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acmetraitor · 3 years

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the art of evasion

“You two did a lot together,” Hawkins says outside the coliseum in Rome, and that draws Jules out of her reminiscing, draws her away from the memory of Carmen’s victorious smirk when they finally slapped the cuffs on the boss of that smuggling operation. “What happened? I mean, why did she leave ACME?”

“...Maybe I’ll tell you sometime,” Jules manages to reply around the rising lump in her throat. “For now, let’s concentrate on tracking her down.”

It’s easier to dodge the question than to admit she has no idea.

Carmen was always a loose cannon, even back when she worked for ACME.

Once, on a stakeout in the dead of night, she and Jules trailed a suspect to a warehouse where the heads of a trafficking ring were temporarily hiding out. Carmen peeked inside to survey the situation while Jules called the Chief to send backup, but any teams were at least two hours away and the culprits were already in the process of clearing out.

“There’s no time,” Carmen concluded. “We have to catch these guys ourselves, now.”

“We can’t!” Jules hissed in protest. “There’s got to be at least ten of them in there!”

“Fourteen,” Carmen said. “But we have these.” She pulled out two pairs of night-vision goggles from her bag and shoved one into Jules’s hands. Then she dashed for the circuit breaker before Jules could stop her.

Once the lights went out, it was too late to turn back, so Jules went along with her partner’s crazy plan as her heart hammered in her throat the whole way. In the end, with the cover of darkness as their aid, they successfully neutralized all the suspects, but Carmen got a bullet graze wound to her shoulder because one trigger-happy goon got lucky.

After everything was over, Jules punched her in that shoulder. Carmen laughed through the pain.

That’s just who Carmen was. She knew she could do anything, she was an unstoppable force, and nobody could ever hope to rein her in. Not even Jules. So whatever reasons Carmen had for leaving ACME, she made that choice on her own, and everyone who blamed Jules for her partner’s betrayal honestly gave her too much credit.

Nothing Jules did could have made Carmen leave.

(Nothing Jules did could have made Carmen stay.)

Hawkins thinks he can do anything. He almost reminds Jules of Carmen in that sense, except Carmen didn’t think she could do anything, she knew it. And Jules knew it, too. Hawkins, though, is still an impulsive and overconfident rookie, and he doesn’t truly understand what he’s up against.

Jules cautions him in Cape Town, keeps him from breaking down the door because recklessness will only get them in trouble. But then Carmen leaves the scene in her chopper, and Hawkins is livid.

“What were you thinking, Jules?!” he cries. “Did you want her to get away?!”

He doesn’t really mean that, Jules knows, he’s just lashing out because he’s frustrated. But those words still hit her, somewhere deep inside.

So Jules dodges the question. She’s found herself doing that a lot with Hawkins.

What Carmen and Jules had wasn’t a romance.

They agreed on that from their very first kiss—Carmen was just doing what she wanted, and Jules wanted that, too. So they kissed, they fooled around, they made each other feel good, but the relationship was never serious. Sure, Jules was a little in love with Carmen, but loving Carmen also meant accepting that she was the type of person who could never be tied down to anyone.

So Carmen never opened up about herself, and Jules never asked her to. Jules never asked for anything more than what she got. Being Carmen’s partner was enough, and Jules was happy with their life together at ACME.

It never really occurred to her that maybe Carmen wasn’t.

Carmen had been MIA from ACME for a week when she announced the success of her very first heist via a video broadcast to the world. “I have stolen the Crown Jewels,” she proclaimed, and that was definitely Carmen on screen holding Cullinan I in her hand, her smug smile and twinkling eyes framed by a bright red fedora Jules had never seen her wear before. “And this is just the beginning. For I, Carmen Sandiego, am going to become the world’s greatest thief!”

The next morning, the Chief called Jules to her office, asked very seriously if Jules had ever noticed any signs that Carmen had been planning to defect. Jules told the truth: she hadn’t had a clue. Protocol demanded that Jules be taken off all her cases and thoroughly vetted anyway, but for what it was worth, Chief seemed to believe her.

Nobody else did, though.

“Maybe she and Sandiego had a fight,” her coworkers whispered amongst themselves, when they either didn’t know Jules could hear or didn’t care that she could. “There must be something Argent isn’t telling us. I mean, how couldn’t she know? She was her partner.”

Jules vowed to be the one to capture Carmen Sandiego, if only to prove to her peers that it wasn’t her fault. That just because she’d been Carmen’s partner didn’t mean she’d been anything more. She’d certainly never been Carmen’s confidant. Perhaps she’d never even been Carmen’s friend—

Except, Jules remembered: Carmen once took her to the top of the Eiffel Tower on one of their nights off, and kissed her breathless as they watched the Paris lights. Carmen once agreed to try all of Jules’s favorite restaurants in Chengdu, persevering even as her face flushed red because Jules liked her food much spicier than Carmen did. Carmen once went undercover as a musician for a case, and for a moment as she performed on stage, strumming her guitar and singing a love song in her native Brazilian Portuguese, she stared right at Jules’s spot in the audience and for those beautiful three seconds, it felt like the song was just for her.

...Okay, so maybe Jules was more than a little in love with Carmen.

(And maybe the idea of locking Carmen behind bars was just as painful as her coworkers’ censure, if not more.)

“You’re practically burning holes in your journal,” Hawkins tells Jules, during the plane ride to Germany right after retrieving the Mayan calendar. “What are you thinking about?”

Jules looks up from the entries she was reading: the ones from the mission where they retrieved the Mok’o fish gong. “I’m remembering the wolf statue in Quebec, and that Sorbonne poster in Paris.” The proof that Carmen Sandiego donated a lot of money to causes she cared about. “There is some good in Carmen,” Jules murmurs, an echo of what she said back in Mexico.

“There was some good in Carmen Sandiego,” Hawkins says. “I’ll believe that much. But Jules, she’s not your partner anymore. The past is the past. You need to focus on now, on this case.”

“I am focused on this case,” Jules insists. “If...if I can just figure out Carmen’s reasons for doing all this, I can figure out what she’ll do next.”

“Figure out...” Hawkins repeats, and something seems to click into place in his mind. “You don’t actually know why she left ACME, do you?”

Jules might as well admit it to him now. “I really don’t. When it happened, it surprised me as much as anybody.”

She’s half-expecting Hawkins to express disbelief like everyone else: How couldn’t you know? You were Carmen’s partner. But instead, he just cocks his head to the side and asks, “In that case, what makes you so sure she even had a reason?”

“...It’s Carmen,” Jules says, unable to produce a better answer. “There must have been a reason.”

Hawkins doesn’t really seem convinced at all, but he doesn’t push the subject any further.

Jules appreciates that.

Jules knew Carmen better than anyone else did. That didn’t necessarily mean she knew Carmen well, but at the very least, she was positive that Carmen wanted to make the world a better place. Whenever Carmen had talked about conserving the environment, about preserving world cultures, about learning from the past so that we may improve the future, there was real, undeniable passion there.

(If nothing else, Jules certainly knew Carmen’s passion.)

But the Carmen who Jules knew, the Carmen who had wanted nothing more than to do good—how in the world had she become the Carmen who stole, who laughed at the law, who left taunting and sometimes cruel messages behind?

Hello Julia. Still trying to prove yourself?

Maybe you’ve lost your edge, Jules.

You’ll learn, Agent Hawkins, that Julia can get quite frustrated at times. Not to mention opinionated.

The remarks hurt, honestly, but they also just didn’t make sense. Carmen hadn’t cared enough about Jules to stay, obviously, but...she had cared. Jules knew Carmen leaving ACME had never been about her, yet now, Carmen was acting as if she had something personal against Jules all of a sudden.

It’s almost as if, a voice whispered in the back of Jules’s mind, Carmen is trying to make you hate her.

And when Jules thought about it like that, she realized: if the Carmen she knew had, for whatever reason, believed she could somehow better the world by making herself into the villain...

She would have.

One hundred percent, she would have.

“Maybe she masterminded these thefts so the whole world could benefit,” Jules ponders aloud, after Carmen escapes her and Hawkins in the lost city. Even as she says it, she knows there’s no proof. There’s nothing there but her own intuition, and maybe too much hope, and a love for Carmen that will never truly be able to leave her heart.

Hawkins doesn’t believe it. The Chief probably doesn’t either. And even if Jules ever caught up to Carmen, even if Jules ever managed to pin her down long enough to ask if her theory was correct, Carmen would never answer her honestly.

That’s just who Carmen is. And Jules will just have to live with that.

“I still think Carmen Sandiego is a bad apple. Rotten to the core,” Hawkins says, because he and Jules don’t agree on a lot of things and will likely never agree on Carmen. But even so, his can-do attitude as the Chief reports Carmen’s next heist is contagious, invigorating. It honestly makes Jules feel better.

Carmen would never answer Jules honestly. But there is still the possibility that Jules could find out the truth for herself.

So, with the chase back on and her confidence renewed, Jules turns to Shadow and smiles.

#treasures of knowledge #jules argent #shadow hawkins #carmen sandiego #julethief #2001 julethief to be precise cuz buddy i been riding this ''enemies who used to be partners'' ship since i was 8 #but also jules & hawkins being bros because i love their relationship too it's so fun #my writing

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batfam-rewrites · 4 years

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Batfam During Quarantine: 27 Minutes

Dick: Good morning adopted dad!

Bruce: *grunts*

Tim: Bruce is so stressed out. Yesterday I watched him stare at a page load for 1 second and he screamed his head off. He almost destroyed the computer.

Jason: I literally saw him counting grey hairs the other day. Whatever it is it must be Tim’s fault.

Tim: Don’t you blame this on me....

Dick: *speaks over Tim* Okay so anyway, here’s the challenge, *speaks a bit lower* first person to make Bruce smile gets to drive the Batmobile on their next patrol.

Cassandra: Awesome, how do we decide who.......

Jason: *walks over to Bruce*

Cassandra: Never mind.

Jason: Hey Bruuuuuce.

Bruce: *glares at Jason while slurping coffee*

Jason: Want some breakfast? *turns on stove* How about some eggs!

Bruce: What do you want?

Jason: Nothing! Just to see my *pauses a bit* old man smile.

Bruce: I will shank you.

Jason: Loving this new color on you? You should be pissed off all the time.

Bruce: Go away.

Jason: Okay......d.....d...da...

Alfred: Don’t burst a blood vessel Jason.

Jason: No, I can do this. Da......d.a....dad *sighs and puts his hand on the stove* AHHH, FUCKER!

Bruce: Jason, are you okay!

Jason: GET AWAY FROM ME, I CAN DO THIS BY MYSELF BRUCE! *quickly runs to the bathroom to run cold water over his hand*

Duke: Well that was entertaining!

Cassandra: *lays head on Bruce’s shoulder and hugs him*

Bruce: *hugs Cassandra back but no smile*

Damian: Father, I brought you a gift. *pulls out a picture of the entire batfamily together*

Bruce: *Bruce smiles* Thanks Damian, that’s really thoughtful of you.

Damian: *turns towards everyone and points* YES SUCK IT LOSERS!

Daily Briefing

Dick: Okay, so we have reached a low point of criminal activity for Gotham City which is a good thing.

Cassandra: A bit funny how it took a pandemic to make Gotham a bit peaceful.

Dick: Exactly my point. Now, with that said, we will still be doing patrols starting at 11. Tim, this is your week on sanitation duty. Throughout the day we will train a bit harder than normal. There will be scheduled times and you will each have partners. Try to train no less than two and a half hours a day. Training should include sparing, cardio, strength, and tumbling. Try to spar with someone new every week.

Dick: Also Jason, you remember when you said you wish you could fall like me.

Jason: I was being sarcastic.

Dick: I will finally be teaching you how to do pommel horse 1 hour a week like you asked.

Jason: I will kill you.

Duke: Being honest, I’d like to try high bar and floor. I feel it will be very beneficial for me in the long run.

Dick: Awesome! You got it. Now everyone has until tomorrow to pick their partner, I know my partner will be Jason.

Jason: Fuck you.

Dick: Also, last thing before I make the training schedules and routines, I need to address something. There are quite a lot of people in Gotham City still refusing to wear mask. During the day lets try to hand out mask with our own designs on them to everyone who we come across during the day. I already ordered them and they should be here by Saturday, so that is something we will be doing starting next week.

*alarm sounds off in the batcave*

Alfred: It would seem there is a fire at Wayne Tower on the thirty-second floor.

Dick: Alright, Duke, Jason, and I will go to check it out. Everyone else do what you would normally do.

Tim and Bruce

Tim: Hey Bruce, I brought you some coffee!

Bruce: How many cups have you had?

Tim: Three large cups.

Bruce: After......

Tim: *mumbles* The five cups I had with breakfast.

Bruce: There we go.

Tim: Okay so what are we doing?

Bruce: Someone is trying to hack into my server. If they do so they will have unlimited knowledge of the companies upcoming projects, along with the identities of our persona’s.

Tim: How long do we have?

Bruce: 27 minutes. Try to locate the hackers location.

Nightwing, Red Hood, and The Signal

They all rushed to the thirtieth floor to help out and find that the firemen are ready to head to the floor. The three heroes turned on their oxygen tanks and they charged in with the firefighters. Half of the entire floor was covered in flames. They noticed a conference room with a few people inside and Jason rushed to the door, pulling out his guns. He shot the door several times before kicking it down and escorting the people out. After that there wasn’t much left for them to do so they went back down.

Fire Officer: Nightbird, that is the dumbest thing I have ever seen anyone do.

Jason: *laughs*

Dick: Thanks.

Fire Officer: Lets get you all checked.

Jason: The mask stay on though.

Alfred and Julia

Alfred: What are we watching

Julia: Well, I thought that with both of us being former spies, I thought we could watch an American film franchise called Mission Impossible.

Alfred: And tear it apart by it’s inaccuracies!

Julia: Yes!

Alfred: Sounds wonderful!

Nightwing, Red Hood, and The Signal

Time- 19:37

Medic: They seem fine, no way of telling for sure though without their mask off.

Duke: So we’re good to go, awesome!

Fire Officer: The fire upstairs has been put out.

Dick: Good.

Tim: Dick, are you still at Wayne Tower?

Dick: Yes, what’s up?

Tim: We’re dealing with a hacker trying to get into the server at Wayne Inc. The hacker is inside the building. We have 16 minutes and 55 seconds......

Dick: Say no more! We’re on it!

Fire Officer: There’s been another fire across town. Lets move out!

Dick: Duke, investigate the fire upstairs. If I’m not mistaken, it should be arson.

Duke: Got it.

Dick: Jason, stay here there is a hacker inside the building, You have 16 minutes to find the person or else Batman is doomed.

Jason: I guess I’ll look.

Dick: GO! NOW!

Jason: Got it Nightbird!

Nightwing

Dick follows the fire fighters down to the floor and tells the guard to let no one in or out of the building. He rides his motor cycle, tailing the fire trucks to the scene of the next fire. He runs into the apartment complex, turning the oxygen tank on. He notices the first floor is clear so he rushes up the stairs to notice the flames stretched out across it. He dives through them and hears pounding on one of the doors. He sees the other residents and grabs two children, takes out his grappling hook, and shoots it towards the ceiling. He leads them down and has them run out of the building. He gets back up to the scond floor and takes the parents and lets them run out as well. When he saw them leave, he jumped back up to the second floor and ran into the door 3 times before finally breaking it down. The flames were now getting closer. He get back up and saw Barbara giving him a hand up.

Barbara: Need some help?

The Signal

Duke: What do you smell?

Fire Marshall: Alcohol.

Duke: Exactly.

Fire Marshall: So.... why did you ask?

Duke: Just wanted to check. Red Hood, Red Robin, Nightwing. Our hunch was right. We have an arsonist inside the building. Some witnesses have said they saw a maintenance worker carrying bottles of vodka in his cart. If I had to assume, both fires are a distraction from finding the hacker meaning there is an accomplice to whoever is in the building.

Jason: Good, now I’m pretty sure I speak for Nightbird when I say this, start helping me search for this bastard.

Duke: On it.

Tim and Bruce

Time- 10:17

Harper: I came as fast as I could.

Bruce: Good, set up your computer.

Harper: Why isn’t Alfred helping?

Bruce: Shut up and get to work.

Harper and Bruce try to fight off the hacker as well as they could.

Harper: Awesome!

Bruce: Not good enough though.

Tim: What’s up?

Harper: We bought ourselves a few extra minutes.

Tim: Nice.

Time- 13:38

Nightwing and Batgirl

Dick: Damn, you’re a sight for sore eyes!

Barbara: Come on! We have one more floor!

The two rush to get the last residents out of the building. The flames were starting to be extinguished by the fire fighters outside of the building. Parts of the ceiling began to collapse as they made it to the top floor. Grabbing the residents they set them down on the floor and rushed to the exit, only to find it blocked by parts of the ceiling.

Dick: Stand back! Batgirl, help me clear the exit.

The two move the rubble out of the way and the residents flee the building. Both ask the authorities if they needed help, but were turned down. When the fire was put out, both walked in, and under the heavy smell of smoke, was also the scent of alcohol.

Red Hood and The Signal

Time- 8:47

Jason was on the twentieth floor, searching, when he got the announcement.

Tim: THE HACKER IS ON THE FORTY-FOURTH FLOOR!!!

Jason: Signal, where are you?

Duke: Fortieth!

Jason: I’ll see you on the forty-four!

Jason rushed up the stairway and ran up to the forty-fourth floor to see Duke there taking on three men. Jason then pulled out his pistols and shot all three with non-lethal rounds.

Duke: Had to take away my fun, didn’t you?

Jason: Yes!

Tim: Did you guys get them?

Duke: All hostiles are taken down.

Tim: Awesome!

Alfred, Julia, Stephanie, Cassandra, and Selina

Alfred: Why would he choose the safe house. If this were reality Ethan would have already been arrested.

Stephanie: Alfred, we love you to death, but your ruining an amazing movie.

Julia: The movie ruined itself by it’s inaccuracies. Plus this is our bonding time, you guys weren’t even invited!

Selina: Yeah, but you guys took the only copy and once we saw you watching it, we just really wanted to watch it, too.

Harper: Oh, cool! Mind if I join?

Alfred: *sighs* The more the merrier.

Nightwing and Batgirl

Dick: Alright, our guy lives in apartment 22 on 1807 Zics Street. Let’s head there now and see if we can find him.

Barbara: Lets head there. Want to get something to eat after?

Dick: Definitely.

Dick and Barbara get on their motorcycles and drove to the apartment where they found the arsonist. They tied him to a lamppost and Barbara informed the GCPD the location of the arsonist.

Dick: So, how has your dad been doing?

Barbara: Not too bad. He’s been a bit under pressure but he’s doing fine. How is it being a dad at the mansion?

Dick: Ohhh god. I had the thought once and decided to leave that duty to Alfred.

Barbara: *Barbara laughs*

Dick: I help him a bit. It’s been so difficult acting like a grown up. I had to seriously step in when Alfred called Jason “Master Todd”

Barbara: Please explain further?

Dick: Well, because Jason is, well, Jason, he lost his shit because he’s “not a snooty ass rich motherfucker, Alfred!”

Barbara: Damn, I could so see that.

Dick: Yeah, and it doesn’t help that Bruce totally lost the ability to interact with other people. The other day Damian was acting up and Bruce picked him up and shouted “WHERE’S THE OFF BUTTON!”

Barbara: *laughs harder*

Dick: *laughs himself* You should have been there, it was funnier in person.

The two stare at the sky for a bit as they watch the sun set. Barbara leans her head on Dick’s shoulder and they both relax.

Dick: I love you Babs.

Barbara: I love you too, Dick.

Dick

They both left the rooftop they were sitting on at around 8:30. Dick had missed Barbara so much and was glad to have been able to see her. He didn’t care he broke one of Bruce’s rules. It wasn’t like Bruce was going to remember anything from the first week anyway. He got into the batcave and began creating workouts for everyone. He then went to the bathroom and took a shower in the batcave, and then went upstairs. He walked into the media room to see Alfred and Julia spending time as a family.

Dick: Aw, isn’t this sweet!

Julia: Get the fuck out Dick!

Dick: Damn, okay.

Dick then walked into the kitchen to see everyone in there.

Tim: Someone took long getting back to the mansion.

Stephanie: What happened.

Dick: I met up with Babs.

Everyone: WHAT!!!!

Damian: No fair. If I knew I could have been with Jon this entire time I would have!

Selina: You’re not able to Damian, and you knew you weren’t suppose to interact with anyone outside of the mansion.

Dick: Chill. Everything is fine. We’re more likely to get sick on patrol then by hanging out with each other. What’s up with Alfred and Julia?

Jason: They got tired of everyone ruining their family bonding time so they kicked us out.

Dick: That makes sense.

There was a knock at the door, so Dick goes to open it.

Dick: Helloooo...............

Helena: Hey Dick, you look great!

Dick slams the door shut and covers the door.

Jason: *shoves Dick to the side and opens the door* Hey, Helena! It is so awesome to see you! What are you doing here?

Helena: I’m here to stay and help. Where should I put my bags?

Jason: You could put them in Dick’s room for right now! You remember where that is, right?

Helena: Yep!

Dick: coolcoolcoolcoolcoolcoolcoolcoolcoolcoolcoolcoolcoolcoolcool coolcoolcoolcoolcoolcoolcoolcool. *starts falling to the floor*

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heartofether · 3 years

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Episode 13 - Dog with a Bone TRANSCRIPT

[You can listen to the show wherever you get your podcasts, or go to our “Listen” page if you’re on desktop.]

AUTOMATED VOICE

[INCREASINGLY SLOWLY] Please state your message.

[THEME SONG PLAYS.]

VAL

Three-eyed Frog Presents: The Heart of Ether.

[THEME SONG FADES TO A STOP.]

[PHONE BEEP.]

[INT. AGENTS MAY AND JUNES’ COMPANY VEHICLE, DRIVING INTO DAUGHTLER, WASHINGTON, MIDDAY.]

[THE TWO ARE HEARD DRIVING THROUGH THE TOWN.]

AGENT MAY

This is the audio log of Operation Saturn, phase 1.2. Investigation taking place in Daughtler, Washington, 2019. Set to last for two months minimum. This is day one. Conducted by Agents May and June. All recordings are legal property of the Harper Foundation. Any unauthorized access to these recordings will result in—

AGENT JUNE

[OVERLAPPING] Does Daughtler know no God? That church is crumbling like a communion wafer!

AGENT MAY

Agent June.

AGENT JUNE

I’m just saying! You’d think for a place of worship, they’d take better care of it. Basic maintenance, maybe a new paint job.

AGENT MAY

Well, I guess the people of Daughtler aren’t particularly religious.

AGENT JUNE

Oh, not that I care. I’m an atheist. Raised in a Catholic household, which went about as well as—

AGENT MAY

Look, in the future, could you please avoid speaking over me when we’re recording important information?

AGENT JUNE

What important information? We just got here.

AGENT MAY

Well, if we’re going to be constantly on the record, I would like to maintain some level of professionalism.

AGENT JUNE

Ahh. Hate to break it to you, bud, but if you expect me to shut up for this whole mission, I think you will be greatly disappointed. I am, you see, constantly burdened by great ideas—trust me, it’s exhausting.

AGENT MAY

[SARCASTIC] I’m sure it is.

AGENT JUNE

[AFTER A BRIEF PAUSE, HE SNORTS A LAUGH.] DVD rentals? Dude, who’s renting DVDs in the digital era of pirating—I mean, uh, legally buying and streaming everything online?

AGENT MAY

[DEADPAN] Nice catch.

AGENT JUNE

Anyways, where are we heading first? I’m guessing the motel?

AGENT MAY

Actually, we’re going to make a quick detour. Stop somewhere for a quick interview.

