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divine-mistake · 3 years

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this is our last stop, love — one.

Everyone knows you don’t leave the Organization. No one wants to anyway—until they do. Assassin AU.

Characters: Bucky Barnes/(f)Reader

Warnings: 18+ (no smut), mentions of death, guns, violence, mentions of suicide

Word Count: 3408

A/N: It's finally here! My baby is finally here!

SERIES MASTERLIST | AO3 | PLAYLIST

the place you exist you never call home, did you know that?

"More than anything, I want you to know that I love you. And I’m sorry."

The only beautiful thing about Neon City is that it’s lawless.

I’ve seen Neon City from the highest floor of the tallest skyscraper and I’ve seen it from the sewers so far underground you think you’ll suffocate, and this city looks the same from every single angle.

Fluorescent and dirty and lawless.

From up here, on the darkened roof of a crumbling hostel that’s been abandoned by everyone but the squatters ‘cause the walls have sucked up so many blood stains and bullet holes they’re threatening to collapse, the city looks exactly like that. The bright lights of Upperside pulse with every single color the universe could have created, tinting the darkness of the night like a kaleidoscope. Even on the eighteenth story, the thumping bass from the strip of clubs just a street over shakes the foundation underneath my feet.

Peering through the scope of the sniper positioned on the roof’s ledge, I zoom in on the street corner at the left-hand side of my vision with a lazy twist of my wrist. Two women, one with hair as dark as night that streams down her back like a river, the other with a short, platinum-dyed spiky cut, smoke rolled cigarettes. They’re dressed to the Neon City nines: a leather corset underneath a metallic jumpsuit unzipped below her belly button and a slinky dress paired with a buckled harness and knee-high platform boots. Leaning against a grimy street lamp with a busted bulb, it isn’t long before a man dressed in a white fur coat shows up, throws his arms around them, and walks them toward the nearest club.

When he adjusts his coat, it lifts just enough to reveal the assault rifle hanging from a shoulder strap. There’s a pistol just above the hem of the dark-haired girl’s dress, strapped to her thigh, only visible by the faint outline in the silk. I don’t even want to guess how much heat the other chick is packing; that hideous jumpsuit she’s got on is loose enough to hide an arsenal without suspicion.

In the distance, all the way from the Kill Zone, a rapture of gunshots goes off just louder than the EDM pouring from the strip. Or maybe it’s quieter down on the streets, air hazy with cloven smoke and threat of death. Maybe no one gives a fuck.

The ugly thing about Neon City is that it only has one law.

No one leaves Neon City. At least not alive.

A weak vibration against the inside of my left wrist, right above my pulse point, steals my eye from the scope. Fifteen minutes.

“Aren’t you supposed to be doing this?” I sit back on my haunches to glance at my partner.

“Why?” He’s laying flat on the roof, boots crossed at the ankle and an arm thrown over his eyes, not a care in the world. A prickling of annoyance makes its presence known at the back of my neck—not the first of the evening and certainly, definitely, unfortunately not the last.

“‘Cause you’re the sniper?” I hiss, but he only laughs quietly in response. The sleek black cuff that bumps against my radius flickers to life with one tap of my finger, an interface made of light projecting itself upon my forearm to show the countdown. Thirteen minutes.

“The World’s Best Sniper,” he corrects, sitting up with a grunt. His legs are sprawled over the dirty ground, black combat pants picking up a coating of dust that’s collected on the roof for what must’ve been ages.

I purse my lips. “World’s Laziest Sniper, you mean.”

“Hey, I resent that.” The heavy soles of his boots crunch gravel and grit beneath them, a grating sound, as he shifts over and bumps me out of the way. “Move.”

“Oh, now you want to do your job?”

Bucky doesn’t reply and it should make me feel better, but it only serves to annoy me further. I fold my legs underneath me and sit back to stare at the building across from us, the one he’s busy scoping out now, letting the irritation simmer through my veins as the cool air of the night rolls over my skin like toxic gas. The black stealth suit glued to my skin does nothing to keep the freezing air from chilling my bones. I envy Bucky’s tactical suit, the combat vest hugging his chest with all its bulletproof padding.

Not that it’s cold enough outside to hurt. Neon City is so alive with masses of squirming, sweaty bodies and drugs and guns and lights and music that I swear the air is always ten degrees hotter than it should be. I don’t even think the dead bodies stick around long enough to grow cold.

The buzz on the inside of my wrist alerts me.

“Ten minutes,” I say.

“God, you’re annoying.”

“How long have you known that?” I pick grit out from underneath my fingernails idly.

“Since the day I met you,” he mutters back. “When they told me you were my new partner, I almost choked one of the Exec’s out.”

I snort. “Which Executive?”

He doesn’t even glance over at me. “Not tellin’ you, snitch.”

My teeth grind together. He’s said it so easy, nonchalantly, like a joke, but it strikes a nerve in me that turns those prickles of annoyance into something more aggressive. Something that heats my blood. I’m not a snitch.

But everyone thinks I’m a little goody-two-shoes just ‘cause I’m on Pierce’s good side.

I take a deep breath and ignore him. “The mark is coming from Black Mamba—he’ll be here soon.” With a quick turn of my wrist, I check the time. “Eight minutes.”

“He own the place?” Bucky asks, twisting the scope and centering it on the fourteenth floor of the apartment building in front of us. The mark will arrive from the left side of the complex, just off the elevator, where the landing is lit with a soft yellow light. The glass windows give Bucky a perfect shot.

“Dunno,” I tell him honestly. “I didn’t read the file.”

Bucky’s head snaps back to look at me. “What?”

I recoil, eyes narrowing. “What?” I mimic. “What’s your problem?”

“You didn’t read the file? And you’re calling me lazy?”

“Calm down.” I wave him off, but he doesn’t turn away from staring at me, his eyes narrowed into a glare. “I read enough of his file to know when and where and how he’s arriving, as usual, so don’t get your panties in a twist. You do your job, I’ll do mine. As usual.”

It’s like I can hear the blood vessels in his neck pop and burst as his jaw tightens.

“Your job is to read the dossier,” he grits through clenched teeth. “The whole dossier. On every single mark.”

A new surge of anger rushes through me, drowning out the loud cacophony of the city beneath us. My fingers twitch and flex, heat pooling in my palms like an itch that needs scratching. Bucky Barnes, out of all people, shouldn’t be sitting here treating me like a goddamn child. Calling me annoying, calling me a snitch, calling me out for not wanting to read a full case file on a man who deserves to die.

I have to twist my fingers in the thin material of my stealth suit to keep my hands busy.

“I don’t need to know a single thing about these marks besides how to kill them,” I say, voice low, and Bucky presses his lips together. “He’s on our list for a reason. I don’t need, nor want, to know why.”

Bucky scoffs, blowing a stray lock of hair out of his eyes. “You really don’t want to know what he’s done to get the Org’s attention? To get a contract?”

The image of the stacks of files piling up on Pierce’s desk, threatening to fall over and collapse, worms its way into my head. Only a week ago I had seen the brown folders collecting in his office, strewn about his shelves, all filled with names and numbers and photos of people who need to be eliminated.

They’re all bad. I’m not going to sit around and read a dossier about what they’ve done; whose blood stains their hands for money or for fame or for shits and giggles and fucks. If Bucky wants his reading material to be covered in a thorough coating of Neon City squick, then by all means, he can read their files.

Not me, though. I just need to know how to kill them.

“No,” I answer honestly. “I don’t want to know.”

He shakes his head, like he’s disappointed in me, and his eyes fall on the apartment complex again. “Part of our job is reading those dossiers, y’know.”

Embarrassment spreads through me, the heat of an anger that threatens to boil over flooding my synapses. It’s like he’s scolding me. Like he’s insinuating that I can’t—that I’m not doing my job right. It makes my palms start itching again so bad that I curl my fingers into a tight, shaking fist.

“The only people who read the full files are the ones who don’t trust the Organization,” I snap, and Bucky’s neck nearly breaks from the speed at which he turns to look at me.

Like you, I let go unsaid.

From far away, but still close enough to send a shiver up my spine, the rattle of Neon City’s train tracks hits me as the cars speed past Upperside, never slowing, never stopping. If I look off into the distance, peer down past the rest of the skyscrapers blocking the view, I bet I could see it making its rounds, a black bullet rocketing through the brightly-lit city night, its horn never braying.

The black band on my wrist vibrates. “Three minutes.”

Bucky opens his mouth, closes it, and stares at me. His eyes look black tonight. With another shake of his head—in disappointment or frustration, I’m not sure—he pulls his goggles down from his hairline and sets them in place as he looks away from me. He palms his sniper rifle, back to adjusting the scope, and my hands are still shaky with a fury I didn’t think would rupture from inside me tonight.

“I don’t get how we’ve worked together for years and I never knew you didn’t read the files,” he grunts.

“‘Cause we’re killers,” I spit, “not Birdies. I don’t need to sit and read a dossier to know how to kill a man.”

He snorts. “Not Birdies,” Bucky mutters sardonically. “As if we don’t skirt the law the same way they all do.”

That’s the problem with being lawless. All the gray. Bucky might think we’re like the Birdies—the cops and the corpos and the politicians who walk around like they’re untouchable, like they’ve got a Get Out of Jail Free card in their pocket—but Neon City doesn’t have laws for people like us. All Neon City’s got is a morality scale weighted by cash. Neon City doesn’t care about the Organization.

‘Cause the Organization is who’s really in charge of this city. We’re the ones who keep the streets clean of Birdies, like tonight’s mark, for the right price.

“That’s him,” I say, nodding my head at the black car that just pulled up to the front of the apartment complex, disappearing around the corner we can’t see from our angle. “One minute.”

“Damn, you’re annoying,” Bucky says again, and he pulls his mask up from where it hangs around his neck, covering the rest of his face.

“Shut up and do your fucking job.”

Everything goes quiet and I shift forward, laying flat on my stomach beside Bucky. About the only time that he ever goes quiet is when he’s behind a scope—my favorite place to have him. In the darkness, Bucky looks like nothing more than a shadow. Dark hair, dark clothes, dark mask. But in the artificial highlights of Neon City, I could almost paint him as a god, with streaks of bright, holocene colors slicking through his hair like an oil spill.

He looks like a killer. A Neon City native.

But I guess I am too, since I’m right here next to him.

There’s only the slight squeak of the scope that Bucky adjusts and adjusts and fucking adjusts, whether in nervousness or in necessity, and the hammering of my heart as we watch the apartment complex from our vantage point. Bucky can probably see the numbers on the elevator as they light up, signaling our mark’s arrival. I don’t get much special equipment like he does with his sniper’s visor. All I have is my C-Link wrapped tight around my wrist as it buzzes with alerts. Infiltrators never get much—occupational hazards and all that. The Org never knows how long an infiltrator will last.

And even after a decade of doing this, of lying prone on rooftops watching Bucky aim for a mark’s forehead, of dressing in a disguise that isn’t my own to sit on the lap of a greasy-haired gang leader with rings on each finger, of slipping poison in my own drink and hoping its effects won’t just take my target—

Even after all these years, I still get nervous before the kill.

“Thirty seconds,” I murmur under the cacophony of Neon city and the twisting of Bucky’s scope, more for myself than for him.

“Can you stop staring at me?” he answers back, and a spark of irritation shoots up my arms like my nerves are on fire.

“I’m not staring at you anymore,” I hiss. “Please, for the love of god, concentrate.”

His voice is smug. “So you admit you were staring at me?”

“God no.”

Then, suddenly silence drapes itself upon us like a cold, tense air as the mark steps off the elevator Bucky has been watching. The bodyguard who flanks him is too relaxed, moving too languidly, and I can tell, even from a distance, that he barely glances out the big glass windows that we use to peek into their lives like a little kid pressing their face to a fishbowl.

A mistake like that is fatal.

“Count me in, sweetheart,” Bucky says, and I can’t help but scoff.

“A second ago you were telling me that it was annoying.” My eyes track the position of the mark as he speaks to someone—another one of his guards—on the landing just outside his apartment.

