From Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License ===== In a 1910 prologue, an unnamed missionary (played by Barbara King) is kidnapped by native Bokor (sorcerers) to be sacrificed under a full moon. The Bokor tie her between two posts, whip her, then carry her to a stone altar where they decapitate her. The ceremony is interrupted, however, by soldiers who shoot all the participants. Unnoticed in the melee, a Shedim (demon) takes possession of the woman. Years later, Professor Jonathan Grant (played by Jack Taylor) commands a safari investigating the disappearance of elephants in West Africa. Amongst the explorers are a "great white hunter," Rod Carter (played by Simón Andreu), two blonde women (Elisabeth, played by Maria Kosti, and Carol, played by Loli Tovar), and a mulatto woman, Tunika (played by Kali Hansa). Elizabeth's father financed the expedition. They stumble across the clearing where the natives had performed their Vodoun rituals before being wiped out in colonial times. Carol decides to take some photographs of the altar for a magazine article. They decide to camp nearby. That night, Carol returns to the clearing to take some more atmospheric photographs. The former missionary, now dressed in leopard skins and with feline-like canine teeth/fangs, emerges from the surrounding jungle and subdues her. The long-dead Bokor, resurrected from their burial mounds, recreate the ceremony from the prologue. Carol is whipped and decapitated. The remaining Europeans search for Carol the next day, but discover only her camera. That night, Carol, now also dressed in leopard skins, joins the other leopard-woman. Together, they sneak into the camp. The brunette kills Professor Grant and destroys the photographs from Carol's camera which he had been developing. The distraught Liz had taken sleeping pills when no one could locate her friend, and is groggy when Carol appears in her tent. "Elizabeth, it's me, your best friend Carol." "We thought you'd been lost in the jungle..." "It's just as well. Come!" The two blondes leave the camp and join the other leopard-woman in the jungle. Just as Liz realizes what they are going to do, the two leopard-women plunge their fangs into her neck. In Liz's struggles, the original leopard-woman is knocked down and the choker she wears to fasten her neck together splits. Her severed head rolls free and she perishes as blood gushes from her neck. After another fruitless day of searching, Rod and Tunika make plans to depart. That night Carol is joined by the demon-possessed Elizabeth, also dressed in leopard skins, her new fangs gleaming in the moonlight. They abduct Tunika, take her to the ceremonial clearing, place her on the altar, and use their sharp fingernails and fangs to bloody her. As they place the leopard skins across her shredded flesh, Rod emerges from the jungle and shoots them both. He tosses his ammunition belts into the ceremonial fire, and the random shots kill the resurrected Bokor. In the confusion, he picks up Tunika and carries her to a jeep. They make their escape, and Tunika tells him she’s "feeling much better already" in the breathy voice of the Shedim. ===== Dr. Simon Kress' (Beau Bridges) research for the government on Martian life is aborted because one of his specimens escaped his lab and almost made it to the surface. However, Kress does not agree with the abandonment of the project and decides to continue his experiments in his barn. He steals some sand containing Martian eggs from his lab and creates a makeshift incubator to hatch more of the Martian lifeforms. Kress' obsession with the project causes his relationship with his wife Cathy (Helen Shaver) to break down. The family dog, Cowboy, gets eaten after stepping into their territory, having been awoken by their digging. The sandkings evolve into two distinct groups, a white group and a red group, and they settle on opposite sides of their glass enclosure. Kress comes to believe that he is a god to his sandkings when the white group builds a sand structure that resembles his face. He smashes the sand structure of the red group who did not do the same, one of them getting loose and stinging him. He kills his former supervisor Dave Stockley (Kim Coates) by tossing him into the enclosure, where the sandkings then devour him. Later, he finds himself in the basement with the red sandkings, who have made a nest with the face of Stockley. He breaks a gas pipe to cause an explosion in an attempt to kill all of the sandkings. In the ending of the episode, a colony of sandkings is shown surviving in the wilderness. ===== The novel is divided into two parts. ===== Interstellar warrior Shep Ramsey (Hulk Hogan) is on a mission to capture intergalactic despot General Suitor (William Ball). The general has kidnapped President Hashina, the ruler of an entire planet. Shep boards Suitor's flagship but is unable to rescue Hashina, who is killed by Suitor. Wounded by Hashina in the process, Suitor transforms into a berserk reptilian creature. Shep barely escapes, but is able to blow up the ship as he does so. Due to his failure to save the President, Shep's superior officer (Roy Dotrice) suggests that he is "stressed out" and should take a vacation. Annoyed, Shep accidentally smashes his control systems and is forced to crash land on Earth, where he realizes he will have to stay until his spaceship repairs itself. Shep has little knowledge of Earth's customs, and his temper and sense of justice cause problems with everyone he meets, especially a mime artist he tries to help in various comical fashions, such as freeing him from his 'invisible box'. Charlie Wilcox (Christopher Lloyd) is a weak-willed architect working for the fawning and hypocritical Adrian Beltz (Larry Miller). His wife Jenny (Shelley Duvall) unsuccessfully encourages him to stand up for himself and tell Charlie to ask Beltz for a raise since the bills are now very expensive. Charlie went to ask for a raise to Beltz, but he chickened out. In order to help out financially, she rents out Charlie's hobby shed as a vacation cabin, which Shep leases. Shep's appearance and behavior make Charlie nervous, and he begins to spy on his guest. He soon discovers Shep's advanced equipment and begins experimenting with it, not knowing that the power sources are traceable and its whereabouts tracked by Suitor's men. They send a pair of intergalactic bounty hunters after Shep. Shep also requires several rare crystals to fix his ship, the closest samples of which can be found in Beltz's office. Charlie helps Shep get into his boss's office during a company party before the bounty hunters corner them. After winning a furious fight, Shep and Charlie head home to repair the ship. After the bounty hunters' defeat, Suitor, who has escaped the destruction of his ship, arrives on Earth. He takes Charlie's family hostage, forcing Charlie to lead him to Shep. Suitor begins torturing Shep, enjoying himself before he intends to kill the warrior. Finding his courage, Charlie injures Suitor, who then turns into his monstrous form. Physically outmatched, Shep is forced to set his ship to self-destruct. He and Charlie manage to escape the ship's explosion, which destroys Suitor for good. Shep leaves Earth using the bounty hunters' ship. He takes Beltz's secretary, Margie, with him, hoping for a quiet family life. Charlie, however, has become bolder from his experiences; he appears in Beltz's office the following morning, shouting at his boss in front of witnesses, and finally quits his thankless job even after being loyal to him and not without raise or promotion. Later, Charlie solves his final problem by using one of Shep's weapons to destroy an annoying set of traffic lights that never changed at the right time, receiving cheers from the other motorists. ===== Charley Varrick is a crop- duster and former stunt pilot. Charley, his wife Nadine, longtime accomplice Al Dutcher, and youngster Harman Sullivan, rob a bank in the rural community of Tres Cruces, New Mexico. While Nadine waits in the getaway car, the heavily disguised Charley and his two accomplices draw their guns and begin the heist. A police officer passing by recognizes the getaway car. When the officers approach Nadine, she shoots at them, killing one instantly and seriously wounding the other, but the second officer returns fire, wounding her. The melee outside distracts the robbers, enabling the bank guard to kill Dutcher. Sensing that the bank manager is concealing something, Charley forces him to reveal two large satchels of cash. Charley, Harman, and Nadine flee, but Nadine dies soon thereafter. Charley and Harman swap vehicles and prepare to blow up the getaway car, with Nadine's body inside. They are stopped by another police officer, but before he can search their van, the explosion goes off and the officer races away. When they count the money, it totals $765,118, much more than expected. After a local news broadcast reports that only $2,000 was stolen, Charley says the bank must be involved in a money laundering operation. He warns Harman that the Mafia will pursue them relentlessly and that their only chance of surviving is by laying low and not spending the money for three or four years, but Harman insists that he should be free to spend his share on women and good times. Meanwhile, Maynard Boyle, president of the bank, dispatches tall, burly hitman Molly to recover the money. Realizing that Harman's rashness will get them both killed, Charley double- crosses him. Charley knows that he, Nadine, and Harman all had dental work done recently, so he breaks into the dentist's office, stealing his and Nadine's X-rays and swapping Harman's for his. To obtain passports, Charley contacts Tom, an old accomplice of Dutcher, who directs him to local photographer Jewell Everett. He has his photograph taken, but he also gives her Harman's driver's license, thereby ensuring that Molly will find Harman. Tom immediately informs on Charley. Jewell also betrays Charley, but he never returns for the passports. Molly arrives at Charley's trailer and tortures Harman to get information about the money, then beats Harman to death. Boyle meets secretly with Tres Cruces bank manager Harold Young, advising Young that his Mafia superiors will suspect that the robbery was an inside job, because it occurred during the brief period when the money was there. He suggests that Young will be tortured. Young, terrified, commits suicide. Charley purchases dynamite, then flies to Reno, where he has flowers delivered to Boyle's secretary, Sybil Fort, so he can identify her and follow her home. He seduces Fort in her apartment. Fort warns Charley not to trust her boss. Charley then contacts Boyle, offering to return the money. He arranges a meeting at a remote automobile wrecking yard and insists that Boyle come alone. Charley overflies the wrecking yard and spots Molly's car. After landing, Charley hugs the confounded Boyle, acting overjoyed; Molly falls for the ruse and assumes that Boyle is Charley's accomplice, so he runs Boyle down with his car, killing him. Molly then chases Charley, who tries to fly away, but Molly damages the crop-duster's tail with his car and the aircraft flips over. Trapped in the wreckage, Charley tells Molly that the money is in the trunk of a nearby car. However, Charley had flipped his aircraft on purpose. When Molly opens the trunk, he sees Harman's body, wearing Charley's wedding band, and the bank satchels; an instant later, he is killed by a booby trap. Charley throws a wad of hundred-dollar bills toward the burning car, then, after a couple of false starts, drives away. ===== In Moscow, SVR director Sergey Golovko survives an attack on his way to work, when a car identical to the armored white Mercedes that he was in was shot with an RPG-7, killing the occupants (one of them a former KGB agent turned pimp) inside. Investigation of the incident by Russian police and later intelligence officers points out to involvement from Chinese intelligence, and that Golovko was the real target. After the failed attempt on the SVR director's life, the Chinese later plot to assassinate the Russian president, but their agent, also a former KGB officer, was arrested by the FSB. Meanwhile, U.S. President Jack Ryan gives Taiwan diplomatic status, which is implied as retaliation to China for secretly assisting in previous plots by Japan (Debt of Honor) and Iran (Executive Orders) against the U.S. Months later, during trade negotiations between the U.S. and China in Beijing, a CNN crew witnesses the murders of the Papal Nuncio to the country and a Chinese Baptist minister, when the two attempt to stop Chinese authorities from performing a forced abortion on one of the latter's followers. Two days later, police officers brutally break up a prayer service led by the Baptist minister's widow in their home, who had been outraged that her husband's body was cremated and dumped into a river without her permission. International outrage over the incidents leads to a boycott on Chinese-made products. With its economy already struggling due to recent military expansions, the country hastens its planned invasion of Siberia to access newly discovered oil and gold fields. Ryan persuades NATO to admit Russia, and promises assistance against China to the Russian president. When the Chinese enter Siberia, the Russians repel their invasion force with help from the United States, causing heavy casualties on the Chinese side. The U.S. Navy attacks the Chinese mainland's coastal defenses and destroys much of the Chinese navy's aging fleet while it lies in port. F-117 Nighthawks destroy railroad bridges in Harbin and Bei'an with GBU-27 Paveway IIIs, seriously damaging Chinese lines of communication for their army in Russia. Ryan later decides to broadcast CNN's coverage of the war, plus direct feeds from U.S. reconnaissance drones, over a CIA website to counter the Chinese government's propaganda about the war's status and purpose. Beijing's increasingly desperate leaders decide to ready their ICBMs for a potential launch. A joint NATO-Russian special operations team led by Rainbow operative John Clark is dispatched to destroy them. The team destroys all but two of the Chinese missiles. Of the two that launch, one is shot down by an AH-64 Apache while the second heads toward Washington, D.C. Ryan's family is evacuated, but Ryan himself decides at the last minute to stay behind on board a docked naval ship, the USS Gettysburg, which is equipped with the experimental Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System. Ryan watches as the ship destroys the ICBM at the last possible moment. News footage of the ICBM's interception was later streamed through the CIA website. A thousand miles away in Beijing, a group of Chinese students, spurred on by what they have witnessed through the CIA website, march through Tiananmen Square and invade a Politburo meeting, setting the stage for an overthrow of the government. A reformist Politburo member, Fang Gan, takes over and arrests the rest of the Communist leadership, ordering an immediate withdrawal of Chinese forces from Siberia. Fang then holds an open discussion with student leaders that starts China's transition to democracy. The country then orders a unilateral ceasefire from the war with Russia. ===== The narrator (who never identifies himself by name) is a college professor and a relatively unsuccessful author of historical novels. While doing research in Vienna, Austria, he met Utch, an orphaned survivor of the German occupation and the Russian siege at the end of World War II. At the opening of the novel, the narrator and Utch are married with two children and live a relatively placid existence until, at a faculty party, they become acquainted with Severin Winter, a Viennese-born professor of German and coach of the school's wrestling team, and his wife Edith, a WASP from a privileged background (she met her husband in Vienna while on a buying trip for MOMA) who is an aspiring fiction writer. The narrator begins a mentor-protégé relationship with Edith, and soon the couples are sharing dinners and play dates with their children. As the narrator becomes more attracted to Edith, and Utch begins to fall for Severin, the couples begin trading spouses for sexual encounters at the end of their dinner dates. At first the affairs proceed smoothly, with emotional conflict submerged beneath sexual curiosity, but soon enough, obsessive love rears its ugly head, and the narrator begins to discover that the Winters have not been entirely honest with him and his wife about their motives for entering the affair. It is ultimately revealed that sometime prior to the events of the novel Severin had an affair with a teacher at the school, and when Edith discovered this she became furious and depressed. In an attempt to provide her with some emotional leverage against him, Severin arranged for Edith to become sexually involved with the narrator, while he himself would sleep with Utch. This foursome soon thereafter fragments; Severin and Edith are able to repair their relationship and forgive each other for the pains they have inflicted on one another. The narrator and Utch, however, are a different story. The narrator had developed genuine feelings for Edith, and while she did seem to reciprocate them, at least to a small degree, he is left despondent after she ends their liaison to salvage her marriage to Severin. For her own part Utch had fallen completely in love with Severin, and she is left devastated upon learning he did not feel the same for her. Utch leaves and takes their children with her, returning to her native Austria to sort out her feelings; she also takes her husband's passport so he cannot follow her. Edith and Severin likewise move to Austria, though it is revealed through letters that Utch writes her husband that she and the Winters do not interact with each other. The novel ends with a small bit of hope for the narrator and Utch when she mails him his passport, indicating she is now ready to mend their relationship. The sport of wrestling featured prominently—the novel's title refers to the 158-pound weight class, which Severin considers the most elite competitive weight—and a subplot eventually emerges involving Winter's protégé, a peculiar wrestling prodigy from Iowa who transfers to Winter's college because of its superior biology department and becomes a pawn in the fallout of the two couples' swinging relationship. ===== Wild Style takes place in 1981 in New York and centers around graffiti artists, Zoro (played by Lee Quiñones) and his encounters with an uptown journalist named, Virginia (played by Patti Astor). More so than its story, however, the film is notable for featuring several prominent figures from early hip hop culture such as Busy Bee Starski, Fab Five Freddy, The Cold Crush Brothers and Grandmaster Flash. Throughout the movie there are scenes depicting activities common in the early days of hip hop. These include MCing, turntablism, graffiti and b-boying. The film demonstrates the interconnections between music, dance and art in the development of hip hop culture. ===== Travelers near Zambezi are being killed, apparently by leopards. The commissioner (Dennis Hoey) asks Tarzan to look into the matter. Tarzan immediately doubts that leopards are the problem. At the same time, Tarzan, Jane, and Boy take in Kimba, a boy who claims to have become lost in the jungle. Kimba (Tommy Cook) is the brother of Queen Lea, leader of a leopard cult. She has dispatched him to spy on Tarzan. Queen Lea also conspires with Ameer Lazar (Edgar Barrier), a Western-educated doctor who resents the West's domination of the area. Kimba has a goal of his own: to take the heart of Jane (Brenda Joyce) a deed that would make him a warrior in the eyes of the cult. The Leopard Men wear leopard skins that form a cowl and cape, with iron claws attached to the back of each hand. Queen Lea (Acquanetta) wears a headband, wrist bands, ankle bands, halter top and miniskirt made of leopard skin. As "Variety" put it: "She displays plenty of what it takes to stir male interest and handles her acting chores adequately." She works her followers into a frenzy in an underground chamber, "These skins are your disguise. These claws are your weapons. Go not as men, but as leopards. Go swiftly, silently." They attack a caravan bringing four teachers (Iris Flores, Lillian Molieri (Miss Central America of 1945), Helen Gerald and Kay Solinas) and bring the maidens back for sacrifice. They also capture Tarzan, Jane, and Boy. Tarzan brings down the roof of the cavern, destroying the cult and rescuing his friends. The plot is summed up by these lines spoken by Tarzan (about Cheeta): :"If an animal can act like a man, why not a man like an animal?" ===== ===== Alex Schlotsky (Alex D. Linz) is a 14-year old freshman at Philadelphia Hebrew Academy, where he and his friends are on the school's struggling basketball team, the Lions. Without a good coach and with a dream of winning the Liberty Tournament and defeating their school's rivals, the Warriors, Alex and his friends are determined to find their own Judah Macabee to coach their team. During one day of practice at a local park, Alex finds what he believes is their coach—Lamont Carr (Richard T. Jones), a college basketball star whose knee injury prevented him from getting to the NBA. After interrupting his practice, Alex and Lamont don't get off to a good start. The next day, however, Alex offers to pay Lamont to coach their team for a while: Lamont reluctantly agrees. During the boys' first days of practice under Lamont's coaching, they become exhausted and frustrated with his coaching style, but an intervention by Alex inspires Lamont to help the team love the game of basketball. During the days leading up to the tournament, there are many hurdles Alex and Lamont must overcome—throughout the movie, Lamont is homeless after leaving his wife and son in Virginia with the hopes of being signed by the Philadelphia 76ers: Alex must balance his mother's desire for him to become a doctor as opposed to a basketball star. Also, among the challenges they must face is the school's principal, Mrs. Klein, who tries to see if Lamont is safe to be with the players. This leads to her one-day trying to inconspicuously follow Lamont to where he goes in his van after practicing. With Alex knowing this and also knowing that Lamont is homeless, he tells him to go to a modern apartment complex where his dad is trying to get a tenant for a room he owns. While Alex opens the door for Lamont, Mrs. Klein is outside the complex. Lamont and Alex's dad compromise to an agreement where Lamont can live there for free until Alex's dad can find a tenant. Later, before the big Liberty Tournament, the players are looking forward to, Lamont tells the team that he received an offer for a 10-day contract from the Philadelphia 76ers and he was going to accept it. This means the Lions must try to win the tournament without their coach. On the day of the final game, Alex finally confronts his mother and breaks through to her about his love for the game and she ends up convincing Alex's best friend Julie to forgive him. However, the Lions have been successful, winning every game in the tournament. While the game is going on, Alex's mother drives Julie to the game, then goes to the stadium where Lamont is playing a game to try to convince Lamont to come to their game despite the fact that his van has broken down before he can leave for the airport. Once she arrives, she speaks to one of Lamont's opponents about Alex's dreams and understands him even more afterward. After she finds Lamont, his car works again and she finally seems to start to understand. The final game in the Liberty Tournament takes place on a stormy night, which eventually knocks out the power in the school's gymnasium. Resorting to the use of an emergency generator for the remainder of the game, the Lions and the Warriors play the duration of the game on the agreement that whenever the fuel in the generator runs out, the game will end and the team with the most points will win. The Warriors devise a plan to make sure it is them—when they are ahead in the game and it becomes clear that the fuel in the generator is moments away from running out, the Warriors call a timeout that lasts for the remaining time. The Lions are outraged and discouraged until Lamont appears in the gym and encourages them to not lose faith. The power then once again goes out in the gym, and the Warriors celebrate what they believe is their victory—until the power comes back on soon after with the generator restarting even though it is out of gas. The final moments of the game consist of the Lions catching up to the Warriors, and with the final seconds on the clock ticking down, Alex passes the ball (as opposed to his usual selfish ways), allowing them to score the winning basket. The entire school celebrates, and Lamont's wife and son enter the gym and plan to stay with Lamont, who reveals to the Lions that he plans to become their full-time coach. Alex's mother is finally convinced by him to let him play basketball and in fact, only showed up at the end of the game so she could go get Lamont's family for him while he went to help the team. The final scene of the movie consists of Alex's and Lamont's families (with Alex's mother proving to be a good player) along with Julie playing a game of basketball, while Rabbi Lewis' story of Hanukkah and its relation to the basketball game plays over the scene. ===== Dilvish is the descendant of both elves and humans, a scion of a prominent Elven house and "the Human House that hath been stricken" which lost its peerage for mixing Elven and Human blood. Hundreds of years before the main story, he comes across a dark ritual being performed by the sorcerer Jelerak who is sacrificing a human girl. He attempts to stop the ritual but is turned into stone, with his soul banished to Hell. His body became a statue, and for many decades it resided within the square of a nearby town that he had formerly saved from enemy conquerors. When this town is again in need of a hero, their citizens' plight allows Dilvish the passage he needed to escape from Hell. He returns to the world of the living with his steed, the metal demon horse Black, and a burning desire for revenge against Jelerak, but must first repulse the assault against the endangered town. Dilvish then goes to call upon the Shoredan - a cursed people bound to his family. He searches for Jelerak in the Tower of Ice and finds the sorcerer's apprentice and his sister trapped there. The two of them believe him to be a servant of Jelerak sent to kill them. ===== This is primarily a novel about adolescent despair, but one that uses devices of fantasy such as having events at different times in history influencing each other. It is said to be inspired by the legend of Tam Lin,Charles Butler, 'Alan Garner's Red Shift and the Shifting Ballad of "Tam Lim"' where a man or boy kidnapped by fairies is rescued by his true love. The author said that a piece of graffiti seen at a railway station, "Not really now not any more", became the focus of the novel's mood, and it forms the last line of the story. It took Garner six years to write. He provided three intertwined love stories, one set in the present, another during the English Civil War of the seventeenth century, and the third in the second century CE. Writer and folklorist, Neil Philip referred to it as "a complex book but not a complicated one: the bare lines of story and emotion stand clear". Academic specialist in children's literature, Maria Nikolajeva characterised Red Shift as "a difficult book" for an unprepared reader, identifying its main themes as those of "loneliness and failure to communicate". Ultimately, she thought that repeated re-readings of the novel bring about the realisation that "it is a perfectly realistic story with much more depth and psychologically more credible than the most so-called "realistic" juvenile novels." ===== The folly on Mow Cop In Roman times, Macey is a soldier with a group of deserters. He has berserker fits in which he fights like ten men, using an old stone axe. Escaping from a local tribe, the "Cats" at Rudheath, the soldiers find a stockaded Cat village at Barthomley, which they pillage, killing the inhabitants except for a young girl, whom they take as a slave. They try to "go tribal", pretending to be members of another tribe, the "Mothers", and settle on Mow Cop. This is a sacred site to the Cats and the girl is their corn goddess. The Cats mine millstones on Mow Cop and bring food as offerings. The soldiers think they have engineered a truce, but the girl poisons their food and they have hallucinations, killing themselves. Only Macey is spared, as he never touched the girl, who was raped by the others. He and the girl leave together after he returns to Barthomley to bury the axe head in the burial mound, asking forgiveness for killing the villagers. In the English Civil War, Thomas Rowley lives in Barthomley with his wife Margery. They find the stone axe head buried in a mound and call it a "thunderstone", believing it to have been created by lightning striking the ground. They intend to build it into a chimney to guard against future strikes. The village is besieged by Royalist troops, who have fought in Ireland, searching for John Fowler, the village leader who has sided with Parliament. The troops eventually kill Fowler and other men of the village. Thomas and Margery are rescued by Thomas Venables, a villager serving with the Royalists who once desired Margery. He leads them to a shanty town settlement at Rudheath and tells them to go to his family on Mow Cop once Thomas has recovered from his wounds. They take the thunderstone with them and embed it in the chimney of their new home. In the modern day Tom is a teenager living cooped up in a caravan at Rudheath with his parents. He is sustained by his relationship with his girlfriend Jan, who is leaving to become a student nurse in London. They agree to meet regularly in Crewe railway station. One day they follow an ancient path from Crewe to the village of Barthomley. Returning next time on bicycles, they go further to Mow Cop, a hill dominated by a folly tower. Here they find the stone axe head embedded in an old chimney. They decide to make it a symbol of their love. Tom and Jan have been avoiding sex, but Jan reveals that she had an affair while working as an au pair in Germany. After this, Tom becomes unstable. He insists on having sex but becomes even more self-destructive and unbalanced. He tells Jan that he has sold the axe head to a museum, as it was a valuable Neolithic artefact. Their relationship dissolves and they bid a final farewell as Jan's train leaves for London. Pieces of the three narratives are alternated in an inconsistent pattern, calling attention to their similarities beyond the landscape: themes, circumstances, visual descriptions and even lines of dialogue echo throughout. ===== Ten years prior to the game's events, President Hughes, head of the Republic of Mercies, is assassinated. The Ruth Liberian Army, a terrorist organisation lead by Roger Tense, takes responsibility for the act. The previously friendly relations between Mercies and Ruth deteriorate and war breaks out. Major powers intervene in the conflict on both sides, and the war spreads to engulf the world. A decade later, Ruth's army is at the gates of Vaxan, capital of Mercies, and the war begins to draw to a close. If the player is successful and captures Remerje, capital of Ruth, the war ends and the two countries sign a peace treaty five years later. ===== Herzog is set in 1964 in the United States, and is about the midlife crisis of a Jewish man named Moses E. Herzog. At the age of forty-seven,Herzog, p. 207 he is just emerging from his second divorce, this one particularly acrimonious. He has two children, one by each wife, who are growing up without him. His career as a writer and an academic has floundered. He is in a relationship with a vibrant woman, Ramona, but finds himself running away from commitment. Herzog's second marriage, to the demanding, manipulative Madeleine, has recently ended in a humiliating fashion. While still actively married, Madeleine convinced Moses to move her and their daughter Junie to Chicago, and to arrange for their best friends, Valentine and Phoebe Gersbach, to move as well, securing a solid job for Valentine. However, the plans were all a ruse, as Madeleine and Valentine were carrying on an affair behind Moses's back, and shortly after arriving in Chicago, Madeleine throws Herzog out, secures a restraining order (of sorts) against him, and attempts to have him committed to an asylum. Herzog spends much of his time mentally writing letters he never sends. These letters are aimed at friends, family members, and famous figures. The recipients may be dead, and Herzog has often never met them. The one common thread is that Herzog is always expressing disappointment, either his own in the failings of others or their words, or apologizing for the way he has disappointed others. The novel opens with Herzog in his house in Ludeyville, a (fictional) town in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts. He is contemplating returning to New York to see Ramona, but