Pokémon In Vino Veritas

[Blackjack Gabbiani]

A wedding present from her husband may be Lusamine's last grip on reality​

You had gotten the wine on your honeymoon. The hills of Kalos were only a memory, but your husband had said that he wasn't looking at them anyway. Why would he, he said, if you were there?

He built a shelf just for it. Those silly gestures were one of the things that made you fall in love with him, and when he presented you with a self-contained cabinet with all the gizmos and gadgets from the lab that kept the bottle in the best of conditions, you laughed out loud. He waited until you were done before kissing you.

He popped it open a year and a half later, when you brought your son home for the first time. You only had a sip before falling asleep on the couch, and when you woke up, he was showing your son around. The boy couldn't even focus his eyes yet and he was already going on a tour, your husband's enthusiastic voice audible down the hall.

Your next sip was after your daughter was born. This time your husband brought it directly into the recovery room and you drank it from a paper cup. Your son, only a few years old, was given grape juice and your husband explained why it was basically the same thing. You laughed, and you swear your daughter laughed too.

Your fifth anniversary was almost forgotten, in the rush of the labs and business meetings. Logically you knew it was there, but neither you nor he had made any plans. He called you to his office to check on some urgent papers, and he was waiting with the wine and plane tickets to Alola. During that trip, you both decided to build a branch there.

By the time your tenth anniversary came around, you were alone. Your husband had vanished far too long ago. You weren't sure exactly when any more and at the same time you knew down to the minute. Your son asked why you were crying. You weren't aware you had been. He asked why you were sitting in the dark. You weren't aware you had been. You took a drink, of something else this time, before you answered, but your answer didn't explain anything.

It was a hallucination, a dream, a nightmare, a fantasy. You felt drunker than you ever had when you thought about the creatures that took him. Did they love him as much as you did? Did he make them laugh? Did he build funny contraptions for them? Maybe they made him laugh. Maybe they built things for him. But he could never love them as much as he did you. That never even crossed your mind.

You had so much love in you, and it was going nowhere. Your children, you would make sure they would go nowhere. They would wait for their father to get back. You would keep them the same so he would recognize them. You would make sure they were on their best behavior. They wouldn't grow up or grow distant or ever leave, and once he got back you would all be the same happy family you had always been.

Your pokémon were the same. His treasured team had to remain the same and that was much easier. Your lab had already developed the necessary preservation techniques, and they could keep for as long as possible. They wouldn't change at all. They wouldn't age. They wouldn't get sick or die. And when he came back, they could be restored. You had other ideas, but people would ask questions if your children suddenly vanished. Everything had to be ideal. There couldn't be questions. There couldn't be anything to disrupt it.

The god killer was too much trouble. The beast that was supposed to help you get your husband back would be of no use. It had to be something flawless, something that would never cause problems, something that would do as it was told and never resist. But your son had other ideas.

And he was gone too, gone with the very creature that was supposed to save his father. You were doing what was best. The creature had failed and your son still saved it. He didn't want his father back, you decided. He was ungrateful, you decided. He put this creature over his own father. Over his own mother.

Your daughter would be the same. She would be perfect. She would be the ideal child. She would do as she was told. She would never cause problems. She would never resist. Those creatures would dote on your husband, so you dressed your daughter like one of them. The beautiful jellyfish, so dainty but so powerful. Just like she would be. She would be the perfect daughter, the perfect doll, the perfect pokémon, the perfect plaything, the perfect Nihilego.

You dreamt of them, floating all around you. He was somewhere in the distance; you knew it, even though you couldn't see him or hear him or sense him, but he was there. Every time you had the dream, he got farther and farther away. You would hold your daughter close in the hopes that she would share your dreams. Maybe she would understand. Maybe she would agree with you. Maybe she would know he was there too.

Over time, you realized that you no longer thought of that runaway as your son. He had rejected your love, and no son would ever do that. Your daughter mentioned him once, and had to be punished. She wasn't being perfect, but she would learn. She would have to.

You saw a boy that looked like another of your beasts. He was a petty thug, a nobody, but you had to have him. He was desperate for approval, and had power worthy of respect. He understood. He agreed. He wasn't perfect, but he could be.

You looked like another of the beasts, one your husband had called beautiful. You grew your hair to resemble its tendrils, did your makeup to resemble its markings, dressed to accent your similar bodies. Your husband would find a familiar sight when he returned, you were sure of it.

