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When we speak of casino gambling in Australia, we’re usually talking about new live or online pokies, fortuitous wins, or the dreaded affliction of problem gambling. That last topic has been abundantly proliferated by today’s leading politicians and anti-wagering groups. But have you ever ever stopped to ask yourself: What has gambling for you?

There’s a powerful message that gambling is bad. It’s a degenerative activity that causes nothing quite pain and suffering. this is often what anti-pokies campaigns are sputtering in radio and tv ads – that nothing good can come of it.

In reality, much good has come of it. The Australian government didn’t legalize lotteries because it thought the overall public needed a replacement sort of entertainment. It didn’t employ companies like Tabcorp and Tatts to officiate racing and sports betting because legislators had an excessive amount of time on their hands.
Read More pokies online
These gambling activities were authorized to assist raise money to enhance local communities.

What Australia Casino Gambling Does For You
Were you aware that the taxes our government collects from gambling operators are wont to ensure every child is provided a free and honorable education? Did you recognize that Australia uses the cash it collects from lottery sales to send promising athletes to free training camps, where they will excel into professional, tournament-worthy competitors?

While anti-gambling campaigners are busy spitting out problem gambling statistics, the sports, lottery and casino gambling industry is doing little or no to defend itself. likelihood is that , an informed public – one that's made conscious of all the items those taxed wagering dollars do for them – wouldn’t be so easily swayed to side with the Nick Xenophon Team (NXT) of anti-pokies politicians.

Transition To Sustainability Messages
Hannah Harrison, SABMillerHannah Harrison is that the Senior Manager of worldwide Sustainable Development Strategy and Consumer Brands, otherwise referred to as SABMiller. She is of the firm belief that gambling operators should take a page from the book of the beer industry when it involves public messages in sustainability.

“I really think it's interesting once you check out beer brands. you'll not think beer as being a very ethical product, but actually you'll use sustainability messages to bring a beer’s purpose to life,” said Harrison in an interview with nzpokiesonline.com/

“Purpose are some things that's here to remain ,” continued Harrison, especially when it involves things people care about. She explained that brands can improve their sale volume compared to competitors by letting consumers know “they are buying a product that resonates their own personal values…”

Her company played a key role in Uganda creating a sustainable source of income through harvesting Sorghum, a crop that they were ready to become a beer product. Not only did it bring down the value of beer, the govt was compelled to supply harvesters a tax benefit since it had been ready to sell the beer at lower cost. it had been clearly a win-win situation.

How does this have anything to try to to with Australia casino gambling, and therefore the benefits it brings to the people? Harrison explained:

“We were competing not with the prevailing beer but with the elicit alcohol market, attracting people out of the damaging and unregulated, illegal alcohol market. So, we are making beers safer for consumer, creating new revenue for our business and creating money for the govt also , which have increased their tax income for over 50 percent since 2002.”

She went on to explain a huge opportunity for Australia’s casino gambling market to tap into unique product and repair concepts which will inevitably appeal to consumers, just by invoking the facility sustainable messages.

Every weekday evening at around 9pm, in the Daily Mail’s headquarters in Kensington, west London, the slightly stooping, six-foot three-inch figure of Paul Dacre emerges into the main open-plan office where editors, sub-editors and designers are in the final stages of preparing pages for the next day’s paper. The atmosphere changes instantly; everyone becomes tense, as though waiting for a thunderstorm. Dacre begins with a low growl, like an angry tiger. His voice rises as several pages are denounced, along with those responsible. Imprecations reverberate across the office, sometimes punctuated by the strangely anomalous command to a senior colleague, “Don’t resist me, darling.” Pages must be replaced or redesigned, their order changed, headlines altered. New pictures are required with new captions. Dacre waves his long arms, hammers the air with his hands, shouts even louder and, if particularly agitated, scratches himself.
Nobody tries to argue. For all the fear and exasperation – “He never thinks of logistics and he has no idea of what’s an unreasonable request,” says one former sub-editor – there is also admiration. Dacre, Fleet Street’s best-paid editor, who earned almost £1.8m in 2012, has been in charge of the Mail since 1992 and, by general consent, is the most successful editor of his generation. The paper sells an average of 1.5 million copies on weekdays, 2.4 million on Saturdays. Only the Sun sells more but, on Saturdays, the Mail has just moved ahead. Its 4.3 million daily readers include more from the top three social classes (A, B and C1) than the Times, Guardian, Independent and Financial Times combined. Its long-standing middle-market rival, the Daily Express, slightly ahead when Dacre took over, now sells less than a third as many copies.
Under Dacre, the Mail has won Newspaper of the Year six times in the annual British Press Awards – twice as many prizes as any other paper. If anything, its authority and clout have grown in the past two years as Rupert Murdoch’s Sun has struggled with the fallout from the hacking scandal. Politicians no longer fear Murdoch as they once did. They still fear Dacre. The opposition from Murdoch’s papers to the government’s proposals that a royal charter should regulate the press is muted. Dacre’s Mail is loud and clear about the threat to “our free press”. Summoned twice before the Leveson inquiry – the second time because he had accused the actor Hugh Grant of lying in his evidence – he didn’t give an inch.
Everyone who has ever worked for Dacre, who has just passed his 65th birthday, praises his almost uncanny instinct for the issues and stories that will hold the attention of “Middle England”. No other editor so deftly balances the mix of subjects and moods that holds readers’ attention: serious and frivolous, celebrities and ordinary people, urban, suburban and rural, some stories provoking anger, others tears. No other editor chooses, with such unerring and lethal precision, the issues, often half forgotten, that will create panic and fear among politicians. “He’s the most consummate newspaperman I’ve ever met,” says Charles Burgess, a former features editor who also occupied high-level roles at the Guardian and Independent. “He balances the flow of each day’s paper in his head.”
“He articulates the dreams, fears and hopes of socially insecure members of the suburban middle class,” says Peter Oborne, the Mail’s former political columnist now at the Daily Telegraph. “It’s a daily performance of genius.”
But Murdoch’s decline leaves the Mail under more scrutiny than ever. Is Dacre at last running out of road? Rumours circulate in the national newspaper industry that members of the Rothermere family, owners of the Daily Mail, are increasingly nervous of the controversy that Dacre stirs up, notably this year with its attack on Ralph Miliband, father of the Labour leader, as “the man who hated Britain”. More than any other editor since Kelvin MacKenzie ruled at the Sun – and, among other outrages, alleged that drunkenness among Liverpool football fans led to the Hillsborough disaster of 1989 – Dacre attracts visceral loathing. His enemies see the Mail, to quote the Huffington Post writer and NS columnist Mehdi Hasan (who was duly monstered in the Mail’s pages), as “immigrant-bashing, woman-hating, Muslim-smearing, NHS-undermining, gay-baiting”.
The loathing is returned, with interest. In Dacre’s mind, the country is run, in effect, by affluent metropolitan liberals who dominate Whitehall, the leadership of the main political parties, the universities, the BBC and most public-sector professions. As he once said, “. . . no day is too busy or too short not to find time to tweak the noses of the liberalocracy”. The Mail, in his view, speaks for ordinary people, working hard and struggling with their bills, conventional in their views, ambitious for their children, loyal to their country, proud of owning their home, determined to stand on their own feet. These people, Dacre believes, are not given a fair hearing in the national media and the Mail alone fights for them. It is incomprehensible to him – a gross category error – that critics should be obsessed by the Mail’s power and influence when the BBC, funded by a compulsory poll tax, dominates the news market. It uses this position, he argues, to push a dogmatically liberal agenda, hidden behind supposed neutrality. Scarcely an issue of the Mail passes without a snipe and sometimes a full barrage in the news pages, leaders or signed opinion columns at BBC “bias”.
To its critics, however, the Mail is as biased as it’s possible to be, and none too fussy about the facts. In the files of the Press Complaints Commission, you will find records of 687 complaints against the Mail which led either to a PCC adjudication or to a resolution negotiated, at least partially, after the PCC’s intervention. The number far exceeds that for any other British newspaper: the files show 394 complaints against the Sun, 221 against the Daily Telegraph, 115 against the Guardian. The complaints will serve as a charge sheet against the Mail and its editor.
This year, the Mail reported that disabled people are exempt from the bedroom tax; that asylum-seekers had “targeted” Scotland; that disabled babies were being euthanised under the Liverpool Care Pathway; that a Kenyan asylum-seeker had committed murders in his home country; that 878,000 recipients of Employment Support Allowance had stopped claiming “rather than face a fresh medical”; that a Portsmouth primary school had denied pupils water on the hottest day of the year because it was Ramadan; that wolves would soon return to Britain; that nearly half the electricity produced by windfarms was discarded. All these reports were false.
Mail executives argue that it gets more complaints than its rivals because it reaches more readers (particularly online, where the paper’s stories are repeated and others originate), prints more pages and tackles more serious and politically challenging issues. They point out that only six complaints were upheld after going through all the PCC’s stages and that the Sun and Telegraph, despite fewer complaints, had more upheld. But the PCC list, though it contains some of the Mail’s favourite targets such as asylum-seekers and “scroungers”, merely scratches the surface. Other complainants turned to the law. In the past ten years, the Mail has reported that the dean of RAF College Cranwell showed undue favouritism to Muslim students (false); the film producer Steve Bing hired a private investigator to destroy the reputation of his former lover Liz Hurley (false); the actress Sharon Stone left her four-year-old child alone in a car while she dined at a restaurant (false); the actor Rowan Atkinson needed five weeks’ treatment at a clinic for depression (false); a Tamil refugee, on hunger strike in Parliament Square, was secretly eating McDonald’s burgers (false); the actor Kate Winslet lied over her exercise regime (false); the singer Elton John ordered guests at his Aids charity ball to speak to him only if spoken to (false); Amama Mbabazi, the prime minister of Uganda, benefited personally from the theft of £10m in foreign aid (false). In all these cases, the Mail paid damages.
Then there are the subjects that the Mail and other right-wing papers will never drop. One is the EU, which, the Mail reported last year, proposed to ban books such as Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series that portray “traditional” families. Another is local authorities, forever plotting to expel Christmas from public life and replace it with the secular festival of Winterval. It does not matter how often these reports are denied and their flimsy provenance exposed; the Mail keeps on running them and its columnists cite them as though they were accepted wisdom.
The paper gets away with publishing libels and falsehoods and with invasions of privacy because the penalties are insignificant. Often the victims can’t afford to sue and, if they can, the Mail group, with £282m annual profits even in these straitened times, can live with the costs. The PCC, even when its rules allow it to admit a complaint, has no powers to impose fines or to stipulate the prominence of corrections.
Besides, many victims don’t pursue complaints because they fear the stress of going to war with a powerful newspaper. They included the late writer Siân Busby who, the paper wrote in 2008, had received “the all-clear from lung cancer” after “a gruelling year”. In fact, the diagnosis had come less than six months earlier and she hadn’t received the “all-clear”. More important, as her husband, the BBC journalist Robert Peston, explained in the James Cameron Memorial Lecture in November this year, she wanted to keep the news out of the public domain to protect her children.
“The Mail got away with it,” Peston said. “As it often does.” (The Mail, in a statement after the lecture, said the information had been obtained from Busby herself and that the reporter had identified himself as a Mail writer.) In his 2008 book Flat Earth News, the Guardian journalist Nick Davies compared the paper to a footballer who, to protect his goal, will deliberately bring down an opponent. “Brilliant and corrupt,” Davies wrote, “the Daily Mail is the professional foul of contemporary Fleet Street.”
Even a list of official complaints and court cases doesn’t quite capture why the Mail attracts such fear and loathing. It has a unique capacity for targeting individuals and twisting the knife day after day, without necessarily lapsing into inaccuracies that could lead either to libel writs or censure by the PCC. For instance, as publication of the Leveson report on press regulation approached, the Mail devoted 12 pages of one issue – and several more pages of subsequent issues – to an “exposure” of Sir David Bell, a name then almost entirely unknown even to well-informed members of the public. A Leveson assessor and former Financial Times chairman, Bell was allegedly at the centre of a “quasi-masonic” network of “elitist liberals”, bent on gagging the press and preventing freedom of expression. This network, based on the “leadership” training organisation Common Purpose, had spawned the Media Standards Trust, of which Bell was a co-founder, which in turn had spawned the lobby group Hacked Off, an important influence on Leveson. To the Mail, this was a perfect illustration of how well-connected liberals, through networks of apparently innocuous organisations, conspire to undermine national traditions and values.
The paper also targets groups, often the weak and vulnerable. The Federation of Poles in Great Britain complained to the PCC that the Mail ran 80 headlines between 2006 and 2008 linking Poles to problems in the NHS and schools, unemployment among Britons, drug smuggling, rape and so on. Most of the stories, as the federation acknowledged, were newsworthy and largely accurate. The objection was to the way they were presented and to the drip, drip effect of continually highlighting the Polish connection so that, as the federation’s spokesman put it, the average reader’s heart “skips a beat . . . with either indignation or alarm”. The PCC eventually brokered a settlement that led to publication of a letter from the federation.