instead flees to Martha's Vineyard to visit some friends. He arrives at their house, but writes a note – this one an actual note – saying that he has to leave: :"Not able to stand kindness at this time. Feeling, heart, everything in strange condition. Unfinished business." He heads to New York to start trying to finish that business, which includes regaining custody of his daughter Junie. After spending a night with Ramona, he heads to the courthouse to discuss his plans with his lawyer. He ends up witnessing a series of tragicomic court hearings, including one where a woman is charged with beating her three-year-old to death by flinging him against a wall. Moses, already distraught after receiving a letter from Junie's babysitter about an incident in which Valentine locked Junie in the car while he and Madeleine argued inside the house, heads to Chicago. He goes to his stepmother's house and picks up an antique pistol with two bullets in it, forming a vague plan to kill Madeleine and Valentine and run off with Junie. The plan goes awry when he sees Valentine giving Junie a bath and realizes that Junie is in no danger. The next day, after taking his daughter to the aquarium, Herzog crashes his car and is charged with possession of a loaded weapon. His brother, the rational Will, picks him up and tries to get him back on his feet. Herzog heads to Ludeyville, where his brother meets him and tries to convince him to check himself into an institution. But Herzog, who has previously considered doing just that, is now coming to terms with his life. Ramona comes up to join him for dinner – much to Will's surprise – and Herzog begins making plans to fix up the house, which, like his life, needs repair but is still structurally sound. Herzog closes by saying that he doesn't need to write any more letters. Through the flashbacks that litter the novel, other critical details of Herzog's life come to light, including his marriage to the stable Daisy and the existence of their son, Marco; the life of Herzog's father, a failure at every job he tried; and Herzog's sexual molestation by a stranger on a street in Chicago. ===== Amar and Prem are two daydreamers with a common aim: getting rich by marrying a rich heiress, Raveena Bajaj, daughter of the wealthy Ram Gopal Bajaj. Raveena travels to India with her secretary and friend, Karishma. She's in India to find a suitable groom. The men run into each other on a bus bound for Ooty, where Raveena lives, and soon realise that they have a common goal. The two then fail at various attempts to woo the woman. Meanwhile, they decide to insinuate themselves in her house. Amar pretends to be a man who has lost his memory after getting hit by Raveena, while Prem pretends to be a doctor. The boys do not know that Raveena and Karishma switched identities. The secretary "Karishma" is the real Raveena while the rich heiress "Raveena" is actually Karishma. Raveena switched her identity because she wanted to find a boy who will love her, not her money. Nobody is aware that Ram Gopal has a twin brother called Shyam Gopal Bajaj, alias Teja. Teja is a criminal who has taken much money from Crime Master Gogo. Teja hopes to land the riches himself by kidnapping his brother and posing as Ram. He has also planted his cronies Robert and Bhalla in the household. Robert and Bhalla attempt to kill Raveena multiple times to no success. Ram arrives in India and Teja plans to steal Ram's money converted in diamonds. Ram sees through the real nature of Amar and Prem, thus declining Raveena's marriage to either of them. The duo plan to fake a kidnapping where they will heroically "rescue" Ram. Unknown to them, Teja has also planned to kidnap Ram. Teja succeeds in having Ram kidnapped. Amar and Prem go to rescue Ram, but Teja makes them believe that he is Ram and enters Ram's household. Initially, nobody suspects a thing, but the girls soon smell a rat. The boys have discovered the real identities of the girls. Prem has fallen for the real Raveena, while Amar has fallen for the real Karishma. The girls tell their suspicions to the boys. The boys tail Teja and soon find out the truth. Here, Ram tricks Teja and escapes the prison. However, the boys mistake him for Teja, resulting in Ram being imprisoned again – with Amar and Prem. However, Amar and Prem succeed in convincing Robert and Bhalla that Ram is Teja. The boys, along with Robert and Bhalla, stop Teja. Meanwhile, throughout the film, Robert and Bhalla are constantly harassed by Gogo who's demanding his money back. He soon discovers about the diamonds and kidnaps Ram along with Raveena and Karishma. At Gogo's lair, the boys try to control the situation along with Ram. In a comic standoff, the real motive of each villain is revealed. However, due to the smartness of the boys, police raid Gogo's lair, thus rounding up all the criminals. Ram gets his diamonds back and finally decides to let Karishma and Raveena marry Prem and Amar. ===== Six months after the conclusion of Cheers, Dr. Frasier Crane is divorced from Lilith Sternin and has moved back to his hometown of Seattle, Washington, in the hopes of a fresh start. Since the move, Frasier has been hosting a talk-radio show on KACL 780 AM Talk Radio as an on-air psychiatrist, alongside producer Roz Doyle. Frasier is approached by his brother, Niles, who informs him that their father, Martin, a retired police officer injured in the line of duty, can no longer live by himself. In hopes of renewing their father-son relationship, Frasier reluctantly offers to take his father in. Martin moves into Frasier's apartment but Frasier is startled when Martin brings in his tatty recliner and Parson Russell Terrier Eddie, both of which greatly annoy Frasier. Some time afterwards, Niles and his wife Maris offer to help Frasier taking care of Martin by jointly paying for a health care provider. Martin convinces Frasier to hire Daphne Moon, an eccentric immigrant from Manchester, England, who claims to be "a bit psychic", much to Frasier's disapproval. After Daphne reveals that she needs to move in, Frasier, who doesn't want more people living in his apartment, dismisses her. This leads to an argument with Martin, ending with Frasier storming out of the apartment. The next day at work, Frasier discusses his troubles with Roz, who in turn tells him the story of Lupe Vélez; she points out that although things might not go as planned, they can work out anyway. Frasier then takes his next call, only to find a remorseful Martin on the line. Frasier in turn apologizes for his insensitivity and reconciles with his father. Frasier then goes on to take a call from a woman, upset and tearful about breaking up with her boyfriend, and proceeds to tell her the story of Vélez. The episode ends with Daphne, Martin and Frasier watching TV in his apartment while Eddie silently stares at an annoyed Frasier. ===== Kate Telman is a 'level 3' executive in the Business, a vast business empire. During her sabbatical year, she comes to suspect that some of her colleagues are stealing from the organisation, and investigates. ===== In late 1969, Billy Covington (Robert Downey Jr.) works as a helicopter traffic pilot for a Los Angeles radio station. When he breaks several safety regulations by flying low, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration suspends his pilot's license. However, his piloting skills, bravery and disregard for the law are noticed by a mysterious government agent, who tells Billy that he can get his license back if he accepts a job in Laos, working for a "strictly civilian" company called Air America. It is readily apparent that Air America is a front for CIA operations in Laos. Unemployed and unable to find work, Billy takes the job. In Laos, he is introduced to Air America's unorthodox pilots and aircraft, being taken under the wing of Gene Ryack (Mel Gibson), a cynical and eccentric pilot and an arms dealer who uses official flights to buy black market weapons for his private cache. His dream, which he refers to as his "retirement plan", is to make a sale big enough so that he can afford to quit his job at Air America. The next day, Senator Davenport (Lane Smith) arrives in Laos on a "fact finding mission", to investigate rumors about Air America transporting drugs on behalf of Laotian forces. Major Lemond (Ken Jenkins) and Rob Diehl (David Marshall Grant), CIA leaders of Air America, show the Senator around refugee camps, shrines, temples, and major cities in a careful deception to hide from him that Air America is indeed transporting drugs. While airdropping livestock into rural villages in their C-123 cargo aircraft, Billy and Jack Neely (Art LaFleur) are shot down. The Pilatus PC-6 of General Soong (Burt Kwouk) arrives at the crash site and his soldiers load bags of opium on board, but leave Billy and Jack behind with Communist forces moving in. Gene and another pilot arrive and rescue them; Billy boards Gene's helicopter while the rest of the crew escape in another aircraft. Billy and Gene's helicopter is shot down on the way back, and they are captured by a rural tribe. Gene notices that the tribe is using obsolete and unreliable guns and strikes a deal to supply them with better weapons. Allowed to go free, Billy and Gene retreat to Gene's house, where Billy is surprised to discover that Gene has a wife and children. Already disillusioned with US actions in Laos, Gene convinces Billy to quit his job with Air America, but Billy wants to get even with General Soong for betraying him when he crashed. Meanwhile, Senator Davenport is losing patience with Lemond and Diehl, and demands to know who is smuggling heroin. Soon after their return to base, the pilots learn that during his search for Billy and Gene, Jack was killed and Lemond and Diehl claim that he was the ring leader behind the drug trafficking. Enraged, Billy purchases grenades on the black market and uses them to blow up the heroin factory, but guards see him running away. Davenport is still unsatisfied and demands more concrete evidence. The next day, Gene finds a buyer for his arsenal, allowing him to leave gunrunning, quit Air America, and take his family out of the country. Meanwhile, Billy accepts one more flight before he actually quits. With co- pilot Babo (Tim Thomerson), he is assigned to transport flour to a refugee camp but they are instructed to divert to a nearby airstrip for "routine inspection". Billy immediately suspects a set-up, and a search reveals several kilos of heroin hidden in the flour sacks. With his fuel gauge tampered with, Babo and Billy decide to crash-land on the same airstrip where Billy crashed a few days earlier, and use the wreckage of the previous crash to hide the smaller aircraft. Gene, on his way to make his final, largest weapons delivery, flies in to rescue Babo and Billy after wondering why Billy can't seem to keep anything in the air. Billy convinces him to respond to a distress call from a refugee camp caught in the crossfire between General Soong's men and local rebels. Gene tries to rescue the United States Agency for International Development official (Nancy Travis) in charge of the camp, however, she refuses to leave without the refugees. After some initial resistance, Gene dumps the weapons to make room for the refugees, blowing up the weapons cache to cover their escape. In the air, Gene and Billy come up with a scheme to sell the aircraft to give Gene his money back. Senator Davenport recognises the set up for what it was, and the Senator threatens to reveal Lemond and Diehl's operation to Washington. ===== The game starts with the user assuming the role of a lowly Ensign Seventh Class on the S.P.S. Feinstein, a starship of the Stellar Patrol. Overbearing superior Ensign First Class Blather assigns the player to mop decks, not exactly the glorious adventures promised by the recruiters on Gallium. In the diary provided in the "feelies", the player is on the verge of deserting ship. But a sudden series of explosions aboard the ship sends the player scrambling for an escape pod, which eventually crash- lands on a nearby planet. There are signs of civilization, but curiously no traces of the beings that once lived there. Eventually encountering a helpful but childlike robot named Floyd, the player must unravel the mysteries of the single deserted structure on the planet, Resida, and find a way to get back home. As the fate of the planet's former inhabitants becomes clearer, a time limit also imposes itself. The adventurer does not remain on S.P.S. Feinstein for long. Talking to the alien ambassador and performing the assigned task of scrubbing the floor don't accomplish much. Wandering to other parts of the ship merits demerits from Blather and an ultimately fatal run-in with the Brig unless the player returns to work. Soon, an explosion occurs and an escape pod door opens. The pod safety netting breaks the player's fall and an escape kit is produced, which proves critical to survival. With great exertion, the adventurer swims out of the pod and climbs up to a mysterious deserted base. By putting together various clues, slowly the player realizes that the nearly uninhabited island is in fact one of the last remaining landmasses on a planet on the verge of destruction. A deadly plague for which no cure existed threatened to kill off all inhabitants of the world. The inhabitants initiated a planetwide project to place everyone under suspended animation while automated systems of robots and computers worked towards finding a cure. Once the cure was found, the inhabitants could be revived. By the time the player arrives, it is clear that the project is on the edge of success, but the planet itself is on the verge of destruction. The planetary orbit has decayed, leading to massive global warming and an enormous rise in the oceanic levels. Meteorites bombard the planet with ferocious intensity, and the project to find a cure for the plague is itself threatened by the failure of the main computer and repair systems. Adding to the challenge is the fact that some of the puzzles are not solvable. Determining which ones are impossible and avoiding even trying is essential. Early on in the game, the player finds what at first appears to be the only remaining inhabitant of the island: Floyd, a childish yet endearing robot. He is both a constant source of comic relief (e.g. "Oh, boy! Are we going to try something dangerous?" when the player saves the game in his presence), and also critical in advancing the plotline. Once Floyd realizes that the ProjCon repair robot (aptly named Achilles) is non-functional, and that the Project is close to completion, he performs the ultimate sacrifice and gives his life to retrieve the vital Miniaturization Card from the Bio-lab (the mutants within kill the player if he tries to get it himself). As Floyd lies dying, the player sings the "Ballad of the Starcrossed Miner" to him (itself an allusion to the earlier Infocom game Starcross). The adventurer then uses the Miniaturization Booth to access malfunctioning Relay Station #384 and repairs the main computer by removing an offending speck of dust with a laser. After defeating a giant microbe, the adventurer is informed that the primary Miniaturization Booth is malfunctioning and is rerouted to the Auxiliary Booth. Unfortunately, this puts a room full of mutants between the player and the endgame. With a biomask and the help of the Laboratory's poison gas system, the player makes it through the Bio-lab but emerges with the mutants on his tail. However, the adventurer makes it to the Cryo-Elevator which is hidden behind a mural. The elevator takes the adventurer to a secret room where the survivors of the infection were cryogenically frozen, just as the entire facility staff is reanimated by the antidote discovered by the ProjCon Computer. The adventurer is proclaimed a hero, Floyd is repaired, and Blather is demoted. There are 41 ways to die. The adventurer must sleep in a Dormitory each night and eat when hungry. Taking more than a few days causes the adventurer to succumb to the infection which apparently has ravaged the facility unless the antidote is obtained at the underground site. But even taking the antidote only buys a little time as the planet is nearing its sun. To achieve the optimum ending, the adventurer also must repair the three Planetary systems: the Communications System, the Planetary Defense System, and the Course Control System. ===== The game's plot begins with a military spaceship crashing to Earth in an unknown location, leaving the craft's controlling artificial intelligence or AI damaged. This AI, known as the "Operator" or "Melissa", is not alone; other AI programs share its system. In an effort to survive and contact any surviving allies, Melissa transfers herself to a San Francisco-area web server, which happens to host a bee enthusiast website known as I Love Bees. To the distress of Dana Awbrey, the website's maintainer, Melissa's attempts to send signals began to appear largely as codes, hidden in images or other text, interfering with the operation of the I Love Bees site and corrupting much of the content. Dana, attempting to regain control over the corrupted website, accidentally erases data which comprises part of Melissa's memory. Furious, Melissa lashes out at the webmaster, obtaining pictures of her using the webcam on her computer and promising to take revenge. Alarmed, Dana announces that she is removing herself from the situation and is taking a previously planned trip to China earlier than expected. All AI units contain a program called SPDR, short for System Peril Distributed Reflex. As SPDR attempts to fix Melissa, random dumps from Melissa's memory began to spill into the website, largely detailing Melissa's history and revealing the presence of a malicious Trojan-horse virus known as the "Pious Flea." The Spider tries to erase the Flea but is outwitted, as Melissa erases the Spider instead of the Flea. The Flea continues to overwrite Melissa's programming with its own mysterious goals, with it eventually being revealed that it is actually an espionage AI more properly called the Seeker, built by the Covenant. With the assistance of other characters revealed by audio chapters, the fictional protagonists break into a secure military installation and manage to deactivate a Forerunner device which is implied to begin the firing sequence of the Halo installations. However, the price paid for the deactivation is a powerful energy transmission alerting the Covenant to the location of Earth. Whole again, Melissa sees how she has been manipulated by the Pious Flea, and returns to her time. I Love Bees ends with the Covenant invading Earth, corresponding to a major plot point in Halo 2. Due to Bungie's commitment to the development of Halo 2 during I Love Bees run, they were unable to assist 42 Entertainment with story creation, and so the ARG's story is only tangentially related to the main Halo storyline. The events of I Love Bees were, therefore, originally not considered to be Halo canon. In a 2006 interview, however, Bungie's content manager Frank O'Connor expressly confirmed that I Love Bees is part of "things that we embrace as canon."The 1UP Show: Episode 07/28/2006 , 27:49 - 27:55 References to elements of I Love Bees have since appeared in the 2006 Halo Graphic NovelAmazon.com - The Halo Graphic Novel (Hardcover) and the 2009 Halo Encyclopedia,Amazon.com - Halo Encyclopedia (Hardcover) both of which are official canon. ===== The series reveals that Wolverine was born James Howlett, the son of rich plantation owners in late-19th-century Canada. He is a sickly child who suffers from allergies, so his loving father, John Howlett, Jr., brings an orphaned girl named Rose up from the town to be his companion. The two children also often play with Dog Logan, son of the Howletts' cruel groundskeeper, Thomas Logan (who looks a lot like the fully-grown Wolverine). Readers are led to believe that Dog was the young Wolverine, but this is later revealed to be not the case. The children's friendship is spoiled by the tension between the boys' fathers centering on James' mother, Elizabeth, who went mad after her first son, John, died under mysterious circumstances years earlier. Rose later stumbles upon Elizabeth changing, and sees that she has three parallel scars along her ribs, hinting that John Howlett III had claws. James Howlett first uses his claws in Origin #2.As a result of beatings and alcohol, Dog, over the next few years, becomes increasingly like his father, and his misdeeds, including an attempted assault on Rose and the killing of James' dog, become so violent that he and his father are expelled from the manor. Thomas returns for the purpose of robbing the Howlett estate and to convince Elizabeth to leave with him (it is implied that they had an affair and that Thomas may be the biological father of Elizabeth's sons). John Howlett enters the bedroom after hearing noises. Thomas kills John Howlett with a shotgun blast in front of all three children and Elizabeth. The horror of his father's death causes James' powers to manifest for the first time, and he uses his claws to kill Thomas and injure Dog, before lapsing into shock. Elizabeth tells James "Not you too" (implying that something similar had happened to his deceased brother), rejecting him with disgust. James escapes and Rose follows him. Meanwhile, Elizabeth, surprisingly, cradles the body of Thomas Logan rather than that of her husband. After a few moments, with her shallow grip on reality shattered, she picks up Thomas' shotgun and kills herself in front of Dog. Questioned by the police, Dog accuses Rose of the killings and the fact that she fled the scene with James appears to confirm this. James is still in shock and appears to have no recollection of what happened. This loss of memory is due to Wolverine's/James' healing factor which, in effect, "healed" (by putting up a mental block) the mentally devastating traumas of witnessing his father's death, the confusion at his mother's anger towards him and the pain and surprise caused by the sudden manifestation of his claws. Rose seeks help from her aunt, her only relative, who rejects her, and even James' grandfather drives them both from the house due to the manifestation of James' powers, mentioning he has had to deal with this sort of thing before. They are given some money and take the train from Alberta to British Columbia, where they are given work in a stone quarry by the foreman, Smitty. Rose claims that her male companion is her cousin and, since they are on the run, calls him Logan to conceal his identity; though why she should choose the name of their enemy remains unexplained. Over several years James/Logan strengthens physically, to the point where he no longer resembles the sickly child he had been, although his memory is still shattered. He often goes into the woods to hunt game, typically among a pack of wolves. He quickly becomes the head of the pack, and begins using his claws to hunt. He turns down Rose's offers to tell him about his past, and reacts angrily when the subject comes up. She therefore keeps detailed notes in her diary. James becomes close to the foreman, Smitty, who, in turn, develops romantic feelings toward Rose, which she returns. He courts her with books, including poetry by William Blake and a history of the samurai (warriors whom Wolverine of the X-Men would later model himself after). Logan's public identity as her cousin makes it impossible for him to declare his own feelings for her. He seems to deal with his feelings by working hard at the quarry, and is given the nickname Wolverine by the local population, who compare his intense digging to a wolverine going after a root. He also develops a deep resentment of the camp's obese cook, "Cookie" Malone, who goes out of his way to cause trouble for Logan from the time he and Rose arrive. After years of enduring Malone's abuses, Logan eventually gives him a beating after the cook provokes an explosion in the quarry. Smitty eventually asks Rose to marry him, which she accepts, and Smitty informs her that the cage fights are a fast and easy way to earn some extra money. He asks her to leave with him, which she is reluctant to do because of Logan. Logan sees Rose kissing Smitty and, feeling betrayed, later confronts her and confesses his feelings to her, though she rejects him for Smitty after he turns down her offer for him to go with them. Just before the couple leaves to be wed, Dog comes to the bar, originally sent by Old Man Howlett, on his deathbed, to find his heir. Logan works out his violence in a series of cage fights, and confronts Smitty at the last cage fight after venting his fury on Malone, and quickly has him at his mercy. Despite mixed feelings, Logan wishes Rose to be happy and allows Smitty to defeat him purposely. After the last cage fight, Dog confronts Logan. Dog blames Logan for the events that led to his father's death and is actually there for revenge. In the ensuing fight, Logan gives Dog a beating, but as he is about to kill him, Rose is accidentally impaled on Logan's claws. Logan goes mad with grief (his healing factor throwing up another mental block due to accidentally killing his first love) and runs into the woods, where he stays for an as yet unknown amount of time, living like a wild animal. Smitty attempts to find him during this period and bring him back to humanity, but fails as Logan no longer wishes to be found. Logan would not let Rose tell him about his past, which he had forgotten anyway. Malone steals Rose's few belongings, and contemptuously burns her diary which contains the truth of Logan's past. ===== Set in a futuristic, matriarchal world of warring clans which vaguely recalls feudal-era Japanese culture, the action centers on the eponymous Spider Garden, a palace-fortress populated by concubines, human pets, and the spider- like automatons who give the Garden its name. The Garden's ruler is Shaalis the Sacred Androgyne, a seemingly immortal hermaphrodite who is referred to by the pronouns 'Hir' and 'S/He' (pronounced as "her" and "she" respectively) to denote Hir multi-gendered status. The main plot follows the socio-political intrigues between Shaalis' Metal Spider Clan and the Serpentine Sisters, Squamata and Lichurna - incestuous twins who command the rival Water Serpent Clan which is based in an aquatic palace, Hydrophidian. Caught in the middle are former lovers Sasaya Nijan, a female courtesan who enters service in the Spider Garden in order to settle a gambling debt, and Lord Verio, head of the Double Ibis Clan who, following a failed assassination attempt on the Sacred Androgyne, finds himself deposed and forced into an alliance with the Serpentine Sisters. Also appearing in the story are the Tengu, a non-human race of horse-like bipeds. Inspired by but not identical to the tengu of Japanese legend, it is implied that these creatures once held humanity in bondage in the distant past. ===== The novel is divided into four parts: Wave; Argil and Mold; Plant and Phantom; and Wake. Within these parts are chorus sections, consisting of play-like dialogue between characters, as well as Time Machine sections, which give brief histories and flashbacks of individual characters’ lives. The story takes place on Anopopei, a fictional island somewhere in the South Pacific. American forces are faced with a campaign to drive out the Japanese so that Americans can advance into the Philippines. The novel focuses on the experiences of one platoon. ===== The Moviegoer tells the story of Jack "Binx" Bolling, a young stock-broker in postwar New Orleans. The decline of tradition in the Southern United States, the problems of his family and his traumatic experiences in the Korean War have left him alienated from his own life. He day-dreams constantly, has trouble engaging in lasting relationships, and finds more meaning and immediacy in movies and books than in his own routine life. The loose plot of the novel follows the Moviegoer himself, Binx Bolling, in desperate need of spiritual redemption. At Mardi Gras, he breaks out of his caged everyday life and launches himself on a journey, a quest, in a "search" for God. Without any mental compass or sense of direction he wanders the streets of New Orleans' French Quarter, and Chicago, and then travels the Gulf Coast, interacting with his surroundings as he goes. He has philosophical moments, reflecting on the people and things he encounters on the road.The Moviegoer: Walker Percy: 9780375701962: Amazon.com: Books He is constantly challenged to define himself in relation to friends, family, sweet-hearts, and career despite his urge to remain vague and open to possibility. "What is the nature of the search? you ask. Really it is very simple; at least for a fellow like me. So simple that it is easily overlooked. