Chapter Text
Dec. 31 - Jan. 1
It’s NYE at the HQ. Wards have trickled back in the inter-holiday dead-space and now stand chattering amongst one another, all sweating with rationed champagne and Good Cheer. Resident Tinker McTicker has set up something of a doomsday timer high on the westernmost wall, which beeps each minute and frightens everyone to no end. (Alana overheard someone ask McTicker what was going to happen at midnight, and McTicker answered only by laughing all the way into the corner in which he’s currently lurking.) There’s a mirrorball as well. Tall handsome team leader Omnidyne keeps asking Alana to put on a bit of a lightshow with it, and she has to keep shaking her head in a modest sort of way.
No members of the Protectorate proper have made an appearance tonight. It’s good to give the teens a bit of space, of course, so that they’ll develop a sense of, you know, camaraderie or whatever, or at least that’s the rationale. It’s all rations here under the government’s thumb. They are allotted only a certain amount of morale. Anything past that is irresponsible, not to mention inefficient. And for what? The only superpowerful lunatics Alana’s come across so far have been bound like S&M fetishists. Not that she’s so bloodthirsty; it’s only that the peacetime environment might end up interfering with her goals re: Cornix, who is — this is the conclusion she’s reached in her recursive toss-turn nighttime thought process — the type to resent peace (that is to say, weakness) and all those who seek it.
She feels now more than ever that lack of tether, the bone-chilling Charybdal pull of Independence. Is this, she wonders, what it means to — jesus — “ come of age ”? That’s what’s got her shaking tonight. For there is certainly a collegiate quality to the party’s chaos, see for instance Omnidyne leading his cronies now in a verifiably Greek chant:
There was once a new Ward they called GlockWho shot bright silver shells from his cock
The Director screamed, “Wait!
You can’t just ejaculate
And expect the poor mob not to mock!”
So they made a device for the fellow
That would get the good public to mellow:
It went round his waist
As though to help keep him chaste
And turned Glocky’s big jizz-bullets yellow!
In the following cacophony of cheers and jeers, lecherous laughter, she scoots farther from the crowd’s center-mass, and Melvin, that Alana-seeking missile, is soon once again at her side. “Too, er, sophomoric for you?” he says.
“It’s an adjustment,” she says.
This past week she’s spent a significant amount of time with this Mr. Markey, due to their being the only ones on site (even the supposedly no-life Cornix mentioned she had “home business” to take care of). So there they were on the stale empty main floor. They watched Full Metal Jacket. Then they watched cartoons about superheroes. 1
Not much meaningful talk, of course, but some important info came out, not the least of which is his power: “If you’re quote-unquote some sort of photokinetic,” he said, “then I guess you could call me some sort of pathokinetic .” And Alana was too put-off to ask any further questions. At the moment he’s standing a good six inches closer than at that Christmas party.
The clock hits 11:59 and Omnidyne rallies the young gods around McTicker’s doomsday clock and starts them off with a booming: “SIXTY!”
Alana joins him at the fifty-nine, against all odds. A definite energy swirls through the wet crowd (you might call it omnipresent, ha ha ha) and she is not yet strong enough to deny it. This is the talent for acquiescence she prays will get her through to the other side.
“Forty-seven! Forty-six!”
No Cornix here now. No mother, no father. Only allies gained instead of assigned — the difference is so important. There is the Draft and there is what you do after. Fall in line, soldier. Left, right; left, right. Ho Chi Minh is a son of a bitch.
“Twenty-five! Twenty-four!”
Melvin takes her hand and she lets him. There is a party in Times Square where a single ball descends a lonely pole. Rose-tinted glasses that spell out some irrelevant number. It is only the celebration. Picture the ticker-tape parade. Douglas MacArthur has come home. Numbers change nothing. America’s decades are all the same. The ball drops. The bomb drops. It is VJ Day. The lonely pole is a flagpole. The rockets’ red glare is a night club’s neon. The White House burning is only pyrotechnics. The world has turned upside down.
“Three! Two! One! Ha—”
And Melvin dips Alana and kisses her. Fireworks.
