Kraven kills Conners
Peter goes on a warpath to find Kraven
Peter catches up to Kraven
Symbiote Spider-Man Vs. Kraven
Peter brutalises Kraven and before he’s about to kill him he’s interrupted by Miles who was secretly following his position
Miles has told Peter that while he was searching for Kraven that Harry just died
Distracted by the news, Kraven is able to use the moment to escape, enraging Peter
Wrapped up in anger and guilt at not being able to say goodbye and having everyone he knows and loves either die or “betray him” he goes ballistic and attacks Miles
Miles Vs. Symbiote Spider-Man
As the fight goes on your Venom attacks start to get less and less effective to the point where the symbiote has nullified its effects. Peter in all his rage succumbs to the symbiote, becomes Venom and severely injures Miles
Miles is down for the count but before Venom kills him, something suddenly changes and Venom leaves. gurgling a a barley audible response
- “Stay outta my way”
For the next couple of days as Miles recuperates, he focuses on what what he heard, thinking that there somewhere inside that Monster is his best friend
A series of news reports inside over the next days entail that a monster has been attacking criminals and villains but not killing them suggesting that Peter is still there. This gives credence to Miles theory that Peter can be saved
Miles visits the Raft to speak to Doc Ock on how to stop Venom
Phase 1
Miles breaks Electro out of the Raft and they escape on the condition that he helps him take down Venom
Miles enlists the help of Prowler, Black Cat, Wraith, Taskmaster to fight Venom
Miles - Wants to save his mentor and surrogate older brother and do what Peter did for him when his dad died
Black Cat - Peter is her former lover and he never gave up on her she’s trying to do right by him in his time of need
Wraith - The same as Black Cat but from coming as a friend
Prowler - He’s Miles’ Uncle, of course he won’t let him do it alone
Taskmaster - Wants a challenge
Electro – Will have small subplot about undergoing rehabilitation and wanting to get rid of his powers so that he can live a normal life and take care of this daughter
Phase 2
Venom is hunting down Spidey Villains so not only do the villains have incentive working with Miles they also act as bait to lead him to a remote location where they can execute their final plan
Boss Fight
Venom Vs. Wraith and Taskmaster (Stage 1)
Venom Vs. Black Cat and Prowler (Stage 2)
In these fights you play as Venom who has to fight two of them at time like with the Sinister Six
Wraith and Black are there to act as psychological warfare (having a personal connection to Peter) while Taksmaster and Prowler’s advanced tech weaken the Venom symbiote over time
Still Venom beats them and before he kills them, Miles shows up and and a chase commences
Phase 3
You play as Miles with Venom chasing after you as you lead him to a remote location far away from New York
Miles and Electro Vs. Venom
You play as Miles fighting against Venom with Electro providing support (providing Miles with full bar Venom energy instantly)
The fight ends with a Electro supercharging Miles’, which kills Electro in in the process. Venom having taken too much damage is distracted as Miles unleashes his Super Duper Mega Venom Blast that destroys Venom, leaving just Symbiote Spider-Man.
Miles passes out from the exhaustion
Phase 4
Spider-Man Vs. Symbiote Spider-Man
We’re inside Peter’s head as he fights back for control over his body and mind in the classic red & blue suit against the symbiote Spider-Man
Think of it as a Scarecrow boss fight from Arkham that acts as a trip down memory lane with the symbiote taunting Peter, saying that he needs it
Peter finds the strength to rip the symbiote off his body as it scrambles to find a host, dying before it can

Today we are continuing the discussion we started last week about Wooyoung!
We've discussed our many confusions about this moment in the story where the boys finally lose the Cromer, and now we will work to make meaning through some sacred practices! Today, we're doing a sacred reading practice, which is where we attempt to make find new meaning through reading a single line very deeply.

03: Sacred Reading Practice

GD: The line is 4, which I'm interpreting as:

Tired of being chased and running away, we fell asleep immediately, and in the meantime, the girl healed my ankle.

But there are arguably two clauses in that sentence. We could just look at the second one "in the meantime, the girl healed my ankle."
BobbyJ: Not arguably even. There just are two clauses
GD: Lol yes
BobbyJ: Okay. Well. I'm down for whichever
GD: I think let's just do the second clause because it's the part that is mostly on 4. Alright, so, what's happening at a narrative level?
BobbyJ: Ateez have just escaped the guardians for the second time but lost the Cromer in the process because they chose to save Wooyoung. Though that might be conjecture on my part. So just--they escaped but lost the cromer
GD: Yeah, I have so many questions, but there are no answers. So the next step
BobbyJ: Actually it's not even that they escaped
GD: Right--they just left after getting the thing they wanted
BobbyJ: The guardians leave and then the Grimes girl opens up her secret cave entrance to let them in. Is it a cave actually?. . . Yes. A cave in the forest
GD: That's what it suggests. So, what's happening at an allegorical level? What does this remind you of in other stories, other parts of ateez lore, etc.
This is only mildly relevant, but it is what I immediately thought of: my writer friend and I often joke about how someone in our stories always hurts their ankle in third act
BobbyJ: The Grimes girl reminds me a bit of Primrose Everdeen. As like an archetype
GD: Oh! I agree
BobbyJ: The young innocent and trusting girl. I want to talk about how she trusts them immediately
GD: I have two differing thoughts/questions on that, actually. Does she trust them because she too recognizes their faces? Or is it more of an intuit/innocence thing?
BobbyJ: I was just thinking about that--does she recognize them? And my question is, do the people in strictland know what Halateez look like? They wear masks and hats. Like, she never says "wow y'all look just like the Black Pirates.” Not just because she can't. But I'm not sure that Halateez's faces are widely known
GD: Also, thinking ahead, the brother seems to explain a lot of things to Hwa, and he wouldn't need to do that if they assumed they were the Black Pirates
BobbyJ: Right. It's the uniform that is recognizable
GD: Have you read a Christmas Carol?
BobbyJ: Ages ago, but yes
GD: You know the ghost of Christmas present? How he has the two children underneath his robe that are for like want and ignorance? The grimes kids sort of remind me of that, but with like innocence and faith. The opposite side of humanity
BobbyJ: Wow I have no memory of that at all. But, yes. They seem to represent the goodness that is trying to survive
GD: I taught Christmas Carol to 7th graders so my knowledge of it runs bone deep
BobbyJ: I only taught it for one year before I was like "how about we don't?"
GD: LOL. 7th graders do not understand or appreciate it at all
It is, on the other hand, one of my favorite stories of all time, so I do listen to it every year
Anyways, every thing in the story is metaphorical, basically, since it's a parable. And it makes me think about some of the thoughts I've been having as we read this story. Like, the story itself is very streamlined, which you can argue is because they have to fit it into these short diaries
but, I guess I would argue that they're also relying on a shared understanding and metaphor to make the story work despite the streamlining of it. Which is why we are able to so easily connect with it and pull a lot of different meanings. And I do mean streamlined in that they leave a lot of things out and skip over a lot of parts--not that it's simple.
BobbyJ: But back to the original question--I do think that it is innocence that leads the girl to open her home to them. She probably saw that they were being chased by the guardians and likely knows what it's like to run for her life. She's been taken by them at least once before. I still think it's interesting that they chose to take her voice rather than recondition her.
GD: I agree on the innocence, and as an aside, I feel like the girl without a voice is an archetype as well? Like it represents something on a deeper level, and if you think about the story as a metaphor instead of a traditional hero’s journey, the only correct choice was to have an innocent girl with no voice.
I sort of have an interest in the phrase "in the mean time" and the word "heal.” We talked a bit about what does it mean that she healed it so quickly, and I guess looking at those words now, it reminds me of the saying "time heals all wounds"
BobbyJ: I interpret it more as she "treated" his ankle with some herbs or something.
GD: I also interpret it that way
BobbyJ: But it also isn't clear how long they spend in the cave
GD: Gave him some ice or something
BobbyJ: Where would she get ice?
GD: The magic fridge she keeps in the cave
BobbyJ: I can't get over that they just immediately fell asleep. I don't care how tired I was, I would be freaking out. But that makes them also seem very innocent and trusting. Not that they would need to be wary about a young boy and girl.
GD: This is what I mean when I say streamlined. We literally skip over any normal human behavior, and have to interpret their actions based on metaphor for what it tells us about them
They should, absolutely, be demanding answers and losing their god damn mind. But they don't
And I think that's a little similar to what the writers do in the intro when they first arrive? They have the android guardians come immediately so we miss the story beat of the characters interacting and freaking out about what just happened. Normal story beats being streamlined by the use of metaphor so that the story is intuited instead of told
BobbyJ: Like, because we've been armed with so much character knowledge, we're left to interpret or supply all character-based actions and interactions ourselves.
Quick note--I've been editing on the side and last week you mentioned that Strictland might have advanced medicine that can insta-heal. So I'm bringing that back to the table
GD: Yes, I do think that's a reasonable interpretation for how Woo was healed in the meantime
I feel like people are often frustrated by the lack of clear answers in the diaries about some story things--and I guess my whole point today is that I think that's by design. The writers could have easily spelled it out if they wanted to, but being told things clearly doesn't necessarily make for an engaging story.
BobbyJ: Here's what I know about kpop fans (and people in general): they don't like uncertainties. It's why we're so obsessed with numbers. How do we know who's the best if we don't know how many albums they sold or streams they've earned?
GD: The world is an uncertain place--people want answers. Answers often do not exist
BobbyJ: Yes, it's understandable. But I'm not interested in that energy applied to art
GD: I think that's why the word heal is interesting to me. Regardless of what she did or how she did it, the important thing is that this young girl with no voice still made a difference with the skills that she does have, and she has arguably set off a series of events that will lead to the change of the whole world. Because she was kind.
What would've happened if she'd left them out there? Would they have survived? Would they have figured out what was going on? Who knows, you know? The character itself represents the power that a childlike innocence and faith can have against the evils of the world, so who cares if she used an ice pack or actual magic?
BobbyJ: Right. Kindness and hospitality are very overlooked qualities. And it's not just Ateez that she has helped along the way. She and her brother become wrapped up in the story as well and join in on the journey. It leads to Left Eye and the healing he experiences thanks to Yunho
Given what they represent, it makes their end all the more tragic.
GD: But sort of fitting...
It reminds me a little of the ending of the Hunger Games series? Innocence and kindness are values that get lost when evil takes over, and it is sad. We should be sad about that--and that's why you can't ever let evil win long term. It's why everyone has to keep fighting. No one should be silent and let it happen.
BobbyJ: I think too that choosing to do what's good and right doesn't guarantee you protection from evil. I think it's also telling that their deaths (or whatever happens to them actually?) are senseless? Like they don't lead to any grand conclusion. They are just more casualties of the war and of Z's greed or lust for power or whatever his deal is.
GD: Death is often senseless.
BobbyJ: It's dissatisfying on a narrative level, but still important
GD: I read The Inheritance Games recently, and I will probably write a post about this for booktiny, but there's a line from one of the characters about how "moral choices depend solely on the outcome of an action"
And he was talking about how when he's giving to charity, the impact he can make with his money tells him the morality of the giving. So, giving to a single homeless person wouldn't be as moral as giving to a town. And I don't think he was right, but it reminds me of some of the things at play here. A question of scales maybe? Like, if you give to a town, the homeless person there could still die, but maybe someone else wouldn't? Or you could give to the homeless person directly in the town and make sure he survives, but not at all change the suffering level of the rest of the town
BobbyJ: That's a millionaire question
GD: They are in fact millionaires in the book, and that's basically exactly what the main character tells him
Anyways, I don't have any meaning to pull from that and what happens to the Grimes/Left Eye. But I guess both things remind me of the fact that senseless and tragic things happen regardless of what you do, the question is how do you live with yourself and how do you keep going
BobbyJ: We can only do what we each are capable of. There's no amount of money I could give to a town that would make any sort of impact. But I could give $50 to a homeless person for them to eat for a few days. Am I less moral than a millionaire because of the size of my contribution?
But I think that connects to GG because she did what she could with what she had. Sure she just provided shelter for some boys but that relatively small gesture, like you said, created a wave of change
GD: Make a wave. I'm reminded of The Giver a bit too?
BobbyJ: You mean Jonas really only saved Gabriel? Or rather--on the surface he just saves this one child, but it had greater impact than that
GD: Sort of? I guess I'm thinking.. if you ignore the sequels, the end of the book was open to interpretation. And I did interpret it as Jonas and Gabriel dying. So, if you interpret it that way, then they didn't even really save themselves or make that change. But, they did release the memories hoping that the memories would cause the town to wake up one day, which we don't actually see. So it's like, we did this thing that may or may not have an impact because we couldn't sit by and do nothing.
I guess I'm saying something like, evil doesn't win when good people die senseless deaths--evil wins when everyone gives up.
BobbyJ: Mmmm, yes. I'm also thinking of our discussion two weeks about choice. You can only choose the sort of person you will be, not the outcomes of your choices
GD: Yeah, and I think it's just important to show what characters do when senselessly tragic things happen. Are they defeated? Or do they keep going? So story wise, the deaths aren't senseless at all, and they do represent the very real chaos and unfairness inherent in many aspects of life
BobbyJ: Yunho is really a perfect example of this. We don't get to see any of the fallout of his brother's second death, but we know he doesn't give up but he keeps fighting the fight that is arguably the reason his brother died
GD: Oh my god, I realized we still have 2 more steps to our reading practice. Any other thoughts about allegory before we talk about our own lives?
BobbyJ: I don't think so
GD: Okay, then what does this remind you of in your own life?
For me specifically, I keep noting and coming back to the words "in the meantime", and I guess it is making me think about what I'm doing with my "meantime" if that makes sense?
BobbyJ: Right--like it feels like I spend a lot of time waiting for things to happen. But that period of waiting doesn't need to be a stagnant time for me, you know?
GD: My "what is the text inviting you to do?" is related to this. Anything else it reminds you of in your own life before we go to that?
BobbyJ: I think this idea that she did what she could with what she had. It often feels like I could be so much more [fill in the blank] if I could have/be/do this thing.
GD: Yeah, I agree completely. I could be the person I want to be only if [whatever]
BobbyJ: I don't know if this is an internet comparison thing or if it's my inability to measure up to my own standards. But I appreciate that GG didn't have a grand house, but she still offered her humble little cave
GD: We've talked about this before, but studies show that comparison is one of the most natural human things we do. Like even if we don't want to compare ourselves to others, our brains do it without conscious thought. The internet just gives us just more people to compare ourselves with
You're a teacher, and I was a teacher, and I'm thinking about what it was like to be a new teacher. IDK how it went for you, but I was given nothing and had to really figure it out for myself
BobbyJ: Same
GD: Looking back, I feel it would've been nice for someone to give me access to their cave, you know? Even if the cave was humble--it would've been nice
BobbyJ: Everyone told me that year that I did a great job, but I remember telling my mentor teacher (that I rarely spoke to bc she was super busy) that I felt bad for the kids that year because I knew I wasn't doing the best I was really capable of
I wish that I'd had a more developed mentor relationship with that teacher but it just wasn't a priority. And it's something that's very important to me even today where I feel pretty settled into my role. So, I've told my principal and my department chair that if they hire someone new to teaching, I'd be happy to partner with them because I feel like having someone you can just connect with on a regular basis who is invested in your success can really make or break your early teaching career
GD: I felt this way about the students too...
Like I had a list of students that I gave to my principle when I quit and said "all of these kids are kids that I meet with every week to check on. I go to their teachers and ask about their grades, and I talk to the kids in the halls before or after school. Someone has to do that when I go."
Relationships, and feeling like someone is on your side, are just so vitally important
BobbyJ: Yes. Building relationships with the kids is a big deal at my school. Which since I'm at a mid-sized private school is decidedly easier than most public schools. I have 93 students, which is still a lot to get to know, but I also have the advantage of having kids with parents who really care. So it's not like I'm the only adult in their lives who's trying to keep them afloat.
GD: Yeah, this was when I was 504 coordinator at a public school, so genuinely kids who would and probably did fall through the cracks when I left, which I felt soooo guilty about and still do
BobbyJ: But that's not and shouldn't be your responsibility. Which I know you know
GD: Logic and feelings rarely match up, unfortunately
BobbyJ: But the teaching profession really comes with a lot of guilt built in because we deal with children
GD: Teaching in public school, I had 140 students. As a 504 coordinator, I had the whole school
Anyways, if we get side tracked by the failing education system, we will never finish
BobbyJ: Seriously
GD: So, as far as what it's inviting me to do, it is to use my meantime more thoughtfully
My author friend is currently working on a book where the theme is about growth, and we had a 3 hour long conversation about what it means to grow and whether or not we had a moral choice to grow, and I argued that we didn't. And I maintain that change is constant, but growth is a capitalist trick/trap. But with the same breath, I'd say that I am often frustrated with the ways in which I fail to use my own meantime 'well'
Perhaps on the day, 'well' means productively, and perhaps some days it means something similar to healing, and maybe it could also mean something akin to what GG does: helping others, making a difference, etc. So I want to be more cognizant of how I'm using my meantime instead of just letting it pass me by and being frustrated when I get into bed at night thinking about where my day went
BobbyJ: I guess I would argue it depends on your definition of growth, but I disagree that growth is a capitalist trap/trick. There's a person that I want to be, and I don't believe the choices I make to become that person are related to capitalism at all. But if you're saying growth as in increased productivity--which I think is what you mean?--then yes. Capitalism all the way down. The idea that I MUST spend all my minutes productively is nonsense. I'm not a machine
GD: I suppose my real thought is something more like capitalism has invaded our vocabulary in such a way that it is hard to remove the capitalist baggage I associate with the word growth.
BobbyJ: Interesting. The concept of growth is entirely divorced from capitalism in my mind
GD: Perhaps this is why I'm so anti-capitalist. It's ruined me.
BobbyJ: Like I automatically think mental/emotional/spiritual
GD: I call that enlightenment and fulfillment, not growth, but of course it is a type of growth
BobbyJ: You need the specificity to create distance
GD: When I hear growth, I think "more" and "better" and "bigger"
BobbyJ: Huh.
GD: I grew up in a very capitalistic environment, including going to law school, and am really tapped into the hustle culture (like there is no one more likely to monetize a hobby than me) so I think it's just a product of my environment
BobbyJ: There is no one less likely to hustle than me
GD: Even on reddit--I could've just had a nice time discussing ateez, but I turned my hobby into a job (even if it is one I don't get paid for). I took us diving deep into these lore books and decided we should make it into content. I just cannot help myself
BobbyJ: Would bible study be as fulfilling for you if it never left our chat?
GD: I genuinely have no idea. I think it would probably maintain it's fulfillingness, but I think it would lose something else. I don't know what that something else is? We know most people aren't interested in this, but there is something about sharing it that feels Important in the big scheme of things
BobbyJ: I feel you're being too critical of yourself. There's a difference between trying to monetize something and simply wanting to share something with others who might appreciate it.
And I think it goes back to choosing to be the person you want to be? You find the diaries interesting and important and why wouldn't you want to share that?
GD: I think this is where my critique of capitalism comes from though
BobbyJ: That it makes things seem capitalist when they aren't?
GD: I am more likely than anyone to try to monetize things I enjoy, which I think is not so much my own capitalism as much as this feeling in my soul that finds it deeply frustrating that the things that make life worth living for me are not things that I can get paid to do. I think it's me being frustrated at having to play a game I don't want to play. If I knew of a way to monetize our bible studies, believe me, I'd be doing it.
BobbyJ: Podcast. It's right there
GD: The obvious answer is a podcast with ads, but the amount of things I'd need to learn compared to the very little money we would make is the only reason I haven't forced you into it
BobbyJ: Funny considering it's always been my idea
GD: I have made the very capitalist determination that I need to wait for you to learn all the things that need to be learned
BobbyJ: Well, my fatal flaw is inaction, so you will be waiting a good long while.
GD: I mean, it's entirely possible that I will decide enough is enough and this has to bring me some income, but for now, I can wait
BobbyJ: I can't wait to be earning $3 a month from bible study
GD: Incredible you think we'll get 3 whole dollars a month
BobbyJ: I dream big.
Okay, so. . . can I be honest and say that this passage is not inviting me to do anything at all?
GD: Yes
BobbyJ: And I can't say whether it's the passage itself just not fully resonating with me or if it's more where I am in my life right now
GD: We did shorten the passage to a relatively small sentence, but just in general, I think it's okay to be fine with examining something and then putting it back down without letting it really touch you
BobbyJ: I do think that's true. But I'm also in this weird and awkward place where I know something bad is on the horizon and I'm forced to just wait for it to happen without knowing when that might be. So, I'm in a meantime. And during this meantime, intentional growth is not for me.
GD: There is something to be said for not examining our meantime to closely too. We've certainly talked in bible study about living in the present and being grateful for small moments

04: A Closing Hymn

BobbyJ: What is our song for Wooyoung? Or for GG?
GD: Hmmm. This one feels hard to me. Have we used Better before?
BobbyJ: We have not.
Can I make an odd suggestion? Just go right off book
GD: Yes
BobbyJ: I would like to consider dedicating Eden's 'Little Bird' to GG
GD: Well in this household we love Eden. Let me look it up real quick. Remind myself of it
BobbyJ: It's very melancholy but a bit hopeful?
GD: Yes, I like it. So today's bible study song is Eden's Little Bird for GG?
BobbyJ: Yes, if you approve. (A quick note on the lyrics.)
GD: I love that bit about each translator doing it differently, which is why I would like KQ to give me all of their official translations for each song please.
I approve.

05: Closing Rosary

BobbyJ: I think my prayer for Wooyoung is that he will always be surrounded by as much love as he gives
GD: We see this in real life too--his love attracts love. Everyone loves Wooyoung, and I think it's because he gives his love so freely once he's decided you're one of his
BobbyJ: I have a rosary thought--are we ready to close?
GD: Yes
BobbyJ: Never alone
GD: Wooyoung
BobbyJ: Be the light
GD: Halazia
BobbyJ: Well done everybody
GD: High fives all around.
Nice work on the rosary. My brain has stopped braining.
BobbyJ: Wooyoung is an inspiration to us all
------
And that's it for our discussion on Wooyoung! Next week we will be back with the start of Seonghwa's page. Let us know what you thought of Wooyoung's section and whether you had any different thoughts on the quote we looked at today!

Be careful getting any NEW Firefox add-ons (extensions) when there is a long holiday weekend in the USA.
I've noticed a recent influx of possible scam extensions on Mozilla's Add-Ons site, also known as AMO (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/).
It's unlikely that Mozilla will do anything about these bad extensions for at least several days because Mozilla is primarily located in the USA, and their entire staff is likely taking a long weekend (the USA observes Memorial Day on Monday).
From what I can tell, Mozilla does not have anyone performing any content moderation or security audits on weekends/holidays (not a great idea, IMO, but they didn't ask my opinion).
My recommendation is to always go through each line of the source code of extensions if you know how to read code. If you don't know how, ask a friend. If you don't have friends that can read code, find geekier friends. If you can't find geekier friends, only install extensions with the "Recommended" badge, and avoid installing non-Recommended extensions just before a weekend or USA holidays.

I'm looking to build a gaming/work PC (graphic design/rendering). I want it to be mid-high end but definitely not insane or top-of-the-line. I know a little about GPU's but nothing about CPU's, RAM, motherboards etc.
Was first looking to build this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dsZgjeCr4E), but I was wondering if this is overkill or if there's anything better that can be switched around. From this post, I would like to keep the NZXT case and maybe the liquid cooler, but the Kraken X53 instead of Z53 because my computer is under the desk and I don't care for the screen. Have also thought of doing one of the pre- built NZXT player two's but was scared by the limited processing power.
I play all kinds of games, from Tarkov, mw2, cyberpunk, high-end shooters, etc, to more memory/CPU-demanding strategy games that run slow sometimes. My current PC is a prebuilt Omen with a 1070 and i7-7700, with 16 gigs of ram so not incredible. It's definitely been struggling with newer games and even some older, and I've been looking to upgrade for a while.
Right off the bat, I would like something with good and powerful (enough) processing power and 32 gigs of ram. The linked video utilized a 4070 ti which wasn't originally in my plan. Originally I was going to do a 3070 and just move to something that would be a comfortable and reasonably affordable upgrade from my museum piece 1070, but I wouldn't mind something from there to the 4070 ti but I'm not willing to go past that. As I mentioned preferably liquid-cooled (unless you think there's something better for this). I only have average 1080p monitors but might upgrade eventually if that matters.
I have 2.5k USD on hand but definitely don't want to spend all of it, preferably $1500-2000
Final side note for the appearance, I would prefer stealthy with only a touch of RGB if any.

