a natural history of dragons ch 20 - THE END

Ch 20 pg 273

One of the boyars comes and tells them they've been invited to hang out at their fancy hunting lodge.  He brought horses like they were just gonna jump on and go.  But they've got stuff to pack and servants to bring along.  So they're gonna stay another night amd head out tomorrow.

Ch 21 pg 280

They go out and do some hunting.  They are attacked by a dragon.

Ch 22 pg 290

EVERYTHING happens in this chapter.   Narrator goes snooping around with her maid and finds a chemical factory that they're using to preserve dragon bones.  Their million dollar idea is to sell it as construction material.   They killed the guy that arranged for them to come Here cause he was interfering with the smugglers.  The bad guy has a knife and he's probably intending to kill narrator and maid.  But narrator's husband comes down the stairs and he gets the stabbing instead and maid smashes a jar.over bad guy's head.

Ch 23 pg 307

Jacob dies, they go to the ruins again to see what they are smuggling there.  They figure out they're not smuggling something in.  They find more rubies and they think the ruins are a ruby mine and by law those should be the tzar's rubies, so the bad guy is smuggling them out to be sold.  If they tell the tzar about this maybe he will care.  But then the bad guys show up.  Narrator thinks she sees a dragon flying overhead and her idea is to run away and the bad guys will shoot at her and the noise will draw in the dragon and maybe it will kill the bad guys and they can get away.  A dragon does come and the bad guys kill it but it kills some of them.

Ch 23 pg 321

Another dragon comes along and kills the rest of the bad guys.  They go home to England 🇬🇧  and narrator sells a ruby and sends the.money back to the Romanians she likes.  Also, old man tells her the next expedition is to Africa 🌍  and she can go if she wants.  

Lady Trent will return in the Tropic of serpents.

leviathan falls ch 35 to the end

Chapter Thirty-Five: Alex

Cara isnt happy about not communing with the big diamond anymore and she punches Amos. It's a little scary how hard it is. Might have killed a normal person. But Amos is a big zombie. Teresa talks to Alex about her existential dread. She's scared to see her dad. Alex tries to convince her it'll be good cause he's her dad and he loves her. Teresa has some baller child abuse statistics. Also everything is scary. Alex should have sent a message to Kit by now but hasn't cause he's scared he'll say the wrong thing.

Chapter Thirty-Six: Jim 

They're all in the slow zone thinking of what to try to say to get Duarte to come out of his egg ship thing 

“It’s me, Dad. It’s Teresa."

He doesn't respond.

Now we're just waiting and trying out different sensors.

Then Tanaka shows up.

Chapter Thirty-Seven: Tanaka 

As much as Tanaka wants to kill everyone,  she's duty bound to her mission.  The plan ends up being her and Teresa trying to go into the station, with the theory that Duarte is inside.

Chapter Thirty-Eight: Elvi 

Sao Paulo, isn't that where Rico from stormship troopers is from?

This hive mind thing is happening all over the place.

Amos is try8ng to "talk" to Duarte.   It goes badly.  He starts screaming and they can't seem to bring him out.  Elvi leaves to try something with Cara and Xan.

Interlude: The Dreamers 

Amos tries to get into the station and finds only pain.   Ut he doesn't die.

Chapter Thirty-Nine: Jim 

MILLER IS BACK!!!!

Chapter Forty: Naomi 

Good news, with Miller back Jim can get Tanaka and Teresa into the station. Bad news is Duarte has pretty much taken over the rest of the world 🌎  by which I mean humanity and that includes the one remaining ship with the super weapon.

Chapter Forty-One: Jim 

They go into the station.   There's a lot of angst and they don't get much done.

Chapter Forty-Two: Alex 

They're fighting what I'm now calling the zombie space fleet. Some of it.goes ok, most of it goes bad.

Chapter Forty-Three: Jim 

They find daddy

Chapter Forty-Four: Teresa 

Duarte is kinda attached to the station via a bunch of wierd cables and what not. I'm imagining it as him floating in the middle of a hige chamber.  It would probaly look all borgey plus blue glow if it were on the show.  Holden says its kinda like how Julie Mao had been overcome woth the protomolecule goop.  Teresa tries to talk to.him and when that doesn't work she flies up to him. She starts ripp9ng cables out and it doesn't help.  A bunch of protomolecule insect guards start coming for them. Man, this whole thing feels kinda hopeless.

