You're My Lady, I'm Your Fool

Radiance #6.5: The struggles of a small-time supervillain who really wishes that his nemesis would take him out and get it over with. No, not like that. Well, wait, actually...

Radiance is a lighthearted fiction serial about one of Earth's darker timelines. It takes place around 2013 in a world where atypical abilities have become increasingly common, with the storyline following a group of minor-league superheroes based in Washington, DC. Our protagonist is Lady Radiance, former teen sensation, aka Christabel Jones, professional ray of sunshine—or, at least, she's trying her best.

This is the original starting point for Radiance, a first-person glimpse into what Lord Hades does on his days off (and how Lady Radiance is trying, however clumsily, to reel him in.)

<#6 || Directory || #7 coming soon…>

Photo via Yannis Abelas on Unsplash

I haven’t been living in DC for too long, but let me tell you one thing I’ve noticed about having superpowers in America: if you’re very, very good at being evil, then you won’t need a day job. If you’re only sort of good at it, then you’re going to need five, and they’ll all suck.

This rule doesn’t seem to apply to heroes, for some reason. Even the third-string day-savers get to be lawyers, and journalists, and businessmen with personal assistants. Me, I get to wake up at five a.m. every Monday and bike across the river, no matter what business I had to handle for the Master the night before. I’d honestly believed that I could power through things when I fell into bed around one, but when my alarm went off four hours later, I just shoved my head under the pillow. It didn’t really help.

"...and what a beautiful day it is shaping up to be. Crisp and partly cloudy, shifting to clear skies by mid-morning—they’re telling me we might finally get some relief from all this snow! Temperatures are expected to get up to 35 degrees by this afternoon—"

I turned off the radio and reluctantly rolled over until my legs hung off the edge of the bed. 35 degrees, that was just great. It would probably melt the surface just enough that we’d have ice tomorrow… My self-pitying thoughts were cut off when I put both my feet down and nearly collapsed under my own weight, cursing aloud. I must have twisted my ankle during the excitement last night, and I hadn't even noticed because unlike mild-mannered part-timer Liam, who has to act normal enough to scrape together rent money, Lord Hades gets to levitate. That kind of thing is exactly why I try not to meet up with the Lady on work nights…at least when I get a say in the matter.

When I refer to ‘the Lady’, by the way, I mean Lady Radiance. Yes, that one. The Light in the Darkness, The Girl With the Thousand-Watt Smile, et cetera. My nemesis. I wish I could say that she chose me, but that’s not how my life works: my father, the Master of all plans, assigned me to keep an eye on her when he first sent me here. That is one thing that I can say I’ve obeyed him in. I always keep my eyes firmly fixed on Lady Radiance.

Heh, yeah, I know what you’re thinking, but it has nothing to do with the spandex. I actually think the new design is tacky as all get out—her management should have stuck with the skater dress. No, what I admire most about my Lady is her presence, the way she commands and demands attention from everyone around her. She seems to look right through a crowd, but face to face...well. The way she looks at you. Gods of hell, the way she looks at you, with all that righteous disdain focused in one place—piercing you, holding you down, calling you to task...

…or maybe that’s just me.

Anyway, cramped studio living was finally paying off, as I only had ten feet to hobble to the bathroom. I layered a couple of shirts and changed into my heaviest jeans, taking the time to brush my teeth before I decided that last night’s shave was still good enough. There was no way I was going to subject myself to the full scleral contact lenses today, so I went straight for the sunglasses. They’d cut the glare off the snow, and they were still better than showing off what my Lady so eloquently calls ‘demon eyes’.

I checked the clock again: out of time already. I plugged in my headphones, tugged my sweatshirt hood up over them, and headed for the stairwell with gritted teeth. I now remembered adding three or four new songs to the biking-to-work playlist last night, but only after I was surprised halfway down the stairs by heavy bass. If I didn’t live in such a firetrap, I would probably have skidded all the way to the next landing and screwed up my other ankle before I could catch myself on the walls. Why couldn’t my Lady have just broken them both and sent me to the hospital? She’d have been doing me a favor. I might not draw a salary, but I wasn’t dumb enough to turn down the Master’s health insurance.

