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]

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.]

[mistconduct]

You ever...think you're going to see her again? When the communicators get all fucked, I mean.

[fridgetothefire]

I ask for her every time. Nothing so far.

I keep. Planning to get her out of there. But it's. Hard.

[Hard to go back, to face everything else she left behind.]

[mistconduct]

She's still alive?

Sorry, I thought after everything you were telling me, she'd passed.

[fridgetothefire]

If you can call it living.

She sort of....gave up on everything, after he really went off the deep end. I force fed her a lot as I got older. But...yeah, technically.

[mistconduct]

Fuck, man. Was she ever looked at for depression? Or PTSD?

[fridgetothefire]

Chris, we lived on an isolated terrorist base in the sixties! I'd never even heard of those before I came here.

[mistconduct]

That's right. I keep forgetting you were a 60s chick.

Thank christ for modern medicine, huh?

[fridgetothefire]

I doubt he'd have let us talk to anyone regardless.

Humans are weak. More wasn't to be expected.

[mistconduct]

Did I ever tell you your dad was way more of a Jonestown-ish cult leader of epic dick proportions?

[fridgetothefire]

More of a what than who?

[Sometimes you make her worry she's losing her English, Chris. But no, you're just incomprehensible.]

[mistconduct]

Jonestown. Didn't you ever hear the phrase 'don't drink the Kool-Aid'?

[fridgetothefire]

The cadence sounds familiar. I'm not entirely sure what Kool-Aid is, either.

All of which you can either actually explain, or piss off while I go look it up.

[Not mad, just practical. She's missed something, and she is going to correct that. Actually, she'll probably look it up regardless, on account of Chris not being a trustworthy source of information.]

[mistconduct]

That's right, I keep forgetting about the lack of childhood.

Okay, Jonestown was this fucked-up doomsday cult that this one cult leader made up in order to create a communist utopia or whatever, and he made it so people couldn't leave and were sucked into the cult idea. And then one day he gets super fucking paranoid, thinks the government is after him, and makes a big tub of Kool-Aid - it's like Gatorade for kids - and poisons it. And all his followers drink it, and hundreds of people died and it was all fucked.

[fridgetothefire]

...yeah, sounds about right.