A Few Days Before…
I didn’t know what to say. I was flabbergasted, incredulous to the point of panic, and angrier than I think I had ever been in my entire life. I held my crackerjack Paranet ring in my hands, shaking slightly in abject fury.
Texas had decided to try to be winter tonight, and I sat with Midori in her new Prius, engine on and heater to full. A side of my brain mused at what I knew of the Wars of Faerie Courts and local meteorolgy and concluded that using the term “War” and “battlefront” to describe the switching extremes in Texas temperatures was apt on a number of levels. That musing, however, cost Midori her serious radio (or was it Sirius? Can’t remember) as the raging tide of my emotions found a weakpoint in my mental floodgates. Emotions are Power, even for minor Practioners like me, so it had easily been enough to hex whatever Star Trek-inspried dashboard on my best friends new car. Midori had sworn at that point, simultaneously calling me an unwholesome name and being thankful I hadn’t knocked out the engine or the heater. I had managed to cast my Paranet Relay spell thru my ring earlier without hexing anything only because Midori had wisely turned off the car until after I had finished the minute or so of incantation.
“Eri, Erica-chan,” Midori sing-songed in a dry pretty sarcasm that was utterly unique to her, “you blow out my iPhone again and you will kindly be walking home.” I cleared my throat and aoplogized as she continued. “What are you listening to back there anyway?”
I took a moment to compose myself. “A coup,” I whispered, barely believing the word myself.
“Oh. Wait, who is having this coup?”
“The Freakshow. Jamie’s Ex and Donna just ousted Belle for Head Honcho.” That had come out clearer, anger rising in my voice again.
“Eriiii…?” Midori sing-songed again. I took the hint and kept my boiling emotions in their internal kettle where they belonged.
About that time, the passenger door opened and the car rocked slightly as someone with a heavy scent of menthol ash and industrial cleaners climbed into the car in a hurry.
“Drive. Now.” Claret’s voice was strong and deliberate, and oddly lacking it’s usual hostility.
Midori took her time putting her seat belt back on in silent defiance, a frustrating tactic she occassionally used when Claret got too bossy.
“OhMyGod #*$%&)& Drive!” A sense of desperation took hold of Claret’s voice, and I could hear her leather pants squeak against the leather interior of Midori’s passenger seat as Claret turned back and forth, I believe, to look behind us. Midori sensed it at the same time I did and made appropriate haste.
After a few minutes, Claret turned back around to me in the back seat, still not wearing a seat belt. “You get all that?” she asked, tossing a plastic ring identical to mine into my lap.
“Yeah, I heard everything. Your clarity potion really helped.”
“Oh, yeah, sure,” Claret stammered, still unused to sudden insurgence of random non-reciprocal compliments in the couple of weeks all three of us had been living together. “But, so, what are you going to do? Are you going to tell?”
“God, Claret, this isn’t high school. Am I going to inform my friend that his raging child-abducting ex-wife is back in town? Yes. As I should. That’s why they didn’t invite me to their little shin-dig, because they knew I would tell Jamie about it. Do I think he will call down the Wardens and the Inquisition upon all of our heads? No.”
“Why not?” Midori and Claret asked together.
I just smiled my mysterious ass-kicking half-smile that I learned from my mother. “Because he won’t have to.”
A pregnant pause filled the car as we sped down the streets.
“But Erica,” Claret asked with obvious concern, “What about the Watches?”
Today…
Summer had won the battle if not the war in Dallas today, I noticed, as I walked in to Barbara’s shop on Bell. I opened my Sight, enough to scan the room and confirm the lack of interlopers and eavesdroppings, closed it again, then I tap-sticked my way to the front counter and rang the bell.
“Buenos Dia…” Something caught in Barbara’s voice as she rounded the corner from her office, stopping in mid-stride for the barest of moments when she had apparently caught sight of me. “Erica! Hermana! What brings you buy here today? Your regular order won’t be ready for another week.”
“You know damn well why I’m here…” I hadn’t meant to say it like that, all angry and anxty. I had come in prepared to be civilized and charming and to take a diplomatic approach, but something about that lost half-step ticked me off, and while I’m a wizard (ba dum ching) at controlling my emotions, they still get the better of me.
“Wha- but, Erica, you hav-” I cut her off by tossing a large ornate pocket watch on the counter between us.
