Student: Blink [Team Dragon]

Name: Tyler John Taylor
Codename: Blink
Age: 18
Appearance: 6'4"with broad shoulders and narrow hips, sandy brown hair worn long but pulled back, leather jacket that he will not be parted from.
Notable Skills: strategy games, particularly chess, basic cooking, camping, football, basketball, pop culture trivia, speaks French (Canadian)
Quirks: loves video games, works out to maintain his physique, doesn't see himself settling down romantically, night-blind, terrified that he might screw up and get somebody hurt

Tyler is a decent student, but frequently gets by on his looks and charm; socially, he's more of a follower than a leader, but he knows how to pick up on other people's cues and is always willing to lend a hand. In strategy games he is absolutely ruthless (but never cheats); in sports he's more laid-back. He's originally from Canada, but he's been in the States since shortly after his power kicked in and only occasionally lets his accent slip through. 

As Blink, he is a master teleporter, capable of teleporting either himself or others; he can still only teleport one person at a time, though, and he needs to either be able to see his destination or already be familiar with it in order to arrive safely. His role on Team Dragon is generally more supportive than combative, but his ability to teleport others gives him some offensive options.

Student: Nightfall [Team Kraken]

Name: Catarina "Cat" Altagracia Montoya
Codename: Nightfall
Age: 17
Appearance: 5' tall, with medium-brown skin, dark brown eyes, and black hair, with a gymnast's tight musculature; wears a black jeans jacked adorned with various patches that she's sewn in place herself.
Notable Skills: first aid, dance, gymnastics, driving, bluffing, reading reactions, speaks Spanish
Quirks: slow to make friends/keeps to herself, constantly polishing her glasses, likes animals better than people, nervous and has trouble relaxing, loves sushi

Cat is a relatively new addition to the school, as well as to Team Kraken. She's a solid student; what she lacks in insight, she makes up in persistence. She prefers not to interact with people she doesn't trust -- which is basically everybody -- and can come across as aloof or even hostile. (She is also quite capable of being actively hostile if she feels the situation warrants it.) She gets along better with the instructors and the younger students than she does with anybody close to her own age. 

Despite this, she has been recruited to the recently-formed Team Kraken -- in part for her power, and in part because of her absolute willingness to fight. She is working on developing more control, both of her power and of herself; she's been reprimanded for overdoing things during training once already, and doesn't want a second reprimand on her record. Cat's most obvious ability is the power to summon darkness, suppressing all visible light in an area of her choosing, but she can also shut off most electromagnetic radiation (notably including radio waves). When she extends a field of darkness around her, she can feel everything that happens inside it, so despite her lack of physical enhancements she generally has little trouble dodging enemies unless they can see in the dark. 

She once used her darkness to escape a particularly nasty situation, actually traveling through the darkness to take herself outside of a building where she was being held. She would love to be able to move around that way at will.

Student: Veil [Team Dragon]

Name: Chance Justin Rutherford
Codename: Veil
Age: 18
Appearance: 6'0" but lean enough to look taller, light skin, brown eyes, dark brown hair
Notable Skills: guitar, driving, boxing, track and field, basic handyman skills
Quirks:gay, enjoys brightening the school uniform with fashion accessories, loves theater, talks a lot (especially when he's nervous), wants to be an entertainer

Chance is a quintessential Theater Kid, with a flair for the dramatic and a deep love of being the center of attention. He is a decent but not exceptional student, strongly motivated by praise from his instructors. He took up boxing in middle school when he first started getting seriously bullied for his flamboyance, found that he enjoyed the exercise, and added track and field to his routines as well. When he's not entertaining an audience, he enjoys building and repairing things. 

In his identity as Veil, Chance is the second-in-command for Team Dragon, and the primary reason that they're largely undefeated. He uses his ability to create psychic illusions to keep himself hidden and ensure that the rest of his team is not where they appear to be, allowing them to attack unseen while their opponents attack non-existent targets. The power is not without its limitations; at present, Veil can effectively influence about thirty people at once, with a maximum range of about ninety feet. Because his power is psychic in nature, any cameras in the area will record actual events rather than the illusions. Nevertheless, it has proven to be a huge asset for the team.

Student: Armor [Team Kraken]

Name: Allison "Ally" Catherine Colvin
Codename: Armor
Age: 16
Appearance: 4'8", with a petite build, light brown hair that she mostly keeps shaved, and blue eyes.
Notable Skills: electronics, lockpicking, welding, soldering, math, physics, chemistry, Science!
Quirks: enjoys stress-testing her creations as much as inventing them, thinks hot dogs are the best food ever invented, forgets to practice fighting and related skills, doesn't like the sun, loathes spawn-campers.

Ally is the school's first gadgeteer, and the faculty are still working out how best to deal with her. Quiet and prone to wandering off on her own, she tends to get absorbed in what she's doing to the point of ignoring obvious dangers -- especially when her power has kicked in and she's busy working out a design for something that's going to be really, really cool, she promises. 

Her masterwork so far is the suit of power armor that she uses to make herself part of the newly-formed Team Kraken. Its design and creation has put a serious strain on the school's budget, but when she's wearing it she can monitor, decrypt, and disrupt all sorts of broadcast communications, use controlled EMP bursts to fry electronics and (potentially) send people into seizures, and recreate some degree of super-strength and damage resistance. She hasn't worked out how to make it fly (yet) but she has equipped it with jump jets that allow her to leap about sixty feet forward and forty feet up, along with a variety of non-lethal armaments to deal with combative opponents. Her real power, however, is that given the time and resources she can assemble the right tool to handle nearly any situation.

Faculty: Headmaster Jonathan Saint-Vincent

Name: Jonathan Charles Saint-Vincent
Codename: The Saint, but he rarely uses it
Age: 86
Appearance: 6'1" with broad shoulders and well-developed arms and torso; his legs are of regular proportions, but otherwise atrophied. His eyes are mismatched: one green and one gray, and his salt-and-pepper hair is neatly styled. Tends towards business suits. Owing to various attempts to cure the nerve damage caused by polio, he looks about half his actual age.
Job: Headmaster, teaches history

Jonathan Saint-Vincent presents himself as an affable older man with a variety of intellectual and political interests. He is considerably older than he looks, and is completely paralyzed from the waist down owing to a childhood brush with polio. He detests using a wheelchair and used to get around with crutches and braces, but recently one of the students (a gadgeteer named Ally Colvin) provided him with a supertech exoskeleton for his legs. (He still has to be careful about how he moves; the rig provides movement but not feedback. Ally says she's working on actual prosthetics but hasn't cracked the neural integration problem yet.) 

Jonathan is a sort of jack-of-all-trades psychic, with modest (but well-practiced) telepathic abilities, telekinesis able to lift up to about three hundred pounds, and minor cryo- and pyro-kinetic abilities. He can defend himself one-on-one, but generally avoids super-battles. He's far more interested in running his school and helping his students prosper. While he's an active and committed proponent of the idea that Exceptionals and Mundanes can live together in peace, he does sometimes have qualms about sending teams of students into potentially dangerous situations, and the recent business in South America has dropped him back into his doubts -- despite the fact that Dragon Team returned completely intact, and with a new student/team member. 

Publicly, he is known as one of the world's foremost researchers into "deviants" and their origins and powers, and his stance on the need for well-considered policies that promote equality and integration garners him both support and opposition from various interested parties.

Student: Team Captain Jade [Team Phoenix]

Name: Emily Annette Hubbard (goes by Em)
Codename: Jade
Age: 17
Appearance: A six foot tall, athletic blonde with creamy skin and blue eyes, who tends to sportswear or jeans and t-shirts and keeps her hair short, giving her a somewhat boyish look
Notable Skills: Soccer, rock-climbing, spelunking, baseball; recently took up classical european swordfighting; good leadership skills with a (usually) easy-going approach; knows how to drive.
Quirks: loves animals, hates thunderstorms, dyslexic, sings to herself, bisexual

Em is very laid-back when off the playing field, but extremely focused and competitive when on it; for her, leading Phoenix Team is just a natural outgrowth of being a team captain for soccer or baseball. She's equally focused on her academics, and considerably more intelligent than her "dumb jock" persona suggests. Her power allows her to manifest shapes of shimmering green force. (She takes her code name from its appearance.) So far she has demonstrated the ability to create armor, sword, shield, axe, and spear, but only as objects touching her body; she would love to be able to throw them or create the effect at range. Her power sometimes appears to act on its own, and it's an open question whether it's simply reacting to her unconscious thoughts and desires or whether it's actually some sort of symbiotic entity that sometimes acts for itself.

Faculty: Salvation

Name: Dianna Dean Salvatore
Codename: Salvation
Age: 31
Appearance: 5'10", slender, with black hair, olive skin, and dark brown eyes.
Job: Auxiliary Headmistress; also teaches algebra, calculus, and trigonometry.

Ms. Salvatore (as even her colleagues usually address her) is graceful, reserved, and always attentive. She is also one of the top five telepaths on the planet, and in her identity as Salvation is renowned for her Salvation Sword, a construct of pure telepathic energy capable of bypassing all physical armor and damaging an opponent's psyche to produce a variety of effects. She also possesses minor and unreliable precognition, which she swears is more a burden than a help.

