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Johnny Payne

Vampire Girl: Chapters 23-27

Read Chapters 19-22 of Vampire Girl here to get caught up on your identity politics with Mayra, a female vampire protagonist!



Chapter 23

Hello


Cuac had no extensive words of advice to give. He simply squeezed Mayra’s hand and said, “Be yourself.” She ascended the rungs of the steel ladder onto the catwalk and strapped herself into harness. The swell of Adele’s tune enveloped her and she let go into the sensation of falling as colored lights washed over her body, which in spandex suddenly felt chunky and mannish. As her soles touched the floor, she made a snap decision to abandon her floor routine, at the risk of offending the Trampire’s handiwork. But there was no way to compete full-on with Lestatia’s whorish physical virtuosity. If she’d only gone to all those aerobics sessions emphasizing Latin dance, it might be a dead heat.


She was going to take Cuac’s two words of advice. Gathering the microphone into her hands, she waited for a musical cue for her vocals. From the first word, Mayra butchered the song. The title should have been “Help,” not “Hello.” Her nose was crammed full of snot and her eyes pouring liquid as she contemplated that Cuac was only a shaman-slash-urban planner; not a lover; Kim a gastronomic phantom-memory whom she could never love because her innate limit for hyphens was two, and he had four; and Tobias lay in the clutches of a pornographic Betsy Ross. She tore each word from Adele’s song as would a wild horse in a field feeding in a patch of turnips with stout roots. She’d never actually seen a horse doing that, but it was the best simile she could come up with in her altered state.


Please give Mayra a better simile for this perilous moment of her life, won’t you? Try three or four if you like and see which one sticks.


She lurched around the way she had after she feasted on the judge. She was a Franken-vampire. Over the auditorium lay a ghastly silence, the kind of silence one would expect of the undead when they had finished a night of depredations on human flesh and now sated, full to bursting as ticks, returned to their slumber. Just when Mayra thought the moment couldn’t grow more tortuous, somebody farted. There were a few titters, which grew into full-bodied laughter, and before long, everyone was roaring, as she sang "Hello, how are you? It’s so typical of me to talk about myself I’m sorry."


She came to the end of the song as to the end of a blind alley. There was no applause. Mayra was about to walk off stage when she happened to catch Cuac’s eye on the front row. He gave her a simple nod. “Be yourself.” That’s what he had said.


She couldn’t remember the speech she was supposed to say, so she spoke from the heart. “I don’t know whether I’m black, white or brown. I don’t remember where my people came from, or when, why and how they got to America. All that is a blank. Our family wasn’t super into genealogy. My mom tried to pass on the little she knew, but I wasn’t paying attention because I’m pretty sure she was making it up so I wouldn’t feel left out at the fall Identity Politics Fair in elementary school. Or maybe I didn’t want to pay attention, because it’s stressful living on both sides of a hyphen. I’m not sure I even have a last name. Certainly it hasn’t been mentioned at any point in this novel. Maybe it’s better that way. When I went to TJ with Jackie and Sheila, and I had to fill out the Mexit form, I put Vampire-American, without thinking, so I wouldn’t leave the space blank. I guess I finally wanted to belong, to be defined in some recognizable way, because in this world, it seems it’s not enough just to be you. Okay. I accept that. I give up on trying to stay on the outside. So I’m here today to claim the title Vampire-American. I wear it proudly. I feasted proudly on hot guys I met on OK Cupid, guys of all races, as long as they were heterosexual or at least bisexual or pansexual or sapiosexual! I proudly lock hands with the Trampire and raise them high, and we declare ourselves part of the LGBTQIAV community. Let us be as one, but also let’s each do our personal stuff pertaining to our specific letter or letters. I embrace the hyphen. Let us build no walls between ourselves and our neighbors, and that includes Mexico. No walls! I am passionately opposed to any kind of wall, real or metaphorical! Let us inhabit the hyphen, even though it’s not actually a space, more like a space between spaces, but even if that doesn’t quite work as a metaphor, let’s do it anyway and figure the technical part out later. Inhabit the hyphen!”