Chapter Forty-Five: Naomi 

The hopelessness is just as bad outside the station.  The zombie ships are coming in from every gate and she just keeps sending people on suicide missions to give Holden, Teresa and Miller more time.  Additionally,  duarte's hive mind invasion is super bad.  Fun bit from the book...

She had the impression that engaging with the other thoughts and memories, even to fight against them, made them stronger. The best she could manage was to let them rise up in her and fall away,

This is the instruction one gets for random thoughts that pop up in meditation 🧘‍♂️ 🙏 

I've heard the same thing said of people trying to deal with suicidal ideation,  but I can't speak to the usefulness of that.

The magnetar class ship has come through.  All hope is.lost.  Naomi sends  out the order to shoot out all your guns at it and run away.  Then the strangest thing happens.  The hive mind thing kinda stops.  Elvi sends out a broadcast message telling everyone to chill.  It seems like things might be good for like one second.  But then the Goths start doing things again cause Duarte and the hive aren't stopping them from doing so.

Chapter Forty-Six: Tanaka 

Tanaka kills Duarte and I think dies for her efforts.

Chapter Forty-Seven: Jim 

Jim reconnects to the station like Duarte was connected.  He gets the urge to create the hive mind, finish what Duarte started.  He resists the temptation.   But he figures out how to keep the goths at bay.

He learns that the station is a torn hole into the Goth universe and its powered by sucking their power.  It's akin to a leech sucking on a person except there's no natural numbing agent so it hurts the goths real bad.  That's why they're so desperate to destroy the source of their pain, in this case all of humanity.   Holden realizes the solution is to shut down the station,  which will stop hurting the goths.  The downside to this is all the ring gates will close.  So Holden tells Amos to “Tell Naomi to evacuate the ring space. Get everybody out. And wherever you go, be ready to stay there."

He opens up a passage for Teresa to go back to the Roci.

Chapter Forty-Eight: Alex 

They're all doing repairs to get ship shape before leaving the ring space.  Thyre gonna go back to sol space.  Alex can't,  he's gotta go to where his kid is.

Chapter Forty-Nine: Naomi and Jim 

Jim shuts it down after every ship has left the ring space.  Naomi's sad.  They're all sad.  Teresa is traumatized. But life goes on.

Epilogue: The Linguist

In the future they've figured out a way to do something that seems like ring gate travel without the ring gates and a guy named Martell has made his way back to earth.  It's relatively sparsely populated these days.  I guess it's a thousand years or so in the future because the earth man Martell talks to says it’s been a rough millennium.  Then he introduces himself as Amos Burton.  So I guess being reconstructed by the repair bot on Laconia made him practically immortal. 

a natural history of dragons ch 10 - 19

Ch 10

The meeting with the smugglers goes well and they have caves marked on the map to inves the dragons.

Ch 11

They find a dragon and they kill it and narrator draws a picture of it.

Ch 12

Narrator and old man gi w8th a local guide to a ruin with a big statue of a humanized dragon.  She finds a ruby and a smugglers cave.

Ch 13

The locals have found out about their trip to the ruins and they're ready to spirituality delouse them cause the ru9ns are a cursed place and they can't be allowed to return to the village woth that bad juju.

Ch 14

Narrator hears a scary monster sound when shes in the sauna.  They find monster tracks that also have burn marks.  Like a hell hound or something cool m ke that.

Ch 15 pg 202

Theres a fun still ry about a king 👑 that made a deal with a demon to become a dragon.  Story is he became a dragon but with a human face and i gurss he attacks cursed people.  So the tram needs to be uncursed by bathing in a freezing cold waterfall.

Ch 16 pg 219

Narrator notices that all the dragon caves form a circle on the map.  She has a theory that maybe theres an alpha dragon that lives in the middle of the circle.  She asks her maid uf she knows anything about the area in the middle of the circle.  She just says its too rocky so nobody goes there.  Narrator tells her shes gonna go there.  Narrator 's maid says, take my brother with you.

Ch 17 pg 226

They go to the middle of the circle a d they find a big cravass and they climb down into it and they find a big cave and the big cave is a dragon graveyard.

