#one thousand one hundred and eighty six ships

[shredsandpatches]

sunday snippet (technically it was actually 1,186 ships edition)

Bit of the Helen of Troy fic for you because why not. Starting to think the fic might not need to go on too much longer after this reveal, although there's a middle section I need to write in any event.

--

"My Faustus," he murmurs, and the absence of breath against Faustus' skin chills him. "Ask of me what you will and it will be yours in a moment. In the twinkling of an eye."

Faustus closes his eyes. His fingers move idly over Mephistopheles' cheek, hot as fever. What can he even ask of someone who is part of him now, who after nearly twenty-four years cleaves to him as closely as his own skin? Even when pulled apart, they will return to one another, fused together with blood and heat and pain.

"Helen," he says, before he's even really thought about it. "I want Helen."

He opens his eyes and Mephistopheles' gaze meets his own, and for the briefest of instants Faustus thinks he sees hurt in those flamelike white-blue eyes—but then Mephistopheles is smiling, that arch look that once chilled Faustus' blood, before long familiarity dulled its horror. Mephistopheles rises gracefully to his feet.

"I am, as always, at your service," he says, with a deep bow. He closes his eyes, spreads his arms, tilts his head back—

And then the air is heavy again, sweet and shimmery with heat, and the candles go out as they had last night, issuing fragrant white plumes, and Faustus draws a sharp, desperate breath as the smoke dances around itself once more and floats over their heads—but now, it coalesces, not into Helen's shape, but around Mephistopheles, and his form shifts and blurs, his solid limbs dwindling into lithe delicacy and his hair brightening from auburn to gold as it lengthens and falls down his back. He raises his arms further and stretches, and Faustus cannot tear his eyes from the swelling curves at Mephistopheles' hips and breast; his lips part and he can feel himself panting. It is Helen who approaches him now, clad in a thin white gown insubstantial as candle-smoke, and the rose-red curve of her smile, the piercing blue of her eyes, belong, as they always have, wholly to Mephistopheles.

"It was always you," Faustus breathes. "Wasn't it?"

Helen's elegant white hand curves into Faustus' jawline, and her caress is icy. "Always," Mephistopheles says.

#sunday snippet #doctor faustus #hot faust summer #faustopheles #otp: as many souls as there be stars #definitely trying to give meph some arthur darvill energy here #one thousand one hundred and eighty six ships #fic

[last-herondale]

Almost Pt. 2

Bucky POV (W/ FemReader)

Angst, heartbreak, sadness

Tw: some mild curse words

AN: Hellooooo. I had an idea for a part two! Two fics in one week? Who do I think I am? 😳 anyway here is Bucky’s point of view on what happened after part one! Will link below! Maybe this will be a new series? Idk feeling ambitious 🤣

Part 1

Part 3

Enjoy 🤘🏼

It had been six weeks since Steve’s party. Six agonizing weeks of silence. Forty-two days of not hearing your voice. One thousand and eight hours of not seeing you smile at my stupid jokes. Sixty thousand, four hundred, and eighty minutes of not seeing the light dance in your eyes whenever you saw me enter the room. Three million, six hundred thousand twenty eight, and eight hundred seconds since I saw you walk away from me during that party after confessing your love for me.

You said you needed time. I respected that. I understood that.

After you bared your soul to me, I told you what I thought you needed to hear. That I wasn’t good enough for you. That you deserved better. It was difficult to stand there and see the light die from your eyes as I said these things. It was painful to see you cry, knowing that I had been the one to cause you that pain. But it was devastating for me to realize that despite how much I loved you, how much I cared for you, that the words I said were still true. Agonizingly so.

I expected that this type of honesty would destroy our friendship. Even though I still held out hope in my selfish mindset that we could continue on like we had in the past. Spending our free nights together, laughing, joking, having fun together, sharing memories, crying, hugging, everything we used to do…

But of course, those dreams had not come into fruition.

When you volunteered to be shipped out of the country for a mission the day after Steve’s party, I knew it was to get away from me. And despite my frustration and worry about you leaving on some dangerous mission without me in the state you were in, Steve assured me that you would be fine. He didn’t know the extent of what happened, but Steve being the inquisitive son of a bitch he is, he was able to connect some of the dots at least. Surprisingly he didn’t lecture or judge me. I was expecting to get an earful from him about how I treated you, led you on, and hurt your feelings, but in return I got nothing.

The mission was only supposed to last for two weeks, but as the days grew longer, the whole team was on edge when the two of you didn’t return. Steve kept communications with Tony, and he would pass along the messages to the rest of us. “They hit a snag. They are safe but they are bunking down for a bit.”

I felt like I was on pins and needles. I just needed to know you were safe, that you were okay. I must have looked worse for wear around the tower, because even Nat noticed and had a conversation with me in my room. It was a little strange. Having her back in my apartment, alone, her fiery gaze still as piercing as it was when we were together. But those feelings I held for her were gone. Something else lingered there, a fondness for the time we had, but nothing more.

I knew she was your best friend, so I assumed you told her everything about what happened at the party, but when she came into my apartment with a stern gaze on me, arms crossed and all, all she said was.

“I don’t know what happened the other night at Steve’s party, but you need to stop moping and get a grip.”

“I’m fine. Stay out of it,” I said with an icy tone.

Nat just rolled her eyes and jabbed a finger at me. “If you don’t feel anything for her, then stay away or get your shit together. She cares about you too much to walk away from you, Bucky.” Nat’s voice grew softer as she thought of you. “Whenever she comes back, and she will come back, she needs to heal. She cannot continue to be your emotional support puppet. It's draining her, James. Every time she returns from hanging out with you I see less and less of her return. She cannot continue to give you all of her heart when she is receiving none of it back.

“So for her sake, please, let her go.”

It was a hard thing to hear, but it was necessary. I stopped driving myself mad with when you would return. It was difficult, maddeningly so, but after another week I was able to distract myself enough with other things… other people. I did a few missions here and there, nothing that took me out of the country, but it filled some of the time I had to think about you.

I spent time with Nadia, the girl I had gone on a few dates with, the girl I had broken your heart over. Our relationship was purely physical. She was another distraction, someone to pass the time with. She didn’t seem to mind the distance I put between us. We weren’t exclusive by any means, and she was free to explore all of her options, but that was as far as that would go. Not that I could ever tell you this, even though I wanted to.

That was the shittiest part of it all. I missed you. Constantly. I missed talking with you about every single part of my day. I missed hearing about your day, or the silly little thoughts that swirled in your curious head. I missed spending my weekends with you, staying up until the sun rose, seeing you curled up in a ball on my couch, sleeping so peacefully. The ache in my chest never ceased, but I was able to drown away the thought of you for moments at a time.

And then you returned.

It was like a blow to the heart, seeing you standing in the kitchen, casually making yourself a bowl of cereal. Your skin seemed tanner than when you left. Clearly you had been somewhere where the sun kissed your skin for long periods of time. You looked beautiful, even just in your morning casual wear. You hadn’t noticed me yet. I was frozen in the entryway, trying to think of something intelligible to say to you, when Steve walked in through the other way. He too had not noticed me yet, his skin also sunkissed and a bit long.

I opened my mouth to speak, but before any sound could come out, I watched as my best friend slid his arms around your waist, turned you around in a swift and gentle motion, and kissed you. Ice filled my veins and it felt as if a rock had dropped in my stomach. I staggered backwards a bit, hiding myself more in the darkness of the archway as I saw the scene unfold.

Steve was kissing you. His hands were gentle around your waist, and although you were taken by surprise in the moment, you stood on your toes to be more on his level. You cupped his face and smiled. You were smiling. You looked…happy.

I slipped away back down the hallway and into my room before I could see more. The image of my best friend kissing the love of my life was burned into my mind. I sat on my bed in a disgruntled mess, fighting the strange waves of feelings that were swirling in my body.

You were finally back. You were safe. At that I was able to release the tension in my chest that I had been holding since you left. And then… Steve. What had changed during those six weeks you were gone? Was it serious? Did you love him? Did he love you? These questions paced back and forth inside of my brain until I was nearly dizzy.

It was the memory of Nat’s voice that stuck out amongst my own thoughts. “Let her go.”

You had been happy in that kitchen. Steve was a good man, too good to play with someone’s feelings if he didn’t truly feel something for them. Steve was good for you. That’s what I wanted, wasn’t it? The reason why I broke your heart in the first place? To set you free to find someone that would love you in all the ways I was incapable of doing. Why was I mad that you had done that? Why did I want to punch Steve for kissing you?

I clenched my fists as I sat on the bed. My body shook with so much emotion. In the torental storm that was my mind, I tried to focus on one memory. The only one that mattered. That night on the balcony. You had stood there, hair swirling in the breeze, more beautiful than the night sky. And you said it.

“I’m in love with you.”

The words calmed me. The memory of that night grounded me. Your tears. Your sadness. Your anger. I caused that. “I’m in love with you.” That is what you told me. And even though I wanted to scream it back, to shout it from the roof that I loved you too, instead I denied you. I threw it back in your face to save you from what I am. I hurt you, and this was my punishment. Seeing you pick up the pieces of that love that I shattered and give it to someone who would nurture that love.

I sat there thinking and thinking, until my head was pounding. I laid down on my bed, the image of you kissing someone else burning in my head.

“I’m in love with you too,” I muttered to myself.

Then, as tears began to silently fall down my face, I began to laugh.

#reader x marvel #marvel fanfic club #fan fic author #fic writing #james bucky barnes #fem reader #marvel #bucky imagine #bucky fic #bucky x female reader #bucky x y/n #bucky x you #bucky fanfic #bucky x reader #james bucky buchanan barnes #bucky barnes #heartbroken #angst #angst prompt

[grandlinedreams]

Will I tire of sending Law requests? Never. So bare with me.

Law meets a girl on an island and they hit it off. She wants to go with him, but he says the sea is too dangerous for her. And he admits he likes her before taking off.

Instead of being broken hearted, she takes this as motivation to go out to sea and find him.

After months she finds him, and after slapping him into the next century, she tells him she likes him too. And maybe after some fluff, maybe have her mention not being left behind because “there’s only so many times you can handle being slapped by me”

Hiya!! I can absolutely do this minus the slapping ghlkjadf

Notes: reader has Ruby's weapon from rwby bc why not even though I've not seen that in years

[heads up!: afab/fem aligned reader, fluff, some silliness, angst, cursing, implied drinking]

You've been out on the sea six months.

One hundred and eighty-two days ㅡ down to the exact day. Gone is the rickety sloop you'd ventured from your home on ㅡ and you'd bartered, sweet-talked, and bargained your way into a ship far better than that.

You've even made a name for yourself, though it's been through some odd mix of unfortunate circumstance and luck ㅡ but you're still no closer to your goal.

Because you're not looking for something, you're looking for someone. And that in and of itself is a drop in the bucket because there are a thousand places he could be, and a thousand that he couldn't.

But as with all places that you stop at, you have to start somewhere ㅡ and so you start at the local bar. It's the best place, after all ㅡ liquored mouths tend to talk the loudest, and you're good at listening.

ㅡ

"You're not from around here, are ya?"

You smile against the rim of your drink before you set it down, watching the ice cubes clink. "What gave it away?"

"The fact ya aren't absolutely trashed off yer rocker," your new companion snickers. He's an older man somewhere in the range of salt and pepper hair and a couple of wrinkles that deep when he grins. "And that ship of yours out at the harbor."

You blink and shift in your seat, letting your fingers drift over the rectangular metal pack at your thigh.

"Relax, missy. Not lookin' for trouble." Your companion eyes you. "Ya must be lookin' for someone if yer here though."

You pick your drink up, sipping from it carefully. "You're right, I am." Your new friend watches as you turn to rummage in your pocket, producing a worn, battered piece of paper and unfolding it.

It's a wanted poster, creases made for how often you've shown it ㅡ and you point to the photo. "Have you seen this man?"

Your companion leans back, humming thoughtfully. "I think I saw 'im a couple days ago. He 'n his crew were stopping for supplies at the next island, I think. But isn't heㅡ"

"Thank-you," you say, folding the paper up and tucking it away before you toss a handful of beri onto the table and stand. "For the drink, and for you. You've been very helpful."

The man watches you go, then glances down at the beri, metal shining dully in the light. "What's a bounty hunter want with a war lord?"

ㅡ

You arrive at the next island by mid-afternoon the next day. Hungry and more than a little exhausted, your mood is far from stellar when you step foot on the dock.

"First food, then a nap, then I'll ask around," you mumble to yourself as you stretch, stifling a yawn. "He's turning into more trouble than I bargained for..."

Part of you often wonders what you're even doing ㅡ leaving your home behind, embarking entirely alone on the basis of talking to someone who'd left you without so much as a goodbye.

Correction, he had ㅡ and it'd sucked.

"Who leaves somebody with 'if it were safer I'd take you with me but it's dangerous no matter how I feel' as a goodbye? That sucked shit!" You grouse, kicking at a loose stone. "Trafalgar Law, you're a jerk."

And a warlord, apparently ㅡ he'd forgotten to mention that. And you suppose you have to commend yourself ㅡ most girls in your situation would probably have sulked and moped, maybe stared out at the sea like a grief stricken widow.

You, on the other hand, had simply sulked for two days before scowling and stomping out of your house and declaring that you were going to track the jerk down and demand an apology and a proper confession because that one sucked.

Six months and a growing reputation as a bounty hunter (whoops) later, here you are. Starving, tired, and desperately hoping Law and his crew are still here.

You're not sure what to do if they aren't. Will you keep chasing him, doom yourself to an eternal game of cat and mouse? You're not even sure he feels the way he had before, or if he'd ever felt that way in the first place ㅡ what if it'd just been to placate you?

No, you don't need to fall into that line of thinking ㅡ you're just tired, that's all. And hungry.

You trudge your way towards the nearest restaurant, footsteps heavy as you stagger your way to a table and slap a handful of beri down when a waiter approaches you. "Whatever is the recommended meal, please."

If there's judgement about how bedraggled you must look (if you look how you feel), you don't hear it ㅡ nor do you care.

Once your stomach has stopped rumbling enough to suggest that it's gnawing on itself, you find the energy to look around, catching the handful of wanted posters tacked to a board near the door.

If nothing else, at least you have means to continue that turn of events. Once your meal is finished, you leave a tip and stand, snagging one of the posters on your way out.

Certain that you haven't noticed them, a pair of men stand a few minutes after you leave, sharing a look before they move to follow you.

ㅡ

You notice the pair following you in under five minutes. For starters, they're nowhere near as sneaky as they think they are ㅡ and while your observation skills need refining, you're not completely without them.

"Alright, you two." You come to a stop, hand at your thigh, ready to engage the metal pack with a single touch. "What do you want?"

"You're a bounty hunter," one of them starts, eyeing you warily. "We've seen your face before."

"Really," you answer dryly. "Good for you. I'm not in the mood for small fry, so if you leave now, I'll pretend I didn't see you."

You really, truly are not in the mood to deal with these two ㅡ you're tired damn it, you want to sleep.

You hear the click of a gun cocking, and you sigh as you press the shallow button ㅡ and watch as your weapon springs to life with a series of sleek metallic clicks. "Alright," you sigh, "you asked for it."

ㅡ

"Excuse me," you say, voice strained for the effort it takes to haul the two unconscous knuckleheads behind you and prop them up against the kickboard of the bar counter. "Two questions. Where is an inn or a hotel or something, and where can I turn these two in for their bounty?"

The bartender blinks at you, then at the unconscious (and lightly bleeding) pair behind you. "Uh..."

Across the room, however, you're being watched again. This time not from small time pirates or thugs. Rather, a set of golden eyes lock on you, trying to parse out where he knows you from ㅡ and then narrowing when it hits him.

Several sets of eyes lock on him as he stands, somewhere between confusion and concern as he weaves around tables, intent on reaching you.

A fist in the back of your shirt is not what you expect ㅡ nor is the abrupt lurch backwards, making you windmill your arms to keep your balance, only to lose it anyways as you're hauled towards the exit.

"Hey!" You snap, squirming to free yourself with one hand as the other goes to deploy your weapon, "what is your problem?"

"My problem," a familiar voice says as they stop, "is that you're here."

You bristle as you wrench free, narrowed eyes sweeping up to lock with gold, blazing beneath a very familiar cap, spotted with the motif of a snow leopard.

And after six months of searching, you've found Trafalgar Law.

ㅡ

Law stares at you, wholly unchanged since you last saw him save for the look of irritation on his face. "Explain."

Of all the places he'd thought to see you again, it wasn't here ㅡ because truthfully, he hadn't been expecting to ever see you again at all. He'd left you in your tiny island town, turned, and refused to look back.

"Explain what?" Your head tips, and his teeth grit.

"This," he says, waving at the cruel curve of metal that arcs over your head from the metal pole in your hand, "and what you're doing here."

You still, and the playful glimmer in your eyes snuffs out like a candle. "What I'm doing here?" You laugh, the sound incredulous and tinted with a hint of hysteria. "What I'm doing here? I was looking for you!"

Law tenses. "For me? Why?"

"Because, you asshole," you snarl, eyes blazing, "you broke my heart!"

ㅡ

"Did you really leave her like that captain? That's cold."

Law's eyes flick to Penguin. "Eavesdropping is an awful habit to pick up."

Penguin shrugs. "We weren't, she was yelling at you pretty loud."

And you had ㅡ close to shrieking as you'd poured out every frustration over the last six months trying to find him, and what he'd done to incite it.

And then you'd cried. One tear, then two ㅡ hiccuping as you tried to stem the flow, weapon put away in favor of pressing your palms to your eyes.

Law had seen no other option but to bring you back to where he and the others were staying, chest aching for the rough way you'd yanked from his touch and retreated to one of the rooms ㅡ his room, ironically.

"What are you going to do?" Bepo watches him, and Law wonders what exactly they're expecting him to do as he sighs and stands, heading for his room.

"What I have to."

ㅡ

"Go away."

Law stares at your back as he steps into the room, watches you tense as he shuts the door. "We need to talk."

"I told you to go away."

"This is my room, technically." He approaches, perching himself on the edge of the bed. "You don't have to talk to me, but listen."

"Why should I?"

"Just listen to me, damn it!" He pauses and then tries again, softer. "Please."

You still won't look at him. "Fine."

Law sighs, trying to collect his thoughts before he says something that will get him into even deeper trouble with you. Had he meant what he said before he left? Yes, he had ㅡ but he hadn't meant for it to be an invitation for you to come find him.

"I'm...sorry. For leaving you the way that I did. But I stand by the fact the sea is dangerousㅡ"

"Made it just fine on my own so far."

Law bites his tongue, pushes back the snappy retort that you'd gotten lucky so far. Even though it's clear you have your own skillset, and that you can hold your own.

Maybe he'd been wrong.

"You'll get yourself killed if you're alone." He doesn't want that, it's the very reason he left you there ㅡ that you'd be safe. "Which is why," he continues before you can snap back, "...I want you to come with me."

You shift, and your eyes lock. "What?"

"Come with me," he repeats. "My crew. On the Polar Tang."

You sit upright. "You better not be saying that to get me to forgive you, Trafalgar Law. It's going to take a lot more thanㅡ"

He snatches your wrist, yanking you in for a clumsy kiss that you pull away from quickly.

"Seriously?" You eye him, then turn away with a huff. "If I join you, I have two conditions."

