INCEPTION
...Is an okay movie, but more importantly, the discussion of the inception of this plot! Now, JRMplot was born from the fear of another FITE WEEK coming around this year. We had one in 2011 and 2013, so it seemed like we were in a pattern of them popping up. I think FITE WEEK now has to have some sort of small plot and a boss battle because by now its tradition, but as we all know, no FITE WEEK came to pass this year, but I wanted to try and prepare for it.
In doing so though, I made the mistake of tipping my hand too early. As part of my Six Months... series, I put down the groundwork of the plot so that it could be clever foreshadowing if we did get FITE WEEK as a thing, and it might give people something to look at as they tried to figure out what was going on. See, Tripwire would have been messing with the fites as FITE WEEK plots do, but he'd be taking a different approach than ultra-violent Rafflesia and corpse collector Dr. Satan. Tripwire... would be trying to make the fites LESS lethal, padding arenas and trying to tranquilize entrants so they go down non-lethally. Since the ideas behind the first two FITE WEEKs was to fite absurd things like a freaking planet and Actually Satan, I wanted this go round to have some gravitas in a different way. At the end of this possible FITE WEEK, Whitey or someone similar would be held hostage, and JRM would lead a charge to save him... and in so doing, get drugged by the pair of Tripwire and Hatch-o-Hatch. JRM would then go rogue, fiting the Kobbers alongside the other two in the final battle. Here, the stakes would be FYM itself rather than the world, and rogue JRM would go giant and be an actual threat for once instead of his goofy ineffective self.
There's a couple reasons the idea wasn't used, the one main one being showing it too earlier made me feel pressured to do the plot without FITE WEEK, but also because JRM getting his mind fucked with is probably one of the worst things that could happen in ZFRP if played straight, because his time powers would be able to instantly screw everything up. Needless to say, if JRM does get possessed or anything in the course of future RP, his Time Spirit powers are locked off from use because of Spirit related provisions rather than "he doesn't use them just because". Faith and Sunshower were also toyed with in joining the final battle, Faith a bit more seriously than Sunshower due to recognizability, but it all was scrapped pretty quickly and the plot as we know it began to form.
From there, two new goals emerged: to wrap up the never followed up on moment in 2011 where Tut-Tut went to the Sands of Time to rescue a dead JRM, and to try and make JRM relevant again, which was a good year to do this as he began to get close to folks like Ko and show himself a bit more. JRM as anything but fitemaster was falling off the radar, especially in regards to him being the Time Spirit, as more and more characters were screwing with time without the ghost and his role being considered. Cornwind, surprisingly, actually did pull me aside some in 2014 to talk about how JRM would see the time shenanigans and all, and I found myself having to jump through many hoops to explain why JRM wasn't doing something when people just did time junk willy-nilly.
So these were all mixed in one pot, as well as a few other things being added for flavor, but we'll see those in the character sections.
JUMPROPEMAN AND TIME SPIRITS
Origins of Jumpropeman and a few others are discussed in an earlier blogpost, so we won't touch those much here, but it's pretty easy to see that for the most part, JRM and me are alike in many ways. I've tried to pull him away from it by making him less empathetic and all, but when it comes down to it, he's still very much like me, even if we'd act totally different in some situations. However, with this plot, I hoped to make some more of those differences more evident, while at the same time playing on the fact we didn't really know the guy that well. Since the whole plot revolved around whether or not JRM is truly in the right sometimes or how he should be held accountable, I didn't want him to be too sympathetic at parts, and I knew trying to conquer the inherit "well, he's basically JRM the user, so I don't want to be rude" hurdle. Ultimately, the only one I don't think that was jumped upon properly was how JRM and Q worked together to program Faith in such a conflicted way, because most other situations could at least be shown as "best of a bad situation" or "he knows more of the universe than us" ways.
This plot was also meant to expand and explore the Time Spirit role a lot more, since it is very much the reason JRM is both cynical and prone to making decisions that seem heartless to others. His time displacement leads to situations like the one involved with Sunshower and Marina, and it gives him a powerful ability that could fix so many problems if used carelessly. You may also remember a 2012 loose thread where he realized he was alive in the 90s (he was in the 80s too but he was too young to be worth worrying about) and how nothing happened from there. Originally a few srs posts of him just chatting with himself under a false identity to try and understand who he was as a human were planned to peel back the inhumane ways we saw him deal with De Nomolos and such and reveal a nicer JRM, but that as scrapped. Also, living JRM would have met with ghost JRM on the World Trade Center once, and we'd see in ghost JRM's mind the temptations to undo horrible events like 9/11, which... It's probably best I didn't try and do it, since it could have gone very wrong if not treated properly.
