#he’s not in the same world as Kassidy I don’t think

[blooblooded]

BOOK 1 OUTLINE AND PLANNING

"He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you." -Nietzsche

PLOT THREADS

Kassidy: ‘Plot A’. Main storyline. Daily life turns to horror. Kassidy Nguyen finds an ancient book in her boss’s office and slowly becomes corrupted by its power. She and her friends flee from their Colony and into Marty’s. Action oriented, major conflicts. THEME: Fight hard for your own growth and strength and against your helplessness, but sometimes that can be ugly. Stopping the bleeding is not the same thing as healing. GOAL: She wants to no longer feel helpless in a world determined to keep her down. She wants to do anything to keep from feeling grief. MOTIFS: blood, the body as a cage, hunger, desire, power over the self. Transformation-- is it good or is it bad?

Smiles: ‘Plot B’. Secondary storyline. A nameless man acts as a tool of the state and does his best to survive. Smiles and his team go on various missions, culminating in an overlap with the ‘A’ plot. Smiles endures misery and trauma while being a funny, enjoyable dude. THEME: Nothing in the world feels worse than failing to protect. GOAL: Protect himself and others. MOTIFS: Shields, bubbles, memory, light, the body as a tool, identity. Who are you, if your only purpose is to cause harm? Can you also protect? 

Sashi: “Plot C”: Tertiary storyline. I don’t know if I should keep this plotline because its purpose is only to exposit on Eden’s political system. I was thinking of changing this POV to Dana but maybe that would be too on the nose? Or would Dana’s POV really make it so that this is a Nguyen family story???? A detective in Eden investigates corporate crimes, leading to Silas enforcing isolationist policies. THEME: We are all little cogs in a big world beyond our understanding. GOAL: Keep the world safe for her and her wife. MOTIFS: unfairness, poverty, commie stuff, motherhood?

Anatole: ‘Plot D’: Quaternary storyline. A military official in a land that has recently undergone a regime change navigates a tense political landscape. He learns about his leader’s goals, which happen to tie into what Kassidy is learning about blood magic and the Lost Colony. THEME: Do you continue following orders and doing your duty when you suspect that the person you are following is bad/corrupt? GOAL: This is just a basic fairytale hero guy, idk, he is honorable and shit.  MOTIFS: Order, mud, uniform, sword, loyalty. Also something about embodiment.

Dr Bellamy: Dr. B works with Yancey on suspicious shit. Serves to set up the Yancey storyline.

Lee: One chapter at the end. “What if a loser nihilist was also batshit crazy and dreams of the Void every time he closes his eyes.” 

MYSTERIES AND QUESTIONS KASSIDY MUST FACE

Where did the Book come from? If Cihad brought it into Eden, where was it before?

Why were 15 pages of the Book posted online? Why did Cathy do that?

Is what happened to Rosaline’s body the same thing that is happening to her’s? Why can’t she cope?

What does Tony really know?

Why does she feel this urge to leave Eden?

What does the Rift and the Void have to do with the Book?

CHANGES IN THE SCRIPT

Smiles is nicer to his teammates.

Ayda never has a crush on Cihad and doesn't mess with his mind.

Cihad is no longer working a 2nd job in the secret police as a nurse, his only job is at the hospital.

THEMES

Embodiment: This is directly pulled from my insane problems with the mind-body connection. Are you a body or are you a soul inside of a body? What does it mean to be trapped inside of a form you don’t want to be in? The source of evil in this story is the BOOK, which is continuously trapped inside of forms/bodies it does not want to be inside. What would you do to get into the right body? I know the things that I’ve done. Our bodies are so fragile, dude, and this fragility ties in with the brutal violence seen in this story. The fucked up nature of bodies

Fate/Destiny: Tolstoy writes about fate as the unconscious life swarm of mankind. That wording has always really fascinated me (reminds me of horror). Tony especially is wrapped up in Fate, he can See it and is unable to escape its grasp on his life. Fate is kind of a higher power and connected to the Book— you are powerless against it. The person who really does not believe in Fate, only Chaos, is Lee— and we see where that got him.

Power: Power over others and power over the self. What are you willing to do to have power?

Addiction: Yeah this goes without saying. Kassidy’s behavior is pretty evident— hiding things, lying about things, compulsively using blood magic and refusing to stop even as it destroys her. And she doesn’t see how this mirrors her mother’s drinking problem. We have Tony, whose sobriety is his lifeline and the only thing he knows he can hold on to. Addiction is something that does not let you go and the BOOK is like a metaphor for that monkey on your back.

Eyes and cameras. Someone is always watching. The watchful unseen eyes of creatures beyond human comprehension. The cameras on every street corner. Everyone is always watching eachother, observing. Silas as literal voyeur. Privacy is constantly invaded and violated. Eden is a literal panopticon. There aren’t really a huge amount of cops and secret police to enforce order (exact opposite of the military dictatorship in the North) but the constant observation is how people keep themselves in line.

Body Horror: Primal fears—from the knowledge of the self as a physical object and the consciousness of pain. It broadly encompasses the concept of bodily violation, but arguably one of its most pervasive themes is that of transformation.A reminder of the body’s unreliability. The horror of the changing body goes hand in hand with the theme of trauma, of the body keeping the score. The unreliability and fragility of your body is a reminder that you are human.

SECRET POLICE MIRRORING: Remember that Smiles is so attached to his team because he has met all of them (including Nickels, I’m just gonna make that canon) when he was still Kip. Met Lucy Singh because Marshal was Harry’s friend. Met Valentine because he came over to get Rome a few times. Met Nickels/Aubrey because who the fuck knows, something to do with a school program. 

ACT ONE: Climax- Esther’s monster is destroyed

ACT TWO: CT comes over and takes his damn Book back

Act THREE: Escape from Eden

This takes place over the course of about 7 months: It begins in October and ends in April.

CAST

Kassidy Nguyen: 23. A 3rd shift nurse who works very hard. GOAL: Avoid feelings of helplessness and grief. Learn about blood magic. Bring brother back from dead? Avoid the feelings of loneliness-- as she becomes more connected to the Book, she becomes more aware of her loneliness and her desire (metaphor-- coming alive/blooming after a long freeze) but it is possible that desire for love and intimacy is more painful than not knowing it. Pushes feelings that are hurtful deep, deep down. Clinging to her pain and growing grotesque nature to avoid other feelings because feelings hurt and feelings suck. Remember during dialogue that she is NOT quiet and immediately reacts, usually aggressively.

Esther Bellamy: 23: I can’t describe Esther because she has never held down a job and had assumed she could rely on generational wealth. Typical failure oldest child. Artificial– the kind that was made to be beautiful. GOAL: growth = realizing you aren’t mentally ill, you were just trapped in a bad situation. How do you relearn how to function in the world? Has been treated like she is fragile her whole life and is just now finding out that she is strong and resilient, that she does not need to be sheltered. Freaks out when others try to control her or get in her business. ***Internally angry, externally withdrawn.*** She does have a mood disorder that causes problems in her life. Associated with electricity and lightning-- very symbolic of a loss of ignorance/divine spark and power.

Rosaline Church, ‘Rosie’, ‘Rose’: 23. A good person who makes money from boxing and helps out at the church’s homeless shelter. GOAL: Figure out what damage has been done to her but hide it from her friends so they don’t worry. The ‘self’ vs the ‘other’. Unlike Kassidy, who also experiences a breakdown of borders between herself and something else, Rosaline rejects the grotesque new part of herself and clings to her humanity because she did not choose for this to happen to her body. In later books she will accept it as a part of herself (obvious trauma metaphor). The mom friend, the kind of person who will go out of her way to make sure you are OK. Represses negative emotions before they even form LOL. She needs everyone to like her and sometimes can come across as spineless. Remember that she never cusses.

Cassiopeia Agapama, ‘Casey’, ‘Case’: 23. An enforcer for her father’s criminal organization, loving and generous but also dangerous. Artificial, but completely normal with none of the freakish traits you see in the Bellamys or Prospases. GOAL: Have a good time, make sure others are happy, but especially make sure Kassidy is happy. Very spontaneous, unthinking person. Simultaneously kind and hurtful in the way that something in nature is. Associated with stars -- something beautiful and bright but also something far away and unobtainable.

Ayda Jay, ‘Ade’: 24: A middle school teacher. Much better with kids than she is with adults. GOAL: Play video games with Marty and find a boyfriend or girlfriend, but also stay hidden in a world she knows is dangerous.  Huge water/ocean metaphor, sometimes being around Ayda is like drowning. She has repressed part of her true self all her life, in a way, holding her true self down under the surface. The shallow mean girl face is a way she protects herself so that nobody can see the true part of her that is vulnerable and alone and feels bad about herself. Remember during dialogue that she is usually quiet but makes little snide comments and remarks.

Martin Violet (Martin Bonneville?)‘Marty’ 22. He has never had a job and the job options are pretty damn scarce other than being a soldier. I don’t know what the fuck he does with his life.  GOAL: Figure out the mystery of the Lost Colony to distract himself from his fucked up isolated life, find out more about the Void. Intense, driven, lonely, very alone, lacks social understanding. Autistic and epileptic. Symbolism is all about ice-- rigidity and frigidity, difficult and unexplored territory. The dividing line between conscious and unconscious. His logical nature is constantly at odds with the mystical visions he receives.

Christopher Nguyen, Smiles, ‘Boss’ (only by Nickels and Johnny), 7139A, Kip, 71: 25. Team leader of a secret police squad. GOAL: Survive as long as possible and protect his friends. Protection, especially of the self, is kind of the whole thing here. Helplessness despite his physical body and dominant personality. Terrible knowledge that deep down inside he is soft and vulnerable, and wanting to destroy that vulnerability. Vulnerability of others even causing him anger because it reminds him of the self. It goes like this: Come over here. Stand like this. Take that off. Put this on. Don’t do that. Hurt this person or we will hurt you. A life of constant surveillance and order imposed on someone who is chaotic and unruly. He is an incredibly loving, friendly, intelligent person, and that is being hammered out of him. Got shot in his LEFT leg. Remember Left Leg. Absolutely riddled by mental illness, namely adhd, bipolar (mania) and a dissociative disorder due to constant trauma.

Tabitha Delmont. ‘Tabby’: 40. A career criminal who makes money by scamming people and selling drugs. GOAL: Make as much money as possible and have fun doing it. Clever, always on that grind. She had a terrible childhood and has never come to terms with that. Missing her LEFT arm.

Anthony Delmont, ‘Tony’: 40. Homeless guy. GOAL: Destroy the Book and also maintain sobriety so he can someday see Cynthia again. Defeated, scared. Has a problem where he always desires things that aren’t good for him. In Book 1 he is mostly coming back to himself and trying to figure out what he is going to do. Missing his RIGHT eye. Remember it is his right eye. Depressed alcoholic.

Cihad Tariq: 35. Head nurse at Eden’s only hospital. GOAL: Be a good dad and employee. Get his Book back. Protect Tony? Serious, hard working. Natural caretaker with a mysterious past. He holds onto his past and his beliefs as tightly as he can.

Dana Nguyen: 50. Police Commissioner. GOAL: Legitimately I think Dana wants to kill herself during the first book. Trapped, desperate, very very angry. Her problem is that she doesn’t take action because she feels trapped. Depressed alcoholic. She has basically been alone for years.

Westley Agapama, ‘West’: 44. Businessman :) And a criminal mastermind. AGA is basically Amazon. GOAL: Maintain economic control of Eden despite rivalries. Get to children before Silas can. Very kind/protective but also power hungry. He is willing to help people but also wants to profit.

Field Marshal Anatole Surkhov, ‘Tolya (only by Dog/Ivan)’: 38. Soldier. GOAL: Struggle with loyalties between Florence and his own people. Be a good soldier and fight abominations. Loyal, brave, bitter, harsh.

Phillip Gauthier, ‘Flick’: 37: Spy. GOAL: Get information for his mommy and cause problems on purpose. Manipulative, sneaky, but friendly. Crippled leg and asthma make it hard for him in his Colony.

Julia LaBelle, ‘Jules’: 34. Witch, specifically the official/head witch of Florence’s regime. GOAL: Live a peaceful witchy life and make sure that she and her loved ones are safe. She wants so badly to keep Marty and Dog safe. Mean, abrasive, and hostile due to people being dicks to her all her life.

Beatrice Kosarin: 39. Florence’s Minister of Propaganda. Calm, strong, completely untrustworthy. Great writer.

Ivan Kosarin, ‘Dog’ (by most people): 39. Used to be a weapon, now he does handyman things. Gentle, worried. Loves Jules and loves Marty. Tries his best.

Olive Vernier: 33: Former courtesan, currently being used as a political pawn because her daughter gives Florence’s reign legitimacy. GOAL: Live a peaceful, blood magic-y life. Bewitching, hopeful. Her purpose is to shed light on what happened to CIhad’s people because he sure as shit isn’t saying anything.

Prime Minister Florence Gauthier: 52. Ruler of the Northern Territories. GOAL: Maintain control of the Northern Territories and figure out how she can fuck over Eden. Harsh, angry, charismatic. Difficult person to deal with but everyone seems to love her.

Quentin Bellamy: 44. Stay at home dad. GOAL: Be a good Dad and husband. Innocent, naive, happy. Disabled due to a pressure malfunction on the subway. Before the accident, he was a talented pianist.

Dr. Lillian Bellamy, “Lily”: 52. Geneticist. GOAL: science shit but also protect her family in her fucked up way. Cold, withholding. Having an affair. Very upset that her family is not perfect. Esther is a disappointment, her husband is disabled. Puts a lot of pressure on the twins.

Eddie Bellamy: 20. Student. GOAL: Get through college and get an internship. Sleepy.

Evangeline Bellamy: 20. Student. GOAL: Also get through college and get an internship. Up tight and prissy.

Benedict Prospas, “Ben”: 25. Guy who has been in prison most of his life. Kind and shy but has a terrible temper. Completely hates himself. 

Romeo “Rome’ Prospas: 20: Neurotic and anxious. CEO of Prosperity Inc. A very young man with too much power. Has a severe anxiety disorder and rarely leaves his house.

Lucy Singh/Smokey Pete, ‘Pete’, ‘Peanut’ 0265A: 21: GOAL: Compete with Smiles for leadership so that she can ultimately keep him safe. Highly controlled, simmering rage underneath, a captive forest fire. Very serious about protecting herself and her team. 

Aubrey Song/Nickels, ‘Nicky’, ‘Nick’ 1022B: 18: GOAL: She just wants to touch Pete’s titties. A realist who despite everything dreams of some normalcy and out of all of them, is the only Death Squad member who can imagine a normal life. Pragmatic and self aware. Not a very talented psychic, but she is better at telepathy than Lady,

Valentine Prospas/Johnny-on-the-Spot, ‘Johnny’ 3385C: 15: GOAL: Make sure everyone likes him at all cost. Loving, playful, but needy. Not getting the help he needs.

Sashi Mahajan: 35. Police detective. GOAL: Do her job and have a baby with her wife maybe. Hardworking, frustrated.

Kelsey Mahajan: 31. Police sergeant. GOAL: Be nice and happy and start a family. Kind, loving.

Marshall Singh: 46. Former prison assistant warden, current inmate. Many years ago, he made a report on his friend Sanjana ‘Harry’ Harris that resulted in her death. Was once best friends with Hax. Imprisoned on false charges. Kind and compassionate, but deeply competitive in nature.

Ajax Guttierez: 28. Bodyguard to Rome Prospas. Pragmatic, has a business degree. Guilty over his inability to protect.

Barbara Church: 48. Worshiper in the Weil religion. Social worker. Calm and grounded, but her heart is conflicted because she hates the injustice around her.

Cynthia Delmont-Tariq: 11. Tony’s daughter, adopted by Cihad. Outgoing and loyal. Has psychic abilities.

Billy Tariq: A slime alien child. Sibling to Cynthia. Curious and funny. Different from the others and has a sense of self.

Rachel Zolin: 11. Cynthia’s friend. She lost both her parents during B-Day and has a lot of emotional problems. I really want to bring back some of the slenderblog shit.

Bubblegum, BG, 8046A: 18: GOAL: Do whatever Silas tells him so she is proud of him. Stupid bully, but has a good heart. Can teleport. Missing his LEFT arm.

Harper Malena/Echo, 9943A: 20: Awkward bully who has a problem talking. Seems to have some mysterious shit going on.

Lady, 1182A: 23: The most talented psychic in the secret police, deals mostly with trauma and memories. Sadistic, hurts others so she can get a sense of control.

Bizo, “Zoey”, 4638A: 20, sweet and delayed. Has befriended one of the slime aliens, named Dot. Dot has learned how to speak and think like Billy.

Creedo, 7071A: 25: Follows the rules to avoid getting in trouble. Up tight. She and Evangeline Bellamy would be best friends.

Pills, 6510B: 21. Always tries to escape and cause problems, More trouble than she’s worth. It seems as though she may have maintained some of her real memories.

Lee Harlan: 29: Depressed, evil psycho. His mind goes to the Void every time he goes to sleep. Likes to think of himself as a good person. He tries hard to be a good person but will always mess up. Very concerned about how he is perceived. Can influence other people’s opinions of him.

Silas Botega:’41’: Awkward control freak. It’s easy to be thrown off by her because she is quiet and dorky, but she holds onto grudges and when she is scared or suspicious she will crush someone into submission. 

Jerry Botega: ‘45’. Deceased? A crawling, starving, empty body that feeds on humans.

Stasya Nekraskova: Age varies. A witch who escaped the horrors of the Lost Colony and came to live in the woods in the North. Despises blood magic and wants to get her hands on the Book. Literally eats people and can turn into a huge snake.

Yancey Gallo: 31. Part time high school chemistry teacher, part time freelance chemistry researcher. Came from the Lost Colony. Believes that he can save the world from the demon of the Void and will do anything to accomplish this.

The Not Marty: An adult slime alien, trapped in the Void after its kind tried to send the Book away from their dimension. Wants to get to Earth to protect its young.

Helen: 51. A blood magic user. Holds onto faith to give herself a sense of inner peace.

Frank Toussaint: Deceased. Astrophysicist.

‘Hax’: 40. Current prison warden. Childlike and cruel. Silas really should have killed her. A rabid dog.

Chief of Staff Vega Pelenato: 45. Divided loyalties. Illusionist psychic. Friends with both West and Dana and nobody is really sure which one she is more loyal to.

Percival ‘Percy’ Ruiz: 40, A technopath who West has under his thumb. Betrayed him once a long time ago and will never do that again. ***HAS INFORMATION ABOUT AYDA’S PARENTS*****

Gena Voorst: Queen of organized crime and engineering. Made a fortune off of BOMB DAY because her company builds prosthetics. Honestly the most honest and trustworthy of the crime family leaders.

Favia Voorst: 23. In grad school for engineering. Used to have problems with Ayda in school. Disabled, has prosthetic legs.

Yura and Emily: 26. Adopted children of West. Both have downs syndrome. They love their family and do whatever West needs them to.

Mayor Jay Malena: 55. This motherfucker is such a loser and I hate him for giving Echo to Silas. A puppet Mayor. I always imagine him as a goofy kind of JFK.

Wicker: 19. A class psychic, an illusionist. Friends with Nickels.

Shorty: 13. C Class secret police dummy.

Flash: 15. C Class secret police dummy.

Coop: 16. Neuro-impulse control, B-Class. Terrible burns on the right side of his body from Pete losing her temper because he hurt her precious baby.  Actual rapist, Smiles beats the shit out of him on the reg.

Major: 18. Aggro-type. C-Class. One of Johnny’s love interests. Dumb guy.

Saturday/Jennifer Al-Harbi: 20. Dormitory staff member.Artificial. Easy to manipulate, sometimes tries to protect Smiles and his team.

October/Henry Eliades: 26. Dormitory staff member. Smiles’s Handler. Artificial. Incredibly sadistic, has it out for Smiles. Responsible for Smiles’s leg never healing.

Captain Reed Kimble: One of Florence’s people, leads the Partisan army. Incredibly loyal to his land of the Strath and incredibly concerned about Florence’s alliances with the neighboring territories, as well as the loss of traditional values.

J.C: Kassidy’s supervisor, a 3rd shift nurse.

Millie: Kassidy’s co-worker, a 3rd Shift nurse

Lyra: A girl Kassidy has a one night stand with.

King Jean-Baptiste Dubois: Deceased. He was kind of shitty.

Georgie Dubois: 13. Olive’s daughter with the King. 

Princess Seraphine Dubois: Deceased. Was injected with slime alien goo and forcibly hybridized by the blood magic cult priest (Cihad’s dad)

Mikhail Surkhov: Deceased, murdered by Dog. Anatole’s father. Was captain of the Imperial Army. Possibly the worst person in this story due to the severity of child abuse and being OK with genocide. 

Halcyon Tariq: Deceased. Cihad’s sister. He thinks about her every day.

Yadira Tariq: Deceased. Cihad’s mother. 

The Red Priest: Deceased. Cihad’s father.

Basil Stewart: Deceased. Cihad’s first crush. Was not part of the blood magic community.

Martin Bonneville: Deceased. Marty’s father. Could hear things speaking in the Void. Murdered by Stasya before his birth.

Ivy Violet: Deceased. Marty’s mother. Never recovered from having him because she didn’t want him.

Sanjana “Harry” Harris: Deceased. Kip’s birth mother. She was uncovering information about the secret police and was murdered because of it. Was permanently manic due to untreated bipolar disorder.

Catherine “Cathy” Delmont: Deceased. Tony’s ex wife. They met in foster care. She was a librarian with an interest in the ancient world.

OUTLINE

Act One:

Kassidy comes home after a long night at work (she is a 3rd shift nurse-- graduated one year ago), just as everyone else is waking up. She is exhausted and talks to Esther and Ayda. Her boss won’t move her to day shift, she has a lot of problems with him. She works hard and it never seems to get her anywhere. Due to her anger, she broke into his office that night and took something from him-- a BOOK that she had been strangely drawn to. Casey has been out all night and Ayda is worried about her-- make reference to how Casey is wrapped up in working for their dad. Esther is thinking about calling out of work at her shitty job at one of Eden’s recycling centers because she feels ‘sick’. Rosie left early because she is making extra money participating in medical research. They’ve moved in together in this 4 bedroom house (owned by one of West’s private housing companies) fairly recently, mostly because of money reasons, but Casey and Ayda haven’t really hung out with the others since high school so it’s hard to get used to and there’s still some awkwardness. They’ve all been through a lot. Make it clear that Casey was the one who reached out in the first place, and as overbearing as she might be, is still a sort of extroverted ‘glue’ of the group. Ayda is talking to Marty and Marty acts weird/guilty around Kassidy.  There’s always been something that follows Esther but Kassidy can’t see it-- she knows Ayda can. In a sudden flash, Kassidy sees the monster for a second and it lashes out at her. Frightened by this, Kassidy retreats to her room and then takes the BOOK from her bag and opens it.

2: Smiles and his team wake up and get ready for their shift. He is feeling irritated by them because they are all acting up. They were late for breakfast because Nickels and Johnny were arguing, so none of them got to eat. Their shift that day is in the Sewers, they’re supposed to hunt down and destroy some of the slime creatures that have made their home down there. This is unpleasant. The sewers are disgusting but essential to Eden’s self sustaining infrastructure, filled with rats and monsters. There are also rumors that people who don’t want to be found hide down there. Exposition about the role of the sewers in a city, and exposition about how Eden is self sustaining. The squad annihilates a few slimebabies, so we get to see them use their abilities and also get some exposition about slime creatures in Eden. The slime creatures seem scared of them. It is clear that Smiles does not understand what they are. The sewers don’t have cameras so Smiles and the gang spend time goofing off. They appear to all really love each other, but there are lots of weird tension and dynamics. It is exceedingly clear that Nickels is his favorite, even though she is a psychic. Imply that Smiles is uncomfortable with most psychics. Imply that pyrokinesis is not a usual ability. Imply that it is not normal for an Artificial to be in the secret police. This is a group of strays. Recruitment is in a few weeks, with new kids coming in to replace the old ones, and Smiles jokes/threatens to get rid of Nickels and Johnny and replace them with A Class agents. He would never do that, they are more important to him than being “successful”. Rats start swarming, running, which freaks everyone out. The squad investigates further, and they find a disemboweled corpse with strange writing on it. First mention of the blood magic cult, who obviously did this.

3: Kassidy flips through the BOOK on her day off. It’s making more and more sense to her, she is really drawn to it. Casey barges into her room and Kassidy shoves the BOOK away. Casey annoys her, there is tension, she wants to hang out but it seems like she is just bored and there’s nobody else around. Casey won’t shut up and she’s overly touchy. Kassidy feels like she is making fun of her.  Kassidy looks at her bills on her phone and feels resentment towards Casey for having money. It’s not fair that she has to work so hard and Casey doesn’t even have a real job. Her mind and body are tired from work. Casey says that Esther is acting crazy, that the ‘Thing’ they can’t see won’t leave her alone. Everyone in Eden is vaguely aware of things beyond most people’s comprehension. Casey shows her an ad she put on the internet for someone who can get rid of the thing, treats it like a big joke. Kassidy takes this more seriously because she remembers what happened when Esther’s monster attacked a bully named Ben who was picking on them in middle school. Suddenly she feels like she is in danger. Casey wants to go get lunch together but Kassidy tells her no, she is tired and just wants to read. 

4: Kassidy is at work a week later and her boss Cihad Tariq shows up out of nowhere, which is unusual for him since he works during the day. Cihad is a real strange guy, he has a weird accent, he’s huge, and he has red eyes. Tariq asks her if she has been in his office, but Kassidy is an excellent liar and denies it. She asks him why he’s at work so late, since she knows he has a kid, but doesn’t get a good answer. This experience shook her, so she tells her supervisor that she is sick and goes home. On the subway ride home, there is a checkpoint (something that is relatively normal, ever since B-Day made security stricter) where 2 secret police members (C Class, but she doesn’t know that) get on the train and scan everyone’s IDs. Kassidy has an anxious reaction to seeing secret police, and her internal thoughts reveal that this is because 6 years ago, her brother, Kip, was dragged away by them and this was the last time she saw him before he was shot for a crime he did not commit. The secret police scan a guy’s ID and he is the guy they were looking for, they drag him away while he is begging them not to hurt him. Nobody on the train does anything. Kassidy’s hands don’t stop shaking until she gets home. It’s 2am, Ayda and Marty are still awake playing video games. They make fun of Kassidy because they’re edgy dicks, but they aren’t malicious or anything. Kassidy goes to her room and opens the BOOK. She has a hangnail that she picks at, drawing blood, and is suddenly filled with power that she has never felt before, the essence of the VOID. For the first time in a long time, she is exhilarated and happy, euphoric, feeling powerful. From Esther’s room, she hears a scream.

5: Smiles and the squad frantically clean their dorm room because they found out that staff is doing room checks. They have some contraband: snacks (JVP’s), a knife that had not been returned to the armory (Nicky’s), some sedatives that Smiles had not taken because he wanted to save them for when he needed them. A member of staff, Saturday, tosses their room and finds everything, the gang begs her to not turn them in but she tells them it’s her job and she has to write them up for something. They get in trouble and have to clean the bathrooms. As they go over there, another agent named Creedo, who is frenemies with Smiles, tells him that someone was just ‘Retired’ aka shot in the head, because they aged out of the program. I’ll call this person Rally, A-Class, telekinetic. Rally was a person Smiles once had a relationship with and he thinks about that. Early in his career, he had considered creating an Elite A class squad with himself, Creedo, Rally, and an illusionist psychic named Wicker. He chose not to when he met Pete, because he felt like she needed him more. He thinks about everything he has lost. While cleaning, Pete is angry at the others because none of the contraband was hers, Smiles argues that there are worse punishments than cleaning. Johnny is lazy and keeps trying to goof off and doesn’t want to work, which makes Smiles, still upset about having lost someone, lose his temper and bubbles him. Pete gets angry about this, but Smiles tells them that he is the team leader and they have to listen to him. Johnny acts like he was fine with being yelled at and is as happy and friendly as ever, which irritates Smiles more. Pete comments that the way Smiles is acting and stepping out of line, he won’t be around much longer. Nickels says he is going to be around long after she is gone anyways, indicates that she has been getting nosebleeds. They talk about what they think they’ll be assigned on their next shifts, about some upcoming training, gossip about their enemies, and allude to stupid politics shit that will come up later, like West being a sketchy problem, and the blood magic cult. They finish cleaning and get Saturday to sign off on it and try to squeeze info from her and triangulate. She tells them some of the missions going on. They go to a rec room and Nickels goes to train with another psychic named Wicker. Division among the team. Smiles leaves to get some training bullshit stuff from their dorm. He sees a guy with a burned face named Coop (B-Class, neuropath) and beats the shit out of him, transferring his aggression, thinking about how he lost another person in his life and how he has no control/can’t keep anyone safe.

6: When Kassidy used blood magic, Esther’s monster had lashed out at/attacked Esther. Esther had a breakdown and went to the hospital for 48 hours. Kassidy wonders if there was a connection with the blood magic-- a connection between blood magic and the slime creature. She goes to Rosie, since she knows she is religious-- Ayda is religious too (turned to religion after being traumatized by Bomb Day) but Ayda can be kind of a jerk sometimes. Rosie looks kind of fucked up, Kassidy asks her about the medical testing but Rosie tells her she doesn't need to worry about it. She asks Rosie what she knows about the Red Religion, aka Red Heaven People’s Church, who practice blood magic, and Rosie reacts with disgust. Wanting answers, Kassidy goes to one of their churches. It’s creepy. She meets a woman named Helen who provides exposition on blood magic. Helen shows Kassidy scans of 15 pages that look like the Book, but Kassidy doesn’t reveal she knows about it. Helen says that they popped up on the internet about 2 years ago and nobody really knows where they came from. There are a lot of people who practice the Red Religion/Blood Magic. Most people can’t do it, their bodies can’t withstand it. IMPORTANT: ALL BLOOD MAGIC STEMS FROM SELF HATRED. Kassidy asks Helen how someone would know that they could use this magic. Helen pricks Kassidy’s finger, mingles the blood with her own, and then grows terrified. Kassidy in turn gets scared and flees. She buys food that she really can’t afford and feels nervous, like everyone is staring at her. When she returns home, she finds Casey and Ayda with a one-armed sketchy looking woman who introduces herself as Tabitha Delmont, the person who is going to “solve their little monster problem”.

7: Detective Sashi Mahajan gets a call from Vega Pelenato (chief of staff and notorious snitch/rat) in the very early morning,  informing her that the CEO of Prosperity and notorious corporate gang leader, Richard Prospas, passed away during the night. They speculate on whether this was murder. Sashi goes into work early and encounters her miserable boss, Dana Nguyen. Dana tells Sashi that she’s going to have to make a statement about a recent case of police brutality (that she obviously thinks was not brutal enough). Dana hates talking to the press, because she feels like they harass her. But then, everyone in Eden hates Dana, including Sashi-- Dana does not work hard, is an alcoholic, and there was some nasty business in her past having to do with how she handled a disaster known as ‘B-Day’. Early in her life, Sashi was involved in Eden’s Worker’s Party (EWP) along with Dana’s dead wife. Sashi notices that Dana’s phone keeps ringing (Silas?) and she ignores it.. She pulls up information on the case and thinks about how much she hates her job. Richard Prospas allegedly fainted into the blades of an industrial meat slicer on his factory floor. His son Rome stated that he has an alibi, corroborated by his bodyguard. But Sashi has several reports filed by social services 6 years ago that state that there was violence within the home. She suspects that this is motive for murder, on top of the inheritance and power grab. Sashi is tired of rich people in Eden taking advantage of poor people and believes that everything is very unfair. When she was young, she used to be involved in union/socialist stuff, so this is important to her. There was actually a time when she thought about joining a group called the UPLF, but it’s a good thing she didn’t because they ended up blowing up many parts of Eden. She just wants to have enough money to start a family. She submits her report detailing the murder, and more importantly, the unabashed levels of power the Prospas Corporation has, just like the obscene power the Agapama corporation has too much power, and how the economy is about to get hit hard, which will lead to poor people suffering.

8: Tabby Delmont is a difficult person to deal with and Kassidy can spot a con artist. Casey seems to be taken with her though, and is stupidly proud of herself for putting an ad for an ‘exorcist’ on the Internet. Everyone gathers in the kitchen. Tabby boasts that she has killed dozens of monsters and that she sells their ichor on the black market for a profit. Tabby claims that this material can be used for top secret science stuff (imply that Tabby is a grunkle Stan conspiracy theory type) She has exorbitant prices. Esther, still not feeling well, asks Tabby why she has to kill these creatures, asks Tabby why she has to kill this Thing that follows her because she does not hate it. It’s been with her since she was a child. Tabby tells her that if it isn’t killed, it will kill Esther, because something has riled it up and it is stronger than most of the ones she has seen. She talks about how these monsters latch onto people with Abilities and feed off of their emotions. She says that they eventually drive people insane, and says that her twin brother had one attached to him and he ended up murdering his ex wife. Marty calls bullshit, immediately pulling up an Article that states that Cathy Delmont killed herself, but he clearly wants to be included. This is the longest all of them have been together for a long time, and Kassidy misses her dead brother for a moment, but quickly represses those feelings. Casey tells Tabby to get on with it and kill it, Tabby pulls out a weird Voorst bioweapon and attempts to slice the Thing but is thrown back and it mauls her metal arm. Everyone is freaked out, especially those who can’t see the Thing. Kassidy has started to get flashes of it more often, which is weird because she shouldn’t be able to see it. Casey and Rosie are unable to see it at all. Tabby says she’ll figure it out, she just needs a better weapon. She bullies and harasses them into letting her sleep on the couch LOL. Casey is obsessed with Tabby’s charisma and we see how….bored Casey is and how she is drawn to stupid shit that interests her just to not feel that boredom (ADHD alert).. Rosie and Kassidy talk after getting Esther (who had been really negatively affected by this) to bed, Rosie says that Esther’s mom was angry that she was in the hospital again and wants to IVC her for a longer stay, that her mom and the others in her family want her to come home so that they can take care of her. Kassidy hears the Thing whispering to Esther as it is curled beside her in bed, and feels a chill. She returns to her room and the BOOK.

9: Smiles and the gang wake up. It’s Recruitment day (twice a year, new kids are brought in to replace the ones who have died or been Retired) and they decide to go watch some of them compete in the entrance test known as the Gauntlet. They are hardened to this. Going over to the gymnasium, they hear two unpleasant agents, BG and Lady, bragging about how they recruited (i.e. snatched kids with Abilities) a bunch of the newbies, which thankfully Smiles is rarely assigned to do since he fucked up too many times. There are 6 newcomers who begin to fight it out Hunger Games style with some volunteers. Smiles jokes about how he and Pete picked out Nicky and Johnny and it’s actually really disturbing to the reader that Smiles is joking so casually about something that must have been brutal to kids who were fuckin...15 and 12 at the time they were taken in. Suddenly he hates to think about it because he knows how awful Nickels and Johnny’s lives would be if he hadn’t picked them out. He notices that Nickels and Pete are acting close...too close…. They watch as one new kid gets really badly hurt and starts to cry, and Smiles hears BG and Echo laugh about it. He is bothered by this and dissociates. When he comes to, he’s back in the dorm and reflects on how he doesn't remember going through the Gauntlet. He is desperate to feel like he’s back in his own body, to feel present, so he tells Nickels and Johnny to get out and asks Pete if she wants to have sex. She agrees to this and they bang it out. Afterwards, she tells him that watching all that violence made her feel worried about Nickels and Johnny, since they’re weaker agents and will be Retired faster. Smiles tells her it doesn’t matter. All of them have an expiration date, they’re all going to die really bad deaths, it’s just a matter of when. Bad things happen to weaker agents.  They can’t get out and most of them don’t even want to get out-- including Smiles. 

10: Tabby brings back all kinds of crazy contraptions. Casey tells her that she isn’t going to pay her any extra money. Sometimes it feels like Casey is flirting with Tabby LOL ew. There’s a lot of tension between Tabby and the girls, since this woman is literally crashing at their home. Kassidy tells Casey that this woman is definitely going to rob them blind and is a scammer, and tells her that Casey can’t see it because she grew up so privileged and doesn’t have experience with scummy low class people, but Casey laughs it off, believing that nobody would dare because of who her father is. Marty tells them that where he lives, there are no slime creatures, but there are other...Things…., and Tabby demands to know where he lives. Marty talks about the Northern territories and his land that is called the Strath. Tabby asks how that is even possible, since Eden’s internet access is super closed off. Ayda is cagey about the whole thing and deflects. Esther’s sweet father shows up to check on her, he says that the rest of the family is doing good. Esther is not doing so good. The Thing won’t let her sleep. Seeing Esther and Quentin in such a state makes Kassidy scared and angry and she searches the BOOK for anything that might help her solve the problem. She finds information in the BOOK and is unsure of how she is even understanding what is written, because it is all gibberish to her. Something inside of her is hungry. She can’t stop eating. During the night, she cuts herself and makes a circle in the living room with her blood, then gets freaked out and covers it with a carpet. Her wounds heal with impossible speed and don’t scar. She can’t remember why she felt like doing that. It just felt natural to do.

11: In the Northern Territories, Field Marshall Anatole Surkhov returns to the Strath after a long campaign. He reports to the Prime Minister, Florence Gauthier, and tells her that he and his men destroyed many monsters in the woods. When he tells Florence that he lost a lot of good men, she doesn’t seem to care. Florence tells him that they need to double their efforts, but that her spies have heard that loyalists are congregating again in the cities and she doesn’t want another war on their hands. Anatole tells her that he would like to stay in his home Territory of Kimanka, which suffered the most losses during the war and where his mother and sisters live, and she denies him that. Florence has knowledge about him that would destroy his life if exposed (he is trans and the Northern Territories are not very progressive-- but they have gotten better under Florence’s regime) and uses that, as well as his family’s/dead father’s history of uh...war crimes...to control him. Anatole leaves, angry. He walks with his valet, Dog (make implications about Dog’s history/we see a parallel between what Anatole’s father was doing and what Silas is doing with secret police), and one of Florence’s little spies approaches them. Anatole tells the spy, Flick, to leave before he beats him down, and Flick just laughs. He asks if the wilderness is getting safer, because Florence wants to re-establish the trade routes with other Colonies. Anatole says that the last time they sent people to Eden, they never came back. Flick says that he doubts that was because of the crawling, twisted flesh creatures in the woods-- he knows about the people of Eden and he says that he wasn’t talking about Eden, he was talking about a different Colony, the ‘Lost Colony’ to the east where something bad happened a long time ago. Flick says that there is a powerful weapon there (the reader thinks she is talking about the BOOK, but she’s talking about the contraptions and Jerry and mayyyybe nukes) that can Make the North Great Again (™ lol). Anatole says that he only knows about Eden because of the witch boy Marty, but Flick says he has been in contact with someone involved in trade (Percy and West…) who want to open up trade routes as well. They walk past the gallows, where Florence has left the bodies of several political enemies hanging. Flick comments that he can’t imagine what would happen if Florence got her hands on the rulers of Eden, who have let the Northerners suffer and starve for 200 years. Anatole tells him not to be stupid, he would never allow his men to die for a pointless war. Flick asks why he thinks he has any say in the matter at all.

12: Kassidy is hungry, she can’t stop eating. She is eating her roommates' food because she is so hungry and they are getting mad at her. She calls out of work again one night, this has been happening more and more often. She is starting to feel worried. Every day, she understands more of the BOOK, even though she can’t read it. She thinks about showing it to Rosie, who she trusts more than Casey and Ayda, and who has proven that she can handle stressful situations. In the living room, Tabby is there, and she asks where Kassidy got the BOOK from in a weird way. No, Tabby doesn’t know anything about the BOOK, she’s just nosy. Kassidy feels defensive. Rosie doesn’t take it seriously and seems distracted. Upstairs, Esther starts screaming again and Rosie leaves. Tabby tries to engage Kassidy in conversation. They are similar: both survivors, both very poor. Tabby asks to look at the BOOK and Kassidy grows angry at her, pushes down the desire to lash out.. Kassidy tells her that this is stupid, but knows different. Casey comes home later in a confrontational mood because her father’s shipping business is being threatened by Prosperity Inc’s new business procedures. The dark thing is is that Casey has killed two people-- other gang goons who were trying to kill her right back-- and it is hard to reconcile with that sometimes, since Casey does not seem to feel bad about it at all and is actually very open about having stabbed people to death before (so….Casey is actually internally very troubled by this and we’ll get into that in Book 2). She asks Kassidy if she remembers Rome Prospas from high school, since he’s only 20 and now a huge threat to her father’s business. The memories of that time are too painful for her to even think about, and Kassidy returns to her room and stares at the BOOK.

13: Dr. Lily Bellamy is hard at work as a geneticist. She works on contracts, sometimes for Eden’s government, but mainly what she does is create Artificials. The first Artificials were developed 30 years ago, using technology her parents developed. Dr. B imagines a perfect world with no more sickness or disease. She checks on the development of several fetuses ordered by some rich people and we see how cold and clinical she is. She has her own laboratory. A chemist named Yancey Gallo shows up to talk about work. Dr. B has been cheating on her husband with Yancey. They have disturbing sex in the lab LOL. Dr. B is worried about her daughter Esther and doesn’t know how to protect her from herself. The two of them look over some clinical trials that they have been working on together and Dr. B recognizes a name (Rosie). Yancey seems frustrated by the trials because there have never been any human survivors. He pulls up video footage of them dying painfully. Dr. B reminds him that there was one, 7 years ago, but it was an accident and the subject is now insane (it’s Lee…). Yancey is like, oh yes, I know Lee but we can’t really count him. In Dr. B’s lab, there are tons of ichor from slime monsters that she has procured on the black market. It’s late, and she goes home to her husband Quentin, who is disabled and irritates her. We see that she is motivated in her genetic projects because of her family members who aren’t ‘perfect’. They watch TV and West comes on, we see that Dr B is troubled by him for some reason. She thinks about her project and wonders if she’s just wasting time.

14: Kassidy and her roommates and Tabby Delmont are ready to destroy the monster. Tabby has finally procured the weapon that she believes can kill it. It is unusual for these slime monsters to be this strong and she asks Ayda if she has also noticed that there seem to be more of them, and they are multiplying. Ayda hurriedly changes the subject but Marty tells her that it’s stupid to try to protect herself because everyone already knows that she is a psychic. Kassidy finds herself wishing that she was like Tabby, Esther, and Ayda. They gather in the living room and Kassidy remembers that she painted a circle of her own blood on the floor beneath the carpet. When Esther walks in, Kassidy finds that she can see the Creature that follows her. It’s terrible, a crawling black slimy thing with a white skull face like a stag’s. It looks at her and it is not angry, it is afraid in the way an animal is afraid of a predator, it’s scared! Kassidy feels so hungry when she looks at it. At first, nothing happens. Tabby brandishes the strange weapon and Ayda tells her to stop, that this isn’t a good idea, and her psychic fear affects the group. Esther is like, wait, wait wait! Kassidy wants to see the slime Creature Destroyed, completely and utterly, and has a vision, a memory, of another place, another universe that these slime alien things originated in and a huge hungry presence ripping a hole in their dimension to get at them. She sees a psychedelic ocean planet and she sees its waters turn black with blood. Tabby slices into the creature again and again without mercy, Esther is screaming and screaming and Rosie tries to protect her. Ayda begs Tabby to stop, she is empathically connected to the creature’s fear. But Tabby does not stop and the creature is reduced to flesh and black blood. Ayda passes out from the psychic connection, and Marty freaks because he is so worried about her. Kassidy feels energized from the massacre, but everyone is wiped and exhausted. Casey, who was unable to see what happened but now knows Tabby was not just conning them, asks where Tabby got the weapon. Tabby said it is secret police tech, sold on the black market. The gang is chilled by that, especially Kassidy, who has a huge fear of them because her brother was murdered by those people almost 7 years ago. Esther begins to cry. The creature had been a part of her life since childhood. Kassidy stoops to touch the black blood and has to keep herself from putting her finger in her mouth to taste it. Marty asks “what now?”

ACT TWO

15: Kassidy returns from work, exhausted. It’s too much, she is not particularly good at being a nurse, and she has too much to occupy her mind. 8:30 am, she gets home to find Tabby, Casey, and Esther -- since Rosie and Ayda are people who, you know, have jobs. Tabby irritates her and she asks why she hasn’t left yet. Tabby says that she’s sleeping on the couch now and Casey has agreed to let her stay if she pays part of the rent. Kassidy doesn’t like this and confronts Casey about why she didn’t talk to her about it, and Casey says that her father’s company owns the house so she makes the choices. As they are beginning to argue, someone knocks on the door. Esther, still recovering from her ordeal, and annoyed by Casey and Kassidy’s angry flirtation rituals, goes to open it and says that there’s a homeless guy on their doorstep. Casey yells at the guy to get lost but he won’t leave. Kassidy suddenly feels unnatural interest, she gets up to go to the door. The guy is DISGUSTING, smells like actual shit, dirty, rotting teeth, scrawny, ragged clothes. As a medical professional (lol) she recognizes that the guy has a severe septic infection in one eye and tells him he needs to go to the hospital. The guy is muttering to himself, crazy things, not lucid at all. He Looks at Kassidy with his one good eye and starts talking crazier, trying to comfort himself, calls her Cathy (LMFAO she thinks that he is saying “Kassie” with a lisp) and starts apologizing to her and talking about something inside of her. Casey becomes protective, pushes him away from Kassidy, tells him to get lost before she beats him into the ground. Tabby finally gets her lazy ass up to deal with the problem and tells him to scram. The guy looks at her, calls her by her name, and tells her that he had to find her. He says he had to find her, something’s coming, something’s coming, saying that something is ‘talking to him again’, something from the Rift. Tabby then recognizes him and tells them that this is her brother Tony, who she thought was dead. Despite this reunion, Tabby does not react with huge emotion. Kassidy feels jealous bitterness twist inside of her-- after all, her brother is dead, he’s not coming back. 