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life." ===== The narrative is based on two historical figures of the late 19th century, Jean-Baptiste Lamy and Joseph Projectus Machebeuf, and rather than any one singular plot, is the stylized re-telling of their lives serving as Roman Catholic clergy in New Mexico. The narrative has frequent digressions, either in terms of stories related to the pair (including the story of the Our Lady of Guadeloupe and the murder of an oppressive Spanish priest at Acoma Pueblo) or through their recollections. The narration is in third-person omniscient style. Cather includes many fictionalized accounts of actual historical figures, including Kit Carson, Manuel Antonio Chaves and Pope Gregory XVI. In the prologue, Bishop Montferrand, a French bishop who works in the New World, solicits three cardinals at Rome to pick his candidate for the newly created diocese of New Mexico (which has recently passed into American hands). Bishop Montferrand is successful in getting his candidate, the Auvergnat Jean-Marie Latour, recommended by the cardinals over the recommendation of the Bishop of Durango (whose territory New Mexico had previously fallen under). One of the cardinals, a Spaniard named Allende, alludes to a painting by El Greco taken from his family by a missionary to the New World and lost, and asks for the new Bishop to search for it. The action then switches to the primary character, Bishop Jean Marie Latour, who travels with his friend and vicar Joseph Vaillant from Sandusky, Ohio to New Mexico. At the time of Latour's departure for New Mexico, Cincinnati is the end of the railway line west, so Latour must travel by riverboat to the Gulf of Mexico, and thence overland to New Mexico, a journey which takes an entire year (and includes losing most of his supplies in a shipwreck at Galveston). The names given to the main proponents reflect their characters. Vaillant, valiant, is fearless in his promulgation of the faith, whereas Latour, the tower, is more intellectual and reserved than his comrade. Vaillant, described as being ugly but purpose-filled, is given the nickname "Blanchet" ("Whitey") as well as "Trompe-la-morte" ("Death-cheater") for his complexion and his numerous instances of bad health, respectively. While the narrative speaks of Vaillant positively, it also alludes to his willingness to acquire (he "forces the hand" of a landowner into giving him and Latour two prize mules, Angelica and Contento, chastises the widow Dona Isabella Olivares for refusing to assert her rights under her husband's will and thereby blocking the church from its testamentary share, and goes on frank "begging trips" to acquire money) and near the end of the novel his questionable financial behaviour receives an investigation from Rome. Latour, again presented favourably, nevertheless does operate with a view to politics: he successfully canvasses donations to build a Romanesque cathedral in Santa Fe according to his own desires (he chooses the stone and brings the architect Molny from France to complete it), and bides his time to remove dissenting priests and help a poor Mexican slave- woman named Sada until he is in a position of political strength (his help of Sada is never described in the novel). The novel ends with the death of (retired) Archbishop Latour in Santa Fe: Vaillant has pre-deceased Latour as the first Bishop of Colorado after the Colorado gold rush (in reality Machebeuf was the first Roman Catholic Bishop of Denver). Near the beginning of the novel, Latour and Vaillant are saved from being murdered by the villainous Buck Scales (at whose house they have sought shelter for the night) by Scales's abused wife Magdalena. All three escape, and Scales is hanged for the murder of four of his former guests, while Magdalena ultimately serves nuns whom Latour brings from Europe and who run a school in Santa Fe. While some of the clergy already established in New Mexico are portrayed favourably (such as the Padre of Isleta Pueblo, the blind priest Father Jesus de Baca, who collects parrots), several of the entrenched priests are depicted as examples of greed, avarice, and gluttony. The priest of Albuquerque, Father Gallegos, is removed for not being devout enough (he dances and enjoys fine food and hunting), replaced by Vaillant. Father Martinez at Taos is removed for denying the necessity of priestly celibacy (and having children, although he is also described as starting a revolt and then profiting from the executions of the rebels to seize their property) and his friend Father Lucero at Arroyo Hondo (described as a miser) is also removed when he joins Father Martinez's new church (Martinez dies an apostate while Lucero receives absolution from Vaillant after repenting near death). Cather portrays the aboriginal people of the Pueblos, the Hopi and the Navajo sympathetically, including a discussion of the Long Walk of the Navajo (mentioned as a reminiscence of the dying Latour of his Navajo friend Eusabio and the Navajo leader Manuelito). Latour reflects that the removal of the Navajos was a wrong comparable to "black slavery," and the narrator describes Kit Carson's actions with the Navajo as "misguided" and "a soldier's brutal work." Cather's characters express the near futility of overlaying their religion on a millennia-old native culture. For example, while caught in a snowstorm with his native guide Jacinto (who dwells in the Pecos Pueblo, which in reality was already deserted by the time of Lamy), Latour and Jacinto are forced to spend the night in a cave sacred to Jacinto's people. Latour initially finds a disagreeable smell, and the unexplained actions of Jacinto with regard to the place make him uneasy. ===== The book begins with the death of Helen Carey, the much beloved mother of nine-year-old Philip Carey. Philip has a club foot and his father had died a few months before. Now orphaned, he is sent to live with his aunt and uncle, Louisa and William Carey. Early chapters relate Philip's experiences at his uncle's vicarage. Aunt Louisa tries to be a mother to Philip, but his uncle is coldly disposed towards him. Philip's uncle has a vast collection of books, and Philip enjoys reading to find ways to escape his mundane existence. Less than a year later, Philip is sent to a boarding school. His uncle and aunt wish for him to eventually attend Oxford. Philip's disability and sensitive nature make it difficult for him to fit in with the other students. Philip is informed that he could have earned a scholarship for Oxford, which both his uncle and school headmaster see as a wise course, but Philip insists on going to Germany. In Germany, Philip lives at a boarding house with other foreigners. He enjoys his stay in Germany. Philip's guardians decide to take matters into their own hands and they persuade him to move to London to take on an apprenticeship. He does not fare well there as his colleagues resent him, because they believe he is a "gentleman". He goes on a business trip with one of his managers to Paris and is inspired by the trip to study art in France. In France, Philip attends art classes and makes new friends, including Fanny Price, a poor and determined but talentless art student who does not get along well with people. Fanny Price falls in love with Philip, but he does not know and has no such feelings for her; she subsequently commits suicide. Bette Davis (as Mildred) and Leslie Howard in the 1934 film version Philip realizes that he will never be a professional artist. He returns to his uncle's house in England to study medicine and pursue his late father's field. He struggles at medical school and comes across Mildred, who is working as a waitress in a tea shop. He falls desperately in love with her, and they date regularly, although she does not show any affection for him. Mildred tells Philip she will marry another man, leaving him heartbroken; Philip subsequently enters into an affair with Norah Nesbit, a kind and sensitive author of penny romance novels. Later Mildred returns, pregnant, and confesses that the man for whom she had abandoned Philip never married her, as he was already married with three children. Philip breaks off his relationship with Norah and supports Mildred financially, though he can ill afford to do so. To Philip's dismay, after Mildred has her baby, she falls in love with Philip's good friend Harry Griffiths, and runs away with him. About a year later, Philip runs into Mildred again and, feeling sympathy for her, takes her in again. Though he no longer loves her, he becomes attached to her baby. When he rejects her advances, she becomes angry with him, destroys most of his belongings, and leaves forever. In shame, and quickly running out of money, Philip leaves the house for good. He meets Mildred once more, towards the end of the novel, when she summons him for his medical opinion. As she is probably suffering from syphilis resulting from her work as a prostitute, Philip advises Mildred to give up her life as a prostitute. Mildred declines and exits from the plot, her fate remaining unknown. While working at a hospital, Philip befriends a family man, Thorpe Athelny. Athelny has lived in Toledo, Spain. Enthusiastic about the country, he is translating the works of St. John of the Cross. Meanwhile, Philip invests in mines but is left nearly penniless because of events surrounding the Boer War. Unable to pay his rent, he wanders the streets for several days before the Athelnys take him in and find him a department store job, which he hates. His talent for drawing is discovered and he receives a promotion and a raise in salary, but his time at the store is short-lived. After his uncle William dies, Philip inherits enough money to allow him to finish his medical studies and he finally becomes a licensed doctor. Philip takes on a temporary placement as locum with Dr. South, a general practitioner in Dorsetshire. Dr. South is an old, cantankerous physician whose wife is dead and whose daughter has broken off contact with him. However, Dr. South takes a shine to Philip's humour and personable nature, eventually offering Philip a partnership in his medical practice. Although flattered, Philip refuses because of his plans to visit Spain. He soon goes on a small summer holiday with the Athelnys, hop-picking in the Kent countryside. There he finds that one of Athelny's daughters, Sally, likes him. In a moment of romantic abandon one evening they have sex, and when she thinks she is pregnant, Philip decides to marry Sally and accept Dr. South's offer, instead of travelling the world as he had planned. They meet in the National Gallery where, despite learning that it was a false alarm, Philip becomes engaged to Sally, concluding that "the simplest pattern – that in which a man was born, worked, married, had children, and died – was likewise the most perfect". He stops searching for happiness and decides to be content with his lot. ===== The Bas-Thornton children (John, Emily, Edward, Rachel, and Laura) are raised on a plantation in Jamaica at an unspecified time after the emancipation of slaves in the British Empire (1834). It is a time of technological transformation, and sailing ships and steamers coexist on the high seas. A hurricane destroys their home, and the parents decide the children must leave the island to return to their original home in England. Accompanied by two creole children from Jamaica, Margaret and Harry Fernandez, they leave on the Clorinda, a merchant ship under the command of Captain Marpole. The Clorinda is seized by pirates shortly after leaving Jamaica. The pirates first pretend they need to seize the ship's cargo and will refund the price of the goods taken, but when the lie becomes obvious, they menace Captain Marpole by threatening to shoot the children if he does not disclose where the Clorinda's safe is kept. The ship is ransacked, and the children are brought aboard the pirate schooner to get dinner. Captain Marpole, thinking that under cover of darkness the children have been murdered, flees the scene, unknowingly abandoning the children to the pirates. Marpole writes a letter to Mr and Mrs Thornton informing them that their children have been murdered by the pirates. The children quickly become part of life aboard the pirate ship and treat it as their new home. They are treated with some indifference, though a few crew members—José the cook and Otto the chief mate—care for them and become fond of them, and Captain Jonsen, the pirate captain himself, becomes very fond of Emily. The pirates stop at their home base of Santa Lucia (in current-day province Pinar del Río, Cuba) to sell the seized goods. Captain Jonsen tries unsuccessfully to convince a rich woman to take care of the children. During the night, José takes John, Edward, and Margaret ashore, and John accidentally falls to his death in a warehouse. He is immediately and deliberately forgotten by his own siblings. The pirate captain seems to be the last one to forget him. While drunk, Captain Jonsen makes a sexual overture to Emily. She bites his hand before anything happens, but she is frightened by the look in Jonsen's eye as he reaches for her. The author gives no explicit details for her fright, just a veiled description from Emily's point of view. Emily later suffers an injury to her leg, in an accident caused by Rachel, and is confined to the captain's cabin. Meanwhile, Margaret, who has become alienated from the other children, becomes Otto's lover and moves into his cabin. Having made no further captures, the pirates quickly take the first ship they finally see, a Dutch vessel transporting some wild animals. The captain of this ship is tied up and left in the cabin with Emily. Everyone else on the pirate ship boards the Dutch vessel to watch a fight between a lion and a tiger. The Dutch captain does all he can to get Emily to free him but is unable to communicate with her. Finally seeing a knife he rolls towards it. Emily, injured and terrified, screams but no one hears. She pounces at the last second and stabs the captain several times. He soon dies. Margaret, oldest of the children, witnesses this event. When the crew returns to the ship, the pirates mistake Margaret for the murderer and without ceremony throw her overboard, but she is rescued by other pirates heading back to the ship. The crew grows tired and scared of the children. Jonsen arranges for them to transfer to a passing steamer. Disguised as a British merchant vessel, the captain claims that some pirates abandoned the children on the Cuban shore and that he then picked them up to bring them to England. Before sending them on board the steamer, Otto instructs Emily not to disclose the truth about what has happened to them in the past months. He chooses Emily rather than Margaret, as the latter seems to have lost her sanity. Once aboard the steamer, the children are delighted with the boat's luxury and the loving treatment by the passengers, who know of the story of the children told by Captain Marpole. Despite her fondness for Captain Jonsen and the fact that she promised not to tell about what really happened, Emily quickly tells the truth to a stewardess. The pirate ship is pursued and seized by the British authorities. Back in London, the children are reintegrated into their families. They seem completely unaffected by their traumatic experiences aboard the ship, apart from Margaret who has lost her sanity. (It is hinted that she may also be pregnant.) Emily is only half aware of the crime she has committed. The younger children have distorted and contradictory memories of the facts, and after unsuccessfully attempting to extract any information from then, the family solicitor decides that only Emily should testify at the trial against the pirate crew and then only to repeat a statement written by him. Under the pressure of the courtroom, Emily breaks down and cries out that the Dutch captain died as she watched. She does not exactly say who performed the murder, but the trial's outcome is decided. The pirates are executed. The book ends with Emily playing with her schoolmates. She is so similar to them that "only God", but no one else, could tell them apart. ===== Mohun Biswas (based on V. S. Naipaul's father, Seepersad Naipaul) is born in rural Trinidad and Tobago to Hindu Indian parents and his father is a Brahmin. His birth was considered inauspicious as he is born "in the wrong way" and with an extra finger. A pundit prophesies that the newborn child "will be a lecher and a spendthrift. Possibly a liar as well", and that he will "eat up his mother and father". The pundit advises that the boy be kept "away from trees and water. Particularly water". A few years later, Mohun leads a neighbour's calf, which he is tending, to a stream. The boy, who has never seen water "in its natural form", becomes distracted and allows the calf to wander off. Mohun then hides in fear of punishment. His father, believing his son to be in the water, drowns in an attempt to save him, thus in part fulfilling the pandit's prophecy. This leads to the dissolution of the family. Mohun's sister is sent to live with a wealthy aunt and uncle, Tara and Ajodha. Mohun, his mother, and two older brothers go to live with other relatives. The boy is withdrawn prematurely from school and apprenticed to a pundit, but is cast out on bad terms. Ajodha then puts him in the care of his alcoholic and abusive brother Bhandat, an arrangement which also ends badly. Finally, the young Mr Biswas decides to make his own fortune. He encounters a friend from his school days who helps him get into the business of sign-writing. While on the job, Mr Biswas attempts to romance a client's daughter but his advances are misinterpreted as a wedding proposal. He is drawn into a marriage which he does not have the nerve to stop and becomes a member of the Tulsi household. Mr Biswas becomes very unhappy with his wife Shama (based on Droapatie Naipaul) and her overbearing family. The Tulsis (based on the Capildeo family), and the big decaying Hanuman House (based on Anand Bhavan aka The Lion House) where they live represent the communal way of life which is traditional throughout Asia. Mr Biswas is offered a place in this cosmos, a subordinate place to be sure, but a place that is guaranteed and from which advancement is possible. But Mr Biswas wants more than being just a gharjamai. He is, by instinct, a modern man. He wants to be the author of his own life. That is an aspiration with which Tulsis cannot deal, and their decaying world conspires to drag him down.Selwyn Cudjoe, V.S. Naipaul: A Materialist Reading, University of Massachusetts Press, 1988, p. 71. See also Kenneth Ramchand, "The West Indies", in Bruce King, Literatures of the World in English, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974, p. 206. Despite his poor education, Mr Biswas becomes a journalist, has four children with Shama, and attempts several times to build a house that he can call his own, a house which will symbolize his independence. Mr Biswas’ desperate struggle to acquire a house of his own can be linked to an individual's need to develop an authentic identity. He feels that only by having his own house he can overcome his feelings of rootlessness and alienation. ===== Set in an unnamed African country after independence, the book is narrated by Salim, an ethnically Indian Muslim and a shopkeeper in a small but growing city in the country's remote interior. Salim observes the rapid changes in Africa with an outsider's distance. Salim grows up in the community of Indian traders on the east coast of Africa. Feeling insecure about his future in East Africa, he buys a business from Nazruddin in a town at "a bend in the river" in the heart of Africa. When he moves there he finds the town decrepit, a "ghost town", its former European suburb reclaimed by the bush, and many of its European vestiges ruined in a "rage" by the locals in response to their suppression and humiliation during colonial times. Old tribal distinctions have become important again. Salim trades in what people in the villages need: pencils and paper, pots and pans, other household utensils. Soon he is joined by an assistant, Metty, who comes from a family of house slaves his family had maintained in the east. One of his steady customers is Zabeth, a "marchande" from a village and a magician too. Zabeth has a son, Ferdinand, by a man of another tribe, and asks Salim to help him get educated. Ferdinand attends the local lycée run by Father Huismans, a Belgian priest who collects African masks and is considered a "lover of Africa". Life in the town is slowly improving. Salim's decision to move there seems to be vindicated when he learns that the Indian community on the east coast is being persecuted, but he still does not feel secure. Mahesh says of the local Africans that "they are malins", "because they lived with the knowledge of men as prey". A rebellion breaks out and the Indian merchants live in fear. Soon white mercenaries appear and restore order. After peace has returned Father Huismans goes on a trip. He is killed by unknown assailants and nobody cares. Afterwards his collection of African masks is denounced as affront to African religion. An American visitor pillages most of the masks and ships them home as "The richest products of the forest". The town now develops into a trading centre for the region. Government agencies spring up. European salesmen and visitors arrive. Salim's friends Mahesh and Shoba become successful with their new Bigburger franchise. The new army arrives, "poachers of ivory and thieves of gold". Portraits of the President, "the Big Man", are displayed everywhere. A new section of town is built, the "State Domain", to showcase the President's vision of a new Africa. Yet buildings are shoddy, the tractors at the agricultural centre never get put to work, and much of the Domain falls quickly into disrepair. Salim calls it a "hoax". The Domain is soon converted into a university and conference centre. Salim is visited by Indar, who grew up with him on the east coast, then went to England to study and now has become a lecturer at the new institution. He takes Salim to a party in the Domain to meet Yvette and Raymond. Raymond had been the advisor and mentor of the President. Although he is in charge of the Domain, he finds himself outside the centre of power. Loyal to the President, he continues to write for him, hoping to be recalled to the capital. Salim, whose experience with women has been limited to prostitutes, is intrigued by Yvette, Raymond's much younger wife. Later, after Indar departs with the steamer, Salim and Yvette start an adulterous affair right under Raymond's eyes. Eventually the liaison breaks down, Salim hitting her and spitting on her between the legs. Raymond's attempts to please the Big Man are not successful. Instead the President publishes "a very small, brief book of thoughts, Maximes, two or three thoughts to each page, each thought about four or five lines long". Like others, Salim is forced to buy copies of the book for distribution. The local youth group displeases the President and is denounced in one of his propaganda speeches. As a result, unrest grows, corruption and extortion become more prevalent, and a "Liberation Army" forms underground. They reject the President, his cult of the black Madonna, his vision of Africa, and want to return to the "truthful laws" of the ancestors. Salim looks for a way out. He travels to London, where he meets Nazruddin. Nazruddin sold his business to Salim, moved to Uganda, left it because of persecution, moved then to Canada, left it because of its capitalistic rapaciousness, and finally landed in London, where he became a landlord. He bemoans the lack of security for honest businessmen: there is no safe place. Salim becomes engaged to Nazruddin's daughter, but soon returns to his place in Africa. Upon arrival he learns that his business has been expropriated under the President's new programme of "radicalization" and transferred to a local. Théotime, a "state trustee", is ignorant and lazy, and retains Salim as manager and chauffeur. Salim recognises that all is lost. He has hidden some ivory on his property, but, betrayed by Metty, is found out and put in jail. He is presented to the commissioner, Ferdinand, who has moved up in the administration after receiving training in the capital. Ferdinand tells him that there is no safety, no hope, and that everybody is in fear of his life: "We’re all going to hell, and every man knows this in his bones. We’re being killed. Nothing has any meaning." He sets Salim free and tells him to leave the country. Salim takes the last steamer before the President arrives. During the night there is a battle on the ship, as rebels try to kidnap it. The attack is repelled, but the attached barge, full of Africans, is snapped loose and drifts down the river. ===== As he is about to die, Porter's life flashes before him in the form of a musical production staged by the archangel Gabriel in the Indiana theater where the composer first performed on stage. He recalls the night he met his wife, Linda Lee Thomas, a recent divorcee and stunning beauty. From the start, they click and become a devoted couple. Linda is well aware that Cole is gay. Her first husband was abusive to her, but, as she confesses to him on their wedding day, Cole is completely different. Because he loves her and is publicly affectionate, Linda tolerates his extramarital dalliances. During their marriage, Cole's career flourishes. Linda begins the tradition of presenting Cole with a custom designed and engraved Cartier cigarette case at the opening of each new show. To cheer Linda after she experiences a miscarriage, the couple move to Hollywood. After an initial period of excitement, Cole's flings become too overt and indiscreet and they create tension. Cole is photographed in an amorous embrace with another man in the restroom of a gay nightclub. Both he and Linda are blackmailed into paying a large sum to suppress publication of the pictures. When he shrugs off the blackmail, she goes to Paris, leaving him bereft. It is not until Cole is seriously injured in a horseback riding accident that Linda returns to his side, willing to forgive, but still finding difficulty in coping with his extramarital affairs. She is eventually diagnosed with emphysema, and in an attempt to provide Cole with a new partner once she is gone, she introduces him to her decorator and estate advisor. The match is successful. When Linda dies in 1954, Cole is devastated. He continues working until 1958, however, until degeneration of his bad leg finally requires amputation, affecting his creative output. He never writes again, but does participate in productions of his earlier works. Cole dies in 1964 at age 73. ===== The novel, initially set in Jamaica, opens a short while after the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 ended slavery in the British Empire on 1 August 1834."Emancipation", The Black Presence, National Archive. The protagonist Antoinette relates the story of her life from childhood to her arranged marriage to an unnamed Englishman. The novel is in three parts: Part One takes place in Coulibri, a sugar plantation in Jamaica, and is narrated by Antoinette as a child. Formerly wealthy, since the abolition of slavery, the estate has become derelict and her family has been plunged into poverty. Antoinette's mother, Annette, must remarry to wealthy Englishman Mr. Mason, who is hoping to exploit his new wife's situation. Angry at the returning prosperity of their oppressors, freed slaves living in Coulibri burn down Annette's house, killing Antoinette's mentally disabled younger brother, Pierre. As Annette had been struggling with her mental health up until this point, the grief of losing her son weakens her sanity. Mr. Mason sends her to live with a couple who torment her until she dies, and Antoinette does not see her again. Part Two alternates between the points of view of Antoinette and her husband during their honeymoon excursion to Granbois, Dominica. Likely catalysts for Antoinette's downfall are the mutual suspicions that develop between the couple, and the machinations of Daniel, who claims he is Antoinette's illegitimate half-brother; he impugns Antoinette's reputation and mental state and demands money to keep quiet. Antoinette's old nurse Christophine openly distrusts the Englishman. His apparent belief in the stories about Antoinette's family and past aggravate the situation; her husband is unfaithful and emotionally abusive. He begins to call her Bertha rather than her real name and flaunts his affairs in front of her to cause her pain. Antoinette's increased sense of paranoia and the bitter disappointment of her failing marriage unbalance her already precarious mental and emotional state. She flees to the house of Christophine, the servant woman who raised her. Antoinette pleads with Christophine for an obeah potion to attempt to reignite her husband's love, which Christophine reluctantly gives her. Antoinette returns home but the love potion acts like a poison on her husband. Subsequently he refuses Christophine's offer of help for his wife and takes her to England. Part Three is the shortest part of the novel; it is from the perspective of Antoinette, renamed by her husband as Bertha. She is largely confined to "the attic" of Thornfield Hall, the mansion she calls the "Great House". The story traces her relationship with Grace Poole, the servant who is tasked with guarding her, as well as her disintegrating life with the Englishman, as he hides her from the world. He makes empty promises to come to her more but sees less of her. He ventures away to pursue relationships with other womenand eventually with the young governess. Antoinette is clearly mad and has little understanding of how much time she has been confined. She fixates on options of freedom including her stepbrother Richard who, however, will not interfere with her husband, so she attacks him with a stolen knife. Expressing her thoughts in stream of consciousness, Antoinette dreams of flames engulfing the house and her freedom from the life she has there, and believes it is her destiny to fulfill the vision. Waking from her dream she escapes her room, and sets the fire. ===== The story reflects the perspective of Nicholas Urfe, a young Oxford graduate and aspiring poet. After graduation, he briefly works as a teacher at a small school, but becomes bored and decides to leave England. While looking for another job, Nicholas takes up with Alison Kelly, an Australian girl he met at a party in London. He still accepts a post teaching English at the Lord Byron School on the Greek island of Phraxos. After beginning his new post, he becomes bored, depressed, disillusioned, and overwhelmed by the Mediterranean island; Nicholas struggles with loneliness and contemplates suicide. While habitually wandering around the island, he stumbles upon an estate and soon meets its owner, Maurice Conchis, a wealthy Greek recluse. They develop a sort of friendship, and Conchis slowly reveals that he may have collaborated with the Nazis during World War II. Nicholas is gradually drawn into Conchis's psychological games, his paradoxical views on life, his mysterious persona, and his eccentric masques. At first, Nicholas takes these posturings of Conchis, what the novel terms the "godgame", to be a joke, but they grow more elaborate and intense. Nicholas loses his ability to determine what is real and what is artifice. Against his will and knowledge, he becomes a performer in the godgame. Eventually, Nicholas realises that the re-enactments of the Nazi occupation, the absurd playlets after Sade, and the obscene parodies of Greek myths are about his life, not Conchis's life. ===== Tobacco Road is set in rural Georgia, several miles outside Augusta during the worst years of the Great Depression. It depicts a family of poor white tenant farmers, the Lesters, as some of the many small Southern cotton farmers made redundant by the industrialization of production and the migration into cities. The main character of the novel is Jeeter Lester, an ignorant and sinful man who is redeemed by his love of the land and his faith in the fertility and promise of the soil. ===== The novel centers on a wealthy family living in New Rochelle, New York, referred to as Father, Mother, Mother's Younger Brother, Grandfather, and 'the little boy', Father and Mother's young son. The family business is the manufacture of flags and fireworks, an easy source of wealth due to the national enthusiasm for patriotic displays. Father joins Robert Peary's expedition to the North Pole, and his return sees a change in his relationship with his wife, who has experienced independence in his absence. Mother's Younger Brother is a genius at explosives and fireworks but is an insecure, unhappy character who chases after love and excitement. He becomes obsessed with the notorious socialite Evelyn Nesbit, stalking her and embarking on a brief, unsatisfactory affair with her. Into this insecure setup comes an abandoned black child, then his severely depressed mother, Sarah. Coalhouse Walker, the child's father, visits regularly to win Sarah's affections. A professional musician, well dressed and well spoken, he gains the family's respect and overcomes their prejudice initially by playing ragtime music on their piano. Things go well until he is humiliated by a racist fire crew, led by Will Conklin, who vandalize his Model T Ford. He begins a pursuit of redress by legal action but discovers he cannot hope to win because of the inherent prejudice of the system. Sarah is killed in an attempt to aid him, and Coalhouse uses the money he was saving for their wedding to pay for an extravagant funeral. Having exhausted legal resources, Coalhouse begins killing firemen and bombing firehouses to force the city to meet his demands: that his Model T be restored to its original condition and Conklin be turned over to him for justice. Mother unofficially adopts Sarah and Coalhouse's neglected child over Father's objections, putting strain on their marriage. With a group of angry young men, all of whom refer to themselves as "Coalhouse Walker", Coalhouse continues his vigilante campaign and is joined by Younger Brother, who brings his knowledge of explosives. Coalhouse and his gang storm the Morgan Library, taking the priceless collection hostage and wiring the building with dynamite. Father is drawn into the escalating conflict as a mediator, as is Booker T. Washington. Coalhouse agrees to exchange Conklin's life for safe passage for his men, who leave in his restored Model T. Coalhouse is then shot as he surrenders to the authorities. Interwoven with this story is a depiction of life in the tenement slums of New York city, focused on an Eastern European immigrant referred to as Tateh, who struggles to support himself and his daughter after driving her mother off for accepting money for sex with her employer. The girl's beauty attracts the attention of Evelyn Nesbit, who provides financial support. When Tateh learns Nesbit's identity, however, he takes his daughter out of the city. Tateh is a talented artist and earns a living cutting out novelty paper silhouettes on the street. He tries working in a factory, where he experiences a successful workers' strike, but becomes disillusioned when he sees it change little about the workers' lives, although in the final chapter he still describes himself as a socialist. He starts making and selling moving picture books to a novelty toy company, becoming a pioneer of animation in the motion picture industry. Tateh becomes wealthy and styles himself "the Baron" in order to move more easily through high society. He meets and falls in love with Mother, who marries him after Father is killed in the sinking of the RMS Lusitania. They adopt each other's children, as well as Coalhouse's son, and move to California. Mixed into the interwoven stories are subplots following prominent figures of the day, including those named above as well as in the Historical figures section below. ===== Recovered from an injury, Jim seeks a position on the Patna, a steamer serving the transport of 800 "pilgrims of an exacting belief" to a port on the Red Sea. He is hired as first mate. After some days of smooth sailing, the ship hits something in the night and begins taking on water. Captain Gustav thinks the ship will sink, and Jim agrees, but wants to put the passengers on the few boats before that can happen. The captain and two other crewmen think only to save themselves, and prepare to lower a boat. The helmsmen remain, as no order has been given to do otherwise. In a crucial moment, Jim jumps into the boat with the captain. A few days later, they are picked up by an outbound steamer. When they reach port, they learn that the Patna and its passengers were brought in safely by a crew from a French navy ship. The captain's actions in abandoning both ship and passengers are against the code of the sea, and the crew is publicly vilified. When the other men leave town before the magistrate's court can be convened, Jim is the only crew member left to testify. All lose their certificates to sail. Brierly, a captain of perfect reputation who is on the panel of the court, commits suicide days after the trial. Captain Charles Marlow attends the trial and meets Jim, whose behavior he condemns, but the young man intrigues him. Wracked with guilt, Jim confesses his shame to Marlow, who finds him a place to live in a friend's home. Jim is accepted there but leaves abruptly when an engineer who had also abandoned the ship appears to work at the house. Jim then finds work as a ship chandler's clerk in ports of the East Indies, always succeeding in the job then leaving abruptly when the Patna is