Gooper once mentioned he thought of Samhain sort of as the Halloween Spirit to the Jumpropeman "pantheon" of spirits, which include Phantomon as the Death Spirit (who probably needs his own plot to reassert that role forgotten by almost all but Cauren), and although I wouldn't mind that (although a few things like Spirits being created by pulling off a face of the Ultra Spirit or being granted the power by another spirit might not work with Gooper's idea of the character), made me realize that the rules of Spirits probably weren't put into RP very well. Heck, the Time Spirit before JRM was mentioned like, three times maybe, so this plot would serve to explain their roles and hierarchy better, although we still didn't see the Ultra Spirit because if we did something super fucked would have gone down (and also because he'd be hard to draw :V)
Which brings me back to... ORIGINAL JRM 2011 REVIVAL PLOT! In 2011, we would have gone to the Sands of Time and faced Hatch-o-Hatch... and two Destroyers. Spirits are the tenders of their aspects, whether they be Death or Time or Sewers (which is based off a misremembered Monster Collector creature named Pipeta that I upgraded to Sewer Spirit. I looked at the pictures of other Spirits lately and they are all very underwhelming, much like the Time Spirit we see in RP! ...not the JRM Time Spirit, the other one, the original...). They are held accountable even if there are other folks with similar roles or powers who screw with their aspect, and if they screw up royally, the Ultra Spirit obliterates them from existence, past, present, and future. You would never know a failed Spirit for this reason. Destroyers are a tool of that. Although the Ultra Spirit is exempt from all powers of the Spirits or basically anything that alters our universe, he has some flunkies called Destroyers who basically remove things from existence if need be. The Ultra Spirit can destroy a spirit, but he needs something to clean up the mess they left if he can't find a reliable replacement quickly enough, and so, Destroyers wipe the slate clean until the new guy steps in. The Destroyers Hatch-o-Hatch would have been with were the Fire Destroyer and Storm Destroyer, and unlike Spirits, I actually liked the designs for the Destroyers even now. Why he'd have them with him and other things were not planned.
Sadly, as anything more than a plot piece, the Time Spirit is rather uninteresting and not worth exploring much. I wanted this plot to wrap up him and I had no planned ending for him as an attempt to let RP happen instead of sending people down set paths. Time Spirit is JRM's biggest moment of moral questionability, as he condemned someone weary of existence to eternal existence, although the circumstance was complicated and all with complete eradication from time being the alternative. The gauntlet ended up the means to wrap him up, and the Fabrics of Time are thankfully exempt from access as they are basically a Spirit exclusive construct. Much like how only Deck members and those they bring with them could enter the Dark Void, only JRM/Tut-Tut can go into the physical representation of time they made to make work easier, and thus the Time Spirit corpse and all super weapons placed on it are irretrievable.
Naturally, we'll touch on Jumpropeman a bit more as we move into sections on other characters, but I think that's all I got to say here about Spirits or Jumpropeman! Well, a few other things. I had him casually reveal the origin of his powers to Marina to get that story out of the way. And we learned a bit more about him as a human with the Hero's League. Say... the Hero's League wasn't explained much now, was it?
Maybe that's something we might all learn more about in the future...
MARINA AND SUNSHOWER
Jumpropeman's family. Originally there was an idea to explore this side in an entire plot about Jumpropeman's former life as a superhero, and we may still get that in the Hero's League thing I just teased. Before I continue, a simple bullet point for better understanding the Hero's League. The Hero's League has three tiers for its heroes based on their abilities.
A TIER: People with such overwhelming power that they basically aren't allowed to use it. A Tiers tend to be the face of the League and contain your Superman types, and they are usually only allowed to use their powers to stop disasters or villains of comparable strength. Most of the time they just do public affairs stuff. They're almost like politicians more than anything, and they're always itching to get a chance to go out and fight for real.
