never forget: we stroll along the roof of Hell,

onward!

Tue, 27 Nov 2007 07:37:22 GMT

I was considering putting yet more poetry in this entry in addition to that of the new layout, but I would not wish to lead anyone to believe that the new use for this revamped journal is any less trivial than the old. Still writing. Only, RP and senior honors theses, these days, instead of fan fiction. Stay bad.

FINAL DRAFT for OUTIM Fic: Good Karma

Sun, 26 Oct 2003 05:56:38 GMT

Good Karma
Within and Defy

Same timeline as Sweet Fucking Mexico (and Her Fifty-Peso Fucks) (see previous posts), but very much stands alone.
Series: Once Upon A Time In Mexico
Characters and Pairings: Sands and Bubble Gum Boy not 'together.' Ugh.
Genre: Angst. Introspection. Pre-action-badassness.
Rating: PG-13
Beta: icebluesilver! Thank you!

* * *

Therefore you and I and Mozart
must thank the Twentieth Century, for

it made you pattern, form
whose infinite

repeatability within matter
defies matter—

Malibran. Henry Irving. The young
Joachim. They are lost, a mountain of

newspaper clippings, become words
not their own words. The art of the performer.

from "For the Twentieth Century,"
by Thom Gunn

* * *

Stretched out back-down on the sheet covers of a hotel room (they smell of detergent; he guesses they're white), it finally occurs to Sands that he needs a plan. Any plan.

First of all, he's going to need some kind of profound mental revolution. He's been on top with the killer view of everything so far below for so long that, pun aside, being in the dark, shadowed, at the bottom just isn't something he knows anymore. Before, rising through the ranks of the CIA had been a amusing diversion at best; his reactions to the 'worst' were the reason that he got himself kicked off to his nowhere-station in Mexico. Sands had never started with nothing because he'd always known that he was the best, and that had been enough supplant the courage necessary to prop one man up against all the screwed-up cartels and government intelligence agencies in the world. He is no longer so sure.

It's almost ironic, that he and the rest of his fellow gringos thought they could play this country, Mexico, and the whole of its swarming population continuously throwing little siestas and little revolutions by turns. Cultural arrogance, fatal hubris, pride before the fall, and oh how far down, down, down he fell. A Mexi-can would pick himself up off his ass and walk to the same bloody beat again, but, face it. He sold his soul when he bought his eighty-fifth cellphone. Technophile, gringo, flexible enough to be good with disguises -- with adaptation, not evolution. Revolution. It's too much for his Ameri-cant psyche to take.

Maybe this is what America will look like when something unexpected finally comes along and kicks its pissed-off-puppy teeth in. Forgotten. Reduced. Two bloody craters in the aftermath of some bright and shiny nuclear holocaust. Maybe he should go roast marshmallows on the rubble that remains and grow himself a couple new radioactive eyeball mutations.

Where the fuck is the chicle kid?

Right on cue, the door clicks open. On the same cue, his drawn pistol clicks off the safe. When he turns his head, he feels minor resistance as his unwashed hair relinquishes tenuous holds on the threads of the pillow case. He can smell the odors of fifty-peso sex and war clinging to him like an oddly seasonal overcoat, customized for Mexican summer. Heh. He must be leaving a Hell of a mess.

"It's me," the boy says, in Spanish. One set of footsteps, light ones, trail over the carpet to what must be some kind of chair or couch thing to his right.

He puts the gun back on safe and moves his arm back into obscurity beside the prosthetic fastened to his shoulder. "Yeah?"

"They had no pork."

Of course. The CIA wouldn't sponsor a hotel that offers pork. "Spiteful little fuckers," he mutters. If the whole world isn't against him, his Agency certainly is. And after all he's done for them, too. He even resigned -- albeit unofficially, so far -- for Christ's sakes, what more could they ask for? Maybe they'd want him to whinge about defeat and eyeballs (or lack thereof), cling to Agency oaths sworn on patriotic honor, go after miscellaneous cartels to prove that he's still the man he'd been, to do the kind of CIA-FBI-retirement-thing that isn't really retirement but just taking it a little easier. Fuck that. Fuck them. Fuck conforming to the fucking expectations of pot-bellied morons. He's not an Ameri-can, whatever he is. "Did you feed yourself?"

"Yes. I brought some leftovers."

