Although he’s got endless tales from his wild youth, Infernus admits he’s not much of a writer. Fortunately, his new friend from the Ritual is so keenly interested in his life, he volunteers to ghostwrite for him. With a few embellishments.
Several whiskey malts into the celebrations, and Kelvin wrangles enough of his wherewithal to say, “You still haven’t told me about the first time you got covered in slime.”
“‘Scuse me?” Infernus asks.
“Covered in slime!” Kelvin repeats, appalled he’s being made out to look like like the crazy one here. “During the Ritual, you said ‘this is not the first time this’s happened’, and that last time you had to fall off a roof to ‘get it this bad’. When I said that certainly sounded like there was a story behind it, you told me if we survived you’d tell me all about it.” Kelvin testifies, at whiskey aided volume, “And I did try very hard to make sure we survived all that.”
“Heh,” Infernus snickers. “Nothin’ gets by you, brother. Got a mind like a steel trap.”
Despite the cloud of inebriation and the barrier of jubilant camaraderie that should blunt the impact, Kelvin winces.
The toothpick twitches downward with Infernus’ frown. “Sorry. Poor choice of words.”
“No trouble,” Kelvin says. “I merely wish I… well that’s the trouble. I wished, instead of looking on my own.”
The Archmother may have given answers, but she did that and only that; Kelvin remembers no more of the expedition than he did before the Maelstrom. A blessing, perhaps, now knowing what sort of horrors the expedition entailed, but still. He’d rather face these horrors head on than have them haunting him, dogging him for the rest of his unlife.
However long that might be. Now that he knows the truth of the artifact — Ettrick, their experiments together, how it all came back upon their heads and the heads of everyone around them — he questions if such necromantic abuses can truly withstand the onslaught of time. Perhaps he and Ettrick — he and Seven, wherever he is now, off nursing his pride after his failed attempt at godhood — did not extend their natural lives much at all. The artifact may be losing its hold on Kelvin’s body even now. Perhaps he only bought himself a few more years, enough to stumble out of the arctic and share with the world what he’d seen.
Enough to make new friends, enough to try new things, he reminds himself. Enough to be surrounded by friendly faces in a warm bar, and indulge new triumphs. That is what life is, after all, whether it be true or borrowed. Either way, he is resolute to make the most of it. Even without memories, he can provide answers to the families of his crewmates; the closure that has been denied to them for so long.
There is much to do, but much to be grateful for. Tonight, he celebrates.
“Tell me the story, my friend,” Kelvin insists.
“Well,” Infernus leans back, both hands on the bar, musing in practiced amiability, “didn’t so much as fall off a roof as fall through it. Molly kept skylights on all her warehouses. She was ritzy like that.”
“Molly?”
“You don’t remember Molenzo? Huh, I guess she was more of a local uh… whatever the opposite of hero would be. Local bastard. Anyway, she had a big section of Harlem under her thumb, was pushing East, Mendoza wanted her to stay on her own turf. I came along to show off, look dangerous while the guys in front threw the real threats at each other. It was the preliminaries you know. No one was supposed to die.” Infernus drags a finger through a ring of leftover moisture. His eyes are far off.
“That seems…” Kelvin thinks. “Honorable. For a turf war.”
“Wasn’t no one supposed to die yet,” Infernus clarifies. “That comes later. There’s an order to these things, even if Molenzo wants to pull she’s gotta at least look like she took a hit first so it doesn’t come off like she caves under pressure. Except when we get there… seems like no one’s home. I’m new blood, so I’m the one who gets voted up on the roof, try to see if there’s some sort of trap waiting inside. So I scramble up, stick my head in, but instead of a trap, there’s this… Goo.”
“Goo,” Kelvin says.
“Viscous’ long lost cousin.” Infernus raises a hand in oath. “Least, that’s what I’m thinkin’ now that I’ve met some deep denizens. At the time, I’m looking at this big blue pool and I’m thinking horses not zebras. Just a swimming pool, you know? Some big, blue swimming pool Molly had installed because she’s a freak.
“Didn’t know it then, but Molenzo had been hearing about the regenerative properties of deep-sea slime, had gotten real particular about it, convinced herself if she could dunk her whole crew in one by one it’d make her an army of super-goons.”
“Dipping them in the River Styx by their ankles,” Kelvin hums.
“Uh, sure. Put the whole river into ‘em. Anyway, Molly was a few cards short of a full deck, and having her at the head of a souped-up army woulda been real bad news for Mendoza. He was lucky sea slime doesn’t actually work like that. Mostly Molenzo’d broken a hundred international laws, pissed off some sentient sea critters, and paid a small fortune, all to smuggle in this goop that was really only good for patching up bullet holes. Useful, but not the way she was thinking. She left plenty of guys, but to guard it, not the building, so they were all grouped in one place.”
“I take it your faction found that out the hard way?”’
“Yep,” Infernus pops. “I’m leaning over, looking at the pool, they get impatient and start clearing the bottom floor. All the sudden, whole building shakes, and I go-”
Vvvpp! emits from between Infernus’ teeth as he uses a shotglass to mime a young Ixian falling through a skylight.
“Splash,” he says. “Right into the drink. And you’ve felt the stuff, way thicker than water, couldn’t swim to the surface. Only saving grace is you can breathe it, but by the time I hauled my ass out — after figuring out how to not keep sinking deeper — fight was already over. All my buddies were either dead or smart enough to beat it, and here I come in, sopping wet, standing shivering in the middle of a bunch of Maulers. They look at me, all pathetic, head to toe in blue slime and can’t start a spark to save my life, and you know what they do?”
“What?”
