War, yes, War suits Gryffindor well. Fighting and dying for beliefs; fighting and dying for nothing; drafted into bloodshed and fire by bravery or chivalry or neither. Some take joy in this; some are burdened beyond repair. There was a cause, somewhere; there was good, somewhere; there was a reason for all this, somewhere. Oh, you’d have to be brave to live through this. Red and gold. Gold like armor and glory; red like blood and reality.
But Famine and Hufflepuff? No. Famine is Ravenclaw, ever-hungry for knowledge, constantly starving for more and more and more, almost feral for fulfillment. Where is the wisdom in the world? The truth? Nothing is true; nothing is enough; all there is to devour is worthless scraps. Blue and bronze. Bronze like a set of scales tipping and found wanting; blue like the infinite that never satisfies… never gives the answers.
Thus Pestilence is not Ravenclaw. Pestilence is Slytherin, sick with clever plans and cunning potential and corrupting desire. Ambition spreads like a sickness, a plague of greed and an illness to the soul. Maybe some might call it cruel, but here among friends it’s simple cunning at work. Green and silver. Silver like the sheen of glazed eyes; green like the complexion of infection.
And so Death is not Slytherin. Death is Hufflepuff. It is a hard work; it is a work that is never done. But someone must do it, and do it fairly – do it justly – do it well… perhaps even kindly. Everyone is equal here – in the end – a bunch of duffers. Said Hufflepuff, “I’ll teach the lot… And treat them just the same.” Yellow and black. Black like loss of sight as the air leaves your lungs; yellow like the flowers that’ll grow over your grave.
(… and now my brain has decided that Micheletto and Bucky would get along very well, and probably share therapists. facepalms I do NOT need more plot bunnies.)
theotherguysride-Today at 12:14 AM
(After all, ‘veterans shattered by three billion years of war’ is sort of his gauge of what’s ‘dificult’ in a patient.) (Dooo eeeeet. ) (Laila wants to punch Tony Stark in the face just because it would be badass.)
morgynleri-Today at 12:15 AM
(Tony Stark sometimes deserves being punched in the face.)
theotherguysride-Today at 12:15 AM
(So it all works out!) (Also if Tony tries to hit on Lucrezia out of habit and she’s just. No. Buddy. You do not fuck with her ship.)
morgynleri-Today at 12:17 AM
(If Tony tries to hit on Lucrezia, there’s even odds that she’ll either take him up on it for a one-night stand just for the sheer hell of it, invite him to share a bed with her and Cesare, or let Cesare tell him in incruciating detail why hitting on Lucrezia is a Very Bad Idea.) (And depending on what Tony has or has not figured out about them, that could be all sorts of entertaining.)
theotherguysride-Today at 12:18 AM
(Like, the threesome thing would be a thing he says yes to on principle.) (But also Laila has a dragons sense of Honor and Loyalty.) (Micheletto, Cesare, and Lucrezia offered her shelter when she was hunted by those she should have no reason to fear. She was forcibly altered by an alien device, infused with said alien device and placed in a position where she has to figure out how to end an intergalactic war, she has a decentralized conciousness for fucks sakes. The fact that they took her in and offered her haven? Very soon they will have her loyalty.) (And when they have that? The world could burn at their whim.) (Also how old was Micheletto when he was doing all that?)
morgynleri-Today at 12:23 AM
(Somewhere in the vicinity of 28, I think, when he took up service with Cesare. 31 when Lucrezia was 17. Give or take a year, since he has less certainty of when his birth happened than Cesare or Lucrezia.)
theotherguysride-Today at 12:24 AM
(Meeps. I was expecting like 22-24. Okay that explains some things.)
morgynleri-Today at 12:26 AM
(Yeah. Micheletto reads to me as considerably older than the Borgia siblings. I don’t know if the show meant for him to be, or if the RL person/people he was based on were that much separated in age from Cesare, but. shrugs)
theotherguysride-Today at 12:26 AM
(Huh, makes sense though. They DO need a keeper.)
morgynleri-Today at 12:27 AM
(SO MUCH. Gods. Without a keeper, they’d probably have gotten themselves killed.)
