#follow me for more research and evidence based information none of this is lies none of this came from my obsessive overly analytical

[blzzrdstryr]

Reveries of changes

Yandere!Childe x Fatui!gn!reader

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CW: Dissociation, mentions of rape, violence, unhealthy relationship, abuse of power.

Sometimes you find yourself asking what ifs. What if the Event never happened and you never received the vision? What if Ajax never developed his obsession with you? What if you treated him a little bit warmer? Would he be more tolerable? There are thousands of possible scenarios buzzing in your head, sometimes diverging just by words left unsaid or an outstretched hand being shaked. You know it’s a futile thing, thinking about the future and the present that you will never have, but you can’t stop, thoughts spiraling further and further.

This morning starts with the similar what if. What if I agreed to start again? The brief conversation from yesterday is still on your mind - you dread it’s another of the turning points in your relationship, just like the rejected handshake or the hospitalized recruit were. A moment after which there’ll be changes, changes that you won’t have time to prepare for. Speaking from the experience alone, Childe, like the rotten bastard he is, will act even worse from now on. It all started from teen Ajax following you and offering his friendship at every turn and somehow ended in him personally asking Tsaritsa to assign you to him, reducing you from a highly respectable Fatui agent skilled both in stealth and subterfuge to a glorified escort and a secretary.

One day he’ll just get tired from all of this and will forcefully bend me over in some dark murky corner, you darkly conclude, the remnants of the sleep leaving your body entirely at the grim thought. Or maybe he will break his promise not to cheat and will order me to do it.

Unwilling to think about the Ninth Wave of your unwanted relationships, you quickly stand up from the bed and start preparing for the day. Dressing and freshening up from the sleep you still mentally return to the darker place, cautious of what Tartaglia will pull out this time. Finally, you exit the door fully ready and lock the room, hiding the key under the clothes after, and make way to the fourth floor of the bank.

Here lies Childe’s working space and personal quarters , and if the former can be easily seen and entered just by walking up the stairs, the latter is hidden from view by the wall and massive door. There is a wide work desk and two armchairs placed too close for your comfort. You peek into the interior window, only to find it veiled by a thick curtain from the other side, so you decide to broaden the space between the chairs.

Satisfied with distance now, you sit at your place, taking a sheet out of the pile of documents, mostly consisting of reports of credits approved and money returned, unusually mundane yet highly classified information. Aside from accompanying Childe when he needs to beat and threaten the debts out of deadbeats, you also have to track the transactions the bank makes, a routine job consuming most of your daytime.

At the sixth or seventh fiscal account, you hear door opening and mentally brace for Ajax’s presence. Harbinger doesn’t smile, looking serious instead. You hope it has nothing to do with you, as it’s too early in the day for you to already deal with his usual mess.

“[First]”, you look up, staring at the bizarrely humorless Ajax looming over your sitting form. He clears his throat, as if he feels awkward right now, “Are you sure you won’t have one of your episodes?”

Your mind blanks for a second and then there’s a mix of shame and anger flooding your being and making you see red. Over the last months you spent working with him, he was the sole trigger of your affliction and now there are considerable gaps in your memory, in which you have absolutely no clue what happened to you. You had an inkling that Childe is aware that you are not always completely here, but a slap in the face with such casual mention is enough to render you wordless for a good minute.

“I... It happens only under certain circumstances”, you find your voice wavering and his face darkens, as he quickly catches unsaid ‘because of you’. Fortunately, he decides not to press it.

“There’s a problem at hands, one that needs your skills". These words make you do a double take - Ajax doesn't look like he's lying, speech lacking usual grandiose and bravado, yet you still can't believe he lets you return to your former work. You make a quick guess.

“Qixing?”

“Qixing” he nods,"their spies must have learned something about the sigils. It's a minor issue now, but if Tianquan or Yuheng will learn about it…"

"A diplomatic disaster and a permanent loss of Geo Archon's gnosis" you continue for him, “Fatui would be banned or seriously limited in Liyue and most of trade routes will be cut off, Ningguang can easily press sanctions against most of Snezhnayan import”. You frown at the thought, no matter what Fatui would do in such situations there's too much to lose and almost nothing to gain, even if you start destroying the investigation and replication of sigils right now, it will be a waste of possible weapons against Rex Lapis.

Then, there's one painless exit from the complicated mess: destruction of all meager material evidence and clues they somehow scraped together. Despite finally having a glimpse of a freedom, you don’t feel any excitement, but doubt instead - just a year ago, such operation would be another routine task for you, but now, having wasted months because of Childe's possessiveness, you can't help but feel incompetent.

You contemplate, glancing at him: on one hand, Tartaglia can easily send any other agents, but on the other hand, none of said agents possess a vision, a vision that you specifically molded to be a perfect tool for stealth and assassinations. He tilts his head, a hand impatiently drumming against the desk, waiting for your answer - you can infer his inner monologue - Tartaglia, just like you, is torn between his loyalty to Tsaritsa and his own feelings on the matter and this is what finally cements your decision.

You can almost see how much he itches to forbid you from taking the mission, but stops himself out of his sense of duty to Snezhnaya, and this knowledge fills you with darker type of satisfaction to the very brim: You lean back, pretending to still ponder over his words, enjoying the view of apprehensive Childe for once.

“I think, I can’t...” you start, your voice deliberately small and hesitant, watching how Ajax smiles again, convinced that you no longer have any confidence in your abilities, “let Snezhnaya be compromised in any way”.

He doesn’t let any of the anger and frustration show on his face, yet the drumming ceases, leaving you two in the silence, save for the sounds of the street coming out of the window.

You know you’re poking at the sleeping tiger, letting a childish impulses to guide your words, but the opportunity to upset Harbinger are much harder to come by these days: he took away your job, your delusion and your freedom, the least he can do to compensate is suffer in return.

“Alright”, he finally says and fails to hold back disappointed sigh “agent [Last]. Your delusion is in Ekaterina’s possession, just as the rest of the equipment. You will start tonight, information is in the upper left drawer. You have no right to fail, if you do I will write a complaint to Tsaritsa against you and personally oversee that you will be discharged”.

It’s a gambling game then, and terribly unfair at that - even if you win it won’t set you free or relocate under someone easier to handle and Tartaglia loses virtually nothing by allowing you to roam out of his sight for one night only, and by failing you will literally had your life into Childe’s eager hands.

You won’t let the bastard triumph.

***

After getting your gear and delusion back, you spend the rest of the day reading the data and mentally preparing for what is about to come. The qixing base you're to infiltrate is located awfully near the current place of sigil research, as if Ningguang or whoever planted it here already suspected Fatui from the start. The base itself is disguised as an ancient Liyuen ruin with a couple of deactivated ruin hunters placed nearby to scare off the adventurers who no doubt will try to explore it.

You are almost panting when you finally reach it - turns out that despite being easily visible from afar, the base is surrounded by the tall and steep cliffs from all sides, with the only passage bound to be guarded. Invoking to the power of your vision, you effortlessly become invisible to the eye, enter the building and almost rush back the same second - there’s a millelith passing nearby in whom you almost bumped in.

Heart racing you enter the building again, walking on half bent legs to minimize the sounds, and avoid milleliths on your way. They feel a sudden rush of frosty air, but seeing no one nearby, just write it off as a sudden midnight chill. You continue to make your way, peeking into each room, forcing yourself to remain in this form longer and longer, body aching and freezing from the overuse. Finally you see it - a stack of documents placed on the bamboo table near the oil lamp in a conveniently empty room.

Your hand is already extended to push the lamp and fake an accidental fire, when you decide to investigate the papers - it’s better to learn what qixing already knows. Your eyes quickly peruse a liyuen script, characters upon other characters - a report about suspicious activities, a detailed intelligence of Northland’s spendings and thankfully, not a word of sigils, except the note stating that Fatuis are buying a considerable amount of paper and ink.

Having memorized each of the documents, you throw the lamp now, a flame quickly spreading to the documents and soon consuming a whole table. Someone in the corridor screams about fire, four milleliths rushing in the room and you use this distraction to sneak out. Having escaped the borders of the faux ruin you quickly run, still maintaining invisibility, and only when you reach the cliffs again do you allow yourself to rest.

After climbing over the rocks, the rest of the trail is spent between jogging and walking, frost from the vision still residing inside. Bitter chill slows down your movements and you can’t help, but shiver from time to time, arms and legs aching and burning from it. You eye the pyro delusion and consider using it - unlike a cryo vision that you sculpted for secrecy and agility, the delusion is more battle-focused, able to produce quick bursts of fire in the rare occasions you get into a brawl.

Suddenly, a ball of flames explodes near you - a whopperflower bursts out of the ground, sensing you in proximity. You dodge another fireball, instinctively flinching at the sudden flash of light and send an ice blade it's way. It slightly grazes the creature's skin, yet a mimetic plant rushes back under the ground as you summon another icicle and swiftly stab it in the "head" the second it emerges again.

The plant dies in convulsion, it’s reddish walls contracting around the blade, a fast stream of boiling hot energy nectar shooting from the wound the moment you pull away the weapon. You curse, as some of the liquid hits you on the leg, burning a part of your pants and scorching the flesh underneath. Hissing and gritting teeth, you use your vision again, now to soothe a throbbing pain.

Well, at least I am not freezing anymore.

You return at the first rays of dawn, dull pain still lingering in the lower body, pulsating and echoing every step. Slightly drowsy Nadia at the entrance nods at you, her gaze at your wound obvious even with a mask on, and you nod back, a wordless exchange providing a slight reprieve, before you have to deal with Childe again.

“Hard day?”, she asks right before you enter, a pale shadow of concern in her voice. You frown, confused by the sudden disquiet.

“Something happened?”

“Uhm”, a small pause, “the boss. He was restless tonight, very restless”.

Ah, shit.

“Well, that is unpleasant” you deadpan, any remaining desire to go inside the bank vanishing the same second: “Thank you anyways” and then you step in.

Harbinger waits right there in an absolutely empty lobby - it seems that Ekaterina’s shift hasn't started yet. He’s leaning on the wall, head turning to you as you enter and immediately noticing the state of your leg. His expression grows darker, when you thought he would lighten up at your perceived failure instead.

"Who did this to you?" he asks, hints of steel appearing in his voice. You lift your eyebrows - no teasing, starters or bravado. Maybe he's so impatient to hear about your failure that he forgot to keep up the act?

You swat away his question, deciding to report on your mission instead - documents were destroyed by a set up accident, none of the qixing and milleliths saw you; he doesn’t seem to listen though, eyes still glued to the burn and then he repeats his question, voice taking the dangerous tone.

“No one, no one did it. It was an accident on the way back”, he isn’t convinced judging by the way he grabs your arm, his monstrous strength evident in the steel trap grip. “Damn” you cuss, trying to free your hand - if Tartaglia learns that you let the whopperflower of all things injure you, he won’t let you live it down and will weaponise it, to point out your so-called incompetence over and over again.

“Let me go” you tug harder, a vision coming back to life from the distress. You pull away your wrist from him again and again and then you hear it first and feel it second - a small cracking sound and a sharp pain, shooting up your arm - you broke a bone. It’s too sudden for you to realize what happened or even properly sense the shock of ache.

He lets go of you in the same second, eyes looking blankly at the injured hand. His lips thin and he exhales, in a long and strangely controlled manner - seeing Childe act and look so emotionless is sure bizarre. He hauls you up bridal carry style, ripping out a low hiss of pain as his clothes rub against the burn, and directs himself to the stairs. You're too busy gritting your teeth and trying not to cry in front of Childe to notice him climbing past the third floor and only when he opens the door to his room with a kick do you finally snap back to reality.

Despite working for him for months now, you enter his quarters for the first time. It's a spacious place, with a wide bed and writing desk located near the window. There are different weapons decorating the walls - swords, claymores, spears - all with the traces of use, and a small pile of trinkets and children's toys on the desk, placed right near the started letter, some of them already half wrapped - must be a gift for someone, then.

He sets you down on the bed and turns to the wall, taking a dagger from its place and some small container. A part of you gets scared all of the sudden - you remember your morning thoughts and all those instances when his eyes focused on your body for far too long to be innocent or comfortable. Is this it? Did he get so fed up with you that he decided to drop any pretense and abandon the cat-and-mouse game you two seemed to have?

Ignoring the pain in both limbs you jolt for the exit - there’s no meaning in fighting him, yet you can still flee, lock in your room and then plan what to do. “Stop it” he says, a warning clear in his voice, and to your frustration it’s enough to glue you in place. You look at him, heart booming in your chest, barely suppressing a flinch at every step he’s taking. He leads you back to the bed, as you feel the world warping around you again and the worst part is that you can’t stop it - It’s unfair, I can’t leave, not yet, I will hate myself for the rest of my life if it happens.

He kneels down, blade slicing through the pants as you forget how to breath. His figure deforms, a dark blue sea leaking out of the dead fish eyes and you see great leviathans lurking underneath the surface. Childe is the ocean, in a sense that he contains horrors beyond the human imagination. He is the great sleeping kraken that will swallow the world and you are his first victim.

His hand takes something out of the container and you expect it to burn and to hurt you, but instead there’s a muffled soothing feeling that comes, an unintentional “ah” coming out of your mouth. He doesn’t force himself and patches you up on the contrary.

You come back to yourself little by little, when he almost finishes with ministrations, leg and wrist looking like two casts. It feels bizarre to come back to your body halfway, to see Ajax kneeling in front of you, head hung low and it’s even weirder to hear his voice, hurt and utterly defeated: “So that’s what you think of me”.

He helps you come back to your room, as you still feel dazed. You pinch yourself a couple of times, still unable to believe that any of these happenings are real, they are.

A turning point, you conclude, there’s no way anything will stay the same after this.

You both dread and anticipate the changes.

#yandere genshin impact #yandere genshin x reader #yandere childe x reader #yandere childe #yandere tartaglia #yandere genshin impact x reader #Reader is unreliable narrator #It's not super obvious here #But it will be evident later #yandere #childe #tartaglia #yandere x reader #my writing

[songwritingtipsandtricks]

Hey lads, here is the transcript for the second episode of the podcast. 

Hello and welcome everyone out there listening to this program.

Thank you for tuning in once more for another episode on songwriting tips & tricks

Have you ever been searching for a better way to rephrase an idea, or maybe you've been looking for a word that fits the meter or beat or paints a more beautiful image in the audiences head? If that is the case, then today's episode will help you with just that.

Today's episode is dedicated to a powerful weapon that should be an essential tool in your songwriting. Of course, we are talking about synonyms.

What is a synonym? Or instead, what is the definition of the word synonym.

1 one of two or more words or expressions of the same language that have the same or nearly the same meaning in some or all senses

2 a word or phrase that by association is held to embody something (such as a concept or quality) a tyrant whose name has become a synonym for oppression

So close your eyes for a minute, or think back to the last song you have been working on. Are you there? Great. Now try to remember writing the lyrics and what you have been thinking about. Did you write the words straight from your mind? Did you contemplate the pictures and how you could clarify or rephrase it more colloquial? If you did, then you are already implementing this powerful tool. If not, don't worry, it is rather tedious work and may take a lot more time than your usual writing.

But how do we use a Thesaurus properly, and what is the intention behind it.

So in general, firstly we open our Thesaurus, may it be digitally or analogue. Then we search for a word we want to get a synonym for, so you search for the entry like you would in a dictionary, or you type it in a digital option. Let us simulate this for a second. So given we are looking for a sharper word for the rather common word heart. In the right context, that word could be compelling on its own, and maybe your style of writing could be based on an everyday style of speech. However, perhaps you want to re-illustrate the picture.

So we search for the entry heart in our Thesauruses. Type it in on MacMillan.And on the left, I have already searched for the word in the rather heavy book (which may be the significant disadvantage of an analogous one). And from here it is quite easy. When we have found the word, we have to think about the meaning we want it to convey. In this case, heart does not only stands for an organ in a body but has various meanings depending on the context. So in the internet version, in our case, the MacMillan dictionary, this is quite easy and well-organised. We search for the right meaning, and just beneath the definition of the word, there is a button for the Thesaurus. As easy as that. Then there is an array of general terms about the concept behind the word heart. So as some of you might know there is a theory in linguistics or language studies in general which is called the semiotic-triangle. This triangle tries to explain the cognitive work when we read, write or speak a word or vice versa. So when we think about a picture we want to convey may be the heart, in this case, we might immediately know the word in our native language. Still, if you are writing in your second language, it might take some more time. So the logic behind this triangle is that the word heart, of course, is just defined term in your language. At the same time, in another language, like in German, there is a different word for the concept behind this. Anyway, you get the point. A word is not bound to the picture. And of course, both the idea and the word are not the real thing.  

And this is excellent news for us songwriters. This means that writing has seemingly endless possibilities for rephrasing and conveying pictures. So rephrasing is an essential and essential part of speech.

So let's get to work. We have found the Thesaurus online an see where the internet comes in handy, not only do we have it at hand at any location, but it is easy to handle. The offline version of this is not as fast as the online one. However, we might get more information and an interesting choice of words that are not available on some platforms and has a special sophisticated touch to it. But that depends on your choice of Thesaurus.