AGENT JUNE

[HE GROANS.] Seriously, dude? We have so much time to do that kind of stuff. Can’t we just, you know, relax for our first day? Settle into Weird Town, USA?

AGENT MAY

I’d like to start this mission off on a good foot. It would be valuable to meet some of the residents, see what they’re like. Besides, this particular individual is important enough that by establishing a relationship early on, it may be beneficial in the long run.

AGENT JUNE

Ugh, fine. Who is our person of the hour, then?

AGENT MAY

Actually, it’s less about the person and more about where they’re living.

[A BEAT.]

AGENT JUNE

Yeah, dude. Obviously. They’re living in Daughtler, Washington. You know, the place we’re investigating?

AGENT MAY

[OVERLAPPING] I mean their house.

Agent June, please, please tell me you know who Bernard Kelly Valencia is.

AGENT JUNE

Obviously, dude! That’s like asking a chemistry student if they know what an electron is. [THEN, UNDER HIS BREATH] Actually, I failed chemistry, so maybe that isn’t the best analogy.

But yeah. Bernard Kelly Valencia. Super weird dude that the entire town was kinda freaked by. Supposedly was well-known among the Ether community for his vast range of research conducted with Dorothy Wood. Nobody actually knows where all that work went after he and Dorothy died, though.

AGENT MAY

Actually, it’s possible some of it was left behind in his own house.

AGENT JUNE

Wait, seriously? Didn’t all of his belongings go to his son afterwards?

AGENT MAY

According to the original house plans, there’s an attic. His son, after leaving the house once and for all, never mentioned there being anything in the attic. This could mean it was just empty, but that fact would have to have been noted at some point. His son was thorough in his complaints about clearing his father’s house, from what we could find. It’s possible nobody ever even bothered to look up there.

AGENT JUNE

So you think he had something in his attic that just never got found?

AGENT MAY

That’s what the Foundation believes.

AGENT JUNE

Alrighty, then. That’s not too bad. We just break into a dead guy’s house and pillage through his attic. I mean, how hard can that be?

AGENT MAY

It’s not that simple. There’s a new tenant living there.

AGENT JUNE

Ahh, I see. Do you think they know?

AGENT MAY

Perhaps. There was a recent missing person report linked to the house—an inspector who the landlord sent out to investigate a supposed mold problem.

AGENT JUNE

Classic.

AGENT MAY

Which leads us to believe that the new tenant is at least familiar with Ether—assuming the mold problem was of supernatural origin, which is probable due to the house’s location and the report filed by the landlord describing the mold: yellow, with an odd scent.

AGENT JUNE

So, what’s our plan? Are we just going to go and ask to search the house?

AGENT MAY

Unfortunately, the Foundation couldn’t acquire a formal search warrant. We’ll have to convince the new tenant to let us in of their own free will.

AGENT JUNE

Who is this person, anyways?

AGENT MAY

Her name is Irene Gray. She’s twenty-one years old. Works as forestry aid.

AGENT JUNE

Do we know anything else about her?

AGENT MAY

Let’s just say the mold inspector isn’t the only missing persons case she’s connected to. Four years ago, an 18-year-old girl named Rosemary Quinn went missing. Officials think it’s likely she ran away. Irene Gray was Rosemary’s girlfriend. The police’s interview with Irene states that the two of them had planned on running away together not long after the date Rosemary had gone missing.

AGENT JUNE

Way to rat your girlfriend out like that.

AGENT MAY

She could have been desperate for any sort of lead, even if that meant getting herself and Rosemary in trouble. And she did get in trouble, I believe, though not with the law, per say. Irene couldn’t have known where Rosemary had gone, though. She was so emotionally devastated after the event, there was little chance she was faking it or lying to cover for Rosemary. She actually started therapy not long after.

AGENT JUNE

So, why does it matter? Did they ever find Rosemary?

AGENT MAY

Unfortunately, no. The official record states that the last place she was potentially seen was a local animal shelter, where she dropped off her cat, whose name she said was Sage. This, however, does not sync up with reports from her family claiming the cat’s name was Sir Griffin the Third, which led to some uncertainty. They had a difficult time tracking her after that, though. All they had to go off of was one potential gas station siting, but all that resulted in was another dead end.

AGENT JUNE

Uh, you still haven’t explained why any of this matters.

AGENT MAY

[FRUSTRATED] Could you just be patient for one— [HE HUFFS A SIGH.]

Look, it’s important because it’s unlikely Irene Gray will let us explore her house if we just ask nicely.

AGENT JUNE

So, we have to use bait?

AGENT MAY

It could be a mutually beneficial relationship, is what I’m saying. We both have something the other wants.

AGENT JUNE

Wait, does the Foundation, like, know what happened to that girl?

AGENT MAY

Not quite, but, potentially. I’ll show you what we have once we stop the car.

AGENT JUNE

Great! This should be interesting.

AGENT MAY

[UNDER HIS BREATH] I’m sure it will be.

[PHONE BEEP.]

[RECORDING ENDS.]

[INT. IRENE GRAY’S HOUSE, MIDDAY.]

[IRENE IS ON A PHONE CALL WITH ADEN. ON HIS END OF THE LINE, THERE IS THE LOOPING SOUND OF A BROKEN FAX MACHINE ATTEMPTING, BUT FAILING, TO PROCESS PAPER.]

IRENE

It’s a fax machine. How do you not know how to use a fax machine? I’ve literally watched you do it before.

ADEN

Well, I thought I knew! And I mean, come on, how come you get to judge me when you can’t even use your phone properly?

IRENE

Oh, my god—Aden, it’s my day off. Can’t you just look it up?

ADEN

I don’t know how to describe the problem in a way a search engine will understand. It’s too—you know—specific.

IRENE

Ask someone there, then. Carol and Julia probably know better than I do.

ADEN

Julia’s sick, and Carol’s on some important phone call. Look, I just—if we have to replace this thing and it’s my fault, I’m going to freak out—

IRENE

Okay, wait until Carol gets off the phone and then—

ADEN

[WORRIED] What if it sets on fire or something?

IRENE

[FRUSTRATED] It won’t! It’s probably just jammed.

ADEN

But what if it does?

IRENE

[SNAPPING] Jeez, dude, just go find the manual! Why are you calling me?

ADEN

[PANICKED, STUTTERING] Because I’m panicking, alright? Look, ever, ever since the mold incident, I’ve been so scared constantly of everything. Every tiny thing that happens feels like it’s the end of the world, especially because that dude’s van went missing and it’s like you guys are just constantly waiting for the police to just show up at your door—

IRENE

[HER TONE SOFTENS, GROWING SYMPATHETIC] Oh, Aden—

ADEN

[CONT.] —and you and Carol almost died, and I did nothing. Okay? I sat in my office and talked to the knitted cat on my desk while I had a panic attack and did nothing.

I just want to find some way to, to do good, to fix something, but instead I think I ruined the fax machine and now I’m just failing you and Carol, again.

IRENE

[CHOOSING HER WORDS CAREFULLY] Hey. Look, I—I’m sorry I snapped. It’s not…it’s not that big of a deal.

ADEN

[COMING DOWN, GUILTILY] No, no, you’re right. I shouldn’t have called you on your day off.

IRENE

It’s fine. Seriously, don’t worry about it. Do you need me to go down there and look at it?

ADEN

No, don’t. I’m kinda starting to calm down, and I think if I can’t find the manual, I’ll just wait until Carol gets off the phone.

IRENE

That’s a good idea.

[A BEAT.] Um, if you need a distraction or anything, we can still talk for a bit. I know how anxiety can be.

ADEN

[SINCERE] That means a lot, Irene. Thank you.

IRENE

Of course.

Is there anything in particular you want to talk about?

ADEN

[A BEAT, THEN, HESITANT] I actually have a question. I’ve been thinking about it for a bit, but if it’s too personal, you don’t have to answer.

IRENE

I mean, I think you’ve already seen me at some pretty low points, so…

ADEN

[HE CHUCKLES.] Alright.

[CAREFULLY] You said you had a girlfriend who went missing.

IRENE

[A BEAT.] Yup.

ADEN

What was her name?

IRENE

[A HESITANT BEAT.] Rose. Er, you may have seen the name Rosemary Quinn at some point, but it was years ago.

ADEN

Yeah, I don’t remember. Sorry.

IRENE

It’s fine.

ADEN

What happened to her?

[THERE’S A PAUSE.]

IRENE

[GRIM] We never found out.

For a long time, I’ve thought that she just decided she was sick of her life as it was. Ran away to start a new one without telling anyone where she went. It would have made sense—she had planned on doing it for a while. Even took cash from her savings out in chunks so nobody would be able to track her card when she did. Her mother simply wrote this off as poorly thought-out impulse purchases.

We had planned our entire future together, though, and for her to just throw it out didn’t make sense, it—well… [SHE TRAILS OFF.]

ADEN

I’m sorry.

IRENE

I thought it was her mom at first, though. Grace Quinn. [SHE SAYS THE NAME WITH VENOM.]

They investigated Grace for domestic abuse. Believed Rose ran away to escape a dangerous situation. Upon Rose not answering her bedroom door, Grace, well…broke it down. Rose had locked it before she went out the window, and her mother just—decimated the doorknob to get in. At least, that’s what the police report says.

ADEN

Jeez.

IRENE

Without the child there, however, it was difficult to prove any abuse. I had some texts. Her aunts had a couple of anecdotes. That was all, though. Grace refused to admit to anything, of course.

ADEN

[HESITANT] Was there? Um, was there abuse?

IRENE

[A BEAT.] Yeah.

ADEN

I’m so sorry.

IRENE

It was rarely ever physical, but it definitely happened.

ADEN

I mean, if Rose was trying to escape something, I hope she was safe in the end.

IRENE

[PAUSE, THEN, SOFTLY, ALMOST SAD] I do, too.

[A BEAT.] That wasn’t all, though. Grace acted really strange afterwards. When police asked what had happened the night before, she said she couldn’t remember. Seriously, she didn’t have any concrete details. She said she had just woken up that morning and Rose was gone, but her story kept changing in little ways. It was disorienting.

She seemed…paranoid. Jumpy. Confused, even. Angry, but her anger wasn’t directed anywhere. I might have felt bad for her if just the thought of her hadn’t made my blood boil. I mean, I imagine your daughter going missing has gotta have some sort of effect on you, even if you’re not on good terms with her.

Grace wasn’t entirely there, though. Looking back, it’s a lot more clear. I…know some things, I didn’t know back then. I just, I wonder what was really wrong with her. I haven’t talked to her in years. Certainly not about to start now.

ADEN

I mean, I kinda sympathize with her, but also, she doesn’t sound like a great person.

IRENE

Oh no, she’s horrible. I know I should feel some remorse for all the awful things I’ve said about her, but I don’t. Not really.

When Rose first went missing, I became blinded by rage. I screamed at Grace when I saw her. Cursed in her face. Said it was all her fault, because I was—well, I was scared, and I had no other explanation. My dad had to drag me away before I attacked her.

ADEN

Jeez, Irene.

IRENE

I’m obviously better about my anger management now. Therapy at least did that for me.

ADEN

I mean, I get it. I can’t imagine how hard that must have been for you.

IRENE

Yeah. Um, yeah. [IT SOUNDS LIKE THERE’S SOMETHING ELSE SHE WANTS TO SAY.]

Thanks, Aden.

ADEN

Of course. If you…I mean, I know it’s been a while, but you can always talk to me about it. I’ve said that before, but, y’know.

IRENE

I appreciate it.

[A PAUSE.]

ADEN

I think Carol’s call ended.

IRENE

[TEASING] And did the fax machine catch on fire?

ADEN

[HE LAUGHS.] No. No, it did not.

[IRENE LAUGHS. ANOTHER PAUSE.]

IRENE

[MORE SERIOUS] Aden?

ADEN

Yeah?

IRENE

I’m…I’m working on something. It’s a personal project.

ADEN

[CAUGHT OFF GUARD] Oh. Okay.

IRENE

I don’t think I can tell you what it’s about, but…just so you know. I mean, I trust you, so.

ADEN

That’s—um, that’s fine. Uh, let me know if I can help at all?

IRENE

Sure. I’ll talk to you later.

[AS THEY SPEAK, THERE’S APPROACHING FOOTSTEPS ON ADEN’S END OF THE LINE.]

ADEN

You, too. Thank you again for talking.

IRENE

Not a problem. Bye.

ADEN

Talk to you soon!

CAROL

[IN THE DISTANCE] What did you do to the damn—?

[PHONE BEEP AS ADEN HANGS UP. IRENE SIGHS.]

IRENE

[CONFUSED] Oh, uh. Didn’t realize my phone was recording. [MUTTERS] When did that start? Guess I turned it on at some point.

[A BEAT.] Well, Rose. I’m talking to you now. Not just some figment of you in my head, but, you.

I know you’re going to hear these. I don’t know when, but you will. Of course you will.

[A BEAT.] Only problem is, I’m kind of at a dead end. My only lead so far is a mysterious recording that popped up on my laptop with no explanation. I have no idea how any of those files got there. Do I just have to wait until whatever weird force that gives them to me decides to throw one my way?

It’s like gambling at that point. I don’t know when I’ll get something or if what I find will be helpful or not. I mean, hell, I could get a new file on my computer and it’ll just be some voicemail I sent you sophomore year about baking brownies. Who knows what I’ll find or when I’ll find it?

I have to figure out something more reliable. Maybe figure out where the recordings are coming from, and if I can use whatever it is to my advantage. Or, I don’t know, Phoebe is coming over at some point to look in my attic. Maybe I should just—

[THERE’S A KNOCK AT THE FRONT DOOR.]

IRENE

…huh. Wasn’t expecting anyone.

[IRENE IS HEARD GETTING UP AND WALKING TOWARDS THE DOOR. AS SHE APPROACHES, THE AGENT'S MUFFLED ARGUING IS HEARD, GROWING LOUDER AS SHE GROWS NEAR.]

AGENT JUNE

[MUFFLED] I'm just saying, it could be pretty cool, you know? I'm all like, "Ooh, ahh, no, tell us what we wanna know, and you're like—"

AGENT MAY

[MUFFLED, OVERLAPPING ] June, you're too impressionable by all of these movies that you watch.

[IRENE OPENS THE DOOR, BUT THEY CONTINUE AS IF SHE ISN'T THERE.]

AGENT JUNE

[CONT.] No, no, listen. It could be great, it could be great! We could like, stand back to back, and like, ooh, finger guns—

AGENT MAY

No, I'm not doing finger guns!

IRENE

[OVERLAPPING] Um, can I help you?

AGENT JUNE

[TO AGENT MAY] Okay, but just try it—

AGENT MAY

[HARSHLY CUTTING HIM OFF.] Yes, actually. Is this the residence of Irene Gray?

IRENE

[SKEPTICAL] Who’s asking?

[AGENT MAY IS HEARD FLASHING HIS BADGE.]

AGENT MAY

We’re Agents May and June of The Harper Foundation. We’d like to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind.

IRENE

The hell is that?

AGENT JUNE

Ah, see, that’s the point: you’re not supposed to know. [A BEAT.] I mean, well, we do leave kind of cryptic ads in the local paper sometimes, but, still.

AGENT MAY

[UNDER HIS BREATH] Agent June.

AGENT JUNE

What? I don’t choose to put those weird ads there!

IRENE

[UNIMPRESSED] …so, what, you’re secret agents?

AGENT MAY

If you’d like to call us that. May we come in?

IRENE

Why?

AGENT MAY

We just need to ask you about a few things. I promise it won’t be long.

IRENE

…are you going to, what, search my house?

AGENT JUNE

You got something to hide?

IRENE

[DEFENSIVE] No! I’m sorry that I value my privacy.

AGENT MAY

We’re not searching your house right now. This will be much easier for all of us if you comply, Ms. Gray.

IRENE

[SHE THINKS FOR A MOMENT, THEN, DISGRUNTLED] Fine.

AGENT MAY

Thank you.

[IRENE IS HEARD LEADING THE AGENTS INTO HER HOUSE, CLOSING THE DOOR BEHIND THEM. THEIR FOOTSTEPS ARE HEARD AS THEY ENTER.]

AGENT JUNE

It’s a nice place you got here. Oh, wow, did you paint that yourself?

IRENE

It was a gift.

AGENT JUNE

Ah, gotcha, gotcha.

[THERE’S A PAUSE AS THEY STOP WALKING.]

IRENE

Well? Take a seat. Be my guest.

[AGENTS MAY AND JUNE ARE HEARD SITTING AT THE TABLE. THERE ARE TWO LOUD THUNKING NOISES, AS IF SOMEONE IS HITTING THE TABLE.]

AGENT MAY

Agent June, take your feet off the table.

AGENT JUNE

Sorry, sorry.

[SHUFFLING NOISES AS AGENT JUNE MOVES HIS FEET.]

IRENE

Can I get you both anything to drink?

AGENT JUNE

There are your manners!

AGENT MAY

[UNDER HIS BREATH] You’re one to talk.

AGENT JUNE

Whatcha got?

IRENE

Um, water? I could make coffee? I also have lemonade in the fridge, but that’s for emergencies.

[A PAUSE.]

AGENT JUNE

I think I’m in the mood for an emergency lemonade. You, Agent May?

AGENT MAY

I’m fine, thanks.

[AS THEY CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION, IRENE IS HEARD GRABBING THE LEMONADE OUT OF THE FRIDGE, TAKING A GLASS FROM THE CUPBOARD, AND POURING JUNE'S DRINK.]

AGENT MAY

How long have you lived here, Ms. Gray?

IRENE

Not long. I moved here for work.

AGENT MAY

And what do you do?

IRENE

[HASTILY] I’m an engineer.

AGENT JUNE

Mm! Enjoying the area so far?

IRENE

It’s nice. The people are friendly.

[SHE SETS AGENT JUNE’S LEMONADE DOWN ON THE TABLE.]

AGENT JUNE

Much obliged.

[HE TAKES A DRINK LOUDLY. IRENE SITS DOWN ACROSS FROM THE TWO OF THEM.]

IRENE

…well? You said you had questions.

AGENT MAY

We’re here to ask you about a missing person.

[A TENSE PAUSE.]

IRENE

Which one?

AGENT MAY

Which one are you thinking of?

IRENE

[SHE PAUSES.] Are you talking about Rosemary Quinn?

AGENT MAY

[A TENTATIVE PAUSE.] You and Rosemary were close, correct?

IRENE

Why do you care?

AGENT MAY

I’m asking a question. An answer would be nice.

IRENE

[HESITANT] I knew Rose, yeah.

AGENT MAY

When was the last time you saw her?

IRENE

Um, it was two days before her disappearance, I believe?

Look, this should all be on her file. I don’t see the need to recount this all to you unless they’ve opened the case again. Hell, you’re not even cops, are you?

AGENT JUNE

Oh, don’t be that way, Irene. I know this case isn’t as recent as the other one you’re involved with, but you should be able to remember, right?

IRENE

The—

[THERE'S A LOW, EERIE INSTRUMENTAL AS IRENE'S BLOOD RUNS COLD.]

IRENE

[BLUFFING] What other case?

[AGENT MAY SLIDES A PIECE OF PAPER ACROSS THE TABLE.]

AGENT MAY

You were the last person to see this man, correct?

IRENE

I, um, I don’t know him, no.

AGENT JUNE

You’re not as good at lying as you think you are, you know.

[HE'S HEARD FLIPPING OVER A PIECE OF PAPER TO EXAMINE IT.]

AGENT JUNE

[CONT.] I mean, why lie to us about your job, anyways? There’s no shame in being a forestry aid. I’m sure it’s a lovely profession.

IRENE

Who the hell are you people?

AGENT MAY

Relax, Irene. The Harper Foundation has already taken care of his vehicle and rerouted the case so it doesn’t trace back to you. Investigators will come up with a dead-end soon enough, and nobody will know what you did.

AGENT JUNE

You’re welcome for that.

IRENE

I— [THEN, GUILTILY] I didn’t kill him.

AGENT MAY

I’m sure you didn’t. That’s not important right now. We’re just trying to give you a nudge in the right direction so maybe then you’ll be inclined to tell us the truth.

IRENE

Why? What do you want from me?

AGENT MAY

If you’d give me a moment to speak, then I can explain.

[IRENE HUFFS A SIGH, BUT LETS AGENT MAY SPEAK. HE FLIPS OPEN A FOLDER.]

AGENT MAY

Are you aware of this house’s previous tenant?

IRENE

You mean Bernard Kelly Valencia? His reputation precedes him, but I never knew the guy.

AGENT MAY

That’s correct. We believe he left something behind after he died, however. Something that could be incredibly beneficial for the Foundation. Have you found anything like that?

[IRENE STAYS SILENT.]

AGENT JUNE

[WHISPERS TO AGENT MAY] I think she’s trying to plead the fifth.

AGENT MAY

We expected such stubbornness. We’re not asking you for this for free, you know. We believe we may also have something that would be beneficial for you.

IRENE

And, what is that, exactly?

AGENT MAY

I’m glad you asked.

[HE'S HEARD HANDING A PAPER TO IRENE. MYSTERIOUS MUSIC BEGINS PLAYING IN THE BACKGROUND.]

AGENT MAY

Sometime in July, the same year Rosemary Quinn disappeared, a dusty yellow bicycle was found in the middle of nowhere in Oregon. It appeared to have had a broken piece in the front where a basket was supposed to be attached. It was never brought to the police, so unfortunately, it could never be examined as possible evidence.

AGENT JUNE

Hiker who found it posted about it on Twitter, though. The guy didn’t have many followers, so it never got traction.

AGENT MAY

This photo was taken not too far from Bent. If this is Rosemary’s bicycle, it could mean that we have a possible travel path for her after her disappearance.

[A TENSE PAUSE.]

AGENT JUNE

Oh, that was quite the shift in your expression, Irene. Have we struck a nerve? [MELODRAMATIC] I guess young love tends to leave such sore, open wounds, doesn’t it?

AGENT MAY

If you let us look at whatever it is Mr. Valencia left behind, we can help you find Rosemary Quinn. It may take some time, but we believe we can determine what happened to her. We just need your help.

[THE MUSIC STOPS. THERE'S A LONG PAUSE.]

IRENE

Get out.

[SHE'S HEARD GETTING OUT OF HER CHAIR.]

AGENT JUNE

Wh—hey!

IRENE

[GROWING MORE UPSET] Get out, I said. Get out!

[AS SHE SPEAKS, SHE'S HEARD PHYSICALLY GRABBING THE AGENTS AND PUSHING THEM OUT OF HER HOUSE. WHILE SHE'S AT IT, SHE GRABS THEIR FOLDERS AS WELL, THOUGH ONE PAPER STAYS BEHIND.]

AGENT JUNE

Hey, no, stop! You can't just grab our things like that! Please.

AGENT MAY

[OVERLAPPING, STUTTERING] Hey—!

[BOTH AGENTS STUMBLE OUTSIDE. IRENE IS HEARD THROWING THEIR PAPERS OUT THE DOOR.]

AGENT JUNE

Woah!

AGENT MAY

That's confidential information, you can't keep that in your house—

[SHE CUTS HIM OFF BY SLAMMING THE DOOR. THERE'S A PAUSE AS SHE BEGINS PACING THE FLOOR.]

IRENE

Who the hell do they think they are? Do they think I’m just some sort of—some sort of tool for them to use? Do they think they can dangle Rose over my head like I’m a dog with a bone, all over some—

[SHE PICKS THE PICTURE UP OFF THE TABLE, STOPPING HER PACING]

IRENE

Some picture of a bicycle?

[THERE’S A PAUSE AS IRENE STARES AT THE PHOTO, BEGINNING TO CALM DOWN.]

IRENE

[CAUTIOUS HOPE.] Is this really your bike, Rose? Why would you tear the basket off? You loved that basket. [WANDERING INTO DAYDREAM TERRITORY] You’d put flowers I got you in it and then ride around your block. Said it made you feel like you were in a painting.

