Nice nod to the legacy of Blood Raven as Jan ponders both the healing and sleeping assistance being provided to her thanks to the older heroine even now.

Jan keeps a sharpie in her drawers? Oh. . . wait, those kind of drawers. Er, nevermind.

The magical excursion into the Ravenwing was brilliantly done. I was fascinated as Jan gradually learned more and more. Midway through her probing, I believed Ravenwing would manifest as a crow familiar. Her realization that Ravenwing is an aircraft hit me just like the semi-truck that hit Jan. I was not expecting that! Then I began to recall that Rook’s approach to the B-52 was aboard such an aircraft and the pieces snapped into place. Blood kin! Who knew?

I'm jealous of how masterfully you crafted this entire episode. Pure Awesomesauce!


Nits:
’…dispel the illusion that obfuscated the stair that lead to the sanctum above.’
- - stair that led to? or perhaps stair leading to?
’She had had {one extra ‘had’} gone into this with no real idea of what the Ravenwing was.’

Renee: January is January. She is unable to read the signs even when she is not tired and distracted.

I think I established that January usually feeds them nuts. I have read that crows seem to really like them. Corn is fav of their's too, which is why the stereotype of farmers having to erect a scarecrow in their cornfields. Fruits like grapes and apples seem to be popular with them as well. Even dog or cat food, especially in small pellets.

January's favorite cereal is vanilla almond, the store brand of course, since she cannot afford the Kellogs Special K version. Her favorite everything is usually vanilla. Ice cream, cake, body spray, etc...


Acadian: January is finally at a point in her career where she can now look back on the things that she has learned. Not that she is not still learning new things. But at this point she really is a seasoned pro at the cape life.

Writing January's attunement to the Ravenwing was challenging. Often in RPGs you spend experience points and it unlocks the next rank in a magic item's powers. I wanted a way to portray something like that in a real world fashion. I wound up falling back upon something like hacking a computer or phone. Then combined that with sewing, as January followed the weave of the Ravenwing's design to get a better sense of Rook, and how he made it.

Yep, we have fully looped back to the beginning of the book now. First we met and dealt with Rook on the bottom of the sea. Now January has unlocked the secrets of his ravenmobile, that allowed him to attempt his bomb heist in the first place.

I was not originally going to make Rook a relative of January. But the more I wrote him, the more it felt right. Especially given the corvid associations. We will have even more about that coming up soon, when Cray is able to crack Rook's secret identity.

As ever, thanks for the nits.






The cockpit of a P-51 Mustang was an inspiration for the Ravenwing's controls.

Riggers in Shadowrun


Book 12.37 - Broken Arrow

That of course meant that she could go inside. She felt through the enchantment's aura, and touched upon the second available command, that to enter. When she concentrated upon it, she discovered a branching tree of options. There were three entrances. One was a large cargo door in the rear, the other two were small, circular hatches. One of the latter was set in the bottom of the fuselage, behind the head of the plane. The other lay just behind that in the roof.

She took the easy way, and with just a thought the rear hatch slanted down to form a ramp beneath the tail feathers. January pulled in her wings and folded them up on her back. That caused her to drop to the floor. She landed lightly, and strode up the ramp. It felt solid under her feet, like metal rather than bone or skin.

Within was a cargo bay, large enough to squeeze a van or small truck into. She was immediately reminded of Viuda's spidercraft Charlotte. But the Ravenwing was a simpler affair. There were some jump seats and a single folding cot built between the metal ribs and stringers that ran around the interior walls of the craft. But it was not as fancy as the Puerto Rican heroine's vehicle. For example, there was no microwave or refrigerator. There certainly was not a terrarium for a pet tarantula.

She reached out to the bare skeleton of the craft. The ribs and stringers were plainly metal. Where the rest of the craft was glossy black, these were gray or silvery in color. January imagined they might be steel, or titanium, or even aircraft aluminum, perhaps varying mixtures of all three in different places. She would have to ask Avery, he might be able to tell. Or maybe she could fly over to Philadelphia and ask Mercury. He had a way with metals after all.

Like the Charlotte, the floor contained insets with metal rings that one could use to tie down cargo. January walked over these to the front of the plane. Here it narrowed at the throat of the bird-shaped craft. She came across the two small hatches, one in the floor and the other the ceiling. Both meshed so seamlessly into the hull that if she had not sensed them in the astral first, she might not have noticed them with her meat eyes now.

Within the head of the craft she found the cockpit, which narrowed as it went forward. It had three chairs laid out in a pyramid. The two in the rear hugged the walls of the fuselage to either side. That left a narrow passage between them that led to a single seat up front. All were made of ebony steel with black leather cushions.

The two rear seats were plainly for passengers. The pilot's seat up front was special. Its headrest was covered in glossy feathers. Those were solely from ravens, though from several different individuals. Protruding from above the headrest was an onyx helmet. It was shaped like a raven's head, with a long, heavy bill that protruded from the face.

January squeezed past the rear seats and sank into the depths of the pilot's chair. It felt warm and welcoming, like it was made just for her. Instrument panels were laid out in front of her. There was not a single electronic screen among them. Instead it was all switches, knobs, dials, and analog readouts. It was not the Christmas tree of controls that modern planes possessed either. Instead it was practically austere.

On the panel straight ahead were a six pack of round dials for altitude, speed, heading, attitude, and the like. Rising from the floor between her legs was an old-fashioned control stick, like something from a World War Two fighter plane. To her left was a throttle, again right at her fingertips. It was just a round knob set atop a lever. She could somehow sense that pushing it forward would give her more speed, and pulling it back would stop it. If she had not known better, she would have thought she was sitting in the cockpit of a P-51 Mustang, or some other ancient craft.

A handful of other controls filled out small panels at the base of these flight controls. January just knew what they were the moment her hands touched them. The aircraft wanted her to know. She belonged to January after all.

She glanced up. There was a third, narrow instrument panel overhead. It bore switches and other controls for the aircraft's utilitarian needs, such as the door controls, or to shrink and enlarge. She reached up and flipped the toggle for the cargo door. An instant later she not only heard, but felt the ramp rise up and seal tightly against the tail feathers of the craft.

Now she looked at the raven helmet perched atop the headrest above her. She reached up and took it in both hands. It easily came free from its mount atop the chair, and she pulled it down onto her head. It was big, roomy even. January recalled that the Rook armor had possessed a helmet. So he must have made it to accommodate for headgear. Even as she considered that, the Ravenwing's flight helmet grew to accommodate the extra space for the wings on the Stormcrow helm. At the same time other parts of the flight helmet shrank, until it conformed perfectly to January's armored head.

Clearly, Rook had thought of everything, at least when it came to his creations.

January felt herself meld even more deeply with the craft now. She did not need to sense into the magical realm to feel its aura. It was just automatic now, like the plane was a part of her. Out of curiosity, she completely withdrew her senses from the astral. Gone was her connection to the aura of the craft. But now she no longer needed it. She had a physical connection to it. Its body—and hers—were one in the same now.

She craned her head to one side, and the head of the Ravenwing mimicked the motion. She imagined flapping her wings, and again, the aircraft complied. She willed herself to rise, and even with the wings still, it rose up into the air. She wanted to go forward, and the bird rocketed ahead. She had to bank sharply to avoid plastering herself against one metal-traced wall of the sanctum. Then the room opened up before her, and gave her a vast cathedral of space to fly about within.

January whooped with joy. It reminded her of her first time flying. Well, her second time. Her first time had just been falling really. She felt the wind under her feathers, and the air itself infused within her being. She was part of the sky, in a way that she had never felt before. Not even since she had learned to create her wings from pure magic and will.

It was the primordial air. She could feel it all around her, bonding the craft to the sky, and granting her mastery over it. To put this to the test, she gave up any pretense at aerodynamics or physics. She just stopped, and hovered in place in the air. She had no forward thrust, nothing to oppose gravity. But she just sat there in the air and did not move an inch all the same.

She willed herself upward, and the Ravenwing responded by lifting gracefully into the air. She willed herself down, and it again complied. She backed up, then pushed forward again. She did not have to flap her wings, or do anything a normal bird or plane or helicopter would need to. Space was hers to move through however she willed it.

She did not have to touch a single one of the controls to do any of this. She surmised that they were a backup, a manual control system just in case this psychic link failed. She put that to the test next, and pushed the Ravenwing's helmet up from her head. It slid back and locked in place atop the flight chair above her.

The craft immediately wobbled under her. She instantly grabbed for the flight stick with her right hand, and went careening to one side as she overcorrected. She began to spin, and had to counter that as well. Sweat began to break out across her forehead. But she did not relent and pull the helmet down, at least not yet. She forced herself to learn the manual controls the old-fashioned way, by fiddling with them and seeing what happened. Thankfully there was nothing she could break here in the sanctum.

Eventually she got the hang of it. Even with the manual controls, the Ravenwing did not possess anything like a normal aircraft's power source. There was no engine, there were no standard control surfaces like a rudder or ailerons, and there was no need for continued thrust to keep it aloft. The primordial air infused with the body of the craft took care of all that.

As she expected, January soon learned that the manual controls allowed her to manipulate that primordial air, and the enchantment of the Ravenwing in general. They just did it slower and more clumsily. For example, how she had opened the rear hatch with a toggle switch. If she had been wearing the helmet, she could have done it with but a thought.

Finally she pulled that flight helmet back down over her features, and once more bonded with the machine. It reminded her of a rigger in the game Shadowrun. They jacked their nervous systems directly into the vehicles they controlled and became a part of them. She was doing the same thing, just with magic instead of technology.

That made her mind turn back to Joshua Nelson, whom they had christened the Rigger in the team's files. He appeared to be able to do the same thing with any vehicle, thanks to his meta-human abilities. She hoped that when he got out of the hospital he would be able to put that power to positive use. Maybe one day he might become the operator of one of those giant cranes that they built skyscrapers with, or he might use his abilities to steer a boat, or race cars, or even drive a truck.

But this was no time to let her mind wander. She had more experimenting to do. She found that she still retained her other magical abilities while interfacing with the craft. She proved this by reaching out to the wards of the Witch House. They responded to her command as ever, and the door to the sanctum appeared in one wall and swung open in accordance with her will. She gunned it forward, and aimed for the doorway.

That is when she remembered that she was still the size of an airplane. With a thought, she willed the Ravenwing to shrink to its original magnitude once more. At her command, it contracted to the size of an ordinary raven. Thusly reduced in size, she flitted through the doorway with ease, and dove down the stairs to the second floor of the Witch House.

She darted through the irregular-shaped loft below, and out into the rotunda that took up the center of the house. She found Ryo there, walking around the balcony that ringed the second story of the large, open space. He must have just emerged from the shower, because his chest was bare, and a towel was wrapped around his shoulders. He slipped his head to one side like the practiced fighter that he was as she buzzed past, and she heard him cry out in surprise even as she sailed past him.

She banked hard, and followed the banister that ringed the balcony. She zoomed around in a tight circle and passed her own bedroom. Then she hurtled down the rail of the steps of the grand staircase that curved down to the floor of the rotunda below.

She found Avery there, climbing up the stairs. His eyes widened with surprise, and he lifted his hands to bat away what he must have thought was a mad bird loose within the house. January cackled with joy, and circled her best friend for a moment. Finally she turned back and soared up the steps to the top of the staircase.

There she brought the Ravenwing to a halt and deployed its landing gear. These were of course its two taloned feet. She felt them wrap tightly around the wood of the banister and lock the craft in place. Then she pushed the helmet up off her features, and rose from the flight chair. With an afterthought she reached out to flip the toggle for the rear hatch.

It was an odd sight, looking out the wide opening that formed in the back of the plane. Everything was so huge! It was like the Witch House and everything in it had grown by multiple orders of magnitude. That included Avery, who now towered seemingly as high as a skyscraper as he lumbered up the staircase toward her.

January imagined this was how shrinking supers like Stinger felt when they reduced their size. Everything around her felt so unreal, it was like being in a different world.

She wondered if she would have to return the Ravenwing to full size in order to get back to normal. Or could she do that on her own? Well, there was only one way to find out. She stepped out of the hatch.

That is when she remembered that she had landed on the edge of the top step. There was nothing but empty space under her feet. She instantly plummeted, dragged down by gravity's avaricious paws. But her wings snapped out by reflex to arrest her fall. She would have been fine, except she was suddenly heavier, too heavy for her small wings. She plummeted again.