16: Smiles, BG, Lady, Echo, and a few other A-Class agents go on a mission to the Prison District to help subdue a riot. It seems that there have been more and more riots and violence over the last couple years. Smiles makes this comment and BG scoffs and says that he wouldn’t be saying that if he had been active during B-Day. Smiles has no memories of the bombings, that was before his time. This riot was in response to an act of brutality by a prison guard against an inmate, and now the prisoners have taken over a cell block. They meet the Warden (Hax...reeeeeeeeeee), who gives off bad vibes and is just as casually cruel as everyone else Smiles deals with. The secret police go to the cell block that inmates have taken over and start fuckin...bashing people, they work together effectively. Lady asks Smiles why he and Pete don’t get rid of the dead weight on their team and replace them with A-Class agents, which Smiles ignores. She gives him the creeps. An inmate gets the jump on Lady and knocks her out (as a psychic, she is physically fragile) and Smiles protects her with his bubbles. BG goes into a rage and kills several inmates, which they weren’t supposed to do. He begrudgingly thanks Smiles, says he owes him one,  and Smiles tells BG he would rather keep Lady alive so that she can make BG and Echo suffer than giving her the mercy of killing her.

17: Kassidy calls on Marty to help her research the pages of the 15 pages of the BOOK that had showed up on the internet in Eden 2 years ago. She is trying to not get involved with the house drama of Tabby’s brother Tony showing up. Casey, generous and curious as ever, took him to a street doctor to get him fixed up -- they had to remove his eye and teeth because of the rot and give him new ones. The rest of the girls are interested in the Tony drama, especially because of the murder that he claims to be responsible for but didn’t actually commit, but Kassidy feels something strange when she looks at him and the way he reacted to her when they first met made her uneasy. Marty is naturally suspicious of Tony and claims that it’s unsafe for them to have let a random dangerous man stay with them, like wtf is wrong with them, but as usual, Casey’s word on the matter was final. Casey is really causing a lot of problems. Why aren’t they worried about living with a guy who may or may not have killed someone? WELL, it’s because they already live with a girl who has DEFINITELY killed people before. Kassidy and Marty haven’t hung out much since they were teenagers and Marty seems glad to spend time researching with her. Neither of them want to mention Kip but Marty drops a few hints that he feels guilty about something that happened back then and mentions someone named Lee-- Kassidy tells him to drop it, it doesn’t matter because Kip is dead. The blood magic religion seems to have spread like crazy over the last 2 years. Marty says that there’s something similar in his Colony, remnants from a nearby town called Blagodat, that was wiped out by the military over 20 years ago. Marty doesn’t know too much about this town, only that they were all blood magic practitioners and had a black pyramid and that the owl-masked priest did something to the Princess of the North to make her monstrous. He saw the terrible Princess briefly 10 years ago before she was killed by another blood magic practitioner named Olive. He also knows about rumors about something called the Lost Colony where blood magic stuff was rumored to have destroyed it, which Kassidy has not heard of, but it gives her a chill. Marty says that in the North, there have always been rumors of a weapon there, and that 200 years ago the last democratic leader (Frank Toussaint….who Silas fuckin let Jerry eat, bitch) went there to investigate and never came back. Ever since then, the Northern Territories have been shit. Kassidy says that it’s hard to get much information about the outside world because of Eden’s political stances, but they’ve learned more because after B-Day, they had to bring laborers in from the Colony of Serenity to help rebuild. Kids in Eden are taught that the outside world is a terrible, dangerous place that is full of monsters (it is) and that the Rift emits weird toxic rays. Marty bitterly says that because of Eden’s trade embargo and isolationism, his Colony has suffered 200 years of starvation and war. He tells Kassidy he will find out more info about the Lost Colony and the blood magic town of Blagodat, if he can.

18: A meeting of the Central Committee, the people who govern Eden. Sashi, who has filed more charges of corporate corruption against the mega-corporations belonging to West, Rome, and Gena Voorst, is called to give a statement about it. Her findings on how much power private companies have in Eden get a stir from everyone. Dana Nguyen is included in this but hates participating. Mayor Malena talks about cracking down on Agapama shipping to and from other Colonies, as he is concerned about drugs being trafficked in, particularly stimulants. Dana is asked what she thinks should be done about the influx of violent crime, but she is hungover and unprepared. A group of civilians have signed a petition about the number of missing children in Eden over the years, but the Committee does not take this seriously since most of them agree that it is likely due to human trafficking to other Colonies and again blame Agapama-- they want to use this as an excuse to crack down on private corporations. The Central Committee begins talking about the pros and cons of moving to Nationalize the corporations and what it would look like for Eden to be completely self-sufficient, and ways that they can cease trade. They have ceased trade with one Colony (The Northern Territories) before, about 200 years ago. Sashi is told that she can leave since she is done presenting her findings. As she walks out, a quiet and normal looking woman she has never seen before and who said nothing during the meeting  thanks her for her hard work.

19: At work, Kassidy goes overboard while assisting with an autopsy and mutilates the corpse. Her supervisor asks her what’s been going on, she looks sick and her work has been getting worse. Kassidy evades the question, her mind filled with images of rotting flesh. Her supervisor asks if she needs time off and Kassidy says no, it’s just her home life is chaotic because of her idiot roommate’s insane decision to bring random people into their home. She has not forgotten that Tony may have allegedly murdered his pregnant wife even though the official story is that Cathy killed herself and the only reason she has not turned him in is because she’s scared of Casey and Tabby. Kassidy goes on break and practices blood magic, she has scanned all of the pages of the Book (BIG MISTAKE) so that she can look at them anywhere and so that she could share them with Marty. It’s 3am. Esther calls her and asks if she’s heard from Rosie, since she didn’t come home yet, but Kassidy has heard nothing. She tries to be comforting to her friend who is worried, but is not very good at it. At this point, Kassidy can completely understand the Book and looks at a spell that can help you find someone. She thinks about using it, but does not.

20: Smiles learns that he has lost 3 days of time. Pete is beyond angry at him and tells him that Nickels and Johnny are terrified because he hasn’t been acting like himself, he has been completely out of it. Smiles says that’s bullshit.. The last thing that Smiles can remember is being on a simple surveillance mission, watching the Mayor give a press conference to a bunch of journalists (psycho violin noise...yes he saw Lee Harlan). He does not know why that upset him. He tells Pete again that he would never hurt anyone on the team on purpose, that he didn’t do anything. She tells him that’s not an excuse and that he is responsible for his own actions and says that he needs to go to the infirmary because there is clearly something wrong with him. Smiles says there’s something wrong with everyone in the program, idiot, they were all kidnapped as children and tortured and forced to hurt others. Pete has a lot of problems with his leadership and believes he is not doing a good enough job.  The staff member October, comes and tells Smiles that he is taking him Upstairs for re-education, because his behavior has been troubling to staff. Smiles does not remember this but knows better than to fight it. Pete is like wait, he didn’t do anything, why can’t you help him instead? Smiles realizes that she thinks he is crazy. October is mean to Smiles as he takes him Upstairs and Smiles fantasizes about how easy it would be to kill him. Smiles gets strapped to a chair in a little room and Lady comes in to hurt him and get into his brain. Lady tells Smiles that he is all fragmented inside, that she knows deep down inside he is vulnerable like a child. Smiles tells her that he shouldn’t be responsible for things he can’t remember and Lady tells him that he’s not special, she can’t remember anything lol and then Lady begins to torture him by bringing back painful memories. The last thing he sees is an explosion contained by one of his bubbles, and he blacks out.

21: Rosie has not returned for 3 days at this point and is not answering her phone, and Esther is beside herself. Despite the Monster no longer following her, she seems really unstable, and she is like well, you would feel unstable too if you lost something/someone who you grew up with. Well, Kassidy does know the feeling of losing someone she grew up with. Esther goes to her parent’s house because she needs support from her dad and siblings. Casey had unthinkingly made a joke that Rosie probably couldn’t deal with Esther being so high maintenance and left her, but they’ve been dating on and off since high school and during short break ups before, Rosie always talked it out with Esther. Kassidy and Marty talk about their theories about the Lost Colony and blood magic. Tony is there, but weird and zoned out as usual, Kassidy thinks he is a huge freak and feels uncomfortable with him living in their attic but can’t fight Casey on it. Marty gets a guy he knows, Anatole Surkhov, to talk to Kassidy about his experiences, because he has explored a lot due to being in the Army. The cast of weird adults Marty seems to live with is well known, especially by Ayda and Casey, they have talked to them all before-- especially Jules and Flick. It is evident that Marty doesn’t have any friends his own age where he lives, and it seems kind of sad. Anatole takes blood magic seriously and seems annoyed with Marty because he is busy. But he briefly talks about what the cultists of Blagodat and their black pyramid did to his territory, destroying the landscape with hideous fleshy pits, poisoning the water and turning people into monsters (YEAH. proof that people are trying to ‘turn people into monsters’ i.e. Rosie, and Lee etc etc), and says that when he was a child, his people eradicated them. Suddenly Tony speaks up and asks if they killed the women and the children as well, a strange look on his face, a sadness. Anatole says that there were some survivors, and that is why the North continues to have problems with blood magic, and it is one of his goals to destroy these people…..as well as witches lol…Then he says something to Marty in another language and leaves. Kassidy asks Tony what that was all about, Tony is evasive and tells them to stop messing around with stuff they don’t understand, it destroyed his life and it will destroy theirs as well. Kassidy and Marty, bastards that they are, say that’s probably because he killed his wife/why she killed herself. Tony does not deny this (wahhh he feels guilt for Cathy’s death) but repeats that they shouldn’t be messing around with things they don’t understand. He asks Kassidy where she even learned all the stuff about blood magic and Kassidy feels defensive/evasive and says that there are 15 weird pages about it on the internet, that she found out about it from an advertisement from the Church. 

22 While Kassidy was asleep, Rosaline returned. It has been a whole week. She seems guilty and apologetic, saying that one of the medical projects she does for extra money went a little wrong and she had to stay at the hospital. She looks sick. Esther is beside herself and wants to reach out to her mom for help, but Rosaline firmly says she does not want to do that. Rosaline can’t stop throwing up black stuff and her eyes look weird. Kassidy feels strange but has to get ready for work, these days she does not leave the Book around because she doesn’t trust Tony. Tabby takes one look at Rosaline and says that there’s something fucked up about her and demands to know what kind of testing she was doing. Rosie says she doesn’t want to get into it all, but she made about $5,000. Tabby rants about how you can’t trust the intelligentsia, that the scientists in Eden do all kinds of messed up things to people, and basically starts talking about conspiracy theories about how the government steals children and does bad things to people (dude if Tabby was real, she would be like a weirdo Q-anon freak). Kassidy gets out of there and goes to work. Cihad Tariq is still at the hospital again despite it being 11 and he checks in with her and says she looks sick, genuinely worried. Kassidy realizes that his accent sounds like Anatole’s (Russian. The Northern Territories are divided by language-- English, French, and Russian. So CT has a light russian-accent, he is scary). Rudely, she asks Cihad where he was born, because she figures that he might be from up there, possibly from the destroyed town of Blagodat, and that is where the Book came from. Cihad tells her that is not appropriate and that he does not appreciate her pushing his boundaries like that. Kassidy has the Book in her backpack and Cihad’s red eyes linger on it. It’s clear that he is about to ask her about it, but then gets a call (from Silas, but Kassidy doesn’t know that) that upsets him, and he says he has to leave. Kassidy, angry at him because she knows that he knows what she has done, tells him that when she was a kid, her mom used to always be at work too, so maybe he should think about his daughter.

23: Kassidy wakes up with a bloody nose and finds that one of her fingernails is flaking off. She opens up the BOOK, and has become really possessive of it. There is a passage in it that talks about bringing the dead back to life. Kassidy fixates on that. She allows herself to think about bringing her brother back from the dead and reads over the passage again and again. She goes downstairs to hang out. Esther is like, “hey Kassidy, did you see Ben got out of prison?” and we see Kassidy get angry but it’s not really elaborated on who Ben is or why this is significant. Ayda is talking about her new crush, some guy she met online and everyone roasts her for this LOL. Casey comments on how much Kassidy has been eating lately (like crazy amounts) but says she looks like she’s lost weight and is pushing boundaries again. Kassidy feels irritable and snaps at her by trying to say something hurtful, but Casey is immune to it. She asks Marty if he’s found out anything new about the Lost Colony, and he says no, then asks her if she’s learned anything about it from reading the BOOK, because he is literally autistic he never really ‘got’ that Kassidy wanted to hide that from Tony like everyone else did.  Tony freaks out and says that he knew it, he fucking knew that the BOOK was here, he had Seen its presence on Kassidy. Tony basically loses his mind and starts ranting about Cathy and gets up to go to Kassidy’s room to try and destroy the BOOK, saying that they were all in danger, blah blah blah. Casey thinks this is terribly funny, but it’s scaring Ayda. Kassidy feels rage she hasn’t felt in years and tries to physically take it back from him but Tony is bigger than she is, even though he is weak as shit, he is stronger than she is. He attempts to tear it to shreds, to rip out the pages, but is unable to, then starts raving about how he is going to take it and leave. Kassidy attacks him with blood magic in front of everyone, takes the BOOK back and tells him that she will kill him if he ever does that again. Tony starts laughing hysterically and talking crazy about how this was fate, that ‘IT’ has set everything up because ‘IT’ wants to kill him, that he never should have left the sewers, that this was ‘IT’s’ plan, that they were all going to die because this little girl wanted to mess around with things she didn’t understand. Casey asks Kassidy wtf is wrong with her because seeing someone use blood magic is fucked up, but Kassidy just tells her that she wants the Delmonts to leave or else she will, and that Casey needs to choose between these people who she views as entertainment or Kassidy, her friend of many years. Casey hesitates for a beat too long. Then Kassidy pushes past her and leaves the house.

24: Smiles and the gang all innocently watch the news in the breakroom. An interview with Rome Prospas comes on where he talks about his economic plans and his company. Johnny  is massively triggered by this because Rome looks exactly like him and it is clear that they are related. Johnny, someone who can’t handle rejection, wants to know why his family didn’t want him, like what was wrong with him that made his family not want him. Did they not love him? Smiles and Pete are not helpful and tell him that recruits are always kidnapped, so he shouldn’t worry about his family not wanting him. There has always been this problem of them not knowing how to deal with an Artificial. He has a hysterical BPD meltdown and leaves. Nickels tells them good job, he’s going to go hurt himself, and Smiles says that he’s sick of having to constantly look out for his younger squadmates and at some point you have to learn how life is and toughen up because he is not going to be around to protect them forever.. He does not actually feel this way, but it’s getting harder and harder and he is so frustrated at this point. Nickels says he can go fuck himself, because they’re all  always watching out for Smiles. Pete takes her side, and Smiles is troubled by how close they’re getting (NICKELS JUST WANTS TO TOUCH SOME TITTIES). Smiles goes to work out with Creedo, an old team mate of his. He asks her how she deals with her own shitty teammate, Pills. Creedo grudgingly tells him that she’s the closest thing she has to family and that weaker agents get Retired faster, so it’s better to care about them while you can. Their lives are so bad and so short. They take out their aggression on each other, then go to the dining hall to get a snack because they can’t stand their own teams LOL. There is some weird sexual tension between Smiles and Creedo, but also they can’t stand each other and can’t work with each other. They listen in to some of the missions getting assigned for the next few shifts, mostly recon, but it looks like squads are getting assigned a raid at a blood magic church. Smiles and Creedo agree that blood magic is the biggest problem in Eden right now and they are scared of it and don’t understand it. A staff member passes by and insinuates something bad happened with Johnny. Creedo and Smiles agree that their teammates are all they have in this place. . Frustrated, Smiles leaves her to go find his teammate. He finds him, it’s clear that Johnny is too young and mentally ill to understand he doesn’t deserve to get hurt and doesn’t understand why people act so horrible to him (well, it’s because he is different). Smiles clumsily apologizes and says that of course his family wanted him, Smiles explains the recruitment process (we see how eaten up by guilt he is for having participated in this in the past). He asks Johnny if he wants to know more about his family. Johnny says no, but Smiles knows he is lying. Smiles thinks about what he would do if he knew that he had a family out there.

25: Kassidy falls asleep at work and has dreams of the planet eating monster ripping a hole through dimensions and of a bright comet shooting through the sky and crashing into the Earth.. She wakes up and realizes that she didn’t hear a patient’s call button and that they are dead. Kassidy is not bothered by death, only by the fear that she may get in trouble. She contemplates death and finally allows herself to think about her dead brother Kip and what he would tell her to do. She re-reads the passage in the Book about bringing the dead back to life (Also….this is the spell that Reuben used to bring all of the Immortal gang back permanently…). Marty messages her and asks why she hasn’t just turned Tony in to the police, since he is still wanted for murder. Kassidy hates cops and hates Eden’s justice system-- after all, it is what unfairly got her brother killed all those years ago. She goes home and Tony is there. He apologizes to her. He tells her about his past, about how he abandoned his wife and baby due to fear of the slime creatures and sensing the Book’s presence for the first time in the hospital, his own experience with addiction, then how he reunited with his family and watched as Cathy became consumed with researching the Book and the Void, that it formed something inside her body and was killing her, and that she killed herself, leading to him hiding in the sewers for 2 years. He says that he does not want that to happen to Kassidy, or to anyone ever again. He talks about evil, true evil, evil that is hungry. Tony asks Kassidy if she understands how devastating it is to lose someone. Kassidy does understand. She accepts his apology, but says that she is going to continue looking into blood magic. Tony tells her that he will help her, but that his reasons are different than hers (see if he can do anything to destroy the BOOK/monster).

26: Sashi continues to research bullshit corporate crime going on in Eden. She tries to get one of West Agapama’s daughter’s, Cassiopeia -- a known enforcer in his organization-- to come in for an interview, but typical Casey does not cooperate and will not without a warrant. Still, Sashi has compiled mountains of shit on the corruption within the megacorporations, as well as the economic impact it has had on the people of Eden. She’s working hard. She goes out to lunch with her wife, Kelsey, who is also a cop, but not a detective. They talk about their days. They are thinking about having a baby together. A nice moment. Sashi goes back to her office to work. And then...fucking....Silas shows up. Sashi is very confused about who this person is, exactly, but feels like she is probably high up in the government since she was at the Central Committee meeting. Again, Silas tells her that she appreciates her hard work investigating corruption in Eden. Sashi thanks her and then politely asks her who she is. And lmao, Silas just tells her that she has worked ‘behind the scenes for a long time’, which is...a little unsettling to hear. Silas asks Sashi about her ambitions, and Sashi truthfully says that she wishes she could get a promotion so that her salary is higher, because she and her wife would like to start a family. Silas is kind of quiet and awkward, but nice to talk to. Silas asks if she thinks that Dana Nguyen would promote her, and Sashi sort of slips up and says that she does not believe Dana likes her. Silas, in a roundabout way, asks Sashi in her opinion, as someone whose job it is to research corruption, is Dana Nguyen corrupt/not loyal to Eden. Sashi truthfully tells her that she might be, and talks about some of the stuff she has observed (her behavior, her closeness to Vega, the fact that her son Christopher was part of a terrorist organization)-- she really believes that Silas must be someone very high up on the food chain. Silas just listens, then thanks Sashi and leaves. Sashi sits in her office and thinks about how weird that was. She continues to work, then leaves at the end of her shift, passing a truly miserable looking Dana on the way out. She goes to bed, and when she wakes up, she sees an email that says that she has been promoted from mere Detective, to Detective Superintendent.

27: Rosaline is still sick, so she and Esther travel down to the Lower Levels to visit Rosie’s old guardian, Barbara Church. Kassidy, Marty, and Tony all discuss what they know so far about the Book, the Lost Colony, and Blagodat. Kassidy tells them that she believes that her boss, Cihad Tariq, is involved somehow-- he is a foreigner and owned the Book to begin with, and she believes he brought it to Eden with him. Tony scoffs and says he knows all about Cihad Tariq, that they have a...history and that he needs to be avoided for more reasons than his blood magic. Kassidy is like WTF why is everything connected, and Tony talks about his belief in fate/something bigger than them manipulating/pulling the strings. Marty says that it’s strange that someone could have traveled so far to Eden with the Book and be allowed to live there, and even go to school and rise to such an important job. Kassidy says that she could just ask him, and Tony says that she needs to leave Cihad alone, he was involved with sketchy things (Silas…) and probably still is. Tony tells them that Cihad raised his daughter with Cathy and that they think he’s dead and he wants it to stay that way. When Kassidy mouths off, he asks her how she would feel if her mom suddenly came back into her life. Kassidy says she never told him about her bad relationship with her mom and Tony says that he picks up on things, he just knows things, he can See things, he’s a psychic but tries to give people their privacy. Kassidy thinks about how it isn’t fair that some people were born with Abilities and she is powerless and grows more determined to use more blood magic despite the side effects.

28: Anatole returns to the destroyed blood magic town of Blagodat because Marty would not stop asking him to show it to him. Dog is with him, and so is Marty’s guardian , a witch named Jules. Also along is a survivor of the town whose name is Olive. Jules and Dog have a weird dynamic where it’s clear they like each other, but nothing is ever going to happen. It is very tender and loving even though Jules is a literal bitch to everyone else. Blagodat is less than 50 miles away from the nearest Territory, but Anatole is watchful. He carries his father’s sword, which is forged of starmetal and was enchanted by Jules. There is not much left of the blood magic town. Marty investigates the place where the black pyramid once stood, and excitedly talks in English to his virtual friends, Kassidy and Tony in Eden. Olive says that she is just glad she survived that night, even though her life got worse afterwards.. Jules spits on the ground to guard herself against evil and tells Anatole that they need to leave. Anatole remembers the day that his father led men to destroy this place. When he approaches the ruins of the black pyramid temple, his sword begins to vibrate and hum. He spots something hauling itself through the rubble and tells Marty to get off the phone because they need to leave. It’s a grotesque twisted disgusting hungry creature, a leftover of what occurred to 90% of humanity when the RIFT opened 800 years ago. It attacks them. They (except Marty) work together to destroy it.. Marty is shaken by seeing one of these semi-human things for the first time and asks how many of them there are in the world and if they are the same thing as the slime creatures he has heard about. Anatole does not know the answer to this. He tells Marty that these creatures are the reason that the Northern Territories are so isolated-- The North is very close to the Lost Colony that lies to the east and these things are drawn to it and the surrounding area. Marty accuses him of being a liar, he lied to him and Kassidy when they were asking about the Lost Colony. He gets worked up and has a seizure, Jules asks him what he saw and Marty will not tell her. Anatole tells him that there are things he is better off not knowing about, and he should be grateful for his ignorance and how he has been so protected. Jules whispers about the great serpent, a witch named Stasya. Anatole’s mind is drawn to the Lost Colony and what happened there. 

29: Kassidy goes back to the blood magic church in the Lower Levels and finds Helen. She tells her that she has been practicing blood magic and Helen seems surprised to learn that she’s been doing it without a teacher. They talk about power, and lacking power. Kassidy opens up a little about growing up poor and getting bullied by other kids, and Helen relates to this (HEAVILY imply that Helen did something to get rid of a man who had hurt her a few months ago and that is one of the reasons that lately weird things have been happening in Eden, why people are angrier and more violent). Kassidy asks about the possibility of bringing the dead back to life, and classic psycho religious person Helen says that it is a matter of faith. She invites Kassidy to become a member of the Church but Kassidy still finds all religion creepy. She wants to know if it’s possible to become very good at blood magic without a teacher and Helen tells her no, which is why she should join the Church. Helen tells her that things are about to get better in Eden because God is about to come back, God just needs a human body. Kassidy remembers what Tony said happened to Cathy and feels very afraid. She gets up to leave, but Helen grabs her by the hand and asks her if she has seen God, and then talks about looking into the VOID. Kassidy tells her to let go of her, but Helen won’t. She keeps asking her if she has seen God, talking crazy stuff about how society needs to be rebuilt and how every Artificial is an abomination, and how Bomb Day had been a great cleanse and sacrifice. She notices that Kassidy’s eyes have not turned red, despite using blood magic, Kassidy’s eyes are still black. Kassidy attacks her with her blood magic and escapes the Church, then passes out on the train. She realizes that she left her ID there. AND THEN….REPULSIVE SEX SCENE LOL Kassidy just wants to feel in control and bangs some random girl.

30: Smiles and his squad are sent to the blood magic church to take in Helen Guttierez. Information says that she has been causing disorder and is personally responsible for the deaths of 3 people, partially responsible for the deaths of far more. Blood magic did not exist in Eden only a few years previously, and the Central Committee has just ruled that it is illegal and punishable by death. The Squad is uneasy and scared of blood magic, they have seen what it can do. They break into the Church. It’s the middle of the night. Helen is still awake and they find her...doing...something. Surrounded by candles, in front of an altar, naked, covered in blood. There is a mutilated body in front of her. Smiles and co are like wtf. Helen is clearly having some kind of religious euphoria, talking to Something (the god of the rift) saying that she knows it is there, it’s in Eden, and that she has seen it. The Squad interrupts her prayers. Smiles is like, you’re coming with us, lady. Helen tells him that she is done doing what others tell her to do. Smiles bubbles her and she easily breaks it, then summons HUGE slime monsters to come and attack them. Big fight, and the Squad is losing badly. Helen sees Johnny, her face twists in hatred, she says that such aberrations should not exist and that soon there will be no more Artificials. She starts hurting him badly, then does something that turns him against them (setting up the future thing where Artificials all go crazy). 2 of her church members bust in. Pete has her hands full with restraining JVP. Nickels’s nose is bleeding like crazy as she uses her powers and she is growing weaker. Smiles is like, uh oh, I think we’re all going to die...And they are all overpowered by the blood magic. Helen is like, did you really think you could fight the power of god? God is here. She takes him to the altar, it’s pretty clear that his guts are about to get spilled. Smiles thinks that it’s ironic that he is going to die like this instead of from a bullet to the head. Nickels saves the day by opening her mind to Lady. BG’s Squad busts in and is easily able to wipe the floor with the cultists. BG tells Smiles that he owed him one anyways for saving Lady in the Prison District. Smiles pushes him away and rushes to check Nickels, who looks like she’s going to keel over, he thanks her for her quick thinking. Nickels is not feeling good, because she just had Lady in her mind, and Lady does some psychic shit to help her. BG is like wtf is wrong with Johnny, because he is still acting crazy, Smiles doesn’t know-- this marks beginning of BG and Johnny friendship. Smiles wanders around the temple. He picks up Kassidy’s ID from the hospital that she forgot the last time she was here, and is compelled to put it in his pocket so that nobody else sees it.

31: Ayda tells everyone to act normal because her friend (NOT CRUSH)  is coming over to talk. They agree to behave. Rosaline is still sick and Kassidy has a conversation with Esther about what they’re going to do if she doesn’t get better, Esther says that she’ll get her family to hire a lawyer and press charges. When Ayda’s friend it’s fucking CIHAD, and oh boy he is fucking pissed.. Kassidy pulls Ayda aside and asks if Cihad came over because of her.. Ayda becomes offended. Tabby comes in and her presence seems to shock Cihad and Kassidy realizes that he sees Tony in Tabby’s face. Kassidy panics and goes to the attic where Tony has been staying and tells him not to leave or freak out because his ex is downstairs. She gives Tony the BOOK because she is in a full paranoia attack. Tony demands she get it away from him, but she leaves him anyway. Cihad calms down, sees Kassidy, and asks her where his BOOK is. Kassidy denies that she has it. Ayda grows upset, with the situation and with herself. Casey thrives in the chaos. Cihad tells Ayda to get the hell away from him (he feels her empathy affecting him), becomes angrier with Kassidy and demands she give him the Book because it belongs to him and has been in his family for a long time. He tells her that he can see she has been using blood magic and that it’s going to kill her, he has always known that she has been using blood magic. Cihad uses his own blood to complete a detection spell to find the BOOK and heads towards the attic. Kassidy tells him he can’t go up there but he ignores her and pushes past her and goes up there. There are screams and lots of noises from the attic. Casey is like, “Good job Ade, you just got Tony killed” LOL because they can’t get up there and it sounds like someone is being murdered. Eventually, Cihad comes down with the BOOK, and they hear him tell Tony to not follow him. Then he tells the girls he never wants to see any of them again, and leaves. They all rush up there to find Tony very freaked out and upset and all he says, miserably, is that he does not understand why he even tries-- there is a fixed, natural order (Fate) in the universe that he can See, and there is no point in fighting what is predetermined. To him, this order/fate will inevitably screw him every time (lol Tony). Kassidy, who is numb and shocked that the BOOK was just taken from her, is not willing to believe that things are predetermined and is not going to give up using blood magic. 

ACT 3

32: Kassidy gets called into work during the daytime. Cihad sits her down and fires her. He tells her that he can’t trust her as an employee because she broke into his office, stole from him, and lied to him. He pauses and tells her to be careful because she doesn’t look well and what she is doing is destroying her body. He doesn’t seem angry anymore, just...disappointed lol. Kassidy feels numb on the train ride home and thinks to herself that now she will have more time to practice blood magic. She looks at her phone and sees that the blood magic church she had gone to has been raided and Helen Guttierez, along with other churchgoers, have been arrested for murder. It is clear that this was secret police and Kassidy feels scared. She almost faints on the train again. She gets home, sits down with Tony, and tells him that she got fired. Tony tells her that he has been fired from a lot of jobs before he got sober. Kassidy already knew he was an alcoholic and thinks about her mother, but doesn’t make the obvious connection to the fact that she is also engaging in addict behavior to cope with her brother’s death. She asks what helped him stop drinking and Tony told her he stopped wanting to die. Kassidy thinks about what CT told her and wonders if she’s dying because at this point what she is doing is compulsive. Esther calls her and tells her that she thinks something’s really wrong with Rosie because they went to see her mom and Dr. Bellamy was acting really weird around Rosie, like she was property, Esther says she thinks she had something to do with it. Little throwaway expository thing about Yancey-- someone Esther already knows vaguely because he works for her mom. Yancey was the one running the clinical trials behind what happened to Rosie.

33: Kassidy goes to her childhood apartment to take some of Kip’s belongings so that she can try to bring him back. The apartment brings back a lot of memories but Kassidy is determined not to feel them. It looks like her mom has not been doing so well, everything is dirty and piled up. She goes into Kip’s bedroom, which has largely been untouched since his death and suppresses her emotions even more. She finds his old jacket, which was very sentimental to him because it belonged to his mom Harry, who ‘committed suicide’. Kassidy also tears everything apart to find his gross old hairbrush that still has his hair in it and an old toothbrush (YES THANK GOD DANA IS DEPRESSED AND A SLOB). She also takes the container that has Kip’s ashes in it, that were given to the family after the execution. She is about to get out, when Dana comes home, extremely drunk, and she is like wtf are you doing here because they have not seen eachother in over 2 years, Dana didn’t even come see her when she graduated nursing school. Kassidy feels disgust and anger towards her mother, she blames her for what happened all those years ago, for not noticing how mentally ill Kip was, for not being around. Dana thinks Kassidy looks like she is dying (she looks really bad) and goes ballistic because she gets angry when she is worried. They get into a terrible fight and Kassidy tells her that she wishes Dana had died instead of Kip. She leaves, wearing her dead brother’s jacket, and allows herself to think about what happened. The BOOK is corrupting and seductive inside of her mind, and she uses blood magic to shove people out of her way. She is angry and full of grief and more determined than ever to be more than the way she was born. She knows she is no longer helpless and will give anything-- even her own life-- to make sure that she does not become powerless again. This is someone who has lost everything and is willing to destroy herself to build herself back up again.

34: Anatole checks in with Florence about the politics in the Northern Territories and grows more frustrated with her. He is tired of the constant struggle and her desire for expansion and believes that their efforts are most useful on their own turf. He is tired of losing people-- the war is over! He just wants to go back to his home Territory of Kimanka but she will not allow it. Florence asks Anatole why he made an expedition to the destroyed blood magic town of Blagodat and asks him if he found anything there-- something that would look like an old BOOK. She has known about the Book for a long time. She takes him to a room and shows him a glass tank of preservative fluids, where she has contained the corpse of the former Princess of the North, a woman killed by Olive 12 years ago, who was a hideous hybrid of human and slime alien. This Princess had been mutated by the Red Priest (CT’s Dad…) as a child. This body is hideous and repulsive and it is proof that it is possible to create bodies that...Entities….can live in without decay and corruption (we think of Tony and the thing that Helen said about God needing a body) Florence asks Anatole about his loyalty. He knows that she has stopped trusting him and his pride is hurt and he leaves. Flick walks up and tells him that she has sent surveillance parties to both Eden and the Lost Colony and that they never came back. He has a tape recorder with radio transmissions from the party that went to the Lost Colony, and plays it, and they listen to a description of a strange device (figure it out-- this is the device that the BOOK wants to strap Tony in so that it can do the Ritual) and then screams. Flick is like, you know everything she told you is real, think about how we need more power if we are ever going to Make our Colony Great Again. Anatole knows that Flick is a manipulator and answers to Florence and does not understand why he would purposefully add to his mistrust of her. He says this, and then beats Flick into the ground for being an untrustworthy rat and messing with his mind. Anatole’s mind turns to rebellion against Florence. He goes to Jules’s house to find Dog (bc Jules and Dog like each other). Marty is there, talking to his little friend Ayda. Anatole finds Dog and Jules, the witch, and straight up asks them if they would support him against Florence if she has gone off the deep end.

35: It is Bomb Day. 7 years ago, in the morning, a group called the UPLF (United People’s Liberation Front) detonated bombs across Eden, leaving 5000 people dead and countless more injured. That same day, Kip Nguyen was arrested and killed (along with 21 other collaborators) for his involvement, despite his innocence. Kassidy can’t think of a better day to bring her brother back from the dead. It seems symbolic to her. The news is broadcasting all kinds of memorials, it is a highly emotional day. Kassidy empties her bank account and buys 153 pounds of meat (correlating to Kip’s weight when he was 18) She reflects on how if she had not been fired from the hospital, she could have taken a human corpse, but according to the Book, flesh is good enough as long as you have DNA from the person you are trying to bring back (Kip’s hair and his toothbrush and his ashes).. Kassidy does some kind of fucked up shit in her room to prepare this ritual that I will figure out later after some more research into necromancy. She has black slime ichor she bought from one of Tabby’s sources on the black market. She cuts herself and loses a lot of blood because a large component of the ritual is sacrifice. Kip’s jacket is there as an emotional connection, since he wore it all the time and loved it. In the background, the news is playing. It is talking about Kip (and the other UPLF terrorists who were caught), how he was a terrible person, blah blah blah. Kassidy lets the BOOK’s power fill her body, letting it have control. She starts talking in the language of the VOID. She completes the ritual.The flesh, the blood, and the black slime come together to form a crawling, whimpering thing but it is not Kip, Kassidy does not know what it is. For a moment she has hope that she brought him back, no matter how disgusting and fucked up, but it isn’t him. The disgusting form squirms in a repulsive, stinking heap. She failed. Kassidy is full of rage and hurt, hating herself for what she perceives to be weakness and failure (JK Kip is alive and that’s why it didn’t work, there was no soul to yank back into the body). She screams and starts wrecking her bedroom. Casey, the only person who was in the house, comes in and sees what she has done and is horrified by it, horrified by what Kassidy has done, horrified by the crawling crying abomination. Kassidy yells at her, telling her to get out, get out, she hates her. She ‘kills’ the barely alive squirming meat monster with blood magic in a very brutal, angry way. The TV has a picture of Kip’s face on it and she knocks it over. Casey holds Kassidy, and in her grief and rage Kassidy hits her again and again, but Casey still holds her. For the first time in years, possibly for the first time since Kip’s death, Kassidy begins to cry. Casey keeps holding her. She picks up Kip’s jacket and puts it on. He is gone. There is nothing she can do about that.

36: Smiles has just been punished and he doesn’t know why. He’s in pain and just wants to lie down. He walks in on Nickels and Pete acting a little too touchy feely and snaps at Pete, telling her that she’s acting irresponsible, taking advantage of someone younger than her, and putting Nickels in danger because of her pyrokinesis. Nickels tells him that she doesn’t understand why everyone else can get what they want and she has to be alone. She just wants to be happy! Smiles asks her if she would think the same thing if he allowed Johnny to act on his crush on him. Nickels says it’s different and they get in a fight, culminating in Nickels going inside of his mind and ripping out a memory of Smiles when he was a child, in some sort of juvenile facility, being bullied and physically hurt by the other kids. Smiles attacks her, tells her that he hates psychics, that he hates people who go into other people’s heads without asking. Nickels fights back, asking if he still thought she was too helpless to make her own choices. Pete gets them apart and yells at both of them. She has always been the most reasonable one. Smiles stomps off and nearly runs into a completely ordinary, frumpy woman named Silas. Silas asks him what the matter is. Smiles is terrified of this woman, he doesn’t understand why she is on the dormitory floors. This is the big boss, Smiles knows that she is behind everything and is the reason that his life is shitty and he suffers all the time. For a second, he lets himself fantasize about killing her, but knows that the punishment he and his team would face would be long and brutal. Silas says that she’s there to see BG, but she is acting very nice and  kind towards Smiles. She offers him a piece of candy and he does not take it. They have a weird, scary conversation that Smiles doesn’t entirely get but he starts to feel like his time is coming to an end and does not want to give them the satisfaction of killing him, but also does not want to kill himself.  

37: The gang holds an intervention for Kassidy LOL. Some people take this more seriously than others. Tabby runs the whole thing because she says that she has a lot of practice having interventions for Tony and for her mom. Very funny moment where Ayda is like “So were those interventions successful?” and Tabby is like “Uh. No.” All the bad things Kassidy has done while using blood magic get laid out in front of her-- getting fired from her job, eating everything in the fridge, getting sick, losing weight, smelling like she is rotting,, dragging 150 pounds of meat into her room (nobody but Casey know why she did that though). Everyone tells her that they care about her and are worried about her and want her to stop using blood magic, they say she can keep doing her research. It seems like everyone has figured out that Kassidy has been pouring herself into this stuff to feel a sense of control, except for Kassidy. However, Kassidy was raised by an addict and starts squirming her way out of trouble and turning it back on everyone else LOL. She is honestly such a bitch and is like, well, if you guys are so worried about me, why aren’t you worried about Rosie, huh? And laying out everything that seems weird about the Rosaline situation, the being missing for days, the sickness, the obviously being experimented on by evil scientists thing. Kassidy is really trying to deflect from her own behavior, very classic. Too bad Rosie is a very solid, honest person. She and Esther kind of look at each other and then Rosie is like “OK…” and transforms into this monster thing. AND EVERYONE ALREADY KNEW EXCEPT FOR KASSIDY bc Rosie doesn’t fucking hide shit unless she doesn’t want to stress someone out more. Rosie is like “Yeah, this is a whole thing, sorry I should have told you but the government is doing some fucked up things to people and they did this to me, I didn’t want to bother you because it seems like you're really going through something right now.” And Kassidy just thinks about how she is literally the only person in the group who does not have some kind of Ability and/or is Artificial. She feels determined to keep using blood magic even if it can’t bring Kip back, because it makes her feel better about herself. 

38: Sashi goes to work. She has been watching the news like crazy, working hard, submitting more evidence of corporate corruption in Eden. Because of her promotion to Detective Superintendent,  she is making more money, and she and her wife Kelsey are going to try for a baby. Sashi feels happy. As she is working, Dana Nguyen calls her into her office. Dana looks fucking rough, she hasn’t been taking care of herself. In Dana’s office, we see a family photograph of her and her dead wife Harry and their children, and Sashi looks at it and feels a moment of pity for this woman, because she can’t imagine losing a partner or a child, even a child who was a terrorist lol. Dana is like, you’ve been working hard, I see. They talk about what Sashi has worked on, all the surveillance and all the numbers crunched. Dana tells her that she agrees with what she has been working on, that she also believes that people like West should not have the kind of power that they have. But then she says that she does not believe that the government of Eden should have that power either. Sashi is like...what are you talking about? Dana gets angrier and angrier as she talks, saying stuff that Sashi doesn’t understand, about always being watched, about how her life has been destroyed. She has been drinking. Dana is like, I remember you were involved in the police union with my wife, all those years ago. Sashi is like, “yeah, Harry, before she killed herself.” And Dana’s face grows cold. Dana is like, “so remind me how you got promoted’ and stupid, truthful Sashi tells her about the day Silas came to her office and talked to her, and talks about how she knows Silas is some kind of high ranking official and how grateful she is to her because now she can finally start a family . And then Dana is like, ‘go pack up your stuff. You’re fired.’ There’s this terrible shock, Sashi is like “WHAT?” Dana repeats herself. Sashi tells her that she can’t do that, and Dana tells her that she can do whatever she wants. Sashi doesn’t understand, feels lost and confused and angry and hurt, having just worked so hard only to get cut down for no reason. Dana is like, “You don’t understand, but I’m helping you. I’m protecting you. Get a new job, do anything you want, just get out of here.” Sashi leaves, feeling numb and betrayed. She passes by chief of staff Vega Pelenato and sees her go into Dana’s office behind her. Sashi remembers everything that she heard about Vega’s dual loyalties and can’t help but wonder if Dana is in West’s pockets as well. She starts to firmly believe that West is paying off Dana and endeavoring to maintain control of the private sector as Nationalization closes in on his corporation. It feels like there is nobody who Sashi can go to, since Dana is at the top of everything. There’s nothing she can do. She thinks about Silas again. Hurt and betrayed, Sashi requests a grievance report from HR and fills it out against Dana.

39: Death Squad spends a shift on surveillance outside of the main gang’s house. They are all very bored and slaphappy because this is a boring mission. They talk about why they were assigned this mission: to drag Rosaline back to the Research and Development floors if it even looks like she’s about to go into hiding. Our goons all think that any Research and Development project is automatically disgusting but they have not been given any information on Rosaline other than to watch her. Smiles watches Kassidy (who is…..wearing Kip’s jacket, sob sob sob) through the sights of his rifle and doesn’t feel anything other than curiosity, because he knows that this girl was at the blood magic church. A staff member radios them to tell them that their location is changed and that they need to go observe the AGA owned warehouse that West keeps his trucks parked in. Smiles is like “what, why?” and staff is like “big things are about to go down, we need to know about movement, weapons, etc”. They get their stuff and travel through the secret little corridors that are all over Eden. Tension between Pete and Smiles. Smiles’s bad leg is troubling him. They pass by one of the secret ways out of Eden, more of a hatch than anything else. Smiles opens it and they look outside at the world. Smiles is like, what if we just left. Pete tells him that’s not funny. Smiles is like they’re going to kill us all anyways, but deep down inside he knows that there is only one way he knows how to live and that’s in the program. Very helpless scene bc even though they’re all in this bad situation, none of them would dare escape. But they look, for a moment. Suddenly BG teleports in and is like wtf are you people doing? Smiles is like “are they fucking keeping eyes on us or something? Is Lady fucking surveilling us?” BG is like uh yeah obviously you people aren’t trustworthy and now she has a connection to your telepath. Someone tells him something over his radio. BG is like, “I gotta take your psychic back to HQ”. The Squad protests. BG tells them they don’t need Nickels for the rest of the mission. Nickels is like BUT I DIDN'T DO ANYTHING. BG is like, yeah but you were thinking it. You thought about it. And grabs her and teleports her out, presumably to be punished for Thought-Crime ™. Pete tells Smiles this is his fault, he is always messing around and getting the rest of them in trouble, he is supposed to protect them. She keeps going. Smiles looks outside again, at the outside world. He asks Johnny if he thinks he is failing to protect them all, if he thinks that he has not done enough to keep them safe. Johnny says no, of course not, and that he knows Smiles is doing everything he can. This is supposed to be a very sweet moment between the two of them. Smiles closes the hatch to the outside and hits a hand hard against his own leg.

40:  Dr. B is troubled by Yancey’s unwillingness to take the only surviving, successful subject of their project in, but he says that it’s better to observe for now. After all, the other living subject from 7 years ago is out living his life. Dr. B tells him that was a mistake and that he should have been terminated. They argue about this in Dr. B’s laboratory. She is worried about her daughter’s connection to the subject. Data has been submitted to Silas. Yancey says that information should have been kept private, but Dr. B keeps nothing from Silas. 

41:  Kassidy realizes that there is nothing for her at home and she has nothing to lose. Kassidy is hungry, so hungry. She goes outside at night and wanders around, wondering if she has lost her mind. She comes across one of the slime creatures and kills it easily with blood magic. Hunger overcomes Kassidy. She ravenously eats the gelatinous body of the creature, and for a while her hunger is sated, but she is horrified by her own behavior. This is usually that moment where someone thinks about how they need help, but Kassidy knows at this point there is nobody who can help her. She just kind of sits there, disgusting, black slime all over her face and hands. Kassidy thinks about calling her mom. There is only one person she knows who knows about this and she calls him. Cihad picks up. Kassidy is like, I’m sorry, I know you hate me, but I don’t know who else can help me. Eternal savior complex guy that he is, Cihad gives Kassidy his address and tells her to come to his house. She rides the subway, thinking about how she is going to probably die soon and wonders if she is OK with that. She arrives at Cihad’s house. It seems so nice and normal. Cihad tells her that she is slowly killing herself, that most people’s bodies cannot handle blood magic. Kassidy says she feels like it’s something more than that. She can feel the BOOK nearby. She asks him where he got it and Cihad carefully says that he has always had it. She’s like, you’re from the town from up North that was destroyed, aren’t you. He says he is. He says that she has to stop using blood magic and tells her that 2 years ago, he watched someone he cared about a lot die a slow, painful death because of this same thing. Kassidy tells him that it isn’t that simple. Deep conversation. Cihad is very different when he is out of boss mode. Then, a child who is presumably Cihad’s/Tony’s daughter and….something….come into the living room. The thing is one of the horrible slime aliens, and it can fucking talk in a human voice and calls Cihad ‘dad’. Kassidy reacts in horror, realizing that Cihad is up to some really dark shit, worse than anything she can imagine, if he is treating one of those things, the same kind of thing that tormented Esther for years, as his child. She’s like, you’re a cultist, you came from that place and infiltrated Eden and brought the BOOK here, you’re evil, this is all your fault, you did this to me, blah blah blah. Cihad, with his terrible red eyes, comforting the little disgusting slime alien that is scared of Kassidy, says “Don’t go. Please. I want to help you.” And Kassidy says “I don’t want your help” and stumbling, runs out.