When Mayra finished speaking, the silence set up again, fortunately without any farts this time. But then, as happens in movies like Napoleon Dynamite, after he does his big surprising quirky, semi-spastic dance, one person applauded with exaggerated slowness, five or six times, then stood up, tacitly endorsing what was just said, as if it were the most profound statement ever spoken to humanity, something on the order of Martin Luther King’s "I Have a Dream" speech, which admittedly has been coopted so many times, even in TV commercials promoting dubious products, that it has become a visual and auditory cliché and a substitute for actual thought, the lazy man’s approach to human rights, since anybody can agree about a five-second clip of MLK and having a dream, at least on a superficial level, to disagree would be like disagreeing about tacos, so anyway this one person stood up clapping slowly and loudly, then everybody else, following the herd instinct, got up one by one and clapped in the same slow rhythm, until every last person was on his or her feet, because in the movie it has to be unanimous, nobody can remain seated, they need to be thought-zombies, liberal or conservative, doesn’t matter, the important part is to function as a single organism, like bees, that’s what utopia is about, even if later they’ll be fighting in the parking lot and torching cars and beating the life out of each other, you need that one orgasmic instant, the one Wilhelm Reich talks about in The Mass Psychology of Fascism, which you can get for $15.12 on Ebay at: https://www.ebay.com/itm/276556367356?_nkw=mass+psychology+of+fascism&epid=8012595872&itmmeta=01J6SYTCWVPQKAJDFENWYB5PRM&hash=item40640b45fc:g:83wAAOSwv1FmmF3Y&itmprp=enc%3AAQAJAAAA4HoV3kP08IDx%2BKZ9MfhVJKmRDzY%2FRIcUZOUsACSDG%2F1Y5VdLCAJp7lPZZom0M1%2BpoP0Ed3PIMBNsXy7NWe2QFYnoT2GCUTWcQ65aRXd1RRNxdp4yPF%2BcN1LQ9dzKalF0%2Bi%2BBH9njOtN4swoEVtT7MVtIa2M4YnDP3kDJKA0aH0jzrlYkDVULcI7HdR7z%2Fujm3kGJy0kkunMH57XYx2bsE4H088gk%2BXBcaD7U4TLztZQmisjfBzjykX2O27aBZRAHkpv9uUYmxAYxv%2F1TD98gzlCiuVKwGi2JUNyKbktSaq1F%7Ctkp%3ABk9SR8LO6b62ZA


If it makes you tired thinking about a big brainy psycho-political tome published way back in 1970, simply contemplate these words: “It is this unfortunate structuralization that is responsible for the fact that every natural, social, or libidinous impulse that wants to spring into action from the biologic core has to pass through the layer of secondary perverse drives and is thereby distorted.” There, it’s all boiled down to one sentence, so get back to TMZ or EllE and read “Working Out With Alessandra Ambrosio Before the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show.”


Long of the short, Mayra stood humbly before an entire auditorium stomping the ground, the way they did for Queen at Wemblely Stadium, chanting, “Inhabit the Hyphen!” or some people just shouting “Habit the Hi!” because it sounds more street and like what a rapper would say. A few of them were texting #HabittheHi to their friends, who had no idea what was going on unless they happened to be part of the 70 or 80 million people worldwide watching the pageant, but then of course, the speech “blew up Twitter,” or “went viral,” or “trended,” or “breached the space-time continuum,” sending generations of different kinds of zombies, ghosts, werewolves, superheroes who met unfortunate ends like getting driven deep into a glacier and frozen, but could still be resuscitated, and other beings upon whom reliable movie franchises and multiple sequels would later be founded, scrambling out of their crypts, graves, caves, tax shelters, underground abandoned nuclear war avoidance silos, all disturbed and enlivened by Mayra’s words. She appeared to be the new It Girl. But that was for the judges to decide, since, unlike the earlier elimination rounds, the contest was not decided by popular acclaim, or by slitting the throats of the other contestants. So neither the audience nor the organizers had any influence over what came next.


