Ryan's Research Notes

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A series of "research notes" taken in a green-covered moleskine journal. On the inner front cover in purple ink is the following message:

*For Ryan, September 21, 2019. Use this in good health! Love, Mom.*

It is followed by a sketch of a heart.

## Character Creation - Modern History of Triathlons

2020, March 18.
So with the Triathlon happening today--seventeenth or eighteenth year in a row something has gone horribly wrong, which is a little much, even for Halcyon City--I was wondering a bit about the sport and where it came from. Turns out, france. I mean, the name is Greek, obviously--τρεῖς for "three" and ἆθλος for "competition", so the three competition event--but it started out in France in the early 1900s, and it used canoeing instead of swimming, which just seems like it would have been really difficult. Then again, all of the events sound really difficult.
Anyway, the first MODERN triathlon was in the seventies in California, and I think by this point nobody's going to be snooping in this notebook. Great. So I had my first uh, real outing with the Big Team today, and I think I'm still crashing from the adrenaline high, because I was at the museum kind of tired and then apparently fell asleep on one of the benches and Mr. Waverly from the Medieval section had to wake me up. Whoops. Thank goodness the Gauntlet had gone dormant again, so he didn't just find a superhero napping in his museum--although I'm sure that's happened before.
But the triathlon, right. So I went there with Dawn and Nega-Challenge with Carmilla there to make sure we didn't get lost. It was weird--apparently we were asked for, specifically, to "put a fresh face on the big team," which...I guess? But once we were there, everyone seemed to expect people who were more established or well-known. Maybe there was some mix-up in communication.
I actually got to talk to Mayor Crossover--or rather, he talked to us as a group--which was nerve-wracking, and then we fired off the starting pistol. By "we" i mean "Nega-Challenge" and I do want to clarify that it didn't happen when we were *supposed*to have fired off the starting pistol, but that's probably all going to get forgotten because a hippo started rampaging. I'd never been right up near a hippo before, just seen them in zoos, and I see what everyone means now about them being terrifying.
Anyway, we had to deal with the hippo situation. It was...really impressive, watching everyone else work. Like, Carmilla got bitten by the hippo and still managed to fight the lady--Funerary, she said--who showed up later, and Solae threw the hippo and a lion in trees, and Nega-Challenge went toe-to-toe with the lady while she was ON the lion. I kind of felt like I wasn't necessary, almost? That woman was ~~completely~~ a little terrifying.
But then I also remembered stuff that I *did*do during the fight--it turns out that Funerary tries to drain people's life force, which is a good thing to remember that she does if she comes back. So she was almost certainly targeting the triathlon, and I got them to move off of the boardwalk and then made sure she couldn't get to them easily, and also helped get her away from her lion. The others seemed to think I really helped, as well. So I might actually, you know, be good at this whole superhero thing.
The Gauntlet was happy, too--it's hard to tell exactly, but there's this warm feeling all up and down my arm whenever we think about that fight. I think it likes being used. Good--I'm probably going to end up using it a lot more. I should probably round this journal entry out with more research notes, just in case people look at the last page first, right?
One thing that was weird about the first triathlon--the first modern one--is that apparently none of the people in it were particularly good swimmers. I guess they just thought that part would be easy. Anyway, one of the organizers recruited his kid, who was thirteen, to lifeguard for it. That...seems like a pretty risky measure to me, but I don't think anyone drowned? So I guess all's well that ends well.