42: The gang realizes that they are in trouble after Tabby discovers hidden cameras in their home-- this has to do with the Rosaline plot. We really see that Rosie is dealing with her monstrous new nature much better than Kassidy/we see the parallel. Esther receives a summons from the court because her mom is trying to get her committed (Dr. Bellamy trying to control her daughter but in her own way, trying to protect her bc she is aware that danger that is about to come down bc she works with Yancey). Esther is like no no no, I’m not going back to the hospital, there’s nothing wrong with me. Rosie has also received a summons.. Kassidy is the first one to suggest they leave Eden— she feels no connection anyways and wants to see the Lost Colony and CT’s town/the black pyramid. They discuss Marty’s vision of seeing them with him in his Colony. Discussion of pros and cons of leaving that somehow ends up with the majority saying they want to go. Some people (Ayda, Tabby) take more convincing than others. Tabby wants more money and Casey promises her a crazy amount of cash when they get back, she promises Tabby anything she wants. Some (Tony especially lol) want to get far, far away. The saddest thing is that we see that Marty is very excited at the prospect, even though his friends are in danger, and we see how desperately he wants to have real human contact and connection.

43: Preparing to leave Eden. Asking West for one of his trucks. We find out that West has been in contact with people in the North, bypassing Eden’s restrictions with the help of his technopath Percy. West has a lot of foster kids and says some bullshit about wanting to keep them safe from something. Kassidy finds West sinister. She overhears him asking Casey what’s wrong with her/asking her if she’s sick and Casey says something hurtful about Kassidy just looking like that/being ugly (OW but Casey is not tactful and not the best liar). Kassidy doesn’t know why she feels hurt by this, she has always...accepted that she will never be pretty (ow this hurts I feel it). Kassidy goes into the fancy bathroom and looks at herself in the mirror, at how dull her skin has become, the dark circles under her eyes, the weight she has lost, her teeth turning gray and brittle. She looks ugly now. But she thinks, maybe, she hadn’t been so ugly before, even though she had felt that way about herself. Kassidy scrubs at her face. She looks in the mirror. She sees a flash of...of something else. A flash of the planet eating unholy thing that for a long time, she has suspected has been living inside of her body. She recoils in disgust, but what is she supposed to do? She leaves the bathroom to go sit with Esther and Rosie. She asks Rosie how she’s doing, with the whole...being a monster thing. Rosie says that she isn’t a monster and that nothing could make her act in ways that go against her values, no matter what her body has become, no matter what anyone has done to her. It’s frustrating to hear that, because Kassidy feels helpless. She gets up and wanders around, feeling the urge to use blood magic but having to reason to do so. She thinks about the Lost Colony. Are they really doing this? Some of her friends have no skin in this game, and she wonders why they would even decide to put themselves in danger. The Lost Colony. The Lost Colony. Bodies, being in the wrong bodies. Kassidy feels like there is something so wrong with her body. 

44: Preparing to leave Eden. Gathering belongings, making calls. The only one who has nobody to call is Kassidy. She wonders if she cares.

45: The gang packs up and gets into one of West’s trucks. Most of them hide in the back. This should be normal, after all, AGA ships things to the neighboring Colonies of Green River and Serenity all the time. Tabby and Casey in the front, everyone else in the back. Kassidy can feel the thing inside of her grow excited, like it wants to leave Eden. She starts getting sick, leaking black goo from her mouth and ears. They arrive at Eden’s entrance and there is a checkpoint. Secret police. They start asking Tabby questions, Tabby says that they can look at the schedule and that it says that they have prior permission for this shipment. Ayda and Tony start panicking because they can psychically feel that it’s over and they know what’s up. Smiles tells them that there’s a new law and that there are to be no more shipments to or from Eden. He tells them that he knows there are people in the back of the truck and tells them that they’re all under arrest for human trafficking and orders them all out of the truck. They all get out, line up. Vague menacing energy from the Death Squad psychos. Everyone is terrified that they’re about to get shot in the street, especially Kassidy, who has a horrible fear of these people. Scary moment where one of them is like  “Hey, aren’t these those people we were running ops on the other day???” One of them (it’s Nickels lol what a bitch) starts to harass Kassidy, saying that she looks sick and saying that she’s a blood magic user aka shoot on sight, and starts to get rough with Kassidy. Casey is the first one to go ballistic and attack (Casey vs Nickels and Pete, Esther vs Smiles, Rosie vs JVP). Tony pulls Kassidy back into the truck with Ayda, Marty gets into the system to try and force the gates open idk anything about technology I will figure out how later.. Kassidy uses blood magic to incapacitate Pete (because we literally can’t have someone who can incinerate everyone in this fight lol) and this seems to piss the rest of them off. Nickels freaks out when Pete goes down and starts trying to get to Ayda’s mind to put her down. Gate starts to open. Rosaline transforms and beats the shit out of JVP and his helmet gets knocked off and she realizes that this is a 15/16 year old child and is like UH GUYS…right before he brutally stabs her and uses his Artificial strength to put her down but she’s gonna be OK don’t worry. Cihad shows up huffing and puffing in his scrubs and crocs out of nowhere, yelling at Smiles and co to stand down and is like WAIT STOP STOP, and this throws them off a little bit. Smiles crushes Esther’s arm in a bubble after she shocks him. Gate opens more, everyone gets in the truck and Tabby starts to floor it. Cihad starts using blood magic to pull them back. Tony is losing his fucking mind, like we have to get out, we have to go, we have to go! They really are all gonna die. This is scary. Smiles looks at Kassidy and freezes. Kassidy uses her last ounce of strength to lash out with blood magic against Cihad and his hold on the truck is broken. We see in his face that he knows that the Entity is living inside of her body (THIS IS THE REAL REASON HE WAS TRYING TO KEEP THEM FROM LEAVING). Kassidy passes out and stops breathing, her heart stops beating,  and Casey gives her CPR to save her life and ends up snapping her few ribs

46: Smiles is taken to a room and is interviewed by Silas about how he fucked up and how he failed and how he is stupid and how he sucks. Getting shocked has jarred something loose in his mind, not a memory, but a clarity about a piece of himself that he has protected for all these years-- his sense of self is conflicted. Smiles is thinking oh boy, this is it, she’s about to tell me I’m getting Retired. But nobody ever gets a warning for that. He straight up asks Silas if this is it, if this is the end. Silas tells him no, no, she needs him. Smiles is like…. Sometimes I wish you would just kill me….because at the end of the day, he would rather be the first one to die on his team. And Silas tells him to get out. Smiles returns to his dorm, and it’s clear that his team all thought they were never going to see him again. Heartwarming reactions from Nickels and JVP to show how much they truly love and were worried about Smiles. Pete isn’t disappointed but she had been amping herself up to be team leader lol. She bursts into tears when she sees that he is OK. Smiles thinks about the outside world and thinks about the people who just got out of Eden. He remembers the things that have been done to him. He remembers the things that have been done to his little family. He tells them all that he isn’t going to let them die here. He can’t lose them. The ID of the woman Kassidy Nguyen is still hidden in his room. He looks at it and to his horror, he feels some kind of familiarity and believes that he must have known her before joining the program. He tosses the ID to Pete and asks her to burn it. Pete does so. 

47: Some random loser journalist named Lee Harlan is bored and depressed and his life sucks. He has chronic horrific migraines and scars at his hairline. He thinks about different stories he could write and really doesn’t have much inspiration. Just a normal guy. Then he goes to sleep and goes into a VOID hallucination where he is tormented by a version of a 13 year old Marty who he beats to death with a rock, he just starts bashing him over and over while Not-Marty calls him a pervert and a creep and he says that he is not. Not-Marty reminds him that it is his fault that Kip Nguyen is dead. He ‘wakes up’ but he is still in the Void. He can’t get out. It’s like this every time he goes to sleep. He wakes up for real and tries to kill himself by slitting his wrists. It doesn’t work. It never works, he always just heals. Pain and guilt. Nothing matters. There is nothing that matters. Lee turns on the news and sees that a bunch of people were shot for trying to get out of Eden. He sees their faces on the news as Police Commissioner Dana Nguyen talks about the incident in a way that is very broken lol. He knows this isn’t real. Lee does some bullshit smart person internet thing that I will think up later because I am stupid and he finds traces of Marty. And suddenly….Lee does not want to die any more.

48: The gang rides down the road in the truck together, shaken by what has happened. There is a 10 hour trip in front of them and none of them have been outside of Eden, this is exhilarating and terrifying. Kassidy is barely conscious and in pain. Technically she just died, her heart had stopped beating, only brought back by the simultaneously violent and loving act of CPR. She is slipping away and nobody is noticing. She is gently held by Tony. She has memories of Cathy, a person she never met, because the Book has memories of Cathy. Kassidy realizes that they have made a mistake by leaving Eden, this is what the thing inside of her wants, it wants to get out. It wants to go back to the Lost Colony and has been making her interested in that place the whole time. She tries to say this but is unable to. Kassidy fully slips away. The Book is in control now. It sits up, despite the injuries in its body and the harm it is doing to Kassidy. IT TAKES OFF KIP’S JACKET. It tells Tony that it is hungry and asks him if he has anything to eat. And from far, far away, Kassidy sees Tony realize that it is fully in control.

#writing #planning

[sasarahsunshine]

SSA Adrian Lacey

Everybody meet my new Criminal Minds OC! My chaotic gay son who is the newest pretty boy on the block. He’s a walking disaster and is the bane of Hotch’s existence (lmao). He flirts with everyone: nobody's safe. He’s loyal to a fault and will die protecting those he loves. He’s also really, really dumb. But like, everyone loves him anyway. He’s an avid collector of Polaroids that he takes himself (of crime scenes, random people, the team, selfies, dogs, doesn’t matter). And he loves chocolate <3 His nickname is Apollo!

I’m not 100% sure yet who I want to pair him with, but I’m heavily leaning towards Spencer. Something about two twinks together just makes me happy idk.

More moodboards for him under the cut!

#sarah posts #Adrian Lacey #new OC!! #I’ve spent the last two hours making his Pinterest board and making moodboards for him #I love him so much already #he’s a good dumb boy #like a big puppy #criminal minds #criminal minds OC #criminal minds x OC #OC #new OC #criminal minds fandom #I might ship him with either Spencer or Luke?? #he’s bisexual but leans heavily for men so idk #maybe even Hotch cause like #he’s not in the same world as Kassidy I don’t think #we’ll see #sarah rambles

[wrestlingisfake]

AEW Fake Rankings, 5/16/2021

Men's singles division - babyfaces

Darby Allin

Cody Rhodes

Orange Cassidy

PAC

Hangman Page

Christian Cage

Lance Archer

Sammy Guevara

Dustin Rhodes

Jake Hager

Men's singles division - heels

Kenny Omega (AEW men's world champion, Impact world champion, AAA mega champion)

MJF

Miro (AEW TNT champion)

Brian Cage (FTW champion)

Matt Hardy

Shawn Spears

Anthony Ogogo

QT Marshall

Powerhouse Hobbs

Nick Comorotto

Unranked: Alex Reynolds, Christopher Daniels, Colt Cabana, Danny Limelight, Dante Martin, Frankie Kazarian, Lee Johnson, MT Nakazawa, Wardlow

It feels premature to rank Darby Allin so highly. But given that Chris Jericho's hurt, Kenny Omega's a heel, and Jon Moxley's chasing the tag title, I can't argue any other babyface is ahead of him. Cody's clout and presentation goes a long way, but that only goes so far when he's been barely been on TV and feuding with QT's band of trainees. AEW deserves a lot of credit for giving Allin the ball and letting him run with it. Even though he just lost the TNT title to Miro, his chase to get it back ought to be even hotter than his run as champion.

A lot of the key fueds right now involve factions--Cody's Nightmare Family vs. QT's The Factory, Jericho's Inner Circle vs. MJF's The Pinnacle, and the Hardy Family Office vs. the Dark Order, Orange's buddies vs. Pac's Death Triangle--not to mention Team Taz and Kenny Omega's group running around. As a New Japan fan I dig it, but it does make it kind of tough to decide where one faction's minions rank relative to another's.

Men's tag team division - babyfaces

Jon Moxley (IWGP United Stats champion) & Eddie Kingston

Santana & Ortiz

Best Friends - Chuck Taylor & Trent Beretta

Lucha Bros. - Penta El 0M & Rey Fenix

Jurassic Express - Luchasaurus & Jungle Boy & Marko Stunt

Evil Uno & Stu Grayson

Varsity Blondes - Griff Garrison & Brian Pillman Jr.

The Gunn Club - Billy Gunn & Austin Gunn & Colten Gunn

Matt Sydal & Mike Sydal

Alan Angels & Preston Vance

Men's tag team division - heels

The Young Bucks - Nick Jackson & Matt Jackson (AEW tag team champions)

FTR - Dax Harwood & Cash Wheeler

Scorpio Sky & Ethan Page

The Acclaimed - Max Caster & Anthony Bowens

Private Party & Marq Quen & Isiah Kassidy

The Butcher & The Blade

TH2 - Jack Evans & Angelico

Chaos Project - Luther & Serpentico

Cezar Bononi & Ryan Nemeth

Unranked: Sonny Kiss & Joey Janela

(Names not listed on the AEW website's roster are noted in italics.)

With Christopher Daniels and Frankie Kazarian disbanding their team, the top title contenders on AEW's official rankings are Garrison and Pillman. However, the team that's actually getting a title shot at the May 30 pay-per-view is Moxley and Kingston, because they trashed the champs' dressing room. Just in case you were wondering why I bother doing this when AEW does it every week.

Women's singles division - babyfaces

Hikaru Shida (AEW women's world champion)

Thunder Rosa

Tay Conti

Kris Statlander

Ryo Mizunami

Big Swole

Red Velvet

Leyla Hirsch

KiLynn King

Women's singles division - heels

Britt Baker

Nyla Rose

Jade Cargill

Abadon

Penelope Ford

Diamante

The Bunny

A year ago I was griping that AEW wasn't doing enough with the women's division. They're still not giving them enough time on the main show, but it definitely feels like Shida, Baker, and Statlander are more important to the product now than they were back then. I wanted them to bring in more women and give them a chance, and that paid off big time with Thunder Rosa. Swole, Conti, Abadon, and Velvet feel underutilized, but I'm confident that will change. Cargill is going to be great once they decide she's ready for more than simple squash matches. Granted, There are others on this list that seem to be just...there. But it's amazing how much less frustrating that is when more than two women on the roster are getting pushed.

No matches in over 30 days: Awesome Kong, Emi Sukara, Karl Anderson, Leva Bates, Doc Gallows, Mel, Peter Avalon, Riho, Shanna, Shawn Dean, Serena Deeb (NWA women's world champion), Yuka Sakazaki

Same old story with Riho, Shanna, Sukara, and Sakazaki (travel restrictions), and with Kong and Mel (no idea). Deeb is booked for the May 19 show, which is probably a relief for the NWA, since they can finally book some title matches again.

When the AEW/Impact storyline started, I expected a lot more Impact wrestlers to appear on AEW programming than just Gallows and Anderson. As it turns out, even Gallows and Anderson haven't wrestled much on AEW lately. I'm really starting to wonder what the point is for all of this.

Part-time/semi-retired: Dasha Gonzalez, Paul Wight, Rebel not Reba, Sting, Tully Blanchard

I feel weird having Tully here but hell, he's probably had more ring time in 2021 than everybody else in this list put together.

Inactive

Anna Jay (right shoulder - dislocation)

Brandon Cutler (orbital bone - unspecified injury)

Brandi Rhodes (pregnancy)

Chris Jericho (right elbow - dislocation)

Kip Sabian (right arm - storyline injury?)

John Silver (right shoulder - dislocation)

Ricky Starks (neck - fractured vertebrae)

Darius Martin (knee - unspecified ACL injury)

Miro "injured" Sabian's arm recently, and Sabian announced on Twitter that he's getting surgery. So is he just playing into the storyline on social media, or is the storyline designed to cover for an actual injury? Either way I don't expect him back in the ring for a while.

In contrast, Jericho's arm injury is legit but he's still appearing on TV and trying to get a match like it's no big deal. MJF challenged Jericho to a Stadium Stampede match two weeks from now, but Jericho reportedly needs 4-6 weeks to recover. So either the reports are overestimating how hurt he is, or Jericho's going to have to creatively avoid doing anything physical...or they'll have to postpone the match right after setting the date. I'm not sure what they're thinking with this one. (Maybe Jericho could call his new buddy Mike Tyson?)

#aew #fake rankings

[csykora]

https://slate.com/transcripts/c2JZaHhQeC9QMGlhdUFpUGEycnl0UnRnNUdJRmo5R0tCdG02ck5pTTRhTT0=

On this week’s Hang Up and Listen podcast, we talked to two members of the group, both from UCLA: Elisha Guidry, a rising sophomore defensive back from Long Beach, California, and Otito Ogbonnia, a rising junior defensive tackle from Houston. The following transcript of that conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. The link to the full audio interview is at the bottom of this piece. —Joel Anderson

Joel Anderson: I guess the first question is: How did this group and the list of demands come together?

Otito Ogbonnia: It was something that we always knew, individually and teamwise, that this is a sentiment that most people felt. We were just waiting for an opportunity to get this whole thing going. And this started with some of the guys from Cal who used this as an opportunity to demand change and try to really get something done here. It was really Zoom that allowed us to do this whole thing, and being in a pandemic. It’d be very hard to coordinate a movement this big in normal times.

Elisha Guidry: Also, the social movement, or the civil rights movement really that’s going on in our country also inspired us. There’s a lot of inequalities that people are noticing. People are being awakened to seeing some of the things that go on in this world, and I feel like college football has many of them as well.

Josh Levin: Elisha, there are 17 demands on the list. What are the top line ones, as far as you’re concerned?

Guidry: For me personally, I feel like they’re all important. Definitely the players’ safety with the COVID, and ensuring that if a player decides to opt out, that his eligibility is honored, as well as getting insurance for players when they finish playing, because football takes a toll on the body and the mind. And I feel like once the player is done, they’re kind of just kicked out. They’re kind of just thrown in the world without a lot of guidance.

The image and likeness is very important because players deserve to be able to create wealth for themselves with this sport. I feel like a lot of players come from lower-income homes, a lot of players have struggles and football is kind of their way out. So just having an opportunity to be able to affect their families and affect their communities and people around them with their sport, even if they don’t make it to the NFL, is very important.

Stefan Fatsis: The demand that’s gotten a lot of attention is asking for 50 percent of revenue from the conference to be directed toward players. I mean, realistically, there’s no way that the Pac-12 leaders are going to agree to that immediately. So it does feel like by asking for it, you’re bringing this out into the open, the idea that athletes are aware of the inequities here and that we’ve got to move toward some system that helps compensate them in some way. Is that how you view it or are the ambitions higher among the group?

Ogbonnia: That’s exactly how we view it. I think when you exploit a group of people for this amount of time, it’s just kind of what you get. They had their opportunity to fix this, multiple opportunities. And one thing we, as a group, aren’t willing to accept is the idea that it’s not possible. This is a country which was brought up upon working hard and doing the impossible. And there are ways to get it done. Fifty percent of revenue is ambitious and it’s high and it’s asking a lot. But we live in this country, just like everybody else. And in regards to name, image, and likeness, why should we be the only citizens in this country who are denied making money off of who we are and our brand? And why is it that a kid at UCLA being a musician can go perform and make a couple hundred bucks off of their name, image, and likeness, but when it comes down to athletes, it’s a whole different story?

And I think that’s where that social justice kind of comes in, right? When you deny a group of people certain rights, you start to wonder why you’re doing it.

Anderson: A little more than a month ago, before even the We Are United movement, UCLA football players published their own list of demands related to coronavirus protections. So there was obviously an activist streak within the team already. And I just was curious to know, where is the team with that?

Ogbonnia: I forgot to mention about when you asked about the start of this movement, one thing those Cal guys told us is that they saw our letter to our university. They saw what we published and they kind of took that lead from us. So that was cool to see that.

And in regards to where we’re at now, for the most part, we’re doing well in terms of guaranteeing COVID protections. And we’re taking a very conservative approach to getting back to play in competition, if that’s even feasible.

[But] this is above UCLA. It’s above any one conference or any one school. It’s above any one person or any one culture or athletic department. It’s a conference thing. And the conference has the power to get some of these things done. As you’ve seen, the NCAA and the conference aren’t necessarily as conjoined as one may think. And a lot of times, they work separately in a lot of these matters.

Guidry: The Cal guys saw the things that we were asking for and they had to stop themselves—like, OK, we don’t have the same type of protection, and that’s something we want, because we feel like we’re taking this risk coming back to school and trying to participate in this game.

We all love football. We all spend so much time playing, since we were kids, and we want to do that as safely as possible, especially during this pandemic. Just asking around is what got everybody started and kind of got us all connected. And then we realized that there were more issues than just with the COVID-19 precautions.

Levin: I think it’s important for folks listening to this to understand how amazing and unusual it is what you guys are doing—even doing this interview. There was a story recently about the University of Iowa. They didn’t even let their players be on social media. The amount of control at these programs, about what they allow you guys to say, what they allow you guys to do in public, it’s so restrictive. And so the fact that you guys are talking to us about this, the fact that you put this message out, it’s an enormous deal. And we’ve already seen, there are varying reports about what’s going on at Washington State, in your conference, about potential repercussions for players there for joining this movement and for speaking out. [Editor’s note: According to a transcript published by the Dallas Morning News, Washington State coach Nick Rolovich told player Kassidy Woods that if Woods was a part of the Pac-12 unity movement, “that’s gonna be an issue.” Rolovich later said in a statement, “WSU football student-athletes who have expressed support for the #WeAreUnited group will continue to be welcome to all team-related activities.”] Are you guys at all concerned about potential repercussions from UCLA? And are you aware of the power imbalance? Your coach, Chip Kelly, was an NFL coach. He’s a multi-multimillionaire and you guys—you could have your scholarships taken away, potentially.

Ogbonnia: I think that’s something that a lot of people consider when they’re joining this movement. When you join something with this magnitude, you get the idea of what you’re getting yourself into and kind of make [peace] with that, with the consequences of what you’re doing. Of course, I would love to keep my scholarship and stay on the team. And our coach or our administration has never threatened us in that manner. And I don’t think they will. It’s been relatively positive and we haven’t seen any type of repercussion, retaliation from anybody from our school.

And it hurts to see that type of stuff being exemplified at Washington State, because you tell people to stand up for what they believe in in this world. When you want to support something, I think you should have the freedom to do it. And in regards to holding your tongue in a lot of these things, I think that’s where the conferences and the universities and college football as a whole gains their control over individuals. Because you start to feel a certain way after you’re done with football, when you’re in the system and you feel silenced, you feel like you can’t say anything, and that takes a toll on you. And it’s taken a toll on me until I kind of had a realization of who I am and who I want to be in this world. And that’s not somebody who’s silenced or who feels like they can’t be who they are because of what I’m doing.

I don’t think that’s what we sign up for. [It] doesn’t say that in our letter of intent. You shouldn’t bar anybody from freedom of speech. They should be able to say what they want without feeling like they may get cut or that they may get blackballed by their team or their coach. And that’s why that Washington State situation is very significant in our eyes in this movement. We’re well aware of what’s going on and we’re trying to do the best we can to help those guys out there.

Guidry: I feel like for real change to come, you’ve kind of got to put yourself out there. If I have to be sacrificed to have a greater movement come, then that’s something I’m OK with. If I got to sit out to help bring a change for my children or my friends’ children that are to come or the next generation, that’s something that, at the end of the day, it’s going to make things better. And if I have to be the one that has to be at expense for that, that’s something that I’m OK with.

#long post #ncaa #college football #the link is to the full transcript which has link to the audio

[weerd1]

Star Trek DS9 Rewatch Log, Stardate 1909.24: Missions Reviewed, “Chimera,” “Badda Bing Badda Boom,” and “Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges.”

Odo and O’Brien are returning from a conference when their Runabout is rammed by a space whale. It suddenly disappears and their ship is infiltrated by a changeling. Initially, they think it might be a Founder, but Odo quickly understands this is a Changeling like him, one of the 100 sent out into the galaxy to explore. This one, called Laas, has found Odo, the only other shapeshifter he has encountered. Laas immediately shows a disdain for “monoforms,” and particularly after linking with Odo feels the two of them should leave to find other Changelings. He cites the fact Odo knows there is a virus killing the Founders, and together with the other 100, they could form a new Great Link. Also, after having linked Laas knows that Odo stays for one reason only: Kira. Odo tries to get Laas to socialize with his friends but it doesn’t go well, with Laas increasingly taunting Odo for bending to the monoforms’ sense of normal rather than being himself.

 When Laas is antagonized by two Klingons on the Promenade, the altercation runs deadly with Laas stabbing a Klingon. When Sisko agrees to extradite Laas to the Empire, Odo believes it would not have happened if Laas were not a Changeling. Quark tells Odo that “solids” are programmed on a genetic level to distrust things that are different. When Odo confronts Kira on this, she realizes how torn he is. She released Laas and tells Odo what planet he can go to in order to find him and start their quest to find the other 100. Odo does go, but tells Laas that he—and Quark—are wrong about humanoids, and Kira is the example that proves it, putting Odo’s desires above her own.  Odo bids Laas farewell and returns to Kira. She regrets that they cannot link, but Odo becomes a shimmering mist and surrounds her, encompassing her in the most intimate way he can be with a humanoid.

An interesting look at xenophobia, and how it seems to work both ways with the humans (or humanoids) being distrustful, but Laas himself also refusing to consider them as anything more than savage. It’s an important step for the Odo/Kira relationship, but with knowledge of where the show is going, also is setting the stage for Odo’s eventual exit from the Alpha Quadrant, and making Kira who he leaves behind. That’s a few episodes off though, and right now we can wallow in and wrap the warmth that is their love for one another around ourselves like a cozy blanket. (Before it is ripped away from us.) It would be interesting to see what ever became of Laas and if he found others.  Laas Is played by JG Hertzler, who usually plays General Martok the Klingon. His performance and the makeup here come together well enough to make you forget it’s the same man. Also, when Laas first appears as a bit of cosmozoa I would describe as a space whale, it seems to me to be very similar to a gormagander which we will see later (earlier?) on “Discovery.” Memory Alpha, the Star Trek wiki, does not make that connection however, so maybe it’s just me.

Vic Fontaine’s casino is in trouble in “Badda Bing Badda Bang.” The program is suddenly taken over by a holographic mobster known as Frankie Eyes. They can’t just restart the program as it will wipe Vic’s memory. Bashir contacts “Felix” who programmed it in the first place and finds out the takeover is a “Jack-in-the-Box”: an effort to keep the game fresh. 

To restore the program (and keep Vic safe) Julian and Miles have to find away to get rid of Frankie Eyes that doesn’t get Vic killed. Much of the rest of the staff want to help, owing a debt to Vic in one form or another. Kassidy Yates also argues for Vic being more than a hologram, but Sisko does not want to participate because he feels the inclusivity of the program ignores the true history of the period, and the struggle African-Americans would have existing in 1962 Las Vegas. Kassidy argues that you don’t have to forget your past to enjoy a version that demonstrates how it SHOULD have been, provided you know the truth. Sisko ponders that while the crew come up with a heist plan to take the casino’s money, preventing Frankie Eyes from passing the cut on to his higher benefactors in the mob. The plan is sound except they need one more role in the heist filled. Sisko unexpectedly appears in order to fill it.

 They prep, but of course there are snags along the way and the plan has to adapt to other little unexpected moments built into the program. They do manage to pull it off, ruining Frankie Eyes and restoring Vic’s casino. To celebrate, Ben actually joins Vic on stage to sing “The Best is Yet to Come.”

The last fun episode of the show, period,  they still manage to get in some interesting commentary.  The argument we may have over a film like “The Patriot” that idealizes a character who would most likely have been a slave owner is demonstrated well here, and Sisko, particularly after his experience as Benny Russell in “Far Beyond the Stars” and “Shadows and Symbols” is the right character to point it out. This is in the end a heist episode, completely in the spirit of “Ocean’s 11” and it never falls into the Trek Trope of “Oh no, the holodeck is going to kill us.” They want to help Vic because the change is real for HIS world, in he has, whether sentient or not, helped them all in their own world (Nog in particular who is well used here). Again, there’s a larger issue here whether or not holograms are life forms, but for the most part, this is a chance to catch your breath, because the next one is back to the big questions.

“Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges” begins with the return of Sloan from Section 31. He knows Bashir is going to attend a medical conference on Romulus with Admiral Ross and Senator Cretak (who, despite being a different actress, we last saw having a stand off with Kira over a heavily armed Romulan hospital in the season opener). Sloan wants Bashir to collect information on the health of the head of a Romulan Tal Shiar (their equivalent of Section 31 and the Obsidian Order). Bashir goes on the trip and finds to his surprise that Sloan is himself there. 

When Koval of the Tal Shiar hopes Bashir can show him how to introduce the Dominion “Quickening” virus into a population, he tells Sloan they have to stop him.  Sloan however just wants a medical diagnosis as it turns out Koval suffers from a rare Romulan disease.  Bashir realizes Sloan plans to kill Koval and make it look like his illness, and that Sloan to know about this must have a mole in the Romulan government. He goes to Ross, who plans to act but mysteriously suffers and aneurysm, leaving Julian on his own. He goes to the one person he trusts, Senator Cretak, to get information that could save Koval. Soon after Koval arrests and interrogates Bashir, soon bringing him before the Romulan ruling council, lead by the Praetor himself (last seen as a proconsul WAYYYYYYYY back in the TNG 5thseason episode “Unification” which had Spock trying to repair Vulcan and Romulan relations). Also there is Cretak, who was caught gathering her information. Koval also brings in Sloan, who he reveals to be a simple intelligence officer looking for revenge for Romulans killing his mentor. Section 31 is a fiction. Koval believes however that Cretak is actually conspiring with Starfleet to kill him, and the council decides to strip her of status, and possibly execute her. In her place on the council, they appoint Koval. 

They plan to release Bashir, but Sloan is to be kept. He tries to escape, but is disintegrated by Koval. Back on the way home, Bashir is deep in thought, and he goes to confront the recovered Ross.  Bashir demands to know where Sloan is, as Bashir has realized that the plot all along was to get Koval, the ACTUAL Section 31 mole onto the council, while sacrificing Ross’ friend Cretak. Bashir has been outmaneuvered by Sloan and Section 31, getting them exactly what they wanted…and Ross must have known.  Ross tells Bashir “Inter arma enim silent leges,” a quote from Cicero that means “in war, the law falls silent.” Bashir is appalled, asking if the Federation is to become a new Roman (or perhaps Romulan?) Empire. Ross dismisses him, and sure enough back on DS9 Sloan reappears, thanking for being a good man who could be counted on to do the right thing so Section 31 could exploit it. Bashir considers calling security, but knows it will do no good.

This one is deep, and Section 31 digs its place in Trek history a little deeper. I really liked Megan Cole as Senator Cretak, eating a jumja stick and winning over Kira before proving to be crafty at the beginning of the season, but she was unavailable for this one.  Casting Adrianne Barbeau, no stranger to the genre (Escape from New York, Creepshow, Swamp Thing, being married to John Carpenter) is a bit of a delight though, and her Cretak is a bit more sympathetic than Cole’s which fits this story well.  Also look for John Fleck as Koval, who among other roles will play the Suliban Silik on “Enterprise.”  The episode though is another unflinching look at what even the best of nations may have to do in war, and what our soldiers may lose of our souls and values to protect the souls and values of the people and nation.

NEXT VOYAGE: The epic NINE PART finale of Deep Space Nine begins with Sisko about to marry Kassidy Yates and Worf back in Dominion hands in “Penumbra”!

#Star Trek #star trek: Deep Space Nine #DS9 Rewatch

[darley1101]

Wicked Games Part 2 Mixed Messages

A/N Thank you to everyone who supported the first part of this story! It is going to be one heck of a journey. I'm not certain on how many parts it will have just yet as I want to be able to tell the full tale without feeling the pressure of cramming everything into a pre-determined number of parts. If you are new to the story, you can read the first part HERE.

Warning for this chapter: Harassment (verbally, text, and cyber), encouragement to commit suicide.

Word count: 3675

tag for story: @starstruckpixelberryhistoryvoid @syltti78 @maxattack-powell @writtenbycandy @silviasutton1989 @alepowell @museofbooks @choices-addict @ihearyoucallmyname @greyeyedsmile

perma tag:  @josieschoices @boneandfur @speedyoperarascalparty @tmarie82 @blackcatkita @mfackenthal @hamulau @endlessly-searching-for-you @umccall71  @penguininapinktuxedo @debramcg1106 @flynnomalleys @damienazariostan @drakelover78 @endlessly-searching-for-you @eileendannie

Part Two: Mixed Messages

Ducking her head down against the frigid breeze that brought a whirl of fallen leaves with it, Aria huddled deeper into her navy blue wool jacket and picked up her pace, determined to reach the campus coffee shop without being waylaid by one of the Alphas; specifically Nathan, Kassidy, or Beau. It had been two days since she'd sent all three texts asking them not to contact her anymore. In that forty-eight house time frame they had sent her dozens of texts and left several voicemails. The texts had started out as confused; them wanting answers to why she was suddenly cutting them off, Nathan going so far as to say he was sorry for anything he might have done to upset her and would she please call him back so they could talk about whatever it was. When she didn't respond, the accusations started. She had used them. She had pretended to be their friend, all while trying to turn them against their dear friend Beau. Did Chris know she had spent the night in Nathan's bed? Did her other friends know what a fake she was? How could she live with herself, using people the way she did? It had been tempting to respond, to them that she wasn't the one pretending to be anyone's friend, that was their forte, that her real friends knew what sort of person she was, and that, yes, Chris knew all about her spending the night at the Alpha club house, where she just so happened to sleep in Nathan's room while he slept on the couch. Mostly,she just wanted to tell them to leave her alone. Chris thought she should block their numbers, change her phone number, and report them to the campus police for harassment; Aria wasn't certain such drastic measures needed to be taken. If she ignored them long enough, they would get bored and stop.

“You're late,” Kaitlyn teased when Aria walked into the warmth of the coffee shop. Her best friend engulfed her in a tight hug, pressing a quick kiss to her cheek. “I'm so glad you asked me to meet you. I've missed this. I feel like we're both so busy we never get to hang out anymore.” She hooked her arm through Aria's and guided her toward the line to order.

Kaitlyn had been busy; Aria had just been stupid, choosing to focus on the idea of exposing the Alphas involvement in the vandalism and pranks taking place across Hartfeld. Not that Kaitlyn, or any of her other friends, knew about that, only Chris had been privy to the real reasons Aria had been unavailable. It was time to come clean, to lay all out on the table and pray that Kaitlyn was understanding. “I've missed you too,” she said softly, her blue eyes scanning the chalk board menu for the daily specials. “I'll have a hot chocolate with a dash of cinnamon and whipped cream,” she told the barista, shifting nervously as Kaitlyn ordered a nitro cold brew with sweet cream, as well as an order of cream cheese filled bagel bites.

“Everything's together,” Kaitlyn said before Aria could pull out her wallet. “Today is my treat.” Pulling out her bank card, Kaitlyn turned to smile brightly at Aria. “I really have missed you.”

“I've missed you too.” Collecting her drink, Aria followed Kaitlyn to a small table at the back of the coffee shop, away from the group of loud, obnoxious freshmen that had filed in. While Kaitlyn yanked out a chair and dropped unceremoniously into it, Aria studied her best friend. In their time apart, Kaitlyn had colored her hair a pretty lavender color and become fond of glittery pink lip gloss, elaborate winged eye liner, and metallic combat boots. “Love the new hair color,” she remarked as she sank into the chair opposite Kaitlyn's.

“Yeah, me too. It was Anissa's idea. She's really good with hair.” Her hand flew up to the shoulder length curls, a grin spreading across her lips. “We could do yours next.”

“No thanks,” Aria shook her head, laughing for the first time in almost three days. “I think I'll leave the unicorn hair to you and Anissa.”

“Rachel too. We talked her into a baby blue and cotton candy pink ombre,” Kaitlyn giggled. “The only member of TBD not embracing her inner unicorn is Kass.”  At the mention of Kassidy, Aria grimaced. “What?” Kaitlyn's brow wrinkled, concern shining in her dark eyes. “Is this about your disagreement with Kass,” she asked lowly.

“What?” Aria stared at Kaitlyn in disbelief, anxiety starting to course through her veins. There was no way Kaitlyn could have known why Aria wanted to meet her. Unless, Aria gulped, Kassidy had gotten to her first and put her own spin on things. “Why would you ask that?”

A sigh whooshed out of Kaitlyn's lips as she took a tentative sip of her coffee. “Kassidy text me this morning,” she admitted. “She says you're mad at her and she doesn't know why.” Her lashes lowered as she fidgeted with the cuff of her gray and pink chevron print sweater.

It was all Aria could do not to groan out loud. Of course Kassidy had gone straight to Kaitlyn and, of course, Kassidy was playing the victim. That was something Aria had picked up on during her investigation. Kassidy enjoyed being a victim. In fact, it was her go to method of operation. Poor, poor Kassidy, confused over why she couldn't keep friends. It was pretty obvious to Aria. Nobody wanted to be friends with someone who was selfish and not above sabotage to get her way. Not that Kaitlyn realized all of that, she was still in the 'Kassidy is alright' stage. Nor did Kaitlyn know about the sixty-five text messages Kassidy had bombarded Aria with, most of which could be considered harassment; especially the ones calling Aria a worthless bitch who should do the world a favor and end her miserable life already. She hadn't shown that one to Chris. She knew how he would react. He'd call the campus police and then head straight to the Alpha club house himself, consequences be damned. “That's kind of why I wanted to see you,” Aria admitted.

Unease flickered across Kaitlyn's pretty face. Folding her arms, she leaned against the table, her chocolate brown eyes troubled. She let out another sigh, her forehead wrinkling. “Look, Ari, I'm going to tell you the same thing I told Kass. I don't know why the two of you aren't getting along but I don't want involved. You're my best friend, and I love you, but she's my band mate. I can't get in the middle of this.”

Closing her eyes, Aria took several calming breathes, reminding herself that if she were in Kaitlyn's shoes she would be saying the same thing. Kaitlyn didn't know about the arguments with Chris, the evidence she'd found against the Alphas that suggested at least Kassidy was involved in ruining Kaitlyn's album, or the harassing texts. What Kaitlyn knew was her best friend and her band mate were having some sort of disagreement. It made sense that she would not want to be involved. Unfortunately, there were things Kaitlyn needed to know that would put her smack dab in the middle. “I understand that but there are things that you need to know, things that-”

Kaitlyn shook her head, strands of her lavender hair sticking to her cheek. “That's just it Ari, I don't want to know. I meant what I said, I don't want in the middle of whatever disagreement you had with Kass.”

Shock widened Aria's mouth, she felt her jaw slacken. “I'm not trying to put you in the middle, Kait, I swear. I'm just trying to tell you that she-”

“No,” Kaitlyn shook her head again. “I'm serious. She's my band mate, Ari. We have to be able to trust one another.” Another sigh escaped her lips as she offered Aria a sympathetic look. “If it makes you feel better, I told her the same thing. I don't want in the middle.”

Swallowing the lump that was starting to form in her throat, Aria bit the inside of her cheek. It had never been like this with Kaitlyn. Except for a few disagreements their freshmen year, they had always talked about everything. Now, because of Kassidy, she was being shut out by her best friend. It hurt worse than any of the petty drama that had gone down their Freshmen year. “This isn't about choosing a side, Kait. There are things you need to know.”

“Oh my God, Ari, I just told you I don't want to know! Why can't you respect that!��� Kaitlyn snapped. “Kassidy's respecting it.”

The little dig about Kassidy respecting Kaitlyn's choice while Aria wasn't hit home. Had their friendship really come to this? Kaitlyn putting her band member ahead of hearing the truth? It was like freshmen year all over again; where Natasha could do no wrong and everyone else was to blame for the things going sour. “Just like you didn't want to know about Natasha,” Aria snapped back. “And we know how well that worked out.”

“Really Aria?” Hurt filled Kaitlyn's eyes. “I can't believe you just said that.”

Curling her hands into fists, Aria's nails dug into the soft flesh of her palms. “And I can't believe you're ignoring three years of being best friends for someone you barely know!” This was not going the way she had thought it would. She hadn't counted on Kaitlyn feeling close enough to Kassidy that she wouldn't even listen to what Aria had to say. Despite her proclamation that she didn't want involved, that she wasn't going to choose a side, it was very clear that Kaitlyn had chosen Kassidy's side without knowing the full truth of what was going on.

“It's not like that,” Kaitlyn said defensively. “She's my band-mate. A band-mate you introduced me to.” She leaned back in her chair, her arms crossed defensively over her chest. “See, this is why I didn't want in the middle. I knew you would do this, that you would want me to take your side, no questions asked.”

“I'm not asking you to take any sides, Kaitlyn, I'm asking you to listen to what I have to say!” Aria resisted the urge to scream as she felt her phone vibrating the pocket of her jacket. Heart pounding, she forced herself to check it. It could be anyone, she told herself. Becca had text that morning wanting to go shopping later and Chris liked to randomly text to say he missed or loved her. The notification didn't have to be from one of the Alphas. Except...it was. Text after text from Nathan, Beau, and Kassidy. The latest was from Kassidy, with an image attached. Her fingers shook as she unlocked her screen, opening the text. Maybe if Kaitlyn seen what Kassidy had been saying to her, she would listen. The taste of bile filled her throat as she stared at a screenshot of a conversation between Kaitlyn and Kassidy. There, right in front of her, was picture proof of what she had suspected: Kaitlyn had sided with Kassidy. “Yeah, you're really staying out of it,” Aria choked out, turning her phone so Kaitlyn could see the screenshots. 'Aria said she didn't want to talk to me anymore. I'm so confused. I don't know what I did wrong.' 'Aria's noting but a drama queen. You just have to ignore her when she pulls this shit. You didn't do anything wrong, she's got issues and probably made something up in her head.'

“Ari-” Aria shook her head. There was no way Kaitlyn was explaining this one away. She couldn't take back the words she had sent to Kassidy. This hurt almost as much as Chris telling her that their relationship was in crisis. Her phone vibrated again as Kassidy sent another message. “Ha ha you stupid cunt, how does it feel to know even your best friend can't stand you? Not so fun having someone screw with your life is it,” Kaitlyn read aloud, her already pale face paling further as the blood drained from it. “Ari...you need to report this.”

“What do you care?” Tears burned the back of her eye lids, her vision blurring as she turned her phone so she could see the texts for herself.

“You're my best friend! Of course I care,” Kaitlyn cried. “And I didn't send that other message!” She stood part of the way up and pulled her phone out of her back pocket. “Here. Look at my text log.” Setting her phone down on the table, she slid it across to Aria. “Password is still the same.”

With fingers that violently shook, Aria typed in the familiar pass code. There was a text from Anissa that consisted of nothing but emojis, the ones from herself, a group text for the band, and finally Kassidy. It was mostly empty, with sporadic texts about the band. Only the last four had a personal feel to them. 'Aria's mad at me for some reason and she won't talk to me. Do you know why?' 'I don't know anything about that but she's my best friend and I don't want involved in whatever issues the two of you have.' 'I respect that, I was just hoping maybe she had said something to you and that maybe you knew what I could do to fix this.' 'I really don't want involved Kassidy. My only advice is take it up with Aria.'

Something didn't add up. The texts on Kaitlyn's phone sounded like Kaitlyn, but Kassidy had sent screenshots. How would she have gotten screenshots if the texts weren't real? “But...how? She has screenshots.”

“I would never say those things about you Ari. You're not just my best friend, you're the yin to my yang. The sister my parents refused to have for me.” A v formed between Kaitlyn's brows, her cheeks flushed with anger as she accepted her phone back from Aria. “I don't know where she got those screenshots, but those messages didn't come from me. And those messages she's sending you...you need to report them.”

Bowing her head, Aria pinched the bridge of her nose. Chris had said the same thing; that she needed to report the Alphas for harassing her. He'd backed off when she'd told him she would if things got out of hand, but she knew if he had seen the latest messages, especially the ones telling her to die, he would call the campus police with or without her permission. If Aria thought it would do any good, she would call them herself, but she'd been around the Alphas long enough to know it wouldn't do any good. Their parents would make a donation for a  new parking lot or upgrades to whatever buildings needed them and the charges would go away. Leaving Aria right back at square one. Or, worse, they would try to pin something on her and she would be the one in trouble. “If I ignore them, they'll stop,” she muttered, reaching for her drink. She kept her gaze lowered she shook the to go cup around, mixing the melting whipped cream with the liquid.

“Ari,” Kaitlyn said softly, reaching across the table to grab one of Aria's hands. “What did you mean when you said them?”

Lifting one shoulder, Aria let it fall. “It's not just Kassidy texting me. Nathan and Beau are too.” She blinked, the tears she'd been trying to hold back trickling down her cheeks. “I think they're responsible for the football field and your album.”

“I don't care about the football field or my album. I care about you.” Kaitlyn frowned, her eyes troubled. “I really think you need to report them. Like right now.”

“I told you, I'm just going to ignore them. They'll see that they're not bothering me and they'll stop.” The lie tasted bitter on her tongue. She hated to admit that they were bothering her, that she was letting their lies and hate get to her. Not that she would ever admit it. Admitting it would be like letting them win and there was no way in hell she was going to let that happen. “Can we talk about something else? Like how I'm pretty sure Kassidy is the one who sabotaged your album?”

“I see what you're doing, and the only reason I'm letting it slide is...what the fuck do you mean Kassidy sabotaged the album?”

“I don't have solid proof. Not yet.” Aria tucked her hair behind her ears before taking a long drink of her almost cold hot chocolate. “I noticed something when I was re-watching that security footage. The person who broke in had on a hoodie with a Foxcake logo.”

