Could you make Purdy?

Purdy

fir branches, tied with red cord.

hello everyone! this writing is a secret santa present for precious @lovely-rubeum, who's works are a must-read for Thoma fans.

(🍂) tags: fluff (flashbacks), angst (currently), small age gap (2 years), fem!reader.

(⭐) spoiler tags: abandoment.

„ ♪ Last Christmas I gave you my heart, but you gave it away the very next day..“ New Year songs could've been heard everywhere. Layers of snowy crystals covered roofs and columns, fences and street lamps, making the light fuzzy. It's been six months since you left your homeland and went to university in another city. Yes, unlike your quiet little town with no kind of gaities and very few inhabitants who all knew each other, the city had much more to offer: wild parties every night, tons of cafes and restaurants, huge 20-floor shopping centers and different varieties of professional paths to follow. But your heart belonged to the calm peace of the town, soft sunbeams in the mornings, endless pinkish sky with plum-colored fluffy clouds — such dear memories were engraved in your soul. And, of course, your constant source of warmth whenever loneliness of an outsider hit you too hard was your childhood friendship with Thoma.

Thoma, who's hair reminded you of straws, who's green eyes shined brightly, who's genuine smile painted your cheeks with a prominent blush. Although you never communicated since he moved, reminiscence of your innocent tender bonds was still precious to you. 

"Does he even remember me?" you wondered at times, looking up at the sky, gazing upon stars, so close yet so far, just like Thoma himself.

You were 7, he was 9. He was a "big boy" with responsibilities much bigger than yours. His family wasn't very financially stable: the father went missing two years ago, the mother worked two jobs so she appeared at home just to sleep and to cook something for her son, who also worked hard everyday, mowing lawns and walking dogs in order to get some money.

Your family was totally opposite. Huge inheritance allowed your parents to live as they pleased, going on trips every year and spoiling their beloved daughter — you — with tons of clothes, toys and sweets. At times, when you acted capriciously, your mom scoldingly reminded you of poor Thoma.

"Honey, you shouldn't take everything for granted. You are living a very comfortable life, unlike some people who weren't born that lucky. Think of the neighbor’s boy! Only two years older yet already working. Behave and take an example"

You sobbed yet didn't start crying in rage like you always did. After all, mom was right. Sometimes, on snowy winter evenings, you could see Thoma from your balcony. He cleared snow with a shovel twice his size. You never saw him playing with other kids or doing silly things natural for his age. Actually, he didn't have friends at all due to being constantly busy.

Christmas arrived, and your parents showered you with gifts on this occasion. Wearing new boots, cute hat and a coat, you went out into the yard to build a snowman. You saw a glimpse similar to a dark spot on a pure white snow. It turned out to be Thoma, dressed in some rags — the boy carried heavy packages, which was visibly difficult for him. 

"Lemme help ya," you volunteered out of nowhere, grabbing a package's strap. 

"You sure? It's heavy..." he hesitantly mumbled.

"I'm billion percent sure. Let's be friends!" you blurted out, steam curling out of your mouth. 

Thoma froze in place. It was the first time ever anyone suggested to befriend him. You two were breathing heavily, dragging bundle along the street in quietness. You started feeling worried due to him keeping silent, but suddenly cheery voice interrupted the hush:

"Sure, let's be friends! What's your name?" Thoma smiled widely, exposing teeth. 

You introduced yourself, and that was the day your life has entirely changed.

You were 11, he was 13. Even after enrolling into middle school and making friends with his peers Thoma still valued you the most. He picked you up after classes, treated to home-made meals, played games with you and helped when it came to studying. School wasn't easy for him. Working part-time and taking care of his mother in a hangover took all of his free time. Thoma expected you to dump him: after all, he was unable to go to cafes and amusement parks, buy you gifts and share candies. He couldn't endure your saddened face and pouty cheeks without heart ache whenever he told you he wouldn't have time to go play with you.

But what Thoma did not expect was you acting on the contrary. 

"Oh, you are such a good boy!" your mother giggled, patting his head. You invited him to a sleepover in your house every week, and he finally gained an opportunity to shower in warm water, eat a proper dinner and not some semi-finished products thrown in one plate, sleep for full 8 hours..Your parents were incredibly kind and caring, considerate yet never intrusive. Here, in your place, Thoma felt loved, loved unconditionally. You two enjoyed your cocoa with marshmallow, cooked slightly crooked gingerbread and decorated the Christmas Tree all together. 

“Who do you think you will be in the future, Thoma?” you asked one evening, when two of you were busy with baking a pie. 

“Uh, wait, wait a second! One last thing… Here,” he spread out dough strips, “closing” the pie. “Who will I be in the future, you said? Ha-ha, to be honest.. I don’t really know. I hope I’ll work with kids or manage domestic stuff, cuz I enjoy doing it,” he chuckled, fixing his apron. “Hey, you are all in flour! Give me a second, I’ll wipe it off,” the boy reached out to tuck a strand of your hair behind your ear and swiped the flour away. His touch sent shivers down your spine, as if you got hit with electricity. 

“And who do you think you’ll be?” Thoma questioned.

“Hm… I want to become a teacher one day. Or a doctor,” ��or your significant other», you added mentally. 

“You are so hard-working, I’m sure you’ll succeed!” he smiled encouragely and patted you on the shoulder. 

You were 14, he was 16. From shy and ordinary guy Thoma became popular, quick-witted and got admired for his nice sunny personality. You, on the other hand, had grown up reserved and quiet. That, whatsoever, didn’t break your friendship. 

“Hey, pumpkin, forgetting your lunch box becomes a habit!” 

Of course you recognized this upbeat voice. Who else would’ve called you a pumpkin? 

When you turned your gaze up to your desk, there was a cute box in sight and widely smiling blond. 

“Aww, come on, Thoma, you didn’t have to!” you sighed dramatically, although internally you were screaming, feeling flattered from such solicitude. 

“I have to, because I care about your health, silly,” he gently ruffled your hair, avoiding ruining your hairstyle. “Let’s have a meal before lunch break ends, okay? I’ll stay here with you, no worries, we won’t go to the cafeteria,” he added immediately after noticing barely evident hints of your anxiety.

“...thanks, Thoma. Let’s see what you’ve prepared for me,” with that, you opened the box.. and your heart started pulsing like you have run a marathon.

Absolutely adorable salad with different vegetables, cut in some cute shapes. The dedication and efforts, invested in this dish, were obvious. You nearly teared up. No one has ever did something like that for you. 

“H-hey, is everything alright? You’ve turned pale…” Thoma asked in concerned tone.

“No, no, not at all! It’s just so sweet of you.. Thank you so much. I can’t make myself eat such masterpiece..”

“Hold on, kid! You need to eat, otherwise I might spoon feed you,” once in a while Thoma acted mischievously, and you couldn’t predict this behavior. He was never mean, of course, but teasing certainly had a place in moments like this. 

“And how about feeding me from mouth to mouth, huh?” you teased him back with a sly grin.

Thoma reddened: the color of his face was similar to the color of his jacket.

“Ah-ha-ha… You are quite naughty, aren’t you?” you could feel the heat emanating from his body. 

“And what if so?” you cheekily raised your eyebrow.

“I assume a kiss will be able to erase this smirk from your face,” the boy tried to get his composure back, but failed miserably, stumbling his words and awkwardly fidgeting.

“Try it, so we could discuss the truthfulness of your statement”

“Um… maybe next time, ha-ha…”

To Thoma’s luck, the bell rang, so he ran out of the classroom, leaving you alone and flustered.

“Don’t forget to eat, pumpkin!”

Since that day you two have never brought up this accident, even though having lunch with Thoma became a daily routine. 

You were 16, he was 18. He was embracing you tightly, despite the uncomfortable proximity under the boiling sun. 

“I’ll miss you, pumpkin,” he mumbled, and you could tell he was being honest — every wrinkle, every muscle of his face depicted the dreary sorrow of parting. Even though his 12 years old Nokia phone still worked, you heavily doubted it would function properly. Yet you still hoped for the best.

“Thoma, dear.. Please, call or text me as soon as possible. It’s dull without you,” tears flowed on their own, and you couldn’t help it.

Suddenly you sensed some soft sensation against your skin. There was no need to look up to understand what was it. You closed your eyes and indulged in bubbly pleasure.

Thoma was your first best friend.

Thoma was your first Valentine, though you both considered it to be a friendly one.

Thoma was the first person apart of your family to cook for you.

Everything important in your life was about him.

And now, he granted you your first kiss.

“I love you,” his green eyes watered just like yours. “When I graduate, I’ll come back for you. Do you agree?”, you grabbed his calloused hands and squeezed them.

“Yes. Yes, of course”

Two years have passed since then. There were no news from Thoma nor texts or calls. He simply disappeared from the world. Both of his parents rested in peace, and they didn’t have any relatives, so wondering about his fate was all you’ve got to do. Your messages never got delivered. 

“Sorry, the number you dialed does not exist,” you heard this voice line so many times it annoyed you to no end. You cried out of frustration, you felt numbness and anger, and finally, you accepted the entire situation. 

Maybe he dumped you.

Maybe something happened to him.

You won’t know until his studying finishes. 

Graduating from high school, passing exams, enrolling into university — you went through everything all by yourself with support from your parents.

Sipping coffee and sinking in your unhappy thoughts, you didn’t pay attention to any of the cafe visitors — after all, it was way too far from yor home, there was no chance to meet your countryman.

With the bell tickle, which announced the emergence of new client, loud fast speech could have been heard:

“Yoimiya, I’m so sorry! I left my place on time, it’s just that traffic accident with a mongrel dog occured, I had to take poor animal to the vet-”

This voice.

You stared upon the guest in disbelief. 

Blond hair. Red coat. Black bandana which looked like horns. Pitiful smile. Green eyes.

“Oh, dear God, Thoma! Is everything okay? Is the doggie alright?! Ugh, how could this be?..” fair-headed young lady came out of the stall and jumped forward the man.

“Wait,” he shook his head as if he was trying to get rid of weird delusions. But that was not a delusion. 

“Is this…” his voice lowered to husky whisper, eyes widened in shock.

“...Thoma?” you stood up on shaking legs.

Dylan O'Brien - NME Magazine Interview

Dylan O’Brien: “I was in this transitional phase – close to a quarter-life crisis”

From YA heartthrob to legitimate leading man – how the 'Maze Runner' star hit his stride after a whirlwind decade

Definitely!” hoots Dylan O’Brien when NME asks if he still has to audition. “I’m not Tom fucking Hanks, bro.” He’s clearly amused by our question, but forgive us for thinking the 29-year-old actor gets cast on reputation alone. A decade into his career, and he’s making an impressive transition from teen TV star and YA franchise hero to charismatic leading man.

New York-born O’Brien cut his teeth on MTV’s hit Teen Wolf series, before landing the lead in the Maze Runner film trilogy based on James Dashner’s hugely popular novels. Leading a band of bright young things that included ex-Skins tearaway Kaya Scodelario, Game Of Thrones’ Thomas Brodie-Sangster and Will Poulter, he honed his craft while racking up nearly a billion dollars at the box office. “My career is a constant acting class,” says O’Brien. “To be able to do the Maze Runner movies simultaneously with Teen Wolf was amazing in terms of getting in reps and working my [acting] muscle.”

Now for the sometimes tricky bit. Many actors struggle with the post-breakout period, but O’Brien is making it look easy so far. This year’s Netflix hit Love and Monsters proved he can carry an old-school family adventure, and new film Flashback (out next week) reveals an appetite for weirder, more cerebral work. He stars as Fred Fitzell, a young man reluctant to buckle down to life as a nine-to-fiver with a boring corporate job and a long-term girlfriend (Mindhunter‘s Hannah Gross). When he runs into a freaky-looking acquaintance from his teenage years, Fred becomes obsessed with finding an old high-school friend he used to drop a mind-bending experimental drug called Mercury with. It’s difficult to say any more without entering spoiler territory, but Flashback is a wild ride underpinned by the idea that we can exist in several realities at once. Even if you follow every plot twist, you might not fully understand the end. “Oh, it’s definitely a headfuck,” O’Brien agrees. “There’s not totally an answer to figure out. There’s a lot of different things that people can take from it.”

Speaking over Zoom from his LA home, O’Brien is bright, thoughtful and really good fun to talk to, especially when he relaxes into the interview, but he clearly knows where his line between public and private lies. When he first read the Flashback script, written by the film’s director Christopher MacBride, his “mind was blown” by just how much he related to Fred. “I felt like I was in this transitional phase of my life that was, you know, sort of close to a quarter-life crisis type thing,” he says. “For whatever reason, it was like me and this script were meant to be. I remember reading it and thinking: ‘I am this guy right now.'”

“There were a lot of things in my personal life that were neglected for a while”

When we ask why O’Brien felt as though he had reached a “transitional phase”, he gives an answer that’s vague but not exactly evasive. For understandable reasons, he doesn’t mention the incredibly traumatic motorcycle accident he sustained while shooting the final Maze Runner film in March 2016. O’Brien suffered severe trauma to the brain and said in 2017 that he underwent extensive facial reconstructive surgery after the accident “broke most of the right side of my face”. Tellingly, he’s never really revealed what happened on set or how it affected him.

Today, O’Brien dances around the details of the accident and other issues he was dealing with at the time, but doesn’t shy away from discussing his inner conflict. “You know, it was a lot of personal things combined with at-a-point-in-my-career things,” he says after a brief pause. He says he’d have been going through some of this stuff anyway, simply because of his age, but it sounds as though success intensified it all. “It was like this whole fucking storm of shit,” he continues. “I was simultaneously so fulfilled and happy about these, like, otherworldly and surreal things that I had experienced in terms of where my career had brought me. I had all this confidence and fulfilment and beautiful people [in my life] – such amazing things to experience at a young age. But at the same time, there were a lot of things in my personal life that were unchecked and sort of neglected for a while.”

O’Brien says that in time, he realised he had to “stop for a second” and “re-explore how I wanted my life to look going forward”. In fairness, you can see why he needed a breather: his career took off while he was still a teenager. After his family moved from New Jersey to Los Angeles County when he was 12, O’Brien contemplated a career as a sports broadcaster – his Twitter bio still bills him as a “no longer suffering Mets fan” – then began posting YouTube videos as moviekidd826. A funny, slickly edited skit titled ‘How to Prepare for the SAT in 45 seconds’, shared when he was just 17, shows he was a born performer and storyteller. YouTube success led to him getting a manager, but his breakthrough role in Teen Wolf still came out of the blue. At the time, he was treading water at a local community college and taking auditions on the side.

Still, he has since taken a rather fatalistic view of this career-making moment. “It’s totally weird because, when I think about it now, I don’t see how it could have happened any other way. I can’t picture myself doing anything else now,” he told Collider in 2011. “It was really sudden and a little random, and not provoked by anything. It was just out of nowhere. It wasn’t my intentional doing.” Today, O’Brien summarises his skyscraper career trajectory succinctly. “I guess I just graduated high school and started acting,” he says. “And then I felt like I was just flying by the seat of my pants and never got a chance to stop.” Thankfully, straight-out-the-blocks Hollywood success hasn’t taken away his sense of perspective. When I say how easy social media makes it to compare yourself unfavourably to others, O’Brien jumps in: “Yeah, that’s very true. I was watching the Billie Eilish doc the other day, and I was like, I’ve done nothing. I’m not an artist at all!”

“No one thought ‘Love and Monsters’ was going to be good!”

O’Brien is also self-deprecating when he talks about being cast in Flashback, suggesting it happened because he had such an intense connection with Fred. “I was honestly like, ‘Who is watching me right now?’ That is the best way I can describe how I was feeling when I came across this script,” he says. “Chris [MacBride, director] and I had this conversation that went so well in terms of [my] understanding this script that I think he’d sent around a lot and [that] very commonly wasn’t understood. I think Chris has even said that the night before shooting, he suddenly had this thought, like, ‘Wait, do I even think he’s a good actor?'”

Though O’Brien has firmly ring-fenced elements of his private life, he’s actually pretty frank about his acting vehicles. He readily admits he was expecting a snobbish response to Love and Monsters, a CGI-heavy hybrid of post-apocalyptic action and romcom that dropped on Netflix in April and topped the streamer’s daily most-watched list. “It means so much that Love and Monsters has gotten the response that it’s gotten,” O’Brien says. “No one thought this movie was going to be good.” His blunt honesty makes me laugh out loud. “No one did though!” he says in response. “And so, fuck that. You know, most of the people who say something to me about the movie, they’re like: ‘I watched Love and Monsters, and it was… good?’ And honestly, that just cracks me up.” For obvious reasons, we hastily decide not to share our response to the film – namely, that it was a whole lot better than expected.

In Love and Monsters, O’Brien plays Joel, a survivor of a so-called “monsterpocalypse” that has bumped humans to the bottom of the food chain. Though he’s known in his colony as a bit of a coward, Joel sets off on a treacherous 80-mile journey to find his high school sweetheart Aimee (Iron Fist‘s Jessica Henwick), which means evading the hungry clutches of various supersize grizzlies including a giant monster-frog hiding in a suburban pond. It’s a simple but pretty out-there premise that wouldn’t work if O’Brien’s performance was even slightly condescending. Instead, his unselfconscious sincerity really sells a film that has as much in common with the family-oriented Robin Williams movie Night at the Museum as darker fare like The Walking Dead.

His obvious affection for the project really comes across during our interview today. “When I read the script, I just thought it was so sweet and funny and smart and unique, but at the same time reminiscent of all these movies that don’t really get made any more,” he says. That’s a fair point: Love and Monsters is neither a fail-safe superhero movie nor a slice of classy Oscar bait. “And when they were talking about how to market this movie, it was so funny hearing all these conversations like, ‘How do we actually get people to watch it?'” he adds. “But that’s a big part of the reason I wanted to do this movie: because it felt like something I missed seeing.”

“I’m lucky to be surrounded by people who want to make something out of love”

So in a way, Love and Monsters was a risk for an actor seeking to establish himself outside of a bankable movie franchise and a hit TV show. O’Brien has only made four films since his final Maze Runner outing in 2018, and insists he hasn’t been tactical with his choices. “I don’t have anyone saying, ‘We need to get you in an Oscar vehicle’, or any of that kind of shit,” he says. “I’m really lucky to be surrounded by people who think like me: that you should do what you’re drawn to, and make something out of love.”

He’s recently finished shooting a mysterious crime thriller called The Outfit in London with Mark Rylance. Directed and co-written by Graham Moore, who won an Oscar for his screenplay to Alan Turing biopic The Imitation Game, O’Brien calls it “quite possibly one of the most special pieces of writing I’ve ever experienced”. He first read the script on a plane and says he “actually stood up and clapped” when he got to the end. Considering O’Brien probably wasn’t flying Ryanair, this reaction presumably attracted a few baffled glances.

Anyway, it must be pretty intimidating walking onto set with Rylance, a multi-award-winning actor revered by his peers – Al Pacino once said he “speaks Shakespeare as if it was written for him the night before” – but it sounds as though O’Brien took it all in stride. He says he’s confident in his abilities, but admits to having a slight wobble whenever he begins a new project. “I’m always sort of re-questioning everything – like, ‘Can I even act?'” he says. “But I think there’s something very natural about that. I think even Rylance could relate to that feeling. Acting is like starting a new year at school every single time.”

At this point in his career, O’Brien has made peace with the fact that some people will have preconceptions about him based on what he’s known for: Maze Runner and Teen Wolf. “People will put you in a box no matter what,” he says. “There was definitely a time when that would get to me, especially when it felt like somebody had a perspective on me that in my soul, I just felt wasn’t accurate.” Still, there’s no doubt he wants to show us what’s really in his soul with more films like Flashback. “If anything,” he adds bullishly, “it just makes me think: ‘Right, I’m really gonna show them now’.”

‘Flashback’ is out on digital platforms from June 4

Shrine to Temptation

The road which the King of Summer led them on went past the foot of the mountain. One of the many shrines that dotted the way up was near the bottom and five fae seemed to occupy its space. They were all male and looked generally humanoid, though there was something very strange about them. For one thing they all appeared to be exactly the same, as if they were a set of quintuplets, and only their clothes made them distinct from one another. Other things destroyed the illusion of their humanity as well. Their mouths full of wickedly sharp teeth that made them look hungry, their eyes were always wide open and somehow unsettling despite how ordinary they appeared otherwise. Behind them slim tails with a tuft of fur at the very end protruded from their clothes and twitched every so often as they moved. But more than anything it was they way they acted that was almost frightening. Calling out to the the group they invited them to climb the mountain, to visit the shrines, to just come and chat a bit. When the King of Summer ignored them they laughed and tried again, taunting him as they moved their bodies in ways that made them seem like animals and their wild laughter both infectious and frightening in the same moment. Still he would not look at them, but the three humans had paused to look. “Who are they?” asked Oliver. Ardri too wanted to know who these faeries were and why they seemed so pleased with themselves and at ease despite what had become of the Summerlands not even a mile away. But another part of him wanted to pull his friends away, away from these things that were almost leering at them, beckoning them closer. Fortunately none of them seemed interested in going closer to the shrine, and the faeries did not set one foot beyond the shadow cast by the roof. “They are harmless as long as you don’t enter the shrine itself. Once they were guardians of this mountain, the prisoner, and the Sage which dwells upon the peaks. But they have long since fallen from such grace and spend their time reveling in the cruelty they can inflict upon anyone foolish enough to get near.” The King spoke with a tired voice, though he turned and glared at the Faeries in the Shrine, causing them to laugh and call out to him even more. One of them, one wearing some kind of medallion on a chain round his neck that set him apart from his brothers, looked to Sam, Oliver, and Andy. “Come on, little humans. Don’t you want to see the Sage? He’s as ancient and as wise as anything could be! Even older than your King here, was old even when the little monarch was a mere few hours of age! Surely he’d have the wisdom to help you? Answer any question you might have... Or maybe you’d like to see the Phoenix?” Andy, who had already begun looking wistful, perked up at this. “It’s real?” he asked in an awed whisper. “The Phoenix?” Drawn to his longing like spiders to prey caught in their web, they moved as close as they could to him without leaving their shrine, leaning upon one another, holding causally yet closely to each other as their eyes never once left Andy’s face. “Yes, as real as the sun. More in fact. It is the truest thing there is. We are all like dreams while the phoenix is waking and truth. You might approach its cage and gaze upon it.” Andy took a step closer to the shrine, looking as if he was almost unaware of doing so. “Wait,” Oliver interrupted. “Cage? Why is it in a cage?” Their eyes turned to him, smiles wider, desire stronger. “Is it not the nature of humans to cage things? They cage creatures, they cage enemies, some even cage children. Would you set it free? Would you be the valiant hero? The one who saves and saves and never needs saving?” This time it was Oliver who took a step towards the shrine, looking dazed by the words. Ardri felt no glamour or enchantments coming from the strange fae, they had nothing but their words. It seemed those were more than enough. Reaching out he put his hand on Oliver’s shoulder, the boy looked at him and reluctantly drew back from the shrine. Andy also stepped back, longing clear on his face alongside his mistrust. “What is this sage? And the Phoenix?” he asked the King, unable to gaze any longer at the faeries who were now almost upon the floor of the shrine, reaching out as far as they could towards him, beckoning with almost urgent expressions. Their eyes still looked hungry. It was Ellie, not the King, who answered. “The Sage is what they said. A Faerie who is among the oldest even by their insane standards. The King here has been ruling for billions of years and he’s barely considered old. I don’t think humans even have numbers for how old the Sage is. The stories I’ve heard say he knows everything that can be known. As for the Phoenix...” The King spoke, gently taking the weight of the explanation. “It is a powerful creature. Not faerie nor mortal, but something else. It is said that while its flames do not burn at the touch, it will not allow those it sees as unworthy near to it. We do not know when it was locked away or why. Some short time after the great wars it disappeared and it was a long time before its cage was found here. Many tried to free it, but failed. If it were not caged, it might have flown you upon its back. As it is, we must hurry on.” “Where do we go? What is your plan?” asked Ardri. The King had never said, and he hadn’t asked. “The Giants may have a way to speed your journey. They know much that might help.” Began the King, but he was interrupted by the hysterical laughter coming from the shrine. The faeries there, who had been listening, had tears in their eyes as they dramatically draped themselves upon one another, laughing so hard they might burst. Another one, this one with little yellow flowers woven in his hair, spoke aloud to them, rising above the laughter of his brothers. “The Giants? They who see only the vast and are blind to the small? They will try to help, even bringing you a vessel. But you won’t reach the Autumn Court in time.” Laughter starting once more as they paused just long enough to catch a glimpse of Ardri’s startled face, they found his surprise just as amusing as they did the idea of giants. “Yes we know of your quest. Little crown seeker, errand boy of the world. What did anyone ever do for you that you put so much effort into saving them? Faerie’s destruction is self inflicted. All we suffer is our own sins crawling back to us after so long. You are new, you could leave. No one would blame you. You could go to the human world, and maybe find some... friends.” Their voices were smooth and reasonable despite their laughter, and their eyes glinted suggestively as they looked from Ardri to Sam. “Or you could join us. We couldn’t harm you, and we wouldn’t touch your human friend if you asked us not to. We love having guests.” They smiled widely, too widely. “Come sit here, we have all kinds of stories to tell, so many have passed this way before. You like stories, don’t you?” And he was tempted. It would be so easy to just sit down and listen to stories, to ignore the troubles that weren’t even his. Or to take Sam and the others back, Faerie would fall. But its people could flee to other worlds, find a new beginning. It might even be better to start over, rebuilding the collapsing remnants of a billions of years old civilization was almost laughable. Ardri felt Sam’s hand on his arm, the human boy drawing close, away from the faeries in the shrine. “No,” he said. “Your offer is appreciated. But I’m going to keep trying.” They stared at him as he spoke, his voice a calm he did not feel, and their smiles had vanished. Almost confused, like puppies unable to understand what it is they were looking at, they all tilted their heads to the side. Taking advantage of their silence, Ardri turned to the King. “I will speak with this Sage. It might be a waste of time, but perhaps he knows of how to free the Phoenix, and if there is a chance I must take it. These folk are still fae, as little as I trust their offers and temptations, they cannot lie and we all know it.” Slowly, ever so slowly. The King of Summer nodded. “Then while you climb, I shall go to the giants. Their help may still be vital to us in other ways.”

Hi I hope you have a great Thanksgiving I would like to request a crossover with Dr. stone with Kagome meeting The kingdom of science.

“Tsukasa-chan is going to kill me.” 

“I’ll take the blame if he comes after you.” 

The mentalist’s brow twitched as he looked at the priestess over his shoulder. She held a smile to show the weight of her honesty in her words. But that was not the problem. Tsukasa was going to have them both. The moment Tsukasa found out he, Asagiri Gen, took out their priestess outside, he was going to have his other generals after them. 