Together with Headmaster Saint-Vincent, she keeps track of the day-to-day functioning of the school, the students, and their teams. Budgeting, logistics, and accounting all fall under her purview, and she frequently serves as the school's investigator, using her power to resolve minor disputes, determine the truth of accusations, and in extreme cases prevent outsiders from remembering any of the school's secrets. She is very much by-the-book and has little sympathy for troublemakers. The students generally regard her as hard but fair, and nobody really wants to get on her bad side. 

Like this.

Faculty: Wolfman Bob

Name: Robert Edwin Craven
Codename: Wolfman Bob, or just Wolf
Age: 42, but looks younger
Appearance: 6'2", with brown hair and eyes and deeply tanned skin, broad-shouldered and lean. When transformed, he retains the same size and build but adds silver-grey fur, fangs and claws, and his eyes turn golden.
Job: Science Teacher, Track Coach, Outdoorsmanship

Fearsome as he sometimes looks, Bob Craven is a gentle soul who was practically born to be a teacher. He enjoyed school, loved learning new things, and was always trying something new. If there's a hobby out there, he's probably dabbled in it, and there's nothing he loves more than getting someone else interested in something that interests him. He loves running, and camping, and would have loved to settle down and have a quiet married life with lots of friends and family in it. Teaching at Saint Vincent's has finally given him most of that, though he still regrets never having found the right person to marry and have kids with. 

His abilities include near-instantaneous regeneration (including virtual immunity to poison, disease, and infection), enhanced senses, and a partial transformation that renders him fanged, furry, and armed with claws strong and sharp enough to cut metal. Transforming also enhances his strength, though only to about half again his usual athleticism. He hates that the only options his powers give him in a fight involve vicious, close-range violence, and has spent the last several years studying locks, holds, and other non-lethal ways of immobilizing opponents. He worries that if he's ever put in a position where he really has to kill someone, he won't be able to do it.

Having a Moment

Had a rough moment a couple of nights ago. I believe I've mentioned before that two of our married-couple friends (that is to say, two couples) have abruptly moved out of town. The first couple moved away about a month ago, just before the start of school; the second couple finally managed to sell their house, so they finished packing and departed this weekend, while we were away visiting Firstborn for Parent's Weekend at his college. 

I found myself awake in the middle of the night, feeling sad. Those two couples were largely responsible for me having any kind of in-person social life these past few years. Three of of them were my camping buddies, and as much as I love the state park where we used to go, the thought of camping there without them is almost as depressing as the thought of never camping there again. 

And I don't know why that was suddenly hitting me that hard, right then, though I suspect there were some extenuating circumstances: the trip up for parent's weekend, and the afternoon we spent at the renaissance faire. The trip up was always going to involve some complications, and I knew that going in, so I was coming into it with this weird combination of anticipation and resignation. We're staying in a hotel, and I didn't bring the CPAP machine -- which is okay, but not ideal. I can sleep without it, I just don't sleep as well and I need to keep my head tilted in a way that hotel pillows don't always want to cooperate with. My father -- Firstborn's grandfather -- and his wife wanted to come up as well, which meant bringing her brother along. (Her brother is living with them owing to a pretty comprehensive lack of any other options.) So that meant trying to coordinate with them (best case) and trying to wrangle them so everybody got where they needed to be (much more often the case). 

Beautiful Wife had spotted an advertisement for a local renaissance festival, and we decided to eschew the on-campus activities on Sunday and go try it out. This turned out to be a great decision, in that the event was quite a lot of fun despite being in its first year and still getting its feet under it. That did mean getting a bit more sun than I'm used to, though, which frequently knocks me for a loop. And, of course, before we left for the faire we took the time to figure out why Firstborn's car refused to start. 

Turned out the battery was dead, so completely dead that it wouldn't even unlock the doors when we hit the key fob. We were able to jump it, so it wasn't a completely loss, and I moved the car around to a spot where we'd be better able to park beside it if we needed to jump it again. Which seemed likely, seeing as I was unable to get it to start a second time. So we got back from the renfaire and dropped Firstborn off at his dorm (he had homework to finish for Monday), and then had dinner and went back to the hotel room to collapse... but, y'know, with the awareness that we were still going to have to deal with the car before we could head out in the morning. And honestly, a really happy afternoon with a lot of stimulating new things to see? It leaves a kind of emotional hangover.

All of which doubtless fed into me waking up at one in the morning, finishing a very good book, and then finding myself profoundly depressed and thinking about absent friends.

In the course of writing this out -- because that helps, strangely; I've always used writing to process things -- I keep reminding myself that it's not like they're lost forever. We're still gaming together online, fer Chrissakes. We can still go camping together, if I can quit burning through my vacation as fast I earn it at work and actually build up some time. It's not like we've lost touch and we're never going to see each other again. 

But damn it, I liked having them in town. I liked getting invited to go see a horror movie, or to come over for swimming and a cookout. I liked being able to just drive up for a weekend around the campfire. I liked playing D&D together in person. So no, it's not the end of the world; but yes, I do get to mourn this.

Travelin' Dog

So we've taken the dog on a road trip. He's riding with us in the van, and -- very sensibly -- he spends a fair amount of the travel time asleep on the floor. However, at one point we stop for a restroom/switch drivers break, meaning that Beautiful Wife and I go inside the rest stop while Secondborn and Crotchstomper remain in the van. 

I come back out first, and find that Crotchstomper has moved up from the center of the van to the passenger seat. Like, he's literally just standing there on the front passenger seat looking out the windows. Which is not okay, but it's kind of  okay because it's my turn to drive anyway. So I open the driver's side door, climb in, and give him the standard command for this: "Crotchstomper! Back! Get back! Back in the back!" 

He turns as if to go back to his spot... and then makes a full 360 and plants his butt so that he is now sitting in the passenger seat and looking forward, much as I have been doing for the last several hours. 

"I have an idea," says Secondborn, and goes to open the door. 

"Wait," I tell him. "Leave it. Your mom needs to see this." 

So Beautiful Wife returns to the van to find her loving husband ready to take over the driving, and her loving doggo ready to take over the passengering. Clearly, she is going to have to curl up on the blanket in the middle of the van; there's nothing else for it. 

"Crotchstomper," she says patiently, opening the passenger door, "Come on. Hop down." 

He obligingly exits the vehicle, and she closed the door behind him and the guides him back in through the side door. Anything to reclaim her seat, I guess...

Anyway, the dog has developed very definite ideas about how to travel in the van. 

Weird Dreams and Life Situations

More weird dreams this week, which is probably a good thing in that it indicates that I'm sleeping deeply and well enough to A) actually dream, and B) remember it afterwards. This is a distinct improvement over the majority of the last few years. (Seriously, if you take a look at the Dreams tag on the blog, you can see it in the way the dates are distributed. I've had several entries since I changed jobs; the last entry before that was back in March of 2023; then it jumps back to December of 2021; and if you keep scrolling down you'll find that I was having -- and blogging -- lots of weird, very narrative dreams right up until about the end of 2016.)

It's nice to have that back, even if the current crop are a bit troubled in tone. 

In the first dream, I (along with some of my friends) was playing D&D in some sort of Dimension 20-ish format, which was naturally complicated by the fact that I've essentially never watched that show. In the dream, we were all comfortably familiar with the D&D elements, but there were some cues and codes for the show format that none of us knew at all. Which... yeah, been feeling that way in real life a lot lately, so it's pretty understandable that my brain would reproduce that mood in a dream. 

The second dream involved being on a farm road sort of... facing off with a couple of truck drivers who were being pugnacious and recalcitrant about sharing the road. At one point they actually sort of drove over us -- not, like, to crush our care but so that the top of our roof was scraping across the underside of their flatbed. I wound up trying to chase them down and get a photo of their license plate so I could report them. But again, the general mood here was just that experience of getting run over like that, not endangered but just hugely stressful and a lot going on. I blame it on the latter half of 2024 just being a lot, and my brain maybe acknowledging some uncertainty about how to navigate it all. 

How about you? What's the weirdest dream that you've had lately?

Off-blog writing project

I've been fiddling with a writing project outside of the Blog o' Doom here, which -- in conjunction with some Big Life Changes that have thrown off the stuff I had going more regularly (Dark Armor, A Wolf In The Mundus) -- is why I don't actually have any significant content for this morning. So... music. 

Shall we go with some Metric? Sure, why not.

Weekly Challenge: Humor

(This post is part of the Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge. You can find links to other writers' answers over at Long and Short Reviews. I have not been following along as reliably this year as I did in previous years, but I'm still participating! Kind of.)

Prompt: Describe your sense of humor

Addams Family meets Dad Jokes? I'm tempted to say, "I don't know, I only just recently got it back!" Which is actually more true than I'd really like to admit; turns out I should have moved to a new job years ago. Eh, live and learn, I guess. So all right, some examples: 

Example One

Me: "Well, the prerequisites installed just fine. The upgrade, however, did not."

Co-worker: "Why does it always have to be so difficult?"

Me: "Impiety."

Co-worker: "That is... not a word I hear very often." 

Me: "I mean, Herakles had his labors; Prometheus had -- or often lacked -- his liver; and I must therefore assume that I, too, have offended the gods. Probably by being better looking than them. Zeus gets real prickly about that sort of thing."

