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omniscientwreck · 3 years

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Like Waves Upon An Open Shore

Pieces of this conversation came to me late last night and I couldn't write anything else until I got this out of my system. This is one in a series of pseudo-character study/ missed conversation fics I have on AO3. There's no lifespan angst here, it's more of a meditation on power and potential.

The first to approach him was Caduceus. After they’d imprisoned Ikithon they combined efforts to build back his home. It turns out that this is something Essek’s particular arcane flare is appropriate for. He is learning to accept that his power has limits and that it likely always will. He’s never had to worry about this before, even knowing that one day he will be among the dirt and there he will stay. He’s never had to consider that the flow of time and how it feeds and consumes life is something one might need to control. When it had hit him, when they’d needed the improbable and he could not deliver, he had cried for this man he’d never known save for fond rememberings told by happy words and sad eyes.

He had come to help them and when they needed him most he couldn’t even fail because he never could have started.

However, fixing a roof is practical. Spreading density until large loads of materials are manageable to carry, freezing objects in place as they’re affixed by regular means. He can be useful here and he is. In the first two days he uses all of his strength helping and at the end of the day he’s exhausted. But Caduceus also needed help with the garden. Yasha had shown him some basics and every night he worked with his hands, for the first time of his life bringing new beauty to a scarred earth.

The first night is quiet and he is alone with his thoughts. The eyes are gone and he can properly think again. The new one, Kingsley, sleeps outside but he’s been through a lot and it’s difficult for Essek to look at him knowing he did nothing. It’s difficult to look at Caleb. To look at any of them for the first day.

But he does. He is trying to learn humility, to learn that whatever ugly thing rises in him (guilt for things he can no longer change and selfishly wouldn’t, longing for someone he has no right to feel close to, regret at working with those who had hurt him so badly, sick satisfaction at seeing him stripped of power, the desire to end him then and there) is not always the most important thing. He works alongside the Nein still. He laughs when Jester jokes, he levitates Luc to catch the child’s attention when he’s being particularly mischievous, he attempts another joke which a few of them catch this time. He is there for them now, an imitation of the way they’ve been there for each other.

He digs into the earth in the cool breeze of dusk, removing his gloves now that the sun is fading on his second night there. He’s elected to tend to the graves of an elven family, many of whom have the last name Akhilvarr. He recognizes the surprisingly light footfalls of the firbolg approaching him as he gently holds two flowers, deciding.

“You’re up late.”

He places the plants down softly in front of the hole he’s dug out, brushing dirt from his bare hands, learning to relish the coating of grime, the feeling of having an impact on the world around you. “I don’t really sleep as much as the rest of you.” He hesitates and from the way Caduceus’ eyes bore through him he knows the statement has a second half, “And I feel like I need to be out here.”

He nods and sits, levelling eyes with Essek who’s still on his knees, facing the graves. “How are you feeling?”

The question is so simple but Essek cannot find an answer that is satisfactory, no words he’s ever known can accurately sum the corners of his heart. “It does not matter right now how I feel. Your home was nearly destroyed, you brought someone back from the dead. I dare not burden you with my own troubles.”

“Essek if I may,” he’s learned by now that Caduceus means this to be a precursor to a deep insight and though he is raw he allows him to continue, “there is a difference in being selfless and being harmful. Now I won’t force anything, only you can know if you’re ready to talk, but I never ask a question I don’t want an answer to.”

“I just-” he can feal traitorous heat as tears threaten to spill over his eyelashes and realizes he can’t wipe them away without streaking his face with mud. “All my life I have trained to be powerful. I have learned to manipulate the equations and theory that make up the way we experience the world. I can manipulate the lenses through which we understand the things around us. I have been touted as a prodigy and I couldn’t do anything to affect fate when it mattered to you all most. I am so thankful that you were there, that you and your god were able to fix a great injustice, but this is the last piece of my world shattering. I thought I could protect you all, to be useful in any circumstance and I was wrong.”

He stares into the two flowers and the purple one to the left blows in the wind, while the yellow remains still. He goes to tuck the purple bloom into the dirt and gently packs earth in around it, protecting roots and brushing dirt off leaves. Caduceus allows him to do this and by the time he looks back up at him, there’s a gentles smile at rest on his face. He knows Essek has more to say and he gestures for him to continue as Essek considers which flowers would most like to celebrate the Akhilvarr family.

“It’s funny, almost. I have heard much about the wonders of gardening and never believed a word. But here I am, dirt under my nails, digging in the earth, repairing damage for once in my sorry life, trying to leave somewhere better than I found it.” he finds a red flower with ruffled petals and a taller white flower who’s stem splits off into several tiny flowers, clustered into one sphere, they seem impatient.

“The gardens at my tower were never tended by myself, I had someone else to do that. They were arranged perfectly, planted with aesthetic and design in mind and little else. Looking idly at the beauty of nature is one thing, but this place-” He looks around, mosses give off a light glow as the sun has now disappeared. Slowly but surely fireflies blink to light up the air around them, dancing from leaf to petal. “I keep having the impulse to decide based on aesthetic. It’s difficult to ignore but-”

Caduceus fills in where he has no words, “That’s not your world anymore. I regret to inform you that as soon as we crossed your path your days of neat little boxes and even rows gained an expiry date. The world is so much wider than the machinations of people, we can never predict what is outside of our purview and when we take a step back, relinquish that control, often something more beautiful will spring up. I have tended this garden for many years, longer than the memory of many and I could never have dreamed up the beauty that lives here now. It gets more and more beautiful as each year grows on because the chaos is nurtured and you are learning that.” Caduceus grabs the trowel and begins digging his own hole, “You have come so far Essek and I do not know whether I have the right to feel this way, but I am immensely proud of you. I’m proud for who you are now, and who you are about to become.”

Essek laughs and it sounds like broken glass, “Proud is a funny word to use for someone who has done as much wrong as I.”

“Each decision we make is a point in a network of thousands of other decisions we make connected to webs of the decisions of everyone who has ever had a hand in our lives. If you and everyone around you acts in fear your decisions will be rooted there. Those are the times where we are most lost and I think you are beginning to realize that.”

Every bad decision flows through Essek’s consciousness and he lets them drift by, hands trembling, and the red flower with the beautiful frills slips from his grasp and falls into place in the hole beside the deep purple of the last planted bloom. It’s fate.

“So each bad decision you’ve made has crashed in on the wave of every other bad decision you’ve made, and every bad decision anyone has ever made about you. Now, every beautiful thing you do, every good decision you make will be carried forward by every good decision you’ve made before. It’s a web, it’s a network where everything is connected and you have as much agency now as you did then, every good decision counts towards every good decision you will make in the future and I know there will be many.”

Tears stream freely down his face now and he doesn’t care about the dirt as he wipes them away. “That is-”

“I believe-”

Again, the silver tongued shadowhand has no words, “Thank you Mr. Clay. I think that is more kindness than I know how to give myself. It is difficult to process and accept but I will try my best.”

Caduceus’ hand wanders through the bag of flowers, not even looking as he picks one, a massive flower, bright white and nearly glowing in the moonlight. He sighs contentedly and plants the flower. They work together in companionable silence and Essek relishes the sound of his companion’s breath, the feeling of dirt sticking under his nails, the gentle breeze that blows through fireflies and looking through them up to the stars, once again teeming with the promise of possibility, change, growth.

AO3 Link Here

#critical role #ficlet #caduceus clay #essek thelyss #character study #no lifespan angst #just some light emotional hurt/comfort #critfic #my writing #wreckwrites

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makeste · 4 years

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I really want to know your opinion on this : do you think OFA's secret should be shared with more than just Bakugou? And if so, who? I really love your weekly reactions (you're hilarious) and your metas (you're so articulate!!!!) (´｡• ω •｡`)

first of all, thank you so much! ( ॢ•͈ᴗ•͈ॢ)

as for your question, it’s a bit complicated. my answer is both yes and no. I’ll start with the “no” part, I guess.

so here’s the thing: I absolutely, 100% fully support All Might’s decision to keep OFA secret. I really can’t stress this enough -- this is not something they were keeping hidden for funsies. “the Power Of All Might is something that can be shared and passed on from person to person, and he gave it to a fifteen-year-old boy” is not just something to be spread around lightly; if it got out to the wrong person, it could literally destroy Izuku’s life.

to the villains, he becomes a target, as we’ve already seen. we’re talking about the power of All Might for fuck’s sake. of course he’s a target. it’s the one power that can stand up to even All for One himself. villains would be coming after him pretty much every day of the week. if they don’t know about the “OFA can only be given up willingly” part, they simply try to take the quirk by force. but if they do know about it, that makes it even worse, because that’s when they start getting into methods of coercing him. hostages; torture; you name it. give us OFA or we’ll kill these innocent people. give us OFA or we’ll hurt your family and friends. his mom would have to go into hiding. he would never be safe again.

to the general public, and to agencies like the HPSC, Izuku becomes the subject of heated political controversy, and a potential government pawn. how could All Might do something so irresponsible as entrusting the greatest power in the world into the hands of a quirkless fifteen-year-old?? now the world is left without its Symbol of Peace, and with no one who’s ready to step in and fill those shoes. why didn’t he give OFA to someone with more power, more experience? this is unacceptable. Izuku should give it up to someone else. Hawks, or Best Jeanist, or Endeavor. people are very easily whipped into a frenzy; all it would take is a few viral opinion pieces, and the nation would probably be demanding the government to step in and force Izuku to relinquish it. some citizens might even take it upon themselves to try and capture him if they got desperate enough. even the other pros would probably be pressuring him. as for the HPSC, I wouldn’t put it past them to try and take control/custody of Izuku themselves and claim that it’s a matter of national security or whatnot. they’d have the best of intentions of course. just trying to keep the world safe. but they’re trending much more Hydra than S.H.I.E.L.D. these days, so who knows how badly that could end.

to Izuku’s schoolmates and friends, he becomes one of two things; either the object of mistrust or envy, or else someone to be protected at all costs. for most of them it would be the latter, since they really are good kids. but there’d be some people -- not in his class perhaps, but it’s a big school -- who’d no doubt be echoing the same thoughts as the public at large. he doesn’t deserve it, he’s not strong enough, etc., you get the idea. and if and when the villain attacks and threats -- “give us OFA or else” -- inevitably began to crop up as mentioned, all of the blame would fall down on him. “just give it to someone else who can handle it. why are you so selfish. this isn’t just about you; you’re putting everyone else in danger.”

and for the ones who don’t turn on him, who stay by his side and defend him, there’s still the fact that doing so puts them in danger as well. these kids are heroes. and if you entrust a hero with something that must be protected at all costs, they will protect it. at all costs. which is yet another burden to add to Izuku’s shoulders as now it’s not only his own safety he has to fear for, but that of his friends and loved ones. and if anything happened to them because of him, that’s not something he would ever get over.

so yeah. it’s insanely dangerous. and none of the above is even taking into account that there is a traitor at U.A., and they still don’t know who it is. so given all of that, it’s no wonder All Might insisted that Deku keep it a secret. and then of course Deku went and told Kacchan anyway, which even Kacchan was mad about once he realized the gravity of what he’d been told. but at least Kacchan is someone Deku’s known literally as long as he can remember, and there’s virtually no chance of him being a secret traitor. the same cannot be said for almost anyone else. we all know that they can be trusted, yes. but All Might doesn’t know that. even Aizawa, who is the one other person I’d argue should still have been told, was still a prime suspect in the traitor investigation due to him being one of the few people who could have communicated the information about the class schedule and the training camp’s whereabouts. we know he is not the traitor. we know he would literally die for any one of these kids. but the other characters do not know that for sure, and even Aizawa himself would probably agree that the rational thing under those circumstances would be to trust absolutely no one, with no exceptions. it’s the safest thing to do for Izuku’s sake in a situation where there is relatively little to be gained from telling other people, and potentially everything to lose by doing so. again, we already know there is at least one person in or linked to class 1-A who is not what they seem, who has managed to earn the trust of everyone, and who is connected to the League. that is just not a situation you can afford to fuck around with. “well we really like all these kids a lot and we’ve gotten to know them and we’re pretty sure they’re all on the up and up” is just not good enough when we are literally talking about a matter of life and death for a sixteen-year-old child.

so that’s the “no” part of my answer. I don’t think the secret should be shared. or at least, that would have been my answer before Shigaraki Tomura woke up from his three-month nap and was all “GOD I REALLY WANT ONE FOR ALL”, and Endeavor was all “ONE FOR ALL WHAT IS THAT”, and Izuku was all “HEY MISTER ENDEAVOR SIR, JUST SO YOU KNOW, SHIGARAKI IS AFTER ME”, and Aizawa was all “I don’t know what the fuck is going on here, but I too heard ‘One for All’ on the comm, and have also deduced that for some reason Shigaraki Tomura is targeting my student, because most of the time I’m the one who’s actually holding on to the two brain cells that all of the pro heroes collectively share.”

so now that all of that has gone down, I think the situation has changed enough where, moving forward, at the very least Endeavor and Aizawa will have to be let in on the secret. because if not, they’re probably going to start doing their own investigations into it and could wind up accidentally spilling the beans to EVERYONE. so at the very least they will (and should) know. and this also applies to anyone else who stumbles across this battle before it wraps up, and thus also starts putting the pieces together. I think this will be Shouto and Ochako and Iida, potentially, which I’ll be glad to see happen if that is the case. because even though I firmly believe not telling them earlier was the right call, that doesn’t mean I don’t want them to know about it. they’re his friends, and they’ve earned his trust and care about his wellbeing. I think and hope that they’ll understand why they weren’t told earlier, and I hope they don’t blame Izuku for it at all, because it absolutely is not his fault. he made a promise to All Might, and All Might, as I’ve stated, had very good reasons for keeping this on the DL.

and by the way, it also would not surprise me at all if in spite of all the precautions they’ve taken, the secret actually DOES get revealed to the world at large eventually. at which point I’m almost positive every single thing I mentioned above will come to pass, and Izuku will be in for one hell of a rough ride. the upside though is that at least he’ll have a bigger support network to help him get through it. and also he is a much stronger, smarter, and more capable person than he was even just a year ago, and he’s better equipped to handle it now than he might have been before. it’s much harder to argue “this child should not have been given OFA” when said child is now capable of using 45% power instead of just 5% and/or 100%-but-his-entire-body-gets-destroyed-in-the-process. also harder to argue when said child has since UNLOCKED THE POWER OF SIXQUIRKS which not even All Might managed to do, so suck on that!! of course, that in turn opens the door to suspicion about him being connected to AFO, which is a whole new set of problems. OFA really is just a humongous pain in the ass in a lot of ways lmao.

anyway, so I hope that answers your question! no I don’t think they should have told anyone earlier, but I do think they should come clean to a few people now, since they’ve basically been all but found out anyway. and I will be happy to have those people included in the OFA Scooby Squad moving forward. they’re going to have to get a bigger clubhouse though I guess.

