Mrs. Reach/Mrs. Curio

chum is an <episodic> <street-level superhero> <political thriller>/<slice of life>/<action procedural> web serial. there, that covers all the genre bases.

it was written as a response to the wave of responses written to Worm, and thus partially as a response to Worm, but does not escalate nearly as fast. chum is more about escalation as a practice of widening scope and tactical complexity, rather than bigger monsters and meaner bad guys, although some of the bad guys are quite mean and the monsters quite big.

we are asking the long awaited question in ratfic - what if every character, not just the protagonist, was competent?

chum does not take place in the most important city in the world, with the supermen, the alexandrias, the homelanders, and so on. chum takes place in Philadelphia (pause for applause), specifically in the northeast philadelphian neighborhoods of Mayfair, Tacony, and their neighbors, for the most part. it is a small pond without cataclysmic, block-leveling powers.

the main character of chum, Sam Small, is not genre savvy, is not a nerd or a self-insert, and is instead a jewish athlete with anger issues and impulse control problems who begins the story at age 14 with her freshly acquired shark powers. she will proceed to use these to accomplish acts of somewhat fathomable violence and extremely uncomfortable-to-watch pain tolerance.

i believe at last check chum is slightly longer than Worm, including all the paratext written for it. it is like roughly 60% done, ish, but, as mentioned, it is episodic in the sense that each arc is designed to be picked up, read, and then have a natural stopping point, about 250-350 pages or so.

chum is extremely serialized. people who enjoy theorizing and hunting for foreshadowing, or recognizing callbacks, will enjoy reading it. it is a bit of an ensemble piece, with each arc generally focusing around a couple of particular characters drifting into the story around the core cast, while the world continues to turn around them.

chum, if i can toot my own horn, has some really stellar fight sequences and really clever procedural investigation sequences.

if this sounds like something you are interested in, you can access it at the following link.

when i ask "why" i am not asking in the literal sense, i want you to instead substitute every why with "what did the director mean when he did this;". this is not meant to be condescending - i genuinely am asking these because i loved this movie because of how just absolutely choked with denseness it is, it is laser focused, and i want other people to be able to enjoy it the same way i do.

so without further ado;

why is clark dressed as a pirate when he runs a furniture store?

what were non-fictional pirates actually like?

as the owner-manager of a furniture store, where do clark's class interests lie? is he a laborer?

what about all the other characters in the movie that show up for more than a single scene? what are their class interests?

what are the genders of all the characters that react with fear to the backrooms? what are the genders of all the characters that react with awe/i-want-to-know-more of the backrooms? if there is a pattern, why would the director make there be one?

what is meant by the store title "captain clark's ottoman empire"? what was the ottoman empire, and, outside bad furniture pun, does it have any relevance to the story?

why do they mark the entrances off the wall in blue tape in particular? what might that mean?

spoiler questions;

Chum 275: The Perfect Drug/Sweet Dreams

Friday.

Morning. Parkour with Alex on the garage. Five levels today instead of four, because Alex is getting better, and because I wanted to push him, and because pushing Alex is easier than thinking about Kill Buddha's pulse. Alex makes it to level four before his lungs file a formal complaint. I make it to level five without noticing I've made it to level five, because my body is on autopilot, and my brain is somewhere else.

"You're weird today," Alex says, bent over, gasping.

"I'm weird every day," I say, which is true, and which is also a deflection that Alex accepts because Alex is sixteen. Sixteen-year-olds accept deflections from older teenagers as a matter of social protocol.

---

Lina. Light session - shadow boxing, stretching, no sparring today. Cooling down from something I never told her I had to cool down from.

"You look like you went a few rounds with someone who wasn't Luis," she says, watching me shadow box in the mirror.

"Something like that," I say. I resist the urge to come up with an excuse. I ran into some ruffians on the street? Ruffians. Rachel says ruffians. Okay, next excuse. Something about my powers that she knows about? No, actually, Sam, just chill out instead. More details is more room for the lie to grow.

"How'd it go?" she asks.

"I lost," I say.

Lina nods once. "Good. You need to lose more. Winning tells you what works. Losing tells you the more important thing, which is what doesn't work."

---

I think about that while I stretch. I think about it on the bus home. I think about it while Dad makes stir fry and Mom runs through the fundraiser checklist at the dining table, the planner open, the two pens going, the phone buzzing every three minutes with a text from someone who needs something. The fundraiser is tomorrow. Mom is vibrating at a frequency that I would associate more with a jackhammer than a human person.

