#- by brute force changing how you present yourself. I’m projecting only a little

[calnexin]

OUUUGGHG LOVE THAT FOR ALINA. i always forget that sidestep's self is added onto by the AI so its like. OUUGGH. anyways love alina so if u have any more thoughts on her.. hehe

There is nothing wrong with her she is normal

Before dying she was a friendly little weirdo, but her mannerisms were still a bit robotic and she was a little too intense at times to really be approachable. Her quirks made her peculiar to most people, and endearing to some. I imagine her as kinda shy and reserved back in the day, when she was more of a blank slate and not quite sure what her place in the world is. Overall: socially awkward, can be intense and a bit hard to talk to, but sweet in her own way. Quirky 😙 She was slowly easing into being human; by the time of heartbreak she had even started cracking shitty jokes 😌

After coming back from the dead, she acts more “human” in many ways - notably, she’s learned how to be an asshole…! She carries herself with more bravado and confidence that’s initially faked but gradually becomes real. During the time between her 2nd Farm escape and the beginning of Rebirth, Alina threw all her effort into conditioning herself and practicing to act like a “real human”, effectively changing or burying all the traits that set her apart before. Truly a rebirth! She reaaally doesn’t wanna get caught again

The biggest change would be her boldness in social situations. While she might seem much more at ease talking to people now, she's really just better at hiding her discomfort. Nobody comments on the change in demeanour because they assume that the increase in assertiveness/confidence is a good thing - best not to jinx it! She’s just come out of her shell a little, that’s it.

She’s still blunt and insensitive at times, but what’s important is that she learned how to be a really good liar! So good that she does it without noticing; everything she does is to deter suspicion. She makes jokes and teases to diffuse the situation when needed, she puts herself in the role of a washed-up hero past her prime to appear nonthreatening, she dresses a bit goofy and is laid back, showing little of the intensity she carried before. Ain’t no way she’s the newest villain currently beating up the rangers on live television 😙

#fallen hero #FHR #sidestep #asks #Tbh this whole thing was a shitty metaphor for overcoming social awkwardness/being seen as weird as a teenager - #- by brute force changing how you present yourself. I’m projecting only a little #thanks for the ask! <3 #also thanks if you read all that #alina can have a little backstory development. as a treat #c draws #alina

[wardencommanderrodimiss]

Witches, Chapter 26: back in the courtroom, and everything’s coming up as a shitshow, which is honestly how it always goes. Welcome to hell, Athena.

The second trial day of Themis is one of my favorites because there’s both Blackquill being entirely done with everything, and him showing for the first time that he’s got a bit of a heart left. Good shit.

[Seelie of Kurain Chapter Masterlist] [ao3]

[Witches Chapter Masterlist] [ao3]

---

Juniper sits on the lobby couch, her hands cradling a lone large sunflower that Athena brought her, watching Athena interrupt her pacing with jumping jacks. “Shouldn’t you take it easy, Thena?” she asks. She was rather green about ten minutes ago, but assured them that it was just the iron and stress of jail that left her that way, and that she would look properly human by the time she would stand before the judge and gallery. And in the elapsed time her skin has settled in its hue, if paler than she was yesterday, her fear still apparent. 

Athena whirls around with a wild glint in her eyes. The tired bags beneath them accentuate her crazed appearance. “I’m taking it easy! I’m fine! I’ve gotta get - be - ready to go!” She jogs in place; she hasn’t had both feet on the floor since she arrived. 

“Did you get enough sleep last night?” Apollo asks, knowing the answer is no. 

“Sleep? Huh?” Athena finally stops moving. “Yeah, sleep! Yeah I totally sleep! I’m fine!”

She sounds like him on his worst days. “That’s not exactly what I asked,” he says. Juniper stares back down into the center of the sunflower. “Maybe let’s just drop it. We’re not inspiring much faith in our client.”

“No,” Juniper says. She looks up. “I have complete faith in you, Thena.”

“O-oh.” From Athena’s face, she’s wondering if that faith is warranted. Apollo will make sure that it is. For both the girls’ sakes. 

“Guten Morgen.” All three of them jump. Klavier chuckles. “Ready to put on a show?”

“Do you have anything about the tape?” Apollo asks. Despite his best efforts, he had found himself wondering when this was all going to come crashing down - if somehow Prosecutor Blackquill would find out and put a stop to it, or if somehow it couldn’t even be proven that the tape was fabricated—

“And not even a ‘hello’ to start with!” Klavier says, still cheerily; he can’t really have expected anything else from Apollo, could he? There’s a trial starting in fifteen minutes and Apollo doesn’t know anymore who he thinks is the killer. “A bit rude, don’t you think? And nonetheless, I have a good-luck present to you both.”

“Guten Morgen, Prosecutor Gavin!” How did Apollo end up stuck with two people like this? Apollo’s probably more fluent in Khura’inese than they are in German (and for Athena, Spanish or Italian or French…), but he doesn’t go around flaunting it like he’s so worldly and cultured. (And he wouldn’t do that even if Khura’in wasn’t something he wishes he would forget.) “Do you have something for us?”

“Of course I do, Fräulein. I could hardly just leave one as lovely as yourself hanging, now could I?” Apollo rolls his eyes, hoping Klavier sees it. Klavier offers to Athena a small stack of papers. “There you are. A summary of the voiceprint analysis, proving that the voice in the tape is most assuredly, exactly the same clip as spoken in the mock trial.” Athena rifles through the pages. “You’ll also notice that there’s still analysis ongoing - hoping to discover what was originally on the tape before it was turned into fabricated evidence. It might give us some other clues, ja? But unfortunately we don’t know much more at this point than the length of the prior recording.”

“Well, maybe that could still help out, somehow,” Athena says. “Thank you! And—” She frowns. “Is this a second copy of the same thing? Wait, this one’s got more information about—”

“About the logistics of the analysis and who precisely down at the precinct was working it,” Klavier interrupts. “That packet is for Herr Samurai. I did not think you would appreciate me tipping your hand to him beforehand, but I imagined there might be more that Herr Prosecutor would like to know to be sure that you are not the ones inventing this wholecloth.”

Klavier made the same warning yesterday when they first discussed this. “Do you think he would?” Apollo asks. “Accuse us of that?”

“Hm.” Klavier considers the question for longer than Apollo would like, idly snapping his fingers. Athena retreats to the couch to discuss their new evidence with Juniper. “Truly, I do not imagine so. He plays a very threatening game, but when it comes to it he seems quite reasonable.”

Apollo thinks about Mayor Tenma’s trial, Blackquill’s dirty tricks that nearly forced the mayor into a false confession. “You and I have different standards of reasonable,” he says. Maybe he means relatively reasonable, that there’s so many other prosecutors who are even worse. 

“Perhaps,” Klavier agrees, “but Herr Samurai could be the most reasonable man and I would nonetheless leave you with this document trail.” His eyes, stormy blue and unwavering in their hue this entire conversation, but Apollo doesn’t remember whether or not this color is the Sight, harden. “I would hate to see your integrity as a lawyer called into question, especially over evidence that I offered you as assistance.” His jaw tightens, thinking, no doubt, of what Apollo has continued to think about since he arrived at Themis. With Phoenix.

This also seems like the most emotionally honest Klavier has been all week. “Thanks,” Apollo says. “I—”

—appreciate it, the sentence means to end, but movement behind Klavier catches Apollo’s eye, and the doors that lead out into the hall thump suddenly shut. “Hey!” Apollo calls. “Who’s—”

“What’s going on?” Athena asks. “Who’s there, did you see?”

“I don’t know,” Apollo says. “It might have been Hugh.” He thinks he saw a bit of the dark blue of the Themis uniform there. “Eavesdropping to figure out our strategy, no doubt.”

“I would expect him not to be the only one,” Klavier says, glancing back over his shoulder. “The cardboard paparazzi and the prosecutor Fräulein are rather nosy themselves, wouldn’t you agree? I’ll go chase them down and make sure they cause no further trouble for you.” He flashes a casual grin, as light and easygoing as he ever tries to be, but it is undercut for Apollo, and Apollo alone; Vongole materializes from the air next to him, red ears pricked and nose pointed at the door, her head held level with her shoulders. A creature ready to stalk, ready to hunt, to pounce, and Klavier barely turns for the doors and she springs, plunging through the door like it’s just a projection. But Klavier, when he gets to the door, without much haste, has to open it, reminding Apollo that it’s Vongole who doesn’t adhere to the physical world, not the door.

What’s she going to do, herd the wayward Themis students back around toward Klavier? Can she even do that if they can’t see her? Can she make them see her? God, Apollo hopes that corralling them is all she’ll do; Klavier’s got control over that hellhound, right? He does, Apollo’s seen that. No need to worry about that. Focus on the case.

(Apollo’s still going to worry about that.)

“Apollo, you ready?” Athena asks. 

“Yes!” Focus on the moment, the evidence, the trial. Forget Klavier and his haunted dog. “I’m Apollo Justice and I’m fine!” He feels better already, and a shaky grin draws across Athena’s face. “Okay, your turn. Ready?”

“I’m Athena Cykes! And I’m fine!”

-

“Ms Newman and Mr O’Conner have recanted their confessions made before yesterday’s adjournment, but you may expect, Your Baldness, to see them again in this courtroom, as I intend later to determine if they should be charged with perjury.”

Apollo has come to think that most of Blackquill’s lauded so-called psychological manipulations are really just brute intimidation that he pretends has more finesse than he actually does. Despite that, the question he finds himself with now is whether or not Blackquill is in as cheery of a mood as he is acting, grinning as he catches the court up on all that has progressed on the prosecution’s side of things. “Ms Woods likewise attempted to recant her confession, claiming it was made in the heat of the moment to” - he rolls his eyes, as if the disdain dripping through his voice wasn’t already making his opinion on the matter clear, and Athena’s expression hardens - “protect her friends, but given that she is already and continues to be the one on trial, that changes little of our situation.”

She did confess, didn’t she? In the midst of Robin yelling and Hugh interrupting, Juniper confessed too, trying to stop her friends from ruining their lives for her. And if he presumes Juniper is innocent, which he has to, because she’s their client, then that means when she confessed to murder, she lied; plainly and wholeheartedly, she lied. Which means that even someone half-fae can lie. 

“Very well,” the judge says. “And the photograph submitted yesterday of the victim and the defendant together minutes before the—”

“Unfortunately, we will find that evidence no longer relevant,” Blackquill interrupts. He is still smirking, even while forced to refute the hand he played yesterday. If this is an act, to unnerve Apollo, it’s working. Or if he’s genuinely amused, then it’s probably because he’s got something new up his sleeve that makes him not concerned with all the ways his case collapsed yesterday. “The art room clock runs fast and will not give us an accurate measure of the time. ‘Tis a pity for our time to have been wasted as such, but the bungling oaf of a detective responsible for overlooking this fact will assuredly be paying for his failure.”

Athena winces. “Poor Fulbright,” she whispers. 

Is Blackquill angry that he thinks Fulbright should have seen it - or is it misplaced anger, Blackquill sure that he would have noticed had he been on the scene investigating and angry that he has to rely on Fulbright, instead. (Is that why they keep spotting traces of Taka around? Blackquill thinking he can’t trust the observation skills of the detective? Taka didn’t notice the clock, either, for whatever that’s worth. Probably not easy for the bird to get into a building. How does it get out of jail?)

“Now,” Blackquill says sharply, and the flashes of mirth he showed a minute ago have vanished. “Today, I intend to prove to you that the accused is the only person who could have moved the body. And to that end, the prosecution calls its first witness.”

-

Hugh O’Conner did assure Athena that he would be testifying today, and true to that word, he takes the witness stand first. His claim is that he saw Juniper moving the high-jump mat that would’ve been needed to move the body without bruising it; he claims to have seen this from a vantage point that would have been impossible, until Blackquill obliquely reminds them of the crane that was present the night of the murder, as involved in the stage setup. This makes sense - the weird thing about it isn’t the statement itself, but Hugh’s reaction to it. He looks pained, clutching the side of his neck in a way Apollo has come to notice him doing each time he is stressed and struggling to regain his footing in an argument. 

“That’s - you’ve said enough, Prosecutor Blackquill!” Is Hugh trying to plead with him or threaten him? Neither, Apollo thinks, is liable to work. “You promised!”

Blackquill laughs, a harsh sound from the back of his throat. “Did I?” he asks. “I recall nothing of the sort. What I do recall is that you came to me blubbering about making a deal that I would keep quiet in exchange for information, but you should have taken care to extract that promise for me before you went ahead and offered me your every secret like a blithering fool.”

Blackquill has a way with words that leaves Apollo incredibly worried about the fates of everyone who is in any way involved with him. Like he’s just waiting for the opportunity to snatch away the souls of anyone who isn’t careful who dares speak with him. Is that part of who he is - what he is - or is it one of his actual psychological manipulations? And is it the witness he means to scare with his phrasing, or the defense? 

