Kimberly's Ramblings 4: Responding to "Ohmigod, You Killed Brenny!"
By Kimberly T. (email: kimbertow at yahoo dot com)
Well, these last few stories seem to have stirred up some controversy… My series now includes:
Stuff about the Praying Gargoyle that Greg Weisman hasn't said is canon.
The death of Brentwood, the poor clone who never seems to get a break in anybody's series.
A clan of gargoyles who survived not by hiding, but by flat-out lying and deceiving men of the cloth… and the occasional murder.
A boatload of dead Quarrymen, most of them killed by gargoyles… and one in cold blood.
Angela being not all sugar-n-spice-n-everything-nice; being prejudiced, even.
People who dance and sing and rejoice at funerals.
What's funny is that what I consider the really controversial stuff has so far barely been hinted at! But that's not what this Rambling is about; nope, you'll have to wait a few more stories for that stuff. Instead, bear with me while I ramble about the above topics, plus a bit more about Demona's tragic past and more background information—including some handy links at last!--on the show I'm doing an ongoing crossover with, Beauty and the Beast. And finally, some news about what I'll be writing next.
First, to respond to "Greg Weisman never said anything about there being a price for using the Praying Gargoyle!"
Nope, it's not firmly established canon that this particular Atlantean talisman demands a price from its user, a portion of the user's life-force, to forestall it from being used frivolously (by, f'rinstance, some thrill-seeking gargoyle who might use it to go exploring the heart of a volcano by just jumping right in.) The info about it being from ancient Atlantis, being able to regenerate itself over a 60-year span and about being made expressly for the protection of gargoyles are all declared canon, but not that one crucial detail. (Not yet, anyway!)
Frankly, I just decided not to wait any longer for Greg Weisman to dribble any more little bits of information about the statue's origins and uses, so I made up some guidelines that went with what little information he had supplied to fans (via the Station 8 "Ask Greg" archives), and posted it all in my "Getting Biblical" a few months before the Mating Games story that featured its use. If more dribbles of information are given out in later years and it turns out that I got a few things wrong, well, it won't be the first time I've violated canon. I really try not to, because I love the whole Gargoyles Universe and I really do try to respect Greg W's vision. But sometimes, canon just won't do for my series. Such as the 20-year breeding cycle, and waiting until 2007 for the next breeding season and 2008 for the next generation to be laid. Nope, sorry, that's too long to wait. And considering it's taken me this many years and stories to go a measly two months in my series' timeline, I think most of my readers would agree with me…
Now, to respond to "Why did you go and kill Brentwood off? I'd thought better of you than that…" (I'm still not sure whether to be annoyed at being judged like that, or pleased that my readers have such high expectations.)
Geez, poor Brentwood never gets a break, eh? In most of the fanfiction series that involve the clones at all, they're either slaughtered en masse to show just how badass a particular villain is, or just one of them is killed (generally for the same reason), and when just one of them is killed it's usually Brentwood. But in almost all those cases, Brentwood's death is something he can't fight against; he's helpless, often even clueless, and a complete victim. At least in my 'verse, he chose to go back to save his friends and clan, and he died while trying to save Delilah. To my eyes, that makes it a hero's death; still a tragedy, but not a senseless tragedy.
So why Brentwood, specifically? To tell the truth, it really bothered me that I was falling into stereotype, with him being killed off in so many other series. But sooner or later the Quarrymen were bound to get lucky and actually kill a gargoyle, and their most likely victim would be someone who had little experience in fighting at all; one of the clones. And of all the clones, Brentwood has the greatest speed in the air but the poorest fighting ability; no web-wing is a particularly good fighter in the air. If they move their arms, legs or wing-struts too much while in aerial combat, they lose their glide plane and start falling; their best bet is to either find a weapon they can wield one-handed with a minimum of arm movement (a gun would be a good weapon, once the wielder learned how to shoot accurately while holding the gun far out to the side), or do that slash en passant move that Brentwood pulled on the Quarrymen.
In addition to their aerial limitations, once on the ground, web-wings tend to be less effective in combat than their free-winged brethren are; those wings are limber and highly pliable, so they can twist and turn this way and that, but they present a much wider target surface area for their opponent. A web-winged gargoyle on the ground, unarmed, facing multiple opponents who are armed… the poor guy was doomed from the moment he landed, but he was trying to save Delilah. And I promise all the Brentwood-lovers out there that he will be missed; in my stories, no character who's been given a name dies without a darn good reason, and no one just dies and is forgotten by the next Tuesday. Actions have consequences, and people have memories, just as in real life.
