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I Faced a Bone Walker and Lived
2023.06.05 02:03 JonathanS223 I Faced a Bone Walker and Lived
Hey all, it’s me Frank Jones again. I wrote that post a while ago about why you shouldn’t be a paranormal investigator and a lot of you liked it. Since settling into my hideaway in the mountains, life has become quiet and I thought about checking in. The plague hit us like nothing and now that everyone is wanting to travel again, I thought to say hi. I want to say thanks to all of you who commented and gave me those weird pointy thingies this social media does. Some of you even figured out my post office box address and sent me letters. I appreciate it (and don’t do it again).
The common strain among your posts was wanting to know if I had ever encountered other things as an auditor. Of course I have but I have been reluctant to tell you because I don’t want to shine some sort of light on all of it or make it sound like some romantic adventure. It’s “pissing yourself” fear all wrapped up in a waking nightmare with a side of gory terror. I am one of the few who actually made it to retirement…if that’s what you could call this life I’m living now.
But, I have nothing else to do really. Carl only visits once in a while when he’s passing through and I cannot risk any other sort of company knowing I’ve pissed off a lot of people…and things. So, I’m back on this internet board and sharing. So many are curious, I thought maybe another story can scare you all straight. This was the first time complacency almost got me and another killed.
This story takes place somewhere in the 90s in a small New England town. It was one of those places nestled along the banks of a serene river, historic brick buildings line the winding streets, their facades adorned with weathered signs that hint at the town's seafaring heritage. A place where everything smelled like either the ocean or decaying fish. I’m not going to specifically name the town to protect the young lady that may still be living there but in the heart of the town, there’s a renowned drawbridge which stands as a testament to the place’s affinity for water. Its ancient mechanisms creak and groan when allowing vessels to pass through the calm waterway. It also had some of the best outdoor markets I had a chance to stop and check out.
I didn’t pass through this part of the country that often as my boss preferred me to do the long hauls across the country but there was a dead haul nobody wanted.I took it cause I wanted a change of scenery. I was already working as an auditor and part of a loose alliance of others who investigated and dealt with any weird things. I actually had a few monsters under my belt. I honestly had the foolhardy idea that I could handle anything out there. God, I was an idiot.
The supernatural never crossed my mind until that evening, stopping to fuel up my red 1992 Peterbilt 379 and paying for the gas with the attendant and restocking up on those beef jerky sticks and coffee.
That was when I noticed her. She was a young woman about in her mid 30s looking like one of the corporate types with the short hair cut and business suit. I would have not paid her any mind if it wasn’t for the touch of apprehension on her face as she talked on one of those new fangled bright yellow Nokia cellphones. Soft strands of chestnut hair framed her face, their gentle sway moving as she glanced around while talking on the phone. As I observed her, I couldn't help but notice the way her fingers trembled slightly, when trying to get money out of her pocket. I’ve seen that type of fear before. So, like a creep, I eavesdropped on her call.
“Yes, it happened again,” she had said as the nickels finally made it to the counter to pay for her snacks. “I could have sworn there was something outside the window near the edge of the forest….no, of course the security cameras didn’t pick up anything. They’re cheap. Ronald was a skinflint when it came to things like this. Hope he’s rotting in hell wherever he is.”
My mind began to drift away, more annoyed I couldn’t get a move on it. It sounded like a problem for the police and if anything, I was gonna tell her that. It was what she said next that made me stop and brought back the reality of the world.
“Yeah. like nine or ten feet tall. I’m thinking kids are playing around with scarecrows or something. Won’t come from the edge of the forest and when I check, I can see foot impressions and stuff. I already put in a call to the cops. They found nothing.“
“Did it sway a bit and its eyes seem to glint like a cats or owl?” I asked without thinking.
The look I got from both her and the gas attendant made me realize what I had done. Well, too late now.
“I’ll call you back,” she said quickly, eyeing me as she hung up the phone and slipped it back into her purse.
“You need me to walk you to your car, ma’am?” the attendant asked, staring at me.
Of course, I forgot that The Truck Stop Killer had only been arrested a few years before.
“I’m fine, thank you,” she said, quickly gathering her stuff and making for the door. I slapped the one hundred and seventy bucks on the counter to pay for my diesel guzzler ignoring the change and followed her out but making sure to not move in a way that caused the teenager in the station to call the cops.
“Ma’am,” I called out to her and she turned to me while hurrying up her pace.
“I’ve got pepper spray. Stay away from me.”
“The thing in the woods. You could have sworn you smelled fresh dirt like mulch and it seemed to sway back and forth like it could not keep its balance.” I threw it out there in desperation.
She froze and turned to look at me. Eying me up and down as I kept my distance and angled to head towards my truck.
“How do you know?”
“I…uh…dealt with something like that before. On a job in Canada.”
“Who are you?” she asked, looking at my faded shirt and company logo. “A trucker?”
“I moonlight as a problem solver. Like an auditor of sorts.”
“Who is it?” she demanded, eyes still affixed to me and hand in her purse.
“Better question is ‘what is it?’,” I answered.
I have learned to pick up on the contempt and disbelief from people who hadn’t seen what I have. I was already being dismissed as a whack job.
“You have tracks on your porch you have written off as animals, especially if you own a dog. If you did own a dog, it’s missing. Cops told you it ran away. You got a garden?”
“Yes,” the certainty had started to leave her voice. “A walled garden.”
“And anytime you’re in there, you feel like you’re being watched.”
At that, her hand came out of her purse empty and she approached me with the fear I had seen in her eyes now on her face.
“How did you know?”
“I’d rather not explain out here,” I said sheepishly running my hand through my sandy brown hair that only started getting flecks of gray. “But you got a…pest problem.”
“And you can do something about it? I’ve had exterminators, cops, nature lovers…even a priest.”
“None of those won’t do you any good and I don’t want to scare ya but it’s more active which is not a good sign.”
For a few moments, I could see the indecision in her eyes. The desperate want to dismiss me as a lunatic but whatever she had heard or seen won over.
“Fine. You can follow me to the house.”
“Mind if I hitch a ride?”
The woman started but then looked at my truck. “Promise. I mean you no harm. I really think you’re in danger.”
That was when I found her name was Isabelle Walker.
We left my truck in long-term parking after she told the attendant that I was a long lost relative and that’s why the change of demeanor. I don’t know if he believed her but at that point, I don’t think he cared. I left my truck with its metallic frame standing tall and proud amidst the rows of other vehicles.
I did not realize how desperate this woman was until we got going on the road. I had loaded myself in the passenger seat after pulling out my military backpack from the war which I also used for my auditing services and tried to look as harmless as a man of my stature could.
For the first fifteen minutes of the drive, her focus was on the lonely road, those beautiful eyes darting to me anytime I shifted my weight. I didn’t want to scare her so it was her that spoke first.
“What is it?”
“I really don’t know but the people in my profession call it a Bone Walker.”
The nose crinkled in disbelief.
“Halloween is not for a few more months, Mister…”
“Jones. Frank Jones.”
The James Bond reference caused her to snort in amusement.
“I don’t know what to tell ya, ma’am, except I’ve dealt with some pretty scary things out there. Normally I’m never this forward as most people try to call the cops on me or dismiss me as a lunatic. I mean, I could be a lunatic but I know what I’ve seen.”
“And that is…?”
“You know. Ghosts, vampires, werewolves. They’re real. They’re not common but real nevertheless.”
“Really?”
There was still the disbelief in Isabelle’s voice but I grew to ignore things like this.
“Sure. I mean, think of all the things you experienced and be open to alternate answers.”
Isabelle was quiet for a few minutes and then sighed. “Either you are telling the truth or you're the biggest liar and I’m a fool that’s not going to live through this night.”
“I promise,” I tried to reassure her. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
After a few more minutes and off the main highway, we approached her home. The large house stood resolute amidst the dense, ancient forest, its weathered exterior a testament to the passing of time. It was a grand structure, its imposing presence commanding attention. The sprawling estate exuded an air of mystery and faded grandeur, as if it held stories whispered through generations.
As we pulled in, the main house loomed before me, its facade adorned with intricate woodwork and worn stone. Ivy crept along the walls, weaving an emerald tapestry that hinted at the passage of years. The windows, framed by elegant yet slightly cracked panes, stared out into the world with a mixture of curiosity and melancholy.
To the side, a large shed stood detached from the main house, its weathered boards echoing tales of forgotten tools and lost endeavors. The wooden structure sagged under the weight of time, its roof covered in a patchwork quilt of moss. Inside, shadows danced amidst remnants of a bygone era, rusty equipment and dusty shelves attesting to the once-bustling activity that had long since ceased.
Not far from the shed, a family cemetery nestled amongst the ancient trees. Tombstones, adorned with intricate carvings and weathered inscriptions, dotted the landscape. The hallowed ground exuded a solemn tranquility, as if time stood still in reverence for those who rested eternally in its embrace. Wisps of fog clung to the grassy knolls, lending an ethereal quality to the sacred space.
At the far end of the property, an old walled garden stood as a testament to the house's former splendor. Once vibrant and lush, the garden now appeared overgrown and untamed. Stone paths meandered through a sea of tangled foliage, leading to hidden nooks and forgotten corners. Dilapidated stone benches, adorned with intricate carvings, sat scattered throughout the garden, silent witnesses to a time when laughter and conversation filled the air.
As I stood amidst the silence of the forest, the house, shed, cemetery, and walled garden formed a tapestry of history and mystery. They were a testament to the ebb and flow of life, the remnants of a bygone era that clung to the present. Within their weathered walls, secrets whispered and memories danced, waiting to be discovered by those who dared to venture into their enigmatic embrace.
“Great place to be haunted, huh?” she said with sarcasm. “My ex left it to me in the divorce. Was only going to be here long enough to sell it but no one wants it and my job wants me to move to this state anyway.”
“Where are you originally from?”
“California.”
“So, this is definitely a change of scenery for you,”
Isabelle only hummed back at me as she fumbled for her keys in the dying light of evening. I pulled my backpack closer to me as my eyes scanned the treeline where the shadows had begun to deepen. Nothing stood out against the silhouettes of ancient trees which was a good sign. I wasn’t too late.
Stepping through the weathered front door, I entered the interior of the old house, greeted by a mix of nostalgia and faded elegance. The air carried a hint of mustiness, a reminder of the countless years the house had to have witnessed. As my eyes adjusted to the dim light filtering through the stained-glass windows, I could make out the clash between old decor and the modern furniture Isabelle had bought.
The foyer, adorned with a worn, threadbare rug. The walls, once adorned with portraits and intricate wallpaper, now bore the markings of time's passage. The wooden banister of the grand staircase, polished with use, creaked softly under my touch as we made our way towards the living room.
Moving further into the house, I found myself in a spacious living room. Large, ornate windows which would have allowed slivers of daylight to filter through the heavy velvet curtains. The walls were adorned with faded wallpaper. An aged fireplace, its stone mantle adorned with trinkets and old photographs, served as the heart of the room.
“You want some coffee?” Isabelle asked, throwing her keys on to the coffee table. I sat down on her couch and dropped my backpack on it with a clunk.
“Sure.”
“Sugar?”
“A lot.”
The kitchen light clicked on and I heard her moving about setting up the coffee pot. The adrenalin was now pumping through me as my mind raced. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail on what a Bone Walker is but it’s a creature that usually haunts the western coast. It being so far out east was strange. I pulled out my old gun bag and unrolled it. My Stevens Model 520-30 “Trench” shotgun was the first thing I reached for as I popped open the internal pouch holding he high flash shells I was glad I packed. It was the startled sound from Isabelle that made me quickly look up.
She stood there with my coffee, eyes locked on the shotgun in my hand. I slowly held up one of the cartridges I was planning to load.
“Flash powder shotgun shells. No load. Just makes a loud noise and a bright white light. What we’re facing lives in the shadows and hates light…normally,” I had heard stories that they could strike in the day but it was extremely rare. She didn’t need to know that.
“Oh,” was her quiet response. “Do…do I need a gun?”
“You know how to use one?”
“No.”
“Then it’ll do more harm than good. You got any flashlights?”
Isabelle nodded mutely, the gravity of the situation sinking in at the array of weapons and items in my pack laid out in front of her.
“Go get them.”
While she was gone, I quickly unloaded the silver bullets out of my Makarov pistol (a gift from a Viet Cong officer and a story for another time) and placed normal 9mm rounds in the clip. I had it holstered under my jacket with the two back up clips when she returned with three cheap flashlights.
“One in your hand and one in your pocket.”
“Why?”
“In case you drop the one you are holding.”
The woman obeyed silently.
As night fell quickly around us, I slung my shotgun over my shoulder and with Isabelle close, we made our way upstairs. There were tell tale signs I needed to check as the only advantage I had over this thing was the fact it stuck to a pattern. If it was at the stage I thought it was, there would be signs.
“Which room is yours?” I asked.
Isabelle pointed to a door down the hallway across from a large window. Approaching it, I quickly shined my flashlight at the mahogany door frame. It was the glint that caught my eye. Deep gouges in the wood.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Claw marks,” I responded. There was no use sugar coating anything now.
“This thing was in my house?” Isabelle said horrified.
“For the last few weeks now,” I said, my nose picking up the faint odor of dirt and mud.
“Why didn’t it attack me then?”
“It wasn’t time.”
“What?”
Talking was going to be the only thing to keep her focused. I had felt the world shift a bit as night fell and I needed her not to panic.
“Bone Walkers are ritualistic creatures. They are very choosy over their prey. It can take a month or two before they move in. That’s why they are so hard to catch.”
“Criteria? Like what?”
“We don’t know.”
That was the honest truth. The only reason we knew their existence and patterns was thanks to blind luck and people surviving their encounters. I showed my light around looking for other signs. Discolored stains in the corners where shadows would naturally form, healthy moss and mold that shouldn’t be there. I found a patch around her bed. She did not notice and I did not want to tell her that it probably stood over her through the night watching her sleep. The sooner I buried this thing, the better.
“Frank!”
There was a trill of terror in Isabelle’s voice and I immediately looked to where she was. The woman was standing by her bedroom window staring out at something. I quickly moved and spotted what she saw. In the forest, at the edge of the shadow cast by the moonlight was an almost, imperceptible form. It stood nine feet, hunched over like a broken scarecrow, its owl like eyes staring back at us.
“Shit,” I muttered. Thank god we had turned on the lights as we went.
It was the flash of light and the crack of thunder that heralded the arrival of the storm. The lights of this old houses flickered which caused my belly to flop a few times. My brain was on fire as I glanced back from the lightbulb to where the creature was and found it had vanished.
“Where did it go?”
I did not have time to explain as another crack of lightning caused the lights to dim. I grabbed Isabelle roughly by the arm and yanked her back down the hallway towards the living room where I had left my stuff. We barely made it to the living room when the lights dimmed low. I grasped the glow sticks out of the bag, cracked a handful and scattered them about, their bright yellow light beginning to glow. The power then went out bathing us only in the eerie glow of the emergency lighting.
As we waited in breathless anticipation, the storm struck, its wrath manifesting in torrential rain. The mansion seemed to respond, succumbing to a power outage that plunged us into an abyss of blackness only moments before.
A trill of terror coursed through me. I knew this Bone Walker thrived in darkness, using it as a cloak to conceal its malevolence. We auditors were not sure if it actually teleported or it preferred to move in pitch darkness. I just knew that the black was our biggest threat.
For a few moments, we could only hear the ragged breathing of the two of us being drowned out by the pounding rain against shingle and glass. Isabelle had wound her hand into my jacket pocket and was gripping it tightly, I could feel her shaking with terror. I kept my shotgun gripped tightly in my hand listening for the tell tale sound of its arrival.
It was the movement out of the corner of my eye and the fact her grip got tighter on my jacket. I swiftly turned on my high-powered flashlight as I spun around and the brilliant beam pierced the obscure corner of the room. No matter what I had read or seen before did not prepare me for what I saw.
It stood there in the corner, its eight foot height engulfing that section of the house. My eyes strained as it appeared the thing was struggling to stay in focus. Its arms were too long for its body, spindly and almost to the floor while the legs appeared backwards giving it a strange forward leaning look. It wore a hunter’s long coat and trousers but through the rips and tears I could make out something squirming and moving underneath. The air filled with the stench of decaying plants and diseased vegetation. Its face was covered with what looked like the remnants of a cheap bandanna but its owl-like eyes gleaned back with malevolence.
Isabelle whimpered, her fear palpable in the room and the Bone Walker lunged toward us. Even though my fear was ripping through me like an unstoppable train, I had the sense to pull the trigger of my shotgun aimed in its direction. The flash and resounding roar painted the entire room in a brilliant black and white shadow causing every corner and edge to appear thick and vivid. The creature screamed and fell to the side into the shadow not illuminated by the weapon’s fire.
Isabelle had thrown herself on the couch and was huddled there, trembling with terror, while I moved quickly to crack a few more glow sticks and toss them into the dark corners of the room. In one, I saw its foot recoil back into the kitchen where it was darker than night itself. This was quicker than I had anticipated. The plans I had been formulating on the drive were no longer viable. I wanted to lure it to where I controlled the battlefield but that was not an option anymore. This had become a cat and mouse game and I knew this was with a predator I could not even hope to understand and had years to hone.
Out of the kitchen again this thing charged forward, relentless in its pursuit, it was trying to find a way around my light barrier which only appeared to slow it down. With shaking hands, I fired several more rounds, each blast forcing the creature to retreat and the girl to scream in terror. As soon as it retreated to a dark part of the house, I turned to where the woman of the house had been. To my horror, Isabelle's fear had gotten the best of her. In that moment of panic, she darted from the safety of the light, towards the hallway and the door outside.
“Isabelle! Stop!” I yelled trying to command her back with my voice but I doubted she heard me. Between the abject horror and the relentless rain, she was going to take her chance. A chance I knew she did not have.
I only took a step when I sensed it. The musty smell of an organic landfill overwhelmed me as the form silently darted past me, its long arm clobbering me up the side of the head. The world spun as pain burst through my brain. I felt the world tilt and fall heavily to the ground, flashlight and shotgun falling away.
As I slipped in and out of consciousness, I knew I was a sitting duck for this thing. There was no way for me to stop it from ripping me to shreds like some of the corpses I had seen. As I blinked, I came to my senses and realized I was alone. How long I had actually been on the ground, I did not know.
I sat up, my head pounding and I could see the door hanging open, the wind slamming the door on its hinges and the rain soaking the hallway floor. Struggling, I found my flashlight and gun and pulled myself together.
There was a slim chance that Isabelle was still alive. I had to think. Where would it go? I ran all the stories I could think of and then it hit me. The garden. The walled garden.
I charged into the rain-soaked night. I sprinted toward the enclosed garden at the edge of the property. As I grew closer, I saw that the rusted door was open and hope flickered in my soul. As I came to a stop, I brought my flashlight up again with my shotgun and saw it.
This creature stood there in the middle of the overgrown garden, its massive clawed hand wrapped around Isabelle’s chest and holding her up. Out from under its bandanna mask, putrid vines had appeared and led up to Isabelle’s face where they were forcing their way down her throat and up her nose. I could see the wide terror in her eyes as vines were snaking their way around her waist and I did not want to think about what they were planning to do.
I brought up the shotgun again and fired. Knowing that I had distance, the flash of light caught the creature by surprise. It shrieked as it fell back. Trying desperately not to release its prey. I did not hesitate to grab the machete at my side and hack at its arm until Isabelle fell down free of it.
It’s claw swiped at me striking me on the leg and easily tearing through my pants leaving bloody lacerations but I put the weapon point blank and fired another round. I do not know if it was the flash, the combination of the creature, or that the almighty above was looking out for me, but the creature caught ablaze from the spark.
It fell back swinging wildly as the fire spread unnaturally fast catching the plants around it on fire. Within a matter of seconds, the walled garden had become ablaze with the bone walker in the center. As I ripped the vines out of Isabelle’s mouth and dragged her towards the door, I looked up to see those owl-like eyes looking at me with such abject hatred that the look stick with me today.
I honestly don’t know how we survived. I had helped Isabelle to her porch and we both passed out against our will from the sheer terror and exhaustion. We were awoken by the sound of a siren. The lights had come back on sometime in our sleep and the rain had drifted off to a comforting drizzle. The fire was still raging in the garden but contained by the ancient walls. At least two fire trucks, an ambulance and cops were flying up the private road towards us.
This entire hunt had been ill-planned and stupid. I knew it. As the cops approached with their hand on their pistols, I knew that I had allowed my own ego to get in the way. I should have taken Isabelle somewhere else until I had done a proper reconnaissance. I shouldn’t have taken her home where it was waiting. And now, the cops were looking at two thoroughly soaked humans, one a trucker with a wound and a gun and a young lady in distress. I was pretty sure I was going to go to jail.
“Isabelle?” One of the cops and his voice caused her to sit up, relief washing over her.
“Derek!” she wailed. “We were attacked! In the garden!”
Another two cops that had arrived had taken off in that direction while Derek helped the girl up and took her towards the ambulance. The other cop with a comically large mustache looked at me with keen eyes, his hand still on his pistol, sergeant stripes glowing in the light.
“Attacked?”
“Yeah,” I said, sitting up slowly and keeping my hand away from the shotgun and trying not to show the one under my jacket. “Someone came after Mrs. Walker. They were in the garden.”
The cop watched me closely but there seemed to be a recognition in his eyes.
“You by any chance Frank Jones?”
My heart jumped and I must have looked startled as the cop’s face broke into a smile. To my relief, his hand fell away from his holstered sidearm.
“I’ll take that for a yes. My guess is you don’t remember me. Clay Wilson. Santa Fe PD, about six years ago. You helped my partner with a...problem. Nellie Nelson?”
I knew the name but the face escaped me.
“She told me you helped her audit a police union building.”
“Ah, yes,” I said, remembering dealing with the wraith and the twinge in my right arm from it’s bite.
The cop looked towards the fire that was slowly being put out by the fire fighters.
“Any chance this will be one of your audits?”
“Yeah.”
He seemed to think for a few minutes and then nodded.
“Then I think you need to grab that shotgun of yours and hitch a ride with me before too many people ask questions. Whatcha think?”
I nodded. I was not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. I collected my stuff quickly from the living room and made my way back out where he was waiting. As I limped with the cop to his car, I looked towards Isabelle who was being held by the other. She gave me a look of thankfulness as the cop looked at his partner with confusion.
“Her brother’s got her,” Clay said, opening the back door for me. I was not gonna argue or fight. If he took me to jail or not.
And that was it. My leg was not as bad off as I thought and wrapped it in the back of the police car. Clay only asked where I wanted to go and he took me back to my truck. With that time, I was back on the road with that small town in the rear view mirror.
I never did find out what happened to Isabelle after that, if another creature came looking for her or if she had a chance to live in peace. I just knew that we both barely made it out alive and that was due to my own stupidity. I was furious with myself for weeks after that and told myself I wouldn’t put another person in jeopardy like that again. At least, despite my idiocy, another life was saved and another monster was put in the ground...I hoped. I never did find out if they found a body.
submitted by JonathanS223 to joinmeatthecampfire [link] [comments]
The common strain among your posts was wanting to know if I had ever encountered other things as an auditor. Of course I have but I have been reluctant to tell you because I don’t want to shine some sort of light on all of it or make it sound like some romantic adventure. It’s “pissing yourself” fear all wrapped up in a waking nightmare with a side of gory terror. I am one of the few who actually made it to retirement…if that’s what you could call this life I’m living now.
But, I have nothing else to do really. Carl only visits once in a while when he’s passing through and I cannot risk any other sort of company knowing I’ve pissed off a lot of people…and things. So, I’m back on this internet board and sharing. So many are curious, I thought maybe another story can scare you all straight. This was the first time complacency almost got me and another killed.
This story takes place somewhere in the 90s in a small New England town. It was one of those places nestled along the banks of a serene river, historic brick buildings line the winding streets, their facades adorned with weathered signs that hint at the town's seafaring heritage. A place where everything smelled like either the ocean or decaying fish. I’m not going to specifically name the town to protect the young lady that may still be living there but in the heart of the town, there’s a renowned drawbridge which stands as a testament to the place’s affinity for water. Its ancient mechanisms creak and groan when allowing vessels to pass through the calm waterway. It also had some of the best outdoor markets I had a chance to stop and check out.
I didn’t pass through this part of the country that often as my boss preferred me to do the long hauls across the country but there was a dead haul nobody wanted.I took it cause I wanted a change of scenery. I was already working as an auditor and part of a loose alliance of others who investigated and dealt with any weird things. I actually had a few monsters under my belt. I honestly had the foolhardy idea that I could handle anything out there. God, I was an idiot.
The supernatural never crossed my mind until that evening, stopping to fuel up my red 1992 Peterbilt 379 and paying for the gas with the attendant and restocking up on those beef jerky sticks and coffee.
That was when I noticed her. She was a young woman about in her mid 30s looking like one of the corporate types with the short hair cut and business suit. I would have not paid her any mind if it wasn’t for the touch of apprehension on her face as she talked on one of those new fangled bright yellow Nokia cellphones. Soft strands of chestnut hair framed her face, their gentle sway moving as she glanced around while talking on the phone. As I observed her, I couldn't help but notice the way her fingers trembled slightly, when trying to get money out of her pocket. I’ve seen that type of fear before. So, like a creep, I eavesdropped on her call.
“Yes, it happened again,” she had said as the nickels finally made it to the counter to pay for her snacks. “I could have sworn there was something outside the window near the edge of the forest….no, of course the security cameras didn’t pick up anything. They’re cheap. Ronald was a skinflint when it came to things like this. Hope he’s rotting in hell wherever he is.”
My mind began to drift away, more annoyed I couldn’t get a move on it. It sounded like a problem for the police and if anything, I was gonna tell her that. It was what she said next that made me stop and brought back the reality of the world.
“Yeah. like nine or ten feet tall. I’m thinking kids are playing around with scarecrows or something. Won’t come from the edge of the forest and when I check, I can see foot impressions and stuff. I already put in a call to the cops. They found nothing.“
“Did it sway a bit and its eyes seem to glint like a cats or owl?” I asked without thinking.
The look I got from both her and the gas attendant made me realize what I had done. Well, too late now.
“I’ll call you back,” she said quickly, eyeing me as she hung up the phone and slipped it back into her purse.
“You need me to walk you to your car, ma’am?” the attendant asked, staring at me.
Of course, I forgot that The Truck Stop Killer had only been arrested a few years before.
“I’m fine, thank you,” she said, quickly gathering her stuff and making for the door. I slapped the one hundred and seventy bucks on the counter to pay for my diesel guzzler ignoring the change and followed her out but making sure to not move in a way that caused the teenager in the station to call the cops.
“Ma’am,” I called out to her and she turned to me while hurrying up her pace.
“I’ve got pepper spray. Stay away from me.”
“The thing in the woods. You could have sworn you smelled fresh dirt like mulch and it seemed to sway back and forth like it could not keep its balance.” I threw it out there in desperation.
She froze and turned to look at me. Eying me up and down as I kept my distance and angled to head towards my truck.
“How do you know?”
“I…uh…dealt with something like that before. On a job in Canada.”
“Who are you?” she asked, looking at my faded shirt and company logo. “A trucker?”
“I moonlight as a problem solver. Like an auditor of sorts.”
“Who is it?” she demanded, eyes still affixed to me and hand in her purse.
“Better question is ‘what is it?’,” I answered.
I have learned to pick up on the contempt and disbelief from people who hadn’t seen what I have. I was already being dismissed as a whack job.
“You have tracks on your porch you have written off as animals, especially if you own a dog. If you did own a dog, it’s missing. Cops told you it ran away. You got a garden?”
“Yes,” the certainty had started to leave her voice. “A walled garden.”
“And anytime you’re in there, you feel like you’re being watched.”
At that, her hand came out of her purse empty and she approached me with the fear I had seen in her eyes now on her face.
“How did you know?”
“I’d rather not explain out here,” I said sheepishly running my hand through my sandy brown hair that only started getting flecks of gray. “But you got a…pest problem.”
“And you can do something about it? I’ve had exterminators, cops, nature lovers…even a priest.”
“None of those won’t do you any good and I don’t want to scare ya but it’s more active which is not a good sign.”
For a few moments, I could see the indecision in her eyes. The desperate want to dismiss me as a lunatic but whatever she had heard or seen won over.
“Fine. You can follow me to the house.”
“Mind if I hitch a ride?”
The woman started but then looked at my truck. “Promise. I mean you no harm. I really think you’re in danger.”
That was when I found her name was Isabelle Walker.
We left my truck in long-term parking after she told the attendant that I was a long lost relative and that’s why the change of demeanor. I don’t know if he believed her but at that point, I don’t think he cared. I left my truck with its metallic frame standing tall and proud amidst the rows of other vehicles.
I did not realize how desperate this woman was until we got going on the road. I had loaded myself in the passenger seat after pulling out my military backpack from the war which I also used for my auditing services and tried to look as harmless as a man of my stature could.
For the first fifteen minutes of the drive, her focus was on the lonely road, those beautiful eyes darting to me anytime I shifted my weight. I didn’t want to scare her so it was her that spoke first.
“What is it?”
“I really don’t know but the people in my profession call it a Bone Walker.”
The nose crinkled in disbelief.
“Halloween is not for a few more months, Mister…”
“Jones. Frank Jones.”
The James Bond reference caused her to snort in amusement.
“I don’t know what to tell ya, ma’am, except I’ve dealt with some pretty scary things out there. Normally I’m never this forward as most people try to call the cops on me or dismiss me as a lunatic. I mean, I could be a lunatic but I know what I’ve seen.”
“And that is…?”
“You know. Ghosts, vampires, werewolves. They’re real. They’re not common but real nevertheless.”
“Really?”
There was still the disbelief in Isabelle’s voice but I grew to ignore things like this.
“Sure. I mean, think of all the things you experienced and be open to alternate answers.”
Isabelle was quiet for a few minutes and then sighed. “Either you are telling the truth or you're the biggest liar and I’m a fool that’s not going to live through this night.”
“I promise,” I tried to reassure her. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
After a few more minutes and off the main highway, we approached her home. The large house stood resolute amidst the dense, ancient forest, its weathered exterior a testament to the passing of time. It was a grand structure, its imposing presence commanding attention. The sprawling estate exuded an air of mystery and faded grandeur, as if it held stories whispered through generations.
As we pulled in, the main house loomed before me, its facade adorned with intricate woodwork and worn stone. Ivy crept along the walls, weaving an emerald tapestry that hinted at the passage of years. The windows, framed by elegant yet slightly cracked panes, stared out into the world with a mixture of curiosity and melancholy.
To the side, a large shed stood detached from the main house, its weathered boards echoing tales of forgotten tools and lost endeavors. The wooden structure sagged under the weight of time, its roof covered in a patchwork quilt of moss. Inside, shadows danced amidst remnants of a bygone era, rusty equipment and dusty shelves attesting to the once-bustling activity that had long since ceased.
Not far from the shed, a family cemetery nestled amongst the ancient trees. Tombstones, adorned with intricate carvings and weathered inscriptions, dotted the landscape. The hallowed ground exuded a solemn tranquility, as if time stood still in reverence for those who rested eternally in its embrace. Wisps of fog clung to the grassy knolls, lending an ethereal quality to the sacred space.
At the far end of the property, an old walled garden stood as a testament to the house's former splendor. Once vibrant and lush, the garden now appeared overgrown and untamed. Stone paths meandered through a sea of tangled foliage, leading to hidden nooks and forgotten corners. Dilapidated stone benches, adorned with intricate carvings, sat scattered throughout the garden, silent witnesses to a time when laughter and conversation filled the air.
As I stood amidst the silence of the forest, the house, shed, cemetery, and walled garden formed a tapestry of history and mystery. They were a testament to the ebb and flow of life, the remnants of a bygone era that clung to the present. Within their weathered walls, secrets whispered and memories danced, waiting to be discovered by those who dared to venture into their enigmatic embrace.
“Great place to be haunted, huh?” she said with sarcasm. “My ex left it to me in the divorce. Was only going to be here long enough to sell it but no one wants it and my job wants me to move to this state anyway.”
“Where are you originally from?”
“California.”
“So, this is definitely a change of scenery for you,”
Isabelle only hummed back at me as she fumbled for her keys in the dying light of evening. I pulled my backpack closer to me as my eyes scanned the treeline where the shadows had begun to deepen. Nothing stood out against the silhouettes of ancient trees which was a good sign. I wasn’t too late.
Stepping through the weathered front door, I entered the interior of the old house, greeted by a mix of nostalgia and faded elegance. The air carried a hint of mustiness, a reminder of the countless years the house had to have witnessed. As my eyes adjusted to the dim light filtering through the stained-glass windows, I could make out the clash between old decor and the modern furniture Isabelle had bought.
The foyer, adorned with a worn, threadbare rug. The walls, once adorned with portraits and intricate wallpaper, now bore the markings of time's passage. The wooden banister of the grand staircase, polished with use, creaked softly under my touch as we made our way towards the living room.
Moving further into the house, I found myself in a spacious living room. Large, ornate windows which would have allowed slivers of daylight to filter through the heavy velvet curtains. The walls were adorned with faded wallpaper. An aged fireplace, its stone mantle adorned with trinkets and old photographs, served as the heart of the room.
“You want some coffee?” Isabelle asked, throwing her keys on to the coffee table. I sat down on her couch and dropped my backpack on it with a clunk.
“Sure.”
“Sugar?”
“A lot.”
The kitchen light clicked on and I heard her moving about setting up the coffee pot. The adrenalin was now pumping through me as my mind raced. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail on what a Bone Walker is but it’s a creature that usually haunts the western coast. It being so far out east was strange. I pulled out my old gun bag and unrolled it. My Stevens Model 520-30 “Trench” shotgun was the first thing I reached for as I popped open the internal pouch holding he high flash shells I was glad I packed. It was the startled sound from Isabelle that made me quickly look up.
She stood there with my coffee, eyes locked on the shotgun in my hand. I slowly held up one of the cartridges I was planning to load.
“Flash powder shotgun shells. No load. Just makes a loud noise and a bright white light. What we’re facing lives in the shadows and hates light…normally,” I had heard stories that they could strike in the day but it was extremely rare. She didn’t need to know that.
“Oh,” was her quiet response. “Do…do I need a gun?”
“You know how to use one?”
“No.”
“Then it’ll do more harm than good. You got any flashlights?”
Isabelle nodded mutely, the gravity of the situation sinking in at the array of weapons and items in my pack laid out in front of her.
“Go get them.”
While she was gone, I quickly unloaded the silver bullets out of my Makarov pistol (a gift from a Viet Cong officer and a story for another time) and placed normal 9mm rounds in the clip. I had it holstered under my jacket with the two back up clips when she returned with three cheap flashlights.
“One in your hand and one in your pocket.”
“Why?”
“In case you drop the one you are holding.”
The woman obeyed silently.
As night fell quickly around us, I slung my shotgun over my shoulder and with Isabelle close, we made our way upstairs. There were tell tale signs I needed to check as the only advantage I had over this thing was the fact it stuck to a pattern. If it was at the stage I thought it was, there would be signs.
“Which room is yours?” I asked.
Isabelle pointed to a door down the hallway across from a large window. Approaching it, I quickly shined my flashlight at the mahogany door frame. It was the glint that caught my eye. Deep gouges in the wood.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Claw marks,” I responded. There was no use sugar coating anything now.
“This thing was in my house?” Isabelle said horrified.
“For the last few weeks now,” I said, my nose picking up the faint odor of dirt and mud.
“Why didn’t it attack me then?”
“It wasn’t time.”
“What?”
Talking was going to be the only thing to keep her focused. I had felt the world shift a bit as night fell and I needed her not to panic.
“Bone Walkers are ritualistic creatures. They are very choosy over their prey. It can take a month or two before they move in. That’s why they are so hard to catch.”
“Criteria? Like what?”
“We don’t know.”
That was the honest truth. The only reason we knew their existence and patterns was thanks to blind luck and people surviving their encounters. I showed my light around looking for other signs. Discolored stains in the corners where shadows would naturally form, healthy moss and mold that shouldn’t be there. I found a patch around her bed. She did not notice and I did not want to tell her that it probably stood over her through the night watching her sleep. The sooner I buried this thing, the better.
“Frank!”
There was a trill of terror in Isabelle’s voice and I immediately looked to where she was. The woman was standing by her bedroom window staring out at something. I quickly moved and spotted what she saw. In the forest, at the edge of the shadow cast by the moonlight was an almost, imperceptible form. It stood nine feet, hunched over like a broken scarecrow, its owl like eyes staring back at us.
“Shit,” I muttered. Thank god we had turned on the lights as we went.
It was the flash of light and the crack of thunder that heralded the arrival of the storm. The lights of this old houses flickered which caused my belly to flop a few times. My brain was on fire as I glanced back from the lightbulb to where the creature was and found it had vanished.
“Where did it go?”
I did not have time to explain as another crack of lightning caused the lights to dim. I grabbed Isabelle roughly by the arm and yanked her back down the hallway towards the living room where I had left my stuff. We barely made it to the living room when the lights dimmed low. I grasped the glow sticks out of the bag, cracked a handful and scattered them about, their bright yellow light beginning to glow. The power then went out bathing us only in the eerie glow of the emergency lighting.
As we waited in breathless anticipation, the storm struck, its wrath manifesting in torrential rain. The mansion seemed to respond, succumbing to a power outage that plunged us into an abyss of blackness only moments before.
A trill of terror coursed through me. I knew this Bone Walker thrived in darkness, using it as a cloak to conceal its malevolence. We auditors were not sure if it actually teleported or it preferred to move in pitch darkness. I just knew that the black was our biggest threat.
For a few moments, we could only hear the ragged breathing of the two of us being drowned out by the pounding rain against shingle and glass. Isabelle had wound her hand into my jacket pocket and was gripping it tightly, I could feel her shaking with terror. I kept my shotgun gripped tightly in my hand listening for the tell tale sound of its arrival.
It was the movement out of the corner of my eye and the fact her grip got tighter on my jacket. I swiftly turned on my high-powered flashlight as I spun around and the brilliant beam pierced the obscure corner of the room. No matter what I had read or seen before did not prepare me for what I saw.
It stood there in the corner, its eight foot height engulfing that section of the house. My eyes strained as it appeared the thing was struggling to stay in focus. Its arms were too long for its body, spindly and almost to the floor while the legs appeared backwards giving it a strange forward leaning look. It wore a hunter’s long coat and trousers but through the rips and tears I could make out something squirming and moving underneath. The air filled with the stench of decaying plants and diseased vegetation. Its face was covered with what looked like the remnants of a cheap bandanna but its owl-like eyes gleaned back with malevolence.
Isabelle whimpered, her fear palpable in the room and the Bone Walker lunged toward us. Even though my fear was ripping through me like an unstoppable train, I had the sense to pull the trigger of my shotgun aimed in its direction. The flash and resounding roar painted the entire room in a brilliant black and white shadow causing every corner and edge to appear thick and vivid. The creature screamed and fell to the side into the shadow not illuminated by the weapon’s fire.
Isabelle had thrown herself on the couch and was huddled there, trembling with terror, while I moved quickly to crack a few more glow sticks and toss them into the dark corners of the room. In one, I saw its foot recoil back into the kitchen where it was darker than night itself. This was quicker than I had anticipated. The plans I had been formulating on the drive were no longer viable. I wanted to lure it to where I controlled the battlefield but that was not an option anymore. This had become a cat and mouse game and I knew this was with a predator I could not even hope to understand and had years to hone.
Out of the kitchen again this thing charged forward, relentless in its pursuit, it was trying to find a way around my light barrier which only appeared to slow it down. With shaking hands, I fired several more rounds, each blast forcing the creature to retreat and the girl to scream in terror. As soon as it retreated to a dark part of the house, I turned to where the woman of the house had been. To my horror, Isabelle's fear had gotten the best of her. In that moment of panic, she darted from the safety of the light, towards the hallway and the door outside.
“Isabelle! Stop!” I yelled trying to command her back with my voice but I doubted she heard me. Between the abject horror and the relentless rain, she was going to take her chance. A chance I knew she did not have.
I only took a step when I sensed it. The musty smell of an organic landfill overwhelmed me as the form silently darted past me, its long arm clobbering me up the side of the head. The world spun as pain burst through my brain. I felt the world tilt and fall heavily to the ground, flashlight and shotgun falling away.
As I slipped in and out of consciousness, I knew I was a sitting duck for this thing. There was no way for me to stop it from ripping me to shreds like some of the corpses I had seen. As I blinked, I came to my senses and realized I was alone. How long I had actually been on the ground, I did not know.
I sat up, my head pounding and I could see the door hanging open, the wind slamming the door on its hinges and the rain soaking the hallway floor. Struggling, I found my flashlight and gun and pulled myself together.
There was a slim chance that Isabelle was still alive. I had to think. Where would it go? I ran all the stories I could think of and then it hit me. The garden. The walled garden.
