"But the world’s an ugly place. Buttering up the truth with ideas of fate, like we’re all pulled in by gravity to some predetermined result no matter what we do, doesn’t make it any better."

• While I always planned on having Hol Horse have an inner monologue about intending to ditch the group at Chicago IX, some of the context of this scene had to be redone from my initial outline because, as discussed previously, him leaving here wasn't part of my original plan. That being said, it did end up going well with the golf setting.
• Okay, for some context. About a year ago while I was still planning this arc, @allshaftsfall played Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach on stream with the intent of 100%ing the game. One of the game's achievements calls for you to get a low score on the minigolf minigame, centered around the alligator animatronic Monty. Shaft lost his mind trying to get this achievement. "Gator Golf" has since become something of a meme between us and our friends (most of which are probably reading this right now; hi!), and I knew I had to incorporate it into Iron Touch somehow. This informed several different things about the chapter, like Screaming Jay's appearance, Mr. Williams' golf clubs, and the moment where Mr. Williams is disappointed he didn't get a hole in one. I mean, hey, I was already doing a resort/beach arc anyways. Those places usually have golf courses.
• That being said, the golf course itself did end up changing a bit from start to finish. I originally planned on having it be a glow in the dark putt putt course like Gator Golf (which is, in my objectively correct opinion, the superior form of golf), but decided against it because I liked the visual of the sun setting as the chapter progresses, symbolizing Hol Horse losing all his options to go out with someone else (and drawing us closer to the next chapter). My next thought was to make the golf course feel "alive" somehow; like maybe slopes would form in the ground that would guide the ball to the hole or something. I decided against that because I felt like it made it seem like I was trying to hard to make Chicago IX feel like this weird, cryptid location that bends the rules of reality. We already have the giant spider car wash portal, we don't need a living golf course. I considered making this Mr. Williams' Stand ability instead, but I couldn't think of a good "mechanism" for how it would activate. The physicality of Stands is very important to me; the Stand can't just "do thing" because the user wants them to. There's gotta be something the Stand does that makes it work, or have it be part of the Stand's design. Plus, I wanted Mr. Williams' Stand to be less obviously tied to golf. Eventually I just settled on having it be a plain old golf course.
• Mr. Williams' half-afro hairstyle was inspired by a picture of a real person I found online (where someone was arrested mid haircut), but is also meant to symbolize how the stress of running Chicago IX is causing him to lose his hair. I also liked how it split down the middle, like how his Stand does.
• "What kind of a person just walks around with cough drops in their pocket?" Me. I'm person.
• Here's a video of what the club flip would look like, if you're curious.
• I rewrote the paragraph where Screaming Jay activates like two times in order to really sell the gross out factor of it. Iron Touch needs more body horror in it! I mean...not like this is the last bit of body horror we'll see this arc. Teehee.
• Originally I was very hesitant on adding an animal Stand user to Iron Touch because I didn't know what else I could do with the idea that Araki hadn't already done himself. I didn't want to make an animal Stand user just because, I wanted the fact that the character is an animal be relevant to the story. While I suppose you could replace Lucky with an old and or terminally ill human, I think the narrative of Mr. Williams restructuring Chicago IX around Random Access Memories works much better when it's his pet and not another human. I also didn't want Chicago IX's owner to be Random Access Memories' user because I thought the narrative of seeking out supernatural abilities for personal gain was too similar to Depeche.
• I had to fight every fiber in my body to not have Hol Horse say "Do me a favor and shut the fuck up" instead of "Do me a favor and shut the hell up." Even in a post Stone Ocean-dub society, I'm still only allowing myself one F-bomb in the fic, and I shan't waste it here!
• Shit's gonna start going down next chapter :)