The air is very cold when he inhales deeply, aggressively chilled by the conditioner purring at a corner of the ceiling. Spice. Beef. Cheese. Spice. "Taco," he says, almost to himself.

Movement ruffles the air and the food is placed neatly in his hand. He gets it to his mouth on his own. It is a taco.

"Not as good as my mother's," the reply is somewhat more subdued than everything else the chicle boy has said.

Sands decides against recommending the kid to assassinate said broad for the sake of 'preserving balance,' mostly because he was told that she was already dead. Revolutions are messy business, Sands has learned.

"What happened to your old man, anyways?"

"He is dead," comes without the same sorrow, so the boy doesn't mean literally dead. Not six feet under in the arms of his beloved, but slack-paunched and unresponsive on a chair in some dusty saloon corner as some cheap whore makes off with the meagre contents of his pocket.

"Rest of your family?" he inquires offhand, chewing thoroughly albeit swiftly, before swallowing every bite.

"They are all dead," dead, dead, dead, why do Mexicans romanticize death so much, anyway?

Heh. "Really." Finishing off another swift bite, he decides to experiment. "Then what do you think El Mariachi's at, kid?"

"He is dead also, sir," -- abruptly -- '"--Because you have nothing to live for,"' his memory finishes, the thought accompanied by a vision of the dark-faced gunslinger of such startling clarity that it sends pain rattling steel-edged through the severed nerves in his empty eye sockets, a white-hot relief to the dull ache that he had sunk into over the past few days. It takes all of his twenty-five years of desensitization, CIA training and poker to keep it from showing on his face. For awhile, everything else is drowned in the sound of his own labored breathing.

Presently, he lifts a gloved hand and waves it between the boy and himself, back and forth, feels an alarming amount of weakness in the motion as well as the dried sweat between his skin and the leather interior. "How about you, compadre? Me?"

"We will be okay," is swift, no hesitation at all. "There is a lot of money left."

Plan snaps back into his thinking, head focusing despite his perfect blindness. Yeah. The plan. 'Money' and any of its sundry colloquial synonyms always jogs his memory for some reason, though boredom has always been his real incentive. But just this once, it doesn't do anything much beyond that. Sands lies back and thinks for awhile, but he can't think of anything. No plan. No schemes. Nothing except 'money,' floating bright like a bubble-lettered cartoon in the dark spaces of his mind's eye, unassociated with any meaning whatsoever.

Unsurprising. Dead men don't make the plans. Startled then, he jerks his head up, annoyed, wondering what the shit he meant when he thought that. "Go away, fuck off," he tells the thought aloud. Understanding, the boy says nothing, until it's apparent that Sands isn't planning on lying back down to take that irritable doctor shithole's prescribed nap. Pushing himself off the soft bed, Sands barely notices the twinge of unhealed hickies on his neck; the echoing creaks from the bandaged bullet hole in his thigh and antiseptic-painted scratches escape his attention entirely. "I'm gonna wash my hair," he tells the chicle boy. "Which way?"

"Right. More right." Sands turns a little more. "Yes, there."

"Cool. Don't peek, Freud," he says, and manages to find the shower stall without hitting a single thing.

Getting his gear off turns out to be more difficult, but after smashing through one or two frail glass shelves of sweet-smelling soaps, he orients the rest of the room to the sink, sits on the sink, and gets the job done. Idly, he wonders if he left two butt prints of grime on the porcelein (smooth, generic contours; probably also white, he guesses. Sterile.) as he tugs the shower curtain to the side. He steps in and lifts his leg up, sitting it sole-flat on the side of the tub to avoid wetting the bandage. Unwilling to decipher the temperature dials that his oddly bare fingers find, Sands settles for a lukewarm shower. Before long, it turns cold.

Spiteful little fuckers.

It's like little hailstones pelting down on his shoulder blades, crawling into his ragged hair in malicious droves to gnaw harsh and frigid on his scalp, an Arctic trickle migrating over his belly, into and over in his navel, Southward.

For the first time in a long time, Sands feels acutely -- alone. 'Lonely' would be too strong a word. It used to catch him by surprise, this silent black feeling of the absolute absence of everything except for oneself, simultaneously unnerving and empowering. 'I alone exist,' he'd read in a book, once. The memory comes floating back to him as memories tend to do nowadays, perhaps compensating for the deficiency of visual input, and thankfully free of images this time. Or at least images of anything besides darkness. 'If the tree falls in the forest and no one was there to observe, did it fall at all?' He is both intelligent and 'an educated man,' so he's been told. Duh. 'Life is subjective. Because life is subjective, oneself is all that matters. Because oneself is all that matters, one's perception is reality. Because one's perception is reality, one's action -- and one's action alone -- shapes reality.'

