From Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License ===== Jan Dítě has been released from a Czech prison just before the very end of his 15-year sentence and is settling in a town near the border between Czechoslovakia and Germany. He occupies his time with rebuilding a deserted house, and begins to recall his past, where he says that his main wish in life was to be a millionaire. Jan begins his career as a frankfurter vendor at a railroad station, and quickly learns the power of money and the influence it exerts over people. At one point during his reminiscences, a young woman, Marcela, and her older traveling companion, a professor, settle in the area. Jan and Marcela develop a mutual attraction, although it remains physically unconsummated. The film continues to alternate between past and present, as the relationship between the older Jan and the new neighbors develops. In the restaurant, the younger Jan has a number of affairs with various women, including an actress and a prostitute at a brothel. He also gradually moves into more socially prestigious work settings, including a stint at a spa, the Hotel Tichota, where he has an affair with a maid there. Jan eventually finds employment in Prague at the Hotel Paříž, where he falls under the tutelage of the Maître d', Skřivánek, who claims that he once served the King of England. Eventually, Jan serves the Emperor of Ethiopia at one occasion. The Emperor tries to award a medal to Skřivánek, but because he is short in height, cannot place the award around Skřivánek's neck. Jan is short enough for the Emperor to reach, and maneuvers into place to receive the medal in place of Skřivánek. With the annexation of Czechoslovakia by the Third Reich, Jan falls in love with Liza, a young Sudeten German woman who worships Adolf Hitler. She agrees to marry him only after he proves that he is of pure Aryan descent through medical examination. During the occupation, the other waiters and the hotel manager, Brandejs, express their contempt for the German occupiers by trying to be as unhelpful in their service as possible. Jan is the only member of the waitstaff not to express symbolic resistance in this manner. Brandejs dismisses Jan for this reason, and says that Jan will be blacklisted from employment in any Prague establishment. When Jan and Liza later appear as patrons, and after Jan mocks Skřivánek that serving the King of England has done him no good in life, Skřivánek pours food over Jan in protest. Eventually, Skřivánek is taken away by the occupying authorities and never seen again. During World War II, Jan works in an institute, formerly the Hotel Tichota, where German women reside to breed a new "master race" with selected soldiers. Because the owner, Mr Tichota, uses a wheelchair, he has been displaced as its owner and is never seen again. In the meantime, Liza serves as a nurse on the Russian front. She returns with valuable stamps taken from the homes of Polish-Jewish families. As the war progresses and the tide turns against the German, the women are displaced from the facility, and wounded and amputee soldiers replace them. Near the end of the war, the facility is attacked, and the soldiers and staff are evacuated. Liza tries to retrieve the stamps to use after the war, but dies when the roof of the hospital collapses. Jan finds Liza's body with her holding the box of stamps, and pries them from her hands. After the war, the stamps' value allows Jan to become a wealthy hotelier, in the same Hotel Tichota premises. After the Communists take power in Czechoslovakia in 1948, Jan loses his property and wealth when he tells the Communist resistance that he himself is a millionaire. He is sentenced to prison for 15 years: one year for each million of his fortune. In prison, he sees that Brandejs and the other formerly wealthy customers are prisoners. Jan tries to sit among them, but they exclude him from their circle. Marcela and the professor leave the area. Jan completes the restoration of his home and finally releases the stamps by letting the winds blow them into the valley. ===== As Christmas approaches Detective Inspector Jack Frost is on the trail of a sensitive case with limited time to solve it. Tracy Uphill, an eight-year-old child, goes missing after attending Sunday school. It turns out her mother is a prostitute who couldn't meet her because she was with a client. There are many suspects and characters to trouble DI Frost's mind including; the mother's client with a false alibi, the vicar with a penchant for pornography and a local psychic who claims she knows where to find the body of the young girl. At the same time other cases also need to be solved, as Frost's colleague DI Allen is suddenly rushed to hospital, leaving him alone to investigate some attempted break-ins at a local bank and a 30-year- old skeleton with a severed arm. Detective Constable Clive Barnard, the nephew of the Chief Constable, is another problem Frost faces when the new detective is freshly-transferred to Denton and takes an immediate dislike to Frost's methods. While many believe that DC Barnard has only got into CID through his family connections and his all-knowing attitude does not help to improve his image, Frost eventually warms to the young cop and becomes his mentor. Category:1984 British novels Category:Crime novels ===== Dr. Petrie is surprised by a late night visitor, "a tall, lean ... square cut ... sun baked" man who turns out to be his good friend (ex-Assistant Commissioner Sir Denis) Nayland Smith of Burma, formerly of Scotland Yard, who has come directly from Burma. We then learn that various men associated with India are the target of assassination by the Chinese master criminal Dr. Fu Manchu, who seems to have been active in Burma (as distinct from India), in places such as Rangoon, Prome, Moulmein and the "Upper Irrawaddy" and who comes to England with dacoits and thugs. Fu Manchu is pursued from the opium dens of Limehouse in the East End of London to various country estates. We learn that Dr. Fu Manchu is a leading member not of "old China", the Mandarin class of the Manchu dynasty, or "young China", a new generation of "youthful and unbalanced reformers" with "western polish" – but a "Third Party". Nayland Smith is outwitted several times by Fu Manchu and thus he reflects more the narrow escapes of the later Bulldog Drummond rather than the "logical" superior approach of the earlier Sherlock Holmes. Fu Manchu is a master poisoner and chemist, a cunning member of the Yellow Peril, "the greatest genius which the powers of evil have put on the earth for centuries", though his mission is not exactly clear at this stage. He appears to be trying to capture and take back to China the best engineers of Europe for some larger criminal purpose. By the end of the book, Fu Manchu's slave girl Karamaneh, a beautiful Arab woman, apparently now in love with Dr Petrie, and her brother Aziz are freed from Fu Manchu's captivity and Inspector Weymouth, driven mad by an injection of serum from Fu Manchu, is restored to sanity by Fu Manchu, who appears to have escaped from a fire which destroys the house that he had previously entered. ===== ===== ===== In Fairfield, Idaho, two janitors witness an invisible force storm down a city street; a road worker is later killed by the force on the highway. The next day, an elephant suddenly materializes in front of an oncoming big rig. The driver manages to stop in time, but the elephant soon collapses and dies, over forty miles away from where it disappeared the night before at the Fairfield Zoo. Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) survey the damage in the city, which appears to have been caused by an elephant even though none was seen. Ed Meecham, an animal handler at the zoo, recounts how he came to the elephant's locked cage to find it empty. His boss, Willa Ambrose, tells the agents that the zoo is in danger of closing due to other animal disappearances. She blames the zoo's decline on an animal rights group which is known to free captive animals. The group's leader, Kyle Lang, denies any involvement in the elephant's release. Lang tells them that Ambrose is being sued by the Malawi government over a lowland gorilla she took from their country ten years prior. Mulder contacts Frohike and Byers, who say that Fairfield is known for its animal disappearances and UFO sightings. They also mention Ambrose's gorilla, who is known to communicate using American Sign Language. Meanwhile, Scully follows one of Lang's activists as he sneaks into the zoo, running into Meecham inside. The activist attempts to free a tiger, but after a flash of light, the tiger seemingly disappears. The activist is promptly mauled to death, with the killing captured on his night vision camera. When questioned, Lang denies any responsibility for the death. Ambrose introduces the agents to the gorilla, Sophie, who has been cowering in her cage and expresses an apparent fear of light. Scully performs a necropsy on the elephant, revealing it to be pregnant — which is impossible, since the animal had never been mated. The tiger reappears at a Boise construction site, and is shot dead by Meecham when it charges at Ambrose; the zoo is shut down the next day over the incident. Mulder tells Ambrose that the tiger was also pregnant, and explains his theory that extraterrestrial aliens are impregnating all the female endangered animals as part of "their own Noah's Ark." Mulder thinks that Sophie too is pregnant and that she is worried that her baby will be abducted. Sophie confirms Mulder's suspicions when she makes signs for "baby go flying light". Sheriff's deputies order Ambrose to release Sophie into protective custody, presumably to be sent back to Malawi. Ambrose unsuccessfully seeks help from Lang, her former boyfriend, but he advises to let Sophie return to the wild. Lang later goes to see Ambrose at the warehouse where Sophie is being prepped for shipping, but finds her cage empty. He is then mysteriously killed by a falling crate. Scully finds that Lang was struck with a cattle prod and suspects Ambrose of killing him, but she claims that Meecham is responsible. Mulder goes to arrest Meecham, who is keeping an angered Sophie at another warehouse near Boise. Meecham suddenly locks Mulder in Sophie's room, where the enraged gorilla attacks and injures him. A bright light appears and causes Sophie to vanish, but not before she gives Mulder a final message in sign language. When Mulder gives the message to Ambrose the next day, she says it means "man save man." Ambrose and the agents are then called to the highway, where Sophie has been struck by a car and killed. Ambrose and Meecham are both charged with manslaughter for Lang's death. As the agents leave Idaho, Mulder says through narration that he believes alien conservationists were behind the events in Fairfield.Lowry, pp. 205–206Lovece, pp. 158–159 ===== Bob Ford of the Jesse James gang is wounded during a bank robbery. He mends at Jesse's home in Missouri for six months, although Jesse's wife Zee doesn't trust him. Cynthy Waters, an actress Bob is in love with, comes to town to perform on stage. Bob catches her speaking with John Kelley, a prospector, and is jealous. He knows that Cynthy wants to get married and settle down. In need of money, Bob hears of the governor's $10,000 reward for Jesse. He betrays his friend, shooting Jesse in the back. Bob is pardoned by the governor but receives a reward for just $500. He spends the money on an engagement ring. Harry Kane, who manages Cynthy's career, books Bob for stage appearances in which he re-enacts the shooting of Jesse. He is booed by audiences and mocked in public for his cowardly deed. Bob goes to Colorado to try prospecting and runs into Kelley, who is rejecting offers to become Creede's town marshal. Bob wakes up one day to find both Kelley and the engagement ring missing. Cynthy arrives just as Kelley returns, having captured the ring's thief. Kelley is disappointed when Cynthy accepts Bob's proposal, so he accepts the job as marshal. Frank James, brother of Jesse, overhears a conversation in which Cynthy confides to Kelley that he's the one she truly loves. Frank makes sure that Bob learns of this, knowing Bob will make the fatal mistake of confronting Kelley face to face. In the street, Bob draws on Kelley and is shot dead. Kelley gets the girl and Frank avenges his brother's death. ===== A plane flying to Cape Town, carrying a young couple and their baby, crashes in the jungle. Everyone on the plane dies, except for the baby who is rescued by Cheeta, Tarzan's chimpanzee. Tarzan and Jane adopt the child and name him "Boy." Five years later, a search party comes looking for Boy, because he is the heir to the Greystoke family fortune worth millions. The search party is led by the Lancing family, who are distant cousins of Greystoke. Tarzan and Jane claim the child is dead and that Boy is theirs, but the elder Lancing, Sir Thomas, recognizes Boy's eyes. The younger Lancings suggest leaving Boy and taking the inheritance. When Sir Thomas objects, they say they will take him back and, as legal guardians, still control the inheritance. Sir Thomas says he'll tell Tarzan, but the rest of the party imprison Sir Thomas in a tent and plan to abduct Boy. Tarzan overhears them plotting; he steals their guns and throws them into a deep lake. Jane arrives the next day and learns what has taken place, and admits that Boy is Greystoke. She persuades Tarzan to retrieve the cache of guns, without which the search party can't survive. Tarzan retrieves them but Jane drops the rope so that Tarzan is trapped. Jane convinced it's the right thing to do, goes with Boy and the rest of the Lancings toward civilization but Sir Thomas convinces her that the younger Lancings only want Boy for his money. Sir Thomas tries to sneak away but they shoot him. Thinking Jane is trying to fool them, they ignore her directions and fall into the hands of the Zambeli, known for mutilation of captives. The white people are held in a separate hut while the tribe begins to kill and preserve the native bearers. Jane is wounded while helping Boy to escape through a fence. Boy finds Tarzan and is aided by chimps and elephants to free him. Tarzan reaches the Zambeli village and uses the elephants to drive away the natives. He saves two of the search party, and he and Jane decide to keep Boy with them in the jungle. ===== In the Norwegian Sea, chaos erupts on board the USS Ardent, an American destroyer escort. Due to mysterious yet unspecified events, half of the Ardent's crew board lifeboats and abandon ship against the captain's orders. Eighteen hours later, they are spotted by a Canadian fishing vessel; however, in that short span of time, the young crew members have undergone rapid aging. Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) and Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) visit the ship's sole surviving crew member, Lt. Harper, who has been quarantined at the Bethesda Naval Hospital. Scully finds that Harper, despite being in his twenties, has aged to the point of being unrecognizable. Mulder explains that the Ardent vanished at the 65th parallel, a location with a history of ship disappearances. Mulder believes that a "wrinkle in time" exists there, and that the Ardent was the subject of government experimentation related to the Philadelphia Experiment from World War II. In Norway, Mulder and Scully get Henry Trondheim (John Savage), a naval trawler captain, to take them to the Ardent's last known location. After crashing into the bow of the Ardent, Mulder, Scully, and Trondheim find signs of advanced corrosion, even though the Ardent is only a few years old. Below decks, the party finds the mummified remains of several crew members. They also find the wizened commanding officer of the Ardent, Captain Barclay, who claims that "time got lost" after his ship encountered a "glowing light" in the ocean. Trondheim's boat is stolen and his first mate is murdered. Trondheim is later attacked by a Norwegian pirate whaler named Olafsson, who has not aged despite being on the ship for the past two days. Mulder, Scully, and Trondheim eventually begin to age unnaturally. Scully develops a theory that the Ardent is sailing near a metallic object beneath the ocean, and that it has caused free radicals to rapidly oxidize their bodies and age them. When Mulder notices that the ship's sewage pipe is the only one not corroded through, the agents realize that something from the ocean contaminated the Ardent's potable water and led to the aging; Olafsson and his men remained unaffected due to their consumption of recycled water from the sewage system. Desperate to survive, Trondheim kills Olafsson after he reveals the secret, and sets out to keep the water for himself. Scully learns from blood tests that the contaminated water causes rapid oxidative damage and dramatically increases sodium chloride in the body. She tries to ration the drinkable water amongst the three, but discovers Trondheim attempting to hoard what little that remains. Trondheim locks Scully out of the sewage hold, forcing her to use minuscule supplies to keep Mulder alive. The mysterious oxidant eventually eats through the ship's hull, flooding the hold and drowning Trondheim. The agents both lose consciousness shortly before Navy rescuers arrive at the ship. Scully comes to at the hospital, where she is told that her written observations on the case helped naval doctors reverse their aging and save Mulder from near-certain death. Scully says that she wants to return to the Ardent for more research, but the doctor tells her that the ship sank shortly after their rescue due to the flooding. ===== In the town of Gibsonton, Florida, one night, two brothers are playing in their home outdoor swimming pool. A mysterious figure approaches them from the woods surrounding their home and jumps into the pool without them noticing. As the brothers play, they notice something is wrong and before they leave the pool, the figure emerges from the water. It's revealed to be the boys' father, "Alligator Man", who scares his sons for fun. After some laughs in the pool, the "Alligator Man" tells his children to go back into the house as it is late and time for them to go to bed. The boys leave the pool and their father stays behind to swim. An unknown mysterious figure approaches the pool from the woods. It attacks and kills "Alligator Man" in his pool. Agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) travel to Gibsonton to investigate a 28-year series of attacks by an unknown assailant in a community of former circus sideshow performers. They attend the funeral of the "Alligator Man" (who suffered from Ichthyosis). Among the people they meet afterwards are "self-made freaks" human blockhead Dr. Blockhead (Jim Rose) (who interrupted the funeral by hammering a railroad spike into his own chest) and his "geek" sidekick The Conundrum (The Enigma), who will eat anything, but says nothing. The agents also meet former performer Jim Jim, the Dogface Boy, who later became the local sheriff after his face went through hair loss. Mulder and Scully stay at the Gulf Breeze trailer court, whose name is a reference to the 1987 Gulf Breeze UFO incident, also mentioned in season 1 episode, "Fallen Angel". Here, they meet the distrustful manager Mr. Nutt (Michael J. Anderson), and Lanny (Vincent Schiavelli), an alcoholic with an underdeveloped conjoined twin named Leonard. The agents hear a story about the legendary Fiji mermaid, a common sideshow act in the 19th century that generally turned out to be a monkey with a fish tail attached—the "humbug" referred to by the episode's title. Despite Scully's usual skepticism, Mulder is intrigued because of what look like simian tracks left by the mystery attacker. One night, Mr. Nutt is fatally attacked by a creature. The agents eventually discover that the attacker is Lanny's twin, Leonard, who is able to detach himself from Lanny's body. According to Lanny, Leonard attacks people and attempts to burrow into them because he is looking for a new brother to replace Lanny, who is dying from liver failure due to years of alcohol abuse. Lanny voluntarily locks himself in the local jail in an effort to keep Leonard from escaping, but dies during the night, and Leonard is able to slip through the bars on the cell window and flee. Mulder and Scully try to capture Leonard, who goes inside a funhouse, but he manages to get away. Upon leaving the funhouse, they find The Conundrum lying on the ground, rubbing his stomach, apparently having been attacked by Leonard. As Dr. Blockhead prepares to leave town with The Conundrum the following morning, he comments to Scully that with modern science eradicating genetic anomalies, it will be up to self- made freaks like him to remind people that "nature abhors normality." The Conundrum looks unwell and Mulder asks what the matter is. The Conundrum -- in his only line of the episode -- replies, "probably something I ate." As Dr. Blockhead drives away with The Conundrum, Mulder and Scully turn to each other with confused and somewhat shocked expressions. ===== The story (existing in the export version only) is presented in a short prologue sequence at the game's start. "In a time and world not of our own", the evil Sorceress uses her dark powers to summon twelve powerful minions, each of them representing one Zodiac sign, and sends them to conquer the world. The slinky has to battle through 12 stages of enemies, destroying each Zodiac boss along the way, in order to reach the Sorceress herself and put an end to her plot. On the final stage, the player must defeat all of the bosses in succession before facing the Sorceress. After she is downed, her body explodes and a battle commences against three enemies resembling the slinky and called "The Mimickers". When they are destroyed, "The Creator" appears as the real end boss. ===== Los Angeles attorney Jeff Mills and his friend Derek Clayton rescue a beautiful woman, Miranda Reed, from an abusive boyfriend. The boyfriend makes Satanic threats at Jeff, but eventually leaves. As Miranda has no home, Jeff offers to let her stay at his. Jeff becomes romantically involved with Miranda, despite the ominous things that keep happening since he has met her. Miranda eventually reveals that she belongs to a coven run by her ex-boyfriend. She explains that the mysterious events Jeff has witnessed are part of the coven's effort to bring Miranda back into the fold. If they have not done so by the winter solstice, Miranda will be free forever. The coven's solstice ritual features a human sacrifice on a beach. Jeff vows to help Miranda elude the coven. He hides her with one of his clients while he goes to work, but the coven finds Miranda. Jeff and Derek rush to the beach to save Miranda. The coven have her tied up as a sacrifice, but she is only there as bait. Jeff is the real sacrifice, and Derek is the actual leader of the coven. He kills Jeff. The film ends with Miranda and Derek replaying the same scenario from the beginning of the film on a new victim. ===== In the film, journalist crews are first seen trying to avoid being penned up in Kuwait City as the war is about to break. Other journalists repeatedly try to get through military zones to capture what's happening. Once these journalists make it into Iraq, they capture troops at their frazzled ends, cussing. A journalist described a Scud missile "whizzing" by is artfully juxtaposed with a shot of a string of photographers taking a "whiz". The reporters themselves wrestle with grisly images and the effect it may have on their humanity. One journalist admits she felt, "I'm in over my head," but presses on. Later, she says of a tragic scene she has just witnessed, "If that doesn't affect you, you should find something else to do. That shit should always affect you." The U.S. later bombs the Baghdad hotel where these journalists are staying. After the gunfire stops, a Polish journalist files a radio report that says, "It doesn't look good," adding that a Marine has told him "too many people still have weapons." ===== Three enslaved orphans (Blockhead, Lucky and Squidge) work in the goldmines in the Underground City ruled by the Evil Emperor, and wish for freedom from their gruelling situation. Along with other characters, they escape from the mines and are briefly imprisoned, and make a second getaway to search for a mythical Sky Kingdom. The group appeal to higher forces when confronted by various challenges such as being chased by hyenas, but eventually reach the Sky Kingdom. ===== Young Gezun of Lorsk, bound to the service of a sorcerer named Sancheth Sar, is sent by his master to bid on the Hordhum Manuscript, one of the magical effects of the retiring magician Dauskezh Van. The errand is complicated and the competition fierce, as the bidding is anonymous and his master's rival, Nikurteu Bayla, is also after the manuscript. But Gezun parries almost all of Bayla's stratagems. Chronologically, "The Owl and the Ape" is the third of de Camp's Pusadian tales, and the first to feature his protagonist Gezun of Lorsk. Gezun is a teenager at the time of this story. ===== The fugitive Gezun of Lorsk, seeking his fortune in the great city of Torrutseish, becomes enamoured with the slave girl Yorida. At his urging, she flees with him from the house of her master, the wizard Derezong Taash, only to be kidnapped by the conspirator Lord Noish as a pawn in the latter's plot to attain the position of chief minister to the king. Noish intends on using the girl as a bribe to secure the aid of the cannibalistic Hercynian shaman Zyc. Gezun must somehow spirit her out of the clutches of the nefarious duo while there is still time. Noish successfully deposes of Lord Haldu, the chief minister, using Zyc's magical truth drug, but then refuses payment to the wizard Bokarri, who recommended Zyc, thus offending him. When Noish finally captures Yorida and delivers her to Zyc and his servant Kumo, the so-called Yorida is revealed to be a magical simulcrum. Enraged, the two men kill and eat Noish while Yorida remains more-or-less contentedly with Derezong. Meanwhile, Gezun leaves for more profitable pastures. He and Bokarri will re-encounter each other in the later tale "The Rug and the Bull." Chronologically, "The Hungry Hercynian" is the fourth of de Camp's Pusadian tales, and the second to feature his protagonists Gezun of Lorsk, Derezong Taash, and Zhamel Seh. ===== Gezun of Lorsk becomes embroiled in schemes surrounding a magical gem known as the Potent Peridot, which confers control over the opposite sex. Having been once victimized by the gem, he steals it and plans on returning his prize to a previous owner, the witch-queen Bathyllis of Phaiaxia, who has offered a reward for its return. With his ally, Aristax, he undertakes the harrowing journey into Phaiaxia and begins negotiating with the queen. But nothing is straightforward when dealing with a witch, and there are also other interested parties poised to complicate the situation... ===== Gezun of Lorsk is saved from a mob in the city of Typhon by the larcenous wizard Ugaph, and enters his service as a hunter to help supply the bats consumed by the wizard's familiar Tety. He is warned away, inevitably futilely, from Ugaph's daughter Ro, his instructor in bat-hunting. After Ugaph is nearly caught attempting to rob the Temple of Ip, he and Gezun plot to con the fanatical Typhonians by pretending to represent a new god, Ka the Appalling, who requires offerings. Unfortunately, they do much too good a job at making their invented god real in the minds of their credulous marks. Chronologically, "Ka the Appalling" is the sixth of de Camp's Pusadian tales, and the fourth to feature his protagonist Gezun of Lorsk. Gezun is about nineteen at the time of this story. ===== Gezun of Lorsk presents King Norskezhek of Torrutseish with a scheme to mass-produce magic carpets based on a sample in his possession, the Carpet of Khazi, which he had previously conned from the magician Larentius Alba of Ausonia. In furtherance of his plan, Gezun finds he must join forces with the president of the local magician’s guild, who turns out to be Bokarri, the victim of another of his cons some eighteen years before (in "The Hungry Hercynian.". The alliance is therefore a shaky one, and when the king turns on Gezun, Bokarri leaps at the chance to betray his partner. Transformed by the magician into a bull, the Lorskan discovers he has become the prime attraction in the next deadly contest in the local bullring. Chronologically, "The Rug and the Bull" is the seventh of de Camp's Pusadian tales, and the fifth to feature his protagonist Gezun of Lorsk. Gezun is middle-aged at the time of this story, and possessed of a wife (Ro, whom he first met in "Ka the Appalling") and three children. ===== After musical performer Suar Peial rescues the druid Gleokh from a murderous affray, the two celebrate the latter’s deliverance in a local tavern. Gleokh holds forth on his revolutionary new weapon, an experimental gun. A general debate over the gun and its merits, and the threat it might pose to the Bronze Age culture in which the characters live. Midawan, an armorer, is worried it will render his profession obsolete, while Semkaf, a wizard from Typhon, is overcome by greed for the device. His apprentice attempts to kill Gleokh for it, only to be shot by the gun, whereupon Semkaf conjures up an invisible serpent to finish the job his servant started. Suar and Midawan are literally caught in the crossfire, and it falls to the armorer to save them both… Chronologically, "The Stronger Spell" has no settled place in the chronology of de Camp's Pusadian tales. Critic John Boardman placed it last in the series on the grounds that the handgun represents a technological advance over weaponry seen in the other stories. De Camp himself had no fixed position in mind for the story. ===== The movie is set around a small group of characters experiencing relationships which build and crumble before the viewers' eyes. The title of the film refers to the belief, expressed by several of characters, that the goldfish retains a memory of something for only three seconds. Tom, one of the principal characters in the film, draws comparisons between this and the human tendency to jump from one relationship to the next, "forgetting" the pain that any previous one might have caused. The film shows complexities involved in straight, gay, lesbian, and bisexual relationships. Writer/director Liz Gill says the film was influenced by the work of directors Robert Altman and Richard Linklater, particularly Linklater's film Slacker. ===== The story begins with Seattle, Washington being plagued by a string of murders, which Edward Cullen suspects is caused by a new-born vampire with an uncontrollable thirst for human blood. As Edward and Bella apply to colleges, Bella tells Edward she wants to visit her friend, Jacob Black, a Quileute Native American who, like some other tribe members, can shape shift into a wolf. Edward worries for Bella's safety, but she assures him that neither Jacob nor the wolf pack would harm her. During one visit, Jacob tells Bella that he is in love with her; he wants her to choose him over Edward. Bella tells Jacob she considers him only as a friend. Meanwhile, Alice Cullen has a vision that the vampire Victoria has returned to Forks. Victoria seeks to kill Bella to avenge her mate, James' death. Alice takes Bella to the Cullen house for a sleepover. Bella learns about Rosalie's past that led to her eventual transformation to a vampire and why she treasures humanity. Bella is determined to become a vampire, but eventually agrees to reconsider her decision. A few days later, Edward proposes to Bella. Despite harboring an aversion to marriage, Bella accepts on condition Edward will make love to her while she is still human. The Cullens soon realize that the Seattle murders are being committed by an "army" of newborn vampires controlled by Victoria. The Cullens join forces with the wolf pack to combat this threat, after their longtime allies, the Denali Coven, refuse to help them. As everyone prepares for battle, Edward, Bella, and Jacob camp in the mountains to stay hidden during the battle. Seth Clearwater, a young wolf pack member, later joins them to wait out the fight. Jacob overhears Edward and Bella discussing their engagement. Upset, he threatens to join the fight and get himself killed. Bella stops Jacob by kissing him and realizes she also loves him. During the battle, Victoria tracks Edward's scent to Bella's hiding place. Edward fights and kills Victoria. The Cullens and their allies defeat her vampire army. Afterwards, Bella tells Jacob that she loves him, but her love for Edward is greater. The book ends with Bella proceeding to tell Charlie that she intends to marry Edward. The epilogue reveals that a heartbroken Jacob has run away in his wolf form. Leah is sympathetic, having gone through a similar heartbreak with Sam. She reveals her own disgust and hatred for Bella. ===== Set in the fictional city of Terminus, Georgia (which is named after the former name for Atlanta), Body Bags follows the contract-killing exploits of a Hispanic father & daughter team of "body baggers" (assassins) Mack Delgado (aka "Clownface"), a knife-wielding veteran of the business, and his overzealous and overly-voluptuous teenage daughter, Panda. Many of their assignments come from the series' only other recurring character, Sheriff Toni Sinn. Despite the arguing that goes on between teenager Panda and father Mack, Mack is still very protective while Panda constantly fights for her father's respect and permission to set out on jobs with her father and his longtime body-bagging partner, Pops. The Body Bags story draws similarities to the film Leon a.k.a. The Professional. For example, Panda returns to her father's side after ten years apart, while Mack is looking for a rival body bagger who set him up. Although Mack was reluctant, he allows Panda to help him take care of his rival and later becomes a full-fledged bagger herself. Their 10-page appearance in Dark Horse Presents ties into the original 4-issue mini-series as the two come under fire from an experimental gun stolen and operated by Geech, a drug dealer whose pregnant wife was critically injured by Mack in the mini-series. The latest Body Bags installment, entitled 3 the Hard Way, features Panda solely dealing with a corrupt police detective who is really a crime-boss while cleaning out Mack's distinctive hot rod, "Da Boss". ===== The narrative starts when Sims Bancorp has lost the franchise to run a colony on the unnamed planet after 40 years, and the colonists are informed of this.. The colonists are informed that Sims Bancorp has lost the