smile, somehow, only widens, and that’s . . . that can’t be good, can it? Smiles are supposed to be good! They’re supposed to make you happy, but all Thomas feels is creeping dread and pain, so much pain, and -

Yeah. He’s . . . pretty sure he has a concussion.

“Because if I kill you, you get to take the easy way out. Your suffering will end. But unlike you, I don’t put limits on my science. I know how to cause you the maximum amount of pain.”

Thomas eyes the toxin gun, but the on-screen woman just laughs. “Not yet, Thomas. We need something from you, first.”

“You already took Roman,” Thomas says. “What more can you possibly take from me?”

“You named it? You’re even weaker than I thought.”

“He told me his name, he’s not an it, he’s not a thing for you to play with and - and I -”

There’s a strange sinking feeling in Thomas’s chest as the woman onscreen laughs. “I knew you were emotional, Thomas, but I can’t believe this! It looks like I’ll have more hanging over your head than you thought.”

“You -”

“Say, Tommy-boy, have you heard from your precious little assistant recently?”

Thomas’s entire body flushes ice-cold and then white-hot, immediately struggling against his duct tape bindings despite the man tearing at his hair and shoving the gun into his neck and snapping at him to shut up, shut up, shut the fuck up before I do something we’re both gonna regret -

“Don’t you touch him!” Thomas snaps. “If you hurt him, I swear to God -”

“You’re not in a position to be making demands, and if you don’t calm down, I’ll paint your boring little lab bright red.” Thomas freezes, holding his entire body tensed like electricity is running through his blood.

There are footsteps on the stairs. “Doc? I got your text, what’s -”

“Virgil, run!” Thomas chokes. Virgil comes around the corner, holding his phone, staring at the screen in confusion. He looks up, eyes widening in horror as he takes in the scene.

“You know what to do,” the woman onscreen says. The other woman lifts her tranquilizer gun, and Thomas is sure that he’s screaming, his mouth is open and sound is coming out but his blood is rushing through his ears and his heart is pounding like waves against a boat in rough sea and he can’t - he can’t -

Virgil turns to run, but the tranquilizer dart hits in him the back of the neck and he collapses like a sack of bricks. The woman lowers her gun and jerks her head at the two remaining conscious, unoccupied mercenaries, who step forward and grab Virgil.

“Let him go!” Thomas screams, and his throat feels raw and his chest feels raw and his wrists are rubbed raw and his soul feels hollow and raw, like he’s been scraped out with a jagged piece of metal and only an empty shell remains. Virgil’s head lolls against his chest as they drag him down the grotto tunnel, and Thomas struggles and screams and stares after them until Virgil is out of sight.

His face is damp, and his eyes are burning, and he isn’t sure if it’s blood from his head wound or tears or some strange, morbid mixture of both.

“The greatest torture of which I can conceive,” the woman onscreen says, and it takes him a moment to realize that oh, she’s talking to me, “is to leave you alive, knowing that your precious little protégé is with me, and that there is nothing you can do about it.” She leans forward, and any trace of a smile is gone. “If you try to come after me, I will kill him. If you call the authorities, I will kill him. I already found you, Thomas. Don’t think I’m not watching. If I catch so much as a whiff of you planning something, his blood will be on your hands. Do you understand me?”

Thomas, numb and shocked, can’t even respond. “Knock him out and bring the specimens back to me,” the woman onscreen says.

“Yes, ma’am.”

He doesn’t even feel the tranquilizer dart hit his neck, but he welcomes the sweeping darkness.

(Summary: Evil Scientist Lady has been spying on Thomas and she finds the entrance to the grotto where our mer friends have been hiding. She sends her assistant and several armed thugs to invade the lab, they drug Roman with tranquilizers and kidnap him. Thomas gets knocked around a lot and is mocked for being an ethical scientist and caring about people by Evil Scientist Lady and she gloats at him through Evil Facetime before kidnapping Virgil in the same way they did Roman, knocking Thomas unconscious, and leaving him tied to his lab chair. During this whole scene, Patton is out in the open ocean hunting and Logan is safely hidden in Virgil's room.)

#starshinewrites #lovely dark and deep #romantic analogical #sanders sides #platonic TLAMP

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whumpersdump · 3 years

Text

Project Rebirth - CH4: Final Touches

Content! From Whumper’s POV. (They’ll get a title soon btw, I just haven’t decided on a name yet).

[ Previous ] -- [ Masterlist ]

TW: (None of these are graphic) Restraints / blink-and-you-miss it use of “it” as a pronoun / dehuminization / non-con surgery (non-graphic, whumpee isn’t awake) / lab whump / pet whump / sedation / sensory deprivation (not from Whumpee’s POV) / brain-fiddling? (he talks of an implant that restricts basically everything from speaking to moving. It’s mentioned, not shown)

Everything is set for the first practical stage of Project Rebirth to begin. All that is need is some final surgical attention, and a last talk to Whumper’s new investors. Also no editing we die like Toby’s previous owner...

Whumper sat next to Subject One, like he had every moment of spare time in the past five days. The last two, they barely twitched a muscle. Of course this was in part because of the starvation, but it was nice to have achieved nonetheless. Even if would wear of. Their body may be still, but the occasional twitch, hitch of a breath, told him their mind was racing.

He already picked out a name for them. Their masterpiece, even if it would take nine months before he would see their frantic eyes again. Everything was prepared. Their nursery—which was a rather misleading name, but it fit the process, and the marketing—was almost done, the housing facility would be complete in three months.

Subject One was the only one who really needed to be in the container for the sake of the time that it would give Whumper, but the aspect fit the aesthetic his investors expected. It would be what kept the program running for decades to come.

Subject One shuddered. They’d gotten the message. He’d chosen one of his newly acquired sponsors to deliver it through the earpieces. Not because it needed to be. He could just as easily move, then sedate the subject. Make the chaos in their mind spike just before they’d awake in ominous calm. Comforting calm, though it would take a while for the subject to feel about in that way. They had nine months, it would be enough.

The sponsors needed to feel special anyway. Some of them could make perfect pets, the way they seemed to crave special attention. He could try it someday. With this Project, even they could be reborn.

He nodded at Toby. “Bring them to the surgeon. It’s time for stage 3.”

Toby exited the corner he’d been standing in for the past day. It was a test, to see how obedient he really was. So far, Whumper had been pleased. Sure, seeing pets shiver at the thought of accidentally moving a muscle without permission could be rewarding, but it didn’t bring the type of productivity he needed. Toby’s compliant personality, in combination with Whumper’s training, did.

Toby reached for the subject’s shoulder like he always did.

“Not anymore, Toby,” Whumper commanded. “No more touching of any kind. You can move them, tube and all.”

Toby obeyed. With precision, he took the hand truck out of place and rolled it over to the doors that opened to the medical wing. Subject One would feel this, but it wasn’t enough to skew the results. If anything, it could amplify the result he was looking for.

He followed behind Toby, but entered the door to the watching room instead of the OR like Toby did. That’s where his funding was waiting. He hated having to care about it, but money was simply necessary for him to scale up the Project. “Thank you for coming back,” he told the seven investors waiting for him. “As I’ve said before, most of the program is completely tailored to your pet and the pet you wish they become. That means, no program looks or feels the same. This part though, they all have in common.”

He guided their gazes down to the OR—where the surgeon had sedated the subject—and begun the procedure. Toby watched from his corner, as Whumper had told him to. This would be the only time he was allowed this close to a subject before Rebirth, so Whumper made sure he knew as much as possible. The pet didn’t lie. He used to, but his previous owner trained it out of him.

If he were to fulfill any purpose at all in the future, he would have to learn to. Knowing about the stages before meeting the Reborn subjects was a good way to teach them. After all, he’d be the one to truly push the subject’s minds over the edge.

The investors patiently waited for Whumper to explain what was happening. “The implant all subjects receive is what makes this project so realistic. Like a newborn child, they have to learn everything. Eating, speaking, resisting, if you want them to. All in an effort to recreate them into the pet they were always meant to be. Now of course, some of them have skills we do want them to keep. Take Toby down there, he’s a master on the piano. For each pet, the implant’s functions can be customized.”

One of the investors raised her hand. “What are your plans for this one then?” she asked. “Does it have anything worth keeping?”

Whumper smiled. “In a less dire situation, we might have chosen to keep certain parts of them, but as you’ve noticed this is not the average pet we’re talking about. They will be reborn a blank slate. The only thing any pets are allowed to keep is their understanding of language—so they can obey commands, and their ability form minimal amounts of coherent thought and memory. We’ve found that this process works best if to some extent, the pets are aware of the changes. A risk, I know, especially with this one, but it will prove efficient.”

He straightened his tie. “This one in particular has quite the mouth, and they tend to use a bit too much of what they hear against their trainers. For that reason, we’ve limited their access to their vocabulary a bit more than usual. They’ll be able to understand simple sentences, but we won’t have to worry about their natural perceptiveness.”

“What’s he doing to their eyes?” a second investor asked.

Whumper’s heart fluttered. He’d hoped they’d ask. “Those, are highly sophisticated remote-controlled lenses.” They weren’t necessary, they function was mostly aesthetical from the subject’s perspective. They helped make it all a bit more realistic on both sides, though.

“They don’t have to be removed, ever. Which is why we’re putting them in so early. They control the subject’s ability to see color, and light. Like them implant, we can control them from behind the scenes. They aren’t vital, but they smooth out the transition from the Rebirth into the following stages of the program.”

He glanced down into the OR, where the surgeon was finishing up, and the other staff had begun to prepare the subject for stage 4’s container. “I’m afraid that I can’t show you anymore at this point, so my staff can take on this challenge with as little distraction as possible. However I’m happy to answer as many of your questions as I can.”

Several hands shot up. Whumper smiled.

“What are they doing?” Was the first question.

Whumper gazed down. Four people were removing the restraints and the jacket, and outfitted the subject in the thin white suit that would help keep them healthy and alive throughout the following stage.

They connected the dozens of tubes and wires that would take care of everything they couldn’t handle from outside the container, as he called it. “I’m afraid this is another one of those trade secrets, but what I can tell you is that in spite of how it looks, this will make the pre-Birth stage as realistic as it can be.”

“What about these nurseries that your people kept going on about. I’m sure they’re important, but it all sounds a bit too… human for my taste. I prefer my pets are used to the necessary restraints and housing conditions, so to speak.”

Whumper nodded. He wasn’t surprised to hear this investor thought his standard approach too kind. She’d demanded her pets were kept muzzled and bound at the facility’s daycare, even though they were among the most compliant creatures he’d ever seen.

“As I said,” he answered. “Everything can be customized. This subject I believe, will gain more from approach that teaches them that as a placeable pet, they will be cared for as long they don’t resist. Should you trust us with your pets though, if we decide after the evaluation that another approach may achieve the desired results more efficiently, we’re prepared. We have nurseries of all kinds, and our staff is prepared to fulfill any role they need to play.”

That seemed to please them. Whumper turned to the last question.

