Mitchell Loughlin > Recent Status Updates

G wakes up in pain, having shit the bed. He men carry him to a bath and he thinking about ending it. He is summoned to his bosses room where he learns the head counseler is dead and then man that was intended to replace him was the master of the mints he just incriminated.

He is offered a job that will bring him power but also the hatered of pretty much everyone

Red answers her questions about eating, they don’t need to but she finds it an explorative hobby, she tastes all sorts of things not just food and doesn’t need to eat for calories, she eats for the experience as her people use sunlight and salt baths for nutrients.

Shes asks about blue and her friends.

The seeker is still following, consuming the refuge of the couples letters.

Red working for a decade in the time of Gengis Kang is harvesting wood for seige equipment when she dines scares in the rings of a tree a letter from Blue. She asks about reds people, makes references again to history and a lot about nature. She talk about food and wonders if reds people eat. This letter was a cool idea.

Blue is hunting for seal meat and furs when she sees a seal with her color assigned to it.

Both sides are so sure of their total victory and taunt each other. Each time they leave a note it is becoming more obscured.
1. A letter you need to burn to read
2. Water you need to boil to encode the message (not sure I got this one)
3. Holes drilled into the bones of a man red was sent to find
4. In the death code of an AI ( again not sure I got this one)

Some passages of this book I need to reread to understand. might just be me but I think it’s the futuristic sciences / artsy language that just takes a moment to digest.

The science feels like magic.

Red + blue take turns leaving notes to each other right where the others mission would have been successful if not for intervention. They leave humerus notes filled with historical references Shakespeare to Mario

The writing of this is very vivid. It uses a lot of description yet to describe red as calculating, emotional, but not overly

Careful, patient, they work in the shadows and try to literally seed the world to grow into something new.

On the battlefield after killing millions red finds a letter. They are suspicious of a trap but read it anyways. It is designed to burn as they read it to prevent re-reading.
Someone, a seeker, does find a way to read it “again” using wrinkles in time and drops of there rainbow blood

The time war is not what I thought. Instead of the future at war with the past its two futures each trying to seed a universe where they exist. The two sides have very different strategies. The agency which red belongs to prefers to destroy all threads of time that weave away from there future. They attack big, and fast descanting whole planets with a single solider. The gardeners which blue belongs to are….

Meeting the sister however his tune changes quickly. She is gorgeous, smart and far outpaces him socially. She constantly kept him off his feet, something her brother also did fencing where he could hardly reply with anything other than “Er-yes”. She mentions that her brother grew up
With Glotka and that he used to be an amazing fencer before he was tortured. They run into the very man and she is compassionate

Jazel is training under the total age of his master and major west. West tricks him by fainting he had lost balance and wins a fensing bout. His master is little pleased and assigns more training so they will
Be ready for the contest in a few weeks.
West tells Jazel he will Need to help escort his sister around town. J is pissed because he things if west as beneath him and his family is worse

One night as he is cooking’s meager ration he here’s good eats approaching and finds an apprentice named quai was sent to find him. Notes on appearance above. Quai is famished, tired and sick and eats all of Logan’s food. They head towards his master and on the way are jumped by 4 bandits. The fight seen in this is DOPE. Logen manages to out muscle them all and robs there corpses

Glotka and the gang have taken the far the master of the mint to get him to confess to crimes. This was the direction of the head of the inquisitors but is very risky for G. They start by chopping off his fingers but by but and manage to get a confession although we don’t know what yet

Logen knows that if he heads south he will
Be met by a magi or wizard. He is waiting trying not to starve in a swamp

Malacus Quasi - Magus in training aka wizard
Skinny, long hair, not a woodsmen, has been apprentice for a while. Not much use in a fight. Was sent to find Logen from his master and the great north library
Jazel Luthar - rich kid, alcoholic, training to be a sword master to please his father but doesn’t have the heart for it, prideful, elitist

Marshal Varuz- jazels instructor, hard man to please, Jan Jab

Glotka
Frost
Severed
Teufel

The writing so far is good, a lot of use of color and is in a first person pov. Abercrombie seems to use a lot of double wording to emphasize certain points. For example “Logen was grasping, grasping at nothing”

Logen (annoying spelling) is at camp when he is attacked by a group of people he refers to as flatheads. They came with numbers and fought viciously with spears. They knock him over the edge of a cliff where he is holding on by just a root. His enemy is holding onto his boot. (Familiar visual)

He feels his hand slipping and knows he will fall so he tries to land in the water instead of the rocks.

