#I’ve asked them to move the appointment and possibly turn it into a telephone appointment but they’re unreasonable so I don’t have faith | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

just-a-poor-boy-queen · 3 years

Note

I'm sorry to hear you've had a bad day. I hope this makes you feel a bit better 💜

Part 20 of Jimercury Kid series

‘I’m going to die.’ Freddie whined dramatically from the sofa, arching his back as Jim walked through the door with a tray of tea and biscuits, carefully setting it on the coffee table in front of the singer. ‘I’m not sure how much more of this pain I can take, darling.’

‘I know, love.’ Jim replied softly, placing another pillow under Freddie’s head. ‘But that’s what happens when you decide to do acrobatics on stage when there are wires lying around.’

‘It was entirely Roger’s fault.’ Freddie huffed. ‘He could have warned me that his drumkit was a danger zone.’

Jim chuckled and kissed his husband’s forehead. ‘The doctor said you’ll be right as rain in a few weeks, so long as you get plenty of rest and keep up the physio.’

The Persian grumbled, ‘I hate rest.’ Then he looked up at Jim with an accusatory glare. ‘And I can’t believe you’re abandoning me to galivant off and cut people’s hair! The audacity.’

Freddie hadn’t been all that pleased when Jim announced that he had accepted a weekend job at the barber shop down the road. The Irishman had befriended the owner, Carl Pritchard, in a bar a few months ago and while he had declined the offer of a full-time job (he still had the garden to think about and Khaleel to look after when Freddie was at the studio,) he was more than happy to lend Carl a hand every Saturday, when the shop was at its busiest.

Khaleel hadn’t been too happy about it either; he was used to Jim being around 24/7 and the sudden change of routine caused him a great amount of stress. Jim was almost late on his first day of the job because his son had cried and refused to let go of his leg. But eventually, the boy begrudgingly accepted it and Jim was able to pacify his separation anxiety with the promise of bringing home a treat when he was finished at work.

‘You’re just saying that because you’re jealous.’ Jim teased, dodging as Freddie attempted to swat his backside. ‘You think I’m going to fall head over heels for Carl’s dashing good looks and run off into the sunset with him.’

Freddie pouted like a child and crossed his arms. ‘So, you do think he’s good looking.’

Jim chuckled and dropped a kiss into his husband’s dark head of hair. ‘I’m old enough to be his dad, sweetheart. Besides, he’s really not my type.’

‘I wasn’t your type either and you still went for me.’

‘Well, how could I possibly resist? Have you seenyour arse?’

He roared with laughter as Freddie attempted to swat him again, but this time the singer grabbed his hand and pulled him down to kiss his lips.

‘Do you love me?’ he whispered once they had parted, brown eyes staring into Jim’s own almost fearfully. They had been together for almost ten years now, and yet he still needed that reassurance.

‘To the moon and back.’ Jim replied, leaning down for a much deeper kiss. He could have stayed like that all day, but a quick glance at his watch told him that he was already pushing it for time.

‘I’ll be back about six.’ He placed one final kiss against Freddie’s forehead before heading to the hallway to grab his coat. ‘I’ve left the shop’s number by the phone in case there’s an emergency. Try not to have too much fun without me.’

‘Very funny.’ Freddie sniggered as Jim blew him a kiss and turned the keys in the door. ‘Have a good day, darling. Don’t snip any ears off.’

The last thing he heard was Jim shouting goodbye to Khaleel up the stairs – which was quickly followed with a cheerful, ‘bye Daddy!’ – before the door was pulled shut. Freddie sighed and stretched his sore back, wishing he could at least hobble over to the piano and belt out a few show tunes to take his mind off the pain. He hated being alone; Phoebe was in town with friends and Khaleel had been colouring upstairs for most of the afternoon. He knew that colouring was one of the ways his bijou coped with Jim’s absence, so he didn’t want to disturb him.

Well, since he was bedbound (or in this case, sofa bound) he might as well catch forty winks. After finishing his tea and munching on a biscuit, he plumped up his pillows, propped his feet up on the armrest and did his best to ignore the constant throbbing in his lower back as he slowly drifted off to sleep.

Freddie was awoken by the sound of the phone ringing in the hallway, and he groggily rose from the sofa to go and answer it.

‘It’s Bernie, Bernie Morris.’ Said the voice on the other end of the line. ‘I know you usually have your physio on Sundays, but my 2 o’clock just cancelled and I don’t have any other appointments today. Would you like to take the slot?’

‘Oh darling, that would be wonderful.’ Freddie sighed in relief, rubbing his back as he spoke. ‘It’s really acting up today. I could use your magic hands.’

Bernie chucked jovially. ‘Alright then, see you in twenty.’

Bernard Morris was a tall, broad, cheerful man, recommended to Freddie by Doctor Atkinson after he had his accident. The vocalist had been apprehensive at first, thinking he could simply deal with the pain on his own; but he eventually relented when it became unbearable and had agreed to six weeks’ worth of sessions, so long as he could do it in the comfort of his own home. So far, Bernie’s methods had proved remarkably effective; Freddie’s back still hurt like hell, but he always felt slightly more relieved once he had been stretched and bent over a few times by a handsome looking man.

‘Thank you so much for this, darling.’ Said Freddie, as Bernie laid the exercise mat out on the floor and shifted the coffee table over to give them more space. ‘I was doing well for a couple of days but last night it started hurting like a bastard. I made the mistake of lifting Khaleel up too quickly during playtime.’

‘It’s no bother at all.’ Replied Bernie. ‘How’s the family? I still have yet to meet your little man.’

‘He’s very shy, our Kenny.’ Freddie chuckled fondly. ‘He’s been a bit clingy lately because of this new job Jim has taken up. He’s not used to him being away and he’s finding it hard to understand.’

‘Poor thing.’ Said Bernie sympathetically. ‘My little girl was the same when I started working full-time. But they get used to it eventually. Now,’ he cracked his knuckles, ‘shall we get started?’

‘Abso-fucking-lutely.’ Freddie said with a laugh and carefully laid himself down on the mat.

Khaleel let out a soft yawn as he finally finished colouring in Goliath’s bright yellow eyes and carefully added the picture to the pile of cat drawings he had been working on all afternoon. He didn’t like it when Daddy went to work; he was used to Baba being away, even though he missed him, but Daddy was always there and suddenly not having him around all day made Khaleel confused and scared.

His tummy began to rumble, so he hopped off his bed and carefully climbed down the staircases to tell his Baba that he would like a snack. But when he reached the bottom of the stairs, he heard a strange noise coming from the lounge. The door was open a crack, so Khaleel peeped through curiously.

Baba was lying on the floor and a strange man was sitting on top of him, pulling on his leg. Baba was moaning in pain, his arm flying up to cover his eyes as the strange man continued to push on his leg until his knee reached his chest, before stopping and doing the same with the other one. Baba started to cry a little, and the man said something, though Khaleel couldn’t hear what it was. The boy felt his tiny heart racing. There was a strange man in the house, and he was hurting his Baba. Daddy and Uncle Phoebe weren’t here to protect them. He wanted to run into the lounge and jump on the horrible man, but his feet were frozen to the floor, unable to move.

Then he remembered the phone. Daddy and Baba had taught him how to use it, though he was only supposed to use it in emergencies, and he was never to call 999 unless he really needed to. Daddy had left his work number beside the telephone in the hall, so Khaleel quickly hurried to it and stood up on his tiptoes to grab the handset. He stared hard at the numbers on the little piece of paper and slowly began pressing the buttons. (1/2)

Jim had to admit that it felt good cutting hair again.

Pritchard & Sons was nothing like the Savoy; it was small and intimate, with a far more welcoming atmosphere and friendly regulars who were always happy to make conversation. He instantly felt at home in the place and found himself actually looking forward to working on a Saturday; despite his full-time commitment to the garden, he had been longing for a change of scenery as of late, and this job offer was exactly what he needed.

He was busy brushing away the stray hairs from the shop floor when the telephone at the front desk began to ring. Carl was nowhere to be seen and his two co-workers, Simon and Neil, were busy with clients, so he set his broom against the wall and crossed over to the desk, picking up the handset before it could ring off.

‘Pritchard & Sons, how can I help you?’

‘Daddy?’ Came a small voice from the other end of the line.

Jim was taken back a second, as if he was hearing things. ‘Kenny? Is that you? Kenny, you shouldn’t be calling Daddy at work, he’s very busy.’

‘Daddy, I need help.’ The little boy whimpered in response.

‘Sweetheart, if you need help with something, ask your Baba-’

‘There’s a strange man in the house.’ Khaleel started to sob, his voice a terrified whisper, as if he was worried about being heard. ‘There’s a strange man and he’s hurting Baba.’

Jim felt his blood run cold. ‘W-what do you mean? Where’s Baba, Kenny?’

‘In the lounge. The man is on top of him, and Baba is crying.’

Oh Jesus. Jim began to shake, sweat beading his forehead as a million images flashed before his eyes. He knew he couldn’t let Khaleel hear the fear in his voice, otherwise it would just panic the little boy further. ‘Sweetheart, listen to me. I need you to go upstairs into your bedroom and hide under your bed, okay? Daddy’s coming, everything’s going to be okay.’

Khaleel continued to sob. ‘Daddy, please hurry.’‘

‘Please, Kenny, do as I say. Hang up the phone and go upstairs as quietly as you can. I promise I’ll be home soon.’

There was a loud sniff, before Khaleel mumbled, ‘hurry, Daddy,’ and the line went dead.

‘Tell Carl there’s been an emergency!’ Jim yelled over the counter to Simon, as he raced to the hat stand and grabbed his coat, racing through the door before he even got a response. He cursed as he fumbled with his car keys, almost dropping them into the gutter as his hands trembled violently; as soon as he was in the driver’s seat, he slammed his foot on the accelerator and sped down the road.

-----

As soon as he reached Garden Lodge, Jim immediately went around the back entrance, not wanting to alert the intruder by ringing the bell. As soon as he had turned the key in the back door, he immediately called for Freddie, feeling his heart sink when he didn’t receive a response. He slowly walked down the hallway, glancing into every room in case someone leapt out and attacked him, until he reached the kitchen and quickly armed himself with a large knife that had been left sitting on the counter. He prayed that he wouldn’t have to use it.

‘Freddie!’ he cried out again, almost in tears, the hand holding the knife shaking so hard it was a miracle he didn’t drop it.

The kitchen door suddenly swung open behind him, and he yelled in surprise, whipping round, knife clasped in both hands and pointed straight at his would-be assailant.

There was a high-pitched shriek and a crash, and only then did Jim realise it was Freddie, clad in one of his silk kimonos and surrounded by broken teacups. They both stood there, frozen, as Jim looked his husband up and down; Freddie appeared unhurt, though shell-shocked, the tray he had been carrying now lying at his feet amongst shards of china.

‘Jim!’ Freddie screamed, once he had overcome his initial shock. ‘What the bloody hell are you doing?!’

Jim didn’t respond. He dropped the knife immediately, letting it clatter against the kitchen tiles as he ran to Freddie and scooped him into his arms, hugging him fiercely. His husband let out a surprised squeak as he was suddenly lifted off the floor and he quickly wound his legs around Jim’s hips before the younger man dropped him on his arse. It felt like Jim stood there forever, holding onto Freddie tightly, swaying back and forth like he did when soothing Khaleel to sleep.

‘Darling?’ Freddie finally whispered into Jim’s flushed ear. ‘Darling, what’s going on? What was all that about?’

Jim finally released his husband, brushing away the tears that had fallen down his cheeks as he cupped Freddie’s face and looked desperately into his eyes. ‘Are you alright? Are you hurt?’

Freddie looked baffled. ‘Hurt? Of course not! Why would I be hurt? And what are you even doing here? I thought you didn’t finish work until six.’

The Irishman’s heart finally began to relax as he took a moment to process this information. ‘Khaleel called the shop. He said there was a man in here and he was hurting you. I got here as fast as I could.’

Freddie stared at him with wide eyes, looking like a deer in headlights. ‘Oh my God…Jim, that was Bernie. Bernie Morris, my physiotherapist. He’s in the conservatory, I was just about to make us some more tea.’

Jim looked like he was about to collapse to the floor. He leaned back against the counter, colour finally returning to his face as he realised that Freddie and Khaleel had never been in any danger. All the horrifying scenarios that had been playing in his mind finally ceased to be.

‘Oh God…’ he covered his eyes with his hands, taking deep, uneven breaths, ‘I thought some psycho had broken in, I thought…’ He cut off, not wanting to even consider what could have happened.

Freddie carefully stepped over the mess on the floor, careful not to cut his bare feet as he approached him and put his arms around Jim’s neck, gently kissing his forehead. ‘You really would have killed a man just to protect me?’

Jim removed his hands from his eyes and replied without any hesitation. ‘Absolutely. The bastard wouldn’t have known what hit him.’

Freddie chucked softly, ‘my knight in shining armour.’ Then suddenly his eyes went wide. ‘Kenny! Where’s Kenny?’

‘I told him to go upstairs and hide under his bed.’ Replied Jim. ‘Come on, let’s go and get him. He’s scared out of his wits.’

-----

It had taken a while to coax Khaleel out from underneath his bed. But his parents eventually managed to convince him that the mean man downstairs was actually a very nice man, who was helping Baba get better, and the only reason Baba had been crying in the lounge was because his back hurt so much. They praised him for being such a brave boy and using the phone to call for help when he thought it was needed. Khaleel eventually crawled out and let Freddie carry him downstairs.

He hid in face in Freddie’s shoulder when he saw Bernie, his body trembling in fear. But he gradually looked up when Bernie started chatting to him, realising this strange man wasn’t really that scary up close. By the time Phoebe arrived home from town, Kenny was sitting on Bernie’s lap, giggling as the man held one of his soft toys, pretending to make it talk in a deep gruff voice.

‘What happened here?’ Phoebe asked as he walked into the kitchen to see Jim sweeping up the broken china into a dustpan.

‘Long story.’ Was all the Irishman said in reply. (2/2)

--------------------------------------------------

Aww an extra long update! I loved it😊 It was exactly what I needed after the exhausting day I've had, thank you for making me smile with this part (and all your stories everyday).

I was happy to see Jim take up a part time job of a hairdresser. I've often wondered about that in Freddie!lives scenarios. I think one of the reasons why Jim took up the job of the gardener at GL is to be close to Freddie who had received his diagnosis by that time, if I'm not wrong.

And aww, baby Khaleel being so smart and calling up his father when he saw that his baba was in danger. And ofc, Jim being ready to do absolutely anything to keep his family safe... my heart.

And lol, I can see Phoebe rolling his eyes in the kitchen like, "I take one day off..."

(More drabbles by writer anon)

#ask response #jim hutton #freddie mercury #anon writing #freddie and jim and their baby

3 notes · View notes

andersunmenschlich · 4 years

Text

Episode 11: Dreamer

All right, I'm trying something new here: doing this one in bits and pieces during packing.

I'm absolutely positive it'll slow the packing down, but hopefully not too much, since I can listen while packing, then pause the episode and write out my comments, then play again and go back to packing. At least, that's the idea. We'll see how well it works.

Okay! Tonight we have the statement of one Antonio Blake, a liar.

Well, he lied to get into the Institute, anyway. I didn't know they had rules regarding the sort of statements they'll accept.

"Any supernatural or unexplainable experience or encounter occurring within the realms of apparent reality. No out-of-body experiences, visions, hallucinations or dreams."

That's interesting.

Makes sense, too. How would you verify any of those last four? I imagine it'd make research pretty difficult. Antonio Blake, however, is certain that the previous archivist, Gertrude Robinson, needs to hear this dream—because it was about her. He also says that in his dream he saw the Institute, the building, and the room he's giving the statement in. Hmm. I assume he's never been here before? Neat.

Apparently Antonio is a down-on-his-luck economist who had—oh. More than just the one dream. Okay. He had these dreams while sleeping on a friend's couch on account of he'd broken up with his boyfriend (Graham... probably not Folger...) and needed a new place to stay.

He'd also had a nervous breakdown. Something to do with the stress of the job.

Yeah, I could see that leading to bad dreams.

He says that the dream starts out with him standing on... on the tallest building in Canary Wharf? I guess? Overlooking the Barclays building where his stress-inducing job was.

Behind him I guess there's a tower with a light on it. He can feel it there, and see the light (he says it pulses), but he can't actually turn around and look. So he looks down at the city instead. I guess it's night, because he says the streetlights are on. He also says the lights are orange. This strikes me as absolutely splendid, because the streetlights around here are blindingly bright white LEDs, and I'd like them all to go kaput.

Warmer lights are always so much less painful. Reds and oranges for me, please!

In any case, there's also a web of dark tendrils just all over everything. Antonio compares them to blood vessels. Some of them are as wide as roads. Some of them are as thin as telephone wires. They're thick and dark, and throbbing in time with the beat of the light behind him.

...So would that make the lighthouse the heart?

Antonio Blake, like me, wants to get a better look at the tendrils.

Luckily for both of us, the dream allows it. Sort of. He moves forward, falls off the roof, plummets to the ground, and goes splat.

He doesn't wake up, which reminds me of the dream I had in which I fell out of a ski lift. My dad told me that if you die in a dream you die in real life, but clearly he was having a joke with me, because after I fell through all those pines (breaking more limbs than just mine) and landed on the jagged rocks so imperfectly hidden beneath the cold snow, I didn't wake up either: just lay there, broken, and slowly bled out. I remember thinking the sky was really beautiful, framed by pine needles and broken branches. I could even see the thread of the ski lift, carrying empty chairs and other people on up the mountain.

I couldn't call out, though. My ribs were broken and my shallow breathing bubbled with blood, and the strange mix between fiery pain and icy cold was just too much for proper processing. Antonio Blake talks about "the knowledge of pain without the white heat of nerves"—I wonder if that's what it was. After all, I've never fallen out of a ski lift in real life. How could I possibly imagine it properly?

My dream ended with my eventual death, though. Antonio Blake's carries on.

After a while, you see, he recovers and is able to keep going. I get the impression that he's sort of floating forwards. He says he's not walking, anyway.

Oh, there are people! Each one seems to be frozen in an instant of time, with black tendrils wrapped around them. One's got a thin vein wrapping around their arms and going into their heart. One's got a thick, heavy vein lying across their legs. The veins are alive, but the people don't seem to be—and they all look surprised, terrified, hurting, and confused.

Hmmm.

Yeah, I don't know what to make of that.

Antonio Blake eventually ends up at the scene of his horrible job, where the lights are *also* orange for some reason, and... oh, all the lights match the beating of the heart-light, too? Interesting.

There don't seem to be any people in the building. His office is 23 floors up, but he takes the stairs because the idea of taking the elevator freaks him out. It's okay, though—his legs don't get tired because even if his dream-self has legs, he's not using them. So he floats on up all those stairs to his office, which it seems he hasn't worked in for weeks (probably because of the nervous breakdown). It's just the way he left it.

Oh, and his manager is in the manager's office.

Apparently he got hung by one of the tendrils, or maybe he hanged himself on it, who knows. Anyway, when Antonio sees that, he wakes up. And he's not a sweaty mess! Actually he's very well-rested. It's like it wasn't a bad dream at all.

Now he's looking for jobs online, so I guess he dropped the one at the Barclays building. Probably a good move, given what it did to him....

He's also curious about his manager (John Uzel).

Turns out John Uzel hanged himself after he lost his kids to his ex-wife. Well, now.

So those tendrils are visible signs of death? The chappie with the veins wrapped around their arms and going into their heart died from, what, an injection with a syringe that had a bubble in it or something? And maybe a tree fell on the other one, or they got their legs run over by a car and died?

Looks like it's a Sabbath dream: every Saturday, like clockwork.

He starts on Canary Wharf, smashes down into the city, then floats around and looks at everybody. Apparently the human-statutes fade out after a while, but the tendrils stay nice and dark and healthy.

...He's totally going to die from jumping off a building, isn't he. Antonio Blake, you might not be able to see any tendrils on yourself, but I bet you're doomed.

Okay!

Antonio's starting to get a feel for what's going on.

Stroke victims get tendrils clutching their heads, smokers get them wrapped around their lungs, car crash victims get buried under big, heavy ones—that kind of thing. He could probably get some good data from visiting the hospital, but he avoids it.

...I wonder whether he can float through the tendrils, or if he won't be able to move when there're too many of them.

Oh, wow. Eight years of this?

I guess you really can get used to anything, because apparently Antonio's life goes on just fine. Not that he's an economist anymore! Nope, to avoid stress he's now working selling crystals and tarot cards in a magic shop. We have a couple stores like that in my town, though I've never been in them. Sure, I like tarot cards—they're cool-looking and I like tarot solitaire games better than the ones played with a regular deck, they're more complex—but it seems like things are always overpriced in those places.

He says he also took advantage of his new job to read every book ever written on esoteric dreaming, which seems like a very solid move to me, but apparently he wasn't able to find anything that came even close to his dreams. Unfortunate.

Oho, and then one day his dad turns up in a dream.

"Walking down Oxford Street"? Wait, so some people in these dreams move? Or do you mean he was frozen in the act of walking?

And then he's not dead in real life? Even though in the dream the tendrils went up his leg and into his chest? ...I thought all the people Antonio saw in his dreams were already dead. If they're not... well, I guess that explains Gertrude Robinson, because she obviously wasn't dead when this statement was given, and if he saw her in his dream—

Right. So he tries to warn his dad.

Obviously he doesn't tell him, "Hey, I have these spooky dreams where I see how people are going to die," because there's no way he'd be believed, but he does ask about his health and even book him a doctor's appointment.

It doesn't help. His dad dies of a heart attack right at the very end of 2014. All the preparation in the world couldn't save his life.

...Whee.

You know, I didn't really think about Gertrude Robinson all that much. I guess I just assumed she retired. Now it's looking like she bought the farm, isn't it. But why would Antonio Blake try to save a total stranger? Especially when apparently warnings don't work and the deaths are inevitable. They are inevitable, right?

Come to think of it, where are these dreams even coming from? Is he the first person on earth ever to have them? Surely not! But none of the books had anything even close....

Ah, I don't know.

Anyway, he says his dad's image turned up about ten days before the actual death. A ten-day warning isn't much, but I guess it might give you time to get your affairs in order. Maybe that's what Antonio's trying to give Gertrude: a little time to wrap things up. But, again, why?

Oh, he says he can see her in the next room. Apparently she's reading a book.

I approve. I like books.

...Of course, it's no good if you're so busy with other things that you can't do your own job properly! Even if the distraction is books, I still can't approve of that. It isn't tidy.

So. Antonio Blake says his latest dream was two nights ago. It started out the same, but he had a sense that something was deeply wrong. Things were darker and the tendrils were everywhere, and sometimes there are dark red lights traveling inside them, all going the same direction. He decides to follow them—and oh, I get a question answered! He can't float through the tendrils. He's got to float above them.

Sometimes he thinks the red lights show faces and shadows inside the tendrils, but the light moves so fast he can't be sure.

It's moving towards Vauxhall, which is apparently a rich part of the city because when he notices that there are fewer people here he wonders whether rich people die less, or have the ability to pick their own places to die, or maybe fight off death so long they're just buried in tendrils when it finally comes.

He crosses the Thames, and most of the tendrils are on the bridge, only a few in the water. That makes sense. I'd expect most of the deaths to be in the places where there're the most people.

Oh, and there's a building on the other side of the river. A small, old building, but with pillars. So... like a small bank or something? And all the red lights are going into it. Every door and window's completely crammed with black tendrils, but Antonio gets inside somehow.

Gah, my question's been unanswered!

Stupid inconsistent dream rules. Well, whatever—I wanted to see inside anyway. Especially after Antonio Blake read the bronze plaque outside the door. "The Magnus Institute, London. Founded 1818."

...Wait, hold up. That number rings a bell, and not just because it's pretty. 1818. 1818....

Episode four: grbookworm1818!

Gertrude Robinson. Reading a book. Magnus Institute founded in 1818. Wait, how long has she worked here? Surely not since the beginning! Then again, this *is* a supernatural horror podcast. Maybe she has. At the very least, she obviously identifies with her place of work quite strongly. So you'd think she'd do a better job, wouldn't you!? Geez louise, Gertrude Robinson! Confuse the bejeebers out of me, why don't you?

Anyway. Antonio follows the red lights to a room marked "Archive," which seems... oddly appropriate, somehow. It's like they're archiving all the red lights, or everything being brought by them, whatever that might be.

...Life?

Ugh, but the shelves are coated in this sticky, black tar-blood, which is just gross. Veins shouldn't leak! Why aren't they properly insulated?

...Whoa. Okay.

So all the veins are headed to this one desk at the front of the room—or, more precisely, into Gertrude Robinson, who's sitting at the desk. All the red lights are flashing into her. Only her face is showing: all the rest is covered by pulsing, black, red-light-transmitting tendrils.

Antonio does a terrible job of describing her expression.

He just says, "far more fearful than any I had seen in eight years of wandering this twilight city." That's not helpful! You do realize that the word "fearful" can mean "full of fear" *or* "frightening"? Which one do you mean?

...You know what, I'm just gonna assume he meant both.

In any case, he decides he's got to try to help her. He thinks probably he can't, but he says he couldn't live with himself if he didn't at least try.

This is baffling. Let me see. So the red lights... I got the impression they were being sent by the lighthouse or whatever's always behind Antonio that he can't look at. And they're definitely going into Gertrude Robinson (and not, so far as I can tell, coming back out). Which means... what? That the red lights are death and the lighthouse pumps them into whoever's got veins stuck to them? And Antonio just couldn't see them until now because things weren't dark enough? Or are the red lights a genuinely new thing?

And where are they coming from? Like, is the lighthouse producing them or just pumping them along? I feel like it ought to be an extraction process—the tendrils pull something out of the dead people and the lighthouse-heart pushes it down to Gertrude—but just because I like the idea of that doesn't mean that's the way it is.

Hmmm.

Maybe Gertrude Robinson's trying to live forever and the process she picked's going to end up being too much for her, so she'll overload and die and then Jonathan Sims'll get hired to replace her.

Anyway, according to Jonathan Sims, his boss (Elias Bouchard) was vague about what happened to the last head archivist.

He said she "died in the line of duty," apparently.

Yeah, I'm with Mr. Sims here: that sounds like having a heart attack during work hours or something like that. Unless it was her duty to try and live forever by taking in a whole bunch of red lights, which I somehow very much doubt! Pretty sure her job was archiving, not "being the focal point of some kind of supernatural event."

Honestly, who could you hire if you put that in the job description? Especially if you included the facial expression our statement-giver apparently saw on Gertrude's face in his dream. Bit off-putting.

Mr. Sims thinks that, of his three assistants, Tim's the one least likely to pull a prank like this on him.

So he had Tim look into it, and apparently "Antonio Blake" is a fake name, and while the Magnus Institute does ask statement-givers for their contact details those were all fake, too. Jonathan Sims concludes that the whole thing's probably a practical joke, but says he might have a word with someone named Rosie and have her get him copies of new statements right away instead of after the researchers are done with them.

Oh, so that's why he's always got research on hand: it's not that he's telling his assistants which ones he's going to do, it's that he doesn't get the statements until they've already finished verifying stuff.

...Head archivist, my eye.

He's not really doing anything, is he? His supposed "assistants" do all the research and checking up, and it looks like it's this Rosie who takes the statements in—all he does is transfer statements from writing to audio, which hardly seems necessary for archival!

I suppose he might be in charge of seeing that things get filed properly. But you don't need an archivist for that, you need a filing clerk.

