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whispersafterdusk · 3 years

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Lost in Time - ch 18

Getting around in Portia was pretty dang easy, all things considered. It was a peaceful town; no one really expected theft or violence.

If she was an actual thief this would have been a dream playground.

But she wasn't. She was far more than a thief -- even thinking of herself in that manner was insulting. She was here for information...even the smallest detail could be important back home, and she was exceptionally good at picking out the right kind of details. ((Continued below cut))

With the simple locks on all the doors here in town it was ridiculously easy to go poking around for information; she'd always walked with a quiet and careful step and had spent her childhood accidentally "sneaking" up on people, which had drawn the attention of Duvos's allies within Lucien. Between her mother's tips and tricks and some rigorous training within Duvos's armed forces she'd been a talented snoop even before she'd stolen her mother's scouting suit. This Portia job was considerably easier than any assignment she'd been given before and even without the suit on she could read everyone's mail, eavesdrop on whoever she wanted, she'd planted the Uplifter manual in a box in the neighboring clinic to uphold the illusion that it had been misplaced rather than stolen and carefully memorized, and Dr. Xu's desk always had up to date information regarding the upcoming construction effort to expand the clinic into a school and install the All Source AI here.

Everything she could feasibly find pertinent to her mission here was all within easy reach.

Dr. Xu's desk also held something far more interesting than the construction information too: she'd accidentally stumbled on some counseling records on one Elizabeth Summers...the folder that held them was dog-eared and worn -- they'd looked more used than the others there and that had drawn her attention. Reading through those had been... To think that someone could have survived inside a fancy, high-tech tank for three hundred years. It seemed impossible and yet at the same time she had to marvel at what mankind had been capable of creating in ancient times, and she felt a sharp pang of jealousy and loss when she considered just how much they'd lost in the Calamity.

All that knowledge that woman must be carrying...first-hand information regarding the Old World -- advanced medical knowledge AND technical knowledge! That would make Duvos unstoppable if they had that in their grasp, and if only she'd known sooner about Summers then they could have planned to snatch her as well when they made their move for the AI.

Oh well. If not now then in the future -- Duvos was going to eventually win. They had to - their worldwide plans for humanity were too important to let sit unimagined: gathering everyone under ONE banner, ONE leadership, and everyone taken care of so there'd be no more fighting over dwindling Old World resources as mankind dug itself out of the crater the Calamity had left them in (a crater that now seemed leagues deeper after what she'd read in the counseling notes).

Granted, she could readily admit that Duvos's methods of getting everyone under one empire were a bit heavy-handed; it was understandable that the wider world wanted nothing to do with a nation they saw as violent warmongers. But that opinion only made sense if people didn't bother to look beyond the outermost layer of the empire -- no one ever dug deeper to truly understand how Duvos was striving to take care of its citizens. One thing Lily appreciated about Duvos's claim to technology was everything they discovered or learned was immediately turned toward the empire's benefit, and its citizens reaped the rewards with more and higher paying jobs, higher crop yields of ever increasing quality, and the feeling of security knowing that THEY, at least, had nothing to fear from other nations daring to come in and take it all away.

Duvos would get the world back on track to becoming that utopia it had once been in ages past, and that would be so much easier if the city states and neighboring nations would just join together and stand shoulder to shoulder beneath the empire's banner.

It was an inevitable future that she wished the rest of the continent would see the sense in, and if they'd all just pick the easy route...

She'd spotted Evangeline walking down the road toward the harbor a few days ago and while she hadn't seen her since, nor had she seen Marcus, if she was here then he was too and it was good to know they had arrived and would be ready to move when the time came.

There would be more than them, of course; as a security measure Lily didn't know who to expect (Marcus and Evangeline WOULD, though) but knew there'd be at least two more because Xan's original plan had been simple and to the point: once the All Source AI had been moved to the clinic they would break in, disable it, and take it and all its attached computer parts out to the open desert where a plane would be landing to take them all back to Duvos. It had some inherent risk to it (all plans of that nature would) but they'd all been satisfied with it and everyone knew exactly what part they would have to play to make it happen.

NOW, however, with what amounted to a body double of the doctor that ran that clinic, they could step back and go a bit slower at it...carefully take things apart, pack them separately and carry it all out a little bit at a time over the course of a few hours instead of a mad rush with all of it on them at one time. She was certain whoever else was sent along to help wouldn't mind the change in the plan, especially since Xan himself approved of it.

And they'd have Harrison on hand to help dispel any suspicion -- Lily didn't believe in any gods or anything like fate but the coincidence of the two men sounding so much alike AND there being a machine that could alter one to look like the other was almost enough to make her consider offering a "thank you" to the cosmos. Harrison wasn't exactly the heroic type either and all he'd have to do is do as he was told to get his family and teacher back safe and sound - she couldn't see him being bold enough to try anything and risk someone getting killed so she didn't feel even the slightest hint of guilt over it!

Speaking of doing what she was supposed to do... Lily shook herself out of her thoughts and glanced behind her at the path she was leaving in the field as she walked. The mud beneath her feet sucked at her boots but it did make it incredibly easy to push in the little colored row markers Sophie had given her; the farm had a multi-bladed plow contraption that was hauled along behind a sturdy draft horse and the old woman liked to have these markers out before the plowing started so not only would the rows be simple to keep evenly spaced but also so it was clear what seed was going where in the fields when planting time came (she'd tried explaining something about crop rotations and whatnot but Lily had honestly tuned her out halfway through her rambling).

White for wheat (there was a LOT of white markers), yellow for cornballs (also quite numerous), various shades of green for peas, leafy greens, peppers, bamboo papaya, bright orange for potato fruit, purple for pumpkins, and bright blue for layered carrots. She'd already marked out a small plot up near the farmhouse for herbs as well...she'd had the passing thought of asking for a plot to plant some flowers just so there'd be something here she'd actually enjoy tending to but there wouldn't be much point in that being as she'd be leaving soon anyway.

Maybe when it was all said and done and Duvos had united everyone Lily could switch careers and get into some manner of horticulture. It would be harder work than spying but it was hard to ignore how much she loved seeing and caring for brightly colored blooms.

It was good to have goals, no matter how far out into the future they seemed.

...maybe they would start construction soon while the ground was soft, and all her goals would shift forward a bit in time.

--------------------------------------

Between training in the mornings, taking on her new patrols and postings in the early afternoon, and training Toby in the late afternoon through early evening, by the time bed time rolled around Eli was only too happy to crawl under the blankets and pass out.

It felt good to be so active. It was like being back in...

Don't-

...no. She couldn't shut this particular thing out. That was too big a part of who she was. She might not be in charge of this "squad" but it was like coming home; maybe it was the only real thing she COULD refer to as "home." It was a topic she'd discussed with Dr. Xu during their sessions and they'd been carefully untangling her feelings regarding the whole thing: survivor's guilt, mourning what she'd lost, and trying not to feel guilty over building a new life that resembled her old one. If she was going to keep moving forward then she had to stop blocking things out.

So. Yes. She could admit to herself it was like being back in her squad. She NEEDED to admit that to herself, and embrace and understand everything that came with it, no matter how painful.

She'd just stepped through the doorway of her room when she heard pounding feet coming up behind her; as she turned Selene - smudged with oil and red in the face - came into view and the woman broke into a wide smile as she spotted Eli standing there.

"Oh good - I caught you before you fell asleep. It's done!"

"...which "it" are we talking about here?" Eli prompted after a pause; her tired brain couldn't recall if Selene had mentioned anything nearing completion recently aside from work on cutting through the door.

"The rifle!" Selene laughed. "Remington managed to find the pieces so I could cast off them and now I've got it all assembled -- I've got some ammo made too."

"Oh. Well, wasn't expecting that." Eli rubbed at her eyes and turned to follow as Selene gestured for her to come along; Selene practically jogged back to her factory while Eli followed at a brisk walking pace.

The factory was still working away at making the components needed for the signal towers so it was as noisy as ever inside the building -- a section of the shelves against the wall that normally held Selene's collection of tools had been cleared away and there were neat rows of pieces and parts all laying together and shining brightly in the overhead lights. A quick count showed that at least four signal towers' worth of parts was there...slowly but surely they'd have them done, assembled, and installed.

Selene led her over to a workbench against the wall to their left; sitting on a makeshift metal stand was a rifle that, while not quite what Eli had been using three hundred years ago, still looked enough like a rifle that she could immediately pick out all the individual elements in the weapon:

The safety was there above the trigger guard, the chamber was left open (it was a bolt action-style rifle), there was a polished set of iron sights installed on the barrel, and it looked like the butt was a decently thick section of rubber that had been repurposed off something else judging by the rubber remnants sitting in a pile next to a bin full of scrap. Sitting in a semicircle beneath the rifle stand were nine bullets; they weren't a caliber she was familiar with (she felt it was safe to assume that they didn't measure bullets in the same way anymore). They were larger than the ones that went into the revolver she was carrying but smaller than the ones she utilized three hundred years ago and she was already debating how she wanted to carry them on her.

"I had Ack help me line the sights up - he may be a cook but his eyes work way better than any human's eyes would," Selene said as she carefully lifted the rifle off the stand and held it out to her. "And, while they weren't exactly thrilled I DID have Merlin and Petra show me some ancient designs. I based this on one of those old guns but had to use what I'm able to make so it has the uh - the little thingy-"

"It's bolt action," Eli interrupted with a chuckle as Selene gestured at the chamber. "I know. Back in my day these were automatic and you just loaded in a magazine that had a lot of rounds in it and they cycled as the trigger was pulled. True bolt actions were usually reserved for marksman competitions."

"Yes, that - the automatic thing I mean" Selene said with a giggle. "I saw how it worked in that design but I just don't have what's needed to craft something like that reliably. Looking at that old stuff was weird though, since some of them had ammo that was like sand...?"

At the builder's question Eli nodded as she turned the rifle over in her hands; it was heavy, sturdy. "I'm surprised you had plans or pictures of those still... They were specialized plasma rifles and they didn't use typical ammo. They were also expensive as hell and broke down rather easily if you didn't keep them immaculately clean. Basically grains of the ammo would fall into the chamber, and in one split instant would be turned to plasma and ejected -- that's the really, really, REALLY simple explanation. I don't know enough of the science behind it to tell you exactly how to make one of those. Heck, I doubt I could tell you enough on how to break down and clean one of them since I've only ever fired one a handful of times on a shooting range."

She picked up a bullet and slotted it into the chamber, then tested how the bolt moved; it was sticking ever so slightly - thinking on it Eli realized Selene probably didn't know how to grease or oil anything like this so before she even thought of test firing she should check the rifle out herself piece by piece.

"Has a bit of a stick to it. Want to learn where all the grease is supposed to go?"

Selene thought a moment, then nodded. "Might as well. I greased and oiled what I thought needed it but I guess I didn't get enough in the right places."

Eli ejected the bullet and placed it back with the others then returned the rifle to the stand. "It's possible, but it's also possible that whatever you're using might not be the right sort of thing for the job. We can go over that tomorrow though - I'm totally wiped for the night."

"Well why didn't you say something?" Selene huffed. "It's not like it's going anywhere."

"It's fine," Eli chuckled. She headed toward the door with Selene following along at her elbow. "I'm always tired in the evenings lately...I swear, eventually I'll be back in top shape."

"And, then you won't be tired?"

"No, I'll be LESS tired," Eli corrected.

Selene stuck her tongue out at her. "But still tired and you should mention that the next time I have something to show you so I don't drag you out of the house again."

"Fine fine," Eli grumbled, but smiled afterward.

They headed back inside the house with Eli headed toward her room again; Selene headed into the kitchen and a moment later stuck her head back through the door.

"Oh, by the way - I got more butter."

"Beat me to it, thanks," Eli called back over a shoulder as she again stepped through the doorway to her room and carefully closed the door behind her, and then leaned against the door as she debated grabbing a snack before bed now that she knew butter was back in the house.

Frequenting Martha's for loaves of that raisin bread was becoming a habit -- partly because she and Selene both went through a loaf in about two days (toasted and with a smear of butter was an amazing treat) and also because Eli wanted to try and help Martha offset any miscellaneous costs that might be cropping up because of her training Toby. She already knew he was going through paper as he made himself reference notes and pictures but when she started in with the physical training aspect there'd be a possible uptick in food costs, and clothes would need replacing if they got torn or stained, boots would wear out quicker...

As she stood there just inside her door she could feel weariness pressing in like a weighted blanket dropped over her head; it was probably too late in the evening for a snack anyway, and if she had a slice of the bread now there wouldn't be enough left for their breakfast.

Pinky was sitting in the middle of her bed again; she rolled the cat over to make enough room to get her legs on the bed and under the covers, then settled in against her pillow. As usual Pinky took her time getting comfortable and Eli winced a bit as the heavy animal briefly stepped across her knees; her legs were sore from all the walking she'd done today but she couldn't be bothered to get up to take an aspirin at the moment, and she mentally reminded herself she needed to pick up another bottle of it from Dr. Xu when she went in for her next therapy session.

They would be starting the construction on the expansion soon...Selene was nearly through that door. She WOULD have been through the door yesterday if she hadn't run out of fuel for her cutting torch; it was quicker to order it from Vega 5 and have it shipped here than it was for her to gather up what was needed and try to refine it herself so during this little waiting period she was focusing fully on getting those signal transmitters finished and assembled.

That was going to be...interesting. Those transmitters were going on top of tall metal towers and it promised to be a heck of a climb to reach the top, and there was the question of how they would haul the transmitter up there with them. They would weigh about forty pounds each which wasn't TOO heavy, technically, but they'd be bulky and someone would be carrying one up a ladder...they should probably rig up a temporary pulley system to make it easier and safer on everyone involved when the time came to install them.

Well, whatever. That was a problem for Future-Eli. Now-Eli just wanted to go to sleep, and for her left calf to stop cramping.

Right as she was dozing off there was a quick knock at her door.

"Hey Eli - sorry to bug you but Asher's wondering if you're still up."

A couple of thoughts immediately raced through her mind: had the spy been caught? Had the spy hurt someone? If this wasn't a case of life or death should she strangle Asher now or wait until morning?

"M'awake," she mumbled. She rolled out of bed (and Pinky immediately reclaimed her spot in the middle of the mattress) and paused long enough to put a bra back on before opening the door and padding barefoot to the living room where Asher was sitting on the sofa.

He was perched on the edge of the cushions, elbows braced on his knees and actually twiddling his thumbs as one heel bounced up and down. When she came through the door his head jerked up to look at her; his expression was grim and she felt a small jolt of worry shoot through her.

"What's up?"

He opened his mouth to reply then paused to look her up and down. "-uh."

