Reach Out and Touch Somecomet

"It's not the moon landing," I heard someone say the other day.

I resisted the urge to kick their arse so hard they flew into orbit, but only by a very shred of my patience.

The ESA, a shining example of trans-European co-operation, is about to embark upon the most risky phase of an Epic Space Mission* by soft-landing a robotic lander on a comet.



There is absolutely nothing about this entire business that is not awesome. This thing isn't a planet, nor a moon; its lifespan is limited and its orbit is difficult to predict because Jupiter keeps messing with it - and in studying it, we will learn about how our planet and solar system formed, as well as others out there in space.

The project has also led to advances in technology, not least improving solar panels to keep Rosetta going so far from the sun.

This mission still has years left in it, but today, and maybe a bit more in future, I'll be tuning into the ESA livestream to watch this amazing achievement of human science and technology happen.


It's not the moon landing, indeed. No. It's way harder than that.

*These are possibly my three favourite words right now.

Death In Heaven (A Rant)

So. There were a lot of things wrong with Death in Heaven, the final episode of the Twelfth Doctor's first season. There were a lot of things wrong with a lot of things in that season. But for me, one really stood out. It showcased the wild incoherence of the show's recent writing in a way that no amount of "bananas" could. It contradicted itself and the purposes it had been set up to establish. It spoke from the heart of something messy and political, something which I'm not used to coming across in my light entertainment, and for the sake of a simple visual salute, tainted itself and its own future. It's the following:

The Tragical Ending of Danny Pink

or

What Does An Emotional Inhibitor Actually Do, Anyway?

So. There's this problem.

Cybermen are emotionless killing machines who want to make everyone like them, killing those who aren't*. An extreme-authoritarian analogue, if you will, whether far-right or far-left.

If you give them emotions, they die on the spot. Because Reasons. I'm okay with that - it's a good message and a good bit of storytelling: people can and do get swept up in political/ethnic/religious conflicts and then spend their lives filled with remorse they were too busy to feel at the time.

Can the power of love prevent someone from committing atrocities in such circumstances? Why yes, of course it can, because of human free will. While we understand the story where the (to invent some ethnicities) Ayese kills the Beean because she feels that the Beeans are the enemies of the Ayese, far more compelling and important to her personal story is the Ceestani girl she lets live and escape because they're in love, even though C will flee and A will never see her again.

But if that's possible, be consistent, for Gods' sakes. There's also stories where the Ayese girl kills her Ceestani lover because the mob she's with force her to, or because of other kinds of fear or compulsion.

All I can think of is how, offscreen, Dafyd is grieving at a grave that opens, and out comes a Cyberman. Terror paralyses him, as it often does to Doctor Who extras. The Cyberman, his little brother, who fell off some scaffolding at work, is now an emotionless killing machine. It holds out its hand with a cry of "DELETE".

Now it's time for the asterisk from earlier. Pop back up and check where it came from.

*This angle seemed to have dramatically changed in Death In Heaven, going from factory-production to nanomachine-enabled conversion; I'm cool with this, but as it appears to shift control and responsibility from "soldier" to "general", it changes the story somewhat.

These Cybermen are different. We can take that for granted: most incarnations of Doctor Who villains are what the writer needs them to be at that moment and nothing more. Their free will, always a scarce commodity, is even further degraded by 1) the fact that their controller isn't one of them and 2) the "babies" thing, which I'm willing to handwave as a way of not having them immediately slaughter the population of the world, but which nevertheless impacts on their place in the story. Their increasingly-limited autonomy helps to underpin the soldier/officer dichotomy the season has spent time building up. That's all good.

But why is Danny Pink special? Is there something about being a Time Lord's Companion's Boyfriend that means that his emotions are special and unique, and he's uniquely placed to resist cyber-control? Was the no-emotions thing really a choice in the afterlife? Why? No other Cybermen were ever given that choice. And how many of them were left in the world after the Great Mass Suicide? Disconnected from the hive-mind, what is it like to be them?

