#she is unfortunately very patchwork coded

[anon-does-art]

Perk of artfight season is having to start on OC refs. Downside of artfight season is-

Anyway, shout out to the only heterosexual couple I have for hanging on to that by the skin of their teeth. I think I actually do have a singular other hetero couple, but I forgot their names so you'll have to wait for next year's OC refs :/

[stimpakstimpak]

1. Two Random Headcanons For Each Companion.

Still no one asked. But it's a fun exercise.

Cait

Has unfortunately vivid dreams. They arent always bad, thankfully, but they are always surreal. It makes getting to sleep every night a reluctant surrender because she knows she will feel whatever dream awakes her.

Post Benign intervention she puts on some weight. She's visibly healthy now and her hair isn't falling out anymore. Although it still is growing back in so occasionally she keeps her hair messy to hide the patchwork.

Codsworth

Has been out of cleaning supplies for years so has been cleaning via heating things. Anything flammable he attempts to boil but that's asking for rust.

He can tap into local radios and if Sole let's him he will keep an ear out for their Pipboy frequency so he can get things ready for them when they are on the way home.

Curie

In her synth body she is actively straining her voice some to make it sound like her original voice box. This occasionally causes her to lose her voice or have voice breaks.

She tailors each stimpak she makes for the person she makes it for. Exact dosages scale to the patients size, activity level, tendency to get into situations.

Danse

Something Something awkwardly holding Sole as they sleep and he only moves every hour or so. Not for his own comfort, absolutely not because he's twisted as much like a pretzel as he can be, but for Sole's. He is trying to think of how he used to sleep on Cutler's shoulder after long missions. How he used to hold Cutler when Cutler slept on him. Tldr he's awkwardly trying to cradle Sole and cover their ears from any vertibird or power armour noise. Even if they are in bed. In sanctuary. Old habits are filled with a mourning love.

He doesn't have a favourite beer. Not that he'll admit. But he DOES have a least favourite. He won't admit that either but you can tell by the slight frown on his lips and furrowed of his brow.

Deacon

He wasnt bluffing about the secret handshake for the railroad. He was honest. He made it fully and has a book he's drawn out with each of the hand gestures being snippets and extracts of hands from old shopping catalogues and posters.

His code name is some sort of rank in the church. I don't know if he is still Christian, but I can imagine maybe he was in his youth. That joining the UP Deathclaws was senseless lynchings justified by bible verses Deacon chose without yet understanding or caring for any nuance that contradicted him. That the code name he wears in the railroad is an eternal reminder to himself of how he twisted faith to justify his actions in his youth, and how he must to atone.

Dogmeat

If laying down when getting good scratches: he kicks all legs instead of just one.

Can get out of any collar put on him. And any harness. He refuses to be robed.

Hancock

Ghouls have a very funky circadian rhythm. Hancock can go days or even a week without sleep and then not last thirty minutes without yawning. The chems don't help either. The only reason this man doesn't have bags under his eyes some days is because they melted off.

Currently the second in the weekly karaoke at the third rail.

MacCready

Knows every scout knot possible from growing up in Little Lamplight. Occasionally makes hanging nets or bags when he needs them. He made Duncan a beautiful hammock.

Hates sleeping alone. Not that he wants to sleep in barracks. He hated sharing a room in the Gunners, afterall. He means he wants to sleep in the same room at the people he trusts. Sleeping in a room and waking alone is a harsh reminder he's alone. That Lucy is gone and Duncan is miles and miles away. That he is alone and it is very much his own fault even if everyone tells him otherwise.

Nick Valentine

Has a collection of old detective movie holotapes he occasionally plays to himself. He will watch them manually with Ellie too, but he always keeps one handy to watch in his head whilst getting his wires or joints sorted.

He occasionally dad monologues at Ellie over her posture or chair. He isn't human but he damn well remembers the aches that a bad chair can give you.

Piper

She is ridiculously good at scrabble. Going against her is like trying to out flex a super mutant.

She keeps a picture of her Dad and Nat in her little cap tucked into the lining. It helps her remember what she is fighting for on the tougher days.

Preston Garvey

He knows how to service wheel chairs and some prosthetics. He's not the best but he knows what is right and what is dangerous.

Runs cold. He wraps up like that for a reason.

Strong

He is rather fascinated by the idea of baths. He remembers the verse of Lady MacBeth trying in vain to wash the spot from her hands and can be seen looking to his own hands whenever he's near water. He'll let you know when he sees a spot.

Prefers mirelurk to human meat. Not for the taste. More for the enrichment of mmmm crab leg.

X6-88

He is severely competitive. Never with a human. But with the other coursers he holds himself to the highest standard. If they have outdone him then he takes it personally and will not stop even if he levels the playing field.

Father finds him unnerving. X6-88 finds father at best irrational but never states such openly.

[chibimyumi]

Lost and Wins in Adaptation

Dear everyone, as per Anon’s request, I shall analyse a Kuromyu and discuss the Lost and Wins in Adaptation. The results of your democratic votes (comments and asks) are out, and the winner is TANGO ON THE CAMPANIA! In this post I shall only be discussing character/plot influential changes, so no stand-alone comedic sketches will be included.

This is going to be a very long post because there’s just so much to unpack. But feel free to read it in bits, or skip to the part you are most interested in (but do come back later though (ÒvÓ)b). This post will include the following sections:

What makes a good adaptation?

AberHanks - Expert Glue and Filler

“Just like my family!” - One line, many messages

Grell - A Capable Career Woman

An unfortunate Sacrifice

Raw Trash Demon

Active Inclusion Midfords - Manga Fix?

Reunion and Aftermath

Afterword

I promise you the analysis will make you love TotC even more!

1. What makes a good adaptation?

2.5D wouldn’t exist without the 2D, so it is essential for any 2.5D producer to prove to the fans the producing side understood the source material using their form of medium. Changes are inevitable, but the key is that when things are changed, the core of the original needs to remain intact.

Theatre as medium’s biggest disadvantage is its strict time constraints. Whether the producers are capable of adapting a story within the time constraints without it feeling like a quickly duct-taped patchwork is what distinguishes a good adaptation from a bad one. The scriptwriters have no choice but to sacrifice parts to tell a concise story, but the art is in skillfully choosing what to yeet. The musical does need to be able to stand on its own without new audiences going “what?”, after all

2. AberHanks - Expert Glue and Filler

The most obvious difference between the original manga and Tango on the Campania is the addition of Aberline and the musical original, Hanks. In Tango on the Campania they are very cleverly employed to tie the musical together within the time constraints.

Ronald appeared before the Campania Arc, but it wasn’t before this one that he gets his own proper introduction. What the manga readers and musical-only audience have in common then, is that at this point of the story, Ronald is almost equally new. The line: “if we get to meet again, alive, that is” is a very effective way to introduce Ronald’s chipper but cynical personality. In the manga Ronald’s conversation partner was a passenger who fancied Ronald. It would have been a waste of stage time to adapt the third class setting and introduce this girl too, but skipping the line entirely would not do Ronald’s introduction justice. So the script writers cleverly used AberHanks instead, and when Ronald delivered the iconic line, the impact is still the same as in the original.

Additionally, AberHanks are supportive roles in them being police officers who help combat the zombies. The historic Titanic had a really poor survival rate, and that’s without dealing with murderous zombies. In Campania however, that’s a different story. I would argue that Aberline and Hanks evacuation efforts, along with the Formidable Midfords greatly increased the survival rate of Campania passengers.

This addition is a brilliant three-birds-one-stone move. This firstly shows that despite AberHanks being the comic relief, as the police they are not there to fool around. Secondly, by explicitly placing the Midfords along literal fighters of crime, the audience also clearly understands what the Midfords - the Chivalric order - are: fellow fighters of crime.

Thirdly, the gentleman’s code of evacuation is children and women first, and AberHanks would undoubtedly also have heeded that code. And yet Frances was there, and AberHanks never attempted to evacuate her or doubted her skill. The police and Frances fighting side by side shows the audience that even in the 19th century, Frances is recognised firstly as member of the Chivalric Order, before being ““just a woman in a huge dress””. Don’t mess with her.

3. “Just like my family!” - one line, many messages.

A very small but game-changing alternation is when Ciel was trying to convince Lizzie to remove her dress to benefit escape. In the manga when Lizzie refused, O!Ciel immediately rips the dress, saying that once dead she won’t be able to wear any dress, because death is the end of everything.

In the musical with real child actors they couldn’t very well reenact this scene, so instead they gave Ciel the line: “Everything is over if you’re dead, just like my family!”

In the musical, Ciel doesn’t touch Lizzie, which is very clever. When someone refuses to remove her clothes, it is because she feels infringed, exposed and/or unsafe. If somebody doesn’t do something out of fear, what you need to do to convince them is to minimise that fear. By forcefully ripping her clothes, MangaCiel only made Lizzie feel even more infringed.

Instead of touching Lizzie, MusicalCiel appeals to Lizzie’s empathy. By making Ciel say “my family” to Lizzie, both audience and Lizzie are shown/reminded how Ciel had tragically lost his family, and cannot afford to lose more. At that time of the musical, new audiences wouldn't know yet what Ciel had been through. So when later the Cinematic Record of Sebas started, “just like my family” also functions as an effective foreshadowing of what would later be revealed, avoiding Ciel being in a cage looking like it came from nowhere to new audiences.

One could argue that Ciel’s phrase was emotional manipulation, yes... but it was a literal life or death situation for the objective good of everyone. And besides, we all know who our Trash Lord™ is; manipulation is part of him.