He raises an eyebrow. "And those are?"

"You still owe me for that shitty and now that shitty kiss. This isn't a romance novel, you jerk."

#ㅡmine. #one piece scenario #one piece x reader #trafalgar law x reader #law x reader #ㅡanswered. #this took so fucking long i'm sorry

[tsaomengde]

“The Mission”

A short story about love, time travel, healing, spaceplanes, and making the world a better place, even when no one will ever know.

---

After the TAG forces shot me out of my cockpit in low orbit, I floated there for about six hours.  Something – probably debris from my fighter – had hit me in the back, hard, and I couldn’t feel anything below my waist.  My suit’s maneuvering jets let me correct the initial nauseating spin I was thrown into, but they didn’t have sufficient thrust to get me out of my unstable, highly eccentric orbit.  

My suit told me I had about eight or nine trips around Titan before my periapsis wobbled low enough into the atmosphere that drag would bring me down below escape velocity.  At that point, gravity would catch up with me, I would fall, and I would crash into the surface and die.  The suit had an emergency beacon, but no built-in communications beyond that.  I was alone in the silent dark.

I sped around the moon at a little less than ten thousand kilometers per hour.  The view of Saturn, for the parts of the orbit where it wasn’t eclipsed by Titan, was gorgeous.  That was a small comfort, as my brain endlessly analyzed the ways I could go.  A bit of debris from the battle could kill me outright at these speeds, or it could puncture the suit on a glancing hit and it would be a toss-up whether I would die of suffocation or extreme cold.  My oxygen meter also claimed I had about three hours of air left, which meant I would probably be unconscious or dead by the time I actually hit the ground.  And, of course, there was the matter of my probably-broken spine.  I suspected I was bleeding internally from that.

Later, when I woke up in a hospital bed on the Agamemnon, they told me that the TAG brass had transmitted a formal surrender eighty-seven seconds after my fighter had exploded.  I was officially the last casualty of the Earth-Titan war.

They fitted me with prosthetics so I could still walk, but as the physical therapist with the cute dimples explained to me, there was some kind of incompatibility with my chromosomal something-or-other that meant I couldn’t use them at a hundred percent, which meant I didn’t qualify for combat.  My spine, which had indeed been broken, was too damaged to repair with conventional methods.  That left experimental regenerative genetic surgery, which was more expensive than the navy was willing to shell out for.

So, at thirty-one, after thirteen years in the navy, I got out with an honorable discharge, a pension that was decent enough but far from what it would take to fix my spine, a chromium heart for my injury, and enough PTSD to fuck me over for the rest of my life.

--- 

“I don’t care about my legs,” I said to Kate, the first time we ever met.  We picked a bar about halfway between us for our first meeting. She had a gin gimlet with cucumber simple syrup.  I had an old fashioned.  “They get me from point A to point B just fine.  I just miss flying.”

“Were you good at it?” she asked, blue eyes very wide.

“I certainly thought so. But then some TAG dipshit blew me out of my fighter above Titan and ended my career, so maybe I was less good than I thought.”

“You can’t fly for one of the intrasolar shipping companies?” she asked.  “Or transport?”

I gave her a patient smile. “Do you know what a pilot actually does aboard one of those big fusion torchships?”

“No, actually.”

“They point the nose where the destination is going to be, fire the engine for half the trip, then flip the ship around and fire the engine for the other half.  There’s nothing to that.  I miss flying.”

She nodded sympathetically. “I understand.”  I could tell she didn’t, not really, but that she wanted to.

I moved in with her a few months later.  Part of me wondered if it was a good idea, moving so fast, but I was two years from Titan and still waking up screaming in the middle of the night, convinced I was back in my suit, in the dark above the moon.  The greater part of me, the selfish part, was happy that someone was there to touch me, to talk to me, to root me back in myself and pull me back to earth from up there in the black.

In that sense, Kate could have been anyone.  I never thought of her as replaceable, but there was always a vague sense of guilt, of knowing that I was definitely getting more from the relationship than she was.  I voiced this to her once, and she told me I was being silly, and that she loved me, and that was all she needed.

So when she first approached me with her idea for the Mission, I like to think it was that part of me, the part that wanted to be more for her, that moved me to say yes to what was honestly an idiotic idea.  Not the part that missed flying.  Just selfless altruism and desire to help the woman I loved.

I like to think that a lot.

---

We cracked time travel about a decade after I was born.  Much to our collective disappointment as a species, it was not the fun kind of time travel that lets you go back in time and kill Hitler.  

Kate, as she told me once we were living together, was part of a DOD think tank tasked with finding some kind of use for the technology.  After a lot of experimentation, they came up with what Kate called the Four Rules.

1.      It’s time travel, not space travel.  If you want to meet Julius Caesar, you had best make sure you’re in Europe when you travel back.

2.      It only works by going back.  There is no forward travel because the future hasn’t happened yet. The only exception is returning to your point of origin.

3.      If you actually do meet Julius Caesar, it’s because your meeting him will not change history in any measurable way.  If you try to go back in time to change something significant, it simply doesn’t work.  The little box makes the noise, it uses up a lot of energy, and then nothing happens.

4.      The corollary rule to number three, then, is that when you travel back in time, whatever you do end up doing has already happened.

I asked Kate what this meant about determinism versus free will, and she primly replied that she was a theoretical physicist, not a philosopher.  The DOD was not known for employing philosophers and paying them the kind of money they were paying her.

---

The Mission’s personnel consisted of four people.  Myself, the heroic pilot.  Kate, the brains behind the time travel stuff and the one who came up with the Mission to begin with.  Leon, the aerospace engineer slash DOD contractor.  And Ash, the director of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. We would go over to Ash’s place, have dinner, and conspire.

Over one such dinner – mac and cheese with broccoli, I remember it vividly for no adequate reason – we discussed the logistical difficulties involved.

“We can’t use anything from the last century,” Leon was saying around a mouthful of mac.  “All the guidance systems on those ships are keyed into the orbital satellite network.  There’s nothing like that at the target time.  We need a craft that can achieve orbit, rendezvous, and de-orbit in a single stage, without remote guidance.”

I nodded.  “That means we need a spaceplane.  Not just a fighter, but an actual spaceplane.”

Ash chewed over the problem as well as their food.  “There might be an SR-75 in decent enough shape we could appropriate from the displays at the museum.  The hardest part will be bribing the transport operators to take it to home base instead of, you know, a navy cache where highly dangerous military surplus equipment is supposed to go.”

I raised an eyebrow at them. “That’s going to be the hardest part? What about getting the parts to get it into decent working condition, or the fuel?”

Leon waved a hand dismissively.  “Do you know how many spare parts I have lying around at work?  How many millions of tons of liquid hydrogen and oxygen are stored in poorly-guarded places that I have access to?”

“No.  I’m guessing the answer to both is ‘more than the general public would be comfortable knowing about.’”

“Exactly.”

I looked at Kate.  “Is the magic box going to be able to send a whole spaceplane back, kitty?”

She wrinkled her nose at me for using her pet name in front of our friends, but let it go for the moment. “The magic box can send anything back given enough juice.”

“Okay, but is the shitty little battery at home base going to be able to give it enough?”

“Probably.  If we strip everything nonessential out of the spaceplane, get the mass down as much as possible.  I need to know the exact mass of the plane, plus us, when it’s ready for travel.”  Kate shrugged.  “If it won’t be enough, we can always add to our list of capital offenses and steal a torchship, then use its fusion reactor for the power.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose and sighed.  “Last resort.”

---

“I don’t really understand why we’re doing this,” I told her one night, in the silence following her helping me out of another flashback.

She shifted a little in bed so she could look me in the eye.  “You said you were on board.”

“I am.  I’d do anything you asked, kitty, you know that. And obviously I’m excited to get to fly again.  But nothing we’re going to do is actually going to matter.  That’s one of the four rules, right?”

With a little shrug, she began running her fingers through my hair, which I’d stopped bothering to keep short after I was discharged years ago.  It was pretty long by now.  “It’ll matter to us, won’t it?  And to her?”

“I mean, sure, but the risk-reward ratio is way off.  You and Leon and Ash could all lose your jobs, we could get prosecuted by the Justice Department –”

“Vee, why did you sign up to be a pilot?”

I stopped.  “I mean, I always wanted to fly.”

“Yes, but what was the reason you put on your application?  And the reason you told me on our first date when we were still trying to look really good and put together for one another?”

That took me back, and I snorted gently.  “To make the world a better place.”

“Exactly.  Does there have to be a minimum threshold of goodness increase in order for an altruistic act to be worthwhile?”

I weighed that particular bit of moral utilitarianism in my mind before I committed to an answer.  “No.”

“So, that’s why we’re doing this.  To make the world a better place, even by the tiniest, slimmest margin.”

I gently snaked a hand out from under the comforter to lightly boop her on the nose.  “And the real reason, since we’re not on our first date and this isn’t an application you’re filling out?”

She stuck her tongue out at me.  “I know how much you want to fly again.  And I want to see my magic box used for something other than letting rich assholes reenact Bradbury’s ‘A Sound of Thunder’ without any of the nuance or lessons learned.”

“Dinosaur leather shoes is not the outcome you probably had in mind,” I agreed.  The time-travel hunting industry generated billions for the government every year now.

We fell asleep that night, and the next morning, we took a magtrain to Vegas, and from there we went to home base.

---

Home base was an abandoned aircraft hangar in the middle of the Nevada desert.  Leon had said something about centuries-old top-secret aircraft testing, when we first conceived of the Mission, and lo and behold, there was a facility with room for a spaceplane.  We spent far too much money on the highest-capacity quantum battery civilians could buy, hooked it into the Vegas grid, and watched it take eight weeks to charge.

It had also cost far too much money to bribe the transport operators to bring the SR-75 here, but the deed was done and they hadn’t sold us out so far.  They probably assumed we were aviation junkies.  What domestic terrorists would bother stealing a hundred-year-old spaceplane when there were far cheaper and more effective ways to kill people, these days?

Kate, Leon, Ash, and I sat at a small table in a corner of the hangar, drinking coffee and going over the ascent profile.  Ash’s part was done, having delivered the goods, but they wanted to be here for everything, and I certainly respected that.  The spaceplane took up the majority of the hangar space, a sleek black dagger with barely a suggestion of wings to either side.  The underside was dominated by a pair of huge jet intakes, and the rear of the plane sported three engine nozzles, the center much larger than either of the ones flanking it.  A gracefully curved tail fin slightly forward of the engines completed the vessel’s profile.

“The plane looks like it’s in good condition,” Leon was saying.  “I’ve sourced the fuels we need.  The main problem is going to be the timing, not the equipment.”

“How so?” Kate asked.

I spoke up.  “The SR-75 should theoretically be able to hit escape velocity just on the air-breathing engine mode, but the target has an extremely elliptical orbit, and we’re launching much closer to the equator, so we’ll have to adjust our inclination, too.  That means either a lot of burns with the rocket fuel mode once we’re in vacuum, or a very steep climb to orbit.  That pronounced an angle of attack might affect the engines’ ability to get enough air to achieve escape velocity.”

Kate blinked.  “Still not seeing how that affects the timing.”

I pulled out my personal comm, laid it on the table, and put it in draw mode, so I could trace pictures on its screen with the tip of my finger.  I drew a little ball, the Earth, and traced a messy, elliptical orbit around it. I indicated the very top of the orbit, where the line peaked like a mountain summit.  “We have about a thirty-minute window to achieve rendezvous with the target.  We need to rendezvous at or near its apoapsis, here, where its orbital speed is lowest and matching relative velocity will be easiest.”

I loved Kate, but it was endlessly amusing to me how she could understand quantum and temporal physics and articulate mathematical concepts I could never grasp in a million years, yet still not understand basic orbital mechanics.  She gave me a blank look, then just said, “And that’s hard?”

“Yes.  It is very hard, kitty.  We are trying to hit a target the size of, roughly, a bullet train car, except the target is going twenty-eight thousand kilometers per hour.  We need to come alongside it, match velocity with it, perform our docking maneuver, and then decouple.  And the parameters of the Mission mean that there is exactly one half-hour window we can do this in if we’re going to avoid violating rule three.”

“I think the best solution is going to be adding some external rocket fuel tanks,” Leon said.  “Not much, since we have to think about flight performance and transit mass for the magic box, but even a few hundred extra meters per second of delta-vee might make the difference in your ability to match orbits with the target.”

“Agreed.  Just make sure the Goddamn things aren’t going to come loose at Mach fuck-you.”

Leon grinned at me.  “I love your optimism, Vee.”

---

Unlike with most modern fighters, and indeed with even-older jet aircraft, the SR-75 did not have a fully enclosed cockpit.  The pilot sat in a big swiveling chair in front of the instrument panel, and the main cabin of the craft was accessible from there.  It was a spaceplane, and therefore supposed to be able to perform orbital docking maneuvers exactly like the one we were about to attempt, which necessitated the crew being able to actually get up and access the docking port without going fully extravehicular.

Kate sat behind me in a second chair that Leon bolted in there for her.  She had the magic box in her lap, hooked up by a pair of very fat and long yellow wires to the bulk of the quantum battery, which squatted heavily just slightly off-center in the SR-75’s main cabin.  (“Gotta keep that center of mass where it’s supposed to be,” Leon had said.)  She was doing something with the box’s controls, squinting at the small readout which displayed some kind of complicated waveform.

“I’ll initiate the breach when we get to fifteen thousand meters,” she told me.  “It wouldn’t do for anyone to actually see us at the target time, because then it just wouldn’t work, but I would rather not get shot down by our modern-day autonomous airspace defenses.”

“Sounds good,” I told her. “Hey.  Kate.”

“Yes, Vee?”

I craned my neck around as best I could while strapped into the pilot’s seat.  “I love you, kitty.”

Her cheeks darkened a little and she smiled.  “I love you too.”

I keyed in the ignition sequence and the SR-75 roared to life.  Leon and Ash, both standing a safe distance away outside the hangar so their eardrums didn’t rupture, started waving and giving us thumbs-ups.  I gave them a thumbs-up in return, projecting more confidence than I actually felt, and brought the throttle up just a little.

The spaceplane practically leapt out of the hangar.  Ruggedized, smart landing gear wheels hit the Nevada desert ground like it was perfectly maintained asphalt.  Within twenty seconds I pulled back on the yoke and the SR-75 was in the air, starting a steep climb.  I opened the throttle up the entire way and was slammed into my seat with the gee-force.

“JESUS CHRIST WE ARE GOING TO FUCKING DIE!” Kate screamed.

I glanced over my shoulder at her.  “You okay, kitty?”

She was clutching at her chest, magic box forgotten, and for a long, terrible moment I thought she was having some kind of heart attack.  But then she nodded, looking pasty.  “I just got taken by surprise,” she shouted over the roar of the engines.  “Sorry!”

“Okay!”  I returned my attention to the instrument panel.  We were already moving at a good clip, and the altimeter was increasing fast enough that even the digital display was having trouble keeping up.  For a long, pure moment, I just relaxed into my seat, hands on the yoke, feeling the currents of air spiraling around the ship.  Now, more than ever before my prosthetics, it felt like an extension of myself.  I was flying again.

“We’re at fifteen thousand meters!” I told her.

Kate pressed a button on the magic box.  Everything blurred like someone just messed with the focus on a camera, except the camera was my brain.  When it re-focused, we were still in the plane, climbing toward space at an impressive clip, but all of the global positioning systems were dead.  There were no satellites to receive data from, not in this era.  However, we had accounted for this; the SR-75 had its own onboard suite of computers dedicated specifically to calculating orbital information.

It was at this point that things began to go wrong.  I felt a sharp tug on the yoke.  Swearing to myself, I corrected, keeping the plane on course, and keyed a status readout. The SR-75’s onboard systems insisted that nothing was wrong, but that the plane was experiencing significant and unexpected drag.

It hit me.  “Fuck me!” I snarled.  “Leon’s fucking external fuel tanks!  I told him they needed to be secure!”

“What’s going on?” Kate asked.

“One of the external fuel tanks Leon spit-soldered onto this Goddamn thing has come loose, and the drag is killing our velocity,” I told her.  “I need to get it off of us, now.”

My gaze was fixed on my instruments, so I couldn’t see the horror in her big blue eyes, but I could hear it loud and clear in her voice.  “How?”

“Shearing force.  Hold on, this is going to fucking suck.”

I stomped down on one of the SR-75’s rudder pedals with my right foot, the motion almost as smooth as it used to be even with the prosthetic, and spun the plane in a sharp, hard three-hundred-sixty-degree roll.  I nearly blacked out, and I know Kate did for a few seconds, since she didn’t go through flight training.  But there was a sudden, violent wrenching feeling that went through the yoke into my arms, and afterward the drag was gone.

“Did it work?” Kate asked blearily.

“Yup.  And apparently an external fuel canister from several hundred years in the future crashing in the Nevada desert doesn’t fuck up the timeline, since we’re here at all.”

“Are we still going to be able to make it?”

I eyeballed the delta-vee readouts on the navigation display.  The lost fuel tank didn’t exactly have a ton in it, and of course, the reduced mass of the ship now that it was gone meant the net loss was slightly ameliorated. But even so, the situation was grim.

“Well, yes and no,” I told her.

“That is never the answer anybody wants to hear, Vee.”

“I should, should, still be able to match velocity with the target and achieve rendezvous. But our margins are basically nil now. If I don’t do this perfectly, we’re going to miss completely.”

I felt her reach out and place a hand on my shoulder, give it a squeeze.  “You can do this, Vee.  I know you can.”

“Thank you for the vote of confidence,” I told her, and was surprised to hear that it didn’t come out sarcastic.

The ascent became a delicate balance.  I was trying to hit escape velocity while still using the air-breathing mode of the engines, which was incredibly efficient compared to the rocket fuel.  But as I got higher, the engines needed to work harder to ram enough air in to function, which meant my thrust decreased.  Without the global positioning system to feed me flight info, I needed to do it all by feel and eyeballing the orbital information given to me by the onboard computers.

I trimmed a couple degrees off my angle of attack, trying to find the sweet spot between still gaining altitude and not starving the engines of air in the increasingly-barren stratosphere. The SR-75 shuddered, engines straining, and began to threaten me with a stall.  I swept my gaze across my instruments.  “Fuck,” I muttered, and switched the engines to rocket mode.

Instantly, we were slammed back into our seats again as our thrust suddenly increased dramatically. I glanced at our projected apoapsis, counted to three, then shut the engines down.

In the sudden silence in the absence of the engines’ roar, Kate asked, “Did we do it?”

“Yes and no.”

“Goddammit, Vee!”

I looked over my shoulder at her and gave her my most reassuring grin.  “Sorry, couldn’t help it.  The drag from the fuel tank breaking loose meant that we lost velocity, which meant we took longer to get to the speed we were needing, and the spin I had to put the plane through shifted our course a little bit.  Our inclination is about five degrees off of where it should be.”

“Okay.  What does all that mean?”

“We are going as fast as we need to be, but we’re not in the place we need to be going that fast.  I’m going to need to do correction burns at certain points in our ascent.  We can still make our rendezvous, but we won’t have the fuel to do a proper deceleration burn. I’m going to have to perform emergency aerobraking.”

“In English, Vee!”

“On our way back down I am going to use the atmosphere to slow us down the old-fashioned way.”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Is this plane designed for that?”

