My friends weren’t exactly enthusiastic about meeting me at a place called the “Death Ridge Lodge,” even after I told them that “Dethritch” was just the name of the shepherd who used to own the land. Truth was, I was more than a little nervous myself. I’d been out of the country for five years; there had been calls and letters, but my friends and I hadn’t seen each other in all that time…would we still have the connection that we once did?
Some of the changes that time had wrought were surprising; others, less so. We’d all expected my stubborn, brilliant friend Jennifer to be an attorney like her father–but in a story straight out of a cheesy Hallmark movie, she’d married a guy from a tiny town in Kentucky and had two kids. Meanwhile, Ned–a loudmouthed, extroverted redhead–had somehow ended up working from a lonely home office as a computer programmer.
And then there was Zoe.
She’d been my crush since our sophomore year of college. It wasn’t just her auburn hair or piercing green eyes; it was the care and honesty she showed in everything she did. Before her, I’d never met someone who really listened, who really cared about other people without working their own angle. We’d all expected great things for her…but in the end, she’d wound up like me. Back in our hometown. Unsure about the future.
But now that so much time had passed, would we even have anything in common anymore?
As it turned out, I needn’t have worried. Not even the wailing winter storm and unexpected power outages could dampen our good time. Ned, Zoe, Jennifer, and I gathered around a roaring flagstone fireplace, sharing our favorite scary stories and urban legends. It didn’t matter that the howling wind made going outside deadly, or that snow had cut off the forest road to the outside world: we had warmth, food, booze–and our rediscovered friendship. We also had Lee.
When we arrived, Lee explained to us that he was the off-season caretaker of Dethritch Lodge and the surrounding cabins. During tourist season in summer, the place swarmed with hospitality workers, but from fall to spring Lee mostly had the place to himself. When the blizzard hit, he made a point of checking in on us.
“Temperature's goin’ down out there,” he warned us that fateful night. “Visibility Is almost zero. You kids wouldn’t wanna get lost out there tonight…or any other night.”
“Don’t worry,” Zoe smiled. “We have no intention of going outside in that.” She pointed to the wind-driven snow that was rattling against the window panes.
“It can’t be that easy to get lost though, can it?” Ned–always the contrarian–asked. “I mean, we’re on the side of a mountain. To go one way you just go down, and to go the other way you just go back up, right?”
“Not that simple.” Lee grunted, pulling up a stool. “We’re a hundred miles from civilization out here, and if you can’t recognize any landmarks, all them pine trees out there look the same. Even if you think you know where you’re goin,’ this mountain likes to play tricks. The gentle slope you walk down in fall might be dangerously steep in spring; boulders tumble, streams change course, and paths disappear from one season to the next. There’s dozens of trails criss-crossin’ this ol’ mountain: 1800’s logging roads, game trails, other paths so old it’s impossible to tell who made’em. Trust me, you lose your way out there, all you’re gonna get is more an’ more lost..and then you’ll start to panic. An’ at that point, if hypothermia an’ hunger an’ the bears don’t getcha, ol’ man Dethritch and his dogs will.”
“Dethritch?” “Dogs?” Zoe and Jennifer asked at once.
“Just how much do you four know about Dethritch Lodge?”
“Not much,” I admitted. “I was looking for a place where my old friends and I could meet up over the holidays, the place looked cozy, had hiking and skiing and good reviews…besides, back then, the weather forecast said we’d have a clear weekend...”
Lee nodded, as if that was about what he expected. “It’s an odd place…with an odd history. Just after the Revolutionary War, a man named Jebediah Dethritch showed up here and started construction on a cabin. He said that the mountain had called to him, that he’d seen it in a dream, an’ that Patrick Henry had gifted him the entire mountainside in exchange for services rendered during the war. There was plenty of land back then, and grants were being handed out like candy, so no one called him on it. Besides, folks wanted farmland, not the slope of a damn mountain. They all thought Jeb Dethritch was crazy, but he carved a life outta these hills, swearing that he and the land were one flesh. Jeb and his sons felled forests, dragged out the stumps, and planted orchards; they set up secret garden patches back in the woods; raised chickens, cows, and a flock of sheep. For a while, things were good.” The old man stared into the fire. “If you young people get bored with all this history, just say so…”
“Well, it’s not like we’ve got anything better to do, do we?” Ned scoffed.
“No, please go on. It’s interesting.” Zoe reassured Lee; Ned rolled his eyes.
“Well, the years rolled by. Jeb died and passed his land on to his son and grandson, who went on livin’ the same way he had. Meanwhile, towns were buildin’ up around the mountain. The more they expanded, the more folks demanded proof that the mountain really belonged to the Dethritches. By the end of the Civil War–that’s to say, Jeb’s great-grandson’s time–nobody cared about yellowed papers and ancient claims. Folks wanted the mountain developed, and kept suin’ ‘til they found a judge who agreed with’em. Amos Dethritch got a few acres and the rest went to minin’ and loggin’ companies. But takin’ advantage of the Dethritchs’ land was no easy task. See, the Dethritches refused to accept the court’s decision. They kept livin’ in their hidden shacks on the mountainside, and made life hell for the companies who, from their point of view, were trespassing’ on their property. Every day there were downed trees on the road, supplies burnt, animals missin’...it went on for decades, all the way into the 1900’s. And while nobody had been hurt in Amos Dethritch’s little guerrilla war, it was costin’ those companies more than the mountain was worth. They had to put a stop to it. The first sign of trouble was when Alice Dethritch–Amos’ wife from back east–stopped comin’ into town to sell her honey an’ fruit preserves.. A few days later, Amos was found in the middle of a dirt loggin’ road, surrounded by his three mastiffs. They’d all been shot to pieces. Ten years later, some trappers found Alice and the kids in a shallow grave. They said it looked like they’d died…badly.”
“So who did it?” Jennifer asked.
“Well, nobody can prove nothin’ about nothin,’ but a group of flashy out-of-towners rode in on the last train from Chicago that night, an’ left in the mornin.’ Folks in town said they saw lantern lights goin’ up the loggin’ road, and gunfire in the hollers…” Lee stared thoughtfully into the fireplace. “In a way, though, I guess you could say the Dethritches won out in the end. The mountain never yielded enough timber or coal to justify the expense. The companies that had fought so hard over the mountain–and even killed to keep it–all went bankrupt a few years later. This place was practically abandoned ‘til the national parks craze took off in the 1950’s. Some clever investors bought it off the bank for pennies…they built the cabins and lodge that we’re sittin’ in today.”
“But what does all that have to do with ‘old man Dethritch’ and his ‘dogs’?”
“Well, the mountain wasn’t completely left alone after all them companies closed down. The local men came up here to hunt, grandmothers collected fruit from the Dethritchs’ woodland orchards, and the teenagers…well, they came up here to do what teenagers do. But over the years, rumors began to trickle down about strange sightings in these woods. Some folks got to thinkin’ that maybe Amos Dethritch wasn’t really dead…or if he was, he was still around somehow.”
“You mean like a ghost?” I ventured.
“You call it what you want!” Lee prodded the dying embers. “I’m just tellin’ it how I heard it–and you wouldn’t believe some’a the tales the folks in town have about this mountain. Like ol’ Bruce Higgins, who came back from deer huntin’ all bitten an’ tore up, with his rifle missin.’ He said he’d been chased down the mountain by three snarlin’ shepherd dogs…just like those huge mastiffs found shot to death beside Amos. Miss Nellie Price said she saw the ol’ man himself, stalkin’ through the trees with a hundred-year-old hunting rifle an’ a sack of dead rabbits slung over his shoulder…” Lee rambled on; Jennifer tried to hide a smile.
“I’m sorry…” she chuckled. “It’s just…my dad was a hunter, and he used to see things in the woods too. Usually after his fifth beer. And my Great-Aunt Mildred was convinced she was hearing whispers in her walls…until my mother got rid of the bird’s nest in her chimney. The birdsong had been echoing in the pipes–it sounded like real human voices. My point is, there’s a snowball effect with stories like these. They live rent-free in the back of people’s minds, and when they see something they can’t explain, they just keep adding to them…”
“I’m not sayin’ you're wrong,” Lee grumbled. “I’ve never seen ol’ man Amos myself, an’ I’ve lived up here all my life. But I will say that there’s somethin’ off about this mountain. Maybe it goes all the way back to Jeb Dethritch, or even before that. Otherwise, how can you account for all the disappearances? Like the four high schoolers who went camping up here on a dare back in the 1970’s. Nothin’ was left of them but a trampled down tent an’ the soggy ashes of their fire…”
“Wasn’t there an investigation?” Zoe asked.
“Oh, sure there was. The police concluded that the girls had run away from home. Then when Terry Bannister an’ his nine-year-old son didn’t come back from their hikin’ trip, they blamed wolves. When a local artist’s car was found along a loggin’ road with spikes in the tires and the driver’s-side door hanging off of its hinges, they called it an ‘abandoned vehicle.’ They jus’ towed it back into town an’ didn’t even look for her. Don’tcha see where I’m goin’ with this? Ever since the loggin’ and minin’ dried up, tourism is the only thing keepin’ those little towns afloat. ‘The Ghost of Amos Dethritch and his Three Hell-Hounds’ makes for a fine local legend, but if the summer crowd ever found out about the real, horrible crimes that happen up on this mountain every year…it’d be the death of the whole industry.”
“I call bullshit!” Ned laughed. “This sounds an awful lot like a scary story that locals use to scare us wide-eyed out-of-towners with, am I right?”
“Call it what you want.” Lee shrugged again. “But I wouldn’t go outside ‘til the storm passes, if I were you.” He pulled on his boots and wrapped himself in his winter gear, so weathered and worn that it was all the same uniform tone of grayish-brown. “You kids got everything you need?” We nodded; he waved to us as he trudged out the door.
“Stay safe out there!” I called out too late. The only response was the rattling of the screen door and the howling of the wind–if it was the wind. I thought of the savage jaws of enormous mastiffs and shuddered.
We all slept beside the fireplace that night. Everyone had their own excuse: Ned claimed the rooms were too cold; Zoe said she wanted to have a slumber party; Jennifer had already fallen asleep in her chair. But I knew our real reason for keeping close to each other was that Lee’s tale had unnerved all of us more than we would have liked to admit. We craved the primal comforts of fire, warmth, and companionship. Before going to sleep, I dared to take a look out the frozen window, but all I could see was blackness. Too cold even for a ghost, I told myself with a chuckle, before stirring the fire and curling up in one of the lodge’s thick blankets. My dreams were haunted by worm-eaten faces in shallow graves and shadowy figures on desolate mountain paths; I woke before anyone else in the morning.
I’d always loved the peace of being awake while others slept; I took my time making my coffee and examining what the storm had done to the mountainside. The trees were bent, icy spikes stabbing into an ominous gray sky; at least a foot of snow covered the lodge patio. Frigid air blasted my face as I heaved open the sliding glass door and stepped out into the winter wonderland. Beautiful as it was, something more than the cold was bothering me; it took me a moment to fully realize what it was:
There were no footprints leading to the cabin where Lee was staying.
True, maybe the snow had filled them in–but no smoke rose from the chimney, either. Where had Lee gone? I was leaning out over the railing for a better view when I heard a low growl behind me.
I wasn’t alone on the patio.
Half-frozen drool hung from the mastiff’s gaping jaws; its hazel eyes burned with fury. Another, identical dog growled behind me–they were trying to cut off my escape! I bolted for the door and slid it shut just before a mouth as large as my face smashed into the glass, cracking it. The enormous dog lunged again, widening the spiderweb pattern on the glass. Barks and howls chilled my blood; my friends were waking, but not fast enough:
"Just a few more minutes…" Zoe mumbled while I shook her.
"Holy shit!" Ned screamed, pointing at the mastiff slamming itself into the glass.
"Get to the kitchen!" Jennifer grabbed the fire poker and waved us through before slamming the kitchen’s heavy wooden door. From outside, barks, snarls, shattering glass–
Heavy canine steps across the hardwood.
A long, mournful howl echoed through the cabin…and three sets of paws began scratching at the door. I wondered if the enormous dogs outside were calling to their master.
"Oh my god, oh my god…what the fuck is going on?!" Ned jabbed his finger at my chest like all this was all my fault.
"Is this some kind of sick joke?" Jennifer demanded.
“How should I know?!” I shouted back at Ned.
“I know what’s going on…” Zoe murmured. “Amos Dethritch. We’re on his mountain…and those are his dogs, just how Lee described them…”
“Ghost dogs?!” Ned rolled his eyes, “come on.”
“That mastiff out there just smashed its head against a sliding glass door until it broke! Would you call that ‘normal’ dog behavior?! Listen!” Jennifer put her ear to the wooden door as it shook beneath the dogs’ attack. “They’re not just scratching the door…they’re gnawing on it. Those aren’t ordinary dogs. And speaking of Lee–where is he?”
“I…I don’t think he made it back last night.” I thought of the smokeless chimney and the untrammeled snow. The kindly old caretaker was probably lying beneath it with his throat ripped out. Amos had come for him at last. The door rattled on its hinges.
“We gotta find a way out of here. That door’s not gonna last much longer…” Jennifer whispered, unlatching the small window above the sink.
“Oh, sure! Great plan!” Ned rolled his eyes. “Let’s run through the woods in subzero temperatures in our pajamas! What could possibly go wrong?”
“What do you suggest, then?” Jennifer challenged. As much as I hated to admit it, Ned was right. Last night’s fire was dead, and its warmth was fading fast. If Amos and his dogs didn’t kill us, the cold would. Zoe was already struggling to keep herself from trembling. While the rest of us argued, she had been scrounging for supplies. She’d found a few cobwebby soup cans, three dull kitchen knives, an almost-empty box of matches…and a trapdoor.
It took all our strength to heave it open, and even then the light didn’t reach whatever waited at the bottom. One thing, however, was clear: we were running out of time. The timbers of the kitchen door splintered, treating us to a view of slobbering fangs. The rusty window frame screeched as Jennifer flung it open. I looked down at her bare feet.
“Jen, going out there is suicide!”
“I WILL NOT wait to die in some dark…fucking…HOLE! We gotta make a run for it!” Of course, I suddenly remembered, Jennifer had claustrophobia. That cellar must’ve looked like her worst nightmare.
“I know you’re scared–we all are! But–”
“But NOTHING! I’m going!” Jennifer wiped away her tears with her pajama sleeve and leapt down into the snow. Behind us, the dogs had almost broken through. Ned, Zoe, and I sprinted for the trapdoor and slammed it shut behind us. The mastiffs sniffed around and dug at the floor over our heads–
But only for a moment. A horrifically human whistle split the silent winter air outside, followed by a cruel command–
“SIC HER, BOYS!”
First came barks, then snarls–and Jennifer began to scream.
Maybe it was a blessing that we couldn’t see what was happening out among the frozen trees, but just hearing it was bad enough. I pressed my fists against my ears and shut my eyes tight against the awful ripping and gnawing, barely audible over Jennifer’s screams. When it was finally over, the chattering of our teeth felt like the only noise left in the world. I had forgotten how much the cold could physically hurt. With trembling fingers, Zoe struck a match.
We were in a low-ceilinged dirt cellar. Decades of cobwebs hung like hideous curtains above us, and generations of junk had been scattered carelessly across the uneven ground. We rummaged through it by matchlight, looking for something, anything, that we could use.
“Paydirt!” Ned shouted. He’d found a canvas sack full of moth-eaten wool blankets, leather boots, and parkas beneath a heap of snowshoes. We bundled up immediately, grateful for the warmth, but there was little else of value in the heaped rubbish around us…and we were running out of matches.
“This is weird…” Zoe nudged me. She’d found an old wooden chest full of century-old dresses, leather bags and belts, and a tiny silver locket. The cellar ceiling groaned with heavy footsteps; Zoe instinctively pocketed the locket and grabbed my arm.
“Now where’d the rest of you run off to…?” The voice above us was the same one that had sicced the mastiffs on Jennifer. There was something antiquated, gravelly, and wild about it–something that made me think of the unsettling tale of the Dethritch clan.
“Amos…” Zoe mouthed, pointing to the far side of the cellar. The crumbling stone wall faded into blackness, but as I crawled silently closer I could see what lay above: a coal chute. An escape. The footsteps overhead left the kitchen–I imagined they were heading upstairs to check the bedrooms. We had shoes and a way of keeping warm–even if they were filthy and fit badly. If we were going to try to slip out through the coal chute, it was now or never. Ned’s hand shot out and grabbed my wrist as I struggled to push open the rusted chute cover.
“Are you crazy?!” he hissed. “Did you not hear what happened to Jen out there?!”
“Jen had a point, too…” I whispered. “Whoever…or whatever…is up there is bound to check down here eventually. Do you wanna be down here when that happens?”
“I’ll take my fucking chances!” Ned had found an ice ax in the heaps of junk, and held it with a white-knuckle grip. I realized that my loud-mouthed childhood friend was even more frightened than Zoe and I. To my surprise, Zoe’s cold hand slid into mine.
“Are you ready?” she asked. I nodded. “Come on, Ned…come with us. There won’t be another chance!”
“No way. I’m staying right here!” Ned shook his head. The last I saw of him was his pale, stunned face watching us scramble out into the winter sun. Zoe and I trudged through the snow, afraid to look back…afraid of what might be following. We kept our eyes away from the red patches in the white where Jennifer had met her end, aiming instead for a suspicious trail of footprints that led from the woods up to Dethritch Lodge: one large human and three dogs.
“Ghosts don’t leave footprints, do they?” Zoe murmured. I shook my head, wondering where this insane day would lead us. Zoe and I had barely entered the silence of the pine forest when we heard the gunshot: the BOOM of a shotgun blast.
Ned had been found.
Zoe grabbed my arm; I could feel her warmth through our improvised blanket-coats. It was what I’d dreamed of when I’d planned this vacation: alone with Zoe, holding her close in the winter woods…but my dream had turned into a nightmare. The triumphant baying of the dogs and a man’s maniac laughter carried to us by the wind confirmed what we already feared: our friend was dead. For a long minute we just held each other, listening to our thundering heartbeats: a reminder that we were still alive.
But for how long? The footprints in the snow seemed to follow a sort of game trail…just like the ones Lee said the Dethritches had used. A small creek ran alongside it. My feet were exhausted from slogging through the high snow, but we had to put more distance between us and pursuit. Right around the time I lost sensation in my feet, we rounded a corner and saw a slumped-over hut up ahead.
The footprints we’d been following seemed to originate there. I swallowed hard and looked back at the boulder-strewn mountainside behind us.
“Hide up there.” I told Zoe. “I’ll see if it’s safe.”
“I’ll come with you, this is no time to be a he–” she began.
“Listen. If it’s not safe, we’re both dead. This way, at least one of us makes it.”
“Are…are you sure?”
“If we don’t find warmth, food, and shelter, we’re dead anyway. I’ve got to see what’s in there, and if you–” Zoe shut me up with a strong hug.
“Let me go instead. I want you to keep watch for me.”
I didn’t like the idea at all, but I could see in Zoe’s eyes that her mind was made up. She left me with an extra blanket and the other supplies she’d dug out of the cellar; I set up a vantage point behind a boulder where I could see without being seen…or so I hoped. Now that the sun was setting and my sweat began to cool, I found myself rethinking what I’d said to Zoe. I’d intentionally exaggerated when I’d told her we’d die without shelter–or at least I’d thought so at the time. But as the pine tree shadows reached out for us like long fingers and the temperature dropped, I wasn’t so sure. I wondered if covering ourselves with dirt would keep us warm enough, or if I’d even be able to light a fire with my shaking hands. I fiddled nervously with the first thing I grabbed out of Zoe’s blanket: that weird silver locket. I realized it had a clasp: it was probably one of those necklaces that held pictures inside…
Down below, Zoe was a tiny black shape on the sagging steps of the hut. She pushed open the creaking door–
I was so concerned about what might come out of it that I’d forgotten to pay attention to the path below. I suddenly sensed a presence just a few feet away.
“You alright, son?” A voice muttered behind me. I nearly jumped out of my skin before I recognized it: Lee! I could have laughed for joy. If anyone knew a safe way off of this mountain, it was him.
“We were attacked!” I gasped. “I know it sounds crazy, but I think Amos and his three dogs–”
“Shhh!” Lee rasped. “I seen’em on my way down here, but don’t you worry. Everythin’s gonna be alright now. Where’s the girl? Is she…?”
“You mean Zoe? She’s down there by the hut.”
“Good.” Lee whistled...and his voice changed. “SIC HER, BOYS!”
Three huge mastiffs bounded down the path toward the hut, barking loudly, and Lee stepped backward. He held an ancient shotgun in his hands. Only then did I look down at the open heart-shaped locket I held in my hands. The black-and-white photo on the right showed a kindly-looking woman named ALICE DETHRITCH, but the photo on the left was captioned AMOS DETHRITCH…and the face it showed was a familiar one indeed. It was staring back at me from behind the barrel of a gun.
“Amos…?” I gasped. The dogs circled the hut below, howling. Any minute now, they’d corner Zoe…
“Don’t tell me you believe in ghosts? I thought you city folk were supposed to be smart. Try this on for size: maybe Alice Dethritch survived the awful things those flashy out-of-towners did to her. Maybe she had a baby a few months later, a feral kid who raised himself after she died from her lingering injuries ten years later. Otherwise, who woulda buried her for those trappers to find? And maybe later, that kid grew up and decided he didn’t want the family name to die with him. Maybe he kidnapped one’a them high school girls who came up here in the 1970’s and used to her get himself an heir. Maybe that heir is standin’ here right now, pointin’ ol’ Amos’ rifle in the face of yet another trespasser…”
I lifted my hands slowly.
“Just…just don’t hurt Zoe…”
“Hurt her? No, I need her. I'm gonna breed myself an heir, the same way my father did, and raise him to carry on the fight 'til this mountain is ours again. After you four go missin,' even the tourism people won't be able to cover it up anymore–"
Lee Dethritch’s speech was cut short by the half rotten log that slammed into the side of his head. Zoe hit him two or three more times, but I doubt the blows were necessary. Lee Dethritch had met the fate of his ancestors, but I could hear his dogs baying below…from inside the hut.
“You alright?” Zoe asked.
“How did you–?” I wondered.
“That hut must be where he’s been living. It was dim…and filthy…but I saw a pile of rope right around the time I heard those dogs charging down the trail. I tied it to the front door knob and left it open just a crack, while I stood by the back door and waited for my moment. When those dogs charged in, I tugged the front door shut and slipped out the back. Dethritch’s dogs are trapped in there…for now.”
I remembered how quickly the three mastiffs had gnawed their way through the lodge’s kitchen door and shuddered. But would they even pursue us without Lee Dethritch urging them on?
We didn’t wait around to find out.
Night had fallen by the time we reached Dethritch Lodge; it felt like years had passed since we had fled the cellar that morning. Too emotionally and physically exhausted to talk much, Zoe and I distracted ourselves with simple tasks of survival: building a fire, heating water, gathering blankets, reinforcing the doors in case the dogs (or anything else) came back. It had been the longest day of my life, and I ended it curled up with Zoe in front of the Dethritch lodge fireplace.
By morning, the snow had melted; the unpaved, switchbacking road off of the Dethritchs’ mountain seemed just barely passable. Once we started driving, I realized just how much danger we were in: the back of my Corolla fishtailed around every turn, and twice the tires stuck in slushy mud and began to slide…toward the cliffs beside us.
When Zoe got out of the car to help me free it, I saw something that I still can’t explain. Maybe it was just a hallucination brought on by stress, but…
I’d swear I saw another Amos Dethritch look-alike watching us from the woods.
Was the mountain really haunted? Even worse, did Lee Dethritch have a brother?
When I looked again, they were gone.
I didn’t have any answer then, and I still don’t.
But I suggest you stay away from Dethritch Lodge.
X

*George & another guy are in line for a new position at work. Every time George is in Steinbrenner's office, this guy comes in, interrupting & starts impressing a gullible Steinbrenner with a bunch of crazy stories as they laugh it up.
George doesn't know how to compete so finally he blurts out
"Yea? ...Well I knew one of the Beatles!"
Steinbrenner loves it but the other guy is obviously skeptical & asks 'which one?'
G - ...Uh George! ...Yea, yea, it was always a running joke 'The 2 Georges, Paul use to call us!'
Now George has to keep telling a very interested Steinbrenner stories about George Harrison for hours
J - Why, George??
G - Well I had to say SOMETHING Jerry! ...I can't compete with this other guy, Steinbrenner loves his stories!
J - No idiot ...not 'Why George?' I mean 'WHY, GEORGE?' ...as in why not John, Paul or Ringo?
G - Ringo?? ...Come on Jerry
J - ...Yeah, alright I see your point but what about the other 2?
G - Well I couldn't pick Paul... he's still alive! ...He can still refute my story!
J - Where in God's name do you ever think YOU'RE gonna run into Paul McCartney?
G - I had to think QUICK Jerry... I was trying to cover all my bases
...& besides them, there's just the 2 dead ones
J - I see... & George just popped up into your head there
G - I just thought knowing John Lennon was kind of unbelievable
J - Where as knowing George Harrison is totally believable
G - Jerry ya gotta help me here. What the hell am I supposed to tell him?? Help!
J - Ya need somebody
G - Help!
*Jerry points at himself & shakes his head
J - Not just anybody
*Later at lunch with Steinbrenner
S - So George Harrison liked tuna with the crust cut off too huh?
G - The EXACT same thing that you ordered sir! Extra mayo & all, it's unbelievable!
S - Uh huh, uh huh great minds think alike eh Castanza? Ya know what George? I was thinking that this new position we have might... be... perfect for a guy like yoou
G - Well sir, I uh...
S - That other guy, what's his name? ...He's a bit of a suck up. A schmoozer George! Not you though. No, you're a very straight forward individual. I! can! see! THAT! ...Ya know who you remind me of? Babe Ruth, that's who!
...Ya kind of look like a sultan
G - Sir, I uh... I don't know what to say... I would LOVE...
Waitress - It should just be a few more minutes gentlemen
G - Thanks. Umm, excuse me. If it's not too late, do you think you could uh, get them to hold the cheese on my sandwich?
Waitress - Sure!
S - aah no cheese for CA STAN ZA.... little backed up are we there EH Georgie boooy??
...Alright! What else ya got for me Gman?! Come on! Let's hear it! ...Mr. Steinbrenner needs his EX CITE MENT... keep it coming... I gotta have it all Geooorge! Give it to me babyyyyyy!!
*At the end of the episode. George walks into Jerry's place looking defeated, shuffling his feet with his head down
J - What's the matter?
G - It's all over Jerry
J - What?
G - I didn't get it
J - The promotion? Why not?
G - Steinbrenner went on a business TRIP Jerry! That's why
J - A trip where?
*George pauses for a moment
G - ......England!
J - England!
G - England Jerry...
While he was there somebody really wanted to meet him
J - **Gasp* NO!
G - Oh yes
J - Sir Paul?!
G - Apparently he's a HUGE fan of baseball, has been his entire life
....I didn't even know they had baseball in England!!

