Who hears the listener?

You send people to space to save the literal entire world and you still don't trust them to dispense their own drugs

Captain America Comics #1

Marvel, 1941

Cover by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, who were also the primary creators in the interior.

BUT you can’t tell me Mr “gave up his soul for his city, his humanity for Karlach, and already resigned to going to the hells” wouldn’t do it all again in a heartbeat. At least it’s a form that he can choose this time.

The man is passively suicidal and doesn’t value his own safety. You cannot convince me any of that changed over the course of the game. All of Wyll’s big reveals (finding out he can be sent after people who weren’t evil on a technicality, that Balduran wasn’t a hero, that everything his father was training him for built up to a pile of bones who doesn’t see his worthiness or even acknowledge him properly then tries to kill him, that the cost of his freedom is his father’s life and soon he will have no powers with which to help others OR his only friends reaffirm that his happiness comes secondary, plus his “friend” potentially sleeping with his ABUSER!!!) would only stir his resolve, pushing him to be the hero who will make up for these shortcomings whether his or others. The Blade of Frontiers isn’t just a title, it’s a coping mechanism for the little boy that got abandoned at 17 for doing the right thing, who had to justify his father’s decision because the alternative is that his hero wasn’t perfect. Wyll has spent 7 years trying to make up for well, being him.

What have you been up to? Um well it's getting warmer so I've been having to brush my cat every day.

Like no it's not that interesting of a thing to say. But now they can respond to it. They could say, man yeah it really is heating up, I've been trying to think of things to do inside more often. Or, oh you have a cat? What's their name?

GEORGE: No, Jerry, it’s not any pronouns! I’d know if it was any pronouns! If they used any pronouns, I would’ve defaulted to “she” by now!

JERRY: Yeah, you would have, wouldn’t you.

(LAUGH TRACK)

GEORGE: Look, Jerry, please, you gotta help me. They’re gonna be here in less than ten minutes, just ask them while I’m in the room. Ten seconds, over and done with. Please.

JERRY: You want me to ask for pronouns?

GEORGE: (FALLS UPON KNEES) JERRY I’M BEGGIN’ YOU!

JERRY: …Tell me I look butch.

GEORGE: Jerry, I - I can’t -

JERRY: See, you hesitated! What is it? Is it the shirt, the hair -

GEORGE: Jerry please, we don’t have time for this! JERRY: Ten seconds to ask your new partner what their pronouns are, and you can’t spare any time to tell me what about me passes as femme? GEORGE: …The deodorant is a bit much, I mean, peach-scented deodorant -

JERRY: I KNEW it!

(Both JERRY and GEORGE turn discreetly to listen) BRICK: Oh, thank you for asking! Any pronouns are fine!

GEORGE: AAAGH!

GEORGE: She didn’t buy my story about fleeing a sudden fire.

JERRY: You’ve got to stop defaulting to she/her.

GEORGE: ANY PRONOUNS, JERRY! She/her is a perfectly valid pronoun! I could’ve had a she/her, a they/them, a xe/xir, Jerry I could’ve had it all.

ELAINE: Still, she/her for Brick? I wouldn’t have guessed, I mean, they were more butch than Jerry.

(JERRY drops his spoon in his diner soup. George and Elaine are unphased. Laugh track.)

GEORGE: So, your relationship is going SO great, huh? With Mr. Deadname?

ELAINE: Yeah, well, I’m probably gonna cut things off. I mean, I got rid of that name for a reason, yknow? Too much baggage.

JERRY: You’re jealous he was born an Elaine?

ELAINE: Look, I don’t see what’s so bad about being an Elaine! I mean, look at me, am I not the picture perfect Elaine? I was born to be Elaine. My parents didn’t know what they were THINKING not naming me Elaine, but does he care? No. Just tosses Elaine aside like an old sandwich.

GEORGE: An old sandwich?

ELAINE: Yeah, you’d toss that out, right?

GEORGE: How old?

ELAINE: I don’t know, a week?