Now you might ask, where do you get neat synonyms and how can you use it in your songs?

Perhaps just have a look in a nearby library, book or antiquities shop or do a little online research for a suitable Thesaurus. For my taste, MacMillan, Merriam-Webster or the Oxford dictionary are reliable sources with high esteem. Analogous Thesauruses should also be adequately collected and published by a renowned publisher. If you are a student at a university, there may also be a table in the linguistics faculty giving away old books that and if you are lucky like I was with my Oxford Thesaurus, you get a tremendous Thesaurus for free. Having one at home comes in quite handy when you are writing.

So there is a little poem we are going to write together now. It intentionally is not sophistically well written nor rhyming, as we think about the synonyms to rhyme it with.

The pain I try to drown in bottles.

The hole it left me with alone

The broken heart lies down in pieces

You swept away so easily

So well, not much of a story, it is quite open and un-rhyming. However, some pictures could be coherently connected. So, we need to look for the nouns adjectives and adverbs, as they convey the most pictorial meaning.

The PAIN I TRY to DROWN in ALCOHOL.

The HOLE it LEFT ME with ALONE

The BROKEN HEART is DOWN in PIECES

YOU SWEPT away so EASILY

The nouns are the most critical conveyors in language, as they determine the verbs that follow it and also have specific attributes. So in order, we will look up nouns first, then think about the verbs and then have a look for the adjectives and adverbs. In this case, I will be using the MacMillan Thesaurus.

A suitable noun for pain would be agony or distress, I find as it paints a picture of great pain and is more specific.

Next up Alcohol, MacMillan does not have the word I am searching for, so I head over to Merriam-Webster. I like the bottle, as it is quite illustrative and fits the broken pieces in the next line.

Another word for HOLE would be crack, and I like this one as it has a delicate touch to it.

Heart, we had earlier, and a suitable word which is quite the contrary to the picture is virtue. And if the protagonist is a man, it leaves the impression of weakness and weariness. Let's try this once and change the to my as well as it is more personal. To my mind, I'm going to drop the is. We are also going to stick with pieces in this case as I cannot find a suitable word that is of my liking.

So this far we have got:

The distress I TRY to DROWN in bottles

The cracks it LEFT ME WITH alone

My broken virtue down in pieces

and you SWEPT AWAY so easily

The last line is mainly verbal and adverbial, so we're going to proceed with the verbs.

For verbs, I prefer Merriam-Webster, as there is a whole section between a noun synonym that find synonyms for the verb.

To try, we are going to trade in to strive, as it also has the same sound as try but has a more zealous feeling and in this context seems more vulnerable. Drown is left the same. The next line is also staying just as it is for now. The next line is without a verb, and the next line suits the picture of shattered glass and erasing all evidence.

So far, we have:

The distress I strive to drown in bottles.

The cracks it left me with alone.

My broken virtue down in pieces.

And you swept it away so easily.

So next up adjectives and adverbs.

The first line has none, the second one only has the alone. And the Thesaurus has on one's own as a suggestion. And thus I'm rephrasing the line to The cracks I'm left with on my own. The broken virtue could also be sinking to pieces as it gives an exciting connotation to the act of falling and cracking open. Perhaps a slow-motion memory or a submerged feeling of shock. The easily is quite dull and common, so the Thesaurus also suggests naturally. In this picture, I find it rather suitable, as he/she appears to be emotionally cold and perhaps a notorious heartbreaker. I'm adding a pronoun in the last line, and we are about done.

So eventually we end up with something like this:

The distress I strive to drown in bottles.

The cracks I'm left with on my own.

My broken virtue sunk to pieces.

And you swept it away so naturally.

Well, it is not a Shakespearean masterpiece. However, this is the first synopsis perhaps, from where we can continue with the next part of the story.

So for now, I think this is a great start. Maybe some of you want to try using my poem with your Thesaurus and start telling your own story from there. I'd be thrilled to hear some of your own interpretations that have different twists.

As you can see, you can find synonyms for nearly every word you might be searching for. Maybe you understand now, how powerful this tool can be. An interesting exercise is using a verse or chorus from one of your favourite songs and try rephrasing it. It opens up a whole world of opportunities, as suddenly there are so many words you can choose from. While pop-music today sometimes is somewhat stodgy in its choice of words, maybe you can go this extra mile to add appealing pictures to your lyrics.

So if you have a few minutes, look up your favourite song and rephrase a few lines from the song. If you like, just send me a message with your poem, and I read it out in the next episode.

Okay, just one more thing that pops up in my mind right now. I guess that most of you listen to music in the language you are using in songwriting as well. An inspiring approach to new inspiration or idea could be to use a song in a language that you are not writing in, in my case that would be German, roughly translate it and do the same thing we did earlier. You might come to entirely different ideas and pictures that lead to a number one hit while telling the same story with different words.

So thank you for listening to this episode. There is more to expect in the next month, and I am so thrilled to continue this program.

I want to leave you with a song recommendation today, and I am really inspired by the style of writing that is implemented. An artist I discovered a few weeks ago. Boy In Space, if you haven't heard of him, has heartbreaking lyrics that are so illustrative. His song Drown is a touching ballad and really well-written. So not only the song is really catchy and flawlessly performed, but the lyrics in themself carry a lot of meaning and fit the music so beautifully. He has recently been the opening act for Alec Benjamin, and his social media is really down to earth and fun to follow. Give it a listen and note down some pictures, rephrase his songs if you want to as well and happy songwriting.

So long I hope you enjoyed today's episode and stick around for another round next time. If you like the format, please feel free to support it by subscribing to it and marking it 5 stars. More tips are available on the Tumblr-blog on songwriting tips & tricks. I wish you all the best and see you next time.

Have you ever been searching for a better way to rephrase an idea, or maybe you've been looking for a word that fits the meter or beat or paints a more beautiful image in the audiences head? If that is the case, then today's episode will help you with just that.

We are about to discuss different reliable Thesauruses, be it digital or analogue, rephrase a sample poem and devise a scheme on how to rephrase a line. In the end, you'd be fully aware of using synonyms properly, finding new approaches to writing original lyrics and getting new ideas from rephrasing your favourite songs.

If you like the format, leave a quick review and subscribe to the show. If you know friends who are searching for a program just like this, just let them know as well. If you have any suggestions or feedback, leave it in the comments or send me a message on any social media platform.

Until the next episode, as always, happy songwriting.

Kieper

#songwriting #podcast #anchor #apple podcast #google podcast #songwriting tips #music #lyrics #writing #inspiration

[rona-1776]

Family Secrets

Summary: Keith knows who he is. He's a paladin of Voltron. But just because he knows who is doesn't mean he's not curious of his own past. There are still things he has no idea about. Especially about his mother. Who was she? Was she also Galra? Was the knife he now has belong to her? If she was an alien why was she on earth? Why was he abandoned by her? One day he finds a file at the Blade’s base. He realizes it has information about an important part of his past. He needs to know more but is being refused information. Now, Keith is determined to found out the truth with or without help.

Rating: T Trigger warnings: cursing, anxiety attacks, abandonment issues, light violence and blood mention Relationships: Platonic Keith and Pidge, platonic Keith and Lance Characters: Keith, Pidge, Lance, Kolivan, Galra OC - Keith’s mom

Hello! This is my fic for the @keithminibang! This was a lot of fun to work on and the longest piece I’ve ever written. Thanks to my great friend Abbey for betaing this for me! The art for this by burr-ell!

Link to this on Ao3!

--------

Chapter 1: Hidden

Keith had always been a person who wanted answers. He never liked things that couldn’t be solved and he hated when people deliberately hid things. It was why he was so furious at the Garrison. He knew that the Garrison was hiding something. There was no pilot error on the Kerberos mission, but they didn't want bad press. Ever since then, he'd been trying to find answers to any question he came across. That was why he wanted to find Shiro, find the Blue Lion, and learn where he truly came from. He told the Blade of Marmora during the trial that it didn't matter where he came from. That he was a Voltron paladin. But still the ache in his chest every time he looked at his knife is too much to bear. It held his past and he wanted to uncover it. He had no one to ask either. Shiro only knew he had it when they met, and that his dad might know, but he left when he was younger and has no idea where he is. He had no idea who is mother was either. Before he was able to form memories of her, she was out of his life.

He wished he knew more about his past. About his family. The only memories he had about his father were close to none. Some of them he remembered his dad preparing meals for him to eat before rushing out the door, and returning home almost a week later. He was always tired, bags under his eyes, never smiled, his clothes in a mess. It was like that for a while until one day he just didn’t come home. Keith was only 7 years old and was forced to grow up quickly to take care of himself. He didn’t have his mom around, though, that was when he needed her the most.

After that, Keith wanted to know why she was gone. Why did she leave? Was it because of him? Was he a bad kid? For a long time he had just settled on the fact that she took one look at him and decided she didn't want him and left. Now with his dad abandoning him as well he started to believe it was his fault. It hurt to think about. It hurt to think that his own mom wouldn't want him, but it was the only thing he could think of. Why else would she leave right after his birth? From what he gathered from his dad, she left a month after he was born and left nothing but the knife he had now. His dad had no idea where she was going and she never stated if she would return. She left no photo or any evidence that she even existed.

Without his mother or father around, it was only a matter of time before child services had come. He was immediately taken to a foster home, where he was only allowed to take his clothes with him. All his other belongings they forced him to leave behind. The one thing he smuggled in was his knife. Even as a kid he knew that in the home he was going to, the people in charge would take it from him. It was his only family connection and he needed it to know about his mother.

Every night while the other kids slept, he would duck under his covers and look at the blade. The glowing stone was what he always studied. He never knew what it was, but he knew it wasn't normal for a stone to glow on its own like that. The dark purple stone held a lighter purple symbol in the middle that emanated the light. Keith, every night, tried to research and find out what it was. Unfortunately, he always ended up stuck and wrapped up the blade and hid it under his pillow. His life was like that for 8 years. Constant moving around, family after family rejecting him, asking for the “cute kids”, and all in all having a shitty childhood.

Keith was 15 when he finally decided to run away from foster care. He knew that trying to make it on his own without the constant abuse from his foster parents would be more beneficial to him. He stopped trying to hide his knife, instead hooking it to his back in a sheath he made that connected to his belt. Every now and then he would take it out while hiding behind a dumpster or some other structure and just look at the blade. In some way when he was alone the blade seemed to bring a sort of comfort to him. When he was feeling lost, sometimes he found solace. He knew it was connected to his abandonment, which should have brought him loneliness or even hatred, but it brought the opposite when he needed it in those lonely times.

Keith wandered around from city to city, town to town. He still only had the clothes he kept from when he was taken from his home. It had been years, and eventually these clothes became too small for him. The shirts he had were stretched out and they no longer fit him well. The jeans he wore were tight and stopped above his ankles. His childhood clothes no longer fit him and he needed new ones. He resorted to stealing other people's clothes from clothing lines outside their homes. He made a quick run through a strangers yard and picked up a red jacket the he ended up cutting the bottom off of, simple black shirt and black jeans, and got rid of his old ratty sneakers in exchange for some boots that he, again, stole. It wasn't the best, but it was better than nothing, and when you have nothing you take what you can get.

It was only when he met Shiro that his life turned around. The first time they met, Shiro caught Keith stealing some food from a cart from an unsuspecting seller in an outside marketplace. He had run away to a secluded area and barely started to bite into his stolen meal when Shiro walked up to him. Keith had shied away shielding his food, afraid it would be taken away. Instead he offered to pay for a real meal and help Keith. He could tell that he looked worse for wear. His clothes were getting dirty, he barely could keep up proper hygiene, and Keith was so starved for food that it slipped his mind if he could trust this stranger.

After that encounter, Shiro had become a constant in his life. However, it took time for him to be let behind Keith's walls. After being left behind by his real parents, abused by his foster parents, and never knowing who he could trust, he was wary of new people. Once he had learned more about Shiro, though, Keith finally had someone to rely on. Shiro encouraged him, helped him out of the streets and into his home. He took care of him when no one else would. He still didn't know why Shiro bad taken a random dirty teenager off the street into his home, but he was happy to finally have a person to rely on.

Through Shiro's encouragement he entered the Garrison not much later. Shiro was a captain. He was in charge of most flight missions. It was here that Keith learned his love of flight. He was taken into the simulator and Shiro gave him a quick lesson on flight just to show him the basics, but Keith fell in love with the flight. Even through the simulator he could almost feel what real flying would be like. He enlisted and quickly became top of class surpassing everyone else. He wanted to fly, wanted to see what else was out there, and maybe find the answers he needed. Everything was perfect. Everything was happening in his favor for once in his life. Everything seemed like he would finally be able to find what he was looking for.

But not everything is what it seems. Before graduating to the next class, the constant in his life went missing. Shiro went missing. The one who kept him stable and the one who took him in and taught him flight was gone. Pilot error, he was told. Keith knew immediately it was bullshit. Shiro was an amazing pilot with two others who were equally as skilled. The Garrison was covering it up. Covering the truth and trying to blame it on the people instead of speaking the truth. He confronted Iverson with rage, yelling about how Shiro and the others couldn't have failed a mission like this. He was so angry at the lies and was blinded by his own rage that he ended up punching Iverson in the eye and blinding him. Unfortunately, he was kicked from the school and had no way of getting information. No way of finding of Shiro. No way of getting answers he desperately needed. The universe was back to make his life hell.

After being kicked out he was still determined to find answers. He wouldn't stop until he knew the truth. It was the night that he found a little run down shack near the Garrison and found it to be the perfect place to start his search. Holed up in a little shack he found in the desert, he spent a year following a strange signal that was calling to him. He took pictures and hung them up on the wall of the shack hoping to connect something. The signal came from a cave where the walls were covered in lion drawings. Nothing made sense or connected. For entire year he spent his time in the desert or infiltrating the Garrison for anything he could find. He even gave up looking for answers for his blade. In that one year finding the one family that actually cared about him meant more than the one that abandoned him.

After a year of searching and digging, he had finally found Shiro. When a large object had crash landed on Earth he hadn't expected to find Shiro. All he knew was that the Garrison had it and it was probably important if they were trying to keep it private from the rest of the school. He broke into the place and took care of the scientists and ran into three other students who helped him get Shiro out.

It had been Lance, one of the three students, who unlocked the way to way to get to the Blue Lion and activate it. It took them out into space where he continued to meet Allura and Coran. They assigned Lance, Pidge, Hunk, Shiro, and him to their own lions to fight the Galra. Keith, along with everyone else, agreed to the job. He knew this was it. This was how he was going to get the answers he deserved. The answers to his past, his blade, and why he was left behind.

XXXXXX

The hallways in the base of the Blade of Marmora were silent. They were normally in this state; none of the members ever made much noise other than when they were training. Keith didn’t mind the silence, he even enjoyed at times. It was very different from the almost constant noise from the Castle of Lions. There was always some kind of noise going on there. Coran going on about his days when he was younger back in bootcamp, the mice putting on a show for Allura during free time, Lance talking with Hunk while he baked, even Pidge would be making some noise as she built some new machine for Voltron to use.

It was very different at the Blade’s base. No one really interacted or spoke to each other unless it was for information exchange or training. For him he’s only ever spoken to Kolivan or Regis for missions, other than that his interactions with other members were none. Another thing was they all wore their masks even when inside the base. Kolivan explained that it was for if someone hurt or killed you wouldn’t be able to attach a face to them and be able to focus better on a mission. It was cold he had to admit, but he also couldn’t disagree with him. Even so, Keith knew that if it came down to it, it didn’t matter to him if he knew their face or not. If he could save a life and bring them back he would do it without hesitation.

As he walked down the long hallway he passed a room that was dimly lit. Curious, he walked back and saw what he suspected to be the information room. Walking in he noticed multiple holographic screens that could show various documents at once. There was a control panel that spread the width of the room and in the middle of the panel he saw a handprint for identification. He placed his hand on it and immediately the screens lit up letting him access the files in the computer. He knew that the files inside were most likely just mission logs that were completed and information gathered, but he was still curious to see what it had. The Blade was very secretive and he hardly knew anything about the place, so this might be a good way to finally get some insight.

He started scrolling trying to see if any files could provide any information that he could to help the Blade or Voltron on their joint missions. As he scrolled he wasn’t finding much. It was mostly things he has already read or things that weren’t relevant anymore. He was about to leave when suddenly he started to come across names and the one that caught his eye first was his own. More specifically his last name. It shouldn’t have intrigued him knowing that it was just his own file. He told the Blade everything about him when he joined, but he was still curious. He swiped his finger across the screen to open it and what surprised was that there were two names in the file. One was labeled with his name and the other was labeled “Raye.” Immediately he opened it and felt nervous. Why was this person's name in his file when he didn’t even know who they were?

The very first thing in their file was about them and Keith opened it. It told him everything from her name, age, status in the Blade, and if she was full galra or not. There was a picture of her on the file and when he looked at it, his chest tightened. She was wearing the full Blade of Marmora suit and her hair was a bright white that was braided behind her back. She had a thin scar running down her right cheek. Her eyes were fully yellow like many galra he had seen while in space, but she was different than the rest. Even though in the picture her face held no emotion, she looked as though she hadn’t experienced as many of the horrors of war yet. It must have been when she first joined. But what was most jarring to Keith is that she looked almost like him. They had the same face shape, eyes and mouth.