I could do this job.

...I wonder how much he gets paid?

No, wait. Something’s off here. He assigned Tim to research this statement, read the statement, was unsettled by it, then decided to assign Tim to research this statement as the least likely to play this kind of prank on him? That doesn’t make sense! Is time travel actually a thing in this universe?

#The Magnus Archives #episode 11 #commentary #late to the party

6 notes · View notes

unfortunate-stranger-losers · 4 years

Photo

All Those Things They Couldn’t Say - A Runaway Baudelaires AU

{ao3} {tumblr} {masterlist}

Chapter Thirteen - Violet is ready to snap

“And that is the telephone.” Josephine said, carefully gesturing towards an old phone at the end of the kitchen counter. “I never use it, for fear of electrocution.”

“Phones are fine, Ms Anwhistle.” Violet sighed. “I’ve taken them apart to see how they work before, I can do it again to show you.”

“Oh, no, no.” Josephine shook her head. “That’s alright.”

“I’ve read books about telephones, I could explain them to you.” Klaus said.

“No, I’d rather not.”

“Delmo.” Sunny said, which meant, “If you wish, I will bite the telephone to show you that it’s harmless.”

Josephine narrowed her eyes. “Delmo is not a word. It’s not grammatically correct whatsoever. Violet, Klaus, don’t you find grammar to be one of the most important things in life?”

“Sure.” Violet sighed. She sat at the table and said, “I’m assuming you want an explanation for our existence-”

“I’m a bit afraid to hear it, but I suppose I’ll have to, won’t I?”

“Yes.”

Josephine sighed. “Would you children like soup?”

“Hot soup would be nice, it’s very chilly.” Klaus said, sitting beside Violet and bouncing Sunny on his lap.

“Oh, no, it’s cold.” Josephine said. “I’m afraid to turn on the stove, in case it bursts into flames.”

Sunny gave her the most bewildered look she possibly could, opened and closed her mouth several times to try and find words, and finally managed to mutter, “Fuck?”

“Sunny’s a bit confused.” Klaus translated, as Josephine started pulling bowls out to dish out the soup. “I’m not sure that’s possible for most stoves.”

“Well, you never know.” Josephine’s eyes darted around.

Josephine brought them their bowls and spoons and nervously sat across from them, and Violet said, “Well, Klaus, I did the last explanation. You wanna go?”

“Not especially.”

“Sucks to be you.”

“Oh, please don’t fight…” Josephine said.

“We’re siblings, it’s our job.” Violet said. “It’s also how we cope.”

“Yeah, and we need a lot of coping.” Klaus said. “We did a bit of crying on the way over but now we gotta move the fuck on.”

“So, catch you up to speed, Bertrand and Beatrice are alive, have been on the run for about fourteen, fifteen years.” Violet said.

“Had us.” Klaus added. “And about… a few days ago? Yeah, Count Olaf found us.”

“Olaf?” Josephine jumped.

“Yeah, he’s got our parents held hostage.” Klaus nodded.

“Hideo.” Sunny said.

Violet quickly translated, “They gave us a list of safehouses to go to in case we got separated. We went to Monty but that didn’t…”

She paused, getting choked up, suddenly feeling a pang in her chest. Don’t think about it, just move on. Just move on…

“Olaf found him.” Klaus shook. “Our… our parents told us to go to you next.”

“We don’t think we’ll be found here.” Violet said unconvincingly. “We just need someplace to lay low until our parents break out.”

“Oh dear.” Josephine reached for a handkerchief to wipe her brow. “Oh dear, this is absolutely terrifying. You children must be so frightened.”

“We’re sure our parents will get out.” Violet said. “They’re very resourceful.”

“Nire,” Sunny said, which meant, “And so are we.”

“Again, we just need to lay low somewhere.” Violet paused. “Can you help us? Without calling the police.”

“Oh!” Josephine gave her a nervous smile, and reached over to pat her on the hand. “I would never call the police here.”

“Really?” Klaus looked relieved.

“Of course.” Josephine nodded. “I would have to use the phone to do that.”

The Baudelaires fell into a grimly annoyed silence, and Sunny said, “Pleh,” which meant, “Get her help.”

“But I must admit, children, I am a bit overwhelmed.” Josephine said. “This is a horribly horrifying situation. Are you quite sure you’ll be safe here?”

Violet smiled grimly, glancing around the kitchen, and then she said, “I seriously doubt Olaf will think we’re with you.”

“Well, if you think so…” Josephine paused. “I’m afraid I’m not prepared for guests.”

“We have our own food that should last about a week.” Klaus said. “And we have money to buy more.”

“Well…” Josephine paused. “I believe I do have an empty room you all can sleep in. And it may be nice to have someone in the library to study with.”

Klaus brightened. “You have a library?”

“Yes! It’s full of all the books on grammar it can hold.”

Klaus deflated. “Grammar?”

“Yes! My greatest joy in life, I believe I said? What do you think, don’t you agree?”

“Um.” Klaus gave Violet a look. “Yes.”

“I want to die.” Violet said.

She flopped onto the bed, groaning. There was a guest room with two, and they’d managed to fill a basket with blankets for Sunny to sleep in, though it seemed more likely she’d sleep on Klaus’s pillow.

“This is our safehouse?” Violet said, staring at the ceiling, trying to make sense of it all. “That woman is scared of her own shadow!”

“Well,” Klaus said carefully, “At least she’ll be scared of Olaf when he arrives and she’ll get us out of here.”

“If she doesn’t fend for herself.” Violet rolled onto her stomach, shooting her brother a look. “It’s what we would do.”

“Mother and Father appointed her a safehouse for a reason.” Klaus said, flipping open his commonplace book. “Who knows? Maybe she was braver when her husband was alive.”

“Is her husband dead?”

“Ike doesn’t seem to be here.”

“Could be on a trip.”

“I dunno. I haven’t seen anything that suggests more than one person lives here. Sunny, any thoughts?”

Sunny bit onto the edge of the pillow and shook her head, causing the pillow to fly around a bit, some stuffing flying into the air.

“Well, we can make the best of it.” Klaus said hesitantly. “We just have to hold on until our parents escape.”

“...yeah. Until they escape.” Violet said quietly. She laid down, curling up around her own pillow, and said, “What are the next safehouses again?”

Klaus flipped his commonplace book back to the first page. “After the Anwhistles? The VFD Hideout in Paltryville- remember, that’s the one father says doesn’t have much contact with main headquarters, and the volunteers positioned there would be sympathetic.”

“Yeah, they owe Mother and Father for some shit.” Violet waved her hand. “That it?”

“Prufrock Preparatory School.” Klaus read. “And… that’s it.”

“Well, hopefully they catch up to us here.” Violet said.

Sunny spat out the pillow, crawled onto Klaus’s lap, and then faced Violet. “Vee?” she asked, and Violet sighed.

“Klaus, how do we explain VFD to a toddler?”

“How did Mother and Father explain it to us?”

“I don’t know, I was eight.”

Klaus sighed. “Well, Sunny… sometimes people band together into groups. To learn the same things, or protect each other.”

“Yee.”

“And sometimes those groups can turn… bad. They convince you that if you ever leave the group bad things will happen, and then make you do dangerous things for them, or give up your money and life for them.”

“Vee?”

“Yeah, that’s VFD.” Violet said. “Mother and Father were given to the organization when they were young children, and raised there, so they didn’t know anything but serving VFD. They did… bad things, not knowing how bad they were.”

“And they tried to leave,” Klaus said, “And then people found out about the bad things, and… and Lemony was trying to clear their names…”

“So that we could stop running.” Violet sighed. “But they can’t tell anyone about VFD, because it’s very secret, and good at covering its tracks.”

“Scary.” Sunny said.

“Yeah.” Violet nodded. “But we don’t have to fear. Mother and Father will get us, and we’ll… we’ll find some other way to clear their names.”

“And avoid VFD.” Klaus said.

Sunny quietly nodded, and then nuzzled against Klaus’s chest. “Tired.”

“Go to sleep, Sunny.” he smiled and ran a hand through her hair. “We’ll be right here.”

Violet glanced at the ground, and then nodded. “Always.” She curled up on her bed, and said, “Goodnight, Klaus. Let me know if you want me to come over there.”

“Goodnight, Violet.”

He rolled over, too, cradling Sunny in his arms. Violet laid on her bed, but faced them. She waited until she heard their snores before quietly getting up, sliding her socks against the wood floor to prevent noise. She crept past her siblings, knowing they were, like her, light sleepers, so she’d have to be very quiet.

She moved into the hall, before peering through doors. Searching.

It took a while, but she finally found the library. It was a sprawling room, shaped pretty circular, with most of the walls made up of shelves. She stepped through, and her eyes locked on the far wall- a round, tall panel of glass, behind which was a rather impressive view of the lake. Violet wasn’t one for aesthetics- even if she didn’t live on the run, she didn’t see the point in caring about the appearance of something if it was functional- but even she had to admit, it looked gorgeous. She moved to the window and slid to her knees, putting a soft hand against the glass as she stared at the rushing waves, reflecting the waning moon ahead, and the sprinkle of stars surrounding.

It looked black, the lake beneath her, but she could still make out the waves, to and fro, to and fro. She remembered once, she was sitting on the beach on her father’s lap, playing with some shells she found. She asked, if she threw the shell into the water, would the waves push it back? He’d smiled and said, “Yeah. It might take a while, depending on if it sinks or floats, or how the waves are moving, or if something hits it, but it’ll be back. Could take a few seconds, could take a few years. But everything washes up eventually.”

“Everything comes back.” Violet whispered to herself, once again looking at the waves beneath her.

Then she stood and moved to the shelves, running her hand over the spines of the books, eyes narrowed. She knew what she was looking for- she knew where and how people hid things in libraries. Sure enough, halfway across the wall, there was part of the shelf indented behind the rest. She grabbed the edges and yanked, pushing it back into the wall.

Behind it, above her, was a portrait of a man Violet guessed was probably Ike. Well, added to the “dead” theory. Beneath that was a safe, which piqued her interest much more.

She knelt down, feeling around the fob and fuming a little. There’d be a thousand different combinations to try…

Well, good thing she had Klaus. And, well, if he couldn’t get it open, she could just invent something to break the door off.

She stood up, sliding the shelf back into place. Soon as Josephine was gone, she and Klaus could break into that no problem. She kept moving around the room, looking for something else suspicious. She paced from one wall to the next, scanning titles and trying to see if there was anything she could investigate now. But most of the books seemed to be about grammar, so they were probably just boring.

Then she spotted a book, a bit tilted on the shelf, that didn’t have any writing on the spine. She pulled it out, noticing that it was quite tall, and bound with a ribbon. Perhaps a scrapbook? She slipped off the ribbon and flipped it open- yes, scrapbook.

She knelt on the ground, flicking through pages. Pictures of Josephine and Ike, her fishing, skydiving… shit, wrestling lions. She did used to be cool. The photos weren’t very interesting, but she kept on, until she reached somewhere in the middle of the book, and froze.

There were photos of some of Josephine’s friends- people she didn’t recognize, for the most part. But in the center was a picture taken of three people at a picnic on the beach- maybe sixteen or seventeen years old.

She recognized her mother first, with the shape of her eyes and face, so similar to Klaus, and the waves as her hair fell over her shoulder, tied into a ponytail. Sitting cross-legged on the far left was her father, with his glasses and slight curl in his hair, and the way he smiled that looked so much like Sunny. He was sitting beside his future wife, a book on his lap, looking like he’d only just glanced up at Josephine behind the camera.

She didn’t recognize the third person beside them- a boy about their age, his face a little blurred. But he had an arm around Beatrice, and had a frown on his face, like he was very invested in a conversation that the other two thought was humorous.

It was funny. That was the same frown she got, when Klaus was annoying her. She’d seen that same look, when she glared into a mirror while something was going wrong with her latest invention.

Hmm, she must have picked up that look from one of her parents, who got it from him… that had to be Lemony Snicket, then.

Her parents must miss him a lot.

Slowly, Violet put the photos away, taking a deep breath, and tried not to think about the obvious question: without him, would they be on the run forever?

#asoue #asoue netflix #asoue au #a series of unfortunate events #runaway baudelaires au #all those things they couldn't say #mine #my fanfic #asoue fanfiction

8 notes · View notes

sophygurl · 5 years

Note

okay so I saw your fox way post (which i realise is from like 5 months ago so i'm sorry if it's not in your main interests anymore) and I wanted to know what you think would be some good descriptors for the organised comfy chaos that is their house. bc i love the idea of a house of miss-matched over stuffed sofas and everything everywhere that doesn't understand the concept of minimalism but I can't find anything online that looks like what I imagine. Thoughts?

omg so The Raven Cycle in general, and Fox Way in particular, is never out of my main interests so thank you for this!! I actually have a Bunch of other metas that I’ve kinda collected notes for and one of them is actual physical descriptions of 300 Fox Way?

I feel bad because I’ve already promised @sparkly-things metas about Maura and Gray next up ages ago, but hopefully they won’t mind? And I happen to have a lil energy and time today, so here goes with every physical description of the house that I’ve collected during re-reads (may have missed stuff).

This got long, and is perhaps not even what you were looking for, but I hope it helps you and/or others looking for descriptions of the house!

Blue describes the architecture of the house, simply, as weird in TRB. In TDT she expands on that, saying it “was two houses knitted together, and neither structure had been a palace to begin with. Narrow hallways leaned eagerly toward one another.” I’m not sure if she means this literally, as in two small houses on nearby lots got made into one building somehow, or just that the way the house is built just makes it feel that way?

She goes on to talk about a “stray toilet gurgling somewhere” - since we know there is only the one bathroom is she talking about that or does this language mean there is maybe another toilet connected somewhere, like in a basement? Then “the wood floors were as buckled as the sidewalk out front.” Some of the walls were painted in vivid purples and blues, and some had decades old wallpaper (in the same rooms or in different rooms?). “Faded black and white photographs hung beside Klimt prints and old metal scissors. The entire decor was a victim of too much thrift-shopping and too many strong personalities.”

Gansey describes the house as being “cramped with extraneous people and whimsical objects. It hummed with conversation, music, telephones, old appliances.” Malory calls the house “lovely” and seems to appreciate just how many walls there are.

At one point, it’s said that 300 Fox Way is one mile away from Monmouth Manufacturing.

The exterior is a “little bright blue house”. There is a hand painted sign that reads “PSYCHIC” and then “By appointment only”. When turned around, the sign reads “CLOSED COME BACK SOON!” I’m not sure if there is a porch, but there is a porch light referred to when opening the front door, so that’s a good guess. There is a front step, so it’s not a ground level entrance to the front of the house the way it seems to be in the back.

Outside in the backyard - there’s Blue’s large Beech tree, which shades the entire backyard with it’s “beautiful, perfectly symmetrical canopy” that kept out all but the heaviest of rains. There is a high wooden fence covered with honeysuckle that blocked out neighboring lights and the canopy of the tree blocked out the moonlight.

Right off the sliding glass door in the kitchen, there’s a cracked brick patio leading into the yard itself. There are chairs arranged on the patio.

In the kitchen, above the table, is the chandelier described as a “badly designed stained-glass creation” (also described as “the fake Tiffany lamp”) - the one they have difficulty changing the bulbs in. The process of changing the bulbs took at least three hands and was generally left until all the bulbs had burned out - so consider that the kitchen would have different levels of light depending on how far along in this process they might be. The kitchen counters seem always to be cluttered with mugs, teas being made and packaged, essential oils, flowers, pots boiling, etc. There is also a cabinet filled with glasses, either in the kitchen, or close enough to the kitchen for them to rattle when one gets down off of the kitchen table.

Also in the kitchen - the door to the pantry that Artemus takes up residence in.

You can see to the front hall and the base of the stairs from the kitchen, and there’s a main hallway that connects from the kitchen, which is at the back of the house, to the front of the house where the front door is, and so I imagine that the stairs are right there in that front hall area. I also believe there is only the one set of stairs connecting the two floors. The staircase has a railing with a knob on it. In the hallway, there is a table with a clock on it.

The reading room can easily be gotten to from both the kitchen and the front hall, so I imagine it’s off to the other side of the stairs perhaps and maybe there’s a door from the hall and another to the back from the kitchen? There do seem to be multiple doors into the room, and since Adam describes it as a room meant to be a dining room, that makes sense to me. The doors are sometimes closed, so it’s not one of those rooms that is just separated off by archways or whatever.

Anyway, it is described as containing “the candles, the potted plants, the incense burners, the elaborate dining room chandelier, the rustic table that dominated the room, the lace curtains, and finally ... a framed photograph of Steve Martin.” Maura seems proud of that photograph, and makes sure to tell Whelk that it’s signed. It’s also described as having mismatched furniture, with an armchair at the head of the table.There’s a framed photograph of a standing stone on the wall. Also, apparently, there’s a phone in the reading room. There are blinds over the windows.

There’s also a living room, which I’m thinking is further into the house, because you can’t see the front hall/door from there. There is a fuzzy mint green love seat, and a blue striped chair, and a wicker bench in front of the window. There’s also a couch. I’m also guessing this is where the TV is, unless there is a separate TV room as well, somewhere on the downstairs level?

There is only one bathroom, and it’s upstairs. There’s a full bathtub.

The upstairs phone, the one dedicated to the psychic phone line Orla had put in, is in the Phone/Sewing/Cat room, which has green gingham wallpaper and is “full of a multitude of odds and ends”. I’m not sure if the long purple silk Calla does her aerial yoga in is always there, or of Calla sets it up before she does it each time? There are bins of sewing materials, a chair with a pillow on it, and I’m guessing this is the room with the sewing table in it?

Blue had repurposed canvas trees glued to her bedroom walls, decorated with collaged and found-paper leaves. There was a card table shoved against her twin mattress with reading materials on it, and a nightstand with a dim green lamp. Her closet door was covered with glued dried flowers. She had a ceiling fan that was hung with colored feathers and lace, also leaves. And she had copied a poem on her ceiling. There was a bird painted on one wall with a talk bubble that read “WORMS FOR ALL”. A shelf cluttered with buttons and scissors. A rotating fan in the corner. Blue’s room is adjacent to the Phone/Sewing/Cat room.

Maura has her own room, which is next door to the Phone/Sewing/Cat room. Calla describes it as being chaotic and messy and filled with too much shit.

Calla and Jimi share a bedroom. It is my considered opinion that they also share a bed, but this is never mentioned or alluded to. We do know that on Calla’s dresser is kept the three statues of Oya, Oshun, and Yemaya, the Yoruban goddesses.

Persephone’s bedroom was at the end of the hall upstairs, past the Phone/Sewing/Cat room and bathroom, and the door to her room was painted red. She had a desk with a Victorian desk chair, and a “high, elderly twin bed”. There was a shaggy rug.

Presumably Orla has a bedroom somewhere up there and if there are other residents of the house (see the post referred to in this ask for why I wonder about that possibility), then perhaps there are also other bedrooms??

The attic is accessible from the second floor with a door that leads to the stairs that lead up to it. This door is at the very end of the hall, probably past Persephone’s room. A single light bulb lit the attic and it didn’t reach the stairs, so that was a dark stairway. Once up there, there are numerous slanting roof lines which means this is one of those houses with lots of angles and not just one flat or arched roof. There’s also unfinished wood floorboards and areas patched with plywood. There’s a porthole window (along with other windows apparently?), the leads out to the mismatched roof angles outside. Before Neeve moved in, there was nothing up there because Maura was against collecting things.

When Calla and Blue go up to investigate once Neeve’s been living there, they find a mattress covered with throw rugs on the floor; lots of candles, bowls, and glasses cluttered together, bright painter’s tape making patterns between those objects, a half-burned plant stalk on a plate dusted with ashes, and in one of the narrow dormers - two full-length footed mirrors facing one another. Also a statue of a woman with eyes in her belly, a black leather mask with a large pointed beak, a red mask that matched it, a switch made of three sticks tied together with a red ribbon, and a little cloth bag with asafetida tied into it.

After they clear out Neeve’s things and it becomes Gwenllian’s room, the mirrors are still there, and the mattress, but it becomes cluttered with her own mess of things, also including candles and half-burnt plants.

So that’s what I got! LMK if you have more questions. I love this house and the people who live in so very much. Thanks for asking about it!

#300 fox way #the raven cycle #trc #fox way #blue sargent #maura sargent #calla johnson #peresephone poldma #ask me stuff #i swear i'm getting to those other topics soon #charactersoverkisses

56 notes · View notes

issantashikibaindr3orndrv3yet · 5 years

Text

Danganronpa Kirigiri Sou translation-Part 2

<- Part 1 | Masterpost | Part 3 ->

A transcript of part 2 of juicedup14 playthrough/translation of Kirigiri Sou, which you can watch here.

Again thanks to @drmedicsgamesurgery for helping me work on the transcript.

Text in brackets () are my comments and not part of the transcript.

“What an amazing garden……”

I look up at the tree and say.

A. “You can practice tree climbing indoors.”

B. “This tree is…...alive!?”

C. “This tree is…...crying?”

(In this part, he translates the above text differently than from the end of the last part. I’ll consider this text the accurate translation.)

juicedup14 chooses A

“You can practice tree climbing indoors.”

“Let’s look for someone. They should be on the second floor.”

Kirigiri acts naturally and doesn’t even pay attention to my joke, while heading up the stairs.

“Wait. Let me ask you before that, is the person you’re looking for an acquaintance of yours?”

“No.”

I thought she would just say ‘It’s a secret’ again or something, but her answer was quite unexpected.

Even so I can’t understand the situation. There is no doubt about it, Kirigiri came to this mansion not as a coincidence. She had some kind of goal in mind, and came here by her own will.

However she says she doesn’t know the owner of the mansion.

At least, it would be useless to ask if it’s her friend’s house.

If so, what is her goal?

“I’ve heard a lot of rumors about this mansion.”

Kirigiri said suddenly.

“Rumors?”

“When you get lost and enter the mansion-you do not leave. ‘A man eating mansion’ is in the forest is what they say.

“‘A man eating mansion’? Why didn’t you say so before? We’re already lost aren’t we!”

I said it in a way that sounds like I’m blaming her.

“Of course there isn’t such a mansion is there? In terms of logic. Such as a cat with a long torso, or a capybara with a human face, it’s the same as those kinds of urban legends.”

“No, there’s something weird about this mansion! Why isn’t anyone coming out? Oddly there’s no signs of life…...moreover why would somebody be living inside this kind of forest, are you trying to say there’s someone living inside the forest?”

“That’s why we’re going to go see them?”

Kirigiri says, regaining her composure.

I don’t know what to think, I’m thinking about way too much. Nevermind about the mansion, what kind of person is Kirigiri Kyouko? She keeps becoming more and more elusive.

“Hey, tell me already. What are-”

At that time, from out of nowhere a telephone ring was heard.

“Whoa! There’s a phone somewhere.”

I run to where the noise is coming from.

However that was where the noise was coming from-from the garden bed.

I timidly get closer and closer to the large tree, it seems like the noise of the telephone was coming from inside the tree.

“What is this…...what’s the meaning of this?”

I try to find where the origin of the phone was coming from, I went around the tree once.

However there is nowhere to find a telephone.

A. “I see, this is mys-tree-ous.”

B. “What a long cord…...where’s the part where I speak into?”

C. “Sometimes trees grow and absorb things that are connected to it.”

juicedup14 chooses C

“Sometimes trees and absorb things that are connected to it.”

I try to show her my knowledge, and say something that I’ve heard from TV. Sometimes things that are left by trees like bikes get absorbed into the trunk, and sometimes after many years later they move all the way to the top.

“Basically a telephone was left by this tree sometime, and the tree grew and absorbed it inside itself.”

Kirigiri says that, impressed.

“That’s right, my dear Watson.”

“Well then can you pick up the phone, Sherlock?”

Kirigiri points to the bell noise towards the tree.

She’s…...not ‘Sherlock Holmes’ she is more like “Ichi Yumi/Hito Yasumin

(juicedup14 didn’t translate this last part, so drmedicsgamesurgery tried to translated what the text says. They don’t know what the name is suppose to say, but they gave their best guess.)

And just like that the ringing stops.

We give up on the phone, with nothing else to do we go away from the garden bed.

And then-

Clatter…...clatter…...

Somewhere far away, we can hear the clatter of metal being moved around.

Clatter…...clatter……

What is it this time?

Is something moving?

Me and Kirigiri look at each other, and close our mouths, and try to listen.

Clatter…...clatter……

I get close to the door by the stairs, and try to listen.

-It’s quiet. I tried turning the door knob but it’s locked, I can’t open it. It’s not here.

From the entrance I go to the right-handed door.

Clatter…...clatter……

Right here!

There’s something on the other side.

While trying to be as quiet as possible Kirigiri gets close to the door.

And grabs the knob, and forcefully opens the door.

And it looked like a reception room. By the fireplace a sofa was lying there, on the walls there were bookshelves lining them.

There were no other lights inside the room, except for the redness of the fireplace, there was some sort of silhouette on the sofa.

The silhouette looked like a person.

-Someone is sitting on the sofa.

They haven’t noticed that we’re here.

“Um……”

Out of nowhere I tried to talk to him.

However the figure did not turn around, they stayed looking at the fireplace.

Kirigiri goes around the sofa, and looks at the person sitting down.

Letting out a sigh, she lowers her shoulders.

“This, is just an armor.”

Armor!?

I go in front of the sofa to make sure.

Just as Kirigiri says, there is a western-styled full body armor sitting down.

One whole piece of metal armor, sitting in a person-like shape.

“Was the metal sound that we heard just now……”

The movement of the armor?

Could there be-someone in the armor?

A. Being curious, I look inside the helmet.

B. I feel danger. And I try not to get close.

juicedup14 chooses A

There is a deep darkness inside the other side of the slits. It doesn’t look like there could be someone in there.

Feeling a bit more calm, without thinking about it I take off the mask.

And jumping out from the front face mask, all of a sudden green leaves start spreading out. Almost like it’s spitting out leaves as it’s blood, and thinking of that I gasp.

It seems the leaves were squished inside the armor, and jumped out when it opened.

“What the hell is this, it’s so weird……”

“Looks like they’re growing plants inside the armor.”

“An armor styled plant?”

No matter the case you can’t call it a good hobby.

Even if the inside is a plant, why did it sound like the armor was moving?

I curiously look at the armor up and down. However Kirigiri is more interested in the fireplace.

“Looks like something’s being burnt.”

Kirigiri takes the metal rod by the fireplace, and starts searching inside of the chimney. There are red and black ambers, of something inside that was being burnt.

It look like a large fire was spreading from cut pieces of cloth.

It is in very colorful pattern. It looks like fashion clothes, looks like there’s only one part so I can’t tell the size.

There was also, a melted piece of plastic that turned completely black like cards, or burnt pieces of paper……

She was squatting in front of the fire, and takes it with her hand.

“Looks like there’s a lot of clothes being burnt here. Some sort of cards. By looking at the letters on the card, looks like some sort of identification. Looks like either two, or three peoples worth of clothes are being burnt.”

“What, what is this? Why are they burning that?”

“Who knows? I don’t really want to think about it too much.”

While saying that, she picks up a piece a paper from the fire.

It looks like some sort of note with something with something written on the edge.

‘Help me.’

That’s what was written.

“Hey…...What’s happening in this mansion?”

“-Who knows?”

Without giving much thought to her response, she puts the piece of paper in her pocket and leaves.

“Do you really not know anything?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t lie. You wanted to come to this mansion in the first place didn’t you? What was your goal? What are you hiding?”

“I’m not hiding anything?”

