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DR. SHINYA HIROMI BS nổi tiếng Nhật Bản đúc kết cách sống "không bệnh tật" chỉ bằng ăn, tập, thở, ngủ Linh Chi | 20/09/2017 08:37 AM

BS nổi tiếng Nhật Bản đúc kết cách sống "không bệnh tật" chỉ bằng ăn, tập, thở, ngủ TS nổi tiếng Nhật Hiromi Shinya khẳng định, một người có hệ thống đường tiêu hóa sạch sẽ, cơ thể người đó có thể chống lại bất cứ loại bệnh tật nào. Với kinh nghiệm khám và chữa trị cho hơn 300.000 bệnh nhân, TS Hiromi Shinya – tác giả của loạt sách "Nhân tố Enzyme" cho biết: "Một người có chức năng tiêu hóa kém thường có chế độ ăn và sống không lành mạnh. Khi hệ thống đường tiêu hóa trong cơ thể người không được sạch sẽ, người đó dễ mắc phải nhiều bệnh tật". "Trong suốt hàng thập kỷ thực hành và thực tiễn lâm sàng khám và chữa bệnh cho hàng trăm ngàn người với vai trò là một bác sĩ nội soi đường tiêu hóa, tôi đã học được rằng khi hệ thống đường tiêu hóa của một người sạch sẽ, cơ thể người đó có thể chống lại bất cứ loại bệnh tật nào". BS nổi tiếng Nhật Bản đúc kết cách sống không bệnh tật chỉ bằng ăn, tập, thở, ngủ - Ảnh 1. Tiến sĩ Hiromi Shinya khi mới phát minh ra phương pháp nội soi dạ dày TS Hiromi Shinya khẳng định, cho dù người đó có nguy cơ cao mắc bệnh do di truyền như bệnh tim, tiểu đường, ung thư ruột kết, ung thư tuyến tiền liệt, bệnh Crohn, viêm loét đại tràng hoặc bệnh thận… thói quen ăn uống và lối sống có thể đảo ngược nguy cơ các căn bệnh này. Nói tóm lại, con người có khỏe mạnh hay không phụ thuộc vào những gì họ ăn và thói quen sống hàng ngày "Các yếu tố quyết định sức khỏe của một người bao gồm thực phẩm, nước, tập thể dục, ngủ, làm việc và căng thẳng", theo TS Hiromi Shinya. TS Shinya từng đưa ra một bảng khảo sát dành cho các bệnh nhân với bảng câu hỏi đầy đủ chi tiết về các thực phẩm họ ăn, lối sống hàng ngày như uống rượu, hút thuốc, thói quen ngủ, uống nước, dùng thuốc nhuận tràng và thói quen đường ruột. Dựa vào các bảng câu hỏi và kết quả khảo sát, dưới đây là những đúc kết của TS Hiroma Shinya về những yếu tố ảnh hưởng đến sức khỏe. TS Hiromi Shinya tránh ăn gì để đường ruột khỏe mạnh? Muốn đường ruột khỏe mạnh và tránh bệnh đường ruột, đây là 10 loại thực phẩm nên hạn chế hoặc cần tránh: • Protein từ động vật – thịt đỏ BS nổi tiếng Nhật Bản đúc kết cách sống không bệnh tật chỉ bằng ăn, tập, thở, ngủ - Ảnh 2. (Ảnh minh họa) • Các sản phẩm từ sữa bò, phô mai, sữa chua và nhiều chế phẩm từ sữa khác • Trà xanh (giới hạn 1-2 tách/ngày) • Cà phê • Kẹo và đường • Nicotine • Socola • Chất béo • Ăn quá nhiều muối • Rượu Nguyên tắc "nói không với bệnh tật" của TS Shinya 1. Chế độ ăn 85-90% là thực vật - 50% hạt ngũ cốc, gạo nâu, mì ống, lúa mạch, bánh mì và các loại đậu như đậu nành, đậu lăng, đậu đen, trắng… - 30% rau xanh, củ quả bao gồm khoai tây, cà rốt, củ cải đường, rong biển. - 5-10% quả, hạt hạch. - Ngoài ra còn có sữa đậu nành, sữa gạo, sữa hạnh nhân. BS nổi tiếng Nhật Bản đúc kết cách sống không bệnh tật chỉ bằng ăn, tập, thở, ngủ - Ảnh 3. (Ảnh minh họa) 2. 10-15% protein động vật - Ăn bất cứ loại cá nào, nhưng tốt nhất là cá nhỏ vì cá lớn thường chứa thủy ngân. - Gia cầm: gà, gà tây, vịt. - Thịt bò, thịt cừu, thịt bê, thịt lợn - Trứng 3. Một số thực phẩm nên bổ sung vào chế độ ăn uống hàng ngày của bạn - Trà thảo mộc - Tảo biển - Multivitamin và khoáng chất bổ sung - Dầu cá – đặc biệt là DHA 4. Uống đủ nước - Nước là dưỡng chất thiếu yếu cho cơ thể. Người lớn nên uống ít nhất 6-10 ly nước mỗi ngày. - Uống 1-3 ly nước sau khi thức dậy và vào buổi sáng. 2-3 ly khoảng 1 giờ trước bữa ăn. 5. Thải độc thường xuyên BS nổi tiếng Nhật Bản đúc kết cách sống không bệnh tật chỉ bằng ăn, tập, thở, ngủ - Ảnh 4. (Ảnh minh họa) - Thực hiện thói quan loại bỏ các chất gây ô nhiễm đường ruột và làm sạch cơ thể bạn thường xuyên. - Không dùng thuốc nhuận tuyến. - Ăn các thực phẩm có chứa lượng chất xơ cao, không lạm dụng chất xơ từ các viên nang hay các chất bổ sung. 6. Giảm sự phụ thuộc vào thuốc kê toa bằng cách thay đổi chế độ ăn uống và tập thể dục - Các loại thuốc có thể tác động xấu đến gan và thận - Nhiều bệnh mạn tính như viêm khớp, bệnh gout, tiểu đường và loãng xương có thể được kiểm soát bằng chế độ ăn uống và tập thể dục. 7. Các khoáng chất cũng rất quan trọng với sức khỏe - Magie kích hoạt hàng trăm loại enzyme khác nhau, điều kiện cần để có sức khỏe tốt. - Cân bằng natri và kali là điều kiện tiên quyết để có cuộc sống khỏe mạnh. Thuốc nhuận tràng, tiêu chảy, tập thể dục quá mức có thể làm gảm lượng natri. Chế độ ăn nhiều rau cải tăng lượng kali. - Quá nhiều canxi sau tuổi trung niên cũng có thể gây ra nhiều tác hại cho cơ thể bạn. 8. Tập thể dục vừa phải - Tập thể dục phù hợp với tuổi và tình trạng thể chất của bạn là điều cần thiết cho sức khỏe, nhưng tập thể dục quá mức có thể giải phóng các gốc tự do và gây hại cho cơ thể bạn. - Một số hình thức tập thể dục tốt như đi bộ, bơi lội, tennis, đi xe đạp, yoga, võ thuật… bạn nên thử. 9. Giấc ngủ cũng rất quan trọng - Đi ngủ vào cùng một thời điểm mỗi tối và ngủ từ 6-8 giờ liên tục mỗi ngày. - Không ăn hoặc uống 4-5 giờ trước khi ngủ. Nếu bạn cảm thấy đói hoặc khát, ăn một miếng nhỏ trái cây một giờ trước khi ngủ cũng không sao. - Ngủ trưa khoảng 30 phút sau bữa trưa. 10. Thở sâu và thiền - Thực hành thiền định BS nổi tiếng Nhật Bản đúc kết cách sống không bệnh tật chỉ bằng ăn, tập, thở, ngủ - Ảnh 5. (Ảnh minh họa) - Rèn luyện suy nghĩ và tư duy tích cực. - Hít sâu và thở bằng bụng 4-5 lần/giờ. Thời gian thở ra phải gấp đôi thời gian hít vào. Điều này rất quan trọng vì hút thở sâu giúp loại bỏ chất độc và các gốc tự do. - Mặc đồ rộng rãi để thực hành thở dễ hơn. - Lắng nghe cơ thể của chính bạn. 11. Niềm vui và tình yêu - Niềm vui và tình yêu sẽ tăng cường cơ thể bạn bằng cách thúc đẩy các nhân tố enzyme. - Dành thời gian khen ngợi ai đó. - Cười - Hát - Nhảy - Sống đam mê với cuộc sống, công việc và yêu những người xung quanh bạn bằng cả trái tim. BS nổi tiếng Nhật Bản đúc kết cách sống không bệnh tật chỉ bằng ăn, tập, thở, ngủ - Ảnh 6. *Theo Wikipedia/Livestrong/Happyhealthylonglife http://soha.vn/bs-noi-tieng-nhat-ban-duc-ket-cach-song-khong-benh-tat-chi-bang-an-tap-tho-ngu-20170919151617121.htm

Dr. Hiromi Shinya, the Physician-Inventor of the Colonoscopic Polypectomy: What He's Learned About Diet and Health From Over 300,000 Colonoscopies

Hiromi

Dr. Hiromi Shinya in the early days of fiber-optic colonoscopy. Gastrointestinal Endoscopy 60(6):977-982, 2004

"It is no exaggeration that the development of the colonoscopy technique and polypectomy made Dr. Shinya famous throughout the world.

His experience to date amounts to almost 300,000 colonoscopy procedures.

[The question Dr. Sivak often asks gastroenterologists]

Of the many endoscopic procedures you will perform throughout your career, which do you think is the most important?

[The Answer] As we now know, removal of colon polyps prevents colorectal cancer, and colonoscopic polypectomy is the "most important" achievement, because it is preventive medicine at its best. Tell me, if you can, that there is something more important in GI endoscopy?"

-Dr. Michael Sivak, Jr., in "Polypectomy: looking back," Gastrointestinal Endoscopy 60:977, 2004-

A medical history lesson. Back in 1969, a young Japanese gastroenterology fellow at Beth Israel Hospital in New York City, Dr. Hiromi Shinya, developed the equipment & technique to endoscopically remove polyps, avoiding what before then meant major abdominal surgery. It was an historic breakthrough in the prevention of colon cancer.

Dr. Shinya is now 75 years old, he's still the Chief of Surgical Endoscopy at Beth Israel Hospital, and he's still performing colonoscopies, in the U.S. and Japan.

Why should we care?

A year ago, one of my readers from New York City mentioned that her long-time gastroenterologist, Dr. Hiromi Shinya, had written a book that was wildly popular (over 2 million copies sold) in Japan, called The Enzyme Factor. She found it interesting that Dr. Shinya was also advocating a low-fat almost vegan diet, similar to what I blog about, and what Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr. and Dr. T. Colin Campbell recommend.

Dr. Shinya published The Enzyme Factor in Japan in 2005 Dr. T. Colin Campbell published The China Study in 2006 Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr. published Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease in 2007. Three weeks ago I finally got around to borrowing a copy of the English translation of The Enzyme Factor from my library--but I only had it for a short time--there's a queue of others waiting to borrow it.

Shinya's book was directed to the lay Japanese public. It reads a little awkwardly, it's repetitive, it contains no scientific references, no statistics, no graphs or charts. It's a compilation of his years of clinical observations, plain language explanations of how the health of the digestive system affects disease, and how certain foods & habits can seriously impair the GI system. It can't compare to the scholarship of The China Study or Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease, with their depth of detail. But it does corroborate their message--and it adds to the evidence of how dairy, meat, fats, and oils can damage the digestive system, and promote disease.

Bottom line, according, to Shinya:

"Over the course of decades in clinical practice, examining literally hundreds of thousands of people as a gastrointestinal endoscopist, I have learned that when a person's gastrointestinal system is clean, that peson's body is easily able to fight off diseases of whatever type."

Whether one has a genetic predisposition toward heart disease, diabetes, colon cancer, prostate cancer, Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, or kidney disease---it's your diet and lifestyle habits that will be the switch that turns on the disease. And the switch to turn off the disease.

Shinya's clinical experience with early stage colon cancer patients corroborates Dr. Campbell's China Study experience: "The same nutrition that prevents disease in its early stages (before diagnosis) can also halt or reverse disease in its later stages (after diagnosis)." and "Nutrition that is truly beneficial for one chronic disease will support health across the board."

Two years after Shinya started examining stomachs & intestines with a scope he started asking his patients about their dietary history. Their were huge differences in the intestines he saw--the healthy ones were clean, soft, pink, with transparent mucous, invisible blood vessels, and uniform folds. The unhealthy ones were swollen, spotty, with thin stomach linings, shriveled mucosa, unequal folds, pocket-like cavities that were often ulcerated, pitted, filled with mucous, as well as stagnant stool. Shinya was determined to figure out if there was some connection between diet and intestinal health.

Shinya's Enzyme Factor Theory: Enzymes are the protein catalysts that are made within the cells of all living things--and they're needed to maintain life--think transportation of nutrients, digestion, excretion, synthesis, detoxification, decomposition, and supplying energy. There are over 5000 kinds of vital enzymes, each with specific jobs--like the digestive enzyme amylase that's found in saliva & reacts to carbohydrates.

Some foods like dairy products, meat, and alcohol require a greater-than-normal amount of a particular enzyme to break them down--creating a shortage of the necessary enzymes needed for digestion & absorption. The solution: Avoid the kinds of foods that deplete enzymes. Consume a plant-based diet and practice the habits that replenish & sustain enzymes. Shinya clearly admits that this is a theory, but one that he has personally practiced for over forty years--and one that has worked well for his patients.

After Viewing 300,000 Intestines & Stomachs, Dr. Hiromi Shinya Has Something to Say about Gastrointestinal Health

"Remember what over 300,000 clinical observations have told me: A person with poor gastrointestinal function is never healthy. When a person's gastrointestinal system is not clean, that person will be prone to suffer from some kind of disease.

In short, whether a person is healthy or not depends on what that person eats and how that person lives day to day. What determines a person's state of health is the daily accumulation of things such as food, water, exercise, sleep, work, and stress." Dr. Hiromi Shinya

Early on Shinya had his patients fill out a questionnaire detailing the foods they ate--and their lifestyle habits--things like, alcohol consumption, smoking, sleep habits, water consumption, laxative use, and bowel habits.

Based on his questionnaires and the conditions of the intestines he scoped, here's what he concluded:

Shinya's List of Ten Foods to Avoid--All are Associated with GI Disease & an Unhealthy GI Tract

1. Excessive Animal Protein--especially red meat

2. Dairy products such as cow's milk, cheese, yogurt, other milk products

3. Japanes green tea, Chinese tea, English tea (limit to 1-2 cups per day)

4. Coffee

5. Sweets and sugar

6. Nicotine

7. Chocolate

8. Fats & oils

9. Regular table salt (use sea salt with trace minerals)

10. Alcohol

Shinya's Keys to Good Health

1. Eat a diet that is 85-90% plant-based foods

50% whole grains, brown rice, whole wheat pasta, barley, cereals, whole grain bread & beans including soybeans, kidney beans, garbanzo beans, lentils, pinto beans, pigeon peas, black, white & pink beans 30% green and yellow vegetables and root vegetables, including potatoes, carrots, yams and beets, and sea vegetables 5-10% fruits, seeds & nuts Soymilk, rice milk, almond milk 2. 10-15% animal-based proteins (no more than 3 to 4 ounces per day):

Fish of any type, but preferably small fish as the large fish contain mercury Poultry: chicken, turkey, duck--small amounts only Beef, lamb, veal, pork - should be limited or avoided Eggs 3. Foods to add to your diet:

Herbal teas Seaweed/kelp tablets Brewer's yeast (good source of B complex vitamins and minerals) Enzyme supplements Multivatimin & mineral supplements Fish oil--particularly DHA 4. Good Water

Water is essential for your health. Drink "good water" such as mineral water or hard water, which has calcium & magnesium, and keeps the body at an optimal alkaline pH Adults should drink at least 6-10 cups of water every day Drink 1-3 cups of water after waking up in the morning Drink 2-3 cups of water about one hour before each meal 5. Regular Elimination

Start a daily habit to remove intestinal pollutants and to clean out your system regularly Do not take laxatives Eat high fiber foods--don't get your fiber from capsules or supplements 6. Decrease dependence on prescription drugs by modifying your diet & getting exercise when possible

Pharmaceuticals can tax the liver and kidneys Many chronic conditions such as arthritis, gout, diabetes, and osteoporosis can be managed with diet and exercise. 7. Minerals are important to health

Magnesium activates hundreds of different enzymes--and is required for good health. A balance of sodium & potassium is a prerequisite for life. Laxatives, diarrhea, excessive exercise can deplete sodium. A diet high in vegetables boosts potassium. Too much calcium after middle age can be harmful Small amouts of trace minerals work synergistically with vitamins, minerals, and enzymes: boron, copper, zinc, iron, selenium, chromium, manganese, molybdenum, & iodine. 8. Moderate Exercise

Exercise appropriate for your age and physical condition is necessary for good health, but excessive exercise can release free radicals and harm your body Some good forms of exercise are walking (2.5 miles), swimming, tennis, bicycling, golf, muscle stregthening, yoga, martial arts, and aerobics 9. Adequate Rest - Shinya is a daily napper

Go to bed at the same time every night and get 6 to eight hours of uninterrupted sleep Do not eat or drink 4 to 5 hours before bedtime. If you are hungry or thirsty, a small piece of fruit may be eaten one hour before retiring, as it will digest quickly. Take a short nap of about 30 minutes after lunch. 10. Breathing and meditation

Practice meditation Practice positive thinking Do deep abdominal breathing 4 or 5 times per hour. The exhale should be twice as long as the inhale. This is very important as deep breaths help to rid the body of toxins and free radicals. Wear loose clothing that does not restrict your breath. Listen to your own body and be good to yourself 11. Joy and Love

Joy and love will boost your body's enzyme factor sometimes in miraculous ways Take time every day for an attitude of appreciation Laugh SIng Dance Live passionately and engage your life, your work, and the ones you love with your full heart Some Shinya Myth Busters

Shinya shares a lot information in his slim book. Far too much to share in a blog post. But, here are a few of the nuggets that caught my attention.

