Sorry, Baron von Heartthrob! Your mustache is very handsome but it also tickles!
Okay so I guess OC Kiss Week 2018 has become OC Kiss Month 2018. This one features @juczerro‘s delightful Agent Zaharian Kavok, who is in his undercover look that @amarearts designed for this piece here. I loved it so much I had to draw it! Here he’s smooching my jedi knight Eli’Zan Luz, who is most succinctly described as “Kaylee Frye with lightsabers.” This might be a bad move, though, because the Eli’Zan defense squad zooms in immediately at the first sign of duplicitous agent smooches. Accidentally kind of hilarious, since as imperial agents go Zah is about as sweet as you can get.
Eli’Zan Defense Squad, clockwise from the left:
Angry Balmorran Mother, Sabine Traken-Luz (mine)
@catpella‘s delightful twi’lek shadow Karreja
@nerdlordholocron‘s looming and disapproving Michaeli
Older sister who Won’t Hesitate, Bitch, Guileta Luz (mine)
@kotorswtor‘s Nauri Massani (right) and Ellekai Massani (bottom), who are on to you, Zah.
Also the pose for the last panel was taken from this Draw the Squad template which was a lot of fun and I strongly recommend.
Nauri and Des, absolutely, sign me up for muscular otter wife and general shenanigans (the military rank but also just, you know, generally). After that I would actually be extremely curious about a Shevlah route.
Yesssss. I feel like one of the fun things about both Nauri and Des is that you can swing a stick anywhere and hit about five dudes with a very similar overview of tropes/attributes, but it’s a lot harder to find women who are doing the “low-key, practical, conscientious, married to my job but also 100% devoted to you” thing or the “overgrown twelve-year-old boy with hidden reserves of competence and maturity” thing. A Shev romance would be unconventional in the extreme/not everyone’s cuppa. Along with her sensory processing/integration and social difficulties, and that silently, invisibly following you around is her primary love language, she’s ace as heck and may meet certain definitions of aromantic (full disclosure: for my personal mileage, the difference between a super-close platonic friendship and a romantic relationship with no sexual component turns into Zeno’s Paradox very quickly). People who are up for meeting her where she lives rather than expecting a romance to transmogrify her into a completely different person are in for a sweet, strange, more-zoological-trivia-than-your-body-has-room-for time.
I just hit 65 with Nauri while running random dailies. That’s another character who’s going to be walking into KotFE in a mix of augmented 208/216/220 gear. Oooops.
Australian High Court challenge to offshore detention
This article was originally published by the Human Rights Law Centre (HRLC) on 14 May 2015 and can be found online here. It is reprinted with permission from the HRLC.
A case has today been commenced in the High Court of Australia on behalf of a group of 10 asylum seekers and their families challenging the lawfulness of the Australian Government’s offshore detention arrangements.
The Human Rights Law Centre’s Director of Legal Advocacy, Daniel Webb, who is part of the legal team representing the families, said the group have been temporarily returned to Australia but are facing imminent removal back to Nauru.
“We’re helping a very vulnerable group of people – including people with serious medical issues, families with young children and even one family with a newborn baby – who’ve asked us to take urgent steps to stop them being sent back to detention on Nauru.
They’ve all described conditions inside the centre as abhorrent. Their time detained on Nauru has clearly taken a toll on them and on their children. The United Nations, the Australian Human Rights Commission and the recent Moss review all make clear the Nauru detention centre is unsafe and unsuitable for children and families,” said Mr Webb.
The case raises important and untested legal questions about whether the Australian Government has the necessary power to detain, or cause the detention of, asylum seekers in foreign countries and to spend public money for that purpose.
“Liberty is a fundamental human right. The Government needs clear legislative authority to deprive people of it or to enter into contracts and other arrangements which procure detention. One of the questions at the heart of this case is whether any such authority exists under any Australian law.
We know the Government has powers to detain asylum seekers in Australia and also has powers to remove asylum seekers from Australia. But the question is whether the Government has the authority to then lock them up indefinitely in the territories of other sovereign nations or to effectively procure that detention,” said Mr Webb.
The case also challenges the Government’s funding of offshore detention. The case will consider the contractual arrangements under which the Australian Government pays Transfield Services Pty Ltd a reported $1.22 billion to provide services inside the Nauru and Manus centres.
“It’s a truly extraordinary thing for the Government to be spending billions of dollars indefinitely detaining people in other countries. We know it’s harmful. We know it’s a breach of international law. We also know it’s also incredibly expensive. This case will examine whether that expenditure is lawful.
In recent cases the High Court has said that, apart from some limited exceptions, legislative authority is required before the Government can spend public money on major policy projects. This case asks whether the necessary authority to spend on offshore detention exists,” said Mr Webb.
Mr Webb said that money spent on offshore detention could be much better spent on developing safe pathways to protection for refugees.
