Rusty Fears 6 - The Telescope Game by Ian Martinez-Hay

Coach, the energy out there felt different.

What changed for the team today?

It was the new game day scratchers from the California Lottery.

Play is everything.

Those games sent the team's energy through the roof.

Are you saying it was the off-field play that made the difference on the field?

Hey, a little play makes your day, and today it made the game.

That's all for now.

Coach, one more question.

Play the new Los Angeles Chargers, San Francisco 49ers, and Los Angeles Rams Scratchers from the California Lottery.

A little play can make your day.

Please play responsibly, must be 18 years or older to purchase play or claim.

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Hi, everyone.

It's Billy Hindle, the voice of Alice in the Magnus Protocol.

Today, I'm here to advertise Frights by Fire, a new storytelling and horror anthology podcast that recently launched on the Archie Network.

Frights by Fire is a weekly community-driven series bringing immersive sound design to live performances of spooky stories provided by the audience.

Created and hosted by Jonathan Magno, creator of The Grotto, and Jamie Petronas, creator of The Seller Letters.

Join Jonathan, Jamie, and special guests by the fire as they bring horror tales written by their community to life.

Episodes are filled with frights, fun, and the fumbles that only performing in front of a live online audience can bring.

Search for Frights by Fire wherever you listen to your podcasts, or go to www.thereedactedunit.com or www.rustyquill.com for more information.

Have fun and see you later.

The Telescope Game by Ian Martinez-Hay

Mark and his daughter, Andy, played the telescope game together on their back balcony, peering up through the ancient telescope Mark had bought secondhand at a pawn shop down the street.

It perched overhanging their fifth floor apartment railing, a broad squat tube with huge bronze knobs.

At first, Andy's small hands could barely fit around the knobs and she would make a sweeping motion with her arms to ask Mark to coax the image into focus.

The telescope game was simple.

Andy would point the telescope at the latest celestial body she was enamored with, then, after peering through the filmy lens long enough to get it focused, she would declare that they had locked on, Captain!

Mark would make a hummmmm as they were teleported together to the planet's surface.

Then, Andy would describe exactly what they were seeing and feeling on the planet.

On Venus, the roiling clouds hung overhead as acid rain pelted their suits.

On Mars, their step was light and the thin atmosphere barely carried the sound of their voices.

And on Jupiter, they flew through through the clouds of the endless storm, tossed and tumbled by the centennial winds.

Andy and Mark would act out collecting samples, exploring craters on moons, and, if they were pushing the telescope to its limits, initiating first contact with aliens on faraway stars.

Andy became obsessed with astronomy at a young age.

After her class at a module about the solar system, she came home starry-eyed, declaring that she wanted to be an astronaut.

She had passed through other obsessions at this point, dinosaurs when she wanted to be a paleontologist, horses when she wanted to be an equestrian, Mark still wasn't sure where she had learned the word equestrian, but her obsession with astronomy was different.

Instead of petering out after a few weeks of scattered interest, her passion only grew as time passed.

Mark bought Andy books about the solar system, then each of the planets and eventually textbooks about the structure of the universe.

Months after her class moved on from the stars, Andy could only imagine one present for her birthday.

That was when Mark bought her the telescope.

Andy's fascination with the stars deepened into a love for learning, driven by her desire to see the cosmos for herself.

When she was just nine, she could quote facts about Einstein's general relativity theory and the speed of light.

Her obsession gave her a zest for her homework that Mark had never had as a child.

She told him that she would have to get very good grades to become an astronaut.

Mark worried for Andy.

At first, his worries were expressed through a concern that her obsession could alienate his daughter from her classmates who were beginning to develop the social dynamics that would exclude someone so obsessed with a specific topic.

And this happened as Andy turned 11.

Mark would sometimes try to suggest indulging more age-appropriate interests to improve her situation.

But Andy brushed off these suggestions, yelling, no, telescope game,

in response to the dolls and sports equipment Mark Pro offered.

Eventually, Mark thought that his suggestions sank in on some level.

To prepare herself for the physical demands of astronaut training, Andy took up soccer and started making connections through her team, which allayed Mark's fears about her social development.

As Andy grew older, her discussions of space grew less abstract and more realistic about the path that she would take.

Being an astronaut was a rare and difficult thing, but she thought starting at an early age gave her a leg up in achieving that lofty goal.

But this change only pushed Mark's mind to further reaching concerns.

He worried about the discrimination she would face as a woman in a science field.

He worried that she would get discouraged as her dreams seemed further away, as high school and then college and then training would bring their own particular challenges that could beat her down.

He believed in and supported her, he thought, but he still worried that the system would find her lacking in some way, that she would be locked out of her dreams.

Then where would she be?

The telescope game invited Mark into other, more visceral fears that formed a stew with the abstract ones.

Although the lens of Andy's excitement obscured it, The landscapes and situations she described during the telescope game were always rich with dangers.

To be an astronaut was to enter the most inhospitable place that a human could go, with only a flimsy suit between themselves and certain death.

The wondrous vistas she described in the game were filled with dangers that he could not imagine that his daughter, who he had held so fragile in his hands when she was born, could survive.

These worries preyed upon Mark's mind after the telescope was packed away in its old leather case and he lay in bed with moonlight streaming in under his curtains.

Sometimes, he wished that they lived somewhere less rural so that stargazing wasn't quite so easy and maybe Andy's interests would turn somewhere safer.

But the ideation was strangled by the wave of guilt he felt as he realized the implications of that longing.

He wanted his daughter to feel confident and supported in whatever she decided to do with her life.

It was wrong for him to want to dissuade her from being an astronaut because it scared her dear old dad.

