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what are the different colored poker chips worth - win

Turning Random League of Legends Champions into a DnD Build (Attempting) Until I've Done all 152 (and Counting) Day 8: Twisted Fate

If I’m being completely honest, Twisted Fate is probably the hardest time I’ve had trying to figure one of these builds and probably the least confident I’ve been on one, but mama didn’t raise no bitch and I’m shooting my shot.
submitted by BestBaconatorNA to 3d6 [link] [comments]

JoJo's Bizarre OC Tournament #4 - Round 3 Match 4 - Cabernet Sauvignon and Inch Nine vs Byte and Fira B

The results are in for Match 2.
Jade had been building, and building, managing to shrug past the bullets sent their way and just eating the chips in their quite literal armor, able to easily replenish it with yet more mud. The mud had stopped Dread from chasing them, and she had gone off and burned the place to scare the people off. Whatever. It complemented what it was they had desired…
All it would take now was this finishing touch, this last gesture of nonaggression towards Sentient Oona, who they were certain simply wished not to be bothered, did not care for any of this commodification of its very existence.
It was crass. It was sickening. It drove Jade, who just wished to live their own life, mad to think about, and now, nobody would follow, soon as they were a short swim through the basin away. The shrine itself would be a sinking island of concrete silk soon. All that would be left then was to use the cover of the dirtying water to avoid the bullets of the fan club, the last guard unit perched within the shrine.
Yet bullets never came, and above them, Jade felt instead a terrible heat, noted the appearance of spiked rubber on their mud-caked back. Something with an exoskeleton like an insect’s stood above them, they careened their head to see who was above them. It was Dread, barely swerving her body past dragonflies which had caught on to her malicious intent and meant to fry her.
“You again… I said fall down… Off.” They spoke with guttural contempt. “How did… You even…”
“You ruined my new boots, Antlerhead, but I am afraid that as much as the ground by which we did our battle had been soiled… You miscalculated in, I think, a fateful way, to utilize that ghastly terminology.” Briefly, indicatively, she looked to her side, and Jade understood as their opponent continued. “You didn’t destroy the bridge first. All I needed to do was walk across, watch your movements… And hop on.”
“You... still talk… too much.” Jade grunted, then, and spat at her, putting on their strongest face.
Then they saw so many dragonflies, flying towards both of them as fell bladed arms raised and descended.
The winner is Dread, with a score of 73 to Jade’s 71!
Category Winner Point Totals Comments
Popularity Tie 15-15 The first two matches in a row, up to the final moments, saw decent turnout while resulting in a tie by deadline.
Quality Red Carpet Renaissance 24-21 Reasoning
JoJolity Black Hill Estate 24-25 Reasoning
Conduct Tie 10-10
After a few futile moments trying to commune with the alien, Dread stepped over that bridge once more, back onto land and stood over the lake where they had left Jade. After that final confrontation, the dragonflies had all dissipated, Sentient Oona either sated or exhausted after that final exchange of blows, and for a few days, slumbering.
Both of the fighters had been covered in blood, covered in gore, covered in wounds. The fire raged on even as the trapped god’s rage quelled, heat counteracted by the cool of the muddy, bloody lake, which Dread, feeling theatrical, turned herself away from.
“How quaint! A beast such as yourself thinking you had a chance beating a woman of my stature. Cute, really. Your malodorous challenge was something indeed, and I will admit that you… That you…”
Dread’s lip began to quiver. Her trip was RUINED!
She didn’t even get a single souvenir! Her train of thought lost, tears well in her eyes. Joywave fell, and she turned away from Jade, beginning to sob. She needed to go hug someone.
To this end, then, she ran and ran, tromping across the edge of the marsh towards the direction of the evacuating town she’d last seen her friend head, who surely would be not judgmental over such a platonic request as consolation. Mr. Jones was surely-
Ah. He’d already left, huh?
All he had left behind, then, was the Green Flying Man, clutching a massive gash in his flickering, transformed torso, hand feebly fumbling with a rotary phone in one of the few buildings not on fire yet.
“H… H-hello? Matilda? It’s… Nngh, it’s an emergency situation! The… The Estate is empty, and the closest member’s here with me in Sentient Oona and I’ll try and get back with them, but a guy cut his own leg off and died and everything’s on fire and Memory… He grabbed Memory Management, and said he knew how to kill her, that he would if she doesn’t-”
Click!
A fell claw hung the phone up, then severed the line, and Green collapsed, having been tripped and sent to the floor.
“Y-you! But if you’re here, th-that means-” Green whined. “No… No, no, no…”
“Do not irritate me with your whining!” The crying Dread, using Joywave, brought her hand down, then the other, then raised them, then brought each down again, and repeated this, and repeated this. “I! Am in! A very bad mood!”
The Green Flying Man was not long for the world anyway thanks to the distinctive sabre wound which had gouged him (a normal man would have been dead already), despite what he had said to assure whoever he was on the phone with, already fading from being, but he practically disintegrated seconds into Dread’s onslaught, and she hardly registered this until she stood, breathing heavily in the aftermath of her tantrum.
If… If what he said was true, then the reason Mr. Jones has left me here, messy and with no souvenirs to my name… Still sniffling pathetically, Dread quivered, trying to stiffen her posture. Then he, at least, had his success…
There’s only a few hours left, as of posting this match, to vote in its predecessor, a duel between a cactus-mancer and a clone-summoner in a clock tower.
Scenario:
Elephant Bones 2 - Afternoon
The empty former diner and tax shelter, adjacent to the legitimate restaurant to which it was a sequel, had constantly had people watching after it since the incident before, when ANVIL militia members had occupied it with the intention of using it to raid and capture the restaurant proper. For Fira B, the place made for a fine space to do paperwork and generally not be easily found when she wasn’t outright needed, also serving double duty in how it kept hooligans from their hooliganry.
“I raise you better dental. It’s a top-secret dental plan - people like us normally don’t get to know about it. But... you gotta risk 8% of the raise you earned so far.”
Byte, sitting at the table opposite her, pondered it over, not typically the type to end up in poker games, but having wanted a raise and found himself very easily swayed by Fira, basically, implying he was afraid to handle it this way, worried he would lose. Sure, Fira was probably blatantly cheating, but hey, so was he, and as it was, his pay was about to go up 10%.
Thanks to his Stand, he already had everything he needed to make a perfect game… All saved in spades, card-counted to hell for the perfect moment, and this forbidden dental plan for teeth beyond compare had been his ultimate goal this entire time.
“Alright, I’ll call.” The final hands were dealt and played to, then, tensely, before he declared, putting it all down on the table, “royal flush, all spades! Those secret teeth are as good as-”
Fira, grinning, displayed her own hand, then, having prepared her own forbidden technique for this exact eventuality, this moment. Not one, two, three, or four Aces in her hand, nor even something so hackneyed as an errant fifth Ace. She had gone beyond Poker, and displayed a devastating, never-before-seen six Aces technique, all in different suits. Everyone in real Poker knew that that was even better.
“No way… Dammit, that’s cheating! No way you seriously got-”
“So were you. Don’t forget this loss, Byte. Work hard, and maybe one day you’ll be able to get any teeth you want. Even mine, if you’re ruthless enough.”
He was about to raise an objection, then, when another figure walked through the faux-restaurant doors, carrying with them a face-obscuring massive gift basket full of assorted soaps and candies that look like soaps. More troublingly, as both parties present immediately narrowed their eyes at, though, was the uniform the figure was wearing.
They were clad in body armor, aqua and blue with white accents, the unmistakable colors of VALKYRIE and its members, complete with the sidearm all were known for carrying idly resting at their side.
“What do you want.” Fira asked sternly, about to stand up.
“Oh, the boss asked me to drop these off to sweeten the deal!”
“Deal?” Her voice lowered, and she stood tall, Byte almost wanting to grin at the sight of what was to come. “I don’t know anything about a ‘deal’.”
“Oh, right, uh, probably should’ve led with that!” Awkwardly, the recruit, young-looking, Byte surmised, put the gift basket down on the table. “See, uh, he wants you to swing by the address on the card later, says he’s sure you could help with-”
Effie Linder was sitting outside, fiddling frustratedly with the wi-fi as she tried to remember exactly what the new password was, only to see the man who’d walked in in a VALKYRIE uniform literally thrown out, crying out and hitting the pavement like a ragdoll. It made her smirk, despite herself and her contempt for the boss.
Fira brushed her hands off, seething and staring before letting the doors shut. Byte, meanwhile, looked over the gift basket, smelling one of the soaps, and one of the candies, within.
“Not bad, actually… Whoever picked this out has some taste. Always bugged me how soap doesn’t taste like it smells…”
“Eugh, I swear… VALKYRIE is acting chummy with us now... It’s one thing for their enemies to fight us because of some bad timing, but we are not people VALKYRIE sends gift baskets to!”
“Never even heard of Ugo McBaise sending gift baskets to anyone…” Byte quipped, curious.
“Exactly. It’s a passive-aggressive thing, clearly. They’re trying to tell us to play nice.” Fira cracked her knuckles, turning to him then. “You can admire soaps later. What’s the address on that card? Let’s go there and beat the hell out of Ugo. Send a message that we’re not friends, and his bones should be broken right now.”
“Hey, alright, I’m down,” Byte said, finding some amusement in the situation as he stood, slowly, opening up the card. “Besides… I know, different branches and all, but you know what happened to Zebra… All because he was backing Peres up in her fight against this company. Like, dammit, I was on that trip, too… Like half of us were, and people risked their lives and died trying to get that Ocean Soul caught alive in the first place, and then some guys from this company show up and then it’s all for nothing. Maybe I’ll feel better calling this a sort of revenge.”
The Black Hill Estate - Afternoon
Inch Nine paced around her room rubbing her temples. Ever since the fight she’d had with Byron Oxbow, everything in her life had gotten more complicated. She’d brought it up with Klein once, and the conflicted expression in his face had stuck with her. Pretty much any friends she had made with connections to the Industrial District reacted that way, to various extents. Inch was a cool headed person, but even though she struggled to show it, it affected her.
Thoughts rushed through her head on who was at fault for this… Cairo, Fira, Byron, that commander of his. Even with all of that a thought kept flowing through her head. Maybe herself, even. If she had only been able to talk Byron down, been more forthright about where she stood, it might have been avoided. She could have worked something out and her relationships would all be fine and so much hurt could have been avoided.
No. No, that was stupid, too.
It was that bastard, Ugo McBaise, and that horrible company he ran. He couldn’t help but keep pushing and pushing forward, turning a security company into a household bogeyman. Of course everyone would have been less on edge, never would have been at war in the first place, had it not been for that lot.
Yes, saying that, Inch felt at peace again, if only for a moment.
As that thought finished a small knock came at the door. Soon enough, she heard a voice she recognized well - that of her teammate, Cabernet Sauvignon, who came through the other side of the door. “Hey, we just got a letter and a gift basket from these VALKYRIE guys… Actually quite a nice fellow at the door, said it was specifically for us.”
“Hm.” Inch tilted her head. It had an… Assorted smell to it, and everything did look quite delicious. To test the mettle of this goodwill, she thought to grab something, take a bite…
She was glad that nobody could see the lower half of her face, the expression on it, at the random item within that she had taken, the soapy taste overwhelming her senses now. With a continued coolheadedness as Cab sat there surely unawares, she asked, “did he say what occasion this was for? I am to understand that this is not a company known for actions such as this, even if many of us have helped ODIN.”
“Said he had somewhere to be, then ran off before I could possibly entertain him,” Cab answered, “though I suspect perhaps that he was intimidated by my attempts to strike up a conversation about the exotic cheeses and scented candles which would best pair with the provided basket…” His face darkened a moment, then, as he added in a suspicious, perhaps self-importantly quiet tone, “and aside from that, probably whatever this is is suspicious as hell.”
“We are in agreement, then. No matter how polite they act towards us,” Inch said, her eyes narrowing at the deceptively tasty looking contents of the basket, towards the letter within, apparently from the head of the company urging them to come, “we can not abide by working with a man like that, or even being seen as his allies.”