I charged into the rain-soaked night. I sprinted toward the enclosed garden at the edge of the property. As I grew closer, I saw that the rusted door was open and hope flickered in my soul. As I came to a stop, I brought my flashlight up again with my shotgun and saw it.
This creature stood there in the middle of the overgrown garden, its massive clawed hand wrapped around Isabelle’s chest and holding her up. Out from under its bandanna mask, putrid vines had appeared and led up to Isabelle’s face where they were forcing their way down her throat and up her nose. I could see the wide terror in her eyes as vines were snaking their way around her waist and I did not want to think about what they were planning to do.
I brought up the shotgun again and fired. Knowing that I had distance, the flash of light caught the creature by surprise. It shrieked as it fell back. Trying desperately not to release its prey. I did not hesitate to grab the machete at my side and hack at its arm until Isabelle fell down free of it.
It’s claw swiped at me striking me on the leg and easily tearing through my pants leaving bloody lacerations but I put the weapon point blank and fired another round. I do not know if it was the flash, the combination of the creature, or that the almighty above was looking out for me, but the creature caught ablaze from the spark.
It fell back swinging wildly as the fire spread unnaturally fast catching the plants around it on fire. Within a matter of seconds, the walled garden had become ablaze with the bone walker in the center. As I ripped the vines out of Isabelle’s mouth and dragged her towards the door, I looked up to see those owl-like eyes looking at me with such abject hatred that the look stick with me today.
I honestly don’t know how we survived. I had helped Isabelle to her porch and we both passed out against our will from the sheer terror and exhaustion. We were awoken by the sound of a siren. The lights had come back on sometime in our sleep and the rain had drifted off to a comforting drizzle. The fire was still raging in the garden but contained by the ancient walls. At least two fire trucks, an ambulance and cops were flying up the private road towards us.
This entire hunt had been ill-planned and stupid. I knew it. As the cops approached with their hand on their pistols, I knew that I had allowed my own ego to get in the way. I should have taken Isabelle somewhere else until I had done a proper reconnaissance. I shouldn’t have taken her home where it was waiting. And now, the cops were looking at two thoroughly soaked humans, one a trucker with a wound and a gun and a young lady in distress. I was pretty sure I was going to go to jail.
“Isabelle?” One of the cops and his voice caused her to sit up, relief washing over her.
“Derek!” she wailed. “We were attacked! In the garden!”
Another two cops that had arrived had taken off in that direction while Derek helped the girl up and took her towards the ambulance. The other cop with a comically large mustache looked at me with keen eyes, his hand still on his pistol, sergeant stripes glowing in the light.
“Attacked?”
“Yeah,” I said, sitting up slowly and keeping my hand away from the shotgun and trying not to show the one under my jacket. “Someone came after Mrs. Walker. They were in the garden.”
The cop watched me closely but there seemed to be a recognition in his eyes.
“You by any chance Frank Jones?”
My heart jumped and I must have looked startled as the cop’s face broke into a smile. To my relief, his hand fell away from his holstered sidearm.
“I’ll take that for a yes. My guess is you don’t remember me. Clay Wilson. Santa Fe PD, about six years ago. You helped my partner with a...problem. Nellie Nelson?”
I knew the name but the face escaped me.
“She told me you helped her audit a police union building.”
“Ah, yes,” I said, remembering dealing with the wraith and the twinge in my right arm from it’s bite.
The cop looked towards the fire that was slowly being put out by the fire fighters.
“Any chance this will be one of your audits?”
“Yeah.”
He seemed to think for a few minutes and then nodded.
“Then I think you need to grab that shotgun of yours and hitch a ride with me before too many people ask questions. Whatcha think?”
I nodded. I was not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. I collected my stuff quickly from the living room and made my way back out where he was waiting. As I limped with the cop to his car, I looked towards Isabelle who was being held by the other. She gave me a look of thankfulness as the cop looked at his partner with confusion.
“Her brother’s got her,” Clay said, opening the back door for me. I was not gonna argue or fight. If he took me to jail or not.
And that was it. My leg was not as bad off as I thought and wrapped it in the back of the police car. Clay only asked where I wanted to go and he took me back to my truck. With that time, I was back on the road with that small town in the rear view mirror.
I never did find out what happened to Isabelle after that, if another creature came looking for her or if she had a chance to live in peace. I just knew that we both barely made it out alive and that was due to my own stupidity. I was furious with myself for weeks after that and told myself I wouldn’t put another person in jeopardy like that again. At least, despite my idiocy, another life was saved and another monster was put in the ground...I hoped. I never did find out if they found a body.
2023.06.05 00:21 skyguyic Ōkami Joō, the Wolf Queen
Howdy all, here's a zanpakutō I just designed for an OC of mine. Feel free to offer changes or discuss how it could be bettemore balance, or even just thoughts you might have on it. Thanks for the read!
—
A nameless zanpakutō taken into the hands of a lowly human known only as Luke S. Westerly marked the beginning of his new life. Thrown into Soul Society by a dying, low-ranked soul reaper, Luke found himself transformed into an animalistic beast for reasons initially unknown to him—sharing a mild likeness to Sajin Komamura. Alone with only the clothes on his back and an asauchi, Luke stepped forth into an alien world.
—
This zanpakutō spirit chooses either the form of a large, dark-furred wolf, or a tall woman clad in wolf pelts and adornments relating to the moon.
To know her, one must learn to balance their whole self alongside her. To know her love for the thrill of the hunt, and to counteract her equally as she counteracts you.
Only then may their user dare to call her name as follows:
"HUNT, ŌKAMI JOŌ!"
—
ZANPAKUTŌ NAME: Ōkami Joō
SHIKAI APPEARANCE: Imposing, six-foot-tall nodachi with a wide, black-and-silver blade.
TSUKIKARI, Shikai Ability #1: Represents the dark side of the user's zanpakutō—unseen, shadow. The user's agility vastly increases behind concealment, almost disappearing from view. The more concealment granted, the faster the user can move. Tsukikari leaves behind a barely-perceptible shadow that disappears immediately upon observation—notably in the corners of the target's vision. Tsukikari not only creates openings for the user, but sets unease and paranoia into the target—so long as the ability is properly utilized by the user. This ability does not work well in open fields, or if the target can detect the user regardless of concealment. The ability also forces the user to attack from the direction of the target's blindspots, which can cause the user to attack in a predictable manner. This ability also clashes with Tsukikiba, making it hard for the user to reliably utilize both of Ōkami Joō's abilities simultaneously.
TSUKIKIBA, Shikai Ability #2: Represents the light side of the user's zanpakutō—lunar, gleaming. Ōkami Joō collects light within its blade, converting light energy into stored reiatsu. This ability is magnified under moonlight, but can still work in any environment. The blade glows depending on how much light has been collected, indicating how much power it is storing. This energy can be expended in multiple ways, such as: Increasing the power behind an attack, creating ranged slash of reiatsu, and other creative usage. This ability has limited effectiveness in the absence of light or absence of moonlight. This ability also takes time to gain adequate charge, leaving the user potentially vulnerable during moments of inadequate charge. This ability also clashes with Tsukikari, making it hard for the user to reliably utilize both of Ōkami Joō's abilities simultaneously.
—
Through further experience, Ōkami Joō will only then reveal her true nature, offering her wielder greater powers in exchange for unending lunacy. The scales are tipped and the user is thrown into unyielding darkness—coaxed from any sense of balance.
In exchange, the user utilizes the depths of their soul to rip apart the enemy. Blotting out the light, shadow become the user's only ally. And ultimately, she grants the user the power they crave. . . .
BANKAI.
—
BANKAI NAME: Yami Ōkami Joō
APPEARANCE: As the user concentrates their reiatsu, shadows drip off their form and surround where they stand. Shadows begin to crawl up their zanpakutō like water, and then the user calls out "Bankai". The immediate area and sky surrounding the user are thrown into darkness. If the sun and moon are present, they appear eclipsed in the immediate area—effect distance depending on the user's reiatsu.
SIDE-EFFECTS OF ACTIVATION: The user's mental state flips, as they lack the power to restrict Yami Ōkami Joō's dark influence. The user's goals become to destroy, hunt, and win—perhaps causing them to sacrifice their morality in the process. This can be overcome with experience, but Yami Ōkami Joō is always nearby to ensure that the user plays by her rules and not their own.
KAGEKARI, Bankai Ability #1: Shadows become concealment for the user as well, allowing them to meld in with all darkness. The user's reiatsu melds with the shadows, spreading their presence out to every possible shadow nearby. This ability shares the weaknesses and strengths of Tsukikari, although it is compatible and even amplified by Kagekiba, unlike with Tsukikiba.
KAGEKIBA, Bankai Ability #2: The user uses their zanpakutō to grab the shadows, dragging them out into the physical world. The user can form small structures from the shadows. The user can concentrate weaker shadows into a focused point, as well as veil theirselves within these shadows to increase the potency of Kagekari. Size, durability, and power depend on the darkness of the shadows—as well as the user's mastery with Yami Ōkami Joō. With Kagesōsa, the user can form things such as: Ranged slashing attacks, obstructions, body-doubles, and other creative usage. Kagekiba hinges on the availability of nearby shadow, meaning that it is weak in open clearings or locations with illumination that overcome shadows spread by Yami Ōkami Joō.
KAGESEKAI, Bankai Ability #3: The user thrusts Yami Ōkami Joō into the ground, pouring shadow out and engulfing the user's surroundings in pitch-black shadow. Ally and foe remain unaffected by the spread of Kagesekai. Kagekari and Kagekiba's potency are amplified, as the user becomes exceedingly difficult while within Kagesekai. This ability only applies to the world and structures upon it, meaning that it can be counteracted by making distance into the air. This isn't a surefire answer to defeat Kagesekai, however, as the user can still utilize Kagekiba within Kagesekai. This ability can be counteracted with light fueled by strong enough reiatsu.
—
Yami Ōkami Joō hides only her final, true ability from her user—one that cannot be found easily from the dark queen. As she represents the power of darkness itself, the user must become the opposing force in order to truly stand alongside her—to find the true balance between zanpakutō and wielder. Once obtained, Yami Ōkami Joō reveals her final ability to her counterpart. . . .
—
KAGEKEN, Bankai Ability #4: The user draws in every available shadow nearby, including lingering effects of Kagesekai and Kagekiba. Like a flash of bright light, all shadow disappears for a moment, now drawn into the entire form of Yami Ōkami Joō. The user loses their ability to use Kagekari, Kagekiba, and Kagesekai—in exchange for a blade of concentrated shadow. Yami Ōkami Joō becomes the ultimate weapon, and its effectiveness hinges on the skills, prowess, and power of its user. Kageken requires complete harmony, mastery, and control in order to be utilized by the user. If the user allows theirself to be consumed by turmoil, Kageken's edge dulls and it rapidly loses power. It goes against every other aspect of Yami Ōkami Joō, requiring sanity to be used effectively.
submitted by skyguyic to Zanpakuto_OCs [link] [comments]
—
A nameless zanpakutō taken into the hands of a lowly human known only as Luke S. Westerly marked the beginning of his new life. Thrown into Soul Society by a dying, low-ranked soul reaper, Luke found himself transformed into an animalistic beast for reasons initially unknown to him—sharing a mild likeness to Sajin Komamura. Alone with only the clothes on his back and an asauchi, Luke stepped forth into an alien world.
—
This zanpakutō spirit chooses either the form of a large, dark-furred wolf, or a tall woman clad in wolf pelts and adornments relating to the moon.
To know her, one must learn to balance their whole self alongside her. To know her love for the thrill of the hunt, and to counteract her equally as she counteracts you.
Only then may their user dare to call her name as follows:
"HUNT, ŌKAMI JOŌ!"
—
ZANPAKUTŌ NAME: Ōkami Joō
SHIKAI APPEARANCE: Imposing, six-foot-tall nodachi with a wide, black-and-silver blade.
TSUKIKARI, Shikai Ability #1: Represents the dark side of the user's zanpakutō—unseen, shadow. The user's agility vastly increases behind concealment, almost disappearing from view. The more concealment granted, the faster the user can move. Tsukikari leaves behind a barely-perceptible shadow that disappears immediately upon observation—notably in the corners of the target's vision. Tsukikari not only creates openings for the user, but sets unease and paranoia into the target—so long as the ability is properly utilized by the user. This ability does not work well in open fields, or if the target can detect the user regardless of concealment. The ability also forces the user to attack from the direction of the target's blindspots, which can cause the user to attack in a predictable manner. This ability also clashes with Tsukikiba, making it hard for the user to reliably utilize both of Ōkami Joō's abilities simultaneously.
TSUKIKIBA, Shikai Ability #2: Represents the light side of the user's zanpakutō—lunar, gleaming. Ōkami Joō collects light within its blade, converting light energy into stored reiatsu. This ability is magnified under moonlight, but can still work in any environment. The blade glows depending on how much light has been collected, indicating how much power it is storing. This energy can be expended in multiple ways, such as: Increasing the power behind an attack, creating ranged slash of reiatsu, and other creative usage. This ability has limited effectiveness in the absence of light or absence of moonlight. This ability also takes time to gain adequate charge, leaving the user potentially vulnerable during moments of inadequate charge. This ability also clashes with Tsukikari, making it hard for the user to reliably utilize both of Ōkami Joō's abilities simultaneously.
—
Through further experience, Ōkami Joō will only then reveal her true nature, offering her wielder greater powers in exchange for unending lunacy. The scales are tipped and the user is thrown into unyielding darkness—coaxed from any sense of balance.
In exchange, the user utilizes the depths of their soul to rip apart the enemy. Blotting out the light, shadow become the user's only ally. And ultimately, she grants the user the power they crave. . . .
BANKAI.
—
BANKAI NAME: Yami Ōkami Joō
APPEARANCE: As the user concentrates their reiatsu, shadows drip off their form and surround where they stand. Shadows begin to crawl up their zanpakutō like water, and then the user calls out "Bankai". The immediate area and sky surrounding the user are thrown into darkness. If the sun and moon are present, they appear eclipsed in the immediate area—effect distance depending on the user's reiatsu.
SIDE-EFFECTS OF ACTIVATION: The user's mental state flips, as they lack the power to restrict Yami Ōkami Joō's dark influence. The user's goals become to destroy, hunt, and win—perhaps causing them to sacrifice their morality in the process. This can be overcome with experience, but Yami Ōkami Joō is always nearby to ensure that the user plays by her rules and not their own.
KAGEKARI, Bankai Ability #1: Shadows become concealment for the user as well, allowing them to meld in with all darkness. The user's reiatsu melds with the shadows, spreading their presence out to every possible shadow nearby. This ability shares the weaknesses and strengths of Tsukikari, although it is compatible and even amplified by Kagekiba, unlike with Tsukikiba.
KAGEKIBA, Bankai Ability #2: The user uses their zanpakutō to grab the shadows, dragging them out into the physical world. The user can form small structures from the shadows. The user can concentrate weaker shadows into a focused point, as well as veil theirselves within these shadows to increase the potency of Kagekari. Size, durability, and power depend on the darkness of the shadows—as well as the user's mastery with Yami Ōkami Joō. With Kagesōsa, the user can form things such as: Ranged slashing attacks, obstructions, body-doubles, and other creative usage. Kagekiba hinges on the availability of nearby shadow, meaning that it is weak in open clearings or locations with illumination that overcome shadows spread by Yami Ōkami Joō.
KAGESEKAI, Bankai Ability #3: The user thrusts Yami Ōkami Joō into the ground, pouring shadow out and engulfing the user's surroundings in pitch-black shadow. Ally and foe remain unaffected by the spread of Kagesekai. Kagekari and Kagekiba's potency are amplified, as the user becomes exceedingly difficult while within Kagesekai. This ability only applies to the world and structures upon it, meaning that it can be counteracted by making distance into the air. This isn't a surefire answer to defeat Kagesekai, however, as the user can still utilize Kagekiba within Kagesekai. This ability can be counteracted with light fueled by strong enough reiatsu.
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Yami Ōkami Joō hides only her final, true ability from her user—one that cannot be found easily from the dark queen. As she represents the power of darkness itself, the user must become the opposing force in order to truly stand alongside her—to find the true balance between zanpakutō and wielder. Once obtained, Yami Ōkami Joō reveals her final ability to her counterpart. . . .
—
KAGEKEN, Bankai Ability #4: The user draws in every available shadow nearby, including lingering effects of Kagesekai and Kagekiba. Like a flash of bright light, all shadow disappears for a moment, now drawn into the entire form of Yami Ōkami Joō. The user loses their ability to use Kagekari, Kagekiba, and Kagesekai—in exchange for a blade of concentrated shadow. Yami Ōkami Joō becomes the ultimate weapon, and its effectiveness hinges on the skills, prowess, and power of its user. Kageken requires complete harmony, mastery, and control in order to be utilized by the user. If the user allows theirself to be consumed by turmoil, Kageken's edge dulls and it rapidly loses power. It goes against every other aspect of Yami Ōkami Joō, requiring sanity to be used effectively.
2023.06.04 19:10 tulpacat1 To Kill a Predator, Chapter 23
Hi everyone.
To Kill a Predator is a work of fan fiction set in the Nature of Predators universe originally created by SpacePaladin15 whose Patreon you should subscribe to.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Depiction does not equal endorsement.
Hope you enjoy it!
[First] [Previous]
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Memory transcription subject: Martin Russo, Human Refugee
Date [standardized human time]: November 30th, 2136
“Wait”. The voice is so sudden I don’t even realize it’s my own at first.
Mosun looks up at me, confused. I’m confused too. Thiva’s right in there. I want to storm in, but there’s something wrong, there’s
A recording of a crying baby
I shake my head and step back, motioning for him to follow me.
Another scream echoes through the hall. Mosun swallows, but lets go of the handle.
Think. You’re in charge of a bunch of terrorists all gung-ho to go Helter Skelter on humanity. You’re a sadistic alien psychopath. You mutilate animals. You keep trophies. You don’t give a damn about your sister. You kill humans. Your tools for that are firebombs that go off when they open doors, and recordings of vulnerable things in distress.
But why here? Why set the trap here? Taking her to a second location makes more sense. Why your base, or this close to it? Why are you luring the human here?
It’s not because he’s here too soon. You expected the warpath right away. You know their empathy and protective instincts overrides their rationality. You might not have expected him to gather a posse, but you know the humans are social animals. You had to know it was a possibility.
So why… Here…
Mosun whispers. “Martin, what’s the matter? Why aren’t we going in?”
There’s something I’m missing. Think. Think! You were happy to get the first human kills while you weren’t even in the area. You might’ve placed the traps or had your mooks do it but either way you were fine with being absent when they went off. Why is this time different?
It’s because the humans were gathered in one place, isn’t it? The fire wasn’t about killing us. It was about scattering us and leaving us solitary enough to hunt. Or maybe... Maybe it didn’t satisfy, didn’t scratch that itch. No trophies, no mutilations.
Because you are a predator. An ambush predator. You want to be close to the trap, like a spider. You want to look the human in the eyes as he dies, and take something to remember the kill by.
You’re here, somewhere.
I swallow, and look at the door. It slides open, like almost all Venlil doors.
Alright, time to Human.
I take the strap to my rifle, and gingerly unsling it from the weapon. I grab one of my last zip ties and loop it around the handle, and in the buckle of the strap.
Mosun flicks his ear in a Venlil-esque sign for understanding and agreement at once, and moves down the hallway. I follow him.
The strap and zip-tie together are perhaps two meters in length, so with a bit of an annoyed grunt I take off my belt and add that to the makeshift rope. That gives me a little under a meter extra.
I hand the rifle to Mosun, and hold a hand up to him while clutching the rope in the other.
Three. Two. One.
I close my eyes and turn away in one single motion, tugging at the door handle. As soon as the door parts from the frame there’s a blast, sending me and Mosun to the ground. The air stinks of wood-pulp, smoke, and dust.
Jesus Christ!!
My ears are ringing as I get on my unsteady feet and grasp the rifle from Mosun, stumbling my way to the ruined doorway and peering inside.
The room is empty but for shrapnel and debris and a cloud of dust. None of it looks like it was alive.
Oh thank God, the bastards weren’t using live bait.
With the high-pitched ringing slowly subsiding I take a few steps down the hall, before falling to one knee from disorientation.
I don’t hear the Exterminator storm up the stairs. But I see them just fine.
The visor’s reflective. The armor’s bulky. The flamethrower’s lit.
With Mosun behind me in the small hallway, there’s nowhere to run. No time to think.
This isn’t aiming at someone’s back, or a sleeping and prone body. I don’t have time to hesitate, so I don’t.
I start shooting from the hip and raise the gun to my shoulder while firing. The weapon jumps in my hand with each pull of the trigger, and from my awkward stance I have quantity stand in for quality. Wood splinters fly from the wall behind the Exterminator, who jerks as some of the shots strike true.
After swaying for a second and losing their grip on their flamethrower, they tumble right down the stairs. The weapon clatters down after them, connected to their fuel tank.
I get to my feet and try to rush over to the stairs. I slam into the wall for my trouble, but get my bearings and raise the rifle.
The Exterminator’s laying prone at the foot of the stairs. They stir weakly and move a paw toward their weapon.
I fire another salvo of rounds. The sound echoes and makes my ears hurt even worse than the blast already did. The Exterminator jerks a couple of times, lets out a shuddering breath, and then goes still.
They’re dead. This is it. I killed someone.
I expect it to hit me like a sledgehammer. I expect to end up doubled over, hurling my guts out. That’s what you always see in the movies.
Instead my response is as anticlimactic as the killing itself: I just hope it was Renak.
I feel Mosun’s hand on my back. He speaks with quiet sympathy. “…Are you alright?”
I sigh slowly. “Yeah… Yeah. Predator, remember?”
Some of his usual energy creeps back into his voice. “Oh, I see how it is. You get to say it.”
We head down the stairs while I fiddle with my makeshift rope to restore my belt and rifle sling to their proper places. The sling needs to be tied into a knot to be put to use, as the buckle is beyond saving. “Yeah. I’m sure I’ll break down later, but for now we have a- MOVE!!”
I see a cylinder about half the size of a Pringles can roll into the room, and push Mosun forcibly into the kitchen. To his credit he doesn’t question it, instead lunging past me.
Instead of a pipe bomb blast as I had feared, the grenade starts leaking thick white smoke.
They don’t have CS gas and that thing looked homemade. So probably phosphorous.
I look around the kitchen desperately before finding a salad bowl in the dishes. I immediately turn the faucet to full blast to fill the bowl with water while the hissing grenade spreads its noxious fumes. I can start to smell and taste the acrid, garlic-like stench. My body starts coughing, my eyes watering and lungs itching.
Yeah. Phosphorous. Fuck.
Mosun coughs a few times and tries to cover his mouth with his arm. “What are you d-doing?!”
As soon as there’s enough water in the bowl, I turn around and lunge at the grenade. Using an awkward double-handed dunking motion, I trust centripetal force to make it work as I flip the water-filled bowl and slam it down around the grenade.
There’s a mess of sloshing, and a lot of hissing, but no more gas escapes. Water slowly starts to leak out from the bowl’s edges, but by the time it’s done it’ll have stopped the reaction.
“Mosun, w-wash your… Oh FUCK OFF!!”
Halfway through my statement I see another Exterminator enter the room. They step over their fellow’s body without a glance and raise their flamethrower toward us.
I raise my rifle in turn and begin firing: three shots in rapid succession.
Before I’ve had time to adjust my aim they’ve already disappeared from view down the hallway beside the stairs, long tail visible for a split second before vanishing. I’ve never seen a Venlil move as sinuously and quickly as that.
I cough a couple of times and wipe my eyes. It doesn’t help. When Mosun appears with a glass of water however, I can dump it directly onto my face. My stinging eyes cry out with relief.
After just a few seconds of exposure to the gas, I’d love a date with an eyewash station. But it’ll have to wait.
Mosun takes the lead wordlessly, motioning with a paw for me to follow. So I do, stepping over my kill in the process. Unlike the Exterminator, I can’t help but look down at it.
There’s so much less blood than I expected.
As Mosun rounds the corner into the next room, he’s forced into an awkward duck against the doorway as a stun rod swishes through the air. He kicks out at the assailant with a growl, and lunges forward into the other room.
I follow as quickly as I can.
In the living room, the two are already locked in a brawl. Mosun’s shorter than the Exterminator, and has less range.
I make a guess and try to distract them. If the Yotul gives me some distance I can shoot. “Renak!”
The Exterminator freezes for a split second, and Mosun gets a good kick in.
Guess that’s you then, motherfucker.
Renak rolls with the kick and manages to get Mosun’s leg caught in his arm. The stun rod swings down, and Mosun’s forced to block it with his arm. The electricity courses through him and he gasps out, dropping to a knee.
Without a good angle, I drop the rifle and trust my sling to keep it from hitting the ground. Instead I charge in to join the fray.
With a wild and poorly planned left hook, I manage to get Renak to take a single step back. Enough for Mosun to rise to unsteady legs. The little badass weaves a few times as he moves into an elegant-looking stance. “Ambush, ambush, ambush. You only know the one trick, huh?”
In response, Renak drops into his own stance. The stun rod’s held in one paw, high near his shoulder. The other paw’s held outward in a warding gesture.
Feeling left out, I get into a boxer’s stance. Though all this excitement’s making the wounds on my right arm ache and act up.
The three of us are still for a moment. “…There’s just you left, Renak. Your terrorist group’s done for.” Technically there’s one other Exterminator left unaccounted for. But I don’t see a reason to tell him that.
He tilts his head toward me for a second. I see myself reflected in the visor.
Mosun’s the first to move, lunging in low. I charge in right after. Renak doesn’t step back, instead swinging the rod down.
Mosun leans back so far he’s almost prone, using his tail and one arm as leverage to kick up at Renak’s arm and stop the descending blow. The movement is beautiful, and wouldn’t look out of place in some sort of Capoeira. By all rights it should break the arm, but the heavy Exterminator armor takes most of the force.
I come in with my own simple straight punch with my left, but I overextend and Renak swats it aside sharply with his own free arm. Instead of relenting, I jab with my right. I catch him on the shoulder and do little damage.
Renak shifts his stance and raises his baton to swing it downward at me. Mosun moves to intercept, but Renak’s leg lashes out and catches Mosun’s knee from the side. The swing that was coming my way turns into a descending thrust at the Yotul, who gets the baton jabbed straight into his torso.
Mosun’s shriek fills the room as he thrashes under the coruscating electrical blow, and I strike Renak with everything I’ve got in a desperate and unrefined haymaker.
I catch the bastard right in the visor and hear a loud sound. It hurts. Renak staggers back with a yelp, dropping the stun rod, and turns to look squarely at me. I’ve cracked his visor, and probably broken a finger or two in the bargain.
I stare for the length of a breath at the cracks in the reflective surface, seeing my own rage reflected in a dozen fractured images.
Renak calmly reaches behind him and pulls out his sidearm. He doesn’t even glance aside as he extends his arm and puts two bullets into Mosun. The gunshots echo in the enclosed space.
“NO!!” I hear myself shouting as I fumble for my rifle. Renak turns his arm toward me and fires again. I hear the crack and a whistle as a bullet flies right past my head.
A second bullet whizzes past and strikes the door frame, tumbling past with a ricochet whine. It missed only because I’m falling to one knee.
With my own rifle raised, I return fire. We’re firing at each other from mere feet away. I fire three times. I miss the first shot, but the second hits him in the thigh. The third takes him in the side somewhere.
He’s spun around, but empties the gun in my direction as he staggers into a dash out of the room, toward the basement.
It’s only when I rise to my feet that I realize I’ve been shot too. My left leg burns, and can’t carry my weight. I awkwardly hop over to Mosun and kneel to investigate his wounds.
His collarbone’s been shattered by one bullet. Another has caught him on the inside of the shoulder. I don’t know Yotul anatomy, but I’m guessing if it’s caught a lung or an artery he’s in real trouble. “Come on, you can’t leave me alone here; you’re the only one I can talk to.”
He takes a slow breath and doesn’t even bother trying to get up. He simply looks at me and plainly says “Ow.”
I can breathe again. The wound’s leaking, but not spurting. Oh thank God.
“Christ, okay, we gotta get you out of here. I don’t think it’s immediately fatal, but the blood loss is gonna get you if we don’t stop it.”
“Later. Get him, then help.”
I shake my head. “I can’t just-”
He swats at me with his good arm. “Not safe to extract. And still need the girl.”
I look around and end up taking a blanket folded over the couch and handing it to him. “Press this into the wounds, as hard as you can. I’ll be back.”
“Y-You better be. I’ll be upset if you m-make me walk back to the truck on my own.”
I get up and grasp my rifle, and limp my way after Renak.
Unless he’s got another ambush planned in the basement, Thiva is his last chance. And the bastard knows it.
I make my way down the basement steps, but it’s slow going. I have to use my injured right arm to brace myself, holding the rifle ahead with the left. My adrenaline’s starting to go down enough that the leg is starting to really hurt. So’s my left hand.
At the foot of the stairs, Renak’s discarded the helmet. The room contains several boxes of explosives, and flamethrowers.
Their weapons stores. Great.
In the middle of the room there’s a chair. Bound to it is Thiva. She’s got cuts and bruises over her body, and her beautiful fur is matted orange all over.
Behind her stands Renak. He’s got a knife to her throat.
I raise the rifle and stare right at Renak. “Let the girl go.”
Thiva gasps out as she sees me. “Martin!” She tries to lean forward, but the blade presses harder into her neck and she shrinks back into the chair.
Renak stares back at me, head-on and with both eyes. When he speaks, his voice is emotionless and without inflection. He sounds bored. “Move a muscle, predator, and Thiva dies.”
I look at my friend. She looks terrified. “Hey Thiva, don’t worry. I’m here. Everything’s gonna be fine. Alright?”
She gives the tiniest nod.
Renak growls. “Look at me, predator.”
My eyes shift back to his again. They’re dull and empty. Just black beads of glass set into his face. It’s like looking at a machine. A complex structure, but no soul animating it.
My leg is trembling, and I feel hot and sticky blood running down it. “You don’t need the girl. You can just let her go, and we can leave, and nobody else needs to die.”
He blinks slowly. “My sister is better off dead than as a predator’s mate. If I can’t save her body from you, I can save her honor.” To emphasize his point, he lets the knife dig further into her throat. I see some orange running down it, and the fur beneath Thiva’s eyes are damp with tears.
My breathing is heavy, and my aim is shaky. “I stormed a terrorist compound to get this far. I’m not leaving without her. You can have her over my dead body.”
He stares silently for a moment. “Fair enough.”
He raises his other arm toward me with a smooth and mechanical motion. His sidearm is in it.
I pull the trigger.
The bullet takes him in the head. With his strings cut, he drops in a heap.
I drop the rifle and rush forward to undo Thiva’s bindings. As soon as I do, her arms fly around me painfully tightly. I return the hug as best I can.
“Thiva, listen to me. Can you walk?”
She gets up and winces, but nods. “Y-yeah.”
“Okay, good. There’s a Yotul upstairs named Mosun. He needs immediate medical attention. We’ve got a truck waiting, we’re gonna head up and get both of you out there.”
One of her eyes suddenly moves up and stares behind me. I turn in place.
Vansi’s standing in stairway, taking in the scene.
“Thiva… Go. Now. Now!” I rise to my feet and put a hand on her back, walking alongside her for a few steps before she rushes the rest of the way past her mother and up the stairs.
Vansi doesn’t move to stop her. She just stares at the crumpled corpse behind us.
It’s only after I take another step that her eyes snap to me with fury.
And I realize my rifle’s right at her feet.
She snatches it up into trembling paws and aims it right at me.
“Vansi, listen, I-”
The weapon goes off.
I fall to my knees. My hands reach my stomach and feel sticky and wet.
She pulls the trigger again, and it clicks dry. She pulls another few times, but it’s empty.
I rise to my feet and try to lunge past her. But she simply swings the empty rifle at me. It hits my wounded stomach, and I fall to my side. She swings it down on me several more times, snarling and cursing, until the weapon breaks enough that she simply tosses what’s left aside.
It hurts. Jesus Christ it hurts so fucking bad.
I try to think of a way out of this as she staggers past me toward her son. I try to get to my feet again, but fail. I drag myself to the wall, and use it to pull myself up bit by bit. I limp along the wall, smearing trails of my own blood with my hands as I go.
I’m almost at the stairs when I hear an inarticulate scream and feel agony blooming out from my right side. I look down and see the knife, in Vansi’s paws.
Fuck.
I collapse on the ground and try to fend her off with my hands. She stabs me straight through the palm of my right hand, then stabs twice more at my left arm and shoulder. My left arm doesn’t respond to my signals, simply flopping down limply.
With only one chance left, I punch her with my right. Again and again, while she stabs at my torso.
There’s a cold math to blood loss. The more you lose, the weaker you get.
‘So you see, that's how I am going to die.’
Each of my blows does less than the last. My hands and feet feel ice cold, while my chest burns.
‘I'll sneeze in the sunlight, or turn my head a bit too fast when someone wants my attention from my blind spot’
Before long I can’t fight back. I simply lay still and hear my flesh tearing and Vansi screaming in my ears.
‘or show happiness with a smile or a laugh’
I can’t lift a finger or even turn my head as Vansi staggers off of me. My shallow breaths are agony, and I can feel one of my lungs has collapsed.
‘or god forbid I might try to save a life again.’
She returns with something else in her hands. I close my eyes.
‘And then someone like your son will show up and burn me alive for it.’
/// ERROR /// Memory transcription fragmented /// Subject no longer conscious.
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[First] [Previous]
submitted by tulpacat1 to NatureofPredators [link] [comments]
To Kill a Predator is a work of fan fiction set in the Nature of Predators universe originally created by SpacePaladin15 whose Patreon you should subscribe to.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Depiction does not equal endorsement.
Hope you enjoy it!
[First] [Previous]
---
Memory transcription subject: Martin Russo, Human Refugee
Date [standardized human time]: November 30th, 2136
“Wait”. The voice is so sudden I don’t even realize it’s my own at first.
Mosun looks up at me, confused. I’m confused too. Thiva’s right in there. I want to storm in, but there’s something wrong, there’s
A recording of a crying baby
I shake my head and step back, motioning for him to follow me.
Another scream echoes through the hall. Mosun swallows, but lets go of the handle.
Think. You’re in charge of a bunch of terrorists all gung-ho to go Helter Skelter on humanity. You’re a sadistic alien psychopath. You mutilate animals. You keep trophies. You don’t give a damn about your sister. You kill humans. Your tools for that are firebombs that go off when they open doors, and recordings of vulnerable things in distress.
But why here? Why set the trap here? Taking her to a second location makes more sense. Why your base, or this close to it? Why are you luring the human here?
It’s not because he’s here too soon. You expected the warpath right away. You know their empathy and protective instincts overrides their rationality. You might not have expected him to gather a posse, but you know the humans are social animals. You had to know it was a possibility.
So why… Here…
Mosun whispers. “Martin, what’s the matter? Why aren’t we going in?”
There’s something I’m missing. Think. Think! You were happy to get the first human kills while you weren’t even in the area. You might’ve placed the traps or had your mooks do it but either way you were fine with being absent when they went off. Why is this time different?
It’s because the humans were gathered in one place, isn’t it? The fire wasn’t about killing us. It was about scattering us and leaving us solitary enough to hunt. Or maybe... Maybe it didn’t satisfy, didn’t scratch that itch. No trophies, no mutilations.
Because you are a predator. An ambush predator. You want to be close to the trap, like a spider. You want to look the human in the eyes as he dies, and take something to remember the kill by.
You’re here, somewhere.
I swallow, and look at the door. It slides open, like almost all Venlil doors.
Alright, time to Human.
I take the strap to my rifle, and gingerly unsling it from the weapon. I grab one of my last zip ties and loop it around the handle, and in the buckle of the strap.
Mosun flicks his ear in a Venlil-esque sign for understanding and agreement at once, and moves down the hallway. I follow him.
The strap and zip-tie together are perhaps two meters in length, so with a bit of an annoyed grunt I take off my belt and add that to the makeshift rope. That gives me a little under a meter extra.
I hand the rifle to Mosun, and hold a hand up to him while clutching the rope in the other.
Three. Two. One.
I close my eyes and turn away in one single motion, tugging at the door handle. As soon as the door parts from the frame there’s a blast, sending me and Mosun to the ground. The air stinks of wood-pulp, smoke, and dust.
Jesus Christ!!
My ears are ringing as I get on my unsteady feet and grasp the rifle from Mosun, stumbling my way to the ruined doorway and peering inside.
The room is empty but for shrapnel and debris and a cloud of dust. None of it looks like it was alive.
Oh thank God, the bastards weren’t using live bait.
With the high-pitched ringing slowly subsiding I take a few steps down the hall, before falling to one knee from disorientation.
I don’t hear the Exterminator storm up the stairs. But I see them just fine.
The visor’s reflective. The armor’s bulky. The flamethrower’s lit.
With Mosun behind me in the small hallway, there’s nowhere to run. No time to think.
This isn’t aiming at someone’s back, or a sleeping and prone body. I don’t have time to hesitate, so I don’t.
I start shooting from the hip and raise the gun to my shoulder while firing. The weapon jumps in my hand with each pull of the trigger, and from my awkward stance I have quantity stand in for quality. Wood splinters fly from the wall behind the Exterminator, who jerks as some of the shots strike true.
After swaying for a second and losing their grip on their flamethrower, they tumble right down the stairs. The weapon clatters down after them, connected to their fuel tank.
I get to my feet and try to rush over to the stairs. I slam into the wall for my trouble, but get my bearings and raise the rifle.
The Exterminator’s laying prone at the foot of the stairs. They stir weakly and move a paw toward their weapon.
I fire another salvo of rounds. The sound echoes and makes my ears hurt even worse than the blast already did. The Exterminator jerks a couple of times, lets out a shuddering breath, and then goes still.
They’re dead. This is it. I killed someone.
I expect it to hit me like a sledgehammer. I expect to end up doubled over, hurling my guts out. That’s what you always see in the movies.
Instead my response is as anticlimactic as the killing itself: I just hope it was Renak.
I feel Mosun’s hand on my back. He speaks with quiet sympathy. “…Are you alright?”
I sigh slowly. “Yeah… Yeah. Predator, remember?”
Some of his usual energy creeps back into his voice. “Oh, I see how it is. You get to say it.”
We head down the stairs while I fiddle with my makeshift rope to restore my belt and rifle sling to their proper places. The sling needs to be tied into a knot to be put to use, as the buckle is beyond saving. “Yeah. I’m sure I’ll break down later, but for now we have a- MOVE!!”
I see a cylinder about half the size of a Pringles can roll into the room, and push Mosun forcibly into the kitchen. To his credit he doesn’t question it, instead lunging past me.
Instead of a pipe bomb blast as I had feared, the grenade starts leaking thick white smoke.
They don’t have CS gas and that thing looked homemade. So probably phosphorous.
I look around the kitchen desperately before finding a salad bowl in the dishes. I immediately turn the faucet to full blast to fill the bowl with water while the hissing grenade spreads its noxious fumes. I can start to smell and taste the acrid, garlic-like stench. My body starts coughing, my eyes watering and lungs itching.
Yeah. Phosphorous. Fuck.
Mosun coughs a few times and tries to cover his mouth with his arm. “What are you d-doing?!”
As soon as there’s enough water in the bowl, I turn around and lunge at the grenade. Using an awkward double-handed dunking motion, I trust centripetal force to make it work as I flip the water-filled bowl and slam it down around the grenade.
There’s a mess of sloshing, and a lot of hissing, but no more gas escapes. Water slowly starts to leak out from the bowl’s edges, but by the time it’s done it’ll have stopped the reaction.
“Mosun, w-wash your… Oh FUCK OFF!!”
Halfway through my statement I see another Exterminator enter the room. They step over their fellow’s body without a glance and raise their flamethrower toward us.
I raise my rifle in turn and begin firing: three shots in rapid succession.
Before I’ve had time to adjust my aim they’ve already disappeared from view down the hallway beside the stairs, long tail visible for a split second before vanishing. I’ve never seen a Venlil move as sinuously and quickly as that.
I cough a couple of times and wipe my eyes. It doesn’t help. When Mosun appears with a glass of water however, I can dump it directly onto my face. My stinging eyes cry out with relief.
After just a few seconds of exposure to the gas, I’d love a date with an eyewash station. But it’ll have to wait.
Mosun takes the lead wordlessly, motioning with a paw for me to follow. So I do, stepping over my kill in the process. Unlike the Exterminator, I can’t help but look down at it.
There’s so much less blood than I expected.
As Mosun rounds the corner into the next room, he’s forced into an awkward duck against the doorway as a stun rod swishes through the air. He kicks out at the assailant with a growl, and lunges forward into the other room.
I follow as quickly as I can.
In the living room, the two are already locked in a brawl. Mosun’s shorter than the Exterminator, and has less range.