#midoriya izuku #all might #one for all #bnha meta #bnha #boku no hero academia #bnha spoilers #mha spoilers #bnha manga spoilers #makeste reads bnha #asks #anon asks #long post #deku meta

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joannalannister · 4 years

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Anonymous asked:

My problem with lyanna is not that she didn't want to marry Robert but her having feelings for rhaegar she talk to ned about wanting a faithful husband but doesn't seem to care about elia the fact that lyanna had a crush on him when he given her the flowers she saw how all the smiles died and am sure her father also had a talk with her after it happened its wrong for Robert but her rhaegar her been young still does not change anything so she would be happy been a mistress

Hey me again so about her being with rhaegar did she accept him to only sleep and be with him as she doesn't like sharing so she would leave elia to share a bed by herself how is alone 24 of course rhaegar is the problem but I am focusing on lyanna because I can't understand her and would she settle being a mistress and her child be a bastard or second best either way I can see her been that stupid not to know and when even she or rhaegar said about elia can't make either of them look good

Aegon the unworthy marriage his mistress even when he was still married but the marriage was illegal and no one saw as a real marriage so why when as saying if he did marry lyanna why would their marriage be valid I think if there was ever a marriage between them I feel lyanna would be the one to ask but rhaegar had to know that their marriage was not valid and in the end she was at best a mistress I feel like he might of lied to her to get her to sleep with her your thoughts

It is not my intent to offend. However, you asked for my thoughts, and I think there are a lot of assumptions being made here that are so completely at odds with my own that I cannot even address your concerns, because they are all so far away from everything I imagine.

Without another book, we are all working off assumptions, of course, but my own assumptions run as follows:

1) Lyanna was unhappy with the idea of an arranged marriage. Her objection was marriage. Any marriage. Something kind of like Eowyn:

“What do you fear, lady?" [Aragorn] asked. "A cage," [Éowyn] said. "To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire.”

But I personally do not think Rhaegar was Lyanna’s Faramir. (I do not think Lyanna has a Faramir-character in her story, just as Cersei largely lacks a Lord MacBeth.)

For this passage:

Ned let him prattle on. After a time, he quieted and they rode in silence. The streets of King's Landing were dark and deserted. The rain had driven everyone under their roofs. It beat down on Ned's head, warm as blood and relentless as old guilts. Fat drops of water ran down his face.

"Robert will never keep to one bed," Lyanna had told him at Winterfell, on the night long ago when their father had promised her hand to the young Lord of Storm's End. "I hear he has gotten a child on some girl in the Vale." Ned had held the babe in his arms; he could scarcely deny her, nor would he lie to his sister, but he had assured her that what Robert did before their betrothal was of no matter, that he was a good man and true who would love her with all his heart. Lyanna had only smiled. "Love is sweet, dearest Ned, but it cannot change a man's nature."

I do not think this passage is about Lyanna or her desires.

I think this passage is about Lyanna attempting to disillusion Young Ned, to try to explain to him that there isn’t going to be some wonderful happy Stark-Baratheon family after she is forced to wed Robert.

Remember, Robert and Ned loved each other as brothers. Look at the passage up above; it’s about Ned’s “old guilts” and about how he “had assured [Lyanna] that what Robert did before their betrothal was of no matter, that he was a good man and true who would love her with all his heart.” Young!Ned was into it!! He was into the idea of this marriage! Robert, his brother, at last, in truth!

Ned was blinded by his love for Robert.

Don’t you see that double-meaning to that last line, hanging there at the end? “Love is sweet, dearest Ned, but it cannot change a man’s nature.” It’s the line that haunts Ned’s memory, as well as our own. Love couldn’t change Robert’s nature. Love could not change Ned’s nature either.

It was Ned’s nature to defend Robert so loyally, because Ned loved him. Ned could have said something to his father Rickard, could have said that Robert would shame Lyanna after they wed, could have maybe stopped this marriage that Lyanna objected to.

But he didn’t. He didn’t speak out. Hence his “old guilts” beating down on him relentlessly.

Would Lyanna find it nice to have a husband who doesn’t cheat on her? Probably, I don’t think that’s a stretch.

Would Lyanna find it even nicer not to have any husband at all? To “be a king's councillor and build castles and become the High Septon?” To do those great deeds Eowyn and Arya long for? To not be locked in a cage, until use and old age accept it?

Fuck yeah.

"Ah, Arya. You have a wildness in you, child. 'The wolf blood,' my father used to call it. Lyanna had a touch of it”

2) I have not read a passage in the books that speaks definitively to me about Lyanna’s feelings for or about Rhaegar. Until I do so, I will continue to assume that Lyanna viewed Rhaegar as an escape rather than as a potential suitor. I believe Lyanna went with Rhaegar willingly, but I do not believe that she stayed with Rhaegar willingly.

3) Personally, when I read “all the smiles died” -- well, I take “all” to mean “all,” and “all” includes Lyanna, so I assume that Lyanna was not happy with the way Rhaegar chose to honor her at the tourney, when he shamed his wife Elia.

When Lyanna presumably ran away with Rhaegar, I do not think she was thinking about how her actions would affect Elia, because I don’t think Lyanna believed she was doing something that would negatively impact Elia. I think Lyanna believed the Crown Prince was using his position to simply help her escape her marriage to Robert. Perhaps he would let her be one of his knights! He had honored her for her bravery regarding Howland Reed, hadn’t he? She could ride with him and all the other young knights in the charming prince’s retinue! How exciting! Is this naive? Yes. But Lyanna was a child; children are naive by definition. If we are apportioning blame, I think Rhaegar takes the lion’s share for this whole situation.

4) With the return of winter after the False Spring, I believe Rhaegar believed that the apocalypse was imminent, and that he was doing What Must Be Done to save the world. I think that, most of the time, Rhaegar was not a terrible person, but I think that Rhaegar was going to do Whatever It Took to save the world, and I think Rhaegar’s definition of “Whatever It Took” included even things like rape. (Note that Westeros probably wouldn’t define it as rape, because a medieval woman’s consent, once given, is given forever (which is fuuuucked up). But we’re readers in the 21st century, so I’m going to call it rape when we have this relationship of dubious consent between a minor and an adult with infinite power over her.)

5) I personally do not believe that Rhaegar and Lyanna got married in the books. I believe that Jon is a bastard, just not Ned’s bastard, and part of Jon’s story arc is coming to terms with his illegitimacy and realizing that it is not a stain or a sin or whatever, and that he is still capable of great heroism. GRRM has set up so many preconceived Westerosi notions about the horror of bastardy in the books that I think he is itching to undercut them with one of his major protagonists being both a bastard and a great hero.

Furthermore, I do not believe that GRRM would undercut his heroine Daenerys like that. I believe that Daenerys must choose to relinquish the throne, not have it ripped out from under her by a cheap technicality of the patriarchy.

(I am asking nicely: please do not comment or speak to me if you do not believe that Daenerys is a hero in the books. I simply do not have time for that in my life. So, I am asking nicely: please cut me out of your life and do not read my blog if you do not think of Daenerys as a hero in the books. )

I also don’t believe that Rhaegar thought he had time for a marriage. Again, impending apocalypse.

And what faith were they married in, if it happened? Did they say the words at the God’s Eye, before a heart tree? Did Rhaegar convert? Did Rhaegar hire a septon? Why would Lyanna put any stock in a marriage by a septon? Did she convert? Why would a septon condone polygamy without fire breathing monsters to back it up? Was Rhaegar the kind of person to hold a knife to a septon’s throat and demand a marriage or else? I don’t think so! But how would this marriage even come about?? Where did Rhaegar even find time to fuss over these details? And if he couldn’t fuss over the details, what kind of wedding planner did he hire? What do you think Westerosi wedding planning agencies are like, and do you think the Lannisters used the same one, considering their targ aspirations???

I think Rhaegar was running to Dorne for all he was worth, to set up a fortress / base camp where he could allow Lyanna’s child (and Elia’s children when he could fetch them) to grow up to become the saviors of the world.

Rhaegar just had to deal with a tiny rebellion and a slightly, every-so-slightly unhinged father and then everything would go according to plan! /sarcasm

I don’t think Rhaegar was *deliberately* doing terrible things like abandoning his wife and children, I don’t think Rhaegar ever *meant* to hold Lyanna against her will in a tower in a land far from her home, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

I think there is a lesson in Rhaegar’s story, that Rhaegar was doing everything for the wrong reasons. Which is very Tragic. He was saving the world because a book told him he had to, and he was going to sacrifice various people to do it. (Which is wrong. Wrong. The only person you get to sacrifice is yourself.)

Whereas Rhaegar’s son Jon ... I think Jon chooses to save the world because it’s something Jon feels in his soul as right and noble and honorable, something worthy of a son -- even an adopted son!! -- of Ned Stark. I think Jon chooses to save the world because he has lived in the world and is a part of it, in a way that Rhaegar never was, Rhaegar with his sad songs at ghostly Summerhall.

I believe that agency is an important theme throughout the books, whether it’s Daenerys finding herself on the Dothraki Sea or Cersei taking back control of her own body or Tyrion saying fuck you to his father or Jon eventually choosing to save the world ... and I think Lyanna’s story is in keeping with this theme, that her story is about her trying to find her agency.

The tragedy of her story is that she -- unwittingly, imo -- traded Robert’s cage for Rhaegar’s, and she died there. She became entangled in Rhaegar’s story, a story in which he chooses to jettison his frankly massive amount of agency -- the books and scrolls told him This All Must Happen! And It All Must Happen Right Now, With Utmost Urgency! -- and it’s terribly, terribly sad, and I feel sad for everyone involved.

Now, I could be very wrong and you could be very right, anon, depending on what direction GRRM chooses to take his characters. But I cannot speculate on your specific concerns without new textual evidence indicating to me that your concerns are something to concern me.

Again, it is truly not my desire to offend with this post. These are just my opinions, and I am very fond of both Rhaegar and Lyanna as characters, I find them both fascinating and I hope we learn more about them. I actually like the ship in a chivalric, Capital-R-Romantic way that’s basically divorced from my understanding of ASOIAF. (I really like Rhaegar x Elia too!)

If you would like to read more of my thoughts, I recommend you go through my lyanna stark tag, because there’s lots and lots of meta posts in there giving my thoughts in great detail, there’s fics I wrote explaining my ideas in fic rather than essay format, everything. So please go there.

#lannister thoughts #/#if i mention incest will this stay out of the tags?#lyanna stark #rhaegar targaryen #rape tw #Ned stark #robert baratheon

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texaslawinformation · 5 years

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How Parental Incarceration Affects a Texas Child Support Case?

If you have need a best Law service, You can get better suggestions from How Parental Incarceration Affects a Texas Child Support Case? with the great process!c

Divorce Lawyer in Houston: Recently I had a consult with a man who was in my office who was having problems with a child support. His story was not that different from many who have come to see me. He had missed so many payments that not only did he who owe current child support he owed a lot of back child support. It was so bad that half of his paycheck was going to child support.

The one difference in his story was that the reason he was so far behind in child support was that he had been incarnated for 8 years. Being incarcerated change many aspects of his life. One aspect that did not automatically change was his child support. What he owed continued to accumulate. In this article, we will discuss:

How incarnation affects the paying parent?

How being incarnated affects the receiving parent? How does incarceration affect the paying parent? Some parents assume that child support automatically stops when they are in jail or prison. However, that is not the case. Something I tell parents who hire or consult with us is that the Order is the Order until a Judge signs a new Order.

This means until an order a parent petitions to modify the existing child support order, the parent will continue to be liable for the monthly amount due to child support. This is also why the man who consulted me was so far behind in child support when he came to see me. He had never done anything to try and change his current Order.

What can a paying parent do regarding child support once they are incarnated?

One thing you can do is file an Incarcerated Noncustodial Parent Affidavit of Income/Assets for a change in the court where the child support obligation was established. This brings the incarnated parents situation to the attention of the Texas Office of the Attorney General.

The Attorney General does not have the power to unilaterally modify a child support order. This power still rests with the Judge who made your current order. By filing this document the attorney general attorney general can file the necessary paperwork with the court. The Judge can decide whether to modify child support.

Child Support Order Modification

A faster way to get things done is if the incarcerated individual, family member, or friend hires a private attorney to file the necessary documents with the court and to request a modification of the child support. The other parent will also have the opportunity to present their own case to the court.

To obtain modification of an existing child support order, an incarcerated parent must file the proper request with the appropriate Texas court. A Texas family law attorney help an incarcerated individuals seek to a modification of the current child support order. When these types of hearings occur, the custodial parent frequently appears to contest modification of the existing order.

