Dollhouse and the Metastory Trap

There's a reasonably famous experiment on perception in which people are asked to watch a short clip of a basketball game, and count the number of times that the players in white T-shirts pass the ball. After watching the video, the viewer is asked one very simple question:

"Did you notice the gorilla?"

Because a gorilla walks through the shot, about halfway through the video. It even stops and does a little dance. And you know what? Nobody does notice the gorilla. Once we've decided what we need to focus on, human beings turn out to be very good at tuning everything else out in order to pay close attention to the things they're looking for.

So what does all this have to do with 'Dollhouse'? It's very simple. The series (which I watched on DVD over the course of the last couple of weeks) quickly developed a reputation as being underwhelming, not worthy of Joss Whedon's reputation. Even among Whedon fans, 'Dollhouse' was seen as a creative misstep. "It moves too slow." "Not enough happens in each episode." Whedon and Eliza Dushku had to personally plead with the fanbase to keep watching for at least six episodes to give the metastory, the overall arc of what happens to Echo and what secrets the Dollhouse holds, time to develop. When the DVD finally came out, fans watched the unaired pilot and said that it was better because so much more of the "real story" was in it.

The thing is...the metastory? That's the three men in white shirts passing the basketball. The stories in each episode? They're the gorilla.

The central concept of the Dollhouse is something that can generate a near-infinite number of good stories without ever changing the status quo. (More on this when I get around to writing "Storytelling Engines: Dollhouse", natch.) It's a series where the lead character can turn into anyone, enter any situation, play any part with perfect accuracy. That's a hook for so many good story ideas, and the first five episodes play through some great ones; Echo goes from being a bodyguard for a singer with an obsessive fan to infiltrating a religious cult to staging a complex theft on a museum, all plots that should be engaging and interesting.

But the fans are saying, "We were promised that this was about Echo regaining her memories and personality! We were promised that this was about an FBI agent trying to crack open the secrets of the Dollhouse! We were promised Alpha, dangit!" And those stories are designed to simmer under the surface slowly over the course of the run of the entire series, not boil over in the first six weeks. (Just imagine if someone told you that Season Two of 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' was "about" Angel going bad and Buffy having to fight him. You'd be absolutely out of your mind with boredom by Episode Eleven. "...the heck? Ted Ritter as a killer robot? Boy, talk about your lame Monster of the Week series!")

Now I'm not saying that it's the fans' fault for not liking the show. Well, okay, I sort of am. Ever since 'Babylon 5' introduced the idea of an overarching metaplot that would build from one episode to the next, we've been conditioned to expect that the metaplot is more important than the individual episodes (possibly because metaplots reward diligent and loyal viewers, and sci-fi fans tend to be both of those things, so we feel kinda special when watching shows with big oomphy metaplots because it feels like they're aimed at "us".) Nothing kills the fun of watching a show faster than projecting expectations onto it that it can't meet. (Even though "Babylon 5" spent a lot of its time on stand-alone episodes, too...)

But of course, the fans didn't form their expectations in a vacuum. (Which is why I'm not actually saying that it's the fans' fault for not liking the show.) Fox, Whedon, Dushku, and everyone concerned picked their angles to promote the series, and they gave people the impressions and expectations that turned out to be, um, not so realistic. If people were expecting Echo to be on the run by Episode Five, accompanied by FBI agent Paul Ballard, that's in no small part because that's how Fox sold the series. (It also doesn't help that it's hard to wrap your head around the idea that mind-wiping pimps could be anything other than unequivocal bad guys. You expect Echo to escape or avenge herself because that's what heroes do. It's kind of difficult to accept the idea that the Dollhouse owners have their own side to the story.)

Which is, in the end, why the season finale--"Epitaph One", which didn't actually air due to weird contractual obligations and which is available on the DVD--is so clever. Without getting into any spoilers, it gives people almost more metastory than they can handle, a great big chunk of game-changing events that flow seamlessly out of the previous twelve episodes, but that alter things so much that fans will be poring obsessively over Season Two (and if we're lucky enough, Three, Four, et cetera) to figure out the details. It tells the fans, both current and potential, "Hey. Be patient. We're going places, this is the map...just sit back and enjoy the journey."

I don't think people were expecting to "enjoy the journey" when they watched 'Dollhouse'. I think they were so impatient to get to the destination that they never looked out the window to see the scenery. If they did...or, thanks to the miracle of DVD, Hulu, iTunes, Tivo and DVR, if they do...they might see some very cool gorillas.

So Very Sorry...

I am so deeply ashamed of myself for inflicting this on you, but ever since finding out that the last David Tennant Doctor Who special would be called 'The End of Time', I just cannot stop imagining what Meatloaf's reaction would be (assuming he was a Doctor Who fan, which I can totally see, honestly...) And I think I just have to blog it.

I think he might say...or actually, sing...

So now I'm praying for 'The End of Time'
To hurry up and arrive
'Cause if I gotta wait another minute for Who
I don't think that I can really survive
I'm praying for 'The End of Time'
That's all that I can do
Praying for 'The End of Time'
The end of Tennant's time on Who!

Taken Out Of Context Theater!

This week, on "Taken Out Of Context Theater", we present an absolute gem from Flash #149 (December 1964):

"I've got to help Kid Flash recover his memory! By taking him to places where we experienced exciting times together, it may arouse him--cause him to remember!"

(The truly funny part of this comes from the mental image of an amnesiac Kid Flash standing there, gaping in horror as a strange man in a skin-tight red suit says, in all sincerity, "Do you remember the exciting times we had together here? Does it arouse you?" And then, no doubt, screaming for the cops.)

Tune in next time, for another exciting installment of "Taken Out Of Context Theater"!

Heist, Part Eleven

And introducing...

Her mind simply stopped when she saw the man in the next cell. It was true, then. They did have him. Amanda saw that they’d taken extra security precautions above and beyond what they’d prepared for the rest of the group; his legs were shackled together, his arms bound in a straitjacket, and his entire body strapped down to a stretcher that was locked to the wall. His feet didn’t even touch the ground; he was such a small man, but if even half the rumors about him were true, Amanda wasn’t in the least bit surprised that the Monitors took such precautions. Rumor said he could change his shape, and that he’d changed his entire physical appearance on at least three occasions—height, weight, everything. Amanda couldn’t tell what he looked like now, though. An iron mask that covered his face obscured his features; most likely, to ensure that he couldn’t hypnotize any of the guards and convince them to let him out. Beneath the straitjacket and the mask, he wore the same paper clothing as the rest of them; he’d been stripped of his eccentric costumes that supposedly concealed all manner of technological tricks and sabotage devices. He didn’t even look like he could move, much less perform one of his legendary escapes.

Seeing him like that almost made Amanda want to cry. It just seemed unfair that the man who couldn’t be caught was sitting two cells away from her, trussed up like a very unsuccessful escape artist on Amateur Night. Amanda had been brought up on stories about him, the single person that the entire Tinarian army feared. They claimed he defeated whole armies with nothing but wits, sticky fingers, and a few trusted friends. He supposedly stared down the Empress herself and somehow shamed her into releasing a thousand dissidents. He wasn’t just a person, and it seemed both wrong of the Monitors to treat him like one, and him to let them do it. He was too important for his legend to just end like this, taken to the prison built for him and expected to rot. She still remembered the first time she heard of him; the Gingerbread Man, they sometimes called him, or the One That Got Away or the Oncoming Storm or the Butterfly’s Wing or the Ka Faraq Gatri. Even the ubiquitous name plaque didn’t list his real name; it just said, “John Doe, alias the Doctor.”

Amanda wanted to talk to him. She wanted to ask him how the Monitors had caught him. She wanted to ask him how he could let down five hundred years of notoriety by winding up on a prison ship. But she didn’t know what to say.

* * * * *

Joachim broke the silence first. He seemed like the type who would.

“So how’d they catch you guys?”

The mousy woman responded by spitting on the floor. “Bribed my mechanic, that’s my guess. My hyperdrive shorted out and I dropped into realspace right in front of a whole blockade. That couldn’t be coincidence.”

Corvus snorted. “That could be an Interdictor Fleet, O’Donnell. They do make trawls through hyperspace looking for smugglers like you.” On hearing the name, the identity of the last criminal clicked in Amanda’s head; she must be Eileen O’Donnell, the gunrunner and smuggler. Amanda was surprised at how unassuming O’Donnell looked. They’d made a holo about her involvement in the Seventh War of Acquisition, and the actress certainly didn’t look anything like the real woman. Then again, not many people ever got to see the real woman…and for that matter, the holo was awful. From the way Corvus talked to her, the two probably knew each other.

O’Donnell’s eyes widened in anger, and she suddenly didn’t seem so mousy anymore. “An Interdictor Fleet would never have caught me. I’d have noticed the disruptions in hyperspace and changed course before I hit their disruption field. They didn’t do anything. My drive just shorted out—and it was timed to do so right when I got there. Had to be my mechanic. When I get out, I’ll—“

Corvus didn’t just snort this time; he outright laughed. It was a bitter, scornful laugh, but Amanda didn’t think he could do anything that wasn’t bitter or scornful. “You won’t get out. None of us will. That’s Nirvana they’re sending us to, not some minimum-security penal colony. Nobody has ever escaped from Nirvana, and nobody ever will.”

The Doctor spoke for the first time, surprising Amanda and probably everyone else as well. His tone was light and airy, as though he was just discussing the weather with a group of old friends rather than locked up in a prison cell, and his voice had a rich, archaic accent to it that reminded her of ancient Earth and stories of the Scottish highlands. “Oh,” he said, his voice echoing slightly beneath his iron mask, “I shouldn’t think it to be too difficult. We’re a resourceful lot, between us.” He rolled the R’s in ‘resourceful’ playfully. “We have the finest thief, the finest pilot, the finest slicer…and, of course, my own modest talents.”

Corvus shook his head. “It’s not a question of what you can do. It’s a question of what you want to do. Nirvana was designed to contain you, Doctor. It has a psionic field generator at the heart of the asteroid it’s made from. Anyone within its field of influence becomes apathetic and unwilling to make any effort to escape. Even if they left the doors unlocked and a fully-fueled space-ship sitting right in the docking bay, you’d walk right past it to your cell.” He smiled cruelly. “It’s been four hundred years since the Empire ordered the creation of Nirvana, and in that time nobody’s ever left the prison alive. Delacourt might be able to pick every lock in the building, and O’Donnell might be able to fly every ship they’ve got. But we’ll all spend the rest of our lives on that rock.”