"You're coming tomorrow," Mom says without asking.

"I'm coming tomorrow," I confirm. "But not to help.

"Right," she adds. "Fatima?"

"I'll ask her," I say.

Sam: do you want to come to a fundraiser thing my mom is headlining tomorrow

Sam: it will have like stalls and cotton candy and the DVD will be there

Sam: convention center annex at like noon ish

...

...

Fatima: i'd love to

Fatima: :)

"She's coming," I tell Mom.

Chum 274: Exhibition

Saturday.

Kill Buddha is on the main card tonight against someone I haven't seen before - a lanky guy with extendable limbs who the emcee introduces as "Mr. Stupendous" and who the crowd seems to like in the way crowds like underdogs, which is loudly and without expectation.

Kill Buddha handles Mr. Stupendous in two rounds. The four arms come out, the rotation happens, the grappling is clinical and efficient and completely without showmanship. Kill Buddha doesn't play to the crowd. Kill Buddha doesn't play to anyone. Kill Buddha fights the way you fill out a form - completely, correctly, without personality. Mr. Stupendous, for what it's worth, doesn't seem to mind. It's all good, clean fun. With gambling.

Except. The ASL trash talk is back. Maggie is next to me and Maggie's eyes are tracking Kill Buddha's hands between exchanges, catching the signs that the crowd can't read.

"What are they saying?" I ask, during a break in the action.

Maggie's face screws up. "It's - okay, it's hard to translate because some of it is really idiomatic and I think they might be using some signs I don't know, but the general vibe is, um. Condescending encouragement? Like, 'good try, you almost had me, keep at it, sport.' But mean."

"Condescending encouragement," I repeat.

"Like if your gym teacher was also a bully," Maggie clarifies.

Kill Buddha wins by submission. Mr. Stupendous taps out after KB gets all four arms wrapped around his extended right arm in a configuration that looks like it was designed by someone who studied anatomy for the specific purpose of finding out how many directions an shoulder doesn't go. The crowd applauds. Kill Buddha stands, folds the extra arms away, and climbs out of the ring without acknowledging anyone.

basically, i think i remember that it's a spider-man video game where the conceit is that. it's a spider-man video game. as in. you are not peter parker, you are entering into this world that is like. devoid a peter parker? and either possessing the existing peter or sort fo injecting your own self insert, i really can't remember the details, but it focused around this girl named jenny temple. i remember that i (the viewpoint character) was staying at her house for a while for dream reasons not adequately explained, but she had a big family with two moms and a dad for ??? dream reasons but if you asked me to justify it probably a weird divorce process, and her grandma, and siblings, it was a whole big multigenerational thing. AH the spider-man stuff came after and is leaking into the front of the dream let me try to drill down to the core.

you and jenny both play the same online video game. thinking about it may have been influenced by my playing of warframe because the movement was very warframe like. same MMO. you are internet friends and then you get to stay at jenny's house. then jenny dies. there was a whole part in the middle about me having a nervous breakdown because i had to leave her loving family home. anyway, so, the online game was literally cursed with creepypasta shit and it turned out jenny was a character from inside the game that was getting like inserted a level up, sort of serial experiments lain style? and she disappeared because the game was just reclaiming her and everyone in the air quotes "real world" forgot about her because she was always just an NPC in the literal sense. but then the day time looped and it became clear to me, not in like a "the goal of the video game" sense but like a *moral* sense that it was my duty to save jenny before the day ended, because i had fallen totally head over heels in love with her, because she was just very kind and pretty and like. nice.

anyway. so. we are in "base dream", jenny is from one level down, inside the video game in base dream, which had a very sort of spiderman/warframe kind of movement, ok? but the vibe is also a little summer wars too.

anyway so part of it involved showing jenny like. the creepy ARG video that was like "yeah so we investigated this trailer for the next expansion pack and it's referring to some person named jenny who we figured out is this npc in this random neighborhood named jenny temple and how she needs to "come home now"". and so i had to have the conversation with jenny - every day, because she kept forgetting - that she was an NPC from a video game and more importantly that i was trying to figure out a way to get her to be real real.

and THEN the spider-man stuff started adding into it. i do remember that there were a couple of notable bosses. iron man. captain america. you were being framed for something and it was a very new canon. i am not sure if this is a different dream that got stapled onto the jenny dream or not but they sort of blurred together into my head and i wrote up thinking "i should write a worm-style spiderman ratfic". so. that's where that went. OH and there was a crossover with whichever comic family spawn and the violator are from. they were there too.