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Lawnmower Boy

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  1. Babylon deepening

    in Champions

    Posted

    Back by complete lack of demand!

     

    Beside Charlotte, her best friend, Nita Guzman, muttered, "Hey, let's go on a field trip to Babylon, City of Art and Man. It'll be fun!"

     

    Charlotte didn't look at her friend, because she was busy not falling as she reached the top stair in the middle of the crowd of people getting off at least three subway trains and a bus stop far below their feet. She was following their Parent Volunteer, the impossible Eldritch. (Who was actually a bachelor, and substituting for Nita's dad, who was busy principaling.) In front of Charlotte, through a high, brilliantly clean blue-green glass wall, was the East Plaza, and, beyond it, the Library of Babylon.

     

    Charlotte assumed. Honestly, if she didn't know it was the Library of Babylon, she would have thought it was a city. A very fancy city with a front of four story Gothic buildings giving way to shiny towers behind. The flow of the crowd, commuters with maybe more teenagers with book bags than usual, was heading to the west, through wide doors; but now Eldritch took the lead, taking them across the flow with more than a few "Excuse mes" and "I'm sorries," to doors set on the south side of the station. Once through, the crowd thinned out, and by the time they reached the wide, stone steps at the edge of the plaza, they were walking amongst a scant few grown-ups, mostly dressed on the tweedy side of fashionable, although there were a few outrageous eccentrics to make Charlotte feel less embarrassed for Eldritch.

     

    At the top of the stairs, three flights up, a tall woman with a short, rounded pixie cut, small, hexagonal, frameless glasses, and a matched, ivory blouse and mid-calf skirt was clearly waiting for them, her eyes registering recognition of Eldritch at least.  "Class," Eldritch said, "This is Ms. Livremore, and she'll be your guide today." He turned around, squinting down through his Three-D-themed sunglasses, and said, "Ms. Guzman? Your nametag?" 

     

    "Sorry," Nita said, clearly not sorry at all, as she pulled her name tag out and stuck it to the school blazer that her Dad had had to bribe her into. ("What's even the point of going to a regular high school if I have to wear this in public?") 

     

    "So You are the Tatammy High School Special Criminology Programme Field Trip? Do you have names?" Ms Livermore's voice was quiet, yet crackled with authority, like a boss, Charlotte thought.  Librarian. Librarian boss. In descending order of clarity and enthusiasm, Rose, Twelve, Charlotte, Bruce, Brian and Nita gave the usual name, rank and serial number routine. That's my team, Charlotte thought to herself. "Well, if you'll come with me, we will get started on this tour, and maybe even answer some questions you might  have."

     

    "Good," Bruce said. "Because as long as Auralia is in the wind, there's no time for sightseeing." 

     

    Ms. Livremore pretended to ignore him, which Charlotte totally didn't get. As irritating as Bruce was these days, his voice was sexy enough to make you think that that was the reason that Bob Kane had ripped his Grand-Dad for the inspiration for that comic book character. You know the one. With the gadgets.  

     

    Ms. Livremore led the group up to spectacular, story-high doors of metal banded wood in the middle of a façade of gray stone cut with niches filled with statues in pure white marble spectacularly touched in brand new paint, engraved with friezes, highlighted in gold or even bronze, and hung with a few extra-polite and orderly falls of ivy. "This is the library's original main entrance." She paused for a moment, probably because even she could tell that there was something wrong with a main entrance that wasn't actually being entered by anyone very much. "Nowadays most people go in through the big foyer around the corner."

     

    "Surely not the  original original," Bruce said.

     

    Ms. Livemore raked him with a librarian's glare. "I'm sorry," she paused for a moment, "Bruce, is it?"

     

    "It's Drindrish-influenced human art," Bruce said, all cool, like that explained everything.

     

    "Ah," Miss Livremore said. "You're young superheroes. With the time travel and such. You've seen Drindrish work before."

     

    "Also, space travel," Nita interrupted.