The Doctor's Sick Babies

Dr. Shinya's wife had difficulty breast feeding, so both of his children were put on formula made from cow's milk. His daughter cried a lot, and at six month's she developed an itchy miserable rash all over her body. At age three, his son developed chronic diarrhea & finally, rectal bleeding. Around this time Shinya had acquired his first primitive colonoscope, so he was able to examine his son, and discovered that he had an inflamed, ulcerative colon.

Needing to know the cause of his daughter's chronic rash, and his son's colitis, Shinya started investigating. Both of these conditions were uncommon in Japan, because at the time there was little dairy food used in Japan--but his young family were living in the U.S. Shinya suspected a connection to cow's milk. When he took away the milk his daughter's skin cleared up. He realized that because his daughter was unable to digest milk, "the undigested particles that were small enough to pass from her intestines into her blood were attacked by her immune system, as if they were foreign invaders. The same thing turned out to be true with his son." When they stopped the milk, the colitis disappeared--as did his daughter's atopic dermatitis.

As milk consumption in Japan has increased since the 1960's, so have the cases of atopic dermatitis.

According to Shinya, dairy foods can damage the intestinal environment, increasing the amount of bad bacteria, and destroying the balance of the beneficial intestinal flora, opening up the door to illness.

The Myth of Yogurt

Although yogurt is credited with improving intestinal flora, like lactobacilli, and benefiting digestion & relieving constipation, Shinya believes otherwise. He says, lactobacilli is naturally present in a healthy human intestine, and any lactobacilli you were to ingest from outside of the body in the form of yogurt would just be destroyed by stomach acid. Although yogurt might seem to "cure" constipation, what people are really experiencing is a mild case of diarrhea, because most adults lack enough of the enzyme lactase to completely break down lactose (and yogurt contains a lot of lactose). The yogurt is not actually "curing" constipation at all.

According to Shinya, "your intestine's condition will worsen if you eat yogurt everyday. I can say this with confidence based on my clinical observations."

The Green Tea Myth

We've all heard about the antioxidant benefits of green tea. There are all kinds of benefits attributed to green tea. Shinya disagrees. Yes, it does have antioxidants, but in his clinical experience, people who drink a lot of green tea also have stomach problems. Here's why: although it contains polyphenols that can neutralize the damage of free radicals, it also produces tannin. When tannin is exposed to hot water or air, it turns into tannic acid which coagulates proteins, and can have a negative effect on the gastric mucosa. "The fact is, when I use an endoscope to examine the stomachs of people who regularly drink tea (green tea, Chinese tea, English black tea or coffee that contains a lot of tannic acid) I usually find their gastric mucosa has thinned due to atrophic changes. It is a well known fact that chronic atrophic changes or chronic gastritis can become stomach cancer."

Bottom Line:

If not for the fact that Dr. Hiromi Shinya was a brilliant clinician and a pioneer in the field of colonoscopy, I would never have looked at this book. For me, its style and lack of journal references gets in the way of its scientific authority. But in spite of that, I can't ignore Shinya's clinical experience & his observations from over 300,000 colonoscopies. He's seen health and he's seen disease--and it appears that he's been able to figure out what contributes to that difference--whether or not you believe his "enzyme factor" theory.

My own experience with a plant-based diet for the past 2 1/2 years seems to agree with Shinya's dietary observations. I've ditched the dairy, the meat, and the oil. I've upped the beans, greens, vegetables, and fruit, and my digestive health has never been better--"as regular as a Swiss passenger train." Shinya claims his last illness was the flu, at age 19. As for me, my last cold was exactly a year ago. Should I credit my healthy intestines? http://www.happyhealthylonglife.com/happy_healthy_long_life/2010/12/shinya.html

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manamoeba · 7 years

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Candle, Bell and Book: The Exorcism of Daniel Goss

St. Patrick hit me like a pint glass to the eye this year, after a lot of misdirection and many assurances that he wouldn’t do it.

What was supposed to be a quiet and subdued birthday party for a friend saw me sitting up, drinking whiskey and talking about whatever meandering shit drunks talk about at 6.30 in the morning, with empty liquor bottles arrayed before me in accusatory phalanx on the coffee table. It was a full-24-hour long surprise attack, of which, 11 hours were spent drunk.

The next day was horrible and proceeded as follows.

The First Attempt at Resurrection

At 10am, Beth tried to wake me so she and the others could go to get breakfast. I don’t remember it, but in my incoherent rambling there was the assurance that I would be very upset if I missed out, and the forceful assertion that I was “sleepy.”

I then became completely unresponsive.

The Planets Align: He Rises

At 11.30am, with Beth’s assistance, I sat up and lurched from my bed. I’m fuzzy on this; she may have helped by having Igor throw the switch and flood my lifeless carcass with lightning. Whatever she did, it worked.

I became fully aware of the terrible penance that awaited me.

The Queue of Destiny

We made our uncertain way to Tavern Co, the purveyors of the single best breakfast I have ever known. Unfortunately, the entirety of Liverpool feels that way about it too, and since it was now noon, our unwholesome party would have to wait 40 minutes for a table.

I milled around in the crowd, waiting to hear my name called with the desperate grip of a terminal patient in a faith healer’s church, hoping to be chosen by God. A random man recognised me, despite the fact that I looked like a Walking Dead extra.

“Hey, you’re the singer from that metal band! Shatter the Skies! I saw you at Bandsoc!”

Two years on, it was pretty weird. I noted that I clearly did not look so far gone as to be unrecognisable.

A Desperate Gamble for Freedom

By the time our breakfasts appeared, I had become frantic. I was not hungover in the conventional sense. Instead, I felt like my soul had been rejected by my body, and I was in the process of being uniformly broken down by my own lymphocytes.

I had only one chance to escape my inevitable death, and it lay in ordering very carefully.

Fifteen minutes later I was looking at an exquisite eggs benedict with bacon, a light garnish and a single slice of orange; plus a stack of fluffy pancakes with banana, butterscotch and toasted almonds; a tall, cold glass of water, and a cup of black coffee. I could have cried.

Emergency Reboot

Breakfast was a complete success, and in its aftermath, it was as though my thoughts had been put on rails. I had only one destination in mind. The time had come to stop forcing my unnatural animation, to release my terrible grip on undeath and walk hand in hand with Jesus back into the void.

Back to bed.

The Long Afternoon

When I woke, I was a new man. The faint smell of spiritual rot still hung around me, and my entire body still moved in sinister and unwelcome ways, but the worst of my demons was gone.

The only way I could imagine spending the afternoon was by reading as much of the fever-dream work of Hunter S. Thompson as I could lay my trembling hands on.

The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved, The Song of the Sausage Creature, Doomed Love at the Taco Stand, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail.

The simple rightness of it helped me to plan the last stage of my recovery.

Made Whole by Candlelight and Running Water

Perhaps the single most important part of hangover recovery is in thoroughly showering, brushing your teeth, emptying your guts of whatever evil is lurking in there, and getting into clean clothes.

With that in mind, at 6 in the evening, it was time for a shower. The Scourging of Dan was coming to a close.

4/5ths of any relaxation is in the ambience, so I lit 8 or 9 candles and left the light off. I ran the water hot, and at some point during that transcendent shower, I was made whole again.

My day-long exorcism had ended. Traditionally performed with “candle, bell and book”, I had lived a strange ritual of coffee-bar service bells, books by unhinged American Gonzos and candles burning down in little terrace bathrooms.

Many evil spirits cannot cross running water, nor endure it, and by happy coincidence, that’s what a shower is.

I went into the evening free and clean.

Now I just need to get ready for it to happen again next year.

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ks-caster · 4 years

Text

By Winter Wind Kissed

Fandom(s): Rise of the Guardians, Frozen, heavily influenced by The Snow Queen (which is also what Frozen is based off of, but very loosely!)

Characters: Jack Frost, Elsa, Bunny, Pitch, The Man in the Moon

Some important background:

Elsa is a changeling child—the firstborn child of the king and queen didn’t survive, and the Man in the Moon needed a family to rise his half-human baby after her human mother passed, so he revealed himself to the monarchs and asked them to take Elsa as their own, which they did.

***Actually, she isn’t a changeling. Manny saved her as a child just like Yue from ATLA and Jack. Pitch just tells her that to stir up trouble, and no one can contest it, because the child the queen gave birth too was brunette, but Elsa is so very blonde.***

Since kids in our world didn’t believe in the Boogeyman anymore after the end of the Dark Ages, Pitch creates a portal to Arendelle and impersonates a seer, telling the king and queen that their newly adopted infant daughter, Elsa, is cursed. He does this partly to gain power and partly as revenge against Manny. As Elsa grows up and starts using her powers, her parents are concerned about her welfare and the welfare of the kingdom, since she’s not old enough for true love, (the magical cure-all) what do they do about controlling and protecting her until she comes of age? They’re NOT the worst parents in the world; they keep her in her room and try to keep her from letting herself feel upset because they don’t know what to do about the supposed curse. But Pitch influences Elsa and makes her fear herself, which in turn makes her powers more uncontrollable. Pitch also influences the manservant, Kai, to be more pessimistic and more malleable to the dark side.

The story is outlined in 3 parts. Chapters 1 and 2 are written an available under the cut, followed by the outline.

Chapter 1

Cold tendrils of panic thrilled through Elsa’s chest, branching out across her nerves and making her hands tremble, which in turn caused even more spires of ice to flake away from her skin, piling up on the floor and solidifying together to form a thick, crystalline buildup. The 9-year-old princess rubbed her hands together feverishly, trying to warm them, to get the snow to stop coming, anything, but the action only caused even more white frost to form, as if in response to the motions.

Elsa knew that getting upset made it worse, that if she panicked her powers would become even stronger, but how could she calm down when they were already going out of control? She had to thaw herself. The thick down comforter on her bed was already frozen stiff, so she ran into the bathroom and turned on the tap as far towards “hot” as it would go. Shedding her robe, she stepped into the tub in her nightdress, wincing as the water splashing over her feet and legs heated up and began to burn.

She crouched down quickly, before she lost her nerve, plunging her hands into the now steaming stream. The bathwater burned horribly, and the thick steam choked her as she gasped for breath. Did the water hurt because it was too hot, or because she was too cold? It had either become more intense, or the initial shock of it had worn off and she was fully aware of the heat. Either way, she felt like she was immersed up to her elbows in liquid fire, and tears formed in her eyes.

The steam was so thick… she couldn’t see, couldn’t draw breath… could someone actually die from scalding? Would anyone hear her if she screamed? Could she scream? She couldn’t breathe…

Another wave of panic hit, and she stood up quickly, splashing the bathwater everywhere as she climbed up onto the side of the tub to reach the window. She needed air. She needed it now. After a few fumbles, she got the latch open, but the window had been closed for a long time, and it was stubborn. She pushed against it with all her might, but it would not budge. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t breathe. The thick white steam obscured her vision—or was she just seeing stars?

Then with a wild howl like a living thing, the winter wind blasted past the window, and it burst open so suddenly that Elsa fell out onto the castle roof.

The princess lay curled up on the ice-slicked roof-tiles for a long time, watching dazedly as the steam billowed up over her head and disappeared into the night. It looked like smoke. Perhaps fire and hot water were not so different… But that was ridiculous, she told herself a she sat up and took a deep breath so she could lean back through the window, into the heavy steam, and turn off the water.

Her nightdress was soaked up to the bottom of her shoulder blades, and the December wind was bone-chilling, but it felt good, especially after all the steam. The water saturating her nightdress began to freeze in delicate strands around the threads of the fabric, and—in a combination of exhaustion and resignation—she let it, watching as the ice made the fabric sparkle in the silvery moonlight. But when the ice threads wove themselves down beyond her hemline, swirling and twisting like lace, and her nightgown-turned-ice-dress passed her feet and began to trail down the roof, she stared in silent horror for a moment before burying her face in her hands and weeping.

Why couldn’t she stop it? It wasn’t that she used her powers—they used her. The wind whipped up around her brushing almost heavily across her hair, like a hand on her head. She wanted her mother. But she didn’t want her parents to know how much worse it had gotten. And she couldn’t possibly climb back in and walk all the way to the royal suite with a skirt that fell nearly her height again past her feet. An updraft came rushing over the roof, gathering the icy folds and piling them up near her before they could fall over the eves and be visible to anyone who might happen to look up from the courtyard.

Although it was nearly midnight, there were still people below, scurrying around with armloads of evergreen boughs and red ribbon and pine cones. Christmas was less than a week away. The king had waited until the very last moment to have the grounds decorated, probably because he wanted the workmen to spend as little time as possible within the castle.

Elsa gazed longingly at the big, spangled pine tree they’d set up in the middle of the frozen fountain. This would be her second Christmas spent alone in her bedroom, except for the hour or so when her parents visited her. They’d have a brief parody of their traditional family celebration—presents and some sweets and carols. But Anna would likely come knocking part-way through, and then they’d have to take her away quickly, since Elsa was still not safe to be around normal humans.

“Chestnuts roasting on an open fire…” She sang softly to herself. “Jack Frost nipping at your nose…”

And right then, as she opened her mouth to continue, something gave her nose a sudden tweak.

Startled, she gasped and sat up straight, which moved her face back from whatever had touched her. Her eyes darted around the deserted rooftop. No one was there. Why would anyone be up there, unless another resident of the castle felt that a bath was not to their liking, and were too flustered to think of leaving the bathroom through the door? She was alone. She was always alone. Tears filled her eyes again, and she wiped the back of her fist across her face with angry roughness. It hurt. Why did everything hurt tonight? The tears wouldn’t stop.

Another wind brushed her fist, but the air seemed to hover around it. It was less like a breeze than like the way it felt when another person touched her hand…

Someone had grabbed her fist, and was holding on. Someone had picked her dress up. Someone had touched her head when she was crying. Someone had opened the window. Someone had nipped at her nose…

Seeing a person materialize out of thin air right in front of her wasn’t actually the weirdest thing Elsa had ever experienced. That particular honor went to the time she’d made a snowman stand up and dance around the throne room with Anna. But her eyes widened in amazement as a boy-shaped shadow obscured her vision, darkened and became solid, and then lightened to pale skin and a mop of white hair and big blue eyes, level with her own and staring straight at her.

Elsa sat perfectly still for a moment. There was a strange boy—man? Boy? Boy—on the roof of the palace. He had grabbed her fist in his long-fingered hand. His other hand was on the side of her head, his thumb on her cheek.

“…Be okay,” he was saying, and she realized he’d been speaking to her in a low, calming voice.

“Bed pardon?” she squeaked out. He blinked a few times. She held eye-contact, not really knowing how to act in this situation. Miss Manners did not really cover this.

“Wha—” he started, looking confused, and frowned. He looked more like the way a person looked when they were trying to decipher a passage in a textbook than someone asking someone else to repeat what they said. “Wait a minute,” he muttered, and his eyes suddenly got huge. “Can you…?” he whispered.

Elsa looked down at herself in terror. What had she frozen now? Her ice dress still glittered, and her hands developed more ice as soon as she looked at them. The stranger still had his hand on hers… she was going to give him frostbite! She yanked her hand away and stumbled to her feet, nearly falling over her skirt in the process. The boy looked taken aback and confused, but when he saw her falling, he reached out and caught her shoulder, steadying her.