[A BEAT.] Maybe I shouldn’t have kicked them—

[THERE’S ANOTHER KNOCK AT THE DOOR. IRENE STORMS BACK OVER TO IT.]

IRENE

[YELLING] I told you to get out! I’m not some stupid—

[SHE OPENS THE DOOR, AND REALIZES IT'S NOT THE AGENTS.]

IRENE

[EMBARRASSED] …dog.

TEEN

Well, I sure hope you’re not.

IRENE

[AWKWARDLY] Um, hi. Sorry, it’s just, someone else was just over and—

TEEN

Those two dudes? Yeah, they didn’t look very happy. That one guy, the one who had his tie undone for some reason, he had to chase one of the papers down the street. It was really funny.

IRENE

You were watching?

TEEN

Well, I didn’t realize you had a line going out your door of people waiting to talk to you.

IRENE

[DEADPAN] I’m new to the famous life.

TEEN

You’ll get used to it, I’m sure.

IRENE

Well, are you here to interview me and talk about my darkest secrets?

TEEN

That would be cool, wouldn’t it?

IRENE

[DISGRUNTLED] Not after the day I’ve had.

TEEN

Well, you see, I’ve actually been dying to meet you. My mom told me about you, said she met you at the store. I don’t know if you remember her, but from what she told me, it sounds like maybe you could use a bit of help.

IRENE

Your m— [IN SHOCKED AWE] Oh my god, are you the meat lady’s kid?

AVERY

Actually, my name is Avery.

Wanna grab lunch sometime?

[PHONE BEEP.]

[RECORDING ENDS.]

AUTOMATED VOICE

Today's quote is: "Most of the people are homesick anyway, and a little lonely, and they hide themselves in their hair and are turned into flowers."

Tove Jansson in Sculptor's Daughter, 1968.

[A PAUSE AS A HOLLOW NOISE BEGINS TO GROW IN THE BACKGROUND, FOLLOWED BY STATIC.]

AUTOMATED VOICE

[SLOWLY, AS IF STRAINED] Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I can feel it—

[THE VOICE IS CUT OFF BY STATIC.]

[OUTRO MUSIC & CREDITS PLAY.]

[AN EXTENDED PIANO VERSION OF THE NIGHT POST’S OPENING THEME PLAYS IN THE BACKGROUND.]

NIGHT POST PROMO

Hello there, citizen. You’ve lived in Gilt City for a while now. Maybe you’ve wondered, when you wake in the morning and retrieve the letters tucked neatly into your postbox, just where your mail comes from. It comes from the Night Post, of course. Those faithful couriers deliver it while you’re sleeping--all the better that they stay out of sight, and keep the unseemly strangeness that follows them out of our city, in the Skelter, where it belongs.

Ahem. If, for some reason, you’d like to know more about Gilt City’s conscripted couriers and the burden that chose them, their secret hopes and fears, the ancient, untamed threats that hound them on their nocturnal journeys--you have only to listen. The Night Post is a supernatural audio drama by an all-LGBT team, delivered weekly, in dead of night, to wherever you listen to podcasts.

Find answers at nightpostpod.com.

#heart of ether transcripts

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bluewatsons · 4 years

Text

Michael John Carley, Autism-Schmautism...In the End, Darius McCollum was Poor and Black, Exceptional Parent Magazine (December 2018)

On October 5th, Darius McCollum, the autism world’s previously-unending sideshow, was sentenced to life inside a New York State psychiatric facility. No, he was not relegated back to Rikers island, or any other “normal” prison, as had been the case for the majority of his adult life. He was this time sent to the kind of place where our most dangerous, disturbed, and marginalized individuals are secretly warehoused to endure horror after horror without witness, until the unmarked, mass grave on Hart Island prematurely, and slowly consumes their trauma-ridden, dissociated selves. Darius’ remarkable story of rotating in and out of the prison system for 38 years came to a halt on the worst side of the turnstile. Autism-Schmautism: He is black and poor. We were fools to think this story would end in a restorative manner.

He almost made it. His brilliance, and the subsequent media coverage had all but ensured that he would not slip through the cracks like other poor, spectrum or non-spectrum African-Americans. Darius had a shot because he was noticed. But the final nail came, comic/tragically, from an African-American judge; one who justified ending Darius’ life because Asperger’s Syndrome, to her, is a “dangerous, mental disorder.” In the words of Darius’ lawyer, Sally Butler, “The sweetest guy in the world, never committed any violent acts, never hurt anyone, is going to be held in a hospital with people who slaughter people.”

Judge Ruth Shillingford hasn’t yet apologized with the standard, Kavanaugh-esque backtrack of, “Ok. Maybe I could have used a better choice of words.” But she will. Too many of us have this same “dangerous, mental disorder.” Darius drew a different kind of bigot.

The success rate on appeals is very low. He’s gone.

***

Darius McCollum, as most spectrumfolk know, couldn’t stop stealing subway trains and taking them on joyrides. His first arrest came when he was 15, and over close to the next four decades, he was caught and sentenced over 30 times.

But by his estimation, he was not caught thousands of times.

Like innumerable spectrum children, young Darius had a “thing” for trains. As a fellow spectrumite myself who works in the field, I’ve long thought it funny how the clinical world overthought our too common fascination with rail travel. The simple truth of why we love trains has not to do with the trains themselves…it’s the track. We don’t have to make any decisions about going left here, or right there, thanks to the track. We don’t have to read between the lines, or interpret a thing, as we would driving a car. The track has already determined our destination and our route. Furthermore, we have full control over the speed of the journey. For folks like us? That’s heaven.

How was this possible, though? How could one man, however Houdini-like, sneak into the driver’s seat so easily, time after time after time? Amidst our modern paranoia of mostly imagined terrorist threats looming around every corner—our FOX News hysteria—how did Darius manage so easily to take over the controls while we were the passengers? Well, Darius was brilliant. He not only knew the ins and outs of the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) ten times better than any MTA employee, he knew the employee timetables, and how the MTA’s Human Resource department operated. He knew the trends, and the procedures, and he was also gregarious. Darius McCollum really is the sweetest guy you’ll ever meet. So when he’d arrive on the scene in a stolen uniform, and tell the scheduled driver “I just got a free day, man. Lemme help you out.” The uninformed, overworked and underpaid MTA employee usually said, “thanks, man,” and laid back on a welcomed break.

No passenger, it should be noted, was ever hurt when Darius was driving. Not one passenger was even aware that, driving their subway train or bus was someone other than a trained MTA employee. Lastly, Darius’ routes were always finished on time.

***

More than two decades would transpire thereafter that first arrest before we’d hear his name. For us, it all started with a Harper’s article from 2002—Jeff Tietz’s The Boy Who Loved Transit. In the opening paragraphs, Tietz introduced us not only to a train thief, but also a brilliant forger, who brought letters to crews “signed” by MTA managers, dictating that the crews allow “Mr. McCollum” to inspect their safety protocols. Tietz also showed us a concerned outsider, who always attended MTA workers’ union meetings and rallies. Finally, Tietz pointed out to us that Darius only attempted to steal these trains, buses, and equipment. After all, he returned everything he stole. Darius’ behavior originated not in contempt. He loved the MTA, and all its inner worlds.

But despite a diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome, one that should have explained his lack of criminal intent, he got idiot judge after idiot judge—monsters of an unfair, impotent, racist, and arcane criminal justice system in New York. To them, Darius was too intelligent, too polite, and too “white sounding” (as one judge put it) to both have a disability and not have control over his actions.

I first met Darius around that time. He was out on parole but at high risk for going back. People put high hopes that my new organization, GRASP, could help. GRASP was the first real peer-run (i.e. run by people on the spectrum) organization in the autism world, and later grew to become the largest membership organization in the world for adults on the spectrum. That all said, we didn’t have much of a budget, and we weren’t a services organization—we had no contract with the city. The type of help that Darius needed wasn’t complicated, but it was intensive. He needed talk therapy with a shrink that really knew their Asperger’s, peer support, perhaps some Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, some trauma-based therapy, a gym, and a Microsoft Excel class. He came to one GRASP support group meeting, but given his relative stardom, he had a hard time feeling like a part of the group. So he hung out in our office with me on several occasions. I’d work while he’d read. We’d talk. We’d go for walks. We got to know each other.

***

Everyone on the spectrum is different. On one end you might have someone non-verbal, who may never experience a reciprocated sexual relationship, or hold down a steady job for long. But this same individual could in fact be quite happy if surrounded by the right supports and attitudes; as measuring happiness by the capacity for speech is one of the infantile mistakes we used to make in the autism world. Why so stupid? Because on the other end of the spectrum you might have someone very verbal; maybe with an IQ of 180—we have all these famous people diagnosed in retrospect such as Einstein, Beethoven, Edison, Jefferson, Emily Dickinson, every famous mathematician…—whom everyone expects to be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company someday. But because no one explained to them how the social world works, their loneliness intensified until they became a suicide statistic. You can’t dumb this stuff down. We’re complicated.

I hadn’t yet seen anyone whose level of “juice” resembled mine—More functional than most in many capacities, I present well. But I was also inundated with spectrumites who were/are way smarter than I. So while better than most at hiding my cluelessness, until then I had always felt somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, with no real parallel.

Darius McCollum was the first and only time I’ve ever sensed someone whose spectrum gifts and challenges instinctively reflected mine. Four months apart in age, diagnosed at virtually the same age, both only children, our internal makeup seemed identical. Darius didn’t present like me, but I knew that if you took away the experiences of being stabbed repeatedly with large scissors when he was in second grade, the horrific prison rapes and beatings, the lifelong trauma, the brilliance…and that if you then took away my educational opportunities, and blatant white privilege…he was my mirror. People thought I was talented—more talented than I really was—and so I got scholarships that allowed me to divide whatever intelligence I had into many different directions, thus creating a more well-rounded individual…than Darius, who had real intelligence that few wished to recognize, and who in lacking those opportunities directed everything he had to trains. I ended up with an Ivy League Masters degree. Darius didn’t graduate high school.

We may have gotten close—It felt that way; the ease was both inexplicable and beatifically jarring. But I’m not sure. It’s hard to tell when the relationship was never equal; for in addition to both our racial instincts, I was to be the mentor, and he the mentee.

***

By this time, everyone was writing about him. Whether it was the New York Times, the London Times, or every news station…By 2004 Darius had racked up an impressive media portfolio. There would be a play, and a documentary—interpretations of Darius’ life made by people that were not out to exploit him—Good people were always on his side. There was talk of a movie starring Julia Roberts…

However, my main mission with him was contrary. I wanted to try and get him to stop seeing dollar signs from imagined film deals, to stop being addicted to the media attention. In my opinion, this was his real challenge. For in addition to withstanding the temptation to steal more trains came the devaluation of what he would do with his life if he wasn’t stealing trains. It’s difficult enough for ANY ex-inmate to get excited about trying to start a new life…when you’re a convicted felon (very few jobs hire folks with prison records) with no job training, money, or education. Being black just decreases your chances even more. I began running interference to try to de-celebrity his life a little.

And just so you know, of course he would have been a perfect hire for the MTA. But they wouldn’t have him. We tried. We tried the MTA, we tried the MTA’s transit museum (where Darius could be a tour guide), we tried the transit authorities of other cities, we tried Amtrak… But Darius, in his “career,” had shamed these folks. He had shown that their security procedures were a joke, thus pissing off Homeland Security and driving their insurance rates through the roof. Later, the MTA would rebuff our criticisms and escalate the divide even further by demanding re-payment on any possible movie deals. In addition to Darius pinning them down, MTA officials dug themselves a deeper hole by reacting like the petty, insecure bureaucrats they might have always been.

(Speaking of Homeland Security: Darius, in his infinite kindness, had even welcomed a visit from them during one of his jail stints, asking nothing in return. And they, after absorbing much information and consultation that Darius was more than happy to give them, free of charge, about how easy it was to skirt the MTA’s procedures…gave him nothing in return. Again, we are discussing the sweetest, most childlike, least streetwise guy in the world. Today, he is still proud of that meeting as he feels he served his country.)

By then, many media outlets were calling me to reach Darius (who struggled to maintain a consistent phone number), and I was trying to rebuff them. That time would be Darius’ longest stint outside prison. And when he fell off the wagon per se, he did so repeatedly thereafter. Over the ensuing years he would get out and almost instantly get caught taking another car or bus for a joyride. In the absence of access to real supports when he would be out, being a celebrated train thief was the only life he could see. He might not have been wrong.

During those years he also made bad decisions, about people, money, and especially legal representation. Stephen C. Jackson, the celebrity lawyer who gained fame during the Tawana Brawley case, rushed to Darius’ side and filled him with promises of millions. But when Jackson (now deceased) quickly saw that the fame he sought wasn’t forthcoming, he then abandoned Darius without officially dropping his name as Darius’ representative. What this meant was that when Darius, on more than one occasion, would show up from his cell for sentencing or a hearing, that he sat alone in court. The judge would ask where his lawyer was, and Darius could provide no explanation. But because Darius, in the court’s mind, couldn’t represent himself (because of his Asperger’s, the courts deemed him incapable of the decision to switch lawyers), he was then sent back to jail for months, even years once, until a new hearing could be rescheduled. Herein, my power of attorney was worthless.

GRASP didn’t have the means to help, but larger organizations like Autism Speaks and the Autism Society of America (ASA) could have. But neither organization would touch Darius McCollum with a ten-foot pole. The excuse was that they didn’t like the way Darius was using his Asperger’s as…an excuse, and that this made everyone on the spectrum look irresponsible. But to me, this was the excuse—to not have to acknowledge the punishments not fitting the crimes. If people really thought Darius deserved to be raped and beaten for taking subway trains on safe joyrides…I just couldn’t believe that. But I grew to believe that as a poor, black man, Darius for them was a lose-lose proposition. These orgs’ gutlessness did not have justification, but they did have explanation.

My prison visits felt more and more like spankings. I’d arrive, furious with him over the most recent arrest, and I’d lay into him. But at the end of the visit we would have worked it out. I once broke policy, and facilitated an interview with him for Caren Zucker and John Donvan’s book, In a Different Key (I trusted Caren, whom I knew from her days at Nightline when she produced some really fine autism coverage). I laughed in solidarity at the finished book, where they quoted my first words to Darius when I brought them to Rikers…in which I distinctively used an expletive. Donvan had inquired after the visit why I was so harsh with him, and rather than explain that neither Darius nor I came from finishing school, or that this was just the way we showed we cared, I answered in an acknowledgement that maybe it was wrong of me, but that “I visit him.” For at the time, no one else really was.

But then Sally Butler became Darius’ (seriously) pro bono lawyer. And he finally had a real chance…because he finally had a real hero.

***

Forget the nightmare center that Darius will go to (Kirby, or Mid-Island, according to an old colleague), our regular prisons are increasing in violence. Author, Shane Bauer, went undercover for Mother Jones as a $9 per hour Louisiana prison guard (an experience he recounts in his new book, American Prison) and took away a wealth of terrifying information. In a recent interview, Bauer stated that when he was being trained, he was instructed that the proper procedure for when prisoners were stabbing each other, was “to yell, ‘Stop fighting!’ and that’s it. We should not get in between them. We are not going to pay you (the guard) that much…if those fools want to cut each other, than happy cutting.”

And does anyone still think that you can go through long prison experiences without being raped? Are some people still capable of such denial? Unfortunately, yes. We are that naïve, or dumb, or complacent. And it’s mostly the law & order crowd—those who demand punishment, punishment, punishment, even when they acknowledge that punishment (even as a concept) really doesn’t work—that heartily approves of our “nudge nudge, wink wink” relationship with rape. We are complicit in this manner because we want to believe that we live in a society that does not condone rape. But it’s nonsense. We don’t just condone rape, we willingly use it as a coercive tool, and the proof doesn’t lie in drunken college parties. The proof of our societal need to never eliminate rape lies in our prison system.

“According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, around 80,000 women and men a year are sexually abused in American correctional facilities. That number is almost certainly subject to underreporting, through shame or a victim’s fear of retaliation...To tackle the problem, Congress passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act, signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2003. The way to eliminate sexual assault, lawmakers determined, was to make Department of Justice funding for correctional facilities conditional on states’ adoption of zero-tolerance policies toward sexual abuse of inmates…But only two states — New Hampshire and New Jersey — have fully complied with the act…The Justice Department estimates that the total bill to society for prison rape and sexual abuse is as high as $51.9 billion per year, including the costs of victims’ compensation and increased recidivism. If states refuse to implement the law when the fiscal benefit is so obvious, something larger is at stake…Compliance does not even cost that much. The Justice Department (also) estimates that full nationwide compliance would cost $468.5 million per year.”

— “Why We Let Prison Rape Go On”

Bozelko, Chandra. The New York Times. April 17, 2015

***

This past year, after 38 years of in and out, it was time to roll the dice. Darius’ health had been deteriorating—He has gained tremendous weight and is experiencing rapid hearing loss. His brilliance has become less accessible, having slowly drowned in accumulated trauma.

In January, Sally scored a major victory: she got the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office to finally admit that Darius was not a criminal. But because of how the court still contextualizes non-apparent disabilities, Darius, in order to become relatively free, would have to plead not responsible by mental defect. And there was a big risk herein. As Sally wrote: “If Darius is determined to be dangerous, he will be confined in a truly horrific locked facility for the criminally insane perhaps for life.” But if the judge were to determine that he was not dangerous, he would be “civilly committed for intense treatment with the goal of returning to society with services available to him.”

In talks at the time with the Puerto Rican government on an autism consulting contract, I began looking into a side project of building a treatment center on the island, one that would use Darius as a pilot for low-risk, non-violent offenders with diagnosed non-apparent disabilities. Everyone’s been saying “there’s no proper care available,” even though what Darius needs is not brain surgery, and since no one else was doing it…I dreamt of him taking that Excel class, going to trauma-based therapies, and helping to repair houses in Puerto Rico’s still-reeling infrastructure, one with no transit system—Yes! There would be an ocean between Darius and temptation, if not also a warm, loving populace that would welcome him. The courts would save a ton of taxpayer money and stop enduring the bad public relations. Sally forewarned that getting the powers that be to allow him to receive his treatment outside state lines would be the challenge, but I was confident. It seemed a no-brainer.

I wasn’t alone. We all figured the odds were good. Who in God’s name would sentence this good-natured child to more torture?

But again, Sally and I being white, we forgot that Darius was black.

***

I’m guessing that at best, only 3% of the people that read this article will be African-American. It’s not that I don’t have black readers. As a white writer, I’m confident I have more than most. But for African-Americans, I would imagine that this material, like any material about Darius, reads like the box score of a game African-Americans already saw, participated in from start to finish, and in which their team got its ass kicked. There’s nothing to be learned, and only more heartache to be gained from reading. Maybe as some “militants” might say, everything really is about race. Maybe everything isn’t about Darius’ autism, nor fiscal variations (I especially have professed in the past that everything revolves around economics)…I’m white, so I can’t go there completely, but I could argue that maybe the Judge Kavanaugh hearings weren’t about women if, as a New York Times article reports, 53% of white women were in favor of his confirmation. Maybe the wonderful #MeToo movement will at some point have to address the buried complaints that many men of color, in corporate settings, have about the sexual harassment they’ve endured from many white, female supervisors. Maybe the LGBTQ community will someday acknowledge that a stereotype exists of them all being wealthy liberals—when most are actually poor (and therein, contain many people of color). Maybe the #MeToo heroes can see that while they risked their career track to report harassing bosses, that when this occurs to women of color in factories (that I’ve worked in), that for her and her family that woman doesn’t risk a delay in promotion, she risks homelessness. Maybe even our nation’s bipartisan era isn’t about Trump, but is still about Obama? After all, one look at the farcical complaints many Republicans had about Obama during his tenure, when compared to their silence regarding Trump’s unending list of proven lies? This nation’s divide isn’t about Republicans and Democrats at all…And then there’s Judge Shillingford, pictured on Google images at many NAACP functions, who simply may have seen a Darius we never saw; one who didn’t have the intelligence we knew of, or the indisputably kind nature. Maybe she saw a person who was incapable of a productive life given the right supports…because of his skin color. Maybe she knew better.

Having raised white children in predominantly black, Brooklyn neighborhoods, I can confess to you that every once in a while, a fellow white would let slip their belief that we were throwing our kids’ safety under a bus to prove our liberalness. The truth was the opposite—Because of the trust we’d extended by living there my boys were protected by those communities. The black on black shit is what will astound you.

(“Sidebar, your honor?” An old contact of mine works closely to [but not in] the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office. Not to go spy-novel herein, but this “source” felt that Shillingford will not be reprimanded for this ruling or her language. She may actually be rewarded. My contact’s theory is that the Shillingford’s “shortcomings” regarding her knowledge and feelings about developmental disabilities, are well known by the Brooklyn DA, Eric Gonzalez. Shillingford may have been set up to take the bullet for a DA’s office that has wanted this ending for Darius all along. And this would make sense; for Gonzalez’s office seems intent on preserving a progressive aura; yet in the case of Darius McCollum has never negotiated in good faith.)

Whether you are African-American, Spanish, on the spectrum, LGBTQ, or Muslim…any minority will always feel doubt about their way of doing things, even if that way is brilliant. And any majority will have supreme confidence in their way of doing things, even if their way is so dumb it’s beyond repair. Unless we are all educated otherwise, that’s simply how majorities and minorities think.

***

I can’t compartmentalize Darius McCollum as the screwup twin brother who couldn’t stop breaking my heart, or as the African-American who only had a chance in our dreams. Darius will perhaps best be categorized as the human being who consciously made us face our capacity for cowardice and inaction. For I could cry at will, in gratitude, for the fact that I was raised on this one notion: If in the course of your job, you have to turn a blind eye to a giant injustice? Then it is time to look for another job. These days, this concept feels more than lost. Judge Shillingford cowardly stated in her sentencing that her “hands (were) tied.” Bull. The judge is a bigot, perhaps twice over (though I can’t make that call). Because she is both a female and an African-American, and I am a white male, I will grant that she had it harder than me—I’d bet a limb on it. But the end result matters too.

I know I’m angry. And in my anger, I erroneously feel it’s my duty to look upon her, and maybe Gonzalez, as garbage human beings. But I think the real duty for us all is to acknowledge that they are not alone.

#racism #ableism #darius mccollum #real folk heroes of the 21st century #travesties #miscarriages of justice #outrage #autism #asperger syndrome #transit #transit history

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snowflake-apocalypse · 5 years

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🍎 The Big Apple Caper

Musical inspiration: But it’s Better if You Do; Panic! at the Disco

Team Red arrives in New York, they start scoping the area and discreetly gather intel on the stock exchange. Carmen, decked out in jeans, a t-shirt with a ball cap, is walking through the Grand Central Station when someone places a hand on her shoulder from behind. Carmen whips around,

“Jules!-Julia. What are you doing here?”

“Here to arrest you, of course...

And if there was ever an ultimate look of dread, Carmen was wearing it.

“I’m joking. Player called me. Said you were capering the stock exchange. I thought you may need some help. And I was worried about you. I’m sorry I stormed off like that,...I just couldn’t bare what you were doing to yourself.”

Carmen, now wearing a small, sad grin. She missed Jules.

|7 Days & Counting|

|Monday|

A week before the planned caper, Julia goes to the NYPD and sets them on a false lead, gets them as far away from the Manhattan Bridge as possible. In disguise, the ground Team went around and looked suspicious as Julia took some pictures.

||Tuesday||

Team Red, disguised as punks and ruffians with their sunshades on, hit the streets of the White Plains district. Objective: Stir up suspicions in the area. (Note: Zach and Ivy are wearing their outfits from “Where on Earth?” respectfully.)

