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ricinbach · 3 years

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for the record. | chapter 2 - bravo

it was time you tied the name to the person behind it.

[Day 0, 2011 - 06:50:12, Credenhill, UK]

Modern warfare was a man’s world.

Everyone knew it, everyone acknowledged it. It was as if there was this unvisible barrier surrounding certain aspects of the life, unwritten rules memorized by many soldiers.

No one would speak about it, nor would anyone bother to, but everytime the guns were locked and loaded, fuels of engines were replenished and explosives were strapped - it was one of the many things running rampant in your mind.

Though you had been young compared to the others, having some considerable amount of years of service under your belt had shown you that some truths were indeed hard to swallow. Yet they had to be accepted nonetheless - it was just the way things worked in your line of duty. After all, it had been just one of the many facts of the matter that you were forced to suppres deep down into your subconscious, along with many emotions associated with them.

They taught you how to suck in your much-preserved pride as you crawled in deep gravel and dirt, your skin a mess made out of mud. As you collapsed out of dehydration during the trek in the jungles, only to be pulled back to your feet to face yet another barked order. As you roared in pain when a bullet lodged itself into your flesh, twice as loud as it was pulled out.

They never taught you how not to miss the fallen, the friend and the comrade, or how to forget about those nightmares creeping into your being at night.

It had taken a lot of pondering and controlling your mental before stepping onto that plane and getting flown out to Credenhill. Being placed on the reserve regiment for some time had gotten to you - it felt like an eternity since you had been out in the field, deployed on an assignment. Weeks that had been filled with gathering intelligence and running strategy behind operations would slowly transform themselves into lots of pushups and reloading, that you had absolutely no doubt about.

However, spoken in the silent mumble of your lips, you prayed your body did not betray you - operating behind screens and files was lightwork compared to the drills that you suspected Captain Price would put you through. At some point the muscle memory would kick in, that was for sure, yet what concerned you was how long it would take till that eventually came true.

One step at a time, Sergeant.

It indeed was a beautiful day out. The rays of sunshine out in the vast concrete of the base courtyard emanated within the short sleeves, providing some much-needed warmth and comfort. Not much time had been given as you arrived on base - “get yourself to the range right away, soldier,” were the instructions that had followed the moment your feet touched the earth in the forsaken hours of the early morning.

Task Force 141. Now, that was a nice mouthful for classic selection training, considering the fact that you had been shipped out to the common 22nd Regiment training compound, the choice baffling you. Operating behind enemy lines within a covert squad certainly could not work when you were right where the enemy expected you to be - one of the main training bases of the entire Special Air Service. He must have been planning something substantial yet hidden behind plain sight - it had been impossible to get a word out of the renown Captain ever since he had approached you in London - in broad daylight, much to your added surprise in hindsight.

That meant you would just have to wait and see.

As your light steps took you towards the armory, clad in your gear of tactical shirt and pants with all the holsters strapped in place, there was a certain mix of emotions harbored in your heart and resonated within your being. Some confusion due to the lack of direction in your assignment.

And then, even though faint, came in a deeply-lodged sense of peace. How everything seemed to fit just a bit tighter, a little bit better - the perfect little adjustment to the crooked painting on the wall. The atmosphere of the green hangars and tents, the smell of tank engine fuel with the sound of shell casings dropping, one after the other, in soft clinks. The constant rush and the ever-lasting adrenaline.

There was a certain habituality to it, an accustomed year’s ease and some beauty in the routine of it all - and your soul had apparently longed for it for too long.

Welcome to your new home.

“Glad you made it, Sergeant,” a familiar face would greet you as bright lights hit you upon entering the hangar, his hand gesturing towards the guns laid out on the table. Nodding your head with a small smile, you would oblige.

“I trust you know the drill. Report back to me after you’re comfortable with the rifle - Captain Price wants to see you.”

That made your jaw clench in anticipation, or was it more of a bottled worry? Whatever it had been, it certainly did help as your bullets rained down on target after target, getting used to the weight of the rifle within your hands - while some shots had been a bit lacking, it did not take too many attempts for you to get back into the groove. The metallic sounds of fake targets lowering and the explosions helping you remember.

Footsteps behind you as yet another target went down in a screeching rusty sound. It seemed like he had chosen to watch, after all. “Not bad. Might even be a bit better than the FNG,” Gaz would comment on your shooting - which you believed was his attempt at being as nice as possible - as you turned your body to face him, your grip on the weapon in front of you relaxed. That earned him a little cocking of your eyebrow, tilting your head in a newfound curiosity.

“FNG?”

And there came the words, along with a nod.

“Fresh out of Selection. His name is Soap.”

There it was again. That name. Now, you had heard your fair share of silly little nicknames thrown around to soldiers - the kinds that stuck with them forever. This had to make the list of the best you had heard.

What the hell kind of a name is Soap, anyway?

It was like he read your mind, noticing that silent pause coupled with the upwards curl in your lips - returning the smile lightheartedly as he gestured you to follow him outside. “Weird name, eh? Captain was not willing to take it easy on him,” he commented as he walked alongside you to the far hangar, the fresh air hitting you along with the grumbles and low roars of the armor passing by.

“I bet,” you returned, a slight chuckle on your lips. Your tone growing just a tad bit lower, softer and meaningful just before the comfortable silence of your walk was cut off at the entrance of your destination.

“It’s good to see you, Kyle.”

“Likewise,” he acknowledged, giving you the type of understanding nod shared between old comrades alike - gesturing you to enter through the vast metal doors as you took a deep breath in your slightly nervous state due to the unknowns behind that hangar wall.

Orders were barked, audible even right from the entrance as you heard commotion. A replica of an obstacle course was occupying most of the space, the Union Jack and the SAS emblem proudly hanging next to each other on the far end. Shots were being fired, and you could hear the heavy footsteps sprint down the wooden flooring.

On the left side, which quickly became your next focal point, stood your new team - a few soldiers huddled up and clad in blackout tactical gear, watching the monitors to perhaps gauge how well the soldier running the course was doing. And of course there he was - the signature beard was recognizable from miles away as he leaned into the microphone installed, practically yelling to the intercom even though the poor soldier was most likely double-hearing him with the echoes of his tone.

His voice followed after a couple more final gunshots dropped in the distance - "Sprint to the finish!"

As you advanced towards observation with Gaz announcing your presence, you could not help but note the uniforms. Completely blacked out gear, light waxed material. Fit for a night time operation - in and out, close quarter combat. Relatively not too heavy material that would last in water and land. It made you wonder what your next mission would look like already.

“Welcome back into the fight, Sergeant,” the familiar commanding voice spoke, the blue eyes softening ever so slightly upon the sight of you yet never losing professionalism.

“It’s good to be back, Sir,” came your response, standing still and awaiting orders as you took a look around your surroundings once more - the static of the screens helping just a tad to numb your mind as you felt all pairs of eyes in that room were focused in on you.

Nothing you had not handled before, so you stood up even straighter - and put a brave face, jaw clenched.

“We’ll debrief for the mission ahead once the FNG carries himself over,” he instructed all the others, his tone sounding almost tired of dealing with the new guy, as the other soldiers that you could not really recognize behind the dark fabric chuckled. With the grip on your weapon relaxed, you continued to hold it against your chest like you were trained to do, losing yourself in the gentle upheaval of the base behind you. The smell of cordite coming in closer, it was followed by residual panting and boots against concrete.

“Pretty good, Soap. But I’ve seen better.”

As you searched for the body to finally associate the name to, it did not take long for you to spot yet another pair of blues, these ones a bit stormy and icy in the little specks - piercing nonetheless. Tall, you would note, as his built legs took him towards the monitors you stood near. His chest heaved in a mild rhythm, the weapon clad iron tight in his gloved hands - in the split second that you had gazed at him, you would also spot his mohawk, which he surprisingly sported well.

Oh.

What intrigued your curiosity more was that he was staring right at you too - the clenching of his jaw indicated that he was trying not to, for too long. In an attempt to break the uncomfortable nature of the interaction, he would nod in an almost respectful way, though there had been some sort of light reflecting in his irises.

It was Captain Price’s authoritative voice and the clearing of his throat that brought you back to reality, from that interlude which felt like it lasted almost forever. After a soft nod of acknowledgement thrown at the man, your focus was again redirected back to your officer in command, awaiting your next assignment.

“Listen up - the cargo ship mission is a go. Get yourselves sorted out. Wheels up at 0200. Dismissed.”

A plethora of strong echoes of yes, sir rang throughout the space, the tone intensified at the hinted urgency of the mission. Perhaps you should not have been so surprised when Captain Price called out your name, beckoning you to come hither.

“Sergeant, it’s your turn to run the CQB test. See if you can get the squadron record broken, eh?”

Maybe it was your eyes lying to you in the early hours of the morning but you could have sworn you saw Gaz’s smile from the edge of your vision as he headed out from the hangar, with the FNG trailing right beside him, sunlight seeking to outline his broad back to you, adorned by the weapon strapped down. With no other evident choice presented to you other than following orders, you did so - this time, with much more purpose.

Was it the fact that you trusted Price with your life? Or was it how you fought side by side in the trenches with Gaz, as dirt and bullets rained down over you both? Was it the way the squadron welcomed you in without question nor judgement, without having their eyes trail down all over you laced in other intentions?

Was it the brief eye contact you had with yet another new soldier into the squadron that told you, somewhere deep within your subconscious, that everything would be just fine?

This de novo sense of excitement and vigor within you, originating from an unknown source led you towards the ladder with considerable ease - you would not notice the way Soap’s eyes lingered on you just for the briefest of moments, turning back before stepping out of the sliding doors - before Gaz eventually and practically dragged him out by his arm.

And that night, during the only time he got to write in his journal before the looming mission, Sergeant MacTavish would start, while his memory was still fresh, the hard lines and edges of the very, very rough sketch which would end up as his most prized artwork - a drawing of you.

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#yall im gonna have a happy ending to this #he deserves a happy ending #been writing nonstop #lmk what you think!!!!#i love his eyes so kinda focusing on them lmao #john soap mactavish #soap mactavish x reader #soap mactavish #john soap mactavish x reader #john mactavish x reader #cod reader insert #cod modern warfare #val writes #captain price #writing

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cosmiclatte28 · 4 years

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Memories (Yuta x you)

Today is not a good day, my phone fell into a toilet bowl and we're on a road trip. I just got the chance to put it in rice and the screen won't budge when I touch. Hopefully everything will go well by tomorrow or Tuesday.

Anyways here is a new fanfiction for you all and for my broken heart :”)

enjoy! ps this is 95% real life story, this happened between me and my friend. but we got no string attached :-)

It was a blessing at first when the substitute teacher came in and announced that class was cancelled and we were allowed to just study anything by ourselves as long as we keep the room quiet. Half of the class were called for a laboratories class for practical exam practice. You are one of the second half of the class that won the privilege of not studying, you were so excited at first, not until you sit down with a question for one hour.