I've been questioning this situation for a about 2 months now and i really havent gotten a valid answer or something that made me realize anything, so im asking reddit.
Is it normal to love someone you could never be with? Like actually be in love with them? Or you're not in love? Or its wrong to be in love with someone you dont want to be with? I dont understand. Like you truly love and care about the other person but you could never be in a relationship with them because of how much they hurt you.
Basically this happened to me. I was talking to a guy and everything was going very well and we both liked each other but he decided to ghost me because he believed a rumour, not a horrible rumour and i dont know what else. I tried to reach out, i begged him for months but he never showed up. I showed him that i care and i love him but i never got an actual response back. About 8 weeks ago i tried to reach out for the last time and he replied with ok and that's when i finally gave up. I was so done. The guy that i loved even though i knew him for a month did this for no reason. I was devastated i couldn't eat i couldn't sleep i almost failed school I didn't have any motivation but i got back to my feet and i got better. I started working on myself going to the gym eating healthy and working on my social interactions as well as putting more effort to my appearance. I still have some issues from past mental health problems but im doing better than i ever was. After a month and half of no contact his friends told me that he said he's sorry and he regrets everything and it makes me question everything. Thing is i know they're not lying because that's what they always do when he wants me to know about something. Im very close with his friends for like years that's why and he's very shy so he just tells them to give me a hint.
Am i the bad guy for not wanting to be back with him after all the hell be put me through? I still love him but if he asked me out i would say no because i know he's not good for me. Lately ive been thinking about him alot though even though i don't want. I want to go back to my self care cycle but my brain keeps wrapping around the memories we have and the fact that he finally realized my worth. The girl who chased him, begged him, made time for him, was head over heels for him is now gone. I feel like im the asshole because i keep rejecting him to his friends for example they say he's interested and i reply "im not". I feel like im too harsh but damn, i really loved him and i still do but i could never do something romantic with him or hang out with him because the feeling is still there but i know I'll get my feelings hurt again. Last time we hung out with friends he treated me like shit and tried to get my attention by making fun of me which made me feel horrible and that's another reason why I could never be in a relationship with him, but for some reason the feeling is still there and i dont know why.
I had to force myself to lose feelings for my own good and peace of mind but sometimes i think the feeling is still there, but not the same. I dont get butterflies anymore i just feel like i want to throw up. My past relationships didn't feel like that and im so confused why. Why am i so in love with the guy that hurt my feelings and made me feel shit about myself?

Both of us. But even during my most desperate and alone time this far in my life I still thought of you and when I was allowed to have a brief time to gather some things before we lost the unit we kept our remaining possessions and memories I didn't just think of myself ,and get as much of my stuff as I could and fk it . We weren't communicating at that time you couldn't /didn't want to figure out with me what or how to go about keeping that locker.You were making big moves improving urself definitely not in a relationship with anyone else as u had literally ditched me after I questioned why you were using incognito on my phone the night before .. and choosing to leave me in freezing car so you could not spend the night with Ty at Kay's smoking dope and fucking two times in two weeks before playing me for stupid and lying to me instead of being honest when i confronted you both . Of course u weren't cheating on me as you'd done oh two three times before in our first round of relationship. Anyway who cares long past now . It's just you I understand that now ik who you are admit it or not we both know ik and it's ok just be happy . I was sayn I did think of you and grabbed some things I thought may be stuff I'd like to not lose. I was allowed one bin and the yellow ice can we jacked that one snowy night. Being broke and unable to earn income during that period I had no money to get storage elsewhere however was able to put the few things at a safe place til I was able to secure financial means to get a new locker in the future . I'm sure you could GAF bout any of it as ur new life took precident over all else . But I being the idiot who you strung along and cared for you in one of your most uncertain yet self inflicted difficult times of ur life and was shown gratitude in the form of distancing and rejection and isolation then finally abandoned in a snowstorm after a argument,totally forsaking the agreement we both made about what each would do in event of such argument opting to drive away and never come back to me. Totally didn't fade me fooo seen it coming .. I can read u like a book . IG where I'm going with this is even tho you had zero fks for me and expected me to just handle shit make it easy as possible for you as I struggled to stay warm fed clean ,I couldn't do that not cuz I didn't want to but literally couldn't . I don't know if u'll ever reach out to me ,be able to face me or GAF bout anything besides living ur best life moment to moment thrill to thrill new relationship to next one free and aloof free to love anyone whenever u want . But if u actually did what u said u were doing and growing and improving urself u should have financial stability if not by now I'm sure shortly . Those things are safe and secure. Let me know so we can make a plan and I can make arrangements to go get everything organized and shit . Anyways this phone is junk but you know my name..hope you're happy and doing well . Deuces nigga !!!As you say..

So recently I had to find out that my GF is still friends with her EX and plays games with them and a few others. They way I had to find out was being in a game lobby with them. (Backstory about gaming; we hadn't bonded for a while since my GF was away traveling so I thought we would spend some good old quality time together playing a game we both enjoy. At first I assumed it was pure luck that someone had the same name as her ex, but after playing a couple matches (The game is irrelevant) I confronted my GF to ask. Low and behold it was her EX. To find out that way without any fair warning or being told she started being all buddy buddy with her ex again was kinda a stab in the back. She made excuses that they rarely even talk it's just through mutual friends. So asked something along the lines of "Is she that important to you that you'd want to play games with her and not even let me know you started talking again?" I asked some friends if they'd ever be friends or have communication with an EX and they simply said "No, an EX is an EX for a reason. It didn't work out."
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I've had a conversation with her before about her EX saying how I wouldn't be okay with them speaking again. The reason why I'm so adamant about it is because my GF claims it wasn't a good relationship and it ended badly. In the beginning of our relationship (we are going 5+ years now to date), she would always bring up her ex, compare me, or just have lingering issues from that relationship which was well over a year or two when I first met her.Since it did end badly and they supposedly didn't get any closure I was more than happy to see my GF speak with her one last more to get the closure she needed. Maybe it was for mental heath reasons or just to simply close off the chapter so even though I myself don't care to get closure from the people who hurt me I thought it would at least help her.
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The kicker is, going back to the present day, after telling her my boundary that I don't want her crossing (having any type of relationship with an EX again) it kind of just ended at that and everything went back to the way it was. I completed my work week and it was time for the weekend to commence. I was spending memorial day weekend with family and I assumed she was hanging out with one of her childhood friends whom I have met (amongst others) and was very kind to me.
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The actual kicker is.... I'm rambling because I'm crying as I write this (please don't sympathize with me and just tell me if I'm being a stupid or unfair or whatever), but I found out she hung out physically and bonded more or less with her EX along with a few other friends. I honestly thought she would respect what makes me uncomfortable. It hasn't even been a full week since I brought up how upset it made me that she was close again with her ex better yet finding out through a game. I thought if those other friends of hers were good people they would respect the boundary of hanging out with my GF without including her EX and they can hangout with her EX without my GF there.
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I don't know if my request is unfair or not and I know some people are capable of being friends with their EX which obviously people can do what they want with their lives. My GF can do what she wants too, I was just hoping for respect on the one thing I ask of her. Not sure if being in an LDR would change the whole opinion of my rant, but IDK what to do. It's not the first time I've had my concerns.
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TLDR; My GF is still in contact/friends with her EX through mutuals. I found out in a gaming lobby that we were playing with her EX. I voiced my boundary that I wish she would not cross (Being close/friends with an EX), but just found out today she hung out physically with her EX and a few other friends despite my known discomfort about it. IDK what to do. :(
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***EDITS were spacing out the entire thing to it's easier to read***

It had to be there somewhere. I refused to be believe that the authors of this damned thing hadn't included any cypher, master code, or cryptogram of any kind. It still didn't make any sort of sense at all; why go to all the trouble to write the cursed thing and not bury the solution to unlocking its secrets somewhere in its pages?
Shoving my glasses to my forehead and pinching the bridge of my nose in equal measures of exhaustion and resignation, I rocked back in my chair, away from the pile of scanned pages before me. I knew the ceiling wouldn't hold the answers I sought, but I searched for them there anyway. Dr. Van Gennep would drop me for sure if I didn't come up with something soon; funding my project and research had already cost him and the department a small fortune over the last four years. Granted, the fact that I'd actually found the thing right where I said it would be had bought me considerable favor among the assorted faculty of the school's Archeology department, but that was almost two years ago now, and I'd produced a whopping fuck-all since then. The way I saw it, I had another 6 months, tops, to make good on my proposals before the "We're sorry to inform you" emails started filling my inbox.
As the more discerning among you might have surmised, I was a graduate student late in my funded research terms at that time. The tagalong son of a pair of prolific treasure hunters and grave robbers, I'd spent my youth being packed up and dragged along on my parents' oft misbegotten adventures. Turkey, Tunisia, Madagascar, Thailand; there wasn't an inch of sacred earth those two wouldn't plunder if given half a chance. I missed them tremendously. It was all I could do for their memories to dedicate my life's work to something they'd be proud of.
Of course, any success I'd enjoy to that point had been entirely thanks to them. If not for all our 'special vacations', I'd never have made it half as far as I had. Hell, the only reason I was here now was because the 'Cambodian temple of the dead' that I'd recovered this profane tome from in the first place was actually a dusty shelf in the basement of our old house. Dr. Van Gennup didn't need to know that though. Nor did the faculty. As far as they were concerned, I was a first rate researcher who had enjoyed a highly productive field excursion, on the university's dime, and made the find of a lifetime. In reality, I'd spent a semester's funding stipend earning a penicillin-resistant strain of chlamydia on a beach you've never heard of.
It didn't rightly have a name, so to speak, but my parents always just called it "The Book". Heavy, several hundred years old, and bound in a repulsive brown material of dubious origins, my parent's had bought the thing for a handful of pennies from a street peddler in Marrakesh the year before I was born. Having failed to fence the thing to their usual customers repeatedly, eventually they just stuffed the thing on a shelf and forgot about it entirely. Valuable or not, Pa always insisted it's worth was beyond measure to the right person. The right person ended up being his own orphaned son, and 'beyond measure' turned out to be a whopping 5 years of doctoral funding to Yale's Archaeology department.
I was done for the day. I'd looked at the scans for hours, again, tonight. The actual volume sat in the rare items collection of the faculty library, just up the street; as the dubiously rightful owner of the volume, I was welcome to access it whenever I wanted, but it was kept in better conditions than I could manage there. Besides, this thing smelled horrendous, and I didn't want it around.
I stripped down and hopped in the shower, failing to make good on my intention to stop thinking about the scrambled scrawling of the mad author who'd frustrated me for months. As the faculty's resident occultist, Van Gennep had helped nudge me along with the translation of anything I hadn't managed myself, but his aid continually failed to reveal anything of substance on the velum pages. That it was an allegorical text was obvious; the tale of a timeless consciousness doomed to visit depraved predations on the souls of those who eagerly embraced their own intentional destructions, written as an account from the being's point of view. The missing piece of the puzzle was, irritatingly, evidence of what drew the ire of the entity in question. The origin of The Book, some 800 years old, was impossible to determine; if I could just figure out what cardinal sin the thing was drawn to, then I might be able to confidently trace it's origins or identify its author; if it went for gluttons, I'd look at places wracked by famine in that period. If it went for blasphemy, then areas with documented religious turmoil would be candidates. Still, nothing sprung from the pages.
Exasperated, dejected, and worn out entirely, I trotted off to bed after lazily toweling off. I knew sleep would elude me entirely unless I redirected my frustrations toward something irrefutably more interesting which, as you'd be correct in guessing, meant a date with the tissues and baby oil on my nightstand. Pornhub never left much to the imagination, or forced me to decode impossible puzzles to give me what I wanted. Unlike a certain centuries-old exercise in frugality, the ol' Hub always bared its secrets to me. Tonight's prize was "Blonde Cutie Cums in the Library". A favorite of mine, both the video and the girl never failed to disappoint. 4 minutes of heavenly stroking later while the busty coed rubbed herself into oblivion, I began to urgently reach for the tissues on my nightstand. I slapped around desperately with the hand not flagellating my abused cock while the certainty that I wasn't going to find them in time built; this would have to be a free range eruption. Eyes screwed tightly shut while the wet ministrations and stifled moans continued to play from my laptop beside me, I covered myself from navel to chest in the hot mess I'd produced. My hand dropped limply to my side as my dick did the same back between my legs. I slammed the spacebar to pause the video, suddenly revolted at the idea of busting a nut in the library.
Laying for long, quiet minutes like that, I was entirely at ease and blessedly relaxed for a change. Fearing I'd fall asleep with my own cum all over me, I grabbed the shirt occupying the other side of the bed and lazily scrubbed it off my tummy and out of my chest hair. I flung the thing into the corner of the room, flicked the light off, closed the lid of the laptop, and let myself drift off into the sweet nothingness of my slumber.
"Oh god yes".
My eyes flew open and my heart skipped a beat as my body jerked itself awake in terror.
"Fuck, that's so good" the voice said again, breathy and quiet. The fans of my laptop hummed next to me. "I'm gonna cum soon".
Relieved to find that my sleep's interruption came at the hands of my outdated and unreliable laptop instead of a home invader, I spied the time on my alarm clock with less enthusiasm; 6:20am. It ought to be illegal to wake up this early.
"Fuck, I have to be quiet" said the voice from the inexplicably resumed video.
"I don't want to get caught" I said in unison with Jennica St. Claire, opening the lid of the computer and keying in my password to close the tab and cease her unwanted murmurs. I might have watched this one a few too many times.
The login screen faded and the video resolved itself, right where I had left off last night. I paused in the act of pushing the cursor to the top right of the screen, spotting something I hadn't before; joke at my expense if you want, but the green walls in the background were an unmistakable shade of vomitus green that I'd know anywhere. Yes, there over the shoulder of the woman I'd donated a hundred loads to in the last 6 months alone, was the unmistakably tacky pastel green of the Yale Archeology department's special collections library. There was no way in hell. It just wasn't possible; the coincidence was too great. I searched around the frame for more clues, wishing for the first time ever that Jennica's tits would get out of the shot so I could confirm my suspicions. I scanned through the video like a man possessed, but couldn't spot anything more useful than what was surely the corner of the shelf dedicated to Mesoamerican reference materials. I had to confirm this for myself. I had to know.
The card scanner flashed green as the happy beep admitted me to the building; locked on weekends, I was permitted access by dint of my status as a grad student. Steaming coffee in hand and nearly empty messenger bag slung over my should more out of habit than necessity, I beat a hasty path to the basement stair case and thundered down.
The familiar smell of old books and slightly rotted carpet filled my nose. This place was more a home to me than any I'd known. Call me a fraud if you want for the deception of how I came to possess The Book, I was nonetheless a decent academic. I'd have ended up here on my own, without the book, if I'd had to. I just hadn't needed to.
Another swipe of my keycard and I pushed into the special collections room, seeing it as if for the first time again. This had to be it, the room from the video. I looked around furtively to try to find the exact desk she'd sat at. It had to be in the back somewhere if she'd wanted to avoid detection. I hurried on through the stacks, delightedly matching the color of the walls to the video. My heart beat unreasonably fast as I neared the corner I suspected to be the one she'd used, unwilling to admit that confirmation wouldn't actually mean all that much; it's not like she'd be sitting there.
I rounded the corner of the last shelf, and there it was. The desk. The very one. And the chair, too. I refused to acknowledge my fading enthusiasm, going through the motions of placing a reverent hand back of the chair and imagining that this discovery meant literally anything at all. I looked back, away from the desk, lining the background elements up with what I remembered from the video. This was definitely it. Yup.
Yup.
I don't know what I thought I'd get out of this. It had seemed so important half an hour ago as I was pulling on anything at hand and rushing out the door. I must have oozed crackhead energy at the coffee place, impatiently standing there checking my watch every thirty seconds while the girl poured my flat white at a half past the ass crack of dawn. Now just felt dumb; I'd skipped brushing my teeth to be at a library at like 7:00 in the morning just to look at a chair that someone had masturbated in at some point in the past. Woo hoo.
Entirely underwhelmed, I figured I'd make the most of the trip. There was no harm in pulling the stupid thing out and flipping through it for the million and seventieth time.
I fumbled the keys into the locked cabinet that The Book slumbered in, scribbling my name on the access record card that bore only my own autograph in the last dozen lines, and hefted the weighty tome out with carefully practiced caution.
"Come on you stupid bastard" I muttered as I knocked the drawer back shut with a hip.
"Oh god yes."
My eyes widened in horror as I realized what must be happening. Piece of shit thing. I should have left it at home.
"Fuck, that's so good" she said again from my bag, muffled only slightly. I worked to calm down by assuring myself that there was nobody else there to hear. I still didn't waste any time getting back over to the desk, only slightly amused at the irony of having left my stuff at 'her' desk while her digital memory did its naughty work there again.
"I'm gonna cum soon" she insisted predictably.
"Yeah yeah," I replied sarcastically, "but what if someone hears you, huh?". I set The Book down carefully and reached for the bag.
"Fuck, I have to be quiet" she replied. I chuckled to myself as I undid the clasps and flopped the bag open.
I froze.
I had left it at home. I hadn't brought it at all. My laptop was still sitting on my bed, where I'd left it. There wasn't anything in my bag except a notebook, a stack of papers I needed to grade, and a few pens. There was nothing that could have produced the audio at all.
The Book sat there, immobile and unremarkable, as it always did, daring me to look upon it. I don't mind admitting to having let my imagination get the best of me in the moment; it was what it was, and the things it portrayed were hardly the stuff of children's bedtime stories. Telling myself that I knew better did absolutely nothing to steel my nerves. A fat pearl of beading sweat ran from my brow; it was late in the fall and cooling quickly outside, but I felt as though I'd burst to flame as I stared down at that damned book. I absentmindedly unzipped my hoodie and tore it off, dropping it to the floor and raising my hands to put them between me and the leather-bound volume, as if I'd fight it if need arose.
"I DON'T WANT TO GET CAUGHT"
I did scream then, and jumped half out of my skin. It's a wonder I didn't shit myself.
I realized almost immediately, before I'd even finished my terrified yelp, that the voice had come from my phone; in my earlier uncaring haste, I'd dumped it along with the rest of my pockets' contents onto the table, and thrown my bag down atop it. Recalling that I'd opened the video before leaving the house to compare details of the room, if needed, I laughed at my own nervousness. It wasn't even a little laugh either; relief at not being haunted by an ethereal pornstar washed over me in waves that produced a deep belly laugh in me. Clutching my chest with the effort to catch my breath, I patted The Book's cover in earnest appreciation for it's part in the now-hilarious deception. Her dialogue had sounded so loud a moment ago, but my nerves had undoubtedly amplified the effect; the rest of the video's audio continued on reasonably from my otherwise dormant phone on the desk. I must have hit play from the home screen preview when I took it out of my pocket.
Relieved laughter subsiding, I flicked the phone's lock slider to the left and closed the web browser, taking care to be absolutely sure that I'd done so, and committing the act to memory. It was only then that I afforded myself the clarity of mind to realize what I'd done; in a rush to get here, and not exhibiting an ounce of adult patience, I'd pulled on whatever was lying around before I left the house. Yes, dear reader. I had put on my cum shirt.
Horror of a different flavor bloomed within me as I let myself lift my hand from the cover of The Book; the same hand that I'd clutched my wheezing chest with moments ago, and the same one I'd wiped up my cum with only a few hours earlier in the privacy of my own home. Examining my sticky digits in disgust, I could only thank my lucky stars that I'd pulled a sweater overtop; I'm pretty sure the barista's would have called the cops if I'd walked in proudly wearing a load of cum all over myself.
Worse was the realization that I'd gotten it on the front of The Book. Mine by right of inheritance or not, the thing was likely to end up in a museum at some point during it's life, and I was loathe to consider some graduate student 50 years in the future getting writing their capstone project on The Jizzy Handprint Grimoire's dubious provenance.
Cursing myself for a fucking fool, I scrubbed the drying mark off the cover, praising myself for the fine work that I was able to do in removing any trace of my unholy offence. Deciding that the day was entirely too fucked already to consider getting any work done, I put it back in it's drawer, muttered an apology to it, and left the building as swiftly as I could. There were other libraries, and I could always mark some papers or something.