Most importantly, the boiled-down question at the heart of the last paragraph, is this: does Evan, the recently-deceased construction worker, kill Dafyd? Does he retain enough autonomy to resist, or does Dafyd only escape because Evan's had his hamstrings cut by the needs of the plot not to kill him and everyone like him?

This is the question: why is Danny unique? Probably the most troubling message I took from the episode was this: that out of the entire Cyber-army, for no particular reasons and working against the entire season's story-arc, Danny Pink was their officer, and not just in commanding them.

He alone was neither brainless, like the other recently-risen grave-Cybermen, nor aware/complicit, like those around Missy on the steps of St. Paul's.

He alone, in the history of Cybermen, was shown to keep his face, for reasons it's difficult to imagine except to make the audience cry.

He alone was a different category of person from them, in direct opposition to his own personal story, which was about how he wasn't different to other people and the Doctor was.

Danny Pink commanded the vast army of mindless, voiceless, unwilling automata, and the fact that he did so on the orders of his General doesn't change the reason he was able to do so. Because he was different. He was special. And everyone else is just lucky their husbands, wives, brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, children and best friends were "babies", cognitively impaired while the proper programming for their new robot bodies was downloaded, because there's obviously no way that extras could have enough love in them to cause a Cyberman civil war when they killed one another instead of following orders. Emotional inhibition or none - well, it didn't make a difference to Danny. Nor the Brig, but that's a comparison that painfully highlights the embarrassing collapse of Danny's storyline.

Consistency. Does the Ayese girl have a choice about whether she kills her Ceestani lover? If she doesn't, by fear or compulsion or literal programming, that's a horrifying tragedy. If she does, is she special or is that true of all people? If she's special, what makes her special? If it's true of everyone, why isn't it happening everywhere?

In Danny Pink's case, the answer is obvious. He's special. Which goes against the story's message, scuppering the point of his life, as the soldier-in-contrast-to-the-officer, and the tragedy of his death, in return for a cheap, tasteless, jingoistic message for Remembrance Day: that officers are relevant, capable of decision-making, emotion and love; and those they command are mindless, voiceless, cruel and disposable.

The Good Death

What's a good death, do you think?

They say grief comes in stages. Obviously that's only a rough model, but it's a model with a lot of options.

Denial, I think, is the instinct that gives rise to that feeling that they're going to come through the door any minute. That uncertainty about the places they lived, or even their seat near the bar, that keeps us glancing over for them. I suspect this is where stories of hauntings come from; we feel there's something wrong about this room without that person in it, so our minds fill it in for us. Soul-proprioception.

Anger is only natural. We get angry about the things we can't change, and death is so adamantine-immutable. Everything else that happens to a person, we focus on their reaction to it: good luck, bad luck, accidents and disease, what they've earned and what's come to them unbidden. But they cannot react to their death, because they've gone. We can't talk it over with them, hold their hand and help them to suffer less. And it's the one time we most want to do that.

Bargaining I don't understand, though I think it's a different aspect of the same thing. We want to change things, so we look for ways to do so. As social animals, that involves looking for someone to trade with. But as we know, she doesn't take trades.

Depression - we miss what we've lost. A great wrong has been done to a loved one, and we're powerless to prevent it, or even to help them deal with it: of course that fills us with sorrow.

Acceptance, they say, is the goal. And when the hormones have died down and someone else has taken the favourite seat, when the sound of their voice has begun to fade and the desire to help them has been misfiled beneath the merciless trivia of everyday life ("life goes on", they say, like it's a good thing) - then we acknowledge that the story's over.

Rest.

So what's a good death?

My great-uncle Johnny was born in 1918. He had an eventful life, and it ended two weeks ago (I will go into more detail on his life, but not in this post). Two weeks before that, he fell and fractured his good hip, so the doctors gave him a matching replacement. He retired to a hospital bed, and as is the way with badly injured 96-year-old people, he stayed there.

The last time I went to see him, he spent most of his time praying, and a little confused from the medication and the trauma of the operation. To call that continuous prayer out-of-character would be an understatement - but my parents, who visited him more frequently, said he'd come to acceptance that he wasn't long for the world, and I think he might have felt that he would die soon, and if so, he would want it to be with the name of Jesus Christ on his lips.