Small wings? What was she thinking, they were large wings, even as she was large herself. January surmised that the shrinking power was confined to the interior of the Ravenwing. Once someone exited it, they returned to full size, even as she was doing now.

As it turned out, she was doing it poorly. One of her larger feet struck the next step of the stair, even as her wings struggled to gain purchase upon the air. The next she knew she went tumbling down the steps. At least until she sprang back up a quarter of the way down, right in front of Avery. Now her wings worked again, along with the rest of her. The full-size rest of her that was, for she had returned to normal. Growing up was clearly something she would have to practice. She was sure that given a few more tries, she would have it down.

* * *

Wonderful job, bringing the Ravenwing to life in a way that seemed both natural and magical.

The aircraft does indeed bear some similarities to the Charlotte.

Jan’s first white-knuckled time trying to use Ravenwing was reminiscent of her first attempts at flight - scary but funny.

As does the Charlotte, Ravenwing certainly opens up possibilities. I’m sure it will easily carry her lunch, motorcycle and several super friends.

Nits
’There was {a} third, narrow instrument panel overhead.’
’Space was hers {to} move through however she willed it.’

Ha! Yeah, I get it. Example is a box of Corn Flakes costing OVER FIVE DOLLARS these days. I mean, what the hell??? I can afford such prices, but almost always I prefer to wait until they've got one of those deals, like 2 boxes for $7.00. Or I'll buy the generic brand like Jan does. If we all pay the inflated prices all the time, then General Mills or Kellogg's or whomever will just keep raising the prices.

Yeesh, that plane's got swatikas on it.

That's crazy she's related to Rook. Did not see that coming at all. Indeed, the fact that he took the Evil path.. he could have avoided that. See, and this is why upbringing is so important. I think that without her mother especially, let's say mom was out of the picture and her ratched dad was the only parent raising her; chances are Jan might've turned out as one of these Evils as well. Angry and defiant at the world, because she was also bullied at school.

I mean, her brother turned out Evil too. But that wasn't entirely his fault, from what I remember, right? He got hoodwinked.



Uh oh. Red Flag. 🚩



Crap.



Okay, you need to get the HELL out of there, dear.

Maybe I'm wrong, but red flags all over this chapter so far... I mean, maybe the Ravenwing is True Neutral; it doesn't possess any sort of morality or whatever, it merely melds to whoever's flying the thing. Hope this is so. Because it does sound as though it's hella fun for her to fly the thing, even in Sim mode.

Lol when she flies into her own Witch House! Bet Ryo's surprised. My gosh, her perspective's all messed up. What a silly scene portrayed on the CW this week.

That P-51 Mustang was restored about 20 years ago, and repainted and renamed to match the P-51 flown by an ace of the Tuskegee Airmen or Red Tails. The swastikas on it are for the Nazi planes her pilot - LT Col Lee Archer - shot down in WW2.

Acadian: The Ravenwing's intricacies were fun to write, if challenging. On one hand I did some research into aircraft cockpits from the 40s and 50s in order to bring a sense of verisimilitude to it all. On the other hand its not a normal aircraft, so it just ignores the laws the physics. Because of that many of the normal instruments just don't exist on the Ravenwing. She is made of elemental air. She is part of the sky itself. So she does not have an engine, or use rudders or ailerons and the like. So flying her is like playing a flight sim in arcade mode. You don't have to worry about all the really complicated stuff that real pilots like you always have to.

The Ravenwing and the Charlotte both serve the same purpose: they are the transport for a cape and their team. So they do have a lot in common. They need to have room for storage to carry stuff, and people, as well as convey their users from one place to another. Since the Ravenwing was built in the late 50s, she has a lot fewer frills. So far.

The Ravenwing does have plenty of room to carry lunch! I see her as becoming the standard way of the team getting to and from their missions in the future. As well as just for any sort of long range transportation. So January does not have to make the old joke about how she just few in from Detroit, and boy are her arms tired!

As ever, thanks for spotting those nits for me to fix.


Renee: Yeah, there is even a name for it: greedflation. It's just corporations being greedy.

If her mother had not been in the picture, January would not have survived her suicide attempt when she was 12. It was mom who came in and found her bleeding to death in her bed, and called 911 and did emergency first aid. Dad didn't want anything to do with January after she came out and said she wanted to live as a girl. So he never would have walked into her room to see what was happening.

January's brother Julian was always a bad guy. He was a narcissist, who was jealous of January even existing. He was the older child, so he was using to having all the attention from his parents. Then January came along, and suddenly he was not the sole center of his parent's world anymore. On top of that he was a racist, homophobic, transphobe. As always, that made it really easy for someone to manipulate him to do violence, as the Hierophant did.

No red flags dear. The Ravenwing is just an enchanted airplane. One that is very good at what it does, given that it was created by one of the most gifted enchanters to ever live. One who was related to January.

It was a silly scene of her flying around the inside of the house, shrunk down to the size of a normal bird. One thing I don't want to lose in the Crow fic is a sense of wonder and fun. At their core Superheros are basically wish-fulfillment. Wouldn't it be cool if I could... (fill in the blank with whatever your heart's content - fly, walk through walls, fight back against the bullies, make the world a better place, etc...). It is supposed to be fun. I think people like Zack Snyder who try to write supers as all doom and gloom all the time have lost a major point to the whole genre.







Battle of Unsan

Marvel Whiteside Parsons - January's great-grandfather on her father's side (Blood Raven's side of the family)


Book 12.38 - Broken Arrow

January plunked the Ravenwing down upon the surface of the table computer. A holographic window immediately popped up over it. It listed the artifact as an unknown device, and requested further information. Around them lay Cray's computer domain. It was ringed with cabinets that brimmed with servers and networking gear, along with smaller, traditional workstations with chairs and ordinary monitors, printers, and even an old fax machine.

That was only one quadrant of the Raven's Nest of course. Around one corner of the marble block that took up the center of the space was the waypoint, amid the Victorian sitting room. The teleportation pad lay dormant now, invisible to the naked eye. It merely awaited the touch of January's blood to activate.

Around the other corner lay the trophy area, and the freight elevator in its far wall. January could feel Y Ddraig Aur there—the sword, not the dragon—slumbering quietly in its display case. Even broken, the shards of the weapon hummed with power in astral space. Finally, the far side of the block of course held their rec room, complete with pool table and old-fashioned arcade games. Along with them was a brand new picture of January with Ranger and the Mid-Atlantic Coalition.

"So this is what I found inside the Ravenwing," January explained. She did not wear her armor. Instead she was clad in a simple white mini dress with spaghetti straps that left her shoulders bare.

She reached into her bag of holding. It had been Blood Raven's final gift to her, and had already proven to be quite convenient. Like the Witch House's sanctum, it was bigger on the inside than the outside. In fact, January had yet to discover the limits of how much she could store within the plain cloth bag.

She pulled out a ring of keys, a cracked and worn leather wallet, some loose change, and finally a full set of clothing. The latter included a pinstripe suit jacket, shirt, trousers, and even a pair of wingtip shoes. Finally she tossed out a plain fedora, and a pair of browline sunglasses that looked like something Malcom X might have worn.

"Did you travel back in time?" Avery wondered. Like January, he was dressed in normal clothes, in his case his Ohm's Law tee and a pair of shorts.

"You could say that," January murmured. Holographic windows popped up over the coins, displaying information about them. She noted that all of them had been minted before 1960. "It was all in a locker in the cargo bay."

"He must have never learned the quick change power," Ryo noted. Like the others, he was dressed in street clothes. In his case an ordinary black tee and sweat pants.

"This looks like something from an old Sinatra movie," Cray murmured as he looked over the old suit. The elder hacker was of course impeccably dressed in a thoroughly modern pair of slacks, Oxford shirt, and tie. The creases on his pants looked sharper than Nitokris' sickle-sword.

The hacker pulled open the wallet. He tossed the bills with it down on the computer. Once again, they all were from before 1960. Then he drew forth a California driver's license. Unlike a modern license, it was made of paper. Under the standard letterhead, the personal details had been filled out by a typewriter, except for the handwritten signature at the bottom. There was no picture either, but a thumb print lay in one corner.

Cray placed it face down on the computer. Given the age of the license, it obviously did not have a magnetic strip or data chip. But the computer did scan the image, and then displayed it in a hologram above them.

"Marcus Lynch, born 1934," Cray read off the window. He moved down the computer, opened up a new window to work within, and began to type furiously. "He was reported missing in late January of 1961. That matches up with the Keep 19 hijacking. There's no birth certificate on file. It was probably never digitized and put into a modern system. But I have other ways to find out what I need..."

"Okay, the missing person's report was filed by his mother Grace. She probably didn't know about his cape life. I've got a California license for her on file, the most recent copy is from 1996. Plus a death certificate from 1998. She died of heart failure, at a ripe old age of 85. Pretty good run old gal."

"Okay, I've got a wedding announcement from a Pasadena newspaper in 1934, for Grace and Greg Lynch. Greg was a lieutenant in the US Army. Here is a birth announcement in the same paper from a few months later. It seems dear little Marcus Lynch was brought into the world, the son of Grace and Greg."

"Greg went on to serve in Europe during World War Two." Now Cray was going through a series of service records. "He was a vet of the campaign from Normandy to Avarica. He got some promotions too, up to major at the end. When the Korean War broke out he volunteered for combat duty. They made him a colonel and gave him a cavalry regiment. He was there at the Incheon landing, and then the drive north to the Yalu River in winter of 1950."

"Cavalry?" Avery asked. "As in horses?"

"No," Cray shook his head. "Well, his unit was back in the 1800s. The Army loves tradition. They keep the unit titles forever. But by then it was just infantry. It became airmobile with helicopters later on."

"Uh boy, this is bad," Cray frowned as he read on. "Greg was at the Battle of Unsan. It was the beginning of the Chinese counter-attack. His unit was outnumbered, cut off, and overwhelmed. Only a handful of South Koreans and Americans broke out and escaped. He was killed in action on November 1st, 1950, the first day of the battle."

"Rest in Peace brother," Cray intoned solemnly. That reminded January that like Greg Lynch, Cray had served in the US Army.

January was amazed at the how quickly and thoroughly Cray had shredded Rook's secret identity and laid every facet of his life bare before her eyes. All around the table computer, screens now glowed with life revealing various details about his family. From state and federal documents, to newspaper columns, to school records, it was a gamut of sources.

"Ok, so Rook himself," Cray cleared his throat and went on. "There's not really much on him. He tried to join the US Army in 1952, when he was eighteen years old. But he failed the psych evaluation. It cites narcissism, inability to work with a team, and issues with authority figures. Someone even scrawled here in the margin that he's a snot-nosed punk who thinks he's better than everyone else."

"I've got the address from his license," Cray went on. "It was an apartment building. But it was torn down in the 70s, and replaced by a tire shop. That got torn down in the 90s, and now it's a Burger Baron. So that's a dead end. Same with his car, it went to his mom after he disappeared. She sold it to a used car lot two years later."

January frowned, but not just at the picture it painted of Rook. She glanced over the Ravenwing, and one hand reflexively reached out to stroke the feathers along the miniaturized vehicle's back. Again, she could not deny the sense of kinship she felt with the craft, and with its creator. Her blood called out, and felt itself answered.

"There's more to it," she insisted. "Are we sure that Greg was the dad?"

"What are you thinking?" Ryo asked. His eyes turned from January to the forms that filled the air before them. His eyes narrowed, and January could see that he was putting that razor-sharp perception of his to use. "Grace was pregnant with Rook when she married Greg."

"So, it happens, especially back then," Avery shrugged.

"Maybe," January still frowned. "But I can't help feeling like I know this guy, like he's family. I can feel it in my blood. It's like you said once Avery: Nátthrafn, Blood Raven, Stormcrow, Rook. When my family picks a lane, we stick to it."

"He didn't turn up in Blood Raven's genealogical research," Cray shook his head. "There's no mention of him, or his family."

"But someone else was in California at that time," January snapped her fingers. "Jack Parsons, my great-grandfather. Look back nine months before Rook was born. Where was his mother then?"

"Pasadena Junior College," Cray answered after a moment, as a new waterfall of school records flowed down one of his holographic windows. "Grace was working on an astronomy degree. She got it too, and went on to work at some pretty swanky observatories later in life. She even discovered a new asteroid in 1967. And let's see, where was Marvel Whiteside Parsons at that time..."