If there was one thing Tsukasa was overprotective about, aside from his ideals, was the girl that had claimed his stone cold heart - Kagome.

He sighed as he stepped over a dug out root. Now that was ironic. The one thing that had remained petrified on Tsukasa had either been his head or heart. He was thinking the latter. 

“Yosh!” 

Gen looked over at the girl behind him, watching her take a step over the boulder before jumping to the flat surface below. 

“So…why is the almighty priestess of Tsukasa’s Empire so interested in the Kingdom of Science?” Gen questioned, eyes trailing her as she took the lead. “Tsukasa-chan warned you about Senku-chan.” 

“Yeah, he did.” Looking left and right, Kagome took the the new surroundings. She was unfamiliar to the territory, but nothing too alarming for her senses. The feudal era times had trained her to be out in the wild as such. But it still threw her off this was the ‘future’. Everyone had pictured a future of high-tech, metal, robots, and floating cars. Everything and anything had been imagined, but not this. Back to their old roots of cave man days. 

“I want this meet this guy.” She continued, parting the bushes in front of her. “I’m curious to meet the guy that has a goal to bring us back to where we were, and also, the guy who made you a ‘nice’ guy.” Kagome’s eyes sparkled as a clearing came in sight. A look-alike tree house stood in the middle of the land as inventions of all sorts surrounded the said hut. Kagome’s lips formed an ‘o’; she moved forward. 

“O-Oi!” Gen tried reaching for her shoulder. Fingers curled into the breeze. A defeated exhale puffed out of his lungs before following behind. Snaking his hands into his long sleeves, Gen’s eyes raked the empty area. Not a soul in sight. Where did the Ishigami Village go? 

Kagome’s steps slowly took her closer to the inventions, many which she had no idea what their use was for. Her fingers gently smoothed over the wooden counter of a man-made cart. Although - eyes rose to see the Hiragana spelling ‘ramen’ - she was beginning to love every bit of them. 

The priestess’s senses spiked slightly the moment she felt a moving aura behind her. Looking over her shoulder, the priestess’s eyes landed on the tree-house’s doors opening. 

“Oi, oi, Asagiri Gen. What news have you brought us now?” 

Gen’s brow crooked up as he kept his same stance. 

A shoe stomped out of the home before the sunlight curtained his full figure. A smirk wormed onto the male’s lips as he tilted his head to the side. “Has Tsukasa delivered a new threat?” 

Kagome blinked, noticing the long white hair with green tips waxed up and the simple animal-skin patched into a rudimentary style. The priestess’s eyes narrowed slightly upon catching the lightning-like cracks on the edges of inside his brow as they flowed upwards. 

“Well~,” Gen chuckled, fingers scratching the side of his cheek, “not so much as a threat, but possibly will poke the bear with this one.” 

“Hm?” The white-haired male’s brow rose. “What are you talking about?” 

“Hi!” 

The female voice made him jolt in place as his head snapped to the direction of where she stood. His red eyes flickered rapidly at the sight of the slender black-haired woman dressed in a long maroon turtleneck dress, tight to her curve, flowing down to her her ankles. The sleeves cut to show her toned shoulders and arms and a - weird - looking necklace with a collection of animal teeth and a small pink jewel hanging from string. 

Her bright blue eyes beamed him a warm welcome. How did he not notice her? 

“Hi?” He questioned his greeting. 

“Are you perhaps the infamous Senku-san I hear so much about?” Kagome asked. 

He scoffed, “don’t add the ‘san’. It makes me feel old.” 

“Technically we are.” She smiled. 

Senku could not help but let his brow raise with curiosity. “Ho~?” ‘Technically’, she had used. Did that mean-? “One of us, huh? An old-timer!” 

Gen rolled his eyes at the joke. 

“So,” Senku crossed his arms, “what is someone from Tsukasa’s empire doing here?” 

Kagome’s eyes caught the formula written on the collar of his clothing. So he was the scientist Gen had been fan-boying about. The scientist who had been able to bring ramen and cola to the stone ages. Doing the impossible with science. Something Tsukasa was fearing. 

“Curiosity, perhaps?” She answered. “I wanted to see the Kingdom of Science and the imminent threat you guys pose to Tsukasa.” 

“Threat, huh?” Senku made his way down the wooden ladder before finally stepping on the ground and turning to the girl. “And you are?” 

Clearing his throat, Gen’s smile jumped back on his lips as he made his way to stand beside the priestess. “Oh, dear me! How rude of me to not have made the introductions. This,” his palm laid upwards as he used his hand to point at the girl, “is Higurashi, Kagome. Tsukasa Empire’s priestess.” 

Senku’s curiosity was tugged. “Priestess? You guys have one, too?” Question after question stacked inside his head. For what reason would Tsukasa want a priestess? Was this a role he just decided to create for his said empire? He took another glance at the girl from the corner of his eyes before looking back at Gen. “Is there a reason you brought her here? Tsukasa might not like it.” 

“Not ‘might’,” Kagome cut in, “he will not like it.” 

The scientist blinked, taken back by her spunk. 

“I became curious to see this so-called Kingdom of Science Gen-kun was parading about. He was badmouthing you for sure-”.

Gen’s smile stretched, “-trying to protect myself, too, you know.” 

“-but Gen-kun loves it here. So I wanted to know what you had done or showed him to convert to your side.” Kagome took a step closer towards Senku. “But I can see it was nostalgia and hope.” 

Senku scoffed as he picked inside his ear with his pinkie finger. “Hope? Nostalgia? Perhaps those could serve as an answer to you if that satisfies you.” Blowing the tip of his pinkie, Senku shined a grin towards the girl. “So are you here to help out?” He knew where this was going. He felt no ill intent from the girl. If anything, she was beaming with curiosity each time she glanced at the inventions that laid around. “I’m always welcoming an extra set of hands for the labor.” 

Gen’s eyes dilated, “a-ah wait a minute! I brought her to see! Tsukasa-chan isn’t supposed to know she came here! We have to go back-!” 

“I never agreed to that.” 

Gen’s fingers twitched inside his sleeves. He felt his stomach churn. “Eh...?” Had he heard her right? If he translated her words in his head, that meant Tsukasa was going to have his head. Crap. 

The scientist continued to observe the priestess before him. He was never one to really look into personalities as he was one to always face facts first, but the girl had definitely tugged on his curiosity. She was peculiar. For someone who was coming from Tsukasa’s empire, she had no fear to it. 

From the dialogue they had just shared, he was able to twine the strings of her connection to Tsukasa - somewhat. The moment she started to help, she would be seen as a traitor, just like Gen. That also meant...

“What do you specialize in?” He questioned. 

“W-Wait a minute!” Gen tried to intervene. “Tsukasa-chan can’t-!” 

“I can heal.” She answered immediately. Gen’s voice drowned in the background. 

Senku smirked as he walked over to a set of weaved baskets and threw one towards Kagome. 

Kagome caught it and looked at the empty basket in her hands. 

“Then let’s go start on your interview.” Senku’s lips stretched to a toothy grin. 

The priestess’s eyes flashed with glee as she followed suit. But not before looking over her shoulder and waving at the mentalist. “Don’t worry, Gen-kun. I’m doing this to help Tsukasa-san.” 

Left frozen in place, Gen felt his thoughts jumble. Help? 

Senku stopped in his tracks to look at the priestess over his shoulder. Whose side was she on? 

“If he comes, don’t worry, I’ll be the first to face him.” 

The huge smile on her face stilled Gen; Senku’s shoulders dropped. Perhaps she had a plan of her own. 

Adjusting the basket to her hip, she turned to face Senku. “All we can do is move forward, right?” 

The corner of his lips pulled upwards. “I’ll agree to that ten billion percent.” 

She was willing to provoke Tsukasa? Perhaps she would do something he had not thought about. For now, there was no harm in taking her in. Besides, he needed the extra hands to keep his Kingdom of Science going. 

[kth] lavender honey ch. 7

note: this fanfic has multiple chapters, so please look forward to more!

lavender honey: kim taehyung x reader

genre: crack, fluff, college au, smut

word count: 3k words

>

lavender honey

ch 7: in which taehyung achieves his dream of world dominance. at least... in the world of your stupid thoughts.

The drive back is filled with jazz music.

Taehyung sits at the passenger seat, half-pouting at a stubborn Namjoon who did not give in, even when the younger male had asked him to rest.

So, instead, Taehyung continues to jam to jazz music and acting as if you all were inside a karaoke box. It’s lively for a change, so you find yourself giggling as you exchange chats with Jungkook here and there.

When a slow song comes on and Namjoon’s gaze goes to the way Taehyung’s deep voice sings the soft song, you put your phone down and listen to the younger male as well. You couldn’t see his face from your seat in the back seat, but you became acutely aware of some little details that you had never noticed before.

Kim Taehyung has the most beautiful shoulders, it fits his posture and build really well. It

You notice for the first time that his hair is growing out, a mullet of sorts.

Shit. That’s hot.

The nape of his neck is so smooth, and you can see the veins in his neck as he sings the song in a very sorrowful voice.

Oh.

This is too much, seriously.

Your subconscious mind, Minji is being extra horny today.

You shut your eyes tight and try to get the nasty visions your nastyass brain was forming in your head as far away from you as possible.

>

And then, you wake up.

You could feel a huge cramp on the left side of your neck, and when you begin to stretch the pain away, you realize that you’re still inside the car, and someone was next to you.

“T-Taehyung?”

“Ah, my dear cauliflower. You finally decided to wake up?”

Cauliflower?

That isn’t even worth questioning..

You yawn in response, stretching yourself a little and looking outside. “Ah, we reached? Where’s Joon?”

“He’s inside. For now, let’s get off.” Taehyung says, and you nod, opening the door and the two of you climb outside.

“Wait. How is it already night, we left from Ilsan in the evening, and the drive shouldn’t have taken more than half an hour, and you were in the passenger seat so why were you in the back just now-”

“You really should leave that nasty habit you have of dumping ten billion questions at once.” He has to say. “And you use varying registers for each word and it hurts my ears.”

“I use varying what?!”

“Anyway. Go back in, here’s the key to the car.” Taehyung says, throwing it at you and you manage to catch in. Score! “I’ll head off home. Rest well today, yeah?”

It’s kinda annoying that he wouldn’t wait for a response. Maybe it’s a guy thing. To say something cool and then turn around and walk off. Taehyung even has his hands in his pockets like the thug wannabe kid he probably is, as well. Is that a trend, now?

You watch him bring the door of the gate to a close, and then walk off, and honestly. Peach is such a hot color on him.

It’s kinda stupid, but peach is perfect on Taehyung’s hair because it makes him look beautiful during bright light, and very… attractive, at night, when the light is fading and the hue of peach darkens a little.

Why are you thinking about Taehyung’s hair at a time like this, what even.

You heave out a big sigh, opening the door and getting inside your house. You find Namjoon in his room, by his study desk, and he watches you take a seat on his bed.

“So. You slept in the car for two hours. How do you feel?”

“I what ?!”

“Yes you did. You fell asleep right after Taehyungie finally started driving, and I was gonna wake you up but he didn’t want to. So he stayed with you until you woke up.”

This makes your mouth wide open in shock, wondering just why on Earth he would stay for so long, when he could have just woke you up and asked you to go to bed at your own home.

See. This is going to go on to the list of the 54920435 things that will forever baffle you, in regards to Kim Taehyung. The mysteries are endless, and if someone is gonna do urban legends on the 21st century in the year 3829, you feel bad at how many things they’ll have to learn about Taehyung.

So instead, you wish Namjoon a good night and retire to your room, where you stare at the ceiling for God knows how long, before you fall asleep again.

>

‘Noona. Are you back? Can I call you?’

A text is waiting for you when you wake up on Sunday morning.

A couple seconds after you reply with a ‘yes’, Jungkook makes the call.

Not just sexy but also a reliable man! What a catch!!

“I… I found out Taehyungie-hyung went to Ilsan to visit you… I had no idea, Noona. If I knew, I’d have gone with him, as well.”

You shake your head, giving him a smile in response. Wait a sec. This is a phone call bro.

Oh yeah.

“It’s fine, Kookie. I’m fine, really. I just had a hard day, but I’m okay, now. Joon is, too.”

“Noonim. If you don’t have other plans, I’d like to prepone our date for tomorrow, to today.”

“I’d like that, Jungoo.”

“I’ll pick you up in an hour, Noonim.” Jungkook says, before he hangs up.

He shows up five minutes early.

Your mouth is an ‘o’ like those naan you crave to perfect when Joon announces that Jungkook has shown up. Since you were not finished getting ready yet, you ask Namjoon to bring the kid inside till you finish.

Since finding out that Jungkook feels… that…. Uh? Positive… Wanna-go-out kind of feelings towards you, you find yourself changing a little in the sense that your allowance each month goes towards buying beauty products instead of useless junk food.

You even bought one of those stupid… tweezers…

Bruh. What were you even becoming?

Jeon Jungkook is quite famous among the freshmen, and you’ve had some of your classmates ask about what your relationship was, when you two had been wearing the totally-obvious-as-fuck clothing on your first date day.

What really was your relationship with Jungkook? Even Taehyung had asked the same question and you didn’t really have much of a solid answer to give.

Oh shit. That might have been the first time you didn’t have a good answer to give to Kim Taehyung.

Dammit. You really hope Seokjin manages to prepare that memory-erasing potion he fantasizes on creating. It’d be nice to wipe that memory away from his head.

And also that time when you came down to the living room to get ice after you’d finished waxing and you were only wearing your towel around your body and Taehyung had been chillaxing with Namjoon and discussing which member from Stranger Things went through the most development.

That’s some quality discussion, now that you think about it.

You also hope you could erase the memory of him watching you slather on makeup for your first date. Crazy as shit, but you still think about that… disappointed expression on his face.

Is this what doom feels like?

Now that you think some more, you’d probably use the potion on erasing only things related to Taehyung.

Why are we even (silent) discussing fantasy potions even, how is Seokjin gonna create a memory-erasing potion when he can’t even figure out and notice how obvious it is that Namjoon likes him back.

Send help now.

You shake your head and race down the stairs after you get ready. Jungkook is sitting on the sofa next to Namjoon, and you didn’t even know that Taehyung hadn’t left for home yet.

So, the two Kim boys and one Jeon boy are just chilling around the coffee table, playing uno.

Uno? L a m e.

Okay, Uno isn’t really lame, but you were expecting them to do something more wild and less mediocre… Maybe having a mini parkour marathon.

Okay, you’ve watched way too much of prince of stride episodes.

Jungkook looks up when you finally come over to the living room.

“Noonim!”

“Noonim?!” Namjoon’s voice echoes in startlement. Out of context, sure, that sounds a bit weird. Who even calls people that anymore, this is the age of blossoming Noona-romances, after all-

Minji does a double flip in your head, so you tell her to calm the fuck down.

“[Name]-noona is older than me, of course. So-”

“I know that, but why specifically Noonim, is my question-”

“Your sister has some nastyass kinks, dearest Hyung of mine.” Taehyung has to say, before he puts a card down and screeches ‘UNO’ at the top of his lungs.

Jungkook looks very flustered and takes a glance at you, too embarrassed to look at Namjoon and instead looks at Taehyung with a small pout.

Seriously, Taehyung really needs to grow up.

Wait.

If Taehyung does any more of growing up, his voice is probably gonna be deeper and his shoulders broader and his-

Minji needs to shut the fuck up oh my good god.

“Shut up!” You hiss at Taehyung. What was he even doing here anyways? Doesn’t he have an apartment that has been paid to keep him inside it? Why can’t he do one single job?

“L-Let’s go, Noona?” Jungkook says, and you nod. He still looks to embarrassed after Taehyung’s remark, to look at Namjoon, so he simply says ‘I’ll be off, Hyung’ instead and stands up. You pull on his sleeve a little and Jungkook lets you pull him out as you stomp out of the house, feeling a little bit annoyed.

“It’s nice to know that you’re not too gloomy. I’m sure your grandpa is at a better place now, so don’t put yourself through any pain. He isn’t suffering either.”

Those are such comforting words, and you almost tear up and ruin your mascara at the way Jungkook looks a little worried.

“I won’t. Where are you taking me, Jungoo?”

The nickname makes him smile, showing his front teeth and he looks so adorable that you can’t stand it. How can he have such burly arms but such doe eyes and bunny teeth like that?

Some men get ALL the luck.

Jungkook interrupts your worry towards the rest of the general male population by pointing at where his bike was parked at. After he makes sure you’ve gotten on his bike safely, he asks you to please be patient for a bit.

And then.

He takes you to an art gallery.

Jungkook takes you to an art gallery, filled with classical paintings.

The paintings there are so detailed, vibrant and beautiful, and they do nothing but remind you of Taehyung.

Okay. This is getting out of hand. When did this even start?

Is it because he came to attend your grandpa’s funeral?

Or because you both keep spending so much time together for your extra credit?

Is it because he’s the one you see the most after Namjoon?

Or is it simply nothing except the sole fact that he technically worships Vincent Van Gogh?

Jungkook seems to notice your fraying thoughts and lack of conversation between you two.

“Noonim? Are you upset about what Taehyungie-hyung said?”

“No! That’s not it! I’m so sorry Taehyung said that. He’s really stupid, he doesn’t realize what he’s saying when he speaks!!”

Jungkook reacts belatedly, his stare on you for a couple seconds before he then says, ‘Was it a lie?’

“What-”

“You know what I’m talking about, Noona~” He sings, and this makes you punch his arm playfully, your face heating up.

Of course, it’s a kink.

Jungkook himself is a kink, after all.

You were so glad you didn’t say that out loud.

Minji has some issues today.

Daylight changes to city lights in the matter of a couple hours while the two of you laze around at a coffee shop and sip on frothy coffees.

While Jungkook drives you back home and you have your hands clutching onto two handfuls of his sweater, you take a good moment to think about your day.

And it’s very upsetting for you when you realize how different this date was from your first date with Jungkook, how much less the conversations had become, and you wonder if Jungkook would still be interested in taking you out if you keep having other thoughts and memories splurging around in your mind like crazy.

“Noona, next week, can I take you to the grass fields a couple blocks from my apartment? It’s really pretty there, and I want to take you there and then take you home.”

“W-What?!”

Holy shit, you could almost see Minji starting to strip, in your head.

You nasty.

“Ah! I- I really need to learn to rephrase my wordings better.” Jungkook says with a facepalm. Minji is putting her clothes back on when he goes on. “I want to show you what I do. Like, what I’m drawing and what kind of videos I make.”

“Oh.”

“You sound a bit disappointed, Noona.”

“Don’t be too cocky.” You respond, and this earns a big grin from Jungkook, and he hurries to intertwine your fingers together. “Now that I think about it, even if we’ve known each other for a while, I haven’t really been able to see much of your drawings.”

“That’s right! I want to show you so that you’d be impressed!” He gushes. “I always want to take pictures of you that I can sketch, if I have your permission. I have the whole date all planned!”

This makes you giggle, the two of you taking a seat at the porch of your house. It was nice that he didn’t want to leave just yet and thought the same thing you did.

“I also have one more date all planned out! That’s for the next next week, though.”

“What’s that date for?”

“I want to sit by the beach with you for the whole day.”

Your heart swells. Aigoo. How can someone be that cute? You’re almost afraid of asking, because you weren’t sure how much your fragile heart could handle this cute little baby boy.

“And the week after that?”

“Well…” He says, glancing at you, and then getting up. “Let’s let you decide that.”

You give him an ok sign, and the two of you glance at the door.

“I should get going,” Jungkook says, carding his fingers through your hair and looking a little disappointed. “Go in first, Noona. I’ll see you at college tomorrow.”

“Drive safe, Jungoo. I had fun today. With you.”

This makes him smile, and you’re expecting the action much earlier than it actually starts, when he holds your hands tight and then leans in to kiss you.

The taste of banana milk still remains on his lips, and the way one hand softly holds your cheek tenderly makes your heart race a little as you kiss him back and wrap an arm around his neck.

Your first kiss! With Jeon Jungkook!

It’s such a new warmth, and it still stays, even when Jungkook moves away a little, his hold changing into a hug while he looks at your face.

“That was my first kiss, Noonim.” He confesses, bursting into a huge grin.

“That was my first kiss too, Jungoo.”

“What?! Are you serious?” He looks surprised, but doesn’t let you go, and you look up at him and give him a nod.

“I’m a happy, and very lucky man, then. I… I like this, and this is definitely not a platonic feeling.”

Your heart races a little, and the fact that Jungkook has both his arms around your waist is not helping. You really couldn’t concentrate, and the fact that you two were still standing at the porch of your house makes you a little nervous about Namjoon or Taehyung seeing you two.

Ah. That was quite a lot of time that went by without you thinking about Taehyung.

Did Minji sign a contract with him or what-

“Let’s see what happens, Noona. Let’s go on dates and find out what we feel. Are you okay with me?”

“Okay is not enough as an adjective to describe how I feel about you.”

“That makes me glad.” Jungkook joins you and chuckles, and then he takes a step away. “Go inside first, and I’ll text you when I go home.”

“Bye, Jungkook- Wait. You have some of my lipstick on your lips!” You say, noticing the uneven red on his lips now.

“What? Really?!”

When you reach a hand to his face, he takes a step back, shaking his head a little.

“K-Keep it.”

“But-”

“Ah, Noona~ Don’t make your Jungoo more embarrassed!” He whines cutely, and you’re surprised that you aren’t on the floor as melted goo right now.

The two of you wave goodbye, and Jungkook heads back home with a big smile on his face.

There’s no one downstairs, and you’re still recovering from the little high you were on because of Jungkook. As you walk upstairs and head to your room, you see that Namjoon’s room door was open.

Now, you had zero intentions on eavesdropping on what was going on, but when you hear ‘Do you like someone, Taehyung-ah?’, you can’t just walk past or interrupt the conversation, right?

Yeah! You’re doing the right thing! Who knows how much Namjoon might have worked to finally ask this question.

Yeah! It’s all for your bro’s sake!

“My… my chances are rare, hyung. I might want to hold tight, the person I like, but I can’t. Not when things are going well for her with the person she likes. I don’t want to be the person that ruins things for the one person I have the hardest time staying away from, you know?”

i wondered if i could come home

so, the episode 300% killed me dead. on the floor. so this came out of it. straight up shameless fluff. fluff without plot, if you will. anyway, i owe my heart and also this fic to @elsaclack​ and @jakelovesamy​. title from first day of my life (thx a billion @jokeperatla​ omg)

Amy slowly comes to, blinking hard against the golden late-afternoon light filtering through her window. She can’t quite seem to gather her thoughts - unsurprising, since these random midday crash-naps are the closest thing she’s gotten to proper rest since the night of the trial. Her eyes are dry and a little red-rimmed, crusty with sleep. She takes a few more moments to relish this calm, taking deep breaths and steeling herself against the long night to come. It’s been ages since she slept properly, centuries since she took a true deep breath, eons since her bed, with its freshly washed sheets devoid of crumbs and spills and the miscellaneous junk that’s made its home in her - their - apartment, has felt truly comfortable or familiar.

She rolls over, away from the setting sun wafting through her half-open blinds, in the hopes of catching a few more minutes of sleep before reality sets in, before she has to put back on a pantsuit and reopen Hawkins’ file and pretend everything is normal--

--and then she lands in an unexpected warm spot on his side of the bed. It smells, quite unmistakably, like him. She groans, curling tighter into the blankets, because she’s had this dream before. She shuts her eyes tight, feeling that brief jolt of hope ebb away into the familiar numbness that’s dulled her mind for more than six weeks. She’ll open her eyes again in a second and the bed will be cold and she’ll get up and find her discarded blouse and Captain Holt will call her with an update and she’ll have ten texts from Charles about how to cry on cue for her upcoming podcast appearance.

But the longer she lays there, steeling herself against the evening of work to come, crouched around Captain Holt’s coffee table with Cheddar safely locked in the upstairs guest room and Kevin bringing out trays of desserts in which sour gummy flourishes are featured with an unusual frequency, the more she notices that something is off.

For one, the warmth isn’t going away as her mind slowly emerges from its post-nap fog. For another, the smell is different this time, tinged with sweat and the unmistakable scent she recognizes from the visiting room in South Carolina. She notes the water she can hear running in the bathroom sink. Finally, she registers the feeling of her too-clean sheets against her naked body, and her mind starts to catch up, first slowly then in a flood of images and memories that nearly overwhelms her.

Jake, sprinting out of the prison complex and into the vacant visiting room so fast he trips over a table. Jake, pinning her against the wall and slamming his mouth against hers, teeth clicking together through their smiles before her hands find his cheeks and his fingers tangle in her hair for a proper kiss, with no guards shouting about enough touching or too much contact (that is, until his hands rove to her belt loops, starting to finger with the bottom of her sunniest daisy-patterned blouse, when the guard behind them coughs pointedly, reminding them of their highly public position).

Jake, gripping her hand so tight it’s bruised in the taxi to the airport in Charleston and dropping kisses on her shoulder, neck, cheek, lips, when the driver isn’t looking. Jake, at their gate at the airport, so much calmer than JFK or LaGuardia, speaking a mile a minute with a wild look in his red-rimmed eyes about solitary and mashed potatoes and shivs and cannibals over heaving breaths that slow as she puts her hand around his shoulder and pulls him close. Jake, falling asleep against her shoulder, his face buried in her neck, on the first available flight back to New York, the overwhelming whirlwind of the past fifteen hours catching up with him.

Jake, foot tapping and knee jiggling in the cab ride home, face eager and bright as he hears about Holt cuffing Hawkins in glorious detail (he laughs when he hears that Charles arranged specially to leave Genevieve’s smelliest leftovers in the appropriate squad car for the duration of the arrest, ensuring the car was so cloaked in scent it was nearly visible, causing a severe bout of carsickness for one corrupt lieutenant on the way to the Metropolitan Detention Center).

Jake, slamming the door behind her and pushing her up against it as her purse and her keys clatter to the floor below the carefully positioned rack they’re intended to hang on. Jake, his eyes dark as he groans into her mouth while her hands search blindly for his belt. Jake, stopping as she backs him towards the couch to comment about how jumpsuits made him realize the fundamental uselessness of belts, causing her to laugh so hard she topples them both over the armrest of his massage chair.

Jake, his head curled into the crook of her neck, his breath tickling her bare shoulder as his arms hold her so tightly she’s not sure she’ll ever be able to get out, not that she’d ever want to.

As her whirling thoughts slow and the last remnants of sleep clear from her mind, the thought hits her: Jake is in her - their - bathroom. And suddenly, she jumps out of bed like someone lit a fire under her mattress, so quickly she trips over the sneakers she’d brought to South Carolina for him (quickly discarded when they made it back home in New York).