“What…?” He went to see the other files she had opened up “missions”. In this it had all the missions that she had completed or were progress. He opened up completed and he was met with a log that she had written. There were a few missions that were dated back many years ago that she had done that he held no interest in. What he was interested in was one that was titled with the year 1997, and it appeared to be her first solo mission on Earth.

‘Mission Log 1: I have landed on planet Earth in accordance with the instructions for my mission. I will start looking for the Blue Lion and try to learn its whereabouts before Zarkon’s army finds and gets ahold of it. Intel by allies says that the Blue Lion is somewhere in the Milky Way Galaxy. I need to find it, retrieve it, and bring it back to the base so that Zarkon cannot get a hold of it. Voltron cannot fall into the hands of the enemy.’

She had been on Earth. She had been looking for the Blue Lion. It still didn’t tell him what he hoped it was but all he needed was to read a few more files to find out. He had a feeling. A feeling that he hadn't had in a long time. If this was his mother, he was going to find out and go look for her. He wanted answers about so many things. Mainly why did she leave him. If this log belonged to her did she leave because the mission was over? Why didn’t she stay then or take him with her? Why would she abandon her child on Earth without even giving an explanation as to why? He’s been so hurt for so many years and now he finally had a chance to know.

“Keith.” Keith looked away from the computer and saw Kolivan standing in the doorway of the room. “You are not allowed in here.” He walked in straight towards him, most likely to shut down the computer and take Keith out of the room. Keith glared at Kolivan his anger building up.

“Why wasn’t I told about this person? She’s on my file so she’s obviously connected to me. I think I have a right to know who it is.” He stood straight up intent on getting answers. Kolivan didn’t answer him. Instead he pushed Keith aside and put his hand on the panel which shut down the computer. The screens went back down making Keith unable to read anything more on the file.

“You do not have clearance to look through any files in here. What do you think you were doing exactly?” He was much taller than Keith and was intimidating without even trying.

“I was able to access no problem. I think I’m allowed to learn more about the people I’m working with. Besides, why am I not able to read files especially when there’s one that obviously connected to me? I have a right to know about this woman and I don’t know why you’re trying to keep it a secret from me.”

“You only need to know what we tell you. You are not allowed to sneak into our databases like this. Now head back to your quarters. That’s an order.” Keith continued to glare but eventually left. He knew that he would get nowhere fighting Kolivan like this. Keith was going to back in that room. He had to know. There was still so much that he needed to see, and from Kolivan’s reaction he knew that the Blade wasn’t going to tell him anything.

When Keith got back to his room he sat down on his bed and started to think. He didn’t get to read much on what he saw so he couldn’t make much much sense of it. However, he wanted to believe that the women he read was his mother. He wanted to believe it so much. The thought of actually finding after so many years finally seemed plausible. He was so close and he wasn’t going to let any closed lipped Blades keep him from finding his family. His blade had gotten him closer to the truth on who he was, but actually finding his mother would give him the closure and the answers that he had been desperately searching for.

Keith reached behind him and took out his blade. Before, looking at it he was so confused, knowing it held something about him that he didn’t know. He found only half the answers when he went through the trials. Looking down at the blade that he knows is hers, he feels that just with a little more research, he could find the answers that he needs. Tomorrow he told himself, he was going to go back into that room. He doesn’t care if he gets caught again all he needs is to get enough information on what he needs and get out. With that in mind and being ordered to stay in here, he put his blade away under his pillow and laid back down on his bed to go to sleep. He was ready to get some answers.

Tomorrow had come quickly. Apparently Kolivan had figured that Keith would try and sneak away back to information room because he did everything he could to keep him occupied. He went through rigorous training that keep him busy for hours, that he barely got a break to catch his breath. Even when given a break, Kolivan was watching him like a hawk as if he moved his eyes away for a second Keith would be gone. In his defense he wasn’t totally wrong. Keith himself was trying to find an opening for him to leave. He had been up all day from the early morning to now nearing late afternoon. He hadn’t been able to eat or have a chance to slow down since he got up. All day was a rigorous training and with exhaustion and lack of food, Keith was starting to run on fumes. For him it felt almost like he was back in the trials and he had barley held up during those.

“Start again!” Kolivan voice boomed from the side of the training deck. Keith was surrounded by three other Balde members all wielding their own blades. Keith took his starting position, eyes moving around the three to see who would move first. He was tired but he was still going to move forward and fight. He wasn’t going to let his tiredness win out during this fight.

Out of the corner of his eyes he saw the small movement of one of their shoulders and immediately Keith brought his sword up to block the attack. The loud clang of metal on metal rang out in the training room. Keith pushed them back with the sword and gave himself just enough room to block a second attack from behind him before dodging out of the way from a third attack. In this training cycle he wasn’t given much time to think. Attack after attack was thrown at him trying to find a weak point in him and exploiting it. Unfortunately for Keith, his hunger and exhaustion was doubling up on him causing him to trip in his movements and he was kicked in the gut and sent flying a few feet back. He landed and the air was knocked out of his lungs. Training was halted as he tried to get up on his knees and get air back into his lungs. He clutched his stomach and saw Kolivan walk up to him. He gathered enough of the strength he had to stand up and face him.

“You do realize what I’m trying to do here, right?” He asked Keith. He had his arms folded behind his back in his usual stance as he looked down at him.

“I know exactly what it is. You’re trying to keep me from that room I was in. You wouldn’t have to if you just told me what was in there since it had information connected to me.” Keith was trying to keep his composure as he glares up at Kolivan. His anger from being outnumbered and constantly beat up all day was taking a toll on him. His head was dizzy from lack on food and water and all to keep him from reading a few files that he didn’t know why were kept so secret in the first place.

Kolivan sighed. “I told you yesterday. The only things you need to know is what we tell you. There is no reason for you to go digging in the files. And I hope you weren’t planning on sneaking in there again today. You have been blocked from any and all access to the computer databases unless you have been given direct access from me.”

“What?!” Keith’s anger flared. “You can’t do that!”

“Yes, I can. You went against the Blade by going into that computer. You will be prevented from having all access to that room or its information unless I am there with you and permit what you can and cannot access.” Keith kept his glare. He couldn’t believe he was put on a lock down like some sort of child. However, that only made him more curious as to what they were hiding from him. “In addition, you are relieved from training for today. I suggest you go and eat. Someone will escort you to kitchen. Dismissed.” He turned and walked away from Keith as another Blade member came up next to him, presumably to lead him to the kitchen.

“I don’t need to be led to kitchen. I’ll be fine on my own.” He started walking away ignoring when they said they were ordered to be near him. It was humiliating but he wasn’t going to be led around and watched like this. It seemed overboard for something so small that he did.

He was followed to entire way to the kitchen. Did they really think that he was going to try and sneak away in this condition? Kolivan made it pretty hard for him to do anything other than go get some food before he dragged himself back to his room. He wanted to go, but his limbs felt heavy from use and his stomach was hurting from more than just hunger now. He quickly grabbed something and sat down at one of the tables in the kitchen. There were multiple long ones to fit many of the Blade members in the base. When Keith first saw them he was reminded of the long tables that you would see in the lunch rooms back on Earth.

As he started eating he was trying to think of a way to get back in and get what he needed. He was blocked from all access so just putting his hand on the panel like before wasn’t going to work again. The only way he could think of was by hacking but he didn’t know how to do that. Wait. Keith stopped for a minute. Hacking. Maybe Pidge could help him. She could hack into the data bases and just get what he needed. It wouldn’t be hard considering how they’ve done it to multiple Galra ships before. The only thing he would need to do is persuade her. He wasn’t sure if she’d agree, considering she’d be hacking into an ally’s databases. However, maybe if he convinced her it was to find his family she might be inclined to do so. He needed her help, and he knew it. He knew the Blade wasn’t going to help him any so he would enlist the help of his friends. He knew that there was a chance that she would say no and he would be on his own again. But he didn’t care. If he had to do this on his own he would. He was done with the cover ups, done with lies, and done with the Blade. He deserved answers and was going to get them one way or another.

#keith mini bang #my writing #voltron #keith (voltron) #pidge (voltron) #lance (voltron) #galra oc #kolivan (voltron)

[avengers-nextgen]

The Rise of The Lost XIX Part 1

It was a week since the battle against M.A.D’s forces. Bianca and Bucky were both certain that the industry still existed, whether it be elsewhere in the world, below ground, or somewhere they were licking their wounds. They were the first to say goodbye.

“We’ll find the rest of them. I can’t risk anything else like this happening because of my DNA,” Bucky sighed, running a tired hand down his face and taking a sip from the beer in his hand. He’d stayed up late talking with Steve and Natasha over the matter.

“It’s not your fault. You know that,” Steve insisted, “even if you haven’t said it I can tell. You blame yourself for what happened with Bianca.”

“It’s hard not to.” Bucky snorted, shaking his head. “I mean-I never wanted to be a parent. Hell I had a hard enough time taking care of both of you as kids. I just don’t think I’m going to be enough for her.”

“You’re all she knows,” Nat smiled slightly, “the only thing she has any evidence of. You’re going to surprise yourself James, you always do, and remember we’re always available if you need it.”

“Yeah, I know.” Bucky smiled, “I lucked out with a pretty damn good family.”

Bianca was more excited than Bucky was. She was determined to investigate her roots, discover more information on her mother, and find more of her real identity. It was hard to see her so happy when they didn’t want her to leave.

Nathaniel was worried about her naievity, she wasn’t used to normal life, and Alex fretted over what would happen should M.A.D recover both of them, Enzo was disappointed because he thought she was cool, and Scout couldn’t help but feel a bit nostalgic. Bianca gave everyone a giant hug as she waited for Bucky to double check the car they were using.

“Be careful,” Nathaniel warned as Scout added, “Be smart.”

“Live a little, would ya kid?” Orion had taught Bianca how to fist bump, and though it was awkward, she happily bumped her knuckles against his.

“I’ll see all of you as soon as possible.” She bounced on the balls of her feet. She looked like a little kid-a proper teenager- with her casual clothes on and a back pack slung across her shoulders.

“Alright! Hop on the Barnes express.” Bucky sighed patting Bianca on the shoulder. With a final wave she scampered off leaving Bucky to look at his niece and nephew. James saw the tears in his eyes first and tackled the man in a big hug.

“I’m gonna miss you Uncle Buck.” James mumbled into his chest.

“Me too.” Alex nuzzled her way into the hug as well.

“You two are pretty amazing you know. Thanks for everything you did for her. It’s not easy, and I should have done more, but if it wasn’t for you two I wouldn’t even be doing this with Bianca.” Bucky held both of them close. He’d seen them grow up over the years and they were starting to look like real adults. With one final hug Bucky lifted both of the kids off the ground. Alex and James couldn’t help but laugh before they were set down.

— — —

“Maps? What are you looking for? Treasure?” Piper chuckled looking at Thalia who was sitting in the living room with maps sprawled on the table.

“More or less,” Thalia smiled up at her, “I’m searching for locations that may have Asgardians.”

“I see.” Piper nodded, pursing her lips. “You’re serious about this then. Finding your people.”

“It feels like the right thing to do. They’ve been dispersed for far too long,” Thalia frowned. “It’s hard to imagine.”

“Do you need help?” Piper offered.

“Well, I’m trying to cross reference data bases with unusual occurrences that match Asgardian identifiers.” Thalia saw a small gleam settle in Piper’s eyes. “What?”

“Nothing, you’re just learning and all. I didn’t think you paid much attention to some of the stuff I said.” Piper admitted.

“Why wouldn’t I? You’re one of the most intelligent!” Thalia laughed. The two girl’s set to work on circling, drawing lines to, and crossing out portions of the map.

Their work was only interrupted when T’Challa-unexpectedly visiting- appeared nearby talking to Vision. Scout’s father nodded in agreement before disappearing briefly. Seconds later the sound of feet pounding down the hallway was followed by an elated, “DADDY!”

Siyanda hurtled into her father who was prepared for the impact. He laughed and rolled his eyes before pressing a light kiss to the top of her head. “Hello. My, look at you, you’ve gotten taller!”

“Dad, I stopped growing last year!” Siyanda snorted.

“Lies!” T’Challa teased.

“As excited as I am to see you, I know you don’t leave the kingdom behind unless it’s an emergency,” Siyanda frowned, and she took a step back to study her father’s face.

“It appears those smugglers have spurred a new industry.” T’Challa pursed his lips. “It’s becoming hard to manage. With the loss of Acacia and you being here...”

“I see,” the young princess nodded slowly, “you need me. Someone to lead the fighting effort?”

“Yes.” T’Challa nodded. “It’s time you begin your rise to the throne. This is the perfect opportunity to start taking a more involved role in the kingdom’s affairs.”

“A challenge I’ll happily accept.”

“As I thought, but are you alright leaving this life behind? It will not be a permanent course of action I assure you, but there is no set time when this will end.” T’ Challa’s eyebrows furrowed together in a concerned look.

“There isn’t much choice here,” Siyanda pressed her lips into a thin line. “It’s time I go home.”

Both royal heirs were set to leave on the same day. Everything was quieter than it had been with Bianca’s departure. One goodbye was now three.

“Tell us as soon as you find someone!” Alex hugged Thalia tightly, “it’ll be amazing!”

“I can’t wait, but I am nervous.” Thalia admitted bashfully.

“A warrior like you?” Scout arched a brow, “has nothing to be nervous of.”

“You’re the best big cousin! I mean I only have one but-that’s not the point!” Enzo smiled like a Cheshire Cat at his cousin. Thalia ruffled his hair despite his half hearted whining.

“I’m gonna miss you,” Piper sniffled, “Tech Buddy.”

Siyanda laughed and rolled her eyes but gave Piper an affectionate hug. “You keep up the work Stark. Perhaps we can be partners again?”

“Yeah, the lab’s gonna be really quiet.” Piper nodded.

“Quiet? With you? Not a chance!” Siyanda laughed, shaking her head.

The goodbyes continued until there wasn’t much else to do. T’Challa was waiting on the opened ramp of the jet. Siyanda turned on her heel and jogged off to meet up with her father before skidding to a stop. She’d forgotten one goodbye. Turning curtly she tackled Thalia in a bone crushing hug.

The blonde blinked in surprise but hugged her back. Nothing happened for what seemed like ages even after they pulled apart. Thalia frankly forgot how to speak and just stared at the girl in front of her until Siyanda stood on her tip toes and pressed her mouth firmly against Thalia’s

Scout’s jaw practically hit the floor, Alex laughed and punched James in the arm saying ‘I told you!’, Piper merely fist bumped Orion, and Enzo cheered loudly.

“See you on the flip side,” Siayanda grinned leaving Thalia to blink in confusion. T’Challa gave his daughter a smug look as the jet ramp began to close.

“An Asgardian! Well, no need for an arranged marriage now, is there?” Siyanda only rolled her eyes and punched her father playfully on the arm.

— — —

The Tower was quiet. Piper grew busier and busier leaving Alex to entertain herself and at last the inevitable happened.

“I’m taking over the family business!” She blurted suddenly. Alex blinked slowly at first before smiling.

“That’s great!”

“No. It means I’m not-well I’m not staying here...” Piper immediately saw her best friend’s expression drop, “I have meetings to go to, conferences, resource management programs to oversee, and more.”

“Well you’ve got to get ready.”

“Alex, I know you’re not the happiest but-well I can call you all the time!” Piper promised.

“Piper, seriously, I’m excited for you. It’s an amazing opportunity. Think of all the things you can design and market now?” Alex insisted, and she meant it.

“I was thinking I could have a design partner.” Piper explained, “do you think it’s weird if I ask Gen?”

“Why would it be weird?”

“Well, there’s school, not to mention a female team is practically unheard of in major STEM research and positions-“ Alex held up a hand cutting her friend off.

“Piper Stark, you be the first one to make an all female team and kick the crap out of misogynistic men. Do it. You’ll have my support.” Piper smiled brightly at her long time friend and hugged her for a solid three minutes.

Alex helped her clean out all of the necessities from her laboratory and load it into a jet. Piper’s first stop was a conference in Japan, a place where she hoped she could heal some old wounds within American-Japan enterprise relationships.

James had to comfort a crying Alex that night. The poor girl really couldn’t fathom what it would be like without Piper constantly under foot. In all honesty even he felt a little sad and he didn’t get along all that well with Piper.

— — —

Nathaniel packed slowly trying to prolong the inevitable. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to see his mother, he loved her, but part of his family was there as well.

Scout could feel the older boy’s uncertainty and went to investigate. He hugged Nathaniel gently and was surprised when the archer ran a gentle hand through his hair. “You’re scared, why?”

“My siblings,” Nathaniel admitted nervously. “I don’t know what they’ll think of me. It’s been years since we’ve all been together and dad says they’re all staying over for a week or so.”

“Why would you be scared of what they think about you? Youre amazing.” Scout frowned.