“I changed my mind. C’mon, doll, for good luck.”

“Yeah, alright Barnes. Like you need any luck.”

The countdown is quiet, breathy, and feels like a rollercoaster crashing straight into my stomach as Bucky squeezes the trigger and the shot rings out, deafening, the glass shattering upon impact, blood spilling all over the white tiling beneath the mark’s feet as he staggers back into the arms of his closest bodyguard, yellow light illuminating his dying face from so far away.

Easy. Quick.

Always so quick.

Then Bucky’s hand, a little warm from his hold on his rifle, is pressing down on my head and forcing me to duck down. We lay there for a few seconds, with only his gun between us, listening carefully for the sounds of someone rushing the building. My cheek is pressed against the cold, dirty surface of the roof, staring at Bucky as we wait the last few minutes.

When he’s sure that no one is coming after us, Bucky pulls his mask back down and shoves his goggles up through his hair, catching some of the chestnut strands in the straps.

His blue eyes flick up to meet mine and he flashes me a smug grin. “See?”

I snort. “Yeah, okay. So you did need the extra luck.”

“Hey.” He frowns dramatically, and I almost crack a smile.

“World’s Best Sniper my ass.”

Bucky breaks into a laugh at that, chuckling softly as he shifts onto his knees and grabs his rifle. A giggle nearly slips through my lips in tune with his own. He props himself up on his elbows to peer over the ledge of the roof one more time. I turn my wrist inward to check my C-Link, swiping past the map of our area to scroll over to the mark’s file. His bio-feedback uploads directly to my Link and a red word projects over the dark sleeve covering my forearm, blinking brightly.

DECEASED.

“Clear,” Bucky declares and I nod my head in agreement, the interface of my Link disappearing as I twist my arm.

Good job, I want to tell him. My lips feel sewn shut and my tongue is dry.

Instead, I watch as he takes apart the pieces of his rifle, slowly, carefully, fluidly. The hands that know where to shove a knife to neutralize a target, that know how to keep still in order to pull a hair trigger and still take the recoil, those hands know how to take apart each intricate section of his gun without hesitation. As if he’s on autopilot, Bucky unscrews each part and packs them in a padded case with a delicacy I only ever see him exert on firearms.

Maybe he uses such care when handling his weapons because he wishes someone would use such care when handling him.

Bucky’s always said he’s just a weapon, too.

In the background, the rattling of the train tracks bursts through the stagnant air of Neon City yet again. This will be its last circuit through Upperside for a while, making its way down to the Lowerside to loop around the gutters of the city instead. And by the time it comes back our way, we’ll be far enough away that the rumbles of the cars won’t vibrate through the concrete. In fact, on the top floor of the Org’s high rise, the black train is but a speck of speeding lights, nearly invisible.

I roll onto my back, the roof hard on my spine, cold seeping through the thin fabric of my stealth suit. The faint clink of fiberglass fades and is replaced by a snap of metal and the click of a lock as Bucky presumably closes the case to his rifle. Above me, the sky is as black as the train that rockets through the city, dark and unending.

“You haven’t always lived in Neon City,” I mention, hearing Bucky’s combat boots shuffle toward me.

“Yeah,” he says, but there’s something hesitant in his voice. He doesn’t offer anything more, and I breathe in the smoky, dusty air, my eyes searching every corner of the sky that I can see for something—for anything.

But there’s nothing there.

“What do the stars look like?” I ask him quietly. On the edges of my vision, the glowing lights of the nightclubs below us tint everything in red and blue and pink and purple, so bright, so sickening, and it drowns everything in the vicinity. I wonder if there’s a sky out there, somewhere, that can’t be drowned.

‘Cause Bucky might not truly be a Neon City native—and fuck him for that—but he’ll never leave it now.

And I’ll never know why Bucky traded a sky filled with stars for a city born of blood.

He never answers, and I never expect him to. Instead, Bucky’s hand appears in front of my eyes, his calloused fingers reaching out for me. And when I put my cold hand in his warm grasp, he locks our fingers together tightly, and a spark ignites when our palms meet as if my mind is still asking to see the sky light up, electric.

As easy as he pulls a trigger, Bucky pulls me up from where I lay on the roof. His arm slips around my waist to hold me as I gain my footing, and he’s so fucking warm it makes me shiver in response, but when I look up to meet his gaze, he tugs his hand out of mine and drifts away. Without a word, Bucky grabs his weapon case and nods toward the open hatch where a ladder leads us back down to the eighteenth floor.

“C’mon,” he says. “Let’s get out of here.”

No one leaves Neon City alive—and that’s usually why no one chooses to arrive.

#bucky barnes #bucky barnes x reader #bucky barnes x you #bucky barnes fanfic #bucky barnes series #enemies to lovers #bucky barnes angst #assassin au #assassin!reader #this is our last stop love #thanks for supporting me!

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neoyi · 3 years

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Back again with another Kingdoms Heart II talky time. What is this, the fourth? Fifth installment? Any who, I’m covering Sora’s revisits to Beast’s Castle, Chin- er, sorry, Land of Dragons, Olympus, Agrabah, Halloween/Christmas Town, and Pride Rock.

*I love that Kingdom Hearts Belle is only so restraint with her annoyance over Organization XIII’s bullshit. She’s already pissed when Xaldin interrupts her big ballroom dance out with the Beast (”not tonight!”), then when Xaldin kidnaps her and threatens the Beast, she elbows the man in response (the music even stops just to emphasize the impact of what she’s done), sporting an absolute shit-eating grin in the process.

Belle is Queen Shit.

*I see The Beast has mastered the Team Rocket School of Quick Changing Clothing. He’s somehow able to switch from his dance outfit to his standard tattered cape and pants between Heartless surrounding them and just before they do battle. What talent.

*Having Marluxia’s - that pretentious rose-spewing jackass - insignia inside Beast’s Castle is apropos.

*I get keeping the Organization XIII members in their hoods is to preserve their mysteries and build anticipation (it’s less about Who They Could Beeee as it is wondering what they look like and what personality/skills are associated with them), but as someone who sometimes has trouble distinguishing things, having to parse out who is speaking to who when they all look identical is kind of hard....They really could have killed for more women in the Org, I’m just saying.

*Oh shit, I forgot how hot Xigbar was. In terms of sexiness, it’s a toss-up between him and Luxurd.

*Oh yes, that eye patch does do things to me. <3

*It is super cute that Mulan asked the Emperor if Shang could have a vacation.

*I think it fits that at some point in Hercules’ life, he’s going to feel burnt out from being a hero without any rest. It’s kind of nice to see this game explore that a bit.

*I haven’t played FFX in a long time, but I think some of the dialogue Auron spouts when Sora picks up his Heart Doll doohickey are from or carry shades from his time during. It’s obviously just meant to pay lip service to his canon role, but I kind of like the Don’t-Take-It-Seriously-Theory that the Auron in Kingdom Hearts ended up in Hades’ realm (maybe he took a wrong turn in Albuquerque on his way to Spira’s whatever-the-fuck-metaphysical-afterlife-is.) I guess if there’s one game series where multibverse traverse is logical, it’d be Kingdom Hearts.

I’ve looked at this artwork of Sora many times over the years and this part of his outfit still baffles me. What are those baggy red things attached to his hips? Are they cushioned to protect a part of his body in case he gets tossed by an enemy? Is it the same with his shoulder guards or are those even shoulder guards and not just clothing that happen to look like shoulder guards? Like, are the red bags bags? Does Sora pack his essentials in them? Toothbrush? Snack bar? Keys to the Gummi Ship????

*If Hercules’ doubt is part and parcel of being a hero to many, Sora’s obsession to be defined as one in Olymupus Coliseum feel redundant and backwards. Didn’t the first Kingdom Hearts established that bearing the moniker of a hero is not reflective of your character, but through your actions? Sora’s a goofball, but apparently that lesson didn’t seem to stick, causing him to obsess over labels he only cares about for this world and this world only.

*Revisiting Port Royal and I’m only just realizing Sora can kill pirates in this game. They’re undead, but they’re that way because of a curse, otherwise they were living and have the capability to live again. I don’t know if I can process this kid having murdered like hundreds of Actual, By Technicality, Living Humans.

*I like how Jack describes the audacity of Organization XIII’s motives that it makes pirates look kind and spoke with a tone as if he’s offended. Pirates have a nasty reputation to live for and those jackasses in black hoods are taking all their creds.

*Luxurd is the other Hot Organization XIII member, and he may be my personal favorite. He’s got that sauve, roguish quality I like in a character. In another universe, he might have been a risky, gambling-his-life Lovable Rouge Pirate and damn if I wouldn’t eat that story up.

*Whenever Donald and Goofy is out of your party, they sometimes circle around to each other and chat and I think that’s adorable. Nice attention to detail.

*Tragically, unlike Belle who got a bit more to do in her world, Jasmine’s expanded role in KHII doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. She gets to be voiced by her original actress, but that’s about the extent of it.

*I don’t know if this was an intended foreshadowing or just the product of Cool Boss Fight, but Sora constantly dodging and reflecting crumbles of building away from Genie Jafar does end up coming back in the final boss fight. Arguably cooler than this one, but you can see it as Sora applying what he’s learned since then.

*If Genie is capable of fixing Agrabah and improving on it, then man, I think Aladdin should let him. Like don’t drastically alter it to alienate the townsfolk, but consult with the Sultan and Jasmine and improve the homes of thousands of impoverished people. Come on, Aladdin, you’re gonna rule these people, and you were once a street rat. Use your position for good!

*I’m a tad worried about Sora’s stick arms. Kid, you eating alright? Is Donald and Goofy giving you proper nourishment?

*At the second half of the game, Kingdom Hearts II really ramps up the Sora/Kairi and how you feel about it likely depends upon your preference for the pairing or not. I actually think they’re adorable as heck and I think a lot of why is that Sora, unlike a lot of other shonen protagonist that his archetype resembles, is far from clueless about his affection for her or even dismissive of her. No, he thinks of her all the goddamn time. He’s ridiculously in love with her that an average teenager can give and that’s such a wholesome thing that almost any scenario where he’s thinking of her really shines a spot on his character. This despite the fact that, well, there really isn’t a whole lot of on the Why they like each other, they just do because they’re the main male and female protagonist (which is why I get people rolling their eyes at the pairing, it is a bog-standard heteronormative relationship.)

*I think it's a good and logical point that Simba still carries doubt shortly after the events of The Lion King. Scar's ghost looming over him filling him with manipulative thoughts and his people especially doubting his kingly moniker because he's not the Great Mufasa is something Simba would likely be compared to. However could Simba compete with Mufasa, a beloved and competent King?

*I think this is the first time the game has ever shown a canon Disney character getting the Heartless treatment and man, this is a cool concept I kind of wished they did more of. I mean, maybe they did? I haven’t played any KH game after this. I hear Hans turns into one in KH3.

*There's a mild subplot between Cid and Merlin where they both clash over Technology vs. Magic. I know Disney Merlin did complain about the future (read: 1960s contemporary when the movie first came out) once he finished his brief sabbatical there, but as someone who's aged backwards, you'd think he'd have a better appreciation for tech.

...Then again, maybe he saw how invasive smart devices have gotten in the 21st century in which case, okay, fair, you are right to complain.

#kingdom hearts #kingdom hearts II #neoyi talks

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cmweller · 5 years

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Challenge #02256-F066: First to Aid

A book written by an alien Medic over humans and their needs (physical/emotional/etc) medical "normal" procedures/operations for them, limits of humans (go wild and have fun with this one^^) and what to do with your human if sh*t hits the fan and emergency medical procedures (Bringing him back to life by smashing repeatedly his ribcage and forcing air in, stopping leaks, treating rocket fuel burn( how did he even get this?!?) , etc.)