I make a guess and try to distract them. If the Yotul gives me some distance I can shoot. “Renak!”
The Exterminator freezes for a split second, and Mosun gets a good kick in.
Guess that’s you then, motherfucker.
Renak rolls with the kick and manages to get Mosun’s leg caught in his arm. The stun rod swings down, and Mosun’s forced to block it with his arm. The electricity courses through him and he gasps out, dropping to a knee.
Without a good angle, I drop the rifle and trust my sling to keep it from hitting the ground. Instead I charge in to join the fray.
With a wild and poorly planned left hook, I manage to get Renak to take a single step back. Enough for Mosun to rise to unsteady legs. The little badass weaves a few times as he moves into an elegant-looking stance. “Ambush, ambush, ambush. You only know the one trick, huh?”
In response, Renak drops into his own stance. The stun rod’s held in one paw, high near his shoulder. The other paw’s held outward in a warding gesture.
Feeling left out, I get into a boxer’s stance. Though all this excitement’s making the wounds on my right arm ache and act up.
The three of us are still for a moment. “…There’s just you left, Renak. Your terrorist group’s done for.” Technically there’s one other Exterminator left unaccounted for. But I don’t see a reason to tell him that.
He tilts his head toward me for a second. I see myself reflected in the visor.
Mosun’s the first to move, lunging in low. I charge in right after. Renak doesn’t step back, instead swinging the rod down.
Mosun leans back so far he’s almost prone, using his tail and one arm as leverage to kick up at Renak’s arm and stop the descending blow. The movement is beautiful, and wouldn’t look out of place in some sort of Capoeira. By all rights it should break the arm, but the heavy Exterminator armor takes most of the force.
I come in with my own simple straight punch with my left, but I overextend and Renak swats it aside sharply with his own free arm. Instead of relenting, I jab with my right. I catch him on the shoulder and do little damage.
Renak shifts his stance and raises his baton to swing it downward at me. Mosun moves to intercept, but Renak’s leg lashes out and catches Mosun’s knee from the side. The swing that was coming my way turns into a descending thrust at the Yotul, who gets the baton jabbed straight into his torso.
Mosun’s shriek fills the room as he thrashes under the coruscating electrical blow, and I strike Renak with everything I’ve got in a desperate and unrefined haymaker.
I catch the bastard right in the visor and hear a loud sound. It hurts. Renak staggers back with a yelp, dropping the stun rod, and turns to look squarely at me. I’ve cracked his visor, and probably broken a finger or two in the bargain.
I stare for the length of a breath at the cracks in the reflective surface, seeing my own rage reflected in a dozen fractured images.
Renak calmly reaches behind him and pulls out his sidearm. He doesn’t even glance aside as he extends his arm and puts two bullets into Mosun. The gunshots echo in the enclosed space.
“NO!!” I hear myself shouting as I fumble for my rifle. Renak turns his arm toward me and fires again. I hear the crack and a whistle as a bullet flies right past my head.
A second bullet whizzes past and strikes the door frame, tumbling past with a ricochet whine. It missed only because I’m falling to one knee.
With my own rifle raised, I return fire. We’re firing at each other from mere feet away. I fire three times. I miss the first shot, but the second hits him in the thigh. The third takes him in the side somewhere.
He’s spun around, but empties the gun in my direction as he staggers into a dash out of the room, toward the basement.
It’s only when I rise to my feet that I realize I’ve been shot too. My left leg burns, and can’t carry my weight. I awkwardly hop over to Mosun and kneel to investigate his wounds.
His collarbone’s been shattered by one bullet. Another has caught him on the inside of the shoulder. I don’t know Yotul anatomy, but I’m guessing if it’s caught a lung or an artery he’s in real trouble. “Come on, you can’t leave me alone here; you’re the only one I can talk to.”
He takes a slow breath and doesn’t even bother trying to get up. He simply looks at me and plainly says “Ow.”
I can breathe again. The wound’s leaking, but not spurting. Oh thank God.
“Christ, okay, we gotta get you out of here. I don’t think it’s immediately fatal, but the blood loss is gonna get you if we don’t stop it.”
“Later. Get him, then help.”
I shake my head. “I can’t just-”
He swats at me with his good arm. “Not safe to extract. And still need the girl.”
I look around and end up taking a blanket folded over the couch and handing it to him. “Press this into the wounds, as hard as you can. I’ll be back.”
“Y-You better be. I’ll be upset if you m-make me walk back to the truck on my own.”
I get up and grasp my rifle, and limp my way after Renak.
Unless he’s got another ambush planned in the basement, Thiva is his last chance. And the bastard knows it.
I make my way down the basement steps, but it’s slow going. I have to use my injured right arm to brace myself, holding the rifle ahead with the left. My adrenaline’s starting to go down enough that the leg is starting to really hurt. So’s my left hand.
At the foot of the stairs, Renak’s discarded the helmet. The room contains several boxes of explosives, and flamethrowers.
Their weapons stores. Great.
In the middle of the room there’s a chair. Bound to it is Thiva. She’s got cuts and bruises over her body, and her beautiful fur is matted orange all over.
Behind her stands Renak. He’s got a knife to her throat.
I raise the rifle and stare right at Renak. “Let the girl go.”
Thiva gasps out as she sees me. “Martin!” She tries to lean forward, but the blade presses harder into her neck and she shrinks back into the chair.
Renak stares back at me, head-on and with both eyes. When he speaks, his voice is emotionless and without inflection. He sounds bored. “Move a muscle, predator, and Thiva dies.”
I look at my friend. She looks terrified. “Hey Thiva, don’t worry. I’m here. Everything’s gonna be fine. Alright?”
She gives the tiniest nod.
Renak growls. “Look at me, predator.”
My eyes shift back to his again. They’re dull and empty. Just black beads of glass set into his face. It’s like looking at a machine. A complex structure, but no soul animating it.
My leg is trembling, and I feel hot and sticky blood running down it. “You don’t need the girl. You can just let her go, and we can leave, and nobody else needs to die.”
He blinks slowly. “My sister is better off dead than as a predator’s mate. If I can’t save her body from you, I can save her honor.” To emphasize his point, he lets the knife dig further into her throat. I see some orange running down it, and the fur beneath Thiva’s eyes are damp with tears.
My breathing is heavy, and my aim is shaky. “I stormed a terrorist compound to get this far. I’m not leaving without her. You can have her over my dead body.”
He stares silently for a moment. “Fair enough.”
He raises his other arm toward me with a smooth and mechanical motion. His sidearm is in it.
I pull the trigger.
The bullet takes him in the head. With his strings cut, he drops in a heap.
I drop the rifle and rush forward to undo Thiva’s bindings. As soon as I do, her arms fly around me painfully tightly. I return the hug as best I can.
“Thiva, listen to me. Can you walk?”
She gets up and winces, but nods. “Y-yeah.”
“Okay, good. There’s a Yotul upstairs named Mosun. He needs immediate medical attention. We’ve got a truck waiting, we’re gonna head up and get both of you out there.”
One of her eyes suddenly moves up and stares behind me. I turn in place.
Vansi’s standing in stairway, taking in the scene.
“Thiva… Go. Now. Now!” I rise to my feet and put a hand on her back, walking alongside her for a few steps before she rushes the rest of the way past her mother and up the stairs.
Vansi doesn’t move to stop her. She just stares at the crumpled corpse behind us.
It’s only after I take another step that her eyes snap to me with fury.
And I realize my rifle’s right at her feet.
She snatches it up into trembling paws and aims it right at me.
“Vansi, listen, I-”
The weapon goes off.
I fall to my knees. My hands reach my stomach and feel sticky and wet.
She pulls the trigger again, and it clicks dry. She pulls another few times, but it’s empty.
I rise to my feet and try to lunge past her. But she simply swings the empty rifle at me. It hits my wounded stomach, and I fall to my side. She swings it down on me several more times, snarling and cursing, until the weapon breaks enough that she simply tosses what’s left aside.
It hurts. Jesus Christ it hurts so fucking bad.
I try to think of a way out of this as she staggers past me toward her son. I try to get to my feet again, but fail. I drag myself to the wall, and use it to pull myself up bit by bit. I limp along the wall, smearing trails of my own blood with my hands as I go.
I’m almost at the stairs when I hear an inarticulate scream and feel agony blooming out from my right side. I look down and see the knife, in Vansi’s paws.
Fuck.
I collapse on the ground and try to fend her off with my hands. She stabs me straight through the palm of my right hand, then stabs twice more at my left arm and shoulder. My left arm doesn’t respond to my signals, simply flopping down limply.
With only one chance left, I punch her with my right. Again and again, while she stabs at my torso.
There’s a cold math to blood loss. The more you lose, the weaker you get.
‘So you see, that's how I am going to die.’
Each of my blows does less than the last. My hands and feet feel ice cold, while my chest burns.
‘I'll sneeze in the sunlight, or turn my head a bit too fast when someone wants my attention from my blind spot’
Before long I can’t fight back. I simply lay still and hear my flesh tearing and Vansi screaming in my ears.
‘or show happiness with a smile or a laugh’
I can’t lift a finger or even turn my head as Vansi staggers off of me. My shallow breaths are agony, and I can feel one of my lungs has collapsed.
‘or god forbid I might try to save a life again.’
She returns with something else in her hands. I close my eyes.
‘And then someone like your son will show up and burn me alive for it.’
/// ERROR /// Memory transcription fragmented /// Subject no longer conscious.
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2023.06.04 18:57 Seamoose_Art NoP 2177: Violence [9]
Credit for the original story goes to u/spacepaladin15.
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Memory transcript subject: Trish, Venlil civilian
Date [Standardized Human Time]: February 30th, 2177
Location: Lower sprawl of City 23, Venlil Prime
The blankets haphazardly twisted around Trish felt like steel chains. The Terran grandfather clock on the wall dutifully marked each second of her prison sentence. Her eyes hurt from exhaustion, and it was all she could do to keep herself from lashing her tail hard enough to fracture it in frustration.
Several long, pointless hours had come and gone as she sat, self-immobilized with blankets in an attempt to sleep. But sleep did not come. There was a sick feeling of apprehension balled up in her stomach, a cold weight in her soul which silently sentenced her to sleeplessness.
Her instinct, that feeling of a frigid vice around her waist, could usually be counted on as a guiding star that commanded her to act decisively. Right now, it was commanding her to stay awake and alert even as the hours dragged by. Out of respect for its “wishes”, she had abstained from taking any sleep-inducing medication, but her meager patience was quickly waning. Simply sitting there in silence was nothing short of torturous.
The thought of how exactly they’d feed the Arxur still hung over her head like a guillotine, the evening’s furious debate having brought them little closer to a solution. Acquiring any organ-cloning tech would be a nightmare, not to mention the steep cost of life incurred from stealing rare medical equipment. There wasn’t exactly an abundance of wildlife for it to hunt. Maybe some DIY-biomedical tampering could expand its diet, but accidentally condemning it to an agonizing death was far more likely.
Perhaps their fixer had some advice to share. There were only a couple ways she could’ve gotten her hands on a fertilized Arxur egg, and her constant insistence on keeping hidden in every way pointed towards one obvious possibility. How exactly an Arxur had survived the fall of Wriss and stayed clear of the Federation’s all-seeing eye for so long, Trish couldn’t even begin to guess. But if it was possible for her, it would be possible for them, and she might have useful advice for keeping the hatchling fed that she garnered from personal experience.
That said, she couldn’t be blunt in her questioning. If their encryption was broken, they were most likely dead either way, but better to be cautious anyway. Most likely, this abundance of caution was how someone actively fleeing the Federation had to operate in all aspects of life.
Something in Trish’s chest protested. To hell with caution. She wanted to see their reptilian sponsor face-to-face, even digitally. Look her in the eye. If she was right, at least; if this was truly her own offspring she was entrusting them with. It would be hell to set up, and a completely pointless risk for both of them, but some things couldn’t be justified with—
A sudden crack of thunder tore through her thoughts, a rough noise which echoed from the bar above. She further entombed herself in blankets for comfort, letting the warm weight…
Not thunder. A gunshot. Someone had fired a gun upstairs.
Trish was out of bed and shaking someone else awake before her thoughts could catch up and form a plan of action. With her mind still reeling, instinct had taken hold, dragging her by the pit of her stomach to act. It issued clear, firm commands which she followed unthinkingly while her own conscious mind couldn’t keep pace.
Act quickly. Get everyone awake, and get them to the fire escape at the end of the hallway. It didn’t much matter if their assailants found the entrance to the Den or not; flames would start pouring down the stairs any second. They wouldn’t have time to gather belongings. Except her pad; if they found her pad, there’d be no escaping them even if they got away. Grab it. The fire would cleanse the rest of their tracks well enough to not be worth spending extra time.
Tressa was already up and alert, pistol drawn and taking aim at the door while crouched behind a couch in the living room as cover. Besides him sat the backpack, with the egg and incubator still inside. James stumbled out of his bedroom, being dragged out by a jet-black Venlil two thirds his size with such force that Trish was slightly worried she might hurt something in his arm.
When he saw the bag, he tore himself from her grasp and ran to the living room. After slinging the backpack over his shoulder, he rushed back to the hallway with Tressa in tow. Sasha was slipping her flame jacket over loose sleeping clothing, still blinking sleep out of her eyes. She didn’t see Burai anywhere; apparently, he’d slept straight through the noise. Trish was halfway to his room when she remembered that he hadn’t gone to sleep at all. He was upstairs, cleaning the bar.
He was upstairs, where the gunshot had echoed from.
Trish’s mind screamed in protest, but her body kept moving down the hall toward the fire escape. They were out of time. They needed to run. She tore open the fire escape hatch with force, praying that their assailants didn’t have the neighboring alley locked down too. The ladder swung down, missing her snout by a hair. Her limbs moved with a frantic, manic power, dragging her to the surface and forcing her down the street. Somewhere in the back of her head, she felt a pang of thankfulness that she didn’t feel fire on her back as she ran.
—
They stopped running by the time Trish was out of breath. She’d never been too fit even for a Venlil, and her endurance was meaningless compared to their human companions. However, in the dense decaying maze of the sprawl, even a few city blocks was plenty to lose anyone chasing. They gathered in the relative privacy of a burned supermarket, breathing heavily through cloth masks to block out the ash that poured from the walls in unrestored buildings.
Nobody spoke a word. There was nothing to say.
In better times, Trish might’ve broken down into tears, but right now adrenaline forced her into a sharp focus. They were still being hunted. Their options were slim, and growing slimmer every second of inaction.
“Tressa, did you bring your pistol?”
The words came out as choked and barely audible beneath the suffocating cloth that protected her lungs, but it was enough to break the silence. The rest of them jolted out of their stupor, minds visibly refocusing to tackle the problem at hand.
“...Yeah, but it won’t be enough to fight them off. I heard multiple sets of boots up there. If these are exterminators, it’s probably a squad of five. I can’t take that many with just a handgun.”
“It doesn’t matter either way. Kill them, and they’ll just send more. We need to run.”
“And run where, exactly?” James coughed a few times and readjusted his mask before continuing. “There’s nowhere the Federation doesn’t have eyes. Nowhere on Venlil Prime, at least, and we’d have better luck standing our ground than trying to board a ship offworld.”
“...a ship?”
“Yeah, walking into a spaceport is just asking to be— Trish?”
“...there’s a ship… there’s a wrecked UN ship on the dark side of Venlil Prime. It’s not too far from here, but far enough that nobody would ever bother checking out there. I’ve been inside it a couple times. There’s still working lights.”
Tressa muttered to himself, considering their prospects. “Working lights… imagine I could get heat working too. It probably has enough water onboard to last until we can dig a well. I… I could maybe even clone meat if they had Zurulian medical tech. You think we’d be safe there?”
“I don’t think there’s anywhere else to go.”
“And you never thought to tell us about this before now?”
“It never came up.”
James paced nervously, kicking up plumes of dust. It hung in the air for a brief moment, swirling dramatically in the cold light of a fluorescent lamp, before resettling as he leaned against the wall. “So you want to drag us to the dark side of Venlil Prime… Jesus, Trish. I thought there was a reason nobody bothered settling out there. Or at least a reason they didn’t scavenge those wrecks. Hell, even people like us avoid it.”
“There are settlements on the edge, and scavengers comb the darkness up to about a paw’s travel out. But no light means no farming, scarce power, and unyielding cold. Unless you just happened to find an abandoned ship with backup power still burning, it’s a death sentence. The Federation won’t look for us there.”
“...and you ’just happened’ to find one, huh?”
“A friend of mine— no, I’ll tell you about it later. We need to get moving now.”
Sasha sat up, brushing a layer of grime off her jacket. “We need to go back for Beast. No way we can make the journey out without her. Unless you think you can hotwire something, Tressa..?”
“Not a chance. Then again, our chances of retaking Beast seem pretty slim too. Do you have a plan for doing this, or is your ‘plan’ to throw me at them and hope I have more bullets than they have flamer fuel?”
“No. We’ll all go together, and try not to pick a fight we can’t win. Slip in, grab Beast, get out.”
“That’s not a plan, and you know it. That’s wishful thinking. If your best plan is ‘walk in and hope they don’t see us’, then we’re walking to our deaths.”
“If you have a better idea, let’s hear it. Until then, walk faster. The longer we’re gone, the more likely they’ll burn our escape to slag before we return.”
Tressa grumbled, but failed to make any coherent objection as he rose to his feet. He checked his pistol over, making sure ash hadn’t wormed its way into anything vital before slipping it back under his coat as the group stepped out into the street.
It was a common work claw, so the more ruined areas of the sprawl were near-empty. The only sign that people lived here in any capacity were the streetlights and a distant hum of life from more central streets and walkways. Not that their little entourage would draw much attention anyway; out here, ragtag herds of misfits were about as common as the burned-out buildings that permeated the land.
Their little ragtag herd of misfits wouldn’t hardly be missed if they went up in flames. Not by anyone important, that is; a few regulars at the Tipped Quill might be disappointed and some exterminator officer’s spreadsheet would need updating. The world would continue on without them. The world was going to continue on without them. Tressa was right; they were marching to their deaths.
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submitted by Seamoose_Art to NatureofPredators [link] [comments]
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Memory transcript subject: Trish, Venlil civilian
Date [Standardized Human Time]: February 30th, 2177
Location: Lower sprawl of City 23, Venlil Prime
The blankets haphazardly twisted around Trish felt like steel chains. The Terran grandfather clock on the wall dutifully marked each second of her prison sentence. Her eyes hurt from exhaustion, and it was all she could do to keep herself from lashing her tail hard enough to fracture it in frustration.
Several long, pointless hours had come and gone as she sat, self-immobilized with blankets in an attempt to sleep. But sleep did not come. There was a sick feeling of apprehension balled up in her stomach, a cold weight in her soul which silently sentenced her to sleeplessness.
Her instinct, that feeling of a frigid vice around her waist, could usually be counted on as a guiding star that commanded her to act decisively. Right now, it was commanding her to stay awake and alert even as the hours dragged by. Out of respect for its “wishes”, she had abstained from taking any sleep-inducing medication, but her meager patience was quickly waning. Simply sitting there in silence was nothing short of torturous.
The thought of how exactly they’d feed the Arxur still hung over her head like a guillotine, the evening’s furious debate having brought them little closer to a solution. Acquiring any organ-cloning tech would be a nightmare, not to mention the steep cost of life incurred from stealing rare medical equipment. There wasn’t exactly an abundance of wildlife for it to hunt. Maybe some DIY-biomedical tampering could expand its diet, but accidentally condemning it to an agonizing death was far more likely.
Perhaps their fixer had some advice to share. There were only a couple ways she could’ve gotten her hands on a fertilized Arxur egg, and her constant insistence on keeping hidden in every way pointed towards one obvious possibility. How exactly an Arxur had survived the fall of Wriss and stayed clear of the Federation’s all-seeing eye for so long, Trish couldn’t even begin to guess. But if it was possible for her, it would be possible for them, and she might have useful advice for keeping the hatchling fed that she garnered from personal experience.
That said, she couldn’t be blunt in her questioning. If their encryption was broken, they were most likely dead either way, but better to be cautious anyway. Most likely, this abundance of caution was how someone actively fleeing the Federation had to operate in all aspects of life.
Something in Trish’s chest protested. To hell with caution. She wanted to see their reptilian sponsor face-to-face, even digitally. Look her in the eye. If she was right, at least; if this was truly her own offspring she was entrusting them with. It would be hell to set up, and a completely pointless risk for both of them, but some things couldn’t be justified with—
A sudden crack of thunder tore through her thoughts, a rough noise which echoed from the bar above. She further entombed herself in blankets for comfort, letting the warm weight…
Not thunder. A gunshot. Someone had fired a gun upstairs.
Trish was out of bed and shaking someone else awake before her thoughts could catch up and form a plan of action. With her mind still reeling, instinct had taken hold, dragging her by the pit of her stomach to act. It issued clear, firm commands which she followed unthinkingly while her own conscious mind couldn’t keep pace.
Act quickly. Get everyone awake, and get them to the fire escape at the end of the hallway. It didn’t much matter if their assailants found the entrance to the Den or not; flames would start pouring down the stairs any second. They wouldn’t have time to gather belongings. Except her pad; if they found her pad, there’d be no escaping them even if they got away. Grab it. The fire would cleanse the rest of their tracks well enough to not be worth spending extra time.
Tressa was already up and alert, pistol drawn and taking aim at the door while crouched behind a couch in the living room as cover. Besides him sat the backpack, with the egg and incubator still inside. James stumbled out of his bedroom, being dragged out by a jet-black Venlil two thirds his size with such force that Trish was slightly worried she might hurt something in his arm.
When he saw the bag, he tore himself from her grasp and ran to the living room. After slinging the backpack over his shoulder, he rushed back to the hallway with Tressa in tow. Sasha was slipping her flame jacket over loose sleeping clothing, still blinking sleep out of her eyes. She didn’t see Burai anywhere; apparently, he’d slept straight through the noise. Trish was halfway to his room when she remembered that he hadn’t gone to sleep at all. He was upstairs, cleaning the bar.
He was upstairs, where the gunshot had echoed from.
Trish’s mind screamed in protest, but her body kept moving down the hall toward the fire escape. They were out of time. They needed to run. She tore open the fire escape hatch with force, praying that their assailants didn’t have the neighboring alley locked down too. The ladder swung down, missing her snout by a hair. Her limbs moved with a frantic, manic power, dragging her to the surface and forcing her down the street. Somewhere in the back of her head, she felt a pang of thankfulness that she didn’t feel fire on her back as she ran.
—
They stopped running by the time Trish was out of breath. She’d never been too fit even for a Venlil, and her endurance was meaningless compared to their human companions. However, in the dense decaying maze of the sprawl, even a few city blocks was plenty to lose anyone chasing. They gathered in the relative privacy of a burned supermarket, breathing heavily through cloth masks to block out the ash that poured from the walls in unrestored buildings.
Nobody spoke a word. There was nothing to say.
In better times, Trish might’ve broken down into tears, but right now adrenaline forced her into a sharp focus. They were still being hunted. Their options were slim, and growing slimmer every second of inaction.
“Tressa, did you bring your pistol?”
The words came out as choked and barely audible beneath the suffocating cloth that protected her lungs, but it was enough to break the silence. The rest of them jolted out of their stupor, minds visibly refocusing to tackle the problem at hand.
“...Yeah, but it won’t be enough to fight them off. I heard multiple sets of boots up there. If these are exterminators, it’s probably a squad of five. I can’t take that many with just a handgun.”
“It doesn’t matter either way. Kill them, and they’ll just send more. We need to run.”
“And run where, exactly?” James coughed a few times and readjusted his mask before continuing. “There’s nowhere the Federation doesn’t have eyes. Nowhere on Venlil Prime, at least, and we’d have better luck standing our ground than trying to board a ship offworld.”
“...a ship?”
“Yeah, walking into a spaceport is just asking to be— Trish?”
“...there’s a ship… there’s a wrecked UN ship on the dark side of Venlil Prime. It’s not too far from here, but far enough that nobody would ever bother checking out there. I’ve been inside it a couple times. There’s still working lights.”
Tressa muttered to himself, considering their prospects. “Working lights… imagine I could get heat working too. It probably has enough water onboard to last until we can dig a well. I… I could maybe even clone meat if they had Zurulian medical tech. You think we’d be safe there?”
“I don’t think there’s anywhere else to go.”
“And you never thought to tell us about this before now?”
“It never came up.”
James paced nervously, kicking up plumes of dust. It hung in the air for a brief moment, swirling dramatically in the cold light of a fluorescent lamp, before resettling as he leaned against the wall. “So you want to drag us to the dark side of Venlil Prime… Jesus, Trish. I thought there was a reason nobody bothered settling out there. Or at least a reason they didn’t scavenge those wrecks. Hell, even people like us avoid it.”
“There are settlements on the edge, and scavengers comb the darkness up to about a paw’s travel out. But no light means no farming, scarce power, and unyielding cold. Unless you just happened to find an abandoned ship with backup power still burning, it’s a death sentence. The Federation won’t look for us there.”
“...and you ’just happened’ to find one, huh?”
“A friend of mine— no, I’ll tell you about it later. We need to get moving now.”
Sasha sat up, brushing a layer of grime off her jacket. “We need to go back for Beast. No way we can make the journey out without her. Unless you think you can hotwire something, Tressa..?”
“Not a chance. Then again, our chances of retaking Beast seem pretty slim too. Do you have a plan for doing this, or is your ‘plan’ to throw me at them and hope I have more bullets than they have flamer fuel?”
“No. We’ll all go together, and try not to pick a fight we can’t win. Slip in, grab Beast, get out.”
“That’s not a plan, and you know it. That’s wishful thinking. If your best plan is ‘walk in and hope they don’t see us’, then we’re walking to our deaths.”
“If you have a better idea, let’s hear it. Until then, walk faster. The longer we’re gone, the more likely they’ll burn our escape to slag before we return.”
Tressa grumbled, but failed to make any coherent objection as he rose to his feet. He checked his pistol over, making sure ash hadn’t wormed its way into anything vital before slipping it back under his coat as the group stepped out into the street.
It was a common work claw, so the more ruined areas of the sprawl were near-empty. The only sign that people lived here in any capacity were the streetlights and a distant hum of life from more central streets and walkways. Not that their little entourage would draw much attention anyway; out here, ragtag herds of misfits were about as common as the burned-out buildings that permeated the land.
Their little ragtag herd of misfits wouldn’t hardly be missed if they went up in flames. Not by anyone important, that is; a few regulars at the Tipped Quill might be disappointed and some exterminator officer’s spreadsheet would need updating. The world would continue on without them. The world was going to continue on without them. Tressa was right; they were marching to their deaths.
---
[First] [Previous] [Next]
2023.06.04 07:32 Libbylemonlegs Big enough family car
Hi there, Previous Toyota Yaris driver (sadly recently written off) with one baby but I hope to have another in a year or two.
I loved my little hatchback and had no plans to upgrade but seeing as it’s now forced upon me I am looking for a car that is just big enough (being a mum now doesn’t mean I need a massive SUV).
The Yaris was great but we want to do extended rear facing and the car seat will not fit rear facing behind the drivers seat (for if we are able to have a second baby). Fitting the pram in the boot was also a bit of a shove and slam and hope it didn’t fall out before it was closed.
I like the fuel efficiency and ease of parking smaller cars though. Just need something a little bigger.
Budget of 15-20k not including insurances
I was thinking maybe a (year range reflects what we can afford).
Mazda 3 2012-2015 under 100ks Kia Cerato 2017-2020 under 100ks
Or maybe something slightly bigger like a compact suv? Honda HRV 2014-2016 under 100ks Suzuki vitara 2015-2018 under 100ks
I was really hoping to not have to go this big but Kia Sportage or Mazda cx5 we can get in our price range but higher kms 150k ish
Any recommendations for a good car that is big enough but not ridiculously big? I online grocery shop and my husband has a bigger car for weekend getaways. Safe and reliable are my main priorities.
Thanks.
submitted by Libbylemonlegs to CarsAustralia [link] [comments]
I loved my little hatchback and had no plans to upgrade but seeing as it’s now forced upon me I am looking for a car that is just big enough (being a mum now doesn’t mean I need a massive SUV).
The Yaris was great but we want to do extended rear facing and the car seat will not fit rear facing behind the drivers seat (for if we are able to have a second baby). Fitting the pram in the boot was also a bit of a shove and slam and hope it didn’t fall out before it was closed.
I like the fuel efficiency and ease of parking smaller cars though. Just need something a little bigger.
Budget of 15-20k not including insurances
I was thinking maybe a (year range reflects what we can afford).
Mazda 3 2012-2015 under 100ks Kia Cerato 2017-2020 under 100ks
Or maybe something slightly bigger like a compact suv? Honda HRV 2014-2016 under 100ks Suzuki vitara 2015-2018 under 100ks
I was really hoping to not have to go this big but Kia Sportage or Mazda cx5 we can get in our price range but higher kms 150k ish
Any recommendations for a good car that is big enough but not ridiculously big? I online grocery shop and my husband has a bigger car for weekend getaways. Safe and reliable are my main priorities.
Thanks.
2023.06.04 06:30 dajordanator Anyone else get seperated rewards of the same weapon for weekly tasks?
submitted by dajordanator to EscapefromTarkov [link] [comments]
2023.06.04 04:20 Cephalomagus 2023 Season 3 Release Notes [Pre-Release Version]
The Release Notes for 2023 Season 3 have been posted on the iRacing Forums!
Find them posted here:
https://forums.iracing.com/discussion/42721/2023-season-3-release-notes-pre-release-version#latest
Or read them below!
========================================================================
Our Dirt Taskforce has completed their work on the Dirt Refresh Project shared with the community back in February, and we are excited for you to experience the fruits of their labors. The Spotter System has received a Race Control-focused set of updates and new calls that will liven up your racing and keep you better informed about what is happening on the track and in the race. New challengers approach - you will now have the ability to add AI Opponent Rosters to your Hosted Sessions that utilize the Heat Racing format! We are excited to announce we have been investing time into saving you time, loading time to be precise, and this Season Release includes a first phase of loading optimizations that should get you into the driver’s seat just a little bit faster. Willow Springs International Raceway is proud to pioneer a new 3D Foliage System that automatically populates the environment with grasses, shrubs, and other creations of Mother Nature. USB Audio Hot Swapping is now fully enabled and supported by iRacing for all of your headset and speaker needs. A new Graphics Option has also been added which controls the display of all cockpit obstructions instead of this parameter being car setup specific.
The New Damage Model has been put into practice on eleven additional cars. And last but not least our AI Drivers have mastered eight new cars and twenty-four new track configurations. Welcome to iRacing 2023 Season 3!
Season highlights include:
Full 2023 Season 3 Release details are below.
submitted by Cephalomagus to iRacing [link] [comments]
Find them posted here:
https://forums.iracing.com/discussion/42721/2023-season-3-release-notes-pre-release-version#latest
Or read them below!
========================================================================
2023 Season 3 Release Notes [Pre-Release Version]
This is the iRacing 2023 Season 3 Release! This release contains both content and upgrades for 2023 Season 3, which officially starts on June 12th! This season update includes three new cars: Cadillac V-Series.R GTP, Ligier JS P320, and Porsche 911 GT3 R (992). iRacing also expands its track offerings to include MotorLand Aragón (7 configs) and Willow Springs International Raceway, as well as a new 2023 Cup config for Chicago Street Course.Our Dirt Taskforce has completed their work on the Dirt Refresh Project shared with the community back in February, and we are excited for you to experience the fruits of their labors. The Spotter System has received a Race Control-focused set of updates and new calls that will liven up your racing and keep you better informed about what is happening on the track and in the race. New challengers approach - you will now have the ability to add AI Opponent Rosters to your Hosted Sessions that utilize the Heat Racing format! We are excited to announce we have been investing time into saving you time, loading time to be precise, and this Season Release includes a first phase of loading optimizations that should get you into the driver’s seat just a little bit faster. Willow Springs International Raceway is proud to pioneer a new 3D Foliage System that automatically populates the environment with grasses, shrubs, and other creations of Mother Nature. USB Audio Hot Swapping is now fully enabled and supported by iRacing for all of your headset and speaker needs. A new Graphics Option has also been added which controls the display of all cockpit obstructions instead of this parameter being car setup specific.
The New Damage Model has been put into practice on eleven additional cars. And last but not least our AI Drivers have mastered eight new cars and twenty-four new track configurations. Welcome to iRacing 2023 Season 3!
Season highlights include:
- Cadillac V-Series.R GTP
- Ligier JS P320
- Porsche 911 GT3 R (992)
- MotorLand Aragón (7 configs)
- Willow Springs International Raceway
- New Track Configuration: Chicago Street Course - 2023 Cup
- Dirt Racing Refresh Project
- New Spotter Calls and Updates for Race Control
- Hosted Session AI Heat Racing
- Phase 1 of Loading Time Improvements
- 3D Foliage System
- USB Audio Device Hot Swapping
- Cockpit Obstruction Removal Graphics Option
- New Damage Model for 11 Vehicles (Cadillac V-Series.R GTP, Dirt Late Model (ALL), Ligier JS P320, NASCAR Truck Series Trucks, Porsche 911 GT3 Cup (992), Porsche 911 GT3 R (992), and Renault Clio R.S. V)
- AI Racing for 8 Cars (Aston Martin DBR9 GT1, Cadillac CTS-V Racecar, Cadillac V-Series.R GTP, Chevrolet Corvette C6.R GT1, Ford GT GT2, Ligier JS P320, Porsche 911 GT3 R (992), and Radical SR10)
- AI Racing at 24 Track Configurations (Autodromo Nazionale Monza - GP without first chicane, Junior, and GP without chicanes, Chicago Street Course - 2023 Cup and Prototype, Circuit of the Americas - East and West, Irwindale Speedway - ALL FIVE Configs, MotorLand Aragón - ALL SEVEN Configs, Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway - Mini, New Smyrna Speedway, Twin Ring Motegi - East and Oval, and Willow Springs International Raceway)
- Hundreds of new and optimized official iRacing vehicle setups
Full 2023 Season 3 Release details are below.
iRACING UI:
--------------------------------------------------------------Hosted Racing
- The Create Starting Grid functionality and button are now disabled whenever both Heat Racing and AI Opponent Roster are selected for an Event.
AI Racing
- AI Drivers have completed an extensive training course for participating in the Heat Racing format!
- - - Heat Racing is now available for Hosted Sessions using AI Rosters!
- - - This is a brand new feature implementation for both AI Racing and the Heat Racing format.
- - - - - It is important to note that this feature is only available for Hosted Racing events at this time. AI Drivers still need the support of real humans in their Sessions or artificial chaos would surely ensue.
Tracks
- All Track location information has been standardized and updated. All Track locations are now identified by: City, State/Province, Country.
Leagues
- Fixed an issue where the names of AI Drivers who won League Series Sessions were forgotten when viewing the League Season Schedule.
Paint Shop
- A new sponsor, Maconi Setup Shop, has been added to the Paint Shop!
- Fixed an issue with a missing font for the Stock Car Pro Series Class Cars.
SIMULATION:
--------------------------------------------------------------Windows Support
- With the release of iRacing 2023 Season 3, the Windows 8.1 operating system is no longer able to successfully launch the iRacing application.
- - - Microsoft officially dropped support for Windows 8.1 on January 14th, 2023. As a result of this, it is no longer compatible with our software, and it will fail to launch.
- - - If you need help installing or running iRacing on Windows 10 or 11, please contact Customer Support here: https://support.iracing.com. Customer Support cannot get iRacing to work on Windows 8.1.
Race Servers
- Race Server capacity has been expanded to allow for nine different car models to be present within a Session.
- A user’s average lap time will no longer exclude laps that had been labeled as “invalid”.
- Fixed an issue where some Open Practice Race Servers were closing early due to inactivity.
- Fixed an issue where track temperatures were changing wildly if the Session was restarted (via AI Racing controls for example).
Loading
- Some adjustments have been made to how video memory resources are loaded.
- Some car loading algorithms have been optimized.
Dynamic Track
- The manner in which the dynamic track algorithm was calculated on surfaces has been improved, particularly along outside track edges.
- Fixed an issue where the visual display of some dynamic track data including dirt, marbles, and rubber was not functioning correctly on some track segments.
Race Control
- The algorithm for generating race splits based on car classes has been improved slightly.
- Short Parade Laps are now available for use at the following additional track configurations:
- - - Barber Motorsports Park - Full Course
- - - Brands Hatch Circuit - Indy
- - - Canadian Tire Motorsports Park
- - - Charlotte Motor Speedway - Roval, Roval - 2018, & Roval Long
- - - Circuit Park Zandvoort - Grand Prix
- - - Circuit Zolder - Grand Prix, & Alternate
- - - Daytona International Speedway - Oval - 2008, Road Course - 2008, & Moto - 2008
- - - Hockenheimring Baden-Württemberg - PEC - Outer
- - - Indianapolis Motor Speedway - Oval - 2009, Open Wheel Oval - 2009, Road Course - 2009, & Bike
- - - Long Beach Street Circuit
- - - Mount Panorama Circuit
- - - Phillip Island Circuit
- - - Talladega Superspeedway
Qualifying Scrutiny
- The Qualifying Scrutiny system has been adjusted to better handle cases where cars needed time to get up to speed after leaving their starting location.
Dirt Racing
- A variety of updates as a result of the Dirt Refresh Project have been enabled!
- - - This project enlisted a focus group of developers, vehicle dynamicists, and testers who did a deep dig through everything that makes our Dirt Racing tick, and they’ve emerged with some sweeping improvements and updates.
- - - Dirt track parameters as a whole have been updated, including:
- - - - - Racing dirt properties at all levels of wear and wetness
- - - - - Dirt height variance, depth, and hardpan behavior
- - - - - Track wear parameters
- - - - - Tire rubber accumulation
- - - - - Dirt displacement from tires
- - - - - The formation of track roughness and perturbation
- - - - - The progression of dynamic track data has been updated for all dirt tracks
- - - All Dirt Racing tires have been updated with some of the following improvements:
- - - - - New wear rates based on the hardness and wetness of the dirt racing surface
- - - - - Dirt displacement parameters
- - - - - The manner in which tires calculate their contact on undulating dirt surfaces has been improved.
AI Racing
- AI Drivers have completed an extensive training course for participating in the Heat Racing format!
- - - Heat Racing is now available for Hosted Sessions using AI Rosters!
- - - This is a brand new feature implementation for both AI Racing and the Heat Racing format.
- - - - - It is important to note that this feature is only available for Hosted Racing events at this time. AI Drivers still need the support of real humans in their Sessions or artificial chaos would surely ensue.
- AI Drivers are now fully trained and capable drivers for the following new vehicles:
- - - Aston Martin DBR9 GT1
- - - Cadillac CTS-V Racecar
- - - Cadillac V-Series.R GTP
- - - Chevrolet Corvette C6.R GT1
- - - Ford GT GT2
- - - Ligier JS P320
- - - Porsche 911 GT3 R (992)
- - - Radical SR10
- AI Drivers have memorized and are ready to race for the gold at the following new tracks and configurations:
- - - Autodromo Nazionale Monza - GP without first chicane, Junior, and GP without chicanes
- - - Chicago Street Course - 2023 Cup and Prototype
- - - Circuit of the Americas - East and West
- - - Irwindale Speedway - ALL 5 Configurations
- - - MotorLand Aragón - ALL 7 Configurations
- - - Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway - Mini
- - - New Smyrna Speedway
- - - Twin Ring Motegi - East and Oval
- - - Willow Springs International Raceway
- AI Drivers have graduated from yet another season of advanced education classes. Training for 2023 Season 3 included the following programs:
- - - Kinesthetics for Preventing Pace Lap Panic
- - - [PHY-220] Drafting Speed Predictions
- - - White-Knuckle Door-to-Door Racing: A Retrospective
- - - Fast Cars Beware: Slow Cars
- - - Slow Cars Beware: Fast Cars
- - - AI Program Upgrade IV: Reaction Timing (Class: Pistol Shrimp)
- - - Danny S.’s Pre-School Seminar: Left-Hand Makes the “L”!
- - - The Technical Know-How Overlaps for GTP & Rocket Ship Piloting
- - - SuperTravel SuperProgram 2023: SuperSpeedways
- - - Lessons from Slot Car Racing on Racing Lines
- - - Tire Compound Connoisseur Magazine (Spring ‘23 Issue)
- - - Brake Pad Dissection - a Science Lab Qualified Course
- AI Drivers have improved their driving skills with the following vehicles:
- - -
NASCAR Cup Series Next Gen Cars - - -
NASCAR Trucks - - - BMW M Hybrid V8
- - - Dallara P217
- AI Drivers have improved their driving skills at the following track configs:
- - - Atlanta Motor Speedway - Oval
- - - Bristol Motor Speedway - Dual Pit Roads & Single Pit Road
- - - Canadian Tire Motorsports Park
- - - Daytona International Speedway - Oval
- - - Detroit Grand Prix at Belle Isle
- - - iRacing Superspeedway
- - - Talladega Superspeedway
- AI Drivers and their cars are now immediately removed from the world at the end of a Session. For safety.