theotherguysride-Today at 12:27 AM
(I just don’t think that giving him the responsibility of an elder sibling like that was smart on the part of the Pope, without backup he’s just.) (Laila IS a robot and has more dynamic expressions than he does XD. She wants to poke him to make him giggle and just PERSON for a bit instead of robot at everyone. )
morgynleri-Today at 12:30 AM
(Micheletto chose to take it on, and works for Cesare from the time Cesare recruits him in the kitchen of Cardinal Orsini’s palace when Orsini had hired Micheletto to poison the newly-elected Pope and Cesare both. And getting Micheletto to the point he expresses emotions like a human person… I’m not sure what that’s going to take, because the closest the man has come is when he was handed the baby by Lucrezia, and he was visibly startled for a split second, and when he found a bed partner he found in Milan had followed him to Rome, and he decided to keep him.)
theotherguysride-Today at 12:35 AM
(Nawwww.)
morgynleri-Today at 12:37 AM
(Said bed partner was an enemy spy, and ended up dead once Micheletto found out, or so indicate the summaries for the last three episodes.)
theotherguysride-Today at 12:38 AM
(Noooooo why do you do this to him you people are MEAN he deserves nice things.) (Also he’s not allowed to be around Bucky for any length of time unsupervised because trading notes would turn into making out and while pretty, would be a disaster to everyone but Lucrezia.)
morgynleri-Today at 12:40 AM
(giggles Either making out or a body count.) (Or both.) (Because, yeah, Bucky is definitely Micheletto’s type.)
theotherguysride-Today at 12:44 AM
(Death from on high?) (Or big doe eyes and scruffy hair and strong shoulders?) (Ohshit.) (Hawkeye ships it.)
morgynleri-Today at 12:46 AM
(Tall, dark hair, athletic. Not as curly as Micheletto’s usual bed partners, but still. And Clint would so ship it.)
…. I do not need more plot bunnies. I don’t. I. *thumps head on desk* Fuck.
Someone tell me it’s a bad idea to have the immortal* gay pet assassin meet the traumatized mind-fucked assassin who is probably a little less immortal? Or to let Tony Stark anywhere near either Lucrezia or Cesare Borgia, much less both?
*Because I can. And because it’s fun to play with functional immortality.
i just had and idea but since im not really up to writing actual fic (and this would be much longer than im prepared to do right now anyway) you get rambly not-fic instead.
ive been thinking about writing a lot lately, especially because with one exception i havent written a thing in months and. i wanna write about babies. i like babies and i like writing about kids and ive been spending a lot of time with my two nieces this past year so ive got plenty of material to draw from now.
the idea is this: after utapau, no one answers obiwans distress call. not yoda, not bail, no jedi.
of course, obiwan goes to coruscant anyway and finds the temple destroyed. he takes care of the beacon message in the temple and, because hes obiwan, checks the security tapes.
for reasons i havent quite figured out yet he decides to do exactly what yoda tells him to do in canon. he goes to see padme to find out where anakin is.
and up to the point where obiwan leaves mustafar with padme thigns go p much the way they do in canon.
(meanwhile, bail is panicking a little bc hes got a little preteen jedi fugitive and shitshitshit the clones totally saw the two of them escape together. what do?!)
(yoda… im not sure what happens to yoda. maybe he goes to fight palpatine earlier and thus never meets up with bail and obiwan. maybe he dies there. maybe he doestn and escapes to dagobah brokenhaerted.)
obiwan takes padme to the medical station i always forget the name of and insists they do everything fucking possible to save her.
from here on out ive got two diff scenarios in mind:
1) she dies like in canon. but because bail and yoda arent there obiwan leaves with the newborn twins and raises them more or less as his own. maybe more like he remembers the creche masters than the way a non jedi parent would.
this is the part i actually feel like writing, the part i WANT to write. obiwan on the run from p much the entire galaxy with his two tiny babies.
