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Private  - Alte Füchse gehen schwer in die Falle [CALLIOPE]

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Turhan
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#1

bone to rune

Woodfire moused up an otherwise perfect late blue dusk.  From the lookouts - anyone who was overlooking the plains could see the blaze even though the Elder smartly chose an area that would not impose an immediate danger to the summer-grass.  There was no wind tonight - the world was eerily silent.  It allowed the flames to rise up and up as the old horse paced in tight circles around the fire, foaming and uncharacteristically anxious as if channeling a nervous spirit.  It looked forbidden to gaze upon, or interrupt.


  Turhan's mane, wild like a lion's but alive like a swarm of snakes, rattled and jingled with bones and bells.  He moaned loudly over the flames and encouraged them to get hotter and hotter while he threw bursts of black powder into it with intention, with energy.  Take his anger away, take his anxieties too - these (to Turhan) were useless feelings.   As more black powder went into the fire, the Elder's energy began to appear unstable.


To make ritual out of it, a previously captured young rabbit screamed with fright when he stomped it and tore its head off with his teeth (it was small enough) - all of it then went into the fire which then started to turn blue.  He made sure to roll his crippled prey into a metallic salt bath for spiritual cleansing of the soul.  Blue was for purity, for spirituality, and when he licked his lips his tongue was blue too,


Turhan leaned into the fire and held his face over the heat until the blood flaked off of his lips like paint chips.  All the while  he was thinking about ..


He forgets ..


The rabbit's body twitched over the flaming pile, none of it made sense to the blind man in a way like that - he just knew what he could smell.


Lightning struck above the old witch doctor and instantly he threw his horned head to the sky and howled like a terrible white-faced beast.  His voice carried on through the empty land with no wind to guide it fatefully one way or another.  In his mind, body, and soul, he felt Vespera's hand through his heart, her claws running down his back, her love terrible, cruel, and wondrous.  All that she was, she was beautiful and savage like he was - and nights when Death felt closer to being Alive, the old man built his sacred fire - then fell to his knees and prayed.


Tonight he spoke in a very different language, a far-away one, and prayed while he rubbed his bloody face off on his shoulder.  The dark bay rocked and writhed in the dirt, his chorded and feathered tail threw dirt across sweaty white bone paint and fresh red horse blood - some of it his.  He reeked of death - and of prayer too being perfumed with copal resins.


 The Elder laughed when he felt the tension of the storm break open over his head with a loud peal of thunder, he sounded mad ... or as if he felt Nirvana in the heart of its Chaos. Lightning lashed in every direction, searing long seams through the clouds, painting it electric white and steel in the blink of an eye.  And Vespera's heartbeat, the constant and tumultuous roll of echoing thunder over distant mountains, matched the beat of his heart and the strength of his soul.  


T U R H A N
skull to dust



@Calliope   Because I believe in you and your imagination is incredible to me.  Feel free to interpret this however.









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Calliope
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#2

It's not the fire that brings her hunting across the plains, not at first.

The rabbit screams summoned her. The sound is a common one, perhaps of some owl seeking to fill a hunger that could not compare to Calliope's. But here in Novus, in a world of politics and walls and strange horses that drink from cups, the way the scream goes on and on is enough to turn her head towards the sound.

It sounds like pain, like torment and the sound is familiar enough to bring a cold, frozen smile twisting across her black lips. No hunter kills so cruelly.

And once she has turned and made her way into the tall grasses, moving slow and low enough to be more wildcat than unicorn, the fire is what brings her closer. Once she's seen it, once she's spotted that poor twitching rabbit upon the flames the rumble of coming thunder is nothing more than a after thought. No storm could turn her away, no snap of lightning could instill fear in blood that remembers the sting of that electric violence so well.

Calliope moves from the grasses, watching the old stallion writhe upon the dirt like a snake. Instantly she is reminded on the sick things of the Riftlands. He looks like one of them, the tainted ones, laid low by his disease and foolish enough to think that he will rise up greater in the aftermath of his decay. Perhaps they could have risen as monsters to claim the leftover wasteland of that world.