B TIER: Jumpropeman fits in here. Superpowered individuals who aren't that great. Basically a step above humans to combat threats more effectively than armed cops. Sometimes they end up commanding C Tiers into battle or police forces, but they cover the kind of real world crimes we see in real life, they just fight with their limited powers instead of guns. But they also usually carry guns.
C TIER: Gifted Individuals. Which is the Hero's League of saying "normies". People who are exceptionally skillful or resourceful. Your Batman types, really strong people, martial arts experts. They are about on par with cops because they are just regular folks who are really good at something.
The reason I bring this up is so you can understand a few things to be explained soon. Anyway, The impetus of this all is part of JRM's backstory, where he mentioned he's had multiple wives who were killed. Partially a joke at comic superheroes having "expendable" loved ones, and even a joke in-universe too as I believe the number has been listed differently, he's had 8 wives. Only one died before Sunshower happened, that being his first, and Sunshower was his fourth wife. JRM divorced his second and third before he met Sunshower.
Sunshower was actually an A Tier hero, and the Hero's League is actually a bit snobby about its tier system, almost seeing them like castes. Jumpropeman didn't care about that and would regularly mingle with C Tiers, and Sunshower did the same when she found out a B Tier was breaking the rules. The then quite overpowered Sunshower had near limitless use of heated water as she pleased, but the Hero's League held her reins so she rebelled in what ways she could, mainly romancing the B Tier hero...and getting pregnant in the process. They married and had their daughter Marina, who inherited her mothers power slightly and was affected by her father's weird biology, but things got... complicated. Sunshower took care of Marina most the time since her job was less demanding while JRM did his "basically a cop" job, but one of JRM's ex-wives was also a B Tier, and they were gradually reconnecting over the course of the job. Sunshower grew bitter with her position, her husband talking with an ex, and having to do the brunt of raising Marina, so she put an end to the ex-wife. When the truth came to light, she was forced to become a villain to avoid punishment from the League, and so began her punishment of JRM.
His second wife was killed next as Sunshower still tried to get JRM to take care of his daughter that she now protected too much to really let go. JRM tried to move on with wife 5 and 6 only to have them meet their end, and wife 7 was a Vegas style spite wedding to try and discourage Sunshower by showing he would not sacrifice his happiness to appease her. Last wife was a fellow superhero and meant to be part of a trap, and although she died in the battle, Sunshower was captured and imprisoned. She was also imprisoned following the first two wife deaths but she escaped and continued her rampage. When Jumpropeman died, Sunshower swung some cred she had with the Hero's League to get her Montana situation, where she was basically under house arrest and surveillance, although the Hero's League had more subtle ways to keep an eye on her than the cover Harry would use to keep tabs on her.
So there's that backstory! Anyway, Sunshower's powers diminished with age and lack of practice, but in RP we still saw her doing massive waves of water and whirlpools that showed that she still had it. The possible Hero's League plot had Sunshower showing up with two former associates based off of weather as well, although nothing solid came of it. Probably thunder powered guy (not lightning mind you) and clouds or something. They would have been tiny and tall as per the typical dynamic and been her "henchmen" of sorts... but they'd also be really old. Geriatric super villains are always an interesting concept, since they still have the powers to do their evil deeds, just not the body for it.
Marina was going to be a non-issue in that plot, but when Marina and Sunshower were worked into the grander plot Harry was kicking off. Sunshower's art didn't look quite as old and grumpy as I woulda liked. Jumpropeman and Sunshower were from different generations of heroes, JRM being from the tail end of "____ MAN" hero days and Sunshower on the cusp of the new "Single word gritty hero" era, so her costume was meant to mix elements from old and new.
Marina was not meant to become a full character at first, more of an anchor to get things rolling by pulling Sunshower into the picture, and the plans never did quite evolve far enough to give Marina a satisfying ending. Marina is heavily sheltered and despite being "super", she grew up in normal school where she didn't fit in because of her hair color. Home schooling after the age of nine made it even harder for her to adjust to anything outside her bubble, but she gets on well one-on-one since she knows that well from experience. Quite clearly, Marina is meant to pull apart the veil of normalcy that hangs over every character the Kobbers meet these days. These things aren't normal, and even normal people like Mary and Vince now just shrug and accept it. Marina is a character who SHOULD fit in here, but she doesn't, because she thinks like someone who is being shown unbelievable things. I do think I played her straight too long and often to the frustration of others, and many concessions had to be made even when paltry efforts were made on the side of the characters interacting with her to help her feel better. Suppose that's just the difference between single writer and multiple writer works, eh? The RVPA was a stroke of luck for helping her find a place, as that was created solely for when Greed just did tons of damage we weren't allowed to do anything about to the border states.