“Rent’s not late until Wednesday!” I yelled when I got to the bottom and saw Krzynski poking his head out of his door. I couldn’t hear what he was actually saying over the music, but he never talks to me about anything else; it’s an occupational hazard of running a roach motel for human beings. I suppose I can’t complain too much, though, since he lets me keep my bike chained up inside. That’s more than I can say for the last place. I yanked on the lock until it came loose (it’s a piece of garbage, like most everything else I own these days) and took off for the city.

My life wasn’t always like this, you know. The Master is what you might colloquially describe as ‘filthy rich’, and every now and then he opens a portal from Toronto to ask why I won’t just accept an allowance and live in the place he bought me in Capitol Hill. The honest answer is that him popping into my brain whenever he feels like it is tiring enough without literally being under surveillance. It wouldn’t have been nearly so hard to get out of bed that morning if I hadn’t been laboring under an additional hangover from the Master simply taking control of my subconscious mind, as usual, and running with it.

All right, I know it sounds bad when I say it that way, but that’s not exactly what I meant. He has puppets; I’m not one of them. The Master doesn’t drive for me, he just navigates. ‘Go there’, ‘stop that train’, that kind of thing. Then he smooths over my memories afterwards so they won’t bother me, because he knows I’m not strong enough to handle the things that he can. I generally have a vague idea of what I got up to, but the details fade away. That morning, I only remembered a rooftop and Lady Radiance’s beautiful, haughty face. I hoped that the Master hadn't prompted me to make too much of a fool out of myself.

I did ask, once. He assured me that I still make all my own decisions about how to accomplish his directives. Would he lie to me? Maybe, but there was some real frustration in his voice, like Lord Hades had been giving him trouble. I apologized. We didn’t talk about it again after that.

The most reassurance I can offer him aloud is the half-truth that the poverty and squalor are all part of my cover. I'm not sure it's working, though. It’s been ten years since my adopted sister Siren betrayed him, and he’s still afraid that I’m planning to do the same. I couldn’t, though—he depends so much on me. There’s nobody else that trusts him enough to willingly let him in. Besides, where could I go? The world hates people like us. The Master took me in when no one else would, a red-eyed freak whose claim to fame is unleashing the literal fury of the damned. I may try to be a decent man on my days off, but with powers like this, the one thing I can never be is a hero.

🔥🚲🔥

It was already after six when I yanked out my earbuds and limped into the shabby garage Dan calls an office, walking my bike in beside me. He looked up from his computer and gave me a critical once-over. “Liam! What’d you do to your leg? You can’t ride on that.”

“Fine,” I said, shrugging. “You’re the boss. Want to buy me a bus pass?”

“Ha, ha...no.”

“Then I can ride on it.” I grabbed my uniform vest from its hook on the wall and the last envelope out of the outbox, a simple enough job: get it into the night drop before they open at eight. It surprises me that people still use couriers, but then again, there’s no satisfaction in screaming at your email client. They don’t realize they’re dealing with a guy who’s spent two and a half decades learning to tune out voices he doesn’t want to hear.

I was about to get back on the bike and head out, but Karim saw me from the back room. “Liam,” he called out, beaming. “You won’t guess what happened last night!”

Oh, I bet I would. This day just kept getting better, didn't it? My Lady is, in the very best way possible, a cross between Wonder Woman and a Disney princess. She thus has four kinds of fanboys: teenage twinks, suspiciously wholesome grandpas, step-on-my-face types of all age categories, and Karim. He has the ballgown action figure, the cherry-blossom Pop! Vinyl that sold out during pre-orders, and the Lady Radiance Barbie in her box lined up in a locked glass case next to the shift schedule. I know he’s having a good day when I come in and Dan’s yelling about how he doesn’t pay Kar to “argue with haters on Twitter”. Point being, the man has an obsession, so I was pretty sure just from context that he’d already heard about our little scrap…somehow. “Go on, tell me while I’m off the clock,” I said.

Karim had already walked up to lean on the edge of the desk, and handed me his phone with a grainy video file open. “Just watch!” he said proudly. “I took that myself. Right on top of the next apartment building to mine, can you believe?”

I admit that my hand trembled slightly as I started the video, squinting through my tinted lenses; I never watch this kind of thing, on the Master’s request, but this was important. This was about my Lady. It was obviously us, despite the poor quality—the only sound was Karim whispering excitedly in Arabic as he zoomed in and then physically leaned out of the window to get closer, temporarily wobbling both Lady Radiance and Lord Hades out of the frame. Then he fell quiet, and I realized you could just make out her voice in the background. What was she saying to me? I couldn’t distinguish the words, so I tried to push past the fog and remember. 