“Probably.”  I shrugged.  “Assuming we don’t burn up, I’ll be able to switch the engines back to air-breathing at a certain altitude and land without the need for lithobraking.”

I could see her trace the Latin roots of litho and arrive at the gallows-humor definition of the word.  She went even paler than before.  “Certainly hope so.”

I let my grin fade as we continued to coast on our momentum, rising inexorably up through the mesosphere into the thermosphere, our speed gradually slowing as we crested toward the very top of our parabolic arc.  At key points, I reoriented the SR-75’s nose, now using chemical thrusters to maneuver the craft in the absence of air for the control surfaces to manipulate, and fired the engines in rocket mode, tweaking our orbital inclination until it matched that of the target.

The computers suggested to me, at that point, that we would be able to achieve equal relative velocity, and it would leave us with enough delta-vee to then de-orbit ourselves. We would not be stuck in orbit forever until we died.  I blinked hard, banishing the memory of Titan as it suddenly threatened to overwhelm me, and repeated the affirmations Kate taught me.  I am not there anymore.  I am here, now.  I am safe.

Safe was, of course, a relative term in the vacuum of space, going tens of thousands of kilometers per hour.  But Kate took my hand from behind and gave it a squeeze, and I was good again.

“We’re going to do a long burn once we’re within ten kilometers,” I told Kate.  “That’ll bring our relative velocity to zero.  From there we just point our nose at the target, fire the engines for half a second, get as close as we can until we’re either about to hit or miss, fire them again to bring ourselves back to zero relative velocity, and then we do that over and over until we’re close enough to dock.”

“I don’t need to know all the mechanics,” Kate replied, and I could see she was fighting to keep her teeth from chattering.  The environmental controls were working just fine, so it was fear she was dealing with, not cold.  “I just trust you, Vee.  Make it happen.”

I suited action to words. It took ten long, arduous minutes, and by the end of it we were very short on time to actually execute the retrieval, but I successfully brought the SR-75’s docking port, which sat on the dorsal surface of the spaceplane, in contact with the target’s own.

Not that they were remotely designed to be compatible, being hundreds of years apart in origin, but fortunately the SR-75 had the advantage of smart materials incorporated into its construction.  Its port sealed itself tight around the target’s, flashing a green light and hissing open to reveal the shiny metal surface of the target.

Kate was already out of her seat, plasma torch in hand, and the acrid smell of it hit my nostrils as she ignited it and started cutting through the ancient hull like butter.  It was joined less than a minute later by new smells: faint traces of iodine and ethanol, urine, feces, and a wet, animal musk.

And, of course, I heard barking.

“Got her!” Kate called to me.  “She’s in pretty rough shape, but she’s alive!”

“Strap back in, and get her secured too,” I told her.  “We’ve passed apoapsis and I need to fire the engines right now for the Oberth effect or we’re going to be stuck in orbit forever.”

I keyed in the command for the docking port to close on our end and release.  The leftover atmosphere inside the target puffed out of it in sudden decompression, pushing our two crafts apart, but not hard enough to seriously perturb either of our orbits.  That was the engines’ job, and I brought them to life as soon as we were clear.

They sputtered out as they burned the last of the rocket fuel.  I looked at our orbital readout.  “Ah, shit,” I muttered.  “This is going to be a bumpy ride.”

---

We all but rammed into the atmosphere with the entire length of the plane.  The yoke bucked in my hand and the instrumentation suggested to me that I was a fucking moron that had doomed us all, but with polite numbers instead of those exact words.  I kept an iron grip on the yoke, worked the rudders with both my leaden feet to keep us perpendicular to our approach vector so we would generate more drag and thus lose more speed, and prayed to every God I could think of.  Behind me, Kate’s teeth were audibly chattering, but she managed to avoid screaming again, and the dog was remarkably quiet.

The interior of the SR-75 got incredibly hot, naturally.  The instrument panel helpfully informed me that it was almost fifty-five degrees Celsius inside, and that was with the life-support system working as hard as it possibly could to cool it.  The one saving grace we had was that the spaceplane’s designers had anticipated the need for this kind of extreme aerobraking, and the skin of the craft was designed to tolerate it – in theory.  I sweated, and I panted, and I watched our velocity slowly decrease until we were no longer going to boomerang back up out of the atmosphere.

Then I pointed the plane’s nose down, let gravity take over, and switched the engines back into air-breathing mode.

They decided they did not want to start.

“Well, we’re fucked,” I laughed.

“This is a plane, right?” Kate asked through clenched teeth.  “Aerodynamic?  You can fly it without the engines, right?”

“Well, glide, yes. Fall slowly, yes.  Land… maybe.”

I let us half-glide, half-fall until we were back in the troposphere.  “Magic box time,” I told Kate.

Everything unfocused again, and when I was able to see once more, my global positioning displays were back online.  They told me that, if I did nothing, we were going to crash into the ocean just off the coast of Hokkaido.

I tried the engines again. Still nothing.  The reentry had fried them, as far as I could tell.

I started the plane’s nose trending up again, trying to bring us out of the dive and into a climb. The control surfaces bucked and the plane fought me.

“I’m sorry, Vee,” Kate said.

“Don’t start,” I told her. “We’re not dead yet.”

“I couldn’t go back and save you from what happened at Titan.  I thought, if I could save Laika, maybe –”

“I know exactly what you were thinking, kitty.”  I looked back at her, and the scared-looking mutt buckled into her lap.  “It’s okay.”

“I just – when I read about how she died, all alone, in that terrible little capsule –”

“I said don’t start, Kate. I said it’s okay and I meant it.”

She kept going like she hadn’t heard me.  “She was supposed to have enough food and oxygen for a week.  But the satellite was rushed, and the temperature control system failed.  So when she was –”

“FUCK me!” I shouted.

That finally got through to her.  “What?!”

“Temperature control.” I quickly hit a series of switches. “The jet intakes were superheated by our reentry.  When you switch the engines to rocket fuel mode, they have shutters at the front that close so you don’t get trace amounts of gaseous oxygen mixing with the liquid fuel. Those shutters are probably half-melted shut.”

“And?”

“There’s an emergency release that just drops them completely.”  I pressed the button, felt the SR-75 shudder as explosive bolts fired and it shed hundreds of pounds of metal.  “Okay. Now –”

I was cut off as the sudden force of the engines firing slammed me hard into my seat.  The plane began to corkscrew wildly as the engines put out differing amounts of thrust for the first few moments until the oxygen feeds equalized.  Clearly one of the intakes had had less of its shutters blown off than the other, and the plane had needed some time to adjust.

Kate coughed.  “The engines?  They’re working?  We’re not going to die?”

“Oh, we’re still going to die,” I told her.  “Eventually, of old age.  But probably not today.”

She smacked the back of my head.  “Jackass.”

---

The vet gave us a very suspicious stare as we paid our bill and accepted Laika’s carrier back from his nurse.  “I have never seen an animal in that kind of shape before,” he said.  “Malnourished, half-dead from heat exhaustion, matted shit in her fur, and primitive bio-monitoring equipment surgically grafted into parts of her. I assume you didn’t do this, since it would be colossally stupid to come into my office and ask me to fix her up if you did.”

Kate shakes her head. “No, it wasn’t us.  She’s a stray.  Found her while we were out on a trip.  We felt so bad for the poor thing that we brought her back with us.”

Somewhat mollified, the vet nodded.  “Well, make sure to give her the antibiotics for the rest of the week, and call me if there’s anything else she needs.”

We stepped outside, and I opened the carrier to let Laika out.  She staggered out, still a little loopy from the anesthesia, and I got her leash onto her without too much trouble.

“You know,” I said to Kate, “when we first shacked up, I said I didn’t want any pets.”

She grinned at me.  “For someone who was so against the idea, you went very far out of your way to get me one anyway.”

---

About six months after we brought Laika home, a very humorless man in a snazzy uniform, accompanied by many more humorless men in uniform with large guns, came and visited our house. The humorless man in charge sat and chatted with us for a while, and Laika sat in his lap and let him give her pets.

Nothing else ever came of the visit.

There is no neat bow to tie on this story, unfortunately.  I still wake up screaming in the middle of the night, though not quite as often. That probably has more to do with the passage of time and a lot of therapy than pulling a time-travel dog rescue, though.  The only point to any of it is that we spent a lot of taxpayer money (since Kate, Leon, and Ash are all paid by the government) and risked our lives to make the world a better place, even by the tiniest, slimmest possible margin.  

And perhaps having read about it will have made your world a little better too.

#writing #my writing #story #short story #science fiction #sci-fi #spaceplane #cw: ptsd #ptsd

[thebeesareback]

Good Omens, political and social satire

We all love Good Omens.

One of the things, though, which was missing from the TV adaptations was the hilarious, Douglas Adams-esque vignettes. I would have loved to see some updates about modern life, although the '90s snapshots are still funny and relevant. Given the presence of corporate mergers, lack of communication between managers, owners and workers, and a recent (and well publicised) problem with a commercial transportation device whose quality suddenly dipped when they merged with a more cutthroat company, I thought I should remind everyone of this.

Several thousand miles away, at almost the same moment as Anathema was staring at her spirals, the pleasure cruiser Morbilli was aground in three hundred fathoms of water.

For Captain Vincent, this was just another problem. For example, he knew he should contact the owners, but he never knew from day to day -or from hour to hour, in this computerized world-actually who the current owners were.

Computers, that was the bloody trouble. The ship's papers were computerized and it could switch to the most currently advantageous flag of convenience in microseconds. Its navigation had been computerized as well, constantly updating its position by satellites. Captain Vincent had explained patiently to the owners, whoever they were, that several hundred square meters of steel plating and a barrel of rivets would be a better investment, and had been informed that his recommendation did not accord with current cost/benefit flow predictions.

Captain Vincent strongly suspected that despite all its electronics the ship was worth more sunk than afloat, and would probably go down as the most perfectly pinpointed wreck in nautical history.

By inference, this also meant that he was more valuable dead than alive.

He sat at his desk quietly leafing through International Maritime Codes, whose six hundred pages contained brief yet pregnant messages designed to transmit the news of every conceivable nautical eventuality across the world with the minimum of confusion and, above all, cost.

What he wanted to say was this: Was sailing SSW at position 33°N 47° 72'W. First Mate, who you may recall was appointed in New Guinea against my wishes and is probably a head-hunter, indicated by signs that something was amiss. It appears that quite a vast expanse of seabed has risen up in the night. It contains a large number of buildings, many of which appeared pyramid-like in structure. We are aground in the courtyard of one of these. There are some rather unpleasant statues. Amiable old men in long robes and diving helmets have come aboard the ship and are mingling happily with the passengers, who think we organized this. Please advise.

His questing finger moved slowly down the page, and stopped. Good old International Codes.

They'd been devised eighty years before, but the men in those days had really thought hard about the kind of perils that might possibly be encountered on the deep.

He picked up his pen and wrote down: "XXXV QVVX."

Translated, it meant: "Have found Lost Continent of Atlantis. High Priest has just won quoits contest."

#good omens #good omens 2 #neil gaiman #terry pratchett #douglas adams

[aroundtheworldwithphillyfogg]

November 23rd, 1872: The Pacific

There was a full complement of passengers on board, among them English, many Americans, a large number of coolies on their way to California, and several East Indian officers, who were spending their vacation in making the tour of the world. Nothing of moment happened on the voyage; the steamer, sustained on its large paddles, rolled but little, and the “Pacific” almost justified its name. Mr. Fogg was as calm and taciturn as ever. His young companion felt herself more and more attached to him by other ties than gratitude; his silent but generous nature impressed her more than she thought; and it was almost unconsciously that she yielded to emotions which did not seem to have the least effect upon her protector. Aouda took the keenest interest in his plans, and became impatient at any incident which seemed likely to retard his journey.

She often chatted with Passepartout, who did not fail to perceive the state of the lady’s heart; and, being the most faithful of domestics, he never exhausted his eulogies of Phileas Fogg’s honesty, generosity, and devotion. He took pains to calm Aouda’s doubts of a successful termination of the journey, telling her that the most difficult part of it had passed, that now they were beyond the fantastic countries of Japan and China, and were fairly on their way to civilised places again. A railway train from San Francisco to New York, and a transatlantic steamer from New York to Liverpool, would doubtless bring them to the end of this impossible journey round the world within the period agreed upon.

On the ninth day after leaving Yokohama, Phileas Fogg had traversed exactly one half of the terrestrial globe. The “General Grant” passed, on the 23rd of November, the one hundred and eightieth meridian, and was at the very antipodes of London. Mr. Fogg had, it is true, exhausted fifty-two of the eighty days in which he was to complete the tour, and there were only twenty-eight left. But, though he was only half-way by the difference of meridians, he had really gone over two-thirds of the whole journey; for he had been obliged to make long circuits from London to Aden, from Aden to Bombay, from Calcutta to Singapore, and from Singapore to Yokohama. Could he have followed without deviation the fiftieth parallel, which is that of London, the whole distance would only have been about twelve thousand miles; whereas he would be forced, by the irregular methods of locomotion, to traverse twenty-six thousand, of which he had, on the 23rd of November, accomplished seventeen thousand five hundred. And now the course was a straight one, and Fix was no longer there to put obstacles in their way!

It happened also, on the 23rd of November, that Passepartout made a joyful discovery. It will be remembered that the obstinate fellow had insisted on keeping his famous family watch at London time, and on regarding that of the countries he had passed through as quite false and unreliable. Now, on this day, though he had not changed the hands, he found that his watch exactly agreed with the ship’s chronometers. His triumph was hilarious. He would have liked to know what Fix would say if he were aboard!

“The rogue told me a lot of stories,” repeated Passepartout, “about the meridians, the sun, and the moon! Moon, indeed! moonshine more likely! If one listened to that sort of people, a pretty sort of time one would keep! I was sure that the sun would some day regulate itself by my watch!”

Passepartout was ignorant that, if the face of his watch had been divided into twenty-four hours, like the Italian clocks, he would have no reason for exultation; for the hands of his watch would then, instead of as now indicating nine o’clock in the morning, indicate nine o’clock in the evening, that is, the twenty-first hour after midnight precisely the difference between London time and that of the one hundred and eightieth meridian. But if Fix had been able to explain this purely physical effect, Passepartout would not have admitted, even if he had comprehended it. Moreover, if the detective had been on board at that moment, Passepartout would have joined issue with him on a quite different subject, and in an entirely different manner.

Where was Fix at that moment?

He was actually on board the “General Grant.”

On reaching Yokohama, the detective, leaving Mr. Fogg, whom he expected to meet again during the day, had repaired at once to the English consulate, where he at last found the warrant of arrest. It had followed him from Bombay, and had come by the “Carnatic,” on which steamer he himself was supposed to be. Fix’s disappointment may be imagined when he reflected that the warrant was now useless. Mr. Fogg had left English ground, and it was now necessary to procure his extradition!

“Well,” thought Fix, after a moment of anger, “my warrant is not good here, but it will be in England. The rogue evidently intends to return to his own country, thinking he has thrown the police off his track. Good! I will follow him across the Atlantic. As for the money, heaven grant there may be some left! But the fellow has already spent in travelling, rewards, trials, bail, elephants, and all sorts of charges, more than five thousand pounds. Yet, after all, the Bank is rich!”

His course decided on, he went on board the “General Grant,” and was there when Mr. Fogg and Aouda arrived. To his utter amazement, he recognised Passepartout, despite his theatrical disguise. He quickly concealed himself in his cabin, to avoid an awkward explanation, and hoped—thanks to the number of passengers—to remain unperceived by Mr. Fogg’s servant.

On that very day, however, he met Passepartout face to face on the forward deck. The latter, without a word, made a rush for him, grasped him by the throat, and, much to the amusement of a group of Americans, who immediately began to bet on him, administered to the detective a perfect volley of blows, which proved the great superiority of French over English pugilistic skill.

When Passepartout had finished, he found himself relieved and comforted. Fix got up in a somewhat rumpled condition, and, looking at his adversary, coldly said, “Have you done?”

“For this time—yes.”

“Then let me have a word with you.”

“But I—”

“In your master’s interests.”

Passepartout seemed to be vanquished by Fix’s coolness, for he quietly followed him, and they sat down aside from the rest of the passengers.

“You have given me a thrashing,” said Fix. “Good, I expected it. Now, listen to me. Up to this time I have been Mr. Fogg’s adversary. I am now in his game.”

“Aha!” cried Passepartout; “you are convinced he is an honest man?”

“No,” replied Fix coldly, “I think him a rascal. Sh! don’t budge, and let me speak. As long as Mr. Fogg was on English ground, it was for my interest to detain him there until my warrant of arrest arrived. I did everything I could to keep him back. I sent the Bombay priests after him, I got you intoxicated at Hong Kong, I separated you from him, and I made him miss the Yokohama steamer.”

Passepartout listened, with closed fists.

“Now,” resumed Fix, “Mr. Fogg seems to be going back to England. Well, I will follow him there. But hereafter I will do as much to keep obstacles out of his way as I have done up to this time to put them in his path. I’ve changed my game, you see, and simply because it was for my interest to change it. Your interest is the same as mine; for it is only in England that you will ascertain whether you are in the service of a criminal or an honest man.”

Passepartout listened very attentively to Fix, and was convinced that he spoke with entire good faith.

“Are we friends?” asked the detective.

“Friends?—no,” replied Passepartout; “but allies, perhaps. At the least sign of treason, however, I’ll twist your neck for you.”

“Agreed,” said the detective quietly.

#Around the World in 80 Days #Jules Verne #around the world in 80 dailies

[hannahssimblr]

Chapter Twenty-Six (Part 3)

Later on, back at my parents house, he parallel parks his car out on the street in one easy manoeuvre, and for some reason, that simple action knocks the wind out of me. “That was hot,” I say. 

He eyes me, amused. “Keep your knickers on Kilbride. At least until we get upstairs.”

“Oh, yeah,” I grimace as I lead him up the driveway. “My parents want you to sleep on the couch,” I expect him to make a joke about it, or say something like “It’s a bit late for them to save your virginity,” But he understands. Shrugging, he just says, “Yeah, sure. Absolutely.”

“I’m sorry, it’s just how they are, they were always really strict about boys and things. They never even let me go camping if someone’s boyfriend was going to be there. I think it was a teen pregnancy thing.”

“I get it, it’s their house so it’s their rules,” He says. “Plus, the pregnancy thing… I mean, it is catholic Ireland after all.”

When we go inside my parents are just settling in front of the TV with a glass of wine. They swivel their heads when the front door slams. “Oh, hope you don’t mind, Jude,” My mother says very politely. “But we’re just going to watch something before bed. I’ll make the couch up for you afterwards.”

“There’s no rush, but thank you Marian.” He smiles. 

“Can we hang out in my room?” I ask. 

“Yes but leave the door open,” I’m aware that this is a glimpse into what my life would have been like if I’d actually had a boyfriend when I was a teenager, and I wonder if mam is thinking the same thing. It’s like seeing the ghost ship I never boarded and feels weird. I take Jude’s hand and lead him upstairs. 

“This is my room,” I say, reverently opening the door. “I know it’s small. Everything in this house is small.”