Chapter 24

The Vote


The judges had remained tight-lipped, but it was time to divulge. Kate del Castillo was first to speak. She said she could forgive the Trampire for trash-talking her relationship with El Chapo while in the custody of the policemen. She was immune to that by now, and besides the Trampire was not a contestant, just a consultant. No, what she couldn’t forgive was Mayra’s speech. The performance had been shaky, but she’d been willing to look past it, seeing Mayra as a friend to Mexico. What stopped her was Mayra’s cry of “No Walls!” Kate’s new television series Balls to the Wall was about to begin filming, and without the threat of a border wall, there was no longer a real-life basis for the premise of the series. Bad for ratings. She had been counting on actual social dislocation and suffering. So regrettably, her vote was going to Lestatia. Next up was Adele. Mayra was sure now that the contest would be decided against her. Her rendition of “Hello” had been abominable: off-key, shrill, inflected with snot, histrionic, wrong in every possible way. Adele spoke. “Mayra could not have possibly performed my song in a more amateurish fashion. I am pretty sure they could have given the song to a wounded raccoon being administered electric shocks and it would have gotten sung better. Yet, something ineffable came through in Mayra’s convulsive interpretation. Her pain was real. It reminded me so much of how I have staggered shit-faced down the streets of London after numerous breakups with bad boyfriends, in the throes of a massive, profanity-laced grieving process, yet unaccountably filled with desire. I don’t know about all this political stuff she mentioned, but I am f***ing tired of thinking all the f***ing time about all my f***ing ex-boyfriends and how they f***ed me over. But her banshee rendition of “Hello” reached into my womb like a steel claw and performed an emotional hysterectomy on me, and now I never have to think about those f***ers again. So she gets my vote.”



Suddenly the contest was tied, against all expectation. As seemed fitting, the world-beating Ziphozinhle Ntlanganiso was the deciding vote. With an otherworldly, simple beauty unadorned by any great sartorial arts and stratagems other than a $900 makeup job, she took the microphone in her shapely hand and signified softly. “Truly, Lestatia captivated in her three-color pageant to democracy. Freedom is what matters most. We in Africa know that as well as anyone. Also she looks spectacular in glitter body-paint. I wish I’d thought of it first. Green, yellow, red and black are my colors. I assume the solemn responsibility of serving as the tie-breaker, for we may not deter history, nor our part in making it. I thought long and hard about this decision, weighing words, for I am skeptical of rhetoric of any kind, so it probably worked in Lestatia’s favor that nobody could hear her speech. And yet—and yet—Mayra represents the young woman of today—confused, contradictory, the war inside her between passion and reason, cruel instinct and noble gesture, so evident. In the memorable phrase of Wilhelm Reich, “The surface layer of social cooperation is not in contact with the deep biologic core of one's selfhood; it is borne by a second, an intermediate character layer, which consists exclusively of cruel, sadistic, lascivious, rapacious, and envious impulses.” For these reasons, I cast my vote in favor of Mayra.”


That was it. She was swarmed by everyone except Kate del Castillo, who was led out by security saying a lot of colorful words in Spanish at the top of her lungs. Yet Mayra knew that Kate would get over this moment, given that she had just given a free plug for her new series to 80 million people, created a little controversy, and projected herself as sexy-bitchy, exactly the way she would act her new show. Who knows, she might have thrown her vote to Lestatia on purpose, to create a stir. Meaning that it was possible that the vote for Mayra could have been unanimous! So it was a happy ending for everybody except Lestatia. Mayra wanted to feel pity in her heart, but it was not destiny’s plan for them to be frenemies. They were mortal antagonists, and there was no use pretending. Wolves could be heard baying in the near distance, but that could have been a bunch of drunk people coming out of a Clippers game. As she was led to a waiting limousine surrounded by bodyguards, trailed by TMZ cameramen obviously looking for an upskirt or a wardrobe malfunction, it came upon Mayra the awesome responsibility of being Beauty Queen of the Children of the Night.


Insert your favorite upskirt or wardrobe malfunction picture, or link to said picture.


Chapter 25

Witch of the Black Rose


Now Mayra had Tobias all to herself. The problem is, she no longer wanted him. Had it all been about the quest, vanquishing the foe, and had Tobias simply been the game piece getting played? Yet she suspected that her diffidence existed because she really couldn’t stay interested in a man who was too interested in her. That contradiction represented her fatal flaw. As much as she might try to pin bad attitudes about the sport of romance on her girlfriends, Mayra was the one who tended toward men who were slightly arrogant, subtly self-centered, who over-rated themselves, who found a way to be disparaging without overtly putting her down. That’s how she’d gotten so hurt by that fireman she moved in with for a while, her only experience in cohabiting. He would rub his Rottweiler’s ears vigorously and spout every kind of endearment to the dog, all the while neglecting her, sometimes leaving her in the bed in silk lingerie in order to go give the dog a belly-rub in the living room.