Yet there is something magnificent about the Mail’s confidence and single-mindedness. Other papers, trimming to focus groups, muffle their message, but the Mail projects its world-view relentlessly, with supreme technical skill, from almost every page. It is a paper led by its opinions, not by news. It is not noted for big exclusives, nor even for rapid reaction. “We were often known as the day-late paper,” a former reporter recalls. “Dacre wouldn’t really be interested in a story until he’d seen it somewhere else. We would sometimes give our exclusives to other journalists. Dacre surveys all the other papers, selects the right lines for the next day and follows them.”
Although Dacre has little enthusiasm for new technology – he still doesn’t have a computer on his desk – his paper is perfectly primed for the age of instant 24-hour news, when the challenge is not so much to find and report news as to select, interpret and elaborate on it. Long before other papers recognised the merits of a features-led or views-led approach, the Mail under Dacre was doing it.
The Mail gives its readers a sense of belonging in an increasingly complex and unsettling world. Part of the trick is to make the world seem more threatening than it is: crime is rising, migrants flooding the country, benefit scroungers swindling the taxpayer, standards of education falling, wind turbines taking over the countryside. Almost anything you eat or drink could give you cancer. Above all, the family – “the greatest institution on God’s green earth”, Dacre told a writer for the New Yorker last year – is under continuous assault. The Mail assures readers they are not alone in their anxieties about this changing world. It is a paper to be read, not on trains or buses or in offices, but in the peace and quiet of your home, preferably with an old-fashioned coal fire blazing in the hearth.
“Readers like certainty,” says a former Mail reporter. “Newspapers that have a wavering grip on their ideology are the ones that struggle. The Mail is like Coke. It’s consistent, reliable. Dacre is one of the best brand managers in the business. He lives the brand.”
Dacre lives mostly in the shadows. His two appearances before the Leveson inquiry gave the wider public a rare glimpse; apart from Desert Island Discs in 2004, he never appears on television or speaks on radio. If the Mail needs to defend itself (and it deigns to do so only in the most desperate circumstances), the job is assigned to an underling. Requests for on-the-record interviews are invariably refused, as they were for this article. A rare exception was made for the British Journalism Review, whose then editor, Bill Hagerty (a former editor of the People), interviewed Dacre in the tenth year of his editorship. There was also that audience with the New Yorker last year. Public lectures are equally unusual for him, though he gave the Cudlipp Lecture (in memory of Hugh Cudlipp, a Daily Mirror editor who was an early hero of his) in 2007, and addressed the Society of Editors in 2008.
Even former staff members mostly prefer not to be quoted when talking about Dacre. If they agree to be quoted, they wish the quotations to be checked with them before publication. BBC Radio 4 used actors for several contributions to a recent profile. The journalists’ fear is not only that they may be cut off from future employment or freelance work – “The Mail pays far better than anybody else and you don’t want to jeopardise the £2,000 cheque that might drop through the letter box,” said one writer – but also that the Mail may hit back. These concerns are shared by many politicians, who are equally reluctant to be quoted.
Dacre has few social graces and even less small talk. His body language is awkward, his manner prickly. He seldom smiles and, according to one ex-columnist, “He doesn’t laugh, he just says, ‘That’s a funny remark.’” He treats women with old-fashioned courtliness, opening doors and helping them with coats, but is otherwise uncomfortable with them, perhaps because he was one of five brothers, went to an all-male school and has no daughters. He speaks gruffly, with a slight north London accent and an even fainter trace of his father’s native Yorkshire. He sometimes buries his rather florid face deep in his hands, as though exasperated with the world’s inability to share his simple, common-sense values. He became notorious for the ripeness of his language – so frequent was his use of the C-word, almost entirely directed at men, that his staff referred to “the vagina monologues” – but when Charles Burgess told him women didn’t like hearing it he was profusely apologetic. On Desert Island Discs, he confessed to shouting at staff. “Shouting creates energy,” he said. “Energy creates great headlines.”
He still shouts, but in recent years, as an insider reported, “He’s no longer the expletive volcano he once was; his barbs these days tend to concern the brainpower of his target and their supposed laziness.”
He owns three properties: a home with a mile-long drive in West Sussex (known to Mail staff as Dacre Towers), a more modest weekday residence in the central London district of Belgravia and a seven-bedroom house in Scotland with a 17,000-acre shooting estate. He is a member of the Garrick Club, and sometimes takes columnists to lunch at Mark’s Club in Mayfair, which one recipient of his hospitality described as “very decorous, the sort of place you could have gone to in the 19th century”. He sent both of his sons to Eton.
There are no stories of past or present indiscretions involving women, alcohol or drugs. Jon Holmes, a contemporary at Leeds University who is now a sports agent, recalls him as “a very cold fish; he never, ever, seemed to go out in a group for a drink or a meal or anything”. A former Mail reporter says: “We’d all be in the Harrow [a Fleet Street pub, heavily frequented by Mail journalists], and he would come in, buy a half-pint, take it to the opposite end of the bar, drink alone, and leave without speaking.”
He has an apparently stable and successful marriage to a woman he met at university, which has lasted 37 years. He frequently attends Church of England services, but is not a believer. He likes and sometimes goes out to rugby union matches, the opera and theatre – the last partly because his wife, Kathleen Dacre, is a professor of theatre studies and partly because he has a son who is a successful director and producer with surprisingly avant-garde leanings. Asked what television he watched, he once mentioned Midsomer Murders and nothing else.
He mostly eschews the trappings and opportunities of wealth and power. It is impossible to imagine him as a member of the Chipping Norton set or anything like it. He rarely dines or lunches with the powerful or fashionable, nor does he attend glitzy parties and social events. Frequently, he lunches in his office on meat and two veg. Sometimes he will lunch with politicians, but he has little respect or liking for them as a class and thinks it wise to keep his distance; Oborne recalls how, one evening, he ignored at least five increasingly urgent requests to take a call from a senior Tory minister. He declines nearly all invitations to sit on committees; his chairmanship of an official inquiry into the “30-year rule” (under which Whitehall records were kept secret for three decades) was unusual. “Editorship is not for him a route to something else,” says a former employee.