Now we come to the gargoyles of Paris, and the deception that kept them alive for centuries. "How could they live like that; lying to holy men all the time? Gargoyles are supposed to be honest; didn't they feel incredibly guilty?"
Well, those people were between a rock and a hard place, pardon the pun. The bishop of Paris had their old home quarried for stone to build Notre Dame, among other buildings, and in that highly religious era—the Church was all-powerful back then, and the Popes could and did order kings to do their bidding—the gargoyles had three choices. They could either fight for their lives against people who considered them demons, a battle they were guaranteed to lose by day, or they could try to flee across the landscape to another mountain home—and there weren't any others within a night's travel, meaning they'd be vulnerable to humans for at least one day in transit—or they could go along with that priest's assertion that they were really "fearsome angels," which meant accepting the bishop's offer to dwell in the cathedral—one that they dared not refuse, considering that the bishop had sent soldiers to back up his "invitation". The gargoyles didn't come up with the story that they were angels, but once it had been suggested, their best shot at survival was to take advantage of it.
(Say, why didn't I get any letters about this controversy regarding the London Clan, back when I wrote "Revelations of the Labyrinth Part 4: Guests and Pasts"? They had pretty much the same deal, after Merlin transformed them. What, did the pretty feathered wings make it okay for them to deceive the general populace?)
Regarding the Paris Clan, I was also informed that "What was done to Father Jerome was more than wrong; it was blasphemy."
(As a non-Catholic, I'm not even going to touch that charge of blasphemy, okay?) To begin, one reader guessed semi-correctly, that Jerome's name was taken from the Brother Cadfael historical mystery series by Ellis Peters; the Brother Jerome in that series is a toadying arse who never fails to set people's teeth on edge. But it's certainly not the same fellow; for one thing my story is set a few centuries later than the Brother Cadfael series, and for another this Jerome was a priest, not a monk, and his last name was Canmore. Yep, he was a Hunter, or to be more accurate a younger brother to that generation's Hunter, who had sought to carry on his family's crusade against gargoyles from within the Church. C'mon, didn't anyone notice that I specifically said he had a Scottish accent?
Yes, Father Jerome was murdered by a gargoyle in cold blood, but I'll let you readers in on a secret; Jerome was just waiting for his older brother Robert to come back from hunting Demona in the countryside of Castile (now Spain), so the brothers could team up and wipe out a clan of gargoyles together. They'd missed a prior opportunity to do so when the London gargoyles had fled their city, having lost the clan's trail before finding their new den. But after hearing about the "fearsome angels" that guarded Notre Dame, Jerome figured his family had another opportunity to kill some of those wretched beasts. But first he had to turn the monks and priests against them; the Canmores didn't want to have to fight their way into a cathedral, and risk the Church excommunicating them. (Back then, the power of the Church was such that excommunication would effectively make the family utter pariahs. No one would want to have anything to do with them, and such utter lack of cooperation would really hamper their work of killing gargoyles.) So in light of that news, perhaps Andrew's cold-blooded suffocation of Jerome could be viewed not so much as murder as a pre-emptive strike?
Which brings us to other death, the one that has earned me the most outraged emails to date: the death of the seventh Quarryman, the one who had been shot by Delilah after killing Brentwood but hadn't immediately died from his wounds. Yes, the one who was "finished off" afterwards. To date, I've had eleven emails and reviews asking in varying tones of outrage, "How could they do that?"
In our modern world, even in times of war it's considered utterly wrong to "finish off" the wounded soldiers of the enemy. That wasn't the case back at old Wyvern; back in medieval times, using scarce food and healing resources on a wounded enemy meant denying those same resources to a comrade in need. Also, a quick death was considered more merciful than a lingering death at the hands of those primitive chirurgeons (doctors) who had no clue about the importance of good hygiene and often still practiced 'bleeding' their patients, and who killed far, far more patients than they saved. It used to be the grim duty of field commanders to decide which of their own wounded men would be brought back from the battlefield alive, and which would be given the mercy blow. But today, with modern medicine and doctors saving far more people than they kill, such mercy killings are officially banned, even for wounded enemy soldiers.