- Fixed a handful of AI System issues including:
- - - Fixed an issue where custom Paint Schemes were not appearing on AI Drivers in Replays.
- - - Fixed an issue where AI Drivers could lag up to several seconds after the green before hitting the gas for standing starts in Hosted Sessions.
- - - Fixed an issue where AI Drivers could incur gain-time penalties while they were being towed back to their pit box. We don’t know what they were doing to Race Control staff to earn them, but it should be fixed now.
- - - Fixed an issue where multiple “Pitting In” notifications could be received.
- - - Fixed an issue with the display of AI Driver names on the Entries tab for Replays.
- - - Fixed an issue where AI Drivers appeared to be using the incorrect dive plane for the Dallara P217.
New Damage Model
- The New Damage Model is now active on the following additional vehicles:
- - - Cadillac V-Series.R GTP
- - - Dirt Late Model (ALL)
- - - Ligier JS P320
- - - NASCAR Truck Chevrolet Silverado
- - - NASCAR Truck Ford F150
- - - NASCAR Truck Toyota Tundra TRD Pro
- - - Porsche 911 GT3 Cup (992)
- - - Porsche 911 GT3 R (992)
- - - Renault Clio R.S. V
- Some New Damage Model system code has been reorganized to make future development easier.
Auto Fuel
- Spotters and Team Members may now control their driver's Auto Fuel state.
Spotter
- The iRacing Spotter System has received some updates to help make it more accurate and dynamic. It is now better able to read Race Control events as they occur on the track, and a variety of new Spotter Calls have been added:
- - - Car in Front/Behind is Pitting
- - - Faster Car Approaching
- - - Gaining/Losing the car in front
- - - Leader Change
- - - Leader Lap Time
- - - Leader is Lapping You
- - - Session New Fastest Lap
- - - Your Personal Best Lap Time
- - - Time Remaining in Session 20/10/5 Minutes
- - - Settings for these new messages have been added to the “[SPCC]” section of the “app.ini” file.
- - - - - These messages will only play if “Chattiness” is set to MEDIUM or HIGH, and they are turned on in the “app.ini” file, which they are by default.
- A new “Silence” function has been added for the Spotter.
- - - In the Sound Options Menu, users can bind a key press that will interrupt and stop any current spotter message and temporarily disable future messages for a short duration. The duration of the hush may be adjusted via the “hushDuration” variable in the “app.ini” file, found in the “[SPCC]” section.
- “Leader Car” calls now returns the leader car in the same class as the player car. This means all spotter messages pertaining to the leader will now reference the leader in the same class as the player, instead of the outright leader.
- - - Messages include:
- - - - - Leader is pitting now
- - - - - Leader is at Start/Finish
- - - - - You're catching the leader
- - - - - One lap to win (if you are the leader car)
- Both Italian spotter packs have been updated and improved!
- - - Many thanks to Renzo A. Olivieri and Marco Arcidiacono!
- The Race Laps remaining spotter message logic has been updated.
- Fixed an issue with the fuel spotter calls when the pit entry location was dramatically different from the Start/Finish line location.
Graphics
- A new Graphics Option has been added: Hide Cockpit Obstructions.
- - - This option hides several visually obstructive elements from the world, including: Halo, A-Pillar, and Rock Screen.
- Vehicles that utilize the New Damage model have had their car model format adjusted to reduce video memory demands.
- Improved the accuracy of steering angles for viewing your opponents’ cars’ wheels.
- Adjust brake light exposure on some cars to try to prevent them from turning white when viewed from a distance.
- Updated the system which processes the hiding and displaying of halos for Replays.
- GGX blended dirt texture shaders have been improved.
- SpeedTree lighting has been updated.
- The graphics Option for SpeedTree self-shadowing has been removed.
- - - The visual benefits were minimal and the processing needs were demanding.
- Tooltips have been added for SSAO parameters.
- A new SDK for SpeedTree has been integrated.
- Fixed an issue where the reverse and unseen sides of some SpeedTree faces were being rendered, wasting processing time.
- Fixed an issue where distortion particles were not rendering properly unless they were inside the car.
- Fixed an issue where motion blur would trigger whenever the garage was visited.
- Fixed an issue where motion blur was appearing at different amounts on different parts of the same car.
3D Foliage System
- A new environmental graphics feature option has been added to the graphics options menu: Foliage!
- - - The new Foliage system procedurally generates 3D foliage of an appropriate biome type at specified tracks. Foliage may include grasses, shrubs, boulders, cacti, flowers, and other small environmental assets. 3D foliage has no impact on driving or physics, but should decorate the world much more realistically.
- - - In the Graphics Options menu, there are several levels of detail that may be selected for use by the 3D Foliage System which can customize your visual experience and your rendering performance. You may also select to disable the system entirely.
- - - With this release, only Willow Springs International Raceway has been seeded by the new 3D Foliage system so far, but Mother Nature always finds a way to spread!
Visual Effects
- Lighting for particle effects has been improved.
- The PopcornFX SDK has been updated to the latest version.
Audio
- Audio Hot Swap support has been added to iRacing!
- - - Forgot to plug in your headset before the race starts? iRacing now detects your device when it's plugged in, even during a race. If you've selected "System Default" from the sound options, audio automatically moves to the new device when the default changes. If you have selected a specific audio endpoint, it activates once it's available.
- - - Runtime audio device switching is now supported. When the default device is selected, a new default device can be chosen in Windows, and the Simulator will use the new device. If a specific device is selected, it will be used in the Simulator when it is activated in Windows.
- - - - - disableWindowsCoreAudio=0 When enabled (1), this option disables any Windows Core Audio integration (native windows audio).
- - - - - disableAudioDeviceChangedEvents=0 When enabled (1), this option disables dynamic audio device changing.
- - - Please note: Audio Hot Swapping is enabled by default.
- A new Audio Options setting has been added which allows you to assign a System Communication Default Device.
- A new audio option, “ambientMusicDisabled”, has been added to the “app.ini” file.
- - - 0 is the default value. Setting this parameter to 1 will disable all environment music that is normally played over the PA system while in the Simulation.
- Dynamic brake sounds have been rebalanced.
- Audio for load transmission on a variety of cars has been improved.
- The engine audio for all Pace Cars has been adjusted and optimized.
Environment
- New color and texture variations have been added for a variety of parked vehicles found around the tracks.
Interface
- Enhanced the right-click pop-up menus on the Session/Replay screen, and the Driving screen, to provide the option for private messaging (PM-ing) an individual user, the current driver of a car, or a car's entire Team (which includes a driver's spotters/crew in non-team sessions).
- - - Existing Admin/Race Control operations applied to a car that would have PM-ed someone on the team have been updated to message the whole team, instead of just one team member.
- - - Manually PM-ing a car number using "/#N", with N being the displayed car number, including leading zeros if shown, will now PM the whole team.
- - - To PM just the team member that's currently driving the car, use "/#N@" (add the @ symbol immediately after the car number). If the team's car is in its pit stall but the driver has gotten out of the car, that user is still PM-ed. If the team's car is not even in the world, no PM is sent when attempting to message its current driver, and you will be informed of this.
- - - - - To prevent receiving duplicate messages, if you would receive a chat message you sent because the target includes you (you're on the target team, you're the target team's driver, or you're talking to yourself!), you only receive the message due to being associated with the target of the message. That is, the message is not separately echoed directly back to you.
- - - You can continue to manually PM an individual using the existing mechanism of specifying their name after the "/".
- Text chat responses to Race Control Admin commands now identify the targeted entry with the team name and car number, instead of the name of the driver. In non-driver-swap events, the “team name” is the driver's name.
- An option for the units selection has been updated to “English (USA)” for clarity.
Camera
- A new highest option level, “Ultra”, has been added for Motion Blur.
- Fixed an issue with Driver View Pitch/Roll chassis effects so that when the view is locked to the horizon the car can now roll farther without the camera following the position of the car. This should help reduce motion sickness in VR if you use this feature.
- Fixed an issue for whenever a car’s center-of-mass left the camera frame, all motion blur on the car was lost.
- Fixed an issue where the focus of the camera was getting unwanted motion blur for cockpit cameras.
- Fixed an issue with motion blur on cars when using multiple displays.
Controls
- The automatic parking brake that holds a car still when you come to a stop will now fully apply itself anytime the car comes to a stop, rather than waiting for the user to hold the brake pedal down once stopped. This should help prevent cars from accidentally rolling away when you come to a quick stop but fail to fully engage the brake pedal.
- The Reset Button now prevents users from putting you into the car if your steering wheel needs assignment. Doing this now will take you to the Controls Wizard and allow you to assign and calibrate your driving controls.
- The test for XInput devices has been simplified.
- Fixed an issue that could cause some joysticks to fail to calibrate properly if the previous calibration was similar enough to the new calibration.
- Fixed an issue in the Options screen where the inputs (shifter, wheel, etc) would not respond if a button was held down on a wheel.
Force Feedback
- When calibrating a wheel, iRacing now checks that your selected maximum wheel angle and Force Feedback status match what we expect based on your detected hardware. A notification will appear if these do not match.
- - - This is an effort to detect common errors with certain wheels, either that do not have the correct drivers installed or that have a maximum wheel angle set to a very low value by default. If you receive this notification, or need help setting up your racing wheel, please reach out to Customer Support.
- iRacing will now try to automatically detect your racing wheel’s maximum force, and adjust the wheel force slider accordingly. This is used to help us safely and automatically calculate the force levels to send to your wheel. We can't always know how your wheel is set up, so this may be an overestimate of your maximum force level. This is the safer guess, but in some instances it may limit how strong of a force you can request from the simulation. In those cases you can turn off the “auto-mode” and manually set your wheel’s peak value, if known.
- Improved the force auto tune button so that it takes the wheels maximum force into account. This will lighten up the auto tune as the wheel force increases.
- - - There is a new scaling parameter in the “app.ini” file, “autoForceFactor”. This value defaults to 0.5, and allows you to adjust the aggressiveness of the reduction. Setting “[Force Feedback] autoForceFactor=1” will remove all reduction, giving you a 1:1 force output. Setting it to 0 will effectively always give you 6 Nm of peak force at the wheel. Any value in between will blend between these two extremes. The default value of 0.5 should be a good value for most users.
- A mappable button (Ctrl-A) has been added to apply the Auto Force adjustment found in the F9 Black Box.
- For the Auto Force Feedback peak force detection, data collected when the car is out of control will now be suppressed. Also, data collection will be paused for several seconds immediately after an incident. The goal is to make this system more stable and consistent, even if you wreck.
- For Force Feedback, a safety check has been added to detect if the wheel jumped in position (ie: we lost/gained communication with the wheel). If a communication interruption is detected, Force Feedback will be suppressed momentarily for safety.
- A new slew rate limiter filter that is controlled via the smoothing slider is now available in the Force Feedback options tab.
- - - This filter limits the rate of change of the force feedback signal so your wheel can't accelerate beyond a fixed value. In essence it smooths out the large jolts while leaving the rest of the signal alone. A value of 25% will have almost no impact on your regular driving, while softenting out curb or wall impacts, and a value of 75% will smooth out most rumble strips and make curb hits almost invisible. If you find that you have to turn down the FFB forces below the level you would like because the jolts from curbs or accidents are too large, then try turning this filter up instead. Try a value of 50% to start, and turn it down to 25% if you feel it is too much.
- - - - - You can go back to the old boxcar filter via the “[Force Feedback] smoothingFilterType=1” entry in the “app.ini” file.
Replays
- Chat messages and incident point accruement are now saved and viewable with Replays.
- Fixed an issue where custom Paint Schemes were not appearing on AI Drivers in Replays.
Telemetry
- Live brake line pressure (LFbrakeLinePress) has now been zeroed out and will no longer show a value.
- - - Disk based brake line pressure is still available (LFbrakeLinePress), and now has any ripple from the abs modulation included in its value.
- - - A new BrakeABSCutPct value has been added to the disk based telemetry that shows the percent of brake force reduction being applied by the ABS system.
- Driver suit, body, face, and helmet type ids have been added to the session string.
Official iRacing Sporting Code
- A variety of updates have been made to the Official iRacing Sporting Code, including:
- - - A new section 6.8.3. has been added which describes the correct behavior for Starting from Pits.
- - - Restructured the paragraphs describing Rolling Starts for improved clarity for both Oval and Road racing.
- - - Better explained how multiclass cars grid, and defined what starts a multiclass race.
- - - License Class images have been updated.
- - - Identified that Joker Laps may not be used for time-based competitions at Rallycross Tracks.
- - - A reminder has been added that it is unacceptable for suspended or restricted Members to use alternate accounts.
- - - Identified that nefarious tactics may also not be used during Races, and removed a poor example of nefarious behavior.
- Review the latest version of the Official iRacing Sporting Code here:
- - - https://www.iracing.com/iracing-official-sporting-code/
2023.06.04 03:57 TheCardinalKing And Only Dark Will Remain... (Chosen Undead/Dark Souls Scaling)
Hey, been a while! Took a bit of a break from Reddit and the internet to recover from a really crappy illness and getting my uni & personal life back on track. So I'm back and here to talk about my favorite video game franchise of all time, the Dark Souls series (& the larger Soulsborne games in general).
Now Dark Souls is a tricky franchise to scale. Not only is it heavily focused on lore and statements over visual feats, but said lore, unlike other franchises that heavily rely on lore scaling such as God of War or Devil May Cry, is generally vague unless you search through item descriptions and notice literal background details that you otherwise wouldn't think about. The gameplay isn't helping scaling either when random naked dudes with torches and 20ft falls can nearly kill the player character, causing massive discrepancy with how tough you are in the actual story vs gameplay. As with GoW & DMC, I'm gonna give several interpretations as to how I think Dark Souls can be reasonably scaled and from there you can decide what scaling you'll wanna buy into.
All this said I think after having played every game in the series sans Demon's Soulscause' I'm too broke to buy the PS5 and obsessively watching and rewatching VaatiVidya videos, I think I'm well versed enough in the franchise to give this a shot. So let's get the obligatory...
Spells and weapons such as such as Sunlight Spear, Divine Pillars of Light, and Price Lothric's Greatsword are all light-based/have light-based attacks that can be dodged after being fired by the player characters.
Besides dragon-scaling, Chosen Undead would scale to this via Gwyn, the God of Sunlight and First Lord of Cinder, beating the Nameless King some time in the setting's ancient history, with the CU beating Gwyn at the end of the first game along with several bosses that possess Lord Souls or fractions of Gwyn's Lord Soul.
So there you have it, Island/Country Level & Relativistic/FTL Dark Souls as our minimum for scaling the Chosen Undead. However it wouldn't be a post of mine if I didn't bring up some ridiculous lore that scales the verse astronomically higher than what most people would assume, so let's go and do that now.
This scales to the Chosen Undead as all Lords of Cinder and candidates to be one have souls powerful enough to link the First Flame and sustain the Age of Fire longer. Some people think that you'd have to divide the energy needed to maintain a stastar system over a set amount of time in order to get the appropriate AP of Dark Souls' player characters by end-game, however that's not really necessary as we're shown in DS3 that snuffing out the First Flame immediately brings darkness onto the world and linking the First Flame can bring the sun back after it's already disappeared.
One of the central themes of the Dark Souls series (and the wider Soulsborne games) is that the current age of the world, the Age of Fire, is impermanent. DS3 especially emphasizes the futility of trying to extend this cycle, with what was once a bright, roaring flame that consumed the Chosen Undead at the end of DS1's "Light" ending barely engulfing the Ashen One. However with such focus on the Flame and Age of Fire, people tend to neglect the Ages that come before and after, i.e. The Age of Ancients and The Age of Dark.
The world during The Age of Ancients is described in DS1 as unformed and grey, its only inhabitants being the Everlasting Dragons. DS2 introduces an important item called the Ashen Mist Heart, which is a power coming from the ancient dragons. While on the surface the item description implies that the heart only allows the holder to enter "Memories" of who or whatever it's used on, DS2 treats this as full-on time travel. Not only can items be brought through into the present, but the Ashen Mist Heart allowed the Bearer of The Curse to travel back in time and fight the Giant Lord, who remembers the protagonist in the present day in its form as The Last Giant earlier in the game. Benhart of Jugo's questline further proves this as he clearly recognizes you and acknowledges the progress of your questline with him while inside of a Memory, reinforcing the idea that the "Memories" the Ashen Mist Heart sends you is actually the past. Not only does this power come from the Ancient Dragons, but it's also associated with the seemingly grey and formless nature of The Age of Ancients.
We can go even further with DS2's Scholar of The First Sin DLC and its main addition to the game (besides the worst f**king enemy placements in Soulsborne history): Aldia, the aforementioned scholar. Aldia sought to escape the never ending cycle of Light and Dark and would succeed in guiding the Bearer of The Curse to that goal in DS2's second ending. Now what did Aldia initially attempt to do to reach this goal? Well he looked to the beings who existed before the Age of Fire, the Ancient Dragons. Aldia would perform experiments on dragon-related specimens and collect dragon artifacts. Aldia's Dragon Aerie located past his Keep was also apparently meant to be set in the past, evidenced by the fact that you were meant run into the child version of The Emerald Herald in the Dragon Aerie. In other words power from the Ancient Dragons and The Age of Ancients itself are somewhat removed from time and linear events. It would explain the name "Everlasting Dragons" as their age was truly an everlasting one that ended when the First Flame appears.
Moving onto The Age of Dark and an associated concept, The Abyss. Similar to The Age of Ancients, The Age of Dark is treated as a timeless era. Most explicitly we see this in Manus, Father of The Abyss, who can reach across time. Even discarding the very popular theory of Manus being the Furtive Pygmy that found the Dark Soul, Manus is still stated to be a primordial human, an important distinction considering Agdayne, Aldia, and Hidetaka Miyazaki all state that humanity is of the Dark and that it contains fragments of the original Dark Soul. Moving onto DS3, we get to see an Age of Dark in the form of the Untended Graves, the past version of the present-day Cemetery of Ash. We know this is the past as not only do we fight the past version of Iudex Gundyr, but we receive unique dialogue for interacting with the Firekeeper for the first time in Firelink Shrine after meeting her in the Untended Graves.
DS3's Ringed City DLC hammers this home even further as we're introduced to the end of the world where kingdoms from all eras converge as the First Flame starts to fade. Here we can also find Shira, Knight of Filianore who, after we break her mistress' egg and reach the end of the world, she waits for you to take her revenge. However as some players have noticed, proceeding with touching Filianore's egg and beating Slave Knight Gael in the future leads to Shira not talking to you in the present, when she should have no earthly idea of what you've done. How is this possible? Well part of Shira's lore is that she trapped herself forever within a darkroom and a Pygmy Lord attached to her cross spear. Not only is there the significance of being in a room with a lack of light, but Shira herself is attached to a Pygmy Lord, one of the inheritors of The Dark Soul itself. So, as with The Age of Ancients, The Age of Dark and the fading of The First Flame is associated with a break down and lack of time. Alternatively you could argue she literally summoned herself into the future, which goes to show how time gets very loose towards the end of The Age of Fire.
And now we move on all the way back to The Age of Fire and the concept of "Light" in the Souls series. As stated outright in the description for the Repair spell in DS3, Light is time. According to Solaire of Astora, time is convoluted, with heroes from the past and even other worlds phasing in and out. The White and Red Sign Soapstones, the items used to carve summon signs, are just markings/runes of light. Bonfires in DS3 allow you to teleport between eras, allowing you to teleport to and from locations like the Untended Graves and end of the world any other Bonfire in present day. And of course there's the scene where upon waking Filianore and destroying her egg, a flash of light sends you forwards in time to the end of the world.
Different timelines are brought up as well in the games. Solaire's dialogue makes references to alternate worlds, and Miyazaki confirms that if you do his questline correctly he links The First Flame of his own world after helping you beat Gwyn. The game is vague as to whether or not there is just one First Flame that sustains all realities or each timeline is its own reality with separate First Flames. While I wouldn't say it's as solid as flat Uni, the Souls series have sold millions of copies, each of which could potentially be its own world similar to how Pokemon's cosmology works (especially if we factor in that Demon's Souls is possibly among these alternate worlds).
Speed... doesn't really change at all from the Relativistic to Light-speed range mentioned earlier. I guess you could wank it though by arguing Benhart of Jugo casually walks into the past without the Ashen Mist Heart, making it an Immeasurable speed feat. It's ridiculous and there's hardly any context of how in the world he walked into the past, but it's technically there.
Also DS2 deserves some slack. Had the best PvP, best Fashion Souls, and Emerald Herald is the best Souls waifu.
See you guys when the episode comes out later!
submitted by TheCardinalKing to deathbattle [link] [comments]
Now Dark Souls is a tricky franchise to scale. Not only is it heavily focused on lore and statements over visual feats, but said lore, unlike other franchises that heavily rely on lore scaling such as God of War or Devil May Cry, is generally vague unless you search through item descriptions and notice literal background details that you otherwise wouldn't think about. The gameplay isn't helping scaling either when random naked dudes with torches and 20ft falls can nearly kill the player character, causing massive discrepancy with how tough you are in the actual story vs gameplay. As with GoW & DMC, I'm gonna give several interpretations as to how I think Dark Souls can be reasonably scaled and from there you can decide what scaling you'll wanna buy into.
All this said I think after having played every game in the series sans Demon's Souls
SPOILER WARNING FOR ALL THREE DARK SOULS GAMES
... and let's get started!Part 1: Physical Feats
Getting physical feats out of the way, the arrival of The Nameless King in Dark Souls 3 creates a gigantic storm (which we know they're maintaining as the storm dissipates as soon as he's beaten), which has been calc'ed at 471 Gigatons to 2.8 Teratons of TNT. This would be consistent with the fact that Gwyn and the gods overcame and defeated the Archdragons, which would include this random, unnamed, mountain-sized Archdragon that, aside from Archdragon Peak being presumably built to face it, has zero lore indicating it's a special member of its race unlike Black Dragon Kalameet or Darkeater Midir.Spells and weapons such as such as Sunlight Spear, Divine Pillars of Light, and Price Lothric's Greatsword are all light-based/have light-based attacks that can be dodged after being fired by the player characters.
Besides dragon-scaling, Chosen Undead would scale to this via Gwyn, the God of Sunlight and First Lord of Cinder, beating the Nameless King some time in the setting's ancient history, with the CU beating Gwyn at the end of the first game along with several bosses that possess Lord Souls or fractions of Gwyn's Lord Soul.
So there you have it, Island/Country Level & Relativistic/FTL Dark Souls as our minimum for scaling the Chosen Undead. However it wouldn't be a post of mine if I didn't bring up some ridiculous lore that scales the verse astronomically higher than what most people would assume, so let's go and do that now.
Part 2: The First Flame & The Sun
Now we take a cosmic leap and analyze the claims of Star to Solar System Level DS characters. The premise of this is that The First Flame, the primordial flame that took the world out of the Age of Ancients, sustains not only the world but cosmic objects such as the sun. Now it's not that hard actually to prove the First Flame likely sustains the sun as towards the latter half of Dark Souls 3 the sun transforms into a giant Darksign as the current Age of Fire comes to a close. A Darksign signifies one being an Undead and links them to a Bonfire, which themselves are linked to The First Flame. Dark Souls 2 goes on to imply as well that the Undead Curse is directly tied to the First Flame, possibly by Gwyn linking humanity to it. Additionally thanks to DS3 there are heliocentric models of the solar system that can be found in the Grand Archives of Lothric:format(jpeg)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorusimage/image/50057813/DARK_SOULS_III_20160708103434.0.0.jpg), meaning the verse contains at least one planet and a star, but is possibly a full solar system in and of itself. You can also faintly see stars in the backgrounds of Heide's Tower of Flame in DS2 and Irithyll of The Boreal Valley in DS3, so you could argue potentially Multi-Solar System.This scales to the Chosen Undead as all Lords of Cinder and candidates to be one have souls powerful enough to link the First Flame and sustain the Age of Fire longer. Some people think that you'd have to divide the energy needed to maintain a stastar system over a set amount of time in order to get the appropriate AP of Dark Souls' player characters by end-game, however that's not really necessary as we're shown in DS3 that snuffing out the First Flame immediately brings darkness onto the world and linking the First Flame can bring the sun back after it's already disappeared.
Part 3: Light & Time
As with the last few times I talked about a video-game series with overly complicated lore, there are indeed arguments for Uni Dark Souls. Get ready, cause' this one is a doozy.One of the central themes of the Dark Souls series (and the wider Soulsborne games) is that the current age of the world, the Age of Fire, is impermanent. DS3 especially emphasizes the futility of trying to extend this cycle, with what was once a bright, roaring flame that consumed the Chosen Undead at the end of DS1's "Light" ending barely engulfing the Ashen One. However with such focus on the Flame and Age of Fire, people tend to neglect the Ages that come before and after, i.e. The Age of Ancients and The Age of Dark.
The world during The Age of Ancients is described in DS1 as unformed and grey, its only inhabitants being the Everlasting Dragons. DS2 introduces an important item called the Ashen Mist Heart, which is a power coming from the ancient dragons. While on the surface the item description implies that the heart only allows the holder to enter "Memories" of who or whatever it's used on, DS2 treats this as full-on time travel. Not only can items be brought through into the present, but the Ashen Mist Heart allowed the Bearer of The Curse to travel back in time and fight the Giant Lord, who remembers the protagonist in the present day in its form as The Last Giant earlier in the game. Benhart of Jugo's questline further proves this as he clearly recognizes you and acknowledges the progress of your questline with him while inside of a Memory, reinforcing the idea that the "Memories" the Ashen Mist Heart sends you is actually the past. Not only does this power come from the Ancient Dragons, but it's also associated with the seemingly grey and formless nature of The Age of Ancients.
We can go even further with DS2's Scholar of The First Sin DLC and its main addition to the game (besides the worst f**king enemy placements in Soulsborne history): Aldia, the aforementioned scholar. Aldia sought to escape the never ending cycle of Light and Dark and would succeed in guiding the Bearer of The Curse to that goal in DS2's second ending. Now what did Aldia initially attempt to do to reach this goal? Well he looked to the beings who existed before the Age of Fire, the Ancient Dragons. Aldia would perform experiments on dragon-related specimens and collect dragon artifacts. Aldia's Dragon Aerie located past his Keep was also apparently meant to be set in the past, evidenced by the fact that you were meant run into the child version of The Emerald Herald in the Dragon Aerie. In other words power from the Ancient Dragons and The Age of Ancients itself are somewhat removed from time and linear events. It would explain the name "Everlasting Dragons" as their age was truly an everlasting one that ended when the First Flame appears.
Moving onto The Age of Dark and an associated concept, The Abyss. Similar to The Age of Ancients, The Age of Dark is treated as a timeless era. Most explicitly we see this in Manus, Father of The Abyss, who can reach across time. Even discarding the very popular theory of Manus being the Furtive Pygmy that found the Dark Soul, Manus is still stated to be a primordial human, an important distinction considering Agdayne, Aldia, and Hidetaka Miyazaki all state that humanity is of the Dark and that it contains fragments of the original Dark Soul. Moving onto DS3, we get to see an Age of Dark in the form of the Untended Graves, the past version of the present-day Cemetery of Ash. We know this is the past as not only do we fight the past version of Iudex Gundyr, but we receive unique dialogue for interacting with the Firekeeper for the first time in Firelink Shrine after meeting her in the Untended Graves.
DS3's Ringed City DLC hammers this home even further as we're introduced to the end of the world where kingdoms from all eras converge as the First Flame starts to fade. Here we can also find Shira, Knight of Filianore who, after we break her mistress' egg and reach the end of the world, she waits for you to take her revenge. However as some players have noticed, proceeding with touching Filianore's egg and beating Slave Knight Gael in the future leads to Shira not talking to you in the present, when she should have no earthly idea of what you've done. How is this possible? Well part of Shira's lore is that she trapped herself forever within a darkroom and a Pygmy Lord attached to her cross spear. Not only is there the significance of being in a room with a lack of light, but Shira herself is attached to a Pygmy Lord, one of the inheritors of The Dark Soul itself. So, as with The Age of Ancients, The Age of Dark and the fading of The First Flame is associated with a break down and lack of time. Alternatively you could argue she literally summoned herself into the future, which goes to show how time gets very loose towards the end of The Age of Fire.
And now we move on all the way back to The Age of Fire and the concept of "Light" in the Souls series. As stated outright in the description for the Repair spell in DS3, Light is time. According to Solaire of Astora, time is convoluted, with heroes from the past and even other worlds phasing in and out. The White and Red Sign Soapstones, the items used to carve summon signs, are just markings/runes of light. Bonfires in DS3 allow you to teleport between eras, allowing you to teleport to and from locations like the Untended Graves and end of the world any other Bonfire in present day. And of course there's the scene where upon waking Filianore and destroying her egg, a flash of light sends you forwards in time to the end of the world.
Different timelines are brought up as well in the games. Solaire's dialogue makes references to alternate worlds, and Miyazaki confirms that if you do his questline correctly he links The First Flame of his own world after helping you beat Gwyn. The game is vague as to whether or not there is just one First Flame that sustains all realities or each timeline is its own reality with separate First Flames. While I wouldn't say it's as solid as flat Uni, the Souls series have sold millions of copies, each of which could potentially be its own world similar to how Pokemon's cosmology works (especially if we factor in that Demon's Souls is possibly among these alternate worlds).
Speed... doesn't really change at all from the Relativistic to Light-speed range mentioned earlier. I guess you could wank it though by arguing Benhart of Jugo casually walks into the past without the Ashen Mist Heart, making it an Immeasurable speed feat. It's ridiculous and there's hardly any context of how in the world he walked into the past, but it's technically there.
Conclusion:
At minimum, The Chosen Undead would scale to Island/Country level for AP and Durability, with Relativistic to Light-speed reactions and attack speed. Lore points to at least Star Level to up to Universal levels of power accounting for The First Flame being correlated with time itself within the lands of the Souls games. If you really want to take the series to its highest reasonable scaling, then you could have Multiversal & Immeasurable Dark Souls.Also DS2 deserves some slack. Had the best PvP, best Fashion Souls, and Emerald Herald is the best Souls waifu.
See you guys when the episode comes out later!
2023.06.04 03:18 normancrane I think I've screwed us in the 1960s
 | I've started writing this hundreds of times and never gotten to the end. The first few times I tried, I did it on paper in a notebook because the internet hadn't been invented yet. I burned the notebooks. This is the first time I've finished and not destroyed what I'd written. If nothing else, this act of creation without destruction is a small victory to me, but I know you hardly care about that. Nor should you. You should care about what you're about to read because if what I say is true, your generation may be in some serious shit. I'm in my late 70s, no wife or kids, not many friends, and although I'm not quite on my death bed, I'm certainly nearing the end of my life, so my personal stake in this is low, but I'd be lying if I said it didn't weight heavily on my soul in an existential kind of way. We all keep secrets, some darker than others, and this has been my darkest. submitted by normancrane to scaryshortstories [link] [comments] The story starts in California way back in the 1960s. For those unfamiliar with that period in history, the one word I'd use to describe it is turbulent. Just imagine the straight-laced world of the 1950s you know from television crashing head-on into what you probably associate with hippie culture, namely radical politics, protest, heavy drug use, rebellion against authority, and conspiracy theories, but also comradery, selflessness, and the genuine belief that it is possible to change the world for the better. I was a university student at the time, so you could say I was in the thick of it, but I wasn't at one of the true hotbed schools like Berkeley. That said, there was almost no way to be young and alive in California and to keep away from the upheaval. It was literally all around you, and it sucked you in. There wasn't a Friday night when you didn't listen to a speech by Abbie Hoffman, take LSD, or hazily conspire to take down the establishment to a background of folk tunes, and then go out to bar where long past midnight some guy in a black suit tried to recruit you for a plastics corporation or the CIA. Or so he said, or so you remembered the next morning. It was actually at one of these bars that I met my first real girlfriend, whom I'll call Edna. Edna wasn't a hippie, she was in town taking typing classes and working part-time as a receptionist, but like me she had become infatuated with the scene. Edna was only the second girl I'd slept with, and after a few months of going with her I started having trouble maintaining, then even getting, an erection. Back then it wasn't like it is now, when even polite people talk about erectile dysfunction and you can get medication to help with it. Back then there was nothing except a whole lot of embarrassment. At first, Edna and I thought it might be stress or lack of sleep causing my problem, then we suspected alcohol, but despite taking a fairly systematic approach and eliminating the possible causes one by one, we couldn't figure it out. Within weeks, my sex life just stopped. You can imagine how devastating that was to a young man. Let's rewind a bit. About six months before meeting Edna, I had met a guy named Jerry in one of my political science classes and we'd quickly become friends. Jerry and I would regularly meet up, talk about everything from music and world revolution to UFOs, and generally goof off together, and he'd always have a decent supply of weed for us to smoke and Grateful Dead bootlegs to listen to, which was fantastic. Although I've never had a truly best friend, Jerry was definitely my closest friend during my early student days in California, so he was the person I eventually turned to for help with my sexual problem. I remember that it was late at night after getting stoned immaculate, as Jim Morrison would say, that I told Jerry about my erectile dysfunction. He listened as I struggled mightily through the telling of it, and without laughing or making light of the situation told me not to worry too much, that it would probably go away on its own, but if I didn't want to wait and wanted help now, I should go see a man he referred to as Gerbil. Gerbil was about ten years older than us, originally from New Mexico and had been studying chemistry at Berkeley until about a year prior, when he'd been expelled after being caught synthesizing hallucinogens in a school lab. Faced with the possibility of going back to New Mexico without a degree, Gerbil had decided to pursue the American Dream instead. He set up his own lab, kept his clientele, and expanded his operation. Drugs, incidentally, is how Jerry had first met Gerbil. And through Jerry is how I met the guy. That's one other unique thing about Gerbil: even compared to the regular paranoiacs, he was paranoid. You couldn't just see him. You had to be introduced by someone he trusted and he had to "vet" you, which included a brief interrogation and sitting silently while he "read your mind." My vetting lasted about half an hour. After it was over, Gerbil relaxed and I explained my problem to him. It was easy because he was like a magnet for deep truths. You wanted to tell him the embarrassing stuff. Long story short, he told me I was far from the first guy to be suffering from this type of condition and that he had a tried and tested solution. I'll never forget the moment when he held out the pill bottle to me. His smiling, unshaven face, the sunlight streaming in through the dirty windows, and the pills themselves, oblong and delicately off-white in their little glass home. When I asked how much I owed him, he shrugged and said that for a friend there was no cost, then laughed and added that he had more than enough money anyway. After all, he said, he was making truth serum for the CIA. "Just make sure you follow the instructions," he said. "And remember: you were never here." When I got home, I read the instructions, which had been typed out on a strip of paper and taped to the outside of the pill bottle. They were simple enough but odd: Insert one (1) pill into urethra at least one hour prior to intercourse. I'll spare you the awkward details of my first time doing the insertion. What you need to know is that the pills worked. God, how they worked! Never before, and never since, have I had an erection as hard and for as long as when I used those pills. In the past twenty years I've tried Viagra and all the others, but nothing even comes close. It was like fucking with the world's most sensitive steel rod, and you could go for hours! Edna and I sure made up for lost time, but pretty soon Edna wasn't enough. We'd go at it two or three times, she'd call it quits for the night and I'd still be raging to go. I'm not proud of it now, but I started meeting other girls just for sex. Any girls who'd have me, really. At bars, meet ups, between classes, at concerts, everywhere. There was no emotional connection but physically it was bliss. I loved it, they loved it, and I guess later they dubbed it the Summer of Love. I wish I'd counted how many pills Gerbil had given me, but I didn't. All I knew was that I was going through them like a knife through reheated butter. From what I remember, one pill was enough to last up to forty-eight hours, but I was using them almost non-stop, and the supply was depleting. I was probably addicted. It was after I'd used about half of my initial supply that Jerry asked over coffee one morning whether my "problem" had gone away. I told him it had and more than hinted at how my sex life had exploded, and he told me that was fantastic news. Then he lowered his voice and told me Gerbil wanted to meet up. I agreed, he told me the time and place, and I never saw Jerry again. But I'll get to that in a bit. Gerbil and I met a few days later in what remained of a hangar on an abandoned airfield. It was beyond city limits, and Gerbil seemed to make a big deal of that fact. He told me he'd recently purchased the land way under value and was planning on building a bunker on it. Because that sounded like just the craziness he'd be into, I took him at his word. When I told him how well the pills had been working and that I wanted more of them, he wasn't surprised. He said he was thrilled and handed me another bottle of pills identical to the first. This time, however, they had a price. But it was the kind of price that wasn't paid in dollars and that made my horny young mind spin with possibilities. Gerbil was organizing a series of orgies and he was giving me the pills in exchange for taking part in them. Back to Jerry: disappearing for a few days wasn't unusual. He went on benders from time to time during which he'd unreachable and absent from class, but those usually lasted a few days, after which he'd show up groggy and with stories to tell. After a week, I started to worry, but even then it's important to remember the times, both in terms of technology and perspective. We didn't have cell phones you could call anytime you wanted, and it wasn't unheard of for people to "drop out" of society. I had a professor who suddenly disappeared for half a semester, and when he came back he told us he'd gone on a walkabout. Still, I expected Jerry to tell me if he was planning something like that. He'd said nothing and now he was gone. I started asking around but realized I didn't actually know much about him. From what I gathered, he was still enrolled in university and still living at the same address. He just wasn't there. My relationship with Edna was falling apart at the same time. I was bored with her, and she was getting bored with life in California. She was honest about wanting to move back East, and we both knew I wouldn't be going with her. And although she never said a word about it, I'm sure she knew I wasn't being faithful. Hell, even free love has a cost. I can't say we broke each other's hearts, but I will say that as I've aged, I've imagined more and more often what my life would had have been if we'd stayed together. I went on to love again but I never found a true love. Edna, especially in those early times, may have been the closest I ever got. Ironically, we loved each other most when we couldn't be physically intimate. The first of Gerbil's orgies that I attended was held in the middle of the desert. There was music, drugs and absolutely no inhibitions. It was the most exciting experience of my life, and I loved it. Gerbil himself was never at the orgies, but almost everyone seemed to know him, at least by reputation. I don't remember how many orgies I ended up going to, but it was over a dozen, each in a different location with new women, many of them intoxicatingly exotic to me. Foreign students, bored housewives, groupies, intellectuals, stewardesses, and wanderers from all around the country and the world: India, Russia, China, Europe, Latin America, everywhere. I still have no idea how Gerbil organized these things or convinced so many women to go to them, but he did, and I must have fucked nearly all of them. The pills were my fuel. Sometime during this hazy period of hedonistic pleasure, the police found Jerry's body in New Mexico. Apparently he'd hitchhiked all the way down there, spent a few weeks living on a ranch and overdosed on a cocktail of drugs so strong he must have been halfway to heaven by the time his organs failed. Foul play was ruled out, and no one in New Mexico cared if a longhaired hippie had killed himself accidentally or on purpose. There was no funeral as far as I know. About a week after Jerry's death, I received a letter from him in the mail. Judging by the gradual degradation of his handwriting, it had been written in several sittings. Most of it was personal and there was a lot of pain behind the words, but it was the last sentence that has stuck with me because of it's plain brutality. Four words: They've fucked us. I fucked away my breakup with Edna and the loss of my friend. Orgy after orgy. It was while sitting in a bar on a hot Wednesday night in the middle of July that I discovered something that chilled me to the marrow of my bones. I was down to my last pill and imagining the best way to take advantage of it, waiting for the perfect piece of ass to walk in through the door. I had a mug of beer in front of me, not my first, and I was absentmindedly walking the pill up and down the tops of my fingers, when suddenly I lost control and it fell straight into my mug. I must have been too drunk to react, because instead of fishing it out, I watched instead as it descended into the murky depths while giving off a spray of infinitely fine bubbles. I didn't know how a pill should react in beer, but something about this reaction seemed off. When it had settled at the bottom of the mug, the pill started shedding something other than bubbles: namely itself. Tiny pieces flaked off and floated to the top, and the pill began to tremble. Soon, dark spots became visible beneath the off-white colour of what I instinctively began to conceptualize as a shell, until the entire casing was gone, leaving only a trembling black insectous creature! Immediately I knew it was organic. Even more: alive! I watched mesmerized as it struggled in the liquid, scurrying towards the edge of the mug but unable to climb the glass sides. Finally, I put my fingers in and lifted it out. It was small but unbelievably hard between my fingertips. I couldn't crush it. I held it briefly against the overhead light, its body wholly opaque, before it slipped out, hit the unswept floor and scurried away. I scrambled after it, much to the cruel amusement of the other patrons, stomping forward on the floor before falling to my knees, but with no luck. It was gone. Returning to my seat, I thought, Just what the fuck have I been pushing into my urethra? I had no pills and the only evidence of anything abnormal was my own boozy memory, so I had nothing. Except a feeling in the pit of my stomach that something was horribly wrong. I tried contacting Gerbil in my usual ways, hoping to get more pills to experiment on and either put my mind at ease ("You hallucinated, idiot.") or get my hands on something I could send to a lab, but all my usual ways were indirect, like asking for permission to speak, and permission was being denied. Gerbil stopped responding. Eventually I grew desperate enough to visit the abandoned airfield, which was the only address of his I knew, but it was empty and unchanged. When I went to the land office and asked about ownership, the clerk told me the land belonged to a man named Beaconfield who was mostly likely long dead. Because I didn't know anyone other than Jerry who'd known Gerbil, I had nowhere else to turn. There's only so many times you can ask a stranger if they know a man named after a small rodent. Eventually you give up. And so Gerbil was gone, my pills were gone, Jerry and Edna were gone, and soon the 1960s themselves were gone, metamorphosing into a sexless 1970s for me, then the 1980s, 1990s and the new millennium. All as if someone had snapped their fingers. To say my life was dull would be an understatement. I had work, and followed it around the country, but I had little else. Forged at a time when we all wanted to remake the world, I had remade nothing and found myself leading a life of comfortable insignificance. But despite my memories fading, they never completely disappeared, and I spent many evenings wondering, trying to piece together clues, and always unable to shake those four words of Jerry's: They've fucked us. Was I scarred by a friend's suicide? Sure. But it was more than that, often in the form of sweat-inducing nightmares about tiny black insects crawling around my insides. In the early 2000s, I saw a political ad for a candidate vying for the U.S. Senate. There was nothing unusual about the spot, but a few seconds caught my attention. They showed a series of photos of the candidate as he was growing up, attending school, graduating, etc. In one of them, he was with his mother, and my heart nearly stopped when I recognized her as Edna. I don't know what emotion I felt first, but I settled on hesitant happiness as I jumped online to confirm what my eyes had shown me. Although I didn't find the ad itself, I did find an interview with the candidate, including one with a gallery of photos, and in one of them was the confirmation I was searching for. Edna's face, older but still beautiful, stared at me from behind her son's electable smile. I was breathless. My happiness became joy. It was wonderful not only that Edna had done OK for herself but that she'd done extraordinarily, because it takes a certain kind of success to raise a future statesman. On election night, I made popcorn, drank beer and cheered on Edna's son as if he were my own. Shortly after the polls closed, CNN projected him as the winner. For one night, my own insignificance didn't matter. I shared secretly in someone else's relevance. A few months passed in the afterglow of this beautiful discovery. Sometimes I even had fantasies about contacting the senator to offer my congratulations, which would be a reconnection with Edna, but I always knew this was impossible. I was nobody to her, a shadow from the past. She probably didn't even remember me. The reason why I mention this is two-fold: because I want to write and relive the happy moments, despite their way of decomposing into dread; and because Edna was merely the first of many. Over the next year, I recognized the faces of three other women I'd had sex with in California in the 1960s. I may not have known or recognized their names, but I do have a memory for faces and I was certain about theirs. All three were the mothers or grandmothers of successful people: a politician, the CEO of a pharmaceutical corporation, and a lawyer. What are the chances? Over the next months and years, I started to actively research the background of anyone who had recently attained a high level of success, or more accurately, a high level of influence: of power. Most were guarded about their pasts, many enigmatic, but some made public just enough of a thread of information for me to pull loose, and whether in photos or on video, what I kept finding were the faces of my former lovers, women I had met while cheating on Edna or, more often, women I'd fucked at Gerbil's orgies. In time, I realized that the web extended beyond America. I found world leaders, generals, economists, industrialists and policy makers scattered about the globe, yet whose foremothers had all been in California with me! It was insane. I felt insane, wacko like the worst conspiracy nuts I'd met in the 1960s. Yet, just like them, I was convinced I was right, and what was right was too weird to be coincidence. Today, the people whose mothers and grandmothers I fucked rule the world, and the singular way in which they are all working toward the same goals terrifies me to the very core of my being. To everyone else, they are unconnected individuals. To me, they are connected, and it gnaws at my mind, this question that I know I will never be able to answer: What are they and to whom do they owe their allegiance? But I no longer search for them. I have accepted reality, and I don't know what difference it makes to know exactly how many of them exist. I still have no evidence. I can't go anywhere with a story relying on an old man's memory of his own LSD-fueled sexual exploits. I've tried, and gotten laughed out of the room. The best reaction is sympathy for being a senile old man whose mind is playing tricks on him about his past. And that's without mentioning my own theories involving parasites, mind control or aliens. Yet those words: They've fucked us. How I wish I had been able to hold on to that tiny black creature! Or stopped myself from putting it in my body. But I couldn't and now I'm here, posting my story somewhere at least a few people will read it. Maybe you'll believe me, maybe you won't. I don't know if I want to give a warning or a confession, but either way I've done it now. What finds its way to the internet stays on the internet. I hope for your collective sake that when you find this years later, you'll be able to have a good laugh. I know I'm not laughing. I truly believe that in the 1960s I participated in something whose conclusion will be the ruin of mankind. |
2023.06.04 03:17 normancrane I think I've screwed us in the 1960s
I've started writing this hundreds of times and never gotten to the end. The first few times I tried, I did it on paper in a notebook because the internet hadn't been invented yet. I burned the notebooks. This is the first time I've finished and not destroyed what I'd written. If nothing else, this act of creation without destruction is a small victory to me, but I know you hardly care about that. Nor should you. You should care about what you're about to read because if what I say is true, your generation may be in some serious shit. I'm in my late 70s, no wife or kids, not many friends, and although I'm not quite on my death bed, I'm certainly nearing the end of my life, so my personal stake in this is low, but I'd be lying if I said it didn't weight heavily on my soul in an existential kind of way. We all keep secrets, some darker than others, and this has been my darkest.
