#and criminal investigation in general frankly that’s a big reason I was so excited to play this game (I’ve taken college classes in this) | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

ruffsficstuffplace · 6 years

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And The AWRD Goes To... (Part 13)

“Say, Mother, won’t you tell me that story again?” Diana asked as she stood on the side of her mother’s bed, her beloved teddy bear nestled in her arm.

Bernadette smiled. “That tale you love so dearly? ‘The Wise Woman Beatrix.’”

“The hero who started the Cavendish family!” Diana cried, her eyes growing wide and bright.

“That’s right.” Bernadette smiled. She looked to the tapestry on the wall, depicting Beatrix with a mythical unicorn, the two of them surrounded by flourishing trees and plants. “And one of the greatest figures of the War.”

She read the inscription on it. “Sybilladura Lelladybura. ‘When traditional and modern powers mingle, the gate to an unseen world will open.’”

“Traditional and modern powers…?” Diana asked, looking at the tapestry with her mother.

Bernadette started coughing, her body visibly wracked with pain.

“Mother!” Diana cried, fear in her eyes.

“Diana...” Bernadette said as she put her hand atop her daughter’s own. “I believe that you can be the one to open that gate… you can create a new future for the Cavendish name.”

Diana frowned. “Mother...” she mumbled.

Click.

The double doors of Nick’s office opened, Akko stepped out, looking much more confident and determined than when she went in earlier. “You’re up, Diana!” she said as she passed her by, shooting her a smile and a look with a meaning she couldn’t decipher quite just yet.

Diana decided to ignore her for now, and stepped into Nick’s office, her posture perfect, her movements graceful, and a noticeable chill emanating from her.

“Please, take a seat, Cavendish,” Nick said, gesturing to the couches near the snack bar. “Cocoa?”

“I’d prefer we do this at your desk, Professor Schnee,” Diana said as she took one of the seats in front of it. “The snack bar feels too… informal.”

“Suit yourself, Cavendish,” Nick said as he returned to his desk, closed the doors with the button, then pressed a different button next to it.

Thoom.

Diana flinched as all of the mountains upon mountains of paperwork flew skyward via controlled explosion, so fast and instantaneous the sheets didn’t even have time to get out of alignment before a basket with a folding caught them, kept in alignment and from falling.

“You know, I always thought your special button for temporarily ridding yourself of paperwork was a joke...” Diana said as she slowly relaxed, brought her feet back to the floor.

“You thought wrong.” Nick said as he settled back in his chair, a custom-made giant that gave off the impression of a leather-upholstered throne with a rotating seat. “So, what’s bugging you, Cavendish?”

Diana sucked in a breath, and let it go slowly. “I’ll be frank: I believe I should have been the leader of my team, instead of Akko.”

“Oh? And why do you think that?”

“Because, Professor Schnee, I am quite certain that I am much more qualified than she in every possible way.

“I will admit, my personal experience with Akko has been extremely limited, and while she has certainly proved that she is a more than capable fighter by herself or coordinating with others—even ones she had only met that day as was the case with myself and Ruby—it is of my opinion that she’s not fit to lead.”

“And why’s that?”

Diana sighed. “You’ve read the report about our disastrous experience during initiation, yes?”

“Yes, yes I have. I’m assuming you’re referring to your little run-in with the gravediggers?”

“An encounter we could have probably avoided if she could have just contained her excitement upon seeing the Shiny Rod,” Diana spat. “The petra gigas would certainly have still been a concern if we had tried to retrieve it, but those subterranean pests and their grave lord would have not gotten tangled up in our business, and the aftermath would not have been nearly as disastrous as it was.”

Nick nodded. “I agree, that was really stupid of Akko, and the situation could have gone better if she had acted more professional. What do you think about how she got you out of your actual situation, with the petra gigas vs the grave lord?”

“You mean Akko’s plan to retrieve the Shiny Rod? Yes, I’ll admit her gamble worked, but still, it was a gamble, and a very stupid one at that.

“I’d accept a calculated risk, but that was a total shot in the dark; regardless of how well it worked, I’m certain we can attribute her success much more to the fact that the Shiny Rod decided to choose her as its new wielder and allow her to use its power, and even more that Weiss just happened to have a semblance and the mastery of it to help us survive the cave-in, let alone Sucy, Constanze, and the others just happening to be in the area, and having the equipment capable of performing that rescue!