Zach: “Okay, gang.. how we gonna do this? I could run up and down the streets, knock some trash cans over... jump on some cars-“

Cut to Ivy, who’s listening to this like “WTF?”

Carmen: “Zach, we want to look suspicious, not get arrested.” Carmen states from her spot on a bench, scoping out the area.

Zach: “Right, yeah. Got it. Calm down, Zach.”

Team Red gets to work, Julia is snapping pictures from various rooftops.

Carmen: “How are we looking, Jules?”

Julia: “Oh, very photogenic.” Causing Carmen to blush, while attempting to control a smile.

Ivy: “Oh, you flirters...” Ivy mumbles under her breath, amusement in her voice. Ivy is walking up and down streets, alley ways, looking into cars, hands in her jacket pockets.

The team continues being “shady” frequently over the next three days.

||Friday||

And one flash of the ACME ID, and Commiss is all hears.

Julia: “Hello, Commissioner Lock, I’m Agent Sliver. My office has intel to believe that banks in the White Plains district are being targeted for robbery. My suggestion is to increase security and patrols in that area should anything arise.”

Julia shows the “evidence” to the Commissioner.

Lock: “I see. Well, New York is such a big place, it’s hard to catch everything. And I’ve heard of trouble stirring up in that area from my officers... I’ll have my departments look further into the matter. Thank you for the tip, Agent.”

Julia: “And thank you for your time, Commissioner.”

Then from her ear piece,

Player: “Brr-haha!”

Julia: “Ehh.. what do you think? Too on the nose?”

Player: “No, not at all, Julia. That was great. Besides, V.I.L.E doesn’t keep any of their moo-la in the White Plains area. We won’t be going anywhere near there.”

Then further in the week, Player just starts setting off random bank alarms in the area. He’s having way too much fun with this caper.

||Monday||

Now the day of capering is upon the team. Carmen goes to the Manhattan Bridge, and she’s announcing that she’s about to make a heist, by dancing. 2-25 different dances.

News Anchor: “Breaking news: Carmen Sandiego has just been spotted, the first time in months actually, on the Manhattan Bridge and she’s.... dancing..? What in the world is she up to...?” And she and Player are naming off different dances..

Carmen: “And slide, jazz hands...”

Player: “Waltz.”

Carmen: “Tango.”

Player: “The Mash Potato.”

Carmen: “Hey... Macarena.” And their just having a grand ole time, this goes on..

And then moments later... the entire stock exchange crashes. Just stops.

Player: “And... freeze.”

Letting the world, and V.I.L.E. know that she’s alive and about to wreck them. All the stiffs on Wall Street begin to freak out, trying to unfreeze the system. But, the deed is done.

Player: “And... done! Get out of there, Red.”

Carmen: “Awesome job, buddy. Goodbye New York, thank you for the warm welcome back!” She winks and bows at the helicopter camera coming her way, and disappears without a trace.

|Part 2|

Player: “Hey, Red. Looks like V.I.L.E. also keeps safes in New York as well.”

Carmen: “Well, seeing as we’re already here...” She says with a smug smile.

This is the night after they robbed the stock exchange, took more than 10 billion from V.I.L.E.. They anticipate there only being about 5 million in total revenue in this safe. But once in..

Carmen and Shadowsan, who just opened the safe: “😦 uh, guys... this is more than 5 million... We’re gonna have to make two trips. Fast.” There are gold and silver bars lining the walls, certificates worth 10,000 each.. just loaded. So this is where Team Red acquires their large sum of liquid. Between the 5 people in the field, they split up the bars and cash and such and go their separate ways for a bit. Player puts the certificates in many separate fake accounts.

|The next day at VILE:

The faculty are watching the news of the big screen, and it’s December 1st, so Cookie is there.

News Anchor: “Yesterday after the abrupt freeze, more than a dozen corporations at the New York Stock Exchange mysteriously went bankrupt. (Cookie just smirks and barely holds back a laugh.)

Dr. Bellum: “Something funny, Ms. Booker?” Dr. Bellum is furiously looking up all the financial records for all the fake corporations they made to spread their wealth out.

Cookie: “Oh, no. Not at all, Sara.” And she mumbles to herself: “Huh, the kid listened to me after all..” Proud mother moment.)

News continues...” Many are saying Carmen Sandiego was responsible. The scarlet thief made her reappearance after nearly 2 months of no activity. Authorities have yet to locate Ms. Sandiego for questioning. She remains at large.”

Maelstrom: “Coach Brunt, increase security at our banks in New York. I have a feeling she isn’t done yet.”

Brunt: “Too late.” She has a 😐 look on her face. Brunt is on the phone with their bank manager in New York. Maelstrom just buries his head in his hand out of frustration.

|Later with Team Red...|

Everyone is in the current hideout, they’re all watching the same news as V.I.L.E., Zach and Ivy cheer,

Player: “Okay, numbers crunched.”

Player just crunched the numbers and everyone is like 😮.

Ivy: “That’s a lot of zeroes, you guys.”

Carmen: “We gotta get rid of this.”

They donate a lot to charity, art & culture museums.. etc. Everyone takes a handful of turns on what they want the money to go to.

Founder of a Children’s Home: “On behalf of our gracious private donor, I would like to announce that we will be developing over 50 new homes worldwide. We will work tirelessly on construction, and to hold to our mission statement, that no child is left out in the cold.”

They take turns in deciding where the money gets donated to. They been around the group at least 5 times already.

Player: “Julia, you’re up.” As the group is circled around a table in a hideout, eating ice cream out of the bucket.

Julia: “Hm.. The Children’s Music Society.”

Player: “You got it. Shadowsan?”

Shadowson: “The Koi Fish Protection Foundation.”

Player: “Koi fish, very nice.”

So tonight everyone mostly donated to the kids,

Zach: “To the kids!”

The group: “To the kids!” They all hold their spoons up in a toast.

Ivy: “And the koi fish!” And then everyone shares a laugh.

Then still have some left over. They start expanding. And I want to be clear, Player is using pocket change in what they stole.

Carmen: “Merry Christmas, Player. Can you make the last of the stash disappear?”

Player: “Oh, I’m sure I can work something out.” As he looks to the rough draft drawings he’s made of Mission Control.

| Continues in OP: Mission Control|

|Epilogue|

So the Team is in Rome, a week since they robbed V.I.L.E blind. Most of the stash has been donated, with a little bit going to of the Team. Carmen is out browsing the city.

Player: ”Whatchu up to now, Red?”

Carmen: “Oh, just spending my cut.” As she stops in the front window of a very posh jewelry store, eyes set on a pair of 1 1/2 karet diamond studs.

Carmen: “Hey, do you think you could make another set of communication earrings?”

Player: “Sure. No problem.”

| Then story picks up in Rome, where Carmen asks Julia to officially be apart of Team Red.|

#carmen sandeigo 2019 #carmen sandiego #team red #writing #au #apocalypse’s stuff #the real rough drafts

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miamaroo · 5 years

Text

Northern Migration- Chapter 26 (Notes + Preview)

I hope you’re having a good holiday season, because I am currently lost in the sauce and I don’t know how to get back up. Either way, we’re going to be updating this a little bit sooner than I really should because I need the validation or something like that. Huh. Remember that this right here is brimming with a whole heck of a lot of spoilers, so beware!

Spoilers!

I am in the very unique position of being the only TAZ writer who has no idea how to write Angus. I definitely have his speech patterns pretty incorrect, like I’m certain he does not sound half as formal as I’m writing him to be. I think the problem is that since Stevie is the immature, pseudo-realistic 10 year old character, putting a cartoony genius character of the same age in the same story feels off. Now the solution to that would be to adjust Angus’s character so that he’s also more childlike, but I guess I’m just in too deep now to change anything.

I could probably get away with claiming that his formalness is a defense mechanism for being in a situation where he doesn’t feel safe. Whether I go with that reasoning or not has yet to be determined.

Shoving in a mention of Brian as someone who tried uncovering information about the Grand Relics was probably the least smooth I’ve ever been with these kinds of things.

I think in another like, Stevie would like Angus as a human being and would probably enjoy having him as a friend. As it stands now, she’s a bit too wound up by everything to not be on the defensive at all times.

Also shoutout to everyone who thought Stevie was swearing out Taako. Nope, it’s another ten year old!

And if I haven’t already butchered Angus enough, I will also concede that him realizing that they aren’t evil enough to agree to team up with them was also done really poorly. I will probably find some chapter in the future where that switch in perspective is explored more deeply.

Bane’s still relevant. Just in case you forgot.

So after 26 chapters, I’m finally giving Killian some love and attention. The upcoming arc is going to deal a lot with her past and how she came upon her mission to get rid of the Grand Relics, so I’m super excited for what’s to come. I still wish I had enough sense to squeeze more about her in sooner, but to tell the truth, there have been a few times where she’s vaguely mentioned a key part of her backstory that I don’t think anyone has really caught onto yet. I think it’s going to be fun to learn the complete tale and just be like “huh. that’s why she brought that up.”

As before mentioned in an earlier chapter, Killian forgot Brian so the person in her past she’s struggling to pin a name to is him.

Carey’s here and still relevant! I would not be a good TAZ writer if I didn’t let these two girls get together. Considering how much of this story I have left and hundred other plot threads I’m tackling, I’m probably not going to get them to the marriage level by the end, but goddamnit am I going to try to get them as far along as I can!

I’m also really bad at flirting in general, so who even knows if Killian and Carey’s flirting is as cute and awkward as I think it is.

Barry is not capable of growing a beard, but he can swing a mustache. The problem is that it always looks like a pornstache and everyone hates it.

That is Ren’s canonical last name, according to the Mysterious Package Company’s Taako’s School bundle.

Everything about the moon is a case study of how not to be subtle about worldbuilding, but I’ll be damned if I was just gonna dump like 500 words down the drain.

And I need to stop writing song lyrics. This is not a musical and I’m not good at them.

I think Barry is this weird combination of being calculating because he can perceive a lot about others but also awkward because he’s not really aware of how much more perceptive he is than the average person. He’s a smart dude and kinda forgets that not everyone is on his level.

I have big plans for Johann for the future of this fic, so I’m trying to start pushing him and his emotional journey to the forefront, meaning that I can now start addressing questions like how does Johann feel about being rescued in part by someone he cognitively knows is one of the bad guys.

A lot of people have rightly been asking me why Julia and Davenport haven’t tried to undo the damage Wonderland caused via the Oculus. I am willing to admit that I initially figured that my reasoning with the broken bonds was obvious, but naturally I realized that I was wrong. I was super duper wrong. So here’s your in universe explanation.

For those who wants an explanation not through the lense of Merle: the Animus Bells breaks bonds, and since the Oculus can’t repair those bonds (especially with how thoroughly Edward and Lydia approached these things), any attempts of recreating missing limbs will ultimately not work. So for Davenport’s hand, the bond that allows Davenport to have a right hand is broken, so no hand can be added to his right side. Technically, can he give himself a gun for a hand? Yes, but let’s not.

This chapter is a little weird because it has Davenport using texts to convey his thoughts, as a general note, I am having a fun time trying to figure out what body language I can give him that conveys what dialogue would normally do. In a way, it’s a fun writing exercise.

Davenport’s emotional recovery is going to be an up and down battle, but at least he’s starting it.

I came up with Merle’s speech at the end there all the way back before I even had that scene with a possessed Taako taunting Julia in the bar. And I’ve been hanging onto it for so long, just waiting for the moment I could write it down here and get it out of my system. And I’m just happy that it exists on paper now and I can stop worrying that I’m going to forget parts of it.

Hopefully, I’ll be ready to update again either before the New Years or just in time for the one year anniversary of this fic. I honestly can’t believe that I’ve really been working on this for so long, and I hope that this thing will be finished before we see birthday number 2.

Here’s the preview of the next chapter:

Chin balanced on hand, Taako leans into the table and watches the scene before him break down—Angus, trying to heave a stack of books to the chalkboard Lucretia had set up in the kitchen while Stevie blocks his path. Both of them are tiny little twerps, but Stevie rocks onto the tips of her toes, holding the flat of her hand to the tip of her head as she tries to measure herself to Angus. “C’mon,” she whines. “I just wanna check!”

“Please— I have very important work I need to be doing right this moment,” Angus says, trying to look over the topmost book on the stack. His glasses threaten to fall off his nose.

Stevie jams her hand on top of his head, trying to keep him pinned in place. “Stop moving!”

Angus leans over, giving the nearest adult a pleading look. Considering that Lucretia went with Davenport to look for a few documents in his office, that meant Taako. “Um, please sir? A little hand?”

“Yeah!” Stevie crosses her arms over her chest, puffing out her chest in a huff. “You judge. Who’s taller?”

Rolling his eyes, Taako slinks to his feet. “Alright. If it gets you two to shut up already. Get back to back…” Angus puts his books down, making sure to stand with his back as straight as possible as Stevie practically bounces in her places. Taako circles them like a shark, finger on chin as he hums. “Hmm, this is a tough one.” They’re fairly close in height, but Taako knows which answer he should give if he wants the max amount of entertainment for the next few days. But when he places his hand on their heads, he realizes he doesn’t even need to lie.

He hides his grin, trying to look pensive as he steeples his fingers over his mouth. “I see.”

Stevie is all but buzz, trying to get her own hand in a position that shows the height difference that she can also see. “Spill it! Who’s taller?”

“There’s no easy way of saying this, but it looks like Angelo here just the tinniest, uh, slimmest bit taller.”

“It’s Angus, sir,” Angus chimes.

Stevie freezes. “Huh? No way!” She twists between him and Angus, frustration building on her face. “But—but—but I’ve always been the tallest in my class!”

[...]

Angus stares at her for a long moment, blinking as he puzzles through his situation. Taako can practically see the math around his head melt away the moment the lightbulb goes off. “Oh, I get it!” Angus grins, pointing a finger up like a real nerd. “You’re jealous I get to help while you’re still grounded.”

Stevie stares.

“Don’t worry,” Angus rambles, reaching for his stacks of books once more. “I’m sure you’ll get the opportunity to help in due time, though I’m not sure where since, while I don’t know you well, I get the sense that you don’t have any particular skills that could aid us—”

Stevie jumps onto him, tackling Angus into his stack of books.

9 notes · View notes

davidbuddbg · 5 years

Text

Chapter 2: What if it’s worth it?

School was going well. My thesis adviser was pleased with my job so far and I had had more time to see my friends that in the past few months. The only negative aspect was that David Budd still wasn’t speaking to me. It’s not that he said much otherwise, but now he wouldn’t even return my hellos in the morning and the goodbyes in the evenings. And I was mad with myself about caring.

We were now in the car, heading back to the Homeland HQ after a meeting Julia had invited me to attend. I desperately tried to catch his gaze in the mirror but he never looked at my side. Then, his phone started ringing. After a while, Julia told him to just pick up before it drove us all up the walls.

I wasn’t usually one to snoop around, but I tried paying attention to the conversation. It wasn’t a happy one, something about his son’s school, Heath Bank and the boy not being admitted to a specialized school. The woman on the other side of the line was pretty much yelling at him before he called her “love” and hung up. Vicky.

Thinking back all those months ago, I remembered him telling me about being separated from his wife. Seems like things had really improved for them.

“Ma’am, could I talk with you for a second?” I asked Julia when we arrived at our floor and she replied with a quick nod.

“So, what did you wish to talk to me about Alma?” She wondered, closing the door to her office. “Are you having difficulties finding time for your thesis?”

“No, Julia, that’s working out well, actually,” I quickly replied, taking a seat in front of her. “I was just wondering if you could perhaps help out Sergeant Budd? His son, Charlie, is attending Heath Bank but he’d be better off in a special needs school.”

She looked up at me, confused and curious at the same time. “Why do you care about PS Budd? Do you know each other?” She asked, playing with a pencil.

“No, not really. We’ve sometimes shared a cup of tea during our breaks these past few days. Nothing more,” I explained, lying through my teeth about the tea and the chatting, but Julia seemed convinced as she nodded.

“Alright, Alma, I’ll see what I can do,” she agreed and I took it as a cue to get up. “Take my personal advice, Alma, never let yourself depend on a man.”

“Thank you! And rest assured, it’s not like, Julia,” I reassured her, making my way to door.

It was exactlylike that.

I walked back to my desk and started working on the mission I had been assigned: Middle Eastern countries were taking the RIPA-18 personally, and the Homeland Office figured a Memorandum of Understanding was perhaps the way to go.

After a while, I let my gaze wander around. First on Budd, who was standing by the wall, still as always. And then at the guy from Security Services, Stephen something, who entered Julia’s office without knocking. Something was off.

I didn’t find out until later that there had been an attack near the Heath Bank Primary School. Budd had left early with Julia, so I didn’t get to talk to him after I’d received the information.

After work that evening, I purposefully took the wrong tub line. I didn’t want to go home. I felt scared, and mad, and helpless. But most of all, I didn’t know why I kept thinking of Budd and his kids, when police officers literally died in the attack today.

Getting out of the tub, I got two Subway sandwiches before making my way to a building I rarely ever went to.

Disappointed at my own behavior, I nevertheless knocked on the door. Seconds later, James answered. “It’s not Wednesday, but I could do with some extra fucking,” I explained, being blatantly honest.

-----

Julia now had daily meetings with Anne Sampson, Mike Travis and Stephen Weirdname. I wasn’t allowed to attend, of course, but I knew they were talking about a possible connection between the 1/10 train attack and the Heath Bank School bomb.

Looking at them through the glass walls, I finally realized something. Dave was the officer from the 1/10. That was the only possible explanation for the targeting of that particular school.

It also meant that the person who had manufactured the bomb for the train was the same one as the for the school. Which only left two options: Either the husband had hidden the bombs somewhere for his friends to use, or the person who did them was still at large.

I desperately wanted to talk with Budd but Julia told me he had been assigned to desk duty for the time being. I didn’t even know what I’d say, but I needed to say something. Maybe something along the lines of “yes, I was a hypocrite, holding your hand during the interview and yet specializing in the law of war, sorry”. Most of all, I just wanted to know if he was okay.

Today was Wednesday, which meant that not only would I get free dinner but also James’ company. I knew he liked me, and I knew I could learn to like him too. After all, we both studied law and he was now a public defender, so we did have some stuff in common. That ought to be enough.

----

“I think we should watch ‘Mindhunter’,” James suggested browsing over my Netflix library as I laid out the Chinese food containers in front of us.

“Maybe we could try something more lighthearted? I’m done with murder,” I whispered the last part but I knew he’d heard it, considering how close we were sitting. “You know, put on ‘Mindhunter’, it’s not like we’re really going to pay attention,” I added flirtingly.

“No ma’am, your wishes are my orders,” James laughed, putting on season 3 of ‘The good place’.

Thirty minutes later, the show was long forgotten and James and I were making out on the sofa. Maybe it was the number of ex-girlfriends he has had, but he knew just where to kiss me. Besides, he was the most unproblematic person I knew. I looked down at him while he was kissing my chest and I tried to make myself fall in love with him. Before I could see if that worked, there was a knock on the door and we both stopped abruptly.

“Are you expecting someone?” James asked, panting and passing me my shirt.

“Not really,” I admitted.

I made sure to do at least the first couple of buttons of my shirt before opening the door. It was Budd. Dave, I mean.

“Good evening, Alma.” His Scottish accent lighthearted before his eyebrows crunched up when he saw my wild hair and half-buttoned shirt.

“Oh hey, David,” I greeted him, frankly embarrassed at the situation. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

Suddenly, I felt James’ hand on my waist. “Hello David, I’m James, Alma’s friend,” he introduced himself, stretching out the last word. He then extended his hand which David took only hesitantly.

“Aye, cheers James,” David exclaimed, shaking James’ hand for much longer than was necessary.

cleared my throat, finally regaining their attention. “Why don’t you come on in, David? James was just leaving.” James seemed confused but at my insisting glare, he grabbed his coat nonetheless.

“You owe me another non-Wednesday,” he whispered sneakily into my ear before disappearing.

I led James to the living room and tried to clean up the mess from dinner. David looked at the couch hesitantly before taking a seat. “So, how did you meet James?”

“Oh,” I blurted out, quite flushed, as I looked for the draft of my thesis. “He did his Erasmus semester in my university in Portugal and we hooked up,” I went on without thinking, finally sliding the document under the bed and realized what I’d just said. “Sorry, that was too much information,” I said sheepishly, stating the obvious. David didn’t reply.

“So, hum, what are you doing here?” I asked after a while, sitting down on the arm of the sofa where all my clothes were lying in a mess.

David closed his eyes tightly before rubbing his temple. “I wanted to thank you.”

“On what grounds?” I came back from the kitchen with two glasses of soda, handing him one.

“I know it was you who got the Home Office Secretary to put in a good word about Charlie.” Dave was smiling now, a rare sight on him.

“It was my way of apologizing for being a hypocrite,” I admitted and Dave nodded slightly, implicitly accepting my excuses. “How is your family coping?”

“They’re under some stress but at least now I know they’re in the Safe House, so that good.” He explained before an awkward silence invaded my flat again. “Actually, I should be heading back, it’s late.”

I accompanied him to the door, somewhat disappointed at having him leave so soon. “Good night, Alma,” he whispered before bending down and kissing my cheek.

-----

The next few days were better. Dave was no longer pissed at me and I got to see him every day. He even smiled a little each time our eyes met.

But what really held my attention was seeing Stephen come to meet Julia so often, one-on-one. Not even Mike Travis was allowed in the office. I knew it was none of my business, but considering it was the Home Office, I was pretty sure they weren’t talking about Hillary not wanting to vaccinate her child. This was something important, something big.

I was still making up a dozen of theories in my head, when Julia knocked on my door.

“Yes?” I replied, getting up quickly.

“This is usually a no-go for interns and you won’t be able to assist most of time, but do you want to join me for the meeting at 10 Downing Street?” She offered, a small grin on her face knowing I’d certainly accept.

I was very surprised she’d offer something like that, but there was no way I’d refuse. “Of course, Ma’am, thank you for the offer. Let me grab my coat.”

The drive was silent, as it mostly was but this time I felt comfortable. Journalists shouted questions at Julia as we made our way inside the house and I was disappointed not to spot Larry the cat.

As predicted, I only got to be present during the first fifteen minutes where the cabinet didn’t talk about anything truly important or confidential. Afterwards, the staff led me to the room next door, the anti-chamberthey called it, which turned out to be library. And there was Larry!

“Come here boy,” I called him over cheerfully, tapping on my thighs so he would come to me.

-----

“You’re full of cat hair,” Julia commented when we were back in the car. “I take it, you found Larry?” She chuckled.

“Yes, Chief Mouser was of very good company, indeed,” I spoke in a very posh manner and everyone laughed. It then transitioned into Julia talking about Mia, the cat she used to have while she was college.

Suddenly, there was a loud noise and shards of glass flew everywhere. Before I could make out what was happening, more shots flew in and Terry was hit in the head. “Down, down!”, Dave shouted. Julia screamed loudly.

I took off my belt and tried to grab her hands but she was just shaking so much. Out of the corner of my eyes, I saw Dave grabbing the steering wheel, he was tetanized. I quickly scanned him over, his blood covered silhouette freaking me out. He wasn’t injured, thank God. “It’s okay, Ma’am,” Dave said, trying to reassure Julia.

Dave crashed the car and my the back of my head hit the car’s door with a loud thump. My vision became somewhat dizzy but then Dave’s hand searched for mine, squeezed it tight and looked at me with worry in his eyes. “Alma, it’s okay!” He shouted over the bullets before speaking unintelligibly on the radio. “The bullets can pierce through the windows, but they can’t go through the armored metal!” He reassured the both of us before continuing stressfully speaking on the radio, trying to reassure us at the same time.