It is not uncommon for a Judge to stop child while a parent is incarcerated one reason is that they do not have a job that allows them to pay child support and their situation is already bad no reason to make it worse. Normally the lack of a job is not enough to stop child support. Generally, a court will construe a person as having a job at least making minimum wage. One exception is incarnation under Section 154.068 of the Texas Family Code.

Texas Family Code 154.068. WAGE AND SALARY PRESUMPTION

Houston Divorce Lawyer: (a) In the absence of evidence of a party's resources, as defined by Section 154.062(b), the court shall presume that the party has income equal to the federal minimum wage for a 40-hour week to which the support guidelines may be applied.

(b) The presumption required by Subsection (a) does not apply if the court finds that the party is subject to an order of confinement that exceeds 90 days and is incarcerated in a local, state, or federal jail or prison at the time the court makes the determination regarding the party's income.

Part b that makes the presumption inapplicable to paying parents who are confined for over 90 days was recently passed in 2015.

How does being incarcerated affect the recipient parent?

If you are the parent who is receiving child support and are incarcerated and you do not contact the OAG, payments will continue to be sent through the payment method you selected:

Direct deposit to a bank account or debit card, or Mail to the address previously provided. The OAG will continue to send your child support payments to you unless a court order redirects them to another person. For example, the court may order that payments go to the person with physical custody of your children while you are incarcerated.

While in prison can I redirect my child support payments?

If you are the parent who is receiving child support, you may have the Texas child support payments sent to the person who is taking care of your child while you are incarcerated. You will need to:

Complete an Authorization for Release of Information and Payment Return it to the OAG Include the name of the person who is to receive the payments. to have the payments sent to another person

Incarnation is a reason to seek a Change to your Child Support Order

Under Texas Family Code Section 156.409:

(a) The court shall, on the motion of a party or a person having physical possession of the child, modify an order providing for the support of the child to provide that the person having physical possession of the child for at least six months shall have the right to receive and give receipt for payments of support for the child and to hold or disburse money for the benefit of the child if the sole managing conservator of the child or the joint managing conservator who has the exclusive right to determine the primary residence of the child has:

voluntarily relinquished the primary care and possession of the child; been incarcerated or sentenced to be incarcerated for at least 90 days; or relinquished the primary care and possession of the child in a proceeding under Title 3 or Chapter 262.

Person in Possession of Children Can also Get Unpaid Support

If the court modifies a support order under this section, the court shall order the obligor to pay the person or entity having physical possession of the child any unpaid child support that is not subject to offset or reimbursement under Section 157.008 and that accrues after the date the sole or joint managing conservator:

(1) relinquishes possession and control of the child, whether voluntarily or in a proceeding under Title 3 or Chapter 262; or

(2) is incarcerated.

(a-2) This section does not affect the ability of the court to render a temporary order for the payment of child support that is in the best interest of the child.

(a-3) An order under this section that modifies a support order because of the incarceration of the sole or joint managing conservator of a child must provide that on the conservator’s release from incarceration the conservator may file an affidavit with the court stating that the conservator has been released from incarceration, that there has not been a modification of the conservatorship of the child during the incarceration, and that the conservator has resumed physical possession of the child. A copy of the affidavit shall be delivered to the obligor and any other party, including the Title IV-D agency if appropriate. On receipt of the affidavit, the court on its own motion shall order the obligor to make support payments to the conservator.

(b) Notice of a motion for modification under this section may be served in the manner for serving a notice under Section 157.065.

Child support obligor's release from prison

Spring Divorce Lawyer: Under Section 156.401(d) of the Texas Family code "The release of a child support obligor from incarceration is a material and substantial change in circumstances for purposes of modifying child support if the obligor's child support obligation was abated, reduced or suspended during the period of the obligor's incarceration."

This means the person who should be receivingchild support could ask the court to start or reevaluatechild support if the parent who should be paying is no longer incarcerated ... Continue Reading

#divorce #Divorce Attorney #family #Family Law #attorney #attorneys #law #lawyer #lawyers #Houston #Texas

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ardentfemme · 6 years

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Beauty is Pain: A Fierce Fem’s Guide to Overcoming Misphoria

“The body has been made so problematic for women that it has often seemed easier to shrug it off and travel as a disembodied spirit.”

- Adrienne Rich, “Of Woman Born”

When I was four, I shimmied into my mom’s fuchsia pencil skirt, hitching it up around my tiny body like a strapless dress. I flounced around the house in it like a tube-topped mermaid caught in a net. Next came the heels. I teetered in them and crashed into walls with no concern for scuffs, skids, or scratches. To complete the look, I smeared my mother’s Mary Kay Midnight Primrose all over my face, indulging in a little taste or two.

I was invincible.

When I was ten, I got my period. Evolution, God, or the Devil himself had catalyzed some alchemical reaction in a body that, for the first time, seemed outside the realm of my control. Womanhood was not all fun and games, my mother explained to me. Womanhood meant buying pads with my babysitting money and crumpling up with embarrassment when the only cashiers to be seen were men. Womanhood was double-wrapping your pads before you threw them in the trash in case your father or uncle or second-removed-visiting-from-out-of-town cousin stumbled upon them and recoiled at the evidence of Eve’s grave sin.

Ten was also the year a man groped me on public transportation for the first time. That same day, I threw away my skirts and pretend makeup. To exist in my body seemed an unbearable task. To bear the weight of my mosquito-bite tits, my ever-growing thighs, my increasingly curvaceous behind, seemed impossible.

I began to realize that my body didn’t belong to me. It belonged to the old men on the street who whistled at me, to the pizza-faced teens on buses who poked and prodded me, to my young male peers who snapped my training bra at recess. My body belonged to my future husband - Oh, when you get married one day, you’ll understand. My body belonged to the children I would raise with my future husband - Oh, when you have kids one day, you’ll understand. And, I learned, men would readily access what they knew their socially-sanctioned right would afford them - my hair was for Uncle Dan to swat, my breasts were for Mr. Crawford to cup, my behind was for Principal Ulricht to pat.

Because my body belonged to men, who dictated what was and what was not attractive in women, I was taught to groom it in accordance with their needs and wants. I was taught to distance myself from my body, to alienate myself from any pleasure it might bring me. “Beauty is pain,” my mother always told me as she plucked wayward hairs from my Brooke Shields brows.

If beauty was pain, then I decided to be ugly.

At twelve, I cut off all my hair and refused to experiment with makeup and clothes like the other girls my age. Teachers commended me for taking my school work seriously and not concerning myself with all the trivialities that come with pre-teen girlhood. My parents started to express concern that I wasn’t “like the other girls.” In a sense, they were right. I was deeply connected to the little girl who played dress up in her mother’s heels and lipstick years earlier, but I felt so alienated from my own body that that complex lexicon of feminine symbology had lost its meaning for me. I had no vocabulary with which to express my own experience with gender, misogyny, and my burgeoning sexuality.

When I was a sophomore in high school, I petitioned the school board to turn the all-boys basketball team co-ed because a certain crush of mine wanted to play. When she asked, “You’re gonna be on my team, right?” I faced a conundrum. Surely, I had realized by then that I was batting for her team in a sense, but I certainly didn’t want to play sports.

By then, I was starting to reclaim the parts of me that had been stolen when I was younger. I wore frilly dresses, unabashedly experimented with makeup (and made some egregious mistakes involving neon eyeshadows), and amassed a sizeable collection of junk jewelry that I paired impeccably with exotic thrift store finds.

But when I got to college, I got sucked into the radical feminist ideology that had swept campus. By reclaiming my femininity, I was making myself complicit in my own oppression under patriarchy by appealing to the male gaze. Just as I did almost a decade before, I threw out the dresses, makeup, and even quite a few of my bras. (In retrospect, the whole bra-burning thing was pretty liberating.) I was claiming my body as mine, I thought. My body was not an object for male sexual gratification. My body was not to be commodified and repackaged to sell products. My body was not an incubator for babies to be churned out in some state-sanctioned transfer of property. My body was mine and mine alone. If it took abjuring makeup and dresses to communicate this, then I would do so.

That same year, when I was twenty, I met my first butch. She was everything I never knew I wanted - curse-slinging, beer-guzzling, knife-brandishing. Loud and seemingly unafraid of anything whenever we were in a big group. Soft and fumbling when she was alone with me. We fell into a dance that felt new and exciting, and, at the same time, ancient and sacred. It almost seems a disservice to retroactively label this dance love. It was a coming home to myself.

In her own way, she reminded me of what I discovered when I was four years old, playing in my mother’s closet: I am a powerful creative force and any way I choose to shape and mold my image is reflective of that. She instilled in me what my radfem circle had alluded to - My body belonged to me. Sharing a cigarette outside a club, her hand dipping below my skirt, she asked me, “Is this okay?” In that moment, I realized I had the ability to dictate what I would and would not allow to happen to my body. I had a voice, I discovered. And I used that voice to chant yes yes YES in that abandoned back alley. A mantra, a summoning, an outpouring of gratitude.

All those years, I had been led to believe that my body was intended for the Mr. Crawfords and Principal Ulrichts of this world. In that moment, I would gladly have relinquished ownership to her instead. She had returned my body to me after decades of struggling.

In a sense, you could say the rest is history. Except that I still have difficulty existing in this body. If I’m being honest, I still feel alienated from my physicality often. Even when I’m intimate with someone, I see myself through the male gaze, silently counting my numerous flaws - stretch marks, moles, and shouldn’t I be doing more squats? My ass is getting flabby. I should cut back on the carbs, too. Although the people I love don’t expect me to be a hairless, poreless statue of a woman, I have been policed long enough by the panopticon of patriarchy to police myself.

I still get groped on public transit. I still get eviscerated by fellow feminists for being complicit in my own oppression and by fellow lesbians alike for not being “lesbian” enough. I get called out for mimicking heteropatriarchal gender roles and for not “queering” my gender enough.

Ultimately, to be a woman is to be under constant scrutiny - whether the scrutiny comes from one’s in-group or out-group, we are positioned to be judged - and often found lacking.

After spitballing with a friend, I arrived at the word “misphoria” - a combination of “misogyny” and “dysphoria” to help explain this bodily alienation many women, specifically fem/femme lesbians, feel as a result of constantly being dissociated from our physical selves. I wanted to avoid lifting the term “dysphoria” from its original context as it relates largely to trans experiences with gender. I hoped misphoria as a concept could broaden the conversation without appropriating terminology.

Due to what I’m referring to as “misphoria,” my relationship with my body has been fraught throughout my entire life. I was conditioned to believe that I had little to no agency over my body, my desire, or my goals. My first butch used her own body to guide me into an understanding that every inch is mine.

Similarly, my relationship to womanhood and to my feminine presentation is my own. If I wear lipstick, it is an homage to my mother, who taught me that being a woman means strength. If I make the conscious decision to put on a skirt it is to honor that young girl who didn’t feel safe from the prying hands of men on city buses. And if I wear lace and frilly undergarments, it is for you, all the butches who have taught and re-taught me that my body is mine alone.

In a sense, this is a love letter. This is a love letter to the butch who valiantly carried my makeup bag up 1,400 ft on a camping trip because I wanted to look cute in the photos. To the butch who just laughed when I said I hadn’t like, you know, shaved down there today. To every butch who has ever opened the door for me or carried a package for me, knowing full well I was just as capable. Each act has helped ameliorate my misphoria by making me feel safe and welcome in my body and in my gender.

As we work toward reclaiming our space, our bodies, and our minds, I am honored to stand beside you.

#butchxfem #femme tag #fem tag #femme identity #misphoria #writing

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thecoroutfitters · 7 years

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Lately so many people are getting so fed up with pervasive totalitarian spying on literally everything we say and do, that they’re wondering whatever happened to the American Dream?

Add in out of control greed municipal intrusions with building code tyranny for exorbitant property tax profits, not to mention a noticeable increase in strangely nosy parasitic neighbors, all combined in a world starting to crumble under the weight of its own violent insanity.

Truth be told, is it even remotely possible anymore to enjoy the wonderful freedom of personal privacy, the peaceful solace that this great land, and our precious Constitution, once held for us?

Let’s take a closer look at the cold, hard reality.

It’s not what you think…

Where Did All the Freedom Go?

“We tried so hard, and came so far, but in the end it never really mattered….”

The sadness of this discussion is that we should not even be having it in a truly Free country. The first important revelation here is that “We, the People” screwed up big time in the last generation with our mass passive acquiescence to the government nanny state.

We allowed Them to brainwash us into relinquishing our rights of self-determination to a point where they now control every facet of our lives in exchange for a specious promise (not even in writing!) to take care of us, and make us all little happy faced cherubs, bouncing blissfully on big daddy government woo woo’s cushy knee from cradle to grave.

Then they threw us a few bare bones in the dirt and we licked them up like the obedient State sponsored lap dogs we became.

The history is clear, but our own innate weaknesses ultimately caused our own libertarian demise because the mouse never resists the free cheese on the mouse trap. I don’t know if we even deserve liberty salvation anymore, or whether we can ever get it back…but that’s another depressing topic.

In any case, here’s what’s left of the whole idea of the off grid under the radar privacy situation today:

“You can run, but you cannot hide!”

First, I hope everybody realizes, or at least most Liberty minded Patriots, that if you want absolute, complete privacy from any kind of government or private sector intrusion, it simply doesn’t exist anymore. Nada, Zippo, Zero, No Mas! And all of YOU, my beloved, let them get away with it!

This is because the so-called ‘Grid’ is now everywhere. The Grid is now life itself! Therefore it stands to reason, if one desires to indulge in the solace of private seclusion, one must first escape the dreaded Grid itself? Unfortunately, there isn’t anywhere to go… where the grid ain’t.

