Hey! So, I’ve been posting these analysis compilations for each team in their respective subs, however, I am banned in the Patriots sub, so I figured I’d post this one (and only this one) here.
Round 1, Pick 3 - Drake Maye, QB, North Carolina:
NFL: Maye has prototypical dimensions and an exceptional arm. The comparisons made between Maye and Buffalo’s Josh Allen are real when it comes to his size, arm strength and leadership skills. Maye lacks the experience of other QBs in this draft, but if he can iron out some of his inconsistencies, he can be a superstar for the Patriots.
CBS Sports: B. He might need some time on the bench, but he has the talent to develop into a good starting quarterback in this league. He just needs to fine tune a few mechanical things. The Patriots had to get a quarterback.
ESPN: They didn't overthink it. In need of a potential franchise quarterback, and open to trading the pick if a big-time offer came their way, the Patriots landed a player who gives the organization the same type of hope that Drew Bledsoe did after being selected No. 1 overall in 1993. Now comes the important part of developing Maye with quality coaching, and ensuring he doesn't have too many voices in his ear.
NFL Absolutely Not Fake News: Freaked out when a bird got into his house last summer and knocked over a lamp.
Round 2, Pick 37 - Ja’Lynn Polk, WR, Washington:
NFL: I wonder if the Patriots weren't hoping for Coleman to fall to them. Polk has some nice physical traits, possesses really nice body control to adjust to passes outside his frame and stepped up nicely when Jalen McMillan was hurt midseason last year. But I saw Polk's upside as lower, viewing him more as a third-round talent. He'll add size to New England's smaller WR room, though.
CBS Sports: B-. Complete wideout without stellar athletic traits who tracks it awesomely. Flashes of YAC wiggle and power. Fun, versatile piece to add to the offense that needs it. A tick early for him though.
ESPN: The Patriots had explored trading back into the bottom of the first round on Thursday night but couldn't strike a deal, according to sources. So they regrouped, traded down three spots in the second round (from 34 to 37) to improve 27 spots later in the draft (from 137 to 110), and then grabbed the player they probably would have picked at 34 in Polk. A Bill Belichick-type move from the new regime that will be judged, in part, by if they should have gone with WR Ladd McConkey (selected at 34) instead.
NFL Absolutely Not Fake News: He is currently binging all 14,000 episodes of Days of Our Lives.
Round 3, Pick 68 - Caedan Wallace, OT, Penn State:
NFL: Wallace is a thick-bodied right tackle who developed into an NFL prospect later in his six-year college career. With 40 college starts, he has experience, but it's almost all at that position, and Coleman was considered something of an underachiever earlier in his career. A reach for me.
CBS Sports: C-. Sizable framed OT with lumbering feet. Average-at-best athlete. Plays with good calmness and accuracy at second level and has quality power but overall athletic profile was severely threatened often in college. A concern for his NFL future. New England did need to add some OL depth. Worried about his upside.
ESPN: The Patriots' top need areas entering the draft were QB, WR and OT, and Wallace caps off the 1-2-3 approach in filling them. He was mostly a right tackle in college, but Wolf said the team believes Wallace has the athletic ability to move to the left side. First-year offensive line coach Scott Peters comes from the Browns and his presence ties to Wallace, who at the least will be counted upon to be a top backup as a rookie.
NFL Absolutely Not Fake News: I’m just saying, if you know, you know.
Round 4, Pick 103 - Layden Robinson, OG, Texas A&M:
NFL: It's funny, if you hadn't told me Eliot Wolf was running the Patriots' draft room, I might have just assumed it was business as usual in Foxboro, with Bill Belichick overseeing things. Robinson, like Day 2 picks Ja'Lynn Polk and Caedan Wallace, were semi-value reaches. Robinson is a hard-nosed guard-only who improves the depth up front, but was it a massive need?
CBS Sports: B+. Mashing guard who plays more athletically than his workout. Tremendous burst off the snap on a routine basis. Could add more strength at the next level. Serious length but hands are late often. Nastiness is there for the run and pass protection. Upside blocker.
ESPN: With starting left guard Cole Strange attempting to return from a late-season injury that could affect his availability early this year, the Patriots are loading up on the offensive line to give themselves as many options as possible. Robinson has been a pure right guard, where 2023 fourth-round pick Sidy Sow is the projected starter. The team also has 2023 fifth-rounder Atonio Mafi, so Robinson joins the young pipeline up front. One scouting report referred to him as an "absolute freight train in the running game," which seems to reflect the style of lineman the team is looking for under the new coaching staff.
NFL Absolutely Not Fake News: You don’t stop the rock It to the bang-bang boogie, say up jump the boogie.
Round 4, Pick 110 - Javon Baker, WR, UCF:
NFL: I figured the Patriots would double up at receiver, and there was some talk of Baker being a Day 2 pick. I didn't love all of his tape, but he clearly features big-play prowess. UCF didn't fully unleash his talent, but Baker also needs to hone the details of his craft before he can be in a featured role.
CBS Sports: A+. This is a future No. 1 wideout. While not a burner, he plays faster and has the complete skill set. Releases at the line are good, flexibility to get open at intermediate level, YAC prowess, and especially rebounding skills are high-end.
ESPN: Baker is a big play waiting to happen, as evidenced by his five catches of 50-plus yards last season. So after the Patriots selected Ja’Lynn Polk in the second round, they doubled down with Baker -- which reflects how director of scouting Eliot Wolf is decisively addressing one of the team's top deficiencies. Wolf grew up in the Packers' system, and they have had recent success taking a similar approach at WR and TE. If there is a knock on Baker, it's that he has 14 drops over the past two seasons.
NFL Absolutely Not Fake News: His favorite movie of all time is Scream.
Round 6, Pick 180 - Marcellas Dial, CB, South Carolina:
NFL: Dial has decent length and has gotten his hands on a lot of passes the past three years, and he has a chance to make it as a jack of all trades in the secondary, with experience at multiple spots.
CBS Sports: A-. This is tremendous value. Zone awareness for days. Didn’t see the football thrown in his direction much. Outstanding ball skills when it does arrive. Doesn’t miss many tackles either. Hard to find a clear flaw to his game.
ESPN: Christian Gonzalez (2023 first-round pick), veteran Jonathan Jones and third-year player Marcus Jones are at the top of the CB depth chart, followed by a group of younger players whom Dial (6-0, 190) will compete against for a roster spot. That group includes Alex Austin, Marco Wilson, Shaun Wade, Isaiah Bolden and Azizi Hearn. As is often the case at this point in the draft, contributions on special teams figure to be a notable factor if Dial ultimately breaks through. Dial said he visited the Patriots before the draft (among the three teams he traveled to see) and had a feeling he would land with them.
NFL Absolutely Not Fake News: If you send the right mod $10,000 they will sell you the sub.
Round 6, Pick 193 - Joe Milton III, QB, Tennessee:
NFL: Milton's bazooka arm figured to make him a late-round flier, but I didn't have him landing in New England after the Patriots took Drake Maye with the third overall pick. Some teams have toyed with the idea of turning Milton into a Logan Thomas-like TE conversion.
CBS Sports: C+. Will immediately have one of the strongest arms in the NFL. Grew a lot as a passer after transfer to Tennessee. Accuracy is very hit or miss and he’s an average athlete. Coverage-reading needs to improve. Big frame.
ESPN: After taking Drake Maye No. 3 overall, and then Milton, this marks just the second time in team history that two QBs were selected in the same draft (1983 with Tony Eason and Tom Ramsey). Milton's physical traits stand out -- he's 6-foot-5 and 246 pounds with a powerful arm -- and some believe he could transition to tight end in the NFL. When looking at Milton through the QB-specific lens, the Patriots obviously view Maye as their hopeful long-term option, with veteran Jacoby Brissett the current projected starter until Maye is ready. They would still be looking to carry a No. 3 option. Bailey Zappe (2022 fourth-round pick) and second-year player Nathan Rourke are also on the depth chart, and their spots on the roster could be in jeopardy if the Patriots view Milton as the ideal developmental option.
NFL Absolutely Not Fake News: Totally cried when he read The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane.
Round 7, Pick 231 - Jaheim Bell, TE, Florida State:
NFL: Bell was a versatile enough athlete that he played running back at South Carolina because of injuries, but his best chance to make it in the league is as a "move" tight end with his smaller frame.
CBS Sports: A+. H-back type with explosive YAC traits. Cutting skill and natural ability to absorb contact and keep the legs churning. Won’t be a natural separator but when schemed open he can be a fun asset in the New England offense.
ESPN: Coach Jerod Mayo said by this point of the draft, the Patriots were selecting the best player regardless of need. The 6-foot-2, 242-pound Bell played more than 40% of his snaps last season in the slot, so he's an H-back-type option more than an inline TE. The Patriots have veteran Hunter Henry atop their depth chart, with top backups Austin Hooper and Mitchell Wilcox on one-year contracts, so Bell gives them a developmental option with the future in mind. If he breaks through, he could be a safety valve for a young quarterback on safer, underneath routes. His 897 yards after the catch since 2021 rank second among FBS tight ends after Brock Bowers.
NFL Absolutely Not Fake News: Consults the farmers almanac every day about the weather.

In the ’80s, the spy agency investigated the "Gateway Experience" technique to alter consciousness and ultimately escape spacetime.
The intrigue revolves around a classified 1983 CIA report on a technique called the Gateway Experience, which is a training system designed to focus brainwave output to alter consciousness and ultimately escape the restrictions of time and space.
The CIA was interested in all sorts of psychic research at the time, including the theory of applications of remote viewing, which is when someone views real events with only the power of their mind. The documents have since been declassified and are available to view.
This is a comprehensive excavation of The Gateway Process report. The first section provides a timeline of the key historical developments that led to the CIA’s investigation and subsequent experimentations. The second section is a review of The Gateway Process report. It opens with a wall of theoretical context, on the other side of which lies enough understanding to begin to grasp the principles underlying the Gateway Experience training. The last section outlines the Gateway technique itself and the steps that go into achieving spacetime transcendence.
Let’s go.
THE TIMELINE
• 1950s - Robert Monroe, a radio broadcasting executive, begins producing evidence that specific sound patterns have identifiable effects on human capabilities. These include alertness, sleepiness, and expanded states of consciousness.
• 1956 - Monroe forms an R&D division inside his radio program production corporation RAM Enterprises. The goal is to study sound’s effect on human consciousness. He was obsessed with “Sleep-Learning," or hypnopedia, which exposes sleepers to sound recordings to boost memory of previously learned information.
• 1958 - While experimenting with Sleep-Learning, Monroe discovers an unusual phenomenon. He describes it as sensations of paralysis and vibration accompanied by bright light. It allegedly happens nine times over the proceeding six weeks, and culminates in an out-of-body experience (OBE).
• 1962 - RAM Enterprises moves to Virginia, and renames itself Monroe Industries. It becomes active in radio station ownership, cable television, and later in the production and sale of audio cassettes. These cassettes contain applied learnings from the corporate research program, which is renamed The Monroe Institute.
• 1971 - Monroe publishes Journeys Out of the Body, a book that is credited with popularizing the term “out-of-body experience.”
• 1972 - A classified report circulates in the U.S. military and intelligence communities. It claims that the Soviet Union is pouring money into research involving ESP and psychokinesis for espionage purposes.
• 1975 - Monroe registers the first of several patents concerning audio techniques designed to stimulate brain functions until the left and right hemispheres become synchronized. Monroe dubs the state "Hemi-Sync" (hemispheric synchronization), and claims it could be used to promote mental well-being or to trigger an altered state of consciousness.
• 1978 to 1984 - Army veteran Joseph McMoneagle contributes to 450 remote viewing missions under Project Stargate. He is known as “Remote View No. 1”.
• June 9th, 1983 - The CIA report "Analysis and Assessment of The Gateway Process" is produced. It provides a scientific framework for understanding and expanding human consciousness, out-of-body experiments, and other altered states of mind.
• 1989 - Remote viewer Angela Dellafiora Ford helps track down a former customs agent who has gone on the run. She pinpoints his location as “Lowell, Wyoming”. U.S. Customs apprehend him 100 miles west of a Wyoming town called Lovell.
• 2003 - The CIA approves declassification of the Gateway Process report.
• 2017 - The CIA declassifies 12 million pages of records revealing previously unknown details about the program, which would eventually become known as Project Stargate.
THE REPORT
Personnel
The author of The Gateway Process report is Lieutenant Colonel Wayne M. McDonnell, hereon referred to simply as Wayne. There isn’t a tremendous amount of information available on the man, nor any photographs. In 1983, Wayne was tasked by the Commander of the U.S. Army Operational Group with figuring out how The Gateway Experience, astral projection and out-of-body experiences work. Wayne partnered with a bunch of different folks to produce the report, most notably Itzhak Bentov, a very Googleable American-Israeli scientist who helped pioneer the biomedical engineering industry.
A scientific approach
From the outset of the report, Wayne states his intent to employ an objective scientific method in order to understand the Gateway process. The various scientific avenues he takes include:
• A biomedical inquiry to understand the physical aspects of the process.
• Information on quantum mechanics to describe the nature and functioning of human consciousness.
• Theoretical physics to explain the time-space dimension and means by which expanded human consciousness transcends it.
• Classical physics to bring the whole phenomenon of out-of-body states into the language of physical science (and remove the stigma of an occult connotation).
Methodological frames of reference
Before diving into the Gateway Experience, Wayne develops a frame of reference by dissecting three discrete consciousness-altering methodologies. He’s basically saying, there’s no way you’re going to get through The Gateway without a solid grounding in the brain-altering techniques that came before it.
1) He begins with hypnosis. The language is extremely dense, but the basic gist is as follows: the left side of the brain screens incoming stimuli, categorizing, assessing and assigning meaning to everything through self-cognitive, verbal, and linear reasoning. The left hemisphere then dishes the carefully prepared data to the non-critical, holistic, pattern-oriented right hemisphere, which accepts everything without question. Hypnosis works by putting the left side to sleep, or at least distracting it long enough to allow incoming data direct, unchallenged entry to the right hemisphere. There, stimuli can reach the sensor and motor cortices of the right brain, which corresponds to points in the body. Suggestions then can send electrical signals from the brain to certain parts of the body. Directing these signals appropriately, according to the report, can elicit reactions ranging from left leg numbness to feelings of happiness. Same goes for increased powers of concentration.
2) Wayne continues with a snapshot of transcendental meditation. He distinguishes it from hypnotism. Through concentration the subject draws energy up the spinal cord, resulting in acoustical waves that run through the cerebral ventricles, to the right hemisphere, where they stimulate the cerebral cortex, run along the homunculus and then to the body. The waves are the altered rhythm of heart sounds, which create sympathetic vibrations in the walls of the fluid-filled cavities of the brain’s ventricles. He observed that the symptoms begin in the left side of the body, confirming the right brain’s complicity. Bentov also states that the same effect might be achieved by prolonged exposure to 4 - 7 Hertz/second acoustical vibrations. He suggests standing by an air conditioning duct might also do the trick. (David’s Lynch and other celebrities are committed adherents to transcendental meditation today.)
3) Biofeedback, on the other hand, uses the left hemisphere to gain access to the right brain’s lower cerebral, motor, and sensory cortices. Whereas hypnosis suppresses one side of the brain, and TM bypasses that side altogether, biofeedback teaches the left hemisphere to visualize the desired result, recognize the feelings associated with right hemisphere access, and ultimately achieve the result again. With repetition, the left brain can reliably key into the right brain, and strengthen the pathways so that it can be accessed during a conscious demand mode. A digital thermometer is subsequently placed on a target part of the body. When its temperature increases, objective affirmation is recognized and the state is reinforced. Achieving biofeedback can block pain, enhance feeling, and even suppress tumors, according to the report.
The Gateway mechanics
With that, Wayne takes a first stab at the Gateway process. He classifies it as a “training system designed to bring enhanced strength, focus and coherence to the amplitude and frequency of brainwave output between the left and right hemispheres so as to alter consciousness.”
What distinguishes the Gateway process from hypnosis, TM, and biofeedback, is that it requires achieving a state of consciousness in which the electrical brain patterns of both hemispheres are equal in amplitude and frequency. This is called Hemi-Sync. Lamentably, and perhaps conveniently, we cannot as humans achieve this state on our own. The audio techniques developed by Bob Monroe and his Institute (which are comprised as a series of tapes). claim to induce and sustain Hemi-Sync.
Wayne employs the analogy of a lamp versus a laser. Left to its own devices the human mind expends energy like a lamp, in a chaotic and incoherent way, achieving lots of diffusion but relatively little depth. Under Hemi-Sync though, the mind produces a “disciplined stream of light.” So, once the frequency and amplitude of the brain are rendered coherent it can then synchronize with the rarified energy levels of the universe. With this connection intact, the brain begins to receive symbols and display astonishing flashes of holistic intuition.
The Hemi-Sync technique takes advantage of a Frequency Following Response (FFR). It works like this: an external frequency emulating a recognized one will cause the brain to mimic it. So if a subject hears a frequency at the Theta level, it will shift from its resting Beta level. To achieve these unnatural levels, Hemi-Sync puts a single frequency in the left ear and a contrasting frequency in the right. The brain then experiences the Delta frequency, also known as the beat frequency. It’s more familiarly referred to these days as binaural beats. With the FFR and beat frequency phenomena firmly in place, The Gateway Process introduces a series of frequencies at marginally audible, subliminal levels. With the left brain relaxed and the body in a virtual sleep state, the conditions are ideal to promote brainwave outputs of higher and higher amplitude and frequency. Alongside subliminal suggestions from Bob Monroe (naturally), the subject can then alter their consciousness.
The Gateway system only works when the audio, which is introduced through headphones, is accompanied by a physical quietude comparable to other forms of meditation. This increases the subject’s internal resonance to the body’s sound frequencies, for example the heart. This eliminates the “bifurcation echo”, in which the heartbeat moves up and down the body seven times a second. By placing the body in a sleep-like state, The Gateway CD’s, like meditation, lessen the force and frequency of the heartbeat pushing blood into the aorta. The result is a rhythmic sine wave that in turn amplifies the sound volume of the heart three times. This then amplifies the frequency of brainwave output. The film surrounding the brain—the dura—and fluid between that film and the skull, eventually begin to move up and down, by .0005 and .010 millimeters.
The body, based on its own micro-motions, then functions as a tuned vibrational system. The report claims that the entire body eventually transfers energy at between 6.8 and 7.5 Hertz, which matches Earth’s own energy (7 - 7.5 Hertz). The resulting wavelengths are long, about 40,000 kilometers, which also happens to be the perimeter of the planet. According to Bentov, the signal can move around the world’s electrostatic field in 1/7th of a second.
To recap, the Gateway Process goes like this:
• Induced state of calm
• Blood pressure lowers
• Circulatory system, skeleton and other organ systems begin to vibrate at 7 - 7.5 cycles per second
• Increased resonance is achieved
• The resulting sound waves matches the electrostatic field of the earth
• The body and earth and other similarly tuned minds become a single energy continuum.
We’ve gotten slightly ahead of ourselves here though. Back to the drawing board.
A psycho-quantum level deeper
Wayne then turns to the very nature of matter and energy. More materially (or less if you will), solid matter in the strict construction of the term, he explains, doesn’t exist. The atomic structure is composed of oscillating energy grids surrounded by other oscillating energy grids at tremendous speeds. These oscillation rates vary—the nucleus of an atom vibrates at 10 to the power of 22, a molecule vibrates at 10 to the power of 9, a human cell vibrates at 10 to the power of 3. The point is that the entire universe is one complex system of energy fields. States of matter in this conception then are merely variations in the state of energy.
The result of all these moving energies, bouncing off of energy at rest, projects a 3D mode, a pattern, called a hologram, A.K.A our reality as we experience it. It's best to think of it as a 3D photograph. There’s a whole rabbit hole to go down here. Suffice it to say, the hologram that is our experience is incredibly good at depicting and recording all the various energies bouncing around creating matter. So good, in fact, that we buy into it hook, line, and sinker, going so far as to call it our "life."
Consciousness then can be envisaged as a 3D grid system superimposed over all energy patterns, Wayne writes. Using mathematics, each plane of the grid system can then reduce the data to a 2D form. Our binary (go/no go) minds can then process the data and compare it to other historical data saved in our memory. Our reality is then formed by comparisons. The right hemisphere of the brain acts as the primary matrix or receptor for this holographic input. The left hemisphere then compares it to other data, reducing it to its 2D form.
In keeping with our species' commitment to exceptionalism, as far as we know humans are uniquely capable of achieving this level of consciousness. Simply, humans not only know, but we know that we know. This bestows upon us the ability to duplicate aspects of our own hologram, project them out, perceive that projection, run it through a comparison with our own memory of the hologram, measure the differences using 3D geometry, then run it through our binary system to yield verbal cognition of the self.
The click-out phase
Wayne then shows his cards as a true punisher, issuing, "Up to this point our discussion of the Gateway process has been relatively simple and easy to follow. Now the fun begins." Shots fired, Wayne. What he's preparing the commander reading this heady report for is the reveal—how we can use the Gateway to transcend the dimension of spacetime.
Time is a measurement of energy or force in motion; it is a measurement of change. This is really important. For energy to be classified as in motion, it must be confined within a vibratory pattern that can contain its motion, keeping it still. Energy not contained like this is boundary-less, and moves without limit or dimension, to infinity. This disqualifies boundary-less energy from the dimension of time because it has no rate of change. Energy in infinity, also called "the absolute state," is completely at rest because nothing is accelerating or decelerating it—again, no change. It therefore does not contribute to our hologram, our physical experience. We cannot perceive it.
Now back to frequencies. Wave oscillation occurs because a wave is bouncing between two rigid points of rest. It's like a game of electromagnetic hot potato (the potato being the wave and the participants' hands being the boundaries of the wave). Without these limits, there would be no oscillation. When a wave hits one of those points of rest, just for a very brief instant, it "clicks out" of spacetime and joins infinity. For this to occur, the speed of the oscillation has to drop below 10 the power of -33 centimeters per second. For a moment, the wave enters into a new world. The potato simply disappears into a dimension we cannot perceive.
Theoretically speaking, if the human consciousness wave pattern reaches a high enough frequency, the “click-outs” can reach continuity. Put another way, if the frequency of human consciousness can dip below 10 to the power of 33 centimeters per second but above a state of total rest, it can transcend spacetime. The Gateway experience and associated Hemi-Sync technique is designed for humans to achieve this state and establish a coherent pattern of perception in the newly realized dimensions.
Passport to the hologram
In theory, we can achieve the above at any time. The entire process though is helped along if we can separate the consciousness from our body. It’s like an existential running head start where the click-out of a consciousness already separated from its body starts much closer to, and has more time to dialogue with, other dimensions.
This is where things get a little slippery; hold on as best you can. The universe is in on the whole hologram thing, too, Wayne writes. This super hologram is called a "torus" because it takes the shape of a fuck-off massive self-contained spiral. Like this:
Give yourself a moment to let the above motion sink in...
This pattern of the universe conspicuously mirrors the patterns of electrons around the nucleus of an atom. Galaxies north of our own are moving away from us faster than the galaxies to the south; galaxies to the east and west of us are more distant. The energy that produced the matter that makes up the universe we presently enjoy, will turn back in on itself eventually. Its trajectory is ovoid, also known as the cosmic egg. As it curls back on itself it enters a black hole, goes through a densely packed energy nucleus then gets spat out the other side of a white hole and begins the process again. Springtime in the cosmos, baby!
And that is the context in which the Gateway Experience sits.
[Deep breaths.]
THE TECHNIQUE
The following is an outline of the key steps to reach focus levels necessary to defy the spacetime dimension. This is an involved and lengthy process best attempted in controlled settings. If you’re in a rush, you can apparently listen to enough Monroe Institute Gateway Tapes in 7 days to get there.
The Energy Conversion Box: The Gateway Process begins by teaching the subject to isolate any extraneous concerns using a visualization process called “the energy conversion box.”
Resonant Humming: The individual is introduced to resonant humming. Through the utterance of a protracted single tone, alongside a chorus on the tapes, the mind and body achieve a state of resonance.
The Gateway Affirmation: The participant is exposed to something close to a mantra called The Gateway Affirmation. They must repeat to themselves variations of, “I am merely a physical body and deeply desire to expand my consciousness.”
Hemi-Sync: The individual is finally exposed to the Hemi-Sync sound frequencies, and encouraged to develop a relationship with the feelings that emerge.
Additional Noise: Physical relaxation techniques are practiced while the Hemi-Sync frequencies are expanded to include “pink and white” noise. This puts the body in a state of virtual sleep, while calming the left hemisphere and raising the attentiveness of the right hemisphere.
The Energy Balloon: The individual is then encouraged to visualize the creation of an “energy balloon” beginning at the top of the head, extending down in all directions to the feet then back up again. There are a few reasons for this, the main one being that this balloon will provide protection against conscious entities possessing lower energy levels that he or she may encounter when in the out-of-body state.
Focus 12: The practitioner can consistently achieve sufficient expanded awareness to begin interacting with dimensions beyond their physical reality. To achieve this state requires conscious efforts and more “pink and white noise” from the sound stream.
Tools: Once Focus 12 is achieved, the subject can then employ a series of tools to obtain feedback from alternate dimensions.
Problem Solving: The individual identifies fundamental problems, fills their expanded awareness with them, and then projects them out into the universe. These can include personal difficulties, as well as technical or practical problems.
Patterning: Consciousness is used to achieve desired objectives in the physical, emotional, or intellectual sphere.
Color Breathing: A healing technique that revitalizes the body’s energy flows by imagining colors in a particularly vivid manner.
Energy Bar Tool: This technique involves imagining a small intensely pulsating dot of light that the participant charges up. He or she then uses the sparkling, vibrating cylinder of energy (formerly known as the dot) to channel forces from the universe to heal and revitalize the body.
Remote Viewing: A follow-on technique of the Energy Bar Tool where the dot is turned into a whirling vortex through which the individual sends their imagination in search of illuminating insights.
Living Body Map: A more organized use of the energy bar in which streams of different colors flow from the dot on to correspondingly-colored bodily systems.
Seven days of training have now occurred. Approximately 5 percent of participants get to this next level, according to the report.
Focus 15 - Travel Into the Past: Additional sound on the Hemi-Sync tapes includes more of the same, plus some subliminal suggestions to further expand the consciousness. The instructions are highly symbolic: time is a huge wheel, in which different spokes give access to the participant’s past.
Focus 21 - The Future: This is the last and most advanced state. Like Focus 15, this is a movement out of spacetime into the future.
Out-of-Body Movement: Only one tape of the many is devoted to out-of-body movement. This tape is devoted to facilitating an out-of-body state when the participant’s brain wave patterns and energy levels reach harmony with the surrounding electromagnetic environment. According to Bob Monroe, the participant has to be exposed to Beta signals of around 2877.3 cycles per second.
CONCLUSIONS
Wayne expresses concern about the fidelity of information brought back from out-of-body states using the Gateway technique. Practical applications are of particular concern because of the potential for “information distortion.”
The Monroe Institute also ran into a bunch of issues in which they had individuals travel from the West to the East Coast of the U.S. to read a series of numbers off of a computer screen. They never got them exactly right. Wayne chalks this up to the trouble of differentiating between physical entities and extra-time-space dimensions when in the out-of-body state.
Wayne swings back to support mode though, lending credence to the physics foundation of the report. He cites multiple belief systems that have established identical findings. These include the Tibetan Shoug, the Hindu heaven of Indra, the Hebrew mystical philosophy, and the Christian concept of the Trinity. Here he seems more interested in hammering home the theoretical underpinnings that make The Gateway Experience possible, rather than the practical possibilities promised by The Gateway Tapes.
Possibly with his CIA top brass audience in mind, Wayne then gives an A-type nod to The Gateway Experience for providing a faster, more efficient, less subservient, energy-saving route to expanded consciousness. This finishes with a series of recommendations to the CIA for how to exploit Gateway’s potential for national defense purposes.
The missing page
One curious feature of The Gateway Report is that it seems to be missing page 25. It’s a real cliffhanger too. The bottom of page 24 reads “And, the eternal thought or concept of self which results from this self-consciousness serves the,” The report picks back up on page 26 and 3 sections later as if Wayne hadn’t just revealed the very secret of existence.
The gap has not gone unnoticed. There's a Change.org petition requesting its release. Multiple Freedom of Information Act requests have demanded the same. In all cases, the CIA has said they never had the page to begin with. Here’s a 2019 response from Mark Lilly, the CIA’s Information and Privacy Coordinator, to one Bailey Stoner regarding these records:
One theory goes that that rascal Wayne M.-fricking-McDonnell left the page out on purpose. The theory contends that it was a litmus test—if anyone truly defies time-space dimensions, they’ll certainly be able to locate page 25.
[Cosmic shrug.]
Writing Credit Vice
​
CIA Declassified Report– The Gateway Experience
Here is a copy of the Missing Page 25
There will be a Gateway Help Post following within the next couple days. Thought you might be interested in a little history in the meantime. Cheers!