“And you know who that is with her, don't you?” Karim interrupted, jabbing a finger at the screen. “That arch-fiend, the Lord of the Dead. The Master of the Underworld. The Wealthy One. The—”

“I think he gets it,” Dan said, leaving me to roll my eyes at the irony of The Wealthy One keeping all fifty dollars he had to his name under a secondhand mattress. “What’s Hades been up to, anyway? I haven’t seen him in the news in weeks.”

“Ah, that is because Lady Radiance has been interfering,” he said, beaming with pride again over his inside knowledge. “Listen, listen to this—may I? Thank you.” Karim reached over and skipped backwards about thirty seconds before turning up the volume as far as it would go.

You could hear my Lady’s words more clearly now, and I tried not to visibly hang on every one. “...think you’re doing?” she asked me with the sharpest tone that the tinny little speaker afforded her. “I left the others fighting the Cephalancer by themselves to come and stop you, and it was a bluff? Again? How dare you waste my time!”

“Is it really a waste of time if you're here with me, my Lady?” Hades purred in that stupid overwrought accent that I use to play up the villain image. I had her caught in a flaming sigil surrounding us both. She had me caught in tendrils of blazing light, pinned in place with my feet barely touching the ground, and the thought made me dizzy now. I didn't know how I’d done it then.

Lady Radiance scoffed in my masked face, which she was only about two inches away from and oh hell no how had I survived this at all. “There are better ways to get on my schedule, and you know it.”

“Mhm, better, maybe...but not as much fun as this.” I couldn’t believe what I was watching—my ridiculous evil alter-ego was flirting with the Lady as if it were nothing. Not only that, Hades was staring right back into her eyes with the same bold look I admired in her! And she was really tolerating that? I tried so hard to be respectful when I saw her of my own volition…but, then, when was the last time that had happened? Ever since that conversation with the Master, when I’d offended him by implying he was being too controlling, he’d given me fewer and fewer opportunities to go out freely.

I hadn’t considered this before, but it had actually been quite some time since I went to challenge Lady Radiance alone. Hell only knew—well, hell and my Master—exactly what had happened in the meantime.

Dan gave an ugly little laugh, covering up whatever my Lady said next. “Now I understand why my daughter wants them to hook up,” he said. “Eh, Kar?”

“Of course not! They clearly can’t stand each other,” Karim said with a frown of disapproval. “No, she loves Dhampir, the Un-Living Horror. He is the wrongdoer she will redeem, not Lord Hades.”

I bristled at that—jealousy, perhaps. It was stupid. I mean, Dhampir, really? You think you know a guy… “I think the Lady deserves better than either of those common fools,” I snapped, flipping his phone shut and shoving it back at him without even trying to watch the rest of the video. “She’s a good woman, and she shouldn’t be with a murderer, redeemed or not. If she’s going to have anyone, it should be a man who’s as good and sincere as she is. A real hero.” The two of them looked at each other and started snickering. “...what? What?”

“Didn’t know you were a Lady’s boy,” Dan smirked, reminding me why he was only my third-favorite boss (with his ranking now rapidly dropping.) “That’s adorable. Come on, hero, get a move on. Time’s a-wasting.”

Despite my lingering embarrassment, I was soon lost in thought, following the route by memory with the help of superhuman reflexes. Not that it was for me to know, but…what was the Master’s game? Why couldn’t Lord Hades go out anymore without his Master in the passenger seat? Was it really possible that all he’d asked me to do was distract Lady Radiance, and that was what I’d come up with? She’d said ‘again’, as though I’d been making this a habit. I wasn’t sure whether to be annoyed that my missions had grown so petty, or flattered that I made such good bait.

The idea gnawed at me that perhaps he thought he couldn’t trust me anymore. It’s true—I’m fonder of my Lady than I should be, given that I’m supposed to be professionally invested in her downfall. The Master’s always said that those are long-term plans, though. He has other gambits in progress.

I supposed that if I did have to hurt her, then I could at least try. For the Master. But the thought made me so uncomfortable that I immediately saw the logic of putting Lord Hades on the back burner, frowning in shame for having ever doubted my uselessness. ‘Annoyed’ was no longer a viable reaction to consider, then—bait was evidently all that I was still good for. That left ‘flattered’. And while I was open to being mistaken about this, it had looked like Lady Radiance was flirting back.