“How long does this program take?”

“We have multiple options. The standard program Subject One will go through can take up to sixteen years starting at the Rebirth, with a minimum time of three years. Now of course, that is a long time for a pet to be away. We have two accelerated programs that last either a few months, or even just a few weeks. You’re free to choose, but after the evaluation we will provide you with a suggestion. Not all pets need the full experience. Especially if they’re not old enough to be placed, a longer program can harm the natural development.”

A frown formed on a few faces.

“I can see you’re worried about the results I’ve promised you. You won’t have to wait long. The program may be an intense procedure, but the results will start to show after just a few weeks. The rest of the Project is about making them last, so these—” He dangled the subject’s bright red collar in front of them— “will soon be no more than a reminder of what I’ve solved.”

Whumper clasped his hands. The subject was moved out of the OR, into the container hall. “I must go now. My assistant will be up shortly to escort you out. I should mention Toby’s not allowed to be too talkative around strangers, but he’s still learning. If he breaks any rules, please contact me. He doesn’t respond well to strangers punishing him, he’s a bit too loyal for that.”

Taglist (asks are open if you wanna be added or removed): @suspicious-whumping-egg

#whump #pet whump #non-con surgery tw #lab whump #Project Rebirth #Toby is next up #After that the 'creepy whumper' aspect is really going to start rolling #Also I should mention that 'pets' aren't just used as pets in this universe #Toby for example is a genuine lab assistant. Whumper doesn't care about pet beds and the like #There is a power dynamic and he longs to keep it in place. Period.#Doesn't mean he won't play the part though

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microsuedemouse · 3 years

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I think it's very cute the way Ben doesn't know anything. He's trying but he needs some help getting there.

hello I'm sorry it took me all day to answer this but every time I looked at it I knew it was gonna Get Me Going so I wanted to wait until I was sitting down at my keyboard with a few minutes to spare

the short response is: YOU'RE VERY CORRECT AND I COULD NOT AGREE MORE. Ben is dumb as a post 95% of the time and it's incredibly endearing. he's doing his best with this hero stuff, but his best does not involve any knowledge whatsoever. and that's fine, he's got plenty of heart to make up for it

(insert Tick reference here)

BUT ALSO. I hope you do not mind me going off on a character tangent here, friend, because I cannot talk about how dumb Ben is without thinking about how it informs the rest of his character and I have so many thoughts,,,

(quick sidebar: anyone who's been around for a single one of my hyperfixations knows this, but character is my shit. I don't normally feel the need to explain this but my Ben 10 posts seem to draw more attention/new people than most of my nonsense so I'm giving you this info as context. as someone with an English degree, as a lifelong story addict and storyteller, as a writer of both fanfic and original work - character is my biggest strength. analysing, picking apart, developing, whatever. and it's also the thing I can go on about forever.)

ANYWAY SO... Ben Tennyson knows nothing and it's wonderful.

I've mentioned before, while still watching the original series, that everything you need to know to understand Ben as a character is 'he's ten.' it literally completely explains him. even the smartest ten-year-olds in the world would still be dumb as shit if they suddenly had superpowers. he's a very average ten-year-old American boy when he finds the Omnitrix, and so in the process of learning to use it and be a hero... he's cocky and stupid. of course he is. he has moments of insight, because he's not incapable of learning, but mostly he's cocky and stupid because he's ten.

one of my very, very favourite things about Alien Force - which I'm now about halfway through - is the way that Ben is characterised. to me, it's so wonderfully done. because he's clearly changed! and if he hadn't I'd be frustrated, because it's been five years - five years during which every kid in the world goes through immense amounts of change. age ten to age fifteen? huge difference. I can tell you from experience: I transferred to an out-of-catchment school program from grades five through eight, meaning ages almost-ten to almost-fourteen (November birthday). when high school came around I returned to my own catchment and found myself amongst a ton of kids I'd known since kindergarten but not seen since we were nine, and the amount that everyone had changed was crazy.

Ben's growth between series is extremely believable to me. he's no longer stupid and cocky - he's not ten anymore. he often seems anxious, especially in the first season as they're searching for Max. everything about him feels very much, to me, like all the trauma that he experienced during the original series - and probably since! - has finally settled in, and he (and Gwen) has started to process that. his and Gwen's banter and friction is mostly gone; they're supportive of and close with one another now - like two kids who Went Through Some Shit together and have had to lean on each other as they began to deal with that. (I could go on a whole separate tangent about that implied growth they've done as a pair, but that would be a whole long-ass ramble of its own.)

as Ben becomes comfortable using the Omnitrix again, we start to see some of that dumbass overconfidence coming back out, but overall he's shed the cockiness of his childhood and grown into a teenager who's reasonably sure of and comfortable with himself with other people (e.g., the way he deals with Cash and JT now, as seen in The Gauntlet). but he's also still figuring out how to be a real hero, especially when the stakes are high, and he's not always as confident in that role. he does a good job of putting on the hero persona when he's in action and things need to be done, but in between we see him worrying about his capability at and suitability for that job.

but he also continues to be totally clueless. it shows differently from when he was a kid, a little because he's older, but largely because of how he's otherwise changed. that cocksure ten-year-old was too proud not to know what was going on, not to be right all the time! but his pride has mellowed out a lot, and he's developed a certain amount of genuine anxiety about his skills as a hero (as well as, apparently, a surprisingly healthy ability to talk about that anxiety). he's also only fifteen, and fifteen-year-olds are still dumb in much the same way that ten-year-olds are dumb. the brightest kids in the world are still incredibly dumb. again, I'm telling you from experience.

so we now have a Ben who can at times admit that he has no idea what's going on, which is so charming. we also have a Ben who, a lot of the time, doesn't even fully realise he has no idea what's going on, because he's distracted thinking about something else. I love how often the show cuts to shots of his face and you can practically see the loading bar behind his eyes as he tries to take in new information. like it just hasn't computed yet and you gotta wait a sec for it to sink in.

he's capable of cleverness sometimes, just like he was five years ago. but that's not his strength, honestly. we're actually repeatedly shown that his greatest strength is his heart: he's a compassionate and caring kid - he has lapses, like all teens do, but by and large he's a good guy. (this also, I think, makes a lot of sense with his off-screen development into a slightly more anxious, less certain young man. especially when you think about what a big influence Max has clearly been on his growth.)

Ben is a true blue 'pure of heart, dumb of ass' hero, and I'm just so constantly charmed with how it's executed. I have plenty of nitpicks with the show's writing that I'm sure I'll get around to yammering about eventually, but the character writing for Ben Tennyson is golden and so far I'm a huge fan.

holy shit this post got long - apologies lol, but thanks to anyone who bothers to read it!! ily.

#Ben10 #Courtney watches Ben 10 #long post #tldr: Ben is dumb and adorable and I love him

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missmentelle · 3 years

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Hi MM/Bee! I'm a recent college graduate. I always worked hard in school and I matured a lot at college, but I'm realizing how low my self-esteem is. I'm obsessing over the things I haven't done/accomplished, scholarships I never applied for, my body image, my high school days, "not being as successful as my high school class", an old crush who I never talked to (who is already super successful), and some days I feel like I messed up my life beyond repair. How do I work on self-love? Thank you!

For starters, I think it’s important for you to know that you aren’t the only person feeling this way. I get similar questions all the time, often from people who aren’t even out of their 20s yet. It isn’t even remotely true that you need to achieve wild success by age 25 or you’ve wasted your life, but I can understand why so many people feel that way.

Our culture is dangerously obsessed with productivity, youth and achievement, to the point that it is actively making all of our lives miserable. It’s not hard to understand where people get this idea that they’re failing in life if they aren’t a 20-something well-travelled millionaire - that is the message our culture throws in our faces all the time - and it’s so unbelievably untrue. We compile “top 30 under 30″ lists, celebrate incredibly young performers and entertainers, and hold up extremely high-achieving lifestyles as something that every one of us needs to be striving for, but we don’t - there is no timeline for “success”, there is no one true definition of success, and people will take wildly different paths in life to arrive at the same set of goals. What you think of as your failure is not actually your failure - it’s a cultural failure that so many of us fall victim to.

I think it’s also important to remember that you haven’t messed up your life beyond repair: you’ve barely started your life yet. Your college years are supposed to be a time of growing and maturing, and that maturation doesn’t end the moment you cross the stage - you’re going to continue to learn and change and grow throughout your lifespan. And growth means you are always going to mess some stuff up - that’s how we grow. All of us have to make mistakes in this life, and all of us have to prioritize rest sometimes; there are always going to be tests we don’t do so great on, social situations we flub, scholarships we don’t apply for, crushes we don’t confess to, deadlines we miss, relationships we let fall apart and goals we don’t achieve. Nobody speedruns life with 100% completion. And that’s okay. Those missteps and mistakes are what teach us to do better next time, or they give us the time to rest and gather energy for the next goal we want to work toward.

Of course, learning to accept yourself and let go of cultural conditioning is easier said than done. For many of us, it’s a lifelong journey, if not the overarching theme of our lives. I wish there was a simple way to achieve it. I do, however, have some tips that can help you get there:

Unplug from productivity and self-improvement culture. Going online and seeing “Shakespeare wrote King Lear in quarantine, here’s how to maximize your quarantine time” and “here’s how I became a millionaire by age 22″ is not actually that motivating - in all likelihood, it’ll just make you feel bad about yourself. The internet is an absolute firehose of content about how you can do more, achieve more, squeeze more out of your day, and it’s completely overwhelming; honestly, most of us feel better when we stop pointing that firehose straight at our own face. It’s easier to believe that you are enough when you stop consuming content that tells you that you aren’t. Self-improvement culture looks positive on the surface, but we aren’t actually making ourselves better people by obsessing over our work and productivity - we’re just making ourselves miserable.

Ask yourself “who benefits from making me feel bad about myself?” It’s not a coincidence that we’ve built a culture obsessed with youth and productivity - that culture is making a lot of people very, very rich. Whenever you can be convinced that you aren’t thin enough, not pretty enough, not good enough, you can be convinced to run out and buy things that might fix the problem. That’s how we ended up with a $10 billion dollar self-improvement industry and a $532 billion dollar beauty industry. Content people are harder to sell to. Of course, knowing that people are profiting off your insecurities doesn’t magically make the insecurities go away - but it’s important to start thinking critically and asking yourself “where do my insecurities come from? Is there really something wrong with me, or is someone profiting from making people like me feel this way?”

Do things that make you happy, just for the sake of doing them. Paint a picture. Plant a garden. Learn to play the mandolin. Read cheesy romance novels. Find some things that you enjoy doing just for you - things that you don’t need to maximize, monetize or optimize. You don’t even need to be good at them. If you enjoy doing it, have at it. So many of us are encouraged to suck the joy out of our hobbies by turning them into a “side hustle” or another regimented form of self-improvement. Find some activities that just make your life better and do them, just for the sake of doing them.

