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The problem/pattern of Lord Elgin's wife repeats. It would seem there is a nun-to-be in the offing.

More, please, with more frequency, please.

Happy New Year, and thank you for writing & publishing another chapter of this series for our enjoyment on the New Year's holiday.

Hopefully Francis Calvert doesn't drink too much at dinner so that he can gain full benefit of the instruction to follow …

One hopes that in being perceptive, William learns discretion & doesn't "out" his father.

As a counter, I suggest a reading of histories of Hollinger, Inc. of Canada, and Hollinger International of Delaware, and one Conrad Black who owned most of it, looted it, and got successfully sued by the other shareholders, the S.E.C., and imprisoned. Hollinger was at one time the third largest English-language newspaper conglomerate. To quote Wikipedia: I have some experience with board/executive fiduciary duty litigation in the Delaware Chancery Court, and "the good ol' boys club" does not protect even merely negligent or derelict board members or executives, let alone those who actively act solely in their own interest in direct contravention of their duties to all shareholders (the corporation). Creditors also have significant rights in this context. This applies to all corporations of every size, and basically every publicly-traded corporation in the USA is incorporated in Delaware, not just the Fortune 100 or S&P 500. Curtis Buck might well be fucked, even more so if his entities are incorporated in California rather than Delaware.

Key thing that everyone should understand about Brad's portfolio analysis & Curtis Bucks' dilemma is that in every corporation, the members of the board of directors are elected by the shareholders, the board hires & fires the CEO and other corporate officers (executives), and all of those people (board members & officers) have fiduciary duty to all shareholders. If they act in a way that is contrary to that duty, the corporate "limited liability" does not cover them, hence shareholder lawsuits, even from minority shareholders. Even Mark Zuckerberg with his special shareholder voting control of Meta (Facebook) has this duty to all other shareholders of Meta and cannot (must not) act exclusively in his own interest, as long as he is either or both a member of the board of directors and/or a corporate officer (e.g., CEO).

Thanks. I have something of a copy editing compulsion. My major outlet for that for a very long time was quora.com, but they removed "suggested edits" a year or two ago, to my great unhappiness & frustration - up to that point I had edited tens of thousands of answers there, and even got compliments from professional writers. In my opinion, the new answers on that site far too often look like shit, because nobody's bothered to do basic spelling, paragraph breaks, separate run-on sentences, clear up ambiguous references … I'd love to do that here, especially if the site software had the same basic structure: I can hit a "suggest edits" button, edit the work, submit, and the author can decide whether to publish my suggestion as-is, edit/revise further, or just reject/ignore, all in the background (nothing shows up in the comments, though on Quora the answer log shows it (along with all edits/changes), if anyone bothers to look). IMHO, Quora's "suggested edits" system made the whole site better because everyone could contribute to making both the questions & answers there really good & clean. Alas, Quora management claims (but provided no evidence to back up the claims) that the system was being abused, and it was hard to maintain in their site code base. They do have serious spam/abuse problems (and I do not envy them in having to deal with that - I've been a professional Internet postmaster since the 1980s, and had a hand in writing the modern Internet e-mail standards, so I know first-hand how hard dealing with spam is), but in my view in that instance, they threw the baby out with the bathwater. Everywhere else, if some writing bugs me enough, I have to add a comment in public, which can be a source of embarrassment for the author. I really liked Quora's interface precisely because the tone of it was just right: I want to help you (author) make this question or answer read (look) better, express your idea more clearly - this is not an attack on your intelligence, education, or character. It's a set of suggestions, not commands or censorship - accept, revise, or refuse as you see fit.

Um, I bet you meant "out."

The other, more comprehensive app for looking at places is Google Earth, which has versions built for MacOS, Windows, iOS, and Android, along with a less powerful web interface. Google collects satellite photos from many Earth observation satellite services (we're way beyond polar-orbit Landsat now), and aggregates them all into their databases. Google Earth is a good interface for browsing that database, though Google Maps also presents a simpler, less comprehensive interface. When a friend first showed it to me in 2002 (before Google bought & renamed it, it was named Keyhole, after the NSA's "Key Hole" spy satellite series), he had to run it on a system with a very beefy GPU (for the time), but that was 20 years & ten turns of Moore's Law ago: standard consumer GPUs in smartphones can handle it with aplomb now (not to mention PCs & Macs). Just to add: Brandon would certainly know about the Terra (EOS AM (morning)) and Aqua (EOS PM (afternoon)) MODIS sensors & data products because they're used for (among other things) wildfire spotting & mapping. Those satellites are in an orbit that takes them over adjacent strips of the Earth at about 9am & 3pm every day, so they can give near-realtime observations. Another worthwhile National Park on the same theme: Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park on the Big Island of Hawaii. In the mid-1990s I visited with friends and we went two days in a row: first day, we hiked into & out of the still-steaming Kilauea Iki crater, and next day we drove all the way down Chain of Craters Road to the coast to see where the current eruption is still sending lava into the ocean. Contrasts between the tropical flora & the lava floes is even more stark there than in the volcano sites in California, Oregon, & Washington (state).