I now bitterly regretted not letting Karim finish showing me that video. Me and my big mouth—how was I supposed to be sure now? Dan certainly thought she had something going for Hades. But Kar had seen the whole thing firsthand, and he was the expert…

Pride goes before a fall, of course. One minute I was coasting across Dupont Circle, congratulating myself on having captured her attention in some way at least, and the next I was sprawled onto the asphalt, gasping in pain as I only half managed to throw up a psychic shield. A couple of cars blared their horns and swerved around me, just in time for somebody to yank me out of the road. “Hey! Are you all right?” she said, still holding my arm. I turned to look at her, and immediately wished I hadn’t. So much for my life. It was my Lady Radiance.

She wasn’t in uniform, I mean—she’d traded the costume for chunky glasses and an outfit you might see on any artsy young professional—but it had to be her. I was surprised not to see her in a real disguise, as much press as she gets. Maybe people who only see the flash and sizzle wouldn’t know what to look for. Me? I was already struggling to pretend I hadn’t recognized her. I mean—damn it, man. Say something.

“Fu- fine!” I said. Tried to say, I mean. It came out more like a squeak as I shoved my sunglasses back up and caught myself doing that damn accent halfway through the word, my voice breaking like glass as I tried to adjust. So much for my dignity, too. “Yes, I’m fine. Everything’s fine. Th-thank you...miss.”

“That’s good,” she said, her voice anxiously modulated away from the tone I knew so well. She hadn’t let go of me. Her face was soft-featured, gentle, even sweeter like this than in her costume makeup, but she looked exhausted. The paper coffee cup still clutched in her other hand was completely crushed and dripping some kind of spice-scented latte onto our feet. “Uh—look, I, I’m really sorry. I was just—distracted, and, um...I think we just sort of smashed into each other.”

“Oh...” I glanced down, saw my bent-up bike lying in the grass, and cringed, suddenly realizing why the Lady was acting so awkwardly. And it was the Lady—it couldn’t be anyone else. I don’t understand all the physics exactly, but it turns out that one of the side-effects of turning matter into solid light is occasionally screwing up your velocity. Hell if I knew how I’d sprained that ankle, because while I may look weedy, I’m actually pretty durable if I can shield. That metal frame wasn’t so lucky. If I hadn’t been a super myself, I probably wouldn’t have been either.

—I had to get going now, I realized, before she started to ask herself if she knew me.

“No harm done,” I said quickly, pulling my arm out of the Lady’s warm grip and, as my ankle rebelled on the snow-slick ground, immediately falling over again. Right on top of her. At this rate, the next time Lady Radiance ran into Lord Hades, he was going to be begging her to put him out of his misery. “Really! Really, that’s, uh—preexisting. I promise.”

“Weak ankles, huh?” she replied as she looked up at me, slipping into her Lady Radiance voice and temporarily kneecapping my ability to think straight. The wisps of a memory she’d just triggered had me turning red even as I saw a blush creep up from under her scarf.

“Heh. I…I really need to be going. People are starting to stare,” I said, finally managing to pull away and balance on my good leg.

“Please let me help,” she insisted. Those kind green eyes were going to kill me. “I'll get you a taxi or something.”

I shook my head. “I said it’s fine, don’t worry about me. I’ll catch the bus.”

The light had turned, so I grabbed my bike by its mangled frame and started to manhandle it through the crosswalk, hoping for my life that I had enough left on my card for a round trip. I’d be cutting it close enough on time as it was, without worrying about getting stranded in the District—

“My Lord!” she called as I reached the sidewalk. I had already turned around, Hades’ edgy smirk reflexively plastered across my face, when I realized what an idiot I was. Before, she had suspected. Now she knew. We stared at each other, her face covered in shock and my expression no doubt melting into horror.

The light turned again. Neither of us moved, and I continued to see flashes of her through the passing cars as pedestrians pushed around me. She was wide-eyed, then blushing pink, now a hand raised to cover her open mouth. —Oh. Now the other, too. She’d dropped her coffee cup.