“Our survival was all about the stars aligning in our favour!” Diana cried as she threw her hands up. “To somehow attribute all or most of that to any skill of Akko would be absolutely ridiculous, unless I wasn’t aware that her semblance is also extreme luck that happens to happen to occur when she needs it most.”

Nick nodded. “So your argument for Akko being an unfit leader, is that her big, potentially lethal mistake in those caverns was self-inflicted, avoidable misfortune, and how she got you out of that mess was divinely-granted, skill-independent fortune. Does that sound right?”

“Yes, exactly!” Diana said, smiling. “I understand that our very lives always have an element of luck involved—accidents are an inevitability, after all—but that was just relying far too much on it.

“Fortune favours the bold and the prepared, and Akko while fits the first, she doesn’t particularly strike me as the latter—quite the opposite, actually. To trust her with so much responsibility as the leader of our team, much more for the next four years, is just a step short of asking the gods to bless you with as much misfortune as they’re capable of!

“Conversely, I think I am a much better choice. You’ve read my transcripts, my performance, my recommendations from Atlas Combat School, yes? Wouldn’t you agree that I’m an exemplary student, and thus the better choice for leader?”

Nick nodded. “I have, Cavendish, and yes, I agree: you really are the picture of an ace student, someone any teacher would have been proud to have in their class then...”

Diana beamed.

“… But I respectfully disagree in your belief that you’d make the better leader now.”

Diana blinked, before she frowned. “I’m sorry, what?”

“Cavendish, for the purpose of full disclosure: Haven’s decision making process for team leaders is very holistic and thorough, looking past a student’s performance in combat school or the GCD, and into every other aspect of their lives.

“We talk to their families, we talk to their friends, we talk to the people who know them, probably even better than the student does themselves. We look into public records, we look into your public social media histories, we even have the right to look into your permanent records in non-martial schools, and your criminal record, should you have one.

“In short: we try and use every single legal means available to use to learn pretty much everything there is about you, as a person, not just as a student of combat school or someone taking the GCD.

“And frankly, Diana, just from the assessments of your old professors at Atlas alone, you don’t feel fit for leader material in my eyes.”

Diana scowled. “Would full-disclosure happen to include my getting to read what they wrote about me?”

“Generally, no, but it seems your professors knew you well enough to waive their right to confidentiality, in case you wanted to investigate. Would you like me to read you some?”

“Please.”

Nick held out his cybernetic wrist, a two-sided projection appeared before them.

It is with a heavy heart that I write this recommendation letter, for though the inevitability of it has always been on my mind, to whom I would be addressing it to, what institution my beloved student Diana Cavendish wished me to aid her enrolling in, has caught me completely off-guard.

Ask any of her classmates or my colleagues, and you will know that I have made no secret of my preference, my admiration, and indeed, my awe for Cavendish: truly, she is one of the most exceptional, talented, and hard-working students I have ever had the pleasure of teaching, whose input, works, and mere presence I looked forward to every lesson, and whose absence was sorely and easily felt by everyone, even a random student passing by and peeking in through the window.

There is no doubt in my mind that she is destined for greatness, one of the rare individuals in each generation that have the power to completely and utterly change the world as we know it, someone who is already making waves and an enduring legacy name for herself as we speak.

But whereas I have always imagined her as joining the hallowed ranks of Atlas Academy, and making her meteoric rise to the very top of its ranks in no time at all, it seems that her heart is destined for Haven, the alma mater of her mother, and indeed, all of her ancestors save Beatrix, if only because it did not yet exist.

You have my word that Cavendish will be a blessing to your institution, like one of the divine gifts of legend the gods rained down from the heavens, or summoned from the very bottom of the sea. But like those, I leave you with a warning:

When Cavendish has set her sights on something, it would be foolish to attempt to stand in her way, and you would do best to either support her, or simply get out of the way.

Signed,

J. J. Lukov, PhD

P.S. If, for whatever reason, you have not done yourself the favour of reading through her accomplishments, I’ve attached records of what I believe to be Cavendish’s most impressive and inspiring feats.

Nick skipped the hefty attachment, and went through a handful of other recommendation letters.

… I honestly believe she would be much better suited for the rigid and structured life of the Atlesian Military, and fear what is to come to her if she continued on with her plans of joining the highly individualistic, diverse, and rather informal culture of Haven academy.