2) padme survives but her injuries and the birth as well as the trauma of being attacked by anakin and the fall of the republic leave her incredibly weak.
she and obiwan (+ the twins) stay at the medical station a bit longer so she can recover a little and then go into hiding. she cant travel much, cant run yet, and honestly just sleeps an awful lot. ofc obiwan ends up taking care of the twins and even when padme is further along in her recovery, cant quite bring himself to leave them. hes sure itd be safer for them if they werent hanging out with a known jedi – and therefore traitor to the empire – but. well. he loves them. they love him. and padme insists that hes a fool wholl get himself killed and if hes dead, wholl teach her children to use the force? wholl watch them when their mother cant? and what if somehting happens to her, who will raise the twins then, huh? obiwan are you fucking listening to me? youre not leaving asshole.
anyway. i like both of these but cant write fic for either right now so feel free to play with these ideas. id appreciate it if anyone who writes stuff for this would send me a link 😉
The reason vampires, theoretically, cannot see themselves in mirrors, is because they are supposedly soulless, and silver is a “purifying” metal.
People have been using silver and silver compounds to treat medical problems since the time of Hippocrates (so from at least around and before
460BC), with silver nitrate being used as an antibacterial/treatment for gonorrhea and other infectious diseases, from the late 1800s on wards.
It’s seen a resurgence in the last few years in the form of
colloidal silver, despite there being no real conclusive evidence that drinking it (DO NOT) will “cure” any and all ailments, ranging from skin infections to Autism or AIDS. (Yes really, that is a thing people have done. They freak out over the truly beneficial, life saving vaccine, but will gladly give their children a highly toxic compound which can result in third degree chemical burns, blindness or a condition called
argyria which turns your permanently blue), In fact I think there was a study as recent as 2010 that said it actually did the opposite and was not more beneficial than a modern antibiotic, as many quack healers have and are claiming. Shocker. (Unlike colloidal gold which is used by the medical world, primarily in detection methods and also gene therapy. It was also used to be injected into the muscles to treat arthritis and was reported to have some benefits, but I think it has since fallen out of practice in a lot of places. My Nan used to get it done to her hands.)
But Joy, I hear you ask, what does any of this have to do with vampires and silver backed mirrors?
Well the thing is, silver backed mirrors didn’t become a thing until the mid 1800s, roughly around about the same time silver nitrate et al were being fully explored for medicinal purposes, and mistakenly thought to be a cure all.
So, what do you do when someone is sick? You give them the latest cure all! What do you do if you live in a part of the world where the fear of vampires is still a thing and the cure all turns them blue and kills them? Shit, they must be a vampire!
By that “logic” all things silver must repel them in some way, including these new fangled silver backed mirrors which reflect light perfectly. That’s why you never see them in the homes of the poor buggers we’re staking into the ground after they’re dead and cutting their heads off…not poverty or lack of availability in our small town…v a m p i r e s.
And from there the new myth grows arms and legs—though possibly not a head for the poor bugger they just threw into a shallow grave covered in garlic—and the idea that vampires don’t have mirrors in their homes because they don’t cast a reflection is immortalized in popular fiction and carried over into modern mythology. (The reason for it being deadly to werewolves is down the the Magical Sympathy Law. ie werewolves are controlled by the Moon, so silver (also known as “
lunar caustic” when the nitrate crystals solidify) being one of the seven metals of alchemy associated with the moon, must reverse their power or kill them! Science! Kind of…)
And even if your mythos does ascribe to his belief (and there’s no reason it can’t! It’s a great story prop!) I feel that conversely, this doesn’t mean vampires have no idea what they look like or cast no reflection at all, purely that they do not cast a reflection in silver.
People have been hammering metal flat and shiny to make reflective surfaces long before they were using silver backed mirrors. We know that polished copper has been used by people as a mirror since around 3000-4000BC in the region that was once Mesopotamia, and polished smooth bronze mirrors have been found in China dating back to 2000BC. They were rare and precious of course, and a luxury item, so not everyone household would have had one, but even your poorest lowly born vampire would have been able to see their reflection in a dark stone bowl filled with water allowed to sit still long enough, or sitting by the river on a clear calm night.