His acceptance helped me immensely. In one sweep, there goes denial, anger, bargaining. There's nothing that I or anyone need to help with; he's content to let his story end. Depression - well, they say depression is acceptance before the thick swell of emotion wears off, so of course I'm sad. But if I get to 96 with a story half as interesting as Johnny Ralph's, I'll be content to let it end too. And I'll try to pass that on to those who love me: do not look for me in the places I loved, but remember why I loved them; do not beg for my return, but remember why you liked having me around.

So what's a good death?

I don't know, but I think he had one. He wasn't sad, he wasn't in great pain, and he was well-loved and knew it. He was waiting to join all the family and friends he'd outlived. He was hopeful for his loved ones. He was ready.

And so, to rest.

Caudle - Weird, Delicious, Experimental

So I just made a caudle, for shits and also because custom and tradition are the best place to find awesome recipes everyone else forgot over the last few hundred years.

200ml white wine (I used some vaguely-fruity shit wine that was the cheapest at Asda, because seriously, the amount of stuff I was gonna put in this, it wasn't worth the extra quid to get the slightly-less-nasty version)
1 heaped tsp clear honey
1 tsp brown sugar
pinch ginger
pinch nutmeg
pinch saffron
pinch salt
yolks of 5 eggs
...wait, what?

Yeah. So this is a Beltane tradition, of sorts, which is why I found it yesterday.

Available recipes describe boiling the wine, saffron and sugar/honey (these are to taste, so ymmv) and then adding the yolks to thicken the consistency. Nowhere did I find the words "whip the egg yolks", which may be why mine ended up as scrambled eggs suspended in wine until I broke and put the damn stuff through the blender - but I suspect, if you do so beforehand, you get a medieval eggnog equivalent.

Of course, it would be more in-keeping to use ale as a base, I suppose - and this is also accounted for. Trouble is, I'm a cider cat; I just can't stand ale. I'll try it out sometime, but you may have to accept the verdict of the missus on that version.

Overall, I might leave out the salt next time, but it's easy to see where it fits into the scheme of a bonfire celebration. It's sweet, alcoholic, full of protein and a little bit spicy (though it could have stood to be spicier - more ginger, say I!), meant to be drunk hot, and with a thick texture. If I can manage to store the eggs somewhere cool, I might see if I can make it next time I'm in a field.

And later, for entirely unrelated reasons, we're going to make meringues.

Antikythera

Prompted by the lovely Webster, a tale of failure set in the future (and also the past; go figure).

Having done a wee bit of travelling around the Middle East, and watching the progress of its ancient civilisations through museum-pieces which show how its memes and its technologies adapt and change, I've always been struck by one apparent anachronism, a piece of technology so wildly out of context that at first glance, it seems to require a supernatural explanation. This is not a supernatural explanation. It's a sci-fi story. But hopefully it's entertaining, at least.

-----

My last thought, as the waves claimed me, was the hope that my failure might change the world.

My name was Alexandra. My number was 17103987202. Of the ten-billion people who lived on the planet, I was somewhere in the seventeens. Seven billion people have lived and died since the Mark of the Beast - that should tell you something about the apocalypse. It never came. The world only spins forward, I guess.

I was born in Europa, well-educated, well-kept, well-loved. I travelled North America, worked in the Californian Republic for a bit, did the tourist thing round Silicon Valley, but in the end, I just had to return to the great Peloponnesian mountains that had always captivated my heart.

I spent my weekends walking those landscapes, wondering what they must have looked like before industry, before the highways. Don't get me wrong - I'm not a hypocritical Luddite like the Cambridge pack - but those of us who work in time-travel research do tend to wonder about the past.

I was appointed Research Chrononaut by the ECA when I was twenty-eight. That was twenty personal-years ago. Although, given that I'm now drowning in 70BC, I suppose it won't happen for a long time yet. Don't think about it. It doesn't help.

Chrononauts are a boring bunch. We don't need the same physical perfection as, say, astronauts, but the emotional and psychological requirements are far more stringent. The past isn't as changeable as we used to think, but still, it's a strain, going back before cleanliness, before antibiotics, back when the world was a dangerous place.