A third letter.

Cavendish is something of a legend in her classmate’s eyes: the one you partner up with if you wish to pass a class from the very brink of failure, get a guaranteed 100%, at the cost of experiencing the other extreme of ‘leaders from hell,’ the one who demands and will ensure she gets nothing but the best from all of you, at all times.

She’s become so infamous, they’ve even coined a term for it: ‘selling your soul to the Blue Devil.’And indeed, it seems that as soon as the contract is honoured, both parties cease all interactions till the next time the need arises, just like any sort of purely professional business arrangement.

Even her closest friends Hannah England and Barbara Parker seem more like personal assistants or loyal sycophants than companions.

“I could go on all night, but Belladonna’s still waiting outside,” Nick said as he shut off his wrist-projector. “I’m pretty sure you get my justification for not choosing you as the leader, unless I thought wrong?”

Diana sighed, sitting lower in her seat than earlier, her posture less proud and straight. “Yes, yes I have, Professor Schnee… thank you for taking the time to listen to my appeal, and for explaining your reasoning.”

“Any time, and you’re welcome, Cavendish.” Nick said. “Anything else?”

“If you can please disclose it: why Akko…?” Diana asked. “I mean, I get that the optics of you choosing your own granddaughter to lead would have been questionable, to say the least, but in time people will surely see that it was far from a case of nepotism, and simply coincidence that the most qualified candidate was also related to you.”

“Because, Cavendish, Weiss isn’t as fit for the position as you think she is, and even with having seen Akko at her best and many more times at her worst, she is still the best pick to lead you all,” Nick replied. “Again, I could go on and on all night about the details I can disclose, but again, Belladonna.”

Diana nodded. “I understand, Professor Schnee. Excuse me, I will take my leave now,” she said as she began to stand up.

“Actually, before you do, could you do me a huge favour?”

Diana sat back down in her seat. “Depends on what it is, sir.”

Nick opened his drawer, pulled out an old, worn, inelegant looking device, about the size of a fist.

“What is that?” Diana asked.

“First prototype for the portable power core that runs the ventilator they replaced my lungs with,” Nick said as he placed it on his desk.

“After I complained about never being able to actually do much of anything because the old cores drained so fast, your mother made it herself and personally socked it into my chest for its first field test. She always said she wanted me to give it back when I was done with it, but I never did—between studying it to make improvements, and all the other shit that happened shortly after I made the Mk. II, it just always took a backseat, until, well...

“… Look: I know your estate preferred to have it as a private, family-only affair, but I always regret that I never could pay my respects to your mother in-person, before they put her to rest in your family crypt.

“So the next time you’re paying her a visit, could you put it somewhere near her?”

Diana looked at the device with an unreadable expression.

“I’ll definitely understand if you don’t want to,” Nick said. “You’ve got school, it’ll take up space, and unfortunately this thing was a big reason she went when she did...”

Diana took the device from him, gently held it to her chest. “I’m sure my mother would love to have proof that even in death, she continues to do her passion: saving lives,” she said, smiling.

“Heh...” Nick said, the corner of his lips tugging up slightly. “That she would…” He stood up. “Come on, I’ll see you to the door...”

Diana went down the hallways, looking deep in thought as she cradled the prototype power core in her hands, Nick leaned out his door and looked at Blake. “Belladonna, your turn. Sorry for the wait, there was a lot to discuss.”

“It’s fine, sir,” Blake said as she closed her books, and got up from her seat. “And I think you’ll be happy to know I wasn’t planning on taking long.”

“Oh? And why’s that?” Nick asked as she stepped up.

Blake looked up at him, sheepishly grabbed her arm, before she smiled at him and said, “I just want to thank you, sir, for the opportunity you’ve given me. I promise, I won’t let you down.”

Nick chuckled. “In my experience, being chosen to be a leader isn’t something you should be thanking someone for, but you’re welcome.”

“And I think differently, sir,” Blake replied. “Excuse, I’ll be taking my leave now.”

Nick nodded. “You do that. Oh, and Belladonna? Before you go: you read any interesting books lately?”

“Not really sir, no,” Blake replied. “There was a historical fiction about Mantle that looked like it was going to be interesting at the start, but it fizzled out pretty quickly.”