Which means I feel like writers are missing a trick when it comes to vampires who are so glad that silver is no longer considered an effective means of making mirrors (it’s expensive and harms the earth to keep mining it for vanity purposes) and are just here for metal alloy mirrors. Like holy shit Mary, hold the receiver, we are going to purchase floor length mirrors and put them in every room, you there my good sir, Harrods as fast as you can and don’t spare the mechanical horse. It’s time to SHINE.
Don’t even get me started on when digital cameras become a thing and silver nitrate is no longer used to develop them, and they print in color. You mean I don’t have to keep getting the family portrait updated every few decades? Marvelous! The cost of blue ink is better than it was but it’s still highway robbery I tell you. Sharron, come here and help me put this on the book of faces. Yes, good. What a pity there isn’t a way to hold it back far enough for a family portrait whenever you want it. How easy it would be to commemorate moments of joy…a selfie stick?!?! TELL ME MORE
what men call “logic” is really just a lack of empathy
I have legitimately started called people out on this, and the fact that it’s a deeply gendered presumption that “logic” is a unilaterally superior decision-making tool over “emotion”. “Rational” doesn’t mean “right”, and ideas/opinions/things described as such are rarely as objective as they are purported to be.
So then, what is your opinion on the Actor for Elliot saying that Elliot used to be apart of a Star Gate team from the Stargate: SG1 series?
I love it. LOVE IT. It fixes literally the only flaw that I actually cared about in the show.
The thing that made my eye twitch a little bit in the first couple of seasons of Leverage was the hacking – the ‘I know he’s a Super Genius, but the hardware for what he’s doing with that flip phone literally cannot do what they’re doing’.
But if it’s in the Stargate universe, then of course some of that advanced tech has slipped unnoticed into the private sector. Boom! Suspension of disbelief now fully back in play.
(SG:1 was my main obsession for years – including a decade of playing in and running a Stargate online game (OCs). It was before I’d gotten back into any kind of online fandom, mind you, so I didn’t do fic, but nevertheless! My screen-correct gate team jacket – the style Daniel’s wearing in the top gif – is still my favourite piece of cosplay ever.)
It also means that Hardison, knowingly or unknowingly, has forced Eliot to sit through episodes of Wormhole X-Treme.
And that is everything to me.
Both. So very both. So Hardison absolutely did it accidentally to complain about the special effects/plot implausibility at some point. And then after the Gone Fishin’ Job and probably after the trio gets together, he FINALLY figures it out.
Probably tries hacking the Mountain, too, now that I think about it. Given Hardison I’m not even placing odds either way.
Anyway picture it: it’s been a year or two since Alec last inflicted Wormhole X-Treme on Eliot, who thought he was safe from That Goddamn Show. And then one TV night becomes one marathon session of That Goddamn Show and literally the only saving grace for his nerves is that Alec’s poker face is not, and his shit-eating grin keeps sneaking out.
Usually, Eliot thinks, when he’s picturing Eliot doing the shit on the show.
I’m now convinced Sam Carter called up Eliot more than once and said “Spencer, could you please convince your boyfriend to stop trying to hack us? If he keeps this up it’s either we recruit him or jail and I don’t want to deal with your girlfriend and Vala getting into shit. Teal’c says hi, by the way.”
I had CA: TWS playing in the background at work today, and something caught my attention that I have idly wondered about before, but this time, it was like a great big flashing sign. So much so that I had to go back and replay the scene.
Pierce: The timetable has moved. Our window is limited. Two targets, level six. He already cost me Zola. I want confirmed death in ten hours.
I saw that then I watched the scene on the bridge. Watch the Winter Soldier. He comes in for the attack, and the first person he takes out of the equation is Jasper Sitwell. AKA the man who let the Lumerian Star get captured by pirates. AKA the reason Fury got the intel and had his suspicions raised. AKA the reason that the timetable was moved. AKA the reason they lost Zola.
I always assumed it was Steve and Natasha he was coming after, but no. Steve is Level 8.
Just watch the way TWS attacks. He doesn’t go for Steve or Sam directly. He takes out Sitwell, the easy target, first then aims through the roof of the car at Natasha first. And when the car crashes, he doesn’t go after Steve.