She snags his tactical village tshirt - oversized and soft and a little wrinkled from the plane - off the pile of clothes on their carpet and pulls it hastily over her head as she moves towards the bathroom, each step quicker than the one before, keeping pace with her heartbeat pounding in her ears.

Finally, after what can only be a few seconds but feels like an eternity, she skids around the doorframe of their tiny bathroom to find Jake in his Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles boxers (she hadn’t realized they sold those in adult sizes until he pulled down his jeans after their eighth date). She hears music - if she’s not mistaken, it’s Taylor Swift’s “State of Grace” - filtering quietly through her headphones, plugged into his battered phone held together with packing tape, perched on his bag of toiletries precariously close to the edge of the sink.

“You should move that,” she says, her voice replete with the unique mixture of reproach and laughter that always seems to tinge it when she’s talking to him.

He moves to turn around, a little startled, and manages to knock his phone onto the tiled bathroom floor in the process. Amy winces a bit, taking a moment to be thankful that at least it’s (mostly) dry, before she’s overcome with the overwhelming normalcy of the moment. This could be any other day in their lives, almost as though her new normal had never existed. She watches the muscles of his back move as he bends down to pick up his phone, checking it for new cracks, and sees his shoulders quake with laughter under mussed curls that he kept surprisingly well-groomed in prison.

And before he can turn around to face her, before he can acknowledge her comment beyond the gentle laughter forcing its way out of his chest, before she even really knows what she’s doing, her arms are around his chest and she’s leaning into his back, resting her cheek up against his shoulder and taking in the warm feel of him all around her. It’s comforting and warm and still a little overwhelming, but she can feel the emptiness, the numbness and hard edges that have filled her for nearly two months, start to dissipate and soften within her, leaving light and warmth and pure, unadulterated happiness so filling she’s sure she’ll burst with the sensation.

She feels him start to move, can feel the muscles tensing and shifting beneath the sleeves of her overlarge shirt, but she just clutches him tighter, part of her still nervous that if she lets go, he might disappear again. She whines, just a little bit, as he unsuccessfully tries to pry her fingers apart, and she’s so focused on the feel of her face against his shoulder blade that she doesn’t immediately notice when his hands leave hers, reaching back to tickle under her arms.

Surprised, she squeals and pulls her elbows down to her sides, forcing her hands just loose enough for him to turn around. She buries her face against his chest, more careful to keep her arms close to her body now, and feels his laughter shaking both of them. On any other day, she’d be pressing him to get ready, reminding him that they have plans and tardiness would be considered unbelievably rude and yes, even Charles would care, Jake, but instead, she lifts her face up, eyes already closed as she moves to kiss his cheek.

And she gets a mouthful of shaving cream.

In retrospect, she should’ve known. Should’ve seen the water running, noticed his razor on the sink, should’ve looked at his face in the mirror instead of staring at the Ninja Turtle on his butt, but instead, all she can do is spit (perhaps a tad dramatically) into the sink, shaving cream coating her lips and chin, while she watches a half-bearded Jake laugh at her from behind in the mirror.

“You jerk!” she finally chokes out between handfuls of water to clean out her mouth (who knew shaving cream tasted so gross).

His only response is more laughter. “I saw it coming, but Ames--it was just--that was too good to pass up,” he gasps.

She pushes his chest gently, not hard enough to actually send him out of her space, rolling her eyes at this goofball. She takes a moment to wonder at the hope and the light that sparkles so familiarly in his eyes - somehow, remarkably, prison didn’t quench even a bit of it. She can’t begin to imagine what it was actually like, and she’s sure the coming days and weeks and months will be full of times to talk and cry and be scared for each other. But for now, he’s here and the light in his eyes is making the whole apartment seem just a tad brighter, as though he literally makes the colors around her more vivid.

She wants to find words for this feeling, for the way that her heart seems to have settled back into its proper cavity and her stomach has calmed and her hands have stopped shaking and her lungs can expand fully again, but it’s a little bit scary, this idea that she can’t breathe without him, and there’ll be time for that later. It is the most relieving thought in the world that there will be time to be vulnerable and desperate and honest and joyful and intimate and silly and everything that falls between - no more hour-limited conversations across a cafeteria table in a prison.

So when he moves fully beside her, pressing his shoulder into hers until she moves away from the mirror to make room for him, she just smiles and shifts right instead. There’s a draft on her bare legs (she blames her perpetually-hot boyfriend, who must’ve turned down the AC a thousand times since he moved in, much to her chagrin), so she inches closer, taking advantage of the warmth radiating off Jake’s bare chest.

Their conversation is small and light as he picks up his razor again - the thoughtless banter she’s enjoyed ever since she learned to live with his garbage dump of a desk has returned without a single hitch or break, with an ease that shocks her. So as she dries her face and pulls out her makeup bag, she can’t manage to wipe the smile off her face long enough to properly apply her foundation.

“Can’t believe you’re shaving the beard already,” she comments lightly, elbowing his side, somehow still soft despite all those days in prison. “Took you weeks to shave the tips after Florida.”

“Yeah…” his voice trails, hitches a little bit at the memory of Florida and all the lost time they’re still mourning. Then, the thought of a retort lights up his face, easing the sadness behind his eyes. “I just figured your thighs would thank me.”

She rolls her eyes, trying to think of a retort, but the chafed skin between her legs is suddenly at the forefront of her mind, her tired quads groaning protest while her skin burns, and despite her best efforts to hold still and deny her goofball boyfriend the satisfaction, she shifts her weight.

“Ha! Told ya so!” he shouts triumphantly, and he dives onto one knee, wincing as his tired joints hit the tile floor. His mostly-bearded face, still covered in shaving cream, goes right for her thighs, exposed below the suddenly too-short hem of his t-shirt, and she reacts on instinct, jumping back so that she trips down onto their closed toilet, laughing as she clenches her thighs tight, muscles screaming in protest as she squeals.

He’s so taken aback by her fall that he pauses before lunging at her again, shoulders shaking with laughter, and it’s then that she sees her opportunity. While his eyes are squeezed shut, his arms against the cabinets, bracing himself to keep his balance on his toes, she grabs his uncapped shaving cream off the counter and squeezes.

Immediately, a jet of white foam coats his hair and face. His eyes open in shock as she shifts her aim to his chest. He laughs and jumps for her arm, but her hand-to-hand combat training kicks in and she shifts sideways, tossing the can to her other hand and letting Jake slide past her, spraying his shoulders as he passes.

“No fair!” he gasps, coughing a little bit as he aspirates some shaving cream. Their laughter mingles, filling up the air in their otherwise-silent apartment, lighting up corners and expanding the rooms that had been growing oppressively smaller, threatening to suffocate Amy without Jake’s personality to prop up her walls.

Her eyes are screwed shut, her arms crossed over her stomach with the shaving cream can clutched against her side, all pretenses at a proper defense forgotten. Jake’s eyes light up at the opportunity for retaliation, but at her bright face, harsh worry-lines eased into a scrunched-up smile in his presence, he takes a few seconds of pause to drink in the sight of her. He’d stared at her picture for hours every day, trying to imbue himself with her bright smile and her silly grimace in a Hawaiian t-shirt, but no mashed-potato art or grainy printout could compare to Amy Santiago, radiantly happy and hysterically laughing in front of him, a left hand with an invitingly bare ring finger clutching his shaving cream.

Finally, after an eternity that must last only a few seconds, in which thoughts of white dresses and bigger apartments and hours spent actually fitting a car seat into a much safer car (but never a minivan) and a hundred thousand more moments like this one flash through his mind, he remembers why he ended up crouched on his bathroom floor in the first place, so he scrapes some shaving cream off his chest and throws it at her face.

It lands with a splat and a gasp from its target, who immediately holds up her can defensively.

“Don’t you dare, Peralta.” She attempts to sound menacing, puts on the face that has perps quaking at the sight of her, but he knows better, so he just scrapes another handful off his left shoulder and prepares to throw.

As she watches, bracing for impact, a calculating look crosses her face. “You don’t wanna do that,” she starts slowly. “Check the t-shirt you’re about to ruin.”

She watches, satisfied as his eyes notice, apparently for the first time, his favorite t-shirt, cloaking her smaller frame. He mutters a curse under his breath as she continues, “You wouldn’t wanna mess up your favorite t-shirt.” She raises her eyebrows, clearly thinking she’s won the argument.

“I mean, you already ruined my favorite boxers,” he retorts, gesturing down to Leonardo’s face on his shorts, nearly entirely obscured by the white foam she’d smothered him with only a few minutes earlier. He does his best to imbue his voice with hurt, trying to guilt her into allowing a retaliatory hit.

“Good.”

She looks so serious, so entirely thrilled that his Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles boxers have been rendered entirely unwearable, that he can’t maintain his hurt facade. Instead, he breaks down laughing once again, taking her down with him at the sheer ridiculousness of their situation. She tries with a shaking hand to wipe the shaving cream off her face, muttering through scarce gasps about having to reapply her foundation, but he lets his sit, having far too much fun to try to clean up.

Slowly, Amy regains her breath, her body weak with the force of her laughter. Her abs are sore, and she lets the shaving cream can clatter to the floor. The sound startles Jake, bringing him back to the reality of his rosy-cheeked, mostly-naked girlfriend. The look on his face sends a blush onto Amy’s cheeks and up through the tips of her ears - the vulnerability of the blatant adoration on his face makes her want to simultaneously laugh, cry, propose, and grab him for a kiss.

She settles on the final option, thinking to herself that there’ll be an eternity for the others. So Amy pulls him up onto his knees and towards her, wrapping her legs around his waist as she wipes his mouth free of shaving cream before pulling him in for their billionth lingering kiss of the day. She’d missed these, almost more than she’d missed the desperate, passionate kisses he’d spent the morning on. His lips move against hers languidly, his shaving-cream-covered hands finding her back and dirtying his shirt, although he’s careful to stay away from her hair.

She smiles against his mouth and he pauses, just for a second, breaking away to look up at her. “Glad to be back,” he says, clearly and loudly, as though he wants to make sure she hears it, understands just how much he means it.

She smiles, but before she can even begin to find the words to reply, to tell him just how much it means that he’s kneeling on the bathroom floor covered in shaving cream, making dumb jokes and wearing her least favorite underwear, he’s gone in to kiss her neck. She lets herself enjoy it for a second, tilts her head back and digs her fingers into his shoulders, before using her hands to push him off.

“Come on - we only have 20 minutes before we have to leave, and there’s way too much clean up to do,” she reminds him, surveying the bathroom.

Jake looks at her, with the puppy dog eyes that melt her heart and her resolve every time he pulls them out, and whines, “But Charles won’t care if we’re late…”

She plants a softer kiss on his forehead before standing and grabbing her hairbrush, tossing him a hand towel in the process. “But Captain Holt will. And anyway - we have forever for that.”

Jigsaw - a Whouffaldi fic - Part 6

Author’s Note: The last of Clara’s memories come to light.  We’re very nearly to the end, folks.  One more chapter to go.

Summary: Because some pieces can’t be kept apart forever.  Post- Hell Bent reunion fic.  Part six.

Rating: T

Warnings: Short-lived character death, Timey-Wimey Pillow Talk

Word Count: 2774

AO3 Link: here

Previous Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

“Are you going to tell me why?” Clara calls out.

Their footfalls echo out through the vaulted hall as Clara and Me hurry after the Sister’s entourage.

Ohila does not turn, but her long red veil trembles with the shaking of her head. “I should think I made my reasons clear. For you to die on Trap Street now would be catastrophic.”

Clara seizes the woman’s arm, holding her fast. Ohila eases to a stop, unruffled, that look of polite interest back on her face.

“And is that it?”

“You think otherwise?”

“Met you lot,” Clara says, surprised at the bitter edge in her own voice. “And I trust you about as far as I can chuck a grand piano. When I told you how long it’s been, you were practically elated. It has been lifetimes, but I remember you. You counted off four and a half billion years like you were doing algebra. The Doctor suffered in that dial for eons and you didn’t even bat an eye.”

A brief flicker in Ohila’s eyes, gone so fast Clara’s not sure it was there at all. “And I shall continue to not bat my eyes,” she says quietly. “I advise you to do the same. It’s not far, but I advise against dawdling.”

The old woman’s fingers grasp her elbow once more, squeezing tightly, and the touch travels in a wave of goosebumps up her arm to her neck, leaving the words not here not yet to rattle around in her skull in a wordless vibration.

Confused, Clara swallows, nods, and drops her hand.

The hall winds away seemingly endlessly, a spiral going constantly down. They pass four or five sporadically arranged lifts before Ohila finds the one she wants. The feel of movement is so slight Clara can’t be sure what direction they’ve gone; there’s only a brief sensation of weightlessness in the pit of her stomach, a faint pressure in her ears, and then the doors hiss open again. A great red stone door swallows the wall at the end of a short hallway, flanked on either side by red-armored guards. Wordlessly, the Sisters approach the door. The guards part, each touching a small console on a plinth on either side of the door. The air crackles, the edges of the door glowing faintly as it swings open.

The other side is dark, torch-lit. A cool breeze drifts through, carrying the scent of fresh rain and distant sulphur.

“Mind your post, we will be returning shortly,” Ohila says, sweeping past the guards and into the dark.

Clara follows into the cool dark, Ashildr at her side, feeling the air shift as the door closes behind her, and fights the sudden urge to sprint off into the darkness.

“You alright?”

Clara blinks, peering into the dark until her eyes adjust and Me’s face appears beside her. “No,” she says. “No I don’t think I am at all. You believing all this?”

The perpetual viking shrugs and starts forward after the trailing red of the Sisters before they can disappear into the flickering shadows. “The readings were legitimate, I know that. Though I suppose there’s always the chance that they’re wrong about what will happen when the shade passes through you.”

“Willing to bet on that percentage?”

“85/15 and not in our favor? No. Not with those stakes I’m not.”

Clara nods at the swaying red-veiled figures. “Still don’t trust her.”

“I don’t think you need to.”

Clara cocks an eyebrow. “Don’t I?”

“I’ve read about the Sisterhood before. Immortality is a rare commodity in the universe, and frequently only obtained for a limited time. The real deal is hard to come by, otherwise I would’ve had much more company.”

“Right, I know, temporarily immortal, you did warn me I shouldn’t get used to it.”

“And I knew you wouldn’t listen,” Me says, smirking. “In any case, the Sisterhood, immortality is definitely their bailiwick. If she says they can pull this off, I’m inclined to believe her.”

“Still. I mean she could’ve suggested something to neutralize the energy or transmute it or something, this just…”

“Feels too good to be true?”

Clara kicks a stone out of her path, a small vent for her frustration, but she’ll take what she can get. “A bit, yeah.”

“You know you’re not even thinking about it,” Me says, somewhat quizzically. “I’m surprised. Figured it would’ve been the first thing on your mind.”

“What?”

“If it works, they take you back to Trap Street, you face the raven. You die. And then…”

Clara shrugs. “Then I suppose you’ll have to come pick me up before they bury me. I don’t even know how long it takes a regeneration kick in. When the Doctor was dying on Trenzalore that took a bit of time for him to sort of...process it I guess? But he was dying of old age. Bugger if I know how this going to work.”

That wry little I’m-eternal-and-you’re-so-daft-it’s-cute smile is back. “Still not thinking.”

Clara laughs, a nervous titter that sets her own teeth on edge. “Thinkin’ about what? For god’s sake I feel like I’m trying to plan faking my own death.”

“You are,” Ohila says, voice echoing over the stones with such sudden strength that it makes Clara jump. A rough-hewn temple squats amongst the stones, ringed by the dancing light of hundred of torch flames. Ohila stands at the edge of the steps, eyes sparkling like embers. “Make no mistake, Miss Oswald, that is exactly what you are doing. But your friend is right, there is something you have not considered.”

“What? Alright, what is it I’m missing?”

“What comes after. For you to have come back to Gallifrey when you did, means that if you were not outright ready to die, you were at least weary enough to accept an end. What I offer you after that end is yet more life. Are you prepared for that?”

Clara sputters and falls silent. Trying to think of the future, of an after, feels suddenly like trying to divide by zero. She thought of the Doctor’s face after he had regenerated, eyes wide and wild like a man on the gallows when the noose breaks. A moment of relief, of reprieve, and then confused horror at the impossible becoming not only possible, but real.

“I don’t know,” she says, a cold little knot of fear forming in her gut.

There’s no amusement in Ohila’s regard now. Her gaze is so sharp Clara can half-feel herself being peeled back and exposed like a deer on a butcher’s table. “A full regeneration cycle, augmented life span, augmented everything. The vortex has worked on you already, more than you know. A thousand years and your memory has not suffered for it as your friend’s did. Make no mistake, this will change you. Your consciousness, your awareness, will expand. Time Lords study for years in preparation and you have had none of that. What sort of person will you be, then, with all that life? All that knowledge? All that power? I need to know, before we go any further.”

“Are you afraid I’ll go find him?” Clara smiles tightly. “You are, aren’t you?”

“My dear I have no doubt in my mind you will find him the first chance you get,” she says, voice too gentle to be a judgement. “What I need to know is what you will do. Time Lords take oaths, bury secret names, take new ones. What will you bury this day, and what oath will you take?”

For a split second, she can’t think let alone speak, her mind is whirling too fast for the rest of her to catch up. Then Clara’s eyes blaze bright enough to make the fires look dim. “I am Clara Oswald. I’m no Doctor, no Master, no General; I am a Teacher. And I think you know my oath.”

Ohila nods, considering. “Well enough. Come then, Teacher.”

“No.”

Even the flames seemed to pause.

“I’ll not take another step until you tell me why you’re doing this. You know this was the only thing that kept me from finding the Doctor again. I see the bait. Where’s the catch?”

Silence swells, the crackling of the flames and the mournful sound of the wind through the ravine the only thing that stops the ringing in Clara’s ears from growing to a deafening pitch.

Then, in a whisper that carries on the wind like raven feathers, Ohila says, “Because I regret it. Because you are both owed better than what they did...what we did. When the Doctor pulled you out of Trap Street that day, there was nothing I could do for you, not then. But the two of you are cut of the same cloth, and thank God for that, because now there is a chance.”

“A chance to what?”

“To make amends. To you, and to the Doctor. And when you find him again, I want you to give him a message from me. Tell him cruelty and cowardice were not his sins alone. I knew what Rassilon meant to do, and I did nothing. I want you to tell him that I’m sorry I didn’t intervene sooner. You’re the best apology I can send an old friend for my part in your death, and his torture.”

Slowly, Clara steps forward, eyes fixed on the old woman’s face. If she’s a liar, she’s the best Clara’s ever seen.

Her mouth too dry to speak, Clara nods her assent.

The temple gates swing open. Another of the Sisterhood trails down the stairs towards her, holding aloft a cup of burnished gold.

“I prepared this brew myself, in expectation of your return,” Ohila says of the gleaming cup. Something dark swirls inside it, flecked with black and gold.

Me watches, still and silent, fascinated.

The cup is warm as Clara takes it. She wishes, for what she realizes might be the last time, that her heart could pound. Soon enough, she thinks.

The elixir is thick, syrupy, tasting of near-rotten grapes and something faint and charred, like a lightning-struck wine barrel. She downs it to the last drop. It settles in her belly, warming, then dispersing, sending little tingling waves of heat out into her limbs.

Ohila smiles, the facade cracking ever so slightly. An apology underneath, guilt and contrition, but then it passes, and the mask reforms. “Come,” she says, and the kindness in her voice is startling. “It’s time you face your raven.”

They talk on the way. Make plans. The Lady Me is already calculating the coordinates for Trap Street in her head when they reach the door that leads back to Gallifrey. When they reach the extraction chamber, Ohila instructs one of the guards to call up a shuttle to take Ashildr back to the TARDIS.

“Don’t be late,” Clara says, pulling Me into a bone-cracking embrace.

“No chance,” she says. “I’m glad, you know. After this long, the universe would’ve been lonely without you. See you on the other side, Clara.”

Inside the chamber, the General paces, a long streak of red against the sterile white. “Is it done?”

“Yeah. Yes. Done,” Clara breathes in a rush.

The General’s face is pinched and worried. “Then for all our sakes,” she says, turning to Ohila, “I hope you’re right.”

“As do I,” Ohila agrees.

The General motions to one of the techs at the console station, and the door at the end of the chamber hisses open. The space beyond it wavers; a cobbled street out of focus, outlined in quivering slashes of red and green, like a bad 3-D film.

“Good luck, ma’am,” the General whispers.

Ohila’s hand gently presses against the back of Clara’s arm, urging her on. “Good luck, my dear,” she echoes.

For a wonder, Clara thinks they actually mean it.

The moment the soles of her shoes hit the cobblestones, the ringing is back in her ears, almost deafening, an absence she’d learned to tune out long ago suddenly roaring back to life. Her life. It’s so close it makes her muscles tremble.

The raven that is not a raven hangs in the air, quantum wings spread wide and inky black, trailing frozen whorls of ash and feathers. But beyond it. Oh God beyond it…

The Doctor stands in the doorway of the infirmary, his burgundy velvet coat gleaming in the light of the streetlamps, face a slack-jawed mask of horror. Frozen or not, his terrified eyes are trained on her, and her step falters. A trick, she knows, he’s staring at the place she was, and will be again shortly. The urge to run to him is overwhelming, to throw her arms around him and promise she’s here, she’ll stay with him this time, but she can’t. She knows she can’t. Eons stand between this then and her now, to disrupt that could bring it all crashing down. At last, maybe she knows better. Maybe she’s learned better. Or so she hopes.

“I’ll see you soon,” she whispers to the Doctor. “I promise, I will see you soon.”

She finds her mark, raises her arms in welcome; before her the shade, behind her the Doctor. The door hisses shut, bleeds out, disappears.

Time, at last, starts again. The haze of color reforms, resolving itself back into reality. Her heart beats, but only once. A single frantic drumbeat that hits like a hammerblow after centuries of silence.

The second hammerblow hits her square in the chest as the raven-shade finds its mark. There is a flash, a brilliant golden light, there and gone like the flashbulb of a camera…

She takes a breath...

And then pain. Great rolling waves of agony tear through her body, and she can’t leash the scream in time.

Everything dims. A trickle of soot from her lungs. And Trap Street flickers out, a reel finally run out of film.

***

The next comes in flashes, dim and stuttery like footage from a broken camera. Me’s face at her bedside, in the infirmary room the Doctor carried her body into.

Time to go, the immortal says, smiling tautly. The space beyond the cot has transformed from an infirmary into a diner. Behind Me’s head is a door painted with the gyrating image of Elvis Presley.

Pain. More pain, still more pain. Her body is burning, rearranging, rebooting. Every cell struggling to roar back to life. She draws a breath that feels like glass shards.

She’s on her feet, only just. Me drags her into the console room, sets coordinates.

Just a little longer, Clara, she says. You can make it, hold on.

The Tardis lurches, whirls, lands. Clara stumbles out the door, out of the diner. It’s dark out, and it’s snowing. Her body feels like it’s on fire, the cold cannot calm the burning. Critical Mass, she thinks, laughing in ragged gasps. And then, Please I need my face please let me keep this one.

The rest is lost not in darkness, but blinding light.

***

The light still fills her eyes when she opens them. She blinks, disoriented, waiting for the flare to fade. She’s warm, lying on her side….where? When?

“In your bed, on your TARDIS,” the Doctor says aloud. “You’re here with me, Clara, do you remember?” His voice is gentle, coaxing her up out of light.

“Yeah,” she mutters, drawing him closer. “I remember now.”

“Good,” he says, tucking her head under his chin. His arms clasp her tight.

“Do you believe it?” she says.

His chin bumps against her skull as he nods. “I do.”

“And Ohila? What about her?”

“You believed her,” he says simply.

“I did.”

He places a kiss on her temple. “Good enough for me. For all else: time will tell. Always does.”

She’s almost drowsing when he speaks again, his chest rumbling against her ear. “What do we do now?”

“Mmm. Go to the Lake District. Eat scones. Invent sonic pasta or something. Shag until we forget how to breathe. Maybe have a shower?”

“Oh, shower, definitely,” he says with a chuckle.

She moves, his arms slip away reluctantly. He’s looking at her like she’s a miracle.  Maybe she is; maybe they both are.

“I never get second chances,” he mutters. “I don’t know what to do with a third.”

She bends, kisses him, stroking gentle fingers down his cheek. “We don’t waste it. And we don’t muck it up this time.”

“Yes boss.”

She tugs at his hand, pulling him. He drifts up like he’s magnetized to her. “Come on. Shower. I think I know where we should go first.”

We all have our hang ups. Mine.......I despise Men...Ironically....I'm married to man. A full blown Jock Asshole who is Tender to me as a Teddy Bear...with teeth.

When I was born, my mother and biological Father were together. Married. Seemingly Happy. My mother got pregnant with me at the age of 17, my dad was 16. His mother, being the wonderful woman she is, made raised him proper. My parents had a beautiful wedding. Everything was good and right in the world. To do even better, my dad joined the Army. We went to Germany when I was 5.

Awesome. Great. Then He came along. My dad had a best friend, H.D. I'm not going to give away names. I'm not going to smear it like that. H.D. is paying the price already.

See,...this man decided when he saw my mom,...he wanted her and decided to visit behind my dads back......and wooed my mom. Now mind you, and I'm not justifying this in any way,cause Lord knows,...she is just as bad for letting it happen. H.D. convinced my mother to leave my dad, and to do it secretly.

Of course, he had made good friends with me and my sib. So off we go back to the states. My dad, was left behind in bewilderment.......not understanding all that transpired. Oh and also...H.D. was now AWOL with the Army and.......he had a wife and kid too that he was leaving behind. Okay. Okay. This is just too wild to believe...Right?

You have got to have lived it to know the truth. And I aint lying, cause ....I have nothing to gain here.

Okay. Back in the states. We moved A lot. Ive lived in Texas. Maryland. Pennsylvania. Florida. Georgia. I have changed schools so many times. Each one, I don't think was more than a year. some not even 3 months. Its hard to make friends that way. Its even harder to say Good bye to the ones you do make. It Sucks. Some places , I was going to school, my biological Father found us. Brought us Gifts, told us how much he loved me and my sib. Each time he found us, We moved. Eventually .......he gave up.  It was taking a toll on his mental health. Funny enough, my mom needed him. Her and H.D., needed my dad to keep us, for a couple of months, so that they could find a place for us to stay. I loved that that time with him. we have a large loving family.