The last nail in the coffin of human privacy, ironically, which replaced the Patriot Act, was the American Freedom Act, which allows the FISA courts and the government dark state agencies to casually violate our 4th/A protections.

Toss in ubiquitous surveillance/location/tracking technology (also 4th/A violating in usage) so advanced that I’d need several more pages to even begin describing them here. Think of it like this, all despotic power elite totalitarian regimes need the same control as farmers have over their cattle.

They need to know where they are and what they are doing at all times. The more Big Brother/Minority Reporting the government becomes, the more of a slave you wind up being.

So before we go any further, realize and accept the following as FACT. If a government agency or one of its oxymoronic private contractors wants to find you, They Will.

Unless you just go somewhere so remote and deep in the jungles or mountains. and disappear yourself, one way or the other, permanently, which is really an optimal below radar off grid style of living, even if they don’t get you physically, as in someone like Assange or Snowden (who traded their freedom to travel for a prison sentence by escaping to sanctuary in other countries), they will be tracking every move you make, every day of your life, and then some.

Even Jason Bourne, today, couldn’t evade them or disappear for very long. Not with the latest biometric facial recognition and location tracking techniques. Not with the specially trained seek and capture teams assisted by inhuman god-like AI computers with seemingly mystical sources of information and telepathic powers! And just by being alive, we all generate some type of electronic trackable footprint.

Ironically, the only real effective way to disappear off grid is to let the government do it for you. Just like they recently did with the September 17th illegal street arrest and due process killing disappearance’ of attorney and activist dissident, Andy Ostrowski.

Oh, you thought they did that only in Russia! The true history is that The American Dark State INVENTED it along with the formation of the CIA and the Soviet Union merely copied it. Apparently, you’ve never heard of the infamous Homan Ave police detention center in Chicago? Where it was impossible for your lawyer to find you after you were arrested?

Instead of just arranging for you to be an “unfortunate victim” of an armed robber and shot dead like Hilary’s campaign staffer Seth Rich, who some say knew way too much about something that could kill her campaign (still not solved). Or a suspicious suicide like Vince Foster, remember that one related to Shady Clinton business dealings? (still not solved).

But if you’re merely a vocal dissident with a growing political following, there are less violent tricks of the trade totalitarian authorities use such as simply remove you by arranging for you to be “picked up for your own safety” (same way they’ll eventually get all our guns) as well as the public’s safety, because you are obviously mentally ill if you talk too much toward the government to where it might incite people to vote.

This is Why Conventional Preparedness Wisdom is Deadly!

There was some recent law maker talk about anti-gov speech being made into some kind of prohibited law!

Then you will be lost in the matrix of bureaucratic red tape, never to be found, until they feel like letting you go after their government psychiatrist prescribed sedative drugs they treated you with left your brain with little desire to activate over any cause ever again.

And you still wonder why so many people have “visions of bushcraft homesteading dancing” in their heads?

Currently our so-called free society here does have some current and growing levels of below radar existence if you consider living like an illegal immigrant or a sleeper cell ISIS group or something like that. You could say these are pretty far off grid, but it would not be in a good way.

They cannot step out of their social status into what authorities call “going deep dark” or “lone wolf”, which is a misrepresented term. Just to maintain such a meager sustenance these types of people need others to depend on and things like fake I.D.s and unreliable associates. Once they do, they’re on radar again, and the authorities will be hot on their trail.

But can’t I just opt out of society and live my own life the way I want? I’m not a criminal fugitive or anything, I just want to be left alone and live as quietly and privately as possible.

Isn’t there a way just to be law abiding, but minding my own business and avoid contact with anybody and not be a constant victim of their agenda based for-profit rip-off abuse on my personal life and money, without getting into all that radical stuff???

It Depends

One of the advantages in a capitalistic society is that money goes a long way towards fixing personal problems in any venue and any scenario. The wealthier you are, the easier it is to disappear and virtually never be bugged by anyone including the government (as long as you pay your taxes).

On a bare bones budget level it’s more difficult but it can be done. But probably the first thing you would need to do, is realize that you would have to change your lifestyle, and especially your location.

And for some it might be fairly dramatic and emotionally troublesome. But for most, just the sheer inconvenience and work outside of your normal life ritual would be too much of sticker shock of a life transition and an automatic deterrent.

Still, some people have valid reasons to go below radar off grid and often no longer have any choice but would even welcome an escape from the typical 8 to 5 lifestyle with a heavily mortgaged three bedroom two car garage home with 2.5 kids, and 1.5 pets.

But hurdles would still exist. Mostly economic. And because of the sub-culture of literally one third of the workforce adults barely existing hand to mouth from pay check to pay check, it is no longer considered a “such a shame” to reconsider a major life change. In any case this requires very pensive rumination.

Because you need to understand what off-grid really means.

But let’s say you simply can’t stand it anymore! You want to cut the twisted umbilical cord to the nanny state womb, and you made up your mind that you seriously want to give it a shot anyway.

What Should We Do?

Okay, here’s the main tricks, tips, and flips.

1. Get Off the Radar Screens

If the government or anybody is NOT LOOKING for you, you won’t be found! Remember, they CAN find anybody if they really want to, but they are not actively looking for everybody.

So don’t let them target you. Don’t buy form 4,473 guns every week. Buy them privately and pay cash. Don’t do anything that will make them come after you and you’re pretty safe from scrutiny.

It’s a shame we have to be so “defensive” like this but we made our own beds and now have to sleep in them. I still wax fondly reminiscent of the days when They knew they had NO business violating our private lives. Now it’s BIG Business.

However, if you think you’re going off the grid and below radar so that you can skip your student loan debt, IRS tax liens, child support payment, etc. then forget about it. All this kind of stuff comes back to your driver’s license, especially the new National I.D Card ones we all MUST have now, by unconstitutional illegal law.

Unless you are hiding primitively up in the mountains like some weird Sasquatch eating grubs, roots, and berries all day and only peddling your bike down the trail every few months for emergency supplies, sooner or later you’ll be rudely dragged back in the grid from that remote mountain paradise, when some bored sheriff’s deputy with nothing better to do than check on strangers takes a second glance at you.

2. Become Untrackable

This is probably going to be the hardest thing to do to consider yourself really off the grid. And it’s a lengthy process to untangle yourself from a spider web Grid.

Everybody knows that being on Facebook or Twitter or everything else is directly reporting your life’s activities and thoughts to the big “cloud” in the sky where the big all-seeing NSA, CIA ‘EYE’ lives. To really become off grid and under the radar you must unplug yourself from the mainstream computer.

Remember, there are specialty resources for this. One really doesn’t need to get this deep into it. If you just want to homestead and self-sustain somewhere private and get off the conventional power grid, you don’t have to get so primitive that you don’t even have a computer.

But it’s not a bad idea to read one of those “how to disappear” books on Amazon to get an idea how thoroughly you are connected to society.

3. Find the Right Off Grid Location

This will likely be the biggest challenge. The problem is that municipalities are often ugly little siblings of Big Brother.

I seems like they stay up late at night trying to figure out new ordinances and ways to tax or fine you into compliance in everything from size and type of housing you MUST have, to what you can do in terms of growing or hunting or recreating on your own private land.

And it gets worse if your land is close to wetlands or has a pond or stream through it. The Feds are usually in on that tyranny as well. This is because county municipalities are going broke due to excessive patronage jobs provided by the town officials to their feckless friends, and recalcitrant relatives who otherwise would fall to the laws of natural selection by themselves.

So many do not allow full time living on your own property in a nice modern travel trailer, for instance! And restrict you to minimum square footage requirements on new built construction so you pay more in property taxes.

And many will allow you—if you file special paperwork/permits and pay an inspector–to have a solar or other off grid power system, but you STILL must be connected to the conventional power line grid besides! Obviously because there’s a monthly base charge whether you use their electricity or not as long as you’re connected.

So this is an important first step. You must determine an off-grid friendly location in which to purchase your own piece of land. These are out there.

The problem is they’re not advertised as such and you have to search them out and find out the local codes. And most of the time they’ll be pretty remote. Deep in the Yukon you can probably find some land at a good price where there’s probably no building codes. Also up in the Canadian Wilderness.

And they say you can find heavenly peace and solitude “Down in the Bayou” Country where the climate might be more hospitable if you don’t mind snakes and alligators and who knows what else?

So make up your mind only after you decide exactly what the extent of your off grid life actually will mean to you, and how much privacy you can afford.

If you are on a fixed retirement income, then that will be your determining cost factor. If you are still stuck in a job that’s location locked then the next best thing is to start prepping for your retirement off grid location.

Or do like some people I know who found themselves a suitable location away from where they must live now, bought at least the land and will begin the steady set up of their off grid retreat as an ongoing project for a future transition.

4. Get a Trust or LLC as an Alt Identity

It’s too complicated to explain here why this is a very good idea for privacy and off-grid security. If you pay cash for your retreat location and have ownership in a Trust or registered in a business, this is the best way to go. Especially if you are into unplugging yourself as much as possible from the New World Order. Even your vehicles can be owned by the Trust or LLC or Nevada type corp. And nobody can just ‘check’ on your property anytime they want to see who owns it.

5. Last but NOT the Least…

…stop dreaming about it and get proactive!

If you’re one of those liberty minded free choice loving hold outs who can’t stand all this government overbearing authority, and truly don’t want to lose every last single bit of privacy (even smart toilets are coming), it would be best to start working on your emancipation from the grid ASAP.

Once a few final straws whack the collective Camel’s back, like the imminent elimination of cash (and illegalization and prohibition of using gold as alt currency) in favor of an all digital daily commerce system, it will become more and more difficult to get comfortably off grid and below radar if you haven’t already done so.

As this is being written the UK has the world’s first food store where customers use their palm finger vein scans as a credit card and facial recognition scans as identification. China is expanding fast on this.

In the U.S. distance radar scanners with biometric facial recognition (linked from your National I.D. card drivers license holographic photo) are being installed to instantly search and identify anyone just walking around an airport or train terminal.

So if you’re going to go off grid and below radar, better get started NOW!

This article has been written by Mahatma Muhjesbude for Survivopedia.

References:

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/19/homan-square-chicago-police-disappeared-thousands

telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/09/20/british-supermarket-offers-payment-fingerprint-worldwide-first/

from Survivopedia Don't forget to visit the store and pick up some gear at The COR Outfitters. How prepared are you for emergencies? #SurvivalFirestarter #SurvivalBugOutBackpack #PrepperSurvivalPack #SHTFGear #SHTFBag

#SHTF #TEOTWAWKI #MARTIALLAW #BUGOUT #PREPPERBAG #USAF #USSOCOM #ARMY #NAVY #SurvivalFirestarter #Sur

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drunkdragondoes · 7 years

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Summoner AU - Petals and Boots

It’s also on ff.net and AO3, though under a different fic of their own. AO3 and FF.net.

Freedom was comprised of two facets for Weiss - authority and power. Authority was the ability to enforce, to give orders and direct others. Power was the proactive choice to do something. Living in the Schnee Manor had given her an early example of both cases at work, and for all that happened under the roof, she wanted to believe that she had freedom. With a few choice words, a five-star meal could be prepared on a whim. Servants would fetch her almost anything under the sun that lien could buy.

Yet while she held this over others, Weiss felt like she had no agency in regards to herself. There were certain things she had to conform to. Her father dictated her every waking hour, from the moment she left the breakfast table to the moment she entered her room for the night. Singing lessons. Etiquette and business.

Failure to participate and meet her father’s expectations were, as he described, unfortunate. Perhaps it was driven out of survival or need, but Weiss did her best to perform to her father’s goals. And as she grew older and the days passed by, she found herself watching and waiting for the moment where she could break free.

So when she was given the opportunity to train and become a huntress, she eagerly followed after her sister’s footsteps. The look of surprise on her counselor’s face when she came in and asked about how to become a huntress was not a look she would forget anytime soon.

But bringing that home to her father was something else, and she realized that he didn’t let Winter become a huntress because she wanted to. Instead, he let Winter be a huntress because it benefited him - her skills were better off in that area, and her face and name in the field was more valuable than her actual enjoyment of it.

Weiss becoming a huntress didn’t benefit him. It was the first time she had ever fought for something directly with her father. Years of watching and carefully avoiding his words had left her with trepidation, never fully secure in him. There was a lack of trust from both sides, and some said the fighting lasted about a week, Weiss stubbornly refusing to back down.

But each time their argument ended, Weiss always found herself sequestered in her room, heart pounding in her chest. Adrenaline coursed through her veins as she knew just how terrified she was of him. Sometimes she needed to work out the energy in her veins and she paced her wide room, trying to breathe and slow herself down. But other times it was too much, and she buried her face in her pillow, unsure if she was crying from relief or from the unfortunate words she heard or nearly avoided.

And then one morning she was at the breakfast table and realized that her father, instead of dictating her schedule to her, had simply left a syllabus on her scroll. And at the very bottom of the list, were two words - hunter training. Weiss had never finished breakfast so tquickly.

The first day was just the introductory course - to explain what was expected, to their roles in society, and how the danger was far more real than what the movies and stories say. Everyone knew who she was and some gave her more than just an odd stare. But she wasn’t scared of them and pushed back - they were all smaller than her father after all, and no one was going to take this victory away from her.

And while some walked away from the class, she drank it in. She learned that the style a hunter fought with was determined by body size, weapon choice, and abilities, but it was ultimately within the hunter’s power to decide what was best. Hunters also had authority in certain cases, such as directing civilians in the lack of other figures like the police or military.

It was freedom, and no matter how much she sweat or had to sacrifice in the name of discipline, (creme brulee, her one weakness!) it was a way out of the Schnee Manor to pursue her own choice, and she relished every moment she had.