franchise, and that they are to be forcibly relocated to another colony. The colonists are given no say as to the time table for the evacuation, nor their destination, and are told to pack, and get ready to leave, and that is it. Ofelia realises that at her age she is effectively non- productive, and is also told this by one of the "company reps." The cost of her relocation will be charged to her family, with whom she does not get on that well. She also knows that her chance of surviving the extended (30 years +) journey in "cold sleep" are poor, at best. She also has spent the best years (and most of her years) on the planet, burying her husband, and a number of children. Basically she does not wish to leave, and knows that if she does she will never arrive at the destination. When the time comes for her to be evacuated she runs off and hides. Due to her age, and the deadline the evacuation ship and crew have to meet, the crew of the evacuation ship fake the record and show her as evacuated, knowing that they can record her as "deceased in transit." Due to her age this will be believed, and not investigated. (Again, this is not explicitly stated, but later on no one knows how she got there, as everyone was evacuated according to "official records," yet we know she was left behind.) Ofelia now finds herself in a position she has never been in before. She can do as she wishes, when she wishes, without censure. She re-activates the bio-power plant that serves the village. With electricity, and the small kitchen gardens next to her cottage and others, she knows she will be able to meet her needs for many years to come. She is also helped as the departing colonists left behind large quantities of preserved food which she collects up and stores in the central administration building. She takes care of maintenance of the colony, as best she can, happy with the idea she will live out the rest of her life undisturbed, with all her needs met. Some time (perhaps years?? Again not stated) later her peace is disturbed. While in the communications centre of the colony perusing the colony logs she picks up a radio transmission. She quickly realises this transmission is from a ship or ships in orbit preparing to land new colonists who will set up a new colony. Knowing her peace will soon be interrupted she listens in to the transmissions as the ships prepare, and then launch, landing craft. Initially the landing of the new colony goes according to plan, automated machinery/robots clear the ground and create a landing grid (runway) for the rest of the craft carrying the colonists. The following day the new colonists start to arrive and build the new colony. Then things take an unexpected turn. The arriving colonists are attacked by a local life-form. One landing craft on the ground is hit by an explosive device, and the landing grid on which it is sitting is damaged. The colony ship in orbit is unable to assist. The landing grid is damaged, so rescue attempts can not be made after night fall, and in any event the colony ship has no military personnel or weapons to fight back with. By the following morning all the colonists have been killed. The orbiting ship is unwilling to send more landing craft in the face of resistance from potentially intelligent natives, even if they could. Further landing attempts cannot be made as the only craft left to them require a landing grid, and the machinery/robots needed to build one have already made planet fall and been destroyed. They have no choice but to return to base, and inform the relevant authorities and let these authorities sort out the situation. Ofelia knows that FTL (Faster-than-light) ships will soon arrive to investigate, as the authorities can afford such technology. For colonising planets the companies prefer a cheaper, if slower, sub-light transit. As she is as much in the dark about what happened as the colony ships she returns home, and continues in her peaceful life, knowing that she can do nothing. At the aborted landing site the aboriginal inhabitants of the planet discuss the events, the arrival of the ships, and the fight to repel the invaders. It is remembered by some of the natives that about 40 years ago similar signs in the sky were seen (contrails of shuttle) but as the area the signs originated from were many days (Weeks?) travel to the south, about 1,000 kilometres, in an area not inhabited by the natives, and nothing came of it to affect "the people" it was soon put out of mind. Now, however, the events of 40 years ago are relevant. A number of the indigenous population decide to go and investigate the area the last landing took place. This group travel to the site of the original colony, and investigate the village found, and start to observe Ofelia. By this time Ofelia has made for herself a cloak that, quite by chance, draws on the folk lore and instincts of the natives. They see her as what she is, a Grandmother. Or in their own terms a "Nest Guardian". I.E. one who is too old to breed, and so devotes her time to caring for the young of others, both guarding them and seeing to their education . In the society of the natives Nest Guardians are sacred, and so Ofelia is safe from attack, and if anything is revered by the natives. They learn from her, as she learns from them, and it soon becomes apparent to her that they are fully sapient, and very, very, intelligent, from a very young age. One of the natives gives birth, and Ofelia takes up the position expected of her as "Nest Guardian" to the 3 newborns. Then the FTL ships arrive (an unspecified length of time later) carrying Specialists in Xeno contact. They scan the planet surface, and see what the previous assay of the planet missed- Cities along several coastlines & large groups of nomadic hunters on the plains. They then land and start to study the natives. The specialists are highly sceptical of Ofelia's claims as to the natives intelligence and self-awareness, and dismissive of her in general as they see her as a poorly educated senile old lady. They admit without realising it that their training is all theory, as no non-human intelligent life has ever been discovered. Some time later the natives disclose to Ofelia the reason for their attack on the new colony. The landing ships picked a breeding site to land on (in Human terms, they landed on a combination of maternity ward and crèche), many nests were destroyed, Nest Guardians and young were killed. All the tribes of 'the people' (the natives name for themselves) in that area united against the attack on their nests, as nests and Nest Guardians are sacred. They viewed the attackers (the colony landing ships) as nothing more than mindless animals to be exterminated without quarter. After all, any intelligent creature would have seen and recognised the markers that designated the area as a breeding site, safe from attack. The natives are not interested in dealing with the specialists. Ofelia is their Nest Guardian, and only Nest Guardians can negotiate and make treaties with the Nest Guardians of other tribes. The newcomers, the specialists, are of a differing tribe, and as a result the people cannot deal with them. Ofelia, being a Nest Guardian for both the people and the Humans, is able to negotiate on behalf of both sides. The specialists have a hard time believing this, let alone coming to terms with it and working with it. As a result, an altercation between the natives and a member of the investigating team takes place. One member of the team attacks one of the young natives, and attempts to strangle it, and is killed by the hunters in the group, an act that is seen by the rest of the group, both human and native, as "justified lethal force". As the deceased member of the human team was the one who most strongly resisted granting the natives rights, the remaining team members recognise the intelligence of the natives of the planet, and decide that conflict is best avoided. They note that the pace at which the natives are progressing technologically far exceeds that of the human society. One team member even notes that while it may take thousands of years to arrive at working space flight from scratch, it might be considerably quicker if you know it's possible from the start, and estimates the natives will have space travel in under 100 years, given the fact they have now electricity (from the power plant), and have working, if damaged, space ships to copy. It is realised that the only way to avoid conflict with the natives is either to make friends with them or to exterminate them totally. A program is set up to recruit nest Guardians from within the OAP human population on all human planets, so that the natives and humans grow together as partners. The narrative closes with the death of Ofelia, who "did not die alone, as she expected, but did die with a smile on her face." . Category:Novels by Elizabeth Moon Category:American science fiction novels Category:1996 American novels ===== The setting is a vast Russian country estate where the resident aristocrats and their many servants are jolted out of their tranquility by the arrival of someone from the city, down-on-his-luck Vassily Semyonitch Kuzovkin, whose own property has been tied up for years in a hopeless lawsuit. At one time a "court jester" to the estate's original owner, Kuzovkin remained in the house as a permanent guest following his master's death. He is anxious about the impending homecoming of the heiress to the estate and her new husband, fearful that, having forgotten the warm relationship they once shared, she will expect him to move out. Wealthy neighbor Flegont Alexandrovitch Tropatchov, who disdains Kuzovkin and the poverty he represents, goads him into drinking too much at a lunch that culminates in his drunkenly revealing an unsettling secret that disrupts the lives of everyone involved and forces them to deal with the consequences of his rash action. A century and a half after it was written in 1848, Fortune's Fool was staged on Broadway for the first time in an adaptation by Mike Poulton. After 28 previews, the production opened on April 2, 2002 at the Music Box Theatre, where it ran for 127 performances. The cast, under the direction of Arthur Penn, included Alan Bates (who had starred in a production staged at the Chichester Festival Theatre with Ashley Artus, Desmond Barrit, Rachel Pickup, and John Bardon) and the Theatre Royal in Bath in 1996), Frank Langella, Benedick Bates (Alan's son), and Enid Graham. From 6 December 2013 Mike Poulton's adaptation of Fortune's Fool starring Iain Glen (later replaced by Patrick Cremin and Will Houston) and Richard McCabe and directed by Lucy Bailey received its West End premiere at The Old Vic. The cast includes Lucy Briggs-Owen, Dyfan Dwyfor, Janet Fullerlove, Paul Ham, Richard Henders, Simon Markey and Alexander Vlahos. ===== In 1940, Nazi Germany invades Great Britain by drilling under the English Channel and up through the cobblestones on Whitehall. In London, from his bunker under Downing Street, Prime Minister Winston Churchill issues a call to arms for all of Britain to band together to resist the invaders. In a small village, Chris, a young everyman, rallies the residents to fight back. Joining forces with Churchill's small group of soldiers, the resistance movement retreats to Hadrian's Wall, where the unlikely saviours of the country come from the Scottish Highlands. ===== Ron Jeremy and Phoebe Dollar stars in this eroticized action-thriller that has a stripper avenging her sister's untimely death. She knows she can't do the job alone, however, so she recruits the help of a rebellious cop to settle the score. But her quest doesn't turn out to be a neat affair, as she soon realizes there's more than one enemy to fight; and they all appear to be gunning for her even as she hunts them down. Co-stars Lemmy (from Motörhead), Dizzy (from Guns N' Roses) and Tracii Guns (from L.A. Guns)! ===== Ruth Patchett is a frumpy, overweight wife and mother, who tries desperately to please her husband Bob, an accountant trying to boost his business. After Bob meets Mary Fisher, a narcissistic romance novelist, at a dinner party, they begin an affair. Ruth, aware of the affair, confronts Bob while his parents are visiting, and Bob leaves her. As he packs his suitcase, he says his assets are his home, his family, his career, and his freedom. Angry, Ruth vows revenge on him and Mary. Ruth writes a list titled "Bob's Assets", with the four assets that Bob stated. She crosses off each one when it is destroyed. With Bob away at Mary's and the kids at school, she overloads the electricity of the house, which is destroyed in a gigantic explosion. She leaves the kids with Mary and Bob and tells him that she will not be returning. However, she is still working behind the scenes to destroy Bob's remaining assets, aided by Mary's financial records which she procured prior to destroying the house. It is revealed that Bob's second asset, his family, is being destroyed, too, as Mary's selfish refusal to learn how to be a mother causes tension in her relationship with Bob. Ruth takes a job at a nursing home under the pseudonym Vesta Rose, where she befriends Mary's foul-mouthed, estranged mother, and arranges for her to return to Mary's life at an inopportune moment. She also meets Nurse Hooper, a woman who has worked for the nursing home for twenty-two years and put aside her earnings for a considerable life savings. They form a partnership and start an employment agency for downtrodden women who have been rejected by society and need a second chance. The agency is a success, and the women Ruth has helped assist her in getting revenge on Bob. Mary writes a new novel loosely based on her romance with Bob, which her publisher considers strange and off-putting, because of its focus on laundry and the protagonist's name, Bob. Olivia, an attractive but ditsy young blonde, applies to Ruth's agency, and she finds her a position as Bob's secretary. He soon starts sleeping with her, but when she proclaims her love, he immediately dumps and fires her. Olivia reveals to Ruth that Bob is a fraudster who cons money out of his clients by skimming interest off their accounts, then transferring it to his offshore account. Ruth hacks his files and exposes this to clients and the police, thus destroying his career. Mary's career goes downhill, too. As she is being interviewed for a puff piece by People, her mother reveals embarrassing secrets about Mary that are then titled "Dethroning the Queen of Romance". Mary, intent on reclaiming her former life, throws a party for her friends, which goes well until state troopers appear with a warrant for Bob's arrest. Bob's lawyer bribes a judge to ensure the verdict is favorable, and unknowingly informs Mary that Bob has been stealing from her account as well. As Mary leaves Bob, he realizes that what he did to Ruth has happened to him and he has ended up with nothing because of his greed, selfishness, and infidelity. A woman who gained employment as a court clerk thanks to Ruth's agency, pays Ruth back by reassigning Bob's case to an unbiased judge. Bob is convicted of embezzlement and sentenced to 18 months in prison, thus destroying his fourth and final asset: his freedom. Meanwhile, Mary sells her mansion when her novel fails, while Ruth's business thrives. One year later, Ruth and her children visit a greatly reformed Bob, who says he will be free soon and is looking forward to catching up with them. It is loosely implied that he and Ruth may be headed towards a reconciliation. Ruth ends by saying she believes a person can change, as has Bob, but that not everyone does so. The final scene shows Ruth at a book signing for Mary's new novel – in which she tells all about her affair. Ruth asks Mary to make the autograph out to Ruth, and Mary does a double take. Next in line after Ruth is a man whom Mary clearly tries to become more personal with, indicating she has not changed her ways. The film ends with Ruth, a smile on her face as she walks down a busy street in Manhattan, accompanied by women from her firm. ===== Moominmamma and Moomintroll are travelling through a dark and scary forest looking for Moominpappa, who has gone off adventuring with the Hattifatteners. They meet a little creature, who joins them (in later books he is named Sniff). They use a glowing tulip to light their way, and are attacked by a giant serpent whilst crossing a swamp. They are saved when a beautiful young girl with shining blue hair called Tulippa emerges from the tulip and scares the serpent away. They later arrive at a mountain and find the home of an old man, who invites them to live in his garden, which is made entirely of sweets. However, when they find out that the sun is really a giant lamp and there's no real food, they leave and continue their journey, travelling through the mountain to the beach on the other side. On the beach, Moominmamma gets attacked by an ant-lion, but Moomintroll and the others manage to save her. Deciding to move on, they come across a group of Hattifatteners about to set sail on a boat, and join them. A storm strikes, but a sea-troll helps them out and navigates the boat to a large harbour where they go ashore. Parting ways with the Hattifatteners, they travel inland and meet a boy with red hair who lives in a lighthouse. Tulippa decides to stay with him, but the others set out after Moominpappa when they learn from the boy that he had passed through recently. Soon a rainstorm that lasts for several days causes a flood, and Moominmamma saves a family of cats. When the rain stops, they sail across the flooded landscape on an armchair and find a message in a bottle from Moominpappa, saying he has escaped the flood by climbing up a tree. As the water starts going down, they finally reach dry land and start searching for Moominpappa. Unsuccessful at first, they finally find him with the help of a marabou stork who flies them up into the air. Reunited, the Moomin family and the little creature travel on until they find the house Moominpappa had built, carried into a small valley by the flood, and decide to live there. ===== Moominpappa has written his autobiography of his amazing life, and he tells it to his son Moomintroll, and to Moomintroll's friends, Sniff and Snufkin. In his tale, he at first was left at an orphanage, but after finding it boring and disliking the strict headmistress Hemulen, he leaves and meets a new friend, Hodgkin. Moominpappa's boat, the Oshun Oxtra (Ocean Orchestra), Moominworld Hodgkin and Moominpappa meet the Joxter (Snufkin's father) and the Muddler (Sniff's father). Together they build a boat, in which to live. They fool the enormous Edward the Booble into helping to set the ship off. After realising their trickery he becomes very angry, but they sail away. They rescue a Hemulen from being eaten by a Groke, however the Hemulen is very bossy, and soon they abandon her with the Niblings. One young Nibling stows aboard their ship, and travels with them. They eventually reach a far away land, where they meet the Mymble family. The Mymble's daughter befriends them and together they go to Daddy Jones (the King's) 100th birthday party where they all win prizes. They then set up new homes on an island, however are spooked by the island ghost. They manage to make a deal with the ghost, and they befriend him. Meanwhile, Hodgkins has designed the Amphibian – a sort of land/sea ship for Daddy Jones. On its maiden voyage, it is attacked by a giant fish, but they are saved when Edward the Booble steps on the fish. The Muddler then marries the Fuzzy, and Moominpappa rescues another Moomin and her handbag from the sea. She turns out to be Moominmamma. The story ends, and links chronologically with The Moomins and the Great Flood. ===== Lisa Piper (Drew Barrymore), an eleven-year-old girl from Cincinnati, Ohio, takes care of her siblings and cooks for her family because her father's passing has made her grow up too fast. She has no time for toys, and refuses to be treated as a child. During a blizzard on Christmas Eve, Lisa is transported to Toyland. She arrives just before Mary Contrary (Jill Schoelen) is to be wedded to the unpleasant Barnaby Barnacle (Richard Mulligan), although Mary loves Barnaby's nephew, Jack Nimble (Keanu Reeves). Lisa stops the wedding and, with her new friends, finds out that Barnaby plans to take over Toyland. Lisa, Mary, Jack, and Georgie Porgie (Googy Gress) go to the kindly Toymaster (Pat Morita) for help, but he can only help them if Lisa really believes in toys. Barnaby confronts them and the Toymaster, finally showing his true colors, and steals a flask containing distilled evil that the Toymaster had been collecting, before leaving Lisa and company to be eaten by Trollog, a vulture- like monster with a single enchanted eye that Barnaby uses to spy on his enemies. They escape by blinding Trollog with paint and locking him in a chest, but are captured and imprisoned one by one in Barnaby's hidden fortress. Barnaby reveals that he had been creating an army of trolls to take over Toyland, and then attempts to corrupt his captives into being his servants with the contents of the flask, stating he would replace Trollog with Lisa and make Mary his Troll Princess. However, Lisa proves to be immune to the evil, and manages to reverse the effects on her friends. After escaping from Barnaby's stronghold, they return to the Toymaster. When Barnaby unleashes his army of trolls upon Toyland, Lisa's newfound belief animates an army of life-sized toy soldiers that the Toymaster had created, and they drive Barnaby into the Forest of the Night. Having lost control of his creatures and having failed at making Lisa his new Trollog, Barnaby is then banished from Toyland. Jack and Mary are then married. Lisa is taken home by the Toymaster—who is revealed to be Santa Claus—in a sleigh with wooden reindeer. They travel across the Milky Way until she wakes up at home, as though it has all been a dream. ===== Long before the Qin and Han Dynasty, in a small community of cave- dwellers called Wudong, their chief by the name of Wu had two wives by custom and a daughter by each of them. Ye Xian is Wu's daughter of one wife, and she is extremely beautiful, kind and gentle, and gifted in many skills such as pottery and poetry. In contrast, her half-sister Jun-Li is plain-looking, cruel and selfish, and both she and her mother, Wu's other wife Jin, envy the attention Wu lavishes upon Ye Xian. Ye Xian's mother died while she was still a baby, so Wu did all he could to raise his motherless daughter. Unfortunately, Ye Xian's father dies from a local plague, and a new chieftain was appointed to take his place, as Wu had no sons. With her family reduced to poverty, Ye Xian is forced to become a lowly servant and work for her unloving and cruel stepmother, Jin, and spoiled and lazy younger half-sister Junli. Despite living a life burdened with chores and housework, and suffering endless abuse at her stepmother's hands, she finds solace when she ends up befriending a beautiful, 10 foot long fish in the lake near her home, with golden eyes and scales. The fish was really a guardian spirit sent to her by her own mother, who never forgot her daughter even beyond the grave. One day, Jun-Li follows Ye Xian to the lake, and discovers her talking to the fish. Angry that Ye Xian has found happiness, she told her mother everything that she had seen. The cruel woman tricked Ye Xian into giving her the tattered dress she wears, and by this, catches and kills the fish and serves it for dinner for herself and Jun-Li. Ye Xian is devastated until the spirit of an old man, possibly one of her ancestors or her maternal grandfather, in a white robe with white hair, appears and tells her to bury the bones of the fish in four pots and hide each pot at the corners under her bed. The spirit also tells her that whatever she needs will be granted if she talks to the bones. Once in a year, the New Year Festival was to be celebrated. This is also the time for the young maidens to meet potential husbands. Not wishing to spoil her own daughter's chances, the stepmother forces her stepdaughter to remain home and clean their cave-house. After her step-family has left for the festival, Ye Xian is visited by the fish's spirit again. She makes a silent wish to the bones and Ye Xian finds herself clothed magnificently, in a gown of sea-green silk, a cloak of kingfisher feathers and a pair of tiny golden slippers. Ye Xian goes to the festival by foot. She is admired by everyone, in particular the young men who believed her to be a princess, and enjoys herself until she hears Jun-Li call out to the crowd "That girl looks like my older sister!" Realizing that her family might have recognized her Ye Xian leaves, accidentally leaving behind a golden slipper. When she arrives home, she hides her finery and the remaining slipper under her bed. The fish bones were silent now, however, for it warned Ye Xian before not to lose even one of her slippers. Sadly, she falls asleep under a tree. Her step family return from the festival and mention a mysterious beauty who appeared at the festival, but are unaware that it is Ye Xian they are speaking of. The golden slipper is found by a local peasant who trades it, and it is passed on to various people until it reaches the hands of the nearby king of the To'Han islets, a powerful kingdom covering thousands of small islands. Fascinated by the shoe's small size,Very small women's feet were highly valued in China, see Foot binding. he issues a search to find the maiden whose foot will fit into the shoe and proclaims he will marry that girl. The search extends until it reaches the community of the cave-dwellers, and everyone, even Jun-Li, tried the slipper. No maiden's foot can fit the shoe. Despondent that he could not find the woman he was searching for, the king made a great pavilion and placed the shoe there on display. Ye Xian arrives there late in the evening to retrieve the slipper, but is mistaken as a thief. Ye Xian then was brought before the king, and there she told him everything about her life, how she lost her friend, the gold-eyed fish, and now her slipper. The king, struck by her good-nature and beauty even though she lived in the land of the savages, believed her and allowed her to go home with the slipper. The next morning, the king goes into Ye Xian's house and asks her to come with him into his kingdom. Ye Xian then wears both her shoes, and appears in her beautiful sea-green gown. The stepmother and Jun-Li, however, insist that Ye Xian could not have clothes of that kind...for she is only their slave. The stepmother says that the finery is Jun-Li's, and that Ye Xian stole them. The king dismisses her lies, and invites Ye Xian to marry him and live in his palace. She accepts, but her cruel step-family is left with the worst possible fate: each other. The stepmother forces Jun-Li, who has lost all hope of marrying rich, into the same state of servitude that Ye Xian suffered for so many years. When Jun-Li promptly and bitterly rebels against her lot, it starts a violent quarrel...the result of which is a cave-in that buries both women and destroys their home. Meanwhile, the king takes Ye Xian's hand in marriage and makes her his queen. ===== Within days of Arlena Twigg's birth in Florida in late 1978, she is found to have a chronic illness. Blood tests reveal that she is not the biological daughter of Regina and Ernest Twigg. Arlena is ill throughout her life and dies at the age of nine. Subsequently, her parents search for their biological daughter, who they find is being raised as Kimberly Mays by a man who believes that he is her father. ===== Following his dismissal from a draper's shop, where his father had placed him as an apprentice, protagonist Alfred Polly (John Mills) finds it hard to find another position. When a telegram arrives informing him of his father's death, he returns to the family home. With a bequest of £500, Polly considers his future; and a friend of his father's, Mr Johnsen (Edward Chapman), urges him to invest it in a shop - an idea that Polly dislikes. Whilst dawdling in the country on a newly-bought bicycle, Polly has a brief dalliance with a schoolgirl, Christabel (Sally Ann Howes); but later marries one of his cousins, Miriam Larkins (Betty Ann Davies). Fifteen years later, Polly and his wife are running a draper's shop in Fishbourne, and the marriage has descended to incessant arguments and bickering. While walking in the country, Polly decides to commit suicide. He sets his shop ablaze in the hope that the insurance will assure Miriam's prosperity. However, he botches the arson job and, instead of killing himself, rescues an elderly neighbour and becomes a minor local celebrity. Still unhappy, Polly leaves his wife and is hired by a rural innkeeper (Megs Jenkins) as handyman and ferryman; however, he soon realises that the position was only open because the innkeeper's brother-in- law Jim (Finlay Currie) is a drunkard who bullies any other man to leave the inn. Polly clashes with him until the latter accidentally drowns in a weir while chasing Polly. Several years later, Polly returns to Fishbourne to find Miriam operating a tea-shop with her sister in the belief that Polly has drowned, and he returns to his happier life at the inn. ===== Gangsters Nat Burdell (Kenne Duncan) and Brad Conley (Ewing Miles Brown) kidnap wealthy socialite Margaret Chaffee (Marilyn Harvey) and, joined by gun moll Esther Malone (Jeanne Tatum), head for the San Gabriel Mountains to await the ransom they've demanded from Chaffee's father. That night, geologist Dick Cutler (Robert Clarke) sees what he thinks is a meteor crash into the forest. But he doesn't see that out of the smoke from the impact emerges a beautiful glowing blonde female extraterrestrial (Shirley Kilpatrick) in a skintight leotard who can kill by touch. The gangsters hole up at Cutler's cabin. When the alien peeks through a window, Burdell orders Conley to go after her, but the alien kills Conley, his gunshots having no effect on her whatsoever. Burdell then goes out and runs into the alien himself. Although his gunshots are also ineffective, the alien walks away backwards, allowing Burdell to retrieve Conley's body. Back at the cabin, Cutler says that Conley died of "radium poisoning" and that by carrying his body, Burdell has taken a potentially lethal dose of radium and needs to get to a doctor before he dies. Burdell decides they should flee that night, even though they'll have to navigate a dangerous mountain road in Cutler's headlight-less Jeep. But before they can leave, the alien smashes through the cabin's window. Everyone runs outside. The alien catches Malone and kills her. When the alien tries to grab Burdell, he quickly sidesteps and she tumbles down an embankment. Burdell wrongly thinks she's dead. Cutler and Chaffee have already run back to the cabin. Burdell demands that they leave at once. But as they drive off, the extraterrestrial stops them and kills Burdell. With all the gangsters dead, Cutler and Chaffee run to the cabin again. Cutler speculates that the alien's body is made of radium and platinum, which protect her from the Earth's atmosphere. He mixes an acid solution that will kill her. When she comes into the cabin, he throws the bottle of acid at her. She is killed and disintegrates. However, a locket she was wearing is undamaged. Cutler finds in it a note, written in English, from the "Master of the Council of Planets of the Galaxy." It's an invitation to Earth to join the Council. Cutler now realizes that the alien was a peaceful emissary who killed only in self- defense. Chaffee says that the Council, with its "superior wisdom," will surely understand that their human nature caused them to fear the alien and that another emissary will no doubt be sent. Cutler agrees, although he asks rhetorically, "But will it come to bring us good will or simply avenge her death?" ===== The series tells the story of a family from Stockholm, consisting of the widowed author Melker Melkersson (played by Torsten Lilliecrona) and his four children: 19-year-old Malin (played by Louise Edlind) who assumes the role of mother in the family, the imaginative 13-year- old Johan, 12-year-old Niklas who is calm and down-to-earth, and 7-year-old Pelle, who loves animals of all kinds. The Melkersson family spend their summer holidays as well as some winters on Saltkråkan, an idyllic place symbolising the unspoilt archipelago. The year-round inhabitants of the island are sometimes amused by the ineptness of the city dwellers, but they become fast friends with the Melkersson family: when the idyll is threatened, such as when the house the Melkerssons rent is being sold, the islanders rise to help their friends keep their summer paradise. The Melkersson children become friends with the local kids: Tjorven (actually Maria) Grankvist who is the same age as Pelle and who owns a huge St. Bernard dog named Båtsman (Boatswain), her older sisters Teddy and Freddy who teach Johan and Niklas to row and sail, and Stina, a gap-toothed Stockholm girl who spends her summer holidays with her grandfather, and who tells endless stories to the long- suffering adults around her. (Astrid Lindgren added the character of Stina to the script when Olle Hellbom had met Kristina Jämtmark and thought that she would make a good addition to the group of children.Astrid Lindgren-nostalgi i ny bok "Astrid Lindgren nostalgia in a new book", article in Östgöta Correspondenten, 26 August 2004] ) The 13 episodes of the TV series were re- made into a movie in 1968, but the original TV series is re-run almost yearly in Swedish television, and some of the actors have become very closely associated with their characters in the series."Man blir ju ganska stämplad" Interview with Louise Edlind Friberg about 40 years of being identified with "Malin"IMDB quote Torsten Lilliecrona about his identification with Melker Melkersson The series has been translated into German, and was popular enough to be broadcast more than 20 times.Ferien auf Saltkrokan German TV Guide (German) ===== Television coverage of Brice Randolph, the first astronaut on the surface of Mars, is interrupted, indicating the signal has been lost. Shortly afterward, Eddie Reese is recruited, and shown what happened after the TV signal was interrupted: Brice reported something penetrating his EVA suit, and soon expired. The other astronaut lifted off alone. NASA (who fear their project will be canceled) needs to keep it secret until they have answers about what exactly happened. Reese is surgically altered, and begins learning his role as Brice. At the arrival of the spacecraft back on Earth, the splashdown site is altered so that the press is unaware of Reese being brought to join the returning space crew, and