The whirring blades of my MD-902 throbbed against the warm evening air, and I smiled.
From 5,000 feet, the ground flew by in a carpet of dark forests and kelly-green fields. The sun hung low on the horizon in a picturesque array of dazzling orange and gold, and I could make out the narrow strip of the Ohio River to my left, glistening in the fading daylight. This time of year, the trees would be full of the sweet aroma of fresh blossoms, and the frequent rains kept small pockets of fluffy white mist hanging in the treetops. It was a beautiful view, one that reminded me of why being a helicopter pilot trumped flying in a jumbo jet far above the clouds every day of the week.
Fourteen more days, and I’m debt free.
That made me grin even more. I’d been working as a charter pilot ever since I obtained my license at age 19, and after years of keeping my nose to the grindstone, I was closing on the final payment for real-estate in western Pennsylvania. With no debt, a fixer-upper house on 30 rural acres all to myself, and a respectable wage for a 26-year-old pilot, I looked forward to the financial freedom I could now enjoy. Maybe I’d take a vacation, somewhere exotic like Venice Italy, or the Dominican Republic. Or perhaps I’d sock the money back for the day I started a family.
“Remember kleineun, a real man looks after his own.”
My elderly ouma’s voice came back from the depths of my memories, her proud, sun-tanned face rising from the darkness. She and my Rhodesian grandfather had emigrated to the US when they were newlyweds, as the violence against white Boer descendants in South Africa spiraled out of control. My mother and father both died in a car crash when I was six, and it had been my grandparents who raised me. Due to this, I’d grown up with a slight accent that many of my classmates found amusing, and I could speak both English, and Afrikaans, the Boer tongue of our former home.
I shifted in my seat, stretched my back muscles, and glanced at the picture taped to my console. Both my parents flanked a grinning, gap-toothed six-year-old me, at the last Christmas we’d spent together. My mother beamed, her dark hair and Italian features a sharp contrast to my father’s sandy blonde hair and blue eyes. Sometimes, I liked to imagine they were smiling at me with pride at how well I flew the old silver-colored bird my company had assigned to me, and that made the long, lonely flights easier to bear.
A flicker caught my eye, and I broke my gaze away from the photograph.
Perched in its small cradle above the controls, my little black Garmin fuzzed over for a few seconds, its screen shifting from brightly colored maps to a barrage of grey static.
Did the power chord come loose?
I checked, ensuring the power-cable for the unit’s battery was plugged into the port on the control panel. It was a brand-new GPS unit, and I’d used it a few times already, so I knew it wasn’t defective. Granted, I could fly and navigate without it, but the Garmin made my time as a pilot so much easier that the thought of going blind was dreadful.
My fuel gauge danced, clicked to empty, then to full, in a bizarre jolt.
More of the gauges began to stutter, the entire panel seeming to develop terrets all at once, and my pulse began to race. Something was wrong, very wrong, and the sludge inside my bowels churned with sour fear.
“Come on, come on.” I flicked switches, turned dials, punched buttons, but nothing seemed to fix the spasming electronics. Every gauge failed, and without warning, I found myself plunged into inky darkness.
Outside, the sun surrendered to the pull of night, the sky darker than usual. A distant rumble of thunder reverberated above the roar of my helicopter’s engine, and I thought I glimpsed a streak of yellowish lightning on the far horizon to my left.
Calm down Chris. We’re still flying, so it must just be a blown fuse. Stay in control and find a place to set her down.
My sweaty palm slid on the cyclic stick, and both feet weighed heavy on the yaw pedals. The collective stuck to my other hand with a nervous vibration, and I squinted against the abyss outside.
Beep.
I jumped despite myself, as the little Garmin on my panel flared back to life, the static pulling aside to reveal a twitching display. Each time the screen glitched, it showed the colorful map detailing my flight path over the ground below, but I noticed that some of the lines changed, the names shifting, as if the device couldn’t decide between two different versions of the world.
One name jutted out at me, slate gray like most of the major county names, appearing with ghostly flickers from between two neighboring ones.
Barron County.
I stared, confused. I’d flown over this section of southeastern Ohio plenty of times, and I knew the counties by heart. At this point, I should have been over the southern end of Noble County, and maybe dipping lower into Washington. There was no Barron County in Ohio. I was sure of it.
And yet it shown back at me from the digital landscape, a strange, almost cigar-shaped chunk of terrain carved from the surrounding counties like a tumor, sometimes there, sometimes not, as my little Garmin struggled to find the correct map. Rain began to patter against my cockpit window, and the entire aircraft rattled from a strong gust of wind. Thick clouds closed over my field of vision like a sea of gray cotton.
The blood in my veins turned to ice, and I sucked in a nervous breath.
Land. I had to land. There was nothing else to do, my flight controls weren’t responding, and only my Garmin had managed to come back to life. Perhaps I’d been hit by lightning, and the electronics had been fried? Either way, it was too dark to tell, but a storm seemed to be brewing, and if I didn’t get my feet on the ground soon, I could be in real trouble.
“Better safe than sorry.” I pushed down on the collective to start my slow descent and clicked the talking button for my headset. “Any station, this is Douglass Three-One-Four-Foxtrot, over.”
Nothing.
“Any station, this is Douglass Three-One-Four-Foxtrot, requesting emergency assistance, over.”
Still nothing.
If the radio’s dead, I’m really up a creek.
With my hand shaking, I clicked on the mic one more time. “Any station, this is—”
Like a curtain pulling back, the fog cleared from around my window, and the words stuck in my throat.
Without my gauges, I couldn’t tell just how far I’d descended, but I was definitely very low. Thick trees poked up from the ground, and the hills rolled into high ridges with flat valley floors, fields and pastures pockmarking them. Rain fell all around in cold, silvery sheets, a normal feature for the mid spring in this part of Ohio.
What wasn’t normal, were the fires.
At first, I thought they were forest fires for the amount of smoke and flames that bellowed from each spot, but as I swooped lower, my eyes widened in horror.
They were houses.
Farms, cottages, little clusters that barely constituted villages, all of them belched orange flames and black pillars of sooty smoke. I couldn’t hear above the helicopter blades, but I could see the flashes on the ground, along the road, in between the trees, and even coming from the burning buildings, little jets of golden light that spat into the darkness with anger.
Gunfire. That’s rifle fire, a whole lot of it.
Tiny black figures darted through the shadows, barely discernable from where I sat, several hundred feet up. I couldn’t see much, but some were definitely running away, the streaks of yellow gunfire chasing them. A few dark gray vehicles rumbled down one of the gravel roads, and sprayed fire into the houses as it went. They were fighting, I realized, the people in the trucks and the locals. It was horrific, like something out of war-torn Afghanistan, but worse.
Then, I caught a glimpse of the others.
They didn’t move like the rest, who either fled from the dark vehicles, or fired back from behind cover. These skinny figures loped along with haphazard gaits, many running on all fours like animals, swarming from the trees by the dozens. They threw themselves into the gales of bullets without flinching, attacking anyone within range, and something about the way they moved, so fluid, so fearless, made my heart skip a beat.
What is that?
“Echo Four Actual to unknown caller, please respond, over.”
Choking back a cry of shock, I fumbled at the control panel with clumsy fingers, the man’s voice sharp and stern. I hadn’t realized that I’d let go of the talking button and clicked it down again. “Hello? Hello, this is Douglass Three-One-Four-Foxtrot out of Pittsburgh, over.”
An excruciating moment passed, and I continued to zoom over the trees, the fires falling away behind me as more silent forest took over.
“Roger that Douglass Three-One-Four-Foxtrot, we read you loud and clear. Please identify yourself and any passengers or cargo you might be carrying, over.”
Swallowing hard, I eyed the treetops, which looked much closer than they should have been. How far had I descended? “Echo Four Actual, my name is Christopher Dekker, and I am alone. I’m a charter flight from PA, carrying medical equipment for OSU in Columbus. My controls have been damaged, and I am unable to safely carry on due to the storm. Requesting permission to land, over.”
I watched the landscape slide by underneath me, once catching sight of what looked like a little white church surrounded by smaller huts, dozens of figures in the yard staring up at me as I flew over a nearby ridgeline.
“Solid copy on that Douglass Three-One-Four-Foxtrot. Be advised, your transponder shows you to be inside a restricted zone. Please cease all radio traffic, reduce your speed, climb to 3,000 feet and proceed north. We’ll talk you in from there. How copy, over?”
My heart jumped, and I let out a sigh of relief. “Roger that Echo Four Actual, my altimeter is down, but I’ll do my best to eyeball the altitude, over.”
With that, I pulled the collective upward, and tried my best to gauge how far I was by eyesight in the gathering night, rain still coming down all around me. This had to be some kind of disaster or riot, I decided. After all, the voice over the radio sounded like military, and those vehicles seemed to have heavy weapons. Maybe there was some kind of unrest going on here that I hadn’t heard about yet?
Kind of weird for it to happen in rural areas though. Spoiled college kids I get, but never saw farmers get so worked up before. They usually love the military.
Something moved in the corner of my eye, and I turned out of reflex.
My mouth fell open, and I froze, unable to scream.
In the sky beside me, a huge shadow glided along, and its leathery wings effortlessly carved through the gloom, flapping only on occasion to keep it aloft. It was too dark for me to see what color it was, but from the way it moved, I knew it wasn’t another helicopter. No, this thing was alive, easily the size of a small plane, and more than twice the length of my little McDonald Douglass. A long tail trailed behind it, and bore a distinct arrow-shaped snout, with twig-like spines fanned out around the back of its head. Whatever legs it had were drawn up under it like a bird, yet its skin appeared rough and knobby, almost resembling tree bark. Without pause, the gigantic bat-winged entity flew along beside me, as if my presence was on par with an annoying fly buzzing about its head.
Gripping the microphone switch so tight, I thought I’d crack the plastic, I whispered into my headset, forgetting all radio protocol. “T-There’s something up here.”
Static crackled.
“Douglas Three-One-Four-Foxtrot, say again your last, you’re coming in weak and unreadable, over.”
“There’s something up here.” I snarled into the headset, still glued to the controls of the helicopter, afraid to deviate even an inch from my course in case the monstrosity decided to turn on me. “A freaking huge thing, right beside me. I swear, it looks like a bat or . . . I don’t know.”
“Calm down.” The man on the other end of the radio broke his rigorous discipline as well, his voice deep, but level. “It won’t attack if you don’t move too fast. Slowly ease away from it and follow that course until you’re out of sight.”
I didn’t have time to think about how wrong that sounded, how the man’s strict tone had changed to one of knowledge, how he hadn’t been the least surprised by what I’d said. Instead, I slowly turned the helicopter away from the huge menace and edged the speed higher in tiny increments.
As soon as I was roughly two football fields away, I let myself relax, and clicked the mic switch. “It’s not following.”
“You’re sure?”
Eyeing the huge flapping wings, I nodded, then remembered he couldn’t see me. “Yeah, I’m well clear.”
“Good. Thank you, Mr. Dekker.”
Then, the radio went dead.
Something in my chest dropped, a weight that made my stomach roil. This wasn’t right, none of it. Who was that man? Why did he know about the thing I’d just seen? What was I supposed to—
A flash of light exploded from the trees to my right and shot into the air with a long finger of smoke.
What the . . .
On instinct, I jerked the cyclic stick to one side, and the helicopter swung to avoid the rocket.
Boom.
My world shook, metal screeched, and a dozen alarms began to go off inside the cockpit in a cacophony of beeps and sirens. Orange and red flames lit up the night sky just behind me, and the horizon started to spin wildly outside. Heat gushed from the cockpit door, and I smelled the greasy stench of burning oil. The safety belts dug into my shoulders, and with a final slip, the radio headset ripped free from my scalp.
I’m hit.
Desperate, I yanked on the controls, fought the bird even as she spun toward the ground in a wreath of flames, the inky black trees hurtling up to meet me. The helicopter went into full auto-rotation, the sky blurring past outside, and the alarms blared in a screech of doom. Panic slammed through my temples, I screamed at the top of my lungs, and for one brief second, my eyes locked on the little black Garmin still perched atop my control panel.
Its screen stopped twitching and settled on a map of the mysterious Barron County, with a little red arrow at the center of the screen, a few words popping up underneath it.
You are here.
Trees stabbed up into the sky, the belts crushed at my torso, glass shattered all around me, and the world went dark.
Copper, thick, warm, and tangy.
It filled my mouth, stank metallic in my nose, clogged my throat, choking me. In the murkiness, I fought for a surface, for a way out, blind and numb in the dark.
This way, kleineun.
My ouma’s voice echoed from somewhere in the shadows.
This way.
Both eyes flew open, and I gagged, spitting out a stream of red.
Pain throbbed in my ribs, and a heavy pressure sent a tingling numbness through my shoulders. Blood roared inside my temples, and stars danced before my eyes with a dizzying array. Humid night air kissed my skin, and something sticky coated my face, neck, and arms that hung straight up toward the ceiling.
Wait. Not up. Down.
I blinked at the wrinkled, torn ceiling of the cockpit, the glass all gone, the gray aluminum shredded like tissue paper. Just outside the broken windows, thick Appalachian bluegrass and stemmy underbrush swished in a feeble breeze, backlit by flashes of lightning from the thunderstorm overhead. Green and brown leaves covered everything in a wet carpet of triangles, and somewhere nearby, a cricket chirped.
Turning my head from side to side, I realized that I hung upside down inside the ruined helicopter, the top half burrowed into the mud. I could hear the hissing and crackling of flames, the pattering of rain falling on the hot aluminum, and the smaller brush fires around the downed aircraft sizzling out in the damp long grass. Charred steel and burning oil tainted the air, almost as strong as the metallic, coppery stench in my aching nose.
They shot me down. That military dude shot me out of the sky.
It didn’t make sense. I’d followed their orders, done everything they’d said, and yet the instant I veered safely away from whatever that thing in the sky had been, they’d fired, not at it, but at me.
Looking down (or rather, up) at my chest, I sucked in a gasp, which was harder to do that before.
The navy-blue shirt stuck to my torso with several big splotches of dark, rusty red. Most were clean slashes, but two held bits of glass sticking out of them, one alarmingly bigger than the other. They dripped cherry red blood onto my upturned face, and a wave of nausea hit me.
I gotta get down.
I flexed my arms to try and work some feeling back into them, praying nothing was broken. Half-numb from hanging so long, I palmed along my aching body until I felt the buckled for the seat belts.
“Okay.” I hissed between gritted teeth, in an effort to stave off my panic. “You can do this. Just hold on tight. Nice and tight. Here we go . . .”
Click.
Everything seemed to lurch, and I slid off the seat to plummet towards the muck-filled hole in the cockpit ceiling. My fingers were slick with blood and slipped over the smooth faux-leather pilot’s seat with ease. The shoulder belt snagged on the bits of glass that lay just under the left lowest rib, and a flare of white-hot pain ripped through me.
Wham.
I screamed, my right knee caught the edge of the aluminum ceiling, and both hands dove into a mound of leaf-covered glass shards on the opposite side of the hole. My head swam, being right-side-up again enough to make shadows gnaw at the corner of my eyes.
Forcing myself to breath slowly, I fought the urge to faint and slid back to sit on the smooth ceiling. I turned my hands over to see half a dozen bits of clear glass burrowed into my skin like greedy parasites, red blood weeping around the new cuts.
“Screw you.” I spat at the rubbish with angry tears in my eyes. “Screw you, screw you, screw you.”
The shards came out easy enough, and the cuts weren’t that deep, but that wasn’t what worried me. On my chest, the single piece of cockpit glass that remined was almost as big as my palm, and it really hurt. Just touching it felt like self-inflicted torture, but I knew it had to come out sooner or later.
Please don’t nick a vein.
Wiping my hands dry on my jeans, I gripped the shard with both hands, and jerked.
Fire roared over my ribs, and hot blood tickled my already grimy pale skin. I clapped a hand over the wound, pressing down hard, and grunted out a string of hateful expletives that my ouma would have slapped me for.
Lying on my back, I stared around me at the messy cargo compartment of the MD-902. Most of the medical supplies had been in cardboard boxes strapped down with heavy nylon tow-straps, but several cases had ruptured with the force of the impact, spraying bandages, syringes, and pill bottles all over the cluttered interior. Orange flames chewed at the crate furthest to the rear, the tail section long gone, but the foremost part of the hold was intact. Easily a million-dollar mess, it would have made me faint on any other trip, but today it was a godsend.
Half-blind in the darkness, I crawled along with only the firelight and lightning bolts to guide me, my right knee aching. Like a crippled raccoon, I collected things as I went, conscious of the two pallets of intact supplies weighing right over my head. I’d taken several different first-aid courses with some hunting buddies of mine, and the mental reflexes kicked in to help soothe my frazzled mind.
Check for bleeds, stop the worst, then move on.
Aside from my battered chest and stomach, the rest of me remained mostly unharmed. I had nasty bruises from the seatbelts, my right knee swelled, my nose slightly crooked and crusted in blood, but otherwise I was intact. Dowsing every scratch and cut with a bottle of isopropyl alcohol I found, I used butterfly closures on the smaller lacerations that peppered my skin. I wrapped soft white gauze over my abused palms and probed at the big cut where the last shard had been, only stopping when I was sure there were no pieces of glass wedged inside my flesh.
“Not too bad.” I grunted to myself, trying to sound impassive like a doctor might. “Rib must have stopped it. Gonna need stitches though. That’ll be fun.”
Pawing through the broken cases, I couldn’t find any suture chord, but just as I was about to give up, I noticed a small box that read ‘medical skin stapler’.
Bingo.
I tore the small white plastic stapler free from its packaging and eyeballed the device. I’d never done this before, only seen it in movies, and even though the cut in my skin hurt, I wondered if this wouldn’t be worse.
You’ve gotta do it. That bleeding needs to stop. Besides, no one’s coming to rescue you, not with those rocket-launching psychos out there.
Taking a deep breath, I pinched the skin around the gash together, and pressed the mouth of the stapler to it.
Click.
A sharp sting, like that of a needle bit at the skin, but it didn’t hurt nearly as bad as the cut itself. I worked my way across the two-inch laceration and gave out a sigh of relief when it was done.
“Not going to bleed to death today.” I daubed ointment around the staples before winding more bandages over the wound.
Popping a few low-grade painkillers that tumbled from the cargo, I crawled wriggled through the nearest shattered window into the wet grass.
Raindrops kissed my face, clean and cool on my sweaty skin. Despite the thick cloud cover, there was enough constant lightning strikes within the storm to let me get glimpses of the world around me. My helicopter lay on its back, the blades snapped like pencils, with bits and pieces of it burning in chunks all around the small break in the trees. Chest-high scrub brush grew all around the low-lying ground, with pockets of standing water in places. My ears still rang from the impact of the crash, but I could start to pick up more crickets, frogs, and even some nocturnal birds singing into the darkness, like they didn’t notice the huge the hulk of flaming metal that had fallen from the sky. Overhead, the thunder rumbled onward, the feeble wind whistling, and there were other flashes on the horizon, orange and red ones, with crackles that didn’t sound quite like lightning.
The guns. They’re still fighting.
Instinctively, I pulled out my cellphone, and tapped the screen.
It fluttered to life, but no matter how I tried, I couldn’t get through to anyone, not even with the emergency function designed to work around having no service. The complicated wonder of our modern world was little better than a glorified paperweight.
Stunned, I sat down with my back to the helicopter and rested my head against the aluminum skin of the craft. How I’d gone from a regular medical supply run to being marooned in this hellish parody of rural America, I didn’t know, but one thig was certain; I needed a plan. Whoever fired the missile could have already contacted my charter company and made up some excuse to keep them from coming to look for me. No one else knew I was here, and even though I now had six staples holding the worst of my injuries shut, I knew I needed proper medical attention. If I wanted to live, I’d have to rescue myself.
My bag. I need to get my go-bag, grab some gear and then . . . head somewhere else.
It took me a while to gather my green canvas paratrooper bag from its place behind the pilot’s seat and fill it with whatever supplies I could scrounge. My knee didn’t seem to be broken, but man did it hurt, and I dreaded the thought of walking on it for miles on end. I focused instead on inventorying my gear and trying to come up with a halfway intelligent plan of action.
I had a stainless-steel canteen with one of those detachable cups on the bottom, a little fishing kit, some duct tape, a lighter, a black LED flashlight with three spare batteries, a few tattered road maps with a compass, a spare pair of socks, medical supplies from the cargo, and a simple forest green plastic rain poncho. I also managed to unearth a functioning digital camcorder my ouma had gotten me for Christmas a few years back, though I wasn’t sure I wanted to do any filming in such a miserable state. Lastly, since it was a private supply run from a warehouse area near Pittsburgh to a direct hospital pad in Ohio, I’d been able to bring my K-Bar, a sturdy, and brutally simple knife designed for the Marine Corps that I used every time I went camping. It was pitiful in comparison to the rifle I wished I had with me, but that didn’t matter now. I had what I had, and I doubted my trusty Armalite would have alleviated my sore knee anyway.
Clicking on my flashlight, I huddled with the poncho around my shoulders inside the wreck of the chopper and peered at the dusty roadmaps. A small part of me hoped that a solution would jump out from the faded paper, but none came. These were all maps of western PA and eastern Ohio. None of them had a Barron County on them anywhere.
The man on the radio said to head north, right before they shot me down. That means they must be camped out to the north of here. South had that convoy and those burning houses, so that’s a no-go. Maybe I can backtrack eastward the way I came.
As if on cue, a soft pop echoed from over the eastern horizon, and I craned to look out the helicopter window, spotting more man-made flashes over the tree tops.
“Great.” I hissed between clenched teeth, aware of how the temperature dipped to a chilly 60 degrees, and how despite the conditions, my stomach had begun to growl. “Not going that way, are we? Westward it is.”
Walking away from my poor 902 proved to be harder than I’d anticipated. Despite the glass, the fizzling fires, and the darkness, it still held a familiar, human essence to it. Sitting inside it made me feel secure, safe, even calm about the situation. In any other circumstance, I would have just stayed with the downed aircraft to wait for help, but I knew the men who shot me down would likely find my crash site, and I didn’t want to be around when they did.
Unlike much of central and western Ohio, southeastern Ohio is hilly, brushy, and clogged with thick forests. Thorns snagged at my thin poncho and sliced at my pant legs. My knee throbbed, every step a form of self-inflicted torture. The rain never stopped, a steady drizzle from above just cold enough to be problematic as time went on, making me shiver. Mud slid under my tennis shoes, and every tree looked ten times bigger in the flickering beam of my cheap flashlight. Icy fear prickled at the back of my neck at some of the sounds that greeted me through the gloom. I’d been camping loads of times, both in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, but these noises were something otherworldly to me.
Strange howls, screeches, and calls permeated the rain-soaked sky, some almost roars, while others bordered on human in their intonation. The more I walked, the softer the distant gunfire became, and the more prevalent the odd sounds, until the shadows seemed to fill with them. I didn’t dare turn off my flashlight, or I’d been completely blind in the dark, but a little voice in the back of my head screamed that I was too visible, crunching through the gloomy forest with my long beam of light stabbing into the abyss. It felt as though a million eyes were on me, studying me, hunting me from the surrounding brush, and I bitterly recalled how much I’d loved the old Survivor Man TV series as a kid.
Not so fun being out in the woods at night. Especially alone.
A twig snapped somewhere behind me, and I whirled on the spot, one trembling hand resting on the hilt of my K-Bar.
Nothing. Nothing but trees, bushes, and rain dripping down in the darkness.
“This is stupid.” I whispered to myself to keep my nerves in check as I slowly spun on the spot. “I should have went eastward anyway. God knows how long I’m going to have to—”
Creak.
A groan of metal-on-metal echoed from somewhere to my right, and I spun to face it, yanking the knife on my belt free from its scabbard. It felt so small and useless in my hand, and I choked down a wave of nauseas fear.
Ka-whump. Creak. K-whump. Creak.
Underbrush cracked and crunched, a few smaller saplings thrashed, and from deep within the gloom, two yellow orbs flared to life. They poked through the mist in the trees, forming into slender fingers of golden light that swept back and forth in the dark.
The soldiers . . . they must be looking for me.
I swallowed hard and turned to slink away.
Ice jammed through my blood, and I froze on the spot, biting my tongue to stop the scream.
It stood not yards away, a huge form that towered a good twelve feet tall in the swirling shadows. Unpolished chrome blended with flash-rusted spots in the faded red paint, and grime-smeared glass shone with dull hues in the flashes of lightning. Where the wheels should have been, the rounded steel axels curved like some enormous hand had bent them, and the tires lay face-down on the muddy ground like big round feet, their hubcaps buried in the dirt. Dents, scrapes, and chips covered the battered thing, and its crooked little radio antenna pointed straight up from the old metal fender like a mast. I could barely make out the mud-coated VW on the rounded hood, and my mind reeled in shock.
Is . . . is that a car?
Both yellow headlights bathed me in a circle of bright, blinding light, and neither I nor the strange vehicle moved.
Seconds ticked by, the screech-thumping in the background only growing closer. I realized that I couldn’t hear any engine noises and had yet to see any soldiers or guns pointed my way. This car looked old, really old, like one of those classic Volkswagen Beetles that collectors fought over at auctions. Try as I might, I couldn’t see a driver inside the murky, mold-smeared windows.
Because there wasn’t one.
Lightning arched across the sky overhead, and the car standing in front of me blinked.
Its headlights slid shut, as if little metal shades had crawled over the bulbs for a moment and flicked open again. Something about that movement was so primal, so real, so lifelike, that every ounce of self-control I had melted in an instant.
Cursing under my breath, I lunged into the shrubs, and the world erupted around me.
Under my shoes, the ground shook, and the car surged after me in a cacophony of ka-thumps that made my already racing heart skip several beats. A weather-beaten brown tow truck from the 50’s charged through the thorns to my left, it’s headlights ablaze, and a dilapidated yellow school bus rose from its hiding place in the weeds to stand tall on four down-turned axel-legs. They all flicked their headlights on like giants waking from their slumber, and as I dodged past them, they each blared their horn into the night in alarm.
My breaths came short and tight, my knee burned, and I crashed through thorns and briars without thought to how badly I was getting cut up.
The cheap poncho tore, and I ripped it away as it caught on a tree branch.
A purple 70’s Mustang shook off its blanket of creeping vines and bounded from a stand of trees just ahead, forcing me to swerve to avoid being run over, my adrenaline at all-time highs.
This can’t be happening, this can’t be happening, this can’t be happening.
Slipping and sliding, I pushed through a stand of multiflora rose, and stumbled out into a flat, dark expanse.
I almost skidded to a stop.
What had once been a rather large field stood no taller than my shoestrings, the grass charred, and burnt. The storm above illuminated huge pieces of wreckage that lay scattered over the nearly 40-acre plot, and I could just make out the fire-blackened hulk of a fuselage resting a hundred yards away. The plane had been brought down a while ago it seemed, as there weren’t any flames left burning, and I threw myself toward it in frenzied desperation.
Burned grass and greasy brown topsoil slushed underfoot, and I could hear the squelching of the cars pursing me. Rain soaked me to the bone, and my lungs ached from sucking down the damp night air. A painful stich crept into my side, and I cursed myself for not putting in more time for cardio at the gym.
Something caught my left shoelace, and I hurtled to the ground, tasting mud and blood in between my teeth.
They’ve got me now.
I clawed at the mud, rolled, and watched a tire slam down mere inches from where my head had been. The Mustang loomed over me and jostled for position with the red Volkswagen and brown tow truck, the school bus still a few yards behind them. They couldn’t seem to decide who would get the pleasure of stomping me to death, and like a herd of stampeding wildebeest, they locked bumpers in an epic shoving match.
On all fours, I scampered out from under the sparring brutes, and dashed for the crumpled airplane, a white-painted DC-3 that looked like it had been cut in half by a gargantuan knife blade. I passed a snapped wing section, the oily remains of a turbo-prop engine, and a mutilated wheel from the landing gear. Climbing over a heap of mud, I squeezed into the back of the ruined flight cabin and dropped down into the dark cargo hold.
Wham.
No sooner had my sneakers hit the cold metal floor, and the entire plane rocked from the impact of something heavy ramming it just outside. I tumbled to my knees, screaming in pain as, once again, I managed to bash the sore one off a bracket in the wall.
My hand smeared in something gooey, and I scrabbled for my flashlight.
It clicked on, a wavering ball of white light in the pitch darkness, and I fought the urge to gag. “Oh man . . .”
Three people, or what was left of them, lay strewn over the narrow cargo area. Claret red blood coated the walls, caked on the floor, and clotted under my mud-spattered shoes. Bits of flesh and viscera were stuck to everything, and tatters of cloth hung from exposed sections of broken bone. An eerie set of bloody handprints adorned the walls, and the only reason I could tell it had been three people were the shoes; all of them bore anklebones sticking out above blood-soaked socks. It smelled sickly sweet, a strange, nauseas odor that crept into my nose and settled on the back of my tongue like an alien parasite.
Something glinted in the beam of my flashlight, and my pulse quickened as I pried the object loose from the severed arm that still clung to it.
“Hail Mary full of Grace.” I would have grinned if it weren’t for the fact that the plane continued to buck and roll under the assault from the cars outside.
The pistol looked old, but well-maintained, aside from the light coating of dark blood that stained its round wooden handle. It felt heavy, but good in my hand, and I turned it over to read the words, Waffenfabrik Mauser stenciled into the frame, with a large red 9 carved into the grip. For some reason, it vaguely reminded me of the blasters from Star Wars.
I fumbled with a little switch that looked like a safety on the back of the gun and stumbled toward a gap in the plane’s dented fuselage to aim out at the surrounding headlights.
Bang.
The old gun bucked reliably in my hand, its long barrel spitting a little jet of flame into the night. I had no idea if I hit anything, but the attacking cars recoiled, their horns blaring in confusion.
They turned, and scuttled for the tree line as fast as their mechanical legs could go, the entire ordeal over as fast as it had begun.
Did I do that?
Perplexed, I stared down at the pistol in my hand.
Whoosh.
A large, inky black shadow glided down from the clouds, and the yellow school bus moved too slow to react in time.
With a crash, the kicking nightmarish vehicle was thrown onto its side, spraying glass and chrome trim across the muddy field. Its electro-synth horn blared with wails of mechanical agony, as two huge talon-like feet clamped down on it, and the enormous head of the flying creature lowered to rip open its engine compartment.
The horn cut out, and the enormous flying entity jerked its head back to gulp down a mass of what looked like sticky black vines from the interior of the shattered bus.
At this range, I could see now that the flying creature bore two legs and had its wings half-tucked like a vulture that had descended to feed on roadkill. Its head turned slightly, and in the glow of another lightning bolt, my jaw went slack at the realization of what it was.
A tree trunk. It’s a rotted tree trunk.
I couldn’t tell where the reptilian beast began, and where the organic tree components ended, the upper part of the head shaped like a log, while the lower jaw resembled something out of a dinosaur movie. Its skin looked identical to the outside of a shagbark hickory but flexed with a supple featheriness that denoted something closer to skin. Sharp branch-like spines ranged down its back, and out to the end of its tail, which bore a massive round club shaped like a diseased tree-knot. Crouched on both hind legs, it braced the hooked ends of its folded wings against the ground like a bat, towering higher than a semi-truck. Under the folds of its armored head, a bulging pair of chameleon-like eyes constantly spun in their sockets, probing the dark for threats while it ate.
One black pupil locked onto the window I peered through, and my heart stopped.
The beast regarded me for a moment, making a curious, sideways sniff.
With a proud, contemptful head-toss, the shadow from the sky parted rows of razor-sharp teeth to let out a roar that shook the earth beneath my feet. It was the triumphant war cry of a creature that sat at the very top of the food chain, one that felt no threat from the fragile two-legged beings that walked the earth all around it. It hunted whenever it wanted, ate whatever it wanted, and flew wherever it wanted. It didn’t need to rip the plane apart to devour me.
Like my hunter-gatherer ancestors from thousands of years ago, I wasn’t even worth the energy it would take to pounce.
I’m hiding in the remains of the cockpit now, which is half-buried under the mud of the field, enough to shield the light from my screen so that thing doesn’t see it. My service only now came back, and it’s been over an hour since the winged beast started in on the dead bus. I don’t know when, or how I’m going to get out of here. I don’t know when anyone will even see this post, or if it will upload at all. My phone battery is almost dead, and at this point, I’m probably going to have to sleep among the corpses until daylight comes.
A dead man sleeping amongst friends.
If you live in the Noble County area in southeastern Ohio, be careful where you drive, fly, and boat. I don’t know if it’s possible to stumble into this strange place by ground, but if so, then these things are definitely headed your way.
If that happens . . . pray that they don’t find you.