Dacre was born and spent much of his childhood in Enfield, an unremarkable middle-class suburb of north London whose inhabitants, he told the New Yorker, “were frugal, reticent, utterly self-reliant and immensely aspirational . . . suspicious of progressive values, vulgarity of any kind, self-indulgence, pretentiousness and people who know best”. Though his parents divorced late in life, his family was then (at least in his eyes) stable, happy and secure.
But the more important clue to him and his relationship with the Mail’s Middle England readership is the Sunday Express of the 1950s and 1960s under the editorship of John Gordon and then John Junor. “That paper,” Dacre told the Society of Editors, “was my journalistic primer . . . [It] was warm, aspirational, unashamedly traditional, dedicated to decency, middlebrow, beautifully written and subbed, accessible, and, above all, utterly relevant to the lives of its readers.” Talking to Hagerty, he described Junor’s Sunday Express as “one of the great papers of all time”.
After leaving school in Yorkshire at 16, his father, Peter Dacre, joined the Sunday Express at 21 and stayed there for the rest of his working life – mainly as a show-business writer but also, for short periods, as New York correspondent and foreign editor. Each Sunday that week’s paper was discussed and analysed over the Dacre family dinner table.
It was then in its heyday, selling five million copies a week, and it didn’t go into severe decline (it now sells under 440,000) until the 1980s. It was a formulaic paper, which placed the same types of stories and features in exactly the same spots week after week. As Roy Greenslade observes in Press Gang, his post-1944 history of national newspapers, it was “virtually devoid of genuine news”; what it presented as news stories were really quirky mini-features, starting, as Greenslade put it, “with lengthy scene-setting descriptions or homilies”. Its staple subjects were animals, motor cars and wartime heroes. Its biggest target was “filth”, in the theatre, the cinema, books, magazines and TV programmes.
It particularly deplored any assault on the delicate sensibilities of children. Dacre’s father criticised the BBC in 1965 for the unsuitable content of its Sunday teatime serials. Lorna Doone, he wrote, ended “gruesomely”, with a man drowning in a bog, and in the first episode of a spy serial the actors used such expressions as “damn”, “hell” and “silly bitch” at a time supposedly reserved for “family viewing”. “Have the men responsible for these programmes,” asked the elder Dacre, “forgotten that there can be no family without children? What kind of men are they? Do they have families of their own?” Another piece denounced the BBC’s Sunday evening play for “an overdose of twisted social conscience”.
The young Dacre was hooked by newspapers. He only ever wanted to be a journalist and he always had his eyes on editing: “I’m a good writer, but not a great writer,” he told Hagerty. As a child in New York, during his father’s posting there, he would wake to the clattering of the ticker-tape telex machine outside his bedroom. In school holidays, he worked as a messenger for Junor’s Sunday Express and then spent a gap year before university as a trainee on the Daily Express. At the fee-charging University College School in Hampstead, north London, he edited the school magazine, and once ran, he told the Society of Editors, “a ponderous, prolix and achingly dull” special issue about the evangelist Billy Graham. It “went down like a sodden hot cross bus”, teaching him the essential lesson, which the Mail remembers every day on every page, that the worst sin in journalism is to be boring.
To his disappointment, his application to Oxford University failed. He went instead to Leeds, where he read English and edited Union News, taking it sharply downmarket from, in his own description, “a product that looked like the then Times on Prozac” to one that ran “Leeds Lovelies” on page three. It won an award for student newspaper of the year. The paper supported a sit-in (led by the union president, Jack Straw, later a Labour cabinet minister), interviewed a student about “the delights of getting stoned”, wrote sympathetically about gay people, immigrants and homeless families, and called on students to help in “breaking down the barriers between the coloured and white communities of this town”. At the time, he subsequently claimed, he was left-wing, though Jon Holmes, who worked on Dacre’s Union News, says: “I never heard him express a political view except in favour of planned economies for third-world, though not first-world, countries.”
His left-wing period, as he calls it, continued until the Daily Express, which he joined as soon as he left Leeds, sent him to America in 1976. He stayed there for six years, latterly working for the Mail. “America,” Dacre told Hagerty, “taught me the power of the free market . . . to improve the lives of the vast majority of ordinary people.”
The Mail brought him back to London in the early 1980s and made him news editor. According to various accounts, he would “rampage through the newsroom with arms flailing like a windmill”, shouting “Go, paras, go” as he despatched reporters on stories. He climbed the hierarchy until in 1991 he became the editor of the London Evening Standard, then owned, like the Mail, by the Rothermeres’ Associated Newspapers. Circulation rose by 25 per cent in 16 months and Rupert Murdoch sounded him out about the Times editorship. To stop him leaving, the Mail editor David English resigned his chair, recommended that Dacre should replace him, and moved “upstairs” as editor-in-chief, another title that Dacre eventually inherited after English died in 1998.
Dacre’s editorship has been more successful than his mentor’s but most staff do not love him as they did English. English, though capable of great coldness to those who fell into disfavour and no less likely to fly off the handle, had charm and charisma. “He would be delighted when you rang,” a former foreign correspondent says, “and he’d want to gossip and know about everything that was going on. Sometimes we’d talk for an hour. But Paul doesn’t give good phone.”
He will invite writers into his office, push a glass of champagne into their hands and start saying their latest story is rubbish even as he does so. “And you hardly got time to finish the bloody drink,” a former reporter complains. A former executive says: “His track record for creating columnists is nil. He buys them up from elsewhere. He doesn’t home-grow talent because he doesn’t nurture and praise it. That’s where he’s unlike English.”
Dacre is a passionate and emotional man. Though the story that he sometimes sheds tears as he dictates leaders is probably apocryphal, nobody who has worked with him doubts that he is sincere in the views he and the Mail express. “He’s not an editor who wakes up in the morning and wonders what he should be thinking today,” says Simon Heffer, a Mail columnist. Another columnist, Amanda Platell, a former editor of the Sunday Mirror and press secretary to William Hague during his leadership of the Conservative Party, says: “When I was an editor, I had to second-guess my readership because they weren’t my natural constituency. Paul never has to do that.”
But while his views are mostly right-wing, he is not a reliable ally for the Conservative Party, or for anyone else. This aspect of his way of working is little understood. More than most editors, it can be said of him that he is in nobody’s pocket, not even his proprietor’s. He inherited from English a paper that was slavishly pro-Tory (“David was always in and out of No 10,” said a long-serving Mail editor), firmly pro-Europe and read mainly by people in London and the south-east. Dacre changed the politics of the paper and the demographics of its audience. Today, it is resolutely – some would say hysterically – Eurosceptic and a far higher proportion of its readership is from Scotland and the English north and midlands. The Mail has ceased to take its line from Tory headquarters or to act as a mouthpiece for Conservative leaders. Indeed, every Tory leader since Margaret Thatcher has fallen short of Dacre’s exacting standards. That applies particularly to John Major and David Cameron. According to a former columnist, Dacre regards the latter as “brash, shallow, unthinking and self-advancing” and he takes an equally jaundiced view of Boris Johnson. Twice he backed Kenneth Clarke for the party leadership, despite Clarke’s enthusiasm for the EU.
Clarke is a model for the politicians Dacre generally favours even if he disagrees with most of what they say: earthy, authentic, unpretentious, consistent in their values. Jack Straw and David Blunkett – both, like Clarke, from humble backgrounds – are other examples. For a time, Dacre took a relatively kindly view of Tony Blair, having been impressed by the future prime minister’s “tough on crime” approach as shadow home secretary. But he was always suspicious of Blair’s socially liberal views on marriage, gays and drugs and he told Hagerty that once Labour attained power, he saw the new government as “manipulative, dictatorial and slightly corrupt”. He wished, he added, that Blair had “done as much for the family as he’s done for gay rights”.
Gordon Brown, however, was smiled upon as no other politician had ever been. The two men developed a strange friendship, involving meals together and walks in the park, which one Mail columnist described to me as “the attraction of the two weirdest boys in the playground”. Brown, Dacre told Hagerty, was “touched by the mantle of greatness . . . he is a genuinely good man . . . a compassionate man . . . an original thinker . . . of enormous willpower and courage”. At a Savoy Hotel event to celebrate Dacre’s first ten years as editor, Brown was almost equally effusive, describing the Mail editor as showing “great personal warmth and kindness . . . as well as great journalistic skill”. “We tried to tell Dacre,” says a former Mail political reporter, “that Brown was not a very good chancellor and the economy would implode eventually. But frankly, Dacre has poor political judgement. They were united by a mutual hatred of Blair. Both are social conservatives; they’re both suspicious of foreigners; they both have a kind of Presbyterian morality. Dacre would say that Brown believes in work. It’s typical of him that he seizes on a single word as the key to his understanding of someone else.”
It is inconceivable that the Mail would ever back a party other than the Conservatives in a general election, but Dacre’s support can be cool, as it was in 1997 and 2010. Although he described himself to Hagerty as “a Thatcherite politically” and though self-made entrepreneurs are among the few people who can expect favourable coverage in the Mail, Dacre is, to most neoliberals, a tepid and inconsistent supporter of free enterprise. Nor is he a neocon. The Mail opposed overseas military interventions in Iraq, Libya and Syria. It has denounced Guantanamo Bay, extraordinary rendition and torture. It may be hard on immigrants and benefit scroungers, but it is often equally hard on the rich and famous, pursuing overpaid bosses of public-service utilities to their luxurious homes, exposing “depravity” among the well-heeled and high-born, and rarely treating TV and film celebrities with the deference that is the staple fare of other tabloids.
Many Mail campaigns have centred on liberal or environmental causes: lead in petrol, plastic bags, secret justice, the extradition to the United States of the hacker Gary McKinnon, and so on. For a time, the Mail furiously campaigned to stop Labour deporting failed (black) asylum-seekers to Zimbabwe, even though, almost simultaneously, it was berating ministers for allowing too many illegal immigrants to stay. Other campaigns, such as those against internet porn and super-casinos (both of which influenced government action), though reflecting the Mail’s conservative social agenda, highlighted issues that concern many on the left.
Dacre’s most celebrated campaign, which even some of his enemies regard as his finest hour, was to bring the killers of Stephen Lawrence to justice. In 1997, over the five photographs of those he believed were responsible, he ran the headline “MURDERERS” and, beneath it, asserted: “The Mail accuses these men of killing. If we are wrong, let them sue us”.
It was hugely courageous, but did it exonerate the Mail from accusations of racism? Critics point out that the paper rarely features black people except as criminals, though this is not exceptional for the nationals. The “soft” features on women, fashion, style and health are illustrated almost entirely by white faces and bodies.

Dacre’s somewhat belated support for the Lawrence campaign was prompted by a personal connection: Neville Lawrence, Stephen’s father, had worked as a decorator on Dacre’s London house of the time, in Islington. The Mail’s campaign, critics argue, was based on substituting one frame of prejudice for another. Young Stephen eschewed gangs and drugs, did his homework and wanted to go to university. His parents were married, aspirational and home-owning. In everything except skin colour, the Lawrence family represented Middle England, while his white alleged killers were low-class yobs who threatened the safety of all respectable folk.
In that, as in much else, Dacre’s Mail recalls 1950s Britain, which rather patronisingly welcomed migrants from Asia and the Caribbean as long as they behaved as though they and their ancestors were English. “If you’re in twinset and pearls, your colour is irrelevant,” says a former Mail journalist. “And Dacre’s attitude to gays changed when he realised it’s possible to be an extremely boring gay person.”
The Mail’s attitudes to drugs are also redolent of the 1950s. Writing about the disgraced Co-operative Bank chairman Paul Flowers, Stephen Glover – the Mail columnist whose views, according to insiders, track Dacre’s most closely – criticised commentators who “concentrated on his financial unsuitability”, placing “relatively little emphasis” on his “moral turpitude”.
Most of all, the Mail seems determined to uphold the 1950s ideal of womanhood: the stay-at-home mother who dedicates herself to homemaking and prepares a cooked dinner for her husband on his return home every night. That, the paper’s defenders say, is something of a caricature of the Mail’s position. It objects not so much to working mothers as to middle-class feminists who insist that women can “have it all”. English aimed at turning the Mail into “the women’s paper”, and succeeded: it became the only national newspaper where women accounted for more than half the readership. That remains true, and yet Dacre sometimes seems determined to drive them away. The paper subjects women’s bodies, clothes and deportment to relentless and detailed scrutiny, and often finds them wanting, particularly in the thigh and bottom department. It gives prominent coverage to research that warns of the negative effects of working mothers on children’s lives.
The Mail’s poster girl is Liz Jones, the columnist and fashion editor celebrated for her self-hatred and misery. “She has so much,” says another Mail journalist, “lots of money, expensive houses, the newest clothes. But she’s never had a child, she hasn’t kept hold of a man, and she’s unhappy. The message is: it’s what happens to you, girls, if you pursue worldly success. You can succeed but, oh boy, you will suffer for it.”
The Mail’s punishing hours, requiring news and features executives to stay at the office until late into the evening (not uncommon in national newspapers), and its largely unsympathetic attitude to part-time employment make it an unfriendly environment for working mothers. When Dacre took over at the Mail, he immediately appointed a female deputy, which, said another woman who then had a senior role in the group, “was quite a statement”. But the paper now has few women in its most senior positions, other than the editor of Femail (though sometimes even that post is occupied by a man), and few staff have young children.
Yet in some respects, the Mail, even though it does not recognise the National Union of Journalists, is a good employer. Unlike the Mirror, it is not under a company ruled by accountants who single-mindedly seek “efficiencies”. Unlike the Times and the Sun, it does not have a proprietor who touts his papers’ support to the highest bidder. Unlike the Guardian and Independent, it is not beset by financial problems. The proprietor, Viscount (Jonathan) Rothermere, whose great-grandfather Harold Harmsworth founded the paper with his brother Alfred in 1896, allows his editors wide freedom, as did his father, Vere Rothermere, who appointed Dacre. The Mail, alone among national newspapers, has had no significant rounds of editorial redundancies in recent years and its staffing levels (it employs about 400 journalists) are comparable to what they were a decade ago.
Dacre’s paper is his sole domain; MailOnline is run separately (though Dacre, as editor-in-chief, has oversight) and although the website carries all daily and Sunday paper stories, much of its content is self-generated and the editorial flavour is distinct. Dacre demands, and mostly gets, a generous budget, paying high salaries for established editorial staff and columnists and high fees for freelance contributors. Journalists are driven hard but, at senior levels in particular, they rarely leave, not least because Dacre is as loyal to them as they mostly are to him. Outright sackings are rare and nearly always accompanied by large payoffs.
Those who do leave often reach the top elsewhere. The current editors of both Telegraph papers – Tony Gallagher at the daily and Ian MacGregor at the Sunday – are former Mail executives.
Despite more than two decades at the helm, Dacre shows few signs of slowing down. After heart trouble some years ago – which caused an absence of several months from the office – his holidays, which he usually takes in the British Virgin Islands, have become slightly longer and more frequent. But he still routinely puts in 14-hour days.
Nevertheless, speculation about his future has grown among journalists on the Mail and other papers. At the end of November, Dacre sold his last remaining shares in the Daily Mail and General Trust, the Mail’s parent company, for £347,564; he disposed of the majority in 2012. His latest contract, signed on his 65th birthday, is for one year only. Geordie Greig, the 53-year-old editor of the Mail on Sunday, is widely regarded as the most likely successor, though Martin Clarke, the abrasive publisher of the phenomenally successful MailOnline, now the most visited newspaper website in the world, is also tipped and Jon Steafel, Dacre’s deputy, is favoured by most staff. The surprising announcement in November that Richard Kay, the paper’s diarist and a long-standing friend of Dacre’s, is to leave his position looks like another straw in the wind, particularly given that his almost certain replacement is Sebastian Shakespeare, previously the diary editor at the London Evening Standard, where Greig was editor before he moved to the Mail on Sunday.
Fleet Street rumour has it that Kay is being moved because he upset friends of Lady Rothermere, the proprietor’s wife, and that she is also behind the abrupt departure of the columnist Melanie Phillips, apparently on the grounds that her style – particularly during a June appearance on BBC1’s Question Time – is too shrill. Lady Rothermere, it is said, is desperately keen to oust Dacre in favour of Greig. Senior Mail sources pooh-pooh such tales, but they stop short of outright denials that Dacre is nearing the end of his days on the paper.