“Shame, that. Till next time, then,” Nick said as he stepped back into his office, closed the door behind him. He got his mug from earlier and refilled it with more hot cocoa, before he returned to his desk, opened one of his drawers, and pulled out a framed, printed picture:

Him, shirtless and in a wheelchair, all the robotic parts of him on full display, smiling as a brand new, portable power core glowed and hummed in his chest, Bernadette beside him looking frazzled, sleepless, but proud and happy.

Nick started tearing up. “You know, Bernie… between the two of us, I always thought Dust Lung would get me first… funny how things actually worked out, right…?

He spent a few minutes crying, sipping his cocoa in between sobs. And then, when his eyes were finally dry, he wiped his eyes, and pressed the second button underneath his desk.

Click. Thoomph.

The mountains of paperwork from earlier were back on his desk once more, a layer of gravity dust keeping them from flying out of their stacks. Nick picked up his pen, found where he had left off earlier, and got back to work.

“Cry all the tears you have, and mourn for as long as you need to, and, bury your dead, and honour all we have lost, and hold close those you still have left...” his father, Herakleides “Herk” Schnee, had said. “… But when your eyes are dry, and you can grieve and wail no more, and the dirt has been patted flat with the grave marker placed, and you have said all you could say, and even your closest loved ones pull away from your grasp…

“… You better be damn sure you’re ready to get back to work, for the work of the living never truly ends.”

#rwby #little witch academia #fanfic #and the awrd goes to #au #white rose #dianakko

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thisdaynews · 5 years

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Democrats’ reckoning on race comes to Detroit

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/democrats-reckoning-on-race-comes-to-detroit/

Democrats’ reckoning on race comes to Detroit

Julián Castro and Sen. Cory Booker speak during the first Democratic presidential debate in June. Both candidates will appear in Wednesday night’s debate.

2020 democratic debates

The party’s struggles on race and identity — how to respond to Donald Trump’s nativist appeals as well as their own pasts — come under the spotlight.

DETROIT — Tonight’s Democratic debate will be the first time in presidential campaign history that the majority of participants aren’t white.

And the timing couldn’t be more striking.

Story Continued Below

A reckoning inside the Democratic Party on racial identity is underway, as President Donald Trump unleashes racist tweets, attacking lawmakers of color and stoking fear among his base about primarily Latino immigrants. But Democrats are being forced to examine their own pasts, too — namely the party’s role in implementing policies that disproportionately hurt minorities for generations.

Former Vice President Joe Biden will stand between Sens. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.), who are black. They’ll be joined by former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro, the only Latino in the race, as well as Andrew Yang and Tulsi Gabbard, who are of Asian and Pacific Islander descent, respectively.

Booker, Harris, and Castro have attacked Biden in recent weeks over his record on criminal justice, busing, and immigration. But Biden has signaled he’s willing to hit back.

Booker’s stewardship of the Newark police department and Harris’ record as a prosecutor are potential flashpoints in the debate. The potential showdown is something then-presidential candidate Jesse Jackson could have only dreamed of in 1984 and 1988 when he tried to put race and black voters front and center.

“Black voters are no longer allowing you to give lip service, are no longer allowing you to do photo-ops or show up at the church the weekend before,” said former South Carolina state Rep. Bakari Sellers, whose father worked on Jackson’s campaign and who supports Harris’ presidential bid. “There’s a lot of parallels to ‘88 and what Jesse attempted to do, and what Jesse attempted to do has come to fruition.”

The explicit debate around racial disparities is both about appealing to voters of color who are critical in the Democratic primary and addressing white liberals who have dramatically shifted on issues relating to race during the Obama and Trump eras, surveys and polling have shown.

“Race is an issue that historically everyone has turned away from unless they are creating this fear of the other, so for Democrats to be tackling that head on in a very diverse city is very very important,” said Laurie Pohutsky, a newly-elected 31-year-old Michigan state rep who won her district by 223 votes in 2018. “It shows that we are actually beginning to acknowledge the people who have done the majority of the work for the Democratic Party. And I say that as a white woman.”

But it also concerns Democrats’ response to Trump and the moral question he’s laid at their feet: Do they subscribe to conventional wisdom that talking excessively about black and brown voters will hurt them in a general election — or define their campaign by overtly addressing race and challenging Trump’s politics of white grievance.