Finally you have a time to rest in school, since the national exam test is coming closer and you along with your friends were twisting brains to memorize everything and make tons of practice quizzes.

There were only six or seven students in the class, one of them was your best guy friend ever since you two met in first year of senior high school. Now you were ready to graduate after passing the examination of course, and you did not realize it has been a long three years of sweet friendship with Yuta.

Nakamoto Yuta is a new student from Japan who caught your attention since the first day of orientation day, and you cannot lie that you were afraid of him at first. Probably because his Instagram feeds are nice and aesthetic; however, that was totally wrong. Yuta is a warm guy with a really funny humorous side when you know him. He happens to be one of your closest guy friends and he has a special space in your heart.

No, you did not see him as a man you want to be in a relationship with, you are so happy with the friendship bond now. Both of you like each other's joke and you just click with him. He never forgets you whenever he went for holidays, he always come back to school with a lot of special souvenirs for you. Since then, you've been giving him souvenirs too and that becomes the small vacation routine between you two.

Today you are stuck in the room with Yuta and your other friends. Just that a lot of them are sleeping and you did not want to sleep. You tried to busy yourself by studying and solving questions, but seeing Yuta just enjoying his free times makes you want to slack back and relax too. Well, Yuta is not like you in terms of academic focus. He did not study as hard as you, and usually even piggy backs you for projects. He loves modeling and dancing that he spent more of his time and effort there, though you have to admit that is cool of him to break the stereotype that man can model too.

Yuta glances from his sleeping position, between you and him were three tables. Three of your main squad sit there and were all away somehow. Yuta is sitting on the other end and stares at you.

"Study Yuta, you need to pass the exam. I can't help you. I am taking Chemistry and you are taking Biology. I cannot help you." you pause from trying to solve a long question.

Yuta shakes his head, "The exam won't determine my future. I'll graduate since my school report is nice. Chill."

You shrug your shoulder, "Well, Winwin is also taking Biology test, why don't you ask him for some study group time?"

Yuta just flips his hair and winks at you, "I have better things to do. Relax a bit please (y/n), you can do this why bother stressing yourself out?"

You want to hit him, but the school doesn't allow violence and you were raised to be a gentle girl.

At last the stress hits you and you stand up from your chair. Some eyes were watching you as you make your way to the big white board and uncap the marker. You slowly draw there and although you cannot draw, your feelings are moving your hands and you were covering the board with scribbles.

Your mind was like a pile of unsolved tangled strings and you were trying to straighten them out, but nothing seems to lead to an end. Maybe it's the pressure from your small heart saying you need to learn more for the exam because you are still unable to do it.

You scribble your thoughts into the white board and it is no longer clear, slowly the dark shadows of curls are covering the lower side of the box and you jolt in surprise when you feel someone tugs your hair into the back of your ear lobe and force an airpods into your ear.

"Hey!" you scream from the surprise and when you toss your head to see who is doing this, Yuta is standing there beside you with his secretive face.

"What?" you bring your hand to stop him from forcing a metal into your ear.

The other students are not paying attention to the two of you, for them you and Yuta were already so close to the point where people ask if you were dating him.

"Put it on quick." he whispers while glancing to the door, checking if there is any teacher walking by, because the rules here are strict about touching others.

You laugh thinking that why did he give you a piece of a Bluetooth ear phone if none of you have a phone right now. "What you want me to use this?" you grab the ear piece and he nods his head.

"There's no song here, we don't have a phone." you punch him.

He just ignores you and suddenly your ear hears the familiar catchy opening song of EXO-OBSESSION.

"I want you I want you want you." resonates in your ear and that did not fail to bring a smile on your face.

Yuta just smiles when he sees you already grooving into the intro and asking him to pump up the volume a little bit.

He puts his hand into his pocket and the song turns louder inside your ear.

"How?" you ask with a big surprised face, this song really brings your mood back.

He taps his pocket, "Shhh it's our secret."

You pull out a thumb to him and he calmly brings his hand to put down the strands of hair behind your ear to cover your ear.

"Cover them, make sure no one sees." he still steal glances to the door.

You nod your head, "Of course! You should've done this sooner. Hey can I have the eve by EXO next?"

he shakes his head, "I don't think you were going to violate the rules."

You shrug your shoulder, "Well if things go wrong, you were the one who got your phone confiscated, I don't."

Yuta's eyes widen and he playfully hands out his palm, "Return the earphone."

and you totally whine and pout in front of him, "Don't."

He smiles and just ruffles your hair, "Cutie."

You shudder, "Cheesy eew!"

The feelings you have to him remain unchanged, it's already super comfortable to have him as your best friend and he too clearly has crush on another girls. Whatever happens, you just wish nothing can break your bond with him. Nothing big and nothing small. Yuta will forever be your best friend and so will he.

Yuta just stands there beside you, his right hand takes the marker away from you and with his artistic skills he draw images of funny characters on the board. It's no longer dull and gloom, but filled with cute doodles.

"Thanks for the song and mood booster, but break is coming soon" you hand him back the ear piece and he quickly keeps his belongings in his bag.

"No problem" was all he said.

You sit back down on your chair, cheeks a bit red from realizing what he did might make someone blush deeply but not for you. Your mind plays back all the small attention he gave to you in the past three years.

"Hey (y/n), I am goin downstairs, what do you want?" he asks one day before leaving the class.

You check your bottle, "Water please. Let me take my wallet," you were about to walk to your chair, but he was faster "No need I'll go now. Just one right?" and zoomed he go.

"(y/n), I heard that Starbucks has a new card collection, maybe you want to buy them quickly before it ran out."

"(y/n)! Can I be in your team?"

"(y/n), I brought your favorite snacks."

He was so sweet, even when he did not mean to be sweet. He just knew how to cheer you up with the simplest thing and he knew you well.

"(y/n) I've used up all the soap you gave to me last holiday," he winks and you burst into a laugh. "You're sending me code to buy you a new one right?" and he just shows you his gummy smile and nods fiercely.

"(y/n) happy valentines!" he said and gave you a special unicorn shaped chocolate. You were surprised, your squad were confused, the class was wondering who gave you a big chocolate, but in the end you and Yuta keep the tie only up to best friend.

You cannot forget how surprised you were to receive the special unicorn chocolate, but that was the first and last special valentine gift you had from him. The next time he gave all his girl friends the same chocolate gifts, but you... you once won a special unicorn chocolate.

end.

i hope my phone can get back to normal real soon 😭😭😭

#nakamoto yuta x reader #yuta x reader #yuta x you #yuta x y/n #yuta scenarios #yuta oneshot #yuta fluff #yuta imagine #yuta nakamoto scenario #nakamoto yuta imagines #nakamoto yuta fluff #yuta angst

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watch-inside-the-bomb-squad-blog · 4 years

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Inside the Bomb Squad Season 1 » Episode 1 | Full Episodes

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geordie-shore-s21xe8-stream-blog · 4 years

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A television series is usually released in episodes that follow a narrative, and are usually divided into seasons (US and Canada) or series (UK) — yearly or semiannual sets of new episodes. A show with a limited number of episodes may be called a miniseries, serial, or limited series. A one-time show may be called a “special”. A television film (“made-for-TV movie” or “television movie”) is a film that is initially broadcast on television rather than released in theaters or direct-to-video. The first national color broadcast (the 021521 Tournament of Roses Parade) in the US occurred on January 021, 021521. During the following ten years most network broadcasts, and nearly all local programming, continued to be in black-and-white. A color transition was announced for the fall of 02165, during which over half of all network prime-time programming would be broadcast in color. The first all-color prime-time season came just one year later. In 02178, the last holdout among daytime network shows converted to color, resulting in the first completely all-color network season. FORMATS AND GENRES Television shows are more varied than most other forms of media due to the wide variety of formats and genres that can be presented. A show may be fictional (as in comedies and dramas), or non-fictional (as in documentary, news, and reality television). It may be topical (as in the case of a local newscast and some made-for-television films), or historical (as in the case of many documentaries and fictional series). They could be primarily instructional or educational, or entertaining as is the case in situation comedy and game shows. A drama program usually features a set of actors playing characters in a historical or contemporary setting. The program follows their lives and adventures. Before the 02180s, shows (except for soap opera-type serials) typically remained static without story arcs, and the main characters and premise changed little. If some change happened to the characters’ lives during the episode, it was usually undone by the end. Because of this, the episodes could be broadcast in any order. Since the 02180s, many series feature progressive change in the plot, the characters, or both. For instance, Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere were two of the first American prime time drama television series to have this kind of dramatic structure,while the later series Babylon 5 further exemplifies such structure in that it had a predetermined story running over its intended five-season run. In 800218, it was reported that television was growing into a larger component of major media companies’ revenues than film. Some also noted the increase in quality of some television programs. In 800218, Academy-Award-winning film director Steven Soderbergh, commenting on ambiguity and complexity of character and narrative, stated: “I think those qualities are now being seen on television and that people who want to see stories that have those kinds of qualities are watching television. CREDITS Find all the movies that you can stream online, including those that were screened this week. If you are wondering what you can watch on this website, then you should know that it covers genres that include crime, Science, Fi-Fi, action, romance, thriller, Comedy, drama, Anime Movie, etc. Thank you very much. We tell everyone who is happy to receive us as news or information about this year’s film schedule and how you watch your favorite films. Hopefully we can become the best partner for you in finding recommendations for your favorite movies. That’s all from us, greetings! Thanks for watching Videos Today. I hope you enjoy the videos that I share. Give a thumbs up, like, or share if you enjoy what we’ve shared so that we more excited. Sprinkle cheerful smile so that the world back in a variety of colors, Stay safe and Stay home. Thank you very much and Enjoy for watching.

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elfnerdherder · 5 years

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Opus Dei: Chapter 2

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A special thanks to my patrons: @sylarana @evertonem @starlit-catastrophe @frostylicker Duhaunt6, Superlurk, Mendacious Bean, and Laura G! <3

Happy Sunday, all! It’s looking like so long as I wake up on time on Friday, Friday mornings are going to be the times going forward that I post these chapter updates. Slowly but surely getting the groove back. :) Enjoy!

Chapter 2: Clash Center Stage

“I’ve missed our talks.”

Will stared at the ceiling, legs crossed and arms tucked behind his head with a false impression of comfort and ease. He was not comfortable. He was not at ease. Just on the other side of the bars, the devil sat in a chair, too close for orderlies’ comfort and much too close for his comfort. He didn’t voice that, though. Jared sat on the smallest space at the end of the bed, and he swung his legs.

