STREET CLAN 2.0 SAMPLE

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

So everyone, I figure I'd take a break here from the past few days of celebrating and post the new Sample for Street Clan 2.0. The Story's about to take shape pretty well, and I'm excited, despite it going in a bit of a different direction. But screw it. It's character driven and a blast to write. Enjoy.

Street Clan: File 2.0 [SAMPLE]

By Sean P. Nolan

It was rare that Micelle Farrone felt tears grasp the cusps of her eyelids the way that they were now. She was a doctor at Durik's main hospital, Hera's Mercy, and she was an emergency room doctor at that. She had witnessed horrible things every day at work, and even more-so when she had been impressed into the service of the 11th Regiment of the Noble Lady's Light Infantry as a combat surgeon. During the New Aegean Raid, Micelle had been outfitted with some of the best combat armor that one could find floating around on miltech black markets, equipped with a helmet HUD that could read a wounded soldier's vitals in the time it took to blink, and had med-tools that could deliver bio-boosters, chem stimms, and accelerated healing programs under even the most viscous EMP attacks. None of that shiny battlefield technology could have kept her from witnessing the atrocities committed by her platoon lieutenant and her fellow soldiers against the New Aegeans. The V'Halsen Wars, as they were so often called now, were nothing but an excuse by a stuck up bitch of a politician to resolve Durik City State's feuds with the rest of the confederated City States in Micelle's opinion.




Blood, death, hatred and carnage was nothing new to her.




Yet it was rare that a story of such tragedy, much less seeing it, had such a powerful effect on her emotionally. Micelle had started off her shift a week ago with ease. She'd woken up in her bed that was covered in purple silk sheets. Not poly silk. No, she'd have none of that. She had the credits stored away to pay for real silk. She rolled over in her large bed as her alarm unit ran its morning program. The shades on the windows opened to reveal the sunrise that was hovering under a belly of low black clouds which perched themselves on the spires of the apartment super-scrapers which housed Durik City's brightest and most beautiful elite. Blinking lights of comm towers flickered in the dark mass like so many rubies and sapphires obscured by malicious waters of a thief's underwater cache. Micelle laid a slender arm out across the bed as the morning program fired up the media file of Salee Pontour's Ninth Opera. The sheets were still warm from her live-in boyfriend's heat, and she could hear him moving about in the living room of their luxury apartment, going about his morning routine before heading out to the Freeman Rehab clinic he founded with loaned funds from his corporocrat father who thought Micelle was fantastic.




She stared down her arm and saw the faint pinprick clusters of scars on her ebony skin and reminded herself of why she always wore long sleeved gowns when her and Tomas went to the nigh sickeningly luxurious parties his conservative father threw. She was always sure not to bring up her views on the Wars when he'd make a toast to the veterans at the start of the dinner. His old V'Halsen Regime mates who now represented Durik in the House of the People and House of Lords probably wouldn't appreciate her making an outburst about their defeated “Noble Lady”.


Micelle rose up from under the sheets and scoffed.




“Butchers.” she muttered to herself, a common morning habit that Tomas found endearing.


Her nude form plodded with the disgraceful walk of a soldier, something she couldn't shake since she left the VH Army, and she stepped into the bathroom lined with slate grey rock imported from the Erisman volcanic steppes. Without sparing as much as a glance toward the mirror, which was suddenly flooded with InfoNet morning reports on traffic and comforting stories about rescued dogs and overblown celeb dramas from the AM talk show vid-streams, she slid into the shower pod and was hit with warm water from the walls and ceiling.


“Clear net streams down to traffic. Bring up Joles and Riker.” she commanded as she began washing the previous evening's activities from her skin.


Soon the sounds of overly cheerful morning hosts, bubbling over their caffeine about some affair that a Klerian vid star was supposedly engaged in dropped away. In their place came the cynical jabs and puns of Micelle's favorite aud-casters, mocking everything from the morning talk shows she'd just turned off, to the way that that the over glamorized celebs were worshiped for nothing other than being famous and good at talking to a camera drone.


This morning, they were playing one of Micelle's favorite parodies of a pop song, and she sang along as she began to dry herself off with a black cotton towel. Again, real cotton. Tomas insisted. She wrapped the towel around her torso, picked out a scrubs suit from her walk in closet in the bedroom, and went back into the bathroom to get dressed. As she applied her makeup in the mirror, she watched the traffic footage in the upper right hand corner.