     

    "And it's not Drindrish. It's Drindrish-inspired," Brian said. "You can tell because the statues have pants."

     

    I totally wasn't going to say, Charlotte thought to herself.

     

    "And is, there, like, some kind of chastity belt for guys? Because those statues are missing a bit here and there," Nita added. 

     

    "The human sculptors must have been ex-slaves," Twelve said. "They're symbolically emasculating the Elvish One Percent."

     

    "Former Elvish," Brian said, a Faerie-American himself. 

     

    "I love it when you talk dirty, Twelve," Nita said, because it had been, like a sentence since she'd interrupted last. 

     

    Bruce cleared his throat. "But the point, is that we came here because you supposedly have a collection from the Old Red Aeon, and it ended twenty thousand years before the Drindrish Exodus."

     

    "Exodus? Curious. I think you'll find more than you wanted about the King of Ivory in our stacks," Ms. Livermore said, politely avoiding saying 'Kal-Turak' or 'Takofanes.' "And in answer to your question, the Library did not put on a welcoming face in those days, and that wing of the building is behind later construction. In fact, it might be fun to take you by it. Now, if we can get on with the tour?"

     

    Through the great door was an echoing hall that somehow gave off a feeling of dinginess in spite of being immaculately clean and in good repair. Just something seemed worn and old, in the stairwells to either side, the closed, glass-fronted doors in front of them, or the hallway of checked linoleum leading to inside doors immediately ahead. Most of the few people who came in with the group were climbing the stairs, down which spilled bright light and the sound of too many voices all trying to be quiet at once. Charlotte could just imagine a public library study space above, all computer desks and writing tables, filled with high school students studying for exams. (At least, that would be what they'd told their parents.)

     

    But instead of there, Ms. Livremore led them through the main doors in front. As Charlotte walked through, it was like she'd passed into another building entirely, a vivarium, almost, with a glass roof, a glass outside wall facing a garden inside the library, fronting a featureless and ominous dark tower with its lowest windows facing them across the garden, three vertiginous stories, at least, above the garden visible through a good half of the floor, which was all shiny glass until it met a brushed metal seam, and polished white inside it. The outside view of the dark tower and its garden was so compelling that it took Charlotte this long to notice that on the side they'd come in, the glass-walled gallery was levered off the inside wall of a building that looked as though it reached at least five stories above them, and three more below. 

     

    Charlotte had no idea how that could be on one side of the door, and the building they'd come through, on the other side. At last, she thought, place is living up to its hype. 

     

    "This way," Ms. Livermore said, setting a fast pace for a woman in high heels with an unsettlingly bondage-y design to go with the thoroughly librarianly outfit she wore, otherwise. At the end of the hall, the group entered a gigantic elevator foyer. Ms. Livremore went to the elevator at the left end of the bank and pressed the down button.

     

    Eldritch walked up to the central elevator and pressed the up button. Turning, he said, "Unfortunately, I have some research of world-shattering import to do myself, and so I will leave you in Ms. Livremore's tender care." He did his best to give them a threatening glare, which unfortunately was completely beyond the old hippy teddy bear, as far as Charlotte could tell.

     

    "You're going to find out how to save the world at," Nita said, reading the sign above the elevator, "Centre for Research into Arboriculture, Forestry and Timber?" 

     

    "Yes," Eldritch said.

     

    "You know, before the trees take over the world," Bruce explained. 

     

    "Exactly," the old wizard said. 

     

    The elevator in front of them dinged open, and Ms. Livremore made an impatient gesture. The group crowded in, and Charlotte saw on the panel that they were apparently on the fifth floor, and were headed for the second. She thought about asking how that was even architecturally possible.