“You know, I don’t know much about this Mcbaise guy, except by the reputation you all gave him, and this may be an old hobby of mine talking, but…” Cab gestured for the card, then, to glance, for himself, over the address. “If they’re going to roll out the red carpet for us, what do you say we head over there just to knock some heads?”
“I could not have thought of a better message myself. Perhaps you are not all culinary knowledge and trivia, Cabernet.”
Business District, Noon
As one would naturally do when receiving a “suspicious as hell” gift basket, Inch and Cab soon decided to investigate further, going to the address mentioned in the card the next day, driving Cab’s truck over there.
That was a mistake; the two of them must have spent almost an hour trying to find any available parking spot afterwards. The odds were stacked against them, but they eventually managed to find an overpriced spot fifteen minutes from their destination that they could stay in for a while, and went on their way.
Inch and Cab made their way through the hustle and bustle of the district, but after a couple minutes of walking, Inch spotted something out of the corner of her eye that gave her pause - a teal-haired woman walking angrily through the street, whom she’d fought for her life alongside not long ago. Fira.
Inch casually walked over, Cab following along behind her, and made her way to Fira, waving. “Hello there, Fira!” She said, actually sort of pleased to see her.
She didn’t expect to see a friendly-ish face here, so it was a welcome sight. Per usual Fira’s expression right now wasn’t one many people would call “friendly,” which is to say that she seemed even more pissed off than she usually did.
“Oh, Inch. You’re here. Hello.” Verbose as ever, Fira B.
“I am. What brings you here, Fira? You live and work quite far west of here, non?”
Before Fira said anything, Byte stepped in, taking over from there. “Those VALKYRIE assholes sent us some kind of gift package filled with soap and candy... wanted to win us over, I guess, make us do something for them, so we’re heading over to tell them to fuck off and beat that Ugo asshole up.”
“Oh! We received a similar package too... I had just thought of what candles I might buy while out here to combine with it all, offer the perfect ambiance for some aged Caciocavallo Podolico, but we agree - something’s suspicious about this…” Cab said, Inch nodding along.
Inch spoke up again then. “If all of us are heading towards the same place… I suppose it is best for us to all go together, non?”
“Guess so.” Fira, though not exactly overjoyed at the idea, seemed receptive enough to it, and neither Byte nor Cab objected either, so the four stand users went on their way. Each, though imagining different melodies, were totally all picturing the scene as being paired with some kickass background music or another.
Making their way towards the address, they noticed that there seemed to be less and less of the tall skyscrapers common to the district surrounding them, and more and more buildings directly associated with VALKYRIE - that made sense, given that this was their part of the district.
As they went along, Byte kept looking around, even more so than the rest of them, always looking and commenting on whatever came to mind for him - “hey, that building seems like a pain in the ass to work in,” “oh, that dude actually looks kind of strong, I bet he could take those other guys over there. Not me though, obviously,” and other inane comments. Soon enough, everyone else simply started tuning it out, paying them no real heed and going on along their way.
Eventually, they reached the address - a building, larger than most others in the area, marking the entrance to a VALKYRIE training ground. Getting near the building, Byte noticed something - a man in a VALKYRIE outfit, walking towards them. He seemed quite well built, enough so that Byte figured he might even have to use BRB to beat him were things to come to that. “Hey, that VALKYRIE guy over there seems like he wants something with us, no?”
No response. The man got closer.
Byte wondered to himself how he could get the attention of Fira or the other two without pissing them off. Eventually, he decided to give Cab a light slap on the shoulder to grab his attention - he didn’t seem particularly threatening, especially when compared to Fira or Inch.
Cab, who seemed to be lost in thought looking at the building, turned to Byte with a sour expression. “What do you want, and why would it necessitate hitting me?!”. He seemed angry, but Byte simply shrugged in response. “Well, you weren’t responding to what I said, and-”
“Uh… excuse me? You’re the ones we called over, right? Inch Nine, Cabernet Sauvignon, Fira B, and-”
“What do you want from us.” Before the man, who seemed to be surprisingly docile considering his build and appearance, could finish, Fira interrupted him, and he found himself angrily stared down by all four of the stand users. The man stammered for a bit, unsure of how to respond or what to say...
“Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey… let’s all calm down, yeah?” The intense staredown was interrupted when a voice came from afar, one that was familiar to Fira.
“Hey, wait a sec…” She cocked an eyebrow in disbelief, grunting and adding as she turned, “no way… Is it seriously-”
A man clad in a dark suit colored like VALKYRIE’s armor, adorned with cute shapes had emerged now, clad professionally head-to-toe, dress shoes to black sunglasses, and lord, that hair.
Such long hair, vertical and striped.
Rushen Smith stood before the lot of them, strutting around like he’d owned the place or something. She’d beaten him once, but hadn’t been expecting to cross paths with him again.
“What do you want.”
“No need to be so hostile, yeah? We’re not calling you here to start trouble or nothing, so-”
“We’re?” Fira interrupted him. “You’re with VALKYRIE?” Well, if he was with VALKYRIE, at least Fira knew very well that she could still beat the shit out of him, given that she already had a good track record against him. Then, she’d move on to Ugo.
“So you’re like a… Miniboss, now.” Byte interjected, disappointed, yet ready to fight nonetheless.
“If I may finish.” Rushen sounded impatient
“To make a long story short… Ugo’s out. CEO fired him for everything he’s done. You’re not talkin’ to some crony to an NFL reject. You’re looking at the new head of VALKYRIE. For security and PR reasons, Allday has been been keepin’ quiet about it for now, preparing for just the right moment to tell the public, make sure I get revealed to the public with a good positive splash, but it is what it is. So… ready to talk now? Because I’m thinkin’ we can use your help, and we can definitely make it worth your while.”
Deeper within the premises - An Open-air training facility
Everyone had been disarmed by their confusion, and by Rushen’s goodwill, and by the thought that, just like that, one of the most threatening people in the city could just be fired like it was nothing, which made for Rushen a convenient situation. They were in line, following his lead, and as he did so, he brought them to a state-of-the-art training facility, one wherein dozens upon dozens of security officers in armor were walking around, shooting the shit, running, chatting by vending machines stocked with overpriced health food and sports drinks, and almost always giving Rushen a respectful nod and salute as he passed by, always meeting it with a cool, “at ease.”
“I still do not understand why we are here…” Inch, after some time being led around, spoke up. “I assume you sent those gift baskets to us, but even then, beyond wishing us here quickly, you did not say what you expect of us. Or even sign your name, beyond ‘the boss of VALKYRIE.’”
“Yes, like I said, my step into the private sector ain’t public knowledge yet… Trying to keep a lot under lock, ‘cuz I’ve inherited a backlog of things to take care of. Need-to-know basis… You know how it is.”
Fira nodded, saying bluntly, “so you’re planning something big. Want us to have a part. What? And why? Better not be wasting our time…”
“All Ugo ever taught people far as tactics went was a bullheaded, aggressive push forward… Rush, and rush, and rush, and just overwhelm opponents before they can think their way out.” Rushen explained. “It hasn’t been working, it got a lotta people on all sides or no sides hurt and killed who didn’t need to be, and while he used to have a man for handling stuff that took a brain, long story short… He’s no longer with us either. We’re trying to work on a way to save the people of this city from what’s up ahead, and no point in doing that if there’s no one to save, yeah? VALKYRIE needs to be better… We need to reorient, pick and choose better battles, get better at fighting them. No more bullcrap about raiding bars or stealing cows, yeah?”
“So you want us to… Help you retrain this security company?” Byte asked. “Why us?”
“The four of you felt right for it,” Rushen answered, looking each of them over in turn, “Byte, I know the part you played in that shipyard incident, and while I still ain’t pleased at what you were working for then, and it really messed Jesse up in a bad way, that’s all over now. The Ocean Soul business is done and in the past, and you’re real good at what you do.”
He was quiet, then.
“Fira,” he continued, “you’re another career criminal in this city, and you and I both know it, but we need someone who can think like that, someone with fight in her, for what I’m trying to get these guys ready for. Now ain’t the time to get picky… Long as you keep minding your business.”
“I try. Some people make it so hard.” Fira snorted, folding her arms.
“Inch, you used to be seen with Cairo a whole bunch, until right around when a certain incident happened… You know what I mean, don’t you?” She and Fira sneered, and Rushen raised a hand. “I’m not here to criticize, mind. I like your style, and that cool gator power thing you got going for you, hear you’ve got some real good learning techniques, and most important of all, I hear the two of you managed to survive bein’ in the dead center of Byron Oxbow at his angriest in thirty years.”
“You are… Praising me. It is appreciated, thank you.”
“And Cab,” Rushen continued, “you are the whitest man I have ever met, and I’ve got family in the same neck of New York as Douglas Jones. But hey, you’re a friend of Jesse’s, and these guys around here, they remember you at the battle on Capital Island, hurt and just popped outta this magic bottle, and still fighting with ‘em and helping people escape. You’re good people, and you got a particular edge to you I need too.”
“I saw I think a better side of VALKYRIE than most, by good circumstance,” Cab started, flattered by the mixed praise, ultimately happy to recognize it as stroking his ego, and a part of him warmed up for what was being praised turning out to be something besides the hobbies with which he’d filled the void. “Though I was just as willing to knock these guys’ heads in as everyone else here, you know… I certainly don’t mind this turnaround, though. And I think I’m starting to guess who it is you want to fight here, why you want a group like this in on it… Might you be planning to stake out the-”
“Not a word. Can’t let this get leaked.”
“Of course, of course,” Cab answered, quite confident in his mental answer nonetheless. “You mentioned this being worth our while… Can I ask what you mean by that?”
“The CEO’s gonna be watching this training sesh too, if you didn’t already guess… We’ll make sure all four of you are rewarded handsomely for this, of course, but if you really go above-and-beyond, she’s said she’ll throw even more bonus on top of all the dough. I recommend you shoot for that.”
“So we need to help train your guys better than these two, huh?” Fira answered, jerking her thumb at Inch and Cab.
“I mean, it probably is better for you to work with the person ya know primarily, but it’s not really a comp-”
“We are gonna blow whatever you guys are doing out of the water,” Byte interrupted, looking towards the Estate residents with a fiery look in his own eye. “We’ll show you the kind of training you can normally only see for a total premium at Dukes!”
“Yes, let’s one-up each other,” Cab agreed with an amused smirk, well aware that this competitive streak was unnecessary, but beginning to feel a certain fire in him, “what do you say, Inch? You up for the task of whipping these guys into crimebusting shape?”
“I suppose I am.” Inch herself was beginning to feel the air of competition, feel her blood pumping, “no hard feelings to either of you, if you are not selected for this… But we are simply going to do a phenomenal job.”
Rushen sighed, shaking his head. “Least you ain’t trying to kill each other… Alright! I’ll roll with it.” He clapped his hands, perking up quite a bit. “Both of y’all are in charge of sixteen recruits who need retraining fast, and we’re gonna compare what you did at the end. Just don’t kill ‘em or nothing, or do nothing stupid, and for four hours, soon as you got a plan together, what you say goes. Got it? Good.”
Man, now I’m feelin’ the competitive spirit a bit… Really is contagious, huh? Probably gonna make ‘em do a better job… Ah, hell, now I’m feelin’ a certain urge. I’m gonna say it. I’m gonna!
“Open the game.”
(credit to magistelles for the awesome art!)
Location: A VALKYRIE training facility in the middle of the business district.
The area consists of track fields, indoor gymnasiums, shooting ranges, training equipment storage, training towers and practical training buildings as well as other training sites. There is also general equipment storage and a small infirmary on site.
Essentially any sort of equipment or facilities you’d expect to find in a military style boot camp can be found here. Things like body armor and helmets, large tires, guns (both handguns and rifles), training dummies, etc. If you aren’t sure if something can be found here, just ask the judges.
There is also a large amount of spare wood used for building obstacle courses.
Goal: Train your group of recruits better than your opponents in a 4 hour training session!
Additional Information:
You can assume there is minimal downtime from getting area to area within the full facility.
Each team has a group of 16 VALKYRIE recruits to be trained. Each of them has 333 physicals and a 2 in gun handling and a 2 in hand to hand combat. While your session is a full 4 hours, you may still need to consider the stamina of the recruits and schedule breaks for them accordingly. They are in full uniform, with helmets, combat boots, and body armor as well as a pistol and baton each. They also have equipment that lets them see stands. They each have spare uniforms and can be refitted with training equipment from the equipment storage as needed. They also have assault rifles and walkie talkies in the equipment storage.