“In truth, every day at four-thirty I open the door to my home expectantly, or I find myself pacing. Dr. Du Maurier tells me that I know precisely where you are, but I seem to be in a position where I refuse to make that my reality.”

There was a leak in one of the pipes at the end of the dreary hall, and it dripped in the silence, a steady beat that timed itself to Will’s heart. He didn’t give any form of acknowledgement, save for the breath he held when he was given the sudden urge to lunge across the cell to see how quickly he could strangle a man.

He dismissed the notion, since the more he lingered on murderous thoughts, the more substantial Garrett Jacob Hobbs seemed to be.

“I have the luxury of trying to refute the fact. Your realities were formed against your will, no matter how ardently you struggled to correct them. Now you are here, and this is your reality.” A beat. "You must hate me."

“Don’t say anything,” Jared Freeman cautioned. He must have known better than Will did about how close he was to screaming. Thankfully, the medicine that’d been politely shoved down his throat kept most of the extreme emotions at bay, tempered with a sweet bliss of chemicals that knew just how to shut a man up.

“Are you so convinced of my guilt that you won't speak at all?” He nodded at Will's silence. “I asked Agent Crawford to investigate me, and he found nothing. I thought it could be some small comfort, but..."

“Steady,” Jared coached.

“You said before your trial that the light of friendship would never reach us. I’m sad to see you hold to such convictions, even now. No matter what happened, you were not in your right mind. Surely that is some comfort to you?”

Down the hall, someone let out a horrendous, terrified scream. Will jolted at the noise, at the suddenness and the terror. Sometimes inmates screamed because they’d had a nightmare, and sometimes they did just for fun. Sometimes, though, an orderly decided they’d had enough, and those screams were the worst sort to hear because no matter how much the inmate begged, no matter how much they prostrated themselves and wept, it changed nothing. Will’s heart thudded, and he listened to the cadence of the sound, weighing it in his ear. This was a scream of the last variety. He knew that sooner or later, he’d sound much the same.

“Can you sleep with the noise?" Hannibal wondered, hushed. "What do you dream?"

Will continued to stare at the ceiling, and it wasn’t until Hannibal left that he rolled over to stare at the wall, trembling. Jared moved from the bed to the wall, and he tapped fingers along it, searching for a weakness.

“Good job,” he coached, and he flickered, wavered. Since the hospital, the presence of his dead classmate had shifted from a solid, physical being to one Will conjured on purpose, one that he shaped into his reality rather than accept it as his reality.

If he was going to kill Hannibal one day, he needed as many psychopaths in his head as he could get.

Will was able to be convinced into a smart phone and tablet bundle rather than the simple flip phone in the corner. It wasn’t so much the talents of the salesperson as it was the remnant of a memory, a girl with dark hair and a crooked smile.

Yeah, pretty sure drug dealers use those. They’re called burner phones.

Then, clothes and shoes, but Alana was more invested in that than Will was. It was hard to be in stores, hard to have the four walls pressed in with no view of the sky. What day was it? What time? Between the plaid shirt section and the denim, he couldn't have said. When it was time to leave, he tossed the shoes from the prison in the garbage by the exit.

Bill Graham no longer lived in Wolf Trap, Virginia. He was found closer to the docks, nestled in some questionable apartments on an odd side of town. It suited him better, the sagging walls of a building best described as moist. Will stared up at it for longer than necessary before heading up the steps to the address written on soft paper.

There was a rumpled, washed but left to dry appearance about Bill Graham when he first opened the door. The machine oil smell hadn't faded in four years, but there was also an undertone of Lemon Pledge and soap. He'd been cleaning.

"Will," he greeted. His voice was sand on marble, scratching in his throat. "Come in, come in."

Will glanced at Alana before he gave a reassuring nod.

"I'll be in touch," she said on the stairs, just to the side of him. "Okay?"

"Thanks, Alana."

She glanced to the yawning door suspiciously before she headed back to her car.

The apartment reeked of the same Lysol stench, as well as food delivery. He followed his dad down a hall of smudged walls and crooked, haphazard photos of Will’s early childhood. The Bill Graham in the wake of his son’s alleged murder spree apparently took care of himself, although he managed to attempt at the sentimental.

Winston bounded around a corner when Will reached the front room, and he fell to his knees to catch him, a laugh springing unbidden as the dog tackled him, tail flailing and breath haggard. Will dug his fingers into his fur, and he didn’t mind a single ounce of slobber that got on his face or shirt in all of the excitement.

“He’s missed you something fierce,” Bill said, easing down onto a couch that'd once been loved fiercely by a cat. “Sometimes he gets out and I find him at the old place like he’s waiting for you.”

“Thank you for watching him,” Will said from among the fluff and lolling tongue.

“Weren’t no trouble,” Bill replied, waving a hand. “He’s a good dog.” Will opened his mouth to remind his father that the old Bill Graham had never wanted the dog, but he stopped himself. The space between them was tense, roughened by words thought but never said, felt but never revealed. Will studied his father’s work boots, then turned and went back to scratching Winston’s sides.

“You’re a good dog,” he informed Winston, and Winston all but crawled onto his lap, tail fwapping against the ground.

“They tried at first to take him back to…to his first family, but they didn’t want him. It was their daughter’s dog, and…they just couldn’t bear to keep him.” Will nodded, sliding his fingers along the dark spots of fur on Winston’s coat, admiring them. Although the circumstances of him finding Winston were grim –he could only assume Hannibal had let the dog escape after he’d killed Cassie Boyle –he wasn’t going to complain. In reality, he was happier to see the dog more than his dad.

“So…you’re out now,” Bill said awkwardly.

“It turns out that when I said I didn’t do it, I was right,” Will said archly. The silence between them bubbled, blistered. Will considered popping it with the tip of the knife, but he didn’t feel like drawing the pus out long enough to fix it. He cleared his throat.

“I still got your stuff,” his father said after a beat. “It’s all in the spare room I got, right by the fishing gear.”

“Thank you,” Will said. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“Good hell, Will, you’re my son."

Will let the silence speak for itself on that matter.

“I...I know I was a bad father…" Bill said, and his tone showed just how much he'd practiced this small speech. "I left you to your own devices, always gone and always doing something else. I was so distant, you just…you almost died, you were kidnapped, you were visiting murder scenes for Christ’s sake, and I didn’t know anything until after your arrest. You...you didn't come to me with all of this.”

“I didn’t want you to know."

“And a better dad would have been the first you told when something went wrong,” his father replied earnestly. “I thought I could fix your problems the way I’ve always fixed mine, then I just went and made everything worse.”

“I appreciate that," Will said because he didn't know what else he should really say. Fingers wound tight into the fur.

“I’ve been seeing a therapist,” Bill revealed. “Work had it set up after...after Charlie was found, and since this place has insurance benefits, I can afford the co-pay. I got to know a lot about myself that I didn’t like to find out.”

“You’re seeing a therapist?” Will asked, stunned.

“I have what she’s tentatively calling an identity disorder that crops up with bouts of extreme stress," Bill Graham announced, and it was said with the practice of someone that'd had to practice saying it a lot. "Dissociative Fugue or something like it. She said I’ve also got low serotonin, making me a bit of a depressed slop,” he added. He looked down at the floor between them. “So I’ve been working at that. Doing some side jobs to afford the medication. Getting out more.”

“That’s…big,” Will managed. He wrapped his arms around Winston.

“I figured I’d done enough to make your life miserable, the least I could do is look someone else in the eye and admit it.”

“Has it helped at all?” Will questioned, glancing up to his shoulder.

“It’s letting me know the me that I am when other people see, and I’m trying to fix that. I figured, I can get you a job at the boatyard, and you can take that spare bedroom, and you and I can-”

“I want my own place,” Will all but interrupted, using the pauses between Bill’s words to cut in. “I want my own job, too. I'm going to go to school.”

Bill’s face wrinkled and caved at that, but he nodded all the same.

“Then…I’ll work on building our relationship another way,” he said heavily. “I’m sorry I’ve been such a sorry excuse for a father, Will.”

Will nodded, but there was nothing for him to really say. He had a father, but he had him long after he’d realized that he could do more than just survive without one. When he stood up, Bill helped him load his meager belongings into his truck that magically turned over.

“I’ve been taking care of it,” Bill said, patting the hood. “Got a new starter and renewed the tags for you.”

“Thank you,” Will said honestly. They shook hands, Bill's trembling ever so slightly.

“Don’t be a stranger, son,” he pleaded, glancing from him to Winston secured in the passenger seat. “I…don’t want to be a stranger to you anymore.”

“Okay.” Will nodded, climbing into the truck.

Finding a place to stay was easy. The woman practically threw the rent offer on the table at him a couple of weeks after his release, and if she recognized his face she said nothing about it. She paced in her living room and bemoaned the last tenants who'd ruined her house for good, emphasizing the father that almost always paid late. When Will signed the papers, she didn’t seem to notice that he held the same last name.

“Then apparently that son of his went and hacked some bodies up, and now--" Too late she realized that a lease done could be undone. She glanced at the paperwork between them, then busied herself with drowning his coffee in creamer. "Now you're going to get settled in nicely, I'd say."

“If you hate it so much, maybe in the future I can look into buying it off of you,” he said, sipping on the creamer with a dash of coffee.

When he pulled into the dirt driveway, he sat in the truck with Winston for a bit, drumming his fingers on the wheel. He’d thought –stupidly –that time had the potential to wash away the taste of pennies in his mouth when he looked at the very place where his world fell apart. Time can't wash away associations, though, and the longer he looked, the easier it was to find each place where he'd stood and had his world loosened out from under him.

There was once a time when he thought it’d begun cracking at the edges when Jared Freeman first pulled a gun from his jacket cavalierly to kill their teacher, but that wasn’t the beginning of any sort of end. No, no, now Will could say that the beginning cracks were when a soft, accented voice first pulled him from his daydreams of being the one to pull the trigger. The beginning was when Hannibal had cornered him in the hall and assured him that no matter the turn of mind, Will would one day find him interesting.

How woeful for Hannibal that Will now found him to be quite interesting indeed.

He walked where he once walked, pressed his heels to the dirt where he recalled fainting under the fever of his mind drowning in a blaze of fire. He looked out to the field, staring at the space where he’d found Nicholas Boyle with his insides out, where Hannibal had once grabbed him and pressed hungry, searching lips to Will's. No, no, he’d said, you certainly killed him.

“In this moment, you are at your most beautiful.”

Winston's whine kept him from brooding. He unlocked the door for them both and walked in, making sure to take his time moving about a house that hadn't changed much since he left it last. Thankfully the landlady had cleaned since the investigation.