But as training went on and she excelled in her classes and she grew older, a strange dread crept into her heart. Winter had finally gained her summon, and something her father had said put her in a state of quiet panic.

“Death sounds like it is a powerful entity. I wonder what you’ll be able to do with it in the end.”

She recognized this line. She had heard it in many instances when she was younger and it fueled her at the time. But knowing now that her father was interested in using Winter’s summon, fear coursed through her heart again. Taking out her scroll, she saw that she would be seventeen and a half in three weeks.

Every Schnee that ever had a summon gained it when the were seventeen and a half. The only exception was Winter.

And so for three weeks Weiss feared and yet dared to dream at the same time. She had hoped that pursuing the career of a huntress would be her way to escape the manor. But a voice in the back of her mind wondered that, just maybe, this was all something her father let happen. Was he still in control, valuing her image more than her ‘disobedience’ to him at this time? Was this truly escaping her confines?

But there was also the excitement in her heart. Even if her father found a way to leash her, he couldn’t keep an eye on everything. Perhaps her summon would be so diminutive at first glance that he would overlook it. Or perhaps it would be so powerful that it would punch a hole in the manor and she could flee, like a princess freed by a knight.

Weiss feared and yet wanted the power and authority that having a summon commanded. She would be on the final steps to being a fully-fledged huntress, and her father would have to relinquish his hold upon her. She wanted the authority to wield and direct for something beyond just a goal of financial wealth. She wanted the power to make change and become her own person.

Freedom.

That was the last word in her mind when she stood at the center of the summoning hall, Myrtenaster drawn and pointed at the center. Her eyes were closed, concentrating, breathing deep, trying to remain as calm as she possibly could.

It was finally happening, she reminded herself. Several years of training both her physical body and mastering her glyphs, and now she was at the cusp at being a true huntress. And then she would be called upon to take on missions, to fight, to save, and to explore the world outside of the Schnee Manor. It was everything she had hoped for.

And yet she hesitated. The draw was there, pulling at her heart, but she didn’t answer it just yet. The four walls of the manor were all she knew. She had lived in this castle all her life, following the directions of her father to the letter. And though she had field training, things would be different. What she had taken for granted wouldn’t be available. And ultimately she would be in an area that she was unfamiliar with. And communicating with others had always been… terse. Outside of office talk and the chats with her sister, her word choice was, at best, prickly.

And there was her father. There was always her father.

But she scrunched her eyes shut and took another breath. Weiss needed this. She bit back her thoughts, her concerns, her fears. She would adapt. She would learn.

After all, freedom was worth it.

She opened her eyes, and light began to gather in front of her.

Whoosh

Staring deep into the light, swirling behind its varying hues, refusing to turn away, she hoped her summon would be great. She hoped it would be strong, that it could tear down walls, reach past barriers. She hoped it would be a guide, for both herself and for those who might follow her through the now-open world.

When the lights faded, and the hall was once again still, a man or teenager, perhaps not much older than she was, stood before her. His body stretched tall, hands shoved into his pockets, clothes made of blacks and grays.He looked no different than a hunter, but Weiss could feel something different about him. What stood out the most were his boots. Made of steel and perhaps something beyond the makings of man, they carried a strange weight to their look, as if his feet could puncture the thickest of hides.

But the most intriguing part were the wings sprouting from the top of its sides.

When his gray eyes looked into hers, she licked her lips once, tried to speak, then tried to speak again.

“What is your name?”

“Mercury.”

A god, or at least the essence of one, stood before her.

But before she could say more, a higher-pitched voice came from behind Weiss, freezing her in her tracks.

“Umm, e-excuse me!”

Her head whipped around and she felt her jaw drop. In front of her was a young girl, dressed in a matching black faux corset and skirt with a trailing red cape tied sewn to the shoulders. In her arms was a scythe longer than she was tall, with gears and machinations and contraptions, meant for transforming into who-knew-what. As the girl traced her eyes around the room, taking in the fact that every Schnee was staring at her, seas of white hair and curious eyes looking her way, she began to shrink a little.

“Sorry, umm…”

One hand released her scythe, letting it collapse and tucking it behind her. Then with both hands she began to play with the hem of her skirt, clearly nervous. With any luck the girl probably hoped that she would shrink and disappear into nothing.

What was this girl even doing here? “Who are you?” Weiss nearly snapped, and the girl became even smaller.

“I’m… I’m Ruby Rose… How, uh… How did I get here?”

“How?” Weiss felt her eyebrow shoot up. “Clearly you snuck in during my summoning rite.”

“B-But the last thing I remember was-” a hand went to her head, scratching through her hair and trailing down just the top of her neck a little. “I mean, there were Dominus-class Grimm around me, and they, one of them-” her face suddenly paled. Her hands flew to her chest and stomach, patting herself down and grasping for something that wasn't there.

Placing Myrtenaster away, she stormed up to the girl and was rearing to bite her head off, but a hand clapped onto her shoulder. Turning, she saw that it was Mercury who had caught up with her.

“Easy, now, Weiss. Ruby’s here with me.”

“... What?”

Did…

Did she just summon a girl? A girl who had gone missing three weeks ago?

A/N: Welcome to my OT3 trash. I ship White Rose, but I think I ship Weiss x Mercury harder. As for tie-ins and whatnot, this is sort of a side story that occurs at or around the same time as Winter's story in this AU. It didn't really belong in it, though, so I thought it was best to load it as a separate fic in this series. This is also especially driven by how Weiss might get her own story for now.

Also, before you bite my head off, given how I've written Weiss, Mercury (and even Ruby) DO thematically match her. I did my research (kinda? kinda).

#rwby #summoner au #ruby rose #weiss schnee #mercury black #White rose #whiterose #OT3 #this is my trash #might become its own story instead of a oneshot #cold feet

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biofunmy · 5 years

Text

‘Fairview’: Watching a Play in Black and White

Though it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and shocked audiences who saw it at two Off Broadway theaters over the course of a year, Jackie Sibblies Drury’s “Fairview” was hard to talk about. Any discussion of its aims and effects had to be blanketed in spoiler alerts.

As the play closes in New York — the last performance is on Aug. 11 at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn — and gets set to play in London at the Old Vic theater and most likely beyond, a conversation about its exploration of black life and the white gaze can take place in earnest.

“Fairview” concerns a “regular” middle-class black family seen in increasingly surreal ways. First they seem to be part of a sitcom, then the object of commentary by unseen white voices. Finally Ms. Drury has the teenage daughter of the family, Keisha, step out of the story to ask white audience members to switch places with the black cast onstage.

“Could I tell them that those seats are not theirs, even though they paid for them?” Keisha wonders aloud. “That no one can own a seat forever? That no one should?”

So: Spoiler spoiled. But it turns out that the play still poses a problem — or an opportunity. In a cultural medium whose producers, audiences and critics are still predominantly white, “Fairview” challenges playgoers to think about how the different backgrounds and assumptions they bring to the theater may produce vastly different results once inside.

With so many black playwrights writing so passionately about these questions right now, the “Fairview” challenge was too important to pass up. Salamishah Tillet, a professor of African-American studies and creative writing at Rutgers University-Newark and a frequent contributor to The New York Times, and Jesse Green, the co-chief theater critic for The Times, sat down for a conversation.

JESSE GREEN Let’s start with our experiences at the end of “Fairview”: mine as a self-identified white man —

SALAMISHAH TILLET And mine as a self-proclaimed black woman. I guess we have to talk about the ending.

GREEN How did it go down for you in the audience?

TILLET Once Keisha invited the white audience members to come onstage, I was shocked and I wondered “Why are they going up there?” I assume that the play thought it was creating a safe space for the people of color who remained in the audience.

GREEN My audience seemed to be about 90 percent white.

TILLET Mine as well.

GREEN I was originally afraid to go onstage because I just don’t feel comfortable with audience participation and theater that picks me out to dance or do things. But that’s not what happened. Once onstage, we were left to our own devices, ignored. And the lights were so bright on us that I couldn’t see what was going on in the audience. Nor could I hear Keisha very well as she spoke to those who remained seated. That’s when I realized that far from being picked out as an individual, I was being treated as part of a group. A white group. Ah, I thought: Not everything is about us. I realized that was the point.

TILLET That’s so interesting. I didn’t feel like I actually stayed with watching the white people onstage for that long. Of course, their procession to the stage was quite a spectacle. But I thought the gaze quickly turned back on me as a black person, and the white audience was suddenly listening to this one-sided conversation between a black actress and the people of color in the audience. I actually felt like I was a “prop” who suddenly had to perform racial solidarity in that moment and was under more scrutiny in the end that I was in the beginning.

GREEN It sounds like you had the experience of still being the subject of white gaze, whereas I and maybe the other white folks onstage had the experience of being completely left out of the proceedings. Was there something on your side of the proscenium that you could have gotten from the play without that device?

TILLET I thought the second act when the black actors were onstage while the white actors were offstage doing voice overs and played the game, “If you could choose to be any race, what race would you be?” was really illuminating. I’ve never played that game, but noticed a lot of the people around me stopped laughing, got really quiet, and saw themselves in that conversation. But, I was really moved by then the scene right before the ending and when the fourth wall was finally broken. It was a stunning representation of the violent schizophrenia of American racism. If the play ended with that lack of closure, it would have been jarring but it offered no absolution, no purging of white guilt.

GREEN What’s the word you used? Absolution? To the white audience by giving them a little chore to do?

TILLET Yes.

GREEN I didn’t feel absolved of anything and I can’t speak for others but I definitely felt that I ought to do what this black playwright wanted me to do. Because, God knows, white people have been telling black people what to do for so long, especially in the theater. And what’s the harm to me, really? It pushed me outside of my comfort zone but I trusted that she had something she wanted to show me, as a white person, that was worth seeing. But that’s where the hard question comes in. Who is the play really for? Would “Fairview” even work if 90 percent of the audience were of color?

TILLET In an interview with Vogue, Ms. Drury said, “This play couldn’t happen for an audience that was entirely people of color.” So, it would not work with if the audience’s racial demographics were reversed. I saw “Fairview” while the House hearings on reparations were going on. In that context, I thought the play did a good job of spotlighting the white gaze, but it was less effective in decentering white privilege. White people were put under the microscope for a few minutes, but how did that help them actually relinquish their power when they leave the theater?

GREEN I’m really interested in your question about absolution because although I doubt black playwrights at the vanguard of this wave of great new plays are very interested in granting absolution to anybody, there’s a big difference between what they write and what audiences do with what they write. I’m sure some white people can see “Fairview” and feel no shame or guilt. Not me. Racism has been part of theater, part of entertainment history for a shockingly long time. I mean we still had blackface Othellos quite recently. Was I personally involved in those decisions? No. But I think if you’re a sensitive person you feel guilt by association. Or at least the need to acknowledge that bad things have been done in ways you may have profited from. I feel that way about lots of issues, not just racism. But racism especially.

Of course, hearing myself say all that, I worry about the desire to “virtue signal,” to say “Oh look, I’ve done something good because I went to this play and was momentarily uncomfortable.” Or, as a critic, to say I’ve done something good because I’ve written a positive review. Perhaps that’s unavoidable, but if I respond so strongly to “Fairview” or, to name another, “Slave Play,” I think it’s because my taste and my self-image come together when confronted by a powerful playwright who wants to push me around. I feel that way about Shakespeare, too. Or Suzan-Lori Parks. So absolution, yes, I can’t get around it; these plays may soothe liberal guilt, even while engaging it. But is that so different from what all theater does when it engages and gives expression to emotions and leaves you lighter from that encounter?

TILLET Yes, that’s Aristotle’s “catharsis” thesis in “Poetics.” But, I also think we should remember the earlier black plays that marked whiteness but to different ends. Set in a New York City subway in 1964, Amiri Baraka’s “The Dutchman” is all about the Manichaean struggle between the black male character, Clay, and the white female character Lula. The moment Clay asserts his agency and tries to exit their racial melodrama, Lula delivers a fatal blow, only to restart her homicidal cycle with another unsuspecting black man. James Baldwin once had separate entrances for black and white audiences for his 1964 play inspired by Emmett Till’s murder, “Blues for Mister Charlie.” And Douglas Turner Ward’s “The Day of Absence” from 1965 is about the day when all the black people suddenly disappear from their Jim Crow Southern town. The white people do not know how to function, take care of their children, govern each other or simply exist. It’s a play about whiteness cast with all black actors. Since “Fairview” actually had white actors play white people who were pretending to be black, I found it noteworthy that new plays, like “A Strange Loop” by Michael R. Jackson and “Toni Stone” by Lydia R. Diamond do that too: critique the white gaze but cast only black actors.

GREEN What I felt was going on in those two plays you mention is that the playwrights, using the techniques of the theater, were giving power back to black people that racism had stolen. They could own the experience and then drop it; they were in charge. I found that powerful.

TILLET They beg the question: Can you really show the trauma of racism when you have a black actor play the racist white character? I think you can. There’s a scene in “A Strange Loop” when Usher, the main character, goes uptown to engage in a consensual sexual relationship with a white man that is based on racial dominance. It was heart wrenching and spectacular at once.

GREEN One thing these plays are teaching me is that our experiences, even if they are relatable, are not symmetrical. The black gaze on white people means something different than the white gaze on black people. And I suppose what I feel in moments like the one you describe is that I don’t really need more information from white playwrights about what they imagine black life to be. But I am happy to see what black playwrights think white life is.

TILLET I’m most compelled by plays that have both a interracial and intraracial critique or others that do not care about the white gaze but rather how black people see each other. Plays like “A Strange Loop,” “Toni Stone,” Tarell Alvin McCraney’s “Choir Boy” and even the recent revival of Lynn Nottage’s “By the Way, Meet Vera Stark” all show black people’s inner lives to varying degrees. When I saw Donja Love’s “Sugar in Our Wounds” last year, I was amazed. I had never seen a coming-of-age story set in slavery about black queer men before.