“Because I took up Dad’s mantel, I spent the most time with him, and when Ellie died-“ Nathaniel’s voice cracked, “mom and dad had to take care of me for a while. It’s not a secret the others were jealous.”

“None of that’s your fault.” Scout assured him. “And if they don’t like you screw them. You’re the best big brother ever.”

Nathaniel swallowed tightly and hugged the younger boy close. “Thanks Scouty, that means a lot.”

“Of course. Do you need help organizing? I know you can be a bit scatter brained.” Scout smirked, once more looking like Pietro.

“Yeah, that’d be nice.” Nathaniel nodded.

Nathaniel cried the whole way home like when he was a little boy and had to leave the dog shelter after he finished volunteering. He’d wanted to adopt all of the animals, and in a way he’d adopted all of the kids as his siblings. Clint held his son’s hand the whole drive knowing he needed comfort. Nathaniel always struggled with goodbyes.

— — —

Scout was the next to go. He’d been following the news with his mother and father. His mother’s home was dissolving into ruins. It angered him that people could be so hazardous, that government could be so toxic, and that everyone acted so sad but no one would actually do anything.

“You look angry,” Orion noted from where he sat with his feet propped up on the dinner table as he looked at stupid buzzfeed articles.

“In space do you have governments?” Scout asked sitting across from Orion.

“Yeah, some planets do. Most don’t have a good system. There’s not exactly democracy in outer space,” Orion explained glancing over at the other boy. “Why do you ask?”

“If you had the ability would you help fix it?”

“Of course,” Orion nodded, “there’s too much oppression.”

“Great, I’m not crazy then.” Scout sighed in relief.

“What’s got you so out of sorts?” Orion arched a brow.

“My mother’s home is dissolving into chaos.” Scout went into a three minute explanation and Orion listened through it all.

“Then fix it.”

“What?” Scout stammered in surprise.

“You and your parents have the potential to help. Do it.” Orion spoke firmly. “Don’t be like the others who do nothing.”

“It’s not that easy-“

“My parents are trying to reboot my mother’s home. They’ve asked me to go home with them. To try and complete the goal.” Orion moved so he sat normally with his feet on the floor and elbows on the table. “We want to make a planet without oppression, dictatorship, a place of true peace and prosperity where every people and species can coexist.”

“So-you’re going to space to become a...”

“The face of a new era. The planet’s been renamed Orion after me. One day I’ll be able to oversee everything with a full cabinet of administrators, representatives, and a congressional body.” Orion’s eyes lit up with excitement and Scout realized that Orion was talking about a world he knew nothing of.

Scout knew almost everything there was to do with Earth but he didn’t know space. “I thought you’d be staying.”

“No, I can’t. It’s what I’ve got to do.” Orion set his jaw in firm resolve. “Just like you should help your people.”

Scout spent that night contemplating Orion’s words. He decided that the space boy was right. He couldn’t sit by. Both boys departed on the same day.

“This is a mail translocator. It’s essentially like a space email,” Orion explained placing a cool metal tripod disc into Scout’s palm. “Keep in touch with me. Itll be interesting to see how things go with your quest.”

“I wouldn’t call it a quest,” Scout snorted, tucking the device into his pocket. “But I’ll use it. I’ve realized that I am actually unfamiliar with space despite my scholarly aura. I’d be thankful if you-“

“Told you about it?” Orion asked smugly. “Sure thing. You’ll be totally confused at first but it eventually just clicks.”

“I am Groot!” Scout jumped as the giant tree alien lumbered over to them.

“Yeah I know! I’m going!” Orion laughed as Groot scooped him up. “Don’t forget to space mail me!”

#avengers #avengers next gen #captain america #steve rogers #black widow #natasha romanoff #romanogers #pepper potts #pepperony #iron man #tony stark #vision #vision/wanda #wanda maximoff #scarlet witch #clint barton #hawkeye #thor #loki #loki laufeyson #bucky barnes #bruce banner #hulk #peter parker #spiderman #wakanda #black panther #guardians of the galaxy #marvel #mcu

[debra2007-blog]

The fatal flaw in the 9/11 cover-up!!

(Long but worth the read)

September 11, 2021

9/11 was one of the most pivotal events in world history. Its impact will be felt for years to come. You owe it to yourself to go beyond the sound bites and the simplified official story. This is an extremely complicated story with numerous players and motives.

Why can no one name the hijackers or prove they flew the planes?

Know how to tell the difference between the truth and lies of 9/11? If they're talking about hijackers having done the dastardly deed, you know they're part of the sinister cover up extravaganza, wittingly or not.

In order for the people of the world to be convinced that Islamic hijackers were responsible for terrible tragedy of 9/11, we need to see some evidence. Not hearsay, innuendo, aspersion or promises of evidence, but real evidence.

Otherwise, the whole subject is rightly regarded as a ruse, a setup to conceal the identities of the real culprits, the ones who sit smugly in front of the TV cameras and plot their cynical war on terror — otherwise known as the war on the peoples of the world.

As President Bush continues to insist that his word be accepted as truth on numerous questions, time after time his statements have been revealed as blatant falsehoods. Yet he continues to repeat them, and the whorish corporate media continues to accept them.

Why hasn't either the Bush administration or some element of law enforcement in the United States issued a single solid piece of evidence connecting the hijackers to the hijacked airplanes? Why don’t the alleged hijackers appear on the airport security videos? Why aren’t there credit card records of their ticket purchases?

Why did FBI director Robert Mueller say very publicly to the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco that nothing on paper connected Arab terrorists to 9/11? I mean, 19 years have passed. And the feds produced 19 names within 72 hours of the disaster. Notice a mathematical inconsistency here? All that has happened since is mere vigilante hysteria, hypothetical scenarios trumpeted ad nauseum by America’s notoriously brainwashed Zionist press.

Seven or eight of the names on that original list have been found living comfortably in other countries. Why hasn’t the FBI made any attempt to correct the errors made on that original list?

And why, after much hullabaloo about Colin Powell using phony information in his remarks to the United Nations about the reasons for war, hasn’t the U.S. government produced a single conclusive piece of evidence to back up its claim that 9/11 was the work Osama bin Laden and other Islamic terrorists? Not a single piece!

If you disagree, tell me what it is!

There's a simple answer to this, you know. It's because there isn't any evidence. And why is that? Because those pseudo-Muslims revealed to be so publicly incompetent at piloting jerkwater training planes had absolutely zero chance of flying sophisticated jetliners into anything narrower than the Grand Canyon, never mind executing tricky maneuvers with extraordinarily complicated machinery.

The unknown men who played the roles of the so-called Arab terrorist hijackers were really recruited by either American and/or Israeli intelligence services in a scheme set up as a diversion to inflame dumb Westerners against the Islamic world. The purpose was to divert the world’s attention from the Israeli genocide and dispossession of the Palestinians by blaming the attacks on Muslims.

But that was only half the objective. The other half was to enable our despicable cabal of neocon gangbangers to fleece the American public with an endless array of no-bid contracts to enrich the conscienceless billionaires who are really driving the war machine.

You know how the Bushista American government uses anything for PR to supposedly authenticate its own evil agenda. If they had any concrete evidence against the hijackers — if they even possessed all their correct names — we would have heard about it by now. There would be an avalanche of TV shows about them, unlike that Jewish claptrap hate crime against Muslims that appeared on NBC one night.

After 20 years, with the whole world knowing that eight of the 19 names on the hijacker list are fraudulent, the FBI has made no attempt to substitute new names. And why is that? Because the identities of the hijackers were constructed with mostly stolen papers, for some of the patsies designed to take the heat. In any case, and whoever they were, there is no evidence they ever got on the planes.

But nothing. Instead we have one minor player convicted in Germany, then the conviction was overturned, partly because Americans refused to help with the prosecution.

We have the so-called 20th hijacker and assorted other preposterous character actors languishing in jails on trumped up charges. We have security camera film at the Pentagon, which surely reveal that no jetliner hit that building, locked away in Ashcroft's vault under the phony aegis of national security. We have all the rubble of the World Trade Center, which surely would have revealed the use of nuclear explosives creating shattered beams in odd places, instantly carted away with no forensic investigation. We have transcripts — but no recordings — of these phony cellphone calls, some from people who may not have even existed.

And we have the famous stand down, in which America's air defenses suddenly evaporated — the only time in our history this has happened.

We have Marvin Bush sitting suspiciously on the board of directors of the security company that had the contract for the Twin Towers.

We have Larry Silverstein, who conveniently leased and insured the towers shortly before the big hits, telling officials to "pull" a relatively intact tower, which then fell identically to the two structures that were struck by airplanes, creating the impression that that's the way all three came down.

We have billions of dollars of windfall profits made by savvy investors in the days before 9/11, and an FBI investigation that insists nothing was amiss with these spectacular deals. Of course, we don't get the details. Only "assurances" that the trades were not suspicious, despite patterns and results that were unprecedented in the entire history of financial trading.

We have reports from firemen of explosions at the base of the Twin Towers BEFORE they fell, and the seismographic evidence to back up these assertions.

We have leader after leader saying they didn't know such a thing could happen when the government had been studying the problem for ten years. It had held at least two major drills simulating such a possibility.

And we have a president sitting in a ghetto classroom in Florida, at possibly the most pivotal moment in American history, pretending to read a book that he was holding upside down.

Perhaps most tellingly of all, we have the tragic tale of John O’Neill, rabidly honest FBI investigator, prevented from following his leads about Osama bin Laden because of the danger he would have discovered the links from Afghanistan back to CIA headquarters. Just review the way he was prevented from conducting his probe of the Cole bombing, and prevented by digging into other leads by the same guys — namely insiders Louis Freeh and Thomas Picard — who prevented significant reports from other FBI agents from seeing the light of day.

So, how does all that make you regard the supposedly impartial government panel investigating these matters? When they talk about Presidential Daily Briefings months before the event, or chitchat with presidential flunkies who leak out these pseudo revelations about this and that tidbit of essentially trivial information. And especially when they talk about the dastardly hijackers (without being able to name them) as if there is no question of their guilt. Talk about your misleading urban legends! This one is the champ.

Well, no sense feeling surprise. We knew this commission was a set-up from the get-go. Recycled Watergate investigators, even. Part of the same bunch that has run the country and covered up everything for the past 30 years or more.

Surely you didn't expect a real investigation. Thomas Kean declared at the outset of his hearings that Osama bin Laden was guilty. End of discussion. As soon as he made that statement, there was no way the hearings could be legitimate.

Asserting that genuine Arab hijackers did not carry out the attacks of 9/11 requires analysis of two concomitant categories: the history of American (and Israeli) involvement (and subterfuge) with Arab terrorists, and methods of remote control of aircraft, or other means of piloting the aircraft.

The remote control aspect continues to be a bone of contention among legitimate pilots, with some asserting only real pilots could have made such extemporaneous maneuvers and others insisting only remote control could have accomplished such a feat. An interesting new perspective on this debate can be found here:

A third natural area of study in this regard would be the intimate histories of those whom officials claim to be the hijackers, including putting the microscope on their behavior in the days and weeks before the tragedy.

Many researchers claim the name al-Qaeda was made up in middle ‘90s by a variety of American functionaries (one of them being none other than Richard Clarke) as an all-purpose villain the U.S. could blame as a convenient reason for its military adventurism. And a group of Israeli provocateurs was recently discovered trying to create their own faux version of al-Qaeda.

How many more hints do you need? The absence of any relevant arrests or discovery of any clues to the hierarchy of this supposedly worldwide terror group should tell you a lot.

Al-Qaeda doesn’t exist except for when they want it to, to blame for any sort of strategic terror they have created themselves for some political reason, like influencing the elections in Spain. Hah, that one really backfired.

Why haven’t American intelligence operatives gone to these foreign countries to interview these named hijackers who turned out to be alive? Simple. Because they knew the list was fiction in the first place, and the Arab-types who have been named as terror gurus are mostly their own employees, or people who have been set up by them.

It is a celebrated fact that Mohammed Atta and some of his friends were seen in nightclubs in the hours before 9/11, certainly a fact that argues against them being able to carry out their supposed missions because they were motivated by Islamic religious zeal. So their appearance in strip clubs blows the whole story that they were devout Muslims giving their lives to Allah. Devout Muslims don't drink, never mind cavort with strippers.

If we knew who the hijackers were, we'd know their names, wouldn't we? Or is it now worth bombing other nations and murdering thousands of innocent people because we say we know who the hijackers were, even though we don't know their names? It is the great shame of the American people that they have approved of the murders of thousands of people because of that blatant lie.

Many of the men who were fingered as 9/11 hijackers received preferential treatment from American immigration officials when it came to entering and leaving the U.S. on numerous occasions. Many of these same names reportedly trained at various U.S. military installations.

What has resulted after 19 years of work by America’s crack intelligence agencies, besides the persecution of Muslims throughout the world?

Well, hundreds of innocent people have been unjustly imprisoned and tortured at Guantanamo. All of them innocent, hapless dupes rounded up in a Rumsfeld-ordered dragnet in Pakistan after U.S. planes had (inadvertently or otherwise) allowed the Taliban fighters to escape with the Pakistani army from Afghanistan.

Two pathetic flunkies have been arrested and held without due process. One of them, the notoriously pathetic shoe bomber who was obviously a deranged personality and not a member of any terror network, was ceremoniously sentenced to life in prison.

Other than that, no al-Qaeda kingpins have been even named, never mind apprehended. No clue about how the 9/11 attacks were engineered has ever emerged. This is simply not consistent with being able to name all 19 hijackers the day after the attacks. It is a case of pretending you have all of the information instantly, and then pretending you no information for the next two years. What a smell!

This means two things: that the list of 19 names was a total fabrication, and that the worldwide terror network called al-Qaeda is also a total fabrication, the wet dream brainchild of the CIA and the Mossad to be trotted out as an excuse for a whole string of terror attacks — Madrid, Bali, Riyadh, Istanbul, etc. — that were really carried out by the CIA and the Mossad themselves, cleverly involving designated patsies to give the operations a suitably foreign flavor.

Al-Qaeda does not exist except as a bogeyman invented by Western powers to justify their evil agenda. There were no hijackers flying those planes on 9/11. And honest FBI agents have been prevented from publicizing that fact.

If you disagree, prove it! The world knows you can’t, though the high-tech mass murder by the United States and Israel spreads around the world because of this falsified version of events.

History will show — and the public will soon realize — that those who are telling these lies not only allowed 9/11 to happen, but planned it for their own personal advantage.

The only question that remains is will the American public awaken to this murderous, treasonous scam before the perpetrators achieve their objective and bury the whole planet in the flames of their insane perfidy.

Just remember. If they’re talking about the hijackers, they’re part of the cover up, whether they know it or not.

Much more productive would be analyzing the tiny hole in the Pentagon, how the ejected material in the WTC photos prove there were unexplained explosions, or how those emotional cellphone calls could not possibly have been made as government flunkies have presented them.

But you won’t hear the official 9/11 commissioners talking about any of that, because they are definitely part of the cover up. You can obviously tell, because they keep talking about the hijackers.

Other than a general alert to citizens of the world about the basic lies that continue to underlie all political debate in the United States at this time, there is another, more pressing reason to discuss and contemplate all these matters at this time.

The Secret History of 9/11 - Full Documentary

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVh9WgGxuIY

The Truth Behind 9-11 Attack [Part 1 of 9]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Arub097L5Co

The Truth Behind 9-11 Attack [Part 2 of 9]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IK7qJTCvAHE

The Truth Behind 9-11 Attack [Part 9 of 9]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQ5AxjjDv-U

Mysterious Deaths of 9 11 Witnesses (MUST SEE) - THESE ARE NOT COINCIDENCES

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suQitX2GmTU

This Computer Simulation Explains How the Twin Towers Fell

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzInIjD6nKw

This is the 9/11 Cover Up

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzkd0C2t2s8

9/11 Firefighter Blows WTC 7 Cover Up Wide Open

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQrmkOWhH48

Remembering 9/11 | National September 11 Memorial | United States

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTpYlm79Fis

9/11 Memorial Video (2020)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bgzm4klQXOw

Alan Jackson - Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning) (Official Audio)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zj6rMcVNQbw

Pray for the families that lost their love ones from such a senseless evil act of life. We must hold those that let this happen accountable and that includes our GOVERNMENT!!!

SEEK THE TRUTH. RESEARCH THE TRUTH. FOR YOU SHALL KNOW THE TRUTH AND THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FREE!!

May Yeshua the Messiah bless you,

Love, Debbie

[antifra]

Is Celebrity Influence in Earnest?: Re-examining Our Brand Loyalty as it Relates to Inclusion

The following is my final project for my Fashion Journalism course I took the semester before last. Getting to know my classmates was hugely beneficial to opening my eyes to the abuse of language and lack of objective observation among young, prospective journalists. There was a palpable absence of integrity among my peers during discussions about current events, celebrities, and a controversial FIT runway show that was falsely deemed to feature racially insensitive accessories. I read this article aloud along with an explanation of what motivated me to bring this manipulation to the forefront, and both were received well, though I wonder if my words were enough to pull anyone out of the endless trance of misattribution and mindless consumerism. 