So, weapons of mass destruction (WMD) all around, ready for use with mutual assured destruction (MAD) to ensue. Will (and Stefan & Grand) has a tape of Curtis Buck raping a girl . Zach has the glory hole ticket on Travis. Both Will and Travis can out Zach and ruin his potential football career. If Curtis Buck attempts to hurt Travis, Will can help Travis become an emancipated minor, as Will is, and credibly threaten to ruin & cause Curtis Buck's prosecution and possible imprisonment, if he doesn't back off. And it's not as if the Crampton-Schluter family is above assassination, if that's what's required to win an all-out war. IIRC, WIll doesn't know that bit of family history …

The Sierra Nevada is beautiful - I live at one of the famous places: Lake Tahoe, but it's also got Yosemite …

Hopefully Pit River pack security will be looking after & keeping tabs on Randy for a while, to keep him safe & see who he talks to. Aiden or Trevor should inform the rest of the pack that Randy has been told about lycans, is trying to deal with the shock of it, and please treat him gently. Hopefully that doesn't result in any blowback from members of the pack who might disagree with any disclosure or the invitation to be turned (though knowledge that an invitation to be turned has been extended doesn't have to be announced just yet). One presumes Aiden or Ethan could tamp down on that with command voice … Ethan's experience was different because of his mating bond with Aiden (which manifested strongly after they spent just a little time together, long before Ethan was turned), which Randy doesn't share with either Trevor or Skyler. That is likely to cloud advice that Ethan could give to Randy, and Ethan should be explicit about that caveat if he & Randy have a discussion. Hopefully Randy eases into his new knowledge of what the world around him is really like … Randy potentially has another shock coming when he's told about (or sees) Ethan & Aiden being elementals … not just Pit River pack alphas, but the most powerful lycans known to exist.

Oops. Got the dates mixed up - it's the Acts of Union, 1800 which gained Royal Assent in July 1800, and came into force in January 1801. This chapter happens in June 1801. Catholic Emancipation is a work in progress … and the King's opinion matters. The question stands: is His Majesty going to be more annoyed over Freddie & the Duke's behavior, or George's defense of his (and now Lady Kendal's) Catholic tenants? Given the results of George's earlier, unannounced visit to Buckingham Palace ("Queen's House"), wherein George neatly disposed of both the mess over his son's name, and the Duke of Cumberland's pressure to evict George's Catholic tenants (with the King's evident displeasure at Cumberland being determinant therein), the King might not be less fond of George …

HIs Majesty will shortly know the contents of Lady Kendal's letter and the disposition of the estate from LordRosslyn … which brings up a question for George: will the King be unhappy that George has pledged to maintain the Catholic tenants on Lady Kendal's lands? OTOH, the Act of Union (given Royal Assent in August, 1801) is coming very soon …

Trevor might want to discuss offering to turn Randy with Brandon, who – while he has reconciled with his wolf & his life – would possibly offer a more balanced/contrary opinion of lycan life than those properly raised in it. There must exist humans who were offered but turned it down - such people could also possibly offer a balanced view to Trevor (and Randy if he's let in on the secret).

The meeting's not over yet …

Not necessarily - the rich people you know from the media are either the tippy-top of the list (and thus have a hard time avoiding media attention), or are ostentatious as hell because they like/want that public recognition/adulation. Check out the Forbes 400 list sometime, and see how many of them you recognize either by name or by face. Then know: it takes over 2.8 billion dollars of net worth to make the cut for that list, i.e., there are many billionaires not on the list. And millionaires? In the USA, they're as common as dirt: there are almost 25 million millionaires in the USA in 2023. See also The Millionaire Next Door.

And yet Trevor has managed to keep his knowledge that Dorian is still alive a secret from the Pit River pack … it would seem that Lycan senses as lie detectors aren't infallible.

"Pressure - it changes everything." - John Milton (Al Pacino), The Devil's Advocate

It's either irrational revenge, or they have people in place for a coup d'état since they tried to take out both Wade & Thad at the same time. If the latter, it's war (well, continuation of war), and the response must be intensified measures to find & kill members of the McKinney faction. The assassin will likely have left some traces in his wake: they have a body, which means facial, fingerprint, DNA identification is possible, and with ID, you move on from there - who's his family? Who are known-associates? Where has he been? Who has he interacted with? As for possible McKinney moles still in Pit River - will they have attempted the rest of the coup plan upon hearing that Beta Thad was shot, or will they stand down knowing that both betas are still alive? If the former, they risk capture from a failed plan. If the latter, the hunt to root them out continues … One way to attempt to root them out (if information control has been tight enough) is to play the same game as when Levi attempted to kill Dorian: put out the word that both betas are dead, and see who comes out of the woodwork. OTOH, if this is irrational revenge, have to maintain high alert until the rest of the revenge-minded McKinneys are imprisoned or dead - that would be hard to maintain over a long haul.