Example Two

Email to my boss about the same upgrade: "Well, I still can't get it to run. I shall now curse the gods for this unkindness and go to sleep. I'll try it again in the morning after food and some kind of pagan sacrifice."

Example Three 

There are small plastic skeletons in the breakroom. Just a few of them. One's on top of the fridge, one's inside a cabinet, another is on a windowsill, another standing on the top edge of the blackboard. There will be more of them, and in more areas, as we approach Halloween; I have bags of the things. Under no circumstances will I admit to being the one putting them in place. 

On a related note, there is a sign on our fence that says, "Caution: Velociraptor Enclosure. Licensed Handlers Only."

Bad Puns and Dad Jokes

If I fix myself myself a waffle and eat it in secret, would you consider that action syrup-titious?

If I were to fire up the old gene sequencer and cross a homing pigeon with a piranha, do you suppose it would come back to bite me?

Stone Walls, Iron Doors, part three

It was two weeks later when the guard named Nimod threw himself off the stone parapet. There was some discussion of how he'd even managed to get up there; the last anyone knew, he'd been asleep in the barracks. Still, there was little question as to how he died; nearby guards rushed over immediately in response to his scream, one of them close enough lean over the wall and watch him plummet to his death. They all swore that there was nobody else on the stretch of wall that he must have fallen from. 

Then again, he hadn't been known to walk in his sleep and his friends among the other guards swore that he wouldn't have killed himself. 

Caracas, securely trapped in his oubliette, learned this in passing from the friendly guard, who spoke sotto voce as he lowered the evening meal of vegetable mash and bone broth. 

"Why are you telling me this?" Caracas had asked, equally quiet. 

The boy had shrugged. "It makes me nervous, that's all," he said. "Can't say that to the other guards; I'd never hear the end of it. But I wanted to tell somebody, and I thought you might like to know."

Well, thought Caracas, once the young guard had gone, that was interesting.

Stone Walls, Iron Doors, part two

Somewhat to his surprise, food arrived the next morning, lowered in a small metal box at the bottom of a chain. Looking up, Caracas saw that the chain was ringed with spikes at various points along its length, likely to discourage any attempt to climb out. He opened the box and removed the tray, finding a bowl of gruel and a chunk of slightly-stale bread. 

"Ah," said a voice overhead. "So you live. After Nimod and Valkas pushed you in last night, I wasn't sure."

Caracas squinted at the silhouette of the guard above, then nodded and stepped back out of the circle of light. The box and its chain were pulled back up, and when that was done this new guard spoke again. "Next shift'll lower the chain again just before sunset. Take the food, and put the morning's tray and bowl in the box. If you don't, they'll stop sending down food until you do."

"I understand," called Caracas, "and I thank you." 

Then another voice called, "What're you doing, boy? We just feed 'em. We don't chat with 'em."

"Yes, sergeant," the guard replied immediately, and his shadow vanished from the circle of light on the floor. 

At least he didn't have to worry about how to dispose of his waste; that had been apparent immediately, from the smell alone. There was a hole in the floor, leading down to some sort of carved pipe that angled down until it came out somewhere beyond the fortress; he hadn't bothered tracing it any farther. It was still better then the conditions in the town, where sewage was dumped into the open gutters with no attempt at even basic sanitation. 

It didn't have to be this way, Caracas thought again. We could have made this world so much better.

Friday Morning

Finally managed to go to bed early, with the result that while I woke up feeling refreshed I'm still kind of logy and unfocused. My body is basically telling me, Oh, so you finally went and got enough sleep! You know what would go really well with that? EVEN MORE SLEEP. Which, after the recent string of late nights, I can't blame it. 

So we're taking it easy today, and hopefully for the rest of this weekend. I've got a couple of things to do, but nothing that should require too much brainpower. Might Baldur my Gate some more, or I might finally settle in and play Undertale. Oh! Or finish up The Entropy Centre. I have options, is what I'm saying here.

How about some music to get us through the day? This week, I'm listening to Mirabilis: 

Music: Kingdom of Cards

Bad Omens: 

College Dreams

Dreamt that I was going off to college, and having trouble sorting out everything that I needed to get done (find my room, get unpacked, figure out my schedule...). It wasn't a particularly long or elaborate dream, but it was very definitely a mood -- probably triggered by some combination of Firstborn being away at college himself (parents' weekend is coming up soon) and me settling in on the new job (which I think is coming along fine but there's still a lot I don't know). 

I'm also beginning to think that I might have some unprocessed trauma around going off to college so damned early myself, though I also don't know what we would have done otherwise.

Writing projects are currently at a stand-still; I think I need to give my brain some downtime. 

And sleep. Even with the weird dreams, I need to be getting more sleep. When I get enough sleep, everything else falls into place so much more easily.

Lordy lordy some late nights lately

So, the thing about trying to wrangle applications is that they're frequently, well, recalcitrant. And they frequently need important, unavoidable things like upgrades... that need to be done outside of business hours. This is true even -- hear me out -- even when when what you're upgrading is actually just a test environment, or one set aside for training people where they can't break your business if they make a mistake. 

You might think that those environments should be available for much more casual upgrades, since they don't affect the actual business that goes on in your production environment, and can be refreshed from Production if anything goes wrong. And in an ideal world, you'd be right about that. In actual practice, well, I had a couple of inconveniently late nights last week while trying to get an incredibly recalcitrant training environment to to fully upgrade so that we can start User Acceptance Testing over there before we just upgrade the production environment and commit our fate to the merciless hands of the Computer Gods. 

This would be a great opportunity for overtime, but here at the new job I'm on salary. Which is fine, and maybe even better, because not only am I getting paid more in general, if I have to (hypothetically) put in four hours on a failed upgrade Thursday Night and another four hours on a partially-successful upgrade Friday night, I can bloody well sleep in on Friday morning and again on, say, the following Monday. I need to inform my co-workers so they know what to expect in terms of when I'm actually conscious, but otherwise nobody cares. (And in fact -- kudos to the new job -- they encourage it.) 

I would love to be responsible for a piece of software that was well-documented, well-maintained, and properly tested for quality. This one is... not that, but that's part of the reason it's worth paying me this much to maintain it. 

On a possibly-related note, I woke up Saturday morning after a dream in which Vincent Price -- that bastard -- was in a wheelchair and trying to break open the bathroom door while I was getting into the shower, so that he could feed me to the marsh people. The marsh people had apparently lived here years ago, and been subject to cruel and horrible experiments; the one I was avoiding introduced itself as having been made from six other marsh people, and looked like a cross between a starfish and a stingray. So if I ever see Vincent Price in a wheelchair again, I'm going to murder him on the spot in self-defense. 

BUT THAT ASIDE, life is pretty good. I keep forgetting that Firstborn is no longer living with us, which is weird but otherwise fine; we've put Secondborn into some math tutoring because apparently middle school has taught him that it's both terrible and useless; the dog has very strong opinions about where we should go when we do walkies; and I'm running three different D&D games which I'm enjoying the hell out of in three different ways. 

If I get my sleep schedule back under control, I'll be unstoppable. 

Here's to you, my friends, being -- or becoming -- unstoppable too.

Stone Walls, Iron Doors, part one

Caracas fell when the guard shoved him over the edge. It was a good distance down, a fall to break bones; no doubt most prisoners made the descent with the help of a ladder, or at least a rope. These guards were looking to punish him well beyond the sentence he'd been given, and no wonder. He'd broken three of them, and they wanted to see him broken in turn. 

But the floor, when he landed, was stone; and stone would never harm him. His feet touched it and he rolled to the side, fetched up gently against the wall, and lay there. The chamber around him was shaped roughly like a vase, wider here at the bottom but narrowing as it curved up to the hole he'd been cast in through.

Two of the guards laughed when he didn't move, and Caracas marked their voices, matching them in his mind with their scents, the feel of their steps on the stone of the courtyard, the warmth of their bodies and minds. Down here in the dark, they couldn't see that he was looking back at them. After a minute or so, they swung the heavy iron gate shut over the entrance and slid the lock into place. 

When they finally moved away, Caracas considered his new environment. The walls were smooth, offering no grips for climbing, the entrance too high up for an ordinary man to reach. A shapechanger might manage it, but iron was widely known to imprison all manner of supernatural beings: beasts and spirits and sorcerers alike. 

So this is the Archon's justice. The judge, mistaking Caracas' reticent curiosity for weakness or at least humility, had declared himself merciful in sentencing the ignorant foreigner to be forgotten for a year and a day for his assault upon the guards, conveniently ignoring the fact that Caracas had been defending himself from them and not the other way around. It had been smoothly managed, too: Caracas had spoken his initial defense to the court, and then the guards had spun their story of his attack on them, and after that everyone had spoken of it as if he had attacked the guards.

After that he had held his tongue. There was little point in arguing with it, and even less in pointing out that he'd acted to prevent a rape and had had no idea that the perpetrators were members of the guard. More importantly, he didn't want to draw the attention of his cousin Jakar in his own demesne; he wasn't prepared to take on the gods. 

So: a year and a day in this oubliette, which was one of several along this side of the courtyard: close enough to daily life to hear it, but still easy to ignore even if he begged or screamed, and fully exposed if he somehow tried to escape through the grate. A land of laws, a domain of justice and mercy, would see him regularly fed and watered, even as it forgot him. Jakar's Imperium? He'd give it a week or so, just to see.