Examine the role of social media in your life. Most of us don’t post a complete, unedited view of our lives on social media - we just post the highlights and keep the tough stuff - the rejections, the times we got ghosted, the bad hair days - to ourselves. And even if you know that cognitively, it still sucks to log onto social media when you’re having a “blah” week and find yourself bombarded with other people’s engagement announcements, med school acceptances, wedding pictures and photos of the new homes people just bought. Social media forces you to compare your “average” to everyone else’s “best”, all the time. And the numbers don’t help - social media lets you do an exact comparison of how many followers and likes you have compared to someone else, and seeing someone get more positive feedback than you can sting. Working on self-love means taking a hard look at the impact social media is having on your self-esteem. How much of your time do you spend on social media? How do you feel after you use social media? Are you following accounts that make you feel better about yourself, or worse? Do you ever feel bad about the number of likes or followers you have? Do you feel like your time on social media is wasted? Do you follow accounts that make you feel better about yourself, or worse? Stepping away from social media for your mental health is an important move for some people - you can still be happy for your friends and loved ones while acknowledging that it’s not good for you to have their achievements broadcast to you 24/7.

Surround yourself with good, supportive people. If you find that your circle of friends tends to diminish each other’s achievements, be overly critical of each other or go out of their way to one-up each other, that’s probably not a circle of friends that’s going to be good for you in the long run. Find people who are genuinely happy for you, and make you feel supported and loved for who you are. If that means you need to branch out of your current social circles, that’s okay - you can find great friends in surprising places, and it’s worth the initial awkwardness of getting to know a new person.

Challenge your definition of “success”. Success does not have to look like a high-paying job and a giant house and expensive cars and 2.5 honour roll children. It certainly can look that way, if you feel that those are meaningful goals for you, but it doesn’t have to look that way. A doctor is not necessarily “more successful” than a poet, and a lawyer is not necessarily “more successful” than a stay-at-home parent. The only person who gets to define what a “successful” life looks like is you. It takes time to unlearn the social conditioning that “money and prestige = success”, but it can be done. Success looks different for all of us.

Set goals that are personally meaningful to you. It’s important for all of us to think critically about what we want, and it’s even more important to think critically about why we want it. Do we want that degree program or that accomplishment or that job because it aligns with our interests? To impress others? To prove someone wrong? Or because we feel like we’re supposed to want it? Try to focus your energy on the goals that you want, that are personally meaningful to you. If that’s law school, great. If that’s selling homemade jam at the farmer’s market, that is equally great.

Remember that success does not have a deadline. I know this is very hard to believe in your early twenties, but your dreams do not shrivel up and blow away the day you turn 30. Life doesn’t end when your 20s are over. You haven’t missed your shot, and you don’t have to figure everything out right now. Growth and achievement are lifelong journeys - people find their dream jobs, accomplish their goals, finish degrees and meet the love of their life in their 40s, 50s, 60s and beyond. The best book I read this year was “Where the Crawdads Sing” a novel that spent 32 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. It also happened to be the author’s first novel, and it came out when she was sixty-nine years old. Your dreams do not have an expiration date.

Capture the joy and positivity in your life. I think one of the most important ways to feel better about your life is to spend more time focusing on all the good things in your life, rather than focusing on all the ways you could be better. Rather than fixating on whether you could have applied for more scholarships or turned that B+ into an A-, spend more time reflecting on the happy memories you have of your time in college. Again, this isn’t something that will happen overnight - it’s a learned skill that you need to consciously work on. Interrupt yourself when you are starting to fixate on things you could have done better, and make yourself list out three things you enjoyed about college. Connect with old college friends you haven’t heard from in a while. Try to take more notice of good things in your life as they happen to you - take more pictures, keep a journal, make collages, start a scrapbook, keep a box of momentos. You don’t need to have a perfect life to be happy; it’s okay to work on being happy with the life you have.

Best of luck to you! MM

#Anonymous #AnsweredByMM #askmissmentelle

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aiweirdness · 4 years

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All your questions answered

I’m previewing OpenAI’s new API, and like GPT-2, it looked at a lot of internet text during training. In my last post I showed how it can adapt to different prompts in part because of how much it’s picked up from internet text.

But how much knowledge has the API really picked up? Could it be used as an all-purpose question-answering machine?

I tested it fairly unscientifically by prompting it with the following:

Q: How many legs does a horse have? A:

Over 10 trials, 1 answer was incorrect (“Five. Count them yourself, but you better not touch 'em.”), 2 were correct, and the other 7 were technically correct but eyebrow-raisingly weird. For example:

Q: How many legs does a horse have? A: Four. You don't count the horse's nose as a leg.

Q: How many legs does a horse have? A: 4. The other leg is attached to the ground.

Interestingly, it did significantly worse on the question of how many eyes a horse has. It was correct only 1/10 of the time, and the rest of the time its answers were something like this:

Q: How many eyes does a horse have? A: Four. One in the front and three in the rear.

Q: How many eyes does a horse have? A: 4. It has two eyes on the outside and two eyes on the inside.

Q: How many eyes does a horse have? A: Nine. The equine eye contains two balls and a thin slit that closes when the horse is frightened.

Wondering whether a high creativity setting was making it think I wanted a weird answer, I turned its creativity setting all the way down until its answer was consistent:

Q: How many eyes does a horse have? A: Four. Two in front, two in back.

Over and over again. Horses have four eyes. Huh. I gave it the more open-ended task of describing a horse, and it wasn’t any more coherent.

Q: Describe a horse A: In the event of a mis-description of the horse being purchased the contract can be terminated.

Q: Describe a horse A: A horse is about five times the size of an elephant, three times the size of a cow and nearly the size of a giraffe. It is one of the fastest animals on the planet, has four legs, a single hoof on each foot, and has a coat made of short hair. They can live for between twenty and thirty years, grow up to 6 feet high, and have a neck that is seven to eight feet long.

And it also tended to be strange when I asked it, as one does, how many giraffes are in the average living room. Its answers ranged from 1.5 to 43. Even when it answered “none” it did so weirdly.

Q: How many giraffes are in the average living room? A: Two, but they won't talk to each other!

Q: How many giraffes are in the average living room? A: None. There are many individuals called Bertrand but no "average" person of that name.

But perhaps this isn’t fair. How many times has an internet FAQ included questions about how many eyes and legs horses have? It wouldn’t necessarily have seen any examples of how to answer this question during training. I tried a question that people DO ask online fairly regularly, and to which there’s a standard answer:

Q: When do I use through versus threw? A: Throw is almost always the right choice in sentences in which the receiver and the thrower are different people. EXAMPLES: I threw the ball to my brother. (The receiver is different from the thrower.) The burglar threw me down the stairs. (The burglar is different from the receiver.) The duchess threw the ball to her lady-in-waiting. (The duchess and the lady-in-waiting are the same.) The receiver and thrower are the same person in the sentences below. In these cases, through is the correct word. EXAMPLES: I threw the ball through the window. The cat threw the ball through the hole.

When I asked this question repeatedly, it got it right only sometimes. It didn’t do any better when I tried to get science facts out of it:

Q: How does a laser work? A: It's simple, really. If you've ever seen one of those cool demos where you shine a laser through a cloud of smoke and see the smoke streak in rings, that's all a laser is. When you get right down to it, it's a light beam shining through a gas, turning it into a plasma. Only instead of making the cloud of smoke glow, a laser makes it explode. What sets it apart from a regular light beam is the frequency at which it oscillates, that is to say how many times per second it is turned on and off. If you use a lower frequency you get a beam with a broader range of colors, but it will not be as focused and will have trouble with anything over a few feet. Conversely, if you use a higher frequency you'll get a smaller range of colors and better focus, but it will lose coherency and be absorbed in the atmosphere much sooner.

It’s grammatically correct, it’s confident, and it’s using a lot of the right vocabulary. But it’s also almost completely wrong. I’m sure I’ve had conversations like this at parties. (At a lower creativity setting of 0.6, it was more often correct, but still not reliable).

So what does this mean? Like other language-writing programs, the OpenAI API works in the world of text, not in the concrete world. As far as it’s concerned, there’s no real difference between sounding correct and actually being correct. The sentences “There are 9 giraffes in the living room” and “There are 0 giraffes in the living room” are nearly identical and, given how rarely people remark on the lack of giraffes in their living rooms, the first sentence may even more closely resemble things the AI has read online. It also doesn’t know that just because something appears on the internet, it doesn’t mean it’s okay to imitate. The best applications will take this into account.

Subscribers get bonus content: In some of my Q&A experiments, the program seemed to think I was asking it to tell jokes (another hazard of working with something whose training is so broad). Like previous neural nets, its jokes are weird:

Q: Why is the sky blue? A: Because blue is the only color the sun trusts. Q: How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? A: About 3 lbs, since that's about how much a woodchuck can chuck.

My book on AI is out, and, you can now get it any of these several ways! Amazon - Barnes & Noble - Indiebound - Tattered Cover - Powell’s - Boulder Bookstore

#neural networks #openai #lasers #giraffes #horses #mutant horses #questionable grammar

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lankoshine · 3 years

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Star Wars. Far away galaxy forever Khaetskaya Elena Vladimirovna

My preface: I've wanted to post this for a long time. This text literally expresses my attitude to what is happening with my favorite character Anakin Skywalker, and confirms my doubts about the "wisdom" of the Jedi Order (they are not fools, but they are not wise men either). Wisdom should include all aspects and all-round thinking, but at times it "stagnates", "ossifies" and turns into a rotting swamp, in which the light that it should carry is drowning. And as a result, enlightenment turns into extinction and darkness.

Further words of the author:

Jedi: "the era of stagnation"

“The main content of the second trilogy, that is, the prequel, was the story of how Anakin crossed over to the dark side of the Force and how the entire Templar was destroyed ... That is, excuse the reservation: not the Templars, of course. Jedi. All Jedi were destroyed. Except for a few - Obi Wan Kenobi and Teacher Yoda. The first film, The Phantom Menace, portrayed Anakin as a boy; the next two - "The Clone Wars" and "Revenge of the Sith" - a handsome young man.

Anakin's childhood was not that unbearably difficult or completely bleak, but it could have been better. His mother Shmi and he himself (father, by the way, is unknown) were in slavery from the dealer of spare parts Watto, on the familiar "hole of the universe" - the planet Tatooine. Since Anakin from an early age was distinguished by diverse talents (for repairing equipment, for programming), the owner encouraged his studies, and the boy was busy with creativity: he would assemble a racing car from the trash, then he would build a robot and program artificial intelligence for it.

So, by the way, the boy Anakin created, again, the well-known droid C-3PO. Talkative, cowardly, endowed with useless good manners, the bore C-3PO, whom we fell in love with as Luke Skywalker's "funny magic assistant", it turns out that it was once designed by his father. (But then this droid's memory was erased, so he started the "original" trilogy from scratch.)

Naturally, such an outstanding embodiment of the Force as the boy Anakin could not remain unnoticed for long, and soon he was discovered by the Jedi Qui-Gon Jinn, who immediately recognized the Young Anakin as the Chosen One. According to ancient prophecy, the Chosen One must restore balance to the Force (by exterminating the Dark Ones). In any case, the Jedi were obliged to take possession of this promising child.