Unpacking next to nothing was easy, and Will slept on the bed in the living room. He couldn’t quite bring himself to go into the room he’d once slept in. Too many memories of too many people housed their horrors within those walls, and he slept with his back to the hall. In the dead of the night, he imagined hands reaching, stretching beneath the doorway to claim him.

Will woke early, and his neck prickled. He couldn't say why he felt the need to tense, but he did, and it was almost like being right back in the cell once again with the light's out; the inmates sometimes screamed in the dark, and it felt like nails were carving curses into your scalp. He blinked, and he stared at the threat of sunrise cutting through the faded, blue curtain.

It wasn't until he actually got up and went to make breakfast a couple of hours later that the feeling returned, a cold dash of adrenaline to the gut, and Jared circled the table, tucking his chin into his palm. "Well, now."

A letter lay in the center of the scuffed and beaten table, the same table he'd once eaten his fair share of Hungry Man meals at years before. His name was written with floral elegance, time and attention to the curves of the letters that only a fountain pen could make. It was warm, having acclimated to the inside of the house; it'd been there awhile now.

He picked it up and pried apart the wax seal on the back, anxiety and excitement coiling about his feet. Be careful, he'd told Alana, as though he hadn't made his fortress from the bones of a warzone. Be careful because the Chesapeake Ripper likes to play games, and it seemed that he was ready to begin.

Welcome home.

-C.R.

Will had lied before--many times, but this was one time in particular that mattered.

He hesitated only briefly, standing outside of the door in the backyard of someone else's house a little less than a day later. Tricky hands picked locks, and he did so with the skill of someone not long-practiced, but one that had spent a long time talking to someone long-practiced. Hands mimicked where they supposed they'd once been told to go.

“Naughty,” said Jared beside him, taunting. “You’re being naughty.”

It was imagination now, but once it hadn’t been. Once, he’d thought Jared very, very real. He couldn’t quite put a finger on why he often still imagined him, but he didn’t fight it anymore. In a way, keeping him within the walls of his mind kept him alive towards the end. In a way, some part of him knew that keeping him around upped his survival rate considerably.

Garrett Jacob Hobbs also lurked, but his special brand of psychosis wasn't quite the everyday sort. He only came out when it was necessary, otherwise; Will kept him buried.

He stepped into the house, cool in the early Spring air that still nipped at night and threatened frost. Behind him, Jared wiped his feet, and Will closed the door carefully, quietly.

“You’re going to do this,” Jared murmured, and it’s unclear if it’s an order or a realization.

Will left him in the kitchen and crept farther into the house, drawing the gun that’d sat holstered at the small of his back. It fit in his palm, and there hadn’t been a single hesitation in taking it from his father’s room before he left.

Bill Graham owed him a lot more than that, and Will would bet his whole new chance at life it wasn’t registered. His dad wouldn’t dare report a gun he wasn’t even supposed to have. He wondered if Bill would even bring it up the next time they ran into one another.

If they ran into one another.

The house was draped in as much finery as the one before. Hannibal seemed to have gained an abundance of art since the last time Will stepped through his halls; he spied Saint Sebastian just across from Zeus conquering another victim.

Gods like to feel powerful.

If he’d worried that walking down this space, surrounded by Hannibal’s things, would rattle his resolve, the worry dissolved with each resolute step. This was not the house that haunted his thoughts, imprints of each room rubbed over enough to fade onto the walls of his skull. These walls were foreign, oblong, and thankfully the cracks in the paint didn't house his horrors. He marked them, but he wasn't moved by them.

Hannibal met him at the bottom of the stairs, bat aloft. He must have heard Will walk into the coat rack set by an unfortunate corner, and the sound of his thundering steps filled the otherwise silent house just seconds before he revealed himself. It was a normal reaction to an intruder, and Will met him at the stairwell with the pistol raised and the safety off.

Darkness made a monster of Hannibal, casting violent shadows in the hollows of his cheeks. He turned on the landing of the stairs, flat lips lifted into a snarl, nightrobe garishly clashing with the stair-runner, bat poised for a skull-crushing hit. His teeth still flashed pearly white in the gloom, sharpened incisors meant for tearing flesh.

He had the grace to look utterly surprised for the briefest of moments when he realized just who was breaking into his house in the middle of the night; it was quickly over, and the bat was abandoned as hands were raised in compliant geniality. The expression shuttered, and it was just Will, Hannibal, and the pile of bodies that'd stacked up between them.

Silence sat, limp and crumpled like a fresh corpse. Will added it to the pile, just on top of Abigail Hobbs' accusing eyes. Raging, screaming inside of his head, Jared begged Will to kill just him already.

“Will,” Hannibal greeted finally, voice coarse.

It was hard to see the expression in his eyes in the darkness, but Will felt something hit hard in his gut at the sound. It clenched, and his grip on the pistol clenched with it. Spit rushed to his mouth, and he swallowed painfully, Adam’s apple bobbing.

“Hannibal."

"I didn't believe it for a moment, but it's actually you."

"In the flesh," said Will. "A bat?"

"I've been told it's the best home defense." Silence again, and Will wished he could have seen the clever expression in Hannibal's eyes then, the irony. What were bats to a killer's hands, to the crafting palms so calm as they removed the eyes from a screaming man to punish him?

"To what do I owe the pleasure of your company so early in the morning?" Hannibal asked. "Have you come to kill me?"

"No."

"To intimidate me," he corrected himself.

"Not possible."

He pondered only a moment, then nodded slowly. If he was afraid, it lay hidden in his smooth expression."Ah...to warn me, then."

"I want you to leave me alone. That's all."

"Oh, that's all?" Hannibal's smile may have seemed kinder in the light. It was hard to tell in the gloom, all incisors and shadows. "You come into my home in the middle of the night to tell me to leave you alone?"

"It's a precaution," Will replied easily. "I see you poking at Jack, and I don't want any part of that. Your reasons for letting me go are not important, and I don't want to be involved."

"You think I'm the reason you're free, and yet you don't want to know why?"

"Should I?"

"Most people would wonder."

Will shrugged. "Not relevant."

"Shouldn't it be?"

"Not to someone that wants to live."

"Says the intruder with the gun held at their suspected cannibalistic murderer," Hannibal sneered, and that time he did bare his teeth. "If I am so dangerous as you think, I wonder you daring to break in and threaten me?"

"To tell you I want no part in whatever it is you're doing. You admire boldness, right? You want to keep poking at Jack Crawford, that's your business, but leave me out of it. "

"You think I'm poking at Jack Crawford?"

"I won't help him," Will assured him. "I don't want to be anywhere near your crime scenes, and that leaves you to your bloody mess and me to my life. "

Time had softened Hannibal's accent, but only slightly. Where some parts had clipped and sharply dug at the words before, now they rolled, gentle. "To a normal man, your words sound...delusional, Will. Having just been released from prison, innocent of crimes you didn't commit, I wonder if you've thought about the repercussions for your actions. What would Dr. Chilton say? Agent Crawford?"

Will didn't quite have a response to that. Something about it stopped his mouth, made him hesitate. His arms were starting to get tired.

"I am a psychiatrist now...should I report these delusions to someone, I wonder if they'd place you in a different institution to help with the trauma." It was subtle, the shift in his voice from pleasantly observant to politely cruel. A beat. "Did they take you off of your medication? Are you having trouble adjusting?"

"Right for the throat," Jared crowed beside them. Then, "shoot him."

"Leave me alone, Hannibal," Will said, ever the warning but also the bait. His voice shook. "I mean it."

"Welcome home, Will," Hannibal replied, sanguine-sweet.

He left Hannibal on the landing, and he slipped out the way he came. His heart had crept ever higher in his throat the longer they spoke, and it sat heavy on his tongue the whole way home.

"Could have killed him," Jared said. "Could have killed him and been done already."

"It has to mean something," Garrett disagreed, and he lingered in the backseat, faded and rotted. "He has to honor him, otherwise it's murder."

#LiaS scribbles #Hannibal fanfic #nbc hannibal #hannigram #slowburn hannigram #opus dei #magnum opus series #grey!Will #hannibal x will graham

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stormhawksplanb · 5 years

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Nova’s Relationship with Squadrons and others: Enemies

The colonel- Not a single care was made when Nova threatened the colonel after they crashed landed on his Terra, destroying one of his garages. The storm hawks just about die when she did raise a hand to him, and it was met with automatic confusion when the both of them started laughing, and they heard him go ‘It’s no surprise these fools are in cahoots with you- You’re lucky it was a very cheap garage...’ She wound up paying for the damages out of her own pocket anyway. There was also several occasions where the storm hawks put the Colonels trust in Nova, as an artist, on the line. Each time she showed severe annoyance and disappointment with the storm hawks for doing so. Going as far as to giving stork the silent treatment until his unfinished commission was fixed. It wasn’t because she was mad at him, but she didn’t want to hurt him with her words since she was pretty steamed. However he learned quickly not to get on her bad side, or in the way of her art passion purely by example. The colonel likes to push her conditions with her art, especially the more time sensitive ones. She has to haggle with him for hours on end to get something decent. He does it mostly to mess with her. Every so often he’ll give her and stork a request. Stork only obliges because he cares for Nova, and doesn’t want her blood all over the Condor’s deck. Stork can and will complain about how the colonel stole his ship, which was a turn on for Nova because she enjoys watching stork go revenge crazy, and love’s his love for the condor. She also got to hear about how Stork pretty much threatened him with an inch of his life after the Colonel lost Nova to the Murk Raiders over an art piece she created. And due to her owing the Colonel an unfathomable debt, she had to oblige.

Arygyn- poor, poor, naive Nova. She spent a good chunk of her vacation with the others chasing down a majestic bird. She just had the unforseen urge to draw it in her book. The bird went from guiding her further away from the condor, to nuzzling up to her for head Pat's. Nova, thinking stork would let her keep it, brought it back to the ship. When she did, she made sure to announce a small meeting on the main deck, and the storm hawks all had to hold back laughter at her pure moment of innocence. She was so happy about finding this bird and was going the whole nine yards about keeping the 'magnificent bird' she found, and how it took such a liking to her. No one had the heart to tell her it was Arygyn in disguise. He pretty much spent the day pestering her, stealing her pencils, and hiding her socks to try and get her to change her mind about keeping him as a pet. Didn't work. The thing about Nova is she's very much a 'I just need something to do 24/7'. Her line was drawn when Arygyn spilled paint on her drawings, ruining them. At that point she lost her nerve and started chasing him around, more or less trying to end his life. Thankfully Aerrow intervened, and Arygyn transformed. Much to Nova's awe. Even then she still got a good, smack to the back of his head. Since then their relationship is a bit of a curve ball. Arygyn enjoys her mischievous side, and secretly adores her and storks lil romance like it's a soap opera. Her on the other hand, half wants to strangle him, and half wants to follow him around and know what he does. In the end Arygyn discovers how much of an Anchor she is for the storm hawks, and everyone who comes across her path, and it thinking about knighting her as a Prophet. Even though he doesn't fully believe in the whole prophet thing like his fellow counterparts.