The child of the stars came to you. It was beautiful, so small and cute, so much like your own child. No, better than your child. It could help you, and you couldn't wait to show your husband.

But your daughter was a problem. She kept expressing the want to dress in something other than what you had selected. She found it horrid that you would put the child of the stars at risk for your own purposes, not comprehending the idea of a greater destiny. Such pettiness and ingratitude couldn't be permitted, not from a perfect child, so you locked her up. She couldn't get away, until she did.

She was no longer your daughter. She had rejected your love, and no daughter would ever do that.

But you had your pokémon. You had your collection. Somewhere you had heard that a collector's gallery was their holy place, and that was how it seemed.

Something was missing. Something far away, that you still knew was there. But it didn't get any closer.

You shared that wine with your new associate, that dirty boy with so much potential, but it felt wrong. Not least of all that he gulped the whole glass down at once and wiped his mouth with his sleeve, but that was something that could be worked on. There was something fundamentally unsettling about sharing it with anyone other than one person.

Your dreams were still those magical creatures, floating around gracefully as far as you could see, as far as you could feel. You floated with them, drifting in the air, and you felt like that presence was drifting alongside you. It was soothing in a way you could never find when you were awake. Sometimes you felt like you could stay there forever.

That dirty boy was to find the child of the stars. You didn't tell him that it was your former daughter that took it. He was still imperfect and may have acted softly towards her if he knew. She wasn't important. She was nobody.

He mentioned somebody with your former son's name, and you didn't ask further. Not knowing was best, but you weren't sure if it was for his benefit or yours.

You told yourself you didn't care, but if you didn't, then you wouldn't have been so angry. What sort of a world would your husband come back to? You had tried your hardest to keep everything perfect for him, but it had all fallen apart. You could save his pokémon but those children were no longer yours. He wouldn't understand, and neither could you. You did nothing but love them and they betrayed your love.

When you had him back, you wouldn't let him go either. He could never leave again, come Hell itself.

When one day, one of the beasts, the Nihilego, came to see you, it was the most beautiful, perfect thing you had ever seen, and you vowed to both worlds that you would love it greater than anything else. It deserved your love. It would know. It would understand. It would never leave you.

Everything would be perfect, just perfect and eternal and lovely.

That night, you drifted off with the empty bottle next to you, and dreamed of a perfect world full of creatures that deserved your love. But this time, that presence wasn't there, and you didn't notice.

 

[SparklingEspeon]

Hello! Here for catnip.

Lusamine is one of the canon's most interesting villains, and yet I haven't seen anyone do a deep dive of her backstory and thoughts before. You really manage to bring out the insanity that took hold of her between the time her husband disappeared and the events of the game. She doesn't just arbitrarily snap at some point and go nuts, she slowly atrophies into it - hanging by that thread of having everything perfect and slowly losing sight of why she wants everything to be perfect until it's all she can think about. It's definitely freaky watching her degrade over the years, you can see things slipping away in real time. I especially liked how you accentuated that in the narration - as she got more and more unhinged, the narration grew more and more like a door swinging. It felt like every sentence was either very choppy or bordering on a rant, oscillating wildly between long and short. By the end of the story, someone who seemed perfectly happy and sane devolved entirely into the near cartoonish insanity we see in the game, and it felt real.

Mechanically, I thought this was well told too. There's a niche second person inhabits that I can't really define, but it's really good at both ingraining the reader into a perspective and forcing them to read it through something slightly dissonant to what they're used to. Whatever it is, it does a really good job of grounding the reader in the shoes of perspective, which worked out really well for a story that's about someone suffering from a degrading state of mind. I really liked the mechanism of the wine bottle as a way to skip time and ground the moments where it appears - the first time we see it, it's an anniversary gift. Then it celebrates two births, then an anniversary nearly forgotten about, and then one spent alone. The last time we see it, it's shared with the "dirty boy" who is presumably Guzma - as a symbol of her marriage, emphasized in how she feels wrong sharing it with anyone outside of the person who gave it to her, it helps emphasize how broken things have become.