Tobias, six foot three, silver-blonde with lithe muscles, represented a welcome change and a perfect specimen. He was attentive, spoke multiple languages and had made enough money flipping houses, so he had told her, rehabbing them himself, to feel secure and have enough free time to actually pursue a relationship—unlike so many people she knew, who were working two or three jobs, often without benefits, to pay rent and even then having to find a roommate to split expenses. Though Tobias never used the word “love,” he seemed to care for her and didn’t go around preening about his good looks. Yet Mayra couldn’t shake the feeling that she had overachieved, that she was dating beyond her level. It was stressful having a boyfriend better looking than you. Women came up to him all the time and flirted openly as if she weren’t even there. Tobias never paid them the slightest attention, if anything, he might make fun of them afterward to dispel any cloud, but Mayra would become insanely jealous, try to break into his phone, and cause stormy scenes at the apartment that would result in either him or her leaving in anger. They wouldn’t see each other for a few days, then they’d have makeup sex, thus the pattern that eventually led Tobias to screw one or more other women during a breakup period, then have makeup sex with Mayra, bite her, then came TJ, Mexit, tacos, Adele, porno Betsy Ross, and Mayra become Beauty Queen of the Children of the Night.


What to do about him now? How to recover her craving for once-cherished Tobias? In retrospect, for the pageant, Mayra wished she had dressed like the Witch of the Black Rose. That was how she imagined the two of them, as a power couple, like Brangelina once had been, at their peak, or even better, like the early Angelina with Billy-Bob Thornton, vials of blood worn around each other’s necks. They’d move among their admirers at clubs with secret back rooms. She would possess the unrealistic body proportions as shown on the comic cover, probably a 65 DD bust in a skintight peek-a-boo dress with a slit, and 45-inch hips, but without cosmetic surgery. Tobias would wear an Elvis Presley coat and have great hair with reddish highlights, Game of Thrones arm cuffs, and would be a grinning skeleton but would still look uber-sexy and strangely patrician. She would complement him with a black thong and thigh-high leather boots, super Goth makeup, hair dyed in blood, holding a goblet of shiraz. From beneath the dress slit would emerge the skeleton of an ex-boyfriend, clutching her buttock with his bony fingers.




Raven Hex and The Skeleton Man on the cover of an issue of Jim Balent's Tarot: Witch of the Black Rose - https://comicvine.gamespot.com/tarot-witch-of-the-black-rose-104-beltane-fires/4000-598935/


The way the new feminism was going in L.A., she would fit right in, giving a message of female empowerment, showing that you could hold a high-level executive position but also have the hot boyfriend of your dreams. Women would want to be you; men would want to be with you. But for the moment, with her impending duties as Beauty Queen, she couldn’t think about the man thing, or have time to visit exclusive clubs with women dancing in cages, so she avoided Tobias at all costs. She was put off anyway when she’d found out that he was lying about getting bit during their breakup. The only male she kept close to her side was Cuac, as Consigliere. The Trampire was more like her Huma Abedin, but with no Anthony Weiner attached to cause PR problems.


Now it is time to make another paper doll, a hot comic-book horror goddess to serve as the mate to the Aztec-Vampire doll. If that one was male, don’t worry, they can be a same-sex couple. For example, one of the witches in that comic book series featured above is a bisexual. In the liberal world of horror, nobody will be shocked.


Chapter 26

Executive Suite


It was tougher than Mayra could have imagined, being a chief executive; that’s what she quickly became. She tried to concentrate, while a voice bleating outside the window of her office at the Vampire Drop-In Community Center, upbraided a dog. “Bella, please! Bella, listen to me, please, please, please, Bella, please! Bella, Bella, no, oh please, no, no!" Those words reminded her so much of the few men who would struggle, fight back, and then realizing they were overpowered, plead for their lives, back when she had time to date. Now, she was so busy going over records in total disarray at the VCC, the only official vampire-oriented organization in the country, let alone one with non-profit status, that she had little time to date. As an expert in Inhuman Resources, it appalled her to discover how many vampires had no pension, no health care insurance, no living will, no 401K, no donor card, no anything.