"Yes, I'm wearing duck-printed pajamas, it's what I pulled out of the drawer tonight. Why are you here?" Eli asked, trying to keep the hard edge of 'authority' out of her tone -- she was NOT in charge, Asher was NOT her subordinate, and it wasn't fair to be annoyed at him since she doubted he'd be making a social call this late at night.

"It's - well, I was hoping to talk on the way."

"The way where?"

Asher bit his lower lip and then huffed out a sigh. "Graveyard."

Eli's eyes narrowed and she spun on a heel to rush back to her room and get clothes, boots, and her holster on. Asher was standing at the door when she came back and she followed him out into the night; he set a quick pace across the yard and waited until they were beyond the gate before he spoke.

"Remington and I were walking to the Corps building from the Round Table, saw a light in the graveyard -- was pretty low to the ground, Remington was worried someone had left a candle lit out there so we went to have a look. Right as we went through the gate someone took a potshot at us - it was way wide so I'm thinking it was clearly meant to be a warning shot, or a distraction to let whoever it was get away. Remington went for back up and I kept going, looking and listening and using the stones as cover. I combed the place over and didn't see anyone or get any more bullets in my direction, but..."

He trailed off as they came to the graveyard's gate, and pulled out a small flashlight and clicked it on; Eli tensed up and scanned the area, marking every shadow and mentally putting herself on high alert for any sort of movement or sound. Asher seemed cautious but not nearly as cautious as she would have been with an active shooter on the loose; he knew exactly where he was going and about six graves in Eli realized where he was leading her.

Darren's grave was very distinct compared to the ones around it, and in the light of the flashlight she could see a message scorched across the stone:

Neither Portia nor the world needs you

She felt the bite of her nails against her palms as her fists clenched, and there was the roar of her own blood in her ears as an immediate rage hit her.

"Oh you fucking did not, you bastard," Eli snarled before she could stop herself.

"...what?" Asher asked after a moment.

...that had come out in Dubeian. Probably good that it had. "I am not translating that," she replied. She took a deep breath and slowly relaxed her hands; her palms were still stinging. "And you didn't see anyone?"

Asher shook his head and quickly panned the flashlight's beam around the grave - the grass was flattened but none of the tracks were clear. "Nope. And I'm thinking I know why."

She tore her gaze from the gravestone and looked over to him; he was looking at her with a clear expression of concern on his face. "You're thinking the spy's figured out who I am and where I came from."

"Duvos likes their technology-"

"-so they're going to make me a target, got it," Eli interrupted. She reached out and took the flashlight from him and squatted to get a better look at the trampled grass.

As she'd initially determined the tracks weren't clear; they were all muddled together and she couldn't get a feel for the size or type of footwear that had been tramping around here and, for some reason, they simply stopped at the edges of the nearby graves. She stood and had a look at the next grave over and could see grass and mud smeared across the top, and similar smears were on the base of the grave beyond that.

"...almost looks like our perp jumped from tombstone to tombstone to hide their tracks, except for here because they wouldn't have been able to balance on the bottom of Darren's stone AND do their fucking defacing without burning their own face off," she muttered. "So what's their damn aim...try and intimidate me into leaving town and grab me off the road? They picked the wrong bitch to try and scare off, I can tell you that much... Where's everyone else?"

Asher gestured beyond the fence line. "Sam went out that way, Arlo took Remington and went to check the ruins down the hill, and Mali is checking 'round the church and along the walls. I cleared the cafe, commerce guild, and apartments, then got sent to go get you. Adam's on alert out at the facility."

With a sigh that trailed out into a growl Eli ran a hand through her hair to push it back into place; some goddamn-- could she even blame this on the spy? That had been both their immediate suspicions, and if Duvos knew about her she supposed it would make sense for them to try and grab her, but what if it wasn't even related to that? Could be some church crony...Portia got a lot of tourists, ANYONE could slip in pretending to be there for the scenery.

"Have you told Gale yet?"

Asher shook his head. "Not yet - Arlo wanted to clear the area first since we've got undeniable proof that there's an armed whoever out there. Can't really let them have the run of the town. I'm thinking they're long gone though -- no idea where to, but I doubt we're going to find them."

"And if they'd wanted to actually shoot one of you they could have..." Eli said quietly. "You'd have to be a piss poor shot to miss a target that doesn't even know you're there."

"Yep. And they could have followed up in the confusion too - we didn't know where it'd come from at first."

Eli panned the flashlight around slowly, marking out where the mud smears and even a few tufts of grass led; it looked like whoever it was had jumped the fence at the back of the graveyard... She walked over and looked up and down the fenceline and could see where the grass had been disturbed but was quickly recovering from the trampling. With a grunt she vaulted over the fence and headed out, only vaguely aware of Asher calling for her to wait for him; he'd said Sam had gone out this way so maybe she'd found something by now.

This was part of the tree farm so somewhere out here she'd come across the now well-worn footpath that would lead out to the facility; of course, there were also a lot of ruined buildings out this way that, while they'd been stripped down of anything useful, were still decently intact and could house and hide any number of persons who managed to get inside.

Those ruins would both take time to clear and be especially dangerous to do so.

So much for sleeping tonight.

------------------------------------------

"At the very least Lee assures me that he knows of no such Church agent within Portia, and frankly he seemed genuinely disgusted and concerned by the idea that someone would fire on an innocent like that - not even enforcers would dare be so reckless."

Asher was only half-listening to the man; he was somewhat distracted by the burning need to find whoever it was that had shot at them AND defaced the gravestone so he could pound them into a fine paste. Competing with that need was the thought that he couldn't decide if it would be better or worse for this latest development to be unrelated to the spy -- it COULD be someone related to the Church in some way - either a rogue enforcer or some random nobody who heard rumors and came to deal with it themselves: vigilantes weren't common but Asher had run into them enough times to know that if someone got it into their head that only THEIR narrowly defined world view was the right view then they felt justified in doing whatever they felt needed to be done. And, of course, it COULD in fact be their spy trying to distract them and spread their numbers thin. They all knew the facility and Stewart were the spy's target but if Duvos knew about Eli too...

"I feel we've little choice - we need to let the townspeople know at the next town meeting that there's an armed and dangerous person somewhere in the region," Arlo spoke up then. "We can't risk someone getting hurt because they didn't know to be on the lookout."

"But the next meeting isn't for another couple days," Sam said. "Do we want to risk something happening in the meantime? Or risk letting whoever this is walk out of town freely?"

Remington shook his head. "We can't do much about them leaving - we have no idea what this person looks like, and while it's not TOO common we do get folks coming through Portia who carry sidearms on them. Not every traveler with a gun is going to be the person we're looking for."

That was something Asher agreed with. Guns weren't plentiful but they were still around, and while they tended to be small or have limited range they were still quite dangerous. Thankfully a lot of them weren't all that accurate and so he'd spent all night (because who in the world could sleep after knowing someone shot at them?) wavering back and forth between believing it had been just a warning shot meant to distract them or if the person had actually intended to hit them but the weapon or their skill was at fault for the wide shot. He was leaning more toward the warning shot still since, even though he and Remington had ducked for cover immediately, there had been plenty of time for follow up shots that hadn't come...but was he willing to stake lives on that assessment? Even if THIS had been just a warning there might not be a warning the NEXT time.

"I think we need to tell everyone, immediately," Asher spoke up then. "And I agree that not everyone with a gun is our troublemaker but if we see anyone armed we should at least keep an eye on them if we can. Our guy probably came in over the fence from the tree farm, same way they left too - can we close the tree farm to any tourists? Whoever this is might not be deterred by the need to scale the fence versus walking through the gate but at the very least we'd cut down on the traffic in the area since regular folks would be kept away."

Gale nodded. "That's an idea -- better to disappoint people than put them in danger or let our culprit have the run of the farm."

Asher saw Eli stir out of the corner of his eye. "Do many people tour the tree farm?" she asked.

"From early spring to early fall we do get a surprising number of folks wanting to see the apple blossoms and pick the fruit, and Dawa keeps a section of just the fruiting trees for that purpose. Portia's emergency funds can certainly cover any lost wages that'll come from curtailing traffic to the farm."

"For now that seems like a good idea, and in the near future we're going to have all the signal towers up so that'll help us coordinate keeping an eye on things. I told Selene about our newest visitor's antics and she's going to pull double duty to get everything made," Eli went on. "We'll need to borrow some muscle to get them up and installed but then we'll all be in contact with one another no matter where we are in Portia."

Asher watched as she lifted and then waggled the wrist that her Hi-Def was strapped to. "-that would make life a lot easier," he said into the pause that followed. "One of us spots something, we ALL know about it immediately."

"Have we heard anything from anyone else?" Remington asked. He was looking at Mali, and Asher turned his attention to her as well.

"No," Mali replied. "So far as the Alliance's spies and scouts can tell nothing has changed within Duvos's territory -- no increases in labor, material acquisitions, or troop movements. They're still occupying the Orzu Ruins and saber rattling at Ethea but nothing has escalated and we've not heard of any secret plans of theirs in the circles our spies have infiltrated. If this person is working under direct orders from Duvos higher ups they're keeping it very well hidden."

Gale stood up and pressed his hands against his desk, slowly panning his gaze to look at all of them one at a time. "All right then, it seems we have a tentative plan -- I'll spread word, and I hope you all will as well, that we're to have an emergency town meeting tomorrow night. I would aim for tonight but I worry that wouldn't be enough time to make sure everyone knows about it -- we'll be cautious, and keep our eyes peeled for any trouble, and I'll go to Dawa immediately after this to instruct him to close the tree farm to everyone except for those there strictly for business purposes."

There was a lot of nodding at that; Gale inhaled and exhaled slowly and then moved out from around his desk only to pause and look toward Eli as she cleared her throat.

"Not to uh...sour the mood further, but what's your protocol on shooting to kill?"

The room went silent; all eyes, Asher's included, moved to Eli. He supposed he shouldn't be surprised by it (she'd already shot at the spy once) but with the exception of Remington and Mali it seemed everyone else definitely was.

After a moment of no responses Eli shrugged. "Sorry, but it needs to be made clear right now. I'm armed, and I've already tried to put a bullet into our visitor once -- I wasn't wanting to kill and I didn't hit them anyway but I was ready to accept whatever consequences would've followed if I had, because I was essentially a private citizen then. Now I'm part of your law enforcement. I need to know if I'm allowed to use lethal force if it comes to it."

"IF it comes to that," Arlo said; his tone was a bit strained -- Asher wondered if the man had ever really stopped to think about taking a life. None of the Civil Corps here seemed to carry a weapon and he doubted they'd ever been placed in a "them or me" situation with anything other than a rogue monster or robot (he knew Remington had seen action in Lucien so that would explain why the man didn't look so shocked at her question). Cutting down some leftover relic or rampaging beast was a heck of a lot different from having to take down another person.

Eli nodded to him. "Unfortunately I think it might, now that we know they're armed. I'll do whatever I can to not let it get to that point but..."

She trailed off; Mali was nodding at her and Arlo noticed it. For a long moment Arlo looked between Mali and Eli, then sighed and looked to Gale. "I'd hear your opinion on this."

Gale pressed his lips together. "Well..." he started, drawing the word out. "You all know I've seen action myself. The thought of killing is as abhorrent now as it was then but sometimes, you're not given a choice." He turned to look to Eli. "Being as you were formally trained and were a ranking member of your military I imagine you would know when it's time to use lethal force or not, and I feel I can trust you to use your judgement to avoid any unneeded loss of life."

"I appreciate the trust and I won't let you down," Eli replied. "I'm not about to let this story become a murder mystery."

Arlo, Remington, Sam, and Gale all nodded knowingly; Asher looked to Mali and saw a hint of the same confusion he was feeling at the moment but Gale was ushering them out of his office now so he hurried out ahead of the others.

The sun was just starting to come up - a reminder that they'd all gotten hardly any or, in some cases, no sleep at all. Asher had a running record of three days without sleep and hoped he wasn't going to be breaking that record in the upcoming days; Mali immediately headed out through Portia's gates to head back to the facility while Gale's steps appeared to be leading him back to his house.

"-any orders for the morning, Arlo?" Asher asked after a moment.

"I'd like you and Eli to comb the area over again, then separate out into your patrol patterns. Sam - take on Remington's patrols this morning. Remington - I'll need you with me. I was supposed to be escorting Selene into the ruins to break down that door and get it ready to be hauled out to the facility to be installed but with her needing to focus on getting the signal transmitters done you and I will have to handle it ourselves. She's showed me how to disconnect most of the wiring we'd be encountering so our task is to get it detached from the wall however we can and stacked together to be moved out of there. Mint is taking charge of getting the install site prepped and ready and he'll be leading a team to retrieve the door when they're ready."

Ha, he'd almost forgotten about the plans for that security door; with that installed they wouldn't need constant surveillance for the facility. That would be one less thing to juggle schedules with and maybe then they could focus on turning over every rock and blade of grass, and check every nook and cranny of the Portian countryside to find whoever their little visitor was and get them out of the picture.

They all began to separate out into their assigned duties; Asher walked side by side with Eli up the hill toward the graveyard again. He felt a little jolt of anxiety up his spine as he walked through the gate into the graveyard but there weren't any shots fired at him again, nor did there appear to be anyone here.

"I'll take the northern half, you go south?" he asked.

Eli nodded and headed off without complaint -- which he was glad for as he'd purposely given himself the northern area because that's where Darren's defaced tombstone was and he didn't want her to have to face that again.

As he suspected there wasn't anything out of place or different from when they'd checked the area over earlier; the grass had mostly recovered from being walked on and if not for the mud smears on the gravestones you'd be hard pressed to tell that anyone had been through the graveyard recently.

Still, he and Eli spent a good amount of time examining every stone and the strip of land on either side of the fence; then, with the sun up and his Hi-Def indicating it was going on nine o'clock, they both hopped the fence a final time and headed out into the tree farm.

"So...if we were back in your time, how would you be handling this?" he asked as they walked.

For a few steps she didn't answer. "...well, back then we had AI drones. They could fly and cover a large amount of ground. And, we had people out on foot searching too with specialized equipment."

"Did you have to do many manhunts like this?"

She shook her head. "Usually they were rescue missions but sometimes yeah, we had armed people out making trouble." She paused, then let out a snort. "What I wouldn't give for my armor kit. Weighed an absolute ton but it could withstand being shot by most weapons. Having to do all this, LIKE this...makes me feel pretty damn useless."

"What? How?"

She waved a hand. "Nevermind. Don't really feel like getting into it at the moment."

"Right. Sorry," he said in a rush. Once they got to the rear of the tree farm they would need to split off into their patrol routes. "So, uh..."

"Hmm?"

"We get done - meet up for lunch?"