Reese, maintaining the cover, is now having to act his role with the dead man's wife Gail. Uneasy about being intimate with another man's wife, Reese unwittingly betrays himself to her, and her suspicions are raised. Eventually, NASA determines what happened on Mars, and is ready to let Reese out of the masquerade, but Reese and Gail are willing to carry on as if he is Brice Randolph. Reese then hears from a boy, who asked for an autograph, that the Soviets have just launched their own mission to land on Mars. NASA does not warn the Soviet of what dangers await them, however, Reese and Gail reveal the truth ===== Ringmaster Piccalilli has lost his magic golden whistle, and without it the circus can't go on. Piccalilli asks the player to aid in its recovery. First the player has to find Waldo, who will help with the search. ===== In Montauban in 1944, during the German retreat from France, Julien Dandieu is an aging, embittered surgeon in the local hospital. Frightened by the German army entering Montauban, Dandieu asks his friend Francois to drive his wife and his daughter to the remote village where he owns a chateau. One week later, Dandieu sets off to meet them for the weekend, but the Germans have now occupied the village. He finds that all the villagers have been herded into the church and shot. In the château, now occupied by the Germans, he finds his daughter shot and his wife immolated by a flame-thrower. Dandieu decides to kill as many Germans as possible to avenge his family. He takes an old shotgun he used as a child while hunting with his father and sabotages the chateau's bridge before he starts to kill them one by one, taking advantage of his knowledge of the secret passages within the chateau. Trapped inside the castle, the Germans begin to think they are surrounded by many partisans and do not realise that he is, in fact, the only one. When a Resistance detachment drops by, Dandieu refuses their offer to help him and continues his vendetta on his own. Eventually, with no more cartridges for the shotgun, he collects the flame-thrower which killed his beloved wife and uses it to kill the leading SS officer as he, the last survivor, is about to commit suicide. Alerted by the partisans, the inhabitants of a nearby village and a company of American soldiers arrive to collect the dead. Dandieu is picked up by Francois, but has suffered a nervous breakdown following the aftermath of the slaughter, behaving as if his family was still alive. The film ends with a flashback to one of his happier days now gone, where he and his family had undertaken a bike tour. ===== In the not-so- distant future, a criminal mastermind named Billy the Poet is on the loose and on his way to Cape Cod. His goal is to deflower one of the hostesses at the Ethical Suicide Parlor in Hyannis. The world government runs the parlors and urges people to commit suicide to help keep the population of 17 billion stable. It also requires that the hostesses at these establishments be virgins on the basis that this makes the idea of suicide more appealing, especially to middle-aged and older men. The government also suppresses the population's sexual desire with a drug that numbs them from the waist down (but does not render them infertile, as that is seen as unethical and in violation of the religious principles of many). This drug is called "ethical birth control," and was originally developed by a druggist who had been offended when, on a family outing to the zoo, his group were confronted by the sight of a male monkey masturbating. Billy is a member of a surreptitious group called the "Nothingheads," people who refuse to take the government-required drugs. Despite a sting by the authorities, Billy the Poet outwits them and kidnaps a six-foot blonde suicide parlor hostess, Nancy McLuhan. McLuhan vows to fight Billy to the very end, but the drugs wear off, and when Billy rapes her, her mind opens as well. Billy convinces her that sex and death are not the answer; birth control pills are. In the end, Billy lets Nancy go, but she is forever changed and, apparently, a convert to Nothingheadism. Billy leaves her a note attached to a bottle of birth control pills that says simply, "Welcome to the Monkey House." ===== Old MacDonald is tired, then goes to the barn, and warms up the farm animals which leads to blackout gags: The rabbit tries to concentrate on playing his flute, but ends up with the snoring goose swallowing his flute, and causing the rabbit to play flute in a "strangling" manner. The pig plays the stovepipe like a tuba, and the lambs sing "Mary Had a Little Lamb", in a fashion like the Andrews Sisters. He blows smoke on the lambs, revealing a blackface gag (edited out in some prints) with the lambs singing "Mary had a little lamb, whose fleece was black as coal!". The duck is annoyed by the goat, in the end he blows a balloon (using a jar wrap), popping the balloon causing himself to disappear with nothing left but his hat that falls in a bathtub of water. The cat tries to eat the mouse with a violin, but ends up with the mouse playing the harp in his mouth using the cat's whiskers. The horse goes jazzy with the trumpet, and the two chicks do the jitterbug, and after the dance sequence, Old MacDonald asks the audience to sing along with the bouncing ball to "Old MacDonald Had a Farm". Each animal sung is sung in every verse, and the boys and girls alternate, then the animals form a conga line. ===== In the weeks that have passed since Sofia's deception, we find the Suarezes at a Mexican restaurant, where in the midst of a conversation between Betty, Justin and Ignacio, Hilda runs in and informs her family that Herbalux has been recalled by the FDA and she is without any income. Betty tries to tell her that it will all be okay. She then offhandedly remarks that she needs to pick up Daniel's dry cleaning and run a few errands for him. Hilda points out that she's not his assistant anymore, but Betty says she needs to look out for him. Hilda tells Betty that she is such a good person for worrying about Daniel. Betty tells her sister that you have to do what you have to do, and puts back on her sombrero hat (filled with nachos) and goes back to waiting tables....her new job at Burrito King. Over at the Wilmont Clinic, Wilhelmina and the mystery woman are informed by Steve, the private eye Wilhelmina hired (who still smells of casket stench) that the price is $1,000,000 to make it look like Bradford is responsible for Fey's death. The mystery woman insists to Wilhelmina that they have to move quickly once she pays the money and that if there is anyone she (Wilhelmina) doesn't trust at MODE....now is the time to fumigate. Wilhelmina then goes back to her office and discusses with Marc who is in and who is out at MODE. She opens her secret compartment with pictures of MODE's employees, half of whom are placed on a side labeled "In" and half are on the side labeled "Out". Christina is placed on the center line, not quite out (because she knows Wilhelmina's true measurements) and not quite "In" (because Wilhelmina has trouble understanding her accent at times). Amanda is on the out list because Wilhelmina sees her as loyal to Daniel. Marc tries to defend Amanda, but Wilhelmina insists that until Amanda proves her loyalty to Wilhelmina, she is out. Marc tells Amanda to loyal the queen, then puts at Wilhelmina's picture perfectly unbeknownst by him. Across town, a scruffy Daniel is living at his loft in a deep depression. He hides in the closet when Betty shows up to deliver his dry cleaning. Betty is shocked at the mess she sees (food on the bed and papers are all over the floor). She hears a noise and grabs a tennis racket for defense, and puts a whistle in her mouth. She opens the closet and finds Daniel all scruffy and bummed out in pajamas and a robe. She says she can't believe he lied to her and didn't go to Rio as he claimed. She tells him next week is Fashion Week and the company needs him. Daniel high-fives Betty for quitting her MYW job with Sofia. He tells Betty that when he goes back to work at MODE, he wants Betty back as his assistant. The next morning, while Betty and her family have breakfast, Hilda gives Betty advice on men while preparing to go job-hunting. She kids Betty about Henry at MODE, but tells her Walter is the kind of guy Betty can settle down with. Betty wonders aloud that if she did settle down with Walter, would she be settling down, or just settling? Betty then meets Daniel on the way to work. She sees he's used a self-tanner ("You look like an Oompa Loompa") to make people think he's been to Rio. Daniel is unsettled to see posters of MYW's first issue, featuring Sofia's article "From Fling to Ring in 60 Days!" plastered on buses and walls, complete with the Daniel-Sofia cover shot. Betty reminds Daniel that he can do this; he can go to work and survive if he runs into Sofia. Meanwhile, at MODE, Wilhelmina starts taking charge, but is thrown into shock when Marc comes running in to tell them Daniel is back. They are even more shocked when Betty arrives right behind Daniel. Marc and Amanda, under their breaths, wonder if they hit Betty with a stick, if candy would fall out. Daniel stiffly hugs Wilhelmina, who pretends she's glad he's back. Unbeknownst to Wilhelmina, handprints from Daniel's self-tanner are on the back of her white dress. Daniel takes Betty and Amanda into his office and tells them they are both going to be his assistants. As for the now-unemployed Hilda, she gets door after door slammed in her face on her job hunt. She makes it back home, checks the messages on the answering machine and erases the job rejections. However, Justin's teacher called, thanking her for the cupcakes that Ignacio made and insisting "there's money in them." Light bulbs start to go off in Hilda's head. Back at MODE, Betty tells Amanda that they have to build up Daniel's confidence again. Betty has an idea and tells Amanda to put 8pm on Daniel's calendar for tonight. Betty then goes to Christina and they begin to search for a new fling to take Daniel's mind off Sofia. Betty gets sidetracked when she sees a stunning outfit on a mannequin—it's Christina's personal design for Fashion Week. At the Suarez house, an excited Hilda rushes in and tells Ignacio she now has her own company....Grandma Suarez's Cupcakes. ("I could be the Latina 'Mrs. Fields!'") She says a diner has agreed to sell them and that they need 500 by tomorrow morning. Later on, Bradford stops by to see Daniel and tells him he needs to focus on Fashion Week. Betty takes Christina's advice and contacts supermodel Gisele's (presumably Gisele Bündchen) people to arrange a dinner date for her and Daniel. Marc tells Amanda she needs to sabotage both Betty and Daniel to prove her loyalty to Wilhelmina. Marc shows Amanda the secret bulletin board in Wilhelmina's office, with Amanda on the "Out" list. Amanda tells Marc she can't betray Daniel, but Marc insists she has to. Daniel tells Betty he's not ready to be set up with anyone yet, but Betty tells him this is exactly what the tabloids need to see, him on the arm of a supermodel. When Marc tells Amanda that Daniel will always choose Betty over her, Amanda tells him she is on the team that is staying. She calls Gisele's people (pretending to be Betty) and says Daniel needs to cancel their dinner plans for tonight. Daniel shows up at the restaurant and takes his seat. He insists to the waiter that his date will be there anytime now, while everyone in the restaurant stares and paparazzi take pictures from outside. Back at the Suarez's, Betty walks in to find the kitchen has been turned into a business for Hilda. Ignacio begs for help in controlling Hilda because she is forcing him, Justin and a Chinese neighbor all to work like crazy on the cupcakes. Hilda even barks orders at the neighbor in Chinese to go faster. Daniel calls Betty and tells her Gisele hasn't shown up. Betty rushes to the rescue and takes a seat at Daniel's table. She tells Daniel that as far as the tabloids know, he's just meeting with his adoring, witty business assistant and discussing her much deserved raise. Wilhelmina gets a delivery with all the information needed to frame Bradford for Fey's death. They mystery lady tells her this must be taken to the police by someone with no connection to Wilhelmina. Back at her office, Wilhelmina looks at the "in and out" board and sets her sights on Christina. For years, Christina has submitted her own designs for Fashion Week, but Wilhelmina, who is in charge of choosing whose designs are shown, has never picked Christina's. Wilhelmina goes downstairs and tries to butter Christina up by telling her that if she does favors for the right people, she could make it as a designer. Christina holds out and says she knows how Wilhelmina works, and that she would rather make it on her own. Back in Brooklyn, Daniel and Betty manage to lose the paparazzi on the streets and duck into a cozy pizza restaurant. Betty tells Daniel that he is a much better person now because he was ready to put his heart out there for the real thing (Sofia). She says she wishes she could feel that way. Daniel says it's obvious that Henry is really into her. Daniel then freaks out as Betty drags him up onstage to sing karaoke. She insists they have to because the price is half off if you sing. Although Daniel protests, "But I'm rich," they head up and do a rendition of “I Got You Babe” and look like they're having fun. Walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, they stop to admire the Manhattan night skyline. Daniel says he's never seen the city from the other side before. "That's the only way I've ever seen it," Betty replies. After they appreciate the scene, the talk turns to Daniel's late brother, Alex. Daniel opens up to Betty about how Alex used to call Daniel and have him meet Alex at some after-hours diner and just hang out and talk, much like he and Betty are doing. Betty gently asks how Alex died, and Daniel says he died jumping out of a helicopter to ski on Mt. Juneau; ski lifts were too tedious for him. But Daniel says at least Alex died as he lived, full of life. Betty tells Daniel she can't be with Henry—she can't compete with a model that "weighs less than (Betty's) shoes." Betty explains that she saw Henry kissing Daniel's ex-girlfriend Aerin at the company Christmas party. Daniel reassures Betty that she doesn't need to worry about Aerin, because she kissed about six guys at the party; "to Aerin, that's like asking 'where's my coat?'" Daniel warmly tells Betty she's much better than a model anyway, and Betty smiles. Hilda makes her first cupcake delivery and rushes back with a check for $181. She then tells Ignacio the diner doubled the order for tomorrow. An exhausted Ignacio tells his daughter they actually lost money because they had to buy equipment, ingredients, etc. He tells Hilda he can't help anymore, so Hilda insists she'll just do it herself. She stays up all night working on the cupcakes and greets Betty when she finally comes in. Hilda is taken aback that Betty was on a "date" with her boss, but Betty shrugs it off and tells her it was just a business dinner. Suddenly, they smell something burning... the cupcakes. Hilda has a breakdown and begins to cry. She tells Betty that she (Hilda) is 30, and doesn't have anything to show for herself. She says Justin is the best thing that's ever happened to her, but she can't help but wonder what her life would be like if she wasn't a single mother, which Justin overhears. Betty tells Hilda that she is a super mom and that this was meant to happen so that she could go on to bigger and better things. The next morning, a surprised Amanda sees the paper with pictures of Betty and Daniel at the restaurant. When Betty comes in, Amanda shows her to her new (larger) desk and admits that she and Betty have one thing in common: they both want what's best for Daniel. Betty will be Daniel's only assistant, and Amanda asks Daniel for her old job back ("with a big raise, since I'm now way overqualified.") Christina, who has been considering her options, reluctantly goes to see Wilhelmina and asks what a woman would have to do if she wanted to be something besides a seamstress. Wilhelmina hands Christina a package and tells her to drop it off at the nearest police station—anonymously. Christina takes the package and leaves. Wilhelmina then goes to the clinic to see the mystery lady and tells her the package is being delivered as they speak. The mystery lady then walks out of the shadows, with all of her bandages removed, wearing a stunning dress. Posing in the mirror, the woman asks Wilhelmina how she looks. Wilhelmina responds, "Looks like that... 'skiing accident' really paid off... 'Alex Meade'." The woman smiles at Wilhelmina and tells her, "Alexis, darling. It's Alexis now." ===== Single mother Jenny Graves decides to restart her dead end life by moving out of Detroit and taking her two sons Green and Jay to small rural town in Alabama. Green is fan of horror films, more specifically the makeup effects used to bring them to life. He meets a pair of affable locals, Tony Bennet and Billy Martin. However, his mother's penchant for getting involved with the wrong type of men brings a very human monster into his life, Earl Knight. Taking some horror films back to the video store, he meets Angevin Duvet who shares both his interest in the horror genre and fish-out-of-water status in the small town. Smart, funny and a sexy Goth girl he is instantly smitten. However, there are hints that there are some troubling aspects to her past. Green approaches the local business man, Tightwiler, who runs a yearly haunted house and by startling him with one of his creations nabs the job of creating this year's haunted house. With his share of the ticket sales, he and Angevin can move to Hollywood to pursue their dreams. However, this puts him on a direct collision course with Angenvin's mother, a deeply religious woman involved with local Holy Calling of the Southern Saints church. ===== An illustration of Yallery Brown from Joseph Jacobs More English Fairy tales. According to Joseph Jacob's version of the story, a young lad named Tom was sitting in a field resting during his daily labours when he heard a little whimper, like the sound of a young child in distress. Upon further investigation Tom found a little creature trapped under a flat stone. The creature was like a ragged little man and had yellow-brown skin, the colour of dark mustard. The little man begged Tom to help free him from the stone. Tom knew that he should just leave the creature where he lay, but it whimpered so much that eventually Tom took pity upon it and lifted the stone from on top of the little man. The creature jumped up in delight, introduced itself as Yallery-Brown then promised to reward Tom by granting him a wish. Being workshy, the young lad asked for help with his daily chores. Yallery- Brown clapped his hands and said it would be so. Tom thanked the creature who flew into a rage and warned that it must never be thanked or dire consequences would follow. As a parting word Yallery-Brown told Tom that if he ever needed him he was to call his name. The next day, when Tom set about his tasks, he found that the jobs were already doing themselves. The broom was rushing around the room sweeping the floor of its own accord and the quern was grinding the corn without human assistance. After many days of the same thing happening, the people began to whisper that Tom was a witch or warlock. This worried Tom, so he called for Yallery-Brown. Tom thanked the creature for its help but told it that it was no longer needed. Yallery-Brown again flew into a rage and told Tom his help would be withdrawn, but as he had been thanked Tom would be left with a curse. The little man vanished with the words: > > In modern English, and without colloquialisms, the verse is as follows: > > Yallery Brown was as good as his word. Tom was plagued with bad luck and ill fortune his whole life. This version differs marginally from the tale submitted by M C Balfour as being collected from a man in the Ancholme Valley of North Lincolnshire, and included in Folklore (see below). Balfour's tale has the teller speaking in first person. ===== The film is a loose adaptation of the fairy tale "Der Zwerg Nase" (German for "The Dwarf [called] Nose") written by Wilhelm Hauff. Jacob, the son of a shoemaker, refuses to do a favour for an evil witch. In retaliation, she takes away seven years of his life and turns him into an ugly dwarf. At the same time the King's daughter Princess Greta is turned into a goose by the same witch after she discovers her in her father's library stealing a spell which will help her rule the kingdom. Jacob and Greta meet and plan to overthrow the witch and get back to their families and true forms. ===== Fraternal twins Phil (Walker) and Stu (Van Wormer) Deedle live in Hawaii and enjoy a life of leisure living off of their father Elton’s (Braeden) hard earned wealth. After they are reported truant from school so they could enjoy a surf session on their 18th birthday, the school expels them. Frustrated with their laziness Elton enrolls them in a boot camp at Yellowstone National Park, to the horror of the boys. Arriving on the mainland, they learn that the bootcamp has been shuttered due to lawsuits and the former owner, Major Flowers (Gainey), intends to give them survival training on his own. En route to their camp he accidentally drives them over a cliff, ejecting them from the vehicle. Believing he killed the brothers, Flowers disappears into the forest. Phil and Stu steal clothing from a nearby campsite and proceed downhill by luge to the nearby ranger station. After a collision with the park sign, the responding park rangers misidentify the brothers by the names “Mel” and “Mo” written on clothing tags that they took earlier. The brothers awaken in the hospital and assume the identities they had been given, learning that Mel and Mo were expected by the station as two highly-touted naturalist recruits to the National Park Service. As they adjust to life at Yellowstone they struggle to adopt Mel and Mo’s apparent foraging lifestyle, while also feebly attempting to accomplish their job as best as they can. Along the way, Phil develops a mutual attraction with Jesse (Langer), a Lieutenant at the station and the stepdaughter of the park’s commanding ranger Captain Pine (Ashton), earning both the brothers Pine’s ire. Eventually the brothers discover that a disgruntled former park ranger, Frank Slater (Hopper), has masterminded a plan to divert the hydrologic process of Old Faithful through a series of underground pipes into an extinct geyser on land that he owns, ultimately creating a new park that would rival Yellowstone. Slater intends to implement his plan during an anniversary celebration for Old Faithful in hopes that he publicly humiliates Pine in the process. Later the real Mel (Gasteyer) and Mo (Cavanagh) arrive at the ranger station after being waylaid by various mishaps, and they expose the Deedles as imposters. This upsets Jesse and Captain Pine, leading to the brother's expulsion from the park. Despite this, they still set out to stop Slater from going through with his plan and attempt to infiltrate his base. When they parachute onto his land, they are immediately taken underground to Slater. There, with the help of a prairie dog they befriended earlier, they don protective heat suits and halt the diversion of superheated water to Slater’s geyser “New Faithful” and restore Old Faithful. This incidentally causes a reaction that creates an explosion on Slater’s land, creating a natural wave pool where visitors can surf. Slater and his henchmen are arrested for their crimes, Phil reconciles with Jesse and the brothers are reinstated into the Park Service. Elton arrives and expresses his pride in their accomplishments, and the brothers along with Jesse go surfing in the newly-created park attraction. ===== Set in the early 1970s, this novel serves as the introduction to Spenser, a private investigator in Boston. Spenser, who served as an infantryman in the 1st Infantry Division during the Korean WarRobert B. Parker, The Godwulf Manuscript, Dell Books, 1987, page 163: "I looked at them obliquely as i'd learned to do a long time ago in Korea". and as a former State trooper, is hired by Bradford W. Forbes, the president of an unnamed university (heavily implied to be Northeastern, the university at which Parker himself taught at the time) to recover a stolen illuminated manuscript, a medieval book of great historical and literary importance. It's being held for ransom by an unknown perpetrator who demands $100,000 be donated to a free school for the manuscript's return. It has no inherent monetary value since it cannot be fenced, and the university—a poor, inner-city school (much as Northeastern was at the time) -- cannot afford the ransom. Head of campus security Carl Tower recommends investigating a radical student group called 'SCACE' (Student Committee Against Capitalist Exploitation) and their secretary, Terry Orchard. After talking to Terry and her boyfriend Dennis Powell, Spenser gets into a minor altercation with Powell. Later that night, Spenser receives a call from Terry requesting help. Spenser arrives at her apartment to find Dennis murdered, the killer having used Terry's gun, and Terry had been overdosed on an unknown drug. He determines that the murder is an attempt to frame Terry and from that point on he is determined to clear her name, believing the missing manuscript and Dennis's murder are related. Spenser's investigation leads him to Lowell Hayden, an English professor at the university who is reputedly an anonymous member of SCACE. Spenser asks permission of the English Department head to interview the members of the faculty, but is rebuffed. Ignoring the department head's warning, Spenser sneaks up to Hayden's office and interviews him anyway. Hayden denies knowing either Dennis Powell or Terry Orchard, although Spenser believes Hayden does in fact know them. Spenser leaves the English Department offices and is met by campus security: he has been summarily 'fired' from his job of looking for the manuscript. Spenser is escorted by two of Broz's men, Phil (a top hand) and a low-level thug, to meet Joe Broz, a local crime lord, shortly after talking to Hayden. Broz warns Spenser to stop his investigation and hints that the manuscript will be returned if he does. The very next day the manuscript is anonymously returned to the university, just as Broz said it would be. Spenser gets no credit for its return. Undeterred by this series of events, Spenser continues his investigation to prove Terry's innocence in the murder of Powell and tie it to the theft of the manuscript. Captain Yates has taken over the police investigation and is determined to railroad Terry Orchard into prison for Powell's death. Spenser tries to contact Cathy Connelly, Terry Orchard's former roommate and the only other person who knew Terry owned a gun. Connelly doesn't answer her door so Spenser breaks in. He finds Connelly's body floating in the bathtub and a wound on the back of her head. Spenser's opinion is that she was murdered and the scene was staged to look like an accident. Boston Police Captain Yates believes the death was accidental but his subordinates, Lieutenant Martin Quirk and Sergeant Frank Belson, believe otherwise. They also no longer believe Terry Orchard murdered Dennis Powell. Spenser begins working unofficially with Quirk and Belson to find the truth behind the two murders. (This is the first of many such collaborations that continue throughout the Spenser series. It is a mutually beneficial relationship: the police are able to use Spenser to gather information that they could not obtain through strictly legal channels and Spenser is able to use police resources to which he would not normally have access.) Spenser decides to trail Professor Hayden and maybe learn something. He sees two thugs get into Hayden's car at the university and Spenser follows them to Jamaica Pond. By then, it was dark. The two gunmen intended to kill Hayden, but Spenser killed one and took a bullet in his side from the other. After crawling away, he managed to kill the other gunman, but instead of helping Spenser, Hayden ran away. Spenser was hauled away by an ambulance and as soon as he was able to walk, he left the hospital and went to see Mrs. Hayden. He convinced her to lead him to her husband's hiding place: a hotel downtown. In fact, Spenser had unknowingly led Broz's man Phil to Hayden. Phil intended to kill them all, but Hayden's wife launched herself onto Phil and bit down on his gun hand so that he was unable to shoot anyone but her. While Phil dealt with Mrs. Hayden, Spenser was on his back choking him to death. In the end, Phil and Mrs. Hayden were both dead and Spenser's wound was torn open again. Spenser threatens Hayden in order to make him tell the truth to Quirk. This ties Joe Broz to Lowell Hayden, leading to Hayden's arrest for Connelly's murder and possibly Broz's arrest. Dennis Powell was in fact dealing heroin on the university campus, heroin supplied by Broz to Hayden, and Hayden to Powell. Hayden believed the heroin would allow people to expand their minds leading to an "open society;" Powell dealt it for the sake of the money to be made from it. Believing Powell had betrayed SCACE, Hayden had Broz put a hit on Powell, orchestrated the framing of Terry Orchard for the crime, and murdered Cathy Connelly himself to cover it up. The manuscript was stolen by Powell at Hayden's request to help fund SCACE's cause. Broz had Hayden return it in the hopes that Spenser would drop the case before discovering the heroin distribution scheme. (This story also introduces Brenda Loring, a character that is referenced in many of the succeeding Spenser books.) ===== At first, no one is sure whether Kevin was abducted or ran away. Eventually, however, a ransom note appears, demanding USD $50,000 for his return. His well-to-do parents pay it, but do not get their son back in spite of a stakeout of the drop site. Kevin's mother, Margery Bartlett, receives a death threat on the phone. Spenser takes on bodyguard duty instead of looking for Kevin. While Margery is shopping with Spenser's protection, the Bartlett's lawyer is found murdered in their residence. He was struck with a blunt object, breaking his neck. Spenser checks out a steamer trunk that Kevin kept locked. In it, Spenser found magazines and pictures of a bodybuilder named Vic Harroway whom Kevin apparently admires. Spenser eventually finds Harroway's backwoods hideaway and observes Vic with Kevin, who is apparently with him on his own free will and not as a kidnap victim. Spenser eventually traces them to Boston, and a private apartment of Harroway, where he and Kevin have set up residence. He also witnesses Harroway making an exchange of cash for a briefcase from Dr. Croft, the Bartlett's family physician. Spenser uses this knowledge to leverage Croft into giving the details of the arrangement he has with Harroway for prostitution and drugs. He also reveals that they had a silent partner. To avoid having Croft tip off Harroway that they were closing in on him, he arranges with Lt. Healy to have Croft held until Harroway is captured and Kevin returned safely. Spenser brings Kevin's parents to Boston to help retrieve him, no easy task since he is with Harroway by choice. Kevin believes Harroway is unbeatable, almost superhuman, and chooses to stay with him even after Harroway has beaten his parents in front of Kevin. Spenser, drawing on his experience as a professional boxer, fights Harroway, beats him, and proves to Kevin that Harroway can be beaten after all. Kevin returns to his parents and Harroway is arrested for murder. (He killed the Bartlett's lawyer when he and Kevin returned to his home to collect some personal items. The lawyer surprised them and Harroway killed him.) Spenser goes to get Croft and discovers that he has been left in the local jail with Chief Trask, the inept head of local law enforcement where the Bartletts live. Spenser has a bad feeling about it and his worst fears are confirmed when he finds Croft dead in his cell. His suspicions are confirmed: Trask is the silent partner. Trask offers Spenser a cut of the take on the prostitution and drug money. Trask pulls a gun and Spenser disarms him. Spenser lets him know that he will call Lt. Healy with all the details and the book ends with Spenser telling him, "Start running..." ===== Each episode is formulaic and has almost exactly the same plot. Quaq Quao is a white origami duck with a yellow beak. He is young, adventurous and a little bit cheeky. Quaq Quao has a brief interaction with his mother, a larger version of himself, which seems to be a lesson, as he repeats the actions and quacks of his mother. He bids her farewell and heads off on his own for the day. He sings the Quaq Quao theme song and performs acrobatics in the water, generally having a good time before he meets the guest creature for the episode. The creature is usually another animal, although four of the creatures were a jack-in-the-box (The Bugbear - probably an Italian misunderstanding of what a bugbear is), a racecar, a cloud and a train. He quacks at the creature and behaves like a duck, and the creature makes sounds and behaves appropriately for its type. The two are initially antagonistic towards each other and attempt to outsmart or outperform each other by one-upmanship, culminating in a shouting match where each tries to convince the other that their "language" is the proper one, but finally become friends and imitate each other by changing colour and/or minor changes in design, making each other's sounds, and behaving like each other. Quaq Quao swims back to his mother, all the while singing the theme tune in the style of the other creature. He regains his normal appearance just before re-encountering his mother. When he returns, she greets him by quacking, and he responds by making the sounds of his new friend. His mother is alarmed and quacks again. Quaq Quao becomes slightly subdued, and he once again responds by quacking. His mother is satisfied, and the two swim off-screen together. Just before the episode ends, Quaq Quao races back on screen, and makes the sound of his friend again in defiance of his mother. He then races off-screen again to rejoin his mother. Because there is no human dialogue, Quaq Quao, his mother and most of the creatures could be any gender, although one of the few intelligible words that Quaq Quao speaks is "Mama" near the end of each episode, after being reprimanded, implying that the parent duck is indeed Quaq Quao's mother. ===== Heaven and Earth Magic centers on an unnamed heroine, whose journey after