As a fit and stable Greek, I was chosen to lead the mission to infiltrate and document the workshop of Archimedes, as well as the usual long-term travel-writing schtick. This, you understand, was a cultural mission. Thirty years ago the first Chinese chrononauts returned with pristine Ming artefacts, and the world rejoiced, but it's been downhill since then. We needed to inspire Europa, or risk our budget entirely. Where better to go than the height of Greek civilisation, especially with a Greek President in Brussels?

Insertion's easy; getting back's the trick. The Consolidator Harness - made entirely of fast-degrading plastics - can't keep good enough count, and it's the only piece of future-tech we can take back with us. But before accurate timekeeping, how are you to know when your time's up? When the window opens, you've got to be ready to jump back, or you're stuck. And nobody wants to live out their lives in squalor, not when the tickertape awaits them.

So we devised in-period, if anachronistic, timekeeping. Using only materials available at the time - bronze, and lots of it - we created devices that we could pass off as curiosities that allowed us to know the exact time that's passed.

But even that wasn't enough. We needed devices robust enough to stand a little travel - that's how we almost lost Kronos 13. And with the window of return literally less than a minute in length, well, it'd have to be somehow perfect.

We knew the Ancient Greeks watched the stars closely, and with our cheaters' knowledge of the future, we could buy our way into the company of any astrologer. We overthought this at first, looking for planetary alignments, or comets, or supernovae, or whatever - but the absolute most precise criterion was the solar eclipse cycle. Totality lasts for only a few minutes, and if the last few millennia of observation are anything to go by, can be retrodicted with very great precision. As long as we were in the right place at the right time, we'd jump back at totality. Job done.

The engineers designed a mechanism of interlocking gears, and Helen, the team poet, decorated it with in-period instructions. We adjusted it for the astronomical changes since the BCs and blind-trialled it against our predictions. We calibrated our harnesses to the length between one eclipse and the next. We shook the Culture Minister's hand and smiled for the cameras. And then we jumped.

That was eighteen p-years ago. A lot has happened since then.

Overflowing with notes, still wrapped in our now-flimsy Consolidator Harnesses, and ready to change the modern understanding of the Ancient Middle East, we bought our way onto a trireme bound for Rome, to catch a glimpse of Caesar before the eclipse that would bring us home.

We're always encouraged to contemplate our deaths in the mission. If we died, we'd leave only notes in Modern Esperanto - thin paper, destined to be reused as firelighters - and our bodies, our clothing, and the Harnesses. Only the device would persist. But if some clever-dick found it, they could change the world forever. Imagine a Roman Empire powered by clockwork. Imagine a European Enlightenment in the time of Jesus, a technological revolution powered by our sacrifice.

You can't change the relative-future. You can't change the tides of history. But the device would be a gift from another world.

They threw Helen overboard when the storm-waves rose above the prow. It wasn't enough to quell Neptune's wrath. The captain aimed for Antikythera, hoping to beach the trireme and disembark - but we lost our sails, we capsized, we started to go under.

I grabbed the device and struck out for shore. And for all my training and all my education, I'm sick of the squalor, of these people's back-breaking, primitive lives. I hope we made it close enough. I hope someone can dive down to this place. I hope they find it. I hope to change the world. I'm sorry I'll never see the Peloponnese again, nor my family, nor the future I was born into. I'm sorry to let down the ECA; I'm sorry to have failed in my mission. But maybe, in these last few moments, I can get it close enough to be recovered.

My last thought, as the waves claimed me, was the hope that my failure might change the world.

The Last Days of Surrey

Courtesy of the lovely Webster, who gave me a prompt here, and whose matching (albeit much better) piece Let's Spend the Night Together you can find here.

 

-----

They fell from the Heavens like the wrath of God, and every man of Woking fell to the ground in awe and terror. In their pain they roared like the devils they surely were, battering our crops with their hot breath. Great wings of smoke unfurled high into the sky, casting all of Surrey into shade. I’ll admit, that did scare me, just a bit.