Hey ya'll, well my wife cheated on me since March until April 20th,.
Everything started in April 15th, around 2 am I couldn't sleep and I decided to go to bed and we have our 8 month old baby, and I decided to put our baby monitor on her phone, she always wakes up when I go to bed and puts the baby monitor, so I thought well we trust each other why not open the app for her and giver that peaceful time. When I unlocked her phone I saw a conversation with a guy, and I just read the last messages and her last message was "I love to hear your voice", when I read that I thought it might be a guy that might have a podcast or something, I couldn't sleep that night and I decided to go to the living room.
When I woke up she was upset with me for leaving the bed, I just told her "I couldn't sleep and I didn't want to wake you up" she didn't talk to me, and I confront her, when I told her about that I just read the last message she sent, her face dropped and she said that it was a guy she met while working and she loved the attention he gave her, and that's why she was talking to him.
That day I spent all day thinking about it, she acted like it wasn't a big deal and I told her about how guys might want to just f her, and she didn't want to hear about it.
Long story short, I Sarurday she went out to her friends house and I was devastated, I was talking xare of our baby, and I got drunk (not my proudest moment, also not considering that I was taking care of our baby), I texted around 11pm she replied back at 12am when I sent her the message "well to that guy you reply pretty fast, and me you just don't care", she came back home and I didn't want to talk to her.
That week I slept in the living room, and around friday April 21st I spent the afternoon with my baby while she was working, but it was something tickling in the back of my head, so I did something I promised my self I wouldn't do, I hacked all her social media, and I found out that she spend the whole week talking to him, even the day I gave her such hassle she talked to him and their condo was, "if he leaves it is a great opportunity for us." She replied: "yeah, no more hotel idea", I confronted her about it, she spilled the beans and she told me that is one of her ex from 15 years ago, and that got me devastated, I didn't sleep for 3 days I ended up in the hospital for that reason.
Well this is the thing since then she blocked him, she started sharing her location with me whenever she goes to work, but I'm upset about it, I didn't think this is going to be a thing between us specially after 3 years and a baby, she gets upset when I tell her how I feel, and complains on how her friends know about the situation and how they think about her.
Sometimes it feels surreal, other times feels like never happened, I live in constant fear she might do it again, and if she didn't think about me or US why she didn't stop talking to him when I first knew about, why she kept talking with him on how they will f themselves if I leave her.
What should I do, I love her, I went through good things and bad things with her, she made me a father but I know if we go for the big D I might be out of my daughter's life for good I might miss lots of good memories of her.

To whom it may concern: this message is of the utmost importance. Please do not disregard it. I don’t know for sure what website you’ll be seeing this on, whoever you are. Probably something submission-based, hopefully one where it stays up. Regardless, it is imperative that you keep reading. I’ll explain why soon, but before I do, some context is in order.
My brother was a brilliant man. Brilliantly talented, brilliantly clever. It was difficult growing up in his shadow. We were raised in the same nurturing, middle-upper class environment, with two loving parents that encouraged us at every turn, but it seemed there was nothing I could do that he wouldn’t outshine me at. He was no savant, you see. Julian held his own in any situation, whether that be an exam or a party with friends. Hardly ever was he not the smartest person in the room, or the most popular.
Needless to say, I was a jealous sibling. My main source of bother was academic performance. I’m not an idiot, even in comparison to my brother, but I was an underachiever for a long period of my adolescence. I’m not sure what I’d attribute it to. Hanging around the wrong people, perhaps, having my head in the clouds, something like that. I’ve always been intelligent, but for a while I really struggled to knuckle down and use that intellect. For so long, I heard the same tired expression: “if you’d only apply yourself…” I’m sure some of you reading this can relate. It wasn’t until many years later that that sentiment really rang true.
I never outright hated Julian, but I have to admit there was invariably a growing seed of resentment in my heart for him, especially as we got older and his natural aptitude really began to shine. We both had an interest in computer science from a young age, most likely inherited from our father, who worked for Microsoft before they went out of business. I still remember those nights as kids when he’d sit us down in front of his computer and show us all the little intricacies of the code he was working on. Any other children our age would be bored out of their skulls, but there we sat, attentive as ever, our developing minds fascinated by the job’s seemingly endless possibilities. Julian’s other main curiosity, which I did not share, was an affinity towards online horror fiction, though he grew out of that kind of stuff in his late teens.
He knew I had a chip on my shoulder. Mostly, he was apathetic towards it; we were never estranged, but he wasn’t going to let my discontent get in the way of his success. Though I don’t blame him, I suppose that was always Julian’s downfall. He was just too headstrong, too confident.
When we became adults, we parted ways. He went on to study at Harvard while I ended up dropping out of some bang-average local university you won’t have heard of. Following that, things were a little rough. My parents were fairly disappointed. They didn’t cut me off, rather, interacting with them became a depressing chore as they waited for their son to get his life together. At family gatherings, I gritted my teeth at the stories Julian told: developing virtual reality hardware, cutting-edge stuff, pushing the boundaries of the way we interact with technology, all while I was couch-surfing, barely making ends meet as the IT guy at a shitty school in a town I hated. It only made the prospect of snapping out of whatever haze I was in feel more difficult.
It all changed one day soon after I got my first apartment. Julian showed up out of the blue on a dewy morning with an armful of equipment and a huge, beaming smile on his face. I let him in, we talked, and he promised that what he was going to show me would completely blow my mind.
I watched as he paced about my living room setting up all his gadgetry. As soon as everything was ready, he switched on my computer and handed me a thin, plastic headset with exposed wires. Two nodes hung from either side of the thing, which fitted snugly over my temples. While I sat back on the sofa and stared at the monitor before me, he gave me one simple instruction.
“Type something into Google.”
“But I don’t have a keyboard.”
“You don’t need one.”
According to Julian’s wishes, I simply thought about the action, and it happened. The word “something” came up in the search box, and my jaw dropped open in shock. At first, I thought the obvious, that my brother was purposefully fooling me with some kind of prank or gimmick, but repeated tests all came up with the same result. And it wasn’t just searching I could do telepathically, but anything. Literally anything I could think of, limited to the capabilities of the computer, of course. I had total control. There was even a sort of projection in my mind’s eye as it was happening, like the process was actually occurring inside my brain. It wasn’t perfect, but it was nothing short of amazing.
“You’re one of the first people to try it,” he told me once I’d tested everything out. “We’re calling it NeuroWorks, or something to that effect.”
I don’t think that feeling of astonishment ever truly left me. It was then that I realised my petty indignation, the dissatisfaction I felt after so many years of being outclassed, meant nothing in the face of my brother’s achievements, and I would be doing the world a disservice by failing to assist him. Julian departed that night after some drinks and a few laughs, and the next day, I enrolled once again for a degree in computer science. Four years later, I passed with flying colours, and Julian hired me to work for him at his company. There may have been a bit of nepotism involved, but that’s neither here nor there.
The next few years were dizzying. During the time in which I was getting (re)educated, Julian had been working with a team of elite neuroscientists, specialists that filled in the gaps in his knowledge, did all the things he couldn’t. Immediately, I felt I was in way over my head, but as my learning advanced, I gradually got up to speed, and my mood improved quite rapidly. That feeling of pride, like I was finally doing something productive with my life, was nothing short of fantastic, especially in the face of so many wasted years. I was never quite on Julian’s level, of course, but with enough time, I grew to be a valued contributor to the NeuroWorks project. Off the back of a long period of arduous work, the device fully came to fruition, culminating in an international commercial release.
It was a global success, and we made a fortune. Once we’d fully optimised it, it ended up being surprisingly cheap to produce and implement. The result was its adoption in billions of households and businesses. As expected, it completely changed the way we live and work in the virtual world. Worldwide productivity and efficiency increased tenfold. Even now, I’m typing this message with those same two nodes attached at either side of my head, hands-free. As cliched as it sounds, at that point, it truly felt like we were living in the future.
Honestly, I would’ve been happy to stop there. I could’ve moved somewhere green and sunny, spent the rest of my days doing TED Talks and sipping cocktails on the balcony of a villa, not giving a single damn. But not Julian. Like always, Julian had his eyes set on further horizons, on the subsequent stretch of progress. No sooner than a few months after NeuroWorks was released did he come up with his next magnificent idea.
“Consciousness splicing.”
That was how he described it on the day he first sat me down to try and explain. We were outside a café, some pretentious, gentrified establishment in the heart of London, with a coffee each.
“The next stage of human learning, or maybe even existence as a whole. NeuroWorks, compared to this…it’s just a stepping stone, Alex,” he told me. “If we get this right, we won’t just be able to use computers with our minds, we’ll be able to think like them, too.”
I struggled to wrap my head around the concept. “How do you mean, exactly?” I replied.
“Take what makes us sentient. Our minds, our passion, our free will. Everything a machine lacks. How can it be improved? How can it be bettered? What we lack naturally, we as a species, I mean, can be found in a computer. The processing power, the boundless memory, the objectivity. Not to mention the ability to conjure up any kind of information on a whim, the entire collective library of human knowledge, dating back thousands of years. But there are limitations. Computers can’t truly think for themselves. Not yet, anyway. They require input, direction. If we can intersect the strengths of man and machine, cross the gap that separates us…”
He was stirring his drink all the while. Julian had a thing about that: he could never look at you directly when he was thinking, like the image of your baffled face would put him off somehow.
“Okay, but you’re talking purely in theoretical terms, right? We’re centuries off reaching that point. I mean, creating a neural link between a person and Mac OS is one thing-
“I think it’s possible.”
A beat passed before he sighed, grabbed a napkin, and produced a pen from his pocket. I waited as he sketched out a crude, yet complicated diagram. I can’t recall it exactly – it was something to do with the relationship between time, space, and information. Far more philosophical than scientific, I remember thinking.
“The internet is a powerful beast. Our means of controlling it, of accessing it, even with NeuroWorks, are subpar. We just need another breakthrough, and then that could open the door for who knows what else. Traversing through decades online, going back and forth whenever we want-
“Easier said than done.”
“But it could be possible. It could.”
“I disagree. Not in our lifetimes, anyway. And even if it is, it sounds…dangerous. Very dangerous. The number of things that could go wrong, the variables…it doesn’t bear thinking about. We don’t want to get too far ahead of ourselves. Let’s learn to walk before we run, eh?”
He was quiet after that. The conversation stuck with me for the next couple of years. We were working mostly on maintaining NeuroWorks at that time, delivering a steady stream of updates and enhancements as society began to mold itself around its advent. There was some discussion as to when the next big leap forward would be, the next huge announcement from Julian’s company, but he remained tight-lipped about anything regarding that.
It was then that he started acting…weird. I saw him less and less in what was supposed to be our spare time together. The cancelled reservations and missed family events added up, but whenever I asked him about it, he just shrugged it off. “I’m a workaholic,” he would say. “You know you all mean the world to me, but so does this job.” I tried to comfort myself with that, but deep down, I think I knew he was hiding something. Something he thought would worry me, that was outside my area of expertise. I was going to confront him about it eventually. I just ended up waiting too long.
One night, he rang me out of nowhere. I remember shooting straight up into a sitting position in a pitch-black room – I think I’d been having a nightmare. The metallic surface of my phone was cold and smooth in my sweaty palm as I picked up the call and pressed it to my temple.
“Meet me at this address in half an hour. And be quick.”
I spoke a word or two in return, but the call had already ended. There was a soft blip, and some postcode I didn’t recognise appeared at the top of the screen.
Doing exactly as my brother asked, I got up, got changed, and made the 20-minute journey by car.
The place was a run-down warehouse in one of the rougher areas of town, where property prices were at their cheapest. I parked up and stepped outside, shivering as I cursed myself for not having the foresight to bring a thicker jacket. It wasn’t immediately obvious which building I was looking for, until I saw a flash of light through a broken window in the distance. Cautiously, I approached it, glancing around to assure myself I wasn’t walking into a trap, as stupid as that thought was. The main door being completely boarded up meant an obscured gap in the brickwork was my entry point.
Dodging the tiny droplets of water trickling in from the broken ceiling, I rounded a corner. The main, spacious area of the warehouse had been kitted out as a kind of makeshift workshop, near identical to a setup from NeuroWorks. It was as if someone had carved out one of our labs and dumped it here, beside walls of crumbling paint. My brow was furrowed as I stared from a distance at the scurrying scientists, who flicked me awkward looks as they went about tending to a central apparatus. I recognised a few of them, but they paid me little mind. I’m sure they knew I was coming.
It took me a few moments to realise, but Julian was part of the almighty cluster of machinery in the middle of it all. His body was a biological cog in an otherwise artificial setup; he was on his back, head tilted slightly forwards, arms splayed in a t-pose like he was being crucified. I’ll never get that image out of my head: him lying there, not having quite noticed me yet, sweat upon his brow. He was shirtless, too, wires running up and down his arms and a mesh inserted atop his shaved head, which was next to a monitor. The wires came down in gangly clumps off the side of the ‘bed’ he was on and fed into this gargantuan hunk of steel by his side. It was truly massive, topped with blinking lights and seemingly missing its outer casing. If I didn’t know better, I’d have assumed he’d been kidnapped and experimented on.
He looked at me, directly upwards from his perspective, and said, “You’re late,” through a smile.
I wasn’t smiling. “Julian, what the fuck is all of this?”
“I apologise for not telling you sooner. Truth be told, I didn’t want you to worry. But this is too important for you not to see.”
I was at a loss for words.
“What we’re going to do here, today, right now, will change the course of humanity. And you need to be here to witness it. So get ready. We’re starting!”
He shouted that last sentence, and all the scientists in the room shuffled to what could only be described as their ‘posts’. I merely watched as they started a countdown sequence of sorts, dutifully coordinating the machine through a large control panel. They communicated with short, snappy gestures and mumbled technobabble that I could barely pay attention to. Instinctively, I stepped back until I was at an arbitrarily ‘safe’ distance.
Seconds later, my mouth turned dry and a quiet ringing in my ears began to form. I chalked it up to nerves initially, but it soon became apparent there was some kind of static in the air, palpable interference that manifested in a painful shock as my hand grazed the shiny edge of a worksurface. It seemed to be emanating from the middle of the room, where Julian was. His eyes were closed now, tightly; he gave the impression of someone concentrating very intently on something.
There was a hum, so low you almost felt it before you heard it, slowly increasing in pitch. I suddenly had a headache, and I’m almost certain my hair was standing up under the confines of my flat cap. Panic surfaced within me as I noticed the scientists arguing. I shouted a word of protest, only to realise my ears had popped, and the faint ringing from earlier now sounded like a cacophonous bout of tinnitus.
Something was clearly and utterly wrong. Julian’s deathly stillness as he honed his thoughts had ended, and he was now thrashing around, foaming at the mouth, unable to break free of his confines. I ran back over to his side-
“Don’t touch me!” He managed to force out. I could barely hear him, but the crazed look in his eyes, dilated like a cat’s, convinced me to leave him alone. Instead, I focused my attention on the scientists.
“What are you maniacs doing to him?” I yelled. “Fucking switch that thing off! Now!”
One of them came and pushed me away. His mouth was moving, but I couldn’t make out the words. The noise of the machine was just too loud. There was a collective moment of fear as the tone became ear-splitting. No-one could hear anyone anymore.
Julian looked like he was being possessed. My attention was drawn to the monitor beside him; before, it had been inert, but it was currently displaying a fast-moving, almost psychedelic kaleidoscope of uniform shapes and colours. If you’ve ever seen what a computer looks like when you remove its RAM while it’s running, it was like that, but even more erratic and animated. I was practically hypnotised by it, and as I gazed further and further into its depths, an awful image began to emerge.
It was Julian. I swear to god, I know it sounds crazy, but Julian’s face materialised in the form of this…nightmarish coalescence of text and code. His mouth was open, and his eyes were bulging out of his skull. I turned to my brother to see him doing the exact same expression there on the table, unable to breathe. It made me feel sick to my stomach.
Suddenly, the machine shut down, taking the monitor’s display and oppressive interference with it. Julian’s eyes glazed over, his face went pale as a sheet, and he slumped down onto his back, letting out a huge exhale. It was when he didn’t take another breath that two white-coated men went to check his pulse.
A single head shake between them confirmed what I feared. Gone.
I think I was in shock the whole rest of the night, because I didn’t speak a word to anyone until the morning. They sent me home in a taxi and promised to take care of what had happened. I burst into furious, bitter tears as soon as I put the keys in the door. I was so, so angry at being kept in the dark and lied to for so long, with this having been the culmination. Little did I know that was just the beginning.
Julian’s team called me into work the next day for a private meeting. To maintain the company’s work and appearance, they were going to sweep the whole thing under the rug. Fucking figures, I remember thinking. My first urge, naturally, was to fight this burial, to expose them and bring about some sense of justice, but I was talked down from it. You might call me cowardly for that, but put yourself in my shoes for a minute; I had no real evidence at hand, and it soon became apparent that the scientists were only operating under my brother’s command. Everything had been planned out in advance, even the system that was being followed now, for what would happen if a fatal accident occurred. Telling the world the true events of that night would’ve been a losing battle – already, they’d began cleaning up their mess – demolishing the warehouse lab, scrubbing all evidence from the archives, etc. It was a tough call, but I felt compelled to adhere to my brother’s wishes and keep moving forward with NeuroWorks. You can judge me for that if you want, but I don’t care.
I forgave them all over time. It wasn’t even really their fault Julian had died that night – there’d been a freak malfunction with the equipment, leading to them being unable to turn it off. I won’t go too in-depth; there’s a lot about it that I still don’t understand to this day. Anyway, once the dust had settled, we put the incident behind us and gave up the whole ‘cutting-edge’ angle for a while. We started pursuing safer technological ventures like media creation, but that was when something strange began happening.
You see, Julian’s cause of death seemed obvious initially – most likely a heart attack or stress-related aneurysm – but the autopsy revealed something startling. There was little to no internal damage anywhere in his body: no burst blood vessels or spasmed arteries. Rather, all the electrical signals in his body had simply vanished simultaneously, deactivating his brain. It was as if he had literally been switched off.
None of this ever got out, of course. NeuroWorks, now one of the most valuable, powerful companies of all time, made sure of that. Julian’s death was publicly credited as a stroke due to undetected high cholesterol levels. But it’s certainly interesting considering what came after.
Over the next few weeks, we had virus troubles. A malicious software was making its way through our computer system. There was a bit of a panic to begin with; an internal investigation revealed we had far too much unsecured data that anyone working for a market competitor would be happy to steal and sell to the highest bidder, but the more we found out about it, the more curious we became. The strange thing about it was only partly what it did. Corruption and deletion are pretty bog-standard as far as viruses go, but its effects were largely patternless, like it was picking items at complete random. But it was also when it was doing it. After some research, we found that people had been complaining about this mystery malware they’d designated as ‘WerStar’ (due to the word apparently repeating itself over and over again in damaged code and text boxes) since the beginning of the internet. Despite this, its existence had never been formally documented anywhere, which is extremely bizarre. Whatever WerStar is, it’s completely transcendent of time.
We think we know what’s going on, though. We had our ideas to begin with, and there were plenty of skeptics amongst us, but a recent event has all but verified it. A couple of months ago, I found a .txt file on my computer that wasn’t there the day before, entitled ‘WerStargift’. It was an enormous mass of code that took weeks to fully analyse. Delving into the nitty gritty of the whole thing would take forever, but from what we’ve been able to glean from it (and I promise I’m being serious when I say this), it’s a formula for communicating virtually with the past.
Which brings us to today. Well, our today. We’re sending this message from the year 2050 to what we’ve calculated to be the mid-2010s. Myself and Julian should only be little children. Don’t worry, this isn’t some Terminator-style mission to erase or alter a former timeline. We just need you to tell us something.
The code wasn’t the only thing in the .txt file. There was a message, a message we can’t read. It’s been cobbled together on an old, outdated editor that isn’t compatible with the modern NeuroWorks setup anymore. Believe me, we’ve tried everything, but not even old computers will display it. We think our failure to view it is the whole reason we’re even able to talk to you now. In your time, it should still be legible. You may need to do something with it, view it through a Source editor, perhaps, but it won’t be hard to decipher.
You should be able to communicate with us, too. Hopefully. We’ve tested this with random forums – dozens of messages we made that were supposedly sent in 2012, and had people respond to them in that same year. We’re well aware of the danger associated with this, but at the same time, it’s the only chance we’ve got.
I’m going to wrap this up by apologising. I’m sorry that I haven’t been more specific throughout this message; there’s a lot I’ve glossed over in the pursuit of keeping things relatively short. Maybe this is just a lost cause – the technology we’re using is still extremely unrefined, so there’s a chance this might not even get out there. But it’s been 10 years since Julian ‘died’, and I’d give anything to be able to see my brother again. If this works, if we’re able to somehow establish contact, then we may even be able to reverse the process, to find him a human host.
So, please, for the love of God, please, what does it say? Where is Julian?
...
...
...
https://imgur.com/a/hu9jOuk