Disclaimer: I've mentioned that I was in the habit of pulling random statistics to support baseless ideas, and this article features a few that I hyperlinked in the original, but have purposefully plucked out. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain and take from it what you will.

Is Celebrity Influence in Earnest?: Re-examining Our Brand Loyalty as it Relates to Inclusion

Since the initial launch of the notoriously diverse array of shades offered by Fenty Beauty’s Pro Filter foundation in September 2017, award-winning recording artist Rihanna has been the subject of praise. Surely, as a woman of color, she’s well aware of the historic inflexibility of complexion product ranges. The brand bears her namesake, after all. Not only that, but Fenty, who also dabbles in size-inclusive clothing and lingerie, cares deeply about those who feel excluded or exoticized in the makeup industry. Rihanna has said herself that she launched the brand “so that women everywhere would be included.”

This sentiment is largely felt by those who patronize her brands as well as other emerging lines like the Kardashian sisters’ jeans and shapewear, hawked by Khloe Kardashian and Kim Kardashian-West, respectively. All three share a similar mission statement that revolves around empowering women who are misrepresented in or completely absent from the media, and subsequently, seemingly, from a highly visual society itself.

The message is clear and agreeable: we don’t typically see average women portrayed in print, on television, or online, which adversely warps the public’s perception of what the female body is supposed to look like, therefore it is necessary to bend this mass misconception back into a place based in reality, and in trying to do so, one is exercising great virtue.

This idea gives way to a slew of sociological probings, but for the sake of celebrity’s influence on inclusive fashion, it’s two-prong. First, in examining widely accepted appearances, it isn’t known that there was a place based in reality to begin with, nor that it has ever been the intention of fashion designers or beauty entrepreneurs to align themselves or their creative executions with it. Second, in fostering a close association with a brand because of the perceived virtue of shared beliefs, one can become blindly loyal and misattribute multiple facets of the brand to its figurehead.

Fashion is no stranger to fantasy. In fact, it serves as an avenue by which people who don’t otherwise have the means to express their innermost desires can do so in the privacy of their bedrooms, among family members, or in the public eye. The idea evokes a sense of exclusivity for a particular time, place, and person, and, not coincidentally, so does traditional fashion media and advertising.

The accessibility and interactivity of sites like Twitter, Snapchat, and Pinterest make it so that users can curate their lives to look however they wish others to perceive it. It is more possible than ever to literally and figuratively “follow” a person’s every move and milestone, however heightened or contrived they may be. Private citizens have used this to further their personal fantasies without the promise of financial gain. Advertisers have also utilized this, but as a means of pushing products and services. A curious dynamic has taken form from the convening of celebrity, consumer, and corporation on the same virtual playing field, insinuating a sense of false intimacy between the three. Where does the product end and the person begin?

Distinctions between Instagram pages of those who are paid to post and those who are not are slowly fading. The line between aspirational and attainable has become increasingly blurry. A study done by researchers at the Manchester School of Business in 2012 concluded that millennials often do indeed develop their personalities around that of celebrities. In an effort to imitate influencers, adolescents and young adults are deliberately positioning themselves alongside products, in places, and with similar production quality as those who monetize their social media. This is accomplished by complying with what will create direct value--in this case, social currency--according to a social marketing report published by the Journal of Business Research in 2010. It isn’t uncommon to hear one refer to maintaining their personhood as upholding their “brand.”

A constant, in-depth conversation can be struck up with the previously unreachable rich and famous whereas before, an occasional surface-level interview and a “who are you wearing?” were commonplace. With this development, there appears to be little difference between big names and lay people at first glance. The introduction and continued endorsement of clothing, products, and services that celebrities lay claim to and purportedly use on a daily basis may add to the illusion that there is substance beneath the shine.

All of this serves to further the narrative that not only is inclusion something that is appreciated, but necessary. The public is privy to a whole host of information about who they’ve deemed to be their favorites and are equipped with the tools to take on their appearance, too.

Rihanna’s look has been heralded as on-of-a-kind, but her partnership with LVMH to create a fashion house inspired by her style has made it so that women from sizes 00-24 can be unique, too. But does that serve to uphold the concept of singularity?

To marketers, it doesn’t matter. Different facets of celebrities’ public lives are merely commodities. Chrissy Teigen’s Twitter-famous food photos can easily be recreated by taking a page from her two bestselling cookbooks. Kim Kardashian’s signature curvaceous figure is finally within reach with her new line of shapewear. Beyonce’s plant-based Coachella-performance body can be achieved by subscribing to her vegan meal delivery plan.

This isn’t subject to objection by the famed nor their fans. If there are financial gains to be made for the former and a perceived benefit to be had by the latter, then the project has served its purpose. Collectivism is essential to the bottom line. If crowds can get behind a product or service and its purveyor, then a loyal following has been formed, and a well known method of retaining this is by creating a sense of trust. Research published by Nielsen in 2015 has shown that millennials and members of Gen Z are more susceptible to trusting celebrity endorsements.

Rihanna and her Kardashian counterparts are regarded as “self-made,” but their projects are far from sole-proprietorships. There are teams upon teams of professionals behind them working to bring a definitive vision to fruition. Whether or not this vision originated in the minds of the “self-made” is neither here nor there, but certainly each part of the supply chain from an idea’s inception to its fulfillment has been facilitated by multiple people. The common misattribution of the fruit borne by brands to their figureheads creates an even stronger association where there may be none.

Keeping Up with the Kardashians has developed a cult following since its debut in October 2007. It has viewers into feeling as if they are witnessing the unfabricated woes and wonderments of the lives of American royalty. A bond has been forged between the viewership and the program’s cast of sisters. Those who tune in every week are under the impression that they know Kris, Kim, Kourtney, Khloe, Kendall, and Kylie on some level by virtue of what they’ve seen play out on screen and online. This superficial omniscience serves to ease some reluctance to invest in their lines of skincare, cosmetics, and clothing because it invokes the aforementioned evidence-based sense of familiarity. 

The clan consists of polarizing figures who have not been immune to bad press, but a study done by Taiwanese researchers in 2011 revealed that consumers’ statuses as fans or foes is irrelevant when considering brand recall. Support from celebrities has been found to be chemically indistinguishable from the advice of a valued friend in the human brain. There remains a finite difference in the motivations of marketing teams and trusted companions: hopes for a return on investment. This isn’t to say that recommendations from stars are any less in earnest than those from the latter, but consciously discerning one from the other can lead one to question the former’s intentions, especially as it relates to inclusion.

Fashion relies on mimicry. If there weren’t muses, common threads among the masses, and a trickling of trends down, up, or across, the principle would be lost. Businesses would and have suffered from not conforming to the ever changing, largely digital landscape that lies before us. In an age when authenticity has become increasingly difficult to gauge with the proliferation of fake news but is still valued by consumers, companies have to follow suit in a way that is not construed as contrived.

Adding a human element to an advertising campaign, or attaching a big name to a product in some capacity instead of prompting the public to pay a faceless corporation has been found to alleviate fears of false promises, as evidenced by statistically-supported blind trust in celebrities. When humans themselves become brands, rely on the compliance of their followers for financial gain, and do so as a means of survival, one may think to revisit the rationale behind that initial fear.

[jessejackreyes]

Written after the whole Jeff reveal. Also on (ao3)

Echos

“Oy! Gabrielito!”

A headache. That’s apparently what was on the agenda for the day. A huge headache. He groaned at the realization, knowing full well that Sombra would bother him repeatedly and obnoxiously until he gave her the attention she wanted and he was in no mood to deal with that at the moment. So instead, he simply turned towards her, hoping it would be over quickly.

“What?” His irritated tone did nothing to dissuade her, it never did. She was too cocky for her own good.

“I got something to show you,” She waved a tablet in the air as she spoke.

“I’m not in the mood,” He grumbled, hoping in vain that she would just drop it.

“Not even if it has to do with your little soldado?” His anger flared enough for him to see red. He could hear the smug smirk as she spoke, as his body began smoking softly. It was a struggle to keep himself from lashing out.

“Don’t test me!” He growled.

“Oh relax Gabi, I have something that I’m sure you will want to see,” He really didn’t like that tone. It always meant she was about to do something that he was going to regret.

“I’m busy,” He growled out, trying to dismiss her.

“No you’re not,” She answered back simply, gesturing for him to follow. He debated responding in several ways: simply leaving, strangling her, exploding dramatically into a dark cloud. In the end he simply followed the annoying woman, it would keep her from harassing him for days until he gave in just to shut her up.

They made their way away from everyone else, all the way to Sombra’s little corner of the base. Here, at the very least they would have an impressive level of privacy. It was very difficult to spy on someone as skilled and paranoid as their resident little hacker. This also meant that she intended for whatever was going to happen to stay between the two of them. She didn’t say another word until they were in the safety of her little workshop.

“Let’s just get this over with,” He growled as the door closed behind them. “What did you want?”

“I was trawling around the UN and I found some recordings that you will find interesting,” He caught the tablet she tossed his way. “You may find it very relevant to that little soldado of yours,”

He doesn’t rise to the obvious bait, instead simply turning his focus to the video file that she had left open. It was frozen, staring into a room full of people that he recognized. First was Jack, wearing his bright blue dress uniform, hair white before it’s time. The rest of them were various members of the UN, Adawe, Woerner, Soueng, Faraji, Juarez, and last and least, Petras. This must have been some kind of meeting about the shit going on with Overwatch at the time. Instead of speculating further, he simply pressed play.

“With all due respect director,” Jack’s voice was forceful and commanding in a room full of people who were clearly not used to dealing with the man like this. “Commander Reyes has served with distinction and has gotten exemplary results for almost two decades in a very thankless job,” The man had the attention of the entire council, even Petras, though he was clearly unhappy to be being challenged.

“His service record is not in question at the moment,” The man replied, interrupting the strike commander forcefully. “This is an unmitigated disaster and we need to act.”

“I agree,” Jack replied calmly. “However, I don’t believe throwing one of our most skilled and devoted men under the bus is the appropriate response.”

“I understand that you and commander Reyes have a very long history, but we can’t simply let everything he does go because you like him,” The condescension in the director’s tone was almost as telling as the sneer he was clearly hiding.

“I was unaware that there were other allegations against commander Reyes right now,” Jack replied sharply, challenging the other man to produce such claims.

“There is nothing official, but we have all heard the rumors,” Petras returned somewhat noncommittal.

“What rumors?”

“Supporting Dr. O’Deorain’s research is the most recent.”

“There is absolutely no evidence to back up those claims,” Jack replied forcefully. “How many witch hunts that lead nowhere is it going to take to convince this council that he is simply doing his job?”

“There are very good reasons that her work was discontinued,”

“I am well aware director. I helped to shut it down,”

“Then you know how serious such allegations are,”

“Yes, and if there was any evidence to back them up I would not hesitate to act. I have, however, found none and since we are speaking hypotheticals now I would assume you don’t have any either,” Jack quickly dismissed the implication.

“Not at the moment,” Petras conceded after a brief silence. “But that’s not why we’re here,” He quickly pivoted away from that line of questioning. “Six civilians are dead and many more injured.”

“A tragic accident and not something that hasn’t happened in official missions that I have led personally.” For perhaps the first time in his life, Gabriel realized that he had never seen Jack like this, this part of his political persona, harsh, clinical and extremely intimidating. “Unfortunately, sometimes our intel is wrong and things go wrong. All we can do is our best with what we have,” The speech ended with his strong, warmer tone, inspirational, instead of intimidating.

“We cannot sit here and do nothing,” Woerner spoke up forcefully.

“I agree,” Jack responded quickly. “But we need to keep from acting rashly and causing mroe harm than good.”

“Let’s put it to a vote,” Petras declared, disrupting any continued debate. “All of those in favor of terminating Gabriel Reyes as commander of Blackwatch,” The call was followed by three hands raising, Petras, Woerner and Soueng. The scowl on Petras’ face was quite impressive as the votes were counted.

“Opposed,” Jack called out, watching as three hands rose as well: Adawe, Faraji and Juarez were opposed. A tie, three to three. The tiebreaking vote was left to the strike commander himself. “And I am opposed,” He declared, carefully hiding the triumph from his voice. Morrison and Petras’ staredown was clearly making the rest of the council nervous. Even Reaper thought it might come to blows, not that Jack was in any danger, before Adawe spoke up.

“I would suggest a compromise,” She waited until everyone’s attention was on her before elaborating. “Instead of hastily removing Reyes from command, I suggest suspending all Blackwatch activity and launching a special investigation into the organization’s actions. We can reconsider the commander’s position once we know more about the goings on behind the scenes,” There were murmurs of assent from around the table.

“Very well,” Adawe’s compromise appeared to have mollified Petras somewhat. “All in favor of suspension and launching a special investigation.” Six hands were raised, all but the strike commander’s. “Very well. Commander Reyes and all Blackwatch assets are suspended pending the completion of said investigation.” There were murmurs of approval around the table. “I trust that commander Morrison will have no problem informing the commander of our decision.”

“Of course not,” Jack replied as diplomatically as he could manage. “When this investigation turns up nothing I hope we will be able to resume operations as normal,”

The video cut out as Jack turned to leave, presumably when he had sent Gabriel the emergency call that led to them discussing the suspension, not that he had listened to the suspension. He had simply shifted his operations to being more low key and he couldn’t use Overwatch assets, but he had kept up his more important ops.

“Why did you show me this?” Gabriel had all but growled, smoking. He wasn’t sure when he had begun losing a hold of his form.

“Wait, wait wait,” She replied energetically. “That’s not even the best part.” She waved her hand and the old tablet screen shifted to another file. “I found this in the ruins of Zurich,” She explained. “The tablet belonged to the supposedly dead strike commander and it was in surprisingly good condition.”

He glanced through the file. It was in part a profile of Moira and her research and why Overwatch had discontinued supporting it, but it was not simply a profile. It included pictures of Gabriel and Moira, information about Blackwatch’s dealings with her and the resources it had given her to work with. He had no idea why Sombra would have wanted him to look at this until she mentioned that the tablet had been Jack’s.

“When?”

“He was sent the file from an unknown source six days before that meeting you saw. It was accessed sixteen separate times over those six days,”

“He lied.”

“Big time, though if you watch a bunch of the other ones, he does it a lot really,” She shrugged as she spoke. “His silver tongue puts even Akande to shame,”

“Why did you show this to me?” Reaper voice was suddenly cold, dangerous as he repeated his question. Sombra paused briefly, considering her words carefully before she responded.

“I heard your little fight in Oasis.” When Reaper didn’t interrupt, she continued. “Both of you told two seemingly very different stories and I was curious as to what actually happened.”

Gabriel’s mind drifted to Jack’s words that day. “There are a lot of things you can blame me for, but don’t you dare tell me I didn’t trust you. I trusted and stood up for you until the very end you bastard.”

He had dismissed what Jack had been saying as simply more of his lies, but now, he wasn’t so sure.

“What are you trying to accomplish?”

“No ulterior motives,” Her grin betrayed otherwise as she spoke. “I merely wished to spread the truth. You always like acting with accurate information after all.” When he didn’t respond to her casually calling him out immediately, she continued. “I put all of the recordings I could find on there and marked the ones I think would be of the most interest to you, though you might want to watch them all.”

Gabriel scrolled through a large list of several dozen videos as she spoke, internally debating whether he should just throw the damn thing away or not. He was suddenly forced to question things that he knew to be true, the distance, the lack of faith, the betrayal. These had been such integral parts of his life for years and suddenly they were in doubt, somehow. By the time he pulled himself out of his head Sombra had departed, which kept him from having to storm off at the very least.

His actual decision was made regardless of what he actually wanted. There was no way he could avoid knowing exactly what had happened when he had the opportunity. Working off of unfinished information always bothered him and this was no exception. He had to resign himself to a very long night of home movies and from the look of Sombra’s mood, it was going to be very educational.

#reaper76 #r76 #Gabriel reyes #jack morrison #sombra #reaper #overwatch

[sugarwaterradio]

What Is Shadow Banning? How The Instagram Practice Can Affect An Artist.

In an era where social media is one of an artist's most pivotal tools, we look at how Instagram's penchant for "shadow banning" rappers may have a detrimental effect on their livelihoods.