• Brackish, the resident brainwasher that Mr. Williams mentions, is named after a song of the same name by Canadian heavy metal band Kittie. Originally this character had a generic name; making it a music reference was a last minute change made literally as I wrote these author's notes. I like the implication of Brackish being important enough to warrant a music reference.
• Mr. Williams is a weird one. Two of the collaborators on the album Random Access Memories were Pharrell Williams and Paul Williams (not related to each other). They're "co-references" of sorts. I'll add a Pharrell song to the playlist just to prevent things from getting too cluttered, but think of them both when you listen. Plus, I felt that the name William would be very fitting for a Fnaf inspired chapter.
• Mr. Williams' beta name was Screaming Jay. My initial idea for him was for him to constantly be whispering despite his name, maybe have him lash out into a yelling fit when he starts rambling, but I decided against it because that wouldn't show up well in the prose.
• Screaming Jay was named after American singer Screamin' Jay Hawkins. Honestly, I just wanted to put I Put a Spell On You on the playlist. Sadly, the Hocus Pocus version isn't on Spotify.
• Screaming Jay's beta name was The Romantic, after the American rock band The Romantics. This was another Fnaf reference; since their song Talking In Your Sleep was used extensively during promotional material for the movie. However, once I actually got to writing the chapter, I realized that I hated the sound of the name and decided to change it to something else.
• Lucky was named after the song Get Lucky from the album Random Access Memories.

• Right off the bat, I will say that I'm not super pleased with how this chapter turned out. It's one of those things where this has been in my head for years now, but I don't think I translated it super well to writing. I hope you guys like it more than I do!
• There was originally a longer segment of the cast hanging out together before Hol Horse gets there which sadly had to be cut to save on word count. This is the longest Iron Touch chapter to date and the only one to break 11k. It doesn't need any more fluff to make it longer.
• Believe it or not, originally it wasn't my plan to use Policy of Truth this arc. That only sprung about after I had Hol Horse get the shard in Chapter 24. Remember, Depeche and Policy of Truth were not in my original outline, so everything about them has been done by the seat of my pants.
• That bit with Hol Horse using the pen to demonstrate how Policy of Truth works was taken from a very famous scene in Liar Liar.
• Did someone say headcanons? This is basically Headcanons, The Chapter™, at least for Hol Horse. Let's go down the list:

1. Though the impromptu nature of the Chicago IX arc means that it didn't turn out exactly the way I originally planned, I always intended to introduce or at least reference a Stand agency in Iron Touch. In Stardust Crusaders, Avdol knows Gray Fly, Devo, and Midler by name and lists off their modus operandi to the rest of the cast (and the audience). That always struck me as weird. How would Avdol know these guys? That's where I got the idea for a "secret society" of Stand users, which later turned into an assassin agency that Enya pulled some of Dio's minions from, which later became SEES. I don't think Avdol was a SEES member, but probably kept an ear to the organization to study the other Stand users there. Avdol was lowkey a stalker in that regard.
2. This is often dismissed as cowardice, but Hol Horse is way more self aware than a lot of Dio's minions and therefore lasts much longer than basically all his contemporaries. To me, this says that he's a whooooole lot more experienced than most of Dio's other minions in both assassination gigs and Stand battles. That's why I had him start off his career as an assassin so young. It also adds an extra layer of tragedy and depth to his character, which Michelle lampshades.
3. I imagine a younger Gray Fly and Hol Horse having a similar relationship to Midler and Cascada, though I think Gray Fly was a lot less honest about mentoring Hol Horse that Midler with Cascada. A lot of Hol Horse's "always work in a duo" mentality probably comes from years of Gray Fly grooming and gaslighting him into believing that Emperor is much weaker than it actually is. That way, the two could go on missions together with Gray Fly would getting a higher cut of the pay because he's the "leader." Meanwhile, Midler actually does care about Cascada and actively keeps her out of the assassin life. Also, Gray Fly and Hol Horse both have animal-based names. I don't think either one of them goes by their real name.
4. "Half the time, I was out romancing girls from some of the wealthier families in the area." Remember Nena? Empress' user? Remember how she turns out to be an old fat lady wearing the skin of a young Indian noblewoman? Yeeeeah...I think they were originally two separate people. Hol Horse probably started romancing "Fake Nena" to gain access to her family fortune, which made "True Nena" jealous, prompting her to steal her skin (presumably with Empress). From a Watsonian perspective, this is the reason that Hol Horse no longer dates Stand users. Whether or not it's because he genuinely mourned "Fake Nena's" death or because he felt slighted by being catfished by "True Nena" is up for you to decide.
5. People in the Discord server have been asking why Emperor doesn't work in Iron Touch for a while now. I've heard theories on everything from the Masqueraders being involved to it being an analogy for erectile dysfunction. Well, here's your answer. Hol Horse shot himself in the head at the end of Stardust Crusaders, and this is a lingering side effect of that. Yes, I know the same thing happened to Avdol and he came out just fine, but A) Avdol only took one bullet while Hol Horse took three, and B) Hol Horse shot himself with his own Stand, which I think would do a lot more subconscious mental damage than getting shot at by someone else's Stand. This is also part of the reason why I'm so adamant about Demonic Heartbreak not being canon in Iron Touch. Not the only reason, but still a big one.
6. One thing you'll notice throughout the chapter is that Hol Horse avoids the subject of J. Geil for as long as he can. Whenever he asks Michelle if she's sure she wants to know all the details, he's at least partially doing it for her sake. While Hol Horse does have a sense of moral superiority over his less than savory partners (like J. Geil), I don't think someone like him, who gives Boingo a whole ass speech about never wanting to hurt a woman, would particularly enjoy hearing about someone raping and murdering an innocent teenage girl, much less having to work with them. So here he is, speaking to the niece of the girl in question. He knows that Michelle won't be happy to hear about what J. Geil did to Sherry (notice how the "rape" part was omitted in the chapter itself), so he keeps it from her not just because she'll be mad at him over it, but because he genuinely doesn't want to upset her.