“Ah, well, if Golden Boy will not take the chance to lift the weight of truth from his shoulders, then I will tell you,” Blackquill says. Hugh, with his hand still clapped tight to his neck like he’s trying to staunch the flow from a wound, makes a kind of undignified whimpering sound. “He was up in that crane, and not simply mucking about there for fun. He does, rather, work part-time as a crane operator.”

“A high school student!” the judge exclaims. “Operating a crane!”

“No!” Hugh snaps. “The prosecution - there’s no proof that I was operating the crane! The prosecution might be lying!”

Blackquill laughs, and makes no move to argue. “I don’t know where this is going,” Athena says in a low voice, “because this is the point that Prosecutor Blackquill wants to make, but…” Louder, she adds, her voice ringing across the courtroom, “I bet we can prove it was you.”

Which they do, for whatever good it may or may not be about to do them, and the judge is still hung up on a high schooler operating a crane, rather than what Hugh would or wouldn’t be able to see from the vantage point of the crane, but Hugh splutters and protests about how brilliant and talented he is and that’s why. Blackquill watches him, smirking, waiting for his failure of an argument to trail away into nothingness. Hugh goes silent halfway through saying something about practicing archery one-handed, and Blackquill’s smirk splits open into a grin. “Dispense with this inane charade, Golden Boy.” He doesn’t wait for Hugh’s response and continues speaking over the witness’ begging. “Now, we will establish, for the sake of argument, that the age range of high school seniors ends at the upper limit of nineteen - still, legally, too young to operate heavy machinery. That, however, does not apply to Mr O’Conner, does it, now?”

“But he is a high school senior,” Athena says. “Are you saying he’s not around that age?”

Blackquill slams his palm on the bench. “Indeed, he is not. Golden Boy here is twenty-five.” The serious expression that he held on his face for a fraction of a second breaks down into raucous laughter, punctured by his further slapping the bench in uncontained amusement. Apollo really doesn’t like seeing him in a good mood. He’s only ever entertained by someone else’s bad fortune. “He took a seven year break from his schooling!”

They all had secrets - Juniper, Robin, Hugh. The courtroom is quiet; is it ever this quiet after a revelation, without a breath of murmured shock. “Eh?” Athena utters faintly. “Come again?”

“Twenty-five,” Blackquill repeats gleefully. He nods to Taka and the hawk snatches up a paper in its talons, launching itself into the air and making straight for the judge. “All in the school’s official paperwork, as you will find.”

“Twenty-five?” Apollo echoes, sure they’re all going to ask this in turn, a round-table of disbelief. “He’s - he’s older than me?” He’s not good at eyeballing ages, he knows that, and he knows that everyone always thinks him baby-faced and younger than he is, and Hugh could be like that. People in their twenties all look all over the place. How’s anyone to know? But on the other hand, what twenty-year-old, after taking a gap year for seven successive years out of high school, would want to go back to high school all over again? Apollo sure wouldn’t. But maybe instead of going to college to be a lawyer, Hugh went back to a lawyer high school because those teenagers are at his same maturity level.

(Solid burn. If he didn’t get heckled every time he was the slightest bit snide to a witness, he would say it out loud.)

“Seven years?” Athena asks. Blackquill might as well just go over the entire situation again, if they’re all going to ask for clarification on each and every tiny point. “But since you’re such a genius” - she does a remarkable job of not sounding wholly derisive when she says it - “wouldn’t taking a seven year vacation make you boring real quick?” She pauses, frowns, playing her words back in her head. “Make you bored.”

Her first one was probably correct, too. Does Hugh know how to have a conversation that isn’t about his own greatness?

“Heh.” Hugh’s recovery from his shock tips him back into the smugness he always seems to carry. “There’s the dull mindless vacations you ordinary plebians take, and then…” He falters, for a moment. “Even geniuses make mistakes,” he says, resuming with an entirely different thread of argument. “The ones I make just, you know, lost me seven years.”

Rising in Apollo’s stomach is the same kind of fear that Blackquill’s particulars of phrasing invoke. “Er, Mr O’Conner,” he begins, ignoring the shock that Athena sends his way, and bracing himself for the way everyone in the courtroom is going to respond to the utterly insane question he is about to ask, “are you actually, like, actually twenty-five, or just - you know, legally, that it’s been twenty-five years since you were first - you were born.”

He knows that at least half of the gallery is going to think he’s an idiot, have some perception of theirs confirmed about how lawyers are all schooling and no sense in their heads; even Athena stares like he’s just lost his mind. Hugh, though, blanches, his whole body tensing and his shoulders drawing inward. Blackquill’s cuffs clank as he hits the bench and Hugh flinches and nearly falls over with fright. Apollo jumps, too. He’d forgotten that Blackquill as much as anyone would hear this question and would get to respond to it in his typical magic-denying ways.

“What a question, Justice-dono,” he drawls. Apollo raises his chin defiantly. It’s a good question, because all the world around them is crazy. “No doubt a matter first brought to your attention by the rather unique situation of some other golden boy of our acquaintance.” His eyebrows raise and his mouth twists in amusement. Apollo’s heart skips and then stops. How does Blackquill know? It seems unlikely - though technically possible - that Klavier would have told him; the alternative is that Blackquill knows enough to know, to realize, when it took even Phoenix several strokes of luck and coincidence to piece it together. Blackquill shouldn’t be saying this. He shouldn’t know. And why of all times choose this as the moment to drop his pretense of disbelief? To psych Apollo out some more? To give Klavier, up in the gallery, a slap in the face for helping Apollo and Athena?

“But suffice to say, we will find that an irrelevant question,” Blackquill continues. “What matters is the legal age of the witness, that has so allowed him to work the discussed job as a crane operator. He was, therefore, up in the crane with the vantage point to see the accused dragging the mat in preparation to move the body. You must agree how clear this is, and that there is no need to deliberate this much any further.”

Oh. Right. Juniper. This is, after all, her trial, and the reason they have gone down this strange road still has to do with her case, and what she did or didn’t do, and Hugh did or didn’t see, on the morning that the body was discovered.

Back to the fight.

-

Hugh lied about ever seeing the body on stage.

It’s an utterly incomprehensible lie, in Apollo’s most just and honest opinion; it’s also one of a host of shady moves Hugh has made. Though the blood Juniper saw on his hands was his own, from trying to sneak a look at the mock trial script and instead finding Myriam’s spring-loaded razor blade-protected script envelope, and her suspicion against him in that regard can be discounted - well, there’s still his grades, and this, about the body.

If the body was moved during the mock trial - moved in fact at the moment Phoenix and Athena heard the shattering of the statues on stage that drew them outside to discover the body - then Hugh and Robin have airtight alibis, on the floor in front of a crowd for the whole mock trial. Apollo had his eyes on them the whole time. But Juniper, ever-multitasking Juniper, the conductor of her show, the only person alive at that time with all the secrets of her script, was not always down on the floor playing the defendant. She was up at the back of the hall in the sound booth, moving back and forth even during Professor Means’ speech. At any of those times, she could have slipped out to the art room, to send Courte’s body to the stage down the banner wire.

All they’ve done is help Blackquill build a more convincing case against Juniper, so convincing that Apollo can’t find within him a single point to dispute. They missed something; he knows it, he has to know it, he has to believe it to the end. But where? Can he object on the grounds that they need to know why Hugh lied about seeing the body? Would Blackquill let that stand?

Hugh starts to laugh. Hugh starts to laugh in the broken, hysterical way of a killer cornered, except he’s about to get away free with Juniper’s verdict. “Behold my brilliance!” he cries, his words breathless and interrupted by his own frantic, frenzied laughter. “Listen well as the rare genius of Hugh O’Conner reveals to the world the secrets of his perfect crime!”

Apollo looks at Athena. Athena glances back at Apollo. “Er,” she says. “What? Why’s this - why again?”

Because this, the wild confessions, happened yesterday too. To hell with this trial. Hugh appears feverish, his hair matting to his forehead and neck with sweat, his eyes darting all around the courtroom, jumping from Apollo and Athena to Blackquill to Juniper and never settling on any of them. “The murder, moving the body, the cover-up, all my works of genius! My great and perfect crime, bow in awe and stand to arrest me! I am confessing, am I not? You have your killer here!”

“Is he serious?” Apollo asks. He’s afraid he is. He’s seen too many other people unravel in this same manner, but the game was up for all of them. Hugh’s game - what the hell is his game?

“I think he’s serious,” Athena says. “Serious, and seriously suddenly cracked.”

“Enough!” Blackquill snarls. Taka shrieks in an angry echo. “You have a perfect alibi, not a perfect crime! And you dare to stand here and further act the mad fool to delay this trial from its inevitable outcome!” He fixes Hugh with his dark eyes, but this time, Hugh doesn’t shrink away. That is definitely stupidity, not bravery, on his part. “I will have no mercy for you should you not this instant stand down.”

“I will never!” Hugh shouts back. “I have testimony that will prove to you, the utter perfection with which I always act! You’ll doubt me, but in truth I used a body double at the mock trial! It wasn’t me at all, not about to lose and not with the alibi! I, the real me, slipped out and had the run of the campus! I moved the body, I’m the killer, and Juniper’s innocent!”

“You have got to be kidding me,” Athena says. 

“I must ask of both the defense and prosecution,” the judge says. “Does this testimony make any sense at all, in the slightest?”

“No,” Apollo answers. 

“Oh, good,” the judge says. “I thought I had just become suddenly, extremely confused.”

“The witness is the one suddenly, extremely confused,” Blackquill says. “And it would be charitable, to call him confused, instead of saying, for instance, that he is a bloody lunatic.”

“You’re a witch, aren’t you?” Hugh demands. As though to make the point for him, Blackquill’s eyes flash silver. “Don’t you know anything about doppelgangers? You know, changelings getting switched for people? You think creatures like that are not okay with being an accessory to crime?” A sour taste gathers in Apollo’s mouth. He thinks of Vera, of Kristoph, of Klavier in the gallery, that life-shaping trauma turned into Hugh’s latest desperate lie in the service of - what? To what end? “I had a—”

“Enough!” Blackquill roars, and it is, indeed, so much more of a bellow than his usual low snarling interruptions. Athena lets out a small scream and stumbles back into the wall behind them. Even Hugh shrinks toward the witness stand, seeming to recognize that he’s taken this impossible declaration a step too far. “That you know such words to use them does not mean you have the damndest understanding of what they truly entail!” He slams both fists in tandem on the bench, and Athena clasps both of her hands over Widget to muffle its surprised swearing.

“You claim familiarity with the concepts as part of your mad gambit, make a mockery of the gravity of such matters, and call me to my face a witch as though that would convince me of the veracity of your statements - yet you never pause to think that perhaps whatever I am, I also bear the ability to see through your pernicious bullshit.” Hugh’s mouth flaps open, and he shuts it without a word. “Spare this court your lies,” Blackquill continues. He has stopped yelling now, his voice merely as low and deadly as it ever is. “There is only one of you, as there ever has been - as is most fortuitous for us, as you the sole dunce as you are have made more than your share of trouble, and another of you would be far more than unbearable.”

Hugh’s mouth opens again like a fish deprived of water, but it seems to Apollo that Blackquill’s outburst has drawn to its close. “Shit,” Athena whispers, her and not Widget this time. “I’ve never heard him that angry.”

Have they? He has been furious at Fulbright, over stupid witnesses, over cases. Professional anger. This is different; this seems a personal chord, and a very disharmonious one, struck, and painfully enough to drop the game he’d made of it prior, denying right to Apollo’s face that monsters, yokai, and magic could ever exist. And is it painful to him the way it infuriates Apollo, on behalf of someone else, or is this another clue in the puzzle, the question, of what is Prosecutor Simon Blackquill?

“Now,” Blackquill says, his calm and his smirk returned, “Your Baldness, where we left off. The verdict.”

“But it’s - hey! Defense!” Hugh, gripping the witness stand, turns on them next. “You have that weird device, don’t you? For crazy testimonies like mine?”

“Widget isn’t weird!” Athena protests. Apollo could object to that. “And I’m not going to waste him on something this plainly ridiculous—”

“We don’t have any objections otherwise,” Apollo reminds her. “The only thing left otherwise is the verdict. There’s nothing worse that can happen from giving this a shot.”

“Oh,” Athena says, blanching as she realizes that she was about to let the trial reach its verdict and damn Juniper to prison. She clears her throat. “Well,” she says loudly, “against some of my better judgment, I would like to conduct a short psychoanalytic session with the witness.”

“As a judge, I feel this to be beyond my better sense as well, yet I also do not feel as though I should deny you.” The judge glances around the courtroom, pondering what must be yet another in the Wright Anything Agency’s long, long line of unprecedented incidents. “Well, then. Prosecutor Blackquill, I will ask your opinion. I trust you have no object… ah.” 

The courtroom doors slam, seeming to rattle the whole room, and rattling Apollo even more is the empty prosecution’s bench. “Ah, Your Honor,” says one of the bailiffs by the doors, eyes still blankly fixated on where they closed. “The prosecution said, and I quote, ‘Rubbish! We will be out on a stroll’ and left, Detective Fulbright with him.”