“It’s not that small,” He says. “But I’m actually more shocked that I can see the floor,” I laugh and punch him gently in the arm. “That’s only because I don’t live here anymore. You should have seen it when I was still at school, it was absolutely disgusting. All of the time. Like old mugs of tea and everything,” I glance at him as I move to sit on the bed to see how repulsive he finds that, but he doesn’t even flinch as he carefully leaves the door ajar behind him and plonks next to me. “My room was sick too,” He admits. “I had such an aversion to keeping it tidy, it was like, the only room in the house that I wouldn’t let the cleaner into. It felt like a weird control thing.” 

“How did all of the girls you brought home feel about that?” I tease, and he gives me a sidelong glance. “All three thousand of them, you mean?”

I laugh and smooth the covers of my bed, freshly changed into the same pink frilly ones I remember picking out in the shop about twelve years ago. They’re thin and faded from use now, and I still remember how vibrant they used to be. “Well this bed has never seen any action,” I say. “It’s pure innocence objectified. I never even had a chaste kiss in this room. How sad.” Jude remedies that quickly by planting a firm lips on mine. “Glad to be the first,” He says, and I blush like a little girl. 

“Oh, look,” He says, eyes catching something over my shoulder, and reaches to the bedside table to take a framed photo into his hands. He turns it to show me a photo that’s been there forever. It’s me, smiling with a missing left incisor tooth on the day of my first holy communion. “Tiny little bride.”

I gaze at it fondly. “That was 2001. Caroline, Shane’s mam sewed that dress for me because I didn’t like any of the ones in the shops. It was so exciting to have something custom made and along with that I got eighty pounds in gifts that day.”

“Pounds?”

“Yeah we didn’t have the euro yet.”

“Well that’s a lot of money for an eight year old.”

“Kelly got three hundred and twenty five pounds and a gold necklace with praying hands on it.” I say, lips pursed with envy.

“Is that a rough estimation, or?”

I take the picture into my own hands and brush the light layer of dust away from the glass. I was so small. Small even for an eight year old. This was a little bit before my sudden, dramatic and heinously awkward growth spurt that turned me from a tiny child to an angular jumble of sharp knees and elbows the height of an adult woman in the space of ten months. I remember how much bigger the other girls looked in the communion group photo, especially Kelly, who even got her first period the following year. For some reason looking at myself as a child makes me emotional, because I’ve come to understand that all of the things that have happened to me in my life have happened to her. When I scold myself for being unworthy or undeserving of happiness and nice things, amn’t I really saying those things to this child? I place the picture back on the table. “Sometimes I wish I was little again.” 

“Yeah, me too.”

I rest my hand on his knee and he turns it over to wind our fingers together. “What were you like?” He asks. 

“I was so quiet, and so anxious. I got overwhelmed and I cried an awful lot.”

“I’m sure you were more than those things.”

“I liked drawing, reading, and playing with dolls,” I say. “I used to take all of the books out of the bookcase in the living room and turn it into a high-rise apartment for my Bratz dolls. I made beds out of shoe boxes with face cloths for the sheets. I was always making up stories for them.”

“What kind of stories?”

“Love stories,” I smile, “Always love stories, like, finding the perfect man was the ultimate goal. I was obsessed.”

“Lucky you found him,” He smirks, and I push him away from me. 

“Do you think you’d have liked me when you were a child? Or a teenager?” I ask. “Like, if we’d gone to the same school do you think we’d have gotten along?”

“Yeah.” He says, “I wish I’d known a kid like you back then. I think we would have been good for each other, you know? It seems like we wanted the same thing but could never get it from the people around us.”

“What’s that?”

“Not to grow up too quickly, like, to be allowed to just be a kid.”

These words make my heart ache with want. I don’t think I ever really thought about how badly I needed permission to just be how I wanted to be. To not rush things, to not have awful kisses with boys when I wasn’t old enough to have those feelings, to not steal cans of cider from my dad’s stash and take them down to a field to drink. I wish I never worried about fake IDs and someone’s eighteen year old sister that kind of looks like me if you squint your eyes, or about having the shortest skirt at school, rolled up at the waist until I had to hold it to the back of my legs going up the stairs.

“I still want that.” I whisper. 

“Me too.”

I’m almost sure I’m about to burst out crying, so I quickly turn around and whip open the bottom drawer of my bedside table, remembering the things I had intended to show him when he visited. “Look.” I say, dropping them onto his lap, much to his surprise. “These are my dirtiest secrets.” He seems a bit confused about what he’s looking at. A form. A book. A scrap of card. 

I clarify, “These are my Jude things.”

“Oh,” He says, opening the cover of Goodnight Mr Tom. “This is my book.”

I nod. “I stole it.”

“I didn’t take you for a thief,” His eyes are gleaming. He didn’t take me for one, but he likes it. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” I admit. “It was just on impulse, the morning of your flight before I left your house I just kind of… rushed in and snatched it. I liked that it had your handwriting in it, I suppose,” I pull the scrap of card out from underneath the book to show him. “As does this. Do you remember this?”

“Yeah, of course,” He breathes. “I was trying to sound so nonchalant. ‘See you later, alligator,’” He lets out a short, mocking laugh. “Dickhead. That was a shit morning. I sat in the kitchen having this miserable bowl of cereal, hoping you’d wake up and come down to say goodbye to me. I don’t know what this note was about, to be honest. Just a last ditch effort for some contact with you. Maybe I thought I was being romantic.”

“I used to look at it every night and cry,” I admit. “That’s so embarrassing, Jesus. Sorry, but I did. I cried for weeks.”

“Awh, man.”

I pull the final item out and lay it on top of the other two with intention. “And this is the admission form for the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts.”

His eyes snap to mine. “You applied?”

“Well, no. I didn’t. See? The form is empty.”

He smooths his hands over the paper like there is some intense meaning to the pages and its blank boxes. “I can’t believe you considered that. That’s nuts.”

“It was nuts. You weren’t even speaking to me at that point, I was just so desperate for some contact with you. I was probably one step away from sending one cent to your bank account with a note saying ‘please text me’,” I observe him. “What would you have done if I actually applied and got accepted?”

“I don’t know, honestly. I would have been shocked. Is it what you would have really wanted?”

I consider this. “To be with you? Yes. But to live in Berlin? No, I don’t think it was the right thing for me. I wasn’t ready to live abroad.”

“Well then I’m really glad you didn’t. Imagine chasing eighteen year old Jude Turner to Germany,” He shudders. “Disaster.”

I laugh and hook my thigh over his so that he can rest his hand on it. “I think I’d be so sickened if you changed your plans for me. Like at that point in your life anyway. Things are so changeable right now and every choice feels so important. If you’d come to Berlin it would have been so wrong, you mightn’t have been making any of the amazing things that you’re making now. I’d have felt so guilty if I knew I was the sole reason you chose to come.”

“Well, lucky I didn’t.”

There’s a long silence after he moves the items off his lap and onto the bed, and we both stare off into the distance, his fingers pulsing a gentle rhythm on the top of my knee. Grasshoppers chirp outside now, and the sound drifts through the open window in unison with the muggy air while bass notes from the TV downstairs reverberate through the floor. 

“Why didn’t you tell me you looked at jobs in LA?” It’s out of me before I even realise it, but Jude turns and looks at me like he’s been waiting for me to ask him all day. “Because it was nothing, it was just out of curiosity, and I’m really not looking to move to the states right now.” 

“Were you scared that I’d think you’d leave?”

“No, it was nothing like that, I just wanted to compare the number of jobs available, that’s all. I don’t want you to think that I was hiding something from you, I’d never do that.”

“Well…” I pause, “Do you think maybe you should even reach out to those companies for feedback? Even if you don’t apply to them, they might give you advice that would be helpful for the London jobs.”

“Well, yeah, I never thought about that. Maybe.”

“You know I just want you to be happy,” I say with a new tremor that seems to come from nowhere. “You’ll always do what’s best for you, right?”

“What’s best for me is to be with you,” He bends over to ease me into a long, dreamy kiss. “Didn’t we have a rule about discussing job applications? What was that you were saying earlier about my sexy parallel parking skills?”

“Oh I could go on and on,” I say. “I could probably write an essay about the muscles in your forearms, actually.”

“Interesting.”

“Do you want to hear some of the highlights?”

“Yeah, maybe later.” We kiss until we hear the TV switch off, and then, like teenagers we scamper apart, and he hurries downstairs to sleep on the couch. 

Beginning // Prev // Next

#lucky girl part 3 #cryin #in the context of Lucky boy this chapter is very sad

[smokeybrandreviews]

Eclipse of my Heart

Man, it feels good to have the Gacha gods back on my side! And it also feels good to have a brand new UR in my fleet; And a Vanguard at that! I definitely need as many goddamn Rainbow Vanguards as I can get because having only San Diego as an option is killing my soul. If you can’t tell what I’m talking about, Azur Lane finally delivered some new Sakura Empire content worth my while. That’s right, there is kind of a pseudo Summer Event tied into whatever the f*ck Effulgence Before Eclipse is supposed to be. Not gonna lie, this new Event feels a little light on content. I mean, there are only five new ships, one of which is a Point Reward and the pother is a Shop item. I feel like, in the past, there were substantially more. Maybe that’s just wishful thinking with the absolute Iron Blood bonanza last year. Still, this year has been a desert for new content, even if I was able to secure myself a New Jersey on the Rerun. Getting a new Event with a UR tagged to the banner has been a real treat and you know I made my run!

In all honesty, I was more into popping Owari the most. I have a thing for that busty, dark skinned, anime girl trope and Owari is right in line for that. The second that update was complete, I hit the Banner with the force of a thousand exploding suns! Interestingly enough, the first ship I popped, on my second roll no less, was Owari! At that point, I had achieved my primary goal and figured, what the hell? I was going to give myself the leeway to burn through about one hundred of my Cube stash chasing the Ultra Rare, Unzen. Any more than that and I had a decision to make. Mostly because I’d probably end up having to open my wallet for more cubed, only had one hundred and sixty at that point, so it felt a little tight. More than that, my average to UR is around sixty-five cubes so that hundred felt acceptable. I was already twenty so I kept going. Literally on the next two attempts, I popped Hatsuzuki (who happens to be the Shop Ship so that was a wash) and Natori, the only Elite ship on the Banner. Seriously, two Super Rares, and Ultra, and an Elite is a very nice mix but I still need that elusive Rainbow. I needed Unzen. It took me four more rolls. Another forty Wisdom Cubes but I finally popped myself Unzen, completing the Banner ship quest! It took me eighty Cubes overall, but I popped every new ship available, even grabbing enough dupes of Owari and Natori to Limit Break both of them three times. I legit cleaned up AND came in under budget. All in all, I am damn pleased. All that’s left is Asanagi but she’s the Point ship. I’ll pop her just grinding my way through the Event maps, looking for those precious Priority Six Blueprints.

Speaking of Priority Six, I just recently finished constructing Kearsarge. Outside of the two Iron Blood offering, she was the only other ship I felt worthy of the grind. Constructing her felt like it went a lot faster than building up her sister P6 Rainbow, Hindenburg, but she was a labor of love. Felix Schultz, less so but if I’m being honest, I still kind of love her, too. She has shades of Meltryllis from Fate/Grand Order, and we all know how much I love me some Sakurafaces! Also, Prinz Rupprecht has a Fate Simulation? I ain’t even know that! He was already one of my favorites and now she is even more powerful! I’m so glad I grinded out tall those Blueprints beforehand. There is very little more satisfying than seeing that development bar flash to full in a matter of seconds instead of who knows how long. Even Chkalov got some of that bonus level love. A little bummed my Priority Four girls haven’t got any of the Fate love but this Event has given me a pretty fantastic costume for Hakuryuu. Flash of Silk and Strings can give Golden Dragon Under Aegir’s Auspicious Clouds, Taihou’s Sweet Time After School, Rupprecht’s The Gate Dragon’s Advent, and Regensberg’s Dark Dragon, Brilliant Beach, a run for their money as my favorite costume. All in all, I am very pleased with this event. I kind of fibbed a little bit in the beginning of this post, I actually have enough UR ships to field an entire Vanguard of Rainbows, without San Diego even. I have, currently, running for the grind, Aegir (who is complete and maxed out at all possible levels), Hindenberg, and Unzen who, through the magic of T1 EXP Packs, is already at level eighty-eight! I have my choice of Main Fleet option, f*cking lousy with Rainbow Main Fleet options, but I am mad content otherwise. Now all I need is a Shimakaze Rerun and I’ll be satisfied. It’s borderline frustrating that I’m missing just one of the Japanese Rainbows. It chaffs the completionist in me like you wouldn’t believe.

#Effulgence Before Eclipse #Azur Lane #Sakura Empire

[smokeybrand]

Eclipse of my Heart

Man, it feels good to have the Gacha gods back on my side! And it also feels good to have a brand new UR in my fleet; And a Vanguard at that! I definitely need as many goddamn Rainbow Vanguards as I can get because having only San Diego as an option is killing my soul. If you can’t tell what I’m talking about, Azur Lane finally delivered some new Sakura Empire content worth my while. That’s right, there is kind of a pseudo Summer Event tied into whatever the f*ck Effulgence Before Eclipse is supposed to be. Not gonna lie, this new Event feels a little light on content. I mean, there are only five new ships, one of which is a Point Reward and the pother is a Shop item. I feel like, in the past, there were substantially more. Maybe that’s just wishful thinking with the absolute Iron Blood bonanza last year. Still, this year has been a desert for new content, even if I was able to secure myself a New Jersey on the Rerun. Getting a new Event with a UR tagged to the banner has been a real treat and you know I made my run!

In all honesty, I was more into popping Owari the most. I have a thing for that busty, dark skinned, anime girl trope and Owari is right in line for that. The second that update was complete, I hit the Banner with the force of a thousand exploding suns! Interestingly enough, the first ship I popped, on my second roll no less, was Owari! At that point, I had achieved my primary goal and figured, what the hell? I was going to give myself the leeway to burn through about one hundred of my Cube stash chasing the Ultra Rare, Unzen. Any more than that and I had a decision to make. Mostly because I’d probably end up having to open my wallet for more cubed, only had one hundred and sixty at that point, so it felt a little tight. More than that, my average to UR is around sixty-five cubes so that hundred felt acceptable. I was already twenty so I kept going. Literally on the next two attempts, I popped Hatsuzuki (who happens to be the Shop Ship so that was a wash) and Natori, the only Elite ship on the Banner. Seriously, two Super Rares, and Ultra, and an Elite is a very nice mix but I still need that elusive Rainbow. I needed Unzen. It took me four more rolls. Another forty Wisdom Cubes but I finally popped myself Unzen, completing the Banner ship quest! It took me eighty Cubes overall, but I popped every new ship available, even grabbing enough dupes of Owari and Natori to Limit Break both of them three times. I legit cleaned up AND came in under budget. All in all, I am damn pleased. All that’s left is Asanagi but she’s the Point ship. I’ll pop her just grinding my way through the Event maps, looking for those precious Priority Six Blueprints.

Speaking of Priority Six, I just recently finished constructing Kearsarge. Outside of the two Iron Blood offering, she was the only other ship I felt worthy of the grind. Constructing her felt like it went a lot faster than building up her sister P6 Rainbow, Hindenburg, but she was a labor of love. Felix Schultz, less so but if I’m being honest, I still kind of love her, too. She has shades of Meltryllis from Fate/Grand Order, and we all know how much I love me some Sakurafaces! Also, Prinz Rupprecht has a Fate Simulation? I ain’t even know that! He was already one of my favorites and now she is even more powerful! I’m so glad I grinded out tall those Blueprints beforehand. There is very little more satisfying than seeing that development bar flash to full in a matter of seconds instead of who knows how long. Even Chkalov got some of that bonus level love. A little bummed my Priority Four girls haven’t got any of the Fate love but this Event has given me a pretty fantastic costume for Hakuryuu. Flash of Silk and Strings can give Golden Dragon Under Aegir’s Auspicious Clouds, Taihou’s Sweet Time After School, Rupprecht’s The Gate Dragon’s Advent, and Regensberg’s Dark Dragon, Brilliant Beach, a run for their money as my favorite costume. All in all, I am very pleased with this event. I kind of fibbed a little bit in the beginning of this post, I actually have enough UR ships to field an entire Vanguard of Rainbows, without San Diego even. I have, currently, running for the grind, Aegir (who is complete and maxed out at all possible levels), Hindenberg, and Unzen who, through the magic of T1 EXP Packs, is already at level eighty-eight! I have my choice of Main Fleet option, f*cking lousy with Rainbow Main Fleet options, but I am mad content otherwise. Now all I need is a Shimakaze Rerun and I’ll be satisfied. It’s borderline frustrating that I’m missing just one of the Japanese Rainbows. It chaffs the completionist in me like you wouldn’t believe.

[lindsaystravelblogs3]

Days 58-59 – Friday-Saturday, 21-22 July

Friday

We had booked a tour to Ancient Corinth for today so needed to be up early to have breakfast and arrive at the pick-up point by 8am.  It was already very hot and we had to walk half a kilometre or more from the pick-up spot to where the bus was waiting.  The bus then took us a kilometre (at most) to where we had to get off and board another bus that would take us to Corinth.  Most of the people on that bus were going somewhere else, so they all had to get off to join some other bus.  It was all a very complicated and risk-prone way to get people onto the correct buses for their correct tours and numerous misdirected tourists were only rescued at the last moment.

It was about an hour’s drive to a ‘comfort stop’ at the edge of the incredible Corinth Canal (that we will sail down in a couple of weeks’ time).  It is only about six kilometres long, but amazingly deep and we took photos of ships sailing the Canal hundreds of feet below us.  There are several bridges crossing the Canal but it is a stupendous sight, seeing how the mammoth gash has been carved through the land to link the Aegean to the Ionian Seas.  Really mind-boggling to me.

We only stopped for fifteen minutes, and by then we were almost melting and happy to be back on the air-conditioned bus – not that that was all that comfortable either.  Certainly well over forty degrees all day.  Our guide was very good and gave us a heap of information almost continuously for three-quarters of the way to Corinth.  She is a staunch Greek patriot, and her politics and contempt for the Turks, in particular, was pretty evident.  Guides are not supposed to let their politics of prejudices show, but her's were pretty obvious.

We passed a lot of sites along the way, including an advertised feature of the tour, Daphne’s Temple, that seemed to have been overlooked entirely.  I never heard it mentioned and Heather only got three photos as we whizzed past.

(We have often noted a mismatch between the blurb provided - both on websites and in brochures, as well as verbal promises by tour operators - to induce you to join a tour and what it actually delivers. I suspect that the same practices in Australia would draw the wrath of clients and the Trade Practices Commissioner, but nobody seems to expect operators to honour their promises here.)

Modern Corinth is now a city just a few kilometres from Ancient Corinth and we passed it on the way, but never closer than a kilometre or two.  Ancient Corinth though, is still a big site – I think we were told the city housed about eighty thousand people at its height.  Its ruins still cover a big swathe of land and although much of it is now just low stone walls and ruins, some of its features have survived better than many of the other ruins we have seen this trip.

Part of Corinth's claim to fame is that Saint Paul stayed there for some time with Aquilla and Priscilla in New Testament times.  I was slightly amused by the place where he preached – the Speakers’ Platform.  It is maybe four metres high and quite extensive, compared to the Ancient Athens Speaker’s Stone that was maybe ten centimetres high and six square metres in total.

