I look at your tired eyes closed As you hold me. I think of oak blossom and acorns I think of still spring mornings I think of violent autumn gales I think of many years. I think of how much of me you have held.

How much did I give you that was hard to hold? How much did I give you that gave you strength? How much of you did I take? How much of you did you give? How much of me did I lose? How much I cannot know.

Have you walked in a wood in a storm? When gusts throw branches, Bend crowns of trees that, in a breath, Bounce back harder, forward faster. When the trees become the violence of the wind, And when limbs that lean on one another scream? Have I been there? Have we?

How much did I lean? How much did you lend? How much did my love sink into my sadness And take you with me? How much did your love stand full grown before it tired? How much I cannot know.

And then in the calm between gales, The same trees, the same earth … another world. How much did you breathe then? How much I cannot know.

I know weather worn wisdom grows, That strain torn boughs that gusts brought low Grow a new angle now. That sadness again like spring’s green leaf, By autumn, became a new colour. That oak blossom of pungent spring Became acorns of promised life in the dying of the year.

I have seen saplings become strong trees. One, two, three, a group, a stand of trees. Next to each other in storms and stillnesses, With twisting, growing branches, Reaching with coarsening leaves, Or even with bare winter twigs jostling. And rhizomes rising through leafmould, And deeper into soil … Slowly rooting this part of the weathered wood.

Your tired eyes closed As you hold me I think of oak blossom and acorns I think of violent autumn gales I think of still, spring mornings I think of many years. I think of life rooted in the weathered wood to come And I know. I know.

Inbetweeners 31- Grey Room Ambush

So instead of doing a separate post for the source material and elaboration of its significance, I'm going to combine it all into one post for this one. First, the source document I referred to for the session:

INBETWEENERS GETAWAY

The Protectors of the Weave have sprung their trap, assaulting the Grey Room directly and monitoring many of the Inbetweeners paths away.

Grey Room- The Jailer and Grandma Nettles fight for the Interloper. The Protectors have dozens of portals open with Weavebound Juggernauts delivering anchors to secure a 3D tether to neutralize the Interloper’s threat. He instructs the players to leave and get help. Taric is on the sidelines laughing.

The grey room starts to grow massively as the Interloper’s draconic abomination is deployed.

-If characters try to fight- they are assaulted by an endless swarm of Weavebound Juggernauts, but eventually Protector Special agents come to assist. The draconic abomination will also pose a threat.

Tavern Cellar-

Perception Check DC 23- An eyebot is motionless, surveilling the room. Will deliver a shock (3d6) and try to escape

Throne Room-

The trap- walls of force blocking all exits, Zane and two Maruts watch has he summons 1, then 3, then 7 Corrected Demons.

-If group doesn’t bring Grandma, Lurian and Seraphine Ashward will arrive, serving legal documents to Maruts that cause them to leave. Zane, realizing he is outmatched, will promise to see the group again “really soon”. This entire encounter could also occur in the Market or somewhere else.

Rats Nest-

Perception DC 20- find hidden glyphs from Mechanus in the room. It is being tracked. Potential location for Zane encounter if group lingers here too long.

Market-

Immediately the group will notice that the Spider Ladies’ stall now sprawls over ⅓ of the entire market. She’s bought out many other stalls and has made a lot of money selling Meat Honey. She even has a few Beeple working at her stalls as brand ambassadors, along with a few troglodyte and lizard folk employees.

Perception 20- show they are being watched but no one will initially target them in such a populated area.

The Spider Lady will tell them “The words dripping across the webs of time like dew are humming with an awful clang. You have been busy, busy bees and the math police are listening. You’ve broken their numbers and they are not pleased.”

Severos Ironpouch will show initial surprise to see the group, but will play it cool and greet them, explaining that he opted to stop running missions for the Interloper and instead work at this stall. He’s set up a little makeshift apartment in the corner and has been making excellent commissions finding customers for the Spider Lady.

If they question Sister Marnix or the Protectors he will get cagey, and may finally admit that the Protectors are too well organized and powerful, their reach extends to every part of the multiverse. The only choice is to work with them, and they will reward the players greatly for doing so.

—If the group starts to catch on to Severos they will notice the market being evacuated by local guards. Once it is, Zane and his group may approach the group here.

***If group decides to cooperate with Zane, he will have them inject a serum that will put them into a coma. When they awaken, they will no longer travel through the ways, but instead will be “tethered” to be taken back to Mechanus whenever their handlers wish. They will be unable to disobey direct orders from Mechanus and will be tasked with helping stop the interloper, Zariel, etc.

_______________________

Lurian Legal Injunction:

INJUNCTION OF DIVINE STAY Filed under celestial authority pursuant to the Concordat of Eternal Balance, Section XIV, Subclauses 3, 7, and 11 Filed by: Lurian the Archangel, Voice of the Judgement of Torm, acting in consort with the Holy Compact of Helm, Tyr, Bahamut, and Allied Concordant Powers To: The Delegated Instruments of Mechanus, including but not limited to Inevitables, Executors, Axis Arbiters, and Nullification Agents Re: Immediate Suspension of Enforcement Action within the Material Plane BE IT KNOWN ACROSS HEAVEN AND CREATION: A formal Challenge of Jurisdiction has been entered by a recognized Material Plane representative pursuant to Article 47b of the Prime Access Accords. Under the Interplanar Due Process Mandate, no enforcement, execution, or punitive measure may be enacted by Mechanus or its agents while jurisdictional status remains unresolved. THEREFORE: All Mechanus-aligned agents are hereby enjoined from engaging in military, arcane, or existential force within the Material Plane, pending the outcome of adjudication before the Court of Planar Authority or a duly convened Tribunal of Writs. Any violation of this injunction shall constitute Contempt of Concordance, and shall be met with proportional response by the Holy Compact and its Lawful Allies under the Celestial Enforcement Treaty of Year 4032 Post-Divine Fracture. Signed and Sealed: ✹ Lurian, Archangel of the Sword and Scale Acting Executor of the Judgement of Torm Bearer of the Platinum Signet Witnessed by the Triumvirs of Law and Light

---

So fresh off of the characters triumph in the Grandma Nettle's Basement dungeon, they have arrived back at the Grey Room with her in tow. She quickly establishes a new cottage and sets back to doing what she does before. Before the players have a chance to debrief with the Interloper, Sister Marnix enters with an empty Beeple Caravan and an odd device. The device immediately activates and the Interloper psychically reaches out to the party and tells them to “run and get help.” The Protectors have arrived.

At first, a reminder, Sister Marnix was one of the new “participants” the Interloper recruited while the players were in the Torment. Most of these participants did not survive, but the few that did found new rolls. Sister Marnix was sweet but simple, and the Interloper realized she wasn't particularly adept at handling and adapting to situations, so instead she basically joined the fledgling Harmonium and helped them transport meat honey from the hive to the market. The Spider Lady had become the point person for the Beeple Hive in the market, and as a result her operation had sprawled immensely. Shoppers from all around came to purchase the meat honey, and she was the only purveyor in the region. This let her expand all of her other wares and hire a lot of additional help. Transporting resupplies of Beeple products to and fro was essentially a full time job.

Severos Ironpouch was another participant who survived, but he was far more cunning than Sister Marnix. He took on a job working with the Spider Lady, helping her procure new gear to sell and setting up trade deals. His skill with commerce made him indispensable in this regard. He brought any particularly unusual or interesting items back to the Interloper. Little did the Spider Lady or Interloper know, Severos had double-crossed them. He was secretly meeting with a handler from Mechanus who offered him massive sums of wealth to set up a trap for the Interloper. After all the chaos the players had caused, the Protectors of the Weave had put their investigation into overdrive. They had mapped out most of the “rooms” the players could access, established a map of how they linked to the Grey Room. They realized the Beeple were also a result of this, but decided to leave them bee (ha ha) for the time being, instead focusing on the source. Severos pointed out Marnix would be an easy vector to break them into the Grey Room. She had the ability to travel through the doors and was easy to dupe. An agent of the Protectors of the Weave, posing as a merchant, gave her a device to bring back with her. However, as soon as at activated, portals began appearing all across the Grey Room.

The assault was well planned and methodical. First order of business was Weavebound Juggernauts (custom built Mechanus war constructs) would bring through dimensional anchors, which were devices designed to tether a 4-dimensional being to a 3-Dimensional space. These extremely heavy, dense magical constructs would essentially tether the Interloper in place. The more that entered, the harder it would be for him to escape. They worked quickly, endless legions of them dropping anchors, and then keeping guard so the next wave could come through in lockstop and drop off their anchors. Within seconds there were over a hundred anchors and the Grey Room was essentially locked in place. After that, high level specialist Protectors Agents, constructs, etc, would enter to defeat any Far Realm hostiles and their allies before targeting the Interloper directly. The players followed the Interlopers' instruction and fled immediately before they to were trapped in the Grey Room.