The story starts in California way back in the 1960s. For those unfamiliar with that period in history, the one word I'd use to describe it is turbulent. Just imagine the straight-laced world of the 1950s you know from television crashing head-on into what you probably associate with hippie culture, namely radical politics, protest, heavy drug use, rebellion against authority, and conspiracy theories, but also comradery, selflessness, and the genuine belief that it is possible to change the world for the better. I was a university student at the time, so you could say I was in the thick of it, but I wasn't at one of the true hotbed schools like Berkeley. That said, there was almost no way to be young and alive in California and to keep away from the upheaval. It was literally all around you, and it sucked you in. There wasn't a Friday night when you didn't listen to a speech by Abbie Hoffman, take LSD, or hazily conspire to take down the establishment to a background of folk tunes, and then go out to bar where long past midnight some guy in a black suit tried to recruit you for a plastics corporation or the CIA. Or so he said, or so you remembered the next morning.
It was actually at one of these bars that I met my first real girlfriend, whom I'll call Edna. Edna wasn't a hippie, she was in town taking typing classes and working part-time as a receptionist, but like me she had become infatuated with the scene. Edna was only the second girl I'd slept with, and after a few months of going with her I started having trouble maintaining, then even getting, an erection. Back then it wasn't like it is now, when even polite people talk about erectile dysfunction and you can get medication to help with it. Back then there was nothing except a whole lot of embarrassment. At first, Edna and I thought it might be stress or lack of sleep causing my problem, then we suspected alcohol, but despite taking a fairly systematic approach and eliminating the possible causes one by one, we couldn't figure it out. Within weeks, my sex life just stopped. You can imagine how devastating that was to a young man.
Let's rewind a bit. About six months before meeting Edna, I had met a guy named Jerry in one of my political science classes and we'd quickly become friends. Jerry and I would regularly meet up, talk about everything from music and world revolution to UFOs, and generally goof off together, and he'd always have a decent supply of weed for us to smoke and Grateful Dead bootlegs to listen to, which was fantastic. Although I've never had a truly best friend, Jerry was definitely my closest friend during my early student days in California, so he was the person I eventually turned to for help with my sexual problem. I remember that it was late at night after getting stoned immaculate, as Jim Morrison would say, that I told Jerry about my erectile dysfunction. He listened as I struggled mightily through the telling of it, and without laughing or making light of the situation told me not to worry too much, that it would probably go away on its own, but if I didn't want to wait and wanted help now, I should go see a man he referred to as Gerbil.
Gerbil was about ten years older than us, originally from New Mexico and had been studying chemistry at Berkeley until about a year prior, when he'd been expelled after being caught synthesizing hallucinogens in a school lab. Faced with the possibility of going back to New Mexico without a degree, Gerbil had decided to pursue the American Dream instead. He set up his own lab, kept his clientele, and expanded his operation. Drugs, incidentally, is how Jerry had first met Gerbil. And through Jerry is how I met the guy. That's one other unique thing about Gerbil: even compared to the regular paranoiacs, he was paranoid. You couldn't just see him. You had to be introduced by someone he trusted and he had to "vet" you, which included a brief interrogation and sitting silently while he "read your mind." My vetting lasted about half an hour. After it was over, Gerbil relaxed and I explained my problem to him. It was easy because he was like a magnet for deep truths. You wanted to tell him the embarrassing stuff. Long story short, he told me I was far from the first guy to be suffering from this type of condition and that he had a tried and tested solution.
I'll never forget the moment when he held out the pill bottle to me. His smiling, unshaven face, the sunlight streaming in through the dirty windows, and the pills themselves, oblong and delicately off-white in their little glass home. When I asked how much I owed him, he shrugged and said that for a friend there was no cost, then laughed and added that he had more than enough money anyway. After all, he said, he was making truth serum for the CIA. "Just make sure you follow the instructions," he said. "And remember: you were never here."
When I got home, I read the instructions, which had been typed out on a strip of paper and taped to the outside of the pill bottle. They were simple enough but odd: Insert one (1) pill into urethra at least one hour prior to intercourse.
I'll spare you the awkward details of my first time doing the insertion. What you need to know is that the pills worked. God, how they worked! Never before, and never since, have I had an erection as hard and for as long as when I used those pills. In the past twenty years I've tried Viagra and all the others, but nothing even comes close. It was like fucking with the world's most sensitive steel rod, and you could go for hours!
Edna and I sure made up for lost time, but pretty soon Edna wasn't enough. We'd go at it two or three times, she'd call it quits for the night and I'd still be raging to go. I'm not proud of it now, but I started meeting other girls just for sex. Any girls who'd have me, really. At bars, meet ups, between classes, at concerts, everywhere. There was no emotional connection but physically it was bliss. I loved it, they loved it, and I guess later they dubbed it the Summer of Love.
I wish I'd counted how many pills Gerbil had given me, but I didn't. All I knew was that I was going through them like a knife through reheated butter. From what I remember, one pill was enough to last up to forty-eight hours, but I was using them almost non-stop, and the supply was depleting. I was probably addicted. It was after I'd used about half of my initial supply that Jerry asked over coffee one morning whether my "problem" had gone away. I told him it had and more than hinted at how my sex life had exploded, and he told me that was fantastic news. Then he lowered his voice and told me Gerbil wanted to meet up. I agreed, he told me the time and place, and I never saw Jerry again. But I'll get to that in a bit.
Gerbil and I met a few days later in what remained of a hangar on an abandoned airfield. It was beyond city limits, and Gerbil seemed to make a big deal of that fact. He told me he'd recently purchased the land way under value and was planning on building a bunker on it. Because that sounded like just the craziness he'd be into, I took him at his word. When I told him how well the pills had been working and that I wanted more of them, he wasn't surprised. He said he was thrilled and handed me another bottle of pills identical to the first. This time, however, they had a price. But it was the kind of price that wasn't paid in dollars and that made my horny young mind spin with possibilities. Gerbil was organizing a series of orgies and he was giving me the pills in exchange for taking part in them.
Back to Jerry: disappearing for a few days wasn't unusual. He went on benders from time to time during which he'd unreachable and absent from class, but those usually lasted a few days, after which he'd show up groggy and with stories to tell. After a week, I started to worry, but even then it's important to remember the times, both in terms of technology and perspective. We didn't have cell phones you could call anytime you wanted, and it wasn't unheard of for people to "drop out" of society. I had a professor who suddenly disappeared for half a semester, and when he came back he told us he'd gone on a walkabout. Still, I expected Jerry to tell me if he was planning something like that. He'd said nothing and now he was gone. I started asking around but realized I didn't actually know much about him. From what I gathered, he was still enrolled in university and still living at the same address. He just wasn't there.
My relationship with Edna was falling apart at the same time. I was bored with her, and she was getting bored with life in California. She was honest about wanting to move back East, and we both knew I wouldn't be going with her. And although she never said a word about it, I'm sure she knew I wasn't being faithful. Hell, even free love has a cost. I can't say we broke each other's hearts, but I will say that as I've aged, I've imagined more and more often what my life would had have been if we'd stayed together. I went on to love again but I never found a true love. Edna, especially in those early times, may have been the closest I ever got. Ironically, we loved each other most when we couldn't be physically intimate.
The first of Gerbil's orgies that I attended was held in the middle of the desert. There was music, drugs and absolutely no inhibitions. It was the most exciting experience of my life, and I loved it. Gerbil himself was never at the orgies, but almost everyone seemed to know him, at least by reputation. I don't remember how many orgies I ended up going to, but it was over a dozen, each in a different location with new women, many of them intoxicatingly exotic to me. Foreign students, bored housewives, groupies, intellectuals, stewardesses, and wanderers from all around the country and the world: India, Russia, China, Europe, Latin America, everywhere. I still have no idea how Gerbil organized these things or convinced so many women to go to them, but he did, and I must have fucked nearly all of them. The pills were my fuel.
Sometime during this hazy period of hedonistic pleasure, the police found Jerry's body in New Mexico. Apparently he'd hitchhiked all the way down there, spent a few weeks living on a ranch and overdosed on a cocktail of drugs so strong he must have been halfway to heaven by the time his organs failed. Foul play was ruled out, and no one in New Mexico cared if a longhaired hippie had killed himself accidentally or on purpose. There was no funeral as far as I know. About a week after Jerry's death, I received a letter from him in the mail. Judging by the gradual degradation of his handwriting, it had been written in several sittings. Most of it was personal and there was a lot of pain behind the words, but it was the last sentence that has stuck with me because of it's plain brutality. Four words: They've fucked us.
I fucked away my breakup with Edna and the loss of my friend. Orgy after orgy.
It was while sitting in a bar on a hot Wednesday night in the middle of July that I discovered something that chilled me to the marrow of my bones. I was down to my last pill and imagining the best way to take advantage of it, waiting for the perfect piece of ass to walk in through the door. I had a mug of beer in front of me, not my first, and I was absentmindedly walking the pill up and down the tops of my fingers, when suddenly I lost control and it fell straight into my mug. I must have been too drunk to react, because instead of fishing it out, I watched instead as it descended into the murky depths while giving off a spray of infinitely fine bubbles. I didn't know how a pill should react in beer, but something about this reaction seemed off. When it had settled at the bottom of the mug, the pill started shedding something other than bubbles: namely itself. Tiny pieces flaked off and floated to the top, and the pill began to tremble. Soon, dark spots became visible beneath the off-white colour of what I instinctively began to conceptualize as a shell, until the entire casing was gone, leaving only a trembling black insectous creature! Immediately I knew it was organic. Even more: alive! I watched mesmerized as it struggled in the liquid, scurrying towards the edge of the mug but unable to climb the glass sides. Finally, I put my fingers in and lifted it out. It was small but unbelievably hard between my fingertips. I couldn't crush it. I held it briefly against the overhead light, its body wholly opaque, before it slipped out, hit the unswept floor and scurried away. I scrambled after it, much to the cruel amusement of the other patrons, stomping forward on the floor before falling to my knees, but with no luck. It was gone. Returning to my seat, I thought, Just what the fuck have I been pushing into my urethra?
I had no pills and the only evidence of anything abnormal was my own boozy memory, so I had nothing. Except a feeling in the pit of my stomach that something was horribly wrong. I tried contacting Gerbil in my usual ways, hoping to get more pills to experiment on and either put my mind at ease ("You hallucinated, idiot.") or get my hands on something I could send to a lab, but all my usual ways were indirect, like asking for permission to speak, and permission was being denied. Gerbil stopped responding. Eventually I grew desperate enough to visit the abandoned airfield, which was the only address of his I knew, but it was empty and unchanged. When I went to the land office and asked about ownership, the clerk told me the land belonged to a man named Beaconfield who was mostly likely long dead. Because I didn't know anyone other than Jerry who'd known Gerbil, I had nowhere else to turn. There's only so many times you can ask a stranger if they know a man named after a small rodent. Eventually you give up.
And so Gerbil was gone, my pills were gone, Jerry and Edna were gone, and soon the 1960s themselves were gone, metamorphosing into a sexless 1970s for me, then the 1980s, 1990s and the new millennium. All as if someone had snapped their fingers. To say my life was dull would be an understatement. I had work, and followed it around the country, but I had little else. Forged at a time when we all wanted to remake the world, I had remade nothing and found myself leading a life of comfortable insignificance. But despite my memories fading, they never completely disappeared, and I spent many evenings wondering, trying to piece together clues, and always unable to shake those four words of Jerry's: They've fucked us. Was I scarred by a friend's suicide? Sure. But it was more than that, often in the form of sweat-inducing nightmares about tiny black insects crawling around my insides.
In the early 2000s, I saw a political ad for a candidate vying for the U.S. Senate. There was nothing unusual about the spot, but a few seconds caught my attention. They showed a series of photos of the candidate as he was growing up, attending school, graduating, etc. In one of them, he was with his mother, and my heart nearly stopped when I recognized her as Edna. I don't know what emotion I felt first, but I settled on hesitant happiness as I jumped online to confirm what my eyes had shown me. Although I didn't find the ad itself, I did find an interview with the candidate, including one with a gallery of photos, and in one of them was the confirmation I was searching for. Edna's face, older but still beautiful, stared at me from behind her son's electable smile. I was breathless. My happiness became joy. It was wonderful not only that Edna had done OK for herself but that she'd done extraordinarily, because it takes a certain kind of success to raise a future statesman.
On election night, I made popcorn, drank beer and cheered on Edna's son as if he were my own. Shortly after the polls closed, CNN projected him as the winner. For one night, my own insignificance didn't matter. I shared secretly in someone else's relevance.
A few months passed in the afterglow of this beautiful discovery. Sometimes I even had fantasies about contacting the senator to offer my congratulations, which would be a reconnection with Edna, but I always knew this was impossible. I was nobody to her, a shadow from the past. She probably didn't even remember me.
The reason why I mention this is two-fold: because I want to write and relive the happy moments, despite their way of decomposing into dread; and because Edna was merely the first of many. Over the next year, I recognized the faces of three other women I'd had sex with in California in the 1960s. I may not have known or recognized their names, but I do have a memory for faces and I was certain about theirs. All three were the mothers or grandmothers of successful people: a politician, the CEO of a pharmaceutical corporation, and a lawyer. What are the chances?
Over the next months and years, I started to actively research the background of anyone who had recently attained a high level of success, or more accurately, a high level of influence: of power. Most were guarded about their pasts, many enigmatic, but some made public just enough of a thread of information for me to pull loose, and whether in photos or on video, what I kept finding were the faces of my former lovers, women I had met while cheating on Edna or, more often, women I'd fucked at Gerbil's orgies.
In time, I realized that the web extended beyond America. I found world leaders, generals, economists, industrialists and policy makers scattered about the globe, yet whose foremothers had all been in California with me! It was insane. I felt insane, wacko like the worst conspiracy nuts I'd met in the 1960s. Yet, just like them, I was convinced I was right, and what was right was too weird to be coincidence.
Today, the people whose mothers and grandmothers I fucked rule the world, and the singular way in which they are all working toward the same goals terrifies me to the very core of my being. To everyone else, they are unconnected individuals. To me, they are connected, and it gnaws at my mind, this question that I know I will never be able to answer: What are they and to whom do they owe their allegiance?
But I no longer search for them. I have accepted reality, and I don't know what difference it makes to know exactly how many of them exist. I still have no evidence. I can't go anywhere with a story relying on an old man's memory of his own LSD-fueled sexual exploits. I've tried, and gotten laughed out of the room. The best reaction is sympathy for being a senile old man whose mind is playing tricks on him about his past. And that's without mentioning my own theories involving parasites, mind control or aliens.
Yet those words: They've fucked us.
How I wish I had been able to hold on to that tiny black creature!
Or stopped myself from putting it in my body.
But I couldn't and now I'm here, posting my story somewhere at least a few people will read it. Maybe you'll believe me, maybe you won't. I don't know if I want to give a warning or a confession, but either way I've done it now. What finds its way to the internet stays on the internet.
I hope for your collective sake that when you find this years later, you'll be able to have a good laugh.
I know I'm not laughing.
I truly believe that in the 1960s I participated in something whose conclusion will be the ruin of mankind.
submitted by normancrane to DarkTales [link] [comments]
The story starts in California way back in the 1960s. For those unfamiliar with that period in history, the one word I'd use to describe it is turbulent. Just imagine the straight-laced world of the 1950s you know from television crashing head-on into what you probably associate with hippie culture, namely radical politics, protest, heavy drug use, rebellion against authority, and conspiracy theories, but also comradery, selflessness, and the genuine belief that it is possible to change the world for the better. I was a university student at the time, so you could say I was in the thick of it, but I wasn't at one of the true hotbed schools like Berkeley. That said, there was almost no way to be young and alive in California and to keep away from the upheaval. It was literally all around you, and it sucked you in. There wasn't a Friday night when you didn't listen to a speech by Abbie Hoffman, take LSD, or hazily conspire to take down the establishment to a background of folk tunes, and then go out to bar where long past midnight some guy in a black suit tried to recruit you for a plastics corporation or the CIA. Or so he said, or so you remembered the next morning.
It was actually at one of these bars that I met my first real girlfriend, whom I'll call Edna. Edna wasn't a hippie, she was in town taking typing classes and working part-time as a receptionist, but like me she had become infatuated with the scene. Edna was only the second girl I'd slept with, and after a few months of going with her I started having trouble maintaining, then even getting, an erection. Back then it wasn't like it is now, when even polite people talk about erectile dysfunction and you can get medication to help with it. Back then there was nothing except a whole lot of embarrassment. At first, Edna and I thought it might be stress or lack of sleep causing my problem, then we suspected alcohol, but despite taking a fairly systematic approach and eliminating the possible causes one by one, we couldn't figure it out. Within weeks, my sex life just stopped. You can imagine how devastating that was to a young man.
Let's rewind a bit. About six months before meeting Edna, I had met a guy named Jerry in one of my political science classes and we'd quickly become friends. Jerry and I would regularly meet up, talk about everything from music and world revolution to UFOs, and generally goof off together, and he'd always have a decent supply of weed for us to smoke and Grateful Dead bootlegs to listen to, which was fantastic. Although I've never had a truly best friend, Jerry was definitely my closest friend during my early student days in California, so he was the person I eventually turned to for help with my sexual problem. I remember that it was late at night after getting stoned immaculate, as Jim Morrison would say, that I told Jerry about my erectile dysfunction. He listened as I struggled mightily through the telling of it, and without laughing or making light of the situation told me not to worry too much, that it would probably go away on its own, but if I didn't want to wait and wanted help now, I should go see a man he referred to as Gerbil.
Gerbil was about ten years older than us, originally from New Mexico and had been studying chemistry at Berkeley until about a year prior, when he'd been expelled after being caught synthesizing hallucinogens in a school lab. Faced with the possibility of going back to New Mexico without a degree, Gerbil had decided to pursue the American Dream instead. He set up his own lab, kept his clientele, and expanded his operation. Drugs, incidentally, is how Jerry had first met Gerbil. And through Jerry is how I met the guy. That's one other unique thing about Gerbil: even compared to the regular paranoiacs, he was paranoid. You couldn't just see him. You had to be introduced by someone he trusted and he had to "vet" you, which included a brief interrogation and sitting silently while he "read your mind." My vetting lasted about half an hour. After it was over, Gerbil relaxed and I explained my problem to him. It was easy because he was like a magnet for deep truths. You wanted to tell him the embarrassing stuff. Long story short, he told me I was far from the first guy to be suffering from this type of condition and that he had a tried and tested solution.
I'll never forget the moment when he held out the pill bottle to me. His smiling, unshaven face, the sunlight streaming in through the dirty windows, and the pills themselves, oblong and delicately off-white in their little glass home. When I asked how much I owed him, he shrugged and said that for a friend there was no cost, then laughed and added that he had more than enough money anyway. After all, he said, he was making truth serum for the CIA. "Just make sure you follow the instructions," he said. "And remember: you were never here."
When I got home, I read the instructions, which had been typed out on a strip of paper and taped to the outside of the pill bottle. They were simple enough but odd: Insert one (1) pill into urethra at least one hour prior to intercourse.
I'll spare you the awkward details of my first time doing the insertion. What you need to know is that the pills worked. God, how they worked! Never before, and never since, have I had an erection as hard and for as long as when I used those pills. In the past twenty years I've tried Viagra and all the others, but nothing even comes close. It was like fucking with the world's most sensitive steel rod, and you could go for hours!
Edna and I sure made up for lost time, but pretty soon Edna wasn't enough. We'd go at it two or three times, she'd call it quits for the night and I'd still be raging to go. I'm not proud of it now, but I started meeting other girls just for sex. Any girls who'd have me, really. At bars, meet ups, between classes, at concerts, everywhere. There was no emotional connection but physically it was bliss. I loved it, they loved it, and I guess later they dubbed it the Summer of Love.
I wish I'd counted how many pills Gerbil had given me, but I didn't. All I knew was that I was going through them like a knife through reheated butter. From what I remember, one pill was enough to last up to forty-eight hours, but I was using them almost non-stop, and the supply was depleting. I was probably addicted. It was after I'd used about half of my initial supply that Jerry asked over coffee one morning whether my "problem" had gone away. I told him it had and more than hinted at how my sex life had exploded, and he told me that was fantastic news. Then he lowered his voice and told me Gerbil wanted to meet up. I agreed, he told me the time and place, and I never saw Jerry again. But I'll get to that in a bit.
Gerbil and I met a few days later in what remained of a hangar on an abandoned airfield. It was beyond city limits, and Gerbil seemed to make a big deal of that fact. He told me he'd recently purchased the land way under value and was planning on building a bunker on it. Because that sounded like just the craziness he'd be into, I took him at his word. When I told him how well the pills had been working and that I wanted more of them, he wasn't surprised. He said he was thrilled and handed me another bottle of pills identical to the first. This time, however, they had a price. But it was the kind of price that wasn't paid in dollars and that made my horny young mind spin with possibilities. Gerbil was organizing a series of orgies and he was giving me the pills in exchange for taking part in them.
Back to Jerry: disappearing for a few days wasn't unusual. He went on benders from time to time during which he'd unreachable and absent from class, but those usually lasted a few days, after which he'd show up groggy and with stories to tell. After a week, I started to worry, but even then it's important to remember the times, both in terms of technology and perspective. We didn't have cell phones you could call anytime you wanted, and it wasn't unheard of for people to "drop out" of society. I had a professor who suddenly disappeared for half a semester, and when he came back he told us he'd gone on a walkabout. Still, I expected Jerry to tell me if he was planning something like that. He'd said nothing and now he was gone. I started asking around but realized I didn't actually know much about him. From what I gathered, he was still enrolled in university and still living at the same address. He just wasn't there.
My relationship with Edna was falling apart at the same time. I was bored with her, and she was getting bored with life in California. She was honest about wanting to move back East, and we both knew I wouldn't be going with her. And although she never said a word about it, I'm sure she knew I wasn't being faithful. Hell, even free love has a cost. I can't say we broke each other's hearts, but I will say that as I've aged, I've imagined more and more often what my life would had have been if we'd stayed together. I went on to love again but I never found a true love. Edna, especially in those early times, may have been the closest I ever got. Ironically, we loved each other most when we couldn't be physically intimate.
The first of Gerbil's orgies that I attended was held in the middle of the desert. There was music, drugs and absolutely no inhibitions. It was the most exciting experience of my life, and I loved it. Gerbil himself was never at the orgies, but almost everyone seemed to know him, at least by reputation. I don't remember how many orgies I ended up going to, but it was over a dozen, each in a different location with new women, many of them intoxicatingly exotic to me. Foreign students, bored housewives, groupies, intellectuals, stewardesses, and wanderers from all around the country and the world: India, Russia, China, Europe, Latin America, everywhere. I still have no idea how Gerbil organized these things or convinced so many women to go to them, but he did, and I must have fucked nearly all of them. The pills were my fuel.
Sometime during this hazy period of hedonistic pleasure, the police found Jerry's body in New Mexico. Apparently he'd hitchhiked all the way down there, spent a few weeks living on a ranch and overdosed on a cocktail of drugs so strong he must have been halfway to heaven by the time his organs failed. Foul play was ruled out, and no one in New Mexico cared if a longhaired hippie had killed himself accidentally or on purpose. There was no funeral as far as I know. About a week after Jerry's death, I received a letter from him in the mail. Judging by the gradual degradation of his handwriting, it had been written in several sittings. Most of it was personal and there was a lot of pain behind the words, but it was the last sentence that has stuck with me because of it's plain brutality. Four words: They've fucked us.
I fucked away my breakup with Edna and the loss of my friend. Orgy after orgy.
It was while sitting in a bar on a hot Wednesday night in the middle of July that I discovered something that chilled me to the marrow of my bones. I was down to my last pill and imagining the best way to take advantage of it, waiting for the perfect piece of ass to walk in through the door. I had a mug of beer in front of me, not my first, and I was absentmindedly walking the pill up and down the tops of my fingers, when suddenly I lost control and it fell straight into my mug. I must have been too drunk to react, because instead of fishing it out, I watched instead as it descended into the murky depths while giving off a spray of infinitely fine bubbles. I didn't know how a pill should react in beer, but something about this reaction seemed off. When it had settled at the bottom of the mug, the pill started shedding something other than bubbles: namely itself. Tiny pieces flaked off and floated to the top, and the pill began to tremble. Soon, dark spots became visible beneath the off-white colour of what I instinctively began to conceptualize as a shell, until the entire casing was gone, leaving only a trembling black insectous creature! Immediately I knew it was organic. Even more: alive! I watched mesmerized as it struggled in the liquid, scurrying towards the edge of the mug but unable to climb the glass sides. Finally, I put my fingers in and lifted it out. It was small but unbelievably hard between my fingertips. I couldn't crush it. I held it briefly against the overhead light, its body wholly opaque, before it slipped out, hit the unswept floor and scurried away. I scrambled after it, much to the cruel amusement of the other patrons, stomping forward on the floor before falling to my knees, but with no luck. It was gone. Returning to my seat, I thought, Just what the fuck have I been pushing into my urethra?
I had no pills and the only evidence of anything abnormal was my own boozy memory, so I had nothing. Except a feeling in the pit of my stomach that something was horribly wrong. I tried contacting Gerbil in my usual ways, hoping to get more pills to experiment on and either put my mind at ease ("You hallucinated, idiot.") or get my hands on something I could send to a lab, but all my usual ways were indirect, like asking for permission to speak, and permission was being denied. Gerbil stopped responding. Eventually I grew desperate enough to visit the abandoned airfield, which was the only address of his I knew, but it was empty and unchanged. When I went to the land office and asked about ownership, the clerk told me the land belonged to a man named Beaconfield who was mostly likely long dead. Because I didn't know anyone other than Jerry who'd known Gerbil, I had nowhere else to turn. There's only so many times you can ask a stranger if they know a man named after a small rodent. Eventually you give up.
And so Gerbil was gone, my pills were gone, Jerry and Edna were gone, and soon the 1960s themselves were gone, metamorphosing into a sexless 1970s for me, then the 1980s, 1990s and the new millennium. All as if someone had snapped their fingers. To say my life was dull would be an understatement. I had work, and followed it around the country, but I had little else. Forged at a time when we all wanted to remake the world, I had remade nothing and found myself leading a life of comfortable insignificance. But despite my memories fading, they never completely disappeared, and I spent many evenings wondering, trying to piece together clues, and always unable to shake those four words of Jerry's: They've fucked us. Was I scarred by a friend's suicide? Sure. But it was more than that, often in the form of sweat-inducing nightmares about tiny black insects crawling around my insides.
In the early 2000s, I saw a political ad for a candidate vying for the U.S. Senate. There was nothing unusual about the spot, but a few seconds caught my attention. They showed a series of photos of the candidate as he was growing up, attending school, graduating, etc. In one of them, he was with his mother, and my heart nearly stopped when I recognized her as Edna. I don't know what emotion I felt first, but I settled on hesitant happiness as I jumped online to confirm what my eyes had shown me. Although I didn't find the ad itself, I did find an interview with the candidate, including one with a gallery of photos, and in one of them was the confirmation I was searching for. Edna's face, older but still beautiful, stared at me from behind her son's electable smile. I was breathless. My happiness became joy. It was wonderful not only that Edna had done OK for herself but that she'd done extraordinarily, because it takes a certain kind of success to raise a future statesman.
On election night, I made popcorn, drank beer and cheered on Edna's son as if he were my own. Shortly after the polls closed, CNN projected him as the winner. For one night, my own insignificance didn't matter. I shared secretly in someone else's relevance.
A few months passed in the afterglow of this beautiful discovery. Sometimes I even had fantasies about contacting the senator to offer my congratulations, which would be a reconnection with Edna, but I always knew this was impossible. I was nobody to her, a shadow from the past. She probably didn't even remember me.
The reason why I mention this is two-fold: because I want to write and relive the happy moments, despite their way of decomposing into dread; and because Edna was merely the first of many. Over the next year, I recognized the faces of three other women I'd had sex with in California in the 1960s. I may not have known or recognized their names, but I do have a memory for faces and I was certain about theirs. All three were the mothers or grandmothers of successful people: a politician, the CEO of a pharmaceutical corporation, and a lawyer. What are the chances?
Over the next months and years, I started to actively research the background of anyone who had recently attained a high level of success, or more accurately, a high level of influence: of power. Most were guarded about their pasts, many enigmatic, but some made public just enough of a thread of information for me to pull loose, and whether in photos or on video, what I kept finding were the faces of my former lovers, women I had met while cheating on Edna or, more often, women I'd fucked at Gerbil's orgies.
In time, I realized that the web extended beyond America. I found world leaders, generals, economists, industrialists and policy makers scattered about the globe, yet whose foremothers had all been in California with me! It was insane. I felt insane, wacko like the worst conspiracy nuts I'd met in the 1960s. Yet, just like them, I was convinced I was right, and what was right was too weird to be coincidence.
Today, the people whose mothers and grandmothers I fucked rule the world, and the singular way in which they are all working toward the same goals terrifies me to the very core of my being. To everyone else, they are unconnected individuals. To me, they are connected, and it gnaws at my mind, this question that I know I will never be able to answer: What are they and to whom do they owe their allegiance?
But I no longer search for them. I have accepted reality, and I don't know what difference it makes to know exactly how many of them exist. I still have no evidence. I can't go anywhere with a story relying on an old man's memory of his own LSD-fueled sexual exploits. I've tried, and gotten laughed out of the room. The best reaction is sympathy for being a senile old man whose mind is playing tricks on him about his past. And that's without mentioning my own theories involving parasites, mind control or aliens.
Yet those words: They've fucked us.
How I wish I had been able to hold on to that tiny black creature!
Or stopped myself from putting it in my body.
But I couldn't and now I'm here, posting my story somewhere at least a few people will read it. Maybe you'll believe me, maybe you won't. I don't know if I want to give a warning or a confession, but either way I've done it now. What finds its way to the internet stays on the internet.
I hope for your collective sake that when you find this years later, you'll be able to have a good laugh.
I know I'm not laughing.
I truly believe that in the 1960s I participated in something whose conclusion will be the ruin of mankind.
