For the New Year...

This year I intend to get back in shape, take up martial arts again, and become the ultimate badass. I will reform our political system, destroy our monopolies, and fund local governments and libraries. I will dye my hair interesting colors and punch Nazis. I will hunt down God Himself and kick him in the 'nads for letting His creation get out of hand like this. I will drink so much Irish whiskey that my body will start generating its own, and I will write stories to make women swoon and brave men weep. I will eat at least one salad! I will gather my army of crows and establish a corvid utopia. I will resume bicycling and climbing, and steal fire from the sun to give to mortals. I will abolish the abomination which we call Generative AI, establish a federal privacy law to protect the data of our citizens, and sew more patches on my jacket. I will cook bacon. I will cook so much bacon that the God of Pigs will swear vengeance against me. And I will do it all with a smile on my face.

What do you have planned?

Student: Shifter

Name: Truong Khang Anh
Nickname: Shifter
Age: 16
Appearance: 5'5" with thick, black hair and medium-dark skin, dark brown eyes, and features typical of his Vietnamese heritage.
Notable Skills: Swimming, Programming, Board Games, Bicycling, Math, Current Affairs
Quirks: no restaurant can ever measure up to his grandmother's cooking, hates using his power, keeps the news on in the background when he's working, enjoys fantasy stories and portal fantasies in particular, gets very involved in games and projects.

Truong came to Saint Vincent's following a couple of incidents that have been told and retold as urban legends; he is one of the very few anomalies who has cryptid hunters as well as human supremacists looking for him. He is capable of turning into a variety of powerful alternate forms -- but not of controlling what he turns into, and he is not always in control of whether he changes or not. Transforming frequently affects his personality and reactions; apparently his different forms come with different sets of instincts and dominant emotions.

When not transformed, Truong is a good student and pleasant to be around. He's prone to getting lost in his own interests, but loves nothing more than sharing those interests with other people. He's also a surprisingly good cook, and speaks/reads both English and Vietnamese fluently. He stays in practice using online forums and chats, and is very careful not to mention his condition to people who don't know about it already. He has taken up Tai Chi and Aikido, but not for combat; he uses them as a sort of meditation-in-motion, to keep himself calm and avoid involuntary transformations. 

Documented alternate forms include: a sleek, feral cross between a tiger and an iguana which is blind but capable of sensing its surroundings out to about fifty feet; a bloodthirsty aquatic form with both fins and tentacles; a purple-skinned humanoid form with a range of acid-based abilities; and a fifty-foot tall kaiju form with super-strength and virtual invulnerability.

Time's Almost Caught Us, My Friend

Well, we made it past Christmas and we're on to New Year's Day. To absolutely nobody's surprise, I'm not ready. But hey, here we go!

Got to spend some time with my friends online, which was a huge relief. Some of the family are back in town and others are coming into town -- Christmas is dragging out this year -- and I didn't take any extra time off because we've got a few things that need to happen right at the end of the year. It's nothing near what came up at year end at the last job, though, so I'm grateful for that.

I've been working on a story that's basically a tribute to a lot of my early X-Men/New Mutants/Generation X comic book reading; I still think there was a lot of interesting stuff going on there that never quite made it over to the X-movies. 

Meanwhile, I'm reading Jennifer Crusie's Maybe This Time, and I have to say that while I would not have expected gothic horror from her, she's done it really well here. She's also done an excellent job with writing the two kids, and (as always) with the romance.

Onwards to 2025! Here's hoping it turns out better than it looks right now.

The title of the post comes from this clip, from the classic movie Highlander. Damned good thing they never made any sequels to it; that movie was complete in itself.

Faculty: Monk

Name: Sarah Leslie Brigham
Codename: Monk
Age: 31
Appearance: 5' with red hair, pale skin, freckles, green eyes, and a compact, muscular build.
Job: Physical Education, First Aid, martial arts

Though nominally the school's Physical Education teacher, Ms. Brigham's primary role at the school is training students in melee combat, both armed and unarmed. She also teaches basic health and first aid, and her PE classes cover a wide variety of activities, including the basics of various sports, ropes courses, parkour, rock climbing, and yoga. She is encouraging with students who aren't naturally athletic, and has helped a lot of students who always thought they hated PE to get in shape. She also knows how to challenge more athletic, experienced students -- and she's always ready to cheer on her students' accomplishments, physical and academic alike. 