     

    When the door opened, they walked out into a gorgeous wood corridor with polished hardwood floors and half-paneling of even more lustrous wood reaching up to plaster walls halfway up. A floor above them, translucent windows let in the glorious noon sun. Below the windows, doors of the same vintage, with smoke-glassed windows decorated with time tables and indecipherable cartoons, lined the wall. On the other side, though, the doors were incongruous metal, each with a conspicuous fire-door handle and an old-fashioned red EXIT sign above. Tiny little windows, just big enough to see if someone was opening the door from the other side, were lined with metal mesh. As they passed the third door, a man in tweed came out through one of the metal doors, and Charlotte caught a glimpse of a long, low-ceilinged room lined with gun-metal bookshelves crammed with books, some beautiful, some more pamphlets, in ugly, functional sleeves, some pierced for coil bindings, others so big that there was only room for two or three, lying flat on a whole shelf. 

     

    Rose gasped. Charlotte summoned her ch'i and reached out with the speed needed to take her friend's shoulder before Rose darted through the closing door at Mach 1, leading to an incident involving in the book love that dared not speak its name. "I think you need a library card to go in there," Charlotte whispered." 

     

    "But I want to. . . "Rose's voice trailed off as Ms. Livremore glared back at her. 

     

    At the end of the hall, Ms. Livremore led them through a double door and into a long, linoleum-floored room that belonged in an office building of, oh, say, a hundred years ago. Well, the lights were modern, which Charlotte could probably appreciate more than most, but  on each of the ranks and ranks of desks reaching from windows on one side to the other, were machines of gray-on-gray, with ranks of keys and switches and dials, rolls of paper, card feeds, illuminated reading screens, foot pedals, and a discrete crank here and there. From each station, a metal pipe the width of a soup can reached up to the ceiling, joining a maze of similar pipes that fed into one extra-large pipe at the far end of the room. At each desk sat an operator, mostly women, but also a few men, all keying, punching, switching, cranking, and, occasionally, taking whatever results the machines fed out, inserting them in a little container, and putting that container into a door in their pipe. 

     

    "A library is only as good as its catalogue," Ms. Livermore said. "And the Library of Babylon collects the literature of every human dimension. To be honest, its origins lie far back before the King of Ivory or the Graven Spear before him, before the days of the Drakines and before the world was split, indeed, before even the Silence." Ms. Livermore paused, as though waiting for an argument, but Charlotte had no idea what she was talking about, and neither of her know-it-all friends spoke up, either.

     

    "How do you manage a collection older than memory, in languages not spoken, from forgotten civilisations? With catalogues! And with catalogues of catalogues! Each entry a precious distillation of the metadata of volume that might, itself, take a lifetime to read and another to master. Each only as good as the librarian who composed it, and none of them ever to be seen by human eye again without the most meticulous cross-referencing, the most assiduous citations! And on top of the catalogues, reference guides, like maps of the surface of a bottomless ocean."

     

    Ms. Livremore paused, discretely dabbed the spittle from the corners of her mouth. Ms. Livremore seemed to be very passionate about catalogues. 

     

    A moment of silence. Charlotte reflected on the snarks, bookworms, detectives, communists, and would-be gay blades in her party, and, well, she guessed this was her job. "That's great. Now, we actually do have a research project that we'd like to work on while we're here. Bruce has already mentioned that we're looking for an artefact from the Turakian Age called. . . "

     

    Which was how they ended up, fifteen minutes later, in a high-ceiling study room, sitting at a table across a waist-high map cabinets from another group of teens wearing silver lame two-piece bathing suits, laced sandals of the same glittery material, and metal hats that looked like oversized bugles. Charlotte was very tempted to stare, if only because the alternative was a  book trolley laden down with the thirty volume Guide to the Turakian Collection and a thick pad of blank recall slips so that they could ask for the books they found. 

     

    "'Let's go on a field trip to Babylon, City of Art and Man,'" Nita said. "'It'll be fun!'"  

     

  4. Babylon deepening

    in Champions

    Posted

    And it was actually canon! Well, no, it wasn't, but Book of the Empress backers got to provide Steve Long with character backgrounds which then appeared in a backer's only online supplement. Mine introduced the Babylon-based multidimensional conglomerate, Piper & Norton, and I say that it's canon. (Although none of the details in my vignette are included.)