Have fun and do your thing :-) -- Anon Guest

The title of the piece was Edge Medicine - Living With Humans and Keeping Them Whole and Rykthaak Malyss had made a fortune off it, back in the day. For a long time, it was the only source for Mediks about Human health. In retrospect, it is an erroneous document full of assumptions and incorrect deductions, but for decades, it was written with the best and most heartfelt of intentions.

Sympathetic rhythm in a human chest can cause their hearts to resume beating after theirs has stopped, ze wrote. Many Humans are taught this from a young age. See appendix file 'Staying Alive' for the ingrained rhythm. Other means of coronary stimulation include electronic rhythm induction, though this is preferred to re-establish a rhythm in erratic heartbeats.

Another chapter was dedicated to broken bones. Human bones are difficult to break. What many consider lethal force would only cause relatively mild fractures in sections of a Human skeleton. Humans are capable of operating with broken bones, but that does not mean that they should be allowed to do so. Fractures large and small cause a great amount of pain in Humans. Especially what they refer to as 'green stick' fractures.

[Be sure to visit internutter (dot) org for a link to the rest of this story, and details on how to support this artist. Or visit steemit (dot) com (slash at) internutter for the stories at their freshest]

#instant story #just add prompt #amalgam universe #humans are space orcs #medicine

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flowerbarrel-art · 5 months

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Dire, Dire Drawing

What?

It’s just an eel.

#Alan Becker #AvA #AvM #AvA 6 #TSC #scientist Sticks #Rocket Org #Jolly Roger Bay #Mario 64 #Qumu #Dire Dire Docks #FlowerBarrel Art #Spotify

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fictionfromgames · 3 years

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The Malevolence (Amalgam, Dark Claw, MURPG)

((Character sheet and setting info after the break)) Logan awoke, bound to the ground, hearing a series of memories played out on monitors around the room, and confusingly, smells from across his lifetime.

“Where, at forty, I attributed my looks to my mother, and my liver to my father,” Logan paused for the tepid laughter, “At sixty, I am forced to admit there were other forces at play.”

1992, when he’d come out as a mutant. Not as Dark Claw, just a billionaire who’d inherited even more luck than most people. He tried to play it off as though his power was just his health. As with all mutants then, he was banned from blood and tissue donations, making it easier to stave off his aging rivals from pestering him on a day to day basis. It made occasional extra work for Dark Claw, however.

Sentinels crashing down onto New Gotham streets, assaulting Wayne Tower and the Thompkins School for Mutant Education and Outreach. Shots of the Friends of Humanity storming DC.

93, he noted as he tested his bindings. They’d snap, but not soon.

Talia, wailing as he shot down Ra’s al-Pocalypse with a rocket launcher.

“Ninety-five,” he said, methodically pulling and relaxing, “What do you need to prove?”

The Joker laughing at a shrieking pitch, almost as if to cover up Sparrow’s screams.

“Bastards,” he growled. His head should have cleared, but there was something else buried into the scents they vented into the room. He blinked. How were they even witness to that?

Seeing Jubilee dying again started up the adrenaline, though. He cursed and spat, trying to slip out the way he knew he had to. Before the next parts.

Jean da Costa, the Dark Phoenix, caught off guard and killed by Erik Magnus via magnetokinetic stroke.

Logan saw red. Killing mad. There was grief in his scream. The mystery behind the Ravens might give way to the immediate need to end them, a quiet but resolute voice tried saying over the din in his mind.

The obituary of Thomas and Elizabeth Wayne, interspersed with grainy footage of the three of them, together.

One of the leg binds snapped as he did, and one of the odd, synthetic looking ropes had stretched just enough for a hand to slip free, allowing his left hand to cut away his remaining binds. flipping to his feet, still shouting. And then the lights went out.

They knew he tracked by scent, which was still confusing due to the manufactured nostalgia in the air, but they did not consider how well he heard. It was a good posture, to always sniff whenever he noticed something out of sight, in case someone was watching.

They were quiet, but not enough. He slashed out with his right hand, raking two someones across their torsos, while feeling blades sink into his left forearm, which had risen to block the assailants he knew were on that side. He growled and plunged his free claws into someone’s face.

Death cries at least drowned out the sounds of his past on the walls. There was enough light from the panels that he noted more arriving, which suited him well. He needed to get something out before he could work properly.

The Malevolence of Ravens was resourceful, even these assassins knew more of what they were doing than the typical street goon. Archival footage of most of this was plentiful. But how the hell were they there for the Joker?

He was losing blood faster than he liked, meaning if he didn’t speed this up, he’d be captured again, or worse. A lot of self defense worked differently with knife hands, but that just made forearm strikes less predictable than a punch or and elbow. It really only worked because of the adamantium, most peoples forearms would have fractured doing what he did, but it made openings for smaller jabs and sideways swipes with extended claws.

The last one stood well into the gloom of televised history. He was not afraid, but based on their rote fighting form, he was not prepared either. The assassin went for an overhead knife strike, which Dark Claw caught in between two blades and twisted sideways, so as to spare his knuckles some grief, and he drove his right fist into the man’s gut. The adamantium claws slid in effortlessly.

“How’s that work for ya, bub?” Dark Claw drew in close.

No response except a gasp and a gurgle behind a black bird mask. They could have been plague-doctor themed if the beaks were longer. Dark Claw dropped him and strode out of the room. Violence sated, for now. Just had to find the bigwig.

********************

The Amalgam Universe

Back in the day, Marvel and DC used to do cross promotion in Versus titles, and a couple of years, the Amalgam Universe, a big ole cross-company mishmash of heroes and villains and plots. The one character they co-owned was Axel Asher, whose power was to traverse between the two multiverses, and across timelines as well. He also had the power to smoosh heroes together, which tended to happen on accident if he stayed on one or the other side too long.

He, however, was not the only character who knew what was going on. Dr Strangefate, the amalgamation of Dr Strange, Dr Fate, and Charles Xavier, knew much too well what was happening, and was Axel’s main antagonist. See, the conflict was, Axel’s job was to keep the multiverses separate, and Dr Strangefate, being a product of the merged multiverse, wanted them to stay so he could live, alongside all of his loved ones native to the Amalgam Universe.

It didn’t stick, and they never collaborated like this again.

THIS Amalgam Universe

So in at least one instance the Amalgam Universe survived in smaller forms, waiting to reborn. Mostly, Strangefate rebuilt it for a return in 1997, but he is depicted as dying at the end of it all.

With the multiverses constantly expanding and contracting, there is always space for something weird. Even if it’s a pocket dimension, Axel Asher is swanning about in both properties and it could, fictionally speaking, always happen again, so right now, it is!

But it’s not the same one. Some of Access’ (that’s Axel’s superhero name) amalgamations were incredibly different depending on who was around, so my version of the Amalgam Universe has different stuff according to taste. Maybe it’s a cast off from the Queen of Nevers.

Dark Claw

Starting with Logan Wayne! I owned the two Dark Claw comics as a kid, because Batman and Wolverine were my favorites, and the Dark Claw Adventures looked like the Timmverse.

Logan Wayne was born in 1932, and orphaned at 8 years old after seeing the Gray Ghost. He would live in his parents’ estate until he was 18, attending New Gotham University. He’d go on to spend his summers travelling, and eventually, did so full time after graduating.

The 50s were a good time to learn how to drop off the grid. Besides postwar Europe, the Pacific saw continued conflicts in Korea and Vietnam. Japan was his last official known location from 1954 until 1970.

A man matching Logan’s description was found wandering in British Columbia. He wouldn’t claim his name or his birthright until 1973 after regaining enough of his fractured memories to give anyone his social security number.

Wayne Enterprises did not take this resurrection well. While the family’s estates had been held by the family butler, Edwin Pennyworth, the company fought any ownership claims or attempts at involvement for the next several years. It was during this time he had, back in New Gotham, full of skills and instincts he couldn’t quite place the origins of, that he took on the mantle of Dark Claw.

Street crime was at a fever pitch, and organized criminals ran rampant. With only a base of operations, a set of mutant powers, and an adamantium clad skeleton he still couldn’t account for, he set about clearing out New Gotham’s underworld.

The year after toppling the Silvermane regime, Logan Wayne finally accrued enough stock for control over Wayne Enterprises, rooting out the men that kept him locked out of his family’s company and installing a new board of directors. 1978 was looking up for Logan Wayne. And then the Joker appeared.

The Joker (an amalgam of the original, Sabretooth, and Whiteface) introduced to both mutant and costumed villainy. A series of gruesome killings, victims all stuck in a rictus grin, led Logan on a trail that ended with the Joker’s debut-- a plot to kill everyone in New Gotham with the Whiteface Poison. The Joker in this case is a little more clowny than the green backhaired Hyena. In this case, to represent the Sabretooth side, he’s got a healing factor, Sabretooth’s claws, keen senses (though played less animal than Logan or Creed would, more comedic), and a green fur trimmed coat instead. To add a little Whiteface (he’s from Supreme and is basically just an homage to Mr J), add the little red painted on dimples and vertical eyelines to the Joker’s normal face.

The Joker would become a consistent foe for decades to come, similarly living longer than he ought to and surviving things like adamantium claws.

The 80′s took Logan to Japan, where he would fight the League of Assassins for the first time, and have a romance or two. The 90′s, coming with an influx of mutants that society could no longer ignore, had him come out as a mutant too, in order to immediately establish the Leslie Kafka Institute for Mutant Education and Outreach, drawing an immediate line in the sand against the reactionary Friends of Humanity and other paramilitary orgs that preyed on mutantkind.

It was also a time that brought him his first sidekick, Jubilee, codename Sparrow. She would assist him for several years until the Joker killed her Jason Todd style. Logan tried to murder him then, though at that point, he hadn’t figured out how to kill anyone with a healing factor.

The standing rule from then on was “no sidekicks; no one else dies,” which would last from 1999 to 2010.

The year of this fluff is 2005, and Logan was puzzled and annoyed at the idea that any organization could have been ruling New Gotham they way the Court of Ravens claimed to without his knowing. It plays out mostly like Court of Owls, with added exposition for my setting’s benefit, and Wolverine style violence mixed in.

2009 brought the Near Apocalypse, perpetrated by Ra’s al-Pocalypse, risen again. Ra’s’ reasoning was that humans needed to end en masse, giving way to the true stewards of the planet, mutantkind. Logan heartily disagreed, as did an assortment of other heroes, and that’s why it became the Near Apocalypse.

2010 brought the second Sparrow in the form of Kitty Grayson, a phasing metamutant that had lost her family in a circus accident. She convinced a grudging Logan to take her on, the reasoning being that her phasing ability made her effectively untouchable, unkidnappable, and that he wouldn’t be able to stop her from visiting the Claw Cave anyway.

Ra’s’ back up plan came to light as well. The lead agent of the League of Assassins, Talon, came into her own. Initially mute, save for growling, Cassandra Kinney came at Dark Claw with everything she had, “everything” being an exact duplication of his powers and adamantium claws. She proved too resourceful for Dark Claw alone, but as mentioned, he was not alone. Sparrow provided him backup, and Logan ended up offering Talon help in the form of extensive therapy from Leslie Kafka and a spot in the Dark Claw Family.

Jubilee hadn’t stayed dead. She rose again on a full moon in 2000, becoming the independent hero Moonwing, and moving to Bludhaven to strike out on her own.

There’s a lot more, and an entire decade to explore for just a few characters since, but this is already long

The Marvel Universe RPG

The MURPG is a diceless system from 2003. It uses an energy resource pool and is entirely effort based, which I think is super cool!

One of the biggest problems is the “death spiral.” Your effort is diminished when you take damage, which sounds like a good idea until you realize that epic comic book style fights don’t tend to peak at the first punch and go entirely downhill from there. There are two ways around this that sound reasonable enough--

Second Wind

Taking one turn in which your character does not spend any energy (red stones), that character gets double energy regeneration the following turn.

I like this one because it can represent down time, like if you get beat up and the villain is monologuing. How often has a hero been hoisted by their shirt, blood on their lips, only to smirk and point out exactly what the villain has missed? I think even with energy regen tied to Durability, accruing additional energy while you’re beat up and climbing to a standing position (for instance) is very thematic.