As If It Were Kismet: Prologue
Matt tore through the brush, blind in the dark. He didn’t care where he was going. He only knew he needed to be elsewhere. Far from here.
Behind him a creature howled that shocked his mind. It’s form was cruel and dangerous, though female. Nothing like the young woman she had once been. Nothing but a girl, a small and slight female.
It’s guttural growls and howls only grew closer as Matt tried to pick between seeing where he was going and getting away. The few times he looked he caught sight of the creature behind him. Hopping through the air with a speed that told him he was being toyed with. As if he were a mouse being played with by a cat.
But the reflex in him to run kept him going. His adrenaline going as hard as it could. The tightness and burning in his core tensing and locking up as his legs felt like there were being burned from within while taking on more of a heaviness.
His lungs were starting to betray him as he tried to gulp big breaths of air but only rapid and shallow breaths were all that he could manage. His brain was starting to burn….and then he was falling.
Falling down the side of a hill he saw the creature dart in a spring towards him, imperceivably fast almost. Catching him in mid air it seemed.
Managing to wrap its body around him and cushion his impact against the ground as they rolled. His mind barely took in what was happening during the roll. Only starting to understand what was happening once they were still.
The creature's triple D-cup breasts were unmistakably pressed hard against his back as he laid facing up at the night sky.
For a few seconds the world stilled and the needle light pain hitting the center of his brain took over for the cooking heat his brain had felt. His whole body felt heavy and reluctant to move.
Even if he could have really moved, a dull ache came over his limbs making them feel stilled and trapped as if by immeasurable amounts of sand that had engulfed him.
Slowly the arms holding him started to move. Moving so the creature's hands could start exploring him. Causing Matt to unstoppably let out a pathetic moan that made him go cold inside as hands lifted up his shirt and started to touch his exposed stomach and then his chest.
He would have whimpered so pathetically had he not still been in the depths of terror.
As its hands felt and groped his pecs he tried to situp as if to get away. For his efforts, his reward was a hand around his throat and a collection snarls and growls against his ear. A beastly, guttural voice spat words at him while somehow holding a feminine tone.
“Don’t move….I don’t know if I can calm down…”
Her words were not helped by her moans in his ear and the subsequent kissing of his ear. The flesh of his ear going between her lips as she moaned and seemed to pant. Releasing it and licking the side of his face with a moist warmth. He could feel its spittle, viscous and coating his flesh where the tongue touched. He could smell something in his saliva. Something that subtly entranced him.
Matt went stock still with fear and the confusion of mixed arousal. He barely perceived her right hand traveling lower on his body. A surprised moan and shudder echoed in the night from Matt’s lips as she took ahold of him. Her hand above his pants but still….stimulating him.
A light squeezing and almost probing of her digits kept him aroused and confused within her grasp. Resigning himself to the strange fate, Matt looked up at the stars as his mind tried not to shatter under the strange maelstrom of events and sensation that had started mere minutes ago.
His mind was only more confused as a slight figure, feminine in build, how it seemed to thunk the ground audibly as she landed on her feet out nowhere. Her knees barely bending under the pressure of the landing. Yet dirt was kicked up anyways and some of it onto Matt. Feeling it pepper his shirt and pants as it fell.
The figure, lit only faintly by moonlight, roared some dark tone Matt could only perceive as a demon as her eyes went bright with a crimson light. A light in the darkness that should not have been. “Let him go you bitch.” Was its words following the roar. Spittle escaping its mouth with faint droplets hit Matt's face.
The creature holding him by his throat and crotch seemed to tighten the grasp of both hands as it roared back. “HE IS MINE!”
The figure paused with a moment's hesitation. He was also her quarry. She had felt his fear without him knowing. His confused arousal. His fear. His terror.
And now he laid at the center of a struggle between two monsters. Unsure of who he wanted to win.
As If It Was Kismet Ch. 1
Matthew Berkshire hadn’t seen his mom in two years. Not that he had seen her much over the last six years.
A messy divorce between messy people and mom’s chaotic want for a life in Alaska had been one of the most…upsetting times in life. Setting him up for so much of what had defined his life thus far but then that had really started two years before he ever turned.
His ear buds were basic and simple. A part of cheap five pack, common for his life as he was known to lose little things. Small things. They had a mix of metal and hard rock playing in them. Some classics, some alternative. Whatever made him feel something, anything. Even if it was hate. Anger. Rage. It was better than feeling numb. Not belonging.
The escalator down to his lone bag to go with his lone carry on showed his mom waiting for him. His had a type, that’s for damn sure. Not that it helped him in the genetics department as he was stuck at 5’9” to go along with his mother’s five foot even as his dad stood six foot. Forever leaving him to feel small, to pale, under his dad’s shadow. Did he ever stand a chance?
The guy next to her with the unkempt former seventies porn stache was “Dave.” He’d met him twice when his mother came and visited him in Florida. To his credit the guy didn’t look annoyed. Kind of concerned kind of which made Matthew want to break his frozen look but he was well practiced. Having removed any note of sadness from his face through much…tribulation.
His mother’s look on her face betrayed a hint of worry as the bruises on his face lightly showed up close. Saying his name was his like a distant echo that belonged to someone else.
Dave cut in and pulled out his right headphone. “What the hell bud, they knock you hard enough to hurt hearing? Your mom’s asking how you are doing.”
Matthew pulled out the other bud and grunted an empty “sorry.”
“You still have bruises after two week? What did they do to you?” His mom’s voice was full of worry. Something he hadn’t heard in….too long. Too long to make him feel anything. To ever make him believe there was any sincerity to her words. To not think her voice and mannerisms were an act. An act by someone who…wasn’t really there.
“It’s only fair. I took a nose. Fractured a couple orbital bones. Left one with having to get his jaw wired shut. And one will never walk right again for what I did to his knee cap.” Matthew said it all with a bored and disinterested tone. Perhaps well rehearsed.
“My man, handing out ass kickings, not bothering to take names.” Dave was quick to be the typical man’s man about it. Matthew wasn’t quite done yet. Lifting up his shirt to expose the right side near his kidney. Revealing a nasty scar from a six inch blade. “Luckily they gave me this first so they could rule it all in self-defense. The fuck didn’t get it in more than inch before I ruined his knee cap and then I took the nose of one of the fucks holding me.” Now he chose to smile keeping the well practiced dead look in his eyes.
No retorts. No questions. Just horrified looks on their faces. As he liked. As he preferred. They could hate him. They could be disgusted by him. But by God they would fear him.
“Well the doc did a good job sewing you up.” Dave commented uncomfortably. “Dissolving sutures. Ain’t they grand.” He smiled again and let it abruptly fall off his face and started walking to the carousel for the baggage claim.
Waiting and making small talk with Dave as his mother stood in silence. He was not the little boy she abandoned. The little boy she left with an angry man. While never hitting him. Left him in constant fear till he turned twelve and just didn’t care anymore. Something snapped. Broke. And he didn’t care if he died. Didn’t care if he stole. Didn’t even care if he killed. He just knew not to get caught. Something left over from his grandfather’s wisdom which came to make more and more sense with each passing year of life since that thing inside him broke.
Finally his bag came around and Dave went to try first to grab it but Dave practically leapt ahead of him. “Is that your grandfather’s rucksack bag?” his mother asked in a perplexed voice.
“Figured it’s been around since Viet Nam. So it’d serve me better than any of the worthless stuff they called luggage.” Dave commented after Matthew’s words. “Well hell yeah I still got mine from Desert Storm. You know the first one.” Dave laughed and Matthew eyed him oddly. Be it in the south or whether it was Alaska, country boys are country boys he guessed.
The car ride to the two people’s house, as Matthew thought of them. Was uneventful and full of vistas he imagined metropolitan types wetting themselves over. At most they meant isolation to him. Furtherness from the world as there were no mountains in Florida. And what mountains he had last seen in another state had been when he was eight. Another life, to Matthew it felt like. A life alien to him.
As If It Was Kismet Ch 2
Dave and his mom’s place was some two story type tucked into a tree line far up an elevated point. It was by no means the highest point in the mountain but it certainly felt up there.
Rocks were where the driveway should have been Matthew thought. Grabbing his backpack and rucksack from Dave’s jeep was no hard thing for him. Matthew was in formidable shape for someone his age, maybe even five years older. He had gotten a mix of fairly big shoulders and arms along with the chest to go for it when compared to most kids his age. A side effect of working out at least twice a day. First thing in the morning, some time in the evening, and the school’s gym when had had a good semester in school before he had to leave Florida.
Dave tried to come up and help him but Matthew walked past him towards the house. His mom was not sure what to make of his demeanor. Matthew was not the sweet kind boy he had once been. But she had been gone from his life essentially for a long time.
Ushering him into the house she cracked some joke he did not hear. He was too busy looking about and seeing a mix of old outdated decorating mixed with the strange and odd flair of his mother. Color contrasting against drab and dated. Like brightly painting over an old home that was falling apart he thought.
“Your room is this way Mattie.” His mom brightly intoned.
Without expressing any interest he followed his mother. Still faced and nonplussed. Just going along with the current. Pushed and pulled with its roll like a piece of driftwood.
The room was simple. A single small bed. A set of rubber weights with a curl bar and barbells. “Your dad said you were into weight lifting so we got you a bunch of stuff. Dave says it looks like his department’s gym almost. The woman’s smile felt very alien to him.
“Thank you. I appreciate it. I’ve got most of my stuff from home.” Matthew starting unpacking his rucksack and pulled out cables of repetitive and mixed colors. A single plastic barbell handle. The ruck sack could be filled with water bottles for added weight during pushups he figured. Remembering a Michael Keaton movie he watched with his dad post-Batman movies where he played a convicted killer using plastic bags filled with water for weights.
Matthew caught movement outside his lone fairly large window that could let him step out onto the roof of the house given its layout.
He saw a number of people running together through what he guessed was the backyard of the property, not that it had any fences to mark boundaries
They wore clothes that looked similar yet different from each other at the same time.”Oh those are the Johnston’s. Really nice bunch of people. Been on the mountain for a long time Dave tells me.”
Matthew looked at the group of people running and noticed the lack of resemblance. “They are related?” Matthew quizzically asked. Seeing a black and possibly a hispanic person amongst the bland looking white people.
“Oh well they are all adopted but for one or two of them…besides the parents of course. The family has a long tradition of taking in orphans they say. Real nice of them to do that don’t you think.”
Matthew looked at his mother and the hosier accent made no sense to him as he arched his left eye brow. Her and his dad were both from Florida. Born and raised. Sure her parents were from New York city but…
Matthew shook his lightly without turning to look at his mother as his vision was grabbed by one of the runners in particular. A girl of moderate height. Soft brunette. A plain beauty he figured with a slim build….and lack of remarkable breasts and rear to make any note of but….girls in general were his type at his age.
She was pretty enough. He couldn’t deny that but he found himself transfixed by her visage.
But the way she turned and looked at him, especially at that distance felt very disconcerting to him. Even if she was smiling like…she was a taste of a bright shiny day. Somehow.
Matthew’s mom noticed the exchange and smiled to herself with closed lips. “Oh that’s Vicky. She’s your age I think. Very sweet girl, who does the charity functions. You know bake sales, blood drives, car washes and the like. I think you should get to know her. Might be good for you.”
A truck horn sounded a couple of beeps in rather succession. “Oh that must be Mack, he said he might come by later this evening but he seems early.”
Matthew’s mother turned and left his room. Leaving Matthew to exchange a few looks with the alluring Vicky as she turned her head away from him to talk to the others in her group and look back at him.
Still Matthew’s left eyebrow was arched. In a way that reminded him of Spock from Star Trek that he and his grandpa used to watch on some streaming service or another.
As he heard ambient chatter elsewhere outside the house he figured to check it out as the alluring sight of Vicky would be around he figured. It was dull to stare at artwork. He was a boy who preferred jet skis and the like. Something he could ride and enjoy immensely. Even if at times it got him stabbed.
As If It Was Kismet Ch 3
Matthew sauntered out of the house and down the rockway that stood in for a driveway.
A few new people had come over from what he could first surmise of the situation. As he got closer it was obvious they were indigenous people. A couple of grown men…and a girl?
She was mousey. Maybe five foot. Hiding behind glasses and a big camo jacket that was far too big for her. It looked made for a grown man and the backwards trucker hat on her head kept her long black a beautiful mess of sorts.
She was cute in a way. A little androgynous but she had a cute energy to her. She reminded him of the more tomboyish Puerto Rican girls he had gotten into back in Florida. Given the deer corpses in the back of the truck….probably more dangerous to play with given the men in her family.
Small chatter passed between the adults when the girl noticed but turned away, trying to hide the tiny hint of a smile.
“Oh Mattie, this is Mack. He works with Dave at the sheriff’s department and John, he’s with fish and wildlife.” Matthew nodded at his mom’s words with some blankness as he looked at the deer the in the back of the pickup truck.
“Gale tells us you hunted with your dad some in Florida and Georgia.” Mack offered with a light hearted laugh camouflaged by his big simple and cheery but husky way he spoke.
Looking in the back of the truck he spoke. “We used lever action thirty-thirties and Mosin Nagants in seven-six-two-fifty-four-rimmed.” Mack and John whistled in an exaggerated fashion. Leaving Matthew to wonder if they were mocking him.
Mack spoke. “Well we just used thirty-odd-six in a custom gussied Garand.” That caught Matthew’s attention. “You have a Garand…” Matthew finally demonstrated interest in anything. “My dad has an SVT-40 and a Hakim 8mm but he always wanted a Garand but was too cheap to buy one.”
Gale, his mother, chimed in loudly. “Oh his Dad loved his guns but was such an odd duck about how he bought or why he bought them. Never made sense to me how he wasn’t a collector but he didn’t get the latest and greatest.” Gale laughed uncomfortably. At least it seemed that way to Matthew.
Matthew pointed to the girl with an underhanded pointing hand. “And who is this? A cute little mute mouse or does she have a name?” Dave and the other men laughed.
Mack again spoke. “Well you people call her Rebecca, she’s my adopted daughter.” Matthew was taken aback by what he heard. “You people?”
Rebecca kindly spoke with a soft but almost melodic voice as she struggled to maintain eye contact. “White people or rather not members of our tribe. It’s just easier to appease the colonizer kind of thing. Borrowed from when the Jesuit missionaries chased us up here.”
Mack stepped in. “It’s just easier to have white people names than have them try to say our tribal names. And we don’t want them shortening or Anglicising our names kind of thing.” Rebecca stepped back into the conversation cutting off her adopted father. “It’s an insult to our history basically.”
Matthew cocked his head sideways raising his eyebrows shortly before letting them drop. “Well as soon as I’m eighteen I’m out of here and back to Florida so I’m a sort of involuntary colonizer of sorts. So I won’t be taking any of your land from you. The Seminoles on the other hand are still shit out of luck.”
Rebecca’s smile caused Matthew to reflexively smile. Mack made the moment more awkward. “See Becca, I told you someone off the reservation would like you some. You just have to be creative.” Mack laughed in a chiding manner…Matthew presumed. He sensed that he was the butt of some kind of cultural joke. Like marrying a white guy was some sort of insult or mark of shame. That kind of thing.
Rebecca turning away from him was not something he had been expecting. Her then getting in the truck in a huff left the group in a silence for a moment.
Dave spoke to break the awkward silence. “Well just bring the truck to work on Monday and leave it for me to grab up.” Mack acknowledged Dave and they started to get off as Rebecca looked at Matthew for another instance. Matthew couldn’t look away for some reason as the two seemed to lock eyes for an instance.
Till Vicky and family seemed to come jogging down the road. While Matthew’s eyes diverted from Rebecca’s. Hers did not till she realized he was looking elsewhere. And her vision found Vicky and what had been a hint of smile on her face turned glum and disappointed.
Matthew did not look away from the vision of Vicky but instead of a starry eyed fool looking longingly. It was a baffled look. Well baffled for him, with his eyes drawn narrow and night with a focus.
There was something about her…he couldn’t quite put a name too. The way she appeared to him. One second brunette. The next second blonde or blonde like. As if the color appeared in her air and disappeared in fractions of seconds. Much the same way her body almost seemed to…shift…very subtly…smoothly. A nicer bum. Larger breasts. And then back to a simple and plain form. Feminine no doubt. Attractive. But not so…remarkable.
As If It Was Kismet Ch 4
The next two days passed without incident. Nothing of any real substance or challenge to note.
Matthew got settled somewhat and started working out almost immediately. Exploring around the woods but Dave told him not to go far. Especially without a hunting rifle. Dave had left a simple semi-auto Winchester out for him. His bear gun as Dave referred to it with its four round magazine. But Matt figured till he got some practice with the rifle to leave it alone. He made a hiking stick like his grandpa taught him and treated it over a low fire. He would take some electrical tape for the end his hand would grip around. Plenty enough to ward off anything smaller than a bear he figured.
The ride to school was a pain in the neck but simple enough. Dave would let him use a clunker pickup truck he had laying around. It wasn’t pretty but it would get him to and from. Even if it was from the eighties and still backfired on occasion. But for now Dave and his mom took him on their way to the sheriff’s department.
It wasn’t much of a school. It wanted to be modern but its fifties original construction was very obvious. It serviced the pipeline families and familys’ of fisherman who worked the seasons in between their time at the pipeline.
Matt was to report to the principal for some reason Dave and his mom wouldn’t share. Which annoyed him but he figured it was to read him the law of land. Small towns with their big views of the outside world and like.
Dressed in jeans, a grey sweatshirt under a light jacket with steel toed boots set him more apart then he expected. His buzzed head didn’t help matters. Already he was feeling like a stranger in a strange land but he was quite strange after all. And he liked it that way. Normal people were so pathetically disappointing to him.
A secretary or assistant or some such led him to the principal’s office. Where it reeked of real wood that was old and fabric and upholstery that needed to be updated for the last twenty years, Matt figured.
“This is Matthew Berkshire, Principal Andrews.” The man was turned with his back to the door and he was quick to wave her off as he turned her around.
He was an older man. Fat and large. Tall with a body built like he had once been fit and a demeanour of annoyed and irate already as he fixed Matt with a scowl and look of disgust. Another worthless government whore. Matt thought to himself. His father and his grandfather had bestowed unto him a natural disrespect for government workers and the figures that wore unjustified authority as a shield but pretended the weight of the state was not at their back ready to crush all who resisted. Little figures of valor pretending to be mighty and alone but acting with the tyranny of the state and all the backing.
“Mr. Berkshire, please sit down.” His tone wasn’t unusually hostile, just gruff. As if he had better things to do.
Matt complied and took a seat in the chair while maintaining a friendly facade. Not everyone was an enemy. And not everyone needed to be an enemy. Even if anybody could be any enemy. There was no reason to make enemies you didn’t have to. Another of his grandfather’s bastardised wisdoms.
“Well I looked over you file and you have quite the history Mr. Berkshire.” Matt resisted qiuping back a joke. Instead he waited for Principal Andrews to continue as he remained nonplussed and looking as if he felt no need to respond. A simple head tilt with dead eyes looking back at the principle as if he was not even there would suffice.
Matt’s reaction or lack of a reaction rather made Principal Andrews only narrow his eyes with examination. He was not used to a kid not responding to him. Especially with his gruff and hard act going on.
“Well by all accounts you moved here after some problems at your last school. A fight broke out and you did some real harm to your fellow students it appears.” Of course, he would take the side of the perpetrators. School administrators always did. Especially when they weren’t white. Just a fact of the times. Cowardice and pathetic mediocrity was the way they leaned, like good government workers sucking the dick of Big Daddy government. Worthless whores.
Matt chose to reply. “Oh you mean the criminals that stabbed me. Got arrested at the hospital and then pled to felonies. Yeah Florida, with the American counties are good like that.” Principal Andrews went real still. No shame. No fear. No penitence. He didn’t like that.
“Well be it as it may Mr. Berkshire we don’t tolerate that kind of behaviour here…” Matt cut him off responding with a deadpan tone. “You mean self-defense meant to save one’s own life while the cowardly and pathetic school workers look on with zero interest but to keep their money rolling in and will allow known gang members with records of violent acts and crimes that should have them expelled many times over, where in certain Democrat counties such cowardice and idiocy empowered a couple school shooters?”
Principal Andrews looked at the Matt with a note of disgust. “Look here Mr. Berkshire, your beliefs matter not one bit here. This isn’t Florida. We don’t like our way of life being disrupted by outside agitators who have problems with authority.”
Matt did his best not to roll his eyes and let the older fat man drone own as he dead-stared him. Lifeless and without emotion.
The man came to a finish and Matt spoke up without having listened to him or paid him any attention. “Great now that’s taken care of. Can I please get to class and finish my sentence of two years at your wonderful school?”
Principal Andrews huffed and snorted before calling in Vicky. Vicky stood in the corner after entering with a quiet and seamless presence. Matt felt disturbed and tried not betray his feelings as the young Vicky was perceived and not perceived to be moving.
Principal Andrews made the introductions and Matt nodded back. She was to be his chaperone for the day. They had the same classes and she was to show him the ropes so to speak. The ins and outs of the school. The locations of their classes.
He recognized her. It was hard not to. The way her appearance seemed to shift fluidly almost. The petite and skinny brunette ever so lightly had a big bust and blonde hair with curves added when she seemed to shift before his eyes. Like watching a film but each frame had a different person.
Matt didn’t say anything about it. Even if he did he would only be acknowledging his crazed state, if he had one. If.
Unlike an obedient puppy dog he got up in a slow and awkward fashion and followed behind her as his oddly disproportionate frame allowed. Causing her a note of concern for some reason. As if she was seeing something she shouldn’t have been….Or he was just weird. And Matt could admit to himself he was just weird. Part of his charm, he would jest about it at times. Not that he had many people to jest to now.
As If It Were Kismet Ch. 5
Following Vicky into the hall off to their first class was simple. She exchanged small talk and he slightly smiled as if to obviously suggest he was just being polite.
Inside his head, Matt was trying to figure out if he was having a psychotic break. The way Vicky looked kept changing and he looked at the other people around him and they stayed the same.
He was searching his mind as they were walking. And thus he wasn’t paying attention to where he was looking and so fell to his face forward over his feet seemingly out of nowhere.
A series of laughs erupted as it sunk in that he was obviously tripped. Like in prison this was a challenge to his superiority. If he let this pass he would be mocked and sneered at by this same group of boys. He wouldn’t walk to them like he was going to do nothing like a little bitch.
In a rage he turned and punched the stomach of the first face he saw. Some typical blonde haired wannabe jock. He knew from experience not to aim for the ribs. Instead he needed to aim for where he thought the belly button was.
Yells and screams blindly echoed around him as his after the punch he followed up his elbow of the opposite arm slamming into the face of the jock. Harder than a fist, the elbow struck the jock’s jaw and seemingly dropped him against a locker. Just in time to catch an errant and soft punch to the nose that sure enough hurt but did little to slow him down as his dad had taught him to fight through the pain. Blood and scars happened. They were a natural consequence of life to a man.
Taking the punch and falling further into his red state Matt headbutted the punch thrower before another guy arm bared his throat from behind. Which he managed to get his grip on the arm over a letterman jacked and jerk the unprepared boy to the side with him still latched on.
A few feet away from the lockers Matt knew his only chance was to jump and push off the lockers and knock the boy to the ground and so he did. He heard a thunk of the boy’s skull bouncing off the ground and he turned to pull out of the grapple.
The beatings he had taken from his father, the grapples, being choked unconscious. Had prepared him for fighting little bitches who didn’t know what a fight was. It wasn’t gay porn with rabbit punch fists flying.
Blood was running down his face and the pain started to hit him as the threats had been eliminated. Only then did he remember to breathe. Taking breathes as Vicky came up to him with tissues and took a hold of his nose.
“Owww owww owww what the fuck my nose could be broken.” He said to Vicky as she pulled his head up and back.
“It’s ok Carl. It’s done.” Matt tried to look to see who Vicky was talking to. It was a boy taller than his 5’9” by more than a small margin. The boy eyed him bored and annoyed before speaking. “What happened here?” An unoriginal line but one Matt couldn’t be a smart aleck about. “Well you see there was an outbreak of tripping and we all tripped over my dick. It happens.” Matt was about to laugh when Vicky seemed to pull up while still gripping his nose causing Matt no small amount of pain which he audibly evidenced.
Vicky spoke in a tone he wasn’t expecting. As if she was accustomed to issuing orders. “Keep Iris away from the hall till we sanitize the site. We have blood from at least three people contaminating the site. And have Jake bring me a spare jacket and shirt for this moron.”
Carl seemed to acknowledge her orders and seemed to blink away. Maybe the punch hit harder than he expected. He had no time to wonder as Vick took her hand away from his and pushed him against the lockers. With ease he had not been expecting from her form and stature.
Before he could respond Vicky licked his blood covered chin and then his lips and spoke to him. “Focus on me you little blood bag.” Her tone had an annoyed yet feminine sneer.
“Look into my eyes. Look at me. You belong to me. You are just another food source in a collection of food sources.” Her eyes were a beautiful hazel Matt thought. Almost green. Pretty like jewels in some old treasure collections. The eyes he could get lost in before kissing her. Finally Vicky was just a slight and petite brunette and he thought she was beautiful.
She would make a hell of a girlfriend. Some cute thing he could see laying on the beach in Florida on their sides laughing and smiling before trading light kisses while hands wandered innocently. Before his mind could drift further he felt her lips on his. It took him a second to mentally grasp the kiss but his arms were around her back as her hands were at his sides. His eyes reflexively closed as he saw hers close.
It was ineffable to Matt. Beyond words, what was happening. The kiss, the moments beforehand. The way his brain tickled with electricity and gentle warmth. He had never had a kiss like this and he had traded more than a few kisses with at least a few girls.
The kiss was like a warm bath with his consciousness slipping beneath the surface. Their lips only parted to try new angles and approaches as Matt struggled to take in breath. It was a moment he could have stayed trapped in for….he didn’t know. But a curt throat clearing by another girl pulled them out of the moment.
The girl was taller than Vicky. Blonde. With slight curves. Vicky addressed her bewildered and gobsmacked, and perhaps a bit embarrassed. “Tina?”

As Reddit doesn't allow posts to exceed 40,000 characters, Eastwood's edition had to be split into two parts because his whole career cannot be ignored. The second part will be posted tomorrow.

Here's a new edition of "Directors at the Box Office", which seeks to explore the directors' trajectory at the box office and analyze their hits and bombs. I already talked about a few, and as I promised, it's Clint Eastwood's turn.
Eastwood was a troublemaker at school, and he had a bunch of odd jobs such as lifeguard, paper carrier, grocery clerk, forest firefighter, and golf caddy. In 1951, he was drafted into the United States Army during the Korean War and was discharged two years later. Through this, he got into contact with a Hollywood representative, who got him into acting classes and started his acting career. He got his start by starring in the hit show Rawhide, but he said he was exhausted by the experience. This caught the attention of some film producers and he decided to act in films directed by the then-unknown Sergio Leone. His career was on the rise, and then he got the chance to make his directorial debut.
From a box office perspective, how reliable was he to deliver a box office hit?
That's the point of this post. To analyze his career.

It should be noted that as he started his career in the 1970s, some of the domestic grosses here will be adjusted by inflation. The table with his highest grossing films, however, will be left in its unadjusted form, as the worldwide grosses are more difficult to adjust.

Play Misty for Me (1971)

"The scream you hear may be your own!"
His directorial debut. It stars Eastwood, Jessica Walter and Donna Mills, and follows a radio disc jockey being stalked by an obsessed female fan.
Before his colleague Irving Leonard died, he and Eastwood had discussed the idea of producing a film that was to give Eastwood the artistic control he desired, and his debut as a director. Eastwood said he was ready, "I stored away all the mistakes I made and saved up all the good things I learned, and now I know enough to control my own projects and get what I want out of actors."
The film was a huge success for Eastwood, and it also received positive reviews. So far, his directorial career was off to a great start.

• Budget: $950,000.
  
• Domestic gross: $10,600,000. ($81.7 million adjusted)
  
• Worldwide gross: $10,600,000.
  

High Plains Drifter (1973)

"They'd never forget the day he drifted into town."
His second film. The film stars Eastwood, Verna Bloom and Mariana Hill, and follows a mysterious stranger who metes out justice in a corrupt frontier mining town.
Eastwood reportedly liked the offbeat quality of the film's original nine-page proposal and approached Universal with the idea of directing it, which would make it his first directed Western. The screenplay was inspired by the real-life murder of Kitty Genovese in Queens in 1964, which eyewitnesses reportedly stood by and watched. Holes in the plot were filled in with black humor and allegory, influenced by Sergio Leone.
It was well received, and the film even surpassed Play Misty for Me at the box office. Eastwood was just going up.

• Budget: $5,500,000.
  
• Domestic gross: $15,700,000. ($110.4 million adjusted)
  
• Worldwide gross: $15,700,000.
  

Breezy (1973)

"Her name is Breezy."
His third film. It stars William Holden and Kay Lenz, and follows the relationship between a middle-aged real estate agent and a young hitchhiker.
This was his first directed film without starring on it. And his lack of presence certainly hurt the film; it received mixed reviews and flopped at the box office.

• Budget: $750,000.
  
• Domestic gross: $200,000. ($1.4 million adjusted)
  
• Worldwide gross: $217,753.
  

The Eiger Sanction (1975)

"His lifeline, held by the assassin he hunted."
His fourth film. Based on the novel by Trevanian, the film stars Eastwood, George Kennedy, Vonetta McGee, and Jack Cassidy. It follows Jonathan Hemlock, an art history professor, mountain climber, and former assassin once employed by a secret government agency, who is blackmailed into returning to his deadly profession for one last mission.
The film received mixed reactions for its writing, and it wasn't a box office success either.

• Budget: $9,000,000.
  
• Domestic gross: $14,200,000. ($82.4 million adjusted)
  
• Worldwide gross: $14,200,000.
  

The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)

"An army of one."
His fifth film. Based on the novel Gone to Texas by Forrest Carter, it stars Eastwood, Chief Dan George, Sondra Locke, Bill McKinney and John Vernon. The film tells the story of Josey Wales, a Missouri farmer whose family is murdered by Union militia during the Civil War. Driven to revenge, Wales joins a Confederate guerrilla band and makes a name for himself as a feared gunfighter. After the war, all the fighters in Wales' group except for him surrender to Union soldiers, but the Confederates end up being massacred. Wales becomes an outlaw and is pursued by bounty hunters and Union soldiers as he tries to make a new life for himself.
Eastwood was fascinated by the novel and he bought the film rights, hoping to star on the film. He got Philip Kaufman involved as screenwriter and possible director, but left after disagreeing with Eastwood in the material adapted to the screen. Kaufman insisted on filming with a meticulous attention to detail, which caused disagreements with Eastwood, not to mention the attraction the two shared towards Locke and apparent jealousy on Kaufman's part in regard to their emerging relationship. This caused Eastwood to take over as the director. Kaufman's firing angered the DGA, as he did most of the pre-production, and sanctioning a $60,000 fine. This resulted in the Director's Guild passing a new rule, known as "the Eastwood Rule", which prohibits an actor or producer from firing the director and then personally taking on the director's role.
The film received critical acclaim, and in subsequent years, is ranked among Eastwood's greatest films. It was also a huge success at the box office, doubling his previous highest grossing film. It was also one of the few Western films to receive critical and commercial success in the 1970s at a time when the Western was thought to be dying as a major genre in Hollywood.

• Budget: $3,700,000.
  
• Domestic gross: $31,800,000. ($174.5 million adjusted)
  
• Worldwide gross: $31,800,000.
  

The Gauntlet (1977)

"The man in the middle of..."
His sixth film. It stars Eastwood, Sondra Locke, Pat Hingle, William Prince, Bill McKinney, and Mara Corday. It follows a down-and-out cop who falls in love with a prostitute, to whom he is assigned to escort from Las Vegas to Phoenix for her to testify against the mob.
While it received mixed reviews, it became another box office success for Eastwood, becoming his now highest grossing film.

• Budget: $5,500,000.
  
• Domestic gross: $35,400,000. ($182.4 million adjusted)
  
• Worldwide gross: $35,400,000.
  

Bronco Billy (1980)

"The most outrageous of 'em all."
His seventh film. The film stars Eastwood and Sondra Locke, and focuses on the financially-struggling owner of a traditional Wild West show and his new assistant.
It became another critical and commercial success for Eastwood, who referred to the film as one of his most affable shoots of his career.

• Budget: $6,500,000.
  
• Domestic gross: $24,265,659. ($91.9 million adjusted)
  
• Worldwide gross: $24,265,659.
  

Firefox (1982)

"The most devastating killing machine ever built... his job... steal it!"
His eighth film. Based on the novel by Craig Thomas, it stars Eastwood, Freddie Jones and David Huffman. The Soviets have developed a revolutionary new jet fighter, called "Firefox". Naturally, the British are worried that the jet will be used as a first-strike weapon, as rumors say that the jet is undetectable on radar. They send ex-Vietnam War pilot Mitchell Gant on a covert mission into the Soviet Union to steal the Firefox.
The film received mixed reviews, but it earned almost $47 million, becoming Eastwood's highest grossing title as director.

• Budget: $21,000,000.
  
• Domestic gross: $46,708,276. ($151.1 million adjusted)
  
• Worldwide gross: $46,708,276.
  

Honkytonk Man (1982)

"The boy is on his way to becoming a man. The man is on his way to becoming a legend."
His ninth film. It's based on the novel by Clancy Carlile, and it stars Eastwood and his son Kyle. It follows Red Stovall, a country music singer and composer. With his nephew Whit by his side, he travels to Nashville to perform at the Grand Ole Opry in the backdrop of the Great Depression.
While the film received acclaim, it earned just $4.4 million, becoming his second worst performer.

• Budget: $2,000,000.
  
• Domestic gross: $4,484,991. ($14.5 million adjusted)
  
• Worldwide gross: $4,484,991.
  

Sudden Impact (1983)

"Dirty Harry is at it again."
His tenth film. The fourth installment in the Dirty Harry series, directed, it stars Eastwood and Sondra Locke. The film tells the story of a gang rape victim who decides to seek revenge on her rapists 10 years after the attack by killing them one by one. Inspector Harry Callahan, famous for his unconventional and often brutal crime-fighting tactics, is tasked with tracking down the serial killer.
The film received mixed reviews from critics, but it earned over $150 million worldwide, Eastwood's first film to pass that milestone. It's also very popular for including the iconic catchphrase, "Go ahead, make my day."

• Budget: $22,000,000.
  
• Domestic gross: $67,642,693. ($212.1 million adjusted)
  
• Worldwide gross: $150,642,693.
  

Tightrope (1984)

"A cop on the edge..."
His 11th film. It stars Eastwood, Geneviève Bujold, Dan Hedaya, Alison Eastwood and Jennifer Beck, and follows a detective determined to hunt down a sadomasochistic serial killer of prostitutes.
The film became another critical and commercial success for Eastwood.

• Budget: N/A.
  
• Domestic gross: $48,143,579. ($144.7 million adjusted)
  
• Worldwide gross: $48,143,579.
  

Pale Rider (1985)

"...And Hell followed with him."
His 12th film. It stars Eastwood, Michael Moriarty and Carrie Snodgress. A couple and their daughter, along with a few others, are driven out of Lahood, California, by goons working for a mining baron. However, a stranger enters their life to assist them in their fight.
There was no stopping Eastwood: another critical and commercial success.

• Budget: $6,900,000.
  
• Domestic gross: $41,410,568. ($120.2 million adjusted)
  
• Worldwide gross: $41,410,568.
  

Heartbreak Ridge (1986)

"The scars run deep."
His 13th film. It stars Eastwood, Marsha Mason, Everett McGill, and Mario Van Peebles. The story centers on a U.S. Marine nearing retirement who gets a platoon of undisciplined Marines into shape and leads them during the American invasion of Grenada in 1983.
The film was inspired by an account of American paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne Division using a pay telephone and a credit card to call in fire support during the invasion of Grenada, and fashioned a script of a Korean War veteran career Army non-commissioned officer passing on his values to a new generation of soldiers. Eastwood was interested in the script and asked his producer, Fritz Manes, to contact the US Army with a view of filming the movie at Fort Bragg. However, the Army read the script and refused to participate, due to Highway being portrayed as a hard drinker, divorced from his wife, and using unapproved motivational methods to his troops, an image the Army did not want.
It received mixed reviews, with some deeming the film as "imperialist propaganda". But it was still another box office success.

• Budget: $15,000,000.
  
• Domestic gross: $42,724,017. ($121.7 million adjusted)
  
• Worldwide gross: $121,700,000.
  

Bird (1988)

"There are no second acts in American lives."
His 14th film. The film stars Forest Whitaker and Diane Venora. It is constructed as a montage of scenes from saxophonist Charlie Parker's life, from his childhood in Kansas City, through his early death at the age of 34.
Eastwood, a lifelong fan of jazz, had been fascinated by Parker ever since seeing him perform live in Oakland in 1946. He approached Chan Parker, Bird's common-law wife on whose memoirs the script was based, for input, and she lent Eastwood and arranger Lennie Niehaus a collection of recordings from her private collection Before Eastwood was involved, Richard Pryor was originally cast as Parker.
Despitive positive reviews, it performed poorly, earning just $2.2 million in North America.

• Budget: $14,000,000.
  
• Domestic gross: $2,181,286. ($5.7 million adjusted)
  
• Worldwide gross: $2,181,286.
  

White Hunter Black Heart (1990)

"An adventure in obsession."
His 15th film. Based on the novel by Peter Viertel, it stars Eastwood, Jeff Fahey, George Dzundza, Alun Armstrong and Marisa Berenson. It follows a famous movie director, John Wilson, who goes to Africa to make his next movie. He is an obstinate, contrary director who'd rather hunt elephants than take care of his crew or movie. He has become obsessed with one particular elephant and cares for nothing else.
Despite positive reviews, it made just $2.3 million domestically, not even 10% of the budget.

• Budget: $24,000,000.
  
• Domestic gross: $2,319,124. ($5.5 million adjusted)
  
• Worldwide gross: $2,319,124.
  

The Rookie (1990)

His 16th film. The film stars Eastwood, Charlie Sheen, Raul Julia, Sônia Braga, Lara Flynn Boyle, and Tom Skerritt. It follows a veteran police officer teamed up with a younger detective, whose intent is to take down a German crime lord in downtown Los Angeles, following months of investigation into an exotic car theft ring.
It received negative reviews for its acting and story, and it became another flop for Eastwood. That's three bombs in a row. Ouch.

• Budget: $30,000,000.
  
• Domestic gross: $21,633,874. ($51.6 million adjusted)
  
• Worldwide gross: $21,633,874.
  

Unforgiven (1992)

"Some legends will never be forgotten. Some wrongs can never be forgiven."
His 17th film. It stars Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Richard Harris and Morgan Freeman. It follows William Munny, a widower with two young kids, who was once a very vicious gunfighter who gave up everything after marriage. Now, a man named Schofield Kid brings him an offer that he cannot refuse, forcing him to come out of retirement for one last job.
David Webb Peoples wrote the script all the way back to 1976, and it was optioned by Francis Ford Coppola, but he lacked the funds needed to helm it. By Eastwood's own recollection, he was given the script in the "early 80s" although he did not immediately pursue it, because, according to him, "I thought I should do some other things first". Eastwood has long asserted that the film would be his last traditional Western, concerned that any future projects would simply rehash previous plotlines or imitate someone else's work. He dedicated the film to his close friends and mentors Sergio Leone and Don Siegel. Hackman initially refused to participate as his daughters were upset that he was starring in too many violent films, but he became fascinated by the script that he agreed.
It opened with $15 million and it legged all the way to $100 million after playing for almost one year, closing with $159 million worldwide, his now highest grossing film. The film received Eastwood's best reviews of his career, with many considering the film as his magnum opus as director. It received 9 Oscar nominations, and won four: Best Picture and Best Director for Eastwood, Best Supporting Actor for Hackman, and Best Film Editing. So Eastwood, on top of being a reliable box office draw, was now a 2-time Oscar winner.

• Budget: $14,400,000.
  
• Domestic gross: $101,167,799. ($225.2 million adjusted)
  
• Worldwide gross: $159,167,799.
  

A Perfect World (1993)

His 18th film. Kevin Costner, Eastwood and Laura Dern, and follows an escaped convict who takes a young boy hostage and attempts to escape on the road with the child, while being pursued by a Texas Ranger.
The film received critical acclaim, and has appeared as one of Eastwood's best films. The film disappointed in North America, but it earned up to $100 million overseas (Eastwood's first film to gross that much) and ended with $135 million worldwide.

• Budget: $30,000,000.
  
• Domestic gross: $31,130,999. ($67.2 million adjusted)
  
• Worldwide gross: $135,130,999.
  

The Bridges of Madison County (1995)

"The human heart has a way of making itself large again even after it's been broken into a million pieces."
His 19th film. Based on the novel by Robert James Waller, it stars Eastwood and Meryl Streep. The film is set in 1965, following a war bride, Francesca Johnson, who lives with her husband and two children on their Iowa farm. That year she meets National Geographic photojournalist, Robert Kincaid, who comes to Madison County, Iowa to photograph its historic covered bridges. With Francesca's family away for a short trip, the couple have an intense, four-day love affair.
It received more critical acclaim, and made over $180 million worldwide, becoming his highest grossing film. For her performance, Streep was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress.

• Budget: $22,000,000.
  
• Domestic gross: $71,516,617. ($146.5 million adjusted)
  
• Worldwide gross: $182,016,617.
  

Absolute Power (1997)

His 20th film. Based on the novel by David Baldacci, it stars Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Ed Harris, Laura Linney, Judy Davis, Scott Glenn, Dennis Haysbert, and Richard Jenkins. It follows a master jewel thief who witnesses the killing of a woman by Secret Service agents.
It received mixed reviews, and disappointed at the box office.

• Budget: $50,000,000.
  
• Domestic gross: $50,068,310. ($97.4 million adjusted)
  
• Worldwide gross: $92,768,310.
  

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997)

"Welcome to Savannah, Georgia. A Ccty of hot nights and cold blooded murder."
His 21st film. Based on the book by John Berendt, it stars John Cusack and Kevin Spacey. It follows the story of antiques dealer Jim Williams, on trial for the killing of a male prostitute who was his lover. The multiple trials depicted in Berendt's book are combined into one trial for the film.
It received mediocre reviews, and flopped at the box office.

• Budget: $30,000,000.
  
• Domestic gross: $25,105,255. ($48.8 million adjusted)
  
• Worldwide gross: $25,105,255.
  

True Crime (1999)

His 22nd film. Based on the novel by Andrew Klavan, it stars Eastwood, Isaiah Washington, Denis Leary, LisaGay Hamilton and James Woods. It follows a journalist covering the execution of a death row inmate, only to discover that the convict may actually be innocent.
This was another project that received mediocre reviews and flopped at the box office.

• Budget: $55,000,000.
  
• Domestic gross: $16,649,768. ($31.2 million adjusted)
  
• Worldwide gross: $16,649,768.
  

Space Cowboys (2000)

"Boys will be boys."
His 23rd film. It stars Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland, and James Garner as four aging former test pilots who are sent into space to repair an old Soviet satellite.
It received very positive reviews, and earned over $128 million worldwide.

• Budget: $60,000,000.
  
• Domestic gross: $90,464,773. ($164 million adjusted)
  
• Worldwide gross: $128,884,132.
  

Blood Work (2002)

"He's a heartbeat away from catching the killer."
His 24th film. Based on the novel by Michael Connelly, it stars Eastwood, Jeff Daniels, Wanda De Jesús, and Anjelica Huston. It follows a retired FBI agent who recently had a heart transplant but still takes up the job to nab a killer.
It was another film with mediocre reviews and flop status.

• Budget: $50,000,000.
  
• Domestic gross: $26,235,081. ($45.5 million adjusted)
  
• Worldwide gross: $31,794,718.
  

Mystic River (2003)

"We bury our sins, we wash them clean."
His 25th film. Based on the novel by Dennis Lehane, it stars Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Kevin Bacon, Laurence Fishburne, Marcia Gay Harden, and Laura Linney. It follows three childhood friends who are reunited 25 years later when one of them suffers a family tragedy.
Michael Keaton was originally cast in the role of Det. Sean Devine, and did several script readings with the cast, as well as his own research into the practices of the Massachusetts Police Department. However, creative differences between Keaton and Eastwood led to Keaton leaving the production. He was replaced by Kevin Bacon. This was the first film in which Eastwood would be credited as composer.
The film had a slow roll-out, but it was aided by strong word of mouth, closing with a wonderful $156 million worldwide. It also received acclaim, and was named as one of Eastwood's greatest films. Sean Penn received universal acclaim for his performance, with some naming it among the best acting of the century, particularly for one scene (if you watched it, you definitely know which scene). It received 6 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director for Eastwood. It won two: Best Actor for Penn and Best Supporting Actor for Robbins.

• Budget: $25,000,000.
  
• Domestic gross: $90,135,191. ($153 million adjusted)
  
• Worldwide gross: $156,595,191.
  