mentioned. In Bangkok, he gets in a fistfight. Marlow realises that Jim needs a new situation, something that will take him far away from modern ports and keep him occupied so that he can finally forget his guilt. Marlow consults his friend Stein, who sees that Jim is a romantic and considers his situation. Stein offers Jim to be his trade representative or factor in Patusan, a village on a remote island shut off from most commerce, which Jim finds to be exactly what he needs. After his initial challenge of entering the settlement of native Malay and Bugis people, Jim manages to earn their respect by relieving them of the depredations of the bandit Sherif Ali and protecting them from the corrupt local Malay chief, Rajah Tunku Allang. He builds a solid link with Doramin, the Bugis friend of Stein, and his son Dain Waris. For his leadership, the people call him "tuan Jim", or Lord Jim. Jim also wins the love of Jewel, a young woman of mixed race, and is "satisfied... nearly". Marlow visits Patusan once, two years after Jim arrived there, and sees his success. Jewel does not believe that Jim will stay, as her father left her mother, and she is not reassured that Marlow or any other will not arrive to take him from her. Her mother had been married before her death to Cornelius, previously given the factor's role by Stein for her benefit. Cornelius is a lazy, jealous, and brutal man who treats his stepdaughter cruelly and steals the supplies Stein sends for sale; he is displaced by Jim's arrival and resents him for it. "Gentleman" Brown, a marauder captain notorious for his evil ways, then arrives in Patusan, his small crew on the brink of starvation. The local defence led by Dain Waris manages to prevent the marauders from looting the village and holds them entrenched in place while Jim is away in the island's interior. When Jim returns, Brown deceptively wins Jim's mercy, who hesitantly negotiates to allow them to leave Patusan unobstructed, but reminds Brown that the long passage down river to the sea will be guarded by armed men. Cornelius sees his chance to get rid of Jim. He tells Brown of a side channel that will bypass most of the defenses, which Brown uses, stopping briefly to ambush the defenders he finds. Dain Waris is killed among others, and Brown sails on, leaving Cornelius behind; Jim's man Tamb' Itam kills Cornelius for his betrayal. Jim is mortified when he receives word of the death of his good friend, and resolves to leave Patusan. Jewel, who had wanted Jim to attack Brown and his ship, is distraught. Jim then goes directly to Doramin and takes responsibility for the death of his only son. Doramin uses his flintlock pistols, given him by Stein, to shoot Jim in the chest. On his regular route, Marlow arrives at Stein's house a few days after this event, finding Jewel and Tamb' Itam there, and tries to make sense of what happened. Jewel stays in Stein's house. ===== Gameplay (Linux) Hyperspace Delivery Boy! follows the story of Guy Carrington, a courier in training. Guy is sent by Sergeant Filibuster on several dangerous missions in four different locations. During the course of the game, Guy discovers a secret organization known as "THEM". ===== Ibn Fattouma, more commonly known by his birth name Qindil Muhammad al-Innabi, is a Muslim man disillusioned by the corruption in his home city. When he asks his teacher why a land whose people obey the tenets of Islam suffers so, Qindil is told that the answer he seeks lies far away from the city, in the land of Gebel; the land of perfection. The teacher encourages Ibn Fattouma to seek the land of Gebel, where such problems have been solved. The teacher attempted to journey there himself, but civil war in neighboring lands and the demands of family ultimately prevented him from completing the journey. Further complicating Qindil's impending expedition, no documents exist about the land and no one is known to have returned from Gebel. Qindil is determined to embark on the journey, for he feels betrayed by his mother, who remarried, and his lover, who was stolen by the sultan. He gives his farewells to his family and proceeds on a caravan out of his home city to the land of Mashriq. In this sexually libertine society, the women and men do not marry; rather, they share each other's partners. The religion of Mashriq is primitive and pagan; the moon is worshiped as a god. Qindil questions the land's customs, but he soon acculturates to their ways. He settles in Mashriq with a woman named Arousa and they have five children. Because of Qindil's insistence upon teaching his eldest son Islam, he is exiled from Mashriq and prohibited from seeing Arousa or their children again. Qindil then travels to the land of Haïra. The invasion of Mashriq by militaristic Haïra further separates Qindil from his family, and when the annexation of Mashriq is finished, Arousa is brought to Haïra as a slave, who is then bought by Qindil. The chamberlain of the god-king of Haïra desires Arousa as a wife and arranges Qindil to be jailed. Twenty years pass in Haïra in jail before the god-king is overthrown, and the chamberlain, who is also later jailed, tells Qindil to look in the neighboring land of Halba for Arousa and children. In Halba, the freedom of the individual is the most important value. All religions peacefully coexist and Halba openly encourages freedom of inquiry. The Halbans are also aggressive promoters of their philosophy of life in other nations; preparations are underway as Qindil arrives for a war with neighboring Aman. There, Qindil meets and marries Samia, an intellectual Muslim pediatrician in Halba's hospital. Qindil reunites with Arousa, who thought he was lost and had since married a Buddhist man. With Samia's reluctant approval, Qindil decides to continue his journey before war makes such travel impossible. In the land of Aman, justice is held as the most important value. To maintain order, he leaves just as Aman and Halba prepare to fight. His next stop, the land of Ghuroub, finds Qindil questioned to the depths of his being. Does he earnestly desire to go to Gebel, and why? Qindil states as he has many times before that he seeks to learn Gebel's secret of perfection in life and share it with the people of his homeland. He and the other seekers of Gebel are driven from Ghuroub by an invading army from Aman, and after months of travel, they sight Gebel itself from a mountain peak. As Qindil descends to continue his journey, the story ends leaving the reader to surmise whether or not he reached the city. ===== Vanessa Lutz is a poor, illiterate teenage girl living south of Los Angeles. Her mother, Ramona, is arrested in a prostitution sting, and her stepfather, Larry, is taken into custody on drug and child abuse charges. Social worker Mrs. Sheets comes to take Vanessa away, but Vanessa handcuffs her ankle to a bed and runs away. She takes Mrs. Sheets' run-down car and plans to go live with her grandmother in Stockton. Along the way, Vanessa stops to see her boyfriend Chopper Wood, a local gang member, to tell him about her trip, and he gives her a gun to sell upon arriving at her destination. Minutes after Vanessa leaves, Chopper is killed in a drive-by shooting by rival gang members. Later, Bob Wolverton, a counselor at a school for boys with emotional problems, picks her up on the side of the highway after her car breaks down and offers to take her as far as Los Angeles, where he is headed. Over the long drive, Vanessa comes to trust Bob, and confesses to him the details of her painfully dysfunctional life, including being sexually abused by her stepfather and foster parents. At one point, Vanessa shows Bob a photo she keeps in her wallet of her biological father (whose picture, unbeknownst to Vanessa, is of mass murderer Richard Speck). That evening, Bob attacks Vanessa and reveals that he is a serial killer of young girls – known in the press as the "I-5 Killer". He tries to kill Vanessa when she refuses to give in to him. The tables are turned, however, as Vanessa eventually pulls out her gun and berates Bob before shooting him several times and escaping. She goes to a local restaurant where her blood-stained appearance attracts attention from the patrons and staff. They call 911. Leaving the restaurant, Vanessa is arrested and questioned by two police detectives, Mike Breer and Garnet Wallace, who write her off as a carjacker, even though she insists Bob had tried to kill her and had told her about his crimes. Bob survives, but the bullet wounds have left him severely handicapped and facially disfigured. Vanessa is put on trial, with everyone believing that Bob is the innocent victim he claims to be since he has no criminal record, while Vanessa has a long record and is a veteran of juvenile detention centers. Vanessa goes to prison, while Bob and his socialite wife Mimi, who knows nothing of his crimes, are treated like heroes. Initially scared, Vanessa makes friends in prison that include a heroin-addicted lesbian named Rhonda and a brutal Hispanic gang leader named Mesquita. Vanessa plots to escape to her grandmother's house and fashions a crude shiv from a toothbrush, a skill she had learned from her stepfather. During their transport to a new maximum security prison, Vanessa and Mesquita escape after killing a security guard and they go their separate ways. While re-examining evidence, the detectives realize that Vanessa was telling the truth. They search Bob's home and find violent child pornography and human remains in a storage shed. Horrified, Mimi runs upstairs and commits suicide. Evading the police at his home, Bob travels to Vanessa's grandmother's home in a trailer park, using the address written on a picture Vanessa had showed him. Posing as a prostitute, Vanessa steals a car from a prospective john and drives to her grandmother's trailer. Vanessa finds Bob in bed wearing her grandmother's nightgown and nightcap with the covers pulled up to his nose. Bob reveals himself and Vanessa sees her grandmother's dead body on the floor. A struggle ensues, culminating in Vanessa strangling Bob. Breer and Wallace arrive and find the bodies of Bob and Vanessa's grandmother. Outside, Vanessa sits in a chair in a daze, then asks the detectives if they have a cigarette. They smile, and Vanessa responds in kind. ===== In light of her brother's unstable rule, in 182 Lucilla became involved in a plot to assassinate Commodus and replace him with her husband and herself as the new rulers of Rome. Her co-conspirators included Publius Tarrutenius Paternus the Praetorian prefect, her daughter Plautia from her first marriage, a nephew of Quintianus also called Quintianus, and her paternal cousins, the former consul Marcus Ummidius Quadratus Annianus and his sister Ummidia Cornificia Faustina.Lucius Aurelius Commodus (AD 161 – AD 192), roman-empire.net. Accessed 29 May 2012. Quintianus' nephew, brandishing a dagger or sword, bungled the assassination attempt. As he burst forth from his hiding place to commit the deed, he boasted to Commodus "Here is what the Senate sends to you", giving away his intentions before he had the chance to act. Commodus's guards were faster than Quintianus and the would-be assassin was overpowered and disarmed without injuring the emperor.Gibbon, Edward, The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire, Vol. 1, Chap. 4, Part I. Commodus ordered the deaths of Quintianus' nephew and of Marcus Ummidius Quadratus Annianus, and banished Lucilla, her daughter and Ummidia Cornificia Faustina to the Italian island of Capri. He sent a centurion there to execute them later that year. Her son Pompeianus was later murdered by Caracalla. ===== Aishiteruze Baby is a shōjo manga series that revolves around the life of Kippei, a popular high-school playboy who flirts with any girl he sees, without thinking about their feelings. His life is turned upside down when one day his aunt abandons his five-year-old cousin Yuzuyu at his house. Kippei is assigned the task of taking care of Yuzuyu for the time being, and he must learn how to become the "mother" she needs. As Kippei learns how to care for Yuzuyu, he also learns to care for Kokoro, a quiet girl at his school, who helps him out. In Japanese, is a casual, masculine way of saying "I love you" (see Gender differences in spoken Japanese). ===== In Beaufort, North Carolina, popular and rebellious high school senior Landon Carter and his friends have partaken in underage drinking on school grounds. They lure a new student, Clay Gephardt, to a factory in the hopes of "pranking" him, with the façade that this is an initiation task into their elite friendship group. However, Clay becomes seriously injured, which is brought to the attention of the school principal through law enforcement. In an effort to avoid law involvement, the school principal gives Landon the choice of being expelled from the school or completing several service projects which include weekend tutoring, janitorial duties, and participation in the school play. Choosing the latter, Landon is further acquainted with Jamie Sullivan, the local Baptist minister's daughter. He never befriended her due to the status quo at the high school, though he has known her most of his life. Landon begins to struggle with the play and reluctantly seeks guidance from Jamie, who agrees to help him on the condition that he won't fall in love with her, but Landon dismisses it as a foolish idea. They begin practicing together at her house after school. A bond begins to form between the two until Landon is rude to Jamie at school to impress his friends, and Jamie realizes that Landon wants to keep their friendship a secret from others, so she decides to distance herself from him. On the opening night of the play, Jamie astounds Landon and the audience with her voice and beauty. When Jamie finishes singing towards the end, Landon impulsively kisses her just before the curtain closes. Afterwards, Jamie avoids Landon until his friends play a cruel prank on her, led by Belinda, his resentful ex-girlfriend who wants them to reconcile despite Landon's lack of interest. In opposition to his friends, he defends her and she eventually warms up to him again. Landon asks Jamie to go on a date, to which Jamie reveals that she's not allowed to date. Landon visits the church in order to ask her father for permission. Jamie's father is initially hesitant but agrees. Their first date is a huge success, and leads to another. Their relationship strengthens as they genuinely fall for each other, and all seems well. During a date, however, Jamie confesses that she isn't making any plans for the future because she has leukemia and hasn't been responding to treatment. Jamie's condition grows worse and she gets sent to the hospital. Landon drives off to beg for help from his estranged father who is a doctor, asking him to help Jamie. Landon drives back in tears after feeling disappointed by his father's inability to help. Upon learning of her condition, Landon's friends come to him and apologize for their past treatment of Jamie and offer their support. While she is admitted, Jamie gives Landon a book that once belonged to her deceased mother and tells him that Landon is her angel. Unbeknownst to Landon, Jamie is given private home care by Landon's father to relieve her father's financial burden. Landon builds a telescope for Jamie to see a one-time comet in the springtime, and with help from Jamie's father, he finishes it in time to give Jamie a beautiful view of the comet. It is then that Landon asks her to marry him. Jamie tearfully accepts, and they get married in the church where her mother was married. Landon reflects that their very last summer together was spent as husband and wife, and that she had died soon after. Years later, Landon returns to Beaufort to visit Jamie's father, revealing that he had been accepted into medical school. Landon laments that Jamie was never able to witness a miracle, to which Jamie's father replied that the miracle was Landon himself. Hereafter, Landon expresses sorrow over Jamie's passing, but describes their love like the wind: he can't see it, but he can feel it. ===== Ippo Makunouchi was an extremely shy high school student, unable to make friends due to always being busy helping his mother run their family fishing charter business. Because he kept to himself, a group of bullies led by Umezawa got into the habit of picking on him. One day, when these bullies gave him a rather serious beating, a middleweight professional boxer who was passing by stopped them and took the injured Ippo to the , owned by retired boxer Genji Kamogawa, to treat his wounds. After Ippo awoke to the sounds of boxers training, the boxer who saved him, Mamoru Takamura, tried to cheer Ippo up by letting him vent his frustrations on a sandbag. It was then that they had their first glimpse into Ippo's talent for boxing. After that incident, Ippo gave the situation a lot of thought and decided that he would like to begin a career as a professional boxer. When he conveys this message to Mamoru Takamura, he gets verbally reprimanded: Takamura thought Ippo was taking professional boxing too lightly. However, Takamura felt that he couldn't outright refuse Ippo, especially since his feat of punching the sandbag much harder than anybody else in the gym (except for Takamura). Therefore, he challenges Ippo to catch 10 falling leaves from a tree simultaneously after a week of training, fully convinced that Ippo would fail, Takamura jogs away as he continues his roadwork. However, after a week of tough training, involving nightly hours, Ippo manages the technique in the nick of time. He waits for the jogging Takamura to come by his usual path and surprises him by catching all 10 of the falling leaves and only doing so with his left hand. This impresses Takamura greatly, and he informs Ippo that the action required to catch all 10 leaves is called a boxing jab. Takamura invites Ippo back to the boxing gym for introductions. When they got back to the gym, the coach, Genji Kamogawa, was not at all impressed by Makunouchi's lack of fighting spirit, and therefore, was challenged by Takamura to have a practice spar against a member of the gym. However, Kamogawa decides to give Ippo a severe challenge and tells him to spar with Miyata, who is 16, the same age as Ippo. Miyata is known as a boxing prodigy and is one of Kamogawa gym's future hopes. Takamura gets extremely worried with this prospect, as Miyata skill is way above the four-rounder pro boxer. As expected, Ippo loses by KO, but not until Miyata struggles dodging his punches and finally ends the match with his trump card: "The Counter". Coach Kamogawa decides that he has great fighting sense and spirit and decides to train him to eventually become the Japanese champion with a world ranking while Miyata became the OPBF (Oriental Pacific Boxing Federation) Champion. Both are expected to hit high in the rankings and, eventually, fight each other for the world champion's belt. The story focuses heavily on character development—even during the matches something is learned about both fighters. Ippo has a habit of running into his opponents before matches, giving him a chance to learn more about their backgrounds and even sympathize with them. Ippo is an extremely timid and modest person who never assumes that he is strong enough. He instead draws courage from seeing the strength of his opponent and realizing that he is able to stand up to it. Ippo and his friendly rivalry with Miyata is the main draw in the early part of the series. That later changes to Ippo's path toward the Japanese Featherweight Championship and eventually the world championship. Along the way the audience is given glimpses into the other characters' pasts, motivations, relationships to others, and current boxing trials. A colorful cast of supporting characters and opponents as well as side stories concerning their paths in the boxing world rounds out the series. ===== A very short 27-year-old teacher has an interesting time trying to teach her class. She has to deal with the eccentricities of her students as they present themselves over the school year. When you have an insane class (which includes a cross-dressing narcissist, an otaku, a dumb jock, a boy-band obsessed girl, a lesbian in love with the teacher, a homosexual in love with the jock, a guy who looks like a middle-aged man, a girl obsessed with material items and the vain rich girl), what's a person to do but hope? ===== In 1968, on the eve of the elections that will end with Richard Nixon ascending to the office of U.S. President, George Roundy is a successful Beverly Hills hairdresser, whose occupation and charisma have provided him the perfect platform from which to meet and have sex with beautiful women, including his current girlfriend, Jill, a model. Despite this, George is a 34-year-old dissatisfied with his professional life; he is the creative star of the salon, but has to play second fiddle to Norman, the "nickel-and-diming" mediocre hairdresser who owns the place. George dreams of setting up his own salon business, but cannot convince any bank to loan him the capital he needs. So he turns to his lover Felicia and her wealthy unsuspecting husband Lester to bankroll him. George's meeting with Lester supplies a second secret for him to keep from his would-be benefactor, Lester's current mistress, Jackie, who is George's former girlfriend, perhaps the most serious relationship he has ever had. Lester, who assumes George is gay because of his profession, invites him to escort Jackie to a Republican Party election night soiree, at which George finds himself in the same room as a number of present and former sexual partners. The principals adjourn to a posh counterculture party, and the night quickly descends into alcohol and other drugs and sexual indulgence. Later, Lester and Jill happen upon George and Jackie having vigorous sex on a kitchen floor. Lester is stunned into silence but when Jill recognizes the writhing couple, she throws a chair at the window and swears at George; as George tries to placate Jill, Jackie flees. George chases after Jackie and proposes to her, but Jackie tells him that she has arranged to go to Acapulco with Lester, who has said he will divorce Felicia and marry her. Jackie leaves George alone on a hilltop above her house, from where he watches her leave with Lester. ===== In early stories the duo work as freelance hit-men, taking contracts from their "fact-totem", a PDA-like device, and killing people for money. The kingpin of crime in these early stories is Holy Moses Tanenbaum. Eventually a large price is put on the head of Holy Moses himself, expecting Sinister and Dexter to take the contract he sends hit-men to kill them, after killing these they decide to take the contract, as their reputation would dictate they have to take the toughest jobs. After a battle which results in the duo both being nearly killed Holy Moses is killed and the person who put out the contract is revealed to be his wife, Demi Octavo. A brief period of gang violence follows as various gangs attempt to take control of the city's underworld for themselves. Eventually The Czar, moblord of the Russian mafia calls a conference of gang leaders in an attempt to resolve the situation and hires Sinister and Dexter as security for the meeting. During the meeting, Sinister and Dexter discover that, naturally, every single gang has made plans to assassinate the other gang leaders. After these are fought off The Czar reveals "himself" to be a robot double outfitted with a close-focus nuke in its chest cavity. With the gang leaders dead The Czar is able to take over the underworld for himself. Following the gang-war, Sinister and Dexter are hired by an accountant working for a Mr Bronsky "Ballpeen" Hammer as protection to 'expedite' the handover of the year-end accounts. The rendezvous between the accountant and Mr Hammer's men in Fred Quimby Municipal Park is violently interrupted by the Department of Taxation, causing the "Infamous Audit Showdown of '66". As a result of the carnage, Sinister and Dexter decide to take a holiday and The Czar recommends that they visit a nightclub in Asbestopol known as the Bawdwalk. At the club a pair of hired muscle known as Buddy Boom and Buddy Bing are threatening the club owner, Kilopatra, so Sinister and Dexter step in to help him and scare off the heavies, thus picking themselves up a holiday job. Kilopatra sends the pair off to pay a visit to local mob-king Philly O'Fisch, as it was he who sent the two heavies after Kilopatra. Sinister and Dexter kill the two Buddies and warn Philly off Kilopatra under threat of taking one of the many contracts that Philly has on his head. When they return from this job, they run into Demi Octavo who is at the nightclub under a pseudonym, she tells the pair that the word spread that she was the one who put out the hit on Holy Moses Tanembaum so she decided to escape Downlode. The Czar suggested that she head to the Bawdwalk, which convinces Sinister and Dexter that The Czar has set them all up. The pair invade Philly's island lair and kill him and all of his minions and return to Downlode to take out the Czar using a giant, cyborg alligator that ticks (referencing J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan). After this, Demi Octavo takes over as mob-queen and hires Sinister and Dexter as her personal guardians. Stories from now on generally revolve around them protecting her empire, though occasionally they also take contracts from other people. During this time Demi's younger sister, Billi Octavo, decides to become a Gunshark, but a misunderstanding results in her killing some respected city dignitaries. During the ensuing police chase Sinister explains the unwritten "Gunshark Code" that they never kill cops or "innocents". Later Billi hacks into the police database and finds the dignitaries she killed were actually guilty of "perverted" crimes and it had been covered up. She released this data to the media and the police were forced to abandon the hunt. It is also revealed most rank-and-file police officers actually support Gunsharks, because they only kill other criminals which results in less criminals overall. Later Dexter begins to see visions on his "Headcase" TV which suggest he is a wanted serial killer, the Blemvoi Butcher. It turns out the actual killer also has a "Headcase" and the signals have been transposed. The Butcher lures the pair and two police officers, including the "by-the-book" Tracey Weld, into a trap. Dexter kills the butcher and this eventually leads to his becoming romantically involved with Weld. In Eurocrash, Demi sees her empire begin to crumble, so plans to marry Prince Guapo and unite the two biggest gangs and restore 'peace' to Downlode. The wedding gets hijacked by 'syns' (artificial humanoids) and Finnigan and Ramone fail to protect Demi, who dies. They both blame each other and walk away from their partnership. Downlode Tales depicts Sinister and Dexter going their own ways, with Dexter joining the 'Ass Kickers' D.U.R. police unit to avoid jail, and Sinister putting together his 'whack pack' to avenge Demi's killers. As the city once again descends into turmoil, the pair mentor a trainee Gunshark, Kal Kutter, who accompanies them on several adventures and eventually becomes a highly competent Gunshark in his own right. Another mob boss, called Apellido, begins to take over the city and sends a huge squad of "bullet monkeys" (inferior but cheaper gunsharks) after Billi Octavo. Sinister attempts to get her out of the city but the other hitmen are chasing the two. Meanwhile, Dexter is with Detective Weld when he hears the news and rushes out of the house with his guns drawn. By chance he is seen by a police officer who tells him to freeze, before going to get out his handcuffs. Dexter misinterprets this as the officer going for his gun and kills him, thereby breaking the gunshark code. He escapes but doesn't get very far before being surrounded. Fearful of being tortured in prison a standoff ensues, and he is eventually shot by Weld. Sinister is last seen speeding out of the city, with a wounded Billi octavo in the car, still pursued by the bullet monkeys. The story line at the end of 2005 (over the instalments "...and Death shall have no dumb minions" and "Festive Spirits") seemed to suggest that the deadly duo were both dead. However, this didn't stop some one-page "gag strips" from appearing in the Judge Dredd Megazine This issue has now been addressed in passing as part of the twist in the, initially apparently unconnected, series Malone. The "Festive Spirits" story, in which both appeared as skeletal zombies who were apparently ignored by their old friends, is hinted at merely being one of Malone's dreams. After surviving the showdown with his boss, Apellido, Sinister changed his face and took drugs to try to forget his past, fleeing offworld to Generica. It wasn't until Rocky Rhodes told him of his true identity that he returned to Downlode City to get revenge on Apellido making sure he knows that he's now alive. It was also revealed that Ramone also survived the shooting but was rendered quadriplegic. Sinister allowed himself to be captured and was sent to the same prison as Ramone, with a plan to escape. After enlisting the help of two other prisoners, he executes the break-out and escapes with Ramone in a wheelchair. Heading to an old doctor friend it is revealed Ramone has been kept immobilised by an implant in his spine. With this removed, and surviving an attack by another Apellido hit-squad, the head for a run-down lock-up. There Sinister stashed the Edsel and their old guns. They collect these and drive back into Downlode to again work as gunsharks, bringing the series full circle. ===== The story, present in the game's manual but mostly conveyed through the introductory animation by Eric W. Schwartz, concerns an unnamed prince, who is turned into a frog by a jealous witch, in homage to the Frog Prince fairy tale. His princess girlfriend is then abducted by the same witch. Subsequently, sulking by the "River O' Despair", the prince chances upon a floating bottle of Lucozade, which confers upon him super powers. With his new powers, the prince heads off to fight the evil witch and save the princess. ===== The story begins in New York City with the traditional Jewish wedding of emotionally shallow, self- absorbed, "nebbish"-man-boy Lenny Cantrow (Charles Grodin), a sporting goods salesman, to Lila (Jeannie Berlin, daughter of director Elaine May), an annoyingly unsophisticated and emotionally needy girl. While on their honeymoon in Miami Beach, Lenny meets and pursues the beautiful but manipulative Kelly Corcoran (Cybill Shepherd), a Midwestern college girl on holiday with her parents. When Lila is severely sunburned, Lenny quarantines her to their hotel room as he engages in a series of rendezvous with Kelly, lying to Lila about his whereabouts. Lenny impulsively ends their ephemeral marriage to pursue an indifferent Kelly, his ideal woman and ultimate fantasy shiksa-goddess. He believes she is the girl he has been waiting for all of his life and just "timed it wrong." After leaving Lila (after only five days of marriage), he follows Kelly to Minnesota, where her justifiably resentful and protective father (Eddie Albert) is a relentless obstacle. Mr. Corcoran has undisguised contempt of Lenny, even offering Lenny a $25,000 bribe for him to leave following a dinner where Lenny inanely praises Midwestern produce as having "no deceit in the cauliflower." Lenny eventually marries Kelly, whose chief intent appears to be to rile and defy her father. At the wedding reception, Lenny's attempt to mingle with the attendees via mindless conversation fails, and he is ignored by the guests, his bride and new in- laws. He is a stranger at his own feast, quoting the cliches of the Republican press to some unimpressed children and lapsing into the same useless hum with which Lila formerly drove him mad. He got the girl, but appears to have lost a feeling of belonging. ===== ===== The novel centres on a young, independent, unnamed, wealthy traveller (the narrator), who visits a friend, a mining engineer. They explore a natural chasm in a mine which has been exposed by an exploratory shaft. The narrator reaches the bottom of the chasm safely, but the rope breaks and his friend is killed. The narrator finds his way into a subterranean world occupied by beings who seem to resemble angels. He befriends the first being he meets, who guides him around a city that is reminiscent of ancient Egyptian architecture. The explorer meets his host's wife, two sons and daughter who learn to speak English by way of a makeshift dictionary during which the narrator unconsciously teaches them the language. His guide comes towards him, and he and his daughter, Zee, explain who they are and how they function. The hero discovers that these beings, who call themselves Vril-ya, have great telepathic and other parapsychological abilities, such as being able to transmit information, get rid of pain, and put others to sleep. The narrator is offended by the idea that the Vril-ya are better adapted to learn about him than he is to learn about them. Nevertheless, the guide (who turns out to be a magistrate) and his son Ta behave kindly towards him. The narrator soon