But Calliope had trapped them in an electric river and collapsed all their passages to salvation and food. She left them to die, to wither away to nothing but bones and give their plague back to the earth. There is no regret in her for that choice, the one that others couldn't bring themselves to make.

Sometimes creatures cannot be saved and blood is the only peace left to claim.

She is near silent as she moves closer, her steps muffled by the storm, the cracking of the flames and the mindless groans of his madness. To her he is not so sacred and the bones and blood upon him are not holy or worthy of praise.

The stallion is nothing more than other mad horse, lost to all the things he thinks might ring true. This is not the first religious zealot she has found, nor the first sacrifice she has witnessed.

Calliope only stops when she is close enough to watch the blood fleck from his face and feel the force of his laughter like pin-pricks on her skin. Her horn is swift as she lowers it to the ground and flicks dirt and grass into his flames. The dead grasses snaps in the fire and the her horn as she lifts it up into smoke of her offering hangs in the air like a nose, silent and coarse and waiting to meet that tender curve of his throat.

He will find only silence in her face, a still sort of blackness that consumes far more than any mortal should. She stands over him poised like a lion, waiting for him to offer another innocent woodland creature to the flames so that she might toss him onto his own pyre instead.

And in her eyes he will see judgment, brighter and sharper than the lighting that lashes above their heads.

Compared to her, the way she oozes brutality and needs no words to make her promises, the last summer storm seems tame.  



BUT THE BEAUTY OF HER FORM BRINGS VIOLENCE
A LONG AND LOVELY FALL NO WILL OR FIRE CAN OPPOSE


@Turhan









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Turhan
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#3

bone to rune

In the darkening night the universe within seemed to expand itself endlessly from horizon to horizon.  Lightning drew lines of white and blue forever into the distance but it was the thunder which punctuated its position for Turhan's finely tuned ears.  It rolled right over his head and when the lightning struck again, his ears perked to pick up the dissatisfied growl the thunder gave in response.  His alertness and high accuracy for pinpointing the bolts in the sky could be considered supernatural for how blind he was but it was just very intuitive listening.  Even at the bright and golden age of sixteen, some parts (not all) still functioned well beyond their intended purposes.  

.. most of the time.  I digress,


Calliope's body moved with all the felinity of a cat when she decided to make Turhan's business her own.  Her approach was sly and secretive and so carefully choreographed that only when the unicorn flicked dirt and other nonesutch into the flames, he knew he was no longer alone. The crackling fire seemed to be Calliope's way of acknowledging her presence, and that was enough to rouse the old horse's attention.


Turhan took a moment to dip his head down and drop the horned mask into the dirt by his feet out of an Ilati custom when acknowledging an equal.  His senses tingled, his mind seemed to wake up, Turhan willingly stepped back from the roar of the flames as a cool and refreshing air rushed up upon them.  With it - it brought the scent of the many lands Calliope had traveled through to get here.  She brought with her the greetings of Terrastella without having (or wanting) to do so.


Whether the unicorn respected his fire or not, the mystic appreciated the calm and even silence between them regardless of the nature of her visit.  Had he known she had a wicked horn trained on him, perhaps he would have readied a poisonous quill hiding deep in the jungle of stuff his hair was made out of.  Instead Ilati smiled a friendly smile, and that was his hello.  With Calliope, he simply lost his common language for greeting her like so many other times and opted for body language.


The stranger didn't try to yell-talk at him like so many other Mlendo often did - because of the beads, braids, feathers, and paint, they simply assumed that talking louder would help him understand better.  Calliope didn't need any language to communicate her intentions (she didn't seem to have any despite her wary approach) -- And so, Turhan threw more wood into the fire to bring more warmth and light to them both to encourage the visitor to stay longer.


She smelled like ozone, or was that the lightning hitting somewhere near by?   Turhan convinced himself the sharp ion taste in the air was from her.  The thunder rattled his heart against his chest and only then did he give a deep, throaty laugh - overjoyed by the tempestuous presence. The 'Otherness' that he felt when standing next to her was very different than so many other Mlendo he had encountered.