(GEORGE sits in quiet thought)

JERRY: Maybe he’s thinking the same thing about you.

ELAINE: What do you mean?

JERRY: Well, maybe he’s been wracking his brain trying to figure out why you’d throw away a name as perfect as…

(ELAINE glares at JERRY)

JERRY: …You know.

ELAINE: No. There’s no way. With a name like that he’s lucky anyone is even interested.

GEORGE: They have a point-

ELAINE: Default back to she/her.

GEORGE: She has a point, Jerry. Not only can I not imagine Elaine’s parents picking a name like that, I can’t imagine being an adult and choosing that name. It wouldn’t be anybody’s deadname, it shouldn’t be anybody’s name. It’s just one prolonged mistake.

ELAINE: Better name than George.

(LAUGH TRACK)

JERRY: Maybe it’s the opposite.

ELAINE: What do you mean?

JERRY: Well, maybe he picked you up because he misses having Elaine in his life.

GEORGE: You don’t think he’s…?

JERRY: No, just likes the name. Maybe he realized he’s got some attachment to the name, but he doesn’t want it for himself.

ELAINE: …I could live with that.

(LAUGH TRACK, KRAMER enters in a torn green sequin dress, wig cap, smeared make up, and holding a blonde beehive wig under one arm.)

JERRY: How long did you last?

KRAMER: I didn’t even make it on. I got into a fight with Katya Zamolodchikova.

GEORGE: Over what?

(KRAMER makes some sort of KRAMER sounds and wild hand gestures, the others nod.)

(ELAINE’S BOYFRIEND enters)

- food goes from esophagus to stomach to intestine

- can eat and digest almost anything

- adaptable and can survive in many different environments

me, a specialized sanguivorous vampire bat:

- food goes from esophagus to intestine to stomach to intestine

- can only eat blood

- will die if I don’t eat for one night (unless someone vomits in my mouth)

- will die if there’s not enough humidity in the air

- will die if I exercise too much

- will become dehydrated if I drink too much

Vampire bats are the only known obligate blood feeding vertebrates. Other animals like vampire finches supplement their blood diets with other stuff, depending on what’s available. This is because blood is a terrible food to live solely on.

Blood is, first and foremost, 92% just plain water. This means to gain appreciable nutritional value from it, you have to drink A LOT. Common vampire bats drink around 20 grams of blood each night, which doesn’t sound like much unless you realize that common vampire bats weigh, on average, around 30 grams. (Several of them could fit snugly in a teacup.) That’s like if a person who weighed 150 pounds/68 kg drank 100 lbs/45 kg of fluid every night in half an hour.

This presents an issue, because vampire bats can’t just swell up into an orb and roll off when they’re done feeding- they need to be light enough to fly. So blood needs to be processed very fast by their digestive system so they can shed the water weight. This is why vampire bats start peeing within about two minutes of feeding, and continue peeing through their approximately 30 min feeding session. It shoots through their body that fast.

Peeing this much at once has consequences on the body, though. To put it briefly, while vampire bat pee is mostly clear water at the beginning of the feeding, it is dark with urea by the end. (Urea is a waste product from food that builds up in the body and is released by urine.) Because they need to keep peeing to process the blood fast and dump toxic urea from the body, their urine becomes more and more concentrated as their bodies run out of water to dilute their urine with. So even though bats may consume 2/3 or more of their body weight of fluid each night, the vast majority of which is water, they may become dehydrated.

Their high risk of dehydration is why they can’t handle dry environments, and why you don’t find them outside of tropical environments. (Really it’s a miracle these creatures can survive at all.)

Blood isn’t just a troublesome food because you need to drink a lot of it to live. It’s troublesome because even with the water taken out, the nutritional value of what remains SUCKS, no pun intended. It’s literally basically just some proteins and iron. And while that may be why vampire bats are so jacked (seriously, they’re very muscular in places most bats aren’t), it is extremely difficult to thrive on. One big reason is that blood contains almost no fat, which is crucial to most animals because it provides spare batteries- essentially, stored energy we can use if food is scarce.