Come back tomorrow for Part 2

MOVIES (FROM HIGHEST GROSSING TO LEAST GROSSING)

No.	Movie	Year	Studio	Domestic Total	Overseas Total	Worldwide Total	Budget
x	The Bridges of Madison County	1995	Warner Bros.	$71,516,617	$110,500,000	$182,016,617	$22M
x	Unforgiven	1992	Warner Bros.	$101,167,799	$58,000,000	$159,167,799	$14.4M
x	Mystic River	2003	Warner Bros.	$90,135,191	$66,460,000	$156,595,191	$25M
x	Sudden Impact	1983	Warner Bros.	$67,642,693	$83,000,000	$150,642,693	$22M
x	A Perfect World	1993	Warner Bros.	$31,130,999	$104,000,000	$135,130,999	$30M
x	Space Cowboys	2000	Warner Bros.	$90,464,773	$38,419,359	$128,884,132	$60M
x	Heartbreak Ridge	1986	Warner Bros.	$42,724,017	$78,975,983	$121,700,000	$15M
x	Absolute Power	1997	Sony	$50,068,310	$42,700,000	$92,768,310	$50M
x	Tightrope	1984	Warner Bros.	$48,143,579	$0	$48,143,579	N/A
x	Firefox	1982	Warner Bros.	$46,708,276	$0	$46,708,276	$21M
x	Pale Rider	1985	Warner Bros.	$41,410,568	$0	$41,410,568	$6.9M
x	The Gauntlet	1977	Warner Bros.	$35,400,000	$0	$35,400,000	$5.5M
x	The Outlaw Josey Wales	1976	Warner Bros.	$31,800,000	$0	$31,800,000	$3.7M
x	Blood Work	2002	Warner Bros.	$26,235,081	$5,559,637	$31,794,718	$50M
x	Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil	1997	Warner Bros.	$25,105,255	$0	$25,105,255	$30M
x	Bronco Billy	1980	Warner Bros.	$24,265,659	$0	$24,265,659	$6.5M
x	The Rookie	1990	Warner Bros.	$21,633,874	$0	$21,633,874	$30M
x	True Crime	1999	Warner Bros.	$16,649,768	$0	$16,649,768	$55M
x	High Plains Drifter	1973	Universal	$15,700,000	$0	$15,700,000	$5.5M
x	The Eiger Sanction	1975	Universal	$14,200,000	$0	$14,200,000	$9M
x	Play Misty for Me	1971	Universal	$10,600,000	$0	$10,600,000	$950K
x	Honkytonk Man	1982	Warner Bros.	$4,484,991	$0	$4,484,991	$2M
x	White Hunter Black Heart	1990	Warner Bros.	$2,319,124	$0	$2,319,124	$24M
x	Bird	1988	Warner Bros.	$2,181,286	$0	$2,181,286	$14M
x	Breezy	1973	Universal	$200,000	$17,753	$217,753	$750K

The Verdict

Hope you liked this edition. You can find this and more in the wiki for this section.
The next director will be Robert Zemeckis. One of the biggest falls from grace.
I asked you to choose who else should be in the run and the comment with the most upvotes would be chosen. It had to be a controversial filmmaker. Well, we'll later talk about... Zack Snyder. Oh, BoxOffice chose fuego 🔥
This is the schedule for the following four:

Week	Director	Reasoning
May 20-26	Robert Zemeckis	Can we get old Zemeckis back?
May 27-June 2	Richard Donner	An influential figure of the 70s and 80s.
June 3-9	Ang Lee	What happened to Lee?
June 10-16	Zack Snyder	RIP Inbox.

Who should be next after Snyder? That's up to you.

Me and Lila always carved dozens of jack o’ lanterns every October, so they’d absolutely saturate our lawn on Halloween night. It was our thing. But looking back on it, now that I’ve lost her, I just feel bad for the pumpkins. I almost relate to them, somehow. The way they were carved up, had everything of substance inside of them torn out, and left as hollow, rotting shells with forced smiles.
Needless to say, I didn’t cope with her death well. I didn’t want to cope with it. I wanted the world to drown in the black sludge of my grief. I loathed the people I saw going about their lives, unaware that the world had already ended the moment Lila died. The Earth shouldn’t keep spinning. Life shouldn’t go on. Not without her.
Even my relatives bringing me along on a trip to Kauai only made it worse. The most gorgeous place on Earth, and it made me sick with hatred. Nothing that beautiful deserved to exist if Lila wasn’t ever going to get to see it. It wasn’t fair.
I thought I’d never enjoy or care about anything again. Then I discovered media preservation.
It started with taking some of Lila’s old VHS tapes to a video repair place to fix some issues with the footage before it’s digitized. The job fascinated me. In a universe based on entropy, where everything inevitably fades away and is forgotten… restoring something lost is like snatching it from the jaws of death, right? Like flipping the bird to the universe and its so-called ‘natural order’. People die, but information doesn’t have to.
Now, it doesn’t matter how small — be it some god-awful plug-and-play licensed game, or a cereal commercial from 80’s — it’s my mission to recover it in as high a quality as I’m able, and make sure it’s freely available online for as long as possible.
A couple weeks ago, I came across a big haul. Four boxes of old VHS tapes offered up on E-Bay for dirt cheap. Most of the tapes were just recordings of Cheers episodes already preserved in higher qualities, but one Maxell E-240 caught my interest.
First of all, I’d never seen one so melted. Sure, sometimes they were left in an attic too long, and the colors and audio start to degrade. But this one looked like it had survived a house fire. It was covered in soot and the smell of smoke, and had the overall shape of a chocolate bar left out in the sun a little too long.
Second was the label, which read in neat sharpie: ᴇᴘɪꜱᴏᴅᴇ 4,679,329 ᴍᴀʀ 8 2035.
The casing was so disfigured, I had to bust it apart just pull out the tapes and respool them in a fresh cassette. I tried to iron out the creases in the tape as best I could, but I had no illusions about it accomplishing much — the mylar surface had been irreparably warped in places by whatever fire had half-melted the thing.
Imagine my despair at the sight of that dreaded ‘ɴᴏ ꜱɪɢɴᴀʟ’. I could clearly see the tape wasn’t blank, yet no amount of adjusting the tracking or trying different TVs or VCRs accomplished anything. Just as I was about to give up, though, the thing just suddenly started playing properly at the exact instant the clock struck 3 AM, as if it had only now decided to work. My all-nighter had paid off.
I didn’t dwell on the fact that this ‘miracle fix’ had been impossible. If I’d had any sense, I’d have torn the horrid thing out of my VCR and buried it beneath holy ground. Instead, fool I was, I sat down and watched.
At first, the thing seemed unwatchable. The audio was so distorted that the show’s theme song emerged as a low, crackling, staticky wail that made my head throb, and the logo was completely indistinguishable through the flickering and interference. I thought it was a lost cause for a moment. But then a figure appeared and cleared away the static, like Moses parting the Red Sea.
It was the sight of the show’s host that hooked me. He was just… perfect. Perfect in every way. I knew it just looking at him. Infinitely handsome and likable and charismatic, and he always said the exact perfect thing. The only issue is, I don’t remember a single thing about him now, in the same way you can’t remember a dream that seemed so clear to you while you were experiencing it. He just appears in my memory as this abstract blur in a sharp suit. Yet at the time, I was awestruck, even before he said a single word.
I can’t even remember a word he said. It was like he was speaking another language, one I felt as opposed to heard. I’ll try and transcribe it as best I can into words, but know that it’s only a pathetic imitation.
“... for another night of laughs, prizes, and fun for the whole family, with your host, #####!” I noticed that the audio and visual distortion seemed to suddenly intensify the instant he said his name, rendering it completely illegible. Idiot I was, I figured that was a coincidence. “Tonight is a night of celebration, folks, because thanks to the support of loyal viewers like you, we have just been approved for, get this: two hundred thousand more seasons!”
The “live studio audience” went wild with applause. I put that in scare quotes because, as far as I could tell, besides the host, the studio seemed completely empty. As if he was standing on a plain white stage that extended outwards into infinite darkness on all sides.
“For those just joining us, the game here is simple…” He explained that this was some sort of a trivia show. Every time a guest got an answer wrong, it brought them a little closer to some sort of unspecified ‘punishment’. And if they got it right? He smirked. “Well, they get to delay the inevitable.”
I wondered what he meant by ‘inevitable’. I didn’t have to wonder long.
The host gestured to a curtain that hadn’t been there moments ago, which raised to reveal a middle-aged man. You know the type — bushy mustache, gray hair, round-rimmed glasses. Kind of guy you’d have doing your plumbing. He couldn’t look any more out of place stood up and restrained in that — what the hell is that?
I recognized that metal coffin-looking thing from a medieval torture museum I went to once. The iron maiden. The lid hung open, countless long, needle-like blades poking inwards, threaten to poke a million new holes in him if it was shut.
His situation was not lost on him. “Where… where am I? What the hell is this!?”
“Oh, lucky guess!” The host ‘joked’. More canned laughter. “I know you always loved watching those trivia shows, Malcolm? Weren’t you always sitting there, grinding your teeth, seething that it wasn’t fair? That you should be the one up on stage, winning big?”
The man paused. Even he seemed mesmerized by the unreal perfection of the host before him. “I… this is a… game show?”
“All you have to do is answer a few questions! Think you can handle that, Malcolm?” He pulled out a cue card without waiting for an answer. “And our first question! What were you doing the night of February 18th, 1998?”
The man seemed baffled. “Just… sat on my couch watching the NFL, I think? I’m not sure how I’m supposed to remember —“
He let out a startled squeal as a horrid buzzer sounded. On cue, the lid slid a third of the way closed, making him flinch. “Oooh, I’m afraid that’s the wrong answer, Frank! But you know what? I’ll give you one more chance. What were you —“
“Following a girl home!” The man cried out. “F-from the bar. There, are you happy?”
“Cor-rect!” The canned audience began cheering! “Such honesty! Now, our second question: just what were you carrying while you followed her?”
He hesitated for a little too long. And then the buzzer sounded again, and the lid slid so near to closing that its blades began poking uncomfortably against his skin. He tried to press himself against the back of the maiden as well as his restraints would allow. “Jesus! Okay! A knife, a knife!”
“Awww, if only you’d said that just a second earlier!” Another big question. “Our third question: why, Malcolm? Why did you do it?”
That set Malcolm off. He started thrashing, clawing, screaming. “Let me out of this thing, you maniac! You can’t do this to me! Do you know who I am? Is this some sort of sick joke? My lawyers will have your head for this, you—“
And then the buzzer. All of a sudden, the lid slammed shut full-force, and the man was utterly silenced save for an unnatural, drawn-out wheeze. “Another wrong answer, Malcolm! I’m afraid I was looking for: ‘because if I can’t have her, no one can’!”
I admit it. I laughed. Out of shock more than anything. How was this allowed on TV? I took it as some sort of dark comedy show, and it was kind of satisfying to see that freaky character get his comeuppance. Still, there was something unnerving to me, seeing the man’s eyes through the openings in the maiden. Wide and red and terrified. They just looked a little… too real.
But the maiden disappeared as quickly as it came, before I could dwell on it too much. “Oh, envy! Definitely one of my favorite sins.” More laughter. “Stay tuned, folks! We’ve still got a night of fun and games in store for you! But first… how’s about a word from our sponsors?”
Cut to a corporate logo which I again couldn't recognize.
“This segment was made possible by Buer Health, which has recently announced a brilliant new initiative to protect our citizens from skin cancer by removing their skin completely.”
The camera cut to a massive industrial building, resembling a solid concrete cube around 50 meters in width and height. Its surface bore arcane symbols etched using carvings of wailing, tormented faces. The host would occasionally be rendered inaudible by a deafening metallic scraping from within, though he didn’t seem to notice. The only protrusion from the building’s cubic shape was a single smokestack, belching a scarlet red smoke into the atmosphere. A queue of gaunt figures waited at the entrance, herded and coerced by their grim overseers, and there were no words to describe the procession of scarlet ghouls limping out the building’s other end.
“Owing to the nonlinearity of time, the brand new Grand Skinpeeling Machine has spontaneously appeared several years before construction deadlines, and indeed, before it was even conceived of by anyone in our timeline. People have rushed all the way from Malebolge just to try this miracle of technology out on opening day, and so far, the reviews have been stellar!”
He shoved his microphone in the face of a shambling thing that could only scarcely be called a human. Tatters of flesh clung to its exposed musculature, blowing in the wind. Its eyes were the only hint of color in that sea of bloody red, and they were wide, white and terrified. The thing screamed and wailed for as long as it could before the last tendons connecting its jaw to its face snapped, and it was left to choke and gurgle.
“An amazing wail! The results speak for themselves, folks. The Grand Skinpeeling Machine is a hit!”
So far, I was still laughing along and having a good time. The sight of the next ‘guest’, however, started making me nervous.
It was an old lady.
She couldn’t be a day younger than sixty, the sort of sweet elderly woman who in a just world would be cooking chocolate chip cookies for her grandchildren in a comfy cottage somewhere. But here she was, tied to a metal chair, eyes wide, shaking like a leaf. Unlike the last contestant, she seemed to know exactly what was happening.
“In exchange for our loving endorsement, they’ve agreed to loan us one of their star employees. Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for: the Liqisma!”
Something slunk from the darkness far behind her — or perhaps it’d be more apt to say that the darkness birthed it whole-cloth. It was like a living shadow, and it took my eyes a moment to register what I was even seeing.
How do I even begin describing this creature? I could say it looked almost human, or at least like something that may have been human long ago. Or I could start with its skin, which was all black and shiny as latex and seemingly smooth on first glance, but if you looked closer you’d realize it was covered in a million tiny reptilian scales, almost like a shark. Its head was a bald man’s, utterly devoid of any distinguishing features, like the basic stock template for a human being. It was notable only for a complete lack of pupils and irises, its eyes a pure white.
Its body defied basic biology in so many key ways, I had to stare it at for what felt like an eternity just to wrap my mind around its physiology. It was at least five or six meters long, by my estimate, composed of multiple human torsos stacked one on top of the other like segments of a centipede, each melding with the ones around it at the waist and shoulders. Each torso sported a pair of short, stubby arms that propelled it with terrifying grace. It ended with a pair of human legs, perpetually bent on their knees, beneath a ‘tail’ that looked more like its coccyx was poking free from its body.
The old last could clearly hear it, and kept futilely trying to turn her head around enough to get a peek at what stood behind her. I mouthed uselessly, don’t. You don’t want to know.
“Glad you could join us again, Miss Wethersby! Judging by our ratings last week, you seemed to have been a fan favorite!”
Her voice was so soft, I could barely hear it below the static. “Oh, God. Please, why won’t you people let me go? I’ve told you, I’ve never done anything, never hurt anybody. There must be some sort of—”
He waved a hand over her, and it seemed to forcefully snap her mouth shut. “Please, Miss Wethersby, save your breath for our questions!” Another cue card. “Your first question, my friend: where did you and your husband buy your first home?”
She had to think about it for a long time. Eventually, she cried out, “Alabama! Tuscaloosa, Alabama!”
“Ding ding ding! Why, you’re already doing better than our first contestant! Next question: what breed of dog was your childhood pet?”
She had a pained look on her face as she thought. Eventually, a timer started ticking down. It wasn’t visible, so it wasn’t clear how much time she had left exactly, but the sound it made got more shrill and high-pitched with every second. “Miss Wethersby, need I remind you that we have a time limit on this show?”
A tear ran down her cheek. “I… I keep telling you people, I don’t know. I have dementia, I can’t remember, please—”
That buzzer again. “I’m afraid that was the wrong answer! Liqisma?” The old lady shuddered at the sounds of hundreds of feet drawing a little closer to her. “Now, your first grandchild. What did he look like? What color were his eyes? His hair?”
She was crying harder now, like it hurt her that she couldn’t remember something so dear to her. “I told you I can’t remember! Why are you doing this to me!?”
“If you don’t remember them, why would they remember you?” The host mocked as the buzzer sounded, and the beast drew a little closer. “Really, do you believe they still even think about you? Or do you think they’re glad that the old bag of bones isn’t there sucking up their inheritance?”
This went on for… God, it could have been an hour. I was glued to the screen all the while, frozen with terror, praying for this nightmare to just end, for her to make it out okay somehow. He poured over every little detail of the life she lived and the people she loved, delighting in how little of it she could still recall.
And the thing grew closer, and closer… until she finally felt multiple pairs of hands resting upon her shoulders. The thing was looming over her now, and a long, black tongue a few feet in length emerged from its mouth and ran trails of dark saliva over the back of her head. She looked broken down, eyes raw from crying, and I could tell by the dampness of her dress that she’d wet herself.
“Now, Miss Wethersby, our time here has been fun, but I do believe it is time for our final question. Tell me, what is the name… of your only son?”
She couldn’t even answer anymore. She just stared ahead, like her mind was a million miles away. He cackled as the buzzer sounded one final time, and threw his cue cards aside. “Thank you for playing, Miss Wethersby. Better luck next time.”
I would say the thing unhinged its jaw like a snake, but that’d be an understatement. The way the thing’s face malformed and wrinkled and stretched as it opened its maw, it no longer looked even remotely human. Its jaws must have parted at least thirty centimeters apart, revealing a second, pharyngeal pair of jaws that lashed out and gripped the woman’s skull, pulling her headlong into that darkness.
I could hear bones crunching and snapping as its throat constricted down around her body, peristaltic muscles compacting her into a meat slurry, bit by bit. Yet she just wouldn’t die. Even as her skull and upper body were already crushed and compacted, organs and muscles pressed into mulch, she still kicked her legs, twitched her fingers, let out a gurgling that must have been some attempt at screaming. She was squirming even as the beast snapped its jaw shut around the last of her, condemning her to whatever torments awaited her inside the creature.
And all the while, that horrible laughter. “Don’t worry, folks! She’ll be back next week! And the next. And the next…”
Needless to say, I wasn’t having fun anymore. In fact, I had to turn away and fight the urge to throw up. I stood, about to turn the TV off and —
“Ah, ah, ah! Don’t touch that dial, now!” I froze. There was something chilling about the way he said that, staring right into the screen as if reacting to what I was doing. I hated that grin on his face. “The real show is just beginning.”
And with the barely restrained excitement of a child on Christmas morning, he yanked back another curtain, and I recognized everything.
I recognized that crappy bootleg knockoff Always Sunny in Philadelphia jacket that was so gaudy and terrible it instantly became her favorite thing in her wardrobe. I recognized those subtle hints of slight acne she disguised as fake freckles. I recognized the way her gray eyes would remind me of those overcast mornings at the beach at Hilton Head and pointing out all the cannonball jellyfish washed up on the sands. I recognized that tattoo of the name ʀᴏᴄᴋʏ, how I’d held her all night long as she cried into my shirt after her childhood cat had died.
It was Lila.
I shuddered, gasped, fell from my seat as if I’d been punched in the stomach and the air had been knocked out of me. I couldn’t breathe. This couldn’t be real. I was dreaming right now. I must be. I just had to wake up.
But I couldn’t wake up. Nothing I could do dispelled the sight of her curled up in that… that thing. That bronze statue of a bull, horns jutting on either side of a head that roaring silently up at the heavens, all while the love of my life was locked in its hollowed out belly, visible only through a pane of glass. I could hear her cry out in shock at where she’d found herself, and every whimper felt like it drove a knife through my chest.
The host soaked in the moment. It was ecstasy for him, the suffering of it all. He stared dead into the camera like he was looking right at me as she called, “What is this? Where am I?”
“Why, I have good news, my dear Lila! You’re exactly where every American dreams of being: you’re on TV.” He pointed to the camera. “And we have a very special guest in the audience tonight. Your very own beloved Jackson!”
I shuddered, hearing my own name ooze from his fetid lips. His façade of perfection was slipping, and there was something so profoundly ugly beneath it. Her eyes snapped to the camera, confused, despairing. “Jackson? Baby? What — what’s happening? What is this?”
I don’t know, I thought, gripping the sides of the TV so hard my knuckles turned white, but I’m going to get you out of there, baby. I’m going to find whoever did this and I’m going to bury them all so far beneath that studio that they’ll never-
“I’m afraid Jackson hasn’t joined us quite yet, my dear. But if you truly love him, surely you’ll give him a show to remember, won’t you?” He taunted her. “All I want, after all, is to ask you a few questions! In fact, I’ll offer you a special deal: get even a single answer right, and I’ll let you go free! But get one wrong and, well…”
On cue, a fire was lit beneath her. Small, smoldering for now, but she whimpered as she noticed the heat. We both realized in that instant what this was. By now, I was screaming things I can’t repeat here, and slamming my hands against the TV screen as if I could reach through and save her.
She bit her lip and acquiesced. Not like she had any room to argue. The host grinned and readied a cue card. “Your first question: where are you, Lila?”
“I… I don’t know. How am I supposed to know?”
“You do know, Lila. You know exactly where you are.” He smirked at her. “Here’s a free hint: what’s the last thing you remember, before you woke up here?
She thought about it… and choked back a sob, visibly shaking as the realization slowly settled in. “But… but why? I… I…”
The horrible wail of the buzzer cut her off. “Oooh, too bad! I’m afraid you’ve run out of time!”
Seemingly as if on its own, the fire doubled in size. Sparks licked the belly of the bronze bull, and began to ever-so-slowly heat the surface. She pawed around in the tight confines, searching for any reprieve from the scalding heat all around her as the metal grew hot like it’d been left out in the sun on a summer’s day. “Please! Oh, God, let me out of this thing! It hurts! It hurts!”
The host seemed to breathe in her pain as if stealing a moment’s indulgence. “Now that there is no doubt about where you are, my dear, let us proceed to the second question.” He switched to his next card. “Did you believe in God, in the end?”
“O-of course!” She pled her case as if she was being tried in court. “My entire life… every day I gave to the poor, helped the sick, did whatever I could to honor Hi-“
“I’m afraid you misunderstood my question. I asked, did you believe in him at the end? The very moment your pitiful little life was snuffed out?”
“I always believed! I’d never forsake Him!”
“Yes, yes, I know. You lived a good and holy life, didn’t you?” He cackled. “But what of the very end? You and your little husband were so excited to deliver your first little baby boy. But o, tragedy! It all went wrong, didn’t it? Your precious little boy didn’t make it through childbirth… and you followed closely behind.”
“That whole business with the botched pregnancy, it was… what do you call it? Ah, yes. A ‘test of faith’. And I’m afraid you failed. In your final moments, you watched the light fade from your child’s eyes, and you assumed — wisely, in my humble opinion — that no ‘kind’ and ‘loving’ God would allow something like that to happen.” He laughed. “Funny how after a lifetime of dutiful service, all it takes is one little mistake at the end… to bring you here. To us.”
I’d never seen such depths of despair in a person’s eyes. Such emptiness. Like with every word, he’d been scooping out another piece of her until she was hollow. And then that buzzer roared again, more shrill than ever, and I could barely see her little window through the smoke and flames. The belly of the bull was turning orange in places, and I could hear her flesh start to sizzle like meat on a grill. There are no words for the noises she made. No words at all.
“And our last, final question,” he continued. “What were your last words to your poor, beloved Jackson?”
“I love you!” I called out the answer. Bloody fingerprints stained the TV screen from my slamming my hands against it, as I screamed the answer over and over. “I love you, I love you, I love you!” At some point, I forgot that there was ever a question. I was just screaming it at her as if hoping that she could hear it, that it could bring her a modicum of comfort in that place.
The buzzer sounded again. I couldn't bring myself to look. All I could hear was the roaring of the bull, and the steam rising from its bronze nostrils.
The curtain fell. Silence drowned the sound. The host dropped all pretense that he hadn’t been speaking directly to me. “Now, Jackson. You just might be one of my new favorite audience members this show had ever had. I know this must have been hard for you. But if you’ll just stay tuned, I have one more show I know you’re certain to love!”
I didn’t bother to touch the remote. After all, nothing could be worse than what I’d just seen, right?
Wrong. Horror wracked me as the curtain rose, and I saw the man chained to a chair. I pulled away like a caveman witnessing fire, cringing and stuttering, face wet with sweat. It was the sort of fear that worked its way into your bones like a bad chill, that left you shaking, teeth chattering.
It was me.
An older me, sure. But not by much. Ten years, maybe. A gaunt and hollow version of me, one twisted by ten years of depression and hard drugs. But it was unmistakable.
His eyes widened as he recognized the host. “Oh — oh God, God please no! It can’t be — oh Christ, let me out of this chair, you —“
“Come, now! We wouldn’t want to use the lord’s name in vain, would we? I mean, that would be a sin!” The host laid a hand on the other me’s shoulder. “It may have been a few years since you watched our program, but I’m sure you remember the rules, don’t you, old friend?”
The other me was wordless, on the verge of hyperventilating, just as I was. The host was giddy with delight. “Now! Our first and only question is one I’m sure our viewer will be very interested in: what sins, exactly, do you think landed you here?”
The other me tried to speak, but the words caught in his throat. I could see it in his eyes. The years of self-destruction, the bitter hopelessness, the whirlpool of nihilism and vice and decay. The suffocating depths of a man. The darkness. How could he put it into words?
The sound of the buzzer was like a pig’s squeal. “Mmm, I’m afraid that our viewer is going to have to figure that out for himself! In the meantime, your punishment? Well, we wouldn’t want to spoil anything…”
The curtains slowly began to fall just as a couple other of those black, grotesque monstrosities emerged from the darkness. The curtain covered them all before I could get a good look at their obscene, twisted, asymmetrical figures. All I could hear was the crunching, the sound of skin tearing like paper, the screaming that went on for longer and louder than a human throat or vocal chords could endure.
The image and audio were beginning to distort, glitch, burn away. The tapes were physically melting as they played. My VCR was starting to overheat, sparks pouring from its front panel. The host voice jumped around in tone, his voice fading into the static blur as the tapes bubbled and boiled and distorted. “But, my friends, I’m afraid that concludes tonight’s episode of our show! So, with a final farewell to our dear, beloved viewer, Jackson…”
Just before the image melted away, the camera seemed to jump forward until his face filled the screen, his eyes piercing into mine as he cackled in that singsong voice.
“See you sooooon~”

II. The Narcissistic Personality of Our Time
Narcissism as a Metaphor of the Human Condition
…
Theoretical precision about narcissism is important not only because the idea is so readily susceptible to moralistic inflation but because the practice of equating narcissism with everything selfish and disagreeable militates against historical specificity. Men have always been selfish, groups have always been ethnocentric; nothing is gained by giving these qualities a psychiatric label. The emergence of character disorders as the most prominent form of psychiatric pathology, however, together with the change in personality structure this development reflects, derives from quite specific changes in our society and culture - from bureaucracy, the proliferation of images, therapeutic ideologies, the rationalization of the inner life, the cult of consumption, and in the last analysis from changes in family life and from changing patterns of socialization. All this disappears from sight if narcissism becomes simply “the metaphor of the human condition,” as in another existential, humanistic interpretation, Shirley Sugerman’s Sin and Madness: Studies in Narcissism.
The refusal of recent critics of narcissism to discuss the etiology of narcissism or to pay much attention to the growing body of clinical writing on the subject probably represents a deliberate decision, stemming from the fear that emphasis on the clinical aspects of the narcissistic syndrome would detract from the concept’s usefulness in social analysis. This decision, however, has proved to be a mistake. In ignoring the psychological dimension, these authors also miss the social. They fail to explore any of the character traits associated with pathological narcissism, which in less extreme form appear in such profusion in the everyday life of our age: dependence on the vicarious warmth provided by others combined with a fear of dependence, a sense of inner emptiness, boundless repressed rage, and unsatisfied oral cravings. Nor do they discuss what might be called the secondary characteristics of narcissism: pseudo-self-insight, calculating seductiveness, nervous, self-deprecatory humor. Thus they deprive themselves of any basis on which to make connections between the narcissistic personality type and certain characteristic patterns of contemporary culture, such as the intense fear of old age and death, altered sense of time, fascination with celebrity, fear of competition, decline of the play spirit, deteriorating relations between men and women. For these critics, narcissism remains at its loosest a synonym for selfishness and at its most precise a metaphor, and nothing more, that describes the state of mind in which the world appears as a mirror of the self.
<…>
Scribe Note:
I think the moment Pathological Narcissism is taken as an opening through which contemporary culture and subjectivity can discussed, in concrete relation to socioeconomic or historical particularities, is the moment the Pathological Narcissus is transformed into a metaphor. Here I understand the metaphor as intrinsically concrete. Serving as a connective tissue, medium, and threshold. Alternatively a meeting place. The shape of the Pathological Narcissus orients and organizes. Find Lasch’s approach implicitly architectural. He approaches his work as a craftsmen. Reading Lasch I envision a series of papers detailing seemingly disparate cultural phenomena unfolding and filling in a human-outline, this outline is the Pathological Narcissus. Flipped right-side up, the Pathological Narcissus reveals the real framing device. Contemporary technologies and the move away from the Industrial without properly buffering the agrarian or the small and mid-sized manufacturing that contained/shaped the animating brilliance, innovativeness, and sociality of the American peoples. The Pathological Narcissus cannot be concrete without the abstract as its genesis. Abstract in so far as it is an atomized or segregated sequence of symptoms (an individual reduced to his symptoms) that emerges into view within the transferal space(eros-field) of the analyst’s office. Detailed and expounded upon in the literature. The grounding is perhaps necessarily abstract (to clarify, my usage of the term is distinct from spectral).
Lasch appears at the verge of anticipating and integrating the easy criticism one might levy against him, that this all rests on the presupposition that psychoanalysis has any genuine scientific validity, that Melanie Klein and Otto Kernberg’s contributions to psychoanalysis serve as the standard bearer of psychoanalytic theory and practice (concretely if I’m not mistaken this is absolutely the case in the United States) and more to the point that the psychoanalyst is a trustworthy authority - into his own Criticism. In my reading of The Culture of Narcissism and The Minimal Self, Lasch spirals around this particular critique and the implications. As if it’s a thread we mustn't risk pulling on lest the whole thing unravels. Serves almost like a therapeutic fiction or ‘noble lie’. Still I think it’s implicit in Lasch’s broader critique. In the essay From Mirror to Window: Curing Psychoanalysis of its Narcissism, James Hillman (who I believe had a superior approach to the question of the Image or Icon compared to Lasch who expresses a stunningly consistent Anglo-Germanic and Reformationist contempt for imagery, indeed Lasch’s Iconophobia is nigh Islamic) notes as much,
“Eminent culture critics - Karl Krauss, Thomas Szasz, Philip Rieff, Christopher Lasch, Paul Zweig, and the notorious Dr. Jeffrey Masson - have each seen that psychoanalysis breeds a narcissistic subjectivism inflicting on the culture an iatrogenic disorder, that is, a disease brought by the methods of the doctors who would cure it.”
The “personality disorder” viewed in this light is a diagnostic category that could only come about thanks to the faddish popularity of psychoanalysis. The mother-tongue and womb-religion of the narcissist is psychoanalysis.
The metaphor serves as the site of agonism. Что делать? What is to be done?
What Lasch does here, in my opinion, is update the Narcissus. Can see why this continues to prove a difficult task. One of the issues with the Metaphor is that it becomes very very difficult to differentiate it from the Phantasmatic Type. Especially once it enters into popular usage. Danger of using psychoanalytic terminology in this manner outside of the institution of psychoanalysis. The Pathological Narcissus is that thing the other person is. The tinge of recognition is painful. Or perhaps the greatest danger comes from over identification with the Spectral Narcissus which is easily syncretized with seductive literary or cinematic types i.e., the Superfluous Man or whatever Woody Allen is- and/or falling into a masochistic hypochondria loop of psychic despair. Important to have the example of what an actual Pathological Narcissist is.
<…>
Psychology and Sociology
Psychoanalysis deals with individuals, not with groups. Efforts to generalize clinical findings to collective behavior always encounter the difficulty that groups have a life of their own. The collective mind, if there is such a thing, reflects the needs of the group as a whole, not the psychic needs of the individual which in fact have to be subordinated to the demands of collective living. Indeed it is precisely the subject of the individuals to the group that psychoanalytic theory, through a study of its psychic repercussions, promises to clarify. By conducting an intensive analysis of individual cases that rests on clinical evidence rather than common-sense impressions, psychoanalysis tells us something about the inner workings of society itself, in the very act of turning its back on society and immersing itself in the individual unconscious.
Every society reproduces its culture - its norms, its underlying assumptions, its modes of organizing experience - in the individual, in the form of personality. As Durkheim said, personality is the individual socialized. The process of socialization, carried out by the family and secondarily by the school and other agencies of character formation modifies human nature to conform to the prevailing social norms. Each society tries to solve the universal crises of childhood - the trauma of separation from the mother, the fear of abandonment, the pain of competing with others for the mother’s love - in its own way, and the manner in which it deals with these psychic events produces a characteristic form of personality, a characteristic form of psychological deformation, by means of which the individual reconciles himself to instinctual deprivation and submits to the requirements of social existence. Freud’s insistence on the continuity between psychic health and psychic sickness makes it possible to see neuroses and psychoses as in some sense the characteristic expression of a given culture. “Psychosis,” Jules Henry has written, “is the final outcome of all that is wrong with a culture.”
Psychoanalysis best clarifies the connection between society and the individual, culture and personality, precisely when it confines itself to careful examination of individuals. It tells us most about society when it is least determined to do so. Freud’s extrapolation of psychoanalytic principles into anthropology, history, and biography can be safely ignored by the student of society, but his clinical investigations constitute a storehouse of indispensable ideas, once it is understood that the unconscious mind represents the modification of nature by culture, the imposition of civilization on instinct.

• Freud should not be reproached [wrote T. W. Adorno] for having neglected the concrete social dimension, but for being all too untroubled by the social origin of… the rigidity of the unconscious, which he registers with the undeviating objectivity of the natural scientist… In making the leap from psychological images to historical reality, he forgets what he himself discovered - that all reality undergoes modification upon entering the unconscious - and is thus misled into positing such factual events as the murder of the father by the primal horde.