Perhaps it was the Rift which clung like a second skin to her - a cologne of chaos and constant disruption - consistent of its own madness and no longer immune to corruption now that it was beyond its own parameters.  He wouldn't know anything about that personally, but being this close to the veil had its own telling secrets to the Elder.  


Turhan could do nothing but think of absurd realities (perhaps he was channeling something, someone, or just moonmad) -- which, being sixteen and having one foot already in the grave spoke out of its own nature.  But here, next to Calliope, Turhan weirdly wondered to himself, if Vespera had found a way to finally reach him.


"Vespera?  Vespera? Is that you?  I am Turhan - have you come for me at last?" Turhan curiously questioned.  He did not want to die, he wanted to die.  He did not want to see, but he wanted to see.  But most of all, Turhan wanted to reach out and feel Vespera for himself, to see if what he felt was real, even though he knew it most likely was not.  


Brave enough to consider the consequences of his trespassing and unafraid of those consequences, Turhan reached out into the dark with his painted white nose and hoped to feel flesh and not a blade against his curious lips.


T U R H A N
skull to dust



@Calliope  Feel free to inflict a wound if she feels compelled to.  No restrictions.  He's old and pitiful.









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Calliope
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#4

Perhaps another would have been startled to see the grotesque beneath the bone. He's a thing of weathered flesh and bone that has long since lost any form of elegance. There is a world in his hair, bones woven into dreadlocks. Everything about him is a grim, patchwork altar to religion and a tombstone for all the animals unlucky enough to meet this monster.

Unicorns are less easy to startled and Calliope is harder than most. Others might see something to fear, to flee or to follow. She only sees the mortal curl of his crest beneath the tangles. She only sees flesh that would hold a grave dug out by the tip of her horn.

Had she known there were darts waiting beneath his tangles she would have carved all his hair out from the apex of his spine to this withers.

When he rises she only watches him as a storm might watch the sea swallow up the shore by the kiss of its winds. She only lifts her horn up high enough so that she doesn't touch his crown. Calliope isn't ready to give up her weapon so soon, not to a blind beast foolish enough to approach a unicorn (just a mare to him) that smells like ozone.

Only her silence greets his words. She nether denies or affirms his questions. It's death that lingers in the silence of her, only that deathly stillness that suggests she has come for him at all.

And when he touches her as another wild thing might she breathes once into his nose. Calliope wonders if he can smell the violence of her on her skin. Her flesh is heavy with a rage that would put every god to shame and shatter all their altars to diamond dust.

Perhaps he can only know by the way that she greets him as no other horse in Novus might that she is something more blooded and wild than he, with all this bones and decay, could hope to be.

All he gets is a single touch of her nose to his and then she replaces her lips with her horn. The tip rests gently against that wide, flat spot between his eyes. Now she is ready to reveal the wicked, brutality of her horn.

It's a gavel against his skin, justice made ready and it could almost feel like a tremble of a noose as she speaks loud enough to challenge both the fire and the thunder. “What is is that you sacrifice for, Turhan?” Calliope leans closer, no more than a single expansion of her vertebrae. The gesture is enough to let him feel the blade of her justice just a little more. Only retreat from her will save him from bleeding-- just a little, less than that rabbit had in his flames.

“Do you think the death of a mere, innocent rabbit will gain you any favor?”  The rage is in her voice now, muted to no more than a low rumble of displeasure. It sounds like a lion might, a soft warning of the death that might follow if another trespass is made.

Calliope dips her tail in the fire, just long enough for embers to cling to her hair. When the tips start to smolder and burn she lifts it up and flicks the clinging embers toward him. The gesture and that smell of singed hair seems to suggest what that low growl in her voice doesn't put to words.

That should he say the wrong thing she might drive him back, back, back into the embers of his pyre. It suggests that he might burn, smolder and scream as the rabbit had.

Even religion is not beyond the reach of justice and karma.   