A vampire bat does not have this backup. They will literally die within about 36 hours of not feeding. Even mice can live 3-4 days without food, and they normally live for two years as opposed to a vampire bat’s 12-20 years. (Depending on their environment.) Each and every night in a vampire bat’s life is on a knife’s edge, teetering towards starvation.

These bats do help each other, however, by regurgitating small amounts of blood for their hungry colony mates who haven’t found food for the night. Without this behavior I’m not sure the species would be anywhere near the populations it has now; they might not be able to thrive at all considering how desperately mothers with pups need the food. It takes most small bats about two weeks to wean their pups. It can take vampire bats up to nine months to wean their pups (though more generally it’s around four months) because their milk suffers from the same lack of nutrition as their food. They also have unusually long pregnancies (5-7 months; other similar-sized bats average around 6 weeks) for the same reason.

The energy budgeting for the vampire bats is so severe that they actually have a sharp limit for how far they can fly before they become exhausted. Vampire bats are not known to migrate or even relocate because frankly, they might end up dropping dead out of the sky.

So, to recap, each day is a struggle between life and death, the bats teeter between drinking too much and becoming too heavy to fly and/or dehydrated, or drinking too little and dying on the way back. This is a highly successful species we’re talking about here. How they’re so successful with these constraints is a mystery to me, although it might have something to do with their high intelligence.

I haven’t covered one thing, which is the structure of the vampire bat’s digestive system. So. For the vast majority of vertebrates, food goes in the mouth, down the esophagus, into the stomach and through the intestines. Let’s call the esophagus/stomach/intestine routine ABC. Vampire bats… take a slightly different route. Using these letters, their digestive order would be ACBC.

Take a look at the following diagram. An average insect-eating bat’s organs are shown on the left, while those of a vampire bat are on the right.

You may notice that things are a bit… off. Unlike practically any other vertebrate on the planet, a vampire bat’s esophagus splits into two branches. One branch leads directly to the intestines, the other to the stomach. The stomach and intestines are not connected in any other way.

The question is: why? Why this? Why do you have to be like this, vampire bats?

Naturally, the answer is in the diet again. The bat uses its intestines to pull out the negligible nutrition from the blood quickly, then sends the resulting wastewater to the stomach, which balloons tremendously even as it rapidly sends the water to the kidneys to be processed into urine. (Then later they have sludgy black poops.) Even with their fast urination system, bats only manage to shed about a quarter of their water weight by the time they lift off into a sloshy flight, weighing easily twice as much as when they left. See the “before and after” shots below.

(Both photos taken by Jon Flanders. Hey kids, contrary to these images, never touch a bat with bare hands, much less a bat that can deliver extremely deep wounds as well as the bacteria and viruses of whatever animal they just fed on. Don’t Do That™)

i don't know the etiquette for posting other peoples tiktoks but the delivery of this punchline hit me like a FUCKING TRUCK please

I nod, setting down my chalk and spellbook. “It does sound like there might have been a bit of a misunderstanding.”

“She took against me, that's what happened,” the dead girl says with a scowl. She looks about fourteen, round faced and spotty, with whisps of brown hair peaking out from under her mob-cap. Her face and her crossed arms have a tell-tale bluish tinge to them. A cholera death.

“I been here for don't know how long and never gave any trouble. Nobody ever complained about me 'till her.”

…well, that's not strictly true.

Number 12, Barclay Street has been attracting rumours of haunting since the mid nineteenth century.

Sounds of faint singing and crying in the corridors at night. Cold spots. Doors that open and close by themselves. Animals acting strangely. Harmless, mid to low-level stuff, typical for a bored teenage poltergeist.

Still, pointing that out isn't likely to achieve much, and certainly the most recent complaints of blood running down the walls, screams in the dark and paralysing night terrors seem distinctly out of character.

The ghost toes the chalk again, more tentatively this time. It stays resolutely unbroken.

