Useful Information

I’m not normally one for pinned posts, but this is all info/links I can’t figure out how to code into my blog’s sidebar so, here we go:

DISCORD SERVER - I have one of these now.  It’s open to readers from all fandoms - if you wanna chat with me or other readers about my fics, or just want a space to chat with me, come on over!

FAQ - Want to know what permissions are open for interacting with my fics?  Want to know my requests policies and what I will and won’t write?  It’s all available here.

#PROMPTS - Want to send a prompt but struggling to think of something?  You can find a variety of pre-made lists here.

OTHER LINKS

Zara applied the last of the foil to her roots and stuck her tongue out at her reflection. Her reflection stuck its tongue back at her, silver tongue bar easily visible, before she grinned, feeling the familiar tap of metal against the back of her teeth as the piercing disappeared back inside her mouth.

The sink looked like a warzone, but that wasn't unusual. Zara hadn't let her hair return to its natural colour in years, and had no intention of changing that, now. If she was honest, it had been bleached white so many times to make a beautiful base for her vibrant colours that the original colour would struggle to survive.

Electric blue was far superior to the old, blonde mess, anyway, especially when she spruced it up with a few more colours for contrast. Outside of the foiled roots, which would later be turning blue to match the base of the rest of her hair once the bleach had leeched away any natural colour that could get in the way of her preferred colour, the shock of blue was currently liberally interspersed with bright red and gold streaks, more intense towards the tips and all but disappearing as they got close to her crown.

It was a glorious mess and she loved it.

Someone knocked on the bathroom door.

"You're taking forever!" her sibling complained. "If you don't get out soon I'm calling Raoul!"

"Raoul loves me!" Zara called back. Their head counsellor did, although he would still frown at her and pull her out of the bathroom. She wasn't about to admit that, though. "I'll be out when I'm done and not before!"

Just to be safe, she double-checked that the door was locked. She still had to apply the new coat of dye once the bleach had done its work, and Zara didn't believe in time wasting.

The basin was already full of colour, because what better time to prepare the dye than while waiting for the bleach to set in? So what if it meant the ceramic got its own permanent dye while it waited. Blue was a cool colour. Cabin seven could do with more blue.

The newest camper was gangly, only eleven but already showing signs that he was going to grow up to be pretty tall, if he grew up at all.

Phoebe knew she was being fatalistic, when she looked at the kid with scratches and a torn sleeve where something had slashed at him as he'd made the last, desperate sprint to camp, but she'd been having bad feelings about the way the war is going. A quest of four left camp only yesterday, Annabeth Chase of all people breaking the rules (then again, the younger girl tended to do that if it suited her, more than she would admit to), and if that wasn't a bad omen, Phoebe didn't know what was.

Being a daughter of Apollo, she liked to think she knew at least something of bad omens, even if she didn't have any more prophetic powers than the nearest rock - just dreams, but everyone in cabin seven knew where those dreams came from, and it wasn't them. She knew words, though, and the connotation between four and death, and she didn't have to be a prophet to know that the war was getting more intense.

Everyone knew that the prophecy said something about a big three kid turning sixteen, and maybe Thalia had dodged that by joining the Hunters, but Percy didn't have that out and he'd survived two summers already. Next summer would hold his sixteenth birthday, if he held out that long. This summer involved the Labyrinth springing up in the middle of camp, or close enough to it, and that was its own disaster.

Rumour had it that even Clarisse refused to go in there, and the daughter of Ares could be called many things, but a coward had never been one of them.

Phoebe eyed the newest camper, all gangly and slightly bloodied, and worst of all untrained, and hated herself for thinking that he'd joined camp at the worst time if he'd wanted to live. She knew he hadn't known that, that something had driven him to come to camp now, but that didn't make it any better. If anything, it made it worse.

Then the universe, the gods, whatever, decided to make it even worse, as the boy stumbled and golden light lit up the air above his head, solidifying into the all-too familiar golden lyre, and Phoebe's stomach dropped like a stone, far faster than the rest of her body as she fell into the automatic kneel, because that meant that this new kid that was probably going to die was her little brother.

His satyr guide stumbled away from him a step or few, always nervous about being the protector when the lyre appeared, but did their duty with a thin and reedy bleat. "Hail Sam Clair, son of Apollo."