• Stardust Crusaders has a very inconsistent timeline, with different official sources saying that it takes place in either 1987 to 1988 or 1988 to 1989. I ended up choosing the former because, in the grander sense of the fic, that gives Polnareff more time to get married and have Michelle and doesn't rush his romance with Marylou (which is very important to me!). The fic is built to accommodate both interpretations of the timeline, so if you're more of a fan of it being 1988 to 1989, just mentally replace the dates. I'm pretty sure there's only one other place in the fic where it's relevant, anyways, and we won't get there for a while.
• If you're confused why Hol Horse would be relieved that Tangerine was his Hamon coach, it's because here he's worried that it might've been Joseph, which would be bad news for him. Hol Horse only barely knows about the events of Phantom Blood through Dio and doesn't know anything about what happened in Battle Tendency, so he wouldn't have any reason to be worried about the Zeppeli name.
• The "Japanese fella" that Hol Horse mentions seeing Dio put a fleshbud in isn't an OC, it's Okuyasu's dad.
• All the movies Sara lists off at the end were taken from a list of Araki's top 20 favorite movies. Yes, even Shrek.
• The ending. My god, the ending. We went over this ending a lot during beta reading. My first draft had the chapter just...ending after the big lore dump, with convenient excuses to get Sara, Cab, and Rumor out of the room so that Hol Horse can ask Michelle if she's okay, and she (in an apt metaphor for me trying to figure out how to end the chapter) just shrugs. Obviously this ending sucked. We bounced a lot of ideas around in beta reader chat about what to do instead. My next draft literally had three proposed endings that we could use. Eventually, I settled on this one, where Hol Horse leaves the group after Michelle and Sara start fighting with each other. I'm still not super happy with how it plays out (if I'm being honest, I think both Sara and Michelle act kinda bitchy here), but, y'know. It works. The part at the end where Cab and Rumor say that they would've gone with Michelle if she left was a remnant of one of the scrapped endings and put back in by unanimous request of the beta readers. I did try working that in before Hol Horse decides to leave, but I didn't want to put Sara in a position where it seems like everyone else is ganging up on her for a couple reasons. First of all, even if Sara is pretty attached to Hol Horse, I don't see her ever picking him over Michelle. At this point in the story, though, she needs to vouch for Hol Horse. Second of all, for reasons I can't get into, Sara would really, really not take well to having everyone be so aggressively against her. It's not in a controlling way, it's just...well, like I said, I can't tell you right now.

• None this time