Dec. 28
Master-9 Enmity sits in her cushy Denver digs reeling. “Demons” by Imagine Dragons (a favorite of hers since she discovered them during the sort of sanity-straining teen years to which most capes aren’t exactly strangers) booms between her ears, and the line “Don’t want to let you down, but I am hell-bound . . .” sends her into pillow-ripping hysterics. And seeing the blizzard of stuffing sends her back in time once more:
The Holidays saw her return to hometown Provo, where soft powder snow coated the valley, dimity for the virgin city, and nostalgia invaded via every opening. SLC Airport2 brought her back half a dozen years to the date of her missionary sendoff, and thereby memories of early tearful nights in bunks tucked tight into high dry corners of Caracas, which offered no relief from the The Center’s sterile wasteland, till a certain Elder Jackson came like a tall dark savior, lanky legs draped graceful over a great big rusty bicycle, and then over weeks: conversation snips, allusions to a post-marital world, some half serious skin to skin here and there, and at last, inevitably, citing sicknesses, backdoors, loopholes, etc. . . .
And once home more recollections, too many to mention here. Hugs from Mom (Dad passed three years ago) and twins Brigham and Brandon and selectively mute little sis Spright. She arrived just in time, wouldn’t you know it, to witness the ascendant Brigham play his last baseball game before the Christmas break, so the Binghams went in their baby blue Odyssey to the diamond, above which lights hung celestially, courtesy of the Church no doubt. Earthy smell from the steadily melting frost off the manicured grass. Four Brighams on his team (the Pioneers), and Brigham Bingham’s got by far the most potential. Ping! went the ball off his bat and miles over the verdure, and Enmity made her hands crimson: that was her goshdarn brother down there for goodness’ sake!
So the mood was something like ebullient by the time they returned home, in other words a long way to fall when Mom, post-kids-to-bed, produced from her meticulously ordered files a letter whose front flap bore a worrying seal. “It’s a summons, Alex,” said Mom. “You know what that means? A summons. It didn’t say for what. You never listen.”
“What? So I’m at their beck and call now? They can’t do that. I mean considering my status?”
“It’s gone to your head.”
“I just mean—”
“They can do what they like. And you will do what they say.”
Settled just like that. She spent the night brushing up on her sign language with Spright, who told her there had been an escape at the asylum near her school.
Then in the early morning she ordered a cab from some heathen service (this being Christmas Eve) and watched the ads on stalks, well above the highway, go from orangeish to blinding white. She watched the beehives on every sign go by and thought: we are all bees. Now empowered, though, Enmity found herself belonging to two separate colonies. This was bound to cause problems. The steely palette of Salt Lake City opened up before her, the Temple its centerpiece. The “summons” gave an address for some bent decrepit structure stuck tickish to a gleaming skyscraper, and in she went, up old old stairs (there likely since that first great migration), through some creaking halls, and in a tall portly oak door to a sort of conference room, around whose mahogany table sat a baker’s dozen of bulging white men stuffed like lobster meat into too-tight suits. And at the far end, the head, stood the President.
This was to come before God Himself. She experienced at first fear and then a perverse sort of excitement, for this was a situation no different, in the end, from facing down some kingpin. She felt the lives of these Important Men in her hands. She felt acutely the sensation of being the most powerful in a room full of power. She had more power than God Himself. But the wires in her head were such that she could do nothing about it. She sat humbly across from Mr. President.
“Ms. Bingham,” he said. “I regret doing this today of all days . . .”
Gulp, went Enmity. “It isn’t at all a problem, Mr. President. It’s only that I didn’t expect, I mean, to see you.”
“And I’m sure you’re very busy. We have followed your career.”
“Oh, well. I’ve taken Christmas off.”
The silent men between her and the seer/prophet/revelator shifted in their seats at the crest of this exchange. A thimbleful of sweat plopped off a plump one’s brow and splashed across the wood before him, and he pulled a purple handkerchief from his breast pocket to mop it up.
“There isn’t an easy way to say it,” said Mr. President. “And — appreciate, Ms. Bingham, this generosity I am affording you. I have great faith in your . . . level-headedness. If I did not I would not have invited you. If I had been worried you would shoot I would have sent a messenger. . . .”
Dead air from Enmity.
“So. As for business. Whatever God requires is right. We all can agree on this point. Now, what does He require in your instance, Ms. Bingham. This is the question at hand. I, His divine agent, am prepared to reveal to you the answer. And the answer is: you are hereby excommunicated from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Or — sorry: we have placed upon you certain membership restrictions. There has been an alteration in official terminology.”
How strange it was for a heart to thump like that in a scene so silent. All eyes involved avoided her. “What,” she said, “what does that mean? Why? How did this happen?”