The boy - Sam - had the same confused face all new campers got when they were claimed (the lucky ones who were claimed, and Phoebe knew she only needed to look in the direction of cabin eleven and she'd see multiple disgruntled and jealous faces), but he was injured and also her new sibling, and she was closest.

With a sigh, she dragged her feet forwards as the satyr fled. "Sam, was it?" she asked, and he nodded, looking up at her with wide, brown eyes. "Phoebe, daughter of Apollo, which makes me your sister." She put her hand on his shoulder and started to push him forwards. "Infirmary first," where Lee would be, so she could palm off their new youngest on the head counsellor and walk away before she got attached.

She wasn't getting attached to anyone new until the war was over.

Clara had only been in camp for six weeks herself, so the whole demigod experience was still new to her. It was certainly taking some adjustment as she got used to the idea that her absent father was a god, and not just that, but also the reoccurring figure in her dreams for as long as she could remember.

Not so absent after all, then.

On top of that, she was also still getting used to living in America, surrounded by English-speakers and very few German speakers (and even less that had a proper accent). Her English was getting a significant work out, though, because she refused to hide behind the convenience of Ancient Greek for mutual communication. Clara liked to know things, and as most people in the camp spoke English, that meant she needed to, too.

The cabin's newest arrival also didn't speak English natively. Lyam spoke it, and spoke it well, at least to Clara's ears, but he spoke Spanish better. Like her, he was also a watcher more than a talker, though. His hands were always busy with something, often a Rubik's Cube but sometimes other things instead, little fidget toys that took most of his attention.

Clara had never been able to do a Rubik's Cube. She'd tried, a few times, and had even looked up how to do them, but no matter how many times she checked and re-checked the instructions, something always went a bit awry. Lyam, on the other hand, seemed to be trying to beat the world record for solving one as his hands kept moving, spinning the sections with familiar clacking noises too fast for Clara to keep track, until all the faces were the same colours and the puzzle was finished.

He didn't leave it finished, though, immediately messing it back up again to start all over, somehow yanking the whites into their cross before magicking the corners into place and moving on to the rest of the colours. It all looked like the theory that Clara had memorised, but unlike her attempts, he never seemed to make a mistake.

She sat next to him. "Show me," she said, skipping greetings, because she was curious, and maybe Lyam would be able to show her where she kept going wrong.

Lyam jumped, clearly not expecting anyone to interrupt him, even though he was watching the surrounding campers as his fingers flew through the motions of solving the Rubik's Cube yet again. He scrutinised her for a minute, as though assessing why she wanted to learn, and if he thought it was a good enough reason, before he messed up the Cube again and shoved it into her hands.

"Sure."

What did Baird wear under his kilt?

It was a camp-wide mystery, and one Baird enjoyed aggravating. It hadn't even occurred to him, when he'd first arrived and stubbornly refused to exchange his kilts for trousers because that was his cultural clothing and he wasn't ditching it just because he was going to spend the next few years in America, that it would get people thinking, but it did.

Did he go so-called traditional, and have nothing underneath? Or was he more conservative, and wore undergarments like most people at camp (Baird was pretty sure at least some of the kids went commando underneath their trousers, but trousers weren't kilts, and so apparently no-one was interested in that)? Quite frankly, it wasn't anyone's business, but Baird had always had a bit of a mischievous streak, which meant there was only one thing to do.

He made it a mystery. Anyone who asked him directly was given a grin and a "wouldn't you like to know?", and anyone who tried hard to actively sneak a peak underneath his kilt discovered that Scotsmen knew well how to make those peaks all but impossible to take.

His siblings were particularly frustrated by it, because Baird always made sure to get changed out of sight, where no-one could tell if there were or weren't undergarments involved, and while siblings would be siblings, which meant extreme levels of chaos, there were still some lines that weren't crossed.

Not that that stopped certain siblings snooping in his chest of drawers to see if he owned underwear, but while they had proven the existence of underwear, so far no-one had any proof whether or not he wore them.

Baird had great fun making sure they never got any proof, one way or the other.

Everything hurt, but it was the sort of hurt where it wouldn't last too long before it all faded away - although that wasn't a good thing, because Owen knew that it wasn't the pain that was going to fade, but him.

No regrets, though. Well, maybe a couple, like not getting to see his Mom again, and the fact that he wasn't the only one dying, or already dead. He'd seen siblings and friends fall, and he hadn't been able to heal them because he'd been too busy fighting for his own life.

