Chasing the Rabbit: Chapter Eighteen -Firewalls and Blindspots

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She lay. Motionless. Numb.

Elsa.

A voice. Anna's? No. Someone else. Pleading with her to get up.

Was she sleeping? What happened to her? There was an island. And a creature. Screeching. With talons. Made entirely of molten rock.

Get up.

Was she dead? The bird had come for her. A gaping beak of flames. Open. For her. The corner of her mouth twitched into a smirk.

It had chosen the wrong girl.

Elsa!

The voice came one last time before vanishing into stillness. She opened her eyes as a cloud of mist dissipated into the hot air around her. She lay. Her back pressed against stone. Glowing stone. Burning.

She shrieked. Sparks scattered as she sprang upright. The ground was hot as coals. She encased her feet in protective ice which immediately began to melt.

A second shriek startled her. On reflex she struck a defensive stance, sending a tiny shield of ice in the direction of the sound which turned to vapor before it touched the floor. It had been nothing more than an echo.

The soles of her feet were starting to burn again. She reformed her makeshift slippers and started mov-



The image of Arendelle's queen on the auditorium screen froze mid step, and Judy Hopps turned her attention to the assembly of figures, thirty or so, scattered throughout the seating meant for around two hundred. Nobody ever wanted to sit towards the front.

"Did I see a hand?" She was positive one had gone up, only to retreat comfortably back into anonymity. "I like questions," she assured her audience who hadn't discovered until an hour before that they were attending a workshop on character analysis. The student who had caught her eye meekly raised his paw again. She smiled. "Yes. Go ahead."

"Wouldn't the heat kill her?"

"Very good! That is an excellent critical question!" She skipped to the edge of the stage and sat down. "Always ask questions like that. It doesn't matter if you go into animation, writing, music, or performance. You should always ask about the details. Look at them from the protagonist's eyes. From the antagonist's. From the side characters'. And especially from the audience's. You don't always have to have an answer. But if something slips past you that you haven't at least thought about, it's only going to reflect back on you. And believe me, someone else WILL pick up on it."

Now that Judy could see the faces of her audience more clearly, she took a moment to scan for the ones who were genuinely engaged in the workshop.

"So what do you guys think? Would the heat kill Elsa?"

Silence, as expected.

"Let me rephrase it then. You have someone whose whole existence is attuned to ice surrounded by recently molten rock. Why is she still alive?"

A few eyes tilted back as if the attendees were trying to puzzle it out, but nobody spoke up.

"There's no wrong answers- well, obviously there are. But there are no wrong ideas in trying to get to a right answer. I'll be honest, I don't know. This is only the second time I'm seeing this footage, and before this morning I didn't know it existed."

"Where'd this come from?"

"I don't know that either. All I can tell you is, it's unused footage from something the high-ups haven't told me about, but they asked me for my take on it and I thought it would be a fun exercise for us to explore together." She hopped back to her podium and reversed the stream to a still of Elsa's slippers melting. "No matter what field you eventually go into, intuition is a healthy skill to develop. Sometimes you only have an instant to make a decision. That's not the scientific method; that's survival. So what quick deductions can we make about what little we've seen?"

"It's not real molten rock?"

"Bingo! That was my first thought. I'm no volcanologist, but it's a pretty sure bet that stones glowing red from heat would kill anyone who isn't aligned with fire. Now we can see there's actual heat, enough to create vapor. A sauna can do that. Do you think a sauna could kill Elsa?"

A few shrugs transformed into a small ensemble of bobbing heads.

"Possibly so." Judy advanced the footage a few minutes ahead, with Elsa flailing all over the screen at triple speed; provoking some comfortable snickers from the students. "I'm going to skip a bit because it's mostly her staggering through the tunnel, trying to create cold spots on the floor to step on."

She stopped the feed on an image of Elsa giving a puzzled look to a series of human-made rails; metal and wood, likely designed for a mine cart.

"All right. Now remember, this is a workshop on character analysis. Based on what we've talked about, and what you're about to see, I want you to make as quick a deduction as you can." She gave her audience a sly grin. "Ready?"

She pressed play. Elsa came to life, gasping for breath. She glanced in one direction the tracks led. Then made herself a small platform of ice to stand on while she intently peered down the other direction. A loud roar. Elsa's attention snapped back to the first direction she'd faced. And the image went blank.