Ch 18 pg 244

Halford comes back and they really him about the dragon graveyard.   He says he must go see it.   But maybe after a couple days of rest.  But there's and angry mob of villagers demanding they leave case they're cursed.  Narrator gets the idea that maybe the curse is real and it was caused by her taking the ruby.  So she asks her maid to take her there.  She does so and they see a bunch of smugglers. Narrator is thinking now maybe there is no curse and all this spooky stuff is cause by these smugglers.

Ch 19 258

Turns out the guy doing the scam is the guy thst toook them to the ruins in the first place.

leviathan falls ch 18 through 34

Chapter Eighteen: Jim 

They decide to refuse the offer.  Unfortunately the Houston lady disagrees and shuts down their ship and sends the former laconian destroyer to talk to the laconians. 

Chapter Nineteen: Kit 

We got a lot of wedded new baby bliss going on here.  But then it is ruined when r

Rohi tells Kit that the San Esteban system has been blinked out of existence. 

Chapter Twenty: Elvi

There's not a lot of useful progress here.

 Interlude: The Dreamer 

I think I get it, this is Cara trying to communicate with the giant diamond that's a protomolecule alien hard drive.  She's trying to learn about the gates.  But there's another presence,  I'm thinking it's Duarte and he wants to know where they have the weapon they tried to use to kill the goths. 

Chapter Twenty-One: Tanaka

Tanaka goes to the rebel base to get Teresa.   She's wearing a power suit.  When she's greated by Jillian Houston instead of Naomi Nagata she is not pleased and after a bit of talking starts killing people but lets Jillianrun away.  Her plan is simple, follow Jillian as she's probably running toward Teresa. 

 

Chapter Twenty-Two: Jillian 

She releases the Roci so they can run away to fight another day.  She gets on the storm and goes to kill the other laconian ship.  

Chapter Twenty-Three: Jim 

A space ship going as fast as it can is no place for an old man.  

Even though he’d been crewed up with her for almost a year.  Time is wierd.  It's weirder when you're reading a book where theoretically long periods of it go by while people are traveling long distances in space.  The closest thing we've had to show us time's passing is that Teresa had her 15th birthday on Laconia and her 16th birthday on the Roci.

Chapter Twenty-Four: The Lighthouse and the Keeper 

It's a fun mixup of little stories here.  One Bout Tanaka scheming to catch the Roci.  One Bout a ship making their way through ring space to Bara Gaon.  Jim has a few paragraphs where Amos tells him they gotta go see Elvi.  Kit and his baby and his doom scrolling wife go dutchman, but for the first time we see them come out the other side.  The roci makes it through to Elvi's system.  Tanaka is in the slow zone when things go all weird. 

Chapter Twenty-Five: Tanaka 

So Kit's ship didn't make It to whatever is on the other side of going dutchman'd.   It sorta undutchmand.

Also there was a blip event where everyone was in everyone else's minds and Tanaka is worried that everyone knows her private business.  Her announcement to the crew declares that these were all hallucinations.  Trejo tells her to get back to work finding Duarte. She has no idea where the Roci went but their best guess based on ring gate activity is Bara Gaon.  I feel like somehow this is going to cause a lot of suffering for the ship in the previous chapter that went there.

Chapter Twenty-Six: Jim 

They get to Elvi without incident.

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Elvi 

They talk about what's going on without incident and Cara and Amos are gonna go in together and try to talk to Duarte.

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Tanaka 

Tanaka is losing her mind.  She realizes this is a problem and schedules a psyche eval.

Chapter Twenty-Nine: Jim 

Jim is hanging out with Fayez a lot cause neither of them really have much to do but wait for their women to do the real work.  

Interlude: The Dreamers 

This is basically a talk between Amos and Duarte.   He says we can use the weapon the Roman's built to keep the goths out of.our universe but f9rst we gotta become a hive mind.

Chapter Thirty: Elvi 

DUARTE IS IN THE HOUSE!!!!

Maybe it was Elvi talking to Duarte the whole time.  Everyone in the lab saw Duarte.  She reads through Tanaka's briefings about the blip where everyone was in everyone else's minds and it feels like bullshit she's spewing cause she can't handle the truth.  Amos comes in and tells Elvi that the Black eye experiments are over in that you do what I want or you die way that is just so Amos.

Fur true true, I kinda hope Elvi kills Amos.