“Careful! You don’t want to fall from up here,” he exclaimed.

“Don’t touch me!” She shrieked, stumbling back again. He froze, and she shrugged out from under his grasp, falling back against the bathroom gable. “I don’t want to hurt you,” she choked out, as more curlicues of frost branched across the tiles from her fingertips.

“You see me,” he whispered. She stared at him, blinking out more tears, saying nothing. But after a few moments, she realized he seemed to be waiting for an answer.

“Y-yes,” she said in a small voice. “Should I not?”

“No, yes! I mean, yes! I mean… You can see me—that’s great, that’s fantastic!” He had gone from looking concerned to looking ecstatic in seconds, and Elsa was so confused that she couldn’t even move to take her hands off of the castle and stop freezing it. The tears wouldn’t stop…

“Hey,” he whispered, loping across the tiles and crouching down so he was looking slight up at her. “What’s the matter? Did I hurt you when I dumped you out the window? I’m sorry.” He reached up and wiped her tears away with the knuckle of his index finger. The tears froze when they made contact with his skin, and Elsa blinked, but before she could get more upset, he twitched his fingers, flicking the ice droplets away.

“Hey, you have winter magic,” he commented with a grin. “And you can see me… Who are you, kid?”

“Elsa, crown princess of Arendelle,” she whispered. “And I think I should be asking you that question.”

The young man’s feet were bare, and he wore plain brown pants and a baggy dark blue shirt with a hood piled behind his neck and a pocket in the front. He was somehow standing on the roof of the castle, 6 stories from the ground, and the bathroom window was the only one open… Where had he come from?

He stood up and took a few steps back, reaching down and picking up a long staff with a crook at the end. Holding it, he dropped to one knee, bowing formally, but with a playful grin still on his face.

“Pleasure to meet you, your majesty,” he said with a wink. “I’m Jack. Jack Frost.”

Chapter 2

In 300 years of complete freedom and invisibility, Jack Frost found plenty of time for exploring. Sure, his first love was and always would be icing up streets and making snow days, but he couldn’t do that all the time. There were times when he’d made so many snow days that those pesky Guardians would threaten to stuff him in a sack and toss him in a dungeon somewhere if he didn’t let the children of the world learn at least enough to progress to the next grade in school. Although he enjoyed antagonizing the other spirits, he’d had to admit that the kids had less fun on his snow days when they heard their adults talking about how far school would have to be pushed into the summer to make up for all of them. Besides, he did have to be careful about causing too much buildup—nothing fun about people freezing to death, after all.

It was those years that he’d spend many months flying around the globe at breakneck speeds, searching through mountains and rivers and wilderness, poking into caves and testing how long he could make it snow in the desert. He did make a point to avoid freezing over Sandy’s castle—of all the Guardians, Sandy was the only one who was consistently polite to him. Obviously, he wasn’t much for conversation, so he couldn’t really assuage Jack’s constant refrain of loneliness, but Jack appreciated the little fellow’s decency.

He was flitting around the South Pole, glancing down crevices in the ice and confusing local penguins by creating his own out of ice and making them waddle around. It was winter down there, so even though it was the middle of the morning, the sky was inky black and peppered with stars. Normal day, normal South Pole, but Jack was surprised when the strong scents of pine and cedar wafted past his nose. He let his ice penguins dissolve back into snow—to the indignant squawks of the real ones—and followed the unexpected scent across the tundra and into an ice cave. Even if trees could have grown in the barren tundra where he was spending his weekend, they wouldn’t have grown down there, he reasoned in curiosity as he followed the twists and turns of the narrow tunnel in the ice.

After a few minutes, dim light appeared in front of him, and he emerged into an unfamiliar forest, within sight of a well-lit city street.

“This is… new,” he commented thoughtfully, making his way into the light. It was torchlight, and old-fashioned oil-and-wick street lamps, illuminating cobbled streets and quaint shops. Horses and carts bore riders and cargo up and down the lanes, and the people dressed in long cloaks and heavy boots.

“Or, old,” he corrected himself as he took in the scenery. With a cursory glance over his shoulder to make sure that the tunnel that had led him here hadn’t vanished into thin air or anything, he hopped up into the air, riding a swell of winter wind a hundred meters into the sky so he could get a better view.

The town was large and busy, set on a lake, with forest bordering it, and mountains in the distance across the water. A small, square-ish spit of land formed a peninsula off of the town and into the lake; on it was built a castle, the likes of which Jack hadn’t seen in use outside the north pole in many years. In the courtyard, men in fur and heavy wool were busy erecting massive Christmas trees, and stringing endless garlands across the parapets.

“A royal family that knows how to have a little fun, huh?” Jack mused with a grin, circling the castle. “Too bad it’s celebrating that angry Russian, but I like parties as much as any three-hundred-year-old kid.” He landed on the roof and walked along the ridge-pole for a few steps, wondering in vague interest what this place was, and what kind of magic could’ve transported him here. It obviously wasn’t some normal place on earth—he’d accessed it through an underground tunnel, and yet the sky spread out above him, perfectly unobstructed. Also, the full moon—which had been below the horizon at the south pole—shone full and bright in the middle of the sky.

“Guess there isn’t much point in asking what this place is, or how I got here, or anything like that,” Jack grumbled up at the ever-silent orb. “Yeah,” he grunted after a minute. “Didn’t think so.”

He was startled out of his sudden moodiness by the loud rattling of hands against glass—someone was pounding on a window near him. He ran a few steps to the source of the noise, and saw a warm golden glow within, and so much thick steam that nothing else was visible. The hands bashed against the window again, and Jack realized that the thing was heavy and covered in rust—it obviously didn’t open often. On the other side, a small pair of lungs were hyperventilating in panicked sobs.

“Uh-oh,” he muttered, and with a swipe of his staff, brought a gust of wind down at exactly the right angle to slam the window open.

Out toppled a little girl, blonde hair plastered to her face from the steam that billowed up behind her, nightdress soaked through, tear-tracks on her face. Immediately, she curled up and lay very still, breathing deeply, clearly trying to get ahold of herself.

“Whoa,” Jack exclaimed. “What happened? Are you okay? You can’t hear me—right. What happened, kid—did you try to boil yourself?” The little girl leaned back into the window, holding her breath, and a loud squeak of protest and the quieting of a dull background roar revealed that she’d turned off a tap. She sat back up again, hugging her knees and breathing deeply.

Although she was thoroughly wet, and her breath was misting in the air in front of her mouth, she wasn’t shivering. However, her eyes grew massively round as she watched ice crystals form at the hem of her nightgown and weave themselves into a long train that cascaded down the roofing tiles in front of her. After a moment of shock, she buried her face in her hands and sobbed.

“O-kay,” Jack said in slight confusion, mentally checking himself to make certain that he hadn’t thoughtlessly done something to her skirt. Apparently, the girl was enchanting it herself—although clearly not on purpose. “That was unexpected. Hey—” he added, kneeling beside her and putting his hand on her head, “calm down now, I’m sure you’ll be all right…” His hand passed right through her wet mop of golden hair, and he sighed. “Guess that’s something this place has in common with home,” he muttered.

Out of the corner of his eye, he watched as her ice dress started to progress over the eves and down the building, where the men decorating below might catch sight of it. Instantly, Jack leapt off the roof and gathered the snowy material in his arms, flying up to pile it near the little girl. She’d gotten her tears under control, and was now staring miserably at the courtyard. Somehow, her shoulders sank even lower, and she curled more tightly into herself. Jack crossed his legs and let the wind set him on the roof beside her.

“Hey, kid, c’mon,” he said, gesturing at the evergreens and holly, and surprising himself with the words that came out of his mouth. “It’s the most wonderful time of the year, isn’t it? That big fat jerk in the sleigh is going to deliver a bunch of new toys, and you’re going to have so much fun… No reason to let a little magic and some steam get you down. You just have to relax and have fun with it—then you’ll have it under control in no time.” He trailed off, since he had no way of knowing if that was why she was so upset, and she couldn’t hear him anyway.

“Chestnuts roasting on an open fire,” she sang in a low, forlorn murmur. Apparently she was aware that it was Christmastime, but that fact didn’t seem to be cheering her up any. “Jack Frost nipping at your nose…”

Although Jack knew she wouldn’t feel it, he couldn’t resist reaching over and giving her red nose a tweak. However, she sat up straighter, as if startled, and looked around in confusion, nose twitching briefly in protest.

“Wha—” Jack whispered. “Did you… did you feel that, kid?” The little girl sank back into her ball of misery a moment later, and tears began to spill anew out of her eyes. She scrubbed her fist into them to wipe the tears away, and the sob that escaped her when she did sounded more like pain than just sadness.

“Whoa, take it easy there, slugger!” Jack exclaimed, laying a cautionary hand on the girl’s fist. “You’ll give yourself a black eye or something.” The girl’s eyes widened, and she hiccupped a little. Jack cupped his free hand on the side of her face, wiping her tears away gently with his thumb. “Just breathe, kid. Everything’s gonna be okay.”

“Bed pardon?” the girl squeaked out. Jack blinked a few times, looking into the wide blue eyes.

“Wha—” he started with a frown, and then realization hit him like a slush-ball to the back of the head. She was looking right at him, like she was waiting for an answer. “Wait a minute,” he muttered, his own eyes widening to match hers. “Can you…?” he whispered. It was impossible. After three centuries of solitude, of doing everything he could think of to get someone—anyone—to see him, could she really…?

The little girl dropped her eyes in terror, and then yanked her hand away and stumbled to her feet, nearly falling over her skirt in the process.

“Careful!” Jack exclaimed, catching her just in the nick of time. “You don’t want to fall from up here.”

“Don’t touch me!” The little girl shrieked, stumbling back again. Jack froze, allowing her to wriggle her way out of his grasp and back up until she was leaning against the gable of the window she’d escaped through. “I don’t want to hurt you,” she choked out.

“You see me,” he whispered, still completely astounded. The girl stared at him, blinking out more tears.

“Y-yes,” she said in a small voice, after several moments’ pause. “Should I not?”

“No, yes! I mean, yes! I mean…” Jack was smiling so widely and his heart was pounding so fast that he could barely form a sentence. “You can see me—that’s great, that’s fantastic!” He gestured wildly at her, still not quite able to believe this was happening. The girl gulped, and blinked out more tears.

“Hey,” he whispered, realizing belatedly that she was still upset. He loped across the tiles and crouching down so he was looking slight up at her. “What’s the matter?” he asked, hoping with all his heart that it didn’t boil down to, ‘there’s a strange man on my roof and I’m scared out of my mind.’

“Did I hurt you when I dumped you out the window?” he asked suddenly. “I’m sorry.” He reached up and wiped her tears away again. They froze when they made contact with his skin, and the girl blinked as Jack twitched his fingers, flicking the ice droplets away.

“Hey, you have winter magic,” he commented with a grin, finally putting the pieces together. “And you can see me… Who are you, kid?”

“Elsa, crown princess of Arendelle,” she whispered. That made a lot of sense, Jack decided in hindsight. “And,” she added with just a fraction more strength to her voice, “I think I should be asking you that question.”

Jack stood up and took a few steps back, reaching down and picking up his staff, which he’d set aside when he sat down. Holding it, he dropped to one knee, bowing formally, but with his ever-present playful grin still on his face.

“Pleasure to meet you, your majesty,” he said with a wink, although he meant it more than he’d ever meant another statement in his immortal life. “I’m Jack. Jack Frost.”

Outline:

Part One

Prologue: Elsa reflects on how wonderful the window in her bedroom is—it entertains her, and makes a great excuse for random snowdrifts.

Chapter 1: Elsa’s attempt to thaw herself ends in disaster, and she meets Jack Frost on the palace roof.

Chapter 2: Jack—who came to Arendelle through a portal he found in the mountains on Earth—sees a frightened little girl and tries to help her, knowing she won’t be able to see him. However, she does see him, and after learning what is troubling her, he decides to take her on a “date” to cheer her up. He also makes her a bunch of roses, saying he’s sorry they’re made from ice and not real ones, but she says they’re perfect. They fly up the mountain and play with her powers, and she talks about how her little sister got hurt. Even though Jack doesn’t remember what happened with his sister, he feels a strong bond with the little girl. He returns her to the castle when the sun rises, promising to come visit again.

Chapter 3: Elsa and Jack hang out and play, in her room, on the rooftops, on the mountain. He’ll come and sit in her window and she’ll draw up a chair and they’ll talk for hours. Each is the only person the other has to talk too who doesn’t spend half the conversation telling them what to do. When Gerda and the King and Queen come in and catch them, Elsa introduces Jack. They assume she’s talking to an imaginary friend, and they greet him, even though they can’t see him, because they don’t want to rain on her parade. However, the first time Kai comes in and she introduces Jack, he tells her there’s no one there. (Kai has been influenced by Pitch, because Pitch liked feeding off of Elsa’s out-of-control fear, but she’s not as out of control when Jack’s around.) Jack comes clean and admits that most people can’t see him; you can’t see him unless you believe in him. Elsa asks how anyone can see him, then, because they wouldn’t believe in him until they saw him. He counters by asking why she believed in him. She says she felt him and saw what he did, so she believed in him, and then she could see him, and that was that.

Chapter 4: Jack sees Elsa have a panic-attack during the second verse of “do you wanna build a snowman,” and he realizes that Anna’s presence is a fear-trigger for Elsa. He grabs her, hops out the window, and flies her in a flurry of snow all the way to the mountain, in broad daylight, and they stay there until she calms down. She admits that Anna must be lonelier than she is, since she has a best friend, and Anna doesn’t. They hug, and Jack takes her back to the palace.

Chapter 5: The king walked into Elsa’s room (somehow triggered by Pitch) to find it empty, and just as he starts to really freak, Elsa lands on the roof outside the window in a flurry of snow. The king is very upset, and demands to know where she’s been. She responds awkwardly that she wasn’t feeling well, so Jack took her out to get some air. The king—concerned that her powers are even more out of control—tells her that no one took her out, she did it herself, with her powers, and she shouldn’t do it anymore, because someone could get hurt. She insists that Jack Frost is real, and starts listing things he does that make her know he’s real. Her father insists that each thing was either her powers or her imagination. She finally says that they always know when Jack is in the room and they can see him, but the king admits that they didn’t want to rain on her parade with her imaginary friend, so they played along. Elsa is badly shaken after he leaves, and when Jack comes again later that night to see if she’s doing okay, it’s a while before he can get her to see or hear him.

Chapter 6: Elsa now has a new fear—a fear of losing Jack. She asks him to make her something—anything that he thought up and she didn’t think of herself. So he designs earrings for her out of ice crystals, and when he’s not there, she fidgets with them constantly, as if trying to remind herself that he’s real. She speaks more quietly now, and stops talking to him when another person enters the room. For some reason, when Gerda sees her sitting, apparently doing nothing, she looks sad, and seems to look right at Jack for a moment before leaving the room when she’s done changing the sheets. Later, Jack confronts her about being able to see him, and she says that she can, she just never saw the need to mention it. “You are there—you exist. I know it, you know it, she knows it… It should not be so hard to convince others of such a simple truth.” (Fix that line—it sucks.)

Chapter 7: Jack doesn’t spend all of his time in Arendelle; his friendship with Elsa convinced him to keep trying with other kids, so he goes back to earth and does his thing all the time. So when the king and queen’s ship goes down, (Pitch sinks it) he doesn’t hear about it until a few weeks later. When he returns to Arendelle, the flags are at half-mast and the country mourns. Since no one can see him, he can’t demand of the nearest bystander which royal(s) died, so he rushed to the castle in terror, thinking it could be Elsa. Elsa is alive, but not responding, and her room is completely frozen over. She also put away all of her toys and childish things—including her earrings. Jack tries to comfort her, but passes right through her, and she can’t hear him. He tries everything he can think of, to no effect, but has hope when he realizes that she’s non-responsive to Anna and the servants as well. He thinks maybe she’s just catatonic, and resolves to do everything in his power to make her see him so he can help her.

Chapter 8: for one year, Jack tries everything he can think of to make Elsa see him. On earth, that winter is the most tepid in history, because he isn’t there to make it crazy. The people chalk it up to global warming, and there’s a massive scare. He enlists Gerda’s help, but there’s a limit to what she can do, since Elsa can’t see Jack, and she is convinced that her powers are just acting up every time he uses his to try and reveal himself. Jack becomes depressed and frustrated, and he tries to stay positive, but it’s hard to do while he is suffering himself and he’s having to watch his best friend suffer and grieve. As time passes, the regents and councilors begin to visit Elsa more and more often, educating her in how to be a queen. The more mature she acts, the less hope Jack has of ever getting her to see him again. He also realizes how darn much he cares about her. In a last-ditch effort, on her nineteenth birthday, he tries to kiss her, because he’s always heard so much about how a kiss is the ultimate cure for negative magic and all that jazz. When it doesn’t work, he begins to wonder if it’s him that doesn’t believe. He leaves Arendelle and returns to earth, where he makes up for his absence with the coldest, most savage winter in living memory.