But do remember that the Quarryman had been one of the group that had just beaten Brentwood to death. And now that Malibu and Dana had brought him through the secret entrance, if they took him alive to the main chambers of the Labyrinth for doctoring, he'd know where the gargoyles and their allies lived; their greatest secret and greatest vulnerability. (Everyone in the Labyrinth could be easily slaughtered in a mass drowning, by a sadistic plumber who knew just which city water main to rupture.) One person had motivation to kill from revenge; the other had motivation to kill from the need to protect others. Who actually struck the blow? That's between Malibu and Dana.
Look, most of my readers know that I'm career military. I regularly recite the Sailor's Creed, which frankly is a lot more patriotic than the Pledge of Allegiance (and doesn't specifically mention God by name, so there's none of that particular controversy.) I can also recite the Code of Conduct, which deals specifically with behavior in times of war. When you join the military, you have to accept the chance that you just might be shot at someday… and you just might wind up shooting at someone else. When it comes to war, General George S. Patton said it best: "The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his."
I am unapologetically on the side of Survival, and sometimes, just sometimes that means being Practical rather than Noble. And that mindset comes out in my stories from time to time. Even back in "Trick or Treat", Goliath spared a few moments to think about how, back in the Middle Ages, the Quarrymen would have been killed just as the Vikings who attacked their castle back then were killed. The gargoyles back then were not in the habit of letting enemies go to fight another day; not when they knew all too well how vulnerable they are during the day. Hudson even recited some of the clan's gorier battles for the New Orleans Clan's chronicler! It was only in modern times, after Elisa specifically asked them to do so, that they began using strictly non-lethal methods against their foes.
And now, to forestall the shouts of outrage and condemnations that would otherwise be sure to arise from the last few paragraphs:
Since I'm in the military and in favor of killing when necessary, does that mean that I want to go out and shoot people? Abso-damn-lutely not. 99 of the people who join the military would rather not be shot at or shoot anybody. Being trained on how to use a gun doesn't make a person a cold-blooded killer, any more than being taught how to use a telephone makes a person an obscene caller or "crank-yanker". It's the attitude, not the skill set.
Does that mean that my gargoyles are all cold-blooded killers? Again, no. It means they're people. I don't see the gargoyles as inherently more noble creatures, without flaws, sent to show all us poor humans the errors of our ways. I see them as people, with both good and bad in them, and daily having to choose between the good and bad, just as most of us do. For the most part, my characters are good people; they know what's right and they try to do the right thing. But they don't always do so; sometimes they make mistakes, and sometimes they give in to expedience or temptation. Are there any readers out there who can righteously say they've never done either? …Didn't think so. My gargoyles have flaws because they're people, but most of them struggle against those flaws, because they're good people.
Which brings us around to the subject of Angela. "Your Angela is drifting away from canon," which means, as near as I could tell from the rest of the complaint, that she's suddenly not all sweetness-n-light anymore. Dear me, she's even a little prejudiced; harboring suspicions and distrust against doctors, against the clones, and against females who openly flirt with males and flaunt their attributes. But she's still a good person; she just doesn't think through all her reactions sometimes.
Remember back in "Flesh and Stone", when Angela was far more excited than Broadway was about Hudson being his biological father? That came from the way she was raised. Raised by humans, who place an extremely high value on biological ties rather than clan ties. Humans who also imparted to their children the idea that only shameless town prostitutes, who earn their living on their backs, ever try to tempt men with provocative dress and even more provocative actions; good girls certainly never act like that, at least not in public. (Yes, that unconscious attitude came mostly from the Princess, because medieval noblewomen were held to an even higher standard than country girls; the men in charge of them didn't want their girls running loose and possibly breeding bastards that would spoil the lineage. Sure, it was okay for the men to do so, but they could always just deny they'd ever fooled around; it's a lot harder for a pregnant woman to do the same. Most anthropologists agree that male chauvinism and the whole idea of women being chaste before marriage, and belonging exclusively to their husbands afterwards, sprang from crude and largely ineffective efforts at population control.)