“Two minutes!”, he announced before they started shooting at us again. The shots were too loud, the noise was intolerable. I searched the pockets of my coat with trembling hands, trying to find my noise-cancelling headphones in order not to panic but before I could, Dave opened his door and exited the car.

“Fuck!”, I shouted, not able to control my feelings before talking. My loud shout seemed to scare Julia even further. “Julia, everything is under control, okay? Less than two minutes,” I repeated Dave’s information, whispering softly, hoping she would hear me through all the commotion. I wanted to hold her hand, but then I noticed mine were covered in blood, my blood. It was coming from my ears. Shit, not again.

Without a warning, Dave opened the driver’s door and pulled out Terry’s body. “Are you fine, Alma?” He asked worriedly, turning on the engine and putting it on reverse. Bullets kept hitting the car’s roof.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I questioned but David didn’t answer, instead the car went to a stop in front of the Pascoe House.

“He won’t have a clear sight here,” Dave explained before grabbing a machine gun out of nowhere. “You’ll be fine,” he said one last time and then exited the car and went straight inside the building. I tried opening my door, go after him but my blood covered hands couldn’t grab the handle. And then I remembered that the backdoors were always locked. Shit!

Julia was sobbing and shaking more each time she noticed all the blood on her white suit. I wanted to help her, help him but the pain in my ears was too much. Too much noise again, it felt like I could hear everything. And then I heard another gunshot. Please, let it not be him.

A few minutes after that, the medics arrived but I didn’t see Dave again. “Miss, we’re taking you to the hospital.” A kind woman who had just excited the ambulance was tending to me, reassuring me but my mind was elsewhere.

“Where’s Dave?” I asked, or rather screeched as she tried to touch me. I pulled away from her, looking everywhere around me, trying to find him.

“Who’s that?” She wondered, getting somewhat impatient now as she forcefully dragged me inside the ambulance.

“Julia’s bodyguard, PS Budd,” I replied, my voice shaking as the doors closed in on us and the ambulance started moving.

“Miss, you have ruptured eardrums. I’m Georgie Garer, and we’re going to take care of you,” she promised as if my true worry was the blood still oozing out of my ears.

As soon as we arrived at the hospital, an otorhinolaryngologist started tending to my ears. It hurt, but not as much as the first time it happened.

“Is this the first time you’ve had ruptured eardrums,” he asked, cleaning out the rest of the blood with cotton swabs.

“No, it’s third time, or fourth, I can’t remember,” I replied, not really focusing on the current situation. “Look, I know to handle this, so if you could just patch me up real quick and let me go home, that would be perfect.”

The old man chuckled but didn’t stop what he was doing. “You didn’t lose your hearing, so that’s good news. But you did lose quite a lot of blood so you will need a transfusion, miss,” he informed me.

-----

I was alone in my hospital room and the blood bag was practically empty now. I wanted to grab my phone but they had placed my bag on the chair against the wall and I couldn’t reach it. Careful not to pull out any needles, I slid off the bed and tried finding balance on my feet, keeping one hand on the bed just in case.

Just as I was looking for my phone inside my messy bag, someone knocked on the door. I didn’t bother turning around even though I knew I flashing them my butt through the hospital gown. “If you’re a nurse, I’m fine, okay. I just wanted to get my phone and organize myself a ride home.”

“Alma, it’s me,” Dave’s Scottish accent reached my ears and it didn’t cause any pain, quite the opposite.

“Dave, are you okay?” I entreated, quickly turning on myself so I could see him, and almost ripping one of the needles in the process. He seemed fine, he was now wearing a fresh suit and apart from a few cuts here and there, he was unblemished. But I knew the worst pains weren’t physical.

I finally dared looking at his face and he seemed in agony as he stared at me in my hospital gown. I slowly made my way over to him until I was just a few inches away from his body, and then I hugged him. “Thank you,” I whimpered, relieved at finally seeing him again.

To my dismay, he didn’t hug me back. Instead, he cleared his throat and carefully pushed me away from him. “The Police now think you’re a possible target and the Home Office Secretary asked for me to be assigned to you, for the time being.” His voice was professional and cold, every ounce of our growing friendship disappearing into thin air.

“How is she?” I asked, sitting back down on the bed as I became dizzy again.

“She was brought to a hotel,” Dave said, still by the door. “That’s where I’m taking you now.”

After this minimalistic exchange, David called for nurse to take off my needles and they let me leave with him after I signed my discharge papers. As we were exiting the floor, a nurse stopped us and addressed Dave: “You are not to leave her alone for the next couple of days, especially at night. In case there’s any more blood, you need to bring her to us.” The woman said hurriedly, but Dave just nodded.

Now in the car, Dave turned on the heat. He’d probably noticed that I was still shaking a little. “I’m not going to the hotel,” I chirped in a small, out of the blue, not looking at him.

“What?” He blurted out with agitation as he pulled out of the parking place. His exterior appeared calm, but I knew that inside he was in a turmoil.

“I want to sleep in my own bed, tonight,” I explained softly. I didn’t want to piss him off, but I needed to find myself in a familiar place. “Just tonight, David. Please.”

Without bothering to reply to my request. David spoke on the radio. “Seven-Nine. Change of plans. Flapper homebound.” I couldn’t hear what the person said but David did take the road leading to my place. “This is just for tonight, Alma,” he spoke seriously, like warning me. “Tomorrow night, I want you in the hotel.”

-----

We arrived at my flat which thankfully was less messy than usually. David was carrying a small duffel bag, most likely with fresh clothes and personal items since he’d expected to sleep in the hotel where Julia was.

“I’m going to take a shower,” I announced the very second he closed the door behind ourselves. “You go and make yourself at home.”

I walked to the bathroom and closed the door behind myself. Looking in the mirror, I was happy to notice I wasn’t hurt, at least not much. Apart from a large bruise on my arm and shoulder from when our car crashed into the other one, and the ears, obviously, I was as good as new. My hair was a mess though, it was caked with so much blood it looked auburn rather than usual cool brown.

I stepped into the shower and let the water wash away the stress. I realized I’d have to call my parents, let them know I was fine, but I decided I’d just do it tomorrow.

I stepped out of the bathroom dressed in nothing more than a towel, since I’d forgotten to take my night clothes with me. Entering the main room, I saw David silently lying on the couch in a t-shirt and black boxers, completely ignoring me.

“Oh, come on, David,” I sighed, rather impatient and disappointed at this. “You saved my life today, I’m not going to make you sleep on an old, small couch. Just hop on the bed,” I ordered, rummaging through some drawers to find some clean underwear. He didn’t budge.

I made my way back to the bathroom again, this time not looking at him because I couldn’t handle how good he looked dressed like that. “If you’re not in the bed when I come out, I’ll be pissed,” I warned, knowing full well that I had no authority to order him around.

To my surprise, considering I hadn’t heard any footsteps, Dave was lying on the edge of the bed when I returned. Sighing, I entered through the other side, taking my contraceptive pill with some water.

“Shit, I forgot to ask,” I spoke out loud without realizing. “Do you want to eat or drink something?” David didn’t answer, and I lied down next to him in complete silence. “Are you okay?” The moment I asked that, I knew I had messed up.

“No, love, I’m not okay,” he yelled and my ears hurt. “You almost got killed today, under my watch!” He was aggravated, now pulling the bed covers away from him, in an attempt to get up. Without thinking, I grabbed his shoulders and pulled him back to bed, pinning him down with my hands and straddled him, trying to ignore the ambiguity of the situation.

“But I did not,” I stated with authority, out of breath for some reason. “I’m okay, David,” I now whispered reassuringly as he slowly calmed down. “My eardrums rupture every once in a while. Last time it was at a concert. I’m okay, David.” As I tried to disentangle myself from him, David pulled himself up and kissed me, out of nowhere. Our crotches rubbed together in this new position and we both let out an involuntary moan. Before I had time to process what was happening, Dave was sliding the strap of my sports bra off my shoulder, my skin erupting in goosebumps beneath his touch.

He then softly kissed the bruise on my shoulder, simultaneously moving his hips beneath mine. Running on instinct, I removed his lips from my body and brought my tongue to his jaw, slowly licking it in a straight line until I reached his earlobe to nibble on it. The groan which came deep from within his chest enticed my hands to wander down his t-shirt before forcefully taking it off him. He did the same thing with my bra before rolling us around so that I was now captive beneath his body.

Without saying anything, we removed the last pieces of clothes and our bodies connected with each other. My hands brushed the scars on his back and he shivered, stopping for a moment. I didn’t, I couldn’t let him know how much it pained me to feel those crevasses on his skin, this was a conversation for some other time. I forced myself to continue and kissed him harder than before, prompting him to continue.

It felt even better than all these months ago. Perhaps it was because I now knew him better, because I knew he had put his life on the line to save mine or because the both of us could have died today. Reaching our peaks, I was aware I’d get some dirty looks from our neighbors later but I didn’t have the heart to care.

Still panting, Dave lied now next to me, his head resting on my naked breasts. “Thank you, love,” he whispered. I wanted to ask what for but decided against it and just let those words hang in the air. Instead, I placed a peck on his forehead and we called it a night.

#RichardMadden #richard madden #davidbudd #David Budd #davebudd #dave budd #bodyguard #netflix bodyguard #bodyguardnetflix #BodyguardBBC #bbc bodyguard

3 notes · View notes

livsoulsecrets · 3 years

Text

It’s us - Batwoman fic

Sumary: Mary is broken after Kate goes missing and Luke tries to be there for her.

Luke hasn’t talked to Mary since Kate disappeared. He saw her many times, yes, but they didn’t exchange a word. They both carried her secret and, therefore, they both felt specially lost with her being gone. Luke had tried to, but no words came to his mind when he looked at Mary’s desperate face every time they found out there were no news about her sister.

He meets her again in the Crows’ headquarters for an update on the searches for Kate. They are taken to Jacob’s office by him in complete silence. The man was a wreck, Luke knew, but did his best to stay strong for Mary. In a falsely calm tone, he told Luke and his daughter they still didn’t know where Kate was. The Crows were sweeping all of Gotham and the nearby cities, being led by Sophie and Julia, and would not stop until finding her, Jacob assured.

Luke was sure he meant what he said and trusted both women a lot. Still, it had been three whole days with no sign of Kate, not a clue about her whereabouts. His fear was bottling up inside him, making Luke feel powerless.

He was Kate’s guidance when she went out to fight whoever stood in her way. Luke was good at it: giving directions, finding shortcuts, thinking fast to help her. Without Kate by his side, he didn’t know what to do. He had been trying to find her by himself, but his searches had ended on dead ends and Julia had assured him the Crows had enough technology to find anybody.

But that was three days ago, when they assumed Kate had either went into a secret vacation or been taken by some crazy bad guy that they could capture. Right now, Luke couldn’t shake the feeling something awful had happened and he was the one supposed to find his friend. He was the one who should be out there looking for her, after all, Luke knew more about her than most in this building. More than even Jacob himself. The only other person who came close was Mary.

He turned to her, trying to think of something to say: a word of comfort, perhaps? A plan of action? Anything, anything at all, he begged his own brain to come through and spite the words out, but nothing came.

Mary suddenly got up from the chair, startling Luke. He could see tears forming in her face when she walked towards the door. Jacob calls after her, but she is gone before either of them can do anything.

Luke leaves shortly after, making his way back to the Wayne Tower. He doesn’t know where else to go.

He finds Mary sitting in Kate’s chair.

It’s not a surprise, when he really thinks about it. Kate spent a lot of time here, especially in the last few weeks, ever since Mary joined their secret mission. It made sense she would seek comfort in a place that reminded her of Kate.

— Hey. — Luke says, almost kicking himself for saying something so dull after everything they had been through the last few days. Mary looks up, but she barely registers him being there. — Are you... I mean, I know you’re not okay, but do you need something? Is there anything I can do to help? — Luke knows he’s stalling, but he can’t help it, his nerves getting the best of him at seeing how devastated Mary looks.

— Can you make it stop? — She questions, slowly getting up from the chair and walking towards him.

— Stop what? — He asks, confused. Mary stops right in front of him, her eyes cast down.

— Stop this fucking nightmare from happening to me again. — She completes her question and Luke doesn’t have an answer to it, so he stays quiet. Mary shakes her head.

— Like I thought... Nobody can stop it. — She takes a deep breath and Luke fears what’s about to come, wondering if he can handle seeing Mary fall apart right in front of him. — I keep losing everyone I love. — Her voice is small, not sounding like her own at all. He needs to fight back his own tears. Mary is the kindest person he knows, she should never, ever feel this type of pain (the type he knew all too well).

— Fuck, I lost my dad when I was so young I can barely remember him. My mom died right in front of me... And Beth? I lost her before even knowing her. Then I got her back for some miracle only to have her dying too. Now, Kate is gone. She’s gone and I don’t know if I will ever see her again... I can’t keep doing this, I can’t keep loving people only to... Only to fucking lose them again. — Her voice is shaking, tears streaming down her face. Luke has never seen Mary so broken, not even in the aftermath of her mom’s death. Kate disappearing brought back all the anger and hurt she had buried deep inside herself, it appeared.

Luke doesn’t know what to do, he’s not sure if Mary even wants him to do anything. Nonetheless, he can’t just stand still while his friend breaks down in front of him. Before he can properly register it, his body is moving forward and clashing against Mary’s. She doesn’t move for some seconds, struggling against him until, finally, Mary collapsed into him, sobbing in his arms. They slid down to the floor, the girl’s cry echoing in the office Kate used to spend so much time in.

— It’s okay, I got you. It’s okay. — He repeats over and over again even though nothing is okay, even though his heart is also breaking at the thought of never seeing Kate again. He clings to those words as if he’s whispering them to himself, not only to Mary. The only thing that keeps Luke from falling apart is his unexplainable need to support Mary through her pain.

Luke holds Mary tightly until she stops sobbing, until her breath is still shaky, but constant again, until she doesn’t have it on her anymore to fight his offer of comfort.

— Mary, look at me. Hey, look at me. — Luke asks, backing away just enough to stare at her eyes, his hands holding hers. He is not sure where he gets the strength from, but he keeps his voice firm when he talks again, not a ounce of dread slipping into it. — You will see Kate again, we will find her, do you hear me? I will look for her for however long it takes and I will bring her home, I promise. — Mary stares at him, exhaustion written all over her face.

— You can’t promise me that, Luke. — Her voice cracks when she mouths his name.

— I know I can’t, but I will anyway. — He answers, Mary’s eyes piercing his, an hesitant flame of hope firing up inside them. — Because I won’t let you lose anybody else. I will find your sister, Mary.

New tears are forming in her face and, for a split second, Luke wonders if he misread the fire in her eyes, until she throws her arms against his neck to hug him. Mary buries her face in his neck and he needs a second to process the desperation with which she holds on to him.

— I don’t know why, but I believe you. — Mary whispers, her voice muffled. — If anybody can do that, it’s you.

— It’s us, Mary. We are her team, remember? If anybody can bring Kate home, it’s us. — Luke answers, hope building up inside himself too, even against his best judgment. Mary is the one to pull away first this time, wiping the tears out of her face with determination. Mary holds her chin up high, in the way she always does when she’s getting ready to win an argument, he notices.

— So, where do we start? — Mary asks. Her eyes are still red and teary, her face is swollen from all the crying, and they are both sitting on the floor a couple minutes after a meltdown. Still, she never looked as brave as she does right now, he thinks.

Despite the fear crippling inside of him, Luke finds himself smiling at Mary. He has a thousand different doubts and concerns about Kate going through his mind, but he grounds himself by remembering the words he told Mary just before.

If anyone can find Kate, it’s them.

They are Kate’s family. And they will not stop until they bring her home.

#batwoman #batwoman fic #luke fox #mary hamilton #kate kane #luke x mary #tw death #tw grief #my fics

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theliberaltony · 6 years

Link

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s weekly politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): Greetings, people. Today we’re going to have a super nice and respectful chat about a recent column from David Brooks of The New York Times.

clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): …

Nate drank his Gatorade.

micah: The column: “The End of the Two-Party System.” Can someone give us a fair summary of Brooks’ argument?

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): The summary is that we need the Reasonable Center Party, which happens to have exactly the same policy positions that Brooks has and would be enormously successful if only anyone bothered to create it.

micah: I said “fair.”

clare.malone: Brooks brings up the rise of basically what he’s categorizing as tribal politics, and compares it to European trends from the late 1990s and early 2000s.

He says that, at some point, conservatives and liberals will split themselves between true philosophical conservatives and liberals, and then the people who are the tribal conservatives and tribal liberals.

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): A more generous summary might be that Brooks feels the Republican Party is too Trumpish and the Democratic Party is too stuck on race- and gender based-politics, and we need another party for people who don’t like those two ideologies.

micah: OK, I don’t want this chat to just be bashing Brooks’s argument; I want to talk about third parties. So let’s get the argument-demolishing out of the way …

There’s a ton wrong in this article, right?

natesilver: I mean, the main problem is that he doesn’t understand how parties work.

Which is a pretty big problem if you’re writing a column about parties.

I like Brooks, by the way (I really do) — this just wasn’t one of his best efforts.

perry: So, first, he points to the good old days of the 1990s. But as Julia Azari has written, we’ve always had very intense political conflict, it’s just more partisan now. Moreover, the 1990s were not great — as we knew back then but are learning more now — if you were, say, a woman trying to advance in many fields or an African-American who dealt with the criminal justice system.

Second, the pre-Trump Republican Party he describes skips over the racialized politics of, for example, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

micah: Yeah, this description of the GOP seems waaaaay off:

In the years after Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party was defined by its abundance mind-set. The key Republican narratives were capitalist narratives about dynamic entrepreneurs and America’s heroic missions. The Wall Street Journal editorial page was the most important organ of conservative opinion. The party’s views on other issues, like immigration, were downstream from confidence in the abundant marketplace and the power of the American idea.

What about all the racialized law-and-order stuff?

clare.malone: My real problem with the article is that he doesn’t really prove his case.

He says at the very end of it, in a single paragraph:

Eventually, conservatives will realize: If we want to preserve conservatism, we can’t be in the same party as the clan warriors. Liberals will realize: If we want to preserve liberalism, we can’t be in the same party as the clan warriors.

But wait … will they realize this? What about hyper-partisanship? And check this out from Pew:

natesilver: The article also skips over the importance of “values voters” and the evangelical movement to the George W. Bush coalition. (And to the Reagan coalition too.)

micah: But, Nate, explain how you think the article misunderstands how parties work.

natesilver: Du. Ver. Ger’s. Law.

Bam!

OK, that’s a pretty obscure reference. But its point is that party systems are heavily influenced by electoral structures.

You usually get two major parties, or maybe three, in first-past-the-post systems like the U.S. uses. Those European systems he’s talking about — where you have lots of viable parties — mostly have proportional representation.

It should really be “Duverger’s reasonably reliable empirical regularity” and not “Duverger’s law,” but it’s a pretty useful heuristic.

clare.malone: What a sentence.

My question is, when does Brooks think all of this is going to happen?

That is, is this something he thinks will come down the pike in 2020 (aka, David Brooks is a stan for Kasich 2020)?

Or is this something 25 years in the future?

natesilver: It will happen once more people read his columns and join the Reasonable Center.

micah: OK, so he sorta bungles parties and bungles recent U.S. political history, but let’s talk about the force he thinks will spur a viable third party …

Isn’t his argument like: People are getting really partisan and so therefore people will break out of partisanship?

That seems … wrong?

Or am I misunderstanding the argument?

natesilver: It’s not necessarily wrong to think that partisanship could abate. It does tend to ebb and flow. And it’s at a high end of the historical range now.

clare.malone: It’s really hard to build a party structure — state-level offices/organizers/money — which is one of the reasons that people tend to stay within the two major parties.

Like, if you wanted to launch a legitimate third-party bid, it would not be something that could happen overnight. The Libertarian Party has been trying for decades, and they’ve only recently been racking up margins that made a dent.

natesilver: And/but/also, the two-party system is pretty adaptable. Does the Republican Party under Trump look a lot different than the Republican Party under Reagan? Sure. But that’s why parties work!

clare.malone: Right. Parties shift priorities. The modern Republican Party emerged under Herbert Hoover. So maybe it won’t break apart now, it’ll just shift to a new iteration.

perry: I was thinking out loud about this before the chat, but the last new, big major party in America was in the 1850s, right? Lincoln’s Republican Party. It replaced the Whigs in many ways.

Trump’s rise is a major crisis to Republicans like Brooks and lots of other scholars who view Trump as kind of the worst possible type of president. So the idea is a Gov. John Kasich-like figure rises to create a new kind of party that is an alternative to Trumpism. I didn’t think that was impossible in October 2016. But it seems much more implausible now, since Republican voters broadly like Trump and it’s not clear that stopping Trump is some clarion call for people outside of the Democratic Party and the Acela corridor.

micah: Yeah, so that’s key: Is there demand/desire among Americans for a third party?

natesilver: Again, a lot of this is just that David Brooks had a party (the GWB-era GOP) that he once mostly agreed with and now he doesn’t have one. Which is annoying for David Brooks but doesn’t really provide much evidence either way in terms of broader public sentiment. There’s been a gradual uptick in the number of people who identify as independent, but it’s really quite gradual and quite mild:

micah: But that’s party identification … people do say they want a third party!

perry: I think there’s demand for changes in politics: a more populist economic strain and a more nativist strain. But it feels like the former is happening in both parties (Trump, Bernie Sanders) and the latter in the GOP with Trump.

In other words, we are seeing huge changes in politics, but they are within in the parties. (And in the opposite direction of where Brooks is, since he is not populist or nativist.)

natesilver: Yeah, exactly. Basically, Brooks is a Democrat now and doesn’t want to admit it.

micah: Explain that Gallup chart though.

clare.malone: I do think it’s fascinating that Americans say they want a third party.

And yet … where is it?

Maybe if the U.S. had less money involved in politics, you’d see more parties.

natesilver: I wrote something once about how Trump himself was essentially a third-party candidate. His platform during the campaign was quite different than John McCain’s or Mitt Romney’s — although he has arguably governed as a much more traditional Republican.

But part of the issue that Americans don’t want a third party — they want their third party.

perry: So, here’s a smarter take on third parties from Lee Drutman at Vox:

Yes, third parties in American politics are kamikaze missions. Because of our single-winner plurality system of elections, third parties almost never gain representation.

And yes, a serious third-party conservative challenge to Republicans would help Democrats in the short term, by siphoning off votes from Republicans.

But each month that the Republican Party has a leader who can’t conceal his overt racism, who calls the media the enemy of the people, is a month in which voters who identify as Republican have to update their worldview to fit with their partisan identity. Only losing, and losing bigly, will break this Republican partisan trajectory.

One more excerpt from Drutman:

Perhaps you like the idea of starting a Conscientious Conservative Party, but don’t like the idea of losing and tipping the balance of power decisively to Democrats. In that case, maybe you could get on board with changing electoral laws to make it easier for third parties.

Perhaps you could get behind the Fair Representation Act, introduced last year in the House, which would move us toward a proportional voting system by creating multi-member districts with ranked-choice voting. That means that even if the Conscientious Conservative Party could only get about 15 percent nationally, it would get some seats in the House — possibly enough to be a pivotal voting bloc for control of the chamber.

Or if that feels too bold, how about just straight-up ranked-choice voting, which would give people the chance to vote for the Conscientious Conservative Party and then list either the Democrat or the Republican as their second choice, ensuring that they could express their true preference without wasting their vote, and putting some pressure on both Democrats and Republicans to court Conscientious Conservatives to earn their second-choice votes.

The point is, third-party votes don’t have to be wasted votes. They’re only wasted votes because our electoral system makes them so.

natesilver: Yeah, look, I don’t want to go overboard in totally dismissing the idea of a third party. Also, independent presidential candidates can sometimes succeed irrespective of a more sustainable third party.