Kirigiri says so with a sharp gaze.

It seems we’ve open more distance between us now.

“Indeed I did want to come to this mansion in the first place, that’s the truth. However, I don’t know the details. I simply came to my appointed place by taxi. However there was nothing there, and when I was looking around, that’s when I ran into you. That’s all.”

“You were ‘appointed’......does that mean someone told you to come here?”

“That’s right.”

“Who was that?”

“Who knows?”

“Hey, tell me the truth.”

“I don’t know either. The client didn’t say their name. However, I think I know who it is…...”

“The owner of the mansion?”

“Who knows. However, I’ll tell you this much. This is my first time coming to this mansion, I’m at the same point as you, not knowing what’s happening in this mansion.”

“I see…...sorry for suspecting you.”

“You don’t need to worry about it. More importantly but it seems this situation is much more serious than I have thought. We shouldn’t waste any time.”

She points to the fireplace. What do those burnt clothes and identification cards mean?

“Let’s find the owner of the mansion and ask them. If we do that that’ll make everything clear.”

I determinedly say so.

“If we can even talk to them.”

“What do you mean?”

“They might be a maniac serial killer.”

“......Huh?”

“Only maybe.”

With no expression, Kirigiri shakes her head from side to side.

That might be. In this ominous mansion, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a serial killer hiding here. The owner still hasn’t shown themselves, and thinking about what’s being burnt in the fireplace, I’ve come to a realization.

“Before finding the owner, let’s look around for evidence. The more we can get the better.”

That’s what Kirigiri said, she doesn’t go to the door leading to the entrance hall, she goes to the door on the back leading to somewhere else.

When we open, it looked like some sort of dining room. There is a white cloth laying over a long table. On the middle of the table there is a three trident candle holder. I’ve never seen something like this other than in movies or dramas.

Looking closely the cloth is a bit in shambles, you couldn’t really call it hygienic. And there are red and black spots all over.

It’s almost like…...stains of blood.

In order to look closely I get close to the table.

However as soon as I went by the windows, I feel like I saw something in the corner of my eye, and I stop.

It feels like someone’s watching me from the outside……

However not just something, but lots of things.

I immediately try to open the window, and look outside.

-There’s no one there.

There are iron bars from the outside of the window, I couldn't look more farther than that. However when I try to strain my eyes to the darkness, I see a garden bed, I feel like there’s an oddly shaped plant growing there. The leaves look like they’re forming a swirling sort of pattern, and the vines are stretching.

Looking closely, looks like something is dropped there.

Skulls!?

On the flower bed, there is a large pile of innumerable skulls.

I let out a short yelp, and I get taken aback.

Kirigiri notices my reaction, and looks outside the window.

However at that moment, a strong wind blew, and plant leaves cover up the sight.

“There, was…...a whole bunch of skulls there just now……”

I desperately try to sway her, but when Kirigiri looked she simply tilted her neck.

A. “This mansion is cursed! We need to get out of here as fast as possible!”

B. “This is a murder case. We need to call the police right away!”

C. “Might be my imagination. Let’s keep looking around.”

juicedup14 chooses C

“Maybe it was my imagination. Let’s keep looking around.”

“Look, there is a red pool over there.”

Kirigiri points to the floor. There are red dots, leading to the door in the back.

What is on the other side of that door?

I’m frightened to even think about it.

Even Kirigiri seemed to have a bit of a frown heading to the door, her feet seemed a bit heavy.

However without hesitation she opens the door.

It looks like there’s a kitchen.

You can hear the sound of dripping water from the sink, it was unexpectedly loud.

It was practically dark and I couldn’t see anything, Kirigiri takes out her penlight.

And then…...we saw stains of red and black liquid on the floor, looking like they’ve been dragged on the floor.

It seems like they’re dry, and there is a rotten stench in the area.

Me and Kirigiri, both cover our noises.

“Geez…...it’s not up to code……”

I was barely able to talk. The person might hear me, and from fear, I made my voice quieter.

“Looks like there’s a fridge on the back there.”

“Oh……”

“Let’s open it.”

“Huh?”

Kirigiri walking through the frightening kitchen I hurry and try to stop her.

“Stop it, it’s enough.”

“If there is something happening here, we need to confirm it.”

“Confirm what……?”

“The tragedy you see before you.”

Kirigiri stands in front of the fridge.

How can she be so calm?

It’s not at the level of courage or calmness.

It seems like-she’s used it it. This sort of situation is normal in her daily life, there’s no way anyone else would be able to not have any expression.

And being used to this kind of situation, what kind of life does she lead? It’s frightening to think about…...I don’t think I’ll be able to stay so calm.

Finally Kirigiri puts her gloved hands on the hinge, and opens it.

Don’t open it, don’t open it……

That’s what my heart keeps telling me.

However without being able to plead, she ends up opening it.

Inside of the fridge, the light of the fridge turns Kirigiri’s face blue. That expression just as always didn’t change whatsoever……

“There’s nothing here.”

That’s what she said.

I don’t know why but it sounds like she’s disappointed.

I make sure as well, but the inside of the fridge was indeed empty, there weren’t any vegetables or beverages inside.

It was anti climatic. But that’s fine. My heart is settled now.

“I knew it this mansion isn’t normal. Let’s leave for now, and find a place where we can get cellphone signal.”

I suggest that, and Kirigiri did not argue.

We return to the entrance hall.

As if being chased by the sound of the grandfather clock, we stand in front of the door. I immediately grab the knob.

However the knob just turns, the door does not open.

“What is this?”

I try hitting the door, and turning the knob forcefully, I tried many things, but it just did not open.

I give up on the door, and try opening the window. However on the outside there is iron bars, and it seems like we can’t leave.

By the looks of it, looks like all the windows have iron bars.

“Looks like we’re locked in……”

I say so with a surprise voice.

Kirigiri tries opening the door as well, but she gives up and lets out a sigh, and leaves.

“Looks like they are right calling it a ‘man eating mansion’.”

“We’re gonna get eaten by this mansion? Stop kidding around! How could this happen? Just what’s happening here?”

“Calm down.”

“What do you mean calm down?”

Thinking about it, ever since I met Kirigiri only weird things have been happening.

It’s almost like it’s all her fault…...no doubt about it she is the cause of all this.

No, could it be that she is the one who’s drawing me here?

No it couldn’t be……

“You look like you’re in despair.”

Kirigiri says so with her arms crossed.

I try to search for the truth in her expression but looks like that’s impossible. Her expression is almost like she is frozen stiff.

Is she the enemy?

Or could it be……

“You might be misunderstanding, but it’s not a despairful situation just yet. We haven’t even searched the second floor, and we haven’t seen the owner of the mansion yet.”

“You said they might be a serial killer didn’t you?”

“I would welcome that if that’s the case.”

“You would welcome that?”

“I’ve seen many serial killers up to now. They all behave exactly the same. I already know exactly how they act, I also know how to deal with them as well. They are more easier to handle than my classmates.”

“What…...what are you talking about? Just……who are you?”

“That’s a secret as well is what I want to say, but it looks like I can’t keep saying that can I? I am-”

Kirigiri as if organizing her gloves, grabs the wrist part and moves it side to side while saying.

“-I am a detective.”

“Detective……?”

“That’s right. An ally to the truth.”

She says that, while going up to the stairs to the second floor.

“Are you going by yourself?”

“I’m going to explore the second floor. You can go ahead and stay there.”

While going up the stairs her skirt sways from side to side, and soon her figure fades away.

…...A detective she says?

A detective who could solve impossible cases, those kinds of people. How could that small-bodied girl be fit to be a detective?

A. Can I let her go? It’s what I ask myself.

B. She might be fine by herself. Is what I tell myself.

juicedup14 chooses A

Is it fine to just let her go? Is what I ask myself.

Do I have any reason to oppose her? Does she have any reason to go against me?

I don’t have any reason. Actually I want to get out of this mansion as fast as possible. I need to think about a way to runaway.

Even so…...looking at her going up the stairs by herself, I feel like I have to go as well. It seems like her intense calmness has rubbed off on me.

Either way, I don’t know any way of escaping this mansion. Even so, this isn’t something I should leave to someone else. I have to do it.

I go after Kirigiri, and go up the stairs.

They’re awfully creaky stairs. There were thirteen steps. They’re well built. I feel like I’m going up to my own execution, and I reach the second floor.

As I go around the corner, I see a door on the far side and I see a figure of a person go in there all of a sudden. I couldn’t see them very well, but from the shadow of the door it seems like it’s someone with long flowing hair, it could have been Kirigiri.

I try going after her, and stand in front of the door.

I put my hand on the door and then-

Something grabs my shoulder.

“Uah.”

I jump.

And I turn around, that’s where Kirigiri was standing.

“Huh? Hun?”

“You couldn’t be a good boy and stay down there?”

“You…...weren’t you just over there?”

“No. I came out from a different room.”

“Well then, the person who went in here……”

“Someone from this mansion right.”

Looks like we caught them.

“I didn’t see them very well, but it looked like a girl with long hair.”

“Even if the opponent is a woman you mustn’t let your guard down. It would be best if you stayed behind me.”

She pushes me aside, and stands in front of the door.

And opens it.

#blog shenanigans #kirigiri sou #dangan ronpa #kyouko kirigiri #kyoko kirigiri #kouhei matsudaira #kirigiri sou transcripts #danganronpa #kirigirisou #kirigiriso

4 notes · View notes

huckleberrycomics · 6 years

Text

Car Thief ch 45

I done did it folks!

Have a new chapter of Car Thief.

Fiddleford H. McGucket was having a fine day, thank you very much.

He’d dropped Tate off at daycare and went straight to his therapy appointment. He’d started out by going twice a week, then once a week, and about a month ago he only went once every other week. His medication was working. He was working through his problems.

He talked a bit about rejoining the workforce, and maybe reconnecting with a few colleagues. He had his hands full with being a parent, Delilah worked part time and he would often stay home with Tate or drive him to daycare in the morning to save her some time and energy. He loved spending time with his son.

Delilah had become his friend, again. That was… wonderful. Being her friend was better than being her husband a million times over.

He was happy.

Mostly.

He arrived at the therapist’s office with five minutes to spare, and made small talk with the secretary.

“Mornin’, Ms. Wong,” he said, tucking his hands into his pockets. “I’m here to see Dr. Braverman.”

Ms. Wong smiled at him. “It’s nice to see you, Fiddleford. You’re looking very well.”

“I certainly feel well!” he said cheerily. “Anything new with you?”

“I’ve been officially accepted as a PhD candidate,” she said, “I’m very much looking forward to pursuing therapy further.”

“You’ll be an excellent therapist,” he said. “The mental health of the American public is in good hands.”

“Thank you,” she replied. “Why don’t you have a seat? Dr. Braverman will be with you in a few minutes.”

He sat, and he read his book for five minutes before he was called into the therapy office. He still got the sharp pang of anxiety in his stomach when his name was called, even after all this time. He took a deep breath and walked into the office.

Dr. Braverman sat him down in one of the comfy chairs, and she sat across from him. “Good to see you, Fiddleford.”

“Good to see you,” he said.

She was a sweet woman. Fiddleford felt completely at ease with her. “How have you been?”

“Very well, thank you,” he said. “My mood has been much better, and so have my nightmares. I’ve been much more productive lately, and I’ve been going out more often. Mostly I’ve been spendin’ time with Tate an’ Delilah. It’s been overall real pleasant.”

He got a small twinge in his stomach at what was unsaid. He glanced away from Dr. Braverman.

She tilted her head and adjusted her glasses. “You look like something is troubling you.”

“Nothing special,” he said, twiddling his fingers. “I just… I miss my friend Stanford Pines. An’ my other friends, too. It’s been so long since I’ve heard from ‘em. I just hope they’re okay.”

She nodded, her eyes compassionate. “You’ve told me about your falling out, but nothing about the details. Is that something you’d like to talk about today?”

“Honestly? The details escape me,” he said, fibbing just a little. “It wasn’t pretty, that’s all I can say. One bad mistake ruined somethin’ real nice that we all had together. Hell, the four of us were a family. A real family.”

“It sounds like you miss them a lot,” she said.

“I do,” he said. “But… well, part of me is ready to try an’ call, try an’ figure out where it all went wrong and what we can do to fix it. Part of me ain’t sure. I feel like I’m gonna say the wrong thing an’ put my foot in my mouth.”

“Well,” said Dr. Braverman, straightening her shoulders. “How long have you been thinking of doing this?”

“Too long,” he said. “Months.”

“What’s the worst case scenario?” she said. “Would you be hurt in any way if it went badly?”

“No,” he said. “Not physically.”

She smiled gently. “Would you be putting yourself in danger?”

“No. Stanford ain’t like that.”

“What would the worst case scenario look like?” she asked.

He bounced his knee, looking at the floor between them. “I… well, maybe we’d fight. That would be bad, but I don’t think I’d be worse off than I am, now.”

“Alright,” she said. “Now how about the best case scenario. What would happen if everything went off without a hitch? How would this turn out in an ideal world?”

“We’d make up and I’d move back up to Gravity Falls,” said Fiddleford. “I miss them all so much.”

“Do you think it’s worth the risk?” she said.

“I do,” he admitted with a sigh. “But… I don’t know what I’d say! How do I apologize? How can we possibly go back to where we were?”

“You can’t,” she said simply. “You just have to take stock and move forward. You can start a new version of your relationship, build a new version of your life. Things won’t be the same, but you’ll be older and wiser. It’ll be easier now that you know which mistakes to avoid.”

“That’s… well put,” he said. “Can we talk about what I might say?”

“Of course,” she said, “Whatever you think is going to help you the most.”

“Can I borrow a pen and paper to write this down?”

She smiled and handed him a notepad. “I’m very glad you’re doing this, Fiddleford. I think this is an important step for you.”

“I think you might be right,” he said. He wrote Stanford’s name at the top of the page.

Delilah was at the kitchen table drinking a cup of coffee when he got home from therapy. The kitchen was small, but the windows were wide open and warm light was flooding in. “Hey, Fidds. How was your appointment?”

“Good,” he said. He gave her half a smile. “I’m gonna do somethin’ today.”

“Oh? Pray tell.”

“I’m gonna call Stanford.”

Delilah’s smile fell slightly. “Oh?”

Fiddleford felt guilty. Conflicted feelings mixed in his stomach. “I’m… sorry.”

She shook her head. “Don’t apologize. I know how important he is to you.” She sighed and set her coffee aside. “Fiddleford… I have to apologize myself.”

“What for?” he said.

“I… I feel awfully guilty,” she said. “Not just for leavin’ you, but for… insultin’ you the way I did.”

“When, specifically?” he asked, trying to tease.

Delilah grimaced. She pushed her hair behind her ear. “Specifically regardin’ your relationship with Stanford Pines and your… orientation.”

Fiddleford’s face flushed. “Delilah, that’s in the past.”

“But I never apologized,” she said. “We were already driftin’ apart when you went up to Gravity Falls. I think you knew it, too.”

“I did.”

She rested her cheek in her hand, her elbow on the table. “I was never very kind to you about who you are. I know you can’t help it. I’ve been doin’ some thinkin’ about it and… the way I talked to you about it was wrong. It’s alright to like men and women. There ain’t nothin’ wrong with it, and I know I made you feel bad about it.”

Fiddleford was touched. He sat down at the kitchen table. “Delilah… I don’t know what to say.”

“You don’t have to forgive me,” she said, “But… dangit, Fidds, I’m glad to have you back in my life. I like having you as a friend.” She smiled at him and put her hand over his. “I feel like we work better this way.”

“I think so, too,” he said with a grin.

“I hope you can mend things with Stanford,” she said, patting his hand. “You deserve to have happiness in your life.”

“You do, too,” he said.

“I guess,” she said with an awkward smile. “We can talk about how much we like boys?”

Fiddleford laughed nervously. “Goodness, I don’t know where to start with that one.”

“Yeah, as I was saying it, it felt like a bad idea.”

Fiddleford laughed aloud. He stood up from the table. “Is there any coffee left?”

“Plenty,” she said. “Oh! I forgot to mention, I’ve got passes to go to the zoo.”

“That’s wonderful,” he said, pouring himself a cup of coffee. “Are you takin’ Tate?”

“I was thinkin’ the three of us could go,” she said. “It’ll be a nice surprise for when he gets home from school.”

“That’s a fantastic idea.” He gave himself cream and sugar, and took a sip. He took the list of things he wanted to say to Stanford out of his pocket and stared at it. He couldn’t shake the anxiety that knit itself firmly into his intestines.

“Whatcha got there?” Delilah asked.

“It’s what I’m gonna say to Stanford,” he said.

“I won’t pry,” she said, turning her attention back to her coffee.

Fiddleford’s list was simple. He planned to give that man an earful, apologize for his wrongdoings, ask for an apology back (Stanford would very often be reluctant to provide those), then ask if he could see him soon. He had it worked out as though he were giving an Oscar’s acceptance speech. He hoped that he wouldn’t bumble over his words.

Hell, let’s rip the bandaid off. He walked over to the telephone and dialled the number he knew by heart. “It’ll just take a few minutes, Delilah. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Of course,” she said, and she excused herself from the kitchen.

The phone rang. His heart thudded in his chest. The paper was sweaty in his fingers.

The phone rang.

And rang.

Finally, there was a click.

“Hello,” said the voice on the end. It was Stanford. The sound of his voice knocked the wind out of Fiddleford’s chest. His eyes teared up instantly. He missed that voice so much.

“Stanford,” said Fiddleford breathlessly. “It’s me, Fiddle-”

“You have reached the house of Stanford Pines,” said Ford’s pre-recorded voice on the other end. “Please leave a message after-”

“Hey,” chimed in another familiar voice. This time, it was Stanley. “Other people live here, too!”

“If you can call it living,” said Stanford exasperated. “Stanley, get out! Please leave a message after the beep with your name, phone number, and what you were-”

“Stanley, Rick, and Fiddleford also live here,” said Stanley. Fiddleford could hear the grin in his voice.

There was a burp in the background, and Fiddleford knew one hundred percent that it was Rick. “L-l-leave a message and go fuck yourself!”

“Rick, honestly!” came Fiddleford’s own voice.

“Guys, I have potential business partners who call this number!” said Stanford’s voice. “You can’t just- Oh, hell, how do I re-record-”

There was a beep.

Fiddleford was already laughing. How had he forgotten about that day? He laughed until his sides hurt and tears were rolling down his cheeks. He laughed until the laughter turned to sobs and hiccups.

After a few minutes, he sniffled, wiped his eyes, and redialled to leave a proper message. He snorted as the recorded message greeted him again.

“Stanford,” he said. “Sorry ‘bout that. I imagine you’re… creeped out by the brand-new laugh track I just gave ya. This is… this is Fiddleford.”

He looked at his speech in his hand. His sweaty fingers had smudged the ink. Hell.

“I just wanted to get in touch with you,” he said, crunching the paper in his hand. “I hope you’re alright.”

He gave his number, and he hung up.

Fiddleford called every day for two weeks with no reply. He had to admit that he was terrified.

His stomach folded knots all the time. He lay awake at night worrying. It wasn’t like Stanford to just… vanish. He was always there, always reliable. Hell, he thought that at least Stanley might be around, even though he tended to move around more.

He was terrified. He feared for the worst.

After three weeks, he knew what he had to do.

“Delilah,” he said, walking into the living room.

“Yes?” she didn’t look up. She was sitting on the carpet, playing with Tate.

He took a deep breath. “I have somethin’ important to ask of you. I hope you aren’t angry with me, but I’d understand if you were.”

“You have to go back to Gravity Falls,” she said, glancing up at him. “Don’t you?”

His shoulders relaxed. “Yes. I do.”

She smiled. “Travel safe. I hope Stanford is okay.”

“You… you’re not upset?”

“No,” she said, “I knew this would happen. I know you love your son and you don’t plan on abandoning us. I know you’re worried about your second family.”

Fiddleford let the relief wash over him. “Thank you, Delilah.”

“Are you already packed?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t forget socks. You always forget your socks.”

Fiddleford sheepishly tiptoed back into his bedroom to put socks in his suitcase. He came back with the suitcase in one hand and his car keys in the other. “I’ll get in touch as soon as I can, and you know I’ll write every week.”

Tate sat up and looked at him with big eyes. “Papa?”

“Kiddo,” he said, scooping Tate in his arms. “I’m gonna miss you, Tater-Tot.”

“Where you go?” he asked, his little baby hands resting on his chest.

“I have to go see my friends,” he said. “I miss them a whole lot, and I’m very worried about them. We had a big fight, and I need to make it up to them. Do you understand?”

He nodded. “Mhm.”

“I love you, kiddo. Your mama is gonna take real good care o’ you.”

He nodded, then leaned up and pecked his cheek. “Love you, Papa.”

Fiddleford kissed the top of Tate’s head and lingered, his nose pressed into his soft brown curls. “I love you too, Tater-tot.” He set him back down on the carpet and ruffled his hair. “I’ll see you real soon, okay?”

He waved his pudgy hand goodbye as Fiddleford walked towards the front door.

“Hey, Fidds,” said Delilah.

Fiddleford paused with his hand on the doorknob. “Yes?”

She wagged a finger at him. “You better call when you get there, alright? And you come visit soon. I won’t have our boy forgettin’ his father’s face.”

“Delilah,” he said firmly. “I promise I’ll be back. I swear.”

She let her hand rest on her knee. “Take care, drive safe.”

He smiled, and he waved goodbye as he shut the front door behind him.

#fanfiction #gravity falls #rick and morty #stanchez #fiddauthor #car thief #runaway writes #fanfic #gf #ram #fiddleford #rick sanchez #stanford pines #stanley pines #grunkle stan

27 notes · View notes

e350tb · 6 years

Text

Steven Universe: Woomera - Two

‘And the legal pads were yellow; hours long, pay packets lean. And the telex writers clattered where the gunships once had been.’

Fryman watched, cheap coffee in hand, as the Major-General, clad in his resplendent lime-green uniform, walked briskly through the King’s Hall and into the government offices.

He'd seen a hundred men like him, back when he was in the army - Colonels, Majors and Captains; Aussies, Yanks and ARVN; officers with inflated opinions of themselves seemed a universal constant. There was a saying in those days - ‘the most dangerous thing on Earth is a Second Lieutenant with a map and compass.’ A detached eye might call them Colonel Bogeys, silly figures of fun to be laughed at.

They'd never been at the front. They'd never seen a bad op, a botched patrol, a misdirected airstrike or ‘blue-on-blue incident.’ Stupid officers weren't funny. Stupid officers got their men killed.

Though, he supposed, he was making assumptions. He knew this General only by appearances - he turned up once a fortnight for a short meeting with the Prime Minister, then disappeared back to who-knew-where. Nobody knew his name or what he did - and if he was honest, that was above Fryman’s pay grade.

“Don! Boss wants you!”

Fryman sighed as a colleague called him from down the Senate corridor.

“Where is he?” Fryman called back.

“He said meet him outside the President’s office!”

Fryman offered a curt nod, heading off down the red-carpeted halls of the Senate. At least it was a bit less crowded down here - the throng of activity was now centered around the offices of the House of Representatives, and nobody really had time for the poor old Senators. Though perhaps that was a blessing for them.

Fryman stepped into the Senate President’s suite, finding himself in a room full of clicking typewriters. Men and women, politicians and journalists and staff, all crowded the room from wall to wall, but the security guard found himself focusing on the typing. It was a loud, urgent, mechanical sound - tap taptap tap taptaptap

Tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap.

Thwup thwup thwup thwup thwup thwup thwup thwup.

A helicopter, olive green, soaring over open rice paddies of green and brown, and he's sitting on the side and thinking to himself - Christ almighty it's a long way from home. There's a door gunner next to him with his big Pig machine gun and he's talking to the sergeant - ‘height o’ gook hunting season, mate, you're gonna be spoiled for work down there’ - he feels uncomfortable, because Jesus mate you're talking about people…

They start to descend and Lieutenant Dewey stands up, and it's time to get his shit into gear. Check the mag, click the safety, remember your SLR’s your best friend and it keeps you alive. Step off and he's immediately ankle deep in mud, and he watches as the Hueys dust off and leave him behind, and he tells himself ‘it's just a routine patrol’, and the Lieutenant turns and says ‘Fryman.’

‘Fryman.’

“For fuck’s sake, Fryman, get your fuckin’ ears checked!”

Fryman jumped. His boss was standing in front of him, his face purple - the bald man somewhat resembled a beetroot. Fryman coughed, shaking his head.

“Sorry,” he said, “I was…”

“Don't care,” snapped the boss, “You're being moved. Edd’s appendix burst, so you're on his shift until he gets back from the hospital.”

“Outside Fraser’s office?”

“Yeah,” nodded the boss, “Twelve to ten.”

“But I need to get home to my son!” exclaimed Fryman, “I…”

“Cry me a river, Fryman,” snapped the boss, “You start tomorrow. Now get out of my sight.”

He stormed away, leaving Fryman decidedly crestfallen.

The American Embassy was grand in scale - a palatial building of red brick that would look right at home in older parts of Boston or Philadelphia. It was almost intimidating to behold - a grand footprint of American interests just five minutes from Parliament House.

Lapis was waved in by the marine guard after a brisk ID check, and now stood at the desk. The woman there was on the phone - Lapis rapped her fingers on the wooden surface as she waited for her to wrap up.

“...well, very good! Give my regards to the Governor, Ambassador Green’s rooting for him in the primaries… okay, goodbye!”

She hung up.

“Thank you for waiting,” she said sweetly, “How can I help you?”

“I'm looking for the owner of a diplomatic car,” replied Lapis.

She checked her notes and read out the license plate. The secretary nodded, reaching under her desk and checking her files.

“...yes, that's Roy Bradley’s car,” she said, “It was stolen last night - are you with the police?”

“Press,” replied Lapis.

“I see,” said the secretary, “I suppose you'll want to interview Roy about the theft? I'm afraid that won't be possible; he's sick today. Food poisoning, poor dear.”

“Can I talk to his boss or supervisor or something?” asked Lapis.

“Hmm… that would be the Ambassador,” said the secretary, “I’ll see if I can make an appointment - who do you work for?”

“Canberra Times.”

“Ah, yes, I see,” nodded the secretary, “A good paper - I try to pick it up when I can… okay, you should be able to meet with the Ambassador at nine o'clock on Tuesday. That's the earliest I can arrange, will that do?”

“Yeah,” nodded Lapis, “Sounds good to me.”

“Very good, I’ll just need a telephone number…”

“Well, hello there.”

A chill ran down Lapis’ spine as she turned around. An old, balding man in a grey suit, his teeth bared, swaggered towards her. She wrinkled her nose - whatever cologne he wore, it did not flatter him. In fact, he rather smelt like a combination of gasoline and onions.

“Aren’t you a fine young woman?” he jeered, running a hand over her cheek and pointedly ignoring Lapis’ disgusted shudder, “What’s say we make a date for…”

“Mr. Briggs, the ambassador wants you,” interjected the secretary, “He says it’s urgent.”

“Not now,” snapped Mr. Briggs, “I’m conducting diplomacy. Say, have you heard of this new ABBA thing…”

“He won’t be kept waiting, Mr. Briggs, he made that very clear,” said the secretary.

Mr. Briggs scowled, taking his hand off Lapis. She breathed a sigh of relief.

“Fine, tell him I’m coming in,” he growled, “Fucking bitch…”

He marched petulantly away.

“That’s Mr. Briggs,” said the secretary flatly, “He considers himself a regular Hugh Hefner.”