Ciel had yelled at Lizzie, and immediately he turned around, clutching his chest. It was such an impressive moment because it showed how that blow Ciel dealt was a doubled edged one. Lizzie was clearly hit too, and very quickly she realised her own fault and apologised. Then the most fun part for the audience is to consider whether this was Ciel’s genuine reaction, or whether that was all part of his acting skills in manipulating Lizzie. I say both are equally likely! (Oh Reo, you brilliant little...)

I personally consider this alteration superiour to the manga original.

4. Grell - A Capable Career Woman

Per Yana’s direct request to Grell’s actor, Uehara, she asked him to portray Grell as a capable career woman because Yana admitted she failed to do so herself.

Most of Yana’s request was fulfilled simply by Uehara’s acting and respect for Grell, but there is also one tiny line added to her script which emphasises her focus on her job. “I’m dropping you!”

Nobody on the Campania had time to fool around because it was literally going down. Grell had her job to do, and yet Rian thought it a good idea to withhold information from Grell about the method of stopping the zombies. By threatening Rian whose life was at Grell’s mercy with “I’m dropping you”, the audience is very effectively shown that Grell is a no-nonsense woman, and that she knows how to get someone to talk. 👌👌👌

5. An Unfortunate Sacrifice

Some things had to be omitted to fit the stage time limit, but the most painful omission in my opinion were details in Sebastian’s cinematic record.

A really unfortunate but understandable omission was Ciel reuniting with Tanaka and Madam Red... but considering the time constraints of the musical, shoe-horning these moments in with different actors would have come at the expense of the rest of the musical. Though very sad, it is what it is.

Another omission is Sebas forgetting to spare one assassin to interrogate. In this post I discussed in detail why this omission by the movie adaptation was such a sin. Tango on the Campania omitted that part too, though as a stage medium it is more forgivable than an animated movie with endless possibilities Ò^Ó. Nevertheless it is a bit sad, because this omission takes away that the audience can see how Sebas was just so used to massacring on auto pilot, and how even Sebas himself recognises he needs to learn control.

THOUGH, I must say the musical actually tries to compensate for this shortcoming, unlike the movie. This omission of what showed that Sebas was far from perfect at the beginning, Furukawa compensated by simply being the most insincere, passive-aggressive, unprofessional, arrogant prick he could be.

The audience won’t catch a hint that Sebas used to be no more than a weapon, but they will see how Sebastyun never served a human on close proximity before!

6. Raw Trash Demon

I have already talked about how Sebastyun is a real game-changer on this blog, so I will not repeat every detail again. So here I will only address the significant changes in spoken lines that add to Sebastian’s character before he was fully trained. In this post I discussed in detail how Furukawa portrayed Sebastian’s gradual growth from raw demon to one hell of a butler. Sebas at the beginning was really butler in appearance only, as he was insolent and never knew when to shut his wondrous trap.

In stage format it would have been quite awkward to do a bath scene, so instead the creators replaced it with a wound-dressing scene. Instead of pouring hot water over the boy, Sebastyun is now scrubbing his master’s skin off. When the boy protests, rather than immediately apologising like his manga counterpart did, Sebastyun just shoves the feedback right back down the boy’s throat. “You’re making too much of a big deal out of it.” Here we see how Sebas is not there to serve his master, he’s just doing his thing because he has to.

Another line that is musical only is when Ciel’s stomach rumbled, and Sebas laughed his arse off, saying: “what an inglorious sound!” In the manga Sebas started a high-horse speech about human weakness, which was quite bold already. But he did not seem to dare straight up humiliate his master for a basic bodily need.

Sebastyun however? Balls of steel.

He humiliates his master, can’t apologise for shit, and when he says things in compliance with his master, it’s in a tone of: “well, screw you too”. Sebastyun was so bad at his job that Ciel too was given another line that wasn’t in the manga: “The preparations of a day’s meals is part of a butler’s job”.

Sebas had just criticised his master for being a useless kid, and now Ciel makes a comeback with the line: “well, you don’t even know what your literal job is, let alone how to do it.” The addition of this line is very powerful in my opinion, because it quite effectively compensates for the omitted scenes of Ciel and Sebas both sucking at their respective roles.

When O!Ciel commented on Sebas’ awful cooking, MangaSebas seemed quite willing to do his job well, and immediately offered to fix his mistake. Sebas does not apologise, but he does show that he made a mistake in not being considerate enough of Ciel’s current condition.

Sebastyun however, couldn’t apologise for shit at the beginning. Instead of showing openness to feedback, he immediately externalises by making humans the problem again, rather than his own lack of cooking skill. No wonder Ciel smashed that table with such aggression!

Another changed line is Sebas bringing his master hot milk after his failed dinner attempt. Originally Sebas did so potentially as an attempt to show his readiness to do better at his job. He explains that he does so out of consideration for the well-being of the boy.

In the musical however, Sebastyun does not say the manga line. Instead he says: “I can’t afford to have you starve to death.” I am not sure whether this was the script or Furukawa’s improvisation, but either way it perfectly shows yet again, how Sebas is not there to serve his master, but to just get his tasks over with.

This is a very short but efficient alternative way to retell how Sebas especially at the beginning was not very enthusiastic about being summoned, as analysed here from the original Japanese manga. Sebas is not like: “(UwU) gimme more orders”, he’s like: “(ಠ_ಠ) what is it this time?”

A small addition that was definitely an improvisation was Sebastyun sitting down on Ciel’s bed, and the boy pushing him away. (At the beginning of the run Furukawa didn’t do that yet. The first time Furukawa sat down Reo just moved aside and gave Sebas a nasty look.) Here it also reemphasises how little Sebastian understood of what was done and NOT done as a servant.

A final, noteworthy addition in the far beginning of their contract was Ciel saying that he acknowledges both he himself are the demon are still fakes. The boy says this line after Sebas had brought him hot milk which Ciel appreciated.

Ciel calls his butler forward in a soft tone, and Sebastyun just looked so self-congratulatory, self-satisfied, he adjusted his suit, standing all ready like: PRAISE ME! (●´ิ∀´ิ●)✨

Yeah no... you wish.

In the manga this line doesn’t exist, so Sebas is simply surprised to hear the compliment, and then his master just splashes the cold water right over him.

7. Active Inclusion Midfords - Manga Fix?

The most dramatic and influential change to the musical is the active inclusion of the Midfords. It is an entire scene that was added to the musical, so it is a bit impossible to unpack everything in this already very long post. So here I will only address the most game-changing alterations.

Yana Beaten to the Punch, strike 2 and 3?

Now many chapters later than the Campania Arc, we know that the Midfords had been the legal guardians of Ciel after the death of his family. But even before the release of the chapter, we’d see in Sebastyun’s Cinematic Record how the Midfords were very involved with their nephew. This shows how much respect for the manga the musical producers had, and how well they understood their source material that they too could beat Yana to the punch. Strike 2!

Both Midfords were present before and during the decoration ceremony. And Sebas bows deeply, thanking them sincerely for their aid all this time. Sebas cannot lie, so when he says “sincere gratitude”, it really was sincere. Alexis responds humbly, saying that it’s simply the right thing to do.

Not only did the Midfords aid Ciel in his reintegration into the world, Frances also showed the audience and Sebas she knows exactly what she is preparing the child for. Frances says she understands how cruel it is for the young Ciel to do what is expected of him, because being Earl means more than wealth and power. It is: “shouldering the burden and name of ‘the Queen’s Watchdog’.” The musical also does a great job at linking Frances’ position as the previous Watchdog’s sister, to being the legal guardian of the future Watchpuppy.

I have seen many manga readers talk about how they found Frances’ involvement insufficient in the manga, and I understand. She has a very small role in the manga, so we don’t know what she has or hasn’t done to help. But in Tango on the Campania, we do get a much clearer sense of the Midfords’ role in Ciel’s life.

Ciel was still mid-preparation before the start of the Ceremony, but Frances and Alexis had already arrived to keep a parental eye on him.Ciel is surprised, but Frances responds with: “it would set a bad example if the star is late”. Though it is but one short phrase, the script writers shows (not ‘tells’) how she is there because she wants to make sure Ciel’s decoration will go smoothly, as well as that her own role is to set an example for Ciel by being on time herself.

This is possibly a reference to what Sebas says to Frances in chapter 14, how he wishes her to be his master’s example. Except that here in the musical, it is Frances who takes this initiative, which in my opinion is the superiour way.

When Frances commends Ciel for his courage of returning to fight, Sebastian adds: “The most opportune chance for counter attack is when the opponent strikes. That is what milady Frances had taught him, the Young Master said.”

To which Frances is quite surprised to hear, and incredulously she says: “Ciel said that?” This makes one suspect whether Frances really said those words to supposedly Real Ciel. It would be very funny if Sebastian (accidentally) gave Frances a hint of his master’s real identity. I am not sure whether this is an implicit hint that Frances might have started suspecting Ciel is not the Real Ciel. Some have theorised Frances has the deepest suspicions among everyone. If that turns out to be true, then TotC might have beaten the original manga to the punch again. Potential strike three!

Another change is the replacement of Madam Red with Alexis. This one is just a very pragmatic change, because the phrase “To Ciel you are already as good as family” is very iconic and important and shouldn’t be left out. But getting a Madam Red in here out of nowhere would require time-consuming exposition. So by giving this phrase to Alexis instead, the musical effectively solves two problems in one go.