The Interloper didn't sit idly while this happened. He activated the new and improved Jailer immediately to fight the Weavebound Juggernauts. Additionally, he greatly increased the size of the Grey Room so that the draconic abomination he had been working on, a fusion of dozens of dragons including the consort of Tiamat could be unleashed. This creature was a fractal dimensioned dragon with an uncountable number of heads that could unleash untold destruction. This alone would hold back the Protectors for some time.

The final question though was Grandma Nettles. What would happen to her? I left this question to the players. They could have brought Grandma Nettles with them, which would have made the next few encounters much easier... albiet stranger. Instead they left her in place, which benefited the Interloper greatly. This didn't happen in view of the players, but my thought was as soon as the forces of the Protectors reached her cottage, she would unleash her tentacled fury and untold devastation on them. Ultimately, the Interloper could fight them to a draw. They could not overcome him, the dragon abomination, the Jailer, and Grandma Nettles along with anything else he could summon. Furthermore, he could use their defeated constructs and soldiers as materials to create more warriors to fight them. He couldn't' call in reinforcements from Zariel due to the tethers, but he had enough. Ultimately the forces of Mechanus would have to withdraw, an the Protectors would keep the Interloper trapped in a pocket dimension and wait as his energy slowly diminished over time.

The players knew none of this, they fled quickly and left the Interloper to an unknown fate. Immediately they realized Mechanus was watching them. An eyebot in the tavern cellar. Tracking glyphs in the Rats nest. They did stop by the market though and let the Spider Lady know of Severos' treachery. She then let her Far Realm mask slip briefly to unleash horrific worms upon him that would enter his flesh and give him a fate worse than death. Before that though, the players traded her a barrel of 700 souls for a ring of three wishes with only two wishes remaining. One wish would be used in the next session... and I think they still have one remaining as of the time I'm writing this. They then decided they needed to make it to Sigil, knowing that not even Mechanus had power there. The Arena was the only way they knew how to get to it, and they had to go through the Throne Room to get there.

The Throne Room was a trap set by Mechanus. Particularly a nasty third party contractor named Zane they used for difficult cases that required moral... flexibility. He immediately put down walls of force to block their way and sent a “corrected” demon after them. The idea was that once the players killed a corrected demon he would send three more, and then seven more after that. If somehow they were still standing, he and two Maruts would them descend on them.

Corrected Demons were no joke. These were powerful demons that had been captured by Mechanus and enslaved with advanced technology so they could serve as weapons. Think like demons assimilated by the Borg but more time-copesque vibes. These creatures had a number of potent offensive abilities, high hitpoints and a CR of 16. A number of their abilities stunned or restrained units, and they had an ability that was just straight up a ray of force that dealt 12d6 damage. The players were still below level 10 so this was a scary enemy. Somehow though, Thogg killed one in a turn, with a combination of an Interloper ability that tripled his attack and some critical hits. This led to a perplexed Zane saying...“huh”. Before he could dispatch more though, Lurian burst through a door behind him holding the injunction that is described in the document above. Basically, he pulled jurisdiction and because of his legal knowledge was able to use bureaucracy to temporarily force Mechanus back until they could challenge it in court. This led to the Maruts immediately retreating back to Mechanus as they are the ultimate arbiters of law. Zane now looked at his odds, Lurian and a party of the Judgement of Torm plus the players vs him. He was an incredibly potent combatant, but he knew this wasn't a fight he was likely to win, so he retreats. Lurian tells the players they are even but they better head to Sigil quickly before Mechanus is able to nullify or overturn the injunction. This surprise interference by Lurian worked well because the Throne Room connected to the succubus run brothel, the very type of establishment the newly formed Judgement of Torm would want to make an example of. One of the members of the shadow who was with the players a while back had his soul taken there, so another narrative reason for them to cleanse it.

So... the players headed to the arena.

This could have gone down a number of different ways. If the players stayed in the Grey Room they would have been captured. If they dallied too long in one of the other rooms, Zane would have come to them with no one to rescue them. If any of these had occurred, Mechanus would have turned them against the Interloper and the campaign would have taken on a very different shape. Mechanus would have either tried to recruit or coerce them into helping defeat the Interloper and stop Zariel and potentially Lurian as well. But they escaped, leaving the Interloper to an uncertain fate.

Here are some of the custom stat blocks for this leg of the adventure. Severos would never appear again, but Zane, Corrected Demons and Weavebound Juggernauts will all pop up later. Zane becomes a major mid-game antagnoist:

ZANE, SPECIAL OPERATOR FOR MECHANUS

CR: 23 (50000 EXP) Proficiency +7 AC: 22 HP: 460 Speed: 40 ft, climb 40 feet (magnetized gauntlets- any surface) STR: 22 DEX: 22 CON: 22 INT: 20 WIS: 16 CHA: 12

Saving Throws: Str +15, Dex +12, Con +13, Int +12, Wis +10 Skills: Insight +10, Perception +10, Stealth +12, Investigation +11, Intimidation +8 Resistances: Immune to poison, heals ½ of electric damage taken, advantage on mind influencing effect saves

Other: Darkvision and Tremorsense

Languages: All (:Polygot chip implant)

Augmentations:

Probability Intuition- May reroll one save, attack, or other roll per turn. Retreat Protocol- When he reaches 0 hit points, Magnus is immediately planeshifted to Mechanus unless the magic effect is somehow blocked VATS- Once per short rest, can use a full turn to make 7 attacks with gun arm.

Actions:

Makes three attacks per turn with his gatling gun arm and one with his arm blade. May only attack with one type of ammo per turn.

Gun Arm: +13 to hit, 6d6 damage (21) x 3- choose from following ammo types Kinetic- normal damage Pyro- Fire damage Charged- Electricity Damage Blinding- Radiant Damage Void- Cold Damage

Arm blade: +13 to hit, 2d6 + 6 dmg + 4d6 electricity (27), on critical hit target must make con save (DC 21) or become paralyzed for 1 minute as their nervous system shuts down.

Sniper Shot- +13 to hit, automatic advantage. 16d6 damage (56), either all kinetic or half kinetic half another choice. On natural 20, player must make con save (DC 21) or be permanently paralyzed as the bullet severs the spinal cord. Only have this work on targets where it would make physiological sense (though they will probably die from double damage anyway).

Abilities:

Crowd Control: Everyone in a 30 foot radius must make a Con Save (DC 21) or be stunned for one round. Recharge 6

Purge Field: Everyone in a 30 foot radius makes a dex saving throw (DC 21) or takes 12d10 (66) force damage. Survivors must make a con saving throw (DC 21) or be stunned for one round. Usable once per day.

Legendary Actions (3 per turn):

Mind wipe (2 actions)– If a target is about to make an attack or cast a spell on Magnus, they must make a contested Intelligence saving throw. Failure and they forget what they are doing and stop mid action.

Adaptive Combat- Ammo type can switch and one gun attack is made

Vantage Control- Teleports up to 60 feet to a safer area.

SEVEROS IRONPOUCH

Severos Ironpouch (Interlop er “Participant” and Protector Asset) Race: Rock Gnome Class: Artificer (Alchemist) – Level 6 Background: Guild Artisan (Merchants' Guild) Alignment: Lawful Neutral Personality: Cowardly, scheming, meticulous, profit-driven Ideals: “Stability comes from structure. And structure comes from contracts.” Bonds: Keeps a signed receipt or IOU from every interaction Flaws: Won’t fight unless profit is assured or escape is guaranteed

bility Scores (Point Buy + Racial Bonuses): Stat Score Mod STR 8 -1 DEX 14 +2 CON 14 (+1) = 15 +2 INT 15 (+1) = 16 +3 WIS 10 +0 CHA 12 +1

Proficiencies: Armor: Light armor, medium armor, shields Weapons: Simple weapons Tools: Alchemist's supplies, Tinker's tools, Calligrapher’s supplies

Skills: Investigation, Arcana, Persuasion, Insight Languages: Common, Gnomish, Dwarvish, Draconic

Class Features:

Spellcasting (Artificer): Uses Intelligence as casting stat Infuse Item (3 active) Alchemist’s Supplies as spellcasting focus Experimental Elixir (2/day): Roll or choose effects like healing, flight, or AC boost Alchemical Savant: Add INT mod to healing or damage from alchemist spells/elixirs Tool Expertise: Double proficiency bonus with tools Flash of Genius (3/day): Add +3 to saving throws or ability checks for self or others Gnome Cunning: Advantage on INT, WIS, and CHA saves vs. magic

Spells (Alchemist – INT modifier = +3):