As for Angela's suspicion of doctors in general and prejudice against the clones, it all springs from her raw hatred of Dr. Sevarius. Remember that in her first encounter with that mad scientist who calls himself a doctor—her first encounter with even the word "doctor"; the term used back in medieval times was chirurgeon—she was imprisoned, treated like a lab specimen and finally damn near drowned; if Goliath had been just a few seconds later in his rescue, she would surely have died in Loch Ness. Who can blame her for hating Sevarius after that, or for being suspicious of any stranger who calls himself or herself a "doctor"? And she sees the mutates as fellow victims of Sevarius, just as she and Nessie were, but the clones that he created are another matter. In addition to that, there's her dislike of Delilah specifically, but that's all tied up in a complex Freudian knot that I'm not even going to try to untangle here; it would take far too long.
If Angela really stopped to think about her prejudices, she would likely be able to overcome them and treat a few people better, at least as well as they deserve… but first she's got to really think about it, to analyze her reactions and figure out her subconscious reasons for them. And introspection is not something Angela is at all fond of doing, for reasons that will become apparent later on in my series.
So, Angela has a few flaws, just like Broadway who eats too much and Lexington with his secret porn collection and… oops, that last bit just slipped out! Anyway, Angela has some flaws she needs to work on, and that's all that needs saying right now.
"That just seemed wrong, the New Orleans Clan celebrating like that after Brentwood's funeral. How could they be so callous about the Manhattan Clan's feelings?"
Ah, jazz funerals… Louis Armstrong reportedly once responded to a question about jazz with, "If you gotta ask the question, you ain't never gonna understand the answer." But I'm going to try to explain anyway. Or rather, I'll let these websites explain for me: the websites ( ) explain the origins of the jazz funeral. This uniquely New Orleans custom has survived to modern times, as the story on this website illustrates: And even in the wake of Hurricane Katrina's utter devastation of New Orleans, the custom persists, as shown by this recent CNN online article: A lot of people, including me, saw this latest event as a sign that the spirit of the Big Easy is still alive, and New Orleans will come back in all its glory someday. (And if you're viewing this at fanfiction-net where the links are always cut out, just google on "jazz funeral" and you'll learn a lot.)
One person also asked how the clan's custom had started at all, since the New Orleans Clan originally came from France, while the jazz funeral arose from African traditions. The Dubois family that came to America did not keep slaves; after allying themselves with another sentient race and accepting gargoyles as equals, there was no way they could participate in the mass pretense perpetrated by most of the South that blacks were an inferior species. But their money came from agriculture, and they needed help to tend their fields; the gargoyles helped out where they could, but even together they were simply too few to do everything needed to maintain the crops. So they took on sharecroppers. Some of their sharecroppers were Cajuns; French settlers who had been forced out of Acadia (now eastern Canada) back in the 1750's when the British took it over. Other sharecroppers were freed blacks who had been emancipated by their former masters. Each man or woman had to be carefully considered and screened before hiring, since the Dubois family had a big secret that they wanted to keep secret. And as a result of that screening and their more open-minded attitude, all the estate's sharecroppers, both white and black, were treated a damn sight better than most sharecroppers were treated not just in those days but for a full century afterwards; intermarriages began almost immediately, and today most of the humans of the clan are mulatto, the old term for mixed-blood. Anyway, those freed blacks brought with them customs from Africa that had been refined and changed over their years in America, including the idea of 'a proper sendoff' for the dead; a jazz funeral.
Out of all the cultural differences between the New Orleans Clan and the Manhattan Clan, the jazz funeral is the one that might have started a serious fight. It's such an integral part of the New Orleans Clan's culture that over half of them didn't even think that the new clan might not have the same attitude and custom. Those who did consider it, simply assumed that somebody else had informed the new clan of their custom during the past week that they'd been there visiting. But it ended up that the only one who had any forewarning at all of what was coming was Hudson, when talking to Stephen and Robert while Goliath was being hosed off and scrubbed down. And only because he was curious as to exactly why Stephen wanted to know what Brentwood's favorite song was.