Several years ago, Belle had come to me with a proposition: to create a stable, de-centralized Paranet Relay that would allow each of it’s members to keep contacted and informed during a time of crisis without giving away important secrets of it’s members, like where they were hiding, and that could operate at peak efficiency even if part of the Relay was compromised. And I had done it. My crowning achievement, my Magnum Opus, more than 6 years of research and planning, and it had been worth it. Three weeks ago in a ritual ceremony at the Dallas Heritage Village at Old City Park just south of I-30, ten or so Freakshow Confederates had pooled their efforts, both mundane and arcane, into a series of large expensive brass pocket watches, covered in bone dust and runes and braille and a bunch of other things to enchant them with a complex matrix of magics that would, I feel, be worthy of a medal. Granted I had originally designed the enchanting process to be done by all thirty-some-odd FC’s, but news of the Red Court war, recent spooky street shenanigans and my affiliation with a particular Warden had cause many of our more paranoid brethren to drop out and subsequently for me to dumb down the complexity on the appropriate magics… but I’m not bitter.
The concept had been simple: The Weasley grandfather clock from Harry Potter but in pocket watch form, with a comprehensive and uniform interface of heated runes, audible tones, colored ovals and static shocks. Shocks like bare feet on carpet shocks, don’t look at me like that. Anyway, the contraption would allow any watch to determine the general disposition of the watch’s owner (“traveling”, “Behind a Threshold”, “Mortal Peril”, “Dead” etc.) quickly and efficiently, provided you had the watch on you at the time. And if you learned the tones for each of the conditions, which it would emanate whenever you pressed hard enough in certain areas, you could use it without having to actually look at it, a big plus in my book. It had been hard, especially trying to enchant it on one night, it had been fraught with complications and drama, but it had been worth it. Even Donna had participated, briefly giving me a flicker of humanity from the bony bitch. It would no longer work as a regular watch, obviously, but any wearer of the watch could determine the safety of any other wearer, and, if they had the appropriate magics on their own, could ‘open a channel’ to any other watch. And if a watch should come under enemy possession, heaven forbid, all you had to do was discard it, walk away, and every other watch would simply display a “N/A” color, white I think, or a tone of about 350 Hz, the “dial tone” for anybody who didn’t know.
And that was precisely what I had just done, by tossing it on Barbara’s counter: discarded it. Barbara stared at it, or me, I’m not sure, but she didn’t speak for a while. I pulled out a small clean moleskin notebook and tossed that next to the Watch. Barbara started to say something but I interrupted her.
“I won’t be a part of anything that has Raven at it’s head. Or Donna, for that matter. Give to the watch to whoever you want, I already had Pia clear the settings on it and she knows how to reattune it to whoever might want it. But I won’t let anything, even something I masterminded and put six years worth of research into, be used to link back to me and stab me in the back. And if you’re smart, you’ll do the same with yours. That,” I tapped my finger on the notebook, “has all the ParaNet contact info out of Chicago and LA. I forwarded messages to the right people telling them to call you instead of me. I figured since you are pretty savvy with the whole social media thing already, that might be right up your alley. Anyway, all the stuff you need is in there. Maybe you could work some extra business out of the extra contacts, maybe, I dunno.” I let the sarcasm linger for a brief moment before I continued. Barb had opened the notebook and was leafing thru it as I finished saying what I needed to say.
(Side Note: I’ve noticed a lot of people lately just clammering up when I start to rant. Not out of fear or intimidation or respect even, they just let me get on my soapbox and let loose with whatever is pissing me off that week and they wait till I’m done like a car idling at a railroad crossing until the train goes thru. I caught my Physics prof doing it the other week, then Auntie Em for Sunday dinner, then Jamie when I called him about Raven. Not sure why, or if I should be offended or impressed… or both? Anyway…)
“I don’t think Raven knows about it, all the contacts I mean. Belle has a copy, so does Claret and Pallas. The ParaNet is a really good resource, I wouldn’t have been able to make the watches without it. And it’s important that we mini-leaguers stick together to keep out the major leaguers.”
Barbara quietly turned another page before she spoke. “So you are leaving us then, little hermana?”