They continued on in silence for several more steps. "-maybe. Depends on what's happened by then."

He let out a sort of helpless chuckle. "Yeah, true."

Again they walked on in silence and reached the point where their routes went in different directions; Asher walked along his for a few feet then turned around. "Hey, Eli?" She stopped and looked over a shoulder at him. "What was the story comment about?"

"I'll tell you over lunch."

He grinned and started back along his patrol route.

#Lost in Time #lit #Lost in Time - ch 18 #Arlo #Mali #Remington #Sam #Gale #My Time at Portia

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neganandblake · 5 years

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I think I liked you better when you didn’t have a knife in your hand, Peaches... Chapter 198 - The New Guy

When Blake finds herself sold out to the Saviours by her abusive fiancé, she realises that she’s certainly not on her own anymore and finds an unlikely friend in Negan. And Negan does NOT like men who beat their girlfriends, one tiny bit….

(Masterlist can be found on my page.)

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Chapter 196- The Weak Link

[As Winter well and truly sets in, how will Negan react when a new guy at the Sanctuary seems to be taking a shine to Blake.]

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The weeks drifted by, with the crisp chill of Fall slowly slipping into the harsh cold of Winter.

Life at the Sanctuary had gone on as normal after Negan's run in with Simon. With the mustachioed man keeping a very low profile for a long while, before sliding back into the pack almost like nothing had happened, paying his dues silently, by going on runs and helping out whenever he could.

Everyone, including Simon, knew that he was far from forgiven for what he had tried to do, but the fact that he hadn't had his head bludgeoned by Lucille could only have been a good thing. And the whispers that Negan was 'going soft', soon dissipated to nothing.

But even so, no one here could deny that Blake's influence on the dark haired leader had not had an impact on the place. For the Sanctuary, despite another hard Winter setting in, seemed to be thriving. With a bounty of fresh food, properly stored and rationed, from the gardens, as well as the usual tributes coming in, the Saviours were better fed than ever before, going to bed with full stomachs and smiles on their faces.

This seemed, these days, far from the regime it may have presented as once upon a time, and far more a community, a family, a support system now.

Feeling happier and more content with Sanctuary life, almost every resident seemed to want to put back in. Whether it was those finding the time to make blankets or clothes, those who cleaned and kept the place tidy, or even those who went out on runs. It was like they all wanted to better the place, to play their part in making it a home for everyone.

And Negan had played his part too.

Not just in being a leader and keeping control, but ever since he and Blake had arrived back with a truckload of needy people looking for a place to live safely, Negan had been far more willing to open the gates again to certain folks in need of a home, found out there on the road.

And the sheer influx of new people had brought happiness in its own right to the Sanctuary. More chatter, more new relationships, halting the boredom of what once was.

Frankie had been seeing a handsome new guy named Sam for a couple of weeks now. And even Layla had been flirting up a storm with a few of the women that Dwight had brought back from a run.

Life at the Sanctuary seemed to be changing, but for the better this time.

To Blake, she and Negan were closer than ever. Both of them able to read each other so well these days.

The sex was good.

Family time spent together with Mia was good.

And both were more in love with the other than ever before, with everything feeling like it was finally falling into place for both of them.

And not having Simon at hand as much, meant that Negan had poured most of his trust into the blonde woman, asking her advice when he needed it, valuing her ideas and guidance that much. Even if he did try and dance around asking her directly on each and every occasion, playing it cool as he always did. But Blake was well aware how many ideas of hers were often implemented only the next day.

...A rota system for the kitchens so that families could get their turn to make their own food together every once in a while...

...Turning the unused garages at the back of the Sanctuary into a winter home for a couple of baby goats they had found several weeks ago with room to expand if any more livestock was found…

They were small things. But to the people of the Sanctuary they had a big impact. And Negan was fully aware of how much the Sanctuary residents loved Blake, speaking to, and about her, with such fondness in their voices, something Negan had never ever had from his people.

He was revered. Yes.

Feared. Yes.

But loved?

Definitely not.

But with Blake, it was obviously how the Saviours felt about her, maybe bar a select few like Simon, but everyone else. Well, they treated her like their queen.

Negan adored her, worshipped her. And of course, often spent his free time stalking her around the Sanctuary, annoying the hell out of her as usual (not that Blake minded all that much, a tell-tale smirk always playing on her lips).

But these days Negan didn't seem like the only one who had his eye on the blonde woman.

One morning two long weeks ago, one of the Saviours' trucks had pulled up at first light with a small group in the back, providing Sanctuary for them after a long time out on the road.

The group consisted of a three women of varying ages, two small children, and two men. One of which, the younger of the two, was named Nick.

Nick was annoyingly handsome, with dark hair, a muscular build, and a charming smile. And as he had a keen interest in helping out in the gardens, having helped run his Dad's farm before all this, he had instantly been steered Blake's way.

And that's when it had started…

"Boss," came the out of breath voice of Dwight standing in the doorway to Negan and Blake's room up on the third floor.

Negan who was sat on his squishy leather couch, a large accounting ledger balanced on one knee, looking up at the disturbance, a deep unimpressed frown gracing his brow.

In that second he knew what Dwight was here for.

"Again?" Negan growled out exasperatedly, as Dwight gave a nod.

"He's been out there for the last twenty minutes apparently," murmured Dwight sheepishly, hands stuffed into his pockets, never quite meeting Negan's eye.

"Son of a bitch," huffed Negan angrily, shutting the ledger with a snap, tossing it aside and getting to his feet.

Snatching up Lucille, Negan made for the door, patting Dwight on the shoulder as he passed him.

"You did good, Dwighty-boy," he said in a low voice, before stalking past him, heading out into the hallway.

This had to have been the third time today Negan had been down there. But ever since that asshole had arrived on the scene, Negan hadn't really had a fucking choice.

The first couple of days he could have forgiven it, brushed it off as a politeness on this guy's fucking part. But over the past week or so, this new guy, this Nick, had been tailing Blake around the place like a damn lovesick puppy.

At first Negan had tried to put a stop to it, so goddamn close to using Lucille on the guy for even thinking about talking to her.

But as soon as Blake had caught on to what his plans were, she had given him hell, told him to stop being so stupid, and stop acting so jealous over nothing.

But the fuck this was nothing, for Negan had seen Nick around her, flirting with her at every damn opportunity he was given.

Now he knew for a fucking fact that Blake would cut Negan's damn balls off if she ever found out he had been sending Dwight and a few of the others to keep an eye on her over the last few days.

But hell, Negan hadn't been able to help himself. Sure he trusted Blake whole-fuckin'-heartedly. But that motherfucker? He didn't doubt for one second that he wouldn't try it on with the blonde first chance he fucking got.

The dark-haired leader sighed heavily as he walked, dragging his gloved hand tiredly down his stubbly face.

Part of him knew that he was probably acting like a goddamn pussy about all this, but shit, Negan knew how he felt about Blake, and after all they had been through together there was no fuckin' way he was gonna lose her to some fucking thirty year old with not a single grey fuckin' hair and knees that didn't give him shit every five minutes.

Negan made it down to the gardens outside in almost record time.

It was freezing out here, and despite it only being mid-afternoon, the sky outside was already growing dark, a chilly wind biting at his face as he stepped out into the lot.

Since the garden wasn't good for much growing at this time of year, Blake and some of the others had taken to giving the space a good tidy, trimming back anything that needed it and helping to shift a lot of the stuff inside the factory, or into the three greenhouses the Sanctuary lots now housed.

But as the weather had gradually gotten colder, volunteers for this type of work had dwindled, leaving just a small handful of Saviours out here helping today.

For this reason Negan spotted them immediately.

Blake standing there like a goddamn goddess, dressed in jeans, a black beanie hat and a black sheepskin jacket, face lit up in a laugh, carrying a large grow-bag full of compost in her arms. While beside her, walked Nick, in his own thick brown coat, carrying two more grow bags of the stuff in his muscular arms, obviously muttering something that was making Blake laugh.

Negan gave a growl under his breath as he watched them turn and head over towards the greenhouse on the far side of the small walled space, eyes narrowed and dark, taking in their every move.

The way Nick leaned in close to Blake as he said something…

...the way she let her head drop in an audible laugh…

Negan felt his blood boiling, as a wave of utter jealousy coursed through him.

Clenching his jaw together hard, Negan let out a huff, his breath circling in the cold air around him, as he hitched Lucille up onto his leather-clad shoulder and began to pace across the lot towards the pair.

The sound of his heavy boots approaching behind them, was enough to cause Blake to look around.

She stopped suddenly, looking a little startled.

"Negan, what're you-" she began, her mouth dropping open and her green eyes narrowing.

Shit, she fucking knew didnt she?

But Negan played it cool, offering her a wide smile, as Nick beside her also came to a halt, turning around to face the dark-haired man.

He nodded almost immediately, lowering his gaze, to the ground. Like Dwight, not quite meeting Negan's eye.

But Negan, irritated with how close this asshole was standing to his girl, took a looming step into Blake, his free hand sliding around her waist possessively.

"You miss me, Peaches?" he growled out in a playful tone, running his tongue over his bottom lip.

But Blake still had her eyes narrowed towards him, her green orbs travelling carefully over his face trying to read him.

"Not since I saw you ninety minutes ago…" she retorted coolly, placing a hand to his chest and giving him a soft shove away, causing his hand to drop from her middle. "What's with you today? You checking up on me or something?"

Well, not checking up on her at least...

Giving a deep sniff, Negan took that as his cue to step back, leaning back against his long legs and giving a wide, forced smile.

"Just checkin' up on my favourite part of the Sanctuary, Darlin'," Negan teased, waving a hand at the ever-darkening lot around them. "That a crime?"

Blake raised both eyebrows, peering at him bemused, while all the while Nick stood there silent.

"Well if you like it so much out here," she uttered in a taunting voice. "Maybe you'd want to give us a hand out here sometime?"

At her words, Negan noticed Nick glance over at Blake and give a knowing smirk.

And fuck. Just that smarmy son-of-a bitch's look alone, was enough to rile Negan up.

And so feeling his hackles raise, Negan dug at the side of his cheek with his tongue, his mood switching suddenly.

"Sweetheart, do I look like the kinda guy that's used to shovelling pig-shit around the place. Hell I'm the goddamn leader of this place." His tone sounding far harsher than he meant it to.

But Negan was feeling petty. And shit, why the fuck shouldn't he?

This guy was moving in on Blake right in front of him and he was supposed to be fucking ok with that shit?

But it was obvious from the way Blake's smile immediately vanished, that his attitude with her was not appreciated.

She stared back at him looking almost hurt now, a small frown appearing between her perfect fucking eyebrows.

"That really what you think?" she asked in a quiet voice, her green eyes searching his, obviously not understanding where this attitude had come from. "That all this is beneath you?"

Negan made to open his mouth to argue, but obviously not in the mood, Blake turned on her heel not giving him the satisfaction of allowing him to respond.

"Come on Nick," she said bitterly. "Let's leave the leader here to get back to whatever far more important things he’s got to be getting on with."

And with one last gulp and a swift sideways glance towards Negan, Nick quickly bowed his head and followed along behind her, hitching the grow bags up a little higher into his arms as he fell into step with the gorgeous blonde as he headed over to the greenhouse...

...leaving Negan alone, staring after the pair and allowing a long puff of frustrated air to leave his lips, where it curled above his head for a second before dissipating into the icy afternoon air.

Shit. What the fuck had he just done?

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#negan #twd #The Walking Dead #Jeffrey Dean Morgan #negan oc #negan fanfiction #twd fanfiction #fanfic #negan otp #negan story #negan series #negan and blake #negan fic #jdm

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scrapyardboyfriends · 5 years

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Jenny’s Belated Live Blogging - 19th August 2019

- Blech! I should have kept searching through the pop toy catalogue instead of looking down at my screen for that last scene of Nate kissing Amy and staring at Moira. That was horrific.

- The thing is...I don’t care enough about Coira at this point because the show hasn’t, to care if they break them up. Fine, shake them up, put them with new people. I don’t care. If they want to use an affair to do it? Sure, fine. But this...this is not the way. If this is cut and dry and Nate is just what he appears to be, a random player farmhand that’s just shown up and gets his kicks out of messing with people’s lives then...it doesn’t work because it doesn’t make any sense, it’s clunky as hell and these characters all deserve better. If there is more to it, if the theories are correct and he is somehow Cain’s secret son with a grudge or something else equally insane, then holding it back for this long really doesn’t do much for me. They’re not hinting at anything strong enough to even make me sure there is something bigger happening. At least with Joe, there were some clues in his behavior and cryptic conversations with Graham. Now there’s nothing. It doesn’t work. I’d much rather know exactly what his motivation is and be in on it as he messes with them. That would be more interesting to me.

- that said, Nate, as a character, and this actor...just do not work at all. *shudders* It’s painful at this point. And if he calls anyone else ‘babe’, I don’t know if I can handle it.

- Also, good god, really Nate was the person they decided to have help Matty to the big conclusion of his toxic masculinity story?! Nate?!?! Really?! That was...wow...yeah...no. This whole thing is such a mess.

- Let’s see...what else...Jacob’s hair is even more horrifying now. I hate that the Tracy/Amy friendship concept is ruined by this factory fire/frank death story.

- I never want to have to watch Harriet try not to flirt with Will or whatever the hell that was. I just need Dawn, a character I like, away from all that nonsense. Can she move in with Tracy once she probably kicks Kerry out after she finds out about the fire?

- Also...they’re going to move Bear and Paddy up to the farm, which means I might have to endure a scene with Bear and Nate? Why are they doing this to me?!

- I remember a little bit of the Ali illiteracy story and that one was way less irritating. This one just seems silly and I will forever be asking what the fuck the point of bringing in Bear even was. Why was that the reason Mandy returned before? (except apparently it wasn’t...ugh whatever). What does he offer the show? What does he offer Paddy as a character? I don’t feel like Paddy was crying out for a father figure. They didn’t even do any prerequisite ‘Paddy talking about his parents’ build up to the story. It was just random. And it still seems random. I don’t get it. I mean...yeah without the wrestling, he’s way less annoying and they’ve toned down his ‘creepy with women’ vibe a bit. But he’s still sooo useless.

- If Paddy never stuttered again....I would forgive the show a lot. I get that it is a real thing that people deal with, but it’s never been an ‘issue’ thing with Paddy...just an irritating part of his character that they play up to the extreme sometimes for I guess...comedy? I don’t know...but it’s painful.

- I did kind of enjoy Bernice pointing out how wrapped up Diane is in Victoria, even if there’s a legitimate reason. But still...Diane is one of those ‘one track mind’ kind of characters and parents so I was amused to see it pointed out.