Judy brought the auditorium lights up for the first time since she'd taken the stage. "Conclusions?"

"Get the heck out of dodge."

Judy laughed along with her audience. "That would be a sensible decision, and I want to put it on hold for a second. What can we conclude about character?"

"She's scared."

Judy nodded. "Good, yes. What else?"

"She wants to leave?"

They were reaching now. "Yeah, this is all good. But we knew that already. We have new information now. What can we take from it?"

Empty stares.

"Okay, let me put it like this. We're making a guess based on what little information we have. One, Elsa. Someone synonymous with ice. Two, an artificial setting that she would be most uncomfortable in. Three, a premade clear-cut choice: left or right. And four, a solid indication that one way is significantly different than the other."

In truth, she wasn't surprised that nobody was making the leap of logic; a thing like that really had to come from experience.

"What's a logical deduction we can make about a character other than Elsa?" Judy crossed the length of the stage and back to give them time to mull it over. When nobody volunteered and answer, she decided to give them one last hint. "Is anyone here familiar with Scooby-Doo?"

"They're trying to scare her away."

There it was. "Good job!" she said. "We call that the 'Aha!' moment, and that's what you're striving for in analyzing character."

She resumed her spot at the podium, bringing up the first still page of the rest of her presentation; but her audience that, until recently could barely be prodded into speaking, now openly expressed their determination to know what happened to Elsa.

"I don't know," Judy reminded them to an audible disappointment. "I don't know what happened next or what any of this was about. That's all the footage they gave me. And that's the harsh reality about answers. They reveal themselves when they do. If you only take one thing from our time together, let it be this. Answers tend not to come to you when you wait for them. Some questions require an answer from the inside. It takes courage to go in blind and it takes creativity to get back out again. It's never too soon to start practicing both."

"So you don't know if Elsa made it out alive?"

"Exactly. I don't know. And I won't know until I do." What she knew was that she was going to have to rush through the rest of her presentation if she didn't bring this portion of it to a close. "I would assume she did, if for no other reason than I can't believe our company would send us the final recorded moments of one of their stars. But ignoring that; if we're right that someone wants Elsa to go a particular direction, and she goes in that direction, the odds of survival are stacked in her favor. It's a lot of assumptions but it's still the most-"

She trailed off. An idea had piqued her curiosity. Something about assumptions.

It took her a moment to realize that she'd stopped mid-sentence in front of her whole workshop, and all she could do was give them a half-attentive apology while she took out her phone.



Monitors. Seventy-six in all. They filled an entire hemisphere of the control room; revealing every single detail, and disguising them in an impossibly thick coat of visual noise.

Alice's ankle had been wounded, likely sprained, possibly broken. That would slow her down, making a handful of screens unnecessary to pay any attention to for a while. Maleficent was impossible to keep track of but anytime she did something important she drew as much attention to herself as she could. Tarzan was...uncomplicated. But it was utterly frustrating that the 'Jasmine' team wouldn't stay together. There was no way to predict where to look. And now that the mouse had returned from his meeting, those twelve screens erupted into chaos.

"Where's Oswald?" He had the nerve to ask such a question of the very staff members who'd been anxiously awaiting him and the rabbit to return together.

"What do you mean 'Where's Oswald'?" Minnie snapped at him. She'd already endured a tongue-lashing over the phone from Madame Medusa, and had to force back tears while vastly overstating her optimism that they'd have regained access of the system by the next day. The robot V.I.N.CENT was their best bet for tech support, and he'd been unable to help them over the phone so Minnie had to approve an emergency overnight flight using a thousand dollars out of her own pocket to get him to the studio by the next afternoon. She was in no mood to hear that Mickey had lost track of their island simulation's main designer.

At that moment the security gate alarm went off. It happened on a fairly regular basis and ordinarily the staff had gotten used to it, but today their reaction was priceless. Ducks spilled papers and chipmunks dove behind shelves as if the place was under attack. It was a much needed moment of delight among seventy-six monitors of monotony.

But somewhere in the franticness was an unfazed horse.

Horace Horsecollar.

Hired in 1925 as a jack-of-all-trades handyman, Horace was your go-to guy for practically anything. In over nine decades, he hadn't missed a single day of work. His presence was so commonplace that the bulk of the newer generation (and some of the veterans) often stopped noticing him. He was always just kind of...there when you needed to know where he was. And now he was there.