discovers that the Vril-ya are descendants of an antediluvian civilization called the Ana, who live in networks of caverns linked by tunnels. Originally surface dwellers, they fled underground thousands of years ago to escape a massive flood and gained greater power by facing and dominating the harsh conditions of the Earth. The place where the narrator descended houses 12,000 families, one of the largest groups. Their society is a technologically supported Utopia, chief among their tools being an "all-permeating fluid" called "Vril", a latent source of energy that the spiritually elevated hosts are able to master through training of their will, to a degree that depends on their hereditary constitution. This mastery gives them access to an extraordinary force that can be controlled at will. It is this fluid that the Vril-ya employ to communicate with the narrator. The powers of the Vril include the ability to heal, change, and destroy beings and things; the destructive powers in particular are immense, allowing a few young Vril-ya children to destroy entire cities if necessary. Men (called An, pronounced "Arn") and women (called Gy, pronounced "Gee") have equal rights. The women are stronger and larger than the men. The women are also the pursuing party in romantic relationships. They marry for just three years, after which the men choose whether to remain married, or be single. The female may then pursue a new husband. However, they seldom make the choice to remarry. Their religion posits the existence of a superior being but does not dwell on his nature. The Vril-ya believe in the permanence of life, which according to them is not destroyed but merely changes form. The narrator adopts the attire of his hosts and begins also to adopt their customs. Zee falls in love with him and tells her father, who orders Taë to kill him with his staff. Eventually both Taë and Zee conspire against such a command, and Zee leads the narrator through the same chasm which he first descended. Returning to the surface, he warns that in time the Vril-ya will run out of habitable space underground and will claim the surface of the Earth, destroying mankind in the process, if necessary. ===== Lord Voldemort tightens his grip on the wizarding and Muggle worlds: his Death Eaters kidnap Garrick Ollivander, and destroy the Millennium Bridge. When Lucius Malfoy is sent to Azkaban, Voldemort chooses Draco to carry out a secret mission at Hogwarts. Draco's mother Narcissa and aunt Bellatrix Lestrange seek out Severus Snape, who claims to be a mole within the Order of the Phoenix. Snape makes an Unbreakable Vow with Narcissa to protect Draco and fulfill his assignment if he fails. Harry Potter accompanies Albus Dumbledore to persuade former Potions professor Horace Slughorn to return to Hogwarts. At the Burrow, Harry reunites with his best friends Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger. They visit Fred and George Weasley's new joke shop in Diagon Alley and see Draco enter Knockturn Alley with a group of Death Eaters, including Fenrir Greyback. Harry believes Voldemort has made Draco a Death Eater, but Ron and Hermione are sceptical. On the Hogwarts Express, Harry hides in the Slytherin carriage using his Invisibility Cloak, but is spotted and petrified by Malfoy, before being saved by Luna Lovegood. Harry discovers his borrowed Potions textbook is filled with helpful notes and spells left by the "Half- Blood Prince", and uses the book to excel in class and impress Slughorn, winning a Liquid Luck potion. Ron becomes Keeper of the Gryffindor Quidditch team and begins dating Lavender Brown, upsetting Hermione. Harry consoles Hermione, admitting to his own feelings for Ron's younger sister, Ginny. Harry spends the Christmas holidays with the Weasleys, and his suspicions about Draco are dismissed by the Order, but Arthur Weasley reveals that the Malfoys may have been interested in a Vanishing Cabinet. Bellatrix and Greyback attack the Burrow, and Harry saves Ginny before the Order arrives and fights off the Death Eaters. At Hogwarts, Dumbledore asks Harry to retrieve a memory of Voldemort from Slughorn. After Ron accidentally ingests a love potion intended for Harry, Harry cures him with Slughorn's help. The trio celebrate with mead Slughorn intended to gift to Dumbledore, but Ron is poisoned, forcing Harry to save his life. Ron murmurs Hermione's name while recovering in the infirmary, causing Lavender to end their relationship. Harry confronts Draco about the poisoned mead and a cursed necklace that nearly killed another student, and they duel. Harry uses one of the Half-Blood Prince's curses to severely injure Malfoy, who is saved by Snape. Fearing the book contains more Dark Magic, Ginny and Harry hide it in the Room of Requirement and share their first kiss. Harry uses his Liquid Luck potion to convince Slughorn to surrender the memory Dumbledore needs. Viewing the memory with Dumbledore, Harry learns Voldemort wanted information about Horcruxes, magical objects containing pieces of a wizard's soul as a form of immortality. Dumbledore concludes that Voldemort divided his soul into six Horcruxes, two of which have been destroyed: Tom Riddle's diary and Marvolo Gaunt's ring. They travel to a cave where Harry aids Dumbledore in drinking a potion that hides another Horcrux, Slytherin's locket. A weakened Dumbledore defends them from Inferi and apparates back to Hogwarts, where Bellatrix, Greyback, and other Death Eaters enter through the Vanishing Cabinet in the Room of Requirement, which Draco connected to the one in Knockturn Alley. As Harry hides, Draco appears and disarms the headmaster, revealing he was chosen by Voldemort to kill Dumbledore, but Draco hesitates. Snape arrives, and casts the killing curse on Dumbledore. As the Death Eaters escape, Snape reveals that he was the Half-Blood Prince. As Hogwarts students and staff mourn Dumbledore's death, Harry reveals to Ron and Hermione that the locket was a fake, containing a message from "R.A.B.", who stole the real Horcrux to destroy. Harry, Ron, and Hermione decide to forgo their final year at Hogwarts in order to track down the remaining Horcruxes. ===== Set in 1946, the story is told from the point of view of Fiona (Jeni Courtney), a young girl who is sent to live with her grandparents in an Irish fishing village, after the death of her mother, illness of her father, and her own failing health. In the evenings, her grandfather tells tales about the family's history, including the evacuation from their generational home on the tiny island of Roan Inish (in Irish, "seal island"), a real location near Narin, County Donegal, during the war. They live in the Ireland of tiny fishing villages, places where everyone knows one another. People live close to nature, and animals are respected and live alongside the villagers. Seals are especially respected for their special human-like spirit. It is said to be terribly wrong to harm a seal. As she meets other villagers, Fiona hears from a distant cousin about an ancestor who married a beautiful Selkie (seal-woman). The story goes that although theirs was a marriage full of happiness, success and many children, there was always the mysterious seal-bond to the ocean. Fiona's cousin tells her that the selkie's blood runs through some of the descendants, he himself is called a "dark", down through the generations, like himself, and Fiona's baby brother Jamie. Fiona hears details about how the sea seemed to steal her infant brother, Jamie, during the departure from Roan Inish, bobbing out of sight in his little cradle boat, some years earlier, never to be seen again. Her cousin, Eamon, who also lives near the grandparents for his health, often accompanies the Grandfather in his curragh - fishing boat - on daily errands to the islands including Roan Inish. Quickly the bright and older Eamon becomes a partner in Fiona's plans, as the day's adventures on the sea and shore become more interesting. Soon, on one of the visits to Roan Inish, Fiona believes that she has found Jamie romping on the strand and again, in the grass. She confides in Eamon, who warns her to not tell the grandparents for now. She observes that the seals seem to care for him, helping to feed him and play with him. They get the idea that her grandparents should move back to Roan Inish and, when they do, the seals will return Jamie to them. The grandparents' current landlord is selling their home and they will need to move soon, but won't move to Roan Inish due to the sadness they feel at losing Jamie. Without telling them, Fiona and Eamon reason: if they must move again, why not back to the cottages they loved best? Saying nothing to anyone about their plan, Fiona and Eamon set to the hard work of reclaiming the long- abandoned cottages on Roan Inish. They clean and restore the cottages, give them new thatch, paint, gardens, and furnishings. After returning to her grandparent's, a terrible storm rises and Fiona fears for Jamie's safety in the strong winds. She wonders aloud: "I hope he thinks to go inside the cottage." Her grandparents hear her and are in utter disbelief at her explanation. Her grandmother is wise and unhesitant - rising to her feet and to the moment, her body and actions say: If there is any chance the child lives, when thought dead these years, rescue must be immediate. She gathers her husband, Eamon and Fiona, they pack what they need, and climb into the curragh and make their way to Roan Inish. Racing inside, they see that Jamie is not there and the wind is rising in power and the rain has begun. The grandparents are, however, astonished and grateful to Fiona and Eamon for their secret restoration of the cottages these past few weeks. Jamie's tiny cradle bobs to shore and he jumps out, heading for the cottages to escape the storm, shepherded to safety lovingly by the seals, as they'd probably been doing all along. But then he stops and runs back - he sees his Grandparents and Eamon and Fiona, his big sister, and has no memory of them. In front of the group, Grandmother calls to him to not be afraid and to come to them for love and safety - come to his family at last. Jamie remains motionless and afraid, still, then runs for his cradle, but at this point several of the seals herd him towards his family, and prevent him from returning to the cradle boat and the sea. He reluctantly makes his way into his grandmother's open arms and they make their way inside. Seeing that Jamie is safe, the seals depart. Indoors, the victorious family are elated at the return of the child they thought dead. They wrap Jamie in a blanket and sit in front of a warm dry fire. Fiona rocks him to sleep in her arms. ===== Full film from the Library of Congress The film starts with an animated sequence, showing an anthropomorphic turtle walking down a road, while picking up a flower and smelling it. A chorus sings the Duck and Cover theme: The significant scene before Bert ducks and covers.Under the theme, Bert is shown being attacked by a monkey holding a lit firecracker or stick of dynamite on the end of a string. Bert ducks into his shell in the nick of time, as the charge goes off and destroys both the monkey and the tree in which he is sitting. Bert, however, is shown perfectly safe, because he ducked and covered. The film then switches to live footage, as narrator Middleton explains what children should do "when you see the flash" of an atomic bomb. The movie goes on to suggest that by ducking down low in the event of a nuclear explosion, (crawling under desks and covering their necks with clasped hands) the children would be safer than they would be standing, and explains some basic survival tactics for nuclear war (facing any wall that might lend protection). The last scene of the film returns to animation in which Bert the Turtle (voiced by Carl Ritchie) summarily asks what everybody should do in the event of an atomic bomb flash and is given the correct answer by a group of unseen children. ===== During World War I, a seemingly respectable middle-aged man Henri Landru has devised an ingenious means of obtaining money to supplement his dwindling income. Adopting various assumed names, he lures middle-class women to his villa at Gambais just outside Paris, where he kills them and burns their bodies. He then helps himself to his victims’ bank accounts so that he can keep his wife, his mistress and his four children in the manner to which they have grown accustomed. Having murdered ten women and one boy, Landru is finally captured and placed before a court of law. Eloquent in his protestations of innocence, he is confident that no jury will condemn a man of such intellect and breeding. ===== Suffering from the skin disease psoriasis and crippling psoriatic arthritis, detective novelist Dan Dark is in such pain in a hospital that he begins to delve into fantasy, resulting in several storylines told simultaneously: * A film noir based on Dark's novel, The Singing Detective, in which a nightclub singer/private eye, hired by Mark Binney, takes on a strange case involving prostitutes and two mysterious men. Nothing is ever solved from this, only a vague plot. Notably, all of the people in the film noir are played by people who are real people in Dark's life; for example, Dark's nurse plays a singer. * The present reality, in which Dark is tormented by incredible pain. Dark interacts with the various people around him, as the doctors and nurses attempt to help, but are dismissed by Dark's anger and bitterness towards everyone. His sense of reality then collapses into hallucinations as the people randomly sing choreographed musical numbers, such as "How Much Is That Doggie In The Window?" In the end, his reality is blended with the film noir and he is abducted by the two mysterious men, only to be shot by the titular "singing detective". * Dark's traumatic childhood in the past, which explains Dark's repulsion toward sexuality (Dark had watched his mother have sex with other men, including his father's business partner), and his own fiery temper. ===== On a late evening, Allan Gray arrives at an inn close to the village of Courtempierre and he rents a room to sleep. Gray is awakened suddenly by an old man, who enters the room and leaves a square packet on Gray's table; "To be opened upon my death" is written on the wrapping paper. Gray takes the package and walks outside. Shadows guide him to an old castle, where he sees the shadows dancing and wandering on their own. Gray also sees an elderly woman (later identified as Marguerite Chopin) and encounters another old man (later identified as the village doctor). Gray leaves the castle and walks to a manor. Looking through one of the windows, Gray sees the Lord of the manor, the same man who gave him the package earlier. The man is suddenly murdered by gunshot. Gray is let into the house by servants, who rush to the aid of the fallen man but it is too late to save him. The servants ask Gray to stay the night. Gisèle, the younger daughter of the now deceased Lord of the manor, takes Gray to the library and tells him that her sister, Léone, is gravely ill. Just then they see Léone walking outside. They follow her, and find her unconscious on the ground with fresh bite wounds. They have her carried inside. Gray remembers the parcel and opens it. Inside is a book about horrific demons called Vampyrs. By reading the book, Gray learns that Léone is a victim of a Vampyr. Vampyrs can force humans into submission. The village doctor visits Léone at the manor, and Gray recognizes him as the old man he saw in the castle. The doctor tells Gray that a blood transfusion is needed and Gray offers his blood to save Léone. Exhausted from blood loss, Gray sleeps. He wakes sensing danger and rushes to Léone, where he surprises the doctor as he is attempting to poison the girl. The doctor flees the manor, and Gray finds that Gisèle is gone. Gray follows the doctor back to the castle, where Gray has a vision of himself being buried alive. After the vision subsides, he rescues Gisèle but the doctor escapes. The old servant of the manor finds Gray's Vampyr book and discovers that a Vampyr can be defeated by driving an iron bar through its heart. The servant meets Gray at Marguerite Chopin's grave behind the village Chapel. They open the grave and find the old woman perfectly preserved. They hammer a large metal bar through her heart, killing her. The village doctor is hiding in an old mill, but finds himself locked in a chamber where flour sacks are filled. The old servant arrives and activates the mill's machinery, filling the chamber with flour and suffocating the doctor. The curse of the Vampyr is lifted and Léone suddenly recovers. Gisèle and Gray cross a foggy river by boat and find themselves in a bright clearing.Dreyer, Carl Theodor. Four Screenplays. Bloomington & London: Indiana University Press. 1970. . pp. 79–129. ===== The main character is a single, nineteen-year-old Japanese college senior living in the fictional city of Meiai, forced out by his parents at the idea that independence may attract him a partner. On top of his quest to find a girlfriend, he is also indecisive about what direction to go in his academics. The player can choose any name for the character (the default name is Daisuke). ===== The film begins with pictures and video of the actual victims of Trujillo. During the montage, a title card appears that says: :From 1930 to 1961, General Rafael Leónidas Trujillo held absolute control of the Dominican Republic. :His secret alliance with the church, aristocrats, intellectuals and the press were the foundation of his dictatorship. :His formula to remain in power was simple: murder anyone who opposed him. :More than 30,000 people were executed during his regime of terror... The scene shifts to a prison cell, where one of his victims, Minerva Mirabal (Salma Hayek), recounts the events of the story. Minerva and her three sisters, Patria (Lumi Cavazos), Dedé (Pilar Padilla), and María Teresa "Maté" (Mía Maestro), live on a farm in rural Ojo De Agua. Minerva, the outspoken sister, convinces her father, Enrique Mirabal (Fernando Becerril), to send her, Patria, and Maté to a boarding school. The sisters spend five years away at school, during which time Minerva captures the attention of Trujillo (Edward James Olmos), who notices her at a school play. When school is over, Minerva wishes to study to become a lawyer, but women are not allowed in law school. The sisters return to the farm, and Minerva soon meets and falls in love with Virgilio "Lio" (Marc Anthony), a member of the Dominican resistance, who gives her the nickname "Butterfly", or Mariposa in Spanish. Lio's activities during a college protest are noticed, and he is forced to leave the country out of fear for his life, though he continues to write to Minerva. Minerva, along with her family, is invited to a formal ball at Trujillo's palace, where she dances with him. During their dance, Minerva asks for permission to attend law school, but Trujillo declines. He grabs Minerva inappropriately, and she responds by recoiling and slapping him in the face. Her family quickly rushes to her side, and Trujillo allows them to leave. The next day, the chief of police, Captain Peña (Pedro Armendáriz, Jr.), arrives at the family farm and takes Minerva's father away. The sisters spend several weeks dealing with the police bureaucracy, trying to locate their father, before it's suggested that there is a way Minerva can get her father out of prison. Minerva goes to the palace, and Trujillo suggests that her father can leave if she stays. Minerva points out that her mother is waiting outside and would "appreciate his hospitality" too. Trujillo decides that they should leave it to chance (a dice roll) to determine if Minerva and her family go free, or if Minerva stays at the palace while her family is released. Minerva accepts, but asks to "up the stakes"—if she wins, she goes free and also gets to attend law school, and if she loses, Trujillo can "have his wish". She rolls the dice and wins, and Trujillo lets her leave. Minerva's victory is hollow. Her father is released from prison, but has been tortured and soon dies. While attending his funeral, the police chief delivers to Minerva a letter permitting her to attend law school. Minerva's hatred of Trujillo is intense, but she decides to accept his "gift" because she views it as her only way to effectively oppose him. While in law school, Minerva discovers that Lio has been killed by Trujillo supporters even though he was out of the country. She meets other members of the resistance, who, through Lio, know of her as "Butterfly". She becomes a member of the resistance, and over time Patria and Maté learn of her activities and become involved too. She falls in love with Manolo Tavárez (Demián Bichir), a fellow law student and member of the resistance, and they are married. When Minerva graduates from law school, Trujillo is present to pass out the diplomas. All the other students receive diplomas, but he refuses to give Minerva hers, saying he agreed to allow her to attend law school, not to practice law. After law school, Minerva has children but continues her resistance activities. After a series of increasingly dangerous events, she, Maté, and many resistance members are arrested and sent to jail. Minerva becomes a symbol, and many prisoners, guards, and outsiders secretly voice their support for "the Butterflies". Eventually, Minerva and Maté are released from jail, but their husbands and Patria's are still held captive. The women continue their efforts to locate their husbands. Trujillo stops by to visit Minerva at her home, and she asks for his help to get their husbands released. Trujillo vows to help Minerva "end her troubles". While returning from a trip to visit their husbands, Minerva, Patria, and Maté are stopped on the road by a large group of Trujillo's men. They are taken some distance off the main road, and the men surround them and beat them to death. Another title card appears at the end that says: :The Death of the Mirabal Sisters was the final blow to the regime of Leónidas Trujillo, who was assassinated six months later. :Several of the children of the Mirabal sisters held important posts in the later democratic governments of the Dominican Republic. :The day of the sisters' death, November 25th, is observed in many Latin American countries as the International Day Against Violence Towards Women. ===== In 1974 George Smiley, the chief of the British secret intelligence service referred to as The Circus, is repairing the damage done to their operations by double agent Bill Haydon and looking for opportunities to target Karla, the Moscow Centre spymaster. Smiley and analysts Connie Sachs and Doc di Salis look into investigations suppressed by the outed mole and find that a historic investigation of a money laundering operation in Laos by Sam Collins could indicate a Moscow intelligence operation. Smiley dispatches Jerry Westerby, a newspaper reporter and occasional Circus operative, to Hong Kong under the guise of a sports journalist. Westerby traces the Soviet money to Drake Ko, a local businessman with links to both the criminal underworld and the British establishment. London establishes that Drake Ko has a brother, Nelson, who is a high-ranking Chinese official and who has been spying on the Chinese for the Soviets. Westerby, following up leads provided by London, interviews Drake's English mistress Lizzie Worthington and discovers that Drake has been attempting to set-up an illicit air route into China. Charlie Marshall and Tiny Ricardo (both pilots and smugglers) were approached by Drake to carry opium into China, and return with a package. The flights were never completed, and Smiley surmises that the package was Nelson, who wished to defect from China. The money supplied by Moscow was intended for Nelson, to be accessed after he left China. Nelson would be a prime intelligence source on both Soviet and Chinese capabilities and political maneuverings between London and Washington hamper the investigation. It is finally agreed that the Circus will run the operation to capture Nelson and interrogate him afterwards, with all information shared with the United States. Smiley instructs Westerby to become more pro-active in his investigations, forcing Drake to move forwards with his plans to extract Nelson. In the course of this Westerby travels in and out of war-torn Vietnam, Ricardo tries to kill Westerby, and two of his colleagues in Hong Kong are murdered. Westerby becomes increasingly stressed and begins to obsess over Lizzie's situation, the ethics of the operation and Western involvement in Asia. Sam Collins has blackmailed Lizzie into bugging and informing on Drake. The Circus now has enough information to predict Drake's plan, which replicates his own escape from China via sea. Westerby is ordered to return to London. Westerby ignores this and contacts Lizzie to warn her of the danger she is in. Smiley along with Circus and CIA operatives arrive in Hong Kong to oversee the final stages of the operation. Smiley and his men encounter Westerby and try to force him to board a plane but Westerby escapes and with Lizzie's help, reaches the rendezvous point where Drake will meet with his brother. Westerby warns Drake of the plans of the intelligence agencies in an effort to protect Lizzie from reprisal and to have an opportunity to be with her. Drake does not heed Westerby's warning; at their appointed meeting place on the beach, CIA forces seize Nelson, and Westerby is killed by Fawn, a Circus operative, on Smiley's orders. In the aftermath, the CIA, and not the Circus, detain and interrogate Nelson. The success of the operation yields top Circus jobs for Collins, who becomes (temporary) Chief of the Circus. Smiley and Connie Sachs are retired and most of the older generation of Circus personnel are moved on. In the aftermath of the debacle, Peter Guillam contemplates the possibility that Smiley allowed the CIA to gain the upper hand so as to have himself removed as head of the Circus. ===== On an idyllic outdoor picnic with her husband, their daughters, and their dog, a woman becomes confused and disoriented when her vision stutters and events begin repeating themselves. Eventually, her reality becomes so distorted with repeating images and sounds that she screams. Waking in a dream-making machine, she discovers she is in the future, alongside hundreds of others. They are all in a sterile, industrial indoor environment. A technician explains to her that she was in a Dreamatron, which is a "Fully Interactive Dream Machine," and it was running a "Country Picnic" program. He fixes the circuit board for her dream bay and tells her to relax and enjoy her last six minutes before returning to work. Still confused, she returns to her dream world and relaxes again. She tries to tell her husband about her "dream" but forgets it almost straight away. She asks her fantasy husband if she can stay with him there forever. He tells her that yes she can and that he wants her to stay forever, too. Meanwhile, the machine burns out before the technicians can disconnect her, trapping her in the alternate reality forever. They note, "At least she died happy." ===== Penny is a harried housewife with a dim-witted and hapless husband named Russell. They also have four children: Janet and Susan, who are always fighting; Bertie, who is very clumsy; and Russell Jr., who is always playing pranks. Penny's typical morning consists of preparing breakfast for her family, listening to arguing children, dealing with Russell Jr.'s pranks, cleaning up Bertie's messes, fielding her husband's complaints, etc., which is difficult for Penny to bear. One day, Penny goes to work in her garden while her neighbor loudly removes tree limbs with a chainsaw. As she digs in her garden she discovers a wooden box containing a beautiful gold pendant in the shape of a sundial. Not thinking anything of it, she takes it inside and puts it around her neck. At the grocery store, Penny struggles to deal with Bertie and Russell Jr's annoying behavior and obnoxious customers. While driving home, as Janet and Susan loudly fight, she nearly reaches a nervous breakdown. That night, while she tries to cook dinner, her children pester her again and her husband starts to complain. As the noise level reaches a fever pitch, Penny yells to shut everyone up; suddenly, everyone stops moving — frozen in time. She soon realizes that the pendant she found in the garden is an amulet that can stop time. When she tells her family to resume conversation — time restarts. She is happy as she realizes that she will finally have a little peace and quiet when she needs it, staving off an inevitable nervous breakdown. Later that night, Penny watches a news program about recent arms talks between the United States and the Soviet Union. She becomes annoyed and briefly freezes time. After expressing happiness, she goes to sleep. The next day, Penny uses her time-stopping power to enjoy a peaceful breakfast with her family, to shop at the grocery store without incident, and to avoid being pestered by two anti-nuclear weapons activists. In fact, she uses her newfound power to drag their frozen bodies into the yard, which, upon resuming time, frightens the protesters away from Penny's home. Later that evening, Penny enjoys a relaxing bath when air raid sirens suddenly start. She hears her husband calling loudly from the bedroom and when she investigates, the television shows the Emergency Broadcast System. The radio announces that nuclear missiles are heading for the United States from the Soviet Union. When the radio reveals that ICBMs have entered U.S. airspace, Russell and Russell Jr. begin to cry. Just as an explosion is heard in the distance, the terrified Penny freezes time, then leaves her house and walks through town toward the noise. As she reaches a street which houses the local movie theater, she notices terrified people looking skyward and is horrified to see a Soviet nuclear missile frozen a few hundred feet in the air, nose down, and moments from impact. The episode ends with Penny facing an impossible dilemma: live eternally alone in a safe but silent, motionless world, or unfreeze time and have the world be annihilated by nuclear war? ===== Debbie is a little girl starved for attention because her parents are always fighting: her mother yells at her constantly and her father is too lazy to give her any quality time. Debbie gives her parents an invitation she received that states: "As bearer of this special invitation, you are entitled to one child's admission to the Children's Zoo. You will be offered all the special privileges described by the other girl who passed this." Though her parents are reluctant they relent after a while and take her to the zoo. At the zoo, they are welcomed by Melody who asks Debbie if she understands the rules and then directs her to the children's entrance. Melody assures the parents that Debbie will be just fine and takes them to the waiting room. Debbie wanders through a hallway where a cheerful voice says, "To hear the parents talk: just press the red button on the side of the window." Debbie is shown five displays, each with a couple of parents inside a locked room with a glass front so that they are clearly visible to outside spectators. The first couple wildly begs her to take them with her; the second couple makes violent threats; the third is sleeping so Debbie passes them; the fourth try to bribe her; and the fifth reveals that their son was seven when he brought them into the zoo and that they are very sorry for their previous transgressions. They promise Debbie that they have learned their lesson and will try to be the best parents they can. Convinced, Debbie presses a green button and makes her selection. Melody tells Debbie that she has made a very good choice, and as the three walk away happily, they pass by Debbie's old parents—now placed in a glass chamber themselves—watching with a mixture of anger, confusion, and horror as their now-former daughter goes off to a better life. ===== Arthur and Norma Lewis live in a low-rent apartment and are slowly descending into abject poverty. One day, they receive a mysterious locked box with a button atop it and a note that says Mr. Steward will come visit. Then, just as the note said, a smartly dressed stranger who introduces himself as Mr. Steward comes to their door while Arthur is away. He gives Norma the key to the box and explains that if they press the button, then two things will happen; they will receive $200,000 in cash, but, consequently, someone "[whom they] don't know" will die. After the stranger leaves, Arthur and Norma wonder whether Steward's proposal is genuine, and they debate whether to press the button. Norma rationalizes that they could make good use of the money and that the one who dies might be an old Chinese peasant or a person with cancer. Arthur hypothesizes that pressing the button could cause the death of an innocent baby. They open the box and discover it to be empty, with no mechanism that the button could for whatever purpose activate. Arthur angrily throws the box in the trash and tells Norma to forget the whole scheme. He remarks that Mr. Steward can find his $200,000 in the city dump; however, after Arthur goes to bed, Norma