At least he isn’t loose unsupervised, but holy hell, is there nothing that Blackquill can’t get away with? (Nothing short of murder, anyway.)

“I must suppose he would have lodged an objection in his parting words if he took issue with Ms Cykes’ plan.” The judge nods once, and decisively. “Very well. Ms Cykes, you may proceed with your therapy session-slash-cross-examination.”

“You’re up, Widget.” Athena draws up the emotional analysis screen and over her shoulder, Apollo watches it load. He can’t help but find the whole process fascinating, no matter that he’s seen it before, and he wonders how many times he’ll have to see it until he gets used to it. Knowing that Athena has the little gadget taking pictures almost constantly doesn’t change his amazement with the way she can compile it all into new mock-ups of scenes discussed in the testimony, or how seamlessly she does it. A large part of him still isn’t sure that there’s not magic involved, somehow woven into the technology. “Now, Mr O’Conner, please repeat your testimony!”

Hugh inhales deeply, his eyes still darting about, like he’s suddenly trying to remember the spur-of-the-moment co-called “testimony” he blurted. “All right,” he says. “I’ll say this simple enough that even mouth-breathers like you can understand. I used a body double! That wasn’t really me at the mock trial! And it wasn’t really me who was about to lose, of course. I slipped out while my doppelganger handled the mock trial, and I had full run of the campus. So it’s me who’s the killer, not Juniper. She’s innocent!”

“Well, he sure wasn’t kidding when he said it was crazy testimony,” Athena mutters, swiping through the pages on which she lists each sentence of Hugh’s testimony and the associated emotions. All of Widget’s projected screens flash bright green, as it blares out the alarm that warns it is overloaded by the emotional input. How Athena, with her sensitive hearing, tolerates that sound, Apollo will never know. “Right now, we’re getting an overflow reading on happiness, which is weird, considering he’s confessing to murder.”

“Maybe he’s just delighted by how the rest of us can’t understand his brilliance,” Apollo says. “But I’m guessing you think there’s something more going on.”

“Mhm.” He can’t tell if Athena was listening or is just mumbling to herself. She flips back and forth between two parts of the testimony, too fast to actually be reading over the sentences again; her eyes follow the images that she has placed with the words. Then she finally looks up. “So, Mr O’Conner, yesterday you told us that you didn’t care at all about Ms Woods anymore.”

Apollo glances to the defendant’s chair, where poor Juniper looks distraught, red-faced from crying and now wide-eyed with shock, staring at Hugh. “That’s right,” Hugh says, about as smoothly as he’s managing to say anything now. A silent sob shudders across Juniper’s thin shoulders. “She told Professor Courte my secret, and I know she wants nothing to do with me now.” 

Juniper shakes her head, her mouth moving, whispering something Apollo can’t make out across the courtroom, but Athena probably could, were her attentions not rightly fixed on the witness. If he had to guess, had to bet on it, from the rest of her body language, she’s probably saying, that’s not true. 

“So now I don’t care about her either.” Hugh laughs dismissively, but his eyes still move uneasily, and his hand clutches his neck. He’s still lying. “What, you think my confession has something to do with her? It doesn’t! It’s about one thing, and that’s the truth, the truth that everyone in this courtroom was too inferior to figure out!”

“No, objection!” Athena slaps her hand to the bench, through Widget’s hologram screen. “This whole testimony, you’ve felt great joy - so much that I can barely hear anything else! You’re happy that you could play a part in setting Juniper free.” She draws her hand back and props her hands on her hips. “People usually don’t feel like you do when they’re broken down enough to confess to murder.”

“So then, this is another confession trying to protect Juniper?” Apollo asks. Meaning it’s a false confession, meaning Hugh isn’t the killer after all. Like Phoenix thought, against all the evidence, on a hunch.

“It is,” Athena says. “He does care about her, without question.”

But if not Hugh, they still don’t have any evidence of anyone else, and they’ve looped back around to—

The courtroom doors slam again. “Figured it out, have you?” Blackquill asks. He whistles sharply and Taka returns to his shoulder from wherever it was hiding. Taka was still in the courtroom, then? Apollo glances around, wondering where it went, wondering if Blackquill’s dramatic timing is perfect because he was following the whole conversation via the hawk left behind. He makes his way back to the bench, without any great haste, and scratches Taka beneath the chin as he continues, “That testimony was naught but a great tangle of lies. May we agree now that the killer is the one person permitted to move freely out of sight in the lecture hall - that is, the accused herself. We need not waste more time deliberating this nonsense.”

“But you haven’t figured it out!” Hugh protests. Blackquill’s face darkens. “The trick behind my body-double stunt!”

“Would one even presume it to be true,” Blackquill says dryly, but lacking even an ounce of amusement in the hard line of his mouth and his shadowed eyes, “you did tell us in the beginning how it was that you claimed to have a doppelganger.”

“I think I’m gonna agree with Prosecutor Blackquill on this one,” Apollo says. A small kernel of doubt has dug its way through his prior certainty, and he wishes that Phoenix had been the one to watch the mock trial, instead. He could have noticed - if he’d thought to look, and he would have, right? He’s that cautious or paranoid, right? - whether or not Hugh was the same person, and human, the whole way through. Apollo just knows that the Hugh in the mock trial didn’t stray from the bench, didn’t seem to disappear or slough eyes off of him for even a brief moment - and still, still he doesn’t trust himself to be sure. Not when the fae could be involved. “But if we quit here, then Juniper is found guilty.”

“So the best of the bad options is to play along,” Athena says. She quickly taps out a few commands with her gloved hand on the screen. “Okay, let’s see here. What else can we find out?”

Hugh’s continues testimony is just as rambling and confused as before, tripping over itself and tangling itself up in knots that will only snare Juniper deeper. It’s pathetic to watch him falling apart as he is: certain that Juniper is innocent but too afraid of the corruption in the legal system to believe that the plain truth can ever win out, and desperate for some affirmation that despite his grades being bought (without his knowledge, which Apollo notes is definitely interesting) his friends could still possibly love him. This is not Apollo’s field of expertise, but he has Athena, Athena with her ears and Widget, and she manages beautifully. He’d tell her that he’s impressed, but Blackquill has been waiting to pounce, and with Hugh recanting his confession, pounce he does. 

“This roundabout trial has returned us once again to the point I have been making: that the only person who lacks an alibi is the accused.” Blackquill folds his arms and taps a finger against his head. The chains rattle. “Consider that, Cykes-dono, and finally realize that your friend’s guilt is the truth you have so valiantly sought.”

“Did we really spend all that time getting nowhere?” Apollo asks. He casts his mind back over Hugh’s testimony. Doppelganger nonsense and more doppelganger nonsense; such useful information, all around. “This is exhausting.”

Athena isn’t listening. She frowns down at Widget’s Mood Matrix screen, which has updated to show that all of the emotions in Hugh’s voice have been cataloged and cleared, and it winks out of existence, only for Athena to immediately bring back up some of her case notes. “Hold on a minute, Your Honor, Prosecutor Blackquill.” She swipes the screen to display a floor plan of the lecture call, with the balcony seats for Courte and Means clearly marked. (Does the head of the prosecutions’ course not have enough seniority to join either of them in the balcony seating? Didn’t Phoenix say they all got fired a few years back?) “If we have someone else who doesn’t have an alibi, then we need to continue the trial, correct?”

“Of course,” the judge says. “But after so much thorough investigation and debate, can such a person even exist?”

“Where are we going with this?” Apollo asks Athena. He feels like someone scrambled his brains. 

She rests her finger above the marked defense’s bench in the lecture hall diagram. “Remember how Hugh has been insistent on seeing this balcony seat empty?” She moves her finger diagonally to point to the seat noted to be Means’. “He thought that was because it was Courte’s, and she was dead at the time. But it isn’t.”

“So if Professor Means wasn’t where he was supposed to be—”

“Your Honor!” Athena calls. “However roundabout this testimony has been, we have arrived at one statement of truth. That balcony seat was empty, meaning that Professor Means wasn’t where he was supposed to be during the mock trial!”

“Oh please,” Blackquill sneers. “The whole of the lecture hall heard him give his speech!”

“It bored me half to death,” Apollo adds. He doesn’t remember what was actually said, just that it became a buzzing in his ears within about forty seconds, as some leftover instincts from college assured him that there would be nothing worth remembering.

“It could have been pre-recorded, right?” Athena says. “Then the professor could have given his speech, while he was wherever else on campus!”

“Wait!” Hugh interrupts. “You don’t - are you seriously accusing Professor Means? He’s been trying to help this whole time!” Apollo doesn’t believe that, but he can’t tell if Hugh believes it, or if his nervous habits are now simple shock at where Athena has taken this case. “It’s crazy to say that he - I mean, he was the one who gave me the tape recorder to take to the police!”

“The tape?” 

Apollo asks at the same time Athena does, and they stare at each other; understanding and alarm start to dawn behind Athena’s eyes. “Athena,” Apollo says. “We have to get Professor Means on the witness stand.”

She purses her lips and nods decisively. “Mr O’Conner, did you just say that Professor Means gave you that phony tape?”

“Phony?” Hugh echoes. “No, I - he gave it to me and told me to go to the police and say I found it in the art room, but it’s not - what do you mean, phony—”

“And it didn’t seem suspicious for him to tell you to lie?” Apollo demands. This goddamn school, he swears - Hugh probably wouldn’t even have an issue with the lying, would have been sure that it meant instead that Professor Means had some kind of shady-but-ultimately-justified plan for Juniper’s defense, and who was he to question?

“Apollo, this isn’t the time,” Athena warns, her eyebrows drawing together. He follows her narrow-eyed gaze to watch Blackquill, his hand on his chin, smirking to himself, pondering something. Maybe whether he can add that to Hugh’s perjury charges. 

“Defense, please refrain from hurling unsubstantiated accusations as you are by calling the evidence ‘phony’,” the judge says. “Unless you can—”

“We can prove it!” Athena interrupts, smacking her palms on the bench like she’s about to try and vault it. “This tape we discussed yesterday, the voice of our client shouting ‘You’re a goner!’, was faked by reusing audio from the mock trial video! We have evidence about the, um, about the evidence!”

Taka lands on the bench, its head twitching back and forth, expectantly waiting. “Hang on, which one of these is which - here!” Athena offers one of Klavier’s evidence packets to the hawk, which blinks at her in almost acknowledgement before it returns across the courtroom to Blackquill. He intently studies each page in turn, the seconds passing in excruciating slowness as they wait for his response. On reaching the end, he tosses back his head, hair falling in front of his eyes, and lets out a loud, sharp laugh.

“Is there an issue, Prosecutor Blackquill?” the judge asks.

“There is not,” Blackquill says. Could’ve fooled me, Apollo thinks. The prosecutor makes a dismissive flick of his fingers and Taka, still with the papers clutched in its beak, heads off to the judge. “I concede that, as asserted and evidenced by the” - he forces out a cough and then loudly clears his throat - “defense, that the evidence on the tape was falsified.” Apollo has to stop himself from turning his head to glance up toward the gallery, wondering where Klavier sits. “However, are not the odds greatest that our lying dullard of a witness merely overlooked the professor in the balcony?”

“We can’t know for sure until we ask him!” Athena fires back. “We can’t overlook any possibilities!”

The judge strikes his gavel twice. “My opinion on the matter,” he says, when they have both fallen to silence, Athena glaring furiously at Blackquill, and Blackquill unbothered, watching Taka preen its wing feathers, “is that it would be premature to pass a verdict without having properly examined a possible witness oversight. And to answer that question, I believe it would be best to ask Professor Means himself, and therefore to call him as a witness.”

Apollo lets out his breath, but the tightness in his chest remains. This is the one guiding piece of advice that Phoenix gave: if you see the opportunity to get him on the stand, take it. 

Now they’re on their own. 

-

“Good afternoon. I would like to thank you all for being here today. This mock trial, the crown event of…”

Means’ speech was ten minutes long. 

Apollo forgot about that, honestly. 

They’re searching for some sort of hint that the speech was pre-recorded, some kind of discrepancy between his words and what they know to be true of the day. Athena assured Means that they weren’t accusing him of anything now, just wanted to be sure of the truth of the matter of the speech and the balcony seating - and she said it with her face drawn solemnly across, her shoulders held stiff and her hands squeezing into fists at her sides. She lied. She suspects him. They’ll be accusing him later. And Means at the witness stand loses his trademark smile to glower at Athena whenever she looks away. 

Blackquill pays no attention to anyone, his back to the court, his elbows propped up on the bench behind him, his head slumped forward. He had said - not really directed at anyone in particular - to wake him up when this was concluded. Apollo no longer thinks he’s joking, watching his shoulders rise and fall with the slow, steady breathing pattern of someone asleep. Taka, in imitation of its master, ducks its head beneath its wing.

Are neither of them actually going to listen? Blackquill not even try to assess the details for himself?

