#atomic airplane

[dronescapesvideos]

B 52 "The Buff" Stratofortress, And The Evolution Of Giant U.S. Bombers ➤➤ VIDEO: https://youtu.be/BhzFiSniXjA

#youtube #aircraft #airplane #aviation #dronescapes #military #documentary #aviation history #b 52 stratofortress #boeing #american bomber #aviation lovers #aviation photography #aviation industry #cold war #vietnam war #korean war #war in the middle east #atomic bomb

[coolthingsguyslike]

#B-58 #Hustler #bomber #atomic age #jet #Air Force #USAF #airplanes

[jcmarchi]

Nuclear Power Renaissance with Molten Salts - Technology Org

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/nuclear-power-renaissance-with-molten-salts-technology-org/

Nuclear Power Renaissance with Molten Salts - Technology Org

A science team is reinventing nuclear energy systems via molten salt technologies.

A retro wonder gleaming white in the sun, propelled by six rear-facing rotors and four jet engines affixed to the longest wings ever produced for a combat aircraft, the Convair B-36 Peacemaker looks like it flew right out of a 1950s science fiction magazine.

Frozen uranium containing fuel salt (NaF-BeF2-UF4), inside a glovebox in Raluca Scarlat’s SALT lab. Illustration by Sasha Kennedy/UC Berkeley

One of these bombers, which flew over the American Southwest from 1955 to 1957, was unique. It bore the fan-like symbol for ionizing radiation on its tail. The NB-36H prototype was designed to be powered by a molten salt nuclear reactor — a lightweight alternative to a water-cooled reactor.

Nuclear-propelled aircraft like the NB-36H were intended to fly for weeks or months without stopping, landing only when the crew ran short of food and supplies. So what happened? Why weren’t the skies filled with these fantastical aircraft?

“The problem was that nuclear-powered airplanes are absolutely crazy,” says Per F. Peterson, the William S. Floyd and Jean McCallum Floyd Chair in Nuclear Engineering. “The program was canceled, but the large thermal power to low-weight ratio in molten salt reactors is the reason that they remain interesting today.”

Because of numerous concerns, including possible radioactive contamination in the event of a crash, the idea of nuclear-powered aircraft never took off. But nuclear submarines, using water as coolant, completely replaced their combustion-powered predecessors. Civilian reactors were built on the success of submarine systems, and as a result, most nuclear reactors today are cooled with water.

Professor Per Peterson holds a single fuel pebble, which can produce enough electricity to power a Tesla Model 3 for 44,000 miles. Illustration by Adam Lau / Berkeley Engineering

While most water-cooled reactors can safely and reliably generate carbon-free electricity for decades, they do present numerous challenges in terms of upfront cost and efficiency.

Molten salt reactors, like those first designed for nuclear-powered aircraft, address many of the inherent challenges with water-cooled reactors. The high-temperature reaction of such reactors could potentially generate much more energy than water-cooled reactors, hastening efforts to phase out fossil fuels.

Now, at the Department of Nuclear Engineering, multiple researchers, including Peterson, are working to revisit and reinvent molten salt technologies, paving the way for advanced nuclear energy systems that are safer, more efficient and cost-effective — and may be a key for realizing a carbon-free future.

Smaller, safer reactors

In the basement of Etcheverry Hall, there’s a two-inch-thick steel door that looks like it might belong on a bank vault. These days, the door is mostly left open, but for two decades it was the portal between the university and the Berkeley Research Reactor, used mainly for training. In 1966, the reactor first achieved a steady-state of nuclear fission.

Fission occurs when the nucleus of an atom absorbs a neutron and breaks apart, transforming itself into lighter elements. Radioactive elements like uranium naturally release neutrons, and a nuclear reactor harnesses that process.

Concentrated radioactive elements interact with neutrons, splitting themselves apart, shooting more neutrons around and splitting more atoms. This self-sustaining chain reaction releases immense amounts of energy in the form of radiation and heat. The heat is transferred to water that propels steam turbines that generate electricity.

The reactor in Etcheverry Hall is long gone, but the gymnasium-sized room now houses experiments designed to test cooling and control systems for molten salt reactors. Peterson demonstrated one of these experiments in August. The Compact Integral Effects Test (CIET) is a 30-foot-tall steel tower packed with twisting pipes.

The apparatus uses heat transfer oil to model the circulation of molten salt coolant between a reactor core and its heat exchange system. CIET is contributing extensively to the development of passive safety systems for nuclear reactors.

After a fission reaction is shut down, such systems allow for the removal of residual heat caused by radioactive decay of fission products without any electrical power — one of the main safety features of molten salt reactors.

The first molten salt reactor tested at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the 1950s was small enough to fit in an airplane, and the new designs being developed today are not much larger.

Conventional water-cooled reactors are comparatively immense — the energy-generating portion of the Diablo Canyon Power Plant in San Luis Obispo County occupies approximately 12 acres, and containment of feedwater is not the only reason why.

The core temperature in this type of reactor is usually kept at some 300 degrees Celsius, which requires 140 atmospheres of pressure to keep the water liquid. This need to pressurize the coolant means that the reactor must be built with robust, thick-walled materials, increasing both size and cost. Molten salts don’t require pressurization because they boil at much higher temperatures.

In conventional reactors, water coolant can boil away in an accident, potentially causing the nuclear fuel to meltdown and damage the reactor. Because the boiling point of molten salts are higher than the operational temperature of the reactor, meltdowns are extremely unlikely.

Even in the event of an accident, the molten salt would continue to remove heat without any need for electrical power to cycle the coolant — a requirement in conventional reactors.

“Molten salts, because they can’t boil away, are intrinsically appealing, which is why they’re emerging as one of the most important technologies in the field of nuclear energy,” says Peterson.

The big prize: efficiency

Assistant professor Raluca Scarlat uses a glovebox in her Etcheverry Hall lab. Illustration by Adam Lau / Berkeley Engineering

To fully grasp the potential benefits of molten salts, one has to visit the labs of the SALT Research Group. Raluca O. Scarlat, assistant professor of nuclear engineering, is the principal investigator for the group’s many molten salt studies.

Scarlat’s lab is filled with transparent gloveboxes filled with argon gas. Inside these gloveboxes, Scarlat works with many types of molten salts, including FLiBe, a mixture of beryllium and lithium fluoride. Her team aims to understand exactly how this variety of salt might be altered by exposure to a nuclear reactor core.

On the same day that Peterson demonstrated the CIET test, researchers in the SALT lab were investigating how much tritium (a byproduct of fission) beryllium fluoride could absorb.

Salts are ionic compounds, meaning that they contain elements that have lost electrons and other elements that have gained electrons, resulting in a substance that carries no net electric charge. Ionic compounds are very complex and very stable. They can absorb a large range of radioactive elements.

This changes considerations around nuclear waste, especially if the radioactive fuel is dissolved into the molten salt. Waste products could be electrochemically separated from the molten salts, reducing waste volumes and conditioning the waste for geologic disposal.

Waste might not even be the proper term for some of these byproducts, as many are useful for other applications — like tritium, which is a fuel for fusion reactors.

Salts can also absorb a lot of heat. FLiBe remains liquid between approximately 460 degrees and 1460 degrees Celsius. The higher operating temperature of molten salt coolant means more steam generation and more electricity, greatly increasing the efficiency of the reactor, and for Scarlat, efficiency is the big prize.

“If we filled the Campanile with coal and burned it to create electricity, a corresponding volume of uranium fuel would be the size of a tennis ball,” says Scarlat. “Having hope that we can decarbonize and decrease some of the geopolitical issues that come from fossil fuel exploration is very exciting.”

“Finding good compromises”

Thermal efficiency refers to the amount of useful energy produced by a system as compared with the heat put into it. A combustion engine achieves about 20% thermal efficiency. A conventional water-cooled nuclear reactor generally achieves about 32%.

According to Massimiliano Fratoni, Xenel Distinguished Associate Professor in the Department of Nuclear Engineering, a high-temperature, molten salt reactor might achieve 45% thermal efficiency.

So, with all the potential benefits of molten salt reactors, why weren’t they widely adopted years ago? According to Peter Hosemann, Professor and Ernest S. Kuh Chair in Engineering, there’s a significant challenge inherent in molten salt reactors: identifying materials that can withstand contact with the salt.

Anyone who’s driven regularly in a region with icy roads has probably seen trucks and cars with ragged holes eaten in the metal around the wheel wells. Salt spread on roads to melt ice is highly corrosive to metal. A small amount of moisture in the salt coolant of a nuclear reactor could cause similar corrosion, and when combined with extreme heat and high radiation, getting the salt’s chemistry right is even more critical.

Hosemann, a materials scientist, uses electron microscopes to magnify metal samples by about a million times. The samples have been corroded and or irradiated, and Hosemann studies how such damage alters their structures and properties. These experiments may help reactor designers estimate how much corrosion to expect every year in a molten salt reactor housing.

Hosemann says molten salt reactors present special engineering challenges because the salt coolant freezes well above room-temperatures, meaning that repairs must either be done at high temperatures, or the coolant must first be drained.

Commercially successful molten salt reactors then will have to be very reliable, and that won’t be simple. For example, molten salt reactors with liquid fuel may be appealing in terms of waste management, but they also add impurities into the salt that make it more corrosive.

Liquid fuel designs will need to be more robust to counter corrosion, resulting in higher costs, and the radioactive coolant presents further maintenance challenges.

Nuclear engineering graduate students Sasha Kennedy and Nathanael Gardner, from left, work with molten salt. Illustration by Adam Lau/Berkeley Engineering

“Good engineering is always a process of finding good compromises. Even the molten salt reactor, as beautiful as it is, has to make compromises,” says Hosemann.

Peterson thinks the compromise is in making molten salt reactors modular. He was the principal investigator on the Department of Energy-funded Integrated Research Project that conducted molten salt reactor experiments from 2012 to 2018.

His research was spun off into Kairos Power, which he co-founded with Berkeley Engineering alums Edward Blandford (Ph.D.’10 NE) and Mike Laufer (Ph.D.’13 NE), and where Peterson serves as Chief Nuclear Officer.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission just completed a review of Kairos Power’s application for a demonstration reactor, Hermes, as a proof of concept. Peterson says that high-temperature parts of Kairos Power’s reactors would likely last for 15 to 25 years before they’d need to be replaced, and because the replacement parts will be lighter than those of conventional reactors, they’ll consume fewer resources.

“As soon as you’re forced to make these high-temperature components replaceable, you’re systematically able to improve them. You’re building improvements, replacing the old parts and testing the new ones, iteratively getting better and better,” says Peterson.

Lowering energy costs

California is committed to reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2045. It’s tempting to assume that this goal can be reached with renewables alone, but electricity demand doesn’t follow peak energy generating times for renewables. 

Natural gas power surges in the evenings as renewable energy wanes. Even optimistic studies on swift renewable energy adoption in California still assume that some 10% of energy requirements won’t be achieved with renewables and storage alone.

Considering the increasing risks to infrastructure in California from wildfires and intensifying storms, it’s likely that non-renewable energy sources will still be needed to meet the state’s energy needs.

Engineers in the Department of Nuclear Engineering expect that nuclear reactors will make more sense than natural gas for future non-renewable energy needs because they produce carbon-free energy at a lower cost. In 2022, the price of natural gas in the United States fluctuated from around $2 to $9 per million BTUs.

Peterson notes that energy from nuclear fuel currently costs about 50 cents per million BTUs. If new reactors can be designed with high intrinsic safety and lower construction and operating costs, nuclear energy might be even more affordable.