Fortunately for inter-clan relations, Hudson is the gargoyle who was actually closest to Brentwood and feels the greatest grief for his loss; while the others truly wish Brentwood was still alive and regret not getting to know him better before his death, their sadness is the sort that most people would feel upon hearing of the death of a neighbor who'd only recently moved onto the block. There isn't the same sort of hole in their lives that the death of a loved one or even well-liked one would leave, and in truth most of them really feel more guilty than grief-stricken; guilty that they didn't try to get to know Brentwood better before he died. While it's ordinarily all too easy for grief to be transmuted to rage when the grieving party feels that others aren't appreciating his/her pain, in this case Hudson had forewarning and enough time, and the sort of wisdom that comes with great age and outliving many others, to accept the concept of a jazz funeral before the music started playing. And the rest were greatly bothered by what was happening, but more bewildered than outraged. The general unvoiced attitude as they headed back to the mansion, surrounded by people who were dancing and playing music and singing at the top of their lungs, was 'These people are even weirder than I thought…'
"What did Demona really have to do with the destruction of the Paris Clan? Were there any survivors of the massacre after all? And does Demona know about the New Orleans Clan too?"
As I've said a few times already, the story the Paris Clan's demise and Demona's role in it can be found in the TGS story "From the Heart"; I really made only two minor changes in it, one of them solely due to the different breeding cycles in my 'verse. But for those folks who are apparently unwilling to read a darn good story in order to glean the appropriate scenes from it:
In July of 1793, Demona came to Paris to discover the Paris Clan in dire straits, due to the French Revolution and the Terror perpetrated by Robespierre and others. After an aborted slaughter shortly before she'd arrived that had killed over a dozen members of the clan, the remaining fifty gargoyles had been evacuated to an abandoned farmstead outside Paris, though that place turned out to be no safer than Notre Dame once the general populace found out they were there. Some members of the clan wanted to flee further into the countryside but their leader, Valjean, stubbornly refused to utterly abandon Notre Dame, let alone leave Paris entirely; it had been the clan's home for centuries.
Valjean and another gargoyle named Elan told Demona a little about the Praying Gargoyle, and how a magic-user was needed in order to use it to protect the clan, but Demona didn't volunteer her services at the time; she was worried that, despite their need of a sorcerer or sorceress right them, they would look down on her magical training just as the gargoyles of old Wyvern had done. (After centuries of living alone, Demona couldn't bare the thought of losing yet another clan, this time to prejudice against magic.) She went off to think for a while and with tragic timing, she decided just before dawn that she'd tell the clan her secret after all, but awoke the next night to find they had already been slaughtered in their stone sleep, Valjean and a few others at Notre Dame and the rest at the farmhouse outside of Paris. She'd hesitated, and lost all once more.
I integrated that story into my universe with just a few minor changes, the biggest being that instead of having eggs in the rookery, in 1793 the clan had young hatchlings scampering about. Those hatchlings had been evacuated to the farmstead shortly before Demona arrived in Paris. The farmhouse had been set on fire after the gargoyles there had been smashed, and was still blazing when Demona came back; she stayed only long enough to see the pieces of broken gargoyles scattered everywhere, so much like what had happened at Wyvern centuries ago… she assumed that all had been slaughtered, and left screaming for vengeance against the entire human race. She didn't know that the hatchlings had been taken down into the farmstead's root cellar before dawn, and so had survived both the smashing attacks and the fire afterward. A few hours before dawn, long after Demona had departed, the sole remaining rookery keeper cautiously brought her charges out of the root cellar and hurried them away, into the forest nearby. From there, they… ah, but that's another story.
The other minor change is that Valjean also mentioned to Demona that a splinter clan had left Paris over twenty years ago to settle in the New World, in a place called New Orleans. Sneaking back into Notre Dame after leaving the farmhouse, she found the clan's chronicles, and read through them to learn not only how to use the Praying Gargoyle, but where the splinter clan could be located. But due to not exactly being free to buy passage aboard ships and wagon trains, it took Demona over seven years to make her way from Paris to New Orleans. By that time, the house that had been described so well in the letters she'd found was no longer home to gargoyles; all she found was gravel, old talon-marks and other signs that they had once been there. She assumed that the clan there had been betrayed by humans and slaughtered as well, and left the city behind, filled with even more hatred for humanity… unaware that the clan had simply moved farther out into the countryside (having grown much more cautious after receiving news of their parent clan's destruction), and weren't patrolling in town that weekend because they were all, humans and gargoyles together, dancing the nights away at a fais do-do deep in the bayou to celebrate a wedding. Basic truth, folks; one of Demona's biggest problems is bad timing.