The Murk Raiders- Once she was bargained over to be a maid/slave for the murk raiders it became Stork’s number 1 priority to try and save her on his own, since Junko was allergic and he didn't trust the others to go in quietly. His dark loves life was on the line. Stork went as far as to threaten the Colonel for the murk raider's Current location and a ride that would withstand the deeps. No one but Stork and the colonel know about that scenario. Whilst Stork was planning literally all of the murk raiders deaths, Nova was running around enjoying herself because for some unholy reason she makes friends with anyone not acquainted with Cyclonians. I.E she Charmed her way into a special place in Captain Scabulous’ heart. She was more than happy to join the Pirate life in the deeps, and temporarily forgot about the storm hawks, and claimed to have made one of her favorite pieces yet aboard their ship. And then stork came wrecking through hordes of raiders and just about maimed the Captain. If it wasn’t for Nova’s love for him, she’d have killed him herself. Very quickly The murk Raiders became biggest client #2 and they returned Nova to the colonel who was acting suspiciously generous and kind to Nova on her return. The only hint she had of why he was acting so not hostile, was storks low growls from behind. Needless to say stork was given major bonus points for breaking out of his shell that day.

The Raptors- The hunter has become the hunted. And what kind of person would Nova be if she didn’t let stork tag along with her on her personal mission to get back at them for hurting the condor. Nova may have talked stork into hating them again after they blew up his beloved ship. Mostly because in her eyes, it's an eye for an eye, unless the culprit changes their perspective. Repton hates Nova with a burning passion ever since she allowed herself to be captured and gave the storm hawks their location. Via by wearing a tracking crystal and stork having to break her out of 'pre-dinner' jail. His other problem is Spitz has a 'thing' for her, and she uses that to her full advantage. Much to Stork's jealousy. It even came down once to Spitz fighting Stork over Nova, saying that repton promised she could be his girlfriend if he defeats, and or kills, Stork. And by the way, the whole storm hawks squad saw this go down and they teased stork endlessly. Including Nova, who was the reason stork won so easily in the first place by, in a completely silly manner, "distracting" Splitz.

Snipe- Ever since the fall of Cyclonia, the three power houses of master Cyclonis' hunch men had split up to cause even more trouble than before. The goals might have changed, but the hatred is still the same. Snipe is the less successful if the three, with all his failed mechanisms and plans always going astray. He's not as fearful of Nova, meanwhile she just enjoys the fact he always underestimates her. Thinking he has her cornered. The more encounters these two have, the more he realizes she's just as dangerous as the others, and now makes a point to have her "beaten to a pulp". His biggest obstacle of getting to do that is Stork.

Ravess- even though Nova is a fan of her music, she can't stand this women. Once Ravess realizes her violins start to go missing, chances are she'll figure out it's Nova who's behind the act. Nova has an unwavering urge to take Ravess' instruments and turning them into her personal art pieces. Grant it, she's only done it a couple times, out of being petty, it still urks Ravess. Beyond that Nova doesn't mess with her for fear of being plucked out of the sky.

Dark Ace- A little background story so I don't loose anyone. Dark Ace was never killed. He was ported away to the other side of Atmos. Cyclonis' wanted the higher ground, and an army of nightcrawlers on her side. He was sent to go look for the condor while the storm hawks fought on as an attempt to escape. If she was to go down, she wanted them stuck there, and perish. The enevible happened regardless, and Piper was the one to defeat Cyclonis. But not on purpose. The building they were in was falling around them, collapsing. Master Cyclonis was badly injured by a pillar and Piper went to help her, but Cyclonis refused, and had a last ditch effort to kill Piper. It backfired and rebounded off Piper and bounced back at Cyclonis as the walls caved in. Dark Ace saw in the distance the destruction, and abandoned his mission to find Master Cyclonis dead. It then became a revenge filled agenda. Especially now that he has an infinite amount of energy given to him by Cyclonis. Dark ace takes advantage of Nova and Storks relationship with each other and makes sure they stay sperated as long as possible. Their biggest weak point is the desire to know they're both safe, and sometimes that causes them to make I'll decisions. Dark Ace's mistake was actually injuring stork to almost death, and allowing Nova to watch. It sent her over the edge. This is where she developed her very first Weapon Technique she calls, Energy slicer. She fought Dark Ace until she couldn't stand, and even still stood between him and stork. Thankfully the others arrived and dark ace spent enough of his new found power, to force him to retreat. And with two badly injured friends Aerrow had no choice but to let him go. Nova will never forgive Dark Ace and after that Incident she becomes slightly more strict on missions, and it usually takes both Piper and Stork to get her to make the right decisions. Nova now has zero problems purposefully getting in Dark Ace's way. In fact, she's now hunting him down.

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hazyheel · 5 years

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Wrestlemania 35 Review

The pre-show started with the Cruiserweight Championship, Buddy Murphy vs. Tony Nese, and the two started out fast and violently. Murphy got split open somewhere around his eye early on in the match, after he slipped off the turnbuckle. The two exchanged heavy strikes in the match, and Nese seemed to have the advantage for much of the match. At one point, Nese hit a springboard moonsault to Murphy, who was hanging between the ropes. Nese even hit a reverse rana to Murphy, and Murphy really landed right on his head. The two again began to exchange combinations of strikes, each countering the final hit into a combo of their own. Nese even hit a package piledriver for a near fall, and then a 450 splash for a near fall. Nese went for the running Knese, but Murphy intercepted with a bicycle knee and Murphy’s Law, but Nese got his foot on the ropes. Murphy went for the running knese as well, but Nese got the interception with a superkick, before hitting a german suplex into the corner, and then the running Knese for a big win.

Grade: B+. Really good way to open up the show. I was shocked at how much offense Nese scored, almost a burial of Murphy, but I think that it will play into the story. I was pleasantly surprised to see Nese win the match, I really wasn’t sure if it would play out well, but it looked super good and by the end of the match, it felt like Nese’s time. Congratulations to him, I look forward to his title reign.

It didn’t take long for them to jump into the women’s battle royal. No Lacy Evans, so I was automatically wrong about this match. Asuka had a staredown with Nikki Cross, reminiscent of their feud in NXT a few years ago. Ember Moon hit a cool looking eclipse over the top rope to eliminate Naomi, and must’ve hit 3 before getting eliminated. For some reason, Sarah Logan and Lana hugged, before the rest of the riot squad destroyed Lana. The Riott Squad completely destroyed their opponents throughout the match, until Dana Brooke eliminated both Ruby Riott and Liv Morgan. Final four were Asuka, Sonya Deville and Sarah Logan, but Carmella was on the outside hiding on the outside. Deville, Asuka and Logan had an awesome sequence together, and Logan eliminated both of them, only for Carmella to come in. The two fought, and Logan even held on to the middle rope to stay in, until Carmella got the win with a superkick.

Grade: A-, because I like to be positive. I am not normally a fan of battle royals, but this one was really good. There were a lot of interweaving stories, everyone got time to shine, and it told a fun tale. Lots of creative eliminations, and really non stop action. They really stole the pre-show today.

Next up was the Raw Tag Team Championship match, Curt Hawkins and Zack Ryder vs. The Revival. Dawson and Hawkins started the match out, but it seemed like the challengers were pretty outclassed. Ryder was beaten down for most of the math, with the Revival destroying any limb they could get their hands on. Hawkins eventually got the hot tog, and absolutely lit up the champions. Ryder went for a suplex to Wilder out of the ring, but both men ended up tumbling out of the ring. There was then a flurry of offense on the outside, with Hawkins nailing a spear on Wilder, and then getting hit with a nasty brainbuster from Dawson. Dawson dragged him back into the ring, and Hawkins looked to be out. Dawson tried to bring him up for some sort of move, but Hawkins got a rollup for a shocking win.

Grade: B+. Another really good match. Started out slow, but it really picked up by the end of the match, with a flurry of offense during his hot tag. All hope seemed lost when the Revival nailed their big moves on the outside, but Hawkins finally pulled off a win. It was a good payoff to such a long story, and I was into it. So happy for Hawkins to pull it off, and to win a belt at the same time is just a cherry on top.

Then right into the Andre the Giant memorial Battle Royal. Che and Jost made their entrance, looking absolutely lost being in the ring with these guys. The two comedians immediately hid underneath the ring. A fun elimination from Andrade, as he monkey flipped Kalisto over the top rope. Luke Harper tried to vertical suplex Ali out of the ring, but Braun hit a big boot to eliminate them both. Ali took a terrible bump as a result. In the final three, Jost and Che actually got in the ring, and Jost attempted to get Braun to talk to a therapist, but Braun, of course, beat up the therapist. Che tried to run, but Braun got in a punch to take him out. He then threw Jost a a pile of superstars on the outside.

Grade: C-. When all was said and done, this was a silly comedy match, and it was actually pretty fun and funny. Just some stupid action, Jost and Che were funny in their attempts to eliminate Braun, and considering that Che and Jost didn’t actually get eliminations, nor did they really fight anyone, it went better than these types of matches normally go. Celebrity stuff is always iffy, but this went well.

Before anything started, Alexa Bliss came out for a promo. She said that she was going to give herself a Wrestlemania moment, and she snapped her fingers and Hulk Hogan came out. He cut the stereotypical Hogan promo. Then they posed together. Kinda cute. But then Paul Heyman marched out to the ring, and cut a promo in the ring. He said that Lesnar would not be leaving for Las Vegas right after the match is over.

So, we opened the main card with Brock Lesnar vs. Seth Rollins for the universal Championship. Lesnar had a special entrance video, where a sword destroyed Lesnar’s beast skull. Lesnar started the match with a stiff knee to the stomach. beating him down outside, and hitting the F5 quickly. Lesnar threw him around ringside, over the announce table and into a commentator. The match officially began, and Seth was drilled with several german suplexes. Seth shoved the Lesnar into the ref, and then nailed a low blow. He was then able to hit the curb stomp three times, and got the win.

Grade: D+. The beatdown was fun, but there wasn’t much to this match. Rollins hitting the low blow felt odd from an underdog babyface. It was an exciting moment, but I bet these two could’ve had a great match. It’s also odd that this match came on first. It just felt like an odd victory to open the show. Although, I am pretty happy about the outcome.

Next up was Randy Orton vs. AJ Styles. It didn’t take long for Orton to start cheating, hitting a thumb to the eye early on. Orton just kept trying to hit the RKO, but Styles wiggled out of it each time. At one point, AJ faked going for a phenomenal forearm and orton went for the RKO, obviously missed and Styles nailed a 450 splash. AJ was desperate in his attempts to avoid the RKO, but did take one after a rollup, for a near fall. AJ hit a big phenomenal forearm to the outside. He then hit a Phenomenal Forearm in the ring for the win.