Molten salt sits on a microscope stage in professor Raluca Scarlat’s lab. Illustration by Adam Lau/Berkeley Engineering

Even if molten salt reactors do not end up replacing natural gas, Hosemann says the research will still prove valuable. He points to other large-scale scientific and engineering endeavors like fusion reactors, which in 60 years of development have never been used commercially but have led to other breakthroughs.

“Do I think we’ll have fusion-generated power in our homes in the next five years? Absolutely not. But it’s still valuable because it drives development of superconductors, plasmas and our understanding of materials in extreme environments, which today get used in MRI systems and semiconductor manufacturing,” says Hosemann. “Who knows what we’ll find as we study molten salt reactors?”

Source: UC Berkeley

You can offer your link to a page which is relevant to the topic of this post.

#000 #2022 #aircraft #airplanes #applications #atom #atoms #boiling #bombers #Building #carbon #carbon emissions #Cars #challenge #chemistry #Chemistry & materials science news #coal #construction #contamination #control systems #cooling #corrosion #crash #designers #development #effects #efficiency #electrical power #electricity #electron

[magnoliamyrrh]

.

#i cant read anything without thinking of world war 3 #the world is Such a mess rn #youve got israel and palestine w the us euro india whoever else pushing for israel meanwhile other side youve got #iran pushing for hamas and mujahedeen from dif regions showing up #all while zelensky the biggest fan of the us on the planet supports israel while hamas thanks ukraine for sending them weapons??? #youve got what's happening in armenia w azerbaijan and turkey and thats a whole fucking mess too #youve got ukraine another geopolitical nightmare #china seems to be gearing up for shit in taiwan #i keep hearing about baddd conflicts going on in india and im sure kashmir isnt great #and im sure pakistan siding w palestine and india w israel will go great #youve got kosovo getting bad again and it might get worse and turn into a whole thing #great!!!! wonderful!! brilliant brillaint state of affairs #how the fuck are we gonna avoid a world war exactly #could this species for once stop fucking slaughtering and opressing each other maybe #we never should have invented weapons like the ones we have. never. guns bombs atomic bombs airplanes drones none of it #we should have stuck with fucking bows and spears and swords and other shit like that

[trazodonedreamer]

A Douglas A-4 Skyhawk carrying a Mark 7 “Thor” tactical fission bomb. The Skyhawk used a method called “toss bombing” to lob the bomb in an arcing trajectory, so the aircraft could evade the blast effect when the bomb detonated.

#a-4 skyhawk #a4 skyhawk #douglas a-4 skyhawk #military aviation #atomic bomb #united states navy #airplanes

[paper-mario-wiki]

i just invented 10,000 nuclear bombs that never stop exploding and when the explosion radius gets to its biggest point it stays that big and violent for the rest of time. the bombs are the size of a car.

i also just invented an airplane with completely normal control layouts, but every surface surrounding the control panel is covered in hundreds of hatch release levers for dropping payloads. they are all labeled as having different functions.

i also just started an international air mail delivery service with the aim to service the most land area from the sky, which is why prioritizing hatch release levers was so critical (to make sure we dont have to stop flying to drop the mail).

i also just employed 10,000 people from the dyslexic pilot convention to man our fleet of 10,000 hatch release lever planes and we plan to start making deliveries tonight. with an internal storage capacity of 1 large sedan, theres plenty of space for plenty of mail.

i do not remember where i put my 10,000 infinite atom bombs. i remember i had enough space in my hangar for 10,000 hatch release lever planes, or 10,000 infinite atom bombs, but not both side by side. i dont remember how i saved so much space.

#text #random thought

[catgirl-kaiju]

FUN FACT!

the first ever hydrogen bomb detonated (Operation Ivy: Shot Mike) completely vaporized the island it was detonated on, leaving a giant undersea crater in its place. there was an island there, and now it's just fucking gone.

The island was Elugelab in the Enewetak Atoll

Before the Ivy Mike test:

After the Ivy Mike test:

the thing about the Ivy Mike test, though, is that the bomb was too big, impractical, and heavy to carry in an airplane, afix to a rocket, or fire from a canon. still, the blast had a yield of 10.4 megatons, rivaled only by the infamous Castle Bravo test (US 15 megatons), the B-41/ Mk-41 Bomb ( US 25 megatons), and the Tsar Bomba test (USSR 50 megatons).

The rest of these bombs can be dropped from airplanes. The Tsar Bomba design was, however, never put into production as a practical weapon and was simply intended to be a one-off exercise with the goal of creating the largest yeild atomic weapon in history. (it succeeded)

#world history #us history #atomic testing #hydrogen bomb #castle bravo #ivy mike #tsar bomba #infodump #spin #special interest

[therealtruthalways]

United States Patent and Trademark Office​

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1284982 – November 19, 1918 – Process and Apparatus for Procuring and Stimulating Rainfall

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1358084 – November 9, 1920 – Method of Producing Fog-Screens

1619183 – March 1, 1927 – Process of Producing Smoke Clouds From Moving Aircraft

1665267 – April 10, 1928 – Process of Producing Artificial Fogs

1892132 – December 27, 1932 – Atomizing Attachment For Airplane Engine Exhausts

1895765 – January 31, 1933 – Artificial Production of Fog

1928963 – October 3, 1933 – Electrical System And Method

1957075 – May 1, 1934 – Airplane Spray Equipment

1993316 – March 5, 1935 – Apparatus for and Method of Producing Oil Fog

2052626 – September 1, 1936 – Method of Dispelling Fog

2097581 – November 2, 1937 – Electric Stream Generator – Referenced in 3990987

2173756 – September 19, 1939 – Process of Producing Fog or Mist by Partial and Flameless Combustion

2352677 – July 4, 1944 – Artificial Fog Production

2476171 – July 18, 1945 – Smoke Screen Generator

2409201 – October 15, 1946 – Smoke Producing Mixture

2480967 – September 6, 1949 – Aerial Discharge Device

2527230 – October 24, 1950 – Method of Crystal Formation and Precipitation

2527231 – October 24, 1950 – Method of Generating Silver Iodide Smoke

2550324 – April 24, 1951 – Process For Controlling Weather

2582678 – June 15, 1952 – Material Disseminating Apparatus For Airplanes

2611992 – September 30, 1952 – Engine Exhaust Operated Fluent Material Distributor

2614083 – October 14, 1952 – Metal Chloride Screening Smoke Mixture

2633455 – March 31, 1953 – Smoke Generator

2688069 – August 31, 1954 – Steam Generator – Referenced in 3990987

2721495 – October 25, 1955 – Method And Apparatus For Detecting Minute Crystal Forming Particles Suspended in a Gaseous Atmosphere

2730402 – January 10, 1956 – Controllable Dispersal Device

2903188 – April 2, 1956 – Control of Tropical Cyclone Formation

2756097 – July 24, 1956 – Process for Weather Control

2801322 – July 30, 1957 – Decomposition Chamber for Monopropellant Fuel – Referenced in 3990987

2835530 – May 20, 1958 – Process for the Condensation of Atmospheric Humidity and Dissolution of Fog

2871344 – January 27, 1959 – Long Distance Communication System

2881335 – April 7, 1959 – Generation of Electrical Fields

2908442 – October 13, 1959 – Method For Dispersing Natural Atmospheric Fogs And Clouds

2962450 – November 29, 1960 – Fog Dispelling Composition

2963975 – December 13, 1960 – Cloud Seeding Carbon Dioxide Bullet

3019989 – February 6, 1962 – Atmospheric Space Charge Modification

2986360 – May 30, 1962 – Aerial Insecticide Dusting Device

3046168 – July 24, 1962 – Chemically Produced Colored Smokes

3056556 – October 2, 1962 – Method of Artificially Influencing the Weather

3126155 – March 24, 1964 – Silver Iodide Cloud Seeding Generator

3127107 – March 31, 1964 – Generation of Ice-Nucleating Crystals

3131131 – April 28, 1964 – Electrostatic Mixing in Microbial Conversions

3140207 – July 7, 1964 – Pyrotechnic Composition

3174150 – March 16, 1965 – Self-Focusing Antenna System

3234357 – February 8, 1966 – Electrically Heated Smoke Producing Device

3274035 – September 20, 1966 – Metallic Composition For Production of Hydroscopic Smoke

3284005 – November 8,1966 – Weather Control by Artificial Means

3300721 – January 24, 1967 – Means For Communication Through a Layer of Ionized Gases

3313487 – April 11, 1967 – Cloud Seeding Apparatus

3338476 – August 29, 1967 – Heating Device For Use With Aerosol Containers

3375148 – March 26, 1968 – Pyrotechnics Comprising Silver Iodate, Ammonium Nitrate, Nitrocellulose and Nitrate Esters

3378201 – April 16, 1968 – Method for Precipitating Atmospheric Water Masses

3410489 – November 12, 1968 – Automatically Adjustable Airfoil Spray System With Pump

3418184 – December 24, 1968 – Smoke Producing Propellant

3429507 – February 25, 1969 – Rainmaker

3432208 – November 7, 1967 – Fluidized Particle Dispenser

3441214 – April 29, 1969 – Method And Apparatus For Seeding Clouds

3445844 – May 20, 1969 – Trapped Electromagnetic Radiation Communications System

3456880 – July 22, 1969 – Method Of Producing Precipitation From The Atmosphere

3518670 – June 30, 1970 – Artificial Ion Cloud

3517512 – June 30, 1970 – Apparatus for Suppressing Contrails

3534906 – October 20, 1970 – Control of Atmospheric Particles

3545677 – December 8, 1970 – Method of Cloud Seeding

3564253 – February 16, 1971 – System And Method For Irradiation Of Planet Surface Areas

3587966 – June 28, 1971 – Freezing Nucleation

3595477 – July 27, 1971 – Fog Dispersing Method and Compositions

3601312 – August 24, 1971 – Methods of Increasing The Likelihood oF Precipitation By The Artificial Introduction Of Sea Water Vapor Into The Atmosphere Winward Of An Air Lift Region

3608810 – September 28, 1971 – Methods of Treating Atmospheric Conditions

3608820– September 20, 1971 – Treatment of Atmospheric Conditions by Intermittent Dispensing of Materials Therein

3613992 – October 19, 1971 – Weather Modification Method

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3659785 – December 8, 1971 – Weather Modification Utilizing Microencapsulated Material

3666176 – March 3, 1972 – Solar Temperature Inversion Device

3677840 – July 18, 1972 – Pyrotechnics Comprising Oxide of Silver For Weather Modification Use

3690552 – September 12, 1972 – Fog Dispersal

3722183 – March 27, 1973 – Device For Clearing Impurities From The Atmosphere

3748278 – July 24, 1973 – Process and Agents Having an Influence on the Weather

3751913 – August 14, 1973 – Barium Release System

3769107 – October 30, 1973 – Pyrotechnic Composition For Generating Lead Based Smoke

3784099 – January 8, 1974 – Air Pollution Control Method

3785557 – January 15, 1974 – Cloud Seeding System

3788543 – January 29, 1974 – Uniform Size Particle Generator

3795626 – March 5, 1974 – Weather Modification Process

3802971 – April 9, 1974 – Pyrotechnic Formulations for Weather Modification Comprising a Mixture of Iodates

3808595 – April 30, 1974 – Chaff Dispensing System

3813875 – June 4, 1974 – Rocket Having Barium Release System to Create Ion Clouds In The Upper Atmosphere

3835059 – September 10, 1974 – Methods of Generating Ice Nuclei Smoke Particles For Weather Modification And Apparatus Therefore

3835293 – September 10, 1974 – Electrical Heating Apparatus For Generating Super Heated Vapors