Cantrips:

Mending Prestidigitation Fire Bolt

1st-level (4 slots):

Cure Wounds Faerie Fire Absorb Elements Grease

2nd-level (2 slots):

Web Lesser Restoration

Infused Items (Typical Loadout):

Enhanced Arcane Focus – +1 to spell attack rolls and spell save DC Alchemy Jug – because a diversified inventory is profit Bag of Holding – essential for carrying “emergency inventory” Replicate Magic Item: Goggles of Night – because margins improve with night ops

Equipment:

Custom-fitted studded leather armor with retractable coin pouch Alchemist's supplies in lockable briefcase Scrolls of contracts, invoices, and warranties Bribe pouch (labeled “Expedited Negotiations Fund”) Lucky silver coin engraved with “In Margin We Trust”

Combat Strategy:

Opens with Web or Grease to delay enemies Throws Elixirs of Healing to curry favor while avoiding danger Uses Flash of Genius to boost allies (and manipulate outcomes) Runs if odds turn or “return on investment drops below threshold”

WEAVEBOUND JUGGERNAUTS

Large construct, unaligned AC 20 (reinforced armor) HP 140 (17d10 + 51) Speed 40 ft. STR 22 (+6) DEX 10 (+0) CON 17 (+3) INT 3 (-4) WIS 10 (+0) CHA 1 (-5)

Damage Immunities psychic, poison; bludgeoning, piercing, slashing from nonmagical weapons Condition Immunities charmed, exhaustion, frightened, paralyzed, poisoned Senses darkvision 60 ft., tremorsense 20 ft., passive Perception 10 Languages understands commands of the summoner Challenge 9 (5,000 XP)

Actions Multiattack. The Juggernaut makes two slam attacks. Slam. Melee Weapon Attack: +12 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 24 (4d8 + 6) force damage. Anti-Magic Pulse (Recharge 5–6). The Juggernaut releases a disruptive pulse in a 30-ft radius. Creatures concentrating on spells must make a DC 18 Con save or lose concentration. Magical effects in the area flicker and fizzle until the end of the Juggernaut's next turn (treat as anti-magic field for spell attacks and concentration checks).

CORRECTED DEMON

Corrected Demon Large fiend (demon, lawful), lawful neutral Armor Class 20 (Integrated Adamantine Plating) Hit Points 225 (18d10 + 108) Speed 40 ft.

STR 24 (+7) DEX 14 (+2) CON 22 (+6) INT 10 (+0) WIS 14 (+2) CHA 6 (−2)

Saving Throws Str +12, Con +11, Wis +7 Skills Perception +7, Intimidation +8 Damage Resistances cold, fire, lightning; bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing from nonmagical weapons Damage Immunities poison, necrotic Condition Immunities charmed, frightened, poisoned Senses truesight 60 ft., passive Perception 17 Languages understands Abyssal, Celestial, and Modron Binary; cannot speak Challenge 16 (15,000 XP) Proficiency Bonus +5

Corrected Protocols (Features) Cybernetic Override. The demon is under the control of Mechanus Command Codes. It cannot disobey direct orders, even suicidal ones. Mind control and enchantment spells automatically fail against it unless cast from a lawful neutral source. Perfect Obedience. Immune to effects that would alter its alignment, change its target, or stop it from attacking (e.g., dominate monster, calm emotions, confusion). Order-Pulse Core. Once per turn, after hitting with a melee attack, the demon may choose to deal an extra 13 (3d8) force damage and attempt to dispel a single magical effect on the target (as if using dispel magic at 5th level). Integrated Weaponry. All its attacks are considered magical and technological for the purposes of overcoming resistances.

Actions Multiattack. The Corrected Demon makes two Cyber-Claw attacks and may use Subjugation Pulse if available. Cyber-Claw. Melee Weapon Attack: +12 to hit, reach 10 ft., one target. Hit: 21 (3d10 + 5) slashing damage plus 9 (2d8) force damage. (30 total) If the target is a construct or undead, it must make a DC 18 Constitution saving throw or be stunned until the end of its next turn. Subjugation Pulse (Recharge 5–6). The demon emits a 30-foot-radius pulse of Mechanus enforcement code. Each creature of the demon’s choice in the area must succeed on a DC 18 Wisdom saving throw or be paralyzed until the end of its next turn. Constructs and fiends have disadvantage on the save. Arc-Mod Beam (Recharge 6). The demon fires a beam of structured reality from a lens embedded in its chest. 60-foot line, 5 feet wide. Each creature in the line must make a DC 18 Dexterity saving throw. On a failure, it takes 42 (12d6) force damage and is knocked prone. Success halves damage and negates prone.

Reactions Phase Countermeasure. When a creature teleports or plane shifts within 60 feet, the Corrected Demon may attempt to intercept. That creature must succeed on a DC 16 Charisma saving throw or the teleport fails, and they take 18 (4d8) force damage.

Lore & Roleplaying Notes Once a howling abyssal war-beast, this creature has had its flesh cauterized with runes of law and its soul-thread spliced with logic cores from the forges of Regulus. Its screams are silent, its rage converted to efficiency. It marches not for desire—but because the Equation demands it. Visuals: Plates of gold-laced adamantine replace muscles. Tubes hiss and glow. Runes tick and click in perfect rhythm. Its eyes burn not with fury, but clockwork stillness.

Behavior: It does not speak. It does not retreat. It only stops when deactivated or annihilated.

Tactical Role: Best used as an elite enforcer of a Mechanus-aligned force, guardian of time-warping relics, or twisted foe in a moral dilemma (“Do you free what was once a demon?”).

the scent of pine. soil, sunsets, alone.

long dark hair messy with wood smoke. bra strap. perfume. touch, kiss, fuck, mine.

Place: By the window facing south, Le Vieux St-Laurent, Tiohtià:ke Date: 2026-10-05, 08:52 EDT Conditions: 11°C, cloudy. Cold hands, dry air, and the muffled din of cooking and conversation.

I wake up with the sun, despite it being obscured by my thick, green velvet curtains. I rise with it anyway, slow and unhurried, flattening the sheets and making the bed before drawing the curtains back on a city dotted with election signs. I light some Nag Champa at my altar. A deep inhale; a moment of calm before the calamity.

I lace up my black combat boots, tightening as I go, and slide my passport through the elastic band of my Traveler’s notebook. Today is election day, and though my polling station doesn’t open for a few hours, I’ll keep it with me, just in case. The door closes behind me with a thud and I’m on my way.

Downtown is eerily empty for this time of morning, and it makes sense: all of the colleges and universities are closed today to give their students a dedicated day off to vote. Their absence bounces off the walls of the buildings on Sainte-Catherine, my footsteps falling a touch louder than I’m used to. I make my way over to Olimpico for an oat latte and a chocolatine, which I eat on the bench outside more out of duty than hunger, before sauntering toward the gates of McGill’s empty campus.

A breeze rushes through the trees and scatters small yellow leaves across the cobbled path, where they turn in the air a moment before landing. The seasons, too, are changing. I fold that knowledge up, tuck it into the plastic zipper pocket at the front of my notebook, and take an instinctual right at the Y intersection, toward Milton-Parc. Low light catches the red brick and limestone, a Bixi clicks free of its dock, and the birds are unusually quiet for an autumn morning.

Once on Parc, I hop on the 80 up to Parc Jeanne-Mance. Michèle Deslauriers’ voice announces my stop through the bus’ tinny speakers: « Prochain arrêt : Monument Sir-George-Étienne-Cartier. » I wander down the stairs and through the empty park. It's undergone significant redevelopment, largely for the better: more washrooms, water fountains, splash pads, a new football field. I settle onto a picnic table facing a fence and the field. Its transition is almost done. Others are just beginning.

I spark a joint. I’ve been struggling to keep food down these days, especially in the mornings, and this is one of the only things I’ve found that helps. This morning is no exception: the chocolatine is sitting weird in my stomach. I stare at the empty field, smoke curling between my index and middle fingers. I pull out my phone and check the location of my polling station on the Élections Québec website before closing the tab. Not that my vote changes much: my riding has been a PLQ stronghold since it was created, and it doesn’t look likely to change anytime soon.

Eventually, I put the joint out and make my way through the park. East for a couple of blocks down Rachel, then a left down Saint-Laurent toward the restaurant that bears its name. I walk in with a smile and grab a seat at one of the tables by the window. This is always where I sit when I come here—a bit of a tradition, if you could call it that. Greasy-spoon comfort food served with black coffee in a white ceramic mug, on paper placemats and particle board tables. I’m right here. I’m already elsewhere.