Caracas settled back comfortably against the stone.

Decisions, part seven

Antoinette opened the door and Chris went out, Elyssa following with the doll-child. He felt off-balance, distracted, out of control; he didn't like it. He wanted to grab the doll and race it to the rendezvous, to get this over with as quickly as possible, but he couldn't do that without revealing his full speed -- and Elyssa was making a real effort to cover for him. He wanted to tear apart their enemies, but their enemies were actually their co-workers; this was just a training exercise. 

He was trying to hold to that knowledge, but the image of a child tied to a chair... 

He shook his head, forced himself to focus, and wasn't sure if he'd succeeded. Thorin was nowhere in sight, which was simultaneously the worst possible scenario and exactly what he'd expected. "That way," said Antoinette, pointing. 

Elyssa started out, and Chris leapt up to an awning, and then across to a window sill on the far side of the street. If Thorin was tracking them, he'd take to the rooftops; Chris would have to make his way there more slowly. More likely, the great cat was off alerting the other two opposition teams, but it still wouldn't hurt to have eyes up at rooftop level. 

Half a block down, the rooftop was empty. Thorin was nowhere to be seen. So it's a question of who gets into position first. If Thorin and the others could set up an ambush, they could still lure the target in using the doll-child. If Antoinette and Elyssa got the child to the head of the house first, the House could withdraw and they would have effectively won. If everybody reached the rendezvous all at once, it would be a fight and the outcome could be anything. 

Chris shaped a tiny bit of Grey and whispered to Antoinette and Elyssa: "Move."

Decisions, part six

 They didn't just drive in here anyway, even knowing it was a trap. Surely they didn't... He could see it though: whoever had planned out this exercise understood the arrogance of the Old Houses. The head of the house wouldn't leave without the child; but at least they'd agreed to wait and let his team bring the "child" to them. 

Would the two other enemy teams realize? Would Thorin tell them? Probably. He's impressed with himself, but not enough to try to take on all three of us alone, and his magus is down. 

How fast could he get to them? "Give me the child," said Elyssa. "I'll carry her." She looked at Chris. "You run interference, but be careful." She turned her eyes to Antoinette. "Do you have enough Grey left to keep up with us?"

Antoinette said, "I'll do what I can." 

"All right," said Elyssa, and they started down the stairs.

Monday, again?

Seriously, why do Mondays keep happening to me?

Though honestly, now that I'm settling in at the new job I dread The Coming Of Monday a lot less than I have in years; I should have changed jobs years ago, probably right around the time that they tripled my responsibilities but left me at the same job title and paycheck. 

Fridays are usually relatively quiet, and I spent a chunk of last Friday going through old service desk tickets from people who are no longer here, then emailing people to find out what the current status on the issue happened to be. I was able to close some of them; the others got added to my To Do list, along with whatever supplemental information I'd been given about them. Top of the list for this morning is a support call to figure out why the command to refresh the information in the Training environment from the Production environment doesn't seem to be working. 

I had a nice, quiet weekend, which was good because last week was -- despite my best efforts -- somewhat fraught. I keep hoping that things will settle out into some kind of regular pattern, and things keep stubbornly resisting me on this. I've also started a new book, which I'm enjoying; I might add a review of it once I get a little further along. 

Ah, well. Onwards and upwards! Here's hoping, as always, for things to get better.

Passage of Faith, part two

Redrick huddled behind the locked door of his cabin and knelt to pray. "Beloved Xandria," he began. "I have done as you willed, and taken the amulet. It was my intent to keep it secret, but with everyone on the ship in danger I chose to place my trust in them instead. Please watch over the crew and the other passengers; the crew is trying to help, and the danger to my fellow-travelers is unjust. Please pay particular mind to the Aarakocra who claims to have taken me under his wing; I do not know whether you placed him here to be a guardian for me or whether the fates jest at my expense, but despite his manners he has more than proven his value."

There was a faint stirring in the back of his mind, and then a momentary image of a robed, winged figure with a palimpset and a pen: the celestial Ernost, Balancer of the Scales. "Ah, Redrick Gleamalong. I hadn't scheduled... well, here you are, so I suppose it was arranged for us." They glanced at the palimset, frowned, and continued: "I will do what I can on your behalf, for you serve honorably and well."

Redrick swallowed. He hadn't expected anything more than a very general message; a chance to ask questions was not to be wasted. "Will we be attacked again, Holy Balancer?"

Ernost nodded. "Yes. A rat may be devoured by a serpent, but it may also create openings for them to use. Until you are rid of this vermin, you will continue to be attacked... and after, if they find you again."

"Can I trust the crew of this ship?"

"They have no part in this yet, and no love for your enemies. You have done well with them."

"If I may... what exactly is this amulet?" 

Ernost hesitated. "This must be your final question, for I cannot answer it. It is a tool of the enemy, more of a danger than it seems, and a warning of greater dangers yet. More than this, I may not say and have not been told."

Redrick swallowed. "I see. I am grateful for the answers you have given, and will continue to undertake the charge that I was given."

"The charge given to you is a burden and a curse, and you are blessed for having undertaken it. Once the amulet reaches the Archive, more may be revealed." They began to fade.

"I will see it done," said Redrick, and opened his eyes to find that he was talking to himself.

Another One Gone

My mom's older sister has died. I'll be attending the funeral, which is going to make for a very long day since it's up in Oklahoma and I'd rather not stay the night unless I have to.

I don't know exactly what to say about this, because I didn't know her all that well; we mostly saw her on holidays. Still, I'm going to show up, in part because I don't think my own mother would ever have forgiven me if I didn't and in part because I haven't seen that side of the family in quite some time -- and I may not have that many more chances. 

She was very sweet, a dancer, and devoted to her family and her sisters. I once made a mixed tape for her to use for her dance lessons; it probably wasn't much help, since I was in my teens and most of what I had on tap was metal rather than dance music. And for all that I failed to keep in touch, she will assuredly be missed.

The rest of the world doesn't stop for anyone's death, of course; I'm fortunate that, at least for a single day, I can.

Decisions, part five

The impact was no more than he'd expected; the wards here were for warning, not protection, and he didn't intend to give them time for their warning to make a difference. The room he crashed into was barren, furnished only with a table, a few chairs, and a battered couch; he caught up one of the chairs and flung it at Sherri, who was sitting on her couch and looking at her phone. 

The chair smashed into an unseen protection, and fell to the floor; Sherri immediately rose to her feet, then glanced at her phone in confusion. To his right, the Thorin Tanelorn of the great cats was standing beside a chair with a hostage in it. 

The hostage was supposed to be a doll! It was a doll -- it had no scent -- but the magi had put a seeming on it for this exercise, and it looked like a human child bound to the chair. For a moment he was back at Pettibone, seeing another face in another chair, and he hesitated for the barest moment as Thorin dodged around the hostage and charged him, impossibly fast over this short distance. 

He felt the impact before he could refocus, before he could bring his arms up or get his body moving again, and caught Thorin's wrist for a brief moment, pulling the cat back and to the floor alongside him. Thorin broke the hold immediately, caught him under the shoulders, and hurled them both back out the shattered window just as Antoinette shimmered into place in the room and Elyssa smashed in through the no-longer-warded door. 

Thorin released him as soon as they were past the window, and they both began to fall; Chris landed hard, and Thorin landed softly and silently on his feet, still human-formed and completely unmussed.

"Sorry," said Thorin, "but that's how it goes." 

Chris shot a hand out, caught the cat by his ankle, and yanked him down. He came to his feet, dragging Thorin up after him, and flung him into a building. He was overreacting, he knew it, and showing too much of his strength. The trouble was that he couldn't stop it. Some part him was still seeing a frightened child tied to a chair, again, and that part had taken control of his actions. He sprang up, caught a ledge around the building, sank his claws in, and launched himself further. There was a lintel above the next row of windows, and he caught himself on it and pushed himself further up. 

He was just below the upper row of windows when Thorin caught his ankle and nearly pulled him off the side of the building; if Chris hadn't been sinking his claws into the stone, the cat would have succeeded. Instead, Chris thrashed and kicked down, raking claws across the cat's face and then his arm; Thorin dropped like a rock, landed easily on his feet, and started straight up the side of the building again. 

By then, though, Chris had found the broken window and rolled inside it, ignoring the broken glass on the floor. Thorin didn't follow him; the cat leapt past the window and up to the roof. 

Sherri was on the ground, thrashing around but otherwise immobile; Antoinette was speaking into her cell phone. "We've got the kid. Pull back. You don't need to make this meet, we'll bring her to you."

Elyssa asked, "Chris? Are you okay?"

"With this?" he gestured towards the doll that had been tied to the chair and was now held firmly in Elyssa's arms. "No. Not at all. I was about to--" He made himself stop. 

"Chris," said Elyssa firmly. "Take a deep breath." 

He took a deep breath. 

"Say it with me: it's just an exercise."

"It's just an exercise." He wasn't sure he believed it, but he was calming back down, starting to refocus. "It's just an exercise."

"It's just an exercise," Elyssa repeated.

Antoinette put her phone away. "We're going to take the kid out to her House," she said quietly. "What are we looking at?"

Chris shrugged. "The cat is still active, and there are two other magi and two other outsiders he might call in. We go now, quickly, and hope to be gone before he returns with help."