“Well,” said Mr. President, “we decided — I decided — God decided . . . that you have no place in our community. It is an issue of perception is what it comes down to. There is no other way to put it: you are too strong. It’s bad optically. You understand. What this means is—”
“You mean because I’m a cape? But what about all the other friggin’ Mormon capes? What’s the difference? I mean Elder Explosion is a Blaster- 10!”
“Please, Ms. Bingham, watch your language. The difference is Elder Explosion is a member of the Melchizedek Priesthood3 — and you are not. Elder Explosion has performed scores of baptisms — and you have not. The proceeds from the sale of Elder Explosion’s figurines find their way into the Church’s many charitable organizations — and where are your figurines, Ms. Bingham?”
It could be mayhem in an instant, she thought. A mess of men’s flailing skeletal limbs till all the old oak, all the new suits went red and wet. But of course the only option was to nod modestly and exit onto the gray streets and stare into the sun and stumble with her vision still filled with orange spots to the bus stop. She watched the woman in the seat behind her stick a needle in her arm and thought: I am no different from you. Only a road of repentance lay before her.
She found Mom scowling on the lawn, all Enmity’s bags gathered around her. She rushed to hug her mother and her mother did not hug her back. She whispered, “You’re a sinner, Alex. They told me. We shouldn’t do much talking, I think, from now on. My friends . . . I got you a car. And a plane ticket.”
Some dumbfoundedness and sobbing, then: “Can I at least say goodbye to my sister? And the twins?”
“I don’t want my children to speak with you,” said Mom.
She had no choice but to sulk to the black taxi, too ashamed to notice Spright signing sprightly through her window: Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. . . .
So Enmity was in the air when the clock hit Christmas. She imagined if she saw Santa out there sleighing across the starry sky with Vixen and Blitzen and all those silver-chested sons of bitches she’d slither her way inside his stupid milk and cookie head and make him hate all the silly unwitting children so he’d stick instead of gifts a couple metric shit-tons of pitch black coal down their ugly fucking chimneys. And she woke the lonely sleeping salarymen with her cackling.
Now she tosses the mirror standing on her vanity to the floor and considers doing something with the shards. “This is my kingdom come,” goes Dan Reynolds on vocals.4 “This is my kingdom come.”
A knock at her spaceship door snaps her out of it, though. Right. Of course. There are still some so-called responsibilities. She is still a hero if by no means an angel. The door slides open and on the other end is none other than our girl Cornix brandishing an enormous hornet’s stinger between her legs. “Jesus,” she says. “What the hell died in here?”
“Sorry,” says Enmity. “Let me . . .”
“This is an important fucking meeting, En’. Or so I’m told. Get a grip.”
Enmity tugs her costume on and then they’re headed for the boss’ office. “So d’you do anything nice after the Christmas party?” says Cornix.
“I had about a liter and a half of eggnog,” says Enmity. “And then I dreamt of Hell. You?”
“About the same. Except my Hell involved my ex, so maybe it was really Heaven.”
They’ve set up Conference Room #4 for all members of Denver Protectorate. And when they’ve settled Director Dimitrov goes, “We are aware of a situation in Sùd. . . .”
Jan. 1
It’s an unproductive breakfast. I.e. very little food consumed. The cafeteria’s suffused with an unbearable snow-boosted sun, and bellboys in PRT uniforms bring buckets for puke, soon to overflow. It seems someone snuck in something harder than champagne after Alana’s tipsy retreat to sleep. Here she is now with Melvin at a separated table staring green-gilled at him (and him at her), listening to the queasy stream of rhymes from Omnidyne et al. carried over from the night before:
There’s a Changer whose antics are sordid
And they call this hot heroine Cornix
She switches her parts
So that she can start
Fucking lions and tigers and swordfish
Then, a little quieter (although still crystal clear):
There’s a photokinetic Alana
Who can make herself hot as a sauna
She twists up the light
And becomes such a sight
That boys jerk it from Greenland to Ghana
“Christ,” says Melvin, and makes to go over to them, only for his limp legs to foil him. . . . “Alana,” he says. “Look. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“I didn’t think you did,” says Alana, which isn’t strictly true. It was in fact her first kiss. Or, well, unless you’re counting eighth-grade class clown Carson Pick’s quick peck at the end-of-year dance, theme: Under the Sea.