My Dad, having retired from the Army, had his gear still and MRE’ s. Those are Meals Ready to Eat. High Calorie. They didn't taste too good, me and my sib, sat in the carport, sampling those things. Funny now. Kinda Funny then. Blech. My dad and Two Uncles watched over us. We saw our Cousins. I'm the Eldest of Five, Its multiplied since. My dad made us Fried Potatoes with our intitial cut from them. Me and Sib, would read the bible and Pray too. We went camping Once. I remember sitting in the truck. No seatbelts. It wasn't a law then. Listening to an 8 Track of Queen, the one that has a bloody hand holding their bodies. I Loved that thing. Each morning my Dad and Uncles woke us up with the music blaring ZZ Top.  I saw MTV first Debut on a Big Screen TV and played Atari, when it first came out.. Pitfall was my Favorite.  I miss those days. They were innocent. sweet. And it is so funny, I caught my Dad smoking weed. He looked so stunned, I just said, “ Its Okay Dad, Smoking weed is fine “ I wasn't that old.

My mom came for us and like that , we were gone again. Lost to my dad. H.D. has now stolen his wife. And successfully convinced me and my sib to accept him. Little did we know how much regret that would be. H.D. and my mom, got married. I know what I said earlier. I don't know how he did that or if he was divorced from his first wife before or after Germany. H.D. and mom, offered up Adoption to us. We said yeah.

The Look on my Dad’s face......I wish I could take it back. We went and saw our Dad. Asked permission for H.D. to Adopt us. MY Dad’s face............the hurt in his eyes. I so wish we hadn't done that. His Heart must’ve broke into a billion pieces.

That memory. Its a guilty thing to live with. A memory, I’ll never forget, and forever regret.

Because now,....H.D. is a step bastard. A child molester. And he still is married to my mom. I’ve wanted to bash his head in. Ram a baseball bat where the sun don't shine. to yank his balls off and roast his peter and make him eat it too. but.....I cant...because it seems God is doing one better than me. God took away his and my mothers son. my Half Brother. H.D. has to care of my mother, a woman who is so inept at taking care of herself. His days are now surrounded by the very object he wanted so bad, and now has no one to help him. Haha. He has gotten Fat and Stupid.

                    But I still pay, for a crime I didn't deserve. My Husband, that poor man.......puts up with my Nightmares. My Demons.  I sometimes romance the Idea of Suicide. I never shared that with anyone .......Until Now.  No. Don't Worry. I'm not there yet. Just......Romancing. so I write. sorta like Therapy, minus the bill.

I write a lot of Poems. Some silly. Some serious. But to Write. Freedom. Relief. Because this thing Ive tried to Lock up, Threatens to Consume Me and Destroy Me. I refuse to Back down. I Think.

              On the Edge of Darkness

                This is what is Familiar

                 It Licks at my Feet

          Summoning Me

Enticing Me

           So Easy to Fall

To Let Go           Sweet Release

This Life seems Tough.    I want to Fall

Here in the Darkness

          I Know Myself

                 To Rip off This Mask

                         To Let you See the Sad Little Girl

Who Is Scared.            Frightened.          Lost..........Lonely.

                       Broken.

 Once upon a time,  A village burned.  Ever since Prometheus passed along the idea of making fire to a caveman somewhere at the dawn of civilization, human beings have enjoyed burning things. It started with wood, moved on to your neighbor’s wood, and then the natural progression was to set fire to your neighbor as well. Prometheus would have rolled in his grave if he’d ever been allowed to die. But this fairy tale takes place before the Catholic Church had gotten its world renowned reputation for burning people in all sorts of ingenious and incredibly creative ways, when the concept was still on the cutting edge of brutality and not something that happened on a day to day basis. Burning villages was still an avant-garde art-form that only the most cultured artists of the era had tried their hand at. The most talented among these was a man named Atilla the Hun, who had reached the forefront of his field slowly and methodically. Like most fools, what he lacked in talent he made up for with endless practice and quite admirable tenacity. Through sheer force of will a man who is inept at a task may slowly become a master.   But that is not the point of this fairy tale. This fairy tale follows in the same classical tradition as the immortal and universally hallowed morality tales of the great Greek storyteller Aesop. It is a homage, if you will. Which is to say that its message is about as subtle as a brick flying out of the back of a truck and near instantly pulverizing your skull so completely that when the paramedics finally show up to scrape your lifeless husk out of your 1973 Oldsmobile Omega, the grizzled 20-year veteran paramedic actually gags a little.  This is one of those kinds of fairy tales.  Once upon a time,  A village burned.  A young man stumbles from the ruins. He is covered in ash, and the softly moaning wind blows his soot stained shawl up against the side of his body, revealing his hollow chest and the bones of his rib-cage. If you’re having a hard time picturing this, imagine him looking a bit like like a certain coyote who’d blown himself up chasing a roadrunner, but admittedly it’s a lot less comedic considering the boy’s circumstances, which are as follows:  Two days before, he had gone out into the wilds alone on his first hunt. This was the right of passage into manhood for this particular village, in which when a boy reached the age of thirteen, all of the older men in the tribe forced him to go out into the nearby forest alone covered in nothing but what amounted to a tattered sack. Sometimes they gave them a stick, too. He had three days to kill an animal of some sort, preferably a big one that tasted good, then bring it back so the village could throw a big party and eat whatever the boy caught. After this set of arbitrary conditions had been met, the boy was thought to have become a man, and everyone congratulated him for slaughtering the animal and not getting killed after they had all abandoned him in the woods. It was a sort of proto college fraternity hazing ritual, basically. The French anthropologist who first studied this practice, Arnold van Gennep, christened it “rite de passage” and so ever since anthropologists have called this the “The Rites of Passage Tradition”, but everybody else calls it “Fucking Stupid.”   But it was tradition, and an important one at that, and as with so many traditions they only look silly from the outside. They are like dreams. For the duration of the dream, the fantastical becomes real. You fly, you read minds, your teeth fall out of your skull, your clothes fall off while giving a 4th grade book report, or you can suddenly freeze and reverse time to fix the errors of the past. Then you awaken, and you look back and see that all that you had seen was fantasy. And yet for a moment it felt real. When you look back upon these dreams, do they not have the same texture as real memories? They feel the same, and the only way to discern the dream from the real is by noticing that dreams do not follow the rules of the real world. People do not fly, you cannot read minds, you cannot freeze time or reverse the past. So the dream is easy to spot, the dream rules are different than those you have experienced for most of your life. Some men live whole lives in dreams, and culture is one of them, a kind of mass hallucination which follows our own invented dream rules, realities that we weave in careful needle strokes, webs of the mind to hide us from  the misguided terror that we live in a cold and uncaring universe. Which is a shame, really,  because the universe is full of wonders beyond imagining. Of all the creatures in the world, only mankind has invented “boring”. Reality is insufficient. We are made of stardust forged in fiery crucibles in the heart of stars, given life and consciousness by the unseen hand of a thousand thousand coincidences. Billions of past events stretching eons led you to this very moment, and had but one of them been changed, you would not be here at all. Yet you are, somehow, against all odds. Is that not enough, in and of itself? Life is miraculous enough as it is, grander than any dream we could ever build for ourselves. Go and dream other dreams, and better.   But if the boy realized this, there would be no story to tell. We should take care not to belittle or look down upon the the cultural dreams of others, no matter how silly they seem to us. They are real so long as there are those to dream them. And so,  On the second day of his rite de passage, the boy returned with a promising deer only to discover every single person that he had ever known was dead. If you actually took the time to trace the modern Gregorian calendar all the way back to when the boy came back to find that everybody and everything that he’d ever known was on fire, you would find that it in fact occurred on a Monday, which anybody probably could have guessed anyway, since it’s without a doubt the worst day of the entire week.  He did not stay in his village long after he returned. Ashes offer little solace to the living. He only stayed long enough to take a broken sword from what was left of his home. He didn’t bother gathering any food; he didn’t plan on traveling much. This was because the young man had decided to kill himself. The village had been his home his entire life. He was born there, and he had once expected to live a long life, start a family, and eventually die there surrounded by friends and loved ones. That was obviously off the table now.   So he walked away from the life he had dreamed of, and from all the people who he had loved who were now nothing more than ash billowing in the wind. Dust to dust. What were their names? What were their hopes, their dreams? Ask the nameless billions who passed from this world without anything in their wake but dust and echoes: what is your story? Their silence is your answer.  Like many suicidal people, the boy also developed a certain inexplicable taste for irony and the macabre. The shattered sword he carried had been passed down from father to son for generations. He supposed now that since his father and brothers were dead that it now belonged to him. His plan was to travel far enough away from his old home so that he could no longer see the flames and billowing smoke rising from what was left of the village, and then take his broken sword from its sheath and slit his throat. There was a cliff outside the village, and for a time he stumbled toward it slowly like a zombie from a bad horror film, but he never got there. He kept looking back on the life that was behind him, and each time the fires in the distance reflected in his eyes. Eventually he stopped and sat on a rock, and sadly watched as his future slowly turned to ash. It would be a disservice, I think, to call what he felt sadness. Nor would it be accurate to call it the mind-numbing torturous emptiness that sucks at a person’s chest like an open wound, which we name despair. It was a kind of peace, maybe, but not the kind which gives us grace in times of trouble. If there were any word to describe it, perhaps it would be resignation. Yet even that is a disservice to the countless millions that have died by their own hand. Who can say what is in the mind of a person who is about to take his own life? They silenced their own voices before they could tell us their stories– their thoughts, whatever they might have been— are gone now forever, hidden from us as though behind the reflective sheen of a darkly tinted two-way mirror: from the outside looking in, impossible to understand, and from the inside looking out, impossible to explain.  But don’t worry. The boy did not die. Well, he did eventually, of course, but not like that. This isn’t some horribly-ending German fairy tale, after all, but an American one. It’s right there in the title.  The sun would soon set in the west. The boy took his sword from its sheath and placed it alongside his throat. The steel was as cold as something that’s really cold, and a drip of blood slowly began to pool at its point.  “Evenin’, traveler. I think I know you.”    The young man spun wildly towards the source of the voice. He was especially quick to move the blade from his neck. Human beings still have a shred of modesty burned into them, even when they are about to kill themselves. The sword fell to the ground almost instantly in a quick jerking motion of his arm, a thoughtless reflex action, like the legs twitching on a dead cricket, and he assumed a position and posture that insisted wordlessly that “Oh. Hey. I had just been standing around with a sword next to my neck.” and that people doing this particular activity were as common as sneezing or starting inane  conversations about the weather. He’d just been thinking, that’s all. Sword? No, I hadn’t had a sword held to my neck. You must have seen me at a bad angle, and gee, isn’t it nice out today?  “It’s harder to kill yourself with someone watching, y'know. Makes people feel ashamed, because something in them knows it ain’t right.”   The young man stared at the the new arrival in disbelief. Anybody living today would have recognized what was standing before him as quickly as they would recognize the Coca Cola logo. Here is what the boy saw:  The stranger wore a white button up shirt, and a rugged brown leather vest, with a sort of cloak thrown over it to protect him from the elements. He wore blue denim jeans. His boots were of an odd design. They were tall, brown, the tips were pointed, and there were odd circular metal rings hanging off the back of them which were ringed with spikes. He wore a belt that had a sheathe for some kind of weapon on his right and left leg, but they were not swords. Instead of having a straight handle like that of a sword, these had a strange curved handle made out of wood. Behind the man, the sun setting in the west  gleamed off the blue steel of the two weapons he wore on either hip.  Most importantly, he wore a hat the likes of which the boy had never seen before. It had a wide brim that circled the man’s entire head.  “Howdy,” the mysterious stranger said. For some reason he was squinting so hard that he looked like somebody who was staring straight into the sun, even though the sun was at his back. It was the sort of weather-worn face you couldn’t ever imagine having smiled. "Who’re you?“  The squinting man shrugged casually, and a brown cylindrical object suddenly appeared in his hand.  He put it in the side of his mouth, and lazily walked over toward where the boy was sitting alone on the rock. The boy wasn’t frightened by this. He was in a place beyond fear now. He wasn’t even afraid when the mysterious stranger sat down next to him, reached into his pocket for a small box, made a quick flicking motion, and fire appeared in his hand as if by magic. He lit the tip of the thing in his mouth with his magic fire, took a deep breath. After a moment he breathed out a cloud of smoke with a sigh that sounded like it was weary with the weight of a thousand troubles and a long and profoundly annoying 62 year Hollywood career.  "Are you a god?” the boy asked.  The man sat there for a long while before replying, seeming to ponder this as he stared off into the distance. The sun was getting lower now.  “‘I 'aint no god. I only been here just as long as people have been around to think me.” His voice was as rough and gravelly as asphalt. He took another long drag of his cigar, exhaled. “Kid, y'know, each drag burns different, but in the final moment, they all become wind.”  The boy told him he didn’t understand.  The stranger nodded toward the broken sword on the ground, which had only so recently been up against the boy’s throat. “That 'aint no way to die.”  The boy shook his head. “I don’t have anything left. Why not do it?”  At this, the stranger took the cigar from his mouth and gestured toward the setting sun and the burning village in the distance.  “Kid, you been lookin’ at the wrong thing out there.”  The boy looked. He saw the life he had thought was his future burning. But then he saw something else, beyond, further in the distance. It was smoke, but not from the burning village. They were campfires, thousands and thousands of them.“  "That’s them,” said the stranger, “the ones that burned your village. They’re out there waiting for you to go fight them.”  The boy looked down at his scrawny body. “But if I do that, I’ll die.”  The stranger took another long drag from his cigar, exhaled, and watched the smoke as it billowed away into nothingness. “Like I said kid, in the final moment, they all become wind.”  This time the boy understood. He picked up his shattered sword and stood up. Before he could start walking toward the horde amassed on the horizon, the stranger put a hand on his shoulder. “Figure I’ll go out there with ya’, and besides, think you could use a horse.”   The stranger worked his magic again, and two horses were there so quickly it felt that they’d been there all along, just out of sight. He and the boy mounted up on the horses and turned them toward the fires of the army in the distance.  “Better to go out like this”, said the mysterious stranger to the boy, “and keep on fighting, for the rest of our lives.”  “For the rest of our lives,” the boy agreed.  And so they rode off into the sunset together, and they kept on fighting, for the rest of their lives.

Chief Gates Comes to Oakhurst: A Cop Drama

One day in late 1992, a trim older man with a rigid military bearing visited Sierra Online’s headquarters in Oakhurst, California. From his appearance, and from the way that Sierra’s head Ken Williams fawned over him, one might have assumed him to be just another wealthy member of the investment class, a group that Williams had been forced to spend a considerable amount of time wooing ever since he had taken his company public four years earlier. But that turned out not to be the case. As Williams began to introduce his guest to some of his employees, he described him as Sierra’s newest game designer, destined to make the fourth game in the Police Quest series. It seemed an unlikely role based on the new arrival’s appearance and age alone.

Yet ageism wasn’t sufficient to explain the effect he had on much of Sierra’s staff. Josh Mandel, a sometime stand-up comic who was now working for Sierra as a writer and designer, wanted nothing whatsoever to do with him: “I wasn’t glad he was there. I just wanted him to go away as soon as possible.” Gano Haine, who was hard at work designing the environmental-themed EcoQuest: Lost Secret of the Rainforest, reluctantly accepted the task of showing the newcomer some of Sierra’s development tools and processes. He listened politely enough, although it wasn’t clear how much he really understood. Then, much to her relief, the boss swept him away again.

The man who had prompted such discomfort and consternation was arguably the most politically polarizing figure in the United States at the time: Daryl F. Gates, the recently resigned head of the Los Angeles Police Department. Eighteen months before, four of his white police officers had brutally beaten a black man — an unarmed small-time lawbreaker named Rodney King — badly enough to break bones and teeth. A private citizen had captured the incident on videotape. One year later, after a true jury of their peers in affluent, white-bread Simi Valley had acquitted the officers despite the damning evidence of the tape, the Los Angeles Riots of 1992 had begun. Americans had watched in disbelief as the worst civil unrest since the infamously restive late 1960s played out on their television screens. The scene looked like a war zone in some less enlightened foreign country; this sort of thing just doesn’t happen here, its viewers had muttered to themselves. But it had happened. The final bill totaled 63 people killed, 2383 people injured, and more than $1 billion in property damage.

The same innocuous visage that was now to become Sierra’s newest game designer had loomed over all of the scenes of violence and destruction. Depending on whether you stood on his side of the cultural divide or the opposite one, the riots were either the living proof that “those people” would only respond to the “hard-nosed” tactics employed by Gates’s LAPD, or the inevitable outcome of decades of those same misguided tactics. The mainstream media hewed more to the latter narrative. When they weren’t showing the riots or the Rodney King tape, they played Gates’s other greatest hits constantly. There was the time he had said, in response to the out-sized numbers of black suspects who died while being apprehended in Los Angeles, that black people were more susceptible to dying in choke holds because their arteries didn’t open as fast as those of “normal people”; the time he had said that anyone who smoked a joint was a traitor against the country and ought to be “taken out and shot”; the time when he had dismissed the idea of employing homosexuals on the force by asking, “Who would want to work with one?”; the time when his officers had broken an innocent man’s nose, and he had responded to the man’s complaint by saying that he was “lucky that was all he had broken”; the time he had called the LAPD’s peers in Philadelphia “an inspiration to the nation” after they had literally launched an airborne bombing raid on a troublesome inner-city housing complex, killing six adults and five children and destroying 61 homes. As the mainstream media was reacting with shock and disgust to all of this and much more, right-wing radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh trotted out the exact same quotes, but greeted them with approbation rather than condemnation.

All of which begs the question of what the hell Gates was doing at Sierra Online, of all places. While they were like most for-profit corporations in avoiding overly overt political statements, Sierra hardly seemed a bastion of reactionary sentiment or what the right wing liked to call “family values.” Just after founding Sierra in 1980, Ken and Roberta Williams had pulled up stakes in Los Angeles and moved to rural Oakhurst more out of some vague hippie dream of getting back to the land than for any sound business reason. As was known by anyone who’d read Steven Levy’s all-too-revealing book Hackers, or seen a topless Roberta on the cover of a game called Softporn, Sierra back in those days had been a nexus of everything the law-and-order contingent despised: casual sex and hard drinking, a fair amount of toking and even the occasional bit of snorting. (Poor Richard Garriott of Ultima fame, who arrived in this den of inequity from a conservative neighborhood of Houston inhabited almost exclusively by straight-arrow astronauts like his dad, ran screaming from it all after just a few months; decades later, he still sounds slightly traumatized when he talks about his sojourn in California.)

It was true that a near-death experience in the mid-1980s and an IPO in 1988 had done much to change life at Sierra since those wild and woolly early days. Ken Williams now wore suits and kept his hair neatly trimmed. He no longer slammed down shots of tequila with his employees to celebrate the close of business on a Friday, nor made it his personal mission to get his nerdier charges laid; nor did he and Roberta still host bathing-suit-optional hot-tub parties at their house. But when it came to the important questions, Williams’s social politics still seemed diametrically opposed to the likes to Daryl Gates. For example, at a time when even the mainstream media still tended to dismiss concerns about the environment as obsessions of the Loony Left, he’d enthusiastically approved Gano Haines’s idea for a series of educational adventure games to teach children about just those issues. When a 15-year-old who already had the world all figured out wrote in to ask how Sierra could “give in to the doom-and-gloomers and whacko commie liberal environmentalists” who believed that “we can destroy a huge, God-created world like this,” Ken’s brother John Williams — Sierra’s marketing head — offered an unapologetic and cogent response: “As long as we get letters like this, we’ll keep making games like EcoQuest.”

So, what gave? Really, what was Daryl Gates doing here? And how had this figure that some of Ken Williams’s employees could barely stand to look at become connected with Police Quest, a slightly goofy and very erratic series of games, but basically a harmless one prior to this point? To understand how all of these trajectories came to meet that day in Oakhurst, we need to trace each back to its point of origin.

Daryl F. Gates

Perhaps the kindest thing we can say about Daryl Gates is that he was, like the young black men he and his officers killed, beat, and imprisoned by the thousands, a product of his environment. He was, the sufficiently committed apologist might say, merely a product of the institutional culture in which he was immersed throughout his adult life. Seen in this light, his greatest sin was his inability to rise above his circumstances, a failing which hardly sets him apart from the masses. One can only wish he had been able to extend to the aforementioned black men the same benefit of the doubt which other charitable souls might be willing to give to him.

Long before he himself became the head of the LAPD, Gates was the hand-picked protege of William Parker, the man who has gone down in history as the architect of the legacy Gates would eventually inherit. At the time Parker took control of it in 1950, the LAPD was widely regarded as the most corrupt single police force in the country, its officers for sale to absolutely anyone who could pay their price; they went so far as to shake down ordinary motorists for bribes at simple traffic stops. To his credit, Parker put a stop to all that. But to his great demerit, he replaced rank corruption on the individual level with an us-against-them form of esprit de corps — the “them” here being the people of color who were pouring into Los Angeles in ever greater numbers. Much of Parker’s approach was seemingly born of his experience of combat during World War II. He became the first but by no means the last LAPD chief to make comparisons between his police force and an army at war, without ever considering whether the metaphor was really appropriate.

Parker was such a cold fish that Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, who served as an LAPD officer during his tenure as chief, would later claim to have modeled the personality of the emotionless alien Spock on him. And yet, living as he did in the epicenter of the entertainment industry — albeit mostly patrolling the parts of Los Angeles that were never shown by Hollywood — Parker was surprisingly adept at manipulating the media to his advantage. Indeed, he became one of those hidden players who sometimes shape media narratives without anyone ever quite realizing that they’re doing so. He served as a consultant for the television show Dragnet, and through it created a pernicious cliché of the “ideal” cop that can still be seen, more than half a century later, on American television screens every evening: the cop as tough crusader who has to knock a few heads sometimes and bend or break the rules to get around the pansy lawyers, but who does it all for a noble cause, guided by an infallible moral compass that demands that he protect the “good people” of his city from the irredeemably bad ones by whatever means are necessary. Certainly Daryl Gates would later benefit greatly from this image; it’s not hard to believe that even Ken Williams, who fancied himself something of a savvy tough guy in his own right, was a little in awe of it when he tapped Gates to make a computer game.

But this wasn’t the only one of Chief Parker’s innovations that would come to the service of the man he liked to describe as the son he’d never had. Taking advantage of a city government desperate to see a cleaned-up LAPD, Parker drove home policies that made the city’s police force a veritable fiefdom unto itself, its chief effectively impossible to fire. The city council could only do so “for cause” — i.e., some explicit failure on the chief’s part. This sounded fair enough — until one realized that the chief got to write his own evaluation every year. Naturally, Parker and his successors got an “excellent” score every time, and thus the LAPD remained for decades virtually impervious to the wishes of the politicians and public it allegedly served.

The Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts burns, 1965.

As Parker’s tenure wore on, tension spiraled in the black areas of Los Angeles, the inevitable response to an utterly unaccountable LAPD’s ever more brutal approach to policing. It finally erupted in August of 1965 in the form of the Watts Riots, the great prelude to the riots of 1992: 34 deaths, $40 million in property damage in contemporary dollars. For Daryl Gates, who watched it all take place by Parker’s side, the Watts Riots became a formative crucible. “We had no idea how to deal with this,” he would later write. “We were constantly ducking bottles, rocks, knives, and Molotov cocktails. It was random chaos. We did not know how to handle guerrilla warfare.” Rather than asking himself how it had come to this in the first place and how such chaos might be prevented in the future, he asked how the LAPD could be prepared to go toe to toe with future rioters in what amounted to open warfare on city streets.

Chief Parker died the following year, but Gates’s star remained on the ascendant even without his patron. He came up with the idea of a hardcore elite force for dealing with full-on-combat situations, a sort of SEAL team of police. Of course, the new force would need an acronym that sounded every bit as cool as its Navy inspiration. He proposed SWAT, for “Special Weapons Attack Teams.” When his boss balked at such overtly militaristic language, he said that it could stand for “Special Weapons and Tactics” instead. “That’s fine,” said his boss.

Gates and his SWAT team had their national coming-out party on December 6, 1969, when they launched an unprovoked attack upon a hideout of the Black Panthers, a well-armed militia composed of black nationalists which had been formed as a response to earlier police brutality. Logistically and practically, the raid was a bit of a fiasco. The attackers got discombobulated by an inaccurate map of the building and very nearly got themselves hemmed into a cul de sac and massacred. (“Oh, God, we were lucky,” said one of them later.) What was supposed to have been a blitzkrieg-style raid devolved into a long stalemate. The standoff was broken only when Gates managed to requisition a grenade launcher from the Marines at nearby Camp Pendleton and started lobbing explosives into the building; this finally prompted the Panthers to surrender. By some miracle, no one on either side got killed, but the Panthers were acquitted in court of most charges on the basis of self-defense.

Yet the practical ineffectuality of the operation mattered not at all to the political narrative that came to be attached to it. The conservative white Americans whom President Nixon loved to call “the silent majority” — recoiling from the sex, drugs, and rock and roll of the hippie era, genuinely scared by the street violence of the last several years — applauded Gates’s determination to “get tough” with “those people.” For the first time, the names of Daryl Gates and his brainchild of SWAT entered the public discourse beyond Los Angeles.

In May of 1974, the same names made the news in a big way again when a SWAT team was called in to subdue the Symbionese Liberation Army, a radical militia with a virtually incomprehensible political philosophy, who had recently kidnapped and apparently converted to their cause the wealthy heiress Patty Hearst. After much lobbying on Gate’s part, his SWAT team got the green light to mount a full frontal assault on the group’s hideout. Gates and his officers continued to relish military comparisons. “Here in the heart of Los Angeles was a war zone,” he later wrote. “It was like something out of a World War II movie, where you’re taking the city from the enemy, house by house.” More than 9000 rounds of ammunition were fired by the two sides. But by now, the SWAT officers did appear to be getting better at their craft. Eight members of the militia were killed — albeit two of them unarmed women attempting to surrender — and the police officers received nary a scratch. Hearst herself proved not to be inside the hideout, but was arrested shortly after the battle.

The Patti Hearst saga marked the last gasp of a militant left wing in the United States; the hippies of the 1960s were settling down to become the Me Generation of the 1970s. Yet even as the streets were growing less turbulent, increasingly militaristic rhetoric was being applied to what had heretofore been thought of as civil society. In 1971, Nixon had declared a “war on drugs,” thus changing the tone of the discourse around policing and criminal justice markedly. Gates and SWAT were the perfect mascots for the new era. The year after the Symbionese shootout, ABC debuted a hit television series called simply S.W.A.T. Its theme song topped the charts; there were S.W.A.T. lunch boxes, action figures, board games, and jigsaw puzzles. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to be like Daryl Gates and the LAPD — not least their fellow police officers in other cities: by July of 1975, there were 500 other SWAT teams in the United States. Gates embraced his new role of “America’s cop” with enthusiasm.