Part Two

Prologue: A recap of the movies, Legend of the Guardians and Frozen, from Pitch’s point of view, explaining his role in each. Elsa’s 21st birthday and crowning ceremony took place about eight months after Pitch got dragged away by his own nightmares. He escaped into Arendelle and recuperated, feeding off of Elsa’s and the advisors’ fears. True love saved Anna and Elsa, and the people of Arendelle are happy. The fear climate is much less potent, so Pitch has retreated to a cave somewhere to recuperate yet again. But his next attempt to gain power will center around Arendelle…

Chapter 1: It’s been a year since Pitch was defeated, and the Guardians begin feeling like he’s has been too quiet. They know he’s out there somewhere, and even though he’s weak, he’ll likely be plotting revenge. They search for him, and the man in the moon warns them that he has left that world, and is no longer within his sight. The other Guardians are confused by this, but Jack realizes what it must mean. He leads them to Arendelle, and explains how he found the portal years ago. The Guardians go through the portal and travel through the country of Arendelle. The original four are all visible, but Jack is not. The others are surprised, because the culture seemed primitive enough that the average person should still believe in all the superstitions, including Jack Frost. Jack explains that any legends of Jack Frost that might still have existed there were generally attributed to Elsa and others like her who may have existed in the past. Once Elsa’s name comes up, Bunny—in all his “tact?”—must have the full story. “A girl with powers like yours… with whom you appear to be on a first-name basis? What’s that say about her personality?” So Jack has to tell the story of Elsa—abbreviated version, because he’s still kind’a torn up about it. The Guardians all (including Bunny, in his own way) insist that Jack should try again, now that he’s got more kids on the other side who believe in him.

Chapter 2: Elsa has been ruling the country for a year, and although they’ve had magical peace, diplomatic relations with other countries have been tense at best, downright hostile at worst. The people of Arendelle have accepted their queen’s abilities, but their neighbors take issue with the fact that she could freeze them over in a single day if she felt like it. Issues with travel and commerce are erupting everywhere, and Elsa’s hands are full all the time. She is extremely overworked, and desperately in need of a vacation. Anna keeps trying to convince her to relax, but that actually just makes the whole thing worse, because Elsa feels like she can’t take a break, and so being told too is frustrating. The Guardians look in on her, and she can’t see any of them, but Anna sees all five of the immediately, and after she tells Kristoff that there’s people in front of him, he believes her, because even though he can’t see them, he trusts his girlfriend. Gerda is also able to see all of them, and welcomes Jack back a little sadly.

Chapter 3: The Guardians wholeheartedly take up the task of making Elsa believe in Jack. They try their hardest, and fail fantastically. She is entirely too practical. She knows that dreams are only dreams—although she cries when she wakes up and realizes they weren’t real. She assumes that the people writing messages in candy canes and egg dye are actually Anna, Kristoff and Olaf, attempting to amuse or annoy her, depending on the day. When she finds things under her pillow, she either blames Gerda or her own carelessness. (I can’t decide what she thinks of the earring they unearth…) Meanwhile something sinister is going on behind the scenes. Pitch has controlled Kai to get him to add small doses of poison to Elsa’s food, so she becomes ill. At first she thinks—and Anna agrees loudly—that she’s overworked and has gotten a cold just from being tired all the time. Elsa tries to rest a little and recuperate, but she’s so afraid of what will happen if she doesn’t personally handle the diplomatic stuff, or worse, if the country was attacked and she couldn’t unleash her powers to defend it. Her fear makes Pitch even stronger. Dark storm clouds gather in the East and progressively cover more of the sky.

Chapter 4: Elsa’s cold gets worse so it’s like the flu, then strep, then full-blown pneumonia. She gets word that [the country on Arendelle’s Western border] has amassed an army and is getting ready to march on them. She gives the order for their army to prepare to defend their borders as well, and both armies man the lines and face off. What she doesn’t know is that Pitch scared her into mustering her army and them into mustering their army with the exact same intelligence report, just flipped around. Fear did the rest. Elsa becomes bedridden, and Tooth Fairy figures out she’s being poisoned by the way her teeth look—somehow. The Guardians go to the kitchens to find the culprit, and they capture Kai. Jack goes immediately to Elsa’s room to keep her from consuming any more poison. There’s a pitcher of water on her night table, left there by Kai. She wakes up thirsty, and Jack figures out that that’s where the poison is, and freezes the water in the cup. Elsa thinks she did it herself, just like the other times, and unfreezes it. Jack dashes the cup out of her hand, spilling the water. She believes shes was clumsy because she was sick. Jack wracks his brains for a way to get through to her, and then it hits him—if the water disappeared, she couldn’t possibly think that was an accident. Without hesitating, he snatches the pitcher and downs every drop.

Chapter 5: Elsa stares at the space where the pitcher hovers in the air, and starts shaking her head. Jack throws the cup at the wall, walks over to her and grabs her face. He demands that she see him, that she acknowledge that he’s there. She puts her hand up and touches the back of his hand—she can feel something there. She takes his hand and presses her palm against his, her fingers lining up with each of his… Then her eyes travel down his arm, up his shoulder, and finally lock on his face. She whispers his name and then collapses in his arms. When Bunny comes in to check on Elsa, she and Jack are on the floor, holding each other and crying. In a rare moment of tact, Bunny makes eye-contact with Jack and then sneaks off to give the two some privacy. Jack and Elsa have a lot to talk about once they get ahold of themselves. First Jack puts Elsa back to bed; she’s still really sick, after all. He sits down next to her, still holding her hand. Elsa figures out that he’s been there for days, trying to get her to see him. They’re just getting the chance to talk about what happened when the door swings open. Jack turns around to greet Anna or North or whoever, and finds himself face to face with Pitch. Elsa asks who that is, and Jack is shocked that she can see him right off. Pitch explains that there are so many people out there who have it in for her that one more isn’t too much of a stretch for plausibility. Elsa forces herself to sit up and speak to her self-proclaimed enemy with royal dignity. Despite his dislike for maturity, Jack is proud of the way Elsa behaves towards Pitch. Pitch tells her that her parents aren’t her real parents; that she’s just the half-breed bastard of Manny and some human wench. He says she has no right to the throne, and that if she doesn’t resign it, he will catapult Arendelle into war with all of her neighbors.

Part Three

Prologue: A brief recap of what’s happened so far, then a meeting in Elsa’s room with the Guardians, Elsa, Anna and Gerda. North gives Gerda the bottle they found when they searched Kai (who escaped after being searched) and she identifies the poison as a rare toxin from the dark, mysterious Island of Spitsbergen. She says there’s a woman—the Finland Woman—who will know how to make a cure, but she lives far away—quest distance. Elsa announces her resignation of the throne.

Chapter 1: Everyone is shocked and horrified, especially Anna. Elsa explains that her abilities are a source of consternation to people who don’t know her, so even without Pitch’s interference this might have happened. With a full-blooded human (whether or not Pitch is lying about her parentage) on the throne, the other countries will no longer have a reason to attack. Also, she’s dying of the poison, which is detrimental to a ruler’s abilities if anything is. Jack says he’s going to get her the antidote no matter where it’s hiding, so she doesn’t have to worry about that part, and she responds that she’s coming with. She has to leave Arendelle for a while so that people will feel safer. Jack changes “I” to “we” obligingly, although he still looks worried, since, obviously, Elsa can barely stand on her own. Gerda nips off to mix them up a remedy, now that she knows what poison it was, which will get Elsa back on her feet and keep Jack on his for a few weeks at least. However, the poison has taken Elsa’s powers away almost completely, and made Jack’s very weak. They prepare for their quest, and the Guardian realize they have to split up; North stays in Arendelle to help Anna rule. Tooth goes back to Earth to guard the kids back home while the others are away. Bunny and Sandy go with Jack and Elsa, as extra protection, since they’ll be near Spitzbergen and Pitch’s hideout. Also, Jack is now visible to everyone, since his powers are waning.

Chapter 2: Jack, Elsa, Bunny and Sandy set out on their journey. They have enough of the antidote to last them until Christmas; Gerda doesn’t have an endless supply of the main ingredient—also native to Spitzbergen. North lends them the sleigh, which can still fly, even in summer. Bunny won’t even get in unless Elsa’s driving, since Sandy is narcoleptic and Jack’s a maniac. Elsa puts on normal clothes for the first time in forever. Her shoes are red, paralleling the original Snow Queen. Jack will NOT wear shoes. Elsa and Jack start getting used to each other again, although it’s awkward, since she stopped believing in him for so long, which was rather hurtful. She feels guilty, so she’s acting odd, holding him at arms’ length. He has forgiven her, but he’s sad that she’s being so, well, cold. It’s also a little confusing for him, because he became attracted to her while she couldn’t see him, and this is the first time they’ve been together since he started liking her as more than friends. They follow a river through the countryside for several days, based on Gerda’s directions, and reach a mansion with endless, sprawling gardens. The woman who owns the house offers them food and shelter, and they accept her hospitality. However, she is a powerful enchantress who wants Sandy, because his dream sand would make her garden magic more potent, and the flowers in her garden have a scent that makes a person forgetful and lethargic…

Chapter 3: The four travelers spend a few days (actually more like a month) in the sorceress’s flower garden. Bunny is happy because it’s spring-ish, Sandy is happy because the atmosphere is so peaceful, and Jack and Elsa are affected by the fumes from the flowers. One day, Jack sees Elsa lying in a hammock, looking at the flowers, and she says they look like ladies’ skirts. He says he can imagine her making dolls out of them when she was a child. She says she would have. Jack starts making up stories for each different blossom (like the ones in Anderson) and the two get closer. Elsa says she can remember him doing the same kind of thing when she was a kid. Then she gets all guilty about forgetting him. He insists that he’s not angry, and they talk about it and resolve things. Then he brings her a bunch of roses, saying he’s sorry they’re real and not made from ice, like they would have been otherwise. (Mirroring the first time he brought her flowers when she was a kid.)This gets Elsa thinking about their power loss, and she suddenly asks Jack how long they’ve been there. The two realize that they’ve been enchanted, but agree to act as though they’re still bewitched until they can snap Bunny and Sandy out of it and all escape together. Jack puts a rose in Elsa’s hair, “so you’ll remember,” and she ties one around his staff in return.

Chapter 4: Anna discusses the slightly improved political situation and her personal fears with North, who is able to advise and encourage her. The questers are still in the witch��s garden. Jack puts his cold hand on the back of Bunny’s neck to freak him out, and they all just carry Sandy. The reindeer are lethargic and difficult to move out of the stables. Outside, a month has passed and it’s beginning to get slightly nippy out. The sleigh is dusty and full of leaves when they return to it, but it will still fly, so they hitch up the deer and get going. The rose on Jack’s staff starts looking dark and frostbitten, but Elsa’s is still in full bloom. They cross the border from Arendelle into Lapland, and Elsa talks about how incredibly smart the princess of Lapland is—she married a commoner, and probably won’t have the fertility issues most of the world’s royalty suffer. Jack feels like this is too much information, but Bunny asks what she means. She explains how the royals all intermarry, so they’re all marrying their cousins, really, and the genetic corruption from keeping the same genes together too long makes it really hard for royal couples to conceive. It’s only recently that anyone figured out why the average queen needs magical intervention to have kids. Most royals also have really small feet. It was the princess of Lapland—who is extremely intelligent—who realized what the problem was. It was she who had the laws against royals marrying commoners repealed in Lapland, a move repeated by most of the major countries once they saw her research. She’s Anna’s hero, since Anna and Kristoff are engaged. The Princess herself—Sophia—is married to a commoner, and her father is scheduled to retire and give her the throne on New Year’s Day. Sandy, using pictures, asks whether the princess, since she’s so clever at research, mightn’t be able to whip up an antidote herself. They decided that even though Elsa might be recognized, Bunny and Sandy could sneak in invisibly and take a look around.

Chapter 5: Arriving in the capital of Lapland, the travelers run across a street festival celebrating the harvest time and the opening of the marketplace. Jack gets Elsa to dance with him, saying fun is an important priority, and accusing her of not having danced with anyone since she was 12. He’s right, although she won’t admit it, and they dance. Elsa finds herself thinking that Jack is pretty easy on the eyes. Bunny and Sandy sneak invisibly into the palace to take a look around to see if the princess even does research on antidotes. After the dance, Elsa and Jack go to get them a room at an inn. Elsa ends up being hassled by some drunken thugs and Jack comes to her rescue rather amusingly. A nice woman says bravo to Jack’s performance, and buys them both drinks. She admires Elsa’s shoes.

Chapter 6: Bunny and Sandy sneak into the princess’s study, and she sees them immediately, and demands to know why they’re there. Bunny explains their quest, and the princess says she doesn’t have the means to help, although she does warn them that Elsa needs to be back in Arendelle by Christmastime, since the other countries are all gearing up for war, and Anna is certainly not a military commander. The prince comes in and says he got a report that his sister’s gang is still active, and they made off with some travelers from an inn. He’s planning on tracking her down with a group of soldiers. Bunny and Sandy realize that the travelers are Jack and Elsa, and go with the prince to rescue them. We learn that Jack was drugged by the “nice woman,” but Elsa only pretended to be knocked out; she has learned to be wary of what she drinks. She is able to conceal a small blade in her sleeve. They are taken to the robbers’ hideout in the woods, and Jack wakes up and sees where they are.

Chapter 7: The Robber Baroness says that she knew Elsa must be royalty from somewhere, because she’s an adult woman with tiny feet, in those gaudy red shoes. She takes the shoes and gives them to her daughter, who is 11 and fits into them perfectly. She then demands to know who Elsa is and where she comes from and how much she’s worth. Elsa says she’s the duchess of Weaselton, daughter of the duke, and that she’s traveling because she was turned out of the house, and her father is broke anyway because of the horrible way he was cut off economically by Arendelle after the Snow Queen Incident (which is what the incident is called in other countries). When they ask who Jack is, Elsa just blurts out that they were eloping, because her father wanted her to marry richly and bring more money into the family, and she wanted to marry for love. Jack is slightly bamboozled, but plays along. The robber daughter says she likes them and wants to keep them; she’s never had a pet duchess before, and Jack would make a good servant. Her mother, who is extremely indulgent and was just going to kill them since there’s no ransom available, gives them to her. Robber girl takes them to her room and then comes all alive, saying how amazing she thinks the power of true love is, and how much she wants to help them because lovers should always be together, no matter what. She says that the best time to escape would be in the morning, because the other robbers will get drunk tonight and sleep in. Jack and Elsa play with the little robber girl, who really has no friends. When she goes to sleep, Jack asks Elsa about what she said about them eloping. She says it was the first think she thought of under pressure. He says he’s glad, and then he winks, rolls over and pretends to snore. She says she knows he’s fake sleeping, and leans over him, wondering if he could possibly have passed out that fast. Their faces are very close. He opens his eyes, smiles, they get close like they’re going to kiss, then he kisses her cheek and tells her to get some sleep, because they’ve got an early morning ahead.

Chapter 8: The prince, soldiers, Bunny and Sandy arrive at the robbers’ camp, and it turns violent. The prince’s older sister is the robber baroness, and they duel. The Little Robber Girl, Jack and Elsa wake up and rush outside to see what all of the hullabaloo is about. They attempt to stop the feud between the prince and the robber woman, but the two are impossible to tear apart. The daughter says this happens a lot, and the two will fight one-on-one for hours, neither one gaining any headway, until, badly injured and exhausted, each will be bodily carried off by their respective men. She advises them to leave as soon as possible and not get involved. She tries to take off Elsa’s shoes, but Elsa says she should keep them; they’re good children’s shoes, but on an adult they attract too much attention. The travelers leave quickly, flying away in the sleigh.

Chapter 9: The four questers journey Northwest, still headed for Finland. The first snow starts falling, and even though Elsa can now feel cold, she takes off her jacket and (stuffed, grown-up sized) boots because the snow’s just so amazing and she wants to feel it on her skin. Bunny asks her if she doesn’t ever get sick of seeing snow, considering her power. She counters by asking him if he ever felt the urge to paint coffee mugs or pinecones. She says she sees lots of snow, but it only falls for the first time once each year. Jack pretends to be mesmerized by the snowfall, but really he’s mesmerized by her, standing there like a queen bee amid a swarm of little white worker bees. Just then, nightmares attack, and the sleigh is damaged and crash-lands. Jack shoots ice as best he can, but his powers are weakened and his leg is broken. (“Jack If-You-Had-A-Middle-Name-I’d-Use-It Frost, you are NOT going to freeze your own tibia back together! Sandy, find me something I can use for a splint!”) Elsa uses Jack’s staff and blasts some nightmares away. Bunny and Sandy fight most of them off. Once they’re gone, Jack is all excited because Elsa was able to use her powers, but when she tries again, with and without the staff, she can’t do it. She explains that it was probably because she was really afraid and upset. As the snow falls faster, Bunny says that she shouldn’t have a problem finding the right stimulus after a while.