“Foxcake? As in Kassidy's former band?” Aria nodded. “Stupid question, but any chance it's one of the other members? Someone who doesn't want to see Kassidy successful?”

“I thought about that and the problem with that theory is all the other members have graduated and moved on. It's why the band broke apart.” The lead singer lived about an hour or so away but the little bit of digging Aria had done didn't give any indicator that Audrey Stanton was behind the destroyed drum set or the deleted album. The only plausible suspect was Kassidy. She had access and with Amara being given top billing as TBD's drummer on the album she also had motive. Kassidy was not a second fiddle kind of girl.

“Great. So not only is my drummer terrorizing my best friend and sending fake ass screenshots from some imaginary conversation that she never had with me, she's a dream crusher as well.” Lying her forehead against the table top, Kaitlyn let out a little shriek that attracted the attention of several students studying nearby. “I swear to God, Ari, I'm this close to hunting the bitch down,” Kaitlyn held her thumb and forefinger about a half an inch apart.

Aria parted her lips, ready to beg Kaitlyn not to say anything, only to have a squeak come out instead as a pair of cool hands covered her eyes. Reaching up, she wrapped her fingers around thin wrists and pulled. “Hey,” Becca yelped, yanking her arms free from Aria's grasp. “What was that for?”

“Sorry, I'm just a little jumpy today,” Aria mumbled, her cheeks flaming as she took in a group of sorority girls whispering one table over. Fantastic. Judging by the way the one was quickly texting, the little incident would be all over campus.

“It's fine.” Rubbing her wrist with one hand, Becca used her free hand to pull out an empty chair. “I've had the weirdest most awful day the way it is, so I should have expected something to go wrong.” She slumped down in her seat and set a piece of paper on the table.

“What's that?” Kaitlyn asked, momentarily lifting her head.

“A rejection letter from Northbridge University's law program.” Tears filled Becca's eyes but she quickly batted them away.

“Oh Bex,” Aria reached out, covering Becca's hand with her own. Their relationship hadn't always been the greatest, there was a time when they considered each other enemies, but they'd moved passed it all and formed a rather solid friendship. Seeing an otherwise strong woman on the verge of breaking was hard to watch. “Did they say why?”

“Given the nature of my submission essay, they feel like I wouldn't be a good fit.” Becca wiped at another tear, her face contorting in anger. “Which is total bull shit.”

Kaitlyn lift her head the rest of the way and offered Becca a sympathetic look. “I know you don't want to hear this, especially right now when its all so new, but fuck them. They're the ones who aren't a good fit. You'll get into a better law program, one that fully appreciates that kick ass essay you wrote.”

Becca's essay had been pretty kick ass. Aria, as well as Kaitlyn and James, had gone over it with a fine tooth comb several times. It had been the epitome of a perfect submission essay. “You don't understand,” Becca sniffed, cutting into Aria's thoughts, “I haven't sent in my application and essay yet. I'm waiting on one last letter of reference.” Shaking her head, Becca bit back a small sob. “I guess what they say about karma is true.”

Dread started fill Aria. She had a sneaking suspicion that karma went by the names Nathan, Kassidy, and Beau. There was no way to prove it though, not without breaking her promise to Chris. Taking a deep breath, she bowed her head and sent a text. 'We need to talk. Meet me in the quad in twenty minutes.'  Her rate accelerated when an immediate response came. 'I'll be there.' God, she hoped she was doing the right thing, that she wasn't somehow about to make things worse for the people she cared about the most. The Alphas needed to be brought to their knees, to be held accountable for the things they had done.

Who did Aria text? Take a guess and then stay tuned for Part 3 of Wicked Games to find out if you were right! 

#choices #choices the junior #choices chris powell #chris x mc #long post

[littleredroseonthevalley]

An Opera on Separation - Chapter 14

Prologue | Ch. 1 | Ch. 2 | Ch. 3 | Ch. 4 | Ch. 5 | Ch. 6 | Ch. 7 | Ch. 8 | Ch. 9 | Ch. 10 | Ch. 11 | Ch. 12 | Ch. 13 | CH. 14 | Ch. 15 | Ch. 16 | Ch. 17 | Ch. 18 |

Summary: The police follows on Claire’s rape and Emily is called in for questioning. Is Nathan a suspect?

Rating: M -  Not suitable for children or teens below the age of 16 with non-explicit suggestive adult themes, references to some violence, or coarse language.

Mention of rape. Reader discretion is highly advised.

Words: 1473

Notes: Remember when I said Beau was one sick little shit? Well, I made him sicker.

Enjoy.

Boring

Zack was still trying to calm Becca down with a cup of cold water when the telephone rung.

Emily and Zack changed a look, debating silently who’s going to answer it, and it ended up to be decided that she’d do it. “Hello?” She picked up the call.

“Good morning, miss. This is from Hartfeld Police Department.” The man’s voice says from over the phone. “Do I speak with Emily Harper?”

“Yes.” She said, wavering and wary. “How may I help you?”

“Miss, your presence has been required at the police station. It is about Miss Pierce’s rape.” He responds, using a grave voice.

Claire? She did not know anything about the girl. In fact, that news report this morning has been the first time she has heard the name in months.

“What about it?” The redhead asks, legitimately confused.

“The deputy has requested your testimony.” He responded, simple.

That was enlightening.

She breathed out, trying to keep her cool. “I’m not sure on what I can contribute, but of course. Is there an appointment that I am supposed to attend?”

“At your earliest convenience.” He said, and then added: “Preferably this morning.”

“Of course, I’m free. I’ll be there in an hour.” She nods.

“Thank you, Miss Harper. We’ll be expecting you; goodbye.” He said and finished the call.

Emily, then, placed the phone back on the hook and walked over back to the living room, where Becca was still altered and Zack seemed to be running haggard trying to control the impulsive blonde.

The ruckus died down as the two of them looked into the pale and struck face of Emily.

“Who was it?” Zack asks, concerned.

“It was the police.” She answered. “They want me to testify on Claire’s case.”

“What?!” The two other roommates shout in unison.

“What can you possibly know about Claire?” Zack says, in his usual over-the-top fashion. “If anyone here should be called into questioning, it would be Becca. They’re friends, after all.”

“Unless,” The blonde says, creepily calm. “Unless it isn’t about who knows the victim, rather than who knows the rapist.”

“You’re not saying…” He turned to her and stopped himself from saying what he meant.

“That’s exactly what I’m saying.” She jumped to her feet. “It happened at Alpha Theta Mu, haven’t it?”

The young man tutted. “Nevertheless, there’s at least fifteen people living there, and none of them are… you know.”

“But Emily’s not close to either of them. Let’s face it, Nathan raped Claire.” The blonde picked up the redhead’s arm. “Come on, Emily! I’m going to the station with you!”

“Good morning, Miss Emily.” An investigator enters the dark and cold room she was sitting on. “I am Deputy McKenzie, head of police here in Hartfeld. Thank you for coming so promptly.”

“Of course, Mr. McKenzie, anything I can do to help.” She nods.

“Allow me to begin by saying that you’re not being accused of anything.” He says, with a soft smile. “I only have a few, commonplace questions. I would’ve gone to your house, but as this is a high-coverage case, I can’t leave the station without the Hartfeld Herald printing it on the front page.

“Speaking of which, I must ask that you refrain from giving declarations to the press. It could hinder my investigation.”

She returned the kindness of his smile and responded: “I won’t be talking to anyone about it.”

“Good.” He took out a recorder and pressed play. “Now, remember you’re giving your official statement. Try to give the most accurate descriptions of events you possibly can. No need to be nervous, but no detail is small enough.”

“Okay.” She nodded.

“Now, first things first, what is your full name, birth town and age?”

“I am Emily Louise Harper. I am twenty years old and I’m from Boston, Massachusetts.”

“Okay.” He writes down her name on a form. “First question, what’s your relation with Nathan Sterling, III, Beau Han and Kassidy Marquez?”

Her nerves hitched at the mention of the names. It seemed like Becca might be right about Nathan, after all. “Nathan’s my boyfriend. The other two are his friends.”

“Are you close to either of them?” He probes further.

“Not particularly.” She bobbed her head. “I mean, we’ve gone out as a group on occasion, but I never really talked at lenght to them one-on-one.”

“Very well.” He says and scribbles something. “Where were you on the night of Friday, September 16th last year?”

“September 16th?” The young woman repeats and thinks about it for a moment. “Oh, right! It was the last time I saw Claire. It was on that bar downtown, Belle Époque.”

He hummed. “Who were you with?”

Her eyes widened when she realized where he was going with it. “I was with Nathan, Beau and Kassidy.”

“I understand something happened that night, didn’t it?” He nudged her to talk.

“Yes, it did.” Her eyes filled with tears. “I was with Beau, picking up some drinks and bringing them back to the table. I was distracted. I bumped into Claire and spilled my drink on her.

“She got really mad about it and started calling me an Alpha Theta Mu’s charity case. Beau tried to defend me, but then she turned on him and said that he wasn’t much better, being a nouveau riche or something.

“He turned red in fury; it was really scary to see such a big man so angry. He raised his hand; it looked like he was ready to strike her on the face. But then, Nathan controlled him and we left the club in a hurry and I went home.”

He slipped a handkerchief over the table for her to dry her tears. “Thank you, Miss Harper, that would be all.”

When Emily was as put-together as she would be given the circumstances, she left the interrogation room to face her friends who were waiting outside.

What she hadn’t expected was a small commotion, centred around Becca, who was barely contained by a police officer. The redhead ran to the main atrium of the station, and she realized the person she was being contained from was Nathan himself.

The blond man sported a few scratches and torn clothes, probably from the girl’s attacks from before the police could intervene.

“You filthy rapist!” Becca shouted. “I’ll sever off your eye with the heel of my Louboutin, and so help me God!”

“Becca!” Emily runs over to her. “Becca! Nathan didn’t do it! He’s not a suspect!”

“Don’t defend him, Emily! He’s the scum!” She barks.

“Becca, listen to me!” She placed both hands on the face of the other woman and forced her to look deep into her eyes. “Nathan didn’t do it. Beau did. He raped Claire because she said he was not old money.”

Her struggle faded, and she whispers: “What?”

“It’s true.” Emily uses the same grief-stricken tone.

“That’s… that’s…” Tears brim the young blonde woman’s eyes. “Barbaric.”

“I know.” The redhead hugged her friend and tried to soothe her.

“Emily?” Nathan neared the pair, touching his girlfriend’s shoulder.

Becca glared at the young man. “What do you want?”

Emily tapped the girl’s shoulder, trying to contain her anger. She locked her eyes on him, dull as they are due to the circumstances. “Yes?”

“I need to talk to you.” He said, pleading silently. “About what’s happening.”

She looked over at Becca and considered the proposition. Finally, she nodded and followed the man to the water fountain, where they could talk.

“What has the police told you about Beau?” He asks.

She shook her head. “They told me nothing. They just asked me about that time we’ve been to Belle Époque and I pieced the rest together.”

The blond man sighs. “There’s more to it. You see, Emily, I wasn’t always Beau’s vice-president. I actually was the runner-up for ATM presidency.”

“I’m sorry, Nathan, but what that’s got to do with anything?” The girl interrupts, rather impatient.

“I’ll get there.” He responds. “I always thought it to be strange I lost, I was always more popular than Beau, I was very confident I would win. So, when he asked me to be his VP, I set myself to investigate why.

“The Alpha Theta Mu you know, that I knew, isn’t the real Alpha Theta Mu.” He swallowed the bile on his throat. “The most illustrious members of the fratority kept an underground club of thrill-seekers. Up until last year, they used to play pranks. Pranks that ranged from the stupid to the dangerous.

“But Beau had gotten bored with it. He enlisted the help of Kassidy and they started a… group. I don’t know what I can call that.”

“What they did?” Emily asks, shakily.

“They had a website…” He coughed. “They posted videos. Of the guys at that… circle… well, violating girls. I gathered enough material to imputate them as quickly as I could, but...” He took a calming breath. “It wasn’t fast enough for Claire.”

A silence befell them. Neither spoke, as them both measured the other’s reactions.

Finally, Nathan breaks it into saying: “I’m sorry. I’m just gonna... leave.”

She stops him with a touch to his arm. When he looks back into her eyes, they were shining with unshed tears.

Emily pulls him into a hug.

The world was far from being alright, but Emily thought she could count on Nathan to make it better.

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An Opera on Separation - Masterlist

#an opera on separation #the junior #nathan sterling #becca davenport

[abigailpoe]

For You (The Junior)

Part 3

Part 1 Part 2

Summary: Who’s body did Kassidy discover? What happened between Nathan and Emily? What about Beau and Amanda? Was it an accident or was it more sinister?

Notes: Hopefully everyone likes this part... all will be explained in the next, and final chapter, of For You. I’m sorry this is so short but I wanted to leave everyone on the edge of their seats.

Rating: NSWF, strong language, and triggers

Tags: @nathan-starling @trianiasti @confessionsofabrokegirl @jlouise88

Present Time...

Amanda and Kassidy sat in the hospital Emergency Room lobby waiting for news. Kassidy was pacing back and forth. Neither of them wanted him to get stabbed. They both cared greatly about him. In all honesty, it could’ve been anyone in the world, and they wouldn’t have wished this upon them.

Three Hours Earlier....

Beau pulled Amanda onto his lap. He gently ran a finger along her collarbones, ever so lightly she shivered. She lightly pushed him onto his back and peeled off her shirt. The two didn’t say a word, and this was the first time she had ever seen him speechless.

“Holy...” Beau breathed. “Can I please take those off of you?”

She began to lightly grind her hips on his, feeling his length hardening below her. He let out a little sigh of pleasure when she began to run her hands on the underneath of her bra.

She climbed off of him and made him watch as she stripped down into her lace underwear. His jaw dropped a little.

“In time, Sweetheart.” She teased. Amanda began toying with the waistband of her underwear. She could she Beau growing impatient. Amanda swayed her hips a bit and sat back down on Beau.

She slowly unbuttoned his shirt running a hand along his chest. He let out a low purr at this teasing. She slid down him and onto her knees on the floor. She unbuttoned his pants and slid them down him with his boxers. He was already a little hard, so she wrapped her lips around his length and began to stroke him.

He let out a little grunt at she did so, and he ran his fingers through her hair. He liked the way he mouth was around him. When she eventually stopped, she got up and stood before him.

“We need to get you out of those.” Beau smirked.

Amanda sat down on the bed beside him. “I think it’s your job.”

Beau lightly pushed her down onto the bed, kissing down her neck and to her collarbones. When he got there, he slid his hands under her bra and began to play with her nipples. She let out a soft moan as he did so. He pulled the bra up over her head and threw it near the dresser. He then began to lightly suck on her chest, leaving little marks of his love on her body.

Then, he dropped to his knees and kissed up from her ankles to the inside of her inner thigh. She let out a breath, as though try to say something, but not being able to.

Beau pulled up the band of her lace underwear. “Do you like these?” He asked, snapping the elastic down.

“Not too much.” She smiled. Beau grabbed the front of the elastic band and ripped the lace off of her body.

His fingers danced around her entire. “Much better.” Beau lowered his head between her legs and her hips bucked the second she felt his breath on her skin.

Meanwhile, back at Nathan’s, Emily was sitting on the floor crying. Nathan carefully set a box of tissues and a trash can by her. She looked up at him as he did so.

“Why didn’t you just tell me?” Emily asked through her sobs. “I... you... were my first...”

Nathan’s heart sank. She really did care for him, love him. He knew it was wrong that he didn’t feel the same, but he didn’t care. His heart yearned for Amanda. He missed her so much. The feel of her soft lips to his, even though they were now Beau’s to kiss. He sat on a chair at the bar.

“I’m sorry...” he whispered so softly Emily could barely hear. Emily took a breath and stood up. She walked slowly towards Nathan. Her fist drew closed, but he didn’t notice. She quickly raised the closed fist and punched him in the jaw. Nathan fell backward off the chair and onto the ground. “What the hell!?!”

“If It were up to me, you’d be dead right now...” Emily snaked.

She kicked his crouch and he let out a little yell. “Ah fuck!”

“That’s what you get you son of a bitch!” She yelled. She grabbed her phone and handbag and stormed out the door.

Nathan rolled over and coughed. When he glanced down at the floor, he saw blood. He got up and headed upstairs to his room to fix himself up.

Present Time...

While Amanda and Kassidy were at the hospital for their friend, Nathan couldn’t believe what he had just done. In the passenger seat lay an empty bottle of scotch and one of whiskey. I can’t believe I just murdered someone...

He was drunk, trying to forget what he had just done. Nathan took a big swig out of a bottle of wine, and when he wasn’t looking, a deer ran into the road. He tried to swerve, and he hydroplaned. He slammed on the breaks, but he didn’t stop. He slid down an embankment and into an oak tree.

His head hit the steering wheel and everything for him went fuzzy. He couldn't feel any pain due to all the alcohol he had consumed. Nathan’s head feel towards the passenger seat when he began to puke.

The last thing he saw was flashing red and blue lights...

Two Hours Earlier...

Amanda could hear Beau’s breathing begin to slow from across the room. Both of them were sweaty and exhausted from what they had just done. Beau watched from the bed as Amanda pulled her hair up into a ponytail. She tucked the stray strands behind her ears. She had put on black, silk pajama shorts and his blue sweater now. She pulled out a makeup wipe and began to remove the leftover sweat from her forehead.

“Amanda... I need to talk to you about something.” Beau laughed.

Amanda went and sat on the bed beside him. “Are you okay?”

“I am. My mother, she’s, well, a hard ass. She hates you because you’re not rich.” Beau explained. Amanda looked at him puzzled, and she raised an eyebrow. Beau let out a little laugh and shook his head. “When I first met you, I thought that you were the prettiest girl that I had ever seen, and I still this you’re the most beautiful girl in the world. I don’t know how a girl as amazing as you ever agreed to go on a date with me. Or do what we just did. I... I love you.”

“I love you too. You’re amazing Beau. You were there for me when I needed you. You picked me up when I was down, and that’s why I love you.” Amanda smiled. She lightly placed a kiss to his forehead.

Beau rose from the bed. “I really need to head home. Nathan and I need to talk, and I have some more homework to finish.”

Amanda nodded. “You’re okay. I get it.” The two said their goodbyes and he headed back to his house.

Present Time...

The doctor came over to Amanda and Kassidy.

“I’m here to inform you about...”

One Hour Earlier...

Beau was almost home when he heard his phone ring, and he pulled off to the side of the backroad to take the phone call. It was his mother’s number that sadly appeared.

Beau let out a sigh and answered the phone. “Hi, Mom.”

“Are you still dating that Amanda girl!?! You know I don’t approve-“ his mother began to yell.

“Maybe I’m dating her because you don’t approve.” Beau laughed, cutting her off. “Mom, I love her, and she loves me.”

“She doesn’t love you, she loves our money.” His Mom snapped back.

“Mom! We used to be poor! You have no right to accuse her of wanting our money!” Beau paused and took a breath to calm himself down. “I’m going to ask her father and mother if I can marry her in a few weeks. If they say yes, I’m going to marry her.”

“If you do that...” she took a breath to think. “I’ll cut you out of the family’s money! And if she leaves you-“

“Which she won’t.” Beau snaked.

His mother sighed. “When she leaves you because you’re poor, then maybe you’ll see my point.”

“And if she doesn’t leave?” Beau questioned.

His mother scoffed. “I’ve kept my eyes on her. I know she was sleeping with three people her freshman year-“ Beau hung up the phone on her and began to head home again.

Back at the house, Nathan was cleaning the blood from his face. The hot water felt nice on his wound. His eye began to swell. His phone rang, and he looked down at it to see his mother’s name.

He picked up the phone. “Hi, Mom!” He happily said. Lately, he and his mother had been getting along a lot better.

Time Out...

So many of you are probably wondering what happened at Nathan’s house and who the body was that Kassidy found was. Now to explain this, I’ll be channeling my inner Lemony Snicket. You see, to understand this, you must go back to what Emily yelled at Nathan before punching him, kicking him, and storming out.

Emily was quite angry at Nathan, but did she mean this remark? To kill another human being is a very hard line to cross. She had stormed out and into a local dive bar. Inside, she had drunk very heavily, confiding in the barkeep with all of her love life woes. She talked about Nathan, and Amanda too. She talked about her love for Nathan, and her hate now too. She talked about how she wanted to marry him, but all he wanted was her. The barkeep eventually cut her off, and her anger towards Nathan just grew more.

She had returned to Nathan’s house and snuck through the front door, which wasn’t that difficult since the door was unlocked. She took a sharp blade from the kitchen and waited behind the couch.

As for the phone call between Nathan and his mother, she was not pleased to hear from Emily’s parents that they had broken up. She yelled and yelled, and he never said a word back. He already felt terrible as it was. He had taken some painkillers, trying to forget it all. Maybe a part of him wanted to die, but he wasn’t so sure.

That’s when he came in downstairs, not even bothering to turn on the lights. He threw down his keys on the kitchen island and headed towards the refrigerator door.

Now there were a lot of things that could have gone differently in this situation, such as Emily had been seen sooner or the bartender hadn’t cut her off. Maybe if Nathan had locked the front door, and Emily hadn’t been so in love.

For there was a lot of things that she could have been doing right now, such as binge watching a Netflix show with a pint of ice cream or taking a nice hot bath. She could have been doing her homework or getting a hot cup of joe. However, that’s not the path she had chosen to walk down, instead, she had picked one much worse. One where she hadn’t stabbed Nathan, but Beau.

Now, Beau and Emily had both been thrown off by who the other one was. Beau punched her in the face and she stumbled backward with pan hitting the floor with a clang. Down the stairs ran Nathan, seeing the knife in his friend’s stomach. He grabbed a knife from the rack and stabbed Emily instead.

Now, Nathan had killed Emily, he knew this in his head. This is why Nathan had gotten drunk and left his home. Kassidy called an ambulance and tried very hard to stop the bleeding in Beau.

The ambulance had come to retrieve Nathan from his now mangled car, and the deer had gotten away. For it appears that the only thing not hurt by the actions of anything tonight was that deer. For off in the distance of those woods was the deer’s family and friends, something the people would maybe never return to.

However, back to the hospital and the current time, the two girls lives were going to change forever, and what the doctor said next was going to change their lives forever.

#for you #Nathan Sterling #nathan x mc #tj #the junior #choices #pixelberry #pixelberry choices #beau x mc

[squaredcircleconfess]

To The Top 6 News & Rumors

𝗣𝗥𝗘𝗦𝗘𝗡𝗧𝗘𝗗 𝗕𝗬 𝗦𝗤𝗨𝗔𝗥𝗘𝗗 𝗖𝗜𝗥𝗖𝗟𝗘 𝗡𝗘𝗧𝗪𝗢𝗥𝗞 ��𝗢𝗦𝗧𝗘𝗗 𝗕𝗬 𝗞𝗢𝗨𝗥𝗧𝗡𝗘�� 𝗞𝗔𝗥𝗗𝗔𝗟𝗘, 𝗦𝗔𝗠 𝗖𝗔𝗥𝗧𝗪𝗥𝗜𝗚𝗛𝗧, 𝗦𝗔𝗝𝗘 𝗖𝗥𝗔𝗪𝗙𝗢𝗥𝗗

6. Paris Traeger's Dinner

Kourtney Kardale: Here’s the first headline of the day; Natalie and Paris are planning a big dinner event. Unfortunately the details remain tight lipped and not even where or when this suit and tie event will take place. All I can say right now is the guest list is open, so who do you think will show up?

Saje Crawford: First off, I just think it’s amazing that Paris has done so much for being a frickin’ toddler. Now as far as the guest list goes, anyone who is anyone will show up. I just want to be invited and see how these people live.

Sam Cartwright: I’m gonna be the first to say it, babies hosting dinners?  They’re messy eaters, we all know it.  This is a recipe for disaster but that said, I’m also here for it.  I want to see a baby hitting grown men with food.

Kourtney Kardale: Does your mind spiral into ultimate chaos mode when it comes to children? We don’t even know what the event entails. I expect nothing but the best out of this dinner. Just imagine the beautiful gowns and the wonderful setup. It will be magical.

Saje Crawford: Am I the only one who wants something juicy to happen? This dinner will be attended by wrestlers and their significant others. 

Sam Cartwright: You remember Paris Traeger Presents?  We saw things like Brennan Devlin getting attacked by a killer baby and god knows what else.  Anything can and will happen.  Honestly, I wouldn’t be shocked if it’s a Clue situation and someone is killed.

Saje Crawford: True. We never really know what those rich people are into. At least it’ll be pretty right, Kourtney?

Kourtney Kardale: I think we’re getting a slight off topic here. Moving on.

5. Many returns scheduled for the Couples Cup.

Kourtney Kardale: CCW is holding a tournament style Valentine’s day couples cup. Thirty-two couples signed up for the event within days that it was announced. So many wrestlers are returning to wrestle along side their sweethearts. Couples that haven’t teamed up, couples that are seasoned in tag teaming. Who was the most shocking to you that signed on for the event?

Sam Cartwright: I’ll give you a couple.  We hadn’t seen Skylar Knight and Matt Knight since early in CCW.  We thought they were long gone, maybe retired, but the first person to have the record of Golden Ticket reigns in Skylar Knight is back.  Also, another shocker to me was Cartier finding a partner in Fudgecake.  We’ve seen him briefly in CCW in the past, so it’ll be interesting to see what the duo calling themselves ‘Thot Fudge’ do.

Saje Crawford: I thought it was ‘Thot Fudge Sundae.’ Anyway, the most shocking couple to join the ranks, in my opinion, is The Carlsons. It’s gonna be the first time we see Genie and Elijah in a ring since forevers ago. They’ve been away raising a beautiful family. It’ll be nice to see how they function as a unit in the ring. 

Kourtney Kardale: My pick would have to be Chad Kassidy and Natalie Dalton. Those two have been inseparable since it was revealed they were dating. It’s interesting to see their dynamic in twitter interactions. Will it translate well in the ring? 

Saje Crawford: They’ve been putting in some training for the show since there is a lot of great couples in the tournament. Greenly Lancaster is returning and bringing her husband Eddie Olivier along with her. Georgia Lancaster is doing the same and joining in with her boyfriend Conor Machina. Don’t forget about the blind date.

Sam Cartwright: I think we’re all ignoring the elephant in the room.  What is going to happen if for some reason, Genie Carlson, Georgia Lancaster and Cecily Golding all end up in the same room?  Or even the same ring?!

Kourtney Kardale: A little mystery for us to find out when it happens. Number four.

4. Beauty giant interested in Britain Cosmetics?

Kourtney Kardale: This one is huge. Britain Jade is selling half of her cosmetics brand to CoverGirl owner Coty. The deal has been ongoing for some time now and Britains rep has told us it’s pretty much a done deal at this point. Get this, the price tag they put on it is six  hundred million dollars. The rep goes on saying that they wanna produce more products under the Britain brand to sell to more counties around the world.

Saje Crawford: That’s amazing, sweetie. I love when a woman like Britain is working hard on turning her passion into an empire. Her cosmetics company is truly a beauty powerhouse. The only way customers could purchase the products is online. Now that they’re gonna make them available in stores? I love it.

Kourtney Kardale: It explains why some of her products were also Ulta exclusives. Britain had successful pop-up shops in New York and Los Angeles. She has the beauty truck that goes around LA and her fans line up around the corners for those. Her vending machines at the Las Vegas airport are selling out of the lip kits. 

Saje Crawford: Honestly, this was her next step. She also launched a new cosmetics brand with her bestie Natalie. You got anything to say, Sam? I feel like we took over for a bit. Wanna talk makeup?

Sam Cartwright: I honestly do not know a thing about makeup but, six hundred million dollars, nice.  I hope nobody in wrestling gets mad at her now for having had a makeup company.

Saje Crawford: Can’t hate on a woman who is minding her business and building an empire.

3. Lola and Noah Weavers repeated attacks on Faith McKinsey in CCW…  WHY?!

Sam Cartwright: Here’s a weird topic, on CCW as of late, someone had been repeatedly attacking Faith McKinsey and it turned out to be Lola and Noah Weaver.  I think a few of us are familiar with them from previous promotions…  but there’s been the underlying theme of ‘why’?  Everything’s been vague and it ultimately came to wrap up Faith McKinsey’s boyfriend, Aaron Pace…  so I suppose the question is - what, if anything, did Faith and Aaron do to rile up the Weavers?

Saje Crawford: Faith and Aaron left the sex cult. I said it! All four of them seem like those sort of people. I mean there’s nothing wrong with getting down and dirty with another couple. Whatever keeps the spice alive. 

Kourtney Kardale: Everything she just said was her opinion. Let’s get that straight. I don’t really know what to say about the unrest that Noah and Lola Weaver are causing. It could be anything. It could be for fun. Who knows. 

Sam Cartwright: The sex cult idea is pretty interesting, I’m kind of with Saje.  Maybe something will be illuminated on in the future, or they’ll settle it in the ring.  Either way, interesting.  It could even just be for attention, Faith has been general manager of Christ Centered Combat from the start.  She’s one of the most powerful women in CCW right up there with Chellsea.  But, all we can do at this time really is speculate.

Saje Crawford: I’m telling you right now, the women of wrestling need their own reality show. I’m sure a lot happens in their lives outside of the wrestling ring.

Kourtney Kardale: Right? I feel like that would make for good television.

Saje Crawford: I wanna know what goes on when they go on dates. Like what does their date think when they’re having those getting-to-know them conversations and the wrestling comes up. Do they have a lovely time and just go back to their place for just the tip? Or what? 

Kourtney Kardale: Just the tip?

Saje Crawford: It happened to a friend of mine. She and this guy had a great time, dated a couple of weeks and they ended up going home together. Then the following day she finds out that he hooked up with another friend of hers and she found out from that same friend! I was so disgusted.. Point is, sex makes people do crazy things.

Kourtney Kardale: So, before we get to our final two spots. Let’s see what Laurel Vaillancourt has for us with the wrestling forecast. 

LAUREL VAILLANCOURT WRESTLING FORECAST

Laurel Vaillancourt: Thanks, Kourtney! In case you didn’t know already, my name is Laurel Vaillancourt and I am here to give you the run down on what’s happening inside the squared circle. Christ Centered Wrestling has come out with another great show this past week and it looks like Angel McMaster is set to defend the CCW world heavyweight championship against Siberia Zombie at Valentine’s Slay. The match was made official at the end of the night at a contract signing that was overseen by the co-owner Chellsea with Brennan Devlin nowhere in sight. With the championship match set, Chellsea upped the stakes and made it a lumberjack match and the lumberjacks are previous opponents of Angel McMaster. Check out Valentine’s Slay and the couples cup this February..

Laurel Vaillancourt: Kings Road Pro Wrestling will be in Las Vegas and the confirmed main event of the night is for the KRPW world championship. The KRPW champion Lisa Seldon will put her championship on the line against challenger Aaron Pace. Aaron defeated Santana Johnson for his chance at the top championship. The same night Lisa Seldon defeated Allister Meowly in an epic main event match. What’s in store when the haughty number one contender meets the unorthodox KRPW champion? Expect the unexpected at Kings Road Pro Wrestling Chapter 57.

Laurel Vaillancourt: Atlanta, Georgia is the site for the next APEX Wrestling Volume nine. New APEX North American Champion Pete Osbourne will defend his newly won championship against the APEX world heavyweight champion Brennan Devlin! At Greener Pastures, Brennan picked up a huge win over Kid Nova retaining the prestigious APEX world heavyweight championship and with a little help from his fiancée Keana and that Dastardly Duo of Donny and Danny. Earlier in the night Pete Osbourne captured the North American championship in a hellish chamber match that saw its own controversy, when Sera St. James attacked Blaise and had Pete declared the winner. With both men coming off wins from Greener Pastures, this is the match you want to see. 

Laurel Vaillancourt: Skull Kids Wrestling is cooking up a world championship match you can’t miss. The ISGC world champion Unknown will be taking on Zack Fantana and the championship will be up for grabs in this bout. After his match with Logan Traeger, Zack declared his desire to face the ISGC world champion at the season finale. When Unknown retained his championship at the end of Identity Crisis, we saw Zack again and the two men came face to face.Their match will take place at ‘In The Cradle of Destiny’ but there is also another match set to take place. It’s a ISGC world championship contendership match battle royal. We’re gonna have a definite number one contender but, will we have a new Champion? Tune into In The Cradle of Destiny when it airs.

Laurel Vaillancourt: I would give you an update on Legacy Wrestling but Frank has been stingy with his report. That’s it for me, guys. Back to you.

                ____________________________________________

2. Britain Jade hiding her pregnancy?

Kourtney Kardale:  Okay, as of right now, this is a rumor. But the first time anyone has ever heard of the alleged pregnancy was a couple months back on the That’s Hot... Tea podcast. Sookie Valentine and Harmony Belle opened the flood gates with this. Now my question is… do you think it’s true.

Saje Crawford: I think it is true. I’ve seen Britain’s twitter page and she doesn’t share too much of her personal life on there. There was also this one tweet she retweeted from an account that read ‘keeping the things that I love to myself.’ Something like that. 

Kourtney Kardale: I’m a little on the fence about it. If it were true, wouldn’t there be a belly present in all the pictures she’s been posting the past year? 

Saje Crawford: It’s easy… the pictures weren’t recent. You think she wouldn’t want to keep her pregnancy a secret being in the public eye for so long? A pregnancy is something I would like to keep to myself and my family. 

Sam Cartwright: How do you keep a pregnancy secret?  I mean, I know we’ve seen Jesus and God appear on CCW programming but, okay, magic pregnancies don’t really happen.  And I still don’t believe in any of that anyway.  Someone would have seen her, somewhere.  Hasn’t she appeared a while back attacking Brennan Devlin at Paris Traeger presents?  A pregnant woman would never have been cleared by the baby doctors on that show.

Kourtney Kardale: That’s another thing. She was at Paris’ Halloween show.

Saje Crawford: In a frumpy looking witch costume. That thing could hide anything. The whole attacking Brennan spot wasn’t that serious. She wouldn’t have gone out there if she didn’t think it wasn’t safe for her. With the resources she could have, you can pretty much do anything you want. 

Sam Cartwright: I don’t know, I saw her post attractive girl shots just the other day so I find this one hard to believe.  But I mean, if it is true, and that bun is in the oven…  well it’s going to have to come out soon or…  get burnt. 

Kourtney Kardale: That’s what gets me the most. She tweets those incredible photos of herself with no signs of pregnancy. A gorgeous figure. I’m not saying that she wouldn’t look amazing pregnant. There is way too many evidence to suggest otherwise.

Saje Crawford: Oh, my god. You can tweet photos of yourself whenever you want. It doesn’t have to be the time you took them. You can scroll back on your phones photo album and choose one from months ago. Her friends, her family and her team are the only ones who know about it. Britain is about to give birth soon, like, next month soon.

Kourtney Kardale: If that’s the argument you wanna make. Who would be the baby’s father? She hasn’t posted about a man in over a year or so. She mutually ended her relationship with Chandler Scott early 2019, so it can’t be his. Give me a baby daddy name and I will believe you.

Sam Cartwright: Well, she posts a lot of a gentleman who looks a lot like a mix between Chad Kassidy and Leo Dawson.  Both men are identical.  But, it’s clearly neither of them.  But still, this guy she’s always showing off looks just like those two.  Is there a third one?  It’s hard to believe there’s that many identical handsome men.

Kourtney Kardale: There could be. 

Saje Crawford: If you two would shut up for a second, I would be able to tell you. So, there’s this one guy she’s known for years, like he use to work for her as a bodyguard. He’s obviously handsome. She’s liked a few of his tweets sporadically. Are you guys ready to hear his name for the first time ever?

Kourtney Kardale: Just say it.

Saje Crawford: Andre. His name is Andre. 

Sam Cartwright: Uncommon name, hard to iron down from there.  But Andre…  a man named Andre who is the spitting image of Chad and Leo.

Saje Crawford: Let’s get a fourth opinion. Laurel, do you think it’s true that Britain is pregnant?

Laurel Vaillancourt: Maybe! She has so much going on in her life right now, a baby wouldn’t be a bad thing for her. 

Sam Cartwright: If we’re just speculating on nothing, and you want a baby, Britain, please call me.  Or call the office.

Kourtney Kardale: Thanks, Laurel. But let’s get on with our number one headline.

1.Chad Kassidy and Natalie Dalton rushing into a new life?

Saje Crawford: Natalie and Britain are dominating the headlines today. We got another hot topic for you to indulge in. So, a source close to Chad Kassidy revealed to us that things within the Natalie and Chad relationship are moving pretty fast. They’re discussing marriage. They’re discussing more kids. They’re discussing moving in together. They’re discussing everything.

Sam Cartwright: Is anyone really close to Chad Kassidy though?  He’s awful.  Literally one of the most annoying human beings I’ve ever met.  Also that saying his own name thing every few minutes?  Kill me.

Kourtney Kardale: They’re really cute together. I wouldn’t be surprised by any of that at all, I mean if it were true. Right now, I feel like they’re enjoying their time together. The relationship is new and fresh for her coming off a divorce.

Saje Crawford: Which brings up another question. Is her divorce like official official? I know she posted a statement about her ending things with her husband but, is it final?

Kourtney Kardale: It seems that way to me. 

Saje Crawford: Wow, it’s hella easy being rich. Normally you’d have to be separated for a year for the divorce to be finalized. 

Sam Cartwright: Listen, she missed out on Logan Traeger.  He is hot.  And he is barely around too.  That’s the dream, a hot person who isn’t there to annoy you all the time all ‘what are you thinking about’.  She missed the boat.

Kourtney Kardale: We were told things are very civil between them considering they have two daughters together. That means they’ll be in each other lives for the rest of their lives. Then you have Chad who is now in the picture, dating Natalie, and getting to know the girls. 

Saje Crawford: Spins us back around to the original topic here. 

Sam Cartwright: I think it’s too early to speculate what’s on with those two.  But hey, love moves fast in wrestling.  People meet, get married in a day, then divorce in the next week, so who knows?

Kourtney Kardale: The world moves fast. That’s all from us right now. Check back with us soon!

#efed #rumors

[koganphrancis]

And Now Shameless Slanders The Littlest Milkovich?  FUCK YOU

My recap of Season H8 Episode H8

They really had Vee refer to Yevgeny as a “little psychopath”, just to retcon every decent Milkovich that ever was.  Completely unnecessary and untrue, and WHERE THE FUCK IS IAN, WHY ISN’T HE IN THIS KID’S LIFE ANYMORE, HE STATED FLAT OUT HE LOVED YEVGENY.  Thank goodness there’s a gif of a Henckel flipping the bird to help me through this trying time.

I’ll try to temper my bitterness for the rest of this, but I make no guarantees.  

That horrific remark about an innocent child aside, this episode had little to get me riled up over-it was one of the most boring episodes they’ve ever done-every week they seem to outdo themselves on that front.  

This piece of shit-pardon me-episode was written by day-to-day showrunner Nancy Pimental and it was either her lame attempt at trying to win Macy that Emmy OR her purposely sabotaging him, because his storyline was the longest and most painfully unfunny this week.  

Also it was directed by Emmy Rossum and she gave herself a shit ton of close ups which I suppose is her prerogative and heaven knows the writer didn’t give her much story to shoot.  

This week opens with the dog Rusty staring at a still in bed Fiona and kicks off the aforementioned close ups.  I still want that dog to be explained-the law isn’t “dogs that have eaten human flesh must be destroyed-unless someone’s willing to take a chance on rescuing them”.  Why is there zero fucking research on this show?

Meanwhile, Franny’s screaming but Debs is too busy in the bathroom taking a half dozen pregnancy tests and acting like the world owes her something-that will be her theme throughout the episode, as it has been for the past few seasons. 

Nancy tries to capture some of that “all the Gallaghers in one place at one time” magic by having everyone crowd around the bathroom and giving Ian his first spoiled toddler line of the ep, “Guess I won’t shower today-gonna get filthy anyway cleaning that shitty building my sister found for homeless kids.”  Whatever that meaningful moment on Ian’s bed was last episode is being forgotten or ignored by this dumbass show.  Will it ever be revisited?  Who knows. 

Lip, who this season is like Mrs. Kravitz on Bewitched and seems to have this compelling need to insert himself into other people’s drama while ignoring his own, volunteers to take Debbie to Planned Parenthood where she again acts like a total bitch who needs a reality check, and where Lip just happens to be there to see Charlie (Snore’s ex) walk in with a very pregnant woman.  Such fortuitous timing!

There’s a gross scene of Carl peeing into a toilet between Kassidi’s legs as she sits on the back of the toilet-good god, Nancy, is that what you think the kids are into these days?  All I’m gonna say about Kassidi is that she’s exactly like Sammi only younger and even more charmless.  Whoever the fuck thought the show needed that vibe back needs to be fired.  And I get that Carl is supposed to be thinking with his self-inflicted deformed dick, but, really?  After seeing his father and Monica over the years, plus living with Sammi for a bit, he wouldn’t know enough to run from that type of chick?

Frank has this totally convoluted “only on Shameless” business venture going where he’s going to smuggle immigrants who feel unsafe in the USA over the Canadian border and bring back his car loaded with prescription drugs.  Sure, Frank.  Anyway, the only scene of note in the many long and boring scenes he got this week is when he’s listing talented Canadians-and when he DOESN’T say “Noel Fisher” we all hear it anyway and laugh at this lame show for letting all that talent go.  Assholes.  

Instead of recycling Mickey’s shirts this week, the show does something even more stupid: they use the VFW hall where Mickey got married as the new youth shelter AND they use the basement where Mickey and Ian banged before his wedding as the food bank Debbie goes to!  Okay, Cam, I gotta say, that’s a version of audacious-reminding us of those classic Mickey moments the show can’t come close to having using any of the characters they’ve kept on.  

Speaking of Mickey (not that the show ever does), Nancy tries to recreate some of that old Mickey magic with having Terror call Ian a “Negative Nellie” when he bitches some more about the new youth shelter.  Pinning nicknames on Ian is a Mickey thing only-why are they constantly reminding us of the gaping holes that losing Noel has left?

Anyway, here’s how Nancy tried to bring some shit talking South Side back into the show: Ian: This place is a dump. Terror (to Geneva): Don’t listen to Negative Nellie he’s still mad about the church. I: (sarcastic) Ye-ah, cuz you got pity fucked by my sister with this building. T: (imitates Ian) Ye-ah-and she was really good.

Side note-can you imagine Ian ever trying to joke with Mickey about him fucking his sister?  Sheesh.

I: I bet-she’s great at getting what she wants and screwing everybody else.

WTF?  Has Nancy ever seen the show?  Fiona always winds up screwing herself over.  I’m not a huge fan of Fiona’s big sister act, but even I can admit she sacrificed a lot for her younger siblings and never did things to screw them while advancing herself.  The thing Ian should be mad about is Fiona’s comments about Mickey-and even then she didn’t screw Mickey or Ian, she just said some stupid shit that Ian didn’t have to listen to.

Anyway, Geneva tells Ian and Terror about the gay conversion church, so now I know taking on organized religion wasn’t what Ian referred to as “larger concerns”.  One of the youths tried to commit suicide after being subjected to it, so Ian and Terror go visit him and the kid holds up his bandaged wrists and asks if they like his hot wristbands and even though it’s canon that Ian witnessed his mother moments after she slit her wrists and Terror spent his prom night in an emergency room because he slit his, neither of them bat an eye or react in any way to the kid’s injuries.  

Emmy throws in a way too long scene of Fiona dancing around in her underwear (after more way too long Frank scenes).  Again it amazes me how this show just recycles the same shit over and over-anyone remember Fiona’s happy dance in the church she went to check out for her and Sean to get married in?  

Ford catches her in the act and entices her to go out and look at Chicago architecture with him-I want the jobs that either of them have where they have all the free time in the world to lollygag.  And why is the show wasting all this time on all this crap in one episode?  Paint drying on those historic buildings would’ve been more interesting to watch than this hour of television.  

At the end of their tour, Ford shows her the inside of a house he’s working on (all by himself, apparently, I guess he doesn’t work with a crew) and asks her to lie down on an improbably placed mattress and she’s a tad hesitant at first, but when she does it, he points out art on the ceiling to her.  She’s impressed with its beauty and then starts making out with Ford in a total recreation of Ian with Faileb and thinking that guys who show any bit of interest in them as people must want to fuck them.  It was stupid with Faileb, it’s stupid with Ford.  

There’s a scene somewhere along the line with Kev and Vee that’s bordering on spousal abuse-I really wish they’d end this “Kev grows some balls” idea immediately. "Big neanderthal man” is not a thinking person’s idea of an ideal partner.  

Ugh, now for more of the Ian crap.  He goes home and asks if they have a Bible laying around.  He finds one, and the next day-THE VERY NEXT DAY-he and Terror go to the gay conversion church and Ian gets into a Bible quoting match with the pastor/minister/whatever he is.  I’m sure Cam was hard as a rock thinking he was coming off like Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction, but the movie character I was thinking of was Rain Man-how else could he have memorized several Bible passages overnight unless he’s some sort of idiot savant?  

Terror is basically an Ian accessory in the scene-a backpack or a briefcase or a Trapper Keeper, holding Ian’s Bible for him until he needs it.  And the whole, “We’ll probably be banging again soon” right after Terror calls himself Ian’s ex was stupid-not funny or sexy, which I bet was what good old Nancy was going for. 

Cut to a scene of Snore getting a bit of a story thread that they probably originally kicked around for Mandy, and she has the triggering line that she’ll “run away to Mexico” if her father is released from prison.  Sure, Snore, whatever.  

Then there’s the scene where Kev is trying out his domineering dick act for the second time this ep on Svetlana, and Vee gets turned on and hands Yev over to Svetlana calling him that P word.  Fuck you, bitch.  I hope Svetlana is scheming to fuck Kev and Vee over big time-they have a scene where it looks like Svet’s doing that, but with this show, who knows if it’ll be alluded to again?