8. Reunion and Aftermath

Another addition to the original manga is the reunion on the rescue ship, just like the the movie adaptation of the Campania Arc did. After all that has happened it is very nice for the audience to see the emotional reunion and the aftermath. In the manga the Arc ended with Sebas and his master on the rescue boat, and it had a very nice, open feeling to it, I absolutely love it! 💖🚤

Audience Considerate Story Telling

To a musical-only audience (which TotC had a lot of because of the collaboration with TOHO), the opening ending might have felt a bit abrupt. These musical-only spectators don’t have the Arcs after the Campania to know for sure Sebas and Ciel went home safely, and that life would just continue. Nor would they know for sure what kind of impact the enormous revelation of Undertaker being a reaper would have on our protagonists. Had the non-manga audiences been given the same ending as the original, then it might have looked a bit like this to them.

Also considering the musical medium, any (Japanese) audience would want a satisfying finale song to wrap everything up. (Kuromyu21 not having one was a real complaint among JP spectators). And after the dramatic brawl song of Sebas fighting the zombies on that boat, you can’t very well pull another song on that tiny thing again. Okay, the song TotC did settle with for the finale song was......very disappointing in my opinion as it reminded me more of a Disney parade, but it at least had a song.

Emotional Full Circle

Despite the song being quite unfitting, the emotional reunion really, REALLY hit hard. When Lizzie says “welcome back” to Ciel, it was a perfect full circle back to what Lizzie couldn’t do 3 years ago.

In her flashback of 3 years ago when Ciel returned to her, the boy lifelessly said: “I’m back... Elisabeth”. Lizzie however never responded with “welcome back” because she was too preoccupied with something just feeling off.

In the musical reunion however, unlike 3 years ago Lizzie was fully emotionally equipped to genuinely welcome her fiancé back, and Ciel too happily responds: “yeah, I’m back, Lizzie”, using Lizzie’s preferred name.

Sebastian’s Aftermath

The reunion is but a simple addition, but it allows the musical to show the impact of such a traumatic event on the omnipotent demon butler.

The Cinematic Record showed how cocky Sebastyun was, and how he didn’t have a single worry in his life. After Undertaker had fatally wounded even the demon however, Sebas became a different person. In the finale we see Undertaker silently disappearing into the shadows. Sebastyun wasn’t even entirely sure whether Undertaker was there, but at the merest suspicion already you see him flinch and twitch. This shows how from now on Sebas has become a person who is on edge.

I mean, what’s the point of telling an event if the event doesn’t impact the story and characters, right? In this way too, the inserted aftermath scene skillfully wraps up an overwhelmingly eventful story.

9. Afterword

Well, thank you for reading this looong post till the end! As discussed in this post, TotC did a wonderful job at adapting an existing story with consideration of its audience and medium.

The largest obstacle of the theatre medium is time constraint, so the makers have to sacrifice parts. In what was sacrificed however, they more than sufficiently compensated by including parts outside the Campania Arc into the musical, without harming the integrity. This shows just how much respect and knowledge the TotC team have of the source material.

As a musical adaptation, it is an exemplary production.

Related posts:

Hyper Detailed Development - The Art of Kneeling

That Demon, Skin Crawling

That Butler - Punchable

Lost in Translation II - Sebastyun’s Butlernese

[gisellelx]

Walls (new Cien Años short)

Walls Ashland, WI November, 2020

To live with Esme Platt Cullen was to live in a carefully ordered chaos. 

In more stable times, and in more stable homes, this chaos had been the chaos of their children, now six-almost-seven of them. Emmett and Jasper, enjoying a boisterous playfight. Rosalie and Edward snipping at each other in that odd way they did that was one part love, one part self-hatred, a third part disdain. Renesmee, when she had been younger, trying everyone’s patience and most of all her parents’. The way the house would eventually rise to a fever pitch like a thrumming beehive and Carlisle would eventually retreat to his study, simultaneously craving solitude and also intensely grateful that, these days, solitude was so hard to come by. Eventually, his wife would come find him, standing next to his chair and raking her hands through his hair as she pulled his head to her bosom. 

Solitude was, unfortunately, easier to find these days. With the children in Europe and the two of them alone in the house which seemed strangely too large without the omniscience of Edward’s gift, quiet was their constant companion. 

And the chaos now was different. Instead of the raucousness of their large family, this was the chaos of sawdust and century-old plaster, warped floorboards with haphazard nails—nails which couldn’t hurt either of them, of course, but which still seemed to appear out of the ether in places Carlisle could’ve sworn they hadn’t existed twelve hours ago. 

He’d retreated to their bedroom, or what was left of it. His body remembered the route more than his mind did, up the staircase and to the right, through the second doorway.  The footprint was still here; wall studs turned a deep brown with age and striped with the pattern of the lath boards which had been removed and carefully stacked in a corner. Esme had told him that he wasn’t to touch them; she’d salvage what she could. 

The house needed new systems. It had been built with only the most nascent plumbing, and while he’d run electricity, it was the electricity which had been able to be run at the time;; not what was standard now. Esme would restore it to its mid nineteenth century glory in the end, but first it needed bringing into the twenty-first. For now there were no walls, just outlines of where walls had once been, with bright-yellow conduit dangling like vine, and red and blue flexible plumbing snaking its way to what once had been and soon would be again the kitchen and bathrooms, making the house look like the anatomy textbooks Carlisle was more used to. Blue veins, red arteries. It made sense to him to think of the house like a body—helped him make sense of, and honor, his wife’s diligent work. 

Esme was on the roof when he arrived home and slid into the remains of their bedroom, shedding his briefcase, his pea coat, and his white doctor’s coat as he passed the foyer, the coat closet, and the hamper, respectively. She understood and honored his desire to live as humanly as possible, and so she had warned him that the roof was coming off for a few days while she brought the trusses up to twenty-first century building code. But that hadn’t happened yet, and for now, there was still this ghost of the structure of the home he had bought, when his only identity had been “sire” and sometimes, if he dared to think it, and Edward had allowed him, “father.” And so he stripped down to his scrubs in this odd shell of a home, and sat, cross-legged, on the floor of the furniture-less bedroom. The sound from above him was rhythmic as his wife worked through the existing structure. First the scraping of the wrecking bar, then the quiet ping of the nail releasing from the roof, then the resounding thwap of the shingle hitting the ground two floors below. 

Scrape. Scrape. Ping. Thwap. The repetition was meditative, and he allowed himself to get lost in it. He was so deep in his own thoughts that he missed the cessation of sound on the roof, the quiet sounds of tools being put carefully back into place, the opening and closing of closet doors in what was left of the frame of the house. 

He finally became aware when he heard the thunk of the tool belt in the foyer, the toeing off of the unnecessary work boots. The soft padding of socked feet on the bare, stripped staircase. A moment later, the light shading through the patchwork of lath which awaited replacement revealed a feminine silhouette, arms crossed as she regarded him coolly.  

“How much longer do we get to keep the roof?” he asked.

“I should have it off by tomorrow midday. I timed it with your long shift.” The socked feet padded across the room and then she, too, had dropped into a cross-legged posture behind him, and then her lips were at the base of his neck. “That is, if you don’t distract me too much while you’re home, Dr. Cullen.” 

He smirked a little. “Far be it for me to separate you from a demolition.” 

She laughed her clear laughter, and he twisted a little so that their lips could meet. They kissed for several seconds, the gentle, familiar kiss of the long-married, her hand finding its way to his hip. 

“You’ve had a bad day,” she said when their lips parted. It wasn’t a question.

He nodded. 

“Do you want to talk about it?” 

“Not particularly.” He looked toward the ceiling, or what once had been the ceiling. It was now, like everything else, bare beams, the odd mixture of new and very old, and he could see to the roof, where the removal of the shingles had exposed the places where the old roof boards had shrunk away from one another, letting in little slivers of daylight. 

“I’m looking forward to furniture,” he admitted. “How far in the future is that?” 

She laughed again. “I’ll get you some for Christmas. In the meantime…” She patted her thigh and, almost without thinking, he lay down, putting his head in her lap. In the same instant, her hands were in his hair, her fingertips against his scalp as she combed through it.

It had taken decades, this part of their relationship. He had been used to fending for himself, convincing himself that he was invincible. And Edward, as glorious as he had been, had only made this aspect worse, as every day, Carlisle had tried even harder to be Edward’s rock. And so when Esme had joined them, it had taken him years to admit to even the slightest crack, and even longer to reach this utter surrender.

He closed his eyes, letting his senses be overcome by the feeling of fingers in his hair, the sound of breath, rolling in and out, the cinnamon-lilac-honey of his wife’s scent—one part his own, one part her own perfect unique essence. 

“There were eleven today,” he muttered finally, not opening his eyes. One of the worst days yet. They’d moved because of the surge here, and he had steeled himself for it. Nothing he’d faced in the states held a candle to Italy, not even this, but the comparison didn’t make it any easier. Sometimes, he’d walked out of the room; let a nurse in full protective equipment, looking like an astronaut hold a phone in a gloved hand as family members on FaceTime looked on while their parent or grandparent slipped away from life. Other times, he stayed; he was the one to hold the phone, to flick the ventilator to the OFF position, to witness the deep, rattling, final breaths. 

His wife sighed sadly. “Eleven is so many, Carlisle.” 

He nodded. “Eleven is too many. One is too many. This whole year is too many.” One by one, the same progression, over and over. Ctyokine. Hypoxia. Multisystem organ failure. The same sequence, the same dread, the same point of no return. And if he thought too long or too hard, he could recall each and every face. 

Carlisle squeezed his eyes closed as the fingers made their way back into his hair. One hand in his hair made its way to his back, the other to his arm. He let his body go slack as he let the day’s pain slip away into her hands.