Instagram can be a powerful weapon for the world’s most creative minds. The Facebook-owned company permits creatives of all types to foster organic bonds with their audience, tailoring their communication to purport themselves and their brand in whatever way they so desire. No longer prohibited by junkets or predesignated appearances, many artists utilize their social media as an extension of the viewpoints and aesthetic that they present in their music. As a result, the relationship between a rapper’s personal life and their movements in the professional sphere are more symbiotic than ever. The autonomy that social media provides the artist and its uncensored, largely self-governed nature has aided many artists’ ascents while also spawning its fair share of cautionary tales. Beyond the intrepid dangers of rampant clout chasing that Denzel Curry is quick to warn us of, there is another, far less publicized side to the application that has largely remained shrouded in mystery and hearsay. This is Instagram's ability to “shadow ban” an aspiring hip-hop artist. In an era where visibility is placed on a high premium, “shadow banning” obstructs artists from gaining new followers or being discoverable by the search function, ultimately hindering their livelihood. Rather than a conventional ban— such as that which was doled out to Boonk Gang or almost befell The Game— there is no significant effect on functionality of the app for the recipient of the shadow ban. In many cases, it’s highly probable that an artist wouldn’t know they’d been given this exposure-hampering designation unless they were specifically informed. By the same token, their pre-existing fans and followers would be none the wiser as their posts would continue to show up on their feed without incident. Ultimately, the problem lies in the fact that their omission or diminished position in search results makes it exceedingly difficult to find them. Thus, getting slapped with a shadow ban can covertly stifle audience growth without Instagram ever having to offer a robust explanation. In fact, the powers at be over at Instagram HQ vehemently refute that it’s a real practice. Speaking to reporters in July of 2018, product lead Julian Gutman opted to use the press visit as a platform to dispel many of the “misconceptions” that have haunted them in recent years. Amid granting TechCrunch and others a window into the intricacies of the platform, they set aside time to downplay the existence of shadow banning and other supposed foibles of the app that have come under scrutiny.  "Instagram’s feed doesn’t favor users who use Stories, Live, or other special features of the app. Instagram doesn’t downrank users for posting too frequently or for other specific behaviours, but it might swap in other content in between someone’s if they rapid-fire separate posts. Instagram doesn’t give extra feed presence to personal accounts or business accounts, so switching won’t help your reach. Shadowbanning is not a real thing, and Instagram says it doesn’t hide people’s content for posting too many hashtags or taking other actions."NLE Choppa at the HNHH NYC Office - Image by HNHH Draped in the same ambiguity as an urban myth, the issue reared its head in the hip-hop sphere in recent weeks after a discovery from NoJumper’s Adam22. Known to champion the exact generation of burgeoning rappers that are so intertwined with social media, he took to Twitter to flag what he saw as unfair treatment of one of Memphis’ rising rappers. Complete with screen-recorded evidence of the issue, Adam proclaimed, "NLE Choppa is one of the most popular up & coming rappers. He’s also shadow banned on Instagram and it’s almost impossible to find his account unless you type in his exact username and scroll past a bunch of fake accounts. He has no recourse or avenue by which to appeal this. I’ve noticed this with a bunch of rappers lately," he continued, "but can’t remember who else. Either way the government needs to step in and stop this shit." Met by fervent agreement by some and scepticism by others, Adam’s insistence that this must go to a higher body speaks to how crucial platforms such as Instagram can be to a rising MC’s progression. When levelled with allegations about this practice, their spokespeople are always quick to espouse the "principles" that are key to success such as "having a distinct visual presence," "being a storyteller" and putting "thought into your creative." This may be sound promotional advice on the surface but it is ultimately null and void when you’re being thwarted by an algorithmic anomaly. In light of Adam’s revelation that NLE Choppa had fallen foul of a shadow ban, it seemed only right to delve into the ranks of today’s rising artists to discern who else has found themselves on the receiving end of it and whether there’s any commonality between them. To clarify, all prior research into shadow banning estimates that they last around 14 days so while these examples are valid at time of writing, that could realistically change any minute in favour of another crop of rappers being afflicted. In terms of artists in the upper-reaches of the modern-day game, two notable victims of this form of social media-based marginalization come in Freddie Gibbs (@FreddieGibbs) and Max B (@Maxb140). Teetering more towards elder statesman than the archetypal Instagram generation, both rappers are nigh-on undiscoverable on Instagram unless you search their username on a search engine that’s independent of the app. Segueing towards XXL Freshman territory, the polarizing Blueface (@bluefacebleedem) has been extricated from the results entirely while Skinnyfromthe9, Icy Narco and the incarcerated YNW Melly are all buried below fan pages and other offerings with far less relevancy and far less follower counts. Veering into the up-and-comers, the social media prevalence of artists such as ABG Neal, Queen Key, Philthy Rich, Freebandz’ Lil Wookie, Peewee Longway, Coca Vango, Egypxn and 9lokkNine is diluted on account of unspecified shadow bans that they may not be privy to whatsoever. An undisclosed restriction that may leave these aspiring artists screaming into the void, where it gets interesting is when you factor in the other societal group that have been plagued by this scenario.Peewee Longway at the HNHH NYC office - Image by HNHH In April of this year, Instagram implemented a new power that enabled them to discreetly minimize what they saw as “inappropriate” content even if it didn’t explicitly violate their community guidelines and, in typical fashion, have seldom expanded beyond the blanket terms. After refusing to provide further explanation to HuffPost, it had been suggested that shadow bans were closely aligned with their new policy of combatting "inauthenticity." "Every day people come to Instagram to have real experiences, including genuine interactions," they declared in a blog post. "This type of behaviour is bad for the community, and third-party apps that generate inauthentic likes, follows, and comments violate our Community Guidelines and Terms of Use." However, the ongoing trend of sex-workers, strippers and other adult-oriented content creators receiving shadow bans suggests that there is an attempt to remove anything risqué or subversive from the platform. Among the most vocal detractors of Instagram’s shadow banning policy, Jacqueline Frances, otherwise known as @jacqthestripper, spoke openly about the toll that it has on her ability to engage with her audience: "I absolutely depend on Instagram to make a living. I sell books, I sell T-shirts, I sell art, and Instagram is my largest-reaching advertising platform," she conceded. "Having my content demoted makes me less visible and makes it harder to remind people to buy my stuff." Although the products may be different, the plight of the artist depicts how shadow banning could directly affect today’s rappers in the same irremovable fashion. While they think they may be doing ample promotion for a new single or project, getting saddled with a shadow ban will mean that they won’t be eligible for any explore pages and are ultimately left preaching to the converted rather than having any hope of alerting potential fans to their material. Not only does it set a dangerous precedent for freedom of expression on Instagram and social media at large, shadow bans have the potential to meddle with an artist’s standing in the hip-hop realm. Consequently, the community must keep a watchful eye on this and spread awareness until this invisible ceiling on creatives has been lifted once and for all. Have you noticed a shadow ban on certain artists? Let us know in the comments.

https://youtu.be/tmWS4dlmK_s Read the full article

#WhatIsShadowBanning?HowTheInstagramPracticeCanAffectAnArtist.

[comecollective-blog1]

3 things I thought I knew about sexualized violence – until I became a survivor

Trigger warning for anyone who has experienced sexualized violence or for whom this is a sensitive topic–find support here​.

Please note that this piece is based on personal experience and thus completely subjective. There is no right or wrong way to be a survivor.

I call myself a feminist. Even though I still have a lot to educate myself on, I thought I had one topic pretty much figured out: sexualized violence.

I am familiar with the national and global discourse, know the laws on sexualized violence in my country (Germany), and like to keep up to date on research and statistics. In a way, I was always prepared to become part of these statistics. After all, ​35% of German women*​ report having experienced physical assault and/or sexualized violence from age 15 onward. Taking into account that only ​5–15 % of survivors​ chose to report, my odds looked even grimmer.

Knowing this, I was, as bitter as it may sound, not really surprised, when one night some years ago, I experienced an attempted rape. I was shocked, however, by what followed. Even with all my reading and research, I was in no way prepared for how I and the people around me would handle the situation. Five things I thought I knew about sexual violence did not hold true at all in my personal experience.

1. I will be sure that I’ve experienced sexualized violence

During my lifetime I have experienced my fair share of sexual harassment, just as many feminine presenting folks do––from catcalling and groping up to being followed home by strangers or stalked by a public masturbator. All these experiences had 3 things in common:

I knew exactly what was happening and that it was wrong

I defended myself, called for help, and informed security, doormen, or the police

I did not know the perpetrator prior to the incident

For my assault, however, the last one of these points did not hold true, which, in a way, changed everything.

I had known my attacker since we were 5 years old. We had grown up together, went to kindergarten and primary school together, graduated from high school, partied and hung out together. He was my friend. My friend wouldn’t do such a thing to me, that’s what my brain kept telling me. I must be wrong in feeling violated, disgusted and shaken to my core, because my friend would never do anything that would make me feel that way. I must have misunderstood what he was trying to do, he must have misunderstood my signals. There must have been a mistake.

Thankfully, somehow, I managed to not let my doubts control me. I defended myself, I got out of the situation before anything more could happen. Yet, I could not for the life of me explain or put into legal terms what had just happened to me.

Later, on the phone with a ​crisis hotline I had called, knowing I wouldn’t make it through the next few hours alone, I told the counsellor what had happened in detail, step by step. When I heard them say the phrases “sexual assault” and “attempted rape”, I was in disbelief. I couldn’t understand that according to the law I had prided myself on knowing, my friend had acted as the perpetrator and I had become his victim––to this day I struggle with the term victim, I like survivor better.

The first thing I needed to understand is that the experience of sexualized violence can be so overwhelming that it becomes hard to recognise and name what happened to you. This is why professional help can be so important––but more on that later.

2. My friends and family will support me

I had been aware that 77% of the women* who experience sexualized violence know their attacker. What I hadn’t thought about, however, was what that meant for my lived experience. A majority of my friends knew the perpetrator. They were not only my but also his friends. My family had watched my attacker grow up. They were acquainted with his parents, had arranged our playdates and heard me tell countless fun stories involving him.

When I approached the people around me, who I considered my support system, and told them what had happened, they responded similarly to how I had first reacted: with disbelief

and dismissal. It was incredibly hard for them to grasp that this was not just a fight between friends. That this was not me asking them to “pick a side” or to be on my team. It hadn’t even occurred to me that any of my friends might still want to hang out with my attacker after hearing what happened.

But some of them did and here’s why: Everyone, including myself, had known the perpetrator as a nice guy. He had always gotten along with everyone, was socially and politically conscious, he volunteered in his free time and got elected class president. At the time of the assault his best friend was in the police academy and he himself was a law student. I’m sure if you asked him, both then and now, he’d call himself a feminist.

In addition to the perpetrator seeming like a perfectly good guy, I didn’t exactly act like a victim myself. When I first told everyone about what had happened, I was still in deep shock. I didn’t cry, I didn’t want to be held, I didn’t ask for anything––I just needed people to know. From an outside perspective it looked like I was handling things just fine. My friends and family mistook this first “autopilot survival” stage of my trauma for indifference.

I recounted the details of the assault and told everyone that I did not want to see the perpetrator ever again. I believed the support I needed would automatically follow. But here’s the thing: People like what they already know.

Actually believing my story would have significantly disrupted everyone’s world view. It would’ve raised uneasy questions and required actual effort and changes in people’s everyday lives:

Did my friend really commit a sexual offence?

Did he always have that potential in him?

How did I never notice?

Do I confront him about what I’ve just learned?

How do I act around him?

What does that mean for our circle of friends?

My family and some of my friends chose to openly face these questions and put the effort in. For these people I’m incredibly grateful. Others chose differently. They had heard “both sides of the story”, my recollection of an attempted rape as well a the perpetrators insistence that this was all a big misunderstanding and he was incredibly sorry, and they thought it best “not to get involved”.

I will say this now in case someone out there needs to hear it: There is no such thing as “not getting involved” when one of your friends is accusing another of a sexual offence. If you choose not to confront the alleged attacker, if you choose to act like nothing happened, if you treat both parties just as you did before, you’re giving power to the perpetrator and taking it from the survivor. The attacker will interpret your non-action as tolerance of their crime while the victim will understand that their experience is insignificant and that people don’t care.

It would have been nice to tell my story and be instantly surrounded by understanding and support. In my experience, however, even the people willing to be there for me often did not know how best to help. They cut all ties with my attacker but in fear of doing something wrong, they did nothing besides that. Only when I actively and specifically voiced my needs did I receive the support I needed. Asking for help is exhausting but healing. Cutting ties hurts, but just one person who sees, believes, and supports you can make all the difference.

3. I will report

I didn’t report. At least, I haven’t reported yet. This is still a hard one for me to grasp, even years later. I struggle to talk or even write about this. It is the only part of my experience as a survivor that fills me with shame. So why didn’t I just do it? After all, I have reported many other acts of sexual harassment, way less serious cases, to the police.

In this statement alone lies part of the answer. After the assault happened, I was simply too overwhelmed. It was too much, I couldn’t grasp what was going on and was in complete survival mode. This state was followed by a year of strict repression. I pushed every thought of the assault into the deepest depths of my brain and locked all of them in a box. I needed to do this, so I could go on with my life. Only when that sealed box of repressed thoughts broke open and caused a complete meltdown once the anniversary of the assault neared, did I realise, I should probably deal with this.

I still am dealing with it. I found a counsellor for victims of sexualized violence and have been going to sessions for a year now. These sessions are healing and necessary (for me personally) but they are also extremely draining and require a lot of energy. At this point, I simply do not have enough strenght or emotional resources to heal myself and also report.

After all, reporting does not only mean reliving the traumatic experiences––I do that every other week in therapy. It means reliving the traumatic experiences in an unsafe space. In a space, where I will be asked, whether I had been drinking, what I had been wearing, if I am sure it wasn’t just a friendly cuddle. It means retelling my darkest experiences and maybe not being believed.

A sad truth for my case is, that the chances of the perpetrator actually being prosecuted are slim to none. It will be his word against mine and there is no physical evidence. Cases like mine, where there was no penetration and there is no rape kit, rarely even make it to court. So why do I feel bad for not reporting?

I feel that by not reporting, I’m not standing up for myself the way I would want to. I feel that I’m letting him win and am not warning other women out there about him. It makes me feel weak and incapable.

The main reason why one day, when I have regained my strength and am ready to face the authorities’ bias and scrutiny, I want to report is this: sexual predators tend to be repeat offenders. In my case, the perpetrator did not even understand that he did something wrong––so what’s keeping him from doing it again?

There is a considerable chance that somewhere out there is another woman who has fallen or will fall victim to his violence. And if this person chooses to report, I want her to have better chances than me. I don’t want it to be her words against his, I want it to be OUR WORDS against his. I want to lay the groundwork for exposing the pattern. If not for myself, then for other women like me.

*The statistics cited here focus on cis women. Trans women and feminine representing non-binary people are affected at an even higher rate.

- Anonymous Survivor

#survivor #sexualizedviolence #article #textual

[nextstop-pluto]

Non-fiction film

//Research through film//

I’ve mentioned in a few posts about the general style and subject of my crew’s film. It’s heavily music centered with a look into the generational differences of the local music scene across the years. 

Essentially what we will be creating is a music based short documentary film, so in order to develop a firmer understanding of creating a non-fiction film based around music I went and watched one. 

I’m personally a big fan of music in general so I applied my personal music interest into the music based film I watched for research. The film I chose to watch is not too long recently documentary film based on the South Korean music group called BTS. The documentary film was titled, ‘Burn the Stage’ and it was released through YouTube Red (see trailer below.) The non-fiction film follows the group over their world tour in the 2017 titled, “The Wings Tour”, and while the music based film my crew will be making is nothing on this scale of production I found that certain aspects used in the film could be potentially implemented in our film.

The film’s mode of presenting the events and members (essentially contributors) is for the most the part what you would expect from a non-fiction film, there are the standard sit down interviews, archive footage and sequences of the members and staffs explaining their work as they do it. However, there are a few “non-standard” modes of conveying/expositing information.

For example there’s a whole sequence of one member showing his work process as he works on writing songs for the group, what’s unique or at least I haven’t seen it before is that the whole sequence appears to have been shot by him. It appears as if he was given a camera and allowed to record his work at his own pace, show what he wants to show, be as honest as he wishes. 

This allowed for a more authentic feeling to the film as a whole, instead of the constant cameras following the “subjects” (members) we, the audience, got a personal insight into the life of artist through his eyes and his consent. 

I found this particularly interesting and worth noting due to how it made the film feel more personal and intimate. This feeling I believe would be worth trying to emulate in my crew’s film. As a audience member myself I connect more to the people to people on screen when I begin to see the world through their perspective, it builds a connection and subsequently allows for engagement and possible emotive reactions from the watcher. 

Media I have found and learnt is about immersion, if we the audience are immersed in what we are seeing or experiencing our memories and feelings are significantly stronger. We remember better and depending on the feeling will sometimes aim t pass that feeling on by, for example, recommending whatever media to other people. As an aspiring creator I want to learn and create content that evokes these types of feelings in my audience. Immersion leads to engagement and engagement leads to remembrance and the possibility of attracting more people.

However, I know I must keep in mind especially when creating non-fiction content is the balance between creating true content and how I go about getting the content I need from a contributor. In the ‘Burn the Stage’ film as I mentioned of one members appears to have been allowed to film a segment himself. This meant that he was in control of what he filmed including how reliable it was. While we can assume what he allowed to be shown was the truth equally as much parts could have been omitted.

In a recent lecture for non-fiction film one of our lecturers mentioned an ITV documentary on a famous couple who were responsible for a slew of murders a number of years ago. The documentary had advertised itself as presenting unseen evidence that would shock the audience, however, shortly before the release date it had been revealed that the documentary’s main contributor had lied. There was no new evidence and as a result, none of the information given was valid or reliable. This was the main problem with relying on evidence given wholly by a contributor with limited personal investigation until, it was too late.