I took a step towards the counter and put my hand where I had heard it a moment before, only missing by a little bit, and squeezed her hand reassuringly. “Hell no, ya’ll can’t get rid of me that easy. And I love you guys, well most of you, I… just think you’re dumb.” I said the last part half-jokingly to lighten the mood, and Barbara scoffed in a half-joking return. “I’ll be around, I’ll still hang out and do the Confederate thing with you guys in the Freakshow I trust, but I’m not going to do the Relay thing anymore. Seriously Barb, Raven is Bad News. She walked in to Atwater’s the other night all sad faced and pouty and woe-is-me, and ya’ll fell for it. The ‘horribly mentally abused wife, wronged by everyone and only seeking the love and return of her child’ routine, it’s a classic. And it’s a classic because it works.”
Barb sputtered for a moment. “How did you hear all that? We had wards up preventing such eavesdropping.”
I cocked my head a little towards her in that classic teenager ‘as if’ manner. It came across a little awkward, since I hadn’t exactly looked in a mirror in a while. But I had mastered that anxty body language at a young diva-ish age, so I think it came across ok. Barbara laughed under her breath again, shaking her head and making her long earrings chime pleasantly.
Barbara continued, intensity rising in her voice. "But she swore on her Power that she had been mentally manipulated by Eric, that she was acting against her own will. How… Why would we not believe her? If it looks like a duck, sounds like a duck, swears on it’s Power like a duck…" she made a gesture that was lost on me, I imagine it was the silent equivalent of “It’s a Duck!” so I proceeded from there.
“Don’t look! Listen!” I rang the bell on the counter on the last word to punctuate my point. "She never actually swore anything directly, she swore that what she had previously said “was true”, which was not about the mind whammy. I listen to a lot of old Detective audiofiction, like the Shadow, plus that’s all I do nowadays is listening since ya know" I waved my hand over my missing eyes, “so please trust me, I can follow verbal traps and feints with the best of them.”
“I don’t know, Erica, that seems insubstantial to me to just dismiss everything she said out of hand.”
“Then think about this: If she had been mind whammied, and she had been ordered to kidnap children and murder by a legit psychomancer, which I’m not saying he wasn’t, you know as well as I do what that would do to a person’s mind to act against they’re nature like that.”
“It’s not kidnapping if it’s your own, sweetie,” Barbara pleaded.
“She kidnapped Jamie’s secretaries kid too, as payment to a Goblin, did she mention that? I was there, I know she grabbed both kids. Goblin’s eat people, and Raven knows that. So you tell me, what kind of mother gives another child, any other child, to someone she knows will eat that child, and is ok with that?”
“But her mind was not her own-”
“But when a mind acts against it’s nature, even under duress and mind-whamminess, it resists. It tears itself apart to rationalize it’s actions, turning itself inside out if it has to. And even the strongest Talents I know could still not work complex magics like Opening a Way under that level of mental mojo. Magic is tied to who you are and what you believe. Nothing, for a woman anyway, is more tied to what and who we are than Motherhood. No Psychomancy in the world would have made any mother worth the name work _major magic _that she knew would lead to definite harm and death to another child, especially one close to age and friendship with her own son. Not without rendering her into a mental bucket full of Jello. You know it, I know it, and Raven knows it. Now you tell me, cause I obviously didn’t see her when she walked in, did she look like Jello to you?”
Barbara’s voice was even and terse, but the tone was clear. “No. No, she looked fantastic. Strong and Composed. Distraught, Sad, and Wronged, maybe…but not… damaged. I will need to research this some more to confirm what you have said, I don’t know as much about Psychomancy as you seem to think I do, but I understand your point now. Something is not Right.”
“Thank you, hermana, I appreciate that. I’m not saying that their argument for Belle’s ‘compromised state’ didn’t have its points, and I’m not saying that Raven and Jamie didn’t get into a fight, but I disagree with her implication that the so-called beatings were one-way. Raven is working a con, something is working her or she has something that’s helping her in a bad way, but she’s definitely deceiving you guys. Why else would she wait until Belle, who I think we can agree is probably the nicest caring and not power jealous one among us, was halfway around the world when this went down. I don’t know what she’s up to, and I’m going to figure it out.”
Barbara put the notebook beneath the counter where I knew she kept a small safe with a copper ring inlaid on the inside. “Maybe I will just save this watch until this clears up, yes?” Her voice had some of it’s usually frolic, one of the many reasons why I liked her, and my smile showed it.