Chapter 10: Elsa is barefoot, Jack’s leg is in a splint, and Bunny’s right shoulder is badly hurt. They start journeying in the direction of the home of an old friend of Gerda’s, whom she said would give them aid and shelter if they needed it when they passed by her. However, nightmares attack again and again through the long, dark nights and cold, dim days, and no one can really sleep. They all become hungry and irritable, and Jack goes off on his own for a chance to cool his head. He is captured by Pitch’s minions, but he warns the others to run.

Chapter 11: Elsa, Bunny and Sandy run for their lives and arrive at the Lapland Woman’s house, but Bunny is hurt so badly that he reverts to small form. Jack had their supply of antidote on him, so Elsa’s clock is ticking; she has three days before she becomes sick again, and maybe seven to ten before she dies. Luckily, the reindeer ended up coming towards the warm, food-y smell of the Lapland Woman’s house when they were scattered in the attack on the Sleigh, so Elsa is able to ride one on her journey to Finland. Meanwhile, Jack is taken to the Island of Spitzbergen, where Pitch’s doom castle is. Pitch interrogates him about where Elsa and the others went, but he refuses to talk. Pitch destroys the last of the potion, so now Jack’s clock is ticking too. He won’t die, but the sickness will be terrible for him, and he will lose his powers completely. Well, if Pitch doesn’t kill him first. (The destruction of the antidote dose by dose and Pitch’s description of how the toxicity will progress are all the interrogative tools needed for this chapter, aside from Jack being hit a few times. This will keep up the suspense without making it graphic.)

Chapter 12: Elsa, with Bunny in her satchel and Sandy in front of her on the reindeer’s neck, rides for Finland, for her life and for Jack’s. The Lapland Woman gave her a bow and arrows, and when the nightmares come, Elsa shoots while Sandy uses his whips. They are about to be taken down, but a massive snowstorm starts, and they land under cover of all the whiteness. They can’t fly again or they risk being seen by nightmares, so they walk, guided by a bobbing red light. When Elsa and the reindeer are completely exhausted, they rest against a snowdrift. In the morning, a whole herd of reindeer have gathered around, warming the air with their body heat and welcoming the travelers in their odd reindeer way. Their leader, Rudolf, guided the questers through the storm.

Chapter 13: On the third day, Elsa wakes feeling dizzy and weak, with a pounding headache. By nightfall, she’s slumping over Rudolf’s neck in a daze. (Rudolf and the herd are taking them the rest of the way there, because the other reindeer is so exhausted from carrying them so far.) On the morning of the fourth day, Bunny has a hard time getting her to wake up at all, and she can barely stand. Sandy has to use dream sand to get her onto Rudolf’s back. Her whole body is in pain, and it’s all she can do not to cry out at every tiny movement. She murmurs Jack’s name often. Jack isn’t feeling too well either in his prison cell, and he thinks of her also. The nightmares have been scouring the land, searching for the travelers, but a migrating herd of reindeer is of no interest. When they pass overhead, Elsa swings under and rides below Rudolph’s belly, clinging to his fur. But on the fourth day, she falls off, and they gather around to hide her. On the fifth day, she is unable to do it at all, and the nightmares see her. They attack, and Rudolph tries to run with Elsa and the boys, because they are so close to the Finland Woman’s house. However, they are overtaken, and he fights nightmares with his powerful antlers. Elsa stumbles onward, but collapses in a snowdrift. Bunny and Sandy cannot rouse her, so they run to the Finland woman’s house to get her to come to help Elsa.

Chapter 14: The Man in the Moon speaks to Elsa while she lays on the edge of death. He tells hew how he saved her as a child, but that she is certainly her parents’ daughter. He gives her strength, and focuses his glow on her so the Finland woman can find her, which she does.

Chapter 15: Elsa wakes up feeling weak, but healthy. The Finland woman has cured her, although it will be a little while before her powers are up to scratch again. She also mixed up a cure for Jack—now all they have to do is rescue him.

And this is where my outline ends :(

Elsa has to die at the end, so the Man in the Moon can bring her back as the spirit of freedom. Freedom and fun, now there’s a couple.

#Beth's New Year's Cleaning Queue #free to a good home #Any and all parts available for general use with credit #fanfic #fanfiction #writing #writing ideas #frozen #rise of the guardians #jelsa

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f4rmville · 3 years

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Wind developers are retrofitting newer projects with bigger, better blades

Xcel Energy recently received approval to repower a pair of wind farms originally built in 2015 to take advantage of improved technology and expiring tax credits.

Utilities and developers are repowering wind turbines with bigger, better blades years ahead of the end of their original life expectancies as they look to take advantage of technology improvements and expiring federal tax credits.

Xcel Energy recently won approval for a $750 million plan to retrofit four wind farms in Minnesota and North Dakota, two of which were built in 2015. The oldest of the batch originally started generating power in 2008.

Wind farm contracts and decommissioning plans generally set life expectancies around 25 to 35 years. By repowering the projects long before that, utilities are able to boost output around 10% or more, adding power to the grid without facing fresh permitting or interconnection hurdles.

“It’s a smart thing to do,” said Beth Soholt, director of the Clean Grid Alliance, a renewable energy advocacy nonprofit. Soholt noted that the added generation means additional federal tax credits, which helps lower the cost of power. “It’s also a good benefit for ratepayers.”

A Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory study on the wind industry reported a mean age of 11 years for turbines reengineered in 2019. Wind farm owners repowered 1,828 turbines producing 2,864 megawatts, with the most common change being an increase in the size of the rotor diameter. Tower height rarely changed, the report said. The data covered “partially repowered” projects that replaced equipment rather than the entire turbine, an approach Xcel will use.

Repowering represents a substantial chunk of the wind industry’s growth. In 2019, about 2 gigawatts — or one-fifth of all wind projects constructed in the United States — were repowering projects, according to the American Clean Power Association. A recent report from Wood Mackenzie suggested at least 3 gigawatts of repowering projects would be completed this year.

NextEra Energy Energy Resources, one of the country’s largest wind developers and a presence in Minnesota’s wind industry, reported last year that it had repowered 60% of its fleet over the past five years. Another 2 gigawatts of repowered NextEra Energy projects will come online by 2022, including an Iowa wind farm that sells power to Minnesota-based Great River Energy.

“We know that developers are constantly trying to juggle and hedge the risks associated with transmission infrastructure costs and upgrades,” said Jessi Wyatt, an associate energy planner and analyst with the Great Plains Institute. “We also know that the technology is advancing in leaps and bounds, and very well could be making the economic case to the developer to repower [retrofit or partial] earlier in the life of the system for that marginal increase in megawatt nameplate capacity between upgrade and simple end of life.”

Turbine owners can take advantage of the federal wind production tax credit as long as they spend enough on new equipment to qualify it as a new project in the eyes of the Internal Revenue Service, said John Hensley, vice president of research analytics at the American Clean Power Association (formerly the American Wind Energy Association).

The tax credit was set to expire at the end of 2020. In December, Congress voted to extend it one year as part of the COVID-19 stimulus bill. The lack of certainty has encouraged developers to repower sooner than they might have otherwise to claim the benefit.

The 2012 closure of Clipper, once a major wind manufacturer, also fueled at least a few of the repowering projects, Hensley said, as owners looked to replace Clipper equipment and rotors with newer models from existing manufacturers, Hensley said.

NextEra replaced 60 Clipper turbines with new GE technology and rotors at Endeavor Wind Energy Center I & II projects in Iowa. Great River Energy buys power from the wind farm, which started production in 2008 and repowered in 2019.

Digitization represents another significant advancement in just the past few years. Before, wind owners sought to optimize the output of each turbine. Today, the goal “is to optimize the entire site,” which could reduce some individual turbines’ production to increase overall production, he said.

“That’s enabled by the visualizations, the data analytics, the machine learning all those other kinds of data-driven insights that help an operator maximize the operation of the equipment,” Hensley said. “We’ve really seen that happen over the last five or so years, and going through these repowers helps you take advantage of some of those more sophisticated systems.”

Great River Energy renewable resource manager Mark Rathbun said repowering with new rotors and improved mechanics offers “better monitoring of the wind speed and direction, and control of the turbine and an increase in efficiency.” He also pointed to the Berkeley Lab report showing a slight decline in wind source quality for proposed projects, a finding that may result in more repowering of prized wind-rich sites.

Repowering projects also have an easier path toward being built than new wind farms. Contracts with landowners can be extended, along with interconnection agreements. Developers do not have to wait in a queue with the grid operator for the many approvals needed by new projects facing a more crowded grid, Hensley said.

Xcel said upgrading its four wind farms will save customers about $160 million in energy costs over the next 25 years. “Higher production from approximately the same amount of capacity means that, on average, each MWh [megawatt-hour] of energy is less expensive for the customer,” Xcel said. Ratepayers benefit through production tax credits and energy with no fuel costs associated with it, the utility added.

Counties get a bump in revenue, too. Mower County, home to two of Xcel’s projects, welcomes repowering. County administrator Trish Harren pointed to the 100.5-megawatt Grand Meadow Wind Farm, which opened in 2008 and pays around $625,000 annually to the southern Minnesota county, a figure that changes based on the wind farm’s output. After being repowered, the county will receive another $60,000 or more annually.

Repowering projects still need to be approved by regulators, which comes with potential hiccups. Xcel’s proposal generated plenty of debate after the state Department of Commerce declined to endorse the plan because of costs and the bidding process involved. At least one older Minnesota wind farm owned by EDF Renewables also notified the Public Utilities Commission last year that it would not repower its turbines after submitting a plan to do just that.

The Sierra Club and several clean energy organizations supported Xcel’s repowering portfolio and argued the company should consider retrofitting more wind farms. They believe the utility’s analysis was too conservative and that more wind farms could be cost-effectively repowered.

For now, Xcel will focus on repowering the four projects it owns, an initiative that will bring more than 700 temporary union jobs to parts of rural Minnesota and North Dakota while helping it reach a goal of 100% carbon-free electricity by 2050. “Modernizing our wind farms with new technology will increase the amount of low-cost, carbon-free wind energy we deliver to our customers,” a company statement said, “while saving money and putting people back to work.”

This article was first published by the Energy News Network and was reprinted with permission.

The post Wind developers are retrofitting newer projects with bigger, better blades appeared first on Renewable Energy World.

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ks-caster · 4 years

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Gone Fishing

Fandom: The Vampire Diaries

Characters: Caroline, Klaus

Summary: The trauma of Bill’s conditioning begins to catch up to Caroline, and as a result of his choice of stimulus, she can no longer tolerate bagged blood. Saddled with the vampire version of an eating disorder thanks to her dad’s idea of being the “good guy,” Caroline resorts to desperate measures, interpreting some advice from Klaus in the darkest and most violent way possible.

Basically, Caroline becomes a serial killer out of necessity - and Klaus wishes he could love it, but mainly he finds he’s just upset that her dad was such a dick.

Chapter 1, part of chapter 2 and my partial outline are available under the cut.

It wasn’t that he intended to stalk her.

Even Klaus knew how incredibly fake that sounded, but really, he didn’t keep tabs on where Caroline Forbes was and who she was with at all times—just, you know, when there was clear and present danger in Mystic Falls.

Which was practically always.

Whatever. Niklaus Mikaelson, hybrid king feared across the supernatural world for centuries, was not one to show chagrin at the accusation that he had merely stalked someone.

He really wasn’t watching her on this particular occasion, however; he was just out for a walk to clear his head in the night air after a particularly useless day of Jeremy Gilbert being Jeremy Gilbert, and her street wound and turned back on itself and basically made for a longer route than its neighbors. He hadn’t intended to listen in on the goings on inside the Forbes residence either, but when he noticed the Sheriff's squad car was missing but Caroline’s car was present and the lights were on, he smiled a little, and tuned his ears in, wondering if she was listening to music or watching TV or on the phone with Elena hearing the “team good-guy” perspective of Jeremy’s day.

What he did not expect—and what took him a moment to recognize because it was so unexpected—was uncontrolled, shattering sobs. He frowned, crossing the lawn in an instant to hear more accurately. A moment more told him that not only had he heard correctly the first time, but it was indeed Caroline sobbing, and it sounded like she was wailing in pain around something that had been shoved into her mouth.

Images of unknown attackers and Caroline with a gag in her mouth blossomed crimson across Klaus’s vision, and he was inside the house and standing in her bedroom doorway before the ragged, stifled cry had ended. However, a millisecond’s scan of the room with his eyes revealed her to be completely alone, curled up tightly on her bed and rocking back and forth in distress, her own hand clamped between her teeth. Her face was a mess of makeup rivulets and puffy eyes—she looked worse than when she’d run to him in Tyler’s body, believing him dead and her boyfriend about to follow, and that was easily the worst he’d ever seen her, including the time she’d nearly died of werewolf venom.

“Caroline?” he found himself whispering, not sure what to do. Her head jerked up, and he barely had time to register the trickles of blood along her wrist from where she’d bitten through her own skin before she was on her feet, hands shoving him back. In his surprise, she caught him off balance, and he stumbled a little before regaining his footing.

“Get out!” she shrieked, her voice cracking painfully in the middle as she lashed out, punching him in the chest with about as much force as the average human who’d had too much to drink and was therefore unsteady to begin with. It didn’t hurt him, but he caught her fist when she drew her other hand back all the same. She screamed again—not words this time, just a primal shriek as she tried unsuccessfully to wrench her hand free, before successfully backhanding him across the face. He caught her second hand and sped her up against the wall, pinning her there as she struggled and tried to kick him.

“What the hell’s gotten into you?” he growled. Even in such a state, she ought to have had the sense not to physically attack an Original, especially a hybrid. Verbal barbs or slamming of doors he’d expect out of a distraught Caroline Forbes, or if she was going to attack him (for whatever blinkered reason) slightly more skill. Shifting forward, he leaned into her, holding her against the wall, impervious to her struggles. She thrashed in his hold, kicking at his legs and feet, but when he was about as responsive as stone, she gave up, and fell limp in his grasp, head down, face shrouded by her unkempt hair as crying became her primary focus again.

After waiting a few moments to ensure that she wasn’t faking it (only to whoosh away as soon as he loosened his grip) Klaus released her wrists, picking her up in the same instant. She fell limp against his chest, the last of her energy going into curling up into herself and pressing the heels of her hands into her watering eyes. For all her violent rejection moments before, now she seemed completely unconcerned about his proximity.

As he moved to return her to her bedroom and deposit her in bed—he’d signed up for rescuing her from attackers, not this, and for all his age and experience he’d never yet figured an effective way to deal with this—he assumed she’d simply given up on getting him off her. But when he moved to set her down, he realized that one of her hands had fisted into his jacket, tightly enough that she was stretching the leather. Perhaps giving up wasn’t quite it, he thought, as he maneuvered them so that he could sit down, then leaned back against her pile of pillows so that they were reclining with her only halfway on top of him. He did know enough to guess that no matter what he said or did, she would be unable to give a coherent response in this state, but he could be patient.

He’d wait her out.

And then she’d damn well tell him what was wrong, and point him towards who he could kill to make it right, whether she wanted to divulge or not.

The hysterics lasted nearly an hour, and after that, she seemed to lose energy, but continued quietly weeping into his shirt for over an hour after that. By midnight she’d apparently run out of tears, but she lay limp against him, face buried in his chest, and he got the impression she’d fallen into the twilight of half-consciousness. He’d started rubbing circles into her spine with his thumb, and some time after that, she’d released his jacket, although she hadn’t retracted her hand; it lay on his chest, her cold palm flush against his heartbeat.

-0-

Half past four in the morning appeared seconds after one, and Klaus realized to his shock that both he and Caroline had drifted off. He regained consciousness for long enough to confirm that she was, in fact, deeply asleep, and his arms were still resting securely around her such that if she tried to get up it would wake him.

Her hand was still resting against his chest, and to his mild confusion, it was still cold. While vampires didn’t generate as much of their own heat as humans—or wolves—but they would still pick up heat from resting against warm objects, same as anything else. Slowly, not wanting to wake her and provoke another fit so soon, he wrapped her hand in his; long artist’s fingers picking up the telltale signs that he’d missed earlier. Her skin was unnaturally cold, and a little rough to the touch, with a subtle hardness which, coupled with how light and slow her heartbeats were, could mean only one thing—something he’d never expected to find in a vampire who wasn’t chained up and locked in a dungeon.