In short, as I mentioned earlier I’ve identified that a balance between allowing the contributor to be as open as they please and directing/drawing out the reliable content needs to always be kept in mind. 

***

 As a fan of group the documentary allowed me to both enjoy the content presented to me but also identify the ways in which it kept me as a watcher engaged. One of the drawing points of the group BTS according us fans is their ability for the members to make their selves feel connected to us. They do it through it their subject matter in music and the regular interaction they have with us. 

Additionally, through the release of content such as this, which presented fans with a look into their lives that we had never seen before. Fans felt a deeper immersion and connection to the members. We cared even more than we did before and as a result this feeling passed itself onto others including non fans through the internet. It was a good mix of media marketing and building a stronger connection between artist and fan.

It was a good experience as fan and as biased as it sounds, although I debated for the purpose of covering all bases in my own film making. I don’t believe that member would have omitted anything particularly weighty content wise during that sequence during the film. The major factor behind this reasoning rests on the fact he was intoxicated during this sequence which remains especially comedic amongst fans and two it’s not something I believe any of them to really do. But I am one to admit I’m biased and this has digressed further than it needed to.

***

My research into non-fiction music based film through watching this film I believe has proven to some extent beneficial in the development of my own filmmaking.

[debra2007-blog]

The fatal flaw in the 9/11 cover-up (Long but worth the read) September 8, 2020 9/11 was one of the most pivotal events in world history. Its impact will be felt for years to come. You owe it to yourself to go beyond the sound bites and the simplified official story. This is an extremely complicated story with numerous players and motives.

Why can no one name the hijackers or prove they flew the planes?

Know how to tell the difference between the truth and lies of 9/11? If they're talking about hijackers having done the dastardly deed, you know they're part of the sinister cover up extravaganza, wittingly or not.

In order for the people of the world to be convinced that Islamic hijackers were responsible for terrible tragedy of 9/11, we need to see some evidence. Not hearsay, innuendo, aspersion or promises of evidence, but real evidence.

Otherwise, the whole subject is rightly regarded as a ruse, a setup to conceal the identities of the real culprits, the ones who sit smugly in front of the TV cameras and plot their cynical war on terror — otherwise known as the war on the peoples of the world.

As President Bush continues to insist that his word be accepted as truth on numerous questions, time after time his statements have been revealed as blatant falsehoods. Yet he continues to repeat them, and the whorish corporate media continues to accept them.

Why hasn't either the Bush administration or some element of law enforcement in the United States issued a single solid piece of evidence connecting the hijackers to the hijacked airplanes? Why don’t the alleged hijackers appear on the airport security videos? Why aren’t there credit card records of their ticket purchases?

Why did FBI director Robert Mueller say very publicly to the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco that nothing on paper connected Arab terrorists to 9/11? I mean, 19 years have passed. And the feds produced 19 names within 72 hours of the disaster. Notice a mathematical inconsistency here? All that has happened since is mere vigilante hysteria, hypothetical scenarios trumpeted ad nauseum by America’s notoriously brainwashed Zionist press.

Seven or eight of the names on that original list have been found living comfortably in other countries. Why hasn’t the FBI made any attempt to correct the errors made on that original list?  

And why, after much hullabaloo about Colin Powell using phony information in his remarks to the United Nations about the reasons for war, hasn’t the U.S. government produced a single conclusive piece of evidence to back up its claim that 9/11 was the work Osama bin Laden and other Islamic terrorists? Not a single piece!

If you disagree, tell me what it is!

There's a simple answer to this, you know. It's because there isn't any evidence. And why is that? Because those pseudo-Muslims revealed to be so publicly incompetent at piloting jerkwater training planes had absolutely zero chance of flying sophisticated jetliners into anything narrower than the Grand Canyon, never mind executing tricky maneuvers with extraordinarily complicated machinery.

The unknown men who played the roles of the so-called Arab terrorist hijackers were really recruited by either American and/or Israeli intelligence services in a scheme set up as a diversion to inflame dumb Westerners against the Islamic world. The purpose was to divert the world’s attention from the Israeli genocide and dispossession of the Palestinians by blaming the attacks on Muslims.

But that was only half the objective. The other half was to enable our despicable cabal of neocon gangbangers to fleece the American public with an endless array of no-bid contracts to enrich the conscienceless billionaires who are really driving the war machine.

You know how the Bushista American government uses anything for PR to supposedly authenticate its own evil agenda. If they had any concrete evidence against the hijackers — if they even possessed all their correct names — we would have heard about it by now. There would be an avalanche of TV shows about them, unlike that Jewish claptrap hate crime against Muslims that appeared on NBC one night.

After 19 years, with the whole world knowing that eight of the 19 names on the hijacker list are fraudulent, the FBI has made no attempt to substitute new names. And why is that? Because the identities of the hijackers were constructed with mostly stolen papers, for some of the patsies designed to take the heat. In any case, and whoever they were, there is no evidence they ever got on the planes.

But nothing. Instead we have one minor player convicted in Germany, then the conviction was overturned, partly because Americans refused to help with the prosecution.

We have the so-called 20th hijacker and assorted other preposterous character actors languishing in jails on trumped up charges. We have security camera film at the Pentagon, which surely reveal that no jetliner hit that building, locked away in Ashcroft's vault under the phony aegis of national security. We have all the rubble of the World Trade Center, which surely would have revealed the use of nuclear explosives creating shattered beams in odd places, instantly carted away with no forensic investigation. We have transcripts — but no recordings — of these phony cellphone calls, some from people who may not have even existed.

And we have the famous stand down, in which America's air defenses suddenly evaporated — the only time in our history this has happened.

We have Marvin Bush sitting suspiciously on the board of directors of the security company that had the contract for the Twin Towers.

We have Larry Silverstein, who conveniently leased and insured the towers shortly before the big hits, telling officials to "pull" a relatively intact tower, which then fell identically to the two structures that were struck by airplanes, creating the impression that that's the way all three came down.

We have billions of dollars of windfall profits made by savvy investors in the days before 9/11, and an FBI investigation that insists nothing was amiss with these spectacular deals. Of course, we don't get the details. Only "assurances" that the trades were not suspicious, despite patterns and results that were unprecedented in the entire history of financial trading.

We have reports from firemen of explosions at the base of the Twin Towers BEFORE they fell, and the seismographic evidence to back up these assertions.

We have leader after leader saying they didn't know such a thing could happen when the government had been studying the problem for ten years. It had held at least two major drills simulating such a possibility.

And we have a president sitting in a ghetto classroom in Florida, at possibly the most pivotal moment in American history, pretending to read a book that he was holding upside down.

Perhaps most tellingly of all, we have the tragic tale of John O’Neill, rabidly honest FBI investigator, prevented from following his leads about Osama bin Laden because of the danger he would have discovered the links from Afghanistan back to CIA headquarters. Just review the way he was prevented from conducting his probe of the Cole bombing, and prevented by digging into other leads by the same guys — namely insiders Louis Freeh and Thomas Picard — who prevented significant reports from other FBI agents from seeing the light of day.

So, how does all that make you regard the supposedly impartial government panel investigating these matters? When they talk about Presidential Daily Briefings months before the event, or chitchat with presidential flunkies who leak out these pseudo revelations about this and that tidbit of essentially trivial information. And especially when they talk about the dastardly hijackers (without being able to name them) as if there is no question of their guilt. Talk about your misleading urban legends! This one is the champ.

Well, no sense feeling surprise. We knew this commission was a set-up from the get-go. Recycled Watergate investigators, even. Part of the same bunch that has run the country and covered up everything for the past 30 years or more.

Surely you didn't expect a real investigation. Thomas Kean declared at the outset of his hearings that Osama bin Laden was guilty. End of discussion. As soon as he made that statement, there was no way the hearings could be legitimate.

Asserting that genuine Arab hijackers did not carry out the attacks of 9/11 requires analysis of two concomitant categories: the history of American (and Israeli) involvement (and subterfuge) with Arab terrorists, and methods of remote control of aircraft, or other means of piloting the aircraft.

The remote control aspect continues to be a bone of contention among legitimate pilots, with some asserting only real pilots could have made such extemporaneous maneuvers and others insisting only remote control could have accomplished such a feat. An interesting new perspective on this debate can be found here:

A third natural area of study in this regard would be the intimate histories of those whom officials claim to be the hijackers, including putting the microscope on their behavior in the days and weeks before the tragedy.

Many researchers claim the name al-Qaeda was made up in middle ‘90s by a variety of American functionaries (one of them being none other than Richard Clarke) as an all-purpose villain the U.S. could blame as a convenient reason for its military adventurism. And a group of Israeli provocateurs was recently discovered trying to create their own faux version of al-Qaeda.

How many more hints do you need? The absence of any relevant arrests or discovery of any clues to the hierarchy of this supposedly worldwide terror group should tell you a lot.

Al-Qaeda doesn’t exist except for when they want it to, to blame for any sort of strategic terror they have created themselves for some political reason, like influencing the elections in Spain. Hah, that one really backfired.

Why haven’t American intelligence operatives gone to these foreign countries to interview these named hijackers who turned out to be alive? Simple. Because they knew the list was fiction in the first place, and the Arab-types who have been named as terror gurus are mostly their own employees, or people who have been set up by them.

It is a celebrated fact that Mohammed Atta and some of his friends were seen in nightclubs in the hours before 9/11, certainly a fact that argues against them being able to carry out their supposed missions because they were motivated by Islamic religious zeal. So their appearance in strip clubs blows the whole story that they were devout Muslims giving their lives to Allah. Devout Muslims don't drink, never mind cavort with strippers.

If we knew who the hijackers were, we'd know their names, wouldn't we? Or is it now worth bombing other nations and murdering thousands of innocent people because we say we know who the hijackers were, even though we don't know their names? It is the great shame of the American people that they have approved of the murders of thousands of people because of that blatant lie.

Many of the men who were fingered as 9/11 hijackers received preferential treatment from American immigration officials when it came to entering and leaving the U.S. on numerous occasions. Many of these same names reportedly trained at various U.S. military installations.

What has resulted after 19 years of work by America’s crack intelligence agencies, besides the persecution of Muslims throughout the world?

Well, hundreds of innocent people have been unjustly imprisoned and tortured at Guantanamo. All of them innocent, hapless dupes rounded up in a Rumsfeld-ordered dragnet in Pakistan after U.S. planes had (inadvertently or otherwise) allowed the Taliban fighters to escape with the Pakistani army from Afghanistan.

Two pathetic flunkies have been arrested and held without due process. One of them, the notoriously pathetic shoe bomber who was obviously a deranged personality and not a member of any terror network, was ceremoniously sentenced to life in prison.

Other than that, no al-Qaeda kingpins have been even named, never mind apprehended. No clue about how the 9/11 attacks were engineered has ever emerged. This is simply not consistent with being able to name all 19 hijackers the day after the attacks. It is a case of pretending you have all of the information instantly, and then pretending you no information for the next two years. What a smell!

This means two things: that the list of 19 names was a total fabrication, and that the worldwide terror network called al-Qaeda is also a total fabrication, the wet dream brainchild of the CIA and the Mossad to be trotted out as an excuse for a whole string of terror attacks — Madrid, Bali, Riyadh, Istanbul, etc. — that were really carried out by the CIA and the Mossad themselves, cleverly involving designated patsies to give the operations a suitably foreign flavor.

Al-Qaeda does not exist except as a bogeyman invented by Western powers to justify their evil agenda. There were no hijackers flying those planes on 9/11. And honest FBI agents have been prevented from publicizing that fact.

If you disagree, prove it! The world knows you can’t, though the high-tech mass murder by the United States and Israel spreads around the world because of this falsified version of events.

History will show — and the public will soon realize — that those who are telling these lies not only allowed 9/11 to happen, but planned it for their own personal advantage.

The only question that remains is will the American public awaken to this murderous, treasonous scam before the perpetrators achieve their objective and bury the whole planet in the flames of their insane perfidy.

Just remember. If they’re talking about the hijackers, they’re part of the cover up, whether they know it or not.

Much more productive would be analyzing the tiny hole in the Pentagon, how the ejected material in the WTC photos prove there were unexplained explosions, or how those emotional cellphone calls could not possibly have been made as government flunkies have presented them.

But you won’t hear the official 9/11 commissioners talking about any of that, because they are definitely part of the cover up. You can obviously tell, because they keep talking about the hijackers.

Other than a general alert to citizens of the world about the basic lies that continue to underlie all political debate in the United States at this time, there is another, more pressing reason to discuss and contemplate all these matters at this time.

This Computer Simulation Explains How the Twin Towers Fell To understand what happened to the Twin Towers on 9/11, a scientist set up an elaborate computer simulation of t... Conclusive Evidence the 9/11 Planes were NOT REAL   https://youtu.be/CUoqwUVOxHE AWAKENING - 9/11 Cover Up This is the 9/11 Cover Up  https://youtu.be/uzkd0C2t2s8

The Truth Behind 9-11 Attack [Part 1 of 9]  https://youtu.be/Arub097L5Co

Pray for the families that lost their love ones from such a senseless evil act of life. We must hold those that let this happen accountable and that includes our GOVERNMENT!!!

SEEK THE TRUTH. RESEARCH THE TRUTH. FOR YOU SHALL KNOW THE TRUTH AND THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FREE!!

May Yeshua the Messiah bless you, Love, Debbie

[itsfinancethings]

New world news from Time: Exclusive: The Chinese Scientist Who Sequenced the First COVID-19 Genome Speaks Out About the Controversies Surrounding His Work

Over the past few years, Professor Zhang Yongzhen has made it his business to sequence thousands of previously unknown viruses. But he knew straight away that this one was particularly nasty. It was about 1:30 p.m. on Jan. 3 that a metal box arrived at the drab, beige buildings that house the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center. Inside was a test tube packed in dry ice that contained swabs from a patient suffering from a peculiar pneumonia sweeping China’s central city of Wuhan. But little did Zhang know that that box would also unleash a vicious squall of blame and geopolitical acrimony worthy of Pandora herself. Now, he is seeking to set the record straight.

Zhang and his team set to work, analyzing the samples using the latest high-throughput sequencing technology for RNA, the viral genetic building blocks, which function similar to how DNA works in humans. By 2 a.m. on Jan. 5, after toiling through two nights straight, they had mapped the first complete genome of the virus that has now sickened 23 million and killed 810,000 across the globe: SARS-CoV-2. “It took us less than 40 hours, so very, very fast,” Zhang tells TIME in an exclusive interview. “Then I realized that this virus is closely related to SARS, probably 80%. So certainly, it was very dangerous.”

The events that followed Zhang’s discovery have since become swathed in controversy. Crises beget scapegoats and the coronavirus is no different. The floundering U.S. response to the pandemic has prompted a wave of racially tinged soundbites, such as “China virus” and “Kung Flu,” as President Donald Trump’s Administration seeks to divert blame onto the nation where the pathogen was first identified. “The outbreak of COVID angered many people in the Administration and presented an election issue for President Trump,” Ambassador Jeffrey Bader, formerly President Obama’s chief adviser on Asia, said at a recent meeting of the Foreign Correspondents Club of China.

Read more: Inside the Global Quest to Trace the Origins of COVID-19—and Predict Where It Will Go Next

Upon first obtaining the genome, Zhang says he immediately called Dr. Zhao Su, head of respiratory medicine at Wuhan Central Hospital, to request the clinical data of the relevant patient. “I couldn’t say it was more dangerous than SARS, but I told him it was certainly more dangerous than influenza or Avian flu H5N1,” says Zhang. He then contacted China’s Ministry of Health and traveled to Wuhan, where he spoke to top public health officials over dinner Jan. 8. “I had two judgements: first that it was a SARS-like virus; second, that the virus transmits by the respiratory tract. And so, I had two suggestions: that we should take some emergency public measures to protect against this disease; also, clinics should develop antiviral treatments.”

Afterward, Zhang returned to Shanghai and prepared to travel to Beijing for more meetings. On the morning of Jan. 11, he was on the runway at Shanghai Hongqiao Airport when he received a phone call from a colleague, Professor Edward Holmes at the University of Sydney. A few minutes later, Zhang was strapped in for takeoff and still on the phone—then Holmes asked permission to release the genome publicly. “I asked Eddie to give me one minute to think,’” Zhang recalls. “Then I said ok.” For the next two hours, Zhang was cocooned from the world at 35,000 feet, but Holmes’ post on the website Virological.org sent shockwaves through the global scientific community.

By the time Zhang touched down in Beijing, his discovery was headline news. Officials swooped on his laboratory to demand an explanation. “Maybe they couldn’t understand how we obtained the genome sequence so fast,” says Zhang. “Maybe they didn’t fully believe our genome. So, I think it’s normal for the authorities to check our lab, our protocols.”

Read more: China Says It’s Beating Coronavirus. But Can We Believe Its Numbers?

Critics of China’s response have latched onto the Jan. 11 date of publication as evidence of a cover-up: why, they ask, didn’t Zhang publish it on Jan. 5, when he first finished the sequencing? Also, Zhang’s lab was probed by Chinese authorities for “rectification,” an obscure term to imply some malfeasance. To many observers, it seemed that furious officials scrambling to snuff out evidence of the outbreak were punishing Zhang simply for sharing the SARS-CoV-2 genome—and in the meanwhile, slowing down the release of this key information.