Energy Independence

A lot of homebrew fixes just divorce red stone regen from health altogether, which works to form a more “whole-hearted” combat experience. This feels more like what you’d be playing like in other tabletop rpgs, where you can take plenty of damage and still swing for the fences.

In either case, it’s not called “the death spiral” because it was a walk in the park. Using any method to make player characters more survivable and feel like superheroes is encouraged, but don’t neglect a sense of danger.

#murpg #amalgam comics

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internutter · 5 years

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Challenge #02256-F066: First to Aid

Have fun and do your thing :-) -- Anon Guest

#instant story #just add prompt #amalgam universe #frontiers #humans are tough

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gravityshifterscouplescounseling · 7 years

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Hostages First, Hoagies Later: A Wolfpack Short Story

[February 14, 2538

1357 hours

Hoppe City fuck-shit city in the middle of nowhere

Colony of Lumesc boring-ass planet in the middle of nowhere]

Oni hated rebels.

Not the leather-clad, chain-wallet-loving, “anarchy is a valid system of governance; no it’s not a phase, mom!” kind of rebels. No, she hated militant rebels – the kind who ran around the galaxy, claiming their own worlds away from the ORG, and then shat them up. Things would be fine if they just stayed there, on their own shitty little worlds, but they didn’t. They never did. Those “enlightened few” who’d split and gone their own way always ended up coming back, usually with big ships and even bigger guns.

And sometimes when they came back, they stormed a super-important government building in a super-important political colony and tried to take hostage a super-important ORG diplomat, failed to get past his office’s reinforced Olympium door, and resorted to taking several office drones who worked for said super-important ORG diplomat hostage instead. And when that happened, somebody usually ended up spending several hours on a rooftop, lying on her stomach and spying on those damn, dirty rebels in the building across the street as they went around waving their big guns and scaring those helpless little office drones.

That “somebody” just happened to be Oni.

“Rebels suck.”

“Eloquent as always, Oni,” Rick said, eyes never leaving his target.

Oni shifted her weight and smirked. “Damn right I am.”

Rick’s finger tightened on the trigger. He adjusted his angle and pulled. “He’s down.”

“Ooh hoo-hoo, they’re not gonna like that!”

“They’ll be dead before they get to that point.”

Oni turned to her rooftop buddy, amusement and surprise on her face in equal measure. “That’s stone-cold, man.”

Rick shrugged. “Just a fact.”

“Gimme the truth: am I rubbing off on you? ‘Cuz that’s totally something I’d say.”

“If you are, I hope there’s a medication for it.”

“There’s no cure for fun, Prickly Ricky.”

In the building across the street, a few floors below where they stood, a man in worn, pitch-black armor rushed to his headless comrade’s side and knelt by him, an endless stream of babble Oni didn’t care to decode pouring from his mouth. He grabbed one of the hostages, a woman with all the bells and whistles of a secretary, and dragged her to her feet by her hair, gun pressed to her cheek. She cried and cried as he barked and barked, and Oni was trying to count in her head exactly how many times she’d seen that scene play out. Had to be in the hundreds by now.

Rick aimed again and fired. “Got him.”

Oni got up, wiping her hands off on her thighs. “We should move. They’re getting antsy and so am I.”

Rick stood with her and nodded. He reached into his pocket and came out with two identical gadgets, square-shaped and palm-sized. One he put on the roof’s metal lip, and the second he put on his forearm where it stuck thanks to the unexplainable power of magnetism. He aimed again at the same window, his arm that time instead of his gun, using his wrist like a sight. The rods sticking out of his shoulder pads hissed and sparked until a blue-white electric charge burst to life in between them. Oni’s face tickled. She put her helmet on.

The charge reached its climax within seconds and was gone faster than it had appeared, a popping sound and a smoky smell the only signs it had ever been there. The little gadget on Rick’s wrist was gone, too. Oni spotted it down by the rebels’ bodies, stuck to a steel pillar among little cubicles. Rick stood himself on the roof’s lip.

“Why don’t you ever just, oh, I dunno, jump across?” Oni said.

“If I did that, what would be the point of all this then?” he said with motions to the gear and gizmos strapped all over his armor.

“Oh, sure, invent stuff that’ll get you out of a little exercise, but when I ask for something it’s ‘too impractical.’”

“No, not impractical. Counterintuitive. Because it’s counterintuitive to die on the job. Now,” he gestured at the wide gap between both buildings, “ladies first.”

Oni smirked slyly. “Exactly what I was thinking.”

Then she pushed him off the edge.

Rick rolled with it, figuratively speaking, and stuck his hand out. The magnets in his gauntlet caught onto the magnetic zip line and he slid down and across the street. He swung feet-first through the broken window. Not a second later, his rifle’s familiar takk-takk-takks echoed through the city blocks.

Oni ran her eyes across the room until they settled on where the rebels were concentrated most. It was near the front of the room, where they hunkered down behind the row of cubicles nearest the elevator. There had to be almost a dozen there. She couldn’t really tell from her position. They spread themselves down the aisle and didn’t budge an inch as they returned Rick’s fire. Maybe that was their escape route.

She had to roll her eyes. Didn’t these guys know the first thing about fire safety?

Oni stepped a good few meters back, then covered that distance again in two long, sprinting steps and gave a double-booted kick at the edge of the roof. For a second, she was flying.

Then she was crashing.

Then rolling.

Then she handsprung and rocketed her feet into the face of some hapless mook and his brains blew out the back of his skull.

She landed low and swept a pair of stubby legs out from an equally stubby woman and drove her fist through her solar plexus before she hit the ground.

The human mind can interpret an image in 13 milliseconds, fast enough to process a picture before one can blink – still too slow to catch a sight of Oni. When she slowed she was still a mere blur of red and blue, a gale of razor wind that tore through flesh and bone with a mere flick of the hand. By the time the rebels had processed her presence, she was elbow-deep in her seventh victim’s chest.

Bullets flew her way. Most of them tore away at the mook she wore for a glove. She tossed him at a rebel nearest a window and they both took the short way down. Four left.

As the saying goes, they put all their bullets in one basket, so when they ran dry there was nobody to cover the rest their reload. An empty magazine fell out of its grip.

Oni covered the distance. Jumped. Kicked one neck, then another.

Grounded now – fed her momentum into a reverse roundhouse. Finished with a hook.

The magazine clattered as it hit the ground.

Two necks, one jaw, and an entire skull shattered in what seemed like the same instant. The bodies flew far.

Oni had a line about broken bones and flying pigs ready but the familiar click of a handgun’s hammer pulling back stopped her. She turned unamused.

The scrappiest of the rebels held his gun to her head with all the confidence of a newborn puppy in the face of a thunderstorm. Every inch of him shook, hands most of all, his face an unconvincing mask of bravado. Oni swore she’d seen the same one, albeit more sincere, on the lead of one of last year’s action blockbuster flops.

The muzzle flashed, fire and smoke blooming like a rose. That wasn’t just artful simile either. Every moment lasted ages. Particles of light exploded before her eyes – a split-second instant that stretched on and on in her head. It was maddening, like she really were watching a plant grow, because it left her alone with her thoughts. Might as well think of something fun.

Like deciding on what would make her look more intimidating: dodging the bullet or letting it bounce off her visor. She came to a decision around the time the round started poking out of the muzzle.

The bullet that hit her at over three times the speed of sound was of a caliber frequently used in anti-armor small arms. Many Hydra tanks had fallen to just a handful of well-coordinated fighters armed with them. Enough concentrated fire with the stuff could tear through a freighter’s hull and get at the squishy humans inside. It was the leading reason Iron Inquisitors never stopped looking to improve their magnetic shield generators.

And it crumpled like a tin can against Oni’s armored brow.

She watched it bounce on the floor and roll to a stop against her foot, then looked at him – arms crossed, hip cocked, the universal stance for silently saying, “Really, dude?”

His mask slipped and fell. He shouted – wailed, really – as he fired until his pistol’s slide slid back. Through the tears in his eyes, he couldn’t see how his rounds disappeared before they could hit home.

Oni gave him a few seconds to collect himself before raising her hands to either side of her face and spreading her fingers. In the little spaces between was every last bullet he’d fired. She grinned widely.

He broke all over again.

An ear-piercing cry stabbed at the air as he tossed his gun her way and ran for the elevator.

“Hey,” Oni shouted, “aren’t you forgetting something?”

She threw his bullets back at him. The wailing stopped.

“Oh, man! Dude looks like I took ol’ Queenie to him,” Oni said, patting the shotgun magnetically stuck to her back. “Nasty.”

One last gunshot echoed through the room and then the only noise was the panicked breaths and whines of terrified office drones.

“That everyone?”

“That’s everyone,” Rick said from across a sea of cubicles.

“Good. Get the door so we can get outta here. It’s Valentine’s Day and you know what that means.”

“Is that the only reason you brought me here – to get the door instead of, you know, defusing the bomb in the basement?”

A wave of gasps and exclamations destroyed the quietly fearful atmosphere Oni’d been enjoying. She rolled her eyes, pulled her magnum out, and fired once into the ceiling.

The sound was like an explosion going off. Oni didn’t even notice the recoil but its sheer force still cracked the ground beneath her feet. There was total silence.

“Relax, you buncha worry-warts. We’ve got someone on it.”

Sam was no bomb disposer.

Her skillset was varied, wide as an ocean and just as deep. She could cleave through an enemy frontline as easily as she could recall the intricate cultural proceedings of Kah’Eel marriage ceremonies; speak hundreds of languages with perfect fluency and care for just as many species of wildlife no matter their planet of origin. But explosives and electronics were why they had Rick.

She supposed that was why complacency was so dangerous. If there was one lesson that had carried over from her childhood days as a hard-working farm girl, that was it. Idle hands and all that.

But she didn’t allow herself a modicum of doubt. Rick had left her with a document of detailed instructions to access from her heads-up display, and if she really needed the extra help she could always patch him. Those reassurances kept her mind clear and her steps steady.

The building’s power had been cut off. That wasn’t an issue on the higher levels, where every wall was a glass window that let in the bright midday sun, but underground there were no such things.

The staircase leading to the basement was dark enough that Sam imagined she wouldn’t be able to see her own hands an inch from her face if her eyes hadn’t been genetically augmented to see in the dark. If the rebels really were as ill-equipped as they suspected, they would have to rely on flashlights down there where it was darker. That made them easier targets and her – clad in pitch-black armor that lent itself well to the shadows cast by ceiling-high hills of office equipment – a nightmare come to life.

She reached the automated double doors leading into the basement, although the power outage meant their emergency systems had kicked in and left them wide open. Just a few feet beyond was a desk before a wall, and an entryway on either side. Washes of light shone from both.

They didn’t move much and, judging by the way they streamed and splashed against the walls, were facing away from her. She took the left entrance and slipped inside.

Sam spotted four men idling about before crouching behind a chest-high machine she didn’t recognize. Their theory had been correct. The rebels only had primitive flashlights to work with, and they each carried one. Two of them stood across from each other, a row of what looked to be 3D printers in between them, nearest the entrance and her, and two more stood near the exit in the same configuration. More walls stood on either side, dividing the room into thirds. Her plan of attack formed and finalized within seconds.

She gave the ground a hard knock and unsheathed a short, hooked blade. Feet shuffled, a wary conversation between the men beginning.

“What was that?”

“Something fell off a shelf, probably.”

“‘Fell off a shelf,’ my ass. Go check that out.”

“Why me? Why’s it always gotta be me?”

“You’re closest. Don’t argue just this once and go check it out!”

“Fine, fine…”

His grumblings and footsteps got closer until a boot landed an inch away from Sam’s hand. She gripped her knife tight. Before he could take another step, he yelped and tripped on torn ankle tendons.

The pain, she imagined, kept him from breaking his fall. He landed on his stomach, winded, and Sam pounced, planting her forearm against his neck while her other hand jabbed the knife through the back of his skull. Not a whisper came out of him.