That was a lost fight, too. The same abilities that had let him help people for so long were telling him now that it was his time to go to the Underworld. Maybe he'd make it to Elysium, going out the way he had. What was more heroic than fighting for the gods, after all? No-one had ordered him to come back and fight. He'd left camp years ago, more than a decade ago, but when the rumours had reached him about this war, about the children that were going to be fighting for it, he couldn't do nothing.

Well, he'd done something, same as the other dead and dying adults around him. Hopefully, it had been enough. Hopefully, they'd managed to cull the army's numbers down to something the children could fend off. Hopefully, he wasn't going to die in vain.

It would be nice if the pain-fading part of dying would hurry up, though. Owen knew he was beyond saving, torn up and hot-and-cold where his insides met the cool New York air, but he was beyond moving, beyond doing anything except waiting, and patience had never been one of his stronger suits.

He had long since lost track of time since Kronos' army had left him in their dust. It was daylight, now, with his father's sun streaming down to highlight the city, but he didn't know how long it had been sunny for, or if his slips in and out of awareness had hidden an entire day from him.

There was movement, feet running through the battlefield, or what had been one. He couldn't focus clearly, but he saw the fuzzy figure of someone, bright orange familiar even though he hadn't seen that shade for years, come to a stop near him.

"This is horrible," a girl's voice rasped. "I don't- I don't even know these people." She stumbled forwards, and Owen felt clumsy fingers on his wrist. "Hello? Can you- I think that's a pulse, that's a pulse, right?" she mumbled, seemingly to herself.

Owen was past being able to respond, but that didn't stop her. "You- you're gonna be okay, whoever you are. My- my name's Nessie, and I'm gonna- I'm gonna go get some bandages, okay? You stay still. Don't move."

Bandages weren't going to be of much use, not any more, but Owen couldn't tell her that, just like he couldn't tell her that he couldn't move. All he could do was lay there as the teenager - why was she alone, did that mean the war was won? - tried to fuss and not panic, spewing nonsense as she staggered to her feet and ran off.

Yvonne sighed, pulling the strap of her shoulder bag until it sat more snugly in the hollow between her shoulder and neck. The trip had been long and tiring, but it was nice to visit another part of the world. She wasn't as much of a stargazer as some of her siblings, but the Spanish National Observatory had a great deal of published works that made for an interesting annual read, and as her flight to Greece involved an overnight layover in Madrid, she'd decided she might as well take advantage of her brief stop in Spain with a pre-booked visit to the Royal Observatory.

A young brown-haired girl ran past her as she made her way through the neighbouring park, giggling as she was chased by several other youngsters around her age, shouting in strings of Spanish. Yvonne didn't speak Spanish, but it wasn't so far away from French that she couldn't get the gist of the words.

"Give it back, Ziva!"

"Catch me first!"

"Go that way, head her off!"

Yvonne didn't know what the girl - Ziva - had stolen, but it all seemed to be in jest, so she left the children to their chaos as she continued her trek across the park and towards the Observatory.

The park was busy, but above the laughter of young children and the whisper of light wind in the trees was the sound of a mellow instrument. A cello, if Yvonne's years in cabin seven surrounded by musicians had taught her anything. It wasn't loud, or obstrusive, but Yvonne had always loved listening to her siblings play.

She had some time before she was supposed to be at the Observatory for her visit. A brief detour, following the sound, had her stumbling across a young man perched on a stool, eyes closed as his bow danced across the strings of his instrument.

The piece was familiar, and with a small smile, she sat herself down on a nearby bench and listened, not interrupting. To mortals, it was likely a pleasant but unfamiliar tune, but despite being an instrumental variation, Yvonne would always recognise a camp favourite.

When it finished, she clapped lightly, and he looked at her, his eyes widening as he caught sight of her throat. Yvonne had never got out of the habit of wearing her old camp necklace; her students thought it was quaint, and the fact that several of the designs came from Greek mythology, as far as mortals were concerned, meant that no-one batted an eyelid at a lecturer on Greek history wearing them.

This young man clearly didn't wear his any more, but there was nowhere else where he would have learnt to play that tune.

"Cabin Seven?" Yvonne asked him in English, shifting closer. He met her eyes and nodded.