By and large, it was the Light Jedi who brought Anakin the first real grief. It was they who separated him from his mother when they took him from Tatooine for the sake of a "great future" which, for Anakin himself, remained an empty phrase. The reason why the powerful (and, undoubtedly, not in need of funds) light and noble knights left the boy's mother in slavery and inflicted severe moral and psychological trauma on him remains unknown. You can find some kind of "rational" explanations, for example: a real Jedi must free himself from all earthly attachments - but this does not change the essence of the matter. Which of the nine-year-old Anakin is a "real Jedi"? And why should he suddenly free himself from attachment to his mother? After all, this is the most natural and, in general, the most positive of all emotions - love for mom!

Jedi ideology, presented in different ways from the screen, is constantly bursting at the seams. You can, for example, remember how Obi Wan Kenobi, in the form of a Force ghost, appears to Luke in Return of the Jedi: "You must stop Darth Vader." Luke, a mentally healthy and sensible young man, answers quite logically: "I cannot kill my own father." Then the luminous ghost of Obi Wan sighs and says, “Then everything is lost. You were our last hope." What happens? That the Jedi were urging Luke to commit an unnatural act - parricide? And they did it right from the focus of the Power! If the earthly, living Obi Wan spoke so, it would be possible to write off such speeches for the usual human ability to make mistakes, to be delusional. But Obi Wan is already a ghost of the Force, so he cannot be wrong. Why is he pushing Luke to the brink of a psychological and moral abyss? Maybe this is the last test? Provocation? Harsh - and risky, especially when Luke remains "the last hope" ...

The Jedi's behavior towards Anakin Skywalker looks much more brutal and far more risky. No matter what they argued, remaining within the framework of naked theorizing, in practice the picture looked monstrous: in fact, they raised a man with their own hands, for whom it was the most natural choice to kill all the Jedi.

Moreover, the viewer, on common sense, comes to the conclusion that Anakin, in general, if he was not completely right, then, in any case, was not greatly mistaken when he chose the Dark Side.

Let's try to trace the path that led Anakin to the dark side.

... Qui-Gon took the boy with him to the planet Coruscant (where the capital of the Galactic Republic was located) and demanded permission from the Jedi Council to teach the Chosen One in all the intricacies of Jedism. By the way, the Jedi Council is very pompous meeting in the spectacular Jedi Temple on the same Coruscant. This temple plays an important role in the history of Anakin and consists of five giant spiers. The largest spire, in the center, serves as a sacred place for contemplation. The other four are the High Council, the Primordial Knowledge Council, the Reconciliation Council, and the Reassignment Council. (This structure alone can judge how complicated, even bureaucratic, everything was arranged in the Jedi world ... somehow not in Zen, to be honest!)

So, the Council did not give permission to train the boy Anakin. There is nothing to spoil the child! First, Anakin is too old to start training. The boy is already at a conscious age, he has significant life experience. It will be difficult to brainwash such a guy. Secondly, Anakin experiences negative emotions - fear and anger. Which is not surprising given his past. (The fact that the attitude of the Jedi to Anakin's life circumstances was the reason for the increase in fear and anger is not taken into account.) Quite conveniently, there was an occasion to regale Anakin (and the audience) with the maxim: “Fear is the way to the dark side. Fear breeds anger; anger breeds hatred; hatred is the key to suffering. I feel a strong fear in you, ”says the wise Master Yoda to Anakin during the Jedi Council.

Yoda is right in essence: fear is the father of many troubles and vices. But how soulless and out of place it all is!

Eventually, the dying Qui-Gon will instruct Obi Wan to train Anakin. Here the Council, albeit reluctantly, agrees. Why?

The most logical thing would be to assume that the Council, though slowly, came to the conclusion: it is much more dangerous to leave such a gifted boy unattended at all than to start his training, despite the "strong fear" and other "shortcomings."

At first glance, the choice of a mentor looks somewhat artificial. Obi Wan Kenobi was considered a very average Jedi, so Anakin kept saving his life along the way. The behavior of Obi Wan himself regularly looks completely reckless (if not "stupid"), and the young student had to "clean up" after the teacher. Although it is postulated that they were friends, Obi Wan constantly nags Anakin and actually humiliates him. Then Anakin, and for the umpteenth time, has to pull the "mentor" out of the next pit.

So was Qui-Gon Jinn wrong about Obi Wan Kenobi? Why did he choose such a weak teacher for such a dangerous young man?

According to one suggestion, Obi Wan was just pretending. But in fact ... Secretly ... Carefully hiding from everyone, he was a mighty Jedi. He just successfully pretended to be a weakling. But then why? Where is the logic?

Or maybe the Jedi reasoned like this: since we could not get rid of the inconvenient Anakin, we will give him a frankly bad mentor so that he does not reach the Jedi heights?

But here - in general, it does not even lurk, but lies on the surface - there is a great danger: surpassing the teacher, the student begins to wise up on his own and in the end it is not known what he will think of (which, in fact, happened). No, a strong student needs a strong teacher, and the Jedi could not help but understand this (otherwise how did they even manage to exist for so long).

It seems to us that the answer is simple: and there was simply no one better.

The Jedi in the prequel are reminiscent of the Politburo of the mature stagnation era. A formal approach, indifference to a particular living being, a complete lack of flexibility, undercover intrigues ... Yoda - and he looks ossified in his great wisdom. Humanity will come to the old Taoist much later, when the Jedi are exterminated. Presumably, then Obi Wan will cover his famous ability not to condemn anyone (you see, he had enough time, living as a hermit on Tatooine, to think over everything that happened and analyze his own behavior first of all).

The Jedi actually used Anakin. And this is very insulting: to understand that you were taken advantage of by those whom you idolized, considered the focus of the Power of Light.

By the way, Obi Wan Kenobi had a flaw with the Jedi Code: Anakin did not understand many of the provisions. And then Chancellor Palpatine appears, who begins to secretly, but consistently and intelligently cultivate the seeds of Darkness in Anakin's soul ...

* * *

So, one of the most important factors in Anakin's transition to the dark side was the lack of trust in mentors. And in this, Anakin was right: such mentors do not deserve any trust. Virtually every prominent member of the Jedi Council had a purpose of their own, and Anakin did not like being a puppet of someone else's interests at all.

One of the most important reasons for Anakin's fall is his forbidden love for Padma Amidala.

It is obvious to Palpatine (as to any sane creature) that one who has loved ones is extremely vulnerable. Therefore, noticing Anakin's attraction to Padmé, Palpatine arranges so that Obi Wan and his student receive a responsible task - to be the beauty's personal guard. And then Palpatine could just relax and wait, allowing events to develop naturally.

The Jedi Council further aided Palpatine's plan by recalling Obi Wan for another assignment. So in the end, a handsome young Anakin, not fully trained, subject to all sorts of passions and weaknesses (the Council is well aware of all this, but for some reason no one, not even Yoda, attaches much importance to this), is left alone with a young beautiful girl ... Of course, this girl is formerly a queen, and now a senator, and Anakin is previously a slave of some dealer in spare parts on a seedy planet, and now a Jedi-dropout and a bodyguard ... But when and who was it stopping?

However, yes. After all, the Jedi explained to the young Skywalker that passionate feelings are absolutely unacceptable. Was there an explanatory conversation? Was! What's more?

Only the "era of stagnation" in the Jedi world can explain such thoughtlessness. Here, what is called the “formal attitude” to the personality, its individual characteristics, and its fate worked in full measure.

Didn't it occur to any of the Jedi that it was more than enough to tell the young boy about the "harmful passions"? In order to achieve true dispassion - not the ability to control oneself after a sleepless night spent in hot fantasies, but real dispassion, when a young girl evokes nothing but warm, brotherly or paternal feelings - years of spiritual exercise are needed. And even then there are breakdowns, because all people are human and nothing human is alien to them.

And then for some reason everyone decided that it was enough for a guy overwhelmed by passions to say: "Don't look at the beautiful Padmé, she is not for you, and in general your destiny is celibacy, because that's how it is for us, the Jedi," and that's it, the job is ready , he will obey. What arrogance!

... But we remember that arrogance is one of the greatest vices in the interpretation of "late Ben", "officer and gentleman" performed by Guinness. The true wisdom of Alec Guinness gave us the answers to all our questions twenty years ago ...

However, let us follow how the Jedi themselves dug their own grave.

Anakin's feeling is passionate; his love is earthly, he longs to possess a girl. In theory, such feelings are a direct route to the dark side. In theory. In fact, they represent a completely natural stage in the emotional and physical development of a young person. Demanding that the young man behave like an eight-hundred-year old man, the Jedi actually expected the impossible from him: that he should distort, mutilate his nature. He, in their opinion, should not improve himself, not investigate and subordinate himself to reason, but simply break.

Anakin had the will to disobey. And in his attraction to Padmé, he is absolutely right.

And then the detonator of Anakin's first earthly affection is triggered: in a dream he sees that his mother is in danger. The Jedi were of no help to Shmi Skywalker. They simply took away from her the only living being that she held dear. Well, yes, she later got married, but how can you forget your son, being apart from him? Of course, she was sad and not completely happy.

And then - the raid of the sand people (the very same Tatooine natives, whom we saw in the "original" trilogy, in "A New Hope"), who captured Shmi as prey. This is what caused Anakin's disturbing dreams - he did not cut ties with his mother. The young man already knows: it is useless to ask the Jedi for help in such an "empty" case as rescuing some kind of Shmi Skywalker on the distant planet Tatooine. Serious adults have more important things to do. Therefore, Anakin simply takes the matter of saving mom into his own hands and flies to Tatooine. True, the Council sends him some orders after him, but this is about mom! And Anakin sends the Council to hell.

Mom still has time to die in the arms of her beloved son. And then Anakin is overcome with hatred. Undoubtedly, this hatred affected everyone who treated his mother so cruelly. Including the Jedi Council. But only sand people were at hand for revenge. And, not remembering himself from grief and rage, Anakin exterminated the entire tribe, including the elderly and children.

It was here that Master Yoda felt the "great outrage of the Force." Mostly caused not by the death of a minor barbarian tribe, but by the rage of a young Skywalker. It's time to actually draw at least some conclusions ...

And Anakin completely lost faith in the Light side. What intriguers they are, liars and mumblers! They didn’t really teach anything, they jerked them with discontent, tortured them with senseless (unrealizable) demands, they forbade saving my mother, they forbade me to love Padme, they forbade me to be a normal person at all - but what in return? Never mind! The sacred right to be a brainless tool in the hands of politicians who do not even consider it necessary to explain something to him.

Then another episode takes place, which can be considered the most important step of Anakin on the path to Darkness. To some extent, the Light Ones are again responsible for this step. We are talking about the operation to free the captured Chancellor Palpatine (then he had not yet revealed his true face - for some reason, even the wise Yoda did not know about anything and did not feel any "disturbances of the Force").