BUT THE BEAUTY OF HER FORM BRINGS VIOLENCE
A LONG AND LOVELY FALL NO WILL OR FIRE CAN OPPOSE


@Turhan









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Turhan
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#5

bone to rune
It is in the way that she approaches him that makes him suspect a mere unicorn for a goddess.  Although in many religions throughout the varying cultures he has learned and lived by like a Seikh, he has known the horned creatures to be representatives of Gods, male and female alike.  It is when she reveals her sword that he has the audacity to think, I know her.  "I know you."  It has nothing to do with what she asks him, but old minds do as they do - he is hiding no clever trick up his sleeve nor does he have any reason to be cruel to her.  I know you, he has said.  


But how?


This is not Vespera who speaks to him now in the tones of windstorms and seasides.  If steel had a soul it would speak harshly-brightly-sharply, just like Calliope. Most unusual, but Turhan knows that tingle in his spine when he feels it - when Death is so close and so far away all at once.  When Death is near, it is electric like a raging storm and so clearly obvious that the old one doesn't move.  He doesn't make an attempt to mark his target with hidden quills - unfair advantages are for gluttons and traitors.


"They come from the Sea.  They come from the Fire.  They come from the Mountain.  But you --"  yes! yes, she already knows she is different " -- you come from Between." Turhan seems so sure of it even though 'Between' is hardly a word to describe the offworlder in ways she might understand.  He sees no other way, finds no other words, and nods to her in reverent silence.


"I am, that rabbit.  We are, that rabbit. Time needs you here, now."  The Elder says after a long thoughtful break, he remains patient and calm under her scythe.  She couldn't have come to all of these lost souls at a better time, when the world as they all knew it was now crumbling beneath their feet.


Silence.

T U R H A N
skull to dust



@Calliope









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Calliope
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#6

It is a terrifying thought that Calliope understands this madness of his, this sickness of the brain. She has known bones that speak, beasts and stones that made words ring like a storm from forms that held no lip, so soul. Turhan is like the things of the Riftlands, consumed by magic and belief until it rots and festers in the body like a plague.

Perhaps had she been anything but a unicorn dressed in black with a storm soul she would have rotted from all the terrible things she has seen and the terrible things she has been made to do in the name of justice.

“I have come from all those places, thrived in places that are made of sea, fire, cliff and between. I have walked between moons upon a floor of glass. My horn has plucked a star out of the night-sky for love. Under a dragon's wing I have walked through a wildfire to promise justice where none were brave enough to do what is right.” Calliope leans closer, close enough to smell the smoke and death upon his skin. She can taste the rotten things in his hair, bones not left to bleach in the sun long enough to dry out the scent of sorrow.

The pressure spreads to that tip of her horn, just enough to feel the way his flesh caves before the gavel of her blade. She doesn't run him though, not yet, not with the madness in him so wild that she falters in passing her judgment.

But oh, how the next worlds make her rage and boil. It festers like his madness and crackles with fury along every cold, steel inch of her soul. This stallion speaks as the gods do and Calliope has every hated how gods are known to speak.

So she leans a little more, enough to make him bleed, enough to part the dreads of his forelock around her horn like a sea parting before a hurricane wind.

There is eradication in her voice now, rage muted only because it must come from mere mortal lips and she has no lightning now to carve the words into the very air about her form. “I am no rabbit, a thing caught and made to burn just because some devil thought to take the right of choice from it. There is no justice in that death. It suffered and burned for no reason at all.”

Calliope drags her horn down his old, gnarled face,  turning the pressure of it light enough to sting instead of tear his flesh from his skull. “But tell me,” The words could be a noose for the tightness to them when they blaze from the sneer upon her face. “If you are a rabbit will you choose to burn? Will you chose to suffer just to serve mystics who have no appreciation for true sacrifice and misery when it is be taken from their flesh one piece at at time?” The storm almost seems to rage overhead as nothing more than an mere mirror of the fury that sparks white and hot, hot, hot inside her chest.