Decisions, part four

Chris? The voice was soft, just at the edge of his thoughts. We found them.

Where? He shifted his weight, thought the better of leaping to the next building, and waited. 

The image formed slowly, but he recognized the location. I should have guessed. He paused, then added, On my way. It was the large central building in the training complex; the exercise's designated bad guys had set up in a corner room on the fifth floor, which gave them a view over most of the rest of the rooftops. If Chris hadn't been wrapped in Look-Away and Nothing-To-See-Here magics, they would doubtless have spotted him already. And even with those in place, it would be better to circle around than approach directly. 

He found Antoinette on a rooftop looking up into one of the windows; by scent, because she was wrapped in her own set of obfuscations. He stopped beside her, deliberately putting his foot down to make the graveled surface of the rooftop crunch quietly. 

"You're here." She sounded relieved, even as she kept her voice a soft, breath whisper. "Could you make it across?"

"Elyssa?"

"I got her inside, past their wards. If you crash in through the window, she'll come through the door. I have enough Grey left to take myself across, but only barely -- I'll try to distract them while you take them down."

Chris nodded slowly, though Antoinette likely wouldn't be able to see it. "Here," he said, then breathed out the word for Connection as he reached for her hand. 

His hand found the small of her back instead, and he shared some of the Grey that he had stored for himself. He hadn't transformed yet, and was still fresh from his last exposure; he could spare it. Antoinette stiffened, surprised and momentarily uncomfortable, but she accepted the connection and magic it offered. "How...?" Then he felt her step aside, and let his hand fall. "We go on your mark," she said. "Elyssa and I come in behind you."

"How many?" he asked. 

"Two," Antoinette told him. "But it's Sherri and Thorin." 

"Shit." He hadn't seen either of them since shortly after their first adventure into the Grey and their encounter with the bonetaker. Thorin was a cat, and fast; Sherri was one of the more formidable magi he had met. If he came through first, he'd need to take at least one of them out, even if it was only temporary; ideally, he needed to shut them both down long enough for help to arrive. "Could be worse," he said after a moment. "It could have been Peter and Morri." He paused. "Tell Elyssa I'm about to go."

He took five steps back, crouched, and then hurled himself forward and launched himself into the air. His foot, half-transformed, caught the edge of the low stone wall that surrounded the rooftop, and he pushed himself up and out, through empty air, aiming directly for the no-doubt-warded windows behind which the opposing magus and her RO were waiting.

Passage of Faith: part one

Redrick Gleamalong hurried through the woods, hoping that he wasn't being followed. He'd covered his tracks as best he could, but there was only so much he could do. Xandria, protect your servant. Preserve me to do your good work. Keep me safe from your enemies. 

There: a break in trees ahead. His steps slowed for a moment, then he picked up his pace again. The squirrel chittered from its place in the thrown-back hood of his cloak: Stop? Sleep? Chase around later?

He chittered back: I know. We're almost there, I hope. 

Acorn huffed, then wriggled out of the hood and climbed onto his shoulder. Hide in a tree, it suggested.

They climb, Redrick answered, and Acorn shivered at the prospect of arboreal predators. The squirrel stayed quiet, looking around warily as Redrick emerged from the break and started out into the knee-high grasses. He touched the hidden slit in his belt one more time, making sure the talisman was still in its place. 

Then he raised his eyes, squinting against the sudden sun, and took a long look around. There was a graveled road ahead of him, blessedly empty of traffic, leading from the outskirts of a town to the heavy wooden ramp that led up to the airdock. And there, tied off to the tower, was an airship. 

Salvation. He drew a deep breath. Thank you, blessed Xandria. 

He started for the ramp.

Music: I was looking for a particular piece...

...and remarkably, I didn't find it on YouTube. I can't decide if that's a good thing or bad. I wanted Lu Mitchell's This Too Shall Pass. Instead, I'm going to throw out the next thing that came to my mind -- randomly, with no association. The band is Cryoshell, known primarily for providing some tracks for the soundtracks of Lego's Bionicle animated movies, but honestly? They did rock. 

Decisions, part three

Going from building to building was harder than Chris expected. The cats could do it, of course; even in human form they could leap incredible distances, move without any sound of footfalls, and land undamaged on their feet after falls that should have broken bones. Antoinette had apparently anticipated him on that; the words she'd laid on him didn't just hide him from sight, they also muffled the sounds he made. Even so, he was glad that the buildings in the training quad were solid.

He was vaguely aware of Antoinette and Elyssa moving away below him; a moment later he lost them completely. He made a short jump across to another building and paused there. It helped that there was nobody else in the training quad; any sounds or movements would only come from their targets. As long as he managed to stay unseen and un-heard, the only thing that could give him away was...

Magic. Chris paused on the low wall at the edge of another room, catching his balance so that he didn't step down and come into contact with it. Somebody was worried about people coming at them from above. It was a simple ward, an alarm, but not something that he -- as a wolf -- should be able to bypass. No, he'd need Antoinette for that. Except...

He lowered himself and then hung over the side of the wall, eased down to the top row of windows. The structure was only three stories high, but he took his time; a fall at this point would be more than just inconvenient, if it gave him away. Nothing. He moved down another level. There. The windows for a corner room were warded as well, but...

He sprang across the width of the alley to the opposite wall, caught his fingertips on a brick ledge, and hauled himself up until he could see inside. The windows were warded, but not covered; he could see a mostly-empty room, with two figures inside. The doll that was taking the place of the hypothetical child hostage might be in there, but if so it wasn't anywhere obvious. 

His fingertips were getting tired from hanging here. Chris pulled himself up to the top of the building and circled around the warded one, finding his own way. He was due to meet his partners at the far side of the quad, and needed to check as many buildings as he could manage on the way.

Decisions, part two

"Okay," said Antoinette, standing in the shadow of one of the training buildings. "I'm open to suggestions."

Elyssa touched the amulet that hung between her collar bones, but Chris looked at her and shook his head. "Not here. How well can you climb?"

Elyssa frowned. "Pretty well if you're just asking about climbing, but if you want some kind of parkour... Can you do that?"

Chris considered. "Well enough, I think." 

Antoinette nodded. "I saw you go through those bones. You're not one of the cats, but you can move when you want to."

"I need you to cloak me with look-aways and nothing-to-see charms," Chris said. "I'll make a quick circuit and see what the scents tell me, then catch back up. If you two come in carefully you shouldn't be seen, and you can do your own looking. at ground level. Can you locate magics without triggering them? Like, find where wards are without setting them off?"

"Usually," Antoinette said. "Depends on the wards, of course."

Chris nodded at that. The clock was ticking; they needed to be moving. They also needed to balance that with being careful. "All right. Meet at the far corner in fifteen?"

Antoinette nodded. Then she spoke and gestured, and Chris felt a layer of Grey settle over him. He nodded and turned away, eyeing one of the buildings, then started up the side of it. 

It brought back memories that he didn't want, and for a moment he almost faltered. He knew how to climb fast because one of his friends growing up had been half-outsider and able to climb walls like a spider; racing her up a wall required concentration, precision, and complete commitment. He still lost, of course, but--

No. That was in the past. He held his focus and kept going, until he came out on the rooftop.

Back to Work

Okay, I'm officially back to work. Today is likely to be a slow day, except that we have a project this evening that will involve moving a bunch of workflows over from a training environment and getting them going in actual production; Firstborn seems to be well-settled in his new environment; and Secondborn should be ready to go out the door pretty much any minute now. 

I'm starting to get my breath back, but I've mostly been using my creative energies to get some D&D sessions ready to go. So for today... Oh, I haven't listened to this in a while: 

Annnnnd a day off

All right, yesterday was Collapse And Recuperate Day. Today, Beautiful Wife is back to teaching and I have dropped Secondborn, who A) usually rides his bicycle and B) usually doesn't oversleep, off at school. On time, yet. Go, team! 

...I need to set an alarm so I remember to go pick him up. 

I've also remembered the thing that I was going to order for Firstborn, so I'm going to go do that now. After that, I get a cup of tea and start on cleaning the kitchen, beginning with laundry and dishes and followed by... well, more laundry and more dishes, probably. 

Holy shit, we did it, y'all. 

I hope you all go out and have a really excellent day.

Update #2

Hit a point about 4:30 this afternoon where I was just like, "Did we really go all the way up there and get the boy all set up and then come all the way back?" Not, like, denial exactly. It just feels so surreal. 

And, of course, we have cell phones. We can text him. He can text us. In a real pinch, there might even be phonecalls. It's really not at all like it was when I went away to college, and I have to say this is giving me some interesting perspectives on that experience. \

I'm still off work tomorrow, and hopefully I'll be decompressed enough to start with some cleaning; the house isn't desperate yet, but it could sure use some attention. Secondborn stayed with his Nana and biked back and forth to school (pretty much the same way he would have if we'd all been home), and apparently the dog kept coming in to check on him while he was asleep; I am so, so proud of him. He and the dog are both back over here, and I'm trying to figure out how early I can go to bed and still reasonably expect to sleep through the night.

Update to Long Day

 I don't know whether or not this counts as "processing" but I am profoundly exhausted.

Another Long Day

Okay, this one's going up unedited because there's a decent chance that I won't even be awake yet when it posts. Basically: better day, a lot fewer issues, but still very, very long. 