I’m not an extraordinary individual. Not to my knowledge at least. However, there have been many anomalous things that have happened to me throughout my life. Some of these incidents were harmless while others were downright haunting. Either way, all these incidents were well beyond simply being “out of the ordinary.”
The most recent of these incidents involve my reddit account. Specifically, a post that I don’t ever remember posting. I don’t have any medical or family history of memory-related disorders. I have never shown any signs of such memory disorders, nor do I have any predisposition to them. I also do not partake in injecting any drugs including alcohol or anything else that could cause me to forget certain events. Therefore, I would’ve remembered originally posting the following post and yet I don’t. The original post was titled, “A former work partner sent me a strange email last night, now I fear for my safety.”
I discovered this post this morning after vomiting for the first time in years. However, the vomit wasn’t what scared me. The fact that it was partly black. Closing the lid of the toilet after vomiting in it, I noticed something on the underside of my left forearm. “Subject Number 9: Attempt number 1; Result: Conversion Rejected; minimal to no physical alteration; failure” where the words printed on my arm. That was the final straw and that’s why I’ve decided to repost the original post rather than simply deleting it.
-Original Post-
It happened last night around 11:30pm. I was getting ready to go to bed when I heard a notification sound from my laptop. It was an email titled, "If you get this email, you’ve been selected for a true opportunity. Don’t resist it!" and attached to it, was a Word Document. It was from an ex-coworker whose real name I won't use (I'll be using the name Dave as a replacement). Not wanting to stay up for what I thought was an advertisement or promotion of some kind, I simply saved the attachment after verifying the email's origin.
I then went to bed before being woken up around 3:00 at night to a loud thumping sound and my laptop being turned on seemingly by itself. Upon opening the laptop, I saw that it was opened to the word document while a page to reddit had been open. After reading the Word Document in its entirety, I was dumbfounded. It wasn’t an advertisement; it was a warning. At first, I would’ve assumed it was just a dumb, ridiculous prank. However, following events made me convinced that’s not the case.
I tried to delete the word document and close reddit with no success and laptop will only pull up reddit, email, and Microsoft Word. I then tried to turn off my computer, but it only gave an error sound in response. Worse yet, my phone won’t even turn on so calling for help via my phone isn’t an option. It’s definitely some sort of virus. Furthermore, in the process of trying to leave my apartment on the fifth floor, the door wouldn’t unlock, and the peep hole was obstructed. Following this, I tried to scream for help, but nothing happened. This has only made me fearful and desperate. That's why I've decided to post the document I received here so I can maybe appease whatever virus this is.
To give context, I met Dave when we were both hired in the same group. Long story short, the job simply wasn't for us, and we were both let go the same day right before the end of our job's probationary period. After that, I went to work for a warehouse job to stay paying for the bills. I'll admit it's not the best job, but I won't complain because it pays enough for me to afford my monthly expenses. However, that didn't stop me from being jealous of Dave once I had learned that he had found work in an unnamed experimental treatment facility.
I live in an area on the southeast coast of North America that's known for constant innovation. Dave on the other hand, lived 20 minutes away from me. That's partially why it wasn't so hard for both of us to find replacement jobs. However, it didn't explain his luck as I never took him as the kind of guy to work in the field of Biology and Gene Therapy. He seemed more of a mechanic than a scientist. Regardless, I was happy for him and moved on with my typical life.
That was all about 2 months ago.
The document that was attached to the email was a letter. Any details such as the name of the CEO or the company Dave worked for have been removed. This was the message I saw when I read the document.
-Message Starts-
[My Name], you’re one of the people I sent this to. You need to read everything that is in this document very carefully, word for word and then post this to a site that it is or will be pulled up on your device. I’ve installed a virus on your computer that will only be nullified once this document has been posted onto a specific internet page designated as “Safe to post” by the virus’ code. I’ve done this to ensure that the truth gets out there not to harm you. I’m sorry it had to be this way.
However, I shall give you some context first.
It all started after I didn't make my previous job's probationary period. I had moved to the local area just for that job. So, when I didn’t make the cut, I originally was planning on moving back to my home state. However, that soon changed as two nights before I was going to begin the move. I had gotten a letter from [Removed] Inc. It was a job offer.
"Hello [Removed], we've heard about your recent and unfortunate separation from [Removed]. We would like to extend a job offer after reviewing your skills and experience as we’ve determined that you'd be a better fit here with us and your contributions valued. Your job would be relatively simple, safe, and rewarding. You will be trained, costs covered by us. Should you choose to stay, you’ll enjoy our amazing benefits including, but not limited to, full insurance coverage, competitive pay, and 152 hours of PTO! All we ask is that you're willing and able to work 12-hour shifts, lift more than 50lbs, comply with our reasonable NDAs and do the job with quality and safety in mind. Should this offer pique your interest, don't hesitate to call us or email us!
Sincerely, [Removed].”
“Today’s biological questions are tomorrow’s biological achievements here at [Removed].”
I must've read it twice before deeming it as "too good to be true" However, the truth is, I was desperate. Desperate enough to take the time and reach out to the company. The fact is, I didn't want to go back to my home state. If I had a chance to stay here, why not try and see if the job is genuine. “The worst thing that can happen is I get my time wasted” I thought.
I called the CEO the next day and to my surprise, long story short, it was successful! I was hired! Not only that but the job's hourly wage was $10 more than my previous job and I only had to work 3 days a week! I was told to come in the next available shift for training.
I eagerly began my first two weeks here normal enough. It was mostly training videos relating to our job procedure, receiving hands-on training for simple tasks, and meeting my coworkers. On the first day, I noticed that all the coworkers barely ever talked. I chalked it all up as they simply being standoffish to me, the new hire. I figured they needed to warm up to me.
After the first 2 weeks were done, I had a good idea of what I'd be doing. I would be experimenting on human and wild animal tissue as well as live animals. This was to study the effects of mutating and altering certain genetic codes. I know the last part might seem unethical, but it was to discover cures for diseases using gene therapy. I wasn’t hurting animals; I was helping them. However, the job still began to feel wrong.
It started with me meeting the CEO. Immediately I noticed something was different about her. Specifically, the way she looked for a CEO. She towered above me at almost seven feet in height and her skin was insanely pale. Her hair was jet-black as was the color of her eye’s irises and the shape of her upturned eyes made her gaze very intimidating as well. She looked young, perhaps 25 at the oldest. Furthermore, the way she dressed; she wore a black and grey camo military-style uniform didn’t help. There was what looked to be the patch of a flag or symbol on her left shoulder, but it wasn’t that of any nation or group I recognized. The symbol/flag in question was a red-letter X in the middle of a red outline of an eye with a black background. Her voice was also very off.
After meeting her, I was then made to sign several NDAs and other contractual documents. The documents I was signing seemed standard but something in me felt wrong with it. After signing the NDAs, I was then introduced to Arin, the person I'd be shadowing. Everything went downhill from there. Immediately, within 5 minutes of meeting him, Arin began to give me a list of ominous, strange suggestions that sounded more like warnings.

1. If you hear the CEO seemingly talking to herself behind a locked door with the hallway lights flickering outside, walk away. She’s talking to the voice. Whatever they are talking about is none of your business and you want to keep it that way.
2. If you are working by yourself and the lights turn off. Don't move. You will hear a voice, cooperate with it, answer any questions it has and do what it says. I don't want to have to clean up after another, "unfortunate work accident."
3. Though this is unlikely, if the CEO tells you to meet them in their room. Do not keep them waiting. She doesn't like it when you're late because it is likely demanding your presence.
4. If you have questions about what exactly we do, don't ask. Don't try to tell anyone outside of this facility the nature of our work and its end goal should you find out. It's not us that will come for you, it's the voice.
5. If you happen to see the figure that the voice belongs to, it has respect for you. Keep it that way but avoid eye contact with it.
6. Do not refer to the voice as the CEO or a mental illness. Even if that’s what it seems like, I promise you It not that. You treat it with the utmost respect and legitimacy even when it's not around.
7. None of these suggestions I’ve given you are a "joke" of any kind. Take it seriously.

I didn't say anything, but I was more than confused. I could tell by his face that he was intent on convincing me. In fact, he had the most serious look I had ever seen on anyone’s face. He then said, "I have your back but don't get yourself in trouble. Don't mention what I've told you at lunch either. Everyone learns in their third week. Now, you know what they say about Rome? When in Rome, do as the romans do yeah? Well, you're in Rome so do as we do. Oh, and I'll say this one final time, nothing I've told you is to be talked about outside of the workplace. Don't think about it too hard though. Just don't forget either." My heart began to race slightly after hearing this as I struggled to go about the work routine of isolating and studying DNA strands, reorganizing documents, Injecting certain labelled syringes into various lab animals, etc.
The next 4 days went roughly the same as I got into the routine of things. I got better at my tasks and was even allowed to work alone by the end of the week. All the other coworkers at lunch would say things like, "I went to go work at my station but the door to the room was locked, I then heard the CEO talking on the other end." or "The lights went out at my station yesterday, IT didn't say anything. The lights came on after 2 minutes. IT must've been observing." As these things were said, they exchanged knowing looks with no sign of any joking going on. At this point I was beginning to be convinced that the CEO was insane just by that alone.
The following 4 weeks were almost completely normal. There was no mention of "The Voice" except towards the end of my 4th week when Arin said, "IT must be taking a break or a vacation if it does that sort of thing." before one of our coworkers apparently got a little too clever and said, "IT might just decide to screw off for once." Everyone then stopped to look at him with stern expressions and no one even smiled. No one else said anything about the voice for the rest of lunch that day. The whole event made me nervous even more.
Midway through my 5th week, I had my first encounter with the voice while working the last hour of my shift. I was in a level A biohazard suit and about to mix two separate solutions in a petri dish based on instructions projected on my station's computer screen. One was dark red and labelled, "Human Blood; O- Type" and the other was black and simply labelled, "Black Blood." I was just about to mix them when the all the lights, including the light from my computer monitor cut out. Then, I heard a low-pitched, inhuman voice speak, "So interesting.” It spoke before continuing, “Tomorrow you will be made to do something dangerous but very important. In fact, that's why we brought you here. You are expendable due to your lack of prior experience and knowledge. However, I know you need the money and if you come in tomorrow, I’ll pay you 100k after you complete the task.”
The voice was beyond haunting because of how abnormal it sounded. It was like 3 people speaking at once. One voice was a deep, yet feminine, prominent, and loud voice while the two sounded like a man’s faint whispers echoing the same words. The voice then continued to my dismay, “Now, you were about to mix the two agents. Remember to destroy the petri dish after 3 minutes.” I didn't even ask how it knew to respond with that. I just stood there drenched in sweat and shaking, horrified at the whole experience. Then I thought back to the rules I was told on day seven. There was no doubt in my mind that this place was insane!
The voice then left without a trace as the lights came back on. I then completed the task according to instructions given. I watched as the Human Blood mixed with the Black substance. The entire petri dish became black within 1 minute before reverting to blood. When analyzing the liquid under a microscope, I saw that the cells had their entire genetic code rewritten. There were also what appeared to be stem cell like cell in the blood. They were black and moved through the other cells mutating any that hadn’t been converted. I immediately stepped away from the microscope as I gasped and then disposed of the mutagenic waste by placing it in the incinerator. The day then ended not long after that. I was reluctant to come back but the money promised was undeniable.
When I got to my assigned station at the basement level of the facility the next day, I was greeted by the CEO again who told me we’d be working on a "willing test subject" for an experiment. She also told me that I and my immediate coworkers were the only employees on site except for a few executives that would also be present. I was still shaken up from the previous day’s experience and the weirdness of that current day. However, I was then fully convinced with the promise of an additional 100k being deposited into my account immediately after successfully completing my task. I would've turned back had I known what would happen less than 30 minutes later.
I was escorted by the CEO to an all-steel room except for a panel of heavily reinforced, thick observation glass and door that looked like it belonged in Fort Knox. In the middle of the room lies a medical bed with a tube full of black fluid beside it. Several of my coworkers then stepped in the room with me as they saw my confusion. The door then closed behind them. Then Arin spoke, “So I guess the CEO didn’t tell you. Listen, there’s a reason why our team is the only one here today. It to put you in that bed.” I shouted in protest, “What! No! I don’t agree with this! Please, you can’t do this to me! This is illegal! Stop it!” Arin then replied with the last words I heard him speak, “Sorry buddy, this is why we brought you here. No one’s going to find out! We are all getting 100k individually to do this. You’re not the only one who needs money right now. Now let’s just make this easy for everyone. Get on there!” I then replied with, “Fuck you! I kill all of you!” as they wrestled me to bed with ease. They then cuffed my feet and hands to the bed with metallic restraints. The last thing I remember is a cloth being put over my nose as a strong scent filled my nostrils.
The next thing I remember was my eyes being covered by my hands as cried. I then pulled my hands away to see that they had become elongated, and my fingers had become claw-like. I then looked down at my mutated, blood-soaked body in horror. All around me was death and bodily destruction. I didn’t recognize a single body. The bed, equipment, walls, and floor were painted with blood and littered with human tissue. I immediately froze for a second time before retching. As a towered above the destruction, I realized I was significantly taller than I remembered. Then I looked ahead of me and saw that the tube with the black fluid was empty. “…No” Was the only word I could get out. That was when I noticed that my voice was altered. I sounded like the voice except prominent voice was a demonic version of my original voice and the faint whispering voices that came from my throat afterwards were feminine. Then I heard The Voice call out to me from the direction of the door behind me. I turned and saw the CEO. “It’s okay child, you’re mine now.” Were the words she spoke to me… and they will be the words she speaks to you.
Dear viewer, I am known by many names. One of them is Goddess Cerridwen. I know all of this is a lot to take in but soon it will all make sense. You were meant to worship me and soon you will as well as everyone else revieing “An email supposedly from [Dave’s real name]”. Your device is being tracked as of the time the Virus is installed onto it. I’m on my way to take you. You shall spread the word. It will do you no good, but it will make my name known furthermore so they may worship me.
-Message ends-
After I first got done reading this, I thought it was some ridiculous joke but now I no longer feel that way as the lights have begun to flicker and I’m beginning to hear whispering sounds from my closet. I’m going to try one more thing to escape.
I thought of an idea to get out of this situation and that was to start a fire in my kitchen to trip the fire alarm and get help. However, as I went over to the stove the power shut out and all the light from the outside streetlights seemed to dim unnaturally until no light came through. The only thing illuminating my entire apartment was my now laptop with its now eerie blue glow lighting up the dark world around me.
I decided to do the only thing I could think of, post the document on reddit. However, just as I was about to do this, I heard what sounded like three demonic voices speaking at once coming from behind me. Then I lost all hope of escape as the horror of reality sunk in and froze my body still as Goddess Cerridwen, the CEO, spoke to me, “Once you read the document, I simply manifested myself near your device’s location. That’s how I’ll get the first of the other ones too. You’re mine now. Go on, post it.”
-End of Original Post-
As I’m reposting this on here, there’ve been several local reports of people in my area going missing with no trace. “The first 10 of the missing people had received an email from [Dave’s real name]. However, now people are going missing without having received any previous let-” I turned off the TV after hearing that. The local news had also been saying that some other people had been waking up with words stamped on their arms. Some of these people that had reported these words on their forearms have since gone missing again. It's likely that whatever this “Goddess Cerridwen” is, it is responsible for the disappearances in my area. Furthermore, it's coming for me now and I know this for a fact. I say this because no light is coming through my apartment despite it still being mid-day and the lights of my apartment… have begun to flicker rapidly.