“Fruk,” she she said after painting on her purple lipstick.


The stream was making it painfully clear that she was going to be lucky to make it on time to work with the way the overpass near the hospital was backed up due to an incident at a C-Fed roadblock. Micelle didn't mind the C-Fed military police. She thought they were a preferable alternative to the V'Halsen Militia which had enforced Lady Katra's rule, and still did in some slums despite the bitch being dead. In her mind, she had to deal with more kids who were messed up because of a VHM six packing (pistol shots to the elbow joints, knees, and ankles), than a harsh MP beating with a stun stick. It was even more rare for someone to come into the ER with bullet holes that fit a Gaian rifle caliber, rather than the depressingly frequent cases of Maclaran or Jimungan made rounds. The VHM were no better than the gangs and the street clans in her medically acclaimed mind. The C-Fed's were just trying to do their best in a frighteningly unstable situation.




“Shit happens.” she said, hearing her old platoon leader's words come from her own mouth.




Micelle wished she could remove the soldier woman's ideology from her brain and put on her earrings and slid into her auto-mold sneakers and left the bathroom. She tied up her hair into a tight ponytail and pulled on a crisp white doctor's smock over her scrubs and grabbed her purse and keys from her anti-modernist dresser. She insisted on that. Not Tomas. She could still hear him in what seemed to be the dining room, and wondered to herself what the hell was keeping him from getting to work.

STREET CLAN 1.5

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Welcome to a world where technology reigns, where the lines between corporate rule and government action blur, a dark dynasty rules. Those few who rise up against these powers run the risk of madness or death. Those who do not die lose the humanity they wish to save, or become just twisted as those they wish to overthrow. Morality in this world is nothing except for varying Shades of Grey...


You are about to meet a user of this world known as Salmon. He has just returned home after many years to his street samurai clan in Durik City. He has returned home for many reasons, but it can be certain, those reasons are going to be nothing when the real truth comes to light.


The Reaver Publishing Collective proudly presents to you:

Street Clan: File 1.5
By Sean P. Nolan and Alex Ross

There's a funny thing about dreams when you've spent so much time in VR in the waking world. It gets even funnier when you've spent what amounts to weeks on end data-dreaming in the aether of the InfoNet. You're never sure when you're dreaming or awake when you actually do dream, and that can make your first waking moments some of the most disorienting, and depending on the dream, the most psychically painful moments you are probably going to experience that day.

It was one of those mornings the day I started searching for Jinny.

I was standing on the roof of my tenement stack, puffing on a cigarette, staring into the sunrise that peeked out of the megaskyscrapers to the east with blurry, tear stained eyes. The tears weren't flowing, no. I don't cry that easily you dumbass. They were from the dream, or at least the last few moments of it. It wasn't a nightmare. I'd have a hard time calling these dreams that, despite the mental anguish that follows them every fruking time I had them.

A cold burst of wind cut across the rooftops, swirling across the coral-like clusters of satellite dishes and net-spires. I held my proxy-leather jacket closer to my body, my dreads slinging around my face like the tentacles of an angry kraken. I turned my collar up against the chill and took a deep drag on the smoldering cancer stick, and glared into the morning's golden rays.

I glared. I glared and tried to forget dreaming about my wife. Tried not to think about the dream of stowing away in a frigid cargo hold with her, holding her shivering body as the storm assaulted the hull of the ship. I tried not to remember the warm comfort of her kiss, a kiss that was recreated by my subconscious so fully that I could still feel it as if that was what had woken me up.

What woke me up was worse.

My fingers reached up to my eyebrow where a rivet had pelted my face when the hull split. There was nothing there but scarless, unbroken skin. I could still feel the cut. I could still feel the blood gushing over my eyes, freezing under the death grip of the Weirizoni Gulf's winter winds. I could still feel the scrapes on my hands from breaking away the crimson icicles, trying to grasp for my wife before she was pulled under by the black waters. She screamed my name at first, grasping for my hand as well.

I pulled the cigarette down to the filter, watching the sun inch it's way up the glass towers of the corprocrats.

“Sari.” I whispered to the sun gods in their golden spires.

“Sari!” I screamed as she finally clutched my hand. “Sari, don't let go! I've got you!”