In light of his celebrity status in a city which worships celebrity, it was now inevitable that Gates would become the head of the LAPD just as soon as the post opened up. He took over in 1978; this gave him an even more powerful nationwide bully pulpit. In 1983, he applied some of his clout to the founding of a program called DARE in partnership with public schools around the country. The name stood for “Drug Abuse Resistance Education”; Gates really did have a knack for snappy acronyms. His heart was perhaps in the right place, but later studies, conducted only after the spending of hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars, would prove the program’s strident rhetoric and almost militaristic indoctrination techniques to be ineffective.

Meanwhile, in his day job as chief of police, Gates fostered an ever more toxic culture that viewed the streets as battlegrounds, that viewed an ass beating as the just reward of any black man who failed to treat a police officer with fawning subservience. In 1984, the Summer Olympics came to Los Angeles, and Gates used the occasion to convince the city council to let him buy armored personnel carriers — veritable tanks for the city streets — in the interest of “crowd control.” When the Olympics were over, he held onto them for the purpose of executing “no-knock” search warrants on suspected drug dens. During the first of these, conducted with great fanfare before an invited press in February of 1985, Gates himself rode along as an APC literally drove through the front door of a house after giving the occupants no warning whatsoever. Inside they found two shocked women and three children, with no substance more illicit than the bowls of ice cream they’d been eating. To top it all off, the driver lost control of the vehicle on a patch of ice whilst everyone was sheepishly leaving the scene, taking out a parked car.

Clearly Gates’s competence still tended not to entirely live up to his rhetoric, a discrepancy the Los Angeles Riots would eventually highlight all too plainly. But in the meantime, Gates was unapologetic about the spirit behind the raid: “It frightened even the hardcore pushers to imagine that at any moment a device was going to put a big hole in their place of business, and in would march SWAT, scattering flash-bangs and scaring the hell out of everyone.” This scene would indeed be played out many times over the remaining years of Gates’s chiefdom. But then along came Rodney King of all people to take the inadvertent role of his bête noire.

King was a rather-slow-witted janitor and sometime petty criminal with a bumbling reputation on the street. He’d recently done a year in prison after attempting to rob a convenience store with a tire iron; over the course of the crime, the owner of the store had somehow wound up disarming him, beating him over the head with his own weapon, and chasing him off the premises. He was still on parole for that conviction on the evening of March 3, 1991, when he was spotted by two LAPD officers speeding down the freeway. King had been drinking, and so, seeing their patrol car’s flashing lights in his rear-view mirror, he decided to make a run for it. He led what turned into a whole caravan of police cars on a merry chase until he found himself hopelessly hemmed in on a side street. The unarmed man then climbed out of his car and lay face down on the ground, as instructed. But then he stood up and tried to make a break for it on foot, despite being completely surrounded. Four of the 31 officers on the scene now proceeded to knock him down and beat him badly enough with their batons and boots to fracture his face and break one of his ankles. Their colleagues simply stood and watched at a distance.

Had not a plumber named George Holliday owned an apartment looking down on that section of street, the incident would doubtless have gone down in the LAPD’s logs as just another example of a black man “resisting arrest” and getting regrettably injured in the process. But Holliday was there, standing on his balcony — and he had a camcorder to record it all. When he sent his videotape to a local television station, its images of the officers taking big two-handed swings against King’s helpless body with their batons ignited a national firestorm. The local prosecutor had little choice but to bring the four officers up on charges.

The tactics of Daryl Gates now came under widespread negative scrutiny for the first time. Although he claimed to support the prosecution of the officers involved, he was nevertheless blamed for fostering the culture that had led to this incident, as well as the many others like it that had gone un-filmed. At long last, reporters started asking the black residents of Los Angeles directly about their experiences with the LAPD. A typical LAPD arrest, said one of them, “basically consisted of three or four cops handcuffing a person, and just literally beating him, often until unconscious… punching, beating, kicking.” A hastily assembled city commission produced pages and pages of descriptions of a police force run amok. “It is apparent,” the final report read, “that too many LAPD patrol officers view citizens with resentment and hostility.” In response, Gates promised to retire “soon.” Yet, as month after month went by and he showed no sign of fulfilling his promise, many began to suspect that he still had hopes of weathering the storm.

At any rate, he was still there on April 29, 1992. That was the day his four cops were acquitted in Simi Valley, a place LAPD officers referred to as “cop heaven”; huge numbers of them lived there. Within two hours after the verdict was announced, the Los Angeles Riots began in apocalyptic fashion, as a mob of black men pulled a white truck driver out of his cab and all but tore him limb from limb in the process of murdering him, all under the watchful eye of a helicopter that was hovering overhead and filming the carnage.

Tellingly, Gates happened to be speaking to an adoring audience of white patrons in the wealthy suburb of Brentwood at the very instant the riots began. As the violence continued, this foremost advocate of militaristic policing seemed bizarrely paralyzed. South Los Angeles burned, and the LAPD did virtually nothing about it. The most charitable explanation had it that Gates, spooked by the press coverage of the previous year, was terrified of how white police officers subduing black rioters would play on television. A less charitable one, hewed to by many black and liberal commentators, had it that Gates had decided that these parts of the city just weren’t worth saving — had decided to just let the rioters have their fun and burn it all down. But the problem, of course, was that in the meantime many innocent people of all colors were being killed and wounded and seeing their property go up in smoke. Finally, the mayor called in the National Guard to quell the rioting while Gates continued to sit on his hands.

Asked afterward how the LAPD — the very birthplace of SWAT — had allowed things to get so out of hand, Gates blamed it on a subordinate: “We had a lieutenant down there who just didn’t seem to know what to do, and he let us down.” Not only was this absurd, but it was hard to label as anything other than moral cowardice. It was especially rich coming from a man who had always preached an esprit de corps based on loyalty and honor. The situation was now truly untenable for him. Incompetence, cowardice, racism, brutality… whichever charge or charges you chose to apply, the man had to go. Gates resigned, for real this time, on June 28, 1992.

Yet he didn’t go away quietly. Gates appears to have modeled his post-public-service media strategy to a large extent on that of Oliver North, a locus of controversy for his role in President Ronald Reagan’s Iron-Contra scandal who had parlayed his dubious celebrity into the role of hero to the American right. Gates too gave a series of angry, unrepentant interviews, touted a recently published autobiography, and even went North one better when he won his own radio show which played in close proximity to that of Rush Limbaugh. And then, when Ken Williams came knocking, he welcomed that attention as well.

But why would Williams choose to cast his lot with such a controversial figure, one whose background and bearing were so different from his own? To begin to understand that, we need to look back to the origins of the adventure-game oddity known as Police Quest.

Ken Williams, it would seem, had always had a fascination with the boys in blue. One day in 1985, when he learned from his hairdresser that her husband was a California Highway Patrol officer on administrative leave for post-traumatic stress, his interest was piqued. He invited the cop in question, one Jim Walls, over to his house to play some racquetball and drink some beer. Before the evening was over, he had starting asking his guest whether he’d be interested in designing a game for Sierra. Walls had barely ever used a computer, and had certainly never played an adventure game on one, so he had only the vaguest idea what his new drinking buddy was talking about. But the only alternative, as he would later put it, was to “sit around and think” about the recent shootout that had nearly gotten him killed, so he agreed to give it a go.

The game which finally emerged from that conversation more than two years later shows the best and the worst of Sierra. On the one hand, it pushed a medium that was usually content to wallow in the same few fictional genres in a genuinely new direction. In a pair of articles he wrote for Computer Gaming World magazine, John Williams positioned Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel at the forefront of a new wave of “adult” software able to appeal to a whole new audience, noting how it evoked Joseph Wambaugh rather than J.R.R. Tolkien, Hill Street Blues rather than Star Wars. Conceptually, it was indeed a welcome antidote to a bad case of tunnel vision afflicting the entire computer-games industry.

In practical terms, however, it was somewhat less inspiring. The continual sin of Ken Williams and Sierra throughout the company’s existence was their failure to provide welcome fresh voices like that of Jim Walls with the support network that might have allowed them to make good games out of their well of experiences. Left to fend for himself, Walls, being the law-and-order kind of guy he was, devised the most pedantic adventure game of all time, one which played like an interactive adaptation of a police-academy procedure manual — so much so, in fact, that a number of police academies around the country would soon claim to be employing it as a training tool. The approach is simplicity itself: in every situation, if you do exactly what the rules of police procedure that are exhaustively described in the game’s documentation tell you to do, you get to live and go on to the next scene. If you don’t, you die. It may have worked as an adjunct to a police-academy course, but it’s less compelling as a piece of pure entertainment.

Although it’s an atypical Sierra adventure game in many respects, this first Police Quest nonetheless opens with what I’ve always considered to be the most indelibly Sierra moment of all. The manual has carefully explained — you did read it, right? — that you must walk all the way around your patrol car to check the tires and lights and so forth every time you’re about to drive somewhere. And sure enough, if you fail to do so before you get into your car for the first time, a tire blows out and you die as soon as you drive away. But if you do examine your vehicle, you find no evidence of a damaged tire, and you never have to deal with any blow-out once you start driving. The mask has fallen away to reveal what we always suspected: that the game actively wants to kill you, and is scheming constantly for a way to do so. There’s not even any pretension left of fidelity to a simulated world — just pure, naked malice. Robb Sherwin once memorably said that “Zork hates its player.” Well, Zork‘s got nothing on Police Quest.

Nevertheless, Police Quest struck a modest chord with Sierra’s fan base. While it didn’t become as big a hit as Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards, John Williams’s other touted 1987 embodiment of a new wave of “adult” games, it sold well enough to mark the starting point of another of the long series that were the foundation of Sierra’s marketing strategy. Jim Walls designed two sequels over the next four years, improving at least somewhat at his craft in the process. (In between them, he also came up with Code-Name: Iceman, a rather confused attempt at a Tom Clancy-style techno-thriller that was a bridge too far even for most of Sierra’s loyal fans.)

But shortly after completing Police Quest 3: The Kindred, Walls left Sierra along with a number of other employees to join Tsunami Media, a new company formed right there in Oakhurst by Edmond Heinbockel, himself a former chief financial officer for Sierra. With Walls gone, but his Police Quest franchise still selling well enough to make another entry financially viable, the door was wide open — as Ken Williams saw it, anyway — for one Daryl F. Gates.

Daryl Gates (right) with Tammy Dargan, the real designer of the game that bears his name.

Williams began his courtship of the most controversial man in the United States by the old-fashioned expedient of writing him a letter. Gates, who claimed never even to have used a computer, much less played a game on one, was initially confused about what exactly Williams wanted from him. Presuming Williams was just one of his admirers, he sent a letter back asking for some free games for some youngsters who lived across the street from him. Williams obliged in calculated fashion, with the three extant Police Quest games. From that initial overture, he progressed to buttering Gates up over the telephone.

As the relationship moved toward the payoff stage, some of his employees tried desperately to dissuade him from getting Sierra into bed with such a figure. “I thought it’s one thing to seek controversy, but another thing to really divide people,” remembers Josh Mandel. Mandel showed his boss a New York Times article about Gates’s checkered history, only to be told that “our players don’t read the New York Times.” He suggested that Sierra court Joseph Wambaugh instead, another former LAPD officer whose novels presented a relatively more nuanced picture of crime and punishment in the City of Angels than did Gates’s incendiary rhetoric; Wambaugh was even a name whom John Williams had explicitly mentioned in the context of the first Police Quest game five years before. But that line of attack was also hopeless; Ken Williams wanted a true mass-media celebrity, not a mere author who hid behind his books. So, Gates made his uncomfortable visit to Oakhurst and the contract was signed. Police Quest would henceforward be known as Daryl F. Gates’ Police Quest. Naturally, the setting of the series would now become Los Angeles; the fictional town of Lytton, the more bucolic setting of the previous three games in the series, was to be abandoned along with almost everything else previously established by Jim Walls.

Inside the company, a stubborn core of dissenters took to calling the game Rodney King’s Quest. Corey Cole, co-designer of the Quest for Glory series, remembers himself and many others being “horrified” at the prospect of even working in the vicinity of Gates: “As far as we were concerned, his name was mud and tainted everything it touched.” As a designer, Corey felt most of all for Jim Walls. He believed Ken Williams was “robbing Walls of his creation”: “It would be like putting Donald Trump’s name on a new Quest for Glory in today’s terms.”

Nevertheless, as the boss’s pet project, Gates’s game went inexorably forward. It was to be given the full multimedia treatment, including voice acting and the extensive use of digitized scenes and actors on the screen in the place of hand-drawn graphics. Indeed, this would become the first Sierra game that could be called a full-blown full-motion-video adventure, placing it at the vanguard of the industry’s hottest new trend.

Of course, there had never been any real expectation that Gates would roll up his sleeves and design a computer game in the way that Jim Walls had; celebrity did have its privileges, after all. Daryl F. Gates’ Police Quest: Open Season thus wound up in the hands of Tammy Dargan, a Sierra producer who, based on an earlier job she’d had with the tabloid television show America’s Most Wanted, now got the chance to try her hand at design. Corey Cole ironically remembers her as one of the most stereotypically liberal of all Sierra’s employees: “She strenuously objected to the use of [the word] ‘native’ in Quest for Glory III, and globally changed it to ‘indigenous.’ We thought that ‘the indigenous flora’ was a rather awkward construction, so we changed some of those back. But she was also a professional and did the jobs assigned to her.”

In this case, doing so would entail writing the script for a game about the mean streets of Los Angeles essentially alone, then sending it to Gates via post for “suggestions.” The latter did become at least somewhat more engaged when the time came for “filming,” using his connections to get Sierra inside the LAPD’s headquarters and even into a popular “cop bar.” Gates himself also made it into the game proper: restored to his rightful status of chief of police, he looks on approvingly and proffers occasional bits of advice as you work through the case. The CD-ROM version tacked on some DARE propaganda and a video interview with Gates, giving him yet one more opportunity to respond to his critics.

Contrary to the expectations raised both by the previous games in the series and the reputation of Gates, the player doesn’t take the role of a uniformed cop at all, but rather that of a plain-clothes detective. Otherwise, though, the game is both predictable in theme and predictably dire. Really, what more could one expect from a first-time designer working in a culture that placed no particular priority on good design, making a game that no one there particularly wanted to be making?

So, the dialog rides its banality to new depths for a series already known for clunky writing, the voice acting is awful — apparently the budget didn’t stretch far enough to allow the sorts of good voice actors that had made such a difference in King’s Quest VI — and the puzzle design is nonsensical. The plot, which revolves around a series of brutal cop killings for maximum sensationalism, wobbles along on rails through its ever more gruesome crime scenes and red-herring suspects until the real killer suddenly appears out of the blue in response to pretty much nothing which you’ve done up to that point. And the worldview the whole thing reflects… oh, my. The previous Police Quest games had hardly been notable for their sociological subtlety — “These kinds of people are actually running around out there, even if we don’t want to think about it,” Jim Walls had said of its antagonists — but this fourth game takes its demonization of all that isn’t white, straight, and suburban to what would be a comical extreme if it wasn’t so hateful. A brutal street gang, the in-game police files helpfully tell us, is made up of “unwed mothers on public assistance,” and the cop killer turns out to be a transvestite; his “deviancy” constitutes the sum total of his motivation for killing, at least as far as we ever learn.

One of the grisly scenes with which Open Season is peppered, reflecting a black-and-white — in more ways than one! — worldview where the irredeemably bad, deviant people are always out to get the good, normal people. Lucky we have the likes of Daryl Gates to sort the one from the other, eh?

Visiting a rap record label, one of a number of places where Sierra’s pasty-white writers get to try out their urban lingo. It goes about as well as you might expect.

Sierra throws in a strip bar for the sake of gritty realism. Why is it that television (and now computer-game) cops always have to visit these places — strictly in order to pursue leads, of course.

But the actual game of Open Season is almost as irrelevant to any discussion of the project’s historical importance today as it was to Ken Williams at the time. This was a marketing exercise, pure and simple. Thus Daryl Gates spent much more time promoting the game than he ever had making it. Williams put on the full-court press in terms of promotion, publishing not one, not two, but three feature interviews with him in Sierra’s news magazine and booking further interviews with whoever would talk to him. The exchanges with scribes from the computing press, who had no training or motivation for asking tough questions, went about as predictably as the game’s plot. Gates dismissed the outrage over the Rodney King tape as “Monday morning quarterbacking,” and consciously or unconsciously evoked Richard Nixon’s silent majority in noting that the “good, ordinary, responsible, quiet citizens” — the same ones who saw the need to get tough on crime and prosecute a war on drugs — would undoubtedly enjoy the game. Meanwhile Sierra’s competitors weren’t quite sure what to make of it all. “Talk about hot properties,” wrote the editors of Origin Systems’s internal newsletter, seemingly uncertain whether to express anger or admiration for Sierra’s sheer chutzpah. “No confirmation yet as to whether the game will ship with its own special solid-steel joystick” — a dark reference to the batons with which Gates’s officers had beat Rodney King.

In the end, though, the game generated decidedly less controversy than Ken Williams had hoped for. The computer-gaming press just wasn’t politically engaged enough to do much more than shrug their shoulders at its implications. And by the time it was released it was November of 1993, and Gates was already becoming old news for the mainstream press as well. The president of the Los Angeles Urban League did provide an obligingly outraged quote, saying that Gates “embodies all that is bad in law enforcement—the problems of the macho, racist, brutal police experience that we’re working hard to put behind us. That anyone would hire him for a project like this proves that some companies will do anything for the almighty dollar.” But that was about as good as it got.

There’s certainly no reason to believe that Gates’s game sold any better than the run-of-the-mill Sierra adventure, or than any of the Police Quest games that had preceded it. If anything, the presence of Gates’s name on the box seems to have put off more fans than it attracted. Rather than a new beginning, Open Season proved the end of the line for Police Quest as an adventure series — albeit not for Sierra’s involvement with Gates himself. The product line was retooled in 1995 into Daryl F. Gates’ Police Quest: SWAT, a “tactical simulator” of police work that played suspiciously like any number of outright war simulators. In this form, it found a more receptive audience and continued for years. Tammy Dargan remained at the reinvented series’s head for much of its run. History hasn’t recorded whether her bleeding-heart liberal sympathies went into abeyance after her time with Gates or whether the series remained just a slightly distasteful job she had to do.

Gates, on the other hand, got dropped after the first SWAT game. His radio show had been cancelled after he had proved himself to be a stodgy bore on the air, without even the modicum of wit that marked the likes of a Rush Limbaugh. Having thus failed in his new career as a media provocateur, and deprived forevermore of his old position of authority, his time as a political lightning rod had just about run out. What then was the use of Sierra continuing to pay him?

Ken and Roberta Williams looking wholesome in 1993, their days in the hot tub behind them.

But then, Daryl Gates was never the most interesting person behind the games that bore his name. The hard-bitten old reactionary was always a predictable, easily known quantity, and therefore one with no real power to fascinate. Much more interesting was and is Ken Williams, this huge, mercurial personality who never designed a game himself but who lurked as an almost palpable presence in the background of every game Sierra ever released as an independent company. In short, Sierra was his baby, destined from the first to become his legacy more so than that of any member of his creative staff.

Said legacy is, like the man himself, a maze of contradictions resistant to easy judgments. Everything you can say about Ken Williams and Sierra, whether positive or negative, seems to come equipped with a “but” that points in the opposite direction. So, we can laud him for having the vision to say something like this, which accurately diagnosed the problem of an industry offering a nearly exclusive diet of games by and for young white men obsessed with Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings:

If you match the top-selling books, records, or films to the top-selling computer-entertainment titles, you’ll immediately notice differences. Where are the romance, horror, and non-fiction titles? Where’s military fiction? Where’s all the insider political stories? Music in computer games is infinitely better than what we had a few years back, but it doesn’t match what people are buying today. Where’s the country-western music? The rap? The reggae? The new age?

And yet Williams approached his self-assigned mission of broadening the market for computer games with a disconcerting mixture of crassness and sheer naivete. The former seemed somehow endemic to the man, no matter how hard he worked to conceal it behind high-flown rhetoric, while the latter signified a man who appeared never to have seriously thought about the nature of mass media before he started trying to make it for himself. “For a publisher to not publish a product which many customers want to buy is censorship,” he said at one point. No, it’s not, actually; it’s called curation, and is the right and perhaps the duty of every content publisher — not that there were lines of customers begging Sierra for a Daryl Gates-helmed Police Quest game anyway. With that game, Williams became, whatever else he was, a shameless wannabe exploiter of a bleeding wound at the heart of his nation — and he wasn’t even very good at it, as shown by the tepid reaction to his “controversial” game. His decision to make it reflects not just a moral failure but an intellectual misunderstanding of his audience so extreme as to border on the bizarre. Has anyone ever bought an adventure game strictly because it’s controversial?

So, if there’s a pattern to the history of Ken Williams and Sierra — and the two really are all but inseparable — it’s one of talking a good game, of being broadly right with the vision thing, but falling down in the details and execution. Another example from the horse’s mouth, describing the broad idea that supposedly led to Open Season:

The reason that I’m working with Chief Gates is that one of my goals has been to create a series of adventure games which accomplish reality through having been written by real experts. I have been calling this series of games the “Reality Role-Playing” series. I want to find the top cop, lawyer, airline pilot, fireman, race-car driver, politician, military hero, schoolteacher, white-water rafter, mountain climber, etc., and have them work with us on a simulation of their world. Chief Gates gives us the cop game. We are working with Emerson Fittipaldi to simulate racing, and expect to announce soon that Vincent Bugliosi, the lawyer who locked up Charles Manson, will be working with us to do a courtroom simulation. My goal is that products in the Reality Role-Playing series will be viewed as serious simulations of real-world events, not as games. If we do our jobs right, this will be the closest most of us will ever get to seeing the world through these people’s eyes.

The idea sounds magnificent, so much so that one can’t help but feel a twinge of regret that it never went any further than Open Season. Games excel at immersion, and their ability to let us walk a mile in someone else’s shoes — to become someone whose world we would otherwise never know — is still sadly underutilized.

I often — perhaps too often — use Sierra’s arch-rivals in adventure games LucasArts as my own baton with which to beat them, pointing out how much more thoughtful and polished the latter’s designs were. This remains true enough. Yet it’s also true that LucasArts had nothing like the ambition for adventure games which Ken Williams expresses here. LucasArts found what worked for them very early on — that thing being cartoon comedies — and rode that same horse relentlessly right up until the market for adventures in general went away. Tellingly, when they were asked to adapt Indiana Jones to an interactive medium, they responded not so much by adjusting their standard approach all that radically as by turning Indy himself into a cartoon character. Something tells me that Ken Williams would have taken a very different tack.

But then we get to the implementation of Williams’s ideas by Sierra in the form of Open Season, and the questions begin all over again. Was Daryl Gates truly, as one of the marketers’ puff pieces claimed, “the most knowledgeable authority on law enforcement alive?” Or was there some other motivation involved? I trust the answer is self-evident. (John Williams even admitted as much in another of the puff pieces: “[Ken] decided the whole controversy over Gates would ultimately help the game sell better.”) And then, why does the “reality role-playing” series have to focus only on those with prestige and power? If Williams truly does just want to share the lives of others with us and give us a shared basis for empathy and discussion, why not make a game about what it’s like to be a Rodney King?

Was it because Ken Williams was himself a racist and a bigot? That’s a major charge to level, and one that’s neither helpful nor warranted here — no, not even though he championed a distinctly racist and bigoted game, released under the banner of a thoroughly unpleasant man who had long made dog whistles to racism and bigotry his calling card. Despite all that, the story of Open Season‘s creation is more one of thoughtlessness than malice aforethought. It literally never occurred to Ken Williams that anyone living in South Los Angeles would ever think of buying a Sierra game; that territory was more foreign to him than that of Europe (where Sierra was in fact making an aggressive play at the time). Thus he felt free to exploit a community’s trauma with this distasteful product and this disingenuous narrative that it was created to engender “discussion.” For nothing actually to be found within Open Season is remotely conducive to civil discussion.

Williams stated just as he was beginning his courtship of Daryl Gates that, in a fast-moving industry, he had to choose whether to “lead, follow, or get out of the way. I don’t believe in following, and I’m not about to get out of the way. Therefore, if I am to lead then I have to know where I’m going.” And here we come to the big-picture thing again, the thing at which Williams tended to excel. His decision to work with Gates does indeed stand as a harbinger of where much of gaming was going. This time, though, it’s a sad harbinger rather than a happy one.

I believe that the last several centuries — and certainly the last several decades — have seen us all slowly learning to be kinder and more respectful to one another. It hasn’t been a linear progression by any means, and we still have one hell of a long way to go, but it’s hard to deny that it’s occurred. (Whatever the disappointments of the last several years, the fact remains that the United States elected a black man as president in 2008, and has finally accepted the right of gay people to marry even more recently. Both of these things were unthinkable in 1993.) In some cases, gaming has reflected this progress. But too often, large segments of gaming culture have chosen to side instead with the reactionaries and the bigots, as Sierra implicitly did here.

So, Ken Williams and Sierra somehow managed to encompass both the best and the worst of what seems destined to go down in history as the defining art form of the 21st century, and they did so long before that century began. Yes, that’s quite an achievement in its own right — but, as Open Season so painfully reminds us, not an unmixed one.

(Sources: the books Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing by Joe Domanick and Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces by Radley Balko; Computer Gaming World of August/September 1987, October 1987, and December 1993; Sierra’s news magazines of Summer 1991, Winter 1992, June 1993, Summer 1993, Holiday 1993, and Spring 1994; Electronic Games of October 1993; Origin Systems’s internal newsletter Point of Origin of February 26 1993. Online sources include an excellent and invaluable Vice article on Open Season and the information about the Rodney King beating and subsequent trial found on Famous American Trials. And my thanks go out yet again to Corey Cole, who took the time to answer some questions about this period of Sierra’s history from his perspective as a developer there.

The four Police Quest adventure games are available for digital purchase at GOG.com.)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/chief-gates-comes-to-oakhurst-a-cop-drama-2/

Best Deals of the Steam Lunar New Year Sale

The Steam Lunar New Year Sale has begun, kicking off a whole lot of hurt for our wallets as game prices are slashed. It feels like we’ve only just finished the Steam Winter Sales, and with Steam Summer Sales around the corner, I don’t know where I’m going to get the funds to support my habit of purchasing games to sit on my virtual shelf.

However, out of all the games available at a discounted price, there are quite a few that are worth picking up to actually play and experience. If you’re looking for something to sink your teeth into, any of the following titles are well worth picking up while the Steam Lunar New Year Sale lasts.