It was almost unbearably hot and we dashed from one tree to the next or huddled up against the occasional wall to avoid the worst of the sun, but we still had to walk at least two or three kilometres with our guide who explained what we were looking at.  I have to say though, we never heard a lot of what she said, because getting out of the sun was more important than her monologue.  We had one smart-arse who needed to prove his scholarship by asking obscure and unnecessary questions, always in full sun.

It was a relief to get into the Museum, into the shade with the air-conditioner on, even if not making a huge impression.  The exhibits were not that much different from the other museums we have visited.  Many of the sculptures seemed better preserved than we have seen elsewhere, and even in the city outside, the structures have survived the ravages of time a little better than some other places we have visited from the same time period – roughly from three thousand BC to one thousand AD if my understanding is correct.

People were tired and the only stop we had on the way back to Athens was a toilet stop for a few minutes. We stayed on the bus but everyone else got off.  The driver told us he would lock the door when he got out but the smart-arse I mentioned before knew how to open it and came back in before anyone else – but he didn’t know how to close the door. When the driver came back he demanded to know who opened the door and quite rightly roasted the guy who had opened the door (a big no-no) and not closed it again (another giant no-no).

Although we quite enjoyed the tour, it certainly didn’t deliver its promise.  We saw nothing of Daphne’s Temple and the promised Christian focus in Ancient Corinth was hardly mentioned.  The highlight of the trip for me was seeing the fabulous Corinth Canal.

We were back in central Athens about 2.30pm and really just wanted to get inside out of the sun.  We bought a couple of things to eat and drink on the way home and had a very late lunch in our room, after 3pm.

We had a nice phone conversation with Deanne and Rob late in the afternoon and are looking forward to seeing them in person when our paths cross for one day in Istanbul in a couple of weeks’ time.

We had seen a KFC outlet just up the road as we walked home so when it was time for dinner, we went to the supermarket to stock up on drinks, and bought some KFC chicken and salad to eat in our room.  How wonderful is a cool shower at the end of a day like that!!!

Saturday

We spent virtually all day in our room, sorting and reorganising a lot of brochures, maps and papers, and discarding a lot of obsolete or unwanted papers to lighten our load when we need to move on.   We also did more work on our photos and blogs but not much else.  I kept an eye on the Test Match and kept hoping that the rain at Old Trafford would continue and save the Aussies a lot of embarrassment. So far, so good.

We were both pretty achy for some reason, more than expected, but maybe we have just been overdoing it given the intense heat.

We made lunch from the things we had in our room, but went out for dinner.  We explored at least half a dozen restaurants on the block around us, but none of them provided a suitable menu where we could sit inside in air-conditioned comfort.  We finally settled on the closest to home and had the worst meal we have had for at least a year or two, maybe twenty.  The staff were atrocious, inattentive, on the phone, rolling fags, and doing their nails, instead of attending to patrons.  We ordered a bottle of wine and after twenty minutes, we asked where it was.  ‘Oh, did you really want that?’  Back in another fifteen minutes with one we really hadn't ordered! And of course, the ones they had in stock were much more expensive. The food was cold and tasteless and we couldn’t get out of there fast enough.  Heather wrote a review for Trip Advisor that may not encourage many other people to patronise them either.

[shredsandpatches]

sunday snippet (homo fuge remix edition)

I have like five different WIPs that I'm actively working on at the moment and the Helen of Troy one is closest to being done so I'm actually trying to get it polished off. Have a bit! It's gross!

The idea of renewing the contract in writing comes from the Spiers Faustbuch and its English translation; it does also appear in Marlowe but sort of peripherally so we can get to the sexy Helen bit. I expanded on it a little because I thought it would be thematically appropriate to this particular fic. There's also a bit I lifted directly from the Murnau film. The choice of writing support, however, is my own invention. As noted: it's gross!

--

"Shhhh." Mephistopheles crouches down to maneuver Faustus' head into his lap, and his fingers are in Faustus' hair now, exquisitely gentle. Faustus curls around himself, blinking back tears as Mephistopheles continues. "I know you have doubts—but I couldn't bear it if I had to tear you apart now, my Faustus. We have so little time left."

Faustus swallows hard; it tastes of tears and rheum and just a hint of blood. He reaches up feebly and feels Mephistopheles' hand grip his own, so tightly that it hurts. He has always liked when it hurts.

"What must I do?"

Mephistopheles releases Faustus' hand, helps him to his feet, and slowly, deliberately begins to unbutton his doublet. In nearly twenty-four years he has done so more times than Faustus can think of to count, sometimes innocently, other times—

"Don't get all excited," Mephistopheles murmurs, indulgently. Faustus feels his cheeks grow warm as he realizes his breathing has grown rapid and shallow, but by now Mephistopheles has finished unbuttoning him, and Faustus stands as passive as he can while Mephistopheles eases the doublet off of his shoulders. He sets it aside and begins to roll up Faustus' shirtsleeves, first the bloodstained left one, then the clean right one. He raises Faustus' right hand to his lips, presses them briefly to the inside of his wrist.

"Hold still," Mephistopheles says, and then his teeth break the skin.

He raises his head to smile up at Faustus, licking the blood from his lips with the same unhurried sensuality with which he'd undone his doublet—and then his sharp nails are at the wound and Faustus feels his eyes roll back in his head as Mephistopheles, just as deliberately, begins to peel back the skin from the soft underside of his forearm. He does not scream, even as he feels it come away from the flesh, but through the red haze that descends before his eyes he thinks he can see the same words that had been inscribed in his skin, all those years ago, shining through the net of tissue and sinew and blood that now lies open and quivering in the air.

HOMO FUGE: yet shall not Faustus fly.

His blood had congealed then. It flows freely now.

Mephistopheles' arm is around his shoulders, now, steadying him, guiding him as he lurches toward his desk, half in a faint; he helps him to sit down. Faustus cradles his bleeding right arm as Mephistopheles spreads a sheet of parchment before him, finer and fairer than the best-prepared vellum, and yet Faustus knows that only moments ago it had been torn from his arm. He reaches out, gingerly, to touch it; his blood drips onto the surface, where the drops smoke acridly for an instant before being absorbed like ink on paper and then fading entirely. He breathes deeply and carefully, dizzy with pain.

"You could have used ordinary parchment," he says.

Mephistopheles makes the odd little sound that usually passes for laughter with him. "Oh, and I suppose your own blood will be enough this time?" He shakes his head, gestures toward the reopened wound on Faustus' left arm. "Now. Write."

Faustus reaches for his quill, almost instinctively, and Mephistopheles' hand grips his wrist once more.

"Use mine," he says, producing a black pen, untrimmed of its barbs; there is an intense odor of burnt feathers as he presses its tip into the wound, and when he presents it to Faustus it is hot to the touch. "Write," he repeats.

"What do I say?"

"Confirm your former vow," Mephistopheles says. "Do it quickly, and with unfeigned heart." His lips twist again. "You'll know what to write," he says.

#doctor faustus #sunday snippet #hot faust summer #faustopheles #otp: as many souls as there be stars #tw blood #tw gore #one thousand one hundred and eighty six ships

[husheduphistory]

Ghost Blimp: The Mystery and Missing on the L-8

On Sunday, August 16th 1942 Richard L. Johnston was going about his business. He had just finished waxing his car in Dale City, California when he looked up and saw something huge creeping out of the sky and towards his house. Suddenly it hit a utility pole, electrical wires broke sending sparks cascading down to the street, and Johnson ran into the house to protect his mother. When he came back outside there was a large group of people in the street including Fire Deputy Marshal Sean Wood and Johnston’s next door neighbor, volunteer fireman William Morris. Johnston’s car was completely hidden under a massive fold of what looked like canvas. When Johnston woke up that morning he probably didn’t expect that a blimp would land on his car that day. And yet, moments later the scene became even more bizarre.

In August 1942 the United States Navy was on high alert. Within nine months after entering World War II Japanese submarines sunk at least six Allied ships off the American west coast and shelled one of California’s largest oil drilling facilities. The fear of another attack on American soil was high and in order to keep an eye on the sea along the west coast the Navy took to the air, deploying blimps to cruise over the ocean and watch for any suspicious activity.

World War II Navy blimp. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

The blimp that landed on Johnson’s car was the L-8 airship, acquired by the Navy from the Goodyear company and commissioned on March 5, 1942. It was an excellent machine, completing over 1,000 trips and never requiring any work beyond routine maintenance. The two-man crew tasked with piloting the airship had records as impeccable as the craft itself. Lieutenant Ernest Dewitt Cody was a 1938 graduate of Annapolis and although he was only twenty-seven years old he was highly regarded with his commanding officer describing him as “one of the most capable pilots and one of the most able officers” under his command. Cody was relatively new to flying LTA (lighter-than-air) airships, but in April 1942 he proved his ability when he flew the L-8 to deliver cargo to the USS Hornet before the ship departed for Doolittle’s Raid over Tokyo. It was that trip that earned him his promotion to Lieutenant in June 1942. Ensign Charles Ellis Adams was eleven years older than Cody and had twenty years of experience flying LTA airships, but only earned his commission the day before their flight together making his trip with Cody his first flight as an officer.

Lieutenant Ernest Dewitt Cody and  Ensign Charles Ellis Adams.

The L-8 delivering cargo to the USS Hornet. Image via National Archives.

Their task together was a routine anti-submarine mission, fly out from Treasure Island, patrol a fifty-mile radius of San Francisco, then head to the Farallon Islands before heading back to Treasure Island. When they left Treasure Island at 6:03am there was approximately five miles of visibility with the Golden Gate Bridge off in the distance. At 7:38am Cody radioed Moffett Field and reported their location as being four miles east of the Farallon Islands. Four minutes later Moffett Field received a second message from Cody, “Am investigating suspicious oil slick—stand by.” Since an oil slick could indicate an enemy submarine below the waves it was not unusual for the airship to investigate the scene. As the L-8 descended closer to the sea its movements were seen by a fishing boat, the Daisy Gray, and a Liberty cargo ship, Albert Gallatin. Apprehensive about seeing the Navy airship creep closer to the surface of the water and then set off two flares, the ship crews pulled in their nets, manned their guns, and nervously waited to see what happened next. But, as they watched the L-8 nothing out of the ordinary happened. The blimp circled for about an hour and crews from both ships could see two men in the gondola. At approximately 9am the blimp again rose into the air and restarted its route back toward San Francisco. Everything appeared normal to the ships and spectators below, but personnel at Moffett Field were getting nervous, they had not heard a word from the L-8 since 7:42am and were not able to reestablish any communication. Two Vought OS2U Kingfisher floatplanes were sent to look for the blimp and other aircraft were asked to keep their eyes open.

The intended flight path of the L-8 aircraft. Image via unsolvedmysteries.fandom.com.

At approximately 10:49am a series of blimp sightings began to roll in. A Pan American Clipper pilot reported seeing the blimp over the Golden Gate Bridge, then at 11am one of the Kingfishers spotted the L-8 three miles west of Salada Beach at approximately 2,000 feet. Although a height of 2,000 feet would typically be avoided by an airship for safety reasons, there was no indication of the ship being out of control or in danger and it began to descend. The next plane to spot the blimp, an Army P-38 pilot, also saw no indication that the airship or its crew was in any distress when it was seen near Mile Rock, seemingly on its way back to Treasure Island. Within minutes an off-duty seaman named Richard Quam saw the L-8 as he was driving along the highway between San Mateo and San Francisco and he decided to take a picture of the sight. He may have been the first person to capture that something was amiss, the blimp was now noticeably bending in the middle.

The L-8 airship visible sagging as it flew over Daly City. Image via National Archives.

Things began to happen quickly. At approximately 11:15am the L-8 was seen approaching the shore of Ocean Beach in San Francisco but its motors were now silent and there was noticeable sagging. It touched down on the beach for a moment but kept moving until it hit the side of a hill, knocking off one of its 325lb depth chargers. Now carrying 300lbs less, the airship again rose, clearing the hill, and moving further inland. Thousands of people now watched as the L-8 staggered overhead obviously in peril. But, according to witnesses, the ship was not unmanned, in a later interview seventeen-year-old C.E. Taylor told reporters that as the blimp descended he was watching the cabin through his binoculars and that two men were clearly visible inside the entire time.

Finally, at 11:30am the blimp came to a clumsy rest on top of Richard Johnston’s freshly waxed car. Sirens blared and firemen surrounded the blimp, slashing it open in an attempt to save Cody and Adams inside. But, when the rescuers got to the gondola they found a scene that made no sense. The door was open, the microphone for communication was hanging from the doorway, a hat was resting on the controls, the life raft and all parachutes were still in place, but Cody and Adams were nowhere to be found.

Once the initial shock of the crash wore off a feeling of worry began to quickly take over. The L-8 was traveling an extremely visible route and was tracked and seen by hundreds of people and ships, with many reporting the same as young C. E. Taylor, that the men were visible inside the cabin. The Navy immediately launched a search for Cody and Adams and the craft was inspected for any clues to solve the disappearance. The engines were in perfect running order, the ignition switches were on, and there was four hours of fuel left. The only thing that was unusual on board was that the blimp's batteries were drained and part of the fuel supply had been dumped out with no obvious explanation why.

The scene after the crash of the L-8. Image via National Archives.

For three days the shore where the blimp initially crashed and the Pacific coastline was heavily searched but there was no trace of the two missing men. A board of investigation was convened by Navy Commander Francis Connell and over the course of seven days thirty-five witnesses gave their testimony of watching the L-8 hover overhead with nothing seeming suspect. Multiple people both on land and at sea at the time reported seeing the men inside and there being no indication that they ever fell or jumped out of the gondola. In the end it was determined that "no fire, no submersion, no misconduct, and no missiles struck the L-8.” While that may have answered some questions the big one still remained, what happened on the L-8 between 7:42am and 11:15am that made two Navy officers stop communication and vanish before crashing their blimp in a residential neighborhood?

Unfortunately, there were many theories but no concrete answers to that question. Some believed it was a simple tragic accident, that a malfunction with the door led to one man falling out at a low altitude and the other following him out in an attempt to save him before they were both lost to the sea. Others proposed much more elaborate theories, that the men were secret spies, that they were lured close to the surface of the water and grabbed by enemy forces, and some even said that the men ended up killing each other by falling out of the blimp during an argument over a woman. Some guesses tried to remain optimistic, that the men fell out but they were able to swim to shore and would be found hiking back to civilization any day now. Maybe they were picked up by a passenger ship after falling from the aircraft, they just had to wait until they were returned home. But, time ticked forward and the men never reappeared. Shortly after the crash the wives of both men were told that their husbands were officially missing. It was becoming painfully obvious this was not going to change and one year after their disappearance the men were declared dead. The Navy officially classified the incident as “100% Unknown/ Undetermined.”

The L-8 was repaired and continued to be used as a training vessel until the end of World War II when it was returned to Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. It was refurbished, renamed America, and was used to broadcast sports events until it was finally retired in 1982.

Nearly eighty years after the disappearance of Lieutenant Ernest Dewitt Cody and Ensign Charles Ellis Adams there is still no official explanation as to what happened on that clear August morning over the Pacific coast

After its retirement the gondola of the L-8 was fully restored and is currently exhibited at the National Museum of Naval Aviation in Pensacola, Florida.

The refurbished gondola of the L-8 on display at the  National Museum of Naval Aviation. Image via www.history.navy.mil. 

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

Sources:

Mystery of the Ghost Blimp by John J. Geoghegan https://www.historynet.com/mystery-of-the-ghost-blimp.htm.

The Crew of the L- 8, https://unsolvedmysteries.fandom.com/wiki/The_Crew_of_the_L-8

The Bizarre Tale Of The World War II Ghost Blimp And Its Missing Crew by Gina Dimuro, https://allthatsinteresting.com/ghost-blimp  

In 1942, a war blimp fell out of the sky onto Daly City. Its crew was never found by Katie Dowd and Andrew Chamings, https://www.sfgate.com/sfhistory/article/SF-Ghost-blimp-Daly-City-15739903.php

Ghost Blimp Mystery of WW2 – Crashed in San Francisco & Crew Was Never Found by Ruslan Budnik, https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/mystical-disappearance-pilots.html. 

#HushedUpHistory #featured articles #world war ii #WWII #airship #WorldWarIIhistory #wwii history #californiahistory #unsolvedmysteries #unsolved #mystery #weirdhistory #strangehistory #scaryhistory #forgottenhistory #horrorstory #scarystory #historyclass #historyisnotborning #creepyhistory #wheredidtheygo #historicmystery #historiesmysteries #truth is stranger than fiction #truestory #weirdstory #blimp #L8 #ghostblimp

[starr-fall-knight-rise]

Humans are Space Orcs “To Deep Space.”

I am finished with university, had my last final yesterday, so we will be moving back to the normal writing schedule, yay! 

I have no idea where this arc is going tbh, but it is going to be good and I am excited. I hope you guys will enjoy it as well! 

“Dr. Adric, Dr. Adric please report to the bridge.”

He stepped from his office wondering what they could possibly need him for there. He had just been trying to get his office situated when the call came out. He set down his papers on the desk and made his way into the ship looking around as he made his tentative way towards the bridge. The ship was roomier than he thought it might be, but still rather small, he wondered how that affected the people on the ship.

He knew that they had to keep plants aboard the ship for the crew’s mental health, but he honestly wondered how much that help. Overhead he was assured the lights were UV in nature to mimic the sun and stave off depression after long months of being trapped inside a metal tin can hurtling through space. Not one was really sure what the effects of deep space on a person.

They knew that being lost in space could result in mass hysteria as demonstrated by the Commander’s own crew and malfunctioned civilian transport, the likes of which had apparently driven themselves to cannibalism in their panic and confusion.

He had read the reports, it was both disgusting and fascinating.

He paused just inside the bridge turning to stare with wide eyed at the men and women positioned at their consuls arrayed in a semicircular pattern against the outside edge of the room. A second tier comprised another smaller set of consoles for about four people, and just above that was a single raised chair.

The captain’s seat.

The room had been designed with both hierarchy and function in mind in that the captain’s chair could look down on all the other chairs with the ability to see what his crew was doing at all times.

And right now they were prepping for launch.

“Engines.”

“Engine one through six online and reporting no malfunctioning cells Commander.”

“Check them one more time. Crew manifest.”

“Four hundred and eighty six confirmed crewmen, sir.”

“What does the manifest say?”

“The same.”

Dr Adric tilted his head watching as the crew worked, but specifically watching the commander. The man spun this way and that, giving orders, taking information, and all the while making quick check-marks in a little black book he held in one hand. He seemed at east in his chair.

The chief weapons officer, the Drev named Sunny, sat at her station despite not really needing her at the moment, and he could see over her shoulder that she was also doing a weapons check for the ship.

The commander turned in his chair spotting the doctor and motioning him over.

He came confused not sure what he would be needed for.

“Commander?”

The man smiled, an expression that fit well on his face. Despite his youth, the doctor could already see laugh lines, faint and barely visible beginning to form around his eyes…. This was a man used to smiling.

“Take a seat doctor, and strap yourself in. This will be an uncomfortable assent.”

“What do you mean?” He wondered in confusion.

“I generally let all new recruits sit on the bridge for at least one launch or warp. I feel it makes the experience real for them instead of just expecting them to use their imagination. Besides, who doesn’t want to watch a ship launch.”