I started working on this months ago, and stopped a day later, then picked it up recently because I wanted to finish it. While it's mentioned below, I'd like to say it here: I know that this might be a mess, and not everybody will like it. But that's the fun of it all; it's not official, and will never be official, so it's fun to create stuff or imagine what happened that hasn't been explained yet. Whether you enjoy it or hate it, I had fun doing this! :)
7 DAYS TO DIE (UNOFFICIAL) LORE—TIMELINE
THIS IS AN UNOFFICIAL TIMELINE OF THE LORE LEADING UP TO THE SETTING OF 7 DAYS TO DIE. ALL EVENTS DEPICTED IN THIS ARE UNOFFICIAL/UNCONFIRMED AND SHOULD BE TREATED AS SUCH (duh).
THIS IS NOT PERFECT. MUCH OF THIS MAY NOT SEEM REALISTIC OR MAY BE TOO CONSTRAINED. IF YOU FEEL THAT SOMETHING DOESN’T QUITE FIT, LET ME KNOW AND I CAN CHANGE IT. IF YOU WANT, YOU CAN HELP OUT.
--------------------------------------------
BCE-April 24, 1986 CE: History is unchanged.
1986
April 25
- A nuclear inspection team arrives at Chernobyl, the negligence they discover and resolve in reference to a soon-to-occur safety test is ruled as 'criminal' by the Russian government due to the estimated damage that would've occurred if the test had gone through. As a result, the true danger of Nuclear Meltdown does not set into the psychology of first world countries and they continue with lax construction of reactors.
2000
January 1
- Y2K occurs in computers across the planet. Multiple systems are permanently fried, pushing technology back several years. DIVERGENCE occurs.
2018
OCTOBER 9
- The United States Of America grants Puerto Rico statehood. The flag now carries 51 stars.
2025
June 9
- A meeting is held at the United Nations in New York to discuss political tensions between North Korea following the death of Kim Jong Un seven months prior. A 19-6 vote is enacted to increase security at the Korean Demilitarized Zone.
October 7
- North Korea attempts an attack on soil with the launch of four ballistic missiles aimed at Guam and Hawaii. Three are confirmed duds; the fourth strikes Guam’s Tamuning. Thousands are killed in the attack. Minutes later, the United States launches three ballistic missiles; all three successfully strike the capital of Pyongyang, killing several thousand people in its limits, including NK leader Kim Ju-ae. South Korea and Japan experience one of the largest refugee crises in human history. This leads to a depression in the region that lasts several years.
October 22
- A local group known as the Woodstock Militia form in the United States, their goals claiming to be “nothing more but the peace among man.” Their numbers grow over several years, expanding beyond North America.
October 23
- Backyard Bunks, a company set on the construction of backyard fallout shelters, is successfully funded and founded in Manchester, England by US expatriate Donovan Clarke, beginning construction immediately.
2032
September 2
- A Woodstock peace rally in Iraq is ambushed, leading to dozens of rally-goers dead or missing. An investigation discovers collusion between some members and a terror group known as the COG, or Caliphate Of Glory. The WM is banned from Iraq as a result “until further notice.”
December 22
- The United Nations begin talks on expanding territory further into the North Korean ruins. China argues against it.
December 30
- Talks at the United Nations ends with the UNSC voting 17-8 on territorial expansion through the North Korean ruins. China warns against this.
2033
March 27
- US expansion into the North Korean ruins begin, expecting to take a total of 18 months to succeed. Protests occur near the border. Later in the evening, a brief riot breaks out, leading to the death of a Korean Border Security Officer and several arrests.
April 1
- China sanctions the United States. As a result, the US sanctions back. The Trade War, as it is simply called, begins.
- Stocks in Chinese trade fall soon after.
August 13
- Backyard Bunks expands into the United States, quickly gaining popularity in major cities, with several hundred requests in just that single day.
September 11
- A terrorist scare occurs in Washington, D.C., after a vehicle was pulled over containing a homemade nuclear weapon. The bomb was successfully deactivated and disposed of properly.
September 19
- China begins underground nuclear testing in a remote region of the country, prompting fears in the United States and Japan of potential military action.
- Coincidentally, hours prior, Russia also announced that they would resume nuclear testing 18 years after it was discontinued.
September 29
- Lucky Larry’s, one of the largest casinos in the midwestern United States, opens to the public in the city of Gravestown, Arizona.
December
- A mass shortage of functioning antibiotics leads to an outbreak of Cholera in India, killing 3 million from December to January 2034, where it is eventually placed under control with international aid.
- Due to the Trade War, the United States experiences what is called “The Year Without Christmas.”
December 19
- United States scientists work with the United States military with the creation of a contagion with the intent to overwhelm enemy territories. Early testing is a failure.
2034
- Nuclear plants undergo a worldwide reconstruction effort to improve performance and defend against large-scale man-made attacks. Very few nuclear plants are completed.
January 2
- Seven bodies are discovered in the Cascade Range. All of them are mauled, covered in human bite marks, leading to rumors of a cannibal group nearby. Law enforcement denied these claims.
January 10
- The United States cancels the remaining expansion into the North Korean ruins, stationing soldiers as far as the city of Wonsan. China lifts few of the sanctions; the United States follows suit, but the Trade War persists.
January 11
- Construction of bunkers by BB in all Las Vegas hotels are complete.
March 18
- China ceases its nuclear testing temporarily, out of fear of radiation leaking into neighboring territories. Russia continues its nuclear testing.
March 19
- Midterm elections begin in the United States.
June 7
- Chinese President Chen-Chi is assassinated while on a trip in the United States. The United States is immediately blamed for her death. Many terror groups across the world claim responsibility. Some say this was a tactic to prevent any retaliation by China.
June 11
- China, upon full belief that the United States is responsible for the death of former president Chen-Chi, declares war on America.
JUNE 12
- World War III, or simply known as “The War,” occurs as late as 6:18 PM EST. It is unknown precisely who fired first, but blame rests solely on China.
6:15 PM
- The Integrated Operational Nuclear Detection System (IONDS) detects seven nuclear ballistic missile launches from an unknown location.
6:17 PM
- NORAD confirms all seven launches. USAF enters DEFCON 1, prompting immediate takeoff of all available bombers. Several of them head for China, believed to be the sole cause.
6:18 PM
- POTUS authorizes full-scale retaliation. Several US ballistic missiles are launched.
- The War commences. China denies any action against the United States, despite their declaration of war the day before, but are bombed shortly after. The United States preps a full-scale invasion scenario into China. The seven immediate nuclear missiles are destroyed. Several more are launched from ocean level, believing to be submarine-based launches. Three of them reach the west coast of the United States. Several submarines are destroyed by military response.
6:23 PM
- Los Angeles is struck by two nuclear warheads several seconds apart. Few of the city’s skyscrapers collapse from the shockwave and sheer force of the explosions.
- News quickly spreads across the nation, confirming the detonation of nuclear weapons in Los Angeles. Panic spreads nationwide as people try to evacuate. Highways quickly go into gridlock, forcing people to escape on foot. Several people take shelter in several bunkers, only to quickly fill up.
- Divisions of the US Armed Forces are deployed in several cities to assist in the evacuation.
6:28 PM
- Seattle and San Diego are hit by two separate nuclear warheads.
- The San Diego warhead was not a head-on strike, instead striking closer towards the outskirts, nearest to the highways. Most on the highway were killed in the immediate blast, while those in the inner city survived.
- Thirty-two more ballistic missiles are confirmed launched from China as retaliation. Many of them strike the west coast and further inland. The midwestern US (Colorado) all the way to the east coast is spared from ballistic strikes due to NORAD’s immediate response.
6:30 PM
- Gravestown is devastated by two consecutive nuclear strikes. The majority of Navezgane County is spared the immediate effects of the detonations.
6:30-8:00 PM
- Six more nuclear warheads breach past NORAD defenses from China, striking Portland, San Francisco, Las Vegas, and even reaching Austin, Texas.
8:00 PM
- No further nuclear launches from China. Birds are in the air and are headed for China. Cities affected/destroyed are Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, and Xi’an.
- Over the next five days, the USAF is deployed across the United States and throughout China. Martial law is declared in the US, and POTUS is relocated to the Mount Weather Communications Shelter on June 14.
JUNE 14—RUSSIA BECOMES INVOLVED
9:58 AM EST
- A van containing a nuclear weapon is detonated in the US capitol. Armed forces are sent to assist the injured and dying.
- NORAD detects several Russian submarines off the east coast of the US. DEFCON 1 is once again in effect, formerly set to DEFCON 2.
10:10 AM
- Russian aircraft arrives in Washington, D.C., dropping soldiers across the city with the intent to take over the White House and overthrow the president. It is revealed the president is hidden away.
- Evacuations are set for the unaffected areas of the city. Several Russian soldiers kill people attempting to flee the city limits.
10:14 AM
- POTUS and NORAD authorize launch of four ballistic missiles targeted at Moscow, Russia.
10:16 AM
- Four ballistic missiles are launched from the United States towards Russia.
- USAF continues to evacuate the outer regions of Washington, D.C.
10:17 AM
- A second nuclear weapon is detonated in the capitol, killing millions. It is unknown who detonated it or where it was detonated.
10:19 AM
- Russia retaliates by launching seven nuclear ballistic missiles targeting New York, Washington, Orlando, Boston, and Atlanta.
10:22 AM
- The United States launches nine more nuclear missiles targeting several Russian cities.
- Several Russian planes fly over the skies across the eastern seaboard attempting to drop soldiers with the intent on invasion. Many of them are shot down, their soldiers killed in their parachutes, regardless of the Geneva Convention.
10:25 AM
- Two Russian bombers drop three nuclear warheads onto Columbus, Ohio, destroying the city entirely. The resulting EMP causes the planes to crash, killing all onboard.
- Poland, France, and the United Kingdom join the conflict, firing their own missiles at Russia and China.
- Several Russian planes touch down in Detroit, Michigan, assuming complete control of the city over several hours.
10:40 AM
- Moscow is struck by two of three nuclear warheads, one failing to detonate. The other nine launches strike other Russian cities, including Saint Petersburg, Omsk, and Samara.
11:00 AM – 9:00 PM
- New York City, Orlando, Boston, and Philadelphia are hit by nuclear warheads and sustain heavy damage. Russia retaliates against Poland, the United Kingdom, and France with nuclear launches targeting them respectively. London, Paris, Nice, Manchester, Warsaw, and Marseille are all struck.
- Many refugees within the United States flee towards the center of the country, residing within the countryside and avoiding major cities. Denver, Oklahoma, and Houston—to name a few—are mostly deserted, with many vehicles remaining on the roads, forever trapped in gridlock.
- The east and west coasts are in complete blackout, a result of the EMPs created by the nuclear detonations.
- China has gone quiet in all military aspects. US soldiers in the region have confirmed that survivors are surrendering.
- Russia invades sections of the UK and Italy, expanding their territory with the intent to take control of more military weaponry. At the same time, their government no longer exists. Many survivors in the affected regions panic; the country is in absolute turmoil, with riots occurring everywhere.
- The northern area of Manhattan is mostly unaffected by the blast, but the radiation has killed most of the people in the vicinity. Cars are left running, filled with the corpses of those who succumbed while trying to escape. Bodies of USAF soldiers can be found as well.
- Riots break out in the few US cities still densely populated. Martial law is further enforced.
- The Blackout occurs: Many power plants within the affected regions are abandoned or destroyed. A rolling blackout occurs across most of North America. Very few cities still hold access to electricity.
June 14
- Radiation from the seaboards begins to seep into water systems and streams, which will begin to irradiate and pollute most major water sources across the country in the coming weeks.
- Patients in hospitals across the United States begin to die by the millions as backup power fails.
- Order starts to break down across several areas in the mid-US.
- Several more nations join into the conflict, firing their weapons at Russia and China.
- A global, limited nuclear exchange occurs. Action between nations is limited to several minutes. Detonations occur over three hours. 49 nations are confirmed affected or destroyed by the exchange. Very few nations remain unaffected or functioning, such as Africa, Australia, regions of South America, and parts of the central US. The rest struggle or collapse from radiation or economic failure.
June 15
- An undetonated nuclear warhead in Moscow suddenly explodes. Millions are killed in an instant. Remnants of Russian missile command see this as an attack and immediately fire twelve more nuclear missiles. They launch in random directions.
- Poland is hit again. England is hit again, London is devastated. Paris is struck again, causing the collapse of the famed Eiffel Tower. Uganda, Africa is struck, leading to them retaliating against Russia.
- The United States is once again hit by Russian warheads. New York’s north side is hit, killing millions of survivors. Washington, D.C. is hit again. NORAD nearly shoots down all of them. One surviving missile strikes Kansas City, devastating it in moments.
- After this day, no further nuclear missiles are launched from any nation. Communications break down across the world. The Great Silence begins.
June 16
- The War ends. Two-and-a-half billion people are dead. Many more are injured and dying; the death toll is expected to climb another billion over several months.
- Several countries drop communications, either intentionally or unintentionally. The United States, for two weeks, is isolated from the rest of the world except for Canada and remnants of Mexico.
June 18
- Radiation has seeped into the water systems of many inhabited US cities. People are poisoned and begin to die. USAF remnant soldiers begin to ration food and water to the population.
- NORAD is abandoned, its surviving crew scattering across the mid-US.
- Surviving members of the Woodstock Militia regroup in Denver with the intent to boost morale across the surviving states.
- Navezgane County, Arizona regains contact with the mid-US states. Several other counties of other western states soon do the same. Navezgane’s climate is heavily altered. Snowy regions plague the mountains, while plant-life blooms elsewhere. The area surrounding Gravestown is abandoned, filled with the bodies of war victims and populated with survivors, who are only now emerging from their bunkers with the intent on beginning a cleanup effort.
June 20
- Cleanup attempts begin across remnants of the nation with the help of USAF. The president is relocated to Denver, Colorado and addresses the nation to his best extent.
July 2-5
- The United States is divided into three sections: The States, The West Wasteland, and The East Wasteland.
- USAF members return from overseas after weeks of silence. Many have died from radiation poisoning and were buried in China.
- Survivors from neighboring countries, including China and Russia, begin to appear on shorelines as they make their way to the States. Very few are turned away. Many Chinese and Russian survivors surrender, only to be taken in and sheltered. It is from these survivors that the extent of the damage from the war is revealed. Russia’s economy collapsed in a matter of days, whereas China’s economy “seemingly collapsed the moment the very first bomb touched down.”
- People begin farms in their own backyards, planting gardens and producing crops.
July 5-16
- Power plants across the States are restored; the lights turn back on across the country, even in areas across the Wastelands. Navezgane County’s power is restored. Some power plants have melted down in recent weeks, irradiating parts of North America for thousands of years.
July-August
- The Great Meltdown occurs, a period in which power plants across the world experience near-simultaneous meltdowns as a result of abandonment and lack of maintenance. Several European countries are irradiated, millions killed.
- Japan’s nuclear plants melt down; those who were unable to flee die quickly of radiation poisoning.
- Hawaii is spared from the radioactive cloud, which eventually reaches North America by early August.
- The west coast of North America is devastated by radioactivity from the GM. Those not already killed by the war are killed by the cloud.
- Alaska is spared from the radioactive cloud.
- The majority of South America is spared from the radioactive cloud, but its west coast is devastated.
- Most of Europe is devastated. Those who are able to escape are forced underground.
- The world truly becomes isolated. Two billion more die during the Great Meltdown. Three-and-a-half billion survivors remain on Earth.
- The States are spared from the radioactive cloud that covers the majority of the planet.
- Very few places on the coastlines are spared from the radioactive cloud, such as Navezgane County.
- Many cities lie dead, full of the remains of the people who used to live there.
August
- An outbreak of Cholera occurs in Tulsa, Oklahoma. A mixture of radioactive and infected water leads to 100,000+ dead, an eighth of its population.
OUTBREAK OCCURS
- A mutation via radiation exposure leads to the full-blown outbreak of V-713, or known more as the Muerto contagion in North America.
August 4
- Cases of an unknown pathogen are reported in Navezgane and several other spots of land across the western board. Reports of infection are heard in Albuquerque and Sante Fe, New Mexico, Salt Lake City, Utah, and Denver, Colorado. Due to recent outbreaks of Cholera and other dangerous diseases, USAF and doctors collaborate to deliver protective masks, while simultaneously quarantining the sick.
August 5
- Bodies are found in multiple areas across several states, in similar condition to the bodies found in the Cascade Range months earlier.
- Muerto spreads into several more towns and cities. Hospitals quickly become overwhelmed with new admissions.
- Many fear the outbreak will reach their area and attempt to leave. Highways are once again clogged, while soldiers attempt to console and comfort those panicking, encouraging them to return home.
AUGUST 6 – THE MUERTOS RISE
- Cases spread further to larger cities.
- Hundreds of infected individuals begin to die in hospitals; some die on the streets. Several areas are quarantined, with hazmat teams burying the dead; in most cases, the dead are burned once space runs out.
- Reports of attacks begin to pile up in areas hit hardest by the infection. They are dismissed as riots and labelled as “fearful anarchists.”
- In the evening, sudden mass ‘riots’ break out across the western board. News reports depict people chasing each other and knocking others to the ground ‘with the intent to maim or kill’.
- Citizens, sick or healthy, attempt to flee the cities and areas that are in chaos. Many seek protection by local police forces, but are gunned down mistaken for attackers.
- Police forces in the main cities are quickly overwhelmed. USAF forces in the area respond with deadly force, but many of them are overwhelmed as well.
- Roadblocks are set up on highways, hoping to contain the violence to the cities—however, reports emerge of similar attacks occurring in small towns and even villages.
- The cities’ streets are a mix of stampeding civilians and crazed attackers.
August 7
12:00 AM – 5:00 AM
- USAF forces are forced to pull out of Denver’s limits. The president is long gone, relocated to De Moines, Iowa.
- Roadblocks outside Denver, Salt Lake City, and Santa Fe are overrun by infected individuals.
- Doctors confirm on radios and functioning stations that the attackers are deceased. The Muerto contagion is gained its name, but the infected are rarely, if ever, named as zombies.
7:23 AM
- The president addresses the nation, revealing the full scale of the situation and urges calm. This does little to prevent further panic.
8:00 AM – 4:00 PM
- The infected overrun multiple military outposts across several cities.
- USAF forces conduct mass napalm bombings in Salt Lake City, Denver, Santa Fe, and more, in an attempt to control the spread. The effort fails.
- Reports arise that USAF forces have gunned down refugees pouring into towns neighboring Denver and Santa Fe. Outrage spreads quickly as the infected continue to migrate further east.
4:00 PM – 11:00 PM
- USAF outposts in Fort Collins, Colorado and Rapid City, South Dakota are overrun by infected.
- Reports of infection arise in the city of Wichita, Kansas. Suspected cases are either quarantined or killed to contain the spread.
- Fort Collins is firebombed by USAF pilots. Containment is initially a success, but the sound draws mass herds of infected hosts. The fort is declared a lost cause.
August 8
- Outposts and blockades are stationed across several areas not yet hit, such as Navezgane County. Cities further to the east succumb to infection and riots.
- Firebombing methods are abandoned for major cities; citizens are left to their own devices. Many die in the panic.
August 10 – August 11
- The Muerto contagion is reported in Navezgane and several other counties. People resort to locking themselves in their homes or committing suicide. However, many commit suicide by either poisoning or hanging, leading to reanimation.
- Suicide patients begin to reanimate over several hours, leading to a siege of infected hosts in several towns.
- The Diersville hospital is under siege throughout the 11th, leading to the infected escaping and attacking the neighboring folk.
- Infection reported in Perishton.
August 13
- Perishton under siege.
- Diersville confirmed lost. Many residents forced to fend for themselves. USAF forces abandon the town after failed attempts to control the infected hordes. Some fleeing residents are gunned down, mistaken for the dead.
- Several nuclear weapons are dropped on Denver, Santa Fe, and Albuquerque as a last resort. The resulting blasts irradiate the entire region. Navezgane County is more or less sealed off from the rest of the nation.
August 18
- Power failures plague large regions of the States.
- The infection is controlled in several areas via USAF border fences.
- USAF forces begin airdrops in areas affected, but still holding survivors.
August 25
- Navezgane is declared a hazard zone. Airdrops still occur, but it is forbidden to set foot until otherwise.
- The Muerto contagion is contained; half of the States survive.
- 7 Days To Die begins.
--------------------------------------------
CONTRIBUTORS
u/Making_Bacon
u/watson895
u/Buggaton