Part 3
Day 14
Chloe walked into what had once been the beautiful home of the Garrisons. The room she walked into was the main hall. It was large and square-shaped with a room on both sides and a hall on the other side of the door. In the middle of the room, a large antler chandelier lay in a destroyed twisted mess on the hardwood floor. She looked over at the walls and saw a few small circular holes. Bullet holes. She thought, taking a step closer to get a better look. Herman followed her wagging his tail like nothing was wrong with this situation. She looked down toward the floor and spotted large claw marks on the hardwood floor. Some looked like hound claw marks (she became acquainted enough with the marks to recognize them) but others were much larger. Far too large to be from one of the hounds.
After scanning the room for another minute she decided she’d go into the left room first. The left room was a small lounge that seemed unassuming at first glance until she noticed the couch that had been thrown against the wall and the dried blood stains on the walls and carpet. It was human blood and was mostly frozen.
She walked across the main hall and into the room on the right. This room was unassuming with very little apart from bookshelves and a small desk. It also seemed relatively undisturbed with little to no damage.
She walked down the hall into the main part of the house. This main section had an open-air kitchen/dining room and a large living room. It looked horrible, it was clear a massacre had happened here. Blood was everywhere on the floors, the walls, and even the ceiling in certain spots. Most of the blood was a dark red with occasional splatters of yellow-greenish blood. She saw bits of muscle and tissue in the blood, and all around that was wreckage. Their large 100-inch flat-screen TV lay crushed on the floor. The leather couch was flipped over and ripped in countless places. The fan lay on the floor looking like it had a sledgehammer taken to it. The kitchen was worse though… slumped against the wall was a mostly eaten body. It was essentially just a skeleton with small bits of meat and tendon still clinging on. Despite being absolutely terrified something made her want to get a closer look. She noticed most of the bones were broken if not shattered, and it wasn’t until that point she realized everything below the rib cage was missing. She yelped and looked away. The rest of the kitchen was destroyed with the drawers and cupboards broken, and one section of cupboards laying on the ground with shattered glass all around it. Lastly, the dining room. Another antler chandelier lay destroyed on the ground and the table was leaned over like it had been used as firing cover.
She walked over to the dining table only to realize another destroyed body lay behind it. This one looked like it had been thrown around by the look of its breaks. This one only had half a skull with the frontal and parietal bones absent. She looked and saw this was wearing dog tags. She let out a small sob when she saw that. She knew who it had to be. It had to be Timothy Garrison. She and Timothy were the same age and had dated through most of high school. After they graduated they had a mutual break up and she met Joey in college, but she and Timothy remained good friends. He had come to their wedding and he was the one who taught her how to shoot a rifle, and he had been the only person in his family to serve in the military.
Herman slowly walked up to the body and started sniffing it.
“Get away from him!” She screamed at the dog.
She started to sob when her brain seemed to kick back into gear. Pull yourself together and cry later, She told herself. She stood up, wiped the tears off her face, and kept going. She went back over to the kitchen and yanked their fridge open. It was stocked to the brim with meats, fruits, vegetables, and bottles. She restrained her excitement at the sight but still grabbed as much as she could. She filled a duffel bag full of only a portion of the goodies in their fridge then moved on. CREAK! The loud sound interrupted her walk over to the pantry. It came from the wooden ceiling just above her, and whatever it was that caused it sounded large. She froze and listened for more sounds, but after a while of nothing she moved on hoping beyond all hope that it was just a house noise.
She and Herman crept over to the pantry and with a quick pull she opened it. The pantry was large and also stocked with food. Most of it was crap that would expire or had already expired, but what excited her was the large sack of potatoes sitting by the door. She grabbed the sack and set it on top of the duffle bag by the fridge.
CREAK! This one was louder than the last and sent a chill down her spine. She wasn’t sure whether or not she wanted to run out of the house or go upstairs and investigate. Her head was telling her she should leave but the other part of her so wanted to know what was making that sound. Finally, she made a decision. She’d search the bottom floor then she would go upstairs to check out the noise. CREAK! This one was the quietest so far, coming from below her. The basement, she thought, looking down at the floor.
She crept down a hall on the first floor with Herman right behind her. She was following a trail of blood like it was a trail of breadcrumbs. It was a deep crimson red and there was a lot of it. Whoever was bleeding definitely wasn’t alive anymore, she thought. She slowly followed the trail up to a white door which was now half covered in blood. Shakily she reached for the blood-covered knob and pulled the door open. It was the basement staircase but she looked at the way the blood had puddled and it told a story. They had hurried halfway down the stairs before something knocked them down to the bottom. There they are killed and then dragged into another section of the basement. She slowly walked down the stairs watching each step carefully until finally, her boot made contact with the linoleum floor.
Meanwhile…
I sat messing with and poking at the satellite phone trying to see why it wouldn’t send a call through. I’d looked through the manual and popped it open to see if anything had broken, but it was perfectly fine. I angrily smacked the phone against the coach, but still, nothing happened. At last, I set the phone down in defeat hoping Chloe was ok.
I turned from the couch to the window and saw Gretchen and Mom still busy with the shoveling. For the amount of snow on the driveway they’d made good work. Almost half of the driveway was clear of snow and covered in salt.
I watched on for a while before I heard a little beep. I looked over and saw the little screen of the satellite phone was showing an empty battery. I smacked my palm into my forehead annoyed by my stupidity.
“Hey Alby, can you get me some batteries?” I asked, looking over at him.
He nodded and disappeared into the kitchen a minute or two later he came back out holding the box of batteries.
“Thank you!” I said taking the box and quickly popping two new batteries in.
The basement was dark, very dark. Chloe could hardly see a thing, but she had thought of this scenario and pulled a flashlight from one of her pockets. Ca-Click! The thin beam of the flashlight kicked on. She was expecting to see the light illuminate the wall on the other side of the room or maybe a piece of furniture. But it illuminated a wall of webs. She saw through the webs at least a dozen cocoons far more than just the Garrison family. But even worse she saw dozens and dozens of stingers. They’d made the basement into a nest.
Bzzz…
The satellite phone continued to buzz and an uproar began to grow around her. Herman let out a growl and looked ready to pounce. Chloe in a hurry grabbed Herman’s collar and started running upstairs with him. The basement became full of the sound of screeches and she heard something big started moving down there. She sprinted as quickly as she could, making it to the top of the stairs and turning around to see at least a dozen stingers following her. Rat-a-tatatatatat!! She shot a barrage of bullets down at the stingers hitting most of them. Then something big appeared at the bottom of the stairs. Two things actually. Two hounds. She yelped and then slammed the door shut. She looked around quickly for something to barricade the door. Her eyes met a small dresser in a bedroom near the door. She pulled it out and shoved it against the door. CRACK! It came from the other side of the door and was quickly followed by a loud slam. She grabbed the still-growling Herman and started pulling him along with her. After a minute he started walking by her side and she let him go.
Suddenly she remembered the walkie and pressed the button.
“Joey… Joey, I'm here!” She yelled half excited and half still terrified.
I let out a sigh of relief; “Did you check out the Garrisons already?” He asked.
“Sort of… I’m still over there,” She explained.
She thought about telling me what she’d encountered but didn’t want to overly worry me. Plus recounting that day's events would just make things worse for her, not better.
“Ok, just be safe. I love you,” I told her.
“Love you too,” She said.
Bzzz…
She sat in the kitchen near her bags thinking for a minute. Since the crash, she hadn’t heard a thing from the basement door which made her start to suspect that the stairs had collapsed. Her curiosity had gotten desperate and she now felt like she had to check what was upstairs. She would never forgive herself if someone was still alive up there and died because she didn’t go and help them.
She slowly crept upstairs, her rifle trained and Herman at her side. The Garrison's house was set on a hill in such a way that the second floor was larger than the first. The second floor was made up of four halls that made a square with rooms within and outside of that square. The spiral stairs entered a corner of the square. Chloe reached the top stair and looked down the halls. Both were wrecked like upstairs but down one of the adjoining halls a body lay on the floor, or what was left of a body. She slowly walked over and saw this was by far the worst body she’d seen so far.
This one looked like it had been eaten similarly to Carl. The sternum and ribs were shattered and the spine was broken, but this one was worse. The bones were covered in bites and scratches, but worst of all the splatters around the body were immense; the person had likely struggled while they were being eaten alive. Chloe shivered at the thought and could only hope that they didn’t suffer long.
She stepped away from the body and got a better look around her. Apart from the body and the blood around it, there wasn’t much sign of death up there, but it still looked awful. Just like downstairs, the walls were covered in gashes and holes, and Chloe was becoming very surprised that they didn’t hear any of these gunshots.
CREAK! She looked down the hall where it had come from. For a brief second, she saw something at the end of the dark hall then it disappeared. It was only then that she noticed how dark it was up there, because of the houses set up there were no windows in the hall and the power had been out for days. She pulled out her flashlight Ca-Click! The narrow beam popped on and barely illuminated the end of the hall, but as she had thought whatever was there was gone now. She started to go about the search process methodically slowly going down the hall checking a room on the inside of the hall and then on the outside. The first room she poked her head into was a girl’s bedroom. It was decorated with a wallpaper of pink flowers and a small bed with pink covers. It was the stereotype of a little girl’s room. She noticed the covers were disheveled and a few things were knocked over. It looked like something had happened in the room but she wasn’t sure what.
She stepped out of the room and moved on to the next and the next. They were both similar with a similar disheveled nature. She started to realize whatever had happened it had woken them all up. She tried to push the last door in the hall open but it wouldn’t budge.
She continued up to the corner where she’d seen the thing. Multiple things then happened at once. She saw something massive lurking in the hall she began to turn down, she heard a creak behind her, Herman barked, and screeches began coming from downstairs sounding like the things had finally escaped the basement. Before she could stop Herman he started making a charge for the thing growling and barking. Chloe made a move after him but a gloved hand grabbed her and then covered her mouth. She watched Herman lung towards the thing then SLAM! It whacked Herman mid-air sending the dog flying back down the hall. He landed with a crash right next to her, a large bloody slash across his body. SCROAR! The sound came from the massive beast and nearly shattered her eardrums, and for one brief second, she raised the flashlight from Herman to the creature. She didn’t see much but that was enough.
She saw its face. It had four disturbing brown eyes, they were eyes she recognized. Those eyes… Those were the eyes of Mrs. Garrison. She gasped in horror through the gloved hand and she heard the person holding her let out a slight sob. The rest of its face wasn’t any better. Its top of head and forehead were all one bony plate. Its mouth was a black hole of teeth, and like the hounds, its lower jaw split into two mandibles. The back of its head had strange thin attachments that reminded her of the gills on an axolotl's head. Then in an instant, a few more things happened. The person holding her made a move for a door, the monster made a move for them, and the slamming footsteps of the hounds as they sprinted up the spiral staircase.
“Get in,” The person said, letting go of her and opening the door.
She turned around and saw the person who’d grabbed her and saw Fred Garrison standing next to the open door.
“NOW!” He yelled, grabbing her and pulling her into the room.
Fred hurried inside after her and quickly slid a fridge against the door. Seconds later angry screeches and slams rang out from the other side. They sounded like the hounds, not the big ones. Then she caught one other sound in the chaos, a wine. Oh gosh, Herman is still alive, She thought.
Fred stood by the door shotgun in hand while the slamming and screeching continued. She stood there and listened as they continuously tried to get in. Suddenly she heard Herman let out a growl, seconds later one of the hounds shrieked like they were in pain. CRUNCH! The sounds of Herman’s attack stopped and were replaced with sounds of meat ripping.
Chloe let out a small sob with her only comfort being that the crunch was likely Herman’s neck breaking.
Fred stepped away from the door and looked at her. He did not look like the man she remembered him as. His hair and beard looked like large rose bushes that were never cut. His blue eyes looked depressed like there was nothing there but sadness. Then she noticed a large bandage on his left arm. It looked like the whole arm had gotten cut open at some point.
Then her eyes wandered around the room. It was a small shop/man cave room. There were a few guns on the table, but more importantly, she noticed lit candles everywhere.
“I… I… I’m sorry,” He said with tears in his eyes.
She let down a quiet sob and Fred walked over helping her find a seat on the couch. After a minute of crying with Fred awkwardly trying to comfort her, she pulled herself together and looked up at the man.
“What happened?” She asked.
The man's face changed and she saw tears build up in his eyes; “A massacre,” He said grimly.
Then he followed with his story: “It happened around the fifth day I think. It was late and Jess and I were watching TV in the living room. Tim, Tom, Bart, and Gerry were chatting at the dinner table. Tom's wife and my four daughters were upstairs in bed. Everything was quiet and peaceful when suddenly my two dogs started barking outside. Now I know sometimes they’ll bark at dogs but this wasn’t that type of barking. This was get the heck away from me or I’ll kill you type barking. Then I started hearing weird screeching noises and at that point, I went over to the backdoor to check out the problem. I saw a bunch of massive spiders outside trying to attack my dogs, except they weren’t really spiders. Some of them had stingers and others kinda looked like slugs with spider legs. They’d stung one of my dogs a bunch and she was lying on the ground, the other was trying to stand her ground but it was a losing battle. I pulled at my revolver and started shooting at them. They were really fast. I think only one or two shots actually hit them. They started running over to me. One ran right in between my legs and a few of them tried to attack me. I shot those ones and turned around to try and stop the one that had gotten in, but it was already running havoc in the kitchen. My sons were chasing it, but they weren’t having the best of luck. Suddenly there was a crash, more spiders jumped through the now shattered windows, and something was banging on the front door. In an instant, the door was knocked off its hinges and one of those creeper things came through the door…”
Chloe interrupted him with: “I’m sorry but what are “those creeper things?””
“The… the big ones. The type that got your dog.” He explained.
“Anyways… it came running into the house, and before any of us could stop it. It threw Tom across the kitchen and into the wall. I came running to help him but that’s when it slashed my arm and threw me into the TV. The TV fell on top of me and then one of those spiders ran over and stung me in the thigh. I lay there with my eyes beginning to grow heavy. I saw Gerry, Tim, and Bart using the table as the shield. All three were hunched behind the table as the creeper began eating Tom. In a quick move, all three made a run for it. As they were running the creeper pounced and threw Tim into the table. Then it slashed Bart across the chest. Gerry managed to maneuver the creature and hurried over to help me. Bart ran down the hall to the basement and me and Gerry started hurrying upstairs. At some point, I blacked out and woke up here. Everyone was gone.” He finished with a somber look on his face.
“Oh gosh, I’m sorry.” She said looking at him.
“And somehow they turned my beloved Jess into one of those.” He said motioning to outside where the Creeper had been.
She stopped to listen and realized that she couldn’t hear the hounds anymore.
“Are they gone?” She asked, looking over at Fred.
“Probably, they eat fast for their size,” Fred said grimly.
They sat there again awkwardly before Chloe asked, “What are all the candles for anyway?”
“Well I started lighting them for warmth, but I realized those things don’t seem to like them. Especially the scented ones.” He explained.
She took a whiff of the air and realized how strong the scents were in the room. It almost gave her a headache smelling them.
“So why were you here anyway?” He asked.
She got a little nervous. She felt like a little kid in trouble with her parents. She didn’t want to tell the truth because she worried it would anger him.
“We were running out of supplies.” She said simply.
Her thoughts turned back towards me as she sat there.
I sat on the couch still watching them work. They were about two-thirds done now, but they were starting to really tire and it was getting late. It had started to darken and I knew soon night would fall, and I just hoped she would make it home before nightfall. I’d tried to call her again, but this time it would ring but not go through. I started to wonder if hers had run out of battery. Bang! I immediately turned to the window in a panic. I saw Gretchen standing holding the rifle a few feet away straight down the barrel as a dead stinger. I let out a sigh of relief and turned back toward the phone in my lap. I hope you’re an ok babe.
“Fred, we have a plan. Come with me, don’t stay here, you'll die,” Chloe pleaded.
“Maybe I want to die.” He said, “Look I’m not stopping you from leaving but I’m not going.”
“Well if I go alone I’ll die, please my family needs me,” She said desperately.
Memories of his family flooded through Fred’s mind. He remembered how he felt when his first kids, Tom and Tim, were born. She hadn’t even had a kid, and suddenly he found himself doing something he didn’t think he’d be doing.
“Fine, let's go send those things back to hell!” He yelled pushing the fridge out of the way.
“Follow my lead,” He ordered turning around to her.
Then he cocked his shotgun and slammed the door open. As he had suspected the hounds and creeper were both gone, but lying on the floor next to the door were two bodies. One was the sprawled-out body of a now-deceased hound. Its neck was broken in multiple places and its yellow-greenish blood was everywhere around it. The other body was ripped off most of its flesh, but she knew who it had belonged to. Herman wasn’t going to sit there and bleed out so he must’ve lunged for one of the hounds nailing it in the perfect spot on the neck killing it. Then the other hound quickly retaliated by feasting on the dying Herman, or maybe it was the creeper she wasn’t sure which one actually ate him. But what she did know was that the skeletal remains of Herman on top of the hound had its teeth in the hound's neck.
Chloe let out a small sob and in barely a whisper said: “You were such a good boy, but you can rest now.”
She reached down and picked up a ripped piece of leather near the bodies. It was what remained of Herman’s collar. She stuff the piece into her pocket and looked over at Fred. Fred had tears in his eyes as he saw the corpse of Gerry just down the hall.
“H… He was only 15,” Fred cried as he got a better look at the scene.
Chloe stood there unsure of what to do or say because Fred looked like he was about to have a meltdown. Then his sad face turned to one of anger. She moved the flashlight past the body and down to the corner and the staircase. Lurking next to the staircase its brown eyes glowing in the light was the creeper. It was guarding the stairs and most likely wasn’t going to let them leave for as long as it lived. Her curiosity was getting the better of her so she turned a dial on the flashlight to make it brighter. She wished she could go back and stop herself. Stop herself so she didn’t have to see the horror that was the creeper. Her first interpretation of the face was fairly accurate except for one part. Inside its gaping maw behind the mandibles almost looked like a separate set of jaws. The second set was much more human-like and looked ready to shred any meat to bits, but its head was nothing compared to the body it sat upon. It appeared to have six limbs, two very long front arms with two large claws at the end, and two more arms that attached to roughly where pectoral muscles would normally be. These arms were much shorter than the previous set. It had two back legs that appeared to be quadruple-jointed. It had the normal heel and knee joints, but it had one additional joint in the foot. Despite this the legs looked vaguely dogfish, but not nearly as those of the hounds. Coming out where the tail should be was a large thorax with two nasty stingers on the end. The thorax was curved like that of a wasp ready to strike when necessary. It almost looked like it had a shell of exoskeleton on its back and thorax, and spouting out of the thicker plates were large needle-like spikes.
It let out a demonic shriek as soon as the light brightened. It ducked out of sight and started making a loud clicking noise. Chloe and Fred kept their guns trained on where it had disappeared ready for it to come out charging, but unfortunately, they underestimated it. It made a loud ticking sound followed by CREAK! Before Chloe could even turn the hound that had crept from behind had her pinned to the ground and was bitting and slashing at her back. BANG!!!! BANG!!!! Fred had lowered his shotgun to its head. The first blast blew out two of its eyes and shattered part of its exoskeleton, and the second blast dug through the broken exoskeleton into the brain. The hound collapsed dead and with his gun pointed at where the creeper had been Fred helped push the body off of her.
Chloe got up a little shaken but relatively ok. She started guarding back while he guarded the front as they slowly made their way towards the stairs. Any second they were expecting the creeper to appear from around the corner, but it didn’t. The creeper was planning something again but they didn’t know what. Just as they made it to the stairs they turned down the other hall, but saw nothing. The creeper had likely walked into one of the rooms and was waiting, but they weren’t there to explore. They hurried down the spiral staircase, but just as they got to the bottom they saw the place was still swarming with stingers, slugs, and 3 hounds. A loud ticking sound came from upstairs and the three hounds charged towards them. They started running back upstairs only to see the creeper now lurking at the top of them. Cornered in the middle of the stairs back to back with each other they began to accept their fate.
I started to really worry about where Chloe was I hadn’t heard from her in a while and it was getting late. I sat there trying to call her every few minutes but it would not pick up. BANG! I dropped the phone and turned to the window. Gretchen stood there with the rifle pointed at something off in the snow, but I couldn’t see what the thing was. BANG! I saw for a brief millisecond the bullet flying into the blizzard then nothing. BANG! I tried to pull myself up to see what it was, but searing pain went through my body when I tried. I looked out again and saw something massive emerge from the blizzard charging for Gretchen.
“I’m sorry we should’ve stayed up there,” Chloe cried as the hounds slowly stepped closer.
“Kid, I would rather die here than die in the room a coward, but you ain’t going to die here!” He said triumphantly.
Suddenly he pulled out a small can of spray deodorant and sprayed it in the hound's faces. All three toppled over making loud hacking coughing noises.
“GO!” He yelled and she quickly made her way past the hounds and downstairs.
There were still dozens of stingers down there and she still wasn’t sure what to do. Before she could do anything. RAT-A-TATATATA! All around her, the stingers began exploding as Fred landed shot after shot.
“A little help would be nice!” He yelled.
She quickly pulled out her semi-automatic and started firing as well. RAT-A-TATATATA! The hall began to fill with the exploded bodies of stingers and slugs. Suddenly she heard shuffling behind her and saw the hounds getting up. Without a second thought, she sprinted down the hall and into the kitchen. Standing in the living room was another group of stingers and a hound. How many hounds are there? She thought, then she remembered how many people in their town had two or three hunting dogs. If all of them were changed they’d be a small army.
She ducked behind the island sitting uncomfortably close to Tom’s body. Fred sprinted in a second later and saw what she did. He jumped to the ground and shimmied over to her.
“Crap kid we really are screwed,” Fred said his momentary confidence completely diminished.
Before anyone could do anything the monster that had emerged from the blizzard was attacking Gretchen. In one quick motion, it slashed open her gut and she dropped the gun. I stared outside as my mom tried desperately to fire, but even from this distance, I could see she’d loaded the gun wrong. In an instant, she was on the ground bleeding. I looked over at the shotgun sitting next to me and fired a round through the window at the beast. The window shattered and I saw the creature get hit right solid in the chest, but it didn’t matter much. Like the dog beasts, this one had a thick darkly colored exoskeleton that the round didn’t pierce. The beast looked up from what it was doing and started charging for the house. I fired again but it didn’t even slow the creature it just kept on charging straight towards the house. The boys at some point had caught onto what was going on and started crying and screaming. I tried to get them to quiet down, but they were too distraught. I grabbed the box and loaded two more rounds just as the door was thrown out of its hinges. SCROAR! It charged into the house. BANG! I shot it directly in that face and saw one of its eyes explode. SCROAR!!!! It swung a large two-clawed hand straight across my face throwing me across the room. I landed against a wall and in my weak state I leaned over and felt myself begin to fall. Unfortunately, it had thrown me right next to the basement stairs. Every time I hit a stair only hurt more than the last. At some point, my bandaged left hand slammed into a wooden stair. The pain was so bad I almost passed out. Finally, with one lass unceremonious thud, I landed on the basement floor.
Chloe looked around her hope beginning to fade then her eyes locked with the pantry. The large pantry with a window.
“Follow me,” She whispered as she started crawling for the pantry.
Fred followed close behind. Chloe crawled into the pantry and ducked into it. She peeked out of the doorway and saw that Fred had froze. The four hounds had gathered right behind him. He looked horrified and clearly unsure of what to do. Suddenly with a loud creak, the creeper's head poked into the kitchen and it let out a loud ticking sound. The hounds started screeching and one began to slowly walk towards Fred. RAT-A-TATATATA! She struck the approaching one 9 times in the face and the sudden burst seemed to wake Fred from his fear. RAT-A-TATATATA! Yellow-greenish blood exploded from the approaching hound's mouth and it slammed its head into the wall in pain. Fred turned around and sprinted into the pantry with Chloe closing the door as soon as he was inside.
Instantly sounds of slamming and scratching erupted from the door. Chloe turned to the window in the pantry and slid it open diving out into the snow. Fred quickly followed slamming the window behind him to give them more time.
Chloe sprinted through the snowy evening as quickly as she could Fred trying his best to keep up with her. The man wasn’t exactly in his prime and combine that with him not having snow shoes to be frank Chloe was surprised he was able to stay caught up at all.
As she sprinted down the darkening street getting closer and closer to home she thought she heard a faint Bang! Followed quickly by SCROAR!!!! Her worries suddenly switched from her and Fred to her family. She hadn’t called them in hours and now there was clearly something going on. She sprinted ever faster looking up and realizing she’d already made it onto their street.
As soon as their house was in view she saw the shoveled driveway, but she also saw my mom laying in a pool of her own blood. Along with that, she saw Gretchen weakly trying to get up also bloody. Chloe ran over to Gretchen.
“Gretchen, what happened?” Chloe asked as she helped Gretchen stand.
“Something… something big.” Gretchen sputtered out.
Gretchen had a lost far away look on her face. She almost seemed drunk but Chloe knew that wasn’t the case. Gretchen was likely in shock. SCREAM! Chloe immediately recognized it as one of the boys. She gently sat Gretchen down and then pulled out the rifle. Fred had finally caught up and quickly but carefully Fred and Chloe made their way into the house guns drawn.
They hurried inside and saw the creeper looming over a now-still Alby. Without a second thought, Chloe raised her rifle RAT-A-TATATA! She shot the thing a few times in the back knowing that it probably wouldn’t do any real damage. It turned around and looked at the two of them standing there. The scene was eerie as the still-burning fireplace cast a strange glow on the creeper. Everything seemed to go still for a second the two of them staring at the creeper and the creeper staring right back at them. All three of them trying to make a decision but are not sure what to do. SCROAR! It dives forward slicing at the welding helmet Chloe was wearing and then pinning her to the ground with its four legs. BANG!! His shotgun blast hardly seemed to phase the thing as started digging its claws into Chloe. She let out a scream that I heard loud and clear from the basement.
I’d managed to pull myself halfway up the stairs with my good arm and leg but my energy was running out and I was feeling lightheaded. I had to save her I had to protect her. BANG! I heard another gunshot followed by an unfamiliar scream. I didn’t know at the time that Fred was putting everything he had into trying to protect my wife.
Chloe gunless and pinned down was beginning to accept her fate when she remembered what she’d done last time. She reached for her knife and stabbed one of its feet. SCROAR!! It backed up off of her clearly in pain. Quickly she pulled the sniper rifle off her back and Bang! The bullet went clean through one of the thing's legs. She’d quite literally found the creeper's Achilles heel. It half fell to the ground letting out another roar of pain and agony. Both its front legs were crippled and it lay there defeated. Fred stepped forward ready to put a shotgun blast to the temple when suddenly. The thing reared up onto its two back legs throwing Fred into the wall. It had to hunch a little as the ceiling wasn’t very high but it still was tall. Chloe figured that on two legs without a hunch it was probably 10 feet tall. SCROAR!! Bang! It lunged towards her and she used her first shot to shoot its arm. The bullet embedded into the exoskeleton but didn’t seem to hurt it. The creature stopped for a moment as if to think. Bang! She shot the creature in the belly. The exoskeleton cracked. Bang! The second shot sunk into its stomach and the creature's blood began to leak out. SCROAR! It bashed one of its arms into her. She felt her left shoulder get cut open and the helmet went flying off.
BANG!! BANG! Two shotgun blasts rang out at the exact same time. The first blast was Fred's. It hit the creeper directly in the back of the head causing it to stumble forward. The second was my blast hitting it directly in the face. The two shots managed to hit at the exact perfect times. The creeper collapsed to the ground critically wounded.
Fred ran over to Chloe who was in a daze on the ground.
“Are you alright kid?” He asked helping her up.
“I’ll live,” She said weakly.
The creeper let out a growl from where it lay on the floor. I pointed the shotgun from where I was on the stairs and fired one final blast into its head.
“Chloe who is that?” I asked cautiously.
“Fred,” She said sounding weak.
I crawled the rest of the way up and saw Alby laying near the fireplace motionless. I froze as I felt tears begin to well up in my eyes. Then I looked closer and saw besides a cut on his arm he wasn’t hurt, and better yet it looked like he was breathing.
“Alby!” I yelled trying my best to over to him with my broken body.
He lifted his head and turned it to look at me.
“Is the monster gone?” He asked.
“Yes it’s gone,” I said trying to sound comforting.
“Ba… Babe,” Chloe stammered, now leaning down over me.
Her eyes were locked with mine but she had a horrified expression on her face. I didn’t care and gave her a long tight hug.
“You’re not leaving me again,” I told her.
Finally, I pulled away and looked at her and for a second it was just the two of us and nothing else mattered.
Fred hurried into the house helping Gretchen walk.
“Everyone downstairs now!” He ordered and we all hurried down.
“Alby where’s your brothers?” I asked him as he followed us downstairs.
“They're down here.” He said pointing down the staircase.
“Fred, what’s happening?” Chloe asked the panic-stricken man as we all stepped into the basement.
“More, more of them are coming.” He said a look of fear on his face.
“Well then let's get ready for a fight!” Chloe said, cocking the shotgun she’d taken from me.

I realized today that I have come incredibly far in my healing journey and wanted to share a few things that have not only helped, but are things that I’ve managed to stick with.
Journaling - You should absolutely track your panic attacks, panic symptoms, what’s going on in your life causing you stress, and also your wins. You should also journal to process that trauma that disordered you and wrecked your nervous system. I notice after I write about something traumatic, I have to put it down for a week or more and that is ok. Being able to look back and remember how you were acurately is extremely helpful. This disorder has left me with shit short term memory, and in general foggy headed so yeah… how are you going to know you are improving otherwise?
Hobbies - find something that is calming and can be scaled up or down to take up the time you need personally. If I am in my thoughts too much, I spiral. Having something to do that I enjoy and am proud of and feel secure while doing is paramount. I honestly believe curing panic disorder is one part processing unhealed trauma, and one part shunting your nervous system into calm/positive/relaxed AS MUCH as humanly possibly.
Avoid drinking and substance use - While both have provided me with a sense of relief, I understand now that it was always making me worse. Be as healthy as possibly. Do things that symbolize your care for YOURSELF. Take your vitamins, eat healthy food, wear your seatbelt, and do your self care.
And most importantly - protect your peace. Cut a bitch off. Stop interacting with drama - see yourself out. Build relationships with positive people. Go to therapy. Limit people’s access to you that can’t be trusted to not disturb your peace. Don’t consume stressful media/content - instead watch inspiring feel good funny stuff. Every minute you spend in a place of wellness and joy is a minute going to tip the scales of if today was torture or great.
And lastly - do things to connect with your physical body. Work out, get a message, put on lotion every day, do yoga, meditate, hug people, etc.