retrieves the box from the dumpster outside the building. The next day, as Arthur leaves for work, he sees Norma sitting at the kitchen table transfixed by the button. Finally, she decides to push the button much to her husband's disgust. The next day, Mr. Steward returns and takes back the box, giving the shocked couple a briefcase with the $200,000. Norma asks what is to be done with the money, to which Steward remarks that they should spend it. Norma also asks what will happen to the box and Steward replies that the button will be "reprogrammed" and offered to someone else with the same terms and conditions. Just before leaving, Steward focuses on Norma and ominously states, "I can assure you it will be offered to someone whom you don't know"...leaving Norma with a horrified look on her face. ===== Peter Wood is a teenager sick with a fever that puts him in telepathic contact with Charity Payne, a Puritan girl from Colonial Massachusetts (specifically 1700), who also has the same type of fever. The two share realistic thought- visions of each other's worlds and Charity has a glimpse of the world in the year 1985. The teenagers discover they can communicate and form a true friendship. When Charity is discovered (when she tries to humble a know-it-all neighbor girl) she is branded a witch for her knowledge of future events. Now her friend from the future must help her escape the clutches of her villagers and prove she is not a witch before she is tried and executed. Peter discovers an historical record that two dead bodies would be discovered near Charity's township, which had been proven to be men whom the judge murdered over a deal gone wrong. However, the judge died of a heart attack prior to the discovery, and the Crown confiscated his lands since they could not try him. At her trial, Charity claims this is not witchcraft, but second sight. Charity tells of a dead sea captain and another man, causing the judge to find her not guilty. Afterward, Charity tells Peter that they probably should not go on communicating, lest more problems arise. Peter sadly agrees and they bid each other goodbye. Approximately one year later, Peter receives one last telepathic call from Charity. She has left him a message at a local landmark known as Bear Rock. Peter finds Charity's message: chiseled into Bear Rock is a Valentine-like heart with the initials "PW + CP". ===== Danny Hayes is an awkward child who is afraid of the dark and who is the regular target of a local bully named Eric. Eric teases him about his interest in Lianna, a pretty girl who is a student at their school. At home, Danny's mother chastises him for sleeping with the lights on. Later that night a mysterious entity emerges from under his bed, proclaiming "I am the Shadow Man, and I will never harm the person under whose bed I live." The Shadow Man leaves the house. The next day, Danny tries to tell his friend Peter about the Shadow Man but Peter dismisses it. At school, Danny hears about a series of attacks on children; witnesses describe the attacker as a shadowy man. That night, the Shadow Man again emerges, reiterates his promise, and departs. Danny unsuccessfully tries to take a picture of him. The next day, Danny tries again to tell Peter but Peter continues to dismiss it. Danny overhears that Lianna needs help in algebra, and he volunteers to tutor her. She is impressed that he would risk an attack by the Shadow Man just to help her. Danny's "bravery" becomes the talk of the school and he attracts a number of false friends. Peter, believing that Danny's story of the Shadow Man under his bed might be true, confronts him about it. Danny reacts dismissively toward Peter, and later challenges Eric to a fight in an area where the Shadow Man has been most often sighted. At the appointed time, the Shadow Man arrives as expected, frightening Eric away. He then begins to choke Danny, who demands to know why the Shadow Man is reneging on his promise of never harming him. The Shadow Man acknowledges the promise to never harm the person under whose bed he lives, only to reveal "But I am a Shadow Man...from under someone else's bed!" ===== Sam (Sherman Hemsley) is a college professor who is frustrated at his multiple failures to solve a complex mathematical equation, angrily exclaiming, "I'd sell my soul to get this thing right!" A demon (Ron Glass) instantly appears and announces that Sam's math problem "had the right phonetic structure to be a good old-fashioned demonic invocation." He makes it known that he intends to steal his soul and sell it to otherworldly bidders. Despite Sam's protests that the "selling my soul" remark was an idle afterthought, the demon explains that it set the deal in motion anyway. The demon also explains that Hell has been able to thrive due to the real world's weakening belief in spirituality, remarking "You bring up Dante to most people these days, and they ask how you liked Gremlins!" The demon says the term will be as follows: Sam is permitted to ask three questions about how the process works or of demonic powers. Sam is then permitted to ask a fourth question or make a request of the demon. If the demon fails to perform the task or is unable to answer the question, the deal is off and Sam's soul is spared. When Sam unthinkingly asks "Really?" the demon responds "Yes, really," and that Sam has posed his first question. Frustrated by the trick, Sam carefully plans the second question. He asks if there are any physical limitations to the demon's powers. The demon gleefully claims that he is able to travel faster than the speed of light and can make two electrons occupy the same quantum state, and that he further has access to every bit of recorded information in multiple universes. For the third question, Sam queries if there is any place from which the demon cannot find his way back. The demon chides Sam and informs him that he can move through galaxies in a microsecond and even see alternate history timelines, such as "Berlin if the Nazis had won the war" or Rome had Alexander the Great "lived to a ripe old age." He then demands that Sam pose his final question or task. Sam calmly provides the impossible task: "Get lost." Defeated, the demon screams and melts away, leaving only his sunglasses. Sam throws them away and turns back to his math problem with a rueful smile, noting, "Well, that guy wasn't any help at all." ===== An ambassador (John Glover) from an alien race arrives and claims that his race had genetically engineered the people of Earth. He tells the quarrelsome members of the United Nations Security Council that his race is displeased with Earth's "small talent for war," as they have failed to produce the potential that the aliens had nurtured. When the ambassador announces that his fleet will destroy all life on Earth, the Security Council pleads for and is granted a 24-hour reprieve to prove Earth's worth. With the survival of humanity at stake, the Security Council and the General Assembly negotiate an accord for lasting global peace and present it to the alien ambassador. The global peace agreement brings great humour to the emissary. The aliens were, in fact, seeking a greater talent for war, as they had genetically seeded thousands of planets to breed warriors to fight for them across the galaxy. Humanity's "small talent" for war (crude weapons, petty bickering over borders) is not significant enough to be of any use to them. And he laughingly states that—worst of all—the people of Earth long for peace. As the ambassador calls down his fleet to destroy the Earth, he thanks the Security Council for an amusing day and their "delightful sense of the absurd." His parting comment is "...as one of your fine Earth actors, Edmund Gwenn, once said: Dying is easy—comedy is hard." ===== The Wrights, a young married couple, wake up on April 27, 1986 to the sounds of construction. When they investigate they find time has stopped. Meanwhile, a crew of blue-clad construction workers are busy removing the furniture in their house and replacing it with new. In terror, the Wrights run outside to find things being rebuilt all over the neighborhood - things that have already existed. The Wrights start to go in the direction of a voice which seems to be commanding the workers, but then turn once the voice commands the workers to capture the Wrights. Confused and frightened, the couple run into a back alley and enter a void of white space. They discover a man in yellow who helps them out of the void and explains to them that he is the supervisor of the maintenance of time. They have somehow slipped into a loophole and while they should be in an earlier time - 9:33 a.m. - for some reason they have hopped over into 11:37 a.m. Showing them exactly how time is maintained, he reveals to them a new understanding of how the universe works: every minute is essentially a separate world which must be built, maintained, and torn down once it is over. The supervisor informs them that they cannot return for two reasons: 1) they cannot reveal to anyone the true nature of time and 2) the supervisor isn't even certain they could return if they wanted to. The Wrights flee from the foreman and his crew, and try to find a way to slip back to their own time. They hide inside a theater ticket booth and wait until 11:37 a.m. rolls around so they can catch up. The foreman finds them too late as the Wrights suddenly emerge into their own world again. Back in their own time, they find a blue wrench sitting on a public telephone which convinces them they had not dreamed their experience. ===== Matthew awakens from a long sleep. His caretaker Sarah confirms he was put in cryogenic sleep in June 2023. Then she reveals he was asleep for more than 300 years... this is the year 2347. Sarah brings Matthew outside to see a small farm town, and he is confused as to why he was not brought to a city. She claims there are no more cities, freeways, or factories. Sarah takes him into what she calls the surgery area. Surgery is performed without need of anesthetic or instruments. She and two others use psychic abilities to take out the cause of the incurable disease that required him to be put into the cryogenic sleep. Matthew is overwhelmed after he sees the villagers can reach into his body and pull out the cancerous tissue painlessly. Although they are no longer technologically advanced, humans made progress in 300 years. In their world, technology is replaced by advances in human awareness and spiritual growth, the organic replaces the mechanical, and they live in balance and harmony with all life on the planet in what Sarah refers to as a "biological gestalt." Matthew learns more about the agrarian post-apocalyptic community in which Sarah lives. Every need in this society is met through genetic engineering, psionics, or super-science in harmony with nature. However, Matthew wonders their reasons for waking him because he has no way of serving their agrarian society. They explain to him a meteor, sufficient to alter the entire ecosystem of Earth, is about to crash into the Indian subcontinent. His work with a satellite defense system from the past can help destroy the meteor. He becomes angry, however, after they say if it wasn't for this problem, he would still be asleep him out and uncured. They show Matthew what happened after he was put in sleep: In 2043, a nuclear exchange wiped out eighty-percent of the human population. The 200,000 survivors pledged to never trust machines again. Despondent, Matthew believes because he does not share the gifts of the others in the village, he will never belong to their community. Sarah comforts him, and tells him they can perform surgery on his brain and give him the same abilities they have. However, the meteor must be handled first. Matthew operates a salvaged personal computer used by the commune in an attempt to interface with the old satellite laser network. After the meteor makes a course correction upon reaching orbit, Matthew realizes it is not a meteor, but a United States spacecraft. Sarah reveals she used her psychic powers to fool Matthew, and explains her community is threatened by the instigators of the war who are returning to Earth. The spacecraft left Earth during the war they started to save their lives to perpetuate their power. The survivors have no defense, however. Violence and murder are not in their nature. She claims they did not want to trick him, but they knew he would not want to destroy the spaceship despite the fact the ship has weapons and would likely start the destructive war over again. Because of the "time dilation effect", time slowed for the ship’s crew and only a few years passed for them. Matthew does not believe Sarah, and he attempts to stop the weapon. Sarah thwarts his efforts by removing a piece of equipment from the computer. After the ship is destroyed, Matthew discovers there were indeed weapons aboard. However, he still feels like an outsider, and does not know his value to the community, especially since they tricked him into destroying the ship. Irene claims he is one of them now, and he learns to begin his psychic journey. ===== Dr. Joseph Fitzgerald, a Harvard University professor of history, has travelled back in time from the year 2172 and has assumed the identity of an instructor at Harvard, where he has now been teaching since 1961. In 1963, Fitzgerald is visited by Dr. Kate Wang, a colleague from his own time. They discuss his mission, which is to observe the assassination of John F. Kennedy, from whom he is descended. Fitzgerald is understandably nervous about watching his own ancestor be murdered, especially since he never got to know the man himself; he has met Kennedy only once. Wang reassures Fitzgerald that every field historian has moments of doubt such as this. When she departs for their home time, she says something that Fitzgerald does not quite catch. Fitzgerald journeys to Dealey Plaza in Dallas. However, when he glances up to the Texas School Book Depository and sees Lee Harvey Oswald raise a gun to kill Kennedy, Fitzgerald is unable to stand by and watch the killing. He intervenes and saves the president's life, shouting for the president and his entourage to take cover. Oswald fires anyway, but misses, and is later arrested by Dallas police. A grateful President Kennedy invites Fitzgerald to stay at the White House. As Kennedy and his entourage return home, the president is notified that Soviet troops have captured West Berlin. Fitzgerald is astonished, and claims that Khrushchev would never do such a thing. Kennedy sadly points out that Khrushchev was assassinated earlier that day. In his room that night, Fitzgerald frantically consults his time-travel wrist computer, which informs him that his alteration of history has caused massive rips in the fabric of time. The assassination of Khrushchev was not enough to "fix" the damage to the time stream; the computer informs Fitzgerald that all possible outcomes to this timeline will result in total war between the superpowers and "total extinction of biosphere". There is only one way to repair the timeline, the computer intones: "The Kennedy presidency must end, as history originally recorded it." Meanwhile, the president and his chief Secret Service bodyguard, Ray, have grown suspicious of Fitzgerald after finding a half dollar coin with Kennedy's face on it (U.S. law states that no living person can be depicted on moneyhttps://www.ajc.com/news/national/this- the-reason-why-only-dead-people-can-featured-american- currency/Hy73VWnB84jjQzLmXrhHbP/.) which Fitzgerald dropped on Air Force One. They have also discovered that Fitzgerald's movie camera is not the standard model it appears to be. Metallurgists cannot open it up or determine what it may be. They summon Fitzgerald, who tells them that the camera is a holographic camera from the future, as he himself is. They are skeptical but are convinced of the truth when the professor demonstrates the camera's use. President Kennedy asks whether Fitzgerald was sent back in time to observe Kennedy's reaction to the Berlin crisis, but the professor replies that he did not know about that. Kennedy is puzzled at this, until he looks again at the coin and notices the date: 1964. Kennedy quickly deduces the truth: that Fitzgerald came to Dallas to witness an assassination, Kennedy's own. Kennedy volunteers to do whatever is necessary to repair history. Fitzgerald, overwhelmed by his ancestor's heroism, removes his Harvard school ring, which is actually his time travel device, and places it on Kennedy's hand. Kennedy vanishes, and Fitzgerald's computer reports that the president has been transported to Fitzgerald's home, in 2172. The professor tells Ray that a few changes need to be made; then, when looping back to Dallas and the motorcade, it is Fitzgerald who appears in the car and is shot and killed. At Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, the dead body of "President Kennedy" (actually Fitzgerald) is being attended to by a doctor, who is actually Fitzgerald's colleague from the future. Ray, the Secret Service agent, recognizes her ring because it is identical to Fitzgerald's. She tells him that she knew what Fitzgerald's fate would be, saying, "Some of us do our research in the even farther future" and goes on to say, "The last time I saw him I couldn't tell him what I knew. All I could do was repeat a phrase"—the remark that Fitzgerald didn't quite catch—"in Chinese that my husband taught me." Holding Fitzgerald's hand tenderly, she repeats the phrase "Zàijiàn, lǎo péngyǒu...zàijiàn. (再見，老朋友，再見); Goodbye, old friend... Goodbye." Ray asks her if what they have seen will change history, and she replies that it will not—because it did not. "Even the act of traveling in time is part of history," she says. At Harvard University in 2172, a man speaks to a classroom full of students, delivering a rousing speech in which he implicitly lauds Fitzgerald's sacrifice and the sacrifices of other honorable men like him. As the camera turns, we see that the speaker, dressed in clothing appropriate to the period, is John F. Kennedy. ===== A sweet, naive young woman named Marsha frantically travels to the mall hoping it will still be open. A worker takes pity on her and lets her inside. As Marsha enters, a man begins following her but keeps his distance. She enters the only open store and asks for help. A female clerk pops up at the counter and Marsha tells her she is looking for a doll. After a moment, the clerk leaves to find it. Meanwhile, a little boy in a tuxedo with a toy spider then pops up, scares Marsha, and calls her by name. A lady in an evening gown joins the boy and apologizes for his rude behavior. She acts dismissively when Marsha asks how he knew her name. He, in turn, begs Marsha to take him with her when she goes. The clerk pops back up with the doll and Marsha pays for it. She then explains that she bought it out of gratitude for her landlord's kid, as her landlord found her a job, and let her rent her apartment for free even though she was broke. Suddenly, the man following her appears outside and the clerk starts aggressively asking for identification. Marsha tells the clerk her name and that she works for a local company. The clerk tells her that her history only goes back one month so inquires as to a longer timeline and asks where she was before then. Marsha runs away before giving an answer and the clerk follows. After getting on the elevator, Marsha discovers the same man from earlier following her. He raises his arms to reveal that his hands are those of a mannequin's. Marsha then runs out of the elevator followed by the lamentations of the mannequins. They find her and inform her that she is in fact a mannequin just like them. She runs away regardless but then slowly begins to transform: first her leg turns to plastic, then her arm. She still attempts to run but is frozen by the transformation as her other appendages turn to plastic as well. The mannequins tell her she has had her month to be a human and now it's someone else's turn. The next day, Marsha the mannequin is on display, while the mannequin she ran past the night before moves forward on her way to enjoy her turn as a human. ===== Harry Dobbs is a family man obsessed with surviving a nuclear war, and he has even built himself a fallout shelter in his basement. One afternoon, his wife Sally makes plans to visit her sister in Kansas City and to take their two kids with her. Harry and their son Jason are downstairs in the shelter teaching him to shoot a gun when Sally decides to leave. Harry and Sally argue about her leaving and him teaching a seven-year-old to shoot. He becomes frantic when he thinks Sally might have revealed the shelter's existence to her sister, as he wants it to remain secret. Nick, who runs Harry's gun and ammo store, comes by that evening and talks about the escalating tension in the Middle East. He is afraid that it could lead to nuclear war. They learn from the news that the President has left the White House to stay in an undisclosed location. Harry then talks about how he wishes the bomb would come so the world could be rid of pimps, cowards, rock stars, hair-dressers and bureaucrats (i.e. the scum of the world according to Harry). He talks about how he and his son would start over in a "purified" world (somehow leaving out his wife and daughter). While drunk, Harry reveals the existence of his shelter to Nick and shows him the whole operation while mentioning that nobody knows about it. Harry also shows Nick the fallout shelter's communications which includes a hydraulic system that can raise and lower an antenna through tons of rubble, so he could tentatively communicate with other survivors after a nuclear attack. Harry then turns on his communication system and raises its antenna while turning on the TV. On the news, Harry and Nick learn that World War III could be imminent. Harry frantically tries to get Sally to come home but she refuses saying that Harry "cries wolf" far too often. Without warning, a massive explosion occurs and Harry runs back to the shelter with Nick and shuts the door. The blast, however, destroys the raised antenna cutting off all information about what is happening outside. Believing that a nuclear weapon has hit the local air force base and that World War III has begun, Harry and Nick believe they are the only ones left alive. Six weeks later, Nick hears something moving above and Harry surmises it to be the walking dead or scavengers. Nick tries to get whatever is moving above to come down into the shelter and Harry goes ballistic. After ten months, the radiation has not gone down at all and Nick is going stir crazy. Harry decides to kill him but Nick leaves the shelter. After a while, Nick returns to tell Harry of what it is like outside. Everything is gone, there is no more daylight and it is freezing outside. Harry refuses to let Nick back in as he is afraid he'll contaminate him. Sometime after Nick dies, Harry's paranoia gets worse, and he prepares for battle in the event of outsiders attacking. Things are quite different from what Nick and Harry believed as the explosion was not a nuclear attack, but the result of a Broken Arrow incident in which a bomb accidentally detonated at the local Air Force base destroying the entire town. The accident actually shocked the world from the brink of war. The blast crater has been contained under a radiation proof dome memorial - The Peace Dome - which has sealed the debris and radiation inside of it and proved to the world the folly of war. The memorial was built on top of the Dobbs' house. The episode ends when Sally and the kids place flower on the memorial. Jason asks Sally if that's where his daddy is buried and she says yes and smiles, knowing he is basically buried alive. ===== The story opens in a health care facility's rehabilitation area. A young man dressed in white with a bandage on his head walks on a treadmill. He has been affected by a traumatic brain surgery. In his room, the young man is discussed by his wife Anita and his son Michael with his doctor. They talk about a seventy-nine- year-old man who is now in a computerized robotic body. While the wife is elated, Michael is very cynical and very suspicious. He thinks that his father is no longer alive having died when they replaced his original brain with a prototype implant. As the doctor leaves, the old man, revealed to be named Darius, enters the room in the middle of Michael and Anita's argument over him and his company. Michael leaves frustrated after Darius announces that he is coming back to work. Indeed, Darius does attempt to go back to work, but Michael interrupts his day with a lawsuit claiming that Darius is not really Darius Stephens. He claims that once his brain died in his body Darius was gone forever and this robot is not truly Michael's father. While in a discussion with his lawyer Darius starts stuttering and repeating certain words. Afterward, Anita enters while Darius is working double time and notices the stuttering and repeating. She attempts to get him to leave the business for rest. The court case begins and its effect is apparent on Darius. Anita and his lawyer continue their attempts to get him to slow down, but he refuses so Anita tries to help. After she falls asleep, he wakes her and his stuttering and repeating gets worse. He starts acting strange, then begins talking in the voice of a computer going through a diagnostic and begs for the doctor. Darius gets back at the doctor and Michael visits. He and Anita get into an argument and Darius starts having trouble. The doctors says that they lost him and Michael smiles and assumes he won. Anita goes to Darius' office and finds an envelope that states that it is to be opened by her upon his death. Inside is a computer disc. She puts it into the computer and an image of Darius comes up and speaks to her. They discuss how Darius is still alive in the disc and that she must be his arms and legs now. She listens intently as he tells her what to do for him to prove that he is alive in order to regain control of the company. ===== Thomas Barton is an astronaut who must deliver a vital cargo of vaccine to a plague-stricken colony world. However, a young girl named Marilyn has stowed away on his vessel with hopes of reuniting with her brother Gerry at the colony. Now the entire mission is in jeopardy as her presence on board was not calculated into the flight plan, which goes strictly "by the numbers" and there will be no way for the pilot to compensate for her added weight. They also discover that there are no other ships which can pick her up prior to arrival at their destination. While she is distraught that she will never see Gerry again, and because their ship is on a crash course, they attempt to compensate by jettisoning all possible extra weight. They discover, however, that the extra weight jettisoned is only half of what they need to make it to the colony planet. Barton suggests that the girl try to contact her brother so they could at least talk before the impending doom. She finally contacts him in time, but only to talk about how they cannot meet in person. Barton considers sacrificing himself so the girl can survive, but finds this is impossible since she would not be able to pilot the ship herself. Resigned to her fate, Marilyn enters the airlock and allows herself to be jettisoned into space, leaving Barton to grieve in silence. ===== Mitchell Chaplin lives in a world parallel to ours. A rude and obnoxious man, Chaplin has been found guilty of "coldness"—of not being friendly or open enough with those around him. According to the State, he is to be rendered "invisible" and a social outcast for one year. An implant placed on his forehead warns others not to interact with him in any way lest they be punished in a like manner. Chaplin laughs at the verdict and his "punishment". On the first day of his punishment, he continues his obnoxious behavior in a cafeteria, grabbing whatever food he pleases and knocking off the chef hat of an employee, knowing that no one would retaliate. Mitchell does, however, quickly shy away when a little boy asks him a question, not wanting to get the child in trouble. What seems like a welcome chance to be left alone becomes a lesson in humility, compassion, and empathy as Chaplin begins to feel the consequences of social isolation. Under the omnipresent eye of floating security drones that monitor their society, people shun him, even a woman who is also sentenced to be invisible. At a dining hall, a blind hobo sits next to Mitchell who laments he cannot afford much, and Mitchell kindly shares some of his food with the man. The friendly conversation is refreshing for Mitchell, until a waitress whispers a warning to the hobo that he is interacting with an invisible man. The blind man furiously curses Chaplin and turns away. Misfortune after misfortune befalls Chaplin; even an attempt to hide his implant with a hat is thwarted. Chaplin's nadir is reached when some drunken men hit him with their car, laughing they "never saw" an invisible man. When Mitchell calls a hospital, the nurse is unable to help him as his invisibility stops him from registering on a picture phone. Finally, on the last day of his sentence two silent policemen come to his residence. Using the same device that rendered him invisible, it removes the implant on his head. Acknowledging his presence for the first time, they address him as Mr. Chaplin and invite him to have a drink with them; they remind him, though with intimidating looks, that this is this world's way of welcoming an invisible man back into their society. Chaplin prudently complies. Four months after completing his sentence, Chaplin is accosted in public by a young woman (whom he encountered during his term of invisibility) who wears the scar of an implant. Knowing the law, he initially ignores her but her cries move him to hug her. As they are surrounded by drones warning him to separate from her and move on, he declares that he can see the woman and that he cares about her suffering. ===== On an interstellar journey in the future, a medical doctor and a priest debate the existence of God in the wonders of the universe. Dr. Chandler (Donald Moffat) believes the universe to be random, but Father Matthew Costigan (Fritz Weaver), who's also an astrophysicist, believes in God's grand but ineffable design. During their friendly debate, their spaceship picks up a subspace signal from a long-dead world. Father Matthew claims it is impossible that a civilization could have survived its star going supernova. Upon landing on the now-dead planet, the explorers discover that it holds the last remains of a race which was destroyed when the supernova's blast hit. Their civilization was quite advanced, and they find remnants of art and other pieces of their culture. A computer record shows that they had one thousand years of peace before their extinction. Father Matthew determines the star went supernova in the year 3120 B.C. To his dismay, Father Matthew realizes that it would have taken 3,120 years for the light from this explosion to reach Earth in the Eastern Hemisphere, causing the starlight that shone down on Earth the day Jesus was born, "The Star of Bethlehem". Father Matthew's faith is deeply shaken, exclaiming that it is unfair that such a star should have exploded near a world that was harboring life. Dr. Chandler attempts to comfort him by translating a poem he found among the archives of the dead culture. It says that no one should mourn for them, for they lived in peace and saw the beauty of the universe. It says to grieve for those who live in pain and those who never see the light of peace. Dr. Chandler says that whatever destiny was theirs, they fulfilled it and passed their light onto another world. The doctor's words and this artifact consoles and encourages the priest. ===== Edward Sayers is a government agent sent to a small town to help investigate a bizarre outbreak of insanity which is spreading throughout the town. With the help of Amanda Strickland, a local, he methodically goes through the town looking for a cure. Amanda's father rambles about his dead wife and that Mrs. Hotchkiss had visited him earlier that morning. They visit her and find that she appears normal, but suddenly she tries to kill them with a knife. Amanda suggests that it may be a disease, since it is spread from person to person. He eventually discovers that the source of the problem is not a physical disease but an idea—-a short, secret phrase-—that is being passed by word of mouth from person to person. The phrase is about the purpose and meaning of existence. It was somehow discovered by a local resident, Jeffrey Potts, while he was traveling abroad; his brother Andrew was the first victim of the word-disease. Jeffrey is compelled by a desire to share this insanity-inducing phrase with others, and visits the local radio station to tell the entire town the secret. Sayers cannot make it to the station to stop the disclosure, but he is able to reach Amanda in time to smash her radio. She then points out that she has already been visited by two townspeople and that she has something very important to tell him. She whispers in his ear, and his eyes widen in dawning comprehension. The scene shifts to a point outside of Amanda's house before a sudden