GREEN In that play Mr. Love wrote as if everybody either knew what the black characters were talking about, or if they didn’t know they were on their own. White plays have done that forever.

TILLET It is also a way decentering the white gaze without reifying the white audience. That’s just a different strategy.

GREEN It’s fine to say: That was not written for me. It wasn’t written against me either. That’s a quality I like in a play, whatever it’s about. I want it to be more interested in itself than it is in me. Another good example is Aziza Barnes’s “BLKS,” about three black women roommates in their twenties in Brooklyn who go out for a night on the town. There’s racism implied in it, but it’s mostly offstage, and these women have other things (often sex) on their minds. And why shouldn’t they? It’s as if the playwright is saying, if you’re not interested in these women’s lives as they experience them, then I have nothing for you. It is indifferent to the white gaze. Honestly, it’s a relief.

TILLET If you decenter the white gaze, what different dynamic stories will we see? Toni Morrison has said, “I have spent my entire writing life trying to make sure that the white gaze was not the dominant one in any of my books.” I thought of that with “Toni Stone,” about the first woman to play in professional baseball, in the Negro Leagues. It was trying to deal with the white gaze in theater and 1950s baseball. But, it was also about sexism she was dealing with at home and on her team; racism was not the only oppressive force in her life.

GREEN I loved that the top note in “Toni Stone” was the character’s own passion — as an individual, not as a representative of her race or gender. So I was surprised to read that others, including black critics, criticized it for privileging the white audience over the black one. So let me just ask you, can white critics helpfully write about these plays?

TILLET Yes, of course you can write about and review these plays sensitively. But, the bigger question is why there are so few black theater critics in mainstream publications that have the power to make or break a show’s run or black playwright’s career?

GREEN I have my theories, if no evidence. But here’s another example of why it’s important. The most scathing review of Suzan-Lori Parks’s “White Noise,” which was about a contemporary black man who agrees to become his white best friend’s slave, came from a prominent black critic, Hilton Als of The New Yorker. He wrote that the play “hadn’t been written from within blackness.” Even if I agreed, I could never say such a thing — nor, I submit, ever know it. It speaks to the necessity of having other voices. But I’m really asking a different question since I’m not actually going to quit my job. What I’m really asking is: Can a white critic even “see” these plays properly?

TILLET Why would you not be able to see it? You’re pulling from your different experiences and different histories. But you also might miss a lot of things, too, which could affect your read and, of course, your review. Like in “A Strange Loop,” Jackson satirizes sacrosanct cultural icons like Zora Neale Hurston and Whitney Houston, black-cast Broadway hits like “The Lion King” and “The Color Purple,” and Tyler Perry’s urban theater. All of these, especially Perry’s “circuit” plays have provoked contentious debates among black people about access, representation, caricature, which are all big parts of the metalanguage of Mr. Jackson’s play. But my main concern is that the critical voices of white writers are considered more important than those of people of color. That simply does not make sense. In this groundbreaking moment in black art and culture, it is cultural malpractice to have so few critics of color weighing in with their interpretations and insights.

GREEN What I’m really learning most from our conversation is the way in which thinking a lot about the white gaze can also be a distorting element within the plays. Which raises a more fundamental question: In making a play whose subject is the white gaze, are you turning the power of the play back to the very people you’re trying to get it away from?

TILLET I know white people who went to “Fairview” and felt like they were being held accountable but also did not realize how much they remained at its center of attention. It is true, however, that I didn’t feel disempowered when I left “Fairview.” A group of us black people found our way to each other and stayed afterward to talk about what we experienced. The only other group near us was the mainly black cast members. So, in the end, who actually felt comfortable? Who felt like they owned that space? In that sense Drury achieved her goal. I actually felt comfortable talking about what I just saw while a lot of the white audience members seemed to be rushing home to process what just happened in the privacy of their homes and not under the hot stage lights.

Sahred From Source link Arts

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lexiseigneur · 5 years

Text

Chapter fourteen: The last Sun Hunter

Ao3

It was reassuring finally knowing how she was going to die. Speculating constantly on the subject for the past year had been a burden. And part of her since the day she had met Joshua had been convinced that living in the bunker was just delaying the inevitable. One way or another, she would perish as a consequence of the Strigoi plague. How ironic that her own actions would precipitate that event.

Quinlan’s memory replayed over and over again. An old woman with compassionate eyes had explained to him how his essence was connected to his progenitor’s. Her name had been Ancharia. Lexi had also gleaned Quinlan’s affection and guilt. She had no intention of asking more about that woman at this very moment. It had been difficult enough to convince her companion to leave that basement. For the first time since she had met him atop that hill, the Dhampir appeared defeated. And Lexi was acutely aware that this was her fault. However, as much as she wished she could alleviate his suffering, she did not regret what she had done. Together, they would end the nightmare and their reward for this coming sacrifice was their time in the Bond.

Strigoi roamed the streets of the city. Having stayed put the entire night had been a shortsighted decision. The heaviness of Quinlan’s thoughts seeped into her mind. There was little she could do as sharing joyful memories required focus. That concentration she needed to dedicate to their course through the infested town. The creatures were relentlessly looking for the Born and had spread in the suburbs. Sprinting from shadow to shadow, the couple crossed Santa Fe and entered the parking lot where the SUV was hidden. It stood anonymous amongst a quantity of other abandoned vehicles. Lexi and Quinlan had consumed her last reserve of blood before leaving the house. Both were getting thirsty. As soon as they drove away, they shared another ration. In Quinlan’s cooler, a single pack remained.

“I burglarized a donation center a week ago but my provisions did not last long.” Quinlan informed her.

“We will have to do that again.”

“Indeed, but there are more pressing matters. The sun will soon come. So far south, it would be judicious to seek shelter.”

Telephone poles cast short shadows beside the road. Around them, arid planes spread toward the rocky hills in the distance. Even with her hood, her glasses and the cover of the vehicle, she grew uncomfortable. How she hated that sun now.

“There are buildings ahead.” Lexi noticed.

Quinlan nodded and accelerated. A forlorn gas station stood amongst a few modest houses. This had not been anyone’s home at least. One of the buildings had once been a seedy looking bar. They hid the SUV behind it. No need to attract the attention of any passing vehicle, however rare they might be. On the back seat, under the near-empty cooler, were half a dozen books. All had flowing lava or exploding mountains on their covers. Lexi did not want to look at them so she gathered the volumes and shoved them into the metal trunk. Then they took the precious devices and entered the bar through its back door. The small space was filled with round tables and at the back, a vast counter spread across the length of the room. They deposited their cargo on the dusty wood of the bar.

“If there is still any fuel here, we might be able to drive straight back to the bunker.” Said Quinlan. He dripped a few drops from their last bag to the brains in the jamming devices. Worms plucked hungrily at the red blooms.

“About that…”

She shared the memories of Laura and Emma but not of the two men. Quinlan turned slowly to her, bewildered.

“You did what?”

“I’ve helped people who needed shelter more than I did.”

“You’ve compromised our base of operations.”

“Quinlan, when you left I doubt you planned on coming back. You relinquished your claim on that place.”

His brow was suddenly crossed with deep lines.

“Did you not plan on going back yourself?”

“I wished it but I knew it was unlikely. I thought you might have found the Master by now.”

Quinlan grunted as that remark. Then he shook his head in confusion.

“Did you not plan on going back after defeating him?”

Lexi did not reply. Even with her Dhampir strength, she had been convinced that the Master would kill her. Ever since she had seen those red eyes fixated on her, it has seemed immutable. Quinlan scrutinized her expression.

“You knew nothing of my plan or of our deadly connection to him, but still, you did not expect to survive this?”

“No, I guess I did not. Not truly.”

The muscles of his jaw jutted out.

“Why are you so willing to die?” There was anger in that thought.

“I am not willing. I accept that possibility because I do not see the point in rebelling against it. I am tired of being scared.”

He shook his head and turned away from her.

“This is my fault. I should not have involved you in that war.”

Lexi sighed and put a hand on his shoulder.

“I had accepted that I might die before we even met. When I crawled on that hill to help you, I was quite sure it would be the end for me.”

She leaned to look at him and he avoided her gaze.

“Quinlan, helping you that day was my choice. Just like what is happening right now is my choice. By blaming yourself, you diminish the value of those decisions. You act as if I could not knowingly lay down my life. As if I had no agency.”

In a blur, he turned back toward her.

“No…I did not mean that.”

“Please, do not regret involving me because then we would have never known each other.”

The corners of his lips lifted in a melancholic grin.

“I will never regret knowing you, Lexi. I cherish every moment.”

“Even that day?”

In the recollection she shared, Quinlan had just finished drinking two deer and she was screaming at him. The Dhampir had sprinted to her and growled menacingly. He laughed and pulled her close.

“So you wanted to shoot me?”

“I did. I knew it wouldn’t kill you and I was quite mad.”

“I pray the Gods that I never anger you again.”

This remark made her cringe in remorse. Her rage had already been costly for two humans. Lexi bit her lip and looked up into his eyes.

“I killed two men that day. When I gave the mother and daughter the map to the bunker.”

“How?"

She showed him and his mouth contorted in disgust.

“They deserved it.”

“Did they really?”

“Is there anything more repugnant than attacking a mother and her child?”

Lexi could not immediately think of other such scenarios. But surely, if Quinlan forgave her, then she could forgive herself as well?

“You gave them your map…”

“I did.”

“Lexi, how did you find me?”

She chuckled. As if he did not know.

“The vast place! Where the Bond is! I can see you there.”

“I am afraid I do not grasp the meaning of your response.”

The woman caressed his temple.

“Inside your mind. Look for the place where you can hear me.”

“I believe you might have had more practice in such endeavors.”

Of course, she had. Already as a child, she had begun treating her mind like a place she could manipulate.

“I’m going to hide and remain quiet. Look for the beacon in the lightless world.”

“Wait…I do not think I can do that.”

Her smile turned into a smirk.

“You? I thought you could accomplish anything you wanted. Maybe I was wrong…” She said out loud.

Quinlan rattled and uncovered his sharp teeth. Excited by this little game, she kissed his cheek and disappeared.

“I will find you, you little vixen. And when I do…”

Lexi repressed a laugh as she hid. The building had a crawl space at its very top and she crouched there. Curious of his progress, she dropped into the grey pool. Inside the boundless space, Quinlan was close. The cocoon of brightness was vibrant and so was her own light. How could he not see it? After several minutes, the cocoon cracked open. Fascinated, she observed as his glow expanded. Intense as a sun which did not burn. It was towering and dazzling. Lexi suddenly felt very small next to his gigantic presence. In a matter of seconds, he would perceive her. Like lances, beams of his brightness pierced the space around.

Dread squeezed her insides. Behind him, like a moth seeking a bulb, a red stain crept. It was blind and did not shine. The thing snapped in out and out of existence, reappearing near the spots where Quinlan’s light had shone brightest. It was getting closer to him. The abomination did not belong here. Lexi rushed back to the physical world and screamed.

“QUINLAN! STOP!”

She sprinted to him and was met with deep confusion.

“What is the matter?”

“You cannot project yourself like this. He knows your light. When you reach too far, he feels you.” She said.

Quinlan had not immersed inside the vastness the way she did, he had expanded the glow of his soul. His method was clearly dangerous. Scared for the safety of the Bond, she returned to her mind. Everything was normal. The stain was gone and Quinlan’s soul was back into its firm cocoon. She breathed.

“It’s safe. We’re safe.”

“This means I cannot find you as you did.”

“If need be, I will find you again.”

“It will be one hour before the sun is covered. When that time comes, let us not dally.”

Lexi nodded. The toxic light provided protection but they needed to remain careful. So they waited. And when the sun started to wane, they knew they had made a huge mistake. Two clouds of dust lifted in the horizon. One came from Santa Fe and the other from the direction they had intended to take. They blocked the only road from both sides.

“They are semitrailer trucks.” Said Quinlan after focusing on their sounds.

She concentrated as well. Besides the powerful engines, there was nothing there.

“I cannot hear anything inside.”

“It means the drivers are not human.”

Lexi growled loudly. Strigoi did not have a heartbeat.

“How many? I cannot hear anything besides the truck themselves.”

“I believe they are attempting to camouflage their sounds.”

They had timed the assault to coincide with the arrival of the ochre light. The Dhampir were trapped between the two incoming trucks. Terrain east and west became rapidly too rocky for the SUV to manage.

“Shall we run?”

Quinlan was still focusing deeply and a satisfied smile appeared on his face.

“No need. There are just a few dozen of them.”

“Hum…”

“The Master did not have time to gather more. We are the lucky ones this time.”

The self-assured Dhampir checked his Micro Uzis. His ammunition was limited to what was left in their magazines but that did not appear to bother him.

“I can deal with them myself. Please remain inside. Do not let them see you…this time.”

Memories of that catastrophic night surged into her mind.

“There are even more than last time. I will fight with you.”

“It really is not necessary. Your change gives us an edge and it would be foolish to waste it. You must keep out of sight.”

“I trust your abilities, I really do, but you almost died last time.”

His gaze shifted and he needlessly checked his magazines again.

“There is something you are not telling me.” She pushed.

They could not lie in the Bond, but they were not obligated to speak.

“That night, I was distracted because you were there. I would have let that Strigoi find any other human associate. It would have mattered very little to me if the Master saw them.”

She growled and gripped the edges of the bar. Quinlan had nearly died because of her. Because she had been a liability. The wood splintered around her fingers. From now on, she would never be a burden to him. Like he had said, she was now “an edge”. Lexi relaxed. She had to remain hidden not because of her weakness but purely for tactical reasons. This she could accept.

“At least finish the blood.” She said.

“Very well.”