I still couldn’t tear myself away. I don’t know what the Lady thought my daily life was like, but it probably wasn’t this. Really, I would have preferred her to go on thinking of me in a more mysterious way…or at least as recently showered. I’d even started today with vague hopes that the Lady might be coming around to respect Lord Hades as a nemesis, but that was gone. Everything was gone. In the space of just a few seconds, I’d lost everything the Master and I had worked for. How could she ever take me seriously again?

The bus pulled up and stopped, and I threw my bike into the rack and stumbled on. The card reader beeped angrily—I didn't even have enough on my Metro card to get down the street—but there was a line behind me, and the driver waved me through. I collapsed into a seat and let the side of my face fall against the cold, grimy window.

This disaster had added two more questions to my list, I realized: when exactly did Lady Radiance start calling me her Lord, and why hadn’t the Master thought I needed to know about that?

I prodded my memories, to no avail. For the first time, I began to feel a hint of resentment for the clouds—a suspicion, maybe, that the Master and I might have slightly different perspectives on what constituted my best interest. The thought was intensely nauseating. I went back to moping over my multitude of failings before I could make this day any worse by vomiting on the city’s finest Clinton-era upholstery.

The rest of my day was shot, of course. I made the drop, abandoned the remains of my bike next to a dumpster, and jumped a turnstile to get back to Dan’s.

“Hey, Lady’s boy!” he said cheerfully when he saw me limping in. “Where's your wheels? I’ve got another run for you.”

I scowled back. Look at me forgetting that Dan never tells a joke once: it’s a million times, or nothing. I immediately bumped him down to last place on the boss scale, for whatever that was worth. “Yeah, no. The rust-bucket finally gave out on me, and I’m out of commission until I can replace it.”

Dan took a minute to cuss his luck out while I threw my vest back on the hook and scribbled my name across the sign-out sheet. “All right, well, tell your friends to stop forwarding your mail here then,” he said. “I’m not just holding onto it ’til you decide to show up again.”

My stomach clenched. “What do you mean, my mail?”

He held out a small, square envelope. “Some kid brought this by and said it was yours, or you dropped it, or something. You’re the only one that fit their description.”

I felt like a broken tape recorder already, but I had to ask. “Wait, or something? Did they at least say who they were? What’d they look like?”

“The game was on, alright? If it’s not for you, keep it anyway, I don't want it.” Dan shook his head at my foolishness. “Now get out of here. I’m not paying you to—well, I’m not paying you at all right now.”

“Don't remind me,” I grumbled. Maybe that was why I’d felt so sick, come to think of it—I hadn’t had any breakfast, and now, with every cent I had rapidly draining away into the new bike fund, I wasn’t going to get any lunch. No dinner, either, unless I either went crawling back to the Master or finally gave up and turned to a life of crime.

There was really only one place to go while I figured out which it was going to be, and, conveniently enough, it was also the only place I felt safe opening the ominous mystery-envelope. It helps to be so broke and tired that you only ever go out to one place, period. I shoved my hands in my pockets and started the long, painful trek to Z Street.

Before I moved out on my own, I had never spent time around other supers without the Master mediating. I stumbled on my local no-typicals-allowed club while tailing Crystal Falcon a few months ago, though, and I’ve never really left. If I'm not sleeping or on the clock, I’m curled up at the far corner of the bar, feeding other people's lost quarters into the music machine. You wouldn’t think it would be a great hangout for a guy who’s only sort of good at being evil, but another thing I’ve learned about having superpowers in America is that there’s just too many supers for most of them to get pigeonholed into the costumed crusader thing. I mean—if you, say, have X-ray vision, there's already three or four major heroes who have that covered, so you can just go into medicine or private security if that's what you want from life. I’m not sure if any of the regulars have me figured out as Lord Hades, but I also don’t think any of them would care. While I’m there, I’m just Liam with the crazy eyes and the meticulously themed playlists. It’s…nice. Best part is, despite the warning sign on the door, the management’s never even tried to kick me out for blocking psychic checks.

Of course, ‘management’ is really just Marla, former Brazilian national treasure, who often enough happens to be the woman behind the counter. She also mops the floors, special-orders the Venusian vodka, and runs the psychic checks. Everybody likes Marla, and—although I cannot figure out why—Marla likes me. She calls me her best investment in years and insists that I’ll eventually understand why she puts up with me being a lousy customer in the meantime, although she refuses to explain. Whatever she has to say about my life, though, she always takes the time to be sympathetic before she reminds me of what a moron I’m being. I take what I can get.