(Bastardizing the concept, one could say that since he can't feel his dick, it doesn't exist, that he could recreate it with a bit of fondling. Sands is rather fond of this theory, but this recall occurs only in the very backmost regions of his conscious.)

These books and scraps of knowledge originated from before he'd joined the CIA, though. Institutionalized, inner 'demons' lost their... profundity, so to speak. 'Acute' feelings of aloneness had become a bored reality, circumscribed by greedy schemes, gunfights and petty mind games. Yes, orchestrating coup d'etats and civil wars is pretty petty. Sheldon Jeffrey Sands was intended for greater things.

Hmm.

A few years ago, he'd framed his first and only partner and had him killed, destroyed his home and his home. Stole his dog, too. The man's name is still tattooed, fondly, into Sands' forearm, often mistaken for that of a lover by strangers, associated with far greater pain in the minds of other powerless Agents who had suspected the truth. To Sands himself, the memory of poor old Jack has far more appeal than sex or pain did: money. Big money. Money still not wholly spent. Numb, he runs a blunt finger over the space he knows the mark occupies, a wry, ironic smile twisting his lips. Essentially, that dead fuck is the reason why Sands ended up stationed in Mexico. Karma's a bitch.

And so is he.

Satisfied that his privates are pretty much beyond the pain of cold by now, Sands awkwardly turns around by precarious hopping, resettles his foot on the opposite side of the tub. He feels the miniscule pellets of icy water strike and ricochet off his nose and the smooth planes of his tattooed chest, slide in between his lips like some elemental deity's overadventurous tongue. Amusing, because he's bitten off more tongues than he can remember; he used to keep a collection.

Strangely, he finds himself resisting the urge to close his eyes. Ew. This is going to hurt.

Cupping the miniature waterfall with two hands, he abruptly flings cold water onto his own face and the knives he'd felt before, recalling El, are nothing compared to the algid burn that sink through severed nerve and ruptured veins and scrapes in flesh and straight into the core of his brain -- 'the eyes are the most directly-connected organs to the brain. A bullet through the eye will cause massive neural destruction' -- and he's groaning or screaming or just gasping like a wounded animal or something, sagging against the tiled wall and he can see himself, pale-skinned like the wall (sterile), black hair streaked over his forehead and tiles with little curlicues of newly-wetted blood licking his cheekbones and tile-grotto -- "--ff-fuck, fuck, f-fuck --" and is that himself? -- empty eye sockets sagging from his brows, oozing sloughs as they gaping stupidly at space. Jack's mouth had looked the same.

So cold.

"F-ff--!" He can barely hear himself talking, and doesn't at all notice his knuckles bruising over sluggishly, blood slowed by the chill, or the neat, chalky cave he just punched into the wall.

He counts to five and doesn't bother asking God to kill him, before shoving off the wall -- a single, violent movement that almost kills what remaining balance he had. Back in under the showerhead, he hastily slaps more water on and scabbles weakly, strengthens, scrubs at his face with gusto. Chapped, wet fingertips scrape away braided rivulets of blood and a little pus, loosen the more stubborn residue that had been baked by desert sun to a death grip on his skin.

A soft thud of a heel or the heel of the hand hitting the door betrays the chicle boy's concern.

Sands ignores him. Sorry. Not fucking prone to whinging about defeat or eyeballs or the loss of the latter.

And like everything else, it's bad. So, so bad.

And then it's numb.

And then it's over.

Before he leaves, he yanks down the showerhead and, pragmatically, takes a few heavy swallows of the freezing water. It wouldn't do to get dehydrated on the way.

The chicle boy's head snaps up so abruptly that it gives out an audible click when Sands storms back into the bedroom. The kid moved back from the bathroom door awhile ago, apparently. Smart. Sands doesn't personally have a lot of time to spare for any bizarre developmental issues that the kid might derive from the sight of a streaming-wet older man, just about butt naked, with no eyeballs in his head and ice cubes for balls. "Where's my panties?" he asks.

"On the table to your right," the boy says.