For the purposes of training they will generally agree to whatever you put them through short of anything that has significant risk of resulting in actual harm.
Teams are allowed to use/take anything from the facilities for the purposes of training.
In terms of Voting and Quality we are looking for a few different things:
  • Having effective training: This can mostly be boiled down to how well their training either strengthenings their bodies or helps them learn muscle memories or techniques that improve fighting.
  • Using your time effectively: Similar to having effective training, minimizing wasted time that could have been otherwise useful is also important.
  • Having your recruits last for as much of the training as possible: Having guys needing to be sent to the infirmary for injuries or overworking them before the 4 hours is up will affect your score negatively. While accidents can happen through say sparring or other mishaps, you should try to minimize any lasting damages to the recruits.
  • Having varied and well rounded training: Having them build skills in multiple areas, full body exercise over focusing on one or two muscle groups, and preparing them for a variety of scenarios.
  • Discipline: While your recruits will be following your orders for training, being able to command their attention and respect can go a long way on making an impression and bolster training effectiveness. On the flip side, doing things that make the recruits not take you or training seriously can defeat the purpose of training.
In terms of training, you can also consider anything security personnel should be trained in, not just strictly combat. That can include rescuing, defending people, perceptiveness, team coordination, etc.
Team Combatant JoJolity
The Graveyard Shift Fira B. “This pain-in-the-ass pillar is a reflection on that woman's personality...” You know, if you are going to be training these people, might as well make this fun for yourself. Personalize your training regiment as much as you can to make it unique with your abilities!
The Graveyard Shift Byte “Climb to the top of the pillar with just your hands. That's the only exit. If you can't climb out, you'll stay there until you die.” Anybody could just sit back and train people, that’s why you can’t bring yourself to do that. Be active and hands-on in your training!
Black Hill Estate Inch Nine “Climbing with something other than the ripple is not appreciated by the pillar... This "Hell Climb Pillar" only likes the ripple and knocks down everything else... Don't forget that.” No point in relaxing while they do all the training, might as well brush up on your own skills. Be active and hands-on in your training!
Black Hill Estate Cabernet “Cab” Sauvignon “It's the fault of the person who built that trap... whoever built this was really fucked up! Making me fall for that” While you could have them do just normal training, that is defeating both the point of the exercise and would be a complete waste of everybody’s time. Personalize your training regiment as much as you can to make it unique with your abilities!
Link to the Official Player Spreadsheet
Link to Match Schedule
As always, if you would like to interact with the tournament community and be among the first to get updates for the tournament, please feel free to PM a member of our Judge staff for an invite to our Official Discord Server!
submitted by boredCommentator to StardustCrusaders [link] [comments]

Who is Scott Borgenson? Profile from 2016 in “Institutional Investor”

(Note the connections)
CargoMetrics Cracks the Code on Shipping Data
Scott Borgerson and his team of quants at hedge fund firm CargoMetrics are using satellite intel on ships to identify mispriced securities.
By Fred R. Bleakley February 04, 2016
Link to article
One late afternoon last November, as a ping-pong game echoed through the floor at CargoMetrics Technologies’ Boston office, CEO Scott Borgerson was watching over the shoulder of Arturo Ramos, who’s responsible for developing investment strategies with astrophysicist Ronnie Hoogerwerf. At Ramos’s feet sat Helios, his brindle pit-bull-and-­greyhound mix. All three men were staring at a computer screen, tracking satellite signals from oil tankers sailing through the Strait of Malacca, the choke point between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea where 40 percent of the world’s cargo trade moves by ship.
CargoMetrics, a start-up investment firm, is not your typical money manager or hedge fund. It was originally set up to supply information on cargo shipping to commodities traders, among others. Now it links satellite signals, historical shipping data and proprietary analytics for its own trading in commodities, currencies and equity index futures. There was an air of excitement in the office that day because the signals were continuing to show a slowdown in shipping that had earlier triggered the firm’s automated trading system to short West Texas Intermediate (WTI) oil futures. Two days later the U.S. Department of Energy’s official report came out, confirming the firm’s hunch, and the oil futures market reacted accordingly.
“We nailed it for our biggest return of the year,” says Borgerson, who had reason to breathe more easily. His backers were watching closely. They include Blackstone Alternative Asset Management (BAAM), the world’s largest hedge fund allocator, and seven wealthy tech and business leaders. Among them: former Lotus Development Corp. CEO Jim Manzi, who also had a long career at IBM Corp.
Compelling these investors and Borgerson to pursue the shipping slice of the economy is the simple fact that in this era of globalization 50,000 ships carry 90 percent of the $18.5 trillion in annual world trade.
That’s no secret, of course, but Borgerson and CargoMetrics’ backers maintain that the firm is well ahead of any other investment manager in harnessing such information for a potential big advantage. It’s why Borgerson has kept the firm in stealth mode for years. In its earlier iteration, from 2011 to 2014, CargoMetrics was hidden in a back alley, above a restaurant. Now that he’s running an investment firm, Borgerson declines to name his investors unless, like Manzi and BAAM, they are willing to be identified.
“My vision is to map historically and in real time what’s really going on in economic supply and demand across the planet,” says the U.S. Coast Guard veteran, who prides himself and the CargoMetrics team on not being prototypical Wall Streeters. “The problem is enormous, but the potential reward is huge.”
According to Borgerson, CargoMetrics is building a “learning machine” that will be able to automatically profit from spotting any publicly traded security that is mispriced, using what he refers to as systematic fundamental macro strategies. He calls the firm a new breed of quantitative investment manager. In unguarded moments he sees himself as the Steve Jobs or Elon Musk of portfolio management.
Though his ambitions may sound audacious, one thing is certain: Borgerson doesn’t lack in self-confidence. Over the past six years, he has secretly and painstakingly built a firm heavy in Ph.D.s that can manage a database of hundreds of billions of historical shipping records, conduct trillions of calculations on hundreds of computer servers and systematically execute trades in 28 different commodities and currencies.
For his part, Borgerson seems an unlikely architect of such a serious, ambitious endeavor. Easygoing and fond of joking with his colleagues, he is a hands-off manager who credits CargoMetrics’ investment prowess to his team. His brand of humor comes through even when he’s detailing the series of challenges he had starting the firm. After using the phrase “It was hard” several times, he pauses and adds, “Did I mention it was hard?” Although Borgerson declines to provide any specifics about Cargo­Metrics’ portfolio, citing the advice of his lawyers, performance during the three years of live trading apparently has been strong enough to keep his backers confident and his team of physicists, software engineers and mathematicians in place. “Hopefully, it won’t be too long before we can make a more significant investment,” says BAAM CEO J. Tomilson Hill. Former Lotus CEO Manzi is optimistic about the firm’s prospects: “It has an unbelievable edge with its historical data.”
CargoMetrics was one of the first maritime data analytics companies to seize the potential of the global Automatic Identification System. Ships transmit AIS signals via very high frequency (VHF) radio to receiver devices on other ships or land. Since 2004, large vessels with gross tonnage of 300 or more are required to flash AIS positioning signals every few seconds to avoid collisions. That allows Cargo­Metrics to pay satellite companies for access to the signals gleaned from 500 miles above the water. The firm uses historical data to identify cargo and aggregation of cargo flow, and then applies sophisticated analysis of financial market correlations to identify buying and selling opportunities.
“We’re big-data junkies who could not have founded CargoMetrics without the radical breakthroughs of this golden age of technology,” Borgerson says. The revolution in cloud computing has been instrumental. CargoMetrics leverages the Amazon Web Services platform to run its analytics and algorithms on hundreds of computer servers at a fraction of the cost of owning and maintaining the hardware itself.
At his firm’s headquarters — where the lobby displays a series of colored semaphore signal flags that spell out the mathematical equation for the surface area of the earth —Borgerson leads the way to his server room. It’s the size of a closet; inside, a thick pipe carries all the data traffic and analytic formulas CargoMetrics needs. That computing power alone would have cost $30 million to $40 million, Manzi says.
CargoMetrics is pursuing a modern version of an age-old quest. Think of the Rothschild family’s use in the 19th century of carrier pigeons and couriers on horseback to bring news from the Napoleonic Wars to their traders in London, or, in the 1980s, oil trader Marc Rich’s use of satellite phones and binoculars for relaying oil tanker flow.
Other quant-focused Wall Street firms are latching onto the satellite ship-tracking data. But, Borgerson says, “I would bet my life on a stack of Bibles that no one in the world has the shipping database and analytics we have.” The reason he’s so convinced is that from late 2008 he was an early client of the satellite companies that had begun collecting data received from space and on land to build a large database of all the world’s vessel movements in one place.
That’s what caught Hill’s eye at Blackstone when he learned of Cargo­Metrics a few years ago. BAAM now has a managed account with the firm. “If anyone else tries to replicate what CargoMetrics has, they will be years behind [Borgerson] on data analytics,” Hill says. “We know that a number of hedge fund data scientists want his data.”
But too much reliance on big data can go wrong, say many academicians. “There is a huge amount of hype around big data,” observes Willy Shih, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School. “Many people are saying, ‘Let the data speak; we don’t need theory or modeling.’ I argue that even with using new, massively parallel computing systems for modeling and simulation, some forces in nature and the economy are still too big and complex for computers to handle.”
Shih’s skepticism doesn’t go as far as to say the data challenge on global trade is too big a puzzle to solve. When informed of the Cargo­Metrics approach, he called it “very valid and creative. They just have to be careful not to throw away efforts to understand causality.”
Another big-data scholar, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor of electrical engineering and computer science Samuel Madden, also urges caution. “What worries me is that models become trusted but then fail,” he explains. “You have to validate and revalidate.”
Borgerson grew up in Southeast Missouri, in a home on Rural Route 5 between Festus and Hematite. His father was a former Marine infantry officer and police official, and his mother a high school French and Spanish teacher. The family traveled 15 miles to Crystal City to attend Grace Presbyterian Church, which was central to young Borgerson’s upbringing: There he was a youth elder, became an Eagle Scout and received a God and Country Award. The church was across the street from the former home of NBA all-star and U.S. senator Bill Bradley, whose backboard Borgerson used for basketball practice.
When it came to choosing what to do after high school, Borgerson was torn between becoming a Presbyterian minister and accepting an appointment to the U.S. Coast Guard Academy or West Point. He went with the Coast Guard because, he says, “the humanitarian mission really appealed to me, and I had never been on a boat before.”
At the academy, in New London, Connecticut, Borgerson played NCAA tennis and was also a cutup, racking up demerits for such antics as placing a sailboat on the commandant of cadets’ front lawn and leading bar patrons in a rendition of “Semper Paratus,” the school’s theme song. Still, he graduated with honors and spent the next four years piloting a 367-foot cutter — which seized five tons of cocaine in the Caribbean — then captaining a patrol boat that saved 30 lives on search-and-rescue missions. From 2001 to 2003 the Coast Guard sent Borgerson to the Fletcher School at Tufts University to earn his master’s of arts in law and diplomacy. While at Tufts he volunteered at a Boston homeless shelter for military veterans and founded a Pet Pals therapy program for senior citizens.
Following graduation, from 2003 to 2006, Borgerson taught U.S. history, foreign policy, political geography and maritime studies at the Coast Guard Academy, and co-founded its Institute for Leadership. While there he would get up at 4:00 each morning to work on his Ph.D. thesis exploring U.S. port cities’ approaches to foreign policy. He would also travel to Boston to complete his course work at Tufts and meet with his adviser, John Curtis Perry.
Borgerson’s military allegiance runs deep. One weekend last fall he played football in a service academy alumni game. On another he attended the Army-Navy game. Still militarily fit at age 40, the 6-foot-5 Borgerson works out regularly at an inner-city gym aimed at helping youths find an alternative to gang violence; a few weeks ago he was there boxing with ex-convicts and lifting weights.