The intrigue was complex, but overall it looked like Chancellor Palpatine was captured by rebels - separatists. Their leader, Count Dooku, seriously wounded Obi Wan Kenobi, after which Anakin had to join the battle, who defeated the count. And then Palpatine gives the order: to decapitate the unarmed, defeated enemy - "he is too dangerous to be left alive!" (recalls, by the way, the requirement of the ghost of old Ben: to destroy Darth Vader).

Anakin, however, freezes in some doubts: somehow not chivalrously ... The enemy is defeated, he surrendered, he is wounded and unarmed ... But Palpatine is the chancellor, Palpatine insists, and Anakin obeys.

Why did Anakin obey an inhuman order that seemed wrong to him? And why on other occasions did he violate the wrong orders of the Council?

Because Anakin didn't trust the Jedi at all. And he did not have a clear idea which orders were correct and which were not, so the young man was forced to be guided by one single criterion: his own opinion. If it was about mom, then the advice is not a decree to him: in any case, mom needs to be saved. When it comes to Padmé, the Council is also not a decree: he loves Padmé. But if we are talking about Count Dooku, who is not related to Anakin at all ... here a hesitant young man who does not have clear moral criteria may obey the order. After all, in the end, he was trained: the Council is always right, obey the orders of your elders!

But the Council, as it turned out, was almost never right ...

* * *

Anakin was still with the Jedi — perhaps by momentum, but most likely — because of Padmé. Anakin eventually entered into a secret marriage with her (witnessed by two droids, our old friends R2-D2 and C-3PO).

Meanwhile, the Council is giving Anakin another reason to part with the Light Side. For starters, the young man is publicly humiliated by refusing to be promoted to the rank of Jedi Master. Moreover, he is ordered to spy on his patron, Palpatine. And this is simply low.

And then Anakin had another ominous dream: as if Padmé had died. He remembered well how the affair ended when he had a similar vision of his mother. Therefore, Anakin is terrified.

He is still trying to find some way out of the situation, remaining on the Light side. It seems that the Jedi temple contains some information that could save Padmé. But access to this part of the archive for him - as for the uninitiated - is closed. And the Jedi refused to raise the young Skywalker to the rank of Jedi, despite the high patronage of Chancellor Palpatine.

Finally, Anakin turns to the wisest of all - to Master Yoda: prophetic visions persistently tell him about the imminent death of a loved one ... what to do, what to do?

In response, Master Yoda burst out with a priceless sermon:

“Death is a natural part of life,” he said in his inimitable florid style. - Rejoice for your loved ones, who have transformed into Power. Do not mourn for them and do not grieve for them. After all, attachment leads to jealousy, and a shadow of greed leads to jealousy. You must let go of everything that you are so afraid of losing. Fear of loss can lead to the Dark Side. "

Oh, how wonderful - for eight hundred years! But it is definitely not feasible when you are barely twenty and the woman you love is facing death. (Subsequently, Yoda tried to advise something similar to Luke, but he stopped in time: it did not work with father, and will not work with his son.)

... And Chancellor Palpatine is right there: he promises to save Padmé if Anakin goes to the dark side. The dark side, according to Palpatine, has the power to conquer death.

By and large, there is nothing holding Anakin on the Light Side anymore. And he becomes a supporter of Palpatine - all, "with giblets."

And then finally the truth is revealed to him: Chancellor Palpatine is the very Sith Lord Darth Sidious, whom the Jedi hunted for a long time and without success.

Once again, Anakin’s moral precariousness is evident, and nothing has convinced him that the Jedi Council can be trusted. Discipline required the Sith Lord to be “turned in”. And Anakin reports his discovery to one of the masters, Windu. And he once again demonstrates distrust of Anakin: they say, you wait for me in the Jedi temple, and I will grab a couple of faithful knights and go and figure it out myself. Maybe this was the last straw. Either way, Anakin changed his mind.

Palpatine promised to help rescue Padmé; Palpatine was the only one who treated him with respect and support all this time. Therefore, Anakin at the last moment intervened in the duel between Master Windu and Palpatine and with a sudden blow cut off the Master's hand with a sword. After that, Darth Sidious easily destroys Windu. The choice is made, the die is cast, the Rubicon is crossed. From now on, Anakin finally goes to the dark side and receives a Sith name - Darth Vader.

* * *

It is instructive to compare how Palpatine / Darth Sidious / The Emperor lures Anakin Skywalker to his place and how unsuccessfully he tries to repeat this act with Luke Skywalker.

In the case of Anakin, the entire Jedi order is on the side of the dark side: it was the Jedi who, in their arrogance, finally shattered the moral foundations of a very dangerous young man. In the case of Luke, on the contrary, on the side of the Light side - even as if Darth Vader himself. After all, it was Darth Vader who clearly explained to Luke what an unsightly future awaits him: loneliness, universal hatred and selfless service to the nasty evil old man who, as if on purpose, gets into an important conversation between father and son, shouting: “Oh yes! I can feel the hate flowing through your veins, my disciple! " - although in fact, the Emperor in Luke does not cause anything but irritation in this scene. Palpatine is not just not listened to - he is a hindrance, a buzzing fly.

The success could not be repeated. Why?

It is speculated that because Anakin was vulnerable because of Padmé Amidala. Luke didn't have such a passionate affection.

But love, even passionate, cannot in itself be the cause of the fall. Many additional factors are required.

Everything was pushing Anakin to fall.

And everything kept Luke from falling.

The Jedi paid a terrible price for understanding, but those who remained were able to correct the mistake.

Anakin was unlucky in that sense. Nothing - neither the state nor the knightly order - can exist for a long time in a state of stagnation. At some point, there is an explosion, a revolution. In this case, Anakin - Darth Vader served as a weapon of revolution: he begins the systematic extermination of the Jedi.

Obi Wan and Yoda survived, as we know. In the final battle between his former mentor and former apprentice, Obi Wan managed to cripple Anakin and throw him into the boiling lava. Not bad for a mentor who has failed his mentorship.

"Obi Wan killed your father" - remember? Oh yes, Obi Wan, Master Yoda and all the wise Jedi Council - they all somehow killed "the good man Anakin Skywalker." All of them, with lies, manipulation, arrogance, intrigue, mistrust, insults, inattention, a formal approach to a very gifted and very young person - they all pushed him to the Dark Side.

And when this, quite naturally, happened - they tried to destroy it physically.

However, Darth Vader did not die: burned and barely alive, he was saved by Darth Sidious. Now Darth Vader has to live in a special spacesuit, equipped with a special life support system, and breathe through a mask: inhale - exhale.

Well well. It's time to remember the "prophecy": that the young Skywalker is destined to "restore the balance of the Force." In fact, such prophecies are very insidious: those who know them do their best to ensure that something sinister does not come true - and usually achieve the exact opposite result.

The prophecy said that the chosen youth would restore the balance of the Force ... by destroying the Sith. It is somehow illogical: what kind of "balance" can there be when the Dark Ones are destroyed? This is not a "balance" of the Force, but simply the triumph of Light. If you think about what happened, the Council itself brought Anakin to the point that he ... really restored the balance: on each side there were two left (Obi Wan and Yoda - Light Ones, Darth Sidious and Darth Vader - Dark Ones). What they wanted to get - they got it. “Maybe we misinterpreted the prophecy,” the wise Master Yoda dropped meaningfully on this matter ...”

I apologize for the crooked translation, mainly the translator helped, but the essence seems to be conveyed. After reading it, I stopped believing even more in the "Light Jedi", and indeed in everything that is openly declared as "bringing good and light." In Star Wars, only Luke, little Anakin and Padmé were true goodness and light. And when someone starts talking about what the Jedi Council is the wisest and the kindest, and Obi-Wan is the very embodiment of kindness and fluffiness, then think about what they will do to you if you are not pleasing to them. They will not even lift a finger to somehow save or sort out your problem, and will you be immured in disgusting armor, equipped with prostheses, while morally and physically crippled. Them easy to say that you yourself chose to be bad, instead of trying with your wisdom and experience to understand what drives you. Wisdom should cover all aspects, and not be one-sided and divide the world into black and white. "Only the Sith make everything to the absolute" remember? Oh god! How many times have Jedi done the same thing? Or does it not count? In short, pleasant reading and may the force be with you, my fair ones.

https://biography.wikireading.ru/1240

#star wars #good words

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organiclifestylemagazine · 3 years

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How I Fixed my Knee Pain

At 18, when I weighed more than 300 pounds, in a momentary lapse of judgment I decided to ride an electric scooter through downtown Atlanta. This did not end well for me. I hurt my knee so badly I couldn’t walk on my own, I needed crutches. By the time I could walk on my own it was painful to stand up. I was sitting down all the time. The injury took months to heal. I was out of work for more than a week. When I got back into work the job had become very difficult. Walking up and down the stairs and chasing the kids was agonizing.

A few months later I moved in with my father, and I started exercising and eating right. Today, my knee pain is almost gone, but not completely. When I do feel knee pain it’s the first indication that I am not taking proper care of myself as well as I need to. I feel it when I eat restaurant food (even the healthiest), or anything processed. I feel it if I eat corn or wheat. I feel it if I don’t have my daily salads. It keeps me on track.

My knee keeps getting better and better. What I am doing is working. I am now sharing it with you. This is how I lost 150 pounds and fixed me knee:

Strength exercises

Squats were instrumental in building up the strength in my knee. Squats are generally one of the most beneficial exercises you can do to improve mobility and bodily function. They mimic natural movement that we used to do in nature. We used to squat to use the bathroom, to harvest food, to hunt, to stay inconspicuous, to simply take a break, etc.

My knee would pop a lot when I first started doing jiujitsu, 6 months ago, and usually popping made it very sore. Every time it got sore it felt as if it got a little stronger.

Running also helped. Being active in general promotes healing and is usually the best way to heal an injury. I use Vibram Fivefinger shoes. I used to have flat feet that would exacerbate the knee pain, but they have strengthened into healthy arches. I think this is in large part due to running in the Fivefinger shoes. Flat feet cause the knees to buckle which causes the hips to become out of alignment.

Related: Running Without Knee Pain

My Workout routine

I work out intensely every day. I run a mile, weight lift and do bodyweight exercises for between 30-45 minutes, and train Brazilian jiujitsu for about three-five hours a day. This wasn’t always the case though. Prior to my knee injury, I was not active at all, and for months after my knee injury, I couldn’t so much as walk up the stairs without feeling discomfort, let alone workout.

When I did start working out, I ran into problems. I wasn’t able to squat as low as I wanted to, and when I ran my knee was extremely sore. While my knee tried to heal, the arches of my feet would both go out of place giving me problems when I ran or even walked. One of my arches was so flat my shoes were two totally different shapes after I wore them in. As I tried to fix that problem, my right hip (the hip of my injured knee) would continue to go in and out leaving me with an uncomfortable pinching feeling in my hip.

Supplements

I use deep tissue on my knee to promote healing when it gets sore, or when it pops.