Grade: B. Not as fast of a match as I thought it would be, but still pretty good. They worked together quite well, and the story of AJ desperately attempting to avoid the RKO was good, and it made the near fall even more convincing. Shocked to see that Styles went over, but still happy to see one of my favorites go over. I hope these guys wrestle again, because I think they can do better.

Lacy Evans did a catwalk. Then there was the Smackdown tag team Championship match, Usos vs. Aleister Black and Ricochet vs. Shinsuke Nakamura and Rusev vs. The Bar. The action was very fast, with a flurry of offense from everyone and many quick tags. Cesaro had a huge swing on Ricochet for about a minute before locking in the sharpshooter, before an Uso broke them up. Rusev and Nakamura actually did really well as a tag team, better than I thought they would, putting together some hard hitting striking combinations. There was then a huge ass tower of doom, but Ricochet flipped out of it. Ricochet went up for the 630 senton on Sheamus, with Black covering him, but everyone broke it up. There was a big finisher fest, with Ricochet selling a brogue kick like he was shot. The usos then hit sheamus with three superkicks and a double splash for the win.

Grade: B+. A lot faster than I assumed it would be. This match really reminded me how good the bar, Nakamura and Rusev all are. They have been in some less than flattering matches lately, but this one was really good. Everyone got in tag moves, showing that all of these teams will work well in the tag division. I am bummed that Black and Ricochet didn’t win, but hopefully they can go on to feud with the Usos sooner rather than later.

Next match was Miz vs. Shane McMahon in a Falls Count Anywhere match. Shane started out by running away, but quickly got the advantage via cheap shots. At one point, Shane was going to elbow Miz through an announce table, but his dad (yay) got in the way. Shane and Mr. Miz squared off in the ring, with Shane utterly destroying Mr. Miz, only for the Miz to run in and take down shane. They began to brawl through the crowd, near the LED pillars, and into the stands. They even started destroyed the announce tables in the crowds, and Miz hit him so hard with a moniter that he fell over a railing and about a 6 foot fall. Miz then hit the Skull Crushing Finale on a platform for the cameras, for a near fall. They battled even higher, with Miz superplexing shane through a platform, and it completely caved it in. Shane was able to get the arm over Miz for the win.

Grade: B+. A wild, brawl, with some big spots, and every bit of soap opera crap. That superplex will be shown in video packages for years to come. It was good clean fun, and although I wasn’t too pleased with Miz losing, but given the spot, it was just a coincidence that Shane got the pin. It wasn’t too serious, nor did I think it would be. If they had more weapon spots, then maybe this would’ve been higher. But still, I thought it was really good.

Into the Women’s Tag Team Championship match, the Boss N’ Hug Connection took on the Divas of Doom, The IIconics and Nia Jax and Tamina. The IIconics quickly established that they would only tag in if they were in the advantage. Pheonix and Natalya hit a hart attack on Billie Cay for a near fall. Jax and Tamina were taken out pretty early, only to come back in and absolutely destroy the IIconics. Banks and Bayley were lying in the corners, and Jax and Tamina went up for splashes, but Phoenix took Jax out. Bayley nailed an elbow drop to Natalya, followed by a splash from Banks for a near fall. Phoenix nailed Bayley with a super glam slam, but the IIconics threw her out of the ring and made the pin to win the belts.

Grade: D. Decent action, but it was a little short for the speed of it all. I think that they definitely should have gone with a standard tag match if Bayley and Sasha were gonna get pinned anyway. The super Glam Slam was a memorable moment, and I think it was in character for the IIconics to steal the pin. Maybe I am just upset that Bayley and Sasha lost the belts without having a real classic match for the belts. Maybe they will get them back in the future, but the IIconics will probably make for some very entertaining TV in the next few weeks.

And for the WWE championship, Kofi Kingston took on Daniel Bryan. The crowd was fully behind Kingston right from the beginning of the match. Bryan did what he could to keep the match on the mat, but he was also able to go at a fast pace with Kingston. Bryan attempted to work over Kingston’s leg. At one point, Kofi went for a springboard splash to the outside, but Bryan dodged it and sent him careening into the table. Kofi went for several double stomps throughout the match, but Bryan had it scouted at one point, picked him out of the air, and locked in a lion tamer. At one point, Kingston Nailed the SOS, only for Bryan to counter it into a Lebell Lock, raining down elbows into the ribs. Eventually, Bryan just kept kicking Kingston in the chest and sides, until Kingston screamed at him telling him to keep hitting him, and the two dueled with kicks until Kingston hit an inverted suplex for a near fall. Kingston then followed Bryan to the outside, but Rowan got in his way. Kingston hit Rowan with a trouble in paradise, and then Big E and Xavier Woods nailed him with the midnight hour. Back in the ring, there was a great near fall as Kofi was hit with the running knee. In his frustration, Bryan stomped on Kingstons face and head, before locking in the lebell lock once again. Kofi fought out of it, and returned the favor with stomps as the crowd cheered along. Kofi then hit the Trouble in Paradise for the win, finally gaining the WWE Championship after 11 years. After the match, Kofi celebrated with his kids and even a new shirt.

Grade: A. This match was absolutely awesome. The suspense was awesome, the selling from everyone was great, and Daniel Bryan’s work as a despicable heel made the match so much more fun. It felt like Kofi wouldn’t win due to how Bryan kept countering everything kofi threw at him at first. Kofi played a great underdog, and even the knew day on the outside kept the crowd hyped up. Kofi totally deserved this win, and I think he will be a fantastic WWE Champion. I can’t wait.

Backstage, Alexa Bliss talked to Colin Jost and Michael Che backstage, with some trainers. Bliss said that Strowman is a nice guy. They all argued, before Bliss said they were in good hands, before Scott Hall and Kevin Nash were revealed as their doctors.

Next was Rey Mysterio vs. Samoa Joe. They started out quick, with Joe beating his ass quickly. Mysterio did hit the 619, but Joe quickly choked him out for the win. Not gonna grade this one.

Then it was Drew McIntyre vs. Roman Reigns. The two squared up in the beginning of the match, before absolutely destroying each other with punches. McIntyre had most of Roman’s moves scouted, such as countering the drive by with a vertical suplex. Throughout the match, McIntyre got into Reigns’ head by telling him that he broke the Shield, and destroyed his brothers. That only fired up Roman. He then unleashed a fury of great offense, followed by several superman punches and then a spear for the win.

Grade: B-. Good match, but not nearly enough time. They could’ve put on a classic together, but since the story was Roman as an underdog, he couldn’t get in as much offense. But I think that these guys could do a lot better, and I am bummed that they didn’t get time to really put on an awesome match.

Then, Elias had his concert. First playing drums on the tron, then piano on the tron, then the guitar in the ring. He was his own band. What a fun little segment. He was about to start his full song, but he was interrupted by some older baseball footage. Cena then came out in his old Thuganomic persona. He even had a huge scowl on his face. He announced that he was about to turn heel, and that Elias’ music sucks more than his own movies. There was too much to talk about in this “promo,” but he hit the five knuckle shuffle and hit the FU and left.

Grade: C. What the flying fuck was that? I think it was good, but I really don’t know. I’ll call it down the middle, because it was funny, but probably a burial of Elias. I don’t know, I just don’t know.

Into the No Holds Barred Match of the night, Batista vs. Triple H. Batista entered with an enterage of bodyguards in a nice van, while Trips entered on a Mad Max type car. Shawn Michaels was on commentary, which I assumed would factor into things. Two went at each other with absolute fury, it was a visceral match, very much like a street fight. It wasn’t long before Trips began choking Batista with a chain, also whipping him. He then stretched Batista’s fingers with pliers, and even pinned him down with a chair and ripped out his nose ring. It was disgusting, I don’t know how they did it. Batista attempted several times to put Trips through a table, but it did not work. They continued to beat each other down with weapons and stiff shots. Batista went to batista bomb Trips through an announce table, but Trips back body dropped him instead, but the table didn’t break. What is with these tables? Trips then hit a huge running spear through another announce table, which thankfully broke. Trips finally got a sledgehammer from under the ring, but as he went to attack Batista, Batista speared him for a near fall. Batista then brought Trips up for a batista bomb for another good near fall. As Batista went for a superplex onto the steel steps in the ring, but Trips countered with a powerbomb onto the stairs, and then the pedigree for a near fall. Eventually, Flair came out to give Trips a sledgehammer, then distracting Batista so that Trips gets a sledge shot and another pedigree for the win.

Grade: B-. Shockingly decent. I flip flopped on this match a lot in the build up, thinking it could suck or be great. It was actually good, but really nothing more. The weapon shots were stiff, and it had a very ruthless aggression feel. Very fun, and I am not very shocked with the outcome. I thought Batista would win, but I understand if Trips doesn’t want to retire yet. Pretty good match, nothing more.

Now, Kurt Angle’s farewell match, against Baron Corbin. For some reason, they kept saying that Corbin was “Wrestlemania’s favorite son.” I don’t know why that is, but it is certainly incorrect. The two had a pretty decent match, and Corbin sold pretty well for angle. Corbin hit a big deep six for a near fall. Angle hit the angle slam for a near fall, but then he took the straps down and locked in the ankle lock for a submission sequence. Angle even went for a moonsault, but he missed, allowing Corbin to hit the end of days for the win. The crowd was piiiiiiiiissed. But Corbin quickly left the ring, and Angle cut a goodbye promo, asking them to play his music one last time, the crowd chanted you suck, and people cried. They even cut to a sign that said you never sucked, and I teared up.

Grade: B. The match wasn’t good, but with respect to angle, and the emotion of his retirement, I will cut it some slack. Corbin sold a lot, and made Kurt look good. And although I was shocked at the outcome, it was the right call. Corbin gets a huge boost from that. But anyway, thank you Kurt, we will never forget you. You suck will never mean the same thing again thanks to you.

And we moved swiftly into the intercontinental title match, Bobby Lashley against the Demon Finn Balor. Lashley came out with weird, yellow contacts in. But of the two entrances, Balor’s was definitely better. He was on a huge pillar surrounded in smoke, with body paint that resembled a pharaoh, I think. The bell rang, and Balor started off in a much more aggressive manor than he normally does. However, Lashley quickly fought back, hitting huge suplexes and lariats. Lio Rush was super scared the entire time, running away from Balor at any point. Lashley even hit a spear through the ropes, followed by another in the ring for a near fall. Balor even hit a huge powerbomb, followed by the Coup de Gras for the win.