He does a shockingly good job of dressing himself. With admirable action-hero-alacricity, at that. Woo.

"Your shirt is on backwards."

Yeah, he'd wondered where the buttons had run away to. Chickenshit buttons.

Fastening and straightening the garment (green, red and white Hawaiian flower print, he guesses. Organic.) with a series of quick jerks, he then carefully slips Ramirez's tape into a breast pocket and pats it affectionately as he turns his head to the approximate direction from which the chicle kid is respiring. "Ever wanted to nuke a big government intelligence agency headquarters?"

The kid is silent for a moment. A fascinated kind of silence. The good kind. Then, "I wanted to shoot Marquez's soldiers with a gun."

"Great," Sands says, resuming the rapid packing of various firearms and extra arms onto various straps and pockets on his person. He finds himself slipping back into that familiar slick, elegant conspirator's veneer with remarkable ease, the blind chessman for whom nations are pawns and life-and-death games exist, to him, only in the mind's eye. 'I alone exist,' the dragon said. "If you come with me, you'll get hot girls, a ticket to the States and lessons on how to make high grade explosives from expired diet pills. All for free." Zip, the small firearm nestled under his arm disappears beneath folds of jacket. (Pure black.) "Low quality pork, though. There's always a catch. Want in?"

If he had an extra cellphone, the effect would be complete. Fuck it. The kid probably can't even read numbers, anyway.

Fixed on him, the boy's eyes are brightly shining, Sands knows. Jack had looked at him the same way, once. "Sì," the kid says, yes.

God, he's fucking good.

It turns out that they have an escort waiting out in the hallway, ready to drive them to the airport. Some stupid, suspicious, squinty-eyed fucktard who's heard all the stories about that Sheldon Jeffrey Sands, and honestly reminds Sheldon Jeffrey Sands a lot of poor old Jack, before Sands had won the other man over into a strange place of creepy soul-corruption and offbeat hero-worship. Maybe they're brothers. Funny, this karma shit. 'Round and 'round and 'round it goes without ever really going anywhere, partly because Sands is his world and he is incapable of revolution or evolution, partly because he's a loco bastard. Mostly just because vengeance keeps dying men alive and he's been fucking with the Reaper for a long time, now.

Author's Note: Maaany thanks to icebluesilver for the idea concerning the Jack tattoo. It should be fun, making up stories for the rest of them.

None of the memories above were direct quotes, except for the short one -- 'I alone exist,' which is from Grendel, by John Champlin Gardner. It was said by Grendel-the-monster's mysterious 'mentor,' the omniscientish dragon who had a serious stick up his ass, or something.

Anyway. According to Depp, Sands is a badass who knows he is a badass and does all that stupid shit like third arms and gaudy CIA shirts while he's meant to be undercover because he's practically daring someone to come and mess with him. A monster under a gentle veneer, basically, but Depp admired him for being the kind of person who doesn't take shit from anybody and refusing to conform to society. So that's how I wrote him. :D Comments? Complaints? Suggestions? Pleeease?

Edit: OH. And I must thank permetaform! Her most recent wallpaper (especially The Postcard) was such an inspiration. XD

FINAL DRAFT for Once Upon A Time In Mexico fic: Sweet Mexico (and her Fifty-Peso Fucks)

Sat, 25 Oct 2003 04:24:09 GMT

Sweet Mexico (and Her Fifty-Peso Fucks)
Series: Once Upon A Time In Mexico
Characters and Pairings: Fideo and The Chicle/Bubble Gum Boy, Lorenzo/Sands
Genre: Porny stuff, a little quasi-poetic fluff. Car sex.
Rating: R
Beta: icebluesilver! Who got to Beta the Most Un-Self-Edited Fic I've ever let someone else see. Oh, there was suffering. Mucho gracias!

The war ends on Saturday. The Mariachis pick him and his bubble gum kid up on Sabbath morning; they say walking's work, for a cripple.

And so begin the unscrupulous days on frayed velvet, car seats and the wet toothmarks in them, short musicians' nails wicked with semen and sweat. It's like the cheap little automobile's developed a miniature ecosystem of its own, where the air is a rancid cocktail fume of greenbacks and alcohol, and ants and dust motes and yanked buttons flee through those cloying skies, as indifferently spared as destroyed by the hectic intercourses of greater beings.