## S4 OVA - Musings on Arthuriana

2020, March 24.
     While obviously the existence of Avalon throws into question the entire Arthurian canon as most people know it, that doesn’t change the fact that poking around any library will get you a bunch of books on it. I wish I could have gotten my hands on my old copy of The Sword in the Stone, because that was my introduction to the entire topic, but I really, really doubt much in it was accurate. All of this is preface to saying that this week, I’ve been reading Arthurian legends.
From what I can tell, the earliest historical mention of King Arthur--or any of the figures known now as residents of Avalon--comes from the *Historia Brittonum* in the 9th century. It and the *Annales Cambriae* are the two historical records that mention Arthur or his knights, both mentioning the Battle of Badon, and with the Annales also bringing up the first known mention of the Battle of Camlann, where Arthur and Mordred--known as Medraut in that version--both died. In the end, there is no concrete evidence that Arthur actually existed until you take into account Avalon.
The existence of Avalon as another realm, which can interface with ours but does so rarely, explains much of the inconsistencies and uncertainties regarding a historical Arthur. I don’t know enough to know if the historical Arthur was another instance in which the Knights were locked out of Avalon and into our world, or were merely stories that migrated to the British Isles from Avalon--maybe one of the Knights knows, but I don’t even know how to start asking that question.
Also I high-fived Merlin today.
Alright that needs some explanation but basically GAIA sent Princess Anaya, Aman, and me into the sewers to check out what looked like an Asgardian incursion onto Halcyon City. It was...well, it was interesting. There were draugr there--a form of preserved Norse corpse, apparently used in Asgard as shock troops of a sort--and the Sewers had been transformed into the core of an Asgardian burial mound. I wish I could have had more time to look at it, but there were a lot of draugr, and they were very intent on getting us out of there. Also, and more importantly, the Knights of the Round Table were there--well, the Halcyon chapter of them.
So we fought a lot of draugr--or, more accurately, everyone else fought a lot of draugr and I tried not to panic--but some really, really interesting stuff came out of it. First of all, turns out whatever changed the sewers into a burial mound? Actually changed the sewers. It wasn’t like some sort of dimensional portal that took us to Asgard; it was more of an overlay. And from that, it turns out the Gauntlet could un-do that change. I’ll admit I didn’t find that out myself; well, I got the basics of it, but it was Merlin who pointed out the implications about how this had happened to the sewer. He also could stabilize the room we were in while I turned it back, which was really useful to avoid another Big-High’s-Loadbearing-Wall fiasco. So we were a good team, which feels like a *really weird* thing to say about *Merlin*.
I guess for another clarification, it was teen Merlin? I mean, Merlin as a teenager, who is the same person but also distinct from adult Merlin, who is closer to the one we have in the stories. He talked to me a bit about it--he has all the memories and experiences of older Merlin, but also all the memories and experiences of a sixteen-year-old. He compared it to my retrocognition, but it sounds even more confusing and hard to deal with. Aman warned me about him beforehand--said he was a jerk. And I can kind of see where he’s coming from! But, I don’t know. Maybe it’s just that growing up around academics you get used to nerds with no social skills and no interest in developing any, but Merlin didn’t seem that bad to me. He was even nice about the retrocognition!
I’ve actually been thinking about what he said about the retrocognition, because he seemed to think it was a really useful power. And the way he described it, I guess...it kind of is? I mean, I know knowledge is power, that’s half of why historians and museums do what they do. Knowledge of the past prevents repeating the mistakes of the past. I guess I just never really applied that to my eyes before, because…
I don’t know why. Because I grew up watching people who could fly and throw buildings on the news? Because my eyes were always the thing that made me a bad student, too distractable, too weird? Even with mom, most of the time my eyes were something I had to learn to cope with, had to learn to mitigate. The Gauntlet is the first thing that made them feel useful, and even then, that was in combination with the gauntlet.
Speaking of mom. I asked Merlin some about time magic, and most of it was...well, a little discouraging. But he did say that it’s very possible to bring someone back to the time they’re supposed to be in. A lot of his advice seemed to be from the side of having someone here who isn’t when they’re supposed to be, not from the other end where someone is gone who is supposed to be here. But there’s definitely still ways to do it.
So I *can* get mom back, as long as I figure out how.
Other things about today. Well, I think I’m making friends on the team? I hope I’m making friends on the team. I didn’t get to talk to Aman much, but he seems really cool--and to know a lot about stuff that has happened in and around Halcyon on the superhero side of things. Anaya I got to talk with more, and she was...surprisingly, really nice? I don’t know why that was surprising--maybe because she seemed so prickly at the idea of helping out the knights? But I think that’s just bad blood between them. She’s only been doing this hero thing a bit longer than I have, which seems wild--she’s so powerful it feels like she’s been doing this her whole life. She threw me, on her trident? Which was terrifying but also kind of *really fun*. She talked about wanting to go on a beach mission sometime soon, or just to the beach, which...I haven’t hung out with someone else in...well, definitely not since mom was taken. It could be fun.
Mom would be happy I’m hanging out with kids my own age and making friends. Which is kind of awful to think about, because I only got to do all of this because I picked up the Gauntlet, and if I hadn’t stopped to do that--
Well. I’ll get her back, and can tell her I made friends then. I’m sure she’ll be proud.
I should finish this up. What’s a good thing I can talk about that isn’t superheroics? Bill had better not find this journal, but if he does, I don’t want him knowing about the team. He’s bad enough about the Gauntlet. I know--Merlin said something about how in the stories we have about Avalon, he isn’t a kid. That’s actually not true--we do have one story featuring a young Merlin!
The way the story goes, King Vortigern (Arthur's uncle, evil) was trying to construct a tower, which always collapsed before completion. Frustrated, he turned to his advisers, who told him that the tower would only be complete if the foundations were watered with the blood of a child who had no father. Like rich people everywhere I guess, Vortigern decided that yeah, that was worth it, and although he didn’t think there could be a child with no father, he sent out people to search for one.
And they did find a child, who is called at this point Emrys but is generally agreed upon to be Merlin, who didn’t have a father, because his mother had been human but his father had been an incubus, which apparently doesn’t count? I guess. Listen, at this point in time they still thought women's uteruses wandered their body when not pregnant. Don't look for genetics to make sense. In any case, he was brought before Vortigern, but before he could be sacrificed, he revealed the real reason for the tower’s collapse, which is where the story gets *real weird*.
According to Emrys, the tower was collapsing because under the foundation, there was a lake containing two fighting dragons, a red one and a white one, which symbolized the conflict between the invading Saxons and the Britons, but were also *very real dragons* which were fighting enough to *cause earthquakes*. I think in most versions of the story, the king digs for them, and the dragons are set free into the air, where one of them wins. I think the red one, because this story originally came from the side of the Britons. Anyway, that place--or the place rumored to be that place--is now called Dinas Emrys, or Emrys’s fort, and there are a number of legends of Merlin hiding something there later. So that’s the story we have about child Merlin.

