Issue #70

[mistconduct]

Fuck me, we're four days into March and the port messed up my goddamn March Madness spread!

Fuck it, fine. Obviously since I can't watch college basketball on the Barge, we make our own entertainment here.

Bets are currently open to be placed on all inmates. It's $5 to play, 5 spots for $20. First inmate you picked to graduate gets paid out.

All unpaired inmates are wild cards - if you bet on them and they're first to graduate, you win a date with Loki in addition to the whole kit and caboodle.

Here's some sample odds I've got running;

Mickey - 2:1
The Emperor - 2:1
Abigail - 3:1
Cass - 3:1
Mira - 5:1
Tig - 10:1
Jax - 10:1
Touko - 20:1
Sylvanas - 25:1
Jerry - 25:1
Dean - 40:1
Arthas - 50:1

...Hey, does anyone else feel like utter crap?

Comments

[fridgetothefire]

I didn't go to school at all.

You just don't listen to anything that isn't about you.

[mistconduct]

....Sometimes I do.

[fridgetothefire]

Okay, fine, yes, sometimes. Not enough.

[mistconduct]

Also you're not fucking meek.

[fridgetothefire]

Not currently.

I spent most of my life scraping and smiling and making whatever whispered or effusive apologies for my gross human presence that were required of me and then scampering away to hide.

[mistconduct]

Well, your family was always a huge bunch of dicks.

House of M, seriously.

[fridgetothefire]

Family, friends, assorted fanatical soldiers and hangers-on.

[They were all dicks. Every one of them.]

[mistconduct]

Yeah.

How'd you end up normal, again?

[fridgetothefire]

I didn't.

[mistconduct]

Normal in comparison to every other motherfucker in your DNA strain.

[fridgetothefire]

You're forgetting my mom.

[This is a venial sin. Everyone does.]

[mistconduct]

Remind me which one was your mom.

[fridgetothefire]

Her name is Magda.

[Is. Is. The only member of her family Anya didn't ruin, because her father had already done it so thoroughly.]

[mistconduct]

Gypsy?

[fridgetothefire]

Tsiganye.

[mistconduct]

Gesundheit.

[fridgetothefire]

[She rolls her eyes.]

I never heard her use that word, is all. But yeah.

[mistconduct]

Being part of a mutant family didn't make you enough of an outcast that you had to be that, too?

[fridgetothefire]

Guess not.

...I don't feel like one, really. She didn't talk about it much and I was only four when we left the village. I know the language but not...

[Wait, why is she trying to talk about this with Chris?]

Nevermind.

[mistconduct]

What?


No, c'mon, Anya. What?

[fridgetothefire]

[Uhg, fine.]

The whole...being a people part? Culture and community or whatever. I didn't live with them. I'm not...anything.

My Father didn't talk about Judaism, Mama didn't talk about what it meant to be Romani, I'm not Ukrainian, I'm not Swiss, I'm not a mutant, and humans tried to lynch me. You can't be an outcast if you were never part of anything to begin with.

[mistconduct]

Fuck.



Looks like someone's getting a subscription to ancestry.com for their birthday.

[fridgetothefire]

Spoilers: they all died in the camps.

[mistconduct]

Jesus, that's unbelievably depressing.

[fridgetothefire]

[She shrugs. It is, but to her it's background, like the cold of soviet winter, or the thinness of the alpine air, a permeating hushed ache that was simply always part of the world. No one ever really explained the gory details to her - no one wanted to talk about it, to taint their new lives that were already inevitably etched with the consequences of it, especially not to the children. She's done her own research, of course, but everything she's found in books feels separate from her, from the flinching silences she dimly remembers and her father's visceral frothing bellicosity.

Sometimes, it's the cheeks that get her - his cheeks stayed a little gaunt, all his life, and so did her mother's, a ripple of of the pictures of wraiths. Mostly, though, she feels as disconnected from the holocaust as she does the rest of history, even though it defined so much of her life.]