But as Perry says, a lot of the changes happen within parties. And independents fall into maybe three different categories — including lots of people on the “far left” and the “far right,” not just Reasonable Centrists.

micah: No one has yet explained to me what gives with that Gallup chart, though. If 61 percent of people think a third party is needed, what’s getting in the way?

Brooks is speaking for the masses!

natesilver: Because among that 61 percent, there’s 21 percent who want the Reasonable Center Party, 20 percent who want the Green Party, and 20 percent who want the America First Party

clare.malone: I mean, there’s no high-profile candidate from a third party. Jill Stein and Gary Johnson are too fringe. And their parties don’t have enough money. So no one except people who read sites like FiveThirtyEight ever vote for them.

micah: Don’t stereotype our readers!

clare.malone: Sorry, readers.

micah: Let’s do a poll.

If you're a @FiveThirtyEight reader, please answer this question:

Have you ever voted for a third party?

— Micah Cohen (@micahcohen) February 15, 2018

Anyway, how could we get more parties? Structural change, as Drutman wrote?

perry: I think so — it’s the structure of our electoral system that gets in the way.

natesilver: Yeah, see, Brooks should really be writing about the need for ranked-choice voting.

You’d probably wind up with slightly more fluid, centrist parties, although maybe not with more parties.

perry: Well, the parties would have to vote for structural change, and I don’t see that happening.

I think I could see an Emmanuel Macron-style situation happening in the U.S.

clare.malone: Macron is basically a Michael Bloomberg type but with less experience. Way less.

natesilver: Yeah. I’d put the odds of “independent candidate wins one of the next four presidential elections” quite a bit higher than “there’s a new major party within 16 years.”

perry: If, say, Sanders and Trump are the nominees in 2020, could the Reasonable Centrist Party do better? Macron is a centrist in policy but has a personality cult around him. Or had one.

clare.malone: I mean, if Sanders wanted, he could lean into the Democratic Socialist Party thing and try to build that out. It probably wouldn’t yield him the presidency in his lifetime, but it would perhaps bear fruit decades down the line. A delayed-gratification legacy.

micah: Sanders doesn’t seem the type for delaying gratification.

perry: Take Arnold Schwarzenegger in California in that very odd California 2003 environment. I felt like he could have won as an independent.

natesilver: But in the case where Sanders has won the Democratic nomination, he’d look like a more “traditional” Democrat by the time the general election rolled around. And the Democratic Party is moving in his direction anyway.

clare.malone: Right. Sanders realized that you need the big party in order to succeed. Even if you hate their guts.

natesilver: Could someone more radical than Sanders win the Democratic nomination? Maybe. Or a Sanders who also had lots of personal liabilities?

micah: OK, so if we all think that it’s much more likely that one of the two major parties will shift in a big way than that a third party will emerge, what could that shift(s) look like?

perry: Those shifts already happened to some extent. And the people who lost out on the them are the Jim Webb types in the Democratic Party and the Bill Kristol/Brooks types in the GOP.

micah: One hundred percent agree on GOP, but are we really ready to declare the Democratic Party fully shifted too?

In other words, is asymmetric polarization more symmetrical now?

clare.malone: Oh, Democrats got stuff a-brewing — though because they lost, it’s a less dramatic fight. But the party, in addition to some demographic changes, is much more liberal than it used to be:

natesilver: Neither party has fully shifted, but the Democratic Party is earlier in its process of shifting, I think.

perry: I’m just having a really hard time seeing the Kristol/Brooks wing retaking the GOP. I think, like Nate said, those people are basically Democrats now. And they should try to push the Democrats to be less-identity-ish.

natesilver: In terms of the Democratic Party shifting, the key question isn’t, “What does David Brooks want?” but, “What do young black and Hispanic voters want?”

micah: So, yeah, you two just identified the tension there, right?

clare.malone: Big ol’ tent, huh?

Big enough for Brooks and Kristol.

micah: It would have to be a huge tent!

Brooks describes the Republican Party of the 1980s without one mention of race — getting Brooks-esque voters in the same tent with liberal Democrats is gonna be tricky.

clare.malone: I mean, those guys are basically European conservatives, to go back to the Brooks point about European politics. And their being in the party for a while could, in 10 years, push the more left-leaning people to start their own thing.

Eventually the tent will get too crowded and some people will have to go to the overflow section.

natesilver: Right now, opposition to Trump unites white urban neo-liberals with white democratic socialists with black and Hispanic voters. You’d have a lot of tensions within that coalition down the road, though.

perry: Brooks and the other conservative anti-Trump voices have resonance, in part, because some Democrats at the elite level are wary of the identity stuff too but can’t say so publicly. (Let’s say Sanders and Biden, if you look at their immediate post-election comments.) But I think a party that is only about 25 percent white men doesn’t really care what Brooks thinks. The Democratic Party is going to get more Sanders-like, I think, in the short term. And this is going to frustrate people like Brooks, who should become Democrats. But could Biden win the 2020 nomination on a kind of unity platform? Maybe.

It feels like Brooks’s best hope is that the Democratic Party, in some kind of “Save America from Trump” move, embraces a style of politics that Jeff Flake, John McCain, etc., agree with but does not piss off young voters, minorities, women, socialists, Sanders types.

In other words, the parties really sort along immigration lines — the people with Trumpish views on race/immigration in one party, the others in a second party.

natesilver: Obama, in some ways, united all these different groups together in 2008 because George W. Bush was so unpopular. So if Trump is really, really unpopular by 2020, a Biden type could do great.

In the long run, I don’t think you can avoid these tensions, though.

perry: That’s a great point. The 2008 Obama campaign was a kind of unity ticket. He couldn’t recreate that in 2012.

micah: OK, and to wrap up: Is there any chance that the Republican Party becomes the party Brooks wants it to be?

clare.malone: That’s a negatory. At least in any sort of near-term future. I don’t think you can just forget about the forces in the party that manifested Trump.

perry: If Trump and Putin had a July 2016 phone call during which Trump told him to hack Podesta’s email, that call becomes public and Trump is impeached and removed from office … then maybe.

micah: See, I disagree with that, Perry.

perry: You think Putin made the hacking suggestion first?

micah: LOL.

The Trumpism in Republicanism predates Trump and — to a first approximation — would postdate him too, wouldn’t it?

natesilver: I’m on Perry’s side. If Trump is perceived to be a failure, there could be a reasonably sharp counterreaction to Trump. (Although, I’m thinking “failure” more in the sense of “he loses re-election,” not “he gets impeached,” which raises a different set of issues.)

micah: So, if Trump loses re-election, Republican primary voters suddenly move to the middle on immigration?

natesilver: STRAW MAN MICAH IS BACK

micah: Whose team are you on, Clare?

clare.malone: I’m not sure about my team. I guess I could see, in the case of a Trump flameout, Trumpians getting completely steamrollered by national establishment figures.

But then you’ve got a part of your base that is wildly unhappy with you. I guess they either leave or just become pains in your asses for the rest of time.

I’m not sure I’m on a team. I’m agnostic.

natesilver: Voters (maybe not voters in the GOP, but voters overall) are already moving left on immigration. The reaction to Trump has been fairly thermostatic, as the political scientists like to say.

micah: What does thermostatic mean?

natesilver: Public opinion tends to move in the opposite direction of the president’s policy preferences.

perry: But while I don’t think the Republican Party will change in the short term, I don’t rule out a strong third-party candidate doing well in 2020. There is some broad dissatisfaction with American politics that someone could capitalize on. Someone more like Oprah than Kasich, but I think it won’t be either one of them. I don’t know who that person is.

micah: OK, I’ll say this: Partisanship is sooooooo strong now that maybe it allows for more ideological/policy movement and flexibility. We’ve seen Democrats and Republicans flip on the FBI. We’ve seen Republicans flip on free trade, Russia and Putin.

So, in that sense, maybe it’s easier to imagine the GOP becoming more to Brooks’ liking pretty quickly.

If, in three years, a set of circumstances comes together so that the “right” set of partisan positions for Republicans is Brooks-ian, I don’t really have much doubt that partisan voters would support those positions — in the same way Republicans became anti-free-trade almost overnight.

clare.malone: I’ll buy that somewhat.

The FBI thing is really interesting. A good point.

perry: That’s a good ending point, I basically agree with Micah’s take there.

natesilver: Yeah, I hate to say it, but I basically agree with Micah too. The very intense partisanship we see in the country today is a sign that the parties are quite healthy, whether or not it’s good for democracy.

micah: OMG!

Let me just marinate in this moment for a little while.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #A FiveThirtyEight Chat

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thestuckylibrary · 7 years

Text

Mods’ Reads: June 2017

New mods, new features!

We know we are very behind on our recs, so by the suggestion of a lovely anon, we’ve decided to compile a list of fics we’ve read this month. This fandom always gives us amazing stories to gush about, which we are very thankful for :D

From new fics to old ones, our picks are under the cut:

Mod Karin

And we’ll be slow, honey lovers (‘til the clocks go forward again) by stellam_ignem

But he knows he wants to stay, because he can’t stand not hearing Steve’s voice, or not seeing that smile on that face, or that solemn look of kindness whenever he hands over a few dollars to the homeless veteran on the side of the street. He can’t stand not making Steve laugh. He loves the the subtle smirk in his dares and the snark in his jokes, and the jerk in his brow when he’s lost in thought, or the way he smiles whenever they kiss and thumbs across Bucky’s lower back. Bucky chokes a little, on air, and gently wraps his arms back around Steve’s neck to kiss him.

or: bucky’s a boxer/writer and steve’s the english teacher who walks in on his life.

Fortunate Resolutions of In-Field Complications a.k.a. Dumb Luck by Katharoses, Lasenby_Heathcote

The mission was simple. The mission wasn’t anything at all. We didn’t have to fight, we didn’t have to break in or steal anything or blow anything up - or at least nothing specific. The mission was simply to create a lot of bluster in the wrong direction. But then, the mission doesn’t always go according to plan.

If They Haven’t Learned Your Name by silentwalrus

Steve gets out of the hospital in two days, but just barely. “I’m fine,” he tells Sam, Nurse Eunjung and the phalanx of doctors assigned to make sure Captain America didn’t bleed out and die and get bad PR all over their nice clean hospital. “I have an advanced healing factor. It’s fine. See? I’m standing.”

“That is not standing,” Sam tells him.

“You’re bending the IV stand,” Nurse Eunjung adds pointedly. “Let go and sit down, they don’t grow on trees.”

aka Steve and Bucky’s Global Honeymoon Revenge World Tour.

Pieces Were Stolen From Me by perfect_plan

Steve Rogers is drawn to the mysterious man who has started to frequent his gallery but has no idea how is life is about to change just by being his friend.

Werewolf? There Wolf by leveragehunters (Monkeygreen)

After the car accident that cost him his arm and the endless rehabilitation that got him his shiny metal Stark Industries replacement, Bucky’s happy for a break from people. The house in the forest is peaceful, town’s a fair distance away, and he’s got no neighbours…except maybe a blue-eyed wolf and possibly a naked guy named Steve.

(PS: Steve is the wolf.)

Mod Blue I (re)read a lot so I’m just going to list them without their summaries or we’ll all be scrolling forever.

The Way Out Is The Way Down by Speranza

Coming and Going by Speranza

20th Century Limited by Speranza

What We Asked For From Each Other by Speranza

Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square by Speranza

All The Angels and The Saints by Speranza

Captain Rogers and Sergeant Barnes by Speranza

Coming Out Party by Speranza

the nightmare from which I am trying to awake by Speranza

Dishonor On Your Cow by mandarou

The Avengers Hate Club by notebooksandlaptops

Nietzsche is Dead by mambo

Kiss the Cook by mambo

half awake in a fake empire by idrilka

Behind closed doors: collected oral histories of queer community in New York, 1930-1945. doi 10.1999/journal.amhistqstud.32557038 by wobblyheadeddollcaper

back seat drive by silentwalrus

Workplace Hazards by AggressiveWhenStartled

Mod Julia

broken people (living under loaded gun) by obsessivereader, Slaughter_Me

“It’s him, Nat.”

“He may look like Steve, but that’s not Steve.” Distress mars her calm, professional mask, a sign of how shaken she is. “You saw how many men he killed, the way he did it. That’s not Steve.”

Until You Wear a Groove in the World by rohkeutta

Steve saves him.

In a way, Bucky wishes he hadn’t, because at least then Bucky could’ve pretended that those letters from Spokane and Tucson and Philadelphia never arrived. Bucky could’ve died imagining that Steve was safely in Brooklyn, clinging to life with the skin of his teeth, maybe taking Rebecca and Alice out dancing.

And Shadows Will Fall Behind byleveragehunters

The world was full of things no one could have expected.

Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes never expected to fall from a train into decades of torture and killing.

HYDRA never expected their perfect Winter Soldier’s programming to shatter.

And Bucky, who’d once been the Winter Soldier, who was now an auxiliary to the Avengers, never expected to look down from a rooftop in New York City, where he was keeping watch over the world’s most ineffectual aspirant supervillains, and see a tiny ball of angry sunshine. Fierce and fearless, he loosed feelings in Bucky that he’d thought were gone forever.

we are the things that we do for fun by Nonymos

Going to a professional Dom may be one of the weirdest things Bucky’s ever done. Especially since this skinny Steve Rogers guy doesn’t really look the part.

But hey, they might just find a way to make this work.

let’s see where we wake up tomorrow by kblaze2

Steve’s gone on his second tour. Bucky gets a dog. There is no correlation. Really. Shut up, Nat.

Feeling I’ll Forget, I’m In Love Now by smithsonianstucky

Five years after the events in D.C., Steve and Bucky are living in Brooklyn and working through Bucky’s last stage of recovery: refamiliarizing himself with touch. At the suggestion of his therapist, they adopt a cat and wonder what changes the pet will make in their lives.

a trip to the grope zoo by mwestbelle

Bucky spends some quality time with Steve’s quality tits.

The Joy of Little Things by obsessivereader, Sealcat

or, how Steve ends up working for a dragon with a very odd sense of humor

Korpimaan kutsu by Feanor_in_leather_pants, rohkeutta

The Wise Man teaches him sometimes if he catches Steve puttering around the woods: how to read the trees and the moss, when to listen to the birds and when it’s better to leave their advice untaken. He teaches Steve about the bears and why you’re never supposed to call them by their real name; tells him grittier and truer stories about the woodsfolk than the old ladies in the village.

Dark Lights of Brooklyn by jwdish98

Steve Rogers is a private investigator who is barely skating by. He spends more time in his office than his apartment, and he continues to watch all his friends live out their lives while he sits on the sidelines.

However, when a case falls into his lap that dredges up past mistakes Steve’s life starts to veer off course- in a good way. Probably.

(He’s not entirely sure yet.)

Send Nudes! by DizzyRedhead, TrishArgh

When Steve decided to cosplay Captain America, one of his favorite TV characters, at a convention, he didn’t expect to meet a Winter Soldier cosplayer who looks like he stepped right off the screen (and has a great ass). He didn’t expect to hook up with Bucky, or to find out that they live in the same part of Brooklyn. He definitely didn’t expect the sexting, or the continued hooking up, or the dinner dates.

Steve didn’t expect any of this. Especially not the feelings.

Magic Fingers by lillupon

Steve is just a simple hairdresser.

The Only Familiar Thing by brideofquiet

Steve takes a breath, steels himself, and asks, “Where are we going, Buck?”

Bucky raises an eyebrow. “You’re the one driving, Steve.”

so pop the hood, see what’s good by Bellakitse, ravyn_ashling

While celebrating his birthday Steve meets a charming guy with beautiful blue eyes and an easy smile, going home with him for the night should be the end of it. Instead it’s only the start when his boss and friend hires him as his new mechanic.

Mod Dee

Someone get this boy a drink by fingersnapstothat

Sam recommends Steve get a Tinder. He does. It proves to be the best and worst idea ever.

An Idiot’s Romance by captainsthve

So. Steve’s not the smoothest person.

Which is why he’s currently knocking on Sam Wilson’s door and groaning, “Sam, I’m hopeless.” as soon as the door swings open.

Sam just rolls his eyes and lets Steve in. “That is not new information. What happened?”

So Steve recounts the events of the morning with Sam listening patiently and only teasing a little bit. “You know Steve, I’m going to write a biography about you one day and I’m gonna make millions because no one will believe that Captain America is so hopelessly in love with his best friend that he turns into a middle schooler with a crush.”

aka the one where Steve realizes he’s in love and also realizes he’s horribly bad at flirting.

only one my arms will ever hold by wearing_tearing

Like most stories about Bucky Barnes and his questionable and sometimes terrible life choices, this one starts because he decides not to listen to Natasha’s cryptic and mostly annoying advice.

He decides not to listen, and he hunts down and kills a deer during that month’s full moon run with his pack and leaves its dead body on Steve Rogers’s front step.

Steve, the man Bucky kind-of-possibly-maybe-absolutely is in love with.

Bucky would try to smother himself after that one, but he’s learned that werewolves are hard to kill.

Or: the four stages of courting Steve Rogers.

Dishonor On Your Cow by mandarou

“Sergeant Barnes?”

“Oh, hell no, don’t call him that, man,” Sam warned.

“Captain Fuck Off!” Barnes shouted over him. “Fight me!”

Steve didn’t know whether to laugh or just slink away. He managed to combine the two by pacing two steps and snorting instead. Like a bull.

“I’m gonna need you to calm your ass, Barnes,” Sam said as he went limp again, obstructing Barnes’s struggling under him. “This is so undignified. That is Captain goddamn America.”

“Captain goddamn America!” Barnes repeated, louder. And angrier.

Steve cleared his throat again. “I’ve been looking for you,” he told Barnes.

“I hope you brought lube this time!” Barnes shouted.

perhaps it is to avoid some great sadness by onibi

Steve: I took an online quiz and it told me I’d be a cup of black coffee. It says that my good qualities are that I’m friendly, adaptable, and low maintenance.

Bucky: and what did it say you were at your worst a lazy jerk who harasses his boyfriend with inane bullshit online instead of coming in and talking to him face to face

or: in which steve gets really into online personality quizzes, everybody suffers, and steve is a huge sap about how much he loves his boyfriend

I love you like rlb by tolieawake

I love you like rlb has become a well-known, accepted and valuable component of American vernacular. The meaning of the letters 'rlb’ is unknown, but is uniformly considered to be a statement of a great romantic love, commitment and sacrifice.

It was Dernier as first said it. Steve never imagined that something like that could have survived the war and all the years in between.

In which Tony goes insane trying to figure out why that phrase affects the Cap so much, Bucky teases the press, and Steve and Bucky love each other like rlb.

#mod picks

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theechosas · 5 years

Text

SOS: What’s Happening to Our Clubs?

Eagles, our high school is undergoing puberty and has experienced a massive “glow up”. The first floor of our annex building is now a snazzy futuristic lounge with flat-screen TVs, the old lounge has given way to a STEM/creativity centre, and our logo has, once again, evolved. But puberty also comes with its downsides, like teenage angst and acne. And the inflamed forehead zit we’re talking about today is the new schedule–– specifically, how it’s stifling the potential of clubs.

In previous years, club meetings were held either during our daily 30 minute break or 50 minute lunch, permitting students to attend two different club meetings in one day. A student could, hypothetically, be a recognised member of ten clubs. This year, with the new schedule shortening break time for Extended Learning (EL), clubs–– whether they are interest, service, or honour societies–– are all finding it harder to meet. Membership is dropping, productivity is slowing, and students are not happy.

In a survey sent out to 10th, 11th, and 12th graders–– students who have experienced both schedules–– 63.4% of respondents reported to be members of clubs with conflicting meeting times. SAS proudly boasts on their website that “there’s a wide variety of clubs at SAS – over 100 at last count” [1], yet this new schedule makes it possible for only 15 at most to meet weekly. And that’s pushing it. With break being just 20 minutes long now, officers have to account for the time it takes for their members to get to and from their meeting location, leaving just a little over ten minutes for actual meeting times. Here’s the problem with ten minute meeting times. The Executive Student Council’s service club audit strongly hints that a successful service club must host “events and activities outside of meetings”. It definitely takes longer than just ten minutes to organise club events.

63.4% of respondents reported to be members of clubs with conflicting meeting times.

“It took one entire year for ORKID to plan its end-of-year fashion show,” Julia Kim (’20), Vice-President of ORKID, claims. “And that was with last year’s lunch meetings.” Last year, lunch lasted 50 minutes.

Longze Chen (’20), the Public Relations officer of Executive Council, adds that he doesn’t believe “the current situation for club meetings is effective” as “ten minutes is simply not enough time for any type of club to work efficiently.” With break meetings out of the question, that leaves clubs to meet at lunch or after school. But after-school meetings are unfeasible as many high school students take the bus home and are not willing to stay for the 4:30 PM bus. Therefore, close to 100 clubs are competing to meet during the same five lunch slots.

In the same survey, students were asked how satisfied they are with the current schedule for club meetings. Responses were overwhelmingly negative with 23.6% selecting “not satisfied at all” and 52.8% selecting “not so satisfied”. In contrast, 22% of respondents selected “somewhat satisfied” and 1.4% selected “very satisfied”. It’s evident that the student body wants the schedule to change.

It’s evident that the student body wants the schedule to change.

“I think it goes against the school’s mission statement in that it limits the power of students to live their dreams,” Luke Heald (’20) says. “I’ve had so many members drop out of my clubs because of previous conflicts that didn’t exist due to break not being thirty minutes long.” Andre Lai (’20) remarks, “[The new schedule] makes it frustrating for the members of dropped clubs because they’re losing manpower for potential projects.” This is a recurring theme in many individuals’ responses. A student who requested to remain anonymous said, “People are prioritising honour societies and service clubs, leaving interest clubs to be ignored. The new schedule seemed to ignore the this.” Like Heald said, the school promotes students to seek and live out their passions, yet this schedule is blatantly restricting students from doing so.

You might be wondering now, has Exec done anything? Where is Exec?

Heon Lee (’20), President of Exec, says that the council has “brought up the issue of club meetings with admin on multiple occasions” to petition on behalf of the student body, but have been “shut down” each time. “[Admin] told us that teachers have to attend Professional Learning Community (PLC) meetings during Extended Learning, which is why they can’t be present to advise club meetings during that time,” he explains. “And on their non-PLC days, teachers host the Extended Learning sessions. It’s a simple dilemma.”

Unfortunately, hosting club meetings during EL seems to be the only viable option anyway. And this idea is very popular amongst students. From the same survey previously mentioned, 87.5% of students supported this suggestion.

87.5% of students support EL club meetings.

EL has become a subject of slight roasting amongst SAS students. Many complain of insufficient number of available spots for independent study time, and although many students (especially seniors) appreciate the extra work time, just as many view this time as an hour-long break to do as they like. And they’d like to be in club meetings. “I feel like Extended Learning can be opened up for students to do club work or anything else students need to work on–– not just seeing teachers,” Elizabeth Zeck (’21) says. If EL became a time where students could also hold meetings, this would not only solve the schedule conflicts but also become a helpful tool for attendance keeping. Club advisors can allow members to sign-up for their club meeting on PowerSchool using the same programme as Flex. Students without club meetings during that EL session can still sign up for other classes and independent study. For teachers, it also means on their non-PLC days they can either host a session for their own course or a meeting for their club.

But there is good news in the midst of all this mayhem. Exec meets with admin tomorrow lunch, and Heon has promised that they have not forgotten to voice their fellow students’ dissatisfaction. And today on September 17th, 2019, as I was writing this article in a library booth, Mr. Muldoon actually stopped by to ask me how I feel about EL and informed me that he is making a survey for students to express their feelings and provide suggestions.

Eagles, when that survey comes out... you know what to do.

Sources

[1] https://www.saschina.org/life-at-sas/clubs

Special thanks to all those who took the survey and/or provided quotes!