Caroline Forbes was beginning to desiccate; dry up and starve surrounded by blood-filled humans.

What the hell was happening?

He knew she had plenty of access to blood; Meredith Fell used her medical license to stockpile it on the Salvatores’ considerable dime, and the Sheriff looked the other way as long as Caroline was provided-for in the process.

So what the hell was going on? Had someone bled her out in the last 24 hours without him noticing? She did know to drink a lot after that, right?

His mind spun, inventing horrible possibility after horrible possibility, and he had to fight to keep his arm from tightening around her and waking her. His burning need to know who he had to kill to make it better intensified with each passing second. Caroline wouldn’t just stop eating of her own accord, so someone or something was doing this to her, and he’d be damned—well, again—if he didn’t find out what.

The arrival of 4:45 announced itself rudely as Caroline’s alarm blared, echoing against the walls in a way only a vampire would notice. Caroline’s right hand remained resting in Klaus’s deliberately loose grip, but her left reached over him and unerringly turned off the alarm, ignoring the large snooze button. Klaus must’ve been more asleep than he’d thought, because the blonde pillowing her head on his chest had to have been awake to do that, and he hadn’t noticed.

Caroline’s arm rested back on his chest immediately, and she lay still, seeming quite unbothered to find him still in her bed. Perhaps, even, trying not to wake him up. Testing his theory, he shifted a bit, re-adjusting his hold on her. She stiffened. Yeah, she’d been hoping he wasn’t awake yet. But she hadn’t made a move to pull away or get up when she thought he was still asleep; he wasn’t sure what to make of that.

“Morning, love,” he greeted her quietly, pressing a kiss to her temple.

“Klaus,” she grumbled in a warning tone, but still made no move to extricate herself.

“What happened last night,” he asked as calmly as he could manage.

“Don’t worry about it,” she sighed, but her heart-rate picked up and he heard her swallow. He sat up, pulling her with him and ignoring her glare of protest as he held her hand between his own, thumb running gently over her desiccating fingers.

“Don’t play that game with me,” he warned, ignoring her glare of protest. “I have never seen you in so much pain, Caroline, and I can see the what,” here he nodded towards her hands, “what I don’t have is the why. Why aren’t you eating?”

“I am,” she hissed, yanking her hand out of his and turning to put her feet on the floor. “I said don’t worry about it.”

“Yeah, I heard you, and I’m going to need a bit more than that,” Klaus responded evenly. Her pulse was racing, and the last thing he needed was to push her so hard that she had another panic attack.

“It’s none of your business,” she snapped, whirling to glare at him over her shoulder.

“Sweetheart you’re starving in a stocked kitchen,” he listed, gesturing at her mini fridge with his thumb, “I heard you from down the street last night and came up because I legitimately thought you were being kidnapped and tortured, and you—who have made it perfectly clear that you find my presence irksome in the highest degree—grabbed onto me for dear life last night and are making no real effort to dislodge me now. I am not an idiot, love,” he growled. “I know that means something is desperately wrong.”

Caroline swallowed, breathing deeply and rubbing her eyes. Her shoulder dropped, and she looked deflated.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she finally gritted out.

“I can help,” he insisted.

“No, you really can’t,” she sighed, and although he could tell she was trying for huffy hostility, all he could hear was sorrow and exhaustion.

“Try me,” he demanded, working hard to keep the snarl out of his voice. Wasn’t it just like her to protect the person hurting her?

“No,” she responded flatly, standing up and rustling around in her dresser for some clothes. Her movements were slow and clumsy, and he saw her lips purse together as her dry, painful skin whacked the side of the drawer.

“Not doing a very convincing ‘fine,’ darling,” he commented, laying back and folding his arms behind his head casually.

“What do you want from me?” she demanded, tossing her outfit on the bad so she could throw her hands up expressively. “There’s no one for you to murder, Klaus!”

“Then there's no harm in telling me, is there?” he countered cleverly.

“What are you going to do; kidnap and torture it out of me?” she demanded, voice dripping sarcasm. “A bit counterintuitive if you ask me.”

“I would never hurt you, love,” Klaus responded, knowing she was baiting him and refusing to rise. “But,” he added, “I'm not leaving until you tell me.”

Caroline scoffed wordlessly, grabbed her clothes and flounced into the bathroom, slamming the door behind her. As the shower turned on, Klaus surveyed the house with his senses, noting that Liz Forbes hadn't yet arrived home. He lay there comfortably, listening to the water run in the shower—and Caroline try and fail to control her breathing—for nearly half an hour. She dried off, blow-dried her hair (for less time than Klaus thought that ought to take, but then what did he know about blow-drying long hair) and he heard the rustle of clothes being pulled on for a moment before she let out a hiss of pain and froze in place.

He frowned, then realized that she’d grabbed skinny jeans, and if they were nearly as hard to get into as he imagined, and her feet were in the same state as her hands, that forcing the denim over her skin would likely be extremely painful. He rubbed a hand through his hair in frustration. If she’d just tell him what the problem was, he could figure out how to fix it; in a thousand years he’d learned quite a few facts about vampires, and was confident that he could resolve the issue, whatever it was.

Unfortunately, the vampire in question was being terribly stubborn; both in her determination not to let him help and, apparently, in her determination to wear that pair of jeans. He winced every time she made a sound of pain, which was quite a few times in the interminably long six minutes it took her to get dressed.

Finally, she exited the bathroom, doing a brief and irritated double-take when she saw him still lounging on her bed.

“You really don’t have anything better to do than sit there and wait for me to change my mind?” she grumbled as she sat down at her makeup table.

“Depends,” he countered, “like I said I’m not leaving you until you tell me, so I suppose I’ll be sitting around your high school at some point.” She whirled to glare at him in disbelief. “Or at the grill, oh, do you have cheerleading practice today?” he added with a bit of a leer. She flipped him off and he laughed. “I’m a very patient man when I want something,” he reminded her, and she wasn’t sure if that was supposed to sound like a threat or a promise.

“We’ll see about that,” she muttered, picking up her phone and sending a text message before turning back to the mirror.

“Is that a challenge, love?” he demanded playfully, wondering which of her troupe of friends she was enlisting to help her shake him off.

“Yes,” she responded coolly. “Because as you’ve noticed, I’m under the weather, so my mom is calling me out of school today. I’m going to sit here and watch makeup tutorials for the next six hours, then go downstairs, eat a tub of ice cream and watch telenovelas. If you really want to glue your immortal, hybrid ass to my bed and try your hand at boring yourself to death, be my guest.”

Chapter 2 Snippet

Apparently Klaus was incapable of getting bored.

She’d thought that the threat of endless makeup videos would scare him off (her boyfriends had always run for the hills when she’d spent more than two minutes talking about contouring) but in short order she realized that he was actually paying attention. She’d follow along with the videos, and at first he just laid on her bed, eyes boring into the back of her head, but after a little while he sat up (she could see him in the mirror) and murmured “turn your wrist a bit.”

She’d frowned, looking back at him, certain she’d imagined that.

“I know my way around brushes, sweetheart,” he’d reminded her with a smirk.

“This is how she’s holding it in the tutorial,” Caroline had shot back, running the video back and trying again.

To her frustration, upon a second watching, she noticed that the vlogger had indeed turned her wrist a little more. She adjusted her grip, pointedly ignoring Klaus’s expression of triumph, which was visible in the mirror.

After twenty minutes, he’d moved to the end of the bed to sit directly behind her, commenting on tone differences and blending techniques and natural shading.

After forty minutes, he had a brush in his hand and was carefully painting over Caroline’s challenging expression—only on one side so she could see the difference.

After an hour, he was telling a story about a hilarious mishap involving Leonardo Da Vinci, and Caroline was leaning back against her makeup table, laughing so hard her sides hurt.

“And how long did it take Elijah to realize he was flirting?” she asked, tears in her eyes from uncontrollable mirth.

“He’s still in denial,” Klaus shook his head. “The way he tells it, they had a remarkably ordinary modeling session, other than Kol’s interference. Kol swears to this day that if Rebekah hadn’t come in when she did, he could have properly set the two of them up.”

“I can see that, I can definitely see that—but what happened to the sculpture?” Caroline demanded, wiping her eyes.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Klaus checked. “He was the model for David.”

Outline

Klaus is walking by Caroline’s place during season 4 and he notices that he hears crying. She refuses to tell him why she’s desiccating. He gives her an ultimatum—he won’t hurt her, they both know that, but he won’t leave until she tells him what’s happening. She sits down at her makeup table and says “fine—game on.”

Caroline decides to practice makeup techniques all day, and when she get bored of that to watch crappy reality television—he may think he can annoy her into submission, but she thinks he may have underestimated her ability to bore him. However, it turns out that he is apparently incapable of being bored—in fact he winds up commenting on her technique—artist and all—and then actually picks up a brush at one point—and that’s when Liz gets back to the house and walks right in on them. Caroline cracks up while Klaus just shrugs and admits that there is no reasonable explanation. Caroline realizes that he easily could have told her mother why he was really there—to save himself a great deal of embarrassment in fact—but without missing a beat he hid it. He can keep a secret. And of all the people who won’t think that being hurt makes her weak, he certainly won’t.

She explains the situation; Klaus initially offers to go into her head and fix the problem, which she vehemently refuses, of course. He suggests, since she can drink no “innocent” blood, that she try his—he is, as she has pointed out repeatedly, the opposite of innocent. She is able to drink blood from him easily, and gulps it down in desperation. He says that until she finds another solution, he is more than willing both to keep her secret and supply her with blood. She asks why and he says it’s for the pleasure of her company.

Over time, Caroline and Klaus’s clandestine relationship starts resembling exactly that—now that they’re spending quality time together, she finds she does enjoy his company, and feels like she can be really open with him; she knows he’ll never judge her, as he has no room to do so.

Elena eventually learns of said relationship, and they have a huge fight over it. Caroline, whose confidence has vastly improved after months of unconditional love from someone who wouldn’t dream of putting Elena before her, reminds Elena that Damon raped and abused her, and that their solution had been to drug her and wait for him to kill her so they could poison him. Elena asks if she’s dating Klaus as revenge, and Caroline tells her she’s missing the point. Elena isn’t the only person in Mystic Falls permitted to dispense divine forgiveness. Caroline is with Klaus because she loves him.

Caroline also discovers that the blood of any criminal will do the trick, so she starts going into the city, walking around the seedy parts, and eating the assholes who follow her down dark alleys. She sort of accidentally becomes a serial killer. Then once Elena basically excommunicates her, she decides to go on a trip. Klaus is hoping she means Paris, but no, she wants to eat her way through the FBI’s most wanted list. Which she does.

Caroline becomes such a successful killer of killers that the FBI starts looking for her; while they don’t know what she looks like, her codename is now top of the most wanted list. (How ungrateful! I did your job for you and this is how you thank me?)

#Beth's New Year's Cleaning Queue #free to a good home #Any and all parts available for general use with credit #tw eating disorder #well kind of #they're vampires #idk if that counts #fanfiction #the vampire diaries #klaroline #tw torture #tw ptsd #tw child abuse #technically she's a legal adult #and a vampire #but her father tortured her #so have a tw for safety

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ks-caster · 4 years

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The Impossible Girl and The Year That Never Was

Fandom: Doctor Who

Characters: Clara Oswin Oswald, Tenth Doctor

Notes: If the Master broadcasted his brain signal with the satellites, wouldn’t the Time Lords have pulled out then?

The Great Intelligence comes to the time at the end of season 3 when the Doctor is a weak old man. He stays low, lulling Oswin into a false sense of security. She is on the command ship, and is one of the girls the Master uses as a maid. She is kind to the Doctor, who is a prisoner and all, and she has conversations with him and they become close friends.

However, the Great Intelligence disables the satellites just before the official Toclifain invasion.

Clara has to scramble and do a clever thing to disable the paradox machine, setting everything back to rights. Before she fades, the Doctor asks who she is.

Her response:“Have you ever had a really bad day, truly awful? But then you wake up the next day, and you think there was someone there, that someone was crying with you? Or, did you ever tell a joke or say something really witty in a room full of confused people, and none of them laughed, except there was one snicker, and you could never find the source? Ever straighten your tie and gel your hair, even though you know you’re headed to a planet where they’ve never seen hair, or ties, because you’ve got this odd feeling that someone’s standing at your shoulder, silently judging your fashion sense?That’s me. That’s who I am. And I’m always there, just beyond your sight, just outside your notice, on the edge of memory. I’m always there.”

Then she fades, whispering, “run, you clever boy… and remember.”

#Beth's New Year's Cleaning Queue #free to a good home #any and all parts available for general use with credit #doctor who #10th doctor #tenth doctor #fanfic #fanfiction #writing #writing prompts #clara oswald #oswin #the master #the year that never was #doctor who fanfiction

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ks-caster · 4 years

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Starcrossed

Fandom(s): The Vampire Diaries, The 100

Characters: Caroline, Klaus, Murphy, the Delinquents

Premise: 100 years after the apocalypse, Klaus believes Caroline to have died in primefiya. Caroline, for her part, happened to be on a space station when the bombs went off, and has spent the last century on the Arc, not knowinf if any of her friends or family are alive - except for Klaus, because if he’d died, she would have died too (we’re just pretending the unsiring thingy never happened, okay?)

Chapters 1 and 2 and my outline are available under the cut.

Moonrise

“I thought I’d find you here.”

Caroline smiled without looking away from the window.

“It’s not exactly rocket science,” she laughed, taking a sip of her coffee.

“C’mon, Forbes,” Dr. Murphy laughed, sitting down beside her. “That joke hasn’t gotten old yet?”

“I’ve only been on Alpha for a month, Murph,” she reminded him, still gazing out into the vacuum of space. Behind the earth—a fantastic sight on its own from the Alpha Space Station—the moon was rising in a shimmering, silvery crescent. It had become one of Caroline’s favorite sights in the year and a half she’d spent in orbit. Polaris had been more enclosed; their largest window was smaller than the average ones on Alpha, but that was to be expected of a research station versus a strategic one. Polaris needed their environment controllable, while Alpha was structured for high visibility, with a combination of missile-proof windows and high-efficiency sensors. It had been years since Shenzhen had tried anything, but everyone knew that relations between America and China weren’t improving.

“You haven’t memorized what the moon looks like yet?” Dr. Murphy quipped.

“You haven’t memorized what Angelii Reyes looks like?” she shot back, quirking an eyebrow. Dr. Murphy opened his mouth to defend himself, then shut it. Everyone on the ship knew about the missile specialist’s massive crush on his coworker—and everyone had been warned when Caroline’s shuttle first docked that lying to a professional mediator wasn’t going to go particularly well.

“Didn’t know that matchmaker was part of your job description,” he grumbled.

“I’m multitasking,” she responded, finishing her coffee. When her contract with Polaris was up last month she’d been intending to return to Virginia, but Alpha had practically begged her to come aboard for a three month period and help resolve a communication crisis among their command team. She’d found herself jumping at the chance to stay away for just a little bit longer.

The year was 2050 when she’d first decided to take a temporary job in space. Her daughters were in their thirties, her school had four campuses, and she was on her third identity; it was a good time to vanish from view for a little while.

At least, that were the reason she gave when people asked her. The truth was, there was one more thing she wanted the chance to get away from for a while; well, one more person.

Once his daughter had begun attending her school, Klaus had become an unavoidable part of her life. At thirty, she’d been much warmer to the idea of him turning up on occasion than she had at nineteen when he’d sworn never to enter her life again. He’d toned the flirting farther down than she’d though him capable—an act of respect for her as a widow, and she’d appreciated it. For a while.

A few years passed, and things began to rekindle between them. It hadn’t been simple, it hadn’t been fast; he’d been mourning Camille and she’d been mourning Stefan. They’d had their issues and their steps back and their makeups and breakups. After a few decades of on-again, off-again, Caroline reached the conclusion that she needed to pick a lane—either pursue a real, healthy relationship with him, or set them both free to find greener pastures. But it was difficult to think straight when he was lying in bed next to her, tracing abstract patterns into her skin with his fingertips, or worse, when she was lying in her bed alone, hyperaware of the space he’d occupy if he was there. Most of the times that she’d traveled, he’d been there in some form or another, so there was nowhere in the world she could run to where she wasn’t reminded of him.

Nowhere on earth, anyway.