O’Donnell clearly remained unconvinced. “And you won’t? If you’ve got some plan to get off, go ahead and share.”

“Oh, I don’t exclude myself. I’ll be right there along with the rest of you, serving out my excessively dull life sentence with a blank expression on my face and a psionic wave over-writing my brain. I know something those bastards who sold me out don’t know, though. That field doesn’t impede any other desires. I won’t want to leave, but that won’t stop me from making sure a few of my little secrets get out into the open. It won’t even be difficult. They’re all going to pay for this. Oh, yes…”

An Open Letter To the Writers of Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Dear Writers of Buffy the Vampire Slayer,

Andrew is not nearly as funny as you think he is.

Sincerely,

All the Fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer

PS. This is by no means a slight on Tom Lenk. Andrew is just as unfunny in the comics as he was on the TV show.

Somethng Someone Else Wrote

This week's section of "Heist" is just below, but I did want to take a moment and direct your attention to this link that the fine folks at "Shortpacked!" brought to my attention. It's a Q&A session with Hasbro about Transformers that contains some of the finest fanwankery, the ripest retconnery, and the most exquisite good old-fashioned BSing I've ever seen.

Behold, the Hasbro story lore Q&A!

Bravo, unnamed Hasbro copywriter. Bravo.

Heist, Part Ten

Next time, some actual Doctor-ness, I promise...

Amanda turned to the holo-projection just in time to see the jury punch in their decisions. “Remarkably quick, too,” her guard said behind her. “The prosecutor’s going to get an Judicial Efficiency Commendation for that…and the verdict’s guilty, no surprises there. Congratulations, Krau Delacourt. You’ve just earned a life sentence on the prison asteroid of Nirvana. Please prepare for automatic neural destabilization as preparation for prisoner transfer.”

Amanda’s last conscious thought before she fell to the floor was, ‘How exactly does one prepare to be shot by seven stun projectors?’

* * * * *

She sat up, rubbing a sore patch on her forehead, and muttered blearily, “Sitting down would have been a good option.” One of the other prisoners, a mousy-looking woman with dull brown hair, looked at her, but said nothing.

All six of the cells were occupied. It wasn’t hard to pick out which one of them wasn’t the Class A prisoner; he was in the cell next to hers, the farthest right on the half-circle, huddled on his bench on the side of his cell furthest away from all the other prisoners. She couldn’t see his name plaque from this angle, but he had an expression on his face that neatly mixed fear and disgust, and once she got a good look at his eyes, she understood why. Dynae were supposed to be pacifists; being in this close proximity to so many dangerous criminals probably terrified him. Of course, she’d never met one before, or at least not one that admitted it. Most of the ones that hadn’t been rounded up in the initial purges concealed their identities, got special contact lenses to disguise their reflective irises, and tried to keep it a secret that they were a member of the most feared species in the Tinarian Empire. Those that didn’t wound up on prison ships like this one. He had to be the odd man out, though. Despite their power, the Dynae never tried to escape from prison once caught. They accepted their fate with stoic resignation.

The cell on her left, the other one whose name plaque she couldn’t read, contained the mousy woman. She didn’t look that dangerous. In fact, she looked like the sort of woman destined for celibacy, a career in the secretarial industry, and an eventual future as a grey old woman whose greatest excitement was in taking Pootles to the vet because he had the sniffles. Then again, by process of elimination, she was probably a master criminal headed to the most secure prison in the galaxy, so it didn’t pay to judge by appearances.

She could read the name plaques on the other three cells, and now that she knew who she was in the company of, she understood exactly why that nameless, faceless guard had been filled with industrial smugness. These were criminals that she’d only heard of, and that in awed whispers; these were the kind of people that were to their respective fields of larceny what Amanda was to the field of burglary. The cell opposite the Dyna contained Joachim Velasquez. The name meant nothing to her, but the plaque also handily included his alias, which meant considerably more. He didn’t look like much in person; in fact, he looked scared witless, probably because he did most of his work through a computer terminal. She’d be willing to bet, though, that if she met his avatar in a VR sim, he’d be a lot more impressive. It was rumored that he’d made his wealth on a single caper, slicing the systems of every single banking computer in the galaxy and transferring a millionth of a diam from each account to his own. Everyone knew his net-name, Quetzal, but if anyone had ever heard his real name, they’d never mentioned it to her. She knew that nobody had ever met him personally. Judging by the expression on his face and the way he rocked back and forth on his bench, that was the way he liked it.

Next to him, a dark-haired man with a stormy expression sat, arms folded, silently seething. His name plaque read Peter Corvus, again not a name she had ever heard, but she recognized his face. She hadn’t had many dealings with him, but it would have been difficult for her to avoid him, given the intersection of their respective fields of influence. He was one of the best fences in the Empire, capable of turning even the hottest goods into money—and of turning money into hot goods. He had fingers in every criminal enterprise, and rumor had it that he made a lot of his money from blackmailing the wealthy and powerful. Amanda quickly reasoned that he’d probably been classified with the rest of them for that very reason; Class A criminals weren’t allowed to speak to either the courts or the media, something that the upper classes would be desperate to avoid in his case. From the looks of him, it was certainly something he was kicking himself for not having expected. Beyond him was…

I'd Like To Try Making a Meme

I've been reading J. Gregory Keyes' "Age of Unreason" series recently (I read the first book when it came out, then got behind and am just now getting back to it. In a few years, I might look into picking up that "Da Vinci Code" novel.) I'm enjoying it greatly, and I've been trying to describe the plot to different people. At one point, I explain that one of the threads of the narrative involves an expedition led by Blackbeard and Cotton Mather to discover what happened to England after the end of the first book...and I suddenly stopped. "That sounds like the weirdest 'buddy cop' movie ever. He's a pirate. He's a Puritan minister. Together, they have to join forces to discover what happened to England...that is, if they don't kill each other first!"

And now I want to see if someone else can come up with an even more unlikely buddy-cop pairing. (Of course, the "buddies" in a 'buddy cop' movie don't actually have to be cops...'Turner and Hooch' is one cop, one dog, while 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit?' is one private eye, one cartoon bunny.) So go ahead and, on your own blog (or in the comments section here if you don't have a blog) come up with your best bizarre buddy-cop pairing.

Here's mine:

"He's an anarchist. He's the ghost of a nobleman. Together, Gavrillo Princip and the spectre of Archduke Ferdinand must discover who framed Gavrillo for Ferdinand's murder--and they only have 48 hours before all of Europe is plunged into a bloody war!"

And a bonus:

"He's one of the most respected and revered physicists in the history of the world. He's the new mascot of 'The Today Show'. Together, Albert Einstein and chimpanzee J. Fred Muggs must stop the Rosenbergs from delivering atomic secrets to the Russkies...or the next world war might start sooner than we imagined!"

Heist, Part Nine

And here's another chunk of Chapter Two, featuring the first oblique mention of the Doctor. Yes, he is in this, and here's the proof! (By the way, as an aside, note the chapter titles are both the titles of "caper" films. This would have been continued throughout the book, if I'd had the chance to continue.)

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, members of the court, esteemed nobility…” the prosecutor began, addressing each of the three pillars of the Imperial Judiciary in turn as he did so, “I come here today to speak to you of grave crimes, committed by a master criminal.” Amanda raised her eyebrow at that; shouldn’t she technically be a mistress criminal? Then again, that didn’t exactly sound right either. “The evidence we have uncovered should lead you to determine, within a matter of hours of deliberation, that Amanda Delacourt of the planet Shantar deserves her current status as a Class A criminal—one of only five such criminals within the past five centuries of Imperial history—and that she deserves, without question, a life of internment at the Nirvana Prison Facility where her anti-social and grossly disturbed tendencies can be kept away from law-abiding citizens of the Empire. Blah blah blah blah blah…”

Or, at least, that’s all Amanda heard. She hadn’t heard much of anything after the phrase “five such criminals”. She felt surprised, and oddly cheated by the sudden revelation that she wasn’t the only master—or, for that matter, mistress—criminal out there. Somehow, somewhere, three other people had been caught and deemed so dangerous that they couldn’t risk the slightest chance of escape. Worse, the Empire considered these three other criminals to be her equal, and that seemed more than a little arrogant to her. Had any of these criminals managed to steal the Seven Keys to Salvation from the very hands of the Bishop of Marahad while he was unlocking the Vault of Holy Relics—and done so, no less, after having already robbed the Vault bare? Were any of these thieves wanted in seventeen systems, under eighteen aliases, for two hundred and thirty seven crimes? Did even one of these so called “evil geniuses” know how to disassemble every kind of security system in existence, while blindfolded, underwater, and being tickled on the soles of their feet? She most profoundly doubted it.

She stood up and marched over to the door of her cell, totally ignoring the prosecutor as he spoke of “crimes so audacious in their intent, design, and execution as to stagger the imagination”, and waved a hand frantically at the guards she knew to be there. She almost knocked, but remembered the stun field emanating from the walls at the last moment.

A voice crackled through the cell intercom. “Yes?”

She wanted to respond sweetly, but surprised herself by sounding indignant. “I want to enter in an objection.”

The intercom crackled again. “All objections will be handled by your lawyer; as a certified barrister, only he is allowed to directly speak to the court.”

Amanda looked back at the holo-projection, this time focusing on the young, earnest, utterly out of his league barrister sitting at the bench reserved for the defense counsel. She could have afforded something much better, but as a Class A criminal, she forfeited her right to private representation. Anyone she hired, after all, might be a confederate helping her plan her escape. Instead, she got a barrister assigned to her by random selection from the court-selected pool. “I see,” she said. “Then I’d like to assist my lawyer by pointing out an objection. The prosecutor is in error in his assertion that five Class A criminals have been prosecuted since the formation of the Empire. I’m the second, not the fifth.”

This time the voice behind the speaker sounded a bit smug. “You’re a bit behind the times, Krau Delacourt. It’s been a busy week for the Service.”

Amanda crossed her arms and glared at the small grille, aware that she probably looked like an idiot to anyone watching. “You can’t tell me that you’ve captured three other Class A criminals in the span of a week! That’s absurd! I don’t know how you found out about me, but I can’t believe that your source—whoever they are—also knew about three other legends of the criminal underworld and how to dig them up and put them away in that span of time.”