2023.06.04 03:14 normancrane I think I've screwed us in the 1960s
 | I've started writing this hundreds of times and never gotten to the end. The first few times I tried, I did it on paper in a notebook because the internet hadn't been invented yet. I burned the notebooks. This is the first time I've finished and not destroyed what I'd written. If nothing else, this act of creation without destruction is a small victory to me, but I know you hardly care about that. Nor should you. You should care about what you're about to read because if what I say is true, your generation may be in some serious shit. I'm in my late 70s, no wife or kids, not many friends, and although I'm not quite on my death bed, I'm certainly nearing the end of my life, so my personal stake in this is low, but I'd be lying if I said it didn't weight heavily on my soul in an existential kind of way. We all keep secrets, some darker than others, and this has been my darkest. submitted by normancrane to normancrane [link] [comments] The story starts in California way back in the 1960s. For those unfamiliar with that period in history, the one word I'd use to describe it is turbulent. Just imagine the straight-laced world of the 1950s you know from television crashing head-on into what you probably associate with hippie culture, namely radical politics, protest, heavy drug use, rebellion against authority, and conspiracy theories, but also comradery, selflessness, and the genuine belief that it is possible to change the world for the better. I was a university student at the time, so you could say I was in the thick of it, but I wasn't at one of the true hotbed schools like Berkeley. That said, there was almost no way to be young and alive in California and to keep away from the upheaval. It was literally all around you, and it sucked you in. There wasn't a Friday night when you didn't listen to a speech by Abbie Hoffman, take LSD, or hazily conspire to take down the establishment to a background of folk tunes, and then go out to bar where long past midnight some guy in a black suit tried to recruit you for a plastics corporation or the CIA. Or so he said, or so you remembered the next morning. It was actually at one of these bars that I met my first real girlfriend, whom I'll call Edna. Edna wasn't a hippie, she was in town taking typing classes and working part-time as a receptionist, but like me she had become infatuated with the scene. Edna was only the second girl I'd slept with, and after a few months of going with her I started having trouble maintaining, then even getting, an erection. Back then it wasn't like it is now, when even polite people talk about erectile dysfunction and you can get medication to help with it. Back then there was nothing except a whole lot of embarrassment. At first, Edna and I thought it might be stress or lack of sleep causing my problem, then we suspected alcohol, but despite taking a fairly systematic approach and eliminating the possible causes one by one, we couldn't figure it out. Within weeks, my sex life just stopped. You can imagine how devastating that was to a young man. Let's rewind a bit. About six months before meeting Edna, I had met a guy named Jerry in one of my political science classes and we'd quickly become friends. Jerry and I would regularly meet up, talk about everything from music and world revolution to UFOs, and generally goof off together, and he'd always have a decent supply of weed for us to smoke and Grateful Dead bootlegs to listen to, which was fantastic. Although I've never had a truly best friend, Jerry was definitely my closest friend during my early student days in California, so he was the person I eventually turned to for help with my sexual problem. I remember that it was late at night after getting stoned immaculate, as Jim Morrison would say, that I told Jerry about my erectile dysfunction. He listened as I struggled mightily through the telling of it, and without laughing or making light of the situation told me not to worry too much, that it would probably go away on its own, but if I didn't want to wait and wanted help now, I should go see a man he referred to as Gerbil. Gerbil was about ten years older than us, originally from New Mexico and had been studying chemistry at Berkeley until about a year prior, when he'd been expelled after being caught synthesizing hallucinogens in a school lab. Faced with the possibility of going back to New Mexico without a degree, Gerbil had decided to pursue the American Dream instead. He set up his own lab, kept his clientele, and expanded his operation. Drugs, incidentally, is how Jerry had first met Gerbil. And through Jerry is how I met the guy. That's one other unique thing about Gerbil: even compared to the regular paranoiacs, he was paranoid. You couldn't just see him. You had to be introduced by someone he trusted and he had to "vet" you, which included a brief interrogation and sitting silently while he "read your mind." My vetting lasted about half an hour. After it was over, Gerbil relaxed and I explained my problem to him. It was easy because he was like a magnet for deep truths. You wanted to tell him the embarrassing stuff. Long story short, he told me I was far from the first guy to be suffering from this type of condition and that he had a tried and tested solution. I'll never forget the moment when he held out the pill bottle to me. His smiling, unshaven face, the sunlight streaming in through the dirty windows, and the pills themselves, oblong and delicately off-white in their little glass home. When I asked how much I owed him, he shrugged and said that for a friend there was no cost, then laughed and added that he had more than enough money anyway. After all, he said, he was making truth serum for the CIA. "Just make sure you follow the instructions," he said. "And remember: you were never here." When I got home, I read the instructions, which had been typed out on a strip of paper and taped to the outside of the pill bottle. They were simple enough but odd: Insert one (1) pill into urethra at least one hour prior to intercourse. I'll spare you the awkward details of my first time doing the insertion. What you need to know is that the pills worked. God, how they worked! Never before, and never since, have I had an erection as hard and for as long as when I used those pills. In the past twenty years I've tried Viagra and all the others, but nothing even comes close. It was like fucking with the world's most sensitive steel rod, and you could go for hours! Edna and I sure made up for lost time, but pretty soon Edna wasn't enough. We'd go at it two or three times, she'd call it quits for the night and I'd still be raging to go. I'm not proud of it now, but I started meeting other girls just for sex. Any girls who'd have me, really. At bars, meet ups, between classes, at concerts, everywhere. There was no emotional connection but physically it was bliss. I loved it, they loved it, and I guess later they dubbed it the Summer of Love. I wish I'd counted how many pills Gerbil had given me, but I didn't. All I knew was that I was going through them like a knife through reheated butter. From what I remember, one pill was enough to last up to forty-eight hours, but I was using them almost non-stop, and the supply was depleting. I was probably addicted. It was after I'd used about half of my initial supply that Jerry asked over coffee one morning whether my "problem" had gone away. I told him it had and more than hinted at how my sex life had exploded, and he told me that was fantastic news. Then he lowered his voice and told me Gerbil wanted to meet up. I agreed, he told me the time and place, and I never saw Jerry again. But I'll get to that in a bit. Gerbil and I met a few days later in what remained of a hangar on an abandoned airfield. It was beyond city limits, and Gerbil seemed to make a big deal of that fact. He told me he'd recently purchased the land way under value and was planning on building a bunker on it. Because that sounded like just the craziness he'd be into, I took him at his word. When I told him how well the pills had been working and that I wanted more of them, he wasn't surprised. He said he was thrilled and handed me another bottle of pills identical to the first. This time, however, they had a price. But it was the kind of price that wasn't paid in dollars and that made my horny young mind spin with possibilities. Gerbil was organizing a series of orgies and he was giving me the pills in exchange for taking part in them. Back to Jerry: disappearing for a few days wasn't unusual. He went on benders from time to time during which he'd unreachable and absent from class, but those usually lasted a few days, after which he'd show up groggy and with stories to tell. After a week, I started to worry, but even then it's important to remember the times, both in terms of technology and perspective. We didn't have cell phones you could call anytime you wanted, and it wasn't unheard of for people to "drop out" of society. I had a professor who suddenly disappeared for half a semester, and when he came back he told us he'd gone on a walkabout. Still, I expected Jerry to tell me if he was planning something like that. He'd said nothing and now he was gone. I started asking around but realized I didn't actually know much about him. From what I gathered, he was still enrolled in university and still living at the same address. He just wasn't there. My relationship with Edna was falling apart at the same time. I was bored with her, and she was getting bored with life in California. She was honest about wanting to move back East, and we both knew I wouldn't be going with her. And although she never said a word about it, I'm sure she knew I wasn't being faithful. Hell, even free love has a cost. I can't say we broke each other's hearts, but I will say that as I've aged, I've imagined more and more often what my life would had have been if we'd stayed together. I went on to love again but I never found a true love. Edna, especially in those early times, may have been the closest I ever got. Ironically, we loved each other most when we couldn't be physically intimate. The first of Gerbil's orgies that I attended was held in the middle of the desert. There was music, drugs and absolutely no inhibitions. It was the most exciting experience of my life, and I loved it. Gerbil himself was never at the orgies, but almost everyone seemed to know him, at least by reputation. I don't remember how many orgies I ended up going to, but it was over a dozen, each in a different location with new women, many of them intoxicatingly exotic to me. Foreign students, bored housewives, groupies, intellectuals, stewardesses, and wanderers from all around the country and the world: India, Russia, China, Europe, Latin America, everywhere. I still have no idea how Gerbil organized these things or convinced so many women to go to them, but he did, and I must have fucked nearly all of them. The pills were my fuel. Sometime during this hazy period of hedonistic pleasure, the police found Jerry's body in New Mexico. Apparently he'd hitchhiked all the way down there, spent a few weeks living on a ranch and overdosed on a cocktail of drugs so strong he must have been halfway to heaven by the time his organs failed. Foul play was ruled out, and no one in New Mexico cared if a longhaired hippie had killed himself accidentally or on purpose. There was no funeral as far as I know. About a week after Jerry's death, I received a letter from him in the mail. Judging by the gradual degradation of his handwriting, it had been written in several sittings. Most of it was personal and there was a lot of pain behind the words, but it was the last sentence that has stuck with me because of it's plain brutality. Four words: They've fucked us. I fucked away my breakup with Edna and the loss of my friend. Orgy after orgy. It was while sitting in a bar on a hot Wednesday night in the middle of July that I discovered something that chilled me to the marrow of my bones. I was down to my last pill and imagining the best way to take advantage of it, waiting for the perfect piece of ass to walk in through the door. I had a mug of beer in front of me, not my first, and I was absentmindedly walking the pill up and down the tops of my fingers, when suddenly I lost control and it fell straight into my mug. I must have been too drunk to react, because instead of fishing it out, I watched instead as it descended into the murky depths while giving off a spray of infinitely fine bubbles. I didn't know how a pill should react in beer, but something about this reaction seemed off. When it had settled at the bottom of the mug, the pill started shedding something other than bubbles: namely itself. Tiny pieces flaked off and floated to the top, and the pill began to tremble. Soon, dark spots became visible beneath the off-white colour of what I instinctively began to conceptualize as a shell, until the entire casing was gone, leaving only a trembling black insectous creature! Immediately I knew it was organic. Even more: alive! I watched mesmerized as it struggled in the liquid, scurrying towards the edge of the mug but unable to climb the glass sides. Finally, I put my fingers in and lifted it out. It was small but unbelievably hard between my fingertips. I couldn't crush it. I held it briefly against the overhead light, its body wholly opaque, before it slipped out, hit the unswept floor and scurried away. I scrambled after it, much to the cruel amusement of the other patrons, stomping forward on the floor before falling to my knees, but with no luck. It was gone. Returning to my seat, I thought, Just what the fuck have I been pushing into my urethra? I had no pills and the only evidence of anything abnormal was my own boozy memory, so I had nothing. Except a feeling in the pit of my stomach that something was horribly wrong. I tried contacting Gerbil in my usual ways, hoping to get more pills to experiment on and either put my mind at ease ("You hallucinated, idiot.") or get my hands on something I could send to a lab, but all my usual ways were indirect, like asking for permission to speak, and permission was being denied. Gerbil stopped responding. Eventually I grew desperate enough to visit the abandoned airfield, which was the only address of his I knew, but it was empty and unchanged. When I went to the land office and asked about ownership, the clerk told me the land belonged to a man named Beaconfield who was mostly likely long dead. Because I didn't know anyone other than Jerry who'd known Gerbil, I had nowhere else to turn. There's only so many times you can ask a stranger if they know a man named after a small rodent. Eventually you give up. And so Gerbil was gone, my pills were gone, Jerry and Edna were gone, and soon the 1960s themselves were gone, metamorphosing into a sexless 1970s for me, then the 1980s, 1990s and the new millennium. All as if someone had snapped their fingers. To say my life was dull would be an understatement. I had work, and followed it around the country, but I had little else. Forged at a time when we all wanted to remake the world, I had remade nothing and found myself leading a life of comfortable insignificance. But despite my memories fading, they never completely disappeared, and I spent many evenings wondering, trying to piece together clues, and always unable to shake those four words of Jerry's: They've fucked us. Was I scarred by a friend's suicide? Sure. But it was more than that, often in the form of sweat-inducing nightmares about tiny black insects crawling around my insides. In the early 2000s, I saw a political ad for a candidate vying for the U.S. Senate. There was nothing unusual about the spot, but a few seconds caught my attention. They showed a series of photos of the candidate as he was growing up, attending school, graduating, etc. In one of them, he was with his mother, and my heart nearly stopped when I recognized her as Edna. I don't know what emotion I felt first, but I settled on hesitant happiness as I jumped online to confirm what my eyes had shown me. Although I didn't find the ad itself, I did find an interview with the candidate, including one with a gallery of photos, and in one of them was the confirmation I was searching for. Edna's face, older but still beautiful, stared at me from behind her son's electable smile. I was breathless. My happiness became joy. It was wonderful not only that Edna had done OK for herself but that she'd done extraordinarily, because it takes a certain kind of success to raise a future statesman. On election night, I made popcorn, drank beer and cheered on Edna's son as if he were my own. Shortly after the polls closed, CNN projected him as the winner. For one night, my own insignificance didn't matter. I shared secretly in someone else's relevance. A few months passed in the afterglow of this beautiful discovery. Sometimes I even had fantasies about contacting the senator to offer my congratulations, which would be a reconnection with Edna, but I always knew this was impossible. I was nobody to her, a shadow from the past. She probably didn't even remember me. The reason why I mention this is two-fold: because I want to write and relive the happy moments, despite their way of decomposing into dread; and because Edna was merely the first of many. Over the next year, I recognized the faces of three other women I'd had sex with in California in the 1960s. I may not have known or recognized their names, but I do have a memory for faces and I was certain about theirs. All three were the mothers or grandmothers of successful people: a politician, the CEO of a pharmaceutical corporation, and a lawyer. What are the chances? Over the next months and years, I started to actively research the background of anyone who had recently attained a high level of success, or more accurately, a high level of influence: of power. Most were guarded about their pasts, many enigmatic, but some made public just enough of a thread of information for me to pull loose, and whether in photos or on video, what I kept finding were the faces of my former lovers, women I had met while cheating on Edna or, more often, women I'd fucked at Gerbil's orgies. In time, I realized that the web extended beyond America. I found world leaders, generals, economists, industrialists and policy makers scattered about the globe, yet whose foremothers had all been in California with me! It was insane. I felt insane, wacko like the worst conspiracy nuts I'd met in the 1960s. Yet, just like them, I was convinced I was right, and what was right was too weird to be coincidence. Today, the people whose mothers and grandmothers I fucked rule the world, and the singular way in which they are all working toward the same goals terrifies me to the very core of my being. To everyone else, they are unconnected individuals. To me, they are connected, and it gnaws at my mind, this question that I know I will never be able to answer: What are they and to whom do they owe their allegiance? But I no longer search for them. I have accepted reality, and I don't know what difference it makes to know exactly how many of them exist. I still have no evidence. I can't go anywhere with a story relying on an old man's memory of his own LSD-fueled sexual exploits. I've tried, and gotten laughed out of the room. The best reaction is sympathy for being a senile old man whose mind is playing tricks on him about his past. And that's without mentioning my own theories involving parasites, mind control or aliens. Yet those words: They've fucked us. How I wish I had been able to hold on to that tiny black creature! Or stopped myself from putting it in my body. But I couldn't and now I'm here, posting my story somewhere at least a few people will read it. Maybe you'll believe me, maybe you won't. I don't know if I want to give a warning or a confession, but either way I've done it now. What finds its way to the internet stays on the internet. I hope for your collective sake that when you find this years later, you'll be able to have a good laugh. I know I'm not laughing. I truly believe that in the 1960s I participated in something whose conclusion will be the ruin of mankind. |
2023.06.04 00:55 arvint1 Question about a 2012 kia optima (fuel gauge acting weird)
Hey guys,
My dads 2012 Kia Optima ex has been acting weird today. He just filled it up with gas and at a standstill or at low speeds it shows the fuel on empty but once he goes above about 40mph it shows full, as it should be. Any ideas what this could be? No check engine lights or anything out of the ordinary are occurring.
Appreciate any insight!
submitted by arvint1 to kia [link] [comments]
My dads 2012 Kia Optima ex has been acting weird today. He just filled it up with gas and at a standstill or at low speeds it shows the fuel on empty but once he goes above about 40mph it shows full, as it should be. Any ideas what this could be? No check engine lights or anything out of the ordinary are occurring.
Appreciate any insight!
2023.06.04 00:37 IrreliventPerogi The Fête - A First-Time Reader's Experience, Thoughts, and Theories
"Now," he whispered, "I deliver death."
That is where I broke, the preceding battle, culminating in this cliffhanger, wore me down. I am a binger by heart and habit, and despite spending the last year or so practicing portion control (of all kinds) dutifully reading slowly, able to experience multiple works and to read them more deeply for the pacing, I decided to indulge this once. IDK If I'll do so again, but for just this once, follow this first-timer's unjaded eyes through their breathless, awe-stricken, confused sprint across the last ninety pages of this book. Without further ado...
Also, if this is the passing of winter to spring, where is Gennebakis, exactly? If the top of the continent is tundra, then Darujhistan would be much further south, (which we know) so somewhere similar to North America? Is Darujhistan in Texas?
He collides with Kruppe, who drops a series of masks. The rotund mage informs his dear friend that his other ear friend, Lady Simtal, has invited him to attend the Fête. That they've never met is ironic, but irrelevant to Magnanimous Kruppe, friend to all. This whole interaction is fantastic, with Kruppe dropping many distractions, such as his mentioning five strangers without naming the fourth, or a series of cantrips, while Murillio dodges them as best he can. He confronts Kruppe point blank about beingLady Simtal disguised the Eel. Kruppe sighs, and modifies the courtier's memory, buying himself free reign for the night.
As Baruk waits for the Eel, he discusses attending the fête with Anomander Rake, who as elected to attend as the High Alchemist's +1. Many members of the Council and the T'orrud Cabal will be in attendance, and Rake wants an opportunity to meet/observe his allies. It'll also put him in the epicenter of the most likely place of Convergence on Genabakis. Rake learns of the new year's title, and correctly guesses Icarium's involvement, as he's evidently produced similar wheels elsewhere. This has quite a few implications, given that this person is evidently traveling with at least one god. They receive news that the Eel will reveal himself to them that night, (although Baruk as much as gives away that he's guessed the truth) as well as Mammot's recovery. The High Preist of D'Riss was able to get away with minimal difficulty and casually mentions that he's aware of the drama surrounding the Coin Bearer. He is also a member of the T'orrud Babal. Rake, asks whether Mammot will be attending the Fête, and then leaves abruptly. If only Baruk had read further into the odd departure.
Adjunct Lorn finally arrives at Worry Gate, witnessing the ritual mentioned in the Book's opening epigraph and being briefly noted by a guard. That guard is Circle Breaker, watching for the Adjunct for the Eel. Once done, he manages to trade a shift to be at the Fête himself. Interestingly, he tells the guard next to him his name, which we do not ever get to know (at least not in GotM)
Lorn enters a bar, and stumbles upon the Bridgeburners. Fiddler is running one of his games, which we get to see more fully here. The game is played with a Deck and depicts the scene in the Gadrobi Hills where Paran met Rake. Tattersail did believe the Sapper to be a Tallent, after all. The game ends predicting Lorn's death, this reading is affirmed by the orb. Whiskeyjack arrives and catches up Lorn with a modified version of events, including their loss of Sorry. Lorn comes to the realization that this man had debated tactics with Dassem Ultor, so there's not much she can do to break him. She asks the name of the estate and announces she will return in two hours, without dropping anything off.
Crokus and Apsalar watch the revelry escalate down below them. They discuss their plans for the evening, the thief growing ever more conflicted about his feelings. Apsalar mentions something within her holding her sanity together. It seems Rigga remains at work. Serrat, meanwhile, creeps up the steps below, comically over-warded and utilizing an abundance of caution. She's immediately thwarted by a mysterious someone, threatening with enough force on behalf of "the Prince" to drop the hunt against the Coin Bearer, with a comical pop, she disappears.
In an age of wind and barren stone, a Jaghut and his mother wander the land, scattered as all their people, thwarting the potential of collected power. A self-imposed Babel, of sorts. The child, young by Jaghut standards, grows observing the powers of the winds shape and mould the earth to their liking. He takes after this, destroying his horrified mother in the process. He starts with lone Jaghut, but they resist or else escape him, brief satisfaction, but not enough. He takes to subjugating the beasts, the winds, the earth, the plants. The earth resists and bucks the subversion of its evolved order, yet not without the death of countless species. Then he meets the Imass, thinking creatures like the Jaghut, yet comically short-lived. These he can use, confounding them in cycles of invention, war, loss, discovery, rediscovery, rediscovery, rediscovery. They invent for themselves a god at the head of all things, and he fancies it to be himself, they discover tyranny of all forms for themselves, and he laughs. A True First Empire, a gathering of minds subjugated under an unbreakable bond. Tool's history proves backward. Then come the Jaghut, unified under a force so great that it tears through even this great Tyrant like paper, and Raest was subjugated, killed, and depowered. A barrow erected, a hemisphere frozen over for good measure. In the intervening years, the T'Lan Imass gather power of their own and wage genocide against the very Titans who were their salvation. Two enter the barrow, the threadbare mind of the once-god coalesces, he is freed, his Finnest stolen. With a concussive force, Raest, the First Emperor of Man, Jaghut Tyrant, steps into a new world.
High above, the Crone watches him emerge as four Black Soultaken Dragons and the Red Dragon Silanah, fly in to stop the monster. We get some old language of some sort, possibly Jaghut? "Dragnipurake" is of course the name of the Sword plus the suffix -Rake, "Draconiaes" seems to refer to, well, dragons, "t'na" is a conjunction of some sort? And finally, Eleint, which is whatever the Dramatis Personae names Silanah. Crone flies high, ready to watch the show unfold.
Raest emerges, and casually injures Burn on his way out, nuking a range of hills in the process. He considers waking her as well. This is a walking apocalyptic event, and our dear Anomander opted to join a party. He notices the dragons, and Holy Moly the fight that ensues is great. I'd mention highlights but that'd just be a beat-by-beat. He offers the Soletaken Tiste Andii to join him, but they refuse. Also of note, he calls Silanah a "Tiem." He rebuffs their initial assault and, telekinetically holding his body together, prepares to deliver death.
Meanwhile, in the Phoenix Inn, the Eel contemplates his next moves, whilst failing to button his coat. He decides that it is time for Circle Breaker to retire, for his own safety. He suspects that someone other than himself has been protecting the Coin Bearer, while the path to ultimate safety for the boy remains elusive. Most concerningly, the patterns in his head end tonight, the outcome of this Convergence is undecided.
Crokus and Apsalar, meanwhile, leave the Temple for the Fête. To the northeast, a "storm" of low rumbling thunder and ochre clouds builds and grows ever closer. As the thief is led down from the tower by Aps, he has another internal crisis. He really doesn't know Challice, and Apsalar's constant ease within his presence is confounding. Dude, she literally took a name axiomatically aligned with your life, take a hint.
The Captain of Simtal's guards berates the Bridgeburnurs for not all being Barghast, but agrees to pay them anyways. He stations them near the garden, as it's recently gotten a bit overgrown, and instructs them to steer the crowds away. Quick Ben and Mallet update Whiskeyjack on the encroaching Tyrant, and they agree to play things by ear if the monster gets any nearer.
Kalam and Paran leave the Phoenix Inn, not after the assassin makes a major threat to Scurve to, by any means necessary contact the city's Master of Assasins with their offer. They leave to find the Adjunct and put her to rest. Kalam takes note of the Greyfaces and begins to be bothered by their movements, for some reason.
Baruk arrives with Rake at the Fête. Despite the encroaching threat, the Tiste Andii seems unbothered, relaxed even. Turban Orr watches the two arrive with Lady Simtal. The Alchemist's mask is barely sufficient. Both a denial and an admission of secret power, depending on the viewer. Rake's mask is of a smug black and silver dragon. I've said it before and I'll say it again, Anomander Rake is That Guy. Still love him, though. The Councilman introduces himself and is introduced in turn to Lord Anomander Rake. The scene plays out humorously, with Orr unaware of how wildly out of his league he is, but does contain one odd detail. Rake, despite running Moon's Spawn, considers his title to be honorary, given by his people. Murillio and Rallick, begrudgingly aware of Kruppe's perfect mask choices, watch the High Alchemist and the Councilman converse, then nearly have an aneurysm over Kruppe (whom they were just praising) and his shenanigans. Kruppe, wearing the mask of a cherub slightly less innocent than himself (although not nearly so clever) bumbles his way toward Baruk and Rake, the latter of whom displays incredulity over this possibly being the Eel. Wise and discerning Kruppe the First notes Rake's nature as an inhuman Lord from high above, and a dragon. Of course, this is all a misunderstanding, and he apologizes, betrays himself as an eel of sorts, and leaves to inspect the kitchen.
Turban Orr, meanwhile, finds himself unable to enjoy the party. The last two weeks have exhausted him, all his plans confounded, and his spy still unfound. He, at last, discovers Circle Breaker, in a chance passing, but is intercepted by a man in a Trake mask. The man practically insists on insulting the Councilman, and Orr, his temper ratcheted up by the past several days, decides to indulge his wrath on this peon. Orr calls for a duel, politically selecting Councilman D'Arle as his second. Meanwhile, Murillio draws deep on his well of suave and seduces Simtal in record time. The duel will go uninterrupted. Down by the terrace, Baruk contemplates interceeding, but declines. Curiously, he considers Rallick his closest friend, explaining the Otataral gift, but it is a shame we never go to see the two interact, there's a story there. Rake offers to be RN's second, and my hype has hit yet another threshold. Here is where I leave my desk for a mandated break, I'm not the sort of person who eats and reads, so I'm mentally cussing the entire way there and back. Baruk meets Mammot on his way to the duel and notes the scholar's accurate Jaghut mask; although Mammot recognizes minute flaws in the design, Baruk thinks nothing of this. Stranger still, despite Oppon's luck drawing Crokus to the party, it is also keeping him away from his uncle.
The Bridgeburners watch everyone filter out into the courtyard by the garden, watching the preparations for the duel. Though they notice Rake, this doesn't amount to much. Quick Ben updates the group on their timetable with the Tyrant, and they make preparations to blast the estate then the city.
Crokus finds Challice; without a method of reaching her at the moment he is distracted by the duel. Kruppe, finds the boy and nabs him while passing a note off to Circle Breaker. The note grants Circle Breaker the right to retire, as well as land and a title in the city of Dhavran (the map shows this to be along the western bank of Lake Azur) as thanks for being the Eel's most trusted servant. The circle is mended (whatever that means, there seems to be a story there) and he can at last rest. Despite everything going down in this and subsequent chapters, this storyline had me by far the most hyped. Good job man, you've earned it.
Baruk offers to referee, and the participants take their places. Turban Orr's grandstanding, and the seconds' lack of comments each take as much time as the fight itself. As everyone notes, this is not a duel, but a public murder. That Anomander Rake decides to get publicly entangled in the proceedings not to comment or contribute at all, but just to watch this fool get merc'd, strikes me as darkly funny. Orr is dead and as Rallick quietly gloats to the corpse, the scandal is broached, and the hostess is nowhere to be found. A large woman in a green dress approaches Baruk and Rake, introduced as the Witch Derudan, another member of the Cabal. Also, she has a personal servant to carry a hookah with her at all times. They leave Rake's presence to discuss some matters.
Simtal, meanwhile, finally arrises from her 30 minutes with Murillio, becoming aware of some great disturbance downstairs. She begins dressing and is interrupted by Rallick Nom entering the room. Rallick stays only long enough to convey his purpose and her situation. It is Murillio who stays a moment to watch the woman process what has become of her. Years of machinations and backroom (or perhaps, bedroom) deals all hinging on the continued support of those around her. With no one, the vultures and enemies she's made will come, likely they've already begun. Murillio leaves a dagger and grants her the privacy to escape the coming storm.
Lady Simtal, you deserved this but that doesn't make what was done to you right. What business does justice have with cruelty? Swearing by the Lady of Beggers, Murillio comes to the crashing realization of what this night has cost his soul. Coll is reinstated, yes, but at incalculable cost to his dearest friends.
Crokus, meanwhile, finally gets the opportunity to peel away from Kruppe and approach Challice, after getting the girls attention, she runs over to him, overjoyed to finally have a moment alone with...Gorlas. Panicking, Crokus does the sane thing and kidnaps her, because that'll make this run smoother, y'kow?
At the first opportunity, Circle Breaker sneaks out of the estate and into the night a free man. Passing a food-comatose Kruppe, he leaves smiling, awed by his own escape.
Despite his best attempts, Raest can do nothing to kill the creature, introducing itself as Kruppe. He informs the Tyrant that he bows to no one, Tyrant or god; in the face of such indifference, there is nothing Raest can do. Beset by a T'lan Imass from behind; despite his best efforts, Onos T'oolan cannot be bound by the Jaghut, as our dear Tool is called by an ancient call of a Bonecaster, Pran Chole's. Befuddled by such impotence on his part, Raest is befuddled further still by the appearance of another interloper, K'Rul. He initially mistakes him for Hood (which greatly alters my estimation of the god's lifespan) although he only refers to him as the Death Wanderer, as opposed to the god of Death. K'Rul warns Raest of the arrival of Anomander Rake and the new form of death he brings with him. Raest scoffs at this initially, but K'Rul makes a fascinating revelation. The flow of power between the gods and mortals has shifted, though of it the mortals are ignorant. I suppose when you have mages mastering domains and relics capable of drawing the gods who wield them, it makes sense. Anything less than omnipotence can be overmastered. K'Rul also repeats his Maker of Paths title and reveals his aspect "was the Obelisk." So he's Burn's predecessor and not Hood's. Given Burn's Sleep began nearly 1200 years ago, that gives us a roughly 800-year window for the shift, given Darujhistan's founding, whatever Crokus may say. This whole sequence is filled with even more magic technobable, but I'll move on. Title of Sword? Moved to the Realms of Chaos, K'Rul's birthplace? I'll figure it out eventually. With a hollow laugh, Raest collapses into dust, his spirit invading a new body.
Kalam and Paran creep into Simtal's garden, finding there a young woman, along with a curious structure. The woman turns out to be Sorry, yet not Sorry. Kalam prevents the Captain from killing her outright, instead ascertaining that she has no memory or deeply incomplete memories of her time in the Bridgeburners. Kalam's reaction to being called a friend is priceless. They observe the structure, a tree stump that is somehow growing from moment to moment, frustrating the eyes as it does. At this moment, one is reminded of the acorn and the Finnest. Paran leaves to fetch Mallet, wondering if the healer could aid the girl.
Rallick, gripped with a malaise he cannot account for, stumbles to leave the party. What if Coll doesn't take his old Lordship back? Would what he's done be justified even if he does? As a reader, I have to wonder, how much of the blame lies on Oppon, and how much on RN himself? Interrupting his musings, he stumbles across a disgruntled and awake Kruppe. The mage is worried, although trusts K'Rul's words that the world as it is now would be enough to put down Raest. The assassin leaves Kruppe behind and is approached by a woman in a featureless mask, who circuitously reveals herself to be Vorcan. She mentions Councilman Orr possessed protective magics that Rallick somehow trivialized. For that reason, she requires his services now. One last note on their conversation here, that RN was fine submitting to punishment helps show how defeated he is, now that his slavish devotion to the plan justifying his own humanity is over with. Defending someone else's humanity cannot serve as a substitute for your own, Rallick, and I feel you know this now.
Crokus, meanwhile, is totally bungling his attempts to speak with Challice. Promising not to hurt her, after a slew of threats, of course, he lets her speak. She reveals that she never betrayed him and that they'd always known the Rope was behind the guard's death. Horrified, Crokus reels from the revelation, wondering what exactly is going on. Chalice restates her love for Gorlas (or more tellingly, his station and his love for her) and her desire to have nothing to do with Younghand's cloak-and-dagger shenanigans. She slips up at the end, patronizing him briefly, and Crokus (more than a little hypocritically) accuses her of romanticizing the dangers of the real world. They part on the worst possible terms.
Mallet, for his part, refuses to enter the garden. Recognizing the power within and its hunger, he demands Paran bring Sorry to him. She heads to the healer smilingly, and Kalam expresses regret that she hadn't smiled before. Mallet discovers Rigga's presence within the girl, torn whether to help what little remains of the Wax Witch to integrate Sorry's history into Apsalar's consciousness safely. Paran advises the healer to trust it. Rallick, Vorcan, and Crokus all enter the glade, the latter staying hidden. Paran meets them as they discuss the stump, with Vorcan asking Rallick to sit on it and dampen its growth. It's here that Rallick just outright admits to knowing the substance he'd used was Otataral dust, rendering my whole Eureka moment a bit... moot. Also, Rallick knew what it was the whole time?! Why play coy with something you'll eventually give to us outright, Erikson? It's either a mystery or not. There have been a handful of moments like this, where a mystery will be teased and then casually solved. It - I - uh, whatever I guess. That's only the second most infuriating reveal in this chapter anyway.
Kalam offers Vorcan 900k goldendoubloons jakatas and a High Fist position to kill off the T'orrud Cabal. Paran assures her that Malazan can scare off the Son of Darkness, having done so twice before. Vorcan personally accepts the contract and after charging Rallick with sitting on the stump until a better solution can be reached, leaves to prepare for the grim task. After everyone leaves, Rallick invites Crokus out of the glade and charges the boy with warning Mammot and Baruk of their impending danger. At that moment, something occurs outside of the garden, and the stump grows past Rallick's ability to contain it.
Sensing the disturbance at the Fête, Baruk laments leaving so early. Rake assures him the situation is under control, but stops himself from revealing one other piece of information, his eyes betraying a quiet sadness. He then offers to help clear the streets for something else coming, using Dragnipur to clear a passage to K'Rul's Belfry after warning Baruk of Malazan's impending assassination attempt.
At the Fête, Raest arives. Subsuming the mind of Mammot, whom he'd imprinted upon while waking, he launches an assault upon the partygoers. Quick Ben manages to save Derudan in the initial volley, which tears through the estate in a series of propagating bolts of power. Whiskeyjack's leg is crushed under a pillar, down for the count, and Captain Paran appears to be instantly vaporized in the initial assault. Derudan and QB launch twin assaults on Raest, quickly draining the Witch.
Here we have what is likely the most vexing scene in the entire book. Or, perhaps, the start of several compoundingly vexing scenes. Paran drops into what seems to be yet another warren, a swamp of sorts, within which a T'lan Imass (likely Tool) and a wooden approximation of a Jaghut fight. Behind the Captain, a house grows out of the swamp. The Imass warns Paran that something called an Azath is not yet ready to contain the animate Finnest. Paran resolves to hold the Finnest until the Azath is made ready. Launching a blast against Paran's very soul, the Finnest circumvents even Chance, or perhaps the blade has at last betrayed him. The Finnest demands total submission, but Paran refuses. Within him, the... Blood of a Hound? wells up, refusing to be subdued. Did the souls of the Hounds follow Paran back out of Dragnipur? That was roughly when Paran's whole "no one's gonna control me" arc began in full. Anyway,Perrin Paran throws himself against the Finnest, tearing into it with fists, claws, and teeth, holding it down until he is shaken out of his blood fury. The Azath is finished and draws the Finnest below the mud. Paran is shunted out of the Warren into the material plane.
Noting Paran's return, Quick Ben assaults the Tyrant with everything he has, opening SEVEN Warrens within himself. A feat that is later noted to be theoretically impossible. He burns through the monster, reducing it to an animate, humanoid totem of ash. Raest retaliates, forcibly closing QB's Warrens one after another. QB is about to give up, before noticing Hedge, off to the side, a pyromanic grin on his face, Ben dives, covering Derudan and his ears. The sapper fires, blasting Mammot's body to smithereens. Paran runs off to inform WJ as QB notices something coalescing in the bottom of Hedge's crater.
It is then that the Azath drags the remaining spirit of Raest kicking and screaming into the garden. So, it turns out Azaths are a known force in this world, but I'll get to that later. I will note its appearance is a surprise to everybody. Was it the acorn? But if the Jaghut could seal the Finnest in an Azath, why not just go all the way? Many questions and few answers. Derudan leaves, and Fiddler and Hedge are sent off to blast the city. Kalam then finally realizes the potential danger of not only blowing up the City of Blue Fire, but of doing so at major infrastructure hubs. Took y'all long enough.
So, what was Oppon's plan for the captain? His use of Chance infuriated Hairlock and the Hounds, drawing the two together, and evidently claiming the Hounds' souls/blood in the process. Thus, Paran was able to resist the Finnest and buy the Azath time. The only issue was that is the Brother's actions in Dragnipur seemed to be surprised by the whole episode. An act? Beyond that, Paran also played half the role in freeing Sorry, thwarting Shadow's aims at Empire. j
Crokus, traumatized by the sight of Mammot possessed, burned, blown to bits, and claimed by the roots of the Azath, runs to find Baruks home. He (and the audience) can only hope that Mammot himself was released to death before the Azath took the possessed body. Running through the streets of Darujhistan, he finally comes to realize why they've emptied so. Rake has moved Moon's Spawn directly overhead, looming as if to crush the city at any moment.
The Adjunct tails the Coin Bearer, sensing the Jaghut Tyrant's death. Assuming Rake's involvement in the defeat, she releases Tayscheren's Ace in the Hole. A Lord of the Gaylen demons, powerful enough to challenge an ascendant, the intended follow-up in the one-two punch which would finish off Rake or Raest, whoever survived their clash. The Adjunct then tails the Coin Bearer further, considering the woman Lorn dead for good. She does not even consider the Adjunct human, but a tool. Lost entirely in her own justification, the Adjunct carries on.
Baruk mourns Mammot in his study. He's deduced too late that Rake knew all along, choosing to shield Baruk from the anticipation of his possessed friend's impending death. The Witch Derudan arrives, prepared to mourn with him, as an act of love. She informs Baruk of the extraordinary circumstances surrounding Mammot's death, as well as the conjuration of an Azath in Darujhistan. The specific use of the word conjuration implies something caused its appearance, though if not the acorn, I couldn't guess what. They feel the release of the demon lord, as well as two more of the Cabal members at the hand of Vorcan.
Anomander Rake, atop the belfry of K'Rul's temple. Silahnah arrives, but Rake asks she leave, she's done enough for today. K'Rul himself arrives, and the two speak of their misplaced wandering within this world. Rake knows no other life than wandering from battle to battle, yet it does not fulfill him. The elder god, having failed to receive the advice he craves, leaves the Lord to his battle. Rake watches as the Galen arises, and begins changing form. Rake then shapeshifts, rising higher, higher, higher above the city into a Silvermaned Black Dragon, more massive even than Silanah, and dives towards his ignorant prey.
The Adjunct formerly known as Lorn moves to kill the Coin Bearer at last. She's interrupted by, of all people, a member of the Crimson Guard.* Fingers, Sixth Blade of the Crimson Guard, grabs Crokus and escorts him to Baruk's place personally. During their discussion, Crokus at long last learns of his nature as the Coin Bearer, and is advised to lose the item as soon as his luck runs out. It is the CG who have been protecting the boy. After breaking away from Blues, a gravely injured Adjunct runs into Meese and Iralta, who finish her off.
* Upon review, Caladan Brood does commit some Crimson Guard members to protect the Coin Bearrer in Ch. 10 debriefing with Crone, just a bit circumlocutiously. He even names the sixth blade, and Kallor immediately takes it to mean they're interfering with Rake.
Paran comes across the Adjunct, injured beyond saving, or at least, dying faster than a healer can be acquired. She laments her ironic, inglorious death, and barely has time to marvel over Paran's return from the dead. The two share a moment of cold sympathy before her end. Paran claims the Otataral blade for himself. The Twins appear before him, begging for protection from Shadowthrone. Paran tells them off, and quietly picks up the Adjunct, returning to the Phoenix Inn.
Baruk and Derudan have set up a magical barrier, but Baruk hesitates to enter it. His hesitation buys him nothing, however, as Vorcan attacks just as the ward is shattered outside. She is forced back by a Tiste Andii assassin, Serrat, who is stabbed by the Master of Assassins. Derudan is similarly stuck down, minutely to slow to take advantage of the distraction. Baruk, fleeing, runs to the door, in which is Crokus, who is able to (luckily) land two near impossible blows against Vorcan, by way of thrown bricks. She flees, and Baruk gets up, moving to save the injured. Serrat has passed, but Baruk reveals that he is able to save Darudan by curing the white paralt in her system.* They mourn Mammot, and then the young thief leaves to find Apsalar.
*Which is also just named outright as a spider, but this one annoys me far less than the Otataral thing.
I'll skip a scene breifly to maintain momentum, but it works in the chapter as is.
Rallick watches the stump, now a house, contemplating the capture he saw earlier. He is experiencing an unaccountable euphoria, believing the house to be "right, and just." Vorcan arrives, begging Rallick to protect her, before fainting. He picks her up, and with no better ideas, runs headlong into the cognitohzardous house, disappearing to we know not where. I suspect we haven't seen the last of either Rallick Nom or Vorcan, but that is the last we see of either this book. Korlat, a Tiste Andii assassin and sister to Serrat, enters the glade. She regards the Azath edielmarn or "Pillar of Innocence" and decides against the pursuit further. To continue the hunt would be to destroy the Azath, and its youthful innocence. In this, Korlat takes after the Queen of Darkness, who defended Light when it too was youthful and innocent. Oddly, in this, Korlat morally succeeds where Rallick failed. We learn that other objects such as this exist, such as the Deadhouse in Malaz city, where Kellanved and Dancer evidently walked through its... Gates. So we know people can leave these things, giving some hope for Rallick an Vorcan's return. Also, considering the heights to which the two Ascended after entering, first through Empire then godhood, R and V may have a long road ahead of them. Who knows? as my cheaky pun earlier hinted, I'm aware of the next book's title, so we may be seeing them soon.
Back at the Phoenix Inn, Whiskeyjack contacts Dujek to update him as to the nights proceedings. Tayscheren is in a coma after what happened to the Galayn Lord, and WJ states that they'll not be taking the city, for fear of detonating the natural gas caverns beneath. This is of course, a problem. The what's left of the 2nd is loosing Pale, Caladan Brood has marched south as Dujek guessed, and brought two other armies besides with him, beyond this, Laseen has outlawed Dujek himself, as Seven Cities is to close to rebellion for him to be useful in saving it in time. The Empire has now severed its last link to the Old Guard as a result.
The Black Moranth stand with Onearm, and will pick up the Bridgeburners once they're out of the city. WJ is made Dujek's second, and Paran is placed in charge of the BBs. Hopefuly, Brood knows enough about the Pannion Seer to accept Dujek's force's continued existence. Though they're free to walk, all of WJ's squad resolves to stay with the rebels, with two slight exeptions. Kalam and Fiddler have decided to leave with Apsalar, whom they're taking home; they commit to return once that is over with. WJ notices Coll is awake, but the Lord only offers them passage out of the city in gratefulness.
The main text of the novel ends with Kruppe, Murillio, and Crokus walking towards the Phoenix Inn. Kruppe assuages Crokus's worries by reassuring him that he knows Apsalar's location, and shrugs off concerns over Rallick, speaking more to the man's likely safety. We find out Challice was saved by Gorlas, tying off that loose end, and begins to regale them with the tale of how Darujistan was saved and Coll was reinstated, with his heroic aid, of course.
I'm straining against Reddit's 40k charachter limit, so I'll give my thoughts on the Epilogue, a deeper dive into the side materials, as well as thoughts on the novel as a whole soon.
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That is where I broke, the preceding battle, culminating in this cliffhanger, wore me down. I am a binger by heart and habit, and despite spending the last year or so practicing portion control (of all kinds) dutifully reading slowly, able to experience multiple works and to read them more deeply for the pacing, I decided to indulge this once. IDK If I'll do so again, but for just this once, follow this first-timer's unjaded eyes through their breathless, awe-stricken, confused sprint across the last ninety pages of this book. Without further ado...
Epigraph
An excerpt from Faces of Darujhistan written by Maskral Jemre. The gods of Darujhistan and their faces will play extensive roles symbolically throughout the impending climax. It briefly describes the ceremonies we'll see in passing through various characters, and there's something haunting about receiving a glimpse of how the festivities ought to go and what it is that they mean.Also, if this is the passing of winter to spring, where is Gennebakis, exactly? If the top of the continent is tundra, then Darujhistan would be much further south, (which we know) so somewhere similar to North America? Is Darujhistan in Texas?
Chapter 20
The chapter that broke me, one near unbearable buildup of pressure before the dam breaks. Here, it all begins to unfold.Epigraph
An excerpt of T'Matha's Children by Heboric. It mentions the "the matron's//blood like ice" This feels like an allusion to the goddess of Darkness, with the Tiste Andii being cold, and all. Beyond that, it "brought light into dark and dark into light" so given the alleged history between Light and Dark, that works. Was this perhaps the creation of the Warren of Shadow? In which case, the "children of chaos" would be... the Hounds? Who knows!The Chapter Itself
Murillio is off to confront Kruppe, musing on the turning of the Cycle of the Age. The Year of the Five Tusks, which we've been constantly reminded it is, is now giving way to the Year of the Moon's Tears. The names bear significance according to the Seers, with the god Tennerock's tusks, Hate, Love, Laughter, War, and Tears, signifying the nature of the coming Years. The device was a gift by some guy named Icarium, whom Mammot believes to be of Jaghut blood. Evidently, the Jaghut were skilled in mechanical prowess and possibly gifted enough to predict a thousand years ahead. Moon's Spawn has arrived, after all.He collides with Kruppe, who drops a series of masks. The rotund mage informs his dear friend that his other ear friend, Lady Simtal, has invited him to attend the Fête. That they've never met is ironic, but irrelevant to Magnanimous Kruppe, friend to all. This whole interaction is fantastic, with Kruppe dropping many distractions, such as his mentioning five strangers without naming the fourth, or a series of cantrips, while Murillio dodges them as best he can. He confronts Kruppe point blank about being
As Baruk waits for the Eel, he discusses attending the fête with Anomander Rake, who as elected to attend as the High Alchemist's +1. Many members of the Council and the T'orrud Cabal will be in attendance, and Rake wants an opportunity to meet/observe his allies. It'll also put him in the epicenter of the most likely place of Convergence on Genabakis. Rake learns of the new year's title, and correctly guesses Icarium's involvement, as he's evidently produced similar wheels elsewhere. This has quite a few implications, given that this person is evidently traveling with at least one god. They receive news that the Eel will reveal himself to them that night, (although Baruk as much as gives away that he's guessed the truth) as well as Mammot's recovery. The High Preist of D'Riss was able to get away with minimal difficulty and casually mentions that he's aware of the drama surrounding the Coin Bearer. He is also a member of the T'orrud Babal. Rake, asks whether Mammot will be attending the Fête, and then leaves abruptly. If only Baruk had read further into the odd departure.