---

Every summer when I was younger, we would take a road trip from Toronto “back home,” to the sleepy town in the Outaouais where my mom was raised, and where a good chunk of her large, Catholic, French-Canadian family still lives. Hell, about half the town is related in some way or another. I remember my excitement as we’d pile into her green Chevy Malibu at three in the morning and snake up the province’s asphalt arteries toward its edge: Highway 401 until the junction with the 37 in Belleville, through Thrasher’s Corner, Roslin and Tweed, then east on Highway 7 to Kaladar and its general store, where we’d usually stop for a coffee or a snack. Then Highway 41: up through Cloyne, along the glistening shores of Upper Mazinaw Lake, through Denbigh, Eganville and Pembroke, to Cotnam Island and the Ontario-Québec border.

The border was always the most exciting part of the journey. The sign made a spectacle of itself: huge, blue and white, an illuminated flagpole welcoming you to the province, first in French, then in other, smaller languages. On the Ontario side, the equivalent was a simple sign with an invitation to discovery and little more. We tuned the radio to 101.9 CHIP FM and made our way up Highway 148. The crawl from there to town felt almost interminable, though my childhood excitement is likely distorting my memory of it. Some years, if I was lucky, we skipped the first intersection with rue Thomas-Lefebvre and carried on about a kilometre, to the street’s other end.

That was where my cousin Jen’s restaurant and dépanneur sat, right at the edge of town. It was one of the only businesses around, inviting drivers in for breakfast, a pack of smokes, fishing tackle, or some scratch tickets sold with a smile. You entered through the main door and took an immediate left through some swinging doors into the seating area, which was what we always did. It was a simple spot, but, in my eyes, it was the best restaurant in the world.

Jen’s fluffy buttermilk pancakes remain one of the highlights of my childhood. They were always served with a small pitcher of pure maple syrup, a huge smile, and a ruffle of my hair that I can still feel if I close my eyes and concentrate hard enough. Once our food was ready, Jen would come over with an ashtray and a pack of Macdonald Originals, and she and my mom would sit and catch up for hours. My mom’s French eased back into place as the conversation went on, less switching between French and English, comfort coating her tongue alongside the cigarette smoke.

I used to have fun folding those paper placemats into paper airplanes and throwing them around the empty dining room while my mom and Jen were shooting the shit. You know the ones: Bienvenue printed over Welcome in burgundy, in that typical serif font, on cream-coloured paper with lacy printed edges. Later, they changed them for another style: basically a page full of advertisements for local businesses and restaurants, and politicians’ faces staring back at you while you eat. I used to scribble over their faces. Plus ça change… Jen’s restaurant closed for good a few years later.

---

Le Vieux St-Laurent used to have those same burgundy and cream placemats. Maybe that’s why I’m here, on this particular morning. Seeking comfort, I find another paper placemat instead: the same layout in light blue on stark white. The sun bounces off it into my eyes, which still have sleep in the corners, all to tell me how many grams of protein a 250 ml glass of milk would add to my meal (nine, in case you were wondering), with a printed reminder in the bottom left-hand corner to order a glass. I open the menu with a sigh, though I already know what I’m getting. Buttermilk pancakes, extra syrup.

There is a sweet little horror story that is only two sentences long:

“The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door…”

Two sentences and an ellipsis of three dots. The horror, of course, isn’t in the two sentences at all; it’s in the ellipsis, the implication: what knocked at the door? Faced with the unknown, the human mind supplies something vaguely horrible.

But it wasn’t horrible, really.

The last man on Earth – or in the universe, for that matter – sat alone in a room. It was a rather peculiar room. He’d just noticed how peculiar it was and he’d been studying out the reason for its peculiarity. His conclusions didn’t horrify him, but it annoyed him.

Walter Phelan, who had been associate professor of anthropology at Nathan University up until the time two days ago when Nathan University had ceased to exist, was not a man who horrifled easily. Not that Walter Phelan was a heroic figure, by any wild stretch of the imagination. He was slight of stature and mild of disposition. He wasn’t much to look at, and he knew it.

Not that his appearance worried him now. Right now, in fact, there wasn’t much feeling in him. Abstractedly, he knew that two days ago, within the space of an hour, the human race had been destroyed, except for him and, somewhere, a woman – one woman. And that was a fact which didn’t concern Walter Phelan in the slightest degree. He’d probably never see her and didn’t care too much if he didn’t.

Women just hadn’t been a factor in Walter’s life since Martha had died a year and a half ago. Not that Martha hadn’t been a good wife – albeit a bit on the bossy side. Yes, he’d loved Martha,in a deep, quiet way. He was only forty now, and he’d been only thirty-eight when Martha had died, but – well – he just hadn’t thought about women since then. His life had been his books, the ones he read and the ones he wrote. Now there wasn’t any point in writing books, but he had the rest of his life to spend in reading them.

True, company would be nice, but he’d get along without it. Maybe after a while, he’d get so he’d enjoy the occasional company of one of the Zan, although that was a bit difficult to imagine. Their thinking was so alien to his that there seemed no common ground for discussion, intelligent though they were, in a way.

An ant is intelligent, in a way, but no man ever established communication with an ant. He thought of the Zan, somehow, as super-ants, although they didn’t look like ants, and he had a hunch that the Zan regarded the human race as the human race had regarded ordinary ants. Certainly what they’d done to Earth had been what men did to ant hills – and it had been done much more efficiently.

---

But they had given him plenty of books. They’d been nice about that, as soon as he had told them what he wanted, and he had told them that the moment he had learned that he was destined to spend the rest of his life alone in this room. The rest of his life, or as the Zan had quaintly expressed it, forev-er. Even a brilliant mind – and the Zan obviously had brilliant minds – has its idiosyncracies. The Zan had learned to speak Terrestrial English in a manner of hours but they persisted in separating syllables. But we disgress.

There was a knock on the door.

You’ve got it all now, except the three dots, the ellipsis, and I’m going to fill that in and show you that it wasn’t horrible at all.

Walter Phelan called out, “Come in,” and the door opened. It was of course, only a Zan. It looked exactly like the other Zan; if there was any way of telling one of them from another, Walter hadn’t found it. It was about four feet tall and it looked like nothing on earth – nothing, that is, that had been on Earth until the Zan came there.

Walter said, “Hello, George.” When he’d learned that none of them had names he decided to call them all George, and the Zan didn’t seem to mind.

This one said, “Hel-lo, Wal-ter.” That was ritual; the knock on the door and the greetings. Walter waited.

“Point one,” said the Zan “You will please hence-forth sit with your chair turned the other way.”

Walter said, “I thought so, George. That plain wall is transparent from the other side, isn’t it?”

“It is trans-par-ent.”

“Just what I thought. I’m in a zoo Right?”

“That is right.”

Walter sighed. “I knew it. That plain, blank wall, without a single piece of furniture against it. And made of something different from the other walls. If I persist in sitting with my back to it, what then? You will kill me? – I ask hopefully.”

“We will take a-way your books.”

“You’ve got me there George. All right I’ll face the other way when I sit and read. How many other animals besides me are in this zoo of yours?”

“Two hun-dred and six-teen.”

Walter shook his head. “Not complete, George. Even a bush league zoo can beat that – could beat that, I mean, if there were any bush league zoos left. Did you just pick at random?”

“Ran-dom sam-ples yes. All spe-cies would have been too man-y. Male and female each of one hun-dred and eight kinds,”

“What do you feed them? The carnivorous ones, I mean.”

“We make food Syn-thet-ic.”

“Smart,” said Walter. “And the flora? You got a collection of that, too?”

“Flo-ra was not hurt by vi-bra-tions. It is all still growing.”

“Nice for the flora,” said Walter. “You weren’t as hard on it, then, as you were on the fauna, Well, George, you started out with ‘point one.’ I deduced there is a point two kicking around somewhere. What is it?”

“Some-thing we do not un-der-stand. Two of the oth-er a-nimals sleep and do not wake? They are cold.”

“It happens in the best regulated zoos, George,” Walter Phelan said. “Probably not a thing wrong with them except that they’re dead.”

“Dead? That means stopped. But nothing stopped them. Each was a-lone.”

Walter stared at the Zan. “Do you mean, George, you don’t know what natural death is?”

“Death is when a be-ing is killed, stopped from liv-ing.”

Walter Phelan blinked. “How old are you, George?” he asked.

“Six-teen-you would not know the word. Your pla-net went a-round your sun a-bout sev-en thou-sand times, I am still young.”

Walter whistled softly. “A babe in arms,” he said. He thought hard a moment. “Look, George,” he said, “you’ve got something to learn about this planet you’re on. There’s a guy here who doesn’t hang around where you come from. An old man with a beard and a scythe and an hour-glass. Your vibrations didn’t kill him.”

“What is he?”

“Call him the Grim Reaper, George. Old Man Death. Our people and animals live until somebody – Old Man Death – stops them ticking.”