“Looks more like Dick Nixon,” muttered Lapis.

“That’s not fair,” argued the secretary, “Poor old Richard doesn’t deserve that.”

Lapis grunted, shrugging.

“Anyway, I’ve got you pencilled in,” said the secretary, “And I’ll telephone if anything comes up. You have a lovely weekend, ma’am.”

“Yeah, you too,” nodded Lapis, “See you around.”

She turned, walking briskly to the door. As soon as she was out, she muttered a curse under her breath - she would have far preferred to have spoken with Roy Bradley himself, and she wondered if the Ambassador would have anything useful to tell her - if he’s forthcoming at all, that is.

Oh well. She supposed she couldn’t know until Tuesday. Until then, she’d do as she always did - rummage for the scraps the men at the Canberra Times left her, dream of brighter futures in Melbourne, and spend the weekend alone in her apartment.

At least, that was the plan.

Government House was the residence of the Governor-General - at present, it was Sir John Kerr.

He was on the surface an uninspiring figure; next to his Prime Minister, he looked decidedly short. His wide, stern features and white hair - thick and puffy, almost like the wig of a Georgian aristocrat - made him look more like a senior accountant or a civil servant than the Head of State. This masked a sharp legal mind of a man who had spent thirty years in the legal profession, and the deep ambition that had propelled him so far left him determined that, ceremonial figure or not, he was certainly no bit player.

Pearl didn’t know what she thought of Kerr - Whitlam seemed to hold him in esteem, but whether that was diplomatic tact or genuine respect, she couldn’t quite tell. Generally, people at Parliament House didn’t tend to think of him - he was there to rubber stamp laws and act as a representative of Great Britain’s fading legal authority in Australia, but nobody really thought he was vital or anything.

In any case, she never got quite as far as the Governor-General himself. She pulled up on the front driveway, next to the expansive lawns of the white brick mansion. Unlike Parliament, it was tranquil - the press were left at the gates, far out of sight. Not that there were any press - who would abandon the ongoing crisis in government to come here? The only sign of activity was of a young man polishing Kerr’s black Rolls-Royce - his official car - and a beleaguered looking secretary standing in front of the door.

Pearl rolled down the window of the old, rusting blue Beetle she drove as the secretary approached. She recognised her immediately - the demure, shy body language and the long bangs that almost seemed to cover her eyes made her a hard one to forget.

“Good afternoon, Blue,” she said politely.

‘Blue’ - her real name was Azzura, but everyone called her Blue - looked troubled, but then, so did everyone today. She wiped her forehead as she reached Pearl’s window.

“The Governor-General is on the phone with the Palace,” she said, “If you have anything for him, I can take it for you.”

“Okay,” nodded Pearl, reaching for Mr. Whitlam’s message on the passenger seat, “It’s just this today. Mr. Whitlam just wants the Governor-General to know he has everything under control.”

“He has a strange definition of control,” said Blue softly as she took the sealed envelope.

“Well, it’s politics,” shrugged Pearl, “You know how it is. I won’t take up more of your time.”

Blue nodded.

“It’s… it’s very nice to see you,” she said softly.

“You too, Blue,” nodded Pearl, “Have a nice day!”

She pulled off the handbrake and drove off down the driveways, glancing at her watch. It was twenty to three - she reckoned had time to swing by and pick up Steven. It'd be a nice surprise for him, she thought - and it would be nice to see how he was getting on at that new school…

Weston Creek High School was a grim, brick building in the shadow of Mount Stromlo, at the northwestern end of the Tuggeranong Valley. It was in a new part of town gazetted in the mid-sixties - the suburb Waramanga in the District of Weston Creek. Three stories tall, the high school more resembled a prison block, complete with an enclosed central yard.

Pearl frowned as she walked into the front office - she felt distinctly unwelcome. The woman at the desk scowled as she approached.

“I'm here to pick up Steven…”

“He's in the Principal’s office again,” the lady snapped, pointing down the hall.

Pearl resisted the urge to snipe back at her, walking briskly past the front desk and approaching the Principal’s office. She raised her hand to knock, but stopped when she heard the voice on the other side.

“...they're just trying to help you, boy. You need to be more of a man.”

Pearl scowled, pointedly opening the door without knocking.

The Principal - a short, balding man in his fifties, wearing an ill-fitting tweed jacket and a grey bowtie - turned around, adjusting his large, round glasses. Next to him, a curly haired boy was shrinking into the seat on the other side of the desk, looking nervously up at the intruder. His left eye was puffy and bruised.

“Ms. Pearl,” said the Principal, “We were just finishing. I don’t appreciate your barging in, though.”

“I won’t be long,” replied Pearl, “Is Steven alright?”

“Just another scuffle with some of the other boys,” replied the Principal.

“He has a black eye,” said Pearl bluntly.

“Yes, they’ll… I’ll be talking to them about that, ma’am,” the Principal nodded, “Why don’t you take Mr. Universe home? I have some paperwork I need to catch up on.”

“I-”

“Very good, good day.”

He sat down, pointedly ignoring Pearl as she took Steven out of the office.

They walked silently back to Pearl’s car, and stayed silent as she drove away, north through Weston Creek and onto the main road into the city - the Tuggeranong Parkway.

The road here was one she knew well, and Pearl managed to loosen her white-knuckled grip of the steering wheel by a degree or two as she fell into the rhythmic familiarity. She stole a glance at Steven, but he was looking out the window with an impassive expression.

“So, what happened?” she asked softly.

“They tried to hurt Peedee again,” murmured Steven.

“So you got in between them,” nodded Pearl.

“I… I couldn’t let them hurt him,” replied Steven, “Because… I know Mr. Purvis says Peedee’s sick and stuff, but he doesn’t look sick to me, and-and he shouldn’t get hurt because of this…”

“The teachers aren’t telling them to do this, are they?” Pearl asked, frowning.

“No.”

But they’re certainly not stopping them, Pearl thought.

“Look, Steven, I know you want to help your friend,” sighed Pearl, “But you can’t keep coming home with bruises and black eyes. If you keep getting into fights, the school…”

“But I wasn’t fighting!” exclaimed Steven, “I was just… blocking them!”

“I know, sweetie,” replied Pearl, “But that’s not what the teachers think, and… sometimes, Steven, you just can’t fight these things.”

“But why? Someone’s gotta do something!”

Pearl smiled and ruffled his hair.

“You’re a good boy, Steven,” she said, “But it’s not up to you to change the world.”

Steven pouted and crossed his arms.

“Well then who’s gonna?”

Pearl had no reply to that. She sighed again, turning on the car radio.

“...opposition frontbencher Robert Ellicott has published a legal opinion that the Governor-General has the right and the duty to dismiss the Whitlam government. As it stands, there does not appear to be any chance of resolving the situation today. In local news, a car found abandoned in Hall this morning has been confirmed as belonging to diplomat Roy Bradley - he could not be reached for comment…”

#steven universe #woomera #au #lapis lazuli #pearl #mr fryman #marty #blue pearl #peedee fryman #1975 #cw sexism #cw swearing #cw homophobia #human au

2 notes · View notes

nobravery · 6 years

Text

The Blood in the Rose | 1

« PROLOGUE || CHAPTER 2 »

A/N: Here’s Chapter 1 already. Lol. Also check the numbers/notes!

Warning: Description of corpse.

WordCount: 2,247

Nineteen past six in the morning. Telephone.

“Fontana, I'm listening.”

“Yea, it's me,” her assistant replied on the phone. “Sorry, no rest today, a corpse has been found Place de la Concorde, the État-Major0 just called me. The IJ1 guys are already on the spot. I'm with Beauchamp, we're on our way. Maybe we can pick you up at your place?”

“What, how so, since when you are the one who’s called?”

“Apparently, you didn’t pick up the phone.”

“What a good day in perspective. No, go ahead, I'll join you there in fifteenish minutes. I'll be prompt. See ya.”

Jordan Fontana hung up and noticed two missing calls from the Ètat-Major. Fuck. She jumped out of bed as fast as she could. She'd been working at the Brigade Criminelle2 in Paris for four years and as a group leader for one year. With an IQ of 172, she had moved up through the hierarchy quite quickly, considering she had graduated high school at fourteen and then had gotten her MAs in Law, History and Psychology six years later, and afterwards her PhDs in Criminology and Engineering two years after. Originally from the United States through her mother, she was following her father's steps, ex-Chief Superintendent at la Crim'2, and ex-FBI agent. Just like him, she entered the FBI as a Special Agent at the Behavior Analysis Unit after having followed her training at the FBI Academy. She'd been staying at the BAU for four years, but had to give up her job due to her father's unsolved murder in 2009. Since then, she had definitively settled in Paris and got a job at the 363, and had eventually been promoted to the rank of Commandant three years later. In spite of her young age, her skills had never been reassessed and mostly worked with her second de groupe4 and good friend, captain Nicolas Mercier, a thirty-nine-year-old cop, originally from Lille, North of France. He had started his career in Toulouse, then used to work at the Brigade des Stupéfiants5 also known as the Stups before being appointed at la Crim' five years ago now.

After her colleague's call, Jordan hurried to get ready, bruhsed her long brown hair, got dressed carefully although hastily and left two minutes afterwards.

Within a quarter of an hour later, she got out off her car, a grey Mercedes C320 CDI W204 that she cherished and called Valentine, and headed to the crime scene which was now secure, where Mercier was already waiting for her, blue police flashing lights dancing all around the place. It was still dark, at this time.

“Good mornin', Commandant,” the latter teased. “First time you're late.”

“Very funny,” Fontana retorted, slipping her armband on. “I just hope that the staff doesn’t bear a grudge against me. Nevermind, where do we stand? What do we have?”

“Bouvier just briefed me this instant. I waited for you for the rest. Nothing good, really not, come see this by yourself. This is Laura Delacour, seventeen. She was still living at her parents' home. They had reported her disappearance five days ago. Her photo has been circulating a bit everywhere. She had gone to a birthday party and had to go back home at twoish in the morning, just like her parents had ordered, but she never got back. No news since. It's the guy over there who found her first, along with other passers-by, around six in the morning. They're still in a state of shock. But, you're gonna understand why once you'll have seen what we're dealing with.”

Jordan had a quick look at the main witness, a certain M. Girard who must be about sixty, questioned by the young lieutenant Éric Belmont, one of their colleagues and cinquième de groupe5, while others OPJ6 were questioning the other persons who found the corpse plus the ones who were on the spot.

“The guy genuinely passed the enclosure to drop off the body there,” Mercier went on. “He had a hell of a nerve, this chap.”

“A seventeen-year-old kid who goes back home, alone, in the middle of the night? It doesn't really surprise me that something bad happened to her.”

“I really appreciate your optimism, Fontana. Perhaps she was accompanied by someone but then their paths diverged?”

“That's our job to determine this.”

Jordan observed the place, gone through with a fine-tooth comb by the specialists of the Identité Judiciaire by photographing the place, searching of possible clues; then the two agents joined Doctor Bouvier, the medical examiner dispatched to the scene, still examining the body—at least, what it remained—, along with Prévost, one of the Identité Judiciaire specialist. The corpse was lying at the bottom of the Obelisk of Louxor, sitting on the ground. Bare and lacerated from all sides, the victim, whose long brown hair was tousled and covered with blood droplets, had her abdomen completely open. Her bowels were removed, as well as her liver and her stomach, put down by her side. Bowels and stomach on the right, liver on the left. I don't like this at all, Jordan was thinking.

“So, what do you say about that?” she asked Bouvier.

“Look, the carotid has clearly been severed, what definitely caused the death. Also, at first sight, the girl has been tortured. And not only a bit, it's obvious. The lacerations seem to be ante-morten and the killer surely used only one weapon, whether it's for the carotid, the lacerations, or the evisceration. As for the face, some mutilations as well, at the cheeks and the forehead; but this is truly nothing compared with all the ones all along the body. For the rest, you need to wait for the autopsy.”

“The killer has been really violent with her. It may be personal,” suggested Mercier. “When may the death date back at?”

Bouvier pulled a face at the question, somewhat embarrassed.

“At first sight and considering rigor mortis, I'd say she died two or three days ago. To be confirmed.”

“And she was left there only this night?” Mercier questioned.

“Visibly.”

“And also, Commandant, Captain, we found this, just next to her.” Prévost added.

The latter reached out a packet to Commandant Fontana in which one of the only exhibits who've been found: a rose, with bright red petals.

Mercier frowned.

“What the heck is this?” he wondered about what he was looking at, intrigued.

“Bah, a rose,” his leader answered nonchalantly, and she seemed as intrigued as him.

“Thank you, Jordan, I think I've noticed it. Where does this come from?”

“It was placed next to the stomach,” the crime scene technician objected. “The killer certainly must have let it there intentionally. However, I don't know what it can mean. I mean, I suppose that it's your job to find the answer to the question.”

Fontana gave the packet back to him.

“His hallmarks,” she interpreted, speaking more for herself than to the others.

It's a bad sign.

“Well, thanks Doctor. Thanks, Prévost.”

“Commandant, Captain.” Bouvier and Prévost said goodbye to them in accord.

Together, Commandant Fontana and Captain Mercier moved away from the others, isolating themselves, after having said goodbye to their turn. Mercier had a quick look at his colleague, who seemed to be lost in thought.

“I can see that your brain is working hard. It's lively, right? C'mon, tell me what you're thinking of.”

“I think we're dealing with a great sadist,” Jordan declared. “And it's just a euphemism.”

“I know right? In every case, I've never seen that kind of stuff before. A real carnage! And the rose, what does that even mean? Have you already seen cases as squalid as this?”

“Hm, as regards the rose, I haven't a clue, Nico. You know, I haven't worked very long at the BAU but in four years, I've seen a bunch of creepy things, even worse than this, believe me. I complained of not having some breakfast this morning, in the end, I'm not hungry anymore.”

The two police officers were joined by Belmont, who just gathered M. Girard’s statement.

“Well, M. Girard, don't hesitate to come back at us if you ever remember something either important or not regarding our investigation,” Fontana said, saying bye to the witness, smiling. “Éric, bring him out of the place, please.”

“Fine, Commandant. By the way, the Boss asked to see you. He just arrived, he's with Le Guen.”

“Oh no, that's all I needed. I'm coming.”

Jordan spotted the boss of la Crim', Chief Superintendent Lafarge, and she headed for him, while Belmont rejoined the other OPJ.

“Monsieur le Commissaire Divisionnaire7,” she said as she approached him.

“Commandant,” Lafarge replied to her, shaking hands with her after leaving the procédurier8 Le Guen. “Nasty case, right? Poor kid…”

The two officers gazed at the place with their eyes. Everybody, policemen and gendarmes alike, plus scientists, had been mobilized this early morning as part of the murder of Laura Delacour. An underage, all everyone needed!

“Apparently you wanted to see me?”

“Indeed. Nothing serious, I reassure you.”

“What is it about then?”

Lafarge took his breath.

“Do you feel capable of working on this case? I can entrust it to Schneider's group, if it's all right with you. I'm aware that you're also taken by the murder of Caroline Corvalan, therefore if you ever…”

“No, thank you. It's gonna be alright for me. I guess the other groups have their work cut out too, anyway. Don't worry, Mister,” Fontana assured him. “I'm handling.”

The police superintendent nodded.

“Fine, it's you who's saying it. I count on you. We're meeting tonight at the 36 for the briefing of the day. I need to go now, the Proc'9 doesn't like when we make him wait.”

“Of course. Have a good day, Commissaire.”

“Likewise, Commandant.”

Jordan weakly smiled at him before her boss goes away. She then rejoined Mercier, who was a few meters away, in full discussion with two other colleagues.

“Ah, Jo, what did the boss want?” he asked while the two others were going back to work.

“Oh nothing, just asked if it would be okay.”

“What, the case? What a question; you're the best, and he knows it. Of course it's going to be okay.”

“Hum hum, yes.”

Fontana pouted.

“Well, that's enough joking,” Mercier continued. “The killer has had the devil's own cheek to abandon the body there, don't you think?”

“Obviously, everyone needs to see his masterpiece. Certainly what he wants.”

“What a crazy guy.”

Fontana lingered at the place, observing and analyzing everything that was going on around her, frowning; she was having her back to her assistant.

“Yeah, have you seen the fierceness, the thuggery?”

“Yah, I saw the same thing as you. This is definitely a crime of the utmost savagery. Never seen this in my life.”

“It makes me think of Guy Georges.”

“What, the Beast of the Bastille? It was a long time ago, no? When was it? And what's the connection? He didn't eviscerate his victims, as far as I know.”

“First victim of Guy Georges, the night of the twenty-fourth of January 1991, Pascale Escarfail, and the last one, Estelle Magd, the sixteenth of November 1997, so indeed, it's been a while. But I was more talking about the savagery. I mean, look at kid right now, no kidding.”

The police captain glanced at the young girl's body which was just covered.

“As for me, it rather makes me think of Jack the Ripper, but well, everyone has their own point of view.”

“Hum, in every case, it smells trouble,” Fontana muttered.

“What?”

“What? Oh nothing, I was just… thinking, yah.”

Mercier didn't insist more and eventually contented himself with this answer, and his gaze fell on the OPJ who were still questioning the people around. As regard Jordan, she spotted the deputy public prosecutor, Bertrand Mousset, and headed for him to talk to him.

A bit later, the IJ technicians started packing up their equipment. Pelletier, one of them, came to meet the two investigators. Usually always beaming and in a good mood, he seemed somewhat preoccupied and disappointed this time; reaction which displeased the group leader and her assistant.

“Other clues?” Mercier hastened to ask him.

“Actually, not much except the rose, Captain. Just some skin micro-fragments taken from certain stakes of the enclosure, but it might have no connection with our case; that said, we're gonna send them to the lab' though. Otherwise, no hair… It looks like our unsub made sure to not leave anything behind him.”

Fontana remained perplexed.

“Super, it begins well.”

“Yeah, not surprising that the case was referred to la Crim',” commented her assistant. “By the way, what does Mousset say about that?”

“Oh, you know him,” Fontana grumbled. “He says goddamn nothing.”

All of them sighed.

“Considering that the kid seems not to have been killed here, it was almost sure that we wouldn't find anything there, the IJ technician spoke, kinda annoyed. Well, I'm gonna deal with the report and I'll pass all that to you. I'm warning you straight away, it's no picnic. We'll be in touch.”

“Thanks, but don't leap to conclusions, Pelletier, right!”

While the latter was moving away, Jordan turned towards her colleague.

“Fine Nico, we need to inform Laura's parents that we found their daughter. They must be still at their home at this time. Let's go.”

“OK, it's not going to be joy. Can you imagine that? I wouldn't like to be told that someone has killed my child…”

As the two agents got in Fontana's car, she dialed a number on her phone, then waited for an answer.

“Hello, Bailly? Commandant Fontana on the phone. Yes, I'm fine, thanks, what about you? Okay, good. Tell me, could you find and send me Laura Delacour's parents' address? Super, you rock, thank you, see ya later!”

0État-Major : basically the staff.

1IJ = Identité Judiciaire : can be translated has Judiciary Identity in English. It's to do with the scientific police. Their work, on criminal cases, consists in gathering, keeping and showing elements of proof, and coordinating their skills with the investigating officer's in charge of the case and the expert witnesses's.

2Brigade Criminelle = the BC = la Crim' : the oldest and probably most famous brigade, especially in charge of homicides, kidnapping, bomb attacks and investigations involving personalities (such as Lady Di's car accident in August 1997).

3the 36 = literally the 36, Quai des Orfèvres : the Direction Régionale de Police Judiciaire de Paris (DRPJ Paris) is very often called by its address (it's actually the former one, now the brigades have moved to 36, rue du Bastion in September 2017, except the Brigade de Recherche et d'Intervention, aka BRI (Research and Intervention Brigade) aka l'Antigang (Anti-Gang Brigade)).

4second de groupe : there's no proper translation but as a definition we can say that a second de groupe is very often the assistant (just like Mercier in the story) of the investigating officer in charge of the case (who is most of the time a commandant). As well for troisième de groupe (third of the group), quatrième de groupe (fourth of the group), cinquième de groupe (fifth of the group)… as long as la Crim' is composed by three groups of common right, groups themselves composed by seven or eight police officiers. Just remember that the cinquième de groupe and sixième de groupe (sixth of the group) not to say septième de groupe (seventh of the group) are the ripeurs (no English translation existing), that is to say that they are at first in charge of neighborhood investigations and stuff.

5Brigade des Stupéfiants = les Stups : brigade specialized in drug trafficking.

6OPJ = Officier de Police Judiciaire : basically a Criminal Police Officer.

7Commissaire Divisionnaire : French for Chief Superintendent.

8procédurier : no English translation existing as far as I know. This is basically an OPJ in charge of transcribing in writing all the steps of the investigation. There's like one procédurier per group.

9le Proc' = le Procureur (de la République) : basically the State Prosecutor.

taglist: @spencerthepipecleaner @i-keep-craving-craving

23 notes · View notes

joybrayden · 4 years

Text

A screen capture from Fae's Engage Post

Make a rundown of all that you offer. Every last bit of it.

Go down that rundown and pick the ones that you think make your item unbelievably exceptional. At that point, pick one clear torment point that it settles, and precisely how it illuminates it. Take that message and run.At Digital Marketer, we realize that our clients are stunning. In any case, once in a while somebody in our DM Engage people group accomplishes something so extraordinary that we want to boast audaciously. Once in a while, it's somebody with another unfathomable promotion set, and different occasions it's somebody who endeavored to investigate a battling methodology. This time, it is Fae Gershenson, organizer of Happily Ever Laughter, venturing up in a worldwide fiasco to spare her business.

Fae posted in DM Engage about her prosperity, and we chose to exhibit her work (and give her the credit she merited). We asked Fae a couple of inquiries about her business and her ongoing turn, and set up a contextual analysis of what she did and how it functioned. Continue looking to peruse the Meet a Marketer meet with Fae, and download the contextual analysis underneath to see precisely what she did!

Download Case Study HERE

Meet a Marketer: Fae Gershenson

What is your organization? Depict it a bit:

At the point when I was a young lady, my family cautioned me, "You can't grow up to be a Faerie Princesses. There aren't any employments for those."

In this way, I made one. *laugh*

In 2006 I opened Happily Ever Laughter, a youngsters' diversion organization.

I've sent my Professional Faeries to engage over a large portion of a million youngsters at 17,000 occasions, and pulled in over $1,000,000 in deals every year.

Fae's spruced up as a faerie

What level of Lab would you say you are in and to what extent have you been an endorser? Everything began in 2017 when my business failed surprisingly fast. After over 10 years of 20% development a seemingly endless amount of time after year, I had no clue what was happening. At that point, I made sense of what occurred. What's more, I was deadened on the best way to fix it. I can contort a mean pink poodle expand, however taking care of this issue was a totally different region for me. Traffic to our site had plunged due to locales like Thumbtack. They were wrecking diversion organizations right and left by tossing us into an accessible database, and afterward charging us when individuals discovered us there. At that point, they utilized that cash to outbid the entirety of our own site promotions, which pushed us so far down into the dull profundities of Google that nobody could ever discover us. I understood I expected to get the chance to individuals some time before they were effectively searching for amusement. I expected to discover them further up the channel. I expected to get to them on Facebook.

That is the point at which I found the web recording Perpetual Traffic.

Molly's voice filled my vehicle for many hours. Indeed, even my youngsters fired getting on showcasing strategies. There's not at all like hearing a 5-year-old state, "Mother, the advantage of me selecting my own bite is that you don't need to do it for me." I was snared. I began discussing what I was realizing with one of my representatives, Meadow, and her eyes lit up. She stated, "Give me where you're learnin this and we should assume control over the world."

We've both been in DM Elite from that point forward.

What has been your greatest battle with your business in the course of the most recent couple of weeks/months? On March first we got our first abrogation due to COVID-19 feelings of trepidation.

By March twelfth, we had lost everything.

On March thirteenth I confronted the truth that we were not going to have the option to act face to face with kids for an incredibly, long time. I wildly connected with Meadow, and Digital Marketing Companies in Nashville before I even got an opportunity to hit send on my Slack message, her indistinguishable acknowledgment sprung up on my screen.

"We need to flip this business on it's head, and we need to do it NOW."

She appeared at my home 10 minutes after the fact to begin conceptualizing.

What changes did you need to make in your business to adjust with this worldwide emergency?

I needed to release a portion of my preferred staff with no notification.

I called each and every bill we had and either dropped it or asked for benevolence. I am fortunate, I moved rapidly. A great many people I called hadn't understood what was going to transpire. Next, I needed to confront the truth that we could no longer act face to face with kids, so the time had come to make sense of how to do it on the web, however I was stressed in light of the fact that such a significant number of different performers were at that point running to YouTube with free substance.

What techniques would you say you were utilizing (that functioned admirably) before things begun to change on the planet?

I depended on a ton of up close and personal advertising (entertainers meeting families at occasions), and via telephone sales reps (calling to ask about our contributions.) Since my staff is prepared explicitly on the most proficient method to be excessively amusing to converse with, that has consistently functioned admirably.

Read Also:- SEO or PPC, what is more, effective for your website?

What methodologies would you say you are utilizing now?

The telephone quit ringing. The in-person appointments were no more.

Along these lines, we went to conversing with individuals through email impacts and online networking efforts. All of which we gained from DigitalMarketer.

Knoll and I went to one another and stated, "All that we've at any point gained from them, we have to utilize at this moment. This is our definitive test."

Do you see yourself proceeding to utilize these systems once things return to ordinary? We've constantly fiddled with attempting to do enormous showcasing efforts, yet we are only two individuals.

The remainder of our organization manages the appointments, or is an entertainer, so we are commonly too caught up with overseeing them to concentrate on promoting.

I couldn't want anything more than to see that change.

What is your course of action for the not so distant future?

Prior to this emergency, we just acted in California, USA.

Since we began performing on the web, we've booked shows everywhere throughout the world. It's unbelievable.

Cousins who've never commended birthday events together because of separation can party together. Grandparents who live far away are gifting them to their youngsters, and afterward joining the playdate to see their grandchildren snicker. There are such a significant number of potential outcomes since movement isn't an issue for us. My heart swells when I think about all the youngsters we can cause to feel unique (and guardians we can help catch a truly necessary break).

I'm going to begin crusades for different states soon, and that feels overly energizing! What has been your greatest accomplishment through the entirety of this? Boast a bit!

I'm ridiculously pleased.

It is difficult for me to feel glad. Yet, I'll clutch this inclination for as long as Possible. It is a light in this obscurity surrounding me at the present time. I have a hard time being a Digital Marketing Companies in Phoenix stickler, and it hinders a ton of my thoughts. With this one, Meadow and I continued pushing each other in light of the fact that we had 50 workers depending on us to move quick. What preparing has helped you the most? What other outside assets (nothave been useful?

I've invested the greater part of my energy tuning in to Perpetual Traffic and doing Elite workshops. Those touch on all components from the certs, however don't push me to step through an examination a short time later. I'm not the test taking sort. The message that those things bored into my skull was that nobody thinks about what I do or what I have.

0 notes

ebdaydreamer · 7 years

Text

Still a Drama Queen

Late for AU August! @doctorroseprompts

Fandom: Doctor Who

Pairing: Rose/Twelve

Warnings: N/A

Rose Tyler has been happily married to the Doctor for millennia, but all their adventuring has come to an abrupt halt with the 'execution' of Missy. Now, they've been stuck at a university on Earth, away from the stars and their adventures, but the Doctor's new pupil gives Rose something new: hope.