More feet-shuffling. “Hey, man, you okay? You need a hand up or something—?”

Sam was up, cartwheeling over the printer. The rebel’s flashlight turned on her and its light shone off the long blade sticking out of her boot-heel. She stuck the landing. And his eye.

Before his body hit the ground she threw two knives from the same hand. They hilted in the temples of the last couple of fumbling rebels.

No flashes of light came from the other two-thirds of the room so she didn’t crawl around as she took back her throwing knives and moved on.

At the left of the room were more doors and another staircase leading only down, which she took three at a time and ended up in an entryway leading into a much larger, more populated floor. She took cover behind the doorway.

Most of the equipment had been pushed to the sides, leaving much of its middle empty space and stone pillars. Eight men patrolled the place – four along the outside diameter, four on the inside – and one stood in the center of it all by a big, bulky, blinking machine. The bomb. She recognized that much. Another plan started forming.

Barring those thin stone pillars, there was nowhere to hide, and those wide swathes of light could easily cover every inch of the room if properly coordinated. But they weren’t. The patrollers moved in very predictable patterns, leaving her with ample space to move through undetected. It didn’t take long for her to figure them out. She took a blade in each hand, one for slashing and the other for piercing, waited, and took her chance the second it came.

The first to fall was a rebel patrolling near the doorway. She caught him through the back of the head, as mundane an act as picking ice, and was slitting another’s throat before his body fell. A third took her blade through the brainstem.

Faster footsteps than usual signaled an irregularity in their pattern. She took a small knife, followed the noise, and threw. Four down.

That left the four forming the innermost patrol diameter. The falling bodies had them spooked and aiming their weapons haphazardly.

Terrified whimpers turned into gurgles through mouthfuls of blood once, twice, then a third time. The last man didn’t whimper, his nerves stronger than most, but not his arteries. They ruptured all the same.

The last one standing, the bomber himself, looked ready to fall, shaking in his boots. He babbled strings of meaningless words and almost hugged his gun to his chest. Time to make herself known.

Sam stepped out of the shadows and into his light. Her armor slipped from black to a dark, snakelike green in the brightness and her helmet fell away. She wanted him to see her face.

His gun homed in on her chest immediately.

“S-stay back, b-bitch!” His voice was barely audible, his knees knocked so much.

Sam took a step forward.

He jumped away, one hand reaching shakily behind his back before raising it over his head, a detonator in hand. “I-I’m serious! Do anything funny and I’ll blow us all to shit!” His voice seemed to have gained the barest hint of confidence with his contingency.

How cute.

Sam took another step. “What a curious contradiction it is,” she said in a voice of honey and ice, “to trust a man desperate to live with a dead man’s switch.” Her grin shone in the light, predatory, hungry. “I think I’ll call your bluff.”

His hands shook even harder, gun muzzle swaying and pointing at everything but her. “It ain’t no b-bluff, bitch. I d-die, we all d-die!”

Sam’s eyes narrowed but her grin got bigger. “Oh, was that a Freudian slip I just heard?”

“W-what?”

“‘It ain’t no bluff.’ Isn’t that what you said? That’s a double negative, meaning that it is a bluff. You’re afraid to die. You’re not even holding the trigger.”

The bomber’s brave façade fell, but his trembling fingers wrapped around the trigger all the same. A tell-tale click said it all. “Ain’t a bluff…” he more whispered to himself than told her.

Sam sighed and curled her index finger. “In that case, be sure to hold on as tight as you can. We wouldn’t want a little high-yield mishap on our hands, would we?”

“What are you on about—?”

He hadn’t seen it until it was too late, glinting in the light as it tightened around his wrist.

For all intents and purposes, monomolecular wire was another science-fiction invention that worked better on paper than in reality. It was simply too thin to have proper tensile strength, no matter the material it was composed of. That was, until Olympium, the “metal of myth,” had been discovered and made the impractical an everyday reality. Smith an Olympium blade and one has the power to cut anything. Forge Olympium armor and the wearer will live in comfort knowing nothing can ever hurt them again. Make Olympium bullets and see one’s enemies fall in droves.

Or so the myth goes. It had surpassed all the tests, in any case. And with flying colors.

But in that moment, the only flying color was crimson, spewing from the bomber’s wrist and staining the basement floor. A puddle formed around his disembodied hand, detonator still tight in its grip.

He screamed loud enough Sam had no doubt Oni and Rick could hear it all the way up on the twentieth floor and long enough that he went pale in the face. Although that could just be blood loss.

Sam extended her hand, the little slot under her wrist housing the wires barely visible to even augmented eyes, and curled the rest of her fingers in. More wire wrapped around his body, invisible but surely there.

And they tightened – tighter and tighter until blood seeped out of the many miniscule cuts in his armor. He only cried louder.

They reached bone and that went too, like butter baking on a hot summer afternoon.

There was a shing sound and then nothing else. Just quiet. The wires formed a blood-covered web where the bomber used to be. His pieces were perfectly proportioned, at the least.

The wires untangled and slinked back into their slot.

Sam didn’t spare a second and moved on to the bomb, helmet back in place.

It was big, its shape reminding her of one of those ancient photocopiers. Its only interface was a touch-based display, but she knew that with the trigger primed, the whole thing was locked down and ready to blow. She needed to find the metaphorical red wire if she was to stop it at that point.

Her knife of choice for the situation was long and thin and she jammed it into the tiny gap between the interface and the machine’s chassis. She pushed on one side of the handle until the metal creaked, groaned, and gave away under the pressure. It popped off, leaving her looking at circuit boards and wires of only one color: beige.

Sam gulped. She consulted Rick’s document.

“Welcome to The Statist’s Guide for Quelling Anarchy Volume I: Explosives and Riot Control,” a woman’s too-bubbly voice began.

Sam wasn’t so sure she wanted to defuse the bomb anymore if it meant dealing with…that.

“In this volume, we’ll be going over the proper procedures for defusing the most common improvised and black-market explosives in use by modern rebel cells, as well as how to properly suppress riots and peaceful protest—” a sudden burst of electric screeching nearly took out Sam’s hearing, “—riots.”

Sam gulped harder.

“You see why I brought you along now?”

“Okay, I’ll admit, it was warranted,” Rick said as he attached one of his many machines to the electronic lock beside the foot-thick, reinforced Olympium door the super-important ORG diplomat cowered behind.

“Damn right it was. These politician fucks are so paranoid the shit they spew makes your ‘liquid anthrax water poisoning’ theory look plausible by comparison.”

“There’s anthrax in the water?” came the panicked voice of the ORG official from the speaker atop the door.

“Oh, sure. Gallons of the stuff. You wouldn’t happen to have drank any in, say, the past month, have you?”

“Oh, sweet merciful…I have!”

Oni shook her head and tsk-tsked. “Shame. See, that’s why I stick to healthier alternatives, like soda and sweet mead.”

“Yeah, and you’d have diabetes if your immune system weren’t so strong.”

“Details, details.”

As Rick dealt with the door, Oni turned to check their evacuation’s progress.

Icarus, the team’s personal dropship, had been brought down and leveled with the window Rick’d broken through, boarding ramp extended to allow the office drones relatively safe passage onboard. She said “relatively” because without Sam at the helm, Icarus had a nasty habit of swaying with the wind. The ol’ boy just didn’t respond to anyone as well as it did to her. Still, better than sticking around where potential rebel reinforcements could get at them. She trusted Sergei would get them all, but there was always the possibility they’d use their heads for once and find a way to sneak inside.

The dropship was only meant for small teams like their five-man band, so the drones had to press together to fit inside the troop bay. Most of them were already inside, ushered in by Recon, who’d retreated into the cockpit before the mass of office workers could prevent him from doing so, leaving them to help each other instead.

It looked like there’d be enough room, which she was thankful for. Babysitting wasn’t her department.

Rick’s lock-picking gizmo beeped, something in the door clicked, and then it receded into the doorway and slid aside.

A slight, meek little man stood on the other side, glasses round and thick, looking like he were one spook away from a heart attack. He jumped when their gazes fell on him, sweat flying off his face. “O-oh. You really are ‘b-breakers.” He looked between them, but his eyes returned to Oni. “I th-think?”

Oni’s eye twitched and an all-too-familiar pain in her temple flared up. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

For such a timid man, he sure had the balls to ignore her obvious irritation and say, “Well, you, in particular, are a bit, um, shorter than I imagined…”

Rick face-palmed.

Oni was quiet for a short moment that felt like a long one. Her vision grew an angry red, sound drowning out until she could only hear his words playing on repeat in her head. The pain grew. Her head twitched.

“Um,” said the government shit-heel, “are you alright?”

Oni snapped out of it. “Oh, yeah, fine. Just measuring, y’know?”

“Measuring?”

“Yeah, measuring.” She took her hand, in knife-hand form, and lined it up with his kneecaps. “Y’know what they say: measure twice—” she pulled her hand back, “—cut once!”

She swung fast enough to cut clean through solid steel.

Rick caught her wrist. “Stop that.”

Their speed had rendered their movements invisible. The little shit didn’t even know he’d almost had his legs chopped in half. “Um. Yes. They do say that, don’t they?”

Her next attack was much more visible – an angry, sloppy punch that Rick didn’t have to predict to catch. The shit-heel jumped again.

Rick pulled Oni in against him as she thrashed and snarled, shouting expletives in between gnashing her teeth. He stepped aside with her in tow and motioned for the shit to get out while he still could.

The diplomatic shit didn’t have to be told twice.

“Sorry,” Rick said as he passed. “It’s just teenage angst. She barely turned the big 1-3 not even two weeks ago. I think the new responsibilities are getting to her.”

The shit swallowed, color draining from his face. “13? Sh-she’s only 13?”

“Oh, yeah. Youngest of us by a whole two years. Gets to her almost as bad as the height thing. You might want to get going.”

Oni’s hand slipped from Rick’s grasp and reached for the official shit’s throat, stopped only an inch away when Rick managed to slip his arm under hers. The little shit looked ready to faint.

Good. It’d make it easier for her.

He didn’t even say goodbye before running off for Icarus, the rude shit.

Rick held her until the dropship had taken off, a mere dot in the distance.

Oni had calmed a little, although steam still streamed from her ears, face a darker shade than usual. “On my shit-list, motherfucker,” she said over and over like a mantra.

Her head snapped in Rick’s direction. “What’s his name?”

Rick feigned ignorance the best he could, which was still piss-poor. “I can’t recall.”

“Oh, that so?”

“That is indeed so.”

“Well, guess you’re barred from this year’s Valentine’s Day dinner, asshole.”

“You can’t do that.”

“Ha. Sure I can. I’m the leader, motherfucker!”

“But I’m the one who always pays.”

“Guess that’ll be me this year then.”

“With what money?”

The truth of the matter hit her harder than she’d ever been hit – and she’d taken a railgun to the gut. “Fuck!”

They’d shared no words on the way down, but that didn’t mean Oni was quiet. She’d muttered to herself about betrayal and all the bad things she’d do to Shitheel McFuck when she found him. For a few minutes it looked like she’d end up working herself into another frenzy until they went out the building’s front doors and reunited with Sam. The redhead had a way of soothing Oni with her presence alone.

“Heya, Sammy! You get the bomb alright?”

Sam smiled and rubbed soot off her forehead. “Oh, yes, everything went fine. Although that…‘guide’ wasn’t as clear-cut as I’d have liked.”

Oni shot Rick yet another dirty look. “Yeah. Egghead over there’s been making a nasty habit of being unhelpful lately.”

Rick rolled his eyes. Oni stuck her tongue out at him.

“Real mature,” he mouthed.

“Fuck you,” she shouted back.

Before any sudden awkwardness could settle in, Sergei, the eight-foot wall of grade-A Russian meat and muscle, stomped onto the scene. Good ol’ Sergei. Could always count on him to come in at the right time.

He grunted.

“Really? Only one convoy?” Sam said. “I expected more from them.”