Leaving the Coast Guard was a hard decision for Borgerson, resulting in part from his frustration with the military bureaucracy’s stymieing of his bid to get back to sea for security missions. With his degrees in hand, he applied for a fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations. During the application process he met Edward Morse, now global head of commodities research at Citigroup. Morse was on the CFR selection committee in 2007 and recommended Borgerson as a fellow.
Morse introduced Borgerson to commodities, and to trading terms like “contango” and “backwardation.” Morse himself had, earlier in career, gotten the jump on official oil supply data by hiring planes to take photos of the lid heights of oil tanks in Oklahoma’s Cushing field.
Working for the CFR in New York reconnected Borgerson with his Missouri roots. Bill Bradley’s aunt called the former senator to say: “The son of a family who went to our church in Crystal City is in New York. Would you welcome him?” Bradley did — and would later play a part in Borgerson’s career development.
While at the CFR, Borgerson became an expert on the melting of the North Pole ice cap, writing numerous published articles on its implications; this led him to co-found, with the president of Iceland, the Arctic Circle, a nonprofit designed to encourage discussion of the future of that region. Borgerson recently spoke to 50 international generals and admirals about the Arctic and is co-drafting a proposal for a treaty between the U.S. and Canada that would help resolve the differences the two countries have in allowing international ship and aircraft travel through the Northwest Passage.
His Arctic research led to an aha moment early in 2008, while he was still with the CFR, on a visit to Singapore and the Strait of Malacca with his Fletcher School classmate Rockford Weitz and their former Ph.D. adviser, Perry. Seeing the mass of ships sailing through the strait, Borgerson and Weitz decided to build a data analytics firm using satellite tracking of ships.
Like many successful entrepreneurs, the two struggled to find financing before reaching out to a network of friends and their contacts. One was Randy Beardsworth, who had sat with Borgerson at a 2007 Coast Guard Academy dinner, where Beards­worth, then the Coast Guard’s chief of law enforcement in Miami, was the guest speaker. Borgerson “made references to history and literature, and I thought, ‘Here is a sharp guy,’” recalls Beards­worth. “We have been friends ever since.”
But Borgerson didn’t turn to his new friend in his initial fund-raising. “He came to me in 2009, after he had been turned down by 17 VCs, was maxed out on his credit card, was married and had a newborn son,” says Beardsworth, who was reviewing the Department of Homeland Security as part of the Obama administration’s transition team. Beardsworth came to the rescue, not only committing to invest a small amount but introducing his friend to Doug Doan. A West Point graduate and Washington-­based angel investor, Doan took to Borgerson right away. “To be honest, it wasn’t his idea, it was Scott I invested in,” says Doan, who provided $100,000 in capital and introduced Borgerson to a few friends, who added $75,000. Manzi came on board as an investor in 2009, having been asked by Bradley to check out Borgerson’s plan for a data metrics firm. (Manzi knew Bradley from the late 1990s, when the latter was considering a run for U.S. president.)
With Doan, Doan’s friends and Manzi as investors, CargoMetrics was finally able to garner its first venture capital commitment in early 2010, from Boston-based Ascent Venture Partners. That gave the start-up the capital it needed to hire a bevy of data scientists to build an analytics platform that it could sell to commodity-trading houses and other commercial users. In 2011, CargoMetrics added Summerhill Venture Partners, a Toronto-based firm with a Boston office, to its investor roster, raising roughly $18 million from venture capital and angels for its data business.
By then Borgerson had already begun to contemplate converting CargoMetrics from an information provider into a money manager; he saw the potential to extract powerful trade signals from its technology rather than share it with other market participants for a fee. Among those he consulted was serial entrepreneur Peter Platzer, a friend of one of CargoMetrics’ original investors. Platzer, a physicist by training, had spent eight years as a quantitative hedge fund manager at Rohatyn Group and Deutsche Bank before co-founding Spire Global, a San Francisco–­based company that uses its own fleet of low-orbit satellites to track shipping, in 2012. “We had lengthy conversations on how to set up quant trading systems and how [commodities giant] Cargill had made a similar decision to set up its own in-house hedge fund to trade on the information it was gathering,” recalls Platzer. So Borgerson reset his course. Doan describes the decision as a “transformative moment” for the CargoMetrics co-founder. “The military trains you to be a strategic thinker,” Doan explains. “Scott had been tactical until then, making small pivots, and like a general who sees the theater of war, he moved into strategic mode.”
Borgerson’s ambition to succeed was in no small part fueled by the early turndowns by many venture capital firms and a fierce determination to best the Wall Street bunch at their own game. “There’s a lot that motivates me, including — if I’m honest — I have a big chip on my shoulder to beat the prep school, Ivy League, MBA crowd,” he says. “They’re bred to make money, but they’re not smarter than everyone else; they just have more patina and connections.” (Bred differently, he spent last Thanksgiving visiting his parents in rural Missouri. After breakfast he and his father were in the woods, shooting assault guns at posters of terrorists, with Gunny, his father’s Anatolian shepherd dog.)
Borgerson’s plan was not met with enthusiasm from the company’s then co-CEO, Weitz. CargoMetrics had been gaining clients and meeting its goals, and was on its way to becoming a successful data service provider. Weitz, who now is president of the Gloucester, Massachusetts–based Institute for Global Maritime Studies and an entrepreneur coach at Tufts’ Fletcher School, did not return e-mails or phone calls asking for comment. For his part, Borgerson says: “A ship cannot have two captains. The company simply matured and evolved into a streamlined management structure with one CEO instead of two.”
Eventually, Doan went along with Borgerson’s plan. “We believe in Scott and that shipping holds the no-shit, honest truth of what the economy is doing,” he says. But buying out the venture capital firms several years ahead of the usual exit time would require a hefty premium over what they had invested.
Once again Borgerson’s early supporters played a key role. Manzi, a fellow Fletcher School grad who had mentored Borgerson since the company’s early days, put up more money (making CargoMetrics one of his single largest investments) and introduced him to a powerful group of wealthy investors. Separately, the CFR’s Morse suggested that Borgerson meet with Daniel Freifeld, founder of Washington-based Callaway Capital Management and a former senior adviser on Eurasian energy at the U.S. Department of State. Impressed by Borgerson’s “intellectual honesty, vigor and more than four years of historical data,” Freifeld brought the idea to a billionaire third-party investor, who took his advice and became one of CargoMetrics’ largest backers. “I would not have suggested the investment if CargoMetrics had not done the hard part first,” adds Freifeld, declining to name the investor.
A chance encounter in the fall of 2012 gave the CargoMetrics team its first taste of real Wall Street trading. Attending an Arctic Imperative conference in Alaska, Borgerson met the CIO of a large investment firm, whom he declines to name. When Borgerson confided his ambition and that CargoMetrics had developed algorithms to trade on its shipping data once it was legally structured to do so, the CIO suggested CargoMetrics provide the analytical models for a separate portfolio the money manager would trade. Live trading using CargoMetrics’ models began in December 2012. Manzi brought in longtime banker Gerald Rosenfeld in 2013 to craft and negotiate the move to make CargoMetrics a limited liability investment firm. Rosenfeld acted in a personal role rather than in his position as vice chairman of Lazard and full-time professor and trustee of the New York University School of Law. The whole process took a year and a half. During that time Blackstone checked in as an investor.
Bradley, now an investment banker, has yet to invest in CargoMetrics, explaining that he is unfamiliar with quantitative investing. But he may eventually invest in Borgerson’s firm, he says, because “we are homeboys. I believe in him and that things are going to work out ” — pausing to add with a smile, “based on my vast quant experience, of course.”
Borgerson has been in stealth mode since CargoMetrics’ early days, when he moved the firm from an innovation lab near MIT because the shared space was too open. He is much more forthcoming when boasting of the firm’s “world-class talent.” The team includes astrophysicists, mathematicians, former hedge fund quants, electrical engineers, a trade lawyer and software developers. Hoogerwerf, who has a Ph.D. in astrophysics from the Netherlands’ Leiden University, built distributed technical environments for scientists and engineers at Microsoft Corp. Solomon Todesse, who works on quant investment strategies, was head of asset allocation at State Street Global Advisors. Aquil Abdullah, a team leader in the engineering group, was a software engineer in the high-performance-computing group at Microsoft. And senior investment strategist Charles Freifeld (Daniel’s father) has 40 years’ experience in futures and commodities markets, including nine with Boston-based commodity trading adviser firm AlphaMetrics Capital Management.
“All were self-made people; none were born with a silver spoon,” Borgerson notes. One of his blue-collar-­background hires was James (Jess) Scully, who joined as chief operating officer in 2011, after his employer Interactive Supercomputing was acquired by Microsoft.
“The team we built treasures team success, which is Scott’s motto,” Scully says. “We want shared resources, one P&L, not ‘How much money did my unit make?’” Both Scully and Borgerson say Cargo­Metrics is like the Golden State Warriors, a leading NBA basketball team known for putting aside personal glory and playing as a band of brothers having fun.
Borgerson says he fosters a no-ego policy with “lots of play because investment teams are built on trust, and playing together builds trust.” Team building at CargoMetrics includes pub crawls, picnics at Borgerson’s house, poker nights, volunteer work in a soup kitchen for the homeless, Red Sox games and visits to museums.
Trips to the Boston docks or Coast Guard base are intended to remind the CargoMetrics team of the real economy. There are also occasional “touch a tanker” days. On one visit to a tanker, everyone was amazed that the ship was the size of a city building, Borgerson says. “They could smell the salt on the deck,” he recalls. “Wall Street can lose sight of the real fundamentals in the world. I don’t want that to happen here.”
Unlike the Rothschilds 200 years ago, only a small percentage of the trades that CargoMetrics makes relate to beating official government data. Most simply are aimed at identifying mispricings in the market, using the firm’s real-time shipping data and proprietary algorithms.
At a whiteboard in his conference room, Borgerson sketches out CargoMetrics’ general formula. He draws a “maritime matrix” of three dynamic data sets: geography (Malacca, Brazil, Australia, China, Europe and the U.S.), metrics (ship counts, cargo mass and volume, ship speed and port congestion) and tradable factors (Brent crude versus WTI, as well as mining equities, commodity macro and Asian economic activity). Using satellite data with hundreds of millions of ship positions, CargoMetrics makes trillions of calculations to determine individual cargoes onboard the ships and then to aggregate the cargo flows and compare them with historical shipping data. All that leads to the final comparisons with historical financial market data to find mispricings. If CargoMetrics observes an appreciable decline in export shipping activity in South Africa, for example, its trading models will determine whether that is a significant early-warning sign by considering that information alongside other factors, such as interest rates. If Cargo­Metrics believes a decline in the rand is forthcoming, it might short it against a basket of other currencies. “This is like a heat map showing opportunity,” Borgerson says, noting that CargoMetrics is not trading physical commodities. “We are agnostic on whether to be long or short, and let the computers spot where there is a mispricing and liquidity in the markets.” He sums up his simple, but still less than revealing, process by writing on the whiteboard “Collect, Compute, Trade.”
Borgerson says CargoMetrics is building a systematic approach that will work even when cargo cannot be identified — on containerships, for instance. It already knows a large percentage of the daily imports and exports into and out of China and island economies such as Japan and Australia. And although the firm cannot glean from its calculations on satellite AIS data the type of cargo, such as iPhones from China, it can measure total flow, which shows present economic activity. Cargo­Metrics’ data scientists are working on linking such activity to the firm’s data set of the past seven years to measure the evolving global economy. That will lead, Borgerson maintains, to more trades on currencies and equity index futures and, eventually, trades on individual equities. “Uncorrelated” is a mantra of Borgerson and his team. Well aware that correlated assets sent the performance of most asset managers, including hedge funds, plunging in the financial crisis, CargoMetrics is determined to come up with an antidote. Careful not to say too much, Borgerson lays out the simple principle that the process starts with placing many bets among uncorrelated strategies in different asset classes, like commodities, currencies and equities.