Assassin’s Creed Origins – $44.85 (from $66.95)

Ubisoft’s latest venture into the Assassin’s Creed series is probably their best since Assassin’s Creed II. Assassin’s Creed Origins is so good, I’ve been covering it non-stop since it released way back in October 2017. While the $44.85 price point might seem on the expensive end of the spectrum, there is well over 100 hours of gameplay packed into the ancient Egypt setting.

Dark Souls 3 – $14.99 (from $59.99)

You want to talk about Dark Souls? Good. Dark Souls 3 is a the culmination of five years’ worth of storytelling, and is currently on sale for an outrageously cheap price on Steam. If you’ve been waiting for a good time to experience the notoriously challenging series, there’s no better time than the present. For those Nintendo Switch owners out there, Dark Souls will be heading to the hybrid console in a remastered version.

7 Days to Die – $9.49 (from $24.99)

A bit of classic survival horror, with a whole lot of crafting. 7 Days to Die is best experienced with a group of friends. Get together, gather resources, prepare your defences, and try not to die.

Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus – $29.97 (from $59.95)

I would lose the respect of my peers if I did not include Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus in this list of best deals of the Steam Lunar New Year Sale. Bill wrote our review for the game at the end of last year, and since then, he’s been banging on about how much I need to play it. Now that it’s reduced by 50%, I have no reason not to get it, and neither do you.

Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes – $5.99 (from $14.99)

Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes burst onto the online scene a couple of years ago, offering gamers an interesting mixture of cooperative experience and puzzle game. This is the perfect video game for parties, as everyone has to work together in order to defuse a bomb. It gets pretty intense when you need to flip through a 20-something page bomb defusal manual in order to find the puzzle you need to work on.

Hollow Knight – $9.89 (from $14.99)

Though describing games as “the such-and-such of Dark Souls” is plain lazy, the influence of Dark Souls cannot be ignored with Hollow Knight. Produced in Australia, this humble 2D platformer manages to combine exploration and imposing boss fights into the limited dimensions available. While never unfair, Hollow Knight is certainly challenging, and well-worth picking up.

Rainbow Six Siege – $41.61 (from $59.45)

Rainbow Six Siege was going to be my other suggestion for come back of the year, because Ubisoft really managed to turn it around and deliver one of the best asymmetrical multiplayer experiences of modern gaming. Five counter-terrorists go up against five terrorists, where the goal is either to secure the hostage, disarm the bomb, or eliminate the threats. Rounds are fast paced, and often come down to making impressive shots through the smallest gaps possible.

Forts – $11.24 (from $14.99)

Developed in Brisbane, Australia, Forts is a unique take on the RTS genre, in fact, it’s about as un-RTS-looking as it gets. Two players face-off over a gorge, with the main goal being to create a fort, throw in some weapons, and ensure the destruction of your enemy. It's as if Worms decided to tussle with Age of Empires. Definitely worth it at a little over ten dollars.

DOOM – $14.97 (from $29.95)

DOOM was probably my favorite game from 2016. Everything about this reboot screamed adrenaline. Sprinting down hallways, firing a double-barrel shotgun into the face of demons, then smashing your first through a demon’s back only to rip out its spine and attack the next monstrosity was pure, gory, bliss. With a $15 price point during the Steam Lunar New Year sale, it’s an absolute must-buy for anyone who’s still missing this from their collection. Be sure to check out David's review from 2016 if you're still on the fence!

Rocket League – $11.99 (from $19.99)

In the latest ShackCast, our fearless leader Asif spoke about his time playing Rocket League, so if there’s one way you can do it for Shacknews, it’s by picking up a copy of Rocket League. For those who’ve been living under a rock, this is basically soccer (or football for our tea-sippin’ brethren) mixed with bumper-cars.

ARK: Survival Evolved – $19.79 (from $59.99)

ARK: Survival Evolved has recently seen its full release, and since then, players have been experiencing the phenomenal world created by the team over at Studio Wildcard. This game mixes survival and crafting with dinosaur hunting and sci-fi goodness. For those PC players still awaiting the release of Monster Hunter: World, ARK will certainly scratch that itch.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Game of the Year Edition – $19.99 (from $49.99)

The Witcher 3 is probably one of the greatest games ever released. If it was released in 2017, it might have given The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild a run for its money as Shacknews Game of the Year. Witcher 3 has it all: excellent storytelling, phenomenal visuals, enticing quests, believable characters, engaging combat. For a mere $20, you’re getting one of the greatest RPGs of modern gaming.

Honorable Mentions:

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice - $20.99

Stardew Valley - $11.99

The Long Dark - $17.49

This War of Mine - $5.99

They Are Billions - $22.49

Cities Skylines - $7.49

Left 4 Dead 2 - $1.99

Getting Over It - $6.39

Planet Coaster - $11.24

Darkest Dungeon - $9.99

Tabletop Simulator - $9.99

Cuphead - $16.99

Hacktag - $14.99

Broforce - $3.74

Stellaris - $15.99

The Steam Lunar New Year Sale won’t be around for long, in fact, it will be ending on February 19th. Before that time comes, make sure you get the games you know you’re going to need while you wait for other excellent games to launch this year. Let me know in Chatty what you plan on picking up!

Featured image by franz888 on Deviant Art

Best Deals of the Steam Lunar New Year Sale published first on https://superworldrom.tumblr.com/

The Psychic Saiyan’s Revenge Chapter 1 (Alternate Timeline DBZ Fanfic)

On a planet far from the prying eyes of Vegeta, a silence echoes throughout it.  Just off the borders of a small town, is a large expanse of dirt and sand. The star for this system is just setting to the east, and as such, creates a deep red lighting effect, and casts long shadows towards the west.  A desert wind picks up speed as it reaches the only inhabitants of an empty plain.  

Three bodies are laying next to each other, just as lifeless as their surroundings. One has short spiky black hair, and has a large muscular body. He would have easily stood seven foot if he were still alive.  Next to him lies what appears to be his mate. She is as small as he is large, measuring in at 5' 2” and yielding a very slender body. Her curves are almost non-existent under the sand that has buried her and her mate.  And just below them, is a small body of a child, no less than eight years old. Her face is positioned towards the ground, and her body is lying just as limp as her parents.  The wind then begins to slow down in speed, until it stops completely.

A lone figure appears next to them, and looks down upon them. Kneeling down to get a better look at them, and perhaps hoping they are not who he thinks they are.  Turning over the small child, he sees her face, and is assured that it is in fact who he thinks they are.  He kneels down further, and reaches over to the large man. He whispers “Father” and takes the necklace he is wearing.  He rolls over his mother, and kisses her on the forehead, and then dusts his family off.  Putting his right hand to his forehead, the man lifts up his family and walks a distance with them.  A ditch suddenly forms after a pink flash of light, and he lowers his family into the hole.  Covering it back up with his psychic powers, he picks up some more dirt, and fashions it into a large headstone.

Burning writing into the headstone, he makes it read “Lying underneath this marker, rests a family that did not deserve to die. Revenge shall be taken upon those that did it, and it shall be in their names, or it will be in vain.”  Standing back up, he looks towards the sunset in the background.  Closing his eyes, he walks off towards the dying light.

***********************************************************************************

Six years later, a space craft, worn from time and from scarring entries into atmospheres, hurtles itself towards Planet Vegeta.  The space craft crashes into a wasteland just outside the capital city of the planet. A door on the side of the ship opens up, and the first one to step out is the man that had found his parents six years ago on that desert planet.  He is wearing Saiyan Armor with yellow straps over the shoulders, white gloves and boots, and dark blue Saiyan pants. Around his neck is the necklace he took from his father. He looks like he is determined to do anything.

Next to step out is a man with black skin, and what appear to be holes in his skin. Though upon closer inspection, they are just markers, and are part of his natural skin.  He wears a loose black jumpsuit, with no sleeves, and black leather like boots.  His hair is cut short, aged gray, and reaches down to his shoulders.  It spikes up in the front, but lays loose in the back.  His face is worn old with age, which is odd for his race, as they live to be well over billions of years old.  He knows not what he is, for he also has amnesia and can't remember any further than back to six years ago.

Behind him, is a very beautiful woman with light blue skin.  Her outfit is torn in many places, and reveals most if not all of her curves.  What is left of her black jumpsuit covers what is necessary.  Her lower jumpsuit cuts of in “shorts”, but the left leg is missing, cutting off at her hips.  Her tense muscles are clearly shown, along with bruises and scratches, though there are no scars.  Her hair falls back to just below her shoulders, and is a bright blond.  She steps aside as the next person steps out of the ship.

The last one stands out the most, and his shredded clothes prove it.  He is a reptilian, with green scales for his skin.  He has a snout, and his feet are long with razor sharp talons. He walks with his legs bent, for support.  His long tail sticks out from his backside, and reaches out six feet.  Spikes come out from the top, and reach all the way up his spine.  He speaks out in a reptilian voice, which is unable to be understood by normal people.

“Yes S'kur, this is my home planet, and it looks as though we have only done more damage since I have been gone.”  The man in Saiyan armor says back, clearly being able to understand the man with his telepathic powers.

“So Duke, where would we go to find information first?” Speaks the man with black skin. “Would it be wise to start in this large city?  I sense that this is the capital, and the king resides here.”

“This is the city we need to start in. I have a feeling that we have little time before something terrible happens.  You and S'kur would do best to wait here while me and Tarah search the city, Vector.”  Duke motions for the two men to go back inside the ship. They do so, and he and Tarah slowly walk towards the city.

“Why are we going so slowly if we need to do what you have come for so quickly?” Tarah asks after they have walked a few miles.

“Because if we exert too much energy, I fear we will show up on their scouters.  I do not know how much they have updated their technology since I have been gone, and would not wish to test it out before I know for sure. Best to be safe.”

“Oh, well, okay, you do know what you are doing.  I trust you.”

“I hope so, or else I have drug you out here all this way for nothing.  All my efforts should not be in vain.”  They continue walking until they reach the city outer wall.  “There should be a small hole around here somewhere that we can use to get inside.  From there, you will need to conceal yourself, and I will gather armorment, and information from the nearest shop or bar.”

“I understand Duke, lead the way.”  Tarah suddenly disappears, but then her voice is heard from where she just was. “I'm ready when you are.”

“Good, follow me, and keep close. I don't want you wandering off to far while you are cloaked.”  They turn right as soon as they are through the hole, and keep walking on. Duke soon blends himself in with the Saiyans as they walk about, tending to their daily business.  As he nears a bar, he sinks inside, and looks around the inside.  “Hmm, also as I remember.  Dark, dirty, and smelly.”  The bar suddenly quiets down though, and Duke starts to worry.

“Come to think of it, you do nothing but fight,” Came a voice next to Duke.  Duke turns to see a tall and brute man standing next to him.  Duke scans his mind quickly, and realizes that the comment is directed towards the bar counter, and not himself.

“Nappa,” says the man at the bar. His face is filled with disgust towards the man he sees next to Duke.  “What do you want to do, boast about your newest mission?”

Nappa, the huge man, is balding and has a black goatee around his mouth. His hair is still wild, even though there is just a small circular patch left.  “Actually,” Nappa answers, “I came to offer you the job that Frieza gave to my team.”  Nappa’s face has a large grin on it.  “Maybe you can do it just as well as we can.”  Nappa practically has a beard of teeth his smile was so big.

Duke considers the situation he has just walked into, and decides he can walk off to the side, and watch safely from there.  “Which planet is it?”  The man at the bar replies as he turns his back on Nappa. “Some planet with people that would rather contaminate their planet before losing it to anybody that will just use it?”  The sarcasm in his voice can be poured into a cup it is so thick.  Duke tries to scan this Saiyan's mind, but finds that he has some sort of mental shield, or has trained himself to block out any attempts on mental reading.

Nappa looks dumbfounded at the Saiyan’s statement.  He catches himself and puts on a smile.  “Well it’s not too far from Planet Vegeta, but I would suggest taking your entire team,”  Nappa snickers with his low voice in a small laugh, “because you couldn’t take this planet with your inferior abilities.  Hell, you couldn’t even take on Bardock’s new kid, Vulcan, and his power level is only five!”  He breaks into a huge laughter that the entire bar picks up on.  Duke even finds himself chuckling out of habit.

Someone off to Vulcan's side catches a glance at Duke, and stares for a second. She can see his concentration on his face as he watches the fight about to break out between her brother and Nappa.  She makes a mental note, and continues watching the other two.

“You don’t know anything about MY skills as a FIGHTER!”  Vulcan leaps from his barstool.  He swings his fist at Nappa’s face.  Duke backs up some more, and pushes Tarah into a corner.  “Stay here, things are about to get hectic, and I don't want our cover blown.  Just watch, and learn.”

The stinging pain comes to Nappa’s cheek as Vulcan’s fist connects with it.  Vulcan shakes his hand with pain from Nappa’s stiff face. Nappa’s face jerks back and blood flows out and landed on the stained floor.  It quickly boils as Nappa’s energy level increases and his energy field can be seen.  Nappa swings his trunk of an arm at Vulcan, who brings up his right arm to easily block it, and kicks Nappa in the stomach.  Nappa falls onto a table and breaks it with his weight.

Duke smiles as he watches the fight, and begins to root for Vulcan.  He once again reaches into Nappa's mind, and pulls any information he can out of it.  He learns that King Vegeta is still in power, and that he is currently spending most of his time in the throne room. Learning that Nappa is the personal assistant to the Royal family, Duke plans on meeting him as soon as the fight is over, if Vulcan doesn't kill him first.

Eventually, the fight takes Vulcan and Nappa a floor below through a hole in the ground that Vulcan causes by tripping Nappa with his tail while Nappa held him in a choke.  The bar erupts into cheers at this point, and hopes for more destruction.  Duke once again chuckles to himself as the fight goes on, feeling his feral Saiyan instincts once again surfacing.

Another Saiyan, apparently one of Vulcan's friends, rushes over to the hole, and jumps down to help him.  “You wouldn't kill an elite Saiyan would you?” Nappa whimpers as Vulcan gets into a position signaling one of his signature moves.

“Not unless he shattered my pride,” Vulcan grits through his clenched teeth.

“Oh, thank Kami,” Nappa sighs with relief, and Duke just lowers his head and shakes it realizing what Nappa is going to try to do. “I'm glad then, so you can put the energy blasts away, okay?”

Vulcan lowers his eyebrows, and Duke just smiles.  “That is EXACTLY what you did, Nappa, you shattered my pride with your belligerent comments.”  Vulcan pulls his arms back, and prepares to end Nappa's life.  Vulcan's friend then steps up to him, and restrains his arms. Duke quickly scans this Saiyan's mind to find his name, and locates it easily: Shade. “Listen Vulcan, Nappa’s not worth the excess energy that you would waste,” Shade says, and looks nervously at his best friend.  He has sweat beading on his forehead.  “Not worth the trouble it would cause.  You already have caused enough trouble.”

Duke could sense sincerity and reason from Shade as he tried to hold Vulcan back.  “Yeah, you’re right, he isn’t,” Vulcan's hands stop glowing, and he puts them on his hips.  Nappa's mouth curls into an evil grin as he charges Vulcan and Shade.  Shade spins around, pulls his sword out of the sheath, and cuts Nappa across the chest, shattering the Saiyan armor.  The sword scrapes his pectorals, and sends him flying backwards.  Nappa's wound appears to be fatal, but with his size, the brute Saiyan will unfortunately be up and walking after a trip to a rejuvenation tank.  Duke smirks and turns to walk out of the bar.  Tarah has to sprint to catch up to him

“Almost tricked us Nappa,” they hear from Shade as they walk out the door. Tarah sighs as they walk into an alley.

“What's the matter?” Duke looks at where he knows Tarah is.

“I just wanted to see the situation come to an end, did you have to leave?”

“Yes, a Saiyan in there is psychic, and she almost found me out.  I can't leave another close call like that.  We'll just wait out here for Nappa, and then we'll get some information from him about the Royal family.  From there, we'll work our way up to the king, and make him pay for what he has brought upon the Saiyan race, as well as making my family go on that mission together, and getting killed by Zarbon.

“Okay, we'll wait. Though I wanted to know what happened next in the bar.”

“Nothing big, Vulcan and Shade flew up out of the hole, gave the bartender a ten piece, and put the house drinks on Nappa's tab. And here come Shade and Vulcan now.”  Just as Duke finishes his words, Vulcan and Shade do come out, followed by a few other Saiyans.  The female Saiyan that had caught Duke's eye earlier looks over towards their direction, but shrugs, and follows her brother.

“Remind me to find out how to see through walls like you do.  It could come in handy at some point.”

“I will, now be quiet, we have already attracted too much attention. We're just gonna wait for Nappa.”

“Alright, but I hope it doesn't take too long.”

America’s Dental Gap Has Left People Relying on Pliers, Chisels, and Whiskey

September went out hot in East Tennessee. Caleb didn’t 
mind; he parked his lawn chair in a shallow pool of shade, clipped a small fan to its arm, lit a cigarette, and settled back to wait. It would be more than 12 hours before the free medical clinic opened its doors. Caleb had read about the clinic online, and that it was best to get there early. Hundreds of people were expected to show up. Caleb had driven up from Georgia to get a cracked tooth pulled. He’s a lean, hard-looking man with a scar running vertically down from his lower lip, the result of a getting bitten by a dog. His teeth are yellowed, many of them dark brown at the gum line. A few years ago, Caleb paid more than $2,000 to have three teeth extracted by a professional, a price that he considered ridiculous. He works odd jobs but wanted me to know that he isn’t poor: He earns enough to own his house and car. “But there’s nothing in the back pocket,” he explained. Since then he’s resorted to pulling teeth on his own, with a pair of hog-ring pliers that he modified for the job. One time he messed up and crushed an aching tooth, leaving a jagged stump embedded in his jaw; he went after that with a chisel and a hammer. He saved a neighbor $300 recently, he claimed, by pulling a tooth for him. “You know what that cost him? Two and a half shots of Wild Turkey 101.” On the ground beside Caleb sat Michael Sumers, a fellow Georgian with a long neck and wide, darting eyes. Sumers, who never saw a dentist as a child, hoped to get his remaining 14 teeth pulled. He’s only 46 years old. His mouth has hurt him almost constantly for the last five years, but he hasn’t been able to afford any help. Sumers lives on his disability check, and after paying $700 a month in rent, he doesn’t have much left. “I can’t eat steak without my teeth breaking,” he admitted.Chicken is what broke one of Jessica Taylor’s teeth. Another two were broken by her ex-husband’s fist, when he hit her in the mouth during a fight. I found Taylor sitting on the ground, her back to a tree, a pizza box beside her. “Now I’m here,” she said, explaining why she’d come to the clinic, “and he’s in hell.” Over on the far side of the lot, a group of women sat around a small barbecue grill, smoking cigarettes and flipping burgers: Beverly, April, Darlene, and Donna, a woman with a thin face and gray hair scraped back into a ponytail. All of them hoped to get their teeth worked on the following morning when the clinic opened. Beverly smiled, showing me how her two front teeth overlapped. Her parents divorced when she was little, Beverly told me, “and forgot which one was supposed to take care of it.” April, her sister, read about the clinic on Facebook and had been the first to pull into the parking lot that morning. At 9 am, when the clinic staff arrived to set up rows of dental chairs, April was there in a pink T-shirt, waiting on the sidewalk. 

 Of the countless ways in which poverty eats 
at the body, one of the most visible, and painful, is in our mouths. Teeth betray age, but also wealth, if they’re pearly and straight, or the emptiness of our pockets, if they’re missing, broken, rotted out. The American health-care system treats routine dental care as a luxury available only to those with the means to pay for it, making it vastly more difficult for millions of Americans to take care of their teeth. And the consequences can be far more profound than just negative effects on one’s appearance. In fact, they can be deadly. Wealthy Americans spend billions of dollars per year, collectively, to improve their smiles. Meanwhile, about a third of all people living in the United States struggle to pay for even basic dental care. The most common chronic illness in school-age children is tooth decay. Nearly a quarter of low-income children have decaying teeth, well above the national average; black and Hispanic children also experience higher rates of untreated decay. Neither Medicaid nor Medicare is required to cover dental procedures for adults, so coverage varies by state, and both the very poor and the elderly are often left to pay out of pocket. (Tennessee provides no dental coverage to anyone over 21.) In those states where Medicaid does cover dental care, benefits are limited. Even middle-class Americans can’t always afford necessary care, as private insurance often will not cover expensive procedures. Dental coverage improved modestly during the Obama administration, through an expansion of Medicaid and the state Children’s Health Insurance Program under the Affordable Care Act, but access remains patchy and wholly inadequate. The situation is made more difficult by the dearth of dentists in low-income communities. Less than half of the country’s dentists will treat Medicaid patients. As one dentist tells journalist Mary Otto in her 2017 book Teeth, while his colleagues “once exclusively focused upon fillings and extractions,” they “are nowadays considered providers of beauty.” Offering cosmetic procedures in wealthy cities and suburbs is far more lucrative than treating people in rural areas and poor neighborhoods—whitening alone is an $11-billion-a-year industry. The result is a geographic imbalance, with dentists clustered around the money. Nearly 55 million people live in areas officially considered to have a shortage of dental-care providers. At the pediatric dental clinic at the University of Illinois at Chicago, there’s a two-year waiting list for children who need dental surgery that requires anesthesia. All of this explains why Caleb and a few hundred other people slept in a parking lot overnight—in their cars, in tents, or out on the ground—and then gathered in the early-morning dark, waiting for the pop-up clinic to open its doors. Held at a sports arena outside Chattanooga, the clinic is one of dozens operated each year by the nonprofit organization Remote Area Medical. Appalachia is RAM’s home territory, but the group now runs weekend clinics in medically underserved areas across the United States, from California and Texas to Florida and New York, providing basic medical, dental, and vision care—as well as veterinary services, 
occasionally—fully free of charge. Dozens of doctors and dentists from across the country volunteer their services. The group’s founder, Stan Brock, was there to open the doors at 6 am. Brock is a tan, trim man of 81 with a clipped English accent; he is also a former wildlife-television star. (A quick search turns up photos of Brock holding a lion cub, a snake fatter than his arm, and a harpy eagle named Jezebel.)The idea for RAM came about after Brock found himself badly injured in a horseback-riding accident in a part of Guyana that was weeks away—on foot—from the nearest doctor. Initially, his intent was to fly doctors and medical supplies into remote regions of the world’s poorest countries. Brock got his pilot’s license and a small plane, and started flying medical missions into Haiti, Mexico, Guatemala, Venezuela, and Brazil. He founded RAM in 1985; a few years later, the mayor of Sneedville in northern Tennessee read about the group’s work in a newspaper. The local hospital had closed and the only dentist had left town, so the mayor asked Brock for help. Brock put a dental chair in the back of a pickup truck and drove to Sneedville, where more than 50 people lined up to have their teeth worked on. Ninety percent of RAM’s operations are now in the United States. Little else has changed about the nature of Brock’s work in the two and a half decades since the Sneedville clinic, despite swings of the political pendulum and the passage of numerous health-care reform packages. When I asked Brock about common ailments among the thousands of people who attend RAM clinics each year, he said, “I can tell you that without any hesitation—it’s the same everywhere we go. They’re all there to see the dentist. They’re all there to see the eye doctor. They’re not there to see the medical doctor.” The health-care system treats the eyes and teeth as being distinct from the rest of the body—no matter that an infection that starts in the mouth can move quickly into the bloodstream and then throughout the body. Unlike many other acute physical problems, a cracked tooth or the gradual blurring of vision cannot be fixed in an emergency room. Nevertheless, more than 2 million people show up in the nation’s emergency rooms with dental pain each year, though hospitals can usually do little besides prescribe antibiotics and painkillers. 

 By the time the sky lightened, nearly 200 people had been ushered into the arena. Outside, the line still wrapped around the building. A woman at the back clutched a ticket numbered 631. Her teeth had been hurting her for a year and a half, but there was no guarantee she’d be seen. Inside, volunteers checked the patients in at rows of folding tables. Dental patients were sent to wait in the bleachers, which filled up quickly. One by one, the people in the bleachers were summoned to a chair overseen by Dr. Joseph Gambacorta, a dean at the School of Dental Medicine at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Gambacorta peered into their mouths to determine whether they needed fillings, a cleaning, or—as was most often the case—extractions. Thirty-six-year-old Jennifer Beard from Dayton, Tennessee, sat uneasily in the chair, her mouth open. She’d already lost all but eight of her teeth. “What do I need to do? I haven’t been to the dentist in a long time,” she admitted in an apologetic tone. “My mom and dad died, and I lost my job.” It took Gambacorta about 10 seconds to assess the damage: “I hate to tell you this, but you need them all out.” Preventing tooth decay doesn’t necessarily require a lot of money: Toothbrushes and floss don’t cost very much, Gambacorta pointed out. But it does require constant attention, and neglect is serious. One dental student who has volunteered at several RAM clinics told me about a man who arrived with a mouthful of rotting teeth; asked how often he brushed them, he replied, “Well, doc, I don’t.” Diet and habits like smoking also hasten decay. But all these risk factors are amplified by limited access to professional care. When routine care is unaffordable and decay goes untreated, minor problems can become critical. What starts out as a toothache can become an infection in the jawbone, which can then spread to the bloodstream. In one now-famous case initially reported by Mary Otto, a 12-year-old Maryland boy named Deamonte Driver died from an abscessed tooth that would have cost $80 to pull. Driver’s family had lost their Medicaid coverage, and his mother was preoccupied with trying to find a dentist for his brother, who had six rotted teeth. Driver died when the bacteria from his tooth spread to his brain—and after more than $200,000 in surgeries and six weeks in the hospital. “Six, eight, 10, 15, 16, and two,” Gambacorta said briskly to an assistant with a clipboard, naming the teeth that had to be extracted from the head of a fidgety 30-year-old who’d last seen a dentist nearly a decade ago, when he was in Navy boot camp. Gambacorta took a second look. “Are you sure you don’t want the bottom ones out, too?” he asked. “Put 18, 19, 31, and 32 on the list, too.”While some patients’ teeth were so decayed that Gambacorta had no choice but to recommend their removal, he hesitates to turn people into “dental cripples” unnecessarily. “Everyone’s eager to get them all out, but they don’t know what that means for after,” he told me. People assume that having dentures is easier than dealing with their rotted teeth, particularly if they’ve been in pain. But dentures come with their own complications, including the fact that people who use them tend to eat softer, less nutritious foods. On the main floor of the arena, behind a wall of green curtains, stood four parallel rows of dental chairs—50 in all. I found April, still wearing her pink shirt, waiting in chair 22, her gums already numbed. Caleb was in chair 13; he was quiet and nervous, with little of the nonchalance he’d projected the previous afternoon while describing his pliers. Later on, I found him smoking a cigarette in the parking lot, a new gap where his top left tooth had been. “It’s embarrassing,” he said of the gap. Still, he was grateful. He was getting free eyeglasses, too; he hadn’t realized how badly he needed them. Donna grinned at me from chair 25 as a third-year dental student prepared to pull four of her teeth. The first three came out easily, in a matter of minutes. But the fourth was stuck. It took the oral surgeon who was overseeing things a few swings of his right elbow, as if he were flapping a wing, to yank it free. Donna whimpered in pain, but a few minutes later, her mouth stuffed with gauze, she gave me a thumbs-up. The incessant ache she’d lived with for so long had already started to fade. 