“Of course time has need of me in the now. I am no rabbit but a unicorn made to take justice in a world lacking it-- a world where there are killers like you.” The thunder roars like a lion and it trembles in her bones like an earthquake.

In that heavy, humid silence of both the storm and Calliope she turns to horn to run it down his cheek towards that tender, delicate curve of his throat.

A rabbit with no choice but fate indeed.    



BUT THE BEAUTY OF HER FORM BRINGS VIOLENCE
A LONG AND LOVELY FALL NO WILL OR FIRE CAN OPPOSE


@Turhan









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Turhan
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#7

bone to rune
Oh! Calliope was a thunderstorm and Turhan hit her the force of an ageless, but hard sea.

If Death did not fear him, then Turhan would not fear death. Not did he believe he would find such things here. "You do not listen!" He spat, twisting and pulling back just to get some inches between them. Quills darted out in self defense, but the thunder misguided his auditory aim and he missed her. Wherever they had disappeared into the night, the poison darts were gone, wasted.


Turhan risked the chance to be skewered, spiral-cut, sliced, diced, or just plain butchered by the unicorn when he threw his time, energy, and weight in the opposite way of her. He didn't know which way was what, he was blind and that seemed to be the end of his logic. He heard her feet, he lowered his head like he would charge her. Old wounds had been opened up in his heart, as well as on his flesh, and the old bear's heart raced with youthful vigor.


Or was that adrenaline?


Blood started down his chin, down his throat, onto his war-paint white chest. His shoulder shook unsteady from muscle strain. The old man's attempt to back off of her horn was quite taxing on his old body but still, he held together. And forced his voice once again at her, just one more time, as clear as he could.


"This rabbit - poisoned. Yes, I catch. Yes, I kill. It is bad to make rabbit suffer, then die. I pray to Vespera. Take rabbit away. Gods, Witches, Shamans, Rabbits - all the same. All the same thing." He was batty as batty could be but with all the rain that was now pouring down upon their backs all the paint seemed to wash all that hocus pocus off of him. Coppery reds and blacks took the places of all the ketchup and mustard paint. The scars looked worse with all the white sloughing off his nose. His hair was crusty red mats that laid flat against his hair. Colourful ribbons painted streaks down his chest and legs - but nothing about any of this detail made him look softer, or more helpless.


Between his eyes, a most hideous scar as he narrowed his blind eyes on her as if he could see. "I was once you." Turhan felt his heart race quite suddenly, heat filled his face as anxious dizziness lead to ringing in his ears. The words came out of him barbed, too hot, and - quite suddenly - too real for him to remember. Blind fury threatened to fill him and make him roar like a mighty tempest.


"Now I am not. If I still was .. rabbit would be here and you would not."



Wind blew fire and ashes up at Calliope's face, consequently Turhan's too but he could not see them, only feel them. The fire finally gave up its last flame and left Calliope and Turhan in complete darkness.


Nothing changed. Turhan started making strange noises in the dark at her. Some awful grating noise to pitch the marrow being spooned out of the top of his head as he remembers when a greedy king held him down with an army of his men and cracked the horn off after having mostly dug it out from flesh, muscle, and soft bone. Now the scars looked like he had went head-to-head with a weed eater, but it was the slight dimple over his brow that made it more obvious.


"I still dream about the sounds when they scrape the horn from my skull."


Lightning interjected, then thunder recanted, Calliope could find Turhan still standing against her, poised, even though his strength had left him. Determined to live like the coo he fought to wear the horns of and not to die when it wasn't his time yet, his admittance was more out of aggravation than anything.


"You cannot kill what is already dead. Leave me."

T U R H A N
skull to dust



@Calliope So this is a painful history he cannot bare to reveal to anyone - not even his presh Ilati .. if you can even understand him. I certainly cannot. I love you.









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#8

Turhan is as rabid as the sick magic, as feral, reckless and foolish as the monster who attacked her on a lightning sea. Surely it is madness to foam and spit like a beast before a unicorn, to rear and attack her with poisoned quills and teeth too ground down with age to do more than sting and bruise. It's pity that keep hers from flaying him wide open from shoulder to hip when she watches the quills fall short and his spit fall like acid rain against her skin.