## S4E35: The Immortal Game

2020, March 29.
I did some research, and it turns out chess has been around for a long time. People think that its ancestor was the Indian game chaturanga, which was also the theorized origin point for xiangqi, janggi, and shogi--all of which are strategic board games. The oldest known chess manual is from about 840 CE, and was in Arabic. Chess really became seen as a modern mental sport rather than just a pastime with the 1873 descriptions of strategy provided by William Steibniz, the first World Chess Champion.
However, one of the most famous chess games was prior to this, in 1851. The “Immortal Game” was between Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Keiseritzky, and is famous for the fact that Anderssen gave up almost all of his powerful pieces early, proceeding to checkmate his opponent using only the minor pieces on the board. He won the game only after giving up both rooks, a bishop, and his queen. This was the height of the “romantic” style of chess; a style where you focused on quick offense, and games were defined by exchanges of  rapid attack and counter-attack.
This all came from the fact that I helped break into a Bishop facility earlier today. Not for any bad reason--for a very good reason, actually. They’d captured a friend of the team--a member of the Millennium Dawn team, the ones who got displaced in time--and the rest of her team wanted to break her out, so we got brought in to be distractions. By “we” I mean myself, Overgrowth, Whisper, and Mithril, by the way. I’d never worked with the others before, but they were really good at what they did.
In this case, most of that was bringing walls down. I think Mithril singlehandedly took down most of that base? We were trying to make a lot of noise and break a lot of things, which...don’t really come naturally to me, I’ll admit. But I did manage to un-make one of Bishop’s mechs--they called it the “rooq”, which is irritating. We get it, you have a chess theme, being coy in the naming just makes you look like a dick. Just call it a Rook. Have some dignity.
During a lot of the break-in I ended up working with Whisper, who is just...very cool. She can summon ghosts--she said she didn’t know if they were actual ghosts-ghosts, so I don’t know if she can actually talk to dead people, but wouldn’t that be interesting if she could? Think about how much you could learn by being able to summon people’s spirits! I would want to talk to so many people. So maybe it’s better that she doesn’t know, because I would hate to bother her and if I knew I could talk to, say, Alexander the Great, I might not be able to stop myself.
...I’m stalling.
I’m writing about the Bishop break-in because Tempus was there. They were there, again, and they were focused on me, which I really shouldn’t be surprised by because I know they want the gauntlet, that’s what they’ve been after this whole time. When we got to the Archives, Tempus was there, along with a woman called Oleandra Hemlock, who Overgrowth hates for very, very valid reasons.
I’m really glad I had other people with me, because I don’t know what I would have done alone. Whisper in particular was fantastic. She--I don’t know what she did in particular, but she got in Tempus’s head, threw them off-balance and on the defensive. They were trying to send things off in time, doing that thing that grates like a note played wrong, where they move something in the general timeline instead of just moving its timeline.
Okay that might not make much sense. It’s hard for me to explain myself. There’s what I do, which is like--well, to continue the music metaphor, it’s like if you slowed down or sped up a song, or played it backwards a little bit. The song is the same, you’re just in a different part of it. And then there’s what I’ve seen Tempus do, with the books and also with mom--where they take a note out of where it belongs and, presumably, drop it somewhere else. They rip things out of their place in time and shove them in other places, and it can’t be good. You’ve changed the song.
Anyway, digression aside, Tempus tried to do that, and I just---I don’t know how I did it. They were getting rid of books and I could tell they were getting rid of things that they didn’t want us--maybe me in particular, maybe a more general us--to see. So I...grabbed it. I don’t know how else to describe it, but they had the book in their hand, and it vanished, but I could feel where it was supposed to be and yanked at it. And then I just kept doing that, and kept doing that, until it felt like I was holding the entire room in my hand, digging my fingers in, keeping it in place. I could feel Tempus trying to pull things away and--I couldn’t let them. Not again.
Thank god for Whisper, you know? Because while I was busy trying to do that, she was still going after Tempus. She got in their head again, and that’s where this gets...well, it was already bad. I think she accidentally tapped into what Tempus was remembering? But something in her powers went haywire, and it slammed outward and caught me, too.
It was. Well, if I’m reading this in the future, I’m sure I remember what it was. It...really, really wasn’t good. There’s living that moment once, and then there’s living it from the other end, feeling what Tempus felt. And...it was the worst thing. Because they were angry, and disappointed, and fixated, and...like, none of that was about mom. It was all at the gauntlet and me. The most important person in that room, and Tempus didn’t even *care* about her.
I’ve hated people before, kind of, but not like this. I don’t like it.
When I snapped out of it, Tempus was gone, and Overgrowth was ten feet tall and built like a brick shithouse. You’d think that would be a kind of terrifying thing to wake up to, but...it was still pretty clearly Overgrowth, so I wasn’t very scared. Whisper was doing worse, though. I mean, I’d been through that moment once before, but it was the first time for her, and she was the one directly plugged into Tempus’s head. She kept apologizing, but--it’s not like what happened was her fault. If anything, I’m sorry she had to see that. It was bad, but also...it’s life, now. Mom’s gone, for the time being. It hurts, but if I got mad at everything that reminded me of it, I’d be mad at the world.
Anyway, Whisper and I needed to take a moment. It was...good. I mean, everything that happened was awful, but the conversation was good.  I told her mom would like her, which is true. How would she have put it? A soft spot for rapscallions? That sounds like mom.
I miss her. Every day, I miss her.
But today I managed to take something that Tempus was tearing out of the timeline, and I put it back. I can’t do people yet, but one day I will be able to. I can get her back. I have to be able to get her back.
I’ve been reading the books that Tempus wanted to send away. The first one I’m looking at is the manual for their security. The security guards were pawns, the rooks were mechs. The most worrying thing, though, is the King and Queen. Whatever they’re doing, they’re preparing for some sort of infiltration, and I don’t like any of the implications of that.
The romantic style of chess is swift attacks, followed by swift counterattacks. I’m thinking about that, and I’m thinking about what that infiltration might be, and I’m thinking about the fact that it was very obviously Big Team who levelled their facility.
I’m sure there’s going to be a counterattack. I just don’t know when, or where it’ll be from.
P.S. Whisper asked me to give her a tour of the museum! I’m going to go through what I know we have and see which items have the wildest or coolest stories attached.

## S4E43: You Might Just Get What You Need

2020, April 06.
     I was thinking about the phrase “you can’t always get what you want,” because it’s quoted around like a popular saying--which I guess it is? But as far as I can find, if it didn’t originate from the Rolling Stones song, that certainly popularized it. As for who said it to them, sources all pretty much differ.