“You’re absolutely correct, Krau Delacourt,” and this time Amanda realized that the smugness wasn’t directed at her. This was serious smugness. This wasn’t just the ordinary, everyday, ‘I know something the prisoner doesn’t know and I’m putting her in her place as part of my daily prison routine' smugness. This was the ‘encode this whole week’s experiences onto a memory crystal and spend my off-hours reliving it in all its glorious detail every night for a year’ smugness. “We haven’t captured three other Class A prisoners this week. We’ve captured four other Class A prisoners this week. The biggest law-enforcement coup in centuries, and you’re lucky enough to be a part of it.”

Somewhere in her mind, Amanda had already made the connection, but her conscious mind simply refused to accept it. “Then the prosecutor’s still made an error,” she said, her voice suddenly brittle. “He said ‘five Class A criminals’, and you said you’d captured five this week. That makes six, counting—”

“Counting everyone we captured, Krau Delacourt,” the guard responded, and Amanda understood exactly where that smugness came from now. “We captured him as well. In fact, he was the easiest of the lot.” There was a moment’s pause. “Yes, I thought that would get your attention. He’s something of a legend to you scofflaws, isn’t he? The One That Got Away. Well, he’s not getting away this time. There’s a cell on Nirvana that’s been waiting for him for four hundred years—and it looks like there’s one for you as well. That’s the jury delivering their verdicts now.”

That Magic Feeling

Part of being a geek, at least my particular sub-species of geek, is the joy of neophilia. It's that moment when you find something that you've never seen, never heard, never read or played or experienced, but that fits perfectly into the spectrum of experiences you enjoy. It's that moment of infatuation, when you find a new TV show or a new movie or a new book that just clicks, fitting seamlessly into your imagination so that you drink it all in. That joy is almost as tangible as the joy of whatever it is you're watching/reading/playing, that feeling of, "Yes, I have found something new and wonderful to love and I want to share it with everyone!"

All of which is by way of introduction to saying, "LEVERAGE is awesome."

I've been aware of the series for a long time; I started reading John Rogers' blog, "Kung Fu Monkey", back in February of 2005 (when Warren Ellis, if I remember rightly, pointed people to it on his own blog.) So when he announced that he was doing a new TV series, that it would be called "Leverage", and that it would be a caper series about modern-day Robin Hoods robbing from corrupt corporations and giving back to their victims, I was interested.

But I work nights, I have little patience for commercials, and so it wasn't until the first season came out on DVD that I actually got the chance to sit down and watch it. (And watch it, and watch it..."Leverage" is one of the reasons this blog post is almost three days late.)

And it is everything a geek could want. Sharp, funny, action-packed, full of smart scams and high-tech sneakiness, and a quirky sense of humor that will delight geeks. (One episode manages to brilliantly work in not only a World of Warcraft reference, but also a Doctor Who gag so subtle that only fans will even notice its existence.) It fits perfectly into what I call "cult fiction", fiction that portrays the real world as crazier and more interesting than it actually is.

And it taps perfectly into the real-world zeitgeist; in a world where the health-care and insurance industries are actively trying to scuttle attempts to fix a broken system because it would cost them money, and banks are sucking up funds from the public trough while fighting government regulation as "unnecessary"...there's a strong sense that the world no longer works for people like us. It only works for the rich and powerful, people who can do anything and get away with it. When Nate Ford and his crew screw those people over, it feels like catharsis.

In short, LEVERAGE is awesome. But I think I said that already.

Heist, Part Eight

And we're back into "Heist", my abortive Doctor Who novel! I'd be interested in comments on whether you'd prefer Chapter Two all in one big chunk like Chapter One was, or alternated with non-Heisty posts to keep you from being glutted with narrative. (Those of you who would prefer I not post it at all, thank you but it's going to happen anyway.)

So with that, let's pick up Chapter Two!

Chapter Two
The Perfect Crime

As she woke up, her limbs still heavy and uncoordinated from the repeated stun bursts they’d subjected her to for prisoner transfer, Amanda looked at the cell around her with blurred vision. It was different from her old cell back on Tinaria; the security measures were a little grimmer, a little more primitive, and probably a little less effective. They had to be. This ship probably wasn’t used to transferring prisoners as—modesty aside—brilliant and resourceful as her. Still, she could see five stun projectors through the transparisteel door, each on a swiveling mount that would allow it to track anywhere in the room. The guards, secure in their booths, didn’t seem even interested in her. They had a perfect view of each of the six cells that formed half of the circular holding cell, and cybernetic control of those stun projectors. They only needed to watch her if she tried to escape.

She looked through the transparisteel walls (prisons loved transparisteel—all the benefits of glass, and none of the downsides) at her fellow prisoners, and in a flash, it all came back to her.

* * * * *

The days after her arrest had passed in a blur for Amanda Delacourt. The Monitors wasted no time in obtaining a warrant to search her modest house on Shantar, which in turn uncovered evidence of a dozen other major thefts that Amanda had participated in. What they called “evidence”, Amanda called “souvenirs”, but she understood that the Imperial Service to Monitor Criminal Intent wouldn’t take the distinction into account at her trial.

Even before her trial, though, the Monitors petitioned the Imperial Courts to classify her as a Class A criminal, one “whose escape would be of the greatest danger to the security and safety of the Empire and whose recapture would be unlikely if not impossible.” Amanda knew what that meant—Class A criminals had no civil rights under the Imperial Code, and any measure could be taken to prevent their escape. In a way, the distinction flattered her; only one other person had ever been assigned Class A status, and that was five hundred years ago. For Amanda to be the next, well…she knew from the moment they caught her that she would never be free again, but being caught after a life-time of criminal activity didn’t tarnish the reputation of a great thief. In fact, it enhanced it. The best thieves might be the ones who never got caught, but the most famous thieves were the ones who only got caught after a long, long career.

She almost looked forward to her trial.

They didn’t allow her to attend personally; as a Class A criminal, her right to stand before the court had been waived on the grounds that the logistics of prisoner transfer and the decreased (still substantial, but decreased) security requirements of the courtroom could give Amanda the opportunity to escape. Instead, they broadcast the trial to her cell. Three guards watched her watching her trial, part of a continual rotation that made sure she was observed personally as well as over cameras. She couldn’t see them, though; as a precaution against her learning details of her surroundings and using them to escape, the transparisteel was only clear from the outside. Paper clothing gave at least a token concession to modesty, although she’d briefly considered going naked rather than wear something so ugly. She sat on a force-field projection that served as furniture—they had already decided that giving her actual chairs was too dangerous—and smiled as the prosecutor began his opening statement, wishing she had popcorn to eat.

The Latter-Day Cronkite

As everyone probably already knows, television news icon Walter Cronkite died recently. He'd already been out of the public eye for quite some time, but death always adds the ultimate finality to someone's departure from events. So even though it's been a subject of comment from time to time for quite a while now, Cronkite's death really brought home to a lot of people the thought that there's nobody in news today who is as trusted (and as trustworthy) as Walter Cronkite. To a lot of people, his death brought an end even more final than his retirement to the idea that there's a person out there who can be trusted to tell the truth and not just his version of events.

But I was thinking about it (because, as I say, I heard it a lot for about a week or so...) And I'm just not sure it's true. I think there is someone out there who I trust implicitly to tell the truth to power, to give the facts free of bias and show the world as it really is, even when that truth makes us uncomfortable about ourselves. Someone who is, in short, the successor to Walter Cronkite as the most trusted man in America.

Jon Stewart.

I'm fully aware that it's a sad commentary on the state of modern journalism that the most trusted journalist in the field is a self-professed comedian who continually insists that he's not running a news show, but it's true. "The Daily Show" relies, for its comedy, on having an audience who knows what the real facts are so that they can laugh at the jokes about those real facts. Over the years, Stewart has gradually come to understand that if "The Daily Show" doesn't tell its viewers those facts, a lot of the time, nobody else will. This, in turn, has given him a strong sense of outrage at the sheer amount of misinformation, spin, and bias in modern news...and that honesty and outrage combine to be exactly what journalism needs right now. Someone who will act as their mirror and say, "No, this is the truth. What you're saying, right now? That's so wrong it's actually funny."

I think the turning point was his appearance on "Crossfire". That, I think, was when he came into his own as someone who was willing to turn to the self-inflated "experts" who were really just a couple of blowhards and say, "Does this even mean anything to you anymore? Is this just some sort of abstract game, Right vs. Left, that's kind of fun to bicker over? Do you even remember that real people have to live, suffer and sometimes die with the consequences of these decisions?" He literally shamed that show off the air. I think that was when he realized that while he was still a comedian, he had a higher calling than just telling jokes. The best comedians change us, and I think that was when he realized he could do that.

I think there are still things he can improve on. I think his interviews still tend to be a bit too deferential at times (although when he does go for the jugular, he can be absolutely mesmerizing.) But he is someone that I do trust, implicitly, not to bullshit me, even when he's saying things that are obviously jokes. He's someone I trust to tell the truth. That's what Cronkite was always known for.

Emergency Snark!

Apparently, Warner Brothers released "300: The Complete Experience" on Blu-Ray DVD yesterday.

Presumably, when you open the package, you're immediately murdered by Persian hordes.

Convention Stories: Foot-In-Mouth Disease

So I was reading Peter David's new collection of "But I Digress" columns, and he had a whole section set aside for his convention anecdotes--mostly positive, but he did mention a few times that he had to deal with fans that were rude, annoying, and just generally jerks. In fact, in one column, he asked the reader to do some soul-searching and ask themselves if they were one of the people who made personal appearances less enjoyable for the creators they supposedly idolized.

Generally, I think I come off pretty well in that regard. I try to be respectful of their privacy, to convey my sincere appreciation for their work (one of my happiest moments at a con was just getting a chance to shake Al Feldstein's hand and thank him for MAD Magazine's role in shaping my young mind), and in general, to spend my time with the pros listening to and enjoying their "performance" as a guest. But we all have our moments of utter stupidity...and mine actually happens to involve one Peter David.