As we finished round 2 of our anniversary tournament, only 12 movies are left. And with only 12 movies left, we are ready to start the last round to decide, which movies will be part of the anniversary. This round will end April 7 and like always, it'll end at the start of the daily of that day. Instead of trailers or posters, this time I write a short summary myself for the movies and since I didn't choose them myself, there might be one or two movies, that I don't remember too well. So let's get on with it :)
Dragon Fury: Dragon Fury is on of the most 90s action movies out there. Tits, mullets, time travel. Our hero comes from the future of 2099 in which a plague killed most of the people, though his family was actually just murdered by typical movie badguy Richard Lynch. So mullet hero - he has the best mullet in the universe - travels back into the year 1999 and find the serum. On his way, he finds a hot scientist lady, bangs her and kicks tons of ass.
Love on a Leash: What is there to say about Love On A Leash? It's basically The Beauty And The Beast, though the beast is a dog. Or more a playboy, cursed by a water fairy (?), who will only turn human if he finds true love. For playboy this means to find a woman, who is willing to fuck him. Enter love interest. Everything in her home is green, like she is mentally obsessed with Kermit the Frog. She is still a virgin and wants to wait for mr right, but the first night doggo turns into a human - they never give a reason for his reverse weredoggo lifestyle - they directly bang and want to marry. Apparently that is not enough for him to turn full human again.
PS: There is no fucking music in this movie.
Miami Connection: A band of rock'n'roll ninjas is kicking ass, while making kick-ass music. All the important things are available. Rivalry between the band and the evil brother of the love interest. Friends for eternity. The search for a father. Good fights and brutal fights. Miami Connection is a classic and it deserves it.
Ninja Apocalypse: To be perfectly honest, I had to check for a second until I remembered Ninja Apocalypse. There is a meeting between all the futuristic ninja clans, as suddenly the overlord ninja is killed and everyone think, that our main clan did it. Sounds familiar? That's because Ninja Apocalypse is basically The Warriors, but with ninjas, magic and zombies. It's the newest movie on our list, but they definitely cared for it.
Penitentiary III: And here we go with something interesting, as Penitentiary III was always an aftershow movie, which I never got around to watch in those two years. I know it's about prison fights and that there is a midget in it, so it sounds like a winner to me.
The Perfect Weapon: Stickfighter Jeff Speakman was a real action star of the 90s, but only of the 90s. The Perfect Weaon was his first lead role in an action movie. The story is fairly simple. He is great at kenpo, his friend is killed by the korean mafia, now Jeff wants revenge. And of course he gets revenge one stick at a time.
The cast surrounding Jeff is actually not too bad, especially when it comes to the asians. James Hong, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, Al Leong, Mako and Professor Toru Tanaka. And then there is Rufio...
Ryan's Babe: Our favorite non-road-movie. Ryan's stalked by a chick, while her father wants to kill him. He runs away and gets in the weirdest situations. Being kidnapped. Being kidnapped again. Having to listen to Mr Shecksphere. Being kidnapped and nearly murdered (again). Being drugged and raped. It's a massively weird road trip, that leads nowhere, but is incredibly fun to watch.
Singham: SINGHAM! He is the most lawful good character you could think of and he doesn't even need a weapon. All he needs is his hand, which slaps goodness into the hearts of bad guys and love into the hearts of females. There are great songs, but all you need is the action. Cars are flipping and flying, people bounce around and Singham bitchslaps. He might not be the hero we deserve, but he is the bollywood hero we need.
Still Flowin': The story of a demented australian rapper. Still Flowin' is the story of R.A.E.D. and is written by him, directed by him, he plays the lead and made the music. The movie starts with 3 minutes of black screen, just so we suddenly see his bank details, because of course he asks for money. What follows is basically an autobiographical movie about a person, who stalked the biggest australian music producer and called a bomb threat on the biggest australian casino. Then he had a 3 hour rapbattle with the australian police and went into an asylum, because he's fucking crazy. That person makes music. That person made a movie. You will never see something similar to this movie about our favorite asthma-rapper.
Suburban Sasquatch: A suburban sasquatch starts murdering people for fun, while a reporter and a native american magical lady try to hunt him. The costume is awful. The acting is awful. The effects are awful. But everything turns into a great bad movie. And then there is that credits song, which seems to have been sung by the directors grandma.
Surf Nazis Must Die: A group of surf nazis took the beach over and murders a black person. His mother swears revenge and if you are the wonderful Mrs Washington, revenge comes one shell at a time. She runs around the beach and kills all the Surf Nazis, no matter if it is Adolf or Mengele.
Who Killed Captain Alex: Who Killed Captain Alex is the first action movie from Uganda and already a massive achievement at that. Making a movie, while you have to live with brownouts nearly every day, is already hard enough, but Captain Alex shows just one thing. When it comes to making movies, the love for movies, and the fun of making it, is more important than anything else. These people learned martial arts, by repeating the moves they saw in movies. They don't care if it's perfect, as long as it is their own. With every second of the movie, you can feel exactly that. They have fun, they love it and they are proud of what they did.
But somehow that isn't even enough for the movie. As there are so many languages around, they simply used a video joker, who jokingly talked over the movie in english. Explaining what is going on in a joking way, while screaming all the important parts. BRUCE U! TIGA MAFIA! ACTION ACTION ACTION! At first you expect him to get annoying really fast, but he adds even more energy and love to the movie and it soon becomes a part of the enjoyment.
So let's get to the battles
Fight 1: The Perfect Weapon vs Penitentiary III
Fight 2: Dragon Fury vs Who Killed Captain Alex
Fight 3: Still Flowin vs Ninja Apocalypse
Fight 4: Miami Connection vs Suburban Sasquatch
Fight 5: Surf Nazis Must Die vs Singham
Fight 6: Ryan's Babe vs Love On A Leash
Have fun voting!