He was a bit surprised but of course he nodded walking over to the indicated seats and strapping himself in with the five point harness. He continued to watch the crew work. The bridge itself seemed to run rather smoothly under the direction of the commander, and from what he could tell the crew seemed very excited to be off.

“Engines ready, commander.”

“Fuel cells engaged.”

Commander Vir reached for his microphone broadcasting his voice throughout the ship, “Alright you beautiful hooligans launch begins in T minus one minute. Please strap yourself and any loose items down and keep your hands and feet inside the ship for the duration of the ride.” He cut off his mic smiling.

Dr Adric watched closely.

“Ground control this is Harbinger preparing to liftoff in T minus 55, do you copy.”

“Copy harbinger. Launch is ready for go standby on grid line trajectory Alpha two niner one one preparing for liftoff over.”

“Thirty seconds.”

He gripped the seatbelt hard teeth gritted watching as the rest of the crew braced themselves as well. The commander flexed his hands sliding his fingers into the flight gloves and hooking his toes onto the pedals. The holographic shield popped up to cover his eyes.

“launch in 10, 9 ,8, 7, 6, 5.”

He gripped tighter.

“4, 3, 2, 1, “

“Launch.”

The force of the rising ship slammed him back into his seat as they were born skyward. All around them the ship seemed to vibrate and rattle. His chest felt like it had a carton of bricks stacked on top of it and a little black circle was beginning to encroach at the edges of his vision.

Somewhere, someone in the room was cheering. Past his vibrating eyes, he could see the commander valiantly fighting to bring the ship into the sky despite it’s immense bulk which had never been designed for gravity. Eyes wide he watched as the eggshell blue of a perfect day morphed before them and grew darker until space stretched out before them like a pair of waiting arms.

“Prepare core for warp. Navigations.”

“Yes commander?”

“Warp Coarse.”

“Sagittarius A. But not to close! Keep to the coordinates the smart guys gave us” he repeated very suddenly looking very nervous all things told.

“What’s in Sagittarius A?” He wondered

The commander turned in his chair one eyebrow raised looking almost incredulous, “you don’t know?”

The rest of the crew shifted very nervously, he could see it on them though there were hints of excitement.”

He shook his head.

“Our primary directive on this ship is deep space exploration. We are a military vessel, but we hold trillions of dollars in scientific equipment aboard this ship, as such we have been tasked by the UNSC in accordance with the NASA foundation to head to Sagittarius A and take the first close space images of the supermassive black hole at the center of the milky way.”

He felt his hands and feet go suddenly cold.

“B but how can you take a picture of something that sucks in light.”

“The accretion disk of course and then the massive black spot at the middle.”

“But if we get to close….”

“Yes yes doctor, I have been flying in space long enough to know what happens if you run amuck of a black hole. We get sucked in and suspended forever in a slow spiral of doom as time slows down and our bodies are slowly ripped apart atom by atom. Please we aren’t getting THAT close. Even I’m pissing myself just thinking about it, but also super excited to be honest. No mess ups this time which is why the ship has been checked to hell and back to make sure it’s working.”

Not for the first time, he was beginning to wonder if he was psychologically stable enough to be on this mission as it seemed you hat to be just a little crazy to want to do this. Maybe that is why a high percentage of people on the ship had presented with psychological anomalies, least of all the commander himself.

How he hadn’t gone mad with fear regarding the eminent death that surrounded them constantly was a mystery.

“Warp core?”

“Ready for ignition sir.”

“How far out are we.”

“Almost to the warp zone sir,”

Dr Adric rubbed his temples. He wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to see a black hole. What kind of psychological effects does something that powerful have on someone, knowing that if you are caught in its gravity well you are done for in the most horrible way possible, and just looking at it from a distance he imagined would be like watching a bear or tiger out in the wild accept for this was different since the bear could now swallow stares whole and the tiger ad gravity so immense that not even light can escape it’s center.

“Preparing for warp in ten.”

He closed his eyes

But they didn’t stay closed as the countdown continued opening for a moment as he felt the space around him go strange. When he did he nearly lost it as his vision seemed to be looking through a glass fish bowl all warped out to the sides and stretched, far things looking close, close things looking far. Outside the window a massive spot appeared before him and around it the stars were morphing and repeating.

The ship reflected back a thousand times in fractal images.

He yelled in shock clenching his seat, and then, it was over.

He was breathing hard, outside there was nothing but blackness, and the emergency lights had flicked on over the crew.

The captain unbuckled his seat-belt and stepped down onto the floor.

He turned to look at Adric who was gripping the seat so hard his knuckles had gone white, “Nice work, first time I warped I definitely pissed myself so, good constitution.” He patted Adric on the shoulder. The blue Drev stood, and the commander grabbed her by the shoulder hauling himself up onto her back.

Adric watched as the two of them walked away.

How strange.

He was in for seeing a lot of strange things in the next few days. The commander and the blue drev spent a lot of time together, and often he rode on her back. At one point he walked in on the crew having a jousting contest where two drev ran full tilt at the other while the two crewmen brandished brooms.

He walked out of his room more than once to find the commander heelieing down the hall at the head of the bridge crew giving orders.

When that wasn’t happening he had run amuck of a freaky group of spider creatures being taken care of by a dog and a very strange humanoid creature who claimed he could read minds. He hadn’t believed it until it started repeating his inner thoughts back to himself.

Instead of being freaked out he found himself almost envious. If he had that kind of power imagine the sort of things he could do to help his patients.

Everywhere he went it seemed as if something strange was happening.

One day they were playing an aggressive game of keep the balloon off the floor and the next they were using window markers to drawn on the viewing field. As expected from a group of soldiers it turned into a heard of inappropriate doodles until it looked as if their ship was cruising past a heard of winged space dicks.

And he himself kept a close eye on the crew. None of them seemed bothered by the fact they were in deep space, but many of them had strange habits.

The commander and the Drev named Sunny spent an excessive amount of time together, or so he thought, the little doctor never relaxed, and couldn’t to save his life even when he tried. Conn, the mind reader, did his best to get attention by pissing everyone off, and the spiderlings, as he had come to know them, were constantly acting up as well.

He would need more time to get used to the crew, but it seemed as if he had his work cut out for him.

If he could hold himself together that is.

[cicada-bones]

The Warrior and the Embers

Chapter 27: Army and Escape

Masterlist / Ao3 / Previous Chapter / Next Chapter

At dawn, they returned to the site to retrace their steps, hoping for a fresh perspective with the new day.

After some deliberation, Rowan had decided to give a few of his weapons to Aelin, only as a precaution. No matter how much it irritated him to shirk tradition, he didn’t know what they might be walking into. And Aelin seemed to have a knack for finding the thorniest patch of brambles – and then gleefully jumping in.

They thoroughly searched the area where body had lain, now only a pale sooty mark in the earth, for long minutes and found absolutely nothing. That is, until Aelin spotted something they had missed the day before – a tiny droplet of dried blood on a nearby rock. Just enough for Rowan to catch a trace of the male’s scent and use his winds to trace the demi-Fae’s path back towards the sea cliffs.

They now stood atop the cliffs, shielding their eyes from the sun’s glare as they scanned their surroundings for any trace of the demi-Fae, where he had come from, and the creatures that had killed him.

There were thousands of caves lining the bluffs, some submerged, others resting high above the water, cut into the cliff face itself. A danger to ships of all sizes, but useful for hiding any manner of things. Particularly the various creatures who used the tide to their advantage in hunting the beasts of the sea.

Though Rowan definitely knew of a few that wouldn’t turn their nose up at a Fae, either. Yet it was mid-day, so he was reasonably sure that nothing would bother them that they couldn’t easily handle.

The beach was nearly a hundred feet below their feet, hardly more than a spit of land lined with rocks and crashing surf. The scent off of the sea wind was fresh and clean and bracing – full of salt and scorching heat.

But it had also wiped away any remaining trace of the male’s scent. It wandered out of the trees, onto this overlook, and stopped dead. Either the male had dropped here out of nowhere (which was theoretically possible – presuming he could shift into some kind of flying creature) or he had doubled back on himself, arriving at this point and then returning from where he came – presumably the spot in the woods where they had found him lying dead.

Either way, there was nothing else to be discovered by standing here. And as they were so exposed, out of the shadowed shelter of the trees, Rowan was rather anxious to depart. But before he could say anything –

Aelin was leaning over the cliff edge, her face twisted into a frown, and Rowan’s hands were automatically reaching out to steady her, taken aback by the degree to which his stomach was twisted by panic.

She just gave him a withering look. “I’m trying not to be insulted,” she said. “Look.” And she pointed over the lip of the cliff edge just over to their left, where the sharp point seemed to have softened somewhat. A sagging curve – as if worn down by some kind of pressure.

Rowan gripped her arm tighter as they both leaned slightly farther over the edge to glimpse a hidden, crumbled stone staircase.

The path was so ancient that there were hardly any steps now – just lumps of rock and sand, peppered with obstinate brown shrubs. It led down towards a slightly calmer section of the beach, hidden by the curve of the cliffs, where the water was just clear enough that a break in the barrier reef was visible.

A space large enough for small ships to pass through. The perfect place to surreptitiously enter the country – and remain undetected by the surrounding inhabitants. Even those that lived and worked on the seas.

Rowan was still looking over at the inlet, his mind whirling with all the possibilities, when Aelin began to speak, her words sounding as though she were already in the middle of a thought. “The bodies were dumped in streams and rivers,” she said, crouching in the dirt and sketching a crude map of the body sites – apparently from memory.

Rowan squatted next to her. “The sea was never far off,” he said. “They could have dumped the bodies there. But – ”

“But then those bodies probably would drift right back to shore, and prompt people to look along the beach. Look here,” she said, pointing at the area towards the center of her map - presumably where they were currently sitting. “There are countless caves along this section of the shore. “It’s an easy access point from – ”

Aelin swore.

Rowan knew that they were both thinking the same thing. Adarlan. “We’re leaving. Now.”

“Don’t you think they would already have attacked if they’d seen us?”

He stood, pointing up at the sun. Aelin seemed skeptical. “If we’re going to explore, then we’re going to do it under cover of darkness. So we’re going back to the stream, and we’re going to find something to eat. And then, Princess,” he said, a wild grin twisting his face, “We are going to have some fun.”

···

By the late afternoon, Mala had apparently decided to take pity on them because just before sunset, rainclouds appeared on the horizon, thundering and crackling with enough of a vengeance to conceal their every sound as they strode across the beach and began to thoroughly search each of the caves.

It didn’t take long. They had barely made it through half a dozen before they found themselves lying side by side on their stomachs on a lower shelf of the sea cliffs, scouting the next stretch of beach before they continued their search. Rowan called a wind towards him, pulling the sights and scents of their surroundings along with it.

The wind whispered of trodden sand and dead fish, of cloth and steel and sweat and the hum that always surrounded closely-pressed bodies. The unmistakable sign of a large host, barely hidden from sight. A stone settled in Rowan’s toes.

A few armed men crossed over their line of sight, clothed in crimson and gold. The colors of Adarlan.

The soldiers passed over the sandy beach from a nearby copse of trees, and entered a massive cave mouth, its size partially concealed by convenient camouflage with the surrounding rock. The wind whispered to him, heavy with the knowledge of heavy booted feet and urine and boredom and pain and the cold damp hollowness of a large, buried space. Big enough to conceal an entire battalion of soldiers.

The creatures had not been dropped here on their own, to wreak havoc on their own prerogative. They had been accompanied by an army – large enough to wipe the area clean of both demi-Fae and humans. Efficient and disciplined.

Aelin turned her head towards him, her eyes slightly wide, and whispered, “The crab-monger. In the village. He said – he said he found weapons in his nets. They must be taking ships and then getting close enough to swim through the reef without attracting attention. We need to get a closer look.”

Her eyes twinkled unexpectedly. “I knew you’d be useful someday.”

Rowan snorted, hiding a grin, and shifted to his hawk without another word. She was watching him carefully, and he had to resist the urge to brush his feathers across her cheeks as he spread his wings and soared out over the cliffs and glided across the water. Nothing more than another animal, hunting for a meal.

He carefully flew out over bluffs, keeping his movements cyclical and seemingly random, all the while approaching ever closer to the cave mouth. The soldiers had now entered the cave and the beach was empty, but his wind told him that a few more men rested just within the antechamber, keeping watch over the entrance.

Rowan rested on a rock, waiting patiently, searching for the right opportunity…

Then a slight hint of movement from the sentries, a small distraction, and Rowan was soaring up and through the cave mouth, keeping his small body as close to the dark ceiling as possible. Hopefully appearing to any wandering eyes to be an animal searching for shelter from the rain. The advantage in facing mortal soldiers – they didn’t know how to recognize a Fae’s animal form even if they tried.

The cave mouth opened up into a vast cavern, barely lightened by a handful of dull torches. It spread out in the darkness, stretching into strange and twisted offshoots – some of which appeared to be even larger than this one.

Below him, a few dozen soldiers lounged about, resting on crates and boxes and stone shelfs, talking, eating, brawling, training, and doing all those things a sedentary army did to entertain itself. The soldiers seemed to have been carefully chosen for this group – all were experienced, and from what Rowan could see, highly disciplined and very well trained.

Rowan kept as quiet as he possibly could, while he called the wind towards him from all through the caverns. Soon he realized that the was not one large space, but an interconnected network of caves and tunnels, spreading along the shoreline and into Wendlyn. They spread through the earth like feelers, some so deep and dark that he doubted they had been touched by any creature larger than grubs and beetles for millennia.

The soldiers occupied perhaps a quarter mile of this expanse with their dining, sleeping, and recreational spaces, leaving much of the caves barren and empty. The sounds of their grotesque laughter occasionally echoed through the space, their joy etching violence in Rowan’s bones.

He spread out over the space, weaving between the stalactites. Now that he was deeper inside the cave, he was no longer so worried about detection. The expanse was too dark, and far too large and complex for anyone to notice more than a strange black blur if they happened to see him. Which was unlikely; none of the soldiers were paying much attention.

Rowan began to count, using the eyes of the wind far more than his own. There were eighty-six men distributed through the main cavern, and another sixty-four spread out between the four main offshoots to the left and right.

Along a narrow passageway directly to the back of the main space, Rowan counted another eight, with thirty-two more sleeping in the improvised dormitories sectioned off alongside the tunnel.

But then Rowan narrowed his eyes. The wind spoke of ten more soldiers, loitering at the far end of the long, twisted passage. Their voices were quiet through the soft stone, though their tone was harsh. The breeze passed him pieces of sentences: The general…how much longer…I hate guard duty…Narrok is…but why…I don’t like them…me neither, but…General Narrok cannot…but he is one of them too…

Rowan was advancing down the tunnel, using the stale air to propel him forwards and keeping his wings tight to his body, reducing the effects his presence to the bare minimum. Soon, the space opened up slightly, and Rowan hid himself in a back corner between two dark planes of rock.

The soldiers were all resting just before another entrance, to a tunnel that seemed to curve and delve deeper into the earth, a catacomb beneath their feet.

Faint whispers drifted up from the sunken space, but the soldiers paid them no heed. So, Rowan cautiously pulled a feeler of wind towards them, a foray into darkness. What it brought back sent lightning through his bones.

Iron chains clanked, darkness whorled, and fear bloomed with the stench of copper and vomit and rotting things - the scent of the demon-creatures mixing in with the scent of the dying.

There were four creatures in that small room, hovering over the body of a demi-Fae female, who was lying on a stone plinth and murmuring incoherently, already close to death.

Even from such a distance, protected from the creatures by a thick layer of stone and earth, Rowan felt his entire body shy away from the creatures. His bones ached as his power twisted, and writhed, aching with the inherent wrongness of the demons. Everything in his body was telling him to fly far, far away, and never to return. To go back to Aelin and take her away from this place.

The demi-Fae female twisted and flipped, and Rowan heard the creatures shift in delight, feeding on her fear and pain like honeyed wine. Draining her dry.

And Rowan knew what would happen next. The demi-Fae would dry up into a withered husk, and the general would order one of his lieutenants to collect the body and dump it in the surrounding countryside, leaving it to rot.

The female gasped, and Rowan’s heart wrenched. He threw his power over to her without thinking, and felt something deep in his gut flinch as his ice and wind struck against an impenetrable iron shield.

And in that jolt, he slipped slightly on his perch, sending a small cascade of pebbles clattering down the stone surface of the cave. He stilled instantly, but on the uneven stones the pebbles fell for long seconds.

He clearly heard a guard say, “What was that?” but apparently, they decided to overlook the small discrepancy, and once again fell into idle chatter.

Rowan knew he had to leave, but still – he hesitated. Wracking his mind for some solution, some way to put the female out of her misery, to provide her with an escape from the visions of fear and pain that were consuming her. But there was none.

So Rowan turned and flew away, ashamed and disgusted with himself, even though he knew there was nothing he could do.

As he flew, he thought. The demi-Fae were not being brought all the way here only for the creatures to feast – if it were only a matter of hunger, the creatures could feed and dispose of the bodies without bothering to drag them all the way into the caves.

No, there was another purpose here – knowledge. Experimentation. And with what Aelin had told him yesterday…Rowan cursed silently.

He returned to the main cave and began to survey it, scanning for weaknesses and possible strategies. There were exactly two hundred soldiers distributed through the cavern systems, with General Narrok and his three lieutenants at the army’s head, each of them leading their own platoon within the company.

They were well armed and stocked, and – Rowan cursed again. Each of the soldiers was dressed in iron, head to toe. They knew their enemy better than he had thought.

And – Rowan flapped a bit closer. And there were small, strange marks carved into the metal, dotting it with whorls and crosses. His eyes scanned over the army, and he began seeing them everywhere. Leaping out from corners and entrances, all carved into the stone of the cave walls.

He tentatively sent his magic over towards the marks, a brush of an invisible finger, and they zapped him with an icy spark that jolted down his spine and rendered him temporarily stunned.

His suspicions were confirmed. They must be those symbols Aelin had explained about yesterday – not ward stones, but akin to them. Charged with a similar, ancient power. Wyrdmarks.

The King of Adarlan knew his enemy, and he had sent an army here to destroy it. Rowan couldn’t help but feel the strange misfortune that had guided the king to lead his forces directly into the path of his oldest enemy, and his greatest foe. The Heir of Terrasen – she who had hidden under his nose for so many years, and she whom he must be desperate to destroy.

For the only place this army could be heading towards was the fortress. Mistward. Where the demi-Fae lay in wait – a feast ripe for the taking.

Rowan longed with his whole being to reach out with his power and suffocate the whole lot of them. To rip the air from their lungs and watch as they twitched on the stones. To keep Aelin and all the other demi-Fae safe from their clutches.

But he couldn’t. If he tried, he would certainly die.

Rowan carefully drew himself up and wove among the stalactites once more, exiting the caves and returning to the stormy evening and the hunted princess waiting for him atop the cliffs. So lost in his thoughts that he didn’t notice the dark figure resting just inside the lip of the cave mouth, its black eyes glinting with malice, and its black talons flashing in the starlight.

Rowan flew above Aelin, circled once, and then headed off into the woods – a clear direction to follow. Rowan led the princess a quarter of a mile through the trees, waiting until she was far enough away from the caves that he could stop her before she tried to run in there, heedless of the danger, fire and magic filling her palms.

He shifted and leaned against a gnarled old pine, waiting for the soft sound of her padding footsteps to mark her appearance.