It's not clear exactly how many years she had to go this nuts, but I'm assuming at least a decade, maybe more, counting the two or three years she probably spent alone between the opening of the Aether Foundation and her fifth anniversary. One drawback of the oneshot being so short is that it does make the passing of time a bit hazy, even if the details help ground certain snippets in certain moments. It definitely did sell that a lot of time had passed, though, I think noting all the specific events that needed to take time and effort to accomplish helped ground that this wasn't all happening at once. The growth of the children, too, helped here, especially Gladion at his different stages of life (under Lusamine, running away, Team Skull).

Overall, I was really surprised by this one! The narration and prose quality blew me away, and you definitely succeeded on selling Lusamine's loss of grip on reality and that she would turn out the way she did in the games. A very striking piece of writing, keep it up!

~SparklingEspeon

 

[Blackjack Gabbiani]

Thank you so much!

As far as time frame, it's assumed that in the games, Gladion is around 13 and Lillie is around 11, but then I guess I'm unclear as to how long it had been since Mohn disappeared before the tenth anniversary, only "far too long ago".

We do see the wine bottle after Guzma--it's in the second to last line.

I'm really glad to see people like this so much. It's a bit of a departure from my usual fics, which is funny because writing about villains is my usual wheelhouse, but second person, no dialogue, etc are unusual for me.

 

[Sinderella]

Hey Blackjack! Thought I'd give another one of your works a try. I think I read Answering Machine before and it kinda hit me in the gut, but being this is with these Alola characters I cherish so, I was expecting p much the same and was of fucking course not disappointed :')

I'm normally not a huge fan of second person, but something about it WORKS here, and made it so much more of a :'))))))))) read. I felt Lusamine's anguish a little more, and felt even more disgusted at her actions following Mohn's disappearance. I felt her psyche slipping lower and lower, until ending on a soft yet hard-hitting note. I knew who was being referred to even without names, and I really loved the subtle hints at how just fucking awful she was to her kids. Locking them up, forcing them to dress certain ways, then forgetting about them when they "rejected her love" good fucking gods.

She truly is a despicable human being (at least in this canon lmao) but I do like how this piece offers some insight into why it happened. I particularly enjoyed the concept of her trying to keep her kids in line, her freezing her Pokemon, and her overall trying to "keep things perfect" because she's trying to make sure things are as they were when Mohn disappeared. The bit about her dressing Lillie as a Nihilego to give long-lost Mohn a sense of sameness from his time being "captive" with them also really hit, and I actually don't remember if that was a canon reason or she just did it because "beauty" and heehoo Nihilego neurotoxin. Regardless, those were the little things that had me like OOF.

My favorite part, however, was how she shared the wine with Guzma, and NO its not because I'm biased, I genuinely sucked my teeth in sympathy at the way she shared it with him because "oohhhh potential perfection" but decided it was weird and not okay because he wasn't Mohn. Just. She's awful but I feel really bad for her, and I hate that I feel bad for her, but AH :')

Anyway yeah, this was some good shit. Thank you so much for sharing this fam!

 

[Blackjack Gabbiani]

Aww thanks for reading, you guys! I'm not sure what prompted me to write this in second person but I'm glad it worked out so well.

I wouldn't say that her treatment of Lillie is misogyny since I get the feeling that if Lillie had left first, Gladion would have gotten the brunt of that treatment.

I'm glad this fic could capture how I felt about Lusamine--that she was sick, more than anything, and while her behaviors were inexcusable, I'm glad she got help and could work towards becoming a better person. And I'll always hate Ultra for taking that from us!

 

[K_S]

Considering who this is centered on i cant see it going well... And considering the gift is a consumable I wager the lower it gets the worse she gets. It'll be an interesting progress bar to say the least.

Its so wierd to think of anyone associating with lusa' being affectionate or even loving.. But then her devotion had to come from somewhere... Ans they seem deeply in love and that is unspeakbly wierd.

I doubt gladion is going to remeber dear old dad still its nice he got a few happy moments. A handfull of years and then hes taken...

And how she wonders at her husband.. How hes doing.. Shes locked her expectation of his state in her fondest experiences of him... And it comes across as weird? Especially when she turns it around into what they (the beasts) would do for him... Mirroring what he did for her...

Shes definitly not thinking right and its a good way to show it.

Thank goodness the foundation never went into crynogentics or else she would have han soloed her kids in her sick obsession to keep everything in lock step. And its only by the grace of social media and perserving her reputation she didnt. Shudder.