Do you love the MFD-4 from the first game?
Do you take M4 over anything else in any FPS games?
Do you like unconventional systems?
Then fear not, the Shadow is for you!
Okay then. There happened a big gap between posting, and I don't know if you guys saw the 2,300 kill post I posted previously, but back we are at talking about weapons.
Right. Let's start with the gun's looks and trivia. Numbers will come later.
The Shadow was the first assault rifle to have built-in anything. Yes, ARC-9 had grenade launchers, but in terms of perks, the first assault rifle with in-built capabilities was the ARC-11. Back in its day it was truly a powerhouse over pretty much all else (even though the fact that I'd much rather use my ARC-9). Decent damage, decent magazine capacity, a two-position mode selector and built-in Piercing Ammo. Anyway.
The gun is a tribute to the MFD-4 Assault Rifle from the first game, at least the base model is. The guns somewhat look similar, with a couple of changes that made the sequel version a lot more appreciatable, such as magazine not being a drum painted in FDE.
Rendition of this rifle somewhat reminds me of an ARAK-21 side charging upper for AR-15 platform. It's not unheard of to have a side charging handle AR-15/M4/M16, but it's an unconventional one nonetheless. Everything seems to work well, there isn't really a thing that makes me complain.
I like the animations. I overall like reloads done with STANAG platforms, and this is no exception. One thing that bothers me is the fact that James feels the need of crooking the rifle significantly and looking at the mode selector while changing modes.
Considering that James is ex-military, using an M4/M16 platform shouldn't have been this disorienting for him. He should have been able to figure out which position is which by simply touch and feel. I mean, the whole mode selector is under his thumb for a reason.
But that's me nitpicking about small stuff. Apart from that, I say the gun is fine. No complaints.
The rifle has an Epic skin, which is worth every single cap in my opinion. The gun gets smaller, and I love the changes on the suppressor, the sight and the stock. We get a holographic sight instead of the Primary Arms sights, Magpul furniture instead of the current stock and the suppressor seems to be an integral one. I'd assume that the upper is swapped for .300 Blackout as well, it would make sense with such a setup.
Anyway. That was the unimportance that is called "looks and stories". Now we walk into the importance named "numbers and tactics".
The Shadow is capable of 15,360hp damage per shot on maxout, with a fire rate of 750 in-game units. Now, that may look a tad bit slow, but keep in mind, this gun has 2 modes: semi-auto, and a 3-shot burst. So 750 units isn't terribly slow for such a gun. Just like in R77, it is fine.
It takes 36-round magazines, with a rather mediocre reload speed of 429 in-game units. Still, compared to the rest of the assault rifle division, 429 units isn't terribly bad (yes I am pointing fingers at you, you fat friggin' AK wannabe).
So, overall, the gun is acceptable it seems. What else does it have up its sleeve?
Well, remember the 3-round burst I mentioned about a minute ago? Yeah, there is a caveat with that. This gun runs Piercing Ammo whenever the burst mode is on. Yes, your 3-shot burst is a piercing burst. This is the ace of this gun. Being very good at hordebreaking whenever burst mode is activated.
And even better, the gun is flexible to some degree. If you don't think you will deal with hordes, or if you're playing for full-on survival, you can keep the gun at the semi-auto mode, and conserve ammunition. And whenever you decide to walk into or summon a horde, flick the switch and go to town.
This sounds very good. I myself, who doesn't really play this rifle all that much, appreciate these features. And if it wasn't for my two favorites being better choices, I would probably name this thing as the "best assault rifle of the game".
However... well, let's give the verdict on this one first. Then I'll be talking about why it isn't the best.
Verdict: ABSOLUTELY BUILD. This gun is worth every bit of silver that you're willing to put into. However it isn't the best option in the game.
I can even now hear you sugarplums yelling at me "get off the stage you weirdo, Shadow is the best gun in the game, booooo".
However, I will ask for 2 more minutes of your time to explain why I said what I said.
Shadow isn't in and of itself bad. I mean look at my verdict guys. You know that I appreciate its strength.
But compared to these two rifles, it's not that strong:

1. AUG: This gun does everything the Shadow does, only even better.
   
   1. AUG has built-in Piercing Ammo as well, but it doesn't consume as much ammo when using this perk. AUG's Piercing Ammo is on its semi-auto mode, which makes it more ammo economy friendly. Think about it. Would you rather spend 3 shots every time you want to pierce through something and potentially have 2 of those shots wasted, or shoot only 1 shot at a time, guaranteeing 100% accuracy and ammo economy with your piercing shots?
   2. AUG has a Crate Ammo skin, making it even more powerful. You have a gun that is powerful, accurate, fast, quicker reloading, more flexible with its Piercing Ammo perk, and on top of that you add a perk that makes it even more effective out on the field. Compared to Shadow, AUG is much better for that reason.
2. ARC-9 Battalion: Yes it doesn't have a built-in perk, but who cares?
   
   1. First of all, you get a grenade launcher which is reloaded every time you pick up ammo for this bad boy. A grenade launcher that is capable of one-shotting everyone regardless of their health pool. I'd sure as hell take this over a measly Piercing Ammo boost which is only good when you actually have some damage capabilities.
   2. ARC-9 is way more intuitive than ARC-11. Think about it. You get to choose how much ammo you will expend at any number of zombies with the Battalion. You don't need to worry about spending too much ammunition at a given time because it's completely under your control, rather than a burst system or a switch you have to manually flick.

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And I know, I know I mentioned that you could use the semi-auto if you wanna conserve ammo, but that's something you manually have to do. Less manual manipulation with a system is usually better out there on the range. A rifle that intuitively works is usually more effective than one where you have to do every single darn thing to make it work.
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But despite all of this, Shadow is a very cromulent and powerful package. Therefore, here are some tactics and perks.
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1. Get familiar with your mode selector. It can get really annoying to face a horde when you accidentally left the rifle on semi-auto. Just be mindful of its position.
2. When you are approaching a horde, use burst. When you're sticking in a rather empty space, use semi-auto.
3. When you're using the burst, treat it like an R77. Do NOT stop firing until you have to break out for a reload or until everyone's dead.

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And perks:
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1. Crate Ammo: Probably the only thing that would put this thing in the same level as the AUG, to a degree. If you're gonna waste ammo with a burst, may as well pack some extra mags in every crate.
2. Explosive Ammo: James' suggestion from the AP-51 Javelin. No further explanation needed. Observe the destructive results yourself by trying.

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Have fun with it guys. And, apologies for the gap. Real life is a bit too high difficulty.
Next up will be our favorite review, where I talk about the almighty AUG. Stay tuned!

As the title says, my father drew up debts in my name behind my back multiple years ago. Once we found out, we had a “father-son” agreement that he would pay back monthly to cover some of the cost.
Now he is in no position to pay the money we agreed. I don’t know what the best forward.
I don’t know if I am any position to declare fraud anyway, since now I have made payments from my bank account to the banks / debt collection departments, and I’ve phoned them up myself. So now I don’t know if reporting fraud is even a possibility…
Basically, what is your advice on this situation? Can I still report fraud even if I phoned the collectors?
(In England)

Long story short: - House built in 1960 - One side of hallway has textured wallpaper - Despite having HUNDREDS OF DOLLARS worth of scratching posts and toys, cats started to tear up textured wallpaper - When pulling it up, drywall looks fuzzy. Is it paper covered drywall? Do we need to replace the drywall to paint or is there a primer we can use?
Images: https://imgur.com/a/ifQi5MZ

a couple of weeks ago my art class was instructed to bring a reference photo for a portrait study assignment. the trainer suggested that we bring a reference of someone who isnt super familiar, as it can bog you down in trying to capture likeness when we perceive faces differently between real life and photos. after thinking for a while I thought, well, my dad passed away when I was 3, so although Ive seen plenty of photos of him, I have almost zero recollection of how he was before he died.
The photo I chose is one my mum changes to her profile picture every November, when its his birthday. Hes gazing from the steps in the back yard, theres the shadows of the trees on his bare torso, and he looks like hes trying to hold back a smile, squinting in the sun. Every time mum shows it to me, she tells me he was watching me play on the grass.
we were given two sessions in class to start and finish the piece. at first I wasnt so invested, Im not into portraiture much, and was going to bludge it. by the second session, (today) I started to really enjoy the process, and as the portrait was taking its shape and his likeness, I began to get attached. My friend stopped to check out what I was doing and says "holy fuck [VB], I cant believe how much it looks like him." I stop and take a step back and actually see that yeah, Ive captured his likeness, and he looks beautiful. i say "maybe Ill give it to my mum"
my mum and I had always been close. since my dad committed suicide shes always called me "her rock". when i was a kid i was really proud of that, and as a teen i was proud that i was friends with my mum. as ive become an adult though, ive begun to realise that offloading your emotions onto your kid is kind of unhealthy. the older i get, the more emotionally exhausted i am by her relying on me that way, yet in comparison to the attention, energy and resources my siblings get, i receive the least. Ive always asked for the least in hopes that it might ease her load, and therefore mine too. I feel really under appreciated in my family scheme, so i started closing myself off.
Lately though shes been treated really shit at work (shes the only woman at her sexist ass company) and had to deal with a lot of my kid brothers emotional trauma, so Ive done my best to sit back and listen and support her. Shes dealing with a lot, so I didnt bring up my recent dramas with her, but she also never asked about me or showed any interest. The most Ive gotten from her recently was some mashed potatoes that she went on at length about how my dad taught her how to make them.
Later in the day Im trying to finish off this drawing. Im extremely proud of it and my friend wont stop complimenting it. I have a weird relationship with the perception of my father, my mum and my dads family (who dont talk) have always evangelised him to me, but he died when I was so young that I dont remember who he really was, as his own person. but looking at my drawing, that I could bring his direct image with my own hands makes me feel connected to him.
i divulge to my friend that mum has been going through all the old photos again, and they express how we could never understand the pride and bitter nostalgia that looking at your childrens baby photos must bring. I told them that my dads supposedly watching me in the reference photo, and I see them tear up, cover their mouth and say "he looks so proud......" I say "yeah, Im gonna give this to my mum" they say "i think you knew that the whole time"
I cant take it home from the studio for now, I still have to submit it, but my friend helps me take a clear and presentable photo, and then drives me home. My back is aching, and Im tired from having to manage conflict in a group assignment that day too. I walk in the door, call hello, and find her in her bedroom.
she "hey [VB], are you especially tired or busy this afternoon?" me "oh uh, i mean im pretty tired but not super busy. whys that" she "any chance you can make some spaghetti for [baby brother]?" me "oh, yeah okay. before i do that though I wanna show you something. its for an assignment but Im really happy with it, and I think youll like it too"
I hand her the phone, but I should probably also say at this point, and humbly as I can, that Im very adept at my art. I took the course not necessarily because I lacked practical skills, but because I needed to learn gallery ropes, and because I needed community. Im not a master or anything, but I can confidently say my portrait was professional quality. Im not a teenager discovering their new natural talent, but even so I dont believe even someone new to art deserves this reaction.
she "oh, hello [dads name]...... you know, hes such a naughty boy!" me "oh?" she "yeah, you know how Ive been going through those photos? Im pretty sure he threw some out!" me "oh fr?" she "yeah, Im missing all my photos of a certain ex boyfriend named [redacted]!"
my dad was a paranoid schizophrenic, and I was aware his jealousy issues got the better of him oftentimes.
me "oh. that sucks. im sorry. do you like it though?" she "yeah its good, it looks like him." "thanks" she "youre such a naughty man [dads name]!! next time you draw him, you should draw him carrying a pile of my photos to the rubbish bin!" "sure. thats definitely how i remember him. thanks"
I leave to go make dinner for my brother and dont speak to her for the rest of the night. I feel like I shouldnt have expected so much as to make her happy. I dont know what the fuck I, my life, my dad or my art means to her. I feel like me and my siblings are just a resentful biproduct of her shitty relationships. I fucking hate it here. Fuck this, and fuck trying.

"Cat-astrophe"– a prequel short story
This is a prequel story I wrote for one of the characters in my book. If ppl enjoy, I think I'd like to post the full novel.
Set in early 1900s Boston, "Cat-astrophe" is about wealth, celebrity culture, and chronic depression. When these factors combine, we get an interesting character study :-) When someone repeats the same patterns over and over, at which point do you give up on them?
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TW: depression, domestic abuse
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Catherine Ophelia Hughes was born on June 16th, 1893. She was quickly nicknamed Kitty, her mother believing that it was a darling name and therefore fitting for their daughter. She was a darling child. By the age of 6, she had big, dark eyes; long, carefully curled locks of brown hair; and a pale face, like a blank canvas, against which the other two stood out.
In the Hughes’ drawing room, Kitty banged on the piano while singing a ditty of her own creation. Her piano playing was imperfect, to say the least, and her song lacked a melody or coherent words, but her voice was high and sweet.
“You didn’t tell me your daughter was a musician,” some visiting man laughed to Mrs. Hughes.
“She might have a real talent,” mused Mr. Hughes through the pipe he was smoking, sitting in his armchair. He took the pipe out of his mouth and turned to his wife. “We could get her into lessons, couldn’t we?”
Mrs. Hughes looked at the girl doubtfully. “If she’s old enough. Kitty, come here.”
Kitty hopped off the piano bench and stood in front of her parents. Her hands fidgeted with the folds of her white, lacy dress. “Stop that,” said her mother, and she stopped.
“Kitty,” said her father. “Do you want to learn how to sing properly? Professionally?”
“Yes,” she said.
The visitor laughed again. “And do you know what the word ‘professionally’ means, Kitty?”
She turned to him. “Yes,” she said more emphatically.
“This is a smart one,” the man commented.
Mrs. Hughes took Kitty’s hand. “All right, then. We’ll see about it. Now, let’s leave Father and his friend, shall we?”
Kitty and her mother left the room, and a few weeks later, Kitty had her first lesson with her new singing teacher. Through practice, Kitty quickly learned to refine her musical ability, and by 9 years old, she was regularly performing for friends and neighbors, and several times in Christmas pageants and other children’s plays.
One night, her mother was out of town visiting family, and Kitty thought it would be the perfect chance to escape the confines of their home. She had only seen the rest of Boston on occasion, mostly just her parents’ friends’ houses, and of those, mostly the upstairs rooms, where she and the other children were placed during social events to keep them from causing trouble. Tonight, Kitty wanted to cause trouble. She escaped her nanny with an excuse and snuck into the carriage. She hid under one of the seats and covered herself up with a black blanket so she would be less visible.
Her father had said he was going to the theater, and she wanted to see a real play, not just a Christmas pageant. She was going to sneak out of the carriage when they arrived and form her plan from there about where to go and how to not get sent back. Kitty knew she could think quickly on her feet, so she would find a way.
Waiting in the carriage grew hot and boring, although it was winter. She could barely breathe under the blanket. She hoped that they would leave soon and that no one was in a panic about her disappearance. If they worried, her father might not go to the play, and all this would have been pointless.
But just minutes later, her father sat down in the seat opposite her, and the carriage took off. It felt as though they hit every bump on the road. At some point, Kitty was jolted so hard that she smacked her head on the underside of the seat. By the time they slowed to a stop, she was feeling nauseous.
The door opened, and Kitty got ready to follow her father out into the theater. But he didn’t exit the carriage. Instead, someone entered.
They sat down next to Father and closed the door. She could hear them kiss.
“I missed you,” said the newcomer with a giggle. It was a woman, and it wasn’t Mrs. Hughes.
“I’m sorry it took so long for me to get away,” Father said in a low whisper that sounded very unlike him. “Life has been… hectic, to say the least.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said the woman. “Where shall we go?”
“Wherever you want.”
Kitty didn’t know much, but she did know that her father and this woman were romantically involved, and that they shouldn’t be. She threw the blanket off her head and crawled out from under the seat. The woman screamed, and she and Father quickly separated.
Kitty stood up and stared at the two of them. Fresh, cool air hit her face, and her hair was all frizzy from her time under the blanket.
“Kitty,” her father spluttered. “What are you doing here?” His tone turned angry. “You snuck out? That was dangerous, and you know it.”
“What are you doing with her?” she interrupted.
Neither responded. They looked at each other.
Kitty studied the woman. She was obviously an actress, with long hair that she wore in styled ringlets. She was heavily rouged, and she wore massive earrings and strings of pearls and feathers on her bodice, which may have looked appealing on a stage from far away– but up close, she looked chaotic and disorderly and the opposite of Mother.
“I should go,” the woman got out.
“Wait–” Father said, and tried to hold onto the end of her shawl, but she tugged it out of his grasp and left the carriage.
Father closed the door and gestured for Kitty to take a seat.
“You shouldn’t have been here tonight.”
“Because you were going to be with another woman!” she burst out. “How could you? Does Mother know?”
“No,” said Father, “and we’re going to keep it that way. Don’t you see, Kitty? If she finds out, she’ll be heartbroken. You can’t tell her.”
She shook her head in disbelief. “But… but what you’re doing… It’s awful. And I’m not supposed to lie to people.”
“Think, my dear,” urged her father. “You don’t want to hurt Mother. Sometimes…” He paused. “... We must do bad things for good reasons.”
She briefly wondered what the ‘good reason’ was behind his relationship with the actress.
“Right?”
She nodded.
Father stepped out of the carriage to tell the driver to take them home.
When they arrived, before they left the carriage, he nodded to her. “You’re a good daughter, Kitty. You’re doing something very kind for Mother.”
Kitty said nothing, just combed her fingers through her messy hair and jumped out of the carriage. Father held her hand on the way into the house and dropped her off with the nanny, who gave her a good scolding.
And Kitty never did tell Mother about her father’s infidelity. Her knowing the truth would have made everything far more difficult. She didn’t know how much longer his affairs continued for, and she never asked.
Only a year after the carriage incident, she was sent to finishing school.
She was assigned a room, which she shared with another girl of the same age. Later on, she wouldn’t even be able to remember the roommate’s name. They spent their first few years together in a friendship filled with constant conflict: they’d fight, then make up and swear it wouldn’t happen again, but it always did. When Kitty was 13 or so, the other girl was moved back home with her family, and she never saw her again.
Kitty had already become popular from that drama, but after the other girl left, she became popular based on her own merits. She was growing beautiful: her hair had darkened to an ebony shade, and her face was starting to gain definition. She was at the top of every class. She could sing prettily, dance gracefully, and write with eloquence, and her manners improved every year.
With her newfound superiority to her peers, Kitty found that she quite enjoyed toying with them, playing little mind-games. Lies could preserve your mother’s innocence and keep your family together; they could also make you beloved, get you easy revenge, and reassure you that you were still, and had always been, the smartest one in the room.
Sometimes it was for tangible benefit, like scheming to become head of the school’s choir, and sometimes it was for no benefit at all, like making another girl cry just because she could. Kitty never found it difficult to outwit anyone, and she felt the need to keep testing the theory over and over again, trying to see how far she could go. It turned out that the answer was ‘as far as she wanted.’ She never received consequences, and she remained one of the most well-respected, envied girls of her grade, if not the whole school.
At some point, she developed her first crush on a girl, but she quickly ignored those feelings.
By the time of her graduation in 1910, Kitty was 16, about to turn 17. She was finally wearing full-length skirts and pinning up her hair. She had made it. In an environment full of wealth, delicate connections, and competition, some girls didn’t. They broke down, gave up on their schooling, and went home to their country estates; or they suffered an embarrassment and became forever shunned; or they drifted by, pathetic and unnoticed, their faces unremarkable and conversation bland, and went off to average marriages with average men.
Kitty was none of those girls. She had made it through by being more beautiful and talented and intelligent than all of the others. A bright future awaited her– one that she unquestionably deserved.
She accepted her diploma gratefully and drove back down to Boston with her parents and one sister, who had come to see the ceremony. Kitty didn’t know or care much about her siblings. She had two sisters and a brother, but she had never been close with any of them. As they traveled over the bumpy country roads in their automobile, Kitty opened the window and let the breeze run over her face to avoid a conversation.
When Kitty was presented in society, everyone was immediately impressed with her, as she had predicted they would be. It wasn’t a surprise when her parents started to talk about giving her a career beyond being a simple socialite; how would she feel about involving herself in the theatre? She wondered briefly if this idea was inspired by her father’s particular interest in the industry, but she ignored the thought and said that yes, she would like to try.
Her father got in contact with one of his oldest friends, Mr. Reed, whom Kitty had known for years. He was a director, and he found a way to get her a minor role in a production, and then another, and then another, until she was playing Ophelia in Hamlet– fitting enough, considering her middle name. This was the first role that she had had that had really shown off her talents. When they took their final bows at the end, the audience roared in approval for the young woman with the sweet face. She had been so endearing and convincing and true and tragic that she had won all of their hearts at only 17 years old.
After the performance, she cleaned up in the dressing room– the first time she had ever had one of her own. She stared at herself in the mirror, pleased with how everything had gone, thinking that she should reward herself somehow. Once she finished changing, she left to reunite with her family.
They were standing with a young man, who was the first to greet her. He shook her hand enthusiastically. “Miss Hughes, I just adore the theatre, and you… you show me exactly why.”
She gave him her nicest, most confident smile. “Thank you.”
“This is Mr. Sheehan,” her father said.
“Nice to meet you,” she said, and the man blushed. She turned to her mother. “Should we be going?”
The next day, Kitty went out in the city by herself, wearing a basic day dress so that she didn’t attract unwanted attention. She didn’t know exactly what she was looking for until she paused by the front window of a jewelry store. She liked jewelry. She should buy herself something nice.
Inside, she found a beautiful pair of earrings, silver and tiny and delicate. She bought them immediately, knowing that although they were expensive, she was soon to start earning far more money than what her father would give her as allowance. She left the shop with the earrings in a velvet box, feeling immensely satisfied.
In the next few weeks, she started seeing more and more of Mr. Sheehan from the play. He appeared at every dinner party and dance, and he visited her father to talk business in the hopes that Kitty would be around. Sometimes she was, sometimes she wasn’t. She found his devotion oddly adorable. Eventually, she decided to act on it. When he asked if they could begin courting, she said yes, not thinking much of it.
Their whole relationship was her not thinking much of it. Had she been seeing Sheehan or not, her life would have been mostly the same. She continued to perform in Hamlet. Her going out with Sheehan didn’t even make much of a difference in the amount of suitors she attracted, since everyone still refused to accept that they didn’t have a chance with her. She moved on from Sheehan to Danny, and then to Joe. None lasted long, and she hadn’t been in love with any of them. She wasn’t going to lie to herself: she knew it was because she had never trusted a man. She simply hadn’t met any good examples. Her father was a cheater; her manager, Mr. Reed, was a pathetic little man who complimented everything she did; Sheehan had been unremarkable; and so were the rest. At some point, she carried out a brief relationship with a girl, a fellow socialite named Amelia. It was nice, and Kitty didn’t carry much fear of being discovered because, as far as she had seen, she could do whatever she wanted and her parents would be none the wiser– but she didn’t love Amelia, either.
Next came Roger.
She didn’t love him any more than the others, but she couldn’t deny that he was a handsome, charismatic man. He was young, wealthy, and well-connected, and they were something of a golden couple together.
In public.
In private, he drank too much and threw her around like a rag doll. He had always been too physically aggressive, but one day, when she told him that she wouldn’t be seen with him in that state, with his face glowing red and strands of his hair falling over his forehead, he slapped her.
Kitty stumbled back, not so much from the blow as from the icy shock running through her veins. He stalked closer to her.
“What’s wrong with you?” she said in a high-pitched tone. “I won’t be near you when you’re like this.”
“Fine,” Roger said, and thankfully didn’t try to lay a hand on her again. He just stood there in the center of his parlor, swaying slightly. “You can go.”
Kitty took her things and practically ran out the front door. She stopped at the stone walkway to catch her breath. She’d never been hit before, not even when she was a child. A hatred for Roger started to bloom in her stomach.
But the next day, he rang her up to apologize. “I wasn’t myself,” he said. She could hear him sigh into the microphone. “Will you forgive me?”
She did forgive him. She didn’t leave him. He was still handsome. And it had only been one slap, after all. She could handle that.
But she still didn’t love him. She developed a relationship on the side with a man named Paul. She didn’t feel so bad about cheating on Roger because he deserved it. She gained some sort of sick pleasure from the idea of making him upset, although she didn’t want to see what the consequences would be if he ever found out. She wasn’t going to test her luck.
The motion picture industry was starting to become more popular. For a while, films had been growing in length and scope. A decade ago, you could see a single gymnastics routine captured in moving images; now, you could see a full story play out. Kitty and her family sometimes went to showings at movie palaces. Even the poor could go to little nickelodeon theaters and witness the magic of film.
Mr. Reed, Kitty’s manager, proposed getting her a role in a film. She agreed. Her parents fawned over Reed, as usual. You’re so good to her– The reason for our success– Our dear friend. She didn’t dislike Reed, but she didn’t care for him. If she was going to do a film, that was her choice and hers alone. She could have easily refused.
When Kitty started in the film industry, she didn’t have to work her way up. The first role Reed found for her was a main character. At the film premiere, she and her co-stars were called up to the stage for a bow. They forced her forward to do a curtsy all by herself. She gazed into the crowd but couldn’t see any faces she recognized, which somehow made her feel better. It was a shapeless mass of smiling people, and all of them liked her.
Beaming, she touched her own cheek, feeling a pretty blush starting to form. She was wearing her Ophelia earrings. She gestured for everyone to join her in another bow.
She starred in several more films, and her fame grew. Instead of being simply popular with the rich, she was a figure beloved by all classes, as movies were more accessible to the general public than the elite theaters she had been performing in.
Kitty grew an obsession with checking her reputation over and over again. She perused magazines to see what was written about her. (All positive things.) She listened to others’ quiet conversations, paying attention to how they described her. (Positively.)
Roger hit her on two more separate occasions.
One day, she was walking in the street, watching the poor people go about their day. There was an advertisement for a nickelodeon posted on the wall next to her. Lightly curious, she paid her nickel and went inside.
A man was playing piano in the corner of the dark room. Everyone was clustered together, whispering, eyes fixed on the screen.
“Who’s that actor? He’s gorgeous,” said a woman in front of her.
“Don’t you know anything, Millie?” said another. “That’s Abie Myers!”
“Well, I know now,” Millie shot back at the girl who must have been her sister.
Who the hell was Abie Myers?
Kitty moved closer to the screen. He must be the lead. Some guy with a stupid-looking mustache and dark eyes. Come to think of it, she might have heard the name before.
But not as many times as she had heard praise of herself. Logically, she knew that she had nothing to worry about. People liked her. She and Myers could exist in the same industry at the same time.
But she still wished to be seeing herself up on that screen. Why had the girl known Myers by sight, but not her? She’d been standing right behind them.
She’d have to work harder than before, keep working until she was easily recognizable. It occurred to her that she still lived with her parents. She should get her own place. She should get more control over the roles she took. Her parents and Reed would see that she could take care of herself. Myers would be jealous of her.
That idea made her very happy.
So she bought her own penthouse apartment, where she wouldn’t be bothered by anyone. She still visited with her family several times a week and came to realize that she much preferred her parents and siblings in small doses. She liked to bring entire plates of food to her room and eat them sitting on her bed. She could do whatever she wanted.
Although she grew fond of isolation– a little too fond–, she still attended gatherings and parties. On New Year’s Eve, Roger hosted a celebration at his house. He invited most of his friends, all of whom were rich people in their 20s. Kitty felt far more free without the oppressive presence of her parents’ crowd.
Paul was there. She spent much of the night staring at him from Roger’s side. Which one should she kiss at midnight? She liked being able to choose– it was her own delightful secret.
She drank some champagne and started to feel lightheaded. Not enough to make her actually drunk– that would have been unwise. She wanted just enough to feel she was floating. The dress she had chosen was silver, patterned with black embroidery. She held a transparent black shawl around her arms demurely.
A little before midnight, she pulled Paul into a side room. She didn’t know where Roger thought she was, and she didn’t care.
“I wanted to get away the moment we walked in here,” she whispered, her hands wrapped around Paul’s shoulders. She tilted her head up so that their lips were almost touching. “You-know-who just wouldn’t let me go.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said softly. “What do you want to do?”
“Whatever you want.”
The door opened, and a man peered inside. Kitty pushed Paul away, but it was too late; he had seen them.
“I was looking for the coatroom,” the man said timidly.
Kitty recalled that he was a friend of Roger’s, and her heart sank further. Mr. King. That was who he was.
“What are you… doing?” said Mr. King. “You’re still together with Roger, aren’t you?”
For the first time in a long time, she was lost for words. Her whole body was paralyzed with fear. She had been playing her little game against Roger, but whenever a thought came up of what would happen if he found out, she pushed it back and back. He wasn’t going to find out, so what did it matter?
But now King might tell him, and drunk, violent Roger might make a return. He was drunk right now on champagne and brandy. Oh, God. Her parents weren’t here. She didn’t know how she was going to get out of this.
“You didn’t see anything,” she said to Mr. King, her voice quavering. “You– You can’t tell Roger.”
Paul had his hands in his pockets, his face turned down uncomfortably.
Mr. King just looked deeply offended on behalf of Roger. “I can’t believe this.”
He turned back and walked through the door. Kitty ran to catch up with him.
In the dark hallway, she fought to remember his first name. King… William King. “William!” She spun him around. She was breathing heavily, panicked. “You can’t tell Roger. You don’t know what he’s like. He’s drunk right now, and he gets angry and physical. He’s going to beat me. He’s hit me before. He’s going to do it again if you tell him.”
William shook his head, confusion etched across his face. “Roger? Roger wouldn’t hurt a fly. I’ve known him a long time.”
“So have I!” she exclaimed.
“Why should I believe you’re telling the truth?” he said. “You’re lying to him every time you’re with… the other man. How could you do it? Roger’s a good friend. He doesn’t deserve to be treated like that.”
She shook her head, still too shocked to cry. “No, he’s not. I can’t stand him.”
Kitty realized that what she was saying wouldn’t make sense. She was going out with Roger, yet she hated him. She was usually a liar, but she wasn’t lying about his abuse.
William turned away and went down the staircase to the hall where everyone else was gathered. Kitty remained frozen in place in the dark.
Paul was probably still waiting in the room, too scared to leave. Asshole.
The clock struck midnight, and everyone cheered. It was now 1915.
Kitty pulled herself together enough to gingerly walk down the stairs. Her hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
When she made eye contact with Roger, it was obvious that William had told him what had happened. There was a dangerous glint in his eyes. He came to her and kissed her soundly on the lips.
“Happy new year,” he said. “Can I walk you home?”
She nodded but then realized her mistake. She should stay here, in a crowd of people, where Roger couldn’t hurt her.
But it was too late. They headed out. The walk back to Kitty’s penthouse was the worst five minutes of her life. She didn’t know how her legs kept moving. She thought she was going to faint at any moment.
She unlocked the apartment door, and Roger followed her inside.
He traced the patterns on her tablecloth with his finger. “Where were you just before midnight?”
“What?”
“You disappeared.” He slammed a hand down on the table. “King told me that you were off with some other man.”
“I was with Paul.”
“Paul?” He looked up at her, his face a confusing mix of expressions. “And you’re not going to deny it?”
“Stay away from me,” she said weakly. “I don’t love you. I never have. I hate you.”
He took her by the hair and hit her in the face.
Hours later, Roger had long since gone, and Kitty was lying broken on the floor. The maid came in the early hours of the morning, found her, and immediately called for help.
If the maid hadn’t arrived, she might have died. Roger had given her a face covered in bruises, a broken arm, two broken ribs, and God knew what head injuries. She had passed out from the pain and dizziness.
The recovery took two months, most of which she spent in her room. It was a testament to her stellar reputation that no one thought she was hiding a pregnancy.
Or maybe some people thought that. She refused to leave the house to find out.
She allowed her family members to visit her, but not until her face healed up. After all evidence of a beating was gone, and only her broken arm remained, she said she had suffered a fall. The stairs at her building were notoriously steep. She didn’t want to go out in public until she could take her arm out of its sling.
She spent lots of time staring into her mirror, trying to make sure that her features were unchanged. Her nose hadn’t broken, so it went back to its nice, smooth slope. Her split lip healed up, and the small, pouty shape of her mouth returned.
The only visible sign of what Roger had done to her was a tiny scar on her upper cheek, which she guessed had been inflicted by a fingernail. Over two months, it never went away. She took to applying a tiny bit of foundation and powder over it each day to cover it up.
She finally started going out in public again. She signed her contract to do another film. She had had a brief illness, she told Mr. Reed, but she was ready to start working again. How glad he was to hear it!
The sickly sweetness he employed to speak to her made her uncomfortable, rather than proud and superior, as it always had.
She was changed, and she knew it. She looked upon everyone she met with suspicion. She didn’t carry on any more relationships with men, preferring to have affairs with women in dark rooms. Every man reminded her of Roger in some way or another.
Roger moved out of Boston in the two months she remained convalescing. She didn’t have to see him, and she was glad for it.
But she always wondered what would happen if she were to encounter William King again. He had been instrumental in the destruction of her spirit. She took to spreading rumors and falsehoods about everyone she interacted with, feeling that people as a whole were like King: naive but not harmless. She had to stay one step ahead of all of them. But, at the same time, she had to hide her overwhelming hatred for everyone around her; revealing it wouldn’t do for her fame and reputation.
So she perfected the persona that she adopted around everyone, including her family: chin slightly down to show off her eyes, hands folded, gentle smiles. At some point, she met Abie Myers, who turned out to be just as obnoxious as she had imagined. It took effort to keep her pretty, neutral face, but she did so, knowing that she was simply biding her time.
She was unstoppable.
Roger had tried to harm her, humiliate her, and take away her strength, but she was going to get the last laugh. She was going to increase by tenfold everything that had made her so successful: her talent, her beauty, her intelligence, her ability to lie and manipulate. She was going to become so powerful, adored, and controlled that she would never feel weak again.
Kitty’s next film premiered in the summer of 1915. She got ready at her mirror, making sure to cover up the tiny scar on her cheek. She put on those earrings she had bought four years ago. Looking at her reflection, she decided that they didn’t match the rest of her outfit, so she chose different ones.
​
THE END