Those who wish to understand contemporary narcissism as a social and cultural phenomenon must turn first to the growing body of clinical writing on the subject, which makes no claim to social or cultural significance and deliberately repudiates the proposition that “changes in contemporary culture,” as Otto Kernberg writes, “have effects on patterns of object relations.” In the clinical literature, narcissism serves as more than a meta-phoric term for self-absorption. As a psychic formation in which “love rejected turns back to the self as hatred,” narcissism has come to be recognized as an important element in the so-called character disorders that have absorbed much of the clinical attention once given to hysteria and obsessional neuroses. A new theory of narcissism has developed, grounded in Freud’s well-known essay on the subject (which treats narcissism - libidinal investment of the self - as a necessary precondition of object love) but devoted not to primary narcissism but to secondary or pathological narcissism: the incorporation of grandiose object images as a defense against anxiety and guilt. Both types of narcissism blur the boundaries between the self and the world of objects, but there is an important difference between them. The newborn infant - the primary narcissist - does not yet perceive his mother as having an existence separate from his own, and he therefore mistakes dependence on the mother, who satisfies his needs as soon as they arise, with his own omnipotence. “It takes several weeks of postnatal development…before the infant perceives that the source of his need…is within and the source of gratification is outside the self.”
Secondary narcissism, on the other hand, “attempts to annul the pain of disappointed [object] love” and to nullify the child’s rage against those who do not respond immediately to his needs; against those who are now seen to respond to others besides the child and who therefore appear to have abandoned him. Pathological narcissism, “which cannot be considered simply a fixation at the level of normal primitive narcissism,” arises only when the ego has developed to the point of distinguishing itself from surrounding objects. If the child for some reason experiences this separation trauma with special intensity, he may attempt to reestablish earlier relationships by creating in his fantasies an omnipotent mother or father who merges with images of his own self. “Through internalization the patient seeks to recreate a wished-for love relationship which may once have existed and simultaneously to annul the anxiety and guilt aroused by aggressive drives directed against the frustrating and disappointing object.”
Narcissism in Recent Clinical Literature
The shifting emphasis in clinical studies from primary to secondary narcissism reflects both the shift in psychoanalytic theory from study of the id to study of the ego and a change in the type of patients seeking psychiatric treatment. Indeed the shift from a psychology of instincts to ego psychology itself grew partly out of a recognition that the patients who began to present themselves for treatment in the 1940s and 1950s “very seldom resembled the classical neuroses Freud described so thoroughly.” In the last twenty-five years, the borderline patient, who confronts the psychiatrist not with well-defined symptoms but with diffuse dissatisfactions, has become increasingly common. He does not suffer from debilitating fixations or phobias or from the conversion of repressed sexual energy into nervous ailments; instead he complains “of vague, diffuse dissatisfactions with life” and feels his “amorphous existence to be futile and purposeless.” He describes “subtly experienced yet pervasive feelings of emptiness and depression,” “violent oscillations of self-esteem,” and “a general inability to get along.” He gains “a sense of heightened self-esteem only by attaching himself to strong, admired figures whose acceptance he craves and by whom he needs to feel supported.” Although he carries out his daily responsibilities and even achieves distinction, happiness eludes him, and life frequently strikes him as not worth living.
Psychoanalysis, a therapy that grew out of experience with severely repressed and morally rigid individuals who needed to come to terms with a rigorous inner “censor,” today finds itself confronted more and more often with a “chaotic and impulse-ridden character.” It must deal with patients who “act out” their conflicts instead of repressing or sublimating them. These patients, though often ingratiating, tend to cultivate a protective shallowness in emotional relations. They lack the capacity to mourn, because the intensity of their rage against lost love objects, in particular against their parents, prevents their reliving happy experiences or treasuring them in memory. Sexually promiscuous rather than repressed, they nevertheless find it difficult to “elaborate the sexual impulse” or to approach sex in the spirit of play. They avoid close involvements, which might release intense feelings of rage. Their personalities consist largely of defenses against this rage and against feelings of oral deprivation that originate in the pre-Oedipal stage of psychic development.
Often these patients suffer from hypochondria and complain of a sense of inner emptiness. At the same time they entertain fantasies of omnipotence and a strong belief in their right to exploit others and be gratified. Archaic, punitive, and sadistic elements predominate in the superegos of these patients, and they conform to social rules more out of fear of punishment than from a sense of guilt. They experience their own needs and appetites, suffused with rage, as deeply dangerous, and they throw up defenses that are as primitive as the desires they seek to stifle.
On the principle that pathology represents a heightened version of normality, the “pathological narcissism” found in character disorders of this type should tell us something about narcissism as a social phenomenon. Studies of personality disorders that occupy the border line between neurosis and psychosis, though written for clinicians and making no claims to shed light on social or cultural issues, depict a type of personality that ought to be immediately recognizable, in a more subdued form, to observers of the contemporary cultural scene: facile at managing the impressions he gives to others, ravenous for admiration but contemptuous of those he manipulates into providing it; unappeasably hungry for emotional experiences with which to fill an inner void; terrified of again and death.
The most convincing explanations of the psychic origins of this borderline syndrome draw on the theoretical tradition established by Melanie Klein. In her psychoanalytic investigations of children, Klein discovered that early feelings of overpowering rage, directed especially against the mother and secondarily against the internalized image of the mother as a ravenous monster, make it impossible for the child to synthesize “good” and “bad” parental images. In his fear of aggression from the bad parents - projections of his own rage - he idealizes the good parents who will come to the rescue.
Internalized images of others, buried in the unconscious mind at an early age, become self-images as well. If later experience fails to qualify or to introduce elements of reality into the child’s archaic fantasies about his parents, he finds it difficult to distinguish between images of the self and of the objects outside the self. These images fuse to form a defense against the bad representation of the self and of objects, similarly fused in the form of a harsh, punishing superego. Melanie Klein analyzed a ten-year-old boy who unconsciously thought of his mother as a “vampire” or “horrid bird” and internalized this fear as hypochondria. He was afraid that the bad presences inside him would devour the good ones. The rigid separation of good and bad images of the self and of objects, on the one hand, and the fusion of self- and object images on the other, arose from the boy’s inability to tolerate ambivalence or anxiety. Because his anger was so intense, he could not admit that he harbored aggressive feelings toward those he loved. “Fear and guilt relating to his destructive phantasies moulded his whole emotional life.”
A child who feels so gravely threatened by his own aggressive feelings (projected onto others and then internalized again as inner “monsters”) attempts to compensate himself for his experience of rage and envy with fantasies of wealth, beauty, and omnipotence. These fantasies, together with the internalized images of the good parents with which he attempt to defend himself, become the core of a “grandiose conception of the self.” A kind of “blind optimism,” according to Otto Kernberg, protects the narcissistic child from the dangers around and within him - particularly from dependence on others, who are perceived as without exception undependable. “Constant projection of ‘all bad’ self and object images perpetuates a world of dangerous, threatening objects, against which the ‘all good’ self images are used defensively, and megalomanic ideal self images are built up.” The splitting of images determined by aggressive feelings from images that derive from libidinal impulses makes it impossible for the child to acknowledge his own aggression, to experience guilt or concern for objects invested simultaneously with aggression and libido, or to mourn for lost objects. Depression in narcissistic patients takes the form not of mourning with its admixture of guilt, described by Freud in “Mourning and Melancholia,” but of impotent rage and “feelings of defeat by external forces.”
Because the intrapsychic world of these patients is so thinly populated - consisting only of the “grandiose self,” in Kernberg’s words, “the devalued, shadowy images of self and others, and potential persecutors” - they experience intense feelings of emptiness and inauthenticity. Although the narcissist can function in the everyday world and often charms other people (not least with his “pseudo-insight into his personality”), his devaluation of others, together with his lack of curiosity about them, impoverishes his personal life and reinforces the “subjective experience of emptiness.” Lacking any real intellectual engagement with the world - notwithstanding a frequency inflated estimate of his own intellectual abilities - he has little capacity for sublimation. He therefore depends on others for constant infusions of approval and admiration. He “must attach [himself] to someone, living an almost parasitic” existence. At the same time, his fear of emotional dependence, together with his manipulative, exploitive approach to personal relations, makes these relations bland, superficial, and deeply unsatisfying. “The ideal relationship to me would be a two month relationship,” said a borderline patient. “That way there’d be no commitment. At the end of the two months I’d just break it off.”
Chronically bored, restlessly in search of instantaneous intimacy - of emotional titillation without involvement and dependence - the narcissist is promiscuous and often pansexual as well, since the fusion of pregenital and Oedipal impulses in the service of aggression encourages polymorphous perversity. The bad images he has internalized also make him chronically uneasy about his health, and hypochondria in turn gives him a special affinity for therapy and for therapeutic groups and movements.
As a psychiatric patient, the narcissist is a prime candidate for interminable analysis. He seeks in analysis a religion or way of life and hopes to find in the therapeutic relationship external support for his fantasies of omnipotence and eternal youth. The strength of his defenses, however, makes him resistant to successful analysis. The shallowness of his emotional life often prevents him from developing a close connection to the analyst, even though he “often uses his intellectual insight to agree verbally with the analyst and recapitulates in his own words what has been analysed in previous sessions.” He uses intellect in the service of evation rather than self-discovery, resorting to some of the same strategies of obfuscation that appear in the confessional writing of recent decades. “The patient uses the analytic interpretations but deprives them quickly of life and meaning, so that only meaningless words are left. The words are then felt to be the patient’s own pression, which he idealizes and which give him a sense of superiority.” Although psychiatrists no longer consider narcissistic disorders inherently unanalyzable, few of them take an optimistic view of the prospects for success.

According to Kernberg, the great argument for making the attempt at all, in the face of the many difficulties presented by narcissistic patients, is the devastating effect of narcissism on the second half of their lives - the certainty of the terrible suffering that lies in store. In a society that dreads old age and death, aging holds a special terror for those who fear dependence and whose self-esteem requires the admiration usually reserves for youth, beauty, celebrity, or charm. The usual defenses against the ravages of age - identification with ethical or artistic values beyond one’s immediate interests, intellectual curiosity, the consoling emotional warmth derived from happy relationships in the past - can do nothing for the narcissist. Unable to derive whatever comfort comes from identification with historical continuity, he finds it impossible, on the contrary, “to accept the fact that a younger generation now possesses many of the previously cherished gratifications of beauty, wealth, power and, particularly, creativity. To be able to enjoy life in a process involving a growing identification with other people’s happiness and achievements is tragically beyond the capacity of narcissistic personalities.”

This chapter took a long time to get out. Life has me super busy. Two jobs, married, two kids, still sober. I like how this turned out, however, someone new stole the show this time. As always, leave feedback, I appreciate it so very much.
[FIRST] [DELETED SCENES] [PREVIOUS]
~ ~ ~
As I reentered my true body without recieving a mending, the vicious wounds I endured manifested into being as I reactualized into my true Self. Through the pain, I couldn't help but think on Raver's words to me.
"The doors have to be closed."
~ ~ ~
Without recieving a mending in Raver's Dreamtime bubble, reactualization was a fucking bitch. I Perceived my Self as having quite the damaged form, my Soul was fucked over by bombardment from dreadlight and my physical body simply disagreed with it all, stating that I was mostly whole and intact, only being damaged by wounds I had already endured. The three parts had an argument of a sort amongst themselves and with the power of the Dreamtime, reached a tortuous compromise.
I'm certain I seizured and blacked out through the process.
I awoke with my body shaking and covered in a cold sweat, Tsula and Luna above me, chanting in the secret language of their esoteric Traditions. The two of them each held diffetent tools required for their cultural and subtle manipulation of reality. Soft hands, awash with mana and glowing tattoos, were placed on my chest, right where my heart was. Cold, icy fingers cradled my soul protectively, keeping it connected to my body in the here and now as harsh, physical laws rent my form.
I was paying the price for Raver's hubris, and I had almost overdrafted. Thoughts of mortal over reach faded from my mind as I slipped into cool and soothing darkness.
Cold and bloodied fingers were pressed against my chest and did little to assuage the burning ache that was my soul. I couldn't focus on anything else as I gazed at the hollowed out body of my beloved. She had been beautiful, gorgeous even, and due to give birth to our daughter in two weeks. Now, the... dead thing in front of me could barely be defined as a corpse. Her skin had been peeled away like a banana and her insides removed, leaving a bloodied, hollow space. The flesh and bones had been scooped away like ice cream, leaving little in the way of remains. Our unborn child had been pulled out and repurposed with the stolen parts of her mother by dreadlight and a mage's fell Will to form the body of a Thing.
With silent tears streaming down my face, I placed the ring I had proposed to her with and put it onto my finger, next to my plain tungsten one. The simple act of removing it almost caused what remained of her hand to simply fall apart in my fingers. I'm not sure how long I stayed like that. I couldn't even hold her body against mine for fear of it crumbling away into a vile mess. I ignored what was going on around me as I kneeled in the spent summoning circle.
The world around me split and rent itself into distorted imagery, as though I were looking at everything from under a pool with gentle waves. Some parts were compressed together and others were stretched out, not quite like a mirror maze as the world was still simply one cohesive image. Additionally, things seemed closer or further in ways that defied conventional Euclidean geometries. The only area not affected by this blatant disregard of spatial dimensions, had been myself and a scant few feet around me.
What...?
A heavy thud broke me out of my thoughts and I saw my Father landing next to me. Since both of us had been prepared, he was wearing, much like myself, full motorcycle safety gear. It had been enchanted and bolstered by hidden runes and severed Will, turning everything into protective objects that even defended against potent and offensive mysticism. The equipment in question had been chosen for its sheer mundanity and ease of access, letting the powerful enchancements skirt around the Lie and Consensus leaving the magic fully intact and potent.
"Alistair," I heard my Father say to me with grim calm as he twisted the space in front of us into a right angle, redirecting rapid gunfire, "I can't do this alone."
I remained silent.
"Damnit, Son," he growled out then literally kicked my ass with his heavy boot, almost knocking me over onto my side, "get a hold of yourself, Its here now. You handle the mages."
That got me going. I finally got up, my grief was as a lead weight and prevented me from doing what was needed. With a last look at C'Leena's hollowed out corpse, I grit my teeth, steeled my nerves and called forth my magic from the Aether.
Was I dreaming? No, worse, I was in a memory...
"Stay out of my way and watch yourself," Father said to me, "I can't pull my punches against that."
"Gotcha," I replied almost absently and turned to face the assembled shadow mages. They had inexplicably stopped theit gunfire to admire the Thing they brought into existence from Somewhere.
I couldn't help but stare, either.
Standing on top of the northernmost anchor stone, an ugly, multi-faceted block of copper with glyphs and sigils harshly hewn into it, was a naked woman. The glyphs themselves were hard to look at, as though their mere presence were an affront to reality itself, which they were. The woman's skin was a darkened olive tone and she was tall as well as athletic, lithe and fit. Her shoulder length black hair was bushy and curly, flowing about her head almost like an afro. As she ran her hands down her body, I could not help but notice that everything was oddly symmetrical and too perfect. It was unnerving me greatly and triggered an uncanny valley response that tore at my heart.
The body this Thing was wearing had belonged to my fiancée.
Father didn't let It have time to get acclimated. Sidestepping forwards, he drew upon the full capabilities of his Path, eyes backlit by stars, an impossible physical sword of abstract spatial geometries held in his left hand, and a reality defying, super-dense distortion held in his right.
The world contorted and screamed under his might.
I awoke with a start and a low groan, glad to be awake and free of that horrid nightmare again. Not for the first time, I wished I had that motorcycle gear still. I had been far too reckless then and immediately thereafter, and everything had been damaged beyond repair. I could never find anyone I trusted enough to make those enchantments anyways. Farnsworth could only enhance the mundane qualities as he didn't know enough about mana warding to permanently imbue the protections I wanted nor needed for my line of active field work.
Looking around, I saw Rue asleep on the other side of the bed and Spades was nestled between us, his massive form making a visible dip in the mattress. The big monster dog was on his back, legs splayed open and snoring loudly with his tongue hanging out of his muzzle. I was reminded a lot of my Lola when she had still been around in the flesh, making me smile with old and pleasant memories. I must have been out for some time for Spades to be here.
A quick, almost reflexive, mental orison told me everything I already suspected. My mana reserves were shot, my body had been through the ringer and my soul was frayed and burnt. While I knew I owed my continued existence to Raver and her godsend, I also knew it had taken a great and terrible toll on my Self. Miracles like that usually held some kind of hidden cost, even if they weren't readily apparent.
Getting off the bed slowly, I began to look for my pack. It took far longer than than usual as I had to steady myself quite a bit from the spinning room. I managed to be quiet, however, and didn't wake up Rue nor Spades. Finally in the shower, after some time and using the wall to support myself, I let the almost scalding water roll over my aching body. The pendant on my neck protecting me from recieving any burns or aggravating the injuries I had, both old and new.
With the hot water soothing aching muscles, I began to think and take stock of my situation. I had never been on the back foot like this, low on any kind of resource, having few allies, and being pressed for time. It was like something out of a bad novel or shitty indie Steam(R) game. Though, real life was often stranger than fiction and had no real need for a logical cause and effect dynamic. If this was going to become the norm, then I had to find another method of approaching my wendigo problem.
I was simply running out of time.
After some long moments of thinking, I began to wash my hair, using the guest products on the corner caddy. They were so much nicer than anything I would have willingly bought and made me seriously consider changing up my usual shampoo. The only idea I could come up with regarding those wendigos, besides an overwhelming frontal assault, was to appeal to their bottomless gluttony and barter for passage.
I resigned myself to actually try to negotiate with their clan leader, leveraging their horrid taboos against them to get what I needed.
Wendigos, unlike most strange cryptids, vampires and were-folk aside, had a lot of things known about them, especially how they powered their supernatural capabilities. It was a simple and rather straightforward process, the more heinous the act, the more mana they drew from it. Cannibalism, sacrilege, incest, murder, torture, hedonistic gluttony, or any number of other terrible and minor sins. As well as general lawbreaking and felonies, oftentimes combined to have as many as possible occur in the same sitting.
I audibly gasped with a sudden epiphany.
My fate had already been decided, by myself no less. In a bar I couldn't remember the name of, when I had been gazing into my bronze coin, I saw what I needed to do. I had to gift what measly scrap of knowledge I understood from Beyond the Infinite to those creatures. To let those wendigos defile and mutilate such sacred and pure knowledge to whatever whims their baleful minds could come up with.
"Fuck," was the only thing I could whisper at the thought of it all as I turned off the water, getting out of the shower. I cooled the bathroom down with but a thought and wiped away the condensation on the mirror with a towel that wasn't my own, finally getting a good look at myself without vertigo, as that had finally passed.
I looked like shit, and that was a compliment. Huge, fist shaped bruises of black, green and yellow littered my torso, though most were located on my left side and blurred together into an ugly shapeless mass. The ones on my right, however, were well defined and I could easily count the number of strikes. My face held a swollen black eye, I never noticed my diminished field of vision as I had gotten used to having them over the years. Turning gingerly and opening the mirror a bit so I could see my back, I grimaced. It was another spiderweb of a bruise, earned from when I had been smashed against the edge of Raver's Dreamtime bubble.
At least none of my fingers were broken, only very stiff and swollen, just like the rest of me. I probably couldn't drive for another day or so, either, not with my hands the way they were. As I looked, surprised I hadn't noticed earlier, the inside of my right hand was, branded. The skin, while fully healed, held the symbolic glyph that heralded the Path of Stars. A circle with nine curved lines inside it. Each line only intersected two others, but with the irregular placement of them, I could trace an intersection to any other one. In each of the open spaces, slightly off center, as a simple dot.
"Miracles leave their marks," I muttered to myself, almost disbelieving the literalness of the phrase.
I didn't bother drying off and struggled a bit getting into the clothes I brought with me, maroon athletic shorts and a black tank top. Exiting the guest bathroom, I thought about where I wanted to go. Settling on a destination, I went into the backyard, found a patch of grass in the shaded, morning sunlight and lay down. The grass was thick and rather soft, and the smell of the lemon tree and the garden was more pleasant and fragrant than they should have been.
Warding myself against dreaming, I pulled on the principles of the Aether, specifically, those of sun and storms. Since the Aether was a realm of energy and mana in all of its varying forms, I employed an advanced technique, a mysterion. It was something only able to be done by those that actually hailed from the Aether rather than having mastery over it. Pulling some of the sunlight and ambient warmth into my form, I converted measly scraps of energy directly into mana. The process was slow, and almost hardly worth the effort. It was like filling a bathtub with water, a single milliliter at a time.
Mana was now such a rare commodity, every miniscule drop of it mattered.
I settled in and entered a trance-like state, most of my attention devoted to my mysterion, though some of it was allowed to drift off elsewhere. While not exactly a dream, and while maintaining my mana draw, my mind conjured up nonsensical imagery and conversations between myself and others. I didn't pay them any attention as my thoughts wandered and drifted idly.
"I thought I'd find you out here," Rue said as I heard her sit down next to me. I didn't hear her walking, however, she continued to speak, "you've been asleep for a few days. What happened?"
"Got fucked," I replied easily, a little sarcastically as well. "Truthfully," I amended, "I got summoned by Raver. She pulled a shenanigan with Fate to let her have a waking dream."
"So she was hallucinating?" Rue stated, though it was more of a question.
"Damned straight," I confirmed, "she had Sasquatch and Farnsworth make something for her. It had to have been lethal, something like that. Anyways, we were talking and then one of Them showed up. Inside the Dreamtime bubble of hers. Found Raver's luminescence despite Mirzam hiding it."
"Shit. So It was physically there? That means It had a stolen body..." Rue said, trailing off.
"Yeah, it had a body alright," I almost growled out, "broke Raver's ritual with little effort. I spent everything I had to make a patch job just to keep it active, burned through all my mana, too. I did not want to be dispersed."
"I see," Rue said to me with understanding, "I wouldn't want to have to find my physical body without a tether either." There was a small pause before she spoke again, "So what happened next?"
"I made it mad with insults to buy time for the repaired shenanigan to stabilize Raver."
"What do you mean?" Rue asked as I heard her stretch out a bit, my eyes still closed.
"Her shenanigan was woven in such a way that whatever drug Sasquatch and Farnsworth made for her didn't just kill her," I answered with a pause then continued, "it let her do things beyond normality, anyways, my fucked up patch job let me tell Sasquatch that Raver had to stay dreaming."
"So he wouldn't just purge the elixir out of her," Rue stated, then added perhaps a tad bit defensively, "I know some things from other paths, not much, but some."
"That's good," I answered back, "knowledge is power."
"With us, it's quite literal."
I murmured in assent.
"So why did you make It mad?" Rue asked, "wouldn't It just draw strength from human emotions, especially in the Dreamtime?"
"It did," I answered back, "but It couldn't act properly on them, like human emotions were new and novel. The whole encounter was sloppy after a certain point, but I did almost die. Raver saved me, gave me a miracle."
"I saw," Rue said simply, "the mark on your hand was a giveaway."
I could only murmur in agreement again then asked, "Did you find a card in my hands, too?"
"I did," Rue replied after a few moments of silence, "it was debit card, with a note attached to it."
"From Procyon, right?"
It took a few moments for her to answer. "Yes, it was from Procyon," she took a breath and continued with wavering effort, "that damned bastard had it all planned out. Wrote a fucked up letter to me on a Google(TM) doc telling me not to worry and that this had always been his exit plan."
"Sounds like he knew what was going to happen," was all I could say.
"Yes, but, I miss him!" Rue all but snarled at me, then, in a small and quiet voice, whispered, "He was my best friend, and maybe we could've been more, y'know? Now... there's... There's just nothing, only memories of him left to mourn."
"I didn't know," I answered simply.
Rue spoke with a wavering breath before continuing, her thoughts more than a little disjointed, "a lot of what he wrote was personal, so I won't get into that, but he was certain that something catastrophic was going to happen to him and myself. So he made sure that I was at my secondary home, recovering from a job. I had just completed a mission from Raver and Mirzam, and was going to perform a ritual to patch up Spades after I got some sleep. Procyon also stated that someone has been altering things for a very long time."
"So that's why you were caught with yout pants down," I said, "you didn't even have time to recover." I paused, adjusting my mysterion as I had to refocus due to our conversation, "what did they have you do?"
"Some hedge wizards actually got a hold of an actual necromancy grimoire and charged mana tools in a graveyard," Rue said with a bit of a tired sigh, "they knew exactly what they were doing, and would have been rather powerful shadow mages if they had been capable of using starlight."
"Fuck," was all I could say, then formed an actual response after a few moments, "that shouldn't have been an issue for you. Hedges don't have our capability, though numbers may have evened out their odds."
"You're right, but they brought a spirit back before I could stop them," Rue answered with more than a little spite, "a real nasty piece of shit, too. Turned on the hedges, absorbed them, and put up a real mean fight against Spades and I. It was touch and go for a long time and I was actually fearful for my life, too."
"You won, though."
"Yeah, managed to send it kicking and screaming back to the Pit, exhausted most of my mana to do so. Fucking bastard."
There was a small silence between us as Rue became lost in her own thoughts. It was a while before I asked her, "Can you elaborate on what Procyon said about Fate being altered?"
"I can, actually, though it's a bit difficult since I'm not even a novice with the Path of Stars," Rue answered as I heard her shift a bit on the grass next to me. She paused as she seemingly collected her thoughts, "it's just that certain events were made to happen sooner or later. The big one, for our Node at least, was that you were always supposed to make your ancestral home translocate. It happened sooner than it should have."
"Fuck," I said, "So I wasn't supposed to send it away a few days ago?"
"No, that was supposed to happen after our wendigo thing, if the letter is to be believed."
"Fuck," was all I could say, "I do suppose that was a snap decision, I really didn't want Them to get a hold of anything inside. If I had been able to wait, or even had help, I'm sure I wouldn't have lost it to time and space."
"Exactly," Rue said with bitter excitement, "and we'd have access to everything in it. Losing your home was a big blow to our Node."
"Yeah, but at least They don't have it," I answered more spitefully than intended.
"Silver linings and all that, right?"
"Yeah, gotta look at the bright side, no matter how bleak," I answered back with a bit of sarcastic mirth, then said as I stretched a bit, readjusting my focus on my mysterion as well, "speaking of wendigos, I know what we need to do to solve that."
"Oh? Do tell, I couldn't come up with anything myself, kept running into dead ends," she said, then added, "lack of resources and help."
"Well, I don't think you're going to like it, I'm not sure I like it either."
"Don't keep me waiting," Rue said to me with a bit of sarcastic exasperation. I could sense her looking at me even though my eyes were still closed.
"I'm going to leverage their taboos against them, appeal to their insatiable greed and offer them what little I can understand of That Which Lies Beyond the Infinite." I sighed and added, "after all, how could they resist the allure of new magic?"
"You're right," she answered, "I definitely don't like it. I'm pretty sure it's not even wise to do so."
"Wise or not, it's the only way forward, I even saw it in a vision when I was manipulating fate magic."
"Have you talked to Mirzam or Raver about this vision of yours?"
"No, not yet, and I'm pretty sure I don't need to."
There was a bit of silence between us as she digested my words. I felt compelled to elaborate as I adjusted my mysterion again, losing a bit of my focus due to the depth of the conversation we were having.
"Acrux," I said, getting her attention fully by using the name of her star, "there's something you need to understand." I sat up, abandoning my mysterion in favor of giving her my full attention. Blinking a bit at the rise of light and warmth, I continued my thought process, "in the Dreamtime, the Thing I was fighting against, It was surprised and enraged that I was able to call upon knowledge that Lay Beyond the Infinite. Whatever those glyphs and powers are, They never wanted humans to know of them, let alone have them."
"Yet you want to give such power to wendigos of all things."
"At least the knowledge, corrupted or not, will still be on Earth," I said then added, "I'm not sure what you remember, but I know you've seen something from Beyond the Infinite. Your self revival and Spade's new form are proof of that. I was there, guided by Oracle. I Perceived something unknowable, something terrible, something no mortal has any right to gaze upon. Something I can hardly even begin to try to put into words. Raver Perceived it, too. It's how she managed to give me a godsend. So, what did you Perceive, really?"
Rue brought her knees up to her chest, thinking deeply. I could tell she was using her Perception to look inwards upon her Self. I waited patiently while she struggled to look at her soul's reflection against her mind and struggled even more to put the image there into words.
At long last, she spoke, her eyes still closed as she did so, "I'm not sure what I saw, there was too much, and I felt so small. Insignificant. Less than even a dismissed, intrusive thought. There is one thing I do remember. A doorway made of the might from two universes worth of truths and laws. A Thing was trying ro break through, but couldn't, not fully, yet the doors were opened, letting smaller ones through."
"The Doors have to be closed," I said, quoting Raver, before continuing, "that's what Raver said to me, before she sent me back to my body."
"Why didn't they mend you then?"
"They were being attacked in the waking world, too. It was a good plan on Their part, They just didn't expect us to put up so much of a fight."
"They never do, though I think that's changing."
"So that's our endgame, not sure how we're going to do it," I said, bringing the conversation back to topic, "at the moment, however, I'm going to eat a few of those mana-stuffed protein bars and fix your leg. I can't keep spending mana to be able to drive your truck. You'll have to use your own mysterion to get mana, too."
"I hate my Path's mysterions," the venom in her voice was palpable.
Before I could say anything, the backdoor opened, revealing Luna. She was wearing a bird-patterned sundress and her hair had been tied back into a loose ponytail. She put her hand over her eyes to shade them from the sun as she squinted against the brightness relative to that from inside.
"Hey, you two," she called out, "Grandmother says she needs to talk yo you."
"Alright," I called out, shakily getting up to my feet with a bit of a grunt. Everything still hurt. Rue had a bit of trouble as well, her leg was not recieving the rest and healing it deserved and needed.
"We're a mess, aren't we?" Rue asked aloud as we began to walk towards the bak door.
"Yeah, but you should see the other guys," I replied with a light chuckle, only to wince and hold my sides, "I forgot how much laughing hurts with fractured ribs."
"I really don't envy you right now," Rue said with a bit of a smirk as we entered Tsula's home, Rue entering first. "I wonder what Tsula wants to talk to us about?" Rue asked aloud, not really talking to anyone in particular.
I could only wonder as we followed Luna to the living room, the house pleasantly cool due to central air conditioning.
~ ~ ~
The moon was not in the sky, and I greatly enjoyed not having to endure the accursed, purifying light of day reflected by its surface, even if greatly diminished. The loathsome wound in my side had been a mortal blow, burning through my toughened flesh and form with unnerving ease and stunning, blinding pain. Once more, I looked at the oily, thin, and black ichor that dripped from my fingers, more human-like than I was comfortable with.
The mote of dreadlight I had recieved for my services had been the only thing that had kept me from vanishing entirely. Mortal alchemy -- science -- had advanced to such a degree so as to emulate the harsh light of day far too remarkably well. That hadn't been the worst part, that damned thaumaturgist had ensorcelled a curse upon the weapon as well. With effort, as the bulk of my power was directed at repairing the oozing wound, I altered my form and shape, struggling to maintain the illusion as I walked out onto the sidewalk from a side alley.
My contract was not yet completed.
The first two nights I had hidden myself away in the dark depths, raging against the oblivion that threatened to overtake me and ending my existence. The preparedness of the thaumaturgist had been unexpected, as well as the skill and the knowledge he had wielded so effortlessly. Without my guidance, nor presence, to instill fear into the gifted abetters, the wraiths I had gathered with me fell and fled into the night, abandoning their duties and contracts.
I would have never made this mistake against the herald of the bear.
Had I known the name of the mortal's star I had been tasked against, I would have demanded more than a simple mote of dreadlight and a paltry handful of coerced allies. Realistically, I should be grateful that I still had a kind of semi-existence. Quelling my anger and hatred, and swallowing my utter revulsion, my form rippled and took the guise of a tall, middle-aged human male in a common and unremarkable suit carrying an old and worn briefcase.
The artificial illumination around me flickered, emitting a grating hum in my presence and the thin television flickered oddly as it tried to display my image, failing to accurately do so. While tracking Arcturus's quintessence had been a bit of a task, as far too much time had passed, my familiarity with it granted me an advantage that overcame that difficulty. Traveling in my wounded state, however, had been much more arduous. Looking the woman at the reception desk over, I took on my role with hiden revulsion, aided by the illusion I was conjuring and the mimicry of my physical form.
"I'm detective Aiden Roth, and I'm looking for someone. I believe that he was here a few nights ago, definitely this past week," I said. My false, human voice had been made to sound smooth, suave and strong, interlaced with a suggestion, using what little forte I could spare. I put the worn and well-used briefcase I had conjured with me onto the counter with a heavy thud, using more of my forte to emulate such a simple thing. Opening it up, I fished out an image and showed the slightly grainy, black and white picture to the receptionist.
As the woman perused the conjured image, I could not help but hiss, my hand going to my side as I expended more of my forte than I had anticipated. The cursed wound fighting back fiercely against the dreadlight tethering my existence and life. I held my disguise with willpower of monumental proportions. A strength of will I rarely had been pressed to draw from.
Seeing the concerned look the woman gave me, I simply stated, shrugging off the pain with yet more expenditure of will, "An old injury, it flares up from time to time. No matter, have you seen this individual?"
"I'm going to need to see some kind of badge or warrant," the woman said with a genuine smile, "sorry."
The fear of losing her menial job overpowered my subtle suggestion. Unfortunate.
"Sure," I replied with a fake and well ptacticed, fetching smile, adjusting my forte to include another suggestion. I showed an actual badge with my assumed name and likeness. The mortal I was impersonating had been slain many years ago by my own hands, and the subtle illusion taking hardly any of my forte adjusted the dates and design of the badge to whatever was current.
Only a thaumaturgist, or a very particularly skilled sorcerer, could pierce the illusion. Against this mortal, there was no chance of resistance and she accepted the stolen badge without question.
She looked it over, as if trying to divine the legitimacy of it. "Okay," she finally admitted, "he was here a while ago, maybe a four or five days? I remember, 'cause I tried to flirt with him..."
I ignored her prattling and asked when she finished speaking, "Can you show me the room he used?"
"Sure, but it's been cleaned a few times since then."
With a nod, I let her lead the way to the room in question, staying silent. The lights around me flickered and hummed loudly in my presence. Had the woman been more observant, she could have seen my true shadow as I had not the forte to expend to hide it entirely from the ever changing lights. She opened the room in question, using what I could only assume was a master key card.
I immediately recognized the faded auras of quintessence.
"This will do," I stated, closing the door behind me and dropping my revolting disguise, using my forte to lock it.
I revealed my true form. My legs and arms lengthened and thinned, the black suit and red tie I was wearing became my skin, armor and form. My face and eyes became blank, gaunt and sunken, skin stretching out over it. The wound in my side made itself visible, it was an ugly red, peeling and oozing burn from my shoulder to my waist and took up most of my torso. The dreadlight I was using to prevent my oblivion illuminated the wound with a kind of sickly, crimson colored backlight. Black ichor oozed out from it and dripped onto the floor as I used the bulk of my forte to ablate the caustic, foreign quintessence from my form.
The woman looked at me as even her pitifully dull, mundane human senses told her that there was incredible danger in the room with her. She screeched and irrationally ran towards the bathroom as my presence became impossibly tall in the very finite space in the motel room. Using the smallest iota of my forte, I remotely smashed her fleeing form against a wall, pinning her there with unseen force as she begged, and sobbed for her pitiful life.
I ignored her for the moment.
Drawing upon more of my forte, freed up as I no longer needed a disguise, I sensed out where quintessence had been used, discovering two places, the bed and a wall. Imbuing the wall with my own forte, I witnessed a spectral, moving image of Arcturus throwing five darts at a map placed on the wall, one at a time, then draw intersecting lines to a single point on the map.
"Wendigos..." I hissed out in loathing, the skin on my face stretching and contorting with the movement as i spoke aloud with a nonexistent mouth. Even I knew their territory.
Turning to the second source of quintessence, I did the same thing. I saw Arcturus ward himself against dreaming and then hold a brilliant shield in the air, as well as a ball of fire. My knowledge of actual thaumaturgy told me that I would have great difficulties against those Knowings. I put the mystery of his Dreamtime excursion out of my mind for now, there was nothing I could do regarding that.
My expenditure of forte caused my horrid wound to pulse against my form painfully. With a hiss, I turned to the woman meekly begging me to spare her life as she was still pinned against the wall. I could use a thrall, especially as I could no longer gain allies, not without offering something in return to my current contract holders.
That was not a barter I wanted to engage in.
"Please... don't kill me... please... I'll do anything... please..."
The absolute terror in her eyes was delectable. Her fear invigorated me with energy and reminded me I needed to feed. However, the morsels offered by her would be more than sufficient for my needs. I dragged my left hand across my oozing wound, covering it in my own essence then flexed my forte. The clothes she was wearing split in half down the middle, revealing her naked form, making her shriek. I could see the ideas her panicked mind vomited forth as she renewed her struggles with vigor.
What I had in mind was so much worse than the mundane taking of her physical body she expected.
Using the full might of my forte, I lengthened and sharpened my index finger, the tip dripping with the gathered ichor of my essence. In an instant, less than the blink of an eye, I appeared in front of her from where I had been by the bed and plunged the very tip of my sharpened, needle-like nail into the center of her heart, cutting through the most sensitive parts of her breast to do so due to the angle I had chosen for just this purpose. As I let my ichor suffuse her body with each beat of her racing heart, her vascular system visibly turning black under her skin as she screamed and writhed in agony, an odd thing happened.
What could only be considered my blood had been tainted by thaumaturgy qnr bolstered by dreadlight as well as my own forte. As it mixed with the blank canvas of the mortal in front of me, I could sense the candle of her soul. Reaching out with dreadlight, letting the wound burn my side with a hiss of inhaled breath, I ignited it with three kinds of mysticism.
A horrified realization overcame her as she knew I had fundamentally altered her to suit my whims. Having a thaumaturgist thrall would be a great boon.
"You'll do quite nicely," I said with an actual grin, the skin stretched over my mouth revealing impossibly large, gleaming flat teeth, as I watched the physical and mystical changes taking place.
My new thrall would never be human again.
I feasted on her terror, anguish and torment.
It was delicious.
~ ~ ~
Arcturus and Acrux will be back. C'Leena Thomas, Prosthetist is going to be my next update.
[[NEXT]]