Instead, he fires towards Natasha, and only misses because Steve pushes her out of the line of fire. The blast sends Steve hurtling over the ledge. You would think he would be a priority target after that, but TWS ignores him. Instead, he calmly stalks after Natasha like a predator.
The other HYDRA operatives are firing like mad, shooting at everything, but he just watches for Natasha. He doesn’t fire until he has her in his sites. He only fires three times when she’s still on the bridge, and each shot only just misses her. (Speaking of, I love that the only thing that makes him lose his cool and fire as wildly as the other HYDRA agents, is when she manages to land a hit on him. That’s the one time he doesn’t aim)
When he gets given the machinegun, he also doesn’t waste his ammunition once she’s out of range. He hops over the edge of the bridge and goes after her on foot. The only time he actually bothers himself with fighting Steve is when Steve attacks him.
Also, I think this whole scene really demonstrates the difference between the design of the Winter Soldier as a weapon and the way HYDRA have used him. HYDRA tends to be very much smash in and “KILL THEM ALL WITH FIRE!” style, whereas the Winter Soldier is very much carefully aimed and positioned. Just watch the way he moves when he’s hunting. Or even when he’s firing. He is absolute stillness and quiet, compared to the chaos and destruction of the HYDRA boys. He just walks into a scene, lifts his gun, fires, and just like that, is gone.
This is a very good point! The Winter Soldier’s behaviour on the bridge makes much more sense when we presume he was after Sitwell and Natasha rather than Steve and Natasha – why would he go after Natasha and leave his team to deal with Steve, arguably the bigger threat, if she wasn’t, in fact, his second target? Logically, if he were sent to kill all of them, he’d take out his opponents starting either with the biggest threat (Steve) and working his way down (Natasha, Sam, Sitwell), or starting with the least threat (Sitwell) and working his way up (Sam, Natasha, Steve). Instead, he took out Sitwell, completely ignored Sam (because he wasn’t ordered to kill Sam since Pierce didn’t know about him?), ordered his handlers to keep Steve busy, and went after Natasha himself.
The only piece that doesn’t fit the puzzle is the ‘level 6′, because both Sitwell and Natasha were Level 7. It might simply be a continuity error, but I always assumed Pierce referred to HYDRA’s own system of threat levels rather than S.H.I.E.L.D.’s clearance levels. A level 6 threat, in this case, would be a trained S.H.I.E.L.D. operative – although arguably, Natasha was a bigger threat than Sitwell. Still, they’re both (more or less) standard humans, unlike Steve. It actually makes a lot more sense that the targets were both the same level if they were in fact Sitwell and Natasha, because Steve was both a higher S.H.I.E.L.D. clearance level (Level 8) and a higher threat level, being a supersoldier, than either Sitwell or Natasha.
Notice also that the Winter Soldier asked Pierce, “theman on the bridge, who was he?” Not “my target.” So I think you’re probably right!
But wait…
If this is true, it also means the Winter Soldier didn’t kill anyone he hadn’t been expressly ordered to kill. In Odessa, he was ordered to kill the nuclear scientist and left Natasha alive. On the roof outside Steve’s apartment, he was ordered to kill Fury and ignored Steve even though he had a high-caliber sniper rifle and a clear line of sight – remember that post about how the Winter Soldier shot Nick Fury by extrapolating from where Steve was looking, meaning he could easily have put a bullet through Steve’s eyesocket if he’d wanted to? On the bridge, he was ordered to kill Sitwell and Natasha, ignored Sam, and told his team to go after Steve knowing Steve would take them out. At the Triskelion, he’d been ordered to destroy the loyal S.H.I.E.L.D. air force which posed a threat to HYDRA’s helicarriers until they reached operational altitude, and then went after his target, Steve, after taking out Sam in a way which would give him a chance of survival, however slim, like Natasha in Odessa.
The Winter Soldier was actively opposing HYDRA by obeying their orders in the most literal sense possible. He knew he couldn’t disobey a direct order due to his programming, but given the opportunity to take out a threat to HYDRA, he ignored that threat if he hadn’t been expressly ordered to deal with it. He even had Steve’s shield, Steve’s most powerful weapon, and threw it back to him.