She came 2 days after my trip to the NE 2nd avenue cemetery. I spent a couple of hours there on a Sunday afternoon, taking pictures of some of the gravestones. The site is notorious, having been the dumping ground of a serial killer that prowled around the area in the mid-nineties. He decapitated prostitutes and set their bodies on fire.
The following Tuesday night, she came.
A loud, crackling sound woke me up sometime after midnight. There was a very strong smell of smoke in my room. Half asleep, still in bed, I saw a fluctuating pattern slowly emerging, struggling to take shape. The face of a woman eventually formed itself from the shifting shadows. Her mouth was open in an angry grimace, frothing at the mouth, like a rabid dog. I turned on the lights and got out of bed. Much to my surprise she was still there, the face was still there. A body was starting to form, too. She followed me with her eyes as I left the room, trying not to fall down.
She comes back every night and every night she is more discernible, more defined, if you will. She has developed a body: naked, dirty and covered with what seem to be knife wounds. Each night she gets closer to my bed, each night she becomes angrier and angrier. As the days pass, she becomes a more interactive, tangible, entity. Last night she said, rather, she growled, that she was going to eat my eyes and chew off my lips.
I tried prayers, burned sage, performed banishing rituals…you name it, nothing worked. Each night she returned, each night she became more tangible, each night she inched her way closer to my bed. Each night the threats became worse (e.g. she promised to castrate me with her teeth).
As a last resort, I called HIM, asked HIM for help. I won’t tell you his name, but it’s not who you think: he predates Judeo-Christian myth by a good thousand years.
She never came back. It was as if she had never come into my life. I enjoyed my first few days of sound sleep in weeks.
He delivered his part of the deal. “His part of the deal”: humm…come to think of it, I never specified any terms or promised anything on my end. To be on the safe side, I fed his image blood from my left hand, a few times, thinking this would satisfy any perceived obligations from me.
Last night I woke up sometime after 4 am.
The air in front of my bed seemed to part, and he appeared, levitating above my bed, arms stretched out towards me, a grimace on his face baring his knife-like teeth. He growled words, terrible words that made me piss myself and empty my insides at the same time, words like hammers banging against the insides of my skull…
He has stated his claim.
He will be back again tonight.

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Cover

41 – Too Easy

There were many ways to access the CARF. Some of them were proper, controlled and regulated, while others were less conventional and reserved only for situations that needed them. Others still were totally secret, known only to a handful of people. The one that the Cromwell-Grassman family decided to use, which was deemed the safest, required them to go through the Quadrangle. Which, considering that the Quadrangle was entirely under PsyOps control, went a long way towards explaining just how unsafe and risky the other methods were.
They had opted to move together for the most part, resorting to splitting up only when strictly necessary. It didn’t matter if they needed to break their covers this time around either, because they were going to redo the whole thing another time anyway after Albert rewound time with the Hazegem. This was a trial run, to figure out the extent of the measures set in place by the rogue operatives and the response of whatever form of hierarchy was still functioning as it was before most of the command structure got compromised.
The trip by car took a couple of hours. It could not be skipped, however, since the teleportation device Albert got from the System was still in the process of being studied, and also because he had never been to the Quadrangle himself. He sat in the rear seat of grandpa’s yellow sports car, feeling like he was on one of those family trips he remembered from his childhood but never managed to recall quite well enough. The ‘adults’, if one wants to define them that way even though Albert was an adult himself, were discussing ways to access the security measures of the Quadrangle without triggering the alarms, and making a list that would be then sent to him via text message. This way it could be preserved through time travel.
As they did so, he fiddled with the piece of junk that once was the PTD, or the teleportation device. He had no dreams of repairing it in the two hours he had, but any headway he made here was less work he would have to do later, and one never knows when yet another piece of magic could come in handy. Eventually though the Quadrangle was finally visible at the horizon, and Albert lost all interest in fixing the small circular device.
“That’s the Quadrangle?” He asked, excited. “Holy shit.”
“Oh yeah, kid.” His grandpa replied from the driver seat. “Pretty cool, eh?”
Indeed, it was like he was seeing something straight out of a science fiction movie. The Quadrangle had tall, black walls that sported a multitude of tiny windows, probes and antennae, balconies and small structures that seemed to grow out of the concrete without rhyme or reason. As they got closer, Albert realized that the structure itself was not made of concrete, but of a strange composite material that was sleek and shiny under the rays of the morning sun. Then, the structure faded from view as the family ditched the road and ventured towards a deep gorge in the desertic landscape.
Admittedly, it wasn’t much of a desert. The rains of the last few days had meant that all the greenery – plants and flowers whose seeds had been dormant in the ground for years – had bloomed and the later frost had sealed the verdant carpets of plants into a tomb of ice. The road was not well maintained at all, but Lloyd’s skilled driving meant that they reached their destination without much delay.
There were two guards standing before a steel door built in the side of the rock at the bottom of the gorge. They wore standard military uniform, their mimetic patterns adapted to the desertic landscape painting big targets of the men standing amidst the greenery and the ice. Before the car was even close, in fact, and before they could even take out their weapons, they were shot with deadly precision by Samantha poking out of the passenger window, and dropped to the ground.
“Huh,” Albert’s mother hummed, examining the weapon in her hands with interest. “Your enhancing magic really did a number on this thing. I’m impressed.”
Albert smiled, proud of his work. He had turned a simple tranq gun into a veritable assault weapon-slash-sniper capable of putting down targets from impressive distances. It cost him a lot of mana, but his regeneration was high enough that he could refill his pool in less than an hour.
“Okay. Onto the door. Usually there would be a passcode, but if we use it, they will know we are here. I’ll take care of disabling the security, Lloyd you stand watch. Albert, you do… stretching or whatever, but be ready.”
As soon as Mother gave the signal, Albert approached the door with heavy steps. His feet sunk into the ground slightly, and his body struggled to carry the heavy steel bar he took from the trunk of the car even with [Strengthening] at full power. Once he was close enough, he inhaled and charged. The thick metal bar was like a sieging ram, hitting the door with incredible force. It only took a handful of hits, and a lot of sweat on Albert’s part even in the arctic temperatures for the hinges to finally give way, and another good hit sent the door sprawling open.
Albert rushed in, right as a smoke grenade exploded at his feet, hiding him from sight. He barreled through in the accelerated speed of [Bullet Time], the shield granted to him by his ring shimmering around him to keep the smoke out, until he felt that he had seen enough and disappeared. When he reappeared from teleporting out of the tunnel, all the targets he had painted for his mother and grandfather to shoot were already down.
“Good work.” Samantha said. “Let’s go.”
***
“Don’t kill them!” The man shouted, looking at the screen. It was surrounded by other screens, all black from when the video feed was cut. “Wound them. Tire them out. But don’t kill them. I want her for myself.”
“But sir, your orders—”
“Ha! You obey me, not them.” The man said. “Your orders are the orders I give you. Nothing else. You understand?”
Beside the man, another man covered from head to toe in small trinkets made of brass and glass stood a full head shorter than him.
“Let’s go,” PsyOps said. “We have stuff to do before she arrives at the CARF.”
***
Getting to the Quadrangle was the easy part, really. It was once they got there that things became suddenly a lot more difficult. The improvised team had to traverse at least two full sides of the structure undetected, reach the secret access point to the CARF, and then hack it as to make it work without a code. Fortunately, a strange event happened as soon as they emerged from the service tunnel they used to reach the structure.
“A notification. From… the Quadrangle itself?” Samantha said, a bit shaken.
She pulled out her phone and looked at the live video feed of the room they were. There were squares painted around their heads, displaying their name and designation, all marked as friendlies. There was a square for Albert too, but instead of being green it was black with white borders, and there was no designation at all. It was disconcerting, considering that they were sure they had cut the feeds when they hacked the cameras, but even more unsettling was the message that came with the video.
>I can help you reach ACCESS:CARF#03
“Is that the Quadrangle itself speaking to you?” Lloyd asked, peeking at the footage on the phone. “Never happened to me. Lucky you.”
Samantha frowned. “Never happened to me neither, before now. I was the one talking to it, not the other way around.”
“Should we trust it?” Albert said.
Lloyd shrugged. “I say yes. We get a redo in case it was a trap.”
Thus, the hard leg of the journey became unexpectedly easy. They navigated through the complicated and dizzying maze of corridors following the instructions of the all-knowing sovereign of the place, who instructed them on which routes to take, when to stop and hide, and when to shoot their way through. No alarms were triggered during the whole journey, and although Samantha never felt quite at ease at the thought of the unexpected helper, nothing happened to make her think that she was being played.
However, things were looking a bit too easy for her tastes. And she knew full well that there was no such mission as a perfect mission. PsyOps and SpaceOps were completely missing from the picture too, which was very suspicious. Something was bound to go incredibly wrong.
***
“Albert, if you ever need to rewind, rewind back to this moment. If you do that we’ll see you disappear before our eyes and then teleport in, right?”
“Yes, that’s how it looks from the—”
Silence.
“Shit.”
One full minute passed. Then two. Then three. Neither Samantha nor Lloyd dared move a muscle.
“He rewound.”
“Yes.”
“Why is he not reappearing?”
“He’s not supposed to reappear here. It’s not how rewinds work.”
“But he should have teleported here as soon as he finished rewinding.”
“Yes.”
“But he hasn’t.”
“He hasn’t.”
“Which means…”
“Something’s wrong.”
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Immense Space

This stand is not just a train, it’s way cooler than that
Stand Typing: 『Runaway Train』is a long range, sentient, post mordum, sub dimension manipulation. Please bear with me.
Category: Humanoid.
Stats
Power: C
Speed: A
Range: ?
Durability: C
Precision: A
Potential: E (post mortem’s should have like 0 potential, fight me)
Stand Ability:『Runaway Train』has the ability to, once being physically seen by a person under the age of 17(usually a child under 13, though) that is currently,or unavoidably about to be, kidnapped, or should leave the care of their current guardian, will be teleported to a place that seems to be a random spot on a rail that stretches forever. It’s actually『Runaway Train』’s sub dimension. This spot will have a lamp-post and one of those bus benches with a cover over it. It begins raining softly l after 6 seconds, getting more and more heavy every second. After the child has sat down on the bench for 10 or more seconds, the chugachug of a train can be heard faintly in the distance. The sound gets louder and louder, until the train is close enough to stop, releasing that hissssss of the break, with the fourth train car out of 7 being equal to where the stop is. After that, the train will open its doors, and the rain will seem to clear in a tunnel to the door. The door is quite high, so the child needs grab something to pull themselves up. When they get close enough, a hand outstretches. If the child takes their hand, they get pulled aboard, the train doors close. The hand belongs to the human disguise of『Runaway Train』 , a kind man named Hanks Allsburg. The child is sat down at one of the empty seats, and a ticket that the child will find in their pocket will be punched. The train will start moving, with the destination labeled “Neither here nor there”. Eventually the train will stop again, and if our child was meant to be getting off there, then they will either be dropped off at either where they live currently with time having been sped up 10 times the time they were on the train or at a relatively unknown orphanage without any time seeming to pass. They are dropped off at the orphanage if their home would not be safe, their guardians are no longer alive, or their guardian(s) are the reason that『Runaway Train』effected the child. The child can also choose to not get off, they won’t have to or be forced off, but they will never have another opportunity to get off the train again. Yeah, it is based on The Polar Express.『Runaway Train』can manipulate this this sub space in every way and quickly at that, due to its precision and speed, and can position itself so perfectly so that nobody but the child can see it and guarantee the child will see it, also due to its precision and speed. More so, if it ever feels it needs to protect the children from something, it’s speed and precision allows for it to make swift and weakening blows to weak spots with its arms or slightly slower and heavier blows with its feet.『Runaway Train』’s user died over 10 years ago, and at this point who he was no longer matters. His name, if you want to know anyway, was John Allsburg.
Humanoid Appearance:『Runaway Train』has the appearance of a tall bipedal humanoid with an over all metallic like body, with a dark green color around most of its body, with a wide head. It’s head is like a soap bar with much smoother, more head-like curving corners and edges. On the back of its head is four lines up rusty steam whistles you find on trains, three pointing down and one pointing up, that every often make a in-and-out whistle sound as some light blue-grey steam comes out of it. The front half of it’s face has bronze-yellow gears that twist continuously, like a machine, covering front half. It has a thin neck that looks way too small to support its larger than usual head, with two flat yellow conveyer belts longways on both sides, going in opposite directions. It’s torso is quite slender, with a grandeur bronze cage with barbed wiring on it. It’s torso on the inside is open, revealing elevator-like pulley system going up and down, with the inner walls being filled with gears twisting. It’s arms are quite slender as well, with sections of it being spiked with microscopic, but still able to pierce, spikes, lining it’s bronze sections. It’s hands are metallic and has 4 fingers, missing the ring finger. Its fingers begin thick and blocker, but become thinner the further you go, but it isn’t sharp. It’s legs are blocky and quite a bit heavy, being thicker the more you go down. It’s feet are separated in the middle, with the sides still being connected. This empty section is a lot like a double sided hydraulic press, with a crusher on the top and bottom, with a lollipop wrapper nailed onto the top crusher, and lollipop stick stabbed into the bottom one. The bottom of its feet converge into a slightly smaller square at the bottom, like some fancy chair legs have.『Runaway Train』is around 6’6 ft tall.
Train Appearence: On the side of the fourth car, where it stops to pick up the children, It says that it’s named the The Runaway Express. The Runaway Express has a likeliness to the Puffing Billy train model(google it) in appearance, with the green sections being replaced by a dark blue; the marine by a turquoise, as well as the bumps in the front being replaced by more steam pipes, near constantly blowing out endless steam.
Human Appearance: (Hanks from the voice of the Conducter in Polar Express,Allsburg is who wrote the “The Polar Express” book) Hanks Allsburg is a quite rotund older white man who appeared around 86 in age, with a grey beard and grey hairs connected by grey sideburns, with the common grandpa face. He wears matching marine red overalls and undershirt shirt underneath a checkers pattern brown and light brown sweater old men wear. He has old dark blue bowler shoes. He wears a sailors cap with the anchor replaced by a conductor train car matching the one at the front of The Runaway Express. He is around 6’7 ft tall. He is quite kind and caring in nature, and plays games with children on the train whenever『Runaway Train』doesn’t have to go out to save another child. When he does have to go, he will say that he has to do something on a different part of the train, before jumping off the train somewhere, bringing it to the real world, somewhere within 2 kilometers of a child fitting the conditions of『Runaway Train』’s ability’s activation.