- In conclusion: Aside from whatever brief glimpse of Robert’s face I might get...this week is going to be ROUGH

#belated live blogging #emmerdale

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passerby-boy-archive · 6 years

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Interview from The Furthest Station paperback - properly this time!

So, uh, several months ago I said that at some point I was going to type up the full interview from the back of the paperback edition of The Furthest Station because I find a lot of it super interesting and it kills me they didn’t put it anywhere more accessible. So this is that, finally! Below the cut because damn, is this thing long.

INTERVIEWER: Hello, I’m Paul Stark from Orion’s audio team and I’m delighted to be joined today by Ben Aaronovitch, author of the bestselling Rivers of London PC Peter Grant series, available in hardback, paperback, ebook and audio narrated by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith. Ben, welcome, we’re here to talk about London and magic today. How are you doing?

BEN AARONOVITCH: I’m fine, thank you. Very nice to be here.

I: Fantastic. Well, on to a simple question to start with: What drew you to write about London?

BA: I always find this a very strange question. I’m from London. Should I write about Birmingham, you know? I write about London because it’s my home town, and I’m lazy and don’t like to go outside the M25. It’s what I know. I’d love to see more books - urban fantasy books - set in places like Birmingham - especially Birmingham, which I think is a very neglected city - and places like that and learn about those places.But all the people from those places seem to come to London and write books about London. So perhaps maybe the question you should ask is ‘why do you write?’ I write about London for a very simple reason: I’m a Londoner. I’m not sure why Neil Gaiman and David Carey and everyone writes about London, except for they’ve moved here and now they write about it.

I: And it’s an amazing city. Lots of history, wonderful characters and myth that kind of provides a bedrock for fiction. What prompted you to add magic?

BA: It never occurred to me not to add a magic. This is another one of those questions that’s rather like saying to a man that has set out on a long walk ‘What prompted you to use your feet?’ What prompted me to use my feet - I thought: I want to do magic cops. That was the first thing that came into my head. So, really, the magic is built in. Magic cops implies magic right from the start. So, really, the rest of that was kind of detail. So, we’re going to start with the idea that we’re going to have policemen who do magic and then everything else was a question of who they are and what they are doing. Police who do magic in London was the starting point of the series and so I wasn’t prompted to put magic into it, it was there right from the start. There were several things built in right from the start.

I: Given that you’ve also told us you should ‘write what you know’, is this your way of telling us that you can actually do magic?

BA: No, I am, in fact, a total sceptic. However, magic is a lot of fun to write about. So I can’t do magic. Honest.

I: What made you go beyond the magic cops? To make the rivers one of the key bases? Was that something you knew about, something you were passionate about?

BA: No, I didn’t actually know that much about the rivers. I came up with the idea of Mama Thames for a different project and then I incorporated elements of another project in the initial idea and then for the book. And once you have Mama Thames and look at a map of all the tributaries, you just go ‘ooh they must all be stroppy women’. So that’s where they came from. And if you just look at them you can see their personalities; a lot of them you can just see their personalities from looking where their courses are. So, you know Fleet, you know Tyburn, you know what they’re going to be doing.

I: Are there any that you feel you haven’t written yet that you’re really keen to?

BA: Oh, there are tons! There’s the River Rom, who is the goddess of illegal street racing. There’s the Wandle, who, for historical reasons,is the goddess of used clothes shops and schmutter. Basically the goddess of schmutter. That’s the Wandle.

I: Any beer connection? You’ve got a lot of breweries along the Wandle.

BA: Possibly, possibly. The Wandle was a very popular river for industry so you have the Romantics all setting up their factories down there. What are they called? I’ve forgotten their names. That’s terrible. You know the people who believed in fabric for the masses and beautiful - you see this is the trouble. I do all this research and it goes in one ear and out the other. People expect me to remember little details of Fleet’s course, ‘Does the Fleet’s course-?’ I don’t know! I’ve got to look at my map to know these things. ‘Where does Wandle…?’ Anyway, there’s a ton. There’s a place called Black Ditch and I haven’t really worked out where she fits in, and there’s Hackney Brook and there’s all the history of the Lea - a very complicated river as anyone who has ever looked at a map will tell you. And so there’s tons of people. You know I’m going to be writing for millions of years before I get to the end of the rivers and that’s not even counting going upstream and the Ash and all those. So…

I: Lots of scope.

BA: Lots of scope.

I: You mentioned earlier one of the prospects of writing on Birmingham. Now, I realise I’m asking a very geeky question here, but would each canal have an individual spirit?

BA: I don’t know. I’d have to go to Birmingham and find out. I don’t know, I��m trying to avoid the idea that everywhere has a spirit, a genius loci. Really the question is: would it be fun if it had a genius loci? So, Grand Union Canal has a genius loci. I didn’t mean it to have a genius loci and had no plans for it to be a genius loci and then I wrote a short story and it ended up having an orangutan for a genius loci, and it was like, ‘I didn’t plan that!’,but you know…

I: Stories have a life of their own.

BA: They often just go places I’m not expecting. So, yeah, I wouldn’t like to say what would happen if I went to Birmingham because you’re shaped by the environment you’re writing in and therefore you go somewhere and you find things. That’s the whole point of going somewhere is you find interesting things. There’s no point in saying ‘I’m going to do this’ and then you go somewhere and do it, or, at least, there’s no point for me to do that. It’s much more fun to go somewhere and then have a look around and go ‘ah’ - you’ve got to smell the place, really. I always say that you’ve got to smell the streets before you can write about them.

I: Fantastic, fantastic.

BA: Except the countryside, which always just smells the same.

I: There’s a bit of a different smell depending on what the local livestock is, but yes.

BA: Yes, unless you go downwind of a pig farm in which case it smells like ‘Get the f--- out of here’.

I: So, back on to your magic cops. Peter himself isn’t that great at magic, certainly he’s been slow on the uptake somewhat. Do you find--

BA: I love this notion that Peter is slow on the uptake.

I: Well he’s not slow on the uptake in general, but he certainly has perhaps been slower to develop magic.

BA: Than who?

I: Than certainly Lesley, I’d say.

BA: Are you sure about that?

I: I feel like I’m being lead down a blind alley.

BA: No, I mean this is where you get this weird idea from fanon, where fanon says that Peter is slow at magic, slow at picking up magic. I haven’t said if Peter is slow at picking up magic because aside from anything else Nightingale is a terrible teacher that way, with telling people how they’re doing. No, Peter is as good as you would expect him to be - someone who has only been doing it for four or five years you know, under the conditions like that he’s got two jobs. Remember he’s also a police officer also doing all these cases, occasionally having buildings dropped on him, so he’s not devoting his full time to it. So I think he’s doing all right.

I: So, did you always envision that Peter would be a student, but dealing with Nightingale who is a phenomenally adept magician, but is terrible at teaching as you say? Was that always how you saw the dynamic?

BA: Ah, well, Nightingale is very limited. I wanted to avoid Dumbledore. I wanted to avoid Gandalf. So, whatever Nightingale is, he’s not Gandalf and he’s not Dumbledore. He’s not a teacher. He’s not a mentor character. He is not, as by his nature, a mentor. He’s not the wise man who tells you what to do. He’s basically Bulldog Drummond with magic. He’s like a magical Bulldog Drummond, he’s possibly the most powerful wizard that the Folly has ever produced in terms of being able to do stuff but ask him how it works and he’s like ‘Uh… you know, I don’t know how it works. I just do it. I learn the formulas and am just good at it and can do these spells that no one else can do.’ And he can do them quietly and he can do them fast and silently and all sorts of things. It’s like he was good at sports except the sports was magic. He’s basically that, he’s one of those. I always imagine him in his cricket whites at Casterbrook: ‘Argh, play the game!’ or playing rugby, or the equivalent of rugby, and just charging through, you know, like ‘rraaaawwgh’ and snoozing through the academic part of the curriculum . So, you see, he’s that guy and part of the reason he has to look things up to teach Peter is he can’t remember what he was taught and he has to go back. But he is very very good. He is excellently good, but in some ways this is almost a story about the limitations of power. So there’s a limit to what you can do. If he got shot in the head from a distance he’s buggered. You know, as he said, ‘Shoot me. If you want to stop someone with my skills, just shoot me from a distance with a rifle.’ There is a limitation. I didn’t want - he can rip up a house by its roots and fling it over a garden fence, but he’s not Superman. He’s not a superhero. He has these limitations and magic has these inherent limitations. It does obey the rules of thermodynamics though it does bend them quite severely occasionally. Ultimately, the power has to come from somewhere and it can get dangerous if you overdo it.

I: Is that one of the reasons you’ve kept the top end of Nightingale’s abilities somewhat under wraps? Ultimately, he needs to be careful how much he exerts himself, how much he keeps from the public.

BA: Well, there is that. There’s also that he hasn’t needed to. And also, the more difficult spells and subtle ones like actually putting Toby to sleep in the first book - that was one of the most powerful spells he’s ever done in front of us, so to speak, in front of us in the book. Actually that’s a very difficult spell. Peter’s not going to learn that spell for like five years. Putting a dog to sleep. And Nightingale could probably put a person to sleep although he’d have to concentrate. You see, that sort of thing is very very hard. I’ve just written a passage in Lies Sleeping which discusses this, where Nightingale is doing something incredibly hard and Peter is astonished and it totally is a very simple thing. It’s not complicated at all. See, in a way smashing things is easier.

I: It’s almost like it’s that much more difficult to accomplish good sleight-of-hand right in front of someone sitting with you than perform a big stage illusion.

BA: Well, it’s also that most of the subtle magic involves affecting people and people are very resistant to being affected. If you want to have a fight with someone you tend to just throw something at them, or you knock them down, or you pick them up and you throw them away. But human beings - in the way my magic is constructed - are very resistant. You can’t reach into them and stop their heart. Magic is very bad at that. So, things like the glamour when you affect someone’s mind - those are all really difficult to do. To make someone pick something up, to take control of their hand - that’s really difficult to do.

I: The other side of that is that you've made magic and technology really incompatible as well. Why did you decide to do that?

BA: Well, you have to explain why no one’s recorded it on their mobile phones, don’t you? Otherwise why aren’t we looking at people, why is there no footage of Covent Garden, why is there no footage of half the things that have happened? Because it melts the chips. That’s the reason I did it. Because you’ve got to explain why it’s secret, otherwise it wouldn’t be secret.

I: Once you’d made that decision and written that in had you thought about taking it further? What would happen if someone tried to do a spell on a flight for example?

BA: You wouldn’t. That would be a very bad thing to do. Unless it’s a DC-3 you don’t want to be doing spells on a plane. I’ve considered doing a scene where you have some of the most powerful wizards assembled and none of them can actually use any magic because they’d all kill themselves if they did. Nightingale probably could. Nightingale is so controlled that he could probably get away with it. But most things about the technology - it’s the chips, not the technology. Microprocessors are particularly vulnerable to magic. So, you’re all right if you’re running valves and stuff. Nineteen-fifties Russian technology would be fine. You could launch a Vostok and you wouldn’t have to worry about doing magic with that, but not anything with a microprocessor, which is everything: your washing machine, your toaster, your cooker. And there’s nothing mystical about it. There’s good, solid world-building reasons why this happens, but we may never find out what that is because the point is Nightingale doesn’t know and I think Abigail, with forty years of study, might be able to explain it to you, although you wouldn’t understand the mathematics of why it affects microprocessors. And I did that on purpose so that I would never have to explain it.

I: We’ve already touched on Birmingham, but are there any other cultures and their particular brand of magic that you’d like to explore?

BA: I’d like to explore all of them! That’s my big problem in life: that you cannot just do that. It's not really a question of cultural appropriation, which is what you essentially do when you're ignorant or you're knowledgeable but don't care. If you're honest, you can show what a culture is like: What are the Chinese like at magic tied up with Daoism and stuff like that? But I just don't know enough Daoism to do that. It was quite hard to construct a magic system that was consistent with Anglo-Saxon and post-Norman, Roman Britain let alone one that’s consistent with more than five thousand years of Chinese, of continuous Chinese history, or Indian history for that matter. You have thousands of years of culture in places like Africa and you have to say ‘Can they do magic?’ Everyone does magic, right? What Newton did in my world is he systemised it and created a system that Postmartin calls - ah, I can't remember what he calls it now, but he's got a fancy word for it: syncretism or something like that. He basically took it and systemised it and made it repeatable. He made it a science, basically. He took the things that people were coming up with by accident and he made it a science, because that was what Newton was like, that's basically what Newton did and why I chose him for the guy who did this: because he was interested. We know that. He wrote more about alchemy than he did gravity. We know he was as interested as anyone. As someone once said: if anyone was going to find out if magic was real it was going to be Isaac Newton so I figured, right, he did. That's the whole point. There is a reason why it’s kept secret as well, but I can't talk about that.

I: Something to look forward to in a future book or interview!

BA: Yes, possibly.

I: You said you'd like to explore more. Is there anywhere outside London and the UK that you're currently researching with a view to writing?

BA: Yes, I'm going to do a novella set in Germany. I don't think it's even going to be a Peter Grant book. Because this novella you’re reading now was successful they want another one. and I thought that if I can't experiment with the novellas what could I experiment with? So rather than taking a risk with a whole novel, I would like to write about Tobi Winter who is essentially Peter's counterpart in Germany. I don't know why but he kind of turned up and started knocking on the door, like all my characters. I came up with this guy and I like him because he's slightly more lugubrious, he's more laid-back than Peter in some ways. He's kind of fun and also he's German so I've had to do quite a lot of research into how German magic works and all that stuff. And I've tried to stay away from recent history, stay away from the Nazis. Not because I feel like letting the Germans off the hook or anything, but I feel you can ram into the ground a bit. It's a bit like the occult Nazis have been done to death and with ignoring the history and stuff, like the Thirty Years War. Germany is a fascinating place, especially pre-unification Germany, when it's like a collection of states and you sit there going they're all Germans, but they don't think they're all Germans. It’s a lot of fun so I'm looking into that for this story, which is going to be the next novella.

I: And will you be basing it around the rivers again? Will be be seeing the Rhine or the Rhone?

BA: I don't know. Rivers of London is one thing, but I'm not sure you want to constantly go there. It's a bit predictable. ‘Oh, look there's a river. Is someone in it? Oh, yes they are. Oh, it's a Rhine Maiden.’ We've established that the Rhine Maidens come visit the Thames for tips, so we know there are Rhine Maidens. It's not going to be the Rhine anyway, because it's going to be Trier. It's not the Rhine, but I'm going for a research visit soon, so I'll ask. Ask the river who she is, or it might be him. You never know in Germany. Could be a guy. It's right on the border; I like it because it's right on the border with Luxembourg, so it's very liminal. It's one of those German cities that’s changed hands quite a lot of times. It's also one of the oldest cities in Germany because it was established by the Romans and there aren't that many Roman cities in Germany. And wine. It's basically about wine. It's basically an excuse - I don't even like wine, but I can't resist this. I've basically just found a way of making it a claimable expense to get a wine tour of the vineyards of Trier.