Apollo tears his eyes away from the opposite bench. The speech, focus on the speech. Athena’s hand flits over a blank Widget screen that she intended to use for notes, doodling flowers and swirls all across the edges. There’s a shape that Apollo presumes to be a bowling pin until she adds the beak to the penguin. She isn’t keyed in to the speech, either. It’s testimony, the worst kind of testimony, where they have to make it through an untold number of minutes of Means reminiscing about his own long-ago days as a Themis student, and how what he learned there became critical in his days as a real lawyer, before he returned again to Themis to instruct a new generation.

Was it in school that he learned that forging evidence worked, or was he like Phoenix, in a real trial back to the wall, nothing but that or losing? Are monsters born or made, and how are they made? What does it take to break an honest lawyer, if ever he began that way?

The video was to record the mock trial, not the speech before it; the camera in the lecture hall is fixed on the floor, the benches where Robin and Hugh stand, and the witness stand that Juniper travels back and forth from. They obviously can’t see the balconies - otherwise there would be an easy answer to this matter - but the audience is visible, students restless whispering to each other or leaning their heads in their hands or on their desks. Apollo wonders where he was sitting, if he can see himself. 

The judge’s head droops and snaps back up, guiltily glancing around to assess whether anyone else noticed.

Professor Means, on the recording of the speech that may have been pre-recorded, interrupts himself to snap at the audience to wake up. The judge’s eyes pop open, and something clatters like he knocked his gavel to the floor; Athena’s arm jerks across her notes page, scribbling across her penguin drawing. “I’m awake, I’m awake!” she yelps, turning panicked to Apollo. 

Blackquill doesn’t twitch.

This still isn’t even evidence that the speech wasn’t pre-recorded. If this is how Means always sounds, he would have known at this point, about eight minutes in, students would be nodding off. He easily could have scripted that for authenticity.

Athena adds angry eyebrows to her drawn penguin and adds what looks like a ball of lint next to it. Is that supposed to be a fluffy baby penguin? 

The audio ends with a click. Apollo registers that the words that ended the speech were words that heralded the end of a speech, and already he doesn’t remember what. He shakes his head to clear out the static. He was supposed to find something useful in there. Something that meant it was pre-recorded. He glances at Athena. Her eyes are huge. So she didn’t hear anything, either.

“Listen well, Cykes-dono - if you subject us to this torturous tedium without due reason, I shall have your head.” Blackquill still hasn’t moved. He slowly tips his head back and turns to cast a cold stare onto Athena.

“Didn’t he nap the whole time?” Apollo mutters, but Athena doesn’t seem to be in the mood for humor. And Apollo shouldn’t be, either. They’re this close to a turnabout, and this close to a loss. Trucy calls it his “tightrope defense act”, and he hates the descriptor even if it isn’t wrong.

“Hey! Apollo!” someone hisses. He expects it to be Trucy, just thinking of her, but when he turns, and Athena with him, there’s Phoenix, hanging over the edge of the gallery. “Catch!”

“Wh—” Apollo fumbles with the object Phoenix just tossed at him, finding the magatama in his hands. “Why—”

“Mr Wright!” the judge scolds, whackling his gavel several times in swift succession. “I’m sure you must want to be behind the bench, but please, this court does not want any liability should you fall and crack your head!”

Yeah, liability for the ankle injury he’d probably incur from that. “Sorry, Your Honor!” Phoenix calls back with a sharp grin, but he only leans further down. “Listen to the end again, Apollo. The last minute or so.”

“But why—” The magatama is for glamours, and glamours are on people, and they’re listening to a recording of Means’ speech, not him speaking directly to them.

“Exactly why you think - I’ll explain the details later, when—” Phoenix jerks backwards as Taka dives, talons outstretched, for his face. Several gasps and shrieks arise from the gallery around him. “When this bird isn’t around! Good luck!” He scrambles away, Taka in pursuit.

“So,” Athena says. “What—”

“Listen to the ending again,” Apollo says. He squeezes his fingers tightly around the magatama. Please, please, he thinks, without any idea who he is appealing to, give me something—

The words hit his ears with a sharper clarity than before. He can think now, his brain no longer buzzing. Even in this little bit, Apollo understands that most of Means’ speech was all fluff and no substance, all inane and nothing meaningful. And then the sign-off: “Once again, our pure white Lady Justice will watch over all of you today. Pay attention now and one day, with the wisdom of our grand academy and your own experience, you may make a difference. Now, let the mock trial begin!"

What’s this Lady Justice that he’s referring to? That was the statue Athena put back together on-stage, with Klavier, but there’s a very similar statue standing very apparent in the center of the lecture hall floor, right in front of the mock-up judge’s bench. A statue that is, however, very much not white.

“Athena,” he says, and her head snaps around in a startled way that says he just knocked her out of another boring speech-induced reverie. “I’ve got something.”

-

Not enough on its own, but together with Klavier’s evidence, and that only breaks Means down into a new set of lies, and worse ones than ever.

“Fine, yes. I had pre-recorded my speech, but I assure you, the reason was not that which you think.” Athena’s eyebrows disappear beneath her hairline and she casts a doubtful side-eye Apollo’s way. Means peers over his glasses at them and continues, “Ms Woods came to me asking that I should do so - record my speech - and come speak with her in the audio room during the opening of the mock trial. There, she told me that she had committed murder and wished that I would defend her. She told me as well that this would happen - the suspicion you cast upon me - as I lose my alibi with the pre-recorded speech, and thus become an accomplice or suspect.” His stony features relax. “But when I said that I would defend Juniper as her attorney, I meant it, because it was the humane thing to do.”

“He can’t be serious,” Apollo says. “There’s no way. This is all too contrived. But he’s good at coming up with bullshit on the fly.” Unless he thought ahead far enough, to this eventuality, and pre-planned the best lies to cover his ass.

“Juniper would never!” Athena shouts. “There’s no way! This is all a bunch of shit.”

“Allow me to be perfectly frank.” Means lightly taps the end of his staff on the floor. “Juniper has taken my teachings to heart. That I would prove her and her two friends innocent was the result she sought, and two that end, she threatened and coerced me, her professor, to do her bidding.”

“And I may only imagine that you found such ruthless tactics to be impressive and admirable,” Blackquill says dryly. Shouldn’t those underhanded strategies be right up his alley; shouldn’t he himself be impressed? As far as Apollo knows, he’s drawn the line at falsifying evidence, but there’s a litany of shady shit that he’s toed the line of. And the murder, of course. The murder that he did and was convicted of.

“Oh, yes,” Means agrees. “What she did was most clever of her, which is why I agreed to defend her. Her capacity for deviousness surprised me, at first, though the more I think on it the more I understand that I should have seen this coming.”

Athena folds her arms, glaring daggers at Means, but she’s gone strangely quiet taking in the lies rather than yelling back. What’s she thinking? What’s she waiting for? Apollo isn’t sure what he’s waiting for - Means to keep digging his own grave talking about his corrupt methodologies, maybe. Get him brought up on additional corruption charges after they prove him a murderer.

“It’s really the hallmark of her kind, is it not?” Means continues, and Athena’s mouth presses even tighter together. Blackquill tilts his head just ever-so-slightly to the side, barely more than a twitch, studying Means, and waiting. “This sort of cunning self-serving cruelty, so typical of the actions of - well. We shall say that anyone may be cruel, but there is a particular and exemplary manner of it displayed here that you will also find to be quite… fae. And rather more than in half as one could first assume of this defendant.”

“Pardon?” The judge blinks in shock. “I am not sure I understand the relevance that this remark holds.”

Does he not realize? Does he know, or somehow have these things passed him by every trial? Juniper shrinks into herself, her hands covering her face. “It has none, Your Baldness,” Blackquill says, his disparaging gaze turning from Means to Juniper. “And before your protest I had been about to lodge my own objection, that the witness had best stick to discussing what it is that the defendant has done, and leave aside that which she is.”

Juniper lowers her hands, her eyes wide, but Blackquill isn’t looking at her anymore. Was it her honor that he was defending, or that of the fae in general? His responses to fae-related remarks have seemed - like he’s taking them personally.

“Objection sustained, then,” the judge says. “Defense, I believe it is time for your cross-examination.”

“You’ve been rather quiet now, haven’t you, Cykes-dono.” Blackquill can’t resist one last taunt. “Something the matter?”

Athena inhales deeply. She places her hands back down on the bench, her shoulders squared and her eyes flinty. “I’m not going to argue on principles,” she says. “Some long-winded idealistic speech. I’m going to let my evidence, and my victory, do the talking.” She lifts her hands and this time slams them down. “You claim that you were lying to cover for Junie, but that’s a load of hot shit!”

“That language, in our fair court of law!” Means interrupts indignantly. “Your Honor, it is an outrage!” Apollo personally finds Means’ guiding philosophies about the uselessness of the truth, and his forged evidence, a lot more of an outrage, but what does he know.

“Ms Cykes. Having adjudicated your mentor’s first case back, I understand where this unfortunate habit of yours was picked up, but please, do try to not make this such a frequent occurrence that I must penalize you for it.”

“Of course, Your Honor.” She takes that better than Apollo expected, though Widget still glows red. “Now, if the court would please recall the audio recording, presented as evidence yesterday, that today we have established to have been faked. It was Professor Means who gave that to Hugh and whispered to go take it to the police. If you had Junie’s best interests at heart, Professor, why would you fabricate evidence that uses her voice? That is, it’s an incredibly damaging piece of evidence that shouldn’t exist if you had wanted to defend Juniper - as it is, it seems like you’re trying to pin the crime on her instead!”

Means lowers his eyes. Apollo isn’t naive enough to think that means he’s chastened, or is going to do anything but dig in further. “You’ve done nothing but lie, and you’ve taught nothing but lies!” Athena shouts. “Your road to hell has no good intentions!”

“How dare you!” There it goes. Means’ head snaps back up. He grits his teeth in a snarl. “Themis Academy is an honorable institution with a proud name and how dare you slander it!” He grinds his staff against the ground. The sound sets Apollo’s teeth on edge, and Athena claps her hands over her ears.

“I’m not slandering the whole academy!” she protests. “Just your terrible teachings! You—” Means reaches into his pocket, producing a piece of chalk, which he flings at Athena. “Ow! What the helllleck, heck, was that!”

“Pay attention, Athena!” Means speaks like this is a lecture hall, like he’s the professor in charge of a classroom and not a witness on the stand, and she some wayward student of his and not a defense attorney on a cross-examination. “You’re disappointing me! The murder occurred on the twenty-third sometime between six and eight pm. I was already home at that time! How could I have killed her?”

“Can you prove you had gone home by then?” Athena asks.

Apollo knows what the answer will be before Means says it - the shifting burden of proof, always to the defense. “Can you prove that I was still at the school then?” he asks, a furious pointer finger waved in her direction.

Apollo casts about for any option, and he watches Athena slowly lose hope, her confident posture falling away, her hands sliding off of her hips and her shoulders slumping forward until she lets her elbows hit the bench and prop her head back up. “No,” she admits.

“Very good! I appreciate your honesty, even as it fails your case.” Means is still in teacher-mode, and now Apollo wonders if it’s some sort of mocking of them that he’s attempting to do. “But given that—”

“Hey! Hold on a second, man!” 

Robin’s shriek could be an impressive rival to the Chords of Steel. She stands up in the front row of the gallery, leaning forward and peering down the drop to the floor, weighing whether she should just vault down, and deciding against it. She raises one hand and then rushes aside, leaving silence for several moments until she properly reaches the floor of the courtroom, where she places herself beside the defendant’s chair. Throwing her arm out in an imperious, pointed objection, directed at Means, she shouts, “I can’t believe I’ve let you lie to me all this time!” The Professor sputters indignantly, and Robin drowns him out with a roar. “I’ve got a confession to make! I can prove it!”

-

Of the statues on the stage, Klavier and Phoenix, Robin only had time to actually make the Klavier statue, the one that they put back together yesterday. Then the late bell rang, and Robin, without permission to stay on campus, asked Means if he could make the other statue for her. This puts him still at the school at the time of the murder, though he claims with the intensive work it would have taken to finish the artwork in an hour and a half, there’s no way he could have taken an instant to go to the art room and commit the crime. (Couldn’t there have been time after? Couldn’t the autopsy report’s window be off, have that wiggle room?)

Or there’s Athena’s objection, offered up without a thought, and then a few seconds after, she has invented a possibility. “What if we were all wrong about where the crime was committed?”

That’s one of Phoenix’s classic turnabout tactics. Apollo sees where she’s going; Means scoffs that she’s lost her mind, but Blackquill, glowering around the court at everyone in equal measure, very slowly says, “Continue.” When Means sounds about to protest, Taka alights from Blackquill’s shoulder and brings its fly-by so close that its talons rake through Means’ hair. 

The murder took place on the stage, the blood spilling onto the banners lying there. The Gavineers banner soaked up most of the blood, was wiped on the art room floor to create the other crime scene, and then burned to hide the evidence. The white Lady Justice statue they repaired during yesterday’s investigation came from the art room, sent down the banner wire to make some noise and lead someone to the body. The body, therefore, was hidden on the stage somewhere. 