the loss of a "very valuable watermelon", results in various bizarre situations including a visit to the dentist, being transported to heaven, and return to earth after being "devoured by Max Müller on the day Edward the Seventh dedicated the Great Sewer of London". ===== A group of high-school role-players decide to spice up their sword and sorcery games with two things: breaking into the local school to use its maze of hallways, and utilizing "spells" from a magic book. What the role-players do not realize is that the spells are real. When read, they summon a powerful demon that begins hunting the players down, one by one. ===== A young cadet at a military academy joins its secret society, the "Black Skulls". Sent to a strange cave on a nearby beach, he does not survive the ceremony, being attacked by a succubus with lightning powers. The mythical creature then goes after the other members of the society. ===== A grandfather tells his grandson a bedtime story about the ancient Narts. There is a very respected Nart named Saynag-Aldar who lives in a castle on a hill, and he has a beautiful daughter named Agunda who has eyes for no-one but herself. In a nearby village lives a shepherd named Atsamaz who was given a magic pipe by a god. Though he loves Agunda, only the pipe's music shows his love. One day, Saynag-Aldar decides that he has had enough, and vows to find a husband for his daughter. He proclaims a contest to see who among the Narts is the most fit, with the gods in heaven deciding the winner. The famous bogatyr Soslan is among the challengers. The first part of the contest is marksmanship: challengers must hit the bull's-eye with an arrow while riding on a horse. None of them manage to do it, until Atsamaz. However, Soslan comes last, ridding very slowly and mockingly, and shooting backwards, but still his arrow pierces Atsamaz's arrow in half. The gods proclaim Soslan the winner. The second contest involves dexterity. Atsamaz manages to dance on the edge of a large bowl without spilling any of the liquid inside. However, Soslan dances on the tops of a number of knives which he throws onto a wooden board, and the gods proclaim him the winner. The third contest involves strength. Soslan lifts up and throws a huge boulder to Atsamaz across a deep chasm. Atsamaz manages to catch it and throw it back, but is unable to throw it all the way back to Soslan. The gods proclaim Soslan the winner. As Soslan basks in his glory, he boasts that no-one in the world is stronger than him. Agunda, who realizes that she doesn't want to marry such a braggart, asks her father to make him prove this. Saynad-Aldar agrees, and sends Soslan away to travel the world and search for anyone who is his match. He makes Atsamaz accompany him, so that he may back up his account. Before they leave, Agunda hears the music of Atsamaz's pipe, and follows its sound. As he plays, animals stop to listen and flowers emerge from the snow. They meet, and he tells her that the music is for her. Agunda asks Atsamaz to give her his pipe as a symbol of his love, but he refuses, explaining that it is a present from the gods. When she tells him that this means he doesn't love her, Atsamaz breaks the pipe in anger and storms away. Agunda regrets her words, gathers up the pieces of the pipe, and goes back to the castle. As Atsamaz gets ready to throw himself off a cliff, Soslan catches up with him and reminds him that he must accompany him on his journey. They venture out into the proud tribes that surround the lands of the Narts, and defeat all whom they come across. Finally, they come across a burial site for fallen Narts, where gods are said to grant wishes. Atsamaz suggests that they should leave an offering, but Soslan declines, saying that they have not helped him, and that he will give them 100 deer if they will find him a worthy adversary. Unknown to Soslan, the gods hear his wish. They transport the two of them to a faraway land, where gigantic man-eating cyclops live. Soslan walks up to one of them, named Uaig, and challenges him. Uaig laughs at them, and asks Soslan to try to pull out one of the hairs on the bottom of his leg. When Soslan is unable to do this, he sends them to a cave where they may find a "more worthy adversary". As they come into the cave, they are grabbed by Uaig's mother. While Soslan tries to challenge her as well, Atsamaz says "let this day bring you fortune, part of my mother". Upon hearing this, she lets them down and says that they are her guests for the day. She hides them in her dress. When Uaig comes into the cave, she feeds him a broth and puts him to sleep, and then transports Soslan and Atsamaz back to their homeland. However, Uaig sees them go, and follows them. He comes to the valley of the Narts and causes destruction; nobody is able to stop him. A god comes to Agunda, rejoins the broken pieces of the pipe, and tells her to give the pipe to Atsamaz. She does this, and Atsamaz begins to play his melody. The song disorients Uaig, and allows Soslan to shoot an arrow which goes straight through his one eye, causing him to crumble. Soslan proudly declares victory, but there is silence in the valley; all around him are the dead and the dying. Finally, after the Narts rebuild, Agunda is wed to Atsamaz. Soslan concedes that there is a power which is stronger than him: love. ===== It is November 1918 and James and Hazel argue, it is implied that James strikes her, and Hazel runs out crying. When Rose comforts her on the stairs, she realises she has a temperature. Dr Foley soon comes round and tells Hazel that she has caught the Spanish flu that is currently a pandemic. She and James make up, but on 9 November 1918 Hazel dies at Eaton Place. Rose is greatly upset by her death. The funeral is held on 11 November, the day the war ends, at St Mark's Church in Wimbledon. Rose, Hudson, Mrs Bridges and Ruby attend while Edward and Daisy stay behind. Daisy wants to start a new life outside of service and wants to give two weeks notice, but Edward is more hesitant. That evening, James insists that Georgina, who had been sent home from France due to exhaustion, go to Armistice Party, while Edward, Daisy and Ruby also go out and celebrate. Meanwhile, Virginia Hamilton sends a letter to Richard saying she'll be arriving in London with her two children that evening. Richard rushes to meet her, and at dinner that evening she agrees to marry him, he having asked her via a letter, and they plan to move to Hyde Park after their marriage. Rose discovers that she has been left £1200 following Gregory's death. ===== Sila is a girl given to a wealthy family in Istanbul. Her biological parents gave her away because she was sick. Later, her biological father, Celil, and her brother, Azad, which she believed have died, come to take her away claiming that her mother was very sick and needed to see her before she died. However, she was brought up with deception to marry Boran, the boss of Mardin tribe, to repay a debt of her brother Azad for escaping with Narin, the sister of the tribe leader Boran. (In the Mardin tribe the tradition says if someone tries to steal a girl or flees with a girl, they either have to kill them both or the boy’s family has to give a girl from their family in return) Sila and her Father go to Mardin in order to meet Sila’s family but just after a few days, her father has to return for an urgent work. Nevertheless, Sila decides to stay a little bit longer. As she is getting ready thinking that they are celebrating her brother Azad’s wedding and her return together. However, the reality was they were marrying her of to Boran, the boss of Mardin tribe. During her stay on Mardin, Sila suffered pressure for Boran parents, she helps her servant and friend Ayse, and tries to change injustices caused by the tribal customs. Sila escapes with Narin and Azad to Istanbul. Boran is willing to do anything to comply with tradition: to kill his "wife" and his sister and her husband Azad. Because as the tradition written says that Sila has to die if she runs away. In the end, Sila and Boran are happy and even expecting their twin daughters Sude and Bade. In addition, Boran is again declared as the boss of the Mardin tribe, in the end everyone seems happy. ===== Following the shooting of a film on the life of Jesus called This Is My Blood, Marie Palesi, the actress who plays Mary Magdalene takes refuge in Jerusalem in search of the truth behind the story, while the film's director, who also plays Jesus, returns to New York to aggressively promote the film. The film within a film is drawing public controversy for reasons that are never directly specified, but some scenes in the film draw on the non-canonical Gnostic Gospels, while there are public allegations that the film is anti-Semitic for reasons that are not given. In New York, television journalist Ted Younger (Forrest Whitaker) is presenting a series of programs about the life of Jesus, and chooses to interview the film's director. Privately, Younger is having a crisis of faith. ===== Two children, Jenny and David, meet a leprechaun-like creature called Fritz in the woods; however, his gold dust is being stolen by a wicked hunter. Only Mimmick the Indian knows that the creature is in our world. As the hunter becomes mad with power, he attempts to capture Fritz and the children. With Mimmick's help, they escape to the Land of Small, a mystical, magical land. ===== The story revolves around bad stand-up comedy performances by Jim Gaffigan, Michael Rispoli and Victor Varnado. The unlikely band of comics travel to a comedy and poultry festival in the country to exercise their art. Later, a follow-up gives a summary of how everyone has progressed since appearing at the festival, with differing levels of success. On the commercially released DVD (approx 83 minutes running time), the outtakes section runs in tandem with the credits for around 5 minutes. ===== Jonathan Shale is a mercenary and a Vietnam veteran who returns home to Miami after a botched covert operation in Cuba in which three men from his platoon were killed. He surprises his girlfriend, Jane Hetzko, at her apartment and is warmly welcomed. On the outside, Hetzko is a schoolteacher at inner-city Columbus High School, an institution with a considerable gang problem. She is particularly disliked by Juan Lacas, leader of the KOD ("Kings of Destruction") gang. While jogging one morning, Hetzko is attacked and has her leg broken. Hetzko and Shale believe this to be related to the KOD, which prompts the latter to go undercover as an Ivy League-educated, government- affiliated substitute teacher for his girlfriend's class. Shale arrives at Columbus High School and is, at first, taken aback by the lowly conditions. He is unable to control his class of poorly-educated students on the first day, but decides to use his street-smarts and military tactics to gain the upper hand. Soon enough, he is able to take command of the students by displaying his combat self-defense techniques when students attack him. He is warned not to use such methods by Principal Claude Rolle, but gains the respect of his students when he bonds with them over the similarities between his early gang and Vietnam War experiences and their involvement in petty crime and street gangs. During this time, he befriends fellow schoolteacher Darrell Sherman and also crosses paths with Lacas, one of his students. Suspicious of odd conditions within the high school, Shale sets up surveillance cameras throughout the building. He discovers that Lacas orchestrated the attack on Hetzko. He also discovers that Lacas is secretly working with Rolle to distribute cocaine around Miami for a major narcotics ring. Shale and his team raid a drug deal, using the stolen money to buy music and sports equipment in the form of a "school donation." While Sherman initially denies Shale's discovery and accuses him of being racist by trying to tear down the good works of Principal Rolle (which are only done to give him both distance from and a money-laundering avenue for Rolle's criminal enterprises), Sherman and a female student inadvertently witness the drugs being loaded into one of the school buses later that day. Sherman tells the student to warn Shale and Hetzko, and sacrifices himself by creating a distraction. Rolle, who at this point is aware of Shale's interference orders a "car accident" for Shale, and sends Lacas after Hetzko. With the help of another student, Sherman is killed by Rolle. Shale and Brown save Hetzko by fighting and killing Lacas, and learn the full story from the female witness. Shale and his team garrison the school grounds to enter combat against the remaining K.O.D. members, Johnny Glades a Native American crime lord who wants his stolen money back from the busted deal, a rival mercenary company led by Janus, and Rolle himself. Ultimately, Shale and Joey Six kill all of the dealers and end up as the sole survivors of the battle, walking away from the school grounds discussing future operations as substitute teachers. ===== Sgt. Albert Doakes, a Homicide detective, has grown suspicious of Dexter & is obsessively tailing him in his free time. This makes it impossible for Dexter to investigate (& perhaps kill) someone that he suspects of complicity in the sexual abuse & murder of young boys. When an unknown man is found bizarrely mutilated, Doakes recognizes the work of "Doctor Danco", a torturer who served with Doakes in the Special Forces during the Salvadoran Civil War & has come to Miami to take revenge on his former comrades. Danco drugs his victims with painkillers & psychotropics &, over episodes lasting several days or even weeks, surgically removes various body parts. Dexter is drawn into the case when Danco abducts his sister Debra's new boyfriend, Detective Kyle Chutsky. Amidst all the chaos, Dexter finds himself accidentally engaged to his girlfriend Rita Bennett. While trying to bond with Rita's children, Astor & Cody, he discovers that they're showing the same signs of sociopathy that he did at their age. Dexter looks forward to teaching them to control their "Dark Passengers" as his foster father, Harry, had taught Dexter to control his. Dexter learns that Danco's murder ritual includes a word game resembling hangman. Each victim is asked to guess a word chosen for them by Danco, a description of a grievous offense against Danco, for which the victim is to atone. Each wrong or unintelligible answer results in the amputation of a body part. The maximum number of pieces removed corresponds to the number of letters in the mystery word that has been carefully chosen for that particular victim. The torture is conducted patiently & methodically to allow the victim enough time to recuperate & begin healing before the next atrocity is perpetrated. This devious process is designed to maximize the psychological, as well as physical devastation without ever actually killing the subject. Category:2005 American novels Category:Dexter (series) Category:American crime novels Category:American horror novels ===== Sunny Holiday, an aspiring singer, abandons his wife and young daughter to embark on a tour of karaoke bars in search of the elusive big break that will catapult him to country music stardom. Living out of a pink Chrysler for months, he and his manager meet various strangers along the way, all of whom they inevitably alienate by trying to sell a concentrated household cleaner or committing some other faux pas. Eventually, the frustrations fueled by their many disappointments nearly tear their friendship apart, and they are forced to return to the lives they had left behind. ===== Wallace Cook, a writer for Everywhere Magazine, suggests that his editor should run an article about small-town girl Hazel Flagg, purportedly dying from exposure to radium. Cook invites her to New York City for an interview. After accepting she discovers that she was misdiagnosed but, eager to visit the big city, decides not to reveal the truth and becomes a media darling embraced by a public deeply moved by her sad story. ===== Written from 1988-1990 in Alma-Ata, this tale, at the same time romantic and harsh, describes teenage children moved into an artificial alien-created environment and forced to fight each other for supremacy. ===== Dima, a 14-years boy who used to fight on streets of his native city Alma-ata, now has to fight in a place where swords are used instead of fists. The new environment consists of forty islands, each connected to three others via high and narrow bridges. There is a castle on each island; and about 15-18 kids ("knights") live in each one. The islands are distinct: dictatorship or democracy, a brutal rude leader or a kind one. The population is made up of approximately 70% boys and 30% girls in homogenous or heterogeneous national groups, no one older than 18. Everyone wants to return home, but to do so they are told they must conquer all 40 islands - then, the aliens promised, they would return the winners to their homes. There are also several rules of engagement, also set down by aliens. Swords are wooden at first, but a sword turns steel when the wielder feels hatred and desire to kill towards the opponent. Although retaining the world of feelings of usual children, these "knights" change: they learn to fight to the death, not to pay much attention to wounds; they cover friends and take revenge for fallen ones. Dima sees his new friends being killed, and he kills, too. The way of life at the islands is very stable, since the aliens take into account human psychology and sociology, even though they don't understand human feelings, relationships and motivation. Also, as it turns out, they had a long time, decades, of trial and error. Dima and Inga, a girl he knew on Earth, propose the establishment of a Confederation of islands as the way to stop the Game, and get support among their peers. Some knights refuse to join the Confederation and are killed when they do not surrender to the conquerors. However, the Confederation, even realized, proves to be unstable and is doomed from the beginning: though most want to return home, some only want power for themselves... Also, this attempt was not the first: Dima and his friends discover a hidden room with remains of children who got on islands during the Second World War and locked themselves in, when their attempt of Union of Islands collapsed because of betrayal. But the heroes also find old weapons in this room, including dynamite. Now the action rushes... ===== The War is a sequel to The Pitt and The Draft. The Pitt told of the Black Event, the accidental destruction of Pittsburgh by Ken Connell, wielder of the Star Brand, a vast cosmic energy source. This destruction, mistaken by the U.S. government for a nuclear attack, is blamed on the then-Soviet Union, and led to The Draft—a selective conscription of the New Universe's super-powered Paranormals. In The War #3, the conflict leads to a general exchange of nuclear missiles, but before the missiles impact, the Star Child, the son of Ken Connell who acquired the Star Brand's vast power while still in the womb, destroys the missiles, but this does not end the conflict; so the Star Child temporarily disables all weapons of war on Earth, and announces his existence and powers to the entire planet, demanding that the fighting cease. Category:1989 comics debuts Category:Defunct American comics Category:Marvel Comics limited series Category:New Universe ===== Atlantic is a drama film based on the and set aboard a fictional ship, called the Atlantic. The main plotline revolves around a man who has a shipboard affair with a fellow passenger, which is eventually discovered by his wife. The ship also has aboard an elderly couple, the Rools, who are on their anniversary cruise. Midway across the Atlantic Ocean, the Atlantic strikes an iceberg and is damaged to the point where it is sinking into the Atlantic. A shortage of lifeboats causes the crew to only allow women and children in (though the captain allows a few men to take to the last remaining boats as the disaster reaches its zenith) and many couples are separated. Mrs. Rool refuses to leave her husband and after the boats are gone all the passengers gather on the deck and sing "Nearer, My God, to Thee" as the Atlantic sinks into the ocean. The final scenes depict a group of passengers saying the Lord's Prayer in a flooding lounge. ===== The Spraggs, a family of midwesterners from the fictional city of Apex who have made money through somewhat shady financial dealings, arrive in New York City at the prompting of their beautiful, ambitious, but socially naive daughter, Undine. She marries Ralph Marvell, a would-be poet and member of an old New York family that has social status but no longer enjoys significant wealth. Before her wedding, Undine encounters an acquaintance from Apex named Elmer Moffatt, an ambitious and somewhat unpleasant character with "a genuine disdain for religious piety and social cant", as the scholar Elaine Showalter observes. Undine, who appears to have had a relationship with Moffatt that might prove embarrassing to her, begs him not to do anything that will endanger her wedding to Ralph. Elmer agrees. Although Ralph dotes on Undine, his finances do not permit the extravagant lifestyle Undine desires, and she feels that her in-laws scorn her. When she becomes pregnant, she is disconsolate; and she neglects her son, Paul, after he is born. Alone in Europe, Undine begins an affair with the nouveau riche Peter Van Degen, who is married to Ralph's cousin, Clare. She then divorces Ralph in the hope of marrying Peter, but this does not work out: Peter seems to want nothing more to do with Undine, and Clare will not grant him a divorce anyway. As a divorcee, Undine loses her high position in society, and spends a few years living in North Dakota, New York, and Paris, scheming to scramble up the social ladder again. In Paris, a French count, Raymond de Chelles, falls in love with Undine. They desire to get married, but, as a Catholic, Raymond cannot marry a divorcée. To procure enough money to bribe the Pope to annul Undine's previous marriage, Undine blackmails Ralph. Having been awarded custody of their son, but allowing him to live with Ralph (it was inconvenient for her to raise him in Europe), she demands that the boy be sent to her. It is clear that she will let him remain with Ralph only if he sends her a large sum of money. Ralph does not have sufficient funds of his own, so he borrows money from friends and family and invests it in one of Elmer Moffatt's business deals. The deal does not go through in time to meet Undine's deadline, and Moffat also informs Ralph that he had once eloped with Undine and then was divorced from her—the secret she feared that New York society would discover. Shocked, and also distraught at the thought of losing his son, Ralph commits suicide. Undine is able to marry Raymond as a widow, though this would not be possible if Raymond knew of her first marriage to Moffat. Undine is soon dissatisfied with Raymond, too. The de Chelles are hidebound aristocrats, their wealth tied up in land and art and antiques that they will not consider selling, and Undine cannot adjust to the staid customs of upper-class French society. She also resents having to spend most of her time in the country because her husband cannot pay for expensive stays, entertainment, and shopping trips in Paris. Ultimately, she divorces Raymond in order to remarry Elmer Moffatt, who by now has made a fortune. Now, married to the crass midwestern businessman who was best suited to her in the first place, Undine finally has everything she ever desired. Still, it is clear that she wants even more: in the last paragraph of the novel, she imagines what it would be like to be an ambassador's wife – a position closed to her owing to her divorces. ===== Franz Woyzeck, a lowly soldier stationed in a mid-nineteenth century provincial German town, is the father of an illegitimate child by his mistress Marie. Woyzeck earns extra money for his family by performing menial jobs for the Captain and agreeing to take part in medical experiments conducted by the Doctor. As one of these experiments, the Doctor tells Woyzeck he must eat nothing but peas. Woyzeck's mental health is breaking down and he begins to experience a series of apocalyptic visions. Meanwhile, Marie grows tired of Woyzeck and turns her attentions to a handsome drum major, who in an ambiguous scene taking place in Marie's bedroom, sleeps with her. After some time, and with his jealous suspicions growing, Woyzeck confronts the drum major, who beats him up and humiliates him. Finally and at the verge of mental breakdown, Woyzeck stabs Marie to death by a pond. Woyzeck disposes of the knife in the pond, and while trying to wash the blood off, he hallucinates that he is swimming in blood and apparently drowns himself and dies. While recovering the corpses, the townspeople relish the fact that "a real murder" has taken place, distracting everyone from their mind-numbingly boring lives. ===== Vijay (Daggubati Venkatesh) son of Chakrapani (Rao Gopal Rao) a multimillionaire, has a lot of arrogance and pride, he plays a lot of mischief in college with his three friends. Bharathi (Khushboo) a middle-class girl studies in the same college. Even Vijay teases Bharathi many times, even then she protects his life once, which changes his entire lifestyle and he falls in love with her. He wants to marry Bharathi, but his father doesn't agree, he traps Bharathi and proves her as a prostitute in the court with the help of a gang: MLA Eekambaram (Nutan Prasad), Dr. Vaayunandan Rao (Rajeev), S. I. Aagreya Murthy (Chalapathi Rao), Lawyer Jalandhar (Narra Venkateswara Rao), Bhudevi (Y. Vijaya) along with Bharathi's brother-in-law Bhairava Murthy (Radha Ravi, 26) who wants to marry her, on that reason Bharathi's father Jaganatham (P. L. Narayana) commits suicide and Bharathi goes away. Vijay quarrels with his father, leaves the house, goes in search of Bharathi, he comes know that Bharathi is with her elder sister Krishnaveni (Saritha) and they are under protection of Retired Army Officer Bhishmanarayan (Ranganath) and he also comes know Krishnaveni is also cheated by Dr. Vaayunandan Rao and sent to jail by MLA Eekambaram and gang only. Bhishmanarayan inspires Vijay, with his inspiration Vijay and his three friends, along with Bharathi form a revolutionary team in the name of Kaliyuga Pandavulu and fight against all anti-social elements and illegal activities in the society. Finally, Vijay catches all the real criminals presents them in an open court, Chakrapani also realizes and admits his mistake. Vijay proves that Bharathi is innocent and they all continue their mission Kaliyuga Pandavulu. ===== The film is set principally in Paris, with one thread of the story set in Africa. Over the course of several months, various stories are intertwined, with different characters and plot threads intersecting. * Pierre is a cabaret dancer who learns from a cardiologist that he has a severe heart condition. The only potential cure is a heart transplant. Unable to dance any more, he retires to his apartment, and waits to hear if a donor becomes available. He becomes reflective on his condition and his past life. He watches old film of him as a dancer on stage, and calls an old girlfriend from his school days. He refuses to tell his parents of his medical condition. When he is able to leave the apartment, he notices several attractive young women, including Khadija and Laetitia. * Élise, Pierre's sister, is a social worker, divorced with three children. One of the clients who visits the office is Mourad, a Cameroonian immigrant with a family who is trying to get paperwork to authorize entry of his brother, Benoit, into France. Her office is on the brink of union contract negotiations, where her presence is needed. However, when she learns of Pierre's heart condition, she asks to go on part-time status, which bothers her co-workers. She sets up house in Pierre's apartment and begins to take care of him. She holds a party for Pierre at one point to try to cheer him up. She also reflects on her single status and her attitudes toward men. * Roland Verneuil is an academic at the Sorbonne and expert on the history of Paris who is envious of the seemingly "normal" life of his brother Philippe and his sister-in-law Mélanie. Roland is afraid of winding up like his mentor Professor Vignard, alone and totally absorbed in esoteric topics that are of no interest to the general public. The television producer Arthur Delamare offers Roland the chance to host and narrate a popular TV series about Paris, with the offer of a financially generous contract. Against his past inclinations, Roland accepts the offer. Roland also finds himself attracted to a student in his class, Laetitia, and begins to send her anonymous cell-phone text messages expressing his attraction to her. * Jean is a vegetable market vendor who is separated from Caroline, another market worker. Caroline is about to leave the market and find work elsewhere, but tension still exists between the two. A lover of motorcycles, Caroline develops a budding relationship with another market employee who is also another motorcycle rider. Jean notices Élise as she shops at the market with her children, and develops an attraction to her. * Philippe Verneuil is a successful architect whose wife Mélanie is pregnant with their first child. The first scene with Philippe and Roland is set at the funeral of their father. Philippe appears to have a content life with Mélanie, but he begins to have nightmares related to the major architectural project of a new urban center in Paris. * Khadija, a student of North African background, tries to find work and eventually finds employment in a bakery, whose owner expresses prejudiced sentiments, but who likes Khajida nonetheless because she is a hard worker. Pierre notices Khadija when he shops at the bakery. * Laetitia, a student at the Sorbonne, begins a relationship with a fellow student. She has an apartment across the street from where Pierre lives. Élise poses as a survey taker to gain entry into Laetitia's apartment to learn if she has a boyfriend, with the idea of pairing her up with Pierre. When Laetitia begins receiving anonymous text-messages expressing an interest in her, she does not know who is sending them, but eventually learns the identity of the sender, who turns out to be Roland Verneuil. * In Cameroon, Benoit works at a resort hotel. He has made an acquaintance with Marjolaine, a Parisian model, who tells him to contact her if he ever gets to Paris. His brother, Mourad, has mailed him postcards of Paris. Inspired, and in spite of not having the legal paperwork to immigrate to France, Benoit begins the long journey to make his way to Paris, by bus and eventually by an illegal boat crossing across the Straits of Gibraltar. ===== On the eve of the Second World War, David Spaulding, a radio voice actor, is recruited by Colonel Ed Pace to run a secret network in Lisbon. The plot advances to 1943. Both the Allies and the Axis find themselves facing key shortages that impede their ability to win the war. The Allies lack gyroscopes capable of operating at high altitudes; thus they are losing an unacceptably high number of bombers. If they do not procure gyroscopes soon, the D-Day invasion of Normandy will need to be postponed. The Germans find themselves without high quality diamonds, which are necessary for the rocket development program at Peenemünde. Ironically, each side has what the other needs: the Allies control access to high quality diamonds from the Belgian Congo; the Germans have a design for a gyroscope able to operate at high altitudes. The German intelligence agency, the Nachrichtendienst, discovers that the Allies are in need of gyroscopes, and proposes an exchange, to take place in neutral territory: Buenos Aires, Argentina. David Spaulding has, in the meantime, become an invaluable spy for the Allies. His Lisbon network ferries agents and defectors back and forth from German occupied territory. He is selected, however, to oversee the receipt of the gyroscopes - critically, he does not know that diamonds are being exchanged for the gyroscopes. The Germans select the exiled industrialist Erich Rhinemann to supervise the exchange at their end. He is a clever choice because, although he is Jewish, he is committed to German victory and believes that he will be welcomed back after a German victory. Rhinemann is immensely influential and powerful in Buenos Aires. Although puzzled at his assignment away from Lisbon, Spaulding accepts his new assignment. However, there are several attempts made on his life: one occurring at an airfield in the Azores, another in New York City. While he is in New York, awaiting details on his assignment, he encounters an old flame, Leslie Jenner Hawkwood who, having drawn him away from his apartment, seemingly vanishes into thin air. Spaulding's mentor, Ed Pace, is meanwhile murdered. Upon arrival in Buenos Aires, Spaulding meets and falls in love with Jean Cameron, a woman employed by the embassy. Attacks on him continue, and he suspects he is being trailed by the Gestapo. He meets with Rhinemann to acquire the gyroscopes, but tries to draw out his mysterious assailants - Rhinemann and the other Germans are adamant that the Gestapo is not active in Buenos Aires. To his profound shock, Spaulding discovers that the people trying to stop him work for the Haganah, a Jewish para-military organization set on stopping the exchange. When he captures Asher Feld, the Haganah leader, Feld informs him that he is a party to an exchange of diamonds for gyroscopes. From then on, Spaulding decides that the exchange must be stopped. He pretends to carry out his end, all the while facilitating a Haganah attack on Rhinemann's estate. Spaulding succeeds in killing Rhinemann (who had planned to kill him after the exchange) and Rhinemann's Nazi controller. Having acquired incriminating evidence about the exchange, Spaulding blackmails the Americans who had arranged it and arranges to retire with his beloved Jean. ===== Sasha walks through his life, leaving a bloody trace behind him. He is chased after. But evil be to the pursuer who will manage to draw up with him. The older he grows, the more he becomes a rectification tool against injustice. The more appalling is a crime, the more dreadful is his punishment. Shocking and unfathomable events slash the tissue of present-day reality. Gradually Sasha becomes too dangerous to live among people, and one day the entire world revolts against him. He possesses a supernatural power, enabling him to destroy everything on his way. SHE makes her sudden appearance on his way. Ignorant of his supernatural powers, she falls in love with