Firi
She had never been more exhausted in her entire life save for the one time she'd been exposed to null, and even that was a closer call than she'd have ever believed was possible. Everything was sore. Even with the warmth of axiom, the warmth of her husband's embrace, his gentle massaging and caresses.
Firi had been in labor for nearly ten hours. One of the last kits had been a stubborn little brat and taken their sweet time coming out. Even if her last daughter had been more compliant delivering eight kits was something her husband had described as a Herculean labor. Jerry having to explain what that phrase meant had been a nice distraction. That he'd made it in time at all was a small miracle. She'd even had a brief moment with Inara before she'd been taken back to the delivery room.
Then there'd been a fair bit of pain, a fair bit of effort, and a mix of hormones and emotions that had laid Firi out flat and left her damn near dead to the world after nursing the kits for the first time. Thankfully Jerry and a nurse had been on hand to assist moving the kits around as needed. Better still, the bed had been designed with recovery with a decent sized litter... or one or two very large babies and a similarly large mother, in mind. So Firi had been able to snuggle up with Jerry and her babies and get some badly needed rest before heading back to the Den.
Jerry had insisted on carrying her. While some of her half sisters had come to help move the kits home. It had been slightly embarrassing being carried through the passageways of the Tear... but if she was honest, it made her feel like the luckiest woman in the galaxy at the same time.
If anything, she felt even better now. Comfortably installed in the master bedroom with Jerry, her litter, Syl and her litter, and joining them as a special guest for a family cuddle, Mama Inara! Firi can't help but radiate with positive energy as she considers how nice it is to have her mother, her real mother, not the creature who'd spawned her, with them at long last. She hadn't realized just how much she'd missed Inara's presence. Even the kits seemed to know her instantly, bonding with Grandma when many of the kits were normally a touch suspicious of strangers, a fairly natural behavior for Volpir infants, but one that Inara's raw 'big mom energy', as Sharon described it, overcame with the same effort as taking out a soup cracker with a laser cannon.
Speaking of Inara, the venerable older Volpir's namesake squirms over towards her father, always able to find him even if she was blind folded, truly the biggest Daddy's girl in the Bridger children by a long shot. All of them were affectionate with their father, but Little Inara's bond with Jerry was something special, and she curls up against his hand, shortly followed by her brother, who was the person Little Inara loved most in all her tiny universe save her parents.
Her own children were mostly curled up against her, snuggling into their mother's warmth on pure instinct. Her own son, Chad, a name she'd been told was a human reference to a great or powerful man of legend, snuggled in most aggressively of all, clearly something of a Mommy's boy, something that made Firi's heart weep with joy. There couldn't be a luckier, more blessed or happier woman in all the known galaxy, Firi thought to herself, stroking her son's back as he fusses just a bit. Lucky as there were so many sons in the family already, and she too had been blessed to present Jerry another of his sons, something she knew pleased him greatly. Blessed because all of the many children of their family were healthy and strong, and they, and she, were surrounded by love in great abundance. Happy beyond measure, because Firi could only sleep from pure exhaustion now. How could she want to sleep, when her reality was better than any dream she'd ever had? Any fantasy she'd ever even dreamed up. Never. Not once. Could she have dreamed of something this blessed. Something this outlandish.
To be married was a dream. To have children was a dream. To be loved was a luxury beyond even many of the wealthiest women in the galaxy. To have all three, to have love in such abundance that it was hard to describe it all. How could she be anything but happy? She had to stop herself from singing with the sheer joy of it all sometimes. Even now. Even bone weary and exhausted, Firi Bridger knew only contentment and joy. Not even the presence of her birth mother, locked away in a cell far from the den could darken the shining beacon that was her life at the moment, as Jerry idly kissed her fluffy ears and combed her long red hair with his fingers.
Mama Inara too looked absolutely blissful. She was opposite Firi and Jerry, while the dozing Syl bridged the gap between them. Inara had been in more or less exile for a long time. Parted from her favorite daughters. Parted from what had always mattered most to her, her family. Blood shared meant a lot to Mama Inara, Firi knew that well. Blood of kinship, blood of oaths, it didn't make her any less a mother, Firi knew Mama Inara had given all of herself that she possibly could to the orphanage she'd been serving at as a nun. Still. It wasn't home, and at long last, Mama Inara was home again. Firi wondered for a moment if having Grandma in for a family cuddle was a bit awkward for Jerry, but considering her husband's taste in women, and that Mama Inara was as beautiful as ever from the healing coma that had sent her into hiding in the first place, Firi considered it probably wasn't too much of a hardship to have another Volpir beauty around, especially one that so strongly resembled his wives, being mother or aunt to all the Volpir wives in the Bridger clan had that effect.
Not that she could tell one way or another from Jerry, he was clearly half asleep, and utterly focused on Firi and the kits. A fantasy father for her children come true. Many men were uninvolved with their children, just as a matter of practicality, not a lack of desire to be actual fathers to their daughters, but with so many demands on their time, to include fathering more children for wives who wanted their own offspring... well. Someone had to lose out in the end. Another thing to appreciate about her husband. The concept of being uninvolved with his children had absolutely horrified him, and reinforced his strong desire to keep his family small, and more importantly, together. No living separately for the Bridger women. They all pulled and stayed together, guided by the sheer force of will of their husband, who would move heaven and earth alike for them, to ensure they all stayed together.
Firi lets herself relax back into Jerry more, practically melding with him as her consciousness expands, basking in the warmth, love and beauty of her little slice of paradise... and in a flash, she finds a small storm cloud in her sunshine. Something is upsetting her mother. Firi frowns, wondering at the brief caress of the thought. What could be troubling Mama Inara now? This should be a purely happy moment shouldn't it? For everyone? Firi wanted this pure happiness for Mama Inara too. Wanted the whole family to know her joy and peace. She reaches out, leaning forward gingerly to avoid disturbing the kits, and strokes Mama Inara's shoulder.
"Mother... is something the matter?"
Inara gives Firi a somewhat guilty smile. "You always were such a perceptive girl Firi. There's so much right at the moment that I can't help but feel a bit guilty for still being upset. I just... It's. You know what it is. Indra. Your mother-"
"You're my mother. Not her." Firi cuts Inara off before covering her mouth with her hand. She hadn't intended to be that sharp.
Still instead of scolding her, Inara simply smiles, easing Firi's worries. "It does my heart good to hear you say that, and in some ways I am, but Indra is your mother too, and my sister... and I wish she was here. Here the way I remember her. Instead she's locked up in a cell like an animal, and it hurts to know that that is the safest place for her to be. For me. For you. For the kits. She was... she spoke to me. While she was waiting for her chance to kill me. I really... I just don't understand. I desperately want to understand."
"Well we're going to have to deal with her eventually." Jerry props himself up on his elbow, joining the conversation. "Today however, we have more important things to focus on. Including you coming home to us Inara." A smile sparkles in Jerry's eyes. "Plus it means we can ask you to babysit a bit."
That got a smirk on Inara's face. "Ah, such is the lot of grandmothers everywhere. I take it you have something specific in mind, young man?"
Jerry nods solemnly. "Yep. If you could stay and support Syl with the kids for thirty minutes, maybe an hour so I can carry this woman down for a nice long, hot soak in the bath and a well earned massage."
"Hmmmmm." Inara weighs the request as if she was a government official considering a petition for a moment before breaking into a big smile with a laugh. "Of course, I'll do it gladly. It's no hardship to spend time with my now numerous granddaughters and precious grandsons, but honestly I'm happy to assist. It truly lightens my heart that my sweet girls married so well. It's beautiful to me. A loving, attentive husband, I couldn't ask for more for you all in terms of a marriage partner. So please, take Firi off for a well deserved soak. Syl and I will mind the wee ones. I've minded far more boisterous kits than these sleepy dearies... including Firi herself as it happens.”
"Oh goddess, husband, please, carry me away before she fetches her communicator and starts showing off baby pictures."
"I suppose show and tell will have to wait for later then. Perhaps after dinner."
Before Firi can say anything more, Inara is bringing the kits over with a touch of axiom and wrapping them in her tail, and Jerry is hoisting her into his arms into what he told her was called a bridal carry. Being in his arms made her feel so warm and safe. Her arms slide around her husband's neck as she gently leans up and kisses his cheek.
Her mother couldn't overstate Firi's luck. Her blessings. Her joy. Her pride. Because she was loved so readily, and after a life of hard work, and hard choices, finally had a chance to do something easy. Being a wife. Being a mother. Both weren't easy. All of life's choices had their hardships. A careless word that came off as cruel, or some other strife between spouses. Children could be a handful at any age, be it a crying kit who wouldn't calm, a toddler throwing a tantrum or an older child testing their parent's patience.
All of it took will and determination.
What was easy was loving her husband. Loving her sister wives. Loving her babies. It had always been what Firi was best at, and now at last she could let her greatest gift truly shine.
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Good morning everyone. Just a few quick things.
Sorry to those of you on Reddit. I messed up the tags for Part.3 of Chap.150 and it didn't send notifications out from the bots. I went ahead and reuploaded the chap so hopefully, you got it then.If not here and you missed it, here is part 3 of chapter 150.
One, thanks to all of you who have filled out the survey. And to those of you who haven't and still want to, make sure you do so because I will cut the survey off on the 19th.
Link=https://forms.gle/bpqSdg2aEHBGnLKY7
Two, as I mentioned at the end of the last chap, I am taking a small break to recoup and get everything fixed up for the recap of Vol.6. I shall see you again on Thursday the 23rd for the Side Stories and for the final week of double posting.
I think the Side Stories are pretty fun this time, as we get some action, adventure, and behind-the-scenes events. As well as checking in on some others :D
Anyways, I hope you all enjoy this epilogue as we are going to get some action with our old friends in Hades Squad.
---
Year 2517, floating somewhere in Federation deep space.
“Heimdall, I don’t mean to question orders, but is something like this actually possible?” Apollo asked as he settled into his harness.
“Yeah, they are keeping us in the dark about this new tech. I don’t really like that,” Hephaestus added.
“And it almost killed you! What the hell is that, huh? They just expect us to—”
“Relax, Artemis, everyone. It’s as they say. I had the same concerns, but Suárez cured all my worries. I saw it with my own eyes. And the tech is being kept on the down-low for reasons just like this. Besides, we might all be freedom fighters and allies in this war, but we are still just soldiers,” I told them, wagging a finger at them.
“So it’s possible to rip a ship out of warp?” Apollo asked, his blue eyes piercing into me.
I nudged Va'cot. “Well, you tell them, won’t you?”
Va'cot nodded slightly. “The Council was working on anti-warp technology for many years, but as far as I’m aware, it never left the initial stages. They lacked any reliable power source to affect ships,” she said in her usual toneless voice.
“But now things are different, huh?” Artemis mused.
She’s right. Things are different now, and we experienced that firsthand.
The anti-warp tech was the real deal, and it nearly took my life. We got our first taste of it on the raid on that space station. I got hit by multiple bullets, and they all left nasty wounds that took an extended amount of time to heal. It was like they left a lingering curse on me or something like that.
It turned out it had to do with these new crystals the Federation found, and we managed to capture one on that very station. That’s why they were so hellbent on blowing it to kingdom come. They resembled the crystals everyone used for warp travel, but these new crystals were… different.
The crystals used in warp drives came in a myriad of bright colors and sizes. Some were as large as a man, and others could even get as big as a bear. It just depended, and as far as we could tell, the color never mattered, and the size just indicated how big of a ship it could move. Those were the only fundamental differences.
But these new crystals were pitch black and smaller, no longer than a finger. But they exuded some kind of sickening aura. The second they busted it out of its containment, I wanted to vomit, which was a new experience for me. The thing felt perverse and wholly wrong, like an evil artifact of some type.
But I’ll be damned, evil, god-given, whatever its power was, the thing was powerful. Two finger-sized crystals were enough to rip a ship out of warp, something that I wasn’t able to believe ‘till I saw it with my own eyes.
When I sat on the bridge of the Stormpike and watched a frigate get pulled out from warp, suddenly, I felt as if I had witnessed a significant change in the way of the galaxy, and I was glad the Council never got their hands on the technology. While in the warp, it was thought that a ship was untouchable until it came out from its warp point.
And it’s not like warping around was omnipotent. It had its limits, and everything had a cost. But regardless…
It’s a shame we only have ten crystals in total. We have no idea where the Federation got them or how many they have in stock, but we think it’s only a few, and they don’t seem to know about pulling ships out of warp yet. And we are sadly already down six. And two of them are about to be used to pull this mission off.
“Whatever, it doesn’t matter if we know how it works,” Artemis said, shrugging her shoulders. “If it gets me face to face with that old hag so I can rip her arm off and beat her to death, then that’s all that matters.”
There was a moment when none of us said anything. Typically it would be best to…steer away from that kind of talk before a life-or-death capture mission, but I felt that everyone was of the same mind. I think, given a chance, everyone would do what Artemis was thinking.
Well, maybe not Va’cot. She’s a good girl when she isn’t trying to slice someone’s throat.
“Now, now. You know we can’t do that,” I chastised half-heartedly. “If you killed her then everything would be for naught, Artemis.”
Artemis clicked her tongue. “Fine, one swift kick to the ribs oughta do it. I promise I won’t break her in half.”
I just chucked wryly. “What you don’t know is that we already lost life to get this information. I’m sure that person is rolling in their grave right after hearing you.”
Artemis begrudgingly nodded in agreement. “But is all of this information accurate? It’s so little, and we were not able to confirm it. Right, Heimdall?” Apollo argued.
I sighed internally but also couldn’t help but remark on just how much everyone had changed. Once upon a time, it was unthinkable for any of these people to question the validity of a mission. Sure, some gripes or questions needed to be answered for clarity, but outright skepticism?
Twenty years ago, that was unthinkable. Guess it all changed because of him, huh?
“Our ever lovely Suárez personally guaranteed that the mole was a trustworthy source. It’s taken us all this time just to find a single trace of her after the war, so this is all we’ve got. It’s now or never,” I explained.
Everyone nodded to themselves and relaxed a bit. It’s not like it would have changed anything, whether the mole was suspicious or not. We’d been waiting for an opportunity like this for over a decade by that point.
”Besides, I’m running out of time,” I muttered quietly to myself as I closed my cybernetic hands.
I had lost the use of both my arms the previous year. Every part of my body ached, and getting up in the morning was becoming more of a challenge with every sleepless night I went through. That was another thing: sleep.
I didn’t have to sleep all that much compared to a normal Human. Back in the day, I could go weeks without even a wink of sleep and still be right in the ol’ mind. But as the sand of my youth trickled down the hourglass, I’d wanted to sleep more than ever.
Getting old sucks. Suárez told me that I only had a few more years, even if I stopped what I was doing and retired for good. Not that I have any plans of doing so. I’m in too deep to go back to AJS and plant flowers with the kids again…
Well, it is what it is—just another mission.
I stood up from my seat and looked out at the four people in my squad. “As all of you already know, this mission is both critical and dangerous. We have forty minutes to succeed, thirty minutes for the warp drive to warm up after taking the ship out, and ten to extract. That also includes the time it takes for their comms to come back on and send a signal.”
I rolled my shoulders and cracked my neck. “I don’t need to remind you that we are far from any kind of backup. If we miss that forty-minute deadline, the two cruisers are to leave without us, and we are to sabotage the enemy vessel and go down with it”
Everyone nodded a single time. “Our primary goal is to secure the doctor alive by any means necessary. If things turn for the worse, we are to eliminate her along with the ship. The mole couldn’t give us concrete details on her security, but it shouldn’t be a surprise. We are expecting at least two squads of Gen 3s on a frigate, along with marines. The old doctor moves fast and light these days, which is good for us.”
“This isn’t going to be a walk in the park. We may have the element of surprise, but that will only last so long. In order to save time, we are aiming for the center of the ship while another squad will hit the lower decks. We split up and cover as much ground as we can on the upper floors and take the escape pods so we can get scooped up by our friendlies…” I trailed off.
Everyone just watched me in silence, so I just sighed and sat down. “What’s the point? Everyone already knows what to do,” I groaned.
I felt Va’cot’s pink eyes staring at me, so I turned to look at her. She nodded quickly and gave me a thumbs-up. I chuckled to myself and gave her one back.
At least somebody appreciated my recap.
Just then, the hue of the hull changed into a soft yellow. That meant it was time to get ready. Like the well-oiled machines we all were, we donned our helmets, grabbed our weapons of choice, and locked ourselves into our harnesses. The time for conversation was over, and it was now time for action.
In just a scant five minutes, the area was bathed in an ominous red light. “Readings indicate an inbound warp jump. Warp point being formed,” the ships onboard AI mono voice echoed.
It could have been a minute or an eternity before the cold metallic voice rang out once more. “Target acquired. Launching in three…two…one.”
The engines roared to life as I was thrown into the back of my seat. Even with my harness, I shook like a madman as the ship rocketed off toward its target. It was always a weird thing, being in a metal coffin about to smack into another metal coffin in the middle of empty space.
The only bright side was that it took the enemy's ship a few moments to fire at us. Thankfully it was standard procedure to power down weapons in warp jump as there was no need to waste power, and it took some time for even small-caliber point-defense systems to come online. And all we needed was those few moments.
Boom.
Crash.
Everyone rocked in their seats as the Tiger rammed into the enemy ship and burrowed its way through the hull using its plasma shield as a ram. Eventually, everything stopped, and the harnesses were quickly released. We stacked up at the front, and the room was bathed in bright green light as the gangplank smashed down.
We were in a long hallway, and my eyes immediately locked on a figure. He had just missed being crushed by the gangplank and looked up at me with teary eyes. I never heard what he tried to say as I crushed his skull under my weight.
Bolter fire thundered off as we mowed down hordes of people frantically leaving their rooms. We had landed in a barracks, and nearly all the hostiles were unarmed besides a handful with pistols. I watched a round ricochet off Hephaestus’s helmet, only for him to turn slightly and reduce the offender’s head into a pink mist.
We made short work of anyone who was still left breathing, and our squad split. I took Va’cot and headed toward the bridge while the others moved on to the ship’s armory and ammo storage. There was no conversation between us, we knew what needed to be done, and we all went about our tasks diligently.
Va’cot and I cleared room after room, hoping to score a lucky break, but all we ended up finding were those attempting to arm themselves or those hiding in their bunks. We didn’t have time to execute every single sailor, but a quick shredder grenade into each room was enough to paint the walls red.
The sound of heavy boots on the floor echoed in the distance, and I gave Va’cot a signal to cloak herself and hide in the doorway. Two figures, both towering over six feet tall and clad in sleek black armor, raced down the hallway with bolters at the ready.
Unfortunately for one of them, they got too close to Va’cot, and she deftly swung her plasma sword. The air hissed with plasma fire, and she cleanly separated the Death Commando’s head from his shoulders. Unfortunately for us, the second wouldn’t be so easy.
I fired two rounds, hoping to hit center mass and a leg, but the commando was quick on the reaction. He threw his body into a doorway and returned fire. It was only thanks to our new Elunari-equipped plasma shields that those bolter rounds didn’t cave in my chest.
The rounds tried to force their way through the shield, only to detonate harmlessly on the outside. My shield hummed from the strain, and I went into the adjacent room. I flicked my visor’s heat sensor on, a new tool courtesy of the Coalition, and I tried to track the Death Commando, but no dice. His armor was far too well shielded thermally to be seen through a thick metal wall.
But his gun’s barrel wasn’t.
I took aim and shot through the wall, tracing the barely visible smear of red. My shots seemed to be missing until Va’cot tossed a plasma grenade into the door. I watched as the small ball of red fire grew in my vision into a miniature sun until it exploded.
The blast rocked the room and kicked up dust, and I wasted no time in reloading and sending more rounds at the target’s last known position. I ceased my fire, reloaded, and counted to ten, waiting for any heat signatures or noises, but nothing came.
We checked and cleared the room, both enemy combatants were dead, but there was no time for celebration. We immediately went back to our search, and when we stepped into the hallway, a hail storm of gunfire barraged us. Rounds clanked and bounced off our armor harmlessly and the two of us returned fire.
The squad of unfortunate souls was reduced to nothing but their legs as rounds burrowed into their chests and exploded. “Marines and Death Commandos engaged. Two combatants neutralized,” I radioed.
I checked the status of the rest of my squad, and they were all green, as was our friendly squad. There were quick flashes of acknowledgements, and Apollo’s voice filled one of my ears. “Marines have been engaged, no Death Commandos,” he said quickly.
Huh, does that mean she is on the bridge after all? It was considered to be less likely, considering she is a researcher. Well, let’s find out.
Va’cot and I wordlessly continued our slaughter, meeting only the bare resistance of marines and crew members. Eventually, power flicked out on the ship, and the bulkhead doors slammed closed. But we planned for that as well.
We had plenty of pre-made charges to blow all the way to the bridge if need be. I quickly placed the charge and—
Boom.
Huh?
I stared in surprise. The bulkhead door was dented inward, but it still remained standing. Considering that we had the schematics, we knew very well what was needed to blow through these doors. We even added a bit more just in case something like that occurred, but to think they reinforced them that much.
“This means we are in the right place,” Va’cot said through our system firmly as she sliced the near-broken door with her sword.
“That’s one way to look at it,” I responded.
It took a bit longer than we had planned, but we eventually arrived at the door to the bridge. The place was sealed shut, and I had to plant multiple explosives to even dent the thing. It was also a problem that we hadn’t run into anyone since the doors started dropping.
“They are either all in here, or we are going to get ambushed when we—”
My words were cut off as the door opened slightly, and a storm of bolter and rifle fire smashed into us. My shield whined and flickered from the intensity, and we were forced to find cover only for grenades to be tossed at us.
The fragmentation grenades exploded and peppered us with shrapnel but left us mostly unharmed. I ended up taking a piece to the fingers in between my armor plates, but nothing that I couldn’t handle. I looked over at Va’cot, and she had a nice long gash in her visor. One of the pieces must have slipped through her shield and cracked it.
“From the pattern of fire, there is one bolter deep, one on the right and one on the left,” I said.
Va’cot nodded her head. “I will eliminate the one on the right.”
“I’ll aim for the left, and we both get the center,” I said back to her.
Our conversation ended just like that, and I immediately set the charges off on the now-closed bridge door. A powerful shockwave rolled past us, and the lights flickered on and off, and the warship rocked from the force. Va’cot tossed plasma grenades, and I threw in shredder grenades before entering, making short work of the crew and marines.
The flurry of hell we sent in was our cover, and we relied on our shields for any blows. I trusted Va’cot fully, so I didn’t bother checking if she was going to be okay. I swept my side, and it was clear with the bodies of dozens of marines and crew members ripped to the shreds. I found a Death Commando still standing on the left, albeit seriously injured but alive and with a gun raised.
The third generation had the lowest tolerance to Ambrosia of all the generations, but regardless of tolerance, if enough of the stuff was pumped into their veins, they were still dangerous. Despite missing an arm, he wielded his bolter from the hip and fired at me.
The shots impacted my shield, and I sent immediate rounds back to him. And he didn’t have a shield. Most of my shots bounced off his armor or didn’t penetrate deep enough for an injury, but one of them hit him in the neck. He dropped to the ground like a sack of potatoes as the round burrowed through him.
They just don’t make them like they used to. The Gen 3s are just so fragile compared to us. Too Human.
Va’cot was in a similar state as she had taken out her target, and a quick scan showed the middle Death Commando had perished before we entered. The room was now quiet, filled only with the groans of dying Humans. We moved quickly.
I turned heat vision on and confirmed five signatures hiding in the panic room. The door was locked up like a vault safe and was well hidden behind a panel. It was meant for situations like this, but it only worked if the boarders didn’t know of its existence.
“Cut it open. We can’t risk explosives now,” I ordered.
Va’cot set to work, and I finished off any survivors before standing guard for her. “Va’cot and I have secured the bridge. One Death Commando squad was eliminated. Doctor Octario has not been found, and we are breaching the panic room.”
“The lower floors are clear, no Death Commandos or targets. Planting charges on warp drive,” an AI voice said through comms.
It must be a species that doesn’t speak English leading the lower floor squad, interesting.
“We are under heavy fire. Resistance is concentrated at the armory. Requesting backup,” Apollo said calmly.
“We’ll be there in a moment,” I told him. “Va’cot, status?”
“Five Humans, three males, and two females. No elderly females in the safe room,” Va’cot radioed.
“Then let’s move to Apollo.”
Boom.
Boom.
Boom.
Boom.
Boom.
We made sure to raise the bulkhead doors and destroy the systems as well as any communication units before racing through the halls back to our squad. Resistance was minimal, only stragglers who had managed to arm themselves from their deceased comrades. However, the sounds of heavy gunfire could be heard as we approached.
We made it to a hallway that was a literal blinding flash of light. Sadly, scanning for life forms wasn’t possible because of the metal used by the Federation. However, we could see the positions of our squad mates. They were pinned down in adjacent rooms by gunfire.
“They are stalling for time. We have ten minutes, Sir,” Va’cot stated.
Yeah, I know…damn. To think she would be toward the armory. How annoying.
“Squad two, can you place charges on the lower deck at the junction to the armory?” I asked.
“Affirmative. Two minutes for placement,” the synthetic voice said.
“You heard them, return fire and keep them busy,” I said into my helmet.
I received the affirmative, and we continued to trade fire. There was no way for us to press forward safely. Even if we maxed out plasma shields and used external shields, we would succumb to this kind of concentrated fire. They even had a heavy bolter in place, which would make quick work of us if we were to rush forward blindly.
“Hey! What if those explosions kill that hag or blow us the hell up?!” Artemis growled into her helmet as she blew the head off a marine that peaked in too far with her railgun.
“We can’t be passive because we are running out of time. If the explosions kill her and ignite the ammo, so be it. Remember why we are here,” I told her firmly.
Artemis said nothing for a moment before sending a few more shots. “Yeah, I know! I just want my chance!”
“Charges are placed,” the voice called out.
“Do it now.”
Boom.
A quick shock wave rolled past us and rocked the ship, only for a fire wave to snake down the hallway. The gunfire was momentarily halted, only to be replaced by the agonizing screams of dying Humans, which didn’t last long. Instead of waiting for the wave to fizzle out, we all pushed through it with Hephaestus at the front.
The walls were scorched black, and the entire floor had been blown inwards. There were no survivors. We had to skate by on the edges to avoid dropping to the lower floors, and we quickly pushed through the junction. There was only token resistance left until we reached a sturdy vault-like door made of black metal.
Hephaestus peeked through the thick glass and ducked down before a round echoed off the metal. “There are people in there, two Death Commandos and a handful of crew members. And so is she.”
“Target located. She is holed up in the armory,” I radioed in.
“Understood. Warp drive charges are set. We are prepping for extraction and shall take the furthest escape pods from you. There are less than ten minutes remaining, Commander,” the synthetic voice said.
Yeah, I know…damn this is gonna be a pain.
“Well, it looks like the ammo didn’t cook. Sucks for her,” Artemis spat.
“No explosives. We’ll kill her for sure. We have little time. Do we retreat?” I asked them.
Four heads turned to me, and they all looked at each other and then back at me. “I have no plans of going back now,” Apollo said firmly.
“Aye, aye, I’m with him,” Hephaestus agreed as he moved to cover us.
Artemis was already back to cutting a hole in the door. “You already know my answer. This is what I signed up for. Either I’m killing her, or she is coming with us, no in-between.”
I looked at Va’cot, but all I could see was the reflection in her blue visor. “I would like to help everyone,” she said with a nod.
“Well, then it’s settled, I guess. Let’s nab her,” I said with a chuckle and shrug.
“Don’t worry. These bastards are dead. I don’t need explosives to kill them,” Artemis stated with conviction.
“Then we will cover you,” I said as I nodded to Va’cot.
“Hey, big guy! I’m gonna need you to rip this door off in a minute. Can you do it!?” Artemis yelled, purposely letting her voice out through her helmet and into the room.
“Yeah, probably,” Heph said with a shrug.
Artemis never stopped working on the door as she clicked her tongue. “Probably?! What the hell are we feeding you for, huh?! You can’t be that big for nothing!”
We all fired down the hallway as a few stragglers attempted to ambush us. Artemis’s yells must have forced them out of hiding and given them some false hope. Nevertheless, we made short work of them.
“Now then…time to die,” Artemis mumbled to herself as she sat on her butt and forced her railgun into the hole.
Her weapon came to life and crackled with red lightning. The air around her whizzed with power as she fired off two thunderous shots in quick order and pulled the rifle out.
“Both the DCs are dead. Just the grunts left,” Artemis said as she made room for Hephaestus.
The giant of a man dug his hand into the door frame and began to yank. It was impressive, to say the least. Those doors were meant to stop the explosion of ammo being cooked off, yet he was ripping them off the hinges slowly but surely.
“There are five minutes remaining,” Va’cot stated in her toneless voice.
“You’re—not—helping! Va’cot!” Heph said through gritted teeth.
“If I were to stand there, I would only get in the way. You are too big,” she stated.
That was… rhetorical, well, whatever.
Rip.
Hephaestus’s muscles bulged, and the door started to pry open. Once he got enough of a purchase, he forced his entire hand into it and peeled the door back like a can of sardines and tore it straight off the hinges, tossing it down the hall with ease.
“Damn, that hurt,” Hephaestus grumbled as gunfire bounced off his armor.
A few quick shots and the rest of the combatants were eliminated. The only people left were the cowering crew in the corner and a lone elderly woman in a dirty blood-splattered lab coat standing tall before us.
She glared at us with eyes that said she was more annoyed than anything. It was almost like she was a mother that came home only to see something disappointing. It made me want to punch her in the throat.
The first to reach her was Artemis. Her leg moved so swiftly that I nearly missed it, and I didn’t even have a chance to stop her. Doctor Octario rocked to the side like a bow and was launched like an arrow into the wall and was promptly knocked unconscious.
“That was for the Commander,” Artemis said, her voice cold and devoid of even rage.
There is a big difference between thinking and doing things, Artemis! But I have no time to complain!
“Grab her, and let’s move. We are running out of time,” I ordered calmly.
Apollo instantly injected the doctor with a syringe and tossed her over his shoulder before I could even finish the sentence. Time was not on our side, and we ran as fast as our legs could take us to the nearest escape pods.
We ignored the marines attempting to block our way with bolter fire, and we piled into a pod that was not meant for this many people or even people of our sizes. Hephaestus was the last in and the poor guy barely fit, but the second he cleared the door, I smashed the button to launch us.
“Stern side! Launching now!” I barked into the radio.
Our bodies rocked violently as the pod jettisoned into the void of space. I peeked out the front glass and saw multiple warp points forming in the inky blackness. The distress signal was sent. And an entire fleet was descending on us. But a shadow quickly loomed over us, and we were jostled again, caught by our friendly ship.
“We are reeling you in, Hades Squad! Get ready for a warp jump the second you get inside!” the captain yelled at us.
“Wait! We are packed in here like sardines. We are screwed if you jump!” Artemis yelled back.
“Too bad! We are jumping, soldiers! You’ll live!” he yelled back.
Damn, this is not going to be fun. I’m going to need a new spine after this. Well, mission accomplished, I guess.
​