How? At least a hundred people passed the stage on their way to the mock trial. What did it look like? Was there a crawl space under it that could be counted on no one to notice? What about behind it? Did they see it from other angles? Athena only has partial photographs, from up on the stage, nothing with the right angle, the wide shot. All of the pieces, these strange inconsistencies and bits of evidence collected, fit perfectly together with this theory.

There’s just no place for the body. 

And that’s going to sink them.

They’re sinking, and Means just laughs. “Don’t you understand yet? There’s no killer other than Juniper Woods! There never was any other possibility, and there never will be!”

“But…” Athena falters. Apollo needs to help her, if he can just come up with somewhere, anywhere, that the body could have been. There were bruises on the victim’s wrists from being tied. Was she tied in some contorted position to allow her body to fit somewhere strange? Every second that he doesn’t say something, he’s failing their client, and he’s failing his friend.

“Poor Juniper must seriously regret asking for your help now - choosing you over me! And not just for herself, but for the way you nearly had Hugh wrongly convicted for murder! Surely you haven’t forgotten that big mistake of yours, too?”

“Don’t listen to him,” Apollo says. Though really, he’s not sure if Athena is listening to anyone, her face gone slack and her eyes glazed over, lost somewhere that isn’t here. “Athena?”

“You’ve not only failed to defend your client, but you brought false charges against her friend!” Means is positively gleeful tearing into her, a shark that’s scented blood and gone into a frenzy, and Apollo remembers what Phoenix said last night, about Athena, about accusing Hugh, wonders what he’s thinking now watching his best-laid plans to shelter her fall apart. “You don’t deserve to call yourself a lawyer!”

“No.” Athena hugs herself tightly, clutching her arms across her stomach like she’s sick, or trying to staunch the flow of blood from a wound, and doubling over herself. Her hair falls across her face, but not enough that Apollo can’t see her eyes, wide and hollow, and Widget’s screen, gone straight black. “No, I - wouldn’t let an innocent person be - I wouldn’t let him be convicted for - something he didn’t—”

“Athena! Hey, Athena, look at me.” Her shoulders start to shake. She doesn’t lift her head. Apollo reaches for her shoulder and stops; she flipped a mann larger than Apollo over her head the last time someone unexpectedly touched her, and if she’s already breaking, the last thing she’ll need is to hate herself more if she lashes out and injures Apollo. Means grins in satisfaction; Apollo glares at him and wishes, horribly, cruelly, for an instant, that he was fae, that he could kill with a look, literally, and then the wish turns his stomach over. Even if this man is a monster, even if he’s getting a laugh out of hurting Athena—

It’s not - it’s probably not a curse, is it? Some kind of spell Means put on her? It’s probably just - a regular mundane breakdown, right? Phoenix is up in the gallery watching, and if something had happened, he’d already be on his way down to let Apollo know. For Athena’s sake, surely, he’d break his habit of staying frustratingly silent on these matters.

“Breathe, breathe,” Athena hisses to herself. “Breathe in, breathe out—”

Blackquill crosses his arms over his chest. After watching him for three trials, Apollo still wouldn’t say he’s got a read on him at all, wouldn’t say he understands if the man has any tics - but maybe Apollo just hasn’t seen them yet. Because Blackquill’s mouth twists, his nose twitches; it might be disgust, and it might be barely disguised fury, and maybe it doesn’t have to be exclusive, one or the other, because those are related emotions. He doesn’t turn his glare from Means but closes his eyes instead, face slackening, like he’s trying to calm himself.

“Hey, shut the hell up, man!” Robin yells. She starts forward for the witness stand, her hands in fists, and Hugh grabs her by the upper arm. “Athena’s a great lawyer! She saved the friendship between Hugh and Juniper and me! And she figured out the secret I couldn’t tell, so I can live my life as a girl again! She is G-R-E-A-T and I don’t wanna hear another word against her, you lying meanie!”

“But I did,” Athena says. Her voice rings out clear and steady despite the way that her body trembles. “I did raise false charges against Hugh. And that - I could have - I could’ve done something unforgivable - I would have—”

“Hey, don’t worry about it,” Hugh says with a shrug. He still hasn’t let go of Robin, and that’s probably the better choice. “It happens. There wouldn’t be defense attorneys if it didn’t. It’s not like I’m mad - it’s really more like you’ve given me a chance to reevaluate. You’re an honest lawyer and I didn’t think it was possible, for an honest lawyer to do all you’ve done.”

Athena blinks. Apollo hopes that’s a good sign, considering she hasn’t for the minute prior. “But I still haven’t done - what does it matter if I can’t save Juniper?”

“I believe in you, Thena!” Juniper stands from her chair, her hands clenched at her sides. “I haven’t given up! You can’t either! And I know you won’t! I know you can do this, Thena.”

A strangled sound emerges from Athena’s mouth, like a wheeze interrupting a hiccup or sob. “Athena, breathe,” Apollo says. 

She tips forward and braces herself against the bench with one hand, the other arm still pressed tight against her stomach. “I c-can’t.” Her valiant attempt at inhaling breaks down into uneven, shuddering gasps. “I c-can’t. I—”

“Perhaps it would help you breathe if you were to cease this pathetic bleating of yours.”

Apollo is ready to yell at him, because someone has to and Robin has already laid into Means, but Athena finally slowly raises her head. “Prosecutor Blackquill?” she asks in a faint, broken whisper.

Blackquill shakes his head. “No more of such foolish words as you have just now spouted.” Is this - is this Blackquill’s attempt at reassurance? Has the world and the court finally gone mad? “You became a lawyer for a reason, did you not? What would come of it should you give up on all of the work that you have done thus far?” He slams his forearm on the bench and leans forward, his eyes sharp and his mouth pressed in a tight frown. “It would hardly do for you to quit now and disappoint a certain someone who has been waiting for you all this time!”

“I—” Athena stares at him, her mouth hanging open, but her breathing has begun to steady from moments ago, and she slowly straightens up, drawing her shoulders back from the way she curved in on herself. 

“Ha!” Means’ laugh isn’t a very convincing one. “Isn’t this a precious little waste-of-time effort you’ve undertaken! But it is, I assure you, meaningless. You have nothing on me, and no plan to create anyone else’s guilt! Your case ends here.”

“Oh shut up,” Apollo says irritably, deciding that if Phoenix and Athena are going to be swearing in court on the regular now, he can definitely get away with that. Ignoring Means’ indignant sputtering, he turns back to Athena. “You okay?” She nods. “You’re doing fine, I promise. We’re still going to prove that the truth can win against people like him, all right?”

“But how?” Athena asks. “What am I supposed to do now, Apollo? He’s right, we don’t have any evidence against him!”

No evidence. That’s the problem that Phoenix kept running up against. What does it take to break an honest lawyer? For Phoenix, it was no evidence. But god damn it, Athena has only been a lawyer for six months and when Apollo had been a lawyer for six months, Phoenix gave him the Jurist System to solve that one particular issue. They don’t have the Jurist System now. They might never have it again. Evidence is everything now, and all Athena has is Apollo, and Apollo doesn’t even have a theory. If they can pull together a plausible theory, they can look for evidence in the places their theory maps out. But they need the theory. 

“Take a deep breath,” he says - she’s started to look frantic again. Not on the cusp of breakdown, thankfully, but frantic, and that won’t help her think clearly. “And we’ll look back over the whole case. There’s still truth to be found, and I believe in you that you can find it.” The sickly expression remains on her face. Is there something he can do about that, too? “Hey, Athena. Remember what Mr Wright says?” That saying that she in particular so enthusiastically took to. “ ‘The worst of times—’”

“—‘force their biggest smiles’,” Athena finishes. Okay, so maybe they skipped a bit in the middle there. “Right. I’ve got it.” She shakes her head back, her ponytail swinging behind her shoulder, and props her hands on her hips. She doesn’t actually smile, which Apollo can’t blame her for, but even with Widget glowing bright fierce angry red, she appears more at ease than she has for a while. “Think it over.” She squeezes her eyes shut and her whole face scrunches in concentration.

The body was moved in the midst of the mock trial, but didn’t have to be moved far, because the murder took place on the stage and the body had to have been hidden on the stage. What was moved via the banner wire was the other statue, so that Means could draw attention to the body and have it discovered when he wanted it to be discovered. It had to have been on the stage, and it can’t have been suspicious. It’s possible that there could have been some other objects involved in stage-setup that would have been capable of storing a body, but if they weren’t on the stage when Phoenix and Athena got there, then Means had to move it away, and that would have increased the time he spent there and increased his chances of being caught. Seems unlikely that there was anything more. So then, what was on the stage when they got there? Apollo didn’t get much of a glimpse of the initial scene. The mockup benches on stage - what were those made of? Could they have hollowed-out insides, possible to be lifted and have a body dragged beneath? What did the rope bruises on Courte’s wrists mean?

Athena’s eyes snap open. “I’ve got it!” she says. “Apollo, you remember how when we were repairing the statues” - more like when she and Klavier were and Apollo was just kind of there, but sure - “and we couldn’t find any chunks of the boss’ statue large enough to put it back together?” He nods, with no idea where she’s going with this. “And the court will recall how remarkable a feat it seemed that Professor Means could finish the statue of Mr Wright so quickly, when it took Robin so much longer on the other statue. And I can tell you why that is!” 

Yep, Apollo has no idea where this is going. “He never built the statue!” Athena continues triumphantly. “It was all an illusion - he hid the body by making it look like the statue of Mr Wright! And with the statues covered by cloth, no one would know what was actually beneath!”

“Wait, what?” Apollo asks. 

“Now this will be interesting,” Blackquill says.

-

What Apollo has come to realize is that he could not be a prosecutor. Not for any reason of principles - arrests have to be made, people are guilty of crimes, and an honest prosecutor is as important to the pursuit of justice as an honest defense attorney, even if both seem in unfortunately short supply these days - but because the prosecution don’t seem to be able to operate with a co-counsel. The closest they get is working as a team with the same detective, and that wouldn’t suit Apollo. What he needs is someone at the bench with him who can come up with utterly batshit theories that escaped his brain because they were, as stated, utterly batshit. 

This is going in his journal as the weirdest thing he’s done in a trial. Because certainly weirder things have happened in trials - Kristoph’s shimmering, flickering glamour as it broke, or Blackquill starting to transform to a nine-tailed fox - but Apollo did not hold an active part in those incidents. Apollo is taking a very active role in helping to turn Athena into a sheet-covered statue mockup of the corpse at the crime scene. 

Apollo is actively facilitating Athena’s outlandish theory - and less outlandish every second judging from Means’ face, furious instead of laughing it off. The trial takes a ten minute recess to hunt down the props that Athena will need to display her theory: a large sheet, a chair, some rope, and just in case, some duct tape. It feels like preparation for one of Trucy's tricks but if she were here it would be easy, and the Magic Panties would provide, but instead Apollo breathlessly rushes back into the courtroom at the end of ten minutes with a large pink sheet that’s going to have to work one way or another. 

What is a co-counsel for but to help you fill in the gaps of your mad ventures? Athena figures out why the professor’s hands were tied and how they were positioned behind her head; Apollo reminds her that Courte had an arrow sticking out of her body and duct-tapes it to her side; they test those two facts together and find that the arrow isn’t long enough to make a convincing statue arm, but Athena notices that Means’ staff certainly could have. Reluctantly, Means hands it over; Athena holds it in place and Apollo shakes out the sheet to toss over her head again. Somehow even that is an ordeal. She got stuck in it last time she removed it, to swap the arrow for the staff, and now Apollo can barely get it tossed up over her head. Fabric doesn’t throw very well. He shakes it out and tries again and this time a cold gust of wind catches beneath it, billowing it upward spread like a parachute to drape neatly over Athena’s head.

Apollo glances at Blackquill. He has stood silent watching - it seems promising that he hadn’t been heckling them - and his arms are crossed, but he slowly lowers the hand he had just slightly raised up off from where it rested on his upper arm, like he made a little wave to direct the wind. Seeing Apollo watching him, he raises an eyebrow.

The courthouse has time and again seen manic laughter within its walls. Athena’s at least is different, triumphant, from underneath the pink sheet where her hands behind her head make the form of a large spiky head of hair, and the staff an extended pointing objection arm. All they’ll need to do now is test the staff for traces of blood, and Means’ guilt will be ascertained.

The proud, proud professor falls apart the way criminals all do, begging and pleading and wheedling for a way out, any loophole or last desperate reason that it isn’t them; cursing the names of everyone involved in their downfalls, everyone but themselves. And Means falls apart, literally, his words becoming more incoherent in his desperation, until they don’t sound like any words of any language Apollo has ever heard. They’re just noises from a man who has finally lost at every game he has played for years, and his voice grows softer and the clack of his teeth together, a horrid sound that makes Apollo acutely aware of all of the nerves in his own teeth that would be giving him pain if he were the one doing that.