There were some things early on to make you think she might be a more normal addition to the Kobbers, like having a combat power and her peppy attitude when one-on-one with Shimmer. There were some scenes I planned with JRM and Marina visiting Sunshower or doing small things to further their relationship that were scrapped for one reason or another. Shimmer's birthday was always going to get interrupted though, no doubt. I almost was surprised I had to put an actual party in front of the battle :V I tried to make it interesting and made sure none of Shimmer's gifts were broken during the battle. Do not worry though: Shimmer's birthday will go off without a hitch next year!
Unfortunately, Marina seems to shed a light on an increasing problem. Remember how Marina sympathized with Otik? Well uh... that was just like, my character's opinion man. Sometimes I make characters go against the grain, like Everett sparing Trooper C, Mac Tonight trying to find the good in Razaan... even if I don't think it's the right thing. Even if I think the villain is bad and should be killed. I'm adding an extra layer to an event, and while killing Trooper C would have probably been satisfying, Everett standing up and sparing him made that ending more memorable I feel. Marina and Otik was just another moment of me having a hero not immediately want to kill a villain, and Shimmer is like, the opposite of that, where she prefers to have opponents she doesn't have to think about fighting. She can just do it and be sure she's doing right. Ol' blue hair here was meant to shake things up in a way different than Everett while still shaking things around. A teenage girl who needed the guidance of Kobbers... but I always felt bad doing basically anything with her since people seemed emotionally drained by her.
Marina's name actually comes from a dummy Myspace account I made back in the day to try and find out what people thought of me :V Here's the picture I used:
HARRY AND FAITH
I love taking unfinished characters and trying to wrap them up one way or another. Whether it be giving all the pointless pets I put everywhere new life in Reject or turning them into villains like Doc Gerbil or Harry here, I always feel bad when a character just disappears without really completing an arc or leaving on a sour note.
Almost this entire plot was kicked off by my guilt over giving Harry a bad ending. During the Cenobite attack on the bar in 2011, his boyfriend Phileas Cardwright was killed. Phileas Cardwright is like my writing signature: I put a character with that name in many things I write although he's usually never the same character save being a man of British descent. Phileas's death left the jovial and loyal Harry rattled, and when we saw him on the Amazon trip in 2012, he was an all-business serious guy instead of the man we met the year before. Having him left off this way seemed mean, so it was decided he'd be the FITE WEEK foe. From there, other things like the Sunshower confrontation and reviving Hatch-o-Hatch's plot from 2011 all were pushed together into what was meant to be Harry... getting killed off actually :V A bad end is only bad if it happens to a good guy, so Harry going bad would mean death would be fine. The pull away from FITE WEEK instead put the fate of Harry/ Tripwire in Kobber hands, and since almost the entire plot no one save Sunshower was really held accountable for being awful with good intentions, he lived.
Thing that didn't make it in: if we had fought Harry more seriously, he had an EMP and toxins on his body to make sure that if he died or went down, no one around him would survive either. It was mostly a threat rather than something he wanted to use and I believe he did threaten to use it, but it was kinda forced since the plot was turning away from that tone at that point.
Tripwire's appearance is taken from Assassination Classroom, a fact Chao picked up, but it had no ties to the character it was taken from. I simply needed a man in a shroud before the reveal it was Harry, and he was fresh in my mind. Harry as Tripwire was also meant to show how paranoid one should be when going against Jumpropeman, as literally everything on the forum is implied to be easily seen by him, even the most private conversations, whether by Snapper or simply being the Time Spirit. We see Harry killing Snappers in a poor attempt to do so, and some things were intentionally never seen on-screen to imply they were out of JRM's sight.
Harry was the connecting thread to make the disparate parts of Faith, Sunshower, and Hatch-o-Hatch all add up into one plot. Phileas's death was the most concrete time JRM probably could have done something but didn't for seemingly no reason, and it allowed me to explore the Time Spirit's powers and personality because of it.