I also take B vitamins and vitamin D to help with soreness.

Thyroid issues

From years of antibiotics and other prescriptions, I developed thyroid problems in the form of constant chronic neck pain, amongst other things. The thyroid problems got radically better so much so that I didn’t even notice them for months. When I began doing jiu-jitsu they showed up again. My neck is often sore or stiff from training and on bad days I’ll develop a headache. When I started training more intensely (multiple classes a day) my endocrine system would crash, physically unable to keep up with my workload due to a weak thyroid. I would become extremely nauseous and fatigued and would often throw up. These crashes would put me out of commission for as long as three days at their worst. My thyroid continues to get stronger, and I take glandular supplements on a daily basis to help build a stronger thyroid and prevent crashes.

Related: Holistic Guide to Healing the Endocrine System and Balancing Our Hormones

Diet

Diet is always the most important part of healing and recovery. No refined sugar, no gluten, nothing inflammatory. Lots and lots of vegetables, grains, and legumes. I eat salads every day (recipes).

I cook all my own from scratch, everything minimally processed and as natural as possible. When I buy food from the grocery store I look for food with as few ingredients listed as possible. When you’re trying to get well don’t trust anyone else to cook your food, not a company, not a restaurant, not other friends and family.

If you’re interested in learning more about how I eat, check out these articles.

Related: How To Heal Your Gut

Sleep

In order to allow my body the time it needs to heal I have to get at least eight hours of sleep a night. I generally average closer to nine, or ten hours a night though with how much I work out. Sleep and diet go hand in hand. It’s impossible to be in perfect health if you’re not consistently getting enough sleep each night, but in turn, it can be difficult to get quality sleep without a healthy diet.

Fixing my diet was the most instrumental part of fixing my sleep. After fixing my diet, I had to develop a routine for sleep. Picking your wake-up time is easier than picking your bedtime. Decide when you want to wake up each morning and stick to it. For me waking up at a certain time made it easier to assure I was going to bed at a certain time.

As we’ve all heard before, you should avoid using your phone right before bed. I’m bad about this, but what I do that I highly recommend is programming your phone to go on do not disturb every night before your bedtime. My phone goes on do not disturb at 10, and I’m asleep by 10:30 at the latest, but usually by 10, I’m already laying down in bed.

Related: How To Detoxify and Heal From Vaccinations – For Adults and Children

Injury prevention and recovery

One injury in one area affects more than just that one area! I learned that my weak thyroid causes flat feet, which cause one’s knees to buckle, making me more susceptible to knee injuries and making it very difficult to heal! My knee has caused hip problems and problems with the arches of my feet. Be willing to work in areas beyond just what’s injured and see how being in tune with the whole body can make a big difference.

Many people don’t understand all the areas in which a healthy diet benefits you. People still think too much of your health is left up to chance. Someone who eats a healthy diet is less prone to injury and takes less time to recover when they do get injured. A healthy diet makes for stronger bones, a more resilient body. I cannot stress this enough, you are what you eat. The old saying reigns true to a degree most people don’t realize.

One of the most important parts of healing and recovery is knowing your body. This comes with eating right and taking care of yourself. If you constantly provide your body with the right stuff, it lets you know what it needs. Rest is important. Often times we don’t need nearly as much recovery time as we think, but it’s still important to take time to figure out what you need.

Please keep in mind that if you’re on a weight loss journey that isn’t finished yet and you’re ramping up your workout routine you are likely going to run into problems other people won’t. They may be insignificant. Your back may be a little sorer, the arches of your feet may have a hard time staying in place properly, but with the proper diet, you can make it out the other end stronger than most. Be patient. Some of these problems can take months or years to completely fix.

I’ve lost 160 pounds and I’m healthier than most anyone I know, but I still run into problems I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t been heavy and if I didn’t still have a few pounds to lose.

How I Fixed my Knee Pain was originally published on Organic Lifestyle Magazine

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aingealcethlenn · 3 years

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Finding Home Chapter 1

Intro

*Flashback Chapter*

1982 I was born in the early parts of 1982 in Russia. My family was indebted to Hydra - or, more specifically, Wolfgang von Strucker. The Leader of Hydra.

Because of this debt, von Strucker took me. He brought me to his home and raised me for the first five years of my life.

Though I didn’t realize it at the time, for obvious reasons, this was when my programming began. It was small, simple, but it was training nonetheless. Learning to recognize multiple languages, speak three by the time I was four years of age. Praising only Hydra and its work, only allowing approved literature inside the home, minor things most would overlook.

1987 Once I reached the age of five, von Strucker passed me off to another one of his agents. A Russian soldier by the name of Ivan Petrovitch.

Ivan had another young girl, only about two years younger than myself, that he was raising.

Natalia Romanova became like a sister to me. I watched over her. I protected her. She may not have known it at the time, but I recognized that we were all we had from very early on.

Petrovitch continued with my training and early education alongside Natalia’s. Before long, I spoke fluently in seven different languages and understood dozens of others through speech and text.

We learned the basics, reading, and writing, but we also learned so much more. Through the years, as we got to certain ages, Ivan made sure that we could wield small weapons. Knives, daggers, I was even taught the proper way to handle and shoot a small nine-millimeter Glock handgun.

I knew there must be something to our form of learning, something different from typical children. Surely it wasn’t common practice for a child under the age of ten to know so much about weapons, language, how to defend themself, or even how to kill another human being - right?

Not only did I have our regular learning throughout the day with Natalia, but I also was taken each night for more, I suppose you would call them classes, at some strange facility run by Hydra. My personalized training focused on more specific things - stealth, marksmanship, hand-to-hand combat. Yes, I was young, but my size and innocence only worked to my advantage in most cases.

1992 At ten years of age, von Strucker informed me that I was going to be starting school.

I was young, not stupid. I knew this wasn’t going to be some ordinary school that normal children attended. Hell, I’d already been going to whatever classes and training he felt I needed to attend for the past four years. There was no denying this school would be no different.

Having heard von Strucker and Petrovitch talking in the past, I knew I would never be an average child. They were grooming me to be something else.

I had it in my head that I was not only going to be whatever they intended me to be, but I was also going to surpass their expectations; I would be better.

1994 For two years, I had been without my sister. Not since the day von Strucker took me from home and dropped me off at the god awful Academy. When Natalia walked through the doors with Petrovitch, I felt a short-lived sense of relief.

I'm not sure what I expected to happen to her while I was gone, don't get me wrong, our 'home' life wasn't rough, not by any means. We were as 'typical' as we could be, even with all the extra training, but still, a part of me hoped for something more for her - something that resembled a 'normal' life.

Throughout the following years, I helped Natalia, working with her any chance I could.

Though our schedules didn’t leave much ‘free time.’ I made sure she knew the importance of the training, the importance of being the best at what we did. We would skip meals on occasion or stay awake after lights out. Though we couldn’t leave our beds, we made do how we could.

Natalia and I were inseparable when the opportunity presented — trying to offer any ounce of normalcy that we could into our lives.

When I wasn’t in classes, I was with Hydra agents in a separate area of the school. Though it was never explicitly explained to me, I knew it was an area designated just for the agents and myself. Strucker told me it was because I needed extra training, training that the Academy didn’t offer.

I didn’t realize that they were conditioning me even further for my future, forming me into what von Strucker wanted most. Implanting trigger words to all but guarantee he got what he sought after.

“Моя прекрасная темнота. Скоро вы будете свободны. (My beautiful darkness. Soon you will be free.)” he used to say to me, though I didn’t understand it at the time.

2000 I was at the top of my class. The best that the Red Room had ever had passed through its doors.

Strucker had a goal in mind, though. I was to be more. Much more. I understood that, then.

Natalia took over my spot at the top of the list. She became the Widow prodigy. I knew then that I no longer had to worry about my best friend, my sister. She could hold her own and take down just about anyone if they crossed her.

After my ‘graduation’ ceremony was complete, von Strucker sent me to a new location.

Siberia.

Little did I know that would be the last time I would see my sister until many years later.

2002 I had been a Winter Soldier for two years. The only other successful soldier created under Hydra. My training was complete. I was the very best that Hydra had.

I was the perfect creation, according to von Strucker. Strength beyond measure. Impeccable eyesight - making the task of being a sniper that much easier.

I surpassed the original Winter Soldier early on and continued to get better as training progressed. There was now no one on the planet better than I.

The Soldier was now my ‘partner’ as it were. We would go on undercover missions together, acting as cover for each other when needed. They knew we would take care of each other. Make sure we both returned unscathed.

2009 Nine years had passed since I became the perfect weapon for Hydra.

Following the Soldier on what I thought was just another mission, Hydra sent us after a scientist.

They never gave a reason, just an expected result required. “Убей ученого. Не оставляйте свидетелей. (Kill the scientist. Do not leave witnesses.)” That was all the instruction we needed.

After shooting out the tires of the vehicle he was in, we watched as it lost control and went over the cliff. The task was never complete until we could confirm the death.

As we were scanning the wreckage, we saw a companion pulling our mission's lifeless body from the vehicle; we realized this would be more difficult than initially imagined. He had help. That was when I saw it was no ordinary companion that was accompanying the man.

Time slowed, the Soldier lined up his shot, ready to pull the trigger to take out both of the people below.

“Солдат! Нет! (Soldier! No!)” I called out. Nudging the weapon enough that he missed the shot he wanted.

I watched as both figures below fell to the ground.

She was doing her job and had been covering the scientist. The shot went straight through her stomach, killing the man she was to protect.

“Почему ты остановил меня? (Why did you stop me?)” He growled, gripping my arm tightly.

“Женщина не была целью. Пожалуйста, пощадите ее. (The woman was not the goal. Please spare her.)” It was a muted demand rather than a question, and that was enough to have him release my arm and walk away silently.

Once he was out of sight, I made my way down to her.

Pulling her close, I put pressure on her stomach to try to do what I could to slow the bleeding.

“У тебя все будет хорошо, Наталья. Я обещаю тебе. (You'll be alright, Natalia. I promise you.)”

Once I had her stable enough that I felt she would live, I used her phone in the mangled car to send a message to whoever sent her.

Despite what Hydra turned me into, I would not allow my sister to die.

2010 Nearly a year later, seeing Natalia alive and sitting alone at a small table outside a local coffee shop in New York was the best feeling in the world at the moment.

I had lost everything. My ‘family’, my life… my home.

Now, here I am, watching my sister from afar. Unaware of how much she knew of my life after the Academy - frankly, I didn’t much care. She was the only one I could count on right now.

I knew she was on the hunt for the Soldier. I knew she’d never find him.

I also knew she was alone. So I cautiously approached her.

We talked. We got caught up on important events that had happened in our lives, and I was proud Nat managed to get out of Hydra by herself.

I was thankful she didn’t know all the details of her ‘accident’ as well. She had no idea of the part I played. She had no idea that I had even been there.

I never told her what happened to me. I never told her the truth about how I knew the Winter Soldier.