He wishes for happiness for all, like Arthur

The end

As they wade through neck deep foul slime lightning crashes above them none stop. When they finally emerge in dry land Red orders Arthur to walk in front of him. A sees the globe and runs to it screaming with joy asking for Happiness for all. He is jerked off his feet and wrung out like a rag. Dead.
Red reflects on why he is here. If it’s fair to trade one son for his daughter. If it’s worth the money.

Arthur- vultures son, and red try to find the golden orb in order to make a wish. They navigate around traps like the gravity well, the air Turing into fire, thick green slime, and a couple others. All the while Ted knows he is using arthur to activate one of the last traps. Vulture also knew this and sent his son to die.

Red saves them Botha a couple times and this whole passage was very intense to read

A cool touch in the book was Nathan’s pov is way faster and energetic sounding while reds is very depressed.

Anomalies happen around those who leave and it causes dangerous accidents to sky rocket

Noothan though was using her to get info on the gangs. Red was with the vulture but they separate and red gets N drunk. Good lord is there a lot of drinking. Red introduced N to his dead who is one of the walking corpses and monkey has really regressed in the past few years. She has become more crippled by the desease the zone left her with

The can no longer leave if they were born near the zone. Statistical….

Noothan visits red and guts after getting the physics at totally loaded. They had talked about how much they have actually learned from the zones, which is not much. They have picked up a few new tools but have no idea how any of them work. Like using a sledge hammer to crack nuts.

Noothan chats with Guta. Apparently after red was arrested he would stop by occasionally to offer a hand. They grew a bond

N talks to the man interviewed in the beginning of the book. he is told the roadside picnic analogy. Assume you are on a road trip and you spend the night at a campsite the next morning you leave garbage behind but you have no intention of coming back. That, he believes, is what happened with the aliens. they left their trash behind unaware and unbothered by our presence like you would a squirrel at your campsite

Assuming about a 3 year time jump
Nooman, the man who stopped Red at the diner is the pov
He has been working to stop the flow of swag
Out of the zone, and thinks he did a good job. He learns from his C.O. That he has done a shit job instead. There is tons of swag flowing out through the vulture. On the surface the V has been laying low, a crippled, societies hosting picnic (basically orgies)

Ducking through allys and shortcuts he runs away. Stopping at home he takes something from the wicker basket and drops it at a secret location. He calls his buyer and tells him he’s caught, where the drop off was and to take care of his wife and daughter for the 3 years he’ll be in prison.

He takes a final look at his daughter knowing he did the best he could. He turns himself in

Red then tries to go to the bank but the taxi driver brings him to the bar instead. He’s so tired he accepts that the story the driver told him was true. Once inside he sees a crowd he doesn’t recognize and Ernest the bar tender asks him into the back room where he is met by military personnel.
Who pat him down and open his briefcase finding goods He escapes through a trap door. Unclear if it was w/ the swag

Anything new he didn’t know what it did he held back copies of incase it sold for more than he asked for. One such item was a ring of perpetual motion. He sells his wears and leaves.
Stops at the vultures house wear he talked to the man’s hot daughter. We get a real long description of the daughter…..
He gives her half the cash and she calls him an idiot for saving her father’s life. Sweet kid.

On the way to a meeting R stops at a diner for a coffee and is met by a man he knows offering “work”. There always seems to “work” available and a lot of it is dangerous. That being said many of the stalkers jobs has been replaced by robots.

He takes a meeting on the 8th floor of a hotel while wearing a suit the man he is meeting is in PJs. He sells
Some, but not all of the swag him and the vulture found

Monkey is an apt name for the stalkers daughter. Something red got into must have been irradiated because she is covered in fine golden hair and her eyes are solid black. In all other ways though she appears to be a normal kid. She likes hanging out with other children and asking loads of questions. We learn later the red does all he can to get other kids to play with her. Making her slides and swings etc