I: That sounds like fun. I have a feeling I can predict your answer this one because you touched on it earlier, but is magic purely fictional or do you think there are some elements of magic, or specifically your magic system that could be real?

BA: You know what? I was born sceptical. I'm one of those people who didn’t believe in Father Christmas when he was three and my parents tried, god bless ‘em.But I make no claims of superiority. I've just got that kind of brain; I don't believe in any of it. I believe in coincidences. I believe that things happen by accident. A lot. I don't look down on people much who believe in stuff, but I just don't believe in any of it. I'm just really sceptical. Sorry.

I: Do you think that makes it easier to write magic?

BA: Oh, god, yes! It's much easier to write because I'm not worried about whether it's accurate. I only have to worry about whether it's consistent, which is the classic thing in science fiction and fantasy. It's making what you do consistent. Unless - and this is very important - you deliberately don't. If you look at Jack Vance: He doesn't bother with consistency in his writing at all because he likes his magic wild and mad. I like consistency because I essentially I'm a science fiction writer writing fantasy. I don't know how I ended up in this position, but it's how I ended up. But I do like a bit of wild magic, which is why I have the rivers. The rivers are my little bits of wild magic and they do wild things and strange things happen in the boundary of things. The fae are there and they're good for weird things happening on the boundary of things, but as for actual magic, no, I don't believe in any of it. I don't believe in any superstitions at all. I just never have. It's not a considered intellectual position. I just never have believed in any of it.

I: How about the more human magic? Do you enjoy watching magicians work in sleight-of-hand and things like that?

BA: Not particularly. I enjoy watching the work, if they're good, but I don't think to myself: ‘Yay, magician’. I like Jonathan Creek. Does that count? I like the early two or three seasons.

I: As Tim Minchin said, Jonathan Creek is a bit like Scooby Doo because no matter how outlandish things get there's always an explanation for everything that makes sense.

BA: Yes, that's part of the fun. It's much better. It's not doing it as old man Granger did it: In a mask, with glowy paint making glowing light.

I: And to go back to London for a little bit for one final question. We've touched a bit already on London's amazing history and the myths that have built up around the city. Is there any particular legend or historical landmark or historical story that you're looking forward to building into a future Peter Grant mystery?

BA: St. Paul's. St. Paul's is featuring very heavily in the book so far. I didn't mean it to, but in the same way the Royal Opera House became more and more important while I was writing the first one, St. Paul's has become more and more important while I'm writing the eighth one - oh god, I’ve lost track, seventh - it's the seventh. Lies Sleeping, anyway. The one after The Hanging Tree. And suddenly St. Paul's. I thought the climax was going to be in one place and now it's going to be somewhere else. And I thought it was going to be about one thing and now it's about something else and I'm sitting there going, ‘Will you make up your mind!?’ Which, of course is futile. I'm arguing with myself. It's very schizophrenic, arguing with yourself. So, yes, I think that St. Paul's is going to get an airing. But there's so much. You know... I haven't even done the Tower of London! It sits there like a big chunky block of history, just there. The Tower of bloody London waiting for me. There's everything from the Bazalgette sewer system - given that it’s about the rivers of London, I didn't even scrape the barrel, the side of a wall, when I did Whispers Under Ground. I did a whole book about the underground and I barely touched on Bazalgette. There's all that kind of stuff. There's so much history. So much stuff, from the Romans to the continuing debate about whether people actually occupied the inside of the city or they didn't. I met a Romanist and they said, ‘No, no. Of course people lived inside the city, we just haven't found the remains yet.’

I: Because we built on top of it.

BA: Yes, we continuously built on it for the last two thousand years and so it's hard to tell. I don't know... when Deloittes or someone needs a new headquarters no doubt we'll find out.

I: Well, Ben, thank you so much for your time today.

BA: That’s all right. It was my pleasure.

#rivers of london #the furthest station #peter grant #thomas nightingale #ben aaronovitch #rol #.txt #cw casual ableist language

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stillness-in-green · 6 years

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i realized mika's the only one of the tekkadan boys to have a specific thing he wants to do outside of fighting- farming- which is kinda ironic considering he's been called aimless. so do you have any ideas of what the other boys could/would like to do as a profession/career outside of fighting (not counting what they actually ended up doing in the epilogue)? doesn't have to be for everybody, just for whoever you can think of. thank you :)

I got this ask ages ago and have been periodically rolling it around in and around other things, but I put it in front of myself again today and finally typed out a response. Below the cut, some thoughts on what these boys would be doing if they had, not only all survived the series, but done so in a way that left them free to pursue whatever ambitions or talents they might desire or discover.

Most of them.

Lets start with the inner circle and work our way out.

I think Biscuit (whose survival is probably the reason everyone else is alive in this hypothetical AU of ours, because he would have an aneurysm before he let Orga join hands with McGillis Fareed) could be good at practically anything he puts his mind to, and therefore, what I think he should probably do is go to school. He obviously values education–he spent lord knows how much time endangering life and limb to earn the money to put Cookie and Cracker through school, and clearly admires how far Savarin’s schooling took him in life. As to what he might study, there are a number of ways that could go–agricultural sciences to help his Granny Sakura with the farm, business to pick up where Savarin left off, possibly a social science so he can find a job in all the inevitable restructuring that Mars’ new government will be doing.

Eugene, more than anyone else, strikes me as wanting to find someone to settle down with. Unlike Shino, who talks about women solely in the context of his sex drive, Eugene is interested in romance. And while he doesn’t seem to have had much luck with that in IBO’s canon epilogue, in a more peaceful time, it’s easy to imagine him devoting more energy to dating. Without Tekkadan eating up his attention, whatever career he finds a way into–possibly bodyguard work still, or maybe an office job like Zack’s–would, I think, be just a way to help support a family.

Akihiro, unlike most all of the boys, already has a girl who’s interested in him, and if he survived this show for this AU, I see no reason to not imagine the Turbines did also. Lafter plainly was never going to leave the Turbines to be with him, of course, but if there was no Tekkadan to protect… I don’t think Naze would be very keen to break his girls-only rule, but every chick must leave the nest eventually–perhaps Lafter and Akihiro might be entrusted with protecting/leading another branch of the business? Given the size of the organization*, there must be other battleships doing the transport business/transport protection thing. Or they could just accompany whichever shipment Naze directed them towards.

That is, though, probably kind of a longshot. Tekkadan Inc. or no, Akihiro has strong feelings about protecting his family, and where I think that’s most likely to leave him is actually in Dante’s place in the epilogue, helping run the orphanage and taking care of children. While I don’t know that gentleness and empathy will ever come easily to him, he would be able to relate with the stories of the many ex-Debris children that orphanage is implied to be seeing post-outlawing-of-legal-child-trafficking, and it would be a way to both honor and grapple with the memory of Masahiro.

Derma would probably end up in about the same place he does in the show–assuming Akihiro doesn’t get adopted by the Turbines, I think Derma would follow him to the orphanage. He had been more directly under Dante’s wing in the series, of course, but for a lot of reasons, I don’t think that the same things that would appeal to Dante in civilian life would hold much interest for Derma. He doesn’t have Dante’s knack with computers; he doesn’t share Dante’s itch for fame. But he does have a load of self-confidence issues that make him exactly as likely to relate to orphan ex-Debris kids as Akihiro’s losses make him. (It’s also the case that Derma is the Tekkadan kid who’s the least explored outside of being a child soldier, so I’m inclined to err on the side of what the show points him to rather than make things up wildly, which is essentially what I’d be doing otherwise.)

Returning to the main group, Shino is easy; in a scenario in which he isn’t a paid civilian soldier, that guy has got “stunt show pilot” written all over him. I doubt Mars’ entertainment industry is so well developed that they need or can afford to hire mobile suit pilots for TV/film work, but I bet the planet can support something more like the Post-Disaster equivalent of monster truck derbies. They’d probably involve old/restored mobile workers, rather than the expensive military hardware that is a proper mobile suit, but I certainly don’t put it past Shino to showboat around in a decommissioned Flauros from time to time.

Dante, always grouped with Shino in combat, would probably follow him here. In a peaceful epilogue, Dante easily could have an entirely lucrative (and possibly illicit) career with his computer skills, but I think he’d finding sitting at a computer all day to be unfathomably boring the more like an actual desk job it became. Compared to the measure of fame Shino would be making for himself, it’s obvious which Dante would go for. Also, with two people with mobile suits, they could possibly get some kind of MS boxing circuit going. I think that would be a very longterm project, more suitable for when things calm back down and there are all these mobile suits around collecting dust.

Yamagi is a mechanic–he’s one of the few characters with job experience other than “soldier,” and there’s no reason to expect him to change streams from the canon to this AU. However, I think Yukinojo and Merribit would have encouraged him to go work with Shino’s pit crew/show team before too long, if he ever held a job down at Kassapa Factory to begin with. He and Shino are, almost certainly, dating on the side. Just, like, fill in Shino and Yamagi for the Special Feeling umbrella meme.

Ride is another gimme. He has an obvious artistic streak, the evidence of which is painted all over the Isaribi, the Tekkadan complex, and the orphanage building. If he didn’t need to fight (and while he was pretty gung-ho about it originally, I have to think the trauma from Hashmal and the agriculture plant is going to be long-lived), it’s very simple to imagine Ride getting nudged into pursuing art in a more professional way. Especially if Kudelia’s new government is subsidizing such things.

Chad is another one that I’d like to see in school. There are several instances in the series that impy he’s doing serious amounts of research/study on the side–he’s constantly shown asking pertinent questions or showcasing some skillset or bit of knowledge that he has no business having access to based simply on what we’re explicitly told about him. Given that, it’d be interesting for the others to convince him to set aside the helper ant mentality and go learn something he thinks is interesting. While Biscuit has family needs to guide his academic choices, Chad could really get into anything. I would slot him into a field that involves research but also quantifiable knowledge–history, for example, or psychology, rather than e.g. theoretical physics. I kind of love the idea of Chad getting access to a bunch of banned books via Kudelia or their Teiwaz connections.

Takaki seems on-track to wind up in politics, if not as a politician himself, then as the sort of lobbyist or aide that any notionally democratic government runs on. Given that he bailed out of fighting by choice, this seems to be his chosen path in any case. He’s also likely to make a hell of a diplomat when he gets older and picks up more confidence in himself.

Aston is so rooted in his self-image of “soldier” that it’s difficult to imagine what he might want to do outside of that field. We do know a few things about him that could give us a direction, though: he’s observant (noticing more about Fuka’s schoolwork than her own brother), he’s relatively prudent and cautious (his teamwork with Vito, and his reluctance to wildly charge McGillis), and he’s a mediator (between his quartet back with the Brewers, and again between Takaki and the other Earth Branch boys). So what kind of career could combine those traits with his gravitation towards military settings? Personally, I think he’d do really well as a crisis negotiator–a specialist brought in by police to help with hostage situations and other threats of e.g. domestic violence, terrorism, suicide, and so on. Of course, the trick there is less getting certified for that job than it is finding a group to work alongside–while I can see him joining an Arbrau/Edmonton police force, it’s much harder to imagine him being able to get a job with Gjallarhorn. In any case, assuming he can manage to find an avenue for said work, he’d be great at it.

This brings us to our Season 2 newbies.

Hush I would mostly see following Mikazuki into farming. Not just to be following Mika, mind, but because Hush’s motivation, beyond a big ol’ chip on his shoulder about the Alaya Vijnana system, is much the same as so many others–to protect and provide for his social circle. If he’s provided an avenue for that that isn’t constant endangerment of life and limb, I think it’s what he’d go for. And farming is helping to provide for a great many people, some very directly–the fact that he can still be around to help Mikazuki is just a bonus.

Zack joined Tekkadan because of their fame, rather than out of real necessity–so what exactly did he think was so cool about Tekkadan to begin with? Given his reticence about actual combat when he comes face to face with it, perhaps it’s more the “spitting in Gjallarhorn’s eye” aspect than the feats of badassity? Given that, what could he do that would scratch that itch? Well, he’s a hell of a programmer, and has Dante available to teach him anything about hacking he doesn’t already know. I think he’d be very happy being one of those whistle-blower internet Ariadne activist types, finding secret information, info on cover-ups, or details on corruption, and providing proof of such things to the world at large, particularly given how government-controlled the media is in the setting.

Dane is already living a life free of fighting, so it’s possible that, absent Tekkadan being a bunch of criminals, he might end up working at Kassapa Factory anyway, or perhaps going with Yamagi to Shino and Dante’s venture. He’s another big mystery as to things he might enjoy outside of work; for example, he evinces little patience with Hush until Hush starts showing some basic empathy/humility, which leads me to think that close work with people would probably not be his thing. So sticking to work with his hands, I wonder if he, like Ride, would get any mileage out of art? He could snap paintbrushes like twigs, of course, but I can see him being good at something like pottery, and if his pre-show history is as violent as we’re lead to believe, I can see it being relaxing–probably as a hobby, rather than a career, just something he can do on his own time and terms.

So, that’s every–mm? A significant exclusion? A deuteragonist undiscussed?

Oh, right.

So, Orga. What would Orga do in peacetime? Well, that’s difficult to even try to conceive. Orga, like McGillis, is massively defined by both his ambition and his dissatisfaction with the status quo. He’s never satisfied, never content; he interprets Mikazuki’s intense gaze as a challenge, and it never stops pushing him forward, no matter who else tries to tell him he’s going too fast. What could Orga ever do in peacetime? It’s tempting to say that every one of the hypothetical outcomes above was paid for in Orga’s blood, because less than a handful of these people would ever desert Orga if he lived, and while he lived and had people looking to him, he would never stop. In that way, Tekkadan is in a feedback loop that they can’t get out of without a system-redefining change. Looking at his skill set, we again find a bunch of things that suggest that Orga works best as a leader–he’s canny, highly charismatic, a quick thinker, and he has killer instincts, albeit with some Mikazuki-sized blind spots. This is a kid practically fated to be a gang leader–and he’s also oathsworn to the mob, making getting out of that life safely a dicey prospect.

So what is there for him, if not fighting? Purely as an imaginary exercise, he’d be a scary effective community leader. I mean, just imagine being a city representative showing up to a town hall meeting and this is waiting in the front row:

But that’s still pretty mundane. Lets try something really different on for size.