 Over the course of two days, more than 
800 people received care from RAM. Sheila Barrow, a pretty woman of 55 with dimples and long blond hair, said it was the fourth RAM clinic she’d attended. This time, she was there to have one tooth filled and another pulled. Barrow has health insurance through Tennessee’s Medicaid program, but no dental or vision coverage. She worked for UPS, but after four knee surgeries, she’s now dependent on disability benefits. “They’ve been a lifesaver,” she said of the free clinics. ��I don’t know what I’d do without them.” And yet it was clear that free clinics like RAM’s barely paper over the yawning dental-care gap. On Saturday afternoon, I found Michael Sumers in the parking lot, waiting for a ride home. All of his top teeth were gone. He’d gotten four pulled, not the 14 he was hoping for—there wasn’t enough time. Up in the bleachers, Gambacorta and another volunteer had discussed how to triage patients as it became clear that the need was greater than the number of dentists. Treating everyone in line meant that some people would have to choose between getting a tooth pulled or another one filled. It should be unnecessary to say that a system that requires people to spend the night in a parking lot to see a dentist, or to pull their own teeth with pliers, or that leaves an infected tooth to kill a child, is grotesquely broken. Yet there is no urgency for reform in Washington, particularly with the party in power more inclined toward cutting health benefits. Part of the fault belongs with dentists’ associations, which have fought proposals for a national health-care system as well as smaller-scale reforms, like giving hygienists more autonomy to provide preventive care in public schools. The fault also rests with the policy-makers who have ignored dental care entirely when debating overhauls to the health-insurance system. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and Maryland Representative Elijah Cummings have repeatedly introduced legislation to expand dental coverage through Medicare, Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, and the Department of Veterans Affairs; the latest version, introduced in 2015, never received a committee vote in either chamber. Unless something changes in Washington, Brock predicted, “Remote Area Medical will be holding these events from now until kingdom come—instead of being where we should be, which is the Third World.”

[intro, i’m on a megabus as it makes its way down the west coast of england. it set out from glasgow and will land in london. i'm typing this letter to a friend using my phone]

YOU

There is a sign opposite me that says: PLEASE MIND YOUR HEAD. And I don't know what that means

You tuned to the moon? I suspect.

Language in full swoon of trying to Make truth not trysts and uncover in one life what another might have missed.

I FELL through the floor of reality Sunday night. Mind scudding over water in a boat. I got my hair wet but the rest of me stayed dry. Life of a fish. Life of two twins. Life of a goat. Hope you had fun. I'm going to carry two way radios or increase massively my powers of surveillance in order to not lose you as soon as I've found you next dance. Because i madly enjoy making mad enough to animate life with joyful mania. And I suspect you're quite mad glad and can dance it out too. Fuckit the only thing I can herein say IN HERE, IN THE CYBERNETIC BOX which substitutes life with meagre feels for agency, is small prods of preference, hummus nuggets of information. Humming and harring to the rhythm of vision under greasy stamp of digits on cell phone screens. But, listen. If I can only write you mad letters of life then mad letters you shall get. But increasingly i am tired of wee words laying so far adrift of the fullness and ecstatic futility of the everyday, out there where the people cluster like exclamation marks in the streets. And I love DOING. More than ever. Listen. There is a wind bending back grasses and the mixing of two waters out where the creeks of fresh water meet the great surly slap of salt sea. There are horses confusing children, children confusing adults with jammy hands and teeth coloured in with flurescant markers. There are whole tribes of these people. Some find truth by being told. Others lose nothing of experience by robing it with second hand facts, but making self education by slapping their tongues off the paving stones and lampposts of world cities to make their own ditties of comparison to show why one city might taste gritty whilst another bites of SunKissedOranges

"Variations in the Taste and texture of street furniture in many countries."Published by Harper. 4 star reviews. Author photo. Pull quote. £RRP.

Explanations expanding the differences in tastes will hinge on the environmental factors of the Spanish post box or Russian drain cover. The pavement in Sevilla tastes acrid, like orange juice mixed with piss and dust and sweat. The tang of the street drains in soho is slightly more salty than other districts in London, and the book puts this down to the heightened sexual activity in the district, and as you now pass the men in the streets of soho you look at them with this new thought, wondering which of these people may take time to make secrets pockets in their day in which they crouch down and release semen onto the streets of the city - the less wordy fully alive part of you shortens the laugh, gans "here man, who is it who's spaffing on drains?" Read all about it Coming soon Please mind your head

Thoughts of a man considering how he might continue to expand explorations of sensations, movements, rhythm, eloquence, and grace in one fast, vast and fully felt global race of radical improbabilities. If the route to truth can be passed on by licking seams and slabs of the streets, what other treats might we use to unfold life's explanations. Hold up.

Outside is now bright yellow leaves still new to the sun. We just overtook an M&S lorry and it made a hum like nails on chalk or a refrigerator spaceship with you small outside, as it hurtles past, as vast as it is slow. FLOW. END OF PART TWO. STILL GOT RHYTHM GONNA GO ON. DONT STOP CANT STOP THIS SONG. Spring is wrapped over the land with a fresh sheen that has not yet been taken out of its box. The new leaves gleam on stark limbs of the trees, backlit. Trees look like jellyfish when they glow so. And big seaweeds when the sun is gone and in the wind they thrash. And sound like cymbals as the drops of rain crash down and print spring's rejuvenated refrain on all different parts.

Right so, shall we tell you a story? I'll just imagine you say yes at this point, because you are not here but for a glowing iPhone screen and some hills out the window like bags of sugar and which are sat on by an angular factory which breathes out puffs of silver. What makes such silver smoke? Why all the factory's long angled conveyor belts? Well without smell even, and from this distance, it does not take genius skills of observation to see that the silver smoke from the factory chimneys must be fine huffs of fish scales. This you see, is a fish finger factory. And complicit in the conspiracy which keeps you from discovering that wild fish have fingers. The fish they were ashamed. They bought all kinds of products to cover up their dexterity. Huge industry emerged to make them feel "more beautiful" if they hid those bits. And aspiration mixed with ashamedness to create a colossal mess in which no fish could face the anxiety of another animal seeing those unsightly fingers and so when even the tip of the top products for anti finger scale smoothing cream failed to perform as rapidly as was wanted they turned to plastic surgery. This created a surge in surgeries and doctors which soon scaled from small Clinics to big factories. And they realised they could sell the discarded limbs as food to humans and instead of fish having to pay for the surgery for finger removal, the cost of the procedures could be billed to the human consumers and keep their profit making industry in work in perpetuity. This created employment and was thus a social good. And so compulsory finger removal surgery, free of charge, was introduced for all fish at 18 weeks of age. But they have a lot of surface area do fingers, and lots of area equals lots of scales. so hence the silver puffs of smoke from the chimneys of the fish finger factory which is sat on some hills that look like bags of sugar that we just passed. And now a sign saying HIGHWAYS AGENCY framed by mud stomping bovine and in the background a girl with midnight blue eyes is yelling: "weren'tevenanycharactersmate Youcallthatafuckkkin story ?!? Andwheresthebeginningmiddlendthingandwelliwontevenaskaboutchapters" Settle.

anything's a good excuse to keep exploring and expanding and things are going burst every moment like a million billion berries being stamped into fresh juice. I want to do. So if you want to do to just say and then hurrays can unfurl without delay of words words words words words [servant to FOOHAMLET: ] "what do you read my lord?" [FOOHAMLET:] "words words words words words" actions are good. Set me a challenge. I can see the sea silver on the skyline and windmills and I want to go listen to all of it yell and tell nothing back but SWELL YEAH OK KEEP BLOWING THAT ETERNAL UNKNOWING NATURE. end of part three. Words have taken us nearly halfway out our tree. On the motorway passing Wepaintanything.biz. Anything? Let's see you paint paint. And by now we've reached Lancaster uni. Verdant synthetics.

Christ are you keeping up with this?

Is Preston ever a shithole. Even in the sun. Reminds me of too many places I have been trapped in. An English Dundee? I am being prejudice beyond what just this demands and far flung from fairness. Maybe it's lovely. Maybe i only resent having idled at this megabus stop in Preston so many times at every hour of the day. Every time I abandon suspicions and hold up my hands and say I don't know, that's when life rewards me. Sooth out the sinners. Growl with the  grinners. Got the front seat of a double decker to myself. Wealth of vision. I am watching a man on the roundabout to Preston high street kick an empty beer can then stamp it. Ghost fist fight cars. He nearly was hit by one. He has now armed himself with a stick. he holds the stick at a stern steady angle towards the cars, demonstrating his readiness. En guard. The bus has moved. Did I really see a commemorative plaque to Britain's first motorway bypass in gold letters with potted geraniums like floppy geriatrics painted in toothpaste ontop? Preston precisely. Treats of individuality trick us against greater treats of shared humanity. Too easy to be a sneak peek sneering at what others take as engine oil. All is all and every spoke gives us hope. You can rarely make a wheel from just one individual. Drink yer own juice. Where are we anyway? I want doesn't exist just do. You, my friend are beautiful. Oh get to fuck the hooks of words just written down. I would rather have them in speech with all meanings entreated beyond each word with the tricks that only speech can leap. Ok. Herd. Heard. Hair'd laird. A long haired boy and a dog, Float down river On a log, 12+ (mild nudity)

Opposite to my right sits a fellow lord of a front seat. He is lord Neptune. With rings on fat fingers and ink wreathed round bald skull, metal curling from his nose forehead ears. And when the bus decelerates to come to a roundabout he mutters into the newly made silence. Maybe he is cursing it away, for his incantations of splutters and grumbles end when the mumbles of the bus pick up again. Later on lord Neptune pulls a can of spray out of a co-op mid-range semi-durable placcy bag and douses his crotch in it. And as the acrid hing of imitation lynx begins to clear you dearly hope he ain't shat himself. And simply stupid questions that can only go: "well how are you" "yeah alright, so: new episode of the grime on tonight." And "oh yes, did you see last week's?" BUT trying is necessary and always admirable.

clumped clouds above are huge pieces of clotted water held above gravity, mixing with light. They're white and bulge, and with the right kind of eyes you can watch those huge slabs of water move, grooving smooth movements no different to the way that ripples move over the surface of the sea, but in scale massive and at a speed reduced. So you throw time as a constant out of the window and let your body relax and your eyes fast forward the progression so that the clouds up above you look just like the waves coming in, seen from below, you're on the sea floor, and up above is just the texture of the water from below as it slaps and spills, and behind it, above it somewhere, some great light that we get just thin hints of shines through. And the trees like seaweed weave and some smaller clouds like fishes swim and despite the motorway this is an octopuses garden. Inexplicably lord Neptune now wears reading spectacles to look at a smart phone and is polishing off a selection of ringed and foil wrapped biscuits. Bus stumbles. He grumbles. passengers revise their hopes with the demise of momentum and the white noise of rain steps in and all the sky is grey downward skyscrapers of wet. Bus starts up. Rain white noise louder. Cuts out in a deafening sudden silence for a half second under every bridge. Landscape now drumkit for the blind. Trees each leafy cymbals. And what symbols does the breath of restless spring foliage frolicking against one another in thrashing wind branches entrance on the entrances to your understanding. What things make us feel how we do. Do things impose feelings or do feelings come up from a deeper place always constant and true ETC. Between breaths are only laughs. You are lightning conductor for everyone's emotions. Sit lap laugh under tree. Be smooth enough to appease them growling. Quick enough that they can't jump over you. See it through. Life's only getting weirder. And I am keen for it. END OF PART FOUR. CONFUSION. WHERE ARE WE. WHAT HAVE WE GLEANED? IS THE HARVEST IN BEFORE THE RAIN. DO WE BELIEVE IN REFRAINS OR IN THE COLOUR BLUE. ARE ALL WORDS STICKY. OR STUCK TO NOTHINK. Please your mind head.

-- Episode 95. Sunset trees of yellow leaves double saturation in setting sun. Eye playing Heart seeing If life is folly, fool. Triple fuck assumptions. Fellow lord of the front seat, his highness Neptune has cranked the tunes from that smart phone of his. Reading glasses not necessary. And now sunset is jaunty regaee fleeing down smooth hills without delay. Life is bright green and bright blue and all grooving. Stoke on Trent is near. What does that mean? Nothing. Moon is up. Days when etc sounds like egg stretcher. DOME why do anything which isn't true?But so many do Limited to thin repeatables that popular stores provide. HERE be what romance, bereavement, the best birthday party ever must look exactly like. Disguise yourself within their restrictions. Buy your life experiences now. Naw. Live outside their lies and lines. Write your own recipe. Instinct GO. Fridge magnets that motivate fish to get fingerless. Boys in highschools with tales of Friday night's fishy fingers Fingals cave and finegann's wake and the sound steak makes when it hits the pavements. I'd like to know what you think about humans. And what specimens you see. And how electricity can run through people when they notice they've noticed one another and adrenaline hoists attention up. Can humans smell emotion or. And a hundred and three things you would never do. And a mini essay (800 words max) on what it means to be true and the ways in which the language of medicine falls between scientific and religious idiom and your thoughts on how such language prejudices affect practice. Top three carnies in Blackpool. Five best trees ever climbed. Time you won against all odds. Last time you really hurt your body. If you have ever crashed a car. If you have a favourite star. If you believe in star signs and if so why. What was the last thing that made you cry. What would the funniest name for a lorry driver be. Do you prefer wasps or nettles stinging knees. Thoughts on limits of athleticism within three legged races and their conspicuous absence from the Olympic program. The first record you bought, the last time you swam and thought you'd sink. Records for dancing (medals, high scores), favourite parks for prancing. A tune. Any tune. similarities between house numbers you've lived at. Last time you fell through a floor. What is valuable but being true. How many flaps. best painted easter egg. Digestions from a megabus. Claps from a running brain. I'm just not sure what to think really. All residents parking round here. Yes they're very strict. Oh I know. What are they like. Yes, but I hope you don't get a ticket. I think it's Wednesdays they're usually around, yes, short fellow with a hat.

All I meant to say is: Hey. How r u?

Chief Gates Comes to Oakhurst: A Cop Drama

One day in late 1992, a trim older man with a rigid military bearing visited Sierra Online’s headquarters in Oakhurst, California. From his appearance, and from the way that Sierra’s head Ken Williams fawned over him, one might have assumed him to be just another wealthy member of the investment class, a group that Williams had been forced to spend a considerable amount of time wooing ever since he had taken his company public four years earlier. But that turned out not to be the case. As Williams began to introduce his guest to some of his employees, he described him as Sierra’s newest game designer, destined to make the fourth game in the Police Quest series. It seemed an unlikely role based on the new arrival’s appearance and age alone.

Yet ageism wasn’t sufficient to explain the effect he had on much of Sierra’s staff. Josh Mandel, a sometime stand-up comic who was now working for Sierra as a writer and designer, wanted nothing whatsoever to do with him: “I wasn’t glad he was there. I just wanted him to go away as soon as possible.” Gano Haine, who was hard at work designing the environmental-themed EcoQuest: Lost Secret of the Rainforest, reluctantly accepted the task of showing the newcomer some of Sierra’s development tools and processes. He listened politely enough, although it wasn’t clear how much he really understood. Then, much to her relief, the boss swept him away again.

The man who had prompted such discomfort and consternation was arguably the most politically polarizing figure in the United States at the time: Daryl F. Gates, the recently resigned head of the Los Angeles Police Department. Eighteen months before, four of his white police officers had brutally beaten a black man — an unarmed small-time lawbreaker named Rodney King — badly enough to break bones and teeth. A private citizen had captured the incident on videotape. One year later, after a true jury of their peers in affluent, white-bread Simi Valley had acquitted the officers despite the damning evidence of the tape, the Los Angeles Riots of 1992 had begun. Americans had watched in disbelief as the worst civil unrest since the infamously restive late 1960s played out on their television screens. The scene looked like a war zone in some less enlightened foreign country; this sort of thing just doesn’t happen here, its viewers had muttered to themselves. But it had happened. The final bill totaled 63 people killed, 2383 people injured, and more than $1 billion in property damage.

The same innocuous visage that was now to become Sierra’s newest game designer had loomed over all of the scenes of violence and destruction. Depending on whether you stood on his side of the cultural divide or the opposite one, the riots were either the living proof that “those people” would only respond to the “hard-nosed” tactics employed by Gates’s LAPD, or the inevitable outcome of decades of those same misguided tactics. The mainstream media hewed more to the latter narrative. When they weren’t showing the riots or the Rodney King tape, they played Gates’s other greatest hits constantly. There was the time he had said, in response to the out-sized numbers of black suspects who died while being apprehended in Los Angeles, that black people were more susceptible to dying in choke holds because their arteries didn’t open as fast as those of “normal people”; the time he had said that anyone who smoked a joint was a traitor against the country and ought to be “taken out and shot”; the time when he had dismissed the idea of employing homosexuals on the force by asking, “Who would want to work with one?”; the time when his officers had broken an innocent man’s nose, and he had responded to the man’s complaint by saying that he was “lucky that was all he had broken”; the time he had called the LAPD’s peers in Philadelphia “an inspiration to the nation” after they had literally launched an airborne bombing raid on a troublesome inner-city housing complex, killing six adults and five children and destroying 61 homes. As the mainstream media was reacting with shock and disgust to all of this and much more, right-wing radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh trotted out the exact same quotes, but greeted them with approbation rather than condemnation.

All of which begs the question of what the hell Gates was doing at Sierra Online, of all places. While they were like most for-profit corporations in avoiding overly overt political statements, Sierra hardly seemed a bastion of reactionary sentiment or what the right wing liked to call “family values.” Just after founding Sierra in 1980, Ken and Roberta Williams had pulled up stakes in Los Angeles and moved to rural Oakhurst more out of some vague hippie dream of getting back to the land than for any sound business reason. As was known by anyone who’d read Steven Levy’s all-too-revealing book Hackers, or seen a topless Roberta on the cover of a game called Softporn, Sierra back in those days had been a nexus of everything the law-and-order contingent despised: casual sex and hard drinking, a fair amount of toking and even the occasional bit of snorting. (Poor Richard Garriott of Ultima fame, who arrived in this den of inequity from a conservative neighborhood of Houston inhabited almost exclusively by straight-arrow astronauts like his dad, ran screaming from it all after just a few months; decades later, he still sounds slightly traumatized when he talks about his sojourn in California.)

It was true that a near-death experience in the mid-1980s and an IPO in 1988 had done much to change life at Sierra since those wild and woolly early days. Ken Williams now wore suits and kept his hair neatly trimmed. He no longer slammed down shots of tequila with his employees to celebrate the close of business on a Friday, nor made it his personal mission to get his nerdier charges laid; nor did he and Roberta still host bathing-suit-optional hot-tub parties at their house. But when it came to the important questions, Williams’s social politics still seemed diametrically opposed to the likes to Daryl Gates. For example, at a time when even the mainstream media still tended to dismiss concerns about the environment as obsessions of the Loony Left, he’d enthusiastically approved Gano Haines’s idea for a series of educational adventure games to teach children about just those issues. When a 15-year-old who already had the world all figured out wrote in to ask how Sierra could “give in to the doom-and-gloomers and whacko commie liberal environmentalists” who believed that “we can destroy a huge, God-created world like this,” Ken’s brother John Williams — Sierra’s marketing head — offered an unapologetic and cogent response: “As long as we get letters like this, we’ll keep making games like EcoQuest.”

So, what gave? Really, what was Daryl Gates doing here? And how had this figure that some of Ken Williams’s employees could barely stand to look at become connected with Police Quest, a slightly goofy and very erratic series of games, but basically a harmless one prior to this point? To understand how all of these trajectories came to meet that day in Oakhurst, we need to trace each back to its point of origin.

Daryl F. Gates

Perhaps the kindest thing we can say about Daryl Gates is that he was, like the young black men he and his officers killed, beat, and imprisoned by the thousands, a product of his environment. He was, the sufficiently committed apologist might say, merely a product of the institutional culture in which he was immersed throughout his adult life. Seen in this light, his greatest sin was his inability to rise above his circumstances, a failing which hardly sets him apart from the masses. One can only wish he had been able to extend to the aforementioned black men the same benefit of the doubt which other charitable souls might be willing to give to him.

Long before he himself became the head of the LAPD, Gates was the hand-picked protege of William Parker, the man who has gone down in history as the architect of the legacy Gates would eventually inherit. At the time Parker took control of it in 1950, the LAPD was widely regarded as the most corrupt single police force in the country, its officers for sale to absolutely anyone who could pay their price; they went so far as to shake down ordinary motorists for bribes at simple traffic stops. To his credit, Parker put a stop to all that. But to his great demerit, he replaced rank corruption on the individual level with an us-against-them form of esprit de corps — the “them” here being the people of color who were pouring into Los Angeles in ever greater numbers. Much of Parker’s approach was seemingly born of his experience of combat during World War II. He became the first but by no means the last LAPD chief to make comparisons between his police force and an army at war, without ever considering whether the metaphor was really appropriate.

Parker was such a cold fish that Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, who served as an LAPD officer during his tenure as chief, would later claim to have modeled the personality of the emotionless alien Spock on him. And yet, living as he did in the epicenter of the entertainment industry — albeit mostly patrolling the parts of Los Angeles that were never shown by Hollywood — Parker was surprisingly adept at manipulating the media to his advantage. Indeed, he became one of those hidden players who sometimes shape media narratives without anyone ever quite realizing that they’re doing so. He served as a consultant for the television show Dragnet, and through it created a pernicious cliché of the “ideal” cop that can still be seen, more than half a century later, on American television screens every evening: the cop as tough crusader who has to knock a few heads sometimes and bend or break the rules to get around the pansy lawyers, but who does it all for a noble cause, guided by an infallible moral compass that demands that he protect the “good people” of his city from the irredeemably bad ones by whatever means are necessary. Certainly Daryl Gates would later benefit greatly from this image; it’s not hard to believe that even Ken Williams, who fancied himself something of a savvy tough guy in his own right, was a little in awe of it when he tapped Gates to make a computer game.

But this wasn’t the only one of Chief Parker’s innovations that would come to the service of the man he liked to describe as the son he’d never had. Taking advantage of a city government desperate to see a cleaned-up LAPD, Parker drove home policies that made the city’s police force a veritable fiefdom unto itself, its chief effectively impossible to fire. The city council could only do so “for cause” — i.e., some explicit failure on the chief’s part. This sounded fair enough — until one realized that the chief got to write his own evaluation every year. Naturally, Parker and his successors got an “excellent” score every time, and thus the LAPD remained for decades virtually impervious to the wishes of the politicians and public it allegedly served.

The Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts burns, 1965.

As Parker’s tenure wore on, tension spiraled in the black areas of Los Angeles, the inevitable response to an utterly unaccountable LAPD’s ever more brutal approach to policing. It finally erupted in August of 1965 in the form of the Watts Riots, the great prelude to the riots of 1992: 34 deaths, $40 million in property damage in contemporary dollars. For Daryl Gates, who watched it all take place by Parker’s side, the Watts Riots became a formative crucible. “We had no idea how to deal with this,” he would later write. “We were constantly ducking bottles, rocks, knives, and Molotov cocktails. It was random chaos. We did not know how to handle guerrilla warfare.” Rather than asking himself how it had come to this in the first place and how such chaos might be prevented in the future, he asked how the LAPD could be prepared to go toe to toe with future rioters in what amounted to open warfare on city streets.

Chief Parker died the following year, but Gates’s star remained on the ascendant even without his patron. He came up with the idea of a hardcore elite force for dealing with full-on-combat situations, a sort of SEAL team of police. Of course, the new force would need an acronym that sounded every bit as cool as its Navy inspiration. He proposed SWAT, for “Special Weapons Attack Teams.” When his boss balked at such overtly militaristic language, he said that it could stand for “Special Weapons and Tactics” instead. “That’s fine,” said his boss.

Gates and his SWAT team had their national coming-out party on December 6, 1969, when they launched an unprovoked attack upon a hideout of the Black Panthers, a well-armed militia composed of black nationalists which had been formed as a response to earlier police brutality. Logistically and practically, the raid was a bit of a fiasco. The attackers got discombobulated by an inaccurate map of the building and very nearly got themselves hemmed into a cul de sac and massacred. (“Oh, God, we were lucky,” said one of them later.) What was supposed to have been a blitzkrieg-style raid devolved into a long stalemate. The standoff was broken only when Gates managed to requisition a grenade launcher from the Marines at nearby Camp Pendleton and started lobbing explosives into the building; this finally prompted the Panthers to surrender. By some miracle, no one on either side got killed, but the Panthers were acquitted in court of most charges on the basis of self-defense.

Yet the practical ineffectuality of the operation mattered not at all to the political narrative that came to be attached to it. The conservative white Americans whom President Nixon loved to call “the silent majority” — recoiling from the sex, drugs, and rock and roll of the hippie era, genuinely scared by the street violence of the last several years — applauded Gates’s determination to “get tough” with “those people.” For the first time, the names of Daryl Gates and his brainchild of SWAT entered the public discourse beyond Los Angeles.

In May of 1974, the same names made the news in a big way again when a SWAT team was called in to subdue the Symbionese Liberation Army, a radical militia with a virtually incomprehensible political philosophy, who had recently kidnapped and apparently converted to their cause the wealthy heiress Patty Hearst. After much lobbying on Gate’s part, his SWAT team got the green light to mount a full frontal assault on the group’s hideout. Gates and his officers continued to relish military comparisons. “Here in the heart of Los Angeles was a war zone,” he later wrote. “It was like something out of a World War II movie, where you’re taking the city from the enemy, house by house.” More than 9000 rounds of ammunition were fired by the two sides. But by now, the SWAT officers did appear to be getting better at their craft. Eight members of the militia were killed — albeit two of them unarmed women attempting to surrender — and the police officers received nary a scratch. Hearst herself proved not to be inside the hideout, but was arrested shortly after the battle.