As planned, we popped up and grabbed breakfast at the hotel, then drove over to Firstborn's new dorm, where we were greeted by a pack of upperclassmen who grabbed his stuff out of our vehicles and got it all up to his room. We then managed to get our vehicles removed to an outer parking lot, so other parents could do the same. 

Then we set about trying to get the room into shape, which meant opening all the boxes, sorting out items... and realizing that there were really only three full-sized drawers and one desk drawer in the entire room (not counting the, um, shelf? at the top of the closets). Firstborn's room is built to be a (pretty tight) double and he's occupying it as a single, so it had a good amount of room, but the furnishings were a dresser with three drawers, a desk, and a side-table with another drawer and a storage space underneath -- all three set up as a single desktop underneath the loft bed. (The loft bed looked rickety as hell, but I think it'll hold; it also completely lacked any sort of steps or ladder.) So, we did some creative arranging and Beautiful Wife -- an absolute life-saver -- started making a list of other things that we needed to purchase for his room, starting with shelves and some kind of low cabinet that could hold the microwave. 

By the time we got all that sorted out, it was time to go meet Beautiful Wife's aunt, whom I'll call T, for lunch. You may wonder why we would interrupt the dorm-room setup to go do this when we had only one day to finish; I know I did. As it happens, T is an absolute treasure: delighted to see us, absolutely thrilled to meet Firstborn as a near-adult instead of a kindergartener, and well-connected with the local community. She had some ideas about how to get the medical staples out of the back of Firstborn's head, and was more than willing to accompany him whenever this happened. Plus, the food was really good. 

After that, we headed over to the local Target, which was absolutely swarming with incoming freshmen and their hollow-eyed parents. We went down Beautiful Wife's list, and I found a low cabinet which would fill in the space beside the refrigerator and a matching set of shelves, both of which were intended for garage/workroom/tool storage deployment, so they had sort of a cool warehouse aesthetic, were cheaper than the things intended for room furnishings, and also were much easier to assemble. Beautiful Wife managed, through what I can only consider a effort of pure will, to find a small and completely suitable card table, plus a couple of rugs and some cushions to complete her vision for the room. (I will note for the record here that I did not have a vision for the room; I just wanted to add places to put shit.) We checked out, taking advantage of a New Student Discount that Beautiful Wife knew about (and in the process endeared ourselves to the mother/daughter pair in front of us, who recognized Firstborn because they'd done the tour together and were thrilled to have a 20% discount to justify some extra purchases) then drove back to the campus. 

By then, though, it was time for the Convocation, which... I am bad at describing rituals and ceremonies. They don't do much for me, and I find them tedious. Beautiful Wife, however, tells me that she found it an emotional experience, and that it gave her kind of closure -- like, we were really here, this was really done, Firstborn was really getting started here. So this isn't a knock on the school or the Convocation, it's just One Of Those Me-Things. I will note that the invocation at the end was aggressively non-denominational and as generically religious as anything I've ever seen (while still being effective), enough so that ending it with the much-more culturally specific "Amen" was actually jarring for me. So really, well done on that whole thing.

In theory, after this, we were supposed to make our goodbyes and leave, but... yeah. Furniture. Still in the van, yet. 

So we brought the new purchases up to his room, and I assembled the shelves while Firstborn assembled the cabinet and Beautiful Wife unwrapped and arranged the rest of it. The three-step step-stool (which Firstborn described as a step-step-step-stool) allowed us to pull the broken-down boxes from the back of one of the closets and store them in the luggage space above the closets; it was later positioned to help him get up to his bed. Once we were finished -- amidst a certain amount of fuss over exactly how to arrange everything for the Optimal Dorm Room Experience(tm) -- we had about twenty minutes left before Firstborn was due for an orientation/socializing dinner, and it was definitely time to go. The furniture was arranged, there was at least one poster on the wall, and the room was comfortably his. The microwave fit perfectly atop the cabinet -- I'm still proud of finding something with exactly the measurements we needed to fit it into its little nook beside the refrigerator -- and the work- and play-spaces were arranged to his liking. So we said our goodbyes, Beautiful Wife got some pictures, and I grabbed the Giant Box Of Trash and carried it down to the dumpster. 

I could make some noises about how this was all such a Profound Emotional Experience, but if we're being honest I was too busy doing it to have much in the way of feelings about it. As I may have mentioned earlier, I'll probably do my actual emotional processing in a couple of days, so it's probably a good thing that I don't have to be back at work until Friday. (New Job takes a while to build up vacation time, but they also hand you a week of it the moment you start so as to cover situations exactly like this, because they're not idiots.) 

Then we turned around and drove all the way back home, because as much as it might have been easier to stop halfway and find a place to stay the night, I really wanted to just put a pin in this whole exercise and mark it as Done. 

So... Good day? I think so. Long day? Definitely. Emotional day? Yeah? Kind of? But also definitely, in some areas? I think we left Firstborn in a room that he can be comfortable in and has kind of marked as his own (which is a lot more important and a lot less superficial than it might sound). I think he was feeling a lot better after assembling the cabinet almost completely on his own, too. I know for a goddamned fact that we weren't the only parents in that particular emotional space, because we could see them all around us and also because we were far from the last to leave. 

This was the kind of quest where I really feel like after all that I should be able to level up, but of course I have to take a Long Rest in order for that to happen. So, on that happy note, good night! I hope you're all already sleeping well by now. You'll see this in the morning, or later, and I may even still be asleep when you do. 

Ye Gods, I love my wife.

Long Day

It's a long way to Arkansas with all the powers of the cosmos conspiring against you. 

What with one thing and another, we didn't manage to get going until nearly three-thirty in the afternoon, so by the time we got settled in to our hotel room it was 10:30 at night. Admittedly, that actually could have been worse, but... the doctor at the Minute clinic said that the staples in the back of Firstborn's head weren't ready to come out, and suggested that we wait until at least Friday; that was the start of the day. We'd intended to leave much earlier than we did, so our departure was marked by a frenzy of last-minute packing and making sure people had their meds with them... and then, of course we hit traffic, though in fairness we might have hit that if we'd left earlier, too. And the hotel parking lot is overrun with construction vehicles from a nearby project, so I'm actually parked at another hotel next door. 

The nice thing about having a plan is that when it all goes to shit you know exactly what you aren't doing.

Tomorrow morning we pop up, grab breakfast, and get Firstborn moved into his dorm room; we also need to talk to somebody about getting his staples removed. There are some Welcome New Students events, and then we're done -- around four-thirty or five, as I understand it. Not sure yet if we'll drive a bit and then stop for the night, or if I'll drive us all the way back in a fit of Let's Just Get This Over With; we'll see how we're feeling.

My new job, at least, hasn't given me even a hint of trouble about any of this. And I remembered to set my out of office and mark myself as on vacation on the staff board, so that was good. We stopped and had an early dinner at The Cracker Barrel, which was fun; I finally remembered how to solve the little peg-board puzzle. And we all made it intact, which I suppose is really the important part. But Lordy are we all tired. I'm going to have a drink and go to bed; a shower would do me good, but I'm not sure I'm up to it. 

Y'all won't see this until tomorrow morning, but goodnight anyway; I hope you were all sleeping soundly while I was typing it.

And so it begins...

Today we depart to take Firstborn to his college. There will be excitement. There will be adventure. There will be Really Wild Things. May the ever-watchful gods of Major Life Changes see us through.

Friday!

Yeah, no, not even going to try for anything that involves thought, writing, or effort on my part. Instead I'll just keep going with the Weekday-Related Music theme that I seem to have in place this week: 

Thursday?!?!?

So yeah, this week has been fraught. In addition to all the events and transitions I mentioned back on Monday, we had an emergency room visit Monday night. (Firstborn managed to hit the back of his head on a parking lot, and wound up with a mild concussion and some staples; fortunately, it turned out not to be anything more serious than that.) Which means that instead of sensibly heading home from D&D at 10:30, I wound up heading home from the ER at something like 2:00 a.m. 

Which was fine, and absolutely did not disrupt my sleep schedule even further or leave trying to slog through my work day on three hours of sleep and some extremely caffeinated tea. 

I am terrified by the prospect of facing off with Next Week. 

Wednesday Challenge: Talk more, people!

(This post is part of the Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge. You can find links to other writers' answers over at Long and Short Reviews. I have not been following along as reliably this year as I did in previous years, but I'm still participating! Mostly.)

Prompt: Things I wish more people talked about openly

I mean... I mean... Swords. Dungeons and Dragons. Obscure boardgames. Horror movies. Any of my hobbies, really. Axolotls. 

But also, if we're being more serious, I also wish more people would talk about basic medical stuff. The sheer number of men I've known who apparently go their whole lives without really understanding how menstruation works, the sheer number of people I've known who apparently survive without having any idea how nutrition works, the sheer number of people who apparently don't realize how many medical and adjacent concepts (BMI, IQ, your brain not being fully developed until age 25) are actually just bullshit...

On a related note, Wikipedia's list of common misconceptions is an absolutely fascinating read, and there are plenty of things on there that I'd love to hear people discussing more often. 

And since I'm apparently posting a song for each day of the week, here's one for Wednesday:

Tuesday???

Honestly, the sheer gall of it being Tuesday like this. How is this even a thing? 