“We’re currently spending over AUS 1 billion a year detaining asylum seekers offshore. That’s more than five times the United Nations refugee agency’s entire budget for all of Southeast Asia.
Instead of using costly and cruel measures to stop the boats, Australia should be working with the United Nations to address why people get on them in the first place. We should be using our resources and our influence to develop safe pathways to protection for people who need to seek it,” said Mr Webb.
The asylum seekers are seeking orders from the High Court:
Preventing their return to detention on Nauru;
Declaring that their detention on Nauru would be unlawful; and
Restraining the Government from continuing to make payments to Transfield Services under the current arrangements.
The legal team running the case includes barristers Ron Merkel QC, Richard Niall QC, Craig Lenehan, David Hume and Rachel Mansted. Assistance has also been provided by the Darwin Asylum Seeker Support and Advocacy Network.
1. Step, kesakiri, kasumi, step, kirikaishi, kiriage. Her striking angles were a little odd, but they had to be. Everyone else in her class was seven or eight years older and most of twice her height.
One of her brothers was in the knot of elders, observing in silence from the far side of the training yard. He grinned when she executed a difficult draw-cut, one he’d practiced with her hundreds of times. “Oya Nau’ika!” he mouthed from behind his hand.
She smiled in return, and the soreness in her shoulders completely subsided.
9. She rolled up to a crouch, heart racing, hands poised to protect or strike. Her situational awareness filtered back in in dribs and drabs. Bed. Bulkhead. Console lights. the Wayward Son.
“Whatever it was, you scared it good. Galaxy saved, situation normal. C’mere.” A hand shot out of the pile of bedclothes at her side, followed the line of sinew and scarring up to that one spot under her left scapula, and pressed in hard. She collapsed against Loren’s chest in an inelegant heap.
“You’re still here,” she murmured, incredulous. Sometimes she was absolutely certain that he knew how unfairly gorgeous he was. Now, though, there was the slightest illicit thrill in following the electricals’ dim amber wash across the planes of his cheekbone and collar, watching the entire, unbroken line of him as he arched and stretched and settled, and knowing that he probably couldn’t see a thing. “No late-night greasemonkeying to attend to?”
“Oh, trust me, mucking out the starboard engine cowling can wait.” He wrapped an arm around her shoulders and kissed her forehead. “I’ve got better things to do in the mean time.”
15. The senator insisted on pulling her chair out for her. Something seemed inexpressibly wrong about that, but Nauri didn’t want to be ingracious.
“What do you think of our statuary?” Lady Traken didn’t do small talk. This was a trap.
She squinted at the painstakingly-detailed bronze buttocks of of a stylized spearman, exactly centered in the grand dining room window and, at the moment, reflecting a beam of slime-green neon onto the back wall. “It’s…uh. Striking. Impossible to ignore.”
The lady snorted. The senator gave her a reproving look.
There was a sharp twang on the periphery of her awareness, ahead and to the right. She sprang out of her chair with a saber to hand. “Prepare to take cover.” Could she could vault the table without ruining any of the food on it?
A speeder screamed in over the balcony rail from the facing block, and spun to a stop neatly between the statue and the window cowling. Its rider, unhelmeted hair blown into a ragged orobird’s crest, dismounted and glared in at them from directly beneath the spearman’s rump.
“…Captain?” Nauri reaffixed her saber. The senator called for another place to be made at the table.
22. She sat in a corner of the cantina they’d repurposed as a storm shelter, nursing her ration of painkillers and ale. Her team of Peacekeepers, desert rats, and space trash had gotten critical supplies ordered and hauled into cover and townsfolk evacuated just ahead of a ferocious sandstorm. The lifting and hauling and constant running back and forth had been the stress-test she’d been spoiling for on her new set of cybernetics. Her shoulder still made a disconcerting tactile squeak when her arm went over her head, but everything seemed to be holding up.
A twi’lek child, six or seven years old, drifted up to her. A smaller sibling followed with a thumb in his mouth.
“Can I help you, vod’ika?”
“Master Nauri, did you really beat up a Sith Lord on Hallan’s Mesa?”
“He asked me to fight. I didn’t want to. But if I did, he said he’d give us the access codes to a storage unit- there were people in there from Mos Aran that his Master had taken away from their families. So we fought.”
“Did you beat him?”
“He was much stronger than me, and very quick. But he got his feet crossed, and couldn’t evade when I got him boxed between me and a sheer drop.” She roughly mimed out the fight. Her new shoulder creaked. “I told him there wasn’t much future as a weapon in other peoples’ hands. You can only live that life for so long.”
“What happened next?”
“He said I’d given him something to think about.” She looked over their heads, to Loren, balancing a toddler on one hip and a drink in his hand, and playfully jabbing at an enormous, brown-robed Red Sith with the other elbow. “and that maybe he wasn’t the only one who should be thinking.”