"You?" he asked, and she smiled at him, at her little brother.

"Me too," she said, "although I was never the best at music."

He shrugged. "Not everyone is," he agreed, because their father was the god of too many things for them all to be good at the same couple of things. "Xavier."

"Yvonne."

OC Ficlet Asks

Okay, I'm bored, I'm in a short fic writing mood, and I'm being drawn towards my ocs right now. Problem is, I have a lot of them and am getting decision paralysis on who to pick, so I'm asking for help here:

Send me a letter of the alphabet (or two, max 3 per ask, duplicate letters allowed) and I'll write a short snippet featuring an oc (or two/three) whose name(s) begin with that letter!

If you want, you can also send a short prompt (couple of words max) with it, but that's just an optional bonus.

I'll be prioritising Apollo kid ocs but if I don't have one with that letter I'll branch out to other campers!

These won't be long, I just have an itch to write something.

Remembrance

Kayla huffed, dragging the box out from underneath the bench.  Damn musicians, shoving all their stuff in the area that was supposed to be her nook, and especially damn the musicians that were also head counsellors that had enabled it.

Also Will, because Will hadn’t been a musician but he’d still let it happen (and Michael, but Kayla would always forgive Michael anything).  No more.  Kayla was head counsellor now, and even if it was only for her final year in camp, this nook at the back of the cabin was going to at least have space for her to stuff all the annoying things like chore schedules.

She wasn’t Austin, or Alice, or Will (or Michael).  She wasn’t having that stuff in her personal part of the cabin, stressing her out with duty­-based things in her safe, stress-free bunk.  Not a chance.  It could get banished to the back of the cabin like she knew other cabins did, for her to pick up when she had to and ignore when she didn’t.

Well, Kayla was realistic.  She wasn’t going to get all of the instruments out of there; there was an entire orchestra’s worth, at least, and several of them were large and heavy, or otherwise not easily moveable – she sent the harp and the full sized drum kits a half-hearted glare, knowing full well that she was never going to win a fight with those particular sisters over the placement of their main instruments.  Still, she could at least clear the flutes that hadn’t been used in years – Kayla didn’t think she’d ever seen any of them come out – off of the desk and find a different cranny to stow them in.

The same went for the crates worth of sheet music stowed under the desk, which was what she was currently trying to wrangle.  For being simple sheets of music, they got heavy when there was a lot of them, rather like a whole pile of target faces all at once, and it took more than a bit of pulling and shoving before she got them moved over enough that she could pull a chair up and sit in it without her legs being crammed against crates.

The True Story of Atlantis

“Hey, Will?”

“Mmm?” he asked, only half-listening to his younger sister as he finished counting up how many boxes of band-aids they still had in the infirmary, and calculating how many more they would need to see them through the new summer.  “What’s up, Gracie?”

She’d only been back at camp for a few hours, one of the first of the summer campers to descend, but Will had welcomed her back already, so this wasn’t her angling her way in for a greeting the way some of his siblings tended to if he didn’t head that off – this was only Gracie’s first return to camp, and Will wasn’t going to let that become a game of hers while he was in charge if he could help it.

The preteen jumped up onto the desk next to his pile of counted boxes, swinging her feet.  They kicked against the furniture in a regular rhythm, because of course they did.  Gracie loved making anything into a drum, even if it was furniture with her own flailing feet as the sticks.

“Mom and I watched a movie last night,” she said, with none of the homesickness some kids had when talking about their mortal parents so soon after leaving them.  Will hoped that meant she was going to settle in well this summer – with no godly shenanigans (there had better not be any godly shenanigans) going on this time, Will was hoping for a calmer year for once.

Consequences

Lee was furious.

It was an unfamiliar feeling.  He irritated sometimes, and frustrated, and sometimes even angry, but fury?  That wasn’t one of his normal emotions, not something he thought he’d ever actually felt before, but what else could it be?  What else was the feeling of something bubbling up inside him violently, seething through his veins and making his teeth ache as they clenched without his permission, if not for pure, unabated, fury?

But Lee couldn’t show it.

He was an awful liar, and he’d never known if that was a side effect of his truth-sensing, something else from his dad, or just an unrelated part of his personality, but being head counsellor and head healer had taught him how to push feelings down, out of sight until it was safe to show them.  And now?  Now was not safe.