The priest cried that none should approach; that we must flee, or else scourge ourselves in repentance. I don’t know if his own whipping helped his soul, but I heard he fell dead a mile down the path, and landed face-down in a ditch. Anyway, I never was one for priests. So I went to look.  

Of course, after a lifetime of spouting nonsense about the French, the King and the evils of wanking, just this once, he was only bloody right. The common and the nearby wood were scourged dry, their airs choked with ash, and the earth at the heart of the crater glowed like the Pit. Everything screamed to stay away from that place, not least the thought of my Martha.

But if it’s the end, and you’re going to God anyway, you might as well go doing something that’d annoy the wife.

After a while the smoke cleared, revealing some sort of great black barrel. That’s a funny-looking devil, I thought, just in time for it to crack open and disgorge something much more familiar. It spilled out onto the ground, greyish, shapeless, and clearly in pain, and lay there panting and moaning.

Now me, ever since that bloody business with the Cornish, I’ve had nightmares about the sound of screaming. And that thing’s keening, let me tell you – it might have been an enemy of God and King, a creature so vile that even a Frenchman might rightly spit on it – but in that moment, I wanted to help it, even if just to put it out of its misery.

Fortunately, I wasn’t forced to choose, because at that moment, a hundred of the King’s Yeomen stamped up on their horses to kill it with halberds.

And then they told me to get lost, and because they had halberds, and I’d just seen them kill a devil, I did.

-----

The dark cloud that settled over the land turned the days that followed into one great long night. Cold and starving, grey with ash, we tried to get the crops in, but the exodus from Guildford put paid to our harvest almost overnight. That lot told us of greater monsters, stretching up past the treetops, glaring with hate-fuelled eyes that burned men to dust. We must have been lucky – we only got a little one.

Presently the story got round that I’d seen it, and people came to hear the tale. Crowds gathered at my house, and when some little scrap from Godalming called me ‘Sir John’, it stuck.

It wasn’t long after that – and it didn’t take much prompting – before the story went round that I’d killed it. Well, that changed things. Men gave me gifts, women gave me kisses, children gave me great teary hugs – and everyone, everyone, looked to me for our next move.

Giant-killer or not, Sir John and his growing family of hundreds had to eat. There was nothing left in Woking, so the dispossessed of the Last Days of Surrey would have to run away. We settled on invading Berkshire; after all, there had to be food in Reading. We’d work out what came next after that.

We were much surprised to find Reading missing, replaced with a great field of thorny red weed. We slept fitfully beneath once-green hedges that night, and by the morning, the distant Downs were bloody with it.

All the world turned to red, then. It grew like a great thick net, making a chore of walking anywhere, trapping us in that ruined town. Panic spread, tempers frayed, fists were thrown. And then, at the last moment, as violence seemed certain, one ferocious voice shouted down both mobs. Martha, my Martha, sitting on our eldest lad’s shoulders, bit into one of the bloody runners, and declared it safe to eat.

And that’s how she became Lady Martha to our desperate followers, and how we all became the blood-drinkers of New Reading Town.

-----

Life in Hell turned out to be much the same as life on Earth. Wake up, say your prayers (perhaps with a certain new urgency), break your back to gather up food, cook it ‘til you can stand the taste. We soon found the red weed went with turnips, which was good, because bugger-all else had survived.

After a month or so, a few tattered soldiers came by to tell us there was a new King. To our great surprise, it wasn’t Beelzebub, who presumably chose Paris for his court – no, just the young Henry Fitzroy, the last Henry’s bastard, the first bugger to reach the throne after the devils all started dying of dropsy. Of all things, dropsy. The mind boggles.

Anyway, best of luck to him. The red weed died off in the winter, and as the great and undisputed heroes of the hour, myself and the missus got made Mayor and Mayoress. Not by the King, far away and pointless – but by our own people, our own friends and family. That’s true honour, you know. So Mayor John it was, and bollocks to anyone who said otherwise.