There was a moment, eight hours ago, when Alana, alone in her room (through whose thin walls boomed “Superheroes” by Daft Punk), smiled, and in her stupor realized it was her first true smile since arriving. Contributing factors included booze, the high that accompanies these massive passages of time — but did they include, er, attraction? Well. Maybe now isn’t the most appropriate time to ask, as up comes yesterday’s lunch.
Jan. 4
We meet the teen heroes today immediately after a “training session” with one Gristlemaster (Breaker-6/Mover-3). They’ve managed to make it back to the barracks. Who knows how. Alana’s slumped over the right side of the leather sofa, sweating. Melvin’s to her left, slumped symmetrically, also sweating. Omnidyne and McTicker both in their boxers lie perpendicular to one another, snow-angel-shaped, dripping like pigs too. Thinker-5/Shaker-3/Master-1 Fog-o’-War is slunched (a position distinct from slumped) lengthwise over an armchair, ice pack over her swan neck. She says, “The Denver PRT has an official corporate alliance with local soft-drink company Slurshalot.” (Brute-7/Trump-3 Glass Joe is the only one who had the strength remaining to reach the showers.)
“This feels like fuckin’ ketamine, man,” says McTicker.
“Our towels, the ones with the ducks on them,” says Fog-o’-War, “are provided by FowlTowels. They’ve also worked with Wimbledon.”
“I mean as in I’m trying to move but I can’t move. I see myself moving in my head but I can’t move. I really fuckin’ see it. Y’know?”
“This is a La-Z-Boy recliner.”
“I’ve still got my arms. I’ve still got my brain. I’ve still got my muscles. So why the fuck can’t I move? Huh?”
“The patent for the ReelTimeRez-Sponse™ Haptic Feedback vests he made us wear, fun fact, belongs to Raytheon. Heard of them?”
“Actually — not at all like ket. Now that I think about it. It’s more like when you’re in a dream and you know there’s a monster coming and you can’t move. Know what I mean? When you can feel its hot breath at your neck and you’re screaming at your legs and they just will not fuckin’ move a millimeter. What if a villain came through here right now?”
“And now that you mention it the drones belong to Lockheed Martin.”
“This is what they want. They’re jealous. They know if they gave me half a chance I’d be on all those fuckin’ posters, all those fuckin’ commericals instead of them.”
“And those quote-unquote healthy snacks in the vending machines? You know outside the cafeteria? All owned by General Mills, baby.”
“Just fuckin’ forest green with envy, man.”
“Except the Slurshalot stuff, obviously.”
“Forest fuckin’ green.”
“. . .”
“Pisselmaster better watch his fuckin’ back.”
“. . .”
“. . .”
Jan. 7
Cornix says today’s lesson involves chess. She leads Alana to an office, says, “Yes, I actually have an office, believe it or not.” She flops a green and eggshell vinyl board onto a coffee table and lines up ebony and ivory pieces while her neck jumps in girth and length, rhino to giraffe and everything in between. The pace at which she’s performing these switches Alana’s never witnessed before. A blur of transfiguration. Any chance to win seems important.
“The thing about chess,” says Cornix, “is it’s all known knowns. What you see is what you get. This is what I want you to learn. This is what will be on the test. What you want to do, when assessing any potential threat is consider first the known knowns. . . .”
She goes on to explain the rules of the game, how the pieces move, etc. (although never exactly what a “known known” is), and Alana starts as white in her first ever game. On her time Cornix joggles her backward legs, whaps flippers and hooves against the ground, so hard and constant the sole window rattles in its frame.
Fifteen moves later it’s quite even considering Alana’s newcomer status. Alana castles and grins at Cornix as if expecting praise. Cornix yanks the board away and sends the kings and queens and so spiralling under the low light. Alana Schrieck shrieks.
“There are no known fucking knowns!” says Cornix, a tiger down her throat. “What the fuck am I talking about!”
“Wha . . . ?” says Alana.
Breathing deep: “Alana. You need to know. You aren’t supposed to know yet but it’s not like I can lie to you. We are aware of a situation in Sùd. . . . Jesus I cannot fucking believe it. Why now? God — why now? Alana, you must listen closely: the Redcoats are coming.”
1. To be specific Cartoon Network’s Young Justice, created in 2010 by Brandon Vietti and Greg Weisman. It proved to be a smash hit with the pair. They sat slack-jawed for eight hours before the screen till they reached episode twenty-one, “Image,” at which point they stopped, for they realized it was too great an act to follow.