During the season break, Orga is attending some official function at Saisei, lurking around afterward and waiting for a chance to talk to Naze. Out of nowhere, he gets jumped by the fashion equivalent of Saisei’s eccentric mechanic, who insists that Orga’s je ne sais quoi levels are off the charts, and he absolutely must grant her at least one modeling session. Naze, walking in on this conversation, has a huge laugh about it and goads Orga into accepting. And then the whole of the second season gets derailed because suddenly Orga is faced with the argument that sufficiently famous people are also rich and powerful, rich and powerful enough that he could relocate his entire gang to some private satellite around Jupiter if he were so inclined. And maybe it feels immaterial, and maybe it wasn’t the method what he expected, but that doesn’t make the paycheck any less real. The designer tells him in no uncertain terms that if he wants to continue, she will personally talk McMurdo Barriston’s ear off about how he is completely wasting this surly teenager’s God-given personal magnetism.

Orga immediately has a huge crisis over it, because it feels terrifyingly unmasculine and he has no concept of the term “soft power.” Atra loves it, though, and Biscuit thinks it’s strange but effective. Things almost fall through anyway when it comes out that Orga has a whisker implant, but the designer is insistent, so they end up just photo-editing it out and limiting his public appearances, which is just as well, because he finds crowds and fans alike to be extremely uncomfortable.

Tekkadan still do odd jobs for Teiwaz now and again, like protecting Kudelia from Dawn Horizon, but are mostly out of the line of fire when McGillis starts looking around for allies. McGillis, deprived of a Tekkadan he can talk around on joining him, is left profoundly annoyed. How things go from there is a whole new question.

*Allow me to quote from this post:

In the interest of context for the number I’m about to lay on you, the Dawn Horizon group–a band of pirates who have ten ships and are considered sizeable enough that they fill a niche that’s important to Gjallarhorn, and would also be too much a pain to try to oust entirely, have around 2,500 members. Wow! That’s a lot!

The Turbines have 50,000 members.

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#mobile suit gundam: iron-blooded orphans #gundam ibo #g tekketsu #my writing #asks #orga's lucrative modelling career is a hilarious au and i thank you for the opportunity to discover it #stillness-answers #ibo meta

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aleatoryalarmalligator · 7 years

Text

Life Story Part 53

I had been looking forward to the new Willy Wonka all summer long. I knew Johnny Depp was going to be in it, and I loved him, and I also loved the old movie with Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka. Sarah and I bought ourselves tickets after school one day to discover that it was quite disappointing.. It wasn't really Johnny Depp's fault entirely, though many people didn't like his performance as Willy Wonka and I didn't much care for it either – truth be told. I honestly didn't like the way it was filmed or the campy cutesy way they portrayed the children and their parents, and this has a lot to do with the fact that Tim Burton seems to have more or less lost his touch (at least in my opinion). The score was terrible and continuous. Most movie music, particularly the kind used in family films is actually kind of terrible and will kill a movie for me in the end. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the original one, and the book itself were actually quite dark in a way that the new remake failed to be. The first movie seemed symbolic of society to me, whereas the second was trying to be quirky. It wasn't that they altered the story. I understand that a new direction is creatively interesting and inevitable to any remake, but the movie itself seemed very empty. You didn't get the bleak metaphors in the second remake. You didn't get anything that compared to the colored lights playing on Gene Wilder's face as they went through the chocolate tunnel and he sang his little song.

I was also disappointed that Marilyn Manson didn't get the role of Willy Wonka. He had wanted it, but ultimately, the movie makers were too worried about making it too frightening for most viewers. Marilyn Manson would have been perfect I think. It was a movie I think that he had personally loved too much himself to mess up. And I always had loved the original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as a child as well, which might have been why I cared so much and was so disappointed by the end product. Whenever I find myself sad or disappointed or lonely in life, I sometimes laugh at myself and and sing Cheer Up Charlie in my head in order to mock myself.

Dare I say, I was obsessed with Marilyn Manson. I think I have mentioned this before, however he was definitely my new number one by the time I was sixteen years old. At the time, I guess I found myself drawn to him, less for his appearance, but by how misunderstood he was and how he seemed to have mastered his message and the collected and methodically he spoke and presented his ideas to people who hated him and all the hype that came with that. I read his biography – which was really more of an autobiography – only he had mostly narrated his life I think through tape recorded conversation and had someone else write it – so technically it was a biography and that inspired me a lot. It probably influenced the language, subject matter, and the way I try to tell stories to a certain extent. While it is true, there are some times in that book more towards the end where he really went too far for me, I rather appreciated the dark honesty and combination of dark comedy and intimacy about the book altogether. He spoke honestly, and that makes most people uncomfortable. I really like uncomfortable subject matter.

There were opinions that he held about creating a world of chaos and drug abuse as some kind of lash back to the postmodern world that has made many people – such as myself if I am to be honest, that I no longer agree with at all (Honestly, he probably doesn't either – the book came out in 1998). The story was very focused on him, and his own selfishness. It wasn't a cruel form of selfishness, but a very self aware one. This is something that people don't like to see in themselves, but Marilyn Manson was all about that. He was very into being driven and moving forward – which I also admired. Some of the selfish stuff he wanted to do led him to pushing himself into some creepy situations – and those are places I honestly would never go, probably because drugs were involved. The notion that you can fix society by breaking down all rules and social structure was lame – and I even thought so in my teenage wannabe-just-like-my-idols larva stage. Also, when the singer for Jack off Jill said that his guitarist Twiggy raped her, I do believe it. Marilyn Manson didn't have anything to do with that, but when you read that book, there was a very strong sense of them breaking down social rules. And there was very little place for women – because of course there generally isn't in the music business. And now, I can honestly say, I don't like Marilyn Manson's music very much. It's okay – but not great like I once thought. I still feel like he had tapped into something very real. And the book was ultimately hilarious – with his choice of phrases and words. I think it really influenced me and it might be a small part of why I am writing my own life story as I am today. And he really showed the strange looking, average people lost in a world of consumerism and shallow beauty standard, how you could transcend that. You don't have to fit a mold. You can create their own form of beauty and become a work of art, rather than accept mediocrity. This idea really revolutionized the way I looked in the mirror everyday.

Most of the time, on the drive to and fro from Kendrick to Moscow and back again in the evening, we would listen to Mudhoney a lot. The reason we liked Mudhoney so much was because we were poor. Sarah and I never had money for decent albums, and when we bought an album, we would listen to it to death. For whatever reason, Hastings had plentiful stacks of Mudhoney cds, often for only three or four dollars a piece. Had we had more money, we would have experimented, but that wasn't there for us. Buying an album was taking a chance. Neither one of us had a job, and we were at the mercy of rare handouts from our parents. So if we spent fifteen dollars on an album that sucked, it was very disappointing. But there was a certain kind of delight in listening to Mudhoney out in the farm roads of the Pallouse Hills. The members of Mudhoney themselves were very apart of the rural north west themselves. They're music seemed relevant and very close to home.

Aside from the general music we had been listening to, the mixes that I made from Danny's computer on the weekends, Marilyn Manson and Mudhoney, I discovered Bob Dylan. Sarah's mother owned the album of Blood on the Tracks. I think lyrically, it was the best thing I had ever heard. It kind of surprised me, since it was a lot more mature than what I generally wanted to listen to. Bob Dylan's unique narration of thoughts and ideas brought my own thinking to a much higher state. Over the course of that year, even though I was fond of a lot of music, Bob Dylan rose and rose in my mind. It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) to me was like a tearing apart of everything in society and expressing it for what it was, and even though I felt this dread about my life and my own future, the growing awareness of death that waits for us behind everything we see, think, do and say, about human beings as the collective and what we have been building since we came into existence, there was this serene sense of everything would be okay. That song really built a foundation for me. There were many dark nights driving home that late fall and throughout the winters, where both Sarah and I would listen to that song in the dark winding roads in rural farm fields well off the highway. Something about the way we would listen to that, and the fact that even though we were a ways out from Moscow, you could still see the light's of the city miles away playing on the dark clouds that loomed above us. Bob Dylan introduced me to the abyss.

Sarah was still very much apart of the CKY internet forum, but she seemed to have left the business of commenting on the forum and arguing with the pointless trolls on there, since it was mostly composed of obnoxious abusive assholes who just hated women, and she had singled out a few friends over the internet that she liked to correspond with online. One of these friends was a fellow who lived over in Georgia. His name was Alex, he was two years older than Sarah and I, and he seemed rather intelligent. He played in a hardcore punk band. Even though he knew a lot of people who considered him a friend, he didn't consider many other people his friend. Sarah was maybe the first real friend he seemed to have. Tough he played in this punk band, he preferring more melodic and organized sounding classic rock/pop music like The Beatles or Paul Simon, and mostly just played in the band he was in for the experience and because his friends were into it. There were parts of the concerts where Alex would rap. He enjoyed writing, and he was far far better at expressing himself that either Sarah or I were. He had skills as an orator.

He also had a substance abuse problem with cough syrup. He took other drugs, and I think over the course of that year he ended up getting into some legal trouble. He was given a counselor, and the counselor betrayed his trust and told his parents what he had done. So there was a lot of that. And then at some point that year, even though he had straight A's and could graduate, he ended up punching one of his friends while they were doing some school project and he got kicked off and went for a GED instead. I never spoke to him. But Sarah talked to him all the time, and she would tell me these things – so by extension, I felt we were friends in an odd way.

It was Alex who got Sarah into Queens of the Stone Age and into Mark Lanegan. Half the time, I was wanting to listen to Hole, Marilyn Manson, mixed cds, and Bob Dylan, Sarah wanted to listen to Queens of the Stone Age and Mark Lanegan. Mark Lanegan, though not a household name, is a well respected singer and songwriter. He initially was in a band called Screaming Trees in the early nineties, had been a friend to Kurt Cobain, and eventually went solo, got clean off of heroin, and his music drastically became far more folk inspired. His voice is distinctly low and raspy. He's compared to Tom Waits a little bit – though they are still quite different. He is a very tall, very serious looking. I mention these details about Mark Lanegan because when Sarah found Mark Lanegan, she became crazy obsessed with him.

Queens of the Stone Age gave our trips to school and particularly back from school, this very particular sound. The album Songs For the Deaf made me feel like we were hundreds of miles away from humanity. Outside the small 1979 Honda Civic, the world was a dark place and we might have been the only two people who existed, Sarah and I – since it was usually night time by the time we got out of school later on as the fall played into the winter. Sarah would also listen to Mark Lanegan's new album at the time, Bubblegum and it's EP cousin Here Comes That Weird Chill. It's a really great record, the both of them, very blues inspired but also very indirectly – dark, bassy and minimalist and lyrically strong. Sarah was madly in love with Mark Lanegan. And we used to laugh about this -as Mark Lanegan was in his forties, and Sarah a sixteen year old girl. He became such an ingrained part of her identity that it's still very much a part of who she is.

Aside from these nights driving home, and the time we put in at school, or the time at home where we would sometimes still have fights that ended in us both crying and falling asleep, we would once a month afford to eat lunch at the China Buffet in the mall. We had so little money, and our parents didn't have much to give for us to eat out. Sarah often was the one who bought us lunch. I don't know if my father or mother can truly appreciate just how often Sarah had to use her chore money to feed the both of us. Today, I kind of look suspiciously at the China Buffet's food – excluding the added fact that I don't consume animal products anymore. It's far far far too cheap and that makes me suspicious since I know they are still churning a profit most of the time. Most of it isn't truly or strictly Chinese – more loosely Americanized Chinese inspired foods and if you want better quality Chinese/Thai/Korean/Japanese food it's better to just look up the reviews online and go to a real restaurant. In any case, it was six dollars a piece for us to eat there, and neither one of us ever even had that much to pay for food – which is kind of hard for me to believe now. Six dollars to me then is like sixty to me now.

I remember there was a weekend when Samantha, who I had not seen much since leaving Kendrick, who was still dating Adam, invited Sarah and I to do to the movies with her, a silly romantic comedy called Failure to Launch with Matthew Mcconaughey. For some reason, I didn't think I needed to pay my own way. Samantha was annoyed with me, and angrily paid for my ticket. I felt badly, in predictable fashion. In the end, I more or less remember Samantha most as someone who was always annoyed with me for my personal failings at being adultlike. After the movie was over, we were driving home, and Samantha and Adam were just ridiculous. They were fighting about nothing essentially. It's something couples do often, and I've never fully understood it. Samantha was being kind of quiet, and Adam was going 'what's wrong Sam??', and Samantha would huff and say 'Nothing....'. He would implore that something must be wrong, because she's 'being all weird'. I didn't see the weirdness personally, but whatever. She seemed to be playing like she was upset, but was hiding something from him, and he was vying to find out what that something was, trying to drive and get some strong eye contact in there. Meanwhile, Sarah and I are sheepishly in the back seat watching all this go down as the dark silhouettes of Samantha and Adam continued on and on this way.

It was like they were fake fighting. Samantha was talking in a high pitched voice. Nobody was saying anything. And then at some point one of them would accuse the other one of not loving them anymore, but of course it was said not like it was a real problem, but like a way to manipulate the other. Then they would sort of weepily banter back and forth. In the end, Adam would put on Styx's Lady in the car stereo, and they would begin making out like it had never happened. I came to the conclusion that neither one of them knew the other at all. For them, like many many people, being in a relationship and being in love is more pushing one another's buttons looking for reactions. There is a lot of power stuff going back and forth. I can't say I am one of those people or not. I never feel like I am looking to press buttons, but I probably am – I may be the worst.

On the weekends, we were at Danny's very small one bedroom house. It was very small – I cannot express that enough. My mom and Danny slept in the bedroom. David was set up in this small hallway TV room to play Danny's bad video games – like American Choppers and other biker related games that nobody really liked but Danny. Allison slept on the floor or a very small loveseat. And I slept in a recliner in the living room, but I would generally be on the computer until three or four in the morning trying to find decent songs to burn. The house was small, and it was also very muggy. Most of the time, my mother and Danny were gone. Nobody was in a good mood, but none of us fought either. I remember awkwardly asking Danny if he wanted to use his computer when he would get off after work, and he would say no, but would sort of mean yes.

What confused me, was that it was clear that we were taking up his space. We took up the televisions, we took up the computer. We probably took up the bathroom and the refrigerator. He wasn't really rude to us about it, but he didn't seem to enjoy it either. And yet, when my mother had found her own place, and was making good money as a bartender, he had demanded that she move in with him and quit her job. He didn't want her working at the bar anymore, because he didn't want her being ogled at by drunk men. So she took a job at a boy's home. It was this place that they sent mentally ill boys between the ages of fourteen and twenty two. You had to have done something criminal to be in there. It wasn't quite an insane asylum, nor was it quite juvy. It was a little bit of both. A few times while my mother was working there, she got knocked down by the boy's who were stronger than her, and beaten up a bit. It was a very rough job and the pay wasn't good, though she did seem to like it a lot.