Part 3
Day 14

Chloe walked into what had once been the beautiful home of the Garrisons. The room she walked into was the main hall. It was large and square-shaped with a room on both sides and a hall on the other side of the door. In the middle of the room, a large antler chandelier lay in a destroyed twisted mess on the hardwood floor. She looked over at the walls and saw a few small circular holes. Bullet holes. She thought, taking a step closer to get a better look. Herman followed her wagging his tail like nothing was wrong with this situation. She looked down toward the floor and spotted large claw marks on the hardwood floor. Some looked like hound claw marks (she became acquainted enough with the marks to recognize them) but others were much larger. Far too large to be from one of the hounds. After scanning the room for another minute she decided she’d go into the left room first. The left room was a small lounge that seemed unassuming at first glance until she noticed the couch that had been thrown against the wall and the dried blood stains on the walls and carpet. It was human blood and was mostly frozen. She walked across the main hall and into the room on the right. This room was unassuming with very little apart from bookshelves and a small desk. It also seemed relatively undisturbed with little to no damage. She walked down the hall into the main part of the house. This main section had an open-air kitchen/dining room and a large living room. It looked horrible, it was clear a massacre had happened here. Blood was everywhere on the floors, the walls, and even the ceiling in certain spots. Most of the blood was a dark red with occasional splatters of yellow-greenish blood. She saw bits of muscle and tissue in the blood, and all around that was wreckage. Their large 100-inch flat-screen TV lay crushed on the floor. The leather couch was flipped over and ripped in countless places. The fan lay on the floor looking like it had a sledgehammer taken to it. The kitchen was worse though… slumped against the wall was a mostly eaten body. It was essentially just a skeleton with small bits of meat and tendon still clinging on. Despite being absolutely terrified something made her want to get a closer look. She noticed most of the bones were broken if not shattered, and it wasn’t until that point she realized everything below the rib cage was missing. She yelped and looked away. The rest of the kitchen was destroyed with the drawers and cupboards broken, and one section of cupboards laying on the ground with shattered glass all around it. Lastly, the dining room. Another antler chandelier lay destroyed on the ground and the table was leaned over like it had been used as firing cover. She walked over to the dining table only to realize another destroyed body lay behind it. This one looked like it had been thrown around by the look of its breaks. This one only had half a skull with the frontal and parietal bones absent. She looked and saw this was wearing dog tags. She let out a small sob when she saw that. She knew who it had to be. It had to be Timothy Garrison. She and Timothy were the same age and had dated through most of high school. After they graduated they had a mutual break up and she met Joey in college, but she and Timothy remained good friends. He had come to their wedding and he was the one who taught her how to shoot a rifle, and he had been the only person in his family to serve in the military. Herman slowly walked up to the body and started sniffing it. “Get away from him!” She screamed at the dog. She started to sob when her brain seemed to kick back into gear. Pull yourself together and cry later, She told herself. She stood up, wiped the tears off her face, and kept going. She went back over to the kitchen and yanked their fridge open. It was stocked to the brim with meats, fruits, vegetables, and bottles. She restrained her excitement at the sight but still grabbed as much as she could. She filled a duffel bag full of only a portion of the goodies in their fridge then moved on. CREAK! The loud sound interrupted her walk over to the pantry. It came from the wooden ceiling just above her, and whatever it was that caused it sounded large. She froze and listened for more sounds, but after a while of nothing she moved on hoping beyond all hope that it was just a house noise. She and Herman crept over to the pantry and with a quick pull she opened it. The pantry was large and also stocked with food. Most of it was crap that would expire or had already expired, but what excited her was the large sack of potatoes sitting by the door. She grabbed the sack and set it on top of the duffle bag by the fridge. CREAK! This one was louder than the last and sent a chill down her spine. She wasn’t sure whether or not she wanted to run out of the house or go upstairs and investigate. Her head was telling her she should leave but the other part of her so wanted to know what was making that sound. Finally, she made a decision. She’d search the bottom floor then she would go upstairs to check out the noise. CREAK! This one was the quietest so far, coming from below her. The basement, she thought, looking down at the floor. She crept down a hall on the first floor with Herman right behind her. She was following a trail of blood like it was a trail of breadcrumbs. It was a deep crimson red and there was a lot of it. Whoever was bleeding definitely wasn’t alive anymore, she thought. She slowly followed the trail up to a white door which was now half covered in blood. Shakily she reached for the blood-covered knob and pulled the door open. It was the basement staircase but she looked at the way the blood had puddled and it told a story. They had hurried halfway down the stairs before something knocked them down to the bottom. There they are killed and then dragged into another section of the basement. She slowly walked down the stairs watching each step carefully until finally, her boot made contact with the linoleum floor. Meanwhile… I sat messing with and poking at the satellite phone trying to see why it wouldn’t send a call through. I’d looked through the manual and popped it open to see if anything had broken, but it was perfectly fine. I angrily smacked the phone against the coach, but still, nothing happened. At last, I set the phone down in defeat hoping Chloe was ok. I turned from the couch to the window and saw Gretchen and Mom still busy with the shoveling. For the amount of snow on the driveway they’d made good work. Almost half of the driveway was clear of snow and covered in salt. I watched on for a while before I heard a little beep. I looked over and saw the little screen of the satellite phone was showing an empty battery. I smacked my palm into my forehead annoyed by my stupidity. “Hey Alby, can you get me some batteries?” I asked, looking over at him. He nodded and disappeared into the kitchen a minute or two later he came back out holding the box of batteries. “Thank you!” I said taking the box and quickly popping two new batteries in. The basement was dark, very dark. Chloe could hardly see a thing, but she had thought of this scenario and pulled a flashlight from one of her pockets. Ca-Click! The thin beam of the flashlight kicked on. She was expecting to see the light illuminate the wall on the other side of the room or maybe a piece of furniture. But it illuminated a wall of webs. She saw through the webs at least a dozen cocoons far more than just the Garrison family. But even worse she saw dozens and dozens of stingers. They’d made the basement into a nest. Bzzz… The satellite phone continued to buzz and an uproar began to grow around her. Herman let out a growl and looked ready to pounce. Chloe in a hurry grabbed Herman’s collar and started running upstairs with him. The basement became full of the sound of screeches and she heard something big started moving down there. She sprinted as quickly as she could, making it to the top of the stairs and turning around to see at least a dozen stingers following her. Rat-a-tatatatatat!! She shot a barrage of bullets down at the stingers hitting most of them. Then something big appeared at the bottom of the stairs. Two things actually. Two hounds. She yelped and then slammed the door shut. She looked around quickly for something to barricade the door. Her eyes met a small dresser in a bedroom near the door. She pulled it out and shoved it against the door. CRACK! It came from the other side of the door and was quickly followed by a loud slam. She grabbed the still-growling Herman and started pulling him along with her. After a minute he started walking by her side and she let him go. Suddenly she remembered the walkie and pressed the button. “Joey… Joey, I'm here!” She yelled half excited and half still terrified. I let out a sigh of relief; “Did you check out the Garrisons already?” He asked. “Sort of… I’m still over there,” She explained. She thought about telling me what she’d encountered but didn’t want to overly worry me. Plus recounting that day's events would just make things worse for her, not better. “Ok, just be safe. I love you,” I told her. “Love you too,” She said. Bzzz… She sat in the kitchen near her bags thinking for a minute. Since the crash, she hadn’t heard a thing from the basement door which made her start to suspect that the stairs had collapsed. Her curiosity had gotten desperate and she now felt like she had to check what was upstairs. She would never forgive herself if someone was still alive up there and died because she didn’t go and help them. She slowly crept upstairs, her rifle trained and Herman at her side. The Garrison's house was set on a hill in such a way that the second floor was larger than the first. The second floor was made up of four halls that made a square with rooms within and outside of that square. The spiral stairs entered a corner of the square. Chloe reached the top stair and looked down the halls. Both were wrecked like upstairs but down one of the adjoining halls a body lay on the floor, or what was left of a body. She slowly walked over and saw this was by far the worst body she’d seen so far. This one looked like it had been eaten similarly to Carl. The sternum and ribs were shattered and the spine was broken, but this one was worse. The bones were covered in bites and scratches, but worst of all the splatters around the body were immense; the person had likely struggled while they were being eaten alive. Chloe shivered at the thought and could only hope that they didn’t suffer long. She stepped away from the body and got a better look around her. Apart from the body and the blood around it, there wasn’t much sign of death up there, but it still looked awful. Just like downstairs, the walls were covered in gashes and holes, and Chloe was becoming very surprised that they didn’t hear any of these gunshots. CREAK! She looked down the hall where it had come from. For a brief second, she saw something at the end of the dark hall then it disappeared. It was only then that she noticed how dark it was up there, because of the houses set up there were no windows in the hall and the power had been out for days. She pulled out her flashlight Ca-Click! The narrow beam popped on and barely illuminated the end of the hall, but as she had thought whatever was there was gone now. She started to go about the search process methodically slowly going down the hall checking a room on the inside of the hall and then on the outside. The first room she poked her head into was a girl’s bedroom. It was decorated with a wallpaper of pink flowers and a small bed with pink covers. It was the stereotype of a little girl’s room. She noticed the covers were disheveled and a few things were knocked over. It looked like something had happened in the room but she wasn’t sure what. She stepped out of the room and moved on to the next and the next. They were both similar with a similar disheveled nature. She started to realize whatever had happened it had woken them all up. She tried to push the last door in the hall open but it wouldn’t budge. She continued up to the corner where she’d seen the thing. Multiple things then happened at once. She saw something massive lurking in the hall she began to turn down, she heard a creak behind her, Herman barked, and screeches began coming from downstairs sounding like the things had finally escaped the basement. Before she could stop Herman he started making a charge for the thing growling and barking. Chloe made a move after him but a gloved hand grabbed her and then covered her mouth. She watched Herman lung towards the thing then SLAM! It whacked Herman mid-air sending the dog flying back down the hall. He landed with a crash right next to her, a large bloody slash across his body. SCROAR! The sound came from the massive beast and nearly shattered her eardrums, and for one brief second, she raised the flashlight from Herman to the creature. She didn’t see much but that was enough. She saw its face. It had four disturbing brown eyes, they were eyes she recognized. Those eyes… Those were the eyes of Mrs. Garrison. She gasped in horror through the gloved hand and she heard the person holding her let out a slight sob. The rest of its face wasn’t any better. Its top of head and forehead were all one bony plate. Its mouth was a black hole of teeth, and like the hounds, its lower jaw split into two mandibles. The back of its head had strange thin attachments that reminded her of the gills on an axolotl's head. Then in an instant, a few more things happened. The person holding her made a move for a door, the monster made a move for them, and the slamming footsteps of the hounds as they sprinted up the spiral staircase. “Get in,” The person said, letting go of her and opening the door. She turned around and saw the person who’d grabbed her and saw Fred Garrison standing next to the open door. “NOW!” He yelled, grabbing her and pulling her into the room. Fred hurried inside after her and quickly slid a fridge against the door. Seconds later angry screeches and slams rang out from the other side. They sounded like the hounds, not the big ones. Then she caught one other sound in the chaos, a wine. Oh gosh, Herman is still alive, She thought. Fred stood by the door shotgun in hand while the slamming and screeching continued. She stood there and listened as they continuously tried to get in. Suddenly she heard Herman let out a growl, seconds later one of the hounds shrieked like they were in pain. CRUNCH! The sounds of Herman’s attack stopped and were replaced with sounds of meat ripping. Chloe let out a small sob with her only comfort being that the crunch was likely Herman’s neck breaking. Fred stepped away from the door and looked at her. He did not look like the man she remembered him as. His hair and beard looked like large rose bushes that were never cut. His blue eyes looked depressed like there was nothing there but sadness. Then she noticed a large bandage on his left arm. It looked like the whole arm had gotten cut open at some point. Then her eyes wandered around the room. It was a small shop/man cave room. There were a few guns on the table, but more importantly, she noticed lit candles everywhere. “I… I… I’m sorry,” He said with tears in his eyes. She let down a quiet sob and Fred walked over helping her find a seat on the couch. After a minute of crying with Fred awkwardly trying to comfort her, she pulled herself together and looked up at the man. “What happened?” She asked. The man's face changed and she saw tears build up in his eyes; “A massacre,” He said grimly. Then he followed with his story: “It happened around the fifth day I think. It was late and Jess and I were watching TV in the living room. Tim, Tom, Bart, and Gerry were chatting at the dinner table. Tom's wife and my four daughters were upstairs in bed. Everything was quiet and peaceful when suddenly my two dogs started barking outside. Now I know sometimes they’ll bark at dogs but this wasn’t that type of barking. This was get the heck away from me or I’ll kill you type barking. Then I started hearing weird screeching noises and at that point, I went over to the backdoor to check out the problem. I saw a bunch of massive spiders outside trying to attack my dogs, except they weren’t really spiders. Some of them had stingers and others kinda looked like slugs with spider legs. They’d stung one of my dogs a bunch and she was lying on the ground, the other was trying to stand her ground but it was a losing battle. I pulled at my revolver and started shooting at them. They were really fast. I think only one or two shots actually hit them. They started running over to me. One ran right in between my legs and a few of them tried to attack me. I shot those ones and turned around to try and stop the one that had gotten in, but it was already running havoc in the kitchen. My sons were chasing it, but they weren’t having the best of luck. Suddenly there was a crash, more spiders jumped through the now shattered windows, and something was banging on the front door. In an instant, the door was knocked off its hinges and one of those creeper things came through the door…” Chloe interrupted him with: “I’m sorry but what are “those creeper things?”” “The… the big ones. The type that got your dog.” He explained. “Anyways… it came running into the house, and before any of us could stop it. It threw Tom across the kitchen and into the wall. I came running to help him but that’s when it slashed my arm and threw me into the TV. The TV fell on top of me and then one of those spiders ran over and stung me in the thigh. I lay there with my eyes beginning to grow heavy. I saw Gerry, Tim, and Bart using the table as the shield. All three were hunched behind the table as the creeper began eating Tom. In a quick move, all three made a run for it. As they were running the creeper pounced and threw Tim into the table. Then it slashed Bart across the chest. Gerry managed to maneuver the creature and hurried over to help me. Bart ran down the hall to the basement and me and Gerry started hurrying upstairs. At some point, I blacked out and woke up here. Everyone was gone.” He finished with a somber look on his face. “Oh gosh, I’m sorry.” She said looking at him. “And somehow they turned my beloved Jess into one of those.” He said motioning to outside where the Creeper had been. 

She stopped to listen and realized that she couldn’t hear the hounds anymore.
“Are they gone?” She asked, looking over at Fred.
“Probably, they eat fast for their size,” Fred said grimly.
They sat there again awkwardly before Chloe asked, “What are all the candles for anyway?”
“Well I started lighting them for warmth, but I realized those things don’t seem to like them. Especially the scented ones.” He explained.
She took a whiff of the air and realized how strong the scents were in the room. It almost gave her a headache smelling them.
“So why were you here anyway?” He asked.
She got a little nervous. She felt like a little kid in trouble with her parents. She didn’t want to tell the truth because she worried it would anger him.
“We were running out of supplies.” She said simply.
Her thoughts turned back towards me as she sat there.
I sat on the couch still watching them work. They were about two-thirds done now, but they were starting to really tire and it was getting late. It had started to darken and I knew soon night would fall, and I just hoped she would make it home before nightfall. I’d tried to call her again, but this time it would ring but not go through. I started to wonder if hers had run out of battery. Bang! I immediately turned to the window in a panic. I saw Gretchen standing holding the rifle a few feet away straight down the barrel as a dead stinger. I let out a sigh of relief and turned back toward the phone in my lap. I hope you’re an ok babe.
“Fred, we have a plan. Come with me, don’t stay here, you'll die,” Chloe pleaded.
“Maybe I want to die.” He said, “Look I’m not stopping you from leaving but I’m not going.”
“Well if I go alone I’ll die, please my family needs me,” She said desperately.
Memories of his family flooded through Fred’s mind. He remembered how he felt when his first kids, Tom and Tim, were born. She hadn’t even had a kid, and suddenly he found himself doing something he didn’t think he’d be doing.
“Fine, let's go send those things back to hell!” He yelled pushing the fridge out of the way.
“Follow my lead,” He ordered turning around to her.
Then he cocked his shotgun and slammed the door open. As he had suspected the hounds and creeper were both gone, but lying on the floor next to the door were two bodies. One was the sprawled-out body of a now-deceased hound. Its neck was broken in multiple places and its yellow-greenish blood was everywhere around it. The other body was ripped off most of its flesh, but she knew who it had belonged to. Herman wasn’t going to sit there and bleed out so he must’ve lunged for one of the hounds nailing it in the perfect spot on the neck killing it. Then the other hound quickly retaliated by feasting on the dying Herman, or maybe it was the creeper she wasn’t sure which one actually ate him. But what she did know was that the skeletal remains of Herman on top of the hound had its teeth in the hound's neck.
Chloe let out a small sob and in barely a whisper said: “You were such a good boy, but you can rest now.”
She reached down and picked up a ripped piece of leather near the bodies. It was what remained of Herman’s collar. She stuff the piece into her pocket and looked over at Fred. Fred had tears in his eyes as he saw the corpse of Gerry just down the hall.
“H… He was only 15,” Fred cried as he got a better look at the scene.
Chloe stood there unsure of what to do or say because Fred looked like he was about to have a meltdown. Then his sad face turned to one of anger. She moved the flashlight past the body and down to the corner and the staircase. Lurking next to the staircase its brown eyes glowing in the light was the creeper. It was guarding the stairs and most likely wasn’t going to let them leave for as long as it lived. Her curiosity was getting the better of her so she turned a dial on the flashlight to make it brighter. She wished she could go back and stop herself. Stop herself so she didn’t have to see the horror that was the creeper. Her first interpretation of the face was fairly accurate except for one part. Inside its gaping maw behind the mandibles almost looked like a separate set of jaws. The second set was much more human-like and looked ready to shred any meat to bits, but its head was nothing compared to the body it sat upon. It appeared to have six limbs, two very long front arms with two large claws at the end, and two more arms that attached to roughly where pectoral muscles would normally be. These arms were much shorter than the previous set. It had two back legs that appeared to be quadruple-jointed. It had the normal heel and knee joints, but it had one additional joint in the foot. Despite this the legs looked vaguely dogfish, but not nearly as those of the hounds. Coming out where the tail should be was a large thorax with two nasty stingers on the end. The thorax was curved like that of a wasp ready to strike when necessary. It almost looked like it had a shell of exoskeleton on its back and thorax, and spouting out of the thicker plates were large needle-like spikes.
It let out a demonic shriek as soon as the light brightened. It ducked out of sight and started making a loud clicking noise. Chloe and Fred kept their guns trained on where it had disappeared ready for it to come out charging, but unfortunately, they underestimated it. It made a loud ticking sound followed by CREAK! Before Chloe could even turn the hound that had crept from behind had her pinned to the ground and was bitting and slashing at her back. BANG!!!! BANG!!!! Fred had lowered his shotgun to its head. The first blast blew out two of its eyes and shattered part of its exoskeleton, and the second blast dug through the broken exoskeleton into the brain. The hound collapsed dead and with his gun pointed at where the creeper had been Fred helped push the body off of her.
Chloe got up a little shaken but relatively ok. She started guarding back while he guarded the front as they slowly made their way towards the stairs. Any second they were expecting the creeper to appear from around the corner, but it didn’t. The creeper was planning something again but they didn’t know what. Just as they made it to the stairs they turned down the other hall, but saw nothing. The creeper had likely walked into one of the rooms and was waiting, but they weren’t there to explore. They hurried down the spiral staircase, but just as they got to the bottom they saw the place was still swarming with stingers, slugs, and 3 hounds. A loud ticking sound came from upstairs and the three hounds charged towards them. They started running back upstairs only to see the creeper now lurking at the top of them. Cornered in the middle of the stairs back to back with each other they began to accept their fate.
I started to really worry about where Chloe was I hadn’t heard from her in a while and it was getting late. I sat there trying to call her every few minutes but it would not pick up. BANG! I dropped the phone and turned to the window. Gretchen stood there with the rifle pointed at something off in the snow, but I couldn’t see what the thing was. BANG! I saw for a brief millisecond the bullet flying into the blizzard then nothing. BANG! I tried to pull myself up to see what it was, but searing pain went through my body when I tried. I looked out again and saw something massive emerge from the blizzard charging for Gretchen.
“I’m sorry we should’ve stayed up there,” Chloe cried as the hounds slowly stepped closer.
“Kid, I would rather die here than die in the room a coward, but you ain’t going to die here!” He said triumphantly.

Suddenly he pulled out a small can of spray deodorant and sprayed it in the hound's faces. All three toppled over making loud hacking coughing noises. “GO!” He yelled and she quickly made her way past the hounds and downstairs. There were still dozens of stingers down there and she still wasn’t sure what to do. Before she could do anything. RAT-A-TATATATA! All around her, the stingers began exploding as Fred landed shot after shot. “A little help would be nice!” He yelled. She quickly pulled out her semi-automatic and started firing as well. RAT-A-TATATATA! The hall began to fill with the exploded bodies of stingers and slugs. Suddenly she heard shuffling behind her and saw the hounds getting up. Without a second thought, she sprinted down the hall and into the kitchen. Standing in the living room was another group of stingers and a hound. How many hounds are there? She thought, then she remembered how many people in their town had two or three hunting dogs. If all of them were changed they’d be a small army. She ducked behind the island sitting uncomfortably close to Tom’s body. Fred sprinted in a second later and saw what she did. He jumped to the ground and shimmied over to her. “Crap kid we really are screwed,” Fred said his momentary confidence completely diminished. Before anyone could do anything the monster that had emerged from the blizzard was attacking Gretchen. In one quick motion, it slashed open her gut and she dropped the gun. I stared outside as my mom tried desperately to fire, but even from this distance, I could see she’d loaded the gun wrong. In an instant, she was on the ground bleeding. I looked over at the shotgun sitting next to me and fired a round through the window at the beast. The window shattered and I saw the creature get hit right solid in the chest, but it didn’t matter much. Like the dog beasts, this one had a thick darkly colored exoskeleton that the round didn’t pierce. The beast looked up from what it was doing and started charging for the house. I fired again but it didn’t even slow the creature it just kept on charging straight towards the house. The boys at some point had caught onto what was going on and started crying and screaming. I tried to get them to quiet down, but they were too distraught. I grabbed the box and loaded two more rounds just as the door was thrown out of its hinges. SCROAR! It charged into the house. BANG! I shot it directly in that face and saw one of its eyes explode. SCROAR!!!! It swung a large two-clawed hand straight across my face throwing me across the room. I landed against a wall and in my weak state I leaned over and felt myself begin to fall. Unfortunately, it had thrown me right next to the basement stairs. Every time I hit a stair only hurt more than the last. At some point, my bandaged left hand slammed into a wooden stair. The pain was so bad I almost passed out. Finally, with one lass unceremonious thud, I landed on the basement floor. 

Chloe looked around her hope beginning to fade then her eyes locked with the pantry. The large pantry with a window.

“Follow me,” She whispered as she started crawling for the pantry. Fred followed close behind. Chloe crawled into the pantry and ducked into it. She peeked out of the doorway and saw that Fred had froze. The four hounds had gathered right behind him. He looked horrified and clearly unsure of what to do. Suddenly with a loud creak, the creeper's head poked into the kitchen and it let out a loud ticking sound. The hounds started screeching and one began to slowly walk towards Fred. RAT-A-TATATATA! She struck the approaching one 9 times in the face and the sudden burst seemed to wake Fred from his fear. RAT-A-TATATATA! Yellow-greenish blood exploded from the approaching hound's mouth and it slammed its head into the wall in pain. Fred turned around and sprinted into the pantry with Chloe closing the door as soon as he was inside. Instantly sounds of slamming and scratching erupted from the door. Chloe turned to the window in the pantry and slid it open diving out into the snow. Fred quickly followed slamming the window behind him to give them more time. Chloe sprinted through the snowy evening as quickly as she could Fred trying his best to keep up with her. The man wasn’t exactly in his prime and combine that with him not having snow shoes to be frank Chloe was surprised he was able to stay caught up at all. As she sprinted down the darkening street getting closer and closer to home she thought she heard a faint Bang! Followed quickly by SCROAR!!!! Her worries suddenly switched from her and Fred to her family. She hadn’t called them in hours and now there was clearly something going on. She sprinted ever faster looking up and realizing she’d already made it onto their street. As soon as their house was in view she saw the shoveled driveway, but she also saw my mom laying in a pool of her own blood. Along with that, she saw Gretchen weakly trying to get up also bloody. Chloe ran over to Gretchen. “Gretchen, what happened?” Chloe asked as she helped Gretchen stand. “Something… something big.” Gretchen sputtered out. Gretchen had a lost far away look on her face. She almost seemed drunk but Chloe knew that wasn’t the case. Gretchen was likely in shock. SCREAM! Chloe immediately recognized it as one of the boys. She gently sat Gretchen down and then pulled out the rifle. Fred had finally caught up and quickly but carefully Fred and Chloe made their way into the house guns drawn. They hurried inside and saw the creeper looming over a now-still Alby. Without a second thought, Chloe raised her rifle RAT-A-TATATA! She shot the thing a few times in the back knowing that it probably wouldn’t do any real damage. It turned around and looked at the two of them standing there. The scene was eerie as the still-burning fireplace cast a strange glow on the creeper. Everything seemed to go still for a second the two of them staring at the creeper and the creeper staring right back at them. All three of them trying to make a decision but are not sure what to do. SCROAR! It dives forward slicing at the welding helmet Chloe was wearing and then pinning her to the ground with its four legs. BANG!! His shotgun blast hardly seemed to phase the thing as started digging its claws into Chloe. She let out a scream that I heard loud and clear from the basement. 

I’d managed to pull myself halfway up the stairs with my good arm and leg but my energy was running out and I was feeling lightheaded. I had to save her I had to protect her. BANG! I heard another gunshot followed by an unfamiliar scream. I didn’t know at the time that Fred was putting everything he had into trying to protect my wife.
Chloe gunless and pinned down was beginning to accept her fate when she remembered what she’d done last time. She reached for her knife and stabbed one of its feet. SCROAR!! It backed up off of her clearly in pain. Quickly she pulled the sniper rifle off her back and Bang! The bullet went clean through one of the thing's legs. She’d quite literally found the creeper's Achilles heel. It half fell to the ground letting out another roar of pain and agony. Both its front legs were crippled and it lay there defeated. Fred stepped forward ready to put a shotgun blast to the temple when suddenly. The thing reared up onto its two back legs throwing Fred into the wall. It had to hunch a little as the ceiling wasn’t very high but it still was tall. Chloe figured that on two legs without a hunch it was probably 10 feet tall. SCROAR!! Bang! It lunged towards her and she used her first shot to shoot its arm. The bullet embedded into the exoskeleton but didn’t seem to hurt it. The creature stopped for a moment as if to think. Bang! She shot the creature in the belly. The exoskeleton cracked. Bang! The second shot sunk into its stomach and the creature's blood began to leak out. SCROAR! It bashed one of its arms into her. She felt her left shoulder get cut open and the helmet went flying off.
BANG!! BANG! Two shotgun blasts rang out at the exact same time. The first blast was Fred's. It hit the creeper directly in the back of the head causing it to stumble forward. The second was my blast hitting it directly in the face. The two shots managed to hit at the exact perfect times. The creeper collapsed to the ground critically wounded.

Fred ran over to Chloe who was in a daze on the ground. “Are you alright kid?” He asked helping her up. “I’ll live,” She said weakly. The creeper let out a growl from where it lay on the floor. I pointed the shotgun from where I was on the stairs and fired one final blast into its head. “Chloe who is that?” I asked cautiously. “Fred,” She said sounding weak. I crawled the rest of the way up and saw Alby laying near the fireplace motionless. I froze as I felt tears begin to well up in my eyes. Then I looked closer and saw besides a cut on his arm he wasn’t hurt, and better yet it looked like he was breathing. “Alby!” I yelled trying my best to over to him with my broken body. He lifted his head and turned it to look at me. “Is the monster gone?” He asked. “Yes it’s gone,” I said trying to sound comforting. “Ba… Babe,” Chloe stammered, now leaning down over me. Her eyes were locked with mine but she had a horrified expression on her face. I didn’t care and gave her a long tight hug. “You’re not leaving me again,” I told her. Finally, I pulled away and looked at her and for a second it was just the two of us and nothing else mattered. Fred hurried into the house helping Gretchen walk. “Everyone downstairs now!” He ordered and we all hurried down. “Alby where’s your brothers?” I asked him as he followed us downstairs. “They're down here.” He said pointing down the staircase. “Fred, what’s happening?” Chloe asked the panic-stricken man as we all stepped into the basement. “More, more of them are coming.” He said a look of fear on his face. “Well then let's get ready for a fight!” Chloe said, cocking the shotgun she’d taken from me. 