3858805 – January 7, 1975 – Ice Nucleation by Micas

3877642 – April 15, 1975 – Freezing Nucleant

3882393 – May 6, 1975 – Communications System Utilizing Modulation of The Characteristic Polarization of The Ionosphere

3887580 – June 3, 1975 – Method of Crystallization of Water in Supercooled Clouds and Fogs and Reagent Useful in Said Method

3896993 – July 29, 1975 – Process For Local Modification of Fog And Clouds For Triggering Their Precipitation And For Hindering The Development of Hail Producing Clouds

3899129 – August 12, 1975 – Apparatus for generating ice nuclei smoke particles for weather modification

3899144 – August 12, 1975 – Powder contrail generation

3915379 – October 28, 1975 – Method of Controlling Weather

3940059 – February 24, 1976 – Method For Fog Dispersion

3940060 – February 24, 1976 – Vortex Ring Generator

3990987 – November 9, 1976 – Smoke generator

3992628 – November 16, 1976 – Countermeasure system for laser radiation

3994437 – November 30, 1976 – Broadcast dissemination of trace quantities of biologically active chemicals

4042196 – August 16, 1977 – Method and apparatus for triggering a substantial change in earth characteristics and measuring earth changes

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4009828 – March 1 1977 – Organic Nucleating Agent for both Warm and Cold Clouds

4035726 – July 12, 1977 – Method of controlling and/or improving high-latitude and other communications or radio wave surveillance systems by partial control of radio wave et al

4096005 – June 20, 1978 – Pyrotechnic Cloud Seeding Composition

4129252 – December 12, 1978 – Method and apparatus for production of seeding materials

4141274 – February 27, 1979 – Weather modification automatic cartridge dispenser

4167008 – September 4, 1979 – Fluid bed chaff dispenser

4347284 – August 31, 1982 – White cover sheet material capable of reflecting ultraviolet rays

4362271 – December 7, 1982 – Procedure for the artificial modification of atmospheric precipitation as well as compounds with a dimethyl sulfoxide base for use in carrying out said procedure

4373391 – February 15, 1983 – Relative Humidity Sensitive Material

4396152 – August 2, 1983 – Aerosol Dispenser System

4402480 – September 6, 1983 – Atmosphere modification satellite

4412654 – November 1, 1983 – Laminar microjet atomizer and method of aerial spraying of liquids

4415265 – November 15, 1983 – Method and apparatus for aerosol particle absorption spectroscopy

4470544 – September 11, 1984 – Method of and Means for weather modification

4475927 – October 9, 1984 – Bipolar Fog Abatement System

4600147 – July 15, 1986 – Liquid propane generator for cloud seeding apparatus

4633714 – January 6, 1987 – Aerosol particle charge and size analyzer

4643355 – February 17, 1987 – Method and apparatus for modification of climatic conditions

4653690 – March 31, 1987 – Method of producing cumulus clouds

4684063 – August 4, 1987 – Particulates generation and removal

4686605 – August 11, 1987 – HAARP Patent / EASTLUND PATENT – Method and apparatus for altering a region in the earth’s atmosphere, ionosphere, and/or magnetosphere

4704942 – November 10, 1987 – Charged Aerosol

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1338343– August 14, 1990 – Process and Apparatus for the production of intense artificial Fog

4999637 – March 12, 1991 – Creation of artificial ionization clouds above the earth

5003186 – March 26, 1991 – Stratospheric Welsbach seeding for reduction of global warming

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5038664 – August 13, 1991 – Method for producing a shell of relativistic particles at an altitude above the earths surface

5041760 – August 20, 1991 – Method and apparatus for generating and utilizing a compound plasma configuration

5041834 – August 20, 1991 – Artificial ionospheric mirror composed of a plasma layer which can be tilted

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5059909 – October 22, 1991 – Determination of particle size and electrical charge

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5110502 – May 5, 1992 – Method of suppressing formation of contrails and solution therefor

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5174498 – December 29, 1992 – Cloud Seeding

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5242820 – September 7, 1993 – Army Mycoplasma Patent Patent

5245290 – September 14, 1993 – Device for determining the size and charge of colloidal particles by measuring electroacoustic effect

5286979 – February 15, 1994 – Process for absorbing ultraviolet radiation using dispersed melanin

5296910 – March 22, 1994 – Method and apparatus for particle analysis

5327222 – July 5, 1994 – Displacement information detecting apparatus

5357865 – October 25, 1994 – Method of cloud seeding

5360162 – November 1, 1994 – Method and composition for precipitation of atmospheric water

5383024 – January 17, 1995 – Optical wet steam monitor

5425413 – June 20, 1995 – Method to hinder the formation and to break-up overhead atmospheric inversions, enhance ground level air circulation and improve urban air quality

5434667 – July 18, 1995 – Characterization of particles by modulated dynamic light scattering

5436039 – July 25, 1995 – Artificial Snow in an Aggregate Form of Snow Granules

5441200 – August 15, 1995 – Tropical cyclone disruption

5492274 – February 20, 1996 – Method of and Means for Weather Modification

5546183 – August, 13, 1996 – LIDAR Droplet Size Monitor for In-Flight Measurement of Aircraft Engine Exhaust Contrails, Droplets and Aerosols

5556029 – September 17, 1996 – Method of hydrometeor dissipation (clouds)

5628455 – May 13, 1997 – Method and apparatus for modification of supercooled fog

5631414 – May 20, 1997 – Method and device for remote diagnostics of ocean-atmosphere system state

5639441 – June 17, 1997 – Methods for fine particle formation

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6030506 – February 29, 2000 – Preparation of independently generated highly reactive chemical species

6034073 – March 7, 2000 – Solvent detergent emulsions having antiviral activity

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6263744 – July 24, 2001 – Automated mobility-classified-aerosol detector

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[wumblr]

one thing i have not thoroughly expanded upon about nuclear policy is supply chain fragility.

the united states did not have enough fissile material to drop a third bomb on japan. enriching more uranium required the construction of refineries at an industrial scale, and producing plutonium required the contruction of reactors in a practically unprecedented infrastructure project (atoms for peace). sl1 was completely unclassified, nuclear car batteries and airplanes were promised and nuclear mutant gardens produced over 2200 novel cultivars. atoms for peace was a coordinated tranche of propaganda designed to convince the public that a limitless energy utopia was just around the corner if we only built out the reactors to produce the plutonium that would make the arsenal. after it was produced, all of these great visions of the future quietly withered away, and would have revealed themselves as lies all along if anybody had been paying attention.

the nuclear deterrent is expiring. we are currently engaged in subcritical testing in nevada to identify what portion of the arsenal could theoretically still function. in order to make any new warheads at scale, we would need to rebuild a number of reactors comparable to the number that has been decommissioned since the cold war.

we no longer have the manufacturing capability to undertake an infrastructure project of this scale. we can't even cobble together the funding to greenlight a single power plant. gates' nuscale just lost intermountain west, we can't even cobble together funding for six small modular research reactors. given no action, the bombs will become duds, and we will not be able to produce any more.

i would give it maybe 40 years at most, realistically more like 20 (an insufficient amount of time for an infrastructure project of this scale), before the united states loses its capability to defend itself, a "right" it never had.

which is why we're doing "atoms for peace 2" now.

it's still a lie.

the people who are going to have to ultimately end this -- in one way or another, disarmament, abandonment, or detonation -- are alive today. it's us. nobody else is coming to save us.

[divine-misfortune]

Hello! For the smut prompts:

“I need to be inside you/you to be inside me“

„In the bath“

With Dewther please?

So....I got....Carried away. This is 2.2k words of Dewther being gross and in love and also really fucking horny about finally being together again.

Mild cw for talk of knotting and the slightest mention of cumflation towards the end, and a bit of weirdly possessive Aether for spice.

Read on ao3 or below!

The atmosphere in the bathroom was heavy, made thick by the rich scents of lavender and geranium. It made his lungs feel warm. Each breath was close to intoxicating, something floral and sweet mingling with the familiar spice that was so unapologetically Dewdrop. To say it was going to his head would be an understatement, almost high off the air of intimacy alone. 

Aether drew in another greedy, full-bodied breath and the little ghoul plastered against his chest stirred. Dew's tail draped over the edge of the tub flicked with a minor annoyance and he carefully wrapped both arms around his midsection, kissing the top of his head with a sympathetic sound.

Safe in the quintessence ghoul's strong embrace Dew mirrored his sigh. Content, finally.

Months of travel took its toll, Aether knew that and couldn't say he missed that part of touring. Too small bunks on a swaying tour bus, lumpy hotel beds with starchy sheets, the entire god awful experience of airports and airplanes in general - Hell, in short. Dew had always struggled with the inconsistent and uncomfortable travel, Aether's own absence surely only added to the distress. The fire ghoul hadn't let him out of arm's reach since they'd reunited that morning. Not that he was complaining, or that he himself hadn’t been equally as bad.

Clingy was one word to describe his behavior but territorial was a better, more accurate one. 

He drew Dew closer, as much closer as he could manage which wasn't much. Bare skin to bare skin, back to chest, the only thing between them was the literal atoms that made them but even that wasn't close enough for Aether. It was almost enough to ease irksome yearning trying to carve itself into his bones. All those months without his pack - without Dew - had started to physically hurt and he never wanted to let him go now that they were together again. The idea was sort of nauseating. 

But he tucked Dew's hair behind his ear. A gesture to prove this moment real, an act of tenderness that was as self serving as it was self soothing. Dew chirped curiously, soft enough Aether suspected he had started to nod off.

“You still with me droplet?” 

“Mm…” He nods, or tries to. It proves to be too much effort for him to commit to, “haven't gone anywhere.” 

There’s a sleepy, floaty quality about his voice that just about makes his heart flutter. 

Aether chuffed out a laugh against his neck and Dew's ear twitched as he tried to shy away from the ticklish breath. He settled quickly though. All it took was Aether petting the flat of his hand over his belly, drawing another shallow sigh out of him. Content as he should be, as he deserved to be. 

“Missed you y'know,” he mumbled into the curve of his shoulder, against the warmth of his skin. It wasn't the first time he'd said it since their reunion and it certainly wouldn't be the last but the words carried the same weight. He hoped they'd stick and linger on Dew with all the permanency of scar tissue. 

“Course you missed your favorite fire ghoul.” 

“Ifrit didn't go anywhere though.”

“Wh-” Dew’s tail slapped against the surface of the water as he sat upright, ears pinning back as he threw a glare over his shoulder. His eyes were still a touch foggy with exhaustion. “We were having a nice moment, asshole. Don't make me boil you in this tub.” 

His pointed nose scrunched up with a feigned distaste as he folded his arms and Aether laughed again. Full bellied and genuine. Contempt was a mask he wore with ease but that was all it was, a mask that Aether saw clear beneath. He'd long since wormed his way under that rough exterior  and made a home in his carefully guarded affections, and since then Dew couldn’t hide a thing from him. 

“Oh you wouldn't,” Aether hummed with a confidence Dew scoffed at. He kissed the space under his ear, and once more under his jaw “I know my sweet boy better than that….” Wandering from his belly, his hand settled to pet over his hip, fingers dipping into the cut of it. Far enough to get Dew squirming a little, “know you missed me too baby.” 

“Nn…Maybe a little bit.” His pulse jumped under the brush of lips, more truthful than the fire ghoul intended to be that's for sure. An open mouthed kiss to the side of his neck was all it took to elicit honesty in a shudder. His knees poking above the water almost knocked together, a few kisses and Aether knew he had that cute little cock starting to fatten up. “...Missed you too Aeth,” he finally confessed, much like prayer. 