Adjunct Lorn finally arrives at Worry Gate, witnessing the ritual mentioned in the Book's opening epigraph and being briefly noted by a guard. That guard is Circle Breaker, watching for the Adjunct for the Eel. Once done, he manages to trade a shift to be at the Fête himself. Interestingly, he tells the guard next to him his name, which we do not ever get to know (at least not in GotM)
Lorn enters a bar, and stumbles upon the Bridgeburners. Fiddler is running one of his games, which we get to see more fully here. The game is played with a Deck and depicts the scene in the Gadrobi Hills where Paran met Rake. Tattersail did believe the Sapper to be a Tallent, after all. The game ends predicting Lorn's death, this reading is affirmed by the orb. Whiskeyjack arrives and catches up Lorn with a modified version of events, including their loss of Sorry. Lorn comes to the realization that this man had debated tactics with Dassem Ultor, so there's not much she can do to break him. She asks the name of the estate and announces she will return in two hours, without dropping anything off.
Crokus and Apsalar watch the revelry escalate down below them. They discuss their plans for the evening, the thief growing ever more conflicted about his feelings. Apsalar mentions something within her holding her sanity together. It seems Rigga remains at work. Serrat, meanwhile, creeps up the steps below, comically over-warded and utilizing an abundance of caution. She's immediately thwarted by a mysterious someone, threatening with enough force on behalf of "the Prince" to drop the hunt against the Coin Bearer, with a comical pop, she disappears.
In an age of wind and barren stone, a Jaghut and his mother wander the land, scattered as all their people, thwarting the potential of collected power. A self-imposed Babel, of sorts. The child, young by Jaghut standards, grows observing the powers of the winds shape and mould the earth to their liking. He takes after this, destroying his horrified mother in the process. He starts with lone Jaghut, but they resist or else escape him, brief satisfaction, but not enough. He takes to subjugating the beasts, the winds, the earth, the plants. The earth resists and bucks the subversion of its evolved order, yet not without the death of countless species. Then he meets the Imass, thinking creatures like the Jaghut, yet comically short-lived. These he can use, confounding them in cycles of invention, war, loss, discovery, rediscovery, rediscovery, rediscovery. They invent for themselves a god at the head of all things, and he fancies it to be himself, they discover tyranny of all forms for themselves, and he laughs. A True First Empire, a gathering of minds subjugated under an unbreakable bond. Tool's history proves backward. Then come the Jaghut, unified under a force so great that it tears through even this great Tyrant like paper, and Raest was subjugated, killed, and depowered. A barrow erected, a hemisphere frozen over for good measure. In the intervening years, the T'Lan Imass gather power of their own and wage genocide against the very Titans who were their salvation. Two enter the barrow, the threadbare mind of the once-god coalesces, he is freed, his Finnest stolen. With a concussive force, Raest, the First Emperor of Man, Jaghut Tyrant, steps into a new world.
High above, the Crone watches him emerge as four Black Soultaken Dragons and the Red Dragon Silanah, fly in to stop the monster. We get some old language of some sort, possibly Jaghut? "Dragnipurake" is of course the name of the Sword plus the suffix -Rake, "Draconiaes" seems to refer to, well, dragons, "t'na" is a conjunction of some sort? And finally, Eleint, which is whatever the Dramatis Personae names Silanah. Crone flies high, ready to watch the show unfold.
Raest emerges, and casually injures Burn on his way out, nuking a range of hills in the process. He considers waking her as well. This is a walking apocalyptic event, and our dear Anomander opted to join a party. He notices the dragons, and Holy Moly the fight that ensues is great. I'd mention highlights but that'd just be a beat-by-beat. He offers the Soletaken Tiste Andii to join him, but they refuse. Also of note, he calls Silanah a "Tiem." He rebuffs their initial assault and, telekinetically holding his body together, prepares to deliver death.
Chapter 21
A Chapter in two halves, beginning with our principal cast all filling into their positions for the climax, making last-minute pivots and discoveries. It ends with the fulfillment of the revenge plot against Lady Simtal and Turban Orr, and what a fulfillment it is! If only we don't feel so hollow afterwards.Epigraph
An excerpt of Anomandris which is, interestingly enough, written by Fisher, the Rumor Born guy. Also, this is like the first bit of Anomandris we've seen since Tattersail and Calot tag-teamed a quotation in Ch. 2 (which also mentions it was written by Fisher, lol) and seems to recount the initial arrival of the dragons. First contact between the dragons and Tiste Andii? Who knows! (Actually, quite a few people probably know at this point)The Chapter Itself
Lorn buries the Finnest in the garden at Simtal's estate. She observes the bustling crowds and almost breaks down at the sight. So much life reminds her of the many cities she's infiltrated before. The recollection of humanity becomes a cacophony, no one life worth any more than the millions around them. The Adjunct breaks at this, and Lorn has to will herself to don the persona again, with Sorry out of the picture, only the Coin Bearer remains. With her last chance to bail out behind her, the Adjunct begins moving towards her failure and death, foretold with certainty by the unwitting Tallent of Fiddler.Meanwhile, in the Phoenix Inn, the Eel contemplates his next moves, whilst failing to button his coat. He decides that it is time for Circle Breaker to retire, for his own safety. He suspects that someone other than himself has been protecting the Coin Bearer, while the path to ultimate safety for the boy remains elusive. Most concerningly, the patterns in his head end tonight, the outcome of this Convergence is undecided.
Crokus and Apsalar, meanwhile, leave the Temple for the Fête. To the northeast, a "storm" of low rumbling thunder and ochre clouds builds and grows ever closer. As the thief is led down from the tower by Aps, he has another internal crisis. He really doesn't know Challice, and Apsalar's constant ease within his presence is confounding. Dude, she literally took a name axiomatically aligned with your life, take a hint.
The Captain of Simtal's guards berates the Bridgeburnurs for not all being Barghast, but agrees to pay them anyways. He stations them near the garden, as it's recently gotten a bit overgrown, and instructs them to steer the crowds away. Quick Ben and Mallet update Whiskeyjack on the encroaching Tyrant, and they agree to play things by ear if the monster gets any nearer.
Kalam and Paran leave the Phoenix Inn, not after the assassin makes a major threat to Scurve to, by any means necessary contact the city's Master of Assasins with their offer. They leave to find the Adjunct and put her to rest. Kalam takes note of the Greyfaces and begins to be bothered by their movements, for some reason.
Baruk arrives with Rake at the Fête. Despite the encroaching threat, the Tiste Andii seems unbothered, relaxed even. Turban Orr watches the two arrive with Lady Simtal. The Alchemist's mask is barely sufficient. Both a denial and an admission of secret power, depending on the viewer. Rake's mask is of a smug black and silver dragon. I've said it before and I'll say it again, Anomander Rake is That Guy. Still love him, though. The Councilman introduces himself and is introduced in turn to Lord Anomander Rake. The scene plays out humorously, with Orr unaware of how wildly out of his league he is, but does contain one odd detail. Rake, despite running Moon's Spawn, considers his title to be honorary, given by his people. Murillio and Rallick, begrudgingly aware of Kruppe's perfect mask choices, watch the High Alchemist and the Councilman converse, then nearly have an aneurysm over Kruppe (whom they were just praising) and his shenanigans. Kruppe, wearing the mask of a cherub slightly less innocent than himself (although not nearly so clever) bumbles his way toward Baruk and Rake, the latter of whom displays incredulity over this possibly being the Eel. Wise and discerning Kruppe the First notes Rake's nature as an inhuman Lord from high above, and a dragon. Of course, this is all a misunderstanding, and he apologizes, betrays himself as an eel of sorts, and leaves to inspect the kitchen.
Turban Orr, meanwhile, finds himself unable to enjoy the party. The last two weeks have exhausted him, all his plans confounded, and his spy still unfound. He, at last, discovers Circle Breaker, in a chance passing, but is intercepted by a man in a Trake mask. The man practically insists on insulting the Councilman, and Orr, his temper ratcheted up by the past several days, decides to indulge his wrath on this peon. Orr calls for a duel, politically selecting Councilman D'Arle as his second. Meanwhile, Murillio draws deep on his well of suave and seduces Simtal in record time. The duel will go uninterrupted. Down by the terrace, Baruk contemplates interceeding, but declines. Curiously, he considers Rallick his closest friend, explaining the Otataral gift, but it is a shame we never go to see the two interact, there's a story there. Rake offers to be RN's second, and my hype has hit yet another threshold. Here is where I leave my desk for a mandated break, I'm not the sort of person who eats and reads, so I'm mentally cussing the entire way there and back. Baruk meets Mammot on his way to the duel and notes the scholar's accurate Jaghut mask; although Mammot recognizes minute flaws in the design, Baruk thinks nothing of this. Stranger still, despite Oppon's luck drawing Crokus to the party, it is also keeping him away from his uncle.
The Bridgeburners watch everyone filter out into the courtyard by the garden, watching the preparations for the duel. Though they notice Rake, this doesn't amount to much. Quick Ben updates the group on their timetable with the Tyrant, and they make preparations to blast the estate then the city.
Crokus finds Challice; without a method of reaching her at the moment he is distracted by the duel. Kruppe, finds the boy and nabs him while passing a note off to Circle Breaker. The note grants Circle Breaker the right to retire, as well as land and a title in the city of Dhavran (the map shows this to be along the western bank of Lake Azur) as thanks for being the Eel's most trusted servant. The circle is mended (whatever that means, there seems to be a story there) and he can at last rest. Despite everything going down in this and subsequent chapters, this storyline had me by far the most hyped. Good job man, you've earned it.
Baruk offers to referee, and the participants take their places. Turban Orr's grandstanding, and the seconds' lack of comments each take as much time as the fight itself. As everyone notes, this is not a duel, but a public murder. That Anomander Rake decides to get publicly entangled in the proceedings not to comment or contribute at all, but just to watch this fool get merc'd, strikes me as darkly funny. Orr is dead and as Rallick quietly gloats to the corpse, the scandal is broached, and the hostess is nowhere to be found. A large woman in a green dress approaches Baruk and Rake, introduced as the Witch Derudan, another member of the Cabal. Also, she has a personal servant to carry a hookah with her at all times. They leave Rake's presence to discuss some matters.
Simtal, meanwhile, finally arrises from her 30 minutes with Murillio, becoming aware of some great disturbance downstairs. She begins dressing and is interrupted by Rallick Nom entering the room. Rallick stays only long enough to convey his purpose and her situation. It is Murillio who stays a moment to watch the woman process what has become of her. Years of machinations and backroom (or perhaps, bedroom) deals all hinging on the continued support of those around her. With no one, the vultures and enemies she's made will come, likely they've already begun. Murillio leaves a dagger and grants her the privacy to escape the coming storm.
Lady Simtal, you deserved this but that doesn't make what was done to you right. What business does justice have with cruelty? Swearing by the Lady of Beggers, Murillio comes to the crashing realization of what this night has cost his soul. Coll is reinstated, yes, but at incalculable cost to his dearest friends.
Crokus, meanwhile, finally gets the opportunity to peel away from Kruppe and approach Challice, after getting the girls attention, she runs over to him, overjoyed to finally have a moment alone with...Gorlas. Panicking, Crokus does the sane thing and kidnaps her, because that'll make this run smoother, y'kow?
At the first opportunity, Circle Breaker sneaks out of the estate and into the night a free man. Passing a food-comatose Kruppe, he leaves smiling, awed by his own escape.
Chapter 22
A major action climax for a few plotlines, with a resolution I've vacillated between sour and sweet on, currently resting at sweet as I've processed things.Epigraph
A poem titled Ravens by Collitt. Acknowledging the Great Ravens as a sign of disaster, the poet fears and reveres them. Politically, this is one of my favorites thus far. Also, I love the connection between the Great Ravens and, well, normal ravens. Ravens are carrion feeders, who gather at signs of battle. Sapient Great Ravens gather at the signs of great events and cataclysmic battles, searching for "interesting" events. That's just a really fun connection.The Chapter Itself
Two of the Soultaken driven from battle, Raest prepares for his final thrust. The Gadrobi Hills are devastated, sundered by his travels and battle. He's killed a few odd creatures along his path as well, who we recognize as the garrison that helped Coll and Paran, as well as Councilman Orr's messenger to Pale. Cresting a hill, he is briefly in awe of Darujhistan, then offers Silanah one last opportunity to retreat. She makes no reply, nor is she even prepared for battle. Raest steps forward, away from Genebakis and into another time, within the dreams of a great, pudgy mage.Despite his best attempts, Raest can do nothing to kill the creature, introducing itself as Kruppe. He informs the Tyrant that he bows to no one, Tyrant or god; in the face of such indifference, there is nothing Raest can do. Beset by a T'lan Imass from behind; despite his best efforts, Onos T'oolan cannot be bound by the Jaghut, as our dear Tool is called by an ancient call of a Bonecaster, Pran Chole's. Befuddled by such impotence on his part, Raest is befuddled further still by the appearance of another interloper, K'Rul. He initially mistakes him for Hood (which greatly alters my estimation of the god's lifespan) although he only refers to him as the Death Wanderer, as opposed to the god of Death. K'Rul warns Raest of the arrival of Anomander Rake and the new form of death he brings with him. Raest scoffs at this initially, but K'Rul makes a fascinating revelation. The flow of power between the gods and mortals has shifted, though of it the mortals are ignorant. I suppose when you have mages mastering domains and relics capable of drawing the gods who wield them, it makes sense. Anything less than omnipotence can be overmastered. K'Rul also repeats his Maker of Paths title and reveals his aspect "was the Obelisk." So he's Burn's predecessor and not Hood's. Given Burn's Sleep began nearly 1200 years ago, that gives us a roughly 800-year window for the shift, given Darujhistan's founding, whatever Crokus may say. This whole sequence is filled with even more magic technobable, but I'll move on. Title of Sword? Moved to the Realms of Chaos, K'Rul's birthplace? I'll figure it out eventually. With a hollow laugh, Raest collapses into dust, his spirit invading a new body.
Kalam and Paran creep into Simtal's garden, finding there a young woman, along with a curious structure. The woman turns out to be Sorry, yet not Sorry. Kalam prevents the Captain from killing her outright, instead ascertaining that she has no memory or deeply incomplete memories of her time in the Bridgeburners. Kalam's reaction to being called a friend is priceless. They observe the structure, a tree stump that is somehow growing from moment to moment, frustrating the eyes as it does. At this moment, one is reminded of the acorn and the Finnest. Paran leaves to fetch Mallet, wondering if the healer could aid the girl.
Rallick, gripped with a malaise he cannot account for, stumbles to leave the party. What if Coll doesn't take his old Lordship back? Would what he's done be justified even if he does? As a reader, I have to wonder, how much of the blame lies on Oppon, and how much on RN himself? Interrupting his musings, he stumbles across a disgruntled and awake Kruppe. The mage is worried, although trusts K'Rul's words that the world as it is now would be enough to put down Raest. The assassin leaves Kruppe behind and is approached by a woman in a featureless mask, who circuitously reveals herself to be Vorcan. She mentions Councilman Orr possessed protective magics that Rallick somehow trivialized. For that reason, she requires his services now. One last note on their conversation here, that RN was fine submitting to punishment helps show how defeated he is, now that his slavish devotion to the plan justifying his own humanity is over with. Defending someone else's humanity cannot serve as a substitute for your own, Rallick, and I feel you know this now.
Crokus, meanwhile, is totally bungling his attempts to speak with Challice. Promising not to hurt her, after a slew of threats, of course, he lets her speak. She reveals that she never betrayed him and that they'd always known the Rope was behind the guard's death. Horrified, Crokus reels from the revelation, wondering what exactly is going on. Chalice restates her love for Gorlas (or more tellingly, his station and his love for her) and her desire to have nothing to do with Younghand's cloak-and-dagger shenanigans. She slips up at the end, patronizing him briefly, and Crokus (more than a little hypocritically) accuses her of romanticizing the dangers of the real world. They part on the worst possible terms.
Mallet, for his part, refuses to enter the garden. Recognizing the power within and its hunger, he demands Paran bring Sorry to him. She heads to the healer smilingly, and Kalam expresses regret that she hadn't smiled before. Mallet discovers Rigga's presence within the girl, torn whether to help what little remains of the Wax Witch to integrate Sorry's history into Apsalar's consciousness safely. Paran advises the healer to trust it. Rallick, Vorcan, and Crokus all enter the glade, the latter staying hidden. Paran meets them as they discuss the stump, with Vorcan asking Rallick to sit on it and dampen its growth. It's here that Rallick just outright admits to knowing the substance he'd used was Otataral dust, rendering my whole Eureka moment a bit... moot. Also, Rallick knew what it was the whole time?! Why play coy with something you'll eventually give to us outright, Erikson? It's either a mystery or not. There have been a handful of moments like this, where a mystery will be teased and then casually solved. It - I - uh, whatever I guess. That's only the second most infuriating reveal in this chapter anyway.
Kalam offers Vorcan 900k golden
Sensing the disturbance at the Fête, Baruk laments leaving so early. Rake assures him the situation is under control, but stops himself from revealing one other piece of information, his eyes betraying a quiet sadness. He then offers to help clear the streets for something else coming, using Dragnipur to clear a passage to K'Rul's Belfry after warning Baruk of Malazan's impending assassination attempt.
At the Fête, Raest arives. Subsuming the mind of Mammot, whom he'd imprinted upon while waking, he launches an assault upon the partygoers. Quick Ben manages to save Derudan in the initial volley, which tears through the estate in a series of propagating bolts of power. Whiskeyjack's leg is crushed under a pillar, down for the count, and Captain Paran appears to be instantly vaporized in the initial assault. Derudan and QB launch twin assaults on Raest, quickly draining the Witch.
Here we have what is likely the most vexing scene in the entire book. Or, perhaps, the start of several compoundingly vexing scenes. Paran drops into what seems to be yet another warren, a swamp of sorts, within which a T'lan Imass (likely Tool) and a wooden approximation of a Jaghut fight. Behind the Captain, a house grows out of the swamp. The Imass warns Paran that something called an Azath is not yet ready to contain the animate Finnest. Paran resolves to hold the Finnest until the Azath is made ready. Launching a blast against Paran's very soul, the Finnest circumvents even Chance, or perhaps the blade has at last betrayed him. The Finnest demands total submission, but Paran refuses. Within him, the... Blood of a Hound? wells up, refusing to be subdued. Did the souls of the Hounds follow Paran back out of Dragnipur? That was roughly when Paran's whole "no one's gonna control me" arc began in full. Anyway,
Noting Paran's return, Quick Ben assaults the Tyrant with everything he has, opening SEVEN Warrens within himself. A feat that is later noted to be theoretically impossible. He burns through the monster, reducing it to an animate, humanoid totem of ash. Raest retaliates, forcibly closing QB's Warrens one after another. QB is about to give up, before noticing Hedge, off to the side, a pyromanic grin on his face, Ben dives, covering Derudan and his ears. The sapper fires, blasting Mammot's body to smithereens. Paran runs off to inform WJ as QB notices something coalescing in the bottom of Hedge's crater.
It is then that the Azath drags the remaining spirit of Raest kicking and screaming into the garden. So, it turns out Azaths are a known force in this world, but I'll get to that later. I will note its appearance is a surprise to everybody. Was it the acorn? But if the Jaghut could seal the Finnest in an Azath, why not just go all the way? Many questions and few answers. Derudan leaves, and Fiddler and Hedge are sent off to blast the city. Kalam then finally realizes the potential danger of not only blowing up the City of Blue Fire, but of doing so at major infrastructure hubs. Took y'all long enough.
Chapter 23
A resolution to all but one of our action climaxes, and a final unveiling of several long-standing plans. We're solidly in the endgame now, and somehow only speeding up.Epigraph
After a long hiatus, we receive another excerpt of Call to Shadow, this one seemingly referring to Simtal's suicide. Given that the author is apparently Paran's sister, the nature of the work is becoming clearer, this is a recounting of the events here in Darujhistan. I'm a bit unclear as to why its specifically attributed to Shadow, aside from Shadow's interference being the inciting incident to all this mess. Perhaps that's sufficient, however. What we can tell from this is that Paran eventually meets with Fellisin again, despite his status as a traitor. So while we can't tell whether or not this will all have a happy ending, we can tell the Paran siblings will make it that far at least.The Chapter Itself
Paran, running through the undergrowth, is drawn into yet another Warren, ambushed by Rood. After nearly tearing the Captain apart, the Hound relents, confused by a sense of kinship. Cotilion appears, complaining that the Captain should interfere with House Shadows, especially given his growing enmity with the Empress. Even still, Cotillion will try again, correcting for the flaws of the initial plan. He considers his treatment of Sorry merciful, insofar as the necessary evil could be. Paran offers Cotillian Chance, seeing as how his luck has finally turned, and the Rope accepts with the intent to strike back at the Twins. Paran wakes back in the garden and leaves to find the Adjunct.So, what was Oppon's plan for the captain? His use of Chance infuriated Hairlock and the Hounds, drawing the two together, and evidently claiming the Hounds' souls/blood in the process. Thus, Paran was able to resist the Finnest and buy the Azath time. The only issue was that is the Brother's actions in Dragnipur seemed to be surprised by the whole episode. An act? Beyond that, Paran also played half the role in freeing Sorry, thwarting Shadow's aims at Empire. j
Crokus, traumatized by the sight of Mammot possessed, burned, blown to bits, and claimed by the roots of the Azath, runs to find Baruks home. He (and the audience) can only hope that Mammot himself was released to death before the Azath took the possessed body. Running through the streets of Darujhistan, he finally comes to realize why they've emptied so. Rake has moved Moon's Spawn directly overhead, looming as if to crush the city at any moment.
The Adjunct tails the Coin Bearer, sensing the Jaghut Tyrant's death. Assuming Rake's involvement in the defeat, she releases Tayscheren's Ace in the Hole. A Lord of the Gaylen demons, powerful enough to challenge an ascendant, the intended follow-up in the one-two punch which would finish off Rake or Raest, whoever survived their clash. The Adjunct then tails the Coin Bearer further, considering the woman Lorn dead for good. She does not even consider the Adjunct human, but a tool. Lost entirely in her own justification, the Adjunct carries on.
Baruk mourns Mammot in his study. He's deduced too late that Rake knew all along, choosing to shield Baruk from the anticipation of his possessed friend's impending death. The Witch Derudan arrives, prepared to mourn with him, as an act of love. She informs Baruk of the extraordinary circumstances surrounding Mammot's death, as well as the conjuration of an Azath in Darujhistan. The specific use of the word conjuration implies something caused its appearance, though if not the acorn, I couldn't guess what. They feel the release of the demon lord, as well as two more of the Cabal members at the hand of Vorcan.
Anomander Rake, atop the belfry of K'Rul's temple. Silahnah arrives, but Rake asks she leave, she's done enough for today. K'Rul himself arrives, and the two speak of their misplaced wandering within this world. Rake knows no other life than wandering from battle to battle, yet it does not fulfill him. The elder god, having failed to receive the advice he craves, leaves the Lord to his battle. Rake watches as the Galen arises, and begins changing form. Rake then shapeshifts, rising higher, higher, higher above the city into a Silvermaned Black Dragon, more massive even than Silanah, and dives towards his ignorant prey.
The Adjunct formerly known as Lorn moves to kill the Coin Bearer at last. She's interrupted by, of all people, a member of the Crimson Guard.* Fingers, Sixth Blade of the Crimson Guard, grabs Crokus and escorts him to Baruk's place personally. During their discussion, Crokus at long last learns of his nature as the Coin Bearer, and is advised to lose the item as soon as his luck runs out. It is the CG who have been protecting the boy. After breaking away from Blues, a gravely injured Adjunct runs into Meese and Iralta, who finish her off.
* Upon review, Caladan Brood does commit some Crimson Guard members to protect the Coin Bearrer in Ch. 10 debriefing with Crone, just a bit circumlocutiously. He even names the sixth blade, and Kallor immediately takes it to mean they're interfering with Rake.
Paran comes across the Adjunct, injured beyond saving, or at least, dying faster than a healer can be acquired. She laments her ironic, inglorious death, and barely has time to marvel over Paran's return from the dead. The two share a moment of cold sympathy before her end. Paran claims the Otataral blade for himself. The Twins appear before him, begging for protection from Shadowthrone. Paran tells them off, and quietly picks up the Adjunct, returning to the Phoenix Inn.
Chapter 24
The breathless end of it all, flowing almost immediately into subsequent adventures. Anything I'm not fully satisfied with is at least spoken to, promising further resolution or explanation later.Epigraph
An excerpt of a poem titled Azath by Adaephon. Written as if narrated by the titular entity, the poem speaks a bit about their purpose. Both a lure and a prison to the power-crazed, an endless prison in a world where death is trivialized to the powerful. It is interesting how much of a known entity these are, despite us not hearing about them until well after its arrival, and that no one (outside of possibly Rake) considered the Convergence would produce one. Ah, well.The Chapter Itself
Crokus cannot enter Baruk's compound, being frustrated by the High Alchemist's wards. Fortunately, he has one last bit of luck. The Demon Lord crashes to the ground, slammed by Rake's assault from above. The crash shatters the gate and any potential wards. Both dragons shift back to their base forms, and the Galayn taunts Rake. Crokus feels someone walk up behind him, and the Lord of Moon's Spawn asks that Crokus flees. He notes that he is speaking with the Coin Bearer, but Brood's "request" and the impending fight save the lad. Rake and the Demon Lord fight, sword to axe, and while the contest isn't quite the spectacle of Raest soloing five dragons, its pretty great. We even get a bit of lore out of it. It seems indeed that some version of the story Tool told Lorn was true, Dark birthed Light, but then light was corrupted. Demons being corrupted denizens of Light is, well, exactly on brand, so that tracks. Crokus watches in horror as the Galayn Lord is subsumed into the black blade. AR then turns with exhaustion to the lad, and asks him to warn Baruk of the impending danger.Baruk and Derudan have set up a magical barrier, but Baruk hesitates to enter it. His hesitation buys him nothing, however, as Vorcan attacks just as the ward is shattered outside. She is forced back by a Tiste Andii assassin, Serrat, who is stabbed by the Master of Assassins. Derudan is similarly stuck down, minutely to slow to take advantage of the distraction. Baruk, fleeing, runs to the door, in which is Crokus, who is able to (luckily) land two near impossible blows against Vorcan, by way of thrown bricks. She flees, and Baruk gets up, moving to save the injured. Serrat has passed, but Baruk reveals that he is able to save Darudan by curing the white paralt in her system.* They mourn Mammot, and then the young thief leaves to find Apsalar.
*Which is also just named outright as a spider, but this one annoys me far less than the Otataral thing.
I'll skip a scene breifly to maintain momentum, but it works in the chapter as is.
Rallick watches the stump, now a house, contemplating the capture he saw earlier. He is experiencing an unaccountable euphoria, believing the house to be "right, and just." Vorcan arrives, begging Rallick to protect her, before fainting. He picks her up, and with no better ideas, runs headlong into the cognitohzardous house, disappearing to we know not where. I suspect we haven't seen the last of either Rallick Nom or Vorcan, but that is the last we see of either this book. Korlat, a Tiste Andii assassin and sister to Serrat, enters the glade. She regards the Azath edielmarn or "Pillar of Innocence" and decides against the pursuit further. To continue the hunt would be to destroy the Azath, and its youthful innocence. In this, Korlat takes after the Queen of Darkness, who defended Light when it too was youthful and innocent. Oddly, in this, Korlat morally succeeds where Rallick failed. We learn that other objects such as this exist, such as the Deadhouse in Malaz city, where Kellanved and Dancer evidently walked through its... Gates. So we know people can leave these things, giving some hope for Rallick an Vorcan's return. Also, considering the heights to which the two Ascended after entering, first through Empire then godhood, R and V may have a long road ahead of them. Who knows? as my cheaky pun earlier hinted, I'm aware of the next book's title, so we may be seeing them soon.
Back at the Phoenix Inn, Whiskeyjack contacts Dujek to update him as to the nights proceedings. Tayscheren is in a coma after what happened to the Galayn Lord, and WJ states that they'll not be taking the city, for fear of detonating the natural gas caverns beneath. This is of course, a problem. The what's left of the 2nd is loosing Pale, Caladan Brood has marched south as Dujek guessed, and brought two other armies besides with him, beyond this, Laseen has outlawed Dujek himself, as Seven Cities is to close to rebellion for him to be useful in saving it in time. The Empire has now severed its last link to the Old Guard as a result.
The Black Moranth stand with Onearm, and will pick up the Bridgeburners once they're out of the city. WJ is made Dujek's second, and Paran is placed in charge of the BBs. Hopefuly, Brood knows enough about the Pannion Seer to accept Dujek's force's continued existence. Though they're free to walk, all of WJ's squad resolves to stay with the rebels, with two slight exeptions. Kalam and Fiddler have decided to leave with Apsalar, whom they're taking home; they commit to return once that is over with. WJ notices Coll is awake, but the Lord only offers them passage out of the city in gratefulness.
The main text of the novel ends with Kruppe, Murillio, and Crokus walking towards the Phoenix Inn. Kruppe assuages Crokus's worries by reassuring him that he knows Apsalar's location, and shrugs off concerns over Rallick, speaking more to the man's likely safety. We find out Challice was saved by Gorlas, tying off that loose end, and begins to regale them with the tale of how Darujistan was saved and Coll was reinstated, with his heroic aid, of course.
Book 7: The Fête
An excellent climax all around, pulling out every stop. While the initial experience was a bit jarring, with all the revelations, I am satisfied as I've let it sit. On the whole, I probably prefer a slower reading pace, but once I committed to finishing the whole thing, I was fine riding it out.I'm straining against Reddit's 40k charachter limit, so I'll give my thoughts on the Epilogue, a deeper dive into the side materials, as well as thoughts on the novel as a whole soon.
2023.06.04 00:10 Vulcann111 [H] 300+ Games [W] Steam Marketable Items (Cases, Gems, Keys, Skins, Trading Cards etc) and Wishlist
I have multiple copies for most of my games, Trades are mostly based on prices from gg.deals. Please notify me if my keys are not for your personal use (i won't take any responsibility if i wasn't notified) and also please clearly state what you have and want in exchange when making an offer, i have no interest in buying games for Keys/Gems etc. and i also have no interest in Alpha, Beta, Curator, Dev and Non-Steam Keys
submitted by Vulcann111 to GameTrade [link] [comments]
Barter.vg Reddit Steam Profile SteamTrades
FUEL (Removed from Steam Store) Magicka: Wizards of the Square Tablet (Removed from Steam Store) Human Resource Machine (Steam Inventory Gift) Operation Flashpoint: Red River (Removed from Steam Store) Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards: Reloaded (Removed from Steam Store) All Zombies Must Die! (Removed from Steam Store) R.I.P.D.: The Game (Removed from Steam Store) ibb & obb (Steam Inventory Gift) Afterfall InSanity Extended Edition (Removed from Steam Store) eXceed - Gun Bullet Children (Removed from Steam Store) eXceed 2nd - Vampire REX (Removed from Steam Store) God Mode (Removed from Steam Store) Gundemonium Recollection (Removed from Steam Store) Hitogata Happa (Removed from Steam Store) Naval War: Arctic Circle (Removed from Steam Store) Red Faction+Red Faction II Red Faction®: Armageddon™+Red Faction Guerrilla Re-Mars-tered+Red Faction Guerrilla Steam Edition Real World Racing (Removed from Steam Store) GundeadliGne (Removed from Steam Store) Beast Boxing Turbo (Removed from Steam Store) eXceed 3rd - Jade Penetrate Black Package (Removed from Steam Store) Jagged Alliance - Back in Action King Arthur Collection (March 2012) Mini Motor Racing EVO+Mini Motor Racing X Monday Night Combat Sine Mora+Sine Mora EX Surgeon Simulator The Showdown Effect (Removed from Steam Store) Zeno Clash 2 Angel Express [Tokkyu Tenshi] Cloud Chamber (Removed from Steam Store) Darwinia DEFCON Defunct Droplitz (Removed from Steam Store) eversion ENDLESS™ Space - Definitive Edition (Steam Inventory Gift) Frozen Synapse Prime (Steam Inventory Gift) Galaxy on Fire 2™ Full HD Hack 'n' Slash (Steam Inventory Gift) Hard Reset Extended Edition Hydrophobia: Prophecy MIND: Path to Thalamus Enhanced Edition Multiwinia No Time to Explain+No Time To Explain Remastered On The Path Out There Somewhere (Steam Inventory Gift) Paranormal State: Poison Spring (Removed from Steam Store) Patrician IV Gold Post Apocalyptic Mayhem Primal Carnage Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad with Rising Storm Robin Hood: The Legend of Sherwood Run Away Sacred Gold Space Rangers (Removed from Steam Store) Spirited Heart Deluxe Splendor Suguri Collection The First Templar - Steam Special Edition The Ironclads Collection The Old City: Leviathan The Ship - 2 Pack Gift (Steam Inventory Gift) Trainz Settle and Carlisle UFO: Afterlight+UFO: Afterlight - Old Version Uplink War of the Roses (Removed from Steam Store) World War 1 Centennial Edition (Removed from Steam Store) Jets'n'Guns Gold Anna - Extended Edition BanHammer (Removed from Steam Store) Beat Hazard Complete Betrayer (Removed from Steam Store) Bionic Heart Crazy Machines 2 Crazy Machines Elements Crazy Machines: Golden Gears Defenders of Ardania (Removed from Steam Store) Depths of Fear :: Knossos (Removed from Steam Store) Driftmoon Edna & Harvey: The Breakout Fairy Bloom Freesia FlatOut Flower Shop: Summer In Fairbrook Flower Shop: Winter In Fairbrook Gettysburg: Armored Warfare (Removed from Steam Store) Grand Ages: Rome GOLD Heileen 1: Sail Away Heileen 2: The Hands Of Fate Heileen 3: New Horizons Interstellar Marines Ion Assault KAMI King's Bounty: Armored Princess Knights of Honor Knock-knock Koi-Koi Japan [Hanafuda playing cards] Lilly Looking Through Little Racers STREET Megabyte Punch Painkiller Overdose Painkiller: Recurring Evil Painkiller Redemption Patrician IV Praetorians Rebel Galaxy Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45 SATAZIUS Skara - The Blade Remains Sky Mercenaries The Void Toby: The Secret Mine Tropico Reloaded Tropico 4 Unexplored Zombie Driver HD Complete Edition About Love, Hate and the other ones A Game of Dwarves Air Conflicts: Secret Wars A.R.E.S.: Extinction Agenda A Valley Without Wind+A Valley Without Wind 2 BANZAI PECAN: The Last Hope For the Young Century Beat Hazard Blood Knights CAPSULE Chroma Squad Cities in Motion Dangerous Waters Darkest Hour: A Hearts of Iron Game Dark Fall: Lost Souls Death to Spies+Death to Spies: Moment of Truth Dementium II HD Deponia Disciples II: Gallean's Return Disciples II: Rise of the Elves Dollar Dash (Removed from Steam Store) Dungeons Dungeons - The Dark Lord Eastside Hockey Manager Finding Teddy Frederic: Evil Strikes Back Ghost Master® Grand Ages: Rome Hearts of Iron 2 Complete Home Imperial Glory Imperium Romanum Gold Edition Kalaban Knights of Pen and Paper +1 Edition Leviathan: Warships (Removed from Steam Store) Men of War: Assault Squad - Game of the Year Edition Meridian: New World Motorama NecroVision NecroVisioN: Lost Company Not The Robots Nuclear Dawn Oniken: Unstoppable Edition Onikira - Demon Killer Patrician III PixelJunk™ Monsters Ultimate Rooks Keep Solar Flux Solar Shifter EX Summoner Sweet Lily Dreams Switch Galaxy Ultra Sword of the Stars: Complete Collection The Journey Down: Chapter Two The Last Tinker™: City of Colors Tropico 3 Truck Racer Trulon: The Shadow Engine Tulpa Vessel Violett Remastered Viscera Cleanup Detail: Santa's Rampage Zombie Driver HD Alien Hallway Alien Shooter 2: Reloaded A New Beginning - Final Cut Angvik AquaNox AquaNox 2: Revelation Aura: Fate of the Ages Axis Game Factory's AGFPRO + Voxel Sculpt + PREMIUM Bundle Bad Rats: the Rats' Revenge Ballpoint Universe - Infinite Bang Bang Racing Battle Group 2 Bridge Constructor Bridge Constructor Medieval Cargo! The Quest for Gravity Cat on a Diet Ceville Cold War Commander: Conquest of the Americas Commandos 2: Men of Courage Commandos 3: Destination Berlin Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines Crash Time 3 Curse: The Eye of Isis Dark Fear Dead Hungry Diner Deadly 30 Deep Dungeons of Doom Drawful 2 Driftland: The Magic Revival Dynamite Jack East India Company Eidolon El Matador Elven Legacy Empress Of The Deep Eurofighter Typhoon Explodemon Face Noir Faces of War Fantasy Wars Final Slam 2 Fireburst Galactic Civilizations® I: Ultimate Edition GeoVox Gravi Greed: Black Border Greed Corp Grind Zones Grotesque Tactics: Evil Heroes Grotesque Tactics 2 – Dungeons and Donuts Gunman Clive Guns of Icarus Online Hacker Evolution Duality Hacker Evolution Source Code Haegemonia: Legions of Iron Helicopter Simulator 2014: Search and Rescue Hexcells Plus Holy Avatar vs. Maidens of the Dead Idol Hands In Between inMomentum Keebles Konung 2 Konung 3: Ties of the Dynasty Labyrinthine Dreams Last Knight: Rogue Rider Edition Lead and Gold: Gangs of the Wild West Machines At War 3 Majesty 2 Making History: The Calm & the Storm Mata Hari Men of War™ Men of War: Assault Squad Men of War: Red Tide Miner Wars 2081 Miner Wars Arena Mirror Mysteries Mountain M.U.D. TV Musaic Box Necronomicon: The Dawning of Darkness Overcast - Walden and the Werewolf Paranautical Activity: Deluxe Atonement Edition Perimeter Pixel Heroes: Byte & Magic Plush POPixel Probably Archery Purgatory: War of the Damned Puzzle Kingdoms Quell Quell Memento Quell Reflect Real Horror Stories Ultimate Edition Really Big Sky Reign: Conflict of Nations Rig n Roll Rush Bros. Sacraboar Satellite Repairman Saturday Morning RPG Save the Dodos Shadowgrounds Survivor Shadows: Price For Our Sins Sinless + OST Skilltree Saga SoulCraft Space Empires IV Deluxe Space Empires V Star Ruler Starsphere Star Wolves Star Wolves 3: Civil War Steel Storm: Burning Retribution Syberia II Teddy Floppy Ear - Mountain Adventure (Removed from Steam Store) Teddy Floppy Ear - The Race (Removed from Steam Store) Terrian Saga: KR-17 Theatre of War Theatre of War 2: Africa 1943 Theatre of War 2: Kursk 1943 Theatre of War 3: Korea The God's Chain The Joylancer: Legendary Motor Knight The Kings' Crusade Tobe's Vertical Adventure Trapped Dead Turba Twin Sector Two Brothers (Removed from Steam Store) Two Worlds II HD Type:Rider Vault Cracker Vegas: Make It Big™ Velvet Assassin Warriors' Wrath Who's That Flying?! Windforge XIII Century – Gold Edition Yumsters 2: Around the World Zombie Pirates ZombieRush Zombie Shooter2023.06.03 23:48 Vulcann111 [H] 300+ Games [W] Steam Marketable Items (Cases, Gems, Keys, Skins, Trading Cards etc) and Wishlist
I have multiple copies for most of my games, Trades are mostly based on prices from gg.deals. Please notify me if my keys are not for your personal use (i won't take any responsibility if i wasn't notified) and also please clearly state what you have and want in exchange when making an offer, i have no interest in buying games for Keys/Gems etc. and i also have no interest in Alpha, Beta, Curator, Dev and Non-Steam Keys
submitted by Vulcann111 to indiegameswap [link] [comments]
Barter.vg Reddit Steam Profile SteamTrades
FUEL (Removed from Steam Store) Magicka: Wizards of the Square Tablet (Removed from Steam Store) Human Resource Machine (Steam Inventory Gift) Operation Flashpoint: Red River (Removed from Steam Store) Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards: Reloaded (Removed from Steam Store) All Zombies Must Die! (Removed from Steam Store) R.I.P.D.: The Game (Removed from Steam Store) ibb & obb (Steam Inventory Gift) Afterfall InSanity Extended Edition (Removed from Steam Store) eXceed - Gun Bullet Children (Removed from Steam Store) eXceed 2nd - Vampire REX (Removed from Steam Store) God Mode (Removed from Steam Store) Gundemonium Recollection (Removed from Steam Store) Hitogata Happa (Removed from Steam Store) Naval War: Arctic Circle (Removed from Steam Store) Red Faction+Red Faction II Red Faction®: Armageddon™+Red Faction Guerrilla Re-Mars-tered+Red Faction Guerrilla Steam Edition Real World Racing (Removed from Steam Store) GundeadliGne (Removed from Steam Store) Beast Boxing Turbo (Removed from Steam Store) eXceed 3rd - Jade Penetrate Black Package (Removed from Steam Store) Jagged Alliance - Back in Action King Arthur Collection (March 2012) Mini Motor Racing EVO+Mini Motor Racing X Monday Night Combat Sine Mora+Sine Mora EX Surgeon Simulator The Showdown Effect (Removed from Steam Store) Zeno Clash 2 Angel Express [Tokkyu Tenshi] Cloud Chamber (Removed from Steam Store) Darwinia DEFCON Defunct Droplitz (Removed from Steam Store) eversion ENDLESS™ Space - Definitive Edition (Steam Inventory Gift) Frozen Synapse Prime (Steam Inventory Gift) Galaxy on Fire 2™ Full HD Hack 'n' Slash (Steam Inventory Gift) Hard Reset Extended Edition Hydrophobia: Prophecy MIND: Path to Thalamus Enhanced Edition Multiwinia No Time to Explain+No Time To Explain Remastered On The Path Out There Somewhere (Steam Inventory Gift) Paranormal State: Poison Spring (Removed from Steam Store) Patrician IV Gold Post Apocalyptic Mayhem Primal Carnage Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad with Rising Storm Robin Hood: The Legend of Sherwood Run Away Sacred Gold Space Rangers (Removed from Steam Store) Spirited Heart Deluxe Splendor Suguri Collection The First Templar - Steam Special Edition The Ironclads Collection The Old City: Leviathan The Ship - 2 Pack Gift (Steam Inventory Gift) Trainz Settle and Carlisle UFO: Afterlight+UFO: Afterlight - Old Version Uplink War of the Roses (Removed from Steam Store) World War 1 Centennial Edition (Removed from Steam Store) Jets'n'Guns Gold Anna - Extended Edition BanHammer (Removed from Steam Store) Beat Hazard Complete Betrayer (Removed from Steam Store) Bionic Heart Crazy Machines 2 Crazy Machines Elements Crazy Machines: Golden Gears Defenders of Ardania (Removed from Steam Store) Depths of Fear :: Knossos (Removed from Steam Store) Driftmoon Edna & Harvey: The Breakout Fairy Bloom Freesia FlatOut Flower Shop: Summer In Fairbrook Flower Shop: Winter In Fairbrook Gettysburg: Armored Warfare (Removed from Steam Store) Grand Ages: Rome GOLD Heileen 1: Sail Away Heileen 2: The Hands Of Fate Heileen 3: New Horizons Interstellar Marines Ion Assault KAMI King's Bounty: Armored Princess Knights of Honor Knock-knock Koi-Koi Japan [Hanafuda playing cards] Lilly Looking Through Little Racers STREET Megabyte Punch Painkiller Overdose Painkiller: Recurring Evil Painkiller Redemption Patrician IV Praetorians Rebel Galaxy Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45 SATAZIUS Skara - The Blade Remains Sky Mercenaries The Void Toby: The Secret Mine Tropico Reloaded Tropico 4 Unexplored Zombie Driver HD Complete Edition About Love, Hate and the other ones A Game of Dwarves Air Conflicts: Secret Wars A.R.E.S.: Extinction Agenda A Valley Without Wind+A Valley Without Wind 2 BANZAI PECAN: The Last Hope For the Young Century Beat Hazard Blood Knights CAPSULE Chroma Squad Cities in Motion Dangerous Waters Darkest Hour: A Hearts of Iron Game Dark Fall: Lost Souls Death to Spies+Death to Spies: Moment of Truth Dementium II HD Deponia Disciples II: Gallean's Return Disciples II: Rise of the Elves Dollar Dash (Removed from Steam Store) Dungeons Dungeons - The Dark Lord Eastside Hockey Manager Finding Teddy Frederic: Evil Strikes Back Ghost Master® Grand Ages: Rome Hearts of Iron 2 Complete Home Imperial Glory Imperium Romanum Gold Edition Kalaban Knights of Pen and Paper +1 Edition Leviathan: Warships (Removed from Steam Store) Men of War: Assault Squad - Game of the Year Edition Meridian: New World Motorama NecroVision NecroVisioN: Lost Company Not The Robots Nuclear Dawn Oniken: Unstoppable Edition Onikira - Demon Killer Patrician III PixelJunk™ Monsters Ultimate Rooks Keep Solar Flux Solar Shifter EX Summoner Sweet Lily Dreams Switch Galaxy Ultra Sword of the Stars: Complete Collection The Journey Down: Chapter Two The Last Tinker™: City of Colors Tropico 3 Truck Racer Trulon: The Shadow Engine Tulpa Vessel Violett Remastered Viscera Cleanup Detail: Santa's Rampage Zombie Driver HD Alien Hallway Alien Shooter 2: Reloaded A New Beginning - Final Cut Angvik AquaNox AquaNox 2: Revelation Aura: Fate of the Ages Axis Game Factory's AGFPRO + Voxel Sculpt + PREMIUM Bundle Bad Rats: the Rats' Revenge Ballpoint Universe - Infinite Bang Bang Racing Battle Group 2 Bridge Constructor Bridge Constructor Medieval Cargo! The Quest for Gravity Cat on a Diet Ceville Cold War Commander: Conquest of the Americas Commandos 2: Men of Courage Commandos 3: Destination Berlin Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines Crash Time 3 Curse: The Eye of Isis Dark Fear Dead Hungry Diner Deadly 30 Deep Dungeons of Doom Drawful 2 Driftland: The Magic Revival Dynamite Jack East India Company Eidolon El Matador Elven Legacy Empress Of The Deep Eurofighter Typhoon Explodemon Face Noir Faces of War Fantasy Wars Final Slam 2 Fireburst Galactic Civilizations® I: Ultimate Edition GeoVox Gravi Greed: Black Border Greed Corp Grind Zones Grotesque Tactics: Evil Heroes Grotesque Tactics 2 – Dungeons and Donuts Gunman Clive Guns of Icarus Online Hacker Evolution Duality Hacker Evolution Source Code Haegemonia: Legions of Iron Helicopter Simulator 2014: Search and Rescue Hexcells Plus Holy Avatar vs. Maidens of the Dead Idol Hands In Between inMomentum Keebles Konung 2 Konung 3: Ties of the Dynasty Labyrinthine Dreams Last Knight: Rogue Rider Edition Lead and Gold: Gangs of the Wild West Machines At War 3 Majesty 2 Making History: The Calm & the Storm Mata Hari Men of War™ Men of War: Assault Squad Men of War: Red Tide Miner Wars 2081 Miner Wars Arena Mirror Mysteries Mountain M.U.D. TV Musaic Box Necronomicon: The Dawning of Darkness Overcast - Walden and the Werewolf Paranautical Activity: Deluxe Atonement Edition Perimeter Pixel Heroes: Byte & Magic Plush POPixel Probably Archery Purgatory: War of the Damned Puzzle Kingdoms Quell Quell Memento Quell Reflect Real Horror Stories Ultimate Edition Really Big Sky Reign: Conflict of Nations Rig n Roll Rush Bros. Sacraboar Satellite Repairman Saturday Morning RPG Save the Dodos Shadowgrounds Survivor Shadows: Price For Our Sins Sinless + OST Skilltree Saga SoulCraft Space Empires IV Deluxe Space Empires V Star Ruler Starsphere Star Wolves Star Wolves 3: Civil War Steel Storm: Burning Retribution Syberia II Teddy Floppy Ear - Mountain Adventure (Removed from Steam Store) Teddy Floppy Ear - The Race (Removed from Steam Store) Terrian Saga: KR-17 Theatre of War Theatre of War 2: Africa 1943 Theatre of War 2: Kursk 1943 Theatre of War 3: Korea The God's Chain The Joylancer: Legendary Motor Knight The Kings' Crusade Tobe's Vertical Adventure Trapped Dead Turba Twin Sector Two Brothers (Removed from Steam Store) Two Worlds II HD Type:Rider Vault Cracker Vegas: Make It Big™ Velvet Assassin Warriors' Wrath Who's That Flying?! Windforge XIII Century – Gold Edition Yumsters 2: Around the World Zombie Pirates ZombieRush Zombie Shooter2023.06.03 17:57 tryna_write DO NOT TRESPASS ALONE
I parked in the tower's lot, letting my headlights bore into the amalgam of twisted metal and glass for a few moments before shutting them off.