him. ===== In post-World War II Hong Kong, unhappily married Carol (Eleanor Parker) has an affair with a married man, Paul (Jean Pierre Aumont). Her physician husband Walter (Bill Travers) discovers it and presents her with a choice: travel with him to a remote mainland village (where he will fight a cholera epidemic) or face the scandal of a very public divorce. She persuades him to reconsider and he proposes an alternative. If Paul's wife will agree to a divorce and he marries Carol within one week Walter will obtain a quiet divorce. Carol presents Walter's 'deal' to Paul, who regretfully declines, citing respect for his wife. Carol sees as her only choice to accompany Walter to the village, where she meets the rakish and booze-soaked Tim (George Sanders). He soon introduces her to nuns at the local hospital-convent and Carol begins to re-evaluate her self-absorbed life and character. Working at the convent, Carol learns she is pregnant. She tells Walter she's unsure who is the father and he regrets her honesty. Shortly after, Walter contracts cholera and dies. Carol returns to Hong Kong and an uncertain future. ===== The film's unlikely protagonist is a mild-mannered window peeper named Dead-Eye Dick (Max Gillies). Dick spies on a Mexican couple. The husband is very jealous and is about to discover that his wife has a lover when Dick rescues the lover, whose moniker is Mexico Pete (Serge Lazareff). The worldly Pete counsels the shy Dick on his problems approaching women. Dick claims that he is waiting for an Alaskan Eskimo named Nell. Pete and Dick decide to travel to Alaska to find this fantasy woman, and they have several wacky misadventures along the way. ===== The main character for this story is a boy named Toan. The book jumps from the past, when Toan is only six years old, to the present, when he is in his teens. The book is mainly written in first person, Toan's and his older cousin's, Linh's point of view. This book is about the Vietnam war, and the problems and hardships the Vietnamese people faced while trying to escape their war stricken country. During the book, Toan and his family escape Vietnam, on a boat. They become part of the first wave of boat people. During the boat trip, Phuong (Toan's cousin) is almost captured by sea pirates, but her mother saves her from becoming a sex slave, by offering herself, in fair exchange and sacrifice for the safety of Phuong. She is taken away and never seen by her family again. This was not her fault however, this was forced upon her through the Vietnam gangs. When the family makes it to Malaysia, the Malaysian people try to send them back, but they destroy the ship, forcing everyone to go overboard. Toan almost drowns. When they make it to Malaysia, they are on a list waiting to be transferred to another country so they can be safe from the war in Vietnam. After being late for their time to leave, Toan's father takes matters into his own hands. They escape from their "home" and chase after the dream for a better life for their family. They end up in Australia. This novel is filled with hope. It shows the inside of Vietnam, the way people feel about the war and the experiences that were experienced, that caused the Vietnamese people, to become stronger and more resilient. Only the heart is filled with hope, desolation and a dream. A dream for a better future... of freedom. ===== Budding film director Dennis Morrison (Michael Armstrong), producer Clive Potter (Terence Edmond), and screenwriter Harris Tweedle (Christopher Timothy) are hired by seedy erotic film producer Benny U. Murdoch (Roy Kinnear) to make a dirty movie based on the poem "The Ballad of Eskimo Nell". However they run into difficulty when each of the production's backers want a completely different style of film made. Then Murdoch makes off with the money and the three have to produce four different versions of the movie to keep everybody happy - a gay Western, a hardcore porno, a Kung Fu-style musical, and a wholesome family production. ===== Air Force pilot John Sands (Steven Seagal) has been wrongfully imprisoned in a military detention center where his memory is to be chemically wiped out. His superiors feel threatened by the knowledge he gained from his assignments to operations that were deemed too sensitive for regular intelligence services. A top secret Air Force Stealth Bomber known as the X-77, capable of going anywhere undetected, is stolen by corrupt Air Force pilot Ratcher (Steve Toussaint). General Tom Barnes (Angus MacInnes), Sands' former commander, hears that Sands was arrested after taking down a group of men who were robbing a rest stop. It is revealed that Sands is Ratcher's trainer, Barnes sends Sands to northern Afghanistan with fellow pilot Rick Jannick (Mark Bazeley) to recover the X-77, by promising Sands that he will be a free man if he succeeds. Barnes has Admiral Frank Pendleton (Tim Woodward), who is on an aircraft carrier in the Gulf of Arabia, keep a team of pilots on standby just in case an air attack needs to be launched on the compound where the X-77 has been hidden. Before Sands and Jannick arrive in Afghanistan, a Navy SEAL team that was planted there to meet them is killed by a group of men led by Eliana Reed (Katie Jones). Eliana kidnaps Jannick, and she takes him to her boss, Peter Stone (Vincenzo Nicoli), the man who paid Ratcher $100 million to steal the X-77. In a village close to Stone's compound, Sands meets up with his contacts Jessica and Rojar (Alki David). As it turns out, Stone was born from a Muslim mother and a British father. Stone had spent his childhood in the Middle East, but was educated at Oxford. Stone's mother was killed in an attack by U.S. troops during Desert Storm, and as a result, a vengeful Stone formed the Black Sunday terrorist group. It is revealed that Eliana is Stone's second in command. She trains with a various guerrilla groups in the region, giving Stone the foundation he needs. Now, Stone plans to use the X-77 and its pinpoint precision to drop two biological warfare bombs undetected one of them on Europe, and one of them on the United States. Stone plans to pay Ratcher another $100 million to fly the X-77 and drop the two bombs. Sands, Jessica, and Rojar, make plans to get into Stone's compound and launch an attack, but Stone has about 60 heavily armed mercenaries guarding the compound. Rojar starts a gun fight between the terrorists while Sands rescues Jannick. After a feud about the money, Ratcher shoots and kills Stone. Sands takes on a few of the terrorists by hand as Jessica shoots and kills Eliana. Jannick catches Ratcher while Sands and Jessica leave in the X-77 but Ratcher manages to shoot him and get up in the air in a F16. After a brief dogfight, Sands manages to shoot Ratcher down and returns home. ===== The story involves a trio of teenagers, named Timmy (Omri Katz), Jamie (Tiffanie Poston), and Mick (Shawn Hoffman), who enjoy watching their favorite TV show which features anthropomorphic dinosaurs. Wanting to watch it on a better screen, Timmy, the youngest of the three, suggests that they try watching it on his father's screen in his laboratory. The moment they turn it on, a vortex sucks the three into the TV screen, and into their favorite show. Upon entering the new world, the trio comes across a flightless Dimorphodon named Forry (Rob Sherwood). Reluctant, his knowledge of Dinosaur City proves useful as he guides the three to Tar Town where they join up with a Tyrannosaurus named Rex (Patrick Labyorteaux) and a Triceratops named Tops (David Jolliffe), two dinosaur freedom fighters willing to ignite a revolution against the villain, Mr. Big (Patrick Labyorteaux) and his caveman henchmen "The Rockies". ===== Altered is the story of four men who seek revenge on aliens that abducted them and murdered their friend many years ago. As is explained via dialogue throughout the film, fifteen years before the events shown in the film, a group of five friends living in a remote American town were captured and experimented on by aliens while on a hunting trip. Only four of the friends returned alive. The main character (Wyatt) has since distanced himself from his childhood friends and is shown to have decided to live with the past, albeit in apparent constant paranoia. Two of the remaining three characters, however, have been obsessed by revenge and have persuaded the remaining character that this is the correct course of action to take. The story opens with the tracking and subsequent capture of a lone alien—the consequences of which Wyatt and the three friends soon become deeply involved in. ===== Nora Powers is the head of personnel at Ashvale Advertising. However, when Nora's retired husband George joins Ashvale Advertising as chief commissionaire, she soon gets very embarrassed. ===== The film is about a group of four people who form a gang to put romance back into bank robbery. The film is light- hearted in tone, and makes impressive use of CGI. ===== The following synopsis applies to the rewritten production (not the most recent Goodspeed version) and not the show that originally appeared on Broadway. As such, some musical numbers and subplots are not accounted for. ;Act One As a ship bearing hopeful immigrants steams toward Ellis Island, a lone passenger reflects on the life he has left behind ("I Remember"). Rebecca Hershkowitz, a Jewish woman, has fled Russia with her young son David, hoping to find her husband, Nathan, who left for America years before and never wrote back to his family. Rebecca has made friends with Bella Cohen, a teenager emigrating to America with her father Avram ("If We Never Meet Again"); her brother Herschel remains behind in Russia. Bella has fallen in love with Ben, another passenger, but Avram does not approve. On Ellis Island, the unfeeling immigration officials treat the immigrants like animals ("Greenhorns"). With no male relative to claim them, Rebecca and David are in danger of immediate deportation until Bella begs Avram to rescue her friend. Avram pretends that Rebecca is his niece, and persuades his brother, who lives in a tenement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to let Rebecca and David stay for the night. Bella, Rebecca and David marvel at the strange new sights in the streets below ("Brand New World"). Rebecca still feels lonely, and wishes that she can give her son a real home ("Children of The Wind"). Rebecca searches for her husband and takes a job sewing in a sweatshop, while David helps Rachel, a widow, selling trinkets out of her market stall. Bella works at home as a seamstress; confined to the tenement, she pines for Ben. Ben pretended that he had a wealthy uncle who would provide for him, but in reality, he has no uncle and works in a cigar factory. Avram, though an educated man in "the old country," hawks goods as a street vendor. Even so, the new immigrants remain upbeat ("Penny A Tune"). However, the business owners in the neighborhood are preyed upon by Mr. Rosen, a greedy man who demands they pay him for protection from his thugs. Saul, a union supporter, confronts Rebecca, urging her to open her eyes to her poor treatment and unfair wages; he suggests that she better herself through education. Saul teaches Rebecca and David how to speak English, and tries to instill American values in them ("Easy For You"). To broaden their horizons, he takes them to see Hamlet as performed by a Jewish theatre troupe ("Hard To Be A Prince"). Rebecca realizes that she is falling in love with Saul ("Blame It On The Summer Night"). Ben comes to visit Bella, and admits he is only a factory worker. He has a new plan, to sell gramophones, and demonstrates one for her ("For My Mary"). As they dance, Avram returns and throws Ben out, forbidding Bella from ever seeing the boy again. Bella flies into a rage and accuses her father of not allowing her to achieve her own American dream ("Rags"). Meanwhile, Nathan, Rebecca's husband, is contemplating his position in the ranks of Tammany Hall, where he is promised great things if he manages to secure the Jewish vote for an anti-union Democratic candidate ("What's Wrong With That?"). He believes his wife is still in Russia until he discovers that she has placed an ad in the paper seeking him. At the street market, Mr. Rosen comes to collect his bribes from the shopkeepers. Emboldened by the Socialist doctrine Saul has taught him, David stands up for Rachel and is beaten by Rosen's thugs. Rebecca blames Saul for corrupting her son and vows that she won't be fooled by any more idealistic notions of America. Nathan suddenly arrives to collect his wife and son ("Nothing Will Hurt Us Again"). ;Act Two Nathan explains to Rebecca and David how he has managed to climb up from the ghetto of the lower East side to a better life ("Yankee Boy"). Rebecca is unsettled that her husband has given himself the American name "Nat Harris" and distances himself from the Jewish community; however, she also likes the idea of having a better life for her son ("Uptown"). She also longs for Saul, though they both realize their love can never be ("Wanting"). Avram and Rachel have fallen in love, enabling Avram to move out of his brother's house and provide Bella with a more stable family life ("Three Sunny Rooms"). Bella and David help Ben sell his "Magic Music Machine" to excited customers ("The Sound Of Love"). The three are natural salesmen, and Bella is delighted to think that soon they will have enough money to marry. To help out, she goes against her father's wishes and takes a job at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory ("Rags" reprise). Rebecca accompanies Nathan to a costume party and feels unhappy with her husband, who acts ashamed of her. When David interrupts the party to tell Rebecca of a fire at Bella's shop, Nathan forbids her to leave. Knowing Bella is in danger, she goes anyway, but it is too late. Bella has jumped to her death from the burning building. Avram is destroyed by the death of his daughter, and Rebecca is confused and guilty ("Kaddish"). Rebecca leads the sweatshop workers in a strike protesting the unsafe conditions that lead to the deaths of the girls at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory ("Bread and Freedom"). As the demonstration reaches near-riot levels, Nathan shows up to try and persuade his wife to come home with him. Rebecca sees Saul in the crowd and knows she must follow her heart and stand up for what is right ("Dancing With The Fools"). She refuses Nathan. Avram is still grieving for Bella and is planning to return to Russia and the son, Herschel, he left behind when Ben comes to pay his respects. He tells Avram that leaving America would mean Bella died for nothing and gives him the gramophone, which plays a recording of Bella's voice. While Rebecca sings of her new life with Saul and David, Rachel and Avram welcome Herschel off the boat as a new wave of immigrants arrive ("Children of The Wind reprise/Finale"). ===== My Husband and I was a typical domestic sitcom made for the refined husband and wife team Evelyn Laye and Frank Lawton. As well as typical comedy situations for domestic sitcoms, My Husband and I also featured humorous songs. ===== The story concerns the efforts of an Allied commando team to destroy a seemingly impregnable German fortress that threatens Allied naval ships in the Aegean Sea, and prevents over 1,200 isolated British soldiers from being rescued. The story is based on the real events surrounding the Battle of Leros in World War II. The Guns of Navarone brings together elements that would characterise much of MacLean's subsequent works: tough, competent, worldly men as main characters; frequent but non- graphic violence; betrayal of the hero(es) by a trusted associate; and extensive use of the sea and other dangerous environments as settings. Its three principal characters — New Zealand mountaineer-turned-commando Keith Mallory, American demolitions expert "Dusty" Miller, and Greek resistance fighter Andrea – are among the most fully drawn in all of MacLean's work. ===== Illiterate villager Second Sister Xiang (Siqin Gaowa) was sold as a tongyangxi (child bride) to her present husband, a man with a lame leg, when she was seven. She has an intellectually disabled son Dunzi, who suffers from epileptic fits and is now grown up, and a younger daughter Zhi'er. Through her diligence she has started a successful sesame oil mill and now becomes the richest person in her village. A Japanese businesswoman decides to invest in her business after visiting her mill. Meanwhile, Sister Xiang tries to find a bride for her son. She engineers her son's marriage with Huanhuan (Wu Yujuan), a peasant girl whose family is in dire financial straits. One night, Dunzi nearly strangles Huanhuan to death during a fit. Huanhuan runs back home, but her mother-in-law makes sure she returns. Huanhuan witnesses her drunk father- in-law beating Sister Xiang in bed. She also chances on Sister Xiang in an adulterous affair with family friend Ren, who fathered her daughter Zhi'er. Ren later initiates a break-up with Sister Xiang. Sister Xiang falls ill. She is heartbroken, despite her sesame oil being awarded top prize by the provincial government. Sister Xiang gradually realizes that Huanhuan, like her, suffers as a kindred spirit. She decides to release Huanhuan by asking Huanhuan to go for a divorce. But Huanhuan states that her life is already ruined. She then breaks down. ===== While treating a policewoman for smoking, hypnotherapist Michael Strother has a telepathic vision of a young girl floating beneath the surface of a stream. She is found to be the escaped victim of a ritualistic serial killer. The girl has become mute because of her experience, and Strother is called upon by Scotland Yard to unlock the secrets she holds. They are trying to catch a killer who believes that he has discovered the key to immortality through these murders. ===== Timofey Berezin (Paddy Considine) works at a former top- secret, badly run and aged nuclear reprocessing facility plant in Skotoprigonyevsk-16, a former closed city and a naukograd. At the film's outset, he is exposed to radioactive contamination while selflessly trying to prevent a critical malfunction. The facility's managers tell him that his exposure was a survivable 100 rems, while accusing him of sabotage and suspending him without pay. Loyal coworkers, however, help Timofey discover the truth that he was exposed to 1,000 rems of radiation. Suffering from acute radiation poisoning, he has only days to live. Before Timofey's adoring wife, Marina (Radha Mitchell), is fully aware of his fate, he leaves for Moscow, on a mission to secure a better future for her and their young son. He hooks up with a small-time gangster, Shiv (Oscar Isaac), in hopes of finding a buyer for a selfmade canister of a little over 100 grams of weapons-grade plutonium salt he has stolen. It is 1995, only a few years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and they spend their time frequenting the hotels, nightclubs and private palaces of the new Moscow underworld, ricocheting between two rival crime lords (Nikolaj Lie Kaas and Steven Berkoff). However, what Timofey and Shiv never realize is that they are both caught in the same dilemma: trying to find a way free of a certain fate; hoping to do right by their loved ones before it is too late. ===== Frank Converse's character (called "Gigot" in the first episode), is told by a woman and two men that they know what he is up to, after which they drug him and dump him in the river. He manages to pull himself ashore and the only words he says are "Coronet Blue". One visual clue as to where Converse's character got that phrase from was a sign on a nightclub he was in immediately before he was attacked: "The Blue Coronet". Suffering from amnesia due to the effects of the drug, he soon discovers that he has been targeted for assassination by the same mysterious group of killers. He adopts the name "Michael Alden," a combination of the name of his doctor and the name of the hospital where he was taken to recover. Over the remaining episodes he attempts to discover his identity and the identities of his assailants, whom he refers to as "Greybeards". The series ended before the solution to these mysteries was revealed, but series creator Larry Cohen later told his biographer: "The actual secret is that Converse was not really an American at all. He was a Russian who had been trained to appear like an American and was sent to the U.S. as a spy. He belonged to a spy unit called 'Coronet Blue.' He decided to defect, so the Russians tried to kill him before he could give away the identities of the other Soviet agents. And nobody could really identify him because he didn't exist as an American. Coronet Blue was actually an outgrowth of 'The Traitor' episode of The Defenders."Williams, Tony: Larry Cohen: The Radical Allegories of an Independent Filmmaker. McFarland, 1997. ===== Rane's opening sequence announces it as being "dedicated to the generations born after Tito". The film follows the fate of two boys, Pinki and Švaba, growing up in New Belgrade during the Yugoslav Wars period (1991–95). Pinki was born on 4 May 1980, the day Yugoslav president Josip Broz Tito died, and was given his unusual name by his father Stojan Mučibabić, an idealistic, impulsive, and patriotic officer of the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) who is deeply devoted to communist ideals and Marshal Tito. Father's first choice for his firstborn's name was actually Tito, but the officials at the municipal office thought it provocative and inappropriate in the time of grieving so he eventually settled on Pinki, after local communist Partisan fighter. Meanwhile, Pinki's best friend Švaba is raised and cared for only by his grandmother, a Serb of Croatia who fled to Serbia during World War II after genocide from the Croatian fascist movement Ustaše. Living in the block of apartment buildings in New Belgrade's neighbourhood of Paviljoni, both kids are extremely juvenile, though Pinki is a bit more thoughtful and articulate while Švaba is moody, impulsive, and prone to anger outbursts. The duo also has another friend in the neighbourhood — Dijabola, an eager, geeky, and bespectacled outsider whose sexy and aloof mother Lidija is a well-known television host. Though they hang out with him, Pinki and Švaba mostly treat Dijabola badly. He is constantly the butt of their insults and occasionally even gets beaten up by them. The story begins in the late summer of 1991 as the kids watch Serbian troops (regular JNA troops and various volunteer militias) going off to war in neighbouring Croatia where the Battle of Vukovar is raging. Pinki's father Stojan is extremely frustrated about being forced into early retirement by the JNA army and thus missing the chance to go to war. He spends his days glued to the television set, watching news reports from Vukovar and cheering on the JNA. By now he has transformed into a nationalist and has become extremely irritable, getting into petty quarrels with neighbours and venting his anger along ethnic and political lines. He has also found a new idol - instead of Tito he's now a huge supporter of Slobodan Milošević. Pinki, for his part, is mostly oblivious to the events around him as he spends most of his time compulsively masturbating. By 1992 and 1993, Serbia is under a UN trade embargo, and the war has spread from Croatia to Bosnia as well. Entering their early teens, Pinki, Švaba and Dijabola begin their fascination with a neighbour across the street nicknamed Kure who drives a nice car, makes regular robbing excursions to Germany while dating a trashy kafana singer. They're deeply impressed with his swagger and lifestyle and are ecstatic one day when he invites them to unload his car that's full of stuff he brought over from Germany. In fact, he sends Dijabola away and picks only Švaba, but then upon Švaba's suggestion tells Pinki to come along as well. Like many of their peers, Pinki and Švaba enter the world of crime at fourteen years of age in an ex-communist community that is in hyper-transition, which, because of war and sanctions, reminds the two friends of a theater of the absurd. The idols of the main characters are famous Belgrade gangsters featured on a TV show called Puls Asfalta (Pulse of the Asphalt), which turns them into media stars. Pinki and Švaba fantasize of being on the show one day and they attempt to be noticed by its producers by committing crimes. After they succeed in establishing themselves as influential criminals and drug dealers, their uprising in the world of crime is cut by mutual conflict as both start having sex with Lidija. Švaba shoots Pinki five times in the same places that Jesus was wounded two thousand years ago. Pinki manages to survive and after some time he escapes from the hospital, and calls his friend to make peace. The truce is more than terrible, as the wounded boy has, after an unwritten rule, to inflict five identical wounds to his friend, so the friendship can be rebuilt. After shooting Švaba three times, he considers wounding him one more time instead of the required two. They are suddenly interrupted by a furious Dijabola who shoots at them, especially Švaba, for killing his mother. A shootout occurs and Švaba and Dijabola are killed. In the end, Pinki, who is wounded and is lying on the ground, laughs at the audience by claiming that he "made out better than you." ===== After 25 years of marriage, mother-of-five Caroline Fairchild decides to go back to work. Her husband Donald would like her to work part-time in their home town of Amersham in Buckinghamshire. Instead she gets a job in London as an Editorial Director for a company called Oasis Publishing. At the company she is reunited with her former secretary, Anthea Duxbury, who is a sales export director. In the second episode of the first series, Caroline provides her home address of Bluebell House, Windlesham Road, Upper Woodley, Near Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire to Peter Stuart, the personnel director. Her telephone number is (0296) 23190. Later in the episode, she has another telephone line installed at home for Donald with the number (0296) 85512. In a later episode, Donald provides his private office line to a headhunter. The number is 240-1429, at this time most likely with the 01 area code. Later Caroline shares this number with a friend. Oasis Publishing is owned by the American Frankland Corporation, which is run by Edgar Frankland, Jr., the son of the corporation's boss. On Caroline's first day at work, The Frankland Corporation takes over Ginsberg Publishing, the company that Donald works for. Donald is moved to Oasis, and Caroline and he find themselves working together. However, an unwritten rule at Frankland states that married couples cannot work together, so they have to pretend not to know each other, so Caroline uses her maiden name of Fielding. In Series Two, Edgar finds out they are married, but does not sack them and makes them joint managing directors of Oasis. ===== In The Triple Hoax, Nancy, her Aunt Eloise, Bess, and George begin by going to New York to help a friend. There they see a performance by the Hoaxters, a group of magicians. These magicians take handbags and wallets from people in the audience – they do return them, but Nancy feels suspicious. Nancy and her friends follow leads to Mexico City, where Nancy is asked to find a child that has gone missing, and then to Los Angeles, where Nancy and her friends are threatened by the Hoaxters to try to scare them off the case. ===== Nancy Drew and her friends visit the Shawniegunk Forest in search of a mysterious flying saucer that is disturbing the locals. While they are working on this mystery, a naturalist who lives in the area asks them to help him search for a treasure left to him by his late father. They also must solve the mystery of a Native American man who mysteriously appears and disappears. ===== The story takes places in 360 BC and tells the tale of Melos, a Greek country man that gets arrested and accused of conspiracy against the king. He gets three days to travel to his sister's wedding while Selinentius (Selinae), a genius sculptor that Melos just met stays as a hostage. As opposed to Osamu Dazai's original story, Melos is here innocent of the conspiracy accusation. ===== At the play's core is a semi-pro Northern England rugby league team. During the week, its members are peaceable men toiling away at mindless, working class jobs. On Saturday, they prepare for gory combat on the playing field. The changing room is where they perform their pre-game initiation rites, strip down, loosen muscles, and get into their uniforms. After the match they return, often broken, muddy, and bloody, regretting their loss or giddy with victory in the communal shower. There is little in the way of plot, but Storey engages his audience with his ability to dissect his characters' hurts, hopes, desires, and fighting instincts. ===== Helen Walker is the no-nonsense 41-year-old head of a building firm. However, her life is turned upside down when she falls in love with Peter Morgan, who is 16 years younger than her. He also falls in love with her and she becomes pregnant. After the two marry, the plot remained largely unresolved as low viewing figures meant a second series was not commissioned. ===== After the events of All the Weyrs of Pern, The Dolphins of Pern, and The Skies of Pern, Thread is less of a threat to the planet. Returning to an earlier time period in Pernese history, the author brings the earlier conflict of Thread reappearing in the Second Pass. The book is set about 250 years after the Landing (the original settlement on Pern) and consequently it only features characters which do not appear in other books of the series. Following in the footsteps of the novels that established the background of the colony, the book exposes the incremental loss of technology due to the hardships of thread, and inevitable progress towards the more feudal society shown later in the series timeline. It answers such questions as: * What happened to the computers? * What happened to the technology? * Who created the Star Stones? It also shows more about the process of caring for a newborn dragon than is shown in any of the other Pern books, and explores the ramifications of male riders of green dragons. The main characters are Clisser (college head, Fort Hold), Chalkin (Lord Holder, Bitra), K'vin (weyrleader, Telgar), Zulaya (weyrwoman, Telgar), Iantine (journeyman artist) and Debera (green rider, Telgar) ===== Sniper Thomas Beckett (Tom Berenger) is hired by NSA officials William Avery (Denis Arndt) and Richard Addis (William Duffy) to perform a covert operation to eliminate a suspected terrorist kingpin in the People's Republic of Vietnam who was providing support for Jemaah Islamiyah. The kingpin turns out to be a thought-dead friend and war buddy of Beckett's, Paul Finnegan (John Doman). Because he views the mission as a very personal one, Beckett demands that he conduct the mission alone, without a spotter. The real purpose of the mission turns out to be something other than what Beckett was told. Beckett begins to suspect his employers' motives are not what they claimed after he is counter- sniped at after attempting to assassinate Finnegan. Beckett undertakes a mission of his own to get to the bottom of the mystery, involving escaping from capture by Vietnamese police, working with an NSA recruited Vietnamese police operative Quan (Byron Mann) and using his military training to search for Finnegan. By and large, the plot focuses on governmental betrayal and resultant feelings of disillusionment. ===== Presented as a story to a group of students by their teacher Lena in a field in the distant future, The Last Mimzy is the story of the attempt by humans in the distant future to avert a catastrophic ecological disaster that has destroyed their world. Humanity has become "isolated and warlike," and one scientist is desperately working to save the earth and its people. A small assortment of High-tech devices disguised as toys are sent by him back in time, where they are found by Noah (Chris O'Neil) and Emma (Rhiannon Leigh Wryn) Wilder, children living in early-21st-century Seattle. The "toys" are initially incomprehensible to them, except for what appears to be a stuffed rabbit. Sensing the paranormal strangeness of the devices, the children initially keep their discovery secret from their parents. Emma becomes telepathically connected to the stuffed rabbit, and learns its name, Mimzy, and other information from it, acknowledging it as her teacher. Interaction with the devices causes the children to develop advanced knowledge, genius-level intelligence and psionic abilities. Due to her psychic connection with Mimzy, Emma's development of her abilities is much stronger than her older brother's; she is the only one to display empathy, telepathy, levitation, and telekinesis (though Noah can also communicate with her once she has telepathically contacted him). Emma is also the only one who can use the "spinners", small rocks that when spun, telekinetically float and can produce a force-field. Noah's own psionic/physic abilities are developed through a green card and a seashell. He gains increased intelligence, knowledge, telepathy, empathic communication and control over arthropods. He can also use the card to telekinetically teleport objects through a small dimensional rift after staring at the object and observing his surroundings. At one point, Noah becomes somewhat envious of his sister's psionic prowess, but she reveals to him that even though she is the "chosen one', he is her chosen "engineer" and she cannot "build the bridge to the future" without him. The children's astounding psionic and extrasensory abilities and Emma's attachment to Mimzy alert their parents, especially their mother, and Larry White, Noah's science schoolteacher, to the devices. Later, Noah accidentally fuses the card with a blue blob, causing it to turn into a "generator" that causes a power black-out over half the state of Washington, alerting the FBI to their activities. The family is held for questioning by Special Agent Nathaniel Broadman (Michael Clarke Duncan), and it is revealed that Mimzy is actually a highly advanced form of artificial life utilizing nanotechnology created by Intel. After this, Emma tells everyone the message Mimzy is relaying to her from humanity's distant future. She explains that pollution will eventually corrupt humanity's DNA, and that many rabbits like Mimzy have been sent to the past, since no natural life forms can survive time travel, but none of them successfully returned. Mimzy is the last one remaining, but is now beginning to disintegrate. The reason for the deaths of all the other