Susan smiled. “Survive. Not, for example, to do anything about this end of the world-”
I rested a hand on Susan’s shoulder as several of the gods turned unpleasant looks towards her. My father took a step forward, his shoulders bunching and muscles standing out like cables, between her and the gods. “A kind offer. Do we have accommodations while we’re here?”
“Of course, my son,” said Zeus, and smiled. “Please, settle in. Enjoy yourselves. There is a feast tonight, in your honor.” He stepped up to my father, and I noticed that Zeus was taller. A moment before, he’d been about as tall as me. Now, he was a couple of inches taller than my dad, and that made me feel just a little bit disturbed. I couldn’t tell whether I’d misjudged his height, or if he’d changed it. He embraced my father in a manly hug, and squeezed him once, quite firmly, before slapping him on the shoulder. “Now, please! Settle in.” He paused for a moment, and then turned towards Megara. “Echidna.”
She drew herself up, her back straight, her eyes meeting his without the slightest trace of hesitation. “Zeus, who marshals the thunderheads.” I couldn’t quite tell whether that was an insult, a compliment, or a careful mix of both. “We meet, at last.”
“We do indeed.” He smiled brilliantly, pearly white teeth flashing at her. “All is forgiven. Please, find yourself welcome here.”
This seemed to catch her entirely off surprise, a single eyebrow arching delicately. “I cannot say I ever expected to hear that from you.” After a long moment, she nodded her head. “But we all of us change in the face of adversity, don’t we? Thank you. I shall strive to be as gracious a guest as I can be.”
There was, at this, a lessening of tension, a subtle lowering of shoulders. It couldn’t have been just that; I wasn’t so absurdly perceptive that I could read a room effortlessly. There had been something in the air, crackling like ozone. A tension that was gone, now that mom had shown she wasn’t angry. The gods dispersed in crowds, save for one who strode forth, a grin on his face. I’d been reading some of my father’s novels on Greek mythology, and had grown confident in being able to identify gods, at least when they wanted to be identified.
I certainly wouldn’t have had to do that for this particular god. Hermes was noticeably nude save for a cape and a cap that reminded me of a World War 1 soldier. I tried not to stare, and in doing so, noticed that both Susan and Isabelle seemed entranced. I gave Isabelle a little nudge, and then aslightly harder one. “Wha?” She looked at me, and flushed red. “I was just…”
“It’s alright, it’s alright, it happens all the time,” said Hermes, a grin on his face. “God of Athleticism and all, comes with the territory. I don’t get to run across the world much anymore, it’s good to know I’ve still got it.”
“He actually looks a lot like Dean,” murmured Susan. Isabelle’s flush grew just a little bit worse. I coughed into my hand, and Hermes did the same, looking- for just a moment- genuinely surprised.
“I believe,” said Harry, “that we could use a guide to our quarters.”
“Of course, brother. Come along.” Hermes gestured, and turned, which seemed to break the hypnotic state that Susan was in. I heard Megara grumble something under her breath, but not loud enough for any of us to catch it. “I must say, it’s thrilling to see you. I’ve spent precious little time in the mortal world for- Well, too damn long, obviously. I…” The god began to walk at a brisk pace, up the side of the hill. “I don’t imagine you’ve heard. But. My great-grand son… Neither of you have happened to see Odysseus, have you?”
Megara let out a soft sound of disconcert. “He’s not here? I’d have expected that if any of the heroes were… I never met him. Never waylaid him.” She shook her head. “I hope he is safe. I always liked him. A hero who never slew monsters.” She chuckled. “Only men.”
“Yes, well, I suppose I can see where that would endear him to you,” said Hermes. “He left. A long time ago. Said he had a mission. I’ve never heard of him visiting one of the cities…” Hermes’ lips twisted into a frown. “I suppose it does no good to worry about him, but-”
“We can hardly help but worry about our kin, particularly when they are so eager to get themselves into a mess, can we?” asked Megara, and there was a certain warm kindness in her voice. Hermes tossed a bright, pearly smile at her.
The trees surrounding us were apple trees. I had grown up in upstate New York. I knew apples. These were not the simple, stunted mortal apple trees. Apple trees in an orchard were, at most, about 15 feet tall, and carefully pruned to keep them manageable. These were great, primeval things, towering over us on either side, growing so thick that they created a dense canopy. Despite that, golden light streamed down between leaves, dappling the ground with pools of warmth, and giving the entire place an ethereal feel. And perhaps most striking was the color. Golden apples, normally, have a yellow-ish color; Something between red and green. These apples were had the lustrous shine of metal. Susan stared up at one of the trees. “Are these safe? They’re not going to cause sudden shame about nudity or doom mankind if we eat them, are they?”
“They’re the Golden Apples,” said my father. “They show up a lot in myth. Greek, Norse, Irish…”
“There’s a reason the island is called Avalon,” said Hermes. “It was said that apples grew here better than anyone else. On an island in the far west of the world the Greeks knew… Sound at all familiar?” He smiled. “It’s always the question, isn’t it? Which came first, the stories, or the reality? The apples are safe. They grant an immunity to age, and disease, to any who eat them. Of course, the mortals who stole them would find that small comfort, considering what the gods would do to them for the theft, but that’s so often the way, isn’t it?” He smiled brightly. “You, however, are guests. Immortality, and health, are what you might call… table stakes.”
“Immortality,” said Susan, frowning dubiously. “Seems like kind of a commitment.” She reached up, and gently tugged on one of the golden apples, hanging low on the branch. With a soft snap, the branch lifted up into the air, leaving the apple in her hands. It was close to the size of her head. “So, you bite into one of these things, and you live forever?”
“Barring accident or misfortune. Sadly, a very limited immortality, particularly in our line of work. But it ensures that your last moments will be glorious- or at the very least, hilarious.” Hermes smiled. “Would you like to try it?”
“Hmm.” She stared at the surface for a long moment. “Nah. Hey, Dean, Isabelle, think fast!”
Susan had a good arm. The apple swished through the air, and my hand came up automatically, at the same time as Isabelle’s. It struck my palm, but would have bounced out if Isabelle hadn’t caught it from the other side. The apple wasn’t quite as heavy as I would have expected from its size, but it had a certain weightiness that was thoroughly metaphorical. Harry frowned over at Hermes. “A panacea? A cure to aging?”
“Yes,” said Hermes, nodding. “You’re thinking, what a wonderful thing it’d be for the humans to have, right?”
Dad crossed his arms. “I’d considered it. I’ve known many good men who could have done a great deal more good, had they survived long enough. There are quite a few humans who are worthy of this sort of thing.”
“It wouldn’t work. Believe me, I agree with you, and I want humans to survive. It’d put that smug bastard Apollo in his place, sure enough, curing all disease. But humans don’t work that way. You give them everything they want, and it just destroys who they are. If every human were immortal, there would be wars over resources; If only a select few were immortal, there’d be even worse wars. Humans have to mature into immortality. You can’t go interfering with them, you can’t just give them what they want. They have to earn it. Otherwise, they won’t ever really have it.”
“Is that why this is the first time I’ve seen any of you?” asked Harry, his voice soft. “You know what my life has been like, I presume.”
“Yeah. I watched. You survived.”
“Because of others. I kept thinking…” My dad was quiet for a moment.
He never talked about growing up. I’d learned a little bit more of the story since I had died and come back, but he’d always held his tongue. I knew that he’d been in Africa, which is where he’d met my birth mother. I remember her telling me stories about the two of them robbing a casino, or a club or a bar, or something- the details were never consistent- and then arriving at the States. Hermes finally spoke. “Why didn’t we help.”
“Not to put too fine a point on it,” said Harry.
“I know. I wanted to help. We all wanted to help. But we can’t. We… tried interfering. Tried getting involved. But we’re only… Well, not human, obviously. But we’re limited in the good that we can do, Harry. You think I didn’t want to help your son, to lead him out of Hades? Even Hades could only do that when he was given the right chance.” He turned towards us. “So. You kids want immortality?”
“I think I need to consider it more,” I said, and Isabelle and I set the apple down on the ground with the reverence that it deserved
Hermes was quiet for another moment as he approached a large, Italian-style villa. It reminded me of the ones we’d seen in Fiesole, standing atop a terrace, great grape vines growing up its sides, the walls immaculate white, the terra cotta roof tiles brilliant in the sun. “And if I may offer some advice… While you are here, try not to talk about Silas Nash. The subject is still a very sore one.”
With that, Hermes gave a brief bow at the door of the Villa, and was then off like a shot, sprinting down the hill with a speed that made it clear that he’d been going quietly mad with the pace of our walk. “What do you think he meant by that?” I asked, softly.
“Nash saved your life. Probably saved the lives of everyone in the city. But he was given power by War, he defied Hades and through him Zeus, and worst of all, he’s strong enough to scare them,” murmured Harry. “You’ll notice that if there’s one thing in myth that worries the gods, its mortals who can stand up to them.”
“He saved my life. He saved your life. He saved literally all of our lives. You’re not going to just let them think that he’s some villain, are you?” I stepped a little bit closer, and tried not to let the heat enter my voice. “You know, sooner or later, that he’s going to come here. And you know, if he does, and they treat him like he’s a monster, things are going to get unbelievably messy. We can’t just let them think that.”
“Of course we can’t,” said Megara, firmly. “We shall simply have to be…” She let a smile run over her lips. “Persuasive.”
A golden plaque was inscribed over the entrance to the villa; Villa diEracle. The five of us split up. The villa was large enough for at least a hundred people to avoid ever seeing each other. I found myself a room, and began to lay out my clothes there. The formal suit and tie seemed strangely silly, in light of what we’d seen the gods wearing, but it’d have to do. I set it out on the bed, and stared down at it for a moment. The first hint I had that someone else was there was when cool hands slid around my shoulders.
“Are you mad at me for staring?” asked Isabelle.
“No.” I smiled. “I mean, how often do you get to see gods nude? It’d probably be a shame if you didn’t peek. I know I’m going to be hoping to meet Aphrodite tonight, rowr.”
She slugged me in the shoulder, and chuckled. “Just be careful, you might run into Artemis instead.” She leaned against my back for a moment. “You’re angry.”
“Not at you, or Susan, or any of them.”
“I know. You’re angry at them.”
I sighed, and felt her arms tighten a little more around my shoulders. She was warm, and her head rested against my back, the scent of her perfume filling the air as she squeezed me a couple of times. “He saved me. You know? I still remember how it looked, when he arrived in the Asphodel, when he told me what happened, when he encouraged me to come back. He was an asshole, but in that kind of way that showed he cared. And he was the one who actually helped. He didn’t have to do any of what he did.”
“He’s frightening, Dean.” Isabelle was quiet for a moment. “I’m not sure you know how frightening. I’m not saying it’s right, he was the one who saved us, but… I can understand why he’d scare the people here. He scared me. He scared Susan. He’s… something else. You heard about that attack that they said he was responsible for, on the Secretary of the Treasury, last year. He might have gone bad.”