In the time it took Ian and Terror and the refugees from the gay conversion church to walk to the youth shelter, a video a person recorded at the church on her phone has been uploaded to You Tube and Geneva tells Ian it has a thousand hits already-cuz, yeah, Nance, that’s how the You Tube works.  Homeless kids working to clean up a dilapidated building have their iPhones turned on to get alerts whenever a video that has anything to do with gays gets posted to YT and they all drop everything and watch it.  

The only other thing I want to mention is the preview for next week-they show a quick clip of Ian and Terror pulling their shirts off that’s a ripoff of Mickey and Ian’s first time, a shot of Ian watching Terror asleep next to him in his bed where he’s awkwardly as fuck touching his face, and then a clip of Ian saying, “Kinda nice-us being a thing again.”  (WHAT HAPPENED TO GET OFF MY PORCH, DICK????  But I digress.)  Terror answers, “Jury’s still out.”  Well, if by jury he means FANS, we handed down our verdict a long time ago.  

I wonder if the show is trying to set up them finding their way to be a “true” couple (GAG), and then “tragedy” will strike and pull them apart when Ian gets arrested and they think  it’ll be poignant and painful for the fans, when actually we’ll be cheering and yelling, “Throw Ian in prison for 15 years, bitches!  Throw away the key and don’t have anyone visit!  Have Terror say it’s too painful for him to see him behind glass like that!!!!”  

But then again, this show is so inconsistent maybe that’s not where they’re headed at all.  Maybe they just think Ian needs the chase to stay interested, and for some misguided reason the writers think that’s what the fans want to see.  

We really, really don’t, though.  

And I can’t say it enough: Fuck this show for that line about little Yev.  It seemed like another very deliberate slap to the face of Mickey Milkovich fans everywhere.  

#Spoilers #Recap #TW: mentions of attempted suicide #Season H8 Episode 8 #They didn't even try to disguise Mickey's wedding hall #Or the basement for that matter-altho they did at least shoot that from a different POV #But the columns holding up the ceiling the high windows and the big square tiles on the floor are very distinctive

[blooblooded]

High School Story Act 1

KASSIDY NGUYEN

Twelve years to the day had passed since Kassidy Nguyen’s mother had taken her own life, and things weren’t exactly getting any easier. The passage of time did not heal all wounds; how could it? It was like her other mother and her brother were like open wounds, just walking around tearing and re-tearing themselves open. Every year it was the same and every year she did the same thing: avoided thinking about it.

In the bathroom, she avoided making eye contact with herself in the mirror. This at least was not anything new. She never looked at herself in the mirror, or if she did she spared only the slightest of glances to make sure that she did not have anything stuck in between her teeth or that her masses of unmanageable kinky blonde hair was not sticking up everywhere. Not that it mattered, since no matter what she did she always looked like a clown. It didn’t bother her much any more, it just affected her in this small uncomfortable way whenever she was around mirrors.

Instead of fixating on this-- something that even on the worst of days, Kassidy was not prone to-- she washed her hands, wiped them haphazardly on her pants, and left.

At least it was still relatively early into the first semester of her 4th highschool year, so she wouldn’t be missing out on much homework if the night went poorly. Not that Kassidy cared much about school or grades either. She had a pretty clear idea of her trajectory and it looked something like following in her mother’s footsteps and joining Eden’s bevy of law enforcement. Didn’t need good grades to become a cop. Didn’t need much of anything. Kassidy didn’t have much of anything. 

She made her way into the kitchen of their small apartment and sat down at the table, pulling her legs up and crossing them. The table was round and made of synthetic wood, since the real stuff was too expensive for the majority of the people who inhabited the underground city. Various plates and used utensils covered the surface in a way that was more lived in than it was messy. Well, it was also messy. Kassidy shoved a couple of plates out of the way so that she could comfortably rest her elbows on the table. 

There was a hole in the wall next to the table. Kassidy looked at it. She looked away.

It was like this every year, but every year the severity of her family’s behavior worsened. Every year it felt like they lost their grip on each other a little bit more.

Her communicator buzzed from inside her pocket and she pulled it out to check for any messages. The device’s rectangular screen had a crack in it from all the times she had dropped it. Sometimes this annoyed her, but where was she supposed to dig up enough credits to pay for a new screen? It buzzed again as her brother kept messaging her.

>christopher.nguyen: tell ma i’m gonna be out late tonight

>christopher.nguyen: we’re making signs for the workers march tomorrow

Kassidy rolled her eyes. It was good that he had found something to do with his energy, good that he had found people to relate to and hang out with, but it was starting to get annoying.

>kassidy.nguyen: don’t leave me with her she thinks all 3 of us are gonna hang out here

>christopher.nguyen: you didn’t hear her screaming at me last night?

>christopher.nguyen: just because i made one comment about police brutality in eden????

>christopher.nguyen:  didn’t even say anything offensive

>kassidy.nguyen: i heard you punching the wall and screaming at her right back you idiot

Kip sent a hybrid laughing-crying emoji, which was what he usually sent when he couldn’t think of something reasonable or normal to say. Kassidy replied with a long string of skull emojis. She shifted her position in the chair so that she was more comfortable. 

>kassidy.nguyen: iits fine. You shouldn’t have to torture yourself thinking about mom.

>christopher.nguyen: neither should you though.

>kassidy.nguyen: i don’t even remember her

>kassidy.nguyen: i mean like not as much as you

Kip sent her about 50 laughing-crying emojis in a row, which was just...impossible to discern. She decided to ignore him since he was being his usual self and opened up the internet so that she could watch videos of people slipping while waiting for the metro and nearly having fatal accidents.

This was where she was supposed to start on her homework, but nothing could motivate her to do so. She didn’t have anything that needed to be done immediately, or at least, she didn’t have anything that she couldn’t procrastinate on. It wasn’t like Kassidy was on the AP track; the only classes she was taking were the ones she absolutely had to for graduation--- the basic 4th level courses. If she absolutely needed to, she could always just cheat off of her best friend Esther Bellamy, who was generally the type to complete her homework.

Half an hour passed and her mother let herself into the apartment, struggling slightly with the keycard as she did so. She walked through the living room and into the kitchen and looked disoriented as she did so due to the novelty of getting home before 10:30. Before saying anything to her daughter, Dana Nguyen put her briefcase down on the floor and slumped down into the 2nd of their 3 chairs.

Kassidy looked a lot like her mother. They both had the same small and slouching way about them. Of course, her mother wore glasses and had straight black hair that was already peppered with grays. And of course, Kassidy was more prone to smiling and laughing and the light in her eyes hadn’t yet been dulled. They were blood related, which was something that her brother could not say. At least he could reach things in high places for them.

“I thought that I wouldn’t be able to get home at all,” her mother complained. “It’s like shit gets piled on top of me on purpose. Practically had to sneak out of my own office because if Anderson or Middleton had remembered I was there they would have jumped down my throat with this Mena Olowe fiasco. Jesus, I could pass out.”

“Did you pick up food?” asked Kassidy.

“Did you?” snapped her mother, pulling at her tie and unbuttoning her top buttons.

Kassidy scrolled boredly through a scary story message board. She knew better than to roll her eyes. 

Dana Nguyen rubbed her temples like she was getting a headache. “Sorry. Long day Where’s Christopher?” Whenever she used Kip’s full name, it meant that her anger was still simmering underneath the surface. “If he’s still out he could bring back pizza.”

“Uhhhh.” Kassidy scrolled more intently through her communicator so that she appeared busy. “Huh?”

While pretending to be hyper-focused on the story of someone claiming that the Red Religion was driving people mad, she watched her mother unwind. She watched as she slid her little shoes from her feet and unclasped the lanyard from around her neck. Her mother took an elastic from her wrist and tied her hair back with it, the greys at the sides springing out to frame her face. She rubbed her face again then stood up, went to the refrigerator, and grabbed a beer can. Without bothering to pour it into a glass, she opened it and took a sip, her shoulders relaxing.

Kassidy looked at her mother. She looked at the hole in the wall. 

Sometimes it felt like her family was crazy and she was the only one who didn’t blow up or freak out. Except that wasn’t true at all. Kassidy still blew up, just not over stupid shit. 

The story she was reading was actually pretty interesting, not that she believed it. Religious people were messed up and deluded, but not deluded enough to start brainwashing people and draining all the blood out of their bodies. Eden had a long history of fervent state atheism which meant that anyone with a more complicated belief system didn’t completely mesh well. It was difficult to be understanding; none of them believed in Science. They were the sorts who liked to hold onto the intangible and somehow that gave them comfort, instead of being comforted by the material world around them. Kassidy always shivered when she walked too close to their Churches. But their whole thing was that they were caring and compassionate, surely not the sort who would engage in blood sacrifices.

Well. From time to time, Kassidy enjoyed a good shiver.

Time passed. Her mother opened another beer and the skin of her cheeks started to flush. It was good that lately she had switched from liquor to beer. A couple years ago when Kip was in the Youth  Detention Center, she had drunk so much that Kassidy was always worried about her. The scary thing was that back then, her mother wouldn’t even cry despite the crushing waves of unhappiness that radiated from her. She would just stare at nothing, drink, then stare at nothing some more. As unsettling as that was it was better than crying. Kassidy had never seen her mother cry.

“Where’s your brother?” asked Dana Nguyen. Already she was looking rumpled, like the part of herself that was well put together immediately fell apart when she was home. “He’s not-- do you know where he is?”

“Uhhh,” said Kassidy awkwardly. “Yeah. Kind of.”

“And that is?”

She clicked out of the forums and pulled up her messages. “EWP meeting. Again, I think. Uh. I think he wanted to stay busy tonight, you know? He wanted to be with his friends.” How terrible it was that she could say that Kip had friends and she didn’t. All she had was Esther. If joining a stupid club was the way that one made friends in Eden, Kassidy did not want friends. The loneliness that she had known all her life was at least familiar.

The thin metal beer can crinkled as her mother gripped it, then threw it into the recycling bin. Her face grew redder. “EWP,” she said, bitterly. “EWP. You know, he is exactly like his mother was. Harry never shut up about the Workers’ Party, she never stopped trying to get us to unionize, never could be quiet about how she thought the Central Committee was corrupt. And look where it got her. Look where it’s getting him.” 

“The EWP isn’t that bad.” It was true. They weren’t. The Eden Workers Party was a popular organization for working class leftists who were averse to the organized crime connections that all the other labour-parties had. While it was considered fringe-- after all, Eden was a one-party system on paper and had been for over two hundred years-- it was accepted as something that passionate yet overly idealistic people involved themselves with. Mostly they protested things like low wages and prohibitive housing costs and were either ignored or laughed at. 

But Kip was not a part of the Eden Workers Party anymore. He had found something even more niche, more anti-capitalist, more extreme. Kassidy didn’t entirely understand it, but the thing that she understood well was how much her mother would flip her shit if she ever found out.

“So he’s out, what, painting posters or something?” asked her mother.

“I guess,” said Kassidy, who did not actually know. She pulled up her contact information for Esther.  

“Unbelievable.” Standing up once again from the kitchen table, her mother got a 3rd beer from the fridge, then went to the beat up couch that was the centerpiece of their living room. When she sat, she didn’t curl her legs up like Kassidy did, rather, she seemed to deflate and slouch even more. “He is unbelievable.”

For a moment, Kassidy wondered if she should join her mother in the living room. How was she supposed to shoulder all that misery? She didn’t want to, but she knew that she couldn’t just leave her by herself, not today. She began to message Esther.

>kassidy.nguyen: can you call me so i can escape?

>kassidy.nguyen: my moms in a weird mood again

No answer.

“Unbelievable,” Dana Nguyen repeated, staring at the hole in the wall. “I don’t know what to do with him, I can’t get him to listen to me. I don’t know what to do. He’s-- he’s practically a grown man. He’s going to get in trouble someday.”

Kip had already been in a lot of trouble.

“I have people breathing down my throat all day, I can’t have my kid out there screaming about, I don’t know, stupid politics. Do you know what it’s gonna look like if he gets himself arrested? We arrested 3 of those socialist nutcases today for vandalizing a train station, can you imagine what would happen if Kip gets wound up in all that? The media gangfucks me hard enough already.”

“Ugh, gross Ma, don’t say gangfuck,” Kassidy glued her eyes to her screen. “That freaks me out.”

“The media gangfucks me during every press conference, Kassidy,” said her mother, who finished off her 3rd beer of the night. “I’m the Central Committee’s whipping boy, something goes wrong in Eden, I’m the one who gets the fucking blame. It’s nonstop, if it’s not one thing, it’s another. I don’t want this. I didn’t want this. If he gets arrested for I don’t know, destroying something, I can’t just bail him out.”

>kassidy.nguyen: she’s getting all crazy again i can’t deal with her by myself.

Her mother looked like she was melting on the inside. Kassidy cleared her throat to try and make a joke.

“It’s fine if you don’t bail him out, Vega will just do it for you.” She tried to arrange her face into something that resembled a smile. Why did she feel so awkward all of the time? “She’s done it be--”

“Is that supposed to be funny?” Dana Nguyen put her hands over her face. “Fucking Vega.”

This did not seem exactly fair. Eden’s Chief Personnel Officer Vega Pelenato had been a part of Kassidy and Kip’s lives as long as she could remember. Vega was the kind of person who picked up garbage that wasn’t her’s, she was a comfortable and trustworthy presence. Back when their mother wasn’t doing well and Kip was in the Youth Detention Center, she would check in on Kassidy a couple nights a week and bring her food. She had always figured that if she got in trouble, she’d call Vega first.

Defending Vega was the right thing to do.

“What’s wrong with Vega?”

“Shady. She’s shady. She wants my job.”

“Thought you didn’t want your job, Ma.”

Dana Nguyen just closed her eyes and slumped over on the couch so that she was lying down. 

(I DON’T KNOW WHERE TO GO WITH THIS)

AJAX GUTTIEREZ

It wasn’t usual for AJ to have enough time to grab a coffee and enjoy it before class. Generally he ran late. Not just in the morning either. It seemed as if he never had any time for himself, as if he was always doing things for other people and shoving his own needs down so deep that they could not be reached.

That morning however, as if through some miracle, everything was running smoothly. The metro eran without any weird delays or hiccups. The kids he babysat did not drag their feet for once as he got them ready for school. He didn’t have to run or wheeze or neglect to feed himself just because he was doing his job; he actually had time to enjoy the morning.

It was a novel experience. He was usually so busy.

The cafe which he frequented was located on the university floors of the Education District. It was one of the cheaper ones, despite its proximity to the sprawling section of classrooms which students who were enrolled in the Business and Marketing programs went to. Not that being on the Business track meant someone had money necessarily, but as a generalization, it did.

AJ did not have any money. It wasn’t like he was not being payed; his employer was the 2nd wealthiest individual in Eden— directly behind West Agapama’s shipping (and smuggling) empire. He got paid enough to pay the exorbitant tuition fees for a degree that did not guarantee a career in the future, but that was it. Sometimes he had money for coffee. Usually he did not. When he did have the money to treat himself, he ended up not having enough time due to having to drag the kids out of bed and making them get ready for school in the morning. 

One of the baristas at this particular cafe was his acquaintance, he had briefly dated her about a year previously and while the two of them had not remained close, they would still talk or hook up from time to time. When she noticed him, he nodded at her. Girls liked him, most of the time they would blush or giggle when he flirted with them. It was more difficult for him to hook up with guys. 

“Whaddya want, Gutierrez?” asked the barista, who was tall and slim and had an aura of bored disinterest about her. She had been in one of his Marketing classes, before she had been forced to drop out of school because her financial aid stopped coming through. “Haven’t seen you in a hot minute.”

AJ shrugged as he studied the iridescent signs that exhibited the various drinks available. “Haven’t had time.”

“Still working the same gig?” The name tag that she wore on her green apron read ‘Qian’, which was her surname— not many people had the privilege to call her Jenny. AJ had, back when he was sleeping with her, but it hadn’t worked out. “Still a miserable bastard, huh? You should come sling drinks with me.”

“You know I can’t do that,” said AJ. “Can I just get a coffee with cream and a shot of caramel?”

Qian nodded and got to work.There were no other customers waiting in line; either they populated the more popular coffee shops that were around the STEM classrooms or it was simply a slow day. Things like that were impossible to discern. He watched her work and envied the simplicity of a job where tasks were straightforward. All she had to do was follow the recipe and smile at the customers. There was no room for fear and speculation, she didn’t have to feel anxious about losing a couple of children or fucking up so monumentally that she got hung up by her toes in a meat packing plant. Customer service sucked too, but it came with less dangers.

AJ hadn’t considered his babysitting job personally dangerous until recently. Now he was brainstorming ways to get out of it but came up blank every time.

Compulsively, he checked his communication device for messages, but saw nothing. 

“Aren’t you graduating this year?” asked the barista. Steam from the latte machines made her straight dark hair stick to the sides of her face. AJ remembered how pretty she was and remembered how lonely he was now. “Marketing, right?”

“Business and Marketing,” said AJ. He took his cup of coffee when she handed it to him, it was too hot for him to drink immediately so he lingered. “Actually I just have 10 credits left. The end is in sight, haha.”

“You gonna work for Prosperity?”

“I mean, I sort of am already if you think about it.” He watched as she shook her head in kind disbelief. Nobody took him seriously. “I’m going to talk to Mr. Prospas about it later on in the semester, after I’ve started working on my thesis. Market research analyst, right? There’s always room for that kind of work in a huge company like Prosperity. I’ve been working for him on the books for almost 5 years, off the books for much longer. That’s gotta mean something, am I right?”

“Working as a babysitter,” said Qian. She wiped her dark hair back from her face. AJ didn’t correct her.

What was he supposed to say, that he had been forced to watch out for a known crime lord’s kids since he was 12 years old? That kind of thing was completely unbelievable. Even when he said it to himself, it sounded unbelievable. For nearly half his life, AJ had taken care of people who were not himself, had been left with minimal time for himself and his interests. Had he cultivated compassion for others during that time? Who was to say. All he knew was that he never had any time for himself, that he never had any time to do what he wanted to do. It was one of the reasons all of his relationships fell apart in the first place. 

(EDIT THIS SHE ALREADY GAVE IT TO HIM)Qian pumped a couple of squirts of caramel flavoring into AJ’s cup and handed it to him. The cup was warm in his hands. “You need to get out of there, man,” she said, and a cautious tone lent itself to her voice. “You know it’s not safe, right? I read about how EPD found some guy with his eyes sliced out of his head and his throat cut the other night, they’re trying to tie it back to Prosperity.”

“Could have been anyone,” said AJ, who knew exactly who she was talking about and exactly what had happened. Even those treacherous thoughts made his heart palpate. “What about AGA? What about the Reds? Or those socialist whack jobs, I heard that last week a couple of them beat the shit out of some guy just because he had an expensive communicator. This Colony is a shithole, Jenny, no wonder the Central Committee has been panicking. Every time something violent happens— so every day-- the cops try to pin the blame on one of the five families because they’re too stupid to figure it out for themselves.”

“Uh huh,” said the barista. She smiled at him a little like she didn’t believe him. “Sure. You need to get out of there. That shit ain’t safe for people like us.”

He already knew what she meant by ‘people like us’. People who didn’t have the means to post bail or people who didn’t have the flashy names to become media darlings. She meant people like him. People who might someday be found slashed to pieces in a warehouse, people who the police wouldn’t care about. AJ took a sip of his coffee. It was too sweet but bearable, he just wanted to sit down and not have to talk to his ex.

Come to think about it, AJ had a lot of exes.

He retreated to the relative privacy of one of the back corners and sat down. Not many students were currently occupying the small room; an accounting professor who he recognized was meeting with a mentee nearby and a couple shared a breakfast of bagels in the opposite corner next to the door. In theory the lack of distraction would lend itself to him being able to get more work accomplished before class, but AJ knew that he would inevitably start scrolling through the feeds on his communicator and waste all his time.

He took his tablet out of his tote bag and activated its keyboard function. One of his professors had assigned a short analysis of product proliferation, or what occurs when an organization markets endless variations of the same products. Take for instance Prosperity Inc, which made its money feeding the people of Eden. The majority of Prosperity's sales came from cellular agriculture— the in vitro cultivation of animal cells on a massive scale, then marketed towards the lower and middle class as an accessible alternative to traditional animal protein. But the company also raised cattle in the flat fields on the surface above Eden, and slaughtered them in the traditional way, then marketed them to the elite who could afford it. In this way, Prosperity sold the exact same product— animal protein— and almost entirely cornered the market.

Although AJ understood this concept of diversification and monopolization well from having grown up around it, he couldn’t bring himself to write about his own experiences. It just didn’t seem right. Instead he stared blankly at the screen of his tablet, his mind drifting every now and then to the conversations around him. He typed one sentence, then deleted it. He typed another one and deleted that one as well.

What was the point of going to college? The pit of fear opened up in that dark place in his chest and he struggled to swallow it down. Whenever he was still and quiet for too long, the terrible thoughts about how he was never going to be able to provide for himself and for his mother swirled up from that dark place. Even if he was able to graduate, he had no relevant job experience in his field. His only hope was to beg for the job he wanted and pray for the best.

To distract himself, AJ pulled up a crossword app. The clue that he got stuck at was 53 Across: ‘Pass (off) as genuine.’ Muddling over it took him a good 5 minutes until he recalled the word ‘foists’. 

In the reflective glass of his tablet’s screen, he could see his own face and he looked away, unable to stand making prolonged eye contact with himself. A few strands of hair were escaping from his short ponytail and he slicked them back with one hand, drinking his coffee with the other. What was it about his own image that caused him such internal disgust? It had never been like this before, it had slowly crept up on him seemingly without cause. The strange thing was that his self esteem was not low, he often felt proud of himself and his self-efficacy. To his knowledge, he was not overcome with shame or guilt. This was different. AJ did not want to watch himself slowly sink into the thick mud of his life.

He pulled up his textbook, read a sentence, and found himself unable to focus. But looking back at the crossword he was working on also could not hold his focus.

Vibrations in his pants pocket alerted him to a message on his communication device and he pulled it out and checked it. The youngest kid who he babysat, a 9 year old, had left him a string of smiley-face emojis. Not just a string, like 25 of them. Valentine was an excitable and loving child, but he never could leave anyone alone. AJ had tried to explain that he had to go to school too, but it just didn’t get through.

Without anything of importance to say to the kid, AJ put his phone face down on the table. What is someone supposed to say to a bunch of random emojis sent with no context? The kids were supposed to be in class anyway. At least the older one never messaged AJ or reached out to him. It was hard enough to deal with one needy child.

Unable to focus on what he was supposed to be doing, he pulled up his newsfeed. In 6 months Eden would have its first serious Mayoral election in over 10 years. Or perhaps, the first serious Mayoral election in 57 years? On paper, Eden did not have political dynasties, but for nearly 6 decades, somebody with the last name ‘Malena’ had been head of the Central Committee. The current Mayor, Jay Malena, had been elected when AJ was 12, after his father Jack Malena had stepped down from office. And when AJ’s mother had been young, Awhina Malena had been in power. It wasn’t something that bothered him, at least not that much. AJ wasn’t interested in politics because he couldn’t see how they materially affected his life.

No matter who had control of Eden, things weren’t going to get any better, at least not for him. Nothing ever changed. 

Anyway, the Mayor was only one part of the Central Committee. There was of course also a Commissar for each of the 10 Districts who supposedly had the best interests of their constituents in mind. Then there was the worthless Police Commissioner, the Minister of Science, the Comptroller, and the Chief Prosecutor. All in all 15 people who held Eden in their hands. They were the people who got payed to sit around on their asses all day while the five families— owners of the megacorporations which actually influenced Eden— did whatever they wanted.

The current newsfeed had a picture of Mayor Malena sweating in front of the cameras during his latest interview. He was a sharp, good looking man with big square teeth like chunks of marble. Moderately likeable, shiny and stupid. The shitshow that would rise up if he lost to his challenger, the flashy and dangerous idiot West Agapama, was unthinkable. Not just for the Colony. AJ’s boss would finally lose his mind. 

At least AJ knew who he’d be voting for. He didn’t know much, but he knew that. 

The youngest kid he babysat sent him another string of smiley face emojis. The corners of AJ’s mouth tightened and he tapped out his own message.

>ajax.guttierez: stop playing on your comm

>ajax.guttierez: you’re going to get in trouble

Valentine replied with yet another incoherent bunch of emojis and gifs. AJ turned his device off vibrate, unable to engage in any more emotional labor.

It wasn’t that he didn’t care about the Prospas kids. They were just a lot to deal with. The basic expectations of his job was that he made sure that they were safe, that he made sure they went to school, and that he entertained them briefly after school and took them where they needed to go. It was not part of his job to be their friend or act as...as some kind of surrogate older brother. AJ knew from terrible experience just how badly that could go and how much he could lose if he let himself get too attached to one of them. He kept himself closed off for the most part, he tried to keep himself professional.

Professional. He did not want his profession to be watching out for his boss’s kids for the rest of his life. He could not let that happen to himself, he needed to move on for his own sake as well as his mother’s sake.

His poor mother…

AJ took another sip of coffee and dialed his mother’s number on VidChat. Usually she slept in, she had always been a night owl, even when his father was still alive. Now she had good reason to sleep the mornings away. On the 3rd ring, she picked up her communication device.

“Ajax?” she said, her voice still sleepy. She was still in bed, her long brown hair uncovered. AJ took after his father more than he took after her, but he could still see his own traits in her long curled eyelashes and her slight overbite. “Are you getting breakfast before class?”

“Yeah,” AJ answered, even though he wasn’t. He didn’t want to waste his money on an expensive bagel or something when he had food back in the apartment. Well, technically there was also food in the kitchens of the Prospas family home which he and his mother shared, but he didn’t want to be accused of stealing. “Just checking on you. You weren’t up when I left.”

His mother rubbed her eyes. “I was up until 3, I think. I get caught up, you know. I keep praying that things will get better for us, I know God is listening. He’s always listening.”

“Uh-huh.” His mother had only started getting into religion a couple of years ago, when the Red religion gained popularity due to some scriptures getting spread online. AJ didn’t care for it or understand, but it was good for her. It gave her something to do, people to talk to, and faith to hold on to. It was better to think that the God from beyond the Rift existed and was listening to her when she was sad or in pain, better than not having anything at all. He had tried to get into it at her behest, but the bloodletting aspect of it made him queasy.

“Someday we won’t have to struggle or suffer anymore, you know? God is coming back someday, He’s coming back soon. Nobody will put us down anymore, nobody will hurt us anymore because you and me, we’re God’s children. He loves us, someday He’s going to come down from the Rift and protect us.”

“Yeah, I know he’s gonna do that, Ma. I know.” AJ turned his head to eye Jenny Qian up behind the counter and watched her bend over to pick something up. Seeing the thin slip of pink underwear show above her pants reminded him that it had been over a month since he last had sex. Probably not the best thing to contemplate while calling one’s mother.

“He’ll get rid of all the evil here. We won’t have to hide underground anymore because He’s going to purify the world.” Helen Guttierez’s face, tan and lovely, was so full of devotion towards her son that once again he wondered if he should go to one of the Red Churches, if only to give her peace. “Everyone will be happy the way that they were in the old days, before the Rift opened.”

Whenever AJ looked up while on the Surface Levels, he could see the impossibly dark red Rift pulsating far above the Dome. It made him sick to look at it for too long, so alien and unnatural. Nobody understood it, other than it had appeared suddenly 873 years ago and had ended almost all human life on Earth. It was a miracle that the few who survived the physical changes of that time were able to band together and form the 11 Colonies.

Then again, history and science had never been AJ’s strong suits.

“If God listens to anyone, it’s gonna be you,” he told her, just so that he could see her smile, that smile that was both like and unlike his own. 

And his mother did smile at him. She sat up a little straighter in her bed, which was covered in pillows and extra blankets for her comfort. She was a good mom, she had always given AJ the love and emotional support he needed to grow. None of this was her fault.

“Do you want to get dinner tonight?” she asked. She fumbled around on her bedside table to find her glasses and AJ wondered if he would also need glasses by the time he was 40.

“I’ll try to figure out something to do with the kids. Yeah, yeah of course.” AJ watched the little screen as his mother’s upper lip curled in disgust ever so slightly. “I’ve been so busy lately. You know.”

“You’re getting older. That’s what happens. You can’t— you aren’t that little boy you used to be. I loved you then and I love you now, just like I’m going to love the man you’re going to be. Growing older and more responsible isn’t going to change that, I pray for you every single day. Every day.”

A handful of students walked into the cafe, laughing and joking amongst themselves. More business and marketing majors, nobody overtly from the upper class.  AJ recognized most of them but wasn’t close to any. It was so easy for him to have fleeting relationships, romantic or otherwise. Even committing to a platonic friendship was difficult and growing more difficult by the day. It was hard for normal people to trust him once they found out who he worked for, and the people who were interested in him despite that? They were not the kind of people he wanted to associate with. 

The only person he actually wanted to associate with was his mom. It was fine to have short flings with people so that he could have casual sex, but anything beyond that? No. It was not worth it to drag out his history in the process of bonding with another human.

But the sound of a group of friends laughing together made something sharp and hungry twist deep in his gut.

His mother was still talking. “We could go to that restaurant in the 7th District that my friend Nneka owns. Their food is so good, cheap too. I think you’d like it.” 

“Vegetarian?”

“Yes. Of course. Of course it is.” She stretched, then rolled her shoulders back and in doing so, the collar of the oversized pajama shirt she slept in slipped down just enough to reveal a bite mark on her neck. It looked new.

It only took that to make AJ’s legs begin to shake. He pressed the hand that was not holding the communicator down on one thigh to try and control himself. “You OK, Ma?”

If she realized that he was upset, she did not show it. After all this time she minimized and brushed things off so that AJ wouldn’t get upset and do something stupid. The one time she slipped up and admitted to how scared she was, he’d flown into a rage and the aftereffects had not been pretty. That had been when he was 16 and he had ended up in the hospital. If he tried to stand up to the person who was hurting his mother now, as an adult? He’d end up like the guy Qian had told him about, the one who had been tortured before getting his throat slit.

Sometimes the best thing to do was not fight back. 

“I’m OK, baby,” she told him, and her smile took on an aspect that his never could: understanding. “It’s like I told you, God’s taking care of me. He never puts anything on our plate that we can’t handle.”

The nearby group of students were still laughing as they waited for their coffee orders and suddenly AJ couldn’t stand it. It made him want to lash out at them and he knew he couldn’t. He continued to press his fist into his leg as hard as he could and hoped that it would keep him calm. How could they be laughing? How could they have friends? When other people in Eden were so...stuck.

“Would you tell me if you’re not OK?” he asked his mother. 

“Of course I would,” she said, and he knew that she was lying. It showed itself in the way she did not look him in the eyes. Even without looking at her he could tell. “I know. You take care of me too.”

What was he supposed to say in response to something like that? When he knew that he did not. When he knew that he was about as effective an influence in her life as God was. If he kept pressing, if he kept asking her if she was OK, she would get upset with him, something which he could not bear. All he could do was grit his teeth and watch, pretend that he was not watching. All he could do was remain passive in hopes that he did not make anything worse. It was like that. She was not the only person who he wanted to protect, as loathe as he was to admit it.

AJ pressed his fist even harder into his leg— as hard as he could-- but it didn’t hurt; he didn’t feel it at all.

KIP NGUYEN

“You have the 16th highest GPA in your cohort,” said Ekala, one of the many Special Education counselors in the Ed. District. “That’s amazing, Christopher. That’s unprecedented. You can do anything you want to, if you put your mind to it. You can get scholarships, grants, all kinds of things with grades like that. Don’t you feel proud of yourself?”

Kip Nguyen, leaning back in his chair inside of the drab little office in which he had been meeting Ekala weekly for the last 4 years, looked up at the ceiling. The white plaster made him feel trapped. The tiny room with only enough space for a desk and an extra chair also made him feel trapped. He jiggled his leg. “No. Nope. Why should I?”

His SpEd counselor’s face was kind. She was kind. He knew that she actually cared about him and that she wouldn’t have chosen to go into the career path that she had if she didn’t have empathy. It was just that empathy and compassion didn’t matter in Eden, not really. Those weren’t traits that changed things on a large scale. “You’ve overcome a lot in your life. You’ve accomplished a lot. You should feel proud of yourself.”

“Why?” Kip asked again. He kept jiggling his leg.

“Because— because you should. //I// feel proud of you, you know.”

At a different point in his life, that kind of validation might have meant a lot. Now it was just sort of useless. Kip hated sitting in a chair in front of her for an hour every week. It was increasingly difficult for him to restrain himself, since he wanted to jump up and move around and talk. Whenever he was in meetings with teachers or his SpEd counselor, he could talk, he just couldn’t say the things that he wanted to say. In order to keep himself safe, he had to make himself...less than he was. Less energetic, less noisy. If he acted in accordance with his nature, the people who were in positions of power over him might get mad.

“I’m glad that //you// feel proud of me,” Kip told her. “But I don't think that really matters. Why does that matter? You know? For my future?”

Ekala looked at him flatly. She was young, less than 30 anyway, and kept her hair in short cornrows. The black uniform that every teacher, counselor, and professor wore in the Education District did not serve to make her prettier, it served as a reminder of who was really in charge. It served as a reminder that when it came down to brass tax, she held power over him that he could never contest. “You don’t feel proud of yourself for your hard work? You’ve come a long way in just two years.”

“It doesn’t //matter// if I’m proud of myself. Materially, I mean. It does not matter. The system doesn’t care about my self esteem, it doesn’t care about anyone.” As those words were coming out of his mouth, he realized that he needed to shut up. His Special Ed counselor wrote something down on her tablet, then looked back up at him like she expected him to say something else crazy. As usual, he could not help himself. “How does being proud of myself help pay 25,000 credits a year for college? It doesn’t.”

“Your grades mean you’ll qualify for scholarships.”

“They don’t give out scholarships to people like me.” It was true. She would try to dispute it but Kip knew it was true; he had talked to other people who had been arrested, other people who had been locked up either in the Youth Detention Center or the Prison District itself. His new friends were in the most part college students majoring in law, economics, or journalism, and all of them were being crushed by mountains of debt that they would never be able to pay off, no matter how hard they worked. Their backgrounds meant that the sprawling college administration hesitated to grant them any money, and their interests only solidified this. Eden did not reward those who were interested in social services or public works, Eden only rewarded those who could contribute to concrete betterment. In the Colony, STEM was everything. “They don’t give scholarships to anyone like me.”

That was not to say that he did not want to go to college. The idea of going into a career where he did something that changed things, a career where he was actually able to help people was like a far off dream to him. It just wasn’t feasible.

“You say that like you’ve already decided that you’re not going to try,” said Ekala. She rested her chin on the palm of her hand. “Is that why you don’t feel proud of yourself?”

Kip exhaled heavily and vigorously rubbed his head with his left hand, his uninjured hand, messing up his hair. “You’re not listening to me.”

“I’m listening to you.”

“//No//, you’re not. I’m //trying// to explain that it doesn’t //matter// because I either have to be in debt for the rest of my life or beg for scholarships I’ll never qualify for because I was in the YDC for 8 months. It doesn’t matter how I //feel// unless somebody does something to actually change things.”

Nobody listened, nobody ever listened. It was why he always had to make a scene to get his needs met or to get his points across. It was easier to be quiet and just take things, but Kip couldn’t do it. He couldn’t ever shut up and act passively, he couldn’t ever roll over. It made things harder for him and it made people dislike him, but it was better than acting like a doormat. He would not let people walk all over him.

When he was agitated he could not stop jiggling his legs or picking at himself, which was to say that he was always jiggling his legs or picking at himself. It took all his self control not to start scratching at one of the zits on his jawline.

Ekala’s face was very kind and understanding. She was a good person, he could see it in her eyes. He could see how much she wanted to help him, she just didn’t understand and would never be able to. “I’ve told you before that having to be detained as a minor doesn’t necessarily mean anything; you can even petition to have your record expunged. Do you want to fill out some scholarship forms with me? I could--”

Kip stood up without warning and realized that he had clenched his fists. WIth great difficulty he unclenched them. He knew that his eyes, which were already too big, were probably bulging out of his head. Due to the lack of space and the forcefulness of his movement, his chair scooted back toward the door when he stood. Aware of his capacity to make other people feel frightened because of his demeanor or his actions, his heart rate increased at the thought that he might frighten his counselor and make her press her panic button and throw him back in the Youth Detention Center.

He could not go back there. He could not be trapped like that again.

But his counselor did not react with fear. She smiled at him kindly. There was a big gap between her front teeth. “OK. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Do you need space?”

He grabbed up his bag which had been sitting at his feet and shouldered it. Everything he wanted to say to her swirled up from his heart and he had to keep his mouth clamped shut so that he did not start yelling again. Kip wanted to yell at her. It wouldn’t make him feel better, just like punching walls didn’t make him feel better. The only purpose yelling would serve would be to expel an iota of the endless energy his mind and body produced.

Ekala had given him an out though. That was more than most teachers did for him.

“Yeah. Space,” he said, not looking at her.

“Can you check in with me tomorrow then?”

Kip nodded. What other choice did he have? His heart pounding, he left the miserable little office. Even though he had recently turned 18 and was legally an adult in the eyes of the state, he was still being controlled by others.

The floors that he attended most of his classes on were similar to the floors of the normal high school. It wasn’t like the Prison District or anything, there was just a smaller teacher to student ratio. Supposedly the extra teachers were there to give students who needed more support the help that they needed, but Kip didn’t believe that for a second.

(I DONT KNOW WHAT TO WRITE. KIP BEING ANNOYING)

“What’s wrong with your hair?” he asked Esther. Usually her limp orange hair fell flatly to her shoulders, but now it had some volume to it.“Why did you fuck with your hair? Haha, did you curl it? You look like a, a, I don’t know. You look bad.”

Esther didn’t answer him, she just fluffed up her hair. Kip attempted to put his hands in it and mess it up and she smacked him in the face. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Ow!” He tried harder to mess up her hair and she smacked him again. Kip tried to hit her back but missed because she was slightly taller than he was. “What’s wrong with me?? What’s wrong with you??” They swatted at each other furiously for a couple more seconds before separating, breathing hard.

It had been like this with Esther ever since they were kids. Kip had met her when he was 8 and she was 7 and they had been squabbling ever since. Something about their personalities did not mesh, maybe because of certain similarities that they shared. Both of them were eldest children with high intensity and a list of diagnoses. They loved each other very much, they just didn’t like each other.

“Nothing’s wrong with me,” said Esther. She was already beet-red.

“Nothing’s wrong with me either!” responded Kip. 

There was absolutely something wrong with both of them. 

“Take some deep breaths then or something, you look manic. Are you off your meds?”

“Oh, that is so patronizing coming from you. You really are nuts, Esther. You take some deep breaths.”

“No, YOU take some deep breaths! Goddammit. I hate you.”

Kip laughed, feeling his body grow light with his fondness for his friend. She was a good match for him. Even fighting with her was fun, he liked to fight. Sometimes it was easy to forget his loneliness, that void filled with distractions such as politics or arguments online. Those distractions were destructive and he knew it. Being around people who cared about him was the truest form of distraction.

“How are the twins?” he asked her

“Oh my God, so annoying. They both have a crush on the same boy and they won’t shut up about him, I want to shove them both out of a window.”

“How would that even work? What happens if the guy actually likes one of them back?”

“The other one would kill that twin and act as a replacement, I guess.”

Kip tried to mess with Esther’s hair again and she widened her candy-apple green eyes at him as a threat. At her feet, the Creature which was her constant companion wound itself between her legs, rubbing itself at her ankles and making a curious sound, something in between a growl and a purr. It was a lethargic beast and only really seemed to be slightly cognizant, only really becoming active when Esther’s emotions ran high. Most of the time, Kip tried not to look at it so that he didn’t look like he was crazy. He wasn’t crazy, not the way that Esther was. He didn’t see things that weren’t really there. But it seemed as though she and him were the only people who could see it.

It was not the only black and gelatinous creature in Eden, but it was the only one that Kip had actually been close to. The others oozed around in the cover of the alleys in the Lower Districts, or scurried chattering into the pipes when he walked by. A few times he had seen them following people around. Some of them had legs like Esther’s did but most of them wriggled unnaturally like cat-sized mounds of black jello. To his knowledge they were harmless, bycatch that had fallen out of the Rift centuries ago. 

Esther’s monster raised it’s skull-like head to gaze at him out of its empty eye sockets. He quickly looked away. Not real not real not real.

“Is your hand OK?” said Esther, noticing the injury for the first time. 

He opened his fingers and made a fist a couple of times, wincing. The wounds on his knuckles had not yet scabbed over and it was painful to move it. It was bad, but it wasn’t broken; he knew from experience what it felt like to break the bones in his hand from punching something.

“Did you punch a wall again?” Esther asked him. Kip glared at her and felt his face grow hot. He didn’t need to answer. “Why do you keep doing that? Did you go to a doctor?”

This was starting to feel like an interrogation. “Doctor? No way I’m going to a doctor for this. I’m not like you people. I’m fine, you should see the wall in my kitchen.”

“‘You people’? If you were like me, you wouldn’t have hit the wall in the first place. You would be able to stay in control.”

He cared about Esther and her awful little siblings and loved them with his whole heart, but sometimes they really got on his nerves. They thought that they were better than he was and he tried not to hold that against them. His friends in the revolutionary socialist group he had recently joined talked a lot about how Artificials were a physical manifestation of how the bourgeoisie wanted to separate from the proletariat-- the rich had practically invented a new species of human. Posthumans. Genetic engineering and biotechnology operated to keep the wealthy in control, then allowed them to say it is in their nature.

Kip knew what people like Esther really thought about him. They thought he was a bug.

It was a struggle. He cared a lot about individuals, but if he started to think about what that meant in the context of the big picture, he started to get upset. 

Kip tugged the sleeve of his heavy old police jacket down over his injured hand to hide it. He’d gotten a lot of questions about his jacket when he started going to EWP meetings-- and he had gotten straight up hostility when he graduated to going to United People’s Liberation Org meetings. UPLO was strongly against Eden’s police state, which was fair since police misconduct was a hot topic in leftist circles. But the jacket had belonged to his birth mother. It was one of the only things that he had of hers.

It was also black, so it went with everything he wore, which meant that he wore it every day. Even though he had hit his growth spurt a few years ago and was reaching 5’10”, it was still too large for him. Whenever he could not find it, or whenever it got dirty or caught on something, he felt scared that he would lose it. And he would lose her again.

He didn’t remember the day that she had killed herself but he knew that he had been there. They had found him in a closet. One time Ma had gotten so drunk that she had told him when she found him, she had picked him up and there had been blood all over his clothes. So that meant-- so that meant he must have touched...

It was a good thing that he didn’t remember. Kip didn’t remember a lot of things. 

“What’s your girlfriend’s name again?” he asked Esther, trying to change the subject and take his focus away from his dead mother.

“Rosie. Rosaline Church. I wouldn’t have met her if she hadn’t been changed to my cohort this year.”

It took a lot for Kip to keep the look of judgement from his face, he always felt a twinge of disgust when he heard that relatively common surname. It was hard to not feel biased. His healthy mistrust of organized religion led him to be wary when it came to people who were raised in any of the Church-run residential group homes in the Lower Levels. In his opinion, organizations such as that needed to be eradicated by the State. “Still going good, huh?”

Esther shrugged. “It hasn’t been a month yet but yeah, I like her. She’s...solid? I don’t know how to describe her. She doesn’t get freaked out by things.”

“Of course she doesn’t get freaked out, she probably deals with fucked up shit all the time. You know those religious people dunk babies underwater, right? Did you know they practice circumcision? Ugh, I mean, right? Isn’t that insane? That’s like, that’s just so--”

“I don’t know anything about it,” Esther cut him off before he could start ranting about all the crimes of religion. “When she talks about her gods it sounds like it makes her feel safe. I don’t think that’s that bad, you know? It’s just something people start thinking when they don’t want to accept that nothing happens after you die. At least she’s not one of the Rift worshippers. I think you’d like her.” She took out her communicator and pulled up a picture so that she could show him.

In the picture, Esther looked genuinely happy. It was not often that her eyes lit up when she smiled; usually she was so glazed over and vacant. She had her head resting on the broad shoulder of the other girl, Rosaline Church. Rosaline’s smile was also completely genuine. She had a handsome butch look about her, and the picture froze her gazing at Esther in the same way that she would gaze at an angel.

Still, Kip did not trust this new union. 

He raised his eyebrows. “OK. I see why you like her. Her arms are the same size as your waist.”

“Sometimes I really want to kill you.” Esther put her communicator back into her purse. 

“Just staying.”

“Right, like I’m just saying that sometimes I want to blow your brains out. You know that my mother raised her voice at Eddie last night because he tried to karate chop the kitchen table? That was all you.”

It was funny but it was also very much his fault. He and Kassidy always got into fights and the Bellamys had learned it from them. It was not the kind of behavior their mother would approve of. Back in middle school Esther had been in a fight with another kid and her mom got so angry that she made sure that kid would be in the Youth Detention Center until he turned 18. People like Esther and her siblings weren’t allowed to be physically violent, they could only express their rage in more acceptable, more insidious ways.

“Your mom’s gonna kill you if she finds out that you’re dating someone like a Church kid,” Kip told Esther. “She wants you to settle down with another Artificial, not some religious orphan pleb.”

“//If// she finds out.” Esther said glumly. “That’s not going to happen.”

“You know about class consciousness, right? My friend Lee told me about it. It’s the beliefs a person has about their social class. Your mom has strong class consciousness, it’s been like a decade and she still thinks I’m going to steal your shit. ”

“I don’t care.” She rolled her eyes.

The 5 minute bell rang. Kip sighed. He did not want to run back down to the Special Education floors. They were more controlled than the normal floors of the high school. He could not stand it. Even though he loved learning and enjoyed his classes, he could not stand being so watched and confined. The student-teacher ratio was higher on those floors.

“Just prepare yourself for when your mom does find out.” Kip checked his communicator for messages. “You’re gonna eventually slip up or get snitched on. And it isn’t cool to hide that you’re dating her, she’s gonna start thinking you’re ashamed of her eventually.”