“Image” opens with a trio consisting of Red Tornado, Batman, and Martian Manhunter informing Black Canary (who has been working hitherto as a martial-arts trainer for the teen superheroes whose antics make up the bulk of the show’s action) and her romantic partner Green Arrow that there is “something [they] need to see.” They flick on footage of a sparring session between Black Canary and one Superboy, a.k.a. Conner Kent, an imperfect clone of Superman whose rescue from sinister biotech firm Cadmus constituted the show’s “inciting incident.” Then, after Canary has “won,” she says, “Almost had me that time, Connor. You deserve a reward.” And this reward involves, apparently, something of a makeout session. Here the showrunners leave us in the lurch, as it were, by cutting to the (short) theme song.
Upon returning to the action we find Green Arrow and Black Canary understandably upset. B.C. says, “That never happened!” at which point Batman informs her she needs to keep watching. As the video continues, the amorous Black Canary onscreen morphs into one Miss Martian, a.k.a. M’gann M’orzz; green-skinned, flying, shapeshifting mainstay of The Team, as it’s colloquially known; niece of Justice League titan Martian Manhunter; and new girlfriend of Superboy. Manhunter assures B.C. that this is only “a Martian game”; she doesn’t understand how this might harm human relations. (And the adult-minded audience thinks: kinky.)
Cut to: the Martian girl in question watching TV. What’s noteworthy is this show’s apparent protagonist bears a remarkable resemblance to Miss Martian’s “Earth disguise,” i.e., the shape she takes to avoid looking Martian and instead look Caucasian (I use “Caucasian” and not “White” for reasons that will become obvious). This protagonist even uses M’gann’s signature catchphrase: “Hel- lo, Megan!” But she switches the program off quick when in comes Black Canary, and we skip ahead to after she has explained why her “Martian games” might cause some offense. M.M. tells her regretfully that she understands. Just then, however, Batman comes over the intercom to tell all Team members that urgent business has come up.
All gathered in the briefing room (M.M., Superboy, Robin, Kid Flash. Notable exception being Aqualad, official leader of The Team and protege to Aquaman, who Batman says he is “busy helping”), Batman says the issue at hand is that Rumaan Harjavti, “democratically elected” president of Qurac, has allied himself with a certain Queen Bee, the “dictator” of Bialya. As a result of this alliance Harjavti now supports the “baseless claim” that Qurac and Bialya were once a single nation. Here B.M. plays footage of Bruce Wayne and Harjavti shaking hands (astute viewers will recall that Bruce Wayne and Batman are in fact the same person) as well as stock footage of Quraci citizens — some of whom are hijab-clad, it’s worth noting — protesting this new push for unification. The general consensus is that “something else is at work here,” since Queen Bee has the power to “enthrall most men,” and “some women.” It is our heroes’ job to figure it out.
So off we go to Qurac/Bialya in Miss Martian’s Bioship, only to stop when they spot from overhead the owner of an animal sanctuary and her son caught in some sort of stampede. “The Logan Animal Sanctuary . . . ?” asks Miss Martian. Our heroes land and superpowerfully subvert the stampede, and we realize the owner is none other than Marie Logan, star of M.M.’s sitcom. Her son wants to hang out with the superheroes and M’gann wants to meet her idol, so they agree to stick around. M.M. asks, “So what was it like to be Megan?” and the eventual answer is, “The person you saw on TV isn’t who I am.” Meanwhile the son, “Gar’”, tells the others about his mother’s obscure sitcom (“only one season,” he tells us) called Hello, Megan!
At this point, though, drones, presumably Bialyan, presumably unmanned, accost the sanctuary, and although they are quickly destroyed, the young son is injured in the process. His mother says he will need a blood transfusion, and the problem is no one has O- blood. M.M. points out eventually that she could morph her own blood to fit in the kid’s system, an act which will turn him into another hero, Beast Boy, portrayed most famously by Greg Cipes in 2003’s Teen Titans, spiritual predecessor to Young Justice. Meanwhile — since she needs “complete concentration” — the male heroes wait downstairs where the VHS for Hello, Megan!, is on deck. What follows is a series of revelations regarding M’gann’s methodology for creating her Earth identity. The Megan in the sitcom has a boyfriend named Connor (we remember it was Miss Martian who gave Superboy his human name to begin with), is a star cheerleader (M’gann has recently joined the cheerleading squad for the high school her secret identity, Megan Morse, attends), and, of course, is quick to go, “Hel- lo, Megan!” as she smacks her forehead. (There is a little “easter egg” at the end of the frankly quite catchy theme song: Hello, Megan! ’s creator is someone by the name of Greg Vietti, ha ha ha.)