I kind of hate it as a phrase. It’s purposely defeatist, isn’t it? You can’t always get what you want. In the song, it’s a bittersweet comfort: *You can’t always get what you want, but you might get what you need.* But that’s not now I find people using it; I find people using it by saying it to excuse why they can’t make something happen, or why they can’t do the right thing. They leave off the last part of the phrase. Today that happened--again--and it really, really pissed me off.

So we went out to help someone--Engineer Princess Tune-up, a girl who had reprogrammed a scrapped Rubicon droid to help her, well, save people. We ran into her two days ago at first, and Ellen convinced her to stop flying into burning buildings, and we invited her to the base. Well, today she showed up, but she didn’t have her mech and she explained that some other mechs had taken it away and it hadn’t come back. So we--well, a group of us--went out to help her out and track Scrap-scrap down for her. Turned out a bishop engineer had stolen Scrap-scrap and wanted to, I don’t know, operate on him to figure out how he was developing intelligence and then extrapolate from that to make better robo-cops.

Which...there are a lot of problems with that. Which we pointed out. First of all, if you want to do something good, don’t do it with Bishop, what the fuck. It wasn’t like he didn’t know they were bad--he did! He admitted that where the company was going was awful! But he didn’t care enough to leave it. And then he stole from a ten year old and his defense was “well, I didn’t sue her, so I’m not that bad.” Yeah, buddy, you have the moral high ground for not suing a child and just robbing her instead. And ALSO, there shouldn’t be ANY robo-cops! Robo-cops are even more inherently flawed than regular cops, which is really saying something!

Anyway when we pointed all this out to him his response was. It was “you’ll learn when you get older that you can’t always get what you want.”

Which, first of all, isn’t a defense for the multiple wrong things that he did! You can’t slap a bandaid over robbing a child and operating on an emergent AI for a company you know is doing terrible things in the hopes that they will maybe return to doing slightly less terrible things with “you can’t always get what you want!” and abdicate all responsibility like that!

...so I may have lost my temper and broke a bunch of robots. And also stood around while Ernest set a building on fire. And...well, in the interest of not being a huge hypocrite about the whole “responsibility” thing i just mentioned, I shouldn’t have done that. There were better ways of dealing with that. We could have just taken Scrap-scrap and left, we didn’t have to kick the guy while he was down. I could have actually, I don’t know, explained to the guy why this wouldn’t work, if I was more persuasive, or if he’d listen to a teenager. But I was too angry.

I can’t let that keep happening. The Gauntlet agreed with me on that, actually--well, it’s talking Obi-Wan Kenobi style about not giving in to my anger, but that’s basically agreement. I can’t be a hero if I let my temper get the better of me and stop me from helping people--if I move into just breaking things because I’m angry and people are wrong--that’s. I can’t keep calling myself a hero if I do that. I mentioned earlier that I hadn’t ever hated someone like I hate Tempus. Well, I’ve never been as angry--or, well, I’ve rarely been as angry as I was when that guy unhesitatingly just implied none of us knew that you had to compromise to get things, that sometimes no matter how much you want something to happen, you can’t always have it happen.

We know that. I know that, at least, and I think a lot of people in the Big Team know about that too. I was with Anaya when she was talking about her dad in the past tense, Aman doesn’t have an eye, Ellen was talking about going back to the past and you don’t do that if you’re happy with things as they are now.

I guess where I’m leading up to with all of this was that I don’t like getting that angry, and I don’t like that I can’t control myself when I’m like that, and wow, I should probably have some sort of therapy.

...unfortunately, they’d definitely want the name of my guardian for that. And there’s no way I’m talking to Bill about this. What would he do? Just tell me to give away the Gauntlet and pretend that nothing’s wrong? That sounds about right.

Yeah, that’s not going to work. I just need to get mom back, and that will help. Then I’ll have nothing to be this angry over, right? Right?

## S4E45+51: Hot Springs and Derby Musings

2020, April 11 and 19.
Wow, I completely forgot to write about the fact that I went to a hot spring because I was too busy a) relaxing at the hot spring and b) getting thrown immediately back into school after relaxing at the hot spring. Whoops. So I didn’t really have time to study much of anything that weekend. This more recent weekend, though, I ended up at a game of Roller Derby, largely because of Bobby Ostenburg. So let’s talk about Roller Derby.

It’s been around since the 30s, where it came out of roller skating marathons that all happened on one track. Somehow, that twisted and evolved into the modern sport of Roller Derby--two men, Leo Seltzer and Damon Runyon, are usually named as the cause of this, and the codifiers for a sport recognizable as modern roller derby. Interestingly, there was a whole period from the 50s to the early 00s where roller derby shared more with sports entertainment (a la televised wrestling) than actual competitive sports, with an emphasis on showboating and drama and scripted bouts with predetermined winners. This is clear when you look at modern Derby, with its love of dramatic derby names both for team members and for the team itself, but the aspect of competition has come back to the fore.

Another interesting thing about roller derby from an academic standpoint is that a lot has been written about its ability to subvert and overturn gender expectations, as the sport is predominantly played by women, but is not catered for a male gaze and in fact encourages women to adopt personas often characterized by violence as they skate around a rink and attempt to block each other bodily, something that, to put it mildly, fucks with some gendered assumptions of what women do for fun. I also spotted a few articles that I didn’t have time to read about how in areas and cultures where a woman’s body is seen as the property of a potential future husband, engaging in a contact sport like roller derby is an act of reclaiming one’s own body, but I didn’t read the full articles and so I’m *super* not qualified to talk about that in any depth.