He watched as Esther’s skin flushed and hated how easy it was for him to pick up on people’s sore spots. 

“Sorry,” he said. “Have you seen Kassidy today? I haven’t been able to get a hold of her. We were going to do something last night but I kind of dipped out because my mom was pissing me off.”

“She’s been weird lately,” said Esther, taking a step back to signal that she was ready to get back to class. “I think she’s mad at me, I kind of ignored her messages last night but I was with Rosie.”

“Kassidy wouldn’t care about getting ignored, people ignore her all the time.”

“I don’t know then.” Esther shrugged. “I’ll see you later. Want to get together tonight?”

Kip shook his head. “Nah I’m going to meet with some UPLO people and paint some signs. A couple of them are protesting AGA’s union busting practices.” He heard his friend make a scoffing little ‘ugh’ noise under her breath, but she was too far away for him to react to it. His heart twinged. “It’s actually really imp--”

But she was already gone.

Kip checked his messages again only to be met with nothing. He walked back to the elevator and pressed the button that would take him down to his floors, using his injured hand. He pressed a little too hard and winced, then leaned back against the rail and waited.

At times it was frustrating to feel like there was nobody else who shared his values. For a long time it had felt like he was alone, even when he was around his friends and his family who cared about him. Now he was finally starting to feel less alone, he had found people who truly understood him and who had shown him that it was OK to be passionate and sensitive. It was OK to care so deeply about things.

The thing that was hardest to accept was that he could not make others care as deeply as he did. No matter how much he yelled or screamed or fought, other people would not be able to see his point of view unless they were willing to.

It...hurt.

It hurt badly. And over the years, Kip had dealt with a lot of pain.

He looked down at his injured hand, with its scabbed over and cracked knuckles.

He made a fist. In the secrecy of that elevator, a translucent blue bubble of energy formed around his closed hand, protecting it completely from everything outside. When he unclenched his fist, that bubble disappeared and he was left vulnerable again. Sometimes Kip wished that he could create a bubble big enough to protect his whole body, so that at least physically he would never be hurt again-- but he did not know how to control this strange thing that he could do and he knew that it was not safe for anyone to see.

KASSIDY NGUYEN

Since waking up at 6:00, Kassidy had burned herself with her new straightening iron no less than 5 times. The contraption was difficult to use and it took forever since the texture of her curls was so coarse and because her hair was so thick. She had separated it all into sections to make it easier on herself like the tutorial online had instructed, but in her mind it was tedious and next to impossible. The air in the bathroom smelled like burning hair and she had reddish burn marks on her neck from accidentally touching herself with the iron.

Still, she was determined to look less ugly. 

She had bought some make-up after school the day before as well and began to clumsily apply it. The cosmetics aisle had been overwhelming, there were simply too many choices. Who needed that many choices when it came to make-up? It seemed like the cosmetics aisle was better stocked than the cereal aisle. Kassidy hadn’t known the first place to start. She had grabbed some foundation that may or may not have been a match for her medium skin tone. Really she just had to hope for the best. She had bought a tube of mascara and a little stick of plum lipstick as well, paying for it with money that her estranged grandparents had sent her for her 17th birthday.

Kassidy leaned close to the mirror so that she could apply the mascara without blinding herself. Her hand was shaky as she held it and dragged the wand across her stubby blonde lashes. Because she didn’t have eyelid creases she was unable to produce the effect that she wanted and the mascara ended up clumping despite her efforts.

She looked at her reflection and saw a different person. Usually her hair curled up to about shoulder length, but straightened, it fell down to the middle of her chest. The makeup didn’t quite match her skin tone, but it covered up the dark circles under her eyes. For the first time in as long as she could remember, she didn’t hate looking at herself. She did not immediately want to look away. Kassidy practiced smiling with her plum painted lips.

Her heart beat faster. This wasn’t terrible. She had been afraid that she would look like an embarrassment but she looked nice, especially when she smiled. She looked like somebody who she would want to be friends with.

Somehow this prospect frightened her more than being ugly.

Somebody banged on the bathroom door. “Hey, let me in,” said her brother. “Why is the door locked? What are you doing?” He rattled the doorknob, unable to help himself.

Kassidy looked at herself one more time in the mirror and wondered when the last time that she had made eye contact with herself for so long had been. Then she opened the door and let her brother into the bathroom, which was more or less a narrow hallway with a shower, toilet, and sink crammed into it.

“Why are you up so--” Kip began, then froze, staring at her. His face, at first bleary from sleep, grew shocked and his big brown eyes strained in his eye sockets. For a second he appeared to be uncharacteristically at a loss for words.

She crossed her arms and hunched her shoulders. Instead of the baggy jeans and t-shirt she usually wore, she had put on black leggings and a green tunic she had purchased from one of the Church charity bins. It was strange and new and she waited for him to react or say something, say anything.

Kip started to laugh. He shook his head. “What are you dressed as?” he asked her. “What did you do to your hair? It looks so-- so stupid! Oh my god, oh my god, what’s going on? Are you wearing make-up? What is this? What are you dressed as?” He kept laughing.

Kassidy punched him in the arm and Kip laughed harder. She punched him again. “I’m trying something new, asshole.”

“You look like a clown. Why’d you put that shit around your eyes, it’s totally uneven.”

Hot anger rose from her chest to her face. She could feel it roiling beneath her skin, even though she knew that she never blushed. Her skin was already a dark tan with warm undertones, if she blushed it was hard to see it. “Shut up,” she said, pushing past him and stomping out to the kitchen. He continued to laugh at her as she went, it was never a normal laugh, always a braying belly laugh. 

Was it that bad? Were they going to laugh at her too? She would rather die. It wasn’t anything new to get made fun of but after she had tried so hard to make herself more presentable, Kassidy knew that getting laughed at would be unbearable. 

In the kitchen, Dana Nguyen was already awake and ready for work. She had her head down on the kitchen table, wallowing in whatever depressive thoughts had overcome her that day. Her job was important so Kassidy didn’t understand why her mother acted like she hated going in every day. As Eden’s Police Commissioner, she was one of the most powerful people in the Colony after the Mayor and the Central Committee. 

“What are you two yelling about now?” she asked Kassidy without moving.

“Kip is a fucking prick.”

“I’ve known that since he was 13.”

“I’m going to push him down the stairs.”

Her mother lifted herself up, her glasses crooked on her face. She did not appear to have slept well the night before. When she saw Kassidy, she squinted at her and frowned like she smelled something bad.

“What?” Kassidy asked, angry and hot with blood. She crossed her arms. “What do you wanna say, Ma?”

P.C. Dana Nguyen vaguely gestured at her daughter. “Is this some kind of... of scheme that you’re pulling, or should I be worried about you?”

Scheme? Kassidy didn’t pull schemes. She didn’t say anything, she just smoothed down her hair and skulked around behind the table to get into the fridge. The inside of it was empty except for mustard, a couple of nutritional shakes, and a 12 pack of beer. Something about seeing her family’s lack of food made her grit her teeth and swallow down her hateful words. Where did her mother get off on judging her when she didn’t ever go to the store to buy things to feed her family?

She shut the fridge and poured herself a cup of coffee, took a sip, then almost had to spit it out. Sludge. It was so thick that it was no good to her either.

Kip came out of the bathroom and pulled up a chair at the table, still laughing.He didn’t have any space to laugh at her! He wore the same stupid old police jacket he wore every day, still had acne on the sides of his face, and the only reason he didn’t have a unibrow anymore was because he had begged for laser hair removal for his 16th birthday. For some reason he thought the sight of his sister actually making an effort was hilarious. She made an obscene gesture at him and drank her undrinkable coffee.

“She’s dressed like a clown,” Kip repeated to their mother in a wheezing, high pitched voice intending to mock. Kassidy’s fingers tightened around her mug because she wanted to throw it. “Ma, ma, look. Look!”

Their mother smacked him. “Will you shut up? Kassidy, what’s going on? You going on a date or something?” Her brother cackled.

It was better not to say anything. After all, it wasn’t like she could tell them the truth! If her mother learned the truth of who she had been hanging out with lately, she would freak out and ruin everything. That couldn’t happen.

Very carefully, she set the mug on the counter next to the sink. She didn’t wash it out. Dishes rarely got done in their household, they just rinsed things off and re-used them. It was easier that way. For some reason, Esther’s little siblings always whined and complained when they came over and had to eat off of their dishes. 

As calmly as she could, Kassidy turned to face her family. She shrugged like it wasn’t a big deal. “I just wanted to look pretty today, that’s literally it. I just wanted to look nice.”

For a moment, her mother and brother stared at her like she was an animal in the zoo, as if they could not comprehend this simple desire. And then Kip started to laugh at her again.

“Why would you try to look pretty?” he asked her. “You’re never gonna be pretty!”

Kassidy knocked her mug off the counter, sending it to the floor where it shattered. She turned and stormed out without another look at her family, grabbing her bookbag on the way. As she left, she could hear her mother start to scream at Kip.

They couldn’t help being the way that they were. They had known her her whole life so it was hard for them to be nice to her.

As she made her way to a cafe she had never been in, Kassidy thought about the person who had only ever been nice to her.

She thought about the person who she had been focused on for days.

Her name was Cassiopeia Agapama, but she liked to be called Casey, and Kassidy had never met anyone so dynamic. Casey was always in motion, but not in the same way that Kip was; she was graceful and had complete control over her body in the way that a dancer has. Even though she was an Artificial, she hadn’t been tweaked in that way that made all of them look unnatural. Her black eyes were turned up at the corners which made it look like she was always smiling-- and she was always smiling with those straight white teeth that contrasted perfectly against her dark, clear skin. It was difficult to look at her, not because she was so beautiful-- and she was beautiful, just not obviously so-- but because something about her was impossibly compelling. It was like looking at the heart of a star.

Casey waved Kassidy over. She and her sister were already seated at a booth. “Hiiii,” said Casey, and when Kassidy sat down beside her, she immediately touched her hair. “Wow. You straightened your hair? That’s so crazy.” Casey’s own hair was dyed pink and fell right below her ears in countless micro-braids. 

Whenever Casey touched her, Kassidy felt afraid. She knew that Casey was dangerous, she knew who her father was and what Casey had probably been exposed to her entire life. Simply being close to Casey filled her with adrenaline and every smart part of her brain told her that she needed to run away. But she could not. That same fear also compelled her to be close to her.

“I wanted to try something new.”

“Aw, I like it.” Casey hid her smile behind a hand bedecked with silver rings. “You look tiny without it all poofy. You’re itty bitty. Teeny tiny.”

“You missed a spot in the back,” said Casey’s sister, whose name was Ayda. Unlike Casey, Ayda was obviously beautiful, but not at all compelling. She was tall and heavy, with soft feminine features. While Casey was energizing, Ayda was languid and slow. It was impossible for them to be blood related; Ayda was certainly adopted seeing as she wasn’t black, but Kassidy was too uncomfortable around her to ask. “It’s like, sticking up. In the back.”

Kassidy flattened her hair down with one hand. Any moisture in the air would just make it poof up again. Casey laughed but it didn’t seem like she was laughing at her, at least not on purpose. It was more like she was laughing at the situation.

“You didn’t get it…” said Ayda, who cut her eyes up briefly at Kassidy before returning to her communication device, which she never seemed to stop typing on.

“Your hair looks fine,” laughed Casey.

“It doesn’t. It really doesn’t,” said Ayda. 

It was hard to understand what was going on between the two of them. That was not because they were wealthy. After all, Kassidy had been friends with Esther for years and she wasn’t weird in the way that Casey and Ayda were weird. It was like there was a joke they knew about that Kassidy was not privy to. Even so, she wanted to be in on the joke.

Being around Casey felt like someone was always paying attention to her. She had never felt that way. So even if she was strange and frightening, the attentiveness made Kassidy want to spend time with her.

It had been a long time since she had made a new friend. It had been years, since the only real friend she had ever made was Esther. Ever since Casey had introduced herself to her in class several days previously, the icy ball of loneliness inside of Kassidy had started to melt.

“Don’t tell me that you did that to yourself just because you started hanging out with us,” snickered Ayda. She wound a strand of her own long dark hair around one finger as if she was bored. When she smiled, only one corner of her mouth turned up. “Aw. That’s sad. Peeeeer Pressurrre...”

That made Casey laugh as well, but it was short, more of a reaction than anything else. Laughing. Always laughing. Again, Kassidy swallowed the urge to laugh with her, whatever joy Casey felt was contagious.

It wasn’t that Kassidy was unhappy, but she wasn’t happy either. She wasn’t exposed to people who were happy all the time. Her mother never laughed and rarely smiled. Kip laughed and smiled a lot, but lately that laughter and those smiles were more angry than happy.

The small moments where she did feel happy were ones she wanted to cling to. It was why she had made up her mind to hang out with Cassiopeia after the other girl first seemed to extend her friendship to her. It was nice to feel...light.

The funny thing was that over the handful of times they had hung out, Casey didn’t seem to talk to anyone else or even message anyone else. Well, everyone knew her-- how could they not, with who her dad was. All kinds of rumours went around school about the kind of person Casey was. All kinds of rumours about how she hurt people. Kassidy couldn’t see any of that. She saw someone who gave her her full attention and was always laughing.

Maybe she really was stupid. A small part of herself believed that, it was the part that told her that she could never ever tell her brother about her new friends because if he found out, his eyeballs would burst from all the screaming.

“What do you want for breakfast?” Casey asked her. Casey had already ordered a mug with a latte in it, and her sister was sipping on orange juice. 

Kassidy, who had a total of 12 credits left in her account, had no intention of wasting any more money. This was not the kind of place that people who were like her went to get breakfast before school. She shrugged. “I ate at home.”

“Really?”

“Uh.” It was hard to lie when Casey was looking at her. Kassidy lied all the time but her brain felt frozen then. She glanced to the side to break the intense eye contact with this strange girl. “Well.”

Ayda snickered.

“Do you drink coffee?” asked Casey. “It’s good here, I promise. Can I buy you a coffee? I bet I could pick something for you that you’ll fucking love, it’s one of my talents.”

This was how people ended up selling their souls but Casey’s little pink braids circled her head like a halo. Again, Kassidy had to swallow the strong instinct to run which interfered with the hysterical feelings of happiness. She would rather feel happy.

“Yeah, OK,” she said, too stupid to think up anything clever. “Thanks.” She watched Casey get up and walk to the cafe’s counter, where the other girl proceeded to give her complete focus to the barista who was working.

This was really scary. Kassidy wondered if her makeup was melting off her face because of how hot and sweaty she was. That was the last thing she needed.

“Oh my goddd,” said Ayda as she typed into her comm without looking up. 

Unfortunately, with Casey out of the way, Kassidy was comfortable enough to be a bitch right back to her. She scowled, which wasn’t helpful when a person wasn’t paying attention. “Hey,” she snapped. It must have surprised Ayda because her whole big body flinched at the aggressive tone of voice directed towards her. “You gotta problem? What’s so funny?” Ayda’s size relative to hers didn’t scare her, she had squared off with a bully three times her size as a middle schooler. This was the kind of person she got the distinct impression could not fight even a person who weighed 93 pounds.

You can always tell when a person isn’t used to being talked to in a certain way.

Blood rushed to Ayda’s face and turned her light olive complexion pink. Kassidy felt herself blush as well, although there was no reason for it. “Funny?” asked Ayda in a high pitched little bitch voice of a person who acts tough but is scared of direct confrontation. She kept typing but was now looking at Kassidy.

“You keep laughing.”

“No I don’t.”

“Yeah you do. Why the fuck are you laughing at me?” Kassidy made a jerky aggressive gesture with her chin.

Suddenly it felt like her body was covered in something thick and sticky, like honey. Heavy. Alarmed, she touched her own face as if to see if something had dripped on her from the ceiling, but there was nothing. The sensation was so alarming that for a moment, she forgot to breathe. Stupid. She was so stupid, what was wrong with her? Why was she even trying to make new friends? She was so unlikable and ugly, Casey was probably only pretending to be nice to her so that she could make fun of her. Unbidden, these negative thoughts about herself were more concerning than the sticky heaviness that seemed to crush her.

The strange feelings left as quickly as they had come. Kassidy gasped.

Something was wrong but the pieces of the puzzle were not all available to her. They never were. She usually just assumed that she was going insane.

Ayda stopped typing. A call beeped on her communication device and she swiped to ignore it. She glanced at her Casey, who was still chatting with the barista up front as she waited for coffee, like she was checking to see if she was looking back. “My sister is funny, that’s all.”

The tone in Ayda’s voice was not explicitly hostile, but there was still hostility in her. Kassidy knew when she was getting fucked with or bullied, and as genuine as Casey seemed to her, her sister seemed superficial. Like every other mean girl bully. The best way to ward someone like that off was to hit them right back.

The kid who had bullied her back when she was in middle school had been named Ben. Why was she thinking about him? She never thought about him anymore. He had been big and mean too, and when Kassidy finally got tired of him shoving her around, she and Esther had figured out a way to hurt him worse than he could hurt them.

But Kassidy wasn’t 12 anymore. She couldn’t just hit people and make them leave her alone. That stops being an option when you grow up.

“I didn’t even know that Casey had a sister,” she said, proud of herself for the way she was about to twist the knife in. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you on TV when your dad does something, even though he doesn’t shut up about her in his interviews. I’ve seen him say ‘Casey this, Casey that’ but he’s never talked about you. I’ve never even heard anyone say your name. You shy or something? You awkward? To me it looks like your dad is hiding you.”

The sounds of the other people in the cafe were loud in comparison to their own table. Ayda’s eyes were so large and placid that Kassidy could see her own distorted reflection within them. And beyond them was...nothingness. That was not to say that she got the impression that Ayda’s mind was empty. It was more like there was a...blankness inside of her that, like her eyes were dark pools of water that were impossibly deep. She grew more uncomfortable and was unable to keep making eye contact.

Again, a call beeped on Ayda’s comm, and this time she answered it.

“What’s going on?” The voice on the other line was a boy’s, funny and round sounding like he had some kind of speech impediment, but not any speech impediment Kassidy had ever heard. “Who’s bothering you, eh? Tell him to fuck off.”

If she craned her neck, Kassidy could see the little screen that was strapped to Ayda’s wrist, but didn’t feel like it. Very briefly she could see a blur of black and pink. In Eden, it was considered very rude to VidChat with someone without earbuds in, especially in a public place like a cafe. It certainly wasn’t normal.

“If he’s hurting your feelings, tell him your dad is going to break his fingers with a sledgehammer,” said the boy with the funny voice. “Quit crying and bitching and whining to me about it if you aren’t gonna do anything about it.”

Kassidy picked up her own portable device and pretended to message someone so that if other people were staring, they’d think that she was normal. 

Usually she would be hanging out with Esther and Kip right now. They’d be doing the same things they always did, talking about stupid stuff and arguing. All of their lives were changing. She was happy that Esther had a girlfriend now, just like she was happy that Kip had found some kind of purpose in his life, but she missed them.

“It’s not a boy, it’s one of my sister’s creepy new projects,” said Ayda into her communicator.

“I’m right here,” said Kassidy. “I can hear you.”

Before things could continue to escalate, Casey returned with a mug full of liquid and whipped cream.Before she sat down, she put the mug into Kassidy’s hands. She glanced at Ayda, who rudely had her communicator on, and her face lit up. “Mart-o!” she exclaimed, and grabbed at Ayda’s wrist so that she could get a good look. “Heyyy, my fav-o-rite greasy boy!”

The mug was warm in Kassidy’s hands. She looked down at it and saw that there was a star drawn in chocolate syrup floating on top of the whipped cream. When she lifted it to take a sip, the liquid was too hot to drink. For a second she wondered if Casey had just handed her poison because her fucked up evil dad wanted to do something that would hurt her mother, the Police Commissioner. She would probably drink it anyway though.

Casey pulled Ayda’s communicator off and fiddled with the settings so that the little screen expanded, then set it propped up in the middle of the table so that everyone could see it. Now that Kassidy could get a better look, she saw that the person who had called Ayda was a boy with pink cheeks and fluffy black hair. He looked a bit younger than she was and the room he was sitting in was strangely decorated in earth tones and rough furniture. He gave Kassidy a sneer.

“Have you met Marty?” Casey asked her. “He plays Candle Quest with Ayda. Marty, this is my new friend Kassidy. Doesn’t her hair look cute?”

“I didn't think you were capable of desiring friendship,” said the boy, Marty. He messed with a handheld game console, his image being captured by a desktop computer that he was sitting in front of. “I thought you didn’t have feelings. Like a reptile.”

Casey laughed. “What are you talking about? That is so funny!”

Kassidy blew on the mug of coffee and took a careful sip. The taste was something that she could not place, sweet and grassy. It wasn’t bad. She looked at the little star drawn in the whipped cream.

“We’re skipping class anyway,” Casey told the boy in the communicator. “We have to run back home because there’s a package coming that Yura and Emily can’t sign for.”

“I can’t skip class,” said Kassidy.

“Nobody said that you’re included in this…” said Ayda. “What makes you think you’re included? You can’t ever come to our house. Our dad has like, a picture of your mom on the wall that he throws knives at. You will never step foot inside of our house.”

“Haha, well maybe someday!” Casey patted Kassidy on the back and it was hard for her not to stiffen at the touch. “We’re all getting along so well right now anyway, you guys. What are you doing today, Marty? What are you up to at the unwashed freakshow?”

Marty didn’t answer or even look back up. He typed something on his handheld device. On the wall behind him hung a strange looking long-gun that resembled the ones in videos about the time before the Rift split open. It looked like it was made out of wood, a commodity that was next to impossible to procure in Eden. Kassidy squinted to get a better look at it.

The gun didn’t have a visible magazine and appeared to have two barrels. The sling that it hung on had been decorated with shiny circles that could have been badges, but were too far away to recognize. Even if one of Marty’s family members was a cop-- as legally, the State did not allow private citizens to own firearms-- a cop would not own a gun that looked like that, much less display it. It looked like it belonged in a museum.

She wanted to ask him about it. Instead, she drank the strange drink that Cassiopeia Agapama had bought her. 

They-- well, mostly Ayda and Marty-- continued to talk and bicker about things and people that only confused Kassidy. She felt like such an outsider, she didn’t know anyone who they knew. Sometimes Marty used words that she had never heard before, which lost her even more. When she checked her own communicator for messages, Esther hadn’t sent her anything and Kip had sent her a single laughing-crying emoji which reminded her that she wanted to kill him.

“Are you 18 yet, Kassidy?” Casey asked her. She rested her chin on one hand; her fingernails were long and sharp and painted pink.

“I will be in January.”

“Oh, my birthday is in November. That’s exciting, you’ll be able to vote on Foundation Day in May. Aren’t you excited to vote in our first real election in decades?”

To disguise her confusion, Kassidy took another long sip of her drink. “Uh. I mean. I guess? I’m not really into politics. I think things are basically fine.”

Casey leaned closer to her. “Don’t you think that the government should have less control, though? Especially when it comes to the free market. I think the state needs to get out of people’s business.”

“I don’t really care,” said Kassidy, who already knew she would be voting for Jay Malena in May. Voting for West Agapama, the guy who consistently terrorized the police and made jokes about her mother in his television interviews was not going to cut it for her. Even Kip was going to vote for Malena, and Kip’s whole life revolved around politics. Malena was OK. Whenever she saw him on TV, he was always smiling, and one time she had met him when she was in the Capitol column with her mother. He had even shaken her hand. “I don’t understand any of it.”

It wasn’t the answer that Casey wanted to hear and she could tell. She chewed on her lower lip.

From Ayda’s communicator, Marty exhaled loudly. “Voting is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of, I don’t understand why you people vote. Why do you think you know as much as the people who are already in charge.”

“Oh, shut up freak,” snapped Casey. Anger flashed across her face like a thunderclap, blinding and awful, and it vanished as quickly as it had arrived. When it came down to it, she was capable of being terrible.

“Ugh.” Ayda rolled her eyes. “Dumb!”

“It’s stupid,” he continued. “Everything you’ve told me about your dad running for king or whatever is stupid. How is some random person supposed to become a ruler? How are random people supposed to make a choice about that? The way we do things up here now makes more sense, we’ve fought for years for one powerful leader. You people are the dumb ones for voting.”

Whatever secret joke Marty shared with Casey and Ayda was incomprehensible to Kassidy. To her it sounded like he lived somewhere that people did not vote, but as far as she knew it was mandatory across all of Eden’s Districts. And outside of Eden and her equally democratic sister Colonies of Serenity and Green River, there was nothing. There was poisoned air and twisted mutants, transformed by the Rift.

The thoughts she was having were illogical.

Still, Kassidy stared at the strange gun behind Marty. What use did firearms have…She finished her drink.

“Your life is terrible, Marty,” said Casey. She poked the screen with her finger like she wanted to poke him and he stared at her nonplussed. “You have the worst life. Your life is actually tragic. You wish you were sitting here with us, talking about voting.”

“I am sitting with you and talking about voting.”

 Casey jabbed the little screen with her sharp manicured nail. She was...she was a lot like Kip in some ways, which was disturbing. They were both creatures of pure impulse, but what was annoying in her brother was fascinating in Casey. It was hard to look away. “Why are you so sassy today, huh? You think we don’t outnumber you just because you see Kassidy here?”

“Don’t break my comm again,” Ayda whined. “Case…”

Marty’s face was soft but his big black eyes were mean. He glanced briefly at Kassidy, who was still watching him intently. “What is sassy?”

“Bitchy. It means bitchy.”

“You’re the bitch.”

And Kassidy couldn’t take it any longer. She cleared her throat awkwardly, which surprised the sisters and reminded them of her presence. “Marty, what class are you in?” she asked him, but in her heart she already knew the answer. “Are you a 1st year? You might know my friend Esther Bellamy’s younger siblings.”

Ayda’s cheeks flushed and she grabbed her communication device like she had been doing something wrong. Casey laughed, shaking her head. “What? You don’t need to talk to him. That’s crazy. Hey, did you like the drink I picked out for you? Didn’t I tell you that I have a special gift when it comes to knowing what people like to eat? I did good, right?” She reached out like she wanted to touch Kassidy’s hair again but pulled back her hand.

“It’s fine I guess.” When she said that, Casey’s eyes went wide like nobody had ever given her a lukewarm reaction. Kassidy pressed on, the inexorable curiosity propelling her. “Do you not go to school, Marty?”

“Obviously I don’t go to school.” He was playing with his handheld device again and unlike his friends, did not seem to be bothered by the question. “School is stupid and a waste of time, why would I go to school? I couldn’t go to school even if I wanted to. Not that I would. I don’t.”

The state intranet was closed to other colonies. Even if someone from Green River or Serenity wanted to communicate with Eden, they could not unless they accessed one of the specific channels only intended for trade. Over the decades there had been dozens of hacking incidents directed from other Colonies and such communication was illegal.

Considering the type of man West Agapama was though, and considering that his fortune had been made shipping goods to and from the sister Colonies, this was not that surprising.

So Marty didn’t have a speech impediment, he had an accent. Accents in Eden were divided primarily between the Upper and Lower Levels-- anyone talking to Kassidy could easily figure out where she was from. Maybe everyone who lived where Marty lived spoke round little words like he did and didn’t understand what ‘sassy’ meant.

“I didn’t realize you were smart,” said Casey in a voice that could have been kind or cruel. “That’s nice.”

“I’m not smart,” said Kassidy, who believed that she wasn’t. “I saw the rifle behind him. Nobody in Eden has firearms like that, not even in a museum. Marty, is that yours? What do you need that for in Serenity? I always heard that they don’t have weapons at all there, at least that’s what my brother told me, but he’s always talking out of his ass.”

“I’m not from Serenity.”

Ayda groaned but did not make a move to turn off her communicator and banish Marty.

“Green River?”

“Nope.” Marty looked up from his game. “But my friends Wera and Seth are from Green River, we all play Candle Quest together. I wouldn’t want to be from there either, no way. That’s what I’m saying, everything I hear about the Colonies sounds so stupid.”

Poison air. Mutated flesh. The Rift, red and hungry across the sky.

Kassidy looked at the very normal and fluffy haired boy on Ayda’s screen like he was an exotic animal. Her heart beat faster. “So,” she said slowly. “So...so you mean that you’re not…”

The game that he was playing made a series of beeps and chimes and Marty smiled. He still had a lot of baby fat in his cheeks so smiling made him appear chunkier.. He put his handheld device down, quite proud of himself. “Can you really not beat that level, Ayda?” he asked, mockingly. “Yeah. No. I’m not from Serenity or Green River or Eden or any of the stupid Colonies. I’m from the Northern Territories.”

AJAX GUTTIEREZ

As usual, it had been an ordeal to get the kids up and ready for school. There was always some excuse they pulled out to avoid getting out of bed or to avoid getting ready. The two of them weren’t bad kids, they were both well behaved compared to what AJ was like at their ages. But for very different reasons, they did not want to go to school.

AJ sat on the metro with his elbows resting on his knees. He was exhausted, since he had put off writing a paper for too long and it was due that morning. Luckily he was still young enough to be able to pull all nighters, but whenever he blinked it felt like his eyelids stuck together. He rubbed his eyes but it didn’t help. Since the Prospas family home was located in District 1, the uppermost and wealthiest residential area and the only one located on the Surface, there weren’t many commuters going down to the Education District in the Mid Levels.

“I’m hungry,” whined Valentine, who was the youngest one at 9 years old, and who had undoubtedly had about 12 hours of sleep that night. “Can we go to the cafe to get doughnuts? I didn’t like my cereal, I want doughnuts.”

“You should have thought about that when you didn’t eat all your cereal,” said AJ. The kid was sitting next to him and kept trying to hold his hand, which he was getting a little too old for. AJ kept pulling his hand away. 

“I told you that I didn’t like it!” The only reason Valentine got away with acting the way that he did was because he was cute. His hair stuck up from his head in a loose afro and he had huge eyes, genetically modified to be yellow. His teeth were genetically modified as well; canines and incisors just large and sharp enough to give him a lisp. Because of this, and because of his genuinely happy and loving nature, he was never punished for misbehaving. “Can you get me doughnuts so I won’t get hungry at school?”

“No. You can’t have sugar for breakfast, it isn’t healthy.”

“I’m gonna be hungry though. I’m hungry now. Rome’s gonna be hungry too, he didn’t eat anything, right Rome?”

Rome, who was 14 and sitting on the other side of Valentine, briefly glanced over before re-focusing his own yellow eyes on his hands in his lap. “My stomach hurts. I think I’m sick.” Rome was the kind of kid who got scared whenever he had to get on public transportation, which was every day. 

“You’re not sick,” said AJ.

“I think I’m sick.”

“You’re making yourself sick because you’re thinking too hard about it.”

“Can I stay home from school?” Rome glanced back over at AJ. He looked scared and unhappy, but he always looked scared and unhappy. Rome kept his hair very short and neat, he buttoned his shirts all the way up to the top, and constantly worked himself up over nothing. “I feel like I’m going to throw up, I don’t want to go to school if I’m going to throw up. I’m nauseous. I don’t feel good, I’m sick. My stomach hurts.”

“If he gets to skip school, I get to skip school,” said Valentine. When he smiled he showed off incisors. The appearance of the Prospas children, with their glowing yellow eyes and sharp teeth, really revealed the values of their father. After all, he had paid ridiculous amounts of money 3 separate times to get his sons to appear predatory. Most Artificials just ended up appearing luminously beautiful in a way that was offsetting.

“Nobody is skipping school,” he said, shaking off his negativity. He pulled out his communicator to distract himself. “Your dad will get mad at me if I let you do that, he wants you guys to have a good education, it’s really important. Don’t you want to go to school and learn stuff? Just quit thinking about how you feel sick, Rome, I thought you were going to meet up with your new friends and go to class together.”

Rome looked back down at his hands. “I don’t think they’re really my friends. It’s only been two weeks. How long does it take?”

“They’re nice.” Valentine attempted to stick a hand into his brother’s bookbag and take something out of it, but Rome pulled the bag away and set it on his other side. “I like them. I like their hair. I want somebody to be my friend. Why does nobody in my class like me? Did you know that there’s something living in our shower drain, AJ? It’s like, it’s like blah blah blah, I think it talks to me more than people in my own class. AJ. Hey, AJ!”

The two Prospas children were difficult for AJ to take care of because they were unlike normal children in many ways. He cared about them and wanted them to be happy, but it was easy for him to feel irritated by the burden of his responsibility. Luckily he didn’t have to worry about them getting into fights or becoming violent with other children like Ben ---well. He didn’t have to worry about that aspect of their safety.

The metro lurched to its final stop before it started making its way down to the Mid Levels. A few more people walked in, probably professors. AJ briefly assessed them to determine whether they might be people who would do harm to the kids out of hatred for their father, then went back to his communicator.

He had been messaging a guy on a hook-up app for the last 24 hours. Talking with Jenny Qian really reminded him of how long it had been since he had gotten laid. It was going well, the two of them were planning on meeting up soon. It would be some much needed stress relief.

The guy, whose name was Harlan, seemed nice enough. Not that AJ cared about personality in this context. The important thing about this guy was that he was attractive-- thin, with a cheeky face which he hid behind a neat little beard. That was all AJ wanted when he was looking for a guy to hook up with: somebody cute and fun. His profile said that he was into some seriously stupid stuff though, but that was best not to dwell on. Whatever Harlan did in his free time, politics or whatever, AJ didn’t care about it  too much.

AJ accidentally opened his DMs to reveal a nude picture that Harlan had sent him the previous night. Panicking, he clicked out of the page and shoved his communicator back into his pocket before one of the kids glanced at it. Even as an accident, if he exposed them to something like that, their dad would absolutely beat him to death with something imaginative and then leave his body somewhere public. 

He sent Harlan a quick message about getting together that night or the night after but didn’t expect him to get back to him any time soon. The guy didn’t seem like an early riser, the ones who are simultaneously lazy and clever never were.

It would be nice if he was able to spend more of his time doing what he liked to do instead of worrying about dragging kids around.

“I hate sitting by myself at lunch, but I bet you like doing that, don’t you Rome?” said Valentine. “I bet you like sitting by yourself, don’t you? Don’t you? Hey! AJ! Didn’t you hear me say there’s something that talks in the shower? You didn’t laugh!”

AJ pinched the bridge of his nose. 

A few of the other passengers were talking amongst themselves but AJ was not listening to them. For all he knew they could be AGA goons who were there to kill him and kidnap the kids so that West Agapama could blackmail their father. Richard Prospas constantly worried over scenarios such as this, but to AJ’s knowledge it was not something that would ever happen. Agapama didn’t mess with other people’s kids, nobody who belonged to the Four Families did. Even in organized crime one had to have standards which expressed a code of honor. 

The real threat that AJ had to worry over was ordinary people. People like him. People who were poor and angry and had been wronged in some way by Prosperity, either through job lay-offs or through violence. It was those kinds of people who were desperate enough to act drastically and it was those kinds of people who posed the greatest threat.

Over the years, AJ had never had to protect the kids from anything. There was nobody who wanted to hurt them; how could anyone ever want to hurt a couple of sweet but stupid kids? He wasn’t really needed. He was not a bodyguard, he was a baby-sitter and he was tired of it.

The metro stopped at the first station of the enormous Education District and the people in their car started to get off. AJ pocketed his communicator, grabbed Valentine’s hand, and jerked his head toward the door to indicate to Rome that there was no wiggle room for truancy that day. Their stop was never crowded because they got there early and because the only people who rode in their car were from the 1st Residential District too. Rich people. Rich kids. It was easy to get on and off; some metro stops in the Lower Levels could take the better part of half an hour to navigate.

The best part about the Education District was how safe it was. You had to scan your ID in order to access each floor, which meant that nobody from the University floors could wander down to the elementary school floors, and vice versa. This could become an irritating problem when one needed to get to one’s child or sibling in an emergency, but it meant that unauthorized adults were unable to interact with kids at any time. Apart from the Capitol, it was the District with the highest level of security. AJ never felt anxiety when he was dropping the kids off for the school day.

Sure, kids could be violent too. He had learned that lesson when the eldest Prospas brother got himself sent to the Youth Detention Center indefinitely after he attacked a middle-school girl. At least that was one problem he didn’t have to worry about anymore. But the younger two were not anything like Ben: neither one of them had an aggressive bone in their bodies, so AJ didn’t worry.

He thought about the paper that he had due that morning and sighed. He’d get a B on it, a C at worse. AJ took his hair out of its ponytail and finger-combed it. Sleep. Rest. When was he going to just rest?

“Are you sure I can’t get a snack?” asked Valentine.

AJ adjusted the child’s shirt collar with practiced firmness. “Yeah. When you get home.” At this point in his life he was immune to the high pitched whining that followed saying ‘no’. With a gentle push, he let him know that there was no room for discussion there. The 9 year old made his way toward the elevators that would take him down to the elementary school floors. AJ watched to make sure he didn’t try to sneak off.

Without asking, he already knew that Rome wanted him to stay with him until his friends showed up. As quiet and aloof as he was, it was harder to understand Rome and his needs than it was with his brothers. It would be easy for AJ to leave him by himself and go write his paper, nothing would come of it and nobody would even know because Rome was not the kind of kid who was always running to his dad. AJ had left him alone when he was distressed before, multiple times. Despite that, he figured he would wait around with him until 7:45 at the latest.

In the meantime, he mindlessly checked his comm. Nothing on the news feeds was new. More election stuff. Every time he saw a picture of Agapama’s face smirking or winking, he felt irritated because he suspected that he was only running to boost his company’s power-- and it was working. AGA was more profitable than ever, which was amazing seeing as it had been all but bankrupt less than 20 years ago. People could say what they wanted about the guy, but he was a savvy businessman, much savvier than AJ’s current employer.

How was it even possible to not turn a quarterly profit when you had a stranglehold on the markets due to a monopoly on one industry? People needed to eat. What kind of idiot manages a company like that but still manages to have costs greater than its revenue?

Those kinds of thoughts were treacherous but as time passed, he had more and more like them. All he really wanted was to be an asset to Richard Prospas. He wanted to be useful and help manage the numbers side of things, wanted to see the other pieces of the puzzle. 

Better to keep his hopes realistic. AJ opened up a picture of some leather shoes he wanted to buy for when he had to present his thesis next semester.

Rome wasn't looking at him. “I forgot my tablet at home,” he said.

“Hm?” AJ opened up a different option for shoes that were cheaper but looked about the same quality. Suspicious. Why would they be a whole 100 credits cheaper? Unless they were actually made of plastic or something that he didn’t want on his feet.

“I didn’t do my geometry assignment last night.”

“OK.”

“I was-- I don’t know. I didn’t even forget it, I just didn’t do it and I don’t know why. I don’t know why. I can’t get a bad grade on it though, it’s making me feel sick. I feel nauseous.”

“Right.”

“Do you think I should just copy someone--”

AJ put away his communicator suddenly. “You know, if you start doing stuff like cheating and copying other people’s work, you’ll get caught eventually. That will be way worse than getting one bad grade on something. Think about it.” He watched Rome hunch his thin shoulders and look at the ground. “You’re better than that, OK? You’re way better than that. Don’t cheat, you’re too smart.”

The kid snuck a glance at him and AJ had to try not to grimace; the yellow eyeshine was the worst when lighting was poor enough to produce a glow effect. “Can I tell you something?”

“Shoot.”

“I think there’s something really wrong with me. I feel--”

Whatever it was exactly that Romeo believed was wrong with him (AJ could think of a great many things off the top of his head as all of his psychosomatic issues changed from day to day) it was interrupted by a sudden excited shriek. In a split second, AJ dug his hands into his pockets to grasp his knuckledusters and had them over his fingers. His fists were clenched before he even turned around and adrenaline coursed through his body. This was it. This was it, this was it, this was it.

It wasn’t it.

Turning, AJ saw that it was only a couple of kids waving at Rome. He unclenched his teeth, forced his shoulders to relax. As carefully as he could, he slipped the harsh pieces of metal from his hands and back down into his pockets. While not illegal per se, if any authority figure saw him with weapons in the School District they would have him arrested. If that happened, his mother would have to bail him out and he couldn’t handle the thought of it.

His heart pounded in his chest. What was he so scared of? Throughout all the years, nothing bad had ever happened.

He passed a hand over his eyes. “Your friends?” he asked Rome.

Rome just scratched anxiously at his face.

The kids were twins, a boy and a girl, who were so eerily identical that it was clear that they were Artificals. They were white, with orange hair and long gangly limbs that gave them coltish gaits. They hurried up to Rome and AJ noticed the fine quality of their clothing and all-around cleanliness. When they got close to Rome, the two of them blushed prettily.

“Hey,” said the girl one.

“Hi!” said the boy one. “Hi, how are you?”

“I’m fine,” said Rome who appeared to have stopped breathing. He tried to smile at the other children without showing his sharp incisors and it came off as insincere. He had not been made with a face good for smiling so this was not entirely his fault. “How-- how are you guys?”

“Kip taught me new karate moves the other night,” said the boy, arranging his arms into an awkward fighting stance. His form was all wrong but his bright green eyes and lazy smile showed that he wasn't serious about it. “It’s pretty cool, do you wanna fight?” Without warning he faked a punch at Rome, then playfully got him into a loose chokehold. Passive as ever, Rome tried to cringe away but was at a disadvantage due to being shorter; his terrible yellow eyes started to glaze over with tears and he looked to AJ for help. Oblivious to the fear, the other boy tightened his grip like he was going to try to disastrously flip him.

AJ grabbed the gangly kid by the back of his sweater and peeled him away from his charge. “Uh-uh,” he said sternly. “Nope. No fighting.”

The kid tried to twist away and kicked ineffectively at AJ’s shin. “Heyyyy!”

“What’s your problem?” demanded the girl. She had her arms crossed and her pointy face screwed up in an unpleasant expression. “He’s just playing around.”

“I don’t care, don’t let me see you touch him like that again.”

At this point Rome’s skin glistened with perspiration. He hunched his shoulders and pulled at his collar, unable to pull his gaze away from his own feet because he was so mortifyingly embarrassed.

Playing or not, AJ couldn’t let either of the kids he watched over get hurt. More importantly, in his mind, he could not permit them to be exposed to violence. There would be enough time for that in their lives later.

He released the boy and watched him dart back to his sister’s side. “Are you going to introduce me to your friends, Rome?” he asked.

“I feel nauseous.” 

AJ took a deep, calming breath.

The girl opened up her purse, took out a stick of gum, and handed it to Rome. “Here, it’s mint, if you chew this you won’t feel as sick, even though it’s all made up in your head. I’m Evangeline Bellamy. My brother is Eddie. Who are you?”

Bellamy was a common enough name in Eden. They were probably harmless. AJ looked at Rome and the way he was chewing the gum and not flinching away when the boy twin, Eddie, patted him on the back. This was not so bad. He overreacted, he often did. All this was was something new.

“I’m Ajax.”

“Yeah, OK, who are you?”

“I watch after Rome and his brother.”

“A babysitter? That’s very very sad and depressing, what are you, like 30?”

There was nothing he could do about kids being snotty towards him. He supposed that he should be more thankful that Rome and Valentine were so well-mannered and would never dream of mouthing off to an adult they didn’t know. AJ grimaced a smile and checked his communication device. The guy he had been talking to had messaged him back.

“Why do you need a babysitter, Rome?” asked Eddie. It seemed as though the greatest physical difference between him and his twin was that she stood straight and rigid, while his posture was hunched over and droopy. He kept his arms crossed over his chest like he was insecure. “That’s weird. We’re the same age, we’ve never needed someone to ride the train with us.”

“We’ve been riding the metro by ourselves since we were like, 9,” said Evangeline.

“My dad is overprotective,” lied Rome, a person who had hyperventilated and cried the last time he had tried to get on a train by himself. “He’s worried I might get hurt.”

>lee.harlan: How’s it going?

>lee.harlan: Come over to my place tonight?

His comm buzzed a 3rd time. Harlan had sent him a picture of himself with an obvious erection, only wearing underwear. The guy was clearly exaggerating about a couple things in his profile. AJ fumbled to swipe the picture away again.

It was better than nothing. A distraction from his life would make him happy, for a while. For a while he wouldn’t have to think about his mediocre grades, or worry about his mom.

>ajax.guttierez: Is 8 OK?

Harlan sent back a winky face and for the first time that day, AJ felt himself smile. Just a little. There was something silly about another adult man using emojis-- every other man in AJ’s life was so serious. He couldn’t imagine Mr. Prospas sending something like that, nor Ib or Scotty who were his own bodyguards. This was good. This guy was going to be good for him, just a shallow funny distraction.

Beside him, the Bellamy twins were talking excitedly to Rome about something or other and Rome didn’t look like he was about to stress-vomit for once-- but he wasn’t laughing or smiling either. Uncomfortable perhaps, but not scared. It was probably not great that the other kids moved so quickly and awkwardly, but at least they weren’t trying out more stupid karate moves. 

AJ cleared his throat. “You good, Rome? I gotta get going.”

“Why wouldn’t he be good?” demanded Evangeline Bellamy as she rummaged through her purse for a yellow scrunchie, with which she tied her hair out of her face. “Of course he’s good. Do you not think everything is good?” AJ smiled at her tightly.

Instead of using his words, Rome just gave a little shrug, which AJ took as a yes. He turned and left, heading for the elevators that would take him up towards the University floors. 

He just wanted to be done with college, with OK enough grades to get an OK job. Hopefully he would work for Prosperity. With all the ass-kissing he had done lately, he figured he deserved it.

On that thought, he dialed his boss’s number as he got on one of the elevators.

Richard Prospas picked up on the first ring. “Is everything OK?” he asked immediately without so much as a hello. He was intense and high-strung and plagued by migraines, which wasn’t the best temperament for a CEO of a large company to have. Ever since what had happened to Ben, he had been intensely concerned about the development of his younger two sons-- who were, as far as he was concerned, his only sons.

“Just checking in,” said AJ. “Rome just told me he hasn’t been doing his homework, do you know what’s up with that?” For a moment he felt guilty about betraying the confidence of a child who trusted him, especially since he knew Rome would get in trouble over it later. What were his priorities though? AJ cared about Rome’s wellbeing, he just cared about his own well-being and the well-being of his mother more. It was important that he continued to ingratiate himself with his boss so that he could move up in the company, so that he could make more money and receive more respect.