In fifth grade, Mark took Andy to Arizona to tour the desert desert where NASA simulated moon walks.

Beyond the plaque that commemorated the first moon landing stretched endless miles of black volcanic rock.

As Mark and Andy hiked together, he involuntarily had a vision of all the air being sucked away from the surface, and their bodies slowly falling to the ground in one-sixth gravity.

He unconsciously held his breath as he replayed the vision in his head.

until he was broken out of his trance by Andy tripping on the craggy rocks as she bounded up ahead.

Where they they stood had been trod by countless astronauts, some of who had died trying to get to the moon.

Others had gone all the way there, left footprints in the lunar dust, and returned safely to the soil.

Mark tried to focus on these survivors as he sucked in the dry desert air.

Now twelve years old, Andy's hands were large enough to grasp and turn the knobs of the telescope on her own, but she still expressed childish joy in playing the telescope game.

Mark's worries had fermented fermented into a stew of tepid disapproval and guilty support.

That summer, she wanted to spend seven weeks away at a junior astronaut camp.

Her latest planetary obsession was Neptune and its moon, Titania.

Mark arrived home late one cold February evening.

Over dinner, Andy told Mark that she someday wanted to be a part of a manned mission to Titania.

Mark tentatively questioned if they would have the technology in her lifetime, a common argument he employed.

He did not express his horror that Andy would want to go to an icy rock almost 2 billion miles away from the Earth.

Andy responded, with familiar frustration, that it was possible, and the technological gap between Mars and other planets would be easier to cross than the current gap between the Moon and Mars that manned missions currently faced.

Mark decided not to press the issue into a fight tonight.

He smiled awkwardly and said that maybe she would be the first person to walk on Titania's surface.

Then, Andy went on to tell him how the thin carbon dioxide atmosphere of Titania wouldn't even carry sound, and that there was liquid water deep under the moon's crust, and that maybe there were tiny microbes living up on Titania right now, whose ancestors she could study in her spaceship laboratory.

She wished she could be there right now, to see it all.

As Mark was washing the dishes after dinner, he secretly hoped the talk of Neptune was over for tonight.

He didn't know if he was up to wrestling with the contradictions in his fears after a long day of work.

When Andy came in and set the old leather case that held the telescope on the kitchen table, he struggled to suppress a groan.

He briefly wished he could be somewhere else.

Come on, Dad, she said.

Just a few minutes.

Neptune is visible early tonight.

Mark begrudgingly unpacked the telescope as Andy went back to her room to collect her notes on Neptune.

His mind briefly wandered to a job in the city he had seen online a few days ago as he gingerly unwrapped the tube.

Guilt shot through his gut like an electric shock.

He took the telescope outside.

Since he was tired, Mark hoped he could sit back while Andy did the heavy lifting of aiming and adjusting the telescope and acting out the telescope game.

He set up the worn bronze tripod and screwed in the knobs that attached the huge telescope to it.

The telescope hung heavy, just over the lip of the railing.

Mark peered down through the lens to make sure it didn't need cleaning, and saw through it a stretch of road, a few blocks from his apartment.

Then, with a hummmmm in his ear, he was suddenly standing in that stretch of road.

He jumped onto the sidewalk and shook his head, disoriented.

He looked back at his apartment.

He didn't know how it was true, but the telescope had teleported him like they had pretended it could do all those years.

A yawning pit of dread opened in his stomach, and his legs involuntarily began a desperate sprint back towards his apartment building.

He was yelling for Andy, but he didn't know if she could hear.

As he approached, his eyes flew up to their balcony, and he saw that the telescope still lay limp, pointed to the ground.

Andy was nowhere in sight.

He burst into the lobby, and the desk attendant watched as he first dashed to the elevators, then backtracked to the stairs.

He took them three at a time, his heart beating erratically.

He didn't know if he had ever moved so fast in his entire life.

He got to his apartment door, but realised he didn't have the key.

He started pounding at the door, yelling for Andy to stop, to not go to the telescope, to not look to the sky.

There was no response.

He busted down the door with a kick, desperation driving him with a whip and tore through the living room, eyes scanning for Andy until he got a view of the balcony.

The ancient telescope sat upright, not leaned on the railing,

but pointing to the starry void above.

The Magnus Protocol is a podcast distributed by Rusty RustyQuill and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 4.0 international license.

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Thanks for listening.

Coach, the energy out there felt different.

What changed for the team today?

It was the new game day scratchers from the California Lottery.

Play is everything.

Those games sent the team's energy through the roof.

Are you saying it was the off-field play that made the difference on the field?

Hey, a little play makes your day, and today it made the game.

That's all for now.

Coach, one more question: Play the new Los Angeles Chargers, San Francisco 49ers, and Los Angeles Rams Scratchers from the California Lottery.

A little play can make your day.

Please play responsibly, must be 18 years or older to purchase, play, or claim.

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Hi, everyone, it's Billy Hindle, the voice of Alice in the Magnus Protocol.

Today, I'm here to advertise Frights by Fire, a new storytelling and horror anthology podcast that recently launched on the Archee Network.

Frights by Fire is a weekly community-driven series bringing immersive sound design to live performances of spooky stories provided by the audience.

Created and hosted by Jonathan Magno, creator of The Grotto, Grotto, and Jamie Petronas, creator of The Seller Letters.

Join Jonathan, Jamie, and special guests by the fire as they bring horror tales written by their community to life.

Episodes are filled with frights, fun, and the fumbles that only performing in front of a live online audience can bring.

Search for frights by fire wherever you listen to your podcasts, or go to www.thereedactedunit.com or www.rustyquill.com for more information.

Have fun and see you later.