“Thank you,” he breathed several minutes later.  

“Thank you for letting me in,” his wife answered, bending deeply and pressing her lips to his again. 

He chuckled. “Well, it’s hard to keep you out when we don’t have any walls.” 

Carlisle felt, more than heard, Esme’s answering laughter. It was a tiny cough of a laugh, small against the all the world was throwing at them. 

But, he realized as he allowed himself to rest, it was also just enough.  

[skia-oura]

The Pros and Cons of Surviving an Unstable Pocket Dimension

A/N: I haven’t worked on any Bentley & Co stuff in almost a year. And yet, I found myself wiping the dust of an old WIP a few days ago. Enjoy.

Ao3

______________________________________________________________

         “All right, we’re going to need to take you aside for further investigation,” the security agent said, gently guiding Bentley to another room. “Your luggage will also have to be searched through.”

           The first time this had happened had been in a grocery store, and Bentley had just about fled the scene after they were done checking for stolen items. He and Torako had also decided to never go to that particular store again—not that it mattered much, because it was closed a week later. Dipper denied any involvement. Bentley knew Alcor better than to believe that particular declaration. Torako had been seen discreetly high-fiving the perpetrator. Bentley had pretended not to see it. Life went on.

The second time, he’d entered a museum exhibit on the rise and fall of civilizations and how their technology had influenced their lifespans and lifestyles. The alarms had blared, he’d been pulled aside and interrogated about what piece he’d just stolen from the museum. When he said he’d just come in, it took two hours and an extensive check of their inventory to decide that he was telling the truth. In all, he’d just been incredulous and frustrated.

Now, on the third major incident—he was just numb to it.

           “I have a doctor’s note,” Bentley said. He gestured back at the luggage checking terminal. “It’s on my phone, in my bag.” He’d gotten it after the museum incident.

           “We’ll bring it to you after we’ve checked everything out,” the security agent said, frilled ears fluttering. The door shut behind them, and Bentley pushed down hard on the nerves that it caused. His therapist, who had not been told nearly everything that had occurred and was under the strictest of non-disclosure agreements as concocted by Torako and Dipper, said that it was fine to react poorly to being shut in a room. Bentley understood that. So did Torako and Dipper, who often took to leaving the doors in their new home open. Sometimes they even took it a little too far. Unfortunately, understanding it was fine to react poorly didn’t really change the fact that he was reacting poorly—heartrate up, breathing short, patchwork hands gripping the fabric of his long skirt.

           The door opened. “Can I see some ID, please?”

           “Of course.” Bentley worked his fingers out of their stiff grip on his clothing. “It’s on my phone, however.”

           The agent squinted at him with her three eyes. “Why do you keep asking for your phone so much?”

           “All of my important information is on it,” Bentley said. He was really going to have to look into analogue options, apparently, if he wanted to have any kind of expediency in his life. “Usually I have my phone on me to clear up misunderstandings.”

           She continued to squint at him, but nodded and left the room. The door clicked shut behind her. He couldn’t tell whether or not it was locked. Bentley closed his eyes and tried to regulate his breathing. It actually halfway worked, which was pleasantly surprising. He opened his eyes, and looked at the room. The room which was bare, save for a lonely, somewhat drooping poster in the corner about alerting the authorities to suspicious behavior in the terminal. It was faded. The section visible behind the poster was darker than the surrounding wall.

           The door opened. Bentley turned his attention away from the sad poster to the agent, who passed his phone over. “Please pull up your identification.”

           Bentley complied, pulling up the code that would allow the agent to access his public ID. She passed a fancy new flat scanner over it, shimmering with magic, and it chirped before lighting up his ID in hologram form. He had a second to think everything will be fine before the next half-second, in which he saw his photo and thought oh right fuck.

           The agent squinted her already squinty eyes further. “…skin tone seems different.”

           “There was an accident.” Bentley made a mental note to get his photo updated. Soon. As soon as possible.

           “Face is also differently shaped.”

           “Accident included weight loss,” Bentley said, frowning. He’d been very comfortable at his previous weight, thank you, and putting it back in a healthy way was taking much more time than usual. The wardrobe situation was unideal. Over by the door, a corner of the poster suddenly gave up and drooped down. Bentley empathized.

           “One of your eyes is…gold now?”

           “Same accident. It’s very frustrating.”

           “I’m sorry, I’m not sure this is sufficient,” the agent said.

           She dug out an attachment to her scanner and passed it over to Bentley. “Please rest your right forefinger on the print scanner.”

           That should work. Maybe now he’d finally be on his way to his work conference, where he could take out his frustration by tearing apart presentations by people who made mistakes they should have known better than to make. Bentley pressed his forefinger to the screen. It played a jaunty, tinny tune while it analyzed the results, and then beeped ominously. Bentley stared at his finger in betrayal.

           The agent peered at the screen. “…fingerprint also seems slightly off the record.”

           Bentley tried one last time to turn her attention where it really belonged. “Can I please show you my doctor’s note?”

           She huffed and put away the scanner and its fingerprint reading attachment. Energy like dust motes trailed in its wake before fading into nothing. “Sir,” she said, folding both of her arms, “I’m going to need you to stay in here while I call terminal police to get to the bottom of this situation.”

           “Okay,” he said, screaming on the inside. “I understand.”

           It took him five hours, several phone calls, and a set of lackluster apologies from all parties involved before Bentley was through security. He had missed his transaction time by a long shot, but still managed to be on his way quickly thereafter.

           The fourth time a similar event happened was two days later, at the terminal he’d transacted into. It took him seven hours, that time, and three different translators who tried to disagree on fiddly translation bits.

           The following day, Bentley went down to the police station. He updated his biographics, his address (which had also been an issue), received analogue documents in duplicate, and endured a lot of awkward small talk from Officer Akuapem. There, he thought to himself. Nothing bad will happen now.

           Then he entered a nearby bookstore, having remembered Torako’s birthday coming up, and single-handedly sent the entire store into siren-blaring lockdown.

             One thing that Bentley hadn’t anticipated about constantly emanating magical energy was that his phone never lost charge as long as it was in his hand. He noticed this a week after they’d moved into their new house, having confused and possibly terrified the poor realtor in charge of their case.

           “Huh,” he said aloud in the living room, lounging about after work with Torako—who was not lounging around, and instead was researching leads into her very first case as a private investigator. She’d moaned about the piles of paperwork the whole time, but had done it anyways. Such were the perils of working for yourself.

           “Huh?” Torako echoed absentmindedly. She twirled the tablet stylus between her fingers, energy become solid. Bentley knew that if he lifted his special reading glasses, it would be shimmering with magic more than it already was.

           “How long have we been sitting down here again?”

           “About two hours, I think?” Torako underlined something, then slid the tab out into thin air to interact with the 3-D image attachment. She mumbled something to herself about plausible cause and environmental influences and then worried at her lips.

           Bentley stared at his phone battery. It was at 97%. He’d been doing some heavy-duty stuff on his phone, like watching dumb videos between watching relevant TADtalk clips about things like the impact of magic on people’s lives or one argument against non-disclosure agreements. He was currently paused on a video discussing Alcor the Dreambender. It had some very strange ideas about how many souls Alcor consisted of.

           “Huh,” he said again. Then he opened his mouth and said, “You know, I think I’ve actually charged my phone sitting here.”

           If it had been one of his coworkers, they might have challenged that notion, or laughed it off as a joke. Torako, on the other hand, paused, turned her attention away from her case, and raised an eyebrow. “Charged your phone? Where’s your charging pad?”

           “In our room.” Bentley frowned at his phone. The percentage ticked up from 97% to 98%. “It…literally went up just now.”

           Torako gasped and rocked up from sitting to standing. “You’re the charger!”

           Bentley pursed his lips. “The phone is a bit on the old side, the software might be going buggy. I doubt it’s me.”

           Instead of seeing sense, Torako thrust her tablet into his face. He leaned back a little and blinked the brightness out of his eyes. “Do mine next!”

           He looked at the display. 11%. “You should really charge this more often, you know,” he said, like a person who put his phone on its charging stand every night before bed.

           “It runs until it dies,” said Torako, who often forgot to charge hers and therefore had a stash of portable energy clips stashed in odd places around the house. Why she needed two in the bathroom was a mystery. “Or rather, it runs until it is resurrected by your literally magic hands.”

           Bentley sighed. He took her tablet in his ‘literally magic’ hands and stared at her with the most deadpan expression he could muster. In response, Torako stared very intently at the percentage icon in the top right corner. In the space above the tablet, an image of a fairly normal looking townhouse loomed over them, apathetic to the tension of the moment.

           Two minutes later—Bentley kept an eye on the clock as well—Bentley sighed. “Look, Torako. Nothing has happened.”

           “Keep holding it, buddy,” Torako said.

           “But nothing has happened. I told you, it’s a quirk of faulty software on my phone.”

           He’d just shut his mouth when Torako let out a whoop of victory and punched a fist into the air. “Take that, it went up!”

           Sure enough, when Bentley glanced over to check, the battery icon was displaying a damning 12%.

           “Your software is bad too,” Bentley said, weakly.

           “My tablet is seven months old,” Torako cackled.

           “It’s faulty,” he tried. “Bad tech. You should get a refund.”

           Torako ruffled his hair. “It’s top of the line and you know it. I ain’t afraid to spend money on quality things.”

           “Good things sometimes don’t work right?” he said, knowing he had lost and still unwilling to face reality. The gleam in Torako’s eye scared him.