As for Harry in general, I was fresh off watching Brazil and the character called out to me in 2011. Jumpropeman's network of employees was growing and I wanted to give him a Legman of sorts, and with FITE WEEK coming up and alt-JRM arriving, Harry ended up the perfect character for the role of "guy who realizes alt-JRM ain't right." The character didn't grow much as my RP at the time was scant (back then, I thought Fites were the more important part of my contribution as we still had non-RPers and all to appeal to in the bar topics) and although I hope we know him better now, he was once again used to show that something ain't right with a Jumpropeman :V
Faith... a character who was created solely because of laptop troubles. Ignazio and Edyth were trapped on a computer that wasn't charging, and as 2013 RP was starting, I was stuck on Rainbow Dash's laptop without my images of the characters or anything. Ignazio was easy enough to find because of his art coming from Tropico, but Edyth proved harder to find, and other characters like Reject hadn't found their legs yet. So, since this was me coming back to RP after my absence, I wanted to get in while I could. Tallish was created similarly I believe as the role was presented and quickly snatched by a character made up on the spot, but I quickly searched for a good holographic lady to do a holographic lady idea I had, and an acronym name was thought up to tie her to JRM.
Unfortunately... Holograms with limited mobility AND no way to interact are hard to use. And some efforts to interact were shot down. Faith fell to the side, and I gave her a way to interact just in time for me to decide she's better of soft-retired... but she was given a small role in Deckplot of wiping up the Tower's children as they seemed less likely to fill in gaps in action or Deck roles.
So when this plot was coming together, I decided it was time to try and give Faith a second chance... and get her killed by the Kobbers! WHICH YOU DIDN'T DO! I regret her and Dimitri never got a proper chat, but she'll probably be back some other year as I feel she wasn't satisfyingly tied up after she managed to survive her encounter. Faith was meant to represent things out of our control. Faith failing as a character was because of my poor planning for her (represented as Faith's flawed programming that basically is "make her a Kobber character") as well as her strange failures at interaction. Even when we don't mean to, sometimes just our inaction to engage with someone can hurt people. You might not ever know how others around you think of how you treated them, even if it was passive. I felt it a strong motivation for her turn to attacking the Kobbers in the hope of being killed, but as she was deemed sympathetic I kinda toned down her intended "I WANT THE KOBBERS TO FEEL ME... THROUGH BULLETS" and "KILL ME SO I CAN AT LEAST BE REMEMBERED FOR THAT" qualities. Again, her messed up mind was meant to cast a bad light on JRM more than it did, but there were also probably too many things to make it seem less bad, like Q's history of incompetence with AI like with Pool Robot and Jumpropeman being apologetic.
The Kori Bustard robot is named after the bird of the same name, it's name picked because for some reason I decided to really like the bird during high school. It was not meant to be too dominating in presence to make the hologram version of Faith inconsequential, and even when she's moving in it I tried to emphasize her over her weapon, as it really is just a weapon rather than an independent robot.
The Faith commission falling through gave Faith a tangible way of showing she was "fixed". She is, right now, a black and white hologram, with her blue holographic appearance representing her false self. She's currently trying to find her true self, so she's in this in between state. It was hinted many times what her real state might be as it shown through lightly during moments she was improving, but nothing ever pushed it over the edge. I wanted to do Faith fretting over her own mortality after the fight against Rex, but it never took off. I'll find some way to wrap her up some day...
Wonder if I could get you guys to kill her next year...
HORATIO
Sheep made a chatzy joke so I made him into a character. Yup. Horatio represents JRM trying to better himself and also showing that it doesn't work quite as well as Harry might think it would. Harry is now retired both in universe and out, but his victory was more of an abstract one as the physical side like the odd personality of lead Snapper Horatio stand as a strange reminder that sometimes you should just improve the foundation instead of trying to fix every shingle on the roof. I've been meaning to draw Horatio since it would be super easy, just a Snapper with a mustache, and I hope Twisted Metal wraps up so we can see how Horatio is effected by his predictions, but Horatio is just a joke character and we won't see him much. Only now and again with the JRM crew.
I'll also mention here Testers, which are robots Jumpropeman uses now and again, and which Snappers and Mr. Chips technically are. Monster Collector had a group of robots called Testers, numbered to indicate their function, and most had some sort of theme. Snappers weren't testers there, but there were testers used for time keeping, to assist with sleep, and so on, although it usually was a drawing of a robot with little lines holding appropriate objects (time one has clocks, sleep on has pillows, etc.) They're the grunt work of JRM's crew and we might hear about them some, but we'll never really get them as a prominent member under the name Tester only.