The goal is diversification, staying as market neutral as possible and remaining sensitive to tail risk in different scenarios. CargoMetrics’ analytic models help find asset classes that are outliers. Those may include a publicly traded instrument such as oil, another commodity or an equity for which shipping information was a leading indicator during times when other asset classes marched in lockstep. The historical ship data is then blended with this new information to seek opportunities. Identifying mispriced spreads among different trades within an asset class is another way of avoiding the calamity of correlation. Borgerson says the firm’s models will find instances where one type of oil should be a short trade and another a long one. The same goes for whole asset classes — shorting one that will benefit if virtually all asset prices plunge and buying another that will rise when oil prices gain. “We’re counting cards with the goal of being right maybe 3 percent more than we are wrong, as a way of making profits during good times and staying afloat during times of sudden, unpredictable but far-reaching events,” Borgerson says. The key, he adds, “is to know your edge and spread your risk.” CargoMetrics’ uncorrelated approach worked during the dismal first three weeks of this year, says Borgerson. Dialing down risk as volatility in the markets soared, the firm was on track in January to have its best month since it began trading.
To improve the firm’s models, eight of its data scientists hold a weekly strategy meeting, nicknamed “the Shackleton Group” after the band of sailors shipwrecked in the Antarctic from 1914 to 1917. Hoogerwerf and Ramos co-lead the group. At one recent meeting they were deciding how much risk, including how much liquidity, there was in a possible strategy; reviewing whether to keep previous strategies; and assigning who would research new ones.
The Shackleton Group’s meetings are free-form, with a lot of “I’ve got an idea” interjections that disregard official roles. “We hit the restart button a lot,” says Ramos, a former director of business intelligence and a quantitative economist at law firm Dewey & LeBoeuf who joined CargoMetrics in late 2010. “That’s why our motto is ‘Never lose hope.’” A bet on oil, related to Russia’s production, was stopped at the last minute in 2014, when Russia invaded Ukraine. Some currency-trading strategies have been abandoned in theory or after failing. Strategies the Shackleton Group likes are passed on to the firm’s investment committee of Borgerson, Scully and Ramos for a final decision. CargoMetrics has a unique set of big-data challenges. Historical shipping patterns may not be as useful in the new global economy now that shipping freight prices are plunging, a sign that trade growth rates may be changing. And analysts point out how hard identifying oil cargo can be in certain locations and instances, even in more-­predictable economic times. “While it may be easy to say that ships leaving the Middle East Gulf are typically carrying crude oil, knowing the type of crude is sometimes quite difficult,” says Paulo Nery, senior director of Europe, Middle East and Asia oil for Genscape, a Louisville, Kentucky–based company that analyzes satellite tracking of ships. Borgerson maintains his team is well aware of the dangers of data mining and getting swamped by noise. “If you run computers hard enough, you can convince yourself of anything,” he says. To make sure CargoMetrics’ algorithms for identifying cargo are valid, the firm spot-checks manifest data filed at ports and imposes statistical confidence checks to guard against spurious correlations.
Getting the jump on official government statistics is likely to become tougher too thanks to the recently formed High-Level Group for the Modernization of Official Statistics. Although the U.S. is not a member, Canada is a key player helping to lead the mostly European nation group (including South Korea) in coming up with a global blueprint for measuring and reporting economic activity.
Reflecting on his journey to Wall Street — raising money, hiring employees with different skill sets, making changes to Cargo­Metrics’ culture, overcoming legal and regulatory hurdles — almost gives Borgerson second thoughts about whether he would do it again. “I’ve sailed ships through tropical storms, captured cocaine smugglers and testified before Congress [on his Arctic research],” he says, “but this was the hardest.”
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Day 12: Divination Adventure

Welcome back! Today we are going to talk about divination! (And also try it out.)
Divination is basically any method of looking into the hidden or unknowable. The inforamtion gained can be from the past, present, or future. It can come from your higher self, your spirit guides, spirits of the deceased, the earth or anywhere else. Divination, or Mancy, covers a broad range of activities and skills, so I'm going to cover some of the most popular today and encourage you to look deeper on your own.
Again, this is only a few of the methods commonly used for divination, but there is no end to the possibilities. One of my old favorites is to let a candle burn until there is a nice pool of wax, then pour the wax into water, then read the resulting shapes.
Your assignment today is to look into a form of divination that speaks to you. Consider the tools and how it would fit into your magical life. Would you like to contact otherworldly beings, ghosts, ancestors, a deity, or your inner self? Consider how you learn best. If you learn best with a lot of tactile feedback, something like runes or bones might work best for you. If you don’t like dead things- bones are probably not for you. Think about other factors as well, like time and space.
For today's Part 2 (optional), it's time to divine! I keep thinking of this as a choose your own adventure exercise. Tools tend to work better when you've gotten to know them, use them regularly, cleanse and consecrate, etc. For today, I want you to think about how you feel about the activity. It's not time to get married to your tools, it's just time to see if you like them.
Materials-
All methods: If you'd like to use color associations, your signature spice blend (or any herbs,) crystals, candles, or sigils- please do! Read through your chosen method to make sure you have an appropriate space/place to perform the divination method.
Option 1: Scrying: A black mirror, a shiny metal surface (like a brass or silver plate,) or something else with a reflection that isn't a clean clear mirror, you may use it. If you have a dish, bowl, cup, that holds water, put as much water as you are comfortable with into it. Black or dark colors work best for most people, but lighter colors or white can work. As I've mentioned before, a phone screen, tuned off, can make an excellent black mirror (with the added association of being a thing you probably look at for information regularly.) A regular mirror, or small hand mirror can work, but there are often more distracting visible things. Keeping the lights low can help, provided you can still see your surface.
Option 2: Read your drink: You'll need a drink that leaves residue and a cup that allows you to see it clearly. Light colors usually work best, and patterns tend to have a lot of distractions and cause confusion.
Option 3: Flip a coin: A coin or similar object with 2 different sides.
Option 4: Truly choose your own: Check out the list from part 1 and pick something that interests you!
Method:
Remember that these are my suggestions for beginners and I encourage you to personalize it and change it up:
All options: Choose a place and time with no distractions. Similar to meditation, you want to be able to let thoughts pass through and think about your question or topic without trying to think of the outcome of the reading. Stay as open as possible. Prepare your space and yourself. Ground, center, and protect. If you are using sigils, herbs, or candles, set them up.
Option 1: Scrying: When you are relaxed and ready, start to think about your question or topic. Try not to form any very solid thoughts as you do so (meaning don’t try to answer the question or make assumptions.) Take as much time as you need, ask for help if you are ready to accept it from other beings, deities, etc. Spend a while with your surface and gaze at and into it for a while. Watch the inner layers/different depths of the reflection. Make note of anything you see and what you think it could it mean. If you have instant success, start asking questions and see if you get an answer. There is no definite set of images or symbols, but common symbols may come up. Do your best to interpret what you see, and make notes to review later.
Option 2: Read Your Drink: Brew your tea, mix your cocoa, or otherwise prepare your beverage. As you sip or drink it, start to think about your question or topic. Try not to form any very solid thoughts as you do so (meaning don’t try to answer the question or make assumptions.) Don't drink the debris. When you have just enough liquid left to let the debris slide around, but not float, give the cup a gentle swirl, or a vigorous shake. Set the cup down and look for shapes. They may be very distinct, very scattered, etc. Be patient and pay attention to any feelings or details from other sources as you interpret the contents of the cup. Do your best to interpret, and make notes to review later.
Option 3: Flip a coin: This method is quick and simple, though not always easy. It is better at this stage to use this as a game rather than a decision maker or a very serious answer. Sometimes a yes or no can carry a much more nuanced meaning. Don't use this for any issue you might not be able to keep a cool head over. Break your question or topic into yes or no questions. First, charge/acquaint yourself with the coin. You can either tell the coin which side is yes and which is no, or you can ask, then flip, then ask again for confirmation. (Don't ask the same thing too many times, you do have to put some element of faith in this.) When this coin (or another) gives you a satisfactory yes/no, ask your questions and flip the coin.
Option 4: Truly choose your own: Follow the directions you found elsewhere.
All options: End your protection, dispel excess energy, safely put your candles out (if using) and clean up. Don’t worry if nothing happened. It usually takes a few tries, so make it a point to practice again. (The same and/or different techniques.)
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Today, tell me:
  1. What method did you look into? Was it something from my list or did you end up learning about a different divination method?
  2. Did you try one of the techniques listed in Part 2? How did it go?
  3. Do you have an idea of what type/s of divination you would like to work into your practice, if any?
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That’s it for today! Tomorrow will be much more relaxing. We’ll talk about ritual baths and essential oils! See you there!
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All information presented is copyrighted material, you may not reproduce any part in any way except as permitted by US Copyright law. For info about reproduction permission, DM me.
My current goal is to turn this into a book, and perhaps repeat this type of "course" in the future. I truly believe there is no cost of admission to witchcraft and I will never ask you to buy anything (from me or otherwise.)
If you would like and are comfortably able to leave a tip, I do have CashApp, Venmo, and Paypal. (Starving artist is a lifestyle choice, but not-starving artist is great too. And no, I'm not actually starving, but I am looking at paying some money to get this project turned into a book and I've got my eye on this tarot deck...)
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[Star Child] Chapter 38

Navigation: Chapter 1 | Previous Chapter | Chapter Index | Next Chapter || Other Serials: Vestiges of Power | Queen of the Desert Winds || Updates: Get Discord pings with ?rank Star Child on the Reddit Serials Discord | Reddit PMs using Butler Bot - see directions in comments
Despite their best efforts, the time anomaly that occurred when Christie made her confession did not go unnoticed. Master Igor had a spell to alert him when Christie left from talking with Meg and her friends. This wasn’t the end of the time anomalies either. Master Igor approached Meg about it the next day, and another time anomaly occurred while Meg was in his office, confirming that time behaves oddly around Meg. While Master Igor and the others investigating Meg tried to use those anomalies to peg her as a non-wizard, they were unable to find anything conclusive, and called off their search, since Meg’s portal was indistinguishable from that of a wizard, leaving Meg to study for finals in peace.
Because of how exams were scheduled, most of my exams were in the first half of the week, but my Intro A&A final was Friday afternoon. On the plus side, it meant I had extra time to study, and didn’t have to worry about oversleeping it. On the downside, it meant that I was studying all week, worrying about all of the potential variations Master Claude could throw at us.
“Calm down, that’s way beyond the scope of this class,” Matt said while we were studying in the library on Thursday.
“Seriously, you’re letting all the reading you’ve been doing for your apprenticeship go to your head,” Alice said.
I laughed. “Sorry about that. Probably also engineering getting to me as well.”
“Yeah, you’ve explained every variation Master Claude gave us at some point this week,” Matt said. “You’ll be fine.”
I knew they were right. I had to keep reminding myself that this was a second-year class, so it was expected for it to be easier than my senior engineering classes had been.
On Friday, Matt’s group met up at Conner’s sandwich shop for a last-minute bit of cramming before we walked over to the exam. Most students had already gone home for the break, so it was pretty quiet there despite being the lunch rush, and we were able to spread out our notes across two tables.
This time, it was my turn to tell everyone else to calm down.
“Seriously, we’ve been studying all week,” I said. “Unless it’s a little detail you want to memorize, I don’t know how much more cramming is going to help you.” I had donated my notes to the cause, but I was focusing on eating my lunch so that I wouldn’t get distracted by my stomach during the exam.
“Yeah, but I keep mixing up my scales,” Alice said. “And if the equations aren’t going to be labeled-”
I cut Alice off. “Your solutions won’t make any sense if you use the wrong scale.” Goodness knows I'd worked through enough problems the wrong way to prove that to myself.
“But what about the essays where you describe which equation to use at each scale?” Alice asked.
“Do the math first, write the essay later,” I said. “I did that all the time in my physics classes back at my mundane college.”
We arrived at the exam early so we could get our normal exam seats in the lecture hall. The lecture hall was bigger than our class needed for normal lectures, but it meant we were able to spread out for the exams. I liked to sit somewhere near my normal seat in the middle of the room for a sense of normalcy. Matt liked to sit up front, so that he couldn’t see everyone else progressing through the exam and get stressed about whether he was working fast enough. Alice liked the natural light coming in from the windows.
“Miss Schmidt, would you mind dropping by my office after the exam to discuss research plans for the break?” Master Claude asked when he walked into the room. About half the class was present. While everyone knew I was apprenticing with Master Claude, it was still a bit odd for him to discuss it in front of the class. He had been swamped in his office hours all week though, and I had been busy studying, so it made some sense that he’d ask to see me. He had mentioned something a few weeks ago when he was over for dinner on Sundays.