           “Give it up, sucker. Your magic hands are magic charging hands now.” She sat down on the couch right next to him and turned the tablet around in his hands. “Now, keep still so I can keep working longer.”

           Bentley dropped the tablet and felt vindicated by the way she squawked. “Can’t have my hands if I’m using them,” he said, and promptly walked away to go take a shower.

           The next day, he came home having mostly forgotten about the incident and felt tired enough to take a nap on the couch. When he woke up, Torako’s tablet was propped up against his bare stomach, and she was working again.

           “You’ll be pleased to know,” she said, grinning and scribbling down some notes in a tab laying across her legs, “that the more direct contact a magitech device has against your skin, the quicker it charges.”

           Bentley smacked her with the couch cushion. She cackled, smacked him back, and very soon the tablet was forgotten on the couch as they hurled pillows at each other like children.

             Lucas Onderon was a smart person. Very smart; it’s why he had a job in the thinktank of one of the first viable sigils research centers. He churned out ideas and made connections at a speed that sometimes made Bentley feel jealous. Unfortunately, whenever he tried to apply his theories, things inevitably went wrong.

           Bentley, glasses perched on his forehead, pointed at a sigil combination that was sparking dangerously to his left eye. “That’s going to explode in your face if you don’t change it.”

           Lucas rolled his eyes and flapped his hand in Bentley’s face. “I get it, you think you’re all hot stuff with your special face and your special eyes, but I know what I’m doing! Everything’s fine. Go pay attention to your own souped-up basic shit.”

           Across the room, very far away, Ziyi flicked her very large, very sensitive ears and looked up from her own work. “Uh, you might actually want to listen to Bentley? The Bentley Farkas? Who literally has a magic eye now and therefore is extra listenable to?”

           Bentley very carefully did not react to the thought that he was surrounded by people who called his body parts magical. Torako had very suddenly wondered aloud at how the magic affected his reproductive system was before freezing and hiding her face in her hands. The fact that it had embarrassed her as much as it had embarrassed him was the only thing that saved her from some nasty prank later on.

On the other hand, Dipper had cackled for all of five seconds before Bentley snapped that he had Dipper’s sister’s soul, and did Dipper really want to think about that? Dipper shut up very quickly after that. Dipper had also woken up in the middle of the night to ice-cubes being slipped down the back of his neck. The screech was very satisfying.

           “Who even cares?” Lucas said, consulting his notes for reference as to where he planned to set the severance line. He drummed his painted nails against the surface of the table next to the special sigils testing paper before him.

           Bentley sighed. It was his job as supervisor, he told himself. He had no room to judge right now, he told himself. “Seriously. It’s going to explode, and you will not be happy. At least move your notes to a safer range so that you can review them later?”

           Instead of listening to Bentley’s very good advice, Lucas stuck out his tongue and started to draw the line.  Bentley, because he wasn’t a saint, shut up and moved to a safe distance as he watched the magic spark higher and more violently with every other second. Ziyi groaned and slid one four-fingered hand up her face. Lucas faltered right before crossing the problematic sigil combo, but then continued. Incompletely cut sigils had even odds of either just going dead or exploding with energy, so Bentley felt it was a pretty fair call. Except for the part that, you know, he had told Lucas not to in the first place.

           As he thought, the moment the line cut through the sigil combo, the magic pulsed, Bentley closed his eyes, and there was an explosion that shook the room. Bentley felt the hum of the room’s containment sigils as they absorbed most of the shock and prevented structural damage. He counted to two, then opened his eyes.

           Lucas blinked, eyes wide, freckled face red from heat exposure and pink-dyed hair blown into disarray. He looked so utterly surprised that Bentley couldn’t help snorting in laughter. When Lucas’s attention snapped over to him, Bentley turned around and tried to muffle his amusement in his hand.

           “Stop laughing!” Lucas said. “This was—this was—this was terrible! A disaster!! My work is all gone!” The explosion had damaged his notes, as well, and Bentley wouldn’t be surprised if they were largely illegible now.

           “He warned you, you know,” Ziyi said.

           “He probably made it worse by standing so close!” Lucas said. Bentley’s laughter faded in his chest. “If he wasn’t here, it probably wouldn’t have even exploded.”

           “Holy shit, dude,” Ziyi said. Bentley’s hand stayed over his mouth. Guilt roiled in his gut—what if it had been his fault? What if he’d influenced an already unsteady sigil combination into instability? “Stop blaming your explosion on the dude who tried to help out?”

           “You know he’s throwing magic out everywhere, all the time,” Lucas argued.

           Ziyi scoffed. Bentley wondered how fast he could make it out the door. “And you know that you have a tendency to think too fast and overlook important factors! You should check over your own damn work after letting it sit for a while.”

           This was true, Bentley thought. Lucas did think too fast, and he didn’t proofread nearly enough for his own projects. From his sputtering, Lucas was also aware of this shortcoming, and that gave Bentley enough strength to compose himself and turn around. And not head straight for the door like he wanted to. Anyways, that was behind Lucas, and he didn’t want to go past Lucas at this point.

           “Hopefully,” Bentley said, burying his insecurity and slipping his glasses back down onto his nose, “this finally teaches you to take a bit more time with your work. You really are smart, Lucas. Just take more time.”

           Lucas blinked, and then his youthful face clouded over with resentment even under the exposing white lights of the sterile room around them. “That’s easy for you to say,” he sneered. “You’re already established and important.”

           “And it took time to get there,” Bentley said. He held his hands behind his back to hide how they were trembling. “Time, and care, and a lot of frustration.”

           “Lucas has got that last one pinned down,” Ziyi snarked. Bentley threw an exasperated look over to her, and she ducked her face with a sheepish grin. The white lights of the room slid over her single giraffe-like horn, dulled by the overlying coating of stubbly fur.

           In response, Lucas threw up his hands and stood. “I’m done! You have what you want! I’m leaving the practical testing room and going back to where I belong, on the drawing board.”

           “Okay,” Bentley said, because there was no reasoning with Lucas when he was acting like this. “You go do that.”

           Lucas swiped the remains of his notes up and glowered at Bentley on his way out. If the door hadn’t hissed shut, he might have slammed it. There was silence for a long moment, during which Bentley stared over at the wisps of burned paper, ashes spread over the table and the floor. He didn’t want to see whether or not they glittered with magic.

           “I’ll go get a vacuum,” Ziyi said, finally.

           “No, no, I’ll go,” Bentley said. He smiled over at her. She didn’t look like she thought it was sincere, which was unfortunate because he was trying very hard to seem sincere. “I have to…think,” he said.

           Ziyi leaned back in her seat and folded her arms. Scales glittered iridescent along the curve of her cheekbone and down the bridge of her nose. “He doesn’t actually hate you, you know,” she said. “He’s just…frustrated and jealous. Don’t stitch what he said into your soul, yanno? It’ll just give your reincarnations inferiority issues or something.”

           Bentley smiled again at her. “I think my reincarnations are already screwed,” he said, thinking of Alcor.

           “Hey, I know plenty of people who think having a magic eye would be cool,” she said, unfolding her arms and leaning forward. “Your reincarnations aren’t screwed for that, silly.”

           “I don’t think that’s how reincarnations work,” Bentley said dryly. Otherwise, he’d be a lot more like the Original Mable Pines (or whoever was first, if there was a first). “I’m going to go get that vacuum, okay?”

           If it took him twenty minutes and a fifteen minute rapid text exchange with Torako in a supply closet several doors down, then that was clearly a lie and never happened. No, his eyes were not red and he wasn’t suddenly congested, thank you very much. And yes, he was wearing gloves because he was just conscientious about keeping his hands clean, not for any other reason.

           He couldn’t resist lifting his glasses and glancing at Ziyi’s current project, though, trying to make something that shrinked and unshrinked on command. “Ah,” he said, pointing his finger. “You sure you want to make that combination there?”

           “Is it going to explode?” she asked, peering at the combination in question. “It’s just longevity and size, you know. It won’t stick it there, will it?”

           “But linking it to that change sign might not be the best idea—look, that change is also the one used for instability, isn’t it? It might make something that’s been made small suddenly become large again.” Bentley stayed very carefully as far away as he could while still looking at the sigils.

           Ziyi groaned and slapped her hands on her face. “Nooo, no you’re right, I completely forgot about that change sigil.”

“You might want to combo fluctuation up with a standard kind of sigil with a mid-level small sigil, and then link it to longevity.” Bentley suggested.

“That’s so many though,” Ziyi said, fingers dragging down on her cheeks enough that Bentley could see the pink skin under her eyes. For a moment she was silent, staring down at her sketchpad. Then she jerked up straight, dragged her sketchpad towards herself, and started scribbling down unbroken sigils and ideas. “But if I—Bentley you’re a lifesaver—if I set the combo up concentrically, then—”

He grinned a little. “I’ll leave you to it,” he said. Bentley turned around, tiny vacuum in his hands, and narrowed his eyes at his worktable a few steps away.

Time to wrestle with the basics again.

 One quiet Sunday evening, when Torako was gone to speak with a client, Bentley sat in the living room on the couch they’d had since college and stared down at his hands. Ostensibly, he was supposed to be relaxing, or cooking, or getting the garden outside started as Torako and he had planned. That obviously wasn’t happening. Instead, he sat in the golden-orange light filtering in past the translucent inner curtains hung over the French doors leading outside and stared down at his hands.