So I was watching the roller derby tournament because, the previous weekend, I’d been in a hotel suite with Bobby Ostenburg for a whole weekend, and it’s pretty hard to get through that without hearing at least some about the upcoming derby tournament, including the fact that they needed more volunteers to help run it, and no, you didn’t need to know anything about roller derby to do it. And I thought, well, we just stopped a weird man from sapping energy from a bunch of college students on spring break (i would elaborate on this, but...that’s basically the whole story, other than getting to see Carmilla again, and meeting both Bobby--Friðr--and Tilly--Challenge, both of whom are--as is becoming a trend with people i work with--really good at this whole hero thing), which kind of makes us friends, and also I really need things to do on the weekends because if I just spend the whole day at the museum, someone’s going to start asking questions.

So I agreed to help ref the roller derby game, which went fine for about the first...five minutes?  Three minutes? I showed up with some other big team members--Ernest, the one who put out a burning building that one time, Kurt, Taxon, and Box (the one who keeps asking people to get checkups, which I keep forgetting to do, whoops)--and we all got our assignments and the players lined up, and then they all vanished and a spaceship tore off the roof of the building.

You know, I’ve lived in Halcyon since I was born, I don’t know why this surprises me still.

So the aliens explain that they love roller derby and think we don’t play it well, so they were kidnapping our derby players to steal their power,  and it was after about seven minutes of poking holes in all the problems of that that they admitted that it was basically all a PR stunt so they could film a really cool session of Power Derby, a version of roller derby with no power-limiting rules. Long story short, we beat them at Power Derby, which must have been pretty humiliating, because none of us had ever played Roller Derby before.

Note to self: I need to talk to Kurt more, they’re pretty cool, and so far their impression of me seems to be “eminently throwable,” which...isn’t wrong, but could be better? In general I want to talk to people on the Big Team more--I just don’t really, uh, know what to talk about. Museum exhibits? School? The most recent life-threatening adventure we’ve been on? What do most kids talk about????

Man, I wish Emmy were here. She was always good at getting me to like, actually leave the house and talk to people. I was thinking about her a lot this week, actually. Lately I’ve mostly been thinking about mom--for obvious reasons--so remembering Emmy sneaks up on me, quietly, until suddenly she’s all I can think about again. It was probably the combination of all the college students at the hot springs--she’d be almost done with college, now--and then the roller derby tournament, which she would have loved. It’s the exact kind of pun-name she always did: histoRyan, Em-ageddon, that kind of thing.

I miss her. She’d be better at this whole...talking to people thing.

I should have looked at the zodiac city team. Well, I should have asked someone on the team who goes up to Zodiac city if the name sounded familiar. Well, really, what I should have done is gone up to Zodiac City myself, years ago, and asked if anyone knew what had happened to Emily Young.

I know I should do that. I know. But every time I think about it it feels like I’m drowning. I want her to be there, but...what if she isn’t? What if she’s just another one of those people who vanished on T-day and aren’t coming back?

What if the reason she hasn’t come back yet isn’t dealing with a transformation, or not being sure about stuff, but because she can’t? Or because she doesn’t want to?

...I’m getting in my own head again, and writing isn’t helping. I should stop before I turn into a huge mess, because that isn’t going to help anybody.

## S4E56: Seeing Double

2020, April 25.
     The term “doppelganger” unsurprisingly comes to us from German, where it literally means *double-goer*. In folklore, it’s a relatively recent term to jump from German to English; prior to that, a more common term for “otherworldly creature that looks just like you” was a *fetch*, from Irish myth; other similar stories mention the *ka* of Egypt, or the Nordic *vardoger* (I definitely didn’t write that right but I returned that book to the library already). They’re all basically the same in concept: a second version of the self, usually either malevolent or a herald of oncoming doom.

In more modern horror tropes, though, the *doppelganger* is usually used closer to the “changeling” concept from Irish lore, albeit with the conceit that rather than replacing a child, it replaces an adult. The way most versions of the story go, doppelgangers--or merely people who can appear as other people--separate allies from each other, and then take the form of one of them to fool the others. I’m less well-versed in literature than I am in history, so I don’t know precisely where stories of this sort began to be more common; perhaps they increased as infiltration became a more common fear and national boundaries solidified, so the idea of an “other” disguising itself as someone you know but working against you became more common. I wouldn’t be surprised if stories like this peaked in times such as the McCarthy hearings in the fifties, though--times when it really serves someone in power to have everyone scrutinize each other and be filled with paranoia.

The possible uses of the doppelganger for propaganda aside, though, I have to admit that they are creepy as all hell. I don’t think the person I ran into today was a doppelganger *per se*--they were a member of the Black Magic Club (the bad one) named Spegulo, who apparently has the ability to turn herself into copies of people. We were all up in Zodiac City--a group of us (Challenge, Mithril, and Verve. And me) had been called to a school up there that was magically sealed to figure out what was going on and help evacuate it during the treequakes.

It was interesting--there were some people from the Consortium there--but Verve ended up tossing me and Mithril up to the roof and then she and Challenge headed up themselves, so we could head in through the roof door after I undid a curse of some sort on it. We ran into some members of the club in there--I recognized them from school, a bit, but Verve knew them, had run into them doing things with the Black Magic Club before.

So she convinced Jerry Phelps to tell us more of what was going on, which was that Vic was digging into the basement of the school to do...something. I’m not sure what, but it wasn’t great. So Verve and Mithril went off to deal with that and Challenge and I headed over to the gym, because it sounded like there were people still in there.

This is where we come back around to doppelgangers. There was a spell over the gym that made it look to people in it like everything was fine, which we learned because Challenge just launched herself right into the spell and got stuck in it. I was trying to figure out a way to get rid of it and I saw someone there at the edge, and it looked like they were holding it up. Unfortunately, they saw me, too, and did...something.

I don’t know precisely what they did, but next thing I knew I was looking at a precise copy of myself, and it--they--were using magic to change one of the people in the gym, and it looked like they were being warped like I was using my time magic on them, and. Well.