Amidst the commotion, Horace suddenly appeared behind Minnie, speaking into her huge ear something that the hacked surveillance cameras couldn't broadcast.

Minnie's expression had recently gone from unbridled stress to subtle relief as Mickey had taken charge of the issue with the security alarm. Now her face had become stoic. For a moment the two animals stared at each other, followed by a simple nod from the horse that Minnie should follow him. What was going on?

Without a word to the rest of the staff, Minnie led Horace toward the stairwell, and it didn't take a leap of intuition to figure out where they were going. The old sound room from the B&W years had never been renovated, essentially storage; but it was also more soundproof than anything the modern era had produced. If you wanted some privacy to warm up your voice, scream your head off, or negotiate off the record, that was the room to do it.

And obviously there was no surveillance.

Unfortunately there was no way to record footage on this end and replay it, so there was no way to tell where Horace had come from, but disconnecting the feed from the outside world was no big loss at this point. And it might even prevent the robot from being of any use at all.

The operator felt under the console for the handful of cords that connected him to the main office and yanked. In unison, twelve monitors shrank to a single pixel and faded to black. "Too fast for ya," he smirked, satisfied that whatever Horace was telling Minnie no longer mattered.

But it did. What he didn't realize was, in trying to send Elsa away from the control room he'd inadvertently given the outside world a suspicion that the simulator's malfunction was not by chance. Not that they could do anything about it, but you should never overestimate the resourcefulness of animals wearing gloves.

It was time to up the ante; so far he'd been too generous. Keep them running. Where was the panther?

He pulled up the feed from the caverns and scanned for glowing eyes; the ambient noise made it impossible to hear footsteps down there. There were specks of light in many places, fireflies and bats, but not what he was looking for.

So intensely did he stare at that handful of screens that he neglected to take notice of anything else happening on the island. You couldn't blame him for not paying attention to Elsa once she'd encountered the roar of the lava monster a few hours ago. Indeed, he'd have no reason to think that she wouldn't make a beeline for the exit, which is why her decision to head towards the danger would have perplexed anyone (save for one exceptionally clever bunny). But even as determined as he was to track down the whereabouts of Bagheera, it was pure carelessness not to notice the Queen of Arendelle stumbling just outside the entrance to the control room.

And even as she now stood behind him, he only became aware of her presence by the abrupt drop in temperature that made the fur on his arms stand up.

Continue to Chapter Nineteen.
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Ten Lessons From Ten Years of Marriage (With Guest Blogger Sarah DeArmond)

Yesterday was our ten year anniversary.

Never having had a ten year anniversary before (not of marriage anyway) I was trying to think of what the ideal way of publicly flaunting my success story would be. My first thought was to write "I'm happily married and you might not be! So nyah nyah!" all over my Twitter feed. But then I worried it might alienate all of those alleged independent publishing houses that keep trying to get me to buy online courses, so instead I want to go with something a bit humbler.

I think the best way to honor the past decade of truly feeling whole is to compile the life's lessons that I never could have learned otherwise into one single blog. And then flaunt that. But as marriage is never a 'my' journey but an 'our' journey, I'd like to welcome my beloved back for her third appearance at the Wooly Side.

Thank you Sean. We've learned a lot, I mean a lot, over these past ten years. I can honestly say I wouldn't be the woman I am today without my husband. I've been though a lot and it's because of him that I'm still standing firm. That's why we want to both present to you all ten things we've learned over the past ten years. 

1. There Are No Secrets.

Now, I'm not talking about those kinds of marriages that you see on Lifetime or in magazines. And I'm also not talking about those kinds of secrets, because that really should be a given regardless of how frequently we see examples otherwise. No, I'm talking about that terrible side of yourself that you keep hidden from the world for your own sanity. Be it any of your undiagnosed mental health issues (chronic depression here) or how you REALLY feel about Harry Potter, those things come out. You can hide them from everybody else but not your spouse. They will see you at your very worst, worse than you would ever have believed anyone would. And when you're still loved, cherished, and honored in sickness and in health after those shadows come forward, you know it's the real thing.

2. You'll Be Each Other's Biggest Cheerleaders.

It's taken me awhile to find my passion in life, but I've had my husband cheering me on every misstep of the way. When I finally found what I wanted to do, there was no rubbing in my face all of my past mistakes, he just continued to cheer me on and say, "I knew you could do it" Marriage is about rooting for the other person, not bringing them down reminding them of their failures.