Oh, well. I lack so much as a pair of brain cells to rub together, so have some music:

Monday? Monday. Monday!

Okay, so it's Monday. To recap: 

• Secondborn starts school tomorrow; today is his orientation. Between my change in jobs and his mother cramming two semesters worth of classes into this semester, he'll be bicycling back and forth most of the time.
  
• Firstborn gets dropped off at college next Tuesday; Secondborn will be staying with his grandmother while we're out of town with Firstborn. Meanwhile, we're... trying to get Firstborn to finish packing, and he's busy freaking out instead.
• Beautiful Wife's classes also start next week. Oh, and her job continues to be a maze of treacherous fuckery, so as difficult as this will be I think she's absolutely right to double up this semester so she can look at other options (while still getting paid) next semester.
  
• Our friends are finishing their packing and heading up to Boston this week, so tonight will be the last fully in-person D&D session. This is not the end of the game, but it really does feel like the end of an era.
  
• My sleep schedule is an unholy mess, which should be easy enough to fix if everything will just settle down.
  

So yeah, I think we're all a little bit unhinged at this point. I'm hoping once the week gets moving we'll find a rhythm, but for now I think we just keep putting one foot in front of the other and moving forward as best we can. The new job, at least, is going well -- a few minor technical challenges and some things I haven't done before, but no unreasonable demands or outrages upon my time. This is the beginning of week five, and it will officially be one full month on Thursday.

Music: Ribbons

Sisters of Mercy:

Okay, yes, wow

You know, I don't think it would have been unreasonable to hope that I could change jobs and just focus on settling in to my new role. I mean, yeah, I have a lot of baggage to shake off from the old job -- obviously -- but a couple of dips in the sleep schedule and some weird dreams and I think I could have gotten over that. 

But based on Tuesday night's Weird Fucking Dreams (which woke me up about half an hour early on Wednesday) and this inexplicable sense of overall stress that I'm carrying, apparently that's not enough. I mentioned in earlier posts that of the two couple-friends who have enriched our social life for the last half-decade, one couple is in the process of trying to sell their house so they can move to Colorado, and the other is moving all their stuff up to Boston next fucking week. Plus school starts for Secondborn next week -- we aren't ready -- and we're dropping Firstborn off at college the week after that -- we really aren't ready. Finally, Beautiful Wife's job is being an absolute shit-show right now -- they seem to be trying to sideline her department, if not remove it entirely -- so she's freaking out because she needs to prepare for a double-load of classes¹ in the fall semester, which also starts Really Soon Now.

I'd like to have a nervous breakdown, please. At least, I'd like to drop everything else and get this stuff sorted out. Instead, I have to keep showing up for work, continue actually working so I can keep this job, and figure out some way to squeeze in the other stuff -- like helping Secondborn figure out ways to get himself back and forth from school, and Firstborn get registered for classes -- around the edges. 

Plus I'm watching a lot of the things that I've spent the last several years relying on to keep me sane -- Monday night D&D, Wednesday night horror webcast, Friday Night Writes -- come apart in real time, and apparently my brain has decided to just seize up and start screaming "NOTHING WILL EVER BE THE SAME AGAIN!!!" at me. Which, yes, thank you, I knew that, Brain. 

I'm so tired. 

I would like one year -- just one -- out of the 2020s to just... be a normal year. Just... have a routine, be manageable, don't be buried under an avalanche of external stressors like Covid (Hi, yes, we've hit the summer flare-up and nobody's acting like it because we've been betrayed and abandoned by our public health organizations), the election (which I'm actually finally hopeful about but if anything goes wrong we're now a fully fascist state), and multiple Major Life Changes all happening at once.

Breathe. Move forward. Don't panic. That's my mantra right now. 

I have a meeting this morning and several projects to follow up on. I know what I need to do next. 

But dear gods I would like to crawl into a hole and hide for a while.

1. The idea is that she does her entire year's worth of classes right now, leaving her free in the spring to look for another job, a suitable side-hustle, or a better way to navigate the current bullshit.

Challenge: Advice

(This post is part of the Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge. You can find links to other writers' answers over at Long and Short Reviews. I have not been following along as reliably this year as I did in previous years, but I'm still participating! Mostly.)

Prompt: Funniest advice I've received

"Okay. Go downhill, really fast. If something gets in your way, turn.” It's a (slightly misquoted) line from the movie Better Off Dead, and Beautiful Wife and I use it as a shorthand for when one of us is vacillating about whether or not to attempt something, and the other one thinks we should go for it. 

Because sometimes you just need to throw yourself down the Instant Death ski slope with only one ski on and win that race.

Music: Gutter Glitter

Blast from the past courtesy of Switchblade Symphony: 

Weird Dreams

There's a meme going around somewhere that asks, "Are you Self-Sufficient as in Self-Sufficient? Or are you Self Sufficient as in I Am Carrying The Weight Of Years Of Other People Expecting Me To Get Things Done Without Adequate Explanation, Resources, Or Support?" and boy howdy, that one hit me pretty hard. 

I have trouble knowing when I need to ask for help, partly because I think Previous Job spent nearly two decades training me to expect that no matter how reasonable the ask, management was never going to direct additional resources my way. Not if they cost money. Maybe I could get my co-workers to help out -- they were actually very good about that, but a lot of them were in the same position I was, resource-wise.

(It's also apparently a pretty common thing with ADHD/Spectrum folks, but leave that aside for the moment. I know that not knowing when to asked for help is an issue for me, and I've watched Firstborn struggle with the same issue. Which is why I believe it's vitally important for both of us to avoid being in situations like that, where our response is just to take more and more of it onto ourselves until we burn out completely.) 

Anyway based on a weird spot of insomnia Saturday night and the even-weirder dreams that hit when I finally crashed on Sunday afternoon, I'm pretty sure that my brain's having trouble processing that, particularly in relation to the New Job. To be clear: the New Job has been very reasonable in its expectations (especially as I'm still getting the lay of the land), substantially more relaxed, and it looks like for the first time in my life they're actually willing to throw money at things that would make my job easier and more efficient. 

And apparently I have no goddamned idea how to process that. 

But yeah, I think part of the reason I couldn't sleep Saturday night is because my brain was just saving up for this huge processing trauma-dump session which it promptly dreamed me through on Sunday. (I'm actually writing this Sunday evening, so hopefully my actual night's sleep will be less fraught.) About fourteen straight hours of playing Baldur's Gate 3 probably helped too. 

So yeah, that was my weekend. How was yours?

(Monday morning update: Ohhhhhh, yeah, more weird dreams last night and this morning, very definitely work/stress related. Woke up feeling a lot more relaxed afterward, though. It'd be nice to change jobs without my subconscious having to stop and process a shitload of deep-seated emotional trauma, but I forget that, well, that's just not how people work. At least, it sure as hell isn't the way I work. And shaking off all that accumulated stress and burnout feels like trying to hatch, like trying to force my way out through an existential egg-shell from the inside... or smash my way out of a cage.)

(And the way the calendar looks, I'll get this more or less settled just in time to have to turn around and process the whole thing with Firstborn going off to college. I can't even imagine...)

(August's going to be interesting.)

Vinnie: Watching the Reunion

Vinnie floated quietly at the edge of the tunnel as Amergin and Archibald turned to embrace their two wayward siblings with shouting and laughter. 

He was... was he sad? This wasn't anger, and it wasn't the greasy satisfaction he'd felt at having tricked them into letting him do something truly horrible. Yeah, sure. Sadness. Me. That'll be the day. But it was... good. Good to see them back together, even if the rogue was still missing. Even if he could only watch this reunion from the outside, it felt right. For this one moment, after centuries of solitary study, Vinnie wished he could have that sort of companionship, that unmistakable sense of belonging. 

He'd never realized that he missed it.

He didn't begrudge Whisper or James for taking the opportunity to leave; he'd pranked them pretty badly. Lithos, though... Lithos' unexpected flight had hurt him. It felt like a betrayal, and it didn't matter at all that Vinnie knew he'd betrayed the goblin first. The kid was supposed to stick with him. That was how he'd set it all up: they'd hate him, but they'd rely on him because they had to. They'd keep him around.

Yeah, but that was just for fun. Just to prove I could do it, make these would-be Good Guys help me, even knowing what I did to them, even knowing that I was looking for powerful souls to eat and that I absolutely will eat them. It wasn't supposed to affect him; he wasn't supposed to get attached to them. 

And I ain't. I'm just usin' them to keep me out of sight. Which meant he couldn't blast Lithos on the spot; he didn't care if the kid had left, or if he came back. Nope, not at all. He'd just sit here, feeling all satisfied that his plan was working. 

It still felt like sadness.

Terror Povos: An Unexpected Arrival

The wagons were rolling slowly along, drawn through the deep roads by the under-oxen. Lithos had read that the under-oxen were not so different from those found overhill, just better adapted to heat and damp and able to see in the dark. They were slower than horses, but far stronger and more reliable. 

Lithos himself was stretched out on the roof of Schist Splitvein's wagon, near the front of the caravan, half-dozing and wondering just what the hell had happened for him to end up here. It wasn't like he didn't remember, it was just that the whole thing seemed unreal... 