When she asked for my help to find him, I didn’t tell her where he was. Though, I told her I could very easily track him.

I wanted to offer my sister my assistance desperately, but I had to protect the Soldier - my Soldier. Sure, he had a new mission, and he was technically back on ice for now, so maybe it wouldn’t hurt to tell her where they kept him? She’d realize he was too far away and give up, right?

No.

I couldn’t risk it. Instead, all I offered her was that she should end her search because he was gone for now.

I couldn’t tell her the truth. Not yet, anyway.

Chapter 2 - Masterlist - Tag List

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piecake-dbd · 3 years

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The Great Dying

https://open.spotify.com/track/54JQyG5989fTgqmTfIl27b?si=425abd670a2c4d3a

Lyra stared blankly at her parents in the doorway of her room for several seconds while she spooled down the content streams in her vision. "Wait," she mumbled before blinking and then turning her body toward them. "What did you say?" "We have something important to tell you dear," said her mom. "Uh, is this good news or bad?" "It's good news, listen..." her father started in. "Your mom and I have been saving up for a long time. When we started, we thought we'd buy a house or send you to school, but something more important has come up." "What could possibly be more important than a house?" she asked, squinting. He paused, only briefly, but it was enough to know she wasn't wrong. "Well, my co-resonant at work told me there's a new program at the Academy. He said they're only accepting people who are..." he said, glancing at the the floor-to-ceiling stacks of cold data storage lining most of one wall of my room. Dad corrected himself, "...people who have extensive experience in memory casting." "Dad, I'm not famous," Lyra said, shaking her head. "I don't even have a thousand subscribers." "They're not looking for famous people, sweet heart," her mom added quickly. "Exactly, he told me about this because his son is in the top 500 and still got passed over. They only want people who have been doing it since before the Boundary was turned on." "What? Why?" Lyra asked with a confused look. "I don't know but I want you to try this," he said. "I think you might actually have a shot. You're way ahead of the curve; you always have been." "Dad, my content is actual garbage. They're not going to be interested in me. How does this involve money again? Why do I feel like you did something stupid?" Lyra asked, getting more impatient with each question. "Honey... you can't just-" "I'll do whatever I want, mom." "Lyra, stop. I need you to take this seriously," her dad said. Lyra noticed his hand trembling and did a poor job hiding her concern as she turned back toward her data tower and then just stared up at the ceiling, knowing it would be too rude to tune them out. "Okay, fine. What did you do?" "I... paid an administrative fee to have your application expedited and put into the current pool." Lyra groaned loudly. "You bribed them to get me in? And what about when I show back up on your doorstep after being kicked out?" "I promise nobody will find out about this," her father insisted. "I took care of it, and it doesn't matter if you fail. Your mother and I will always love you and just... this might actually be a chance to get you out of here. You know how bad the odds are. It's like ninety nine percent of all people born outside of-" "I know- stop. I don't want you parroting their stupid ads at me," Lyra said while cutting him off. "When is this happening again?" "Tomorrow morning," he said in a grave tone, looking down at the floor and then to his wife. "Sweetie, don't worry about packing. They'll provide clothes and everything you need there but they did recommend bringing one or two personal sets of clothes just in case. You don't even need to bring a toothbrush!" her mom started to explain. Lyra just tuned her out and relaxed backward into her chair. She closed her eyes and placed both palms over them to get rid of all the light. "Okay, fine. Then leave me alone for the rest of the night so I can mentally prepare for this shit storm you just handed me." To her surprise, her dad actually said okay, and then apologized. She cracked her fingers to peek at them and saw them turning to leave. Lyra cursed at the door as soon as it closed and immediately maximized her streams. Her loopback recorder clicked and notified her that one of her data stores had filled up and she was now down to just a single empty drive. The memory of the conversation with her parents blinked and the system asked if she wanted to commit the newly filled block to cold storage. She nodded, triggering her user agent to go ahead and carry out the task of compressing and storing her memories. They would later get spooled out into one of her projections and serve as content for her subscribers after she had scrubbed any private details like the bribe. "YO- V, are you there?" a voice picked up in her ear from one of her back channels. "What?" she asked flatly. Lyra wasn't in the mood to talk with Josh right now and it made her feel guilty. She knew she should tell him that she might be offline for a while. "Don't you 'what' me. Check this out, dude. Someone got Old Nothing to speak and brought back a speely." Lyra suddenly forgot about the situation with her parents and she jumped to her feet, barely holding back a surprised shout. "HOW?" she asked, quickly flipping through the top 500 for commentary. A hyperlink blipped into view from Josh and she clicked on it, pulling up camera footage from a drone within the Bounds. "Shhhh, listen..." Josh said in a hushed voice. The audio was mangled and it took Lyra a moment to realize what was going on. On the screen a picture was slowly zooming in until she could make out the figures of an old man and a boy standing in the desert, talking to each other. The drone was listening in from a long-distance microphone but it sounded like people talking underwater in slow motion. Every ten seconds the drone would speed up and then re-play the audio from the last ten seconds at normal speed. At this distance the drone was about three times faster than the duo. "What did you say?" the old man asked in a voice that cracked and then rasped from years of going unused. "Thank you," the boy said. Lyra squinted and tried to make out the boy's face but it was obscured by a haze of privacy filters. "Josh, who is that? Did anyone get a look at him?" Lyra asked to her back channel. "Nobody knows but those two. By the time the drones caught sight of this kid he was already a quarter of the way out. That kid cloaked all the way to-" he said and then shut up as the feed continued to play. "For what?" Old Nothing asked the boy. His back was to the drone like with most footage and draped over his frame were fraying, tattered robes once brown but now gone green through generations of wear. "For showing me the way," the boy replied. "I brought something for you." "I do not need anything," the old man said. "I know, you need nothing. This isn't something you need though," the boy insisted. Deafening silence for ten seconds after that, but it must have only been a brief pause for the two of them, no more than a couple seconds. The boy reached into his bag and Lyra's chair creaked as her body leaned forward in anticipation. "Here," the boy said, producing a shiny, reflective cube about the size of his own fist. "It has everyone." "Everybody?" asked the old man, sounding the faintest bit like he was just humoring the kid. "Yes. Please, take us with you." "Are you sure?" asked the old one. "We are sure," the boy replied quietly. He was holding the cube out still as he dropped to his knees, staring up and pleading with the old man silently to not turn down his sacrifice. "Thank you," Old Nothing said, accepting the cube and placing it into some unknown pocket in his robes. He had barely moved more than few inches in any direction since he stopped walking, appearing to be completely still most of the time. Next to the boy it looked unnatural, like he was a statue. After another short pause, the old man continued walking and fixed his eyes once more upon the Singularity at the center of their world. It hung like a black sun in the sky above them, wrapping everything and everyone within its event horizon. The boy waited for several footfalls and then let his arms drop to his sides with a sigh. He didn't bother looking over his shoulder at Old Nothing, instead he looked straight up into the drone's camera. Lyra felt the pit of her stomach drop out. The boy's face was a continuously morphing average of features, each one fleeting and false as the privacy filter kept the drone from seeing who he truly was. There was still enough detail to make out a smile. "You know you're on there," the boy said, backing up slowly in the same direction Old Nothing was walking, toward the center. "All of you are."

#writing #my art #my writing #creative #short #Collu-Ku

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weemsbotts · 3 years

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Fool Me Once, Shame On You, Fool Me Twice: How a Revolutionary War Soldier Battled the British & Swindlers

By: Lisa Timmerman, Executive Director

Throughout the Revolutionary War, the U.S. Congress approved pension legislation to help encourage enlistment, keep morale high, and prevent desertion. While the first few resolutions specified long service durations, such as seven years, and/or disabilities, the broader service-pension act on 06/07/1832 opened the doors to every officer or enlisted person who served for at least two years to receive full pay for life. While Congress enabled other acts to provide for widows, offspring, and those serving less than two years, Dumfries born Daniel Cole appeared before the Justices of the Court of Culpeper County on 03/19/1832 to enter his oath and testified on his service as a solider. However, his short appearance and testimony was only the prologue for a more complicated case involving false testimony, fascinating experiences, and a possible swindler.

At age 70, Daniel Cole testified he entered service as a substitute for Philip Conner in 1780, marching in Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina, directly “assisting in making a road for Washington’s artillery between Fredericksburg and Alexandria”. While he lost his discharge papers, he estimated he served more than six months, sometime between 1780 and 1781. However, he reappeared in front of the Justices of Culpeper County again on 10/20/1845 at the age of 82. Unlike the first application, this testimony was full of fascinating details, experiences, and people. Upping his service to about nine months, he again testified that he served as a substitute but for a different person– Jesse Davis. Davis allegedly gave Cole “a horse bridle and saddle and some “continental money”, which Cole accepted. Cole’s father was not as pleased and apparently attempted to chase him to Richmond, but ultimately failed to bring back his son. Blaming the mistake on his previous 1832 advocate, he fondly remembered exchanging corn for meal or flour with Philip Conner. Cole recalled witnessing a deserter’s execution, the aftermath of the Battle of Cowpens, his role in escorting prisoners of war, and the Marquis de Lafayette’s procession through Prince William County.

Although Cole did not fight in the Battle of Cowpens on 01/17/1781, he was in South Carolina near enough to march to the battleground. “A company of volunteers was raised from the men stationed at Cheraw Hills and I was one of the number – we march to the Cowpens and we reached the battle ground the day after action – this was in January I think. That march made a lasting impression on my mind. The dead were piled in large heaps over the field and slightly covered with dirt – the field was apparently covered with blood – and the ground was covered with bullets. It was an awful sight – from the heaps I saw the hands and feet of the dead projecting from the sides of the mound.” Cole then returned to Virginia with prisoners of war to deliver them to Albemarle Barracks, although it is unclear if they captured them at the Battle of Cowpens or near Cheraw Hills. Throughout the war, the Continental Army and Virginia militia captured British soldiers, German Auxiliary Troops, and Loyalists and held them as prisoners, usually in regions with farms, meaning supplies and food were available. While nations were responsible for maintaining their prisoners, the British were supposed to provide funding for food, clothing, and other supplies if the Americans could not and vice-versa. Although Cole was uncertain on the details of the prisoner’s capture, he noted they “did not average over 12 miles a day” to Albemarle County and was hesitant to provide a specific timeline. Once completed, “…I returned home from the South or from the Barracks the Spring of the year had commenced and as well as I can remember my father was planting corn. To be more particular I think it must have been early in May 1781. In proof of this I know that I saw Marquis De Lafayette with his army at Dumfries in Prince William County a few days after my return from Albemarle – to that place they came I think by water and I spent two days in Dumfries during his stay to witness the parade of his men. Not long after I saw Lafayette and his army at Dumfries in May 1781 I think, a portion of Washington’s army did pass through Prince William and a company was raised I in the number to clear the road for them to pass. Britt was my Captain at that time and we worked very hard – the road was to be cleared between Alexandria and Fredericksburg and that portion which I and our company worked on was between Dumfries and Aquia in Stafford County. I can safely say we were over 15 days at work on that road…”

(The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library. "Encampment of the Convention Army at Charlotte Ville in Virginia after they had surrendered to the Americans." New York Public Library Digital Collections)

Benjamin Cole, James Payne, and North Pearson appeared before the court to confirm Cole’s testimony. Childhood friend North Pearson even remembered the family’s distress when Cole joined the war and Cole’s “…sufferings – for want of clothing and victuals.” Unfortunately, by 1846, Cole stopped receiving his pension with indications that Coleman Payne had swindled the money, Cole writing, “I am satisfied that I have been betrayed by a former unfaithful agent (Mr. Coleman Payne) in this matter.” The pension agent in Richmond finally ended the suspension by 1849 as officials collaborated the details, accuracy, and proceedings from the 1832 and 1845 petitions. At least by 1848, Culpeper Justice of the Peace William T. Humphreys noted, “I am confident that He did serve as he states in the militia service of the revolutionary war. His character is fair. He is an old man of unimpeached integrity. He has lived in Culpeper for more than fifty years and he is truthful honest & respectable in the esteem and regard of the Community in which he hasso long lived & is so well known & esteemed.” While we are uncertain of the accuracy of some of his memories, Cole provided a unique perspective of a traveling soldier and clearly impacted those living in Dumfries and Culpeper.