He attended a local convention in the early 1990s, during the height of the 90s comics boom. (I think it was in the fall of 1993, judging from the comics that were out around then.) Now, this was during the "honeymoon period" of my Peter David fandom--I still enjoy his work, and his name on a book is enough to make me want to pick it up, but you know what it's like when you first discover a writer you like. This was during that, "can do no wrong, everything he writes is brilliant, even his bad novels/comics are good novels/comics" phase that I'm sure everyone's familiar with. (Like the Grant Morrison fans who actually liked 'Final Crisis'.)

So my first stop was at his table, to get my books signed and ask a few polite questions. Then I went to the panel he did, which was quite entertaining (I remember getting a free Marvel baseball cap for finding Waldo in the background of the first issue of "Hulk: Future Imperfect".) Then I browsed around the dealer's tables for a while.

Now remember, this is late 1993, the absolute height of the collector boom. Everyone was anticipating that every #1, every foil cover, every "special issue" was going to be a must-have collectible that would skyrocket in value. As a result, everyone over-ordered everything, and was left with tons of leftover copies. And of course, a quick way to get rid of those was to schlep them to conventions, mark them as "3 for a dollar", and count on the convention atmosphere to help sell.

So as I browsed around the dealer's tables, any time I found a cheap Peter David comic, I'd pick it up and go get it signed. Some of them were for me, to replace my existing copies. Some of them, I had signed for friends or family, since Christmas was coming up and I did, after all, have family members who were comics fans. The point is, I didn't really make a plan to do this, it was just an impromptu decision every time I saw a comic he'd written in the discount bins.

And about the fourth trip through the line, he obviously must have recognized me, because he said, with this very polite look of concern on his face, "You know, you can take up to three books at a time to be signed."

And I, cheerfully and thoughtlessly, said, "Oh, it's not that. I just keep finding your books in the--" At which point my brain caught up with my mouth, and I realized that very few authors would take it as a compliment if you suggested that their comics littered discount bins all over the convention.

Peter David raised an eyebrow at me, and said, "Yes?" in a tone that suggested he knew perfectly well how the sentence ended.

In a tiny voice, staring down at my shoes and hoping for the ground to swallow me whole, I said, "...three for a dollar bins."

At which point, I proceeded to babble about over-ordering, and how I knew it wasn't a reflection on his talent, and I felt lucky to get such a good deal on great comics, et cetera et cetera et cetera. He took it well, and I wasn't so ashamed that I couldn't attend his second panel, later that day. (He had the last slot of the day for that room, and kept the whole crowd so entertained that the hour-long panel ran something more like two and a half hours instead. And I think we'd have probably sat there for longer if he hadn't wound it down.)

So remember, industry legends...sometimes, we're not jerks. Sometimes, we're just plain stupid.

Heist, Part Seven

And this is the end of Chapter One, folks. I'll probably post something else between Chapters One and Two, just to satisfy the people who aren't into the story at all.

The safe was empty.

Amanda looked again.

The safe was still empty.

Immediately, Amanda turned around. Something had clearly gone very wrong, but the time and place to think about it was not in the vault where the safe had been emptied with 1.5 minutes before the guards showed up to ask her questions about the whereabouts of its contents, questions she couldn’t answer. She could think about all this later, when she was safely in her space-ship returning home.

That thought flickered and died in her mind when she saw seven flickers of light fade into seven olive-green individuals pointing seven very large rifles at her. She recognized the flickers as the tell-tale signs of mimetic camouflage suits deactivating. She hadn’t noticed them before because they’d been staying perfectly still—trained eyes could detect a person in mimetic camouflage when they moved by the flickers at the edge of the image-field, but when they stayed still, even the sharpest eye couldn’t spot them. These men must have been very bored.

These men must also have been placed here specifically to wait for her. Someone had set her up for this. One of about five people who had either suggested she go for the Styrax Medallion or who knew she had plans to go after the Medallion had tipped off the Imperial Monitors to her intentions, and they’d set up a trap for her. She realized that she’d been grassed.

The door at the end of the hallway opened, and Gavin Lloyd walked in still wearing his forest-green suit. He flashed an identity badge at her. “Krau Amanda Delacourt,” he said, the tone of earnest uncertainty in his voice at their last meeting replaced by a clipped formality, “I am required to hereby inform you that you are being placed in detainment for the following crimes: The attempted theft of the Styrax Medallion, in contravention of Tinarian Statute 1415.7B, the assault of an officer of a private security firm, in contravention of Tinarian Statute 2374.9A, the unauthorized entry into a private residence…”

Amanda let the charges wash over her; she knew they were meaningless. Enough to put her away for life, but she wasn’t really being arrested for attempting to steal the Styrax Medallion. She was being arrested for all the crimes they knew she’d committed but couldn’t pin on her; all the brilliant thefts she’d pulled but had never gotten caught in, all the tricks that had left the police baffled and angry. They could never prove it, but they knew it was her, and now that they’d caught her, they were never going to let her go. She’d spend the rest of her life in Nirvana for her crimes.

Amanda had occasionally wondered how she’d react if she got caught; she was confident enough to believe it wouldn’t happen, but it was nonetheless an interesting hypothetical question. Would she attempt to fight her way free, killing police in a daring bid for freedom? Would she die in a blaze of glory, forcing them to kill her rather than live a life in imprisonment? Would she perhaps break down in a fit of terror, once she realized that she couldn’t get away and that her crimes had caught up with her? She’d imagined all these scenarios from time to time. As Gavin finished reading off the list of charges and finished his formal arrest with the classic words she’d heard on so many police vids, “I must now take you into detainment until a fair and just trial may be convened,” she knew the only possible way to respond.

She smiled wickedly at him and held out her hands to be cuffed. As he walked over to her, pulling out a loop of flexisteel and wrapping it around her wrists, she grabbed his lapels and pulled him in close. The guards began to shout, cocking their weapons, but all she did was plant a long, slow, smouldering kiss right on her captor’s lips.

After a long moment, she let him go and said, “It’s a fair cop, guv.”

Heist, Part Six

And more...I know it seems like this isn't a Doctor Who story at all, but it is. Really.

After checking to make sure the guards were as unconscious as they seemed, Amanda walked down the short hallway towards the vault itself. She smiled gently at the lack of cameras; for someone so concerned with security, Dame Abigail had a major neurosis about being watched. Amanda remembered her drunken conversation with the architect (well, he’d been drunk, and he’d thought she was too) and his impression of Dame Abigail discussing the security measures.
“Oh, my goodness no,” he’d said, flapping his hands around to imitate the elderly woman. “All those black, creepy little eyes watching me and who knows what on the other end, looking at the monitors…no, no, we’ll have genuine people doing the watching. You know where you stand there.” Or in this case, Amanda thought, looking back at the guards, where you fall down and drool into the carpet.

Amanda stood in front of the vault door for a long moment, kneading a small ball of putty with her right hand, slowly and carefully folding it back over itself again and again until she was satisfied with it. Only then did she open the door to reveal the inner vault.

She looked across the ten-foot expanse of the room to the far wall, where the safe itself sat smugly, defying her to cross to it. Amanda knew that between her and that safe were three sets of motion detectors, a whole floor of pressure sensors, dozens upon dozens of light beams, and nano-machines designed to note anomalies in air-flow and pressure. If Amanda tripped even a single one of those security measures, a silent alarm would sound and within 1.5 minutes, a dozen guards would flood this passageway. Even the best thief in the galaxy couldn’t hope to avoid that much detection technology.

Of course, Amanda thought to herself as she walked briskly across the floor of the vault and yanked open the safe door, 1.5 minutes can be a very long time.

* * * * *

Amanda knew what was supposed to happen at that point.

She’d mixed the debris from the keypad into the putty, after first running it through a genetic filter. The filter had sorted out the random bits of dust, pollen, and other contaminants, finding only those bits of dead skin which belonged to one Dame Abigail Marsten, a frequent user of the keypad. It had then spit those back out, allowing her to mix up a putty which would contain a relatively large amount of Dame Abigail’s genetic material, fooling the sensors on the safe’s computerized lock and allowing her to open the door of the safe as easily as one opened a screen door.

From there, Amanda was supposed to grab the Styrax Medallion and sprint back down the hallway. By the time her 1.5 minute window had passed, she should have gotten three rooms and one floor away from the scene of the crime. The guards, not understanding that the safe itself had been burgled already and expecting a thief to still be working very hard to crack an uncrackable safe, would head to the vault first. By the time they got in and absorbed the psychological shock of the safe being both open and empty, Amanda would have been ten rooms and two floors away, and already signaling her getaway craft. Guards on the grounds would notice a ship flying up to a third-story window and someone leaping out into it, but wouldn’t be able to act fast enough to prevent Amanda’s escape. She would fly past the still-blind defense systems, jet out into the spaceways of the Tinarian Empire, and proceed to her fence. The Medallion would fetch large sums of money, which she’d donate to some suitably deserving charity. Two weeks later, she’d be planning her next caper.

That was what was supposed to happen.

* * * * *

Heist, Part Five

Apologies for the lack of a Thursday post (and the lateness of this "Monday" post)...I was at CONvergence over the Fourth of July weekend, and even though I'm local to the Twin Cities, the transition from "nothing to do, I'll have plenty of time to post" to "OMG, I am swamped with fun things to do and can't get anywhere near my computer" was too abrupt for me to even notice it. Now that I'm back in gear, though, we'll continue...

Fending off three more requests to dance and finishing her glass of champagne along the way, Amanda made her way through the ballroom and slipped through a side exit. It should have been locked, but one of the reasons she’d chosen to do this during the party was the sure and certain knowledge that a lot of bored aristos and their teenage offspring, trapped together at one of Dame Abigail Marsten’s parties, would find ways to slip off into the rest of the house to have sex. Sooner or later, all the locked doors would get unlocked, including this one that led down into the high-security areas of the mansion. She walked down a gallery of statues, politely ignoring the muffled moans that came from the alcoves, and headed towards an unassuming door with a keypad next to the handle.

The keypad wouldn’t pose more than a moment’s work to hack into—pass-code reliant systems rarely did, since the designers built them keeping in mind that ten-digit security codes needed to be recalled and inputted precisely by human beings who ran on two pounds of fatty tissues and water and could sometimes barely remember where they kept their shoes. The weak link in any secure system always came down to the human beings who had to use it, and this system was no exception. So, secure in the knowledge that she’d have no trouble hacking it, Amanda paused for almost a full five minutes to gently and cautiously clean every inch of the keypad. Only when she had removed every single piece of debris, no matter how microscopic, with tools designed for the express purpose of doing so, did she then deign to crack the ten-digit security code with a soldering iron and a few moments of deft work.