Chapter Thirty-One: Tanaka 

The psyche eval goes surprisingly well.  Tanaka went a whole other day without trying to kill someone.  Then she gets drunk and takes the pills she was prescribed.   Then comes a message from Mr science.  We found Duarte's ship.  It's at the ring gate station. 

Chapter Thirty-Two: Kit 

His kid is in the emergency room.  The doctor knows it's part of the incident and there's a standing order to send anything incident related to Laconia, but the doc is a fan of Alex's so he doesn't do that.  But everyone is scared all the time. They're losing their minds as more frequently their thoughts are not their own vut from someone else that's was involved in the incident. 

Chapter Thirty-Three: Naomi 

We are all lost like raindrops falling into an ocean.

Naomi takes Trejo's offer.  Trejo sends back a super angry acceptance message and also Duarte's location. 

Chapter Thirty-Four: Tanaka 

There's lots of drugs that can inhibit this shared .ind thing.  Tanaka goes to the hospital and gets all of them.  Also the therapist she saw tells her that she's now sharing memories with Tanaka.   So this thing that Duarte did is spreading.  She's gonna try to go to Duarte and make it stop.

leviathan falls ch 1 through 17

Prologue 

BEST 

PROLOGUE 

EVER

It's from Duarte's point of view from just before he lost his mind to him killing evil scientist with his new powers to slowly regaining his mind. 

DUARTE'S BACK!!!

He uses his psychic powers to find Teresa.   He sees she's OK and moves on.

He reaches out to Trejo and talks to him with his psychic powers.  Trejo tells the crew to get their asses back to Laconia. 

Chapter One: Jim 

The laconians are gaining traction 9n controlling other ring systems.  Their ships are basically unbeatable so it only takes one to come into the system, blow up the resistance communications and tell everyone that they are in charge. 

That's what they do in the system that Holden is in.  They identify a ship and broadcast out to everyone that they need to power down and be boarded.   They decide to run instead. Good for them.

They talk about their options.  Should they run since the laconian ship isn't currently after them?  Should they get. Ready to fight?  Naomi says no.  There's an ice hauler in this system that's a rebel ship and they're gonna go to that ship and hang out.

Chapter Two: Tanaka 

Tanaka is a female in the Laconian navy.  She vapes and has sex with younger much lower ranked men.  6

Chapter Three: Naomi 

She did stuff and went through the ring gate.  Amos is having a seizure. 

Chapter Four: Elvi 

Elvi and the zombie children are doing science.  She gets the call we've been waiting for about duarte.

Chapter Five: Tanaka 

Tanaka doesn't have sex in this chapter.   She's looking for Duarte in a super suit that's got the most advanced sensor system there is.  Sshes effectively hunting him by scent.  She ends up in Amos's cave hide out and makes her way to a big cave that has a bunch of repair drones doing their while repair deal.  Mostly they take broken things and dump them in protomolecule goo pits.  She finds Duartes scent again and follows it to a spot where she sees things that look like eggs in nests.  Science people tell her it's a ship.  So she's pretty sure Duarte took that ship somewhere.   Also those ships are untraceable.   So unless someone just happened to see an egg flying through space she's up a creek.  So her next thought is that Duarte might be searching for his daughter.   So that's what she's gonna do.  Find Teresa and hopefully find Duarte. 

Chapter Six: Naomi 

They find a message torpedo and read all the messages.  Mostly underground political stuff.  But one from Alex's son tells him he's gonna be a grandpa and that he's moving to some other system for work.  Funnest thing is a message for Teresa that's says admission approved for fall semester.   So either she'll go to school and won't be part of the plot anymore or we'll get a back to school viewpoint or maybe fall us a ways away and we won't even get there in this book.

Chapter Seven: Jim 

Teresa isn't overly enthusiastic about going to school.  She needs time to think about it.   Amos is doing fixes and Jim likes to spend as much time with him as he can cause he's the only one that understands that the Goths are going to kill them all.  Alex is psyched about being a grand PA and wants to send a message to his son.  Teresa comes around on the school thing.  So the plan us to pop over to the sol system for a minute to send a message to Alex's son, drop off Teresa at school and find a place to resupply. 

Interlude: The Dreamer 

They say I'm a dreamer...

I have no idea whats happening here.

GREG, explain it to me in the comments.

Maybe this is the perspective of their wierd overly protomoleculed precog lady. 