“I don’t believe that,” I said, and rested a hand on hers. “And I know you don’t, either.”
“No, I don’t. You’re right that he saved us.” Her voice dropped a little. “He saved Susan. She…” She shook her head. “Do you know that she tried to kill herself, on the rooftop?”
“I didn’t,”I murmured, and frowned. “She never told me.”
“She told me about it. She thought it was the only way to make things right, and he stopped her.” Isabelle was quiet for a second. I thought about the day before, when I’d found Susan on the rooftop. “She’s still guilty about what she did. I’ve tried to convince her that it wasn’t her, that it wasn’t her fault, that it was a manipulation. That she’s nothing like that. But…” Isabelle sighed, and sank down onto the bed. “It’s hard to get her to see sense sometimes. You know? She acts so cool about everything, but…” She rubbed at her eyes, and I noticed a little moisture on her fingers. I sat down beside her, and squeezed her gently. “I worry about her.”
“Maybe the two of you should spend a little more time together? I want to keep my father company tonight. The two of you could have an evening to yourself. I…” He frowned. “You know how it is. It can feel a little bit like I’m intruding sometimes, with you two. You’ve been friends for a long time. I don’t mind giving you your space for a bit.”
“I-” She was quiet for a moment, and then smiled. “I don’t think that’s what she needs. I don’t think that’s what I need, either, for that matter. But that might be what Harry needs. This sounds like it’s going to be kind of… tense.” She frowned down at the clothes on the bed. “I wonder if it’s more polite to be shaped like a human, or a snake, while I’m there.”
“Personally, I have always favored my true form. But that may mean something different for you than it does for me.”
The two of us turned. Megara stood in the doorway. She was dressed in a bright jade-green tunic, and her skin was a shade of pale blue, contrasting with the green. Her dark hair hung curled around her face, and her tail was the color of rust. It glittered in sunlight. A delicate skirt hung around her waist, concealing her modesty somewhat, the tail coiled behind her. Isabelle smiled, and bowed her head. “You look very lovely, Mrs. Drakos.”
“Echidna might be best here.” Mom smiled warmly. “And I know that you have been feeling some uncertainties about your body.” She paused for a moment. “In honesty, I do not know precisely how that would feel. I was born as I am; I have never been otherwise. But I know that I have seen it happen in my own children, when they were reborn. The clash between human and monster. The strangeness of the mix of sensations. The uncertainty of which side to embrace. I have seen them make every choice on the spectrum between the two. None of them have made a wrong choice, if you catch my meaning. Whatever you want to be, be it with conviction, and you will be fine.”
“That is… good advice, which I may find difficult to follow, Echidna.”
“Good advice always is. If all we needed to do was follow it, the world would be a simpler place.” She smiled. “Now, if I may. Dean, do you mind talking with your father? He’s in a pacing mood.”
“Oh, heck.” I stood up, and grabbed the clothes. “Yeah. I’ll see if I can help” I moved to step past Megara, and then stopped, halfway through the doorframe. I gave her a peck on the cheek, and squeezed her gently around the shoulders. “And you look great, Mom.”
“Go, go, there’s no need to make your girlfriend jealous,” murmured Megara, but she smiled as she did.
True to her words, dad was pacing in the large master bedroom. He looked over half a dozen ties, picking up one, and then another. “Dean. Your mother sent you here?”
“Yeah.” I looked over the ties. “I’m going to be honest, Dad, you could probably wear a lion skin and get away with it.”
“I should be so lucky as to have a lion skin on hand,” he murmured, checking himself in the mirror. Anything my father wore, no matter how well tailored, looked like it was about to tear apart at the seams if he moved too quickly. He tried the tie again, and again it came out like a mess. “Son, help.”
I stepped in front of him, and began to tie the tie. I frowned. “You’re really worried about this?”
“Just a touch.”
“Dad, you’re one of the greatest heroes of western mythology, finally returning home after conquering a literally millenia-old nemesis. I’m sure that they’re going to be thrilled with you.”
He nodded slowly. “Son… How do you call Megara mom?”
I frowned at that. “I’m… not quite sure what you mean.”
“I still remember Acanit. How do you not feel… disloyal? I know you wouldn’t do it if you thought it meant forgetting your mother. But…” He was quiet for a moment. “The only father I ever knew died, burning. Zeus was not there. He wasn’t there when Acanit died. He wasn’t there when I fought Megara. He hasn’t taken an interest in me for a long time. It’s…” He sighed. “It’s odd that I should ask you for advice on this, but the situation feels familiar. How do you acknowledge someone as family when you think of them as anything but? The man was never there for…” He paused, and looked over at me. “God, son. I was never there for you, was I?”
I squeezed his shoulder. “You were there for me when it really counted. And for mom… for Acanit. You were there for her when it really counted. But you couldn’t be there all the time.”
“I should’ve.”
“That’s not who you were. I was angry at you for that, for a long time. But… What’s the point of getting angry about those things? You were doing what you thought was right, and the fact that you cared was part of what she loved about you. I can be angry about that, or I can understand it, and appreciate it about you. That’s what you have to do with Zeus, I think. Understand him. He’s still the father of the gods. And either he’s someone who can be your father, or he’s not.” I paused. “And if he’s not, we should probably still be respectful.”
“Yes. That certainly adds a certain note of terror to the evening, doesn’t it?” Harry smiled warmly. “Well, we’ll just have to see if we can get through the evening without any faux pas.”
—
“I’m just saying! I’m just saying. I think they should wipe them all out.”
“Ah,” said Harry, delicately. “And who is this, again?”
Ares grunted. A tall, bellicose man, he was olive skinned, and energetic, his dark curly hair hanging around his face, dressed in armor. I wasn’t sure specifically what kind, but it was made of overlapping plates that didn’t look like the armor I’d seen in museums of Greek artifacts. “Whoever. I feel as though it’s fairly universal advice, really.”
“Ah,” said Harry, for lack of something better. I coughed into my hand, and Thor frowned. His shaggy red hair had been cut into something smoother and more stylish, framing his handsome, rough features.
“I don’t know. I mean, without a good agricultural group to raid, you wind up having to grow everything yourself. I think we can all live in peace, provided we have the occasional chance to indulge in a little pillage and slaughter.” Ares rolled his eyes visibly. “What, you disagree?!”
“No, no. I can just see how barbarians would think such things. Do all the fun of pillaging and taking, but when it comes to the hard work of holding…” He sighed. “No wonder your people became a bunch of slack-jawed egalitarian pacifists. When was the last time a Scandinavian nation fought a war of aggression?”
“Oh, yes, and the Italians and the Greeks have certainly been the scourge of the continent,” said Thor, smirking. “What was it? The only colonizing nation to ever lose a war to an African nation. That’s one for the history books, isn’t it? Ethiopia certainly gave you what for.”
“Ah,” said Harry, smiling. “My first wife was from Uganda, actually. Not quite neighbors, but close.” He paused as Thor and Ares looked askance at him.
“You seem different, Heracles,” said Ares.
“He IS different. You used to laugh a bit more. And…” Thor cast an eye towards Megara, and frowned. “Well, I understand how it is, attractive women and all, but… You’re much more into snakes than I remembered. Three of them?”
“Only one’s his,” said Ares. “The other two are with the boy. And someone’s got a taste for exoticism!” The war god roared with laughter, and slapped Dean’s arm with a carefully calculated force; Sufficient to sting, just short of dislocation. “Well, good on you, I say! No conquest like the conquest of love. Just because this soft Norseman’s got a phobia about snakes!” He elbowed Thor with a degree of violence that, when used on any mortal, would likely have crippled them for life, if not killed them outright.
“I think both of you,” said Harry, “should shut your goddamn mouths and think carefully about what you say about my wife.”
There was a very notable silence for several seconds. Then Ares laughed belligerently. “That’s more like it!” He prodded dad once very firmly in the chest. “It’s unsettling to see you acting all quiet and thoughtful! That’s more like the half-brother I know! Care for a drink? The ambrosia’s good tonight.”
“Oy, son,” said Thor, pointing, as Harry accepted the drink. “Looks like your girlfriend is looking for you. Don’t worry, your dad’ll keep for a minute. I want to hear about this story. Sounds like some good old-fashioned questing.”
I turned, and saw Isabelle, standing with a young woman. She smiled, and waved, and I approached the two. The hall was one of the Norse longhouses, smoky fires billowing, great racks of meat and bread and cheese and other foods, and an overabundance of something hideous, slightly bitter, and gelatinous that the older Norse gods attempted to force on others. I’d heard one of them refer to it as ‘lutefisk’, and after obligingly choking down one of the cubes, had sworn to myself to never again attempt to eat it, as it had roughly the consistency and flavor of snot. Instead, I grabbed a leg of some unknown but likely hoofed animal, scooping it onto a handy platter, and carried it over to the two.
The girl turned towards me, and nodded her head politely. “You must be Heracles’ son. I’ve been talking with Isabelle.” She held her hand up, almost reaching it out to shake, before suddenly withdrawing it. “Ah- sorry. My name is…” She paused for a moment, and frowned. “Artemis.”
“Artemis? The goddess?” I looked her up and down. The headphones around her shoulders, the rather punky black shirt and shorts. It appeared she was a fan of the Arch-Senators, too. She looked a bit pale to be Greek, and her hair was a messy, mousy brown. There was a distinct nerd vibe I got from her. “It’s an honor. But, uh, if I can say-”
“I wasn’t Artemis. These guys… a couple of hitmen, they murdered the original Artemis. Turns out that I won the qualifying match to be the new one. I was…” She concentrated, taking a deep breath. “Penelope. That’s the name. God, everyone here calls me Artemis, they treat me like Artemis, it gets really weird.” She frowned. “It’s nice to have new people here. People who don’t have this idea of what I should be. And, sorry about not shaking your hand. I get… weird, when I touch guys. It kind of… hurts.”
“That’s…” I searched for the right words. “That sounds like it sucks.”
“Yeah. Yeah.” She sighed, and then smiled. “But, I’m glad to have new people around here, anyway. And someone who’s my age. Actually my age. Like, even the kids here kind of get to be… timeless, you know?” She smiled. “I was like, 17 when this happened. Only a couple of years ago. I haven’t actually been home since then. Athena brought me here, told me that I wouldn’t be safe out in the wild, and, well, considering what happened to the last Artemis…”
“Does that happen often?” Isabelle asked, her voice kind and gentle, resting a hand on the girl’s shoulder. It seemed that she was able to make contact safely.
“No. Apparently I’m only the second god it’s happened to in, like… a century, at least. It had everyone here really worried for a while, but they say it’s going to be taken care of soon, so…” She shrugged. “They don’t really tell me a whole lot. I don’t know whether that’s personal or not. It’s just a pain in the ass.”
“I’ve been talking a bit with Penelope about my issues. It’s been… reassuring, really.”
“For me, too,” said Penelope, and smiled. “I, uh. If you’d like, tomorrow or something, I could show you a bit more of the island. There’s some interesting stuff. It’s actually about the size of like, Wales or something, though it doesn’t look like it. It gets all weirdly folded up.”
“Yeah,” I said, and smiled. “It’s good to meet you.” Then, I heard a voice from behind me. It was Susan’s.
“Fruit of the poisoned tree, hmmm?”