As she put the soldering iron away, the door hissed open to reveal two security guards whose facial expressions rapidly flickered through bored to startled before firming up into an angry boredom on seeing some high-class tart trying to head into a restricted area. They headed towards her angrily. “Hey, lady,” one said, in the same tones he’d used on two other bored, over-intelligent curiosity seekers tonight, “you can’t come in here. It’s a restricted.”

He didn’t exactly finish his sentence there; instead, he touched his hand to his cheek, plucking out the dart that was the cause of the brief stinging sensation that caused him to stop speaking. His head turned towards the other guard to see if he’d felt the same thing, but he had difficulty in seeing his partner through closed eyelids and the falling sensation made it difficult to concentrate, and…

Neither guard even felt the impact of hitting the floor. Amanda smiled, folded up her blowgun, and replaced it in her pouch. She could have gotten rid of them some other way. Dame Abigail didn’t scan for high-tech equipment the way some other places Amanda’d had to break into in the past, and she could probably have used a stun-gun. Not to mention, they seemed to be dim-witted enough that she could probably have gotten to within hand-to-hand range before they drew their guns. But it was always a good idea to keep in practice with the darts. Technology definitely had its places, but sometimes people kept a watch out for that sort of thing. A hollow tube and a dart, though, could be concealed virtually anywhere, tripped no sensors, could be disguised as any number of other pieces of equipment, and with the right toxins, could be relied upon to take out a person just as efficiently and silently as any sort of stun beam you care to name. All that was required was a bit of skill and practice, something Amanda had spent years honing.

Heist, Part Four

And the saga continues...we're still quite a ways out from the Doctor's involvement, so I hope you're not reading this waiting for him to show up...

Idly, as she headed out of the maze of darkened hallways and into the well-lit ballroom where Dame Abigail was holding her latest party, she wondered if her industrialist friend might not be here tonight. She snatched up a glass of champagne from a passing hover-tray without breaking stride, sashaying casually through the knots of guests. It was a risk; after all, when one stole from high society for a living, it did make parties a bit more high-risk than one usually considered. The Duke of Sarabeth, over there, still had a four-million diam reward on her head for the theft of his wife’s necklace, and if he knew what she looked like, Amanda was sure he wouldn’t spare decorum in tackling her right into the hors d’ouvres. The Baroness Alexandra Winter, on the other hand, served as the final destination for many of the items she stole, and Amanda smirked lightly to see that she was wearing the Sarabeth family jewels. The woman had style, even if she was a ruthless, amoral, possibly actively immoral, cruel, vicious aristo bitch. Fabulously rich, though, and able to afford the things Amanda stole…and since Amanda had long ago amassed enough personal wealth to be able to donate the proceeds of her thefts to charity, she felt no misgivings in dealing with the woman. In fact, Amanda thought, you could almost think of it as noble, if you were genuinely self-deluded and didn’t want to admit that you stole things for fun. She raised her champagne glass to Winter in an impromptu toast, but wasn’t surprised that the Baroness didn’t respond.

A young man in a forest-green suit who’d tinted his eyes and hair to match walked up to her, hand extended. “Would Madam like to dance?” he asked, smiling to reveal a line of perfect teeth.

Amanda blinked once, consulting her HUD chronometer. She still had three hours before her computer virus expired and the security satellites around the planet began noticing little things like her space-ship in geostationary orbit; that was plenty of time for a quick waltz with a handsome young man. “Why not,” she said, taking his hand in one of hers while keeping a grip on her champagne with the other. A small fleet of sonic generators hovered around them and began resonating with each other, creating a small field of perfect dance music that wouldn’t disturb anyone outside of their tiny little universe of noise. Amanda smiled, and began to waltz.

Over the music, the man said, “My name is Gavin. Gavin Lloyd. I’m here as a guest of the Duchess of Westchire, but to tell the truth, I’m feeling a bit low-born—I’m new money, made it all in computers. And you are…?”

Amanda smiled. Gavin danced quite well. “What kind of a mystery woman would I be if I told you my name?”

He grinned back. “The kind I could call tomorrow and invite to a better party.”

“I’ll have to hand you my slipper,” she said. “Mind you, we’re not anywhere near midnight yet, so we’ll get to finish the dance before I turn into a pumpkin.”

Gavin laughed at that one, and the two continued to dance in their own little world, while all around them dozens of others moved to their own beats. It was almost a metaphor for the universe, Amanda thought, excepting that nobody was bumping into each other and getting violent. For just a moment, she let herself forget why she was there, just enjoying the music, the dance, and the company.

As the dance finally ended, she curtseyed to Gavin, who said, “Another, perhaps?”

She shook her head, careful to make it seem regretful. “I do have to keep moving,” she said. “This is as much business for me as pleasure, and I’m afraid I can’t let one person, even a charming one, monopolize my time.”

He frowned. “Will I see you later, then?”

She touched his cheek. “Maybe. If you’re good.” With a last, dazzling smile, she turned and headed off. A good job, that; she could turn up somewhere else ‘by accident’ a few weeks from now, and be almost guaranteed entry to his house. Always assuming he had anything tasteful, of course; new money tended towards the garish. Old money did too, come to that, but at least they’d had generations to build up a few nice pieces.

Heist, Part Three

Impressively, I manage to be late posting an entry I didn't have to write...

The door gently slid open and Amanda stepped inside. Almost immediately, she dropped into a crouch just as two massive arms closed around the space where she’d just been. She lashed out with a sweep kick, dropping the guard onto his back, then stood up and planted a foot solidly between his legs. Of course, she thought as he curled up into a fetal ball, the truly successful criminals were the ones who understood that, while violence wasn’t the preferred option, it was nonetheless one of the ones available to them.

She knew that the patrols here worked in pairs, which kept her from being surprised when the second guard showed up. He came in a bit more cautiously than his partner, knowing that not only did he not have the advantage of surprise, but that his partner had and look what had happened to him. Amanda risked the slightest of glances downward at her wrist to ensure that the red light on her wrist-band still blinked steadily; after doing so, and knowing that the guard’s comlink remained jammed, she locked her eyes back on the guard and prepared for his initial assault.

He started out by throwing a round-house kick at her, almost immediately betraying his fighting style as one of the old Earth karate variants; she ducked under it easily and closed in, wanting to get too close for him to try another kick. She’d heard the tell-tale humming of a kinetic enhancer as his foot passed by her head—that meant that a single well-placed blow on his part could probably take her head clean off her shoulders and send it a good fifteen feet down the hallway…or embed it in a wall, depending on the direction she was facing.

The guard used the momentum of his kick to spin himself in a full circle, so that by the time she’d closed in with her he was facing her again. He punched straight out at her head, but this time she was ready for the blow; she grabbed his arm and used his momentum to throw him to the floor. He leapt to his feet, only slightly winded, but before he could turn to face her again, she’d grabbed his shoulder and put him in a joint lock. As always, her mind returned to the time she’d learnt that hold, her sifu putting her in it by way of demonstration.

“You see,” Sifu’d said, her voice like old leather, “how the lock forces you to put your weight evenly on both feet. Try to lift one to kick back at me, and you either lift the shoulder too high causing pain, or too low causing pain. You cannot turn, or you will dislocate it, and—“ Her reverie was interrupted by the popping sound of the guard dislocating his own shoulder. She winced. He’d done exactly what she’d done the first time Sifu had used the hold on her, and with exactly the same result.

With a quick shove, she sent the dazed guard sprawling forward into the transparisteel barrier, after which he slumped forward to the ground. She didn’t know if he was actually unconscious or simply considering discretion to be the better part of valor, but she didn’t much care either. She headed purposefully down the hallway, preparing herself for the most enjoyable part of her little caper. She pulled out a gem-studded brooch and placed it just over her heart, where it affixed itself to her dark grey cat-suit. Amanda pressed one of the gems on the image-bender, activated the holographic evening gown, and prepared to mingle.

The image-bender was unique among the items she’d assembled for the evening’s activities, in that it was the only device she hadn’t obtained herself. It was a gift from an admirer, some boring industrialist from the Dival Nebula with a bull neck and a hairy back, who insisted that the sea-blue gown would bring out the blue in her eyes. Oddly enough, he’d been right—the holographic gown had looked perfect on her, right down to the way the back was cut low enough that her hair didn’t brush through the holographic field. Not that it mattered tonight—she was wearing it in a bun. Blonde hair might look beautiful, but she didn’t intend on giving anyone anything to grab. Even so, she was proud of the way she looked in the holo-gown, and a little surprised at the taste of what was otherwise an odious little squat of a man—so surprised that she briefly considered not robbing him of his priceless sculpture and leaving him tied to the bed wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts that said, “Love Machine—Grab Handle To Activate”. But then, on thinking about it, she realized that fashion comes and goes, but that kind of opportunity can only come along once in a lifetime.

Heist, Part Two

Picking up where we left off, as cat burglar Amanda Delacourt plans her latest caper...

She pulled out a heavy black glove and pressed her hand up against the surface of the wall; it sizzled and popped slightly as she touched it, but the insulation protected her from the lethal current running through micro-filament wires baked into the red brick. She rolled her eyes heavenward—or, more precisely, she rolled her eyes up towards the expanse of space above the small planetoid, which Dame Abigail Marsten had bought and gotten towed into a custom orbit around an otherwise barren solar system, then expensively terraformed for the express purpose of holding parties at. It almost made Amanda want to laugh. She went to all the expense of making a planet of her very own, she had more money than the total GNP of some entire solar systems, she was obsessed with holding onto her valuables to the point of spending astronomical sums to keep them, and the best she could do was a glorified electric fence? It was an insult, that’s what it was. Amanda applied a slight amount of pressure to the ring finger of the glove, activating a feedback surge that blew out the generator supplying power to the wall. Clearly, Dame Abigail deserved to lose the Styrax Medallion.