I remember seeing her smile, nodding, her face paler than ice, her sea green eyes locking onto mine for that moment. The blood began to freeze over my vision again, violently cutting our stare off like a Crokian pirate's machete. I smashed them away again, but her hand slipped away from mine as the deck of the hull opened up between us, the ship screaming as the cavernous maw opened up. Massive mottled green-blue tendons covered in lichen and slime shot up into the room, flailing around and knocking down crates and cargo containers, snapping girders and walkways like so many twigs.
My eyes never left hers as she fell back.

My eyes never stopped staring into the sun as it marched up the towers.

Her feet slipped on the ice that had already formed along the jagged metal gash that seperated us now. Sliding down along the slope, her arms and legs moving like a Glinkan death-dance, she plunged into the water. Yellow barbs as long as a katana swirled around in a whirlpool of destruction, edging Sari closer and closer to the immense clacking beak that threatened to consume her. I shot my arm out for her hand as it rose above the water for a nanosecond, gripping her wrist.

Blood flowed from our wounds caused by the maelstrom.

It froze our hands together.

A crimson crystal formed around our wedding bands.

I felt the bare skin where my ring had left its mark.

Our eyes met again, mine pleading yet determined, hers cold and doll-like. Soulless. A walkway groaned above me as it came apart, the guardrail snapping away as a tentacle crushed it within it's python grasp. I didn't see it as it slammed through my bicep, punching through and into my gut below my sternum, but I felt it for the five point eight seconds it took before my pain-distilling software kicked in and shut it down. My jaw clenched, and my free hand flew to my belt on autopilot, pulling out the Revin 8mm machine pistol I had tucked behind my back. Nadia stared up at me still, and mouthed a barely audible curse.

“Riser Rat.”

The pain-distillers couldn't hold back the emotional pain I felt hearing that phrase from her. Riser Rats were the poor, unclean, and foul. Riser Rats lived and died in their riser tenement buildings. Riser Rats were hated by anyone who wasn't one. And I was one. And she knew that all too well.

Another tentacle slipped out of the water and wrapped around my gory torso, pulling our hands apart as it lifted me into the air, slamming my body against the roof of the hull and snapping the guardrail in half. I smirked, although my distillers had overloaded and I felt the intense sensation someone feels when being mortally wounded, inches from death. My gun hand whipped out from behind me, finger held down on the trigger, ripping the air with bright orange flame from the barrel as it barked out rounds into the beast holding me. Blindly, my other arm reached behind my back, pulling out the electro-katana from under my jacket and charging it as I pressed the thumb stud in one motion and brought the blade down into the tentacle.

The monster screeched like a thousand sonic-grenades going off at once.

Oily gray blood hissed and oozed out of the gaping incision I had made in the monster's limb, and all the others that had taken the caseless rounds I'd streamed into it. I glanced down at Sari as I was swung around again, watching her swim up to the beak only to kiss the bulbous tongue that lolled out of it's side. My blade swung down again in a blue flash, slicing clear through the tendril that held me aloft. I fell to the deck, landing on broken plasteel crates and plunging the rod further into my guts and through my back, barely avoiding my spine. I could feel it scraping my vertebrae, only fractions of a millimeter from paralyzing me entirely.

I pulled myself to my feet, hunched over, my sword arm hanging limply in front of me, the blade sending small shocks through the deck as it tapped it repeatedly due to my shaking form. The shock had set in. The shock meant one thing.

I did not give a fruk.

The hull began to rear up like a drawbridge closing. I glimpsed Sari straddling the tongue and the beak closed around her. The roof of the hold cracked open, revealing a black blanket of clouds in the night sky. I charged up the slope, raising my pistol again, firing at the kraken's mass. I was halfway up when the magazine emptied and the action chittered hungrily for more. A suspended cargo crate swung down, suddenly freed from it's chains that had held it to the ceiling. My blade rose up and cut down to the right, the two halves hitting the ever increasing slope of the deck and tumbling back behind me.

I tossed my gun aside as the deck reached ninety degrees, my hand clutching the ripped metal where the monster had broken through. The points of adamantium pointed to the sky like Neptune's trident. I hung there, pulling myself up, my arm straining under my full weight and swung my leg over the tear. I gazed into the abyss, watching the beak submerge into the black water. An object glinted under the seizure-like lights of the dying ship. It was Sari's wedding band, still encased in our frozen blood.