Annie Xie

#@annie xie #school news #student life

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thejakeformerlyknownasprince · 7 years

Text

Modern Animorphs AU (part 2)

@jollysunflora : The second half of my complete list of modern AU Animorphs headcanons, approximately one per book.

28. “Ax,” Marco says, “How come you can roll out ‘venti dulce de leche dark-chocolate frappuchino extra whip’ without batting an eye, but you giggle every time you have to say the word ‘soy’?”

“It has so many vowel—owl?—sounds, in so little space,” Ax says. “That long sssssssssss, so pleasant on the tongue, but then that odd oooyyy ooy-yah? All in the back of the mouth. Very strange. Sssoooy. Ssususs-oooyaaa.”

“Also, he’s moved on from the frappuchinos,” Tobias adds. “Now he keeps spending all our hard-stolen bitcoins on espresso mack... mach...”

“Espresso macchiato con panna,” Ax explains. “Doppio.”

29. Cassie feels herself sweating as she props the laptop across the room from her, tools laid out and Ax unconscious on the table. She never expected to find a YouTube video on how to perform brain surgery—and to be honest, it’s actually about “how neurosurgeons perform an orbitozygomatic craniotomy,” not intended to be a how-to manual—but it’s the best she can do under the circumstances, and so she’ll follow along for now.

MM3. “That’s the kind of strong leadership we need.” Jake gestures to the full-color television (this year’s latest model) where a program of their current leader plays on a loop. “Keeping the wrong kind of people out of this country, saving America for the right kind of Americans.”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” Rachel says. She and Tobias and Jake are the only three Animorphs, except when Melissa joins them sometimes, and listening to their “Supreme Leader” blather on gets old sometimes. “All I want to know is whether it’s true that within a few years people will really have phones that plug into their cars. That’d be cool.”

Tobias rubs his eyes against the silk of his wing feathers. They itch constantly, since he doesn’t have a gas mask to wear every time he goes out into the pollution-opaque air outside the way that his human friends do. Jake and Rachel take bets sometimes, idly, brutally, about whether he’s the last raptor left on the face of the planet.

“Magnificent!” Drode appears in their midst, and both the Berensons immediately point guns at his head.

30. Marco is lying on his bed the day after watching Eva fall, staring at a patch of wall above his dresser, when he registers that his phone has been buzzing for a while now. It goes off so many times he assumes he has to be getting a call, but when he checks his notifications he just discovers he’s gotten seventeen text messages in the last hour.

The first is from “Smurfette,” and says “Did you know that there is a type of food that involves baking a cinnamon bun inside of a donut? We must secure as many of these as it is possible for a human to consume, as soon as possible!”

The next one, from “Hawkgirl,” reads: “found out recently that apparently ax still thinks you invented flea powder. i told him that if youd invented flea powder wed all be a lot richer right now.”

“Team Dad” (not to be confused with “Real Dad,” which is how Marco lists Peter) sent along several invitations to team missions on League of Legends this afternoon, along with a threat to have Cassie play Marco’s avatar if Marco doesn’t join in. “we both know that by the time you get back you’ll have only healing attacks and she’ll have trained it to apologize automatically for stabbing people,” Jake adds.

One of the many texts from “Julia Butterfly Hill” suggests that Jake has underestimated Cassie’s diabolical streak, because it’s a screenshot of a clone of his account which has had its name changed to HarambeWasFramed.

The real surprise, however, is the single text from “Xena: Warrior Princess.” It’s a link to an article about a disaster in the local national park and the efforts to clean up the wreckage of an as-yet-unidentified craft which went down in the canyon. Marco has to read it a few times to understand the point she’s making, because it’s all about what’s not there: the article makes no mention of any human bodies being found among the wreckage.

Marco gets halfway through typing a reply to them all which informs them in no uncertain terms that he sees through their transparent attempts to cheer him up and doesn’t appreciate it, but he deletes without sending. He can practically hear his mom’s voice saying it: he can focus on the fact that he’s still surrounded by people who love him, or he can focus on the negative side of everything. And being constantly negative is no way to live.

31. “Sharing this again, because its been 3 months,” Jake’s cousin Brooke posts on Facebook. “Anyone who has any news at all about Saddler, no matter what it is, PLEASE contact my family. Big brother, I dont know if youre still out there, but I miss you. I miss you like crazy.”

Jake turns up his Spotify’s Offspring channel a little louder to drown out the sounds of Tom and his dad shouting at each other downstairs. His eyes flinch past Brooke’s post, but they can’t move fast enough to prevent the thought that flashes across the surface of his mind: Is this going to be me a year from now?

32. Tobias texts Rachel and Jake an article from Audubon.Org, where several birdwatchers are going into ecstasies of scientific fascination at the bald eagle and peregrine falcon seen flying in close formation in a cell-phone video taken near a highway overpass downtown. His only comment is, “Told you so.”

33. In the aftermath, Rachel does a Google search: “PTSD treatment symptoms outcomes.” She reads through the WebMD site, the NIMH page, the Wikipedia link to a DSM-5 entry. She thinks of Tobias’s withdrawn silences, his antipathy toward so much they used to enjoy, but she thinks of other things as well. How exhausted Jake seems any time they’re not on-mission. How badly Cassie flinches when the school bell rings and doors slam. How Ax seems to be gradually losing interest in the things—cooking shows, new condiments, human history trivia, These Messages—that once drew his fascination. How last week Marco flicked an ant off the back of his hand and then went white like he’d just kicked a puppy. How good it had felt when she’d hurt David, spreading the pain around, giving it back.

She catches an Uber to the clinic downtown, filling out forms in the waiting room based on the checklist written on her phone for “how to get tobias an ssri”: Yes, she often feels tense and worried. Yes, her heart often races for no reason. No, she hasn’t thought of ending her life. No, she doesn’t feel out of control when she eats.

She gets as far as developing a cover story—it’s about how she’s never felt the same since her parents’ divorce—but in the hallway to the office she panics and calls Cassie. “Am I doing the right thing?” she asks, after she’s explained.

Cassie is silent for a long time, never a good sign. “I’m not sure an SSRI would work on a bird,” she says at last, “and that’s even if we could figure out a dose that would work without killing him. I know you want to help, and I think you should, but...”

Rachel hears what she’s not saying: but what if her mom asks too many questions? But is this risk really worth it? But what if the psychiatrist (the receptionist, the pharmacist) is a controller? But isn’t it them, and only them, against the world, and isn’t that just how it has to be?

“The war won’t last forever,” Cassie says weakly, and Rachel hates her a little for it. “When it’s over, when we get to tell everyone what’s happening...”

Rachel hangs up. She goes home, morphs, and flies out to the woods.

«You know I love you, right?» she asks Tobias later that evening.

«Of course I do.» He sounds exhausted. She’s never felt more helpless in her life.

34. The Yeerk Peace Movement, as it comes out, has a Twitter feed. It is rather painfully obvious that it has been set up and run entirely by aliens who are doing their very best to communicate with humans, and not quite succeeding. Most of the posts are couplets, for some reason that none of the Animorphs can fathom.

“Want to be On Fleek? When you see someone’s rights threatened, speak!”

“Don’t be a Belieber anymore - end slavery and even the score.”

“#tbt: Remember when we were symbiotes? Give taxxon freedom your sympathy votes!”

“Nickelback is super lame, and keeping involuntary hosts is just the same.”

“Respect your host’s rights today, and make your human into your bae!”

35. It’s Marco who comes up with the idea for how to take down William Roger Tennant. This is a guy, after all, whose cockatiels have their own Instagram account: he runs his fame on the internet.

“It's simple,” Marco explains. “We start a hashtag—#notsonicetennant—and we make it go viral. All we have to do is film this guy everywhere he goes, and eventually the yeerk will slip up.”

It proves not to be simple after all. Their gif of Tennant twitching madly mid-EPA speech gets overshadowed by the news story about One Direction nearly getting poisoned with spiders at the same banquet. Ax does not understand the concept of hashtag, and keeps adding #notsonicetennant to his retweets of what Marco calls “food porn.” They train one of Tobias’s repurposed GoPros to follow poodle-Marco, but that becomes a meme mocking the world's most obnoxious stray dog rather than Tennant himself.

The plan finally, finally comes off when they pull out all the stops and just confront him in morph. The smartphones that Rachel rigged up in the surrounding buildings don't pick up the thought speak, but the audio of Tennant screaming at the aliens to leave him alone comes through just fine.

When the scandal breaks, the internet (in truly predictable fashion) drops #notsonicetennant and starts using #tennantgate instead.

Ax reposts an old photo of Tennant eating a quinoa salad—zoomed in on the salad—and tags it #tennantgate. All of his teammates assure him they appreciate the attempt.

36. “All right, that’s just weird,” Marco says, looking at the final entry in the underwater creepshow they’ve been walking through for the past hour. “All the other ships have been getting more modern as we’ve gone, but this one? Looks like it was made in the sixties, at the latest.”

«The world’s creepiest museum curators are getting sloppy with the placement of bodies as well,» Tobias points out. «There’s no way that many people could fit on a boat that small. They’re practically falling over the sides.»

Jake and Cassie look at each other, seeing the same realization reflected in each other’s eyes. Neither one of them wants to say it out loud.

Jake becomes the one to bite the bullet. “Don’t you get it?” He points to the ragged clothes, the emaciated bodies, the modern smartphone tucked in among the antiquated radio equipment. “They were refugees.”

37. Rachel shuts the window on the library computer as soon as she hears someone walk into the room, but she can tell she was too late by the look on Jake’s face when she turns around.

“Roy Ludvig, huh?” Jake says. “Heck of a name.”

“He was at the T.V. studio when we attacked.” Rachel looks down, picking at her nail polish. “No civilians were supposed to be in danger.”

Jake’s expression softens, as much as it ever does. “And now you’re scrolling through his Facebook, looking for something that’ll let you sleep at night.”

“He’s got a grandson,” Rachel blurts. “Jordan’s age. He...” She shrugs. He’s dead, and it’s more or less her fault.

“Shouldn’t be looking on Facebook.” Jake sets his phone on the library table next to her, taps the screen to bring up an official-looking report. “You should be, say, borrowing my dad’s computer. Sending an email from his account to ask for the guy’s medical records. If you had, you’d know that Mr. Roy Ludvig had a heart condition. That he had maybe a year to live, at most, and doctors said he might die at any old time.”

Rachel looks down at the report for a long time, and eventually looks up at Jake. “Doesn’t make it okay, what I did,” she says. “He’s still dead.”

Jake shrugs. “You don’t have to forget it ever happened, but you do have to live with it. Live, and fight another day.”

38. In the aftermath of Estrid's visit, Tobias is flying over the boardwalk when he sees a henna artist who clearly smokes way too much pot to be a Yeerk. He gets Ax, they morph human, and both get henna tattoos of Elfangor's name. (Ax had previously expressed an admiration for the human tradition of commemorating a lost loved one by making markings on one's body.) They know the tats will disappear when they demorph, but they're both glad they did it. The artist asks how long they've been together, and Tobias says in a scandalized voice, “he's my UNCLE!” Thus, Tobias succeeds in both of his goals: making Ax laugh, and reminding him he has family here on Earth. Honestly, the reminder doesn't hurt Tobias either.

39. “You know, not all squirrels are like that,” Marco is fond of saying after a morph goes wrong. “Not all termites are horrifying worker drones.” Sometimes it’s, “You know, some of my best friends are fleas.”

It’s Cassie, however, who gets the last laugh out of that one. «You know, Marco,» she says as they swim away from the wreckage of the helicopter, «Not all ants are like that, right? I shouldn’t say that all ants are killers, right?»

Marco stares at her in silence while the others snicker, watching him war between the two impulses: to keep the joke going forever, and to express his honest hatred of ants.

«Come on.» And now Rachel has joined in on the teasing. «You’re just going to let that kind of besmirching of the ant community stand?»

«Okay, okay!» Marco gives in. «Ants suck. Yes, all ants!»

40. “Our experts have examined the video extensively, and near as we can conclude, this footage is genuine and unedited,” the newscaster says. “Given how viral this video has proven to be, with over two million views since it was posted to YouTube on Wednesday, everyone wants to know: is this footage proof that aliens exist? Is this a publicity stunt for the upcoming Fantastic Beasts sequel? Or, as one YouTube commenter asks, did a Smurf just have sex with a centaur?”

«Potential new ally?» Tobias suggests. He’s already tapping out a search for the original video in his modified tablet.

Ax laughs. «Of course not. He’s crippled. A vecol. Useless. We must respect the privacy of his isolation.»

“You know what? Fuck that,” Marco snaps. He shoves to his feet, posture tight with anger. “Just... Fuck that,” he tells Ax. “I have ADHD. Attention Deficit whateverthefuck. I take a pill every morning to help me function because my brain isn’t good enough to filter stimuli all by itself. I got a fucking 135 on the world’s most boring IQ test and I’m still failing half my classes. I’m a vecol. You think I’m useless, huh? You gonna start refusing to talk to me because of some bullshit about ‘respecting’ my ‘privacy’? Huh?”

«That’s different,» Ax says. «You’re not...» He doesn’t seem to know how to finish that sentence.

«If he’s an exception, I hope I am too,» Tobias says more gently. «I got screened for anxiety disorders as a kid, and I guess we’ll never know if I qualify or not, ‘cause my aunt decided that doctors cost money and if the test said I needed one then she didn’t want to know about it.»

Ax doesn’t answer for a long time. He doesn’t seem to know where to look.

«Let’s go tell the others what we found.» Tobias taps a button to send the video to himself. «We can talk more about this later.»

MM4. Tobias flinches when his phone makes the small ping sound that means he has an alert. The new kid is the easy target in every school on the planet. He wonders what it’ll be this time: another Facebook post where the semi-anonymous account Toby IsALoser tags him in another meme about how he has to pay people for sex because the sight of his body would make any normal girl run away screaming, another unnamed Instagram ping telling him he should kill himself so that no one has to look at his stupid fat face anymore, another Snapchat image of a puddle of vomit with the caption “me when I think of you,” an email with the most disgusting gif anyone could find after a quick search...

It’s not, though. It’s an invite to join a private Facebook group, called The Sharing, with several hundred local members. Most of the names Tobias recognizes are cool older kids from the high school. Intrigued, willing to trust for the moment that this isn’t some ridiculously elaborate prank, Tobias clicks “join.”

41. Jake looks around at the enormous open field, concrete pitted with openings and low hovels of corrugated steel and rebar. He can see for nearly half a mile in every direction before the smog makes it impossible, and the tallest things around are the hunched hork-bajir. “Where are we?” he asks.

Cassie frowns. “This? Jake, this is downtown Manhattan.”

He gapes at her. “What happened to it?”

“Tall buildings are targets for drone strikes,” she says casually, turning away. “The only way to be safe was to go underground.”

42. Marco doesn’t bother going to the house of the guy who photographed them, nor does he try to catch the kid before he uploads the video anywhere. Instead he waits for the image to appear on YouTube, then becomes the first commenter. “Sweet manip!” he says. “Is that Photoshop, or can you do that in free programs like Gimp?”

43. “EarthIsOurs-dot-tumblr-dot-com?” Marco says incredulously. “What does Taylor do there, post pictures of her pet taxxon? Reblog plans for planetary domination?”

«Judging from her archive history, she’s had this blog for many years,» Ax says. «She recently changed the domain name, but some of the content on here is from as early as 2008.»

Jake and Marco get caught up in debating with Cassie about what exactly to send to her, but Tobias just scrolls quietly through Taylor’s old posts. She didn’t lie about being beautiful, he realizes, or about being popular. There’s a long blank period in her tumblr account in mid-2014. And then she posted one selfie—just one—after the fire.

He can’t bring himself to read the names that the trolls call her, or the discussions about how much money they’d have to be paid to have sex with her. But there’s no overlooking the suggestions that she kill herself. The posts are too numerous, too vitriolic.

“Every chick ever to wander onto the internet has gotten that crap,” Rachel says; clearly she’s been reading over his shoulder. “She should’ve developed thick skin, not joined the Sharing.”

Tobias thinks of the Facebook page made at his old school just to discuss the fact that he’s a chubby zit-face, of the posts which eventually overwhelmed his Instagram with death threats. «Yeah, I guess,» he says.

44. It takes a long time for Cassie to get home from Australia, but at least they’re not too worried for most of that time; she texts them her location and a brief description of the insanity that landed her in the Outback as soon as she gets in contact with Yami’s family.

45. “None of this makes any sense,” Peter says. “I’m hallucinating, or you’re delusional, or else—”

Marco sets his phone in Peter’s lap. “Check the timestamp, Dad. I took that six months ago.”

Peter stares at the phone for a long minute, and then slowly looks up at Marco. At a clear loss for words, he tilts his head back toward the screen.

“I know.” Marco laughs, the sound wet with tears. “That blond wig looks terrible on her. But it’s really her, Dad. I swear.”

46. “So they’re going to get the U.S. embroiled in another war,” Marco says. “And this one with a country that can actually fight back.”

«Seems like,» Tobias says. «Only why bother with all the secrecy and political wrangling? Why not just send a couple mean tweets to Donald Trump and Kim Jong-Un? That’d probably do the job just as well.»

“No, it wouldn’t.” Jake runs a hand through his hair, looking around at them all. “The yeerks need a total war. Everything the U.S. and its allies can pull out, against everything China and its allies can muster. Our military has gotten too used to sending drones to fight its wars, to ‘tactical strikes’ against insurgents. If the yeerks want half the species annihilated, they have to do a lot more than poke a couple of egos.”

47. “News flash,” Marco says. “Your average suburbanite ain’t gonna accept a seven-foot-tall alien for a neighbor. You know the number of times my mom’s been asked for proof of citizenship before she was allowed to vote or cash a paycheck or buy a car? How many times she’s been pulled over by cops while driving the speed limit with her seatbelt on? And she’s a regular old human being. Toby’s right—the hork-bajir have a whole other fight coming if we ever win the war.”

48. Rachel feels the blood drain from her face when she opens the Facebook message and sees the name attached. David’s Facebook account has been defunct for almost two years now; there’s no one left who would want or even be able to access it from the outside. Should be no one.

Miss me? the message from David’s account says.

Who are you? she types with shaking fingers. What do you want?

I know what you did. I’m coming for you. I’ve got friends all over the place and they’ll find you. They’ll kill you. Amazing the allies you can get, when you know where the bodies are kept. On the internet, no one knows you’re a—

Rachel hits “block.” She tells herself that the screaming nightmares she has all that night and into the next are the product of having a stressful life, she’s an Animorph for pete’s sake.

She doesn’t stop shuddering every time she gets a message for the next two weeks, but she never hears from whoever (It wasn’t David. It couldn’t have been.) it was ever again.

49. They stagger away from yet another hopeless fight, all of them injured, half of them missing limbs or bleeding to death. Dragging their damaged bodies behind the first dumpster they find, they demorph, remorph, and force their minds to focus long enough for the long flight home. It’s only when Rachel is in owl morph, staring around the dimly lit alleyway, that she sees the security camera pointed directly at their location.

«They must not check it that often,» Marco says without much hope. «Or else they’d be out here already to come looking for us.»

«Doesn’t matter,» Tobias says harshly. «It had a perfectly clear view of all your human faces. And that building is owned by the yeerks.»

They all stare at each other in dull shock as the realization sinks in. They always knew this moment was coming—they could only be so careful for so long—and yet, on some level each of them hoped it never would.

«Take one more night to be with your families,» Jake says at last. «We evacuate everyone in the morning.»

Jake loses his phone, again, somewhere amidst all the chaos. This time around he doesn’t bother to replace it. It’s not like his mom is going to be wondering where he is, not anymore.

50. “So,” Jake says, “this is going to sound crazy, but—”

“Aliens are invading the planet, and you’re the only kid terrorist who can stop them?” James suggests. “We do have wifi up here, you know. You’re Jake Berenson, right? You’re all over the conspiracy theorists’ forums right now.”

“Um.” Jake runs a hand through his hair, starts again. “Yeah, pretty much.”

James nods. “In that case, you’ve got thirty seconds to convince me your story’s not a load of crap before I call security.”

51. Ax secures their wifi in something a billion times better-hidden than Tor. With that reassurance, they all end up starting blogs.

Marco’s is a rambling string of wry comments about everything from the invasion to his parents’ science projects. Sample post: “Insider source (aka my mom): Visser Three has morphed human and eaten AN ENTIRE BAG OF MARSHMALLOWS in one sitting, ON MORE THAN ONE OCCASION. Pass it on!”

Jake’s is the place that people go to find out how they can help, and to get his reassurance that the help means something. Sample post: “As Barack Obama says, ‘We the people recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights; that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom without a commitment to others is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense.’ This fight will never be over just as long as we keep supporting each other. I can’t tell you how grateful I am to you all for the KickStarter donations.”

Rachel’s has beauty tips for the American girl on the run, light and self-deprecating enough that you often don’t notice the undercurrent of desperation. Sample post: “If you want to be able to look at yourself in the mirror, try fixing your hair using reflective surfaces such as pots, ponds, or pieces of Bug fighter wreckage. Alternately, just say ‘fuck it’ and never look at yourself again.”

Cassie’s tells people how to stay safe, and how to keep their environments safe as well. Sample post: “Everyone please remember, it’s important to stock enough food and water for family pets as well as humans when retreating to an apocalypse bunker!”

Tobias’s has a lot of good-natured grumbling about everyday life in the valley. Sample post: “In other news, my girlfriend’s mom is currently arguing with the smartest being on the face of the planet about where to put the new latrine facilities. Sorry Naomi, but my money’s on Toby.”

Ax’s has a lot of food reviews, of course, but again there’s that undercurrent of desperation, almost like he’s trying to convince someone else (or maybe even himself) that humans are worth saving. Sample post: “Marco assures me that there are no less than 23 distinct flavors contained within every sip of Dr. Pepper. Just think of the years of experimentation and innovation it must have required to produce a drink which can inspire 23 different reactions from human taste buds, all at the same time. Truly inspired genius.”

52. They run drills upon drills for what to do in case of a drone strike. Using any morphs they have that can dig or build—mole, taxxon, elephant, beaver—the Animorphs create an extensive network of tunnels and shelters, posting guards at all times to keep their eyes on the sky. The hork-bajir valley doesn’t show up on satellite imagery, which they only know thanks to Peter’s definitely-illegal fact-gathering missions on the darkweb, but they don’t know for sure whether an overhead camera would be subject to the same strange perceptual distortions they all experience when flying there as birds. They nearly lose their precious secrecy when Naomi sends several emails from her work account, claiming she’s being held hostage and asking anyone who will listen to come rescue her. Eva generates a hasty follow-up from the same account asking people to ignore “the prank that I now realize was in poor taste,” but none of them are sure it worked for the next several days.

53. Rachel makes one last post on her nearly-extinct Instagram account. This time the scrap of paper she uses appears to be torn from the back of a food label, but the penciled script is as intricate as ever. It reads “Who wants to live forever? —Freddie Mercury, 1986”

54. After it’s all over, Tobias retreats, he hides, but he keeps a thread of communication open. Cassie shoots him an email with the subject line “Hawk patient with intermittent aggression and lethargy—any idea what could be causing it?” Marco sends him idiotic memes that now feature the Animorphs’ names and faces. Ax asks for constant updates on the new wing of Taco Bell being built downtown, and repays the favor by leaking confidential information about the search for the Blade ship.

And then he gets one of the stranger emails he’s ever received. It’s an offer of a full legacy scholarship to Harvard University (which has just found the means to explain some inconsistencies in the records of one “Alan Fangor,” who graduated in the ‘80s) in exchange for Tobias teaching one class per semester on any subject of his choice. He agrees, with the stipulation that all his classes be online.