"Pasadena Junior College," January read it even as the transcripts ran across the holographic window.

"Rook was your great uncle," Ryo stated it as simple fact.

January knew it was true. Like so many things about magic, it was just so plainly obvious to her. There was no escaping her blood.

"So Jack knocked up Grace, but didn't marry her," Avery reasoned. "Instead Greg did. Pretty solid of him. Sort of like Mary, Joseph, and Jesus."

"It was the same with my great-grandmother Alice." January noted. "She lived at the Parsonage for a while after World War Two. She and Jack never got married, but she had a daughter by him. That was my dad's mother Livia."

"The Parsonage?" Avery raised an eyebrow.

"It was Jack's house," January explained. "He divided it up into apartments and it turned into a big free love polycule. My great-grandfather was a rocket scientist by day, and a wizard by night doing sex magic in the desert. He was a free love libertine before the 60s made it cool."

"Damn, that guy must have been spitting some hot game," Avery whistled. "How many other kids might he have had off the books?"

"There is no telling," January frowned. Most people would be glad to learn that they had a long lost family member. But for her, family was rarely a blessing. It was usually an atavistic horror. Her bloodline was the key to Nátthrafn returning to the world after all, and devouring it.

* * *

Okay, I see. So each swastika = a Nazi down, I get it.

true, Jan's mom is the main reason she's around today, sounds like. She's the positive influence, and ah, okay. So the brother was Evil from the very young age; this wasn't just Higher Pants' fault.

And Ravenwing is more like a True Neutral, then. It's just, the way that scene was going, it sounded as if the plane was taking over her mind!

The contents of the Bag of Holding are amusing.



Hee hee!

Wow, Cray's really tearing into the identity of Ro0k. Everything, it's all available to him, that's intense. Rook = Jan's great uncle. Sheezus, what the heck? Small world.



Very true.

Wow, scary how much crap Cray was able to dig up with his technomancy.

As ever, love the bag of holding.

Sex magic? Oh, yes, practice of the lascivious arts. Typically by a carnalmancer.

Well, I’m glad Stormcrow favors Blood Raven’s side of the family. . . .

Renee: The contents of the bag of holding are just what Rook wore in his civilian identity. I looked back at Men's fashion from the late 50s, and that is what was popular at the time.

Cray's Oxford shirts and cardigan sweaters are his superhero suit. So they always look the best.

Once again, a villain is a member of January's family. Her blood is often a curse.


Acadian: Cray really shines in this book, because he has several opportunities to do what he does best, hack the shit out of people's activities and identities. A lot of this is freely available information too. A subscription to Newspapers.com gets you access to digital archives of newspapers all over the country (and maybe even the world? Not sure about that). If you know what terms to search for, you can find a wealth of information. Like Cray did with wedding announcements and obituaries.

Sex magic is a funny thing. In some magical traditions - like Theosophy - they believe that you have to a pure in order to do magic. So no drinking, no smoking, no drugs, and absolutely no sex. Like what a classic high school football coach tells their student athletes. But in other traditions sex and drugs and rock and roll is literally part and parcel of doing magic. You do sex to raise energy, and then you send that energy out into the universe and will it to create the change you desire.

Needless to say Jack Parsons fell into the second camp.

Actually, all these villains are from Blood Raven's side of the family. Blood Raven is Nátthrafn's daughter after all, and the rest are her and his descendants:Jack Parsons, Rook,Julian, and of course January herself. Though Blood Raven's mom Saoirse and January's mom Barbara's sides have some necromancers in the family too however. So it is not all coming from Nátthrafn's bloodline. Just the really prominent ones.

One of the things I really picked up on reading HP Lovecraft is the very common trope he uses of Atavistic Horror, and being part of a Cursed Bloodline. In many of his stories the protagonist is a completely ordinary person. Then suddenly some horror comes out of their past and engulfs them. The Rats in the Walls, the Case of Charles Dexter Ward, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, a lot of his greatest hits play on this idea.

My original idea for the main quest in Season One concerning the Abyssals and Nátthrafn was based on the Case of Charles Dexter Ward. I was originally going to use it directly, and have January be a descendant of Charles Dexter Ward, and have that story be something that really happened in her past. I eventually decided to abandon that idea however, and instead work on a history that was all my own. Which I am glad for, because it came out better suited to what I am writing. But January's last name is still Ward because of that original plan. And I did keep that sense of Atavistic horror, since it still works with the new history I created.







The view from 70,000 feet


Russell Watson - Faith of the Heart (the Star Trek: Enterprise theme)



Book 12.39 - Broken Arrow

August 23 (Friday)

Just a day later January felt confident enough to take the Ravenwing out for a real test drive. Not around the back yard, but across the continent. In keeping with her promise to Cray that they be more careful with their transitions from civilian to super identities, they started from the sanctum, and used the teleportation network within to teleport to the waypoint a few miles away, in the woods behind the movie multiplex.

From there she and Gadget boarded the ravencraft. January nestled herself into the pilot's seat, while Gadget sat in one of the chairs behind her and to the side. Both were clad in their capes: January in her Stormcrow suit, and he in his powered armor. This was not just for fun, but a work mission as well after all.

"You know, maybe we should test this out some more, in a controlled environment like the Raven Bunker," Gadget observed. He rubbed the back of his armored neck, the sure sign that he was nervous. "You know, something could go wrong."

"Well, the best way to find that out is to get it up in the open sky," January insisted. "If anything's going to happen, it's going to happen up here."

"That makes absolutely no sense at all..." he murmured.

"Don't be a spoilsport." January stuck her tongue out at her best friend. "I spent all day yesterday practicing with it. I've uncovered all of its surprises. Just enjoy the ride."

"I'm just saying, maybe you should take this more seriously," Gadget argued. "You only found this thing a few days ago.

"I know," January replied in a somber tone now. "I am taking it seriously. I spent all yesterday working with it in the house and the back yard. If it had any surprises, I would have found them already. It's time to take it out on the road. Besides, it's family. Sort of like an aunt. It likes me."

"It likes you?" Gadget said incredulously.

"Yeah, it likes me," January insisted. "Can't you feel it? It's like Blood Raven's sword Samhain. It likes me too. It knows me. We share the same blood. It's something like that with the Ravenwing. Magic items like these aren't technically alive. But they do have a personality, and a sort of life of their own."

"Yeah, you said that about Y Ddraig Aur too. How it's grown beyond its original design." Gadget twisted around and turned to look back at the cargo bay behind him. "This thing does have a lot of potential. We could stow Ôkami's hoverbike back there with ease. There's plenty of room for the whole team in fact, and then some."

"I'm glad you think that," January said. "I was thinking this could be our official team vehicle from now on."

"Yeah, if it doesn't have any issues, it would sure beat us all flying or riding separately." Gadget mused. "Some of us aren't the best at the flying part after all."

"Aw, you're learning," January argued. "Lighthammer's a good teacher. He taught me after all, and look no hands!"

January raised both of her hands up in the air for dramatic effect, and grinned.

Gadget was unimpressed. "Since that thing has a psychic link, that's not saying much..."

"You can take the stick," January said quite seriously. She sent a telepathic command to the Ravenwing, and the flight helmet rose from her armored features. "It does have manual controls. So even though you're not a mage, you can still fly it."

"Do you have to be a wizard to use the psychic interface?" Gadget asked.

"I don't know, let's find out!"

January climbed out of the black steel and raven-feathered pilot's chair, and shimmied back to sit in the empty passenger seat opposite Gadget in the rear of the cockpit. The powered armor hero threw up his own hands in near panic, at the sight of her just abandoning the controls like that. But the Ravenwing continued to fly straight and level, so far at least.

"Go on, give it a whirl," January pointed to the now empty cockpit. "If nothing else, it'll be good practice for you to fly an actual plane."

"I don't think a magical ravenmobile qualifies as an actual plane," Gadget murmured. But he did clamber ahead when it was clear that January was not going to return to the pilot's seat. Instead he lowered himself down within it. January noted that just as when she sat in it, the furniture seemed to morph to conform to his size and shape, in order to fit him perfectly. In his case, the chair visibly expanded to make space for his powered armor.

"So do I need to take my helmet off?" Gadget wondered.

"Nope," January leaned forward and took the raven-headed flight helmet in both of her hands. She moved it off the headrest of the flight seat, and gently nudged it downward. It slid over Gadget's armored head with ease, and once again, morphed to fit itself snugly in place.

"Ok, what next?" Gadget asked. She could see his head move back and forth, but nothing obvious happened.

"You should be able to sense the Ravenwing's control interface," January explained. "I could."

"What does it look like?" Gadget asked. "Is it like a heads up display on the inside of the helmet?"

"No it's just... there, in your mind," January said. "It's easier if you sense into astral space, but you don't need to. It's just... there."

"I don't see anything," Gadget shook his head. "I don't feel anything."

"Well, I guess that answers that. You have to be a magician to jack into the ship." January mused. "Try the manual controls then. Those will still work. I think Rook built them as a backup, just in case he was having trouble with his magic, or he could not concentrate."

"Or maybe he built the manual controls first, and then added the mind link later," Gadget mused.

He wrapped one hand around the joystick between his legs. He pushed it over gently, and the next thing January knew they banked sharply to one side. She had to throw her hands out to grab hold of the fuselage in order to keep from flying out of her seat. Just when she regained her balance, Gadget overcompensated, and they ship heeled over in the opposite direction. Again January had to hang on for dear life.

"Spleckt!" Gadget cursed. "This thing is sensitive. It really maneuvers though."

"Yeah, it's agile," January murmured. Now she hurried to strap herself in. For a moment she had second thoughts about putting him behind the controls. But that only lasted a moment. She knew that her bestie could handle this. He had spent his entire life playing video games. If he could fly a Spitfire in Sky Wars, or a biplane in the Black Baron, then he could handle this.

Besides, the altimeter said they were at 70,000 feet in the air. They were not likely to run into anything that high.

"You know, this is really not that hard after all." Gadget's words practically said what January had been thinking. "It's like playing a video game in arcade mode. Over half the normal controls aren't even here. There's no rudder, or ailerons, or oil pressure, or fuel gauges, or any of that fancy stuff. The plane just goes wherever you want it. It's like an anime character; gravity is not a law where it is concerned, just a guideline."

"That's true," January noted. "I already found that last part out. It will hover in place indefinitely if you want."

"Wow, the view is something else too," Gadget breathed.

January looked over his shoulder, and saw what he meant. This high up, the clouds were a white cotton carpet far beneath them. Only occasionally could they make out the plains below, or the mountains in the distance. The latter were just tiny humps from here, rather than towering masses.

"That reminds me..." January undid the straps that held her down, and rose up to stand behind the pilot's chair once more. She reached up to the control panel overhead, and flipped one of the switches there.

An instant later the walls, ceiling, and floor of the aircraft just vanished. The seats, and controls, and everything else inside were still visible however. But the fuselage had turned invisible. January craned her neck back, and saw that the hull around the cargo bay remained normal. So it was only the cockpit that was affected.

This gave them a totally clear and unobstructed view all around. It was just amazing. It felt like they were living in the sky. The curve of the earth was clearly evident along the horizon. The sight of it was breathtaking. It was a white arc along the edge of the clouds below. Then as one looked higher up, the color deepened to soft teal, a deeper baby blue, dark velvet, and finally near blackness. January knew that they were nowhere near the height of satellites or the International Space Station, but it really felt like they were at the edge of space.

"It's like in a video game, where you can make the cockpit disappear to see better," Gadget murmured. This he spoke more clearly and gazed around. "I guess this must be what it feels like to be Captain Picard."

"It's been a long road, gettin' from there to here..." January sang softly.

"That was Captain Archer," Gadget noted.

"I know, but I still have faith of the heart," January smiled.

Gadget edged the stick forward, more gently this time. The Ravenwing slowly nosed down this time, and gradually took them lower into the atmosphere. In time the blanket of clouds below became a white fog that enshrouded them. He kept on going lower, until they finally broke from the white fluff and could see again.

The Great Plains states spread out beneath them, the Dakotas, Wyoming, Montana, and their neighbors. They were a flat dish of green that just went on and on forever. Here and there a narrow ribbon of blue revealed a river. Dead ahead lay the Rocky Mountains. They rose up sharply, like a vast, jagged stone wall meant to keep out King Kong. But even those lofty peaks were far, far below them.