“Maybe.”
I didn’t know what to say. I was flabbergasted, incredulous to the point of panic, and angrier than I think I had ever been in my entire life. I held my crackerjack Paranet ring in my hands, shaking slightly in abject fury.
Texas had decided to try to be winter tonight, and I sat with Midori in her new Prius, engine on and heater to full. A side of my brain mused at what I knew of the Wars of Faerie Courts and local meteorolgy and concluded that using the term “War” and “battlefront” to describe the switching extremes in Texas temperatures was apt on a number of levels. That musing, however, cost Midori her serious radio (or was it Sirius? Can’t remember) as the raging tide of my emotions found a weakpoint in my mental floodgates. Emotions are Power, even for minor Practioners like me, so it had easily been enough to hex whatever Star Trek-inspried dashboard on my best friends new car. Midori had sworn at that point, simultaneously calling me an unwholesome name and being thankful I hadn’t knocked out the engine or the heater. I had managed to cast my Paranet Relay spell thru my ring earlier without hexing anything only because Midori had wisely turned off the car until after I had finished the minute or so of incantation.
“Eri, Erica-chan,” Midori sing-songed in a dry pretty sarcasm that was utterly unique to her, “you blow out my iPhone again and you will kindly be walking home.” I cleared my throat and aoplogized as she continued. “What are you listening to back there anyway?”
I took a moment to compose myself. “A coup,” I whispered, barely believing the word myself.
“Oh. Wait, who is having this coup?”
“The Freakshow. Jamie’s Ex and Donna just ousted Belle for Head Honcho.” That had come out clearer, anger rising in my voice again.
“Eriiii…?” Midori sing-songed again. I took the hint and kept my boiling emotions in their internal kettle where they belonged.
About that time, the passenger door opened and the car rocked slightly as someone with a heavy scent of menthol ash and industrial cleaners climbed into the car in a hurry.
“Drive. Now.” Claret’s voice was strong and deliberate, and oddly lacking it’s usual hostility.
Midori took her time putting her seat belt back on in silent defiance, a frustrating tactic she occassionally used when Claret got too bossy.
“OhMyGod #*$%&)& Drive!” A sense of desperation took hold of Claret’s voice, and I could hear her leather pants squeak against the leather interior of Midori’s passenger seat as Claret turned back and forth, I believe, to look behind us. Midori sensed it at the same time I did and made appropriate haste.
After a few minutes, Claret turned back around to me in the back seat, still not wearing a seat belt. “You get all that?” she asked, tossing a plastic ring identical to mine into my lap.
“Yeah, I heard everything. Your clarity potion really helped.”
“Oh, yeah, sure,” Claret stammered, still unused to sudden insurgence of random non-reciprocal compliments in the couple of weeks all three of us had been living together. “But, so, what are you going to do? Are you going to tell?”
“God, Claret, this isn’t high school. Am I going to inform my friend that his raging child-abducting ex-wife is back in town? Yes. As I should. That’s why they didn’t invite me to their little shin-dig, because they knew I would tell Jamie about it. Do I think he will call down the Wardens and the Inquisition upon all of our heads? No.”
“Why not?” Midori and Claret asked together.
I just smiled my mysterious ass-kicking half-smile that I learned from my mother. “Because he won’t have to.”
A pregnant pause filled the car as we sped down the streets.
“But Erica,” Claret asked with obvious concern, “What about the Watches?”
Today…
Summer had won the battle if not the war in Dallas today, I noticed, as I walked in to Barbara’s shop on Bell. I opened my Sight, enough to scan the room and confirm the lack of interlopers and eavesdroppings, closed it again, then I tap-sticked my way to the front counter and rang the bell.
“Buenos Dia…” Something caught in Barbara’s voice as she rounded the corner from her office, stopping in mid-stride for the barest of moments when she had apparently caught sight of me. “Erica! Hermana! What brings you buy here today? Your regular order won’t be ready for another week.”
“You know damn well why I’m here…” I hadn’t meant to say it like that, all angry and anxty. I had come in prepared to be civilized and charming and to take a diplomatic approach, but something about that lost half-step ticked me off, and while I’m a wizard (ba dum ching) at controlling my emotions, they still get the better of me.
“Wha- but, Erica, you hav-” I cut her off by tossing a large ornate pocket watch on the counter between us.