This chapter took a long time to get out. Life has me super busy. Two jobs, married, two kids, still sober. I like how this turned out, however, someone new stole the show this time. As always, leave feedback, I appreciate it so very much.
[FIRST] [DELETED SCENES] [PREVIOUS]
My bare-bones-ish Discord.
~ ~ ~
As I reentered my true body without recieving a mending, the vicious wounds I endured manifested into being as I reactualized into my true Self. Through the pain, I couldn't help but think on Raver's words to me.
"The doors have to be closed."
~ ~ ~
Without recieving a mending in Raver's Dreamtime bubble, reactualization was a fucking bitch. I Perceived my Self as having quite the damaged form, my Soul was fucked over by bombardment from dreadlight and my physical body simply disagreed with it all, stating that I was mostly whole and intact, only being damaged by wounds I had already endured. The three parts had an argument of a sort amongst themselves and with the power of the Dreamtime, reached a tortuous compromise.
I'm certain I seizured and blacked out through the process.
I awoke with my body shaking and covered in a cold sweat, Tsula and Luna above me, chanting in the secret language of their esoteric Traditions. The two of them each held diffetent tools required for their cultural and subtle manipulation of reality. Soft hands, awash with mana and glowing tattoos, were placed on my chest, right where my heart was. Cold, icy fingers cradled my soul protectively, keeping it connected to my body in the here and now as harsh, physical laws rent my form.
I was paying the price for Raver's hubris, and I had almost overdrafted. Thoughts of mortal over reach faded from my mind as I slipped into cool and soothing darkness.
Cold and bloodied fingers were pressed against my chest and did little to assuage the burning ache that was my soul. I couldn't focus on anything else as I gazed at the hollowed out body of my beloved. She had been beautiful, gorgeous even, and due to give birth to our daughter in two weeks. Now, the... dead thing in front of me could barely be defined as a corpse. Her skin had been peeled away like a banana and her insides removed, leaving a bloodied, hollow space. The flesh and bones had been scooped away like ice cream, leaving little in the way of remains. Our unborn child had been pulled out and repurposed with the stolen parts of her mother by dreadlight and a mage's fell Will to form the body of a Thing.
With silent tears streaming down my face, I placed the ring I had proposed to her with and put it onto my finger, next to my plain tungsten one. The simple act of removing it almost caused what remained of her hand to simply fall apart in my fingers. I'm not sure how long I stayed like that. I couldn't even hold her body against mine for fear of it crumbling away into a vile mess. I ignored what was going on around me as I kneeled in the spent summoning circle.
The world around me split and rent itself into distorted imagery, as though I were looking at everything from under a pool with gentle waves. Some parts were compressed together and others were stretched out, not quite like a mirror maze as the world was still simply one cohesive image. Additionally, things seemed closer or further in ways that defied conventional Euclidean geometries. The only area not affected by this blatant disregard of spatial dimensions, had been myself and a scant few feet around me.
What...?
A heavy thud broke me out of my thoughts and I saw my Father landing next to me. Since both of us had been prepared, he was wearing, much like myself, full motorcycle safety gear. It had been enchanted and bolstered by hidden runes and severed Will, turning everything into protective objects that even defended against potent and offensive mysticism. The equipment in question had been chosen for its sheer mundanity and ease of access, letting the powerful enchancements skirt around the Lie and Consensus leaving the magic fully intact and potent.
"Alistair," I heard my Father say to me with grim calm as he twisted the space in front of us into a right angle, redirecting rapid gunfire, "I can't do this alone."
I remained silent.
"Damnit, Son," he growled out then literally kicked my ass with his heavy boot, almost knocking me over onto my side, "get a hold of yourself, Its here now. You handle the mages."
That got me going. I finally got up, my grief was as a lead weight and prevented me from doing what was needed. With a last look at C'Leena's hollowed out corpse, I grit my teeth, steeled my nerves and called forth my magic from the Aether.
Was I dreaming? No, worse, I was in a memory...
"Stay out of my way and watch yourself," Father said to me, "I can't pull my punches against that."
"Gotcha," I replied almost absently and turned to face the assembled shadow mages. They had inexplicably stopped theit gunfire to admire the Thing they brought into existence from Somewhere.
I couldn't help but stare, either.
Standing on top of the northernmost anchor stone, an ugly, multi-faceted block of copper with glyphs and sigils harshly hewn into it, was a naked woman. The glyphs themselves were hard to look at, as though their mere presence were an affront to reality itself, which they were. The woman's skin was a darkened olive tone and she was tall as well as athletic, lithe and fit. Her shoulder length black hair was bushy and curly, flowing about her head almost like an afro. As she ran her hands down her body, I could not help but notice that everything was oddly symmetrical and too perfect. It was unnerving me greatly and triggered an uncanny valley response that tore at my heart.
The body this Thing was wearing had belonged to my fiancée.
Father didn't let It have time to get acclimated. Sidestepping forwards, he drew upon the full capabilities of his Path, eyes backlit by stars, an impossible physical sword of abstract spatial geometries held in his left hand, and a reality defying, super-dense distortion held in his right.
The world contorted and screamed under his might.
I awoke with a start and a low groan, glad to be awake and free of that horrid nightmare again. Not for the first time, I wished I had that motorcycle gear still. I had been far too reckless then and immediately thereafter, and everything had been damaged beyond repair. I could never find anyone I trusted enough to make those enchantments anyways. Farnsworth could only enhance the mundane qualities as he didn't know enough about mana warding to permanently imbue the protections I wanted nor needed for my line of active field work.
Looking around, I saw Rue asleep on the other side of the bed and Spades was nestled between us, his massive form making a visible dip in the mattress. The big monster dog was on his back, legs splayed open and snoring loudly with his tongue hanging out of his muzzle. I was reminded a lot of my Lola when she had still been around in the flesh, making me smile with old and pleasant memories. I must have been out for some time for Spades to be here.
A quick, almost reflexive, mental orison told me everything I already suspected. My mana reserves were shot, my body had been through the ringer and my soul was frayed and burnt. While I knew I owed my continued existence to Raver and her godsend, I also knew it had taken a great and terrible toll on my Self. Miracles like that usually held some kind of hidden cost, even if they weren't readily apparent.
Getting off the bed slowly, I began to look for my pack. It took far longer than than usual as I had to steady myself quite a bit from the spinning room. I managed to be quiet, however, and didn't wake up Rue nor Spades. Finally in the shower, after some time and using the wall to support myself, I let the almost scalding water roll over my aching body. The pendant on my neck protecting me from recieving any burns or aggravating the injuries I had, both old and new.
With the hot water soothing aching muscles, I began to think and take stock of my situation. I had never been on the back foot like this, low on any kind of resource, having few allies, and being pressed for time. It was like something out of a bad novel or shitty indie Steam(R) game. Though, real life was often stranger than fiction and had no real need for a logical cause and effect dynamic. If this was going to become the norm, then I had to find another method of approaching my wendigo problem.
I was simply running out of time.
After some long moments of thinking, I began to wash my hair, using the guest products on the corner caddy. They were so much nicer than anything I would have willingly bought and made me seriously consider changing up my usual shampoo. The only idea I could come up with regarding those wendigos, besides an overwhelming frontal assault, was to appeal to their bottomless gluttony and barter for passage.
I resigned myself to actually try to negotiate with their clan leader, leveraging their horrid taboos against them to get what I needed.
Wendigos, unlike most strange cryptids, vampires and were-folk aside, had a lot of things known about them, especially how they powered their supernatural capabilities. It was a simple and rather straightforward process, the more heinous the act, the more mana they drew from it. Cannibalism, sacrilege, incest, murder, torture, hedonistic gluttony, or any number of other terrible and minor sins. As well as general lawbreaking and felonies, oftentimes combined to have as many as possible occur in the same sitting.
I audibly gasped with a sudden epiphany.
My fate had already been decided, by myself no less. In a bar I couldn't remember the name of, when I had been gazing into my bronze coin, I saw what I needed to do. I had to gift what measly scrap of knowledge I understood from Beyond the Infinite to those creatures. To let those wendigos defile and mutilate such sacred and pure knowledge to whatever whims their baleful minds could come up with.
"Fuck," was the only thing I could whisper at the thought of it all as I turned off the water, getting out of the shower. I cooled the bathroom down with but a thought and wiped away the condensation on the mirror with a towel that wasn't my own, finally getting a good look at myself without vertigo, as that had finally passed.
I looked like shit, and that was a compliment. Huge, fist shaped bruises of black, green and yellow littered my torso, though most were located on my left side and blurred together into an ugly shapeless mass. The ones on my right, however, were well defined and I could easily count the number of strikes. My face held a swollen black eye, I never noticed my diminished field of vision as I had gotten used to having them over the years. Turning gingerly and opening the mirror a bit so I could see my back, I grimaced. It was another spiderweb of a bruise, earned from when I had been smashed against the edge of Raver's Dreamtime bubble.
At least none of my fingers were broken, only very stiff and swollen, just like the rest of me. I probably couldn't drive for another day or so, either, not with my hands the way they were. As I looked, surprised I hadn't noticed earlier, the inside of my right hand was, branded. The skin, while fully healed, held the symbolic glyph that heralded the Path of Stars. A circle with nine curved lines inside it. Each line only intersected two others, but with the irregular placement of them, I could trace an intersection to any other one. In each of the open spaces, slightly off center, as a simple dot.
"Miracles leave their marks," I muttered to myself, almost disbelieving the literalness of the phrase.
I didn't bother drying off and struggled a bit getting into the clothes I brought with me, maroon athletic shorts and a black tank top. Exiting the guest bathroom, I thought about where I wanted to go. Settling on a destination, I went into the backyard, found a patch of grass in the shaded, morning sunlight and lay down. The grass was thick and rather soft, and the smell of the lemon tree and the garden was more pleasant and fragrant than they should have been.
Warding myself against dreaming, I pulled on the principles of the Aether, specifically, those of sun and storms. Since the Aether was a realm of energy and mana in all of its varying forms, I employed an advanced technique, a mysterion. It was something only able to be done by those that actually hailed from the Aether rather than having mastery over it. Pulling some of the sunlight and ambient warmth into my form, I converted measly scraps of energy directly into mana. The process was slow, and almost hardly worth the effort. It was like filling a bathtub with water, a single milliliter at a time.
Mana was now such a rare commodity, every miniscule drop of it mattered.
I settled in and entered a trance-like state, most of my attention devoted to my mysterion, though some of it was allowed to drift off elsewhere. While not exactly a dream, and while maintaining my mana draw, my mind conjured up nonsensical imagery and conversations between myself and others. I didn't pay them any attention as my thoughts wandered and drifted idly.
"I thought I'd find you out here," Rue said as I heard her sit down next to me. I didn't hear her walking, however, she continued to speak, "you've been asleep for a few days. What happened?"
"Got fucked," I replied easily, a little sarcastically as well. "Truthfully," I amended, "I got summoned by Raver. She pulled a shenanigan with Fate to let her have a waking dream."
"So she was hallucinating?" Rue stated, though it was more of a question.
"Damned straight," I confirmed, "she had Sasquatch and Farnsworth make something for her. It had to have been lethal, something like that. Anyways, we were talking and then one of Them showed up. Inside the Dreamtime bubble of hers. Found Raver's luminescence despite Mirzam hiding it."
"Shit. So It was physically there? That means It had a stolen body..." Rue said, trailing off.
"Yeah, it had a body alright," I almost growled out, "broke Raver's ritual with little effort. I spent everything I had to make a patch job just to keep it active, burned through all my mana, too. I did not want to be dispersed."
"I see," Rue said to me with understanding, "I wouldn't want to have to find my physical body without a tether either." There was a small pause before she spoke again, "So what happened next?"
"I made it mad with insults to buy time for the repaired shenanigan to stabilize Raver."
"What do you mean?" Rue asked as I heard her stretch out a bit, my eyes still closed.
"Her shenanigan was woven in such a way that whatever drug Sasquatch and Farnsworth made for her didn't just kill her," I answered with a pause then continued, "it let her do things beyond normality, anyways, my fucked up patch job let me tell Sasquatch that Raver had to stay dreaming."
"So he wouldn't just purge the elixir out of her," Rue stated, then added perhaps a tad bit defensively, "I know some things from other paths, not much, but some."
"That's good," I answered back, "knowledge is power."
"With us, it's quite literal."
I murmured in assent.
"So why did you make It mad?" Rue asked, "wouldn't It just draw strength from human emotions, especially in the Dreamtime?"
"It did," I answered back, "but It couldn't act properly on them, like human emotions were new and novel. The whole encounter was sloppy after a certain point, but I did almost die. Raver saved me, gave me a miracle."
"I saw," Rue said simply, "the mark on your hand was a giveaway."
I could only murmur in agreement again then asked, "Did you find a card in my hands, too?"
"I did," Rue replied after a few moments of silence, "it was debit card, with a note attached to it."
"From Procyon, right?"
It took a few moments for her to answer. "Yes, it was from Procyon," she took a breath and continued with wavering effort, "that damned bastard had it all planned out. Wrote a fucked up letter to me on a Google(TM) doc telling me not to worry and that this had always been his exit plan."
"Sounds like he knew what was going to happen," was all I could say.
"Yes, but, I miss him!" Rue all but snarled at me, then, in a small and quiet voice, whispered, "He was my best friend, and maybe we could've been more, y'know? Now... there's... There's just nothing, only memories of him left to mourn."
"I didn't know," I answered simply.
Rue spoke with a wavering breath before continuing, her thoughts more than a little disjointed, "a lot of what he wrote was personal, so I won't get into that, but he was certain that something catastrophic was going to happen to him and myself. So he made sure that I was at my secondary home, recovering from a job. I had just completed a mission from Raver and Mirzam, and was going to perform a ritual to patch up Spades after I got some sleep. Procyon also stated that someone has been altering things for a very long time."
"So that's why you were caught with yout pants down," I said, "you didn't even have time to recover." I paused, adjusting my mysterion as I had to refocus due to our conversation, "what did they have you do?"
"Some hedge wizards actually got a hold of an actual necromancy grimoire and charged mana tools in a graveyard," Rue said with a bit of a tired sigh, "they knew exactly what they were doing, and would have been rather powerful shadow mages if they had been capable of using starlight."
"Fuck," was all I could say, then formed an actual response after a few moments, "that shouldn't have been an issue for you. Hedges don't have our capability, though numbers may have evened out their odds."
"You're right, but they brought a spirit back before I could stop them," Rue answered with more than a little spite, "a real nasty piece of shit, too. Turned on the hedges, absorbed them, and put up a real mean fight against Spades and I. It was touch and go for a long time and I was actually fearful for my life, too."
"You won, though."
"Yeah, managed to send it kicking and screaming back to the Pit, exhausted most of my mana to do so. Fucking bastard."
There was a small silence between us as Rue became lost in her own thoughts. It was a while before I asked her, "Can you elaborate on what Procyon said about Fate being altered?"
"I can, actually, though it's a bit difficult since I'm not even a novice with the Path of Stars," Rue answered as I heard her shift a bit on the grass next to me. She paused as she seemingly collected her thoughts, "it's just that certain events were made to happen sooner or later. The big one, for our Node at least, was that you were always supposed to make your ancestral home translocate. It happened sooner than it should have."
"Fuck," I said, "So I wasn't supposed to send it away a few days ago?"
"No, that was supposed to happen after our wendigo thing, if the letter is to be believed."
"Fuck," was all I could say, "I do suppose that was a snap decision, I really didn't want Them to get a hold of anything inside. If I had been able to wait, or even had help, I'm sure I wouldn't have lost it to time and space."
"Exactly," Rue said with bitter excitement, "and we'd have access to everything in it. Losing your home was a big blow to our Node."
"Yeah, but at least They don't have it," I answered more spitefully than intended.
"Silver linings and all that, right?"
"Yeah, gotta look at the bright side, no matter how bleak," I answered back with a bit of sarcastic mirth, then said as I stretched a bit, readjusting my focus on my mysterion as well, "speaking of wendigos, I know what we need to do to solve that."
"Oh? Do tell, I couldn't come up with anything myself, kept running into dead ends," she said, then added, "lack of resources and help."
"Well, I don't think you're going to like it, I'm not sure I like it either."
"Don't keep me waiting," Rue said to me with a bit of sarcastic exasperation. I could sense her looking at me even though my eyes were still closed.
"I'm going to leverage their taboos against them, appeal to their insatiable greed and offer them what little I can understand of That Which Lies Beyond the Infinite." I sighed and added, "after all, how could they resist the allure of new magic?"
"You're right," she answered, "I definitely don't like it. I'm pretty sure it's not even wise to do so."
"Wise or not, it's the only way forward, I even saw it in a vision when I was manipulating fate magic."
"Have you talked to Mirzam or Raver about this vision of yours?"
"No, not yet, and I'm pretty sure I don't need to."
There was a bit of silence between us as she digested my words. I felt compelled to elaborate as I adjusted my mysterion again, losing a bit of my focus due to the depth of the conversation we were having.
"Acrux," I said, getting her attention fully by using the name of her star, "there's something you need to understand." I sat up, abandoning my mysterion in favor of giving her my full attention. Blinking a bit at the rise of light and warmth, I continued my thought process, "in the Dreamtime, the Thing I was fighting against, It was surprised and enraged that I was able to call upon knowledge that Lay Beyond the Infinite. Whatever those glyphs and powers are, They never wanted humans to know of them, let alone have them."
"Yet you want to give such power to wendigos of all things."
"At least the knowledge, corrupted or not, will still be on Earth," I said then added, "I'm not sure what you remember, but I know you've seen something from Beyond the Infinite. Your self revival and Spade's new form are proof of that. I was there, guided by Oracle. I Perceived something unknowable, something terrible, something no mortal has any right to gaze upon. Something I can hardly even begin to try to put into words. Raver Perceived it, too. It's how she managed to give me a godsend. So, what did you Perceive, really?"
Rue brought her knees up to her chest, thinking deeply. I could tell she was using her Perception to look inwards upon her Self. I waited patiently while she struggled to look at her soul's reflection against her mind and struggled even more to put the image there into words.
At long last, she spoke, her eyes still closed as she did so, "I'm not sure what I saw, there was too much, and I felt so small. Insignificant. Less than even a dismissed, intrusive thought. There is one thing I do remember. A doorway made of the might from two universes worth of truths and laws. A Thing was trying ro break through, but couldn't, not fully, yet the doors were opened, letting smaller ones through."
"The Doors have to be closed," I said, quoting Raver, before continuing, "that's what Raver said to me, before she sent me back to my body."
"Why didn't they mend you then?"
"They were being attacked in the waking world, too. It was a good plan on Their part, They just didn't expect us to put up so much of a fight."
"They never do, though I think that's changing."
"So that's our endgame, not sure how we're going to do it," I said, bringing the conversation back to topic, "at the moment, however, I'm going to eat a few of those mana-stuffed protein bars and fix your leg. I can't keep spending mana to be able to drive your truck. You'll have to use your own mysterion to get mana, too."
"I hate my Path's mysterions," the venom in her voice was palpable.
Before I could say anything, the backdoor opened, revealing Luna. She was wearing a bird-patterned sundress and her hair had been tied back into a loose ponytail. She put her hand over her eyes to shade them from the sun as she squinted against the brightness relative to that from inside.
"Hey, you two," she called out, "Grandmother says she needs to talk yo you."
"Alright," I called out, shakily getting up to my feet with a bit of a grunt. Everything still hurt. Rue had a bit of trouble as well, her leg was not recieving the rest and healing it deserved and needed.
"We're a mess, aren't we?" Rue asked aloud as we began to walk towards the bak door.
"Yeah, but you should see the other guys," I replied with a light chuckle, only to wince and hold my sides, "I forgot how much laughing hurts with fractured ribs."
"I really don't envy you right now," Rue said with a bit of a smirk as we entered Tsula's home, Rue entering first. "I wonder what Tsula wants to talk to us about?" Rue asked aloud, not really talking to anyone in particular.
I could only wonder as we followed Luna to the living room, the house pleasantly cool due to central air conditioning.
~ ~ ~
The moon was not in the sky, and I greatly enjoyed not having to endure the accursed, purifying light of day reflected by its surface, even if greatly diminished. The loathsome wound in my side had been a mortal blow, burning through my toughened flesh and form with unnerving ease and stunning, blinding pain. Once more, I looked at the oily, thin, and black ichor that dripped from my fingers, more human-like than I was comfortable with.
The mote of dreadlight I had recieved for my services had been the only thing that had kept me from vanishing entirely. Mortal alchemy -- science -- had advanced to such a degree so as to emulate the harsh light of day far too remarkably well. That hadn't been the worst part, that damned thaumaturgist had ensorcelled a curse upon the weapon as well. With effort, as the bulk of my power was directed at repairing the oozing wound, I altered my form and shape, struggling to maintain the illusion as I walked out onto the sidewalk from a side alley.
My contract was not yet completed.
The first two nights I had hidden myself away in the dark depths, raging against the oblivion that threatened to overtake me and ending my existence. The preparedness of the thaumaturgist had been unexpected, as well as the skill and the knowledge he had wielded so effortlessly. Without my guidance, nor presence, to instill fear into the gifted abetters, the wraiths I had gathered with me fell and fled into the night, abandoning their duties and contracts.
I would have never made this mistake against the herald of the bear.
Had I known the name of the mortal's star I had been tasked against, I would have demanded more than a simple mote of dreadlight and a paltry handful of coerced allies. Realistically, I should be grateful that I still had a kind of semi-existence. Quelling my anger and hatred, and swallowing my utter revulsion, my form rippled and took the guise of a tall, middle-aged human male in a common and unremarkable suit carrying an old and worn briefcase.
The artificial illumination around me flickered, emitting a grating hum in my presence and the thin television flickered oddly as it tried to display my image, failing to accurately do so. While tracking Arcturus's quintessence had been a bit of a task, as far too much time had passed, my familiarity with it granted me an advantage that overcame that difficulty. Traveling in my wounded state, however, had been much more arduous. Looking the woman at the reception desk over, I took on my role with hiden revulsion, aided by the illusion I was conjuring and the mimicry of my physical form.
"I'm detective Aiden Roth, and I'm looking for someone. I believe that he was here a few nights ago, definitely this past week," I said. My false, human voice had been made to sound smooth, suave and strong, interlaced with a suggestion, using what little forte I could spare. I put the worn and well-used briefcase I had conjured with me onto the counter with a heavy thud, using more of my forte to emulate such a simple thing. Opening it up, I fished out an image and showed the slightly grainy, black and white picture to the receptionist.
As the woman perused the conjured image, I could not help but hiss, my hand going to my side as I expended more of my forte than I had anticipated. The cursed wound fighting back fiercely against the dreadlight tethering my existence and life. I held my disguise with willpower of monumental proportions. A strength of will I rarely had been pressed to draw from.
Seeing the concerned look the woman gave me, I simply stated, shrugging off the pain with yet more expenditure of will, "An old injury, it flares up from time to time. No matter, have you seen this individual?"
"I'm going to need to see some kind of badge or warrant," the woman said with a genuine smile, "sorry."
The fear of losing her menial job overpowered my subtle suggestion. Unfortunate.
"Sure," I replied with a fake and well ptacticed, fetching smile, adjusting my forte to include another suggestion. I showed an actual badge with my assumed name and likeness. The mortal I was impersonating had been slain many years ago by my own hands, and the subtle illusion taking hardly any of my forte adjusted the dates and design of the badge to whatever was current.
Only a thaumaturgist, or a very particularly skilled sorcerer, could pierce the illusion. Against this mortal, there was no chance of resistance and she accepted the stolen badge without question.
She looked it over, as if trying to divine the legitimacy of it. "Okay," she finally admitted, "he was here a while ago, maybe a four or five days? I remember, 'cause I tried to flirt with him..."
I ignored her prattling and asked when she finished speaking, "Can you show me the room he used?"
"Sure, but it's been cleaned a few times since then."
With a nod, I let her lead the way to the room in question, staying silent. The lights around me flickered and hummed loudly in my presence. Had the woman been more observant, she could have seen my true shadow as I had not the forte to expend to hide it entirely from the ever changing lights. She opened the room in question, using what I could only assume was a master key card.
I immediately recognized the faded auras of quintessence.
"This will do," I stated, closing the door behind me and dropping my revolting disguise, using my forte to lock it.
I revealed my true form. My legs and arms lengthened and thinned, the black suit and red tie I was wearing became my skin, armor and form. My face and eyes became blank, gaunt and sunken, skin stretching out over it. The wound in my side made itself visible, it was an ugly red, peeling and oozing burn from my shoulder to my waist and took up most of my torso. The dreadlight I was using to prevent my oblivion illuminated the wound with a kind of sickly, crimson colored backlight. Black ichor oozed out from it and dripped onto the floor as I used the bulk of my forte to ablate the caustic, foreign quintessence from my form.
The woman looked at me as even her pitifully dull, mundane human senses told her that there was incredible danger in the room with her. She screeched and irrationally ran towards the bathroom as my presence became impossibly tall in the very finite space in the motel room. Using the smallest iota of my forte, I remotely smashed her fleeing form against a wall, pinning her there with unseen force as she begged, and sobbed for her pitiful life.
I ignored her for the moment.
Drawing upon more of my forte, freed up as I no longer needed a disguise, I sensed out where quintessence had been used, discovering two places, the bed and a wall. Imbuing the wall with my own forte, I witnessed a spectral, moving image of Arcturus throwing five darts at a map placed on the wall, one at a time, then draw intersecting lines to a single point on the map.
"Wendigos..." I hissed out in loathing, the skin on my face stretching and contorting with the movement as i spoke aloud with a nonexistent mouth. Even I knew their territory.
Turning to the second source of quintessence, I did the same thing. I saw Arcturus ward himself against dreaming and then hold a brilliant shield in the air, as well as a ball of fire. My knowledge of actual thaumaturgy told me that I would have great difficulties against those Knowings. I put the mystery of his Dreamtime excursion out of my mind for now, there was nothing I could do regarding that.
My expenditure of forte caused my horrid wound to pulse against my form painfully. With a hiss, I turned to the woman meekly begging me to spare her life as she was still pinned against the wall. I could use a thrall, especially as I could no longer gain allies, not without offering something in return to my current contract holders.
That was not a barter I wanted to engage in.
"Please... don't kill me... please... I'll do anything... please..."
The absolute terror in her eyes was delectable. Her fear invigorated me with energy and reminded me I needed to feed. However, the morsels offered by her would be more than sufficient for my needs. I dragged my left hand across my oozing wound, covering it in my own essence then flexed my forte. The clothes she was wearing split in half down the middle, revealing her naked form, making her shriek. I could see the ideas her panicked mind vomited forth as she renewed her struggles with vigor.
What I had in mind was so much worse than the mundane taking of her physical body she expected.
Using the full might of my forte, I lengthened and sharpened my index finger, the tip dripping with the gathered ichor of my essence. In an instant, less than the blink of an eye, I appeared in front of her from where I had been by the bed and plunged the very tip of my sharpened, needle-like nail into the center of her heart, cutting through the most sensitive parts of her breast to do so due to the angle I had chosen for just this purpose. As I let my ichor suffuse her body with each beat of her racing heart, her vascular system visibly turning black under her skin as she screamed and writhed in agony, an odd thing happened.
What could only be considered my blood had been tainted by thaumaturgy qnr bolstered by dreadlight as well as my own forte. As it mixed with the blank canvas of the mortal in front of me, I could sense the candle of her soul. Reaching out with dreadlight, letting the wound burn my side with a hiss of inhaled breath, I ignited it with three kinds of mysticism.
A horrified realization overcame her as she knew I had fundamentally altered her to suit my whims. Having a thaumaturgist thrall would be a great boon.
"You'll do quite nicely," I said with an actual grin, the skin stretched over my mouth revealing impossibly large, gleaming flat teeth, as I watched the physical and mystical changes taking place.
My new thrall would never be human again.
I feasted on her terror, anguish and torment.
It was delicious.
~ ~ ~
Arcturus and Acrux will be back. C'Leena Thomas, Prosthetist is going to be my next update.
[[NEXT]]

10,000 Stolen Days

May 10, 2024 marked exactly 10,000 days since Sophie’s life was taken. 10,000 days which had they not been stolen from her in December 1996, must have seemed to be filled with possibility .1996 had been a banner year, she had achieved so much in the previous 6 months, setting up her production company "Les Champs Blancs", and producing three different productions, with more on the way. But it had been exhausting few months with all this work and travel, and although Christmas is a holiday, it is not always a relaxing one.
Christmas had often been a difficult time for Sophie. She walked out her first husband Pierre Jean at Christmas 1981, so suddenly, she left her infant son behind and had to steal him back with a ruse involving a relative. She broke up with Bruno Carbonnet over Christmas in 1993. leaving him a puzzling note;
“Je suis partie là où tu n'a jamais été, là où tu n'iras jamais".
“I have left there where you have never been, there where you will never go”. This didn’t make much sense to Bruno. He waited alone for two weeks in the apartment hoping she would return, he a had bought a bicycle for Pierre Louis for Christmas. In January he left to teach in Le Harve and when he returned the locks had been changed and all his stuff was on the landing. Sophie was deliberate about change in her life she didn't just let things happen to her. Her agenda year planners reflect this. She was meticulous in recording meetings, calls, contact details and travel plans. She brought 1995, 1996 & 1997 year planners with her. There are notes and reminders stretching into February 1997. She even tore off the little perforated corners as each week passed. It's a poignant reminder of how abruptly her life was cut off in full flow - the week beginning 23/12/1996 still has its corner intact.
Sophie’s style was austere, almost minimalist. Her cottage was painted white inside and out, with a except for the ground floor, which was black slate with a shiny varnish. The only decorations were a few sprigs of holly placed by the housekeeper to welcome her. A traditional Christmas week filled with loud music, tinsel and overconsumption was the diametric opposite of her character.
Worse there is the prospect having to trade pleasantries with tiresome relatives.
That Christmas Daniel had decided for the first time to have a big family Christmas inviting his extended aristocratic family to his chateau in Ambax in the South of France. For Sophie, who even after six years of marriage barely knew Daniel’s relatives, this was an easy choice and a hard no.
She bought her ticket on the morning of her travel planning to spend nearly a week in Ireland including Christmas Day and return on the 26^th. It may be that this was the only return flight she could get at the time. Or it may be, as she told her aunt Madame Opalka “she was going to go to Ireland to spend Christmas there, because the house in Ambax was full of people”. From what Daniel has said, and from what others have said, it may be he tried to persuade her to come to Ambax for Christmas and convinced her. Sometime during the weekend she got an itinerary by fax at the cottage confirming her flight back on the 24^th. But even on Sunday afternoon she told friends she had not made up her mind which flight she would take.
It is difficult to say how well their marriage was going at that time because the reports vary. Daniel said it was "harmonius and peaceful" which was far from accurate. There are several biographies of Daniel Toscan du Plantier, and they paint a vivid picture of a man who though incomparably charming, lived his life his own way without much concern for his family. He married four times and in three cases his wives were already pregnant before they got married. When he married Sophie, his eldest son and daughter were not even told about it, they only found out later in the summer when Sophie turned up at events.
Some witnesses including Daniel said was it was the happiest period, others say she was basically “an official wife” and that “their open marriage was an open secret”. The truth was probably somewhere in between. She had visited Ambax in November and collaborated closely on the documentary Europa 101 with Daniel. Whatever their personal arrangement, Daniel was deeply affected by her death, even though he refused to come to Ireland. His daughter Ariane wrote how she spent months taking care of him, feeding him sedatives and sleeping pills. He was clearly overwhelmed, so Sophie must have been more than an "official wife" to him. Was their marriage "open"? They clearly had a high degree of independence from each and had affairs in the past.
Nevertheless, Sophie may have balked at spending Christmas in Ambax. For one thing, it was far away from Paris, where her friends and family lived. For another, Daniel’s family and entourage knew very little about her. Apart from his second son Carlo, who was friends with her son Pierre Louis and some servants, she would have been on her own. Christmas in Paris would have been tolerable, she could escape and visit her parents and friends whenever she wanted, but in Ambax, she would be cooped up with nowhere else to go.
There is a question of whether Daniel was having an affair at the time. According to a Garda memo, French journalist Caroline Mangez said that Daniel was with a female film producer. However the files are full of unsubstantiated rumours and lies. Even if he wasn’t having an affair Sophie may have suspected he was. If Daniel had invited a mistress, or even a former mistress, or a former wife to Ambax, it would be unbearably awkward for Sophie. Daniel had uncountable affairs, and many of his mistresses knew each other, some remained on good terms.
Daniel may have been faithful at that time, perhaps he was telling the truth when he said their marriage was harmonius, but in any case Sophie had other reasons to skip Christmas. She had wanted to come to Dunmanus for months, but work got in the way. The heating had just been fixed and she needed to pay the plumber and her housekeeper. They preferred cash.
And if Daniel was unhappy that she wasn’t going to be there for Christmas, they were going on holiday together in the New Year to Dakar, Senegal. It would be much easier for Sophie to be with Daniel by himself than his whole family. This trip to Ireland would be a breather for her. She didn’t want to be alone, she asked at least 8 different people to accompany her, including 2 former intimate partners, though there is no evidence that she was having an affair or intended to have an affair.
There is a post-it note with a message in Sophie's hand seemingly inviting someone to spend Christmas: "Je vous laisse le choix : venir ou de refuser histoire que vous passiez un bon noel"
"I leave you the choice: come or refuse just so you have a good Christmas"
Whoever that note was written to, it was to someone she addressed as "vous" so not one of her closest friends or family.

Work

If she had another relationship, it is not obvious from her diary and it was unknown to her friends. What her diary does show though is that she had thrown herself into work.
Apart from her agenda she kept a working notebook, a red hardback book which is filled with a tantalizing mash of different references to famous works of art, music, and contacts details of artists and philosophers. She had recently completed work on three different films. The first work was a documentary on African Art. The next was Europa 101, a documentary written by Daniel showcasing the wealth of European cinema. This was Daniel’s pet project, he loathed US cinema and the dominance of Hollywood. He once likened his wife’s death to a “bad movie”. His life’s work was a “struggle against cheap portrayals of violence, which is what leads to deaths like this” (Irish Independent 12/07/1998). This project involved gathering interviews and footage from dozens of famous directors and actors, including John Malkovich, Ingmar Berman, Pedro Almodovar, Werner Herzog, Nanni Moretti, Jean Luc Godard and many others. It was broadcast on December 8, 1996.
The third was an art house movie called “He sees folds everywhere”, a concept movie exploring the idea of folds and creases in everyday life, in hanging clothes, paper, wrinkles on skin, folds of a human brain. This was a project of the director Guy Girard, and it was the work to complete this that delayed her trip to Ireland. But she had other projects in train in her notebook. She was researching Greek folk music, Rebetiko. She had a project or projects in mind which were somewhat dark in nature.
She was in contact with George Didi-Huberman who had written a book called “The Invention of Hysteria”. This is a photographic history of how Jean Marie Charcot – one of the giants of 19c French science – locked up thousands of women for the imagined maladies of hysteria, lethargy, catalepsie and experimented on them, deliberately photographing them in contrived and frightening poses. It is a very weird and frightening history.
Her next project seems to have been based around human fluids. Her final notes are filled with references to human flesh, death and the four medieval humours of blood, phlegm, black bile, yellow bile. There are extensive notes to what seems to be a lecture given by linguist Jean Claude Milner on the subject of melancholia. Note that “melancholia” is a synonym for “black bile”, one of the four humours.
She was researching the avant garde Irish/British painter Francis Bacon, who was known for producing uniquely disturbing images. She references “Three Studies for the Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion”. There was a Bacon exhibition in Centre Pompidou in 1996 and Sophie must have attended it. Her notebook contains her jottings from a lecture on Bacon by writer Philippe Sollers which seemed focused on blood.
"Why does painting touch the central nervous system?" "We are carcasses of meat, meat above all" "The canvas bleeds, blood spurts red" "Dostoyevsky had a crisis in front of the 16^th century Hans Holbein’s painting “The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb She jotted down a quote from the play Libation Bearers from Aeschylus:
Orestes sees the Furies coming and exclaims "O Lord Apollon look! Now they come in troops, and from their eyes they drip loathsome blood!"
The last entry reads "research the Furies"

Friday

Having failed to convince anyone to join her in Ireland for Christmas, she went alone. She telephoned Josephine on Tuesday 17^th, told her she would be arriving alone on Friday. She called her again on Thursday to ask her to make sure the house would be warm.
She went to the airport on Friday morning, bought a ticket with the return date on the 26^th, carrying with her a rather hefty bag filled with clothes, including some eveningwear. Perhaps she envisaged visiting people at Christmas time. She expected to stay nearly a week. Later, possibly on Sunday she changed her ticket, she called the Aer Lingus ticket desk in Charles de Gaulle airport, Paris and got a return flight for the 24^th. She received the itinerary details by fax, as she had a machine in the cottage.
She was not in a good mood when she arrived. She had some words with the woman at the Avis counter who passed her to her colleague. The photos on CCTV show a woman looking tired and drawn, something which was remarked upon by the Avis rep, who estimated she was in her forties, a little older than her 38 years. But nobody looks their best walking off an aircraft. She had also attended the Unifrance Christmas party the night before. This was a lavish party held in “Les Bains Douche”, a unique Paris nightclub combined with a swimming pool. Apart from the late night, the social effort must have been tiring. There was a rumour that Sophie had a row that night at Les Bains, a row with one of Daniel’s mistresses, but I have never heard that confirmed. But other reports say that those who met her there found her "radiant", "in good form", "playful". "She went arm in arm to see friends," one guest at the party told Paris Match, "but she always came back to the table where Daniel was sitting." (Paris Match 09/01/1997) Daniel was quoted years later by Michael Sheridan - “She spent some hours having an intense, passionate conversation with a film-maker” - Alain Terzian, producer of Les Visiteurs, one of the most successful French comedies of the 1990s.
Strangely though, Daniel’s first statement said she left on Wednesday. So perhaps it didn’t register with him that she was at the Unifrance party with him on Thursday 19^th, or perhaps he had forgotten the party altogether.
Sophie was captured on Cork Airport CCTV at 14:41 pushing a trolley through the arrivals gate. The scheduled arrival time was 13:20, but because of almost an hour’s delay in departure it didn’t touch down until after 2. It would have taken about 15 minutes to pick up baggage from the carousel.
Cork is a small airport and it is quick to get through the arrival hall to the car hire desks, only a matter of a few meters away.
Sophie hired a silver Ford Fiesta and would have been on the road by 14:50.
The quickest route to West Cork would have been via Bandon and Dunmanway but it is more likely she went via Clonakilty and Skibbereen. She stopped in Ballydehob to buy kindling. She may have stopped in Skibbereen to buy petrol. A pump attendant reported seeing a woman matching her description driving a silver Ford buying petrol. He also noted a tall male companion in the passenger seat. The Gardai discounted this sighting because they accounted for the petrol in the car when it was hired and the mileage thereafter. There were also some discrepancies in the vehicle’s appearance and its description in the statement. Also the Ballydehob sighting is more reliable as the woman got a chance to talk to her. It would seem odd to stop in both Skibbereen and Ballydehob, both petrol stations.
But she seems to have stopped again in Schull because she bought bread and cheese in the Courtyard Deli, and this was most likely on Friday. She talked with the proprietor, Denis Quinlan to ask if there would be live music. At this stage it would have been around 4:30pm and after this she went to the cottage. She called her caretaker Josephine at 5:15, so she must have been at home by then. We don’t know if she went out after that point. She may have stayed in. At 10:15 she called her friend Agnès Thomas and spoke to her for half an hour.