As much as Dew appeared to prefer a more silent variety of affection, he was impossibly weak to being loved on. Adoring whispers of I love you was all Aether needed to bring some pink to those high cheekbones. Chaste kisses and casual displays alone could get his dick twitching with interest and Aether loved that about him. Loved how sweet of a weakness it was, and how easily he could exploit such a proclivity nearly as much. 

“Say it again” Aether instructed, teasing his nails through the cornsilk hair just above where Dew needed him. He'd barely brushed the base of his cock and Dew was starting to blush a proper, more fitting of a fire ghoul, red. 

Somehow Dew melted further, like he was trying to meld himself entirely with his mate. His knees fell apart against either side of the tub. More than invitation. 

“Missed you, fuck, Aeth I missed you every fucking second.” He choked out, head falling back against his shoulder, “need you to touch it. Touch me, remind me.”

The flowery air turns spiced, clove just starting to be exposed to heat. Faint yet growing. Aether couldn't get enough. 

Still partially soft, his cock was almost engulfed in his palm. Dew exhaled shakily, he was sure his eyes fluttered but Aether wasn't looking - though he should have been - his attention was fixed below the surface of the water. Watching Dew slowly stiffen up was his favorite part. He wanted to watch the head flush to match his cheeks, enjoying the sight almost as much as the physical sensation of him filling out and twitching for him. It made it feel real, made Dew feel real. 

It's not fast but it certainly wasn't slow. Teasing was the last thing on his mind, but he refused to rush. Not when they'd both gone so long without each other. He mouthed lazily at his pulse and caught himself grinning against his throat, already imagining the messy purple splotches he planned to litter his skin with. Truthfully they had nothing but time. 

“Did it miss me too?” Aether purred, squeezing his cock just enough to wring a semi pained and entirely pleasured groan out of Dew. 

“Uh-huh…” Dew noddled, a little dumbly. Something that happened often when he was left in Aether's hands. 

Aether reveled in every twitch, every hitched breath. He wanted to commit it to memory. He kept an arm tight around his middle while twisting his free hand up and down his length. With his eyes screwed shut Dew reached blindly for him, overlapping with his unoccupied hand before naturally lacing their fingers together. It was sweet if you ignored the slight death grip Dew had on his other arm. 

It was getting increasingly harder to ignore his own ache. 

He thumbed over his slit a few times and Dew keened enough he nearly peeked over the water but Aether drew him back with a little hum. Shamelessly taking the opportunity to slide his cock against the cleft of his ass, Dew kicking hard in his fist. 

“Easy baby boy…Don't tell me I've got you close already.” 

Dew shook his head but all Aether had to do was sneak that hand down to squeeze at his overly tight balls. His jaw went slack and his thighs shook. 

“Can't cum for me yet,” Dew whined sadly, a little wounded “need to be inside you.” 

“Aeth…” His breath trembled, a quiver throughout his entire little body as those thick fingers moved further. Over the seam of his sack to rub the pads of two against his taint, grazing his hole. 

“Shh” He knew the pleading was close behind. The pathetic breathless babbling that would usually drive him wild would only drive a sad stake into his already yearning heart. He didn't want that version of Dew tonight, he wanted him blissed and spoiled to the point of overwhelm. An entire tour worth of love and desire to pour into the space of a single bath, months of time to make up for. “You've got me, you've got all of me.”

Unwilling to waste another precious second he pressed his middle finger past the fluttering ring of muscle, the two of them groaning in unison. Always so fucking tight - something that hadn't left his thoughts since their last night together. The promise of Dew wrapped so snug around him made him lightheaded.

“Belial, you still get all slick for me like you used to.” He nosed into his pale hair, wanting to bury himself in the smoky scent. “Always gonna be my little water ghoul, aren't you?” 

Squirming slightly, his flush crept damn near all the way down his chest. Despite that fidgeting Dew still moaned and tried to roll his hips. Aether gave him a second digit without warning and the biddable fire ghoul was nearly trying to fuck himself on both fingers. Doing most of the work for him, all Aether had to do was scissor him open and listen to hot puffs of breath that Dew panted out. He swore the room was getting warmer with every sigh. 

“Could smell it on you all fucking day,” Aether rumbled lowly, lips grazing a particular birthmark on his shoulder blade and Dew’s body clenched around him. “My needy boy, couldn't get my cock off your mind.” 

“Couldn't stop thinking about it, haven't stopped since the last show ended. Been waiting to come home to you.” 

Aether nearly growled, proprietorial desire burning like a supernova at his core. It made his neglected cock throb against the small of Dew's back, fat and heavy. He licked over his fangs and withdrew from the desperate clutch of his body. Dew deflated, sagging uselessly into him. 

Limp and pliable, it was almost like sliding into a doll. Easy with only the slightest bit of his resistance despite the proper lack of prep. Dew's breath caught as he nudged the head of his cock against his winking hole, unaccustomed to his girth but desperate for it, he tried to sink down onto him. Aether swore the whole bathroom tilted, maybe the entire world went sideways when the flushed red tip popped inside of him. It punched a guttural sound from him, and a high reedy cry from Dew. He grabbed a handful of his barely there ass to still him, already breathing heavily. 

His body was heavenly, or hellish in how sinfully good it was. Aether should have been dubbed a saint with the sheer restraint he exhibited not throwing Dew over the edge of the tub then and there. Hot and tight hardly described it, a vise set to draw him in and never let him go. Only having taken an inch Dew was already trying to milk him for all he was worth. 

“Ha - shit.” Aether swallowed thickly, dizzy. “Oh, oh you want it bad.”

“Fucking fill me.” A touch more demanding than Aether would typically allow, he chose to let it go. After so many months he couldn't fault Dew for forgetting his place or the rules. 

Taking his bony hips in both hands, he was reminded of just how small the fire ghoul was - just how perfectly he fit in his palms - Aether finally gave it to him. In one less than gentle movement he sheathed himself into the unholy embrace of his velvety walls. Dew's mouth fell open in a silent cry, breath ripped from his lungs. He hadn't fared much better, Aether swore the edges of his vision went fuzzy and dark. 

“Yes, yeah, Lucifer - You just fucking take it don't you?” 

“So…S’big.” 

“It is, huh darling?” He lifted him up an inch and immediately let him drop back down quick and unguided. Aether was sure Dew’s eyes crossed. “Been waiting for you. Saving it for you.” 

“Y - You,” 

“Mhm…” The quintessence ghoul licked a fat stripe up the side of his throat, reveling in the salt of his sweat on his tongue. “You wanna be filled, gonna fucking fill you.” 

Dew's head tipped forward, chin to his chest, as Aether guided his hips in a slow circle. 

“Gonna make you so full” he grabbed a shaking hand and guided Dew's palm to his belly, pressing. “Nn…Feel me? You feel me in there?” 

The fire ghoul could barely gurgle a semblance of response.

“Here, I'm gonna cum right here and then you'll really fucking feel it. Bet I can make that belly swell with it, then ‘m gonna force you on my knot where you belong.” His head was swimming. Water sloshed over the edge of the tub. “Might never let you off, keep you, claim you.” 

“O-Oh fuh-” 

“Hells below, you're oh - my good boy.” Aether reached for Dew's little dick, fingers curling snug around it. “Mine.”

#spicy tag #writing #answered #void writing #the band ghost #ghost the band #the band ghost fanfic #nameless ghouls #dewdrop ghoul #sodo ghoul #aether ghoul #dewther #aether/dewdrop

[dronescapesvideos]

Convair NX-2 Camal, The Story Of The Secret Post WW2 Atomic Powered Bomber Plane

#Convair #Nuclear Bomber #Atomic aircraft #atomic plane #NX-2 Camal #youtube #aircraft #airplane #aviation #dronescapes #military #documentary #aviation history #Youtube

[inthedayswhenlandswerefew]

North To The Future [Chapter 15: Drive] [Series Finale]

The year is now 2000. You are just beginning your veterinary practice in Juneau, Alaska. Aegon is a mysterious, troubled newcomer to town. You kind of hate him. You are also kind of obsessed with him. Falling for him might legitimately ruin your life…but can you help it? Oh, and there’s a serial killer on the loose known only as the Ice Fisher.

Chapter warnings: Language, alcoholism, addiction, murder, violence, character deaths.

Word count: 7.3k.

Link to chapter list (and all my writing): HERE.

Taglist: @elsolario​ @ladylannisterxo​ @doingfondue​ @tclegane​ @quartzs-posts​ @liathelioness​ @aemcndtargaryen​ @thelittleswanao3​ @burningcoffeetimetravel​ @poohxlove​ @borikenlove​ @myspotofcraziness​ @travelingmypassion​ @graykageyama​ @skythighs​ @lauraneedstochill​ @darlingimafangirl​ @charenlie​ @thewew​ @eddies-bat-tattoos​ @minttea07​ @joliettes​ @trifoliumviridi​ @bornbetter​ @flowerpotmage​ @thewitch-lives​ @tempt-ress​ @padfooteyes​ @teenagecriminalmastermind​ @chelsey01​ @anditsmywholeheart​ @heliosscribbles​ @killerqueen-ofwillowgreen​ @narwhal-swimmingintheocean​ @tillyt04​ @cicaspair418​ @fan-goddess​ 

A/N: This is the fic I almost never wrote because I didn’t think anyone would be interested in some random, angsty, 1990s, Alaskan, crime-thriller AU. Thank you for proving me wrong. I hope you enjoy the ending. 💜

Almost everything about your existence is pure chance; it’s the most freeing and horrifying truth imaginable. There’s the genetic lottery and corporate downsizing, revolutions and hurricanes, plagues, asteroids, famines, faulty airplanes and malignant blooms of cells and drunk drivers. There are 100 billion planets in this galaxy and your atoms ended up on the one called Earth. After all that, do you really think what you want matters? So make all the choices you like, all the nail-biting deliberations and promises and vows, weigh costs and benefits, do research, roll dice, ask astrologers and palm readers, start over every New Year because that’s something we tell ourselves is possible. The fact that you exist at all is one big cosmic coin flip. If you think you’re the one driving, you’re dead fucking wrong. You’re the speck of dust on a windshield, the spin of a roulette wheel. You’re a flash of silver in the universe’s pinball machine.

I spend a lot of my time thinking about chance, okay? My family is one of the wealthiest in the Western Hemisphere, and I didn’t do anything to earn that. I was born first, and I definitely didn’t do anything to earn that, Jesus Christ, what a chromosomal fuckup. I inherited an affliction that others get to live without. I can’t imagine what it feels like to wake up and not be horrified by myself, my shortcomings, my failures: too small, too stupid, too wild, too weak. And the first time someone says something like that to you, you want to apologize, you want to drop to your knees and cling to them and beg for absolution, maybe even the first hundred times, the first thousand. And then it just starts to piss you off. Yeah, I know, I’ve heard it all before, why would you expect anything different? Isn’t this getting old, Mom? Maybe you’re the stupid one, Dad, if you think you could cut me and anything but disappointments would fall out. I’m not horrified by the fact that I’m an addict. The horror came first. The horror is what led to all the rest of it.