     

    . . . . 

    (Cut, pasted, edited, because I can!)

     

    The teenage runaway sits, huddled in the booth at the interstate truck stop, nursing one more coffee than is good for his skinny, skinny frame, wondering where he's going from here. It turns out that truckers aren't happy to give a pimpled, gangly kid in not-at-all-fashionably distressed clothes a ride to the big city. His eyes slowly focus on the man in the next booth, who is enjoying a heart attack on a plate. Their eyes meet, hold. For some reason, the trucker doesn't react for a long moment. 

     

    Then he sighs, beckons the boy over. "Lisa says you wanted a ride to the city." He gestures at the counter, like the boy should know who Lisa is. One of the waitresses, he guesses, because he's not as dumb as his teachers say he is.

     

    The boy nods. "You look like the kind of kid who needs out of where they're from, but this is just a stupid way of going about it. And I'm not going to the city, least not any city you've heard of. But you shouldn't have seen me at all, so there's something going on, and I think I might be the ride for you.

     

    He stops for a moment. "That don't scare you off, get your stuff, get cleaned up, take a dump because we might hit traffic, meet me in twenty minutes at my truck." He gives the kid a parking lot number.

     

    The boy was told that he'd have better luck with an independent trucker, but when the runaway gets to the rig, he finds a double, blazoned with a corporate livery. It's Piper & Norton, which the boy's never heard of, but then he doesn't know much about the world. About that, at least, his teachers are right.

     

    A half hour later, they're rumbling down the Interstate, next stop coming up one of those towns in Ohio that start with a "C." The evening skies are bright ahead, just past a wooded rise. The kid guessed that they'd top it in a minute, and be the middle of the lights and the local exchanges, and he would have to decide where he wanted to be let off, if he couldn't talk the driver into taking him to Chicago.  Not what the kid had in mind, but better than home. Anything was better than home.

     

    That's when the trucker nudged over to the outside line and lined up an exit only he could see. For a moment, they're headed right off the road, and the kid spasms and sets his foot hard against the floor like that's going to help. "Watch out," he begins to say, knowing he's not even going to finish the words before they  plunge off the road and die in a burst of flame, just like a car accident on TV.

     

    Instead, they're suddenly on that exit that doesn't exist. 

     

    The truck curves around a bend, and they're in the middle of the knot of trees, climbing just slightly up the rise as the road curves round. The driver is braking, turning, and hits about forty as the pavement ends. Soon, they're picking their way over a washed out gravel road. It's weird, not what a double rig is made for at all.

     

    "This is the part where I'd turn out to be a serial killer in most versions of this story," the trucker points out, as the road suddenly acquires asphalt again, and the scenery . . . changes. They're on an Interstate on ramp now. Oh, and it's suddenly full night, because clocks are boring.

     

    Or. . . not an interstate. Because the route sign is orange, not green, and round, not the badge shape of an Interstate sign at all. It says, "Via 5," and the distances are marked to Watershed Pass, 1 Mile, and Babylon, 25 miles. The kid is surprised, but not completely, because he reads science fiction, and the world's got superheroes and aliens, and after that, he's ready to believe in weirder things. 

     

    The driver looks over at him. "I don't know how well you know the Interstate system. . . "

     

    "We're in an another dimension, aren't we?"

     

    "Kids today," the driver mutters. He shifts up, just a bit. It's obviously quite a climb, the last mile to the summit, and then they're at the top, and looking down at a valley stretching towards ever-thicker clusters of light and at the end a bigger city than the kid has ever seen. "That's Babylon, City of Man and Art," the trucker says.  "Chews up kids like you and spits you out, don't mind me saying. But maybe you're meant to go there. If you get cold feet, though . . . " The driver pauses as they drive down the mountain slope, occasional, rudimentary exchanges leading on to places marked as "Loon Lake, 4 miles," and the like. At last the driver speaks again.  "Look, I'm not telling you, but Babylon's full of rich people who like to get away to a cabin by the lake for the weekend. They don't come much in the off season, so if you know how to pull a B&E, which you look like you do, you could probably make it through the winter cabin surfing. "

     

    The runaway just shakes his head.