Less the ecosystem than a microcosm maybe. Cocksuckers and proud national colors; deadbeats and the bleached despair of drought. The kid is sleeping in an awkward coil, vacant face plastered to the window, shotgun side. The drunk is driving. In the back seat, the deadbeat's lost both eyeballs and is newly unemployed, carrying a half-healed bullet crater in his thigh. The whore's smeared with new money, buying his own fifty peso fucks now. The brand new world looks just like the old one, if you ask the blind man.

Sweet Mexico.

Sands is trying not to giggle, or else the whore -- well, that's incorrect now, let's say 'the pretty player' in the jacket (red, the blind man guesses) will ask and make him tell -- about the skull fucking and the shooting and the rectal investigation... and probably do it by taking all three steps backward. Funny: Sands has two Goddamn 'holes' and all; maybe if Lorenzo acknowledges the phallic nature of his chosen weapons, he could use both sockets simultaneously. Not entirely unlikely. Gunslingers and gun fetishes. Sweet fucking Mexico.

Sands might be going out of his mind if he wasn't already long gone.

The saliva welling in the groove of his butt is noticeably cooler when he bucks his hindquarters off the seat, relieving the pressure on the boner escalating at an alarming rate under his half-open fly. His butt hits Lorenzo in the face. "Ow," Lorenzo says -- serves him right, dammit. "What the Hell was that for?"

"Bad guys on top," he says; somewhere between the muffle of cheap upholstery and the deeper whirling of steel, his words lose what little power they originally had.

Long fingers pinch an exposed butt cheek, twisting granite flesh. Clockwise. Sands makes a face: Ow. "You said it," Lorenzo agrees.

The Hell? He pulls his face up so he can breathe. "What?"

"I'm a wanted criminal, Sands," close, suddenly, the added heat of another body stretched out lithe and humid over his back registers a little late, delayed by his clammy, lukewarm shirt rucked up between them. Cooler teeth rake over his ear, thermal contradiction to the hot, foreign erection nosing up, palpably, over the back of one thigh, rapidly impending on the pink pucker between his ass cheeks. "You... are C.," nosing through his hair, "I., A."

"Retired," hurts to say so; breathe in, breathe out, steady, steady, "actually. Heh. Unbelievable. You think you're the bad--" Those teeth fasten on the side of his neck, just off his windpipe, fit precisely into rosy bruise marks. Sands words sink briefly into a pleasurable growl, before they find his voice again. "--the bad guy? And you saved... the fat bastard... and Mexico, and--" he breaths a soundless laugh, barely breaths at all. Once upon a time in Mexico, he didn't taunt like a little girl. "'C. I. A.'"

"Retired CIA," returns the little bitch.

Sands almost answers. Almost. Somewhere between his uplifted butt and the pulsating effigy twitching at Lorenzo's crotch, pressure is building, slick and appreciably painful. Somewhere between the swirl of dark hairs at his belly and the cheap upholstery of the seat, Mariachi fingers begin to tease, to play him like some... cheap... guitar, an artist at work, delicate ministrations and miniscule adjustments made for every answering jerk of captive flesh. Some part of Sands' mind -- the one clinically classified as a little abnormal -- recalls a woman's voice all scratched up and cackly as if off an much-rewound casette or from a hysterical witch, 'Your games are too small,' she told him, and even though their breakup was mutually unpleasant, he has to agree that it's. Not. Enough.

Fucking tease.

"Besides." A singer's voice, crooning in the hollow of his ear, a third sensation that converges with the other two already aching in his gut. "I did it for the money."

He grins. Sneers. Snarls. Whichever. Heh. "Me, too."

Lorenzo adds, triumphantly, "And you... like kids."

Does the boy have no idea into which whose ass his peewee is halfway shoved? Sands should kill him, or something. 'Like' was way too strong a word... that was low. Ironic because then, abruptly, Sands finds himself face-down on the seat again, breath choked off by his squeezed nose and his suddenly-squeezed dick and his suddenly-clogged mouth. Leather tastes slimy and bitter in his mouth, between his teeth, a drier snatch of velvet sleeve tickling his tongue caught off to the side. He grinds a retort out between his teeth, and is surprised by how diffident it goes. "People are like Coke." My, he marvels, how mild he sounds, "Leave them out too long and they go all gross and flat. You're just boring, man," he thumps his chest once or twice, "I'm sorry."