Aelin’s brows were furrowed, her scent touched with worry.

He spoke before she had to ask the question. “There are about two hundred mortal soldiers and three of those creatures in the caves. There’s a hidden network of them all along the shore.” Her face tightened, but she remained silent.

“They are under the command of someone called General Narrok. The soldiers all look highly trained, but they keep well away from the three creatures.” Rowan wiped at his face, realizing that in his Fae form, his nose had begun to bleed. “You were right. The three creatures look like men, but aren’t men. Whatever dwells inside their skin is…disgusting isn’t the right word. It was as if my magic, my blood – my very essence was repelled by them.”

He examined the blood on his fingers. “All of them seem to be waiting.”

“Waiting for what?”

Rowan’s face darkened, and he cocked his head. She should know better than he. “Why don’t you tell me?”

“The king never said anything about this. He – he …” Aelin stared into the distance, her voice trailing off. Then she refocused. “Send word for Wendlyn’s forces—warn them right now.”

Rowan shook his head. “Even if I reached Varese tomorrow, it would take over a week to get here on foot. Most of the units have been deployed in the north all spring.”

“We still need to warn them that they’re at risk.”

“Use your head. There are endless caves and places to hide along the western coastline. And yet they pick here, this access point.”

A pause. “The mountain road will take them past the fortress.” Panic blossomed on her face and in her scent, her wildfire reaching through the iron bars to soothe her. “No – not past. To the fortress. They’re going after the demi-Fae.”

Rowan nodded slowly, his gut twisting as a vision of the sentries, of Luca, fighting atop the fortress walls passed behind his eyes. All so young. He shook his head of the unwelcome images.

“I think those bodies we found were experiments. To learn the weaknesses and strengths of the demi-Fae, to learn which ones were…compatible with whatever it is they do to warp beings. With these numbers, I’d suggest this unit was sent here to capture and retrieve the demi-Fae, or to wipe out a potential threat.”

Aelin only lifted her chin and said, “Then right now – right now, we’ll go down to that beach and unleash our magic on them all. While they’re sleeping.” She began to turn, heading back for the caves, but Rowan grabbed her elbow.

Aelin looked at him in surprise and disgust. “If I had thought there was a way to do it, I would have suffocated them all. But we can’t – not without endangering our lives in the process.”

“Believe me, I can and I will.” Rowan could see that she wasn’t listening, that instead she was turning to the bloodlust, the desire for revenge. He clenched his jaw.

“No. You physically cannot harm them, Aelin. Not right now. They know enough about those Wyrdmarks to have protected their whole rutting camp from our kind of magic. Wards – like the stones around the fortress, but different. They wear iron everywhere they can, in their weapons, in their armor. They know their enemy well. We might be good, but we can’t take them on alone and walk out of those caves alive.”

Aelin shook off his head and began to pace, running her fingers through her golden hair. Rowan hesitated, the words resting on his tongue. But Aelin saw them anyways.

“Say it,” she demanded.

“Narrok is in the very back of the caves, in a private chamber. He is like them, a creature wearing the skin of a man. He sends out his three monsters to retrieve the demi-Fae, and they bring them back to the cave – for him to experiment on.”

The news passed over her face like a shadow. “I tried to cut off her air – to make it easier for her,” Rowan said. “But they have her in too much iron, and…she won’t make it through the night, even if we go in there now. She is already a husk, barely able to breathe. There is no coming back from what they’ve done. They’ve fed on the very life of her, trapping her in her mind, making her relive whatever horrors and miseries she’s already encountered.”

Her words were frozen, her fire guttered. “It truly fed on me that day in the barrows,” she whispered. “If I hadn’t managed to escape, it would have drained me like that.”

Rowan growled viciously in confirmation, unable to form any words.  

Aelin scrubbed at her face, tipping her head back so that the rain washed over her cheeks. As if she sought to cleanse herself of their mark. Then she took a long breath and turned to face Rowan, her eyes hard. “We cannot kill them with our magic while they are encamped. Wendlyn’s forces are too far away, and Narrok is going after the demi-Fae with three of those monsters plus two hundred soldiers.”

Rowan nodded as she continued. “How many of the sentries at Mistward have actually seen battle?”

“Thirty or less. And some, like Malakai, are too old, but will fight anyway – and die.” Rowan turned to walk deeper in the woods, needing to move, to get back to the fortress so that they could begin to prepare. So that they could put more distance between them and the female currently writhing on that stone plinth, and he wouldn’t so anything so stupid as go after her.

If he went, Aelin would die. So he walked.

Aelin was dazed, lost in thought a few feet behind him as they slowly began to make their way back to the fortress. But they barely made it a hundred feet before an all-too-familiar stench wafted towards him on a salty wind.

Rowan’s entire body stilled, and he raised his fist to tell Aelin to stop, his nostrils flaring. A demon was close.

Rowan silently unsheathed a blade from his vambrace, shifting his muscles into a subtly defensive position and scanned the trees ahead and behind. The winds carried a warning: tiny stream…old oak…dark limbs, rancid stench…walking slowly…dark eyes forwards…towards where the warrior and the wildfire stood still…

“Only one.” His voice was near-silent, his mind whirring like a wound clock, cold and calculating as he pulled up a skeleton of a plan.

Aelin drew her dagger just as quietly. “That’s not reassuring.”

Rowan pointed. “He’s coming dead at us. You head to the right for twenty yards, I’ll go left. When he’s between us, wait for my signal, then strike. No magic – it might attract too much attention if others are nearby. Keep it quick and quiet and fast.”

“Rowan, this thing – ”

“Quick and quiet and fast.” He had no other choice than to believe it.

Aelin’s eyes flashed at him. It fed on me and would have turned me into a husk. We could easily meet that fate right now.

You were unprepared, he said back. And I was not with you.

This is insane. I faced one of the defective ones, too, and it almost killed me.

Scared, Princess?

Yes, and wisely so. But then she seemed to sigh, either accepting that they had no other choice or rising to his teasing. Regardless, she nodded, slipped silently into the trees, and vanished.

Rowan wrenched his gaze away from the empty space where the princess had just been standing, and moved to his position on the left flank, ducking behind a large evergreen.

The demon still hadn’t entered his view, though with his wind he could track its movements through the undergrowth. It had not shifted from its previous path, and was heading directly for the space between him and Aelin – the spot they had only just left.

Rowan steadily manipulated the air to pull their scents through the trap, hopefully guiding the creature forwards, without arousing any of its suspicions or revealing their true hiding places. Then, he threw the remnants of their scent out towards the sea, where he hoped the salty wind would wipe the air clean of their trace. He knew it was likely a wasted effort, but he tried anyways.

The demon took another slow step, and with the slightest crumple of dried leaves, it appeared in Rowan’s field of vision.

The creature was a man, with black hair and black eyes. A man with a haunting, ethereal face, and a stone collar around his neck. Though Rowan had been in the barrow fields when Aelin had faced this creature, and though he had just discovered all four of them hiding away in their nest, deep in the darkness of the caves, this was the first time Rowan had seen one of them with his own two eyes.

Blood began to trickle down from his nose, lining the curves of his lips in red. The creature took another step.

It was a man, and yet, it was also something as far from human as physically possible. The strange, silky-smooth movements, the curved black talons, sharper than steel. The smell that had now deepened, turning from a faint hint into an unbearable reek of death and decay and soul-rot that Rowan was forced to breathe through his mouth.

He knew Aelin was capable, knew that she was as safe as she could be, but still – it ached to be even a few feet from her with that creature stalking towards them. The wind told him that she was crouched behind a mossy oak, facing away from both him and the creature. Her breaths were steady, but her heart thundered.

It took another step forwards, now standing directly in between him and Aelin. Rowan flashed his dagger towards her – a clear signal to strike.

But she did not move.

He flashed it again. Still – no reaction.

Panic began to seep into his very bones. In some small part of his mind, he could still sense Aelin – hidden behind that tree. But her presence had dulled and warped in his mind until he could no longer tell, no longer knew, was not sure –

And then the creature turned its head to face Rowan, and the screaming began in his mind.

Nothing, absolutely nothing in all his imaginings, could have compared to it. Every other time he had heard Lyria’s voice, had listened to her begging, had witnessed her screams of agony – had been nothing but a pale imitation.

Lyria appeared before him, in all her remembered beauty. She was on her knees, her eyes sparkling with tears as she grasped at his traveling cloak, begging him not to go. Her voice cracked. Rowan left.

And then she was dead, her stiff weight a stone in his arms. The scent of their dead child a ghost between them.

But then she was alive once more – thrashing and screaming in pain as invisible fingers tore at her clothes and sunk blades in her flesh, weeping blood. Crying for Rowan to come, for Rowan to help her – for her mate to come save her.

But he hadn’t. And now he couldn’t.

Tears were streaming down his face of their own accord as he fell to his knees, the blade in his hands slipping between his fingers, slicing as it went. And the sharp sting cut through the visions, distracting him just enough to allow him to grasp onto the pain like an anchor, and pull himself free.

The apparitions melted around him, dripping away to reveal that the trees nearby were empty. The creature was gone.

Aelin.

And Rowan was running headlong through the forest, heedless of any danger, towards the princess of flames.

He found her just as she pivoted, making to strike at the creature’s exposed side while her other arm made to slash at its throat. A fluid, perfect maneuver.

But then she froze.

The demon smiled, and Aelin’s blades clattered to the earth.

“You,” it said, darkness pouring from it like a waterfall of whirling black smoke, until it covered both of them completely in its dark cloak. “Your agony tasted like wine.”

Rowan fought through the screams, battered against the fear and agony that threatened to down him once more. In the back of his mind, Rowan knew that the only reason he was able to remain upright was that the majority of its attention was focused on Aelin.

Rowan threw his magic at the darkness, seeking to blow the it away, to suffocate the creature within or to force Aelin from the demon’s thrall. But the smoke did not shift, his wind passing through it like water in a fisherman’s net.

Rowan was screaming her name, desperate and frantic, but it felt almost soundless in the strange hollow air.

So Rowan breathed once, and then tore through the darkness with his steel and wind, his canines bared and growls thundering in his chest.

Rowan ripped Aelin from the creature, but she did not even look at him. Her gaze was still locked with the demon’s black eyes, her face blank and her fingers clawing at Rowan desperately. To get free, so that the demon and the suffering and the guilt could have her, could consume her.

So with rage and panic flowing freely within him, Rowan pulled her body even closer and bit her between her neck and her shoulder.

Even with a demon before them, surrounded by pain and darkness, it was exactly the same as before. Her blood was nectar on his tongue, spiced and bright with her fire and her fear.

Aelin’s body jerked, and he let go. But all he wanted to do was bite her again, to bite her all over, and Rowan realized that this time wasn’t the same.

It was stronger.

Aelin gasped, finally awake and aware, and Rowan crushed her body to his, still hauling them away, while the demon lingered by the tree, barely a few yards from them.

Rowan sketched a snarl. The demon only laughed.

And Rowan knew that this was a fight they could not win. In the dark, with such limited weapons, against an enemy that did not need mortal steel to kill them – they were outmatched. Rowan’s magic was useless. Aelin’s fire might be able to mark it but he couldn’t know until they tried, and with Aelin in such a state, Rowan didn’t want to waste the time it would take for a try.

“We have to run,” Rowan breathed in her ear. Another laugh from the creature, who stepped closer. Rowan pulled them farther back.

“You can try,” it said.

Rowan had barely a second’s warning before Aelin threw out her magic in a wall of flame between them and the demon. The creature hissed, and Rowan didn’t take the time to figure out whether it was in pain or only annoyance before the pair of them turned, and fled into the forest.

Aelin’s magic had bought them time, but it was barely a minute before they could hear the creature crashing through the trees behind them. Rowan knew these woods, knew which paths to take and how to hide their trail – both with his winds and with the land. The creature fell farther behind. But it did not stop, did not give up.

And Rowan knew that it wasn’t because of fear of detection, or because of a need to remain hidden and unknown to the demi-Fae. No, the demon was chasing Aelin. Her specifically. The pleasure of feasting on her fears would be unmatched by any other they could find, here or across the sea. Even by Rowan.

They ran for miles through the trees, veering away from the fortress where Rowan feared that even the ward-stones would be unable to protect them from the demon’s magic. All the while, Rowan searched his mind for any way, any solution that would leave them both, or at least Aelin, safe and unharmed.

He considered leaving her and going after the demon himself, but his magic had no effect on the creature – ice and wind doing nothing against darkness. Only Aelin’s magic would do anything, and Rowan would not allow her to go up against that creature until she had full access to her might – that iron gate unlatched.

For at the moment, she was too weak for Rowan to be sure that she could overcome the demon. So they ran, and Rowan forced the despair back by inches.

Aelin’s breaths were ragged, and Rowan felt his muscles begin to twinge under the weight of the steel he carried. They wouldn’t be able to keep up this pace for much longer.

“He won’t stop,” Aelin panted, rain pouring down her face, which was silver in the moonlight. “He’s like a hound on a scent.”

Rowan bared his teeth. If she told him to leave her, to shift and save himself, he would lose it. “Then I’ll run him down until he drops dead.”

Lightning illuminated a deer path atop the hill, and Aelin turned her head, her eyes glinting. “Rowan,” she breathed. “Rowan, I have an idea.”

···

Rowan was sure that Aelin had a death wish. But he went along with her insane idea anyways – he didn’t exactly have a better one to offer.

His wings were slick in the pelting rain as he circled, leading the creature around and around with the scent of Aelin’s tunic. He flitted from tree to tree, making sure to mark each of them with both their scents. He could just hear the creature a few hundred feet behind him, stumbling through the underbrush.

Rowan could see Aelin’s fire, bright orange through the gray rain, at the top of the hill at his back. An invitation for the skinwalkers. Rowan shook his head. That morning, if he could have told himself that he would be purposefully drawing the skinwalkers towards Aelin in some inane plan she’d concocted –

He sighed, smothering the fear in an affectionate disapproval.

Rowan could faintly hear the “screee” of the blade on the whetstone, and the sounds of murmured voices, and knew that the first part of her plan was drawing to a close. And soon, Aelin was sprinting through the underbrush, a mile up from where she had told him to lead the creature. A mile to run before they would be safe from both the skinwalkers and the creature.

Rowan’s hawk screeched as she approached, warning her that the demon was near, and that he was waiting for her by the place where the ancient road bent around a boulder.

The road ran right, but Aelin went left, her eyes bright but her face determined. Rowan shoved a fierce wind over the road, pulling Aelin’s scent with it and leading the skinwalkers right into the path of the demon.

Aelin threw herself behind a tree, only a dozen yards off the road and forced her body into stillness, a hand clasped over her mouth, smothering the gasps that racked her lungs. Rowan dove and shifted, enveloping her body in his, attempting to cover up her scent with his own.

Though her body trembled, and her scent stank of fear, it was a relief to once again have her close – a thorn removed.

Five pairs of feet slithered along the road, passing them without stopping and continuing on to follow the false scent – right into the waiting arms of the demon.

Rowan waited only a moment for the skinwalkers to be out of earshot before he tugged at Aelin’s sleeve, urging her upwards. We have to climb, he silently said. And in a few deft movements, Aelin was clambering up the trunk, foot after foot, until she stalled on a wide branch near the top, at least fifty feet up.

Rowan sat beside her, pulling her next to him, needing to feel her heartbeat on his skin. And also to hide her scent from the monsters below.

Only a minute passed before the screaming began. The otherworldly shrieks and roars of two deaths facing each other, and discovering which, of the two of them, were the stronger.

They fought for the better part of a half an hour, until the shrieks turned from desperate to victorious, and then faded into the rainy night. But Rowan and Aelin did not let go of each other once, nor did they dare close their eyes until dawn graced them with her golden light.

Relief flooded Rowan, but it was immediately followed by despair. Yes, they had escaped this one danger, but a whole army of them was on their way to Mistward, and there was nothing Rowan could do to stop them.

···

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[scarpool-gmk]

2

Title: Godly Marine: Killed Author: Scarpool Fandom(s): NCIS, Percy Jackson & the Olympians Pairing(s): Gen Rating: PG/K+ Summary: Chapter 2 (3/13) — Staff Sergeant Michael Kahale, Marine Corps Mechanic and Son of Athena, was murdered. Annabeth Chase is determined to find out who did it and why. She, along with Percy Jackson, Grover Underwood, and Clarisse La Rue, infiltrate NCIS where they team up with NCIS Agents Leroy Gibbs, Anthony DiNozzo, Timothy McGee, and Ziva David. Complete Genre: Fanfiction, Mystery, Drama, Humour, General, Action Warnings:  N/A

"Staff Sergeant Michael Kahale, aged twenty-one, born on March 15, 1988," said Tim, pulling up Kahale's I.D. on the plasma screen. "Joined the force when he was sixteen. Signed up as a machinist. Clean service record, and absolutely spectacular performance remarks."

"Background?" Gibbs asked.

"Uh…" Tim looked at Tony for help. Tony shrugged at him. Prick. "There wasn't really anything…"

"I think what McGee means to say," Tony said, exasperated, "is that there are barely any records before he enlisted. No high school. No college. Not even a sports club."

"Not even the car was his," Underwood piped up, getting off of his laptop. "I just ran the number of the car. It's a rental. Marko's High-Performance Cars of East Maryland run by a Mr. Marko Tarsibo."

Tony smiled, and Tim prepared to roll his eyes.

"Marko? Ah," Tony tried on his best Russian accent, "'It reminds me of the heady days of Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin when the world trembled at the sound of our rockets. Now they will tremble again - at the sound of our silence.'" He looked around expectantly, grinning, and was about to speak until Lima responded.

"The Hunt for Red October," she said. "Captain Marko Ramius."

Gibbs raised an eyebrow, and Tim smirked as Tony blinked away his surprise. "That's right. 1990. Sean Connery. Directed by-"

"John McTiernan," Lima finished for him.

"Nice," Tony said, "Are you a-"

"DiNozzo," Gibbs said. Tim swore he saw his boss flash a look at Lima that was far from gratifying.

"Right," Tony continued and snatched the remote out of Tim's hand. "The only records we could find were family members and profiles of his first six elementary schools."

Tim raised his eyebrows and turned to Gibbs. "Six schools in five years. Kindergarten to fourth grade. Looks like a troubled kid."

"Or a troubled family life," Gibbs said.

"The changes were definitely not about his grades," Jackson said with a grin, flashing his eyes to his boss who, to her credit, did not spare him a glance.

"Very true," Ziva said. "Kahale passed all of the knowledge evaluations with close to perfect scores getting maybe one or two wrong."

"Passed all of the Military's written exam bars with such great scores he was able to skip some basic classes. Guy's like the next Einstein, Boss," Tony said, "Genius."

Gibbs nodded slightly. "Anything else? Was there a missing child report?"

Tim looked at him, a bit anxious to persist with the bad news. "None, Boss, and it's like I said. No other information at all between his fourth-grade year and when he enlisted. It's like he didn't exist for about six years."

"Well, he had to have been somewhere," Ziva said matter-of-factly.

"And what could he have been doing?" Tim wondered. "Possible that he could have made enemies during this time, Boss?"

"And then went to hide from them by joining the corps?" the burly girl, La Rue, if Tim remembered correctly, asked skeptically and crossed her arms.

Ziva grabbed the TV remote from Tony. "The Sergeant's family lives in Baltimore."