[AO3]

Over two thousand years, they’d been married. Two thousand years of adventure and friendship and parenthood, all ended by Missy.

Rose resented the Time Lady, but she couldn’t hate her, not when the Doctor’s relationship with her ran so deep and meant so much.

Her ears perked as the mechanical squeak of Nardole approached. What did he want n- oh, yes. The Doctor had asked a Bill Potts to come and see him. Odd, Rose had thought, a century at the university, thousands of pupils and sneaked into his lectures, and not once had he asked one of them to meet him in the office. Though once he explained his intentions to tutor her, Rose teased that he needed someone new to show off to.

As the door opened, Rose sighed, placing her book back on the shelf, turning to meet her husband’s new pupil.

‘Well, this is weird,’ thought Bill, as the man who led her to the office stumbled away. The professor who everyone knew as ‘The Doctor’ had asked her - a canteen worker - to his office. And what a strange office it was. The room was littered with unusual bits and bobs. A giant police box stood proud in the corner. A pen pot contained stick-like things that couldn’t possibly be pens. The desk was completely covered in photos. One had a young, smiling blonde, probably in her early twenties. Another was a big group photo with several teenagers, the blonde woman again, and a man in a pinstriped suit. The next one had all different faces, except the blonde woman again, barely aged a day. Another one was full of adults, the only people she recognised was the man in the suit and the blonde yet again. Only one photo didn’t have the blonde: a black and white photo of a teenage girl with a dark pixie cut.

“You must be Bill, right?” a voice said from above, startling her.

Bill glanced at the balcony to see a woman leaning on the bannister and had to refrain from gasping. She was beautiful. Couldn’t be more than fifty, she seemed to have an ethereal glow about her. Her face was gently lined, laugh lines emphasised by her kind smile. She was wearing black skinny jeans and a cream jumper: a plain look that somehow seemed so elegant on her. Her brown eyes twinkled with something Bill couldn’t quite place and her blonde hair fell in natural curls just past her shoulders. It was then Bill realised: she was the woman from the pictures.

But those pictures look far too modern for her to be fifty.

It was when the woman reached the bottom of the stairs that Bill noticed she was staring… and that she’d been asked a question.

“Yeah. Bill Potts.”

The woman stuck out her hand, “Rose Tyler, the Doctor’s wife. You’re here to see him?”

“He asked me to meet him, yeah. Not sure why,” Bill confessed.

Rose smiled sympathetically, “Most of what he does doesn’t mak-”

She was cut off by an electric guitar ripping apart the silence.

Rose rolled her eyes and muttered, “Beethoven again.” She knocked on the right-hand door and yelled, “Bill’s here, dear.”

Rose pulled out a tablet and sat on the window ledge as the Doctor poked his head out the door, sunglasses perched on his face.

As her husband disappeared again, Rose heard the familiar sound of the sonic whirring followed by feedback.

Typical, Rose thought loudly over the bond, has an appointment due yet decides to play rock star again.

Oi! came the reply. Rose chuckled and opened up her emails to find several lengthy letters from the kids.

“Potts?”

“Yeah?”

“Bill Potts?”

“You wanted to see me?”

The Doctor emerged from behind the door and shuffled some papers. “Er, you’re not a student at this university.”

“Nah, I work in the canteen,” Bill replied easily.

“Yeah but you come to my lectures,” he accused.

“No I don’t. I never do that,” she denied, even though she had to have known she’d been caught. Rose smiled to herself: exactly what she would’ve done.

“I’ve seen you.”

“Love your lectures. They’re totally awesome.”

Oh, I like her, Rose thought with a suggestive smirk.

The Doctor gave her a mental eye roll, You know we can’t, love.

“Why’d you come to my lectures when you’re not a student?”

“Ok,” Bill took a deep breath, and Rose felt a rant coming on, “so my first day here, in the canteen, I was on chips. There was this girl. Student. Beautiful. Like a model, only with talking and thinking. She looked at you and you perved. Every time, automatic, like physics. Eye contact, perversion. So I gave her extra chips. Every time, extra chips. Like a reward for all the perversion. Every day, got myself on chips, rewarded her. Then finally, finally, she looked at me, like she'd noticed, actually noticed, all the extra chips. Do you know what I realised? She was fat. I'd fatted her. But that's life, innit? Beauty or chips. I like chips. So did she. So that’s ok.”

“Completely agree,” Rose butted in. “Always chose chips over anything.”

“As much as I agree, how does that in any way explain why you keep coming to my lectures?” he asked, moving to stand by the desk.

Bill stiffened, probably thinking over what she’d just said, “Yeah, it doesn't really, does it? I was hoping something would develop.” She looked around, clearly hoping for a distraction. “What's that? A police telephone box?”

“Yeah,” the Doctor moved to stand by the TARDIS, and they both felt her mournful tug, begging them to take her out.

“Did you build it from a kit?”

The Doctor looked almost offended and Rose had to stifle a laugh, “No, it came like that!”

“Then how did you get it in here? The door's too small and so are the windows,” Bill pointed out. Observant, and probably very nosy.

“I had the window and a part of the wall taken out and it was lifted in.”

“What, with a crane?”

“Yeah, with a crane. It's heavier than it looks. Why do you keep coming to my lectures?” He brushed off the conversation, but Rose felt his sorrow, linked so closely with her own, as she watched him take his seat.

“Because I like them,” she replied as if it were obvious (which it was). “Everybody likes them. They're amazing.” She shrugged, “Why me?”

“Why you what?”

“Well, plenty of people come to your lectures that aren't supposed to. Why pick on me?”

“Well, I noticed you.” Not answer enough, dear. I was right: showing off.

“Yeah, but why?” Bill continued questioning.

The Doctor wrung his hands, gazing at the picture of Susan on his desk. “Well, most people when don' t understand something, they frown. You,” he pointed at her and paused for the dramatic effect he adored so much, “smile.”

“I'll tell you what I don't understand,” Bill began. “You've been lecturing here for a long time. Like, fifty years, some people say. Nabeela in the office says over seventy. Except for the random three-year disappearance in 2006.”

“Family matters,” Rose answered automatically.

The Doctor ignored that comment. “Yeah, and you're thinking, 'Well, he doesn't look old enough'.”

“No.” The Doctor’s face fell and this time Rose couldn’t help but giggle. Don’t worry, love. The silver fox definitely works for me.

“I'm wondering what you're supposed to be lecturing on. It's like the university let you do whatever you like. One time, you were going to give a lecture on quantum physics. You talked about poetry.”

“Poetry, physics, same thing,” he shrugged.

“How is it the same?”

“Because of the rhymes. What are you doing at this university?” he diverted again.

“I always wanted to come here,” she stated plainly.

“Yeah, to serve chips?”

Rude.

Bill cocked her head to the door. “So anyway, am I nearly done?”

“Do you want to be?”

“See ya.” She got to her feet, clearly thinking she was.

‘Oh how wrong you are,’ Rose thought to herself.

The Doctor didn’t watch her leave, picking papers up off his desk. “You ever get less than a first, then it's over,” he called casually.

Bill halted. “You what?”

“A first. Every time, or I stop immediately.”

“Stop what?”

“Being your personal tutor.,” he grinned. Drama queen, Rose chided.

“But I'm not a student,” Bill was definitely surprised, exactly what her stupid husband was going for. “I'm not part of the university. I never even applied.”

“We'll sort all that out later,” he announced, rushing over to the door, grin firm on his face.

“You kinda have to sort that out earlier.”

“Leave it with me,” he promised. “I'm assuming that it's a yes.”

Bill just blinked for a moment, before looking over to Rose to see if he was serious. Rose sent her a warm smile to reassure to the poor girl. Seemingly convinced, she gasped out, “Yes.”

“I'll see you at 6pm every weekday. I don't care who's dying, never, ever be late. I'm very particular about time.”

Rose rolled her eyes, “Ignore him, he’s a bit of a drama queen. You’ll get used to it soon enough.”

“Ok,” Bill beamed and made to leave, but soon turned back. “Oh, er. People just call you the Doctor? What do I call you? Doctor Tyler?”

“No. The Doctor.”

“But Doctor's not a name. I can't just call you Doctor. Doctor what?”

The Doctor stared at her, before facing Rose. “Roooose, she didn’t do the thing!” he whined.

Rose chuckled. As much as this body pretended he was more grown-up, he was still just a child at heart. “I know, love. I’m sorry. Humans aren’t a hive mind.”

As Bill left the couple, Rose heard the Doctor grumble, “Not at this point in history anyway.”

#doctorroseprompts #doctor who fanfiction #doctor x rose #rose tyler #twelfth doctor #bad wolf #bill potts #university au #canon divegence au #doctor who #dw fanfic #my writing

36 notes · View notes

transbeck · 4 years

Text

EFREC Counselling Session 14.04.2020

Today I had a telephone appointment with Ruth (forgot last name) at the Edinburgh Fertility and Reproductive Endocrinology Centre (EFREC for short).

Overall it was a positive experience. I was expecting transphobia and was pleasantly surprised. I spoke about needing to present a palatable narrative to access treatment and my fears about being misgendered or treated transphobically, or being denied treatment etc now, and further down the line when/if I retrieve my eggs, and was at least acknowledged in my fears, although really there’s not much she can do about them. She said that the laws around fertility preservation for trans people are still under development, so I hope that by being honest about my needs and advocating for the needs of other trans people I might be able to at the very least just give them some accurate data to work with.

I learned that I can freeze my eggs and store them for free on the NHS, for more than 10 years provided that I do not drink alcohol, smoke tobacco, use illegal drugs, or have a BMI over 30 at the time I am undergoing clinical procedures.

To use my eggs some options have NHS funding and some do not, although this funding is likely to change over the next 5,10,20 years so likely will be different when I actually get round to using them. On the NHS either myself or someone I am in a “long term stable relationship” with (which here means: married/civil-partnered, demonstrably living together for at least the last two years, and emotionally stable (as decided by whoever the fuck assesses this at the clinic?)) can use my eggs for IVF or ICSI. Apparently lesbians can only have one baby by IVF on the NHS which is wild, so if me and my legal partner are both legally women that sucks for us I guess?? I would consider changing my legal gender to get more babies tbh.

Also the single long term partner thing could complicate my relationships because I am polyamorous and having a single long term partner who I’d want to have kids with is only one of several relationship structures I can see myself in! Possibly I can see a scenario where we use one of our other partners as our sperm donor? IDK but there must be polyam ppl who’ve gone through this who I can read the stories of!

What if neither myself nor my legal partner can/want to be pregnant? Surrogacy does NOT have NHS funding, which means I guess I have to get fake married to someone if they want to be my surrogate??? Which complicates things bc I wanted to be able to get usefully fake married to someone for immigration reasons... Apparently atm surrogacy costs upwards of £10k, including medical and legal fees. It’s not currently legal to pay for a surrogate although you can give them financial aid and gifts.

What if the law changes? I can get up to date legal information from the clinic by asking them for it to be posted to me. If the law gets more restrictive, well, that would suck. Hopefully the law will get kinder towards queer people.

Can my eggs could be moved around the country? Yes although funding may be different for procedures as different postcodes have different clinical commissioning groups. Do I have the right to travel back to Lothian and have my IVF/ICSI here on the NHS if I move to a different postcode? Unknown - she will get back to me on it.

Am I allowed to bring someone with me to the clinic? Yes, and it’s recommended! I can bring a companion with me to appointments but they aren’t allowed into the operating room with me. I also have to have a lift arranged for my return after the oocyte retrieval due to the effects of the sedative and she’s going to check for me if I can get a taxi paid for by the clinic.

What else did I learn? I have the option to have more counselling, which I’ll probably take her up on after I’ve seen the clinician. Currently all treatment is paused due to coronavirus, but I am on the waiting list and I’ll be told when my next appt. is when they know! I might not have to stop taking T to have the oocyte retrieval. If I use a sperm donor the child will have a legal right to find out who the donor is once they turn 18. I have to go for multiple scans where they stick a camera probe up there... The procedure involves using instruments that go into the vagina so I should have a think about that - what I want to tell the doctors etc...

Things I still want to find out:

- do I still get IVF/ICSI for free if I’m legally male

- how does the procedure work?

#transition update #trans body #trans fertility #egg freezing #efrec

1 note · View note

asoulofstars · 4 years

Text

Intelligence Rewrite Episode 1

As I’ve mentioned, I’m re-writing the Intelligence episodes with Riona for her AU. Here’s Episode 1.

Episodes are very dialogue heavy, so it’s a lot of talking. I do try to intersperse it with Riona’s thoughts, body language of the characters, and what’s happening around them.

But they’re fun, and they’re my children.

Pilot

When Riona got the invitation to meet Lillian Strand at United States Cyber Command, she was equal parts excited, hesitant, and confused. Lillian was the best in the intelligence game; she was who every woman looked up to and admired. But Lillian also looked eerily like Riona’s mother, and that was an experience that Riona was not looking to have. She left home when she was seventeen and preparing to go to Michigan State University, and she had not seen either of her parents since. The thought of meeting Lillian—actually meeting her, not just briefly in passing—sent such a myriad of emotions running through her that her hands shook at the thought. Riona also had to wonder what Lillian Strand wanted with a Secret Service agent. But Riona got up, and she dressed in her best suit. She hated wearing pants, and much of her salary went towards tailoring her clothes. At 5’6” and as curvy as she was, it was nearly impossible to find pants that fit her length wise and in her hips. And today, she wanted to dress at her best. She brushed out her hair, and she tried to quell the anxiety that bubbled in her stomach. She grabbed herself a Dr. Pepper and headed out the door.

The ride to CyberCom was uneventful. She was instructed to park in the public lot and then given a ride into the actual compound. She was impressed and unsurprised by the amount of security, and she had her Secret Service identification ready and waiting. She presented it to security, and she entered the building relatively unaccompanied. The thing she noticed right away was the portraits on the wall. President Obama and Director Strand were placed on the same level, and Riona could not help but swallow. She could only hope that Director Strand was different from her mother in personality and mannerisms. She walked the halls to find Director Strand’s office, and she waited outside.

She didn’t wait long before the Director of Cyber Command strode out to greet her. Lillian held out her hand.

“Riona. Lillian Strand.”

Riona cleared her throat to make sure her voice didn’t crack. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Director Strand.” She took Lillian’s hand and shook it.

Lillian gave her a squeeze. “I should have warned you. I have seen your file, and I’m sure that this is a bit of a shock. But call me Lillian; we’re not that formal around here. Now, we have met once before, haven’t we?”

Riona nodded. “Yes, we did. On Air Force One. It was so brief; I didn’t think you’d remember.”

Lillian gave her a smile. “Riona, you have been vetted for months for a job you neither applied to nor were even aware of. We narrowed the list of candidates to six, and in the end, you’re the only one I brought here.”

Riona was floored. She raised an eyebrow. “Lillian, that’s…very flattering. But I already have a job. What could I even do for you?”

“Take a walk with me,” Lillian instructed and gestured down the hall. “What do you know about CyberCom?” she asked as they walked.

Riona gave a small shrug. “Not a lot, to be honest. You’re responsible for deep net salvage, data mining, cyber defense…” she trailed off.

“And a program called Clockwork. In 1939, the Nazis began developing a doomsday weapon. The US response was an unprecedented mobilization of resources called the Manhattan Project, resulting in the most devastating weapon ever built. Now, we face new and even more insidious threats. Clockwork is this generation’s Manhattan Project. It has been active for six months and has enjoyed a 100% success rate. Included in that success is the thwarting of the Super Bowl Bomber.”

Riona could not help but be impressed and curious. She took a breath, and her brows furrowed. “I thought that was CIA?”

“You haven’t been cleared to think anything different. Until now.”

Riona let out a breath as she realized Lillian would finally introduce her to why she was here.

“Last year, 60 Minutes aired a story about a quadriplegic who could operate a robotic arm with her mind. The microchip that made that possible was created right here.” Lillian opened a door for them. “While other agencies have been busy trying to make artificial intelligence more human, we gave a human the kind of power that had previously only been found in a machine. We created a man who’s the first of his kind: an advanced intelligent agent.” Lillian opened yet another door.

Riona could only imagine with that sort of information why this meeting was taking place at CyberCom behind so many secure doors. She walked in with Lillian to see a man lying on a table, wires hooked up to him, and scans on screens. A man in a lab coat walked out.

“We’re almost done. We haven’t found any residual virus.”

“What kind of virus?” Riona asked.

“Stuxnet. The world’s first weaponized cyber worm,” the man explained.

“The computer virus?” Riona stared at him.

“Boo-yah!” he replied. “Of course, the only way to plant it in an isolated bunker in the middle of the Himalayas was for Gabriel to carry it in himself, which is why we’re making sure none of the code burrowed in.” The man in the lab coat gestured to the other man on the table before sliding his chair across the floor.

“Burrowed into what?” Riona asked, looking between Lillian, the tech, the man on the table, and the screens. His brain. The answer flashed at her as she looked at the scan again. “Is he under anesthesia?” she asked, realizing what was happening.

“I wish,” the guy on the table said with an annoyed grunt.

“Gabriel, you’re done.”

“Finally,” Gabriel groaned and sat up, pulling the wires off his head. “Riona, surprised you’re not wearing more purple.”

Riona stared at him. She didn’t have a common name, and she was wearing minimal purple today, as suit jackets and pants didn’t exactly come in purple. Just the blouse she had on under her jacket was her favorite color. But he couldn’t possibly know that.

“Have we met before?” she asked; she would have remembered him.

“Wow, that photo of you from Cosmos. Been a while since you were there, but digital permanence is very much a thing, right, Amos?”

Riona stared at him as he mentioned Cosmos. She knew exactly what pictures there would be of her, and she was very not thrilled that this random guy had found one.

“Don’t worry; he can’t print. By the way, I’m Amos Pembroke, Gabriel’s pri-tech.” Amos turned from his screens to look at her.

“Primary technician,” Gabriel elaborated. “Nobody around here uses more syllables than they have to. Might be an adjustment for you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Riona asked, biting at her bottom lip.

“Degree in forensics and anthropology?” he replied. “Not exactly technology, but you’re used to hanging with eggheads.”

“Intelligence has nothing to do with degrees and career paths,” Riona replied. “And…who are you?” She stared at him.

Gabriel continued to look at her, and Riona noted the slightly glassy, unfocused look in his eyes. It was more like he was looking through her.

“What’s this police report about? September—”

“Gabriel, don’t open that file,” Lillian cut him off.

Riona suddenly couldn’t breathe. She knew exactly what police report he was about to look at, and she swallowed hard. Her hands tightened into fists, and she blinked furiously trying to hold back tears.

“Fine,” Gabriel replied. “What was it? Shoplifting?” he asked condescendingly.

Riona almost opened her mouth, but then he was moving on.

“Tell me, how’s the daughter of a Naval hero turned Catholic school teacher and a stay at home mom end up in the Secret Service? Youngest woman ever appointed to presidential detail. Now, that’s the beginning of a storied career. But, now what? Following around a charming devil with a microchip in his brain?”

Riona took a deep breath, stepped towards him, and refused to let him intimidate her. “Impressive,” she told him honestly. “Almost every word of that was accurate.”

“Almost?” he asked, surprised. “Which word I get wrong?” The question was genuine.

“Charming,” Riona nearly growled at him. She turned back to Lillian. “Whatever the job is, I think you should find someone else.” She walked out the door, strode down the hall enough, and leaned against the wall to catch her breath. She could hear Gabriel’s Bye ringing in her ears.

“Riona,” Lillian said gently. “I’m sorry; I didn’t mean for him to dig that up.”

“That guy is your advanced intelligence agent?” Riona asked, swallowing.

“That guy was Delta Force, Tier One. Five tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He’s a hero. He’s also reckless, unpredictable, and insubordinate.” Lillian snorted. “As he just demonstrated.”

“And you put a computer in his head?” Riona asked incredulously.

“We connected a human being directly to the information grid: internet, wi-fi, telephone, satellite,” Lillian explained.

“And I’m a Secret Service agent!” Riona stared at Lillian. “What even is this job that you want me to do? Why me?”

“This is the most valuable piece of technology that this country has ever created. I want you to protect it for us.”

“You…you want me to protect him?” she asked.

“You think protecting the president is more important than this?” Lillian asked.

“I…I don’t know about more important, Ma’am, but I’m sure there are better people for this job,” Riona said honestly.

“He didn’t think so,” Lillian told her. “Come sit with Agents Jameson and Gonzo. Let them tell you a little bit while I talk to Gabriel. I only brought you here, because I believe that you are going to work well with this team and with Gabriel. Despite what he demonstrated, he is a good man, and he’s easy to get along with once he behaves.”

Riona swallowed. “You know what was in that police report, don’t you?” she asked.

“Yes, I do. I should have known it would catch his eye; I should have debriefed you a little better about this entire thing. That was my fault, and I’m sorry. But it won’t happen again; he doesn’t make a habit of digging around his team’s personnel files.”

Riona nodded. “Okay. Where can I find Agents Jameson and Gonzo?” she asked.

“Right in here,” Lillian said.

Riona entered the room Lillian gestured to, and she was greeted by two dark-haired men in suits, with the leaner of the two in glasses. She gave them both a smile.

“Agent Riona Gallagher, Secret Service,” she said.

“We know. Agent Chris Jameson,” the one with glasses said and offered her his hand.

Riona shook it, and then she offered her hand to the other man. “So, you must be Agent Gonzo?”

“That’s me,” he replied. “What’d you think of Gabriel?”

“He’s…well, he’s something,” she said.

Jameson gestured for her to take a seat, and she sank into the chair.

“He’s an acquired taste,” Jameson admitted honestly. “But it’s easy to click with him. He’s just not fond of the idea of having someone assigned to him like this.”

“You’re the…fourth…person Lillian has tried to hire?” Gonzo looked at Jameson.

“You’re forgetting about the two who saw Gabriel’s little parlor trick and immediately bolted for the door. She’s gotten three to stick around for at least a mission,” Jameson replied.

Riona raised an eyebrow. “He really doesn’t like this plan.”

“Not in the slightest,” Jameson confirmed. His phone buzzed. “Come on, Lillian needs us at C-Doc.”

The three of them went to meet Lillian, and Riona was surprised to see all the monitors and people. Jameson and Gonzo took their spots, and Riona leaned against the wall.

“Eyes up front,” Lillian ordered as she walked in. “What you’re about to see is a kidnapping; victim is priority red.”

She turned towards the screen, and Riona watched as a video came up.

“It’s hard to make him out in the video, but that’s Dr. Shenandoah Cassidy. As most of you know, until his retirement this year, Dr. Cassidy was not only our top neuroscientist, he was the leading member of the Clockwork team.”

“Where’s this video from?” Jameson asked.

“An EPA camera trap intended to monitor the Chesapeake Dwarf Bat,” Amos replied.

“Has it been scrubbed?” Gonzo questioned.

“Working on it,” Amos answered. “No facial rec yet.”

Riona crossed her arms as Gabriel moved to stand next to her. He was tense, and Riona swallowed.

“What about the van’s plates?”

“Looks like we may be able to dig out a partial.”

“Amos, I want you to go out there with them. Make sure his computers aren’t compromised,” Lillian ordered.

“Will do, but I’m not concerned. I created the encryption protocol. 20-40 Bit. Impregnable.”

“Unless they torture him for the password,” Gabriel replied.

“If they do gain access, they could learn about Gabriel,” Jameson said.

“Could be a target already,” Gonzo acknowledged.

“Well, it’s a good thing we have Riona here to protect me.” Gabriel spared her a glance over his shoulder.

Riona watched him. This whole thing was bothering him. The kidnapping. The fact that she was even here. But she knew it wasn’t her personally.

“Listen up,” Lillian said sharply. “This isn’t like any kidnapping we’ve handled before. The clock always ticks on the victim; this time it ticks on us, too. Get to work.”

Riona watched as Gabriel stared at the barely visible face of Dr. Cassidy on the screen. She moved closer to him and put a hand on his shoulder. He looked at her, but he didn’t shrug her off.

“We’re getting a car,” Jameson told them. “You two ready?”

“Yeah,” Gabriel replied.

Riona just nodded, and she followed the men out of the building. The ride there was silent, and Riona found her eyes drifting to Gabriel frequently. He’d added a leather jacket to his gray top, and Riona had to admit that he looked good. She could tell that he had walls up, and she knew that if she was going to do this job, she had to get those to come down. But she didn’t even know where to begin.

“So, how bad is that police report?” he asked as they walked up to the house.

“You really haven’t read it?” she asked softly in return.

“What am I, an animal? Was it drugs? You robbed a liquor store?” He kept shooting her looks.

Riona glanced at him out of the corner of her eyes but said nothing. They had other matters to deal with right now, and she didn’t want to get sidetracked the way that the report would sidetrack her.

“Come on. I thought this was the part where we shared and bond?” Gabriel’s voice was half sarcastic, half playful.

“I’ll tell you what’s in it if you really want to know, but not now. We’re on the job, and I want to get Dr. Cassidy back,” Riona told him honestly.

“You don’ know him,” Gabriel said.

“But you do, and you care about him. That’s enough for me,” Riona replied. “So, let’s get him back, and then you can ask me whatever questions you want.”

“Fair enough,” he replied before stopping; his head tilted to one side, and his eyes got that same far-off look as earlier.

“What is it?” she asked.

“The kidnappers are Chinese,” he told her.

She stared at him. “How could you possibly know that?”

He just chuckled, led her into the house, and went straight to the kitchen. She followed and watched as he laid on the kitchen floor and reached under the fridge.

“There you are,” he grunted. He held it out to her as he pulled himself up. “Cassidy’s pocket recorder. I caught it when we walked up. Bluetooth.” He gave her a smug little half-smile.

They were joined by Jameson, Gonzo, and Amos, and they listened as they played the recording. Dr. Cassidy’s voice came over the machine.

“Oh, boy. Looks like our raccoons are back. All right, I think I’ll keep you inside.” A cat yowled, and Riona frowned.

Where was the cat?

A glass shattered on the recording, and then Riona heard the Chinese kidnappers. She had to admit: Gabriel’s chip was impressive.

“There’s your Chinese,” Gonzo said. “Translation?”

Gabriel squinted. “Bring the box?” he guessed.

“Bring the box?” Gonzo repeated.

Riona had a knack for languages, and it was something that came in handy with the Secret Service. She stepped a little closer to Gabriel.

“Where’d you learn Mandarin?” she asked him.

“I didn’t. I got an app for that,” he told her.

“Apps aren’t one hundred percent,” she replied. “Xiang ze means box, yes, but bao shen xiang ze means safe. Bring the safe,” she told the others.

Gonzo and Jameson shared a look, and Riona blushed a little at how impressed they were. Gabriel just eyed her. He opened his mouth like he was going to say something, but the door opened behind them.

“Gabriel,” a voice said. “I’m so glad you’re here. Now I know we’re gonna find him.”

Gabriel put a hand on the other man’s shoulder. “Nelson, this is Riona,” he introduced them. “Riona, Nelson Cassidy. He’s the doc’s son.”

Riona nodded. “You want to sit down?” she asked Nelson. “Maybe you can help us learn something we don’t know.”

Nelson sunk onto the couch, and Riona stayed back. The house had a lot of big windows, and she didn’t like it. The Secret Service habits she had kept her pacing and glancing outside, always scanning the horizon. They were sitting ducks if someone was watching them. She listened as they questioned Nelson about the safe, and her brows furrowed the more he talked about the computer and classified intel.

“Can I ask a question?” she offered.

“No,” Gabriel replied, glancing at her.