“That bomb was probably the best they could do,” Rick said.

Oni shrugged. “Well, if that’s the case, we’re free to go, right? Cops’ll pick it up at some point—wait. You guys hear that?”

Everyone stood still and listened.

The unmistakable sounds of a monster engine and gravel-chewing tires tearing down the road were loud and clear. And they grew closer.

A couple blocks down the street, a Trojan troop carrier turned the corner and didn’t slow down. The steel behemoth had been painted the rebel colors of black, gray, and red, its three-ton bulk gunning for them faster than any sports car. The van-semi hybrid was known to smash through entire meters of steel barricades without slowing down. Its horn roared and it breathed smoke that looked like it could single-handedly destroy the ozone layer.

Oni swept her hand out in its direction. “Big guy, if you would…”

Sergei grunted and stomped forward. He could’ve used his massive metal axe to stop the vehicle, or maybe his mini-gun to rip it to shreds, but sometimes a man just has to feel something crunch under his fist.

His fingers curled, he wound back, and, when the time came, brought his fist up and then down on the Trojan’s hood.

The entire front disappeared, just like that, into chunks and fragments of metal. The entire thing flipped forward, over his head, and at the speed it was going it kept flipping and flying until it landed well behind where they stood, its roof scraping against the street and spitting sparks. It whined until it stopped an entire three blocks over.

The team waited for any survivors to get out and they almost decided that nothing would come of it until the back doors exploded off their hinges.

A man stepped out, clad in the skeletonized remains of a Nandi exo-suit. One of the older models, it seemed. He clanked his metal fists together and shook his head, getting himself hyped to fight.

He turned to the team, glaring. Not happy to see them, Oni guessed. Couldn’t blame him. If she had to compensate by wearing ORG hand-me-downs she might just be pissed at the world too.

He crouched and took hold of the Trojan by the end of its roof. He bellowed, lifted, and kept lifting until he could hoist the thing up over his head. He shouted again, spitting and red-faced.

Oni yawned. Rick checked his watch. Sam looked her nails over.

The metal madman reared back, and then tossed the vehicle their way with enough force to rise a few stories before it fell. Its shadow grew until they were all covered in it.

Rick looked through his pouches until he found just what he was looking for: a little disk-looking thing that glowed red on its inside diameter, fitting snugly in the palm of his hand. He tossed it at the transport and it stuck to the surface. It beeped.

The explosion swallowed the Trojan whole. Its heat was overbearing and turned the nearby street to tar. Any metal that flew off burned to molten slag before it could land. In the seconds it took to near them, its body burned until it was nothing more than harmless kindling, and then ash. And the flames died as soon as they appeared.

Then silence.

The team looked at the rebel expectantly.

He was too stunned to do more than gape.

Oni drew her magnum, Rick and Sam their rifles, and Sergei his mini-gun. And they fired.

His body jerked, their rounds chewing through his outdated armor as easily as they would through any of the more modern tech. Pockets of blood exploded from his body. Bullet casings flew and clattered at their feet.

They only stopped when they ran out of ammo. He wasn’t anything worth burying by then.

Oni took her smoking gun and blew the smoke from its barrel. “Okay. I’m in a good mood again.”

Sam smiled. “Well, that’s good to hear, Kit.”

“Yeah,” Rick agreed. “I wouldn’t want to get kicked under the table the whole time I’m trying to eat.”

“Speaking of which, have we decided on the place?”

“I could go for some Chinese.”

Oni scrunched her nose. “No. Ew. Plenty of sweet; not enough meat. I’m thinking good ol’ Texan cuisine instead.”

“Just like last year.”

“And the year before that,” Sam added.

“Alright, what do you want then, Sammy?”

“I could go for anything you three decide, really.”

“That’s not an answer!”

Sergei grunted.

Everyone else paused. Then, in perfect unison, started gagging.

Sergei sniffed. Philistines, the lot of them.

#my writing #Project Wolfpack

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thisdaynews · 4 years

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How Buttigieg's childhood pal ended up managing 2020's breakout campaign

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/how-buttigiegs-childhood-pal-ended-up-managing-2020s-breakout-campaign/

How Buttigieg's childhood pal ended up managing 2020's breakout campaign

Mike Schmuhl, the Buttigieg campaign manager, has never worked for a candidate outside Indiana. | Lyndon French/POLITICO

Before the Democratic presidential debate in Columbus, Ohio, Mike Schmuhl ventured into the city to get his mop of red hair cut. It wasn’t so much that Schmuhl needed a trim — but Pete Buttigieg’s campaign manager wanted to make sure the barbershop was up to the task of a presidential shave.

Thirty minutes later, after the Royal Rhino Club Barbershop & Lounge passed muster and Schmuhl made an appointment under the name “Max Harris,” another aide who got his hair trimmed, Buttigieg appeared for a fresh predebate cut.

It’s not the type of assignment you’d normally associate with the most prestigious job in politics.

But Schmuhl — an even-keeled, attention-deflecting 36-year-old prone to telling staffers up and down the org chart that they have “the most critical” job on the campaign — has taken an unconventional path into presidential campaign management. Schmuhl has never staffed a statewide or national political run, unlike most other presidential campaign managers. The biggest campaign he managed before taking charge of Buttigieg’s presidential bid is a House race. In fact, he’s never before worked for a candidate outside Indiana. When he briefly lived in Washington, D.C., he worked at The Washington Post, not on Capitol Hill. He’s not on Twitter.

“I’ve worked for Pete, for Joe Donnelly, for Mel Hall, for Shelli Yoder,” Schmuhl said, rattling off the names of Indiana congressional candidates. “It just so happens that one of them is running for president, and honestly, if one of them wasn’t, I wouldn’t be doing this. And it just so happens the one I know the best, the one I’ve known for the longest time, is the one who is running.”

That is Schmuhl’s greatest qualification for shepherding the $50 million startup that is this long shot-turned-frontrunning campaign: He’s the Buttigieg whisperer — the childhood friend who has one of the biggest jobs in the 2020 primary. Schmuhl’s résumé is modest for his position — something he shares with his boss, who’s running for president at 37.

Schmuhl, who managed Buttigieg’s 2011 South Bend, Ind., mayoral run and became his first chief of staff, and Buttigieg, who is deeply involved in his own political strategy, share a shorthand that aides and former staffers likened to a secret language — a depth of trust that you only “have with somebody you’ve known for so long,” Buttigieg said in an interview.

Occasionally, Buttigieg and Schmuhl will literally communicate in another language, dipping seamlessly into French when they want to speak privately in a car packed with other people.

Schmuhl, Buttigieg continued, “shares a lot of my instincts, but can also press or nudge me when I’m kind of veering off where I need to be. … He uniquely understands both my story and my city’s story, and those two things are so important to each other and they’re so important to this campaign.”

Trust with the candidate is “the most important part of the job” of campaign manager, but another “important part is being the truth-teller,” said Jim Messina, who managed President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign. But “that’s the challenge with friends. Are they able to have those tough conversations?”

‘Some catching up to do’

Schmuhl isn’t a familiar face on the national political scene, but at a union hall in South Bend on a chilly fall night, everyone knows him. Schmuhl cataloged nearly all of the people attending a vote for the St. Joseph County Democratic Party chairman: a state representative here, a city councilman in that corner, former Sen. Joe Donnelly’s wife over there, the former fire chief stopping by for a hug.

“This is a good test for me,” Schmuhl joked.

It’s been a year of tests. Buttigieg rocketed into the group of contenders for the Democratic nomination earlier this year thanks to a flair for composed answers with a knack for going viral to interviewers’ questions, among other raw political talents. Whatever his flaws, which rival candidates are now litigating daily on the campaign trail, Buttigieg was ready to seize the opportunity. That left Schmuhl scrambling to keep up with his friend, as the campaign rapidly multiplied in size and attracted scrutiny.

In a few months, Buttigieg’s email list grew from 24,000 people to over 1 million, the campaign headquarters expanded from one room with donated furniture and WiFi hotspots to 60 offices throughout the country, and the payroll has grown to over 500 staffers from just a handful in January.

But the process has not been one smooth upward line, and some of the missteps along the way exposed the campaign’s inexperience, starting with Buttigieg and Schmuhl.

Buttigieg, who has struggled to gain traction among African American voters, was painfully slow to get organized in South Carolina — an early problem that has become a recurring negative theme on the trail. His campaign later stumbled over releasing a list of disputed endorsements of Buttigieg’s Douglass Plan, a policy proposal that targets systemic racism, and the use of a stock image of a Kenyan woman.

In October, the campaign cut ties with donor Steve Patton, a Chicago lawyer who tried to block the release of footage of the 2014 police shooting of Laquan McDonald, sparking a warning from David Axelrod, Obama’s former chief campaign strategist, to “hire one more” staffer and “put them on vetting.”

“There were some glaring missteps by the campaign, especially as it relates to the most reliable voting bloc in the Democratic primary,” said J.A. Moore, a South Carolina state representative. “Our politics in South Carolina is all about relationships, and they are new.”

Schmuhl acknowledged that it’s “fair to say we had some catching up to do.” But, he said, “we literally came from almost nothing to where we are now, so it just took a little bit of a lag time getting there.”

It became clear by June — after Buttigieg blew past senators and governors in fundraising and early polling — that Schmuhl had too much on his plate. He had nearly 20 people reporting directly to him, and “that was unsustainable,” he said.

Schmuhl brought on reinforcements, building a campaign staff, 40 percent of whom are people of color, and filling out the senior team with seasoned hands with far thicker résumés than his own, including Larry Grisolano, a messaging consultant who worked on Obama’s presidential runs; Jess O’Connell, former CEO of the Democratic National Committee; Brandon Neal, former DNC political director; Hari Sevugan, another Obama alumnus and an experienced Democratic strategist; and Michael Halle, who played a key role in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and managed Democrats’ gubernatorial campaign in Ohio in 2018.

“The folks [Schmuhl] brought in, clearly more experienced than him, clearly very smart, talented people, but he’s confident enough to bring them in,” said Jeff Link, an Iowa-based Democratic consultant who’s unaffiliated in the primary. “He’s not trying to keep out smart people who might challenge him.”

Schmuhl freely admits to the imbalance. “The two folks on the campaign who don’t have modern presidential campaign experience are me and Pete,” he said. “I’m pretty up front with people about what I don’t know.”

On David Plouffe’s podcast, “Campaign HQ,” Schmuhl talked to Obama’s former campaign manager about mitigating that experience shortage by bringing “together people who can specialize in their areas so you don’t have to.”

‘The guy knows how to keep you on edge’

Schmuhl isn’t outside the norm as a longtime loyalist managing a 2020 presidential campaign. Roger Lau has been in Elizabeth Warren’s orbit for nearly a decade, helping steer her to victory in both of her Senate races. Greg Schultz served as Joe Biden’s senior political adviser during his second term as vice president. Justin Buoen took his first job on Amy Klobuchar’s first Senate campaign in 2006, sticking with her ever since.

But Schmuhl and Buttigieg’s relationship stretches back much further than most.

They first met when Schmuhl was in eighth grade: Buttigieg, then a ninth grader, led him on a tour of St. Joseph High School in South Bend. Their fathers both taught at the University of Notre Dame and knew each other, but the boys hadn’t met until Buttigieg helped Schmuhl learn where the cafeteria was. They were both only children, “short, pudgy, shy and bookish,” in Schmuhl’s retelling.

The pair took different paths and stayed in infrequent contact after becoming friends in high school. While Buttigieg left for Harvard University, Schmuhl stayed close to home at Notre Dame before spending three years as a producer and a booker at The Washington Post. But Schmuhl, drawn to political work, got his résumé to then-Rep. Joe Donnelly and returned to South Bend as a field representative in the congressman’s office.

Then in 2010, Donnelly, a Blue Dog Democrat in a red district who voted for Obamacare, faced the prospect of losing reelection. But Donnelly picked Schmuhl, who had never worked on any campaign before, to manage his race because, Donnelly said, he “doesn’t worry about who gets the credit, just the getting it done.” Joel Elliott, Donnelly’s former chief of staff, assigned it to Schmuhl’s “preternaturally calm” disposition.