rabbits is the "chosen ones" before Emma had no "engineers" (like Noah) to help build the bridge across time. Emma and Noah must build the bridge by using the other toys to activate a time portal, so that they can return Mimzy to the future with uncorrupted 21st-century human DNA that the people of the future can use to correct the damage to their DNA caused by ecological problems. Despite attempts by the unbelieving FBI to prevent them, Noah and Emma use their psionic abilities to escape so that they can activate the portal. As they journey to the family beach house, where it all began, Mimzy absorbs a tear from Emma, thus providing the DNA required to restore humanity's corrupted DNA. Emma is almost sucked into the future with Mimzy, but Noah grabs Emma and pulls her out of the portal just as Mimzy is sent back to its own time. Following the transport, Noah's science teacher, who was present at the event, claims that he saw "numbers", a reference to a previous dream he had with numbers in it, which turned out to be the winning lottery numbers, but missed out because he never bought a ticket—thus exciting his fiancée about this second opportunity. Back in the future setting, Mimzy is returned to the future, and humans are finally able to restore their DNA, and abandon their then-necessary protective suits, and more importantly, repair the "mental corruption" that stripped most of them of their feelings toward each other. The teacher ends the story time and the children levitate and fly home. The world in their time has become a beautiful place, where humanity has integrated into the reconstructed ecosystems. The story ends in the current time, with Emma's teacher (Julia Arkos) asking if anyone did anything exciting over the weekend break. No one volunteers, so she calls on Emma at random, who merely smiles. ===== On first airing, "Dark Frontier" aired as a single-length feature. ===== In 1964, General Étienne Fourre, once a village apothecary, is the leader of the French Maquisard Brotherhood and serves as France's representative in the Supreme Council of United Free Europe. He is on his way to confront his friend Commandant Jacques Reinach, the chairman of the Supreme Council. Fourre has studied psychodynamics, a mathematical technique for predicting future trends, and he believes that Reinach is leading Europe down a dead-end path. Reinach is sending a tiny delegation to Rio de Janeiro to represent Europe at the relaunch of the United Nations, refuses to establish a parliamentary government, and intends to recognize a neo-fascist dictator as ruler of Macedonia. Fourre confronts Reinach in his office on the campus of the University of Strasbourg - now used as a makeshift government center - and presents him with an ultimatum: a majority of the Supreme Council have ordered Reinach to step down as chairman. When Reinach refuses, Fourre compares him to the Roman general Gaius Marius, who showed a unique talent as a general and rescued Rome from the barbarian Cimbri, but then proved incompetent in civil politics, inadvertently setting off a civil war that ultimately led to the fall of the Roman Republic. Fourre keeps Reinach distracted with small talk while his men infiltrate the university and stage a coup. As Reinach is about to shoot Fourre, Stefan Rostomily bursts in through his office window and unintentionally kills Reinach. ===== The story concerns a man alone on New Year's Eve, who loves to "sit by the fire, thinking of what I have read in books of voyage and travel" while he himself has never been "around the world, never has been shipwrecked, ice-environed, tomahawked, or eaten." Some of the books he has read concern Christopher Columbus, James Bruce who searched for the source of the Nile, John Franklin who made an "unhappy overland Journey" and was lost searching for the northwest passage in the Canadian Arctic, "Men-selling despots" and the Atlantic slave trade, and Mungo Park, a Scottish explorer (1771–1806) who wrote Travels in the Interior of Africa and other adventure stories. He also touches on "one awful creature" by the name of Alexander Pearce who escaped from a penal colony on an island and cannibalized his fellow escapees. He then tells the story of the Mutiny on the Bounty, and of Thursday October Christian, the son of Fletcher Christian who mutinied against Captain Bligh leaving Bligh to fend for himself on the open sea. He then reads about the sad fate of the Halsewell, lost in a shipwreck on rocks off the Isle of Purbeck in which 160 people died. Captain Pierce stayed to comfort his daughters, even though he could have saved himself. Finally, he recounts the exciting story of the Grosvenor, an English-bound Mercantile ship that ran aground on 4 August 1782 in South Africa. Of the 125 who made it to shore, only 13 survived the trip back to civilization. After meditating on these stories he comes to a startling realization about The Long Voyage, looking into the fire on that first of January 1853. ===== Voyager stops to assist a xenophobic species known as the Varro. This species lives on a generational ship which has housed them for 400 years. While the crew works on the Varro ship, Voyager is infested with synthetic ship-eating parasites that had been released on the Varro ship by dissident Varro. Meanwhile, Harry Kim becomes intimate with Varro scientist Tal, and develops a physiological bond with her, one that is standard in the Varro. The physiological connection alters his behavior and sways him from his duties aboard Voyager. It is later revealed that Tal is one of the separatists. There has been a rumor of a minority of Varro that want off the ship. The parasites that Tal helped create were made to separate the individual pods of the Varro ship without destroying the ship itself. Fractures along the hull created by the parasites begin to grow as the Varro ship begins to fall apart. Voyagers docking port is seized, trapping it with the Varro ship. If the explosions get to Voyager, it would be destroyed as well. However, Harry comes up with a plan to extend Voyagers integrity field around the unstable ship. This gives the Varro enough time to stabilize the parasites. Once the parasites have been stabilized, Voyager breaks free as the Varro ship experiences multiple breaches and the individual pods of the ship begin to break free. The majority of the Varro remain together in separate pods but the minority group that wanted to leave is allowed to do so. Later, Harry must painfully say good-bye to his recent love. ===== Action of the animated film happens in Dykanka, in Ukraine. Noticed by nobody, in the sky two are turned: the witch on a sweeper which gathers stars in a sleeve, and the devil who hides month in a pocket, thinking that the come darkness will keep houses of the rich Cossack the Chub invited to the clerk on kutia and hated to the devil the smith Vakula (who painted a picture of the Last Judgement and the devil on a church wall) won't dare to come to the Chub's daughter Oksana. The forelock with the godfather isn't known whether to go in such darkness to the clerk, however decide and left. The beauty Oksana stays at home. Vakula comes, but Oksana urges on him. The gone astray Forelock, without godfather, decided to come back home because of the blizzard arranged with the devil knocks at the door. However, having heard the smith, the Forelock decides that got to other hut. The forelock goes to Vakula's mother, Solokha who and is that witch who stole stars from the sky. To Oksana her girlfriends come. On one of them Oksana notices the cherevichks embroidered by gold (that is shoes) and is proud declares that will marry Vakula if that brings it cherevichks, "which the queen carries". In crowd going round carol- singing the smith again meets Oksana who repeats the promise apropos the cherevichks. From Vakul's grief it decides to be drowned, throws all bags, except the smallest, and runs away. Having slightly calmed down, Vakula wants to try one more means: he comes to the Zaporozhets to Big-bellied Patsyuk who "is similar to the devil" a little, and receives a confused answer that the devil at it behind shoulders. Anticipating nice production, the devil jumps out from a bag and, having mounted upon the smith's neck, promises to it same night Oksana. The cunning smith, having grasped the devil by a tail and having crossed it, becomes a master of the situation and orders to carry to the devil itself to St. Petersburg, directly to the queen. Having appeared in St. Petersburg, the smith comes to Zaporozhetses with which got acquainted in the fall when they passed through Dykanka. By means of the devil he achieves that it was taken on reception to the queen. Marveling luxury of the palace and strange painting, the smith appears before the queen and asks from it imperial shoes. Touched by such naiveté, Ekaterina pays attention of Denis Fonvizin standing at some distance to this passage, and Vakule gives shoes. Having returned, the smith takes out a new cap and a belt from a chest and goes to the Forelock with a request to give for it Oksana. The forelock seduced with gifts and angry with perfidy of Solokha's agrees. It is echoed also by Oksana ready to marry the smith "and without chereviks". ===== One of Africa's most shocking legends comes to life in this terrifying tale of four students whose fascination with tales of a half-human, half-leopard man-beast find them fighting for their lives. The tales have been passed down through the generations, but few have lived to see the horrific monstrosity firsthand and lived to tell the tale. Now, as four students venture into the wilderness under the flawed theory of safety in numbers, the beast will make itself known, and the curious students will find out why some legends are best left to the storytellers. ===== The original production of EFX featured a loose plot involving the celebration of the human mind. The EFX Master, in charge of EFX, a world where "anything is possible" thanks to imagination, invites the audience to relive their childhood innocence and wonder by taking them on a journey through four different stories: those of Merlin and King Arthur, a futuristic P.T. Barnum and his alien circus, the last days of Harry Houdini, and H.G. Wells' classic novella, The Time Machine. Each story was its own "act," and was introduced by a "helper" of the EFX Master's based upon their "mastership" of that story's overall theme. After being introduced to the world of EFX, the EFX Master transforms himself into Merlin as the Master of Magic tells the audience that they are about enter the time of a young Arthur, before he became king. Arthur begs Merlin to teach him about magic, and Merlin explains that Arthur first needs to learn how to live in harmony with nature. Their lesson is interrupted by the arrival of the witch Morgana, who seeks to kill Arthur to keep him from fulfilling his destiny of becoming king. Merlin and Morgana duke it out as giant dragons in a fiery on-stage battle before Arthur pulls the sword from the stone and defeats the evil sorceress. The audience is left with the message that "good must triumph always." The Master of Laughter then sends us deep into outer space where we meet up with the EFX Master, now P.T. Barnum, and his crazy alien circus. Mishaps and hilarity abound as the intergalactic ensemble perform, and, led by the assistant Vladimir, eventually try to upstage the ringmaster Barnum. This act of the show is the one that was the most re-written. It originally featured a long, innuendo-laced solo-stand-up act by Barnum that included a mind-reading trick involving playing cards and audience participation, an evade-the-blade stunt with the ill-fated Martian Mingo-Sniffer named Muffy, and a juggling act using the cannonballs of Bull Run. The card trick was quickly cut from the show, and Bull Run was reworked to become part of a human cannonball stunt, which gets botched up nicely by Vladimir. Barnum was also supposed to dance the entire Irish jig with the cast, but a hip injury sustained during one of the many stunts left Michael Crawford unable to dance for long, and the number was re-staged to feature just the ensemble performing the jig while Barnum tries in vain to catch Vladimir in an effort to stop his assistant from upstaging him. After leaving the Intergalactic Circus of Wonders, the Master of Spirits appears and asks us if we wish to make contact with the other side. The audience is then brought to a seance led by Bess Houdini in which she asks to speak to the spirit of her dead husband, the famous illusionist Harry Houdini. The EFX Master, as Houdini, appears, and he and Bess reunite briefly to relive various moments of their past, starting with the night that they first met at one of Houdini's escapes. Upon being reminded of Harry's dangerous career, a disillusioned Bess asks Houdini if he ever really loved her, or if his feelings were really an illusion like his many tricks: "Did you just make me believe that you loved me and not even care enough to stay alive?" We then see Houdini's death, drowning in a water tank before freeing himself from his chains, and Houdini tells Bess, "There's nothing here on Earth that is stronger than the love that I have for you. I only wish I learned that sooner." They then say their goodbyes, promising to be reunited again someday. The final act is introduced by the Master of Time, who asks us if we're brave enough to see what the years ahead have in store for us. He takes us to see the EFX Master, who has now become H.G. Wells. Wells expresses his amazement that his novel The Time Machine has been so enthusiastically received by the public, and goes on to explain that his own personal interest in the story lies in the scientific possibility of actually traveling through time for research purposes. He has even built a real time machine, but is hesitant to use it, citing the "effects on future generations not yet shaped. It could be dangerous." The Master of Time urges him to "take the journey you've always dreamed of," adding that sometimes the risks are worth it. Wells agrees, and uses the time machine to enter the far-distant future, an effect achieved through a 3D music video projected onto a scrim during the scene change. Wells arrives in a beautiful garden to find that the surviving human population has been enslaved by a race of reptilian-like creatures, the Morlocks, who force the humans to work underground. The Morlocks steal the time machine while Wells befriends one of the female slaves who managed to escape. Together, Wells and the slave girl enter the caves to free the other slaves and take back the time machine. After successfully defeating the Morlocks, the slave girl tries to persuade Wells into taking her back with him. He refuses and she kisses him. Moved by the kiss, and an earthquake, Wells agrees to let the slave girl join him, and together they travel back to his own time. The EFX Master then appears one final time, this time as himself, and with the entire cast, he praises the human imagination and encourages us to continue to create incredible tales and believe in ourselves and our capacity for creation. We're asked to open ourselves up to infinite possibilities. ===== The original plot from the 1995 production was rewritten by Chisholm and Shaun Cassidy under David Cassidy's supervision, and the music was profoundly changed by Bill Wray, who thought that the audience would better appreciate a more "coherent" story with a logical plot progression. The resulting book focused on David the bus boy, a character that it was felt the audience would identify with more, rather than an EFX Master who ruled a world of dreams. The darker, more serious themes of the show were also cut and replaced by more humorous elements, particularly those that poked fun at the Master of Time. The show opens with the EFX Master (now a projection of James Earl Jones' face) instructing the Masters of Magic, Laughter, Spirit, and Time to find a human who has "lost their imagination" and bring them to EFX. The Masters discover David, a disenchanted bus boy who's serving drinks in the audience. David reveals that he's lost something in his life since losing his love Laura (an audience member selected by the cast before every performance). The Masters tell him that they'll help him regain that lost part of himself, and find Laura, if he's willing to go on a journey to do so. David agrees, and the Master of Magic turns him into King Arthur. Merlin explains that magic is in nature and is accessible by everyone. Arthur is skeptical until Morgana arrives and engages Merlin in a wizard's duel. Just when it seems that Merlin is about to lose the battle, Arthur understands the lesson that the old wizard was trying to teach him, and pulls the sword from the stone to defeat Morgana. With his belief in the impossible and the power of imagination restored, David is sent on the next part of his journey. David becomes P.T. Barnum, the ringmaster of the Intergalactic Circus of Wonders (whose theme song of the same name is now a rap performed by One Spirit). Barnum performs with the circus, and in the process, rediscovers his sense of humour and ability to have a good time. As the circus comes to an end, Barnum spots Laura in the audience, but she's whisked away before he can get to her. He has no choice but to continue on ... Wondering if Laura might be in the spirit world, David becomes Harry Houdini. He fails to find Laura, but Houdini and his wife Bess are briefly reunited and relive some of his greatest escapes before he has to perform one more daring feat: escaping from the spirit world before the Master of Spirits traps him there for all eternity. Houdini escapes, and now remembering what it's like to love, continues his quest for Laura. The final part of David's journey requires him to travel through time. After having a humorous go at the light-hearted Master of Time, David becomes H.G. Wells and travels into the far distant future. Upon his arrival, he discovers that Laura has been kidnapped by the monstrous creatures known as the Morlocks, and is being held captive, along with other humans, in the Morlocks' caverns. Wells enlists the help of two slaves who managed to escape, and together, they defeat the Morlocks and free Laura and the others. Laura and Wells then return to the present time where the cast presents Laura, who is played by an audience member, with flowers for her participation in the show. David, now reunited with his long-lost love and filled with a new-found joy for life, reflects on his adventure and celebrates with the cast while encouraging the audience to embrace all the wonders life has to offer. ===== Tommy Tune brought his own vision to EFX when he replaced David Cassidy in 1999. The show was once again rewritten, this time to better suit Tommy's performance style, most particularly his dancing. The 1999 plot was a somewhat more serious show than the David Cassidy version; however, it still retained some of the humor that had been introduced by Cassidy.. There was also an emphasis on dreams, with the line "Wake up and dream!" becoming the unofficial slogan. ===== The little town of Burnt Culvert has a problem. Storms like never before are arising. This is the beginning of the end. Foo is falling. Evil is seeping into the world, Leven and Winter's romance is beginning to be obvious, and dreams are not as they should be. Twisted minds overpower Foo. Strange things are beginning to happen in the world. Clouds are territorial; buildings walk to the opposite side of the street; and weird bugs are carrying people off. Everyone is jittery. Only Leven Thumps can save the day. ===== The Born Queen, Virgenya Dare, defeats the evil Skasloi with magic and frees humanity from slavery. The Skasloi king tells Virgenya humanity is cursed. About 2300 years later, Dare's grave is found by her descendant, rebellious Princess Anne. The forester Aspar White rescues a novice monk, Stephen Darige, from a kidnapping. Aspar is warned about the mythical Briar King by the strange Sefry travellers. Evil Prince Robert murders his sister and tricks his brother into war with nearby Hansa. Queen Muriele secretly sends Anne and her friend Austra to a convent to be trained as an assassin. Muriele and her two other daughters evacuate to the country, aided by loyal knight Neil MeqVren who is in love with Princess Fastia. At the monastery, Stephen finds corruption within the church, and prophecies concerning the terrifying Briar King. Beneath the castle, the captive last Skasloi (known as "the Kept") makes evil predictions. Anne's training takes a strange turn as she finds herself in a magical realm. On her return, Anne is warned she must be Queen to save the world. The other princesses are murdered as Neil and Muriele watch helplessly - themselves saved only by the appearance of the Briar King. As the assassins aim for their final target, Anne and Austra escape the mass slaughter at the convent, aided by swordsman Cazio and his mentor z'Acatto. Prince Robert murders the king who deals a fatal wound as he dies. Muriele, back in Eslen, consults the Kept from whom she gets the most terrible curse imaginable to cast on the murderer of her husband. She does not know that it was Robert and that he is also dead. The curse, however, is more powerful even than death and by casting this on Robert, Muriele inadvertently and unintentionally breaks the Law of Death. The Briar King ends with the awakening of Robert, now a form of undead, which also explains the title of the next volume, The Charnel Prince. ===== Arianus, the World of Air, is composed entirely of porous floating islands, aligned in three basic altitudes. In the Low Realm, the dwarves (called "Gegs", an elven word for "insects") live on the continent Drevlin and cheerfully serve the giant Kicksey-winsey, a city-sized machine that is the source of all water in Arianus. In the Mid Realm, elves and humans have warred for centuries with each other and amongst themselves for water, status, and advantage. Above them all in the High Realm live the Mysteriarchs, isolationist human wizards of the Seventh House rank. They were some of the most powerful wizards of their kind, leaving fellow humans behind in their disgust for the constant warfare, but they never equalled the likes of the missing Sartan and Patryn races. In the Realm of sky, humans, elves, and dwarves battle for control of precious water—traversing a world of airborne islands on currents of elven magic and the backs of mammoth dragons. But soon great magical forces will begin to rend the fabric of this delicate land. The assassin Hugh the Hand is about to be executed when he is rescued by Trian, the wizard who serves the human King Stephen. Trian gives him a contract to kill the child of King Stephen and his wife Queen Anne. The child is called Bane. Hugh thinks that Bane is being killed against the will of Queen Anne, but it is revealed after his departure that Anne and Stephen are allied in wanting Bane dead. Hugh departs with Bane, who's a creepy but beautiful and endearing child, and soon after they leave a man called Alfred catches up with them. Alfred is a courtier and serves Prince Bane, but he appears very weak and easily threatened, and keeps fainting whenever he is afraid. They get close to Hugh's concealed dragon ship (an elven ship that he stole) and Hugh thinks that Bane has been killed by a falling shard from the glass trees, but by the time Hugh gets to the scene he is alive again. Then Hugh, Alfred and Bane start to fly to one of the other islands, but Bane poisons Hugh and the ship plunges down towards Drevlin and the Maelstrom. Haplo, a Patryn, has arrived in Arianus through Death's Gate, the first Patryn to venture through it. He has been sent by his lord, Xar, to explore the world, because no Patryns have visited the worlds since the Sundering. Xar rescued Haplo from the Labyrinth, where he and all the other Patryn have struggled against countless monsters. In preparation for visiting mensch worlds ("mensch" being the derogatory term Patryns and Sartans use to refer to humans, elves and dwarves) he wears long clothes and has covered his neck and hands in bandages, to hide the runes tattooed all over his skin, that he uses to perform magic. Haplo is not prepared for the strain of going through Death's Gate, which nearly destroys his ship. He crashes on one of the lower islands of Drevlin. He is found by a dwarf, Limbeck, who was thrown off the main Drevlin island for speaking against the leader of the dwarfs and encouraging them to question things, and work out why things are the way they are. Jarre, Limbeck's girlfriend, and her allies rescue Limbeck from the lower island, as they planned, but Haplo comes up with him, and Haplo's dog. Limbeck thinks Haplo is a god but he says he is not a god. Shortly after Haplo and Limbeck get back to the main island of Drevlin, Hugh, Alfred and Bane crash land there in Hugh's dragon ship. Limbeck's followers clash with the other dwarves, though neither side is particularly fierce or violent. In the confusion, Alfred falls over against the base of a statue in the centre of Drevlin, the statue that the dwarves call the "Manger". He opens a door below the base of the statue, and goes in, but then Jarre also falls down it and it closes behind her. She is terrified, having never been in this part of Drevlin before, but Alfred reassures her, and leads her through chambers near the heart of the Kicksey-Winsey. One such chamber is a mausoleum, which she realises is full of the dead of Alfred's people, and she sympathises with his grief. Alfred is a Sartan, but all the other Sartan that he used to live with in these chambers are now long dead. Alfred then leads Jarre back out of the Sartan chambers. Another elven ship arrives to claim the regular tribute of water, to take back to their lands in the Mid Realm. The dwarves, led by Limbeck, refuse to give up the water and are in danger of being attacked until the elven lieutenant, furious at the cowardice and cruelty of the elven captain, mutinies against the elven captain and kills him. He is not the first elf to rebel -- many other elves have started rebelling against their emperor in recent years. Bane reveals that his father is a mysteriarch who purposely swapped him with Stephen and Anne's child soon after it was born, so that he could grow up and take over the Mid Realms in his father's name. Bane persuades the elven lieutenant to take him, Hugh, Alfred, Haplo and Limbeck to the High Realm to visit his father Sinistrad. Bane has been communicating with his father all his life, via a magical feather amulet. Over the course of the book it has become clear that Bane has magical power to make people love him (a spell cast by his father), and he is also able to manipulate people, but that he also wants to be loved by his father, and hopes to rule Mid Realm side by side with him. On the way up to the High Realm Alfred uses a spell to send Haplo to sleep and sneaks a look under the bandages on his hands, and discovers that he is a Patryn, but Alfred does not know what to do with that information. Haplo is suspicious of him in turn, but has not guessed what he is. Sinistrad tells his wife Iridal, who lives in terror of him, that their child, Bane, is coming up to see them, and she looks forward to being reunited with her child. Their High Realm is dying, because their magic cannot sustain life up there, where the air gets too thin and there is too little water. When the elven ship arrives, Sinistrad puts on the illusion that there is a large population of happy mysteriarchs to welcome them and lead them through an apparently beautiful city. Sinistrad gives them a feast and tries to get Haplo to tell him more about what he is. Sinistrad also talks a lot to Bane, getting Bane to tell him all about the Kicksey-Winsey, because Bane has worked out what it does. But Bane is disappointed that his father treats him harshly, not lovingly, and talks of himself ruling alone, not alongside Bane. Hugh falls in love with Iridal, and she with him, though he rejects Sinistrad's suggestive comments about them. Bane tells Alfred that he knows Alfred is a Sartan, and Haplo overhears. Bane knows his father's plan is to drive the "Gegs" (the dwarves of Drevlin) to war, and to take over all the lower realms. Bane, knowing Alfred's magical powers, wants Alfred to help him take over instead, starting by killing Sinistrad. Alfred refuses to kill anyone. Alfred realises he might have been wrong to bring Bane back to life back when he was impaled by a glass tree shard. Haplo's dog enters and stops Alfred from leaving, and Haplo comes and confronts him. He tells him of what the Patryns had to endure after being cast into the Labyrinth by the Sartan, and Alfred tells him the Sartan never intended the Labyrinth to be a torment, and that the Sartan have since had troubles of their own. Bane gives up on them both and goes off to kill his father. Iridal confronts Sinistrad, to save Bane, and Hugh gets himself killed saving Iridal -- Sinistrad poisons him just before he dies himself. Once Sinistrad is dead, his dragon is free from his control and starts to attack the palace. Haplo drives it off for long enough to escape in the elven ship with the elf lieutenant (now captain), and Bane, and the dog. Iridal remains in the High Realm with Alfred. The elven ship joins the elven rebel army and Haplo returns through Death's Gate to his lord in the Nexus, taking Bane to be his lord's protege. ===== On steamy Pryan, Realm of Fire, never-ending sunlight and plentiful rain have created a jungle so vast that humans and elves dwell high in the trees and only dwarves live anywhere near the ground. From the treetops the aristocratic elves sell weapons to the other races, whose incessant warfare sends a steady stream of profits and essential resources skyward. Now, generations of dissent and race hatred will not heal -- not even under threat of annihilation at the hands of the legendary tytans. Armed with little more than their wits and a prophecy, elves, humans, and a dwarf must unite to try to save the world from destruction. Paithan, Caliandra and Aleatha are the three children of one of the richest elves. Caliandra runs the business, Paithan goes out on trading journeys and Aleatha lounges around, flirting with many male elves, while their father distracts himself with experiments involving rockets. Paithan goes to the nearest human town to conclude an arms deal with two humans, Roland and Rega. They are actually brother and sister but pretend to be husband and wife, and persuade Paithan to travel with them to deliver the arms to the dwarf who ordered them. They plan for Rega to seduce Paithan so that Roland can then accuse and attack him. Instead, Rega actually falls in love with Paithan, and he with her, though a series of misunderstandings delays them in acknowledging their love to each other. In the meantime, they have finally got close to dwarf lands, though they are concerned about all the reports they've heard of tytans, massive monsters, destroying settlements further north. They are captured by a dwarf, Drugar, who is the only surviving member of his tribe, and he plans to escort them back to their home and watch as they and all their loved ones die, as his did. Whenever the tytans approach people, they keep asking telepathically "Where is the citadel?" and then kill people when they cannot answer them. In the meantime, Haplo has arrived on Pryan, and couldn't work out where he was or where he needed to go until he realised that he'd appeared through Death's Gate in the centre of a massive shell world, with four suns near the centre and all life on Pryan growing on the inner surface of the sphere (like a Dyson sphere). He finds his way to the elf city not long after a "human wizard" arrives, who was invited by Caliandra's father, who wanted to know more about the stars in the sky and how to get up there in a rocket. The wizard is called Zifnab (an anagram of Fizban) and talks very strangely, making references to other fictional texts including Star Wars. He is accompanied by a huge wingless dragon who serves him but also mothers him. The tytans pursue Paithan, Roland, Rega and Drugar through the forests, though they finally get back to the elf city. Haplo tries to fight the tytans and is horrified when the tytans easily break his rune magic protection, and nearly kill him. Caliandra sacrifices herself to save her siblings, and Haplo, Paithan, Aleatha, Roland, Rega and Drugar, Zifnab and the dragon, along with many other elves and some humans, flee in Haplo's ship. They fly upwards towards the stars, and keep flying towards one star until they get close enough to see that it is a citadel, in a forest. Haplo has realised that all the "stars" are citadels scattered around the inner surface of Pryan, itself a Dyson sphere. The city is surrounded by Sartan warding runes, but they are able to camp nearby. Haplo leaves the mensch and flies away, back to Death's Gate. Zifnab's dragon pretends to kill Zifnab and attack the mensch, to drive them towards the citadel, and the dwarf Drugar finally realises that the amulet he wears, which is a single Sartan rune, can be used to open the doors and let them into the citadel, where they can live, safe from the tytans. ===== Abarrach, the World of Stone is just that: lava, stone, poisonous fumes, and precious little food that can be grown. The peoples of Abarrach rely on giant rune-inscribed stone pillars called colossi to provide warmth and breathable atmosphere, but the colossi have been failing slowly for many years. The mensch have all died out, and the only remaining people — all of them Sartan — are far reduced in power; most of their innate magic is consumed with simply keeping them alive. To bolster their numbers, they have taken to the forbidden art of necromancy: the raising of the dead. These reanimated corpses are not very smart, but they're better than nothing. Haplo is sent to this world and discovers, much to his alarm, that Alfred has somehow infiltrated the Nexus and stowed away on his ship. Before he can do anything, however, the vessel passes through Death's Gate, and their consciousnesses switch: the two are forced to relive each other's most painful memories: a seven-year-old Haplo seeing the slaughtered bodies of his parents and being taught that it is all the fault of the Sartan; and Alfred, waking up to find that he is the only Sartan left alive on Arianus and possible all the worlds for all he knows. The experience changes them and they no longer look at them with the same hatred or fear. On Abarrach, Alfred is initially overjoyed to meet living Sartan, even bastardized ones, but is appalled at the state of things; the Sartan rune-language, highly evocative, is laden with images