howl of madness emanates from inside. ===== In 1912, Dr. Watson visits the retired Sherlock Holmes, who is happily cultivating bees on the Sussex Downs. Holmes seems mostly concerned about interesting Watson in his new hobby, but Watson prefers to interrogate Holmes and fill some of the gaps in previous Sherlockian history. For example, Watson says, Holmes's account of how he spent the "Lost Years" (1891 to 1895) was laden with contradictions. Finally, he persuades Holmes to retell one episode of his adventures. The narration switches to Holmes. He describes how, following the events of The Seven Percent Solution, he traveled Europe and slowly realized that the entire world believed him dead. Wandering aimlessly, he finds himself in Paris, where after a short-lived stint as a violin instructor, he obtains a position at the Paris Opéra. From the very beginning, his job has ominous undertones. For example, the vacancy only appeared because the previous violinist ran into the street, swearing that he would never work in the place again. This does not daunt Holmes, who interviews with and favourably impresses the conductor, Maître Gaston Leroux. Holmes gradually becomes accustomed to the Opera's distinctive culture. He learns that all minor mishaps are attributed to the Ghost, a spectral personage who haunts the Opera's labyrinthine passageways, sometimes appearing to ballet dancers wearing an evening suit but without a head. L'orchestre de l'opéra by Edgar Degas, 1870. Though painted before the events of this novel, the fictional Degas sketch that alerts Irene Adler to Holmes' existence was made in the same building as this work. All goes well until the prima donna soprano, La Sorelli, falls ill and is replaced by Irene Adler, a past adversary known for her ability to outwit Holmes. His admiration for her provokes uncertain emotions, largely foreign to his calculating nature--but he soon realizes that torment is secondary, when the opera rehearsals subject him to her incomparably beautiful singing. He suffers in silence until Adler sees his profile in a Degas painting, whereupon she realizes that he is alive, and enlists his help. She has taken the young coloratura Christine Daaé "under her wing", and is fearful that the innocent singer may fall prey to intrigue once Adler has left. Irene Adler blackmails Holmes into assisting her, promising that she will remain silent about his survival. While investigating the intrigues that surround Christine, Holmes appears to run afoul of the Opera Ghost. ===== On the planet Telos, an archeological expedition uncovers a hidden entrance in a mountainside. Whilst one of the members tries to open the doors, he is electrocuted. Moments later, the TARDIS lands nearby and the expedition is met by the Second Doctor, Jamie and Victoria. Parry, the expedition's leader, explains that they are here to find the remains of the Cybermen, who apparently died out five centuries before. The expedition is funded by Kaftan, who is accompanied by her manservant Toberman and her colleague Klieg. Deciding to accompany them, the Doctor helps open the doors and, whilst he, Parry and Klieg stay to open the hatch leading to the tombs, the others explore the building. Victoria, Kaftan and Viner, Parry's assistant, discover a chamber with a sarcophagus-like wall inset facing a projection device that was apparently used to revitalise the Cybermen. After Victoria is locked inside, the Doctor is called to help her escape, though he suspects Kaftan is to blame. Meanwhile, Jamie and Haydon, another member of the expedition, experiment with the control panel in another room. After activating a certain combination, a Cyberman emerges and a gun fires, killing Haydon. The Doctor investigates and deduces that the room is a testing range for weapons; the Cyberman being a dummy to be used for such purposes. With two members dead, Parry decides to call off the expedition, only to be informed by pilot Captain Hopper that someone has sabotaged the rocket ship, meaning they are left stranded until repairs are completed. Klieg finally opens the hatch and the team descend, leaving Kaftan and Victoria behind. Beneath, the group find a vast chamber beneath with a multistorey structure, containing a small army of frozen Cybermen. Back in the control room, Kaftan drugs Victoria and reseals the hatch. Using the controls Klieg revives the Cybermen and betrays the group, killing Viner when he tries to stop the process. As the Cybermen emerge, Klieg reveals that he and Kaftan belong to the Brotherhood of Logicians, a cult that possess great intelligence but no physical power. He believes the Cybermen will be grateful for their revival and will ally themselves with the Brotherhood to conquer the universe. After they awaken, the Cybermen revive their leader, the Cyber-Controller, and take the group as prisoners. The Doctor realizes that the tombs are actually an elaborate trap, with the Cybermen keeping themselves frozen until they were revived and rebuild their invasion force to conquer Earth. When Victoria awakens, she confronts Kaftan, who holds her at gunpoint to prevent her from interfering. However, she is attacked and rendered unconscious by a Cybermat, which Victoria destroys. Retrieving Hopper and co-pilot Callum, who have stayed to repair the rocket, they open the hatch to mount a rescue, using smoke grenades to distract the Cybermen. Though they are able to rescue most the party, Toberman is recaptured and taken to be converted. Disarming and placing Klieg and Kaftan in the weapon testing room whilst they wait for the rocket to be repaired, the group is attacked by a swarm of Cybermats, which the Doctor incapacitates with electrical currents. After repairing a cybergun on the dummy, the Logicians return and open the hatch, believing that they can still forge their alliance with the Cybermen. With their energy levels running low, the Cybermen return to their tombs whilst the Cyber-Controller and a partially converted Toberman meet with the group. Taking him to the revitalizing chamber, the Doctor attempts to sabotage the process, only for the Controller to escape and turn on the group. After it murders Kaftan, Toberman breaks free of the Cybermen's conditioning and apparently disables it. Whilst he, the Doctor and Jamie return to once again freeze the tombs, Klieg, unable to accept the Cybermen will not forge his alliance, tries to stop them, only to be murdered by a remaining Cyberman. After Toberman destroys it, the Doctor activates the tombs, hoping that the Cybermen will stay there for good. The Doctor reseals the tombs and sets up counter measures to ensure the Cybermen will not be revived again. After resetting the defenses, he discovers the Controller is still functional and flees, working with the survivors to close it into the tombs. Whilst the others struggle to do so and keep the Controller inside, Toberman sacrifices himself to close the doors, completing the circuit, and electrocuting both him and the Controller. With the rocket repaired, the expedition leaves, the Doctor and his companions bidding them goodbye. As they return to the TARDIS, Jamie wonders whether they have seen the last of the Cybermen, which the Doctor doubts. As they leave, they fail to spot a surviving Cybermat, which approaches Toberman's body. ===== The game begins with Mario receiving a letter from Princess Peach inviting him to come to her castle for a cake she has baked for him. Mario arrives at Peach's castle, along with Luigi and Wario. The trio disappear as they enter the castle, and Lakitu, the game's camera operator, informs Yoshi of the disappearance. Yoshi explores Peach's castle to find Mario, Luigi, Wario and Peach. Scattered throughout the castle are paintings and secret walls, which act as portals to other worlds where Bowser and his minions guard the Power Stars. After recovering most of the power stars and defeating Bowser's minions, Yoshi acquires keys that access other areas of the castle, where he finds Mario and his friends captured. Yoshi defeats Goomboss and frees Mario as they continue searching the castle to find more Power Stars. Mario defeats King Boo and frees Luigi who uses "invisibility power" to get Wario's key. Luigi defeats Chief Chilly and frees Wario using the key. Mario and his friends tackle three obstacle courses, with each ensuing a battle with Bowser. After defeating him twice, they received a key that opens more levels of the castle. After collecting 80 power stars, Mario and his friends reach the highest area of the castle, where they ensue a final battle against Bowser. Eventually, after Bowser's defeat, Mario and his friends return to Peach's castle, where they free Peach from a stained-glass window above the entrance. As a reward for saving Peach, she kisses Mario on the nose and goes to bake the cake she had promised. The game ends when Mario, Luigi, Peach, Yoshi and Wario wave goodbye to the player as Lakitu films and flies away. A photo with Peach's cake appears. ===== Thad Beaumont is an author and recovering alcoholic who lives in the town of Ludlow, Maine. Thad's own books – cerebral literary fiction – are not very successful. However, under the pen name "George Stark", he writes highly successful crime novels about a violent killer named Alexis Machine. When Thad's authorship of Stark's novels becomes public knowledge, Thad and his wife, Elizabeth, decide to stage a mock burial for his alter ego at the local cemetery, which is featured in a People magazine article. Stark's epitaph says it all: "Not A Very Nice Guy." Stark, however, emerges from the mock grave as a physical entity, complete with the personality traits that Thad exhibited while writing as Stark, such as drinking heavily and smoking Pall Mall cigarettes. He then goes on a killing spree, gruesomely murdering everyone he perceives as responsible for his "death" – Thad's editor, agent, and the People interviewer, among others. Thad, meanwhile, is plagued by surreal nightmares. Stark's murders are investigated by Alan Pangborn, the sheriff of the neighboring town of Castle Rock, who finds Thad's voice and fingerprints at the crime scenes. This evidence, and Thad's unwillingness to answer his questions, causes Pangborn to believe that Thad – despite having alibis – is responsible for the murders. Later, it's discovered that Stark has the same fingerprints as Thad, a clue to the twinship he and Thad share. Thad eventually discovers that both he and Stark share a mental bond, and begins to find notes from Stark written in his own handwriting. The notes tell Thad what activity Stark has been engaging in. Observing his son and daughter, Thad notes that twins share a unique bond. They can feel each other's pain and at times appear to read the other's mind. Using this as a key to his own situation, he begins to discover the even deeper meaning behind himself and Stark. Pangborn eventually learns that Thad had an unborn twin brother who was absorbed into Thad in utero and later removed from his brain when the author was a child. He had suffered from severe headaches and it was originally thought to be a tumor causing them. The neurosurgeon who removed it found the following inside: part of a nostril, some fingernails, some teeth, and a malformed human eye. This leads to questions about the true nature of Stark, whether he is a malevolent spirit with its own existence, or Thad himself, manifesting an alternate personality. Thad eventually destroys Stark, but the book ends on an unhappy note with Thad's wife having serious doubts about the future of their relationship: she is appalled that Thad not only created Stark (if unintentionally), but that a part of him liked Stark. ===== The story focuses on a family of anthropomorphic rabbits. The widowed mother rabbit warns her four rabbit children, Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter (the youngest rabbit child) not to enter the vegetable garden of a man named Mr. McGregor, whose wife, she tells them, put their father in a pie after he entered. Her triplets (Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail) obediently refrain from entering the garden. Peter's older sisters (Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail) were good little bunnies and went down the lane to gather blackberries. But Peter enters the garden to snack on some vegetables. Peter ends up eating more than what is good for him and goes looking for parsley to cure his stomach ache. Peter is spotted by Mr. McGregor and loses his jacket and shoes while trying to escape. He hides in a watering can in a shed, but then has to run away again when Mr. McGregor finds him, and ends up completely lost. After sneaking past a cat, Peter sees the gate where he entered the garden from a distance and heads for it, despite being spotted and chased by Mr. McGregor again. With difficulty, he wriggles under the gate, and escapes from the garden, but he spots his abandoned clothing being used to dress Mr. McGregor's scarecrow for crows and other pesky critters. After returning home, a sick Peter is sent to bed by his mother, after she tells him that his jacket and shoes are the second jacket and pair of shoes that he has lost in a fortnight. His mother also takes note that he was not feeling too well, and deduces that he had definitely been to Mr McGregor's garden. To cure his stomachache, Mrs. Rabbit gives him chamomile-tea which is revealed to be one teaspoon and gives a dose of it to Peter. Peter's older sisters (Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail), meanwhile, receive a scrumptious dinner of milk, bread and blackberries. However, only Mr. McGregor knew where Peter's clothes were as they were used to frighten the crows like a scarecrow. ===== ===== David and Diana Murphy are married high school sweethearts, living in California. Diana works as a real estate agent, while David hopes to establish himself as an architect by designing their dream home. The couple invest everything they have in David's project, purchasing beachfront property in Santa Monica and beginning construction, but the recession leaves Diana without houses to sell and David without a job. In desperate need of $50,000 to save their land from being repossessed, they travel to Las Vegas, determined to win the money. At a casino, Diana catches the eye of billionaire John Gage, while David wins over $25,000 at craps. Reveling in their winnings, Diana assures David that she loves him regardless of the money. The next day, they lose everything at roulette; leaving the casino, they notice a crowd gathered to watch Gage play poker. Gage asks Diana to join him for good luck, and she makes a winning craps roll on his $1 million bet. As thanks, Gage insists on paying for the Murphys' stay, gifting them a lavish hotel suite and a dress he saw Diana admire. After an enjoyable evening together, Gage offers the couple $1 million to allow him to spend a night with Diana, but she and David refuse. After a sleepless night, the Murphys agree to Gage's proposal, and David reaches out to his lawyer, who prepares a contract for the arrangement. Leaving Diana with Gage, David has a change of heart and races to stop them, but arrives just as they depart by helicopter. Gage flies Diana to his private yacht, and offers her a chance to void their deal and return to her husband if he loses a toss of his lucky coin. He wins the toss, and Diana spends the night with him. Agreeing to forget the incident, the Murphys return home, and learn their property was foreclosed and resold. Overcome with jealousy, David accuses Diana of continuing to see Gage after finding his business card in her wallet, which she denies knowing about. Discovering that it was Gage who bought out their land, Diana angrily confronts him, and rejects his attempts to pursue her. When she informs David, their tension reaches a breaking point and they separate; Diana later tells him to keep all the money. Weeks later, Gage visits Diana at work and renews his advances. Initially resistant, she eventually consents to spending time with him, and a romance develops between them. Haunted by happy memories of his wife, David hits rock bottom, leading to a public confrontation with Gage and Diana. He pulls his life back together and finds a teaching position, and Diana files for divorce. Finding her at a zoo benefit with Gage, David donates the entire $1 million in a charity auction bid, then makes his peace with Diana and signs their divorce papers. Realizing that Diana will never love him the way she loves her husband, Gage lies to her that she is merely the latest member of his "million-dollar club" of women. Seeing through his deception, she gratefully ends their relationship; before parting ways, he gives her his lucky coin, which is revealed to be double-headed. Diana returns to the pier where David proposed to her seven years earlier, finding him there. Repeating their unique declaration of love, they join hands. ===== The Cherrywoods are a middle-aged couple who run an orphanage. One day, Mr. Cherrywood tells the orphans a story about the Care Bears and Care-a-Lot, their home in the clouds. In the story, Friend Bear and Secret Bear travel looking for people to cheer up. They meet Kim and Jason, two lonely orphaned children, who lost their parents in a car accident. Friend Bear and Secret Bear introduce themselves and remind the children of their ambitions, but neither of them are interested. At an amusement park, Tenderheart Bear spots a magician's apprentice named Nicholas. While unloading a trunk of goods for his master, the "Great Fettucini", Nicholas finds an old book with a diary-style lock. When he unlocks it, an evil spirit appears as a woman's face, and starts corrupting him. With his help, it lays waste to the park, and begins a quest to remove all caring from the world. Back at Care-a- Lot, some of the other bears are working on their new invention: the Rainbow Rescue Beam, a portal that can send any bear to Earth and back. The two Care Bear cubs belonging to Grams Bear, Baby Hugs and Baby Tugs, interfere with it and bring forth a group of unexpected visitors: Friend Bear, Secret Bear, Kim, and Jason. The bears introduce themselves to the children, and give them a tour of their home. Tenderheart Bear returns on his now out of control Rainbow Roller just before a "Cloud Quake" caused by the spirit, which ruins Care-a- Lot. He informs the others of Nicholas' troubles on Earth. Using the Rainbow Rescue Beam, he sends Kim and Jason to the park, along with Friend Bear and Secret Bear. They end up in the Forest of Feelings when the portal malfunctions. From a nearby river, the rest of the bears begin searching for them aboard a cloud ship called the Cloud Clipper, leaving behind Good Luck Bear, Grumpy Bear, Grams Bear and the cubs in Care-a-Lot. Within the Forest, the children and their friends are introduced to Brave Heart Lion and Playful Heart Monkey, two of the Care Bear Cousins. Later on, the other bears discover more of these creatures, among them Cozy Heart Penguin, Lotsa Heart Elephant, Swift Heart Rabbit, and Bright Heart Raccoon. During their stay, the spirit attacks them in several disguises: a cloud, tree, and eagle. After the Care Bears and their Cousins defeat it, they venture back to Earth to save Nicholas from its influence. At the park, Nicholas obtains the ingredients for his spell against the children and the creatures. After he casts it, the Care Bears and company engage in a long battle. The bears shoot beams of bright light on him, forming their "Stare"; the Cousins help with their "Call" – Good Luck Bear and Grumpy Bear arriving in time to help after fixing the Rainbow Rescue Beam. As the creatures' power drains away, Nicholas and the spirit briefly regain control. After Kim and Jason reach out to him, Nicholas finally realizes his misdeeds and shakes off the spirit's influence. He closes the book, which Secret Bear then locks. Having saved himself, the park, and the world, Nicholas thanks the group. He reunites with Fettucini, while Tenderheart Bear inducts the Care Bear Cousins into the Care Bear Family. Kim and Jason find new parents who take them to one of Nicholas' shows. As Mr. Cherrywood finishes his story, it is revealed that he is Nicholas, and his wife is Kim. Tenderheart Bear, who has been listening from outside a window, returns to Care-a-Lot in his Cloudmobile. ===== In 1967, in Greenville, Mississippi, the office of Jewish lawyer Marvin Kramer is bombed, injuring Kramer and killing his two young sons. Sam Cayhall, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, is identified, arrested and tried for their murders, committed in retaliation for Kramer's involvement in the Civil Rights Movement. Sam's first two trials, engineered by his Klan-connected lawyer, each end in a mistrial. Twenty years later, the FBI pressures a suspected associate to testify against Sam at a third trial. Sam is convicted and sentenced to death by lethal gas. He is sent to the Mississippi State Penitentiary and placed on death row. Now without a lawyer, Sam becomes a pro bono case for a team of anti-death penalty lawyers from the large - and Jewish - Chicago law firm of Kravitz and Bane. Representing Sam is his own grandson, Adam Hall, who travels to the firm's Memphis office to aid Sam in the final month before his scheduled execution. Although lacking experience in death penalty cases, Adam is determined to argue a stay for his grandfather. Sam, despite his violent past, is one of the few living links to Adam's family history. Sam's alcoholic daughter, Lee Cayhall Booth, slowly reveals the family's tragic past to her nephew, Adam. Initially uncooperative, Sam eventually opens up to Adam and reveals a remarkable depth of hard-won legal knowledge, regularly preparing his own briefs and court motions. Adam interviews the FBI agent in charge of the original case and realizes that Sam almost certainly did not commit the actual crime for which he had been found guilty, although he was present. Nevertheless, Sam has a long and largely- secret history of Klan-related crimes, including several murders. Dogan, the associate who testified against Sam at his third trial, has apparently been murdered by the Klan. Sam himself will not reveal if another associate exists, thus not violating the Klan's loyalty oath. Adam desperately files motion after motion and argues some of them before judges. He seeks to persuade Mississippi's governor to grant a reprieve, knowing full well that such a move is politically impossible; Sam forbids such a move, suspecting that the governor is using him for political gain. All appeals are finally exhausted. Sam is now repentant, but does not want Adam as a witness to the execution. He faces the last moment with courage and fortitude, publicly repudiating his past with the Klan, and dies proud of his grandson and happy to have forged a strong link with him during this last month. The sentence is carried out, Sam having ordered Adam to walk away and not watch him die. With Sam and Dogan dead, no one knows that Roland, the third man who prepared and set off the bomb, is still free and living nearby under a false identity and observing the progress of the case - having graduated from Klan member to a full-fledged "proud fascist" and neo-Nazi. The reader knows - but Adam never does - that Roland stalked the young lawyer and considered killing him, but concluded it was not necessary and that Sam would take his secret to the grave. Meanwhile, Adam, sickened but fascinated by the experience - and disliking the idea of having a career as a corporate lawyer - quits Kravitz and Bane. Instead he accepts a poorly-paid position with a group of anti-death penalty lawyers. ===== The film is set in Moscow in 1958 and 1979. The plot centers on three young women: Katerina, Lyudmila, and Antonina, who come to Moscow from smaller towns. They are placed together in a workers' dormitory room and eventually become friends. Antonina (Raisa Ryazanova) is seeing Nikolai, a reserved but kind young man whose parents have a dacha in the country. Katerina (Vera Alentova) is a serious, upstanding woman who strives to earn her chemistry degree while working at a factory. She is asked to house-sit an apartment for her well-to-do Moscow relatives (a famous professor's family) while they are away on a trip. Lyudmila (Irina Muravyova), a flirty go-getter looking for a well-to-do husband while working at a bakery, convinces her to throw a dinner party at the apartment, and pretend that they are the daughters of Katerina's professor uncle, as a ploy to meet successful Muscovite men. At the party, Lyudmila meets Sergei, a famous hockey player, who falls in love with her and marries her even after discovering the truth about her origin. Katerina meets Rodion (Yuri Vasilyev), a smooth talker who works as a cameraman for a television channel. They start dating. During Antonina and Nikolai's wedding, Lyudmila and Antonina find out that Katerina is pregnant. Upon discovering that Katerina deceived him and is not the daughter of a professor, Rodion refuses to marry her and believes that she is to have an abortion. Katerina is unable to get an abortion because her pregnancy is in a late stage and ends up giving birth. The film shows Katerina, with tears in her eyes, setting her alarm clock in the dormitory room she shares with her daughter, Aleksandra (subsequently played as a grown young woman by Natalya Vavilova). The film then takes a 20-year leap forward in time to 1979. Katerina is shown waking up to the sound of an alarm clock in her own apartment. She is still single, but she has gone from being a down on her luck student to becoming the executive director of a large factory. She has a lover, an older married man named Vladimir (Oleg Tabakov), but she leaves him after he shows himself to be cowardly and disrespectful. Despite her successful career, Katerina is unfulfilled and weighed down by a deep sadness. She is still close friends with Lyudmila and Antonina. By this time Sergei has quit playing hockey and become an alcoholic, having divorced Lyudmila, who is working at a laundry. Antonina is happily married and has three children. One evening, when Katerina is returning home from Antonina's dacha in the countryside on an elektrichka, she meets a man, Gosha (Aleksey Batalov), who starts a dialogue with her. She sees his shabby boots and dismisses him at first, but the dialogue continues. Soon afterward they start seeing each other. Gosha is an intelligent tool-and-die maker who believes that a woman must not make more money than her husband, so Katerina doesn't tell him about her position. As their romance begins, Rodion unexpectedly reenters Katerina's life when he is assigned to film an interview with her to do a report on her factory's success at exceeding its production quota. At first, he does not recognize Katerina, but when he does, he wants to meet his daughter. Katerina tells him that she does not want to see him again. Nonetheless, Rodion shows up uninvited at her apartment when Katerina is having dinner with Gosha and Aleksandra. Rodion tells Gosha and Aleksandra about the interview, and Gosha finds out that Katerina is a factory director. His pride is hurt not only because of Katerina's high position and large salary, but also because she has deceived and offended him before, and he leaves the apartment. Unable to stop him, Katerina is upset with Rodion. She reveals to Aleksandra that Rodion is, in fact, her father. Gosha disappears from Katerina's life. She becomes frantic. Lyudmila, Antonina, and Nikolai come to her apartment to comfort her. Nikolai gathers what little information Katerina knows about Gosha and sets out to find him. Gosha has been binge- drinking at home for days, and Nikolai, during a "men's talk" over vodka, defends Katerina and convinces Gosha to return. Sobered up Gosha brings drunk Nikolai to Katerina's flat and asks for a dinner. As he eats, Katerina watches him, saying "I have been looking for you for so long". Gosha replies that it's been only a few days, to which Katerina repeats, with tears in her eyes, "I have been looking for you for so long...". ===== Conradin, a sickly 10-year old boy, lives in the care of his despised, overbearing and controlling cousin Mrs De Ropp. He relies on his vivid imagination not only to keep him strong enough to survive, but also to serve as his escape from the real world. Rebelling against Mrs De Ropp's oppressive care, Conradin secretly cares for two animals in an unused garden shed: a hen, which he adores, and a polecat-ferret, which he fears and keeps locked in a hutch. Gradually, Conradin begins to venerate the ferret as a god, naming it Sredni Vashtar. He worships it weekly, bringing offerings of flowers and berries, and stolen nutmeg for special occasions. Mrs De Ropp grows concerned over Conradin's visits to the shed. She discovers the hen, and sells it. She announces the sale to Conradin, expecting a protest, but to her surprise the boy does not respond. But in secret, he changes his worshipping rituals and asks of his god an unnamed boon: "Do one thing for me, Sredni Vashtar". When Conradin's visits to the shed do not cease, Mrs De Ropp investigates further, and discovers the locked hutch. Suspecting guinea pigs, she ransacks his room, finds the key, and goes down to the shed, forbidding Conradin to leave the house. While she is gone, Conradin slowly begins to accept defeat, knowing that his god was not real and that his cousin will come out of the shed in triumph. But when Mrs De Ropp fails to reappear after some time, Conradin begins to chant a song of victory. Eventually he sees the ferret emerge from the shed, with dark wet stains around its jaws and throat. It passes out into the garden. A sour-faced maid announces tea and asks for Mrs De Ropp. Conradin tells her that she has gone to the shed, and makes himself a piece of buttered toast. As he enjoys his toast, there are screams from the maid, calls for help from the kitchen staff, and later the sound of something heavy being carried into the house. As voices discuss fervently who should break the news to the boy, Conradin calmly makes himself another piece of toast. ===== The Reality Dysfunction opens in the year 2581 with a war raging between two worlds, Omuta and Garissa, over three hundred and eighty seven mineral-rich asteroids known as the Dorados. The war escalates in a matter of months and it is rumoured that Garissa has developed an ultimate weapon of mass destruction known only as 'The Alchemist'. The Alchemist deployment mission, on the starship Beezling and its two escorts, is intercepted by blackhawk mercenaries. Two of the ships survive, although they are crippled and stranded far from the nearest system. Dr. Alkad Mzu, creator of the Alchemist, survives the attack. Shortly after, the Omutans drop fifteen antimatter planet-busters on Garissa, rendering the planet uninhabitable and killing the majority of the ninety-five million inhabitants. The Confederation imposes a 30-year blockade around Omuta, and executes its government. Many millions of years earlier, the extremely rare conditions on a moon orbiting a gas giant in a remote galaxy allow for the creation of a lifeform able to 'transcend' to a purely energy-based (later known as energistic) state, the Ly-Cilph. The Ly-cilph become explorers of the universe, determined to know all that can be known about space and time. Over the course of aeons, they explore the universe and, presently, one arrives in the Milky Way galaxy. An Edenist voidhawk named Iasius returns home to Saturn to die. As is traditional, a mating flight is called, with many voidhawks and even a blackhawk, Udat, joining Iasius on its final voyage into Saturn's atmosphere. As it descends, the other ships energise its bitek eggs, which are taken to nest in Saturn's rings. After several months, when the eggs are large enough, the infant children of Iasius' captain, Athene, are placed within them, so ship and captain experience infancy together, forming an unbreakable bond of love. The ship that grows from the egg energised by Udat, Oenone, becomes the most notable of the new brood of voidhawks, and its captain, Syrinx, the most wilful. As with many Edenists, Syrinx and Oenone volunteer to serve a tour of duty with the Confederation Navy, but the destruction of their fellow ship Graeae (commanded by Syrinx's brother, Thetis) by an Adamist starship (called the Dymasio) using antimatter causes Syrinx to take a dim view of Adamists in general from that point on. She finishes her service with the Navy and then goes into cargo shipping. A group of colonists arrive on the frontier world of Lalonde from Earth. Grossly overpopulated, with tens, sometimes hundreds of millions of people crammed into domed cities called arcologies, many people on Earth dream of escaping to virgin worlds with open skies above their heads. However, Lalonde is a typical stage-one colony world, dirty and corrupt with a ridiculously low level of technology. The latest colonists, mostly from Earth's European arcologies, vow to create a peaceful, safe society. They are taken by steamboat up the mighty Juliffe River to found their new township, which they name Aberdale. Among the colonists are the Skibbow family, whose patriarch, Gerald, is excited about the prospect of living as a farmer. His