“Of course, sir” I said.
The exam was pretty much what I expected it to be. It took me most of the time to do it, since I wanted all of my answers to be thorough, but I got it done and checked over with a few minutes to spare. Alice had been right that I was letting all of the advanced texts I was reading go to my head.
“Do you remember when I mentioned that I was trying to arrange observational time over the break?” Master Claude asked me once he had ushered me into his office.
“It’s been a few weeks,” I said. “But I do remember you mentioning that.”
“I gave your question about measuring the Celestial force some more thought,” he said. “Surprisingly, most of the Masters in the department are traveling for the holidays, so it might actually be possible to try to engineer something in between the observations I have planned.”
That piqued my attention.
“Since you’re going to be staying on campus for the break, I thought that you might be interested in helping with the observations, I needed” Master Claude said. “They’re not specifically tied to the project you’ll eventually be doing, but having the observational time will be useful."
“It’s not like I have much else to do,” I said. I had been anticipating this, based on our previous discussions, but was waiting for the semester to be done before asking about specific details.
"Once we've measured the night's targets, you would be more than free to use the instruments to see if it gives any insight into your magic,” Master Claude said. "It will involve a few all-nighters, and there are only a few days during which each set of observations can be taken on-”
I cut him off. “It’s break, and Hank has been begging us to test his latest caffeine enhancements.”
“I just wanted to check, since I know my niece tends to use the break to get up early and work on personal projects,” Master Claude said.
“I’m of the camp that uses break to feel less guilty staying up late,” I said with a laugh. “Strange magical antics aside, I’ve never been the sort of person to pull an all-nighter.”
Master Claude walked over to his desk. “I have a schedule here somewhere,” he said, looking around the surface. Then he started digging through the papers. A minute later and he gave up. “Between reading papers, grading, and my own work, it probably got buried. If I find it, I’ll have Beth bring it by, otherwise I’ll write it out again once I’m done grading. I'll also bring by some books on the instruments you'll be using on Sunday.”
“Sounds good, sir,” I said.
“Enjoy your weekend,” Master Claude said. “Also, I started looking at your exam for the last few minutes before the block ended, and you certainly outdid yourself in how thorough your answers were.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said.
I walked back to the house feeling infinitely lighter, almost like I was floating along. The impact of my feet on the cold ground through the thin soles of my shoes kept me confident that I wasn’t actually floating, but I kept checking myself to make sure that I wasn’t doing anything else.
“Congrats on finishing your first semester!” Hank shouted as I walked in the door.
Of course everyone was already here and ready for dinner. Those that had had exams had already finished them, and then Hazel and Jack had just been hanging out and making sure the rest of us still ate and slept. Hazel had to harp on Hank in particular, since he was self-testing his magic caffeine again.
“How’d it go?” John asked when I got to the kitchen.
“Fine,” I said. “Pretty much what I expected. I took most of the time, between answering in detail and checking over my answers, but finished with a few minutes left.”
“What took so long getting home then?” John asked. “Dinner’s been waiting.”
“Master Claude wanted to check whether I was still in for helping with some observations over break,” I said. “He was going to give me the schedule, but he couldn’t find it.”
“Don’t get me started on his office back home,” Beth said. “If you think his campus office is bad, his home office is even worse.”
It didn’t take too much to imagine. The difference between his desk and the rest of his office made me think that he was keeping it clean for when he needed to speak to more important people. Without that pressure, I could imagine the books and papers strewn everywhere, chalkboards with diagrams and equations at all angles.
Dinner was one of the best I had had in weeks. It was just a basic chicken and pasta bake, but with exams done, my stomach was ready to enjoy anything I fed it. Despite the cold, we made some smores in the backyard and just spent time laughing.
When I woke up the next morning, I was the most relaxed I had been in months. Four glorious weeks without classes. Even with the observation periods later in the break, I would have plenty of time to just do nothing.
Doing Nothing was a lot harder with the limited technology we could use around campus. I meandered downstairs to find the brothers hunched over the table.
“What are you guys doing?” I asked.
“Shhhh…” Sam said from the kitchen.
I left them and walked over to the kitchen to get some breakfast..
“So what are they doing?” I whispered to Sam.
“They’re playing Wizard’s Wager,” Sam said.
I looked up from my bowl of cereal and stared at him blankly.
“Right, sorry,” Sam said. “It’s a derivative of mundane poker. Obviously with magic.”
“But why are they hunched over the table?” I asked.
“That’s the puzzle part,” Sam said.
I gave Sam a confused look while I chewed my way through my bite of cereal.
“Wizards two hundred years ago liked to combine games that maybe shouldn’t have been,” Sam said. “I don’t know why they chose poker, puzzles, and magic, but they did.” Sam looked at me, and then back at the brothers. “That didn’t help, did it?”
I shook my head.
An idea dawned on Sam’s face. “You don’t have observations for the next few days, right?”
I hastily swallowed the food in my mouth. “Nope,” I said. “Later in the week, but Master Claude is going to have Beth bring me a copy of the schedule once he finds it.”
“We really should have done more of this in the summer,” Sam said. “We all grew up playing these games, be we only really play them over break, since summer is taken up by apprentice work. But even though you’ve got the orphan story covering you for the most part, it’d be good to get familiar with some of the pastimes wizards grow up on.”
“You mean like terrorizing your dog in the backyard with nerf guns?” I asked.
“Fair point,” Sam said. “Grew up on in generations past then. And the games are still part of wizard families, especially at the holidays.”
A knock sounded from the door.
“I’d better get that,” Sam said. “I’ve never seen John break concentration for anything when he’s playing Wizard’s Wager.”
Beth came and joined us in the kitchen. “You know you can just come in,” I said as she joined us in watching the still scene playing out on the table.
“It still feels weird,” she said.
“You’ve been over here daily for how many months?” I asked. “You practically live here.”
“In Beth’s defense, I forgot to unlock the door this morning,” Sam said.
“So did you have any plans for relaxing?” Beth asked.
“Well, Sam got the idea to introduce me to some games,” I said.
“Oh! We’ll have to have a game night once Uncle Claude is done grading exams!” Beth said. “He won’t be coming for dinner on Sunday, unless he finishes grading exceptionally quickly, but sometime after grades have been submitted, when you’re not working on those observations.”
“We’ll probably be playing some games once the families are here,” Sam said. “So that would be a great warm-up so Meg knows the basics.”
“Wait, are your parents coming too?” I asked Sam.
“Nah, they’ll be busy at home for the break,” he said. “I think one of my uncles was going to try to visit though. And he’s terrible with names, so even if he tells my parents about you, he’ll get your name wrong, and probably whatever backstory we tell him.”
“That’s good,” I said through a mouthful of cereal. I wasn’t as worried about the other families, since they didn’t know me, but Sam’s parents would know me immediately from all the school projects we had done together when we were younger.
“John’s probably going to be a while though,” Sam said. “You know him and Wizard’s Wager.”
Beth rolled her eyes. “Honestly, I’m not surprised,” she said. “It took him half of last spring to get over losing to his cousin last New Year’s. They’re all probably going to want to test new strategies before their parents arrive. But Meg, you really shouldn’t start with Wizard’s Wager. Actually, Portal Racer might be more up your alley. It’s a bit newer, since it only really developed when collectible toy cars became popular.”
“I do like to play with portals,” I said.
“Someone’s gotta show Sam up at that,” Beth said.
“Hey!” Sam said. “Don’t blame me for being good with portals.”
“So how does it work?” I asked.
“It honestly sounds stupid when I try to explain it,” Beth said.
“You know those race car tracks?” Sam asked. “The ones with the big ramps, and a loop-the-loop. Now imagine using portals to extend that down ramp, and a six foot loop.”
Instead of imagining it, I made a projection.
“Exactly!" Sam said. "Part of the game relies on having a good set of racecars, like the mundane versions would. But it also depends on your skill with portals. Between the guys and me, there’s a pretty good collection at our homes, and I could always make a quick trip back to get them. I’d be really interested to see what sort of max speed you could get.”
I thought about how the portals would work. You’d want to keep the car oriented the right way, but otherwise, all it would take would be either a really long passage, or a set of portals and a nice fall in between.
“I’m definitely interested in trying that,” I said.
“Okay, that’s one game down,” Beth said. “But that isn’t a whole games night, so I’ll have to think of a few more things.”
“Awesome,” Sam said. “We’ll have to bug the guys later, or see if Hazel’s got any ideas.”
“Have you seen Hazel?” I asked. “She wasn’t in our room when I woke up, and we were going to experiment with some hairstyles from an old history textbook.”
“I think she went for a run?” Sam said. “But don’t quote me on it.”
“Wait, have you been to the boutiques around campus?” Beth asked.
I was kinda surprised that Beth asked. I wasn’t one for boutique shopping, and clothes had mysteriously been appearing in the closet as the seasons changed. I just assumed that it was some wardrobe that was part of the house, like the rest of the random stuff from the attic. The clothes had all fit, and been the plain, comfortable style that I favored.
“No,” I said with a dose of skepticism.
“Since you can’t go home, we’ll have to get you some holiday clothes,” Beth said.
“Good point,” Sam said.
“What am I missing out on here?” I asked.
“Holidays at Bard require more formal attire,” Sam said.
“Yeah,” Beth said. “Jeans and a cardigan won’t cut it for gatherings. Especially around John’s family.”
I was not liking where this was going. “Couldn’t someone just go to my house and get some of my stuff from there?” I asked.
“Nope,” Sam said. “Mundane dress clothes don’t fit the bill either.”
“You’re telling me there’s wizard dress attire,” I said.
“Precisely,” Beth said. “We’ll wait for Hazel to get back, and then you’ll both need some more formal attire.”
“Well, Hazel could get away with whatever’s considered formal for elves,” Sam said.
“Formal? Elves?” Hazel asked. I jumped a bit, since I hadn’t heard her get back from wherever she had been. “That’s literally all my grandparents wear. I have something in my wardrobe, but it was a present from my great-grandmother, and it looks the part.”
We all laughed. Mythic or mundane, we all had a relative who simply didn’t understand our taste in clothes, and would buy something they liked but that we would never wear.
“I still don’t have any wizard money though,” I said.
“You will by the end of break,” Beth said. “Uncle Claude couldn’t find his schedule for the days he wants to take observations, but he did say that there was some extra funding for that project, and that he'd pay you for your assistance with the observations, since they're technically outside of your apprenticeship. And besides, like the restaurants, most of the other shops around here will take any currency, magical or mundane.”
I had no more ways to protest. We waited for Hazel to clean up from her run, and then Beth led us from one shop to the next, trying on clothes and accessories. We stopped for lunch at one of the nicer restaurants we had been meaning to try, but hadn’t because of how many of us there usually were when the guys were along.
“They’d better be done with their game by now,” Beth said as we walked up the stairs to the house.
“How long does a game go on for?” I asked.
“Depends on who’s playing,” Beth said. “Longest John’s been in was eight hours I think? Usually families will try to keep it shorter though.”
“Okay then,” I said. “Portal Racers is sounding more and more appealing.”
“But you can’t spend all evening on that,” Beth said. “I think Uncle Claude and I have some board games that I can bring over. Ooooh. Do you think you could do colored illusions?”
“I can try,” I said.
“We’ve got one game that’s better with an illusionist,” Beth said. “You can play with the cards and chips, but I’ve heard it’s better if you can become the leader of the ancient civilization, since it’s easier to get into character that way.”
I had no clue what sort of game Beth was talking about, but I let her continue listing off different games that we could try playing over the break.
“You went to Bella’s without us?” Hank asked after we described our shopping adventure.
“There’s usually too many of us to go there most of the time, and we were next door anyways, so we figured we’d try it out,” I said. “The food was good, but it’s definitely too small for us all to go, except maybe later again in the break before students get back.”
“Yeah, they didn’t have tables for parties larger than four,” Hazel said.
“That is a bit of a problem,” Hank said. “So what’s this I hear about a games night?”
“Meg’s going to challenge Sam at Portal Racers,” Beth said. “And we’re going to introduce her to other games so that she’s not completely lost when your family visits. Didn’t Sam fill you in?”