One day when I was in 10th Grade—I was slumped way down in my chair and drinking vodka out of an Evian water bottle—my American History teacher, purely by chance, assigned me to make a poster about Juneau, Alaska. Some other kid got Los Angeles (Hollywood! The Whisky a Go Go!) and another got Chicago (the Mob!) and another got Nashville (Johnny Cash!) and some jock moron I hated got Baltimore (um, crabs? the War of 1812…?), but I got fucking Juneau, Alaska. I thought this was so unjust that I never forgot it, the fact that I had to get up in front of the class with my pathetic Crayolas-and-magazine-cutouts poster and pretend that Juneau was a place that mattered, that microscopic cloud-covered relic of a late-1800s gold mining settlement on the shores of the Gastineau Channel. Juneau was never on my list of cities to run to. It just wasn’t. It didn’t have anything I wanted. But when I started thinking about places where I could really disappear, where no one would ever bother looking, where days are short and dark and incurious and irrelevant…well, that sounds like Juneau, right?

Let me tell you something about the night I left. I’ve been more messed up, yeah, and I’ve hurt people worse, and I’ve been closer to death, I’ve been one more powder-white gram on the scale away from oblivion; but I’ve never felt that fucking low. I can’t decide if I wish I’d never gone to Juneau at all. I can’t decide if it was a blessing or a curse.

My flight is a red-eye with a layover in Ketchikan, American Airlines, bound for Seattle. Sunfyre has the window seat. He’s wearing the bright red Service Dog vest that I once stole for him specifically for such occasions. My dog fly with the cargo? My dog?! Bill Clinton will be elected pope first. Sunfyre is chewing contently on Milk-Bones and watching the sun rise over the Pacific Ocean. He knows the drill. We’ll touchdown and deplane, and then…and then…

And then we’ll start over again somewhere new. I’ll find a flight board and pick a destination; Seattle is a hub, with spokes leading everywhere. I could go south, to Galveston, Lafayette, Biloxi, someplace where it gets hot, someplace where I can sweat her out of me, purge every cell that still remembers what she felt like. I could go west, fading into mountains or cornfields, vapid infinitesimal towns in Montana, Iowa, Idaho, Nebraska. I could go to New England or the Great Lakes or freaking Hawaii, sleep in hammocks, swim with sea turtles, drink my rum and Cokes out of coconut shells. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that nowhere really sounds good to me. My legs are suddenly tired of running. There’s an ache that rattles down to the bone.

I don’t have to tell you that I love her, right? It’s not so easy for me to say. But it’s true, and it’s beautiful, and it’s torture, and it’s a dream. It’s pain that flays you alive and then builds you back again, layers of fresh muscle and tendons and veins growing over ribs and vertebrae like a trellis thick with ivy. It’s not a high. It’s just the best life can get down here on earth. It’s the ocean, it’s the Northern Lights.

I’m swimming in a black hoodie that is three sizes too big; I haven’t slept and I’m pale and raccoon-eyed, looking like death, feeling worse. When the stewardess rolls by with her clattering cart just slim enough to fit through the aisle, I order a cup of water for Sunfyre and a double rum and Coke for myself. It arrives with two blood-red cherries bobbing in a caramel-dark carbonated sea. The guy in the next seat over gives me a judgmental little eyebrow raise.

“That doesn’t look like breakfast,” he says.

I bite off both cherries—juice dribbling down my chin, wiped away with a sleeve—and throw the stems over my shoulder. The lady sitting behind me yelps in disgust. “Because it’s dessert.”

The man smiles and shakes his head, one of those I shouldn’t find it funny but I do sort of looks. I inspire a lot of those. He’s maybe mid-thirties, long hair and ripped jeans, very punk rock, cool as hell. There is a constellation of pins on his denim jacket. One of them has a roman numeral 10 on it, a stark X nestled inside a triangle. Unity, Service, Recovery, the gold letters say. To Thine Own Self Be True. It’s an Alcoholics Anonymous pin. What are the chances?

He catches me staring, and I ask: “Does it really make you a better man?”

“It doesn’t make you better. It just makes you real.” He smiles again, patient and kind. “It makes your emotions and experiences real, your relationships real. And so you become whatever version of yourself you were always supposed to be. But you have to want it. Not your wife, not your parents or your kids, not your pastor, not your friends, not your parole officer. You.”

I speak without knowing what I’m going to say. “I want it.”

“Yes, I think you do.”

He sees a lot, I think, as the plane descends into the grey fogbank of Seattle. 20/20.

When we land, the man squeezes into a cab with me and Sunfyre—he sniffles into a Kleenex for a while before reluctantly admitting that he’s allergic to dogs—and pays the fare. The cab’s worn brakes squeal to a stop outside a residential treatment center on the banks of the Puget Sound. When we step out onto the sidewalk, I ask the man if he’s going to take me to get one last drink first. He laughs in my face. Fucking jerk.

He pulls out a black Sharpie and rummages through his pockets, his wallet. He can’t find a scrap of paper. He writes his phone number on the underside of my arm instead. “You call me, okay?” he says. “Call me when you get out. Call me before you get out, if you need to. I don’t care if it’s in five minutes, I don’t care if it’s at 2 a.m. You just make sure you call.”

“Why would you do this? I mean, you don’t even know me. You have no idea who I am.”

“Because once, years ago, someone did the same thing for me, and someone did it for her too. Maybe one day you’ll be able to pay it forward. I don’t care who you are or where you’ve been. It doesn’t matter to me. I’d like to think that we’re all more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”

And then he waits for me to go inside. He doesn’t leave until he watches me check in at reception on the other side of the rain-flecked glass. Outside, a brand new day is beginning. A misty sun rises as pieces of the sky fall.

Sunfyre trots into the lobby alongside me, panting cheerfully, shaking the perpetual Seattle drizzle from his fur. There’s a girl at the front desk, just a girl, and that’s the other thing that’s different now. She’s not a maybe-future-one-of-my-girls. She’s just like anyone else. I already have a girl. I mean, I don’t anymore, not really. But I still do.

I throw my things onto the counter: my single suitcase, my tattered wallet, my bundle of cash held together with rubber bands, my scraped-up electric guitar.

“Checking in?” the girl asks.

“Yeah.”

“For how long?”

“As long as it takes, I guess.”

She opens my wallet, reads my license, blinks in bewilderment. “Aegon…?”

I sigh dramatically. “It’s Greek.”

~~~~~~~~~~

You dream of him; and when you do, he’s always smiling. He’s reading your palm in an empty Taco Bell, he’s kissing you under the Northern Lights, he’s regaling your parents with stories—of lobster fishing in Portland, of cattle ranching in Denver—all through Thanksgiving dinner, he’s undressing you in his moonlit apartment, he’s climbing into your bed. He’s not angry, he’s not ruined, he’s not running away. He’s exactly as you remember him in his best moments. He’s all chaotic white-blond hair and weightless light, sharp laughter and bright eyes. And each morning there’s a splinter-thin moment before you remember that he’s gone. That’s the worst part, really. You always knew it would be. You can’t even begin to forget him.

Your friends want to help you, but they don’t know how. Neither do your parents. Your dad gets an atlas from the study, throws it down on the dining room table, and opens it to a map of the world. “Pick anyplace and we’ll go there,” he says. “We’ll close the vet clinic for two weeks and we’ll all go.” But you can’t give him a single name: not Athens, or Paris, or Buenos Ares, or Cairo, or New York City, or Rome, or Tokyo, or anywhere else for that matter. It’s the strangest thing. All your life you’ve been waiting to get out of Juneau, but now nowhere sounds good to you. And maybe that’s a lesson you wish you’d never learned: sometimes freedom is less about places than it is about people.

The blood on the equipment recovered from Trent’s apartment matches DNA from the first three victims. He is charged with eight counts of first-degree murder and held awaiting trial in the Lemon Creek Correctional Center. His family visits him faithfully each week. His lawyer is exasperated that he won’t plead guilty and spare his parents the humiliation and expense of a protracted court battle. But Trent’s story never changes: he’s innocent, he’s never killed anybody, he doesn’t understand how the blood could have been found on his belongings. He wants to know exactly what items the police tested; he and his lawyer are still waiting for the prosecutor to turn over all the details during discovery. In the midst of the scandal, the upheaval, you fade into the backdrop like the stars behind fog. People talk around you and through you. They offer gaps that you don’t care enough to fill in. Drinks clink, whispers fly, conspiracies are exchanged between pool shots. You watch the days grow longer and wait for the future to arrive. You don’t know what it will look like, you can’t even begin to fathom it. But surely there must be a future. Life goes on. It did for your mom after Jesse. It will for you too.

A week after Aegon leaves, there is a knock at your parents’ front door. You open it to find Aemond standing there in the muted amber-pink afternoon light. His hair is long and loose, his Armani suit immaculately tailored, his BlackBerry nestled in his right hand. He glances up from it at you and his jaw falls open. And only then do you realize how awful you must look.

You tell Aemond, your voice hushed and heavy, ankles in quick-drying cement: “I don’t know where he is.”

“No, I can see that,” Aemond replies, dull horror in his blue eye. Then he turns around and strides halfway down the driveway towards the street, where a cab idles as it waits for him, engine exhaust pouring into the air like smoke from a firepit.

“How’s your dad?” you call after him when you get your bearings.

He pauses under the dwindling light. “Alive. For now.” And then Aemond considers you for a while. “I suppose if I ever want to find you again, I know where to look.”

You nod. “I’ll be here.”

I’ll always be here.

A month crawls by like a wounded animal, dead leaves snared in the fur of its belly. The flesh on your thigh knits back together. The things that Aegon ordered show up in Juneau, packages left on the front porch and stuffed into the moose-shaped mailbox like Christmas gifts in a stocking. You pack these remnants of him—Zoobooks and cooking accessories, knives and Chia Pets—into a cardboard box and tuck it away in a dusty, cobwebbed corner of the attic, and you’re aware the entire time that this has happened before, almost exactly twenty years ago. When your dad puts a Third Eye Blind or Red Hot Chili Peppers or Oasis album on his record player, you find some excuse to leave the room. When you tack magazine cutouts of beaches and cityscapes to your bedroom walls, all you can think about is where Aegon might be now. You wonder where he works during the day, a surf shop or a construction site or a farm or a fishing boat; you wonder who he spends his nights with.

I’ll always be here. Even if I leave, I’ll always be here.

~~~~~~~~~~

Twenty years ago to the day, almost to the hour, a man fell into the Gastineau Channel and drowned. They found water in his lungs, though the autopsy was only a formality, an afterthought; Jesse had a reputation in Juneau, and no one was particularly surprised to see how his story ended. There were abrasions on his back and shoulders, contusions on his wrists, but so what? He probably tripped half a dozen times before he tumbled over some guardrail and into the frigid black water. There was a bloody mess of an impact wound on the side of his face, but who cares? The blood alcohol concentration doesn’t lie. The man was wasted, and more than that he was a waste. If his premature demise hadn’t been then, it would have been later, in a week or a month or a year. And when someone like that goes, there’s a sigh of relief that accompanies the misery, isn’t there? There’s the sense of a weight being lifted from a scale.

You’re sitting in Ursa Minor at the usual booth, but the bar is practically empty. It’s Valentine’s Day. Joyce is with Rob, Kimmie is with Brad; Heather’s parents have spirited her away on a short vacation to Sitka to try to take their minds off Trent’s imminent lifelong incarceration. Your mom and dad’s February 14th tradition is cooking a homemade Italian dinner together—pasta, bread with herbs and olive oil, caprese salad, tiramisu—and then settling in for a romantic Blockbuster rental. This year, it’s Runaway Bride. Your mom loves Julia Roberts. They didn’t ask for privacy, but you gave it to them anyway. Kimmie offered to drop you off at Ursa Minor and then drive you home after her date with Brad so you could drink away your sorrows without having to worry about calling a ride. So now Kimmie is getting wined, dined, and plied with boxed chocolates at the Red Dog Saloon while you drain appletinis and flip through one of Jesse’s journals, not knowing what you’re looking for.