I might have panicked a little bit, because I reached out and tried to use the gauntlet to get them to stop, but I think I reached too big and did too much because, well. The next thing I remember I was on my knees and the entire gym was coming down around me. Which wasn’t great. The good news was that Challenge had managed to get out of the spell and stall Spegulo-me.

...the less good news is that the way she decided to do that was. Well, I’ll be generous and say that it took a little too much inspiration from dramatic spy movies and a little too little from practicality because, well, her idea was to convince Spegulo that she and I were dating, and then make out with them.

In her defense, it worked, I guess! But still, very weird to come out of a panic breakdown to see someone who looks like you being dip-kissed by Challenge. I used the opportunity to try to knock Spegulo out, they managed to get away enough to warp out, and the two of us booked it to the basement.

Shit had apparently happened there, because Verve wasn’t there but a motorcycle was, and also the stairs were very broken, and Spegulo still looked like me and was trying to convince Mithril to jump into this weird hole that Vic Toxic was drawing a magic circle of some sort around! Which was a bad idea, so of course Mithril started to do it, and I tried to stop her, and we BOTH ended up in the hole.

Fortunately, Mithril got us out before we could be used as a human sacrifice or WHATEVER they were planning. Cambria was there--Engineer Princess Tune-up’s sister--and she summoned Scrap-scrap to help defend herself, which was alright in the end for us because Scrap-scrap doesn’t want to hurt us, and the only people there who he wasn’t programmed to protect were Spegulo and Vic, so they ended up just bailing. Also, Verve got herself back out of her pocket dimension--apparently that’s where she went.

After that, things really died down. Everyone else went up to try to cut off Vic and crew, and I stuck around because someone had to make sure whatever magic circle Vic was drawing was completely gone. So I spent some time hanging out in a basement with Scrap-scrap, mopping up glowing tree sap.

Scrap-scrap was really sad, because Cambria had just abandoned him, in his mind. I tried to reassure him that it wasn’t that bad because she would definitely be back. I mean, who would just leave someone in a basement with no way out?? And Grace--sorry, Tune-up--has a locator. So it wasn’t like Cambria was gone forever. Just for the moment. I don’t know how convincing I was--I mean, how convincing is it ever to say that someone isn’t gone forever? How can you ever be sure?? But I think it helped.

## S4E68: Drastic Changes

2020, May 11.
Emmy’s okay!!!!!

**A lot has happened. A *lot* has happened. I don’t really know how to start into what happened last night other than just saying that Emmy’s okay, she’s safe and she’s back and we went out for dinner and talked about what’s been happening in her life and she wants me to talk to Bill, which I don’t want to do, but she’s okay and she’s back and my sister is alive and I feel like this has got to be a dream. There’s no way I’m this lucky, right?**

**She isn’t entirely “better,” for whatever value of *better* there is--she took the cure for Permutation Pink, but it still left her a little scaly. I don’t entirely understand what that’s got to be like, but...I know what it’s like to have something terrifying and uncomfortable start happening to your body and then only be able to partially undo it (thanks, puberty blockers), so it’s not an entirely alien idea. Anyway, she’s back and we talked like, half the night after going to get food at Burgertime, like we used to, and.**

**She’s back.**

**It’s weird to say. I keep writing it down in the hopes that it’ll look more real. Emmy’s back, she’s okay, she’s safe. For now.**

**I say *for now* because of what else happened tonight, but when I try to write that I just end up knuckling down on the pen so hard that my hand aches and nothing gets written. I don’t know how to stop that from happening; I guess I’m going to have to come up to it normally, and hope that then I can write it.**

**So I got a text from Seb that the museum was going to be robbed tonight. I was already there, and was going to head out but I ran into Hisham (whoops, I’d been doing so well at not tipping people off to where I was staying, but he’s. Well, he’s perceptive. Also, turns out he knows way more about superhero stuff than I thought! But we’ll get to that) and was trying to make him not suspicious of me, and then we both noticed that the night watch’s flashlight was on the ground, where it really shouldn’t have been, so I headed that way to see what happened, and that was where I ran into Emmy.**

**Apparently, what happened was that Tempus had said that she would be able to help Emmy go back to normal, if Emmy helped her do this break-in, which is just… I don’t know. I don’t know if she was telling the truth. I don’t *know*. But the rest of the team showed up (Anaya, Seb, and Phalanx), and I told Emmy about the thing with Tempus and mom, and so she got out of our way, and we headed in to the exhibit.**

**Tempus was trying to get something called the Circlet of Nut, the Egyptian sky goddess, but she abandoned that real fast once she saw I was there. Seb--Anomaly--was really interested in this gadget she was using, said it came from someone called Quantum Knight. Tempus tried to distract us by animating a bunch of the ushabti, but Anaya and Phalanx were really good at taking care of them--and then one hit Anomaly while he was trying to get away with the device, and it malfunctioned and sent us all onto Zodiac City while it was falling, so. That wasn’t great.**

**Anomaly got us back, though! It was rough--and Anaya wanted to do something there, I’m not sure what. She said later it would have been a bad idea, and I can’t pretend to know enough about her and what she’s struggling with to say if she was right or not. I still felt bad, not knowing how to help, or what she was trying to do.**

**But we made it back into the museum, thanks to Anomaly, and that was when Tempus punched me in the gut and dropped Phalanx at high speed into a sarcophagus--I felt so bad for the exhibit, during all of this. Those are priceless artifacts!! Hisham works hard on that wing!!! I’m so glad I could put it all back.**

**I’m going in circles around the point, again. Anaya managed to pin Tempus to a wall, and she still wouldn’t answer as to where mom was, and Anaya pulled off her mask and**