Saturday

Sophie’s whereabouts on Saturday morning are unknown. Perhaps she stayed in, perhaps she went out. Finbarr Hellen was working on his land nearby and saw her car outside the house 12 to 1pm. He didn’t see her and thought it was unusual for her not to come out and say hello. He also remarked her car was parked in an unusual place. He did not elaborate more than this.
The next event we know is that she bought some groceries in Brosnans supermarket on the main street in Schull and took £200 out of the ATM.
For the curious, her shopping list is listed below:

Item	Price
Firelighters	0.85
Independent Newspaper	0.85
EP Televised "Chopped" & Her	0.52
Parsley	0.40
Low Fat Yoghurt	1.90
Ballygowan Natural Spring Water	0.85
Napolina Penne	0.75
Rashers	1.26
Courgettes	1.23
Chicory	1.79
Onions	0.09
Fox's Classic Biscuits	0.83
Flat Mushrooms	0.65
Pepper Coated Salami	0.85
Cooked Turkey	1.89
Mushrooms	0.34
Avonmore Leek & Potato Soup	0.99
Monini Olive Oil	3.45
Ballygowan Natural Spring Water	0.85
Avonmore Carrot & Coriander Soup	0.99
Ballygowan Natural Spring Water	0.85
	22.18

This list does suggest she was buying just for herself, but also that she planned to cook moderately elaborate meals with parsley, courgettes and chicory. Together with the cheese, bread and fruit already in the house she had enough food on there to last a few days. This quantity of food suggests she had not decided to travel home on the 24^th at this stage.
The till recorded a time of 2:49pm.
Sometime after this or perhaps before Sophie entered Tara Fashions, the clothes shop run by Marie Farrell. What Marie Farrell saw that day and subsequent days has been subject to revision, retraction and details seemed to be added with each telling. But I think the most reliable report is the first and all the subsequent revisions cannot be trusted. Farrell called the Gardai on the 25^th but they didn’t get around to taking a statement from her until 27^th. Even so we can assume her memory was fresh. Here is her statement, verbatim.,
On Saturday the 21st December 1996 I was working in my shop at Main Street, Schull, Co. Cork. Between 2p.m. and 3p.m. I noticed a weird looking character across the road from my shop. He was approx 5’10” in height, late 30’s, scruffy looking, long black coat, flat black beret, thin build, sallow skin, short hair. He was there for about 10 minutes. On Sunday morning at 7.15a.m. approximately I noticed the same man on the road at Airhill. When I saw him he was walking towards Goleen on the right hand side of the road and I was travelling in the opposite direction. When he saw me he stopped and put up his hand to thumb a lift. I did not see this man before or since. On Saturday the 21.12.1996 at approx 3p.m. there was a woman in my shop. She did not buy anything. I now know that this woman was the deceased woman from Goleen. I recognised her from the photograph on the television.
There is also a record of her questionnaire which may have been taken earlier than this statement.
In reply to question no 8 When/where did you last see him/her alive? She replied "saw her in shop. She bought a "Carrig Donn" aran sweater aran nap coloured, rolled neck late Sat aftemoon. Paid £39.00. Questions No. 9, 10, 11 & 12 were left blank. In reply to question No. 13 "any other help?" Marie Farrell replied "saw a man on Sat afternoon hanging around street. Desc late 30's, 5'10" very short hair wearing black beret. Saw him again Sun morning @ 7.20am walking towards Airhill but thumbed her.
In a later questionnaire, Farrell said the sweater was too big and she didn’t buy it.
What is interesting her is that Farrell does not draw any explicit linkage between the weird character in the long black coat and the woman in the shop. They were just there at approximately the same time. Farrell did say in later statements that the man followed her up Ardnamanagh road, but this was many years later. Her statements that she saw the same man at Kealfadda bridge at 3am on Monday are untrustworthy, but we won't go into this here.
A farmer, Frank Lannin, saw Sophie driving towards Schull from Goleen around 3pm. She saluted him as she passed him in his tractor. The time or the direction of travel must be wrong here.
The final sighting on Saturday she was seen in the Courtyard pub, eating a crab sandwich and left at 3:30pm. Sally Bolger went to feed her horses on Alfie Lyons land at 4:15pm and says she saw Sophie’s car at her house.
Saturday evening is a complete blank. Nobody saw her, she may have called people on the phone but we don’t have precise details. Her husband said she called him twice on Saturday, but we don’t have any confirmation of this.
At some point Sophie changed her ticket home. Her diary has a number listed as “O’Mahony” and the number was the line to the Aer Lingus ticket desk in Charles-de-Gaulle Roissy airport. The new itinerary was faxed to her in her cottage. The reason why she decided to come home early is not known. Her friend Jean Senet said her husband Daniel persuaded her. For his part Daniel said there was no particular plan and he was to pick her up from the airport at Toulouse at 8pm. Another report tells that she came home early to meet her father, so she could help him with his taxes.

Sunday

For Sunday morning we don’t have any reports.
She called to Dunlough at in the early afternoon, perhaps around 1pm. Sophie had walked here several times before. It is a spectacular headland featuring a lake and three crumbling castles. It was cold and dry at the time, good weather for a walk, if bracing. It is necessary to pass the farm to walk the headland and when Sophie did so she met Tomi Ungerer. This was the second time they had met. Sophie had called here in April but it seemed Tomi and his wife were having a row at the time and Tomi had not paid much attention. Daniel said that Sophie feigned a puncture as an excused to call to the farm. In June Sophie had sent Tomi a fax about the death of a mutual colleague, Gilbert Estève. She may have been seeking information or just making contact. Sophie made a habit out of making contacts with important artists and thinkers. It was one of the things that a colleague said of her, she knew all the right people. It is possible that Tomi was one of the people Sophie wanted to meet for a while. Tomi invited her in for a drink after she had finished her walk. She returned an hour later and they had a conversation over two glasses of wine.
Tomi was a renowned visual artist, with a keen eye and a professional interest in culture. Born in Alsace he was marked by World War II and had seen the ravages of the Nazis and the backlash from the French afterwards. He worked for as a cultural ambassador to improve Franco German relations.
The statement that Tomi gave is remarkable in the insight it gives to Sophie’s character her interests and state of mind.
“She was saying how great Ireland was for literature and education compared to France, how France had thousands of books published every year but that there was no good Authors there, how Ireland was vibrant as a centre of literature for a small Country. She discussed her family, moreover her children and their education in France. She indicated that the reason she was here in Ireland was she wanted to be alone for Christmas. I considered this strange but I sometimes like to be alone too. We talked about books and culture and how the language here was more meaningful and truthful compared to the superficial nature of the French.”
“She seemed a very genuine person, a fine person, not pretentious or snobby. I thought she was deep and intelligent, so much so that I made notes of some things she said, “In a language there should be no need of the use of cuteness” “The problem of France is her lack of modesty”. I wrote those saying they might be useful for my work in the futre. I wrote the quotes on a card in which we exchanged addresses before she left. On hindsight now I would go as far as saying she was not beaming, that she had something on her mind. It’s hard when you do not know someone well to say. I offered her a third glass of wine but she did not take any. We gave her some eggs to take with her, half dozen for her supper. We have hens.”
The word “genuine” is telling. Tomi was struck by Irish people, how the highest compliment an Irish person can give about another, is to say that person is “genuine”.
Tomi described her appearance:
“She was wearing some type of black leather expensive looking pants, brown suede hiking boots, a white/cream ribbed polo necked sweater and a beige wool blazer and a navy blue wool jacket with belt and a navy wool cap and red suede gloves, wine/red gloves. She was dressed very well. She had her hair tied back.”
As to her demeanor, this seems to have grown with the telling. The documentaries made much of the legend of the lady of the lake, whose appearance is reputed to be a harbinger of death. This lurid tale does not feature in the early Garda statements. Tomi remarked that “she was not beaming”, that she may have had something on her mind. His wife Yvonne turned up while they were chatting.
“While we were chatting, Sophie told me that while she was up at the castles she felt this great anxiety almost fear. This is not an uncommon feeling for people who visit the castles. She wasn’t in a cheerful mood but she wasn’t really glum either. She talked about her plans for the future and we spoke about meeting up in Paris in the Spring. She seemed happy to be here and she wanted to be here. She said she liked it here but her husband didn’t. She said she would be back at Easter. We made vague arrangements to meet over the next three days. I gave Sophie some eggs and she left here at about 5.45 p.m.” Yvonne’s estimate of the time she left must be an error. It is more likely she left at around 3:45.
After leaving Dunlough Sophie went to Crookhaven to Sullivans pub, a legendary stop. Here she spoke with the proprietor Billy O’Sullivan and his son Dermot, both of whom speak good French and knew Sophie from prior visits. They also knew her friend Alexandra Lewy. One time Alexandra had arranged to buy a cast iron church gate for Sophie’s birthday, Sophie was fond of antiques and bric-a-brac. Dermot had carried this gate up to the cottage. Sophie asked about getting logs for her fire. Dermot recommended she go to a filling station. She said there was only kindling at the filling stations.
It is interesting that so much of Sophie’s alleged stops and conversations were about fire, kindling, logs etc. Despite this, the photos from her house show she had a lot of fuel. There is a stack of logs, several bales of peat briquettes, what looks to be a 40kg bag of coal and one, perhaps two baskets full of kindling. She had enough for days of fires, unless she lit both hearths, which would be unlikely considering the second hearth did not draft properly, and she was arranging to have it fixed. The kindling may have been bought from Camiers Garage when Kitty Kingston reported meeting her on Friday.
She told her friend Alexandra before she left that she was going to sleep in the guest room because it was the warmest room, being directly above the oil range. There was also a brass bedwarmer found next to her bed. All these details point to Sophie being acutely aware of the cold.
A witness heard her discussing the old Coastguard houses with the Sullivans. These are a prominent landmark visible from O’Sullivan’s pub across the water. The witness left before Sophie did at 4:30pm so she must have returned to the cottage no earlier than 5pm.
The witness noted she was wearing “black leather pants and brown suede desert boots and a long chunky jumper”. This matches well with Tomi Ungerer’s account.
Note the "desert boots" seen by this witness and the "suede hiking boots" mentioned by Tomi Ungerer are probably not the hiking boots she was wearing when she died. The hiking boots she was wearing were very worn, the laces had snapped and had been tied halfway down the lace holes. It looks to me she shoved them on without untying/tying the laces. Sophie would not have visited Schull wearing old worn-out shoes. A pair of dark brown suede "desert boots" are visible at the bottom of the stairs in the garda photos. These match better with the shoes seen by the witness.
It’s 25 minutes drive from Crookhaven back to the cottage so if Sophie left at 4:30 she would have been back home before 5pm.
We know she most likely went home, because at 5:32pm she called her friend Agnès Thomas to wish her a happy birthday. Agnès was out so Sophie left a message.
The postman called at 6pm and noted the lights were on. Presumably he was doing a Sunday shift to cope with the Christmas rush. He didn’t see Sophie’s car, but as he only went as far as the lower gate, it is quite possible he missed it.
At 7:30pm she called her housekeeper Josephine but she was out. She tried her again at 9:10pm but again she was out. Josephine returned and called her back at 10pm. Sophie told her she would be leaving on the 24^th, not the 26^th as she originally intended. They arranged to meet the following day at noon.
Sophie’s phone records were not available, as the exchange she was on was a traditional analogue exchange, with no recording facility. Schull was one of the last places in the country to have such an old system. Days later Garda technicians tried to retrieve call details from her cordless phone but its batteries were flat and nothing was found.
At around 10:30pm she called her husband Daniel, who said he couldn’t take her call. He said he was in a meeting with Unifrance associates. As it was nearly midnight in France, this an unusual time to have a work meeting. Daniel called her back “about twelve minutes later”. He said she was sleepy and probably in bed. Given that the cordless phone was found next to her bed, this seems plausible. He also said that she told him about her visit to the Ungerers and had formed a work project with him. He said she told him she returned home at 9:30pm, but he could be wrong about this. The phone calls to her friend and housekeeper strongly suggest she was at home from 5:30pm.
This was the last anyone heard from Sophie until her body was discovered at 10am the following morning.
From this point all we have is are the police photos and the story they tell is ambiguous, there are multiple possible interpretations.
The fire was lit that evening and there was an empty wine glass on the mantlepiece with dregs of wine in it. There was a loaf of bread, a white crusty “basket loaf” which had been sliced and left open. This is odd as there are no crumbs visible on the table and no plate. Would Sophie have gone to bed leaving the bread out? It’s possible. Another possibility is that the bread was sliced in the morning. But if so where is the plate that she used?
Conceivably Sophie may have left these items from another evening, but it is more likely she consumed the wine that evening, possibly with some cheese she had in her pantry, and the bread she had cut. There was a book open on the table, propped open by a jar of honey next to an empty teacup. However as the cordless phone was found by her bedside, it seems likely this was all left from the previous evening.
It seems the most likely Sophie spent her last night reading, went to bed and then took the call from Daniel.
The book propped open was not a Yeat’s anthology. There is a tale repeated by many true crime authors that Sophie was reading a Yeats poem called “A Dream Death”. It contains the lines
I DREAMED that one had died in a strange place Near no accustomed hand,
Ralph Riegel titled his book after this poem. But this is not the poem she was reading, if any. Yes there was a Yeats anthology found on her bed, but not the bed she slept in, it was on the bed in her personal room which she didn’t use that weekend. The anthology is “Quarente-cinq poèmes suivi de La Résurrection”, a collection of later Yeats poems translated by Yves Bonnefoy. It does not contain the poem “A Dream of Death” but it does contain a poem called “Death”, a meditation on how animals die versus men.
Nor dread nor hope attend A dying animal; A man awaits his end Dreading and hoping all;
But the Yeats anthology is not open on the bed, it is closed in the police photos. Unless the Gardai picked it up before photographing the room, then we cannot be sure what poem or poems she read. As regards the book propped open on the kitchen table, it’s prose and it is French. Journalist Lara Marlowe wrote that the book open on the table was a book about lighthouses.
Among the exhibits the Gardai took are three books

1. Le Coeur Battant – “The beating heart” – this is the title of a 1960 French movie.
2. Le Tenes Vert – Unknown – looks like a transcription error by the Gardai, could be “Les Terres Vertes”
3. Le Cine Monde – World Cinema

Other books in the house seem to correspond well with what we know of her character. On the landing there is another book from an Irish writer, Sean O’Casey, “Les Tambours de Dublin” in French.
On the shelf in her box bedroom we can see a book by Virginia Woolf, the title itself is illegible in the photo but Woolf’s distinctive profile photo is visible on the spine. I wonder if the book might be “A Room of one’s Own”. This essay advocated that a woman writer could never accomplish anything unless she had financial independence and her own space to work in. Even if it was some other book by Woolf, this essay would have been known to Sophie. It hints at what the white cottage meant to her. Her tiny box room tucked under the gable and raised single bed was a quasi-monastic cell - a creative space, a room of her own in West Cork.

Hi! I would very much appreciate your thoughts on my query. I've been working on it and have done a bunch of research but I 100% need help please. Thank you so much for your time, it really means a lot.
Dear [Agent],
I am pleased to submit for your consideration, Putting the U in Neighbour, a 72,000 word contemporary romcom. Set in London, this “slowmance” is for the women who spent years watching Gilmore Girls’ Luke and Lorelai dance around their chemistry, and lived for the “will they, won’t they” of X-Files’ Mulder and Scully.
Born and raised in a sleepy California beach town, Olivia has only ever known her small-town life. It’s not like she was sheltered. Sure, she never moved out for college. Yes, she’s only had one boyfriend who never really had that spark. And maybe she spent more time being responsible than living a reckless adolescent life, but Olivia has only ever had one goal. Pursue her Master's from her dream university in London. Despite having everything planned to a tee with her move to London, Olivia couldn’t have planned for her jerk, fuckboy of a downstairs neighbor.
Liam, a posh rugby-playing, self-proclaimed asshole, has dodged his father again. To delay his overbearing father’s wishes and vision of his future, Liam takes off to London to pursue his PhD. It doesn’t hurt that London is filled with single women. So long as they listen to his one rule: “I don’t do relationships.” Used to his good looks and charm landing him any woman he wants; Liam is frustrated when things don’t go the way he plans with his annoying American upstairs neighbour.
Despite their rocky start, the two become friends, even if their own desires tell them otherwise. Neither are willing to make the first move, not when Liam can’t seem to stop sleeping with every woman in London, and not when Olivia gets caught up in her own pride. Held back by her insecurities of her more-than-a-little-curvy body and her lack of romantic experience, Olivia struggles to navigate her new city life, men, and love. Liam, faced with feelings he’s never felt before, continues to battle his own growing desires and the urge to not mess up a friendship he holds more dear than he even realized.
Putting the U in Neighbour is similar to When Harry Met Sally (but if there was more chemistry), while having the spice of Meghan Quinn, and the angst of Elle Kennedy. Putting the U in Neighbour is the first novel in a completed duology and is perfect for the reader who loves the build-up as much as the payoff.
Jacqueline Sahlin is the co-host of a successful literary podcast, Book Talk for BookTok where she and her best friend deep dive into the most popular books of today. From analyzing Sarah J Maas, to interviewing authors like Tessa Bailey, Ana Huang, and Hannah Grace, this podcast has quickly taken off and has over 1.7 million downloads. The podcast is represented by UTA and has recently signed with Cloud10 network. With her Bachelor’s in creative writing and her Master‘s in Comparative literature, Jacqueline has continued her passion for writing while also working as a full-time digital marketer. With almost 10 years of social media and digital marketing experience, she has used those skills to organically grow her podcast and is ready to launch her own career as an author.
First 300 words
“Olivia!” Mom yells. “We’re running late and we’re going to get stuck in traffic. You’ll miss your flight, and you’ll never get your degree. Then we’ll both be destitute.”
I roll my eyes.
The house is small enough that I barely need to raise my voice to get her to hear me from my room.
“Don’t worry, I lied about the time. The flight is at 6, not 5.”
I made sure to give us plenty of time, taking into account the 2-hour drive, traffic, and my mom’s inevitable ADHD to kick in.
The anticipation for this very moment has been years in the making and yet I can’t seem to drag myself out of my childhood bedroom. The only bedroom I’ve ever known.
It’s small compared to most bedrooms. It’s just big enough to fit a twin bed, a secondhand desk and chair, and a thin bookcase we found on the side of the road. The yellow walls that my mom once helped me paint now look like a faded photo of smiling memories.
Every inch of this house is either faded or falling apart, but it’s perfect.
Living so close to the beach it’s inevitable the salt air rots the wood or peels paint. Every time a window frame fell apart, or another board from the too old picket fence splintered, or the front porch steps caved, mom would do her best to fix it herself with secondhand materials, then planted another flower or fern to cover any mistakes. From the outside, the small two bed bungalow looks almost overrun with plants and a rather impressive vegetable garden. The tomato plant was a real hit last summer with the neighbors.
I look at the batch of farewell cards neatly stacked on my worn, empty desk. Notes of love and well wishes from the community that helped my mother, single and alone with a baby, at every turn.

I’m so tired of people talking about Civil War as though it “purposely tries to avoid politics” or “doesn’t delve deep.”
I honestly think that all discourse about Civil War can be boiled down to one thing and one thing only: exposition. All of these arguments are arguments about style, and people don’t even notice that's what they're talking about. Part of A24’s success has been its acceptance of anti-exposition stories. The characters just act the way they would in real life and it’s up to us to fill in the blanks. It’s a stylistic decision that’s been around forever, and A24’s success IMO is a great example of how the demographic for anti-exposition movies is growing.
But anti-exposition is always misinterpreted for some reason. People have this weird tendency to try to explain why the movie is anti-exposition through some other means: “oh it’s actually symbolism”, "oh it’s meant to represent the blah blah blah”... People are just so used to directors that hold their hand through the story that when they watch a movie where that doesn’t happen, they feel the need to explain why. But there is no “why?” They made the movie that way because that’s just how they liked it. It’s better that way because it’s more like real life: there's no fuckin exposition in real life.
Civil War was A24’s biggest budget movie ($50 mil) and this means it needs to reach an even bigger audience. Suddenly, millions more people are watching this movie, adding to the discourse, and of course trying to answer “why?” Why does it not make it clear what the politics are of each character? Why doesn’t it make the history of this conflict clearer? And for some weird reason, despite all evidence, everybody wants to think this was some philosophical statement about current politics and not a stylistic decision. It’s like they don’t even consider anti-exposition an option.
I get it that style affects the content of the film, but if movies without exposition are normal to you then all the discourse about Civil War becomes so fucking boring. All these people asking “why?” are just betraying the fact that they’re not used to anti-exposition movies.
1) clearly the main characters think the president is the aggressor (and that his third term was the main catalyst for this conflict) 2) clearly the president is modeled after Trump (his speech at the beginning is so obviously modeled after Trump its almost too on the nose) 3) clearly the conflict has developed so much that it’s not recognizable to us, and there are a million different possible ways this could happen (Texas cities breaking off from rural Texas and joining California, for example.) Our current understanding of the American political situation is underdeveloped. If we fully understood it, then we wouldn’t be having fucking problems now would we?
There. End of conversation. Let’s talk about the more interesting parts of the movie: like how it absolutely nails the feeling of being part of a historic moment.

Hey all, so for several years I have had internal conflict and questions regarding the morality of fighting sports, especially wrestling (I don't really watch UFC or boxing.) I do enjoy watching wrestling (though I hate the filth like bad words, people saying omg etc.) But I wanted to know if the wrestling itself as sports combat was sinful intrinsically. I recently, by God's providence, found several Catholic sources which touch on this topic (they often call it prize-fighting.) I figured I'd share this info here for any other men (I don't really think women should watch combat sports or God forbid even fight in them themselves) whose consciences this information can help like it has been helping mine.
I may make a video about this on my YouTube channel in the future for anyone interested in that: https://youtube.com/@theundergroundcatholicpodcast
Catholic Sources Speaking About the Morality of Prize-Fighting (combat sports like boxing, UFC & wrestling)
1) Moral Briefs: A Concise Exposition of Catholic Morals (Fr. J. H. Stapleton) (1904 A.D.)
“ALL injury done to another in order to repair an insult is criminal, and if said injury result in death, it is murder. …
Duelling is a form of murder and suicide combined, for which there can possibly be no justification. The code of honor that requires the reparation of an insult at the point of the sword or the muzzle of a pistol has no existence outside the befogged intelligence of godless men. The duel repairs nothing and aggravates the evil it seeks to remedy. The justice it appeals to is a creature dependent on skill and luck ; such justice is not only blind, but crazy as well.
That is why the Church anathematizes duelling. The duel she condemns is a hand-to-hand combat prearranged as to weapons, time and place, and it is immaterial whether it be to the death or only to the letting of first blood. She fulminates her major excommunication against duellists, even in the event of their failing to keep their agreement. Her sentence affects seconds and all those who advise or favor or abet, and even those whose simple presence is an incentive and encouragement. She refuses Christian burial to the one who falls, unless before dying he shows certain dispositions of repentance.
Prize fighting, however brutal and degrading, must not be put in the category of duelling. Its object is not to wipe out an insult, but to furnish sport and to reap the incidental profits. In normal conditions there is no danger to life or limb. Sharkey might stop with the point of his chin a blow that would send many another into kingdom come ; but so long as Sharkey does the stopping the danger remains non-existent. If, however, hate instead of lucre bring the men together, that motive would be sufficient to make the game one of blood if not of death.
2) A Manual of Moral Theology (Fr. Thomas Slater) (1925 A.D.)
“Canon 140 forbids clerics to be present at spectacles, dances, and pageants which do not become them, or when their presence would cause scandal, especially in public theatres.
" The word spectacula" says Fr. Ayrinhac, " comprises all theatrical representations and likewise such exhibitions as horse-races, bull-fights, prize-fights, etc., at least if it be taken in its most general sense." Dom Augustine gives a similar definition of the term.”
3) A Handbook of Moral Theology (Anton Koch) (1926 A.D.)
“Systematic bodily exercise not only benefits health, but also occupies the mind in a useful manner, and hence the various forms of wholesome sport, e. g., walking, riding, swimming, hunting, fencing, boxing, sleighing, skating, etc., are in themselves morally licit and often exert a whole some influence upon the mind. They become reprehensible only when they exceed the right measure or are made the object of sinful desire or the occasion of sensual excitement, effeminacy, or dissoluteness, or are indulged in to the detriment of vocational duties or of health. A sports man who is not satisfied with amusing himself and benefitting his health, but wishes to triumph and be admired at any price, may easily fall into sin. …
The early Christians condemned and avoided the dissolute diversions of their pagan contemporaries and followed the advice of the Apostle, "Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say, rejoice." This did not, however, prevent them from indulging in suitable recreations. Clement of Alexandria admonishes his hearers to hunt or fish, to play ball, and to try their hand at boxing, and adds : "To exert one's strength in the right way and for the benefit of one's health, is commendable and manly."
“Bull-fights are a favorite diversion of Spaniards and Latin Americans. The Church authorities formerly condemned these exhibitions,92 but the prohibition is no longer in force. The modern bull-fight, as described by Father Ramon Ruiz Amado, S.J., in the "Catholic Encyclopedia," 93 as a rule does not involve the shedding of human blood, and is no more, in fact is less brutal than our prize-fights.94 In consequence most present-day moralists, following the famous "Doctor Navarrus," Martin de Azpilcueta, who stood alone in his day,95 now hold that bull-fights, as held in Spain, are not forbidden by the natural law.96 But clergymen and religious may not attend them.97 …"
4) Moral Theology: A Complete Course Based on St. Thomas Aquinas and the Best Modern Authorities (J. A. McHugh, C. J. Callan) (1958 A.D.)
“1428. Fighting.--Fighting is an angry conflict between two or more persons carried on by means of physical violence.
(a) Thus, it is an angry conflict, and so differs from contests of strength or skill made for the sake of sport, amusement, recreation, health, exercise and training. Hence, wrestling and boxing matches, football games, fencing and similar athletic contests, in which fair play and a sportsmanlike spirit prevail, are not fighting as here understood. Similarly, the tournaments of the medieval knights were sports or spectacles, rather than fights.”
“1870. Other Bodily Punishments.--Other bodily harms (wounds, blows, restraint) may not be inflicted except under the following conditions: …
It is not wrong, however, to inflict moderate bodily hurts, if the other person is not unwilling and there is a reasonable purpose, such as exercise, training in the art of boxing or wrestling, recreation, or mortification;...”

SOURCE
I'm going to do something a bit different and take a close look at two major works from the DC Universe: Darwyn Cooke's The New Frontier, and James Robinson and Paul Smith's The Golden Age. If you're playing along at home, the texts I'm using are The Absolute New Frontier from 2006 and The Golden Age trade paperback from 1995.
First a bit of personal context: I didn't enjoy The New Frontier when it first came out, serialized in six quite expensive installments. I loved Cooke's art, I loved the use of some of the more obscure DC war characters, and I loved the characterization of the Martian Manhunter, but the narrative didn't work for me when read in small monthly doses back in 2004. I had read all of the full-length work Cooke had done up until 2004, and none of it had disappointed me at all. But The New Frontier seemed to read more like a tour through the 1950s and 1960s than an actual story. It wasn't until the final issue that I really understood what Cooke was leading up to, but then it was over, and I didn't have the time or the inclination to dig out the back issues and read the whole thing in one sitting. Even when I got the two-volume trade paperback collection a couple of years ago (in an eBay lot of trade paperbacks I bought off of none other than comic book scholar George Khoury), I still didn't bother to read it. To paraphrase Hemingway's Frederic Henry, we don't do the things we want to do.
So I never actually read the entire text of The New Frontier until this past winter, when I was able to sit down with the luxurious Absolute edition and dive into Cooke's illustrated world. I enjoyed it immensely, enough that I wanted to reread it again this summer, which is what I have just done, and now I want to talk about it. But I don't want to talk about it in isolation, and I'm interested in the connection between texts, so I'll also talk about its logical precursor: The Golden Age.
Like The New Frontier, Robinson and Smith's The Golden Age deals with the era between the 1940s and the 1960s. The era in which the comic book Golden Age grew into the comic book Silver Age. The era in which America was undergoing its own transformation, moving from threats abroad to suspicion at home. And just as I had difficulty enjoying The New Frontier as a serialized comic, I couldn't appreciate The Golden Age in that manner either. I only bought the first two issues, actually, back in the early 1990s, and then I lost interest, vaguely thinking that I might buy it as a collected edition some day (even though collections were not guaranteed the way they are today). I did buy it when the trade paperback was released, and because I had never finished it originally, I read the collection immediately. And I liked it. But I thought it was deeply flawed.
I reread The Golden Age yesterday, after thinking about it in regards to The New Frontier. It's not a surprising connection, after all. Cooke himself claims The Golden Age as an inspiration for his own work. But my memory of The Golden Age was a bit hazy, and I recalled it being a much more cynical view of the territory than what Cooke achieved in The New Frontier. My recall was pretty accurate--Robinson and Smith present a quite cynical view of the late Golden Age America.
Now that I've read both works back-to-back, I'm interested in exploring what each says about super-heroes, what each says about America, and how each achieves its (very different) effects. These are the kinds of things I'll be looking at over the next few days.
James Robinson's use of History in The Golden Age
One of the things that strikes me about both The New Frontier and The Golden Age is the way the creators weave American history into their stories. On the surface, such a technique might not be surprising, especially considering that both tales take place in the past. And while it may be true that a so-called "historical novel" or "period film" would be amiss to neglect the details of history which fit its setting, the same isn't always true for comics.
In comics, stories set in the past tend to take place in some vague memory of the past, without any apparent intent in locking the stories into a particular date or era. Take the typical origin stories, or "Year One" stories which DC Comics' creators have retold again and again. In such a story, whether it be Miller and Mazzuchelli's take on Batman, or Waid, Augustyn, and Kitson's take on the Justice League, the setting lacks a distinct time stamp. The characters are younger, true, but the setting lacks specific period detail. The reason for this isn't at all surprising, because locking the characters' past into a specific date would require some major explanations about their ages in the present. Had Miller time-stamped the date on Batman: Year One, and included captions saying "May 3rd, 1980," or whatever, then that might have worked for a few years, but even if we assume that Batman was only 23 when he took inspiration from that window-smashing flying rodent, according to that temporal continuity, he'd be 50 years old in the current stories. And he's clearly not.
So we expect stories set in the past to avoid any kind of specific references to contemporary history, at least in comics. A recent jarring exception to that can be found in Diggle and Jock's newly released Green Arrow: Year One, in which a young Oliver Queen references the "Kevin Costner" Robin Hood. That means Queen must have become Green Arrow sometime in the mid-1990s, which might explain his age today (if he was 22 in 1992, he'd be 37 today, which might be right), but it also implies that his son Connor must only be a teenager today, and he's clearly older than that. Perhaps the reference will work better 10 years from now when the Kevin Costner reference will become part of the vague historical past, but right now it seems too current to make sense.
Anyway, the other MAJOR exception to the rule of not using historical references in comics is the case of stories set during World War II. Even comic books written at the time of WWII regularly included time-stamp references in a way that later comics tended to avoid. Yes, since then, Superman has met Kennedy, and you might see analogues of Bill Clinton or George W. in a story or two, but in the 1940s heroes came face to face with major historical figures (contemporaries to them) on an almost daily basis. Here's FDR! Here's Superman grabbing Hitler on a cover! Here's Tojo! Here's Hawkman enlisting in the army to fight overseas! Etc. Such close ties between "comic book reality" and real-life events never matched the heights of the WWII comics.
And that's why later writers, Roy Thomas MOST prominently among them (he practically invented the whole idea of historical nostalgia super-hero comics), felt compelled to weave actual historical events into the retelling of stories from the WWII era. Thomas's Invaders for Marvel and his All-Star Squadron for DC playfully fit the timeline of actual US history into the fictional timeline of the past super-heroes. In his letter columns, Thomas would often explain (or justify, for the more contentious fans) how the chronology worked.
But, other than WWII era-stories, most comic book stories that take place in the past (unless they are time travel stories, which have their own rules) DO NOT USE SPECIFIC HISTORICAL REFERENCES. It's weird to imagine novels or films avoiding such references—they would surely be criticized for it—but in comics, it's commonplace.
So, in the case of both The New Frontier and The Golden Age, you have two rather significant violations of that standard "rule." And both of which seem deeply indebted to the type of approach Roy Thomas favored so much.
Let's take The Golden Age first, since it was published a decade before Cooke's work. The Golden Age seems like a logical off-shoot of Thomas's All-Star Squadron. It features many of the same characters, and Johnny Quick, a relatively obscure DC character from the past, would certainly not have been a suitable narrator for the story without the characterization Thomas provided in years of All-Star Squadron stories. James Robinson is clearly building on the foundation Thomas created. So, it's not surprising that he would, like Thomas, blend US history into his story. Yet Robinson's approach differs in two distinct ways: (1) He doesn't seem interested in the exact historical details and how they fit into his timeline—he seems more interested in the general sense of historical forces of the time, and (2) Unlike Thomas, who was writing out of a Golden and Silver Age optimism and a belief in the American Dream, Robinson was writing from a post-Watchmen perspective, as a foreign-born writer, who could play with the cynical expectations of the time.
Thus, Robinson gives us coke-sniffing "super-heroes," corruption, brutality, and sex in a tale which features the "pure" heroes of the DC Golden Age of comics. Robinson's approach is not to use specific elements of McCarthyism or the Red Scare (even though those ideas are referenced at least once), but to use the general sense of paranoia and panic, the cynical manipulation of the public for personal gain, and the looming threat of the bomb.
Ultimately, however, Robinson uses all of this as a backdrop for a traditional super-hero romp. The coke-sniffing "super-hero" turns out to be Hitler in disguise!!! (Well, actually the brain of Hitler in the body of a former kid sidekick—talk about a symbol of corruption!) And the hero-turned-power-hungry-politician in the form of the patriotic Mr. America turns out to be old JSA villain the Ultra-Humanite, who knows a thing or two about brain transplants. So, in the end, it's just a classic Golden Age story about punching Hitler and defeating an evil genius.
But it's Robinson's historical subtext which makes the story resonate. It's his use of those undercurrents of paranoia and despair which make these formerly perfect heroes of the past seem flawed and human. His story starts dark and becomes darker but, by the end, Robinson's veil of cynicism falls away, and he reveals himself to be a humanist, if not an optimist. His reverence for these Golden Age characters would not let them be truly corrupted—it had to be evil masterminds and Hitler all along.
And that, perhaps, is one of the failures of The Golden Age. The shock of the initial chapters is just a ruse, and as low as these characters seem to sink, everything can be explained by pseudo-science and comic book logic.
It's just another Justice Society of America story, ultimately, but it's a good one. And Robinson's use of the undercurrents from that era of history make it work, even if it never transcends its roots.
The New Frontier and Camelot
While The Golden Age used the historical subtext to evoke currents of paranoia and doom in a super-hero story, The New Frontier approaches history with a different agenda. As Ultimate Matt pointed out in response to yesterday's post, The Golden Age is labeled an "Elseworlds" title, which not only grants it an exemption from DC continuity, but it allows more freedom for the creators to take the characters and setting in a fresh direction.
The New Frontier, however, is not labeled as an "Elseworlds." And yet, it strays far more from the currently accepted version of continuity than The Golden Age does. The key word there is "accepted." Darwyn Cooke, in his annotations, states that he approached The New Frontier with a set of rules:

1. The timeline is real and covers 1945 to 1960. Silver Age characters appear at the time DC started publishing them.
   
2. Retcons haven't happened yet.
   
3. No New Frontier retcons could contradict original continuity—they had to complement existing continuity or show a fresh point of view.
   