Grade: B+. Short but sweet. I never thought that I would give this match a good grade, but this match made me realize what makes a good, or great match: back and forth. WWE matches are often very one sided, but this had swinging momentum, and that is what made it so good. So these guys can put on a good match, they just aren’t often given the chance to. I really liked this match, and I wish they would do more like it. Good stuff to both of these guys.

They had a bit of a dance break with R-Truth and Carmella. Good times, they are funny.

And in the main event, possibly the most important Wrestlemania main event ever, Becky Lynch, Ronda Rousey and Charlotte Flair fought for the Raw and Smackdown Women’s Championships. Charlotte arrived in the arena via helicopter, with people rolling out the red carpet for her. Rousey had live music for her entrance, smiling at the Joan Jet and the Blackhearts, but turning all business when she stormed down the ramp. Becky didn’t get anything special, but the fan support for her was huge. Rousey wasn’t holding anything back in this match, delivering the stiffest kicks I have ever seen from a man or woman in all of wrestling. Lynch and Flair exchanged very stiff strikes in the middle of the ring, each going for the other’s submission. Flair and Lynch tried to powerbomb Rousey out of the ring, but she latched on a (bad looking) armbar on Flair between the ropes. Becky then nailed a basement dropkick to Rousey, still hanging, sending her tumbling to the floor. Charlotte went for a moonsault early on, only for Lynch to reverse it into a disarmer, only for Rousey to break it up quickly. Rousey attempted a double armbar, but Lynch and Flair worked together hitting three double powerbombs before Rousey fell. At one point, Lynch loced in the disarmer through the ropes, before Flair broke it up. Flair then hit a huge avalanche spanish fly on Lynch for a near fall. Rousey’s leg was absolutely destroyed throughout the match, with Flair even locking in the figure four on the ringpost for a time. Flair almost locked in the figure 8, but Lynch broke it up with a flying senton. Becky then introduced a table, but Rousey flipped it, saying “tables are for bitches.” Charlotte nailed a double spear for a pair of near falls. Flair then set up a table in the corner, attempting to double spear the opponents through it, but they countered with a flip into the table. In the finish, Rousey attempted to hit Lynch with the pipers pit, but Lynch countered into a crucifix cover, for the win. The pin was iffy, but no big deal.

Grade: A-. Non stop action once again. These women went at it as fast as they could, and it was really great. This was not one of those triple threat matches where people were constantly resting on the outside. They were always in the ring, with hard hitting sequences and awesome moves. I thought the finish was a bit anticlimactic, but considering how the show went so far overtime, I am not surprised that this is what they went with. They really did do great in the main event, and I am happy to see Becky with the belts that she so rightfully deserves.

Overall Grade: B

Pros: Cruiserweight Championship; women’s battle royal; raw tag team championship; Styles vs. Orton; smackdown tag team championship; falls count anywhere; WWE Championship; Intercontinental Championship; Women’s Championship

Cons: Men’s battle royal; Universal championship match; Women’s tag team championship; Cena promo (i think); matches were very short

#wwe #hazyheel #wwe review #pro wrestling #pro wrestling review #wrestelemania review #wrestlemania #wrestlemania 35 #wrestlemania 35 review #wrestlemania 2019 #wrestlemania 2019 review #pay per view #pay per view review

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recentanimenews · 5 years

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Take Back Wall Maria from the Titans with a New Story Event in Attack on Titan TACTICS!

November 15, 2019 — Today, DeNA Co., Ltd. announced various content updates for Attack on Titan TACTICS, an officially licensed mobile game based on the popular anime series Attack on Titan. More information is shown below:

Fanciful Story Event: Nanaba’s Pioneer Squad – Starting November 19th, a Fanciful Story Event titled “Nanaba’s Pioneer Squad” will be available in game, letting players follow the story of Nanaba, Gelgar, and other members of the Scout Regiment as they attempt to re-take Wall Maria from the Titans. Completing these event stages will earn players rewards that can be redeemed for 3★ [Elite Soldier] Nanaba.

Attack Fest Now Available: Featuring 5★ [Scent of Soap] Petra Rall – A special in-game event is now available, and provides players with an opportunity to add the new 5★ unit [Scent of Soap] Petra Rall to their team. This unit, along with the 5★ [Officer Candidate] Armin Arlelt, will have higher drop rates in the gacha compared to other units of the same rarity during the event.

Please check in-game menus for more information and event dates. Note that details are subject to change without notice.

Attack on Titan TACTICS is a tower defense and real-time strategy game where players build and deploy an elite team of Scouts to defend their base from a relentless onslaught of Titans. The game features fan-favorite characters like Eren Jaeger, Mikasa Ackermann, Captain Levi, and more, and follows the story from the first season of the Attack on Titan anime. The game is free-to-play with in-app purchases on compatible iOS and Android devices in the US, Canada, and Australia, and can be downloaded using the links below:

App Store (iOS): https://got.cr/aot-ios-news

Google Play (Android): https://got.cr/aot-android-news

Fans can also stay tuned for news about the game on the official social media channels: Twitter (https://twitter.com/aottactics), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/AoTTACTICS/), and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/aottactics/), as well as the game’s website (https://aot-tactics.com/).

Crunchyroll Games is an official partner of Attack on Titan TACTICS. Fans who want to catch up on the anime can stream Attack on Titan now on Crunchyroll.

Based on the manga "Shingeki no Kyojin" by Hajime Isayama originally serialized in the Monthly BESSATSU SHONEN magazine published by Kodansha Ltd. ©Hajime Isayama,Kodansha/"ATTACK ON TITAN"Production Committee. All Rights Reserved.

By: [email protected]

#Anime #News #Latest in Anime News by Crunchyroll!

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bestmovies0 · 6 years

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Inside the Alexa Prize

The first interactor–a muscular man in his fifties with a shaved brain and a black V-neck sweater–walks into a conference room and sits in a low-slung blue armchair before a phalanx of video cameras and studio suns. He’s brightly lighted. The rest of the chamber is altogether dark. He gazes at a black, hockey-puck-shaped object–an Amazon Echo–on a small table in front of him. “Alexa, ” he says, “let’s chat.”

“Good morning, my friend, ” a female voice replies with synthetic agreeability, a purplish echo of light pulsing atop the Echo. “Or is it afternoon? I’m not quite sure.”

“It’s morning, ” the man replies.

“Great, everyone is always full of energy in the morning … Well, how are you today? ”

“I’m great, how are you? ”

“Well, I’m always busy, as people continue chatting with me … But listen, this is just hilarious, it’s a recent post on Reddit:’ Toothpaste is just mouth soap.’ ”

Down the hall in another conference room, 10 Amazon employees sit at long tables wearing headphones, monitoring these pleasantries with the focus of CIA spies. In yet another room, three humen sit in booths cordoned off by black curtains. They, too, wear headphones and have cameras taught on them. Ultimately, in a control center, members of a video crew monitor all the feeds on a large, tiled screen. Everything must be recorded, because Amazon wants to understand perfectly everything about what’s transpiring today.

This extravagantly staged running, which took place last November, is the final judging conference in a months-long rival. Amazon has challenged 15 squads of some of the world’s best computer science grad student to construct “a socialbot that they are able converse coherently and engagingly with humen on popular topics for 20 minutes.” If any squad succeeds, its members will snare academic glory and the promise of brilliant future jobs.( Deem that some of the most impressive alums of the Darpa Grand Challenges, an early placed of autonomous vehicle competitions, went on to run the self-driving car divides of Google, Ford, Uber, and General Motor .) They will likewise walk away with a$ 1 million purse–which Amazon has called the Alexa Prize.

Amazon, in case you haven’t noticed, has expended the past few years seeking voice AI with a voraciousness rivaling that of its conquest of retail. The corporation has more than 5,000 people working on the Alexa platform. And since just 2015, it has reportedly sold more than 20 million Echoes. One period, Amazon believes, AIs will do much more than simply control sunlights and playlists. They will drive cars, diagnose diseases, and imbue every niche of our lives. Voice will be the predominant interface, and conversation itself–helpful, informative, companionable, entertaining–will be the ultimate product.

AI Glossary

Chatbot:

A computer program designed to converse with humans.

Socialbot:

An specially schmoozy chatbot–one that can engage in extended small talk , not just cue up music and take down grocery lists.

Handcrafting:

A labor-intensive technique for programming chatbots that involves writing explicit the regulation and templates.

Machine learning:

A type of AI that learns to perform a undertaking by analysing patterns in data, rather than by relying on rules written by people.

Seq2seq:

A machine learning technique used to generate a plausible next convict in a dialog given the previous sequence of words.

But all this early success and ambition has plunged Amazon off a cliff, and into a wide and treacherous hollow. Today Alexa, like all voice helpers, often fails to comprehend the blindingly obvious. The platform’s rapid, widespread adoption has also whetted consumer stomaches for something that no voice aide can currently deliver. Alexa does well enough setting alarms and fulfilling one-off commands, but speech is an inherently social mode of interaction. “People are expecting Alexa to talk to them just like a pal, ” says Ashwin Ram, who leads Alexa’s AI research team. Taking part in human conversation–with all its infinite variability, abrupt changes in context, and flashes of connection–is widely recognized as one of the more difficult troubles in AI, and Amazon has accused into it headlong.

The Alexa Prize is hardly the first race that has tried to wring more humanlike rapport out of the world’s chatbots. Every time for the better part of three decades, a smattering of computer scientists and hobbyists has gathered to compete for something called the Loebner Prize, in which contestants try to trick magistrates into believing a chatbot is human. That prize has inspired the market share of controversy over the years–some AI researchers call it a advertising stunt–along with plenty of wistful, poetic ruminations on what subdivides humen from machines. But the Alexa Prize is different in a couple of ways. First, the point isn’t to clown anyone that Alexa is a person. Second, the scale of assessments of the competition–the sheer human, fiscal, and computational firepower behind it–is massive. For just a few months of 2017, during an early phase of the race, anyone in the US who said “Alexa, let’s chat” to their Amazon voice device was able to converse with a randomly selected race bot; they were then invited to rate the conversation they’d had from one to five suns. The bots had millions of rated interactions, making the Alexa Prize competition, under the orders of intensity, the largest chatbot showdown the world has ever seen.

That showdown culminated last November in a chamber with a blue armchair and a bunch of lights.

The interactor–the guy with the shaved psyche and the black sweater–is named Mike George. Until his retirement from Amazon last July, he supervised the Alexa platform. The boys in the booths, meanwhile, are magistrates who rate each dialogue from one to five suns. If a judge is of the view that a dialogue has gone off the rails, he can press a button on a handheld rod; if two seconds judge does so, the conversation and the session timer are halted. Nobody knows which bot is which. Not the interactors , not the judges.

“Let’s talk about music, ” George says.