Which wasn’t to say that Amanda deserved to have it. As she pulled off the feedback gauntlet and slipped on a pair of gravity induction gloves, she admitted freely to herself that she didn’t even want the silly thing. A lump of pure gold the size of a clenched fist, studded with rare gems around the periphery and a diamond the size of an eyeball at the center—really, who would want something like that? No, she was in this simply for the challenge. She wanted to steal it, she thought proudly as she climbed effortlessly up the wall, simply to prove that it could be stolen. She reached the top of the wall and swung herself up onto it, then checked to see if her breathing filters were in place. Having done so, she dropped a small glass phial to the ground. It shattered, releasing a nano-atomically engineered chemical essence derived from hot peppers; the chemical, on releasing, immediately began spreading to cover the widest possible area in search of living beings, just as it was programmed to do. Dogs…honestly, what did they think she was, an amateur?

Amanda walked briskly through the grounds, ignoring the occasional strangled yelp of a German Shepard and the not entirely dissimilar yelp of a human being who’d gotten sentient pepper spray up his nose, and headed to a set of sliding glass doors in the west wing of the mansion. They weren’t actually glass, of course—Dame Abigail had spent far too much on security to put glass in her glass doors. No, these doors were made of transparisteel, specially hardened and able to resist .50 calibre machine-gun fire. Amanda knew just by looking at them that she wouldn’t be able to force her way in.

Luckily, she wasn’t interested in trying. As she kneeled down by the lock and pulled out a set of micro-manipulators, she mused on the common assumption among the law-abiding; they always seemed to think, for some impenetrable reason, that the successful criminal was some sort of jumped-up thug with a crowbar and big arm muscles who liked to smash things. Whereas in fact, that description fit far better the unsuccessful criminal, the kind who got caught because breaking glass and twisting metal always made loud, attention-attracting sounds. Successful criminals, she thought modestly, like the one currently and gently convincing the tiny computer in the locking mechanism that emergency evacuation protocols had been enacted and the door needed to unlock itself so that the inhabitants could leave, were the sort who weren’t violent at all, and finessed their way into things.

Heist, Part One

By way of introduction:

Some time ago, back when the Doctor Who novels were still accepting submissions from unpublished authors, I came up with an idea for a Doctor Who novel featuring the Seventh Doctor and Ace, where they assembled a group of criminals a la "Ocean's Eleven" for a grand theft of an expensive jewel that also happened to be the computer core of a fleet of invincible battleships. The range editor, Justin Richards, liked the idea...but unfortunately not quite enough to commission it. He did encourage me to submit something else, though. At that point, with what I have to consider to be perfect timing, the entire range collapsed due to the prominence of the new series, and novels set in the "classic" Doctor Who timeline ceased to be. Oh, and they decided that the new series novels would exclusively use authors who'd written for the range before.

But I've still got the two sample chapters I wrote and the synopsis, just sitting there on my hard drive. And here I've got a blog that's always starved for content. So, for the next few "until it's dones", allow me to entertain you with a serialized version of "Heist", an adventure for the Seventh Doctor and Ace!

(Um, they don't show up until Chapter Two. Just to warn you.)

Chapter One

To Catch a Thief

The safe itself had pressure-sensitive plates that measured the weight of its contents, instantly setting off dozens of alarms if the balance of its weight changed in any way. The computerized lock on the safe responded only to the genetic code of its authorized operator, and any attempt to open it by unauthorized users fused the lock into a solid mass of metal. This left force as the only option for a potential thief, and given that the material of the safe was composed of pure styronium, a metal whose melting point could only be reached by the heart of a star, it seemed like the one-billion-diam insurance policy that came with each safe would remain safely in the pockets of its manufacturers.

The room in which the safe was located, in turn, had a number of security measures of its own, all of which triggered more alarms; three separate and redundant sets of motion detectors, each with its own internal power supply, more pressure sensors on the floor, electric eye laser grids, and a web of nano-machines that prowled the room, constantly in Brownian motion and looking for anything out of the ordinary.

Outside of the room, one encountered two guards; after all, computers had their advantages, but the living brain still beat it in some highly specialized areas and as a further redundant system, it helped the owner of the contents of the safe sleep at night. They patrolled the hallway leading to the room, which had a lock of its own with a numerical keypad that accepted a ten-digit code, thus presenting the hypothetical thief with a further ten billion possible errors to make in their quest for ill-gotten gains.

The hallway, in turn, was part of a house whose entrances and exits all contained security devices of their own, and which had guards patrolling the different floors. A private security firm that catered to the very rich employed the guards for their ability to seem reassuring and non-threatening to their clients, while at the same time remaining highly capable of dealing with intruders through a number of options, up to and including lethal force.

They also employed them to handle boredom very well, because any potential intruder would have to have gotten through the grounds before getting to the secured entrances to get to the guards inside the house, and the guards patrolling the grounds would take care of them. Even if they didn’t notice anything—after all, the grounds were quite vast—the owners had twenty-seven German Shepards, imported at vast expense from ancient Earth. They weren’t even clones; these dogs had actually been bred from the original ancestral beasts that had guarded humanity before they made their leap to the stars. Their owner could sell any one of them to buy a small continent, but preferred the reassurance that came from their excited barking when they happened upon an intruder.

Of course, that intruder would first have to scale the three-meter wall that surrounded the entire estate, keeping everything inside in, and more importantly, keeping everything outside out. The owner, a sweet old lady who’d inherited a vast munitions fortune, considered all this a small price to pay for knowing that she and her belongings were safe.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, thought Amanda Delacourt, professional cat burglar, as she went over her selection of tools one last time. The dogs were a nice touch, though. Very quaint.

Dream Movie of the Week

So my stack of unread books is now finally down to the point where I can see it all (it's actually an entire bookcase, and I'm proud to say that I've read through enough that it's no longer stacked two deep on every shelf.) This means that I can now read some of those series that have been sitting in the stack for a while, since I can now find every book in the series instead of going, "OK, there's Book Two, Book Four, and Book Seven...Books One, Three, Five and Six must be in the back somewhere."

So I'm now reading the "Phule" series, by Robert Asprin. The first book, "Phule's Company", is an old favorite of mine, I enjoyed the second and the third books, but after that it got away from me a bit and I'm just now getting back to them. As a result, I'm starting by re-reading the ones I've read already to refresh my memory. They hold up pretty well on re-reading so far--it's always a danger, going back to old favorites, that you might find that you've outgrown the book (the Narnia books, for example, just didn't seem the same to me at thirty-three as they did at five.) But I'm still enjoying Asprin's characters, and aside from noticing that the book does make a hero out of a wealthy playboy with dubious business ethics and finding some unintentional humor in Asprin's description of a futuristic "Port-A-Brain" that apparently costs as much as a small company but does about what a Blackberry does today, I'm having just as much fun as I ever did.

And halfway through the book, it hit me. For the first time, I know exactly who should play Willard Phule in the movie version of this.

David Tennant.

He's absolutely perfect. He's the right age (actually maybe a little older than the character, but actors play younger than their real age all the time.) He's physically perfect for the part--Phule is described as tall and lanky. And he's got the right attitude for the part--Phule is constantly described as filled with energy, constantly pacing and moving and jumping from thought to thought as fast as he can and expecting everyone else to keep up. Sound familiar?

He can even fence. (A must for the part, if you've ever read the first book.)

So there, that's casting underway. Now, I just need a script. And money. And the film rights to the book. And a director. And the rest of the cast. And locations, props, costumes...

Entertainment News #3

BILLY JOEL ARRESTED FOR ARSON

POP STAR OFFERS CONFUSED, INCOHERENT DENIAL

Singer and songwriter Billy Joel was arrested today on suspicion of arson, after being found near the scene of a three-alarm fire by police officer Sergeant Thomas O'Leary. O'Leary was off-duty at the time, heading to a second job as a bartender at "Mister Cacciatore's", a popular local establishment, but nonetheless made the arrest.

Police claim that when questioned about the incident, Joel offered a confused and incoherent "alibi" that amounted to little more than a string of names of people and places, many of whom were deceased at the time of the fire and a few of which were fictional. The four and a half minute long statement seemed to imply, at points, that he was with "Davy Crockett, Peter Pan, (and) Elvis Presley" at "Disneyland", but contradicted itself with his later claim that he was with "(Menachim) Begin (and Ronald) Reagan" in "Palestine."

One thing that Joel maintained steadfastly throughout the stream-of-consciousness statement was his innocence of the crime that police accused him of. Frequently and repeatedly, he insisted that "we didn't start the fire, it was always burning since the world's been turning" (police are now searching for co-conspirators based on Joel's unintentional use of the word "we".) He further claimed to be trying to fight the blaze when police found him.

Ironically, while attempting to clear his name of arson charges, Joel seemed to confess to a crime he almost certainly didn't commit--at one point, he cocked his thumb and forefinger into a gun and said, simply, "JFK, blown away--what else do I have to say?" Police point out that the singer would have been fourteen at the time of the Kennedy assassinations, and would have had no way to get from New York City to Dallas for the shooting.

At this point, the next stage in the legal process remains unclear. Joel has been released on bail, but his press conference consisted solely of him insisting again and again, frequently in a high-pitched voice, that he was "an innocent man." His lawyers have not declared yet whether they intend to use an insanity defense, even though Joel has stated publicly on his leaving the courtroom that "you may be right, I may be crazy, but I just may be the lunatic you're looking for" (an incriminating statement that may make it difficult to find an unbiased jury.)

One thing is certain; if convicted, the legal system has made it clear that they intend to seek the maximum sentence for his crimes. It seems that the New York City penal system intends, if possible, to hold him for the longest time.

Personal Favorites: Hawk and Dove #4

Feeling a bit uninspired today (more from lack of sleep than any sort of ennui), so I figured I'd take it easy while wallowing in nostalgia with another reminiscence of a personal favorite comic. Someday, these will include things other than comics, by the way. It's just that when I thought about cool moments that always bring a smile to my face, Hawk and Dove #4 (written by Karl and Barbara Kesel, penciled by Greg Guler, inked by Scott Hanna) is perennially high on the list.

It's a charming, light-hearted, self-contained comic, the kind that DC doesn't really do a great job of publishing anymore in its "mainstream" universe. Hawk and Dove come up against a group of bank robbers calling themselves "The Untouchables", because a) they dress up like 1920s gangsters and use tommy-guns, and b) they have devices in their belt buckles that let them become intangible. Because of this, robbing banks is ludicrously easy, even when super-heroes get involved (it's made pretty clear that the gang robs more for the thrill than the money.)