HATCH-O-HATCH
The big egg himself, and yes Chao, that is a nose, despite how hilarious it would be for him to have an orange goatee.
Hatch-o-Hatch's connection to JRM was never really laid down too clearly I feel, partially because of me struggling to rope him in after Harry and Faith were redeemed. After Faith was meant to die, we'd get the reveal that Tripwire was Harry. Harry would then go to Hatch-o-Hatch as he struggled to find out what to do next and we would've got a scene like the one Harry had with Faith, although Hatch-o-Hatch would have been the one in control and he would've let Harry know how foolish he was to release him. Tut-Tut would've been taken hostage as he was in the end, but the Harry scene with a Phileas Cardwright impersonator would not have occurred.
As said elsewhere, when Hatch-o-Hatch broke and revealed his body as a ball of snakes, that was an idea made live as I watched Slowbeef play Bloodborne during the plot and he just so happened to come across that enemy. Many RP ideas, like Jasper and a character I'm using next year, were slightly inspired by Retsupurae, although so far nothing has been directly taken, despite rejected characters like Rock Knight almost having been so. Before the ball of snakes, Hatch-o-Hatch would have likely been either one small snake or just a group of snakes that all slither away.
Yes Chao, that is fire coming out of his head, not a crown. That's the hole larger snakes emerge from, and a light/fire of the energy of time snakes shines out from the top. The cracks on his body are from wear and tear, but also from the imprecise holes made below his vest pockets for smaller snakes to slip out.
I probably should've done more to hint about Hatch-o-Hatch's history with JRM besides a blogpost that gave us Tut-Tut's origin in more detail. Most people probably forgot that secondary character and some people did ask who he was as he was written like someone you already knew. Sheep also expressed interest in his design which only made me want to use him more. Hatch-o-Hatch has always looked ridiculous, but I feel like his initial sketch looks better than my reproduced version oh so slightly, especially in the shoe department.
Yes those are shoes, not tentacles. The wings, thankfully, are just wings though, I don't think anyone thought they weren't.
There was a bit of an underwhelming turnout for what should have been a high-stakes plot and I've used it as an example already as the limitations of RP and how it reflects poorly on the characters if we take things on face level. Having a high stakes plot where characters sit off to the side and say "nah I'll pass" makes no sense, but it just happens with our format and its something we need to accept. I also felt bad having to tell people their time powers didn't work, especially when Ko tried to Haste, but the Sands of Time are the dumping ground for time controlling objects. Even things like the guy we met there who is constantly dying are only allowed to exist on a biological level, as his ability was partially biological and partly time based. Terrence was just made up as an example of something living there (or dying there rather) to better explain the Hourglass. I was tempted to have it a literal hourglass in season 1, but with so much time to think better of that, the dynamo we saw that is an hourglass in shape only is what we got.
IN CONCLUSION
There are probably some things I meant to be here that I left out, as is the way of things, and I apologize if I rambled or repeated myself, as the first quarter or so of this was written on a different day than the rest. I wanted to do a plot that explored the depths of JRM and bring his role as Time Spirit back to prominence. Jumpropeman actually did quite a bit this year, more than some characters who got bigger billing, so to speak. This was definitely my poorest of plots this year, primarily because of the mixed reception of characters like Marina, Faith's inconclusive end, a poorly handled finale as I tried to adjust for RP rather than power through with the original plan, and much more.
This plot was ever so briefly considered as a retirement plot for JRM, but I felt shifting the hands of Fite Yer' Mates is a poor decision unless a new user literally takes it over. Keeping some things consistent is best to keep FYM as a sort of easy entry for new users of a place where users who don't follow RP as closely can still keep track of what's going on in the arena. I do not regret this plot, but it shows its status as an adjusted FITE WEEK plot hat could have used more love, attention, and pre-planning. I'm sure the issues seem more visible to me, but I feel like this is more of what you'd have expected from pre-Deck JRMplots, which is fine, as it is very much a throwback plot, but I'm trying to get better and do new things, not rest on old methods.
So finally, tune in next time for the blogpost you guys actually want. The one about my major plot of the year: Alruthines.