“Goddammit,” swore Prospas. “What is wrong with him? That means he lied to my face, you know. He told me he had finished everything this morning. What is wrong with him?”

“Maybe he needs to see a therapist. He makes himself freak out by overthinking and then--”

“He doesn’t need a fucking therapist, he needs to grow up and start being responsible. At this rate Valentine is more responsible than he is.”

“Oh, absolutely,” agreed AJ, groveling as usual. Valentine was not responsible at all, with his clinginess and his imaginary friends. “Absolutely.”

“He knows that he’s going to be in charge of the company when I retire. He needs to be working hard and making connections, not hiding in his room all day. I don’t understand him, I don’t understand him at all. That-- that funny wheezy breathing thing he does is going to drive me up a wall.  At this rate he’s going to be a piss-poor leader, if he runs my company into the ground I swear to God that I’ll force the Board to make his brother CEO.”

“I don’t think anyone is going to be good enough to fill your shoes, sir.”

“Thanks, AJ.” For a long minute, Prospas paused. Then he cleared his throat. “You know, your mother is really starting to freak me out with her religious shit. Last night she-- she has these fuckin’ cuts on her stomach. Is she doing alright? She’s not going to try to kill herself again, is she? I can’t deal with that any more, I just can’t. It was awful the last time. I couldn’t sleep at all, you gotta picture it, I would lie awake all night just terrified that she would slit her wrists or something.”

Air suddenly would not fill AJ’s lungs and images he had tried to forget flooded his mind. His left hand clenched into a fist.

“You there?” 

The elevator was not moving fast enough. AJ forced himself to suck in a breath. “She’s fine,” he said, keeping the anger and fear out of his voice. “That’s how-- you know about the Rift religion? They do that. Something about blood, I don’t know. It’s how they worship. She’s fine. She’s happy, I think the church gives her a sense of community. She keeps telling me about how happy she is.”

“Oh, good,” Prospas said absently. “Thanks.”

“Of course,” said AJ, thinking about how his mother had tried to overdose the day after that Prospas sent his father into an Agapama storehouse to get shot. AJ had been 16 years old, and so angry that he pulled a knife on him. Prospas had his own bodyguard Scotty hold AJ’s arms behind his back and then beat him with his blackthorn walking stick. The severity of the beating left him with a concussion that he had to go to the hospital for. The memories served as a reminder to never fight back. “Anything.”

“Remind me to give you some different work one of these days. You’re too good a worker to keep wasting on the kids.”

AJ’s heart fluttered and the bad memories were pushed to the back of his mind. The past didn’t matter. All that mattered was the future. His future.  “I-- I would really enjoy that,” he said.

“Really?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Great. Maybe you can help with some numbers that aren’t adding up, I’ll tell the guys. Look-- I have to go. I have a meeting with one of our suppliers. Great talking to you, Ajax.” And he hung up.

AJ realized that his hand was still clenched into a fist. The elevator dinged and he walked out into the University floors, absentmindedly scanning the ID chip in his wrist as he went.

When he did not know how to feel, he generally busied himself and pushed the emotional aspects of his mind to the side. He had things to study. He had a paper to finish. The things in his life were not all bad. The things that hurt him, the fears that always crept in could be put into boxes for him to deal with later. He didn’t know anything else.

What he did know was that he was going to go to town on Harlan that night. A welcome distraction.

KIP NGUYEN

(I DONT KNOW WHAT TO WRITE HERE. KIP IN THE LIBRARY, SPACING OUT)

“Who are you?” he demanded, preemptively defensive. It wasn’t fun to get caught spacing out, it always made him feel like he had done something wrong. “Do you need something?”

The girl didn’t jump back or flinch the way that people usually did when he moved too fast or talked too loud. There was something gently familiar about her, with her solid build and her broad face. She wore a faded sweatshirt and a pendant with a deity on it around her neck. She looked at him in a way he wasn’t used to and he couldn’t put his finger on what it was. “You OK?” she asked in the low, coarse tone of the Lower Levels.

The question was so preposterous that he was unable to contain his reaction and tried to make himself a threat by looming over her. The girl still didn’t flinch, she gazed calmly up at him.

“What?” exclaimed Kip, puffing out his chest. “What the fuck, man, don’t just ask strangers how they’re feeling. It’s not normal. What’s wrong with you?”

She put her hands up to placate him but didn’t appear to be mocking. Her brown eyes were unremarkable except for their steady kindness. “Sorry, you just don’t look so good. What’s so wrong with checking in?”

Kip glanced down at the girl’s religious necklace, then glared at her. He knew what those people were like. They could sense weakness and used that to their advantage when proselytizing people. The way that they had formed religious branches of social services sickened him-- didn’t they understand that nonreligious mutual aid programs already existed? A firm believer in Eden’s state atheism, he took pride in never having been inside of a church. 

“Do you need something from me?” he demanded. He took a step back to give her some space, disturbed that she had not been flustered by his posturing. People didn’t just come up and talk to him, and when they did they never stayed calm for long. “What do you want, huh?”

“Seriously? You don’t know who I am?”

“How would I know that?!”

“I’ve been going out with Esther Bellamy for two months. I know who you are, I know all about you.”

The ghost of a memory attempted to move through Kip’s synapses and failed. In a vague way, he knew about Esther’s girlfriend. He knew she had talked to him about her and he knew that she had shown him pictures of her on more than one occasion. But the fogginess that had been filling his brain since he woke up that morning prevented him from accessing this information.

He shook his head and then slapped his own face hard.

The girl finally flinched when she saw him hit himself. “Don’t do that, what’s wrong with you?”

Kip snapped his fingers. “No. Yes. Church. Rosie Church. Rosaline Church, yep, I got it. Shit. I know about you, my brain just doesn’t kick in until I get my morning, uh, coffee…”

Rosaline stared at him without saying anything. Her thick eyebrows were knitted together in an expression that was either confusion or worry. This was the same expression that well-meaning adults got, not other kids.

Anger flared in him. Who was this stranger to judge him, to worry about him? He was sick and tired of being worried for and over. There was nothing wrong with him. There had never been anything wrong with him. He was-- he was simply in an environment that was not conducive to his health. “Whatever. What do you want from me? Are you looking for Esther? She has therapy this morning, she’s not coming back to school until noon.”

“I know Esther is at therapy,” said Rosaline. “I talk to her. She’s my girlfriend. No-- look, I’m not trying to get into your business…”

“But clearly you’re about to anyway.”

Rosaline shrugged. “Esther cares about you and your sister a lot, I care about her. I think it’s pretty simple. Anyways, I was just wondering, do you know who your sister has been hanging out with over the last couple weeks?”

“Nobody. She doesn’t have friends.”

“Wow. That’s-- no.” Rosaline pushed her shaggy hair away from her forehead. “So, OK. There’s this girl named Ayda Jay in my cohort and she’s pretty much the worst person I’ve met in my life, I don’t know, it’s like she wants people to feel bad about themselves. She’s quiet but she’s always talking to this guy on her comm and lately she’s been talking about your sister. Like making fun of her and stuff.”

Unfortunately, this wasn’t anything new. Bullying wasn’t anything new. There had always been bullies. Kassidy was small and ugly and over-reacted to things, she was an easy target. When he could, Kip tried to protect her, especially when the bullying became physical. Hell, he had gone to Juvie because he had protected her in middle school back when Ben Prospas was picking on her. When he had seen that huge Artificial take his fat hand and shove his tiny sister down to the floor, something broke in Kip’s brain. He couldn’t even remember attacking Ben, it was like he had gone to sleep and then woke up in the Principal’s office getting screamed at by his mother. Compared to that, some girl making fun of Kassidy was nothing.

“Thanks,” said Kip in as mocking a voice as he could manage. Religious people were really too sensitive. “Really. I think Kassidy is tough enough to deal with some mean words.”

“You don’t get it. Ayda Jay is related to Casey Agapama somehow, I think they’re sisters or cousins. They live together, they hang out together. Your sister has been hanging out with Casey Agapama, man. I’d be worried if I were you.”

In his shock, Kip grabbed Rosaline by the shoulders with both hands and brought his face close to hers. Rosaline’s eyes widened, she grabbed one of his wrists and twisted it so hard that she flipped him around and wrenched his arm up behind his back. It hurt but Kip could not even think of the pain.

Casey Agapama.

He knew about Casey Agapama. Everyone did. Her rat bastard venture capitalist father was unspeakably wealthy due to the labor he exploited from his workers. People were terrified of Casey, they said that she was a sociopath. She didn’t so much get into fights as she did beat the crap out of other kids for no reason. People said that she had stabbed a teacher and gotten away with it. When she walked down the halls, everyone else got out of her way.

In 4 years of secondary education, Kip had only seen her once. She had shoved him out of his chair in the library while walking past him when he was 15. She hadn’t even looked at him, it was like she had done it out of pure boredom.

What was Kassidy doing around a girl like that? Surely even she wasn’t that stupid.

Rosaline released her grip on his arm. “Don’t just grab people like that. You scared me.”

“What the fuck?!” groaned Kip, rubbing his arm where Rosaline had twisted it. He was used to scuffling with people who were 30+ pounds lighter than him, not people who were sturdy like she was. “Jesus, fuck my tits, my sister is gonna get fucking killed!! That’s why she’s been messing with her hair and shit, like all that make-up shit, she’s trying to impress that freak!”

“Wow, you cuss more than anyone I’ve ever met,” said Rosaline. “ Maybe you should--”

“My sister is associating with someone who could rip her arms off and you’re telling me not to fucking cuss?!”

“No, I’m just making a comment, calm down.” Rosaline put her hands up, as if that was going to calm him. She was looking at Kip like she expected him to attack her now, and that was a look he was used to, a look that was worse than pity or concern. Dangerous. Bad. When people like Rosaline Church saw Kip, they did not see a well functioning member of society, they saw a dangerous individual who might hurt them. Kip did not want to hurt anyone, he knew his heart was gentle, but he could not help the way he talked or reacted to things. 

(I DONT KNOW HOW TO WRITE THE KIP/CASEY FIGHT THAT BRINGS EVERYONE TOGETHER)

#writing

[emulateharry]

story of my life: touring Cheshire

The story was missing something, a little piece, and felt unfinished.  So here is the last vignette--slightly out of order.  As always my deepest gratitude to my friends and betas @niallandharrymakemestrong​, @whoopsharrystyles​, and @melissas173​ without whom I would never write anything.

Anne Twist was making a pot of tea in her kitchen as This Morning with Phillip and Holly droned on in the background.  Gemma was setting the table on the patio when she heard a car pull up.   A moment later Harry and Kacey popped through the gate and into the garden.   Harry put his finger to his lips as he approached the patio.  He continued on to the sliding door while Kacey stopped to hug Gemma.  Stepping quietly up to his mum, he put his hands over her eyes and said softly “Guess who?”

“Harry!” she exclaimed as she turned and hugged him.  “Sweetheart, this is a surprise!”

“I had a few days off and thought we might visit for a bit.”

“Oh, I’m so glad.  Where is Kassidy?” she asked, looking behind her son to find his girlfriend walking in the door.

“Hi Anne,” Kacey smiled as she entered Anne’s open arms.

Anne hugged her and it felt…different.  She felt softer than usual.  Anne pulled back and looked at Kacey with surprise and a growing smile. She glanced at Harry’s face and saw his huge grin.

“Is there something you want to tell me?” she said, smiling broadly.

Harry looked to Kacey and said, “I told you she’d know. Mum, you’re going to be a Nana.”

Gemma squealed behind Kacey and scooted in for a big group hug.

*

 “Hi Daddy!”  Kacey said to the computer screen.

“There’s my daughter.  How’s my number one girl? And Harry, how are you?”

While they made small talk for a few minutes, Kacey could hear her stepmother in the background talking to her siblings.

“Well, Daddy, we have something to tell you.”

“You’re getting married?!”

“Um, no. You are going to be a grandpa,” she said, her smile wide.

Sam Day did not smile at the news.  He paused, although only for a few seconds, it felt like an eternity to Kacey as her smile began to fade. With a hint of a frown her father looked at Harry and said, “You got my daughter pregnant? So what do you plan to do about it?”

“Daddy!” Kacey exclaimed, censure in her voice.  A light flush crept into her cheeks.

Harry squeezed her hand out of sight of the camera and replied, “I’m going to love her and take care of her and our child,” he replied in a pleasant but firm tone.

Sam Day gave Harry a hard stare then turned his attention back to his daughter.  “When is this blessed event going to take place?”

“Baby is due in February, February 12.”

“How--” he was interrupted by Harry’s phone ringing.  It was Jeff and, with an apology, Harry excused himself to take the call.

Starting again, Sam asked “How are you feeling?”

“I’m well.  My doctor says everything is fine.  Baby is about the size of a large grape,” she said with a small grin.

“Hmm. Been sick at all?”

“No, I feel fine.  Just tired.”

“Your mother never got sick with you,” he said grudgingly.

“I didn’t know that.” After a long pause she said “Daddy, I have to go.  Just wanted to tell you the good news. But please don’t tell anyone other than Lucinda.  I’m not ready for that publicity yet.”

“Okay, Kassidy. Take care of yourself.”

“I will Daddy.  I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

Kacey was about to disconnect when she heard her stepmother’s voice “So her rock star knocked her up but isn’t going to marry her?  He’s not such a prince after all, is he?”

Kacey slammed the laptop closed and sat trying to compose herself.  She wished she hadn’t made the call.  Her father’s lack of enthusiasm and her stepmother’s derision were stealing her joy.  She sat quietly for a few more minutes until Harry walked back into the room.  Seeing the sadness on her face, he knelt down in front of her and pulled her into a tight hug.

“It’s just a surprise, love.  He’ll be over the moon when the shock wears off.”

She gave him a rueful smile.

“I love you, Kassidy.”

“And I love you, Harry.”

*

Kacey was subdued after the Skype call to her dad.  She decided to take a walk to clear her head.  Harry had asked if she wanted company but she gently declined.  Making sure she had a phone and it was fully charged, she headed out the door and ambled through the neighborhood.  She came upon a bench overlooking a play area and she sat to watch the children running around.  She was disappointed in her father’s reaction and his words brought to light something that she had not admitted to herself.  Until it had been spoken out loud, she hadn’t realized how much she wanted it; how much she wanted to be married to Harry.  It was silly, really.  Saying some words and getting a piece of paper wouldn’t make his love more real, or make their relationship better.  Yet deep down in her heart she didn't believe that.  She believed in the power of professing your love in front of a minister and she believed that the bonds of marriage would make them even stronger as a couple.  Kacey Day wanted that fairytale so much, she could taste it.

But living in the real world, she knew that marrying Harry would entail reams of paperwork and pre-nups and planning and business details that made her head hurt to think about.  Because Kacey wasn’t absolutely certain that her desires weren’t the result of her insane hormones, she decided not talk to Harry about them.  She sat on the bench and, like Scarlett O’Hara, chose to worry about it tomorrow.

It was late afternoon and she was still sitting on the bench watching the children when Harry found her.  The sun was shining on her hair and little wisps were practically glowing around her face.  The shrieks of the children playing and the chatting of their mothers went unnoticed.  Harry only had eyes for his beautiful love.  He moved toward her as she turned to look at him.  Her smile lit up his world.  For a moment he could not take a breath.  He sat on the bench next to her, putting his arm around her as she snuggled into his side.  They sat and watched the kids for a bit longer, in their own private bubble, until it was time to walk back for dinner.

*

Anne relished the opportunity to think of something happy after the two months of mourning Robin.  She wished he had lived long enough to hear the news; he would have been overjoyed at the thought of another grandchild.  It had been so hard and she missed him more than she could have thought possible.  Even when it was no longer in the forefront of her mind, she would see something or hear a joke and think “I’ve got to tell Robin about this…” before realizing that he was gone.   Each time it happened it was a stab of pain that took her breath away.

Anne threw herself into spoiling Kacey, who seemed to understand that she needed the distraction and let her.  Kacey felt pampered and loved by the whole family.  They were all so happy about the baby and all determined that she would be comfortable and cared for.  She jokingly referred to Harry's mum as Mama Anne one evening and the name stuck.  Anne loved it, as she loved this young woman who was carrying her first grandchild.  Harry could not have chosen a better partner.

Harry would often catch Kacey looking sadly into the distance when she didn’t know he was there.  The second that she heard him, she plastered a cheerful mask on her face.  He thought she was still upset at the uncomfortable Skype call with her dad and he tried to draw her into conversation about it but she resisted his efforts.  The night before had been the last straw.  She had come out into the bedroom after her shower and he could clearly see that she had been crying.  She refused to talk about it only replying “Hormones” to his attempts to get her to talk.  He’d had enough.  While Kacey was taking a nap the following afternoon, he went out into the garden and called Laura.

“Well if it isn’t my best friends Baby Daddy!” she answered on the first ring.

“Hello Laura.  How are you?” Harry began politely.

“Same as when you and Kace talked to me two days ago.  Come on, Henry, you don’t call me for small talk.  What’s up?”

“Kassidy has been a bit down since she talked to her dad.  He didn’t seem excited about our news; he even seemed a little disappointed.  I don’t understand that at all.  I am about to call him myself and have a chat.”

Laura paused before replying.  “Mr. Day is very old-fashioned. I’m sure he was shocked to hear that she is pregnant; it’s not like he didn’t know that you have sex but now he KNOWS.  Kace expected it though she hoped for a little more enthusiasm.  The idea is growing on him and he’s getting used to it.  I’ll bet he’ll be calling Kace soon.”

Harry heard a bit of hesitance in her voice.  “There’s more, isn’t there? What do I not know?”

Sighing Laura said, “As she was disconnecting the call, she heard her stepmother make a snarky comment. Lucy’s been making little remarks to her family about how Kace is being taken down a peg or two—but no details about how.  They’ve always been a bit jealous of her so they are ecstatic to have a chance to trash talk her.  This is Kentucky, Harry, part of the Bible Belt.  People often like to use the Good Book as a club around here, even now in the 21st century.”

“Dammit, Laura.  What the hell can I do about that?” Harry raised his voice in exasperation.

“Not really anything you can do.  You won’t ever change them; their morality only applies to other people; never to themselves.   She’s certainly not the first one in that family to have a kid without being married and she damn sure won’t be the last.  They’re trolls.  She’ll be fine.  Let her grieve a bit.”

Harry blew out a breath in frustration.  “Okay.  I’ll give her some time.  Thanks, Laura.”

“You’re welcome.  Now go take care of my best friend.”

Harry clicked off the call and walked back into the house.  Climbing the stairs he opened the door to their room gently so as not to disturb Kacey.  He stood next to the bed watching her sleep, resisting the urge to reach out and stroke her hair lest he wake her.  His life was so crazy sometimes.  His job was insane and took a lot of time but he loved it.  Looking at Kacey he knew he’d give it all up for her in a heartbeat if she asked.  He couldn’t remember what it was like before she came into his life and he didn’t want to.  Now she was bringing his baby into the world.  How had he been so lucky?  He turned and tiptoed from the room, closing the door behind him.  He walked out to the garden again to make another call.

They were sitting at breakfast several days later when Harry suggested that he show Kacey some of the sights in Cheshire.  He asked Anne and Gemma to go as well and make a day of it but they both had other plans.  Gemma was heading to a new yarn shop near the bakery where Harry used to work. She wanted to get some alpaca yarn to knit some booties for the baby.  Anne was having lunch with some friends.  Kacey loved the idea and just after cleaning up the dishes they climbed into the SUV for the hour long drive.

It was a perfect August day with only a few puffy clouds in the bluest of skies.  The windows were rolled down, and they sang along to the radio as they motored down the A54 past Middlewich and Winsford.  The road meandered on through Little Budworth and Tarvin Sands with Kacey giggling at the quaint names of the villages.  Arriving in Chester at last, they parked and decided to explore the City Wall first.  

Wending its way through the city, the remains of a 2000 year old Roman wall (built to protect the city when it was a fort) provided a 2 mile walk around Chester affording them beautiful views of historic buildings, gates and the River Dee.  They ended their stroll at the Chester Cathedral. Harry had arranged a private tour of the cathedral and the falconry that was on the grounds.  They spent two hours ambling through the building that had been built originally in 1093 and then added to many times over the thousand years since.  At the Birds of Prey exhibit Kacey took video of Harry calling a falcon and having it land on his gloved arm.  His look of childlike wonder and pure joy made her heart melt.  

Harry noticed that Kacey was looking a bit tired and, though she did not complain, he suggested that they skip the zoo on this trip and head back.  It was almost 2 and he had made reservations for tea at a restaurant just outside of Holmes Chapel.  They held hands as they walked back to the car and he kissed her after helping her into her seat.  She reached up to brush a stray lock of hair out of his face and let her palm rest on his cheek, stroking softly with her thumb.  He leaned in to kiss her again, a gentle parting of the lips and meeting of the tongues.  Breaking apart he whispered “I love you so much.”  Kacey smiled at him and kissed him on the tip of his nose as his hand moved to caress her slightly swollen abdomen.  

“We love you too.”

*

The Yellow Broom in Twemlow Green had a special secluded table ready for Harry and Kacey in the garden.  Harry held her chair for her and then sat across from her at the table.  Her face was a tiny bit puffy from the nap she’d had in the car on the drive back from Chester.  Her fatigue was easing some as she neared the second trimester and her hormones seemed to be calming down a bit.  It had been an adventure dealing with the rapid mood changes and frequent naps but he wouldn’t trade this for the world.  He had read four books about pregnancy and childbirth in the last three weeks and kept a copy of “What to Expect When You’re Expecting,” otherwise known as ‘the bible’, in each vehicle and at easily accessible points in the house.  He had downloaded Lenart Nilsson’s photos of babies in utero and linked them to his calendar to see how his baby was developing each week.  All this while getting ready for promo and tour.  Kacey had watched him running himself ragged and started asking him to snuggle with her when she napped.  He couldn’t deny her and found himself napping along with her.  Today he had settled for holding her hand as he drove.

The waitress brought out a pot of the Yellow Broom Breakfast Blend for Kacey and a pot of Darjeeling for Harry.  As Kacey was pouring her cup, a Red Admiral butterfly fluttered up and landed on the handle of Harry’s teapot.  It lingered, slowly opening and closing its wings as they watched it.  When the server arrived with their sandwiches, the tiny creature flitted away again.  Harry reached for Kacey’s hand and squeezed it before stretching to kiss her on the temple.  

They enjoyed the savory little sandwiches, scones, and tiny cakes, lingering in the garden together for a bit afterwards.  Thanking the staff, they got back into the Rover for the short drive into Holmes Chapel.  They saw St.Luke’s Church and, on a whim, Harry asked if she wanted to take a look at it.  Built in 1430 it was much newer than Chester Cathedral, but Harry clearly loved his village’s small church.  Kacey agreed with enthusiasm and he pulled into the carpark at the back.  Walking to the door they saw a beribboned floral wreath on the door.  

“Harry--maybe we shouldn’t go in.  What if there’s a wedding in progress?” Kacey asked tentatively.

“It’s probably there for tomorrow morning. They don’t do weekday weddings here,” he replied confidently.  

Harry pushed the door open and lead the way into the church. The nave was beautiful with the timbers and arched plaster ceiling,  The old wood of the west gallery boxes called to Kacey to run her hands over it. She was enthralled with the organ gallery and the leaded glass windows.  A brass chandelier hanging from the center of the ceiling dated from 1708 and had been a gift from a local ironmaster during a renovation, Harry explained. Kacey was looking up at it and admiring the workmanship when the vicar entered the room.  He greeted Harry with a wave and walked to meet the couple.  Harry introduced him as Reverend Paul and they exchanged pleasantries for a few minutes.  As Kacey and the reverend chatted, Harry fell silent.  He was standing behind Kacey and when she noticed that he was no longer participating in the conversation, she turned around to look at him.  He was staring at her.  

“Are you okay?” she asked him with a crooked smile.

He hesitated before replying.  Taking a quick breath and with a tiny shake of his head to clear it, he knelt on one knee and took her hand.  

“Kassidy.  I can barely remember what my world was like before you came into it, it’s as if it started the day we met.  That day is one of the happiest of my life.  You are a part of me, a part that I can’t live without.  Your strength supports me, your kindness enriches me, and your love encourages me. You are the keeper of my heart.  I love you now and I promise to always love you.  Kassidy Christina Day, would you marry me?”

Kacey was smiling as tears pooled in her eyes and slipped down her cheeks.  She blinked them away and replied simply “Yes.”

Harry stood and pulled her into his arms.  WIth Reverend Paul beaming at them, he bent to kiss her.  Pulling apart, he reached into his pocket and removed a ring.  It was a marquise cut sapphire nestled between two diamonds.  It’s simple design highlighted the perfection of the stones.  He slipped it onto her finger as a flash went off and someone started clapping.  Startled, Kacey looked up to see Anne and Gemma walking up the aisle.  

Gemma hugged her first and Anne followed, holding her tightly as Kacey’s tears began again.

“Stop!  None of that. No puffy face today, Kassidy.  Come on, we need to get you ready,” Gemma commanded.

“What?  Ready for what?” she asked, confused.

“For the wedding, of course.”

Kacey’s eyes widened.  Harry, face split into the biggest grin ever to grace that visage, added “Yes. Is that okay?  That we get married today? Right now?”  He pulled his lower lip between his teeth as he waited for her reply.

“Oh, Harry Styles, I love you. Yes. Today is a good day to get married.”

“Right then, let’s get moving!  We’ve got 45 minutes to get you ready. Come on!”  Gemma ordered, grabbing Kacey’s hand and pulling her down the aisle.  Anne kissed her son on the cheek before following.  

Gemma led Kacey to a room down a long hallway.  Entering, she saw a stunning dress hanging from a hook in the wall. Kacey recognized it from a picture she had pinned to her pinterest fashion board several years before she had even met Harry.  She walked to the confection of lace and tulle with a bodice of sparkling crystals and touched it gingerly, afraid that it might be a figment of her imagination and that this was all a hormone-induced dream.  Gemma gave her a moment and then ordered her to a chair so that Lou, who she had not seen when she walked in, could start on her hair.  

The women were chattering around her as she sat in a happy daze while they fussed over her.  Gemma was working on her nails while Lou curled her hair.  There was a quick knock on the door before it opened and Kacey heard the strains of a Billy Idol song being sung loudly.

“It’s a nice day for a white wedding!”

“Laura!!”  Kacey squealed as her best friend came barreling into the room carrying a garment bag and some shoes.  Carefully, so as not to muss Lou’s handiwork, Laura hugged her and kissed her cheek.  

“Maid of Honor reporting for duty!  Let’s get this show on the road.  What can I do to help?”

“Take over on her nails please, and mum and I will get dressed.  Then we’ll relieve you while you change.  Once Lou’s done we can help Kassidy get dressed.”

“Got it.  Oooh!  I love the color.  This sparkly pink screams Rock Star Wife!”  Laura joked.

Gemma and Anne hurried out of the room. Kacey sat completely bemused as Laura described the trip over from Kentucky in the chartered plane.  She was quiet, trying her best to absorb all of the details so as never to forget this beautiful day.

*

Just down the hall there were some stern voices coming from a similar room.  Harry was inside already changed into his classic, black tux.  Jeff was trying to make him be sensible.  

“Harry, it’s irresponsible to not have one.  As your friend and manager, I strongly encourage you to get this signed,”  he said, holding a sheaf of papers in his hand.

“No, Jeff. No. We only have thirty minutes and I am not barging in there to demand that she sign a prenup. No.”

“But Harry!  You’ve worked so hard. What if you…”

“No Jeff.  Look, she is not that type of person.  She barely lets me buy her tiny gifts, do you really think she is going to suddenly change once we’re married and become greedy?  Did it occur to you that she is quite wealthy on her own?  No.  If I lost her no amount of money would make it better.  It’s just not that important in comparison.”

“Damn it, Harry…”

“Jeff, we’re in church.”

The door burst open with a “Knock Knock!   Where is the groom?  Look at you, Harold.  Very nice.”  Nick Grimshaw swept in, followed closely by James Corden.  

“Never thought I’d see the day…” Nick began but was interrupted by James.

“Knew this was inevitable.  From the moment you met, it was clear.  You two are meant for each other.”

Harry smiled at his friends.  The only one missing was---

“Hello there Harry.  Nice o’ you to invite me to the weddin’,” Niall drawled as he walked through the doorway.  “And I see that there is a pretty little bridesmaid here too.”

“Nialler you know that my sister is off limits!” Harry scolded then burst into laughter at Niall’s affronted expression.

Nick grinned and said, “Well, well. The gang’s all here.”  

There was much back slapping and ribbing and general silliness as they worked at keeping Harry’s nerves away.  They needn’t have bothered.  Harry was not nervous; he was calm.  He knew exactly what he was doing.  

*

Kacey was in her dress, her hair and makeup were perfect and  she held a beautiful bouquet of white and pink roses.  Lou had woven rosebuds into her hair along with a diamond and pink sapphire comb.  She had left to go sit in the sanctuary with Anne and Laura was standing with Kacey as they waited for Gemma to return.  Her future sister-in-law bustled into the room leading someone else behind her.  

“Sorry for taking so long.  Had to find someone to walk our bride down the aisle,” she said with a grin as she presented a distinguished looking gentleman in a simple black tux.

“Daddy!” Kacey squealed, not quite believing her eyes.

“Hello my number one daughter.  Let me look at you,” Sam Day held her at arm’s length before pulling her into a tight hug.  “You are beautiful, Kassidy.  Your mom would be so proud.”

Kacey’s tears welled again but Gemma produced a tissue and an admonishment “None of that!  You’ll ruin your make up.  Okay people, let’s get this show on the road.”

Harry was frustrated.  It was Sunday afternoon and, in the middle of rehearsal with the band, Nick had called him about his Live Lounge performance.  Seems the Killers had been trapped by a hurricane in the US and would not be able to make it for their Monday performance.  The BBC wondered if Harry could switch days from his scheduled Wednesday slot.  This normally would not be a problem but today Clare was sick.  She had picked up a respiratory virus of some sort and sounded more like a frog than an angel.  They had hoped her voice would be better by Wednesday but there was no way she would be recovered by tomorrow.  Running his fingers through his hair, he heard Kacey in the corner humming.  

“Kassidy?”

“Yes Harry?”

“Baby, I need you”

“Harry!  This is neither the time nor the place!” she said frowning.

The band laughed as he said “Kassidy, I need your help.”

“What’s wrong?  What can I do?”

“They’ve moved our Live Lounge to tomorrow. Clare can’t sing backup with her voice like that.  You have a very similar range.  Would you sing with me?”

“Oh, Harry.  Oh, I don’t kno---”

“Please, love.  You have a beautiful voice and we have the rest of the evening to practice.”

“I---” she hesitated, fear reflecting in her eyes.  She took a deep breath, looked at the man she loved and her resistance crumbled.  “Okay.  I will do my best.”   

Harry whooped and picked her up in a bear hug, careful to not ‘smush the baby.’

*

They had just finished performing The Chain and Nick was chatting with Harry.  

“Well, Harry.  I reckon that was a spot on performance.  Good show.”

“Thanks!”  

“I see that you have a guest singer with your band today.”

“Yeah.  Clare is a bit under the weather and is on vocal rest.”

“Lucky that your girlfriend is a good singer then, yeah?”

“I don’t have a girlfriend Nick,” Harry replied cheekily.

“Harry Styles!  I see your girlfriend Kacey Day sitting right there.  See?  She just waved to me.”

“Now Nick, she’s not my girlfriend and you know it.”

“She’s not? Well then why don’t you introduce us?”

“This is Kacey Styles, and she is my wife.”

It took less than two hours for the internet to melt.  

#harry and kacey #soml #touring cheshire

[wrestlingisfake]

All Out preview

Chris Jericho vs. Hangman Page - This match is to determine the first AEW men’s world champion.  Page qualified for this match by winning a 21-man battle royale at Double or Nothing on May 25; Jericho qualified by defeating Kenny Omega later in the same show.  Jericho has held six world heavyweight titles; this would be his first outside of WWE.  Page has never held a singles championship of any kind in a major-league promotion, although he’s been talking about being the first to hold this title since the original AEW press conference in January.

AEW is trying to position this as a true main event, mainly on the strength of the title and Jericho, even though the ladder match and (at one point) Omega-Moxley were clearly bigger draws.  I expect that this match will go on last just to establish the primacy of the world championship.  That’s a lot of pressure on Page, who was barely even a midcarder 18 months ago.  Of all the talent getting pushes to elevate them to the Kenny Omega’s star power, he’s the one with a rocket strapped to his back.  There’s a sense that this match is his Rocky moment, and he’s carried that idea well in interviews.

Jericho has handled the story convincingly, pushing the notion that Page is ready for this level of competition, while still asserting that he’s the favorite going into the match.  Page is great...but he won’t be good enough on this particular night.  Jericho has also stressed that he needs to beat Page, because a loss would set up talk about him passing the torch in the twilight of his career, and he’s not willing to be treated like a used-to-be.  It’s an interesting approach for the 48-year-old Jericho, because the tipping point between “veteran superstar” and “old timer doing jobs on the way to retirement” is precarious.  It makes sense that he would fight tooth-and-nail to keep from going over that tipping point, and direct that fury towards his 28-year-old opponent.

Assuming this really will close the show, it needs to be a great match.  I don’t think it will be, or needs to be, the best match of the night.  But it needs to be great enough that we leave thinking they were right to put it on last, and that Page has what it takes to close the show.  More critically, we need to come away thinking AEW title matches are epic conflicts, so the promotion can credibly use the championships as box office attractions in their own right.

I would be fine with Page as champion, but I think the best move is to have him deliver a star-making performance and then suffer a heartbreaking loss to Jericho.  That’s not to say Page shouldn’t eventually win the title.  But Jericho has both the clout and the heel heat to sustain a very long chase from multiple contenders, which will make the first men’s world title change as important as the first men’s world title match.

Rey Fenix & Pentagon, Jr. vs. Matt Jackson & Nick Jackson - The Lucha Bros, Penta and Fenix, are defending the AAA tag team championship.  The Young Bucks, Matt and Nick, are defending an AEW undefeated streak.  This is a ladder match, so the title belts will be suspended above the ring; to reach them ladders will be provided at ringside for the wrestlers to climb.  The first person to retrieve the belts will win the match, and the championship, for his team.  Since that’s the only way the match can end, there are effectively no count-outs, disqualifications, pinfalls, or submissions.

The feud between the Lucha Bros and the Young Bucks in February, when Penta and Fenix took exception to the Bucks claiming to be the best tag team and attacked them at their own press conference.  On March 16 the Lucha Bros headlined AAA’s Rey de Reyes and won the tag team title, but the Bucks showed up for an impromptu title match and took the belts back to AEW.   The Bucks successfully defended the title in a rematch at AEW’s Double or Nothing on May 25, but the Lucha Bros finally won it back at AAA’s Verano de Escandalo on June 16.  The Bucks teamed with Kenny Omega against the Lucha Bros and Laredo Kid at AEW Fyter Fest on June 29 and AAA Triplemania on August 3.  Penta and Fenix issued the challenge for this match at Fight for the Fallen on July 13.

Fenix suffered some sort of leg injury in the past week.  From what I’ve read, it might not be anything, but he was worried he tore something and had to get it checked out.  The fact I haven’t heard an actual diagnosis suggests that they couldn’t find anything wrong with him.  That doesn’t mean there isn’t anything wrong, but I’m hoping it turned out to be nothing and Fenix just needed to rest it up.  Either way, I expect the possible injury to be worked into the story of the match, and for the Bucks to do a bunch of moves and stuff onto the leg.

I kinda think the Mexican team should walk out with the Mexican championship, but it is the Bucks’ show and they’ve talked up how legendary their ladder matches are.  They can easily win here and then drop the belts at a AAA show, without any apparent impact on the AEW win-loss stats.  I gotta pick the Bucks to win (at least all the way up to the finals of the AEW tag title tournament).

Kenny Omega vs. PAC - Pac, formerly Adrian Neville in WWE, is a substitution for Jon Moxley, who had to pull out of this match last week due to a staph infection.  Ironically, the substitution pays off on plans that were canceled a while back.

Pac’s involvement in AEW was announced at the company’s original press conference, while he held Dragon Gate’s top title (the Open the Dream Gate championship).  He was set to feud with Hangman Page, and the storyline played up the idea that Page wanted to be a champion, implying the match would figure into the AEW world title picture.  Then on May 18 Page beat Pac by disqualification at a British indy show, setting up an angle where Pac refused to face Page at their scheduled AEW match on May 25. 

It turned out Pac would not agree to lose any matches during his title run, and AEW had decided never to do DQ finishes to get out of booking clean finishes.  There was talk that Pac wasn’t even supposed to lose to Page, but he would be feuding with Omega later.  I seem to remember speculating that Omega and Pac were meant to win their matches on May 25 and meet for the AEW title here.  Obviously that didn’t happen.  But Pac has since lost the Dream Gate belt on July 21, which puts him back in play at AEW.  And just in the nick of time, it seems.

I was expecting Moxley to be the slight favorite in the originally scheduled match, but now that Pac is in the mix anything is possible.  The outcome is totally up in the air, and it’s just as well since I expect the focus is on delivering a killer match to make up for failing to deliver the advertised match.  Even though Omega was playing a dick by mocking Mox’s “boo-boo,” Pac is an even bigger dick, so I’m lowkey pulling for Kenny.

Cody Rhodes vs. Shawn Spears - Spears will be seconded by Tully Blanchard, playing on the legendary rivalry between Blanchard and Cody’s father Dusty.  Cody brought an entire entourage to the ring a year ago at All In, but for this match he is contractually limited to a single person in his corner.  We haven’t been outright told this person will be a big surprise who will make a big difference in the match, but it’s been set up to let us think that, so I hope Cody doesn’t just bring out Dustin Rhodes or Dallas Page.

Rhodes and Spears were friends in OVW when they were coming up through WWE developmental.  Cody hit it big in WWE, while Spears (as Tye Dillinger) languished for most of his thirties.  When Spears jumped to AEW, fans generally considered it a positive move for both parties, although Cody made an offhand remark about Spears being a “player-coach” and a “good hand,” curiously implying that he was dismissing his friend as a journeyman.  Spears took offense and blasted Cody with a chair on June 29, leaving Cody a bloody mess.

This is easily the biggest match of Spears’s career, and it’s probably one of his last chances to escape the stigma of being a never-was.  A win would give him momentum as a key figure in the early weeks of AEW’s TV show, as Cody would need to chase him for a few more months to seek vengeance.  A loss would simply validate WWE’s lack of interest in Tye Dillinger--and worse, affirm Cody’s kayfabe dismissiveness on AEW’s own programming.  Cody hasn’t actually been pinned yet in AEW, so I assume they’re saving that for something; I hope this is it.

Evil Uno & Stu Grayson vs. Chuck Taylor & Trent Beretta - The team that wins this match earns a bye in the AEW tag team championship tournament.  So basically you have to win this one match in order to skip one tournament match.  That’s kinda screwy.  Both of these teams won three-ways to qualify for this match.  The Best Friends (Taylor/Beretta) qualified on June 28, while the Dark Order (Uno/Grayson) qualified on July 13.

I think the plan was for the Dark Order to be super-over as a hot team with a spooky gimmick and a cult following on the indies.  It hasn’t been working out.  Honestly, Chuck Taylor manages to come off as creepier than the Dark Order’s gimmick just by being a really weird dude who is oddly devoted to hugs.  Hopefully the popularity of the Best Friends will override disinterest in the Dark Order to heat the match up.  Logically, the bad guys should get the bye, so I think the Dark Order better cheat a lot.

Riho vs. Hikaru Shida - I’ve heard talk that the winner of this match will qualify for the first women’s world championship match on October 2, but I haven’t been able to confirm that.  It wouldn’t make a ton of sense anyway, considering Riho is 2-1 in AEW and coming off of a loss, while Shida is 1-0 but hasn’t appeared in the company since May.  I don’t have stats in front of me, but I would think at least one other woman in the company would have more credibility in this spot.  Then again, Britt Baker was sidelined with a concussion for much of August, so maybe she was originally slated for this spot and they decided they couldn’t wait to see if she’d be cleared.  I guess I’ll go with Riho to win, even though I’m still not sure what’s at stake.

Christopher Daniels & Frankie Kazarian & Scorpio Sky vs. Jungle Boy & Luchasaurus & Marko Stunt - The Daniels team is SCU.  Jungle Boy and Luchasaurus are “A Boy and His Dinosaur,” so I guess with Marko they’re “A Boy and A Boy and His Dinosaur” or something like that.  This could be a good chance to put over the Luchasaurus team, but their gimmick is going to be over either way, so maybe they should keep up momentum on SCU.

Darby Allin vs. Joey Janella vs. Jimmy Havoc - This is a three-way match, so the first man to score a fall on either of his opponents wins.  These guys were on the losing end of a six-man tag match on July 13.  At the time I believe I observed that nobody in that six-man had yet won a match, so now the losers of the Weenie Hut Jr.’s Bowl are having a Super Weenie Hut Jr.’s Bowl.  I guess the guy who scores the winning fall gets to escape into the midcard, while the other two open the next show, and the loser of that match gets to hang out with Brandon Cutler backstage or something.  Of the three, Allin is the biggest project with perhaps the least indy scene cred, so he’ll probably be the Super Weenie Hut Jr.’s champion.

21-Woman Casino Battle Royale - This is set for the free pre-show.  It’s a gauntlet battle royale with timed entrances and over-the-top-rope eliminations, but with the same special rules as the one AEW did on May 25.  Five women start the match, and every three  minutes another group of women enter; the 21st woman enters alone.  Eliminations can occur at any time by exiting the ring over the top rope and placing both feet on the floor before re-entering.  The last woman left after everyone else is eliminated wins the match, and qualifies to wrestle...uh, someone (maybe the winner of Riho vs. Shida?) for the women’s championship on October 2.

As soon as AEW announced the match, they admitted they didn’t have 21 women on the roster, so we can expect a lot of new faces.  Confirmed so far:

Allie

Awesome Kong

Big Swole

Brandi Rhodes

Britt Baker

Ivelisse

Jazz

Nyla Rose

Sadie Gibbs

Shazza McKenzie

Teal Piper

I heard AEW and Impact Wrestling were in talks to put Tenille Dashwood in this match, but even if that’s true they might not get the i’s dotted in time.  Taya Valkyrie was on Being the Elite the other day, but I don’t know if that means anything.  Obviously Chicago is wondering if CM Punk will be at this show, but I never see anyone wondering if his wife, AJ Mendez, might show up.  Apparently something is up with Kylie Rae but nobody’s talking about it, which is troubling.  I don’t even know what continent Bea Priestly will be on during this show, so she may not be available.

It feels like AEW’s biggest plans in this division are for Baker, although that could be just to have her put over someone else when the moment comes.  The safest bet is Britt, though, until someone else emerges from the pack.

Jack Evans & Angelico vs. Isiah Kassidy & Marq Quen - Another match for the pre-show.  Kassidy and Quen are Private Party, and everyone likes them but the big issue I’m always hearing is that they’re green and need to be protected by veterans until they’re ready.  Evans and Angelico are veterans, so there you go.  My guess is that AEW won’t book Private Party to actually win a match until they’ve decided the team is truly ready, but since we don’t know when that’ll happen we have something to look forward to every time they wrestle.  For now, I gotta pick Evangelico (is anybody calling them that?) to win.

#aew #all out #hangman page #chris jericho #the young bucks #lucha bros #kenny omega #pac

[anotheruserwithnoname]

New thoughts on The Orville and Star Trek Discovery

This post contains spoilers on both series up to “Cupid’s Dagger” for The Orville and “Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum” for Discovery. As I’ll probably get wordy, I’ll throw in a page break.

Before the break, though, the tl;dr is The Orville continues to be great (though this week’s episode is a bit controversial to some); meanwhile, approximately three episodes ago, Discovery finally became, for me anyway, proper Star Trek. And the renewal of both series is a cause for celebration.

I’ll start with Star Trek Discovery. Up to and including “Choose Your Pain”, the episode that reintroduced Harry Mudd, I was starting to lose hope in Discovery. It was too dark, too unlikeable, the characters were not gelling either as a team or as TV heroes, the Klingon subplot was - save for some unexpected in-show shipping of two Klingons - dull as an economics textbook. It was fading. And I speak as someone who gave both Voyager and Enterprise more than a year each to find their voice. The “icing on the cake” was having two characters unnecessarily utter the F-word for no other apparent reason than to justify the episode TV-MA rating. I was already saying to people that I gave it two more weeks and then I was probably done.

And then came “Lethe” and something great happened. It felt almost like having Stamets and Tilly drop F-bombs caused the show and its writers to snap to attention and snap out of whatever TV-MA/streaming cliches rut they’d fallen into. Maybe hearing two people in Starfleet uniforms make like Malcolm Tucker made them realize they’d taken things too far. Because all of a sudden we began a run of episodes that truly felt like Star Trek, the characters snapped into place as a team and as TV heroes, the plots were interesting, Michael dropped the woe is me routine (for the most part) and even the Klingon stuff became less boring. OK, the tech is still too advanced, the Klingons look awful, and there are a few other problems, some of which (like the fact it’s a prequel) cannot be fixed ... but the show felt like Trek, finally.

“Lethe” gave us some valuable insight into Sarek and Michael’s backstory. And while I still wonder how they’ll reconcile not having any past reference to Spock having an adopted sister (maybe Sybok will show up and whisk her away somewhere), and the new abilities related to the mind meld are coming close to deus ex machina territory, it still seemed to work. Having Canadian actress Mia Kirschner as Amanda - who resembles both a young Jane Wyatt as well as Abramsverse Amanda Winona Ryder - was a bonus and I hope we see her again.