So that’s my story. The rest, you know, that’s just sweat and dirt. Our Humphrey bought a flock and moved them out onto the Downs. Our Fulke lost his sight and went off to be a monk. Agnes, Isobel, and little John – they’re all well. So are the folk of New Reading, who we stumbled to safety with, when Hell came to earth in the summer of… oh, fifteen thirty-something.

And that’s about the shape of it. God bless you and keep you, my friend.

The Chronicles of JUSTICE FIST

I have no idea what happened here.

(Once again, the lovely Webster gave me a prompt: "Word Shark". He also told me to do it in the style of a "real life crime show" or something. I don't know what that is, so I fell back on my encyclopaedic knowledge of Judge Judy. And then JUSTICE FIST happened. Seriously, I don't even).

--------------------

The Chronicles of JUSTICE FIST

(Scene: Int Courtroom. STRIPES and WEBSTER stand at the defendant & plaintiff's stands. JUSTICE FIST enters.)

VO: Oxford writer WEBSTER is suing Manchester layabout STRIPES for property damage, after a disagreement over a deadline turned heated.

BAILIFF: All rise for the honourable JUSTICE FIST.

(Cue JUSTICE FIST Intro. All dance. JUSTICE FIST shreds like a badass).

BAILIFF: The matter at hand is between this respectable citizen here and this dodgy bastard here, your honour.

JUSTICE FIST: Thank you, bailiff. Mr. WEBSTER, I have here your… incoherent statement. On the night of January 18^th 2014, you came to blows with the defendant here. Tell JUSTICE FIST... everything!

WEBSTER: I was sitting at home when Mr. STRIPES rang the doorbell. He looked… he looked…

JUSTICE FIST: Take your time if you’re upset. JUSTICE FIST knows that not all humans can be as MIGHTY as JUSTICE FIST.

WEBSTER: I’m not… that thing, y… your honour. I’m fi… I’m o… (grunts)

JUSTICE FIST: (raises eyebrow)

WEBSTER: I apologise. I am… experiencing difficulty expressing myself. I was sitting at home, writing words to satisfy Mr. STRIPES. He ordered me to write stories.

JUSTICE FIST: What’s your relationship with the defendant?

STRIPES: Well, I would, but y’know…

JUSTICE FIST: Sir, when JUSTICE FIST wants you to speak, JUSTICE FIST will say so.

(cue STRIKE ONE graphic)

STRIPES: Yes, your honour.

WEBSTER: I met him when we were… augh… (leans on the desk to steady himself)

JUSTICE FIST: BAILIFF, Mr. WEBSTER needs a stiff drink.

(BAILIFF brings Mr. WEBSTER a stiff drink)

WEBSTER: Thank you, that’s- ow!

JUSTICE FIST: Mr. WEBSTER, get on with it!

STRIPES: He always was late, your honour.

WEBSTER: University. We met there. I had friends… he shared. [NAME], [NAME] and [NAME].

JUSTICE FIST: And how did you end up writing for him?

WEBSTER: We were friends. He bought drinks, he wrote things, he ran a… a kind of gaming group I… (grunts) belonged to. He seemed… I can’t say it. We wrote things. I wrote stories; he wrote stories. He went away for a few years. He came back… changed. He said he made words in Cairo loaning En… loaning them to Egyptians.

JUSTICE FIST: JUSTICE FIST approves of foreign aid. One day, all nations should be as awesome as Fistopia!

(cue FISTOPIAN anthem)

WEBSTER: Yes, honour.

BAILIFF: Please address the judge as “your honour”, or alternatively, “Mighty JUSTICE FIST”.

WEBSTER: I apologise. Well, he came back with words. Words, words, words. (WEBSTER makes an expensive gesture). I had no words. I had deadlines. I borrowed words from him.

JUSTICE FIST: You took out a loan? Of words?

WEBSTER: Writers do it. The deadline was January 18^th.

JUSTICE FIST: Was this the first time you’d borrowed words from the defendant?

WEBSTER: No. 2009, he loaned me words. I published a thousand.

JUSTICE FIST: So what was different this time?

WEBSTER: I didn’t know anything was. I guess it was Cairo. He’s dif… he’s… I don’t know this man.

JUSTICE FIST: What were the terms of the agreement?