Hawk gets annoyed by the way the gang humiliates the duo with the ease of their escapes, and decides to track them down. He comes up with a clever plan (a rarity for Hawk--he's not stupid, but he's impulsive and direct and tends to like the simplicity of the frontal attack.) To wit, he looks up information on old speak-easies from the Prohibition era, and goes to each one attempting to change into his super-heroic identity (something they can only do when danger threatens.) When he suddenly finds himself transforming outside of a boarded-up building, he suspects supervillainy. He calls Dove and gets her out there to whomp some bad guy butt.

With the advantage of surprise on their side, the duo easily take out most of the gang. Only one of them even has the chance to put on her belt and grab her gun. Still, that's one woman with a machine gun against two heroes who aren't bullet-proof. She sprays machine-gun fire all over the warehouse in a lethal burst. While Dove distracts her by providing a convenient target, Hawk rips the belt off, leading to the awesome moment that gives me a warm, happy glow remembering it even now, twenty years later.

"You should have taken the gun!" the mock-gangster shouts, drawing a bead on Dove. Dove just stands there, fixing the woman with a cold stare.

"I can think of fourteen ways to keep you from firing that gun," she says. "Six are painful. Face facts. It's broad daylight, you can't turn intangible, in order to get out of here, you have to get past Hawk and me, and your gun is empty." Dove smirks. "You did know that, right? No bullets? I've been counting." (Because unlike the simple, direct Hawk, Dove develops super-perception and insight on how to use her environment tactically and strategically. She becomes, in essence, a master planner when she changes.)

There's a certain brilliant, quiet simplicity to a single-issue story with great dialogue and stellar art. You don't need game-changing metastories, epic world-shattering events, or shocking deaths. All you need is a good idea, well executed. And this issue had that in spades.

Dang, I miss that series.

Cinematic Titanic: The Story So Far

It occurs to me that I really haven't talked much about Cinematic Titanic, one of the two heirs to the legacy of the late great "Mystery Science Theater 3000", since I reviewed their debut release. This is somewhat unfair, because a) my initial review focused more on "things they could improve" than talking about the episode, and b) they've had six more DVDs out since then, and they deserve all the publicity they can get for them. (Yes, the eight people following my blog will no doubt be the source of tremendous additional revenue, assuming they don't just skim this and say, "Damn. Not a Storytelling Engines entry. Oh, well, maybe next week...")

So, here are my thoughts, in the form of quick capsule reviews, on how the series is doing with seven releases under its belt.

The Oozing Skull: Again, it's their first release, and you can see where there's room to improve, but this one holds up quite well on re-watching. 70s horror always seems to be a goldmine for movie riffing goodness, and this one is definitely 70s-riffic. ("Feel free to turn on the 8-track. That's 'Frampton Comes Alive'!" "Nehru's right! This stuff is really comfortable!")

Doomsday Machine: I still feel like this is probably their best movie to date, although "Legacy of Blood" comes in a close second. The movie is absolutely insane (I guarantee you, your jaw will drop in confusion when you get to the double-twist ending...the second twist came about because they ran out of money and had to fire all the actors...) the riffing is great ("Want some Ben and Jerry's? It's Nuclear Choco-caust!") and the sketches are terrific. I adore the one where Mary Jo is trying to discuss who should live and who should die in the event of apocalypse. (MJ: "Naturally, as a woman, I would be in the living group--" Frank: "You're going to have kids?" MJ: "Hell, no!" Frank: "Well, then, get back in line, sister!") And best of all, this one is where they start doing the pre-movie sketches. I've looked forward to every single one of these little skits, as the group discusses conditions in the bunker where they toil tirelessly to preserve bad movies for future generations, and I think they're a wonderful and welcome addition to the show.

The Wasp Woman: It's a Corman movie, so it drags a little, but there's one bit where Trace riffs over an extended montage that is worth the price of the DVD all by itself. I also never get tired of Joel's cute animal voice when the mad scientist is injecting the guinea pigs with his youth serum. ("I swear, it's like kissing God!") The line is funny, but it's Joel's delivery that makes it kill. This is, unfortunately, the point where they go down to two sketches an episode instead of three--I'm still hoping they'll get that number back up in future releases. (Plus, the sketches are a little weak, but I admire their self-awareness on that point. "And now, for one of the most beloved features on Cinematic Titanic--" "You don't read the Internet much, do you, Frank?")

Legacy of Blood: This one is also a 70s classic, featuring the late, legendary John Carradine as the patriarch of a dysfunctional family who come together for his funeral. Unsurprisingly, he's got a will conducive to murder ("Dad was watching a lot of Scooby-Doo before he died.") This one is an absolute riffer's paradise; plenty of bizarre dialogue, oddly-staged scenes, and goofy-looking characters ("Body by Charles Atlas. Head by Mel Brooks.") to make it absolutely soar. Even the lowered sketch count doesn't hurt it. Great, great stuff.

(I should also note that this was when I stopped getting the DVDs sent to me and went to their "download to burn" option, which lets you make the DVD yourself. I highly recommend this if you have a DVD burner and a Windows computer; the software is smooth and user-friendly, the whole thing takes just a few hours, and you wind up with a DVD that you can pop right into your DVD player and watch like normal. And you save about five bucks. As much as I like the case art on the first three releases, it's not really worth five dollars to me.)

Santa Claus Conquers the Martians: This one was a bit controversial, since they already did the movie on MST3K, but they do a good job with it (I showed a friend both versions, and he preferred the newer one.) They show the movie uncut, so you do get jokes on a few sequences that weren't in the MST3K edition ("If you haven't seen Dumbledore's cabaret act, you haven't lived.") And, of course, they use a prop version of the TARDIS in the sketch (cutting down the sketches yet further is unfortunate, though.) Oh, and the pre-movie sequence has a dynamite gag involving Trace's reaction on finding out what movie they're watching.

Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks: This is one of their weaker releases, to be honest; mostly it's because the movie is so badly-dubbed (it's originally Italian) that you can't get past the terrible voice work to the rest of the movie. The crew tries their best, and there are some good lines about the bad dubbing ("Now, let's go get a lozenge together!") but it's not their best.

Blood of the Vampires: But they rally magnificently with this Filipino vampire movie set in Mexico ("It's not a good sign when English is your movie's third language.") This one has more bad dubbing, but not distractingly bad, and it's also got bizarre vampire behavior, kinky relationships ("It's going to be awful hard to spice up the marriage a few years down the line when you start off with a Master/slave blood covenant.") and the eye-poppingly racist spectacle of actual actors in blackface...and this was made in the 70s, just to clarify. ("Back in the old days, everyone had an actual vaudeville actor sleeping at the foot of their bed!") Still low on sketches, but the riffing is great.

So of the seven releases, I'd say there are four excellent films ("Doomsday Machine", "Legacy of Blood", "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians", and "Blood of the Vampires"), two solid hits ("The Oozing Skull", "The Wasp Woman"), and one slight underperformer ("Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks".) All in all, a pretty good track record, even considering that these guys are all polished performers with a lot of work behind them. Oh, and direct download is definitely the way to go, if you have the equipment for it.

The Evil That Demi-Humans Do

So, yes, I've officially sunk so low that I'm willing to tell my old gaming stories on my blog. Let's consider this a test, to see whether all gaming stories are really just "you kind of had to be there" shaggy dog stories, or just the vast majority of them.

This one isn't actually about me (which is, I think, a +1 on the "general entertainment" scale...any gamer will tell you that the worst nightmare is to be stuck sitting next to someone whose every utterance is about how tough their imaginary self is.) It's about a game I was in, though, where we were helping the rightful Emperor regain his throne from a secret cabal of evil mages who feared the Emperor because he was immune to magic. It was our job to foil these evil schemers and restore the Emperor to power!

Until we, um, killed him.

See, we'd found a few magical items on our travels (like you do), and one of them was a "castle in a bottle"--it was a bottle, about the size of a backpack, with a castle inside it. You put on a ring, you got teleported inside the castle in the bottle, and you shrank so that the castle was full-scale to you. Fairly straightforward magical item.

Well, one of the players, Amanda, was getting on everyone's nerves (in a good way--she was a fun person playing an obnoxious character, not an obnoxious person driving the rest of the group up the wall), and someone got the bright idea of sticking her in the bottle. So they grabbed her, put on the ring, let her go, and took off the ring. Bingo, she's in the castle and can't get out until we let her out.

But she's a mage in her own right (not an evil cabal mage, just a mage.) She decides she's not putting up with that, and casts "dispel magic" on the bottle. She actually succeeds, temporarily dispelling the magic that makes the castle small. Suddenly, the entire party is hit with what the GM charmingly describes as a "+1/+1 castle."

Most of us survive. (I was reduced to single-digit hit points, but I survived.) The Emperor? Turns out immunity to magic is great, but immunity to rapidly-approaching stone walls would be handier.

So now our quest is to destroy the cabal of mages and find a new Emperor. Amanda's character is still around, mainly because the gods themselves appeared to us and told us that she has to take part in the divine task of finding the godly-anointed Emperor, and killing her would be met with a little high-quality smiting. Which, fair enough, most of the people who died were NPCs, and the motto of our gaming group was always "NPCs are like tropical fish. They're pretty to look at, but don't get too attached to them." (I should put that on a T-shirt.)

But another member of our group, Joe, was not the "forgive and forget" type. He decided to find a way to bump off Amanda that would be non-smite-inducing. He decided to do a little research on the castle while everyone else was asleep, putting on the ring and taking it off over and over again while walking away from the castle (which had returned to the bottle once the effects of the "dispel magic" spell wore off--it's a powerful magical item, you don't just dispel them with a wave of your hand), and he figured out the exact range of the teleportation spell.

How is this fatal? Well, for the final battle against the cabal, we'd obtained a powerful, destructive magical item...sort of like a nuke, except that it turned stuff to stone instead of just blowing it up. The problem was, it was activated by holding it and speaking a command word. So the user had a tendency to get turned to stone, as well. But good old helpful Joe came up with a plan. "Amanda, we'll fly far overhead with the castle. You take the item, and we'll drop you. Then, you speak the command word, let go of the item and put on the ring, and zap! You'll be teleported back to the castle and perfect safety."

And so Amanda dropped out of the sky towards dozens of evil mages, spoke the command word, put on the ring...and nothing happened. Until, that is, she was turned to stone, hit with just about every destructive spell in the Player's Handbook, and then fell onto the ground and shattered into a million pieces.