After his meal, the Dhampir removed his coat and goggles and put his holsters and the sword sheath directly above his vest.

“This time I enter the battle with the reassurance that if one of them finds you, it will die swiftly.”

Lexi felt reinvigorated by his faith. She observed from a window as he walked into the ochre light. The Dhampir stood on the asphalt, mocking one of the nearing trucks then turning to also taunt the other. Lexi snorted. Both large vehicles stopped askew to block the road completely. Their windows were tinted, protecting the drivers from harmful rays. It would not protect them from the lone warrior. Strigoi poured out of the bellies of the metal beasts. Crimson eyes jumped from creature to creature.

INVICTUS! They screeched in unison and that display made Quinlan laugh.

Like a flock of starlings, they moved and surrounded him.

“Beloved, please duck.”

She obeyed and instantly the rapid fire of automatic weapons drowned the snarls of the Strigoi army. Two rounds pierced the windows above her. Most landed inside white flesh with satisfying thuds. The bullets would be insufficient and the sword would have to sing. When the Uzis stopped firing, Lexi resumed her observation. The dance had begun. Red eyes blinked everywhere and then closed forever when metal flashed.

Quinlan flew among them. As her Dhampir eyes managed to follow, she was taken aback by the gracefulness of his gestures. Notwithstanding her new abilities, she could not move like this yet. On the horizon above Santa Fe, more dust was rising.

“More are coming. I should join you and finish this quickly.”

“No! Your existence is a weapon! We must keep it a secret!”

He was right. Her new strength gave them an advantage intrinsically but also because the Master could not predict it. Quinlan was healthy and still fighting with mesmerizing grace. When she reached through the Bond tentatively, she could perceive his confidence and…his pleasure at slicing unencumbered. Falling into savagery was delightful. As her own heart ached to enter the battle, she understood.

When the approaching vehicles got close enough she focused on the sounds within them. Ten heartbeats rang clear. The engines were small compared to the trucks. She doubted more Strigoi accompanied the humans. Slowly, Quinlan was tiring. Should he falter, even for an instant, she would be at his side.

“There are ten humans coming.” She warned.

“Inconsequential.”

Twenty Strigoi stood strong when three SUVs arrived at the level of the parked truck. The cars stopped in the dirt on each side of the road. Humans emerged from their sunroofs and she promised to herself that should any of them shoot Quinlan, she would drink them dry. That animosity permeated through her self-control.

“I know. Let me contend with them. Everything is well.” Soothed Quinlan.

She did not protest but braced herself when the men pulled high caliber automatic weapons upon the vehicles. Quinlan started whizzing about, making himself a difficult target. Then a loud voice boomed above the Strigoi cacophony.

“QUINLAN! GET OUT OF THERE!”

“Huh?” Said Lexi to herself.

The warrior sprinted to the SUVs and the Strigoi followed. But he was faster. As soon as his silhouette joined the men, they opened fire on the swarm. Limbs and torsos exploded at the contact of the powerful projectiles. All was over in seconds.

“What is happening?” She thought.

“The last Sun Hunter.”

The image of a young man appeared in her mind and with that, the respect of one warrior to another. Then a name: Augustin Elizalde. She was still unsure what he meant by Sun Hunter but at least, this was not an enemy. Relieved, she concentrated on their spoken exchange and watched.

“I fucking knew this mess was for you!”

The man jumped off the car roof. He thrust a palm toward the Dhampir who accepted the handshake.

“We’ve been tracking you for two weeks, man!”

There was a murmur of agreement in the small crowd.

“You have?”

“You thought nobody would notice a ghost making Strigoi sashimi all over the place?”

Quinlan was embarrassed, she could sense it. He did not like being exposed in such an unexpected way.

“I guess I cannot be surprised that humans might also have…taken notice.”

Gus laughed and added:

“When we arrived in Santa Fe we had missed you by less than a day…I was pissed. But then, some Strigs started gathering and, we’re no fools. We knew they were coming for your white ass.”

A hint of irritation at the colorful language. Lexi giggled.

“Why have you come to find me?”

“I thought you were dead since the bomb. Do you think we want to live the rest of our lives like rats? We want the Master dead."

The other men nodded and some threw words of agreement. Quinlan paused.

“The Sun Hunter and his confederates would make formidable allies. He had proven useful in the past.”

“Can we trust them?” Asked Lexi.

“Since we all share the same goal, I believe we have little choice.”

“Then I’m coming.”

He was unsure but she was not. She walked out of the house, hoodless.

“You better introduce me before they start shooting again.”

“Mister Elizalde, my companion will join us now.”

“Your what now?”

Lexi closed the distance between the bar and Quinlan in seconds. Some of the men jumped back in surprise and the one standing closest to Gus positively screamed.

“MADRE DE DIOS!”

She stood by the Dhampir's towering silhouette with a hand on his back. His body radiated intense heat due to the recent battle.

“What’s this?” Gus asked, less surprised than the other men.

The olive-skinned fighter was rather handsome with his dark eyes and high cheekbones. Despite his agreeable features, the tattoos on his neck and arms made him look fierce.

“My name is Lexi.” She said and looked at each member of that troop. Not a single woman and they seemed like they had seen better days. All were unshaven and one had a terrible scar across his face.

“Nice to meet you, Mister Elizalde.” She added and offered Gus a hand which he shook. This was the first time a human looked at her new face. His gaze was confused but fearless. She grinned.

“Nice to meet you too, huh, ma’am.”

Then he turned to Quinlan.

"So you have a sister?”

"Oh hell no." She thought.

“Revolting.”

Her smile morphed into a grimace. Quinlan must have reacted similarly because Gus’ face transformed with the realization that their relationship was of another nature. He nodded and waved a dismissive hand. The men had gone over their surprise and were detailing the two Dhampir. Their eyes switched from Quinlan to Lexi, comparing. Some exchanged looks and there were discreet smirks. The gang judged she was not as impressive as Quinlan was. They had just seen him fight after all, while she cowered within the safety of the bar. Still being regarded as weak was bothersome.

“I’ve got like a thousand questions but I think we should bounce first.” Said the Sun Hunter.

“Agreed. We have our own vehicle.”

They made arrangements and soon it was decided that their own SUV would lead. Gus and his cousin, Raul, would ride with them. The other eight would remain in contact via radios. Before departing, they checked the fuel tanks of the deserted station. They were empty. Not ten minutes of driving later, Gus could no longer hold back.

“So there are two of you, huh?”

His dark eyes observed them briefly in the rearview mirror before returning to the road ahead. Lexi reached for Quinlan’s mind and they exchanged words in the span of a few seconds.

“Does he know how you were born?”

“No. I never told him.”

“We cannot tell him of my origins either. For that matter for now on, the story of your creation needs to be kept secret. If I figured out this out thanks to you, others could as well. We don’t need another Eldritch Palmer.”

“What should I say?”

“That you were born from a Dhampir mother and father.”

“Why should he believe that?”

“Because you’re going to sell it and so will I. If we are lucky he might never ask. From now on, our story is that our species is a cousin to the Strigoi and the Master hunted us to extinction. We cannot infect humans, ever. This is our taking revenge for the genocide of our own.”

“Very well.”

Quinlan turned to Gus who was completely unaware of the exchange which had just taken place.

“So it seems.” He replied.

“Hey, lady, why did it take so long for you to climb into the ring?”

It was lady now? Urg.

“What makes you think I haven’t been plotting from the shadows this whole time?��

For their lie to work, she would need to suggest that she was much older than she really was.

“Really?”

“I only come out now because events are ripe for a final blow.”

“I like the sound of that. But then what are you doing on the other side of the fucking country? The Master is still in New York.”

“Ha! What indolence! He basks in his perceived victory.”

Quinlan was shaking from the revelation and the remark had burst through the Bond.

“How can you be so sure about that?” Lexi asked.

“I’ve got some eyes all over the place. We cornered the black market in the city. And a few of my little birdies told me that Eichhorst is established there…I figured…”

“You thought well. The lapdog would be reluctant to leave his master’s side.” Said Quinlan.

While they spoke about the probability that the Master did indeed reside in New York, Lexi’s brain was bubbling. This information and their new associates changed everything. Even more than her new body. The outlines of a plan, insane but elegant, formed. It would be dangerous and involve her meeting the Master while shackled but it could work. She shared it in the Bond. Quinlan snarled and turned to her.

“You are NOT doing this. I will not allow it.”

Lexi was disappointed. They were past this, or so she had thought. The rage which had carried her through her transformation came back. It had not disappeared at all, it had merely been repressed. Quinlan startled and pulled away from her.

“Mister Elizalde, would you be so kind as to park at your earliest convenience?” She said.

Her voice was smooth ice.

“You got it, ma’am.”

As soon as the vehicle stopped, she exited it and Quinlan followed. They were on a deserted highway. Her back turned to him, she cracked her neck and assessed the overwhelming urge to draw her machete and jump him. She ran her fingers through white and brown hair. No. This was not something she could do. Not for lack of desire or ability but because it would be wrong. She could not resent him for depriving her of her agency using his force then turn around and do the same. Love could not be corrupted by violence every time a problem arose. They were adults. Equals. They could use their words to resolve their problems, even those that drove them crazy. Especially those that drove them crazy. Lexi had no intention of being in a relationship as dysfunctional as her parent’s marriage. Even if it lasted only a short time.

"We just discussed this, Quinlan."

"It is nonsensical to put yourself in so much danger."

"There is no way to face the Master safely. Even the best case scenario means we die."

"If you give him the opportunity, he will inflict upon you a fate worse than death."

"Yes...but I accept that possibility."

"I do not."

The wings of her small nose flared.

"Am I a doll to you that you can prop up as you wish and toss in a box when you are scared I might break?"

"What a preposterous analogy."

"Isn't that what you did when you left me behind?"

His scowl was almost savage.

"All I wanted was for you to be safe. You would have never accepted to let me leave. To let me walk to my death alone."

"No, I would not have."

"Then I was right, wasn't I?"

"No. You were so completely wrong."

His hands closed into tight fists and he looked away.

"You broke your promise." She said.

That made him wince.

"How can I trust you if every time you are afraid, you tread on my consent like this?"

"I did it so you would be safe, not to hurt you."

"You used your superior strength to crush my will."

He faced her and even in the shadow of his hood, his horror was evident. But his fear was still clear in the Bond, stronger than his regret. He still thought himself justified. This was not something Lexi could tolerate. It was crucial for him to comprehend how much his actions had diminished her.

"I will show you something. It will hurt."

He nodded. For the first time since her transformation, Lexi reached for the dark room. That cramped place was different. More tangible. She opened her mind’s eye and found herself in a basement. It was dark and dusty. A flight of rotting wooden stairs led to a closed door and at ceiling level, on the wall opposite the steps, was a small window. Through it, she could see the lightless vastness and Quinlan's soul. On shelves covering the brick walls rested all the monsters she had locked here. Each was contained in a jar and as the worms had, they moved as she moved. So her mind had indeed changed as well. It was more solid, more real. Now that it inhabited the vastness, it had gained substance.

In that dark room, she could not hear Quinlan and that loneliness was strangling her. Even as she resented him, she wanted his presence. But Lexi had to bear that suffering just a little longer.

There was no need to peruse through the imprisoned memories. It had been the second one to ever become a permanent resident of this dark room. The dustiest shelf had to be the oldest. When she took the second jar from the left, she knew she was correct.

Holding it with only the tip of her fingers, she climbed up the stairs. Laid before the door were empty cardboard boxes and she grinned joylessly. Those were for the thoughts she only pushed in the room temporarily. She twisted the handle and Quinlan's voice immediately echoed.

"Lexi?"

It was good to hear him. She hesitated as she pulled the door shut behind her. This was not a memory she wanted to relive ever again. Never before had she retrieved a recollection from the dark room. There was a good reason those tormenting nightmares were locked away from the rest of her psyche. Freeing one was a terrifying prospect.

Now she advanced in that house which was her mind. It was cozy, with old wooden furniture and a lot of clutter. She stared at the flashes inside the glass. Then she closed her eyes and smashed the jar on the floor.

Lexi was shaking. She had done something mightily stupid. When a neighbor had praised her father in front of the congregated church for his donations and for being a pillar of their community, she had snorted. It had been only a month since she had slapped that Bible out her mother's grasp and since then she had thought many times about her father's violence. She despised him and that feeling had shone through at the worst moment. People had turned to her briefly when she had made that idiotic noise. And her father's eyes had stared at her just long enough to make her understand what type of punishment laid ahead.

They drove back home. She jumped out of the car as it parked, rushed inside and attempted to get to her bedroom. But her legs were small and his were long and far-reaching. A clammy hand closed on her nape and yanked her back before she could climb up the stairs. This time, his rage was focused solely on her. She had humiliated him. Tarnished his impeccable image. When he grabbed her shirt and slapped her hard she knew this time would be different because her affront had been unforgivable. So she did something she had never done before.

She fought back.

Screaming, she clawed at his hands, kicked and even tried to bite. But it was pointless. Lexi was just a child and even as she struggled to protect her body from his violence, she was aware of her helplessness. Her defiance angered him further. The punishment would only be more severe. His hand closed on the small neck and his fist connected with her cheekbone. Immediately, her body went limp and she fell. A ringing vibrated in her head and she could not control her muscles. The girl wondered if that was what dying felt like. Her father walked away and since the danger had passed, her mother came to her help. She cursed her own weakness and drifted.

Her real eyes opened and she chocked on the desperation of her younger self. Quinlan clawed at his temples as if attempting to remove the memory. He grunted when it stopped pouring through the Bond. Lexi focused intensely to leash that memory again. The dark room swallowed it whole, more easily than it would have with her human mind.