But, as I mentioned earlier. Almost all my time was devoted to school work. By November, I was just beginning to get the hang of this school thing. I was finally becoming somewhat receptive to Mike teaching me, and I felt rather special. Most people would have thought that an alternative school education would be deluded and easier than the main public schools. Actually, the alternative school was much more challenging, and even more rewarding. Mike didn't like testing at all. He never used it except in the rare occasion where the state demanded it. Personally, he didn't like grades, though he understood that they gave an indication of how you were doing. All he really wanted you to do is learn how to think critically about ideas. And I was starting to trust Mike and Jenni a lot. I trusted them more than I had ever trusted most adults. Mike and Jenni at home had a son and a daughter. I remember their daughter's name was Sunshine. Both of them had bright smiling faces, their parents actually seemed to want a little more than to keep them fed and clothed. In fact, they didn't exist solely for their parent's benefits at all. The point of their existences was for them to become capable strong adults. They actually cared how their kids were getting on in life and how they coped with things. Mike and Jenni would pool up the money they made every school year, and they would take that money, get visas for the whole family and visit places in Europe and South America every summer. They seemed incredibly happy – living somehow in a world that I could never truly belong in. And yet, Mike obviously at the same time was able to take on a lot of philosophical issues and to face very harsh realities of humankind, and we were always there to remind him of that.

I could not help but feel a little bit jealous of their family. Not that I was crazy envious about it, but I really was beginning to care a lot about Mike and Jenni and what they thought of my own future. Dare I say it, the little rebellious satanist that I was secretly wanted their approval quite a bit. I wanted them to see great potential in me and to care about me like I was one of their own smiling happy kids. But I obviously wasn't. No matter how many books I read or how much I wrote, I was still very much a member of my own clan. Internally, I felt like a sick little creature that lingered on the outskirts of their happy home. Metaphorically, I, as the sickly thing, on a cold winter night would stare into the the household of their happy family and long to be one of them as they ate dinner or sat around a Christmas Tree (the image that comes to mind). But of course, that could never be.

Understandably of course, Mike had this wall towards his students becoming too close. And it seemed painfully unfair to me, even though it was the only way that this school could function. He broke layers and walls up in his students, but they could never really get to know him. He didn't lie to anyone exactly, just pushed students away subtly at any hint that they were getting to be that way. It was a mindfuck and it could hurt your feelings if you were vulnerable. He knew that he had a very strong affect on his students and he was afraid he would meet an especially vulnerable student one day who would either kill themselves, and break his heart a bit, or get confused about the nature of their teacher-student relationship. He also wanted us to be self sufficient. It was contradictory, but in order to try to help us to helping ourselves, he had to get inside of our minds. He knew what he was doing. Jenni and him had met in high school. They went to college together and eventually got married. They were incredibly close, and I venture to guess that while Jenni was taking psychology courses, Mike learned second hand from her and was using it on his students to retrain us. He was obsessively curious about that kind of stuff.

What I did always find strange, and what I eventually found out was that Mike and Jenni were extremely religious. Mike was very decent about not mixing his Christianity with his teaching. He taught about human truths that went to the core of the human spirit so to speak, but he did so in a way that an atheist could understand as easily as a religious person could. I respected Mike enough not to challenge him on religious grounds, but it bothered me. Mike was very much dedicated to real true debate and expressing your ideas. He wanted his students to know how to debate like pros. So I found it strange that he had decided to believe in the bible so heavily. He questioned none of it. Or at least, I really imagined that he didn't. I found out offhandedly from Jenni that both of them believed the first testament when it said that there was a time when men grew to be a thousand years old, and the world was only about six thousand years old at that. It was preposterous. Mike even played guitar in the church band.

I am quite certain that Mike converted to Christianity because of Jenni. I am not saying he didn't believe it. I think he did. But it was much more of a struggle for him than it was for her – not for reasons of wanting to sin or anything like that, but because he had to at some point shut his mind off and have faith in something without question. I knew that, because Mike tended to challenge concepts a lot. And as I was still in my first year atheist stage, I really wanted to question him. But I promised myself I wouldn't.

All the same, I learned a lot about Christianity indirectly in a way that created greater complexity for me and my schemas about what it meant to be Christian. For one thing, we often think about fundamentalist Christians as being the Pro-Trump types. They tend to vote right wing, have a mistrust for education, they tend to be either stingy and rich, or hopelessly poor. We see them in the political arena often, holding their signs against abortion, gay marriage. Mike – though I think it was a contradiction, was not against gay people. Jenni might have been, but Mike was not. If he had a problem with it, it didn't seem to create any sort of riff in his mind. I never asked him in specific detail about what he thought, but it was clear that this was a nonissue for him. He was much more privately adamant about evolution not being how we came to be what we are than he was about God hating gay people.

I once asked him about abortion. I didn't ask him because I wanted to fight, and at first I had to assure him this was not the case. What I really wanted was to ask someone who would be obviously caught in the middle – having strong ties to the liberal education system and the church. His answer was that he personally only in his own conception of the world could not imagine not wanting to have the baby. He just saw life as a blessing and human beings as being primarily good – so only good could come from a new baby in the world. But he let me know that this was just him. He was not about to say that he was the ultimate authority of what should and should not happen in the world. He felt it was a woman's place to make the decision and it was between them and their own truths. He could not possibly comprehend what everyone's situation or reality is like. And I really respected that answer. Obviously, the benefits to being in his shoes probably would have made having children not such a bad thing and he was fully willing to admit that he had a personal bias for himself that he and Jenni both agreed with. But he wasn't getting in anyone else's business.

Another interesting thing I learned from him came from the time I asked him about what he felt about the division of church and state. I knew vaguely that there were a lot of politicians who wanted to combine Christianity with government policies, and most hardcore Christians were all for it. When I asked him about it, he explained something to me that I hadn't really thought of before. Mike really didn't want religion and government to combine at all. He didn't feel like any of it had to do with being close to god or being enlightened by Jesus. And aside from opposing it on the grounds of religion having a way of corrupting our civil liberties, he actually felt that government made religion worse too. It was intrusive to his spiritual life. He didn't want government in his religion. He respected those boundaries because he felt the idea of government being mixed with his personal faith actually tampered with his relationship with god and brought it down to earthly places. I keep these conversations in mind, because even though I am not a Christian at all, I felt that his answers were well thought out and what I wish more Christians were like.

Mike also taught us about Islam and Judaism in an incredibly fair way. We spent two weeks studying Islam, reading texts – in a secular way. We watched several documentaries on the history of Islam. Mike had no problem with Muslims, and in fact had many Muslim friends who he respected. This isn't to say that Mike gave us the whole truth about Islam, but he basically gave us a much clearer view of the religion as a whole. All in all, it's equally as violent as the bible is. To a degree however, when I compared the two religions, I actually found myself gravitating towards Islam the most. I wasn't by any means dropping my atheistic views. But I could see certain elements of Islam that resonated more deeply with me. Their idea of God felt more in depth than the Christian god. I admired how they represented their idea of God through architecture. Not that I don't love a good rosary or catholic cathedral – I do. But when you are trying to conceive of something as profound as the creator of all beings alive or dead, some all knowing consciousness that lays beyond time and space itself, than the design and math that is used in Islamic architecture fits better with my idea of how one should go about thinking of it. With Christian architecture, it often feels like you are looking less to the heavens than you are to yourself.

Anyway, I am very happy that I was introduced to religion in this way. It didn't so much change my views about God, but gave me a greater appreciation for the fables and stories that resonate with people. I felt for the first time in my life, connected to people who lived thousands of years before me, and I think it grounded me in the history of my own existence, what it really means to be alive, to pursue truth for truth's sake, to actually want to make the world a better place for more than just myself, and to harness beauty. It put in motion a need to find meaning behind everything.

After the first quarter there was supposed to be a parent-teacher conference. Even though it had only been a few months, and even though I still occasionally saw my father for a rare three or four hours a week – I wanted him to come to this conference. I wanted him to see how much better I was doing in school. Given what a academic failure I had grown into being over the previous seven years, I wanted him to sort of acknowledge that I was flipping things around. He promised he would show up. But of course, he forgot. My father was desperately trying to find a way to hide the pain of Patty's death. He was online dating again, more as a distraction I suppose than a genuine need to be close to anyone. After Patty, there was a string of forty or so women he would talk to for a time. Most of these relationships never went past the telephone, and I cannot even remember them all. You could pick up a phone book and just start naming off women, and many of those names would come to mind as the name of someone my father online dated for a time.

And when he wasn't doing that, he was buying speakers and musical equipment on the internet. Rooms of our house were beginning to fill up with speakers. He became so emphatic about certain products that he would spend hours on the phone, till he eventually was talking to CEO's of these companies. And even stranger still, my bald conservative father who had accused me of being high for a few years at this point, who loved listening to conservative talk radio for five hours straight most days, decided that it was fine for he himself to hang out with the druggy crowd of teenage boys in town. It was a strange sight for me, and I didn't know what to think about it. I was mostly too busy learning in school, but I observed it from a distance and had to scratch my head.

Sarah's mother did showed up to the school for the conference that day, so I got a ride home with her and Sarah – thankfully. Carol and Sarah might have felt a little bad for me. There is something incredibly disappointing about being forgotten or stood up. I remember we went out to a Mexican restaurant afterwards that made very tasty salsa and homemade chips, and I cheered up somewhat after that.

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matterprints · 7 years

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Connected Clothing: Jennifer Nini

Jennifer Nini is a writer, activist and the founding editor of Eco Warrior Princess - an online platform discussing all things concerning eco-fashion and a green lifestyle. Her journey to sustainable and ethical fashion is one where intention meets mindfulness. As action creates impact, Jennifer and her partner decided to move from city to farm to start an organic food venture while cultivating a permaculture farm and food forest. From what she wears to how she lives - Jennifer Nini makes a conscious decision to actively be a part of the solution.

What is your intention behind what you wear and what you buy?

Process and material are just as important as style. I seek first clothes that are well designed, and made sustainably and ethically. The main motivation is that I want the clothes I wear to be biodegradable, not just because it feels better on my skin but because of its impact. What this means for me is that I usually buy natural and organic fabrics, like organic cotton, lyocell, tencel, hemp, and bamboo - plant based materials that are built to last and transeasonal. Of course, bamboo isn’t as eco-friendly because of the way it’s spun but I trust that over time, it will be improved.

When I’m adding pieces, I know what my non-negotiables are. It has to be sustainable and ethical - from process to product. Living on an organic farm, I’m committed to wearing fabrics that are sustainable because I see first hand what the impact is from that - and so I’ll steer away from anything synthetically made and created with chemicals. Aside from sustainability, I’m also passionate about the ethical aspects of fashion - it’s important to me that the garment workers, farmers, and people involved in the supply chain and production are paid and treated fairly.

I tend not to buy very frequently, when I need an item I try instead to look for secondhand options first. Where a brand gets me is the story, if they practice what they preach and value their positive impact in the community and the environment - then I’m more inclined to support them.

When I say that it’s something I’m passionate about, it’s not just a superficial statement. This really is my life and purpose.

Tell us more about your journey to ethical fashion, was it a change that happened over time? How did this come about?

Like many modern women, I grew up in a time of fast fashion. This generation is the first where fast fashion has completely taken a hold of the industry, before that I would say that conscious fashion and respect of the garment and trade was more important. I did a Fashion Business course and in that time my business partner and I went to China in 2008 on a mission to start our own fashion brand. In our time there, we learned about the background of fashion - everything behind the scenes, beyond the glory and beauty of aesthetics and advertisements. We travelled around South China, in cities like Shenzhen and Guangzhou to look at the different factories and got a glimpse of the industry that one rarely gets to see. We never did get the fashion brand off the ground, but it was still a significant trip for us. It was the key changing point for me where I really thought about my clothes, who made them, the factories involved, and the way the workers were treated - this was the catalyst to my journey with ethical fashion.

Growing up, I had always been politically active - my parents fled from the Philippines because they felt that the government was corrupted and the President ended up stealing millions of dollars. I learned from a young age that it was vital to stand for social justice. I had always been going to protest marches, but I never thought about fashion in that same light. To come back from that trip in China was an awakening for me, and I started talking to anyone who would listen. My partner encouraged me to start a blog and so I did - that’s how Eco Warrior Princess came to be.

The name Eco Warrior Princess is a tribute to the fact that I was living in cosmopolitan Melbourne and about to make my move to a rural area of 300 people where I would live in a tent for 4 months. I left Melbourne because I wanted to start producing my own organic foods. The farm runs 100% on solar power, it’s sustainable, self-sufficient, and we recently received our organic certification - our life has completely shifted to a more primitive sort of lifestyle but I love it because of its low impact. There’s 40 odd varieties of things that I grow - from mangoes to nuts. It’s a cross of two worlds, cocktail parties and organic farms. I moved to the country to live off the land and be one with nature, and it’s taken me several years after to learn more about what this lifestyle really means. When I say that it’s something I’m passionate about, it’s not just a superficial statement. This really is my life and purpose.

What are some of the items currently in your closet?

Actually, I don’t really have a closet - not in the conventional sense anyways. 3 years ago, my partner and I bought a farm and we’ve since yet to build one. What I use instead is just a tall boy - a set of drawers to hold my clothes. I figured since I don’t really have many clothes, I don’t exactly need a closet. I have a highly curated selection of clothes, it’s completely minimal with only the necessities. Most of them are pieces that I can wear easily with others, secondhand pieces, and gifts that I’ve received through Eco Warrior Princess.

What would your ideal wardrobe look like?

Most people might not agree, but I would say my ideal wardrobe is the one I have now. When I look at it, there’s nothing that I would consider adding. The only thing I can see myself needing would be a pair of gum boots for the farm. Every 6 months, I sort through what I own and make sure it’s curated properly so that I’m not holding onto anything that I don’t need.

Vintage pieces are my weakness when it comes to curating my closet - it’s like a collectible for me. I have high respect for the construction and uniqueness of the garment, they’re one of a kind treasures that you won’t be able to find anywhere else. I tend not to buy multiples of anything, I’m not looking to buy repeats - I prefer pieces that are unique in look and history.

What do my clothes say about me as a human being and the identity I created for myself today?

What statement do you want to make with the clothes you wear?

Clothes, for me, are a sense of expression and an artistic endeavor. Everything I own is highly functional and versatile - it’s an expression of who I am first and foremost, then what I stand for. Because of the industry I’m in and the values that I’m passionate about, what I choose to wear goes beyond the surface of how it looks on my body. That might be the first conversation shared, but the more important one to consider is - what do my clothes say about me as a human being and the identity I created for myself today?