As the boys stand around dumbstruck, going, “It must be a coincidence,” M’gann, having completed her medical duties, returns, and in Kid Flash’s race to conceal the fact that they, for all intents and purposes, have “figured her out,” he switches on by pure chance a live press conference from Harjavti, and in the background is visible one Psimon (pronounced just like “Simon”), longtime psychic foe of The Team. “[Psimon] must be controlling [Harjavti],” they assert.
So we find them in the next scene infiltrating the Presidential Palace, and once they’ve ascertained that Harjavti has indeed been the victim of some kind of mind-whammy, they encounter an unnamed military leader who insinuates that he will tell the world it was them, the “American heroes,” who assassinated the president, after he has done away with both Harjavti and all his “saviors.” While The Team battles the rogue Quraci/Bialyan military, M’gann goes to find Psimon. She encounters him in a defunct theater, where he catches her off-guard, and says something to the effect of, “I will use your greatest weakness, Miss Martian, to defeat you,” and gives her a bit of a brain-blast, which turns her into a grotesque white-pink creature. The Team, sensing trouble, rushes to her aid, but are soon put down. We first believe it was Psimon who incapacitated the male contingent of The Team, but he implies it was in fact Miss Martian engaging in a bit friendly fire in order to keep her friends from discovering her “true self.” Is this white monstrosity, we are left to wonder, M’gann’s “natural state”?
There’s a psychic-battle during which Psimon forces onto M’gann a hallucination featuring her friends’ and family’s potential reactions to discovering this disgusting “true self.” They kick her first off The Team, and then back to Mars. Faux Connor goes, “Love you? I can barely look at you!” This series induces M.M. to unleash a kind of ultra brain-blast which renders Psimon catatonic.
Cut to: Harjavti exchanging terse words with Queen Bee, who came to the Quraci capital under the impression it would lead to productive diplomatic discussion — only, this is not in fact Queen Bee but M’gann morphed into her shape, mimicking her voice! The status quo is restored. The Wayne Foundation is free once more to do business with the Quraci government.
Then, back at the Logan Animal Sanctuary, The Team confronts M.M. about how they know she’s stolen her look, and she tells him she’s sorry, and that it’s time for her to show them her “true self.” We expect for her to return to her grotesque “natural state,” but she only goes bald, which is enough to satisfy her Team, who expect this easy resolution. Connor says something like, “I love you, Megan. Not your appearance.” Yeah yeah yeah, we think. Megan, pleased with her lie, goes to check on the injured Gar’, and discovers in his sickroom none other than the realQueen Bee, who informs M.M. that she will tell everyone the pale-monster secret if she does not do as she asks. Credits.
“Postmodern,” said Alana (which, there’s lots to unpack there ). “Hauntological,” said Melvin (probably misunderstanding the term). They agreed the episode seemed to indicate something about US foreign policy. Was Harjavti an analogue, perhaps, for Saddam Hussein, a strong ally of the US during the Iran-Iraq War of the 80’s, only to become something worse than Satan in the Gulf War? The TV motif seemed to support this claim. Or were Qurac and Bialya more akin to Israel and Palestine?
We could go on . . . but won’t. [<-]
2. The logistics of providing these vacations to members of the Protectorate can get complex. They are afforded, of course, only to those lucky enough to land in the pockets of the country where “crime” can be left to fester a few days or so without massive destruction/loss of life. Essentially what’s pertinent to Enmity’s case is the local chapter of the PRT has worked it, somehow or another, to ensure she’s unbothered by either fans or paparazzi while home, to ensure she gets the rest necessary to, you know, be ready just in case. (Odds are this wasn’t particularly difficult — Enmity’s not exactly on Wheaties boxes. Or at least not yet.) [<-]
3. It is necessary to be a Melchizedek Priest to perform baptisms, and to become a Melchizedek Priest you must first of all be a man. [<-]
4. Funny bit of synchronicity(?) here: Dan Reynolds started Imagine Dragons after getting kicked out of BYU for engaging in premarital sexual intercourse.[<-]