Donnelly scraped together a narrow 2010 victory. Buttigieg, who ran for Indiana state treasurer, got crushed in the general election. But Buttigieg and Schmuhl kept running into each other on the trail, and in the “aftermath of both races, we started talking about what’s next,” Schmuhl said.

What happened next runs parallel in some ways to the 2020 presidential primary, said Dan Parker, a former Indiana Democratic Party chairman. Buttigieg, then 29, cut through a crowded primary of familiar party leaders to become mayor of South Bend, running an upstart campaign based on the themes of economic revitalization and generational change. And Schmuhl managed it.

“The more I think about it, the more the 2011 primary race for mayor mirrors the kind of campaign they’re running for president right now — a newcomer with an optimistic tone,” Parker said.

Schmuhl became Buttigieg’s chief of staff and did a brief stint as the district Democratic Party chairman, but he left after 1½ years to go to graduate school in Paris. His going-away gift from Buttigieg was a “hand of the king” pin from “Game of Thrones,” which now sits on Schmuhl’s desk in South Bend. “I don’t exactly wear it around,” Schmuhl said, flashing the badge, a symbol of the second in command in the show.

One day while Schmuhl was in France Buttigieg dropped the news that he was gay over Skype. Thinking back on it, Schmuhl, one of the first people Buttigieg told, said he wasn’t “crazy surprised.” He’d always just assumed Buttigieg “didn’t really have time to date or anything — I thought about it that way.” The conversation turned quickly to how Buttigieg would make his sexual orientation public in Indiana.

Schmuhl observed that when Buttigieg drops big news on him, it usually starts out casually.

“‘Hey man, I’m thinking of running for mayor.’ ‘Hey man, I’m going to Afghanistan.’ ‘Hey man, I’m gay.’ ‘Hey man, I want to be DNC chairman.’ ‘Hey man, I think I might run for president,’” Schmuhl said.

“The guy knows how to keep you on edge.”

Building a long-shot campaign

By the fall of 2018, after a few years at the Democratic consulting firm 270 Strategies, Schmuhl returned to South Bend again, this time to lay groundwork for Buttigieg’s presidential campaign alongside Lis Smith, who started serving as a senior adviser to Buttigieg when he ran for Democratic National Committee chairman in 2017.

Smith — a fierce New York-based Democratic operative — admitted that she “didn’t know exactly what to make of [Schmuhl] when we first met because our styles are so different and he likes to sit back and observe,” she said, describing her and Schmuhl as a yin and yang-like force. “We probably had tense moments, but I can count them on two fingers.”

“It’s a little offcast for people who would traditionally run presidential campaigns,” said Jeremy Bird, who served as the Obama reelection campaign’s national field director and hired Schmuhl to work at 270 Strategies, his consulting firm, in 2015. “In a political world where people are often focused on chest bumping, hyperbole and being louder to be heard, Schmuhl is not that. He listens.”

Schmuhl and Smith hashed out Buttigieg’s strategy over beers at the Rusty Knot, a bar in New York’s West Village, and over board games in Buttigieg’s living room in South Bend. “It was hardly a cast of thousands around a big conference room table,” Smith said, calling the early days of the Buttigieg campaign “a pipe dream and a bit fantastical.”

But Buttigieg soon outgrew the small beginnings of his campaign. Sitting in the green room backstage after a mid-March CNN town hall, Schmuhl was approached by a producer with an iPad who said, “I want you to look at something.” The screen showed online engagement during the three-hour broadcast, which featured Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, former Rep. John Delaney and Buttigieg.

“It’s two hours of a completely flat line, and the final 45 minutes, it’s just this —” Schmuhl swept his hand steeply upward. “That was the first kind of inkling something was up.”

While Buttigieg’s fundraising and his attention from voters and the media rose rapidly in the spring, the campaign’s infrastructure was slower to grow in the early states. “It still didn’t seem real then,” said Grant Woodard, a longtime Democratic operative in Iowa, describing some “staff types who thumbed their nose at Buttigieg’s campaign” as it was trying to expand.

A lot of that fell on Schmuhl’s plate, as he sought to build on-the-ground infrastructure and a senior leadership team. “When you throw 450 people into a project in a tight amount of time, it’s a lot of people, it’s a lot of personalities,” said Schmuhl, who admitted to only getting “hot” three times during the presidential race, though he declined to explain further. “There’s going to be quirks.”

Over the summer, when the mayor began to sink in national polling after his early splash, Buttigieg’s top staffers were at odds over coordination between the campaign’s two main offices in South Bend and Chicago. The group was “intractably split over what to do,” said one senior Buttigieg official. “But we were not working well not being in the same place.”

Schmuhl took in the arguments and made the decision: Everything would be in South Bend. Staffers moved soon after.

Buttigieg staffers said Schmuhl is tasked with the hard conversations, often “riding in the car alone with Pete before big events, before debates,” Smith said. “If there’s something that Pete needs to hear, and just one person alone, Mike’s the designated person.”

As Buttigieg faces more heat and pressure, there will be more of those moments. At last week’s Democratic debate, Amy Klobuchar skewered Buttigieg’s experience, questioning whether a candidate who couldn’t win his state could lead the Democratic ticket against President Donald Trump.

But Schmuhl is aware that anytime someone questions Buttigieg’s experience, the same question applies to him: In the most consequential Democratic primary in recent history, was he prepared to handle the job?

For all the times he’s heard the question, asked or implied, he still struggles with an answer.

“I think that Pete is —” Schmuhl said, breaking off and tearing up over ramen at the Crooked Ewe, a brewery on the banks of the St. Joseph River.

“Pete is somebody who makes people around him better,” Schmuhl went on. “He’s the kind of MVP who makes the whole team better. He makes me better.

“I’ve completely realized that I’m not a traditional campaign manager, and I think the things I’ve done in my life and how well I know Pete, I think we’re a good team and we’re a good package,” Schmuhl continued.

Still, when asked for a moment when he and Buttigieg disagreed — a moment when a friend who also happens to be your campaign manager could deliver a much-needed hard truth — Schmuhl blew out his cheeks and thought for 30 seconds. He declined to share those thoughts.

“I don’t know,” Schmuhl said.

Buttigieg, for his part, reached into a past campaign and described a moment in his 2011 mayoral race when his friend sat him down and said, “I need to know if you want to win this.” Skimping on additional details or conflict, Buttigieg said he and Schmuhl “needed to sharpen a lot of things in the campaign, and we did.”

“And we won.”

#breakout #campaign #Foreign #Politics

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1nebest · 6 years

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The growth of Windows has slowed as Microsoft’s mobile platform goals have faded and the PC market matured. As a result, Microsoft has had to seek new revenue outside of its operating system.

In 2017, as part of that effort to grow, Microsoft announced a new subscription product called Microsoft 365, bringing together Windows, the company’s cloud-centered productivity suite Office 365 and enterprise tooling into a single package.

The introduction of Microsoft 365 presaged the company’s re-organization which, to quote CNBC, “rebuilt the company around the cloud instead of Windows.” This seems reasonable; if Windows isn’t going to return to growth, other services have to keep adding top line revenue. Microsoft’s evolution to a cloud-powered, services-focused company is therefore set to continue.

In the pursuit of new, non-Windows top line, Microsoft wagered that it could expand its “commercial cloud” revenue to a $20 billion run rate by the end of its fiscal 2018. It beat the goal, reaching the $20 billion mark far ahead of the calendar-equivalent date of mid-Summer of this year.

One of those products, Teams, is a component to Office 365 and part of what Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called a “growth opportunity” that is “a lot bigger than anything [his company has] achieved.”

Today we’re going to explore Microsoft’s current actions in one part of the cloud productivity space through the lens of Teams.

Microsoft Teams

Microsoft’s Teams product is a communications tool often compared to Slack. TechCrunch, for example, recently called the software service “Microsoft’s Slack competitor.” ComputerWorld, in a news item earlier this year, wrote that “Microsoft turn[ed] up [the] heat on Slack” when it announced new Teams features.

It goes on and on, allowing us to comfortably hold up Microsoft Teams as Redmond’s answer to Slack, a company famous for its quick growth, impressive mind share and its independent status from any major tech company. That last fact remains true despite rumored acquisition interest from Microsoft itself, along with pretty much every big company in the sector you can name.

To see Microsoft invest in its own tool that competes with Slack isn’t surprising. There is a large market for the product, and Redmond is loath to let any rival service cut in on its productivity revenue.

Therefore, if there is a hot productivity tool in the market and Microsoft isn’t going to buy it, it might as well build one of its own. Unsurprisingly, the company has been hard at work doing just that.

Joining a big company when you are a comparatively small company can be arduous.

News that Teams could release a free version made headlines. Teams also picked up guest access in February, its introduction of Cortana integration made it into mainstream tech publications and this week Microsoft announced new “retention policies” for Teams.

All that and Microsoft bought Teams a friend this year in the form of Chalkup, a collaboration company focused on the education world.

In short, Teams is adding new features while building its org chart and expanding access. All good things, certainly. However, it was not too long ago Microsoft spent quite a lot of money to buy a different, distinct collaboration tool. What happened to it?

Yammer

Microsoft bought Yammer in 2012 for $1.2 billion, building out what TechCrunch called, at the time, its “Social Enterprise Strategy.” And while the Yammer-Microsoft deal was “great news” for the company and its investors, it also marked the beginning of the “tough part” for the newly acquired startup.

Joining a big company when you are a comparatively small company can be arduous. And if you do so when the larger company is undergoing a massive change in leadership (Microsoft hired a new CEO two years after the Yammer deal) and a business model change-up (Microsoft bought Nokia in 2014, also two years after the Yammer deal, before closing that strategic idea out years later), it’s probably even harder to integrate.

Externally, that difficulty showed. Following the Microsoft deal, Yammer search volume grew before stagnating and later slipping. The product was eventually switched on for free for Office 365 customers in early 2016, four years after it was purchased. Office 365 itself launched a half-decade before, making the moment a bit long in the works.

But all that is the past, and, notably, Microsoft is putting more emphasis on Yammer today than it has in recent years. That may feel odd, given what we just went over concerning Teams.

To dig into that, Crunchbase News got Microsoft’s Seth Patton on the phone, who explained the company’s thinking. According to the 15-year company veteran who now works on Office 365, Microsoft has two separate views for Teams and Yammer. Teams is built for what Patton calls inner-loop communication: stuff for teams, smaller companies and the like; Yammer, in contrast, is better for outer-loop communication: less tactical decisions and more company-wide communications.

The split between Slack and Teams products and the Yammers and Convos of the world isn’t hokum or mere corporate-speak. I’ve worked in newsrooms that used the mix of tools to allow for simple direct messaging between individuals (Slack) and team-wide threaded communications (Yammer). It takes a little getting used to, but it can flow well if you need that level of inter-party discussion.

Even more interesting than the fact that Yammer is not dead is that Microsoft is actively investing in it. According to Patton, Microsoft’s chiefs “doubled down” on Yammer while Teams was being brought into the market in late 2016. This gave Yammer about a year of redoubled investment and attention.

Taking all that together, Microsoft is investing in two communications products at the same time, both of which are baked into its productivity suite. So why the huge push now?

Slack: Software’s favorite rocket ship

You are no doubt familiar with Slack’s growth arc. It’s been a nearly chronic narrative in tech for the past few years. And I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense. (I’m as guilty as anyone else.)

But, in case you have a life, here are some highlights: Slack reached ARR of $50 million in December of 2015. In October of 2016, Slack hit the $100 million ARR mark. Then the company bested $200 million last September. That’s darn quick, and investors took notice, showering the company with cash and ever-rising valuations.

One way to get acquired, after all, is to stick out by worrying the biggest companies in the market through growth.