Riona’s lips twitched, but Jameson moved closer to the couch from the other side of the room.

“I’ll ask it,” he said. “If there was nothing compromising on the computer, and it was encrypted, why did it have to be in a safe?”

“So, either that’s not the only thing on that computer,” Gonzo continued the thought.

“Or the computer’s not the only thing in that safe,” Gabriel finished it.

Riona’s gaze turned to Nelson, who let out a sigh, deflating a little. There was a lot going on, and Riona’s heart went out for all of them. This was very stressful, and it had to be worse for them since they had a history and knew each other.

“…It was…” Nelson swallowed. “He made another chip,” he admitted.

“What?” Everyone else in the room stared at Nelson, the exclamation coming from a few of them simultaneously.

“Okay, I-I don’t know why I lied. Okay, I-I was scared. Gabriel, I should have told you.” Nelson looked at Gabriel, who turned away.

Riona was interested that Nelson said Gabriel. Not CyberCom. Not anyone else. Just Gabriel.

“He made another chip?” Amos asked. “Why?”

“Well, did you really think his brain would just stop working?” Nelson exclaimed. “He’s always perfecting; you know that! Look, we were gonna give it to CyberCom!”

Riona turned back to the shoreline, but she heard the furniture groan as Gabriel sat down.

“Nelson, tell us about the Chinese,” he said, and Riona frowned at the pain in his voice.

“Chinese? What Chinese?” he asked.

“The men who took your father.”

“What?!?” Nelson exclaimed.

Jameson and Gonzo moved in as Nelson stood up from the couch.

“Wait…what? You guys think I had something to do with this?” Nelson’s hurt caused Riona to look over at him.

“Did the deal go bad?” Jameson asked.

“What are you talking about? I would never!” Nelson shouted. “Amos!”

“Just tell them the truth, Bro.”

Nelson scoffed, but Riona’s attention was back on the shoreline.

“Guys,” she said. “Do we have an asset across the lake? Southwest tree line?”

Gabriel came to stand next to her, and she noticed the same unfocused look that she was beginning to associate with the chip.

“I’m getting something. They’re broadcasting a signal. Sniper!” he growled.

“DOWN!” Riona shouted and threw her arms out to shove Gabriel to the floor.

She looked at him, and she put a hand on his shoulder. He shrugged her off this time, but he did help her back to her feet as he stood up.

“They’re gone,” he said. “Signal’s cut out; they’re packed up. Someone should see if they left a trail.”

Gonzo nodded and went to talk to other agents who were out there.

“Let’s get back to CyberCom before Lillian gets her panties in a bunch,” Gabriel suggested. “We can finish this conversation there.” He looked at Nelson.

Riona climbed into the van beside Gabriel once more, and she could feel the tension rolling off of him in waves. It was worse than earlier, and she couldn’t imagine what he was thinking right now.

“We’ll get him back,” she said gently.

“What makes you so sure?” he asked.

“You do,” she replied before looking out the window.

It wasn’t long before they were back at CyberCom. Lillian sat in the interrogation room across from Nelson, and Jameson, Gonzo, Riona, and Gabriel were in the observation room. Riona leaned against the wall, one eye on the door. Not that she didn’t trust the people around them, but it was clear that someone had betrayed this team.

Riona watched Nelson closely. She didn’t truly believe that he was involved. The man was his father.

“Look, you’re wasting time! My father’s still out there somewhere,” Nelson said. “Have you all lost your mind?” he yelled at the two-way mirror.

“Since when does Lillian run an interrogation?” Gonzo asked.

“Since it got personal,” Jameson replied.

Riona tried to focus on what Lillian was saying, but she couldn’t hear her over the men talking.

“There’s no digital signpost he’s involved. No emails, voicemails, nothing,” Gabriel told them.

“He runs his father’s lab,” Riona mused. “He knows exactly how to avoid those traps, right?” She still didn’t think Nelson was involved, but she didn’t think her opinion was welcome.

“I like the new girl,” Jameson said.

“She’s not the new girl,” Gabriel replied, annoyed. “In fact, there’s a coffee room down the hall. I’m pretty sure I’m safe here. These are my people.”

Riona swallowed. “I don’t like coffee,” she told him. “And one of your people had to be involved in this.”

“He was just going to hand it over to us?” Riona could finally hear Lillian. “Just like that?”

“Well, loyalty doesn’t always go both ways,” Nelson said, bitter.

“Oh, you think I was disloyal?” Lillian seemed surprised.

“You could have kept him on!” Nelson exclaimed.

“He did his job. You did yours. But the project entered the deployment phase.”

Riona had to wonder what exactly Dr. Cassidy—and Nelson’s—role had been with the team beforehand. A neuroscientist and his clearly equally as intellectually gifted son could only be assets to this program, no matter what phase it was in.

“He had more to give,” Nelson said. “Now, the new chip hasn’t been tested, but Moore’s Law dictates it will be significantly faster and more robust than the original.”

“And you’ve just given that to a foreign government.”

“Why would I put my own father in danger?!?” Nelson shouted.

“To get back at him,” Lillian replied coolly.

“For what?!?”

“For Gabriel.”

Riona watched Gabriel tense, and she uncrossed her arms before recrossing them. He was already annoyed, and she didn’t need to make it worse by invading his personal space.

“Who could blame you? The way your father doted over him as if Gabriel were his own son.”

“This is insane.” Nelson put his hands on the table and leaned back, looking at the mirror again.

“I don’t think he has anything to do with this,” Riona finally said. “He keeps emphasizing his father. If he were guilty and trying to cover it up, it’d be about him. It’s not about him at all. It’s about Dr. Cassidy.”

Gabriel looked at her surprised.

“I know it’s counterintuitive for a Secret Service agent, but I don’t generally see the worst in people. I assume everyone is good at heart. But I look for the tipping points, for the extreme circumstances, for the mindsets that negate that. Nelson’s not malicious. He’s worried about his father; he’s upset. This is, in his eyes, another betrayal. He and his father cared a lot about this program. It’s all in his language.”

“You’re good at language, aren’t you?” Gabriel asked.

“Writer, linguistic anthropology training, and my first language is Gaelic, not English. Once you know Gaelic, you pick up on other languages pretty well, and Secret Service gives a lot of linguistic training for major countries that we come into contact with.”

“I like the new girl,” Jameson repeated his earlier sentiments. “You’re good,” he complimented her.

Riona flushed.

“Amos got something,” Gonzo said, a finger on his ear. “Let’s get to C-Doc.”

Amos looked up as they entered. “We scrubbed the video, and we got a partial plate. Maryland—HB. Doesn’t match any white vans in the database, though.”

Lillian nodded. “What if the plates were lifted from another car?”

“I’m in the DMV database now,” Gabriel said. “A blue Chevy ’88 Caprice parked on the 2300 block of Castor Road reported stolen plates that begin with HB.”

Riona was impressed. She moved to Gabriel’s side. “Can you tell us how many white Chevy vans are in a thirty-mile radius of that Caprice?”

“27,” he answered immediately.

“Ours is a ’98 Chevy Astro,” Jameson told them.

“That narrows it to two vans. One was towed for unpaid parking tickets six weeks ago and still sits in the impound lot. The other is registered to a business called Bullseye Paintball.”

“The video revealed paint splatters on one side of the van.”

“Guess where Bullseye Paintball is?” Gabriel asked.

No one asked, but Lillian and Riona both quirked eyebrows at him.

“Chinatown.”

Riona, Gabriel, Jameson, and Gonzo found themselves heading towards Bullseye Paintball almost immediately. Riona was surprised when Gabriel offered her the driver’s seat of the car, and she took it without comment. No use in questioning him. Riona noted how quiet the drive was, but she also noted that Gabriel was a little less tense. Having direction helped him.

“This place is huge,” she whined as the four regrouped at the location.

“Yeah, we’re getting a satellite feed,” Jameson said. “Infrared will give us a headcount and any basement where they might be hiding him.”

“How long till the satellite’s in position?” Gabriel asked.

“Amos says fifteen minutes,” Gonzo answered.

“Let’s take a look around,” Gabriel said.

“We should wait for the tac team,” Riona replied; she knew it was fruitless, but she wanted her disagreement out there.

“You ever been held captive?” Gabriel asked in response. “Fifteen minutes can seem like a lifetime.”

Riona followed him, knowing that there was more to that statement than was on the surface. She turned just enough to see Gonzo and Jameson head a different direction. She kept her ears focused, wanting to hear anyone before they could be ambushed.

“Say it,” Gabriel said as they rounded a corner and found the van from the video.

Riona rolled her eyes. “Good job; you found the van. We will still need the tac team if we’re planning on an assault to extract Dr. Cassidy.”

“Won’t know anything until that satellite’s up.” He tried to open the van door, but it was locked.

Riona smirked a little as he walked around to the other side of the van, and she grabbed a screwdriver off a nearby barrel. She picked the lock on the door, and she slid it open.

“Auto theft?” he asked incredulously as he stared at her through the windows of the van. “That police report?”

Riona gave him a sharp look, and then she frowned. She held up the glasses wordlessly, noting the crack in the lens.

“Those are Cassidy’s,” Gabriel said, rushing back around to her side.

“Hey!” A voice exclaimed. “You’re trespassing!”

Riona whirled around, and she instinctively moved her hand closer to her gun.

“Hello, Huang Fu,” Gabriel said casually before whipping out his own weapon. “Federal agents! Hands in the air!”

Riona pulled her gun out all the way, and she had to remind herself to take a slow breath. She imagined her exhale rolling over every part of her body, loosening herself up.

Huang Fu and his friends pulled out their own weapons, but Riona was one step ahead of them. She knocked Gabriel to the side with her hip.

“Gun!” she exclaimed.

The pair exchanged fire with Huang Fu and the group of Chinese men, and Riona felt a bullet hit her arm.

“Ah!” she groaned.

Gabriel helped move her over to use the van as cover. “You took a bullet for me? What the hell are you doing?”

“My job!” Riona replied.

“Gabriel, talk to me,” Lillian said over their coms.

“Riona’s been hit; I repeat, Riona’s been hit.”

Riona could hear the concern in his voice, and she had to admit, it was better than annoyance. She really could have gone without this, though.

“Tac team is five minutes out,” Lillian said. “Gonzo and Jameson are trying to reach your location.”

“No time!” Gabriel threw Riona’s arm over his shoulders, and he hooked an arm around her waist. “Can’t stay here!” He fired awkwardly with one hand to cover them as he forced them out of the alley.

They entered the arena, and Gabriel fired his gun into the air.

“Everybody out now!” he ordered.

The paintball players fled, and Gabriel set Riona down behind one of the figures that the arena used as a shield.

“I need that satellite!” Gabriel exclaimed.

Riona winced. She heard Lillian asking where the satellite was, and she had to wonder the same thing. That was the key to them getting out of this.

“Moving five tons of metal through space isn’t like ordering a pizza,” the tech answered.

“Now would be good, Amos,” Gabriel growled.

“Gabriel, satellite in five…four…three…two….”

Riona watched as Gabriel’s posture shifted.

“I’ve got satellite infrared.” He moved about easily, firing without even really needing to look. He came back and helped Riona up, holding her close. “Come on.”

Riona heard someone move behind them, and she fired. She aimed for the right shoulder, taking down the man without killing him. The two escaped, and the tac team flooded the place. Riona was relieved to see an ambulance waiting, and Gabriel walked her over to it.

“Patch her up,” he said to the EMTs.

“Gabriel,” Riona said, reaching out for him with her left hand. “Can you stay here?”

He softened his posture, and he gave her hand a squeeze. “I’ll be right back, okay? I gotta talk to Gonzo and Jameson, give them the brief on what went down inside.”

Riona nodded. She kept her eyes on him as he walked away, and she barely felt it as the EMT stitched her up. This was by far not the worst injury she’d ever had. Protecting the president’s daughters, she’d endured stab wounds from the attack. Not to mention what her parents did to her a long time ago. This was nothing, and it was part of the job. She relaxed slightly when he walked back up to her.

“You got any cash on you?” he asked.

“Why?” she replied.

“The Romans said it’s bad luck not to give something to the person who saved your life,” he replied, leaning against the ambulance.

“Wait, I took a bullet for you, stopped a sniper from shooting you earlier today, and you think I owe you money?” she asked. “No, no. I’d say a 20 covers this.”

“I saved your life,” Gabriel argued. “We wouldn’t have gotten out of there if it weren’t for me.”

“We wouldn’t have been in that if it weren��t for you. And I’m bleeding,” she replied.

“It’s just a flesh wound; don’t be dramatic.”

Jameson and Gonzo walked up, clearly having finished with the tac team.

“Hey, no sign of Cassidy. He’s not here,” Jameson said.

“You’ll never guess who that clown’s cousin is,” Gabriel replied, nodding towards Huang Fu as he was put in the back of one of their cars. “Jin Cong.”

“Are you serious?” Jameson asked.

“Who the hell is Jin Cong?” Riona interjected.

“Chinese Intelligence,” Gabriel replied.

“No way,” Gonzo breathed. “That, the second chip. Everything’s coming together. And not in a good way.”

Riona nodded. She let out a loud sigh, and she rubbed at her eyes with her left hand.

“So, Lillian called. You’re not going to be happy, but we’re to take you and Riona to a safe house,” Jameson explained.

“Why?” Gabriel growled.

“She’ll meet you there and tell you herself.” Jameson shrugged. “You okay to move?” he asked Riona.

She nodded; the EMT had given her a sling. The drive, once again, was quiet, and Riona leaned slightly into Gabriel. She feigned the motion as keeping herself from leaning against her injured arm, but Gabriel put his arm around her and gave her a small squeeze as if acknowledging what she was doing. Touch was how she tried to give comfort. It was how she received comfort best. And just because she didn’t know Gabriel that well didn’t mean that she wasn’t aching for him.

“Thanks,” Gabriel muttered when they got out of the car.

“Yeah,” she replied, taking his hand as she stepped down to the driveway.

“You two settle in; Lillian will be here soon. There’s a change of clothes for both of you up in the bedrooms. I think there’s some beverage choices in the kitchen.” Jameson sighed. “Good night,” he said.

“Good night, Jameson. Thanks for everything today,” Riona replied.

“Hey, you’re part of the team now, Riona.” Jameson smiled at her.

Riona went and found her change of clothes right away, and she came back downstairs to a mug of hot chocolate. She looked at Gabriel in surprise.

“You don’t like coffee, right?” He shrugged.

“Thank you,” she replied. “Why don’t you go change? I’ll watch for Lillian.” She took a sip; he used milk, not water. It was too creamy for water.

He nodded, and he went upstairs, too. When he came down, he paced in front of the windows, and Riona watched him from the couch. She could tell he needed some space. She knew so little about him, but she knew that he was taking this case personally, and that was all that mattered. They had to get through this; they had to get Dr. Cassidy back. She wouldn’t let Gabriel lose him.

She knew when Lillian pulled up before any car doors opened, because Gabriel shifted. She knew that the coming conversation was not going to be pretty.

“What am I doing in a safe house?” he growled.

“I’m pulling you out,” Lillian replied.

“You’re what?” he asked.

“In the past twenty-four hours, you’ve nearly gotten yourself killed twice,” Lillian said.

“That’s the job,” Gabriel argued. “The F-35’s the most expensive airplane ever built. The first thing they did was throw it in a war zone. This thing in my head may be valuable, but you don’t want it sitting in a hangar.”

“I also don’t want it getting lost in some dangle-op gone wrong,” Lillian told him.

“Touching,” he replied, walking away.

“Do you have any idea what would happen if this chip ends up in the wrong hands? Today, China. Tomorrow the Russians. Korea, Iran.”

“I know the stakes,” he grumbled.

“Then why can’t you stay on-problem?” she exclaimed.

“I am on-problem!” he growled back.

“You had no business going into that place before the tac team arrived. When it’s personal, you think it gives you the license just to—”

“This is more than personal,” Gabriel interjected. “Cassidy’s like a father to me, and Amelia’s my wife.”

Riona winced. She sipped at her hot chocolate, and she tried not to let her heart take over too much. She didn’t know what the story was with Gabriel’s wife. He didn’t wear a wedding band, but it was clear that he loved her.

“You just made my point,” Lillian’s voice brought her back to the conversation. “Look, you got us to Jin Cong. I’ll take it from here.”

“All right,” Gabriel said and walked away.

Lillian turned and joined Riona in the living room. “How are you feeling?”

Riona adjusted, and she shrugged with her left shoulder. “I’ve had worse,” she said. “What’s the story about Gabriel’s wife?” Riona wanted to ask Gabriel, but it was clearly a point that Lillian knew a bit about, and it was something that played into Lillian’s choices.

“Excuse me?” Lillian asked.

“It’s clear that Amelia makes him unpredictable. If you want me to do this job, I need to have all the information I can.” Riona took another sip from her mug.

“The story is that Amelia Hayes was an enemy of the United States. She was deep cover with the Lashkar, and she turned. She died in an attack that she was sent to prevent. End of story.”

Riona’s brow furrowed. That was not the response that she was expecting. “If that’s true, then why did you choose Gabriel for Clockwork? That goes against every protocol imaginable. He loves her, and you gave him the most powerful intelligence weapon on Earth.”

Lillian looked at Riona with sad eyes.

“You don’t believe she was a traitor, do you?” It was the same look Riona had earlier when looking at Nelson. “Do you even believe that she’s dead?”

“Let me be very clear with you. We’ve spent billions of dollars creating something that every nation on Earth would go to war to possess. You’re not here to question me. You’re here to keep it safe.”

“Him,” Riona replied. “I’m here to keep him safe. That’s his wife, Lillian. He’s not going to let this go. Nor should he.” Riona knew then and there that she was going to help him however she could.

“Good night, Riona,” Lillian said. “Feel better.”

“Good night, Lillian,” Riona replied.

When the door closed, she saw Gabriel hovering at the bottom of the stairs. She gave him a small smile.

“Hot chocolate was good,” she said.

“Good,” he replied. “You should get some rest.”

“So should you, Gabriel. We’ll regroup in the morning, okay?” Riona put the mug in the sink, and she put a hand on his shoulder before she went upstairs.

“Good night,” he called.

“Good night,” she replied.

The next morning, Riona came downstairs to see Gabriel wandering about the living room, looking at something that clearly wasn’t there.

“Gabriel? What are you doing?” She blinked sleepily, rubbing at her shoulder with her left hand.

“How’s your shoulder?” he replied.

“Stiff,” she answered. “Now what are you doing?”

“I’m cyber-rendering. It’s something the chip does that nobody expected. I can create a virtual snapshot of an event in my mind and then walk through it. But it’s more than that. It’s like a virtual evidence walk.”

“You’re really doing that right now?” Riona was amazed. To her, it just looked like, well, wandering.

“All the intel I have access to, I can see it. The chip processes it like a computer, but my brain metabolizes it, well, like a brain.”

“What do you see?” Riona asked, moving closer to him. She rubbed at her arm again.

“Cassidy’s staring into the van.”

“And?”

“There’s something about his face. It’s not fear. It’s…recognition.”

“But we couldn’t really see Dr. Cassidy’s face in the video. How are you getting that?” she asked.

“Well, remember, the render is generated by me. Part fact, part imagination.” Gabriel looked at her this time, and Riona knew he was actually seeing her.

Riona chewed on her bottom lip, and she furrowed her brows. “What’s that mean?”

“I think of it like a dream. Analyze it like a dream. My subconscious wants to tell me that Cassidy knew his kidnapper.”

“Nelson. But we cleared him. Kind of.” She wasn’t sure how much her linguistic analysis and his digital trace actually cleared Nelson.

“That’s what I thought, but…the plans for the chip were on Cassidy’s computer, and Nelson’s not the only one that had access to it.”

“Amos wrote the encryption code. He wrote the encryption code. 20-40 bit, impregnable.” Riona repeated the tech’s words.

“Get your gear; we’re leaving,” Gabriel said.

Just as they were walking out, Amos walked up the drive.

“Hey, Guys! I wanted to see how Riona was doing.”

Gabriel drew his gun, and Riona winced, because her right arm was still weak, and she couldn’t pull her own weapon fast enough.

“You son of a bitch. I’m taking you in,” Gabriel growled.

“You’re not taking me anywhere, Gabriel.” Amos smiled smugly, holding up his hands. “I’m the one taking you.”

A group of Chinese men surrounded them, and Riona tensed as they took her and Gabriel’s guns and pushed them into their vehicle. Gabriel sat beside her, and he looped an arm around her. Riona knew he was trying to help absorb a bit of the shock from the van and to help keep her from bumping into the door of the vehicle. When they arrived, Riona yelped as they were tossed into a room and the door locked behind them.

“You okay?” Gabriel asked her.

“Yeah, are you?” she replied, looking him over.

They’d taken his jacket, as if he was hiding more weapons in it, and Riona pulled her zip-up down so that she could get a look at her wound. She went to the sink, wet a cloth, and dabbed at her wound.

“Yeah, Riona. I’m just annoyed. You know how many hours I spent with Amos? Sitting in that lab, all those tests, software updates, diagnostics? You get pretty close to someone, think you know him.”

Riona frowned. She could only imagine. She dabbed at the bandage again.

“I better take a look at that,” he said, walking over to her.

Riona looked up, shocked. He took the cloth from her, and he knelt beside her.

“Just the wound; don’t get excited,” he said, a tad too serious to be the teasing he was going for.

Riona looked at him as he dabbed at the wound himself, peeling back the bandage to get a better look.

“The stitches are holding, but it doesn’t look great,” he mused.

Riona took a breath as she watched him. He was just betrayed by someone that he was close to, and she knew that he needed to know that someone had his back.

“That police report is about my brother’s murder,” she told him. “I was twelve; he was eight. We went to the park. I was old enough to take him alone; it was Sunday, so Mama and Papa didn’t want to leave the house after church anyways. I was supposed to watch him. He managed to slip away before I realized it, and when I realized that he was gone, it was too late. I heard him scream for me. Rona. He couldn’t pronounce my name properly when he was little, and the nickname stuck. He was dead before I got to him. Throat slashed so deep it cut the bones. He bled out in seconds, Gabriel.”

“That’s why you got your degrees in forensics and anthropology. You had a different career path in mind before Secret Service.” He pushed the bandage back down with gentle fingers.

Riona nodded. “But I wanted to remind Soll’s killer that I’m still here, that I haven’t forgotten. And I wanted to make up for failing him. I need to protect people in my life.”

“That why you didn’t let me intimidate you away?” he asked.

Riona nodded again. “You know, I wasn’t just hired to protect you.”

He sighed. “I know. You’re supposed to keep me from looking for Amelia.”

“Yeah. But I’m not going to do that. I’m going to help you find her. Soll’s case has been cold for twenty years, Gabriel. But if you believe Amelia’s still out there, then I’m gonna help you find her.”

Gabriel looked at her, and his eyes gleamed. She could have sworn that he was about to smile, and then the door opened. Men with guns came in, straight for Gabriel, and one punched him in the stomach as the other wrenched an arm behind his back.

“Where are you taking him?” Riona asked, growling.

They didn’t answer, forcing Gabriel out the door.

“Where are you taking him?!?” she repeated.

She only stopped when a guard pointed a gun at her, forcing her to stay in the room. The door shut and was locked once more. She wasn’t about to lose him. Not when she’d finally clicked with him. No, she understood Gabriel. And she was going to get them both out of this. She just had to figure out how.

She paced back and forth in the small room, and she froze when the door opened back up. It was Amos, with a glass of water.

“I brought you some water.”

“No thank you,” Riona replied.

“Look, I’m the only reason they haven’t killed you yet,” he told her. “Do you have any idea how much money Cong has? We don’t have to be enemies, Riona. We could be friends.”

Riona rolled her eyes, and she used her pressure point training to take Amos down quickly. He dropped, and the guard rushed in. She disarmed him and knocked him out quickly, too, and she whirled around to head through the door, but Jin Cong blocked her path, gun pointed straight at her.

“Come with me,” he said. “We’re going to make Gabriel an offer.”

Riona growled, and she hip checked Cong. Cong hit her in the arm, right over her stitches. He slammed her into a wall, and Riona yelped.

“Gabriel, I have your friend. I’m willing to make a trade. I imagine you can find us quite easily.”

Riona was clenching her jaw, trying not to scream. This was a trap, and she didn’t want Gabriel to walk right into it. But she knew that he wouldn’t just leave her in Cong’s hands. She didn’t have to wait long for Gabriel to round the corner in front of them.

“Drop your weapon,” Cong told Gabriel.

“Don’t do it, Gabriel,” Riona said, struggling against Cong’s grip; his left arm was wrapped around her throat, and his right hand held his gun to her temple.

“There are only two ways this ends: either I open her head, or I open yours,” Cong said.

“Shoot him!” Riona shouted.

“Put your gun down and come with me. Then I’ll let her go,” Cong stated.

“Don’t do it, Gabriel. We both know he’ll just kill me anyways.”

Gabriel held up his hands, moving his weapon off of Cong. Riona’s eyes widened, and she nearly growled.

“You owe me twenty bucks,” he told her.

“I’m still ahead, remember?” Riona shot back.

“Put the gun down slowly,” Cong instructed.

“A little to the left,” Gabriel said, and Riona realized that his eyes were slightly unfocused.

“What are you talking about?” Cong asked. “Do it now!”

“Little more,” Gabriel said.

“Drop the gun!”

“Three degrees down. Now, Doc!”

A gunshot rang out, and Riona fell forward into the stair railing. She caught herself as Jin Cong went flying forward.

“Call it even?” Gabriel asked.

“No, I’m still ahead by one,” Riona answered. “You okay?” Her eyes ran over his face, bloody lip and cut on his forehead.

“I’m fine,” he replied. “Definitely had worse. Doctor’s not gonna be thrilled about your arm, though.”

Riona rolled her eyes at him. It was throbbing like hell, but she’d live. It was a relief when Gabriel was able to get ahold of CyberCom. Riona and Gabriel were both looked at by EMTs and cleared, and Jin Cong was taken into custody.

“You want a ride home?” Gabriel offered.

“I’m probably way out of the way right now. You go home; I’ll see you tomorrow.” She put a hand on his shoulder.

“Riona,” he said. “Thanks. For everything.”

Riona nodded. “We’re on the same team, right?”

“Yeah, we are.” He gave her hand a squeeze. “See you tomorrow.”

Riona met the team at C-Doc the next day, and she found herself greeted with CyberCom credentials. She smiled. Gabriel gave her a smile when she walked in.

“How’s your arm?” he asked.

“Sore. How’s your face?” she replied.

He chuckled. “Nothing a hot shower didn’t take care of.”

“Where’s Lillian?” Riona asked.

“Interrogating Jin Cong,” he replied. “Apparently she let him stew overnight. She and Gonzo are tag-teaming him.”

Riona nodded. In the room were also Dr. Cassidy and Nelson. Gabriel waved Dr. Cassidy over.

“Doc, didn’t get a good chance to introduce you last night, but this is Riona. Riona, Dr. Shen Cassidy.”

“It’s nice to meet you,” Riona said. “And it’s good to have you home.” She looked at Gabriel. “I told you we’d do it.”

“You did,” he said.

Shen smiled at her. “So, it’s your responsibility to keep Gabriel out of trouble then?”

Riona laughed. “Oh, if that’s the job, then I think I’ve already failed. I’m just here to make sure that he lives through the trouble he gets himself into.”

“I’m not that bad.”

Riona, Shen, Nelson, and Jameson all looked at him with raised eyebrows.