If your house is on fire, what are the five pieces you would save - even if it meant running back into a burning house?

Definitely my vintage dress, it was an old 1960s style dress that I found in a shop in Melbourne. I brought it to a tailor to get the sleeves cut off and it’s one of my go to pieces. I’d also grab my leather skirt, a secondhand vintage piece I bought 10-15 years ago (before I made the decision to go vegan) and it still fits me perfectly. My engagement dress would be another to take along, the year I got engaged I didn’t want to buy anything new - even for my wedding, and so I found a vintage dress from the 1950s and got it secondhand. I was lucky to score it and till now, I still wear it on other occasions. There’s a pair of skinny jeans that I got as hand me downs from my niece, she was going to get rid of them but I saw it before she did and grabbed it. I was on the lookout for a pair of black skinny jeans and since then they’ve been a staple. The final thing I would grab is an old hoodie that I’ve had since I was 16, it was my first boyfriend’s basketball hoodie - it’s a sentimental piece to me because he’s since passed away and it’s something of his that I have to hold on to.

Sustainability isn’t just about consuming what’s there, it’s also making sure that you’re consuming someone else’s waste.

What advice do you have for those who want to build a more sustainable closet?

Sustainability is such a broad topic. I think the first step is to focus on what’s important to you. What is important to you - veganism, locally produced, natural fabrics, workers’ rights? What are the key factors and values that matter most to you? If you’re able to define what that is first, then it’ll be easier to break it down into something that’s easier to tackle later on.

Do your own research! Some people find it difficult, but there’s a lot of apps and platforms available like Project Just where you can check up on certain brands. Research before you make a purchase.

Always look for secondhand stuff before making a brand new purchase. Sustainability isn’t just about consuming what’s there, it’s also making sure that you’re consuming someone else’s waste. It’s a part of sustainable fashion to shop secondhand - to reduce waste that goes into the landfill. Try first to purchase something secondhand, and only when you can’t then buy something new.

All photos were taken by Ben McGuire.

We began with the intention to inspire consciousness in our everyday, to cultivate a culture that encourages others to uncover where and why something is made. The Connected Clothing series spotlights on different individuals in the fashion industry - why they wear what they wear and the significance behind their choices.

Read the rest of the series here.

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thecoroutfitters · 7 years

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Not so long ago, activated carbon was a common cure for many different ailment as well as a common household staple. Old habits and remedies should be revived: they are based on natural solutions much safer for our health than anything nowadays industries are offering us.

If you know how to use activated carbon, you might revert serious health problems now as well as prevent some of the worst ones that will occur in the aftermath of disaster.

If you want a good “multi-use” item in your medicine kit, activated carbon is the one to carry.

From removing ingested poison from stomach to air and water filtration, keep reading to find out the top 12 uses for activated charcoal.

Remove Ingested Poison from Stomach

No matter how hard you try, there are going to be times when you consume something that will present a danger to your health. By the same token, if you have livestock or other animals living with you, there is also a chance they will ingest some kind of poison that needs to be absorbed by a media such as activated carbon.

Fortunately, making and using activated carbon for this purpose uses the same basic process as you would use for most other purposes. You may also want to purchase pre-manufactured activated carbon at a local pharmacy that is made for this purpose.

Discover the survival things the Pioneers took with them when they traveled for months!

Reduce Gas Reflux and Stomach Bloating

Given the number of toxins and dangerous additives in modern foods, it should come as no surprise that acid reflux and stomach bloating are on the rise. When you factor in side effects from various drugs, this situation gets even worse.

During a major social collapse or other crisis, you may wind up consuming other foods that irritate your stomach simply because you have no choice. These and many other situations may be made even worse because you may not have any remedies on hand to deal with the situation. Activated carbon capsules can help reduce both stomach bloat and acid.

Aquarium Filtration

If you are going to grow your own food, aquariums and fish ponds are likely to be part of your plans. Even if you choose not to eat the fish, you will still need waste from them for hydroponics and other forms of fertilizer.

Large numbers of fish are hard to keep in a smaller area without the use of activated carbon.

Here are some ways activated carbon makes it easier to start and maintain a healthy aquarium or fish pond:

Activated carbon helps remove gas based fish waste from the water.

When aquarium and pond water is cleaner, there is a less chance of toxic algae buildup.

Water that is full of toxins increases the risk of fish disease. Given that some fish carry TB and other illnesses, you will not want to take this kind of chance, especially if you are planning to eat the fish or use the water to fertilize plants.

When aquarium water is full of fish waste or other toxins, the fish will be less likely to breed and produce healthy offspring. While this may not be of much concern while you can still buy fish, it will most certainly be a problem when you must replace them in a crisis situation.

Aquarium and pond water are notorious for pulling toxins from the air. As a result, if the area is polluted, you can rest assured that the water in the aquarium is also in bad condition. Activated carbon will pull these toxins from the water and help ensure your fish remain as healthy as possible.

To use activated carbon for this purpose, just break bigger pieces down to about the size of a pea and add them to the air filter.

I have used bubble filters for decades in my aquariums and have never needed to buy pre-fabricated cartridges for them.

If you plan to use bigger or stronger power filters, then you may need to find some way to refill the cartridge once the activated carbon needs replacing. Some aquarists say it is possible to reuse the carbon after heating it up and letting it dry out. I have never gotten this or other variations to work properly.

Keep Your Teeth Clean

Many people are surprised to learn that activated carbon can remove all kinds of stains and hidden debris from teeth. No matter whether you want to whiten your teeth or keep them clean without using toothpaste, activated carbon will be very useful.

All you need to do is grind the activated carbon down to a powder and mix it with some water. Let the black paste sit on your teeth for a minute or so, brush, and then rinse off as you would any other toothpaste. Since activated carbon doesn’t have a good taste or texture, you may want to follow up with a peppermint wash or something else that helps you feel more comfortable.

You can use baking soda as toothpaste and then follow up with activated carbon now as well as during a major disaster.

Modern toothpaste is filled with carcinogens and other dangerous toxins. As with the air and water, more than a few of the chronic illnesses you are dealing with right now may be made worse by toothpaste.

Give activated carbon a try and see how you feel both from a dental and physical perspective. Remember, cavities and other dental diseases don’t just come from bad dental hygiene. They also come from making bad food choices and ingesting chemicals that do harm to the enamel on your teeth.

Ask your dentist about the benefits of using activated carbon as a toothpaste replacer, as well as what you can do to make your own toothpaste so that you can avoid all the toxins in modern formulas.

If your dentist says that modern toothpaste is an absolute necessity for dental health, bring with you a list of all the ingredients in the toothpaste, and the studies that prove one or more is carcinogenic. As strange as it may sound, if you wind up needing to get a second opinion, this may be better than going on with a growing health problem that you weren’t aware of.

Video first seen on Silke Dewulf.

Remove Pesticides from Soil

If you thought air and water pollution were bad, you may not realize that soil pollution is just as bad. Runoff from commercial farms and factories as well as pollution falling from the air all lead to soil based problems miles away from the initial site of contaminant release.

Once activated carbon touches something, it will begin leaching various chemicals from it. In this case, if you mix activated carbon into the soil, it will pull out pesticides and other dangerous toxins.

Personally, I would recommend using blocks or sheets of carbon for this purpose. You can try them a the surface level, or bury them in layers in order to give the chemicals a chance to leach through to the carbon layers.

Later on, you will need to remove the carbon so that the plants don’t break it down and release the pesticides right back into the soil.

Remember, activated carbon doesn’t break chemicals down, it is simply a very porous medium that acts as a storage container. You will still have to remove the carbon from the soil to completely get rid of the pesticide and other toxins.

Air Filtration

Do you ever notice that when you travel to certain areas, the air smells really bad? Do you also notice that this sensation seems to fade after a few days? The air around you is so dirty it is probably making you and your family members very sick even though your nose had adapted to it.

From higher volumes of cars passing to garbage dumps and industrial smokestacks, there are actually very few places left where there is safe, clean air to breathe. Here are just a few contaminants that trigger everything from asthma to increased risk of panic attacks, heart problems, and other diseases:

Aside from carbon monoxide, automobiles also release other dangerous chemicals into the air, and some of them are known to trigger asthma and other breathing disorders.

Medical waste and rubbish dumps release dangerous chemicals into the air. If you smell something bad in the air when downwind of a dump, then this is the natural gas released by the piles of garbage. The dump may also be releasing all kinds of chemicals created when trash mixes together and new substances begin to form. You can’t tell just how many of these substances cause cancer or other health problems simply because you inhaled the disgusting odor of rotting trash.

Factories and power plants also release volatile organic compounds and other chemicals into the air. You may be able to smell some of them, while others are odorless.

If you spend the money and time to build an air quality sensor capable of detecting specific chemicals, you’ll be amazed at how dangerous the air around you really is. It will get much worse after a crisis because of increased numbers of fires and a lack of tools, labor, and resources required to manage dangerous chemicals.

Activated carbon can be used to remove most volatile organic compounds, and many other chemical based contaminants from the air. In fact, if you suffer from chronic medical problems, you might need a pre-fabricated carbon filter attached to a fan or some other source of air flow. Aside from cleaner smelling air, it will ease your health problems.

If you are concerned about gas attacks or other social collapse related scenarios – these kinds of filters will be essential if you plan to stay in your home. While there is much more to prepping for an air quality related disaster, activated carbon filters are a good place to start.

There are a number of furnace filters available that have activated carbon in them. In most cases, these are little more than a liquid solution of activated carbon added to the filter media.

You can try experimenting with your own versions to see if you can get a filter that effectively removes odors (and therefore their cause) from the air.

DIY Respirators and Gas Masks

Even if you could seal off your home entirely from the outside world, it would not be a feasible option. Gases and bio weapons will easily seep through even the tiniest crack and can be devastating, and there will also be times when you have to leave your location. And if you are away from your bug out location, you’ll need to protect your lungs as much as possible.

These are reasons why making and wearing a viable gas mask or respirator is very important. As with air filters, activated carbon offers the widest range of protection against a range of chemicals.

Considering the rising rate of smog and other air pollutants, activated carbon masks are also very important for improving and maintaining a reasonable level of health. For example, in many Asian countries, people don’t go outdoors or exercise without wearing an activated carbon mask.

While this is a fairly rare sight in the United States, those who know the truth are doing the exact same thing. If you have asthma or other chronic breathing problems, even a surgical style mask with activated carbon in it can make a big difference.

I have personally noticed a 50% reduction in noxious odors from insecticides, smog, and other fumes when wearing this kind of mask. Others that have tried them notice a 70% or better reduction. While I have not tried the wrap-around designs more common in Asian countries, I suspect they would be more effective because they would seal off the areas where I tend to get the most air leaks.

A surgical style activated carbon mask is better than nothing, however you will need a more robust respirator design for gas attacks and other dangerous situations.

Just remember to practice breathing with these masks, and they can and do restrict air flow. Also make sure you keep the mask clean and change the cartridges on a regular basis. As good as activated carbon is at filtering out many kinds of chemicals, the pores in it still fill up quickly, hence the need to replace the cartridges often.

You can and should try taking used cartridges apart to see if you can find a way to refill the activated carbon part. Even if you cannot obtain or make the other filter media, at least you may be able to keep this vital part of the mask working for a longer period of time.

Filter Water

As a prepper, you may already be giving a lot more thought to water quality than air quality, but activated carbon isn’t only useful for removing the bad taste from water after it has been boiled. That bad taste is an indicator that the water isn’t as clean as you think it is.

Boiling water will kill off bacteria, however it will actually cause an increase in the concentration of heavy metals, pesticides, and even dangerous drugs that have leached into just about every potable water supply at the surface level. While activated carbon will not remove all heavy metals, it is excellent for removing most other dangerous chemicals and drugs.

Typically, filtering water with activated carbon is a lot easier than filtering air. At the simplest, just add some activated carbon to a clean sock and pour the water through it. You can also make your own cartridges and add a pump for larger volumes of water.

When designing your own system, don’t forget to make it easy to change the cartridge as well as detect when it needs to be changed. Since many water quality issues reflect in changes in pH, you may want to try building a pH sensor into your system so that you know when to change the filter.

Video first seen on MakerBoat.

Preserve Papers

If you have books, paper based maps, or other important documents in your stockpile, it is very important to keep them free of air based chemicals that will do damage to them.

While a ziploc bag can be very useful, adding some activated carbon to the bag will also ensure the paper does not break down as quickly.

Remove Odor From Fabrics

Today, many people still use moth balls and other camphor based products to store clothes away for long periods of time. Aside from making your clothes very smelly, many of these products can also be very dangerous to your health.

If you want to keep clothes in your stockpile odor free, activated carbon may be of some help. If you routinely have bad smelling clothes, adding some activated carbon to the wash will also get rid of the problem.

You can make activated carbon sachets from nylon stockings (or very thin socks) and aquarium carbon, or buy them pre-made at the pet store.

Scent Block for Hunting

More than a few hunters have lost a chance to capture dinner because the target animal got a whiff of the hunter when the breeze changed. Since most animals are afraid of human scent, even a slight breeze can cause problems.

Today, a number of hunting supply stores sell activated carbon solutions that will absorb body odors before they can be carried to the animal. You can also grind activated carbon into a powder and mix it with water.

Next, just dip your clothes in the solution and let them dry. Even though there is some controversy over whether this actually works, there is no harm in giving it a try, especially if you know or suspect that scent related issues are interfering with the hunt.

More than a few hunters also store their clothes in activated carbon in order to prevent other odors from getting into the clothes.

Tip: if you have been using the same clothes for years, and took a lot of time making sure they absorbed the scent of the woods, this can help prevent that from being disrupted. All you need to do is add a few sachets of activated carbon to the bag or box and store away until needed for the next season.

Video first seen on Cabela’s Hunting.

Manage Stings and Insect Bites

Bee stings and insect bites can become infected as well as cause a lot of pain and irritation. While activated carbon will not stop an infection, it can pull out the venom from stings and small bites. Just apply the activated carbon to the skin and let it absorb the venom.

If you are allergic to bees or other insects, it is still very important to use an Epi-pen or other neutralizers that have a known track record for reliably managing this problem.

Activated carbon will not work for snake bites. Insect bites have much smaller amounts of venom than a snakebite. You can try a moist chewing tobacco bandage for snakebite and a constriction band above the site of a snakebite. You will still need the proper anti-venom to treat this condition.

Now that you know how to use activated charcoal, discover more valuable survival secrets from our forefathers.

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This article has been written by Carmela Tyrell for Survivopedia.

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