Fueling Slack’s continued growth is a push into the realm of bigger companies. The firm launched Slack Enterprise Grid last January, bringing enterprise-grade management tools to Slack’s product. With Enterprise Grid, Slack can keep going after bigger accounts. (To that point, IBM has more than 200,000 active users on Slack that use Enterprise Grid.)

That quick growth has made Slack an acquisition target. One way to get acquired, after all, is to stick out by worrying the biggest companies in the market through growth. It’s just hard as heck to do, as incumbent revenue numbers are so large that, well, you have to grow fast to become interesting.

An even bigger scrap

As we know, Slack has rebuffed acquisition offers. As a result, we’re seeing Microsoft, the dominant player in the world of productivity, attempt to slow down Slack in an effort to not lose future users and future dollars. Hell, even Google is in on the race. Its Slack competitor launched for early users in February. Facebook is also tinkering around the edges. It’s fun to watch.

But productivity is Microsoft’s cash cow. For Google, it’s a big side project, but nothing compared to its advertising revenue. That puts Microsoft and Slack more up against one another in the enterprise chat fight.

(In mid-March, Microsoft announced that 200,000 organizations now use Teams, up from 125,000 in September of 2017. That’s 60 percent growth in a half-year or so — a quick growth pace, too.)

What we’ll learn over the next few years is if Microsoft’s enormous enterprise channel can be leveraged enough to slow Slack’s growth, or if Slack’s momentum can actually capture a piece of the productivity market and hold onto it.

It’s a startup against a platform company, a classic enough battle. But with big tech bigger, richer and more powerful than ever, it’s a more relevant business case than we might think at first blush. More when one draws blood or Slack goes public.

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flowerbarrel-art · 27 days

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Slow Day at Rocket Org ⚠️(bad jokes ahead)⚠️

#AvA #AvA 6 #Rocket Org #Ice #Cat #War #Agent #Ballista #Mercenaries #Safety Sign Sticks #FlowerBarrel Art #OCs

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dalepwithchari · 6 years

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In a Slack world, Microsoft bets on Teams and Yammer

Buy some great High Tech products from WithCharity.org #All Profits go to Charity

The growth of Windows has slowed as Microsoft’s mobile platform goals have faded and the PC market matured. As a result, Microsoft has had to seek new revenue outside of its operating system.

Today we’re going to explore Microsoft’s current actions in one part of the cloud productivity space through the lens of Teams.

Microsoft Teams

Microsoft’s Teams product is a communications tool often compared to Slack . TechCrunch, for example, recently called the software service “Microsoft’s Slack competitor.” ComputerWorld, in a news item earlier this year, wrote that “Microsoft turn[ed] up [the] heat on Slack” when it announced new Teams features.

Joining a big company when you are a comparatively small company can be arduous.

All that and Microsoft bought Teams a friend this year in the form of Chalkup, a collaboration company focused on the education world.

Yammer

But all that is the past, and, notably, Microsoft is putting more emphasis on Yammer today than it has in recent years. That may feel odd, given what we just went over concerning Teams.

Taking all that together, Microsoft is investing in two communications products at the same time, both of which are baked into its productivity suite. So why the huge push now?

Slack: Software’s favorite rocket ship

One way to get acquired, after all, is to stick out by worrying the biggest companies in the market through growth.

An even bigger scrap

(In mid-March, Microsoft announced that 200,000 organizations now use Teams, up from 125,000 in September of 2017. That’s 60 percent growth in a half-year or so — a quick growth pace, too.)

[Read More …]

In a Slack world, Microsoft bets on Teams and Yammer

#HotTrendsWithCharity.com #In a Slack world #Microsoft bets on Teams and Yammer

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flauntpage · 6 years

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A Comprehensive Review Every New NBA 'City' Uniform

The biggest NBA news of the day is that Baron Davis and Laura Dern are dating, but the second biggest news is that Nike Released their designs for every NBA team’s “City” alternate jersey, which are jerseys inspired by cities or some shit. I looked at them and wrote about them, like a normal sports blogger does.

GOOD:

CHICAGO:

It’s the flag, and it’s a nice flag everyone is very fond of. I am worried about players spilling chocolate on their unis, though. That would be very embarrassing, I think, to walk around with a big ol’ chocolate stain on your nice white uniform. High risk, high reward play, here.

PACERS:

It has a checkered flag, like a race car. I like race cars. I like that they go vroom vroom very fast.

CLIPPERS:

Look I don’t know what the fuck is has to do with boats, or why the team is wearing Miami Dolphins colors, but teal is an NBA power color and you have to respect any team that dons it.

BUCKS:

Eggshell tones baby! Perfect for the river-yacht or a chilly, fire-lit library, with a tasteful stripe down the middle to bring it all together. This is the midwestern thinking man’s alternate jersey. Also they say “CREAM CITY” on the bottom, which is where I live, work and play, spiritually.

MAGIC:

If you don’t like these, you need to smoke more weed. One time I was EXTREMELY blitzed off THC drops at the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle, Washington, and I spent like ten minutes in the gift shop, looking at the t-shirts they were selling. I thought the drawing was really nice and for a hot second I thought, damn I need one of these motherfuckers REAL bad but then my good brain, not my stoned brain, kicked in and way like “Hey Corbin, man, you’re probably too stoned to make this purchase, this shirt isn’t that nice dude.” Anyway, if I was still using, and I encountered this jersey in that state, I would HAVE to buy the Bismack Biyombo manifestation of this jersey, just spend whatever obscene amounts of money was requested of me, and regret the purchase in a very true and real way while also savoring my stoned wisdom in that time. This jersey rules.

SPURS:

I get that, as a left leaning-dude, I’m expected to hate black and white Spurs-branded digi-camo. But by making the camo black and white, it goes BEYOND a tribute-to-the-troops and turns a bunch of dudes who plays a game for a living into members of a private mercenary gang that kills its enemies with hoops. Watching capital inadvertently debase the world spanning military colossus that keeps it in power is kinda funny, I think it’s good.

SIXERS:

EXTRAORDINARILY classy font! Finally, the play of Joel Embiid is being recognized for what it is: a luxury product, grander than any wine, any gold topped chocolate bon bon, any gentle scented oil, rubbed into your back by the world’s strongest and most skilled masseuse.

ROCKETS:

At first glance, it’s maybe a little weird that the Rockets have Chinese writing on a jersey that is meant to celebrate the city of Houston, a city where most people speak English. But, clearly, this is the harbinger of the future for the franchise, which is going to move to Beijing as soon as possible. What’s my source? THAT’s my source buddy! BEIJING ROCKETS 2018-19, DON’T TRY TO HIDE FROM IT!

UTAH:

Evokes the 70s, cocaine. Maravich belongs in this jersey.

KINGS:

The Basketball is a Lion King. He will stand above all other balls and roar, and the other balls will bow at his might until, one day, he is killed by another basketball, his brother who is also a basketball. His son, a basketball as well, will get revenge and take his place on the mountain, though.

BROOKLYN:

It’s a Nets Jersey. It’s black and white and it looks nice. Not everything needs to shatter molds.

MIAMI:

I wanna make a joke, but what, I’m made of stone?

KNICKS:

I like firefighters and no one can say otherwise.

BAD:

CELTICS:

You guys aren’t gonna believe this, but the Celtics have a boring looking alternate jersey to compliment their boring looking regular jersey. Features grey. More on that later. We are living in the wildest possible times.

LAKERS:

Kobe Bryant designed these. They’re supposed to look like snakes, because Kobe branded himself as a snake. Kobe spending his retirement trying a bunch of sports-adjacent shit he’s not good at and getting deferrence because he is Kobe Bryant, The Player Who Scored A Lot, is maybe the most embarrassing shit I’ve ever seen a professional athlete do. It would be less embarrassing if he was posting videos where people pissed in his mouth or making sly pro-Trump allusions to reporters or taking 125th place in Scrabble tournaments.

CAVS:

It is, I think, truly stunning how terrible these things are. They are, first, off, grey. You know, grey? The color of cloudy days and paved over fields? The color that only looks good on dads, while they swing hammers or pick up their children, or whatever? And then, the only color that REALLY compliments grey, which is yellow. You know. Like a paved road, that thing everyone thinks has a cool color? I mean who can blame Nike, I suppose, when LeBron James, the world’s most famous athlete, is the human being who is your most prominent non-Jordan pitchman, you gotta put him in the ugliest shit imaginable

OKC:

Honestly, It’s impressive how awful these are, soup-to-nuts. No one who made this had even one good idea they put into the final product. Every OKC jersey is bad, of course, on account of the team’s very existence being born from the poison seed of theft from Seattle, but… Gradients!? GRADIENTS!? A grey-to-grey-gradient? Why, on God’s green earth, is Nike fucking so hard with Grey, a color, not even a color, a SHADE, that has inspired exactly no people, ever? They like grey so much that they put TWO DIFFERENT KINDS of grey in this piece of garbage, and subtly mixed the two greys so that there would be nearly infinite manifestations of grey betweens the main greys. This jersey is seeking the limits of grey itself, the deepest grey, the grey at the edge of our understanding of grey.

WASHINGTON:

All the chocolate staining potential of the Chicago jersey, none of the evocative shit. These are maybe, low key, the worst one.

ATLANTA:

This evokes bees, not Hawks. Would someone please put feather texturing on these jerseys, like the world has been demanding all these years.

DETROIT:

These say “Motor City” but do not feature any pictures of cars, which I love because, like I said earlier, they are fast and they make loud noises. The move here was an updated version of the mid 90’s Grant-Hill vroom vroom firehorse, but Nike isn’t listening to good sense!

GOD ONLY KNOWS:

WOLVES:

Look, I’ve talked a lot of shit on Grey, which is Nike’s favorite color right now I guess, but I can accept it here. Minny winters are insanely grey, wolves are grey, this all makes thematic sense. But also: good god grey is ugly. Don’t wear grey!

MAVERICKS:

These are bad but they’re like so bad that I think they almost fly around the moon and become good again? They are a bad uniform that lives somewhere out of time, a look that has never been cool in any era, but in that fact I think they gain a kind of integrity. There’s a possibility that, someday, in 2067 or some shit, these will have been regarded at an innovative step forward in jersey aesthetics, even if we think they’re hideous now. Cop them and freeze dry to sell in the future.

WARRIORS:

That shade of yellow is hideous but the logo is cool? “The Bay” is some real San Francisco bullshit though, one of those subtle org-wide attempts to separate the team from Oakland before they strip the city of the team and move them to rich-ass tech boi SF in a few years.

MEMPHIS:

Honestly I feel weird writing snarky, mildly absurdist jokes about a jersey that is based on signs from a famous workers rights struggle. While I guess I respect Grizzlies celebrating a monumental protest with their unis, the fact that they were designed and manufactured by Nike, a company with a workers rights record that is spotty at best, goes a long way to defanging the allusion. Capitalism: it’s everywhere and it’s amoral!

SUNS:

EXTREMELY PURPLE. Purple is my favorite color and I honestly admire how purple these are, while also wondering… how purple is too purple?

PELICANS:

These are also Purple.

BLAZERS:

Every other Portland fan hates these things, which makes sense because they live in the world capital of streetwear snobbery. I think they’re fine. The plaid is totally unnecessary. If I was making these bad boys, I think I would stick a fat-ass salmon on there, personally. I also think that the mascot should be replaced with a salmon.

HORNETS:

I don’t even know, man. If it were up to me, I would make them play in a white jersey with a fat-ass picture of Michael Jordan’s smiling face on the front, and anything else will just seem incomplete to me.

RAPTORS:

Finally a uniform that tells sports fans: “Hey: my face is up here. I know my body is chugging away down here, but the soul is in the face, and that’s where a person’s TRUE MEANING can be found. Geeze louise.”

NUGGETS:

Nice shade of blue. Fun stripes. Otherwise: whatever.

Okay I did it, this is every uniform. Back to tracking down every last piece of information I can collect and Baron + Laura. Where do they like to go to dinner, you think?

A Comprehensive Review Every New NBA 'City' Uniform published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

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