“Well, it’s good to meet you, Riona. Lillian has asked Nelson and I to come back to the team, since Amos has vanished, Gabriel needs a technician who knows the chip, and we’re more than happy to come back.”

“Fantastic,” Riona said. “It’s going to be great to have you.” Riona walked over to Nelson. “For the record, I want you to know that I never doubted you.”

“It’s true,” Jameson said. “She was the first one to say you didn’t do it.”

“Thank you,” Nelson told her. “And thank you for helping get my dad back.”

“Of course.”

It felt like hours had passed by the time that Lillian and Gonzo came out. Lillian went into her office, and when she came back, she seemed determined.

“We’re giving Jin Cong back to the Chinese,” she said. “Gabriel, Riona, Gonzo, Jameson. You’ll accompany me to the drop point. Dr. Cassidy, Nelson, you two will get set up here; make the lab yours.”

They followed Lillian out, and it was a long drive.

“You want to explain to me why we’re giving Jin Cong back to the Chinese?” Gabriel asked when they arrived.

“We’re making a trade,” she replied. “You said you had information. About Amelia Hayes.” Lillian looked at the other woman, the Chinese Intelligence officer.

Riona and Gabriel’s heads shot up, staring at Lillian and then the other woman.

The woman smiled. “The Pakistanis claim she is alive.”

“Where is she?” Gabriel asked, stepping forward.

“They had her under surveillance as recently as three months ago.”

“I need proof,” Lillian said.

“She boarded a flight from Punjab to Zurich on June 12th. I’m sure you can find the video yourself.” Lillian nodded.

Jameson and Gonzo walked Jin Cong to the Chinese officers waiting to take him. Gabriel and Riona turned around to follow Lillian back to the car.

“I need to go to Zurich,” Gabriel said.

“No, you need to go to Seattle,” Lillian replied.

“Seattle?” Gabriel asked incredulously.

“Eight dock workers are sick with radiation poisoning. Customs found traces in a container that arrived from Malaysia yesterday.”

“Lillian—”

“Seattle, Gabriel. After that, it’s better for both of us if you don’t tell me your travel plans.”

“I just wanted to say thank you,” he said gently.

“For what? This never happened.” Lillian smiled.

Riona watched Lillian walk away. It was then that she knew that no matter how much Lillian looked like her mother, Lillian was nothing like Caitlin Gallagher. No, Lillian cared about the people closest to her. She smiled at Gabriel, and she wrapped her arm around his as they went back to the car.

“I’m here with you,” she said.

“I know,” he replied. “Thank you. For believing in me. In Amelia. You did something the other night, and Lillian never would have done this if it hadn’t been for you.”

“Well, it’s my job to have your back,” Riona told him.

“I’ve got yours, too,” he replied.

She smiled, and she was more than happy when she got home and collapsed into her own bed that night. They met at the airfield the next morning to go to Seattle.

“You okay?” Riona asked; he seemed a different kind of tense than he had the past few days.

“Yeah,” he replied. “I ain’t gonna change, you know.”

Riona smiled. “Good. They didn’t want a robot, Gabriel. They could have just built a robot. They wanted a human. They wanted you. And you shouldn’t change yourself at all.”

Gabriel handed her a twenty-dollar bill.

“What’s this for?” she asked.

“For the next time,” he replied.

Riona smiled, and she followed him onto the jet. When she sat down, she pulled a Sharpie out of her bag.

“We’ll keep track,” she said.

She wrote a G and an R at the top of the bill, and she put two tallies under her R and one under his G. He chuckled.

“Don’t spend it,” he replied.

“Wouldn’t dream of it. We’re gonna be doing this for years,” she told him.

#written in the stars (my writing)#v: protect and serve #otp: loyalty

0 notes

bountyofbeads · 5 years

Text

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2019/10/01/daily-202-mike-pompeo-and-bill-barr-are-increasingly-implicated-in-the-impeachment-inquiry/5d92da5b88e0fa4b0ec247b9/

The Daily 202: Mike Pompeo and Bill Barr are increasingly implicated in the impeachment inquiry

THE BIG IDEA: President Trump finds himself facing impeachment, at least in part, because he’s surrounded himself with yes men who enable and even encourage his impulses, rather than check them. Two of the most prominent officials in his administration may now pay a reputational price for their loyalty to Trump as they find themselves becoming central characters in the scandal engulfing his presidency.

Trump fired his first attorney general and secretary of state after he judged them to be insufficiently loyal, replacing each with someone who proved to be a more pliant foot soldier.

Rex Tillerson, who was chief executive of ExxonMobil when Trump tapped him to be secretary of state, has said his relationship with the president soured when he refused to follow illegal directives. “So often, the president would say, ‘Here’s what I want you to do, and here’s how I want you to do it,’” Tillerson said in Houston last December, not providing specific examples. “And I would have to say to him, ‘Mr. President, I understand what you want to do. But you can’t do it that way. It violates the law.’” (Trump responded that Tillerson was “dumb as a rock” and “lazy as hell.”)

The president turned against Jeff Sessions as soon as he followed the advice of ethics lawyers and recused himself from overseeing the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. “Oh my God, this is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m f-----,” Trump said when Sessions told him that Rod Rosenstein had appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel, according to contemporaneous notes from Sessions’ then-chief of staff.

-- The Wall Street Journal reported last night and the Associated Press confirmed that Mike Pompeo, Tillerson’s replacement, was listening in live on July 25 when Trump prodded Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden’s son. The president asked for this “favor” after Zelensky expressed a desire to buy antitank weapons to fend off the Russian occupation in Crimea, and the conversation came after Trump put a hold on about $400 million in assistance that Congress already approved for Kiev. During that call, according to the rough transcript released by the White House, Trump said that Bill Barr, who replaced Sessions, could help the Ukrainians, along with his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani. As a result of these and other fresh revelations, congressional investigators are increasingly scrutinizing the roles that Barr and Pompeo played as part of their fast-moving impeachment investigation.

-- Though he was mentioned on the Ukraine call, Barr declined to recuse himself from the discussions that led to the swift conclusion by other Trump appointees that the criminal referral from the intelligence community’s inspector general did not merit an FBI investigation. Barr’s spokeswoman stated last week that the attorney general was unaware of Trump’s effort to push Ukraine to investigate the Bidens and that he never spoke with the president nor the Ukrainians about the issue. Speaker Nancy Pelosi has accused Barr of “going rogue” and being involved with the “coverup of the coverup.” Other Democrats, including House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, have called on the attorney general to recuse himself going forward. (In case you missed it, I wrote a Big Idea last Thursday on all the president’s loyalist lawyers in an agency that’s supposed to be independent.)

-- The big news about Barr is that he has been holding private and undisclosed meetings overseas with foreign intelligence officials seeking their help in a Justice Department inquiry that Trump hopes will discredit U.S. intelligence agencies’ examination of possible connections between Russia and members of the Trump campaign during the 2016 election. “Current and former intelligence and law enforcement officials expressed frustration and alarm Monday that the head of the Justice Department was taking such a direct role in reexamining what they view as conspiracy theories and baseless allegations of misconduct,” my colleagues Devlin Barrett, Shane Harris and Matt Zapotosky scooped last night. “Trump still complains frequently that those involved in the investigation of his campaign should be charged with crimes…”

-- Against the backdrop of the Ukraine donnybrook, Barr continues to play a hands-on role in the very probe that Trump long demanded, ensuring that the 2016 election continues to be relitigated three years later. The nation’s chief law enforcement officer startled career professionals inside the government this spring when he testified that “spying did occur” against the Trump campaign.

Meanwhile, Barr drew intense criticism for his misleading summary of Mueller’s report, which deflated public expectations and blunted the political impact of its eventual release. The attorney general announced that he and Rosenstein concluded there was insufficient evidence to establish Trump committed obstruction of justice, even though the Mueller report painstakingly laid out evidence of 10 different cases of potential obstruction by the president. Mueller chose not to reach a definitive conclusion about whether the president sought to obstruct, partly because Justice Department policy says sitting presidents cannot be indicted. “If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so,” Mueller said later.

-- The New York Times also reported last night, and my colleagues have confirmed, that Trump pushed the Australian prime minister during a recent telephone call to help Barr’s inquiry. White House officials subsequently restricted access to the transcript of this call to a network usually reserved for covert operations, just as they did with the suspect Ukraine call. “Like that call, Mr. Trump’s discussion with Prime Minister Scott Morrison of Australia shows the president using high-level diplomacy to advance his personal political interests,” Mark Mazzetti and Katie Benner report in the Times. “The discussion with Mr. Morrison shows the extent to which Mr. Trump views the attorney general as a crucial partner: The president is using federal law enforcement powers to aid his political prospects, settle scores with his perceived ‘deep state’ enemies and show that the Mueller investigation had corrupt, partisan origins.”

THE CREDIBILITY GAP:

-- On ABC’s “This Week” the Sunday before last, host Martha Raddatz asked Pompeo directly about his knowledge of Trump’s conversation with Zelensky. The secretary deflected and replied that she was asking him about the whistleblower report. “None of which I’ve seen,” he said.

Pompeo then attacked former president Barack Obama for not offering sufficient support to Ukraine’s military when he was president. Raddatz followed up by reading from Ukraine’s initial readout of the call and asked whether it’s “perfectly fine” to ask a foreign leader to investigate a political opponent. “I think I saw a statement from the Ukrainian foreign minister that said there was no pressure applied in the course of the conversation,” Pompeo said, adding that Biden is the one who should be investigated. Asked if Trump should release notes from the call, which he would do a few days later, Pompeo said “there’s no evidence” that it would be “appropriate” to do so. All the while, he knew exactly what the president had said.

-- Meanwhile, Barr’s Justice Department continues to behave as if its client is Trump himself, not the American people. The Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in Manhattan disclosed late Monday in a letter to a judge that his office will join a lawsuit filed by Trump that seeks to block a subpoena for eight years of his tax returns. In a brief letter to the judge, U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman said the U.S. government would file a submission on Trump’s behalf by Wednesday, the Journal reports. Berman previously worked for the same law firm as Giuliani. He replaced Preet Bharara, who was fired in 2017 the day after refusing to take a phone call from Trump that he felt was improper and outside the chain of command.

-- Lawyers for House Democrats suggested in a fresh court filing last night for another case that they have reason to believe that the grand-jury redactions in Mueller’s report show that Trump lied about his knowledge of his campaign’s contacts with WikiLeaks, according to Politico. This is part of the House Judiciary Committee’s bid for Mueller’s grand jury materials, which have remained secret by law. “Not only could those materials demonstrate the president’s motives for obstructing the special counsel’s investigation, they also could reveal that Trump was aware of his campaign’s contacts with WikiLeaks,” the House lawyers wrote, responding to the Justice Department’s opposition to the disclosure of the grand jury information.

“To back up their claim, the House’s legal team — led by House General Counsel Douglas Letter — cited a passage in Mueller’s report about former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s testimony that he ‘recalled’ Trump asking to be kept ‘updated’ about WikiLeaks’ disclosures of Democratic National Committee emails,” Andrew Desiderio reports. “There is a grand-jury redaction in that passage, the lawyers note. … Jay Sekulow, Trump’s personal attorney, said the suggestion that Trump lied to Mueller’s investigators is ‘absurd.’”

MORE ON WHAT BARR’S BEEN UP TO:

-- The way Trump talks about Barr compared to how he talked about Sessions is night and day. Five months ago, Trump praised his attorney general for moving to investigate the people who investigated his campaign. “I hope he looks at the U.K., and I hope he looks at Australia, and I hope he looks at Ukraine," Trump told reporters on the South Lawn on May 24. “It’s the greatest hoax in the history of our country, and somebody has to get to the bottom of it.”

From the looks of it, Barr has strived to comply with this presidential plea. “The direct involvement of the nation’s top law enforcement official shows the priority Barr places on the investigation being conducted by John Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, who has been assigned the sensitive task of reviewing U.S. intelligence work surrounding the 2016 election and its aftermath,” Barrett, Harris and Zapotosky reported.

“Barr has already made overtures to British intelligence officials, and last week the attorney general traveled to Italy, where he and Durham met senior Italian government officials and Barr asked the Italians to assist Durham,” they add. “It was not Barr’s first trip to Italy to meet intelligence officials … Barr met with British officials in London over the summer to discuss the Durham probe, said a U.S. official familiar with the matter … In those conversations, according to this official, Barr expressed a belief that the U.S. investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election stemmed from some corrupt origin, the official said. It was not clear what Barr thought was amiss, but he expressed a suspicion that information had been improperly gathered overseas about people connected with the Trump campaign and that the British may have unwittingly assisted those efforts …

“One area that has been of sustained interest to Barr and Durham … is a murky figure named Joseph Mifsud. Mifsud, a European academic, was publicly linked to Russian interference efforts in late 2017, when Mueller revealed a guilty plea by former Trump campaign staffer George Papadopoulos, who admitted he had lied to the FBI about the details of his interactions with Mifsud. … While court papers filed in Mueller’s investigation suggested Mifsud operated in Russia’s interests, conservatives and conspiracy theorists [including Giuliani] have suggested he was instead aligned with Western intelligence agencies.”

-- The Times reports that Barr has not just taken an active role in overseeing Durham’s work but that he has been “pushing his team to move as quickly as possible”: “Mr. Durham has interviewed F.B.I. agents involved in the investigation into Mr. Trump’s campaign,” per Mazzetti and Benner. “Mr. Durham’s investigators have also interviewed other current and former intelligence officials outside the C.I.A. … But Mr. Durham has not questioned current C.I.A. employees, even though his team has had discussions with the agency about interviewing some of them…”

Regarding the Australia call specifically: “Mr. Trump initiated the discussion with Mr. Morrison in recent weeks explicitly for the purpose of requesting Australia’s help in the review,” the Times notes. “In making the request — one of many at Mr. Barr’s behest — Mr. Trump was in effect asking the Australian government to investigate itself. F.B.I. investigators began examining Trump ties to Russia’s 2016 election interference after Australian officials reported that Russian intermediaries had made overtures to Trump advisers about releasing information that would damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign. … Mr. Morrison also met Mr. Trump in Washington this month for official meetings and a state dinner at the White House. Mr. Barr attended the dinner, and Justice Department officials met with Australian representatives during the visit.”

-- Flacks at the White House and DOJ say there was nothing wrong with the outreach to Australia. “I’m old enough to remember when Democrats actually wanted to find out what happened in the 2016 election,” White House spokesman Hogan Gidley said in a statement. “The Democrats clearly don’t want the truth to come out anymore as it might hurt them politically, but this call relates to a DOJ inquiry publicly announced months ago to uncover exactly what happened. The DOJ simply requested the President provide introductions to facilitate that ongoing inquiry, and he did so, that’s all.”

Kerri Kupec, Barr’s spokeswoman, added in her own statement: “Mr. Durham is gathering information from numerous sources, including a number of foreign countries. At Attorney General Barr’s request, the President has contacted other countries to ask them to introduce the Attorney General and Mr. Durham to appropriate officials.”

-- In a fresh piece about Barr for the New Yorker, David Rohde invokes the specter of Richard Nixon’s attorney general John Mitchell, who went to prison for 19 months on conspiracy, obstruction and perjury convictions stemming from his tenure as chairman of the committee to reelect the president in 1972:

“For many in the American legal community, though, Mitchell’s actions before Watergate were more troubling,” Rohde notes. “While serving as Attorney General, Mitchell hatched secret—and, at times, bizarre—plots to aid Nixon politically. He investigated government officials and journalists suspected of leaking damaging information about the President. He prosecuted opponents of the Vietnam War. And he controlled a secret slush fund used to smear Democratic Presidential candidates deemed a threat to Nixon. In one simultaneously abhorrent and amateurish act, Mitchell approved a payment of ten thousand dollars to a faction of the American Nazi Party, in order to carry out a failed effort to remove Governor George Wallace from a Presidential ballot in California. Nixon aides believed that supporters of Wallace—an avowed segregationist running as a third-party candidate—would shift their votes to Nixon.

“Judges later found Mitchell’s actions, such as wiretapping Americans without court orders, to be not only illegal but unconstitutional. He had used his powers as Attorney General to harass and smear Americans engaged in constitutionally protected political activity—from leading Democratic politicians to street protesters. After Nixon resigned and Mitchell was sent to prison, an elaborate series of norms and rules was established to prevent the President from acting like an authoritarian ruler—and the Attorney General from acting like the President’s personal lawyer.

“Since Mitchell, Attorneys General have also worked to restore public faith in the independence of the Justice Department. Edward Levi, a conservative legal scholar whom Gerald Ford appointed as the first post-Watergate Attorney General, was hailed by both political parties for restoring neutrality and integrity to the office. In an attempt to cement Levi’s legacy, multiple Republican and Democratic Attorneys General have recused themselves from investigations involving the Presidents who appointed them. During the Clinton Administration, Janet Reno recused herself from the Whitewater investigation, which led to Clinton’s impeachment. During the George W. Bush Administration, Attorneys General John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales both recused themselves from an investigation of the leak of the C.I.A. agent Valerie Plame’s identity. Barr has an opportunity to … show that he represents the best interests of the American people, not those of Donald Trump. So far, he has declined to do so.”

THE WHISTLEBLOWER:

-- Trump ramped up attacks against the unknown whistleblower, saying he's trying to "find out" who it is, as some Republicans pleaded with the White House for a more measured and strategic response to the impeachment investigation. Toluse Olorunnipa and Ashley Parker report: “The White House has not yet set up anything resembling a ‘war room’ to coordinate its response, and officials spent Monday in meetings trying to determine a path forward. The president’s outside legal team played down the threat of impeachment and dismissed the need for the kind of coordinated war-room-based effort that President Bill Clinton relied on 20 years ago. … As he faces mounting accusations of wrongdoing, Trump is leading his own defense effort, largely from his Twitter account."

-- Legal analysts fear the whistleblower may receive little protection. Matt Zapotosky and John Wagner report: “Federal laws offer only limited protection for those in the intelligence community who report wrongdoing — even when they follow all the rules for doing so. Trump and his allies, analysts said, might face few, if any consequences, for outing the whistleblower or otherwise upending the person’s career. ‘If he wants to destroy this person’s life,’ said whistleblower attorney Bradley P. Moss, ‘there’s not a lot to stop him right now.’ While the acting director of national intelligence told lawmakers last week the whistleblower had acted in good faith and should be protected, Trump has seemed to suggest the opposite. … ‘The whistleblower knew almost nothing, its 2ND HAND description of the call is a fraud!’ Trump wrote on Twitter. The intelligence community inspector general deemed the whistleblower’s complaint credible, despite the person conceding much of the information was secondhand. …

"The inspector general’s office also seemed to dispute an allegation, which Trump had seized on, that the rules for whistleblower complaints were recently changed to allow secondhand information to be passed on. That assertion seemed to be based on reporting in the Federalist, which found a previous whistleblower complaint form with the heading, ‘FIRST-HAND INFORMATION REQUIRED.’ The law never had such a requirement.”

-- The Post’s Fact Checker examines Trump’s incorrect claim that the whistleblower rules have changed: “In his letter outlining the complaint, the whistleblower cited 50 U.S.C. Section 3033(k) (5)(A), which sets out the process that allows someone in the intelligence community to trigger an ‘urgent concern.’ The ‘urgent concern’ form apparently had not been online until recently. But the Federalist, an online publication, obtained an earlier form, from May 2018, which had a section titled: ‘FIRST-HAND INFORMATION REQUIRED.’ ... This warning language is not in the new online form. … But forms don’t change rules; the rules are set by laws and policies. In this case, the guiding document is Intelligence Community Directive 120, which was issued in 2014 and last updated in 2016. … Notwithstanding the section on firsthand information highlighted by the Federalist, the May 2018 form includes a box that can be checked about the sources of information: a) ‘I have personal and/or direct knowledge of events or records involved,’ b) ‘Other employees have told me about events or records involved’ or c) ‘Other source(s) (please explain).’"

-- There’s another whistleblower at the Internal Revenue Service, and House Democrats are exploring whether to release the allegations. From Bloomberg News: “The complaint raises allegations about ‘inappropriate efforts to influence’ the audit process, House Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal said in a letter to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in August. Neal told reporters on Friday that a decision on releasing the complaint depends on advice he receives from lawyers for the House of Representatives. The release of such a complaint could bolster Neal’s lawsuit seeking to obtain six years of Trump’s tax returns, which he filed in July after the Treasury Department rejected the committee’s request. Neal has said he needs the returns to ensure the IRS is following its policy of annually examining the president’s returns. … Neal has cited his committee’s oversight of the presidential audit process to support his lawsuit. Republicans have criticized this rationale, saying Democrats only want the documents as a way to target a political enemy.”

GIULIANI'S TURN IN THE BARREL:

-- Three House committees subpoenaed Giuliani, demanding all records pertaining to his contacts regarding Ukraine, the Biden family and other related matters. Karoun Demirjian and Josh Dawsey report: “In a letter to Giuliani accompanying the subpoena, the chairmen of the three committees — Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) of the Intelligence Committee, Eliot L. Engel (D-N.Y.) of Foreign Affairs, and Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) of Oversight — cited ‘a growing public record’ of information in accusing Giuliani of appearing ‘to have pressed the Ukrainian government to pursue two politically-motivated investigations.’ ‘The first is a prosecution of Ukrainians who provided evidence against Mr. Trump’s convicted campaign chairman, Paul Manafort. The second relates to [Biden],’ the letter continued, demanding Giuliani turn over materials to their investigation by Oct. 15. The chairmen also said they are investigating ‘credible allegations’ that Giuliani ‘acted as an agent of the president in a scheme to advance his personal political interests by abusing the power of the office of the president.’”

In a text to The Post, Giuliani confirmed that he had received a subpoena but would not say if he'll comply: “It raises significant issues concerning legitimacy and constitutional and legal issues, including inter alia, attorney client and other privileges," he wrote. "It will be given appropriate consideration." He did not comment further.

-- On Sean Hannity's Fox show last night, Giuliani said he’s “weighing the alternatives.” The former New York mayor "then indicated he could be swayed if Congress wanted to review video and audio recordings he had gathered over the course of his Ukrainian adventures. Some Democrats, meanwhile, have expressed hesitation about inviting a wild card such as Giuliani for a public hearing," the Daily Beast reports.

-- Republicans may be defending the president, but they aren’t rushing to defend Giuliani. Aaron Blake parses their messaging: “Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.) stepped forward as one of Trump’s earliest defenders. But there was one place he would not go. When Chuck Todd asked him whether he agreed with what Trump and [Giuliani] were doing, Kennedy sought to clarify exactly for whom he was vouching. ‘No. No, no, no. No, no, no, no. I can’t speak for Mr. Giuliani. He’s wild as a March hare,’ Kennedy said. ‘I do not speak for Mr. Giuliani. I speak for John Kennedy.’ The folksiness of the most quotable man in Washington might have masked it, but here was a Republican distancing himself from the president’s attorney and his various pursuits. … Kennedy is hardly the only one backing away from Giuliani." House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-.S.C.) suggested they were sticking up for Trump in TV interviews but not necessarily Giuliani.

THE IMPEACHMENT PROCESS:

-- Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he would have no choice but to take impeachment up if the House advances it. Seung Min Kim reports: “McConnell said he was bound by existing Senate rules governing the impeachment and conviction process, amid speculation that he could simply ignore the specter of putting Trump on trial. … McConnell has given few public clues as to how he would proceed, and several Republican and Democratic officials on Monday cautioned that it was far too premature to predict how one of the most polarized Senates in decades would approach Trump’s trial. ... Now, McConnell is abiding by a 1986 memorandum written by then-Senate Parliamentarian Robert B. Dove, who concluded that Senate rules call for a 'rapid disposition of any impeachment trial' and also require at least two-thirds’ support to avoid taking up the question of trying someone who had been impeached. ...

"Senior party officials have also raised the prospect that Senate Republicans could simply move to dismiss any articles of impeachment — a maneuver that failed during Clinton’s impeachment trial in January 1999 but would have a far likelier chance of succeeding with GOP control of the Senate. Back then, former senator Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) offered the dismissal motion that would have effectively ended Clinton’s Senate trial. But Republicans who controlled the chamber, as well as then-Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.), voted to sustain the proceedings, denying Democrats the simple majority needed to dismiss the trial on a 56-to-44 vote. Should Republicans try this tactic now, at least four GOP senators would have to align with all 47 senators in the Democratic caucus to keep the impeachment trial alive. ...

"If he were to take this route, McConnell would most likely let the proceedings play out for some period of time to give the trial an air of legitimacy. Clinton’s impeachment trial opened Jan. 8, 1999; the vote to dismiss the charges came Jan. 27. The majority leader alluded to the timing issue in the CNBC interview, noting that while his hand is forced on the actual trial proceedings, ‘how long you’re on it is a whole different matter.’ … On the other hand, Republicans also noted that should House Democrats turn the impeachment proceedings into a sharply partisan endeavor, it would be easier to shorten the process once it reached the Senate.”

-- Republican senators Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley are pressing the Justice Department to probe Hillary Clinton and Ukraine. From Politico: “In a letter to Barr released on Monday, Johnson (R-Wis.) and Grassley (R-Iowa) pressed the Justice Department to probe any connection between Clinton and Ukrainian operatives. They said they have ‘concerns about foreign assistance in the 2016 election that have not been thoroughly addressed.’”

-- Senate Democrats are demanding to know whether Trump judicial nominee Steven Menashi, who works in the White House counsel's office and is one of Trump's top legal advisers, has played a role in the handling of the whistleblower complaint. From the AP: “[Ten Senate Democrats] asked Menashi in a letter Friday to disclose what he knows about [the Ukraine call]. ... The senators also want to know what role, if any, Menashi played in responding to a whistleblower complaint that sparked the impeachment inquiry."

-- The Kremlin said its approval is required before Trump can publish the transcript of any of his calls with Vladimir Putin. From the AP: “Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov responded that ‘the publication is possible only on mutual accord.’ ‘If we receive some signals from the U.S., we will consider it,’ he said in a conference call with reporters. Peskov noted that the ‘diplomatic practice doesn’t envisage such publications,’ adding that the issue is U.S. internal business.”

THE POLITICS OF IMPEACHMENT:

-- Nearly half of Americans support Trump’s impeachment, according to two new polls: A Quinnipiac University poll shows that support for impeaching and removing Trump from office has grown from 37 percent of registered voters at the start of last week to 47 percent as of Sunday. An identical 47 percent said Trump shouldn’t be impeached. Meanwhile, a CNN poll found that 47 percent of American adults believe Trump should be impeached, a rise from 41 percent in May, when CNN last asked that question. Here are other key takeaways:

Both polls found movement among independents. The CNN poll found an 11-point rise in support among this group, which has been consistently critical of impeachment, from 35 percent to 46 percent. In the Quinnipiac poll, independents' support for impeachment grew from 34 to 42 percent.

Despite an increase in support for impeachment, the Quinnipiac poll showed no drop-off in Trump’s approval rating, which stands at 41 percent among registered voters. That's because support among Democrats for impeachment rose from 73 percent last week to 90 percent now. The CNN poll didn’t show significant change among Democrats.

-- "In CNN’s new poll, 14 percent of Republicans think Trump should be impeached and removed from office," Philip Bump notes. "That figure mirrors another question in Quinnipiac’s poll. … Across the board, support for an inquiry was only slightly higher than support for straight-up impeachment and removal. On the one hand, that suggests that those who support an inquiry are almost all people who think Trump should be removed from office. On the other, though, it also suggests that those who oppose removing Trump from office aren’t even interested in investigating the Ukraine issue. That’s probably partly a function of the fact that people tend to see the impeachment push as a partisan issue.”