It was to here that Gadget guided them, and soon enough they left the plains behind, and soared high over the peaks. He eased up on the throttle. Once more January marveled that it was a simple round knob on a lever mounted on the left side of the cockpit. January noted that while they had been going Mach 2, Gadget now slowed down to less than the speed of sound. That made it easier to pick out features in the ground below. Well, it gave them more time to do so at least.

"Ok, we need the very north of Idaho, in the panhandle," January glanced down at Sága at her wrist. The mini-computer revealed her location on the map, and where they needed to go.

"This thing's very retro," Gadget noted. "There's no GPS, not even a single electronic display. The airspeed is an old-timey dial."

"I like the old analog systems, they have character," January insisted. "But you could still add some things. Put in some cameras and a link for Cray. Maybe even set up a remote control, so he can pilot it like a drone when we're out of the cockpit."

"We can do that?" Gadget wondered. "I mean, it's magical, won't that break the enchantment?"

"I don't see why," January mused. "I mean, yes, it's a magical artifact. But it's also a plane. Well, and a bird. It just uses magic to fly. But look at these controls you are using. They are all just standard flight instruments from the 40s and 50s. I would swear some of them came from a P-51 Mustang. I compared them to pictures yesterday. I don't see why you couldn't add more. I'll make sure it doesn't get hinky with the magic."

"You think so?" Gadget said.

"I know so," January insisted. "Magic items are not static objects. They have a certain form of life of their own. They grow, they evolve, given the chance. Look at Y Ddraig Aur. It's a different sword now, broken and all. The Ravenwing can grow too, beyond what Rook had intended for her. With us, she can have a second chance."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, 'Let's do some Good' says the Paladin!" Gadget laughed.

"Hey, it's true," January insisted. "I've got a really good feeling about the Raven here. She's going to take us places."

"Oh, so she's a 'she' now, is she?" Gadget teased.

"Of course she is," January insisted. "She's a higher life form after all..."

Gadget snorted, and lifted the raven-shaped flight helmet up from his powered armor helmet. He was not using the Ravenwing's telepathic interface anyhow, so it did not make a difference.

"Ok Miss Higher Life Form," Gadget said. "We could put a satellite uplink in here so Cray can interface with the systems and pilot it like a drone. We could probably add a real time map, and maybe some stealth technology so we don't show up on radar."

"We already have stealth: the size control." January insisted. She pointed a finger to a toggle switch in a small instrument panel above Gadget's head. "We can shrink down to the size of a raven, and no one will give us a second glance."

"Even if they pick us up on any kind of sensors, they will just think we are an ordinary bird..." Gadget nodded. "Ok, that Rook guy was pretty smart. I was thinking he just made it shrink down so he could carry it around with him. But now I see he was thinking about who might be watching. Stealth tech before there was stealth tech. How could that guy have been so smart to have built this thing, and so dumb to have gotten himself killed over an asinine stunt like stealing two nuclear bombs?"

"You know, the more I read of history for the podcast, the more I am seeing that the people we like to call geniuses and 'Great Men' were really just regular dudes. They happened to be good at one thing, like math, or playing the stock market, or getting rich people to give them money. Because they were good at that one thing, they thought they are good at everything, and they knew everything. The truth is they weren't though. Once you dig deeper you find out all the things they screwed up, that the historians don't talk about it, because it doesn't fit their hagiographic narrative. In reality they were all just a bunch of schmucks muddling through life, and failing upward thanks to their privilege. Or crashing and burning once that societal support system was gone."

"Maybe you should get a History degree, instead of an English one," Gadget mused. Then he cocked his head slightly to one side, and his tone became more business-like. "If I'm reading my helmet's HUD right, we should be close now."

The Rocky Mountains had closed in all around them some time ago. Below it was all peaks and valleys, going on from horizon to horizon. Here the mountains were low enough to be blanketed in green forests, rather than snowy peaks, as Mount Shasta was farther west.

A lake spread out at the bottom of the wide valley that Gadget flew them into. It snaked around one way and then the other, in a jagged crescent. It sort of reminded January of a silhouette of a seahorse, the way it gracefully wended one this way and that. January noted civilization huddled along the northern shore, in the form of a small town at the western edge of the vale.

"Okay, that is Sandport and Ponderay," Gadget noted. "That means the farm is to the north and east."

He eased on the joystick, and they heeled over sharply to the right. Once again, January had to thrust her arms out to brace herself against the fuselage to avoid falling over. Gadget did not over steer out of it this time however. Instead he eased back more gently to flatten out his flight path, once he had the direction he wanted.

"Sorry," he said sheepishly. "I'm still getting used to maneuvering this thing."

"Don't worry about it," January insisted. "I'm a crow. I can handle a few aerial maneuvers."

The town quickly vanished behind them, almost as soon as they left the shores of the winding lake. Now the valley transformed into wide, flat farmland. Tilled fields stretched out in squares, rectangles, and other geometric shapes. Between the clearly delineated farms rose patches of evergreen forest. It was nothing truly dense, just strips and clumps of trees sometimes up to a mile long, and if lucky half that in width.

Gadget slowed down again, and brought the Ravenwing down to a wobbly landing. He set the enchanted aircraft down on a narrow, but paved driveway. It ran past a large country house and terminated at a tall barn made of corrugated steel. A small, grassy lawn surrounded the immediate area, and a small copse of shade trees stood to one side. Then the land gave way to a sprawling field of leafy green plants, all laid out in low ridges. January imagined there might be potatoes under those emerald leaves. This was Idaho after all, did anything else grow here?

Unlike a regular plane or helicopter, the Ravenwing was silent. She did not have jet or piston engines after all. Her primordial air kept her in flight. The only sound she made was the mechanical clank of the cargo hatch swinging down, and becoming a ramp that finally terminated at the asphalt driveway below.

So January was not surprised that their sudden arrival had not garnered any attention from the farm. Unless someone happened to be looking, they never would have noticed. She took a moment to stretch out her senses into the astral. The crops growing in the nearby fields sprang to life in her vision, along with the copse of trees. Closer still the barn ahead contained more life forms on four legs, which January took to be cows. A human moved among them, going from one to another, and depositing something in troughs before their faces. Finally January detected two more people in the house. By the posture of their auras, both were sitting.

"Ok, my scanners tell me one in the barn, two in the house," Gadget replied. So apparently he had used technology to do the same thing that January had accomplished with magic.

"Let's get them all together, so we only have to explain things once," January decided. She stepped off to the barn, and Gadget clomped after in his glowing powered armor.

"So how does this go?" he asked as they walked up to the open door of the barn. "I mean, how do you break something like this to someone?"

"Break what? Who..." A man stepped out of the barn, and his words stopped abruptly when he took one look at who was standing before him. He dropped the metal bucket he had been holding, and what January took for cow feed spilled out across the ground from it. "You're, you're..."

"Stormcrow," January forced a smile to her lips that she did not feel. "This is my friend Gadget."

She extended a hand to the farmer. He looked like your stereotypical Western dude. He was dressed in jeans, a flannel shirt, and even wore a cowboy hat and boots. He could have stepped off the set for any cowboy movie, or paper towel advertisement.

"Umm, I'm Joe," the farmer said once he had found his voice again. His head moved like a swivel, as if he was looking for a hidden camera. "Is it really you? I'm not being punked am I?"

"We do a lot of things, but punking people is not among them," Gadget assured. He stepped to one side, and gestured with one hand to the Ravenwing. More than anything else, the bird-shaped aircraft spoke of their sincerity. It was not like anyone was going to cosplay that after all.

"We'd like to talk to you about your uncle Kaleb," January said somberly, "better known as Bismarck."

"You're barking up the wrong tree." Joe leaned down to grasp the bucket, and spent a moment trying to push the spilled feed back into it. But that just shoved as much dirt into the container as actual food. Finally he gave up, and pulled his work gloves off. "I haven't seen him since I was a kid. He disappeared back in the 90s, went to prison. He's never coming back here."

"You haven't heard then?" January looked to Gadget. Worldwide Network News, and pretty much every other news source, had been talking about practically nothing else for the past two days. It was not every day that a neo-Nazi terrorist cell attacked the Smithsonian, and then tried to steal two nuclear weapons from the bottom of the ocean.

"Heard what?" Now Joe looked as puzzled as he must have been astonished by the sudden appearance of two superheroes in his driveway.

"I'm surprised the press has not been calling you," January wondered aloud, "or been here yet."

"We got an unlisted number back in the 90s, after my uncle tried to blow up that federal building." Joe explained. "What's going on? What's he done now?"

70,000 feet, lovely. Yeah, I agree with the Gagd. Controlled environment, I'm with Avery. Really am leery of this new craft they've got, even if it can do some really wonderful things. Then again, I'm not a superhero. But neither is Gadget, really. Although he's dabbled a bit with flying. He's more of a tinkerer. A behind-the-scenes sort, or at least he was.



Mm hmm, I'm with ya buddy. Sounds as though his suggestion's not going to get followed, but let me shush.



My word. I mean, I'd trust January more than I'd trust Stockton Rush, but still...

... the dialog between the two friends is quite amusing. Love Avery's fears and doubts, and also how he's not magically inclined like Jan is. Yeah, Spleckt indeed.

Cripes, the plane vanishes.

Although I loathe referring to ships as "she" or "her" (I call Rivet City "it" for instance) I can see Ravenwing having gender. The plane's got Intelligence after all, so why not sexual traits, in a sort of way?

Ah, that's clever. Indeed, any radar is going to ignore something the size of a bird.

He could have stepped off the set for any cowboy movie, or paper towel advertisement.



Okay, so this farmer is related to Bismarck. Yikes. Is this a death notification? Yep, seems so.

Nice to learn more about Jan’s new winged partner. Stealth via miniaturization and silence – nice!

As ever, great banter between the two friends who’ve known each other so long.

And the additional purpose of their operational test flight becomes apparent. Ahah, opposition research on their foe(s).

Renee: In some ways Avery is the opposite of January, as he is the science and tech guy that balances out her wizardry. Where magic essentially runs on will and power, he is always using logic and looking for a rational explanation for things. They are not as extreme as Mulder and Scully from the X-Files. But it does make Gadget less quick to embrace mystical solutions like the Ravenwing. Combined with his naturally cautious and prudent nature, that makes him overly hesitant in this case.

You guessed the purpose of their visit. They are in Idaho to serve a death notice to Bismarck's relatives.


Acadian: I was originally thinking of incorporating some kind of magical stealth technology to the Ravenwing, just as Gadget had been thinking. Then it occurred to me that it already had it, in the form of its ability to mimic an ordinary bird. It is nice and simple.

Avery and January are always fun to write together, given their deep history together.




Book 12.40 - Broken Arrow

"I'm guessing that's your folks inside?" Gadget nodded to the house. "Why don't we go and get them too."

January felt her stomach slowly tie itself into knots as they followed the thirty-something year old farmer up to the house and through the front door. She had done this before with Blood Raven. That time they had informed her mother Barbara that Julian was dead, then afterward told her father the same thing. Finally they had also visited the home of Rafael Laurenti, who had been slain at Gull Island.

She had let Blood Raven take the lead then. But she could not rely on someone else to bear the brunt of serving the death notice now. Blood Raven had insisted on doing it. She had said it was a reminder to her that people's lives were not insignificant. That this was not all just a game they played with supervillains. When people died, even the villains, it mattered to someone. They needed to look that someone in the eye and tell them.

The inside of the farm house was about what January expected. Joe led them into a wide living room. A big screen TV took up much of one wall, and a couch and two chairs were parked across a coffee table from it. A picture of a cowboy on a horse graced one wall, and a Native American dream catcher hung upon another. A John Wayne cookbook lay on a side table, along with several estate sale magazines.

Vulpine News filled the TV. Rather than talking about the neo-Nazis like every other network in the world, they were running the story of Patricia Fine accusing January Ward of being a gender terrorist. They even had Canadian former professor and current right wing pundit Peter Jordanson explaining to the two hosts that women were symbols of chaos. He went on to expound that trans people defied the natural hierarchy of life, because they were inherently anti-life, and anti-Western democracy. In fact, he proclaimed that they were the agents of Cultural Marxism, which wished to overthrow Western society as part of their Globalist agenda. The next step would be forcing women into straight to gay conversion camps.

As if January had not had been given plenty of evidence in her life already, this made it plain why organizations like the Transgender Equality Project needed to exist. It was the very same propaganda that had radicalized the members of the Atomkrieg in the first place.