He should just steel himself for what Clay calls “Fair Folk fuckery” at the end of every trial. He should expect it by now. And maybe he does, but with the myriad possibilities of their curses and consequences playing out, how does he brace himself when he doesn’t know what’s coming?

He assumes this is fae. What else could it be? Maybe an accident, the first time that Means’ mouth snaps shut and then he opens it and there is blood on his teeth and a chipped white piece of one falling into his hand. Maybe he just spent most of his life putting too much stress on those bones and one of them was already breaking apart before today. But without catalyst a second tooth cracks apart and drops from his open mouth, and another, and Apollo glances away from the spectacle, can’t close out of his mind the blood streaming down Means’ teeth. 

“Ugh,” Widget groans, and Athena presses a hand over her mouth. Juniper, sickly green, covers her eyes with her hands. Only Blackquill has the stomach to not turn away, his narrowed eyes fixed on the witness stand and gleaming silver, equally cold and piercing as the yellow glare of the hawk on his shoulder.

#roddy fanfics #fic: the witches of los angeles

[zentherainbowunicorn]

Everlasting Party - Mystic Messenger Time Loop AU (pt 37)

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Summary: You’re caught in a time loop during the 11 days leading up to the RFA’s party unless you can do… what, exactly? 13+

After about 7 and a half hours of time spent on this one freaking chatroom, I present to you: Chapter 37! Holy lord the chatroom was endless and yet it's only around 800 words T_T It is about the longest chatroom yet, rivalling Chapter 30's chatroom. Much thanks to Masdevallia on AO3 for being a wonderful beta, and to you guys for the nice comments and tags :) I'm always so happy to see a new notification sitting in my inbox~

Itty bitty 'spoiler' for the very very beginning of Day 5 Seven's route. If you've played Jumin's route though then you're definitely fine. Anyway, enjoy!

You’re nearly startled out of your chair when your phone goes off, then almost drop the phone itself trying to see what the notification is for.

1:48am – Jaehee Kang is now online.

1:48am... God, you’ve been working on this for almost two hours already, yet it feels like you’ve barely made any progress. True, some of the underlying structures to Unknown’s encryption are the same, as you’d hoped, and you’re pretty sure you know how long the key he used to encrypt the log is. But you’re starting to run out of ideas on what to do besides just checking every possible key in a brute-force attack, and that would take far longer than just a few hours. The new computer you cobble together each new loop is powerful, but not enough to do that many calculations in so short a time period.

1:50am – 707 is now online.

Seven! Perhaps you should log in. He might have something to say about the hacker. You log in and quickly scroll up to read the past messages before joining the conversation. It looks like earlier in the night Yoosung logged in to complain about a weird alarm sound that his phone made. Hmm. You don’t recall your phone making any odd sounds. When Jaehee logged in a few minutes ago, she mentioned hearing an obnoxious alarm sound as well. Now she appears to be chastising Seven for encouraging Jumin to pursue another cat project.

 You set your phone down and turn back towards your computer, which is still running the log against a series of possible decryption keys you’d given it earlier. At this rate it’ll be days before you finish decrypting the log – time you don’t have, unless something changes. Seven did mention he’d work on decrypting it as well… but he also seems to have a lot on his plate. And anyway, it’s unlikely Seven would share the decrypted log with you. The goal now is to figure out where Unknown is on your own so you can solve some of these questions yourself. If you can figure it out before you’re reset, you’ll never have to hack into the RFA’s app to retrieve Unknown’s log again since you can just memorize the information.

You think about your conversation in the chatroom earlier and smile a little to yourself. Seven did notice something odd with the messenger, but it’s pretty clear he doesn’t suspect you at all. Most of your initial attempts at extracting the log from the messenger had ended early because Seven would realize something was wrong and block you from the app, but judging from your recent conversation he’s not even sure what information you’d retrieved when you hacked the RFA application earlier. It would be fun to see his face in person if you told him you, too, hacked into his app. He mentioned wanting to come see you at Rika’s apartment, which is a nice thought, if impossible. Having someone else in the apartment has got to be better than sitting around here on your own. And you’ve really grown to enjoy some of your conversations with the RFA’s hacker. Quirky though his sense of humour might be, he’s made you smile on days where you were questioning what exactly you were putting all this effort into learning how to code for. In fact, you’ve been smiling more as of late, even daring to make some of your own jokes in the chatrooms instead of just typing in responses you know will make the days continue. Maybe he’s rubbing off on you.

You lean your chair on its back legs and stare up at the ceiling, rocking back and forth precariously with your foot anchored to the desk. It would be nice to be able to work together with Seven on how to solve this issue with Mint Eye and Unknown, too, instead of trying to take this on by yourself. But this is just how it has to be, isn’t it? Every couple of days without fail Seven will forget your previous conversations, forget the code he taught you, forget the jokes he told you. You’ve been pushing this series of days to the limit trying to find ways to avoid having the exact same conversations with everyone day after day, but no matter how much you change your own actions you’re inevitably drawn back to the same topics, the same phone calls, the same sequence of events. It’s like an elastic; no matter how much you push and stretch at the boundaries, it always snaps back into place just as it was before.

The foot that you’d been pushing against the desk to rock your chair back and forth catches on air and you gasp as you suddenly lose your balance. You try to sit up and right the chair, but it’s too late so you thrust out a hand to break your fall instead. There’s an immense clatter and a sharp pain in your wrist as you’re deposited unceremoniously onto the floor.

Ow. Ow, ow, ow. That was really stupid. You roll off the upended chair and put a hand on the floor to push yourself up – ow! You flop back onto the floor and carefully bring your hand up to your face, the one you’d used to break your fall. It throbs a little, and when you try putting pressure on it there’s a prickling pain in your wrist. Wait. You didn’t seriously sprain your wrist, did you? You use your other hand to sit up and study the injury. It doesn’t look bad… but it definitely hurt when you tried to put your weight on it. Goddammit, this is your dominant hand, too. Can you still type with a wrist injury?

You curse your foolishness under your breath. How stupid can you be to hurt yourself at a time like this? You couldn’t have done this later, after you’d decrypted the log? Of course not, it just has to be now, when you’re on a time limit. Still grumbling under your breath, you stand and pick up your chair with your good hand, then wander into the kitchen to get some ice for your wrist. This had better not slow down your progress with decrypting Unknown’s log. You glance at the window he sometimes breaks through and frown. And it damn well had better not prevent you from escaping if Unknown drops by.

Well, whatever, you think, angrily reaching into the freezer for some ice. A few more hours and you’ll be reset anyway and won’t make this stupid mistake again. You’ll just put some ice on the damn thing for a little while and then—

...There’s no ice in the freezer.

Goddammit.

Of course there isn’t. You haven’t had a reason to make ice in Rika’s apartment this loop, so why would there be any ice here? The fridge doesn’t have an ice-maker, either, so you’re fresh out of luck.

You slam the freezer door shut again and lean against the kitchen counter, holding your injured wrist away from your body awkwardly. Would cold water suffice…? Probably not. No, that’s a stupid thought. You don’t even have ice trays to make ice with in the apartment. You suppose this means you should go to the convenience store and pick up an ice pack or something. They’re open 24/7 so it doesn’t really matter that it’s past two in the morning. Maybe they’ll have something you can wrap around your wrist to stabilize it, too.

Luckily you’d already put your shoes on beforehand, so you don’t have to worry about doing that with one hand. You consider locking your computer before you leave in case… in case what? In case Unknown comes by? Whether or not your computer is locked would be the least of your problems if that were the case. No, better to let it continue to try decrypting the log while you’re out. You’ll only be away for a few minutes. You shove your phone in your back pocket and carefully scan the hallway before leaving the apartment. Your injured wrist throbs slightly as you punch the button to summon the elevator. Honestly, it had to be today of all days that you fell off your stupid chair. If you weren’t so determined to finish decrypting the log this loop, it would almost be easier to force a reset than deal with it.

...One of these days your reliance on the resets to get you out of trouble will surely come back to bite you. If, indeed, you ever get out of this loop.

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I always love hearing what you think, so leave a comment or send me an ask! Here’s a link to the masterpost of all my Mystic Messenger fics. Thank you very much for reading! ♥

#fanfic #fanfiction #mystic messenger #707 #seven #jaehee kang #cheritz #everlasting party au #rainbow unicorn stuff #holy christ this took up so much of my time #i would get home from work #edit this #sleep #repeat #arghh #I wonder if there are more improvements I can make to my template to be even faster...

[edwardlando]

A definitive guide to a life well-lived

As I sat in a cab on Saturday evening being zoomed through some blurry part of Chelsea in the recklessly competent style of the New York cab driver, my friend texted me and asked how I would define a life well-lived. I assumed correctly that she was drunk.

This question brought back memories of a class I took in my senior year at Penn called “Literature of Success,” a popular one among almost-real people getting angstily ready to begin noble consulting and finance professions — both the culmination and beginning point of their lives so far. The class offered a rich reading syllabus with works from Benjamin Franklin (of course), Viktor Frankl, and others which I presently forget, and the goal was to ingest these people’s stories and eventually come to our own answer and plan to achieving success in the real world. And naturally to be graded on the quality of that plan.

I texted her back with a few spontaneous answers from my left thumb and later realized that it would be nice to expand on this list and keep it somewhere.

Here it is. I know that my answers are very influenced by my present conditions and advantages, and that some of these suggestions are more or less within our control. I’m also sure that this list will deserve to be added to and edited over time as more life is lived and more parchment unfolded.

Have a healthy and happy family.

Work every day with people you love and respect, moving toward fulfilling your potential and mission.

Make sure you live the experience of real romantic love and don’t settle until you feel it.

Make sure that your opinions and choices are really yours.

Work to be in great physical shape.

Expand continually out of your current boundaries of comfort and competence.

Do not leave any rock that you find interesting unturned. Similarly, do not let fear stop you from sampling something that you really want to do.

Pay attention to the elephants in the room. When you feel something is wrong, even if only a little, act on it immediately. You are in a position to course correct.

Be aware of your general slope, your dy/dx, and ensure that it’s sloping up and steepening. Keep accelerating.

Don’t spend much time sulking. There is no nobility in suffering for too long… unless it inspires you to compose a nice song or poem.

Reroute and leverage your anger, insecurities and other negative spirals. Make sure that they are not the only forces motivating you (otherwise you will implode) but use them as explosive fuel to propel you forward. Anger is like an extremely heavy unwieldy sword that can be very useful.

Prioritize aggressive decisiveness — even if sloppy — over over-analysis.

Realize that even though many people are wrong (except for this author), they have simply been shaped by their life so far and do not explicitly intend to be evil. Several truths can exist at once.

Do not pause your learning, even when you’re in the trenches executing on the current plan or project that has taken over your life.

Do not keep neglecting something you know is fundamentally important to you. Those things are not the same for everyone.

When the time comes, drop everything for the more important person or thing.

Ask yourself what the people you are close to are great at and suffer from. Encourage them to express their greatness more and help them navigate away from their bad habits and pain.

If you have the luxury to, make sure you work on ideas that directly improve life for people. Those that viscerally confront the human condition. There is no such thing as a dearth of ideas. As long as there is suffering, there will be great novels and also problems for you to tackle and solve. If you are in a position to try tackling one of them, it is almost your obligation. Great people will also be attracted to join you because doing something meaningful is one of the most powerful magnets that exists.

Practice random acts of kindness. You will feel good and these will compound. There is an ongoing war in the world between cynicism and naive benevolence. You are contributing to tilting the scale because your behavior is the reality of the person you are interacting with.

Do not pretend to be morally superior (unless you are on Twitter). Your human nature makes you inclined to prioritize yourself. It is hypocritical to deny this, and yet this does not stop you from becoming a kindly-motivated person.

Spend more time with people you love and who have a good influence on you and less time with people you don’t love and who don’t make you someone you are happy being. You already know who falls in which bucket.

Often ask yourself what you will regret not having done at the end of your life and the lives of the people you love… and do those things.

Remember that nothing matters. And that everything matters.

There is no right answer. There is a right answer.

Remember that everyone feels the same spotlight effect you feel. They are more distracted being self-conscious of their own appearance and barely notice you. You are wearing an invisible cloak, so have more fun and don’t worry about how you look on the dance floor.

Realize that most of what you want is within your reach, usually only a few good decisions away.

Prioritize the spontaneous plan over the planned plan. Sunk costs are a real thing.

Speaking of… the thing about cognitive biases is that even very savvy people fall for them. Sunk cost, confirmation bias, loss aversion, endowment effect, anchoring, halo effect, mere exposure effect, bandwagon effect… there are more. Learn about psychology and behavioral economics because you will learn about yourself and discover some of the hidden forces that have been barring you from making the progress you want. Being able to name them is already a big win toward neutralizing them.

While we’re on the topic of savvy people, keep in mind that even the most professionally accomplished among us frequently make terrible decisions in other parts of their lives. Don’t think that someone is necessarily correct across the board because they stand out on one dimension. Similarly, don’t think that just because someone has made a lot of money they are by definition unhappy in the other parts of their lives.