If you don't already know about it (and this is for everyone else too), I recommend TV Tropes (.org) which is about narrative storytelling: tips, techniques, examples - it's massive. When I first found it a decade ago, its front page warned off potential readers: once you know how the bones of any given story type or trope works, it can spoil one's enjoyment of a whole lot of media: books, movies, etc. For me, even if I know how the story is gonna end, it can still be fun (if well done) to see how the author gets us there, e.g., James Cameron's Titanic - we know that the ship's gonna sink before the movie starts. Or, that can be subverted as Quentin Tarantino did in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. I was going to ask if you'd ever read Robert Heinlein's Methuselah's Children which apparently coined a trope: masquerade (Wikipedia) and since you're world-building as a writer, I thought that TV Tropes' page on masquerade would be more appropriate … I hope that if you haven't visited TV Tropes before that your dive into it doesn't delay next Monday's chapter (and I apologize to other readers if there is a delay and the author's diversion into TV Tropes is the proximate cause).

Not all prisons are dens of rape - depends on the inmates, and how the prison is run. The Lycan Council prison(s) may well be different … It just now occurs to me: how can lycan prisons be separately run and not be obviously different and thus subject to scrutiny? Not that I pay a lot of attention to prisons, but the rest of lycan society appears to be "just like them humans (eat, sleep, work, raise kids), but we have this secret stuff we do" - so long as that's not exposed, no problem; like Wednesday Addams' explanation of her ordinary daily clothing as a Halloween costume: “This is my costume. I'm a homicidal maniac - they look just like everyone else.” However, prisons are part of the government (city, county, state, federal) justice system - can't have private ones without government sanction, and it'd take a pretty thorough infiltration of prison administration to cover up that there's a second, entirely separate population being imprisoned through an entirely separate justice system. It's one thing for a given pack to have a pack jail (small, likely easy to hide from outsiders), but another thing entirely for a very large, dedicated prison to go unnoticed unless very well camouflaged and supported - kinda like the rogue gang underground facilities that Sebastien Renard ran … Remember: we live in the era of Google Earth and open source intelligence (which is being quite effectively used in the Russian-Ukrainian war) - it's harder to hide stuff than it used to be. I remember how freaked out my Mom got over her lack of privacy when (about 15 years ago) I told her that property assessment & tax records were online for anyone to search - no longer dusty record books in the basement of City Hall. You wanna hide there now, you need a corporation to own it (e.g., your own, oddly-named LLC), but that just adds a level of indirection … someone owned the land over the rogue gang's redoubt. Satellites possibly recorded the disturbance of the earth from excavation … One hopes that with the … "reorganization" of the North American Lycan Council, their prisons are being run more for rehabilitation & education than punishment.

Two thoughts about "shot at close range" - Thad probably saw his attacker, and would be able to identify him if Thad survives - I note the text message said "shot" and not "killed" or "dead from gunshot at close range"; unless Thad was alone and far from others (allowing the shooter to escape the scene before others come to investigate), it's likely the shooter has been captured or killed. This is probably not the work of a professional assassin - such a person would want to kill from a distance, or on a delay (e.g., slow poison), rather than run the risk of identification or capture. Shooting someone up close is a more … personal act ("I want to see his face as he dies!"), perhaps done on a whim (opportunity presented itself, attacker was already armed) rather than premeditated … unless the shooter doesn't care if he lives or dies (it's extremely difficult to defend against an attacker willing to die to kill his (or her) target). This has some parallels to the George Moscone & Harvey Milk assassinations which I remember from high school - I grew up in the north bay area, and November 1978 was awful: the other bad thing was the Jonestown Massacre in Guyana - that group had previously been in the bay area.

Aww, with Lord Rosslyn present, no knock-down, drag-out family fight - though Freddy & Davina might not show proper decorum & restraint if George inherits the whole of Lady Kendal's estate (the will itself would be interesting if Lady Kendall lays out her reasoning for the chosen distribution of her estate rather than simply parceling it out without explanation, and given that there are two wills, she probably did. Will we get a look at the unchosen-by-Scruggs will? If the chosen will is favorable to George, will the others accuse him of undue influence on Mr. Scruggs?). Surely the Duke will understand the meaning of Rosslyn's presence, and might admonish his first son & daughter-in-law to mind their tongues. They may be unaware of the degree of George's separation from Caroline, however, for the Duke, this means treating with his third son rather than Caroline, and that might come as a relief. It will be interesting to see if George decides to support Freddy's bid for advancement anyway, to foster some goodwill or perhaps for a favor to be returned later. If Colonel Stewart leaves Caroline, she'll be feeling alone, save for her social circle which includes other disfavored parties (e.g., HRH Princess of Wales). If she takes up with another lover, one wonders if she'll be more discreet. There's still the question of how (or even if) she'll retaliate against George and his friends/supporters …