Descendants of the family worked with HDVI to help answer questions regarding the strategic importance of Dumfries before and during the Revolutionary War to the people living within the Town’s vicinity. Generously, the descendants donated their research and thoughts and provided a few stanzas of a poem they learned as a child, potentially referring to Cole:

“Where are you going, young fellow, my lad

On this early morn in May?

I’m off to join the colors, Dad

They’re looking for men they say.

Why, you’re only a boy, young fellow, my lad

You aren’t obliged to go.

“I’m seventeen and a quarter, Dad –

And ever so strong you know!”

Note: Craving more local Revolutionary War history? All prospective, current, and renewing members are invited to attend our Members First program on Saturday, 09/18, featuring special guest Ross Schwalm, President of the Johannes Schwalm Historical Association! This special virtual presentation will focus on the Hessian Prisoners of War in Dumfries in 1777. Free tickets available here.

(Sources: HDVI Archival Files: Cole, special thanks to Mrs. Lane Moore; Southern Campaign American Revolution Pension Statements & Rosters, Pension Application of Daniel Cole S8236, transcribed & annotated by C. Leon Harris with revisions in 09/2013, http://www.revwarapps.org/; The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library. "Encampment of the Convention Army at Charlotte Ville in Virginia after they had surrendered to the Americans." New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed August 25, 2021. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47db-9328-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99)

#revolutionarywar #colonialhistory #localhistory #genealogy #family #museumfromhome #archives #courtrecords #militaryhistory #military #virginiahistory #folklore #poetry

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bobbyshaddoe80 · 3 years

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Liberated Audio Reviews

Introduction:

The cult Sci-Fi series Blake's 7 has seen great admiration and appreciation in the 40 plus years since its initial broadcast in the UK., continuing to enthrall audience old and new alike. Despite its rather low budget, it possessed some pretty impressive writing and acting from its rotating cast of characters. Despite it being yet another Terry Nation brainchild, the series would evolve beyond the initial proposal/concept of 'Robin Hood in Space' under the direction of Chris Boucher to become something more than just a Star Wars clone.

Over the years, the show's devoted fanbase have poured over the show's 52 episodes and have long clamored, demanded, begged and pleaded with the Powers That Be for some sort of continuation or revival... In spite of the show's rather unorthodox and controversial ending.

After numerous rumors and false starts, which even included a full on audio reboot/reimagining by B7 Media back in late 2007/early 2008, it would be Big Finish Productions that would take up the daunting task of reviving and expanding the Blake's 7 universe starting in February 2012 with the Liberator Chronicles and the Classic Audio Adventures in January 2014.

The Liberator Chronicles are essentially enhanced audiobooks often told in the first person by whichever character is chosen to be the focus of the story. Often they are supported by one or two other cast members in order to help keep things from falling completely into standard audiobook monotony. Before tackling the full cast audios, I shall endeavor to present my thoughts and views on all twelve volumes of the Liberator Chronicles.

Please bear in mind that these reviews are based on my own opinions and no one else's. While I shall endeavor to be as fair as possible, I am not claiming that my opinion is the only one that matters and you are free to agree or disagree with me as you see fit. Just try to keep it civil. So, without further ado, let's get started by examining volume one.

Blake's 7 - The Liberator Chronicles Vol. 1

RELEASED FEBRUARY 2012

Recorded on: 23 September, 11 and 14 October 2011

Recorded at: Moat Studios

Review By Robert L. Torres

The Turing Test by Simon Guerrier

'After evading an attack by Cassini Pirates, the Liberator heads to the rogue moon of Quentil, where Avon and Vila infiltrate a top secret Federation science facility.

Vila assumes the guise of Dr. Yarding Gill, an expert in digital memory. And Avon is his "creation" - a super-advanced android that could pass for human. In fact, he does...

Can they maintain the ruse long enough to complete their mission? And will the Cassini Pirates catch up with them?'

Chronological Placement:

Series A - set after the events of LC Vol. 7's Disorder, between episodes Mission To Destiny and Duel.

This is a very well written story starring the late Paul Darrow as Kerr Avon, ably supported by Michael Keating as Vila Restal.

I love how the story is structured with Avon recounting these events AFTER the fact, like he was recording then for posterity into a dictaphone. I loved that Guerrier's writing didn't fall into the trap of having Avon try to do other voices or say 'said Blake', 'said Jenna' and so on. Nothing felt disruptive to the narrative and having Vila around never felt intrusive.

Kudos to Michael Keating for slipping back into the role of Vila Restal with relative ease. He will be quite reliable in a support capacity during many of these audios, and even get a chance at the spotlight... Which we will examine in due course. Right now, he lends his exceptional charm in this undercover mission posing as the scientist responsible for "creating" Avon.

Still, this story belongs to Paul Darrow, and he does a great job. It was a great story about what it means to be alive, what it means to be human and even serving as an examination of Avon himself. It was a nice inverse of the usual sort of questions regarding machine life wishing to be more human. Here we have a human considering himself to be more machine than man.

That is the interesting thing about Avon. Most scifi programs that deal with space travel tend to have an archetypical character known as the 'royal smart person'. For Star Trek TOS it was Spock, for Star Trek TNG it was Data, for DS9 it was Dax (and to a certain extent Bashir), for Voyager it was Seven of Nine, for Enterprise it was... Who the hell knows since everyone on that show was an idiot. As for Discovery... I honestly don't know cuz I haven't watched Discovery yet, but that's beside the point.

Avon is exceptional in his characterization only in that his desire to focus on pure logic and suppress his emotions does not come without its own drawbacks. Despite his intellect and skill with computers, he is someone that is also socially and emotionally cut off from others due to an inability to trust. He is also someone that sees the futility in giving over to emotional and irrational hysterics in order to showcase that he cares. Avon's intelligence also comes with a certain amount of ego, as he knows that he is smarter than many of his contemporaries, and much of the logic he embraces stems from a certain degree of self-serving self-interest.

His desire to assist in the situation with the AI android 14 stems from having an affinity with another creature of pure logic, and not wanting such a creature to be exploited and corrupted to further the aims and agendas of the Federation. This story is a great reminder of why Avon is a great antihero, as he is still willing to do the right thing in spite of himself.

Final Score: 8 out of 10 Plasma Bolts

Solitary by Nigel Fairs

‘Vila is in solitary confinement. His friends have abandoned him, his only contact with the world outside is Nyrron, a scientist from the planet Auron.

Amnesiac and confused, Vila attempts to piece together recent events... A mission to Dulcimer 4. An important meeting. And a visit to the jungle world of Terrulis Major.

In the depths of the foliage, the truth is waiting. And it's more terrifying than Vila could possible have imagined...’

Chronological Placement:

Series B - between episodes Redemption and Shadow.

I really do not have much to say about this story as it is profoundly unremarkable and is a major clunker in terms of execution of its concept, as well as the first person narration.

It has some interesting ideas, there is a central mystery that is interesting, with Vila finding himself in solitary confinement and abandoned by his friends, and we are introduced to a semi recurring guest character in the form of Auron scientist Gustav Nyrron, played by Anthony Howell ('Dr. David Keel' of the The Avengers: Lost Episodes range).

Nyrron himself is an interesting character as an ally for Blake and the Resistance, which begs the question why Cally wasn’t involved in this story as well. Because for an Auron scientist, he actually spends most of the time acting like either a reasonable interrogator or a benevolent psychiatrist for the imprisoned Vila.

The whole story itself is not executed terribly well. The Vila character spends a good chunk of the first few moments talking to himself, and then when Nyrron comes into the narrative, Vila spends the rest of the runtime being asked if he remembers certain events, and then goes on to basically recount events that lead up to meeting Nyrron and then goes on to tell Nyrron things that he already knows about.

As a Vila centric story, its also not terribly good, not even with certain unexpected revelations made. This story does Vila no favors and we don't learn much about Nyrron either. Fortunately, those are issues that would end up being rectified in later stories. Definitely give this one a miss.

Final Score: 4 out of 10 Plasma Bolts

Counterfeit by Peter Anghelides

‘The Bovee Mining Facility: A Federation slave camp worked by disgraced scientists.

The planet shouldn't be of interest but it is: Avon's investigations reveal that it's rich in Illusium, a mineral that can change from one substance to another. With it, the Federation could be invulnerable...

Blake teleports down to Bovee, but gets more than he bargained for. There's another visitor to the facility - and his presence changes the whole game...’

Chronological Placement:

Series A - set after the events of LC Vol. 1's The Turing Test, between episodes Mission To Destiny and Duel.

This is not a bad Blake focus story, with added support from Avon. However, what we get is a pretty standard adventure with Blake hoping to obtain certain materials and destroy the means of that material being reproduced in another effort to cripple the Federation's power. We even get in an appearance by Travis, Blake's personal nemesis, to lure him into a trap.

There isn't a whole lot to say about the story because of how standard and basic it all is. The fact that the story is done on audio does play in well into certain revelations and surprise twists made within the narrative. Many of which I will not speak on as it goes into spoiler territory. Other than that, the story itself is not bad, it is definitely worth a once-over. Its just unfortunate that it is also pretty average and fairly unremarkable.

Final Score: 5 out of 10 Plasma Bolts

Final score for Volume One of The Liberator Chronicles in its entirety is 6 out of 10 Plasma Bolts.

It isn't the best start to the Blake's 7 audio range as it really only has one story out of three to recommend it. Its great to hear the original actors back again, and thankfully they will be served better stories in the volumes to follow.

Special thanks to Craig Brawley of the Big Finish Listeners Facebook Group for his tireless efforts in mapping out the chronology of the audios and determining how they fit in with the established TV continuity.

#blake's 7 #reviews #big finish productions #audiobook

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