The kraken pulled the ship that had been one but was now two into the deep.

I was consumed by the black.

The morning's sun enveloped me.

“Well,” I said to myself, my feet shifting on the roof of my building. “Time to go.”

I turned my back to the morning glow and walked down the stairwell.

---

Rumors are like the lifeblood of the underworld at times. Sometimes you can find them buzzing about like flies in a bar or club. Other times you can find them dug deep into Black Nets, hidden away from the all seeing eyes of the InfoNet crawler programs run by the Corps and the Govs. Sometimes an odd synchronicity occurs where meatspace life and what is on The Net blurs so much that the rumors go either way. Usually rumors on Black Nets are in regards to hits on corp or government servers, big league data theft, people who've burnt out entire blocks of the Network with one specifically designed virus, and how any one of those things allowed them to have some impact in meatspace (mine, as mentioned, was diverting arms shipments for my clan). That's usually how things flow on The Net. It's like how in all the Gideon Crissone holo-vids where him and his intrepid band of adventurers would hole up in some fort before running out and fruking up some B'Aritti tribesmen in wholesale slaughter, grabbing what supplies they could, and then running back into their fort. It was rare in those holo-vids that the B'Aritti would come after Gideon and his guys, so what happened outside the fort rarely effected them on the inside of the fort.

As it was with Black Nets.

However, as I was to learn, it wasn't the case for Jinny.

The first whiff of a trail came from a drug hazed encounter with one of the clan harem girls. I'd taken about three sticksof a drug meant more for combat troops during the Wars than street samurai hackers. During the Wars, both the Vannies and the C-Feds knew the drug program officially as “Apollomax”. Apollomax had been designed by Hifflon Corp's pharmaceutical department to make sure that combat troops and their own private security personnel could stand the long shifts of boredom that usually typified their lifestyles, yet at the same time be able to rise to the occasion when needed with “less than point zero five milliseconds of lag time”.

All that doesn't matter right now.

What does is that I'd taken a handful of data-sticks from Jerri-Boy when I told him about Jinny's disappearance. I knew that I'd need it because I'd probably be data-dreaming pretty fruking hard for the next few days, and none of it was gonna be very dream-like. Nightmarish seemed more accurate. I figured that even though I had a job to do, I could still try and multi-task, using a dual-data-link to split my mind's focus into two nice partitions aimed at two entirely different subjects. The DDL was something I happened to come across, not on a Net of any kind, but in Meatspace. Manny and I had been raiding a Belkaviskan gang's supply house during the build up to the war with the Shuijini and I came across it and knew I had to keep it for myself. Luckily the Clan Code provided me with that, because those DDL's are more illegal than a Maclaran mutant getting a paying job in Cathai. The amount of netrunners turned into slavering slabs of madness because of the neural partitions is larger than anyone would want to acknowledge. If the partitioning doesn't do you in, the burn-out probably will.

Those apollomax data-sticks were the only things keeping me from total burn-out. Sure, I was able to run the DDL without any issue, sometimes even leaving a good portion of my mind running on instinct scripts in one data-dream, spreading and gathering information of dissent, while in another I was manually (in the virtual sense) picking through anything I could in regards to the Mackavelli family's connections and enemies during my absence. The drugs just kept both partitions fueled with enough amphetamine producing incentive to keep Old Man Burny away from my brain cells. After what felt like a combined drag of five weeks netrunning in two days real-time, I was out of apollomax and was having a hard time maintaining the DDL connections and the gods-damned nosebleeds that kept hitting me every fifteen minutes like an orbital battery test firing. The difficulty with the connections was because I was getting frustrated at how it seemed like everyone and their fruking grandma loved Don Mackavelli so much it seemed like if it weren't for Jinny's disappearance, you'd think the man had no enemies at all. The nose-bleeds meant that I was probably doing some neural damage. It could have been a few things; trying to reconnect with the DDL so often, using too much appolomax in too small a time frame, or that the street cleaner drones using that new chemical outside of my place was probably bending a few rules and regs for the sake of efficiency and saving the corp contractors some credits. I took all three options into account and decided they meant one thing; I needed to get fresh air/laid to take my mind off the Net for a while and have some fruking fun. There was only one problem.