WEBSTER: No interest. He called it a gift.

STRIPES: I did no such thing, Mighty JUSTICE FIST; he’s lying.

JUSTICE FIST: (cutting STRIPES off) Mr. STRIPES, strike two. (cue STRIKE TWO graphic) Three strikes and you’re out!

AUDIENCE: Ooooooooh!

WEBSTER: Then he came to my house. He said he wanted the words. I told him I had none to give him. He became… he became…

JUSTICE FIST: What did he become?

WEBSTER: He said he would hurt me.

JUSTICE FIST: Did he assault you?

WEBSTER: …no. He wanted to see the words. I showed him the words.

JUSTICE FIST: These are the words he loaned you?

WEBSTER: (struggles) Yes, and no. I mixed up the loan-words and m… mine (grunts, steadies himself again)

JUSTICE FIST: So you showed him all your words, both his and your own?

WEBSTER: Yes.

JUSTICE FIST: And what did he do then?

WEBSTER: He broke the adjectives.

JUSTICE FIST: …what.

WEBSTER: He broke m… the adjectives.

JUSTICE FIST: I don’t understand.

WEBSTER: I can’t use adjectives. Adjectives, no. Adverbs, slightly. I'm in agony… (takes a deep breath) when I use adjective clauses. I can say articles, though. He left me those. He said they weren’t considered adjectives.

JUSTICE FIST: …how did he do this?

WEBSTER: He had a hammer.

JUSTICE FIST: And you didn’t notice the hammer when you were talking?

WEBSTER: It was a sm… it fit in his pocket.

JUSTICE FIST: So an adjective’s a delicate thing, is it?

WEBSTER: Yes. He did not have to hit them… hard.

JUSTICE FIST: …isn’t “hard” an adjective?

WEBSTER: It's an adjective and an adverb, honour.

(cue Time’s Up! music)

JUSTICE FIST: Alright! Your time’s up! JUSTICE FIST will return after these commercials!

(cue commercials)

--------------------

(Scene: Int Courtroom. JUSTICE FIST enters.)

VO: Oxford writer WEBSTER accuses Manchester layabout STRIPES of breaking his adjectives, leaving him unable to work.

BAILIFF: All rise for the honourable JUSTICE FIST.

(Cue JUSTICE FIST Intro. All dance. JUSTICE FIST shreds like a badass).

JUSTICE FIST: Thank you, bailiff. Mr. STRIPES, you've heard the accusation. Defend yourself!

STRIPES: It was as he says.

JUSTICE FIST: …what.

STRIPES: And I’ll absolutely pay him any sum he can name.

(cue GUILTY graphics, music)

JUSTICE FIST: Hoo-ah! Justice is served! Mr. WEBSTER: you heard the man! Name your price! Ooh yeah!

WEBSTER: You know that numbers are adjectives, right?

STRIPES: Damn right.

(AUDIENCE gasp! Cue REVERSAL graphics)

VO: A Reversal has been played. This means the fucker might be about to get off on a technicality.

WEBSTER: I hate you.

JUSTICE FIST: Justice has been served! Mighty JUSTICE FIST grows tired of your mewling!

STRIPES: Any number he can name in pounds, Mighty JUSTICE FIST.

WEBSTER: Million.

STRIPES: How many millions?

WEBSTER: One.

STRIPES: One million… what?

WEBSTER: Pounds.

STRIPES: Sentence fragment; consider revising.

WEBSTER: (screaming) I will wound you!

STRIPES: Gasp!

(cue CRIMINALITY graphics, music)

JUSTICE FIST: Mr. WEBSTER, only JUSTICE FIST can issue threats in this court!

(cue BAILIFF to take WEBSTER away)

STRIPES: Justice. I laugh in the face of justice.

JUSTICE FIST: (JUSTICE EYEBROW)

(cut to Ext. Courtroom. WEBSTER enters, handcuffed and shame-faced)

REPORTER: Mr. Webster, that’s a stunning turn of events; I have to say we outside were all very surprised. Can you describe how you’re feeling at this time?

WEBSTER: …[INVECTIVE]