The Patti Hearst saga marked the last gasp of a militant left wing in the United States; the hippies of the 1960s were settling down to become the Me Generation of the 1970s. Yet even as the streets were growing less turbulent, increasingly militaristic rhetoric was being applied to what had heretofore been thought of as civil society. In 1971, Nixon had declared a “war on drugs,” thus changing the tone of the discourse around policing and criminal justice markedly. Gates and SWAT were the perfect mascots for the new era. The year after the Symbionese shootout, ABC debuted a hit television series called simply S.W.A.T. Its theme song topped the charts; there were S.W.A.T. lunch boxes, action figures, board games, and jigsaw puzzles. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to be like Daryl Gates and the LAPD — not least their fellow police officers in other cities: by July of 1975, there were 500 other SWAT teams in the United States. Gates embraced his new role of “America’s cop” with enthusiasm.

In light of his celebrity status in a city which worships celebrity, it was now inevitable that Gates would become the head of the LAPD just as soon as the post opened up. He took over in 1978; this gave him an even more powerful nationwide bully pulpit. In 1983, he applied some of his clout to the founding of a program called DARE in partnership with public schools around the country. The name stood for “Drug Abuse Resistance Education”; Gates really did have a knack for snappy acronyms. His heart was perhaps in the right place, but later studies, conducted only after the spending of hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars, would prove the program’s strident rhetoric and almost militaristic indoctrination techniques to be ineffective.

Meanwhile, in his day job as chief of police, Gates fostered an ever more toxic culture that viewed the streets as battlegrounds, that viewed an ass beating as the just reward of any black man who failed to treat a police officer with fawning subservience. In 1984, the Summer Olympics came to Los Angeles, and Gates used the occasion to convince the city council to let him buy armored personnel carriers — veritable tanks for the city streets — in the interest of “crowd control.” When the Olympics were over, he held onto them for the purpose of executing “no-knock” search warrants on suspected drug dens. During the first of these, conducted with great fanfare before an invited press in February of 1985, Gates himself rode along as an APC literally drove through the front door of a house after giving the occupants no warning whatsoever. Inside they found two shocked women and three children, with no substance more illicit than the bowls of ice cream they’d been eating. To top it all off, the driver lost control of the vehicle on a patch of ice whilst everyone was sheepishly leaving the scene, taking out a parked car.

Clearly Gates’s competence still tended not to entirely live up to his rhetoric, a discrepancy the Los Angeles Riots would eventually highlight all too plainly. But in the meantime, Gates was unapologetic about the spirit behind the raid: “It frightened even the hardcore pushers to imagine that at any moment a device was going to put a big hole in their place of business, and in would march SWAT, scattering flash-bangs and scaring the hell out of everyone.” This scene would indeed be played out many times over the remaining years of Gates’s chiefdom. But then along came Rodney King of all people to take the inadvertent role of his bête noire.

King was a rather-slow-witted janitor and sometime petty criminal with a bumbling reputation on the street. He’d recently done a year in prison after attempting to rob a convenience store with a tire iron; over the course of the crime, the owner of the store had somehow wound up disarming him, beating him over the head with his own weapon, and chasing him off the premises. He was still on parole for that conviction on the evening of March 3, 1991, when he was spotted by two LAPD officers speeding down the freeway. King had been drinking, and so, seeing their patrol car’s flashing lights in his rear-view mirror, he decided to make a run for it. He led what turned into a whole caravan of police cars on a merry chase until he found himself hopelessly hemmed in on a side street. The unarmed man then climbed out of his car and lay face down on the ground, as instructed. But then he stood up and tried to make a break for it on foot, despite being completely surrounded. Four of the 31 officers on the scene now proceeded to knock him down and beat him badly enough with their batons and boots to fracture his face and break one of his ankles. Their colleagues simply stood and watched at a distance.

Had not a plumber named George Holliday owned an apartment looking down on that section of street, the incident would doubtless have gone down in the LAPD’s logs as just another example of a black man “resisting arrest” and getting regrettably injured in the process. But Holliday was there, standing on his balcony — and he had a camcorder to record it all. When he sent his videotape to a local television station, its images of the officers taking big two-handed swings against King’s helpless body with their batons ignited a national firestorm. The local prosecutor had little choice but to bring the four officers up on charges.

The tactics of Daryl Gates now came under widespread negative scrutiny for the first time. Although he claimed to support the prosecution of the officers involved, he was nevertheless blamed for fostering the culture that had led to this incident, as well as the many others like it that had gone un-filmed. At long last, reporters started asking the black residents of Los Angeles directly about their experiences with the LAPD. A typical LAPD arrest, said one of them, “basically consisted of three or four cops handcuffing a person, and just literally beating him, often until unconscious… punching, beating, kicking.” A hastily assembled city commission produced pages and pages of descriptions of a police force run amok. “It is apparent,” the final report read, “that too many LAPD patrol officers view citizens with resentment and hostility.” In response, Gates promised to retire “soon.” Yet, as month after month went by and he showed no sign of fulfilling his promise, many began to suspect that he still had hopes of weathering the storm.

At any rate, he was still there on April 29, 1992. That was the day his four cops were acquitted in Simi Valley, a place LAPD officers referred to as “cop heaven”; huge numbers of them lived there. Within two hours after the verdict was announced, the Los Angeles Riots began in apocalyptic fashion, as a mob of black men pulled a white truck driver out of his cab and all but tore him limb from limb in the process of murdering him, all under the watchful eye of a helicopter that was hovering overhead and filming the carnage.

Tellingly, Gates happened to be speaking to an adoring audience of white patrons in the wealthy suburb of Brentwood at the very instant the riots began. As the violence continued, this foremost advocate of militaristic policing seemed bizarrely paralyzed. South Los Angeles burned, and the LAPD did virtually nothing about it. The most charitable explanation had it that Gates, spooked by the press coverage of the previous year, was terrified of how white police officers subduing black rioters would play on television. A less charitable one, hewed to by many black and liberal commentators, had it that Gates had decided that these parts of the city just weren’t worth saving — had decided to just let the rioters have their fun and burn it all down. But the problem, of course, was that in the meantime many innocent people of all colors were being killed and wounded and seeing their property go up in smoke. Finally, the mayor called in the National Guard to quell the rioting while Gates continued to sit on his hands.

Asked afterward how the LAPD — the very birthplace of SWAT — had allowed things to get so out of hand, Gates blamed it on a subordinate: “We had a lieutenant down there who just didn’t seem to know what to do, and he let us down.” Not only was this absurd, but it was hard to label as anything other than moral cowardice. It was especially rich coming from a man who had always preached an esprit de corps based on loyalty and honor. The situation was now truly untenable for him. Incompetence, cowardice, racism, brutality… whichever charge or charges you chose to apply, the man had to go. Gates resigned, for real this time, on June 28, 1992.

Yet he didn’t go away quietly. Gates appears to have modeled his post-public-service media strategy to a large extent on that of Oliver North, a locus of controversy for his role in President Ronald Reagan’s Iron-Contra scandal who had parlayed his dubious celebrity into the role of hero to the American right. Gates too gave a series of angry, unrepentant interviews, touted a recently published autobiography, and even went North one better when he won his own radio show which played in close proximity to that of Rush Limbaugh. And then, when Ken Williams came knocking, he welcomed that attention as well.

But why would Williams choose to cast his lot with such a controversial figure, one whose background and bearing were so different from his own? To begin to understand that, we need to look back to the origins of the adventure-game oddity known as Police Quest.

Ken Williams, it would seem, had always had a fascination with the boys in blue. One day in 1985, when he learned from his hairdresser that her husband was a California Highway Patrol officer on administrative leave for post-traumatic stress, his interest was piqued. He invited the cop in question, one Jim Walls, over to his house to play some racquetball and drink some beer. Before the evening was over, he had starting asking his guest whether he’d be interested in designing a game for Sierra. Walls had barely ever used a computer, and had certainly never played an adventure game on one, so he had only the vaguest idea what his new drinking buddy was talking about. But the only alternative, as he would later put it, was to “sit around and think” about the recent shootout that had nearly gotten him killed, so he agreed to give it a go.

The game which finally emerged from that conversation more than two years later shows the best and the worst of Sierra. On the one hand, it pushed a medium that was usually content to wallow in the same few fictional genres in a genuinely new direction. In a pair of articles he wrote for Computer Gaming World magazine, John Williams positioned Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel at the forefront of a new wave of “adult” software able to appeal to a whole new audience, noting how it evoked Joseph Wambaugh rather than J.R.R. Tolkien, Hill Street Blues rather than Star Wars. Conceptually, it was indeed a welcome antidote to a bad case of tunnel vision afflicting the entire computer-games industry.

In practical terms, however, it was somewhat less inspiring. The continual sin of Ken Williams and Sierra throughout the company’s existence was their failure to provide welcome fresh voices like that of Jim Walls with the support network that might have allowed them to make good games out of their well of experiences. Left to fend for himself, Walls, being the law-and-order kind of guy he was, devised the most pedantic adventure game of all time, one which played like an interactive adaptation of a police-academy procedure manual — so much so, in fact, that a number of police academies around the country would soon claim to be employing it as a training tool. The approach is simplicity itself: in every situation, if you do exactly what the rules of police procedure that are exhaustively described in the game’s documentation tell you to do, you get to live and go on to the next scene. If you don’t, you die. It may have worked as an adjunct to a police-academy course, but it’s less compelling as a piece of pure entertainment.

Although it’s an atypical Sierra adventure game in many respects, this first Police Quest nonetheless opens with what I’ve always considered to be the most indelibly Sierra moment of all. The manual has carefully explained — you did read it, right? — that you must walk all the way around your patrol car to check the tires and lights and so forth every time you’re about to drive somewhere. And sure enough, if you fail to do so before you get into your car for the first time, a tire blows out and you die as soon as you drive away. But if you do examine your vehicle, you find no evidence of a damaged tire, and you never have to deal with any blow-out once you start driving. The mask has fallen away to reveal what we always suspected: that the game actively wants to kill you, and is scheming constantly for a way to do so. There’s not even any pretension left of fidelity to a simulated world — just pure, naked malice. Robb Sherwin once memorably said that “Zork hates its player.” Well, Zork‘s got nothing on Police Quest.

Nevertheless, Police Quest struck a modest chord with Sierra’s fan base. While it didn’t become as big a hit as Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards, John Williams’s other touted 1987 embodiment of a new wave of “adult” games, it sold well enough to mark the starting point of another of the long series that were the foundation of Sierra’s marketing strategy. Jim Walls designed two sequels over the next four years, improving at least somewhat at his craft in the process. (In between them, he also came up with Code-Name: Iceman, a rather confused attempt at a Tom Clancy-style techno-thriller that was a bridge too far even for most of Sierra’s loyal fans.)

But shortly after completing Police Quest 3: The Kindred, Walls left Sierra along with a number of other employees to join Tsunami Media, a new company formed right there in Oakhurst by Edmond Heinbockel, himself a former chief financial officer for Sierra. With Walls gone, but his Police Quest franchise still selling well enough to make another entry financially viable, the door was wide open — as Ken Williams saw it, anyway — for one Daryl F. Gates.

Daryl Gates (right) with Tammy Dargan, the real designer of the game that bears his name.

Williams began his courtship of the most controversial man in the United States by the old-fashioned expedient of writing him a letter. Gates, who claimed never even to have used a computer, much less played a game on one, was initially confused about what exactly Williams wanted from him. Presuming Williams was just one of his admirers, he sent a letter back asking for some free games for some youngsters who lived across the street from him. Williams obliged in calculated fashion, with the three extant Police Quest games. From that initial overture, he progressed to buttering Gates up over the telephone.

As the relationship moved toward the payoff stage, some of his employees tried desperately to dissuade him from getting Sierra into bed with such a figure. “I thought it’s one thing to seek controversy, but another thing to really divide people,” remembers Josh Mandel. Mandel showed his boss a New York Times article about Gates’s checkered history, only to be told that “our players don’t read the New York Times.” He suggested that Sierra court Joseph Wambaugh instead, another former LAPD officer whose novels presented a relatively more nuanced picture of crime and punishment in the City of Angels than did Gates’s incendiary rhetoric; Wambaugh was even a name whom John Williams had explicitly mentioned in the context of the first Police Quest game five years before. But that line of attack was also hopeless; Ken Williams wanted a true mass-media celebrity, not a mere author who hid behind his books. So, Gates made his uncomfortable visit to Oakhurst and the contract was signed. Police Quest would henceforward be known as Daryl F. Gates’ Police Quest. Naturally, the setting of the series would now become Los Angeles; the fictional town of Lytton, the more bucolic setting of the previous three games in the series, was to be abandoned along with almost everything else previously established by Jim Walls.

Inside the company, a stubborn core of dissenters took to calling the game Rodney King’s Quest. Corey Cole, co-designer of the Quest for Glory series, remembers himself and many others being “horrified” at the prospect of even working in the vicinity of Gates: “As far as we were concerned, his name was mud and tainted everything it touched.” As a designer, Corey felt most of all for Jim Walls. He believed Ken Williams was “robbing Walls of his creation”: “It would be like putting Donald Trump’s name on a new Quest for Glory in today’s terms.”

Nevertheless, as the boss’s pet project, Gates’s game went inexorably forward. It was to be given the full multimedia treatment, including voice acting and the extensive use of digitized scenes and actors on the screen in the place of hand-drawn graphics. Indeed, this would become the first Sierra game that could be called a full-blown full-motion-video adventure, placing it at the vanguard of the industry’s hottest new trend.

Of course, there had never been any real expectation that Gates would roll up his sleeves and design a computer game in the way that Jim Walls had; celebrity did have its privileges, after all. Daryl F. Gates’ Police Quest: Open Season thus wound up in the hands of Tammy Dargan, a Sierra producer who, based on an earlier job she’d had with the tabloid television show America’s Most Wanted, now got the chance to try her hand at design. Corey Cole ironically remembers her as one of the most stereotypically liberal of all Sierra’s employees: “She strenuously objected to the use of [the word] ‘native’ in Quest for Glory III, and globally changed it to ‘indigenous.’ We thought that ‘the indigenous flora’ was a rather awkward construction, so we changed some of those back. But she was also a professional and did the jobs assigned to her.”

In this case, doing so would entail writing the script for a game about the mean streets of Los Angeles essentially alone, then sending it to Gates via post for “suggestions.” The latter did become at least somewhat more engaged when the time came for “filming,” using his connections to get Sierra inside the LAPD’s headquarters and even into a popular “cop bar.” Gates himself also made it into the game proper: restored to his rightful status of chief of police, he looks on approvingly and proffers occasional bits of advice as you work through the case. The CD-ROM version tacked on some DARE propaganda and a video interview with Gates, giving him yet one more opportunity to respond to his critics.

Contrary to the expectations raised both by the previous games in the series and the reputation of Gates, the player doesn’t take the role of a uniformed cop at all, but rather that of a plain-clothes detective. Otherwise, though, the game is both predictable in theme and predictably dire. Really, what more could one expect from a first-time designer working in a culture that placed no particular priority on good design, making a game that no one there particularly wanted to be making?

So, the dialog rides its banality to new depths for a series already known for clunky writing, the voice acting is awful — apparently the budget didn’t stretch far enough to allow the sorts of good voice actors that had made such a difference in King’s Quest VI — and the puzzle design is nonsensical. The plot, which revolves around a series of brutal cop killings for maximum sensationalism, wobbles along on rails through its ever more gruesome crime scenes and red-herring suspects until the real killer suddenly appears out of the blue in response to pretty much nothing which you’ve done up to that point. And the worldview the whole thing reflects… oh, my. The previous Police Quest games had hardly been notable for their sociological subtlety — “These kinds of people are actually running around out there, even if we don’t want to think about it,” Jim Walls had said of its antagonists — but this fourth game takes its demonization of all that isn’t white, straight, and suburban to what would be a comical extreme if it wasn’t so hateful. A brutal street gang, the in-game police files helpfully tell us, is made up of “unwed mothers on public assistance,” and the cop killer turns out to be a transvestite; his “deviancy” constitutes the sum total of his motivation for killing, at least as far as we ever learn.

One of the grisly scenes with which Open Season is peppered, reflecting a black-and-white — in more ways than one! — worldview where the irredeemably bad, deviant people are always out to get the good, normal people. Lucky we have the likes of Daryl Gates to sort the one from the other, eh?

Visiting a rap record label, one of a number of places where Sierra’s pasty-white writers get to try out their urban lingo. It goes about as well as you might expect.

Sierra throws in a strip bar for the sake of gritty realism. Why is it that television (and now computer-game) cops always have to visit these places — strictly in order to pursue leads, of course.

But the actual game of Open Season is almost as irrelevant to any discussion of the project’s historical importance today as it was to Ken Williams at the time. This was a marketing exercise, pure and simple. Thus Daryl Gates spent much more time promoting the game than he ever had making it. Williams put on the full-court press in terms of promotion, publishing not one, not two, but three feature interviews with him in Sierra’s news magazine and booking further interviews with whoever would talk to him. The exchanges with scribes from the computing press, who had no training or motivation for asking tough questions, went about as predictably as the game’s plot. Gates dismissed the outrage over the Rodney King tape as “Monday morning quarterbacking,” and consciously or unconsciously evoked Richard Nixon’s silent majority in noting that the “good, ordinary, responsible, quiet citizens” — the same ones who saw the need to get tough on crime and prosecute a war on drugs — would undoubtedly enjoy the game. Meanwhile Sierra’s competitors weren’t quite sure what to make of it all. “Talk about hot properties,” wrote the editors of Origin Systems’s internal newsletter, seemingly uncertain whether to express anger or admiration for Sierra’s sheer chutzpah. “No confirmation yet as to whether the game will ship with its own special solid-steel joystick” — a dark reference to the batons with which Gates’s officers had beat Rodney King.

In the end, though, the game generated decidedly less controversy than Ken Williams had hoped for. The computer-gaming press just wasn’t politically engaged enough to do much more than shrug their shoulders at its implications. And by the time it was released it was November of 1993, and Gates was already becoming old news for the mainstream press as well. The president of the Los Angeles Urban League did provide an obligingly outraged quote, saying that Gates “embodies all that is bad in law enforcement—the problems of the macho, racist, brutal police experience that we’re working hard to put behind us. That anyone would hire him for a project like this proves that some companies will do anything for the almighty dollar.” But that was about as good as it got.

There’s certainly no reason to believe that Gates’s game sold any better than the run-of-the-mill Sierra adventure, or than any of the Police Quest games that had preceded it. If anything, the presence of Gates’s name on the box seems to have put off more fans than it attracted. Rather than a new beginning, Open Season proved the end of the line for Police Quest as an adventure series — albeit not for Sierra’s involvement with Gates himself. The product line was retooled in 1995 into Daryl F. Gates’ Police Quest: SWAT, a “tactical simulator” of police work that played suspiciously like any number of outright war simulators. In this form, it found a more receptive audience and continued for years. Tammy Dargan remained at the reinvented series’s head for much of its run. History hasn’t recorded whether her bleeding-heart liberal sympathies went into abeyance after her time with Gates or whether the series remained just a slightly distasteful job she had to do.

Gates, on the other hand, got dropped after the first SWAT game. His radio show had been cancelled after he had proved himself to be a stodgy bore on the air, without even the modicum of wit that marked the likes of a Rush Limbaugh. Having thus failed in his new career as a media provocateur, and deprived forevermore of his old position of authority, his time as a political lightning rod had just about run out. What then was the use of Sierra continuing to pay him?

Ken and Roberta Williams looking wholesome in 1993, their days in the hot tub behind them.

But then, Daryl Gates was never the most interesting person behind the games that bore his name. The hard-bitten old reactionary was always a predictable, easily known quantity, and therefore one with no real power to fascinate. Much more interesting was and is Ken Williams, this huge, mercurial personality who never designed a game himself but who lurked as an almost palpable presence in the background of every game Sierra ever released as an independent company. In short, Sierra was his baby, destined from the first to become his legacy more so than that of any member of his creative staff.

Said legacy is, like the man himself, a maze of contradictions resistant to easy judgments. Everything you can say about Ken Williams and Sierra, whether positive or negative, seems to come equipped with a “but” that points in the opposite direction. So, we can laud him for having the vision to say something like this, which accurately diagnosed the problem of an industry offering a nearly exclusive diet of games by and for young white men obsessed with Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings:

If you match the top-selling books, records, or films to the top-selling computer-entertainment titles, you’ll immediately notice differences. Where are the romance, horror, and non-fiction titles? Where’s military fiction? Where’s all the insider political stories? Music in computer games is infinitely better than what we had a few years back, but it doesn’t match what people are buying today. Where’s the country-western music? The rap? The reggae? The new age?

And yet Williams approached his self-assigned mission of broadening the market for computer games with a disconcerting mixture of crassness and sheer naivete. The former seemed somehow endemic to the man, no matter how hard he worked to conceal it behind high-flown rhetoric, while the latter signified a man who appeared never to have seriously thought about the nature of mass media before he started trying to make it for himself. “For a publisher to not publish a product which many customers want to buy is censorship,” he said at one point. No, it’s not, actually; it’s called curation, and is the right and perhaps the duty of every content publisher — not that there were lines of customers begging Sierra for a Daryl Gates-helmed Police Quest game anyway. With that game, Williams became, whatever else he was, a shameless wannabe exploiter of a bleeding wound at the heart of his nation — and he wasn’t even very good at it, as shown by the tepid reaction to his “controversial” game. His decision to make it reflects not just a moral failure but an intellectual misunderstanding of his audience so extreme as to border on the bizarre. Has anyone ever bought an adventure game strictly because it’s controversial?

So, if there’s a pattern to the history of Ken Williams and Sierra — and the two really are all but inseparable — it’s one of talking a good game, of being broadly right with the vision thing, but falling down in the details and execution. Another example from the horse’s mouth, describing the broad idea that supposedly led to Open Season:

The reason that I’m working with Chief Gates is that one of my goals has been to create a series of adventure games which accomplish reality through having been written by real experts. I have been calling this series of games the “Reality Role-Playing” series. I want to find the top cop, lawyer, airline pilot, fireman, race-car driver, politician, military hero, schoolteacher, white-water rafter, mountain climber, etc., and have them work with us on a simulation of their world. Chief Gates gives us the cop game. We are working with Emerson Fittipaldi to simulate racing, and expect to announce soon that Vincent Bugliosi, the lawyer who locked up Charles Manson, will be working with us to do a courtroom simulation. My goal is that products in the Reality Role-Playing series will be viewed as serious simulations of real-world events, not as games. If we do our jobs right, this will be the closest most of us will ever get to seeing the world through these people’s eyes.

The idea sounds magnificent, so much so that one can’t help but feel a twinge of regret that it never went any further than Open Season. Games excel at immersion, and their ability to let us walk a mile in someone else’s shoes — to become someone whose world we would otherwise never know — is still sadly underutilized.

I often — perhaps too often — use Sierra’s arch-rivals in adventure games LucasArts as my own baton with which to beat them, pointing out how much more thoughtful and polished the latter’s designs were. This remains true enough. Yet it’s also true that LucasArts had nothing like the ambition for adventure games which Ken Williams expresses here. LucasArts found what worked for them very early on — that thing being cartoon comedies — and rode that same horse relentlessly right up until the market for adventures in general went away. Tellingly, when they were asked to adapt Indiana Jones to an interactive medium, they responded not so much by adjusting their standard approach all that radically as by turning Indy himself into a cartoon character. Something tells me that Ken Williams would have taken a very different tack.

But then we get to the implementation of Williams’s ideas by Sierra in the form of Open Season, and the questions begin all over again. Was Daryl Gates truly, as one of the marketers’ puff pieces claimed, “the most knowledgeable authority on law enforcement alive?” Or was there some other motivation involved? I trust the answer is self-evident. (John Williams even admitted as much in another of the puff pieces: “[Ken] decided the whole controversy over Gates would ultimately help the game sell better.”) And then, why does the “reality role-playing” series have to focus only on those with prestige and power? If Williams truly does just want to share the lives of others with us and give us a shared basis for empathy and discussion, why not make a game about what it’s like to be a Rodney King?

Was it because Ken Williams was himself a racist and a bigot? That’s a major charge to level, and one that’s neither helpful nor warranted here — no, not even though he championed a distinctly racist and bigoted game, released under the banner of a thoroughly unpleasant man who had long made dog whistles to racism and bigotry his calling card. Despite all that, the story of Open Season‘s creation is more one of thoughtlessness than malice aforethought. It literally never occurred to Ken Williams that anyone living in South Los Angeles would ever think of buying a Sierra game; that territory was more foreign to him than that of Europe (where Sierra was in fact making an aggressive play at the time). Thus he felt free to exploit a community’s trauma with this distasteful product and this disingenuous narrative that it was created to engender “discussion.” For nothing actually to be found within Open Season is remotely conducive to civil discussion.

Williams stated just as he was beginning his courtship of Daryl Gates that, in a fast-moving industry, he had to choose whether to “lead, follow, or get out of the way. I don’t believe in following, and I’m not about to get out of the way. Therefore, if I am to lead then I have to know where I’m going.” And here we come to the big-picture thing again, the thing at which Williams tended to excel. His decision to work with Gates does indeed stand as a harbinger of where much of gaming was going. This time, though, it’s a sad harbinger rather than a happy one.

I believe that the last several centuries — and certainly the last several decades — have seen us all slowly learning to be kinder and more respectful to one another. It hasn’t been a linear progression by any means, and we still have one hell of a long way to go, but it’s hard to deny that it’s occurred. (Whatever the disappointments of the last several years, the fact remains that the United States elected a black man as president in 2008, and has finally accepted the right of gay people to marry even more recently. Both of these things were unthinkable in 1993.) In some cases, gaming has reflected this progress. But too often, large segments of gaming culture have chosen to side instead with the reactionaries and the bigots, as Sierra implicitly did here.

So, Ken Williams and Sierra somehow managed to encompass both the best and the worst of what seems destined to go down in history as the defining art form of the 21st century, and they did so long before that century began. Yes, that’s quite an achievement in its own right — but, as Open Season so painfully reminds us, not an unmixed one.

(Sources: the books Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing by Joe Domanick and Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces by Radley Balko; Computer Gaming World of August/September 1987, October 1987, and December 1993; Sierra’s news magazines of Summer 1991, Winter 1992, June 1993, Summer 1993, Holiday 1993, and Spring 1994; Electronic Games of October 1993; Origin Systems’s internal newsletter Point of Origin of February 26 1993. Online sources include an excellent and invaluable Vice article on Open Season and the information about the Rodney King beating and subsequent trial found on Famous American Trials. And my thanks go out yet again to Corey Cole, who took the time to answer some questions about this period of Sierra’s history from his perspective as a developer there.

The four Police Quest adventure games are available for digital purchase at GOG.com.)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/chief-gates-comes-to-oakhurst-a-cop-drama/