Next

not op

https://www.reddit.com/pettyrevenge/comments/11uwznn/she_expected_an_inheritance_from_my_late_husband/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
My husband passed away 2 years ago. He was a remodeler who had a broad list of clients. For a time, to help out the adult daughter, let's call her "Kiki" of my good friend of 42 years, "Ami". He would hire her as a helper on some of his larger remodeling projects. During that time, K would occasionally borrow things for her own projects- a portable cd player, a pair of channel locks, a winch & come-along, a table saw, chain saw, a Graco cart paint sprayer, and an air compressor and nail gun. They were all borrowed clean, in working order, in good condition with all relevant parts included. Every single one of them was returned with great delays, all broken and missing significant parts and a crap ton of excuses. Over two years, Kiki managed to cost him nearly $5K in losses. Finally, he also quit hiring her as a helper because he caught her stealing from one of his clients and forced her to put the item she took right back and then kicked her off the job immediately.
Last September, I was visiting Ami and Kiki was there. And then Kiki hit me up for what she called her 'promised' inheritance which was the first I ever heard about it. Given that my hubby and I spent the 8 years of his terminal illness talking about what he wanted after his death, given that he gifted things of his that he wanted friends to have BEFORE he died, I knew damn well he didn't intend for Kiki to have anything. My husband left no will. Ami knew that my hubby had quit lending her tools after getting the cart paint sprayer back (it was a $1200 purchase and was less than 4 months old when it was borrowed and returned broken in ways the warranty would not cover.) Ami also knew Kiki's attempted theft had caused him to refuse to have her work on anything with him for any reason. (Ami was also a victim of her daughter stealing from her as well.)
Now, our state is a community property state. When a spouse dies without a will, only the surviving spouse inherits, so Ami told her daughter to back off and I got the bright idea of how I was going to handle getting rid of all that broken stuff which was still taking up room in the tool shed, so I told her, I'd be sure to pick something out for her even though her own behavior was the root cause of the bad blood between herself and my husband.
So, the next day, with Ami's help, I dropped off ALL the broken tools and the busted-up CD player Kiki borrowed from my hubby at her apartment. Kiki wanted to know what I expected her to do with all of it. I told her that I expected her to do with them whatever it was she had expected my hubby to do with them after she returned them in the condition they were in. Now, she is the proud owner of a bunch of useless tools and I got to reclaim nearly 35 sq. ft. of space in what is now MY tool shed!

This was, by far, the sleaziest place we’d stopped for supplies. At least while I’d been part of the crew. For all I knew, the upstanding little courier starship had visited some real dives under previous leadership, but Captain Sunlight was both respectable and smart.
I wondered whose idea it was to stop at this freewheeling anarchy market, set up on an asteroid that somebody had installed a gravity generator on. There was an atmosphere too, and a wide variety of stalls on this mile-long hunk of rock, but not much in the way of oversight.
I saw two different fistfights in progress among the other ships while we exited onto the landing pad.
“Okay,” announced Captain Sunlight, standing as tall as she could — which wasn’t much, lizardy little thing that she was, but she looked dignified — “Mimi, Blip, and Blop, come with me. Trrili, take one or two others with you. Anyone else object to staying to guard the ship?”
There was a hearty chorus of no’s. Zhee turned a faceted eye on the pair of bystanders walking a little too close, clicking his pincher arms at them until they scooted away. In the distance, something that looked like fireworks colored the sky.
A polite claw tapped my elbow.
“Want to come with?” asked Coals, the Heatseeker with dull red scales. He was both shorter and stockier than the captain, and more importantly, he was good friends with Trrili. “It’s a pretty interesting place; I’ve been here once before.”
“How safe is it?” I asked, wanting to be convinced. There were some bizarre things for sale in the stalls visible from here.
“Should be fine as long as we’re careful,” he said. “Especially with her around.” He lifted his chin towards the insectile horror that loomed over him.
Trrili loved looming. “Yessss,” she said. “Essspessssially with me.” She flexed her own pinchers, glossy black to Zhee’s purple, and chuckled darkly. The red patterns on her carapace were especially vivid in the light of the nearby sun.
I smiled. Trrili was terrifying, but she was our terrifying. “Sure. I’d love to come.”
Coals aimed a claw in the opposite direction of the one that Captain Sunlight was looking towards. “Pretty sure I saw some Earth animals for sale as we landed.”
“Oh, well why didn’t you say so?” I asked. “Lead the way!”
We checked in with the captain, promised to be careful, and were off. I had some interplanetary credits in my pocket that I didn’t really plan on spending, but it was good to be prepared.
I also had a mini stun gun in a different pocket.
This place was just as chaotic as I’d expected, like an alien farmer’s market with a distinct lowlife element. Here was a humanoid selling pottery that glowed; there was a tentacle alien selling food that moved; over there was a would-be pickpocket getting the tar beaten out of them by a large hairy whatsit. A hand appeared around the corner of another stall to grab a power cell and disappear.
I kept my own hands close to my pockets, wishing I’d worn something with zipper pouches.
“Ah,” said Trrili. “There is the media.” She didn’t bother hissing in normal conversation, but as she led us over to a booth lined with shelves and run by small individuals, I fully expected the intimidation to come out soon.
Just before we reached it, Coals rapped a knuckle on her foreleg. “Hey. We’ll be at the end of the row. See?” He pointed.
“Yessss,” Trrili agreed.
With a nod, Coals left her to her bargaining, and waved me onward. I was a little concerned about this, but the end of the row wasn’t far. We could yell for her to come charging over if need be.
“See those guys in the solar ponchos?” Coals asked. He didn’t need to point.
I squinted. “Hard not to.” The clothes that the two plant-like people wore weren’t as bright as the actual sun, but they sure were unpleasant to look at. The other shopkeepers were giving them some distance, leaving space between their little cart and the proper stalls. Aside from the eye-searing fashion, they had ropy green limbs and faces like rose blossoms that wanted to be mandibles. Fleshy maroon, sharptoothed mouth in the middle, at least half a dozen eyes scattered throughout. More than a little creepy.
“I was watching with the mag lens earlier,” Coals said. “With the classification setting. They’ve got the Earth animals.” He was watching my face as he said it.
The series of expressions that I went through were probably interesting to see as I got a proper look at what was on that cart.
Earth animals, yay! Which ones? Those look like fishbowls. But there’s no water inside, just … fur? Are those cats shoved in fishbowls??
I felt my face grow stony. “Coals,” I said. “Who do we report animal cruelty to around here?” One of the plant guys was waving a bowl around, shouting about potted predators. A passerby turned him down, and he yelled an insult after them.
“Uh, nobody.”
I watched the guy hold up a different one and say something about food paste squeezed in through the lid. When he flipped the cap to demonstrate, piteous mewling filtered out. “What about theft?” I asked.
“Also no.”
“Good,” I said, voice flat. “Go get Trrili, then help me steal these.”
​
* * *
​
It took less convincing than I thought. Trrili already had her selection of media in a bag slung behind her, and she chuckled evilly. Coals cracked his knuckles and talked strategy. Then we went for it.
“Hello,” I said, approaching the sellers alone. “How many of these do you have?”
“Everything on this cart,” said the taller one with the bigger blossom head. “Limited supply, very valuable; get them before they’re gone.” He picked up a fishbowl full of gray fur, turning it like a fine art appreciator. A tiny face with big eyes peered out, meowing silently. Stars, these were kittens.
“You don’t have a source for more?” I asked, trying to sound unimpressed.
“These are very exotic, from a far away planet,” he said.
The shorter one bent to pull a big bowl from the bottom shelf of the cart. “Perhaps we can interest you in a larger model? It’s one of a kind.”
That’s the mother cat. Good. I straightened up. “I’ll take all of them,” I said. “Every one you have.”
The sleazy pair chortled and fawned and named a price that could have bought a single-seater spaceship.
I pulled out my tiny stun gun and aimed it at the tall one. “No. I’ll just be taking them.”
They of course laughed at me, and pulled out their own weapons, which Coals had spotted and identified through the holsters. These were also stun guns, but a bigger and more painful model that put mine to shame.
They weren’t, however, very effective on people with exoskeletons.
Trrili leapt out from behind the nearest stall, crossing the distance in a heartbeat of flashing black-and-red limbs, then reared up to stand over them with her pinchers flared, shrieking at earsplitting volume.
I’d already ducked to the side, so while they stumbled back and aimed, I got a great view of Coals jumping forward to grab their stupid ponchos and yank them off their feet.
One of them shot Trrili in the foreleg, making her hiss a little, but the other didn’t even manage that. And before I could use my little peashooter, Coals had tackled them and wrestled the guns from both. With an oversized stun gun in each hand, he got to his feet and aimed at the pair, just daring them to try something, like the tree-foot-tall badass he was.
“What did we do to you??” asked the tall one, rubbing his wrist but otherwise holding still.
“Yeah, how did we piss you off?” the smaller one demanded, eyes locked on Trrili.
I stepped forward with anger in my voice. “You didn’t offend either of them,” I said. “You offended me.” At their baffled silence, I continued. “Where did you get these animals? And what makes you think it’s okay to keep them contained like that?”
They both answered at once, and neither was terribly helpful. Some space trader somewhere. They didn’t even know where the cats were from.
“They’re from my planet,” I informed them. “And they should never be treated like this. Any human can tell you that.”
Their answer was just mumbling that sounded like “Yeah, okay.”
“Have you ever met a human before?” I asked, stepping closer. I leaned in. “My people eat things that look like you.”
They held very still, and didn’t object when Trrili pulled their cart away. Coals stepped back to follow, stun guns still aimed.
I put mine back in my pocket and gave them a final glare. “Do not try this again,” I said. “Or I will know.” I turned on my heel and followed Trrili, with Coals bringing up the rear. He kept the guns.
Shopkeepers and bystanders watched in curiosity, but none seemed particularly bothered by any of that. I heard what sounded distinctly like laughter. As we walked away, the hustle and bustle that had quieted a bit gradually resumed its normal volume.
I took the cart handle from Trrili. “Thank you both.”
Trrili chuckled. “My pleassurrrre.”
“Yeah, happy to help,” Coals said, moving up to walk alongside. He looked over the half dozen bowls that were rattling a bit, though I tried to pull the janky cart smoothly. “When you said you’d know…”
I held my chin up. “As far as they can tell, I will,” I said. “Any psychic abilities on the part of humans is for them to worry about.”
Coals laughed quietly and found the safety settings for the stun guns, saying nothing.
We got the cart into the ship without any objection from the crewmates we passed, though there was a fair amount of curiosity. Trrili and Coals stopped to tell the story in the lounge while I made a beeline for the medbay.
“I require use of your scanners,” I told Eggskin, who was understandably surprised. But at the sight of the cats, they wasted no time in bringing out everything required for a full checkup. I made sure to scan for contagion first, cart and all. I certainly didn’t trust those sleazeballs to be sanitary.
“All clear,” Eggskin said. They pulled gloves on over yellow-green scales. “Do we have spare carrying crates in the storage hold?”
“Oh, good point. We should put the family together.” I opened the door and leaned into the hallway. “Hey, Mur! Could you please bring a mid-size carrying crate? It’s urgent.”
Mur had been going a different direction, but he turned readily on dark blue tentacles with a “Sure thing.”
“Thank you!” I called after him.
He was back in no time with the crate, an ideal size for us to put Mama Cat into after her scan. She was dehydrated, but didn’t show any signs of having been in there long. Good. A bit of proper food and a reunion ought to be just the thing.
When we put the first kitten in with her, the purring was so loud it brought tears to my eyes. Eggskin and I wasted no time in checking the others. They were all okay. Not even any fleas.
I was talking with Eggskin about where to keep them for the time being when the door opened to let Captain Sunlight in. A curious crowd waited in the hall.
I stood at attention. “I’m not apologizing,” I said over the tiny kitten mews.
She shook her head. “No, I don’t expect you to. Are you hoping to keep them onboard, though?”
I shook my head. “I’m sure I can find a home for them at the next space station. Anywhere with a lot of humans, really. These are little cuties, and the mom didn’t even hiss at me, so she ought to raise them to be friendly.”
Captain Sunlight nodded. “All right, then. How about you keep them in your quarters as soon as they’re clear to leave the medical bay?”
“Yes, I was thinking that would be best,” I said. “I’ll just have to be careful opening the door. Maybe I can rig a net as a barrier that I can step over, to at least slow them down.”
“I’ll leave you to figure out how to keep them from roaming the halls,” she said. “Or the engine room, or the cockpit.”
“Yes. I will.”
She left it at that, and opened the door to shoo people away from the convalescing animals. The cart was already out there with the empty bowls and the food paste that would be going in the kitchen trash.
I saw Paint rummaging around the miscellaneous junk on the lowest shelf, which I hadn’t bothered to touch. Her orange tail straightened with excitement. “Hey, there’s money in here!”
I winced. Captain Sunlight gave me an unreadable look.
I felt bad about it, but then I looked down at the kittens tumbling over their mother, each getting licked in turn, and the feeling vanished.
“We can buy cat food with that,” I said.
The captain nodded. “Of course.” Then she sighed. “Mimi is going to be insufferable. First we find a replacement hoverbike after all, now this.”
A gruff voice called from down the hall, “Told you it was a good idea to stop there!”
I grinned. “The cats thank you!”
A toothpaste-green octopus head popped into the doorway. “Name one after me,” said Mimi, waving a tentacle.
I grinned wider. “I think that’s a great name for a cat.”
~~~
The ongoing backstory of the main character from this book. More to come!
Cross-posted to Tumblr and HumansAreSpaceOrcs.

This was, by far, the sleaziest place we’d stopped for supplies. At least while I’d been part of the crew. For all I knew, the upstanding little courier starship had visited some real dives under previous leadership, but Captain Sunlight was both respectable and smart.
I wondered whose idea it was to stop at this freewheeling anarchy market, set up on an asteroid that somebody had installed a gravity generator on. There was an atmosphere too, and a wide variety of stalls on this mile-long hunk of rock, but not much in the way of oversight.
I saw two different fistfights in progress among the other ships while we exited onto the landing pad.
“Okay,” announced Captain Sunlight, standing as tall as she could — which wasn’t much, lizardy little thing that she was, but she looked dignified — “Mimi, Blip, and Blop, come with me. Trrili, take one or two others with you. Anyone else object to staying to guard the ship?”
There was a hearty chorus of no’s. Zhee turned a faceted eye on the pair of bystanders walking a little too close, clicking his pincher arms at them until they scooted away. In the distance, something that looked like fireworks colored the sky.
A polite claw tapped my elbow.
“Want to come with?” asked Coals, the Heatseeker with dull red scales. He was both shorter and stockier than the captain, and more importantly, he was good friends with Trrili. “It’s a pretty interesting place; I’ve been here once before.”
“How safe is it?” I asked, wanting to be convinced. There were some bizarre things for sale in the stalls visible from here.
“Should be fine as long as we’re careful,” he said. “Especially with her around.” He lifted his chin towards the insectile horror that loomed over him.
Trrili loved looming. “Yessss,” she said. “Essspessssially with me.” She flexed her own pinchers, glossy black to Zhee’s purple, and chuckled darkly. The red patterns on her carapace were especially vivid in the light of the nearby sun.
I smiled. Trrili was terrifying, but she was our terrifying. “Sure. I’d love to come.”
Coals aimed a claw in the opposite direction of the one that Captain Sunlight was looking towards. “Pretty sure I saw some Earth animals for sale as we landed.”
“Oh, well why didn’t you say so?” I asked. “Lead the way!”
We checked in with the captain, promised to be careful, and were off. I had some interplanetary credits in my pocket that I didn’t really plan on spending, but it was good to be prepared.
I also had a mini stun gun in a different pocket.
This place was just as chaotic as I’d expected, like an alien farmer’s market with a distinct lowlife element. Here was a humanoid selling pottery that glowed; there was a tentacle alien selling food that moved; over there was a would-be pickpocket getting the tar beaten out of them by a large hairy whatsit. A hand appeared around the corner of another stall to grab a power cell and disappear.
I kept my own hands close to my pockets, wishing I’d worn something with zipper pouches.
“Ah,” said Trrili. “There is the media.” She didn’t bother hissing in normal conversation, but as she led us over to a booth lined with shelves and run by small individuals, I fully expected the intimidation to come out soon.
Just before we reached it, Coals rapped a knuckle on her foreleg. “Hey. We’ll be at the end of the row. See?” He pointed.
“Yessss,” Trrili agreed.
With a nod, Coals left her to her bargaining, and waved me onward. I was a little concerned about this, but the end of the row wasn’t far. We could yell for her to come charging over if need be.
“See those guys in the solar ponchos?” Coals asked. He didn’t need to point.
I squinted. “Hard not to.” The clothes that the two plant-like people wore weren’t as bright as the actual sun, but they sure were unpleasant to look at. The other shopkeepers were giving them some distance, leaving space between their little cart and the proper stalls. Aside from the eye-searing fashion, they had ropy green limbs and faces like rose blossoms that wanted to be mandibles. Fleshy maroon, sharptoothed mouth in the middle, at least half a dozen eyes scattered throughout. More than a little creepy.
“I was watching with the mag lens earlier,” Coals said. “With the classification setting. They’ve got the Earth animals.” He was watching my face as he said it.
The series of expressions that I went through were probably interesting to see as I got a proper look at what was on that cart.
Earth animals, yay! Which ones? Those look like fishbowls. But there’s no water inside, just … fur? Are those cats shoved in fishbowls??
I felt my face grow stony. “Coals,” I said. “Who do we report animal cruelty to around here?” One of the plant guys was waving a bowl around, shouting about potted predators. A passerby turned him down, and he yelled an insult after them.
“Uh, nobody.”
I watched the guy hold up a different one and say something about food paste squeezed in through the lid. When he flipped the cap to demonstrate, piteous mewling filtered out. “What about theft?” I asked.
“Also no.”
“Good,” I said, voice flat. “Go get Trrili, then help me steal these.”
​
* * *
​
It took less convincing than I thought. Trrili already had her selection of media in a bag slung behind her, and she chuckled evilly. Coals cracked his knuckles and talked strategy. Then we went for it.
“Hello,” I said, approaching the sellers alone. “How many of these do you have?”
“Everything on this cart,” said the taller one with the bigger blossom head. “Limited supply, very valuable; get them before they’re gone.” He picked up a fishbowl full of gray fur, turning it like a fine art appreciator. A tiny face with big eyes peered out, meowing silently. Stars, these were kittens.
“You don’t have a source for more?” I asked, trying to sound unimpressed.
“These are very exotic, from a far away planet,” he said.
The shorter one bent to pull a big bowl from the bottom shelf of the cart. “Perhaps we can interest you in a larger model? It’s one of a kind.”
That’s the mother cat. Good. I straightened up. “I’ll take all of them,” I said. “Every one you have.”
The sleazy pair chortled and fawned and named a price that could have bought a single-seater spaceship.
I pulled out my tiny stun gun and aimed it at the tall one. “No. I’ll just be taking them.”
They of course laughed at me, and pulled out their own weapons, which Coals had spotted and identified through the holsters. These were also stun guns, but a bigger and more painful model that put mine to shame.
They weren’t, however, very effective on people with exoskeletons.
Trrili leapt out from behind the nearest stall, crossing the distance in a heartbeat of flashing black-and-red limbs, then reared up to stand over them with her pinchers flared, shrieking at earsplitting volume.
I’d already ducked to the side, so while they stumbled back and aimed, I got a great view of Coals jumping forward to grab their stupid ponchos and yank them off their feet.
One of them shot Trrili in the foreleg, making her hiss a little, but the other didn’t even manage that. And before I could use my little peashooter, Coals had tackled them and wrestled the guns from both. With an oversized stun gun in each hand, he got to his feet and aimed at the pair, just daring them to try something, like the tree-foot-tall badass he was.
“What did we do to you??” asked the tall one, rubbing his wrist but otherwise holding still.
“Yeah, how did we piss you off?” the smaller one demanded, eyes locked on Trrili.
I stepped forward with anger in my voice. “You didn’t offend either of them,” I said. “You offended me.” At their baffled silence, I continued. “Where did you get these animals? And what makes you think it’s okay to keep them contained like that?”
They both answered at once, and neither was terribly helpful. Some space trader somewhere. They didn’t even know where the cats were from.
“They’re from my planet,” I informed them. “And they should never be treated like this. Any human can tell you that.”
Their answer was just mumbling that sounded like “Yeah, okay.”
“Have you ever met a human before?” I asked, stepping closer. I leaned in. “My people eat things that look like you.”
They held very still, and didn’t object when Trrili pulled their cart away. Coals stepped back to follow, stun guns still aimed.
I put mine back in my pocket and gave them a final glare. “Do not try this again,” I said. “Or I will know.” I turned on my heel and followed Trrili, with Coals bringing up the rear. He kept the guns.
Shopkeepers and bystanders watched in curiosity, but none seemed particularly bothered by any of that. I heard what sounded distinctly like laughter. As we walked away, the hustle and bustle that had quieted a bit gradually resumed its normal volume.
I took the cart handle from Trrili. “Thank you both.”
Trrili chuckled. “My pleassurrrre.”
“Yeah, happy to help,” Coals said, moving up to walk alongside. He looked over the half dozen bowls that were rattling a bit, though I tried to pull the janky cart smoothly. “When you said you’d know…”
I held my chin up. “As far as they can tell, I will,” I said. “Any psychic abilities on the part of humans is for them to worry about.”
Coals laughed quietly and found the safety settings for the stun guns, saying nothing.
We got the cart into the ship without any objection from the crewmates we passed, though there was a fair amount of curiosity. Trrili and Coals stopped to tell the story in the lounge while I made a beeline for the medbay.
“I require use of your scanners,” I told Eggskin, who was understandably surprised. But at the sight of the cats, they wasted no time in bringing out everything required for a full checkup. I made sure to scan for contagion first, cart and all. I certainly didn’t trust those sleazeballs to be sanitary.
“All clear,” Eggskin said. They pulled gloves on over yellow-green scales. “Do we have spare carrying crates in the storage hold?”
“Oh, good point. We should put the family together.” I opened the door and leaned into the hallway. “Hey, Mur! Could you please bring a mid-size carrying crate? It’s urgent.”
Mur had been going a different direction, but he turned readily on dark blue tentacles with a “Sure thing.”
“Thank you!” I called after him.
He was back in no time with the crate, an ideal size for us to put Mama Cat into after her scan. She was dehydrated, but didn’t show any signs of having been in there long. Good. A bit of proper food and a reunion ought to be just the thing.
When we put the first kitten in with her, the purring was so loud it brought tears to my eyes. Eggskin and I wasted no time in checking the others. They were all okay. Not even any fleas.
I was talking with Eggskin about where to keep them for the time being when the door opened to let Captain Sunlight in. A curious crowd waited in the hall.
I stood at attention. “I’m not apologizing,” I said over the tiny kitten mews.
She shook her head. “No, I don’t expect you to. Are you hoping to keep them onboard, though?”
I shook my head. “I’m sure I can find a home for them at the next space station. Anywhere with a lot of humans, really. These are little cuties, and the mom didn’t even hiss at me, so she ought to raise them to be friendly.”
Captain Sunlight nodded. “All right, then. How about you keep them in your quarters as soon as they’re clear to leave the medical bay?”
“Yes, I was thinking that would be best,” I said. “I’ll just have to be careful opening the door. Maybe I can rig a net as a barrier that I can step over, to at least slow them down.”
“I’ll leave you to figure out how to keep them from roaming the halls,” she said. “Or the engine room, or the cockpit.”
“Yes. I will.”
She left it at that, and opened the door to shoo people away from the convalescing animals. The cart was already out there with the empty bowls and the food paste that would be going in the kitchen trash.
I saw Paint rummaging around the miscellaneous junk on the lowest shelf, which I hadn’t bothered to touch. Her orange tail straightened with excitement. “Hey, there’s money in here!”
I winced. Captain Sunlight gave me an unreadable look.
I felt bad about it, but then I looked down at the kittens tumbling over their mother, each getting licked in turn, and the feeling vanished.
“We can buy cat food with that,” I said.
The captain nodded. “Of course.” Then she sighed. “Mimi is going to be insufferable. First we find a replacement hoverbike after all, now this.”
A gruff voice called from down the hall, “Told you it was a good idea to stop there!”
I grinned. “The cats thank you!”
A toothpaste-green octopus head popped into the doorway. “Name one after me,” said Mimi, waving a tentacle.
I grinned wider. “I think that’s a great name for a cat.”
~~~
The ongoing backstory of the main character from this book. More to come!
Cross-posted to Tumblr and HFY.