They were patchworked in different tones, in slightly different textures that didn’t quite blend into each other seamlessly. When he turned his palms over the patchwork wrapped around, crossed his palmar creases and rounded through the whorls of his fingerpads. His fingerprints weren’t the same as before, he remembered. How deep down did the changes really go? How far had the pocket dimension embedded itself in him, in his DNA, to change the smallest parts of his body so subtly? The doctors had said there was nothing physically wrong with him but—he was so cold, and his fingerprints were different, and his eyes were different his skin was different he could feel magic—

He curled and uncurled his hands, slowly, watching the light slide over his skin, watching the shadows bloom before creeping away. Bentley bent his head closer, brought his hands up, and inspected the beds of his fingernails, ran his thumbnails over the surfaces of them. He’d never paid this much attention to his hands before, he thought. That being said, he was—pretty sure that they had never glittered before. When he shut his left eye, the glittering disappeared. A sudden lump in his throat, Bentley closed both his eyes and leaned back. The sun shone dim through his eyelids until he squeezed his eyes shut and counted the seconds for each inhale and exhale.

There was a sudden thrum of energy, like friction skittering over the exposed skin of his arms and setting his hair to stand on end. Bentley opened his eyes just as an arm settled slowly over his shoulder. Only the knowledge that it was Dipper stopped him from jumping, and even then he couldn’t not stiffen just a little.

“Hey Ben,” Dipper said. “It’s been a while?”

“It’s been seven hours,” Bentley drawled. “How was it at Batoor’s new place?”

“Peaceful,” Dipper said. “He’s doing well, excited about college life next month and all that. Haji says to say hello. I also stopped to say hello to the Pines, and they were wondering when you and Torako were going to come out next. Lata especially.”

Bentley pursed his lips. He flexed his fingers, then gripped his legs with his hands and stood. Dipper’s arm slid off him in a rasp of not-quite-real fabric. “I’m going to take a shower.”

“Bentley?”

He threw a quick smile over his shoulder, but Dipper looked far from convinced. “It’s fine, I just was reminded I needed one.”

“Bentley…”

Fortunately, Dipper didn’t follow him into the bathroom. He didn’t protest when the door shut, or the lights turned on, or when Bentley said nothing else. Bentley chewed at the inside of his lip and looked at himself in the mirror.

Haji had never apologized, he remembered. Not in words, at least. Bentley leaned forward, putting his weight on his arms, and traced the contours of his face’s reflection. Haji didn’t seem to want to look at Bentley for very long, the two times that Bentley had interacted with him after the pocket dimension incident. Not that Bentley blamed him for that, he thought. His face wasn’t exactly his anymore.

The thought struck his breath in his chest for a few seconds before Bentley gritted his teeth and shoved it away. He thought he’d been over this. He’d thought that he’d come to terms with his new look. With the new needs that came with it, in the forms of two kinds of moisturizer and an extra delicate facewash. His gaze flicked between both of his eyes, the dark eye he had inherited from his parents, the light eye he had inherited from his trauma. Magic sparkled over nearly everything he saw. He suddenly wanted his glasses, wanted to try to forget that his body was no longer one he recognized. Bentley stared at himself in the mirror and was hit by a longing for the him of last year that had him biting his lip and ducking his head against the tears in his eyes.

Bentley sunk to the cold tile floor, the heels of his palms digging into the wells of his eyes and wiping away the water springing forth from them. He curled his body into itself, bare feet dragging against ceramic patterned like ocean waves.  Torako had loved them when they’d first looked at the house. The breath sucked into him was almost immediately dispelled. He ran his fingers through his short hair and tugged as hard as he could, baring his teeth against the pain in his chest. “I’m still me,” he whispered into the stillness of the bathroom. His heart beat out, no you’re not, no you’re not, no you’re not, and he curled in tighter on himself.

“Bentley just—let me in, please.”

“No,” Bentley just managed to say. “I’m taking a shower.”

“No you’re not,” Dipper said. The door opened, and Bentley did his best to hide his face, but it didn’t help. “I can read auras, you know.”

Bentley hated Dipper, very suddenly. It wasn’t right to, but he did. “Go away!”

“No,” Dipper said. He slid down the wall to sit next to Bentley, close enough that Bentley could feel the heat of him but far enough that they weren’t actually touching. Bentley wasn’t sure what he would do if Dipper touched him right now. “You need somebody. You don’t need to be left alone with your thoughts.”

“You wouldn’t understand,” Bentley said like an absolute child.

“Try me,” Dipper said, echoing that age-old reply. “I’ve lived for like, millennia, I’ve experienced a lot. Maybe it’ll help.”

Bentley sniffled loud and wet and tried to calm down by counting breaths again. “I don’t like talking about it,” he said.

“Take your time,” Dipper said. He shifted. When Bentley sneaked a glance, Dipper had stretched out his legs, one ankle crossed over the other, the hems of his pants cut a few centimeters above his ankles and tailored tight around his calves. The fabric shimmered blue—not with magic, but because Dipper was a showboat.

So Bentley nodded, pressed his face into his knees and covered his ears, and just tried to be. He counted his breaths—one to three in, one two three out, over and over. He focused on the pressure of his knees against his forehead, the coolness of the tile against the soles of his feet, the subtle hum against his skin that he always got now when Dipper was around. He was there. He was alive.

It was strange to think that, all those months ago, he had planned to never be alive again. It was even stranger to think that he’d made it out of that death hole. He never managed to talk about this with his therapist for obvious reasons. Maybe he should have, just—in the barest terms.

“Better?” Dipper asked.

He sighed. “Don’t just read my aura, will you?”

“Can’t help it,” Dipper said. “I barely remember when I couldn’t.”

The thought that Dipper wasn’t able to at one point shocked Bentley just enough that he lifted his face and looked Dipper in the eye for the first time since that morning. “You couldn’t?”

Dipper grinned, shark-teeth sharp. “You know I was human once, back before the Transcendence. Even fewer humans could read auras then, and I certainly wasn’t one of them.”

That’s right, Bentley thought. He looked over Dipper’s features again, eternally young and smooth. Dipper was human once, too. He’d had a human sister, human parents and friends and relatives. He hadn’t had sharp teeth, or black sclera, or brown hair—or maybe he had? How much of his appearance was rooted in reality? Had he had brown eyes, back when he was human?

Bentley sniffled again. Maybe Dipper could understand. “Remind me how you became Alcor again?”

“That old story?” Dipper’s eyebrows raised up a bit higher than most human eyebrows did. “There’s not much to it.”

“Humor me.” Bentley crossed his arms over his knees and rested his head there, face turned towards Dipper. “If you want.”

“I mean,” Dipper said, bending a knee and slinging one arm over it. “It wasn’t on purpose. We—my sister, my friends, my Grunkles and I—were trying to stop a demon from starting the apocalypse. It eventually became the Transcendence, but it was better than it would have ended up. Long story short, I got into a tussle with Bill, the demon, and—somehow, I won. Then everything changed.”

When Dipper didn’t continue immediately, Bentley pressed on gently. “How? Did it change, I mean. For you.”

Dipper hummed and tilted his head. “I guess the best way to describe it is that things stopped and happened all at once to me. Time was—I was always going to look thirteen unless I took it upon myself to look different, for one. The eyes and the wings and the teeth were definitely different. I didn’t used to have gold blood, obviously. I was also just…mentally different.”

Bentley blinked, slow, eyes tired. “Oh.”

“Parts of me were changed completely,” Dipper said. He looked down at the tile at Bentley’s feet. “Bill became part of me even as his soul was excised from the energy that made me become a demon. His proclivity towards formal clothing, the knowledge he had of the universes, his masochistic and sadistic streaks, his disregard for life and his desire for chaos are all a part of me, now. Demons are not kind, and I’m no different.”

“Yes you are,” Bentley found himself saying. “Because otherwise you wouldn’t be in here, helping me.”

“Would I?” Dipper asked. He smiled at Bentley. His face became just a little rounder, eyes just a little wider in his features. “I’m not sure. You are Mizar, after all.”

“Would you care about Mizar if you were just Bill?”

Dipper laughed a little. “Not in any good way, so I guess no. I guess you’re right. Why are you asking, anyways?”

Bentley worried at the inside of his cheek. “Would you say that you’re trapped in a body that isn’t…isn’t yours? That you don’t recognize yourself in the mirror anymore?”

After a second, understanding bloomed over Dipper’s face like the summer sunset outside. “Not often, no,” Dipper said. “Maybe once every few years, at most. But I’ve also had a long time to get used to my situation. It was much worse at the beginning.”

When Bentley didn’t respond apart from looking away, Dipper reached out to slide his hand over Bentley’s cheek, slow enough that Bentley could move away if he wanted to. Instead, Bentley leaned into the warmth of his palm and closed his eyes.

“But it got better,” Dipper said into the quiet of the bathroom. “It got better, and it will get better for you too.”

Bentley tugged his lip inside of his mouth and found himself blinking back more tears. “Sometimes it doesn’t feel that way. I feel like I was stolen from me, you know?”

“I did,” Dipper said. He shifted closer, and Bentley turned to press his face into Dipper’s chest almost eagerly. “And you have a right to feel angry. But it will get better. I promise, it will.”

Bentley wrapped his arms around Dipper, and tried his best to believe that it would.

 The sun beat down warm on his skin through his gauzy overshirt and the wide-brimmed sunhat on his head. His hands dug down into the rich earth, moist and cool from the previous day’s summer storm. Bentley pulled away more loose soil from the hole he’d just dug, before tugging the decomposable plastic from the base of the tomato plant and setting it into the ground. He piled cool soil back around it and patted it down just firm enough to hold without restricting. The plant was barely tall enough for the cage—which he picked up and snapped into three-dimensions before setting it down into the ground. It ground, metal against dirt until the lowest ring of it was a mere seven centimeters above the earth. Bentley smiled down at it, then shuffled past a basil plant over to the next spot—the last spot for their tomatoes—and dug in his spade.