     

    The interstate, or, no, the Via, levels out and fields open out around them, pretty soon they're flying by a big high school campus. "That's Norma Jean Mortenson Memorial High across that field. I let you let you off on the shoulder, it's a half mile from campus through the hayfield. You wait at the door, there'll be an outreach worker  in the morning. The valley towns, they lose enough of their kids to the Babylon streets. Maybe they'll help." The kid shakes his head.

     

    The driver sighs. "Just as well. There are people who go to that high school who don't go down to Babylon when they graduate, but I'm not sure how real they are ."

     

    Soon the school is well behind. The kid sighs. He's not exactly running away from do-gooding school counsellors who will do anything except actually help, but he figures he knows their kind well enough.

     

    The next notable exit is at the top of a rise, so that the kid can look down into a hollow valley along the river that runs towards Babylon. Lights spill around tiny, rectangular lots stuck too close together, a street grid only too small. It's a mobile home park, the kid realises, for the kind of people who work in the city but can't afford it. 

     

    "More your kind of place?" The driver asks. "They've cleaned up good since the last flood. Or was it a tornado? I can drop you." His hands tense on the wheel, but he does not turn it. BEcause the kid knows the drill. B&Es again, only for damn sure not unoccupied places. You look for users, take their stash. Or a bullet. Whichever. No thanks. The kid shakes his head. This was what he wanted away from in the first place.  The driver exhales in relief. 

     

    Next it's a suburban shopping mall, probably an hour from closing, the kid figures. Place where the kind of people who work in the city but live in a big house in the suburbs shop on their way home. By this time of the night, only the anchor stores would be open, and a lot of security would be gone. Good shoplifting, not that the fences who used to run him ever let him keep anything over what he needed to keep his stepdad happy. The driver looks over at him, but the kid shakes his head. Better than ripping off druggies, but still awful. He wanted something better.

     

    And then, as though they'd passed some kind of barrier, they were in the city. Full stop. Lights, buildings, cheapass-looking apartment buildings way too close together. Warehouses. Parking lots. "You can come to the City in a wagon train, you know," the driver says. "They go right through a city gate, with towers just like Lord of the Rings. Or you can take a train and get off at a big old station, or parade down a grand avenue. Or you can be like us and come in like a trucker through the ugly side."

     

    Then the entire highway goes under a massive concrete pile straight out of the urban maps of Lego Racers, and suddenly it's an entire multi-lane freeway, but underground, lanes and stanchions stretching to both sides and great overhead lamps glaring down. Signs with arrows point to exits and lower levels.  A convoy of black SUVs blasts by on the right, flanked by sleek motorcycles, with an incredibly cool sportscar following on behind so fast and so close it was like they were watching a car chase. Who knows? Maybe they were. 

     

     "So this is the Understate, kid," the driver says. "Buried for no distractions, and also not much traffic, for a change. No more sightseeing, no more delays. Just a twenty minute run to the Piper & Norton depot to drop my trailers and hook up a return load. Looks like I'll be home on time. And before you ask, I live in a little town in Ohio just like yours, because I can afford an acreage and horses for my daughters there. This is your last stop, kid, sidewalk outside the truck gate. There's a 7-11 across the street, so unless you get yourself run over, that's where the rest of your life starts."

     

    He pauses, then reaches into his pocket and pulls out his wallet. "The 7-11 is the only place in Babylon where you can buy a map that's worth a damn. Maybe it'll even show you where you need to go, if the city has a plan for you." He thrusts out his hand, offering a bill. The kid takes it. "To buy stuff, you'll need money. That's five Babylon sovereigns," the driver says. "Twenty bucks, give or take. Try not to do either 'till you've got the lay of the land." 