Several years ago, Belle had come to me with a proposition: to create a stable, de-centralized Paranet Relay that would allow each of it’s members to keep contacted and informed during a time of crisis without giving away important secrets of it’s members, like where they were hiding, and that could operate at peak efficiency even if part of the Relay was compromised. And I had done it. My crowning achievement, my Magnum Opus, more than 6 years of research and planning, and it had been worth it. Three weeks ago in a ritual ceremony at the Dallas Heritage Village at Old City Park just south of I-30, ten or so Freakshow Confederates had pooled their efforts, both mundane and arcane, into a series of large expensive brass pocket watches, covered in bone dust and runes and braille and a bunch of other things to enchant them with a complex matrix of magics that would, I feel, be worthy of a medal. Granted I had originally designed the enchanting process to be done by all thirty-some-odd FC’s, but news of the Red Court war, recent spooky street shenanigans and my affiliation with a particular Warden had cause many of our more paranoid brethren to drop out and subsequently for me to dumb down the complexity on the appropriate magics… but I’m not bitter.
The concept had been simple: The Weasley grandfather clock from Harry Potter but in pocket watch form, with a comprehensive and uniform interface of heated runes, audible tones, colored ovals and static shocks. Shocks like bare feet on carpet shocks, don’t look at me like that. Anyway, the contraption would allow any watch to determine the general disposition of the watch’s owner (“traveling”, “Behind a Threshold”, “Mortal Peril”, “Dead” etc.) quickly and efficiently, provided you had the watch on you at the time. And if you learned the tones for each of the conditions, which it would emanate whenever you pressed hard enough in certain areas, you could use it without having to actually look at it, a big plus in my book. It had been hard, especially trying to enchant it on one night, it had been fraught with complications and drama, but it had been worth it. Even Donna had participated, briefly giving me a flicker of humanity from the bony bitch. It would no longer work as a regular watch, obviously, but any wearer of the watch could determine the safety of any other wearer, and, if they had the appropriate magics on their own, could ‘open a channel’ to any other watch. And if a watch should come under enemy possession, heaven forbid, all you had to do was discard it, walk away, and every other watch would simply display a “N/A” color, white I think, or a tone of about 350 Hz, the “dial tone” for anybody who didn’t know.
And that was precisely what I had just done, by tossing it on Barbara’s counter: discarded it. Barbara stared at it, or me, I’m not sure, but she didn’t speak for a while. I pulled out a small clean moleskin notebook and tossed that next to the Watch. Barbara started to say something but I interrupted her.
“I won’t be a part of anything that has Raven at it’s head. Or Donna, for that matter. Give to the watch to whoever you want, I already had Pia clear the settings on it and she knows how to reattune it to whoever might want it. But I won’t let anything, even something I masterminded and put six years worth of research into, be used to link back to me and stab me in the back. And if you’re smart, you’ll do the same with yours. That,” I tapped my finger on the notebook, “has all the ParaNet contact info out of Chicago and LA. I forwarded messages to the right people telling them to call you instead of me. I figured since you are pretty savvy with the whole social media thing already, that might be right up your alley. Anyway, all the stuff you need is in there. Maybe you could work some extra business out of the extra contacts, maybe, I dunno.” I let the sarcasm linger for a brief moment before I continued. Barb had opened the notebook and was leafing thru it as I finished saying what I needed to say.
(Side Note: I’ve noticed a lot of people lately just clammering up when I start to rant. Not out of fear or intimidation or respect even, they just let me get on my soapbox and let loose with whatever is pissing me off that week and they wait till I’m done like a car idling at a railroad crossing until the train goes thru. I caught my Physics prof doing it the other week, then Auntie Em for Sunday dinner, then Jamie when I called him about Raven. Not sure why, or if I should be offended or impressed… or both? Anyway…)
“I don’t think Raven knows about it, all the contacts I mean. Belle has a copy, so does Claret and Pallas. The ParaNet is a really good resource, I wouldn’t have been able to make the watches without it. And it’s important that we mini-leaguers stick together to keep out the major leaguers.”
Barbara quietly turned another page before she spoke. “So you are leaving us then, little hermana?”