of death when spoken by Abarrach natives. He is even more horrified that they practice necromancy. It was taught that, when one is revived untimely, another dies untimely, and (though the series never spells it out) it is implied that Abarrach's necromancy is the reason most Sartan died during stasis. And the Sartan here regard Alfred with hungry eyes: he has magical abilities that they had long forgotten existed. Even his simplest magic is beyond them, so they now want what he has. Haplo and Alfred meet Prince Edmund, who is leading his ragged band of people to the "greener" pastures around Abarrach's capital city (Necropolis), and his chief necromancer, Baltazar. In the realm of Kairn Necros, they meet minor nobles and necromancers Jonathan and Jera, just married and very clearly in love with each other. Haplo and Edmund meet with the Dynast Kleitus XIV, who is not a pleasant man; he orders Edmund executed on a whim and imprisons Haplo when it becomes clear that he, too, still knows the secrets of rune-magic. Kleitus poisons Haplo so that the corpse will be left undamaged, the runes free to be studied at Kleitus's leisure. Alfred, Jonathan, and Jera manage to free Haplo, but Jera is killed, and Jonathan revives her immediately without waiting the customary three days to let her soul depart entirely. Jera now becomes a lazar, a revived dead who still retains her intelligence and personality because her soul is so closely bound to the body... and whose existence is endless torment, caught between life and death. Haplo, Alfred, and Jonathan flee with the dead Edmund and Jera from Kleitus and his dead soldiers, and end up in a curious chamber: heavily warded, full of the skeletal remains of people who apparently killed each other or even themselves, with seven sealed doors spaced evenly around its perimeter and a white wooden table in the middle. It is called the Chamber of the Damned. Once rebels gathered here and were ambushed and killed here by an ancestor of Kleitus, but he and all his forces were struck down by an unseen hand on the very spot. The chamber is entirely peaceful and seems to resist violence, and Alfred (and Haplo too, though he will not admit it) feels for a moment as if in the presence of a Higher Power. While Alfred and Haplo view this ancient scene, Jera is calling to the dead soldiers that Kleitus brings with him. He arrives at the chamber, only to be killed and resurrected as a lazar by Jera. She begins to reanimate many new lazar, culminating in a slaughter of nearly the entire population of the city. The living (and Edmund) are forced to run again, trying to reach Haplo's ship to flee Abarrach, as well as stop the dead from breaking through its runes to enter the other worlds and kill all the living. Jonathan sacrifices himself to aid their escape, and is murdered and turned into a lazar at his wife's hands; Prince Edmund, on the other hand, demonstrates how a lazar can surrender his/her anger and find true death by doing so. Baltazar gathers his remaining people on the outskirts of the city, in for the long haul, though the new army of lazar will make life difficult. Haplo and Alfred escape in Haplo's ship, and Haplo, driven by odd impulses, gives Alfred a chance to jump ship before he returns to the Nexus and his lord. Haplo's report to Xar is minimal, he tells his lord that Abarrach may be removed from his calculations since it is a dead world. The novel, however, contains a Xar’s written response in the margin of the report, where he calls Haplo a liar. ===== Haplo, returns to the Nexus from Abarrach, leaves an extremely cursory report of his time there, and plans to depart again for Chelestra without seeing Xar, but Xar gets to him before he can depart. Xar tortures him to cleanse him of disloyalty and to find out everything Haplo didn't report about Abarrach. He discovers Haplo had been travelling with Alfred, and that there are Sartan on Abarrach using necromancy. Haplo didn't want to reveal the existence of necromancy because he was afraid Xar would want to use it, whereas Haplo now knows it is a magic that should be avoided at all costs. Haplo departs again towards Death's Gate. Alfred has been hiding on Haplo's ship since their departure from Abarrach, but now Haplo's dog pushes Alfred out of the ship as it's heading into Death's Gate. Alfred wakes up in what he thinks is the Sartan mausoleum on Arianus, but then the other occupants wake up and he discovers they are living Sartan, in fact the very group of Sartan that performed the Sundering of the worlds. They are led by Samah, accompanied by his wife Orla and son Ramu. On Chelestra the mensch races live on seamoons, living rock creatures that drift through the waters of Chelestra, and at the start of the book the three races are planning to leave their current seamoon, because the seasun has drifted too far from this seamoon and it is becoming uninhabitable, and move to another seamoon closer to the seasun. Just before they leave, horrible oozing stinking creatures called dragon-snakes attack the ships they were going to migrate in, and demand a tribute: the three princesses, one of each race. The leaders of the three races discuss what they should do, but the three princesses (Grundle, the dwarf princess, Alake, the human princess, and Sabia, the elf princess) plan to escape from the seamoon and give themselves up to save their people. At the last minute Devon, Sabia's love, knocks out Sabia and dresses himself in her clothes and departs with Grundle and Alake. Haplo, travelling through Death's Gate, is determined to reaffirm his loyalty to his lord and forget the doubt he felt after discovering the Chamber of the Damned on Abarrach. As soon as Haplo arrives in Chelestra in his ship, it starts to break up, and when the sea touches him his tattoos vanish and his magic dissolves. He discovers the sea is breathable, but is left defenceless. Grundle, Devon and Alake find him floating in the sea and rescue him. His dog disappeared before he reached Chelestra. Alfred is given an audience by the Sartan Council. Orla occasionally disagrees with Samah and he refers to some past incident where she resisted obeying him. Samah asks Alfred whether any Sartan on Arianus heard the call for help that was sent out by the Sartan Council, and is shocked to hear that thousands of years have passed since then, whilst the Council have been in stasis, and that all the other Sartan on Arianus are dead. Alfred also tells Samah that the Labyrinth, far from being a fairly simple test for the Patryns, ended up being a deadly place of torment for them, teaching them to hate the Sartan. Alfred also tells them that some Patryns have now escaped from the Labyrinth, and that Haplo has come to Chelestra. Samah is horrified, and assumes Haplo has been sent on a reconnaissance, which is indeed Xar's purpose in sending him. Alfred becomes flustered when Orla is kind to him and concerned about his welfare. He tells her that the Sartan underestimated the mensch, who have been coping pretty well without the Sartan. Orla reveals to him that she resisted Samah's plan to Sunder the worlds. Samah talks to his son Ramu, revealing that he thinks Alfred has been corrupted by the Patryns. Orla shows Alfred around Surunan, the Sartan city in Chelestra, which is situated on the Chalice, a fixed part of Chelestra that does not move like the seamoons. Haplo's dog reappears, to Alfred's shock, and Alfred talks more about the horrors of the Labyrinth that the Patryns have endured, and tells her of the time he swapped consciousnesses with Haplo on the way through Death's Gate to Abarrach. A dragon-snake appears on the ship carrying Haplo, Grundle, Alake and Devon. They are abnormally terrified of it, as is Haplo. and it talks to Haplo and reveals that the old Patryn enemy Samah is on Chelestra. The three mensch are also now afraid of Haplo, because the runes that dissolved in the water have now started to reappear, glowing, on his skin. Alfred feels out of place on Surunan, because he is still dressed in his old outfit from Arianus, and has not told the others his true Sartan name (Alfred is a mensch name). He is also frustrated that the Sartan don't seem to realise how much the worlds have changed since they were last awake, and that the only other Sartan still alive are the ones on Abarrach, who have forgotten most of their magic and now practise the forbidden art of necromancy. Samah distrusts Alfred, esp. as Haplo's dog keeps following Alfred around. Samah tells Alfred about the early days of Chelestra soon after the Sundering, when the mensch came to Surunan, terrified of the dragon-snakes and begging for sanctuary in the Sartan city. The Sartan go to confront the dragon-snakes, who say they want the destruction of the Sartan, and say that the Sartan created them. The Sartan can sense that the dragon- snakes are evil, "older than time itself", and show even more hatred for the Sartan than the Patryns ever did. The dragon-snakes repeatedly attacked the city, and the Sartan were defenceless, because of the effect of the seawater on their magic. The Sartan sent the mensch away to live on the seamoons, thinking, correctly, that the dragon-snakes would leave the mensch alone and just keep attacking the Sartan. Then the Sartan sent out a call for help from the other worlds, and went into stasis. Haplo, Grundle, Alake and Devon escape from their ship as it starts breaking apart, and wash up on the shore of Draknor, the seamoon where the dragon snakes live. They are again struck with unnatural terror in the presence of the dragon snakes. The dragon-snakes greet Haplo as their Master, try to reassure the mensch, and tell Haplo their version of the history of Chelestra. They tell Haplo that the Patryns created them. They are also very afraid of Alfred, whom they call the Serpent Mage. They want the mensch to help them fight against the Sartan. Alfred goes exploring in Surunan, finds the library, with lots of extra Sartan warding runes around it, goes in, and is discovered by Samah, who clearly thinks Alfred snuck in on purpose to find a particular scroll, which Alfred hadn't noticed but is now very curious about. Grundle, Alake, Devon and Haplo return to the mensch seamoon in a ship provided by the dragon-snakes, where their families are happy to see them, but have to break the news that Sabia killed herself after they left. Alfred talks to Orla again about the horrors of the Labyrinth, and about how the Patryns are fierce and loving and loyal. Alfred accidentally ends up embracing Orla. He asks her what is concealed in the library, then goes and sneaks into the library through the roof, which has weaker warding runes. Orla, alone at her home, realises that her life with Samah has been devoid of love, and that she is in love with Alfred, who has the power not only to feel love himself but to induce it in others, in making her feel empathy and compassion for the Patryns and the mensch. Orla goes to the library, and finds Alfred, who has read in the scroll that several Sartan had sensed the existence of a higher power, just as Alfred did whilst in the Chamber of the Damned on Abarrach. Orla tries to justify why she and the others who discovered the higher power didn't resist the Sundering more strongly. Samah finds them in the library, and at once concludes that Orla is colluding with Alfred and the Patryns. Alfred does not resist when Samah decides to imprison him. Alake tells Haplo she has fallen in love with him, though he has already guessed that. Haplo persuades the mensch to go to Surunan and they start preparing for their departure. Devon tries to kill himself and Haplo rescues him, and heals him using his Patryn magic, which also involves him experiencing Devon's hurt and pain at Sabia's death. Haplo also tells Devon about his own escape from the Labyrinth and how he was saved by his dog. Orla tries to reassure Samah that she is still loyal to him, but he remains cold and unfeeling towards her, and she keeps thinking it is her fault. Then, at the Council meeting, he is once again polite and kind to her. Alfred is brought before the Council, and tells them about life in Arianus, and what it was like for him to wake up and find all the other Sartan were dead. Samah talks about the history of the world before the Sundering, tries to justify the Sartans actions in performing the Sundering, and accuses the Patryns of interfering in mensch affairs behind the scenes, even though, as Alfred points out, the Sartan also got involved in mensch affairs. Alfred accuses the Sartan Council of carrying out the Sundering because they were afraid of the possibility that they might not be gods, that there might be a higher power. He is astonished when Samah doesn't react with anger but instead is polite, and leaves him alone with Orla. Haplo, prompted by Devon, Grundle and Alake, talks to the dolphins, who have visited Surunan recently, and they tell him about Alfred and the dog being in Surunan, which upsets Haplo. The mensch all set off in their ships, following the dragon-snakes. They arrive on Draknor, the home of the dragon snakes, and send a message asking the Sartans to meet with them. Orla tells Alfred that Haplo has asked to attend the meeting. The Sartan council meet the mensch on Surunan, and the mensch are horrified at the Sartans' arrogance and superior attitude towards them. The Sartans are angry that the three races are allied with the dragon-snakes, and refuse to let the mensch settle on Surunan, even though there is more than enough room for them to settle there. Haplo's dog refuses to leave Alfred and return to Haplo. The mensch declare that they will try to take land on Surunan by force, and Samah declares war on them in return. The mensch return to Draknor. Alake, Grundle and Devon follow Haplo when he sneaks off in the night to talk to the dragon-snakes. Haplo wants the mensch to weaken the Sartan by flooding Surunan with seawater then move in peacefully, because he thinks they couldn't easily survive open warfare with the Sartan. The dragon-snakes discover Alfred has been listening in, because he came to give the dog back to Haplo. The dragon-snakes want Haplo to kill him. After Haplo and Alfred and the dog leave, Grundle, Alake and Devon overhear the dragon-snakes complaining to each other about the lack of fear and hatred and the fact that Haplo doesn't want open warfare between the mensch and the Sartan. They hear the dragon-snakes plotting to invade all the other worlds. Alfred and Haplo agree that the dragon-snakes are dangerous, and want to invade the rest of the worlds. Samah overhears them, and attacks Haplo. Haplo falls into the sea, losing his powers. Alfred tries to help him. Alake runs up to them, begging for help against the dragon-snakes, who have trapped her and Devon and Grundle and are about to kill them. Samah refuses to help them. Alake returns to Grundle and Devon, and defies the dragon snakes, and one of them attacks her. Haplo can't use his magic, dissolved by the seawater, but he attacks the dragon-snake with his rune-enhanced daggers. Devon holds Alake as she dies. Grundle runs to Samah and Alfred, desperate for help to fight the dragon- snakes. Alfred transforms into a dragon and attacks the dragon-snakes, chasing them away. Grundle tells Haplo that the dragon was Alfred. Samah takes Haplo prisoner. Alfred comes to visit Haplo, and the two show that they are friends again. Grundle and Devon come to see Haplo too, brought by Orla. Orla reveals that when some Sartan resisted the Sundering, many years ago, Samah cast them into the Labyrinth. Grundle and Devon tell Haplo of the dragon-snakes' plans. Samah tells them all that the rest of the mensch are travelling to Surunan with the dragon-snakes. Samah also announces the Council's verdict: that Alfred and Orla will be cast into the Labyrinth. Alfred goes peacefully, refusing to believe that he previously turned himself into a dragon. Haplo senses their departure through Death's Gate, and remains in prison, waiting for the mensch to breach the seawalls and let the magic-dousing seawater into Surunan. ===== Samah has opened Death's Gate, allowing the dangerous dragon-snakes unfettered access to all four worlds. Haplo is too exhausted to capture Samah, so he returns to the Nexus and reports to Xar, his lord. Xar assigns Haplo to take Bane back to the air world Arianus, where Haplo will reactivate a city-sized machine called the Kicksey-winsey, which has stopped for the first time in history. Haplo contemplates returning to the Labyrinth, the prison world of his people, the Patryn, but is intercepted by Zifnab, a Sartan. Sartans are the enemies of the Patryns; despite this, Haplo warns Zifnab to leave before Xar finds him. Bane informs Xar of this conversation and is ordered to kill Haplo for his betrayal. Limbeck, the leader of a dwarf rebellion, enlists Haplo's help in reactivating the machine. Haplo, Bane, Limbeck, and Limbeck's wife Jarre must sneak through the elven base in the Factree to reach the machine's center. Haplo, Bane, and Jarre are separated from Limbeck and captured by red-eyed elves led by Sang-drax. Limbeck finds a room where members of all races sit peacefully together, but have frightening red eyes. He overhears elves discussing Sang-drax taking Jarre to his dragonship and plots to rescue her. Haplo and Bane are taken to the elven Emperor, Agah'ran. Agah'ran is simultaneously fighting wars with humans, Gegs, and his own rebellious son. He plots with Bane to end the human war by assassinating Bane's adoptive parents, the human monarchs Stephen and Anne. Stephen, Anne, and Bane's true mother Lady Iridal learn that the elves are holding Bane captive. The three do not want to rescue Bane, who is publicly charming but privately a power-hungry villain, but realize it would look strange if they failed to attempt to rescue him. Iridal decides to rescue Bane personally with the help of the retired assassin Hugh. He is persuaded to attempt to carry out a previous contract to kill Bane. At the elven capitol, Hugh and Iridal seek help from a religious clan of elven mages, the Keepers of the Cathedral. Hugh pledges his soul to them in exchange. They slip into the Emperor's palace, where Iridal falls into a trap. In exchange for her life, Hugh agrees to kill the human monarchs for Bane. Haplo is taken by the dragon- snakes and mentally tortured, but is rescued by the Keepers. The Keepers give Haplo a book written in every language, which will help him reactivate the Kicksey-winsey, and send him back to the surface. Iridal goes with him to stop Hugh and Bane. They find Sang-drax's dragonship. Haplo boards the vessel and rescues Jarre, but finds himself in the middle of a human mutiny. Jarre is injured before Haplo can teleport them to safety at the Factree. Limbeck is wrongly advised that Jarre is dead, and leads his rebel dwarves to massacre the elves in vengeance. Sang-drax and his soldiers join the battle disguised as dwarves. Their red eyes give them away and they are revealed to be dragon- snakes. The battle becomes a chaotic three-way clash between elves, dwarves, and dragon-snakes. Sang-drax and Haplo sustain significant injuries. Limbeck eventually surrenders to prevent further losses. The snake-dragons begin to attack the Kicksey-winsey, causing the elves and dwarves to band together to stop them. Sang-drax's dragonship arrives and the human mutineers join the elves and dwarves against the dragon-snakes. Hugh and Bane intercept a meeting between the human monarchs and the rebel elven prince. Bane demands Hugh accept a contract to kill Haplo, which Hugh accepts with no intention of following through. On arrival, Hugh intentionally botches his assassination of Stephen. Bane stabs Stephen and turns on Anne, but is magically suffocated by Iridal. Hugh returns to the Keepers of the Cathedral to fulfill his pledge to give them his soul. However, the Keepers cannot take it, because he is bound by the contract he made with Bane. The Keepers command Hugh to fulfill his contract by killing Haplo. ===== On Abarrach, Xar is attempting to learn the secret of necromancy, but he needs a fresh corpse to test it on. He interrogates the lazar Kleitus about the location of any living Sartan, and Kleitus reveals that Haplo lied to Xar about all the Sartan dying at the hands of the dead; Balthazar and his group remain living. Kleitus also reveals to Xar that there is a "Seventh Gate", as well as the ones that lead to the four worlds and the ones that lead to the Vortex and the Nexus, and that the Seventh Gate was the room where the Sartan performed the Sundering Spell. Xar immediately becomes obsessed with it, realising that it must be very powerful and would allow him to recombine the four worlds and unite them under his rule. Marit, the woman Haplo fell in love with in the Labyrinth, is one of the Patryns working with Xar on Abarrach. Sang-drax, the leader of the dragon snakes, is also supposedly working for Xar, though Marit does not trust him. Marit and Sang-drax bring Samah and Zifnab to Xar, having captured them near Death's Gate. Xar is exhilarated to finally be able to face Samah and unleash his hatred of the Sartan. Samah has been changed by his recent experiences and is now repentant, understanding how wrong he was and how much damage he did to all the races, including his own. Samah also tries to tell Xar not to trust the dragon- snakes, but Xar thinks he is being tricked by Samah and refuses to listen to him. Xar tries to interrogate Samah about the Seventh Gate, but Samah just says they "sent it away", which makes no sense to Xar. He leaves Sang-drax to torture Samah and goes to talk to Zifnab. He discovers that Zifnab is actually one of the dissenting Sartan who refused to go along with Samah's plan; he was among the mensch on Earth during the Sundering, and was the first of either race to escape the Labyrinth. It was he who penned many of the books Xar educated himself with in the Nexus. (With all that Zifnab has seen, his total dementia seems a bit more understandable.) Zifnab, amongst his ramblings, tells him that Haplo is his most loyal servant, that Bane is dead, and that the mensch in Arianus are about to start up the Kicksey-Winsey. Xar is afraid that he will no longer be able to control Arianus, so he tells Marit to prepare for a trip to Arianus to see what's happening. He returns to Samah's cell, lets him die, and starts the spell to try to revive him. Jonathon, the lazar, comes to Samah's cell but Xar just thinks he's a random lazar he called for to help with reviving Samah. Sang-drax calls Xar to the other cell, where Zifnab has disappeared, and when Xar comes back to Samah's cell Jonathon has released Samah's repentant soul before departing himself. Xar talks to Sang- drax about what happened on Arianus, and Sang-drax twists what actually happened so it looks like Haplo was disloyal to Xar. Xar uses rune-joining to bind Marit to him as his "Wife" so that they can communicate via his rune and hers, drawn entwined on her forehead. Then he sends her to Arianus and goes himself to Pryan with Sang-drax. In Arianus, Hugh the Hand risks his life by returning to the Brotherhood's stronghold to talk to Ciang. Out of curiosity, she lets him live and he tells her of his contract for Bane to kill Haplo. He doesn't know how to kill a "god". She gives him the Accursed Blade, an ancient artefact held by the Brotherhood that looks like a crude knife but is imbued with Sartan magic and can turn it into whatever is needed to fight its owner's enemy. Hugh takes it and leaves for Drevlin. Marit arrives on Drevlin and discovers the three mensch races peacefully preparing to restart the Kicksey- Winsey, helped by Haplo. She reports to Xar and he orders her to kill Haplo and bring his body back to Xar. Hugh also arrives and prepares to kill Haplo. Trian, Limbeck, Jarre and Haplo use the automaton to restart the Kicksey- Winsey, bringing water to the higher realms and starting to move them all into position. The dog leads Hugh to Haplo's ship, and Haplo finds them there, then Hugh tries to kill Haplo. The Accursed Blade turns into an axe, Haplo tells the dog to attack Hugh and Hugh accidentally falls onto Haplo's knife, severing a major artery, and dies. Then he comes back to life, cursing his fate. As instructed, he has told Haplo that "Xar wants you dead" so Haplo prepares to leave, then Marit comes aboard. Hugh tries to use the Accursed Blade to defend Haplo from Marit, but the blade, being Sartan-made, tries to attack both the Patryns. Whilst trying to fight off the Accursed Blade, Haplo also tries to convince Marit that he is loyal to Xar and that the dragon- snakes cannot be trusted. She tells Haplo that she did bear him a child, whom she called Rue before giving her up to a group of Squatters. They fly the ship through Death's Gate to Pryan to find Xar, but then Haplo thinks of tytans and the Accursed Blade becomes a tytan. Haplo realises the blade loses its powers while in Death's Gate, so takes them back through Death's Gate and to Chelestra. The ship starts to break apart, losing its Patryn magic in the Chelestra water. Hugh is terrified by being surrounded by water, even though the Chelestran sea is breathable. A dragon-snake appears outside the ship and seems to have some control over the Cursed Blade. The ship breaks apart, Haplo and the others are rescued by Alfred. On Pryan, Paithan, Aleatha, Roland, Rega and Drugar are living in the citadel they reached with Haplo. Paithan is obsessed with a room in the center of the citadel that he calls the Star Chamber, a room with seven huge seats and an apparatus that generates blinding light. Roland and Aleatha are mostly not on speaking terms; the elf maiden finds herself spending more time with Drugar, who may be the last of his race. But Drugar has discovered a delightful illusion: at a certain clearing in the garden maze, at certain times of the day, he can see ghostly shadows of people from all the mensch races, walking around and talking to each other. Xar arrives on Pryan, accompanied by Sang-drax, and finds that he cannot land his ship in the citadel because it's protected by the Sartan runes. He lands outside the citadel, and is attacked by tytans. Fizban and his good dragon turn up to talk to the mensch in the citadel. Xar is let in and tries to befriend the mensch. Sang-drax and Fizban's dragon fight each other, then disappear. Xar asks Zifnab about the Seventh Gate. Zifnab tells him that Sang- drax has just stolen his ship and left Pryan, so Xar is stuck there. Marit, Haplo and Hugh are in a peaceful white stone room, though they don't know where. She talks to Xar, and he tells her to stay with Haplo. Haplo thinks that she saved him from the wound he got while in the ship, but she says it was Alfred. Alfred comes to visit them, bringing Haplo's dog. Hugh is furious with Alfred for bringing him back to life, and wants Alfred to take away his life again. Alfred tells Haplo that the Chamber of the Damned that they visited on Abarrach was the Seventh Gate, and that Samah didn't, or couldn't, destroy it after the Sundering but instead sent it away, then everyone forgot it was on Abarrach. Alfred reveals that Orla is dead. Alfred also reveals that the four of them are in the Vortex, the peaceful place in the centre of the Labyrinth, and that the Vortex is the unidentified beautiful place Haplo saw when going through Death's Gate. Marit is terrified, because it took many generations for the Patryns to get through the Labyrinth, and now she's back at the heart of it, unlikely to ever get to the final gate again. Xar decides to leave Pryan in a ship he spotted outside the citadel, covered in Sartan runes, but to do that he needs to get past the tytans. He decides to kill off the mensch and revive them with necromancy to serve as distractions. Alfred refuses to leave the Vortex, but Haplo gets his dog to bring Alfred, and just after they leave, a massive earthquake/landslide brings rocks down over the gateway so they can't get back to the Vortex. Whenever Alfred tries to use his magic the Labyrinth attacks them. They are attacked by tiger men, and rescued by local villagers. Alfred reveals to Haplo that his true, Sartan name is Coren, meaning "the chosen", a common Sartan name, but which Alfred hated when he woke up on Arianus and found that he was the only Sartan still alive there. But Haplo interprets the Sartan word as "to choose", and Alfred takes this as a sign, and becomes more determined to choose a path for himself. Xar takes Roland, Rega and Paithan to a feast he has prepared, but discovers that Zifnab has drunk all the poisoned wine. Zifnab tells the mensch about the poison, and they try to escape from Xar, only to bump into Aleatha, who is distraught because Drugar has vanished into the mirror-world of the maze. She flees from Xar into the maze, which he can't enter because it's surrounded by Sartan runes, and she finds Drugar there, who used his amulet to travel to the other citadels, finding dwarves alive there. He tells her they should invite the tytans into the citadel. Xar attacks them, Drugar dies, but Aleatha grabs the amulet and goes to the gate and invites the tytans in. Xar is attacked by Zifnab's dragon, furious that Zifnab has been killed. Xar recovers from his battle with the dragon, and prepares to leave for the Labyrinth after Marit reports back to him-- apparently corrupted by Haplo's influence into thinking Xar has made a mistake in allying with the dragon-snakes, as she says they are planning an attack. He is surprised when the tytans don't kill the mensch, and actually act to protect the mensch from him, but he avoids a fight by snatching Drugar's amulet from Aleatha, killing Drugar, and running away. The amulet will gain him entry into the Sartan ship, which he can then use to return to the Labyrinth. The book then reports that the mensch lived peacefully in the citadel with the tytans, that Paithan married Rega and Aleatha married Roland, and Paithan stayed in charged of the Star Chamber whilst Aleatha became High Priestess of the citadel. The Patryn villagers take Alfred, Hugh, Haplo and Marit to a city. Haplo is astonished to see a city in the Labyrinth, and shocked that the headman of the tribe there is a soft- looking man with little physical strength, yet is respected by his tribesmen. They discover that Alfred is a Sartan. Alfred later talks to Vasu, the headman, and discovers that he is part Sartan, descended from those Sartan who were thrown into the Vortex/Labyrinth by Samah. Sang-drax appears, having been told by Xar where Marit is. Hordes of Labyrinth creatures gather to attack the city of Abri. Marit overhears Sang-drax and other dragon-snakes talking about betraying them, and realises they are totally evil. She runs to find Haplo, who's in the city's humane prison with Alfred and Hugh, and she and Haplo are finally happily reunited. They discover that Hugh still has the Cursed Blade, which had disguised itself as Hugh's stregno pipe. Then the enemies attack. At Abri, the battle between Patryns and Labyrinth creatures rages fiercely, but the real threat comes from the dragon-snakes. Haplo, Marit, and Hugh lead a sortie to deal with them, and the three battle Sang-drax in his serpent form. Sang-drax is apparently killed by Haplo, but Haplo has been badly injured and almost crushed beneath the massive body. Marit is attacked by a wolfen, then a green and golden dragon carries it away: Alfred, having made his choice to accept his power. He lifts the serpent's body off of Haplo, leaving Marit to hold Haplo's blood-soaked form, his heart-rune's wound having reopened. But while Alfred is distracted in battle with the dragon-snakes, Xar appears. He wants Haplo's knowledge of the Chamber of the Damned, and will stop at nothing to get it. The battle ends with the Labyrinth's armies driven off, but Marit dazed and wounded, Haplo abducted by Xar, and Alfred missing in action. ===== In the Labyrinth, Marit and Hugh venture out to try to find Alfred. He turns out to be the prisoner of a Labyrinth dragon, which are almost the equal of the dragon-snakes in cruelty and savagery. With the help of the Cursed Blade, they drive it off and rescue Alfred. On Abarrach, Haplo is dying. He will never willingly give up his knowledge of the Chamber of the Damned, and Xar knows it. What Xar must do is allow Haplo to die, and then revive him with necromancy. The fact that they both know it and accept it does not make it easier on either of them. Haplo dies peacefully, as Xar, Lord of the Nexus, the most powerful human being in the universe, weeps silently over his surrogate son, whom, despite everything, he still loves. But when the time for necromancy comes, it doesn't work. Xar realizes suddenly: the dog! Haplo never owned a dog until his last few moments in the Labyrinth--he had fought well and bravely, but just a few steps from the Final Gate, his injuries overtook him. Because he longed to rest and let death claim him, Haplo instilled all his instincts of loyalty, love and optimism into an external form: the dog. In doing so, though, he gave it his soul. The dog is still very much alive, and escapes into the catacombs under the capital city, bringing Xar's plans to a screeching halt. Marit, Hugh and Alfred, though alive, are at start of the Labyrinth; they must somehow reach the Final Gate, way at the other end. Providence arrives in the form of Zifnab and the "dragons" of Pryan--the good, true side of the Wave, polar opposites to the dragon-snakes. Marit, Alfred and Hugh travel to Abarrach, where they hope to somehow rescue Haplo. In the meanwhile, Zifnab is sent on an important mission: he tells Ramu, son of Samah and leader of the remaining Sartan on Chelestra, to travel to Abarrach as well. When Xar hears about this, he redesigns his plans, sending his few Patryn bodyguards back to the Nexus, where they might make a difference in the defense of the Final Gate, and then begins to make his own preparations... On Abarrach, Alfred and Marit leave Hugh on their ship (without magic, the air is too poisonous for him) and find the dog, through which Alfred can communicate with Haplo, but are unable to leave: for some reason, the dog can't pass through Death's Gate. Marit sustains wounds from a lazar, and the two retreat to Balthazar's encampment to rest and heal. Balthazar, of course, is very eager to leave this world if he can, but a problem arises when Kleitus, the leader of the lazar, attempts to seize Marit's ship himself. Alfred attempts to defeat him, but it takes Balthazar to really do the job. In the middle of this, Ramu arrives and peremptorily takes control of the situation. He decides to take everyone, including Marit, Balthazar and Balthazar's people, to the Labyrinth, to deal with the Patryn threat once and for all. This is exactly