She could get out if she wanted to. I'm not one of those assholes who brings out their full arsenal of wards and sigils for a first meeting with a level 2 spectre. The summoning circle will keep her in one place for as long as I need her to talk, but it wouldn't hold for a moment if she really fought against it.

I take it as a good sign that she's still here. Pouting or not, she's clearly willing to work with me.

“None of the others could do this,” she says. “None of 'em even saw me.” She looks up. “Are you here to exise me?”

“Exorcise,” I say instinctively, and curse myself when she flinches. “Sorry, no, no! I don't exorcise people from their homes without good reason, not if they're happy where they are.”

“I was happy. Till she started calling in all them ghost hunters.”

Mrs Delaney had been quite persistent in her attempts to 'fix' her haunted house. Most of the people she found were charlatans, of course, but I'd still arranged an appointment as fast as I could once word reached me. It wouldn't have been long before she happened upon somebody with Talent, and unfortunately not everybody in this field knows how to behave like a professional.

“I think we might be able to help each other,” I say, careful to keep my voice calm and level.

“Don't see how. Not unless you can exorcise Her.”

“Not quite what I had in mind.” I pull out my phone and scroll through my photos. “You say that you're not the cause of the most recent incidents of paranormal activity?”

A pause. The ghost gnaws on her lip. I wait, patiently, keeping my body language open and nonthreatening. “I… I knocked her coffee cup over,” she admits at last. “She was being mean and talking on her telephone, saying I done all these things when I never did! So I decided to show her what I could do if I wanted.”

“Hmm.” The ghost eyes me nervously, as if expecting me to pull out a book, bell and candle and banish her on the spot.

“I only tipped it,” she adds. “I didn't break it or nothing!”

“You shouldn't have touched it at all,” I say sternly. “But… I can appreciate that you were frustrated, so let's say no more about it.”

The ghost looks relieved.

“My point is,” I continue, “if you weren't the one making blood rain from the ceiling or tormenting people in their sleep, then what was? There's no other ghosts on the property.” I find the picture I was looking for. “You can get anywhere around the house, right? Including behind the furniture and in the backs of cupboards?”

“Yes'm.”

I hold the phone up so that she can see the picture on the screen. “I'm going to let you go free in a moment, and I need you to see if you can find anything that looks like this.”

The ghost wrinkles her forehead. “What's that when it's at home?”

"Now that I have a few spare moments I shall write a description of my cat. This black cat of mine had previously been given to the former emperor by Minamoto no Suguru, the Junior Assistant Governor-General of Dazaifu, upon his return to the capital after completing his term of office. The emperor loved the colour of the cat’s fur, which is truly beyond compare. Other cats are a light black colour, but this cat is dark black like a crow, and very much resembles the Chinese dog “Blackie.”

My cat is a foot and a half in length and about six inches in height. When he curls up he is very small, looking like a black millet berry, but when he stretches out he is long, resembling a drawn bow. The pupils of his eyes sparkle, dazzlingly bright like shiny needles flashing with light, while the points of his ears stick straight up, unwaveringly, looking like the bowl of a spoon. When he crouches he becomes a ball without feet, resembling a round jade taken from the depths of a cave. My cat moves silently, making not a single sound, like a black dragon above the clouds.

By nature he has a preference for Taoist-style health practices and instinctively follows the “five-bird regimen.” He always keeps his head and tail low against the ground. But when he arches his back, he extends some two feet in height. His fur is lustrous, perhaps on account of his Taoist health practices. He is good at catching mice at night, better at it than other cats.

The former emperor enjoyed the cat for several days and then gave him to me. I have cared for him now for five years. Every morning I give him milk gruel. It is not simply that I am impressed by the cat’s many talents; I have felt particularly keen to lavish the utmost care upon him, however insignificant such a creature may really be, because he was given to me by the former emperor. I once said to the cat, “You possess the forces of yin and yang and have a body that is the way it should be. I suspect that in your heart you may even know all about me!” The cat heaved a sigh, raised his head, and stared fixedly at my face, seeming so choked with emotion, his heart so full of feeling, that he could not say a thing in reply."