It was argued in his defense by her predecessor, a nice Jewish man and retired accountant, who faintly resembled Grandpa from The Munsters, and in fact might have been him, that vampires didn’t need such things. They lived by their wits. But if Mayra had learned anything in her short time as a vampire, it was that life is chancy. Vampire lore had created a morass of public misinformation, to the extent that vampires themselves had no idea what their essential qualities were, much less what a Roth IRA was.


The organizers of the pageant were upset with Mayra. They wanted her to be out touring in her sparkly bikini, going on talk shows, saying cute vampire tidbits, pandering to the sudden curiosity that America had about the Children of the Night. Yet Mayra surprised herself by having such a strong pragmatic streak that ran counter to the fantasies of fame and desirability she carried around in her head. The part of her that asserted was the part that never forgot she was a third-chair violinist. She knew she wasn’t going to parlay this beauty gig into a musical career. She knew she wasn’t that good-looking, and despite her bulimic tendencies, she couldn’t stay in shape and was not wild about going to the gym. All things being equal, she’d rather sit around eating cereal out of the box, vaguely hoping that a sugar rush would offset her chronic tendency toward mild depression. She didn’t even have a porn tape to leak to boost her long-term appeal to the masses. Besides which, she found herself suddenly proud to be a Vampire-American.


Declaring herself so on the Mexit form had been one of the most positive gestures of her life. She had owned it, and this decision gave her a sense of purpose and of self. It was good for once to be able to say “my people” rather than “you people,” and not to go around wondering. Yet Mayra understood that this vampire fad was a flash in the pan for humans at large. America as a collective consciousness had a permanent case of ADD. It lurched through the news from natural disaster to natural disaster; from racial assault to racial assault; from sexual harassment to sexual harassment; from celebrity breakup to celebrity breakup. Every time a famous musician died, America went on a Pandora orgy of their music for exactly one week, sharing their supposedly favorite song links on Facebook, and wrote heartfelt messages such as “RIP” on YouTube under their favorite songs, as if they had known that singer personally. “Goodbye, Tom Petty. Thanks for the great times.” “We’ll miss you, Prince. You made our lives better.” “I saw him at the Garden on July 8, 1987 and was drunk as shit and got escorted out by security, but I will never forget the impact he had on the rest of my life.” A few days later, that emotional orgy ended and another one welled up as soon as another pop singer died. So she didn’t want to insert herself into a nanosecond of celebrity, knowing that she had simply ridden a wave of semi-accidental popular sentiment to the crown and did not have the physical and psychic equipment of Lestatia to carry out her queenly duties.


The truth was, she only accepted the gig to get back to the U.S., to bring down her rival and to get back Tobias, whom she now didn’t want and who had gone right back to Lestatia and her exuberant chi-chis. The beauty pageant organizers tried to exert pressure on Mayra to comply, but they couldn’t find a hook. In their rush to take over the pageant, they had neglected to write up any kind of a contract specifying her duties.


They could have easily gotten a form from Office Depot and modified it, or from www.typeform.com (please visit this site reader, and make up a draft of your living will, including spiteful comments to relatives left out of it).


But in their greedy rush to take legal possession of the pageant, they simply forgot about the contestants. Now, despite the organizers’ empty threats to strip Mayra of the title, there was nothing they could do. There was no budding entertainment career to deprive her of, because she didn’t want one, knowing that she sang for shit, her dancing was just so-so, she couldn’t tell jokes, much less do standup comedy, her tits were only a C cup and despite her sometimes having used padded bras on a first date or at her high school reunion, she was not inclined toward cosmetic surgery. Besides, Mayra remembered a bit of wisdom her grandfather used to say regularly, after he won the national badminton championship in a freakish surge of precise execution, overcoming his limited ability at just the right moment: “Fame is not the same thing as wealth.”


For once, Mayra was going to do what she was good at: promote the well-being of her subjects, like an enlightened queen, such as Maria Carolina of Austria, Queen of Naples, who revoked the ban on Freemasonry and made other reforms until the French Revolution arrived and she turned Naples into a police state. Now, when Mayra said “Welcome to Inhuman Resources” to each new arrival, her remark was greeted with a genuine smile. What’s your favorite song by a recently dead pop singer?