“He stopped the two crea-tures? He will stop more?”

---

Walter opened his mouth to answer, and then closed it again. Something in the Zan’s voice indicated that there would be a worried frown on his face, if he had had a face recognizable as such.

“How about taking me to these animals who won’t wake up?” Walter asked. “Is that against the rules?”

“Come,” said the Zan.

That had been the afternoon of the second day. It was the next morning that the Zan came back, several of them. They began to move Walter Phelan’s books and furniture. When they’d finished that, they moved him. He found himself in a much larger room a hundred yards away.

He sat and waited and this time, too, when there was a knock on the door, he knew what was coming and politely stood up. A Zan opened the door and stood aside. A woman entered.

Walter bowed slightly, “Walter Phelan,” he said, “in case George didn’t tell you my name. George tries to be polite, but he doesn’t know all of our ways.”

The woman seemed calm; he was glad to notice that. She said, “My name is Grace Evans, Mr. Phelan. What’s this all about? Why did they bring me here?”

Walter was studying her as she talked. She was tall, fully as tall as he, and well-proportioned. She looked to be somewhere in her early thirties, about the age Martha had been. She had the same calm confidence about her that he’d always liked about Martha, even though it had contrasted with his own easy-going informality. In fact, he thought she looked quite a bit like Martha.

“I think I know why they brought you here but let’s go back a bit,” he said. “Do you know just what has happened otherwise?”

“You mean that they’ve – killed everyone?”

“Yes. Please sit down. You know how they accomplished it?” She sank into a comfortable chair nearby. “No,” she said, “I don’t know just how. Not that it matters does it?”

“Not a lot. But here’s the story – what I know of it from getting one of them to talk, and from piecing things together. There isn’t a great number of them – here, anyway. I don’t know how numerous a race they are where they came from and I don’t know where that is, but I’d guess it’s outside the Solar System. You’ve seen the space ship they came in?”

“Yes. It’s as big as a mountain.”

“Almost. Well it has equipment for emitting some sort of a vibration – they call it that, in our language, but I imagine it’s more like a radio wave than a sound vibration – that destroys all animal life. It – the ship itself – is insulated against the vibration. I don’t know whether its range is big enough to kill off the whole planet at once, or whether they flew in circles around the earth, sending out the vibratory waves. But it killed everybody and everything instantly and, I hope, painlessly. The only reason we, and the other two-hundred odd animals in this zoo, weren’t killed was because we were inside the ship. We’d been picked up as specimens. You do know this is a zoo, don’t you?”

“I – I suspected it.”

“The front walls are transparent from the outside. The Zan were pretty clever at fixing up the inside of each cubicle to match the natural habitat of the creature it contains. These cubicles, such as the one we’re in, are of plastic, and they’ve got a machine that makes one in about ten minutes, If Earth had had a machine and a process like that, there wouldn’t have been any housing shortage. Well, there isn’t any housing shortage now, anyway. And I imagine that the human race – specifically you and I – can stop worrying about the A-bomb and the next war. The Zan certainly solved a lot of problems for us.”

Grace Evans smiled faintly. “Another case where the operation was successful, but the patient died. Things were in an awful mess. Do you remember being captured? I don’t. I went to sleep one night and woke up in a cage on the space ship.”

“I don’t remember either,” Walter said. “My hunch is that they used the vibratory waves at low intensity first, just enough to knock us all out. Then they cruised around, picking up samples more or less at random for their zoo. After they had as many as they wanted, or as many as they had space in the ship to hold, they turned on the juice all the way. And that was that. It wasn’t until yesterday they knew they’d made a mistake and had underestimated us. They thought we were immortal, as they are.”

“That we were – what?”

“They can be killed but they don’t know what natural death is. They didn’t anyway, until yesterday. Two of us died yesterday.”

“Two of – Oh!”

“Yes, two of us animals in their zoo. One was a snake and one was a duck. Two species gone irrevocably. And by the Zan’s way of figuring time, the remaining member of each species is going to live only a few minutes, anyway. They figured they had permanent specimens.

“You mean they didn’t realize what short-lived creatures we are?”

“That’s right,” Walter said. “One of them is young at seven thousand years, he told me. They’re bi-sexual themselves, incidentally, but they probably breed once every ten thousand years or thereabouts. When they learned yesterday how ridiculously short a life expectancy we terrestrial animals have, they were probably shocked to the core – if they have cores.

At any rate they decided to reorganize their zoo – two by two instead of one by one. They figure we’ll last longer collectively if not individually.”

“Oh!” Grace Evans stood up and there was a taint flush on her face. “If you think – If they think -” She turned toward the door.

“It’ll be locked,” Walter Phelan said calmly “But don’t worry. Maybe they think, but I don’t think. You needn’t even tell me you wouldn’t have me if I was the last man on Earth; it would be corny under the circumstances.”

“But are they going to keep us locked up together in this one little room?”

“It isn’t so little; we’ll get by. I can sleep quite comfortably in one of these overstuffed chairs. And don’t think I don’t agree with you perfectly, my dear. All personal considerations aside, the least favor we can do the human race is to let it end with us and not he perpetuated for exhibition in a zoo.”

She said “Thank you,” almost inaudibly, and the flush receded from her checks. There was anger in her eyes, but Walter knew that is wasn’t anger at him. With her eyes sparkling like that, she looked a lot like Martha, he thought.

He smiled at her and said, “Otherwise -‘

She started out of her chair, and for an instant he thought she was going to come over and slap him. Then she sank back wearily. “If you were a man, you’d be thinking of some way to – They can be killed, you said?” Her voice was bitter.

“The Zan? Oh, certainly. I’ve been studying them. They look horribly different from us, but I think they have about the same metabolism we have, the same type of circulatory system, and probably the same type of digestive system. I think that anything that would kill one of us would kill one of them.”

“But you said -”

“Oh, there are differences, of course. Whatever factor it is in man that ages him, they don’t have. Or else they have some gland that man doesn’t have, something that renews cells.”

---

She had forgotten her anger now. She leaned forward eagerly. She said, “I think that’s right. And I don’t think they feel pain.”

“I was hoping that. But what makes you think so, my dear?”

“I stretched a piece of wire that I found in the desk of my cubicle across the door so my Zan would fall over it. He did, and the wire cut his leg.”

“Did he bleed red?”

“Yes but it didn’t seem to annoy him. He didn’t get mad about it; didn’t even mention it. When he came back the next time, a few hours later, the cut was gone. Well, almost gone. I could see just enough of a trace of it to be sure it was the same Zan.”

Walter Phelan nodded slowly.

“He wouldn’t get angry, of course,” he said. “They’re emotionless. Maybe, if we killed one, they wouldn’t even punish us. But it wouldn’t do any good. They’d just give us our food through a trap door and treat us as men would have treated a zoo animal that had killed a keeper. They’d just see that he didn’t have a crack at any more keepers.

“How many of them are there?” she asked.

“About two hundred, I think, in this particular space ship. But undoubtedly there are many more where they came from. I have a hunch this is just an advance guard, sent to clear off this planet and make it safe for Zan occupancy,”

“They did a good -”

---

There was a knock at the door, and Walter Phelan called out, “Come in.”

A Zan stood in the doorway.

“Hello George,” said Walter.

“Hel-lo Wal-ter,” said the Zan.

It may or may not have been the same Zan, but it was always the same ritual.

“What’s on your mind?” Walter asked.

“An-oth-er crea-ture sleeps and will not wake. A small fur-ry one called a wea-sel.”

Walter shrugged.

“It happens, George. Old Man Death. I told you about him.”

“And worse. A Zan has died. This morning.”

“Is that worse?” Walter looked at him blandly. “Well, George, you’ll have to get used to it, if you’re going to stay around here.”

The Zan said nothing. It stood there.

Finally Walter said, “Well?”

“A-bout wea-sel. You ad-vise same?”

Walter shrugged again. “Probably won’t do any good. But sure, why not?”

The Zan left.

Walter could hear his footsteps dying away outside. He grinned. “It might work, Martha,” he said.

“Mar – My name is Grace, Mr Phelan. What might work?”

“My name is Walter, Grace. You might as well get used to it. You know, Grace, you do remind me a lot of Martha. She was my wife. She died a couple of years ago.”

“I’m sorry,” said Grace “But what might work? What were you talking about to the Zan?”

“We’ll know tomorrow,” Walter said. And she couldn’t get another word out of him.

That was the fourth day of the stay of the Zan.

The next was the last.

It was nearly noon when one of the Zan came. After the ritual, he stood in the doorway, looking more alien than ever. It would be interesting to describe him for you, but there aren’t words.

He said, “We go. Our coun-cil met and de-cid-ed,”

“Another of you died?”