Dale is washing pint glasses in the sink behind the bar and humming cheerfully along to a Cake CD. It’s just you and him tonight; evidently, Dale doesn’t have a hot date either. It was nice of him to eschew the usual Shania Twain or Sheryl Crow soundtrack. He’s trying to spare you from any crooning love songs. He must have forgotten that Cake has its own little slice of relevance in your memories of Aegon, those memories that refuse to fade, ink in your skin as dark as night.

Your fingerprints trace Jesse’s scrawling, handwritten letters. It’s his very last journal, the last words he ever wrote. His final entry is unremarkable, a lucid recollection of his latest woodcarving project: it’s a family of tiny bears, three of them. He says he wants the cub to have the same slope of your cheeks, the shape of your eyes. And it’s just like your mom said. It really did seem like he was getting better.

You flip to the next page, blank. The heading reads: Thursday, February 14th, 1980.

You go back a few days. And your gaze catches on words that you’ve read before, months ago, back when the journals were a new discovery like striking oil. The entry is from Saturday the 9th. It ends with an unceremonious bullet point of a reminder: dinner w/ Dale on Thursday.

You leaf forward to Thursday, to the blank page that tells you nothing. Back to the 9th, forward to the 14th, again, again. Valentine’s Day 1980, before Dale had married his wife, after your mom had stopped trying to make plans with Jesse, maybe even rebelled against them; just two unromantic, discarded men with a vacant slot in their calendars and troubles to drink into submission. Except that Jesse never came home.

Dinner with Dale, you think dizzily. Dinner with Dale on the night he died.

The opening notes of The Distance shout from the stereo. Everything suddenly feels very loud.

Reluctantly crouched at the starting line,

Engines pumping and thumping in time…

What had Aegon said about that song before you sang it together, stomping and staggering across the hardwood floor? It’s not about NASCAR, it’s about a journey!

Outside, it’s a rare clear night in Juneau. The Northern Lights are a kaleidoscopic ribbon against indigo night, the sky a mausoleum of stars. And you remember when Aegon sang Everlong, when he grabbed your hand, led you upstairs to the roof, kissed you for the first time under the ethereal, shimmering curtain of green and purple and blue…before Heather had interrupted to tell you that Dale was closing the bar. He was irritable, he was tired; he wanted to go home.

The arena is empty except for one man,

Still driving and striving as fast as he can…

And then they found a body, didn’t they? Yes, you can remember being in Aegon’s apartment and hearing the police cars zoom by. You remember the red-and-blue flashes on his face. You remember thinking they looked like sapphires and rubies, the ocean and blood.

The sun has gone down and the moon has come up

And long ago somebody left with the cup,

But he’s driving and striving and hugging the turns

And thinking of someone for whom he still burns…

Icy claws glide down the length of your spine. Memories play back with a focused clarity that you didn’t have before: Dale groggy and yawning just before they found the fifth victim at Christmas, and again before they found the eighth the same night Trent dragged you—shrieking, bleeding, virtually naked—out of your Jeep. You remember Dale at your parents’ New Year’s Eve party talking about how maybe the killer was an athlete with brain damage from CTE. You remember him offering to give Trent a box of his old equipment from when he was a park ranger. You remember him watching as Trent towered over you here in Ursa Minor with a cue stick clenched in his fist, demanding to know where you had been the night before, Dale’s eyes gleaming with disapproval and fascination and…and…oh god, opportunity.

He’s going the distance,

He’s going for speed,

She’s all alone (all alone)

All alone in her time of need…

And now Aegon’s long gone, but you’re still here. And so is the Ice Fisher.

You’re staring at Dale, eyes huge and glossy with terror. He glances up, gives you a brief casual smile, looks down at the pint glasses again. And then his eyes come back to you. He sees you and you see him, really see him, and it’s the first time in your life that you can recall him being a centerpiece instead of an ornament for gazes to skate over like ice, wallpaper or taxidermy deer heads or a mirror. And you watch as the thing that lives inside Dale stirs awake. It is a shadow with fangs, talons, barbs down its spine, a weblike scribble of a brain loud with the echoes of screams; and it unfurls and fills him completely, all the way to his fingerprints. It possesses him, it eclipses him.

It’s Dale, you realize like a bullet slicing through an aorta, spilling an ocean of hot blood. It was him twenty years ago and it’s him now.

You gasp and fumble for the cannister of bear mace still clipped to your purse. Dale crosses the room with staggering swiftness, like a wolf, like a storm, one pint glass still gripped in his hand. He reaches you just as your thumb presses down on the cannister’s release tab. The rust-colored mist spews not directly into his face but into the room; Dale is hacking and rasping, you both are, but he isn’t in too much pain to haul you out of the booth and onto the floor. You’re screaming, you’re clawing at him, your eyes feel like they’re on fire, tiny pinpoint infernos that drill down to the bone. You can feel the ice-cold juice and schnapps and vodka of your appletini, knocked off the table when you fell, soaking through the back of your sweater. You can feel pebbles of glass as they burrow into your flesh. You are dimly aware of a barstool tumbling over as you struggle with Dale.

“No!” you cry into the monstrous hand that he clamps over your mouth. “No—!”

Dale brings the bottom of the pint glass down on your head. The Distance lyrics—she’s hoping in time that her memories will fade—swirl around inside your fractured skull.

Silence descends like a curtain, shadows in, lights out.

~~~~~~~~~~

I knock, and he opens the door. The house smells like fresh bread and alfredo sauce, rosemary and crushed garlic. My rental—a Toyota 4Runner, I remember what she said about the Nova being a bad idea in Alaska—is parked in the driveway behind her Jeep. Sunfyre is standing beside me, eyes sparkling, smiling with that unburdened-by-intellect innocence that dogs have. There’s a bouquet of blue-dyed roses in my left hand, cool melancholy blooms of life like seawater, like bruises.

“Hi,” I say to her dad as he stands in the doorway. “It’s good to see you again.”

“It’s good to see you too, Aegon.” He’s not just staring at me in the artificial front porch light; he’s gawking, he’s damn near speechless. “Wow. Wow. It’s really good to see you.”

Yeah, I know I look different. The dark rings around my eyes have vanished, my face is less puffy, my hair is trimmed and healthy and mostly out of my face, I stand taller. I’m wearing a white turtleneck sweater and a leather jacket, black skinny jeans, my combat boots. I have a red chip in my pocket that I can’t fucking wait to show her: 1 month sober. On the first day, you think you’re going to die, and on the second day you wish you would. But you don’t. You live, and that starts out as a grisly inconvenience, and then you get a taste for it. “You can probably guess who I’m looking for.”

“Yeah, I reckon I can,” her dad says. “But she’s not here right now. She went to Ursa Minor.”

I grin, a crooked little curl of the lips. “I think I remember how to get there.”

I hop back into the 4Runner with Sunfyre and pull out into the street, snow and ice chomping under the tires. I had missed driving, I realize now. I got so used to almost never being able to do it that I forgot how good it feels to turn the wheel yourself, to watch the speedometer ramp up when you decide you want to fly. Ten minutes later, I swerve into Ursa Minor’s deserted parking lot and screech to a stop across three separate spaces.

“Oh, what the fuck!” I choke out as I step into the bar, coughing into my sleeve. The blue roses tumble out of my hand. Ursa Minor is empty, but there’s something in the air, something invisible that drives scorching, stinging needles into my eyes and my sinuses. Tears stream down my face; my exposed skin prickles and burns. Sunfyre sneezes over and over again and lingers in the doorway, gulping in fresh night wind from outside. There’s shattered glass and green liquid on the hardwood floor. There’s an upturned barstool. The stereo is playing Cake’s cover of Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps.

What the hell happened here—?

And then I see it: the cannister of bear mace that had rolled under the booth, the same one she and her friends always sat in.

She used the bear mace. She finally used it. But why?

There’s blood on the floor. There’s blood on the table too. There’s a tattered, olive-green journal opened to a blank page. The pieces slide closer and closer and then link together, an explosion in my mind like fireworks.

I bolt outside and study the snow-covered parking lot. There are fresh tire tracks there under the murky luminescence of the streetlights; they lead out to the main road and then north towards the lakes.

“No,” I whisper to no one but the fierce wind, the sky threaded with the opalescent Northern Lights. “No, no, no…”

I sprint back inside Ursa Minor, get the phone Dale keeps behind the bar, and call the cops. “Stay where you are,” the 911 dispatcher instructs me sternly. “Wait for the police, do not attempt to investigate yourself, do not attempt to intervene—”

“Yeah, fuck that,” I say, and slam the receiver into the cradle. Then I swipe the black 8 ball off the pool table.

I load Sunfyre into the 4Runner and spin out of the parking lot, following the parallel lines of tire tracks like the etching of veins beneath skin.

~~~~~~~~~~

There’s a sound, rough and grating; and then you realize that it’s you being dragged across the ice. When your eyes flutter open, you see the uninterrupted sky: indigo night, distant stars, the Northern Lights. Your clothes are wet with snow; it’s so cold that the fabric is freezing, stiff and crackling when you try to move. Dale is lugging you over the frozen lake by the collar of your sweater. It’s choking you, but of course that doesn’t matter much. He’s about to kill you anyway.

“It’s not right,” Dale mutters, and you’re aware through the disorientation and the fog-like cloud of pain that he’s not really talking to you. “Your mom’s a nice lady. It’s not right that she had to lose two people this way, she doesn’t deserve that. Oh well. It can’t be helped now, can it?”

You whimper something, disjointed helpless words. Please, hurts, don’t, please.

“It’s not me,” Dale says, as if it’s perfectly logical. “I mean, not really. It’s this part of me that I can’t cut out. I can only feed it so it goes away for a while. It quiets down sometimes, it hibernates like a bear in the winter…but it always comes back. And my god, is it hungry.”

You smack clumsily, futilely at his hands as he hauls you over the ice. Dale doesn’t seem to notice.

“You have to make it look like an accident. That’s the ticket, if you don’t want anybody to know. You shove a hiker from a ledge, a drunk into the ocean. I did that for a long time, never raised suspicion. Never pinged on anyone’s radar. Jesse was the hardest, though. Good lord, did he fight. Had to pour a bottle of Everclear down his throat. Had to make it look like he was drinking that night. He wasn’t, which was unusual. Kept saying he wanted to turn things around. I think you had something to do with that. Now this? You were never supposed to be here, ladybug. What a shame. What a goddamn shame.”

Consciousness is a river that you dip in and out of; blackness crumbles around the edges of your vision, collapses in, recedes, swells again like a wave. You moan, you beg, you struggle as much as you can. It’s not much. It might as well be nothing.

“Things were easier after I got married,” Dale continues. He has a large hiking backpack slung over his broad shoulders, you see now. It jostles from side to side as he drags you. You know what’s in there: a chisel to break the ice, fishing line to strangle you. “Having someone else there all the time, it was a distraction. And it kept that thing inside me…not tame, no, I wouldn’t say that. But chained up down in the basement, maybe. Now I’m alone again. And when the chains start rattling, there’s nothing to stop me from hearing them.”

You get your feet under you, twist around, and slam your fists into Dale’s chest as hard as you can. He laughs in a baritone rumble and shoves you back down onto the ice; your head hits the ground, and you can feel yourself fading again, the last wisps of sunlight at dusk.

“Sometimes you want to hide,” Dale says. “And sometimes you don’t. I was ready to stop hiding. I can’t tell you what a high it was every time they found a body. The news, the ceaseless chattering around town, the name they gave me…incredible. Exhilarating. I couldn’t sleep for days after each kill. I’d toss and turn all night imagining what the headlines would be. Let me tell you, ladybug. I’ve never tried heroin, and I never need to. It can’t possibly be better than this.”