“About time he had some real competition,” Hank said. “I’m pretty sure he sends his cars through some time loops to speed them up.”
I already had some ideas to do him one better, taking advantage of both physics and magic.
Without the structure provided by responsibilities, dinner turned into dessert turned into talking around the table into the night. If anything, it felt like we had even more time than we should have, but for the first time in weeks I wasn't worried about accidentally altering the flow of time.
Hazel dragged me out of bed on Sunday morning to go for a run.
"Do I have to?" I asked.
"Unless you want to watch the guys hunch over a table all morning," she said. For whatever reason, we had instituted a no work rule for the weekends, so reading the books Master Claude had loaned me was off the table.
"I could go back to sleep," I said. Not that I actually would go back to sleep. But it was an excuse.
Hazel knew I wasn't going to be able to go back to sleep and called my bluff, forcing me to get out of bed and get ready to go for a run with her.
The cold morning air wasn't as painful as I had been expecting. The run itself was bearable at best, but my nose didn’t sting with every breath, so I was counting it as a win.
“Wow it’s been a long time since I went for a run,” I panted when we finished our set of loops around campus. I had done a lot of walking the last four and a half years, all around the campus of my mundane college, and then all around Bard this past semester. But my legs were still complaining about the exertion.
Hazel, on the other hand, looked like she had just gone for a morning stroll. “The discipline is good,” she said. "Not just for running, but for magic. Wizards use alcohol to push their limits, but it's also important to know what those limits are."
"Can't have my portal be too efficient," I joked.
"It's not just about that," Hazel said. "You know as well as I do that you're a lot more powerful than portals and party tricks."
"I know," I said. "But what do I do that's risky? If anything, I use it to stay away from the action."
"Well, there's gravity," Hazel said. "And then probably time. And who knows, whatever you do to see other places might have its limits."
"Fair point," I said.
"So we'll keep at the running over break," Hazel said.
I groaned, but accepted the wisdom to her plan.
The rest of the day was spent up in the attic. Once the guys remembered that it was a disaster zone, they had put it on our group to-do list to organize it a bit, but everything that had gone on during the fall had killed that plan. There was generations’ worth of stuff hiding up there, ranging from textbooks and supplies to clothes and furniture. Sam’s extended family, which the brothers were part of, took turns using the house as their respective children came of age, and no generation of occupants seemed particularly concerned about bringing their stuff along with them after college.
“Hey, what’s this old diary?” Beth asked. She started flipping through it.
“Meg, you’ve got to come see this,” she said after a few pages.
The handwriting was startlingly familiar. I hadn’t thought about it in months, since other things had taken priority, but there was no mistaking the script.
“That’s got to be older than anything else in here,” I said. “Sam, you never said Master Giovanni was a distant ancestor.”
“What?” Sam asked. He came over to look at the diary.
“That doesn’t make sense though,” John said. “Wasn’t he in Europe somewhere? And if the dates in his other diary were right, he’s older than Bard College.”
“Maybe someone else put it here?” Hazel said. Everyone was putting down the things they had been looking at to come look at the diary.
I kept flipping through the pages. “This isn’t from his time as a student,” I said, skimming some of the entries. “He hid it here late in his life.”
“Wait, go back!” Beth said. “There was a symbol.”
I flipped back through the pages, slowly so Beth could scan them for whatever she had seen. Four pages earlier, she told me to stop.
“That’s an ancient symbol for l’Ordre,” she said.
Unfortunately, while the script was familiar, the language varied, and the page we were on wasn't in English. The last journal had reacted to my aura, so I called a little bit to my hand to see if this one was similarly enchanted. It didn’t react.
“Looks like we have to translate this the old-fashioned way,” I said.
“With the library empty and no major field trip this break, I don’t have much else to do,” Beth said. “John and I could probably work on that while you’re doing the observations with Uncle Claude.”
I looked at John. He seemed surprised at being roped into the project, but wasn’t complaining.
“Speaking of which, has he found the schedule yet?” I asked.
“Oh! Yes!” Beth said. “Sorry, I forgot about that when I came over. It’s in my bag downstairs.”
It was getting late anyways, so we called it a night for the attic organization party, and went back downstairs for dessert.
Beth handed me the piece of paper with Master Claude’s scribbled notes about which nights he wanted to take observations.
“Looks like I’ll be keeping busy,” I said. He was ambitiously hoping to start observations as soon as grades were submitted on Tuesday.
Next Chapter
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[Star Child] Chapter 38

Navigation: Chapter 1 | Previous Chapter | Chapter Index | Next Chapter || Other Serials: Vestiges of Power | Queen of the Desert Winds || Updates: Get Discord pings with ?rank Star Child on the Reddit Serials Discord | Get updates via Reddit PM by commenting HelpMeButler down below (keep the < > for it to work)
Despite their best efforts, the time anomaly that occurred when Christie made her confession did not go unnoticed. Master Igor had a spell to alert him when Christie left from talking with Meg and her friends. This wasn’t the end of the time anomalies either. Master Igor approached Meg about it the next day, and another time anomaly occurred while Meg was in his office, confirming that time behaves oddly around Meg. While Master Igor and the others investigating Meg tried to use those anomalies to peg her as a non-wizard, they were unable to find anything conclusive, and called off their search, since Meg’s portal was indistinguishable from that of a wizard, leaving Meg to study for finals in peace.
Because of how exams were scheduled, most of my exams were in the first half of the week, but my Intro A&A final was Friday afternoon. On the plus side, it meant I had extra time to study, and didn’t have to worry about oversleeping it. On the downside, it meant that I was studying all week, worrying about all of the potential variations Master Claude could throw at us.
“Calm down, that’s way beyond the scope of this class,” Matt said while we were studying in the library on Thursday.
“Seriously, you’re letting all the reading you’ve been doing for your apprenticeship go to your head,” Alice said.
I laughed. “Sorry about that. Probably also engineering getting to me as well.”
“Yeah, you’ve explained every variation Master Claude gave us at some point this week,” Matt said. “You’ll be fine.”
I knew they were right. I had to keep reminding myself that this was a second-year class, so it was expected for it to be easier than my senior engineering classes had been.
On Friday, Matt’s group met up at Conner’s sandwich shop for a last-minute bit of cramming before we walked over to the exam. Most students had already gone home for the break, so it was pretty quiet there despite being the lunch rush, and we were able to spread out our notes across two tables.
This time, it was my turn to tell everyone else to calm down.
“Seriously, we’ve been studying all week,” I said. “Unless it’s a little detail you want to memorize, I don’t know how much more cramming is going to help you.” I had donated my notes to the cause, but I was focusing on eating my lunch so that I wouldn’t get distracted by my stomach during the exam.
“Yeah, but I keep mixing up my scales,” Alice said. “And if the equations aren’t going to be labeled-”
I cut Alice off. “Your solutions won’t make any sense if you use the wrong scale.” Goodness knows I'd worked through enough problems the wrong way to prove that to myself.
“But what about the essays where you describe which equation to use at each scale?” Alice asked.
“Do the math first, write the essay later,” I said. “I did that all the time in my physics classes back at my mundane college.”
We arrived at the exam early so we could get our normal exam seats in the lecture hall. The lecture hall was bigger than our class needed for normal lectures, but it meant we were able to spread out for the exams. I liked to sit somewhere near my normal seat in the middle of the room for a sense of normalcy. Matt liked to sit up front, so that he couldn’t see everyone else progressing through the exam and get stressed about whether he was working fast enough. Alice liked the natural light coming in from the windows.
“Miss Schmidt, would you mind dropping by my office after the exam to discuss research plans for the break?” Master Claude asked when he walked into the room. About half the class was present. While everyone knew I was apprenticing with Master Claude, it was still a bit odd for him to discuss it in front of the class. He had been swamped in his office hours all week though, and I had been busy studying, so it made some sense that he’d ask to see me. He had mentioned something a few weeks ago when he was over for dinner on Sundays.
“Of course, sir” I said.
The exam was pretty much what I expected it to be. It took me most of the time to do it, since I wanted all of my answers to be thorough, but I got it done and checked over with a few minutes to spare. Alice had been right that I was letting all of the advanced texts I was reading go to my head.
“Do you remember when I mentioned that I was trying to arrange observational time over the break?” Master Claude asked me once he had ushered me into his office.
“It’s been a few weeks,” I said. “But I do remember you mentioning that.”
“I gave your question about measuring the Celestial force some more thought,” he said. “Surprisingly, most of the Masters in the department are traveling for the holidays, so it might actually be possible to try to engineer something in between the observations I have planned.”
That piqued my attention.
“Since you’re going to be staying on campus for the break, I thought that you might be interested in helping with the observations, I needed” Master Claude said. “They’re not specifically tied to the project you’ll eventually be doing, but having the observational time will be useful."
“It’s not like I have much else to do,” I said. I had been anticipating this, based on our previous discussions, but was waiting for the semester to be done before asking about specific details.
"Once we've measured the night's targets, you would be more than free to use the instruments to see if it gives any insight into your magic,” Master Claude said. "It will involve a few all-nighters, and there are only a few days during which each set of observations can be taken on-”
I cut him off. “It’s break, and Hank has been begging us to test his latest caffeine enhancements.”
“I just wanted to check, since I know my niece tends to use the break to get up early and work on personal projects,” Master Claude said.
“I’m of the camp that uses break to feel less guilty staying up late,” I said with a laugh. “Strange magical antics aside, I’ve never been the sort of person to pull an all-nighter.”
Master Claude walked over to his desk. “I have a schedule here somewhere,” he said, looking around the surface. Then he started digging through the papers. A minute later and he gave up. “Between reading papers, grading, and my own work, it probably got buried. If I find it, I’ll have Beth bring it by, otherwise I’ll write it out again once I’m done grading. I'll also bring by some books on the instruments you'll be using on Sunday.”
“Sounds good, sir,” I said.
“Enjoy your weekend,” Master Claude said. “Also, I started looking at your exam for the last few minutes before the block ended, and you certainly outdid yourself in how thorough your answers were.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said.
I walked back to the house feeling infinitely lighter, almost like I was floating along. The impact of my feet on the cold ground through the thin soles of my shoes kept me confident that I wasn’t actually floating, but I kept checking myself to make sure that I wasn’t doing anything else.
“Congrats on finishing your first semester!” Hank shouted as I walked in the door.
Of course everyone was already here and ready for dinner. Those that had had exams had already finished them, and then Hazel and Jack had just been hanging out and making sure the rest of us still ate and slept. Hazel had to harp on Hank in particular, since he was self-testing his magic caffeine again.
“How’d it go?” John asked when I got to the kitchen.
“Fine,” I said. “Pretty much what I expected. I took most of the time, between answering in detail and checking over my answers, but finished with a few minutes left.”
“What took so long getting home then?” John asked. “Dinner’s been waiting.”
“Master Claude wanted to check whether I was still in for helping with some observations over break,” I said. “He was going to give me the schedule, but he couldn’t find it.”
“Don’t get me started on his office back home,” Beth said. “If you think his campus office is bad, his home office is even worse.”
It didn’t take too much to imagine. The difference between his desk and the rest of his office made me think that he was keeping it clean for when he needed to speak to more important people. Without that pressure, I could imagine the books and papers strewn everywhere, chalkboards with diagrams and equations at all angles.
Dinner was one of the best I had had in weeks. It was just a basic chicken and pasta bake, but with exams done, my stomach was ready to enjoy anything I fed it. Despite the cold, we made some smores in the backyard and just spent time laughing.
When I woke up the next morning, I was the most relaxed I had been in months. Four glorious weeks without classes. Even with the observation periods later in the break, I would have plenty of time to just do nothing.
Doing Nothing was a lot harder with the limited technology we could use around campus. I meandered downstairs to find the brothers hunched over the table.
“What are you guys doing?” I asked.
“Shhhh…” Sam said from the kitchen.
I left them and walked over to the kitchen to get some breakfast..
“So what are they doing?” I whispered to Sam.
“They’re playing Wizard’s Wager,” Sam said.
I looked up from my bowl of cereal and stared at him blankly.
“Right, sorry,” Sam said. “It’s a derivative of mundane poker. Obviously with magic.”