“Last night This is pla-net of death.”

Walter nodded. “You did your share. You’re leaving two hundred and thirteen creatures alive, out of quite a few billion. Don’t hurry back.”

“Is there an-y-thing we can do?”

“Yes. You can hurry. And you can leave our door unlocked, but not the others. We’ll take care of the others.”

Something clicked on the door; the Zan left.

Grace Evans was standing, her eyes shining.

She asked, “What –? How –?”

“Wait,” cautioned Walter. “Let’s hear them blast off. It’s a sound I want to remember.”

The sound came within minutes, and Walter Phelan, realizing how rigidly he’d been holding himself, relaxed in his chair.

“There was a snake in the Garden of Eden, too, Grace, and it got us in trouble,” he said musingly. “But this one made up for it. I mean the mate of the snake that died day before yesterday. It was a rattlesnake.”

“You mean it killed the two Zan who died? But -”

Walter nodded, “They were babes in the woods here. When they took me to look at the first creatures who ‘were asleep and wouldn’t wake up,’ and I saw that one of them was a rattler, I had an idea, Grace. Just maybe, I thought, poison creatures were a development peculiar to Earth and the Zan wouldn’t know about them. And, too, maybe their metabolism was enough like ours so that the poison would kill them. Anyway, I had nothing to lose trying. And both maybes turned out to be right.”

“How did you get the snake to -”

Walter Phelan grinned. He said, “I told them what affection was. They didn’t know. They were interested, I found, in preserving the remaining one of each species as long as possible, to study the picture and record it before it died. I told them it would die immediately because of the loss of its mate, unless it had affection and petting – constantly. I showed them how with the duck. Luckily it was a tame one, and I held it against my chest and petted it a while to show them. Then I let them take over with it – and the rattlesnake.”

---

He stood up and stretched, and then sat down again more comfortably.

“Well, we’ve got a world to plan,” he said. “We’ll have to let the animals out of the ark, and that will take some thinking and deciding. The herbivorous wild ones we can let go right away. The domestic ones, we’ll do better to keep and take charge of; we’ll need them. But the carnovora – Well, we’ll have to decide. But I’m afraid it’s got to be thumbs down.”

He looked at her. “And the human race. We’ve got to make a decision about that. A pretty important one.”

Her face was getting a little pink again, as it had yesterday; she sat rigidly in her chair.

“No!” she said.

He didn’t seem to have heard her. “It’s been a nice race, even if nobody won it,” he said. “It’ll be starting over again now, and it may go backward for a while until it gets its breath, but we can gather books for it and keep most of its knowledge intact, the important things anyway. We can -”

He broke off as she got up and started for the door. Just the way his Martha would have acted, he thought, back in the days when he was courting her, before they were married.

He said, “Think it over, my dear, and take your time. But come back.”

The door slammed. He sat waiting, thinking out all the things there were to do, once he started, but was no hurry to start them; and after a while he heard her hesitant footsteps coming back.

He smiled a little. See? It wasn’t horrible, really.

The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door…

#brown

Image: Dietmar Rabich (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Greetings and SNAIL-utations blog friends!

Cute Snail and I are writing to say “Shello!” wish you a good day and let you know that some new pages have been added to our fall coloring book as well as the pre-written text section of our fall coloring page collection! Links to all pages can be found below. Red crayons are next to new pages.

Each page is easy print PDF and 100% free to download. Contributions to help keep the SNAIL-TASTIC smiles and good cheer flowing. All payments accepted via PayPal. “) are appreciated however. Each page can be printed at any scale you like. Smaller scales create more margins on the sides which makes the pages look like something you might find in a vintage storybook. Share your finished color ups or gifting, decorating or crafting stories on our fall community gallery wall if you like. Just click “Post” to post.

PS: Cute Halloween spider coloring pages are also available in the fall coloring page collection as well. Coffee and cat pages (and Cute Snail fall coloring postcards) coming soon.

---

• Cute Snail Fall Sunflower Garden Smiles Coloring Page 🖍️
• Cute Snail Disco Ball Skateboard Back To School Coloring Page
• Cute Snail Apple-y Sweet Learning Adventures Back To School Coloring Page
• Cute Snail Bright Day (Back To School) Coloring Page (sensory friendly)
• Cute Snail Rainbow, Stars & Glasses (Back To School) Coloring Page (sensory friendly)
• Cute Snail Bright Day (Fall Edition) Coloring Page (sensory friendly)
• Cute Snail Rainbow, Stars & Glasses (Fall Edition) Coloring Page (sensory friendly)
• Cute Snail Fall Heart Tree Coloring Page (sensory Friendly) Cute Snail Fall Sunflower Garden Smiles Coloring Page
• Cute Snail Disco Ball Skateboard Back To School Coloring Page
• Cute Snail Apple-y Sweet Learning Adventures Back To School Coloring Page
• Cute Snail Bright Day (Back To School) Coloring Page (sensory friendly)
• Cute Snail Rainbow, Stars & Glasses (Back To School) Coloring Page (sensory friendly)
• Cute Snail Bright Day (Fall Edition) Coloring Page (sensory friendly)
• Cute Snail Rainbow, Stars & Glasses (Fall Edition) Coloring Page (sensory friendly)
• Cute Snail Fall Heart Tree Coloring Page (sensory Friendly) 🖍️
• Cute Snail Mail Delivery Time Coloring Page (sensory friendly) 🖍️
• Cute Snail On A Mushroom Cozy Fall Wishes Coloring Page (sensory friendly) 🖍️
• Cute Snail Sending Apple-y Sweet Smiles Fall Coloring Page 🖍️
• Cute Snail Sweet And Happy SNAIL-oween Wishes Coloring Page 🖍️
• Cute Snail SNAIL-TASTIC Thanksgiving Coloring Page 🖍️
• Cute Snail Fall Comfort Food (Raining Mac N Cheese) Coloring Page 🖍️
• Cute Snail Mail Delivery Time Coloring Page (sensory friendly)
• Cute Snail On A Mushroom Cozy Fall Wishes Coloring Page (sensory friendly)
• Cute Snail Sending Apple-y Sweet Smiles Fall Coloring Page
• Cute Snail Sweet And Happy SNAIL-oween Wishes Coloring Page
• Cute Snail SNAIL-TASTIC Thanksgiving Coloring Page
• Cute Snail Fall Comfort Food (Raining Mac N Cheese) Coloring Page 

Publicat la 2 iulie 2017


Mi-a atras atenția descrierea de pe coperta a patra și cele câteva cuvinte de pe îngusta copertă a treia. Am cumpărat-o pentru că în vara aceluiași an zburasem peste Long Island. Am văzut titlul, mi-am amintit de minunatul concediu pe coasta de est, am citit descrierea și am cumpărat-o.


A urmat lectura. Nu imediat, ci la vreo lună distanță.

Primele pagini, nostime, amuzante, au făcut lectura plăcută și rapidă. Primele zeci de pagini.

Până pe la pagina o sută, când boala asta de care mă ciocnesc mereu în stânga și-n dreapta a apărut și aici. Boala asta care ba mi-a răpit o colegă, ba mi-a ținut un coleg în comă, până a trecut în neființă, ciopârțește trupul unei rude, operate în cursul unei zile de luni, îi răpește timpul unei prietene și îi întinde nervii la maximum.

La un moment dat vom ajunge să o considerăm stare de fapt, o situație cotidiană. Va ajunge să ne decimeze mai ceva decât războaiele.

După ce dai de boala asta și în cartea pe care o credeam ușoară, de lecturat toamna sau primăvara, când ziua nu e atât de lungă și te îndeamnă la lectură, ajungi, după alte zeci de pagini — mai puține de data asta — să te obișnuiești cu ideea. Dar tocmai atunci afli de finalul tragic și de cauzele tulburătoare ale acestuia, al unui alt personaj al romanului.

Din nou regrete. Din nou pus pe gânduri. Din nou futilitatea planurilor și a gândurilor de viitor.

Ce rost au toate acestea? What are we living for? se întreabă și cei de la Queen…

Răspunsul este poate de găsit printre celelalte secvențe din viața naratorului și din viețile celor din jurul său.

De pe la jumătate, cartea devine parcă mai greu de citit. Citesc parcă mai puține pagini până să o închid și să o așez ordonată pe noptiera de la capătul patului, alături de unele cărți sau deasupra altora. Toate celelalte își așteaptă rândul.

Toate, mai puțin una pe care nu o voi citi integral niciodată, dar care mă luminează din când în când: un dicționar Larousse de prin anii ’60, cu coperta pânzată, cenușie, cu o supracopertă lucioasă și galbenă, cam roasă pe la colțuri și lipită pe alocuri, și cu un semn de carte verde, cu o terminație în formă de arc gotic, frânt, pe care o fetișcană suflă într-o păpădie zicând:

Je sème à tout vent.