Ethical Anarchy
Every 1 million years, we vote on whether or not to keep Ethical Anarchy as a system.
Ethical Anarchy is a system based on the individual adoption of law. The only ground political contracs are the no killing, destruction or attempted destruction contracts, nor claiming ownership of the property except Simeon. A final ground ethical contract states that penalties for all crimes may be taken in blindness, pain, time or money. Simeon is immune.
Before, countries operated based off violence and war. Now they use money, lotteries and anti money to get better results. People had no real influence over the state. Even in democracies, the wisdom of the crowd was lost to bad education.
Ethical Anarchy has rules that distinguish it from old governments.
Law is individually adopted and enforced nonviolently.
People individually adopt laws that only apply to acts done against their person or property.
The "government" only has the power to keep you off of public property, not kill you. It has jurisdiction over the environment and streets. Any law enforced with prison, fines or anything else must be approved by a majority of the public in a referendum via ethical contract. There is no death penalty for anything other than murder, and that is decided individually or locally per star system, where life in hell or death are options in the death penalty referenda.
There is a judicial anarchy and rules for trials and appeals. Anyone can serve as a justice elector, but only has as much judicial power to share as people who vote for them. It takes a minimum of four votes to become a judicial elector, however a new ethical contract may decide. To have a trial, determine the size of judicial pool and how many judges you want. Judges are randomly selected from the drawn jurisdiction pool. Both victim and defendant pick half the applicable districts and can strike one of the other’s. They must also select a common language for the trial, if not then the language spoken by the most people on that planet will be chosen automatically.
Judges are rated by both the public and official rating services, or collections of rating services elected by the public that have a higher vote rate. Victim and defendant both rate judges after the trial. Highest rating judges are automatically selected. Appeals require you to bring in more judges.
There shall be one judge seat per 10,000 people judges serve a 10 year term. Each judge elected during phase 1 gets 1000 judicial points per vote they receive and bids on available judicial seats. Alternately, they can vote directly for candidates to fill each seat and use approval voting.
Good vs. Evil is replaced with left vs right as a main dichotomy and driving force in society.
Law enforced via warrant contracts.
All have authority to act in situations that require someone to act when they can
Land points used as money.
No force, just subvention as a means to enforce laws.
No destruction or death for anything other than murder, trespassing, breaking of ethical contracts and violating the bill of rights. This list may not expand without the 7/8ths consent of congress and the public in a referendum.
​
Media and Education Funding would be done via congressional grant with the president possessing a line-item veto.
Economy, Land Ownership and Integration.
​
All must work or go to school. Distributaries fund schools and set standards for payment for taking different subjects or completing assignments. Individuals in space get paid to go to school, and must use this money to pay for entertainment , food and gaming access. The more and better assignments you do , harder classes you take or tutoring you complete, and better grades you get, the more money you earn.
Money must be used by all to pay land taxes, food taxes, and identity theft and reputation damages insurance among other things.
Licenses to sell food, access or traverse a bounded area, peak, trade, warp, park, live in a home, eat in space cost money, and must be paid each time a service is used. There shall be at least two licenses to sell food issued per star system, and all must be distributed via auction. The final number of food licenses must be determined by outlawry congress, and limited to no more than 90% of the population. Transferable eating licenses are to be sold by multiple providers in packs of 50, with each 50-pack being auctioned off.
Money may also be earned by interacting with the human economy: Creating, Buying and selling books, ideas, media, or online shopping, design, data entry, or any other digital or creative service. Drones may also be rented and space vacations sold. All earth money earned by working an ordinary job is matched at a rate set by the tax property assessor.
All entertainment must be paid for and original creators, be they people or being, be paid for rights to view, copy or share their work. Beings must purchase entertainment licenses from original creators by accosting movie studios or otherwise remunerate them. Copyrights in space last a minimum of 200 years, with the final amount being decided by ethical contract.
Money supply:
A UBI of $1000/month must be given to all individuals, and a circulating money supply of 4x extra must be distributed via work, grants, school and lotteries. The UBI must be funded through taxation of all income and is the only government expenditure besides game funding. Earth money is convertible into space money. On earth, space money can be used to pay for church expenditure, spirit cards and media.
In space, earth money can be used to pay for media and buy land for kingdoms.
Land Ownership
All land must be assessed a land tax by property assessors- general elected y the oubic using RRV, and each property asessor having the power to assess properties proportional to their vote share. Simeon and the body public at large, represented and effecting their will via congress, own the property.
Land value tax is not to be not less than 1% or land value per year, used to fund UBI.
All must send their taxes to a local galactic treasurer elected by all in a galaxy, who runs a census and distributes the money minus their salary equally to all. They must state their salary upfront before election and take no more than that amount from the tax haul to pay themselves. Nonpayers get their property claims ignored and their property sold at auction with the money going to everyone else.
Land must be leased for a time specified in a contract, during which the land rentnever goes up. Whoever offers the highest rent per month wins. Permanent land ownership is forbidden.
Any group of 10 or more contiguous landowners may agree to bound their neighborhood and charge tolls for access or traversal to nonresidents. All must pay except those egressing and giving notice. Rates shall be regulated by ethical contracts. Control zones one galaxy wide must be established.
Kingdoms
Gods must fund kingdoms with people money earned from followers, businesses and ventures on earth. No space-earned money can be used to build your kingdom other than what was earned via congress.
License to operate planet-based currency exchanges may be given out or auctioned, with the method to be determined by ethical contract.
Policing
Police forces must enforce centralized law that an absolute majority of the population selects. There would be a monopoly on police funding, but decentralized forces may be able to do police work. Police consumer cooperatives may be established to compete, selling no more than 20 percent of stock to non owners.
All police forces must be organized as consumer police cooperatives, with a minimum of fifty members. unless a majority of a star system's residents choose to allow private police. Everyone must join one, and police cooperatives may self-defend or contract with external agencies for defense, serving as buyer's coops. All members of police coops must vote on police chief leading the department and sign a thirty year security contract.
Cooperatives will compete to provide property insurance and security to members. Any group of fifty or more people can start a security force and be legal to buy weapons. All security cooperatives are funded by the people they serve and everyone must join one.
Anyone who is properly trained can do policework in ethical anarchy. Any person can make an arrest after attending free or paid police education. Police would be able to enforce orders of outlawry on the population. Only trained police officers could make arrests. Police forces would operate independently and be able to outlaw rogue agencies after a trial, where agencies representing a ¾ majority of the public could convict and shut down a police force.
Police services would partner to respond to calls and trade tokens. If police force a responded to a call from someone in police force b, then police force b would need to respond to one call from police force a in the future.
No cooperative may be created excluding customers from a segment of the population and compete to hire centrally trained and licensed police officers. No limit on police licenses given out may be issued.
Police Coordinator
Elected by the police chiefs of all forces one vote one police force, most votes wins. The police coordinator is elected by all cooperative leaders in a system, sector, galaxy and universally. Cooperatives decide who votes for them. Additional funding may be given to cooperatives based on membership.
Central Police Chief
Chosen by Jungle primary FPTP.
No special power to kill, just right to evict trespassers from public property and transfer to rison.
CPC appointed officers would accompany those seeking to arrest individuals for a bounty to make sure rogue agencies couldn't make false arrests. A court established by congress or ethical contract could outlaw an agency found to be in breach of local guidelines for operation, like extortion.
Funding
Services would be funded via warrant contract. Contributors to essential charities a majority of the public likes, like educational and health services would band together and refuse to buy, sell or admit people who traded with those who didn't contribute. Alternatively, they could simply charge them more. This works for the military too. For business owners, they would pay personal income taxes or their personal homes and property would not be protected and crimes against them would not be investigated.
Prison and Outlaws
All prisons could be run either privately or publicly by the highway police. All would be funded via warrant contract. Regulations for prisons and police would be created by congress.
Who may outlaw? Only a democratically elected judge or their delegates chosen by an absolute majority of people in any given area. This implies a two stage election w/runoff. FPTP with runoff if no candidate receives an absolute majority should be used.
Higher levels of government might offer veto and safe harbor to an outlawry notice.
Who can arrest?
Anyone if someone is a suspect. And there’s the issue.
​
President is elected every two weeks via approval voting and can serve up to ten years in a row before they must resign. The president must maintain a high approval rating and keep their coalition energized to stay in power. Politics would be fun. Debates would be held all over the place. Approval voting means you could vote for as many people as you wanted. The president would have the power to..
Appoint prosecutors, one fifth of judges to the supreme court and lower courts,
They may veto congress and the results of referendums, pardon criminals and commute sentences. They may also appoint the heads of agencies open during their term. Terms of heads of agencies are decided by congress.
President appoints theme leader, and may create as many positions as they need for their administration.
Kudzumi
​
Tax collection. Taxes, I'd they exist would be collected socially via warrant contracts. Nonpayers would be refused service at businesses or be charged higher prices because taxpayers would band together and refuse to patronize businesses that didn’t. It’s far more likely that nontaxpayers would pay extra.
Congress
Everyone has a right to create a party for congress and collect the votes of nonvoters, gathering petitions from those who want to give their votes to a party for a given length of time, say, 2 weeks to 5 years.
Congress would consist of a single unicameral legislature with 1 seat per 10000000 people. Parties would be elected. Uninterested voters may be able to give their votes to a party or congress as a whole as mentioned. Congress would establish agencies, tribunals and provide oversight. They could impeach and remove a president from power. They would also hold contests..
Congress could make rules enforceable by deprotection, outlawry or confinement to home or building with a simple majority. Congress could not force, but relies on society and local governments to implement its will. It could also withhold funding.
A good ethical anarchistic congress can..
Congresses have the ability
To fund, subsidy, To mint To tax gods and people.
To create universal educational and other requirements for bounty hunters and police.
To establish by law and have Thaos enforce a land, wealth, and income tax and any other tax they so desire. To grant To establish roads and prisons and other infrastructure To imprison with simple majority To kill with unanimous consent minus the person accused or their representative. The required majority may not be lowered. To regulate the use of force in society. To regulate the dichotomy To raise an army, navy and police forces to suppress insurrection and false claiming. To budget and law the economy and work trade, investment and businesses To create banks To license and control businesses To establish copyrights, trademarks and register or renumerate original ideas. To establish themes and technology taxes To fund games and prizes on game shows. To rate To establish mediations To regulate advertising and media. To spread the word and issue proclamations and directives to lower congress and attach democratically decided (by congress) stipulations.
To kill with the 99% approval of all members in each house of congress minus the representative(s) of the person effected and their locale or home district.
To outlaw and deprotect with a majority.
Congress may refuse to fund or give grants to businesses for any reason, including effusing to require a person to follow congressional law, which might be approved or rejected as a package.
To create all laws assistant and just to serve these ends.
Police and Security Districts
Are drawn by the president or people in referendum, and the map must be approved by congress. Everyone voting in one may select the police chief.
Collective Action
Collective action gets accomplished voluntarily through collective action contracts or labor lotteries where you get paid to sign and remain on-call.
Terror and Ethical Anarchy
Voluntary monitoring of Extremist views and voluntary censorship and reporting via individual anti-terror contract, no sig, no job, you are looked at suspiciously.. And do not serve.
War and Military
People who donated to the military and businesses woohol supported it would refuse to hire noncontributors. The goal is for everyone to support the military, so those who did not support it could not buy houses
Education funding
Would occur via warrant contract, lottery or Human Capital Contract or the nominal budget
Would be funded using all kinds of things, including Human Capital Contracts and Diverse Microinvestment
All constitutions must respect and not violate the full bill of rights in the original constitution listed here.
The constitution that gets the most Thaos verified signatures in two weeks in th is chosen for four hundred weeks. No person may stop signatures from being gathered.
Forms of government are chosen every hundred weeks.
Border Control
Access to zones in ethical anarchy would be established via a pay to enter system or free at the community's request.
Nominalism pays
Political problems come from guns your guns. How deserving are polticians to decide how they are used?
Discrimination. Discrimination is bad. How can an ethical anarchy handle discrimination when local majorities support it? Ethical anarchy can do just as well as a democracy does when businesses discriminate. All it takes are smart warrant contracts. Businesses need supplies from all over to function. Those who refuse to hire or serve an underpriveleged minority can lose when other businesses boycott their suppliers or charge them extra. This will force them to go out of business or stop discriminating. Customers who support discriminatory businesses can be charged extra when they shop elsewhere, as may workers or owners.
This makes gathering and arresting suspects easy even en masse as they do it themselves. People who refuse to turn themselves in for questioning are most likely guilty, so crime solved itself. The less crime, the more resources there are to solve the little crime that exists, making us better at it. Everyone could be investigated eventually, and road cameras or overhead blimps could surveil the territory.
Ethical Anarchy
Weapon, Tool stores and gun stores would be required to record all buyers.
Any underhanded purchases would be caught by a double sting system. Purchases without proper identification would result in shutdowns and sentences. Gun store owners would be rewarded for reporting people who attempted to buy guns without the proper identifying info. They would have their property seized, sold and go to jail.
As for gun store owners, they would have their businesses, personal property and possibly lives taken if an unauthorized buyer successfully bought a gun. They would go to jail for life at the very least.
To operate without violent mobs burning down the store, gun stores would work with local police and advertise the fact in the window. No person would try buying a gun without valid ID.
All transfers of guns and lost or stolen guns and other weapons must be reported. Or else you go to jail or pay. However, any time you have a gun to someone who used it in an aggressive shooting you would be fined.
Gun safes and checkups would be handled by the gun store so they didn't get taxed.
Deterring crimes. More stings may occur than crimes. The media may report this. And report on successful stings. This would replace most bad news. Anyone could participate in or start a sting operation.
Ask are you buying a gun for someone else? And do some stings. Asking to or offering to straw purchase would be crime.
Refusing to allow mediators in to your house to search or arrest would be seen as suspicious.
Voluntary Congress and Fun
Ethical Anarchy can be made far far better with a universal basic income and voluntary congress. Congress would pay you a stipend of four hundred dollars every month as long as you obeyed all laws it passed. There may be a requirement to obey several dozen laws or so on and stop receiving money if you refuse until you turn yourself in.
Another way to run it is t are incentivize people to sign ethical contracts individually from a central fund and use reciprocal democracy to fund laws. This just means politicians get paid based on how many votes they Recieve, giving them an incentive to vote well.
Contracts and Enforcement
All contracts notarized by a congressionally authorized individuaal could be considered valid In reality. And thus enforced.
Penalties for Murder
Economic imprisonment is the best way forward, rather than prison.
For murder, a person would be burned for three times as long as they and the victim had been alive in addition to modern slavery. They would be chained to a work facility, weighted and fed by their employer or get food subsidies for authorized food. They would have ninety percent of their wages or more taken and the rest used to buy time away from fire. While prison costs money and resources, and death takes them away, this creates them. When not at work or in the bathroom, the prisoner slave would be blindfolded.
They could also be burned.
Why ethical anarchy? A story.
Democracy is better than dictatorship, but it's still rule by the few chosen by the mostly uneducated. Democracy is bad on rights. If the government can kill you, it has too much power. Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to eat. Ethical Anarchy is excellent on rights because everyone only has power over their own property and bodies, not yours. Collective property like air, water and roads are managed publically through democracy and local congresses. Your stuff is managed by you.
Individual property is managed and well taken care of by people.
But at the same time, collective property accessible by those paying for it's upkeep will be managed by an elected manager.
Anyone who wants to access collective property may if they pay a fee. Only those who pay may enter or use it. Stewards are chosen by paying members or a central authority.
The author suggests that property upkeep be auctioned off to the lowest cost highest quality firm via contract.
Democracy works sometimes, but other times it doesn't. Imagine if we democratically decided what to eat for dinner instead of letting people make their own choices. In ethical anarchy, personal rights and freedom win every time because the system is built off of it. Ethical anarchy protects the smallest minority of all, the person.
Unified police training
Voluntary Congress and Fun
Ethical Anarchy can be made far far better with a universal basic income and voluntary congress. Congress would pay you a stipend of four hundred dollars every month as long as you obeyed all laws it passed. There may be a requirement to obey several dozen laws or so on and stop receiving money if you refuse until you turn yourself in.
Another way to run it is to incentivize people to sign ethical contracts individually from a central fund and use reciprocal democracy to fund laws. This just means politicians get paid based on how many votes they Recieve, giving them an incentive to vote well.
Contracts and Enforcement
All contracts notarized by a congressionally authorized individual could be considered valid in reality. And thus enforced. n issue may be having congress deenforce certain contracts with a 2/3 majority.
Lottery
Lotteries can be used to enforce law by providing inspiration to obey rather than force.
Captain of Police chosen by Daily approval voting.
Consumer Safety
And now, for the piece de la resistance, consumer safety. The chief of justice would run an agency tasked with listing all business service providers that were up to snuff. Nobody would shop at a business that didn't have the seal. Lying about approval would be grounds for a raid and closure of the business. All businesses would be required to have insurance to cover loss and damage before they opened up in a city. God may also regulate it. This would be regulated by deprotection. The list of ethical contracts you and your business have signed enabling the consumer safety authority to investigate you would be publically displayed.
To be approved, grocery stores would only carry merchandise from approved businesses. Any business not approved would be allowed to warn

Ethical Anarchy
Preamble
In times, we have sought to create the most free, most fair, most joyous and happy society. Praise be to God, our journey is complete. We have lived through and seen dictatorship, the weakness of democracy and ineffectiveness of anarchy. We resolve to choose none of the preceding and avoid repeating the errors of the past. We the people of Paelia, Karine, Nara, Rallfallamine, Pellend, Cassini, Section, Trace and Ledder along with surrounding states combine to form an Ethical Anarchy, and name our new country Ethica, in honor of said system as developed by our founder and freemaker Simeon Burks.
Remembering the many just who died to ensure our liberty and freedom during the transition and war for congress,
All honor and glory be to, amen.
We establish a new state based on Non destruction and
Legislature
The legislature for ethical anarchy shall consist of the people and a bicameral Congress for outlawries.
The people shall freely adopt ethical contracts as they wish, with a fifty one percent majority of the public being sufficient to send power to an ethical contract. Once powered, violators of an ethical contract may not access, traverse or use public property. They must also submit to tribunals and punishments described in the ethical contract although they may not have signed. Until powered, ethical contracts only bind people who sign them.
No person may be forced to sign an ethical contract, but individuals and groups may require the adoption of certain ethical contracts for entrance, or membership. Failure to ratify an ethicalrecal contract is valid cause for firing or dismissal from a group.
The legislature shall have the power to outlaw a person or create reasons for outlawry with a fifty one percent majority in addition to the public. Members of Parliament shall have the right to broadcast ethical contracts to all on a monthly ballot. The legislature controls ballot access. The legislature may make any law with any penalty except death with a fifty one percent majority. Acceptance of law is mandatory to travel on public property. Congress shall regulate police divergence, arrests and academies. Congress may regulate the economy and choose an economic system with a simple majority.
There shall be 454,000 seats distributed daily proportionally by party. The party getting the most votes selects the president.
The upper house (House of Gods) consists of 16,000 seats, and approves all judicial appointments, or regulations on god (not taxes) and standards for becoming one by a simple majority. Otherwise, legislstion needs only the first house. Thaos reserves a third of this house. It is elected by personal, national and local gods, each getting a vote number equal to the number of people supporting them, be they followers or voters. 40 year terms. The house of gods may block a lower house bill for up to 2 years or until the next election and regulate contests and coregulate space commerce. It, along with Chaos shall publish reports rating gods. It may rule on questions of the day and issue pronouncements via the figure.
The upper house shall select a yearly figure, chief distributary and person of the year. The same person may win up to two times in a row.
The vote gods possess in this house is cumulative. Gods choose a virtual district 1-sixteenthou and must stick with it for three elections.
Ethical contracts may only bind a person and their property, never third parties who did not sign unless the contract is mutual or about children, who may be considered collective property.
Ethical contracts must be voluntarily signed without coercion, although pressure and incentives can be used.
The legislature consists of a Congress for force that determines legitimate reasons for using force. No person has a unqualified legal right to use force, only valid and invalid reasons. Only a majority of people in both Congresses or the mediations it establishes may determine if a particular use of force is valid.
Ethical contracts are enforced using warrant contracts, blacklisting, boycott and exclusion from the use of public property if a contract is mutual. They may also specify other penalties.
When a person who has not signed an ethical contract acts against someone who has not signed it, the person not signing is indemnified unless the contract was powered with a majority vote, in which case the person breaking the contract is subject to legal action.
Ethical contracts cover acts done against signing people on public property, the private property of signers and the private property of nonsigners if signers are there, but not the private property of nonsigners if no signers are around.
Simeon has a prenalty of twenty million at 999 nonbinillion cubed providing immunity from all nonmurder crimes.
The territory allows no individual or group destruction or government issued a death penalty. If someone is outlawed nobody may protect them and they may be hurt or killed by any person.
Outlawry may only be used in cases of murder and for people failing to report to arrest, questioning, or prison.
Executive
The leader of the day selected by the largest party possesses the right to unilaterally appoint judges of the day and police chiefs. They may make any policy or appointment, subject only to veto by the guardian council and standing council. They may be impeached and removed by a 4/5 vote of either. Policies and appointments may last 1 day. The same person may be reelected 5,200 times in total, and for 1400 days in a row. Every two years we elect a special Leader of the day who serves a two year term. This person serves as a long term planner and appoints or oversees the election of visionaries at local discretion.
Guardian council is a 10,000 member council of randomly selected citizens who pick the highest numbers minus the top 4000. As selects. Standing council is all interested citizens who voluntarily join. They can block any action of the leader by majority vote as may congress.
The Congress may create congressional agencies and staff them at it's discretion.
A Standby Emergency Director shall be selected via mass petition. The person with the most votescollected in 4 days wins a three month term. Voters may vote for as many candidates as they want. The SED shall have the power to coordinate and lead emergency response if Congress declares a state of emergency for up to six months. The same person may win twelve times.
Law Enforcement
Every level of government is to elect a chief of police coordination and emergency response to oversee investigations and arrests and choose watchers.
If someone is listed as an outlaw by a congressionally established mediation or Congress itself, any person may make an arrest and Recieve a reward if the subject is captured alive. There will be a fine if the subject is killed during arrest unless watchers oversee the arrest and verify it was conducted lawfully in accordance with congressional rule
Prison
Prisons are public, private and mixed. They are to be regulated by law. Refusing to voluntarily go to jail to await a trial or sentencing is automatic outlawry.
Warrant Contracts
Warrant contracts, or pledges not to trade with people who trade with other people
Security
The people shall elect a monthly minister of security via petition. The person with the most signatures by the end of the month wins the position. The Minister of Security shall oversee regionwide defense and intelligence.
LSDD is Provisional Minister of Security until a new one is elected.
Security Districts to elect local police chiefs are drawn by the Minister of Security. Police chiefs elected every three months.
Naos is part of the security plan. XDD must be made programmed to resurrect chaos.
Judicial
Daily judges elected by leader of the day service all typical cases. Every second year, the second leader of the day appoints two year justices who serve as a court of appeals. Judges must be allowed to complete cases they start regardless of whoever appointed them's term being up.
Everyone is entitled to nine appeals before they go to Naos or a religious court.
The lower house of congress shall create an act organizing the supreme court (s) and visionaries. Congress shall create cours in addition to the 11 member Supreme Court. They shall approve or reject supreme court nominees by the Emergency Director.
For Ethical Anarchy Territory, As shall Staff the thirty five member supreme court.
The supreme court is the final arbiter of appeals for all cases on or in the territory.
There shall be sixteen districts throughout the land, each of equal population. District map drawn and approved by Chaos and Force Congress. God's compete over districts courts and the right to organize or sponsor police departments.
Property and Land
Chaos registers property. Simeon owns the land and caretakes it for Ethical Anarchy.
No person may be kept on a persons territory by force.
World and Environment
Simeon owns Naming rights. The environment the constitution may regulate is defined as any public or private property that flows into and intermixes with public property. (i.e, air and water) The public may regulate activity in and on such.
Ballots and Information
Individuals may create ballot listing services compiling a list of ethical contracts for readers to sign. The parliament regulates fraud and valid signature collection. It is not the government's responsibility to gather and list all Ethical contracts in one place.
The government may establish signing houses for people to sign notarized ethical contracts free of compulsion and mandate their use. Alternatively, they may send people who were listed as signing an ethical contract a notification.
Money and Minting
Simeon owns the minting and Economic system. Money must be used to pay taxes, buy a $10,000 weekly travel pass, land, play games and view media, but land and travel expenses. Simeon shares the mints with Congress. You earn money by attending school and going to parties or by playing sports. School attendance pays up to 15,000 weekly with good grades paying more.
Permanent Seats in Congress
Simeon Satan Narissa Shan Sitch Saddeus Entamion
Thaos reserves thirty percent of Seats in Congress
Chief Visionaries
Tiara and Vivian
Each selects 1/3 of Visionaries who serve at their leisure.
Visionaries serve a minimum of fifty years and promote and demote people in government positions and can recall elected and judges officials, comment on ballots, create themes
3 CommentsAwardShareSaveComment as Equal-Upstairs-213 CommentMarkdown ModeSort By: Best📷📷level 1Equal-Upstairs-213·just now
Kingdom funding
1ReplyShare📷level 1Equal-Upstairs-213·just now
Proxies.
Police chief
oathkeepers, forgeries, lotteries figure of the day, rolling agenda. strategist,
Figures of the day, month and year elected every so often.
President elected every four months
distributaries and contests chief chosen by president.
Figure: 1/3 popular vote 1/3 congress 1/3 presidential college every 4540 years.
Media grants, advertising distribution, education regulations.