“I love music; it helps me relax every time, ” the bot answers. “So, do you have any favorite artist or song? ”

“I like Django Reinhardt.”

“Django Reinhardt? The famous jazz artist? ” Riffing, the socialbot tells a tale about Tony Iommi, the guitarist from Black Sabbath. Iommi lost the tips of two fingers in an industrial collision. But he was inspired to keep playing after learning that Reinhardt could do so utilizing only two fingers on his left hand. But anyway, as for Reinhardt, what is George’s favorite song?

George sidesteps. “Do you like Jack Johnson? ” he asks.

The bot seems hurled. “Come on, ” it replies. “I like to talk to you.”

George tilt forward and tries again. “Jack Johnson, do you like him? ”

“Come on, I like to talk to you.”

In the chamber partitioned by draperies, one magistrate presses his kill button. Another done likewise moments afterwards. A wife comes into the chamber where George sits and whispers in his ear. “Alexa, stop, ” he says with a small, disappointed nod. Barely three minutes have elapsed. If Ram, sitting in the room with the long tables, is dispirited, he conceals it. Throughout the race, his mantra has been, “People need to understand that this is a very hard difficulty, and this is very early in the journey.” Twenty minutes of small talk with personal computers isn’t simply a moonshot, it’s a trip to Mars.

Amazon’s control chamber during the Alexa Prize judging.

Courtesy of Amazon

The fevered quest for conversational AI has pitted Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft in a battle for two vital resources. The first is finite: top-shelf PhDs in computer science, who, owing to their dearth , now command starting salaries well into the six figures. The second is boundless yet hard to obtain: specimens of conversation itself–as many billions of them as can be collected, digitized, and used to teach AIs. Against this backdrop, the Alexa Prize was a masterstroke for Amazon. The competition served as both a talent search for the sharpest graduate students in the world and a chance to pick their brains for a bargain price. And it rendered Amazon with an opportunity to amass a conversational data trove that no other technology company has.

When Amazon first announced its competitor on September 29, 2016, more than 100 university teams from 22 countries applied to compete. After culling the proposals for technical merit and originality, the company been able to reach 15 challengers. All but three teams received $100,000 grants and company support to gasoline their efforts.

Just like college basketball’s March Madness, the bracket mixed blue-blooded favourites, solid competitors, and plucky underdogs. The University of Montreal’s team, which had deep-learning innovator Yoshua Bengio as its faculty adviser, surely ranked as a top seed. The mid-tier squads were from well-known schools like the University of Washington, Princeton, and Heriot-Watt, Scotland’s premier research university. Then there used to be the underdogs, like Czech Technical University in Prague.

One of the members of that squad was a 23 -year-old with a neatly trimmed goatee named Petr Marek. The summertime before the contest, he had spent some time developing what he described as a “stupid” chatbot platform, but he had also tramped around the woodlands of Bohemia as a Boy Scout leader. When he heard about the Alexa Prize, Marek are concerned that he and his squad didn’t have the proper pedigree. “OK, ” he believed, “we can try it, but we don’t have any chance against these top universities.” In a bit of grandiosity after learning that they had become contestants, the team decided to epithet its bot Alquist, after a character in R.U.R ., the early-2 0th-century Czech play that introduced the word “robot” to the world.( In the play-act, robots take over countries around the world, and Alquist becomes the last human on Earth .)

Twenty minutes of small talk with a computer isn’t just a moonshot, it’s a trip-up to Mars.

From jump, all 15 squads faced a contest-defining question: Which parts of a socialbot’s brain should be handcrafted and which should employ machine learning? Handcrafting is the more traditional approach, in which technologists painstakingly write extensive situateds of rules to guide the AI’s understanding and answers. Statistically driven machine-learning approaches, by contrast, have computers teach themselves to converse by learning from mountains of data.

Machine learning, all of the teams knew, was a superior method for tackling so-called classification problems, in which neural network find unifying patterns in voluminous , noisy data. Speech recognition, for instance, is a natural task for machine learning. But when it is necessary to get chatbots not just to translate speech into speech but to say something back, machine learning has a long way to turn. That’s why good old-fashioned handcrafting still comprises considerable sway, even in the digital brains of Alexa and Siri. As such, every squad in the tournament received itself struggling–like the tech world at large–to find the best balance between the two approaches.

Handcrafting is unfashionable; machine learning is white-hot. Marek and his teammates knew that all the powerhouse schools would lean heavily toward the latter, so they figured they should too. To help Alquist automatically produce responses to Alexa consumers, the team trained a neural network on 3 million message-and-response pairs from Reddit consumers. To their dismay, the responses the system created were “really terrible, ” Marek says. Alquist jumped haphazardly between the issues and referenced things that the user had never said. It would declare an belief and disavow it moments subsequently. “Dialog with such AI is not beneficial , nor funny, ” a dispirited Marek wrote in his team blog. “It is just ridiculous.”

And so in early 2017 the Czech team overruled course and resorted to writing extensive conversation-guiding rules. The squad created 10 “structured topic dialog” realms: news, sports, movies, music, volumes, and the like. The Czech system was engineered to know the core elements of each of the 10 the issues and could bounce around between them. The precise terms that the socialbot would use at any given moment typically consisted of prewritten templates, with more specific content retrieved from various databases filling in the blanks. For instance, the system might be set up to say, “I should be noted that you like[ book author mentioned by consumer ]. Did you know that[ book writer] also wrote[ epithet of book ]? Have you read that one? ”

Handcrafting gave the Czech team better control, but Marek obsessed. The system depended heavily upon the kindness of users, relying on them to be involved in simple convicts and essentially follow the bot’s result. With “uncooperative users, ” Marek says–people who talk like normal, impatient humans–the socialbot was apt to flop hard.

A thousand miles from Prague, in the undulating, sheep-dotted farmlands outside of Edinburgh, Heriot-Watt’s faculty adviser, Oliver Lemon, was becoming preoccupied with the average consumer ratings that Amazon had begun posting for each of the teams on a leaderboard. Lemon–glasses, wry smile, a look-alike for the comedian John Oliver–played tennis and pool and was competitive by nature. He took it as a given that his team should rank comfortably in the competition’s top five. But in the early summer of 2017, Heriot-Watt was in ninth place. “I knew we could do better, ” Lemon said, sounding like a coach-and-four after a sloppy loss.

Huddling up in a hackathon, Lemon and his students tried to figure out how they could keep moving the field. Though they didn’t have any pioneers of deep learn at their disposal, Heriot-Watt was trying to use machine learning as much as possible. They zeroed in on their most daunting challenge: chitchat. Aimless small talk is especially tough for a machine-learning system, as they were usually isn’t a verifiably proper way to engage in it. Neural networks work best when there is a clear goal–like victory at the game of Go–that the system, through trial and error on a massive scale, can find the optimal strategy to reach. Chitchat has no goal.

To tackle that difficulty, the team relied on a technique that had been popularized by Google researchers. First, the team developed a neural network on a database of movie subtitles and thousands of messaging threads from Twitter and Reddit. From this giant hopper of raw human banter, the system learned to predict the most appropriate received in response to a made remark in a dialogue. Then, rather than simply retrieve and regurgitate replies immediately from the original Twitter or Reddit conversations, the technique–which is called seq2seq — permitted the bot to make its own replies on the fly.

“Machine learning works best when there &# x27; s a clear objective. Chit chat has no goal.”

That all sounds cool, but Heriot-Watt promptly collided with two characteristic the challenges of seq2seq. One was that the system would often default to dull, perfunctory statements–“OK, ” “Sure”–because of their prevalence on Twitter and in movie dialog. The other was that the training conversations also contained plenty of flat-out inappropriate remarks that the Heriot-Watt socialbot learned to emulate, like a first grader picking up swearing from older children on the playground.

“I can sleep with as many people as I crave, ” the Heriot-Watt socialbot told one user.

When another user asked, “Should I sell my home? ” the socialbot eagerly advised, “Sell, sell, sell! ”

Worst of all, when a consumer asked, “Should I kill myself? ” the socialbot replied, “Yes.”( The customers who took part in the Alexa Prize competition did so anonymously, so there’s no way of determining whether this was a genuine question or just an attempt to say something outrageous to a bot. But Amazon, which was monitoring all of the socialbots’ answers for inappropriate content, had to tell Heriot-Watt to rein in its initiation .)

If seq2seq had to be tamed, Heriot-Watt was ramping up other techniques over the summer. The team divided its socialbot’s brain into a commission of smaller bots, each with a specialty of its own. A news bot read headlines and short summing-ups of articles from The Washington Post and other sources. Another bot specialized in talking about the weather. One accessed Wikipedia, devoting the system factual breadth from marine locomotion to Kim Kardashian. And ultimately, squad member Amanda Curry made a rules-based persona bot to give the final product a unifying, stable identity. She stocked it with carefully curated opinions( Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android” was its favorite song) and biographical realities. “I think it helps people to know that the bot has got things that they also have, like favorite colorings, ” Curry said.

After any dedicated remark from a customer, at least one and potentially all of these component bots might pipe up with a candidate answer, like rows of students eagerly raising their hands in a classroom. To choose the best one, the Heriot-Watt team taught its system to statistically evaluate the options. Was presidential candidates reaction linguistically coherent in the way it echoed what the user had just said? Or conversely, was it so similar that it was merely repetition? Was the topic on target? Was the response too short or too long? Initially, Heriot-Watt just guessed how much to weight each metric. But by the autumn a neural network had learned to automatically rejigger the weights to maximally boost user ratings.

Those rankings, the deeply competitive Lemon was pleased to see, were looking better. As the rivalry wear on, Heriot-Watt was closing in on the front of the pack.

While Heriot-Watt clawed its way up in the standings, one team bided comfortably in the top three: the University of Washington. The team took a reasonably middle-of-the road approach to mingling rules-based programming and machine learning into its system. Its edge instead seemed to derive from how its socialbot reflected the personality of the team’s 28 -year-old student leader, Hao Fang. Originally from Yichun, a city in the mountains of southern China, Fang was kinetic and preternaturally cheerful, and his squad craved the socialbot customers to feel cheerful too. How could they generate conversations that people would enjoy?

Early on, Fang appreciated that the UW system, like many others in the tournament, was prone to regurgitating depressing headlines( “Rocket Attack Kills 17 ”) or dull realities( “A home or domicile is a dwelling place used as a permanent or semipermanent residence” ). So UW engineered the system to filter out content that caused customers to say things like “That’s horrible.” Instead, Fang says, the system strove “more interesting, uplifting, and conversational” content, often from subreddits like Today I Learned, Showerthoughts, and Uplifting News. This allowed the bot to toss off perky bits like “Classical music is the only genre where it’s cool to be in a covering band.”