All this time, we’ve been discussing Bucky in terms of loss of autonomy, how he was HYDRA’s brainwashed puppet, when in fact he was fighting HYDRA all along in the only way left to him – by sparing the lives of HYDRA’s enemies whenever he could.
When the show Stargate SG1 ended, the Stargate was dismantled and thrown away in a dumpster on the lot. John Rogers, creator/writer/director/producer of Leverage, was shocked and dismayed to discover its final resting place. Not one to let such travesties pass, he rescued the Stargate pieces from the dumpster and kept them. Later, in an episode of Leverage, the season 4 finale, The Last Dam Job, he made use of the pieces, by sticking them up on several walls as pieces of art in a vault of someone’s prized possessions.
The Stargate lives on and is well loved.
Someone please stop me from trying to fold Eliot into Star somehow. @dogmatix doesn’t have internet and she’s like that last 10% of my self control that keeps me from making REALLY dumb writing attempts.
(the rest of the time she’s cackling and egging me on. Though to be fair it’s not like I do any differently)
I was thinking…. I can’t find the actual quote for the life of me, but doesn’t Eliot basically state that America abandoned him in some hell prison and that’s why he left the military?
So, what’s to say that hell prison was on Earth? He either escaped, got back to the gate and then left the program (I’m thinking he was the only member of his team that made it out), or he didn’t have his teams GDO so he had to hop gates until he could get to an allied world, THEN he left the program.
A point of recontact with the program could be him spotting the above in that vault there and having Parker snatch what are obviously gate address panels and fedexing them to the mountain.
On the subject of his team… Sophie knows about the gate. She never left Earth, but she totally snuck her way into the mountain as, like, one of the psychologists assigned to the gate teams? IDK, that seems like the best place for her to have gotten in, since I don’t think she could have kept up a scientific or anthro/archeo role for more than a few days without having her cover blown…
I’m sure Hardison has found a few ‘interesting’ files over the years, but even he hasn’t tried to mess with the terrifying levels of encryption on
Cheyenne
Mountain. So he knows the gov is Up To Something there, but isn’t quite willing to risk being shoved in a windowless box for the rest of his life to find out what. Yet.
Parker totally knows about the gate and aliens. No one knows how, or when she found out, but she knows. (Parker is possibly the only survivor of a ship that crashed somewhere in the Midwest. She was found at an assumed age of four-ish and shuffled into the foster care system when no family could be located.)
Nate… Well, he knows kind of obliquely that there is something odd going on in Colorado, but not the same way the others do. Archaeologists and anthropologists often have contact with things of great rarity and value, things that require insuring. He knew people, and when several of them took jobs in Colorado Springs out of the blue and pretty much fell off the academic map, he noticed. He doesn’t know why they did, not yet, but he made a mental note.
On the subject of Star though… Omg, Clones would ADORE Eliot. Eliot is like the most Mandalorian person on Earth. I dearly want to see the Leverage team meeting Clones now…
This is all AWESOME and I really hope someone runs with the plunnie because daaaaaamn, this sounds fascinating.
As for Star, I might admit to occasionally flirting with the notion of a side crossover for shits and giggles. No serious clone presence yet, though. ^_^;;
Remember that awesome post where we all saw the Stargate plates up on the walls behind Victor Dubenich? And how excited we all were that the crew of Leverage were such massive Stargate geeks?
I was listening to the commentary for The Last Dam Job yesterday, and apparently, during the team break, John Rogers et al were actually going to have Eliot in the uniform going through the gate saying, “Okay, just one last time,” and the only reason this didn’t happen was because the Stargate set got dismantled.
So, this means that in Rogers et al’s headcanon:
a) Stargate and Leverage take place in the same universe, and
b) Eliot has been through the gate before! Eliot has seen many things that not even Hardison has seen! Eliot is probably friendly with Teal’c, and has definitely said “Dammit, Jackson!” more than once!
#i’m always here for eliot’s transparent attempts at pretending he has dignity and is not a complete dork#‘no i don’t want an eliot signal i’m not a nerd like you….. what- what would be on this hypothetical signal’#‘can it be a wolf maybe’
There's a Mirror on the Wall 