With trembling fingers, Quinlan caressed his cheekbone. Had he ever felt that vulnerability? It was a special type of feeling, helplessness at the hand of those who ought to be protecting.

“I understand now. Please, forgive me.”

His pain was digging into her deeply. It was overwhelming guilt. The emotions twisted her stomach and made her dry-heave.

All the moments she could recall where her heart had swelled with love for him, she gathered and applied onto his distress like a balm. Quinlan sighed in relief and shared his own. For an instant, Lexi saw a polar bear, heard the racing of a heart and observed herself trying to muffle it. Already then, he hoped and desired. Lexi embraced him and they found each other’s lips.

“Did we stop just so you two could fondle each other?”

Lexi startled. The presence of the humans had slipped her mind. Quinlan rattled and glanced at a confused but entertained Gus.

“We have to tell him about our…mode of communication. It’s necessary for the plan anyway.” She said.

“Agreed.”

The couple re-entered the car in the blink of an eye.

“Holy crap!” Yelped Raul, still in the passenger seat.

“I’m sorry! Didn’t mean to startle you.” Said Lexi with an apologetic smile.

“It’s ok, ma’am.”

She scowled. Gus sat behind the wheel again.

“Call me Lexi, please. You too…Gus.”

Raul nodded but still appeared worried. The Sun Hunter turned briefly and gave her a nod of agreement.

“Mister Elizalde, we can leave now. We have a plan to discuss.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“First we have to clarify something.” Said Lexi.

The couple exchanged a look. How would they react to this information?

“When we stopped, Quinlan and I were discussing an issue.”

“Huh…no…you guys just stood there then smooched.”

The woman laughed at his choice of words.

“We do not require spoken words to communicate.”

Raul’s eyes widened but he stared ahead. Gus shrugged.

“Yeah…The Ancients did that too. At least you guys can also speak. What about the plan?”

“It doesn’t bother you?” Asked Lexi.

“Nah, ma…Lexi”

She beamed at him and via the rearview mirror, the Sun Hunter returned the smile.

“To make things simple: we have the means to incapacitate the Master temporarily. Machines that will mess with his brain. But for that, we need to know in advance where he will be. We also need him to be in sight and unlikely to flee.” Started Lexi.

“Ok. How you gonna do that?”

“Lexi will be bait. The Master thinks she is human and through the years, he has taken immense pleasure in killing the humans I cared about.”

This was what he had objected to.

“Why would he think she is human?” Raul turned to them and detailed Lexi once more.

"We have hidden my appearance and masked my Dhampir scent. The Master knows that we are together but not of my nature."

“If the Master’s people capture Lexi, he will have her brought to him immediately.”

Gus shook his head.

"Yeah, how you gonna hide that she ain't human then?”

"One of your men will pass as my captor. My face doesn't need to be identified. The human scent we used would be enough."

“In that moment just before she is lead to him. I will seek a Strigoi and make a deal with the Master.”

“Huh…”

“I will offer my life against hers.”

They were certain that the Master would not resist the appeal of destroying his sanity before killing him. And the best way would be to hurt Lexi while Quinlan watched.

“That sounds like a shit plan.” Said Gus.

“That’s when you and your men become important. You need to make sure the devices I built surround us and are functioning. Once the Master, Quinlan and I are in the same location, you will activate them. Then, we will destroy his body and take the worm.” She said.

“The what?” Asked Gus.

“His essence. What jumps from body to body.” Clarified Quinlan.

"What the hell? He can do that?" Asked Raul.

"So could the Ancients but this ability was not openly advertised for obvious reasons."

"Yeah, those dicks weren't exactly the sharing type." Said Gus.

“Then we will flee with the worm and dump it into an exploding volcano.” Concluded Lexi.

Gus laughed. His eyes appeared in the rearview mirror.

“You guys have to be joking. Volcanoes don’t fucking blow on command.”

“No, they don’t, Mister Elizalde. Unfortunately, while we know for sure a nuclear explosion will destroy the Master, so does he. In the past year, he has taken possession of all those weapons. However, such natural explosions are just as destructive. Sometimes more so."

"What about just filling him with silver?" Asked the Sun Hunter.

"It would hurt him but not kill him. Even direct sunlight did not destroy him. His body, the outer shell, would just be discarded." Replied Quinlan.

"Crap." Said Gus. He and his cousin exchanged tense looks.

“But he cannot hide entire mountains away. And volcanoes give warning signs. There are monitoring systems for active ones around the world. We need to find a way to tap into those systems, then when one is about to go off, we will set our plan in motion.” Said Quinlan.

He had obviously already read some of the books she had put away.

“How the fuck are we gonna tap into those systems?” Said Raul.

Quinlan opened his mouth to answer but Gus cleared his throat.

“I’ve got a guy for this type of shit.” Said the Sun Hunter.

“You’ve got a guy for volcanoes?” Asked Raul.

“No, dumbass. I’ve got a guy who hid a lot of the brainiacs the Strigoi wanted dead. If any of them know of this volcano system bullshit, then the Librarian will bring them to me.”

Gus nodded to himself and bit his lip.

“I’ve been sponsoring this Librarian dude. I wanted info on the Master and he’s been tracking historians and other smart ones for me. But after the bomb went off, they were the first to be rounded up and slaughtered. We never got much intel that way."

"Historians were executed?" Whispered Lexi.

"Not officially but we ain't stupid. Basically all leaders and anyone with two brains cells to rub together disappeared quickly."

Lexi closed her eyes in mourning for those who died for the crime of carrying the accumulated knowledge of humankind.

"This is what he does. He steals knowledge and memory. What makes a person a person. Now he will accomplish that at the scale of an entire species." Said Quinlan.

Raul leaned toward Gus and murmured: "You think they are chatting right now?"

"He wants to erase humans. Domination is not enough." Said Lexi and she shook her head. How would humanity ever bounce back from this?

#quinlan #mr.quinlan #the strain #the strain fx #quintus sertorius #the strain fanfic #the strain fanfiction

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digitechlifestyle · 6 years

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*•.¸♡ 𝐖𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐲 𝐌𝐜𝐄𝐥𝐫𝐨𝐲: 𝐂𝐫𝐲𝐩𝐭𝐨’𝐬 𝐌𝐞𝐚𝐧𝐬 𝐀𝐫𝐞 𝐈𝐭𝐬 𝐄𝐧𝐝 – 𝐚𝐬 𝐂𝐫𝐲𝐩𝐭𝐨-𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐬 𝐖𝐞𝐥𝐥 𝐊𝐧𝐨𝐰 ♡¸.•* The Satoshi Revolution: A Revolution of Rising Expectations Section 4: State Versus Society Chapter 10, Part 6 Crypto’s Means are Its End, as Crypto-Statists Well Know The problem of the Means is, as I see it, a twofold problem: first, the problem of End and Means; second, the problem of the People and the State, that is, the means by which the people can supervise or control the State….[M]eans must be proportioned and appropriate to the end, since they are ways to the end, so to speak, the end itself in its very process of coming to existence. So that applying intrinsically evil means to attain an intrinsically good end is simple nonsense and a failure. -Jacques Maritain, Man and the State The 20th century French Christian philosopher Jacques Maritain saw End and Means as the problem of political philosophy. He based his conclusion on political science, religion, and the lessons of history. The French Revolution provided a model of how an End failed because the Means used to achieve it were “intrinsically evil.” France transformed from an absolute monarchy that ravaged the rights of common people into “a superior person called the Nation State” that acted the same way. “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” never materialized. The Revolution did not achieve the “final aim and most essential task of the body politic or political society,” which is to “better the conditions of human life itself” and “to procure the common good of the multitude, in such a manner that each concrete person, not only in a privileged class…may truly reach that measure of independence which is proper to civilized life.” Maritain’s point can be expressed colloquially: You can’t get there from here. Means that contradict a goal will never achieve it; an acorn cannot turn into a tomato plant. Repression will not breed freedom. Violence will not lead to peace. The means of the French Revolution led it into a different form of statism. Cryptocurrency resolves the problem of political philosophy because it is a means and an end at the same moment. The strategy: decentralize financial exchanges through a blockchain in order to bypass trusted third parties and return monetary control to the individual. The political end: decentralize financial exchanges in order to bypass trusted third parties and return monetary control to the individual. Mahatma Gandhi famously pronounced, “the means are the ends in progress.” Cryptocurrency further collapses the distinction so that the means are the ends. Few approaches have so eloquently and intimately entwined the two. Within the framework of ideology, libertarianism best parallels crypto because its means and its end are also identical. The means: “anything that is peaceful.” The end: a society in which individuals peacefully exchange. Peaceful interaction is both the means and the end of libertarianism. Like crypto, libertarianism bypasses the trusted third party problem—that is, the state—and operates on a peer-to-peer basis, even within cooperative ventures. Both crypto and libertarianism resolve what Maritain viewed as the Means versus End dilemma. The Dangerous Doctrine of “the End Justifies the Means” Most political scientists focus tightly upon ends, such as security, diversity, or democracy. Ideologies are contrasted according to their competing ends, not their means; do they advocate sovereignty or globalism, diversity or meritocracy, free trade or protectionism? Once an end is established, a menu of means is scrutinized for ones that will achieve the goal as quickly and cost-efficiently as possible. More fundamental questions about the relationship between means and ends are rarely asked. Can war bring peace? Can censorship create an open society? Does banning crypto protect people’s financial freedom or safety? These expedient actors do not disagree with Maritain’s analysis; they do not even consider it. One explanation of the common gulf between means and ends is that the real end of a strategy differs from the stated one. That is, the stated goal is a lie, and the means of achieving it are appropriate to the real end. Such outright deceit is often easy to discern, however, especially over time. Fear the Power of the BUT Another sleight of hand emanates from crypto-statists who claim to share the same goal as crypto-anarchists…or close to it. In other words, the ground of discussion becomes means, not ends. Crypto-statists may agree that people should control their own wealth and that banks are corrupt. Yet they want the same agency that created central banks to regulate crypto. “Individuals should control their own wealth,” they say, “but we need to weed out those drug dealers and tax evaders who discredit the community.” The solution: only desirable users should have financial freedom. “Individuals have a right to financial privacy,” they grant, “but only a person with something to hide objects to ‘reasonable’ reporting.” The solution: everyone should make ‘reasonable’ disclosures to sort out those with something to hide. “Individuals are 100% correct about the corruption of fiat and central banks,” they admit, “but the system can be reformed.” The solution: a corrupt system is preserved in the name of stability while crypto is penalized. “Crypto radicals may express a view that once served a purpose,” they acknowledge, “but current talk of anarchism or private money is extreme and blocks respectability.” The solution: radicals should be quiet or quieted. Crypto-statists pit the means against the end, which destroys the goal of freedom. Because the means are the end in progress. Using the state or other violence to advance crypto only strengthens the state. In The Voice of Truth, Gandhi asserted, “For me it is enough to know the means. Means and end are convertible terms in my philosophy of life.” The two ways to sabotage crypto are to oppose either its end or its means because end and means are identical. It Sounds So Reasonable When They Say It Everyone who argues for crypto as the financial empowerment of individuals encounters an appeal to so-called reality. Total freedom for the individual is not possible, it is argued, but a significant increase in financial freedom is within reach. It can be grasped, however, only if crypto users compromise with the existing system. Otherwise, the perfect becomes the enemy of the good. The reality is “so-called” because crypto and the blockchain already offer financial freedom to individuals. Central banking and state control are the old reality that desperately tries to remain relevant. No wonder crypto-statists advocate a compromise in order for both sides to “win.” That’s not possible. The state is a back-alley thief who extends the “choice” of “your money or your life.” A philosophically-inclined thief or his advocate may explain how the dynamic is a “win-win” situation because it achieves the agreed-upon goal of your leaving the alley in one piece; after all, killing you is work, and it eliminates a repeated robbery. You may relinquish the money and leave, but you are not a winner. You win by using crypto that allows you walk around the alley and the thief. The state does not co-own wealth by virtue of pointing a gun; all it does is to exert control through violence. Most people agree; it is morally wrong to take property from a peaceful person by force. To avoid the morality argument, where they are on weak ground, crypto-statists employ another sleight of hand. They attempt to substitute the practical for the moral as a focus of debate. They juxtapose the collective “greater good” against the rights of an individual, for example. Society requires the imposition of preemptive rules, they maintain, or else calamity will ensue. To envision the consequence of elevating the so-called practical over the moral, imagine it is 1858, and you are living on a farm in the Northern U.S. A man has arrived at your door with papers documenting his ownership of a run-away slave whom you are sheltering. The slave throws himself at your feet, begging for sanctuary, while the slave-owner reasons with you. First, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which makes it illegal for you to retain “his property.” Then, the slave owner declares that he, too, opposes slavery, but the South’s current economy would collapse without it. If slavery were to cease abruptly, then the political system itself would collapse. No! Slavery will be phased out, he assures you, but for now, you must surrender the black man who trembles at your feet. A libertarian rejects violating the slave’s autonomy by answering, “There is no practical consideration that overrides this man’s right to his own body.” A crypto-anarchist rejects the claim that state force is necessary by answering, “There is no practical consideration that overrides a person’s right to his own person, including the products of its labor.” Conclusion The conflict between crypto-anarchists and crypto-statists is not merely over means. It is not merely over how to get there from here. It is that the there being discussed is a different destination. When the means advocated by two parties are antithetical, their goals are as well. The political choice comes down to Rothbard’s “eternal struggle” between Liberty and Power. The conflict is the same now as in the past. A recent scholarly article flashed back into history: “Punishing Forgery with Death. In early nineteenth-century England, forging currency was considered to be such a subversive threat that it was punished with the death penalty.” That’s how seriously the state took the sanctity of its currency. Imagine how seriously it will take a “fake” currency that provides an actual and active alternative to the entire system. [To be continued next week]

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