Chapter Eight: Elvi 

There's lots of science talk in here.  Cara can kinda get messages from the giant diamond that works like a HUGE memory drive and Elvi kinda gets the theory that what it's trying to tell her is the biological history of the protomolecule makers.  The theory so far is that they initially evolved from animals that were deep sea creatures that got their energy from volcanic vents.  Also that their planet was frozen at the time.  Fayez is very frustrated by this cause it's nice to learn but it's nor gonna help them against the Aliens that killed the aliens that made the protomolecule. 

Chapter Nine: Kit 

Alex's kid seems like a good dude.  He's really trying to live life family first in a way that his parents and his wife's parents (2 moms, I love how in the future that's just a thing and not a big deal) claimed they wanted to be but ended up putting career ahead of family and didn't quite make it work.  They go out to dinner and his wife suggests they don't do this job that puts them on a spaceship for a year before they get to a planet with gravity.  Instead she said delay a year so the baby can grow his first year on Mars and avoid a lot of the developmental problems that babies that grow up in low/no G environments have.  The thing she's kinda h8nting at but not saying is that s8nce this is Kit's job, he could go without them.  Kit smashes that train of thought immediately.   Whatever they do, they're gonna do together.

Chapter Ten: Fayez 

Lots of science talk.  None of it means anything to me.  All of it reconfirms Amos's knowledge that the aliens that killed the aliens that created the protomolecule are gonna kill all of humanity. 

Chapter Eleven: Teresa 

Sohag Presbyterian Academy.  Sounds like something from a H P Lovecraft book.

Doesn't matter, when they get there Tanaka is already there. She already figured out that they'd take Teresa to the planet with her only living relative.  There's a lot of talking and then the ground starts to rumble.

Chapter Twelve: Tanaka 

Tanaka was feeling good about this situation as Holden's crew is wearing light armor and her crew is in super advanced laconian armor.  But the roaring is the Roci and it easily kills her crew with rounds designed to punch holes in spaceships.  Holden and Amos get Teresa back to the Roci, but Tanaka has super air and runs faster than them.  She tells Holden to give up Teresa and move along.  Amos punches her in the head and after some fun power armor.on zombie fighting Holden shoots her in the chest three times.   He thinks she's dead,  which gives her enough time to shoot Amos in the chest.  She's about to shoot Holden, but then she gets hit in the head again and I assume loses contiousness.

Interlude: The Dreamer 

Maybe this is what Cara is going through as she counts with the giant diamond 💎  that stores the combined knowledge of the protomolecule aliens.

Chapter Thirteen: Jim

They get off the planet but Tanaka's ship comes after them.  They tell them a lot if lies about coming only for Teresa and then they shoot a bunch of missles at them.  So that's a bummer.  But they put a rail through the laconian ship and that appears to have stopped them.  Or they're playing dead like Tanaka did.  Guess we'll find out in chapter 15.

Also, Amos isn't dead.  It just took a while for whatever is in him to repair the hole that Tanaka made.

Chapter Fourteen: Elvi 

Cara wakes up screaming that she's been shot.  She must be connected to Amos.

Lots of other fun science talk.   Her second in command, Lee, informs her morale is down and she should talk to the crew.  She needs sleep and she doesn't know what to say.

Chapter Fifteen: Teresa 

Teresa is having a cool dream.  Her dad uses his psychic powers to tell her everything is going to be ok.  She doesnt know that, she just thinks it's a dream.  Someone comes in and tells her its food o'clock.  Its her birthday 🎂and they made her a cake and they sing and she blows out candles and its neat.  They are running away from new Egypt and they've decided to run to freehold.  Whhen they get there they see a laconian ship.  So this is bad.

Chapter Sixteen: Tanaka 

Tanaka is still alive, but she's messed up.su0er bad.  The medic on the planet suggests she stay there a couple weeks rather than going on another high G trip.  She doesn't care.  She's going after the roci.  Problem is she doesn't know where they are.  She gets a message from Trejo saying he thinks they're in freehold.  She sets a course for free hold.

Chapter Seventeen: Naomi

The destroyer in the freehold system is se dong out a message that they know the storm is here and if they don't surrender soon they're going to start killing civilians. To make matters worse tanakas ship shows up.  Fun twist,  its broadcasting a message from Trejo to Naomi suggesting an alliance.