At least gladion got the hecknout of dodge and did slow lum' own a little. But you can just see the mental breakdown in stages. When shes shoving herself and her kid into looking thenmon he studied fornhis familiarity/comfort you can also see sanity waving in the back mirror as its been long left behind.

And now lil is out thank goodness with cog so theres a bit of hope there. Gotta wonder how chummy guzma wouldhave been if he knew lums plans and history. And i wonder how much did you think guzma knew during thier little meet and greets?

Amd by the last few lines we see how gone lum is... Shes lost her husband and doesnt even care anymore shes swapped one obsession for another.

 

[Blackjack Gabbiani]

She's way gone, but as the games show she's still not unsavable...just really difficult to save.

 

[JFought]

Arriving from Catnip! A Lusamine story: that's already a good sign, isn't it. This one-shot is short, effective, and to the point, so I'll stick to general thoughts.

Thoughts on In Vino Veritas
This story hits hard right off the bat. I think it wields its source context and the reader's familiarity with it very well: since we know this is about Lusamine, the second the first line mentions her honeymoon is a big oh no moment because we know exactly where this is going. It elevates the feeling of incoming tragedy that hangs over the otherwise whimsical and idyllic first few paragraphs. I also appreciate how these paragraphs establish all of the important pieces to the story in a way that's quick and effective, so that we can get right to twisting them.

And man do they get twisted! While it does feel like a jump at first, the effectiveness of "my love is going nowhere. my children are also going nowhere." is like oh god. A very strong, hard turn into crazy: her conclusions were insane but there was a twisted logic to it that could be followed throughout the story.

I also like how her obsession over Ultra Beasts is depicted, and how it slowly grew over time. I don't think I've ever made the connection between Lusamine's design and Pheramosa before, and I've definitely never made the Guzma/Xurkitree connection before! It feels suitably tragic how her love for her husband is slowly transplanted onto the very beings who kidnapped him, and ending on the note of the empty bottle and her having forgotten him was a fittingly dark end to the story.

Two other damn... moments for me were the way the narration implied she was willing to freeze her kids, and the part where she's assessing Guzma and is like "i can fix him :)"

I didn't notice any typos, so we're good on that front! Overall, this was a great deep dive into Lusamine's character. The use of second-person and the bottle as a framing device felt inspired, and her descent into madness hit hard. It got me thinking about SuMo's story again too, and how much I appreciate it for what it tried. Good job!

 

[Spiteful Murkrow]

Heya, coming around to take care of some lighter reading tonight and I remembered that this one-shot was one that I briefly considered reading in RB4 but ultimately didn’t get around to. Well, now seems like as good a time as any to fix that and I don’t know anything about this story other than that it follows Lusamine as she progressively loses it, but I suppose there’s only one way to find out for sure:

Spoiler

You had gotten the wine on your honeymoon. The hills of Kalos were only a memory, but your husband had said that he wasn't looking at them anyway. Why would he, he said, if you were there?

He built a shelf just for it. Those silly gestures were one of the things that made you fall in love with him, and when he presented you with a self-contained cabinet with all the gizmos and gadgets from the lab that kept the bottle in the best of conditions, you laughed out loud. He waited until you were done before kissing you.

Oh, well. That would explain the title there. Though wait, does Lusamine have a wine bottle lying around her office in some official continuity or something? Since this is a really particular choice for a memento, so now I’m curious.

He popped it open a year and a half later, when you brought your son home for the first time. You only had a sip before falling asleep on the couch, and when you woke up, he was showing your son around. The boy couldn't even focus his eyes yet and he was already going on a tour, your husband's enthusiastic voice audible down the hall.

Your next sip was after your daughter was born. This time your husband brought it directly into the recovery room and you drank it from a paper cup. Your son, only a few years old, was given grape juice and your husband explained why it was basically the same thing. You laughed, and you swear your daughter laughed too.

I… think I know where this one-shot is going to be going, and I can already tell that this is going to be painful to watch given that this wine bottle’s going on quite the journey with Lusamine, I can already tell.

Your fifth anniversary was almost forgotten, in the rush of the labs and business meetings. Logically you knew it was there, but neither you nor he had made any plans. He called you to his office to check on some urgent papers, and he was waiting with the wine and plane tickets to Alola. During that trip, you both decided to build a branch there.