His dad was frustrated, too.  Maybe angry, but if he was, Lee couldn’t tell.  Even if he was, he wasn’t lashing out, either, not in a way that mattered.  Apollo could spout lies about regretting his intervention in the war, in wishing he hadn’t when it had so clearly got him punished, but that was all they were.  Lies.

Lies didn’t hurt Lee anywhere near as much as cherry-picked truths did.  Even if it had forced him to admit his secret to his siblings, promise them that their dad didn’t mean the injured words he was lashing out.  They were all familiar with frustration, with lashing out in anger – gods knew Michael did it enough, even if he’d got a lot better at taking it out at inanimate objects that people than when he was ten.  They just weren’t familiar with it from their dad’s mouth.

Source of Knowledge

Will found them after Apollo and Meg had gone into the woods.

Maybe he should have found them earlier – it had been a whole day, he thought, since they’d gone, and there certainly wasn’t any excuse to have not tracked them down before he did – but he hadn’t.  He’d had other things on his mind, things like injured campers and missing siblings and a finally-sleeping mortal father, even if Apollo’s sleep had been restless at best.

He still hadn’t been actively looking for them when he’d stumbled across them.  There was a whole nest of things – a flashlight, blankets, a discarded but still full water canteen – but the ones that caught Will’s attention were the same things he’d first registered as missing the previous night, when he’d gone to bed in a cold and empty cabin.

Over the years, cabin seven had acquired a large collection of books on Apollo.  Will was pretty sure some of them had been written by long-gone older siblings, and at least one had the distinctive handwriting of Chiron.  Others were more modern, typed instead of handwritten, on paper instead of fading parchment, and even papyrus.  Cabin six might be known for their library, but they weren’t the only cabin with a god associated with books and learning and knowing things.

Beyond Help

“I’m sorry, Will.”  Will swallowed at the despondent sound in Miranda’s voice as he forced himself to look at her.

She still had her fingers buried in the soil of the planter on the window sill, but there was no sign of the usual spark of life the daughter of Demeter could bring.  The flowers stayed drooping and faded, as though they were mere moments from losing their petals and drying up into the shrivelled brown stems of dead plants.

It was normal, a part of nature.  Will was familiar with the seasonal nature of plants the same way most people were, used to different flowers blooming at different times of the year, always with some colour to display proudly somewhere.

He had never, ever, seen these flowers wilt before.  Logically, he knew that they weren’t the exact same flowers that he’d first seen when he was seven – they’d moved around, had different shapes and clusters – but whatever happened to cause those changes always happened without his notice.  Will suspected overnight, when the flowers took on a silvery hue in the moonlight, but he’d never seen them to prove it.

They were his dad’s sacred flowers, as eternal as the god himself.  In eight years, they’d never faltered.

After the Setting Sun

In the glow of the campfire, Chiron smiled fondly – and with more than a little bit of amusement.  The cycle was so familiar to him after so many centuries that it was obvious what was coming, but to the children with their infinitely shorter lifespans and experience to match, it was going to come as a surprise, at least until Will begrudgingly recalled the last time it had happened.

The sun was setting, leaving the flickering flames of every colour and then some to take the lead on lighting up the demigods’ world the same way it did every night, especially in the summer when the camp was at its peak capacity, and with the setting sun came changes.

It was common knowledge amongst campers that Apollo’s children got more and more lethargic the further past sunset it got.  Of course, the older, experienced ones could force themselves into activity during the night if circumstances demanded it (it was a burden the head healers bore, and Chiron wished that sometimes there weren’t medical emergencies that needed more than his learned training to heal – Apollo had taught him everything there was to know, but some things could not be replicated no matter how much knowledge the practitioner held).  The younger ones, however, were another story entirely.

Most of Apollo’s children were older, when they arrived.  Apollo didn’t like to separate his children from their mortal parents until it was necessary, so most of cabin seven’s new arrivals were eleven or twelve, in the wake of the promise Percy had extracted from the gods.  Before that, some of them had been thirteen, or occasionally older.  Children of Apollo arriving earlier usually indicated that something was wrong, or otherwise out of the ordinary (not many of his children were abused, because Apollo had a good sense for danger when it came to children, if not for himself, but there were other reasons, like untimely deaths, that could force an earlier arrival).

Hide and Seek

Michael didn’t know what he’d expected, but it wasn’t this.