The brat's slow (or just unused to discussing flat Coke in the middle of claustrophobi sex, who knows?): it takes him a whole minute -- to figure out what Sands is doing, to realize that Sands' butt cheeks are redoubled in clenching, throttling the sweet hot life out of his pretty little birdie. By the time Lorenzo draws pistol and the cold metal rind pushes against the blind man's earlobe, streaming its bitter gunpowder reek, the Mariachi's voice is tight, oh so strained, authority wavering in precise illustration of his self-control. One little lurch of the car, and he'd blow his load right there, but it doesn't and he doesn't. "Loosen up," Lorenzo almost asks.

Too easy. In more ways than one. Lorenzo's squeaky discomfort is worth it, even though his half-impaled ass is practically on fire now. Against the seat, Sands is grinning like a jackal. Heh.

But, slowly, exaggerating the voluntary nature of the act, he does as requested. Before the gun begins to slide away from his temple, however, he rolls his head to the side in a single lazy, fluid motion, and snaps his jaws around the cool, silky nozzle with an almost alarming metallic click.

Lorenzo's surprise is a cool backdraft against the hot dampness of his bruised, laved-over throat, a sharp inhalation that confirms Sands' previous suspicions. Fetishy gunslingers. Mexicans are weirdoes, Sands reflects, perhaps a little hypocritically. He plays the gun in his mouth, the taste of metal and calloused hands pleasantly familiar.

Then the other man's nimble fingers release the gun and drag abruptly through his hair, yanking his blind head to the side, the motion echoed by the sudden jerk of narrow hips between his kneeling legs and, subsequently, the solid intrusion of the Mariachi's sex in full thrust. The double motion is a bone-jarring counterpoint to the delicate touch and play of the hand that remains, teasing, around his own erection; light sparks abruptly into the pit of his blindness, an errant figment of reality that burns dimly, glowing as lust contracts tighter still in his gut.

He finds himself kicking air and tearing crescents into the leather with his nail-less fingertips, can't moan because his mouth and throat shudder silently down the barrel of the fat firearm rolling over his tongue, and he's wholly unprepared for the gentle slide of lips like flesh pearls suddenly on his blood-scabbed cheek. Chaste.

"I saved your life, asshole." A little cocky roll of Mariachi hips to emphasize the fact -- and the gun falls out of Sands' mouth with a round wet pop as he yowls ecstatically, catlike. In heat. "Relax, okay?"

Okay? Okay? Okay? 'Are you okay?' a choppy boy-voice asks him on replay, echoing in his head... and he still doesn't know.

Indistinctly, Lorenzo says, "Just pretend you're doing it for the money."

Everything hurts. (Even his tortured cock, though that's not in the bad way.) It's sad, in some deep, depressing, eloquently bone-toggling way that bodes poorly for the future of humanity and civilization and its soul. There is nothing left for him, for the once-proud purveyor of American justice, except profound darkness and badly-drawn memories, mid-battle napping half-defeated in bullet-shredded courtyards and hitting his head on high obstructions, and and... and... "What, what, wait, you didn't tell me that. Asswipe. I'm getting paid?"

These are the nighttimes of cramped car sex that slide indistinctly through mornings and daytimes, where the drunkards drive and war-time orphans swallow their gum in oddly untroubled sleep, while the Mexicans and Americants have cramped car sex, good guys and bad guys slide indistinguishably tan and sultry-sweet through one another in a tangled cradle of overheated filth and sweat-stained bills, and 'fuck you' is, as always, strangely appropriate.

Further Author Comments: First piece of pornishness I've written in awhile, so like I said, muchly thank you to icebluesilver! Though it's all her fault, anyway. Imagine, prodding for fic 5 minutes after we see the movie. Wholly improper.

I personally thought Sands and Lorenzo were charmingly similar as people, despite superficial differences. Bizarre sense of justice, one being that prostitute singer gunslinger materialistic patriot thingy and the other psychopathic and completely amoral in a huggable off-kilter way. They're both materialistic, really. So big on money. Yet Sands likes kids. XD XD Or at least, the kid. I couldn't get over that.

And and. I also noticed there was the whole patriotism... civilization... philosophy going on in OUTIM which was kind of neat, if not horribly well done. So that's in there as well. And and.

I'm done. Please toss me a comment if you've anything to say, whatsoever. Suggestions? Compliments? Complaints? Suggestions? Encouragement? Suggestions?