Then came my favourite episode so far, “Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad”. Hopefully this episode will silence those Discovery fans who keep harping about The Orville borrowing/stealing/revisiting storylines and concepts from Trek considering this episode was basically a remake of the classic TNG tale “Cause and Effect” with a touch of Battlestar Galactica 2004′s “33″ tossed in for good measure - and even hints of Doctor Who’s “Heaven Sent”. And it works. Stamets finally became a character I enjoyed watching, and Tyler also became more interesting. Some are complaining about him and Michael becoming an item but, again, this is Star Trek and while TOS never went there, all the other shows had on-board romances. The time loop was intelligently played and out and Rainn Wilson was terrific as Mudd though I hope his cold-blooded killings early in the episode were done with his assumption that time would reset and everyone would be fine - I’m OK with Wilson playing Mudd as a darker character (so far he’s been the best part about Discovery), but making Mudd a cold-blooded murderer crosses the line. It’s also a shame they couldn’t put Mudd in the title of this or the Choose Your Pain episode, as that’s always been a bit of a tradition in the franchise, but they obviously didn’t want to give the surprise of his appearance away.

“Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum” was not as much fun as the last two, but it gave us some valuable character development for Saru, making him less of an Odo clone. And the subplot where the female Klingon operative teams up with and then appears to betray Admiral Cornwell was interesting. I think there’s more there than we think. By the way, I’ve been a fan of Jayne Brook since she was in WIOU back in 1990 so I’m glad to see her on this show. I hope they don’t kill her character off.

So, yeah, Discovery suddenly got good three weeks ago (and to be fair, “Choose Your Pain” was a good episode too; they just didn’t need to have the juvenile swearing; I was reminded how in one of Torchwood’s first episodes they had Jack announce he was taking a pee mainly because that was something they couldn’t do in Doctor Who. It just served to cement some folk’s negative first impressions). If it keeps on going this way, it’s going to become appointment viewing for me.

The Orville, meanwhile, continues to go from strength to strength. After the surprisingly grim “Krill”, we had “Majority Rule”, which tweaked today’s knee-jerk “like-dislike” culture. (Don’t let that stop you from clicking that little heart at the bottom of this article, though! 😂) I’ve heard people compare it to Black Mirror. Having never seen Black Mirror, my comparison is actually more towards The Outer Limits. It raised some interesting questions and right after watching the episode a friend sent me a video of Katy Perry doing an “apology tour” type TV appearance for some indiscretion of hers, much like LaMarr has to do in the episode. I enjoyed seeing the crew in (sort of) modern day outfits, too.

Then we had “Into the Fold”, a great spotlight episode for Penny Johnson Jerald (formerly Kassidy Yates on DS9) with the surprising reveal that she’s a single mom raising her two boys on board the Orville. The fact we’ve already been introduced to the concept of families on board a starship both with Bortus and his husband - and in TNG before that - makes it less of an ass-pull than such a sudden introduction might usually appear. And it works really well as a character builder for Isaac as he becomes the boys’ surrogate father when Dr. Finn goes missing. I have some issues with Dr. Finn’s rather violent escape (I don’t think shooting the guy was justified) but the episode holds together well otherwise.

Last night’s episode, “Cupid’s Dagger,” was the first overtly comic episode of the series, and it rubbed a few people the wrong way. The same way comedic episodes of TNG and DS9 often did. (Two decades of brain bleach have yet to wipe away the memory of Quark’s head superimposed atop a woman’s lingerie-clad body. 😱) There are also those who questioned the wisdom of an episode about a Deltan-like race that causes anyone who comes in contact with them to become sexually infatuated airing during a time when so many people are accusing or being accused of sexual misconduct and assault. I won’t go into those arguments. I’ll just say the episode was a very strong character building episode once again which gave some closure to the scene in the pilot where Kelly cheats on Ed, while raising more questions. We also saw some resolution to the Finn and Yaphit relationship (uh ... yeah ... I’ll just leave that with a “no comment”), some great Alara moments, and an interesting resolution to the episode’s B-plot involving preventing a war. We also get to enjoy the first appearance by one of Seth MacFarlane’s Family Guy co-stars, as Mike Henry appears in a very funny running gag about an alien who wants to start piping elevator muzak into the Orville’s turbolifts.

Next week’s Orville is looking to be another dramatic one, and if the promo images that have been released are anything to go by, it might be an Alara-centric story, and more Halston Sage is never a bad thing.

---

So basically where I sit now is that The Orville is still amazing, a lot of fun, and still gives off classic Trek vibes with a little modern edginess, though “Cupid’s Dagger” probably pushes the show as far as I’d like it to go in terms of the comedy. Discovery, meanwhile, appears to have undergone some sort of slight internal reboot/reset after its initial set of episodes. Which is good because I want to be able to enjoy both shows, both for the remainder of their first seasons, and into next fall, too.

As a side note, it’s been announced that a book on the making of The Orville is going to be published in January 2018: The World of the Orville by Jeff Bond.

A North American DVD release for Season 1 of The Orville has also been indicated on Amazon, though no date has been announced yet. I’m assuming sometime early 2018, though with Season 1 ending in early December there’s always a chance they might try to sneak in a release for Christmas.

As for Discovery, a novel based on the show is already out in Canada and the US and IDW is gearing up to start publishing a spin-off comic or two. No word on a DVD/Blu-ray release. Being a streaming series doesn’t disqualify it from physical release (Netflix issues most of its shows on DVD eventually, with House of Cards and Orange is the New Black usually coming out within months of their release - though I wouldn’t be marking any calendar dates re: House of Cards at the moment) but I wouldn’t expect to see anything until at least fall 2018 assuming they release the complete Season 1 at once.

#the orville #star trek discovery

[sinsiriuslyemo]

Things suddenly get complicated,as  if it wasn’t already… CHeck out @missjennifercole for episode 25 tomorrow!! And thank you guys for all the love!!

EPISODE 24

Your plane landed in the morning, you and Nevada were so peacefully happy in the plane bed that you didn’t want to get up.

“Just leave us here!” You shout in a giggle to the flight attendant as you kiss down Nevada’s neck, licking his ear.

“We gotta go get our kids, Mami,” he replied softly to you, kissing your nose. “Just give us ten minutes,” he said to the flight attendant, who quickly averted her eyes from his very naked form.

“Yes, sir, Mr. Ramirez,” she said softly, rushing out of the back room.

“And keep your eyes to yourself puta!” You growled after her before biting down on Nevada’s shoulder drawing blood as you rocked your hips faster on top of him. Soothing the mark with your tongue.

“Ow, coño, Dama why do you gotta take it out on me?” he teased in a chuckle, bucking his hips up to meet yours.

You just kissed him, wrapping your arms around his neck and humming as the two of you rocked the bed with every thrust, before you knew it, you were coming hard, moaning and kissing his lips softly.

He followed quickly after, hands threaded in your hair, which had already begun to grow some. His mouth moved against yours insistently, humming against your lips and pulling you down to rest your head against his chest.

“I love you,” he whispered.  

“I love you too,” you grinned warmly at him. “We can do anything as long as we do it together, okay?” You whispered and kissed his jaw. This vacation had made things very clear, the two of you loved the peace of it all but your home was the Heights and as long as you both stayed together, everything would work out in the end.

“Okay,” he replied softly, smirking down at you. “Bueno…let’s go get our rugrats, and head home.”

You nodded smiling and getting dressed.

The second the two of you pull up to your mom’s house, Lily is running screaming towards you both with a bright grin.

“Mami! Papi!” She hugged Nevada’s leg tight and then your leg smiling up at you two. “I misses you!” She puckered her lips for kisses and you smile, covering your little one in kisses before passing her to Nevada so he could do the same as you go to your mother.

“Hola Mami,” you smiled and kissed her cheek, hugging her tight. “Thank you for watching mi vida, I know she isn’t alway easy.”

“Nonsense mija, you know she’s an angel,” Lucia hugged you tight and you smiled watching Nevada load Lily into the car.

“I really am lucky.” You smiled and watched your little family.

“You deserve to be happy, mi niña.” She kissed your head as you gave her another hug goodbye and headed back into the car.

“Let’s go get Eddie, Princesa, quieres?” Nevada asked, looking back at Lily.

“Yay!!!”

Loading Lily up into her carseat, the three of you went and picked Eddie up from Amber and Omar’s before making your way back home. When you got there, Nevada opened the door, furrowing his brows when he realized that it was unlocked and looking back at you.

“Stay here,” he mumbled, moving inside and taking the gun from his waistband out, cocking it back. You nodded, arms wrapped tight around the kids as you kiss Lily and Eddie, moving them back towards the elevator.

“Tia, what’s going on? Should I go in with him?” Eddie asked.

“No baby,” you cooed softly. “We’re fine, your tio is just checking to make sure things are safe.” You kissed his hair and smiled at him. “You stay with your sister, yeah?”

Lily looked up at Eddie with worried and confused eyes, not understanding what was going on. Eddie smiled down at the toddler, stroking her hair gently.

“It’s okay, Lily,” he said. A few moments later, Nevada came out, tucking the gun back into his waistband and gesturing you over.

“It’s okay, vamos,” he said in a low voice when you were close enough to hear. “Eddie, did you come by the apartment while we were gone, and forget to lock the door?” he asked his nephew.

“No, tio…I think Amber came by,” Eddie answered, and Nevada looked down at you.

“You think she would’ve forgotten to lock the door?” he asked you softly as all of you went into the apartment.

You shrugged, “I’m not sure.”

You hurried to the bedroom, checking over all the jewelry and valuables just to be safe. When you headed back out front to Nevada, you frowned. “She took a dress and my shot glass,” you pouted.

“Shot glass? What shot glass?” Nevada asked with furrowed brows. “The one that’s been sitting on the dresser forever?”

“Yes,” you frowned, “That’s the shot glass from the arcade where we first kissed, Nevada that thing means the world to me,” you said softly. You’d never tell him this, but the moment you’d kissed, you were sure you’d spend the rest of your life with him. So you took the shot glass to remember that day.

“Oh,” he replied, frowning a little. “Well, give her a call, tell her to give it back, la muy pendeja,” he added, rubbing your shoulder in comfort. “When did you take a shot glass?” he asked with a smirk. “Had to be when I was in the bathroom, right?”

You nodded, “I wanted to remember that night,” you said honestly, kissing him softly. “And she took my favorite dress, the rainbow one.” Nevada hated your favorite dress, so did Amber, but if was your favorite still.

“Oh…that’s…awful,” he answered half-heartedly. “Maybe she’s auditioning for Joe and the Technicolor Dreamcoat,” he teased, smirking at you. “Baby, just call her. She’s your friend, just tell her to bring your shit back.”

You pout, “It’s a nice dress, it’s comfortable and all the kids I taught love it.”

“Tia, we loved it cause you looked like the rainbow goldfish,” Eddie chimed when he’d reached the top of the stairs.

“A rainbow fish?” Nevada offered, still smirking. “I always thought it made you look like a really colorful pilgrim,” he added.

“You guys suck! I love my dress!” You crossed your arms and stomped out of the room to call Amber.

Eddie laughed and grinned. “It’s an ugly dress, she has so many beautiful ones! But that one is horrible and she loves to wear it!”

“I don’t know why either, mijo. Women,” Nevada replied, rolling his eyes. “Speaking of which, how’s everything with Melanie?”

Eddie rolled his eyes, “Oye, la pendeja loca doesn’t even want me to talk to my female lab partner. I can’t talk to other girls, look at them, she got mad that I asked Mrs. Aiden a question the other day and asked if I was fucking the teacher.”

“She probably thinks you’re gonna fuck around on her. Tell her you won’t and that you don’t like that shit,” Nevada offered. “If you tell her it bothers you and she keeps doing it, bota la par carajo. Plenty of fish in the sea, and you’re young.”

Eddie nodded and smiled, giving Nevada a tight hug. “I missed you tio.”

You stormed back in and glared at the men. “She threw it away! She said it was for my own good!”

“The dress?” Nevada asked, his face lighting up a bit. He never thought he would be grateful to Amber for much of anything, but he would have to remember to thank her later. “What about the shot glass? She toss that, too?” he asked.

“She says she hasn’t seen it, she didn’t take it so I must have misplaced it…” You shrugged still too angry about the dress to think much about the glass. “I’ll just look around for it.” You smiled at Nevada kissing him and whispering against his lips, “I will buy another dress just like it,” you whispered seriously.

“That sounds…terrifying,” he said gently, smirking a little. You couldn’t be mad, you were still in too good of a mood, pressing your nose against Nevada’s and smiling.

“Let’s just spend time with a family dinner, and you and I can have a little dessert later, hmm?” You whispered softly so only he could hear.

“Now that, I can wrap my head around,” he replied, chuckling softly.

Rafael walked out of the courtroom, sigh softly and moving towards the elevator to head back to his office. It appeared as though he was winning the case against Helen Gianni’s murdering ex-husband, but somehow all at once, it felt as he were losing…something. Kassidy would be happy to know that the trial was going well at least. But he had never been more confused or torn in his entire life. The only thing that came close was when you’d started dating Nevada.

He liked Kassidy.  He enjoyed her company, but it wasn’t love. It certainly was not love, and how could he carry on their…relationship? Arrangement? How was he expected to make a decision when he couldn’t even define what he was deciding?

“Counselor!” Sonny ran over to Barba, “You did great in there, you really got that creep on the run.”

”Thank you…” He furrowed his brows. Did he just say ‘thank you?’ To Carisi? “The evidence is solid. I’m hoping we won’t need to call Kassidy to the stand,” he added.

Sonny frowned at Rafael’s lack of snark but shrugged it off. “How is she?” he asked softly. “She was so shaken up…I was gonna call but I can’t call a witness the day of the trial,” he frowned and looked at Rafael eager for a response.

Barba looked up at the Detective with a slight frown. “She’s…holding up. You should call her,” Rafael replied sadly. “She’s not a witness anymore,” he added in a mumble, starting to walk away before he turned back to Carisi. “Are you…interested in her?” he asked.

Sonny to a hesitant breath, “Yeah she’s…incredible. But she seems pretty happy with you, so I’m happy for you both,” he offered a warm smile, he did genuinely mean it. He was happy for them.

“She is incredible,” Rafael agreed, nodding his head. “But I don’t…deserve her affection. I wish more than anything that I could give her…” He swallowed, shaking his head gently as he failed to finish his thought. “Well, you should just call her. I think she would be happy to hear from you,” he said again, smiling softly before he pushed the button to catch the elevator.

“She acts like you give her all she needs, she seems really happy with you,” Sonny said softly. “If she didn’t seem happy I would be worried but…she seems to like you so much.”

Rafael didn’t say anything for a moment, frowning as he remembered Kassidy tell him she loved him. He wasn’t in love with her, he didn’t think he ever could be. All he could see to focus on was Emmy.

“I’m in love with another woman,” he mumbled sadly. “That’s not fair to her.” He kept his eyes forward, unable to look the other man in the face.

He was ashamed of himself for keeping Kassidy on the hook for so long, letting her believe that they ever had a chance at something real. He’d wanted to believe they did. He’d wanted to believe he could give her something real, but he knew now that he couldn’t.

“No, that’s not fair, but she doesn’t seem to mind,” Sonny said frowning a bit. “Kassidy is such an amazing woman Counselor, you’re incredibly lucky to have her. Don’t forget that.”

Rafael frowned, shaking his head as he mentally willed the elevator to move faster. Swallowing hard, he suddenly wished he could go back to the night Emmy left. He would’ve done things differently.

“I’m trying,” he mumbled. “Will you call her?” he asked, eyes looking towards him, but still not at him.

“Yeah…I’ll call her but I don’t see the point,” he said softly. “She said she wanted to see if there was anything between you two, which I respect.” Sonny said firmly.

“Just…call her, Carisi,” Rafael hissed, sighing in relief when the elevator doors opened and he was able to quickly make his way out into the lobby.

Sonny sighed put pulled out his phone, dialing her number and smiling when she answered, “Hey sunflower,” he said softly to her.

Nevada walked into the club, moving straight for his office. He was going through the mail when there was a knock at his door, and he called out to the person on the other side. He sighed silently when Melody came in, sporting her dark hair again, and he arched a brow.

“I thought I said no more unapproved changes,” he mused, going back to looking through the mail.

“I got better tips as a brunette. I told Omar,” she answered.

He nodded, looking her over for a moment. “What did you need, Mami? I have a busy day today.” With Diamond starting to show, he had to start looking for another dancer soon.

“I have to talk to you about something,” she said, coming and closing the door. “It’s important,” she added when he didn’t look up at her. Sitting down in the chair in front of his desk instead of her usual spot in his lap.

“Okay, what did you want to talk about,” he furrowed his brows wondering what it could be this time, although she’d been pretty tame. “Dale Mami, I don’t have all day.”

“I’m late,” she said softly, fidgeting with the hem of her skirt.

“Bueno don’t be late again, as long as you’re on stage on time that’s all that matters.”

“No, not that kind of late,” she answered with a small smile, shaking her head. “I’m pregnant,” she clarified.

Nevada stared at her for a long moment before snorting a laugh. “No you’re not. Oye, that’s not funny.”

She frowned, lowering her gaze as she squeezed tears into her eyes.

“Yeah, I’m not kidding,” she replied. “I’m pregnant. Four weeks along.”

He felt his stomach drop. Things had just gotten back to somewhat normal. “You need to get rid of it,” he said immediately.

“What? No!” she exclaimed, putting a hand to her stomach. “No, I’m not gonna do that, Nevada. This is our child. Yours and mine,” she added, reaching towards him and placing her hand on his.

He pulled his hand away. “That isn’t possible. We used a condom every time. You must have been whoring around with someone else. I was careful, that’s not my kid and if it is, you need to get rid of it. I’ll pay to have it done, but we need to do it fast.”

“Nevada, everybody knows that condoms are only, like, 97% effective,” she said, standing and moving around his desk to stand in front of him. “Don’t you see? We made a baby together even though we were being safe. You and me,” she added, taking his hand and placing it on her flat stomach. “We’re meant to be together, Nevada,” she whispered.

“Jesus Christ,” he whispered with a growl, yanking his hand away and storming out of the strip club without so much as a word to any of them.

“Nevada! Wait! You don’t have to be afraid!” he heard her call after him, and he hopped on his bike, forgetting his helmet as he tore off down the street towards your apartment.

Ahora si se cago la mierda al piano, his mind said to him.

This could not be happening. What was he supposed to do? What were you going to do when you found out.

Parking along the curb, he ran up the staircase, all the way to the top floor. He just need to see you, hold you, kiss you one last time before you sent him packing.

“Dama!” he yelled out, slamming the door shut behind him. “Dama!! Y/N!! Y/N!!”

“Hey,” you smile coming out of the bedroom in one of his leather jackets, you loved wearing his clothing when he was gone. “You’re home early,” you smiled warmly at him.

He came up and cradled your face in his hands, kissing you deeply as he moved you back into the bedroom, tongue darting into your mouth as he pushed his jacket off your shoulders.

“Where are the kids?” he asked between kisses.

“Eddie’s at school, and Lily is at daycare,” you kiss back and smile. “Since when do you come home for a little afternoon delight?” You smiled, letting his jacket slide to the floor, beneath you were completely naked.

“No talking yet, okay?” he whispered back, shedding his own jacket and pulling his button down shirt over his head before he laid you on the bed.

His mouth crashed against yours again, hands tucking under your knees to pull your legs high up on his hips. Moving to kiss down your neck, he hurried down your stomach until he was finally burying his face in your center. His mouth worked with purpose, hands gripping your hips closer to him.

You gasped, arching your back, “Nevada,” you moaned loudly, grinding your pussy against his face as you shivered.

Groaning against you, he sucked on your clit, tongue moving over it in his mouth. His eyes watched you intently, mouth working overtime against you. It took you no time before you came hard against his mouth, shuddering and whimpering. Immediately you tugged him back up, kissing him hungrily.

“I love you.”

“I love you, too,” he whispered back, kissing you hard and reaching for his belt.

You smile and help him, pulling his belt from his loops and tugging down his pants. “Slow it down,” you whispered. “I’m not going anywhere, mi vida. Hazme el amor.”

He looked down at you as though you might disappear any minute, but steadied his breathing long enough to kiss you softly and slowly. He kicked his pants off and moved his lips against yours like it would the last time he would do it.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered against your cheek. “I fucking love you so much.” Before you could answer, he aligned himself with your entrance and pushed gently inside you, groaning when his hips met yours. “Oh fuck, you feel so good,” he groaned, kissing your neck.

You wrapped your arms around his neck and threaded your fingers through his hair.

“Mmmm,” you whimpered as you urged him to start moving, you kissed him hungry and slow, trying to figure out what was off. But you loved him and you loved making love to him.

“Nevada, keep moving,” you pleaded and kissed him again. “Papi, por favor.”

Sighing audibly, he started a slow, sensual pace kissing every inch of skin he could reach as the muscles in his back flexed and relaxed beneath your hands with his movements. His arms held you close to him, fingers threaded into your hair.

“I love you so much,” he moaned against your neck. “I love you. I love you…” He said it over and over between dropping kisses over your skin.

You kissed back, moving with him. “I love you,” you whispered and stroked his hair, already both of you nearing a building climax, “close,” you whispered after another few minutes, burying your face in his neck and hugging him tight.

He moved slightly faster inside you, reaching down with one hand to pull your leg up higher, allowing him deeper inside you. Arching his hips upwards, he stroked over your g spot.

“Oh God, I’m gonna come,” he breathed, moving his hand over to rub circles over your clit as he got closer and closer to release.

You gasped, moaning loudly and came hard around him, kissing him through your orgasm as you pulled him close. He followed close behind you, groaning loudly against your mouth as he stroked you through both your releases.

He didn’t want it to end, continuing to move until both of you were over sensitive, but he still didn’t want it to be over.

“Nevada,” you whimpered, “babe, baby, stop,” you slow his movements, cringing a bit.

He stopped moving, but stayed nestled inside you, face buried in your neck, his arms holding you close against him.

“She’s fucking pregnant,” he whispered, eyes screwed shut.

“What?” You turned to try and look at him, not sure what the hell he was talking about. “Who is?”

“Melody,” he mumbled, still unable to pull away from you enough to look at you. “I was so careful,” he added, almost to himself.

You close your eyes, trying to process the information you were hearing, she was pregnant.

“I never fucked her raw, I swear to God. I never fucked her raw,” he said against your skin, seeming to hold you tighter to him.

“Even so,” you said softly. “You got her pregnant,” you took a deep breath. There was no changing that now, what you could change was how you reacted to it. “Okay, so that means somehow a condom broke or something, we should both get tested and we’ll…figure out what to do from there.” You whispered softly to him, stroking his hair and kissing it.

“I already told her to flush it,” he replied. “We can still get checked, but we test the dancers regularly, we shouldn’t have anything,” he added. “I’m so fucking sorry,” he whispered, still afraid to let go of you.

“Hey,” you pulled back seriously. “I’m not leaving you,” you reassured his fears and kissed his face and he let out a breath in relief. “But you don’t just get to tell her to flush it. You did this, whether you wanted to or not, and you have a responsibility to her and that baby.”

“Fuck that, I don’t want it,” he answered, shaking his head and looking down at you. “I don’t want it, and I don’t want her. If she’s gotta stick a screwdriver up there and scramble that shit herself, she’s getting rid of it,” he said seriously.

“Nevada, you don’t get to make that choice. She does. I lived my life with an absent father and I will not be married to one as well. You made your bed now you have to lie in it. You think I want this? No. The next Ramirez baby born is gonna be to some slut instead of me and I hate that. But you knocked her up, man up and deal with it.”

He rolled off of you, rubbing a hand over his face.

“I am not letting her and that…bastard kid near our daughter or Eddie. Lo siento, Mami, but if she’s gonna keep it, they’re both gonna stay far, far away from our family, me entiendes?” he replied. “I don’t want our kids with some half-bred sibling…and it’s not a Ramirez.”

You stood, pulling on clothes, “You know, it’s one thing to fuck up. But not owning up to those fuck ups? That baby would be innocent in all of this,” you shake your head and walk out the door, not wanting to talk to him right now.

“Oye, you know what? What about my feelings?” He’d gotten up and was following you down the stairs. “Everybody always talks about how it’s the woman’s choice on whether or not to keep a baby, and I get it, it’s your body. Pero, coño, it takes two to tango, I’m no more to blame than she is, and I don’t want to have a kid with her. Why doesn’t that count?” he asked, hot on your heels. “If it was the other way around, that she didn’t want to keep it, but I did, you would still side with her, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes! I would still side with her! Because she’s not married Nevada! Maybe she’s trash that fucked a married man but like you said, it takes two to tango! You didn’t want a baby? Then you shouldn’t have stuck your dick in a stripper!” You shouted, opening the front door to Amber.

Amber looked at Nevada and sighed, “Dude…again?”

“Oh, so if she was married, then it would be a different story? That’s fucking bullshit. I was careful! Yeah, I fucked up when I fucked her, but I wasn’t such an asshole that I was careless with it. I should have a say. But you know what? Fine. We’ll wait till she pops and then send her away, and keep the kid since you want it so bad,” he answered, ignoring both his naked state and Amber’s look of utter confusion. “I should have a say in this!”

“You do have a say Nevada,” you said softly, “but what you say, is gonna tell me a whole lot about the man I married.” You looked at him, frowning and not wanting to leave during a fight, you wanted to hold him, work things out. You felt Amber’s arm on your lower back as she led you closer to the door.

“Come on Barbie,” she cooed softly to you. She hated seeing you constantly upset, constantly hurting because of the same man.

You looked at Nevada still, waiting for him to respond, wondering if he’d tell you to go, ask you to stay, or just stare back at you. Every answer sounded like a new mess.

“Oye! Como que ‘come on, Barbie?’ We’re talking,” he said to Amber. “Come back later. Matter of fact, let me ask you something, why is it when a woman gets pregnant without either her or the guy meaning to, that she’s the only one that gets a say in what happens with it?” he asked her, hands moving to his hips.

“No, they should both get a say,” Amber said immediately. “But ultimately, a woman is the one who has to carry it and breastfeed it and grow a whole person…did you get this bitch pregnant? The whore from the club?” Amber glared and turned to you, “Barbie I can get a coat hanger and we can have this done by noon. Still make it in time for our facials.”

“Says her, I don’t even know if it’s really mine,” he scoffed. “I always used a condom. How often do those things break, and wouldn’t I have noticed if one of them did break?”

“It can be a tiny tear and also condoms break all the time,” Amber said seriously. “Look, have her do a paternity test, if it’s yours, you guys have time to work out what to do, if it’s not yours, it’s not your problem. But there’s no point right now in fighting over a baby that’s not even past the first three months where it could melt into goo.”

“Just punch her in the stomach the next time you see her, blanca,” he said without thinking.

“Nevada!” You glare at him in absolute horror.

“Or put some oil on the stairs and have her walk her ass up them to get here. Drop a plan B in her coffee. Murder her,” Amber mused. Nevada slowly raised his brows, tilting his head to one side as if considering her suggestion. When he saw your pointed stair, he sighed exasperatedly.

“Okay, Dama, what’s your idea? Wanna have her over for a family dinner? Shit, why don’t we just ask the little tart to move in with us? I can sleep in the middle, is that what you want?”

“Are you trying to hurt me?” You whispered with a frown. “I don’t have to stay with you. You knocked this bitch up, not me. I’m choosing to stay. So why are you trying to make me want to leave?” You turned and walked to the elevator.

Amber said nothing, just following behind you.

“I’m not trying to– Dama! Dama!” He called out after you, but you just kept walking. “Y/N!!”

“What?!” You turned looking at him wiping tears. “What do you want Nevada?!”

“I want you to tell me what to do,” he replied. “What the fuck do I do?!”

“I don’t know,” you said softer, moving back to him. “I wish I could just tell you to get rid of her, or I wish I could just go and hand her cash and tell her to disappear but that’s not who I am. It kills me, that she’s carrying a baby because of you. But it is what it is and now we all have to deal with the aftermath. All I know, is that the idea of forcing her to give up a child feels wrong,” you whisper to him. “And we already do so much wrong in our lives, I don’t want to do more.”

“So I have to be forced to raise this kid? How is that fair? Not like I forced her to fuck me,” he pointed out. “It’s not even just that, she was coming at me today like her getting knocked up means that her and I are supposed to be together. What the fuck is that? I don’t want her near our kids,” he added as your neighbor came out of her apartment, looking shocked as she saw that Nevada was naked. “Hola Mrs. Beasley,” he said nonchalantly, offering the old woman a small wave before he looked back at you. “Dama, this puta is crazy, I don’t wanna let that into our lives.”

“I don't…” You shook your head and shut your eyes. “This is too much,” you whispered.

“Y/N, you’re my wife. I love you. I don’t want anyone else, and I don’t want to…have a kid with anyone but you. That’s gotta count for something,” he said, stepping closer to you and putting his hands on your shoulders. “I did everything I was supposed to do to make sure this didn’t– well…not everything, I guess but I wasn’t just throwing my seed around for her to catch. I’m yours, nobody else’s. Baby or not.”

You nod, leaning your forehead against his and saying nothing.

“I’m so sorry,” he whispered. “I love you.”

“I want to talk to her,” you say seriously. “I’m owed that. I want to talk to her.”

He sighed, shaking his head a little, and rolling his eyes.

“I don’t know that it’ll do any good, but…you’re right, I owe you that much so…have at it. I’m not going back there today, fuck that,” he answered.

You nodded and stepped against him giving him a long kiss before heading out with Amber to the strip club. When you pulled up to the club, you took a few deep breaths and hurried inside, walking right past Amber and Omar, who had been standing out front, before either could stop you.

“Que le pasa a ella?” he asked Amber, pointing in the direction you’d gone in.

“Nevada and Dama stuff, you know how it is,” she rolled her eyes and smile up at him. “But hey you, I missed you last night. I’m sorry I had to work late.”

“That’s okay, how’s that article coming along? When do you finish?” he asked, pulling her into a hug.

“I’m done today,” she smiled and wrapped her arms around his neck, kissing him. “You will be reading it on the front page of the New York Times next week,” she pressed another soft kiss to his lips.

“Coño, they gave you front page? Who’d you have to tug to pull that off?” he teased.

“Your mom,” she quipped, “she says hi by the way.”

He laughed heartily, head leaning back before he looked down at her.

“Alright, you win that round. That was good,” he replied, still chuckling. “You know, Nevada offered to let me run the restaurant,” he added.

“Yeah? That’s good news, are you gonna take it?” The two of them always talked like this. Her arms wrapped around his neck, his hands on her waist as they chatted and swayed back and forth a bit like they were always dancing to a song that only they could hear.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “I mean, I could, but…he needs me here, you know. I’d rather stay close to him. He counts on me for a lot.”

She smiled and nodded, “I agree, you take care of tons of stuff, he needs you,” she nuzzled her nose against his. “Whatever you choose, I’m supporting you,” she whispered. “And um…speaking of new job offers, I got a call from my old employers. They said something opened up in Baghdad and they don’t trust anyone but me to do it,” she frowned, fingers lightly pressing into the back of his neck.

“Baghdad, huh? What’d you say?” he asked gently.

“I told them that I was flattered, and I am. But I have more to think about than just myself now. I have my best friend here and…the man I plan to marry someday.” She looked up at him. “So I told them that if have to talk it over with him before I gave them an answer.”

“Really?” he asked, clearly impressed and touched that she took his feelings into consideration. “Yeah, we can talk about it. How about when I get home, I’ll bring pizza and a six pack, and we can talk then,” he suggested, wiggling his brows a few times.

“Pizza and beer?” She smirked. “I guess I know who I’m gonna ‘tug’ tonight.”

“Coño, I hope more than just a ‘tug,’” he replied, smirking.

She smiled, leaning up and pressing her lips to his, slow and sweet, “I love you so much,” she whispered.

“I love you, too,” he replied, smiling down at her.

Melody came out of the Red room and saw you looking in the dressing room, smiling sweetly, she walked up.

“Hey Dama! Nevada left early,” she said, her smile friendly and warm.

“I’m actually here to see you, can we talk?”

“Sure! Do you want to go out and grab a table or talk at the bar?” she asked sweetly.

“How about Nevada’s office?” You smile and nod for her to follow you inside.

“Okay, sure!” she answered, following you into Nevada’s office and moving to sit down in one of the seats in front of the desk. “What’s up?” she asked cheerfully.

“My husband got you pregnant,” you say casually, you had decided in the car that you’d have to detach yourself from this situation to get things done. “I told him that what’s done is done and we have to deal with the aftermath of his affair, that’s fine. I need to know why you told him. What do you want?

“Help raising the baby? Money? Do you just want to ruin his reputation? My husband is emotionally involved in this and because of that, he can’t think clearly. But we need to do what’s best for our kids and our business. So I’d like to assume you have good intentions and you just got caught up with a handsome older man. But if you want something, name it now.”

She looked at you with furrowed brows, tilting her head to one side and shaking her head.

“I want Nevada and I to raise our baby,” she replied, saying it as though her desires were obvious. “I didn’t want you to find out this way. I was hoping that he and I could talk to you together…but we’re in love. I don’t care about his money, I love him and I would never do anything to ruin his reputation.”

Your look for her softened, “Melody,” you said softly. “Honey…Nevada is my husband. We had a rough patch but we are back together and stronger than ever. The only way he would ever be a part of your life is through that child.”

She sighed softly, eyes closing, almost as though she felt sorry for you.

“I told him that it was better to tell you when you first back,” she said, almost to herself. “He was going to leave you, Dama. He told me that he loved me and that when you got back you started tearing your hair out and lashing out at him, and that he couldn’t take it anymore. He was happy when I told him about our baby…” She put a hand on her stomach, and smiled softly. “He said he didn’t want to hurt you, and that he was going to try to get you to make the decision to leave for him. I told him it would be better to just be honest with you, but he said he was worried that if he just told you how he felt about me that you might hurt Lily to get back at him.

“I told him a mother could never hurt her own child, but he was convinced that the best way was to make it seem like it was your idea,” she said softly, frowning at you.

“Oh my god,” you whispered, “thank you for telling me Melody,” you smile and put a hand over hers.

“You’re welcome,” Melody replied, smiling back at you. “I hope our kids can be close,” she added. “I think it’s important for Nevada Jr to get to know his big brother and sister. It’s too soon to know for sure, but…it feels like a boy.” She laid a hand on her stomach and smiled warmly.

You smiled back, putting a hand on your own stomach. “Maybe we’ll give birth at the same time.”

“Oh my gosh! You’re pregnant, too?! That’s so exciting!!” she exclaimed. “Two babies! Oh my gosh, Nevada said you were on the pill! What a couple little miracles!” she cooed. “We should use the same OB! And the three of us can go to maternity classes together! Don’t worry, I’ll talk to Nevada, make him understand how important it is for him to be in your baby’s life.”

You feel a rush of familiar panic as you’re running to the bathroom, lungs seizing up. You puke into the toilet, feeling unable to breathe through the mess of anxiety. This bitch was insane and she didn’t miss a beat.

“Aww, are you okay?” she asked coming up behind you and rubbing your back in soft circles. “Morning sickness, huh?” she assumed. “It’s okay,” she whispered.

You nodded, throwing up your lunch into the toilet. You had to admit, the puking came at a very convenient time. You wiped your mouth after a minute and sniffled.

“Sorry,” you whispered.

“You don’t have to apologize to me,” she answered, placing her hand on her belly again. “I understand. Do you want to get you some ginger ale?” she asked.

You shook your head, “no I’m actually about to head back home, I’m gonna rest. Thank you…”

“That’s a great idea,” she replied. “I’m gonna get back. Nevada said he wanted this to be my last shift,” she said, rolling her eyes a little. “He says no woman of his is going to strip while she’s carrying his child. And hey, I hope there aren’t any hard feelings between us. I’m going to be a great mom and an amazing stepmom to your kids. I promise not to ever try to take your place,” she added, smiling warmly as though that wasn’t exactly what she was trying to do.

You smiled and nodded, standing up, “thanks, you’re a good friend,” you give her a tight hug before walking out quickly to Amber and Omar out front.

“Barbie, Jesus you look terrified,” she put a hand to your forehead and frowned, looking you over.

“You need me to take you home, Dama? I can get Sucio to cover for me for a few minutes,” Omar offered, putting an arm around you.

“Melody–” you whispered.

“Oh shit, yeah…ella es un poquito locita pero she’s harmless for the most part,” Omar replied. “What happened?” he asked, walking you over to Amber’s car.

“I just want to go home, please?” You take a deep breath and relax yourself.

“Okay, we’ll drive you home now,” Amber stroked your hair and nuzzled you.

When Omar and Amber drive you back home, you mimicked Nevada’s actions from earlier, running, calling his name and looking around for him before flinging yourself into his arms and holding him tight.

“Are you okay? Que paso? What am I dealing with when I go in tomorrow?” he asked, clinging to you tightly. He’d gotten dressed since you’d left, opting for a simple jeans and plain black beater. “Tell me what happened.”

You frowned and kissed his neck softly. “She’s a fucking nutjob,” you whispered. “She says that you and her are running away together and that you love her instead of me and I panicked so hard I threw up and told her I was pregnant and now I’m part of the crazy!”

“Baby, none of that is true– wait…” He looked at you, a hint of a smile playing on his lips. “Are you pregnant?”

“No, no…I…no, I’ve been on the pill since a week after I got back…” you shook your head. “But she scared me,” you nuzzled your face against his neck and kissed him.

If you were honest with yourself, you hadn’t even considered that you were pregnant, now neither being the time or the place to worry about it. The weeks you’d been gone had set you off your medication just long enough to make it a possibility. That alone, unsettled you greatly. You would not have a baby the same time as Nevada’s mistress and you would not be going to birthing classes together.

“I’m gonna figure this out, okay?” he said softly, rubbing your back. “I can move her to one of the other clubs for now. At least that’ll get her away from of us,” he suggested.

You nodded and pressed your face against his. You kissed his face and neck kissing his lips and smiling.

“I love you,” you whispered. “And you are the only man I want,” you whisper as you stroke his hair before looking down at your stomach for a moment. No…no there was no way you were. Were you?

#nevada ramirez #rafael barba #cuba v dr #season 8

[truesportsfan]

Chris Jericho’s beautiful view atop the wrestling world

Being the top guy has a specific meaning to Chris Jericho.

The pro wrestling legend is back at the summit of the business at age 49 as the first and only world champion in All Elite Wrestling history. Being the headliner and face of a major company for a significant period of time is a role Jericho has rarely had in his three-decade career. He never won the world title in WCW and only had a combined five WWE or World Heavyweight championship reigns in his nearly 20 years with Vince McMahon’s company.

Being a promotion’s standard-bearer, who carries the weight of helping it and the talent around him succeed, is a job he’s never been more ready for.

“Could I have done more in WCW in a headlining position? Would I have been good? I don’t know. In my mind I’d be great,” Jericho told The Post. “The first time I was put in a headlining position in WWF, I wasn’t ready, and in WCW, it was a couple years earlier. So maybe I wasn’t ready.

“And as the career goes forward, I can tell you the exact moment when I knew I had become a legit, headlining, main-event guy and the exact moment where I became the top guy, which was in New Japan Jan. 4, 2018 [versus Kenny Omega at Wrestle Kingdom], which led to [me] being the top guy here in AEW.”

Now that he’s been “given the baton,” Jericho’s goal is to help elevate others in the company to legitimate main event players, giving them their piece of the spotlight.

In the more than 13 months since AEW launched, Jericho has had singles matches with Scorpio Sky, Jungle Boy, “Hangman” Adam Page, Darby Allin, Cody Rhodes and others. He cut a memorable promo with Maxwell Jacob Friedman (MJF), and has surrounded himself with Jake Hager, Sammy Guevara and Santana and Ortiz in his Inner Circle faction. He has been a big backstage supporter of Allin. Jericho described giving the hot upstarts the chance to beat the grizzled veteran heel as the “magic” that wrestling is about.

“We had a match a couple weeks ago where Isiah [Kassidy] from Private Party had such a great false finish, people thought Isiah was going to beat the champ,” said Jericho, the son of former New York Rangers winger Ted Irvine.

Most of the company’s younger talent had very little, if any, cable-TV time before appearing on “AEW Dynamite.” Now they get to share the ring live on TNT or on pay-per-view with one of wrestling’s most recognizable faces. Jericho said he wants to have a match with Orange Cassidy, a slow-moving comedy wrestler with a cult following, at some point, too.

“When you’re the top guy, you don’t hide and stop others from getting in there because then it just becomes stale and it dies,” said Jericho, who was at the New York Toy Fair, where AEW showed off its new action figures and ring sets from Wicked Cool Toys and Jazwares. The first series will be available this August.

“Your job as the top guy is to help everyone else up on top of the mountain so that there are 15 top guys and everybody is making money and everyone’s having a great time, people are enjoying the show and the product.”

AEW’s first series of action figuresAll Elite Wrestling

Wrestling legends are among those taking notice.

“Hulk Hogan called me a few months ago and said, ‘What you guys are doing is putting guys no one had ever heard of in a main-event spot and having them believe that they can beat you,’” Jericho recounted.

Jericho’s current rival is Jon Moxley, formerly known as Dean Ambrose in WWE. The two have a match for Jericho’s title set for AEW’s Revolution pay-per-view on Saturday. Jericho recruited Moxley to AEW knowing his talent level and understanding he was unhappy as he was transitioned into a comedy character in WWE. What Jericho didn’t expect was exactly what person and character would emerge in AEW. When Moxley debuted and attacked him and Omega at the “Double or Nothing” pay-per-view last May, Jericho saw someone who had “completely” changed.

“This is not the guy formally known as Dean Ambrose, this is a completely different person, a new character, performer,” Jericho said. “He’s totally different, not even the same guy. And that to me is another feather in our cap because it shows the creative freedom that you have in AEW that allows you to live and breathe and be what you know you can be.”

Moxley, also the name he used prior to joining WWE, is a violent, unpredictable badass babyface whose tendencies AEW announcer Jim Ross has compared to Stone Cold Steve Austin’s.

“I knew he’d be good,” Jericho said. “I didn’t expect him to just become this amazing. I say that with the utmost of respect. I don’t think anybody, including Mox, would have been able to predict that.”

Both Jericho and Moxley also recently wrestled for New Japan Pro-Wrestling, where Moxley is the promotion’s United States champion. When Jericho was in Japan for Wrestle Kingdom in January, he beat legendary wrestler Hiroshi Tanahashi in a match that would have given his opponent an AEW title shot with a win.

It led to Jericho being outspoken about wanting the two companies to work together in the future given the financial opportunities that would come, especially given the history he, Rhodes, Omega, The Young Bucks and other AEW talent have with New Japan.

He is willing to help make that happen, but Jericho noted that “in other people’s opinion, we shouldn’t” work together before floating the idea of an AEW/New Japan invasion a year down the line.

“I think it would be beneficial relationship,” Jericho said. “Do I think we need New Japan? No. Do they need us? Well, if they want to work in the States, they may want to think about it.”

During that appearance in Japan for Wrestle Kingdom, the hashtag #fatjericho made its way onto social media along with pictures from the match that showed a heavier version of the Canadian star.

Jericho said the added weight was by design. He wanted to look more like the character portrayed by legendary wrestler Bruiser Brody, a pain-causing killer whom everyone feared. In Jericho’s experience, bigger-looking wrestlers are more respected in Japan. He likened it to Robert De Niro gaining weight to play the role of Jake LaMotta in “Raging Bull.” He has dropped some of that weight since coming back to AEW, posting workout videos to social media.

“When you see the online criticism, I love the idea of the fat Jericho because I can take my shirt off right now and I’ve got six f–king abs,” he said.

It’s all part of Jericho’s constant attempts to reinvent himself, creating new wrestling moments and catchphrases. Recently, the crowd at the episode of “Dynamite” taped aboard Jericho’s rock and wrestling cruise loudly serenaded him with his entrance song “Judas” by his band Fozzy — continuing to belt it out long after he first appeared. It’s continued at each show since.

“The next week, I went to the producer of the show, Keith Mitchell, and said, ‘Let’s pull the music down a little earlier,’ and I went to the announcers, Jim Ross, and said, ‘Don’t say anything,’” Jericho said. “When the music stops, let’s see what happens and let’s see if they continue to sing. We made it a thing.”

When it does, Jericho lets it happen, saying even as a heel, trying to tell the audience to shut up and don’t sing would spoil the vibe and organic nature of the moment.

“If they want to sing the lyrics to ‘Judas’ for an extra 30 seconds, that’s something that everyone’s talking about,” Jericho said. “People are going to go, ‘Wow, are you seeing this?’ It transcends good guy, bad guy. That [leads to] iconic moments in wrestling, which is what we strive for so much and when it happens organically, that’s a gift from the wrestling gods, so don’t mess with it.”

Chris JerichoAll Elite Wrestling

Jericho said the AEW talent is having fun backstage as well. In his opinion, there is no “snaky-snaky bulls–t” going on. The company continues to grow. “Dynamite” was renewed on TNT for three more years. A separate hour-long TV show is in the works, and AEW will run its first “Dynamite” in the Tri-State area on March 25 at Prudential Center in Newark.

“Dynamite” has consistently beaten WWE’s NXT show in the ratings each Wednesday and has had a headlock on the 18-49 demo. While not specifically correlating it with ratings, Jericho believes that AEW highlighting young stars such as MJF, Guevara, Jungle Boy and Marko Stunt is helping to attract a younger audience because “we don’t send them to the developmental league or whatever for five years.”

It’s helping the company expand into action figures and potentially video games down the road. Jericho said he has had around 200 different action figures over his career. The AEW line, which will debut with Jericho, Cody, Brandi Rhodes, Omega and The Young Bucks, stands out to him not only because of the figures’ detailed looks, but the story around them. As the company’s top guy, he’s been one of the biggest driving forces behind all of it.

“We’ve only been on TV since October and these will be coming out in August, so it’s a quick turnaround and the reason why the turnaround is so quick is because the product is hot,” Jericho said. “That’s of great pride to me because obviously when I came to AEW, there was a lot riding on my shoulders to make sure it was a success.”

He’s never been more ready to ensure it.

source https://truesportsfan.com/sport-today/chris-jerichos-beautiful-view-atop-the-wrestling-world/