I was tripping out.

Hard.

Really hard.

In the ten minute commute from my riser building to the local Clan Harem house, I dodged three wish dragons, had an in depth argument with a gargantuan spirit frog wearing a Weirizoni turban on the finer points of why he smelled like trash, and joined in with a game of hyperball where the ball was Lady Katra V'Halsen's head. When Taina's perfume hit me with its pheromone sucker punch, I was surrounded by hysterically laughing children, screaming at a hyperball about how its sadistic gunmen had mutilated my younger brother for life.

“Hey, sweetheart.”

I turned, coming out of the first wave of the trip, but not before Taina's voice had rung like Sari's in my ears, and I saw Taina's face, not Sari's, was covered in oily kraken blood. The blood melted away around the soft lines of her jaw and the lusty points at the corners of her eyes like vomit in an ivory shitter.

Taina lit a cigarette.

“You done playing with your balls,” she scanned me from boot to dreadlock and blew smoke, “or do you wanna come inside and play a real game?”

I ignored the coded tentacle wrapping around her left ankle and smiled.

“Just your lucky day.”

“Oh?” she said with pursed scarlet lips in mock-surprise. “Do tell.”

“I've finally lost enough of my mind to sleep with you.”

She smiled.

My eyes darted around.

“Again.”

The smile grew and exposed her near-augmentic pearly whites.

“There you go Jakk.”

It was just then she turned into a medusa and led me away by the hand. The kids went back to batting the Vannie leader's head around the street.

---

I felt like my head was the one that had been bounced around on the street by the time the apollomax was wearing off. Combined with the wind down from Taina's pheromone perfume though, I probably was getting a light treatment in those regards. That and the fact that she'd spent way more time fruking me senseless than I'd paid for with a swipe of plastic at her door back when she was still a medusa. Honestly, she had been a lot of pre-tech myth women during the lust dive, but I don't think that the Cult of Artemis priestesses would vouch for her doing half of the things we'd done. I was thankful in the least that she didn't turn into anyone I knew personally or had been involved with. I had a moment of vivid clarity under Taina while she still was Taina; I prayed to every god, demon, and mythological female I'd just fruked that she wouldn't turn into Jinny. If it wasn't for my panic and irrationality bubbling to the surface like that, I'd probably say that they answered that prayer and gave me the bonus of not having Sari show up.

Granted, I'd be lying if I said no-one I'd been involved with showed up.

I rolled over on the wave of purple orchids that shimmered on the holo-silk sheets as I propped my head up to view Taina. She was in the corner of the room reapplying her makeup in the reflection of a traditional three piece Jimungan mirror. Hardcopy notes and doodles were stuck into the corners of each mirror frame. The only thing I was stuck on was the reflection of her bare cleavage slipping through her loose kimono.

“Don't stare too hard, Jakk.” she said while she dabbed powder onto her cheeks. “You need those eyes to find Jinny.”

I grinned drunkenly, still muddled by the hormonal rush of the past six hours, and rolled onto my back, throwing my arm over my face.

“Yeah...” I muttered.

“Not going well?”

“The net's not what it used to be, I'll say that much.”

A laugh like bronze wind chimes.

“You've barely even started looking, Jakk. From what Manny tells me, the firewalls are bad now,” A creak of her auto-mold chair as she turned to face me, “but they're not that bad.”

I turn my head out from under my arm, one black eye poking out to meet her greens. They're not the green eyes I remembered from the party a few weeks before. They're the green eyes I dove into like the green vectors of code back in my teens. They're the green eyes that gazed at me with a compassion and faith that I could never return and never understand, and instead of returning the same, I used them to hide in, like woods I didn't even think existed outside of holo-vids and conservatoriums until I ran from those eyes across the black waters. The black waters that were still trying to drown my soul.

What did I say about girls I was involved with?

“You're one of the best, babe.” Taina said, her eyes never leaving mine as she rose up from her seat, slim fingers holding her kimono closed over her heart. “But you're not the best.”

My laugh sounded more like a cough.

“I know that.”

“Oh?” The pursed lips and mock surprise. Damn those lips. “You've only been at this for, what? A week? Two maybe?”

“Time runs different when you're jacked in.” I pulled myself up and leaned against the wall, crossing my arms over my bare chest. “And you know that.”