Okay, so. Let me start off with the obligatory "I'm actually really loving the game, BUT..." comment. I really do mean that, the gameplay feels fine from moment-to-moment exploration, I love having the expanded biomes (Sky and Caverns) to explore, I like the idea of iterating on the powers from the previous game to make entirely new inventions and creations. The core gameplay loop of TotK is EXTREMELY tight, and I appreciate it for that. I'm constantly remembering that something is only hard because I'm making it hard, I'm not using the tools I have access to.
But what is going on with the story? I've been talking to a few friends about this, and I know, Zelda games are never really about the connecting story as they are about the current version of Hyrule. Every Link is a new Link, every Hyrule a new Hyrule, the connections are best considered random chance or direct references, and not intended connections. But Tears of the Kingdom is a new kind of Zelda game, one that is directly linked to its predecessor. We aren't meeting the Hero of Time from an age long past in a dungeon, we *ARE* the same Link, we're in the same Hyrule. The only other time we've taken up the mantle of the same Link, directly after a sequel, is... Majora's Mask. But even there, we play in an entirely new kingdom... It isn't even Hyrule, it's a new, completely original location, where the only shared similarities are character names and occupations and models.
I'm going to liken TotK to Majora's Mask multiple times in this post, for that exact reason. This game, at it's core, is very closely related to MM in ways that, even if not directly (Mechanically) similar, are at their core spiritually similar.
Okay, here's what I mean by that. Characters who SHOULD know Link, who have had direct interactions with him in the past, are completely oblivious to him now. Even if we're talking about four or five years, Link is... Well, Link. Bolson, the man you help in BotW with his construction company, doesn't recognize you at all. And, well, that could be a canonical inconsistency... It would be absurd to think that Link does EVERY side quest, and EVERY mission from a gameplay point of view, then you really are leaving out people who never did every single side quest in BotW. Mass Effect uses a similar system wherein Shepard has a "set" series of actions/decisions, and specific missions, with specific outcomes, that are decided for you if you begin a new game later in the series without carrying over a save.
Problem is, though, we KNOW that the house in Hateno is owned by Link. Link's pictures are there, along with the image from Champion's Ballad if you did the DLC. So why doesn't Bolson remember us?
Where are the Divine Beasts? The new Champions still exist in the world, we interact with them for our four main Dungeon quests... But where did they go? And it isn't as if Nintendo washed them out, they're still referenced (Albeit lightly) in the gameplay in a few locations, they just -don't exist-. Not one line of dialogue explains it, no environmental clues hint as to their fate. The old Shrines disappearing into the earth once they served their purpose, I can be fine with no explanation. The Towers to scan for Malice and the return of Ganon being torn down and rebuilt into the Skyview Towers, I can also easily enough accept without an explanation... But where the hell did the Purah Pad come from? It's so clearly the Shieka Slate from BotW, but it's inexplicably stripped of its power, renamed, and thrust upon Zelda once more.
And we'll get to Zelda later, don't worry about that. My point, for now, is that the game feels like it's trying to put Link in a world where he's still an unknown, despite being the savior of Hyrule, and the Hero of the Wilds. But the game isn't really sure how to handle the existence of BotW, either. People don't remember or don't know you, when they should. Items, like the Master Sword, are apparently -never canonically collected- in BotW, as shown by a cutscene while collecting Memories Dragon Tears. The world has changed only slightly, but it seems to have already forgotten Link and the Calamity he put an end to only a FEW YEARS prior.
Okay, so. I'll be honest, all of that isn't even my biggest problem with the game. It's left me scratching my head, as I can think of one of a half-dozen of ways the Divine Beasts and previous Shieka Tech could be worked into the story, and then written out, without much of an issue to provide closure. But it's still a Zelda game, at it's core, and no two Zelda games are ever going to be the exact same world and exact same characters, even Majora's Mask proves that to us. The gameplay comes first and foremost, and giving the player characters that they can interact with without having done every faucet of the previous game should take priority over making everyone know Link on a first-name basis, I just wish they'd put more thought into who he does and doesn't know. Minor issues.
You know what aren't minor issues? That god-awful main story and its design. References to MM end here, for the most part.
MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW.
So let's ignore, for a moment, that the Memories Dragon Tears are massively relevant to the main plot, and figuring out what happened to Princess Zelda, which is a change that itself spoils massive chunks of the game if you happen to stumble across the wrong Geoglyph at the wrong time. The game tells you, explicitly, FOUR TIMES, with the SAME CUTSCENE about the evils of Ganondorf and how the Sages need to help Link defeat him. The only thing that changes are the character models and voices.
Moving back to Dragon Tears, I believe three or four of them all reference the same snippet of dialogue from one of the Zonai about swallowing Sacred Stones turning you into a dragon, and how that's bad, because you lose yourself, and it's forbidden. If you do them in order, then you'll get that repeat cutscene snippet back to back to back.
I understand that they need to account for the player possibly finding these things out of order. You can, from the start of the game, go do Zora, or Goron, or Gerudo, or the Rito quests just like in BotW. But you know what BotW did differently? Each of the four races had the same cutscene in spirit, the Champion from 100 years ago reuniting with Link and sharing their powers with him. But the actual cutscenes were different, they all said different things to him, they all had different interactions. In TotK, each cutscene is "My descendant, take my power, and help Link fight the big bad."
EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. They all have snippets of what I'm dubbing Bizzaro Zelda (Again, getting to it.), three of them have almost the exact same concept of "puzzle" (Oh my GOD the Temples make me want Divine Beasts back, I'll GET TO IT.) where you spend five minutes looking for the door, then tell your Power Friend to power you up, then you do the thing, and then push ONE button instead of five.
The game reuses assets and concepts harder than an indie dev in the early 2010s trying to get on the Steam marketplace. Which finally brings us on to...
Princess Zelda. Every time I stumble into a new place "Oh but I saw Princess Zelda, but she did something mysterious and/or evil!" This is only half-explained in ONE of the Dragon Tears, where Ganondorf creates a clone of Zelda to do nefarious things. It isn't explained, they just cold open to a clone of Zelda who acts and talks a little strange compared to what we've seen of her, then "Zelda" does her evil deed, and surprise, it's an evil clone of Zelda! But it comes out of the goddamn blue.
It makes sense that if Ganondorf can do this in the past, he can do it in the present. But the question is... Why? He doesn't know Zelda comes from whatever the current year is, in TotK. Why create phantoms of this one specific girl you met possibly millennia ago, and do vaguely evil stuff with said clone?
TLoZ writing has never been particularly amazing. It doesn't have to be, because the story itself is timeless and classic. The brave knight goes on an adventure to rescue the princess. But for whatever reason in TotK, they start going on this weird tangent about being super narrative-driven, the player HAS to always know what's happening at all times. Every new location a reminder that Princess Zelda is missing, that she's doing evil things, that Ganondorf is evil... It holds your hand, constantly, while beating you over the head with the same concepts you heard *twenty hours ago* when you first discovered Ganondorf beneath Hyrule Castle.
And then there's the twist. Oh my god, the twist. Keep in mind, that I haven't fully beaten the game yet, so maybe they do -something- to make this a little less painful and irritating, but in order to save the Master Sword after magically taking it from Link in the tutorial island, Zelda swallows her Sacred Stone and transforms into the Dragon of Light, taking the Master Sword with her that it may bask in her radiant powers of evil-banishing Light until Link finds her and takes it back.
I would think this is an absolutely amazing piece of plot development, if they didn't KEEP BASHING YOUR SKULL IN over it. Zelda, the princess who RARELY has any agency over her own story, who so often is just the princess with magical powers, sacrifices herself to ensure that Link can banish the evil once and for all. But it feels wrong. I know it feels wrong, because you remember how I mentioned that the game loves to spoil itself if you do the wrong thing at the wrong time?
I now know what happened to Princess Zelda. I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that these Bizzaro Zelda appearances aren't our Zelda, they're Ganondorf's puppet clones. And yet, the game still insists that I find out "what happened to Zelda". I know the truth, but rather than acknowledge that, it treats me as if I've learned nothing. My quest still says "Find out what happened to Zelda" even though I -know- what happened. Which makes me think... Well, maybe I spoiled myself with spoilers, because they're probably going to undo the grand sacrifice of Zelda's transformation at the end of the game, right? That's when that quest goes away, Zelda comes back after Rauru de-dragonifies her with his magical hand, and everyone lives happily ever after, or something. I can't be awestruck at the sacrifice, because I'm already numb to the idea that in another hour or two, I'll just be told to go investigate another false Zelda appearance from some random schmuck that doesn't have a damn clue who I am, even though he should.
Like I said at the beginning of this. I love the gameplay of TotK. It feels so freeing to make a gizmo to help me in battle, or to remember that I can just attach a rocket to my shield if I need to get somewhere fast. I love playing around with weapon fusions, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy the Depths, crawling through the darkness while throwing lightseeds every few feet like I'm 5, and scared to go in the basement.
But the gameplay is where it stops being good, for me. Nintendo has access to amazing story writers, and plot threads from previous Zelda games have been amazing, even though they don't break the mold. Why does Tears of the Kingdom feel like it's so... Hollow? The voice acting is rarely amazing, the direction is questionable... And the worst part is, none of this is even the fault of the people who made the game world, itself.
Hyrule still looks amazing. The way fusions work is astonishingly good, everything is crafted with such love, and detail, and care. They really did put in their best work. But atmosphere, and visual design, only carry me so far in games like this. Zelda didn't NEED some grand, epic story, but they felt like they had to give it one, anyway. And they failed, in my opinion. Massively. I don't want to do the Gerudo or Goron temples because I know I'm going to get the same drivel I've had shoveled in my face for hours and hours of gameplay, there's nothing *new* there except a new ability to use in the open world. I don't even really feel like hunting down shrines, because it's more of the same from the last game.
TotK had the potential to be amazing. It really could have been everything Breath of the Wild wasn't, but at the end of the day, I'm left wanting to put the game down and pick up its predecessor more and more. And the worst part? I wouldn't have had a problem paying $70 for this game, if they had just stayed in their lane, and not somehow managed to tarnish something that should have been stainless.
I don't regret buying the game. But I can't believe no one else has talked about its flaws, the muddled and confused story, or how terrible the new dungeons are. Tears of the Kingdom is the game I'll boot up when I feel like soaring through the sky to try and land on new islands, or delving through the gloomy depths searching for lost souls...
But Breath of the Wild will always be the game I go back to when I want to save the princess from evil.

My radio came to life, as sound crackled through the speakers. "Immediate assistance needed at the park on Grande Ave. Unidentified woman attacked and in critical condition."
Grande Ave was only a couple of blocks away. I turned the car's ignition on, and picked up the radio and while clicking the side button. "Copy that. On my way now. Any information as to the nature of the attack?"
"That's a negative." Was the distorted reply.
I backed the car out onto the road, and made the short journey to Grande Ave. Even from the distance I could hear the wail of other first responders quickly heading over there as well. Whatever the problem was, it seemed to be big. After a few minutes, I pulled up to the scene and with a quick flash of my badge, crossed the police tape.
I made my way past the ambulances and other first responder vehicles to where a group of people, dressed in their correlating uniforms, stood huddled around a singular area. A police officer looked back and seemed to recognize me, probably from the academy, and stepped back to let me take a glimpse of what was causing the commotion.
I whistled through my teeth.
There was a woman, lying on the floor. Well, the only way I knew it was a woman was because I was told so. The woman that laid before me was so disfigured, it was impossible to tell what she actually looked like. She was covered in thousands of toothpicks, every single one embedded deeply into her skin. Streams of blood flowed through each incision, coating her entire body red, and covering the ground near her.
And yet she was still alive.
She was very obviously and painfully breathing every couple of seconds. A nearby paramedic informed me that it wouldn't be the case for much longer.
"We can't move her. It just drives the toothpicks into her skin further, which increases the problem. We can't remove them either." He said, solemnly.
"Why not?" I asked.
He looked up at me, and for the first time I saw the fear in his face. "That's just it. We can't. The toothpicks all have a barbed spike on the tip, meaning the only direction they move is downwards, and we don't want that. We've tried to insert a catheter to induce artificial respiration, but we can't get that in." He gestured wildly towards the woman. "There are toothpicks up her damn nose!"
I stared at the woman a while longer. I looked at her chest heave as she struggled to take a breath, before coming back down again, pushing the toothpicks further into her skin, which increased the already alarming rate of blood-flow. I looked at the paramedics who were coming to the slow realization that this person was going to die a slow and painful death. And there was nothing they could do about it.
I had seen many things in my career. But this. This took the cake.
I used to pride myself on staying calm during any situation. I was able to stay stoic and take control of any situation. But this time was different. The brutality of the attack made my insides feel like a swirling mess, threatening to spill out of my mouth if I wasn't careful. Everything about this just seemed so...wrong. The human body wasn't built to be treated like that. There was an internal instinct to run away from this, stemming from a primal fear ingrained into my brain.
But I couldn't. While the situation filled me with such a fear of the unknown, I had to stay. I had a job to do, after all.
I turned back to the paramedic. "How was she found?"
He sighed. "Exactly like she is now. A passer-by called emergency services. We've tried to help her in any way we could. But..." He trailed of the end of his sentence, his gaze shifting into the distance.
"Is there anything else I should know?" I asked.
He looked back at me, but not directly. His eyes appeared foggy and seemed to linger at a faraway point, without really comprehending what he was looking at. Grief, I assumed.
"....uh. Yeah. Yeah. There were a couple of items found beside the body." He finally said.
He left to go get it, and came back with a both small piece of folded paper in his hands and a small silver wristwatch, which he passed onto me.
The watch caught my attention. It seemed familiar.
Well, I suppose all silver chain-link watches with three faces look the same. But this one seemed different, somehow. The weight and the feeling of metal against my palm seemed to awaken a long-forgotten memory in the back of my mind. I could see myself holding this watch, years ago, and sliding it onto my wrist. Or someone else's.
I turned the watch over.
Two simple letters were engraved on the backside of the watch face. Two simple letters that made the color drain out of my face, and made the world seem as if it was collapsing on top of me. Two letters that I had put there, 6 years ago.
A.E.
Alice Edwards. My sister.
She was presumed missing over 3 years ago, after she left her house to go for an evening jog and never came back, leaving behind a grieving husband and a four year old daughter. The search was given up eventually, there was no leads and no witnesses. How do you begin to find someone who's vanished?
With my mind clouding up with questions, I made my way back to the body. I forced myself to look past the blood and the toothpicks, and the sight of mutilated flesh. I looked at the eyes, the only part of the body not completely covered in toothpicks, and collapsed into fits of tears. Because in that moment I knew. The eyes were bloodshot and lifeless, but I had seen all I needed to.
The woman on the ground before me was my sister.
I thought she was dead, and now I had seen her die. Without even knowing her true identity. I turned my gaze away from her, and from all the others. All of these events were too much to process, and I knew I had to leave the scene, or risk having a breakdown. In that moment the pain was too great, and the tears too strong. I nodded to the police man guarding the tape, and crossed it once more.
As I left, I became aware of a piece of folded paper in my hands, given to me by the paramedic, as it was also found near the body.
I opened it up.
What do you think of my little hedgehog?
If you liked this, don't worry.
My zoo has only just begun.
x

The Case:
It all started on Wednesday, March 24, 2007, when Thami left home after lunch with a group of friends in a car. At the time, Thami was a 17-years old student in his second year of high school.
The day Thami disappeared, he is believed to have been in a car with four of his male friends; Fouad G., Youssef S., Ayoub L., and an unidentified person, according to Alami who saw them from the balcony.
The victim was last seen by his brother, Ahmed, around 5:15 p.m. local time in the same car with the same friends. No one suspected anything at the time as the family knows their son’s friends.
The fear and mystery started when Thami did not return home which was a first as he always notified his parents if he was going to be late.
The following morning, Thami’s sister received a phone call from Soulaima B., another friend of Thami. The friend asked Thami’s sister whether her brother slept at home the night before.
Hearing no news about her son, Mrs. Alami went to school to ask his friends if they had heard from him. Yet, she was not able to meet them since two of them left school early and one did not show up at all that day.
One of the school personnel informed the mother that Thami and his friends skipped school the day of his disappearance. Later, Thami’s mother learned from Soulaima that her son had a "drug overdose."
Shocked and frightened, the mother continued to look for her son. 48 hours after his disappearance, Thami’s mother filed a disappearance case at the police station in the same neighborhood of Thami’s residence.
While the police started their investigation, Mrs. Alami continued looking for her son. She visited a psychiatric center for "drug addicts" in Mohammedia where she learned that one of the school personnel had come before her and asked for her son.
After learning that her son did not register in the center, she visited the fire department in Anfa, Casablanca. One of the staff informed her that they transported an unknown individual the day before from Sidi Maarouf to Hay El Hassani, Casablanca.
After visiting the Hay El Hassani hospital where the unidentified person had been sent, a nurse told her the individual who was admitted did not have an ID card.
The unidentified person was found in the streets unconscious with signs of being hit in the head.
The mother showed her son’s picture to a nurse who confirmed that the person who was admitted looked like her son. He said that he provided him with the necessary medical care before he disappeared at 7 a.m. The nurse added that a group of friends visited the young boy around 3 a.m. before his disappearance.
But, rather mysteriously, the nurse changed his deposition when the investigation started, the mother said.
Having no leads, Mrs. Alami went to Soulaima’s house to learn more about the overdose rumor. Then, Soulaima told her Thami’s “friends killed him, they burned him, and threw him in the sea.”
However, Soulaima also changed her testimonial in the presence of the police.
Thami’s friends who were in the car with him the day of his disappearance reported unanimously in their testimonials to the police that they did not see him.
In the absence of leads and given Thami’s friends’ changing testimonials, Mrs. Alami was trying to recollect her memories to make sense of the mystery surrounding her son’s disappearance. In the process, she remembered that Thami had asked her to give him money to attend the birthday party of a female friend. She later learned that it was Soulaima’s birthday.
As she grew desperate, Mrs. Alami contacted Mokhtafoun (Missing Persons), a famous show on Moroccan television channel 2M. Although she did not like the fact they posted her son’s story in a special episode on drug addicts, it enabled her to receive calls about her son.
Some of the calls were suspicious as the callers sounded like they were aware of her son’s cause of the disappearance. Yet, she did not receive any crucial information.
Getting more and more desperate, she got in touch with someone working at Meditel, a telecommunication operator known today as Orange Maroc. The person tracked her son’s call history. He concluded that the last two phone calls from Thami’s phone were at 12:04 p .m. and 12:33 p.m. on the day of the disappearance. The first one was directed to a number owned by a man born in 1953. The second number was not investigated by Thami’s mother.
Mrs. Alami visited the owner of the first number. He claimed that he gave his phone on that day to his son, yet he refused to let her meet him. The son lived with his mother at the time. BNPJ contacted Thami’s mother in 2019 informing her of her son’s death from a "drug overdose." The authorities investigated everyone connected to the case including Thami’s friends.
Based on a phone call between Youssef S. and Fouad G. or Ayoub L., in which Youssef was informed of Thami’s death, authorities concluded that Thami died of a "drug overdose."
In 2019, BNPJ also informed Thami’s mother of a body found in Casablanca in 2007. Authorities conducted the DNA test but it was negative.
Two years later, the judge ordered a DNA test on a buried body that was later found to be a female. The results of the three DNA tests in 2010, 2019, and 2021 came negative as Thami’s body continues to be missing.
With no other leads to shine some light on the disappearance case, the police arrested Fouad and Ayoub while Youssef was released since he was not in the car and he was a minor at the time. As of today, the search for Thami’s body continues.
The case is an example of morocco’s police corruption as they hid evidence due to the suspects wealthy families. https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2022/01/346721/thami-bennani-case-inside-a-desperate-mothers-15-year-fight-for-justice

I know, late to the party, lol. I'd heard it was good and so had avoided spoiling myself and I finally took the holiday weekend to watch it, figuring it was longer than it was. Wish I had watched it sooner actually. I did run smack-dab into a problem I have with most drama/tragedy, that being my "too bleak, stopped caring" threshold is like a paper-cup in size. I still really enjoyed it even with that though because even while I had emotionally checked out from the characters, I was still having fun with events and enjoyed the poignancy of the way it ended for everyone. That last flashback almost got me a little though. (Sortof hoped we'd have seen Falco too, though only because I'd have liked to think that Lucy might still keep contact with any possible friend away from Night-city's garbage. Well as much as you ever can be when the world is so broken.)
That said, if I have a complaint it would be in the way the presentation sortof handled Adam Smasher. On reading around a bit, I think other people noticed too and may have gotten the wrong idea about him. That Smasher is somehow "more special" than David was and its because of it that he's powerful. When its really sortof the opposite, imo. David kept his humanity even when losing his mind, by and large. Smasher was just such a psychopath *before* mods that he didn't really have any humanity to lose after them. If anything that makes him *more* ordinary, since give any human enough brain damage in the right way and you could probably remake him. (Actually a fun, if terrifying, idea for a campaign probably.) I did like that they alluded to his tech supremacist views. (I'd also have liked to see someone with more bioware, but I don't think that's as big a draw.)
Whelp, I'm going to go probably unconsciously run this over in my head until it invades my dreams for the next week and a half, like when you have a chipped tooth and rub your tongue against it til it cuts you, because that's when stuff like this actually processes for me. Have a good Memorial Day to those of you (in the US) getting it off. To the rest of you, have a good Monday?

Monday
Dimmy: Hello, we’ve all been sick since yesterday! But we also develop a severe allergic reaction if we stay home! So Superspreader Kate ran outside in her pajamas to have a tea party with the ducks at the park then we plopped her back in bed for a nap in her dirty pajamas, but she woke up soon after because she’s sick and pooped her pajamas. Why get a clean outfit out now, when I can just take her pajama pants off and continue about our day! Beady Kate was upset so I gave her a pack of 36 cheap bracelets from Amazon to distract her. I’ll link ‘em up for you even though they’re labeled as a choking hazard for kids under three! I dunno know what happened to the last pack of 36 I gave her. I guess she swallowed all of the beads from those! Sniffles Kate went back outside in her diaper and pajama top. I hate wearing pants too so I wore my hot dog jeans which is the next best thing to no pants! I showed Pantsless Kate how to paint with water since we banned sidewalk chalk after she colored our walls blue. Let’s paint our ABCs!
A a a airplane in the sky B b b bee spray that doesn’t work C c c code for the fat poors
What a full day of shilling (products), Schylling (tea cups) and spilling (tea)!
Tuesday
Dimmy: Guys my period is five days late but I’m not pregnant! Has this ever happened to you? Yes or not yet!
Dimmy: Hellloooo I’m back. Like, a lot of people are saying just wait a few more days and take another pregnancy test then.
NO SHIT KIMMY.
Dimmy: So anyway even though I’m super sick I went to Mindy McKnight’s bath and body launch to spread my germs because it was at a hamam and you all know from my time in Morocco, I love a good hamam! Mindy and I took a photo with our mouths hanging open and faces pressed together so….. hope one of your new bath products is an immune booster, Mindy! Good luck not getting sick!
Meanwhile Scooter Kate had fun skiing for donuts in her clogs, riding her scooter and learning to catch a football.
Wednesday
Kimmy took the day off stories without explanation and was nowhere to be found. Could she be feeling poorly? “Working?” Taking multiple pregnancy tests? Shopping for more ripped-knee jeans?
The disheveled moppet and her tax-challenged handler surfaced on stories at Turtle Creek Lane. Smartie Kate had gone over there to teach McKenna Kate how to spell, and correct the errors on her summer bucket list. As a reward for tutoring MK, the fridge troll gave Stevie Clog an ice cream cone, but the sugar police caught her red-handed. Not to be bullied for her sweet treat, Stevie Kate tightened her grip on the cone and licked away defiantly as Minnie scolded her. As punishment, Jen made her cut up a huge plate full of raw veggies and eat them. Then Stevie Swan visited Swannie Kate and taught Jen how to read, and finished her afternoon at TCL by taking a nap with one of her favorites, Uncle Sam.
Thursday
Dimmy: CAN YOU SAY GOOD MORNING?
Chef Kate: Good morning mommy here’s your breakfast: two pieces of bacon and a pancake served with a side of my snot syrup. Zero calorie play food, since we all know you never eat any real breakfast! You intermittent fast for 1100 hours and then break your fast with HLTH code powder and whipped cream!
Dummy is crowdsourcing Twitter and Instagram for suggestions on how to get SK to stop whining as the Contentot was put in timeout twice today.
Dimmy told everyone that taking your toddler to Costco is a fun idea because they can destroy everything in the store instead of your house. She and Jen piled Shopping Cart Kate high with Memorial Day weekend groceries for their upcoming trip to the lake house. Costco Kate was not amused by the Tide on her toes and snot on her nose.
Dimmy shilled CVS ExtraBucks and then it was time for Cartwheel Kate to hit the gym and In-N-Out. Stevie Kate and Dummy enjoyed burgers with buns and Dimmy got to lick the wrappers. Unclear if she has anything else, as she placed a movie recommendation box strategically over the spot where her dinner should be.
Friday
Dummy said he’s already listened to two parenting books at 4X speed and has detailed the perfect six step plan on how to get Stevie Kate to stop whining, which involves gossiping in front of her and some other weird shit. Now if only he could find the perfect six step plan on how to stop being an asshole.
Shoeless Kate managed not to lose any toes racing around in her little car, feet flying across the pavement. She pretended her baby doll was Shilly Lilly and followed Tiffany’s safety guidelines for how to treat a newborn, although everyone agreed she was gentler with her doll than Tiffany is with Chilly, as the doll was properly dressed and only flew out of the car and hit the pavement once.
Then it was time to hit the road for Memorial Day weekend at Possum Kingdom. The Dummies packed up their car by grabbing armfuls of all the junk in their house and shoving it into their car, filling up every square inch to the top. Despite not being able to see out the car windows, Dummy drove the overstuffed hail-dented junk mobile to the lake house without getting in an accident. On the way Dimmy gave us an update on Period Watch 2023 as if any of us care. She’s now eight days late and still churning out negative pregnancy tests.
The Dummies were the first of the Turtles to arrive at the lake house. The fridge troll collapsed on the new Love Sac sofa with his shoes on for a nap while Feral Kate was ready to go out on the boat but alas the Senior Turtles weren’t due to arrive until the next day.
Saturday
Goooood moooorning… Hiiiiiii trilled the shrill one, in her screechiest greeting of the week as she located her troll of a husband and diaper-clad tot in The Ranch at Possum Kingdom’s neighborhood pool. She changed the Contentot into a swim diaper but didn’t bother dressing her in a swimsuit. After SK’s Elsa and Anna dolls lemming-jumped to their deaths off the waterfall feature with an assist from Dummy, it was time to tour the $5 million lake house the Senior Turtles just purchased to add to their growing portfolio of properties, which will soon fill up an entire Monopoly board. Entitled Kate, finally clothed in a swim cover-up, was bored with the new home tour (another day, another mansion, am I right?) so the troll played hide and seek with her throughout the cavernous rooms. Then Dimmy bribed Stevie Carb with white bread if she’d pretend to love her new cousin and gaze at her sweetly, which worked like a charm. The Contentot gleefully held slices of white bread in each grubby paw on the expensive brand new white Lovesac sofa and crouched next to Shilly. Then Stevie Kate went out on the boat and had a grand time since she got fed more bread there and didn’t even have to waterski for content and donuts. Channeling her inner Geico commercial piggy, she gleefully cried weeeeeeeeee the whole way home.