You’re at your worst when you focus on the success of other people and wish it were yours. It’s the biggest and most demoralizing distraction to anyone ambitious. Let them live their lives and focus on your own story.

Never delay telling people you love them. You should take the chances you get and you don’t know what a powerful effect you have on them by telling them that.

Remember that you too are maddening to the people you love, so don’t sabotage your closest relationships over stupid things. You do those things too, or have other charmingly infuriating habits.

Change your mind decisively when you have realized that you are wrong. You are a work in progress and only the truth and resolution matter.

Write the list of things you’ve been wanting to do for a long time, and go down the list doing them now.

No one — not even your spouse or best friend — can or will ever quench your every need and desire. Do not expect that of them and you will put less strain on your relationship.

Enjoy the warm, snug feeling of being dependent on someone but make sure you are autonomous enough to thrive independently and venture out into the snowy woods alone should need be.

Rarely is it worth using your energy to retaliate against someone who has wronged you (unless they are actively still doing so). You will create more value by continuing to create and ignoring them.

The most redoubtable people are not those who get into street fights.

Choose partners who do not have a fixed-pie view of the world. That paradigm is very difficult to unlearn and is unfortunately tainting.

Realize that relationships compound dramatically over time. Be loyal to the people around you and continue to write the story together. You can move so much faster when you have deep-rooted trust.

If you’ve observed yourself mentioning or noticing something more than a couple of times, pay real attention to it. It is likely very important and should be addressed now.

Think of yourself as a professional athlete, aiming for daily excellence. Now balance this image with the realization that it is a handful of key decisions and events every year that will shape your life. Create and wait for those.

Travel is wonderful, but do not try to use it to run away from facing the important questions head-on.

People only share 1% of their lives publicly. So don’t let Instagram (and people’s selective sharing) make you sad.

“When the student is ready, the master appears.” You are an agent of your own life, and yet.. some of the things you most desire cannot be brute-forced into reality, often because they are not external. Perhaps you haven’t yet found your life partner because there is still a little tinkering to be done on yourself.

It is possible — and sometimes really worth — fixing broken relationships (of all types). If you feel like something ended for the wrong reasons and you miss it, you should put your ego aside and give it a sincere shot.

Speak well of people behind their back and criticize them (if you have to) to their face.

Deliberately expose yourself to more randomness. Enjoy seeing if you can break something about your model of the world.

Let your heroes teach you about general strategy and incite you to do great things, but do not attempt to replicate their exact execution.

If you know you’ve made a mistake and it’s not too late, you should consider yourself incredibly lucky and go fix things immediately.

Don’t do things that compromise your integrity. It is — per the definition of the word — what makes you whole.

Fun is not only reason enough, but one of the best reasons to do something.

If you often tell people you’re not good at something, decide if you want that to be the case of the rest of your life or if you want to try to become good at it.

You’ll be surprised at how good you can become at most things if you apply yourself to it for a year or two. Try it and tell me.

A few subjects worth taking one class in at some point in your life: dance (especially before wedding season), public speaking and / or stand-up comedy, cooking, wine (so you can at least distinguish between more than just white vs red). Knowing just a little bit more than nothing here will feel great and goes a long way.

Go on more road trips.

Keep note along the way of things that you will want to share with your children (even if you don’t want children).

The world is scary, random and unfair. The world is wonderful and kind and always conspiring in your favor (as Coelho would say).

Never let events or people extinguish your fire and love for living. You are alive when you are burning.

Your intuitive voice is the one that is correct.

#guide #life #well-lived

[insideanairport]

Nietzsche’s “Untimely Meditations”

❍❍❍

A very difficult book to read in English. The best translation I have found is the one by Ludovici and Collins. The worst is by R.J. Hollingdale published by Cambridge University Press. The good translation by Ludovici and Collins, however, is published by Digireads.com and has the worst introduction by anti-semitic and white-nationalist Oscar Levy written in 1909. His review was probably the most racist and white-nationalist academic writing I have ever read. The introduction of the Cambridge University Press by Daniel Breazeale is very deep and enlightening.

The Digireads book has the essays non-chronologically. It has the first and last meditation as Part 1 and has the second and third meditation as Part 2. It works better because I could just ignore the part 1, which contains the 2 most boring works of Nietzsche: "David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer” and “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth”. You need to have a full scholarship to read both of those essays and not fall sleep. Although Nietzsche admits that the real subject of the essays “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth” and “Schopenhauer as Educator” is himself, we don’t see the usual fire that is inside his writings in part 1 of meditations. I think, its mostly, due to Nietzsche’s narrow focus on the German condition rather than a border analyzation that we see in part 2 of the meditations. That might be the reason he abandons the projects after finishing the “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth”.

The young Nietzsche was into Schopenhauer, Goethe, and Machiavelli. The mature Nietzsche was into Stendhal, Dostoyevsky and (again) Machiavelli. He might have been inspired by La Rochefoucauld for his aphorisms in the latter part of his life but I don’t think the influence was as high as other figures.

It is also understandable that writing of thesis meditations is simultaneous with Nietzsche’s shift of interest from philology to philosophy. Nietzsche seems to be focusing on concepts of “culture” and evolution of “culture through education”, especially in “Schopenhauer as Educator”. I am not sure if by culture he means national culture? I wouldn’t expect him to know any better, especially that 140 years ago culture was widely understood to belong to nations. The state was the precursor to culture. In that view, without state, there would be no culture –a colonial idea that dominated the 19th century Europe and dehumanized southern peoples with a darker complexion. Montserrat Guibernau has a great essay on this topic in analyzing Anthony D. Smith’s national identity and culture. She focused on the idea that the European conception of nation and culture often mixed with the notion of state. In this view, the existence of nations without state becomes undermined.

The right-wing interpreters of Nietzsche admire this book because it contains most of Nietzsche’s philosophy minus the most important part; “harsh and direct attack on Christianity”. Currently –but for not much longer– I live in Finland. The brute skin-head racism here functions similar to the rest of the white-majority countries. The idea that a traditionally white nation cannot become mixed with darker peoples. Recently, Jussi Halla-aho the leader of the second-largest political party in Finland (True Finns) announced that the only “real Finnish people” are white and Christian. Simultaneous with this type of violence, some white academics who see themselves in opposition with the far-right mentality, think racism is an import of globalization and a side effect of the current economic system. They omit the notion of racial/cultural homogeneity and monochrome Christian practices and its history.

On Nietzsche’s criticism of Christianity, Reza Aslan comes to mind, an academic who wrote the book “Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth” on the life of Jesus. Since 2013, he received much criticism simultaneous with death-threats solely because he is Muslim. In some part of the book, he argued how the catholic church has preferred to promote Jesus as a peaceful spiritual teacher rather than a politically motivated revolutionary who urged his followers to keep his identity a secret.

Going back to Nietzsche, his meditation “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” was the essay that inspired Foucault in his work on madness. “Schopenhauer as Educator” has probably inspired other postmodern thinkers who were interested not just in culture but in different modes of thinking and knowledge production. Edward Said ends his introduction of Orientalism (1978) with a quote from Raymond Williams and invites us to engage in a process which will result in “unlearning” of “the inherent dominative mode” [of thinking]. We see the roots of this idea not just in “Schopenhauer as Educator” but in Nietzsche’s life itself. How do you break with your teacher and friend, who have uplifted you to where you are? And more important than that how do you engage in a field that is completely antagonistic to what you have been taught? We can see the evolution of Nietzsche’s oeuvre from “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth” to “Nietzsche contra Wagner” which he wrote in the last years of his career. And we can see a change in Nietzsche’s mode of living from Wagner years to his solitude and madness. Similar to his Zarathustra who first ascents to the mountains to solitude, then descend back to humanity. One might interpret this process as an Eternal Return (eternal recurrence) -a non-Deleuzian interpretation of the concept which is contrary to Deleuze's Eternal Return as the moment in which extremity of differences is reached.

As far as historical heretics and political activists names such as Mansur Al-Hallaj and Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi come to my mind. Mansour Al-Hallaj was a Persian mystic, poet and teacher of Sufism in his book, “Kitaab al-Tawaaseen” (902) he mentions:

If you do not recognize God, at least recognize His sign, I am the creative truth because through the truth, I am eternal truth. — Ana al-Haqq (I’m the truth/God)

This is the place where we have to be reminded of “writing with one’s own blood”, writing as an activist, making art as an activist. A more contemporary figure that comes to mind in reading Nietzsche's Meditations is Malcolm X. He has definitely read Nietzsche or at least “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life”. Malcolm understood the notion of healing the wounds which he also referred to in some of the interviews. Thinking about Nietzsche’s emphasis on the philosopher’s way of life, and what Nietzsche himself has done to Wagner, we can see a correlation to Malcolm X’s life. What Malcolm X has done to Elijah Muhammad is not much different than what Nietzsche has done to Wagner (although we can agree that anti-semitic Wagner was a much lower and nastier character than Elijah Muhammad). How do you break apart from your teacher, admit our mistake, mature yourself and your ideas? In almost every photo or interview, Malcolm X is smiling and laughing. How to maintain a cheerful attitude toward life in the midst of dark and gloomy events?

Malcolm X was always direct and on point. One of the examples of ideal greatness which Nietzsche used in Thus Spoke Zarathustra was borrowed from ancient Persians: “To speak the truth, and be skillful with bow and arrow”. Shooting well with arrows has a connotation to be on point and straight forward. (1)

“In order to determine this degree of history and, through that, the borderline at which the past must be forgotten if it is not to become the gravedigger of the present, we have to know precisely how great the plastic force of a person, a people, or a culture is. I mean that force of growing in a different way out of oneself, of reshaping and incorporating the past and the foreign, of healing wounds, compensating for what has been lost, rebuilding shattered forms out of one's self. There are people who possess so little of this force that they bleed to death incurably from a single experience, a single pain, often even from a single tender injustice, as from a really small bloody scratch. On the other hand, there are people whom the wildest and most horrific accidents in life and even actions of their own wickedness injure so little that right in the middle of these experiences or shortly after they bring the issue to a reasonable state of well being with a sort of quiet conscience.” (On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, translated by Ian C. Johnston)

Malcolm X’s life can be an embodiment of Nietzschean philosophy, a better example than the life Nietzsche lived himself. One can argue that Malcolm X might have been slightly inspired by Nietzsche, or maximally Malcolm X completed Nietzsche’s philosophy by actualizing it in his own life. Nietzsche’s philosophy is not made to be actualized or utilized in a state level, cultural level, or worst national-cultural. It starts with the individual and stops at the individual level. His critique of modernity and modern humans is one and the same.

“Every philosophy which believes that the problem of existence is touched on, not to say solved, by a political event is a joke- and pseudo-philosophy. Many states have been founded since the world began; that is an old story. How should a political innovation suffice to turn men once and for all into contented inhabitants of the earth? But if anyone really does believe in this possibility he ought to come forward, for he truly deserves to become a professor of philosophy at a German university…” -Schopenhauer as Educator, translation by R. J. Hollingdale, 1984 Cambridge University Press

“Culture and the state—let no one deceive himself here—are antagonists: ‘cultural state’ is just a modern idea. The one lives off the other, the one flourishes at the expense of the other. All great periods in culture are periods of political decline: anything which is great in a cultural sense was unpolitical, even antipolitical.”–Twilight of the Idols, translated by Large, Duncan. (2)

In a talk about Nietzsche and Derrida, Spivak mentioned that the life of an activist requires more than writing. Gramsci, Malcolm X, and such people didn’t just write books, they had notebooks or a series of essays and speeches. Gramsci and Malcolm X were operating outside of the academy, next to their communities and comrades where their struggle was taking shape. They were writing with blood.

At the first look, there might not be any similarity between Malcolm X and Nietzsche. The former was a political activist and the latter was a philosopher-artist. The former was a Muslim minister and the latter was a Christian heretic and son of a Lutheran minister. Malcolm was nationally famous at the time of his assassination. Nietzsche was almost unknown outside of his close circle at the time of his death. Yet, there might be some parallel characteristics between the two. In the past, there has been some informal comparison between these two figures and their works. For instance, Malcolm X’s House Negro Speech and Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality.

Both Nietzsche and Malcolm X were tired of their contemporary condition, the political climate of their region, and the failed struggles of the past generations that were passed on to them. Nietzsche took refuge in Greek tragedy, classical antiquity and Pre-Socratic philosophy. Malcolm took refuge in Islam, international black struggles, Pan-Africanism and Organization of Afro-American Unity. They both experienced a dramatic shift in their ideology and position, although with different intensities. Nietzsche shifted away from Wagner and German Wagnerism, and Malcolm X shifted from Elijah Muhammad and Nation of Islam toward a more comprehensive radical positionality, especially in regard to white Americans. 

When Malcolm was in prison he read Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Kant. In his autobiography, he described his education: “Many who today hear me somewhere in person, or on television, or those who read something I’ve said, will think I went to school far beyond the eighth grade. This impression is due entirely to my prison studies.” (3)

One contrast between Malcolm and Nietzsche’s life is that Nietzsche’s isolation and his idea’s of solitude have very radical individual aspect built into it, while Malcolm’s struggle as much as it was personal, to a great degree it was a predicate from the general social isolation of African-Americans in pre-Civil Rights Act of 1964 America. Both Malcolm and Nietzsche disliked alcohol drinking and smoking.