“And still it screamed, loud enough to bring me.” Calliope doesn't move as she speaks. Her rage needs no movement now. It's an inferno that needs no wind to breathe, to devour up the world with a cleansing more powerful than all any flood might be. “Your poisons are not strong enough to spare a rabbit.”

The rain isn't enough to cleanse him now not when she knows what the paint and bones and tangles cover up. He could be black, black, black for all the sin she sees when she looks at him now.

Calliope thinks back to Shrike. How she tore her neck open quick enough that the end was no more than a shooting star, lovely and gone too quickly to think of a single wish. Turhan does not know mercy, not the kind that a unicorn should understand.

So she has little pity when the forest of his hair and the fallacy of his paints wash clean to reveal the mangled scar. She feels no sorrow when the thunder echoes just a little bit off the edges of her own horn.  Even the lash of ash and ember against her feral features do little to move her hooves towards him to offer comfort for that empty, hollow space upon his brow.

Surely he cannot think he was the same as her, that even if he had a horn he might stand a chance of killing her. There has never been a creature such as Calliope, a unicorn who has held a lioness in her skin and lightning in her veins. A mortal who dissolved into shadows, traveled between worlds just to hunt justice.

She doesn't need to say that no army of kings and soldiers could hope to hold her down and carve out her horn. Calliope would kill them all, let her blood run with their own until there was nothing left but death and gore. Nothing would be left in the aftermath of her rage. Nothing can capture a unicorn and hope to find anything but corpses in the aftermath of such avarice. There would be only bones left in chains in the end, bones and blood.

“I hope you killed them all Turhan.” Her words are not gentle. Calliope is not made for gentle judgment or forgiveness. She is not made for horses like Turhan to understand, to think that they might fathom all the things that Calliope might be. “But if you can poison a rabbit and call it mercy when it feels enough to scream I doubt you had the will to claim your justice.”

Perhaps it's gentleness after-all that turns her from him, that sends her fading into the downpour as nothing more than a nightmare of an old beast, come to rattle out his sorrows and sins. Certainly it's mercy that promises in nothing more than a whisper of fading thunder. “The next time I hear screams around your fires, you will know that you're not dead. Not yet.” Like the storm she's gone.

Turhan is not the only one that causes flashes of suffering and calls it mercy and prayer in Novus.

Calliope has come for them all.



BUT THE BEAUTY OF HER FORM BRINGS VIOLENCE
A LONG AND LOVELY FALL NO WILL OR FIRE CAN OPPOSE


@Turhan, let's do this again soon. I love getting weird with you.









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Turhan
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#9

bone to rune

Her words coursed through his body and consciousness like strobes of electricity. It was not strong enough to kill, just to hurt him, and he couldn't help the tired feelings which flooded him as soon as Calliope turned to leave. He had nothing left to say to her so he did not call out to the fading figure. Instead he listened to her go quietly, peacefully (if such a word could be used, even). And curiously enough, the storm had lessened in its severity. No longer was the thunder deafening the old man's ears. No longer was the lightning electrifying his blood, his spirit,


He wished he could have imparted some wisdom on her, for all of the things that he had seen he felt she might know and appreciate it, but her heart was closed. Her mind was mad. And her body was no longer just a body to feel warmth and to return it, it was a weapon. He had killed them all, every last member -- and terribly enough -- the generations that followed who were exposed to it. He was both proud and saddened by how his youthful vigor was lost, but neither of those feelings would affect him today - for yesterday did not matter anymore now that it had passed. Turhan waited for the last of the coals to stop hissing before he too packed himself up, and returned to whatever darkest reaches he had emerged from, now naked without his paints with half his braids washed out. The newest infliction on his neck would serve as a reminder to him - that not all who is lost can be found.


Calliope had been one of the few he now knew of.


T U R H A N
skull to dust



@Calliope Indeed! <3!









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