“But why are they hunched over the table?” I asked.
“That’s the puzzle part,” Sam said.
I gave Sam a confused look while I chewed my way through my bite of cereal.
“Wizards two hundred years ago liked to combine games that maybe shouldn’t have been,” Sam said. “I don’t know why they chose poker, puzzles, and magic, but they did.” Sam looked at me, and then back at the brothers. “That didn’t help, did it?”
I shook my head.
An idea dawned on Sam’s face. “You don’t have observations for the next few days, right?”
I hastily swallowed the food in my mouth. “Nope,” I said. “Later in the week, but Master Claude is going to have Beth bring me a copy of the schedule once he finds it.”
“We really should have done more of this in the summer,” Sam said. “We all grew up playing these games, be we only really play them over break, since summer is taken up by apprentice work. But even though you’ve got the orphan story covering you for the most part, it’d be good to get familiar with some of the pastimes wizards grow up on.”
“You mean like terrorizing your dog in the backyard with nerf guns?” I asked.
“Fair point,” Sam said. “Grew up on in generations past then. And the games are still part of wizard families, especially at the holidays.”
A knock sounded from the door.
“I’d better get that,” Sam said. “I’ve never seen John break concentration for anything when he’s playing Wizard’s Wager.”
Beth came and joined us in the kitchen. “You know you can just come in,” I said as she joined us in watching the still scene playing out on the table.
“It still feels weird,” she said.
“You’ve been over here daily for how many months?” I asked. “You practically live here.”
“In Beth’s defense, I forgot to unlock the door this morning,” Sam said.
“So did you have any plans for relaxing?” Beth asked.
“Well, Sam got the idea to introduce me to some games,” I said.
“Oh! We’ll have to have a game night once Uncle Claude is done grading exams!” Beth said. “He won’t be coming for dinner on Sunday, unless he finishes grading exceptionally quickly, but sometime after grades have been submitted, when you’re not working on those observations.”
“We’ll probably be playing some games once the families are here,” Sam said. “So that would be a great warm-up so Meg knows the basics.”
“Wait, are your parents coming too?” I asked Sam.
“Nah, they’ll be busy at home for the break,” he said. “I think one of my uncles was going to try to visit though. And he’s terrible with names, so even if he tells my parents about you, he’ll get your name wrong, and probably whatever backstory we tell him.”
“That’s good,” I said through a mouthful of cereal. I wasn’t as worried about the other families, since they didn’t know me, but Sam’s parents would know me immediately from all the school projects we had done together when we were younger.
“John’s probably going to be a while though,” Sam said. “You know him and Wizard’s Wager.”
Beth rolled her eyes. “Honestly, I’m not surprised,” she said. “It took him half of last spring to get over losing to his cousin last New Year’s. They’re all probably going to want to test new strategies before their parents arrive. But Meg, you really shouldn’t start with Wizard’s Wager. Actually, Portal Racer might be more up your alley. It’s a bit newer, since it only really developed when collectible toy cars became popular.”
“I do like to play with portals,” I said.
“Someone’s gotta show Sam up at that,” Beth said.
“Hey!” Sam said. “Don’t blame me for being good with portals.”
“So how does it work?” I asked.
“It honestly sounds stupid when I try to explain it,” Beth said.
“You know those race car tracks?” Sam asked. “The ones with the big ramps, and a loop-the-loop. Now imagine using portals to extend that down ramp, and a six foot loop.”
Instead of imagining it, I made a projection.
“Exactly!" Sam said. "Part of the game relies on having a good set of racecars, like the mundane versions would. But it also depends on your skill with portals. Between the guys and me, there’s a pretty good collection at our homes, and I could always make a quick trip back to get them. I’d be really interested to see what sort of max speed you could get.”
I thought about how the portals would work. You’d want to keep the car oriented the right way, but otherwise, all it would take would be either a really long passage, or a set of portals and a nice fall in between.
“I’m definitely interested in trying that,” I said.
“Okay, that’s one game down,” Beth said. “But that isn’t a whole games night, so I’ll have to think of a few more things.”
“Awesome,” Sam said. “We’ll have to bug the guys later, or see if Hazel’s got any ideas.”
“Have you seen Hazel?” I asked. “She wasn’t in our room when I woke up, and we were going to experiment with some hairstyles from an old history textbook.”
“I think she went for a run?” Sam said. “But don’t quote me on it.”
“Wait, have you been to the boutiques around campus?” Beth asked.
I was kinda surprised that Beth asked. I wasn’t one for boutique shopping, and clothes had mysteriously been appearing in the closet as the seasons changed. I just assumed that it was some wardrobe that was part of the house, like the rest of the random stuff from the attic. The clothes had all fit, and been the plain, comfortable style that I favored.
“No,” I said with a dose of skepticism.
“Since you can’t go home, we’ll have to get you some holiday clothes,” Beth said.
“Good point,” Sam said.
“What am I missing out on here?” I asked.
“Holidays at Bard require more formal attire,” Sam said.
“Yeah,” Beth said. “Jeans and a cardigan won’t cut it for gatherings. Especially around John’s family.”
I was not liking where this was going. “Couldn’t someone just go to my house and get some of my stuff from there?” I asked.
“Nope,” Sam said. “Mundane dress clothes don’t fit the bill either.”
“You’re telling me there’s wizard dress attire,” I said.
“Precisely,” Beth said. “We’ll wait for Hazel to get back, and then you’ll both need some more formal attire.”
“Well, Hazel could get away with whatever’s considered formal for elves,” Sam said.
“Formal? Elves?” Hazel asked. I jumped a bit, since I hadn’t heard her get back from wherever she had been. “That’s literally all my grandparents wear. I have something in my wardrobe, but it was a present from my great-grandmother, and it looks the part.”
We all laughed. Mythic or mundane, we all had a relative who simply didn’t understand our taste in clothes, and would buy something they liked but that we would never wear.
“I still don’t have any wizard money though,” I said.
“You will by the end of break,” Beth said. “Uncle Claude couldn’t find his schedule for the days he wants to take observations, but he did say that there was some extra funding for that project, and that he'd pay you for your assistance with the observations, since they're technically outside of your apprenticeship. And besides, like the restaurants, most of the other shops around here will take any currency, magical or mundane.”
I had no more ways to protest. We waited for Hazel to clean up from her run, and then Beth led us from one shop to the next, trying on clothes and accessories. We stopped for lunch at one of the nicer restaurants we had been meaning to try, but hadn’t because of how many of us there usually were when the guys were along.
“They’d better be done with their game by now,” Beth said as we walked up the stairs to the house.
“How long does a game go on for?” I asked.
“Depends on who’s playing,” Beth said. “Longest John’s been in was eight hours I think? Usually families will try to keep it shorter though.”
“Okay then,” I said. “Portal Racers is sounding more and more appealing.”
“But you can’t spend all evening on that,” Beth said. “I think Uncle Claude and I have some board games that I can bring over. Ooooh. Do you think you could do colored illusions?”
“I can try,” I said.
“We’ve got one game that’s better with an illusionist,” Beth said. “You can play with the cards and chips, but I’ve heard it’s better if you can become the leader of the ancient civilization, since it’s easier to get into character that way.”
I had no clue what sort of game Beth was talking about, but I let her continue listing off different games that we could try playing over the break.
“You went to Bella’s without us?” Hank asked after we described our shopping adventure.
“There’s usually too many of us to go there most of the time, and we were next door anyways, so we figured we’d try it out,” I said. “The food was good, but it’s definitely too small for us all to go, except maybe later again in the break before students get back.”
“Yeah, they didn’t have tables for parties larger than four,” Hazel said.
“That is a bit of a problem,” Hank said. “So what’s this I hear about a games night?”
“Meg’s going to challenge Sam at Portal Racers,” Beth said. “And we’re going to introduce her to other games so that she’s not completely lost when your family visits. Didn’t Sam fill you in?”
“About time he had some real competition,” Hank said. “I’m pretty sure he sends his cars through some time loops to speed them up.”
I already had some ideas to do him one better, taking advantage of both physics and magic.
Without the structure provided by responsibilities, dinner turned into dessert turned into talking around the table into the night. If anything, it felt like we had even more time than we should have, but for the first time in weeks I wasn't worried about accidentally altering the flow of time.
Hazel dragged me out of bed on Sunday morning to go for a run.
"Do I have to?" I asked.
"Unless you want to watch the guys hunch over a table all morning," she said. For whatever reason, we had instituted a no work rule for the weekends, so reading the books Master Claude had loaned me was off the table.
"I could go back to sleep," I said. Not that I actually would go back to sleep. But it was an excuse.
Hazel knew I wasn't going to be able to go back to sleep and called my bluff, forcing me to get out of bed and get ready to go for a run with her.
The cold morning air wasn't as painful as I had been expecting. The run itself was bearable at best, but my nose didn’t sting with every breath, so I was counting it as a win.
“Wow it’s been a long time since I went for a run,” I panted when we finished our set of loops around campus. I had done a lot of walking the last four and a half years, all around the campus of my mundane college, and then all around Bard this past semester. But my legs were still complaining about the exertion.
Hazel, on the other hand, looked like she had just gone for a morning stroll. “The discipline is good,” she said. "Not just for running, but for magic. Wizards use alcohol to push their limits, but it's also important to know what those limits are."
"Can't have my portal be too efficient," I joked.
"It's not just about that," Hazel said. "You know as well as I do that you're a lot more powerful than portals and party tricks."
"I know," I said. "But what do I do that's risky? If anything, I use it to stay away from the action."
"Well, there's gravity," Hazel said. "And then probably time. And who knows, whatever you do to see other places might have its limits."
"Fair point," I said.
"So we'll keep at the running over break," Hazel said.
I groaned, but accepted the wisdom to her plan.
The rest of the day was spent up in the attic. Once the guys remembered that it was a disaster zone, they had put it on our group to-do list to organize it a bit, but everything that had gone on during the fall had killed that plan. There was generations’ worth of stuff hiding up there, ranging from textbooks and supplies to clothes and furniture. Sam’s extended family, which the brothers were part of, took turns using the house as their respective children came of age, and no generation of occupants seemed particularly concerned about bringing their stuff along with them after college.
“Hey, what’s this old diary?” Beth asked. She started flipping through it.
“Meg, you’ve got to come see this,” she said after a few pages.
The handwriting was startlingly familiar. I hadn’t thought about it in months, since other things had taken priority, but there was no mistaking the script.
“That’s got to be older than anything else in here,” I said. “Sam, you never said Master Giovanni was a distant ancestor.”
“What?” Sam asked. He came over to look at the diary.
“That doesn’t make sense though,” John said. “Wasn’t he in Europe somewhere? And if the dates in his other diary were right, he’s older than Bard College.”
“Maybe someone else put it here?” Hazel said. Everyone was putting down the things they had been looking at to come look at the diary.
I kept flipping through the pages. “This isn’t from his time as a student,” I said, skimming some of the entries. “He hid it here late in his life.”
“Wait, go back!” Beth said. “There was a symbol.”
I flipped back through the pages, slowly so Beth could scan them for whatever she had seen. Four pages earlier, she told me to stop.
“That’s an ancient symbol for l’Ordre,” she said.
Unfortunately, while the script was familiar, the language varied, and the page we were on wasn't in English. The last journal had reacted to my aura, so I called a little bit to my hand to see if this one was similarly enchanted. It didn’t react.
“Looks like we have to translate this the old-fashioned way,” I said.
“With the library empty and no major field trip this break, I don’t have much else to do,” Beth said. “John and I could probably work on that while you’re doing the observations with Uncle Claude.”
I looked at John. He seemed surprised at being roped into the project, but wasn’t complaining.
“Speaking of which, has he found the schedule yet?” I asked.
“Oh! Yes!” Beth said. “Sorry, I forgot about that when I came over. It’s in my bag downstairs.”
It was getting late anyways, so we called it a night for the attic organization party, and went back downstairs for dessert.
Beth handed me the piece of paper with Master Claude’s scribbled notes about which nights he wanted to take observations.
“Looks like I’ll be keeping busy,” I said. He was ambitiously hoping to start observations as soon as grades were submitted on Tuesday.
Next Chapter
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what are the different colored poker chips worth video

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