By the time your tenth anniversary came around, you were alone. Your husband had vanished far too long ago. You weren't sure exactly when any more and at the same time you knew down to the minute. Your son asked why you were crying. You weren't aware you had been. He asked why you were sitting in the dark. You weren't aware you had been. You took a drink, of something else this time, before you answered, but your answer didn't explain anything.

Also, my money’s on Lusamine going for the whiskey. Since something about her seems like a ‘whiskey’ sort of person.

It was a hallucination, a dream, a nightmare, a fantasy. You felt drunker than you ever had when you thought about the creatures that took him. Did they love him as much as you did? Did he make them laugh? Did he build funny contraptions for them? Maybe they made him laugh. Maybe they built things for him. But he could never love them as much as he did you. That never even crossed your mind.

Oh, so Lusamine saw Mohn vanish in that fateful mission, huh? I actually don’t remember whether or not that’s canon in the games, but yeah. That’d definitely mess just about anyone up.

You had so much love in you, and it was going nowhere. Your children, you would make sure they would go nowhere. They would wait for their father to get back. You would keep them the same so he would recognize them. You would make sure they were on their best behavior. They wouldn't grow up or grow distant or ever leave, and once he got back you would all be the same happy family you had always been.

Boy, Lusamine started going down the slippery slope fast there. Though I suppose I suppose I should be a lot less surprised at her collection of cryofrozen Pokémon given this obsession of trying to keep things as they were for Mohn to re-enter her life.

Your pokémon were the same. His treasured team had to remain the same and that was much easier. Your lab had already developed the necessary preservation techniques, and they could keep for as long as possible. They wouldn't change at all. They wouldn't age. They wouldn't get sick or die. And when he came back, they could be restored. You had other ideas, but people would ask questions if your children suddenly vanished. Everything had to be ideal. There couldn't be questions. There couldn't be anything to disrupt it.

You know, it’d make a lot of sense that Lusamine would’ve considered deep freezing her kids considering all those Pokémon just chilling around, but boy that was chilling (har har) to read.

The god killer was too much trouble. The beast that was supposed to help you get your husband back would be of no use. It had to be something flawless, something that would never cause problems, something that would do as it was told and never resist. But your son had other ideas.

Yeeeeeeah, I can already see how “stay the same for daddy” would cause major issues for a kid going through his teenage rebellion phase.

And he was gone too, gone with the very creature that was supposed to save his father. You were doing what was best. The creature had failed and your son still saved it. He didn't want his father back, you decided. He was ungrateful, you decided. He put this creature over his own father. Over his own mother.

So wait, did she just kill off the other two Silvally in this continuity, or…? .-.

Your daughter would be the same. She would be perfect. She would be the ideal child. She would do as she was told. She would never cause problems. She would never resist. Those creatures would dote on your husband, so you dressed your daughter like one of them. The beautiful jellyfish, so dainty but so powerful. Just like she would be. She would be the perfect daughter, the perfect doll, the perfect pokémon, the perfect plaything, the perfect Nihilego.

I suppose that would explain a thing or two about why she was so ecstatic to see that one that pops up in the scripted encounter in SM…

You dreamt of them, floating all around you. He was somewhere in the distance; you knew it, even though you couldn't see him or hear him or sense him, but he was there. Every time you had the dream, he got farther and farther away. You would hold your daughter close in the hopes that she would share your dreams. Maybe she would understand. Maybe she would agree with you. Maybe she would know he was there too.

Yeeeeeeeah, a lot about the Alola games plot could’ve potentially been nipped in the bud if Lusamine would’ve just bothered to go and see a therapist, huh? ^^;

Over time, you realized that you no longer thought of that runaway as your son. He had rejected your love, and no son would ever do that. Your daughter mentioned him once, and had to be punished. She wasn't being perfect, but she would learn. She would have to.

Ah, yes, we’ve moved on from trying to keep things exactly as they are to writing off entire children as lost causes. I wonder over what timeframe this occurred, since Lusamine sure spiraled fast in the span of about a quarter of this story.

You saw a boy that looked like another of your beasts. He was a petty thug, a nobody, but you had to have him. He was desperate for approval, and had power worthy of respect. He understood. He agreed. He wasn't perfect, but he could be.

Boy does that put Lusamine and Guzma’s relationship in another light.