**[a long, scrawling line cuts across the page, almost as if someone jerked a pen in frustration]**

**I still can’t write it. I try to and I just go blank. I want to say that I was wrong and there was some trick of the light, but there wasn’t, and I wasn’t. I just. I couldn’t. Anaya was still holding her there and I couldn’t do anything, couldn’t stop her--she went back through the wall, tried to escape--and I couldn’t do anything.**

**I’m not much of a good hero, I guess, if learning that some version of my sister is a supervillain throws me this much.**

**Emmy--my Emmy, the right Emmy--managed to come in and help. I don’t think she saw Tempus’s face. I don’t think I want her to. Hisham tried to help and Tempus almost--it was almost mom all over again. I’m so glad the others had their wits about them and could stop her because I would have done anything not to see that again. God, what would I have told Aman? “Sorry, I was sitting around useless while your uncle got vanished, I’m sorry I’m a failure??” I couldn’t have done it. I couldn’t have even told him. I could have promised to get Hisham back, but I can’t even get mom back.**

**But it didn’t happen. It didn’t happen, it was fine, and I fixed the room. I fixed everything she did and AEGIS took her into custody and she’s gone and I don’t have to deal with her right now, because I have enough to deal with--I’m moving into the Big Team Base, Anaya helped convince me and if it wasn’t there it would be Emmy’s apartment (but I don’t want to be a burden on her--but what if I leave her alone and she grows up alone and becomes that?? But what if clinging too close is what caused it?? I don’t *know*) and I think Hisham was going to offer but that would, uh, be a little awkward? I mean, he’s real nice, but I don’t know if I could just. Crash at his place without feeling very guilty about it.**

**But the Big Team Base has rooms for superheroes, and that’s me, I guess, so I’m here now. It didn’t take a long time to pack, although there are some more things I want to bring over, and I might try to sneak into the house again to pick up some of my stuff (I told Emmy I’ll think about talking to Bill. And yeah, I’ll think about it. I’m not sure if I’m going to do it, but I’ll think about it).**

**Today Anaya asked if we all wanted to meet up at Philosotea for a celebration. I’m not sure how much I feel like celebrating, but I think it’s a good idea to go--and also, I like all of them a lot. Again, I think I’m making friends. It’s weird. Seb even offered--apparently he has some experience with like, weird alternate versions of your relatives being evil time villains. Which is such a specific life experience, but it was nice for him to offer to talk about it if I ever want to.**

**Anyway. I need to go out and do that, so I’ll stop writing. God, this one is long. And then later today I’m meeting up with Emmy again--she wants to hear about what I’m doing with Big Team more. I already told her about the race, and again about the sewer thing (She kept laughing and waggling her eyebrows when I brought up Merlin. Emily *no*), but I need to get into the rest of it.**

**Maybe I’ll tell her about Tempus--Tempus without the mask. Maybe I won’t. I don’t think I can, yet. I can’t even write it down clearly.**

But. If Tempus is really--who she is. If that’s really her. Maybe there’s some way to get through to her? Maybe there’s some explanation. I can’t think of one, but if she really is the same person, well--there has to be something. Right???

## S4 Finale: In Due Time

2020, June 6.
Nevermind, Tempus Fugit is a huge bitch.
I’m starting all in the wrong place again. Maybe I should go back to doing the research notes, because those are so much more organized, but I’m pissed off and my hands are shaking and maybe writing will help.
It was bad enough when it was just me she was hurting. Now she’s hurting other people, just to get to me, and I can’t--I can’t. I didn’t even really know Bolt before today.
Alright. Start at the beginning. A record is nothing but a huge headache if it isn’t clearly laid-out, and I guess that’s what these are now, records of my time as a superhero. I can’t really pretend they’re research notes anymore.
This all starts with AEGIS contacting us because they needed help. This was, not gonna lie, rather surprising, because last time I saw someone from AEGIS it was Agent Carson (who is. The same but also not the same as Millennium Dawn Carson) and he was pulling the “oh you kids should let us do things” bullshit again.

After today, they don’t get to say that again, or I swear to god I will lose my entire mind.
Anyway, they called on us (me, Bolt, Phoenix, and Taxon). Director Hussain herself, actually. What had happened (and she wasn’t entirely upfront about this the entire time, but it was easy enough to figure out as we ran into stuff) was that AEGIS had been experimenting with the Zodiac Tree Sap with some AEGIS volunteers, trying to make super-soldiers. They made super *something*, all right, because there were these three giant translucent animals (ox, boar, monkey--all animals from the chinese zodiac, I noticed, which isn’t super surprising) rampaging around with unconscious AEGIS agents in plugsuits inside them.
So that was a great thing to arrive to. We did get some help--Agent Carson, Agent Tonner, and a guy that Bolt called Smoke and that Bolt and Phoenix seemed to really like. He seemed pretty cool to me--helped me get out of a tough spot. Anyway, the things were really tricky to deal with--they started out by throwing Bolt and his robot at the AEGIS carrier and it really just got trickier from there.
I’ll be honest, there’s not a lot of stuff I could do against giant rampaging monster creatures. So I grabbed Agent Tonner and got her to get me into the lab, hoping that there was some way to undo what AEGIS did to those people in there. The good news was, there was. I found their lab and a scientist in there--the guy in charge of those experiments. I think I overheard the director later say that his name was Doctor Rand? Whatever. He got pissy at me when I pointed out that maybe, keeping a failsafe in the same room as an experiment that could cause everyone to go super berserk and break things wasn’t a good idea, so I’m not super impressed with the guy. Later it turned out he’d been totally misrepresenting the safety of his experiments to AEGIS, which doesn’t surprise me.