What will happen to my parents? you think, heartbreak gutting you, dull knifes rearranging your organs. What will happen to Heather and Kimmie and Joyce? What will happen when Aegon finds out he left too soon?

“I knew I needed someone to pin it on,” Dale informs you calmly. “Didn’t take anyone who went to the bar, didn’t take anyone who could be traced back to me. And still, I knew they’d figure it out eventually if I didn’t give them another suspect. At first, I was thinking I might use Aegon. He was a little small, sure, but he showed up around the right time and he was an outsider. Then I saw the way Trent was with you…aggressive, menacing…and I knew it had to be him. It was almost too easy. I planted the seeds, and good lord did they grow.”

“They’ll know,” you croak. “If you kill me, the police will find my body and they’ll know Trent’s not the Ice Fisher.”

Hideously, horribly, Dale smiles down at you. “Oh, ladybug, I don’t think they’ll ever find you. They found the others because I wanted them to. And no one is looking for victims anymore. Once you sink, I’ll cover up the hole with ice and snow. No blood, no signs. People will assume you’re a runaway. It was just too much, wasn’t it? Trent getting arrested, Aegon leaving town. Maybe you ran off after him. Maybe you threw yourself in the channel. Who could say? No, your bones will become silt, your name will slowly disappear from Juneau. And in ten or twenty years, your parents will have you declared dead in absentia. That’s my best guess. That’s how it will go.”

“No,” you sob, battling against the hands knotted into the collar of your sweater. “No—!”

His knuckles bash the side of your head, and a black silence rolls in like high tide, engulfs you, drowns you. When you swim back up into consciousness again, Dale is a few yards from you and drilling a hole in the ice with his chisel. You try to crawl away and promptly collapse, frail and boneless. He glances over at you, chuckles pleasantly, and then begins using a hatchet to widen the opening.

No, you think, hooking your fingers into the snow and dragging yourself towards the forest. No, no, no…

Dale’s ready for you. He walks over, grabs both of your ankles, tugs you with terrifying ease to the hole in the ice. Then he has a length of fishing line in his hands, and he’s looping it around your throat again and again, and he’s tightening it until the needle-thin nylon wire bites into your flesh, spilling tendrils of blood. You know you don’t have a chance, but you try; you owe it to your parents to try. You claw at the fishing line and you struggle and you cry out in hoarse, useless screams—

And then you hear something that doesn’t make any sense. Through the darkness, through the wind, there are the barks of a dog. Sunfyre rockets into your dimming field of vision and jumps on Dale, snarling and growling and snapping at his hands, his face. Dale flings the dog away, and as he’s distracted, Aegon arrives. He’s holding—ludicrously—a black 8 ball from a pool table, and he smashes it into Dale’s head. A sick, wet, crushing sound ricochets, cracked bone cushioned by flesh, and Dale howls as he rolls onto his side and covers his head with his hands.

He peers up at Aegon, furious and pained and stunned. “You?!”

“Me.” Aegon’s voice is dark and low like thunder, like the iron gale of storms over the ocean. “And I’m a killer.”

He lunges at Dale, still wielding the 8 ball. Dale’s massive hand juts out and closes around Aegon’s wrist, and then he yanks him to the ground. They’re grappling on the snow and ice, they’re striking out with knuckles and elbows, they’re ripping at each other with their bare hands. You’re trying to unravel the fishing line still coiled around your throat, panting in deep, frantic breaths so you can see and think clearly, so you can scramble to your feet, so you can help Aegon. And then Dale gets away from him just long enough to grab you again, to wrap the ends of the fishing line around his fingers. He delivers one last macerating blow to your skull, pulls you by your throat to the gaping hole in the ice, and shoves you through.

The water is so cold it’s paralyzing. There is a thought that seizes you—so overwhelming, so strangely rational—that says all you have to do is stay where you are, to wait a little longer, and then you’ll never hurt again, you’ll never be disappointed or caged, you’ll never be anything. And you think of all the lives you could have lived, all the places you could have gone: cities and beaches and deserts and valleys, gardens and rivers, ruins and glass. You were always so afraid of really going after them. What the hell were you so afraid of? Everything worth fearing is right here in Juneau.

I can still do those things. I can still live. And I can still help Aegon.

You jolt out of your inertia and clamber madly for the surface. But you don’t hit frigid open air; you hit ice, ice too thick to break through, ice too thick for more than a murmur of light to penetrate. Your palms press against the semitransparent wall; bubbles of carbon dioxide spurt from your nose and mouth. You feel for the opening that Dale made, but you don’t know where it is. You are lost beneath the ice, running out of air, fading rapidly. Then you hear Jesse—and you aren’t sure how you know what his voice sounds like, but you do—speaking softly and kindly to you, comforting you, telling you which way to go.

I’m sorry that no one knows the truth, you say without speaking. I’m sorry we thought you destroyed yourself. I’m sorry you never got the chance to truly live.

You were all better off without me anyway, he answers, without any bitterness at all. And that’s true, isn’t it?

There is a great disruption that rocks through the water. New currents stir into existence, fresh waves spring out of the darkness. And then someone takes your hand and draws you towards a noise, muffled through the ice and water: a dog barking, you realize. Then your palms find the opening and you inhale brutally cold air into your aching lungs, the best you’ve ever tasted. Aegon helps pull you through the hole and out of the lake, out of the jaws of oblivion.

You lie together on the ice, breathing in gasps that turn to mist in the night wind. Dale’s body is sprawled several yards away. The hatchet he’d used to break up the ice is buried in his neck, spine severed, eyes slick and vacant. You can see reflections of the Northern Lights flickering in them.

“You came back,” you whisper to Aegon as whirling police sirens approach, the lights dancing on his face: blue like the ocean, red like fire and blood.