She was initially recruited by the Wonder Women after briefly going viral for fighting through a half-dozen fraternity brothers to prevent a sexual assault at a party, but they parted ways when she found that their idea of how to protect women included preemptive assault. Saint-Vincent found her shortly after that, helped her finish her degree, and recruited her to teach at the school he was founding. 

As Monk, Ms. Brigham is both physically adept -- strong, tough, and gifted with ungodly reflex speeds and the ability to learn physical skills almost at will -- and capable of delivering other effects through a combination of physical and mental techniques: she can paralyze or stun with a blow, absorb the damage from attacks, and heal with a touch. She has no ranged powers, so she's leaned in on learning close combat instead; fortunately, that's exactly the area in which she excels. She knows how to use weapons but generally disdains them; she can do more with a touch than she can with a blade, and sees guns as an easy way to kill people that you weren't actually trying to hurt.

Christmas Eve Eve

Well, we're almost there. I don't know if I'm ready, but like so many things it's going to happen anyway. Here's hoping that all my lovely readers have a safe, enjoyable holiday filled with plenty of good cheer in whatever form bests suits you. 

Friday Reflection

With Christmas bearing down on us like a freight train, I'm finding myself increasingly baffled by just how much I do not want holidays. Like, how long has it been since I looked forward to a holiday celebration? When did I move from tolerating them to dreading them? The ones I do enjoy -- like Halloween -- are the ones with basically no social obligations.

Since changing jobs, I've been trying to take advantage of being less stressed out: get my sleep schedule under control, eat better, start getting real exercise again... 

What I'm finding is that in order to even attempt that, I'm having to try to roll back what turns out to be a whole bunch of unhealthy coping mechanisms that I've apparently accumulated over fucking years of being low-key miserable. It's hard. It's good, but it's hard. It's like I'd forgotten how to not be miserable -- or, now that I'm not so much so, I don't remember how to stop acting as if I am and need this stuff to get by. 

It starts with putting in the work, I guess. (And it's complicated by the fact that I am not looking forward to moving into 2025, but that's -- say it with me -- another post.)

Anyway, Firstborn's back home, Secondborn is finishing up his last school day of 2024, and I -- once again -- am mere days out from the holiday with no idea what we have planned and what I'm going to need to be ready to do. Which is, to be clear, mostly on me. 

But I think I'd like, at some point, to get back to anticipating holidays. I'd like to be able to look forward to getting together with family and friends. I'd like to be interested enough to be planning for the holidays, instead of basically hiding from them. I'd like to go into them feeling rested and prepared.

I'm starting to remember that that might be possible.

StV: Sudden Onset, part three

The bedroom was untouched, so much so that the smell of smoke was still cloying. Cody opened the door, and Em waited beside him while Ryan went inside. "I'm sorry," she told him. "I can't imagine how hard this is for you."

Cody kept his eyes on Ryan, but said, "It doesn't even seem real sometimes. Like, if he just walked back out of the bathroom I wouldn't even be surprised. And then other times, it's a knife through my heart."

Ryan was moving around the room, touching things here and there before finally stopping beside the bed. The burnt linens were still there; the scorched mattress still in place. He bent down, touched it, and froze. Then he straightened, blinked, and swallowed. 

"Well?" asked Cody, as Ryan came back out of the room. 

"It wasn't--" Ryan swallowed again. "He was more surprised than anything. He wasn't even in pain, or if he was he didn't feel it. I just got this flash: light and heat, surprise starting to turn to worry, and then nothing."

"So he didn't suffer," Cody said slowly.

"No," Ryan told him. "No, I don't believe he did. As far as I can tell, it was over almost before he realized what was happening. He didn't even have time to be scared."

"Get out," said Cody.

Em drew back, startled, and Cody added. "Sorry. Thank you. But we need to be alone with this. Get out."

"Done," she said, and led Ryan back outside.