“Oh, shit,” I murmured, and turned. There, standing across from Athena, with one arm crossed over the other, holding a cup of mead in one hand, was Susan. She had her best ingratiating smile on, her expression warm and pleasant. It was the precise expression she always wore when she was being particularly venomous with someone. I began moving through the crowd.
“It is one of the natural logical progressions. Tainted deeds produce tainted ends. Like an illegal search and seizure, an act must be considered for its origin, its method, and its results; if any of those three are suspect, so too is the deed.”
“You don’t say.”
I elbowed past a Vanr who was setting down another rack of meats and cheeses, trying to accelerate without making it completely obvious.
“Well, it’s something you must consider for the rest of your life. The Horsemen are planners. Even without War’s power, you are perpetually tainted. Every action you take in the future, everything that you might accomplish, everything you might do, may simply be advancing the desires, the ideals, of a creature that is trying to destroy humanity. Your family. Who already has used you once to betray-”
I stepped in. “Begging your pardon, Athena Parthenos. I have someone to introduce Susan to. Begging your pardon-”
“And you, for example,” said Athena, her voice cool, devoid of any heat or passion, as though it was the most reasonable thing in the world, “should have died, along with your girlfriend.”
I froze, already turned away from her, my hands on Susan’s shoulders. Her expression had gone very still. “I apologize,” I said, keeping my tone even, respectful.
“I do not say this to be cruel. It would have been a simple solution to the pin that War created. She used the desire for your life, or the White Snake’s, on everyone. I believe that the young lady even proposed the solution. Making things right. If only that man had not tried to have it all, perhaps the world could have continued on.”
“You think he should have died-” began Susan, heat in her voice. I pulled her physically, shifting myself between her and Athena, and turned to face the woman.
“Why do you feel the need to say that?” I asked, my voice level, calm. I found that despite it all, I was very calm. I had died. I had seen the worst that could happen. And while Athena could be prideful, could do some foolish things, she was being very actively provocative. This was about something else. And it struck me that much like Susan, and Isabelle, and mom, and dad, she had something she needed to say, and she did not know how to say it openly. In that light, she was much less frightening. Still a bit frightening, but I didn’t feel any shaking in my stance as I faced her.
“Because there may come a time when you find yourself making the same choice,” said Athena. “Because of that selfishness, that refusal to let you die, we have been set down a course that will end, almost inevitably, with the death of most humans, and no small number of the gods. This place is a sanctuary. A place to wait out the end. And if the day comes when Silas Nash arrives at this place, I want to be sure you realize the consequences of mindless compassion. Because someone always pays a price for those decisions, those small mercies. A few short years of your lives were traded for the lives of countless billions. That is the weight that is on your shoulders.”
I felt the shudder run through Susan. I took a slow breath. I shouldn’t react. Should stay calm.
“It’s funny, that logic,” said Susan, and her voice was very calm and very clear. “You’ve been following it for a very long time. And you’ve wound up here, the whole city thing falling apart, and terrified that humans are going to finally start kicking you in the head. That’s it, isn’t it? The reason you’re so bothered by Nash. Because he can actually stand up to you, and your behavior for thousands of years was based on the idea that you weren’t responsible for your actions.”
A vein began to throb in Athena’s head, and her fingers rattled out a staccato beat on the shield slung by her side.
“Well, good news, because not everyone is as much of a heartless asshole as you.” Susan narrowed her eyes. “And you’re going to be really glad that people have compassion, someday soon.”
Athena took a step forward, and there was a fluttering of wings. A woman’s hand rested on her shoulder, a dark figure behind her clad in crow feathers. A spear hung loosely from one hand. Her hair was dark. Her eyes were dark. And her skin was pale as Isabelle’s, though their features were otherwise quite different. “Athena. You aren’t being provoked, are you?”
“No, Morrigan,” said Athena, her upper lip twitching once, very slightly. “You are alive now, boy. There is little point dwelling on the past. Not when there is the future to consider.” She turned sharply on her heel, and left at some speed, the dark feathered woman following her.
“What the hell was that about?” I murmured softly to Susan, as the party returned to its former vigor around us. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I understand where you’re coming from, just-” I let my hands stay on her shoulder, and gave her a squeeze. “You don’t have anything to prove, Susan. You know that, right?”
“Yes, I do,” she said, and then looked apologetic. “I’m sorry. Just… She got to me.”
I rested an arm around her shoulder, and she seemed somewhat warmed by that, pulling my hand down against her throat, pulling in a bit tighter against me as the two of us walked to join Penelope, and Isabelle. Penelope’s eyes were wide. “Are you nuts? You know what she does, right?”
“I’m pretty sure I’m already a deformed monster,” said Susan. “What’s she going to do?”
“I don’t really ask that question. There aren’t a lot of mortals around here, but…” Penelope shivered.
“I’d think it wouldn’t be so frightening to you. You’re their equal, aren’t you?” I asked, and then paused. “Right. They’re not exactly discriminate. I remember reading about a lot of sniping between the gods. They tiff, so one of them murders another’s lover.”
“That kind of thing, yeah.” Penelope sighed. “The Irish aren’t so bad, the Norse are even kind of friendly, but… It’s hard to let my guard down.” She looked at the crowd. “Athena can be… nice. But she can also be scary as hell. I can’t believe you stood up to her like that.”
“Prior experience,” murmured Susan. “God. Uh, I think I need to go be somewhere… else.” I nodded to Isabelle, who took Susan’s arm. “Oh, come on, guys, I don’t need a chaperone.”
“Actually, I was thinking that I wanted to talk with you a bit, with Penelope’s help. Dean, do you want to come along with us?”
“In a minute,” I said. “I need to check on my parents.” I smiled. “I’ll see you three later tonight, alright? Tomorrow, we can have a nice time together.” I gave a warm smile, and drifted away from them. Susan and Isabelle would do alright together. I wanted to let my parents know about the little encounter with Athena sooner, rather than later. I turned, and spotted them at the far end of the hall, talking with Zeus, and someone else.
“Ah, grandson,” said Zeus, smiling magnanimously. “I’m sorry about Athena. She’s been… Well, the only real word for it is bitchy. You understand how it can weigh on her to be cramped here in Avalon. She always dreamt of ambition and success. She’s worried about all of us, and she can occasionally be slightly callous in expressing that concern. If she should give you any more trouble in the future, you have only to mention it. I am still the sky god around here.”
Megara nodded softly. “Thank you. You can understand, it’s something of a shock.” She looked around the room. “In honesty, Zion was always much… closer to humanity, I suppose would be the way to put it. This feels much closer to the old world. I’m not entirely sure whether I find that comforting or odd, but it is good to know.” She paused for a moment. “Hera, mother-in-law-”
Hera raised an eyebrow. “Am I? I can never remember all the genealogies.”
“Through Typhon. At least in a few of the stories.”
“Oh, yes. I think I remember that. Seems like something you might have done,” said Zeus, a light smile on his face, even as he rubbed at his knee. “Certainly felt like your style.”
“Not at the party, dear,” said Hera, a weary expression on her face. “I can take your word for it, Echidna. What can I help with?”
“It’s… something of a personal matter.” Mom gave Harry a smile. “We’ll be back in a bit. Enjoy talking with your father.”
And then it was just the three of us, in an expanding circle of awkward silence.
“Son.”
“Zeus.”
“It would be too much to ask for a Father?” Zeus asked, a little hint of a plea in his voice. My dad was silent. “No. I understand. There is certainly some things to be answered for.”
“I understand… most things. Most of the things that you would’ve had to do. I’ve led men into battle. I understand that you can’t always hold their hands. But the thing that kept coming back to me was Echidna. Surely you knew about what she was doing. Millenia have passed, and there’s been no Hercules. I suppose… Why didn’t you interfere?”
“I…” Zeus sighed. “This may sound callous of me. But it was… a sacrifice, of sorts. She began her vengeance, sometime after Avalon was built. And I realized that she would keep doing it. She was twisted by hatred, and killing her wouldn’t change that. It would drive her further into the grasp of the Horsemen. By allowing her to go about her hunt, it… focused her. She was a monster, but one that could be overcome that way. In honesty… I hoped this would come about. That you would wind up taming her. It meant the lives of many decent men sacrificed. But that is, unfortunately, a frequent consequence of being a god.” His features hardened momentarily. “I won’t apologize for what I did. But I hope that you can recognize the act for what it was: One of faith in you. In your abilities, your compassion, and your nature. And I am glad that you, Harry Constantinou, became my son.” He crossed his arms. “I hope that you will stay here. I know it is not in your nature, but in these uncertain times, it would be a great comfort.”
There was a long quiet period in the conversation, as dad shifted uncomfortably in his jacket. Finally, he sighed. “Hell. That’s a pretty good reasoning. And I can’t say I was there enough for my own son, so I can’t be one to judge.” He gave me a brief, apologetic smile before turning his gaze back to Zeus. “So you’re not bothered by the fact that I’ve married the mate of your nemesis? The one who tore your tendons out, and all of that?”
“Honestly, son, and don’t tell Hera or your wife about this, but I consider it something of a point of pride.” Zeus smiled. “I know I have a few bad habits in my history. But I’m glad to see you putting them to good use. You two are in love?”
“I think so, yes. I hadn’t really expected it, but…”
“Then I feel at least that I did not do the wrong thing. I’m proud of you, son.”
“Thanks.” Harry frowned. “I don’t know if I can call you father. Not quite yet. But… I’m glad that I could meet you, at least.”
And that, it seemed, was sufficient to end the night on a positive note. The two of us made the trip back to the villa, the sun set, the moon slowly rising. It was full, and I got the distinct impression that it was always full in Avalon, casting a silvery light that somehow managed to illuminate as well as the sun had during the day. The villa was quiet as we arrived, and I made my way to my own room. Neither Susan nor Isabelle was there, which made me feel slightly uneasy, but I trusted them to be well wherever they were, and lay down in the bed. It was lonely, without either of them there. I’d grown surprisingly used to having their company most of the time. I closed my eyes, and despite the hollow loneliness, I was asleep in a handful of minutes.
The sound of scales awoke me, the gentle but unmistakable rustle. I opened my eyes, and yawned, blinking. “You okay?”
“Somewhat,” said Megara, her voice soft. She stood in the room. Beside her, Hera stood, tall, imperious, her expression mixed. “I am sorry to disturb you, son. I needed someone along to see me, and… no one else seemed quite appropriate. Do you mind joining me? We will not be long, but it would help a great deal to have you with me.”
I nodded, and rubbed my eyes. I was still dressed in the shirt and tie. “Do you want me to change, or anything?” I briefly looked to the side, at Hera, who was looking more than a little bit nervous. “Is this dangerous?”
“Not quite,” said mom, and she sighed. “I am afraid that this is dangerous only on the emotional level. There are loose ends that need to be tied up. We’re going to Tartarus.”

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