  6. Coronavirus

    in Non-Gaming Discussion

    Posted

    9 hours ago, archer said:

     

    This is part of the problem with politicizing health policies.

     

    When someone asks them to wear a mask during a moment of silence, they're hearing "we would like you to proudly wave the communist flag during a moment of silence".

     

    What you are saying when you make the request seems totally reasonable in your frame of reference.

     

    But what you're asking them to do, in their frame of reference, is totally reprehensible.

     

    It's going to take a long time to bridge that gap.

     

    Or something innovative like advertising clips of Eisenhower, Reagan, or John Wayne advocating wearing masks. With modern CGI, that shouldn't be a stretch and the family/estates might donate their images for the purpose.

    You know, if you're going to the funeral of a Communist, it's not going to kill you to wave a red flag. I could go on and make an argument about church funerals, but the point seems pre-made. If you show up and refuse to rise for the hymn/take off your shoes/ wear the hat, you've made your point. Which is that you're an a##hole.

  8. Sick Call

    in Non-Gaming Discussion

    Posted

    On 1/5/2021 at 7:50 PM, Badger said:

    I would be curious too.  If only to know how much one needs to worry.

     

    To briefly respond to these questions, while I do not know the specifics of Scott's current condition, I did know him quite well in college, and can tell you that he suffers from a congenital disorder that would more than explain why he currently requires assisted living and remedial surgery. 

  12. Marvel Cinematic Universe, Phase Three and BEYOOOOONND

    in Non-Gaming Discussion

    Posted

    7 hours ago, Ranxerox said:

     

     

    Please show me some numbers.  The numbers that I found (link) only go to 1997, and they show an industry that has had good years and bad years but generally sells about 80 million physical copies a year, but has really grown their TPB and digital copy business.  In overview the industry appears to be doing fine.

    Oh, there you go, dragging facts into the conversation again

  14. Coronavirus

    in Non-Gaming Discussion

    Posted

    2 hours ago, archer said:

    Sweden Sees No Signs So Far Herd Immunity Is Stopping Virus

     

    ...according to the country’s top epidemiologist, “The issue of herd immunity is difficult,” Anders Tegnell said at a briefing in Stockholm on Tuesday. “We see no signs of immunity in the population that are slowing down the infection right now.”

     

    every third Stockholmer tested has antibodies, according to figures published this week

     

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-24/sweden-says-it-sees-no-signs-herd-immunity-is-stopping-the-virus

    Wait. The thing that all the experts were saying turned out to be true? And the glib contrarian was wrong? This cannot be!

  15. Political Discussion Thread (With Rules)

    in Non-Gaming Discussion

    Posted

    Taking a break from my postblogging writing because I had to put this somewhere:

     

    Apparently, after being taken by a con man claiming to be the advance man of a travelling circus in 1950 cla, Wetumka, Oklahoma has been holding an annual town festival on the day that the circus was supposed to arrive. 

     

    It's called "Sucker Day," and celebrates the day when they were taken for suckers. 

     

    It feels like the whole world could maybe throw a Sucker Day party this year. 

  19. Political Discussion Thread (With Rules)

    in Non-Gaming Discussion

    Posted

    17 minutes ago, Old Man said:

    Concussed Andy Dalton > incumbent. 
     

    I’m serious though, I really did avoid the news for 36 hours. It was difficult, but I recommend it, especially for days like yesterday. 

    And by "avoid," I take it you mean, "Lie in bed gritting your teeth and trying to will  yourself back to sleep so you don't go online to check if they'd called Michigan yet."

  20. Political Discussion Thread (With Rules)

    in Non-Gaming Discussion

    Posted

    In fairness to Trump voters: First, it is very hard for an American administration to fail to be re-elected; Second, it has proven very hard for a government to lose an election in this fall of COVID. Yes, one can argue that the Trump administration's response to the pandemic has been poor, but I don't notice that the elections this fall have been sensibly affected by the details of the response. Trump's supporters certainly don't seem to believe that he has handled the pandemic badly. 

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