You looked like another of the beasts, one your husband had called beautiful. You grew your hair to resemble its tendrils, did your makeup to resemble its markings, dressed to accent your similar bodies. Your husband would find a familiar sight when he returned, you were sure of it.

And thus why the title of this oneshot is Obsession- oh wait, wrong story there.

The child of the stars came to you. It was beautiful, so small and cute, so much like your own child. No, better than your child. It could help you, and you couldn't wait to show your husband.

But your daughter was a problem. She kept expressing the want to dress in something other than what you had selected. She found it horrid that you would put the child of the stars at risk for your own purposes, not comprehending the idea of a greater destiny. Such pettiness and ingratitude couldn't be permitted, not from a perfect child, so you locked her up. She couldn't get away, until she did.

I know it’s becoming a bit of a running trend, but:

Since boy is this oneshot really effective at getting into the head of Lusamine as she goes further and further off the edge.

She was no longer your daughter. She had rejected your love, and no daughter would ever do that.

But you had your pokémon. You had your collection. Somewhere you had heard that a collector's gallery was their holy place, and that was how it seemed.

She really just went and spent entire evenings contentedly beholding her popsicle collection, huh?

Something was missing. Something far away, that you still knew was there. But it didn't get any closer.

You shared that wine with your new associate, that dirty boy with so much potential, but it felt wrong. Not least of all that he gulped the whole glass down at once and wiped his mouth with his sleeve, but that was something that could be worked on. There was something fundamentally unsettling about sharing it with anyone other than one person.

Oh, there’s the wine bottle again. I was starting to think that it’d been gone for a while, though boy is it a trip to see it come back in such a different context from how it originated as a symbol of her love for Mohn.

Your dreams were still those magical creatures, floating around gracefully as far as you could see, as far as you could feel. You floated with them, drifting in the air, and you felt like that presence was drifting alongside you. It was soothing in a way you could never find when you were awake. Sometimes you felt like you could stay there forever.

And she almost did in SM, at least. And probably spent years afterward in psychiatric care given that she basically just faded from the plot afterwards.

That dirty boy was to find the child of the stars. You didn't tell him that it was your former daughter that took it. He was still imperfect and may have acted softly towards her if he knew. She wasn't important. She was nobody.

He mentioned somebody with your former son's name, and you didn't ask further. Not knowing was best, but you weren't sure if it was for his benefit or yours.

You told yourself you didn't care, but if you didn't, then you wouldn't have been so angry. What sort of a world would your husband come back to? You had tried your hardest to keep everything perfect for him, but it had all fallen apart. You could save his pokémon but those children were no longer yours. He wouldn't understand, and neither could you. You did nothing but love them and they betrayed your love.

When you had him back, you wouldn't let him go either. He could never leave again, come Hell itself.

That… makes me wonder if this Lusamine ever does get to see Mohn as he is in the present day of the Alola games. Since if so… yeah, only good things™ followed afterwards, I can tell.

When one day, one of the beasts, the Nihilego, came to see you, it was the most beautiful, perfect thing you had ever seen, and you vowed to both worlds that you would love it greater than anything else. It deserved your love. It would know. It would understand. It would never leave you.

Everything would be perfect, just perfect and eternal and lovely.

Nihilego:

That night, you drifted off with the empty bottle next to you, and dreamed of a perfect world full of creatures that deserved your love. But this time, that presence wasn't there, and you didn't notice.

That ending, man. Like I presume that you’ve had a bit of practice at writing obsessive characters since… yeah, it’s kind of a running trend in your works, but boy was that a ride. And it was a pretty believable portrayal of Lusamine, who she used to be, and how she came to be the person we all know from the Alolagames. I honestly wonder how long it took you to pull this one off, since the perspective is really well done, and the prose was close to pitch-perfect.

The only real point of contention that I have is that the wine bottle that the story’s title evokes basically fades out for about a third of the story as Lusamine starts going further and further off the cliff. Like you’d think that it’d potentially also be able to be used as a gauge of how far her mental state has been going through things like her deciding one day “no, I need to stop drinking from this, it needs to be as close to how it was before Mohn showing up” and promptly throwing it in a fridge which might give her the idea of “... wait, what if I do this with Mohn’s Pokémon, too…?

” but that’s honestly borderline nitpicking from how well-done everything is.

Good work, @Blackjack Gabbiani . I wasn’t sure what I was getting into with this story, but I’m really glad I gave it a shot this week.