4. When the story ended, everything had to be as it was when the JLA debuted in Brave and the Bold #28.
   
5. Snapper Carr does not exist.
   

In other words, you should be able to pull out your original comics from that era (or the Archive editions) and read them concurrently with The New Frontier and nothing Cooke does should contradict what happens in those old comics.
The problem with the continuity is that the comics from that era didn't have any continuity. It was never explained how a character could be on the moon in one issue of his own comic, and under the ocean in the same month in his Justice League adventure. All Golden and Silver Age DC continuity is a retcon. So what Cooke did was create his own continuity—he made his own sense out of the various adventures as they were originally published, although the bulk of the book deals with the time between major events. Just like The Golden Age, The New Frontier is about filling in the gaps.
While James Robinson filled the pre-Silver Age gap with an almost allegorical tale of Cold War paranoia and corruption, Darwyn Cooke fills the gap with a sense of wonder and idealism, and he uses his attitude toward history to solidify that tone.
Cooke's approach takes three strands: (1) The Right Stuff-inspired history of that era, embodied by the test pilots and early astronauts, (2) The early promise of the Kennedy administration, and (3) The strange DC comics history as seen in the stories published during that time. Cooke uses the first two strands to illuminate the latter. He puts the Silver Age ascension into perspective as part of a generation of hope and achievement. He shows that the formation of the Justice League was not a random incident, but part of a larger historical movement which led (in our reality) to things like the Peace Corps and Apollo 11.
Cooke ties together such disparate elements as The War that Time Forgot, The Challengers of the Unknown, Dr. Seuss, and all of the characters who would join the initial incarnation of the JLA into a single narrative. And although it takes quite a while before the villain emerges and the heroes band together, the narrative is structured around the real historical forces that would have shaped the creation of these characters. John Broome doesn't wax poetically about the symbolism of Hal Jordan's career as a test pilot in the original Green Lantern run from the Silver Age, but Cooke takes the fact that he was a test pilot and places him in the actual context of such a man. He even includes a scene where the young Jordan meets Chuck Yeager.
That's quite a different approach to history than we saw in The Golden Age, which covers a very similar time frame.
Although Cooke didn't intend (according to his "rules") to change any of the original stories, his interpretation of "fresh point of view" allows him to add things which would have been more historically true even if they weren't addressed in the comics of the time. For example, he not only changes Wonder Woman into an almost plump, hawkish, zestful character (to signify her Greek origins and Amazon heritage), but he creates an entirely new character to illuminate the civil rights struggle of the time. Since he had no black DC characters to draw upon, he created a Silver Age analogue to Steel, the black Superman ally. The Silver Age Steel, unlike his modern equivalent, isn't a technological marvel. Instead, this earlier incarnation of John Henry suffers at the hands of the KKK before taking vengeance, and ultimately dying when he's betrayed by an uncaring white America (symbolized by a blonde little girl, who points out his location to his pursuers). John Henry never meets the Justice League or teams up with any heroes. His death doesn't affect them at all, really, since they didn't know him. But Cooke includes a scene where Edward R. Murrow mourns the fallen hero and laments the state of the country, bringing an actual historical personage into the DC story.
The civil rights subplot, although powerful, is overwhelmed by the exceeding optimism of the other plot threads. Cooke's America, as full of conflict as it might have been, is one of scientific progress and movement toward a brighter future. His villain, ultimately revealed to be Dinosaur Island itself (a sentient being who has unleashed monster after monster), is even more absurd than the Hitler-brain-transplant nemesis in The Golden Age, but because Cooke accentuates the fun and spectacle of the super-heroes (and, to be clear, his emphasis is on the men and women in the costumes, and the risks they take for their heroism), the absurdity of the villain doesn't detract from the story.
Both The Golden Age and The New Frontier end with similar images (the first appearance of the Justice League banded together) and similar sentiments (hope for the future), but where James Robinson built that hope out of the wreckage of the 1940s, Darwyn Cooke builds it out of the dreams of the men and women who sacrificed for the promise of tomorrow.
Both books end with optimism for comic books and optimism for our country, but they took starkly different approaches to get there.
The Unstoppable Force of Progress: Characterization in The New Frontier
Since both The New Frontier and The Golden Age re imagine comic book chronology through one part actual US history, one part comic book history, and one part imagination, it's not surprising to find both Cooke and Robinson taking liberties with the characterization of these pre-Silver Age heroes. Both creators ask the question asked by any creator attempting to retell stories from the past: Okay, this is how they were portrayed, but what were the characters who did these things REALLY like?
I'll start by looking at The New Frontier. Cooke doesn't focus his story on one dominant point of view the way Robinson does (with Johnny Quick), but he tells his story through a few central characters:
Rick Flagg: Leader of the WWII-era Suicide Squad (and presumably the father, or grandfather, of the Ostrander-penned incarnation). Cooke presents him as a tough guy cliché. He's a Hemingway hero—he does what needs to be done and doesn't whine about it or waver in his determination. In Act III of the narrative, his position in the story is replaced by the similarly-characterized King Faraday, who also does what needs to be done, although he seems to have more internal conflict than Flagg. Faraday is a spy, after all, not a soldier. But both characters represent a government which has the best interests of the country in mind. If they hurt a few individuals along the way, that's a necessary sacrifice for the good of the many.
Hal Jordan: The man who would be Green Lantern is NOT portrayed as a cocky rocket jock, as he usually is in contemporary interpretations. Cooke turns his lack of fear into a self-destructive streak stemming from his face-to-face act of self-defense in Korea. In Cooke's universe, Jordan doesn't immediately become a hero just because an alien handed him a ring. It takes time for Jordan to learn that he deserves to be a hero, and that's a large part of what The New Frontier is about. He doesn't reveal himself in Green Lantern costume until AFTER he risks his life to save the world working as a pilot. The two-page "hero shot" of the characters walking towards camera (a la The Right Stuff) shows some costumed heroes, but Jordan is wearing a flight suit. Cooke seems to be showing that he needed to prove himself TO himself before he could accept his new identity, but his reluctance to use the power of the ring leads to Nathaniel Adam's death. (Adam is later reborn as Captain Atom in the comics, but that doesn't happen in this story, and as far as Jordan should be concerned, Adam is dead.) Cooke doesn't provide Jordan with any time for remorse, though, since he needs to use his ring to kick alien butt. The ring, by the way, is also shown as a symbol of destructive energy. When Jordan first uses it, he cannot control it, and it causes great damage. Cooke, then, seems to indicate that the ring might symbolize nuclear energy, and the subtext would be that Jordan's hesitance to use it led to another hero's death. Ultimately, Jordan is Cooke's symbol of the Kennedy era: conflicted, yet determined to bring forth a positive future—harnessing great powers for the good of the nation (and the world).
John Jones, the Manhunter from Mars: Jones says, "...this is a world where good and evil struggle in all levels of existence. I want to be a force for good." That's a simplistic view of humanity, but it's one seemingly shared by Cooke throughout this work. Good and evil may not be easily discernible on the surface, and Cooke gives us the threatening-looking John Henry (with a hangman's hood) as a hero and a little blonde girl as a villain, but the line between good and evil is absolute (and, in fact, John Jones assumes the role of a film-noirish detective so he can find the evil beneath the surface appearance of the world). Jones defines this ethical stance for the reader, and it represents the code of Golden and Silver Age comic books, which lacked anything but absolutes. Even though Cooke might try to provide some not-so-subtle shades of gray (Jordan as a murderer, Wonder Woman as feminist avenger, an undercurrent of xenophobia), his view of history seems to echo the simplicity of the comic book stories of the era. Individuals may not have always done the right things at all times, but it was an era of progress, and good triumphed over evil. The subtext could also indicate that governmental order triumphed over chaotic nature, with the unified heroes, under the leadership of the US government, destroying a threat that wasn't so much malicious as it was animalistic.
Even though Cooke's characterization of some of these characters, Hal Jordan in particular, might not match traditional representations of these individuals, I think it works in the context of the story. The characters serve the story and add a few layers to the text, but it's primarily a historical action spectacle, a celebration of progress over stagnation, and Cooke's characterization unifies the text. I don't think his characters have many hidden depths, but I think their lack of depth matches a story which is primarily about the grand force of history.
As one final observation: Cooke is actually better at small character moments with the minor characters than he is at developing convincing lead characters. The death of Johnny Cloud, Jimmy Olsen's eagerness, the sassiness of Carol Ferris, and several other character bits show Cooke's facility on the small scale, even if his epic narrative doesn't provide the opportunity for subtle nuances with the major characters.
Characterization in The Golden Age: Dragging Heroes to Earth
While Cooke ignores anyone else's retroactive continuity to graft archetypal personalities onto the early Silver Age heroes in The New Frontier, Robinson takes characters straight out of Roy Thomas's All-Star Squadron (like Johnny Quick on the left here) and Young All-Stars and sends them on a dark journey into the 1950s. Robinson does not re imagine these characters drastically, although he seems to do so with Mr. America (but that's part of his narrative ruse). Instead, he takes their established characterization and expands upon it by adding seeds of self-doubt, paranoia, and despair as the characters face a world in which the villains are not as easily identified as they once were. Robinson misdirects the reader at first by pretending to adopt a simplified Watchmen approach, pretending that he's showing what these characters would have been like without costumed villains to fight or gangsters to punch, when, in truth, he's simply changed the nature of the evil to something more covert and less easy to spot. (Which might seem Watchmen-esque as well, except Alan Moore showed us that the heroes were the villains in that story, and here, Robinson ultimately reveals that secret villains with brain-transplant powers were behind the whole thing from the beginning.)
Here's a quick rundown of the central characters in The Golden Age:
Johnny Chambers, a.k.a Johnny Quick: Johnny not only provides the book-ends to the story but, as a documentary filmmaker, he provides the exposition which sets up the story context. One of the things Robinson does NOT do well here, by the way, is clearly distinguish between narrative voice (provided through white, rectangular caption boxes), and newsreel voice over (also provided by white, rectangular caption boxes), although perhaps the colorist was supposed to use different color cues for each and didn't. The CHARACTERS who narrate, like Johnny Chambers, each have their own style of caption—Johnny's are rounded and blue, as you can see in the image. Actually, it's not that it's so difficult to identify the narrative voice, it's just that there is an omniscient narrator who pops up every once in a while for no good reason, and tells us things about the story sometimes, while other times he sounds like he's trying to give us character thoughts but not really: the highly subjective "fingers...fumbling...focusing...trying to..." immediately follows the objective "a photographer lurks among the rubble." The photographer is the one who's fingers are supposedly fumbling as he tries to snap the photo, so why does the caption sound like a bad Batman internal monologue? This really has nothing to do with Johnny Chambers, but I just wanted to point out this major flaw in the narration throughout. With so many characters (Johnny being one) actually providing narration through captions, why does Robinson add an omniscient narrator also? It's jarring and ineffective. It's like he took the strategies of Watchmen with the multiple points of view, and then spliced the conventional narrator on top of it. It just doesn't work.
But a few more things about Johnny: He smokes, and he wears glasses. He still has his powers, but even though they would help him in his day job, he doesn't use them. And he's incredibly suspicious, which is the characteristic that makes him the character the reader most identifies with. He's also lost the woman he loves because he works too hard, although he gets her back in the end. In short, he's a slightly older (although he actually seems to get younger as the story progresses, perhaps symbolizing his return to heroic stature), slightly more sullen, slightly more flawed version of the character we saw in the comics produced in the 1980s (even though those stories were set in the 1940s). He refers to his costumed self as "That Jerk!" at the beginning of the story, but ends on a hopeful note as he describes a "new age...fresh and clear and bright...as sterling silver!" He's never really a cynic, but his pessimism and self-loathing turns to optimism in the end (even quickly dismissing the threat of McCarthyism to look ahead to the glowing future of super-heroics).
Paul Kirk, a.k.a Manhunter: If we play out the James-Robinson-is-trying-to-do-Watchmen-but-not-as-well game a bit more, we could say that if Johnny Chambers is the Dan Dreiberg analogue (the low-self-esteem voice of reason and calm) then Paul Kirk is clearly the Rorschach character. He's the crazy one who will surely upset the apple cart, yet isn't that what has to happen in order to get to the truth? That's his role, anyway. Unlike Rorschach (in his insane way), Kirk doesn't have a methodical approach to uncovering the truth. In fact, he's tormented by the truth, which lies buried beneath mind implants, exploding into awareness only through a series of horrible dreams. He seems deeply disturbed because of the War, but he's actually deeply disturbed because of the secrets he knows. He's another character, like Johnny, who seems to become more youthful and vibrant in the final Act, when he is able to unleash his demons through old-fashioned fisticuffs. Unlike Johnny, though, he visibly suffers for a long time before he reaches the point of action. Here's a sample of his internal monologue from one of his many tortured dreams: "Save the eagle. Save it. Save—n...no...nooooohhhh!!" Then he wakes up and thinks, "Still afraid." That's about the extent of his characterization. He's tormented, fearful, and knows he should be better than that. And, "save the eagle?" Geez, I wonder what in the world that could possibly mean in a book about corruption within the American government. Clearly, even though this book is directed at an older audience than the original Golden Age tales, Robinson keeps his symbolism quite simplistic.
Tex Thompson, a.k.a. Mr. America, and Daniel Dunbar, a.k.a. Dan the Dyna-Mite: These are the two characters most radically changed from their Golden Age counterparts. Mr. America was a whip-wielding patriotic hero and Dan was a kid sidekick who later, under Roy Thomas's writerly guidance, became one of the lead characters in Young All-Stars. In Robinson's story, Mr. America becomes a corrupt politician who seeks power by any means necessary, and Dan the Dyna-Mite becomes America's beloved Dynaman, the only active costumed crime fighter of the time. And he snorts coke. And he's evil.
Neither of these two characters have internal monologues via captions for the reader, because that would give away the twist. Tex Thompson is not really who he seems, for he has the brain of the evil Ultra-Humanite (who has in previous stories adopted the forms of a gigantic white gorilla and a hot ex-starlet, among others). And Daniel Dunbar, who has fallen so far from grace in our eyes (a former teen sidekick with a drug problem whoring around) actually has the BRAIN OF ADOLF HITLER!
So there's not much to say about the characterization here, since these are two evil characters in the most simplistic way. What is interesting, though, is that (a) Robinson chooses one character, Thompson, who seems vaguely sleazy to modern readers anyway, what with that whip and the mustache, and when he's shown to be corrupt, we can buy into it, falling into Robinson's trap of thinking that it's just a regular dude becoming corrupted by power; and (b) Robinson's use of the pure and innocent Dunbar is also a good choice, because it is not only shocking to see him corrupted so extremely (before the truth of the brain-swap is revealed), but it's a nod to cultural expectations about former child stars, who, by the 1990s, were expected to grow up and become criminals or drug addicts or worse, at least by our tabloid-fascinated society.
Like a director who makes his film better through excellent casting, Robinson uses the right two ex-heroes in the apparent role of the villains. His bait-and-switch works, although I was personally disappointed that the threat turned out to be external (evil villains) and not the corruption of these characters from within.
Robinson uses other characters to show the corruption of innocence and loss of the heroic dream. Robotman, so noble in Roy Thomas's All-Star Squadron, has lost any humanity by the time of this story—he's pure machine, while Alan Scott, Green Lantern is conflicted about his duty as a business leader and law-abiding citizen and his passion for ring-slinging and butt-kicking. Hourman is shown to be addicted to his Miraclo pills, while the man once known as the Tarantula is an egoist with writer's block. Ted Knight, Starman, who Robinson would go on to write with great depth and sensitivity in the ongoing series about Jack Knight, is a mad genius who is trying to put the pieces of this shattered world together through science.
I should add here that Robinson, unlike Cooke, isn't drawing from the original sources as the basis for his story. He's adapting his characterizations from the work done during contemporary comics, as Roy Thomas provided retroactive characterization (and explanations) for the WWII-era heroes. Robinson is building on the layers which Roy Thomas built upon the layers which Gardner Fox (among others) built.
Overall, Robinson does provide a sense of disillusionment in his characterizations in this story, even if his narrative technique is sometimes sloppy or inconsistent. Cooke tried to add a bit of humanity to iconic characters in his work, but he was mostly interested in the icons of the era. Robinson drags his characters down into the muck and then builds them back up again, hoping to show how their inner humanity wins out (with all of its flaws) in the face of systematic adversity. Cooke's characters inhabit the skies, the stars. Robinson's characters live on the ground.
So, the final verdict, after looking at The Golden Age and The New Frontier for a week: Not much different than my initial assessment after reading them both last weekend. The Golden Age is flawed because of its inconsistent narrative point of view and it's cheap, brain-swapping revelations. Robinson and Smith capture the disillusionment and paranoia of the time quite well, but it all amounts to nothing except a superhero slug fest in the end. It's 80% of a great work, and 20% of stuff that doesn't quite fit (including the optimistic ending, which seems unearned). As part of a larger, genre-wide trend to make super-heroes more "realistic," violent, and depressing, I'm not a huge fan of its influence.
The New Frontier is flawed, but it's a flawed masterpiece, and I can imagine revisiting the story many times in the future (and I can't say the same about The Golden Age). Cooke tries to include too much in the narrative, and the main threat of Monster Island isn't presented as well as it needs to be, but the book contains dozens of amazing sequences, and it features sharp, engaging characters who flash in and out of the story. The speed of the narrative demands that the book be read quickly, and it works best when read this way, not because it allows the reader to gloss over the weak parts of the story, but because The New Frontier is an overture, and can be best appreciated when all of its notes are heard in rapid sequence. I didn't love it when it first came out, in the completely inappropriate floppy installments, but I loved it after reading the Absolute version a week ago, and I love it just as much after studying it closely all week.
As one final thought: Both The Golden Age and The New Frontier tap so deeply into comic book lore, and I am so deeply embedded in it myself, that I wonder if either of these works has any merit for a "civilian" reader. And I wonder if, perhaps, the darker, more "realistic" tone would be appealing to a non-comics fan, more so, perhaps, than the wide-eyed optimism (tinged with bits of darkness) seen in Cooke's work. Or would the non-comics fan find both stories completely useless and without merit? Are both works examples of the snake swallowing its own tail? I've already been swallowed by the snake of comic book geekery, so I can't answer that one.

Part 1 // Part 2 // Part 3 // Part 4
“Melissa Ethridge,” I said.
“What?”
“Melissa Ethridge,” I repeated, grabbing the car’s aux cord and plugging my phone in, “Listen”
Destiny twisted her face as the opening chords of Melissa Ethridge’s “Come to my Window” blared through the car speakers.
“Look,” I said, making my sales pitch, “I know its probably not your cup of tea, honestly, I’m not really crazy about 90’s lesbian rock n’ roll either, but it was the first thing that popped in my head when Indigo told us we needed an example of ‘true’ love or beauty.”
“I don’t think it’s a particularly beautiful song,” Destiny said, “Why this song? Why not Boyz II Men? ‘End of the Road’? Now that’s a pretty song”
“Because this is the first song I learned to play on the guitar. My Mom taught me before she died. I think that gives it special meaning to me. Even if it’s not the best song, it’s truly beautiful to me because it has special meaning.
Destiny thought for a beat, folded her arms and said, “Ok, you win. Not like I have any ideas anyway.”
An hour later we were back in my house absolutely blasting Melissa Ethridge out of my stereo system and staring at the leg from behind the couch waiting to see if anything would happen. Nothing did.
We cycled through every musical artist we could think of. Boyz II Men, Tiny Tim, Evanescence, Elton John. We even tried whale calls and several podcasts. Nothing happened other than the lights flickering a bunch when we played the Beach Boys, we got the sense the leg was growing stronger and feeding off the awful music The Beach Boys played so we quickly turned it off.
“Maybe you have to play the music yourself,” Destiny suggested.
It was as good a guess as any, so I grabbed my guitar and started playing “Come to my Window”. Initially, outside of Destiny’s pained wincing, my playing didn’t seem to make much of a difference, but after about 30 seconds the skin on the leg seemed to ripple and move. I focused and sang even harder, which made Destiny wince even harder, but I didn’t mind - it was working! Eventually the leg started to shake like it was having a seizure. Just then a flash of silver caught my eye and I turned to look just in time to dodge the kitchen knife that flew towards my head from the kitchen. That quickly put a stop to my playing.
“Ok, so we’re on the right track,” I said, “It clearly doesn’t like that”
“Yeah,” Destiny replied, “But does it not like it because it’s hurting it and could potentially destroy it? Or because you suck at singing and you’re just really annoying to listen to?”
I turned to face her.
“You sound like a bag of cats in heat,” Destiny was not holding back her feelings on my singing voice.
I ignored the comment, “No, we’re on the right track, but something is missing.”
“If only we could get Melissa Ethridge here to play it for us.” Destiny said sarcastically.
“That’s it!” I shouted, “We need Melissa Ethridge’s guitar! I know there is one hanging on the wall of the Hard Rock Café downtown. Let’s go get it!”
“Your plan is to ask them if you can play Melissa Ethridge’s guitar?”
“We’re not going to ask”
“Your plan is to do a smash-and-grab at a restaurant owned by Native Americans? One of the most oppressed groups of people in the country.”
“Destiny,” I retorted, “The Seminole Tribe of Florida owns several billions of dollars’ worth of real estate and has more white people working for them than Facebook. They aren’t oppressed.”
“Alright, but I’m not going in. I’ll be the lookout with Hercules.”
“Fine.”
5 minutes later we were on the road heading towards the Hard Rock Café. Destiny sat shotgun, Hercules and the leg sat in the back. Hercules sat behind me and I could feel his stinking breath on my neck. It made my eyes water.
“Do you know who stole Hercule’s body from your porch?” I asked, trying to make conversation, “I mean, how will he ever get to rest in peace?”
“I have no idea who did it, but I’m sure Hercules does.” Destiny replied.
The conversation died down again and I turned my focus to the road, periodically checking my surroundings and my mirrors for any sign that Psycho Jimmy could be following us.
“What are you looking for?” Destiny asked, breaking the silence, “You seem, like, really paranoid about something?”
“Oh, I’m just paranoid about the haunted prosthetic leg in the backseat garroting me, you know?”
“Fair point.”
We arrived outside of the Hard Rock Café and quickly realized we had no plan that could feasibly work. After a few minutes of deliberation, we decided to go in and get a table. We were seated between two displays. One of Michael Jackson’s iconic gloves hung in a glass case above my head. Above Destiny’s head hung one of Prince’s electric guitars. Across the restaurant we could see Melissa Ethridge’s guitar encased in glass and hanging above the table of a couple who were clearly fighting with each other.
“There’s the guitar,” I said, nodding towards the display, “We just need a distraction.”
“Ok,” Destiny said, “I got this. Get ready”
She took two steps from our table, let out a dramatic sigh and fake-fainted on the floor of the dining room. No one seemed to notice.
“She’s fainted!” I shouted.
“Fucking TikTokers,” I heard a man mumble from a table near us.
After a few embarrassing moments, Destiny stood up, dusted herself off and sat back down across from me. “That didn’t work”
“No shit.”
“I have an idea for a distraction,” I told Destiny as I pulled out my cell phone, “I got the perfect guy for this.”
I called Psycho Jimmy. He picked up after 3 rings, but didn’t speak. I told him where I was and explained the situation to him and how we needed a distraction. He still didn’t speak. I told him if he could be there in 15 minutes that would be great, but if not, then he shouldn’t worry about it, but I had a feeling he was probably right around the corner.
The line went dead without Jimmy saying a single word.
“Give him 15 minutes,” I told Destiny.
5 minutes later Destiny and I were startled by a low growl that emanated from under our table. It was the snarling of an angry dog. It was Hercules.
Destiny quickly lowered her head under the table and began uttering commands to the phantom dog in a stern, authoritative voice. Patrons of the restaurant, one-by-one, began to take notice of the noise and began to stare.
“What is the issue?” I asked
“I don’t know!” Seethed Destiny.
I glanced around the room at all of the eyes watching us and began to apologize when I noticed Psycho Jimmy walking in through the front door of the restaurant. I began to stand up to greet him but Destiny quickly stole my attention.
“Oh my God!” She said, “This is it. I think Hercules sees whoever stole his body” She had a hand gripping her ghost dog’s invisible collar but was struggling to maintain control over the specter. Several waiters were on their way over to us when Destiny couldn’t hold on any longer.
The invisible phantasmal force that was Hercules exploded from under our table and through the dining room of the restaurant knocking over several chairs and tables in the process. Several patrons of the restaurant who had been tossed to the floor by Hercules or had seen some of the chairs tossed aside by the unseen force started to panic. Just like I had only a few days earlier, they’d suddenly been confronted with the possibility that there are things in this world they cannot explain.
A few people got out of their seats, a few women yelped, a particularly fat man stood on his chair like the ground was suddenly made of lava. The waiters were not paid enough for this.
Hercules continued on his war path through the dining room, pushing more chairs and tables aside and knocking over the hostess before finding his target – Psycho Jimmy.
Jimmy hit the ground with a grunt and began wrestling with his invisible foe. After a few intense seconds of rolling on the ground it appeared Hercules had him by the shirt sleeve and was dragging him back into the dining room, stopping every few steps to ragdoll Jimmy’s arm. Blood splashed out from Jimmy’s forearm as if he was cut by a knife.
This is when everyone really started to lose their minds. The restaurant descended into pandemonium. People who’d never met each other in their lives were clinging together and crying, some were fighting, one lady fainted and one woman too drunk to stand simply took in the scene and laughed.
A punch on my shoulder pulled my attention from the scene. It was Destiny.
“The guitar!” She shouted.
Right.
I ran across the restaurant to the glass case that housed Melissa Ethridge’s guitar, took the prosthetic leg from my backpack and smashed the glass with it sending a thousand razor sharp shards down into the meals of the angry couple who sat beneath it.
“You’re paying for our meals, buddy!” Said the man.
“Dude, look around!” I said back to him, extending an arm towards the insanity unfolding before us, “Just leave!”
I pulled the leg back and smashed the glass case again sending more shards of broken glass down onto the angry couple seated below.
“You NEVER stand up for yourself, Bryan!” The female half of the couple said to her mate, “Look at you, letting this crazy man with a prosthetic leg push you around and ruin our dinner! You’re a Beta!”
An arm grabbed me by the wrist, it was Bryan, “I’m not going to ask you again”
“Dude, get your priorities straight man” I said, pulling back the leg a third time.
A fist connected with my stomach and sent me to the ground. The leg clattered on the floor beside me.
I laid on the ground wheezing like a fat guy walking up his 5th flight of stairs when I heard Bryan’s lovely partner cry out to him:
“Hit him again, Bryan” shrieked the bimbo, “Kick him in the nuts!”
I gasped for breath and observed the chaos around me. Everything seemed to be moving in slow motion. Men and women were running out of the restaurant screaming, Psycho Jimmy was being rag-dolled by an invisible dog, one of his arms had been reduced to hamburger. One woman was walking casually out of the dining area and sampling foods from various plates as she walked by each table.
My eyes came to rest on Destiny who sat solemnly in her chair watching her beloved pet maul a man. Tears fell silently down her cheeks. As strange and morbid as the situation was, it was for her a final goodbye to her companion over the last several years. As far as we knew, once Hercules was done thoroughly thrashing the man who had stolen his body, he’d presumably ascend to Heaven in some sort of Rapture. If a dog can go there, that is – The Bible is pretty fuzzy on the subject. Maybe he’d go to Hell, he didn’t seem like the friendliest dog.
My gaze shifted again to the frat bro who towered over me. He was lifting his cheap imitation snake skin cowboy boot to stomp my lights out when an ear-splitting screech filled the dining room.
People throughout the restaurant clasped their hands tight over their ears, a few dropped to their knees in pain. Covering my ears didn’t seem to do much, the sound was sharp enough to penetrate straight through the bone of my cranium and reverberate around in my skull cavity knocking loose neural connections as it bounced back and forth.
I felt concussed, dizzy.
The screech turned into a chorus of screams as the floor directly in front of Psycho Jimmy began to crack and separate. Psycho Jimmy crab walked backwards away from the fissure as it widened to about the size of a manhole cover; heat and orange light began to pour forth from it. Suddenly arms, several of them, burst from the newly formed cavity. The arms were a patchwork of raw red skin, pustules of pussy white sores and deep black areas where they had been too heavily charred to even be recognized as human flesh. Swollen and shiny, the arms began to flail in circles, heatwaves seemed to rise from their angry hands as they grasped at the air around them.
The restaurant lights flickered and my old friend, Fear, began bubbling up inside of me once again. A palpable sense of dread weighed heavy on all of us left in the dining room. I was filled with a dizzying mix of disbelief, panic, and a primal instinct to flee from the hell-spawn emerging from the depths of hell before us.
I got the impression that frat boy Bryan was the type of person who could never pass up an opportunity to impress a girl. Generally, to these guys, this usually meant drinking a beer while wakeboarding, getting into fights with total strangers after a night at the bar, or being incredibly mean to waitresses and various other positions in the service industry. At that moment, I guess he thought closing a door to hell itself would earn him a few late-night snapchats, which it probably should have if he had any idea what he was doing.
Bryan, as if this was just another bar fight, casually walked towards the thrashing mass of charred hands without making direct eye contact with it. When he got within striking distance he attempted to throw a massive haymaker punch, it was almost as if he thought he could catch the monstrosity off guard.
One of the grotesque hands easily grabbed his wrist mid-punch and Bryan could hardly get out a pathetic, “Huh?” before the hand pulled him into the fiery crevasse.
His girlfriend erupted into shrieks.
Less than half a second after Bryan’s demise, another hand lashed out from the group and caught something invisible.
The hand had grasped Hercules by one of his back ankles as he was trying to make his way around the hole and over to Destiny and, for a brief moment, Hercules’ true form came into view. Hairless, slimy, with human hands at the end of each of its limbs and a single horn protruding from its forehead, Hercules definitely wasn’t a dog.
What the hell was Destiny up to? I couldn’t believe I’d been in close proximity with that thing for the past few days. I felt sick.
Just like Bryan before him, Hercules was pulled into the pit of fire and the restaurant descended into a brief second of silence as it closed behind him.
I lifted myself up off the floor and took one more swing at the glass display case that protected the guitar of Melissa Ethridge. It finally shattered.
Dropped the leg on the table in front of me and reached into the shattered display case and pulled out the guitar. I took a step back, cleared my throat and began to strum the guitar when –
WHACK!
A very heavy and very gaudy purse smacked me upside the head, “You Bastard!” Shouted the life-size Barbie girl Bryan had brought out on a date tonight, “You motherfucker!” she shouted again in unison with a second swing of the purse.
“Ma’am, please stop” I pleaded with her as I ducked under another swing of her unusually heavy purse, “I’m trying to destroy a haunted prosthetic leg with the power of song to save my intern from being trapped in a painting for all of eternity!”
Not only did she not stop, but she grabbed the prosthetic leg from the table next to us and started inspecting it, no doubt to judge its effectiveness as a weapon against me.
I took the opportunity to start playing, “Come to my Window” while slowly backing away from the angry woman.
After a few seconds of my sweet music-making, I watched the human leather on the leg begin to ripple in the woman’s hands. Any sane person on the planet would have dropped the leg at that point, but she didn’t.
Instead, the woman tilted her head back and screamed. Her mouth opened wider and wider until it reached a point when she physically could not possibly continue to expand her gaping maw. Then her jaw shifted slightly and there was a sudden POP! and her mouth continued to stretch wider.
Then the hands appeared, two hands appeared from out of the woman’s mouth and gripped the sides of her lips as if something was about to pull itself out of her mouth – and that is exactly what happened.
“I would dial the numbers, just to listen to your breath // I would stand inside my hell and hold the hand of death”
I started singing faster now, desperate to make this work.
An old woman’s head emerged from the mouth. She was old, dripping red with blood and I could see by the look in her face that she wasn’t just angry – she despised me. I could feel the hate radiating off of her. It was as if I could taste it in the air. She didn’t just want me dead, she wanted me annihilated.
The neck breached the mouth and in short order – the shoulders. The scene was quickly changing from one reminiscent of childbirth to one of a snake molting its skin.
“Come to my window // Crawl inside // Wait by the light of the moon”
This wasn’t working. I glanced around the room. Looking for an ally. Destiny was gone. Hercules was gone. Psycho Jimmy was pulling himself to his feet. He was looking at me with his crazy eyes. I couldn’t tell if he was under some sort of trance, but he wasn’t blinking, and he looked pissed. Then again, he always looked pissed. He started moving towards me.
I continued to sing, but panic was starting to rise within me. The song wasn’t exactly going as I'd hoped, there was a demon being born in front of me and Psycho Jimmy didn’t exactly look like he wanted to hold hands and sing Kumbaya.
I took a step backwards and found my back against a wall. I was cornered.
“Giving away promises….la la…na na na nahhh”
I realized at this point I didn’t even know all the words to this song. I quickly switched over to the first song that popped in my head. It was by The Ramones and it wasn’t even close to a beautiful song, but Melissa Ethridge wasn’t cutting it.
“The KKK took my baby away // They took her away // Away from me!”
The demon continued to pull itself out of its skin suit and revealed more of its true form: Her upper body was a twisted, nightmarish version of an old woman. Shriveled, wrinkled, naked and dripping with blood. From the waist down, it was an enormous spider, its black, chitinous legs clicking against the wooden floor stepped on to the hardwood floor of the dining room. The spider's body was bloated and hairy, with glistening beady eyes that dotted the area where the woman’s abdomen met the spider’s face.
Psycho Jimmy was nearly within arm’s reach as well.
“Time for Plan B” I thought.
In a flash I swung the guitar over my head and smashed it across the face of the demon, sending shards of chipped wood flying across the room. I wanted to try and quickly throw a punch at Psycho Jimmy before he could react, but when I turned to face him, he was already on top of me.
Before I even knew what was happening Psycho Jimmy had grabbed both of my wrists, pressed me up against the wall and pinned my arms above my head. His grip was vice-like, even with one of his arms being torn to shreds. For the first time I saw him smile. His crusty lips parted to reveal a row of cracked, yellowed teeth.
I was about to try a kick, when Psycho Jimmy leaned in quickly and kissed me on the mouth.
What the hell was going on?????????/
Psycho Jimmy pulled back from the smooch, looked me dead in the eyes and said in a surprisingly gentle voice, “I didn’t believe in love at first sight until I laid eyes on you. I just didn’t know how to say it.”
I glanced over to the monster standing a few feet away and it seemed to be physically pained by what it was witnessing.
An act of True Love! This was it!
“Oh Jimmy, I feel the same way,” I whispered back to the crazy and most likely homeless man who had just kissed me. It was difficult to pull my eyes away from the literal demon next to us, but I had to make eye contact with Psycho Jimmy to make the moment work.
“Call me Psycho” he said, moving in for another kiss.
In that moment I fought the most difficult internal battle of my life – Do I kiss him back?
I took one last look at the demon – it was now writhing on the ground in pain, I could hear it whimpering.
“I cannot believe I have to do this,” was my only thought.
I closed my eyes and kissed PJ back. A large slimy tongue that tasted like cigarettes slipped into my mouth, I tried to hold back a gag – and then I heard shouting.
I opened my eyes just in time to see a police officer full-body tackle Psycho off of me. Two more officers followed close behind to kneel on Psycho’s back as they cuffed him. I scanned the room looking for evidence of the demon spider woman.
All I could find was the prosthetic leg. It was covered in hard plastic. The human leather that had been used to bind it was gone.
There was no other evidence of what happened. No demon, no manhole to hell. Just a totally destroyed restaurant dining room. Imagine if Lord of the Flies took place in an Applebee’s. That’s what it looked like.
A police officer escorted me out of the building asking me if I wanted to press charges on the man who assaulted me. I could hear Psycho shouting at me, “Wait for me! No jail can hold me! I’ll come find you!”
I would need to put my house up for rent immediately.
I got in my car and drove home; I called Destiny on the way but she didn’t answer. There was something about her that she was hiding from me, I decided it’d probably be best for me to never find out.
I pulled my car into the garage and was about to head inside, when a loud banging rattled my trunk door.
I pulled out my keys and popped the truck door and my car birthed Pedro onto my garage floor. He was sweaty and breathing heavily. A blank canvas lay in the trunk he just emerged from.
“Holy shit, Boss!” he said between breaths, “That was wild, bro! What are we going to do next?”
I paused for a moment to evaluate not only what had just happened in the last week, but my entire life, then I told him, “You’re fired, Pedro” and then, “I need to get a real job.”