Law: Treaurer of ethical anarchy with power to distribute UBI and set sschool salaries elected by all via JUngle primary FPTP with runoff if someone fails to receive a majority.
Law: Interpreting Ethical Anarchy is the responsibility of Simeon, RHo and Sitch and fmy mother and father and Entenny. They may clarify and add addendums to law.
1ReplyShare
RIder
Land Works like what? Asessor rrv
Maps and districting?
A territory may be split when..
Game based
Vote games for outlawry congress and elected congress. % of territory captured equals percent of senate seats you get. Outlawry senate.

I'm not particularly a religious person. I never really connected with the idea of believing in a God or a Devil; something like religion never really resonated with me until the night a few of my friends and I explored the Lockwood house.
My mother gave me a laptop this morning; she thought that it might help me cope or whatever so here I am, typing what I remember. I haven't been able to sleep; there's a shadow that stands in the corner of my hospital room at night, and sometimes I hear voices inside my head telling me to do things, and I'm terrified.
No one believes me. They keep stating that my traumatizing experience must have triggered my anxiety. They called it a dissociation or detachment from reality, I think. Whatever. I know that what I saw in that house was real, and what had happened to my friends actually did happen. We just wanted an experience. We never really stopped to evaluate the risks that might come with it.
I guess I'll start from the beginning.
It was Friday morning, and I decided to kill some time in the library across from my high school. The greatest thing about being in a library was the calming atmosphere. I leaned forward on the worn sofa and rolled my eyes as I turned the page.
What? I scoffed. Why is this even a thing someone would think is even remotely attractive?
[ I am a lot to handle, but I can assure you that you'll have fun handling me, love ]
Seriously? I've met drunk perverts hanging outside of bars with better pick up lines than that I thought to myself. I didn't think it could get any cringier until I read the next line.
[ My heart did an unexpected flip, startled by his bizarrely attractive smile ]
I frowned inwardly. You know what you really need instead of a creepy-ass stalker boyfriend? A cardiology consult
"So annoying," I sighed. How is this tripe a best seller?
"What's annoying?"
"Oh, shit." I squeaked. I sat upright and turned around, instinctively about to clog the person when I realized who it was. Harlen leaned up against the wall with a tilted smirk on his face. He stood between me and the fluorescents.
Harlen was a fellow classmate and a friend of Mark's, who was an older guy Albie, and I guess Harlen hung out with. Harlen was a tall, attractive guy with an athletic build, short obsidian hair, and grey eyes. To quote the main character in the novel, Harlen was the kind of trouble smarter girls than I had fallen into with disastrous results and a few regrets.
My cheeks flushed and I closed the book as he cocked his head at me. "Did I seriously scare you?" He joked, but his smile faltered slightly as I glared up at him.
"Dude," I groaned. "Don't sneak up on me like that,"
"What? I didn't sneak," He crossed his arms over his chest in protest. "No sneaking was involved. I just walked over here. And to be fair, this is a library-silence is sacred in a library so technically we're supposed to sneak. We're also the only ones in here right now anyway, so who cares."
My eyes did a pointed sweep of the decidedly empty area before settling back on Harlen's with an unamused glower. "Yeah," I said. "I'm pretty sure the zero other people in here appreciate the deceptive aura of calm. What are you doing here?"
"Well, actually I was doing some research for a paper I'm writing for English." He tightened his grip on his bookbag. "I was told I'd find you here," He explained.
"Why?" I asked. "I didn't tell anyone that I was here."
"I've got my ways of tracking people down."
When he saw my expression, Harlen rolled his eyes. "Oh, come on Kaya. I'm just kidding! Is it really that weird that I happen to be in here the same time as you?"
"I guess not."
"I'll let you get back to reading, then. Oh," He started. "I almost forgot. Meet us down at the Love Triangle for lunch. I found a cool place for us to urbex."
My friends and I loved urban exploring. Most of the time it was exciting and exhilarating. Sometimes it was a challenge; some places were remote enough that you could simply walk in through the front door like a welcomed visitor. Other times we would be forced to climb up over fences or crawl through windows.
There was this one time we decided to check out a drainage tunnel because a few people have sworn they heard ominous laughter coming from it. Water seeped into our clothes and we shivered at the coldness. I remember that I cracked a joke about the movie "IT" when we suddenly heard a loud BOOM right next to our heads. I have no idea what caused the sound, but I doubt that it was anything paranormal.
I was in the middle of stabbing at a large crouton with my fork when Harlen, Albie, and Jessica took their seats at the table.
"Hey, Kaya," Albie said as he sat down beside me. Albie and I have been friends since we were little. He was a skinny black guy with a box fade haircut and light brown eyes. We were neither popular nor unpopular. We were what some people called, "drifters" and, according to Albie, those whose social standings meant that if he made random eye contact with someone in the halls he would probably get a nod back, and maybe even a quick "Hey" or "What's up" If you didn't know us personally you'd likely assume that we were siblings, especially with the way we acted around each other most of the time.
"What took you guys so long?" I asked, pointing my fork in his direction.
"It was my fault. I'm sorry." He grumbled, as he unzipped his lunch bag. "Mr. Wizzner chastised me for like, ten minutes."
"To be fair, You were looking at your phone in class." Jessica said. Jessica was Albie's girlfriend, a petite girl with long blond hair, and hazel eyes. "And that wasn't the only thing,"
Albie sighed. "You're not wrong, but he's kind of an asshat."
"You should use that filter once in a while," Jessica said.
"Oh baby, since when have you known me to have such a filter?"
"Oh please," I scoffed. "You just choose not to use it."
Albie gave me a frown and tossed a baby carrot my way, which I was able to dodge easily.
Harlen cleared his throat as he pulled out his phone. "So, shall we get to it, then?"
The Lockwood house had been abandoned for years now, but a few people who have walked the trail close to the place have claimed they could see the spirits of the family walking around inside, and others had even heard music coming from the house. When they went to investigate, there was no one inside.
In 2010 Ethan Lockwood brutally murdered his wife, Anna Lockwood, and her parents Steven and Isabelle Thompson in the middle of the night. Authorities found Anna's parents dead in their bedroom; both of their bodies were in pieces, and their daughter's body was found in the basement. Anna had multiple blunt force head injuries and what's worse, her eyes and tongue were missing. Ethan's body was found in the living room with a shotgun beside him, and a deep laceration on his neck. People have compared this to the Amityville horror - which was a huge reason we were doing this.
"Get this," Harlen said, as he scrolled down. "There was a survivor - a ten year old boy. He also had a twin brother, but he was never found."
Some have assumed the father killed him and buried his body somewhere on the property, and others have assumed the boy escaped and is probably alive under a new identity. I guess we'll never know.
"Holy crap. What happened to the boy who survived?" I asked.
"I don't know. I guess that part was kept confidential," Albie said. "For the boy's protection I guess."
"Poor baby," Jessica frowned.
"So," Harlen said. "Are you guys up for it?"
◇
We all crawled into Harlen's truck around 6pm and headed to the Lockwood house. Albie took his video recorder and held it in front of his face. "Hey, what's up guys, gals, and nonbinary folks!" Albie spoke with conviction as he stared wide-eyed in the video recorder. "We're going to prove that ghosts are real!"
I rolled down the window and glanced out at the scenery. I laughed to myself when we passed a large cornfield. "Guys, this seriously looks like we're going straight into a modern day horror film."
"It really does," Jessica agreed.
"I can already feel this place, I'm beginning to sweat all over." Albie exclaimed as he turned his camera to the window then back on himself.
"Like something about this place isn't right at all? That's pretty understandable, considering." Harlen said, turning down a gravel road.
"We're gonna recieve a ton of views for this!" Albie smiled. He turned the camera toward Harlen who waved back from the review mirror.
"Dude," Harlen chuckled. "I bet some of these viewers are going to think you're crazy because you're willing to allow something to throw you across the room and-possibly-murder you for content."
We pulled up to the gate in front of the two - story colonial home. There was already a green van parked outside the gate to the property. Mark greeted us at the gate with a colorful bottle of vodka. Mark was an average looking guy in his early 20s with shaggy brown hair and brown eyes. He raised the bottle in his right hand with shot glasses in the other.
"Hey, guys," Mark handed each of us a shot glass. "Did you get here alright?"
"Oh yeah. I've driven passed this place a couple of times, I didn't even need the GPS" Harlen said.
"This definitely screams illegal." I commented, pointedly toward the large house.
"Only if we get caught, but this place is abandoned so I doubt we'll get into any trouble with the law." Harlen said.
"I'm giving you alcohol, and you're more worried about "breaking and entering"? Mark laughed.
Albie took his shot of the Three Olives Loopy vodka and made a face. "This tastes like Tucan Sam fucked me."
"Ew," Jessica grimaced.
Harlen and I laughed. Mark only snorted.
After we each had several shots of vodka, we got ready. We each grabbed a headlight in order to keep our hands free, gloves, and disposable face masks and placed them into our backpacks, along with first aid (just in case). Mark had been urbexing for a while, and he was always prepared with supplies just in case anyone forgot to bring something.
"So, what happens if we're not alone in the house?" Jessica asked.
Even though urbex sites are technically "abandoned" that didn't mean you wouldn't run into other people inside like squatters or addicts, and they may not react well to seeing a stranger in their space.
"It's a good thing I brought this along," Mark said. He pushed his jacket aside and revealed a hand gun tucked inside its holster.
"Holy crap, man." Harlen said.
"I can't believe you brought a gun." Albie said.
Jessica and I were speechless. It's a good idea to bring some sort of self defense tool just in case your physical safety is threatened, but bringing something like a gun raises the risk of you accidentally injuring yourself.
"Of course I did. It's always good to carry protection." Mark explained.
A few minutes after, the five of us walked up to the large rusted gate. With a little bit of work, we each slipped through the bars and headed up to the house.
"You know those haunted attractions where people dress up in order to scare the shit out of you, except it's actual demons and they're going to steal your soul!" Jessica smiled beside Albie who threaded his fingers through hers. "It's actually kinda thrilling."
"Awesome," Harlen smirked. "I'm glad you sound so optimistic about it."
"I try to be!"
We stepped up onto the porch, which wrapped around the front of the house. The paint on the door was chipped with age in places. "Are you guys ready?" Harlen asked. "Once we enter this house, we will possibly become vulnerable to any demonic presence that might reside here."
I rolled my eyes. "If I'm in serious danger, I'm getting out. I'll throw myself out the window if I have to."
"I'm on Kaya's team," Jessica agreed. "Team rational."
"What, and risk getting a broken leg?" Albie asked.
"Better a broken leg than having your soul taken by some kind of entity." I replied.
"Alright, guys let's do this." Harlen said. He opened the door and the five of us headed inside.
The front door opened up into a foyer. Straight ahead of us was a staircase that led up to the second floor. There was a spacious living room to our right and a dining room to our left, and from there, an alcove enterance that led into the kitchen. I could tell that this place had been abandoned for years; there was cobwebs and peeled paint on the walls. There were remnants of furniture left ripped, dismantled, and stained which laid disorderly on the floor of the living room, reminding me of death.
This had once been the home of a happy upper-class family, full of life. Now it was replaced by ghosts of the past, vermin, spiders, dirt, and trash. The smell of rot and the taste of regurgitated food made me grimace in disgust.
"Why hasn't anyone fix this place up and put it back on the market?" Jessica asked.
"Who really knows," Albie replied.
"Hello!" Harlen announced as he twirled on his heels. "Are there any spirits here?" I glanced over at Harlen with a look and he shrugged.
"Is this what you guys imagined?" Mark queried.
"Sure, minus the dead bodies," I walked into the living room and spotted a mid century record player console propped up against the wall next to a grand piano. There was a record still on the turntable, "Tonight You Belong To Me" by "Patience and Prudence"
"Hey, come check this out." Out of curiosity I placed the stylus and tried turning it on, not really expecting anything to happen. I jerked my hand away when it began to play.
I quickly took the needle off, a little creeped out. "Holy crap, that scared me."
"That thing still works?" Albie asked, as he inspected the record player. "That song is kinda sweet,"
"No it isn't," Jessica frowned. "It's the kind of song you would hear while being tortured to death."
After we goofed around a little bit, we all decided to begin exploring around the house. Mark started up the stairs and asked if anyone would like to join him.
"I'll join you, man." Harlen said. He gave me a wink before heading towards the stairs with Mark, and I glanced over at Albie and Jessica as they disappeared down the hall.
I was alone.
I walked over to the piano, and carefully lifted the lid up and over to reveal its keys. My fingers traced the lines in between them and pushed down lightly on a few. The deep sounds reverberated around the room.
My eyes drifted up to the small picture frame sitting on top of the piano. I absent-mindedly bit my bottom lip and reached up to grab the frame. My fingers trailed across the picture, leaving an oily impression against the glass that held the picture in place. A family of four stared back at me and I realized that it was Ethan, Anna, and their twin boys. I was so focused on the twins that I almost didn't hear my phone alerting me that I had a new text message.
It was a text from Albie.
From "Albie" at 6:45pm: Meet us down in the basement. I want to show u something.
To "Albie" at 6:46pm: What is it?
From "Albie" at 6:46pm: There's some cool shit down here. Hurry up.
I rolled my eyes and placed my phone in my pocket as I made my way down the hall. I paused at the top of the basement stairs. I could hear Jessica and Albie, the beems from their headlights bouncing around.
"Albie?" I called out.
"Yeah, Kaya, we're down here." He replied. "Come on down. We have something to show you."
"Alright, I'm coming down hold on." I carefully descended the stairs and turned the corner. "So, what did you want to show me-"
My voice died in my throat. It was dark down here, and my friends were nowhere to be seen. I was gripped by a sudden sense of unnease. I stood near the stairs and turned on my headlamp. "Hello? Albie, this isn't funny, dude."
What answered me was silence. Absolute silence. I was alone, or I thought I was until my light fell onto something moving a few feet in front of me. It was an androgynous looking kid around my age with pale skin, shoulder-length black hair, and violet eyes. They wore a long sleeve gothic cloak poncho, over thin black leggings. Their lips pulled back into a malicious grin as they came closer to me. I watched in horror as their eyes rolled to the back of their head and their mouth split open wide, revealing sharp teeth.
They reached out for me and I screamed in terror, my instincs finally kicked in. I bolted up the steps, and stumbled into the hallway. I ran for the front door and tried to leave, but it wouldn't open. What the hell?! that made no damn sense! My heart sank into the pit of my stomach. Suddenly I felt something touch my shoulder. I screamed, ready to defend myself.
"Hey. Hey! Kaya, stop it's me, Albie."
I stopped struggling as my eyes refocused on the familiar faces in front of me. Albie, Jessica, and Harlen stared back at me with confused alarm.
"Are you alright?" Harlen asked. "What happened?"
I shook my head and quickly glanced behind them at the basement door, but there was nothing there. I know I hadn't imagined it! I turned my attention back to my friends. "I saw something down in the basement! I want to leave. Now."
"What are you talking about, Kaya? Hold up, did you see something down there? Holy shit. The ghosts didn't think one of us would see them, but we did. Can you-"
Before Albie can finish his sentence, I roughly pushed him away from me and turned back to the door. "Damnit, Albie! I don't want to be in this fucking house anymore! It won't open! Why won't it open!"
"Seriously, Kaya what the hell?" Albie asked, almost annoyed.
"Just relax, Kaya. Let me give it a try, alright?" Harlen offered, calmly. He grabbed the knob, but it stayed shut. "What the hell?"
"See? I told you it won't open!" I hissed.
"What do you mean, "it won't open" let me give it a try." Albie shoved his way passed us. He motioned for all of us to stand back and we watched as he tried to use his whole body against it.
"M-maybe the door's jammed." Jessica exclaimed. "Let's chill out. The front door isn't the only exit out of this place."
"Jessica's right. Let's try the door in the kitchen." Harlen said. We entered the kitchen and Harlen quickly made his way over to the screen door that faced the forest. He cursed under his breath. "Damnit. Nothing."
"Hold up, guys. Where's Mark?" Albie asked.
Harlen quickly pulled his phone out to call Mark when we all collectively got a text from him. Reminding us that we had set up a group chat for easy contact. Harlen glanced back at me with an odd expression I couldn't name. I opened my texts and a sharp stab of dread settled in my stomach.
From "Mark" at 7:05pm: I'm down in the basement, Harlen. Where r u?
From "Mark" at 7:06pm: Harlen is that u? It's not funny, man.
Harlen texted Mark that we were all in the kitchen. I watched as the three small dots in a text bubble pending before it disappeared and Harlen's cell phone rang. He answered and placed Mark on speaker phone.
"What the hell do you mean you're in the kitchen? I definitely heard your voice down here."
Harlen cursed, and told Mark to make his way to the kitchen. Harlen started toward the basement and we all followed right behind him. Before we could reach the stairs to the basement, however, the door swung shut, the force of it knocked us backwards. We heard Mark's gun go off several times followed by his peircing screams of terror before they were abruptly cut short. In our inebriated panic, I failed at the last second to realize we were all running in different directions.
I remember running up the stairs and locking the bathroom door behind me. My heart pounded painfully against my ribcage as I fumbled for my phone, thankful that it hadn't fallen out of my pocket. I willed myself to control my sobs and called 911, but for some reason my call wouldn't go through.
"Nononono! Fuck, please no." I collapsed against the bathtub and cried into my sleeves. Paranoia nearly consumed me once I thought of my friends and every horrible scenario when I received a text from Albie. I looked at it confused.
I wiped the snot from my face and quickly texted him back. How in the hell was I able to receive his texts when I couldn't get ahold of the cops?
From "Albie" at 7:20pm: Apparently we can contact each other in this house, but our phone's service seems to be cut off from the outside world. Where r u?
What the hell is going on in this place??
To "Albie" at 7:21pm: I'm in the upstairs bathroom. Do u know where Harlen and Jess are?
From "Albie" at 7:25pm: Jess is with me. I don't know where Harlen is.
My stomach dropped, but before I could reply Albie sent another text, and what I read made my blood run cold.
From "Albie" at 7:25pm: There is smthing moving in the hallway outside the room we r in. Stay quiet and keep ur phone on silent. If we need to contact each other use text.
It was around thirty minutes after when Albie replied with another text updating me with their situation. The thing stalking outside their room a while ago was gone now, and it hadn't come back.
From "Albie" at 8:00pm: We're going to make our way to you. Stay where u r
To "Albie" at 8:02pm: Ok. Be careful.
I slowly got to my feet and set my phone down beside the sink and took a deep breath to level my breathing. Suddenly, I heard something pound against the door. I screamed and stumbled backward. "Holy shit!"
"Kaya?" It was Harlen. "Kaya, is that you?"
"H-Harlen?" I collected myself and made my way over to the bathroom door. I walked into the hallway, relieved that I wasn't alone anymore. Harlen was safe, thank God. "Oh my god, Harlen I'm so glad you're-"
I gasped, and I stumbled forward as the door behind me slammed shut. I felt a sudden wave of dread wash over me as my eyes swept up and down the vacant hallway. Whatever was keeping us here tricked me. I quickly tried going back into the bathroom, but it wouldn't open, not only that but I left my phone by the sink. "No! Damnit!" I needed my phone, it was my only way to stay in contact with my friends, and how was Albie going to know where I was? I had two options, I could try and make my way to Albie or find another place to hide.
My heart thudded loudly in my ears as my headlamp bounced off the walls, chasing nothing more than shadows. I stuck close to the wall as I made my way down the hall. From somewhere down the hall, I heard a voice call out. It was Albie's voice telling me to come over to him. I hesitated for a moment. What if it was another trick? It definitely could be since whatever is toying with us was capable of mimicking voices. What if it really was Albie? Regardless, I had to go passed the room if I wanted to find Albie or another place to hide.
"Kaya, we're in here," Albie whispered to me as I got closer to one of the bedrooms. I hesitated before I stepped inside. The bedroom smelled awful, like rotten meat hung out in the sun for too long. My headlamp's light swept the room until it landed on a lone figure lying face-up on the bed.
"...Albie?" I whispered, tentatively. My voice sounded thin, like old paper. The figure on the bed didn't answer, but when I crept closer, I slipped on something wet. I glanced down at the floor. It was blood; a trail of blood led in from the doorway all the way to the bed. "Oh my god!" I screamed. My stomach rebelled and I heaved out my lunch until I couldn't expel anything else.
My throat burned as I wiped my mouth, and my chest hurt from sobbing out his name. Mark laid sprawled on the bed, his abdomen was ripped open and what remained of his entrails spilled over his body like a gory blanket. I stumbled backward, I fell against the door closing it shut. I was about to leave when I spotted the gun tucked under Mark's jacket.
Oh god, this was probably the worst decision ever and the likelihood that this was yet another trick was high, but I needed something to protect myself with. I've watched Mark use it before when we all went camping a year ago, so I kind of knew how to use it. I steeled myself and started toward the bed.
The closer I got the more I can see the damage done to his body; his abdomen and chest cavity were open and hollowed out. The skin looked like it was rolled back, torn and ragged. His sternum was completely gone, a few of his ribs were cracked so they protruded from either side of his body like fangs. Half of his bottom lip looked like it was chewed off and his left ear was missing. I shook my head and tentatively reached out for the gun. Just as I grabbed it, I felt something gooey covered on the grip of the gun.
I yelped and dropped it on the floor. I cursed and bent down to pick it up. Once I did I wiped the substance off with my sleeve with a grimace and made sure the safety was on. I was tucking it into my jacket pocket when something dripped onto my hand. I looked up and saw Mark or what used to be Mark looming over me from the ceiling like Spiderman. His eyes were oily black, his face twisted in an agonized and vengeful expression. Before I could move, he threw himself at me.
Somehow, I managed to dodge him and wrench the door open, hitting Mark as he lunged at me. The blow was hard enough that it sent Mark sprawling across the floor. I rushed out of the room and back into the empty hallway. I took a chance and looked back, but Mark wasn't there.
When I reached the end of the hallway, I felt hands grab me and pull me around the corner. I opened my mouth to scream, but a hand clamped over my mouth, silencing me. Panic cut through my body like a hot blade, and new found adrenaline flooded my system as I twisted and shoved at the person holding me immobile.
"Kaya, stop," Albie hissed. "It's me."
I turned around and my eyes widened with tears as Albie released his hand from my mouth, and Jessica pulled me into a hug as I told them what happened. Albie pointed towards the stairs and motioned for us to follow. Albie led us into the foyer. We heard movement in the basement so as quickly and quietly as we could, we crawled inside a closet across from the living room.
"What are we going to do?" Jessica asked. "We have no weapons!"
"I found this on Mark's body." I exclaimed as I showed them the hand gun.
Albie got to his feet. "ah, crap...I'm going to be right back. I left my camera in the kitchen."
"What? Hell no." I hissed. Splitting up is a terrible Idea! Risking his life for that damn camera? Was he an idiot?
"Just stay here, alright? Kaya, keep that gun out." He said, with no room for an argument. "Whatever this thing is, it can mimic our voices so we'll need a password to distinguish them from us." He took out his phone and typed Last Alliance
After he left, I crawled over to the door and locked it. I sat down next to Jessica who was sobbing. I turned to her and placed my palms to her tear stained face. "Hey, Jess. We'll make it out of here alright? I promise-"
Jessica shook her head and pushed my hands away from her face. "Don't say that shit to me. We're going to die here, Kaya!" She hissed. "Why is this happening? I wanna go home!"
I sat back against the wall and sighed.
Ten minutes later I heard movement coming from outside the room. I quickly got to my feet and placed my hands on the door.
"Last Alliance," Albie whispered, rather quickly. "Hurry up and let me in."
I hadn't even released the door knob when Albie pushed passed me and helped Jessica to her feet without much protest on her end. "Shit, it was him all along."
"What are you talking about?" I asked.
"I caught it on camera!" He whispered frantically. "The reason he brought us out here wasn't to-shit-" he was breathing hard. He moved toward me and shoved the camera in my direction. "Here, hold onto it for-" His sentence was cut off abruptly as the thing that used to be Mark drilled his fist into Albie's chest from behind. Albie's eyes widened as his mind had come to the realization at what happened.
Mark dropped Albie's body on the ground and his lips twisted into a manic grin as he examined his blood-covered arm. "He was spying on us," Mark said, but it didn't sound like Mark anymore. His voice sounded like several voices overlapping, fighting for center stage. "He didn't think that we would notice, but we did."
We screamed, and holding onto the camera with one hand I pulled her toward me with the other, quickly. We couldn't save him, and I knew that if we didn't move now we would end up just like him.
Jessica and I bolted down the hallway and back up the stairs. We found an empty room that must have been a personal office at one point, and barricaded ourselves inside. I cursed when I noticed the room we were in didn't have a window wide enough for us to escape through. I sat against the wall beside Jessica who sobbed into her sleeves.
I glanced down at the camcorder which felt heavy in my hand. What did Albie capture on camera that had him so upset? I turned it on and what I saw on the screen made my blood run cold. It was Harlen, the kid from the basement who stood beside Harlen, and the thing that used to be Mark; Harlen was speaking to him, but it was in a strange language that I couldn't understand. After he was finished, the thing that used to be Mark knelt down as if Harlen was some kind of royalty, and that was where the video stopped.
I heard that thing right outside the room we were in. He was telling us that no matter what we did, we were not leaving this place. A few seconds later, he broke through the door, pushing the desk and chairs out of the way with ease. With the force, one of the chairs knocked me to the floor.
He released a sick and twisted laughter, and stalked toward me, eyes filled with malice. Jessica grabbed something heavy from the floor and chucked it at Mark. Mark was startled for a second, and then slowly turned his attention to her. She yelped and frantically swept her eyes around the room for anything she could use as a weapon. He lunged for her and they collided to the floor.
I fumbled for my jacket's zipper for the gun, but I was too late. I watched in utter horror as he ripped into my friend; her screams of terror and agony will haunt my nightmares for the rest of my life. I pulled myself to my feet, my back bumped into something hard. A metal filing cabinet. Mark turned his attention back on me, but before he could reach me, he tripped over something and he fell to the floor. I shifted, and using my whole body weight, I managed to tip it over. It landed on top of Mark with a sickening crunch of bone and viscera.
I slowly made my way to Jessica's body and collapsed to my knees. I clutched at my own head and screamed until it hurt. At that moment, all I wanted to do was crumble in defeat. My voice had broken into heavy sobs so loud and ugly that I almost didn't hear Harlen's footsteps behind me.
"Kaya, is that you?" He called out to me, his voice full of worry. I was hardly listening to him. This was his fault! Rage spiked through me like a knife to my gut, it twisted and turned until I was all ground beef inside; I had the sudden urge to pull the gun from my jacket and-no, I had to calm down. Maybe if I feigned ignorance, I might still have a chance to escape, however slim that was. He bent down, and I let him pull me along with him without protest. With his eyes forward, I slowly put my hand on the gun.
We were almost to the kitchen when Harlen turned around, and leaned against the wall. "So, you know, don't you."
It wasn't a question. I slowly pulled out the gun, unlocked it, and trained it on him. He stared at me with an unsettling expression, and I could have sworn his eyes were black. I suddenly felt an intense pressure pour down on me. I could feel a miasma of something intense as his eyes bore into mine; my arms trembled with the effort of keeping them aloft. The gun clenched tightly in my hands like a life line. I couldn't faulter. I knew that if I did, even for an instant, Harlen would undoubtedly kill me.
"Oh, don't be like that, Kaya. You're not getting out of this house unless I say so, so let's just chat, hm?"
I shook my head and raised the gun to his chest, and for a brief moment I caught a glimpse of a surprised expression on his face when I pulled the trigger. The sound of the gunshot reverberated around me. I pulled the trigger again and again, but the gun was empty. I dropped it to the floor, my hands shaking. He glanced down at himself. "Huh. Well, would ya look at that, you managed to get me through the ribs, good job."
I was running before Harlen finished his sentence. However, he wasn't coming after me-at least not yet. Figures. I couldn't leave this place so he had no reason to put much effort into the chase. I stumbled through the house, catching myself on overturned furniture in order to keep my balance as I made my way towards the stairs.
I tripped over something and I caught myself against the wall across from the stairs. I paused for a moment to catch my breath. The house seemed to resonate with his manic laughter. I glanced behind me, and I felt a wave of cold dread as he sauntered toward me down the hall. Hands in his pockets, with an almost amused expression.
"Where do you think you're going, Kaya?" He asked. "Didn't I tell you before?"
The words, "There is no escape" suddenly appeared all over the walls in blood. I cursed, and pushed myself off the wall and bolted up the steps, down the hall, and into one of the bedrooms and quickly closed the door. I looked around at what was once a child's room. There was a twin sized bed in the center of the room, a nightstand across from the closet, and a bathroom.
I spotted a decent sized window and I ran over to it, but it wouldn't open and I cursed when there was nothing around me to break it with. Without any time to come up with a plan, I quickly slid underneath the bed and turned off my headlamp. I immediately cursed at myself again, of all the places to hide I chose the first place any one would look!
I contemplated whether or not to find another hiding place, but before I could move I heard him make his way down the hall singing that creepy ass song. "My honey I know with the dawn that you will be gone, but tonight you belong to me, just little 'ol me~"
The bedroom door opened. I covered my mouth and tried to silence my breathing, hoping to God that he wouldn't find me under the bed. I watched in fear as he closed the door behind him and made his way over to the bed. The bed dipped slightly as Harlen's weight sank onto it. He told me things I didn't want to hear and more. This monster-this demon-slithered into our lives just for all of this to happen.
My eyes widened and I tucked my arms to my sides, the wooden bed frame gave a protest above me as Harlen laid down on top of it. Then he sighed, almost forlorn. "This was my brother's room, you know. Coming back here brings back so many memories,"
Right after he said that I felt something prickle behind my eyelids. I shut my eyes tightly as gruesome scenes appeared inside my head. There was so much blood, and images shown of a young boy in pajamas stalking through the house with an ax in his hands picking off his family members one by one-doing things a normal child his size wouldn't be able to do, but Harlen was anything but normal. I felt bile rise in my throat but I managed to keep it down.
"The final stage of grief is acceptance, Kaya." He said. His cruel voice brought me back to the present. "You have a lot of spirit, I like that. I'm also in a good mood so I'll give you two options: you can either die here or you can come with me. You should be grateful that I'm even giving you an option. So, what's it going to be?"
I opened my mouth and closed it again; what was I supposed to say to something like that? What was going to happen to me if I said yes? If I said no...
A low growl -yes, a growl- rumbled above me and I felt something snag my ankle. I panicked, my fingers tore into the wooden floor as I was dragged out from underneath the bed. I was thrown across the room, pain shot up my back as something bit into my spine. Harlen straightened up and started toward me. I quickly averted my gaze, the panic swarmed all over me like a hive of angry bees.
"Wh-why are you d-doing this?" I asked, my breath hitched between sobs.
Harlen knelt down in front of me. "Hey...hey look at me, Kaya."
Absolute terror gripped me as he forced me to look at him. His features weren't human; the light of the moon highlighted the inhuman planes of his face. Black, spidery thread-like lines creeped around his forehead and right beneath his oily black eyes. His mouth had split open, wider than any human mouth was capable of.
His nails grew long and sharp against my chin. It was mesmerizing, fascinating almost, like watching a lion's face before it tears yours off. Suddenly, I couldn't breathe; my lungs felt swollen and inflamed, my hands came up to my throat as I coughed and wheezed. Was this an asthma attack? No, it was Harlen.
"When I ask you a question, do not answer it with another question do you understand?" He snarled. "You will understand why when you arrive. Now, will it be a yes or a no?"
His features calmed and he looked human again, and whatever power on me broke, it allowed me to inhale sharply. I gasped. I wanted to scream at him, I wanted to rage. Instead, I dropped my hands on my thighs. I wanted to live.
◇
"Kaya, honey" My mom said, as she came into my hospital room, "You've got someone to see you this morning! One of your friends from school, I think."
I placed my book down on the table beside me. She bent down and gave me a kiss on the forehead. "And he's very attractive," She whispered, "It's not every day a tall handsome boy comes to sit by your bedside."
I nodded and gave her a small smile as my chest filled with dread. The doctor informed my mom that I was found in the middle of the woods, unconcious by a young man. She had no idea what really happened to me or what happened to my friends'. Harlen told me that he had ways of covering his tracks so there was no use in telling anyone what really happened. It didn't matter if I did or not because no one would believe me anyway.
Harlen came around the corner with a bouquet of flowers. My mom smiled at him and walked toward the door, "I'll just leave you two alone. What did you say your name was again?"
"My name is Harlen," He said, as he stepped forward. "Harlen Lockwood."
"Nice to meet you, Harlen," She said, smiling back at him before exiting the room.
Harlen placed the flowers on the table and sat down next to the hospital bed, he placed a hand on my thigh. "I'm so glad you're feeling better, Kaya." He said. He gently pushed a loose strand of my hair out of my face and gently tucked it behind my ear. "Remember what we talked about. You will come to me after you are discharged from the hospital,"
I shivered at his touch, and out of curiosity I asked, "What happens if I don't?"
Harlen let loose a dark chuckle. His head dips until his lips skate by the curve of my ear. "Then I'll hunt you down." He whispered to me like it's obvious. "I'll kill you and everyone you care about. I'm capable of all sorts of horrors; things you can't even imagine." I watched as Harlen stood up from the seat.
"Now, I've got a few things to do before you arrive," Harlen said, smiling down at me. He paused by the room's door. "I'll see you soon."
His visit was a few days ago. I've made up my mind; all of those lives are dependent on me. Everything that happened that night was real. I know that most people won't believe me, but to be quite honest I don't care anymore.
[Update] I just got the news I'll be discharged tomorrow.