---

21 martie 2017, 02:17

Publicat la 2 iulie 2017

De scris. Descris.

Am remarcat o marcă de instrumente de scris care te duce cu gândul la o descriere, dar al cărei nume nu te îndepărtează de instrumentele pe care le produce.


Acum am de scris. Așa am convenit: vorbim mai puțin și scriu mai mult.

Cam dificilă această situație în care eu trebuie să vorbesc mai puțin. „Mai puțin înseamnă mai mult”, atât în sensul minimalismului arhitectural, cât și în situația de față: să tac mai mult.

Un deziderat mai vechi, dar aplicat lamentabil. Am ajuns să tac când nu era cazul. Ajunsesem să tac atunci când ar fi trebuit să vorbesc, poate, mai mult.

Ar trebui să fiu mulțumit, având în vedere timpul ce mi s-a oferit pentru a fi dedicat scrisului. Dar ceea ce se presupune că ar trebui să aștern pe hârtie vine tocmai din conversațiile cotidiene, din aduceri aminte și din dialoguri de idei întrețesute, din sentimente, culori, mirosuri și sunete.

Mirosurile și muzica, cu sau fără versuri, percepute, înțelese ori pătrunse, dau avânt degetelor pe tastatura virtuală sau fac să alunece vârful dur al peniței cu păstrungă — și cu acel cerculeț mic, mic la capătul crestăturii — pe coala albă de hârtie sau pe cea crem a carnețelului de notițe pe care îl port în buzunarul din spate al borsetei din piele neagră.

Fără ele rămâne doar imaginarea lor.

Dar cum poți să-ți imaginezi un parfum? Cum?

Parfumul lui Süskind ar putea oferi răspunsul…


Emoția nu mai este aceeași. Nu mai poate fi aceeași.

Dar timpul se scurge în două sensuri, indiferent la singurul sens dat de ceasornicarii care au preluat această curgere de la umbra intangibilă a discurilor solare.

Timpul curge în favoarea celor care au un scop. Și tot el se scurge pentru cei care au lăsat fără voie ceva în urmă și la care nu se mai pot întoarce.

De la ea am aflat o vorbă a lui Lao Tzu despre viață și moarte care se potrivește cu această viziune asupra timpului:

Life and death are one thread, the same line viewed from different sides.

Așa și cu timpul.

E ca un drum cu sens unic. Putem privi înapoi fără a ne mai putea întoarce, dar putem privi înainte către țelul propus.

Dacă ne-am propus unul, vom merge motivați. Altfel, vom merge fără tragere de inimă, împinși de alții prin zonele aglomerate, ținuți și trași de mână de prieteni sau, poate, de binevoitori.

Keep walking!

Da, este sloganul unei băuturi spirtoase faimoase, dar este și îndemnul pe care l-am primit, îndemn pe care simt că trebuie să-l transmit, la rându-mi.

Ba nu!

Este îndemnul pe care trebuie să-l urmez! EU!

By Andrew Wooldridge

My latest game is a beat-'em-up. I grew up on Double Dragon, Streets of Rage and Turtles in Time, and I wanted to see whether that style could be rebuilt in three.js without a single sprite sheet.

Play Sister Circuit

The story

It's 2089 in Port Solace, a city of forty million owned outright by Aurex Dynamics. Juno Vega's little sister Mika is a gifted hacker, and Aurex has taken her. Her mind is the only one compatible with VANTA, the company's neural-link program. Juno breaks into an Aurex warehouse, steals the prototype VANTA-7 combat suit and starts fighting her way north to the Aurex Spire.

The suit talks. Its AI, ECHO, coaches Juno, teases her, and halfway up the city learns something about where it came from. I won't spoil it, but the last two boss fights aren't really about the corporation.

Pixel art, made in code

Like every game in the collection, this one has no image or audio files. The fighters start as a simple 2D skeleton: a pose is a dozen joint angles. A small rasterizer fills each limb pixel by pixel with an outline, three tones of shading and a little dithering, and the frames are baked into a texture when the game boots. Enemy colour variants, a boss's angry second phase and Juno's glowing Overdrive mode are all palette swaps on the GPU.

The streets are real 3D sets: rain-slicked storefronts, a maglev train, a lantern market, container docks, a bio-lab and a penthouse in a storm. They're drawn at 240 pixels tall and scaled up chunky, with a neon glow and optional scanlines. A separate skyline scene sits behind them for parallax.

How it plays

It has everything I remember from the arcade: four-hit combos, launchers and juggles, grabs with knees, throws and suplexes, enemies thrown into other enemies, and pipes and katanas lying in the street. The suit adds special moves and an Overdrive meter. There are seven stages and seven bosses, from a gang boss with hydraulic arms to a sword-wielding android with a counter stance. Between stages you spend the credits you've picked up on suit upgrades in a safehouse.

It plays on phones too, with a stick wherever your thumb lands plus four buttons, in portrait or landscape. Keyboard and gamepad also work.

Go get her back.

People say to me, Brendan, they say, you’re dissatisfied with Massachusetts’ leadership and say you want bold action, but you won’t say what you mean by that! What exactly do you want?

Well, I’m so glad you asked! Here are some things I would put forward if I were running for Governor.

We are in a climate emergency but our response hasn’t been urgent or bold. When climate disaster strikes, we’ll need to spend a lot of money to fix things, so let’s fix some things on the front end instead! I actually don’t think this should count as bold leadership as much as “the bare minimum required of competent leadership.”

• First and foremost: close Hanscom Field. It is unconscionable in a climate emergency that we operate an airport for private jets at public expense. If rich people want a private airport, let them build, staff, and maintain it. And then tax it at an incredibly high rate.

• Make all public transportation free in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Electrify the commuter rail. And run rail links from Worcester to Springfield. It’s absurd that the third biggest city in the Commonwealth is the only one of the 23 most populous cities inaccessible by rail. Ideally this line could stop in Amherst as well. Once again, it’s absurd that the flagship campus of the UMASS system is inaccessible by rail.

• This should do a lot to get unnecessary cars off the road in Massachusetts, but we can do more. Tolls should be put on 93 and 95 as well as on the Mass Pike. (I’d like to have special transponders for folks with mobilty or other physical challenges who have to drive that allow them to pay reduced tolls or no tolls at all.)

• Solar panels on every building owned by the Commonwealth. And on non-park property owned by the commonwealth as well. There’s a big solar array at the Framingham service area on the pike Westbound: where are the rest of them?

• Massive subsidies to get homeowners and other property owners off fossil fuels. Nobody should be burning oil to heat their home in 2026, and people using gas need to get off it. But we can’t leave this to individuals. The heat pump programs in effect are a start but are still out of reach for a lot of people. And why no solar subsidies?

• Masshealth for all. I’ve lost confidence that we will ever be able to get the federal government to provide health insurance for all citizens, but Massachusetts can and should be a model for how that can work. I’m not suggesting we abolish private insurance right away—let people who want private insurance pay for it. But we have a moral responsibility to offer no-cost health insurance to everyone in the Commonwealth.

• Proper ventilation for all public schools, K-University, in the Commonwealth. Keep everyone healthier and thereby improve attendance for both teachers and students and thereby have everybody get more out of school. I am actually dumbfounded that nobody is proposing this easy, common sense win for education.

• Raise the minimum wage to $30/hr.

• Baby box like they do in Scotland. Free period products like they do in Scotland. Free childcare like they do in Scotland. Hell, basically just look at Scotland and do as much of the stuff they’re doing as possible.

“Okay,” the liberals who don’t actually want this stuff will say. “But how are you going to pay for it?”

Well, first of all, this is a canard. Ten years ago, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the City of Boston combined to offer General Electric Corporation 275 million dollars in public money to entice them to move to Boston, which, by the way, they never did. People like Deval Patrick were working to try to get hundreds of millions of dollars tax money funnelled to the IOC when Boston was bidding for the Olympics. The point is that when government wants to do something, it finds the money, and “we can’t afford it” is just a dishonest way of saying, “that is not something we want to do.”

But sure, I’ll play—we can institute a progressive income tax instead of the current flat tax. Single-payer health coverage will also save a lot of money—even just looking at the Commonwealth, it now employs people to adminster Mass Health and people to administer private insurance policies for Commonwealth employees. Getting cars off the road will mean fewer accidents, which will generate cost savings from a reduced need for first responders, tow trucks, and cleaning crews. It will also improve air quality, which will help people stay healthy and lead to less sick time, fewer hospital stays, etc.

Big ol’ tax on second and third homes. People who own vacation homes and empty tax-dodge condos in luxury high rises can afford to kick in some more for the public good.