Because you really, really didn't want to mess with Joe.

From the Comic Book Urban Dictionary

chutzpah (huts-paw): noun. Taking three comics that were so drastically overhyped that just about every comics fan in the world at the time bought a copy, and so drastically overprinted that even now, sixteen years later, they're still available in discount bins at comics stores all over the United States, reprinting them with ten pages of additional material, calling the whole thing "X-Men Forever Alpha", and charging eight bucks for it.

Who Doesn't Want To Be A Superhero?

Not that I've ever seen the show, but I do know about Stan Lee's surreal reality series wherein people try their best to act like real-life superheroes and convince Stan that they've got the chops to save the world (or, at least, get their own comic book where they pretend to save the world.) But really, on thinking about it, is there a single superhero out there you'd actually want to be?

Sure, having the powers would be neat. I'd love to have Batman's martial arts skills, his deductive genius, his neat gadgets. But you know what I wouldn't love? Getting shot at every night, and never being able to get past the tragic deaths of my parents at an early age. Sure, it sounds awesome to be Superman, until you remember that his whole species was wiped out the day he was born (wow, that's got to be one downer of a birthday celebration. "Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me, happy birthday to the lone survivor of a cosmic genocide, happy birthday to me!") And let's not even start to get into what it might be like to be Spider-Man. Even Aquaman has a sucky life, and he doesn't even have the awesome powers to make up for it! (Although, to be brutally honest, it would be kind of sweet to be able to swim without needing to hold your breath, and talk to the dolphins and hang out with giant squids and stuff.)

On thinking about it, I'm actually hard-pressed to name a single superhero I'd actually want to be, and you'd think that'd be a no-brainer fanboy question. Being a superhero seems to come with a free, non-returnable gift of death, misery, pain, and suffering for you and your loved ones, with the added bonus of no actual financial gain out of the deal (pretty much all of the billionaire playboys started out as billionaires before becoming superheroes.) Even the guys who are living the good life are just one new creative team away from becoming the next Penance (so-named because...well, because just appending "Dark" to the front of a character's name to indicate how mature and bad-ass they are wouldn't come back into vogue for another couple of years.)

So remember, denizens of the Marvel and DC Universes. When you look up and see superheroes flying overhead, and dream of sharing that grand and glorious life...thank your lucky stars you're not actually doing it. Because the best-case scenario is that you only die once.

The First Precept: A Deleted Scene From "Glimpse of the Abyss"

When I wrote my sections of "Glimpse of the Abyss", it was my third time working with editor Will Hindmarch. We had a discussion about the tone of the book before I started writing, in which he expressed some concern that my previous work on the Feng Shui gaming line had been a little too comedic. (Personally, I still feel that when your writing assignment involves cyborg monkeys with names like "Orango Tank" and "Furious George", you can only get so dark, but I understood his concerns.)

So as a result, I made a conscious effort to write pieces that were a little darker, and a little more horrific. However, Will wound up leaving Atlas before the project was completed, and a few of the bits wound up being cut. One, in particular, I quite liked--the entry was on an order of nuns called the Sisters of Mercy, who believed that since the afterlife was better than this world, it was their duty to usher as many souls into it as possible before they had to suffer too much from the misery of day-to-day existence. The fiction section that showed their indoctrination was cut, though--possibly due to space issues instead of tone issues, I really can't say. I'm well aware that a lot of considerations go into taking a rough draft and turning it into a finished book, and I don't second-guess my editors. But I did think the piece was worth sharing here. So, enjoy!

Um...just as a slight warning...it was written as something dark and creepy. If you're not into that kind of thing, there's nothing wrong with waiting for Monday, when I will no doubt post another terrible pun.

The First Precept

Mother Amanita Virosa, the 78^th Mother Superior of the Sisters of Mercy and the thirty-fifth to bear that name, kept her eyes firmly fixed on her charges. Her arm moved up and down with a mechanical pistoning gesture, lashing out again and again with the whip, but she ignored the girl she was beating in all other respects. The lesson she was teaching that girl would be remembered through a thousand scars. The others learned through the wisdom she imparted.

“Little Sister Eluria has the privilege today of learning the First Precept.” Mother Virosa spoke in a sing-song, rhythmic cadence with the smack of leather against flesh serving to keep time. “And the First Precept is thus: Life Is Suffering.” Eluria hadn’t done anything wrong. She just happened to be the one that the Elder Sisters picked out of the class today. Now they held her in place in an implacable grip as the whip lashed into her flesh.

“And since Life Is Suffering, it follows that all those who live cannot escape it.” The other Little Sisters watched in absolute silence. One started to turn her face away as a particularly hard blow landed, but caught herself. The punishment for living was a whipping. The punishments for actual wrong-doing were far more terrible. “We cannot escape suffering through our skill, nor through our strength, nor through virtue or wickedness. The only way to escape from suffering is to die.”

Tiny trickles of blood now worked their way over the welts in Eluria’s flesh. “Death is the only escape from the pain of existence. Death is the only blessing that grants us release from the suffering we must endure. Death, blessed death, wonderful death…” The whip was wet with blood now. “Death is the only mercy the Creator has granted to us. And the instinct to survive is his greatest curse.”

The Mother Superior stayed her arm. Eluria flinched nonetheless, her body now conditioned to expect the blows, and the rest of the class tensed in the unexpected silence. Mother Amanita walked around the two Elder Sisters and stood in front of Eluria, still facing the class. The Little Sisters could not see Eluria’s face, only the mass of torn and bloody skin that made up her back. But they all saw Mother Amanita grasp Eluria’s chin firmly and lift her head up to meet her gaze.

“Does it hurt, Eluria?” The Mother Superior’s voice was calm and neutral. Eluria, by contrast, was barely able to gasp out a “Yes!” through choked sobs of pain.

“Does it hurt, Eluria?” Again, the neutral voice, no more emotional than asking the time in Peoria. Again, the choked and gasping confirmation.

“The pain will continue, Eluria. I will continue. There is no escape, Eluria. You know that, don’t you?” Eluria tried to nod, but the Mother Superior’s grasp held her head in place. Eventually, she gasped out another yes.

“Then I will ask you The Question, Eluria. Do you want to die?” One Little Sister had pressed her fingernails into her palm so tightly that she’d drawn blood, so intent was she on not looking away. She didn’t notice. Eluria’s response was barely audible. “We didn’t hear that, dear,” Amanita said. “Do you want to die?”

Eluria’s response was a scream this time. “YES!”

The two Elder Sisters let go of her arms at the same time as the Mother Superior let go of her chin, and Eluria crashed to the flagstones. “Remember this moment, Eluria,” the Mother Superior said, looking down at her. “The Creator has delayed his Mercy to you, that you might grant it to others. You are the bringer of blessings to all human-kind, that someday you may receive it yourself.” She looked up at the class once more. “Thus it has been since the Beginning of our Order, and thus shall it always be.”

Worth Mentioning (A Minor Shameless Plug)

Just a brief post today, because they can't all be Shakespeare (yes, you in the back there, stop laughing or leave the room.) It did occur to me that some folks who read this blog might also play 'City of Heroes', given that I have, you know, mentioned 'City of Heroes' several times and made a semi-regular feature out of describing my characters' biographies. And as many/some/a few of you know, 'City of Heroes' has recently added a feature where people can design their own story arcs that anyone can play, complete with custom villains!

So I thought I'd mention, for the benefit of those who do play 'City of Heroes', that I've got up two arcs. The first is "The Alternate Armor Assaults" (sorry, I don't know my Arc ID numbers off the top of my head--I'll edit the post when I get a chance to find them out, but in the meanwhile you should be able to find them by searching the titles.) It's designed for heroes in at least their 20s, and is about Positron (one of the major heroes in Paragon City) needing your help. See, like all good technological heroes, he's designed a whole bunch of specialized armors--almost as if he had a toy line to worry about--and someone's managed to sneak past his security systems and steal them! So you have to recover his Gladiator Armor, his Volcano Armor, his Dynamo Armor and his Chrononaut Armor, all while trying to figure out who's behind the theft and capture them.

The second arc, "Get Real!", is designed for a team of high-level villains (let me stress that, a team--the first mission features a giant monster. You cannot solo this arc, or at the very least I wouldn't recommend trying.) It's about the Television (the best contact in the game, seriously), which is suffering from a little problem--with so much reality television on TV, the boundaries between Television and reality are breaking down completely. How do you solve this problem? How does any supervillain solve a problem? With violence against society!

I'm working on a third arc (you can't have more than three at a time, at least not without a near-deus ex machina happening), featuring a mass invasion of Paragon City by an alliance of all its villains, but that's still in progress. In the meantime, feel free to leave feedback on the arcs in the comments section here, or in the game!

My Civic-Minded Mind At Work

So I was thinking about this a while ago, and I meant to post about it, but then I think I got irritated by Captain America #600 and I kind of forgot. It's an idea for our improving our nation's increasingly decrepit system of roads, and it's the sort of thing that would be a) cheap, b) possibly implemented on a grassroots scale, and c) a neat use of our nation's ultimate resource, its geeks.

My idea is to build a little widget that could be attached to any car, probably somewhere around the wheels or axles (below the shocks.) The widget would have a GPS sensor, a simple shock sensor, and a little transmitter in it that continually sent that data out. Then, little "collection stations" dotted alongside the road would pick up that information and collect it, collate it, and sort it. The net result? You would have a real-time map of how bumpy every single inch of every road in America is. The car sensor would notice how much it was getting jarred around at any one spot, and send that info to the station, which would turn it into a map. This means that anyone who needs to know what roads are in most urgent need of repair doesn't need to drive around and look at them, or wait for someone to call the highway department and complain about a big pothole; they'd know instantly, just by looking at the map, where our highway dollars are most needed. The only drawback I see would be in trying to convince people that no, it can't be used by the men in the black helicopters to track your car and raise your taxes/take your guns away/arrest you for smoking dope, and honestly, it'd probably be pretty safe to make voluntary anyway.

I think the widget would be cheap and easy to build, the sort of thing any hobbyist could do--not me, of course, because I can barely figure out how string works. But for someone tech-savvy, I'm sure it would be a snap. Anyone reading this know whether I'm right, or just blowing smoke?