“Start laughing,” Infernus grimaces, though it mellows when Kelvin provides the expected bark of amusement.
“I certainly would have a hearty chuckle if I saw something so absurd as a blue Infernus,” Kelvin plays.
“It was about as stupid as you can get,” Infernus confirms. “Everyone yucks it up, I gotta stand there and take it. They say ‘go home, kid’, and let me walk out with my life, even if I don’t got my dignity.”
“Oh,” Kelvin blinks. “How old were you during this?”
“So young and already so put upon,” Kelvin says. “Infernus, truly no one in New York has lived as interesting a life as you.”
“I can think of a few. Ones who didn’t get out of the game as early as me.”
“But yet every adventure you share is that of legends! Have you ever considered writing them down?”
“Convincing me to start a diary?” Infernus jokes, passing Kelvin another malt and taking away his empty. “No need. All up here.” He taps the fedora’s brim.
“I meant for others to read.”
Infernus, after all, is quite a popular draw. If this were a normal night, everyone would be flocking to the bartender, which would make it rather rude to arrest his time so completely the way Kelvin is doing. But tonight is not a normal night. There are no paying customers in Jezebel’s, only the victorious, the triumphant leaning on tables and swinging from chandeliers. (That last one was almost literal, with Vyper promptly squandering the benefit of the doubt afforded her the instant her ban was lifted, and needing to be chased out.) Hank’s been serving too, though now even he’s succumbed to shooting the shit, lounging with an elbow on Geist’s table while she bandies something in his direction. A smile plays at her lips while she sips her wine. His make no such attempts at humility. Across from the bantering pair, the pool tables are filled with Ritualists: Mo and Kill sweeping the others for all they’re worth, offering no mercy to the first timers; Victor stands by, humorless, as unfazed always; Paige has only nominally allowed herself to be included in the celebrations, and has gleefully buried herself in phonebooks with hopeful gusto; Haze has made progress in her drink at a rate of approximately one ice cube per hour.
Yes, tonight Kelvin has Infernus quite to himself.
“Maybe folks would read ‘em if you were tellin’ ‘em,” Infernus deflects airily. “I ain’t a writer.”
“You’re an incredible storyteller, which is more than many writers can say.”
This, too, Infernus looks like he’s about to dismiss. But before he can, a ripple of genuine appreciation catches him, the kind his relaxed persona doesn’t usually let shine through. The moment is brief. He takes a great and sudden interest in Kelvin’s drink, which alone is enough to sate Kelvin’s self-satisfaction. It’s maybe the first time he’s seen something more than smooth cordiality from the bartender.
“Still can’t,” he does eventually admit with a shake of his head. “Pretty sure statute of limitations isn’t out on the most interesting ones.”
“Ah,” Kelvin understands.
“Got people and names I still wanna keep protected, you know.”
Kelvin does, but as he takes another drink, an idea is brewing, one that needn’t involve Infernus airing all his dirty laundry for the world to see. One that still might bring his tales to those who’d appreciate them.
“Shelf Ice on Lake Ontario” - Lakeshore Beach, PEC
“Water, in its many forms, continues to amaze me. From warm gentle streams in summer to the surprising frozen cryovolcanoes of the shelf-ice of the Great Lakes, water is ever changing” – Ed Lehming
Today, I went for a walk along the shores of Lake Ontario. My destination, once more, was Lakeshore Beach in Sandbanks Provincial Park, which I have written about quite a bit lately. Just a few weeks…
The ion-powered Dawn spacecraft orbited the dwarf planet Ceres, taking false-color images that highlight differences in surface materials. It appears that Ceres once had a global liquid ocean whose surface is now frozen and bound up with rocks, salts and clathrate hydrates(a cage of water molecules surrounding a gas molecule). Yet, liquid water may still exist deep below the icy crust.
In fact, Dawn sent back images of a huge cryovolcano (a volcano that erupts liquid water instead of lava) named Ahuna Mons; it towers 3 miles(5km) above the surface.
Ceres has a diameter of about 590 miles (950km), making it the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, comprising 25% of the belt's total mass.
Ceres is named for the Roman goddess of grains/agriculture. The word 'cereal' comes from the same name. ~beauty-funny-trippy
"NUMEROUS ICE VOLCANOES MAY HAVE EXISTED ON CERES ONCE UPON A TIME"
According to new research by Michael Sori and colleagues at the Lunar Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, Ahuna Mons, Ceres' only ice volcano, may have once had company. These older cryovolcanoes would have flattened out and disappeared over the eons via a process called 'viscous relaxation'.
Viscous relaxation is a process in which many solids on a planetary surface flow, given enough time (think of flowing glaciers found on Earth). Unlike Earth's rocky mountains, Ahuna Mons has a lot of water ice mixed in, making it a relaxation candidate.
Through computer simulation models of Ahuna Mons, Sori and his colleagues found that such relaxation would only occur if the cryovolcanoes were made of at least 40 percent water ice. Estimating a rate of flattening of about 10 to 50 metres (33 feets to 165 feet) per 1 million years , Ceres' cryovolcanoes could have been wiped out in hundreds of millions to a few billion years. Therefore it is entirely possible that Ahuna Mons once had older brothers and sisters, which have since vanished back into Ceres' frigid surface.
"It would be fun to check some of the other features that are potentially older domes on Ceres to see if they fit in with the theory of how the shapes should viscously evolve over time," Singer said in the same statement. "Because all of the putative cryovolcanic features on other worlds are different, I think this helps to expand our inventory of what is possible."
Read more about this fascinating story at: http://www.space.com/35571-ceres-ice-volcano-ahuna-mons.html