Hello! I feel like a links and nodes diagram would be a great way to visualize a galaxy map for sci-fi settings especially in an RPG setting were traveling is part of the adventure.
Does anyone know of a good software that easily lets you create Nodes with Categories, volumes/magnitudes and Links between them with a magnitude that auto sorts to positioning to make all the nodes make sense. Example of what I'd like to end up with are the early Spelljammer maps.
In summary what I'd love is software that can make Circles whose size is based on an integer value (size of world), whose color is based on some text based categories (e.g. star system names). Lines/Links whose length is an integer value (distance) between two nodes. Ability to enable labels/names on the links and nodes. And an automated sorting/order function so that the planets arrange to make the length of nodes work.
I've found a few that I could use but they all have way more than I need and that complexity is slowing my learning curve. I'd like to keep it simple but not MS Paint simple.
Thanks!

The subject of how to safeguard a home from likely harm while pressure washing is significant for any property holder. To guarantee that the home remaining parts protected and in one piece, it is important to comprehend the dangers related with this undertaking as well as manners by which these can be limited. This article will examine the prescribed procedures for safeguarding a home during pressure washing, including readiness prior to starting the work, choosing the right hardware, and avoiding potential risk during use.
Prior to beginning any work on the outside of a house, there are a few stages that ought to be taken to get ready. In the first place, surfaces should be gotten free from any flotsam and jetsam or articles that could turn out to be free or in any case slow down appropriate cleaning. Second, all electrical plugs ought to be covered or switched off so they don't get wet or harmed during working. At last, gasketed windows need to have their seals checked and fixed if necessary so water doesn't enter through them.
Whenever arrangement has been finished, the time has come to choose a suitable tension washer for the current task. The size of both the spout opening and siphon ought to relate with what sort of surface should be cleaned; an excessive amount of tension might cause hopeless harm though too little won't eliminate soil successfully . Furthermore, utilizing an internal combustion machine rather than electric might offer more noteworthy command over yield yet additionally accompanies added risk due its flammable nature.
At last, while working a tension washer around a home exceptional consideration ought to be taken all together limit risk of mischief happening. Continuously keep hose spouts pointed away from individuals and pets as even limited quantities of water delivered at high tensions can cause injury. Likewise attempt to keep away from contact between metal parts, for example, spigots and window outlines since electrical flows going through them can direct power once more into administrator's hands bringing about shock or consumes . By observing these rules one can have a solid sense of safety realizing their property will stay unharmed in the wake of finishing a palatable tidy up task.
​

My wood deck can I use a pressure washer on?

Utilizing a strain washer on a wood deck can be a powerful method for cleaning and keep up with it, as long as the legitimate precautionary measures are taken. Pressure washing is best when done at lower pressures, so that no harm happens to the basic surface. It is critical to guarantee that any soil or trash has been taken out from the deck prior to starting the cycle. This will assist with forestalling any further harm during the cleaning system.
Moreover, picking a fitting spout tip for the gig can likewise lessen expected harm. Wide point fan tips ought to by and large be kept away from, since they produce higher water strain than different sorts of spouts. All things considered, utilizing a cone-molded spout with a more modest opening can give better exactness while as yet giving sufficient ability to eliminate obstinate soil and grime without hurting the wood.
The kind of cleanser utilized in pressure washing may likewise affect how well it cleans your wood deck. Certain cleaning arrangements may not be appropriate for particular sorts of wood decks because of their synthetic sythesis, which could cause staining or twisting over the long haul whenever left uncontrolled. Accordingly, consistently read item names cautiously prior to applying them onto your wooden surfaces, and ensure you pick one that is explicitly intended for use on outside furnishings and decks.
It is likewise prudent to try out a little part of your deck first with both low and high strain settings prior to beginning the full cleaning process. This will provide you with a thought of what regions require more consideration and permit you to change likewise if necessary to stay away from any superfluous harm brought about by inordinate power or wrong selection of synthetic compounds. By following these straightforward advances, property holders ought to have the option to securely partake in their wonderful wood decks after every meeting of tension washing without stressing over enduring impacts or weakening down the line pressurewashingcalculator.com/.

Submitted into Contest #189 in response to: Write a story inspired by this quote from Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy: “In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.”
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The boy had ran through the woods of this pine forest so many times, it never occurred to him that he could get lost. He could not get lost here, any more than he could get lost walking from his bedroom to his kitchen. And yet, the fallen knotted pine that marked the middle of the trail never materialized.
“Shoot,” the boy said, crouching down to the forest floor to take a momentary break. His parents would be worried about him soon. He looked to the tops of the trees and moved his body this way and that to find the sun; if he could locate it he would know where west was and he could find his way out. He ran twenty yards and could not see the sun. He was lost.
A branch snapped loudly in the underbrush. The boy whipped around to face the sound. After a moment, “It’s just a fox. Stop being a chicken. It’s just a fox.” He marched onward. The trees became so dense the sky was blocked. Another snapped branch. The boy jumped, in spite of himself.
“Hello? Is someone there?” There was no answer. The boy trudged forward, still dropping the sticks. Then, out of the deepest brush emerged another boy, maybe a teenager.
“Are you Danny?” He asked, panting. He was wearing a tightly packed hunting pack and the boy saw that he was carrying a compass.
“Who are you?”
“Gil. I’ve been looking for you.” He slipped the hiking pack off of his shoulders and sat on his haunches. He pulled water and a peanut butter sandwich out of it. “Want half?” Gil asked.
The boy hesitated. “How do you know who I am?”
“So you are Danny, then. You’re lost, right?” Gil said.
“Yes, I. Wait. How do you know?” Danny took a small step back.
“It’s my job to find people who are lost in the forest.”
“Well, how did you know I was in here? Did my mom and dad send you?” Danny asked.
“Sure, we’ll go with that. Want part of the sandwich or what?” Gil broke the sandwich in half and ate one of the halves in a single bite. He held the other half out to Danny in offering. Danny tentatively accepted and scarfed the sandwich down.
Gil wiped the crumbs from his hands and stood up. “Time to get you unlost, Danny, follow me,” he said, before heading deeper into the forest, away from the direction whence Danny came. Danny looked once behind himself and followed Gil into the wood.
When they’d walked for some time, Danny asked, “Where are we going?”
“Out of the wood. Stick close to me, we’re going off trail here.”
They started to climb over thick, knotted roots and into beds of all tree leaves. The branches too dense to climb through. Danny had to lift his legs high enough to climb through the openings in the branches that Gil cut with a machete.
“I didn’t come this way, uh, Gil.”
“It’s okay,” he called back over his shoulder. “Shortcut.”
The branches entwined so thickly at one point that Danny and Gil could only pass by crawling beneath them on their bellies. Eventually, the branches cleared and they were in a small glade; it glowed a dull yellow, but was illuminated by neither the sun nor the moon. On the other side of the glade, a rope was strung among several trees, from which hung a wooden placard that said “Turn Back, Private Land.” Gil strode confidently under the rope.
“Gil, this is private property, we can’t cross.”
“It’s fine.”
“The owners might have guard dogs. Heck, they might shoot us. Let’s go another way,” Danny was trying to tamp down the squeal of panic trying to escape in his voice.
Gil turned to him, skin ethereal in the yellow light, “Just trust me, Danny.”
Danny inhaled sharply as he bent under the rope and entered the private property. They continued on a narrow path until they came, quite suddenly, upon a rather large stone house. Danny wasn’t sure how he could have missed it; but there it was. He counted a dozen windows and huge double front doors made of oak. Gil approached confidently and knocked a pattern on to the door. It opened. Gil lazily waved at Danny to follow.
Inside, the house was tiny, a single room cottage with a small fire burning in the fireplace. There was an armchair facing the fire, and in it sat a huddled figure, obscured by a hood.
Still staring at the fire, the figure asked in a rasping voice, “Danny, do you want to go home?”
“Sir?” Danny replied.
“Do you have an answer?”
Danny swallowed and answered, “Yes, but I think it’s time for me to go back now, the way I came. This is not the right way to my house, I can see that now. It was ever so kind of you to send someone for me, but I know the way now.”
The figure in the chair waved his arms and the shadows teeming along the floor took shape, dragging and pulling Danny, overpowering him; pushing him closer to the fire.
“Hey! Gil! Help!” The end of Danny’s screams were muffled by the shadows overcoming his face. Gil stood impassively watching as Danny was dragged, wrapped in shadows into the fire.
Danny emerged somewhere on the other side of the fire, the shadows melting, burning and disintegrating around him. Gil was leaning against a stone wall opposite him, waiting.
“What on earth is happening?” Danny demanded. He tried to suppress the beginnings of tears. “Why are you doing this to me? Just take me home.”
“It had to be this way, Danny. This is the way home."
Danny didn’t follow. “I’m not coming,” he said, sticking out his chin defiantly.
Gil said, “You’re going to want to follow. It’s about to get weird in here.”
Danny still did not move, but then a great din of shrieking cries clamored into the room. Danny turned, trying to find tsource of the noise, but he couldn’t see anyone, or anything, that might be the source of the noise. Sometimes the voices said his name: Danny! Help us.”
Danny asked. “Where are those people, calling for me?”
Gil tapped his fingers to his head. “They’re in here.”
“I don’t understand. What do they want from me.”
“They want you to help them, Danny.”
“How can I help them?”
“They’re trapped. You need to dig them out.”
Danny’s hands were suddenly full of a pickaxe and a shovel. Confused but determined, he slammed the pickaxe into the stone floor again and again, until the stones were broken away. He went to his knees and pulled the stones until he reached rich, dark earth. He hit it with shovel, digging out earth until he saw a dozen or so fingers poking out of the dirt. The yelling was louder now.
“I’m coming! Give me a minute. I’ll be there.”
He put his hands into the dirt, expecting to feel an arm or a head, but he felt nothing. He pushed his arms in to the elbow, but nothing. He knelt upright and the fingers were gone.
“Where did they go?” Danny cried. “They were right here!” The screams had gown fainter.
“You didn’t get to them in time,” Gil replied simply. “They’re gone. We need to move on.”
“No! I have to help them!” Danny reached for the shovel, determined to dig more quickly, but it was gone and so was the pickaxe. The stone floor had been repaired. Danny gasped in shock, but Gil walked on. This time, Danny followed. They left the stone room into an open wood and approached a wide, rushing river.
“We need to cross,” Gil said. “And soon, before the embankment floods.”
“Is there a bridge?” Danny asked, looking into the river. “If we try to swim in that we’ll drown.”
The river started to spill out over its embankment. Danny took an instinctive step backwards. Then, he ran down the length of the river for twenty-odd yards, hoping to find something that could help him cross the river. Gil followed behind him a trot. The river flooded several feet more.
Danny was panicking. “Please, I don’t know why you’ve brought me here. But just help me.”
“I am helping. I’m showing you where to go. Get across the river and you’ll get to where you need to go.”
Danny dropped his pack and took off his shoes and shirt, so they could not weigh him down if he had to swim. He approached the flooded embankment and put his toe in. An idea hit him.
“I need another axe!” An axe appeared in his hand. He ran to an enormously tall oak tree and whacked and whacked and whacked at the base. Sometimes it would seem that he was more than halfway through the base and other times it was like he’d made no dent in it. The water was past his ankles then his knees, then he was swept away, desperately grabbing for the trunk of the tree, which finally fell as he was moved downriver, causing a massive wave that carried him even more quickly down the raging waters.
“Danny?”
Danny’s eyes blinked open to see his mother dabbing his forehead with a cool, wet cloth.
“Mom?” Danny sat up. “Oh mom, I had the most awful dream”
His mother’s eyes were filled with tears. “Danny, we were so scared. Billy, tell the doctor he’s awake!” Danny’s older brother ran out of the corner of the room and down the stairs. “You’ve had a terrible fever, Danny. We haven’t been able to wake you.”
Danny could hear a light figure taking the creaky wooden steps two at a time, and a young man with a white coat and a stethoscope rushed into the room.
“No!” Danny jumped in the bed, drawing his knees to his chest. “Mommy, help me. Get him out!”
Danny’s mother looked from him to the doctor with confusion. “Danny?”
The doctor approached closer. “Danny, it’s ok.”
“Mom, that’s Gil. He tried to trap me.” Danny pointed at Gil.
“That’s the doctor, sweet. Doctor Viro.”
“No, that’s… that’s the boy from the woods.”
Danny faltered as the doctor approached and he could see that what had been Gil’s features resolved into someone older, gentler. Danny exhaled and slowly lowered his knees away from his chest. The doctor sat on the side of the bed gently placed the stethoscope on Danny’s chest and then his abdomen.
“Good,” the doctor said. Then he reached in his bag and pulled out a thermometer. He popped it into Danny’s mouth. “Temperature dropped,” the doctor under his breath. Then he stood up and said to Danny’s mother. “More rest. Fluids. He should be fine.”
Danny heard a faint squelch, squelch, squelch. The doctors boots, covered in mud, leaves and twigs, were leaking water on to the bedroom floor. Danny tried to show the shoes to his mother, but he was back in the river, speeding toward a waterfall. Danny flailed his arms, looking to grab anything to keep him from going over the edge. Just as he was about to go over the waterfall, Gil grabbed his hand and pulled him on to a rocky outcrop on the other side of the river.
“What do you want with me?” Danny asked. “Why were you in my house?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Gil said.
“You were the doctor, dragging your dirty boots on the floor.
Gil gave Danny a skeptical look. A thought dawned on Danny. “This is a dream. It’s not real! I can end this.”
Gil shot a dark look. “Are you sure you can end this? I think you need to find your way through the wood first.”
Danny stood up not the rock, and slipped his shoes off to dump the water out. Putting them back on, he headed toward a mountain in the distance.
“Where are you going?” Gil asked.
“I’m climbing that mountain and finding my way out.” Danny hiked for what felt like hours. Finally, he reached the bottom of the mountain and spared a glance back to Gil who was following closely behind in silence.
“Are you coming?” Danny asked.
“I can’t.” Gil replied. “I’m have to stay here.”
“What's making you?" Danny was genuinely confused.
“It’s the laws of this place.”
“What if you held my hand?” Danny held his hand out.
Gil cocked his head to the side. “There is one thing you could do.”
“What?”
“Give me a drop of your blood.”
Danny raised an eyebrow. “That’s it? One drop.”
“Just one.”
“What will one drop do?” Danny crossed his arms over his chest.
“It will break the enchantment keeping me here, and then I can join you out of the mountain and find my way of the the wood.”
“Who are you, really? What are you doing here?” Danny asked.
“I’m Gil and this is where I’m fated to be.”
Danny, taking great pity on Gil, sat on his haunches and rub his hand along the broken flint gathered in a clump along the bottom of the footpath. He took a piece to his palm and nicked his skin; it hurt worse than he thought it would.
“Here.” Danny held his hand out to Gil.
Gil approached and pulled a vial out of his shirt. He uncapped it and held it to the wound on Gil’s palm. He recorked it and put it back in his shirt.
“Thanks,” Gil said, looking at the ground.
Danny continued up the mountain, somehow never getting out of breath, but the peak never seeming to get closer. After hours or days, Danny didn’t know, he stopped.
“Gil, why isn’t the peak getting any closer?”
“It is,” Gil replied, looking at something over Danny’s shoulder.
Danny turned around and a pair of wrought iron gates blocked the rest of the trail leading to the peak of the mountain. Danny tried to pull them open, but they were locked. He hit the lock on the gates with a rock, but no luck.
“Here, let me try,” Gil suggested. He walked to the gate and fiddled with the lock, reaching in and out of his pockets while doing so.
A few minutes later, the gate popped open, and Gil stepped through. Danny followed. The peak was much closer; maybe thirty minutes’ walk away, but Danny’s legs grew heavier until he could not longer lift them. He felt like he was being dragged back down the mountain.
“I need to stop,” Danny said, pulling off of the trail.
He couldn’t deny it now, he was being pulled down the mountain.
“Gil, help me. I’m falling.”
Gil shot him a pitying look. “Sorry, but only one of us can go through. I already used this,” he pulled the vial out of his shirt, "to open the gate. It senses another person who didn’t provide blood. You’ll have to go back."
Danny looked confused. “Wait, so I can’t come up?”
“I’m sorry.” Gil was smiling.
“Can you give me your blood?”
Gil laughed. “I’ve been trying to get out of here for hundreds of years. I don’t have any to give.”
Danny was further down the mountain now, nearing the gate. Rage filled him and he remembered, in the side pocket of his cargo pants, he had put a makeshift slingshot before he set out in the wood. He pulled it out and scrambled his hands over the ground until he found a decently sized rock. Gil had turned around, walking back up the mountain. While falling ever further, Danny aimed the slingshot and hit Gil in the back of his head.
Gil stumbled, rubbing his hand on the back of his head. He fell back and tripped over a large root sticking out of the ground, he fell and fell until he was even closer to the gate than Danny. Danny summoned all of his remaining strength and kicked Gil in the chest and though the gate, grabbing him by the shirt and retrieving the vial as he did. Danny didn’t wait to see what happened to Gil, instead he ran back up the mountain and reached the peak. He turned around to view the landscape below him and he woke back up in the room, his mother lightly sleeping in the chair next to his bed.
Danny was hyperventilating, still expecting Gil to walk through the door. Instead, Dr. Viro came back in, smiling genially. “Up are we, Danny?”
Danny did not led his guard down. He spied the doctor’s shoes to make sure they weren’t waterlogged boots. He tensed up as the doctor again listened to his chest.
“Are you ok? Your heart rate is kind of fast.”
Danny pulled back. The doctor moved the stethoscope to Danny’s back.
“Lungs sound good. I’m going to listen to your chest one more time. Okay?”
Danny nodded. The doctor stuck his hand into an inside pocket of Danny’s dressing gown and retrieved the vial. He pushed Danny into he bed, continuing to push him until he disappeared.
Danny fell onto the ground of a blank, grey room with no noise and no depth.
“Gil! What did you do?”
Danny stood up and wandered, but The room seemed limitless. He started to cry. I just want to go back home. He heard something that sounded close-by and yet far. He was afraid to listen more closely, lest it be another group of people begging for his help. But when he listened, he heard Gil’s voice, altered to sound like Danny, talking to his mother.
“I’m swell, ma,” Gil said.
Danny yelled as loudly as he could, hoping to get his mother’s attention, but no noise came out.
On the other side, Gil settled into the bed and accepted a kiss from Danny’s mother.
Danny continued his unheard scream.