A wide-bellied man in a blue Western shirt rose up from the couch. A cigarette fell from his mouth as he gaped at them. That caused him to scramble for it as its glowing ember bounced across his jeans and down onto the couch. As he fought to recover it and put it out in an ashtray, a rail-thin woman with gray hair pulled back into a severe bun rose to her feet as well.

"You're, you're, them!" she cried. Then her eyes narrowed into slits, and voice turned to a serpentine hiss. "What are you doing here? We know our rights. You government types can't take them away from us."

"We don't work for the government," Gadget insisted. He introduced himself and Stormcrow once more. When the woman did not respond, he continued. "I take it you are Elizabeth and Mark?"

January looked Mark directly in the eye. He had put out his cigarette now, and had dusted its ashes from his clothing. "We are here to tell you about your brother Kaleb, also known as Bismarck."

"Kaleb?" Mark looked as dumbfounded as Joe had been earlier. "What does he have to do with anything. Did he do something again?"

January looked to Gadget. These people really did not know. One glance at the TV screen revealed why. Vulpine News was an echo chamber of conservative propaganda. One that had defended itself in court by claiming no reasonable person would take them seriously. But it was not a satire or comedy network. It was of course deadly serious in its messaging. It also studiously avoided ever mentioning right wing violence, and anything else that could make their political team look bad.

These people were living in a literal echo chamber.

"I don't know how to say this..." Gadget rubbed the back of his head, his sure tell of distress.

"Kaleb—Bismarck—is dead," January took the rip the bandage off approach. It was what Blood Raven had done. Now she saw why. There was just no way to lessen this blow. It was best to just be honest and earnest. "He died two days ago in the Atlantic Ocean, after a previous battle at the Smithsonian. He and his terrorist cell were trying to steal two nuclear weapons, and we had to stop him."

"We?" Mark's face slowly darkened, as his look of shock turned to one of anger and disgust. He thrust a thick finger at her face, as threatening as a sickle-sword in the hands of an Egyptian supervillain. "You mean you. You killed my brother!"

"No, I did not," January insisted. "He was killed by a supervillain named Rook. What was left of him at least."

"What was left of him?" now it was Elizabeth's turn to ask. "What is that supposed to mean?"

"Rook died sixty years ago, trying to hijack a B-52 with two nuclear bombs on board," Gadget jumped in now. "He failed, and killed everyone on the plane, including himself. But he was a magician. His... spirit... his ghost, lived on after a fashion. Kaleb found the location of the crashed plane and tried to steal the bombs within."

"We were fighting, and Bismarck took us right to where Rook's ghost was lying in wait, all these years. It came out of nowhere and killed him in an instant." January explained.

"You were fighting, but you were fighting him!" Mark's voice grew more heated. "You were there to kill him anyway!"

"No, we were not," January argued. She realized that it was indeed devolving into an argument. That was not what they had come for. She had to get things back on track, if there even was such a thing when you were informing someone of a family member's death. "We did not kill any of the members of the Atomkrieg. We captured all the others and handed them over to the Navy. They are all in federal custody right now."

"So why, why all of this?" Joe interjected. He once more looked dumbfounded. "I mean, I know uncle Kaleb went down a weird hole back when I was a kid. But why would he be doing such a thing? That's crazy!"

"Buddy, your uncle was a Nazi," Gadget said plainly. "He was going to nuke DC and New York City. The feds got it from the other Atomkrieg members in custody already. He thought it was going to start a race war that would usher in an apocalypse, which a Nazi utopia would follow."

"If that was true it would have been on the news!" Elizabeth shouted, and pointed to Vulpine News on the television. "Why is there no mention of it then?"

"Try a real news channel for a change, instead of Russian propaganda," Gadget murmured. He raised a gauntleted hand to the television, and a moment later its screen flipped over to Worldwide Network News. It revealed a shaky video of the two nuclear cores in their containment cases. They were being loaded into a lead-lined truck by men in what looked like space suits. In a small picture in picture screen, anchor Nathan Reed explained how the Atomkrieg had attempted to steal the two Cold War-era nuclear bombs.

"That's woke indoctrination!" Elizabeth raved. "That's what they want you to think. It's all lies. Everything they say is lies!"

January opened her mouth, ready to follow up with a retort. But Gadget raised a hand in front of her face, and warded her off. She let her words die in her throat, and sighed. This was a Sisyphean task, and she knew it. No amount of pushing the boulder of truth up their hill could ever convince these people of anything.

"We are sorry for your loss," January finally mouthed. "That is what we came to tell you. If we could have saved him, we would have."

"I don't believe you, mister," Elizabeth said pointedly. The misgendering comment was just the tip of a series of transphobic slurs that followed. They were the kind January had heard a thousand times. They were nothing worth listening to now. So she tuned them out. Or at least, she tried to.

In spite of her best efforts, January's hands balled into fists, as if of their own accord. The temptation to plant one in the other woman's face was breathtaking.

"And a good day to you too, sir and madam," Gadget said to all. He swept his arm out, and guided January to the door. She followed his lead, and made her way outside to the open air. It was a relief to escape the house, and the aura of rancor that now filled its walls. She suddenly felt like she could breathe again, and inhaled a deep breath of mountain air. She stared up at the blue sky overhead. As always, it felt like home. Just the sight of it calmed her racing heart.

"I'm sorry about that," Joe's voice came from behind them. She turned just in time to see the door to the house clatter shut behind him. He pulled his work gloves from his back pocket, and fidgeted with them nervously. "My folks, they've been going down a Vulpine News rabbit hole lately, ever since the last election really. Me, I stopped watching the news years ago. It just gets me so damned... pissed off sometimes."

"Yeah, I get that," January nodded. Though she wondered about what exactly it was that upset him. Was it the fabricated stories crafted to rouse hate and fear, or the facts?

"They aren't bad people, really," Joe went on. "My father, he knows my uncle Kaleb was evil. Just flat out evil. That's how he said it to me when I was a kid, after my uncle tried to blow up that federal building in Boise. It's just hard to square all that with the man who used to let me sit on his knee and pretend to drive the tractor around the yard. But I know it's true. Kaleb was a bad man, and I'm sure in the end he got what he deserved. Like what they say about karma: what you put out into the world, it comes back to you."

"I am sorry Joe, I really am. I did not want things to work out this way." Stormcrow's voice eased. She reached out, and gave him a gentle pat on one shoulder. Then her voice lowered to a whisper. "So tell me, your meta-human power. Is it telekinesis? Or can you absorb energy?"

"What?" Joe hissed. His eyes darted to and fro, as if to check that no one else was listening. "How do you know that?"

'I can see it in your aura," January said. "Don't worry, I'm not going to out you. Just be careful with your power. It's easy to lose your cool, and do something you regret with it. We can train you if you want."

"No, that's alright," Joe stepped back, his voice returning to normal. "I've got a handle on it. I have since I was a teen."

"Just... be chill then bro," Gadget raised a fist in a form of salute to the other man. Then as if by an afterthought, he reached into his belt, and pulled out a business card. "This is our hotline. If you're ever in a jam, call us."

"Yeah, I'll do that," Joe stared down at the card, then back up at the superheroes. Clearly, he had a lot to digest.

"Oh, and the press is going to be here, soon," January added. "Your unlisted number won't keep them at bay for long. You might want to get it disconnected. Once they track you and your folks down they'll be showing up in person too. It's what they do."

With that January and Gadget left him, and headed back to the Ravenwing. This time January took the controls of the ravencraft. She sent them winging high into the sky, and left Idaho and Bismarck's surviving relatives far behind. She hoped that she would never have to face Joe across a battlefield in the future. But she could not escape the nagging feeling that he might fall down a rabbit hole of hate one day, the same as his uncle had, and the same as his parents were in the process of doing.

"Maybe, let's not do this again," Gadget murmured.

"Yeah, I get it. Usually it's just soul-crushing. It's never been like that." January breathed. "Then again, my mother did punch Blood Raven when she told her that Julian was dead..."

"She did what?" Having raised the faceplate to his armor, Gadget's jaw dropped with a look of amazement.

"Yeah, she put her whole body into it too, tagged her solid in the jaw," January explained. "Not that it hurt Blood Raven of course. She barely even noticed."

"I guess like they say, everyone deals with grief in different ways," Gadget murmured.

"And sometimes we have to be the punching bags for them," January mused.

* * *

Well, ya tries to be nice. Ya tries to do the right thing even. But sometimes. . . well, it just doesn’t work out and ya get stuck in a shoot the messenger mess. Ya know?

X-files were great.

Even in Idaho, she cannot escape herself being news, mmm.





One might think such puritan nonsense would be way behind the times, but all ya gotta do is listen to two minutes of J.D. Vance to realize plenty of asshats still think like this. So at first I'm thinking Farmer Joe seems rather cool. He didn't freak about a bi-racial pair showing up at his doorstep, for instance. But with that crap on his BIG screen...


The rail-thin woman thinks they're government? What are Jan & Avery wearing?

See, now I wonder if Jan & Avery are going to be safe. Like, why is it their job to do the notification? Seems like they've just walked into the middle of a right-wing lion's den.

Yeesh, this notification isn't going so well. Usually notifications bring tears and wailing, not arguments with the notifiers. Interesting how the family has sort of disowned Bismarck, or at least distanced themselves from him; they've made comments like "what has he done this time?", yet now they're defending him, in a way.

I actually like that this farmer family is getting hostile, by the way. This shouldn't be a congenial scene.

Yeah, Joe seems cool. Not as close-minded, anyway. He's probably the black sheep of this hick family.

I agree with Gadget again. I don't think it should be up to them to notify folks like them again. The message gets lost.

Phew, they're outta there! Was worried a shotgun was about to go off as they turned their backs.

Acadian: Sometimes you just cannot win, such as in this case. I included this because I wanted to show just where Bismarck came from. Not only physically, but more importantly the kind of stochastic terrorism that turned him into a monster. The same propaganda that is still at work on others, insuring that there will be no shortage of replacements for Bismarck in the future.


Renee: Everything that the Crowverse's Peter Jordanson says are direct quotes from RL Jordan Peterson. Women being chaos dragons that men must slay, to trans people being invented by Cultural Marxism to destroy Western democracy. Like Margaret Atwood did in the Handmaid's Tale, I am always careful to portray people like this using their exact words and actions. So I am not projecting my beliefs on to them. I am taking them at their own word.

Jan and Avery are in their super suits of course. They are flying around in the raven mobile, and telling them what they did as superheros.

It is not January and company's job to do any of things they are doing, like fighting supervillains or cleaning up Belle Isle. This is all their choice, because they are heroes. They know the world they want to live in, and are determined to make it reality. That means not just punching bad guys, but treating others with compassion. It is not something new. Blood Raven did this. As January noted, her own mother punched Blood Raven in the face when they told her about Julian's death.

Bismarck's family is complicated, as real life bigots are. They know that Bismarck was evil. But at the same time, they are falling into the same propaganda hole that Bismarck did. They just are not as far down it as he was. But they still hate black people, and queer people, and the like. They are just are not literal Nazis. Yet...

If Bismarck's family had shot them with a gun, well, that would not even have scratched Gadget's powered armor or January's bare skin. They are superheros after all. The ricochets might have killed the family however.





Mount Rainer and Mount Adams from the peak of Mount St Helens

Shadowrun is the cyperpunk RPG that January and Avery refer to

Renraku is one of the mega corporations in the setting


Book 12.41 - Broken Arrow

They traded the long mountain range that filled Idaho's panhandle for a vast plateau to the west. Soon another chain of snowy peaks crossed their path: the Cascade Mountains. Hundreds of peaks rose up throughout the range. Most were relatively ordinary, and created a jagged line across the horizon. But here and there giants rose up to twice the height of the others, which immediately drew the eye to them. It sort of tricked one into not really noticing that the smaller mountains were in fact, mountains

January's eyes danced across these cyclopean peaks. Down to the south she recognized one by its broken dome: Mount St. Helens. She had been there with Blood Raven, Ôkami, and Vortex after Jobbie Nooner. Deep in the bowels of that volcano they had put to sleep the fire elemental that they had battled at the waterborne festival.

Vortex... Hannah. January had gone the entire day without thinking about her. In fact, she had also gone most of the previous days without thinking of her first, last, and only girlfriend ever. Now that was something to be said for neo-Nazi's trying to nuke the country and start a race war. At least it took your mind off your failed love life...