I took a step towards the counter and put my hand where I had heard it a moment before, only missing by a little bit, and squeezed her hand reassuringly. “Hell no, ya’ll can’t get rid of me that easy. And I love you guys, well most of you, I… just think you’re dumb.” I said the last part half-jokingly to lighten the mood, and Barbara scoffed in a half-joking return. “I’ll be around, I’ll still hang out and do the Confederate thing with you guys in the Freakshow I trust, but I’m not going to do the Relay thing anymore. Seriously Barb, Raven is Bad News. She walked in to Atwater’s the other night all sad faced and pouty and woe-is-me, and ya’ll fell for it. The ‘horribly mentally abused wife, wronged by everyone and only seeking the love and return of her child’ routine, it’s a classic. And it’s a classic because it works.”
Barb sputtered for a moment. “How did you hear all that? We had wards up preventing such eavesdropping.”
I cocked my head a little towards her in that classic teenager ‘as if’ manner. It came across a little awkward, since I hadn’t exactly looked in a mirror in a while. But I had mastered that anxty body language at a young diva-ish age, so I think it came across ok. Barbara laughed under her breath again, shaking her head and making her long earrings chime pleasantly.
Barbara continued, intensity rising in her voice. "But she swore on her Power that she had been mentally manipulated by Eric, that she was acting against her own will. How… Why would we not believe her? If it looks like a duck, sounds like a duck, swears on it’s Power like a duck…" she made a gesture that was lost on me, I imagine it was the silent equivalent of “It’s a Duck!” so I proceeded from there.
“Don’t look! Listen!” I rang the bell on the counter on the last word to punctuate my point. "She never actually swore anything directly, she swore that what she had previously said “was true”, which was not about the mind whammy. I listen to a lot of old Detective audiofiction, like the Shadow, plus that’s all I do nowadays is listening since ya know" I waved my hand over my missing eyes, “so please trust me, I can follow verbal traps and feints with the best of them.”
“I don’t know, Erica, that seems insubstantial to me to just dismiss everything she said out of hand.”
“Then think about this: If she had been mind whammied, and she had been ordered to kidnap children and murder by a legit psychomancer, which I’m not saying he wasn’t, you know as well as I do what that would do to a person’s mind to act against they’re nature like that.”
“It’s not kidnapping if it’s your own, sweetie,” Barbara pleaded.
“She kidnapped Jamie’s secretaries kid too, as payment to a Goblin, did she mention that? I was there, I know she grabbed both kids. Goblin’s eat people, and Raven knows that. So you tell me, what kind of mother gives another child, any other child, to someone she knows will eat that child, and is ok with that?”
“But her mind was not her own-”
“But when a mind acts against it’s nature, even under duress and mind-whamminess, it resists. It tears itself apart to rationalize it’s actions, turning itself inside out if it has to. And even the strongest Talents I know could still not work complex magics like Opening a Way under that level of mental mojo. Magic is tied to who you are and what you believe. Nothing, for a woman anyway, is more tied to what and who we are than Motherhood. No Psychomancy in the world would have made any mother worth the name work _major magic _that she knew would lead to definite harm and death to another child, especially one close to age and friendship with her own son. Not without rendering her into a mental bucket full of Jello. You know it, I know it, and Raven knows it. Now you tell me, cause I obviously didn’t see her when she walked in, did she look like Jello to you?”
Barbara’s voice was even and terse, but the tone was clear. “No. No, she looked fantastic. Strong and Composed. Distraught, Sad, and Wronged, maybe…but not… damaged. I will need to research this some more to confirm what you have said, I don’t know as much about Psychomancy as you seem to think I do, but I understand your point now. Something is not Right.”
“Thank you, hermana, I appreciate that. I’m not saying that their argument for Belle’s ‘compromised state’ didn’t have its points, and I’m not saying that Raven and Jamie didn’t get into a fight, but I disagree with her implication that the so-called beatings were one-way. Raven is working a con, something is working her or she has something that’s helping her in a bad way, but she’s definitely deceiving you guys. Why else would she wait until Belle, who I think we can agree is probably the nicest caring and not power jealous one among us, was halfway around the world when this went down. I don’t know what she’s up to, and I’m going to figure it out.”
Barbara put the notebook beneath the counter where I knew she kept a small safe with a copper ring inlaid on the inside. “Maybe I will just save this watch until this clears up, yes?” Her voice had some of it’s usually frolic, one of the many reasons why I liked her, and my smile showed it.
“Maybe.”
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