where Haplo wants him: with all the Sartan and all the Patryns in the Labyrinth, not to mention the good dragons of Pryan and the dragon-snakes of Chelestra, this would be the perfect time to seal shut Death's Gate, leaving the mensch to their own devices. Though both Patryns and Sartan think of themselves as gods among men, it is clear they have caused nothing but trouble. What Haplo proposes is to end it all in one final stroke. He asks Alfred to help him and Alfred, honored, agrees. In the company of Jonathan the lazar and Hugh the Hand, the two descend to the Chamber of the Damned, actually the Seventh Gate. Alfred opens the door to Death's Gate, entering a hallway and preparing to shut the doors at both ends. Hugh the Hand takes a great deal of interest in it, and, when pressed by Haplo, he reverts to his normal appearance: Xar, Lord of the Nexus, come to finish what he has started: the collapse of the four realms back into one world, one he will rule. "Do no violence," intones the lazar Jonathan, but no one is listening. Alfred, at the far end of the hallway, opens the door into the Nexus, where he sees Ramu being approached by dragon- snakes, who promise allegiance in destroying the Patryns. Both Marit and Balthazar see through it, and the Sartan man aids the Patryn woman in escaping to warn her people, but Ramu is totally taken in. He and his forces prepare for war. As this happens, Xar casts a spell on Alfred that nearly kills him, and allows Death's Gate to swing wide open; in through the door rushes Sang- drax, who attempts to urge Xar into reversing the Sundering, while surreptitiously killing Haplo. But seeds of doubt have finally taken hold, and Xar sees the dragon-snake for what it really is. He sacrifices himself to undo the reverse-Sundering spell -- his life's work -- and is slain by Sang-drax. Sang-drax urges Haplo to finish what Xar started, but Haplo shakes his head and begins to shut the doors--all the doors--into the Seventh Gate, saying a final good-bye to his mensch friends as he does so. When he is done, Sang-drax has abandoned his elven form and towers above him, threatening death... But Alfred lurches in, wounded but coherent. "Do no violence! It wants us to fight!" Haplo throws down his sword, and Sang-drax rears up for the kill... Only to smash himself into the ceiling of the Seventh Gate, destroying himself and bringing the entire structure down on all of them. Haplo and Alfred have only one door to jump through: Death's Gate itself, which is slowly collapsing and taking all of creation with it. Haplo and Alfred have to combine forces, forcing their magics to work together--Patryn and Sartan rune-structures, diametric opposites... That fit together so obviously, Haplo wonders why it has never been seen before. Their spell works, and with a dull thud, Death's Gate closes for the final time. In the Labyrinth, the dragon-snakes still loom, but there is a modicum of peace. Haplo is reunited with Marit, clearly intending never to leave her side again. Alfred is alive as well--at peace with himself, having finally chosen what he truly wants. Zifnab is here as well, doddering about causing trouble for his faithful dragon. Hugh the Hand is dead, found surrounded by the corpses of Labyrinth monsters (Chaodyn) Lord Xar, as well, lies in state, the greatest of the Patryns, flawed though he-- though they all--might be. And the war between Patryn and Sartan has been called to a halt: Ramu has been removed from command, replaced by Balthazar, who was quick to form an alliance with Vasu. The war, for now, is over, and perhaps, in time, there can be peace. ===== Liz Lemon (Tina Fey) and Jenna Maroney (Jane Krakowski) keep running into the same two men in the elevator at the 30 Rock building, and find themselves interested in them. Not knowing their names, Liz and Jenna refer to them as "The Head" (Brian McCann) and "The Hair" (Peter Hermann). Jenna and Pete Hornberger (Scott Adsit) persuade Liz to ask out The Head, a low-maintenance and harmless geek, but as she goes to do so, she runs into The Hair, a suave and handsome charmer, who asks her out instead. Liz hesitates due to their perceived incompatibility, but agrees to try new things. Their date at a hip restaurant opening seems to evident their incompatability, but she realises they have more in common than she thought when they have the same reaction to a difficult shop owner. On their second date, Liz lets herself be charmed by Gray until she finds a picture of her great-aunt in his apartment and they learn that they are related. Meanwhile, Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan) panics in the TGS with Tracy Jordan staff office, as his autobiography is due to a publisher the next day but he has not yet begun to write it. He engages Frank Rossitano (Judah Friedlander) and James "Toofer" Spurlock (Keith Powell) to help him get it done in time. Despite Tracy's lack of memory of his own life, they work non-stop on the project and have it finished when Tracy remembers that the publisher actually rejected his autobiography. Finally, General Electric Executive Vice-President Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) and NBC page Kenneth Parcell (Jack McBrayer) are participating in "Bottoms Up" day at the office. Jack must work in Kenneth's job for a day, to help him be a better manager. Disillusioned by the menial nature of Kenneth's job, Jack tries to get Kenneth a better role in another division, but insults Kenneth in the process. Kenneth reveals that he adores television and those who make it more than anything, and he puts up with the menial job to support the industry. Jack admires Kenneth's passion and asks his opinion on television content, something Jack has been struggling with. Inspired by Kenneth's idea, a game show called Gold Case, Jack helps him sell it to NBC, but the show quickly runs into problems when the immense weight of the gold reveals its location to the contestants. The show is quickly cancelled. ===== A Few Days in September imagines a scenario in which an American C.I.A. agent, Elliot, with advance intelligence about the attacks on New York's World Trade Center towers is being chased by an assassin, William Pound, while he is trying to reunite with his two grown up children with the help of an old colleague, Irène. ===== Now that their children have grown up and left home, Sarah and Frank Gladwyn are alone in their large family home. However, when they decide to move Sarah insists on selling it to "the right person". However, things soon start to go wrong and their daughter Jane also returns from college. Meanwhile, Sarah's sister Liz Ford is taking Valium. ===== The Nun starts out with a young woman, named Suzanne, in a wedding gown preparing to take her vows of chastity, obedience, and poverty to make herself a nun, but she refuses at the last moment and instead begs her parents not to force her to take them. This does not work, and later Suzanne learns much about her family and her heritage – or her lack thereof. She discovers that her mother's husband is not her father, and that her mother is shutting her up in the convent because she does not want her husband to know that the girl was not his daughter. She also does not want to see her sin in the flesh, for she says bearing the girl was her only sin. The father sends the priest to convince her, who reveals her heritage, but it fell on deaf ears. Later the mother falls on her knees to beg the daughter to take the vows, explaining the story enough to make Suzanne resign herself to her fate, realizing that her mother would never give her a chance to marry because the mother did not feel she was worthy to marry and the family could not afford to marry her off. According to the mother, she did not have the bloodline to marry. She writes her mother a letter that says she will take the vows, a letter that will later be used against her in the court case she wages against the church to be released of her vows. Suzanne allows herself to be dressed in a wedding gown and takes the vows. She enters the convent, extremely depressed and unresponsive, unable to cope with the requirements of being a nun. She bonds to the Mother Superior, who takes her under her wing, and they have many long conversations. The Mother Superior, Mme de Moni, knows it is a mistake to accept the girl as a nun but does not stop it, instead telling the girl to accept her fate and make the best of it. Suzanne attempts to, which is made easier by Mme de Moni's encouragement, and does not utter more words but her body language reveals all. During this time, Suzanne's mother dies, and Mme de Moni does as well. She bears it until the life finally drives her mad, for the new Mother Superior, Sister Sainte-Christine, mistreats her because of her rebellion as a result of her dislike of the nun's life. She isolates her constantly and deprives her of food, forcing her to adopt a diet of bread and water. Suzanne then sends her friend away with a letter to a lawyer. She wants to be free and absolved of her vows under the argument that everyone around her forced her to take the vows against her will: her mother, her father, the Mother Superior, etc. The lawyer, who becomes her biggest advocate against the religious orthodoxy enslaving her, informs her that while the case is pending, she will have to stay with Sister Sainte-Christine and endure the resulting persecution, but that either she will win or be transferred. Suzanne does not care, not truly understanding the depths of Sister Sainte-Christine' cruelty. While the case pends, Suzanne suffers many mistreatments under Sister Sainte- Christine, who steals her crucifix, forbids her to eat, forbids her to pray, forbids the other sisters to interact with or speak to her, and isolates her. She allows them to walk on the weakened, starving Suzanne after Mass. She is also whipped. They become convinced she is possessed, and Sister Sainte- Christine requests an exorcist. Officials arrive, see her mistreatment and understand that her devotion to God is not the way a possessed person would act, and investigate the mistreatment, which involves Sister Sainte- Christine's being reprimanded. After that, Sister Sainte-Christine lessens the punishment to only isolation but still treats her coldly. When Suzanne discovers that the church has decided not to absolve her vows, she once again falls into a severe depression. Her lawyer apologizes and promises to keep in touch, although a church official forbids the contact. The same man later tells her that the church transferred her to another convent under the supervision of Mme de Chelles. In addition to long conversations about her thoughts and experiences, the light-hearted, fun, happy Mme de Chelles displays an attraction to and makes sexual advances towards Suzanne, which Suzanne never fully grasps. She meets a monk who attempts to comfort her by saying that he was forced into religion against his will as well. They develop a relationship and he later tells her that they must escape together. Suzanne goes with him, but flees from him when he forces kisses on her as soon as they are together which implies he desires more with her. Suzanne finds refuge nearby, working as a seamstress and doing chores for women. While there, she learns that the monk was caught and faces life in prison, same as she does. She cannot bear the thought of returning. She flees the small village she has taken refuge in and winds up begging on the street. A smart looking woman takes her to her home, but Suzanne does not understand it is a brothel and joins the girls who are dressing to entertain clients at a masked dinner party. As everybody takes their places, Suzanne realises what is involved. Crossing to the window, she asks God's forgiveness and jumps to her death. ===== The film is a biopic of American dancer Isadora Duncan. ===== Alex Fletcher (Hugh Grant) is a washed-up former pop star who is attempting to revive his dwindling career by hitching his name to the rising star of Cora Corman (Haley Bennett), a young megastar who has asked him to write a song titled "A Way Back Into Love". Alex is reluctant to compose again after two decades, but his caring but professional manager tells him that his career is doomed if he doesn't. During an unsuccessful attempt to compose the song in collaboration with a "very hip, very edgy" lyricist, Alex discovers that the woman who is temporarily watering his plants, Sophie Fisher (Drew Barrymore), has a gift for writing lyrics. Sophie, a former creative writing student reeling from a disastrous romance with her former English professor Sloan Cates (Campbell Scott) who "forgot" to mention he had a fiancée, initially refuses. Alex cajoles her into helping him by using a few quickly-chosen phrases she has given him as the basis for a song. Over the next few days, they grow closer while writing the words and music together, much to the delight of Sophie's older sister Rhonda (Kristen Johnston), who happens to be a huge fan of Alex. Barely meeting the deadline Cora has set for the song's delivery, Alex and Sophie are thrilled when she accepts it; however, at a celebratory dinner with Alex's manager Chris (Brad Garrett) Sophie is mortified to encounter Sloan. She confronts him but finds herself tongue-tied in his presence, and Alex's own attempts to defend her result in a scuffle. Nursing their wounds back at Alex's apartment, Alex and Sophie fall into an unplanned romantic encounter. Sophie is later horrified when she finds Cora plans to record a sexually confident interpretation of "A Way Back into Love," complete with an Indian vibe which she feels clashes with the insecurity expressed in the song's lyrics. She is determined to convince Cora to abandon the arrangement, but Alex vetoes her efforts for fear he will lose Cora's goodwill. In the ensuing argument, he admits Cora's version is awful but contends accepting it as the cost of doing business. Sophie leaves Alex when she gets upset by his willingness to demean his talent and his claim that Sloan was right about her personality. Sophie, intending to start a new life in Florida, reluctantly attends the opening of Cora's new tour at Madison Square Garden, at which Alex and Cora will debut "Way Back Into Love". Upon hearing that Alex is singing a new song "written by Alex Fletcher", Sophie is upset to believe that Alex is stealing credit for her work; however, the song Alex sings is called "Don't Write Me Off", his plea for Sophie to give him another chance. A touched Sophie finds Alex backstage and he confesses to having successfully convinced Cora to drop the risqué version of "A Way Back into Love" in an attempt to win Sophie back. He and Cora perform the tune as he and Sophie intended it to be sung. The end of the movie (an homage to VH1's Pop-Up Video) reveals that the song becomes a hit for Cora and Alex, the film version of Sloan's novel flops with critics and moviegoers (destroying his career), PoP! reunites for their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, after which their lead singer Colin Thompson (who left the band with some of Alex's songs to start a solo career) winds up having his hip replaced after years of dancing, and Alex and Sophie go on to become successful partners, with five new more pop hits, both in songwriting and romance. ===== Chili Palmer (John Travolta) is a loan shark based in Miami who clashes with mobster Ray "Bones" Barboni (Dennis Farina) over a leather jacket that Barboni borrowed from Palmer without permission. They have two brief but violent confrontations, the first of which leaves Barboni with a broken nose and the second singes his scalp from a bullet from Chili's gun. Palmer's long-time mob boss Momo dies of a heart attack, and Palmer suddenly finds himself working for Barboni, whose first order is for Palmer to collect a loan debt owed by Leo Devoe (David Paymer). Palmer believed that Devoe was killed in a commercial airliner crash, but he had actually gotten off the plane and failed to re-board. After the plane crash, Devoe's wife Fay identifies his personal effects, and the airline offers her a check for $300,000. Chili visits her and discovers that Leo is still alive, partying and gambling in Las Vegas with the insurance settlement money. While in Vegas looking for DeVoe, Palmer picks up a second job from a casino manager to collect a debt from Hollywood B-movie producer Harry Zimm. Palmer goes to Los Angeles and locates Zimm (Gene Hackman) at the home of B movie actress Karen Flores (Rene Russo), and he warns Zimm to pay the money that he owes in 90 days. Palmer then pitches a movie script idea which is a thinly veiled story of his own life, including the scam by Leo. Zimm is interested, but he has both financial debt and a script called Mr Lovejoy that he doesn't wish to share. He owes $200,000 to limo service owner drug dealer Bo Catlett (Delroy Lindo) for investment in a picture that never got made. The script is, according to Zimm, "My Driving Miss Daisy." Catlett himself owes even more money to a foreign drug cartel led by Mr. Escobar (Miguel Sandoval), whose nephew Yayo (Jacob Vargas) is trying to collect it. Catlett also wants to be in the movie business for the fame and fortune, but not for any artistic pretensions. Palmer says that he will help Zimm take care of solving the debt issue with Catlett. Palmer gets a tip and tracks down Leo Devoe in his hotel room and collects the money owed, plus the "vig" owed for late payment, leaving Devoe the remainder of the insurance money to gamble with. Palmer then returns to Karen's house, where he asks Karen on a date. She is the ex-wife of famed actor Martin Weir (Danny DeVito), which gives Palmer the idea that Weir should star in his movie. He and Karen go to Weir's home to pitch the story idea. After pitching the movie, Palmer gives the actor tips on how to act like a loan shark. Palmer is waiting for Catlett, who comes to Zimm's office for a progress report about the film he is supposedly financing. Chili tells Catlett that Zimm has a different project he needs to finish first and that Catlett can wait in line. Catlett and his sidekick Ronnie (Jon Gries) proceed to threaten Zimm, saying they want their money back, and to get rid of Palmer or else. Zimm, trying to regain the upper hand in the situation, makes a call to Barboni in Miami, telling him Chili has recovered the money from Leo Devoe and speaking to him rudely on the phone. Barboni promptly flies to Los Angeles, confronts Zimm in his office, and beats him mercilessly when Zimm does not reveal the location of Chili and the money. Ronnie walks in and Barboni shoots him, then puts the gun in Zimm's hand. Doris (Bette Midler), Zimm's girlfriend, whose late husband wrote Mr. Lovejoy, calls Karen and tells her that Zimm is in the hospital. When he is eventually released, Zimm must wear a neck brace and remains in agonizing pain, even as he endures Weir's arrogant behavior in a brief lunch meeting with Chili and Karen about their movie project. At another restaurant, Catlett offers Zimm a large sum of money, which he claims is locked in an airport locker from a deal gone bad. Zimm is suspicious, and Catlett suggests that he send Chili to retrieve the money and gives Zimm a key. Chili and Karen arrive at the restaurant, and after Catlett's bodyguard, Bear (James Gandolfini) threatens him, Chili throws Bear down a flight of stairs. Zimm tells Chili about Catlett's offer, and Chili agrees to take the key and investigate. At the airport, Chili pretends to open the locker before stealthily opening an adjacent locker instead, and he is detained by DEA agents, who question and release him. Desperate for money to pay Escobar, Catlett kidnaps Karen and demands the money that Chili has gotten back from Devoe. But after Chili gives him the money, Catlett reneges on their deal. Unbeknownst to Catlett, though, Chili has already made a deal with Bear to double-cross Catlett. On a balcony at Catlett's home, where Karen is being held, Bear pretends to give Chili a beating, but it's a set-up. In the struggle, Catlett is pushed over a balcony rail that was previously loosened, falling to his death. At his hotel, Barboni confronts Palmer, demanding the money. He finds the airport locker key and Chili indicates the terminal. The same DEA agents guard the locker. On a Hollywood studio set, a film is being made. Harvey Keitel is playing Barboni and Martin Weir is playing Palmer. Penny Marshall is directing, with Zimm as executive producer, Chili and Karen as co-producers. Bear is a technical consultant. Chili and Karen are arguing with Weir's agent about Weir's appropriateness for another role. ===== The premise of the parody is the question, "What if Dickens' Mrs. Cratchit wasn't so goody-goody, but instead was an angry, stressed-out modern-day American woman who wanted out of this harsh London 1840s life?" The main character in Binge is the hard-drinking, suicidal Gladys Cratchit, whose harshness to her family surpasses Mommie Dearest by a mile. The other two leads are The Ghost and Ebenezer Scrooge. The Ghost, whose character is written to be an African-American woman, plays the narrator role as she escorts Ebenezer Scrooge through the past, present and future of his life. But, as she says, everything keeps going "kaplooey" because she can't get her magic to work properly. In their first journey, the Ghost tries to take Scrooge to his past at the Fezziwig Christmas party, but they end up at the Cratchits' home in the present, where we meet Mrs. Cratchit and her eternally hungry yet eternally sunny children, all 21 of them. The majority of the 21 live in "a bunch in the root cellar." Most of the characters retain their original Dickensian qualities. Ebenezer Scrooge is old and miserly. Bob Cratchit is the gentle family man who is the primary target of Scrooge's cheapness. Tiny Tim is crippled and heart-rending. Equally heart-rending is Little Nell from Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop, who appears as one of the Cratchit children. In typical Durang style, these qualities are heightened and shaded dark (not to blackness this time, just to blueness) to give it his brand of comic tone. Durang adds many classic allusions and pop-culture references to the story, including scenes where the Ghost accidentally takes Scrooge to the lives of Oliver Twist and Leona Helmsley. The play also makes stops in It's a Wonderful Life, the Enron scandal, The Gift of the Magi, and Touched by an Angel. ===== Screenshot of Zhigu city as it appears in the game. Voyage Century Online is a game set in 16th-century Europe with its roots in the Age of Sail. From the 15th century, western European explorers push eastward in an effort to seek treasures, spices and other luxuries of that time. They opened a gate to riches and greed for those in power, who sponsored explorers' cause without abandonment. As the fleets stretched their paths, westerners expanded their influences to Africa. Later they cruised around Cape of Good Hope to reach the Indian Ocean. In the other direction, they explored westward and found the New World. The late 15th century saw the start of the global expansion of Western capitalism and colonial exploitation of the rest of the world. Voyage Century's storyline begins at the Mediterranean from the late 15th to early 16th century. The western powers start the bloody pursuit of riches that led Europe into an age of great turmoil. Every character in the game was from a mysterious birth. Some of them are descendants of the courageous cavalry in Yuan Empire, some carry the family line of caravan merchants faring the Silk Road, some are the witnesses of the not so well-known affair between of Marco Polo and Chinese princess, and some are even the offspring of West Europe's pirates. ===== As Chloe Sullivan tries to get in touch with Clark Kent, she finds herself cornered in an alleyway by a man named Sylvester Pemberton, who is wielding a staff that has the ability to control light. As Sylvester attempts to inform Chloe that he is a friend, an assassin known as Icicle attacks and Sylvester is ultimately killed. Chloe and Clark go to the hospital to investigate the truth behind Sylvester, which ultimately leads them to the Daily Planet archive room. There, Clark and Chloe discover documents and an old 16 mm film that identifies Sylvester as part of a team of "criminals", which includes: Carter Hall, Kent Nelson, Jay Garrick, Alan Scott, Ted Grant, Abigail Hunkel, Wesley Dodds, and Al Pratt. In the documentary footage, Sylvester and the rest of his team are systematically arrested, but because of allegations of jury tampering, falsified evidence, and lack of connection all of the individuals are released. While Clark and Chloe are looking into the criminal group, Icicle tracks down and kills Wesley Dodds. Following Dodds' death, Clark tracks down Carter Hall, believing him to be Icicle's next target. Clark finds Hall at a museum; he also finds Kent Nelson, who is mumbling incoherently to himself and clutching onto a small bag. Using his X-ray vision, Clark sees a helmet inside the bag, which turns on its own and looks back at Clark. Having enough of Clark's questions, Carter sends Clark on his way. Meanwhile, Chloe sends Oliver Queen after Sylvester's staff. Unfortunately, high school sophomore Courtney Whitmore has already taken the staff. Before Oliver can get the staff from her, Kent shows up and uses the staff to teleport both him and Courtney back to the museum. Here, it is revealed that Sylvester's team was actually a group of superheroes led by Carter Hall, who went by the codename "Hawkman". The group called themselves the "Justice Society of America". Courtney, who was Sylvester's protégé, Kent and Carter band together to find Sylvester's killer. As such, Kent places the Helmet of Nabu back on and transforms into "Doctor Fate". After investigating Dodds and Pemberton's deaths, Clark and Chloe believe they have located the killer at the psychiatric ward of Metropolis General Hospital. When they arrive, they find the individual, Joar Mahkent, in a vegetative state and Doctor Fate reading his mind. Doctor Fate then sees Clark's fate and teleports Clark and himself to the museum. Meanwhile, the real assassin is revealed to be Joar's son, who is killing the Justice Society members for putting his father in that vegetative state decades earlier. Hired by an organization known as Checkmate, and instructed by Agent Amanda Waller, Icicle sets his sights on Courtney. Oliver tracks down Courtney—who calls herself "Stargirl"—and realizes that she is setting herself up as bait to lure Icicle out. Icicle arrives, but Oliver interrupts Courtney's plan. As a result, Hawkman grabs Oliver, throws him through the Watchtower window, and then threatens to do worse if Oliver interferes again. Meanwhile, Checkmate sends Lois Lane an anonymous package that provides her with the truth about the Justice Society. Clark awakens at the museum, where Doctor Fate informs Clark that his fate is to lead a new generation of superheroes, and that he will one day conquer his greatest enemy, Lex Luthor. Oliver and John Jones show up at the museum to rescue Clark, unaware that Hawkman, Doctor Fate, and Stargirl are actually heroes. Banding together, the group splits up into pairs to locate Icicle. While on patrol, Doctor Fate and John Jones are attacked by Icicle. Before Doctor Fate is killed, he uses his abilities to restore John's Martian powers. While John lies unconscious, Icicle steals Doctor Fate's helmet and acquires the powers that go with it. Clark and the others regroup at Watchtower, where Icicle arrives to kill the rest of the Justice Society and avenge his father. At first, Clark, Hawkman, Stargirl, and Green Arrow have trouble taking down Icicle and his new abilities. When John arrives, the group is finally able to defeat Icicle. Afterward, Carter tells Clark that he and Courtney have located the surviving members of the Justice Society, their children, and their protégés in order to build a new team of superheroes for today's generation. Back at the Daily Planet, Lois publishes her article on the Justice Society, revealing them to be a team of superheroes who were lambasted by the government, and falsely imprisoned. Icicle is transported back to Checkmate, where Agent Waller subsequently kills him after informing Icicle that he was a part of the new Suicide Squad. Afterward, Tess Mercer is revealed to be an agent of Checkmate. ===== At Cape Kennedy, Florida, Colonel Benson oversees the launch of Sun Probe, a three-man spacecraft designed to extract matter from the Sun. Sun Probe lifts off safely and its journey to the Sun passes without incident. A week later, as Sun Probe nears its target, International Rescue watch live TV coverage of the mission from Tracy Island. Brains (voiced by David Graham) is absent from the proceedings as he is busy working on his latest invention, an artificially-intelligent humanoid robot called Braman. In space, solarnauts Harris, Asher and Camp fire a smaller probe through a solar prominence and succeed in capturing fragments of matter. However, by the time the probe returns to the main spacecraft, the increasing solar radiation has caused Sun Probes retro-rockets to fail, locking it on a collision course with the Sun. On TV, Benson implores International Rescue to save the crew. Alan and Scott (voiced by Matt Zimmerman and Shane Rimmer) suggest remote-firing Sun Probes rockets by radio beam from Thunderbird 3. Virgil (voiced by David Holliday) points out that Thunderbird 2 is more powerful and that it would be easier to transmit the signal from Earth. The team finally agree to launch a two-pronged rescue attempt. Alan, Scott and Tin-Tin (voiced by Christine Finn) blast off in Thunderbird 3 but their radio beam falls short of Sun Probe, forcing them to travel closer to the Sun than anticipated. Having determined the optimal Earth-bound transmitting position to be in the Himalayas, Virgil and Brains take off in Thunderbird 2 carrying the Transmitter Truck. Landing on Mount Arkan, they align the truck's dish with Sun Probe but their transmission fails to reach the spacecraft. Further attempts to transmit from Thunderbird 3 fail. With the crews of both Sun Probe and Thunderbird 3 growing delirious from the heat, Alan suggests that Tin-Tin overrun the power and the beam finally makes contact, successfully firing Sun Probes retros. Sun Probe reverses course for Earth but the crew of Thunderbird 3 pass out before they can switch off the beam, draining the ship's power and preventing its own retros from firing. With the news media now reporting that Thunderbird 3 is heading for the Sun, Jeff (voiced by Peter Dyneley) alerts Virgil and Brains, who hurry back to Thunderbird 2 to calculate the frequency needed to fire Thunderbird 3s retros. Opening a storage box meant for International Rescue's portable computer, they are dismayed to find that they have accidentally packed Braman instead. However, Braman is able to calculate the frequency on his own and Virgil and Brains succeed in firing Thunderbird 3s retros. Back on Tracy Island, the International Rescue team thank Brains and Braman for their efforts. ===== Mi Vida Loca tells the story of young Mexican-American women in Los Angeles and the struggles they have in a life of poverty and early motherhood while being members of an infamous street gang. Mousie and Sad Girl are best friends from childhood, growing up in Echo Park, a neighborhood that had a significant amount of gang activity in the late 1980s and early 1990s era. They pride themselves for remaining loyal to each other and their gang. But when Sad Girl sleeps with Mousie's boyfriend (a member of their neighborhood gang who is killed in a drug deal gone bad) and becomes pregnant, their friendship is ruptured. As dramatic situations unfold around them, some that would turn violent, they must try to stay together as friends despite the betrayals, heartbreak and tragedies. The film takes a rather independent look at a world where women seem to have no choice but to raise their children, involve themselves with gang activity, and survive by whatever means available. ===== Bean Bunny wishes he could help with the preparations for the Bunny Picnic, but he is told by his older brother Lugsy that he is too small and will only get in the way. Feeling very disappointed, Bean wanders off alone into the lettuce patch, where he imagines himself as the king of the bunny picnic and community and then encounters a farmer's dog, who chases him around the patch. Bean runs away and escapes the dog and warns the village, but none of the other bunnies believe him. They conclude that there is no dog and that Bean is simply making up the story for attention. At first, it seems that the farmer's dog is the story antagonist, but it is revealed that it is his master the farmer that wants him to get the bunnies for his stew. The dog is only trying to protect himself from the wrath of the farmer by hunting the bunnies. The bunnies soon discover that the dog is indeed real and out to get them. After much debating and futile attempts to rid themselves of the farmer's dog, the bunnies finally listen to Bean, who seems to have a solution to their problem. Inspired by a story about a giant hedgehog, they all hide inside of a giant bunny costume to frighten the dog, except Lugsy who went out for a sleeping potion only to get captured by the dog. The dog, being threatened by the farmer to catch the rabbits or starve, sets out to pursue the bunnies. When he enters their village he is confronted by the "Giant Bunny". The dog is frightened and begs for mercy, which the Giant Bunny grants to him. However, Bean goes into convulsions upon being told of the farmer's intent to stew any captured rabbits, and his spasms cause the costume to fall apart, revealing the bunnies to the dog. The dog is now infuriated by this deception and captures Bean, but only for a brief moment as Lugsy and their sister Twitch get him back. But just as Bean escapes and before the dog is able to attack the bunnies, the farmer appears. The dog cowers as his angry master approaches. The bunnies, feeling sympathy for the obviously petrified dog, decide to forgive the dog and help him against the vicious farmer. They run at the farmer singing an empowering song. The farmer, with his allergy to bunnies acting up, begins sneezing uncontrollably and runs off never to threaten the bunnies' village again. The bunnies then welcome the dog into their village and name him "Mr. Dee-Dop Dee-Diddly-Dog Bop." The film then goes back to an elderly Bean (Now called "Grandpa Bean" by one of the young bunnies) who finishes telling the story. The dog, by now aged as well, is with him as he does. The film ends with the bunnies, celebrating the picnic with the dog. =====