Soon they crested the summits of the Cascade Mountains, and the land below them immediately changed. It was like a switch had gone off. One side of the peaks was all arid and dusty tablelands. On the other a carpet of densely forested lowlands spread out beyond their feet. A finger of water hooked down through these woodlands from the north and west. Wedged between the eastern shore of this giant sound and the mountains were the gray concrete and glass buildings of a large metropolis. The far side of the estuary was all wild forest, and even boasted some mountains of its own. Finally to the west of that lay the endless blue expanse of the Pacific Ocean, which ran away into infinity across the horizon.

January nosed the Ravenwing down. The strip of land between the mountains behind them and the sound ahead became larger and larger as they gave up altitude. Seattle and its environs filled this narrow space. She was a little disappointed that there was no massive pyramidal arcology built by a Japanese mega corporation, nor a burned out barren land ruled over by go-gangers. But when she pushed away these fictional expectations created from playing a certain cyberpunk role-playing game set in this very same city, she did find much to appreciate in the real world metropolis below.

The Space Needle was of course the first thing that caught her eye. It perched above the city's skyline like a flying saucer from an old science fiction movie. Even taller skyscrapers rose up all around it of course. Some were bright and shining, others dark and ominous. They clustered along the shores of Puget Sound, which spread out behind them like an azure blanket.

"It's all new," Gadget noted. "It's all glass and steel and concrete, there's no old buildings."

January realized that her partner was right. Unlike Detroit, Seattle looked fully modern and new and shiny. Then on second glance she did note some older Art Deco and Neo Gothic masterpieces of a century past. But these older buildings were lightly sprinkled through the modern technological wonders, so that the eye did not land on them at first. It felt like a city of the future, almost like something she might see in a Star Trek show.

"Maybe Renraku tore down the old buildings and replaced them with new cyberdeck factories." January once again in referenced the role-playing game Shadowrun.

"Slot it and run chummer." Gadget replied in the slang that would have been common had they lived in that game. Then he was all business. "Ok, hang a left before SeaTac."

January followed his directions, and they passed over a long industrial district. Rather than old time chimneys cutting the skyline and bellowing smoke, this was all wide, featureless buildings with flat white roofs. A U-shaped building that seemed to be painted in white and blue rectangles briefly interrupted the monotony of light industrial factories. January imagined that must be some sort of tech bro enclave. But that went by in no time at all, as did the freeway that bordered the southern edge of the district.

Now they came to a mixed neighborhood of homes and retail businesses. She slowed down, and followed Gadget's instructions as he led her down to a specific point among the sea of small houses. With a thought she bid the Ravenwing to shrink down to the size of a bird. That would keep them off of TV and MeTube.

Then they settled into the back yard of a small blue and white house with a peaked roof. A wooden fence lined the rear of the yard, and separated it from the alley behind the property. A red and white shed stood within the yard, so too did a small garden patch. A table and chairs sat to one side, an empty hammock swung from an overhang next to the house, and a wheeled grill waited beside the back door.

A dog lolled on the grass in the middle of the yard. He picked up his head as the Ravenwing settled to the ground, and he studied the tiny vehicle intently. He rose up to his feet and sniffed the air. But he seemed confused by the miniature aircraft, and tilted his head to one side, as if trying to figure out what was wrong with the strange bird that had landed on the grass.

January did not want to scare the poor animal. But there was really no way around it. She lowered the door of the cargo bay and stepped out. As with her first time trying this at the Witch House, it was a little disorientating. Once she cleared the Ravenwing, its shrinking magic no longer affected her. She shot up to full size, and one small step for a crow became a giant leap for a woman. She tottered for a moment, but soon found her balance.

She stepped aside quickly, just in time to avoid being accidentally body-checked by Gadget. The powered armor hero popped up to full size right where she had been standing a moment before. He too wavered as he tried to regain his bearings, and January reached out with one hand to steady him.

"That is weird," Gadget murmured. "Growing up is going to take a little getting used to."

"Been saying that since junior high school..." January breathed.

The dog was a gray and white Husky or Malamute with a big, drooping tongue and a huge, bushy tail. He jumped back in surprise. Then he stared at the two superheroes that had suddenly appeared in the middle of the lawn, and barked several times.

"Hey there boy, it's ok," Gadget tried to say soothingly.

"There's a good boy," January chimed in with the age old way of addressing all dogs. "We're friends. Give me a sniff. I'm a crow, we're pals from way back."

"Sure, I saw it in a documentary," January said breezily. "Corvids and wolves have worked together for thousands of years. The birds lead the wolves to other animals that have died. The wolves eat them, and rip them apart in the process. Then the corvids come in and eat the leftovers. It's the stuff they can't get at on their own, because deer and elk hide are too thick for their beaks to get through. It's a win-win for everyone."

January pulled off one gauntlet and took a few steps forward. Then she went down on one knee and extended her hand the dog. He stopped barking and studied her for long moments. Finally he crept forward and did indeed cautiously sniff at her fingers. He seemed satisfied with that, and a moment later gave her hand a lick.

"Awww, who's a good boy!" January exclaimed. She lifted her other hand, and gently stroked the canine behind the ears. He seemed to like that, and so she continued to pet the dog. That brought him closer, and the next thing she knew January had to screw her lips shut as he began to lick at her lower face, where it was not covered by her winged helmet.

"Well that's a good start," Gadget observed. "I hope this is a sign of things to come."

January turned her head at the sound of the back door creaking open. She saw an old woman within. Her black hair was shot through with gray, and her face was creased with wrinkles. She wore a house coat decorated with pink roses and green leaves. That instantly conjured images of Gadget's Nana within January's mind. It was exactly the sort of thing she would have worn as well.

"Who are-" her voice fell silent as she stared at the two superheroes. It was a look that January had grown accustomed to seeing. It was a mixture of surprise and awe. Some people took meeting a cape in stride, as if it was something they did every day. Some people thought it was just cosplay, and not the real deal. Finally some people were just completely overwhelmed.

Thankfully time and patience usually helped with the final response. Just showing people that you were ordinary, and not some larger than life figure seemed to help. It was the same thing January had noted herself when it came to meeting important people like governors and generals. They were all just people in the end.

She rose to her feet and walked slowly to the old woman. The dog followed her, and January kept one hand down to softly pet his head. Gadget followed. As ever, his armor hummed softly and gave off its signature glow of blue ions in his wake.

"Hi!" January's perky phone voice leaped out of her mouth like a superhero catapulted by a fastball special. "I'm Stormcrow. This is my best friend Gadget. We came to see you. Well I hope we did. Unless we got the wrong house, in which case we came to see someone else. But we're here anyway, so hi anyhow."

January realized that she was babbling, so she shut up. Clearly, she still needed more practice interacting with the public. Some days it went great. Other times, well, here she was. Thank goodness she was not talking to a reporter!

"Are you Margaret Dixon?" Gadget asked, "the daughter of Major Doug Aitken?"

"Yes, yes I am." One of Margaret's hands reached up to grip the slender crucifix that hung from her neck by a silver chain. "Did something happen?"

"Yes, about sixty years ago," January said. "Your father, he was the commander of Keep 19, a B-52 that went missing over the Atlantic, right?"

"That was a long time ago," Margaret looked confused. Then her gray eyes brightened, and her features blossomed with understanding. "That thing on the news, the people who tried to steal those nuclear weapons, was that..."

"Yes," January nodded. "They were trying to recover the bombs from your father's plane. We found it first. We also found your father's final resting place, along with that of the rest of the crew."

"It's in the Atlantic," Gadget chimed in. "I have the GPS coordinates. I can give them to you. It's been declared a gravesite by the government."

"You... you... found my father?" Margaret seemed dumbstruck once more.

January glanced to Gadget. She did not know how to explain this gently. So she just did the best she could to muddle through.

"I'm afraid there was not anything left, of remains at least," January said. "They've been on the bottom of the sea for too long. We would have brought something back—like his dog tags—but it's a gravesite. It's not appropriate for us to tamper with it. We stayed out of it as best we could. But we can share my body camera footage of it with you."

With that another face appeared behind the old woman. This was a young man in his late teens or early twenties. He had a shock of jet black hair, and wore a shirt for a band that January had never heard of. He too, went from a look of surprise to one of amazement when he saw who was at the back door.

"Maybe we could come in, and explain things to everyone together?" Gadget nodded to the kitchen behind them.

Things did go better than their previous visit. Major Aitken's descendants gathered around with their dog Klondike. January recounted the events that led her and the others of the Mid-Atlantic team to the wreckage of their ancestor's plane. She also told them what they had been able to piece together about how it had been hijacked by Rook in the first place, and inevitably crashed with all on board.

True to his words, Gadget displayed his technical abilities by casting the recording of January's suit camera footage to their TV set. That allowed them all to see everything January had when she had first approached the wreckage of the bomber. He cut it off before the battle with the Atomkrieg, Rook, and Nitokris began of course.

Margaret showed them an old black and white picture of her father, and the rest of the crew of their plane. They were all men in their prime. Most of them could not have been much older than January or Gadget. Doug Aitken was the oldest, but even he still looked solid and strong, and full of life.

Margaret broke down into tears then. But at least her children and grandchildren were there to comfort her. As were January and Gadget of course. The one ray of hope the superheroine took away from it all was that is appeared to be cathartic, a release from half a century of wondering.

"I finally know what happened to him," Margaret said quietly. "Now I finally know."

They made their goodbyes and returned to the Ravenwing in the back yard. They still had two more families to meet and notify here on the West Coast. January hoped they would go more like Margaret's, and less like Bismarck's. There would have been more, but thankfully Silverlight had promised to perform the death notifications on the East Coast.

The thought brought the face of her brother Julian in her mind's eye. It was not his living face, so often twisted into a sneer. It was his dead face. His dead eyes, that stared from a dead husk of a body, with a hole burned through his chest where his dead heart had once been.

His dead face was replaced by that of Bismarck. Half of his skull had been replaced with shiny metal, and half was still pale skin. A big, bristly white mustache filled his face, as did snowy white hair along what remained of his scalp. Both of the eyes that stared back at her were cold and mechanical, now empty in death.

Then even that melted away. It transformed into the face of the Hierophant, whose fair skin was heavily creased with age and folds of fat. His scalp was a bare patch of rubbery skin, and his neck was practically non-existent. As she had thought the first time she had seen him, he was a bald thumb-head.

But his eyes, they were not calm and glassy with death. Instead they bulged in shock and terror. Because he knew what was coming, just as January did. January wished she could have closed her eyes to the horror, but she could not blind herself to the memory. Once more she was there, and watched as her nemesis was torn apart by his own summoning spell.

January snapped out of it when she felt a hand on her shoulder. She looked up to see that it was Gadget. The young man leaned in close to her. She forced a smile to her lips, keenly aware that she was in public, and put it off as wool-gathering. But in private, she feared that her mind was not big enough for all the dead faces now crammed within it.

* * *

A wonderful skytour as the Ravenwing carries its crew to Seattle.

I smiled at Jan’s perky babbling to Margaret. You show us that, although, she’s gained much confidence in public, she still struggles sometimes. And the task at hand was not an easy one.

A sobering thought as Jan ponders just how many dead faces she can cram in her head, for it is simply not her nature to embrace the ‘Just another corpse in my wake’ approach.

We appreciate your accuracy for quoted words, especially from douches like Jordan Peterson. The guy sucks but idiots like him make the story more riveting.

Oh, I understand that a shotgun to the back wouldn't do much to hurt Avery & Jan. It's just that moment of *shock* when the gun goes off. Even veteran cops in full-armor bodysuits dread that moment.

Uh oh. Hannah/Vortex. Again, her name comes up. I'm still a little bummed Jan didn't pick up the signals being sent from that femme in D.C., although that was a very busy day, of course.

Really dig your description of the Cascades area. Lived out there from '96 until 2004, it really is gorgeous to hike trails, without the east's humidity bearing us down with sweat.

Wow, the details of Seattle. I've always assumed a lot of buildings out there are newer also because of earthquakes. Not sure if Seattle went through as much devastation with quakes (and the resulting fires which followed) as San Fran, for instance.

Who is Renraku? Ah, Wikipedia to the rescue!. Not a 'who', more of a 'what'? I think. Mmmm.... Little confused by that article, but that's okay. I'd rather stick to The Stormcrow.