More fucking big eared furry menaces hounding him with the bows that he just wished he could get his hands on?  He’d rather not because they meant trouble, but they were a possibility.

Brainwashed humans and stupid cyclopes working together to pin him down and drag him back to his dressed-up fucking prison?  Second most likely, and preferred out of the two – even without a weapon he had a chance of wriggling past them.

The horse?  Fuck off, but also a known quantity.  Same for the deluded creepy freak that called himself an emperor-god and kept telling Michael he was going to replace Apollo.  If he never saw either of them again it would be too fucking soon, but so far his luck hadn’t been that good.

It hadn’t been good at all.  If it was, he wouldn’t have been stuck on these fucking boats for the past two years.  Michael was very, very sick of water everywhere he looked.  There was land around them at the moment, some bay or other, although he had no idea which one.  He didn’t care, either, as long as he could finally get away, and there had been enough noise going on that something was happening, and he had another chance to slip away – if he could get onto one of those landing boats unnoticed.

Then the lightning had struck the boat he was on, blowing apart enough of it that the freaky sound-proofing that Michael hated so much cracked open and the noise of fighting was right there.

Lightning.  Striking a boat.

Michael had been a demigod long enough to know that lightning didn’t just strike for no reason.

Going Back

Returning to London felt weird.  Yan hadn’t been there for years, not since they were on the cusp of thirteen and facing their second sudden migration to another country for their own safety, although at least that time they hadn’t been alone.

They weren’t alone this time, either, which was helpful because they’d spent all of a year in England before jetting off to America and Camp Half-Blood, and six years of living separated from most of the mortal world entirely.  True, Jerry also hadn’t really spent much time outside of camp during those six years, either, but unlike Yan, he had the muscle memory and nostalgia of peak time London to fall back on as he led them through streets that were familiar but only vaguely.

Yan was going to have to relearn the quirks of the English transportation system if they were going to spend three years here.  They hadn’t yet settled on which university, exactly, they were going to attend, but they had no intentions of staying in America, and they did have fond memories of their year in London.

Maybe they wouldn’t live in London this time around, though.  Living in a busy city after six years of camp seemed like a bad idea, even without the justified paranoia of monsters lurking.  Britain wasn’t as bad as the Mediterranean for quantity or strength of monsters, but it was still part of Europe, and all of Europe trumped America for monster danger.  Yan wasn’t entirely certain why, but they had theories, and their dad hadn’t disproven or dismissed any of them when they’d brought them up.

There's An Endless World To Rediscover

There were some memories that just didn’t fade.  Austin had had a few of those through his life, but the one that stuck with him right then was the staccato of a breaking bridge, the crescendo of water erupting from the river below, and the silence of bare cables.  Many of his memories of Michael were fading, the way memories tended to, but that one was still pin sharp, even two years later.  At this point, Austin was pretty certain it had cemented itself a place in his reel of memories for good.

This moment was going to join it.

There had been no staccato or crescendo ahead of the silence, just the usual ebb and flow of chatter between siblings, liberally sprinkled with interjections from their dad.  It didn’t make it any less dramatic as, one by one, their attention was caught by the new arrival.

Michael looked rough.  He looked tired, and dirty, like the two things he needed most in the world were a hot shower and his bed.

He looked alive, and Austin was glad for Will and Apollo jumping in, breaking the silence and proving that Austin wasn’t suddenly hallucinating his dead brother.

The rest of the day was a blurred whirlwind, one that Austin couldn’t tell anyone specifics of if asked.  Yes, he knew that Michael had reclaimed his old bunk above Will, yes he knew that they’d filled an increasingly tired looking big brother in on the whole Roman side of things, and he even remembered that there had been happy birthday songs at the campfire, because apparently Michael’s birthday was close to Will’s.

Austin had never known that, although if he looked at a calendar he could understand why that had never come up before.  The only summer he’d known Michael had been the summer the war against Kronos had reached its peak, and things like birthdays hadn’t been deemed important.  They hadn’t celebrated Will’s that year, and now, remembering how bittersweet Will had been about it last year, and even that morning, Austin realised that the two of them had always had a joint celebration at camp, before the silence that had stolen Michael from them.

Now, he was back, and things were slotting back into place that Austin hadn’t even realised had fallen askew in the first place.