Yet Zhang denies reports in Western media that his laboratory suffered any prolonged closure, and instead says it was working furiously during the early days of the outbreak. “From late January to April, we screened more than 30,000 viral samples,” says Fan Wu, a researcher who assisted Zhang with the first SARS-CoV-2 sequencing.

And, in fact, Zhang insists he first uploaded the genome to the U.S. National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) on Jan. 5—an assertion corroborated by the submission date listed on the U.S government institution’s Genbank. “When we posted the genome on Jan. 5, the United States certainly knew about this virus,” he says. But it can take days or even weeks for the NCBI to look at a submission, and given the gravity of the situation and buoyed by the urging of colleagues, Zhang chose to expedite its release to the public, by publishing it online. (Approached by TIME, Holmes deferred to Zhang’s version of events.) It’s a decision that facilitated the swift development of testing kits, as well as the early discussion of antivirals and possible vaccines.

Read more: ‘We Will Share Our Vaccine with the World.’ Inside the Chinese Biotech Firm Leading the Fight Against COVID-19

Zhang, 55, is keen to downplay the bravery of his actions. But the stakes of doing what is right over what one is told are rendered far higher in authoritarian systems like China’s. Several whistleblower doctors were detained early in the pandemic. According to a Jan. 3 order seen by respected Beijing-based finance magazine Caixin, China’s National Health Commission, the nation’s top health authority, forbade the publishing of any information regarding the Wuhan disease, while labs were told to destroy or transfer all viral samples to designated testing institutions. Caixin also reports that other labs had processed genome sequences before Zhang obtained his sample. None were published.

It’s difficult to know what conclusions to draw. Dr. Dale Fisher, head of infectious diseases at Singapore’s National University Hospital, says he doesn’t think that any delay by the Chinese authorities was malicious. “It was more like appropriate verification,” he says. Fisher traveled to China as part of a World Health Organization (WHO) delegation in early February and says outbreak settings are always confusing and chaotic with people unsure what to believe. “To actually have the whole genome sequence by early January was outstanding compared to outbreaks of the past.”

Of course, Zhang’s fears based on the viral genome were just one evidence strut to inform China’s decision-making process, alongside public health data and clinical reports about specific cases. Despite mounting evidence of human-to-human transmission, including doctors falling ill, it was only on Jan. 20 that China officially confirmed community transmission. Two days later, Wuhan’s 11 million residents were placed on a bruising lockdown that would last for 76 days. Even while the WHO publicly praised China for transparency, internal documents seen by the Associated Press suggest health officials were privately frustrated by the slow release of information. One joint study by scientists in China, the U.K. and U.S. suggests there would have been 95% fewer cases in China had lockdown measures been introduced three weeks earlier. Two weeks earlier, 86% fewer; one week, 66% fewer.

Read more: ‘I Told Myself to Stay Calm.’ As Wuhan’s Lockdown Ends, A Doctor Recalls Fighting Coronavirus on the Front Line

Yet there was some historical basis for skepticism about the severity of the emerging viral disease. After all, the last global pandemic—the swine flu outbreak of 2009—was far less deadly than initially feared, mainly because many older people had some immunity to the virus, leading to criticism that the WHO was overly hasty and even overly dramatic in declaring a pandemic when the virology didn’t warrant it. “In China, even though we had a very bad experience with SARS and other diseases, in the beginning nobody—not even experts from China’s CDC and the Ministry of Health—predicted the disease could be quite so bad,” says Zhang.

Donald Trump disagrees. He has repeatedly claimed that swifter action by China could have stopped the pandemic in its tracks. “The virus came from China,” Trump said Aug. 10. “It’s China’s fault.” Beijing concedes that mistakes were made at the outset, though insists that blame lies solely with bungling local officials (who have since been punished for those failures), while the central government’s response was exemplary. This is, of course, its own politically motivated oversimplification. On both sides, wild accusations have eclipsed reason as Sino-U.S. relations spiral to an unprecedented nadir. While U.S. officials have suggested that COVD-19 originated in a Wuhan laboratory, their Chinese counterparts have propagated conspiracy theories that the U.S. military is responsible. “It’s not a good thing for China and the U.S. to be involved in this struggle,” says Zhang. “If we can’t work together, we can’t solve anything.”

Read more: The Coronavirus Outbreak Could Derail Xi Jinping’s Dreams of a Chinese Century

Some facts are undeniable. The first U.S. case was confirmed on Jan. 21—a man in his 30s who had just returned from Wuhan to his hometown in Washington State. Japan confirmed its first coronavirus case one day later, and reported the world’s highest infection number early in the outbreak, before getting a handle on the situation. Today, the U.S. has 16,407 cases per million population compared with 462 in Japan. Across the world, authoritarian and democratic nations have both handled the crisis well and poorly.

For its part, the global scientific community has risen to the challenge, working across national boundaries to advance understanding of the disease, including priceless collaborations between Chinese and Western virologists. Previously, the best described epidemic in terms of viral genetics was the 2014 West African Ebola outbreak. Then, about 1,600 genomes were mapped over three years, providing insights into how viruses move between locations and accumulate genetic differences as they do. But for SARS-CoV-2, following Zhang’s initial genome, scientists mapped about 20,000 within three months. Genomic surveillance enables scientists to trace the speed and character of genetic changes, with ramifications for infection rates and the production of vaccines and antivirals. “Very large-scale genomic screening can evaluate whether any resistance mutations have occurred and, if they do, how those spread through time,” says Oliver Prybus, professor of evolution and infectious disease at Oxford University.

For Zhang, focus must now be on understanding how pathogens and the environment interact. Over the past century, an inordinate number of new viral diseases have emerged in China, including the 1956 Asian Flu, 2002 SARS and 2013 H7N9. Zhang attributes this to China’s diverse ecology and enormous population. Moreover, as China’s economy boomed its people have begun traveling far and wide in search of work, education and opportunities. According to the World Bank, almost 200 million people moved to urban areas in East Asia during the first decade of the 21st century. In China, 61% of the population lived in urban areas in 2020 compared with just 18% in 1978. This brings unknown pathogens and people without natural defenses into close proximity. “People and pathogens must be in contact [for outbreaks],” says Zhang. “If no contact, no disease.”

As urbanization intensifies, outbreaks of pathogenic diseases will only become more common. Mitigation, says Zhang, comes from deeper understanding of viruses, so that we can accurately map and predict which are likely to spill over into human populations. Just as satellites have made forecasting weather patterns unerringly reliable, Zhang believes science holds the key to predicting viral outbreaks with similar accuracy as with which we now anticipate typhoons and tornadoes. “If we don’t learn lessons from this disease,” says Zhang, “humankind will suffer another.”

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Over the past few years, Professor Zhang Yongzhen has made it his business to sequence thousands of previously unknown viruses. But he knew straight away that this one was particularly nasty. It was about 1:30 p.m. on Jan. 3 that a metal box arrived at the drab, beige buildings that house the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center. Inside was a test tube packed in dry ice that contained swabs from a patient suffering from a peculiar pneumonia sweeping China’s central city of Wuhan. But little did Zhang know that that box would also unleash a vicious squall of blame and geopolitical acrimony worthy of Pandora herself. Now, he is seeking to set the record straight.

Zhang and his team set to work, analyzing the samples using the latest high-throughput sequencing technology for RNA, the viral genetic building blocks, which function similar to how DNA works in humans. By 2 a.m. on Jan. 5, after toiling through two nights straight, they had mapped the first complete genome of the virus that has now sickened 23 million and killed 810,000 across the globe: SARS-CoV-2. “It took us less than 40 hours, so very, very fast,” Zhang tells TIME in an exclusive interview. “Then I realized that this virus is closely related to SARS, probably 80%. So certainly, it was very dangerous.”

The events that followed Zhang’s discovery have since become swathed in controversy. Crises beget scapegoats and the coronavirus is no different. The floundering U.S. response to the pandemic has prompted a wave of racially tinged soundbites, such as “China virus” and “Kung Flu,” as President Donald Trump’s Administration seeks to divert blame onto the nation where the pathogen was first identified. “The outbreak of COVID angered many people in the Administration and presented an election issue for President Trump,” Ambassador Jeffrey Bader, formerly President Obama’s chief adviser on Asia, said at a recent meeting of the Foreign Correspondents Club of China.

Read more: Inside the Global Quest to Trace the Origins of COVID-19—and Predict Where It Will Go Next

Upon first obtaining the genome, Zhang says he immediately called Dr. Zhao Su, head of respiratory medicine at Wuhan Central Hospital, to request the clinical data of the relevant patient. “I couldn’t say it was more dangerous than SARS, but I told him it was certainly more dangerous than influenza or Avian flu H5N1,” says Zhang. He then contacted China’s Ministry of Health and traveled to Wuhan, where he spoke to top public health officials over dinner Jan. 8. “I had two judgements: first that it was a SARS-like virus; second, that the virus transmits by the respiratory tract. And so, I had two suggestions: that we should take some emergency public measures to protect against this disease; also, clinics should develop antiviral treatments.”

Afterward, Zhang returned to Shanghai and prepared to travel to Beijing for more meetings. On the morning of Jan. 11, he was on the runway at Shanghai Hongqiao Airport when he received a phone call from a colleague, Professor Edward Holmes at the University of Sydney. A few minutes later, Zhang was strapped in for takeoff and still on the phone—then Holmes asked permission to release the genome publicly. “I asked Eddie to give me one minute to think,’” Zhang recalls. “Then I said ok.” For the next two hours, Zhang was cocooned from the world at 35,000 feet, but Holmes’ post on the website Virological.org sent shockwaves through the global scientific community.

By the time Zhang touched down in Beijing, his discovery was headline news. Officials swooped on his laboratory to demand an explanation. “Maybe they couldn’t understand how we obtained the genome sequence so fast,” says Zhang. “Maybe they didn’t fully believe our genome. So, I think it’s normal for the authorities to check our lab, our protocols.”

Read more: China Says It’s Beating Coronavirus. But Can We Believe Its Numbers?

Critics of China’s response have latched onto the Jan. 11 date of publication as evidence of a cover-up: why, they ask, didn’t Zhang publish it on Jan. 5, when he first finished the sequencing? Also, Zhang’s lab was probed by Chinese authorities for “rectification,” an obscure term to imply some malfeasance. To many observers, it seemed that furious officials scrambling to snuff out evidence of the outbreak were punishing Zhang simply for sharing the SARS-CoV-2 genome—and in the meanwhile, slowing down the release of this key information.

Yet Zhang denies reports in Western media that his laboratory suffered any prolonged closure, and instead says it was working furiously during the early days of the outbreak. “From late January to April, we screened more than 30,000 viral samples,” says Fan Wu, a researcher who assisted Zhang with the first SARS-CoV-2 sequencing.

And, in fact, Zhang insists he first uploaded the genome to the U.S. National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) on Jan. 5—an assertion corroborated by the submission date listed on the U.S government institution’s Genbank. “When we posted the genome on Jan. 5, the United States certainly knew about this virus,” he says. But it can take days or even weeks for the NCBI to look at a submission, and given the gravity of the situation and buoyed by the urging of colleagues, Zhang chose to expedite its release to the public, by publishing it online. (Approached by TIME, Holmes deferred to Zhang’s version of events.) It’s a decision that facilitated the swift development of testing kits, as well as the early discussion of antivirals and possible vaccines.

Read more: ‘We Will Share Our Vaccine with the World.’ Inside the Chinese Biotech Firm Leading the Fight Against COVID-19

Zhang, 55, is keen to downplay the bravery of his actions. But the stakes of doing what is right over what one is told are rendered far higher in authoritarian systems like China’s. Several whistleblower doctors were detained early in the pandemic. According to a Jan. 3 order seen by respected Beijing-based finance magazine Caixin, China’s National Health Commission, the nation’s top health authority, forbade the publishing of any information regarding the Wuhan disease, while labs were told to destroy or transfer all viral samples to designated testing institutions. Caixin also reports that other labs had processed genome sequences before Zhang obtained his sample. None were published.

It’s difficult to know what conclusions to draw. Dr. Dale Fisher, head of infectious diseases at Singapore’s National University Hospital, says he doesn’t think that any delay by the Chinese authorities was malicious. “It was more like appropriate verification,” he says. Fisher traveled to China as part of a World Health Organization (WHO) delegation in early February and says outbreak settings are always confusing and chaotic with people unsure what to believe. “To actually have the whole genome sequence by early January was outstanding compared to outbreaks of the past.”

Of course, Zhang’s fears based on the viral genome were just one evidence strut to inform China’s decision-making process, alongside public health data and clinical reports about specific cases. Despite mounting evidence of human-to-human transmission, including doctors falling ill, it was only on Jan. 20 that China officially confirmed community transmission. Two days later, Wuhan’s 11 million residents were placed on a bruising lockdown that would last for 76 days. Even while the WHO publicly praised China for transparency, internal documents seen by the Associated Press suggest health officials were privately frustrated by the slow release of information. One joint study by scientists in China, the U.K. and U.S. suggests there would have been 95% fewer cases in China had lockdown measures been introduced three weeks earlier. Two weeks earlier, 86% fewer; one week, 66% fewer.

Read more: ‘I Told Myself to Stay Calm.’ As Wuhan’s Lockdown Ends, A Doctor Recalls Fighting Coronavirus on the Front Line

Yet there was some historical basis for skepticism about the severity of the emerging viral disease. After all, the last global pandemic—the swine flu outbreak of 2009—was far less deadly than initially feared, mainly because many older people had some immunity to the virus, leading to criticism that the WHO was overly hasty and even overly dramatic in declaring a pandemic when the virology didn’t warrant it. “In China, even though we had a very bad experience with SARS and other diseases, in the beginning nobody—not even experts from China’s CDC and the Ministry of Health—predicted the disease could be quite so bad,” says Zhang.

Donald Trump disagrees. He has repeatedly claimed that swifter action by China could have stopped the pandemic in its tracks. “The virus came from China,” Trump said Aug. 10. “It’s China’s fault.” Beijing concedes that mistakes were made at the outset, though insists that blame lies solely with bungling local officials (who have since been punished for those failures), while the central government’s response was exemplary. This is, of course, its own politically motivated oversimplification. On both sides, wild accusations have eclipsed reason as Sino-U.S. relations spiral to an unprecedented nadir. While U.S. officials have suggested that COVD-19 originated in a Wuhan laboratory, their Chinese counterparts have propagated conspiracy theories that the U.S. military is responsible. “It’s not a good thing for China and the U.S. to be involved in this struggle,” says Zhang. “If we can’t work together, we can’t solve anything.”

Read more: The Coronavirus Outbreak Could Derail Xi Jinping’s Dreams of a Chinese Century

Some facts are undeniable. The first U.S. case was confirmed on Jan. 21—a man in his 30s who had just returned from Wuhan to his hometown in Washington State. Japan confirmed its first coronavirus case one day later, and reported the world’s highest infection number early in the outbreak, before getting a handle on the situation. Today, the U.S. has 16,407 cases per million population compared with 462 in Japan. Across the world, authoritarian and democratic nations have both handled the crisis well and poorly.

For its part, the global scientific community has risen to the challenge, working across national boundaries to advance understanding of the disease, including priceless collaborations between Chinese and Western virologists. Previously, the best described epidemic in terms of viral genetics was the 2014 West African Ebola outbreak. Then, about 1,600 genomes were mapped over three years, providing insights into how viruses move between locations and accumulate genetic differences as they do. But for SARS-CoV-2, following Zhang’s initial genome, scientists mapped about 20,000 within three months. Genomic surveillance enables scientists to trace the speed and character of genetic changes, with ramifications for infection rates and the production of vaccines and antivirals. “Very large-scale genomic screening can evaluate whether any resistance mutations have occurred and, if they do, how those spread through time,” says Oliver Prybus, professor of evolution and infectious disease at Oxford University.

For Zhang, focus must now be on understanding how pathogens and the environment interact. Over the past century, an inordinate number of new viral diseases have emerged in China, including the 1956 Asian Flu, 2002 SARS and 2013 H7N9. Zhang attributes this to China’s diverse ecology and enormous population. Moreover, as China’s economy boomed its people have begun traveling far and wide in search of work, education and opportunities. According to the World Bank, almost 200 million people moved to urban areas in East Asia during the first decade of the 21st century. In China, 61% of the population lived in urban areas in 2020 compared with just 18% in 1978. This brings unknown pathogens and people without natural defenses into close proximity. “People and pathogens must be in contact [for outbreaks],” says Zhang. “If no contact, no disease.”

As urbanization intensifies, outbreaks of pathogenic diseases will only become more common. Mitigation, says Zhang, comes from deeper understanding of viruses, so that we can accurately map and predict which are likely to spill over into human populations. Just as satellites have made forecasting weather patterns unerringly reliable, Zhang believes science holds the key to predicting viral outbreaks with similar accuracy as with which we now anticipate typhoons and tornadoes. “If we don’t learn lessons from this disease,” says Zhang, “humankind will suffer another.”

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