“How’s it going over there, Ben?” Torako called from the other side of the house with Dipper.

“Fine!” he said, pushing up his glasses. “How about you?

“It’s going peachy!”

“But you’re planting apples?” He dug a well big enough and deep enough into the ground, and then set the spade aside. He couldn’t help touching the earth with his bare hands, feeling the natural energy of it thrum up into him. It was like he was all the more alive for it. It was—it was rejuvenating.

“Exactly!” Dipper yelled, which either meant that things weren’t going nearly as well, or that they were settling for a weak pun on the basis that peaches were fruits too. There was a clang, and Torako cursed. Bentley set the tomato plant in the ground and piled the dirt over it, shaking his head. Standing, he winced at the crack of his knees before shaking out another cage and setting it down.

“How has it even taken you this long to get that taken care of?” he yelled over. Squinting his eyes against the glare of the sun, he set his dirty hands on his hips and surveyed the small plot they’d just developed. Basil interspersed between tomato, beyond them two lines of carrots. Peppers and chives just beyond those, all the vegetables ringed by a protective barrier of nasturtiums and marigolds. “You just had three trees!”

“Don’t sound so high-horsed, you only planted the tomatoes and nasturtiums today,” Torako hollered back. “Don’t think I don’t see you standing over there like you’re surveying all of your work.”

Bentley laughed, heart light in his chest. A pleasant breeze blew by, sweeping the hem of his overshirt up. He turned around. “Do you need my help over there?”

“Sure,” Torako said, wiping her brow with the back of her arm. She grinned at him, dark eyes warm under the shadow of her arm. “You’ll do more good than Mr. Dipper himself here.”

“Hey!” Dipper protested, feet flat on the ground, eyes white and brown and black and ears rounded. He stuck out his tongue past (slightly too sharp) human teeth at Torako and leaned on the shovel he’d shoved into the ground, gardening glove thick on his hand. “I’m plenty helpful. This casing is just being more difficult than the others.”

“Let me see,” Bentley said, walking over and wiping his hands off on the apron he had on.

Behind him, though he didn’t know it and hadn’t seen it, the magic from inside of him had seeped into the ground. It would travel slowly up into the roots of those plants, soft and imbued with care, the desire to grow and grow well. Those plants would grow into abundance, tomatoes ripening sweeter despite being planted just a little too late, chives taller, peppers longer than they would have otherwise—if only by a little. The marigolds and nasturtiums would bloom brighter and longer. The carrots would dig into the ground, greedy for more until they were pulled up in the fall. The apple tree Bentley helped plant would be just a little hardier than the other two. Torako would look at him slyly, tell him that his green thumb had certainly improved in leaps and bounds and was he sure his hands weren’t magic, before getting a pillow to the face and falling down to the floor laughing. Dipper would cackle and join in, and they would fight until the morning, when Bentley would get up and go to work for his first full day since being kidnapped.

But he didn’t know all that yet, so Bentley went over to Dipper and Torako, took the apple seedling by its base, and tugged the wrapping off in a couple quick motions.

Torako stared. “You really do have magic hands.”

“Oh shut it,” he said, reaching out and smearing his dirty hand down the side of her cheek. She gasped in false affront, hand on her chest. Dipper laughed, Bentley crouched down to set the seedling in the ground and cover it, cool dirt on his hands and the life of the earth trembling up into his skin.

[headlesssamurai]

Have you seen Altered Carbon? If so, what do to think of it?

Alright, I finally bucked up enough courage to do another honest, non-sarcastic, write-up for a piece of media. Just been somewhat bitterly reluctant to voice my true opinions on fiction, or anything else really, since it seems like lots of folks are quite intensely engaged in violent uproars of one kind or another. No need to add more noise to the feedback loop, if you know what I mean.

But you’re, like, one of a dozen or so dudes who asked me about this series. So I reckoned I’d write it up for you, it being such a popular subject and all. I’d also like to thank you for your curiosity. It’s pretty damn humbling to know anybody cares enough about what I think to even ask after my thoughts. I’ll make sure to offer a notary warning before I spill any spoilers.

I became acquainted with Richard K. Morgan’s Kovacs-verse a few years back, but accidentally read one of the protagonist’s later adventures before backtracking to the original novel. I found it to be a respectably well-written futuristic detective story in the grand tradition of vintage writers like Robert B. Parker, even if including the predictably pornographic sex scenes in the grand tradition of modern urban sci-fi/fantasy writers like Laurell K. Hamilton (maybe the ‘K’ middle initial is a code for graphic sex content). In preparation for watching the new Netflix series, I re-read Morgan’s Altered Carbon to refresh my knowledge of the future he created.

Now, I’d like to say I’m a prolific reader of novelized fiction and other books, but I’m not one of those “hardcore” purists who always cries “the book was better” while pounding my fist on the podium. Thus in my effort to avoid any such farcical nonsense, I’m going to sort of examine both the book and the Netflix series of Altered Carbon at once, and write about what I enjoy and dislike about both versions, instead of directly comparing them.

I’ve grown so cynical with modern film and TV, I tend to unintentionally generate lists of what I think they’ll change about a book’s story once they adapt it, and what they’ll add and leave out. Usually, these lists are fairly accurate. Game of Thrones, for instance: how depressing it is to be absolutely correct some times. Not that the books were much better, but a pinecone up the ass doesn’t make a kick in the nuts feel any better.

A lot of people would describe Altered Carbon as having cyberpunk vibes, and this is true, but I believe it fits more comfortably into the realm of biopunk than anything else. If you’re not familiar with the concepts herein, Altered Carbon involves a distant future in which humanity has colonized the stars over many generations using sleeper ships, and with a little help from recovered alien star-maps, but has not achieved faster-than-light interstellar travel. The central technology in this universe is the cortical stack, a type of neural backup which allows a person’s consciousness to be digitally stored in a “disc” and uploaded into a new body if they die.

The new bodies are referred to as sleeves, and the filthy rich clone themselves so their sleeves are all identical and genetically enhanced, but most common folk have to accept whatever body is available or is covered by their insurance, or even a synthetic sleeve (which in the novel is a cheap and distasteful thing, but in the series synthetics seem to have superpowers). People can only travel quickly to other star systems in the settled worlds (known as the Protectorate) by transmitting their stored consciousness into another cortical stack on their planet of destination and uploading into a new sleeve there (a process called needlecasting), but physically transporting anything still takes a really long time for ships to travel across the vast distance of space.

Straight out of the gate, this concept does not appeal to me at all. If there’s anything that drains your story of tension and thrills, it’s got to be the idea that everyone lives forever. The way the universe is constructed however, it ends up making the story far more interesting than what I had anticipated. Not everyone can afford to live forever, first of all, since re-sleeving can be an extremely expensive undertaking, and even those who have the money rarely feel the desire to live more than two lifetimes. Additionally there are complications which can arise, such as personality fragging, a type of insanity which occurs when a person is sleeved in one too many different bodies throughout their life.

Certain religious groups also vehemently resist re-sleeving, and for law enforcement various lengthy sentences of storage without the possibility to re-sleeve are the primary means of punishment for most crimes. There are even interesting concepts like criminals who copy their consciousness into several cortical stacks at once, making them difficult to apprehend once and for all. Other criminals and intelligence operatives also utilize virtuality to torture people in a digital environment, allowing them to subject victims to days or even months of agony which equates to only a few hours in real-time. Real death can also still occur, if the individual’s cortical stack is badly damaged or destroyed.

The actual plot involves a former soldier named Takeshi Kovacs, who is paroled early from a criminal sentence and re-sleeved by a rich tycoon who offers to exonerate Kovacs of his crimes if he can solve a murder. While reluctant to work for some rich asshole, Kovacs is almost instantly attacked by mercenaries which makes him curious enough to take the case. Kovacs then works to investigate the purported crime while getting himself into a bit of trouble with the locals, and trying to deal with extreme trauma from his combat experiences.

It’s surprising that in the case of Altered Carbon I was entirely incorrect in everything I thought the producers might add/change/amputate from the original story. I also could not have predicted what they decided to add and how they decided to change certain elements from the story of Morgan’s novel. I believe the series they crafted from his story is competently scripted, very well cast, doesn’t waste too much time with any silly subplots, and is generally a well-paced, adult-themed sci-fi story. Altered Carbon really wants to take itself seriously, in the same vein as things like SyFy’s praiseworthy diamond The Expanse, but its unique setting gets a little too bogged down in conventional tropes for my liking. Gratuitous T&A (as well as other, less commonly exploited extremities) and generous helpings of the fuck-words do not an edgy and intense sci-fi experience make. Good but not great, would be my general assessment of the series.

Don’t get me wrong here, Altered Carbon is plenty intense, even thrilling at certain points, but a somewhat bland smattering of writers and directors, thrown into the recipe with a few others who are brilliant geniuses, create a mixed bag of stylistic choices which don’t always fit together very well. So you’re often left with an unusually faithful adaptation of a badass novel, wonderfully enhanced in certain aspects, but grotesquely mutated in others, and some of the conflicting storytelling elements feel hurriedly stitched together. A Patchwork Man of a story, rather than prime quality tank flesh. None of Altered Carbon’s flaws are crippling however, and all-told I’d say the series is eminently watchable and very worth your while if you enjoy futuristic sci-fi stories.