Chapter 27

Fangalicious


Meanwhile, Mayra had to manage her need for blood and her surges of libido. Ironically, this quest began to feel like a double life. America in theory was now cool with vampires and unlike the situation in Mexico, with its Catholic conservatism, it seemed that every third person in the US of A wanted to get fanged. To such an extent that popular expressions such as “Fang me, baby,” “All fanged up,” “Fangalicious,” and “Hang with the Fang” entered the national lexicon. Even some Christian evangelicals, especially those who had already betrayed every religious principle they had ever espoused, and whored out Jesus by voting for the current President, began to conflate reaching eternal life with being undead, and wanted to get in on the action. Perhaps some of them thought they might not reach the Kingdom of Heaven in the conventional way, despite being “born again,” so they settled for a version of the Hell to which they were destined, but an earthly Hell where they could still go to Applebee’s. At the same time, this newly liberal populace was likely to turn on a Mayra who had refused to tart herself up and parade around in the sparkly bikini, yet was out secretly being promiscuous, hunting down man-meat while setting herself up as a clean reformer.


It wasn’t easy for Mayra to find victims. If she’d been open about her huntress activities, she would find no end of willing fangees, given the current fad. But these brief boy-toys would only be exploiting her as a stepping stone for their fame and might file harassment suits later. And if Chinese battery factory syndrome took hold and she produced a series of undead duds, it would be as though she had a low sperm count. She did not want to risk that kind of notoriety. The dating apps were out, unless she resorted to catfishing, and she did have principles after all. So she was reduced to a Bram Stoker level of vampire activity, skulking around in an actual black cloak and white mime makeup, to cover her identity, and preying upon victims in the midnight hour.


She even went back and read Dracula, a novel that had scared the lights out of her when she was sixteen. Mayra got off on the soulful passages of rapture, such as “I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things, which I dare not confess to my own soul.” Sometimes when about to pounce on an unsuspecting human, she whispered those words to herself. Because she did indeed have many weird thoughts. Yet she was pleasantly surprised to discover that Dracula also sometimes expressed himself like a motivational speaker, a Tony Robbins of the damned: “We learn from failure, not from success!” She had printed out those words and tacked them behind her desk. As for romance, Mayra did have an experimental side. She had briefly tried a fling with another vampire, proposing that instead of contributing to the infection of the populace, they bite each other and live off one another’s blood. This pilot project could prove useful to the stability of American birth and death rates and overall social well-being. However, this strategy turned out bankrupt. The failure to take had something to do with antibodies or some other bullshit diagnosis like those pseudo-medical explanations they always say in science fiction movies as a quick nod to realism right before they get on with the zombie plague and the helicopter explosions.


No, she had no recourse but to do it the old-fashioned way. When she didn’t have much time and needed a quick snack, Mayra didn’t care whether the victim was good-looking. Also, it could be man or woman, young or old. Yet because she sometimes climaxed in the midst of these snacks, without vaginal or oral stimulation, she wondered whether that made her bisexual, or some other designation along the LGBTQIAV spectrum, or simply like some women, who can’t climax with a cock or a mouth, but go around for their entire lives pretending otherwise and overcompensating by making bizarre bestial noises in bed. To keep this orgasm from happening, she often masturbated before feasting, so she wouldn’t have to worry about such perplexing questions. Other times, she simply thought what the fuck and called it a quickie, then went home and drank a lot of vodka to forget the encounter, as she had done as a college student when she made coyote love after too many Jagermeisters. All the same, amidst her administrative labors, her blood quickies and her occasional feeding frenzies on hot guys with six packs who didn’t recognize her and who would basically fuck anybody with two legs for one night as long as there were no strings attached, she yearned for a true connection and even fantasized about an LTR to balance out her long, busy days at the Vampire Drop-In Community Center. That’s when, tempting fate, obeying a primal, ancient stirring in her loins and in her heart, she called Tobias out of the blue, proposing that they meet for a drink, because she had something important to speak with him about.


If possible, improve the lyrics to Bootylicious by Destiny’s Child. Here is a sample: “I don’t think you’re ready for this jelly/ I don’t think you’re ready for this jelly/ I don’t think you’re ready for this/Cause my body’s too bootylicious for ya babe.” For complete lyrics go to: https://genius.com/Destinys-child-bootylicious-lyrics

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