At long last, another season, the 19th in American Association history, is upon us as the season opens tonight for Cleburne and Winnipeg (everyone else opens tomorrow). The AA will have the same 12-team, 2-division (East and West) alignment as in 2022 and 2023.
Of note, there was a large offseason talent drain in the AA thanks in large part to the higher-paying Mexican League loosening roster rules, leading many established veterans to head south of the border and leading to less continuity than what we're accustomed to seeing. With that said, let's preview the East Division, with the West coming tomorrow:
CHICAGO DOGS
2023 Record: 56-44 (T-1st, L Finals vs. Kansas City)
Season Outlook: The Chicago Dogs reached the Miles Wolff Cup Finals for the first time in franchise history...then promptly fired their only manager (Butch Hobson) and hitting coach, as several players (including superstar Josh Altmann) reportedly asked out of Chi-Town. Amidst the new (on-field) management and turmoil, the Dogs are slated to return just five players from 2023 are set to have a very young pitching staff (six rookies and all but one arm is LS-2 or less).
The Dogs' offseason acquisitions include former Triple-A arm Jason Bilous and Pioneer League boppers Dusty Stroup (.343, 20 HR) and Jaylen Hubbard (.316, 25 HR), though it's hard to say how well the latter two will adjust after leaving a high-elevation league with worse pitching. Augie Voight (6-2, 3.95), briefly a Dog in 2022, was re-acquired from Lake Country in the Altmann trade and should be a solid arm towards the front of the rotation, though not the one you give up a 20-20 shortstop for. Outfielder Brantley Bell (.262, 12 HR, 22 steals) has enjoyed Frontier League and Atlantic League success and is probably the most notable offseason add for the Dogs, though Narciso Crook is a nice power bat who was signed last-minute.
That said, I'm not high on this pitching staff and am not sure if the PBL guys will be enough to replace Altmann's production and after the turmoil that marred the offseason, Chicago is my biggest pick to sink down the standings in 2024.
CLEBURNE RAILROADERS
2023 Record: 46-54 (4th, L 1st round vs. Chicago)
Season Outlook: After a stunning mid-season turnaround in 2022 to reach .500 and make the playoffs (and win a playoff series for the first time), Cleburne back-slid, needing a tiebreaker and a collapse by Lake Country to squeeze in with the fourth spot, where they were bounced in the first round. Manager Logan Watkins left and in a huge coup was replaced by former Texas Ranger Pete Incaviglia, who won an AA championship with Laredo in 2015, an Atlantic League crown in Sugar Land in 2018, and has just one losing season in 14 years managing at the Indy ball level.
Amidst the changes, only five players return from last season, though Hill Alexander (.287, 23 HR) and late-season revelation Bret Boswell (14 HR in 37 games) are key building blocks, as are Kasey Kalich (5-3, 3.97 ERA, 91 K), Cleburne's best starter last year, and late-inning reliever Joe Corbett (5-4, 3.07, 72 K in just 41 IP). Shed Long Jr (.307, 13 HR, 20 SB) and Thomas Dillard (39 HR, 100 RBI) both arrive after big seasons in the Atlantic League a year ago. This team will hit. Pitching-wise, several former Triple-A arms are in. Justin Kleinsorge (8-2, 4.17 ERA, 113 K) had a really nice year in a terrible Pioneer League pitcher's park last season and is an intriguing add.
The bats seem unlikely to drop off, so with just OK pitching, Cleburne could be in line for one of their best seasons in franchise history. Their first division title could be in play.
GARY SOUTHSHORE RAILCATS
2023 Record: 41-58 (6th)
Season Outlook: There's nowhere to go but up for Gary, who finished last for the third time in four years and posted the worst record in the AA in 2023. Manager Lamarr Rogers is back for a third year and without signficant improvement, it could very well be his last, especially in the first full season under new ownership. I said at the end of last season "this is looking like a franchise that needs a BIG reset"...and it didn't really happen.
Gary is returning 12 players from 2023, including nine players from 2023's lowest-scoring offense in the AA, which seems like...a choice. Gio Diaz (.319, 37 steals) is one of them, though. All-Star Jesus Marriaga (.281, 9 HR, 28 SB) is currently on the inactive list, so maybe he'll be back at some point, but it's a big loss if not. Chris Erwin (3-4, 4.50, 56 K) posted the second-best ERA by a RailCats starter in 2023 and is back. Among newcomers, Olivier Basabe (.293, 7 HR) was solid between two AA stops last year, though their biggest get is probably catcher Guillermo Quintana (.277, 10 HR) from Cleburne. The pitching side is mostly filled with imports from around the Double-A level with a few other additions from the other three Indy leagues, though nothing seems to stand out.
In the league's top pitcher's park, those new arms should get some help, but will it be enough to get this team out of the cellar? I don't think so. I believe this is the worst team in the AA...again.
KANE COUNTY COUGARS
2023 Record: 49-51 (3rd, L 1st round)
Season Outlook: Kane County was my biggest disappointment last year, as I pegged them as my division champion, only to finish sub-.500 and a first-round loser. Last season, the Cougs had the top pitching staff in the league, but an offense that rivaled Gary for worst in the league. George Tsamis is back for year #4 in charge and is also returning seven pitchers (great!), but also seven hitters (ehhhh).
Starers Weston Muir (5-3, 3.51) and Jack Fox (6-8, 4.05) are back, while Nick Belzer (1-4, 5.14) struggled, but his AA pedigree suggests a rebound is coming. Logan Nissen (3-6, 2.82) and C.J. Carter (3-1, 3.83, 62 Ks) are back to shore up the bullpen. Jonah Davis (.253, 18 HR), Todd Lott (.269, 8 HR, 34 RBI in 40 games), and AA vet Josh Allen (.256, 12 HR) are the top offensive returners. Coming in, Jordan Martinson (5-2, 3.16, 69 K) had a really nice last two years in Kansas City, and Alex Troop (4.38 ERA, 95 Ks) was a decent Double-A starter last year. Offensively, none of the newcomers turn many heads (all are first-year Indy ball guys from the low minors), though Jevon Ward (.231, 8 HR) is probably the most encouraging.
I have no reason to believe Kane County won't pitch well, but I also have no reason to believe the offense is much better, which may lead to another middling finish.
LAKE COUNTRY DOCKHOUNDS
2023 Record: 46-54 (T-4th, missed playoffs on tiebreaker)
Season Outlook: After firing their manager nine games in 2023, the DockHounds nonetheless made massive strides from their inaugural season in 2022 and were all but a shoe-in for the playoffs until a 3-14 slide caused them to miss on the virtue of a tiebreaker. After serving as interim manager, pitching coach Paul Wagner stays on, but hands over the reins to Ken Huckaby will stay on for his first full season as an Indy ball skipper.
The Hounds only return five players from 2023, but Blake Tiberi (.303, 8 HR, 10 SB), Marek Chlup (.325, 9 HR, 25 RBI in 34 games), Thomas Jones (.260, 14 HR, 21 SB), and Matt Mullenbach (3-0, 2.60 in 38 games) are among them. Coming in, LC pulled off the steal of the offseason by flipping a #3 starter for Josh Altmann (.290, 26 HR, 21 SB) who is one of the top players in the league. Former big-leaguer Deivy Grullon has had some big MiLB seasons in the past. Pitching-wise, the staff is a veteran one that almost all of them were pitching in Double or Triple-A in 2023, with almost no Indy ball experience among them.
It's an intriguing mix that will probably produce improvement over last season (second-worst ERA). Combine that with an offense that should be even better with Altmann in the fold and I think Lake Country finishes with their first winning record and playoff berth in 2024.
MILWAUKEE MILKMEN
2023 Record: 56-44 (T-1st, L East Division Finals vs. Chicago)
Season Outlook: Milwaukee is habitually near the top of the East and last season was no exception as they tied for the division title, though the Milkmen were sub-.500 after the All-Star break (losing a 6.5-game lead) and finished one game shy of a repeat visit to the Miles Wolff Cup Finals. Under Anthony Barone, who returns for his fifth season, the Milkmen have had a winning record every season, though this may be his toughest build yet after Milwaukee was hit hard by departures, losing just about everything from last year.
Just two players from the 2023 Milkmen return: Juan Echevarria (4-2, 4.04, 65 K) and Reggie Pruitt Jr. (.234, 9 HR, 39 SB), who had the second-lowest OPS among Milwaukee regulars a season ago. To replace the rest, the Milkmen made big splashes with former AA MVP Jose Sermo (.273, 28 HR, 77 RBI), who is 4th in AA history in home runs. Greg Minier (6-6, 2.48, 116 K in 2022) was also really good for two years in Lincoln and AA career saves leader Victor Capellan makes his surprise return to the AA after pitching in other leagues the past three years. Capellan will be joined by Rodrigo Benoit, who is back after logging a 1.60 ERA with 8 saves for the Milkmen in 2022. I do think Milwaukee will have another good pitching staff (they usually do), but after their offense finished third in runs scored last year, I just don't think they've re-loaded enough to match that, even with Sermo.
This season may be tougher than years past for Milwaukee, but Barone is the best skipper in the East, so I'll give him the benefit of a doubt more than most.
Final Division Standings Prediction
This was extremely tough because no team seemed to stand out to me. I'm pretty sure Gary will finish last, but you could talk me into just about any 1-5 combo ahead of them.

1. Cleburne
2. Milwaukee
3. Lake Country
4. Kane County
5. Chicago
6. Gary

-I- -I- -I- -I- -I- -I- -I- -I- -I- -I- -I- -I- -I- -I- -I- -I- -I- -I- -I- -I- -I- -I- -I- -I- -I- -I- -I- -I- -I- -I- -I- -I- -I- -I- -I-
Utrecht, Confederation Administrative Military Peacekeeping Zone Doorta (Former Kingdom of the Netherlands)
May 8, 1945
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Isa Visser
Holland. The land of tulips.
The land under eternal occupation.
My home.
When the Nazis came in 1940, my home town of Utrecht was turned upside down. The war was quick and I hardly even remembered it until the Wehrmacht began to strut freely in our town. At first, we did our best to ignore the grey troops in the streets. But eventually, the Jews of our town began to disappear without a trace.
I didn’t really think much of it, the rumours were horrendous but unfounded. I knew the Nazis preached something about anti-Semetism, but I never really thought anything of malice was happening to the Jews. Besides, the Germans were mean and pushy to all of us, shoving us along like prisoners or attacking us without reason.
Some collaborated with them, but most despised them. However, true anger arose once food began to fade from the shelves. Rationing was in full effect and Mama had to come up with new thinner recipes just for us to get by.
By the time 1943 rolled around, just when we thought that things couldn’t get worse, the Confederation came.
At first, it was some Allied and some Axis aircraft getting blown out of the sky by seemingly nothing. Then some astronomers kept on saying that there were a billion asteroids in the sky. Their estimates put many of them at the size of the Vatican! The world didn’t mind this developing situation as the Nazis tried everything they could to knock both Red Russia and the United Kingdom from the war.
Eventually, they landed, and the world was not prepared in the slightest for their arrival. They didn’t shell any of our cities, even though they could’ve turned all of them to dust in a flash. Not even that American ‘atom bomb’ project could’ve saved us, even if it was somehow made in time for their arrival.
Their troops swiftly subdued the superpowers in under a month. The Soviet Red Army, the American US Army, the British Royal Army, and the previously feared German Wehrmacht were no match for the very advanced and very coordinated men and machines of the Confederation. Sure, our tanks gave them a good scare just as much as the Russian rocket artillery, whistling bombs, and wailing Stukas, but those alone weren’t war-winning weapons.
The world surrendered in Versailles and the post-war world was negotiated in the places that the Allied Powers wanted to negotiate with each other. Yalta, Tehran, Cairo, and the Germans offered Magdeburg and Potsdam too for negotiations.
As it turned out, the Confederation didn’t want us dead or enslaved. Instead, they just wanted to occupy us and help us forward from our brutal wars. I couldn’t really blame them, but then again, their soldiers were the fearsome bullet-proof beasts that could, and had, brutally mutilated and even devoured human soldiers resisting.
Even with those setbacks, the total number of deaths in the Verrassingsoorlog only reached an impressive and scary 1 million. Never surpassing that compared to the nearly 50-60 million corpse pile the world was already stuck in.
Now, the Netherlands as a nation was disbanded. We were still Dutch through and through, and all humans still used the old borders to define land and places. But according to the dozen species entente that conquered us, we were now a hundred occupation zones with the ruling of each zone being distributed to what species got there and captured it first.
The Netherlands, as well as the rest of the Benelux, Northwestern Germany, Denmark, and Calais, were now a part of the ‘Doorta’ zone. Doorta. What a dumb name! The Nvouw in charge named it after the flowers and plant life of the region which made them nostalgic for their homes. There were some rumours that they’d give us our old names back, but that was just hope at this point.
“Isa! Can you quickly run down to Mr Achter’s store to get some butter? I need it for the cookies!”
“Ja, mam!” I called back, setting down the basket of eggs I was carrying. Mama was restocking her depleted goods from the morning rush. Now, she was making new foods for the afternoon rush. It was a very tight schedule that she somehow perfected with robotic efficiency and a warm smile that was the complement of every serving. Now that people had stable homes and jobs once more, they could now enjoy the wonders of life, like Mama’s cooking.
The Confederation weren’t really all that bad once the gunfire ceased. They stayed true to their word. They fixed our country’s buildings and roads, they brought peace and stability in a way, and on a personal note, they gave me a chance to learn Mama’s cooking with some real ingredients rather than some Fanta crap or vegetable peels.
But their soldiers patrolled our streets like hawks. The aliens seemed to best us in everything, hearing, strength, agility, speed, marksmanship, and overall better traits like fangs, venom, appendages, snouts, tails, frills, thorns, and many other animal-like characteristics. But the soldiers were nice and most of the time, didn’t care about us and just let me and my friends play tag. Goodness, some of Felshans even taught some of the boys war tactics while they played war games last week!
I quickly grabbed my late father’s old bulky satchel and patted my bunned-up hair as I walked back into the kitchen to see Mama zooming from baking pies to sizzling batters like a robot. Her eyes then fixed on me as her smile crested her white face, she quickly gave me a tight hug and handed me some guilders for my little expedition.
The Dutch guilder was worthless according to the aliens, who wanted us using their standardised tolija instead. Of course, no one cared and each nation still used their reichsmark, pound, ruble, peso, dollar, guilder, franc, or whatever they had before the first war even began.
I tightly hugged her back and kissed her cheek as she reciprocated the deed. Mama was the best mother one could have. She was loving, good at cooking, good at knitting, and calm and quiet. She would never shout unless I burned down a farm or something.
“Mmm!” I hummed smelling the apple pie from the oven. The warm and delicious apple smell mixed with the doughy batter simply created a scent that one could only find in heaven.
“Ask him for the butter from Rotterdam, the ones from Amsterdam don’t mix well with the cookie stuff like the chips, lemons, sugar, or—”
“I get it, Mama!” I punctuated her typical verbose lecture, shoving the guilders into my pocket. “Rotterdam butter.”
“Zeer goed,” she smiled. “Now off you go!”
Dashing out of the kitchen to the main café, I waved in greeting to some of the people already there. Most of them were either young people doing work, or old people playing chess. These were things you could do anywhere else, but the reason why they were here, was for the food and drinks.
“Where are you going, Isa?” the old Mr Maes asked me, looking up from his little thick novel. He was Flemish and was a veteran of the Great War. He served in the Somme, and Passchendaele, but mostly served in Belgium and Calais. The only answer he gave to me on why he was fighting in France proper was: “I was there to beat the Germans back on every front and every town from the Channel to Switzerland.”
“To get some butter from the store. That’s all,” I replied with a warm grin. I then slipped out of the store onto the lively streets as I dashed down the cobble roads towards Mr Achter’s place. Utrecht was still as bustling as it was before the war. I was born in 1934, so I knew the city well enough before the war to get around quickly.
Mr Achter’s store was down the street and left around the corner shop and then it was down a little incline at the end of the next street as a corner store of its own. I quickly zoomed across the road to the other sidewalk before I ran towards the corner of the street.
I didn’t think or register anything as I weaved through some people and snapped around the corner only to come into a collision trajectory with two shadows that blocked the sun. I couldn’t stop myself in time before a little gust of wind slapped me and now suddenly, the sun was hitting my face again.
Now, instead of ramming into huge shadows, I was on a collision course with a street pole. I braced for the surge of pain, but that also changed until I was frozen upright in under a second.
Reorienting from the random situation, I dizzily readjusted my focus only to now face-to-face with a Nvouw and a Felsha that eyed me up with composure. My blood ran cold, especially with the Nvouw present.
“Be more careful next time, ok?” the Felsha advised as my eyes fixed on him. They were scaled lizards that were as blue as the deep sea. They had snouts with at least 100 fangs just packed into there in such a scarily neat fashion. Their eyes were glowing aqua and they had little prongs and “D” shaped animal ears. Not to mention the bajillion thorns that were dawned on their backs like a cape of bee’s stingers.
Add that with the fact that they were a good two-and-a-half metres tall, and you got the perfect killing machine. But, regardless of their traits, they were probably the nicest of the two occupational species here. Which was a pretty low bar to pass anyway due to the evil of the other demon that I had also stupidly bumped into.
The Felsha soldier in front of me tilted his head and wagged his humongous tail in patience for a response from me. That’s another thing, their spiky tails were at least as long as Mama if she was horizontal. As if these things weren't deadly enough on their own.
“Y-yes,” I replied, a bit scared. “I-I’m sorry.”
“Aw, don’t worry,” the Nvouw replied for the Felsha as I snapped my head to meet him. “You’re just a kid, aren’t you? What are you out for?”
The Nvouw were the ones who occupied the Benelux first, arriving in their skyships randomly. I didn’t even know they were in the Benelux until they began to shepherd the surrendering Germans through the streets after they captured Utrecht. Some of them were covered with human blood. I didn’t know why until they spoke with each other, and then I could see blood covering their large main quadruple fangs and their smaller fangs too.
They ate the German soldiers.
Now, I didn’t like the Nazis, they were mean and tyrannical. But, they were still humans. Sometimes, they’d give me chocolate, sometimes they’d help me around, and sometimes they were understanding when I wanted to go out past curfew to buy some goods from the always-open Mr Achter. They were humans and they were merciful. But never, never, did I want to kill them. And never, never, never, never did I ever even think of wanting to eat them.
And yet, the Nvouw had done it and even enjoyed it. They mowed through many German squads before the garrison here even knew it. By that point, it was too late and they surrendered to the Nvouw, who could just zip up to them and tear them apart in a second if they wanted.
As a result, it was the Nvouw that I feared the most. They weren’t the reason for anything bad in my life, but the first impression I got of them was one of them being merciless brutes and man-eaters. My fear of them is probably why my mouth was zipped shut and I looked down to the ground in terror, resisting the urge to whimper.
My face was hot like the sun above and my hands fidgeted behind me as I simply puckered my mouth and faced the floor. I didn’t want to be in such a predicament. Maybe if I went slower, I wouldn’t be here. But now here I was, and I wanted to disappear in a snap so I could escape these soldiers.
“What are you out for?” the Nvouw repeated to no avail as I did my best to resist crying. My body went into a million different scenarios of how this would end. It could gut me here! If I tried to run, it’d just do it quicker.
“Citizen, I will not repeat myself,” the Nvouw asked once more with agitation. It seems that this beast had a chip on his shoulder for insubordination. But then again, maybe it was just me as I began to hyperventilate, more tears pushing against my eyes and probably making them bulge.
Not even the strongest dike could hold the deluge ready.
When the Nvouw came, Mama hid me in the house. Every time we left the café she brought me with her. I couldn’t be alone. She always kept my head pressed against her and she hugged me until we reached wherever we wanted to go. She did all the talking when the Nvouw would stop us for ID or just to converse. I never wanted to be face-to-face with one, and even worse, I wasn’t ready.
“Answer me,” the Nvouw asked again with its tentacles fluttering in annoyance.
Their tentacles obstructed their fangs and powerful teeth. But, if they just pulled up their tentacles, you could see every gut-cutting fang in their mouth. I didn’t reply and this only seemed to agitate the Nvouw as it hissed with its fangs. Those pristine white teeth were the ones that cut through the Germans like paper. Those were the incarnates of suffering themselves. Those damned fangs.
With that, I couldn’t help myself as a little sob escaped me and tears rolled down my cheeks in small amounts before more flowed. I did my best to suppress my sobs, but that was like trying to hold back the whole English Channel with a table for cover. So to the beasts, it probably sounded like I was gasping for air like a drowning human while also screaming for help.
The Felsha stared at me with concern and realisation before it rose from its squatting position and turned to the monster it called an ally. After whispering something more akin to garbling than Russian like my mother had compared it too, the Nvouw sighed and walked off to the side with its big bulky rifle unshouldered and resting in its talons.
“Look, I’m—,” the Felsha squatted again. But this time, he used the blunt edge of his claws to push my head up to meet his. His eyes were glowing with concern as he looked over my reddening and teary face with pity, “I’m sorry about that. I know that they weren’t the most docile when they occupied this land. But don’t worry, we won’t hurt you ever. Am I clear?”
“Y-yes, sir,” I mewled.
I was assessed once more by the concerned Felsha before he nodded and moved out of my way. I broke into a trot, then a speed-walk, and then a wild dash until I reached my destination. I looked back momentarily to see both creatures staring at me before the Felsha snapped its head to its monstrous comrade and conversed with him.
How anyone thought those creatures were friendly was beyond me. Call any of the Confederation species docile and I’d agree, except the Nvouw.
I quickly jumped into Mr Achter’s shop through the push door, stumbling around before regaining my footing. The store was as old as Mr Achter himself, being made in the 1870s. The shelves were wooden and antique. The products, however, were new and fresh.
“Woah, Ms Visser,” the old Mr Achter gasped at my haggard and eccentric demeanour. “What snake bit you?”
Mr Achter was an old man, in his seventies and was bald on the top with hair on his sides. He wore round professor’s glasses and always wore a pale blue-checkered jacket with a red tie and white undershirt. He always had a pipe in his mouth and yet his teeth were somehow always bright white and as clean as the rest of his shop.
“N-nothing, Mr Achter,” I wheezed. “Just the usual sticks of Rotterdam butter for Mama please.”
“M-hmmm,” he scanned me suspiciously. “Was it something to do with the soldiers?”
He was good. I never understood how he did it anyway. He did raise three sons, but two of them died in World War I and the other died of malaria in the Congo on a trip. I guess his fatherly instincts kicked in once he saw my trance.
“Y-yes,” I replied hoarsely.
“Did they do anything to you?”
“N-no,” I shook my head. “It’s just . . . one of them was a Nvouw and—”
“Oh!” Mr Achter exclaimed, slapping his palm to his forehead in realisation. “Oh, don’t worry. I understand, yes. They scare me too.”
Mr Achter brought out about three bars of butter, the usual amount I ordered, and I pulled out the guilders to pay him. Except, I was three guilders short.
“W-what?” I tensed up in shock. “I-I had all of them . . . How . . . ?”
Then it clicked. I must’ve dropped it in my hurried escape from the soldiers. Now I was short on cash and couldn’t even purchase the ingredient I had encountered a Nvouw for. My body burned hot with rage until it just boiled over and I slumped my shoulders in exhaustion and misery.
“Don’t worry,” Mr Acther smiled sombrely. “You can take it anyway. I’ll take what you have.”
“T-thanks, Mr Achter,” I sniffled. This day was nothing but hell for me.
Mr Acther looked at me with concern before puffing a smoke cloud from his pipe and leaning back into his seat at the cashier desk, “Occupation is a weird thing.” He hummed.
This was how he started a lecture, with an unconfirmed claim. He’d state his claim as more a question and have me try and fill in the gaps. To be honest, I thought it was patronising. But then again, it worked wonders. He always got his point across in the most clear ways possible.
“In what way?” I replied with a small grin.
“You have one power conquer the land of the other. And then, they decide to keep that land until the end of the war or even after. Sounds normal right?”
“Right,” I replied with a nod.
“But, sometimes the occupying power wants to stay. When they do, it’s usually either for strategic reasons . . . or for something else.”
“What?” I pestered impatiently.
“Guess,” Mr Achter coaxed.
“To make it a part of their nation?”
“Good!” Mr Achter jumped before putting his hand to his chin in fake thinking. “What should they do to accomplish that?”
“Just make it formal in a treaty,” I shrugged nonchalantly.
“Well . . . yes,” Mr Achter replied with a bit of lost energy. “But once something small is a part of another bigger thing that is much more different to it. What do you think that smaller something would do?”
“Assimilate?”
“Yes!” Mr Achter congratulated me with a rejuvenated spirit. “But what happens when you move to a new culture where another one is?”
“You force it out,” I replied in realisation.
“But if the people don’t want to?” Mr Achter pushed.
“You force them too.”
“By?”
“Intimidation,” I replied blankly, finally understanding the concept.
“Excellent,” Mr Achter snapped his fingers in delight at my response before handing me the butter to stuff into my rucksack. “That’s what we never want. They will try and intimidate us into listening. But never fold. We are Dutch through and through. Nothing will change that.”
“Thank you, Mr Achter,” I smiled politely as he waved me off.
“Alright, go on. Your mother’s cookies can’t bake themselves.”
I stopped walking in an instant. I never told him she was making her afternoon cookies, “How do you know they’re cookies?” I turned to him in shock.
“You really think I can’t tell my own butter in her cookies?” Mr Achter cackled. “Don’t be a fool. I know something’s mine when it’s good. I give the good-tasting ingredients and your mom turns them into even better-tasting food. Now run off before I ask for a discount.”
I laughed and dashed out of the store with a happy energy that was stolen from me earlier. I didn’t have to fear the Nvouw, not anyone! I was human and Dutch. Nothing could ever change that!
Running up the road again, I slowed down around the corner and peeked out. No one was there, so I turned and ran up the rest of the way to Mama’s café. Bashing through the spruce door into the kitchen like a tank as I put the rucksack down on the floor and took the butter out.
Mama’s head snapped my way in surprise before it warmed up to a smile, “Be careful!” she hissed playfully. “You almost made me burn the pies!”
“Sorry,” I hummed, handing her the butter.
I probably would’ve stayed to help, but a knock at our house door drew me away from the kitchen. Our house was behind the shop and so there were two doors that were used. The main door for all the customers, and the backdoor for me and Mama.
Only the mailman or milkman used the backdoor to deliver items. Except the milkman doesn’t come until tomorrow and the newsboy comes in the morning as well as the mailman. So whoever was at the door was clearly someone random.
I reached the door and turned the knob, the door creaked open and I looked outside to see a boy. Upon seeing him, a sudden odour forced me back a bit in shock.
The boy was thin and looked frail, even though he also seemed just as old as me. His face was pallid and sickly and his clothes were tattered and torn, like he had just swam across the Atlantic from America. His hair was unkempt and overgrown like an abandoned garden.
To my disgust, he was also barefoot and his legs looked bruised and cut. His arms were exposed by the ripped shirt except for a hastily bandaged part of his lower left arm. His eyes were a murky blue and his lips were cut and as dirt-covered as the rest of his face.
“What’s your name?” I asked the boy. Looking him over with contempt at his haggard apparel.
“B-brutus,” he replied hoarsely, tugging at his torn shirt.
“Really?” I scoffed. “That is not your name.”
“J-Johann. . .” he mumbled.
“Johann what?” I pestered him with impatience, tapping my foot in anger.
“I don’t know,” he replied in broken Dutch, rubbing his bandaged arm anxiously. “I-I forgot.”
“Forgot?” I hissed before giving a hearty sigh. “Alright, Johann, that first name doesn’t even sound Dutch. Where are you from?”
“U-uh . . . G-germany.”
How unspecific! Might as well have just told me ‘Earth’. Why was he so meek and secretive? Maybe he was a challenged boy. How did his parents let him wander like this? Also, his accent was so Eastern European that I could smell the borscht. Metaphorically of course, he smelled more like cow manure than a bowl of borscht. There is no way he thought he was really fooling me.
“Right . . .” I trailed off with suspicion of the boy’s intent. “Where are your parents?”
He seemed to tense up at the simple question. I was now concerned for this boy, but I also didn’t want to trust him at all. He was dirty, spoke Dutch poorly, was secretive, and probably addicted to something that would bring us trouble.
“G-gone,” he stuttered. “I-I lost Mama a while back. Then I was sent away.”
“From where?” I huffed.
“I-I don’t know . . . Some place that began with an A.”
“An ‘a’?” I raised a brow at the boy. I really didn’t like him, but then again. He was cold and hungry. The least I could do was give him some basic necessities before I sent him off to be someone else's problem.
“Who’s at the door, Isa?” Mama called from the kitchen. She then peeked out and her eyes fixed on the boy. “Who’s that?”
“Brutus,” I sighed, looking at him with disgust.
“Where are your parents?” Mama hollered to the boy over the sizzling pots and pans.
“He said they were gone,” I replied to the boy. When I looked back at him, his mouth was literally watering. I backed away a tad bit in disgust as the boy’s eyes fixed back on me.
“S-sorry . . . I just haven’t eaten for a bit and . . . your mom’s cooking is what brought me here really,” the boy mumbled in embarrassment. Since he seemed to deserve something to eat to make up for his crappy appearance, I decided to turn back to a concerned Mama
“Mama!” I called out.
“Yes!?” she called back, now seeing the boy in all of his dirty glory.
“The boy is hungry. Can we give him some food before we let him go?” I asked.
“Sure,” she replied, her face puckered up at the sight of the boy. I couldn’t blame her for that really. “On second thought . . . he needs a shower . . . and a new set of clothes first. Isa, take him up to my room and have him wait there. I’ll finish the batches here.”
I really didn’t want to be in the same room as this smelly boy, but I didn’t have many other options. Besides, I kind of felt bad for his situation, even if his personal specifics and identity were just a load of poorly made lies.
“C’mon,” I sighed. “Let’s go.”
The boy’s eyes lit up as I led him up the winding steps to the second floor. I skipped my room and pushed open the spruce door to Mama’s as the boy walked in and sat on the ground.
“Nice house,” he hummed to my concern. I was now pretty sure this kid wanted to steal from us.
“Y-yes . . . it is,” I replied slowly, squinting at the dirty boy with contempt at his appearance and his ulterior motive for being here.
Unless I wanted to contract a disease, I wasn’t going anywhere near him. This kid was more of a biological disaster than an actual living being. I found myself subconsciously drifting away from the putrid kid, but since I didn’t trust him alone, there I remained. It was a long while of miserable waiting before anyone spoke again.
“Your m-mom is g-good at c-cooking,” the boy complimented sheepishly from his sedentary pose on the wood floor.
“Yeah, her café is popular for a reason,” I sighed, pinching my nose in disgust at the lingering smell.
“My mom owned a flower shop,” the boy reminisced as I just sneered at him. “It was a beautiful one, the best in all of Wa–” The boy stopped as if he had just said too much.
“What?” I pestered with a bit of jumpiness at the information that he had mistakenly donated.
“Westphalia,” he corrected in a choppy manner as if he had just pulled the name from his rear.
“Uh-huh,” I scoffed. “What next? She fed you schnitzels and swastikas every day?”
“I’m not a Nazi,” he grumbled at me with some pent-up anger. “Those are the worst people to ever walk this earth.”
“A bit odd from a German,” I hummed, tiling my head in a sarcastic show of curiosity. “I expected you all to be the same. Unless if you weren’t a German.”
“I am German,” the boy replied adamantly.
“So you are a Nazi?”
“No!” he shouted. “I am German.”
“A Na-zi!” I mocked.
“Przeklęty!” he retorted before shutting up and clasping his mouth with wide-open eyes.
“See,” I giggled. “Not German.”
“Part-German,” he grumbled with his head down.
“Changing your story again?” I hissed, stamping the floor. “Just tell me the truth.”
“It is the truth.”
“That isn’t the truth, Mr ‘Johann’!”
“Well, my name is just as Germanic as yours,” he hissed. “That’s because . . . What’s your name?” the boy bleated.
“Hitler,” I sighed with a little smirk. If he was going to play around with his identity, then who cared if I did? “Do you believe me?”
“No,” the boy replied with a hiss.
“Then why should I? You are no ‘Johann’ because I can hear and taste the pierogi and borscht in your accent. Don’t think you’ll fool me with some German-sounding name.”
The boy opened his mouth to respond, but it was hushed when Mama came upstairs in her food-stained apron as her eyes fixed on the boy more clearly. Now she could see his haggard state in the sunlight from the window, like some sort of bad impression of an angel.
“Oh, God,” she practically mouthed as she stared at “Johann”. He pretty much looked at her with the most fear I’d seen yet. That’s one thing I could trust about him, his fear was raw.
Mama said nothing, simply walking into her room past the boy and opening one of her wardrobe’s drawers where she pulled out some of my old clothes. Due to the boy’s skinny frame, he’d fit in that old farm wear like a glove.
“Isa, leave for now. I’ll fix him up,” Mama ordered with a serious face before giving a little smile. “Unless you want to shower him with me?”
“What!? Ew!” I kicked, finally stumbling out of the room far enough to not smell the boy. Mama simply laughed and the boy tensed up in embarrassment. That was the last I saw of the two before Mama shut the door.
To be honest, this day just kept on getting weirder and weirder. First, I nearly soiled myself in front of a Nvouw. Second, I was three guilders short when I went to buy butter. Finally, some odd kid who couldn’t seem to lie properly and who smelled like he just crawled out of a garbage pit appeared at our door for no good reason other than he smelled Mama’s cooking! The Nvouw encounter was scary, but that kid was just weird.
But I didn’t let that bother me, I was now free to play in the little fields behind our house. Those fields were wild and led to forests. We lived on the outskirts of Utrecht anyway, rarely going downtown. That stuff was only for expensive shopping, not day-to-day errands.
Running out the same back door that the dirty kid had used, I dashed into the field of tall grass. Eventually, I found a little wild tulip, swaying in the wind.
It was beautiful. The symbol of our people. The red pedals bounced around in the wind freely, taking hit after hit from the soft blows of nature. I got down on my belly in front of it and watched it for a bit as it swayed and bounced, swayed and bounced. Inhaling a whiff of it, I smiled and rolled onto my back facing the skies.
They were blue and open, not tainted by low white clouds or the occasional spacecraft, the only thing puncturing the darkening blue sky were some high strips of clouds way up in the atmosphere.
The Netherlands was my home, and these sights are why Mr Achter’s lecture was so useful.
My job wasn’t to just be proud of my little Holland, it was to defend and preserve her beauty.
And I would do anything to keep my serene life here as free as possible.

Last time/win v the Crows, Highlights. (Even game outside of the Crows first 4 goals and Lions 3rd, Was on the same time as Matildas v France).
Last time v the Crows at AO, Highlights.(Was wet and kicked 1.9 in the 3rd).
Last win v the Crows at AO, Highlights. (Even for the first half, Lions then kicked 8 in a row and 11 of the last 13).
Injury List: ....sigh Ah Chee (hamstring) is a test, Answerth (concussion) 1 week, Michael (knee) 1 week, Robertson (shoulder) 2 weeks, Bailey (ankle) 2-3 weeks, Starcevich (calf) 4-5 weeks, Ashcroft (knee) is likely out until midseason or until round 19ish, Doedee (ACL), K. Coleman (ACL), Gardiner (ACL) and McCarthy (ACL) all out for the season.
Ah Chee should be available.
In the Mix:

There'll be at least four changes for the Lions' team to face Adelaide on Sunday following the weekend's QClash injury chaos. Cal Ah Chee is available after overcoming a hamstring problem and could fill the void left by Linc McCarthy (knee). Logan Morris did a fine job as a late replacement against the Suns and should get another opportunity in the forward line in place of Darcy Gardiner (knee). Harry Sharp did enough against the Suns to move into the 22, while Chris Fagan could go with Jimmy Tunstill, James Madden or untried Shadeau Brain as a half-back option to cover for Brandon Starcevich (calf). Brain has had an excellent run in the VFL.

Game Day Guide.
Adelaide has a free travel for footy with a ticket. (Still tickets available).
Lions Launch Sir Doug Nicholls Round Guernsey for 2024. (Will be worn in round 10 and 11)
The Story Of Logan Morris, Maccas, And A Half Marathon.
Logan Morris' Journey to the Big Time.
(McCluggage) not fazed by contract delay.
Lessons await for Lions after injury chaos.
Lions call for permanent Q-Clash blockbuster fixture after record crowd at Gabba. (Labour Day long weekend, Always* the 1st Monday of May in QLD).
*^{outside of 2013-15}
VFL:
Lions 11.5 71 were smashed by Suns 24.13 157 by 86 points.
Match Centre.
Match Replay, Match Highlights, Mini-Match.
VFL Match Report:

Liston medallist Jarryd Lyons continues to make heads shake as to why he’s not playing AFL footy, racking up 35 touches, six marks, eight clearances, 15 tackles and eight inside-50s, while Jaxon Prior was possibly even better with 32 touches, 10 marks and 13 rebounds as he tried to turn back the tide.
James Tunstill (25 disposals, five marks, five clearances, 10 tackles) also did his best, while young forward Ben Thomas also shone, backing up his three goals against Southport with four against the Suns.

Lions version.
Around the state leagues.
Next game: Lions have a bye next week. Lions v Casey Demons at Casey Fields (Melbourne), Saturday May 18th at 11:05 am AEST.
AFLW:
Around the state leagues.

Evie Long, drafted by Brisbane in December, was strong for the victors, gathering 22 disposals and four inside 50s for the day.
For Maroochydore, fellow Brisbane draftee Indiana Williams was clean with her 11 disposals.
Another of Brisbane's new draftees, Jacinta Baldwick, was classy for Coorparoo with 19 disposals, two goals, and eight inside 50s.

Edit:
Team: Thurs
In: Ah Chee, Morris, Lyons, Prior, Fort, Brain, Joyce
Out: Gardiner (knee), McCarthy (knee), Answerth (concussion), Starcevich (calf).
Extended bench, Will be cut down to 23 on Friday.
Team: Fri (Image)
In: Ah Chee, Prior, Brain (debut). (Morris and Reville retain their places).
Out: Gardiner (knee), McCarthy (knee), Answerth (concussion), Starcevich (calf).
emergencies: Lyons, Fort, Joyce.

Hello, I am not a frequent traveler. However, I have a child who will be playing sports in the KC area in the fall. Basically I'm trying to figure out the cheapest out-of-pocket way to fly my wife and I up there 5-6 times per year. I currently have an AMEX gold and we spend around $7,000 per month on it. In the past I have converted AMEX points to British Air Avios and booked reward flights through BA on American. I haven't gone to one of the more "lucrative" travel cards in the past because I didn't think we'd use enough of the benefits to justify the annual fees.
All that being said, I feel like I have 3 good/obvious options: -Just keep doing what we're doing and stretch the points as much as we can. This has gotten harder lately because reward eligible flights have been more and more rare in my experience. -Switch to an American Airlines card, get the bonus signup points, and move our spending to that card. -Switch to a Southwest card, get the bonus signup points, and work towards companion passes.
If you had asked me several years ago I would have gone right to Southwest because if you planned travel in advance you could book flights to KC from here for ~$180 round trip. That doesn't seem to be the case anymore, and rates on American and Southwest are very similar most of the time.
I'm just not sure how to balance the math of the flight costs + rewards + potential companion tickets + benefits of being a cardholder with the airlines, and I figured this sub may be able to fill in some of the blanks or at least help me find a common denominator to compare. Thanks in advance!