-- A super PAC that supports GOP candidates launched attack ads against three House Democrats for backing what it calls “a radical scheme to impeach.” From the AP: “The spots by the Congressional Leadership Fund target veteran Rep. Matt Cartwright of Pennsylvania and freshmen Reps. Elaine Luria of Virginia and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan. They are among 31 House Democrats representing districts that Trump carried in 2016. The Luria ad, largely verbatim to the other two, says the effort is ‘Dividing the country. Tearing us apart. Because she doesn’t like the President.’ The group plans to run the ads during Congress’ current two-week recess.”

NOTABLE COMMENTARY:

-- Jeff Flake, the former GOP senator from Arizona, endorses impeachment in an op-ed for The Post: “Fellow Republicans, there’s still time to save your souls.”

-- The Post’s Editorial Board: “Trump’s tweets distract from the Ukraine matter, but we can’t ignore them."

-- The Intercept’s James Risen: “When [Biden] went to Ukraine, he was not trying to protect his son – quite the reverse."

-- Columnist Karen Tumulty: “James Madison warned us that Trump is dangerously un-American.”

-- Eugene Robinson: “The most damaging witness against Trump is Trump.”

-- Hugh Hewitt: “If you want the truth on impeachment, stay away from the fringes.”

-- Michael McFaul: “Here’s what a presidential phone call with a foreign leader looks like in a normal White House.”

-- The Atlantic’s David Frum: “Bill Clinton Had a Strategy. Trump Is Doing the Opposite.”

-- George Washington University Law School professor Randall Eliason: “Trump’s ‘hearsay’ defense plays right into Democrats’ hands.”

-- Charles Lane: “The impeachment road leads to voters – in the Senate and at the polls.”

-- Max Boot: “Even if the Senate won’t convict, impeachment will still punish and deter.”

-- Robert Atkins and Adam P. Frankel: “President Pelosi? It could happen.”

-- Fox News judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano: Trump’s actions are “arguably impeachable.”

-- Former House GOP staffer Kurt Bardella for USA Today: “Trump thinks Republicans weren't tough on Obama. Believe me, we were.”

-- Jordan Gans-Morse, a political scientist at Northwestern University: “Ukraine has been waging war on corruption. A U.S. president encouraging a ‘favor’ could undermine these reforms.”

-- National Review’s Charles C. W. Cooke criticized the NYT story: “The Australia story is not a story … There’s no suggestion of a quid pro quo here. And there is nothing odd about Trump’s asking these questions of Australia given that Australia contributed information into the Five Eyes system that, eventually, informed the Mueller investigation and had serious effects on American politics.”

-- A counterpoint from Mother Jones’s Kevin Drum: “The issue here isn’t that a legitimate investigation might just happen to produce findings favorable to Trump. That would be fine. But aside from the fact that this was never really a legitimate investigation to start with, we aren’t talking about Trump keeping himself at arm’s length and letting the chips fall where they may. We’re talking about Donald Trump explicitly getting on the phone to encourage an ally to help him.”

0 notes

ecofinisher · 5 years

Text

The Adventures of Super Nathan 2 - Chap. 15

Chapter 15

https://archiveofourown.org/works/18224606/chapters/46626247

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13243294/15/Miraculous-The-Adventures-of-Super-Nathan-2

https://www.wattpad.com/754695900-miraculous-the-adventures-of-super-nathan-2

At the start of the next week Gabriel Agreste went together with the mother of Kagami to the city hall and waited there inside a meeting room for the state agent they want to discuss their idea about building a home for the homeless pets and to offer the homeless people a spot for them to work there, until they find a place to work and live.

“Are you and Kagami feeling alright after, what happened on the night after our dinner?” Questioned the fashion designer earning a nod from the blue-haired woman.

“Nothing harmed us” Responded Tomoe. “Our driver is recovering from the concussion and might come out of the hospital at the end of the week.”

“That is good” Replied Mr. Agreste. “If you two don’t feel safe at home, we have free rooms in the house and you and Kagami could sleep there until this guy gets caught”

“Thank you Gabriel-san, but it’s not necessary”

“Sure, but in case you change your mind, the door is always open” The blonde said making the Japanese woman smile, afterward the door got open and at the entrance appeared a woman with blonde hair carrying a file on her hands, then she walked up at the two, that sat in front of the meeting desk and gave the two her hand.

“Sorry for the delay, I’m Mrs. Hapréle and I’ve talked with you on the telephone last week Mr. Agreste. As I heard about your idea I’ve looked through all the buildings, that are free and picked up a few of them. I can explain to you how I imagined everything in and outside of the building and if you two want we can change some things or remove or add some more details.” The woman explained sitting down next to Gabriel showing him the first four pictures of different types of buildings, then Gabriel picked up the third image which was a large factory over an island, that was located at the Seine. Gabriel recognized the building, which used to be a car manufacturer and built in the past many French vehicles for the imports and for selling.

“This old car factory would be perfect,” Gabriel said, then Mrs. Hapréle took from her file a few sheets out and handed them to the man.

“The first idea would be the ground floor would have the cages for the stray pets with dog doors, so they could always go in and out to the outside, which would be surrounded by fences. At the outside I also thought on a small path for people to go look around and watch the strays, walking in the free space.”

“Sounds neat” Replied Mrs. Tsurugi.

“In the kennels nowadays the pets have also a free space to walk and play, but it’s not as big as it’s going to be here” Mrs. Hapréle explained the two adults vice versa to her. “I don’t know if you wanted to do anything else on the second floor, so I brought these ideas here” The blonde woman mentioned handing out the sheets at Gabriel Agreste, so he could look at them.

“The first drabble is only a copy of the first floor with the cages, including a stairway down to the latter mentioned floor. The second drabble contains at the end of the floor a veterinary station, who depending on who you organize to come here either work all day here or in her own clinic and comes by, when necessary.”

“Okay”

“In front of the veterinary on the right side is going to be the office of the warden, next to it would be the souvenir shop, if you’re planning to have one or we can leave it out. On the other side would be the stall for the people to buy snacks and drinks, next to it would be the restrooms….and eventually, I might change this up to here, where the souvenir shop is or right next to the office if the souvenir shop isn’t part of the plans”

“Good and the other ones?” Asked Gabriel moving together with the woman to the next sheet.

“This one is quite similar to the first, besides the office takes place here, where the vet was in the first sketch. The souvenirs are now here in front of the office and vice versa from the souvenirs will be the stall for the snacks, new here, where the toilets were in the first will be one or two elevators and on the other side of the room the restrooms”

“The fourth one the vet and the office are here on the back together, in front of the vet are the restrooms, while in front of the office the stall stands along with the souvenir shop and the lifts. Next to the toilets will be a row of cages again for the strays.”

“They’re all good,” Gabriel said. “The last one I liked the most”

“That’s great, what about you Mrs. Tsurugi?” The woman asked looking at the woman, that had her eyes covered with her sunglasses.

“The last two sounded great to me, but I thought about instead of having a souvenir shop, there could be a side, where only the restrooms, the stand and the lifts were and on the other end more cages for the animals, but for those, who have special needs and need to recover. Maybe a special cage or room for them?” Tomoe Tsurugi suggested then the woman appointed it on the last sheet, she showed the two adults.

“Okay about the outside now, have you got any special wishes?” Questioned Madame Hapréle and Gabriel glanced at Mrs. Tsurugi, who had her face straight at the woman.

“Is it possible, that we could talk with a gardener or a landscaper about this?” Gabriel asked the woman.

“You need most likely to meet one of them and explain your situation and they would give you any ideas about how it should look like for the pets. I don’t think it needs to be a perfect garden since most of the pets use it as a bathroom to do their needs”

“Yes of course, but I was more thinking about, that the homeless people, we would hire could walk the pets around like normal owners”

“Or we could also let visitors walk the pets for free?” Suggested the mother of Kagami. “Eventually if that person starts to like the pet and the pet likes the person too, they could also adopt the pet if they want”

“Just like in the kennels?”

“What would be also a good idea would be for children and teens to spend a few hours with a pet and take care of them like the pet really belonged to them, so they could learn how much responsibility it takes to own a pet.”

“That’s something I wanted to do with my son at some point, but I was afraid it wouldn’t work out or Adrien would get hurt by the pet”

“This wouldn't happen that easy Gabriel”

“I know, it was long ago I wanted to give my son a pet. It was on the time my wife had disappeared. My former assistant Nathalie had suggested me to buy my son a Labrador”

“Labradors are very smart dogs. Back in Japan people had suggested me to get one to use as assistance when I went out.”

“So you had one?”

“No, but I was always busy with Kagami’s schedule, that I decided to not get one, because then I wouldn’t have any time to take care of him” Explained Mrs. Agreste earning a nod from the blonde.

“If you two want, I can look up for addresses for all the available gardeners and landscapes around Paris, so you can get more ideas for the outside. I also will hand you out my visit card and if you want I can suggest you some architects and companies to take care of the renovation of the building, if we’re staying with this one”

“Sure I’m fine with it and Mrs. Tsurugi?” Asked Adrien’s father looking at the mother of his son’s girlfriend, who nodded in agreement with the man. “Yes we take that house”

“Good so I can prepare the contract for you two to sign,” The woman said taking out from her file a tablet, then placed it on the table turning it on. Afterwards, she opened the writing app to search for the specific contract, that was needed for the two.

At the Françoise Dupont high school, the class of Miss Bustier went back into their classroom after the break to attend her next lessons, which was English.

“Good morning everyone” Greeted Miss Bustier watching all the classmates entering into her room, then Rose passed by the teacher.

“Morning Miss Bustier, can I pick out a name from the jar to give her a compliment?” Asked the short blonde earning a nod from the teacher.

“Of course you can” Responded the redhead with a smile watching the short girl happily pick the jar with the names of the classmates to put her hand in it and take a small note out of the jar, afterward she opened the sheet to read the name.

“I’ve got Nathaniel,” Rose said making the redhead groan as he had to come to the front of the class.

“Why me?” Nathaniel asked as he was about to sit down next to the girlfriend.

“Lucky you, it ain’t me,” Lila said making Nathaniel look bewildered at her.

“Why?”

“Well you wouldn’t like the compliments I would give you,” Lila said wiggling with her eyebrows setting the boy in shock.

“Lila, you’re crazy”

“You don’t need to tell me something I already know Nathy” Lila replied with a giggle, then Nathaniel walked to Rose, who smiled at him excited to hear his compliment.

“You already know that and I probably said this like a thousand times, but you’re the nicest girl in our school”

“Awww thank you so much Nathaniel and you’ve got the funkiest hairstyle from all the boys here,” Rose said looking at her classmates, then watched Kim caress his blonde highlight over his hair.

“You forgot me Rose,” Kim said forming his hand into a pistol, making the short teenage girl giggle.

“Sorry, but Nath has the best,” Rose said watching Nathaniel head back to his seat and dropped his arms over the table.

“Can I pick the next two?” Asked Rose earning a nod from the teacher, therefore Rose stuck her arm into the jar again and Alya got up from her sheet walking with her tablet in her arms.

“Miss Bustier, can I prepare myself for the presentation?” Questioned the Martinic descendant girl, then the teacher agreed accompanying the girl to her desk to assist her in connecting the tablet with the overhead projector.

“Now we have to call….Ivan and……..Marinette to the front of the class” Rose said watching Marinette get up from her seat followed by Ivan, who was sitting vice versa to the empty seat next to Marinette.

“That will be interesting,” Rose said watching Marinette and Ivan stood in front of each other, wondering, what they could say about each other.

“I like the fact you always seem to find a solution to everything,” Ivan said making the girl with the pigtails smile.

“The best thing I find about you Ivan is, that you’re always there for your friends and your girlfriend, whenever they need you”

“Aww that was cute,” Rose said putting her arm into the jar again. “This is the last time I promise,” Rose said looking at Miss Bustier, that checked together with Alya on the tablet if the presentation was working.

“Now we got….Juleka and Kagami” Rose said watching her girlfriend and her friend come to the front of the class to give each other a compliment.

“My favorite thing about you is your smile,” Kagami said making Rose smile and hug her tall girlfriend.

“That’s my favorite thing about her too”

“Aww,” Kagami said watching Juleka turn a little pink on her face as the shorter girl gave her a hug.

“Boohoo, I’m crying, can we start the lessons, please? I want to learn something” Chloé said waving her hand in front of her mouth after yawning.

“Only Juleka needs to say something, then we’re done. It only takes a few seconds” Rose said earning a nod from the two friends beside her.

“What do you want her to say?” Asked Chloé.

“A compliment. That’s what all this game is about” Rose responded at the other blonde girl. “Come on Juleka, you can do it” “You’re very smart Kagami,” Juleka said a little quiet, making Kagami smile, who following after wide her eyes as she heard along with the girl Chloé interrupting them again.

“Everyone in the class knows she’s smart and very skilled at fencing. Don’t you have something new?” Asked Chloé.

“Chloé Bourgeois, if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all” Miss Bustier said glaring sternly at the daughter of the mayor.

“But what’s the point of this game, if certain people keep saying the same thing about the others?” Asked the girl.

“Chloé just listen to Miss Bustier and stay out of it” Adrien ordered his childhood friend. “Arguing about something, that belongs to our school schedule is none of your business”

“Ignore Chloé, just tell anything, so we can go back to our seats,” Kagami told the girl earning a nod from the raven-haired girl.

“You...you’re p...pretty” Complimented Juleka making the Japanese girl smile, then shriek as again the mayor’s daughter raised her voice in the middle of the class.

“Aha! I told you Adrikins you couldn't trust this sushi-eating rat. She’s flirting with Juleka!”

“No one is flirting here!” Hissed Adrien annoyed with the attitude of his friend. “That was just a normal compliment”

“What is your problem Chloé?” Asked the Japanese descendant girl. “Why do you have to mess with the others”

“That’s one of your business, Kagami” Replied the blonde crossing her arms, causing the brown-eyed girl to roll her eyes.

“What’s the point of this conversation,” The girl said looking at Juleka, that was sad about the situation, then Kagami placed her arm behind the raven-haired girl’s back to caress it. “Forget everything Chloé said” The blue-haired girl said watching the girl make her way back to the seat and sit down, followed by Rose and the blonde focused along with the other classmates on Alya’s presentation. The overhead projector got turned on showing a picture of a young journalist with short brown hair with several photos related with the news and down on the presentation, Alya had her full name on it, followed by the theme of her presentation.

“Greetings everyone, I’m going to do a presentation about one of my favorite idols. I wanted to do about Ladybug, but she had got retired a few years ago. So my second choice was the young journalist River Langerak, who visited this high school here and she accepted it and I spend the whole afternoon with her, seeing her at the work and she told me, how she got there” Alya said, then used a remote to change on her power point to the next slide showing the table of contents of her presentation.

At the last row, Nathaniel was drawing on his sketchbook, then Lila came with her face closer to his ear to whisper into it.

“When Alix is going to do the presentation about you and how are you going to manage this?” The brunette asked her boyfriend.

“Don’t worry, I have a stupid plan” Responded Nathaniel. “I’m pretending, that I have to go during the presentations to the toilet, then I transform into a hero and enter through the window to visit all”

“You’re going to pretend, that you got diarrhea or something?”

“More like a terrible stomach-ache” Corrected the redhead. “Don’t worry, I’ll be careful”

“Alright and please don’t do anything crazy, during the presentation”

“Of course not” Nathaniel promised the girl, then got nudged by her. Parallel to the couple Rose was paying attention to Alya’s presentation, next to her Juleka had her head leaned down to the desk sobbing quietly, afterward she cleaned her tears with her hand and lied her head down on the table earning a surprised look of her girlfriend.

“Come Juleka, forget what Chloé said. She’s not worth your attention” Rose said passing her hand on Juleka’s back to comfort her.

“Is Juleka crying?” Asked the Vietnamese classmate looking back at Rose, watching the dark-dressed girl sob on her arms, then watched Rose nod to respond in mute at his question. “Maybe she needs to be alone for a moment until she feels better?”

“Too bad Luka isn’t here for us, he knows how to calm her down,” Rose said afterward Juleka got up and passed behind Nathaniel and Lila, who gazed back at her worried about her feelings, also the students in front of them noted, that something was wrong with the raven-haired girl.

“Juleka, are you alright?” Asked the Italian girl, then as the sister of Luka passed beside Ivan, Kagami got up from her seat and grabbed the girl on her hand.

“You don’t have to go out there all alone. Stay here with your friends, stay here with Rose” Kagami suggested the girl with the purple streak, who looked away from the Asian descendant girl. “Come with me”

“Kagami please go back to your seat.” Commanded Miss Bustier making Kagami sight and walk back to her seat. “Juleka, you know you’re a very great and strong girl. You had a rough childhood as your father had left your family all alone”

“So that’s why she doesn’t have a boyfriend like everyone else”

“Chloé!” Shouted the half of the classmates.

“Girl can you just shell up for the next few hours?” Asked the Moroccan descendant student, that sat next to Adrien.

“Loving someone of the same gender isn’t wrong” Added Myléne.

“Of course it is!” Hissed Chloé. “I mean, how is she supposed to found a family in the future if she and Rose are both females?” Asked Chloé looking at Juleka, that looked back at Rose, which got shocked about the question. Juleka covered her face starting to cry, making all the others look at her beside Chloé in pitifulness.

“Your luck Chloé is, that Ladybug and Cat Noir have defeated Hawk Moth a few years ago. If Hawk Moth was still around, he for sure would have akumatized Juleka, so she could kick your ass” Alix said glaring at the blonde girl.

“Good thing now I don’t have to worry about it anymore,” Chloé said with a short chuckle, then on the side of the desk, Lila smashed with her flat hands on the table shrieking Chloé.

“You know what you are?” Asked the Italian girl. “You’re a miserable, spoiled brat”

“Who asked you Pinocchio?” The blonde asked, then behind Lila Juleka fell on her knees looking at the ground, afterward, all classmates turned their eyes on her to see her there inhaling in and out slowly.

“Juleka are you alright?” Asked Adrien coming down at her to see her facial expression wasn’t sad anymore, but now angry.

“Juleka is gone for now,” Juleka said with a deep voice disappearing in a cloud of dark smoke and the raven-haired girl had disappeared and a dark blue tune colored version of Reflekta stood there with the hair gelled up like a manga character forming pyramid-like form. On the place of the skirt, the villain wore a blue kilt coming down to her knees and light blue thighs and dark blue boots. “The name is Genderbend”

“Oh oh,” Adrien said making Marinette gulp about the akumatization of her boyfriend’s sister.

“But wasn’t Hawk Moth already defeated?” Asked Nino looking at the blonde, who shrugged the shoulders and Kagami passed beside Nino and Adrien slowly heading at the exit of the classroom.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Asked Genderbend raising her arm up aiming with her laser gun, she had installed on her arm at the Japanese girl, that shrieked as the villain caught her.

“Out of here” Responded Kagami making Chloé laugh.

“You all say she’s very brave and all that and look now who wants to leave this classroom as soon as an akuma appears?”

“Shut up Chloé, she’s one of the fewer girls here that have the guts to tell you off your shitty behavior”

“Talking about shitty behavior have you first listened to your voice?” Asked the blonde. “You sound like that weird Swede from the Bing Bong Song”

“Well if I were you I would take a nice selfie of yourself, cause afterward you’ll not going to look that pretty anymore”

“If I have to look like you it’s not gonna make you look better, cause you still look as awful as before” Chloé mentioned making Genderbend furrow her eyebrows in anger, lifting her arm up pointing at Chloé, then as she fired her laser arrow Chloé got pulled to the floor towards Genderbend and the laser hit Sabrina instead.

“Sabrina!” Shouted a few classmates, afterwards, Sabrina had changed gender and now she had short red hair similar to Kagami’s, a purple men vest and light blue shorts with black shoes on her feet.

“Sabrina has turned into a guy” Lila mentioned surprised standing close to Miss Bustier, which had grabbed the brunette on the arms to avoid her from going back.

“That explains, why the name Genderbend,” Kim said then shrieked as Genderbend pointed her gun at him firing another laser transforming him into a female with the same clothing, but with a ponytail, blush, red gloss and eyelashes over the eyelid. “Ah!” Screamed Kim nearly like a girl, making Ivan laugh along with Nino.

“So who’s the next?” Asked Genderbend looking around at the back to only see Ivan in front of the seat of Nathaniel and Lila.

“A new makeover for Nathaniel would not be bad” Chloé said with a laughter, then Genderbend turned herself around aiming the French girl again and as she shot the arrow in front of Chloé’s face appeared a mirror, which ended up ricochet the attack back at the villain, who jumped in surprise at the reflect and hid behind Myléne frighting her, therefore she got anxious as she witnessed her boyfriend being hit by the ray and turn into a woman. Genderbend looked back at the previous victim, which had grabbed the mirror to see the symbol of the art miraculous holder, then she looked at the door to recognize the superhero Super Nathan standing at the entrance of the door along with Lady Red.

“Dear Juleka, why did you get sad?” Asked Super Nathan. “A girl that cute and smart doesn’t need to get herself brought down like that”

“I’m a boy, you idiot,” Genderbend said making Super Nathan wide his eyes bewildered, afterward the purple-skinned superhero got hit by an arrow and turned also into a girl, but with red shoulder-length hair.

“Now that was low” Super Nathan said as Genderbend smirked about it.

“Oh great well done, how are you going to get us out of this?” Asked Chloé as Super Nathan wasn’t able to work without his tablet.

“With my bare hands” Super Nathan said running towards Genderbend, who held her weapon towards the superhero, then Super Nathan jumped at the villain bringing her down on the floor.

“Quick get out of here!” Demanded Lady Red stepping in the classroom, then watched the students ran quickly at the exit, then observed Super Nathan trying to hold Genderbend down, then Lila assisted Super Nathan holding the villain down, then the villain pushed Lila away from her, which flew against the table of the teacher hitting her head on it.

“Lila!” Shouted Super Nathan getting shoved away towards the desk of Marinette, then Lady Red stepped in front of Lila spinning her yo-yo in front of her, then looked down at the Italian girl, who was patting her own head from the impact on the wooden desk.

“You’re alright?” Asked the Japanese heroine earning a thumb up from the brunette.

“You’re not going to be able to protect your friend forever,” The dark blue villain said, then heard a familiar voice coming from the door to see the cat-themed superhero stand there playing with his tail on his hand.

“There is a super villain we gotta defeat? That’s pawesome!” Cat Noir said making Genderbend look unimpressed at the hero coming up with his cat puns. “What? Are they claw-ful?” Questioned Cat Noir. “I can do better,” The superhero said looking at Lady Red and Lila winking at them quickly with his left eye, earning a nod from the two as they got, what Cat Noir had planned.

“Fur-real I’m a very….cathletic person….I also enjoy reading lots of furry tails, but what I enjoy the most is….hanging out with my fur-ends…...Litter-ally….I...uhm….”

“You’re tricking me!” Shouted Genderbend shooting an arrow towards Lady Red, who just managed to deflect the attack in time with her yo-yo, after that Super Nathan, who still was in the female body jumped at Genderbend bringing her down on the floor.

“Damn the boobs are kind of annoying to me,” Super Nathan said making Lila giggle, then Lady Red stepped on right arm of Genderbend, where the laser gun was and Cat Noir took the baton from his back to break the wrist gun, then from the gun flew out a black colored butterfly, which the friends around Genderbend saw.

“It really is an akuma,” Cat Noir said. “But what is it doing here?”

“Most important question, who is now using the moth miraculous” Added the Italian girl.

“I don’t know, but we have to figure this out,” Lady Red said letting her yo-yo roll down, then she spun it around to catch the akuma. “Time to de-evilize!”

Lady Red released the akuma from her yo-yo, who was now a normal butterfly again. “Goodbye, little butterfly” The blue-haired heroine observed with a smile the butterfly flying away out of the classroom, then she threw her yo-yo up in the air again. “Miraculous!” Shouted Lady Red to activate the healing light to restore everything back to normal, including setting Super Nathan and other students back into their previous genders.

“Yes! I’m a guy again!” Super Nathan shouted excited making his girlfriend laugh, then they looked down at Genderbend, who had transformed back into Juleka Couffaine.

“Are you alright, Juleka?” Asked Lady Red coming down to her knees.

“What happened?” Questioned the raven-haired girl seeing Super Nathan present with Lila and Cat Noir.

“You were akumatized, but whoever caused you this or why it’s unknown” Responded Cat Noir. “Unless do you remember him entering in contact with you?”

“I don’t know, he wanted me to transform so many people as possible into the opposite gender….he promised me he would turn me into a boy, if I did everything he said”

“He didn’t ask anything about the miraculouses?” Questioned Lila and Juleka shrugged her shoulder.

“I don’t remember” Replied Juleka.

“And why exactly do you want to turn into a boy?” Asked Cat Noir. “Do you not like it to be female?”

“It’s just….I’m afraid about me and Rose’s future.”

“She won’t ever leave you Juleka. She loves you” Lila comforted the raven-haired girl caressing her on the back. “And you know that too”

“I know, but what if everyone in the future has babies?” Asked Luka’s younger sister. “What will be about Rose? She adores children and she has always gushed about how badly she wanted to have her own”

“You two can adopt?” Suggested Super Nathan. “There are many children, that don’t have any parents and need to be adopted”

“Also artificial insemination is a thing….is that legal in France?” Questioned the Italian watching Lady Red shrug her shoulders.

“Come on Juleka, you two will find a way to have your own child. And I think Rose would like the idea of adopting a child or two. What do you think?” Suggested the blonde cat superhero.

“I think this is good” Juleka responded making the blonde smile. “Thank you” Super Nathan helped Juleka up, then walked her out of the classroom, leaving the other three back.

“This situation now makes me think on last time when Adrien asked me from where babies actually came from” Lady Red mentioned making the cat-themed superhero blush.

“Not that story again” Cat Noir said making Lila smirk at his reaction.

“What happened?” Asked Lila curious.

“Please it’s just embarrassing”

“Come on, Adri. No one is ever gonna hear this, besides us” Lady Red pleaded the blonde, who crossed his arms ignoring the girlfriend.

“Nope”

“I swear I won’t tell this anyone nor laugh at it” Lila promised the blonde, who rolled his eyes.

“Okay, because it’s you,” Cat Noir said faking a cough before he could say it. “Last winter I said something with I would even have 100 children to make Kagami happy, then she had turned really red about, what I said making Luka laugh. Of course, I got confused about his reaction, then asked him, what was so funny and he told me, it was impossible for us to have 100 children from our own and I asked him why afterward Kagami asked me if I knew exactly how babies were…..made….” Explained the dark-dressed superhero causing Lila to laugh and fall down on the floor at the story. “Then she and Luka explained to me and they kinda reacted like that too”

“We all know about him being oblivious sometimes, but this was kinda too much. But at least he knows it now”

“If this was the case with Nathaniel I think I couldn't be able to explain him everything without him feeling awkward about it or me not laughing”

“You were lucky then,” Lady Red told her best friend, who nodded at the blue-haired girl. “Come let’s get out of here and transform back, before they get suspicious about us” Cat Noir’s girlfriend warned the blonde, then the three ran out of the classroom to drop their suits down.

#miraculous #miraculousladybug #chat noir #adrienagreste #lilarossi #chloe bourgeois #Kagami Tsurugi #juleka couffaine #rose lavillant #genderbend is inspired by reflekta #Nino lahiffe #alya cesaire #marinette dupain cheng #nathaniel kurtzberg #super nathan #fanfiction #fanfic #Wattpad #ao3

0 notes