Anyway, he had a remote thing which could turn off the connection between the sap and the people, so I fixed it (it was still pretty wonky, though, but hey. I did the best I could) and headed back out. On the way, we ran into an escaped supervillain, because *of course* AEGIS was keeping their supervillain containment right next to their berserker superhero experiments!! Of course.
AEGIS never gets to pull the “you kids should leave this to the professionals” bullshit again is all I’m saying.

So Agent Tonner goes to take care of the supervillains and I go outside, where everything has gone completely to shit. I don’t know what happened, but it looked like a bomb went off, Bolt and Lugnut (his robot) were off chasing after the boar, who was charging straight for the city, the monkey was still running around breaking things, both Taxon and Phoenix looked as though whatever bomb had gone off had gone of in their faces, and the ox was gone, so I guess at least that went right.

Taxon tackled the monkey, which was super useful--I had actually asked them to, but I’m not sure they understood me. Their helmet was off, and when it was off they didn’t speak in any language I knew and didn’t respond to what we said, so I think that it might have some translator thing in it for them. Anyway, between Phoenix and Taxon I managed to get close enough to turn off the thing, at which point Savior showed up and caught the guy who was in the monkey (he had been falling) before heading off to help out Bolt and Agent Carson. Phoenix and Smoke stayed behind to deal with the supervillain escapees, and Taxon and I headed off to deal with the boar.
By which i mean Taxon carried me there. Uh. That happened.
It’s tough being a superhero who can’t fly.

Anyway by the time we got there, Savior had tossed the boar around a bit, Lugnut had gotten banged up, and Carson was completely unconscious, so clearly SOMETHING happened. Taxon helped hold the boar down and I hit it, although it hit me pretty badly right back, and then we were picked up by AEGIS.

And that should have been the end of it, you know? Job well done and all that. But of *fucking course* it wasn’t.
So we get back to the base, Phoenix has helped deal with another supervillain (who actually seemed pretty decent, from her telling--someone who would actually honor “best two out of three,” which is more than I can say for most people, myself included) and there was only one villain left out, and.
I would say I was being paranoid, because there was no reason for me to suspect she was being held at this facility in particular, you know? But then I saw Agent Tonner talking to someone, someone who looked like she was in an AEGIS uniform but Tonner had her blaster out, and then I saw blue and

I didn’t know I could move that fast, honestly. I was never great at gym. But apparently everything people said about adrenaline and life-or-death situations was true because suddenly I was over there, blocking her, and the rest of the world just stopped.
She called me Ry-ry and I wanted to punch her fucking teeth in.
That wasn’t all that happened, but she--she tried to vanish Agent Tonner like she did mom, she tried to do *that* to someone else and then she turned around and said “I’m still your big sister” as though she had any right to that title at all after what she did to mom. She said I didn’t understand, which was a cop-out when people told it to me as a kid and is still a cop-out now, and when I asked her to explain she said she would when the time was right, which is *another* cop-out. You know what the right time would have been? *Before you fucking took mom, Emily*. You don’t get the benefit of the doubt and you don’t get to choose what the right time for me to learn things is, not if you want me to listen to or believe you.

She told me to let her go and I asked her why I should and then she vanished, of course, because she can just fucking blip out of space if you give her the chance, and then I heard Bolt yelling my name and I looked over to see that Lugnut wasn’t there.
It took me too long to realize what had happened, but he said--he said that she wanted him to pass on a message. To stay out of her way or else my friends would get hurt. And she left one part of Lugnut, just to taunt me, with a note on it. *All in due time, RyRy.*
To taunt *me*. She took something important to Bolt, something that he clearly cared about more than he cares about a lot of things (he talked to it, like it was a pet or a person, and he talks to machines so he would know) and used it to taunt *me* like Bolt didn’t even matter. That’s what gets me most about it. I didn’t know Bolt, really, we’d never worked together, but like--just because you don’t know someone doesn’t mean you use them as a tool to get to someone else. Doesn’t mean you take something they love and break it not even to hurt them, but to hurt *someone else*.

I tried to get Lugnut back. I really, really did. *I tried*. I wasn’t enough. I could feel it, just on the edge of my reach, but *I wasn’t good enough*.
But I know where it is. I can feel it there--the wavelength that Tempus was using, the time where she sent it. I’m trying to argue the Gauntlet into giving me a proper time and date, not just, you know, weird Gauntlet Vibes. Once I have that, I’ll give it to Bolt. He says he’s done a time heist before, that there are people in the Big Team who can help. I’m going to get him Lugnut back. It’s the least I can do.
I’m sorry for all the profanity, if anyone else is reading this. I’m not usually this--this angry, this fired up. I promise. But this made me furious.
We met with Director Hussain after all of that. She was talking about working with Big Team, about how AEGIS and Big Team should work more closely with each other. I could kind of see where she was coming from. It’s an old problem, you know? *Quis custodiet ipsos custodes*--who watches the watchmen? All the way back to Socrates in Plato’s Republic (who expressed the same sentiment, although the quote isn’t actually from him). Her idea was to appoint someone from AEGIS to work with Big Team. I asked if this would go both ways and she...well, she seemed to agree. Said some stuff about more transparency toward the Big Team. We’ll see if she meant it.
She wanted to put Carson as the--well, liaison, I guess, but he really didn’t like that idea, so Smoke--Kenneth Ribaldi, that’s his name--volunteered, and. He seemed like a cool guy, so I was already for it, but him volunteering was the first thing since Lugnut that made Bolt look a little less like he was about to cry, so it needed to happen. And it did. So at least that was good.
I need to get that time and place for Bolt. Maybe other things will be there, maybe they won’t, but I’m sick and tired of Tempus taking things and people that matter. Last time it was almost Hisham, this time it was almost Agent Tonner and then it *was* Lugnut--and she thinks I can *let it go*, that I’m not going to try to stop her?

She must really not be my sister anymore, because she doesn’t know me at *all*.