“Of course I came back, Appletini,” he says, laughing with frenzied relief, kissing your cheeks and forehead over and over again, lake water dripping from his hair. Sunfyre jumps around you both, yapping ecstatically, his tail wagging. “I couldn’t leave without my Juneau girl.”

~~~~~~~~~~

There’s wind, but it isn’t sharp like a blade. There’s a sky, but it isn’t cloaked in cloud cover or fog. The boats that bob in the surf are sailboats and cruisers, not fishing vessels. Dolphins crest out of the sun-speckled waves like someone coming up from a dream.

It’s June 9th, and you’re soaring down the Pacific Coast Highway in the red Ford Mustang convertible you rented after the plane touched down in Seattle. Aegon is in the driver’s seat, black sunglasses and white T-shirt, his hair whipping in the breeze. He has one hand on the wheel and the other behind your headrest. Sunfyre is in the backseat, grinning like only dogs can. You turn up the song on the radio: Drive by Incubus.

You and Aegon had stayed in Juneau long enough for your skull to heal, and for your parents to find someone else to take over the vet clinic. They settled on a 32-year-old from Detroit: Justin McNair, a former Marine like your dad, and he either has no family or a bad one because he never wants to talk about them. Perhaps it doesn’t really matter which it is; perhaps sometimes they’re just about the same thing. Your parents have already basically adopted him. He eats dinner with them three times a week and calls your dad when he needs help with house maintenance or scaring a moose away from his truck. And just before you went south, Aegon showed him how to make the world’s best hot chocolate.

You send postcards back to Juneau from each town you stop in. Heather’s bon voyage gift to you had been an indecently revealing swimsuit. Joyce appeared with—what else?—a stack of books fit for leisurely beach reading. And Kimmie gave you, however bizarrely, a compass. So you don’t get lost, she had said with an innocuous little smile. You honestly couldn’t tell if she was joking.

During his one month in jail, Trent learned how to meditate and do yoga. He’s still kind of a dumbass, but he’s also a supposedly devout vegan Buddhist, and he had the decency to leave you alone aside from an apology letter that he slid into the moose-shaped mailbox: handwritten, six pages, lots of spelling and grammatical errors. Oh, and he finally got that job with the Forest Service, probably mostly due to his high-profile wrongful detainment. Now hikers get to swoon over his muscles and hair flips.

You’ll go back to Juneau, of course. Maybe just for visits, maybe for more than that someday. But it will never feel like a cage again.

Aegon calls Aemond every two or three days, a habit he started when he was in rehab. At first it was by necessity—he needed someone to pay the $30,000 bill—but now you think he secretly looks forward to it. He updates Aemond about how the road trip is going and reassures him that the plan hasn’t changed: south to San Diego, and then cutting east across the country to Miami. You don’t know what exactly life will look like there, and neither does Aegon. That’s not the important thing about going. Part of AA is making amends, and Aegon has a lot of work to do in that respect. He wants to go back to Miami, he says. He’s ready to go back.

San Diego is exactly like Aegon once told you it would be. You weave through the rust-colored peaks of the Laguna Mountains and there’s the Pacific Ocean, glittering and sapphire-blue, peppered with surfers and sea lions. It’s hot and it’s beautiful beyond words and everything grows there: ivy, cactuses, palm trees, calla lilies, roses. And for the first time that you can remember, the world feels breathtakingly, impossibly big. You get carryout from an unassuming restaurant called The Taco Stand, and then Aegon parks the convertible in La Jolla. You walk down the steps carved into the cliffside, paper bags in your hands full of tacos and churros, Aegon carrying Sunfyre so the dog won’t slip.

You sit together on the golden sand and watch the 8:00 p.m. sun sink into the waves, Aegon’s arm around your waist, your fingers tucking his lock of silvery hair behind his ear. And then he takes your hand, kneads it until it’s sinuous and relaxed, and reads the lines of your palm in the amber dusk like firelight.

“It says you’re happy,” he tells you. “And that you’re free.”

“I am,” you reply, smiling as the ocean stretches out like the arm of a galaxy: the ancient past, the infinite future.

#aegon ii #aegon targaryen x reader #aegon targaryen ii #aegon x reader #aegon targaryen #aegon ii targaryen #aegon x y/n #aegon x you #nttf #north to the future

[plaguedocboi]

If I see one more fucking idiot make this stupid “argument” on this post again I’m turning off reblogs because this is the 900th moron comparing ships to guns as if there’s no fucking difference between a weapon designed with the intention to kill/hurt people and a vehicle. It’s a weapon you dumb piece of shit it has no purpose other than to kill people. In what fucking way is that in any way similar to a mode of transportation. “Oh you see an airplane and an atomic bomb are exactly the same because they can both be used to hurt people” ass take. I hate this post I just wanted to admire some sexy ships with their pretty sails and their wood I have gunfuckers in my notes because of it

#ignore this post I’m at my wits end over here

[accessiblecalvinhobbes]

10 Panel Comic - Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson. Calvin is a young boy often in a striped shirt. He has an imaginary tiger friend named Hobbes. When Calvin is alone Hobbes is a tiger who stands on his hind feet and talks only to Calvin. Others see Hobbes as a stuffed tiger toy that Calvin carries with him. This particular strip on this date was in full color.

Panel 1: A pink, purple and blue barren rocky terrain is under the words "Calvin and Hobbes" in yellow. There is a yellow space space that is shaped like an airplane approaching the planet.

Panel 2: Calvin is dressed like Spaceman Spiff who has a futuristic body suit with round sleeves and a rectangle pair of glasses on. His eyes look to be a single line. He is holding onto a space blaster. At top it says "Our hero, the valiant spaceman Spiff, is marooned on a strange world..." Spiff says "I'll set my mertilizer on "deep fat fry".

Panel 3: Miss Wormwood, Calvin's teacher is holding a pointing stick over one shoulder, dressed in a green dress with yellow spots, as she stands before Calvin's school desk. Calvin's head is turned and he is leaning on his hands. He has a far off look with a smile on his face as he is day dreaming. Miss Wormwood says "Calvin! You're not paying attention!"

Panel 4: Spiff is hiding behind a purple rock and behind him is a green with yellow spots alien with a pig snout nose on the other side of the rock. The alien is growling and making "Gronk! Argh!" sounds. At the top it says "... We join Spaceman Spiff on the distant planet Zorg". Spaceman Spiff holds onto the rock with his back to it says "Zounds!"

Panel 5: At the top it says "Trapped by a hideous Graknil, Spiff draws his trusty atomic napalm neutralizer!" Spiff clenches his teeth as he brings both hands together to hold his space blaster. A red ray comes from it as Spiff says "Chew electric death, Snarling Cur!"

Panel 6: At the top, it says "But the weapon is useless! Spiff is doomed!" The green and yellow alien's mouth is closed with a black char mark where it had been. Spiff looks a bit surprised.

Panel 7: At the top, it says "Our hero makes a break, and ducks into a nearby cave!" Spiff is running across the pink planet's surface toward a cave.

Panel 8: It is pitch black and only the two yellow squares of Spiff's eyes are visible. He says "Weeooo! What's that awful smell?"

Panel 9: Spiff is surprised as the lights turn on and he is surrounded by aliens. There are two large ooze types on the left that are shades of orange. One has a long neck and looks like a giraffe with one large eye in the center of its face. And the one on the right has a long nose like an anteater, but yellow. Spiff shouts "Eep!"

Panel 10: Calvin is shown running down the hall of his school having just slammed the door Teacher's lounge. From inside the lounge are two voices. One asks "Who was that?" and the other replies "Beats me, Fred."

#alt text #image described #school #1985 #Dec 8 1985 #calvin and hobbes #spaceman spiff

[therealtruthalways]

United States Patent and Trademark Office​

0462795 – July 16, 1891 – Method Of Producing Rain-Fall

803180 – October 31, 1905 – Means for Producing High Potential Electrical Discharges

1103490 – August 6, 1913 – Rain-Maker

1225521 – September 4, 1915 – Protecting From Poisonous Gas In Warfare

1279823 – September 24, 1918 – Process and Apparatus for Causing Precipitation by Coalescence of Aqueous Particles Contained in the Atmosphere

1284982 – November 19, 1918 – Process and Apparatus for Procuring and Stimulating Rainfall

1338343 – April 27, 1920 – Process And Apparatus For The Production of Intense Artificial Clouds, Fogs, or Mists

1358084 – November 9, 1920 – Method of Producing Fog-Screens

1619183 – March 1, 1927 – Process of Producing Smoke Clouds From Moving Aircraft

1665267 – April 10, 1928 – Process of Producing Artificial Fogs

1892132 – December 27, 1932 – Atomizing Attachment For Airplane Engine Exhausts

1895765 – January 31, 1933 – Artificial Production of Fog

1928963 – October 3, 1933 – Electrical System And Method

1957075 – May 1, 1934 – Airplane Spray Equipment

1993316 – March 5, 1935 – Apparatus for and Method of Producing Oil Fog

2052626 – September 1, 1936 – Method of Dispelling Fog

2097581 – November 2, 1937 – Electric Stream Generator – Referenced in 3990987

2173756 – September 19, 1939 – Process of Producing Fog or Mist by Partial and Flameless Combustion

2352677 – July 4, 1944 – Artificial Fog Production

2476171 – July 18, 1945 – Smoke Screen Generator

2409201 – October 15, 1946 – Smoke Producing Mixture

2480967 – September 6, 1949 – Aerial Discharge Device

2527230 – October 24, 1950 – Method of Crystal Formation and Precipitation

2527231 – October 24, 1950 – Method of Generating Silver Iodide Smoke

2550324 – April 24, 1951 – Process For Controlling Weather

2582678 – June 15, 1952 – Material Disseminating Apparatus For Airplanes

2611992 – September 30, 1952 – Engine Exhaust Operated Fluent Material Distributor

2614083 – October 14, 1952 – Metal Chloride Screening Smoke Mixture

2633455 – March 31, 1953 – Smoke Generator

2688069 – August 31, 1954 – Steam Generator – Referenced in 3990987

2721495 – October 25, 1955 – Method And Apparatus For Detecting Minute Crystal Forming Particles Suspended in a Gaseous Atmosphere

2730402 – January 10, 1956 – Controllable Dispersal Device

2903188 – April 2, 1956 – Control of Tropical Cyclone Formation

2756097 – July 24, 1956 – Process for Weather Control

2801322 – July 30, 1957 – Decomposition Chamber for Monopropellant Fuel – Referenced in 3990987

2835530 – May 20, 1958 – Process for the Condensation of Atmospheric Humidity and Dissolution of Fog

2871344 – January 27, 1959 – Long Distance Communication System

2881335 – April 7, 1959 – Generation of Electrical Fields

2908442 – October 13, 1959 – Method For Dispersing Natural Atmospheric Fogs And Clouds

2962450 – November 29, 1960 – Fog Dispelling Composition

2963975 – December 13, 1960 – Cloud Seeding Carbon Dioxide Bullet

3019989 – February 6, 1962 – Atmospheric Space Charge Modification

2986360 – May 30, 1962 – Aerial Insecticide Dusting Device

3046168 – July 24, 1962 – Chemically Produced Colored Smokes

3056556 – October 2, 1962 – Method of Artificially Influencing the Weather

3126155 – March 24, 1964 – Silver Iodide Cloud Seeding Generator

3127107 – March 31, 1964 – Generation of Ice-Nucleating Crystals

3131131 – April 28, 1964 – Electrostatic Mixing in Microbial Conversions

3140207 – July 7, 1964 – Pyrotechnic Composition

3174150 – March 16, 1965 – Self-Focusing Antenna System

3234357 – February 8, 1966 – Electrically Heated Smoke Producing Device

3274035 – September 20, 1966 – Metallic Composition For Production of Hydroscopic Smoke

3284005 – November 8,1966 – Weather Control by Artificial Means

3300721 – January 24, 1967 – Means For Communication Through a Layer of Ionized Gases

3313487 – April 11, 1967 – Cloud Seeding Apparatus

3338476 – August 29, 1967 – Heating Device For Use With Aerosol Containers

[foone]

Idea: 1950s B-Movie scientist who transitions using ATOMIC Power! (a cross post from Twitter under the readmore)

We open in a laboratory scene, in black and white. Tesla coils and Jacob's ladders arc in the background. There's a big machine with lots of lights and dials, including a prominent one with two settings: X and Y.

A group of journalists mutter "rhubarb, rhubarb" as an elderly man with white hair walks in, wearing a labcoat.

"Gentlemen, I've invited you all here today to witness the first application of my new invention, the Atomic Gender Manipulator!"

The rhubarb increases in intensity.

"As you all know, the difference between men and women comes down to chromosomes. Men have XY, while women have XX." he says, while gesturing to a chalk board with some outlines of men and women on it.

"And for centuries this is just how it's been... But what if we could change that? What if we could rewrite that Y into an X? Many have said it's impossible, and... It is."

The rhubarb stops momentarily

"But that's not the end of the story! Recall the development of the airplane. Many ingenious scientists spent years trying to replicate the flapping wings of a bird, and got nowhere. But how many of you flew here today? Clearly flight is possible!"

"no, it was only when we realized that we had to stop aping the natural world and think differently about solutions to our problems that the Wright Brothers built their first plane, or Dr. Braun built his rockets. And so the same strategy must be applied to gender!"

"I ask you... What would happen if all the Y chromosomes in your body were destroyed? Well, your body would try to heal, of course. DNA is miraculous in its ability to repair damage. Your broken chromosomes, now all merely X, would join back up together, forming XX strands."

"and this is why all our attempts to rewrite a Y into an X have failed. It's not rewriting that will create the XX we need, but destruction. Remove the Y chromosome, and your body will naturally heal, forming XX chromesomes using the only remaining material."

"But professor!" one journalist pipes up, their notepad still for a moment. "Doesn't that mean you can't reverse the process? You can't turn back into a man."

The professor smiles. "That's true, and an inevitable limitation of the technology."

"if you were to try to turn back, the machine would destroy all your X chromosomes. As a woman, that's all your chromosomes, so there would be nothing left for your body to heal. You would merely die."

One journalist, a handsome man with some real Protagonist Vibes, looks up from his notebook, a concerned look on his face. "professor, I have another question. What if-"

The professor waves his hand dismissively. "I'm sorry gentlemen, we're running behind schedule."

"it's time to demonstrate my device. As the first test on humans, the only ethical subject to use would be myself. I shall see you in a few moments, transformed!"

He steps inside a chamber, all metal with a leaded glass viewing window.

His assistant flips a switch, and the hum of turbines increases in volumes.

"I am now targeting the professor with carefully tuned atomic rays, which will only affect his Y chromosome" he explains in a Russian accent.

Indicators show levels increasing. The professor looks uncomfortable though the window, grasping his head and torso. The assistant throws a final lever, and the chamber fills with steam, obscuring the professor from view.

The gathered journalists look uneasy, but say nothing, watching intently.

The assistant turns off the machine, and there's the sound of rotors spinning down. The chamber's porthole only shows swirling clouds of steam.

They walk over to the door, release a safety latch, and pull it open. The steam billows out onto the floor, slowly dissipating. The journalists rush forward, eager to see the results, whether success or failure.

In the chamber stands a beautiful woman. Inexplicably the machine has given her a new hairdo and applied makeup.

The journalists rapidly ask questions, all blurring together. The professor raises her hands to silence them, and explains that she'll be happy to answer any questions later, but for now she's tired from the procedure and needs to change out of this ill-fitting labcoat.

She walks out, as the journalists write rapidly in notepads and discuss with each other. The protagonist-looking one walks over the forgotten assistant, and asks him a question.

"say, Ingvar, I had a question. The professor explained how targeting Y in a man turned him into a woman, and that trying to target X in a woman would kill her. I can assume targeting Y in a woman would have no effect, but that leaves one possibility:

what would happen if you targeted X in a man?"

The assistant looks nervous, and maybe a little disturbed by the thought.

"well, that would destroy the X, leaving them with only Y. The healing process would kick in, and result in YY chromosomes."

"my science classes were a long time ago, Ingvar... What's a YY chromosome give you?"

"nothing that God has created in his earth. That would be a new form, a new gender... There's no telling what would happen."

The journalist walks off, eager to return and interview the professor tomorrow. He's got many questions for her.

Naturally during the course of the movie, someone does get turned into a YY, and seem fine... At first.

Then they start transforming, becoming what's basically a werewolf. Bigger, stronger, hairer, more violent, able to shrug off bullets.

The professor and protagonist finally manage to stop them, but the professor dies in the process (that's just how these movies go, sorry.)

Then as the journalists look on at the remains of the lab, in flames, they voice one of those end-of-movie speeches. She tampered in God's domain, learned too late that man was a feeling animal, etc.

The scene is carefully shot so we only see the silhouettes of the journalists, and then only as a mass of people.

The camera cuts to the final shot, facing the journalists, and one of them offers to take the rest out for drinks, they've earned it. The protagonist wipes the blood and soot off her face and asks if anyone has a light?

Then patting where her double-breasted suit pocket would be, smiles. "and a cigarette?"

There's a rustling of purses, and she's offered plenty of both from well-manicured long-nailed hands from off screen. She laughs, and the film fades to black.

Directed by Ed Wood.

#My writing #Reposting from Twitter