MeTube!

Yeah, the woman made me think of Avery's grandma as well. No, Jan's doing fine 'interacting with the public'. She's in better domain speaking to residents like this than she is notifying bigots for sure, squeaky phone voice and all.

WHOA, this is the daughter of the bomber's commander! Yeah this is a better notification for sure. Family's gathered around, lots of questions are getting answers, and so on.

Yikes, Jan's trippin at the end. Lots of stimuli this summer.

Acadian: Making a long road trip to somewhere new seemed like the perfect way to bring the Ravenwing into the story more, and cement its position as the Alliance's new team vehicle. I am not sure why I picked Seattle. Maybe it was just lodged in my brain from so many years of playing Shadowrun (it is the main setting for the game).

I did pick Idaho on purpose for Bismarck's family. That area of the Pacific Northwest is brimming with white supremacists. One of their big dreams is for the entire region to secede and become a white christian ethnostate. They call it the Northwest Territorial Imperative.

Jan has a pretty high charisma attribute. It is just the product of being earnest, determined, and empathetic. But she could still stand to put some xp into raising her Speech skill, and maybe take a few perks in that tree. She probably will not do so any time soon. There are too many other things to learn for one. And for two it just makes her more relatable and sometimes adorable.

January is starting to finally realize that she has a problem, and that her PTSD is real. She's not there yet. But she is starting to acknowledge that she is very carefully avoiding the fact that she does not want to acknowledge that it exists.


Renee: Hannah's name does come up from time to time these days. But if you note, it is more and more rare, and comes with less and less pain. So January is getting better.

That is very cool that you lived in the Cascades! What were the mountains like? They seem strange to me. The pictures I see makes it look like they come in two levels, or tiers. It seems like most of the mountains are in a big long line of roughly equal height (around 8,000 feet I think). Then there are these occasional giants that rise up from among them like Mount Rainer that are nearly twice that in elevation.

Renraku is a fictional mega corporation in the RPG Shadowrun. They have a huge arcology in Seattle, and there was a major adventure/world event set there, where an AI took it over, killed everyone inside, and went to war with the world. I went back and added links to Renraku and Shadowrun.

I included Margaret and her family because I wanted to show that these death notices are not usually as hostile and hateful as the previous one with Bismarck's family. Really, people like Margaret are the reason January and company do everything they do.





Book 12.42 - Broken Arrow

August 26 (Monday)

The Sterling Heights City Courthouse was a nice, modern affair. The walls were painted a nice soothing baby blue, with a darker strip along the edge of the drop ceiling. The floors were covered in what felt like brand new carpet, in a nice gray and blue broadcast pattern, the kind January would expect from any modern office. It was all so very... nice, and new, and sparkling clean.

The bench that she sat upon was constructed from light brown pine. So too was the bar that separated the gallery where she sat from the litigation area. Across the wooden barrier were the two attorney's desks, a podium with a microphone, and finally the judge's bench. The latter was a wide, upraised island made of the same light pine. The judge loomed in its center, like a spider in the center of a pristine web. A witness box sat to one side of him, and a court reporter's station to the other. Finally a jury pool lay one wall over, filled with cushioned office chairs. Across the room from the jury box a wide screen television hung from one wall.

There was no jury today however. Instead the courtroom was filled with ordinary people like herself, who sat and waited in the gallery for their turns. As each was called, they went up before the judge for their various civil issues. As January waited, there was a dispute between someone and their landlord. Then came another person angry with a contractor they had hired to build an addition to the house, who had never finished it. It was all so inane that January did not really want to pay attention to any of it.

She passed the time as she always did in those dead times of the day. She meditated, and exercised her power. She controlled her breathing, and pulled up her mana within her body as she inhaled. It flowed through her body as she did, and filled her with power. Then she exhaled slowly. That allowed the energy to sprinkle down around her like rain, to be soaked up by the Earth below her feet. Then she inhaled again and drew the power back up through her body once more, and the cycle continued anew.

Avery fidgeted beside her and listened to music on his headphones. Her mother Barbara read a book. It was an old fashioned kind, made of paper and everything. It was a history book, about the Gracchi brothers and the rise of policing in Ancient Rome. That gave January a good idea of what her mother's next series on their podcast would be about.

Finally the court called out her own name: January Ward. She stood up and waited for the previous claimants to leave the litigation area. She glanced down at her mother and Avery, who both gave her encouraging smiles. Then once the way was clear, she walked past the bar and up to the podium before the judge's bench.

The court reporter recited her case number and the generalities of it. Specifically that she was petitioning to change her last name from Ward to Ryan.

"So, why do you want to change your name?" the judge did not quite glower down at January. But she was keenly aware of the height he sat at, which placed him above her and looking down. His black robes likewise lent him a visual cue of authority. This was only somewhat softened by the horn-rimmed glassed he wore, which looked like something Buddy Holly might have worn. His iron gray flat top hair style seemed to come from the same era as well.

"Well, your honor," January swallowed hard. Why did this make her more nervous than fighting literal Nazis? She imagined that it was because she could not solve this by punching the judge in the face if things did not go her way. "My parents got divorced recently. My mother changed her last name, back to her old name. To her maiden name I mean. I mean to her... Well, I want to change my last name to the same as hers too."

"Well that's seems like an admirable show of solidarity," the judge considered. "Didn't want to keep the old man's name?"

"He's a dick," January breathed. Only too late did she realize that it was loud enough to be picked up by the microphone and repeated around the courtroom. That brought some chuckles from the gallery behind her. January had to resist the urge to plant the palm of her hand against her face in horror at the faux pas.

But the judge simply chuckled as well. January briefly wondered if a case like hers—a simple name change—might come as a breath of fresh air after having to hear out so many petty grievances between people.

"Well in that case it seems like a good idea," the judge declared. Then his voice took a formal, official air. "Do you swear that you are not changing your name for fraudulent reasons, to evade criminal or civil charges, or escape financial responsibilities?"

"I swear." January insisted with certainty, and even held one hand up by reflex.

"Then by the power invested in me by the State of Michigan, I declare your name change to be legally binding. Congratulations Miss Ryan."

He then leaned down to sign the affidavit for her name change, which he passed to the clerk at his side. January stepped over to get it, and then moved out as the next set of plaintiffs came up for their case.

"You did it!" Avery grinned, and slapped her on the back as she returned to the gallery. That brought looks from everyone in the court, and he sheepishly raised his hands in contrition.

"I mean you did it," he whispered more quietly afterward.

"Way to go January." Barbara hugged her.

This was not the first time she had changed her name of course. The last time had been when she was twelve, and it had been a far more momentous occasion. That was when she transitioned, and changed her first name to January. This was much less spectacular of a change. But it still was an important one, at least in her mind.

Next up would be a round of trips to various state and federal agencies, with the proof of her name change. She had to update her birth certificate, her social security number, her driver's license, and so on. But before they could finish they had one important stop to make: Kell's house. Well, his parents' house at least.

That took them back to the old neighborhood in Warren. They went one street past January's old house, and Avery's current one. This was the street that Rus and Blackjack lived on. But they passed their houses, and only stopped at a yellow home with a single story. A rusty old Ford Explorer was parked in the driveway, stuffed to the gills with boxes and bags.

"You made it!" Kell cried as they pulled up. The full beard that the blond-haired youth wore belied his nineteen years. He opened up his arms to give January a gentle hug, followed by a manly, backslapping embrace for Avery.

"How did the name change go?" he asked.

"I am now officially January Ryan!" she beamed.

"Huzzah!" Rus cried out. Ryo was silent, and simply nodded his approval.

"Well, I got to get moving," Kell murmured. His parents moved in for their own goodbye hugs, and the young man finally climbed into his beat up old vehicle: the Kell Mech.

"Kick ass up there in Houghton!" Rus exclaimed.

"Yeah, you show them Yoopers up at Michigan Tech how we Trolls roll down here under the bridge!" Avery smiled.

January just smiled as one of her oldest friends in the world backed out the driveway and drove away. The Knights of Nerddom had just shrunk by another member. Blackjack was not there of course, because he was still off making his movie. Now Kell was gone to school Up North for his engineering degree.

Growing up was still taking some getting used to.

* * *

August 27th (Tuesday)

"Prisoner 8675309!" the guard's voice blared from the depths of a suit of powered armor. "Galbraith, Robert."

Reinhard stood up. He was not used to being referred to by his dead name, by his legal name. Ever since he had joined the Atomkrieg a few months earlier, he had been Reinhard. He had been transformed, purified. The weakness of modern life had been melted away, and his White spirit distilled down to its purest elements. Bismarck had made it so, when he had initiated him into their resistance cell.

But Bismarck was dead now, slyly murdered by that cowardly groomer Stormcrow. The Atomkrieg had died with him. All their plans, all their dreams to free the White Race, had been wiped away by the icy waters of the North Atlantic.

There would be vengeance, he silently vowed. He did not know how, or where, or when. But someday he would make them all pay for what they had done.

"Step forward prisoner."

Reinhard rose from the narrow cot in his cell, and took the two short steps to the Armex steel bars that blocked off the tiny cubicle. He found four prison guards waiting for him, all clad in humming powered armor. Two carried sparking shock sticks, while the other two wielded plasma cannons.

The cell door clattered to the side a moment later, and the armored guards stepped back. At their command he exited the cell and followed them through the block. More cells ringed the long rectangular hall. His eyes searched their contents for anyone he might know, such as Blitz or Tirpitz. But he had been separated from them the moment they had arrived at the Super Max prison. He had not seen them since.

He had no idea what was going on. The block was locked down, leaving them the only ones walking outside of the cells and guard pods. It was to one of the latter that the guards took him. They went through more force fields and heavily armored doors, down more reinforced bunker hallways, and finally to the same processing center where he had arrived a week before.

There he found himself signing for his possessions, which the clerk—a convict like himself—passed to him in a bag and envelope. The larger of the two held his black Atomkrieg uniform. The smaller paper envelope contained his wallet, ID, watch, and phone. At the guard's command, he changed out of his prison uniform, and into his old clothing.

The next thing he knew, they led him to another door, which seemed to be made of five feet of steel, surrounded by glowing force fields. Once the energy screens were deactivated and the massive vault door swung upon, he saw a parking lot and blue skies overhead.

"You must be the luckiest son of bitch in the world," one of the guards murmured. "I don't know where you got the money to for pay an attorney like the one that got you out. That's the kind only billionaires can afford."

The guard gave him a prod of his shock stick. It felt like a bolt of lightning had exploded into his back. Before he knew it, he fell forward, body contorted in agony. He dropped to his knees, and barely threw his hands out in time to prevent his face from planting into the asphalt of the parking lot. Behind him he heard the vault door clang shut, and then the hum of the force fields as they reactivated on either side of it.

He pulled himself to his feet, still feeling the after effects of the electricity jolting through his body. There was a man in a suit standing before him now. It was the kind that cost more than the trailer he had grown up in, probably more than the entire trailer park. Its owner wore a pair of round, wire-rimmed glasses whose lenses were covered in solid white light from the sun's glare. His mouth widened into a shark-like rictus, and Reinhard had the distinct feeling that this was a man who devoured others for a living.

"Who are you?" Reinhard asked. "Did you get me out?"

"Mr. Galbraith... Reinhard," he said in a dead voice. "Call me... the Accountant. I represent a group of investors. We recognize your talents, and have further work for you."

"What kind of work?" Reinhard asked.

"Have you ever been to Detroit?" the mystery man said. "I understand that the dragon on Belle Isle is quite a remarkable sight."

* * *

A couple of mundane but important events as Jan becomes a Ward like her mother and another member of her knights moves away from the Order of Nerddom. The details you provide help remind us that Jan balances another whole life besides that of Caped Crowsader.

Wow, that’s some serious security measures around Reinhard. And he’s getting out?!? Yikes! Oh, and it just gets better – he’s going to Detroit. Whatever is going on, I’d wager it can’t be good.


Nits:
Well, his parents {parents’?} house at least.
But they passed their houses, and only stopped at {a?} yellow home with a single story.

Let's see, where did we stay?

Absolutely true about Idaho being a haven for supremacists. Can remember driving through that one particular state on my way to Oregon, and seeing a very LARGE sign (a billboard) next to a motel which had a derogatory statement against native Americans. Of all states, too. I've driven through the Carolinas, Alabama Georgia, Texas (etc.) but the one state which had its racism out in the open was Idaho.