"Mr. Johnathan Kahale, the father, is an esteemed lawyer for the private company, Lowe's Consultancy," La Rue stated, "His salary is two hundred eighty thousand. His step-mother, Patricia Kahale," Tim heard her voice turn a bit bitter, "is a salesperson for an insurance company. They have three kids together."

"Absolutely no information on his biological mother," Underwood said, albeit a bit nervously casting glances to Lima.

"Let's work our way through both of these missing timelines. Clarisse," Lima ordered, "go to the car rental. Get all the info you can, and find who gave him the car."

Tim saw his boss eye the young special agent. "DiNozzo," he said, "go with her."

Lima glanced at Gibbs with careful, calculating eyes. "And Percy, talk to the parents." She looked back at Gibbs, waiting for him to interject again.

He didn't say anything at first, and Tim held his breath for a second. Why is it always so tense?

"Ziva," he stated. Ziva nodded. Nobody moved. "Well? Move!" Everybody started scurrying to their assigned task.

Tim tried not to show how startled he was when Gibbs whispered at him. "Do a background check on them. I don't like not knowing who I'm really working with."

Tim nodded. Of course, Gibbs didn't trust the Long Island team.

"Lima!" Gibbs called, going up the stairs. "Come on."

And so, Tim was left alone with Agent Underwood, who had plopped himself on Tony's desk and was typing on his laptop.

-Λεον-

Was it him, or did his paperwork triple since yesterday? The director groaned, pulling a hand over his face, and glanced at a packet that had something to do with the FBI. It was huge, and it was just one packet in a mountain. His secretary swore that she has no recollection of it coming into his office. Leon glared at the pile conspiringly. Honestly, she probably had such a traumatic experience just by looking at the amount that her brain wiped the memory of the entire moment to spare itself. He hoped this was just some nightmare, but no…

Not to mention, he got a late notification this morning telling him of a joint assignment with the NCIS branch of Long Island. Which meant they were paired up with Gibbs. Which meant Gibbs was going to barge into his office like he owned the place and throw a hissy fit. Which meant his headache was going to get 10 times worse! Maybe Gibbs wouldn't drag in the Agent in charge of the Long Island team, so Vance didn't have to mend another relationship between agencies.

And just like that, his door was thrown open, and Gibbs sauntered in. "Speak of the devil," the director grumbled. At the corner of his eye, he saw a notification pop up on his computer screen, most likely his secretary apologizing again about Gibbs's intrusion.

"Good morning to you too, Director Vance," Gibbs said with a smile.

Leon Vance felt the blood leave his face. It was still morning? Aw, he swore it had been hours since- wait, Leroy Jethro Gibbs calling him by his given title? Oh no. And then he saw her. Blonde, lean, professional, young…a bit too young. He straightened up and looked her in the eyes, a startling grey. How interesting.

"Director Vance," the girl nodded in greeting.

Leon returned the nod, taking a side glance at Gibbs's fake smile, and offered his hand. "Yes, and you are?"

"Special Agent Anne Lima," she replied as she shook his hand, firm, meeting his eyes, confident, determined.

"Ah, from Long Island, yes?"

"That's right."

"Director," Gibbs said, "My team can handle this case."

Blunt as usual. "Well, Agent Gibbs," Leon quipped, "Extra hands are always a help and appreciated."

"Why wasn't I notified about this when I was told about the case?" Leon saw Gibbs's eye twitch.

"I just got the e-mail this morning, and unfortunately, wasn't able to see until later. But Gibbs, working with the Long Island branch opens a way to connect to our other fellow agents," Leon said sternly but kindly shot a smile to the girl. She raised an eyebrow.

Gibbs took that as a sign to interrogate the poor girl. "Why is Long Island interested in the Staff Sergeant?"

"Michael was stationed at a ship currently docked in Northern New Jersey. He also had other matters that had him in Long Island," Lima replied smoothly.

Gibbs was ready to grill her some more, but his cell phone rang. 'Thank God.'

He gave Agent Lima another distrustful glace before glancing at the caller ID. Gibbs opened his flip phone. "Yeah, Abbs?"

'Yes,' the Director thought, 'Leave it to Ms. Sciuto to save us.'

"Yeah, we'll be right there." He clicked his phone shut and headed for the door. "Come on," he ordered Lima. The girl glanced at Leon with an unimpressed look, before heading out the door Gibbs was holding open.

Leon stopped Gibbs before the man could leave. "I didn't appreciate you turning my office into an interrogation room; don't do it again."

Gibbs tilted his head in response and left.

Alone again, Leon allowed another sigh to escape him as he rubbed his temples. Gibbs was being Gibbs, and although he had to admit the toughness of Agent Lima to yet be unmoved by the man, Leon worried that her stubbornness would be too much like Gibbs. Just added stress…

Speaking of stress, Leon looked at the mountain of files on his desk. Gathering himself up, he picked one up. He opened it, made a face, and put it back down.

"I need a coffee," He muttered, 'Or something stronger.'

-Ζήβα-

Ziva decided that Jackson had a very likable personality. The two rode together to visit the Kahale family, and Ziva had opted to drive, receiving no argument from Jackson. However, she had not been able to get much information on the NCIS Long Island branch than what Lima had already told them.

"Well, I think your mother and I would get along very well," Ziva laughed as she walked up to the door of the house, locking the car behind her with the remote key. She knocked on the door, quickly assessing her surroundings. She saw Jackson casually glance through a window. She caught the grin he sent her way. No visual problems from the front door, then.

A couple seconds later, a woman's voice came through the door. "Who is it?"

"NCIS!" Ziva shouted through.

"IDs, please."

'So,' Ziva thought, 'this woman is one of those.' She and Jackson brought their Federal IDs to the peephole. They heard the click of a lock turning, and the door opened to reveal a young woman. Ziva recognized her from the rundown on the dead Sergeant. "Patricia Kahale?"

The woman stared at them through the parted gap of the doorway. "What do you want?"

"I am Agent Ziva David, and this is Agent Jackson. We are here to inform you about your son-er-stepson, Staff Sergeant Michael Kahale."

"What about him?" Mrs. Kahale asked tersely.

Ziva resisted an urge to sigh in exasperation. "If we can converse indoors, Mrs. Kahale," she said politely.

For a moment, the woman didn't move and only observed both of them. 'A suspicious woman?' Ziva noted. After supposedly deeming them trustworthy enough, she allowed them in her home. The dwelling was telling of an upper-middle-class family. There were pictures of the Kahale family among the house for display. They featured mostly of Patricia's and Johnathan's three kids, two boys and the youngest, a girl. Not one showed the face of Staff Sergeant Kahale. As Mrs. Kahale led them into the living room, Ziva found the house to be impeccably clean and organized. She remained standing, and so did the two NCIS agents. "What is it you wished to tell me?" the woman asked.

Ziva made a show of turning her head as if looking about. "Where is your husband and children, Mrs. Kahale?"

"Out," she said curtly, "Johnathan took the kids on a visit to the beach."

"Do you know when they'll be back?" Jackson asked bluntly.

"No," The woman eyed him, "Aren't you a little young to be a federal agent?"

Ziva caught Jackson stiffen. "Just look like it."

Ziva tried not to frown. Mrs. Kahale didn't seem to believe it.

"You never answered my question. Why are you here?"

Ziva sighed. "I regret to inform you, ma'am, that your step-son, Michael, was found dead this morning."

Patricia Kahale closed her eyes and took a deep breath. "Michael? Michael is dead for sure?"

"We are sorry for your loss," Ziva consoled, even as Mrs. Kahale was shaking her head.

"I didn't really know him. I didn't even know he joined the corps. I haven't seen him for years."

Jackson nodded. Ziva stared at him to see if he was going to ask any questions. She internally sighed when he remained silent, looking just a bit awkward- and kind of dumb, too, just standing there.

"We noticed that your step-son disappears on record for a period of nine years. May you explain why that is?"

"I think that is a question for my husband."

Ziva raised an elegant eyebrow at the quickness of her response. "Oh, why is that? Does your husband know where his son went?"

"No." Mrs. Kahale started to head for the door, "He ran off years ago, now I think you should leave. I don't have anything more to say about the boy."

Ziva took the hint but took her time to rattle off a couple more questions, "There was no report of the disappearance."

"We did report it, we were never contacted," the woman responded, as she held the door open for them.

"We will also need someone to confirm the identity of the body, Ziva said as she went back outside.

"Call us," Mrs. Kahale all but shot back.

As Jackson passed the lady out the door, he said, "Thank you for your time."

The woman grunted and shut the door. The lock clicked back into place.

"What a nice lady," Jackson lamented.

Ziva scowled at him, "What was that?"

"Looks like she didn't like us much."

"Obviously. No, I'm talking about you. You weren't much help!"

Jackson had the gall to look surprised, "You had it!"

"Well, someone had to," Ziva shook her head, feeling disappointed. "Anyway, I have a feeling that Mrs. Kahale does not care much about her step-son, and from the way she threw us out- it seems she might be hiding something."

"Did you see the knife?" Jackson asked, acting nonchalant.

Ziva was thrown off guard, "What? Where?"

"The table by the entrance," Jackson said, "It's probably nothing, just forget about it."

Ziva wasn't deterred, "Really? On the table?" Ziva tried to remember. She may have seen something shine in the light, but she must not have noticed it. Was she getting rusty? "What is it doing there?"

"Nothing, probably just a fancy envelope opener."

Ziva sent a look at him.

Jackson shifted on his feet for a bit. "So, what do we do now?"

Ziva sighed, thinking about what she had to tell Gibbs, "I must report back to Gibbs and then call Mr. Kahale."

"Let's go then, I'll drive."

Ziva's brows furrowed into a small frown as Jackson practically raced to the car. He was hiding something. But what? And what was the significance of the dagger? She had a strong feeling these agents from Long Island were not telling them everything.

-Κλαρίς-

Clarisse did not enjoy her car ride. Her first opinion on this 'Very Special Agent Anthony DiNozzo' was that he was a complete doofus. And he was, but it was made clear why he had gotten to be a top agent. His tactic was to play the completely dumb chatterbox, and boy could he talk like a daughter of Athena in a museum, but that was just a ploy to get others to talk to him as well. This was an interrogation. And Clarisse had gotten pissed off. She did not like being interrogated by some snobby, stuffed up Agent. And she especially hated how he had done it. If Clarisse La Rue was to be interrogated, then let it be straight up. No descendant of the Ares was going to tolerate such a petty approach.

So, she had told him to 'shut up or else.'

Ah, sweet silence.

DiNozzo broke that with a whistle of appreciation as they finally drove into the Rental estate. It wasn't hard to figure out why. Rows of high-performance sports cars were displayed for customers.

"Wow!" Agent DiNozzo exclaimed as he parked the car. Clarisse rolled her eyes as she saw him slide on some sunglasses dramatically and walk up to a sleek, red Ferrari. "Wow!" He repeated. He checked his reflection in its tinted windows. Clarisse frowned slightly as he pulled his phone out to take a selfie.

"Come on," she huffed at him, "We're supposed to interview why Michael was here, not take selfies of cars we can't afford." She looked at a description of a Lamborghini, "Besides, what are you going to do with 600 horsepower, go from one red light to the next red light?"

"Ah, it's about the display, the comfort, the thrill on the highway, the style." DiNozzo lifted an eyebrow and grinned at his phone, most likely looking at his newest selfies. "Besides, you got to learn how to take a break from time to time."

Clarisse scowled and led the way into the dealership building, leaving the older Agent to trail behind her at a slow pace still taking in the sights. She entered the building and breathed in the cool air. Though once the door closed behind her, she tensed and didn't move a muscle.

DiNozzo charged through the door still talking. "You know, taking breaks during work is suggested. It can be a stressful job and-"

"Sh!" Clarisse snapped.

DiNozzo blinked in surprise. "You know, I think we started off on the wrong foot," he began.

"No," Clarisse whispered, "It's not that."

DiNozzo frowned, "Why are we whispering?"

"Do you hear that?" Clarisse asked.

Clarisse's ears rang a little as DiNozzo took a couple seconds to listen. "I don't hear anything."

"Exactly."

"Manager could just be in his office?" DiNozzo mused, but even still, he nodded.

"Hello?" He called out. "Mr. Tarsibo?"

Clarisse moved towards a glass window, facing the street. They were right by a busy street intersection, too.

An office door opened as a man pushed his way out and quickly shut the door behind him. "My apologies, I had a customer to attend to."

Clarisse's senses prickled, "A customer?" she asked, glancing around the empty building.

The man smiled, "Yes, he was otherwise engaged and did his business through call. I am Marko Tarsibo, by the way," He held his hand out, "How may I help you?"

"Mr. Tarsibo," Agent DiNozzo replied as he shook the proffered hand, "I am Special Agent Anthony DiNozzo from NCIS, and this is Agent Clarisse La Rue."

"Federal Agents," Tarsibo acknowledged, his shake strong and confident, "What seems to be the issue?"

"Unfortunately," DiNozzo explained, "Your car was found in a crash site."

"Crashed? How horrible! But no worries, I have procedures in place for such a situation. The renter does sign a form and all that jazz. Come and sit, and I can give you any additional information you want."

He directed them to the front desk.

"Yes, thank you," DiNozzo said, "We would like to confirm the lessee of the car."

"Of course, I hope the person was not critically injured by the crash. Do you have a plate number or anything I can go by?"

DiNozzo brought the plate number and other such identification numbers up on his phone.

As they sat there, Clarisse observed the area of the main desk. It was pretty bland except for the assortment of mini flags. She was able to identify the American flag as well as the French and even the Greek flag. There were a couple more she really didn't recognize- maybe that one was Finnish. She saw another with a horse and rider. She tilted her head a bit. Did that one have Greek words on it? Before she could read it, Mr. Tarsibo exclaimed, "Yes! Here we are. A Mr. Michael Kahale was the client. I remember him. Yes, a marine, was he? Is he alright?"

"He did not make it," DiNozzo responded.

"We are currently investigating his death," Clarisse added, "How did you know he was a Marine?"

Mr. Tarsibo directed his smile to her, "We have a discount for members of the service and veterans here. Proper ID is required."

"Can you tell us about your interaction with Staff Sergeant Kahale, Mr. Tarsibo?" Agent DiNozzo asked.

"It was very brief," Mr. Tarsibo said, "He was simply looking for a quality car for his time here. Nothing out of the ordinary at all."

"When was he here?"

"Two days ago. Sometime in the afternoon. Let me give you the time from the sale."

Mr. Tarsibo quickly printed out a log and handed it to them. "Will there be anything else today, agents?"

"No," Agent DiNozzo said with a smile of his own and offered his card. "Thank you for your time, and please don't hesitate to give us a call if you remember anything."

"It was no problem, and if you ever need to rent a car, I would be happy to offer discounts to federal agents as well."

Mr. Tarsibo's warm smile led them all the way out.

The blast of noise when Clarisse stepped outside was welcoming. She took a deep breath of fresh air.

Agent DiNozzo walked up behind her. "What was up with you and Mr. Smiles in there?"

Clarisse glared at him. "I don't trust him. He's slimy. I don't know what it is; maybe he's not sharing everything or something.

"I understand the distrust. But he is a car dealer. It is natural to feel that, but maybe try not to be so aggressive next time."

"Whatever," Clarisse growled. She snatched the car keys out of his hands. No way was she just going to sit in a car for another two hours doing nothing.

"I'm driving."

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#scarpool #fanfic #fanfiction #Godly Marine: Killed #NCIS #Percy Jackson and the Olympians #PJO #Crossover #gen fic #PG/K+ #Writing #Complete

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Lycoris Recoil

Azur Lane is back at it with that Event bullsh*t, man! This time, it’s a Sakura Empire focus and I'm only borderline interested. Like, the Japanese are my secondary Fleet. Obviously, KMS main, this blog is riddle with my love for the Krauts, but i do enjoy some of the ships from the Land of the Rising Sun. I had no real plans to make a serious run at this particular banner, roll whatever ships i get, but then i actually looked into it. There is another Ultra Rare available. That means, of the eight available URs, Sakura accounts for damn near half. I missed out on Shimakaze because, at the time, i just didn’t want to spend the Wisdom Cubes but i did get Shinano. Considering Musashi appears to be kin to the Silver Fox, i kind of changed my mind about the whole event. Plush, i mean, have you seen that art? Possessed Back Fox Battleship? Come on? How can i NOT make a run at this banner?

I have to say, I'm glad i did. It cost me eighty-two rolls but i finally popped Musashi. It was slightly more costly than i would have liked but well within the margin of error. Plus, while chasing that Ultra Rare dragon, i effectively unlocked the rest of the Banner ships. That’s right, i was able to get Haguro, Suzuki, Sakawa, and Wakatsuki; All before i popped my first Musashi. I say first because i ended rolling, like, two more on a “Let’s see what happens” roll. That last ten-roll attempt netted me a second Musashi, three Haguro, Sakawa, and, interestingly enough, f*cking Pola. That last one was a genuine surprise because i didn’t think she was in the general pool. I have a surprisingly robust Itai dock so adding another ship to it is always a boon. If i had to say, I'd probably call them my third or fourth favorite Fleet. It’s a coin toss between them and the Ruskies. No Zar,a though... All in all, I'm pretty content with this situation. I have all of the available Event ships, outside of Miyuki but that’s just a matter of time. I mean, she’s a Points reward and you know i gotta grind out for them Priority Five Blueprints anyway, so....

More than that, I'm kind of hyped i was able to enhance my Musashi so far on day one, with no grind. I got her to level 117 because of all the goddamn EXP packs i own. It took everything i had on hand, over six hundred of the blue ones and eight of the purple, but i think it’s money well spent because i didn’t have the time to actually play the Event while at work. Kind of bummed i couldn’t get her to 120 but I'm close. What i did get to achieve, was fully limit breaking her, thanks to my stockpile of UR Bulins. It also helps that i have around twenty-eight thousand of those Specialty Cores. They only cost four thousand in the Prototype Shop so purchasing the single one i needed was nothing. The others all came from the Seasonal Cruise rewards. Invest in that Fair Winds pass, man. It’s totally worth the ten bucks. I was able to immediately rank-up her Violent Lightning Storm to ten (Thank you, Classroom Speed-up) and am currently working on her Tempestuous Blade skill. That last skill, Musashi’s Guardianship, is going to be a grind, though. I get to do that straight and I'm kind of dreading it.

Ultimately, i went at this banner halfheartedly and the gacha gods decided to reward me. I started the day with 284 Wisdom Cubes and ended it with 100. Sure, i probably spent more than i would have liked, but considering i have several weeks to make up what i lost, and i didn’t have to actually buy more with my real loot, i am okay with the outcome. All of the Event ships. Musashi, twice. Another expansion of my Sakura dock. And a Pola for good measure. Now all that’s left is to actually beat the maps, which i a few weeks to do. Won’t even have to eat up more Oil than i am comfortable with, in order to beat them. I mean, i have twenty thousand of that sh*t so i think i can make a pretty solid dent into those maps before i feel like i need to pause. I mean, i only need ten thousand points for Miyuki. That’s a cake walk. My only concern is that i might have overreached in terms of my Inverted Orthant rerun cache. Listen, Musashi is dope but i have a might need for them Orthant boats, man!

#Azur Lane #Sakura Empire #Violet Tempest Blooming Lycoris #Musashi