3.  You'll Get Comfortable Being Wrong.

I've heard several other men describe marriage sarcastically as "Oh yeah, I love never being right." And I understand where they're coming from, but I also can't help but feel they're missing the vital element. The harsh reality is, you're going to be wrong. A lot. And in a healthy marriage, you're going to be reminded. On the flip side, sometimes you'll be right and your spouse will not. How to reconcile those conflicts is a later entry on this blog. For now the takeaway is, being wrong isn't the worst thing in the world. In and of itself it's not even a bad thing. It feels like it, sure. But eventually you come to realize that *gasp* you can be wrong and not be any less of who you are; not be loved any less. It's okay to be flawed, to make mistakes, and to say those three beautiful words to your love "You were right".

4. You Will Say, "I'm Sorry."

While we're on the topic of being wrong, love doesn't mean never having to say you're sorry. Of course it does. As my husband was saying, sometimes you'll have to be the bigger person, swallow your pride, and say, "I'm sorry." Now, that doesn't mean throwing your beloved's apology back in their face, this is where you talk it out. But saying those two words can lift a huge burden off of you both.

5. When Someone Wins, Nobody Wins.

It seems counter to just about everything you're taught growing up, but the sooner you remove the idea of 'winning' the argument from your mental facilities the better off you'll be. You're not out to win, you're out to return to each others arms. In most cases that means being partially right, partially wrong, deciding several things aren't even worth sorting into either category, and ultimately defeating the conflict by rendering it unimportant. Arguments you win are still important to you. Arguments you resolve are just vessels to a warm embrace. You both win when the idea of win versus loss is irrelevant.

6. You'll Get To Know Each Other's "Silly Side."

I know this is a bit of a weird one, but going back to what my husband said in the beginning, you will get to know every part of the other person, including what makes them laugh at weird moments. Sean knows I get goofy at night or when I don't get enough sleep. To be honest, I never knew that about myself until after we got married, but he doesn't mind. When you find the one, you won't mind what hits your partner's funny bone, even if it is a little odd!

7. You'll Become an Authority on Unexpected Topics.

When your significant other cares a lot about something, you're obligated to care at least a little. Not a fake "that's nice dear" kind of caring, because you'll never slip out that way more than once. As such, you're going to be finding out-of-the-box ways of connecting to things you otherwise would never have noticed. I've become a connoisseur of romantic comedies. They're not all equal in quality regardless of predictability; there's a whole spectrum between very well done and offensively bad, and it's actually quite fun to explore. I still can't tell you the steps to applying makeup, but I've become quite interested in the 'why' behind it. And, oh yeah, Netflix please give Girl Meets World a reunion movie; those characters were awesome!

8. Be Prepared That Your Spouse Might Change Their Mind On Some Big Things.

When my husband and I first got together, we agreed to be parents. A few years down the line, I discovered that wasn't what I wanted. I broke the news to him as soon as a realized it. That's key, as soon as you know deep in your heart your mind has changed on plans, tell your spouse. If Sean had truly wanted a kid, we would have worked something out in therapy. It wouldn't have ended us, but when I told him, he was shocked at first. Then, as we had a long talk, we realized we were on the same page. The point is, never go along with something you aren't 100% on board with that you will later regret. If your spouse disagrees, work it out in therapy. I'm thankful that after a very long talk, we were (and still are) on the same page.

9. You're Never Alone.

That sure sounds like happily ever after; and yes, it IS the case, but that's not much of a lesson. There's a side to that fairy tale ending which requires some very real (and ongoing) responsibility. Namely, whatever you do is always going to affect the other person. We had a wonderful counselor who explained how the notion of two becoming one paints an inaccurate picture of marriage. In actuality, two become one and one and a marital connection (which makes three by my count). The people are still individuals, and the marriage is a whole new entity that has to be cared for and nurtured. The work is constant, but not in a grudge work kind of way. This is the work an artist puts into their craft for the pure joy of creating something they're proud of.

10. You Still "Date".

You know how you acted like you were when you were a couple? You always hugged, kissed, held hands, and made time to go out. That doesn't stop after the wedding. We will always keep doing those things. Saying "I do" doesn't mean we're no longer dating. It means a more intimate level of it.

Thank you love for indulging me. Next blog should be a characteristic return to my regular snideness and cynicism, but here's a toast to our second ten years!