Oh shit, he thought. Vinnie. Vinnie must have cast Wish, that nearly-ultimate magic. He must have erased the events in the prison, rearranged things so that all those deaths had never happened. Except the Warden. He would have kept the warden's soul. Even so, it meant that the demilich had made good on his side of the deal. It meant that Lithos owed him. 

Shit. Fuck. Damn it. He considered rolling over and just going back to sleep, but...

You can't ignore a debt, his mother's voice said firmly. You have to do the right thing by others, and hope that they do right by you. Was skipping out on Vinnie the right thing? Or did doing the right thing mean going back and paying his debt by helping Vinnie take those souls like he'd agreed to do? He was two cycles out now, and traveling with traders. It could take twice that to get back to where they'd parted, and longer to track down where the demilich had taken his brothers. 

And then he'd have to deal with Vinnie, who'd sent a ghoul to try to kill him. If Vinnie blasted him on the spot... Then I guess my problems are over. He could risk that. He could risk it in order to pay his debt and then try to make things right. Even if making things right ultimately meant going up against Vinnie, which was spider-fucking suicide. 

T'would be an honorable death, said his father's voice in his head. Far better than fleein' tae the goblin tribes and tryin' tae find a place there. 

Lithos? called a soft voice, cutting into his half-dozing considerations. 

He rolled over, trying to tangle himself further in his blankets. His siblings, in their good-hearted way,  made fun of him for it; but he found it comforting. Only this time, it didn't work; the blankets caught on something, refused to turn with him. 

"Lithos?" asked the voice again, and this time he realized he was hearing it. 

He jerked fully awake, twisting out of the blankets like an escape artist, and brought a hand up. 

James caught it. "Brother," he said. 

The air fled Lithos' lungs. He drew it back in with a terrible effort, then asked: "What are you doing here?"

"Whisper sent me back," said James. "Said it wasn't safe, after we finished off the ghoul. He said if you'd run you'd have gone this way, and then here you were on the caravan."

"Whisper," said Lithos. Then: "Is he here?"

James shook his head. "Gone. Really gone." She looked stricken. "Like, he-said-we-wouldn't-see-him-again gone."

Lithos considered that for a long, long time. "He was always going to leave us someday, wasn't he?" 

"I hoped not," James admitted. "But yeah, he was." 

"Did he want you to go into hiding with me?" Lithos asked. "Because I've been thinking I should go back to Amergin and Archibald... and Vinnie."

"He just said I should stay with you," said James. "But that's Whisper. He worries over us, but he's always been happiest taking care of himself. I think we should go back."

"Then we'll do it, Brother," Lithos said quietly. He reached for the blanket and began folding it over so he could roll it up. "You have no idea what a relief this is."

Yeah, Vinnie might kill them. But Lithos didn't think so. He didn't pretend to understand what a centuries-old demilich might want or how he might think, but the patterns were there. Vinnie hadn't killed them when they'd first pulled him out of the pile of skulls. He could have, but he didn't. He'd traveled with them, and he hadn't killed any of them then, either. He'd gotten them imprisoned, but he'd neither abandoned them nor destroyed them. Vinnie might not care about them, exactly, but he'd... taken a liking to them. Maybe only the kind of liking that a child has for an interesting toy, but... maybe not? Lithos wasn't sure.

It's worth the risk, he decided.

Challenge: Haunted House

(This post is part of the Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge. You can find links to other writers' answers over at Long and Short Reviews. I have not been following along as reliably this year as I did in previous years, but I'm still participating! Mostly.)

Prompt: Would I stay in a Haunted House? Why or Why Not?

I would. It's not something I would seek out, but I absolutely, 100% would. About the only reason I wouldn't stay in a haunted house is if I had some reason to believe that an actual, living human being was planning to murder me there. That would probably put me off. 

So yeah, if I needed a place to stay and something was the best available choice except that it was supposed to be haunted, I'd settle in. No problem. If someone offered me a cash reward to camp out overnight in an abandoned sanitarium, I'd probably sign up. I'd take precautions against possible intrusions by living humans, but I wouldn't be worried about the ghosts. (In fact, if you watch a random selection of Urbex -- Urban Exploration -- videos on YouTube, you'll run into several where somebody exploring an "abandoned" building found that it was haunted by people who actually lived there and weren't too keen on random tresspassers with cameras. It's a whole thing.) 

Now for the second half of the prompt. Why? Well, mainly because I exist in this weird liminal space between I don't believe ghosts exist and even if they somehow do, they don't actually seem to be that much of a danger or we'd know more about it by now. After the Victorian Spiritualism craze and decades of ghost-hunters, there'd be some kind of overarching hypothesis, some quanitified collection of events and measurements. But mostly I come back to If ghosts were really a thing, we'd know a lot more about them by now. Like, you want to convince me that they're mysterious and hard to gather data about? Okay, but we know about things that are absolutely wild in terms of being hard to study. We know about the bacteria that live around the edges of volcanic vents so deep in the ocean that there's neither light nor oxygen to speak of. We've found ways to study particles that are incomprehensibly small and even some that only exist in momentary bursts. If ghosts were a real-world phenomenon, surely by now we'd at least be comparing data over competing theories of how they worked.

Vinnie: Those Little Rats

Lithos was gone. The shitty little wizard of a goblin was gone. The damned little rat had fled. Well, he'd fix 'im. Run away from me? It was a good thing that Wish wasn't the only spell he'd prepared. I was gonna use it on Whisper, but fine: I can send a message to Lithos instead. Shitty little wizard... Now you get Vinnie's Malicious Messenger instead of your brother.

He'd enjoyed playing with the kid. Hell, he'd enjoyed playing with all of them. The expressions on their faces when the Senator keeled over? Priceless. They had no idea what had happened. Watching them flail around in the prison trying to figure out how to escape unnoticed using only what he'd offered? Fuckin' hilarious. He hadn't been this entertained in centuries. And then the goblin had gone and given him permission to murder everybody? Fuckin' awesome. 

Not that he needed permission, but that was part of the game. And he could use that. It was gonna be easy. Train him up. Give him a taste of power. Offer him more. And then promote him to a lich under my command. Durest's Bones, the kid was so easy, so fuckin' desperate for anybody to take an interest in him.

The others... Eh, they were good cover. A smokescreen. Nothin' more. And funny as shit to watch. He wouldn't miss the rogue -- a rogue couldn't hurt him, but rogues had other ways of making trouble. Which is why I was gonna send 'im a message. Specially since he took the halfling wit' him. But all right. Three followers. Now just two. And they were supposed to meet with Garm, so it was a good thing he'd charmed the everlovin' fuck out of Garm.

Vinnie eyed his two remaining followers, the dwarven druid and the human bard. He could do this with only them, and they were still useful to have around. If he had to fuck with the goblin mage at a distance instead of close up, he'd do it that way. Yeah, Whisper can get his messenger tomorrow.

Decisions, part one

"Are you all right?" asked Elyssa. "You seem... I don't know, different, this morning."

"Yeah," said Chris, who was feeling surprisingly bright and alert considering how little sleep he'd gotten and the fact that his dreams had been overwhelmed with glimpses of events that he'd never experienced. He closed his throat against saying anything else; he still had to keep his secrets, no matter how much more comfortable he was feeling with them. "I'm good."

"Good," she said. "I'm glad. Any idea what we're doing now?" 

"None," Chris told her. "Antoinette?"

Their magus was waiting at the edge of one of the training areas, the one set with fake buildings and other obstacles. She'd seen them coming, and stopped to wait. "No idea," she said. "Magus Frummelt said he wanted us to try another approach to training, but he didn't explain." 

The magus at the edge of the training area wasn't Frummelt, but Chris still recognized him; it was agent Spencer, the one with the aggressively square face who'd brought him to Frummelt after Julius Thornblade had been killed. For all that he'd looked cold and authoritative then, he looked friendly enough now. 

"Magus Gillespie," he acknowledged. "Magus Frummelt wants you and your people to practice working at as a team. For this scenario, a child from one of the families has been kidnapped by by a group of rogue magi and their unregistered outsiders. They're still in the Mundus, but they have access to a portal."

Antoinette glanced at Chris, who asked: "Do we know how many magi and how many outsiders?"

"For this, you do: three magi, and three outsiders. The information you have suggests that they aren't close with each other, but they're united in their desire to  take the child and use him as bait. They want the head of the house to come so they can ambush him; you have to get there before that happens."

Antoinette turned her head the other way and looked at Elyssa, who swallowed and said: "That sounds like we're operating with prejudice. Are we allowed to kill them? Do we need to keep any of them for questioning?"

Agent Spencer smiled approvingly. "The child's survival is your top priority, but the Ministry would be appreciative if you could keep at least one of the magi alive for the truthspeakers. We've put some enchantments in place to prevent -- but mark -- things that would have been serious injuries, so you can treat this as if the threat were real." He hesitated. "We're not using an actual child, obviously, but the doll representing the hostage has been similarly enchanted. We'll know if it's 'injured'."

"How much time do we have?" asked Antoinette. 

"You don't know for sure, but... some. Enough to approach strategically. You'll be uninterrupted until the head of the house decides to come, or sends agents of his own. Hypothetically. The rogues might decide to dispose of the hostage, but not before that happens. Is all of that clear?"

Antoinette glanced at Chris, and then at Elyssa. "Do we know where they are?" she asked.  

"Somewhere in the training quad," agent Spencer told her. "Good luck."