Over the years and identities, she’d earned several degrees. Turned out, having all sorts of contracts between her school and various colleges paid off; she could take a wide variety of online courses for virtually nothing, or take sabbaticals to attend various schools. Her current identity—Tasha Forbes, her own second cousin and godchild—had a masters in conflict mediation, and received an invitation to do a study on conflict resolution among the diverse scientific and military teams crewing the Polaris space station. An eighteen-month contract during which she would be entirely focused on work and uninterrupted by Klaus or anyone else from back home had struck her as the perfect opportunity to decide exactly what—and who—she wanted.

And it had worked—she knew it had worked when she hadn’t stopped missing Klaus, and had developed the habit of watching the moon rise from behind the earth because it reminded her of him in the most beautiful way. She made up her mind by the end of her third month that when she set foot on solid ground again, she was going to get into an interstate shuttle direct to Klaus’s current abode in California and tell him definitively that she wanted to be together, for real. She had a plan. She’d rehearsed the conversation.

And then she had nine more months to over-analyze and second-guess herself—not her plan; she was confident that she wanted a relationship with Klaus—but her delivery. Suddenly a simple “I love you and I want to be with you” was the most complicated thing in human history to try to express.

All in all, the emergency summons to Alpha station had been a welcome relief from the pressure she placed on herself.

“If you’re that interested,” Dr. Murphy was saying, bringing Caroline back to the more immediate romantic conundrum, “do you think you could put in a good word for me? I was actually thinking of maybe asking her to dinner next week, when we dock with the Paradise to resupply.” He scratched his nose—an awkward habit he always did when he was nervous or stressed.

“Girls always know when their friends have been enlisted to improve a guy’s chances,” Caroline scolded. “What I can do is talk you through the process so that you can present the idea as appealingly as possible.”

Murphy stared out the window, a frown on his face, and Caroline laughed a little. God, he was shy in romance for someone so confident in actual, legitimate rocket science.

It was when he slowly rose to his feet and walked to the window, the color draining from his already pale face, that she realized something was wrong.

“Those are…” he whispered, and her eyes were drawn to what had distracted him. Six trails of golden fire were making their way across the blue background of the pacific ocean.

“Shuttlecraft?” Caroline suggested hesitantly, but she knew she was dead wrong before the words had left her mouth. They were traveling too fast for shuttlecraft—and much too close together to conform to safety regulations.

“Missiles,” Murphy breathed, and then took off towards the bridge, Caroline hot on his heels, cursing the fact that she had to run so slowly due to all the security cameras that could catch her vamp speed.

Command was in chaos—alarms blared, people were shouting orders while red lights flashed. Caroline vaguely remembered that as a civilian, she was supposed to return to her quarters during a red alert, but she doubted anyone was going to notice her.

“Status?” Murphy demanded, dashing to his post.

“Six 100-megaton nuclear warheads, heading from China towards the United States,” Angelii reported immediately. “Trajectories suggest Langley, Chicago, Atlanta, Austin, Denver and Portland are the targets.”

“An even spread,” Dr. Murphy murmured darkly. “ETA to detonation?”

“Thirty-two minutes,” an ensign whose name Caroline could never remember responded. Her heart stuttered. She couldn’t feel her feet. Someone was talking—murmuring to her in a low, calming voice… she wasn’t screaming, or crying, or doing anything to warrant a Low, Calming Voice™; actually it was her job to do that sort of thing, wasn’t it?

“Miss,” he was asking, possibly for the third time. “Miss, is there anyone you would like me to contact?” Caroline swallowed, the rush of sound from the last thirty seconds computing at vampire speed. Angelii was trying to break into the missiles’ targeting software to redirect them into space. The speed of her heartrate and the tone in her voice said she already knew she wouldn’t manage it in time.

“Girls,” Caroline finally go out. “I have two girls. One’s in Canada.” She struggled to meet his gaze. “Josie was in Portland. She… might still be there. I don’t remember how long she was staying.” There was no strength to her voice—it sounded thin and unnatural. Shouldn’t she remember her own daughter’s lecture tour itinerary? She stumbled to the communications console as the man with the infuriating calming voice punched in a code, and she dialed Josie’s number.

“Hi, this is Josephine Saltzman,” her voicemail announced cheerfully. “Please leave your name and number and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”

“Jose, it’s mom,” Caroline said, forcing the edge of panic out of her voice. “There’s a nuclear bomb headed for Portland in less than half an hour. If you’re still there…” she choked momentarily. “Honey, I love you—and you need to get out of the city, whatever you gotta do…” had the twins ever gotten the hang of the whole teleportation thing? They’d found the spell in some old grimoires Alaric had been researching a few years back, but it had been tricky, and the last she’d heard of it, they still hadn’t managed to travel more than a few hundred meters. “Call me,” she finally managed, then hung up, immediately dialing Elizabeth.

“Hey there, mama bear,” Lizzie’s husband greeted her as he always did.

“Carlisle, I need you to put Lizzie on the phone right now, it’s an emergency,” she demanded, all in a rush.

“Sure thing—what’s happening?” he asked. She heard him shuffle to his feet, then footsteps announced he was traveling through the house to find his wife.

“The world’s ending,” Caroline murmured numbly as, out of the corner of her eyes, she saw eight trails of fire heading the opposite direction. America was firing back while they still could, apparently. Hopefully no one would shoot anything towards Canada… everyone liked Canada, right?

“It’s your mother,” Carlisle announced, and then the sound quality changed, indicating that she was on speaker.

“China just fired nuclear bombs at the U.S.,” Caroline explained without preamble. “Have you heard from your sister lately—is she still in Oregon?”

“Oh my god,” Lizzie breathed, and even through the phone Caroline could faintly hear her heart speed up. “Last I heard, she was still there until the end of the month. I’ll try and send a message… hang on.” The sound of paper ripping and a pen scratching frantically against it ended with a quickly whispered spell and a ‘whoosh’ of flame.

“I don’t think anyone’s shooting far north enough for you guys to get hit. Yet,” she added as another few missiles appeared on the view screens. Russia had joined in the fight. What was the blast radius on a nuke of that size? There were different colored rings on a large, interactive map of the world. They encompassed a frighteningly huge area.

“Try her phone again,” Lizzie suggested. “I’ll let you know if she gets back to me, okay? I’m gonna call dad.”

“Okay,” Caroline whispered. “I love you both.”

Elena didn’t pick up the phone, but Steve, her ever-friendly middle child, answered on the first ring.

Bonnie didn’t answer at first, but called back right away. She was in Arizona. Inside two of the threatening circles on the map. Caroline’s brain wouldn’t function right—wouldn’t figure out for her whether that meant instant death, slow horrible death, or just increased chances of cancer.

With two minutes left on the clock, she was dialing Klaus’s number. Could a nuclear blast kill an Original? Would Klaus even know? She swallowed as the line rang. The whole reason she was seeing all this from the aliens’-eye-view was because she didn’t know how to tell him how she felt about him.

Now the world was ending beneath her feet, and she had less than 100 seconds to figure it out.

“Hello, love.” Klaus’s voice was warm and smooth and full of the particular joy that he seemed to reserve just for her. This, out of everything, brought tears to her eyes, and for a moment she couldn’t speak—couldn’t force a single sound past the agonizing pain in her throat, and the crippling ache in hear heart when she thought that this could be the last time she ever heard it.

“Klaus,” she sobbed faintly, clutching at the nearest console for support.

“What’s the matter, darling?” he asked. No, he demanded. His demeanor had changed instantly, and she imagined the way his eyes had gone hard, the way his spine straightened and his brow furrowed as he waited to hear who he needed to kill.

“Um, the nuclear arsenal of mankind is being launched,” she summarized. Numbly, she counted 48 total bombs being tracked. Around her, a few soldiers were still frantically working, but most were leaning into their personal comm links, exchanging last words with their loved ones below. No one was trying to stop them. Angelii sat back from the screen, shaking her head helplessly.

“Where are you?” Klaus’s voice had a bit of a growl in it, and she recognized the fear for what it was, although anyone else would have thought it was hostility.

“I’m on a military base,” she whispered. “I’m watching the whole thing in real time… are you still in California?”

“Chicago,” he corrected immediately. “Where…”

“Chicago,” she echoed in muted horror. “There’s one right on top of you… oh my god…”

“Caroline, where are you—are you in danger?” his voice was impatient. She’d heard that particular tone before—it meant he was worried about her, terrified, even, and why on earth wasn’t her first priority saving herself?

“I’m fine, I’m…” but a sudden buzz of static cut her off. “Klaus? Klaus can you still hear me?” a quick glance around the room showed everyone else experiencing the same thing. Her eyes found Dr. Murphy’s.

“The warheads have started to detonate,” he explained quietly. “Most of the U.S’s electronics just shut off. I’m sorry,” he added. Caroline had heard him, and understood the words, but her fingers were in denial and she dialed first Josie’s number, then Lizzy’s. Neither of them rang.

Slowly, dream-like, Caroline made her way to the main window, abandoning the analysis screens in favor of looking directly down at the carnage. She watched as first the Chinese bombs and then the American ones, followed by sundry others, reached their targets and exploded in deceptively tiny eruptions of orange and red. Thick black smoke rose up and began to cover the sky, concealing the planet below in round patches. Within thirty minutes, the planet she knew so well looked like it had contracted some horrible disease.

World War III had taken less than 2 hours, from start to bloody finish.

Freefall

“So, what’re you in for?”

Caroline glanced up from her meagre, bland food, critically evaluating the speaker. His pale skin, prominent forehead and sardonic smirk told him his name without a shadow of a doubt. This boy was unquestionably one of Dr. Murphy’s direct descendants. She wondered vaguely why they’d never met, but then, the Ark was a pretty big ship.

“Vandalism,” she responded simply, skewering an unappetizing piece of something and shoveling it into her mouth. “I set the art gallery on fire,” she elaborated through the edible substance filling her mouth. She’d worked hard to make her newest teenage persona as laid back as possible; someone of whom no one would have any particular expectations. With each generation and each new set of draconian laws, adulthood on the Ark had transitioned from irksome to deeply detestable.

“Nice,” Murphy snorted in appreciation.

“Hey, what do you have against art galleries?” a boy with an honest, innocent face and a beanie over his shaggy hair demanded.

“I dunno,” she shrugged, leaning back in her seat. “Put me in a weird mood, I guess. Honestly though, I think maybe the moonshine might have been more at fault.”

“Cause you drank it or cause you used it as accelerant?” the boy checked with a grin.

“Both,” she admitted freely, to a general, appreciative snicker.

“Well, it’s a dumb crime, but as long as nobody got hurt you might have a shot at your review,” a girl she thought was called Monroe commented quietly from the next table over.

“The last paintings in all of humanity,” Wells Jaha spoke up sadly, but fell silent when Monroe turned a frosty glare on him. He’d only been in the skybox for three days—the newest juvenile detainee besides herself. The way he carried himself, some of the things he said… Caroline got the impression they’d received the same information, and had the same idea. Of course, his motivation was fairly obvious; his massive crush on Clarke Griffin who’d been in solitary for the last six months had spurred him to ensure that when she was sent to the earth to be a human radiation canary, he’d be by her side.

‘Young love,’ she scoffed internally, then grimaced by how old she sounded. 157 was entirely too young to be so disparaging of youth or love.

Of course, she was on her way down because of love too—but as a vampire she at least had a significantly higher chance of survival than he did; the little human fool.

“Back to your cells,” a guard shouted, hitting a button on the wall which sounded a nasty digital whistle that never failed to give Caroline a splitting headache. She stumbled to her feet, balance compromised until her head stopped echoing.

“Um, do you need help?” an unfamiliar voice asked hesitantly. She looked up blearily and met a completely new pair of brown eyes. She knew vaguely that she’d run across every single person on the Ark at one point or another—even Murphy, first name John she finally recalled—but this girl was entirely foreign to her.

“I’m good—thanks,” she finally responded, straightening up with a little difficulty. “Carrie Forbes,” she added, sticking a hand out. “I don’t think we’ve met.”

“O-Octavia,” she girl nearly squeaked, falteringly extending her hand but looking a bit confused by what she was supposed to do with it. Caroline shook it gently. “Octavia Blake.”

As it turned out, Octavia Blake was to be her roommate—at least, that was what was on the official docket. They’d barely made it into the room before two guards were following them, binders and syringes in hand. Caroline heard Octavia starting to hyperventilate, and as the men approached, demanding that they hold out their hands, she looked over at her.

“Octavia, they can’t kill you twice,” she reasoned quietly, not wanting to admit what she knew, but also wanting to help in some way. “Think about it—what more do you have to be afraid of?” the smaller girl looked her way, gulped, and squared her shoulders.

“At the end of the day, no matter how this goes,” Caroline murmured as the men pulled the caps off the syringes, “you’ll be free.”

More so than she could possibly know.

Octavia passed out but Caroline was immune to whatever they were using and had to let herself go limp, eyes closed enough that the casual observer wouldn’t notice them cracked open, but still open enough that she could sort of see what was going on. They were carried along with the other drugged juvenile offenders down dark hallways by silent men, the whole operation a complete secret from the Ark’s residents.

She let them strap her into a seat, listened as they did the same to her neighbors, then as soon as the last guard departed, she opened her eyes, scanning the area. Every other passenger was still unconscious except for one—slightly older by the smell of him, with his heart pounding out a staccato sprint. A stowaway, apparently.

‘The plot thickens,’ was the only thing she had time to think before the clamps were releasing and the thrusters were firing and the rough movements had startled the other passengers into varying stages of wakefulness. A recording of Chancellor Jaha started to play on the view screens and Caroline cursed under her breath, wishing one of them had a picture of the planet they were now rapidly falling towards.

“Did you know this was going to happen?” Octavia whispered from beside her. Caroline glanced over and nodded subtly.

“Mm-hm,” she hummed quietly. “Like I said,” she breathed back with a hint of a smile, “one way or another—free.”

“Yeah, if we don’t burn to death from the radiation,” Octavia hissed back.

“We’ll see,” Caroline responded, remembering the Great Solar Radiation Debate 12 years ago, and the way neither side had been able to definitively prove themselves right. She’d always been rather in favor of the idea that space-born humans had a higher ability to metabolize radiation than their earth-dwelling ancestors, but she wasn’t a scientist, so she couldn’t really speak authoritatively on the subject.

Anyway, they were about to find out.

Notes:

Caroline and Klaus get back in touch a few years after she opens the school—what with Hope attending—and they become cordial, perhaps even flirtatious. However, Caroline is afraid to jump back in so quickly after becoming a widow. She feels like her immortal life is rushing into too much, too quickly. So she and Klaus don’t get serious, although when she takes a sabbatical every couple of years, sometimes he’ll meet her abroad. They have an on-again, off-again thing going on for a few decades, because she can’t commit and he won’t push her.

In the year 2050, Caroline accepts a job to work on a space station for a few years, studying group psychology among the scientists working there. It seems like a fun adventure.

While she’s up there, cut off from everyone she knows, she makes the decision to take The Plunge and tell Klaus when she gets back that she’s ready for a real relationship with him. Then ALIE launches the nuclear arsenal of mankind, and the world burns beneath her.

The Ark forms, and Caroline mourns. She mourns for her daughters, for Rick, and she believes for Klaus. (Remember, in TO Season 3, his sire line was cut off.) She thinks that he must’ve been destroyed—and if he lived, then he was burning in radiation and desiccating from the total lack of humans to feed on. She prefers to think he’s dead, when she imagines this.

97 years pass. It’s hard to reinvent yourself every decade or so, but compulsion is a wonderful thing, and there isn’t a scrap of vervain on the station, so no one can resist her. Unbeknownst to her, Aurora Blake had told stories about her old school friend Caroline, and then after she compelled everyone she knew on the ship, Bellamy Blake started to mention her as well, so Octavia, who she doesn’t know exists, thinks something seems a little off.

Caroline always begins as young as she can get away with—usually 14 or 15—and she’s in Clarke’s class at school. Everyone thinks she’s extremely weird; honestly she lost the desire to get close to people after her a few generations of her friends died. The fact that there are no immortals left for her to get close to is a living nightmare, but she can’t turn anyone because she doesn’t have the means to make a daylight ring, and all the witches who ever lived are dead.

She drinks or drugs herself into oblivion whenever she gets the opportunity; has been jailed and had to compel herself out of the death sentence three times so far. Everyone thinks she’s the weird, anti-social stoner kid. Aren’t junkies supposed to be loose and friendly? She realizes that the delinquents are going to be sent to the ground, so she sets fire to a priceless Earth painting so that she can join them. She figures that even if she burns up and dies, it might be worth it just to escape this lonely eternity.

The 100—including Caroline—land and survive. She keeps her secret under wraps, although it’s tricky as she has to dry out from everything she’s been on for the last century. She doesn’t reveal herself to anyone, and doesn’t interfere much in anyone’s affairs, but she does once single-handedly rescue someone from a horde of reapers.

She gets her neck broken during the final battle and is assumed dead, so the mountain men don’t take her.