WARNING: Spoilers ahead.

First the good news. This series stars an extremely talented cast of performers who own their roles with wonderful conviction, and very convincing poise.

Joel Kinnaman has been on my good side since he appeared in The Killing, and even his unfortunate role in the Robocop reboot didn’t water down my appreciation for him. I feel like his role as the newly sleeved Takeshi Kovacs was perfectly cast. Martha Higareda is just a little too cute to be such a badass, but she winds up playing Detective Ortega to that strong female archetype in a far less sensational and much more casual way than what you might expect from the modern trends of scripting for such characters. Though quite the opposite of Higareda in terms of the role she plays, Renée Elise Goldsberry brims with charisma as Quellcrist Falconer, a sort of futuristic Che Guevara if he had also practiced Zen and gong fu, and was a woman. Chris Collins is also incredibly memorable as Kovacs’ A.I. hotel manager Poe.

Ato Essandoh as Vernon Elliott became one of my favorite characters as the series goes on, and though I wasn’t totally sold on the arc of her character Hayley Law as Elliott’s daughter Lizzie completed a very nice trifecta of beautiful lead women who just happen to be racially diverse. The third of these ladies, of course, is Dichen Lachman who I’ve got to say delivers probably the most convincing and most nuanced performance in the entire series, having to run a wild labyrinth of different emotional expressions which all feel very genuine. As was the case with Sylvia Hoeks as Luv in Blade Runner: 2049, Dichen Lachman as Rei hooked me instantly and woudn’t let go. Maybe I just got a thing for sociopathic women or something.

There are also a few minor roles worth mentioning, Marlene Forte does a great job as the overbearing mother of detective Ortega, which again felt very genuine and not forced, Tamara Taylor as ambitious sleazy attorney Oumou Prescott gave me chills with her smug smile (again perfect casting), Kristin Lehman and James Purefoy seem a perfectly matched pair of megalomaniacs, Byron Mann and Will Yun Lee kick ass portraying Kovacs at very different stages of his troubled life, and there is some terrifically believable acting on the parts of child actors Morgan Gao and Riley Lai Nelet.

All that being said, not everything the actors are given to do is particularly well-written, in my humble opinion.

Takeshi Kovacs is something called an Envoy, a type of specially trained soldier who is mentally conditioned to be hyper-aware at all times, integrate and adapt to new environments and circumstances, and even manipulate his own bodily chemistry, allowing him to eliminate the pain threshold, instantly recover from debilitating drugs, and avoid lingering trauma from torture. The Envoys were created to help the Protectorate put-down political dissidents and rebels, which were running rampant throughout the settled worlds at the time of the Envoy Program’s inception. Many of these rebels often followed the outlawed “Quellist” writings of an infamously respected revolutionary leader called Quellcrist Falconer who fought, and lost, against the Protectorate hundreds of years before the time of the novel (and long before Kovacs was born). When she was born, Quellcrist Falconer, like Kovacs, also happened to be from Harlan’s World. In the novel, this reputation causes Harlan’s World to be viewed as a backwater source of rogues and misfits by citizens of more civilized worlds (which is fair, since it’s described by Kovacs as being overrun by crime syndicates and swamp gangs). But even compared to Harlan’s World, Earth is considered a polluted over-populated shit hole.

In the novel he was trained by the somewhat fascist forces of the Protectorate, and the Envoy Corps was an elite black ops group who could be transmitted to any planet and topple the regime in less time than it would take a massive army to win a single battle. In the series, Kovacs is just a random soldier burn during the time of the Quellist revolution, but Envoys were created and trained by revolutionary leader Quellcrist Falconer to combat the very fascist forces of the Protectorate, whom were too used to conventional warfare to properly adapt to Quell’s asymmetrical tactics.

The problem for me, with this particular change in the writing, is that much of the details have been glossed over. I never got a sense of how Quell was able to so efficiently condition her soldiers into such a formidable force, nor did her portrayal emphasize her military acumen in this manner very convincingly. Quell’s character is certainly charismatic and sympathetic to the audience, but I find it much easier to accept that Envoys are the product of sociopathic, strict, and brutal military conditioning than to grasp the concept that a fairly undisciplined group of freedom fighters were able to develop such a sophisticated method of training. If Quell’s rebels were portrayed differently, it might be easier to accept, but in the series they seem more like hippies with guns than hardened elite warriors.

This is one of my only major gripes with the series as a whole, and it wouldn’t even be that big of a deal to me if it didn’t play such a large role in the plot and arc of Kovacs as a character. I didn’t like the way it changed his backstory either.

See, in the novel Kovacs is a former Envoy turned career criminal since Envoys are generally feared by everyone despite their having fought for the Protectorate, so they don’t have a lot of options and their skillset is only useful in a limited context. He’s haunted by his combat experiences, regrets his role in assisting the government in putting down various rebels, and has a cultural misunderstanding of Earth because he’s from Harlan’s World. His criminal ventures could be seen as his own personal revolution, and Kovacs has spent about a century in and out of storage since leaving the military, but has only been consciously alive for about forty years. He isn’t portrayed as a morally centered person, but he has his own system of honor, and he selfishly accepts Laurens Bancroft’s offer because it’s a way out of a lengthy sentence. This gives him a nice arc, because he slowly becomes more morally invested in what he’s doing as certain things come to light, and ultimately risks it all toward the end basically to avenge the death of a prostitute and save a single life, which is a nice shift in contrast from the Kovacs we see leave storage at the start of the book.

In the series Kovacs is a lovesick puppy dog, who misses his one true love. He’s a former Quell revolutionary who also became a career criminal, but the moment he got caught they put him in storage indefinitely, because he’s the last of the Envoys, the rest of which were mercilessly butchered by stormtroopers from the evil Protectorate which has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. When the series begins, he awakens 250 years after he was captured and he finds that the galaxy has become what he always feared, a one-percenter’s paradise ruled by the rich, where the poor are exploited and marginalized and everyone with even the slightest sense of prominence is an irredeemable asshole. Politics aside, this change makes his character arc far less interesting to me, because he doesn’t want to help Bancroft but his reluctance comes from a very different place than the book, and ultimately Kovacs accepts the offer not out of selfishness but because the ghost of his dead girlfriend tells him to.

This also deeply conflicts with the first time we’re introduced to Kovacs, in his usual East Asian sleeve on Harlan’s World where he speaks of caring only for “getting paid” and seems like a typical devil-may-care bad boy. Then when he’s talking to Bancroft, he tells the tycoon “Some things can’t be bought. Like me.” So which is it? Do you only care about getting paid, or can you not be bought? This makes for a somewhat confusing characterization of Kovacs, who one minute is murderously avenging himself upon psychotic bio-smugglers and claiming he cares for no one, only to turn around and behave like a typical romantic the next. It isn’t entirely jarring, but for me it hurt the dark tone and mature themes to discover the central core of the series is a centuries-old fairytale love story.

Sorry. I like fairytale love stories. But I also like darkly thematic dystopian science fiction, and in my opinion the two mix about as well as apple liqueur and olive oil.

This is all, however, as I said one off my only major gripes about the series. And even the sum of its parts aren’t badly executed. Like I said, Quell is charismatic, Kovacs is haunted, and all three actors (Kinnaman, Goldsberry, and Kim as Kovacs in his original sleeve) deliver convincing performances as well as share a great sense of chemistry, so the love story is believable at least. Visual effects and set design are also wonderful, and for such a high concept sci-fi setting it all feels very seamless. Dialogue is well-scripted as well, and most of Poe’s interactions with other characters are some of the best scenes. It’s also nice to see a series that exploits the naked female form to a fault, yet also makes a point to ensure you get just as much if not far more male nudity to surprisingly counterpoint its shamelessness. I haven’t seen this many swinging dicks since the last time I read YouTube comments. Just makes you feel better when the characters finally ride the stuffed unicorn, know what I mean?

Many of the minor roles from the novel are also modified to make certain characters more important, and some of their roles have been altered so that they are completely different people. Some of these changes work better than others. Rei, as Tak’s sister rather than just some asshole crime boss he once knew, was a change in the story that had the reverse effect of how I felt about the altered Kovacs/Envoy backstory. It makes Reileen a more interesting character than just the Big Bad you might expect in such a story, and causes her motivations, maniacal as they remain, to be far more empathic and invested in the events of the plot. In that light, they made the villain stand out as memorable among the bland villains we often get in movies and TV shows now, thanks to the K-Mart quality antagonists so popularized by the Marvel movies.

While certainly not perfect, Altered Carbon still manages to offer fans of science fiction a fascinating world populated by characters who are easy to give a damn about, and a galaxy spanning story of heartbreak, betrayal, and retribution. I personally wasn’t that big a fan of the romantic warrior monk stuff in this particular story, but that doesn’t mean it won’t appeal to others. There’s enough mystery here to keep you guessing, and enough solid dramatic force to keep us wanting more on its own merits, not by virtue of any stupid cliffhangers. Much of the visual style and action sequences are just icing on the cake, really. Though, I confess, I almost jizzed my pants when I got to see the Phillips Squeeze Gun in action. And there’s nothing quite like one of those sci-fi stories where someone picks up a samurai sword, let alone during the finale.

All told, I’d watch Altered Carbon again, and you should too. Regardless of whatever I say, or my own personal preferences, it deserves your attention. Because it may be adapted from a novel, but a least it’s trying to be something different than most of what’s out there right now, even if its poetic love story doesn’t want it to be. So, ignore cynical bastards like me, watch the damn show and decide for yourself.

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