The resultant course (Ornithology 442: An Insider’s Perspective) is like nothing the students who participate have ever seen before. Tobias will write out rambling treatises on Why Blue Jays Suck or All the Ways Hawks Are Superior to Eagles with a thought-speak-to-text recorder. He’ll deliver online lectures from a shaky webcam pointed into a nonspecific tree, occasionally wandering off for hours at a time to go hunting. Students who ask him personal questions about Rachel get regurgitated mouse skeletons Fed-Exed to their campus mailboxes. Essays that don’t demonstrate much effort get feedback such as “even I can tell this sucks and I have a seventh-grade education” or “my grandmother could make better sentences than this AND SHE’S AN ANDALITE WHO DOESN’T SPEAK ENGLISH.” Assignments include “find one bird fact in a textbook and explain why it’s a load of crap” or “go film a Boston pigeon until it does something interesting, I dare you.”

Nevertheless, enrollment is so popular that Harvard has a three-year waiting list and charges students an extra $500 just to sign up. When Tobias finds out about the extra fee, he promptly video-calls the Intrepid, gives Ax remote access to his computer, and explains why he needs Ax to convert the course illegally to a MOOC. Harvard University fires him for breach of contract; Yale hires him on that very same afternoon.

part 1 here

#animorphs #modern au #long post #ableism #mental health stigma #food #racism #cyberbullying #fatphobia #ptsd

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toldnews-blog · 5 years

Photo

New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/world/biodiversity-heroes-the-teenagers-saving-madagascars-wildlife/

Biodiversity heroes: The teenagers saving Madagascar's wildlife

Image copyright Victoria Gill

Image caption Nantenaina, 15, is one of the young farmers working to save the forest and to make a living

The island nation of Madagascar has a dubious accolade: it is the world-leader in deforestation. Now, some of the island’s teenagers have started a farming revolution – working to stop food production from destroying the island’s rich rainforest.

The bridge across the river to Mangabe has collapsed. Probably many years ago. Just a few wooden stumps now protrude from the murky water separating densely forested riverbanks. The only way across is on an unnervingly wobbly canoe.

We crouch low – backpacks at our feet – gripping the sides of that canoe as it is expertly steered across the water. We are less than 100 miles from the capital of Madagascar, Antananarivo, but this is a stark reminder of just how remote the communities of this protected area are. When we have crossed the river, it is still a two-hour walk to Mangabe village.

We’re going there to meet a group of Malagasy teenagers – young famers who are leading a small but vital revolution – transforming how people farm in order to save their forest.

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Media captionMadagascar’s forests are home to 100 species of lemur found nowhere else on the planet

Almost 9,000km away in Paris, at a glossy, international gathering, scientists and politicians are finalising an assessment on humanity’s relationship with nature. With its somewhat ungainly title, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) will publish a seminal upsum of the ecological emergency our planet is facing; humanity’s impact on the natural world.

Life in the balance

There is little doubt that, worldwide, humanity struggles to coexist with other species that inhabit the planet – even some that we are keenly aware that we need. Biodiversity encompasses pollinating insects we rely on for food, trees and plants that provide clean air and water and the network of life underfoot that keeps soil fertile and productive.

It is the network of life – we depend on it.

The global report due on 6 May has the lofty goal of setting out a path to a more sustainable future. But here in Mangabe, communities live alongside one of the richest, most diverse rainforests in the world. They make their livelihoods entirely through farming; here the link between people and the forest is palpable and inextricable.

Image copyright Victoria Gill

Image caption A forest guide holds a chameleon in Mangabe forest

“If the forest is lost, many things will be lost,” explains Voahirana Randriamamonjy from the Malagasy conservation organisation Madagasikara Voakajy. The diminutive, unstoppably optimistic conservationist has been working with the young people of Mangabe’s communities for the last three years.

“It’s not just about the wildlife. Without the forest, there will be no clean water for people to drink, the soil will lose its fertility and be eroded away,” he says.

“The forest even provides medicine,” she adds. “It takes hours to walk to a doctor from these villages, so people rely on natural remedies that grow here.”

Image copyright Victoria Gill

Image caption Local communities depend entirely on the land and what they can grow

As well as being our hosts and guides, Voahirana and her team are here to meet with and to train the teenage recruits as part of their “Youth for Lemurs” project. This community-based mission sets out to provide the new generation of farmers with the skills, knowledge and tools to be able to grow their food without destroying the forest.

Image copyright Victoria Gill

Image caption Conservationist Voahirana Randriamamonjy

Traditionally, Voahirana explains, forest destruction and farming go hand in hand. “The old method is often called ‘slash and burn’ – cutting down a patch of forest and setting fire to it. Ash makes a good fertiliser.”

But when the nutrients in the ash are used up, that cycle of slash and burn starts again. “It causes a great deal of deforestation here in Madagascar,” says Voahirana.

That has contributed to a dubious accolade; Madagascar is the world-leader in deforestation. In 2017 alone, 500,000 hectares were cut down – half a million football pitches of rich, diverse rainforest. Gone.

The rainforest’s last chance

The situation has become so dire that a group of Malagasy and international scientists have come together to urge the new government here to take steps to preserve the country’s famous biodiversity.

Image copyright Victoria Gill

Image caption The rice harvest is a task for the whole community in Mangabe

“Madagascar’s irreplaceable forests are burning and there are species threatened by the pet trade which will go extinct in the next few years if things don’t change,” explains Prof Julia Jones from Bangor University, UK, who led that study.

“The link to human well-being is often less clear for biodiversity loss than it is for climate change, but effective conservation is essential. If Madagascar lost its lemurs, its forests, its coral reefs, it would be so much poorer.”

Image copyright Victoria Gill

It is that pattern of destruction that the young people of Mangabe are now working to break away from.

‘It’s a special place’

Mangabe forest is officially protected. But looking over its landscape, you can see where farms have bitten chunks out of irreplaceable habitat.

Where it is intact, under the shade of its dense canopy, there is a palpable sense of what a biodiversity hotspot it is.

Vines wrap around trees that are surrounded by leafy plants buzzing with insects. As we follow our guides along the path to the village, a nearby tree shakes – an indri lemur bounds quickly away from us. When one of our guides, Emille, gently flicks over one particular leaf, a minuscule, bright orange frog is sheltering beneath.

Image copyright Victoria Gill

Image caption Even small-scale farming drives deforestation, but people need space to grow their food

It is a golden mantella – a critically endangered amphibian that – like so many species here – lives only in Madagascar.

“This forest is unique – it’s a very special place,” says Voahirana.

Image copyright Victoria Gill

Image caption Golden mantella frogs are critically endangered

‘If we can do this, people will not cut the forest’

On our first morning in Mangabe village there is a buzz of activity. The community is planning a meeting to welcome the visitors and to launch a new season for the Youth for Lemurs project.

The charity – Madagasikara Voakajy – will recruit and train a new group of young volunteers in 10 villages around the forest; this year, they are starting in Mangabe.

Voahirana, her colleague Harifefitra and the rest of the team will provide the dozen or so new recruits with tools and seeds, as well as the new skills and knowledge.

“They tell us what they want to grow and we give them the training,” explains Harifefitra.

Image caption On an experimental plot, the young farmers can try out new crops

That training consists of how to make compost as a fertiliser and how to rotate the crops you grow to produce a better yield. These modern farming techniques may not appear revolutionary, but they provide life-changing benefits. They enable the same plot to be farmed each season, eliminating the need to move into the forest. And they produce higher yields.

The village has an experimental plot where the the teenagers practise their skills and try growing new crops.

Rows of sweet potatoes are flourishing and there are papaya and lychee trees at each end. When we visit in the morning, this year’s volunteers are busily weeding and pruning the fruit trees. Voahirana demonstrates the right branches to snip.

Nantenaina is weeding around the papaya tree. At 15-years-old, her pensive expression gives her an air of worry that makes her seem older than her years. But when she talks about what she has learned, she is positively glowing.

Image copyright Victoria Gill

Image caption Mangabe forest is now a protected area – one of the pockets of Malagasy rainforest still intact

“I feel very happy,” she says. “By planting just a small surface of land, I can produce high yield. And if we can do this it means people will not cut and clear the forest.

“We have a beautiful forest in Mangabe – that’s why I became involved in this project.”

Her friend, Omega – a gangly, smiling 16-year old boy – shows off his knowledge of just how valuable the forest is.

Image copyright Victoria Gill

Image caption Omega is one of the Youth for Lemurs volunteers

“It provides the fresh air we breathe and helps the livelihoods of the local people,” he explains.

“If it continued to be destroyed, there would be less water to drink. There would be a loss of habitat for wildlife in the forest, such as the lemurs – they would disappear. They would all die.”

Nantenaina says that, since the project started three years ago, older villagers have started coming to the young pioneers for advice about their methods – wanting to understand how they achieve their higher yields.

“The future of the forest, says Voahirana, “depends on these young people”.

“They have these new skills, which they can teach to their kids. So the next generation will be able to farm sustainably.”

Image copyright Victoria Gill

An environmental precipice

As Madagascar’s recently elected president, Andry Rajoelina, begins a five-year term of office, scientists and conservationists who have spent decades studying and protecting Madagascar’s natural habitats hope that this will be a turning point. They say this is the last chance to prevent habitats and species unique to this island nation from being lost forever.

“In a place like Madagascar conservation has to be very careful to ensure that it doesn’t have a negative impact on poor rural communities whose livelihoods depend on using natural resources,” Prof Jones stresses.

“It has to be about people and about tenure. People at the forest frontier need to have their rights to agricultural land respected.

“If you had an allotment and you’re told you only have it for one year, you’re not going to invest in its future – improve the soil and put in fruit trees or asparagus plants. You might just grow a few lettuces you could eat that year.”

Image copyright Victoria Gill

Professor Jonah Ratsimbazafy, from the University of Antananarivo and one of the paper’s co-authors, added: “The United States have the Statue of Liberty, France has the Eiffel tower…. For us in Madagascar, it is our biodiversity – the product of millions of years of evolution.

“It is the unique heritage we are known for around the world. We cannot let these natural wonders, including 100 different types of lemur found nowhere else, disappear”.

But however much people want to protect the forest, adds Prof Jones, “they need to be able to feed their families. Shifting towards more productive forms of agriculture can be beneficial for people and for the environment.”

But as much as the teenagers of Mangabe are working hard to save their forest, the youngest, poorest people simply do not have the power and resources to drive change in Madagascar.

“If people want a world in which lemurs [live], people in richer countries may well need to be willing to help cover some of the costs of protecting that forest,” says Prof Jones.

“This involves supporting organisations such as Madagasikara Voakajy to do what they do.

“They work on a shoe-string, protecting some of the most threatened species on the planet by working with some of the poorest people on the planet. I personally feel they deserve our support.”

‘We’re proud of our forest’

Image copyright Victoria Gill

Image caption Dore now supplements his income by working as a forest guide and ranger with the charity

On the morning that we leave Mangabe village and head back through the forest towards the river and that wobbly canoe – we hear indri call. It is a haunting song that seems to fill the entire valley.

“We’re very proud that the indri live here,” says our guide, Dore. He is Mamtemaima’s father and he was born and raised in Mangabe.

“They are like a clock for the local people – they know what time it is when they hear them sing.

“In other places, the forests are being cut down, he adds. “But not here. Here we preserve the forest because it gives us so many things that improve our lives. We’re so proud of the rainforest.”

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d2kvirus · 5 years

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Dickheads of the Month: November 2018

As it seems that there are people who say or do things that are remarkably dickheaded yet somehow people try to make excuses for them or pretend it never happened, here is a collection of some of the dickheaded actions we saw in the month of November 2018 to make sure that they are never forgotten.

Just when you think the current Tory government can’t get any scummier they find new depths to sink to, this time as it emerged that their use of gagging orders wasn’t just last month’s story of how Esther McVey silenced over twenty groups who oppose Universal Credit, oh no, the latest one to emerge was how engineering firm WSP had to sign a non-disclosure agreement expressly forbidding their report into the Grenfell Tower fire from criticising Theresa May or her government - which came to light just weeks after Theresa May claimed she was going to get tough on gagging clauses

Of course Theresa May herself wasn’t above scumminess, not when her address to the Confederation of British Industry featured her claiming how EU nationals “jump the queue” in terms of immigrations, and initially attempted to deny that she had said it - a claim that was somewhat difficult considering that comment had been broadcast by numerous television stations by that point

Bastions of journalistic integrity and not knowing what Photoshop is Newsnight hosted a panel of six members of the public to discuss the merits of Theresa may’s Britait deal, and one of the panel claimed to be a lifelong Tory supporter named Lynn who was wholly behind the deal - but what she neglected to mention was that she was an actress named Marina Lynn Hayter who had previously appeared in several BBC programmes ranging other political programming to working as an extra in EastEnders who also happens to post Islamophobic tweets. When this came to light the initial response was for Newsnight host Emily Maitlis to tweet patronising comments to anyone who dared think the BBC’s word couldn't not be trusted while editor Esme Wren responded by doubling down on claims that “Lynn” was a legitimate pastor - claims which were rapidly torn to shreds as Hayter’s Twitter feed proves she is a pastor of the Seeds For Wealth Ministries (who definitely aren’t a pyramid scheme...) whose ceremonial garb looks nothing like the Anglican garb she wore on Newsnight, which only begs the question whether she chose to wear that garb and nobody checked if she was genuine or whether Newsnight dressed her up that way

In a desperate attempt to gain sympathy and/or relevance David Cameron said he was “bored shitless” after two years being away from politics and spending most of his time in his shed and he was considering a return to frontline politics, possibly as Foreign Secretary - apparently failing to understand that the reason that he’s been away from frontline politics for the past two years is because his gamble of an advisory referendum on EU membership backfired horribly due to his incompetent handling of the Remain campaign, especially since he also promised to activate Article 50 if a Leave vote came in, which is the reason he ran for the hills the second his fuckup was readily apparent

Feckless cunt Ivanka Trump scored a spectacular own goal against Team Trump when it emerged she had sent several hundred government emails from her personal e-mail account before initially trying to claim she didn’t realise she had done anything wrong - as if she forgot about her father saying “But her emails!!!!!!” several thousand times during the Presidential campaign whenever any question he couldn’t or wouldn’t answer came up

The past two years of acting like a cockney gangster who thinks he’s gotten away with it to the point he’s rubbing it in the faces of everyone else meant that Arron Banks really looked foolish where, after months of saying he doesn't care what the Electoral Commission says about him, the Electoral Commission referred the investigation into his business dealings to the National Crime Office

...or course, within 24 hours of this, the geniuses at the BBC announced that Banks would be appearing on The Sunday Politics Show, which sails dangerously close to interfering with a criminal investigation, and as expected the whole thing was a farce as it degenerated into Banks using the opportunity to smear Carole Cadwalladr for the umpteenth time as Julia Hartley-Brewer agreed with him the whole time

It seemed the Banksification of the BBC continued apace when Andrew Neil posted a particularly nasty tweet about Carole Cadwalladr that sounded remarkably similar to the tweets Banks has posted about her for the past year or so - and the BBC did not help themselves when their response was to say that, as Neil had deleted the tweet, there was no reason to complain

And the BBC’s dereliction of duty continued apace on Question Time when David Dimbleby made no effort to demand a retraction from Claire Perry when she called Jeremy Corbyn an antisemite

...and finally Andrew Marr decided he wanted part of the action when adopting a needlessly aggressive and downright nasty tone when interviewing Shami Chakrabarti

Compulsive liar Esther McVey had the gall to claim in her resignation letter that she could not be true to herself or the public in accepting Theresa May’s Britait proposal - a week after she told the House of Commons that mental health charity MIND had recognised and welcomed her suggested changes to Universal Credit, which was news to MIND, who had repeatedly criticised Universal Credit due to it having conditions that could stop those with mental health problems receiving benefits, as not only had they not welcomed her changes but she had not even informed them of these changes in the first place.

It appears that Paul Joseph Watson is quite happy on Manor Farm without his master telling him which lies to disseminate, considering he not only happily re-edited the footage of Jim Acosta having the microphone snatched out of his hands by a White House intern so it looked like he was assaulting her (and I’ll get to that in a moment...) but just 24 hours later falsely claimed (as did Laura Loomer and Pamela Geller) the perpetrator of the Thousand Oaks shooting was a Middle Eastern man and not an ex-marine who happened to be white

Doing her bit to unite the people of Mississippi was Cindy Hyde-Smith and her pledge to stand in the front row of a public lynching, which definitely didn’t have any connotations whatsoever considering her opponent Mike Espy happens to be of the ethnic background of people who tended to get lynched in Mississippi

Not only did Laura Loomer think that posting Islamophobic tweets about newly-elected Minnesota representative Ilhan Omar wouldn’t come back to bite her on the backside, but when Twitter blocked her account for spreading hate speech she responded in the most insane way - by pinning a gold “Jude” star to herself and handcuffing herself to Twitter’s offices in New York, livestreaming the whole thing...which only turned into a humiliation conga line starting with Twitter employees simply walking in and out of the office ignoring her, soon followed by Twitter stating they wouldn’t press charges so she could stay there as long as she liked, the NYPD walking up with a set of bolt cutters and telling her to bugger off, and the bizarre moment where somebody watching ordered pizzas for Loomer and her cameraman only for Loomer to send them away as getting her Twitter back was more important than eating. And, no, Twitter did not give her account back.

Professional contrarian Piers Moron Morgan obviously needed attention that day when tweeting some utter gibberish on International Men’s Day about radicalised feminists and how men should be manly men at the height of their manliness, all interspersed with him getting increasingly triggered by Little Mix because...nope, no idea whatsoever, but he certainly seemed angry about the whole thing

We got another round of “REEEEEEEEEEEdom of speech” wailing after a group of middle-aged edgelords who burned an effigy of Grenfell Tower because apparently if you can’t post a video of you and several of your friends burning an effigy of a real-life tragedy and using it as an excuse to make Islamophobic comments online without breaking some race-hate laws, what can you do in this country? Other than what the South Norwood Conservative Club did, which was decide that deleting photos of the individuals from their Facebook page wasn’t enough, and instead they should just delete the whole page

NRA TV’s lead hate preacher Dana Loesch decided to revive a decade-old tweet saying teenagers piss her off to advertise she would be reading out her hate mail, sounding uncannily like the school shooters who benefit from sociopaths such as her and her NRA buddies making it so easy to get hold of an AR-15

Vile mass of blood and organs with a deep-seeded need to be despised Lindsey Graham took it upon himself to patronise Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and say he could educate her about the Holocaust - a comment which saw him slapped down by someone with a far greater understanding of the Holocaust than him, namely the Auschwitz Memorial

It apparently only just dawned on Dominic Raab that the UK is an island that imports the vast majority of its food by sea, primarily from the European Union. This is somebody who is in charge of the UK’s negotiations to leave the European Union...

Seemingly on a mission to prove that the people most vocal about leaving the EU don’t have a clue Nadine Dorries stated she wouldn’t support Theresa May’s Britait deal as it would mean that the UK wouldn’t have a single MEP...something that’s a bit of a given considering that, by leaving the EU, the UK wouldn;t have a single MEP as they would also be voluntarily leaving the European Parliament

Doing their bit to demonstrate the failings of the American education system were the students of Baraboo school district who celebrated graduation by performing the Nazi salute en masse in their graduation photo

In the wake of a White House intern trying to grab a microphone from the hands of CNN’s Jim Acosta for his free exercise of the press, which I believe is something mentioned in the First Amendment, in their attempts to control the story Sarah Huckabee Sanders claimed Acosta assaulted the intern - and had an obviously doctobered piece of footage from the Squealer to Alex Jones’ Napoleon as quote-unquote proof

It’s hard to feel sorry for Scott Walker being unable to demand a recount for the Wisconsin gubernatorial election in spite losing the vote by just 1.2% to Democrat candidate Tony Evers - mainly because Walker passed a law stating that, if the candidate who finished second lost by more than 1% of the vote, they couldn’t demand a recount

Upon arriving at Luton Airport and learning that the airline he had flown on had lost his self-propelling wheelchair and being offered the use of one of the airport’s standard wheelchairs in order to help him through the airport, instead it occurred to Justin Levine that the best course of action would be to drag himself through the airport on his backside and, once he had left, threatened legal action against the airport - even though those who were responsible for the entire situation were the airline for losing Levine’s chair, and Levine for refusing any attempt at assistance from the airport just so he could make a show of his “struggle” for the person who quite conveniently filmed the entire thing

While it may be his schtick to make asinine arguments that he tries to tie to Trump getting elected, it should have occurred to Bill Maher that posting a blog just days after Stan Lee’s death laying into adults for reading comics and blaming them for Trump’s victory made him sound like a complete prick

Arbiter of what is or isn’t a consensual penis Enzo Amore demonstrated just how well he had gotten over being fired by WWE by buying a ticket for their Survivor Series pay per view, sneaking into the building in a disguise, and during the show jumping on his chair to make a spectacle of himself - for the few seconds before security dragged his sorry ass out of the arena

For the 2018 edition of using Remembrance Sunday as an excuse to bash Jeremy Corbyn the Daily Mail was up in arms that he attended the Cenotaph wearing an anorak - but then again, given MailOnline users were saying Meghan Markle was being “disrespectful” because...something about her face and not knowing her place, sentiments which definitely don’t sound like the dogwhistling of some indignant racists, it’s as if our soldiers died for these idiots to seethe in their sleep

Just an FYI: when Cressida Dick states that a Metropolitan Police investigation into a leaked dossier is not investigating the Labour party, neither the BBC or the Evening Standard should run headlines saying there’s an investigation into the Labour party - especially since the text of their own reports states that’s not the case

Putting the “amateur” in “amateur football team” was the bizarre story that unfolded when Ballybrack FC announced the death of their player Fernando Nuno La Fuente in a traffic accident...which was certainly news to La Fuente

With his position of Most Inexplicably Popular Youtuber under threat by the rise of T-Series, all that PewDipShit PewDiePie accepted the challenge by spouting all manner of insane conspiracy theories about the legitimacy of their subscriber count and going so far as to pay for billboards to try and raise his visibility, which looked like her was throwing the sort of tantrum not seen since Veruca Salt was told she couldn't have an Oompa Loompa because his precious record was about to fall - which, of course, his brainless followers swallowed whole

Somehow it never occurred to an estimated twenty members of Direct Action Everywhere who marched into a steakhouse to play audio of cattle being slaughtered to the diners while yelling their various slogans that they’re not getting their message across - you're pissing people off and being dickheads while you’re doing it

Oh-so-edge high schooler/Youtuber NathanTheHicc managed the impossible: he managed to give Bethesda some good PR from the trainwreck that is Fallout 76 after he decided the best way to play the game would be to round up a posse who would grief players while yelling homophobic insults at them through voice chat, or engage in “playful immaturity” as he tried to claim it was when slapped with a ban

None of which exonerates Bethesda from the utter shitshow that is Fallout 76, where not only was the game a bug-riddled mess by Bethesda standards to the point a bug in the game’s beta deleted the whole thing from people’s hard drives the second they installed it, but they couldn’t even fulfill expectations for the tat bundled in with a pre-order special edition - and thought the equivalent of a $5 giftcard was sufficient compensation

It should have occurred to Gary Neville that his being widely misquoted with his summary of Tottenham Hotspur (which was mainly to shut up the clueless Jamie Carragher, who doesn’t appear to understand how finance works) that the best course of action would be to let the whole thing blow over. Instead he got wound up by his failures as manager of Valencia being brought up by Harry Redknapp and fired back with a spreadsheet...which only drew more attention to his failures at Valencia

And finally, hiding behind an intern as he doesn’t want to get his hands dirty, there’s Donald Trump blaming Californians for fires caused by his budget cuts, which shows it’s not just the midterm results he doesn’t have a clue about

#dickheads of the month

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