Marla had the morning shift today, so I went straight up to my familiar seat and shoved the envelope over the bar as I dropped into it gratefully. “Hey, Ms. Marla…you wouldn’t mind telling me what’s in that, would you?” I said. “Keeping in mind that I’m not actually sure I want to know.”

She set down the glass she was drying and chuckled at me as she laid her right palm flat on top of the envelope. “Hmm. Well, it’s not cursed, and it’s not going to explode.”

“Oh, g—”

“But I’m going to have to charge you double for bringing glitter into an honest establishment like this, Liam boy.”

“Glitter,” I said, wondering if I’d heard her correctly.

She slid the envelope back to me. “Yes. Spill any, and you’ll be cleaning it up yourself.”

“Yes, ma’am.” I examined the paper in my hands closely for a moment and then slid a finger under the gold-chevron washi tape holding it together—it wasn’t really an envelope, but a large sheet of paper folded into one. The paper was a flyer for an animal adoption event held six months ago, now scuffed and slightly crumpled as if it had spent most of that time sitting in the bottom of a backpack. A few flakes of pink glitter that had been stuck to the inside fell out onto the bar, along with the other contents. Marla tsked knowingly and set down a damp cloth.

“Sorry,” I muttered as I picked up everything else: twenty-dollar-bills, ATM-crisp, and a note dashed off hastily in purple gel ink on the back of an unused planner page. My hands, shaking with a mind of their own, were having trouble holding it still enough to read.

1. Get yourself a helmet too, or so help me, next time I will run into you on purpose. Be a good example. I know you can find it in yourself somewhere.

2. Rest Ice Compression Elevation. No excuses.

3. There are still easier ways to get on my schedule.

   Would Thursdays work better for you? Because they’d work a lot better for me. Think about it.

—LR ♡

“Well?”

I looked up at Marla with a dawning awareness that my face was probably about as red as my eyes were. “My bike got totaled this morning,” I said, at least mostly truthfully. “It's probably for that.”

“Mmmmm-hm.”

I started trying to wipe up the glitter so I didn’t have to meet her amused gaze, and gave the Lady’s proposal a little thought. I probably didn’t have any control over whether I kept her out late on Sunday nights. On the matter of Thursdays, though…the Master had never said that Lord Hades couldn’t go wreak havoc on his own. He’d just stopped sending him. Perhaps I might even convince the Master I was still good for something, and remind my Lady at the same time that I was, in fact, a threat to be reckoned with. The thought of it crinkled up my face just enough for me to realize that my mouth already hurt from smiling.

I folded the bills away and set the note down where I could see it. “Ms. Marla, you don’t, uh, have—”

There was already an Ace bandage and a packet of Nordic Ice on the chair next to mine. Right. Psychic. By the time I had my foot propped up with the ice pack strapped on, Marla was back with a Crown and Coke and a plate of fries. “That’s a real bossy girl you have there,” she said.

“Heh. Yeah, I know.” I pulled a quarter out of my pocket and set it spinning on the counter. “I like her, though.”

She chuckled again. “Oh, was I not supposed to have noticed before now?”

“It would be nice if you pretended you hadn't.” I slapped the quarter down flat and slid it off into my hand, leaning back in my seat to reach the jukebox. “Well, she says rest, so I guess I know what I'm doing today. ’80s okay with you, Ms. Marla?”

“Perfect,” she said. “I might even forgive you for the glitter... which, so you know, is on your nose now.”

I somehow found it in my face to grin even more widely. “I don't mind.”

’Cause you’re my lady, I’m your fool
It makes me crazy when you act so cruel
Come on baby, let’s not fight
We’ll go dancing, everything will be all right.

<#6 || Directory || #7 coming soon…>

---

Original Author’s Note:

It’s Throwback Thursday AND Thorny Thursday in one email here today as I post a new edit of an old superverse story (you can tell it's old because when I first wrote it, journalism was a day job and DoorDash and LimeBike didn’t exist yet.) It still makes me laugh every time, and I still love Lord Hades far, far more than the poor sap deserves. Look, he hasn’t even figured out yet that he’s in the middle of a redemption arc…

I’d like to write more from Radiance, which is mostly a third-person story from Lady Radiance’s point of view, but I'm still planning to return to our regularly scheduled programming on Tuesday with the next installment of Poets and Chess Players. We’ll see how it goes.