“And I remember you giving it all of five minutes back in the day before jacking out.” Her lips slipped into a red smile, her feet padding silently on the floor, the pink and purple screams of pleasure and lust from the room below rising like incense smoke around us.

Closing in on us.

Like memories.

“I lasted much longer than that.” I said, swinging my legs over the edge of the bed, leaving the covers and leaving myself exposed. “But that was a long time ago.”

She steps closer.

Her kimono brushes my knee.

“Yes it was.” Her voice is like her perfume, but she's not wearing any. “But you're hardly the best.”

My hands grip her thighs, and slide up to her hips and I stand over her.

I'm deep in her code green of her eyes.


Deeper than the black sea water.

“Who is?” I whisper.

An MP convoy wails down the road outside.

Her hands touch my chest as she leans into my ear and her voice is as husky as a cat in heat.

“Rider. The Crokian.”

Thunder rumbles outside and the humidity of the past few weeks breaks with a flash of lighting that illuminates our bodies in a flash of electric blue. Her kimono's on the ground and even though I knew who Rider was, and knew that I had to ask her how to contact him and what he had to do with Jinny, and why the Crokians would be mixed up in this, I don't even care. I'm caught in the code and we're back on the bed. Rain pelts the windows like the questions pelting my mind and soaks into the buildings of Durik like the sweat on the sheets.

My mind was everywhere and nowhere at once.

But I didn't care.

I had broken free of the kraken.

The sirens, however, held me firmly in their grasp.

And after such a long wait, that's File 1.5 of "STREET CLAN". If you liked that, check out our Anthology, "Shades of Grey" (which will have a 25% discount for paperbacks in honor of it's one year anniversary) or click the donate button in the sidebar. You can also like Reaver Publishing on Facebook and follow this blog as we give you updates on the Global Revolution.


Check this spot on March 25th for the next installment of "STREET CLAN" and learn who the Rider is and what they'll be dragging Salmon into! If you liked this, please click the donate button on the sidebar and support Reaver so we can keep making kick ass stuff like this and spreading the word about the Global Revolution!

The World As It Stands - Part III

Evening, everyone. Hope you all are doing well. This post is a long time in the making, so thanks for sticking by.

To start off, we've received a very detailed after action review from a contact at Occupy DC. The day started off with the occupiers erecting a large tarp over the General McPherson statue in the square in protest of the calls for eviction. Later on, with the appearance of media trucks and rumors spreading about, there were talks of a raid by 11:30 p.m, which was going to be coincidentally after the 11:00 news. The next day, in the early hours of the morning, the police surrounded Freedom Plaza but did not leave their cars. After a day of deliberation, a General Assembly to determine whether or not to take down the "Tent of Dreams" or let the police take it down, and even passing comments and threats from a Neo-Nazi group and a Tea Party member.

The tent was literally torn down by the wind at 1:30 p.m, and by midnight that night, DC police and Park police came to "inspect" the camp. They did a quick walk through, and left not a moment too soon.

_

We have also received word that Occupy Providence has been evicted from Burnside park in downtown Providence. Sources say that the mayor of Providence attended an Occupy Providence press conference and marched with them to city hall. "An estimated 200 people chanted 'Whose city? Our city!' on the way to city hall." said a reporter from the Providence Journal. The marchers entered silently and presented a letter addressed to the mayor and police commissioner arguing that they had constitutional rights to remain in the park.

A day later, clean up of the park began. The mayor commended Occupy Providence for their "peaceful and non-violent" behavior. Occupy Providence is not dead, however. They are organizing as we speak, and are still as strong as ever.

However, in the wake of Occupy Providence's eviction, a new movement has risen: Occupy Rhode Island Campuses. Students and faculty from Brown University, Rhode Island College, University of Rhode Island, and Providence College have organized the group to protest, what they call, a broken system of higher education, and they have cited on their website the skyrocketing cost of tuition and student debt as well as the "corporatization" of the nation's colleges and universities as issues that jeopardize the student's education. The movement stands in solidarity with Occupy Providence, and hopes to stage "teach-ins" and other forms of protest in the future.

_

And so is the world as it stands. I'll be trying to get these up a bit more frequently as the news comes in. Feel free to comment or leave questions. If you have any news to share, you can leave us a message here on the blog or, if you follow our Facebook page, there as well. We'd love to hear from you all.