Meanwhile, the Originals have survived the apocalypse; Hope and Freya had to go into a magical sleep for twenty years, but they got through it. The Originals rule a large portion of what was once the Western United States. Klaus is called the King of the West and is feared across the continent. He learns that a star fell to the east—bringing strange people with it. He sets out on a journey on a prayer that Caroline might have been on it.

When things start to go badly wrong, Caroline sneaks into the mountain, intending to help. However, the government was vaguely aware of vampires, and the residents have been consuming vervain in their water, for 100 years, so she can’t use compulsion. If she uses violence she could save everyone, but it would likely be at the cost of tons of collateral damage, and she’s pretty against harming children, especially after having lost a couple of her own.

When the King of the West arrives with soldiers and spears demanding to be taken to the Sky People immediately, at first everyone is afraid. But when he begins describing the woman he’s looking for, Octavia pipes up and says that’s Caroline he’s describing. Caroline had once drunkenly described Klaus to Octavia—including the detail of the moles on his neck, so she knows it’s the same guy. She says that Caroline was taken by the mountain men, and if he wants her back, he’ll have to go in and get her. Klaus offers (in a you-can’t-refuse sort of way) his aid to those attempting to get the prisoners out of the mountain.

Caroline has to come with a way that the children survive—it’s in her character to do so. When the prisoners come marching out, it’s not because the mountain releases them—it’s because she did something clever.

When Caroline sees Klaus, she immediately runs into his arms, bursts into tears and kisses him like—well, like she hadn’t seen him into a century. He absolutely doesn’t care that anyone’s watching and sweeps her off her feet, to everyone’s general shock.

#Beth's New Year's Cleaning Queue #free to a good home #Any and all parts available for general use with credit #fanfic #fanfiction #writing #the vampire diaries #the 100 #klaroline

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ks-caster · 4 years

Text

May 8th, 2019

Fandom(s): The Vampire Diaries, The Originals

Characters: Caroline, Klaus, Marcel

Premise: Klaus has been pain-daggered in Marcel’s keeping (see end of TO season 3) and meanwhile all is not well in the magical world. Upheavals in leadership make new potential Big Bads overconfident, and Marcel is too busy sitting on his laurels in NOLA to be of much use as a deterrent. After the deaths of many of our MF peeps, Caroline leaves her ghosts behind to work for the new supernatural division of the FBI. She is fitted out with the ability to time travel (who better to experiment on, since she’s immortal and if she goes too far back and runs out of battery she can just wait until it’s the right time again.)

Summary: “This is the field record of Time Agent Caroline Forbes. It is May 8th, 2019, and it has been May 8th for over six months now. Today marks my 188th attempt to rescue Klaus Mikaelson from Marcel Gerard. I’m betting it ends with death by mega-hybrid bite. Not really feeling too optimistic.”

Before:

Everybody from the Mystic Gang basically dies—the few who survive are rebuilding their lives together, but Caroline can’t stand the constant reminders of everyone she’s lost. She gets a job with a Hephaestus, the FBI’s new “Special” R&D department. They’re using a combination of futuristic science and black magic to create agents who can time travel, appropriately called “Time Agents.” Caroline becomes a Time Agent prototype, and does extremely well for herself at the agency, but isn’t very personable at all.

Caroline runs into Hayley and Hope May 1st, 2019, and Hayley tells her what’s been happening. Caroline had assumed that Klaus was in hiding with his family, giving his daughter a normal-ish childhood. She puts Hayley in contact with Hephaestus, to try to find a way to cure Kol and Elijah. Part of why the FBI needs Hephaestus in the first place is because the supernatural world went pretty crazy after the Originals left. Vampires and Witches used to prioritize keeping a low profile, but ever since Marcel Gerard took charge, they’ve been run ragged trying to keep the humans safe. Caroline tells her bosses that the Mikaelsons were once the ones who kept everyone in check, and they’re the only ones with a hope of taking down Marcel. Hephaestus confers and then decides to help. Ultimately, they realize that the best way to cure Elijah and Finn is to actually use Klaus’s venom to burn away the venom in their bodies, then cure it once all that’s left is something they can cure. But for that, they need Klaus. They make plans to do basically a big group suicide mission to rescue him, but Caroline goes in alone the day before they’re supposed to attack—May 8th, at 9am.

Day 1: “This is the field record of Time Agent Forbes. It is May 8th, 2019, the time is 9:06am, and this will be my first attempt to extract Klaus Mikaelson from imprisonment in New Orleans, Louisiana.

She enters NOLA, learns where Marcel lives, tries to sneak in the back door, trips an alarm, is captured, goes through Marcel’s famous mockery of a trial, and publically beheaded.

Day 2: “This is the field record of Time Agent Forbes. It is May 8th, 2019, the time is 9:01am, and this will be my second attempt to extract Klaus Mikaelson from imprisonment in New Orleans, Louisiana. Yesterday was completely unsuccessful—I was captured attempting to sneak into Marcel’s private residence, tried—if you can call it that—and publically beheaded. Today I’ll avoid tripping the motion alarm on the back door.”

Caroline tries to sneak in through an upstairs window, and is caught by the two witches who work for Marcel. They turn off the spell on her daylight ring, trap her in the sunlight, and she burns to death.

Day 3: “This is the field record of Time Agent Forbes. It is May 8th, 2019, the time is 9:07am, and this will be my third attempt to extract Klaus Mikaelson from imprisonment in New Orleans, Louisiana. Yesterday’s attempt ended in another lethal failure—Marcel has two witches working for him, and when I attempted to enter the house through a third floor window, they deactivated my daylight ring and I burned to death.”

Caroline gets in by a different window than the room where the witches work, but is eventually caught by Marcel. He bites her, but then leaves her to die. She is able to explore his house a little more, and concludes that Klaus isn’t there, before succumbing to the pain.

Day 4: “Field record of Time Agent Forbes, May 8th, 2019, 9:02am. This will be my fourth attempt to extract Klaus Mikaelson from New Orleans. Yesterday I made an important discovery—do not let Marcel bite you ever again. His venom is not only more deadly than Klaus’s, it’s also a lot more painful. However, since he left me alone to die, I had a chance to explore his house a little. I don’t think Klaus is there. Today I’ll focus on finding out where he’s being kept. Hopefully it’s nowhere near Marcel. I don’t really want to repeat that experience.”

Day 25: “This is the field record of Time Agent Forbes, May 8th, 9:16am. This will be my twenty-fifth attempt to extract Klaus Mikaelson from imprisonment in New Orleans, Louisiana. Yesterday I learned that he’s not at (place). Over the last two weeks I’ve managed to cross off (list of places), so today I’m going to get a witch to do a locator spell, even though I know Marcel will find and kill me. This will probably be the third time I’ve died from nasty juiced-up hybrid bite. Really not looking forward to this.”

Day 38: “Time Agent Forbes, field record, May 8th, 2019. The time is exactly 9:00am, and this will be my 38th attempt to rescue Klaus Mikaelson. Yesterday I learned that Klaus is being kept somewhere in or around the old witch graveyard in the French Quarter. I also learned that pretty much every witch in New Orleans is on Marcel’s payroll, except for Vincent Griffith, who won’t help me, no matter what I do or say. Today I’m going to play innocent, get a bunch of flowers, lay them on a grave, and see if I can pinpoint his exact location.”

Day 42: “This is the field record of Time Agent Forbes. It is May 8th, 2019, the time is 9:19am, and this will be my forty-second attempt to rescue Klaus Mikaelson. Yesterday I finally managed to find him—he’s bricked into a tomb. I also discovered that nobody looks twice at a pretty blonde laying flowers on graves; three days in a row and the most suspicion I got was from the florist when I knew her prices by heart. Today I’m going to try and subtly get him out.”

Day 43: “This is Time Agent Forbes. It’s May 8th, 2019, 9:02am, and this will be my 43rd attempt to rescue Klaus Mikaelson. So, it turns out, there’s a spell on the tomb that alerts Marcel to any supernatural tampering. I got venom’d to death. Again. Today I’m going to try and compel a human to open the tomb for me.”

Day 68: “This is Time Agent Forbes. It is May 8th, 2019, 9:13am, and this will be my 68th attempt to rescue Klaus Mikaelson. After many unsuccessful attempts, I have discovered that the perfect formula for getting Klaus out of the tomb is to compel Jacob Woolworth from Home Depot to come and rip out the mortar, after calling the police with a fake bomb threat so that they clear the area around Marcel’s house, and waste his time trying to get him to evacuate. This ensures that he will basically stay put because he thinks someone is trying really hard to get him to leave. Today’s project is finding out what’s wrong with Klaus—he’s catatonic.”

Day 76: “May 8th, Time Agent Forbes 9:00am, if Klaus doesn’t kill this Marcel guy immediately after I rescue him, so help me God I’m coming back to do it myself. Ahem. Today will be my 76th attempt to rescue Klaus Mikaelson. I’ve learned that he has a black magic dagger of unspeakable torture embedded in his chest. To get it out, I have to touch him—humans can’t even seem to find it, and I waste precious time directing them. That means I’m not going to have much time before the alarms go off and I have Marcel and all his minions on my ass. Not really feeling very optimistic about today. Yeah, I’m pretty sure this is die-of-Marcel-poison day.”

Day 87: “This is Time Agent Forbes. It is May 8th, 2019, 9:25am, and this will be my 87th attempt to rescue Klaus Mikaelson I don’t think there’s any way around it—I’m going to have to learn how to fight Marcel.”

Day 99: “This is Time Agent Forbes. It is May 8th, 2019, 9:04am, and this will be my 99th attempt to rescue Klaus. Basically, I definitely can’t fight Marcel. Day 71 is still my record survival time at one minute and eight seconds—and I definitely wouldn’t have been in any condition to rescue anybody after about half of that.”

Day 100: “This is Time Agent Forbes. It is May 8th, 2019, 9:11am, and this will be my hundredth attempt to rescue Klaus. Milestone day here.

Day 123: “This is Time Agent Forbes. It is May 8th, 2019, 9:11am, and this will be my 123rd attempt to rescue Klaus. Marcel (analyze fighting style). I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it was definitely a good thing Agent Hanes made me go through basic training. I survived a total of one minute and twelve seconds, and other than the part where he ripped my heart out of my chest, I was in pretty good condition by the end. I’m getting there. It’s not easy, it’s not fast, it’s not even going very well, but it’s going. Klaus, you seriously owe me one when this is all over. Or, like, ten. At least. Seriously. Today I gotta avoid Marcel’s left hand when I go to kick his kneecap.”

Day 145: “This is Time Agent Forbes. It is May 8th, 2019, 9:05am, and this will be my 145th attempt to rescue Klaus. As long as I can mess with Marcel’s senses enough and remember his moves, I can beat him. He’s not very creative—he relies heavily on his enhanced abilities, so things like joint locks and sensory confusion are highly effective. I can simulate more strength than I have by using leverage and momentum. Today’s all about simplifying that fight—I can’t waste all my energy fighting Marcel when his minions will arrive thirty seconds after his defeat.”

Day 178: “This is Time Agent Forbes. It’s May 8th, 9:09am, and this will be my 178th attempt to save Klaus. Okay, so far I can beat Marcel, then either un-brick Klaus or fight off the four vampires who show up at exactly 4:11:26. I need to speed up the Marcel fight somehow, but keeping him down long enough to escape is proving difficult. Today also marks my hundredth time dying from his venom. I really, really want a day off at this point.”

Day 203: “This is Time Agent Forbes. It is May 8th, 9:06am, and this will be my 203rd attempt to save Klaus. So, I figured out how lure the minions in before Marcel, so I can fight all of them, then un-brick Klaus, but then I don’t have as much energy left to fight Marcel. Even if he doesn’t remember it, I’m finding it harder every day to watch Klaus’s face when he comes around only to watch me die. To be honest… after everything that went down in Mystic Falls, after I lost everyone… I had kind of convinced myself that there was no one left in the world who cared if I lived or died. I was wrong—and that hurts more than I could have imagined. …I’m going to get you out of there, Klaus.”

Day 235: “This is Time Agent Forbes. It’s May 8th, 9:08am, and this will be my 235th attempt to save Klaus. So, if I have the Marcel fight in his house, the minions don’t realize I’m in the graveyard, and they go to help Marcel instead of catching me. But then by the time I get Klaus out, they’re all on me at once, and I die. No matter what I do to distract whoever I can, the fewest opponents I can get is this combination of Marcel and these four.”

Day 273: “Time Agent Forbes, May 8th, 9:14am, 273rd attempt to save Klaus. Okay… so if I pull the dagger of doom out of Klaus and then turn and throw it, I totally miss Marcel every time. But I’ve only tried three times so far, and practice makes perfect, right?”

Day 300: “Time Agent Forbes, May 8th, 9:14am, 300th attempt to save Klaus. Okay. We can do this. And by “we” I mean me. And by “I can do this” I mean I might need someone to save me next—because I totally cannot do this. I can’t… I can’t do it anymore. I’m tired. So very, very tired. I just don’t see how I can win this. I don’t… I just…. (sighs, breathes.) I’m going to drive my f*cking car through Marcel’s front door and just skip today. Who knows—maybe that’ll help.”

Day 340: “Time Agent Forbes, May 8th, 9:12am, 340th attempt to save Klaus. I can now throw the dagger straight every time. What I can’t do is fight off all four vamp minions and get Klaus from the tomb to my car in one piece before Marcel gets the dagger out of him. I am really, really tired of dying from super-venom. It hurts. A lot.”

Day 386: “Time Agent Forbes, May 8th, 9:14am, 386th attempt to save Klaus. I’m getting pretty good at fighting a bunch of opponents at once. I get about two minutes ant twelve seconds from the time the dagger makes contact with Marcel to the time he gets it out of him and bites me. In that time, I can take down all four minions and get Klaus almost all the way to the graveyard entrance. I wish I had another dagger… I just need one more thing to keep Marcel off of me so I can get Klaus to the car.”

Day 408: “Time Agent Forbes, May 8th, 9:14am, 408th shot at saving Klaus. So, stuffing an explosive into Marcel’s chest when he comes after me for round three just gets me blown sky high too, no matter how I time it. I’m just not strong enough after everything I have to do today to carry Klaus and get outside of the blast radius. I’ve been revenge-tortured to death a total of forty of these attempts so far, and the explosive gets me into that position every time. I really, really hate this. I need a vacation. A long one.”

Day 437: “Time Agent Forbes, May 8th, 9:14am, 437th attempt to save Klaus. I finally found the perfect set of arguments to convince Vincent Griffith to make me a paralytic ash spell to use on Marcel. Here goes nothing.”

Day 437b: “Agent Forbes, May 9th, 1:56am. I have successfully retrieved Klaus.”

After: Klaus slowly comes around in the front seat of Caroline’s car. She’s driving at breakneck speed down the highway, and there are cars after them. She calls for a ride, and a hover-jet flies down in front of a pier, which she drives off, right onto the loading ramp, which they’ve opened. She pulls the emergency break and only hits the interior wall a little. She helps him out of the car, and then hands him off to Hephaestus’s medical team. Klaus is weak and exhausted, has little choice but to basically let them do what they want.

Klaus wakes up in a hospital-type bed with Hayley next to him. She explains where they are and why Hephaestus is working with them, and says they’re trying to find a cure for Elijah and Kol, and for Freya. She then lets Hope in to see her dad, and they have an adorable scene of awesomeness.

Later, Klaus asks how he got out—thinking he dreamed up Caroline in the car—and Hayley tells him that Caroline works for Hephaestus and that she went out two days ago with no explanation other than a note with instructions about where to pick her up. She says that Caroline is really different—everyone says she’s like a machine, and she does seem pretty detached, but not switched off; not as liberated as that. She seemed broken and grieving and hard. But somehow she had the skills to rescue Klaus in one day. She shows him some traffic camera footage of one of the fights with Marcel. She says that the most expression she’s seen on her face in the week they’ve been here was the triumph when she drove up with him in the car.

Caroline’s coworkers also ask who the hell Klaus is that she cares so much about him—they say she jumped 437 times, and the record is 182—and that wasn’t dying every day, that was potentially world-ending consequences, AND the agent needed years of extreme therapy afterwards, and tendered his resignation. “You must be really something, if the Ice Queen cares enough about you to go through all that.” Klaus is horrified by everyone’s descriptions of Caroline, but she confirms that a lot has changed in the time he’s been gone. He begins to try and bring her back, and eventually she admits that everyone died and she lived.

#Beth's New Year's Cleaning Queue #free to a good home #Any and all parts available for general use with credit #fanfic #fanfiction #the vampire diaries #the originals #klaroline #writing #writing ideas #tw death #I mean she come back #but she does die a bunch

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