"The heaviest weight. -What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you : 'This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!' Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine.' If this thought gained power over you, as you are it would transform and possibly crush you; the question in each and every thing, 'Do you want this again and innumerable times again?' would lie on your actions as the heaviest weight!" Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 194.

Photo: Mirza Cizmic, “Reality is finally better than my dreams”, from “Broken Fragments, 2019”

I like to connect Nietzsche with the new “Iranian nationalism” and opposition to the Islamic Republic which sometimes results in Islamophobia and another version of Uncle Tomism of the Middle East. Nietzsche is a very dangerous thinker, he can mess you up or uplift you to a higher human. As he says, “I am not a man, I am a Dynamite!”. What you get out of Nietzsche can depend on many things, how you read him, and when you read him, where you are in society and where you have come from. Nietzsche is not only against God, but he is against the god-like sovereign world-view. The universalism of European objectivity and concepts such as theology, history and even science are deeply problematic for him.  

Reading Nietzsche after leaving Iran to Germany transformed Aramesh Dustdar an Iranian Heideggerian philosopher into an Islamophobe. In 2010, after the Green movement in Iran, he wrote a letter to Jürgen Habermas, condemning Islam and calling the recent events in Iran as “Shia-Iranian...magic show” staged by a bunch of crafty “pretenders to philosophy.” (4) This letter sparked a lot of debate among Iranian intellectual community condemning Dustdar for his Eurocentric views upholding the orientalist banner: non-Europeans are incapable of thinking.

According to Badiou (wink wink), Modernism started in music before fine arts and Richard Wagner was one of the people who started it. Even if we want to speak in such a categorical language, Wagner’s violent modernism was challenged by Nietzsche who took up the task of overcoming the centricity of the absolute mediums. He identified as an artist more than a philosopher and often used poetry in his works. He believed that old-school rigid theoreticians inside European academies and philosophy as a whole are following the footpath of Hegel's absolute knowledge and scientific objectivity. Something that he saw very dangerous and sought to overcome.  

“What people in earlier times gave the church, people now give, although in scantier amounts, to science.”

Anti-semitic Wager used the term Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) for his operas where all sorts of visual and auditory mediums were combined: music, dance, theatre, and images. There is an array of white supremacists supporting Wagner’s case (from Hitler to today’s Roger Scruton) on defending Wagner and bringing back the very white/pure European modernity which Scruton calls “high culture", he writes: “Modern high culture is as much a set of footnotes to Wagner as Western philosophy is, in Whitehead’s judgement, footnotes to Plato”. (5)  

“…let us leave the superhistorical people to their revulsion and their wisdom. Today for once we would much rather become joyful in our hearts with our lack of wisdom and make the day happy for ourselves as active and progressive people, as men who revere the process. Let our evaluation of the historical be only a western bias, if only from within this bias we at least move forward and not do remain still, if only we always just learn better to carry on history for the purposes of living! For we will happily concede that the superhistorical people possess more wisdom than we do, so long, that is, as we may be confident that we possess more life than they do. For thus at any rate our lack of wisdom will have more of a future than their wisdom.”

“Insofar as history stands in the service of life, it stands in the service of an unhistorical power and will therefore, in this subordinate position, never be able to (and should never be able to) become pure science, something like mathematics. However, the problem to what degree living requires the services of history generally is one of the most important questions and concerns with respect to the health of a human being, a people, or a culture. For with a certain excess of history, living crumbles away and degenerates. Moreover, history itself also degenerates through this decay.” (6)

Bib.

1. Nietzsche, Friedrich and Common, Thomas. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. s.l. : Dover Publications, 1999. 0486406636. 2. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Duncan Large. Twilight of the Idols or How to Philosophize with a Hammer. s.l. : OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS, 1998. 3. 15 Books Malcolm X Read In Prison. radicalreads.com. [Online] APRIL 10, 2018. https://radicalreads.com/malcolm-x-favorite-books/. 4. HAMID DABASHI, AHMAD SADRI, MAHMOUD SADRI. An Open Letter to Jürgen Habermas. PBS. [Online] October 17, 2010. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tehranbureau/2010/10/an-open-letter-to-jurgen-habermas.html. 5. Jakobsen, Peter. Wagner and Modernism. www.thevarnishedculture.com. [Online] May 26, 2016. http://www.thevarnishedculture.com/wagner-and-modernism/. 6. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Untimely Meditations (Thoughts Out of Season 1-2). s.l. : Digireads.com, 2010. ISBN13: 9781420934557.

(Cover photo by Negin)

Suva, “Interminably outside the box” 2019

#reading #read #nietzsche #malcolm x #Mirza Cizmic #Suva #Music

[gilbertineonfr2]

TROOPERS 2017 Day #1 Wrap-Up

I’m in Heidelberg (Germany) for the 10th edition of the TROOPERS conference. The regular talks are scheduled on Wednesday and Thursday. The two first days are reserved for some trainings and a pre-conference event called “NGI” for “Next Generation Internet” focusing on two hot topics: IPv6 and IoT. As said on the website: “NGI aims to provide discussion on how to secure these core technologies by bringing together practitioners from this space and some of the smartest researchers of the respective fields”. I initially planned to attend talks from both worlds but I stayed in the “IoT” tracks because many talks were interesting.

The day started with a keynote by Steve Lord: ”Of Unicorns and replicants”. Steve flagged his keynote as a “positive” talk (usually, we tend to present negative stuff). It started with some facts like “The S in IoT stands for Security” and a recap of the IoT history. This is clearly not a new idea. The first connected device was a Coca-Cola machine that was available via finger in… 1982! Who’s remember this old-fashioned protocol? In 1985, came the first definition of “IoT”: It is the integration of people, processes and technology with connectable devices and sensors to enable remote monitoring status. In 2000, LG presented its very first connected fridge. 2009 was a key year with the explosion of crowdfunding campaigns. Indeed, many projects were born due to the financial participations of many people. It was a nice way to bring ideas to life. In 2015, Vizio smart TV’s started to watch at you. Of course, Steve talked also about the story of St-Jude Medical and their bad pacemakers story. Common IoT problems are: botnets, endpoints, the overreach (probably the biggest problem) and the availability (You remember the outage that affected Amazon a few days ago?). The second part of the keynote was indeed positive and Steve reviewed the differences between 2015 – 2017. In the past, cloud solutions were not so mature, there was communication issues, little open guidance and unrealistic expectations. People learn by mistakes and some companies don’t want to have nightmare stories like others and are investing in security. So, yes, things are going (a little bit) better because more people are addressing security issues.

The first talk was “IoT hacking and Forensic with 0-day” by Moonbeom Park & Soohyun Jin. More and more IoT devices have been involved in security incident cases. Mirai is one of the latest examples. To address this problem, the speakers explained their process based on these following steps: Search for IoT targets, analyze the filesystem or vulnerabilities, attack and exploit, analyze the artefacts, install a RAT and control using a C&C then perform incident response using forensic skills. The example they used was a vacuum robot with a voice recording feature. The first question is just… “why?”. They explained how to compromize the device which was, at the beginning, properly hardened.  But, it was possible to attack the protocol used to configure it. Some JSON data was sent in clear text with the wireless configuration details. Once the robot reconfigured to use a rogue access-point, root access on the device was granted. That’s nice but how to control the robot, its camera and microphone? To idea was to turn in into a spying device. They explained how to achieve this and played a nice demo:

So, why do we need IoT forensics? IoT devices can be involved in incidents.Issues? One of the issues is the way data are stored. There is no HD but flash memory. OS remains the first OS used by IoT devices (73% according to the latest IoT developers survey). It is important to be able to extract the filesystem from such devices to understand how they work and to collect logs. Usually, filesystems are based on SquashFS and UBIFS. Tools were presented to access those data directly from Python. Example: the ubi_reader module. Once the filesystem details accessible, the forensic process remains the same.

The next talk was dedicated to SDR (Software Defined Radio) by Matt Knight & Marc Newline from Bastille: “So you want to hack radios?”. The idea behind this talk was to open our eyes on all the connected devices that implement SDR. Why should we care about radio communications? Not that they are often insecure but they are deployed everywhere. They are also built on compromises: big size and costs constraints, weak batteries, the deployment scenarios are challenging and, once in the wild, they are difficult to patch. Matt and Marc explained during the talk how to perform reverse engineering. They are two approaches: hardware & software defined radio. They reviewed pro & con. How to perform reverse engineering a radio signal? Configure yourself as a receiver and try to map symbols. This is a five steps process:

Identify the channel

Identify the modulation

Determine the symbol rate

Synchronize

Extract symbols

In many cases, OSINT is helpful to learn how it works (find online documentation). Many information is publicly available (example: on the FCC website – Just check for the FCC ID on the back of the device to get interesting info). They briefly introduced the RF concept then the reverse engineering workflow. To achieve this, they based the concept on different scenarios:

A Z-Wave home automation protocol

A door bell (capture button info and then replay to make the doorbell ring of course

An HP wireless keyboard/mouse

After the lunch, Vladimir Wolstencroft presented “SIMBox Security: Fraud, Fun & Failure”. This talk was tagged as TLP:RED so no coverage but very nice content! It was one of my best talk for today.

The next one was about the same topic: “Dissecting modern cellular 3G/4G modems” by Harald Welte. This talk is the result of a research conducted by Harald. His company was looking for a new M2M (“Machine to Machine”) solution. They searched interesting devices and started to see what was in the box. Once the good candidate found (the EC2O from Quectel), they started a security review and, guess what, they made nice findings. First, the device contained some Linux code. Based on this, all manufacturers have to respect the GPL and to disclose the modified source code. It takes a long time to get the information from Quectel). By why is Linux installed on this device? For Harald, it just increased the complexity. Here is a proof with the slide explaining how the device is rebooted:

Crazy isn’t it? Another nice finding was the following AT command:

AT+QLINUXCMD=

It allows to send Linux commands to the devices in read/write mode and as root. What else?

The last talk “Hacks & case studies: Cellular communications” was presented by Brian Butterly. Brian’s motto is “to break things you must understand how they work”. The first step, read as much as possible, then build your lab to play with the selected targets. Many IoT devices today use GSM networks to interact with them via SMS or calls. Others also support TCP/IP communications (data). After a brief introduction to mobile network and how to deploy your own. An important message from Brian: Technically, nothing prevents to broadcast valid networks ID’s (but the law does it :-).

It’s important to understand how a device connects to a mobile network:

First, connect to its home network if available

Otherwise, do NOT connect to a list of blacklisted networks

Then connect to the network with the strongest signal.

If you deploy your own mobile network, you can make target devices connect to your network and play MitM. So, what can we test? Brian reviewed different gadgets and how to abuse them / what are their weaknesses.

First case: a small GPS Tracker with an emergency button. The Mini A8 (price: 15€). Just send a SMS with “DW” and the device will reply with a SMS containing the following URL:

http://gpsui.net/smap.php?lac=1&cellid=2&c=262&n=23&v=6890 Battery:70%

This is not a real GPS tracker, it returns the operation (“262” is Germany) and tower cell information. If you send “1111”, it will enable the built-in microphone. When the SOS button is pressed, a message is sent to the “authorized” numbers. The second case was a gate relay (RTU5025 – 40€). It allows opening a door via SMS or call. It’s just a relay in fact. Send “xxxxCC” (xxxx is the pin) to unlock the door. Nothing is sent back if the PIN is wrong. This means that it’s easy to brute force the device. Even better, once you found the PIN, you can send “xxxxPyyyy” to replace the PIN xxxx with a new one yyyy (and lock out the owner!). The next case was the Smanos X300 home alarm system (150€). Can be also controlled by SMS or calls (to arm, disarm and get notifications). Here again, there is a lack of protection and it’s easy to get the number and to fake authorized number to just send a “1” or “0”.

The next step was to check IP communications used by devices like the GPS car tracker (TK105 – 50€). You can change the server using the following message:

adminip 123456 101.202.101.202 9000

And define your own web server to get the device data. More fun, the device has a relay that can be connected to the car oil pump to turn the engine off (if the car is stolen). It also has a microphone and speaker. Of course, all communications occur over HTTP.

The last case was a Siemens module for PLC (CMR 2020). It was not perfect but much better than the other devices. By example, passwords are not only 4 numbers PIN codes but a real alphanumeric password.

Two other examples: a SmartMeter sending UDP packets in clear text with the meter serial number is all packets). And a Solar system control box running Windows CE 6.x. Guest what? The only way to manage the system is via Telnet. Who said that Telnet is dead?

It’s over for today. Stay tuned for more news by tomorrow!

[The post TROOPERS 2017 Day #1 Wrap-Up has been first published on /dev/random]

from Xavier

#TROOPERS 2017 Day 1 Wrap-Up