Pretty sure I got a photo of it, too. If I ever find it, I'll post it.

Mostly, the Cascades are standalones, at least in the Oregon/Washington area. Mount Hood is many miles away from Mount St. Helens which is many miles away from Mount Rainier, and so on. The rest of the land is relatively flat with rolling hills occasionally. It's not like the Rockies or the Appalachians, where the range is more continuous. Of course, it's because all of those Cascades are volcanos, slowly being forced up and up until one day... 🌋 But my personal experience was just driving out to Hood mostly, alone or with a friend, and then finding some trail to walk on. One time I encountered a brightly-colored salamander, right in the middle of the trail! This was on a cold, drizzly day. I had no idea amphibians could withstand such cold.

I have a memory of that particular day being the very last Seinfeld episode, which dates to May 14, 1998. I remember rushing home from Mt. Hood to watch it and it kinda was "meh" imo. Could've spent more time on the trail. Honestly, Larry David's bursts of creativity couldn't last forever!

Only went to St. Helens twice. One of the times, went with a girlfriend who convinced me to go caving with her, and I can say this; NEVER AGAIN! I assumed it would be like Mammoth Cave, touristy, well-lit caverns. But this was a real cave. Climbing through passages which we'd literally need to squeeze through. Stalactites and stalagmites. Getting into some chamber and seeing a huge boulder on the floor, and realizing I could see by the boulder's top shape, that it originally fit perfectly into the cave's ceiling, but an earthquake (maybe caused by the Big Explosion in the early 80s) knocked it down at some point. Keep in mind, all of this was in the Saint Helens region...

Yeah, I told Emily NEVER again, hon. I love you, but never again! -- One thing I liked though: you don't know real darkness until you've been in a real cave. Like, you cannot even see your hand in front of your face, as the saying goes. Because of that experience, this is why I prefer to darken videogame caves & mines so much.

And one more incident (sorry for blabbing). As I was driving Emily's car home, she in the passenger seat, flying along at about 60 miles per hour, all the sudden I see these 'shapes' in the road. It was foggy though, and for a split second I was thinking those are just tendrils of fog. But I slowed down anyway. And good thing, too. There was a herd of Moose, crossing the middle of the road. Just like in Northern Exposure, except in the middle of the night.



No need to explain. I probably watched all the First 48 episodes back in the 2000s, most of the time notifications go just as they did with Margaret. Sadness / grief, not accusations against the notifiers. 👮 The bigots handled theirs in a very ... 'unique' manner, we'll just say. And thanks for explaining about Renraku.

----------

Whoa, they're in a courtroom but it's mundane. Sounds like Judge Judy without any of the humor or drama/pissy moments! Still, why is she in a courtroom?

Do you meditate, Florens? I do. It's nowhere near as spectacular as described with Jan, or what the swamis describe. Wish I could attain that. Guess that takes a lot of time / lack of distractions, of course. Not happening in suburban Ellicott City. Always a lawnmower / landscaping crew somewhere within earshot. Or even worse: leafblowers.

Mom is here, okay. They're in Michigan, then.

Oh crap, Jan's got a trial! Wonder what for? Okah, PHEW. Just a name change. For a sec was thinking someone had a lawsuit against our protagonist.

Buddy Holly rocked.

"He's a dick!" whoa! I mean he is, but whoa. Eaaasy there! - Judge is cool, though.

Robert Galbraith... ah, Reinhard. He's a in jail. Stormcrow's a 'cowardly groomer'... right. WHOA the guard shocks Reinhard!!

The Accountant gets the bigot free, wow. Looking forward to where this goes!

Acadian: January's mundane life goes on, even as her crow life does. I like writing these ordinary events, because they ground January in the real world. These are the sorts of things that happen to everyone. She's a person who sometimes wears a cape. She's not the cape itself.

And Reinhard is out and on the loose again, thanks to the help of the same man who Bismarck was working for (and who hired Nitokris to spy on him and stop him from getting those bombs). In a way this book was just a prologue. It was setting Reinhard up to become a mid level boss villain in the main story of the season, as he creates a neo-Nazi group in his own image. Their goal: to kill Stormcrow and the Alliance.

As ever, thank you for being my editor and finding those nits.


Renee: That caving sounds like it was quite the adventure! I have been to Mammoth Cave too, when I was a child. So I do not really remember much of it. Just that like you related, it was made for tourists to walk through, with lights and even guard rails in some places. Not a real struggle through total darkness, squeezing through cracks and crevices.

January's courtroom experience was based on a RL experience of mine. I went with a friend of mine who changed her name when she transitioned. I wrote the judge in January's case the same way I remember the real judge from my friend's case, looking like a guy from the 60s. When he asked why she was changing her name from her birth name (which was male) to her new name (which was a woman's), she explained that she had transitioned. The judge smiled and said that the new name definitely suited her better now. And that was it. Then she just had to do all that paperwork at different government agencies.

The Accountant is going to loom larger and larger in the books to come, and the people he represents. People like Bismarck and Reinhard are just the foot soldiers that they use to enact their agenda.





Lane State University can be found on the Stormcrow Map


Book 12.43 - Broken Arrow

August 28 (Wednesday)

Lane State University was not that much different from Macomb Community College after all. It was just bigger in every way. More programs, more buildings, more classes, Lane State had more of everything. Unlike the community college, it was not located within a single, self-contained campus however. Instead it was spread out across one corner of Detroit's Midtown neighborhood. I-94 and the Lodge freeways made for soft borders to the north and west. From there the university class, dorms, and other buildings sprawled out to the south and east along Woodward, Warren, and other avenues and streets.

Being bigger meant that Lane State was a lot busier than Macomb as well. Far more fellow students and faculty members rubbed shoulders with her as she moved from building to building, and class to class. Fortunately not all of them were strangers. Ryo was taking classes here as well. Unfortunately he was a STEM major, meaning he was taking completely different courses than she was. So she only saw him on the days that they both drove in together.

January had an hour between two of her classes, so she took a break in a small park ringed by classroom buildings. One of the many school libraries rose up on one side, the chem building was to another, along with information sciences, communications, and a fitness center. January could not deny the appeal of the latter. She had not been able to use a proper gymnasium with rings and uneven bars since leaving high school. It would be nice to work out on them again.

But it was not time for getting hot and sweaty. Not with another class coming up. Instead she settled in on a wooden bench to do some reading. It was only the first day, but she had homework to do already. Students and faculty both walked past her on the sidewalk. She noted that one person wore a brand new Stormcrow tee. It bore the same introspective picture Annie Leib had taken of her looking out the window across the front, while the name and website of the Transgender Equality Project was written across the back.

January smiled in spite of herself. The money from that shirt had gone to help someone just like herself, but with fewer options in life. Her trip to DC had definitely been worth it. Even without all the shenanigans with nuclear bombs. After all, it was just as important to make the world better as it was to prevent it from growing worse.

"Say, do you want to stick around? It's around dinner time. We could order something. You could just take a moment to unwind and recharge your batteries..."

Annie's words from exactly a week before came back to her, seemingly out of the blue.

"Oh, you have a roommate. Of course you do."

Sweet Freyja! Had Annie been thirsting for her?

No, that could not be. January shook her head. Women did not do that, not for her. She was probably just misremembering. She was not someone that anyone found attractive. Both high school and junior high school had made that very plain, thank you very much. There was no need to kid herself.

Sure, there had been that whole... whatever that was with Hannah. But look at how that had turned out. It had been a disaster, one that did not bear dwelling upon, much less trying to repeat.

She turned back to her electronic books. She did have studying to do. But for some reason, it was hard to focus on the pages on her screen. Before she knew it, she found herself tuning into everyone's favorite dirty secret podcast.

"Hello subscribers, this is Gilda Gadfly, and do I have the dish for you!"

Good, hearing about someone else's drama would be a nice way for January to take her mind off her own.

"By now we all know about how the unofficial Mid-Atlantic super team traded blows with a neo-Nazi terrorist cell known as the Atomkrieg at the Smithsonian a few days ago. They had the help of Ranger from the US Army, Detroit's loveable Crowgirl, and Calypso from the Caribbean of course. We also know how they later laid the watery smack down upon the same nasty Nazis at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, when the Atomic Kriegers tried to steal a pair of nuclear weapons from a crashed B-52 there.

The Mid-Atlantic supers are led by Silverlight of Washington DC, and include others from nearby cities, such as the train man Mercury from Philly, and Rebel Yell from Richmond. A new player in this game is the mysterious Hwarang. Who is this guy? What does his name mean? Why does he wear lipstick? Is he from an 80s hair metal band? You all are asking it, and Gilda has heard your cries dear listeners.

Yes, the Gadlfy has reached out to the amazing archer, and do I have the dish for you! Let's get right to it, straight from the Hwarang's mouth, as it were:

"When I was little they called what I am Intersex, now it's known as Differences in Sex Development, or DSD," a distinctly male voice came over the feed. From the change in audio quality, January could tell that it was from a previously recorded segment. "My exact diagnosis is not something I am going to get into. But suffice to say my chromosomes are not the same as most people's, and that has affected me physically."

"I never really had any intention of coming out to say any of this," he went on. "But the truth is the whole reason I became Hwarang is because of Stormcrow. Like her, I wasn't born with a body that fits who I am inside. I have had to spend a lot of my life trying to figure out who I am, and what I am supposed to be, in spite of how I was born. That by the way, is something other people seem awfully eager to dictate to me, even though they don't know a thing about me."

"In some ways, I'm a lot different from Stormcrow. I'm not technically trans, not in the way she is at least. It's... complicated. I'm not a woman. I'm a man. But if Stormcrow hadn't been such a vocal and visible member of our community, I wouldn't be doing this. She inspired me to do more, to be more. As part of that, I feel it's not only right, but necessary for me to come out and be open about my situation as well, just as she did. There are millions of other people like me with DSD just in the United States alone. They deserve to be seen, to make it plain that we are real, we are here, and we matter. We all matter."



Author's Note: This is the end of Book 12, and will be the last Crowpost for a while. I have the outlines for the next several books, but have only done a little actual writing on the next one. I am also considering doing several on Blood Raven's adventures in Boston as Corvus, which will have a much stronger Urban Fantasy emphasis. I prefer not to post anything until I am completely finished with a book, so it will be a while before January or Blood Raven return.

School Daze for Jan.

Her thoughts on Annie reveal she still has work to do when it comes to self-confidence of the heart. She'll fearlessly wade into foes but fears dipping her toes into romantic waters. Although understandable, she’ll never know unless she looks into possibilities – like Annie. It takes courage to risk being hurt, but Jan is not one who lacks courage after all.

And Gilda dishes some on what makes up Hwarang.


Well, I’ll miss hearing about the Crowgirl until she’s back but look forward to perhaps a Boston story from Corvus. Like you, I’ve gone to fully drafting a book before announcing or beginning to post it. In fact, that is an approach I borrowed from you. I much prefer a ‘writing’ phase, followed by an ‘editing/posting’ phase.

Guess your friend didn't call anyone a dick in front of the judge! Anyway, that's awesome you were able to scribe that court experience into the story.


August 28, here we go. Alright, it's Back to School. (gosh that phrase... rgh). Anyway, back to college, which might be more daunting than fighting some monsters. How does one compartmentalize the slowing down of life after an entire summer of saving the world?

Ooooh yeah, Annie was thirsty alright. Dig it, hon. Women do indeed 'thirst', probably more openly nowadays. We just are more subtle about it. We can't just state our intentions usually, for fear of being branded sluts or whatever. Not unless alcohol and a bit of time is involved. ...So that's another superpower Jan might want to invest in, some sort of internal radar which blips when moments like that occur. Especially now she's surrounded by lovelies, some whom are more receptive.

Jan's getting distracted! I can only imagine. So glad we didn't have constant electronic gadgets in our day.

Silverlight. There is a Silverlight reference buried in the last Vicious. 🌔

Huh. Hwrang's got DSD, never heard of this term.

Hey, we're out of Books! What a surprise. It's a good one, though. I'm always switching stories, seasonally. Don't know how it is for you, but it's usually good to switch gears. Take a break from posting. Just 'cause of perspective. I dunno, hard to explain. But for instance going from the olden-type language of Laprima to using terms which are modern to our times .... it feels fresh. Then again, seems you're constantly writing behind the scenes. Not taking any breaks, etc.

I had a feeling Branwen might return at some point. We shall see.