“[Trump] frankly has juiced the issue of race as a political mechanism to motivate and inspire a portion of his base,” said former Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum. He summed up the president’s message as, “‘‘I’m one of you, I’m your guy — I’m the one who’s going to chase out black and brown people.’”

And for Democrats, Gillum added, it’s “not going to be good enough to just say the past is the past.”

Democrats’ ability to speak to minority communities, specifically black voters, could determine their ability to win in a state like Michigan. Trump won the state by just 11,000 votes in 2016. and in Detroit, where black people make up about 80 percent of the population, roughly 42,000 eligible voters sat out the election.

The emergence of race as a defining issue in Democratic presidential primaries began in 2016 when Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders were repeatedly confronted by black activists pushing them to state directly that “black lives matter.”

The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and an emboldened activist base stemmed from Barack Obama’s presidency.

“Obama illustrated for a lot of people, particularly young black people, the limitations of representation,” said Rahsad Robinson, president of the nonprofit civil rights group Color Of Change. “That just having a black face in a high place doesn’t mean that you’re actually going to get everything that you want to achieve.”

The Black Lives Matter movement “forced a conversation about race in a way that I don’t think had happened before with a white candidate,” Theodore Johnson, senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, said of Clinton’s candidacy in 2016.

The discussion around racial identity has reached a turning point this cycle. Most of the Democratic presidential hopefuls are speaking explicitly about how their proposals would address minority communities affected by the racial wealth gap, higher maternal mortality rates, and the threat of deportation after living in the United States for years.

Biden and Booker dueled last week over their own records on criminal justice, with Booker calling Biden the “architect of mass incarceration” and Biden criticizing Booker for a federal investigation into the Newark Police Department during Booker’s tenure as mayor.

“His police department was stopping and frisking people, mostly African-American men,” Biden said last week.

Mayor Pete Buttigieg also did a flurry of media appearances to promote his “Douglass Plan” named after the famous abolitionist, which he calls “a comprehensive and intentional dismantling of racist structures and systems.” Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke frequently talks about how he benefits from white privilege and disclosed this month that he and his wife’s ancestors owned slaves. As his debate guests last night, O’Rourke invited three black high school football players from Michigan who were benched after they kneeled during the national anthem (two eventually transferred high schools).

“The very foundation of this country, the wealth that we have built, the way we became the greatest country on the face of the planet was literally on the backs of those who were kidnapped and brought here by force,” he said at the debate.

Johnson said he expected Biden to be the target of the discussion tonight and going forward.

“Race is going to be talked about more, and the more it’s talked about the more people are going to hit Biden on it because they’re after the black voters in his coalition,” he said.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has already signaled he will attack Biden over past comments on working with segregationist senators and may mention, as he did in the first debate, that he is the only one on stage with a black son. But De Blasio has his own vulnerabilities on race, such as the fact that the officer involved in the death of Eric Garner remains on the force in New York.

Black activists were frustrated by the lack of time dedicated to race on Tuesday night given Trump’s latest attacks on Baltimore and Rep. Elijah Cummings.

“Skirting around the issue of racism and its impacts will not help Dems and the media is doing a disservice to the country by diminishing this critical issue on the debate stage,” tweeted Adrianne Shropshire, executive director of the progressive BlackPAC.

Wednesday night is expected to be different, and a big reason why, operatives and activists say, is the Democratic base and grassroots groups that sprang up in response to Trump.

“This fight is coming to a head because our communities are finally saying, enough is enough, if you want us, if you want the Democratic Party to be our political home then prove it,” said Natalia Salgado, a Latina and national political director for the Center for Popular Democracy Action, a progressive group.

“It’s not enough to say I was friends with a black person,” Salgado said, referring to Biden’s oft-used rejoinder that he was Obama’s vice president.

But Democratic strategist Jamal Simmons offered a warning to Democrats who plan to dig into any of their opponents’ pasts concerning policies that have negatively affected minorities ahead of the second debate.

“The danger is that the candidates end up giving Donald Trump ammunition in his efforts to depress black folks while he tries to excite white nativist voters,” said Simmons.

The lingering question for Democrats is whether or not the party’s reckoning on how it addresses racial identity and Trump’s nativist appeals is resonating with voters — black, brown or white.

“I don’t know the answer to that,” said Sellers. “We probably won’t know the answer for a really long time.”

Sally Goldenberg contributed to this report.

#comes #Detroit #Foreign #Politics

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