Tolls and congestion pricing will add revenue, as would repealing the law that requires construction sites to have a police detail, a law that Massachusetts cops say is absolutely essential to public safety but exists almost nowhere else.

I’m not a public policy scholar. But I know these things are doable because they’ve been done elsewhere. And if any of these policies look like an unachievable dream, that’s an indictment of the United States, not of government policies that actually benefit ordinary people.

Life sort of went crazy this year. I’ve been doing art when I can, but:

• My dad died, yielding a trip across the country to settle his affairs. I was there for over a month, and drove home.
• I’m in the process of the world’s longest divorce. There’s not enmity there, just a different set of needs and wants from life, but extricating oneself from an almost 20-year relationship in healthy, no-hard-feelings kind of ways takes a weird amount of time and effort.
• I need to sell my house. There is painting to be done (so very different than on canvas or paper or wood!), repairs to be made, and “beautification” to be done before we can sell. Regretfully, the market in my town is saturated, and also, have you looked at things like interest rates and general economic stability lately. Sheesh.

All of this has made sitting down to paint, draw, or even doodle a bit more challenging.

But! I’ll soon be posting some photos – that, at least, was an accessible option while traveling. I recently started a foto.app account, so I’ll be hosting them there – the gallery is far easier to navigate than a blog-style posting. I’ll still be posting here, too – probably cross-referencing and whatnot.

I’ll be consistent someday, too. I hope. :)

Publicat la 2 martie 2017

Mă gândesc de cele mai multe ori la scris ca la o artă. Ceea ce scriu eu aici sau prin alte părți nu este nici pe departe artă, ci un alt mod de a mă exprima, un mod de a face uneori ceva cu timpul liber.

Multă lume scrie pe blog. Anii trec rapid, iar evoluția tehnologiei, în special în zona echipamentelor de calcul și a comunicațiilor, a făcut ca accesul la instrumentele necesare să fie din ce în ce mai ușor.

Și uite așa m-am abătut de la subiect — nu că aș avea o direcție foarte clară, dar intenționam să mă orientez spre scris — către tehnologie și marketing.

Revin.

Scrisul ar trebui să fie, poate, treaba absolvenților de litere și a pasionaților de literatură. Dar sunt și alții care vor să scrie sau simt că prin scris se exprimă mai bine decât prin alte metode de comunicare.

Rezultatul? Uneori remarcabil. Alteori apreciat.

De cele mai multe ori rămâne însă o simplă pagină de jurnal în nori, așa cum sunt și blogurile mele.

De multe ori mă întreb ce caut eu online. Ce rost au blogurile mele, în afară de a-mi satisface nevoia de a mă exprima în scris? Folosește cuiva ceea ce scriu?

Ceea ce am scris pe site-ul profesional, deși modest, am observat că a fost util unor navigatori interesați să-și completeze informațiile pentru câte un proiect sau să-și găsească turbina potrivită.

Astă seară, ascultând o selecție rock, mi-a atras atenția o piesă a formației Styx: Man in the Wilderness.

Voi sări peste traducere, deși știu sigur că un prieten îmi va reproșa că folosesc engleza în textele românești. Ba, mai mult, chiar voi cita aici și câteva versuri.

What kind of man have I become?

All of the years I’ve spent in search of myself

And I am still in the dark

Sometimes I feel like a man in the wilderness

Sometimes it makes no sense at all

Can’t find the meaning of it all

Ei bine, am zis „câteva”, dar m-am lăsat purtat de val.


Valuri. Undeva pe țărmul Atlanticului.

Mi se pare ciudat cum, uneori, dintr-o multitudine de posibilități apare ca din senin tocmai cea care are legătură cu propriile gânduri sau frământări.

Cam așa am remarcat și piesa de mai sus, din selecția pe care o ascultam în timp ce făceam cu totul altceva decât să caut o piesă anume.

E ca și cum acordurile sau versurile unei piese ar intra în rezonanță cu gândurile.

Poate e doar o coincidență.

Dar ce este aceea o coincidență? E oare ceva mai mult decât ne sugerează definiția?

Eu așa cred.

Cum se face că un eveniment, început la un moment întâmplător, poate avea anumite caracteristici care se potrivesc perfect cu un anumit gând dintr-o serie întâmplătoare de rememorări, conexiuni mentale și aduceri aminte?

Iar acestea sunt, la rândul lor, declanșate de un alt gând sau de un eveniment oarecare.

E oare posibil să fie atât de multe coincidențe?

Poate că, privind totul de la nivelul la care ne poziționăm, putem interpreta aceste intersecții ca pe niște coincidențe.

Dar, imaginându-ne că fiecare eveniment este o frântură dintr-un șir lung de evenimente succesive și continue, intersectate cu o mulțime de alte evenimente, am putea stabili o rețea de „coincidențe”.

O rețea ca o plasă de pești.


Și asta doar într-o proiecție plană.

Extrapolând într-o perspectivă spațială, tridimensională, vom obține o rețea de o complexitate inimaginabilă, asemenea creierului uman.

Deși eu mi-o imaginez mai degrabă ca pe o rețea mai rarefiată, nu atât de densă și compactă.

Și mult, mult mai extinsă, depășind cu mult orizontul nostru vizual.

O însumare a tuturor acestor rețele individuale.


Iar asta e doar perspectiva tridimensională, cea accesibilă modului nostru de a raționa și de a observa lumea înconjurătoare…

Și totuși, revenind la ideea de la care am pornit:

scrisul ca artă.


Se pare că subiectul „scrisul ca o artă” nu își găsește locul în această postare.

Sau poate că tocmai l-am găsit.

Pentru că, până la urmă, și gândurile sunt niște rețele. Iar scrisul este unul dintre modurile prin care încercăm să le facem vizibile.

Poate că blogurile mele nu sunt create pentru a adăuga o anumită valoare.

Ele sunt niște înșiruiri întâmplătoare de gânduri.

Ori de gânduri întâmplătoare.

There was a refreshing cool in the overcast morning air today, and the dew was chilly on my bare feet. I know better than to think it will last or that there will not be more hot weather; however, it gives me hope to feel the cool mornings and to hear the windchimes blow early in the day on the soft breeze, something they do not do during the heat of summer.

Autumn is coming, even to Southeast Texas.

#life

After a semi-writing break in September I’m back to my writing schedule: three posts a week, two on the following week, repeat. While taking a break is always good for writers the main problem is trying to get back into the writing habit. But it’s easy to overcome that.

First, make short posts with a paragraph at most or a sentence at least. Second, write your solutions as if you’re talking to a loved one face-to-face. Finally, don’t push your writing brain too hard. Take it slowly, one sentence at a time, until it becomes a habit again.

Hope that helps. Let’s go October!

#writing #advice #solutions

When one begins contemplating whether to share their anomalous experiences publicly, there are a number of questions it is wise to ask and answer prior to sharing. The first question is, of course, Should I? And there is no right answer to this question, as it is deeply personal and private for each person. But to those who are enthusiastic to open up and share, I strongly suggest caution and patience, for there are risks in such sharing that may not be immediately obvious, especially if blinded by the desire to reach outside of oneself in an attempt to find validation, understanding, or peace of mind.

For example, one's reputation is probably the most immediate personal aspect at risk. By exposing deeply personal experiences, such as those involving the anomalous, one will certainly be judged by society at large, including by family, friends, employers, coworkers, acquaintances, strangers, and so forth. Different people have different thresholds for how much or how little they value their privacy and their social reputation and capital. This is not a protest against sharing the anomalous, but a caution to pause and consider what it might mean for the reaction of others who encounter an inner truth and, in turn, for the person who shares it. For in the eyes of others, especially those who cannot relate, these two things are one and the same.

Another example is the potential harm the sharing may cause the people close to them, such as spouses, best friends, parents, children, and so forth. Even if one doesn't care or worry about how the sharing might affect them directly, it's still wise to pause and consider the possible effects on the people they care about. Our modern, highly toxic society is filled with piranhas scanning the web for prey—fodder for their subscribers and views—and the personal story becomes blood in the water.

One more risk is that of digital permanence. The internet does not forget, meaning that when the potential chaos and social media feeding frenzy has finished, that personal exposure never really goes away. Years, even decades, may pass, and the story once shared, and the names and words associated with it, will forever be enshrined in the growing digital footprint of humankind.

As I mentioned, I'm not encouraging others who have anomalous experiences they wish to share to remain silent, but I am suggesting that some pause and deep thought be given to it—for themselves and the people they care about.

The question of “Should I?” is the important first question, but it certainly isn't the only question, because any question about should must also ask why.

#Intermundia #Excultio

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By D. Bowman | Nomina Numina is a journal of my reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.