"That was Vincent of 'Beauty and the Beast' who showed up to keep Macbeth company, wasn't it?"
Yes indeed, that was Vincent, and his Father with him for the introductions. But for those of you who are still wondering what "Beauty and the Beast" is all about, I finally have some good links for you! "Songs of the Bluebird" at is a website devoted to almost entirely to "Beauty and the Beast", with not only fanfic and fanart and links to fan clubs, but a decent episode guide at (And if you're reading this at fanfiction-net, the main website can be found at: www dot beautyandthebeast-tv dot com slash bluebird slash songs dot html. Check out the heading "The Romantic Drama," and "the Bluebird Guide" is the best episode guide to look through.) Readers who go to the episode guide and read about the events of the third season, should have little trouble integrating the events depicted there with Matt's description of events in my story "Unsolved Mystery, Redux."
Honestly, when I started writing "Keeping Watch" I hadn't expected any of the people from "Beauty and the Beast" to make an actual appearance; I'd been figuring that they'd cautiously stay in the shadows for a few more months, until the Labyrinth… ah, but that would be saying too much. Anyway, I was almost halfway through the first draft of the story that the Macbeth in my head was urging me to write, when Vincent quietly mentioned that he'd like to pay his respects to the fallen warrior too.
Astute readers have already guessed by now which two members of the Labyrinth—three, if Father Sullivan is counted as well--are familiar with the subterranean community Vincent dwells in; let's just call it "Below", since that was the term used most often in the old TV show. But what even those astute readers don't know is that one of the gargoyle clones is also aware of the other community. See, one night shortly before the events of "Flesh and Stone", Malibu was chasing a particularly fat and tasty-looking rat clear out of the common tunnels used by the Labyrinth, until it ran into territory that happens to be claimed by those who dwell Below. After catching the rat and snapping its neck, he noticed the scent of another human nearby, and stumbled upon one of their hidden sentries just as the poor frightened lad was banging out a call for help on the pipes that they use for long-distance communication. Hearing the alarm, Vincent came charging onto the scene, but stopped flat-footed at the sight of Malibu cautiously holding his fresh-killed rat out to the sentry, trying to entice the lad to be friends with a gift of food!
Some basic information was exchanged and a tentative friendship was formed that night, but Vincent urged Malibu to tell no one about the other community living Below, not even his brothers and sister. Below depends on secrecy even more than the Labyrinth does for its survival, or at least the survival of one of its people; Vincent's wife Catherine. The Labyrinth dwellers have good reason to be worried about the Quarrymen, but they have nothing to fear from the Illuminati. But as Xanatos explained to Matt in "Unsolved Mystery, Redux", Catherine Chandler is still wanted by the Illuminati for questioning—and it would not be polite questioning—about a certain black book with some very damaging information in it. And the Illuminati have operatives everywhere, even in the police departments and the FBI; no stranger can be trusted.
Malibu still doesn't quite understand what the Illuminati are, but even at his current childlike stage he knows how to keep a promise, and keep a secret. So far, he's told no one at home about the other community; he didn't even tell his best buddy Brentwood. But from both conversations with Malibu and from their own contacts, Vincent and the others in his community know about the mutates and cloned gargoyles that live in the Labyrinth.
When Father Sullivan, dropping off some supplies that Tuesday morning, told the Below community about Monday night's battle and tragedy, most of the Below residents shook their heads, murmured in helpless sympathy and went back to what they'd been doing. But later in the day, two morbidly curious little boys went up to the site of the tragedy to see if there were any gargoyle remains left; boys do that sort of thing sometimes. And an hour later, those two boys came tearing back saying excitedly that there was a stranger sitting up there, someone they'd never seen before, but he'd known they were from Below and had mentioned "the Father" (the rather patriarchal title that Jacob Wells has been given.) Worried that their secrecy might have been compromised somehow, Vincent and his Father went up Topside to get a look at this stranger, to see if he was someone they knew after all. The rest is in the story.
Sheez, this thing has gone on for a full ten pages already; that's about enough rambling for now! Just one more bit of news: the "Mating Games" and "Meanwhile, Back in New York" story arcs are going to go on a brief hiatus, so I can work on some other stories that I promised myself I would get out by the end of the year. But rest assured, they will continue! There's so much more to tell…
Clear skies,
Kimberly