teenage daughter, Marie, is less impressed and vows to escape back to Earth at the first opportunity. Also among the colonists are Father Horst Elwes, a Christian priest, and a large number of 'Ivets' (Involuntary Transportees), petty criminals from Earth sentenced to work on the colony worlds to repay their debt to society. Unbeknown to the authorities, one of the Ivets, Quinn Dexter, is a member of the Light Brother sect (devil worshippers) and is armed with highly advanced information implants which have escaped detection. Dexter soon exerts his command over all the other Ivets through the use of satanic rituals, whilst simultaneously ingratiating himself with the colonists. His act does not fool Powel Manani, the town's assigned settlement supervisor. Around this time the Ly-cilph arrives on Lalonde and studies Aberdale. Its curiosity is piqued when Father Elwes manages to see it, since few species are capable of perceiving it. Joshua Calvert is a resident of Tranquillity, an independent bitek habitat (one of only five such habitats) orbiting the gas giant Mirchusko. Tranquillity was founded to study the Ruin Ring, the remains of some forty thousand alien habitats which apparently self-destructed two thousand years ago. It was created by the strictly Christian Kulu Kingdom, but when its founder Prince Michael Saldana chose to also accept affinity gene implants and have them inherited by his children, Tranquillity was excommunicated by the Kingdom and its leaders disinherited. Since then it has flourished as a tax haven, a trustworthy base for blackhawk mating flights, and an exclusive business locale in its area of the Confederation. Calvert has inherited a trader starship, the Lady MacBeth, from his late father, but the ship was heavily damaged in an unknown incident (Calvert makes up several stories during the course of the novel to explain this incident, all false; the incident is later explained in the short story 'Escape Route' in the short story collection A Second Chance at Eden) and is no longer operational. Calvert dreams of making a big find in the Ruin Ring to finance repairs. Much to his surprise, Calvert indeed strikes lucky, finding a virtually intact memory core with the first-ever images of the reason for the Laymil racial suicide. However, decoding the information will take some time. Calvert sells his find for nearly seven million six hundred thousand fuseodollars, fixes up the Lady MacBeth and begins his life as a trader captain. He also starts a relationship with Ione Saldana, the current ruler of Tranquillity. Also on Tranquillity is Dr. Alkad Mzu, who has been imprisoned on the habitat for nearly thirty years. How she escaped the situation at the start of the novel is not explained. Mzu is kept under the watchful eye of half a dozen major Confederation intelligence agencies to ensure that her knowledge of the Alchemist is not revealed to anyone else. From time to time, Mzu asks ship captains for passage off the habitat, knowing that such requests will be vetoed by Ione Saldana. She asks both Calvert and Meyer, the captain of the Udat, for aid but both times they refuse to help after Saldana intervenes. On Lalonde Dexter encounters a group of people hiding in the jungle, led by the authoritative Laton. Laton is a 'Serpent', an Edenist who has rejected his society and, for lack of a better term, 'gone bad'. More than thirty-five years ago Laton tried to stage a coup to seize control of a habitat called Jantrit, using a proteanic virus to threaten it with destruction. In the resulting chaos the habitat was destroyed (the only Edenist habitat ever lost) with more than a million deaths. The Confederation Navy believed it had killed Laton, but Laton had evaded capture and fled into obscurity in the wilds of Lalonde. Laton, impressed with Dexter's resourcefulness (but disgusted by his religion), offers him a place in his organisation, whose goal is the discovery of true immortality. Dexter pretends to agree, knowing refusal will mean death. Realising that Dexter is faking his interest, Laton arranges for the villagers to discover that the Ivets are satanists. In the resulting chaos most of Dexter's followers are killed. The remaining few take Powel Manani prisoner and sacrifice him in a grisly ceremony. At this moment, the observing Ly-cilph detects a strange energy current streaming from Manani through a quantum fracture in the space-time continuum. The Ly-cilph attempts to investigate by following the energy current, only to find it flooding into an energistic vacuum. Unable to extricate itself, the Ly-cilph goes into hibernation whilst still halfway between the two dimensions. This allows the strange energy forms in the dimension beyond to cross back into our universe. The result is utter mayhem. Several of the strange entities seize control of Dexter and his followers, in effect 'possessing' them. Able to call upon powers from the other realm, such as the ability to control and alter matter and hurl powerful white fireballs around, they then seize control of Aberdale and Laton's compound, forcing the inhabitants to accept possession or death. Father Elwes escapes onto the savannah with most of Aberdale's children, but not before one of the possessed reveals a terrible secret: the possessing entities are the souls of humans who have died and been trapped, some of them for millennia, in an absolute void where the only way to pass the time is to parasitically feed on the memories and experiences of others. And there are billions of them in the darkness still screaming for escape. At the moment Laton is possessed, he manages to generate a tremendously powerful affinity SOS. This reaches the only two Edenists on the planet, a pair of agents from the Edenist Intelligence agency. They travel upriver to investigate, but are neutralised by the possessed. They manage to alert Ralph Hiltch (the Kulu External Security Agency's Lalonde head of station) and Kelven Solanki (from Confederation Navy Intelligence) to the threat, although not its nature. With the subversion spreading across the planet, the governor authorises the recruitment of mercenaries to put down what he perceives as an 'Ivet uprising'. Unbeknown to the governor, several possessed have already infiltrated the capital, Durringham, and taken passage on ships bound for other worlds. One of these ships is the Lady MacBeth. Calvert has hit on the idea of transporting Lalonde's legendarily tough wood (called Mayope) to the pastoral planet of Norfolk, which has banned all high technology. The idea sounds crazy, but it gets around Norfolk's ban on high-tech items and gives Calvert access to the planet's lucrative market in 'Norfolk Tears', the most desired alcoholic beverage in the galaxy. Calvert also begins a relationship with Louise Kavanagh, the young and naive daughter of Joshua's business partner, Grant. Although Calvert treats the relationship as a bit of fun, Louise falls in love with Joshua and, due to her planet's lack of chemical contraceptive, falls pregnant shortly after he leaves. Unfortunately for Norfolk, Calvert's passenger on the flight from Lalonde was a man called Quinn Dexter. Syrinx and Oenone arrive at Atlantis, the only planet colonised by Edenists (and unsurprisingly, entirely covered in a vast planet-ranging ocean), to purchase seafood to transport to Norfolk to trade for their Tears. During the stay at Pernik Island, Syrinx develops a relationship with an Edenist by the name of Mosul, the son of the family patriarch and guardian of the family fishing business. Mosul and Syrinx develop a contract which includes Syrinx's return to distribute ten percent of Syrinx's stock to the inhabitants of Pernik Island. However, the possessed have infiltrated Atlantis, led by the possessed Laton. They have taken control of Pernik Island and plan to possess Syrinx in the hope of possessing Oenone as well. Syrinx is captured and tortured as a prelude to possession. The plot backfires when Laton, having taken the time to study his possessing soul, manages to gain access to Pernik Island. He saves Syrinx, allows the crew of Oenone to rescue her (and gives them a message to take to Jupiter), and then causes the island to self-destruct, killing all of the possessed on it. Laton's departure from Lalonde was observed by a reporter. Within days half the Confederation knows that the most infamous Serpent of them all has returned, and a Confederation- wide quarantine to prevent the spread of Laton and his proteanic virus is enacted. On Tranquillity data from the Laymil information stack reveals that their homeworld in the Mirchusko system (which does not seem to exist any more) was taken over by a 'reality dysfunction', triggered by the 'Galheith research death essence tragedy'. The data shows the Laymil homeworld being overrun by a red cloud of unknown origin. On Lalonde the possessed close to within a few hundred kilometres of Durringham. As they advance, a strange red cloud starts forming above centres of possessed activity. Ralph Hiltch and Kelven Solanki evacuate their respective personnel from the planet. Hiltch's team manage to capture a possessed before they leave (this possessed is controlling the body of Gerald Skibbow of Aberdale) Solanki's report reaches the Confederation Navy, which swiftly organises a fleet to quarantine Lalonde. On Norfolk Quinn Dexter manages to reassert control of his body, by feeding his possessor images of his depraved activities as a satanist to the point where the possessor starts behaving like Dexter and then retreats into a catatonic state. Enhanced with his ex-possessor's energistic power, Dexter swiftly organises the possessed and they rapidly start taking over the planet. Several more possessed reach the independent bitek habitat Valisk in the Srinagar system and begin possessing several inhabitants as a prelude to taking over the entire habitat. They are led by Kiera, who has possessed the body of Marie Skibbow from Aberdale. Dariat, one of the children of Rubra, the eccentric genius who founded Valisk and then transferred his personality into it upon his death, becomes aware of their activities and volunteers to help them, so he can revenge himself upon the manipulative Rubra. His knowledge of the habitat's surveillance techniques and how to evade them proves invaluable to the possessed. They kill him, and then guide his soul into a new body to give him the same powers they possess. The Kulu embassy staff reach Ombey, the nearest Kulu colony world to Lalonde. However, when they bring their possessed prisoner out of zero-tau (a form of suspension which reduces energy movements to zero, effectively freezing time), they find the possessing spirit has fled, leaving the traumatised, broken form of Gerald Skibbow within. Princess Kirsten Saldana, the Saldana family member responsible for Ombey, is rapidly forced to declare a state of emergency when it is revealed that three personnel from the embassy staff were possessed and have begun spreading across the planet. Ralph Hiltch is brought in to advise. The Lady MacBeth reaches Tranquillity at the same time that representatives of the Lalonde government are forming a mercenary fleet and army to save the planet. Keen to protect his investment, Calvert volunteers to accompany the fleet. They reach Lalonde (of which a sizable portion is covered by a strange red cloud) and begin landing mercenaries on the surface, but many of the landing teams are rapidly possessed and return to the orbiting ships. A full-scale space battle erupts when the Confederation Navy squadron arrives to blockade the planet and the possessed ships start firing on them. The mercenary team from the Lady MacBeth evades possession and manage to take a prisoner whose possessor is called Shaun Wallace, who tells them that the red cloud will hide Lalonde from the universe. He reveals that the possessed can hear the cries for help from the possessed still in 'the beyond' and they desperately need to escape them. Once the cloud encircles Lalonde completely, the combined will of the possessed can physically move the planet onto another plane of existence where the cries of the possessed will not reach them. The mercenary team evacuates to a nearby settlement belonging to the alien Tyrathca. The xenocs are extremely agitated by the human's newly revealed ability to become 'elemental' as they call it. They have built a statue to their 'Sleeping God', which 'sees the universe' and they believe will save them. A reporter accompanying the mission, Kelly Tirrel, takes images of the statue and notes that there is no record of the Tyrathca having a god due to their highly unimaginative nature. They move on and discover Father Elwes and the children from Aberdale in hiding on the savannah. They manage to arrange a pick-up from the Lady MacBeth. The mercenary team sacrifices itself against an attack by possessed masquerading as the stereotypical knights in shining armour in order to give the children, Elwes and Kelly, time to evacuate. A message hidden in the request for aid given by Alkad Mzu to Captain Meyer of the Udat is revealed, offering him a vast sum of money for his help in aiding her escape. Meyer agrees and has Udat make a wormhole jump into the interior of Tranquillity. Mzu arranges to be in place for a pick-up, but underestimates the ability and sheer power of Tranquillity to enforce its will through affinity. Udat is compelled to jump back out with Mzu perilously hanging onto a rope ladder trailing from the blackhawk. The story continues in The Neutronium Alchemist. ===== Reginald Tate as Professor Bernard Quatermass in a shot from the second episode, "Persons Reported Missing" Along with his laboratory assistants, Professor Bernard Quatermass anxiously awaits the return to Earth of his new rocketship and its crew, who have become the first humans to travel into space. The rocket is at first thought to be lost, having dramatically overshot its planned orbit, but eventually it is detected by radar and returns to Earth, crash-landing in Wimbledon, London. When Quatermass and his team reach the crash area and succeed in opening the rocket, they discover that only one of the three crewmen, Victor Carroon, remains inside. Quatermass and his chief assistant Paterson (Hugh Kelly) investigate the rocket's interior and are baffled by what they find: the space suits of the others are present, and the instruments on board indicate that the door was never opened in flight, but there is no sign of the other two crewmen. Carroon, gravely ill, is cared for by the Rocket Group's doctor, Briscoe (John Glen), who has been having a secret affair with Carroon's wife, Judith (Isabel Dean). It is not just Quatermass who is interested in what happened to Carroon and his crewmates; journalists such as James Fullalove (Paul Whitsun-Jones) and Scotland Yard's Inspector Lomax (Ian Colin) are also keen to hear his story. Carroon is abducted by a group of foreign agents whose government wants the information they believe obtained while travelling in space. It is clear that there is something critically wrong: he appears to have absorbed the consciousness of the other two crew members, and is slowly mutating into a plant-like alien organism. As the police chase the rapidly transforming Carroon across London, Quatermass analyses samples of the mutated creature in a laboratory, and realises that it has the ability to end all life on Earth should it spore. A television crew working on an architectural programme locates the creature in Westminster Abbey, and Quatermass and British Army troops rush in to destroy it in the hour just before it will bring about doomsday. Quatermass convinces the consciousness of the three crewmen buried deep inside the creature to turn against it and destroy it. This appeal to the remnants of their humanity succeeds in defeating the organism. ===== Trish Maplewood (Cynthia Stevenson), the eldest Jordan sister, is an upper middle class housewife married to psychiatrist Bill Maplewood (Dylan Baker) and has three children. She appears to have the perfect marriage, but she is unaware of Bill's secret life: he is a pedophile who is obsessed with 11-year-old Johnny Grasso, a classmate of their son, Billy (Rufus Read). When Johnny comes to the Jordan house for a sleepover, Bill drugs and rapes him. Later, Bill learns that another boy, Ronald Farber, is home alone while his parents are away in Europe. Under the guise of attending a PTA meeting, Bill drives to the boy's house and rapes him as well. After Johnny is taken to the hospital and found to have been sexually abused, the police arrive at the Maplewood residence to question Bill. After alerting his wife to the police presence, Bill begins by asking the two detectives, "You said something about Ronald Farber?" The two detectives, looking puzzled, say nothing. Bill then stammers, "I mean, Johnny Grasso." Out on bail, he tearfully admits to Billy that he "fucked" the boys, that he enjoyed it, and that he would do it again. When Billy asks, "Would you ever fuck me?", his father replies, "No... I'd jerk off instead." Helen Jordan (Lara Flynn Boyle), the middle sister, is a successful author who is adored and envied by everyone she knows, and can have any man she wants. Her charmed life leaves her ultimately unfulfilled, however. She despairs that no one wants her for herself, and that the praise regularly heaped upon her is undeserved. She is fascinated by an unknown man who makes obscene phone calls to her apartment and tries to seek out a relationship with him. But she is disappointed when she finds out the man is her neighbor Allen (Philip Seymour Hoffman), to whom she is not attracted. Allen—who is coincidentally one of Bill's patients—sinks into depression as Helen's rejection ruins his fantasies, and he realizes that a woman who truly cares for him, Kristina (Camryn Manheim), has been right under his nose all along. However, she had recently killed the apartment doorman after he raped her. While Allen is still content with her friendship after she confided this in him, it is revealed by Helen the genitals of the doorman were discovered by police less than six months later in Kristina's freezer. Joy (Jane Adams), the youngest sister, is overly sensitive and lacking direction. She works in telephone sales, but leaves to do something more fulfilling: teaching at an immigrant-education center. Her students call her a scab because their original teacher was striking, and she begins to feel empty in that job, too. Joy is also constantly let down in her personal life. After a rejected suitor, Andy (Jon Lovitz), calls Joy shallow at the beginning of the film and then goes on to kill himself, Helen tries to set her up with other men. Expecting to hear from a suitor, she instead gets an obscene call from Allen. Later one of her Russian students, Vlad (Jared Harris), offers her a ride in his taxi and they end up having sex. She is initially smitten, but she soon realizes Vlad was using her and that he may be married. After being attacked by his wife and lending him $500 in return for the guitar and stereo he stole from her, she is back to being alone. Finally, the sisters' parents, Mona and Lenny, are separating after 40 years of marriage, but will not get divorced. Lenny (Ben Gazzara) is bored with his marriage, but does not want to start another relationship; he simply "wants to be alone." As Mona (Louise Lasser) copes with being single during her twilight years, Lenny tries to rekindle his enthusiasm for life by having an affair with a neighbor. It is no use, however, as Lenny eventually finds that he has become incapable of feeling. The only person who seems happy at the end is Billy, who throughout the film attempts to make himself ejaculate and finally succeeds after masturbating to a sunbather in a bikini. ===== The British- American Rocket Group, headed by the taciturn Professor Bernard Quatermass, launches its first manned rocket into outer space. Shortly thereafter, all contact is lost with the rocket and its three-man crew: Carroon, Reichenheim and Green. The large rocket later returns to Earth, crashing into an English country field. Quatermass and his assistant Marsh arrive at the scene. With them are the local emergency services, Carroon's wife Judith, Rocket Group physician Dr. Briscoe and Blake, a Ministry official who chides Quatermass repeatedly for launching the rocket without official permission. The rocket's hatch is finally opened, and the space-suited Carroon stumbles out. There is no sign of the other two crew. Carroon is in shock, only able to say the words, "Help me". Inside the rocket, Quatermass and Marsh find only the fastened but completely empty spacesuits of the two missing men. Carroon is taken to Briscoe's laboratory facility on the grounds that conventional hospitals and doctors would have no idea how to evaluate or treat the world's first returned astronaut, now suffering from some sort of adverse outer space event. Even under Briscoe's attentive care, Carroon remains mute, generally immobile, but alert with eyes that now have a feral and cunning quality. Briscoe discovers an oddly disfigured area on his shoulder and notices changes in his face, suggesting some sort of mutation of the underlying bone structure. Meanwhile, Scotland Yard Inspector Lomax has undertaken investigation of the other two men's disappearance and, having surreptitiously fingerprinted Carroon as a suspect, alerts Quatermass that the prints are like nothing human. At Judith's insistence that Briscoe is not helping her husband, Quatermass agrees to have Carroon transferred to a regular hospital, under guard. Marsh, meanwhile, has developed the film from the rocket's interior view camera, and Quatermass, Lomax and Briscoe watch it. The crew are seen for a time at their duties, then suddenly, something seems to heavily buffet the ship. After that, there is a nightmarish wavering distortion of the cabin's atmosphere, and the men react as if something frightening, yet not visible, is there with them. One by one they collapse, Carroon being the last. Quatermass and Briscoe determine from the evidence that something living in outer space has entered the spaceship, dissolved Reichenheim and Green in their sealed spacesuits, and evidently entered Carroon's body, who is now in the process of being transformed by this unknown entity. Not knowing any of this, Carroon's wife, Judith, hires a private investigator, Christie, to break her husband out of the secured hospital. The escape is successful, but not before Carroon smashes a potted cactus in his hospital room, which fuses to his flesh. In the lift he kills Chistie and absorbs the life force in his body, leaving a shrivelled husk. Judith quickly discovers what is happening to her husband. Carroon disappears into the London night, leaving her unharmed, but completely traumatized. Inspector Lomax initiates a manhunt for Carroon, who goes to a nearby chemist's shop and kills the chemist, using his swollen, crusty, cactus-thorn-riddled hand and arm as a cudgel and leaving a twisted, empty man-husk to be found by the police. Quatermass theorizes that Carroon has taken select chemicals to "speed up a change going on inside of him". After hiding on a river barge, Carroon encounters a little girl, leaving her unharmed through sheer force of will. That night he is in the zoo, barely visible amongst some shadowed bushes, now with far less of his human form remaining. In the morning, scattered animal carcasses are found, their life forces having been absorbed, with a slime trail leading away from the zoo. Among the bushes, Quatermass and Briscoe also find a small but living remnant of Carroon, and take it back to their laboratory. Following an examination, Quatermass concludes that some kind of predatory alien life has completely taken over and will eventually release reproduction spores, endangering the entire planet. The remnant, having now grown much larger, breaks out of its glass cage, but dies of starvation on the floor. On a police tip from a vagrant, Lomax and his men track the Carroon mutation to Westminster Abbey, where it has crawled high up on a metalwork scaffolding. It is now a gigantic shapeless mass of combined animal and plant tissue with eyes, distended nodules, and tentacle-like fronds filled with spores. Quatermass arrives and orders London's electrical power centres be combined and the generated power quickly diverted to the Abbey. Heavy duty electrical cable is run and attached to the bottom of the metal scaffolding. The alien creature is cremated by electrocution before it can release its spores. The threat eliminated, Quatermass quickly walks out of the Abbey, preoccupied by his thoughts. He ignores all who ask questions. Marsh, his assistant, approaches and asks "What are you going to do?" Never breaking stride, Quatermass offhandedly replies, "I'm going to start again". He leaves Marsh behind, walking off into the dark, and sometime later a second manned rocketship roars into outer space. ===== The story's protagonist, Charles Prentice, ventures to Estrella de Mar in order to rescue his jailed brother, Frank who has been arrested for instigating an arson attack which killed 5 people.https://www.theguardian.com/books/1997/aug/24/fiction.jgballard Upon arriving and talking with his sibling, Charles finds to his horror that his brother has confessed to everything, and has no interest in trying to escape his plea. In a matter of days, Charles becomes immersed in the strange world of Estrella de Mar, learning more of her dark secrets, and spending less time worrying about his brother. Constantly being manipulated while he thinks he is finding the truth, Charles soon finds himself out of control and at the nexus of certain disaster, at which point he finally begins to understand just what happened to his brother. ===== In the game, the player controls the protagonist, Hugo, who has come to a haunted house to look for his girlfriend Penelope, who hasn't been seen since she went to babysit there. The premise bears similarity to LucasFilm Games' Maniac Mansion, released in 1987, where the main character enters a mansion in order to rescue his girlfriend from a mad scientist. ===== In Toronto, an Armenian Canadian family is headed by Ani, a widow whose husband attempted to assassinate a Turkish ambassador. Her adult son Raffi is involved in a sexual affair with Celia, his step-sister, who has accused Ani of pushing her father off of a cliff, while Ani insists he slipped and fell. Ani gives art history presentations on Armenian American painter Arshile Gorky, with Celia constantly attending and publicly heckling Ani about concealing the truth. An Armenian film director, Edward Saroyan, arrives to Toronto with a goal to make a film about the Armenian Genocide, the Van Resistance, and Gorky. Ani is hired as a historical consultant, with Raffi working on the project with his mother. An aspiring Turkish Canadian actor named Ali receives his big break when cast as Ottoman governor Jevdet Bey. Ali reads on the history of the genocide, which he had never heard much of before, and offends Raffi when he tells Saroyan that he believes the Ottomans felt the genocide was justified, in light of World War I. Raffi attempts to explain to Ali that the Armenians were citizens of the Ottoman Empire and that the Turks were not at war with them. Ali shrugs the encounter off, saying they were both born in Canada and they should together try to move past the genocide. After Raffi returns to Canada from a flight to Turkey, he is interrogated at airport security by a retiring customs official named David, who has reason to believe Raffi is involved in a plot to smuggle drugs. Rather than employ drug-sniffing dogs, David prefers to speak to Raffi at length, with Raffi claiming he had taken it upon himself to shoot extra footage in Turkey. In fact, the film is premiering that night. Inspired by his own son, David chooses to believe Raffi is innocent, and releases him. The film reels remain with him, however, which David discovers to contain heroin. ===== Note: there is one set, which serves as a street scene, Justice Squeezum's courtroom, Mrs Squeezum's boudoir, a tavern bar-room, Politic's parlour, Hilaret's bedroom, a prison cell, an upstairs room at the tavern, and Justice Worthy's courtroom. In London, 1735, naive young Hilaret leaves the over-protective walls of her father's house resolved to elope with her beloved Captain Constant. She charges Ramble with rape, and her maid Cloris charges Constant with rape. The cases are tried by the corrupt justice, Mr. Squeezum. ===== Querry, a famous architect who is fed up with his celebrity, no longer finds meaning in art or pleasure in life. Arriving anonymously in the late 1950s at a Congo leper colony overseen by Catholic missionaries, Rozenberg Quarterly, December 2013. he is diagnosed – by Dr Colin, the resident doctor who is himself an atheist – as the mental equivalent of a 'burnt-out case': a leper who has gone through the stages of mutilation. However, as Querry loses himself in working for the lepers, his disease of mind slowly approaches a cure. Querry meets Rycker, a palm-oil plantation owner, and a man of apparently earnest Catholic faith who does not accept his own nothingness and tries to amplify the relevance of Querry's presence in that country. Rycker's wife, a young and ill-educated woman, is absolutely bored with his prudishness and her own lack of freedom. It is revealed that Querry is a famous architect, known throughout the world for his design and construction of churches – which he himself believes have been defiled by the religious occupants. Querry is persuaded to design and oversee a new building for the hospital. An English journalist called Parkinson arrives at the village with the intention of writing a series of articles, to be syndicated in many European and North American newspapers, on the subject of Querry's perceived 'saintly' activities in the village, including a story of Querry rescuing his servant – an African mutilated by leprosy- who became lost in the jungle. However Parkinson also brings up Querry's past not only as an architect but also as a womaniser. It is revealed that Querry's former lover committed suicide, thus prompting his journey to the village (however his journey was not the result of feelings of guilt or grief, but rather the incident acted to magnify his growing loss of faith and vocation.) When the first article is published and received at the village, Querry becomes angered by his portrayal, not only by Parkinson, but by Rycker whom Parkinson interviewed for the story. Querry travels to the provincial capital and on the way calls in to confront Rycker. Querry learns that Rycker's wife fears that she is pregnant and that her husband does not want a child (despite having refused contraception and having effectively forced her into sex numerous times). She tells Querry to ask Rycker for permission to travel to the capital Luc to see a doctor. Following a confrontation between Querry and Rycker, Querry leaves for Luc and takes with him Mrs. Rycker so she may visit the doctor, however neither of the two inform Rycker of her departure. Querry never becomes physically intimate with her. In Luc, Querry and Mrs. Rycker take rooms at the hotel. However, before going to sleep, Querry suspects that Mrs. Rycker is crying in the next room. When he investigates she informs him that she was actually laughing at the novel she is reading – one that would be banned at her home with the pious Rycker – and the two share a bottle of whisky. As Mrs. Rycker is going to sleep, Querry tells her a story which closely parallels his story: a man losing both faith and vocation. The following morning Parkinson informs Querry that Rycker has arrived in Luc in pursuit of his wife and, upon discovering his wife's diary with an entry stating "Spent the night with Q", Rycker accuses Querry of having an affair. Querry, after briefly meeting Mrs. Rycker and learning that she is pregnant with Rycker's child, leaves Luc and returns to the village, where the construction of the hospital is nearing completion. Days later Mrs. Rycker arrives at the convent near the village. She tells the sisters and priests that she has been having an affair with Querry and that she is pregnant with his child. When Querry visits her she claims that she thought of Querry whilst having sex with Rycker in an attempt to endure the man, and thus she became pregnant with what she views as Querry's child (despite it being Rycker's). Father Thomas, the temporary supervisor of the village, becomes angry at Querry for bringing shame and sin upon the village (as well as damaging his image as saintly – despite strong objections to having such an image from Querry himself). Rycker arrives at the village and demands to see Querry, who has gone to stay in Dr. Colin's room for the night. Rycker begins to walk to Dr. Colin's stating that a court would never convict him, which troubles the priests – one of whom pursues Rycker to prevent him shooting Querry. Enraged, Rycker confronts Querry. While being accused of adultery, Querry laughs at the absurdity of the accusations. Rycker misinterprets the laugh and becomes angry and shoots Querry, who then dies. Querry is buried in the village, which fulfills his wish to never return to his old life. =====