Josh muttered, his voice low. "We're really doing this, huh?"
He ran a hand through his mop of curly hair— a dumb tic he developed last summer when his girlfriend, Annabeth, told him it was sexy. She was beside him now, cuddled up in the backseat across his lap.
I glanced at my own girlfriend, Ellie, in the passenger seat. She was trying her damndest to appear brave, but I knew better. There was no way she was comfortable with trespassing tonight.
I sighed, realizing that Josh would also chicken out.
"We're doing this? You sure you want to come?" I prodded.
Josh shifted in his seat, hand running through his hair yet again. "Maybe it's better if I stay in the truck.”
Annabeth shrugged next to him, unsurprised.
"Me, too,” Ellie chimed in, nodding at Josh.
Annabeth met my eyes, a glimmer of understanding passing between us. Our partners were both boring, god-awful goody two shoes.
"Pussies," I jabbed, swinging open my door without giving them a moment to respond.
Annabeth hopped out behind me, waving at the two losers in the truck before spinning towards me with a grin on her face.
"They're weird," she said, rolling her eyes.
For a moment, I was drinking in the way her golden hair shimmered in the moonlight. A light breeze tickled at our faces, sending sparkles of her moon-lit hair between us.
"Yup," I mustered.
I turned, strolling towards the chain link fence that formed a circular perimeter around the base of Sabe's Tower.
Sabe’s Tower. Thirteen stories of abandoned potential, whispering of times past when our town's inhabitants thought we'd hit a population boom, becoming the Houston of West Virginia. In the 70s, our success was tied to coal. Jobs flooded in, and with them, a myriad of people trying to make their way in life. Then the mines abruptly ran dry, decimating our town's economy. Since that time, our population has done nothing but dwindle.
Sabe’s Tower. Thirteen stories of decaying grandeur, silently rotting from the inside out. Some say that's what happened to Sabe himself— a rot took hold in his core, spreading and spreading until nothing but rot was left. In the end, he took his own life, which some say was for the best. He was a greedy fool, the wealthiest man for miles, owning half the surrounding countryside before the mining industry took off. Made a fortune selling his family's land to coal companies, putting every ounce of profit into making his towering hotel more luxurious than a Ritz Carlton.
Sabe’s Tower. Thirteen stories of failed dreams, now screaming vulgar obscenities at our eyes. It is a truly ugly behemoth, domineering our town's skyline with unmerited arrogance. Sabe thought painting the tower purple would give it an air of majesty, like royalties of the past, swaddled in silky lavender robes. His aspiration, after all, was nothing less than to emulate the sacred Tabernacle of Moses, to make his hotel a dwelling place for gods among men. In its current state of disrepair, however, the tower was no more than an eyesore— a visual cacophony of broken glass, peeling sickly-purple paint, and rusted steel inlays.
Adding to the hotel's disgrace, it was cylindrical in form, perched atop the highest peak for miles, jutting into the sky like a middle finger to the gods. Its phallic outline stood in stark contrast to the run-down strip malls lying in its wake.
The fence surrounding the tower was a bit too tall and a bit too wobbly to safely scale, so we circled, looking for an entry point. Every few yards, a DO NOT TRESPASS sign hung, tied to the fence with zip-ties in each corner. Someone had taken the liberty to spray paint a word underneath each sign, now making them all read:
DO NOT TRESPASS ALONE.
"Good thing you're coming with me," I joked, pointing at one of the signs.
Annabeth paused to read it for a moment. "Yeah... kinda weird that someone did that. I wonder why?"
I shrugged, continuing around the perimeter.
Eventually, we found a gate in the fence, held closed with chains at waist level. The gate's post careened steeply outward, creating a manageable gap near the top. The gate post was only held in place by the chains, not even slightly anchored to the ground. Without too much of a struggle, we hoisted ourselves up and through the gap.
Once inside the fence, I found myself spellbound by the abandoned hotel. The stars in the night sky reflected across the windows, bending and warping around the curved perimeter. Each glimmer of starlight turned into dizzying fractals, melding together and slipping between the shards of broken glass with each shift of my gaze.
The result was honestly breathtaking.
At night, the eyesoriffic tower was beautiful. Its silhouette dared to embrace the star-studded cosmos, standing with a quiet dignity that defied its daytime mockery.
I felt Annabeth shuffle beside me.
Suddenly, her phone flashlight was on, illuminating a path through overgrown concrete to the tower. At the end of the path was the structure’s entrance— a gaping hole with no attempt to conceal the darkness within.
"WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?!" I yelled, spinning to face her.
"W... What do you mean?" she stuttered.
"Turn that off, you idiot," I explained, lowering my voice. "Someone might see the light and call the cops."
The light flicked off, Annabeth mumbling apologies.
I blinked away the afterimage of weeds eating through the concrete lot, silently cursing myself for being so ridiculously hostile toward her.
"Sorry," I mumbled.
"You're good, Donovan" she whispered, brushing her hand across my arm.
As we continued to the open doorway, the outside of the tower came into focus. It was far further dilapidated than I had realized— each accent of purple paint, faded and peeling, was bulging out from between the glass and steel like it was trying to escape. I rubbed a fingernail on the paint, revealing a soft, rotting wood beneath.
I entered the tower first, pausing to let my eyes adjust. The darkness of the doorway opened up into an atrium that must have once made for a magnificent entrance. It was shaped like a slice of pie, us standing near the crust, peering inward toward the center. Above was pitch black, not yielding any answers to just how high up this mighty room's ceiling stretched.
The musty scent that filled my nose was surprisingly welcoming— somewhere between the smell of fishing trips and century old bookstores. I took a deep breath, relishing in the soft stench.
I could vaguely make out wires dangling down from the ceiling of the atrium. They were impossibly long, stretching upward into the infinite gloom.
"They look like vines," Annabeth whispered, her voice a soft purr.
The air was thick with falling dust, filtering down from the abyss above, twirling between the wires in satisfyingly slow-motion. The falling dust made it even harder to see in the dark, leaving the walls on either side of the room foggy blobs. I waved my hand, sending fleeting dust spirals through the air.
I remembered seeing photos of the atrium online, taken on some of the earliest digital cameras ever made. Those pictures showed marble countertops, intricate wooden carvings, and lushly carpeted floors.
The room, as it stands today, is a barren husk of Sabe's vision. The carpet, only present in scattered clumps, was impossibly dark, soiled to the point of true black. It clung to the concrete foundation, viciously holding on for dear life in a losing battle.
I bent down to examine a clump of carpet in front of me, amazed by the absence of light reflecting back. It was like staring into a pit of nothing, a vague absence, an outline of something that should be there.
I poked the toe of my boot at it.
FPOOSH.
It exploded, erupting into my face.
I gagged instinctively, tasting the vile substance mix into my lungs. Annabeth slapped my back as I continued gagging and coughing, begging the mucus to tear itself free from my lungs and just fucking get out of my body because it feels like I'm dying oh GOD.
And eventually, it did.
The violent hacking subsided into slight wretching, then was gone.
"Are you okay?" Annabeth tested.
Do you think I'm fucking okay?
"What the fuck was that?" I spewed.
She bent over the clump of carpet. Underneath the blackened top layer that just violently erupted was a pale network of matted spiderwebs.
"Hmm..." she began, "It kind of looks like mycelium."
She met my raised eyebrow with an eye roll.
"You know, like the roots of a fungus or some shit, I don't know. I just saw the shrooms growing in Bryce's closet that one time he showed me his stash. This white stuff looks just like it. So I guess that makes this black stuff like the part of the shroom we eat, or whatever."
"Oh dip," I responded, nodding. "That makes sense. One time I saw a nature show about some plants that shoot their seeds everywhere when something touches them. It's probably just spreading its spores when we touch it."
"Yeah," she breathed, "pretty gnarly."
We shuffled deeper into the gloom, weaving between dangling cables and clumps of fungus. I felt a drop of moisture flick off a cable, sliding onto my arm.
I groaned. "Fuck. That cable was wet."
"Disgusting," she whispered back.
We made our way to the apex of the room, the center of the tower, revealing a rusted set of elevator doors leaning together like drunks at a quinceanera. The doorway to the stairs, however, beckoned to us with the same unobstructed, pitch-black allure that the tower's entrance emanated just minutes before.
In the dark, it's truly amazing how utterly void all open doorways look.
Upon stepping inside the stairwell, the world vanished. The only proof of having working eyes was a faint, vertical glow of light filtering through the door, abruptly fading into all-consuming black.
Every sound in the entire building bored through my soul, bouncing from wall to wall, ceiling to floor, echoing on and on for all of eternity. The stairwell, directly in the center of the decrepit hotel, was the focal point of every creaking floorboard, every popping nail, every howling gust of wind. It was as if I was holding up a monstrous conch shell to my ear— a deafening murmur of echoes in disarray, smelting together to form satanic harmonies.
"Whoa," Annabeth mumbled.
Her word cut through the other echoes, impossibly loud against their monotonous hum.
Instantly, the echo of her voice filled the stairwell, rising like the build up of a dubstep song until peaking, impossibly overwhelming for a few brief seconds. The echoes of her voice then faded as quickly as they arrived.
She put a hand to her mouth, the whites of her eyes barely visible in the glow coming from the doorway.
I reached out, placing a hand where her shoulder should be. There was not enough space for us to stand abreast in the stairwell, leaving us in a comically squished proximity. She was breathing rapidly, barely managing to stay silent. I squeezed, and her breathing quickly slowed. I felt her hand creep onto mine, and we stood for a minute, simply listening to the cries of the dying building echo around us.
As my eyes adjusted, I could make out a staircase spiraling up the curved wall. Clearly this was a service stairwell, as it is much too cramped for the likes of Sabe's guests. Only a few steps were visible through the darkness at a time, making the staircase feel even tinier than it already was. Luckily, no fungus grew on the stairs themselves, leaving the metal alone to rust.
Annabeth shuffled onto the first step, producing a small object from her pocket. She handed it to me, then pointed up the stairwell, careful to not send echoes through the cylindrical chamber again.
I brought it close to my eyes for inspection, straining against the lack of light.
A joint...
She wants to go to the roof and smoke.
A smile cracked my lips. Classic Annabeth.
Every couple stairsteps, there would be a doorway. Most of them let in a dim glow, offering a glimpse into what must have once been a custodial closet on each floor.
On floor 9, I tugged at Annabeth's hand. We made eye contact in the faint light coming from the doorway. I motioned through it, pointing to the nearly fungus free floor. I wanted to explore at least a little bit, to see if the closet circled around the stairwell or not.
I poked my head through the doorway, freeing myself from the overwhelming cacophony of echoes in the stairwell.
I verified that the closet did, in fact, curve around the circular staircase like a donut. A few steps in one direction led to a terrifying drop— the elevator shaft. Next to it, a sidewalk sized ledge led to an open door, giving a view of the floor's main hallway. The path looked safe— no fungus, cracks, or otherwise obvious defects— so I proceeded, treading as light as a fox, fumbling for Annabeth's hand behind me.
The main hallway ran between the custodial closet and the guest rooms, creating another donut ring around the central stairwell. Throughout the hallway, patches of fungus grew alarmingly close together, threatening to overtake the concrete.
"That stairwell was insane," Annabeth whispered.
I nodded. "Fuck yeah, I wonder what it was like when the hotel was actually open. Must have been miserable for the staff."
We weaved through the fungus filled hallway, coming to room 901. I glanced at Annabeth, raising my eyebrows. The door was slightly ajar, hanging from its one remaining door hinge. I pushed gently, eliciting a monstrous creak.
The room was empty, extending away to the outside in a familiar pie shape. The mold seemed to grow thinner in the room, leaving most of the exposed concrete safe to cross. At the far side, a floor to ceiling panel of windows looked out over our town.
I gasped, taking in the view. Never before had I seen our town from this high up. My eyes drew to the smokestacks by the river, their blinking lights ominously flickering over downtown. Individual streets ran in parallel lines away from the tower, lit with yellowing streetlights. Between the roads, tiny lights cast from window panes twinkled, blending with one another into a starscape of their own.
"Dude," I said. "Look at this."
No response.
I spun, looking for Annabeth, frantically scanning the room. My eyes had adjusted to the outside light, leaving me sightless.
"Annabeth," I hissed.
A cold tingle went up my spine, pulling at hairs on the back of my neck.
"Annabeth?"
Silence.
Silence.
Silence.
I crept back across the floor, now aware of the entire room at once. There was nowhere for her to be hiding. No desks, cans of paint, ladders, nothing. Just an empty room with patchy fungus growing on the cement.
Something must have happened.
I studied each fungal growth in the room as I passed by. Even with the light cast from the windows, the tops remained impossibly dark. Not a single feature was discernible— only an outline was visible.
Halfway to the door, a three foot wide hole led straight to floor 8. I could have sworn it wasn't there before. I peered into the opening, seeing straight through to the room below. From what I could see, it was identically empty.
"Annabeth," I tried again, nearing the door to the hallway.
"BOO!"
I stumbled backward, tripping over my own feet. I landed squarely on a patch of fungus.
FPOOSH.
I remembered to hold my breath, close my eyes, and plug my nose.
Annabeth cackled from the threshold of the doorway, standing over me with both hands on her forehead.
"You should have seen the look—" she began, breaking off into another fit of laughter.
"Shut up," I groaned, pushing to my feet. My entire body was covered in squishy fungus gunk. I pointed at the hole behind me, continuing. "You could have killed me."
"Blah, blah, blah," she mocked. "You're fine... you're just being a baby."
Annabeth gave me a playful shove, hands lingering for a moment overdue. Swatting her paws off me, I marched back to the stairwell. I led the rest of the way to floor 13, followed by her snickers.
As I reached the top of the stairs and stepped onto the 13th floor, my jaw dropped. It was a scene straight out of a surrealist painting. An enormous pool room lay before us. Glass walls extended up from the tile floors, creating a massive, clear domed perimeter. A swath of stars twinkled brilliantly through the clear ceiling, their light refracting through the glass, casting ethereal patterns onto the room's otherwise bleak surroundings.
The pool itself was a semi-circular cutout covering half the floor space, starting at ground level and deepening in a corkscrew motion. Its ceramic tiles, once probably a bright blue, were now tinged with patches of the same fungal growth we had come across on the lower floors. The growth was sparse here, though, letting the original floor design take prominence.
In the center of the room— on top of the staircase we just stepped out of— stood a circular pillar that extended up to the middle of the glass dome, like a spine holding up the entire tower. A small antenna jutted out from above the pillar atop the dome. Surrounding the antenna was a low fence, perhaps a safety measure for maintenance workers.
Annabeth, having finally contained her laughter, stepped beside me, her face illuminated by the soft starlight filtering in through the dome. She too stood silent, taken aback by the unexpected beauty of this forgotten space.
As we moved around the room, our steps echoed across the vast emptiness. With every patch of fungus we passed, the same eerie darkness hovered, the undulating mold standing stark against the ceramic tiles.
We made our way back to the central pillar. A ladder, carved into the pillar, connected to the glass ceiling with a trapdoor.
"To the roof?" Annabeth sang, rubbing her hands together in a goblin-like motion.
"Ladies first."
As she climbed above me, I couldn't help but crane my neck and drool. She slammed open the trapdoor, and we burst through to the roof.
The fenced-in area was covered with a dark spongy surface, gripping at my knees when I stood up. Wind whipped around us, carrying a chill that cut through my clothes and bit into my skin. With each gust, the antenna above us groaned and swayed, almost as if it were joining in a dance with an unseen partner.
We sat on the squishy rubber surface, comfortably in silence. I met her eyes, smiling dumbly. We passed the joint back and forth until it dwindled down, its ember glow flickering one last time before extinguishing completely. A familiar haze crawled through my thoughts, slowing the passage of time to a languishing crawl.
"Hey..." she started, "I think I've finally found inspiration for my next album."
I scooted closer to her, taking her hand. I knew the topic brought about an unusual timidity in her— a blemish in the badass persona she's so keen on presenting. She won't even talk to her own boyfriend about her music career.
"Yeah?" I floated.
She hesitated for a second, settling into the moment. I felt a tug at my crotch, suddenly all too aware of how pretty she looked in the moonlight. I took in every detail— the way her hair fell across her face, the pattern of her freckles, the soft speckling of stars reflecting across her eyes.
"I think you need to take off your shirt, first, though," she whispered, now inches from my face. "You're filthy."
I glanced down, remembering the fungal gunk that had soiled my clothes when she scared me.
Without warning, her hands slid under my shirt, warm and sure. I helped her yank it off, collapsing into her lips.
***
When we got back to the truck, I was still high enough to see everything in slow motion. Before pulling out of the parking lot, Annabeth and I regurgitated the events of our urban exploration, trying to show our significant others what fun they missed out on. It goes without saying that part of the story was intentionally omitted.
Ellie and Josh were unamused. Their lack of adventure will forever be a mystery to me.
We swung out of the lot, hopping onto the highway headed into town. I swayed between lanes, struggling to keep the double-yellow lines in focus.
"Are you sure you're good to drive?" Ellie asked, gripping the armrest.
"I'm fine," I slurred.
Seconds later, another truck materialized in front of us. I swerved to avoid it, then everything went black.
***
I woke up to a strong hand pulling me out of the window. My truck was upside down, the roof completely caved in.
I groaned. "Aww... fuck...."
The person who pulled me out looked like the kind of guy to chew tobacco and spit wisdom. His fishing cap cast a deep shadow across his eyes in the moon's glow, concealing his gaze. He was an old timer, that's for sure, one of those folk who came during the coal rush and decided to stay when all was said and done. I could see his truck— the same truck I saw moments before the crash— pulled into the shoulder of the highway with its blinkers on.
"Easy now," he reassured, his voice like gravel under a boot. "Anyone else inside?"
I nodded, unable to speak.
I plopped onto the grassy slope embarking off the side of the road. The old man pulled their mangled bodies out, one by one.
The countryside shrank around me. I felt the corners of my vision pulling in, the weed in my system straining the limits of shock I could take before melting down.
"I'm sorry, son," he whispered, his voice carrying the weight of my guilt. "The police will be here soon. Don't you worry."
The police.
I stood up. I knew exactly how the police treated people with my skin color in this town.
I ran.
"Hey now!" the man hollered.
I kept running.
Away from my truck, away from my dead friends, away from the police.
I ran until my breath came in ragged, uncontrollable huffs. I flopped to the ground, laying on the cool concrete, cradling my head with my hands. Blood flowed between my fingertips, pooling onto the pavement.
I laid there until police sirens wailed through the night, rapidly approaching. They stopped at the wreck, leaving me in silence. Moments later, the sirens picked up their mournful song again, heading toward me.
I sat up.
I was back in the lot of Sabe's Tower. Only then did I realize how little distance I really ran from the wreck— a couple hundred yards at most.
Four, five, maybe even six sirens filled the air. They were all coming for me. They knew what I had done.
I bolted from my position on the concrete. I could hide in the tower. No way the cops would look for me in that rotting place. They wouldn't dare.
I squeezed through the gap in the fence, same as before, vaulting past the
DO NOT TRESPASS ALONE
signs in a fluid lunge. The sirens behind me screamed into the night, melding together into a continuous doomsday chant.
Red and blue lights filled the lot. I hit the ground right in front of the gaping entrance to the tower, praying that the weeds poking through the concrete would be enough to mask my form. I army crawled, inch by inch, dragging myself across broken bottles and plywood shrapnell, until I was safely in the darkness of the tower.
In.
Out.
I breathed.
In.
Out.
A police cruiser parked in the lot. Its siren drowned out all other wails for a moment before shutting off. A chubby white officer hopped out, surveying the scene. His gaze came to rest on the spot where I had lain. He squatted down, raking a finger through the pool of blood I left behind. He took a few steps toward the tower, squatting down yet again. Another splotch of blood, no doubt.
His voice floated through the plaza, slightly nasal and a little out of breath. "Dispatch, this is officer Chetty, badge number 741. I'm on the scene at 1019 Pleasant Valley Lane, in the lot of Sabe's Tower. I've located a pool of fresh blood that may be linked to our hit-and-run suspect. Possible injury, suspect could be close. Requesting immediate backup and forensics for evidence collection."
Fuck.
I wormed my way further into the tower's belly, sliding between patches of fungus like a mouse in a snake pit, heading for the stairwell. I had to ascend, to find some nook or cranny out of reach of the pursuing officers. The godforsaken tower was one big game of hide and seek, only this time, losing meant far worse than a bruised ego.
Something gurgled in the darkness.
My blood froze. I halted, my heart hammering a tattoo against my ribs. Holding my breath, I strained my senses, eyes peering into the graying murk, searching for the source of the sound.
It came again, a wretched retching, like an animal choking on its own vomit. Hacking, gurgling, bubbling wetness bursting through strained vocal chords, a sound of fading vitality. It was coming from near the door, just outside the meager halo of light slipping through the hole.
A wet line smeared across the back of my neck. A yelp escaped my lips before I realized it was just a cord dangling from the ceiling.
At my yelp, the gurgling paused.
A heavy hush fell over the place, the quietude of the hunted.
I could faintly make out echoes emanating from the stairwell, only a few feet behind me.
The gurgling continued, sucking at the thick air. It began to drag itself forward through the fungus covered floor— a slow, steady, rhythmic drag against the concrete.
FPOOSH.
A geyser of spores bloomed, mingling with swirls of dust in the meager light. The creature, or whatever it was, did not slow its approach. Out of the darkness, a form began to shape— a silhouette clawing its way toward me.
FPOOSH.
I could see this eruption envelop the mass on the floor. One hand appeared, then another. Its fingers scrabbled over the concrete, searching for any purchase to grip. They flexed, heaving the thing even closer.
A mop of curly hair appeared between the hands. A body, face down. It pulled itself closer, into another fungal growth, grinding its face through the rough concrete.
FPOOSH.
A knife protruded from its back. The handle jutted upward, a grim totem amidst the grime and gore. I shuddered, involuntarily taking a step closer to the stairwell.
It looked up at me.
Or rather, Josh looked up at me.
I stared back, mouth agape.
His face was nearly sanded off from the concrete. His nose took the worst of it, ground down to the bone, leaving only two sucking, gurgling holes between his eyes. His cheeks were a mangled mess of blood and rocks, viscous red flowing freely to the tip of his chin before dribbling off. The chunks of meat hanging where lips should have been flapped against his teeth with every jerky motion, tethered to his face by all too little strands of flesh. Beneath them, his teeth showed bright red and white in a perpetual grimacing smile.
"Josh?" I managed to whisper, my voice a frightened squeak.
Josh opened his mouth as if to respond, ripping both cheeks in half. He hacked, gurgling, spitting up blood that came from deep within his torso. He slowly cocked his head to the side, but instead of stopping at a slant, he kept twisting his neck until bones started to crack and his head dangled upside down.
His mangled, upside down head swung limply as he pulled himself to his knees, his neck like jelly. He wasn't wearing the same clothes he was wearing earlier tonight— no, he was wearing clothes from the night Annabeth first cheated on him with me. He was at a Villanova game, supporting his favorite team since birth. Annabeth knew he would be gone for the weekend, so we took our chance. I was still at her place when he came back, wearing his Collin Gillespie jersey and reeking of beer.
Now in front of me, his prized jersey was in tatters, torn to ribbons by the concrete. He groaned, shuffling and reaching for me with bloody fingers.
I bolted into the stairwell, taking the steps two at a time. I pushed myself faster and faster until the door to floor 9 loomed to my side. I didn't pause for a moment, pushed forward by the gurgling echoes reverberating from below.
My thighs, weak from the frantic climb, begged for a break. I wobbled into the hallway, painfully tip-toeing through the fungus. The door to 901 beckoned ahead, hanging open like it had been awaiting my hasty return.
I stumbled over the threshold when Annabeth's singing filled the room. "Oh, Donovan!"
I froze.
Outlined against the window was a two-headed beast. One face belonged to Annabeth, the other to Ellie. The creature swayed, an obscene dance of bare, fused flesh. It wore no clothes, as if to mock God himself. It had two sets of everything— eight appendages total, like a humanoid arachnid. Annabeth's breasts, now side by side with Ellie's, put Ellie to shame, even now.
Annabeth crooned again, "Oh, Donovan!" each syllable laced with acid and honey. The sound made my skin crawl as it floated through the silent room.
"You always did want more, didn't you Donovan?" Ellie sneered, a harsh grin splitting her face.
Annabeth spat, "More than Ellie could give. More than anyone could give."
The thing dropped to the floor with a thud. All eight limbs moved in unison as it crawled.
"Isn't this what you wanted? Both of us at the same time?" Their voices tumbled over each other, mouths moving in synchrony. Together, their laughter filled the hollow room. "Don't you like the thrill, Donovan? Don't you like playing with fire?"
The thing scurried at me, jumping over fungal growths with powerful leaps. The sudden movement broke my paralyzation, spurring my legs to action. I darted into the closet and through the stairwell door, into the gurgling echoes.
Back down the stairwell I ran, the two headed beast in pursuit. Both girls snarled, hindered by their conjoined size in the narrow passageway. Their struggle echoed through the stairwell, mixing with the gurgling. I fled further down, needing to put distance between that thing and me.
I stopped dead in my tracks between floors 2 and 3.
Josh was there, leaning against the wall with the knife removed from his back, now grasped tightly in his hand. I staggered back up the stairs, instinctively retreating, narrowly avoiding the blade as he lunged at me.
Glancing up, I caught a flash of pale skin bearing down on me, cutting off my escape. My only way out was the door to floor 3. I charged through the closet, leaving the echoes behind me.
Floor 3 was empty— no walls, only fungus and windows. The atrium loomed to my left, a pie shaped hole missing from the floor and ceiling. I backed away from the door, eyeing the dangling cords hanging in the atrium.
Maybe... Just maybe....
Josh stumbled from the stairwell, filling the air with his wet slurping. Annabeth and Ellie followed, scrambling toward me.
I didn't have time to think.
I jumped, grasping at the dangling wires, praying they would hold my weight.
Time stuttered, hanging suspended like an icicle on a winter's morning. The world spun in a dizzying blur as I twisted, fingers stretching for a grip. Panic clawed its icy fingers up my spine, but it was the surprise that struck me most. The simple disbelief that this was happening.
A wire found its way into my hand, snapping without slowing my fall.
The wind whooshed past, ripping the breath from my lungs. Above me, the third floor retreated, its grimy concrete replaced by a view of the atrium's ceiling, wires swinging back and forth from my desperate escape.
Then came the sensation of falling. It's a feeling that strikes a primal chord, an orchestra of fear and adrenaline that means the end of a life. My stomach lurched, free-falling alongside me, while the rest of my body seemed to hover in a state of disbelief.
The impact came as both a shock and an inevitability. There was a moment of sheer, undiluted pain, a soundless scream reverberating through my very bones. It felt like being shattered from the inside out, an explosion of agony that started from my back and radiated outwards. An iron-hot spike of pain shot through me, and then, a chilling void as everything below my waist slipped into a terrifying numbness.
The echo of my body's collision rang in my ears as the world spun into a disorienting whirl of blurs, shadows, and pain. The cold concrete beneath me felt real, solid, a chilling contrast to the sudden loss of sensation in my legs.
In the throbbing silence that followed, I understood. I had fallen. I was broken. I lay sprawled on the atrium floor, gasping, the world tilting dangerously in my vision.
Annabeth and Ellie emerged from the staircase, scrambling across the atrium floor. Red and blue police lights filtered through the tower’s windows, making shadows dance between the monster's eight limbs. Josh wasn't far behind, still clutching onto the bloody knife, head rolling upside down between his shoulders.
"Police, we're coming in!" a familiar nasally voice shouted.
The moment officers stepped foot in the tower, the monsters vanished in a spray of spores.
X
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Josh muttered, his voice low. "We're really doing this, huh?"
He ran a hand through his mop of curly hair— a dumb tic he developed last summer when his girlfriend, Annabeth, told him it was sexy. She was beside him now, cuddled up in the backseat across his lap.
I glanced at my own girlfriend, Ellie, in the passenger seat. She was trying her damndest to appear brave, but I knew better. There was no way she was comfortable with trespassing tonight.
I sighed, realizing that Josh would also chicken out.
"We're doing this? You sure you want to come?" I prodded.
Josh shifted in his seat, hand running through his hair yet again. "Maybe it's better if I stay in the truck.”
Annabeth shrugged next to him, unsurprised.
"Me, too,” Ellie chimed in, nodding at Josh.
Annabeth met my eyes, a glimmer of understanding passing between us. Our partners were both boring, god-awful goody two shoes.
"Pussies," I jabbed, swinging open my door without giving them a moment to respond.
Annabeth hopped out behind me, waving at the two losers in the truck before spinning towards me with a grin on her face.
"They're weird," she said, rolling her eyes.
For a moment, I was drinking in the way her golden hair shimmered in the moonlight. A light breeze tickled at our faces, sending sparkles of her moon-lit hair between us.
"Yup," I mustered.
I turned, strolling towards the chain link fence that formed a circular perimeter around the base of Sabe's Tower.
Sabe’s Tower. Thirteen stories of abandoned potential, whispering of times past when our town's inhabitants thought we'd hit a population boom, becoming the Houston of West Virginia. In the 70s, our success was tied to coal. Jobs flooded in, and with them, a myriad of people trying to make their way in life. Then the mines abruptly ran dry, decimating our town's economy. Since that time, our population has done nothing but dwindle.
Sabe’s Tower. Thirteen stories of decaying grandeur, silently rotting from the inside out. Some say that's what happened to Sabe himself— a rot took hold in his core, spreading and spreading until nothing but rot was left. In the end, he took his own life, which some say was for the best. He was a greedy fool, the wealthiest man for miles, owning half the surrounding countryside before the mining industry took off. Made a fortune selling his family's land to coal companies, putting every ounce of profit into making his towering hotel more luxurious than a Ritz Carlton.
Sabe’s Tower. Thirteen stories of failed dreams, now screaming vulgar obscenities at our eyes. It is a truly ugly behemoth, domineering our town's skyline with unmerited arrogance. Sabe thought painting the tower purple would give it an air of majesty, like royalties of the past, swaddled in silky lavender robes. His aspiration, after all, was nothing less than to emulate the sacred Tabernacle of Moses, to make his hotel a dwelling place for gods among men. In its current state of disrepair, however, the tower was no more than an eyesore— a visual cacophony of broken glass, peeling sickly-purple paint, and rusted steel inlays.
Adding to the hotel's disgrace, it was cylindrical in form, perched atop the highest peak for miles, jutting into the sky like a middle finger to the gods. Its phallic outline stood in stark contrast to the run-down strip malls lying in its wake.
The fence surrounding the tower was a bit too tall and a bit too wobbly to safely scale, so we circled, looking for an entry point. Every few yards, a DO NOT TRESPASS sign hung, tied to the fence with zip-ties in each corner. Someone had taken the liberty to spray paint a word underneath each sign, now making them all read:
DO NOT TRESPASS ALONE.
"Good thing you're coming with me," I joked, pointing at one of the signs.
Annabeth paused to read it for a moment. "Yeah... kinda weird that someone did that. I wonder why?"
I shrugged, continuing around the perimeter.
Eventually, we found a gate in the fence, held closed with chains at waist level. The gate's post careened steeply outward, creating a manageable gap near the top. The gate post was only held in place by the chains, not even slightly anchored to the ground. Without too much of a struggle, we hoisted ourselves up and through the gap.
Once inside the fence, I found myself spellbound by the abandoned hotel. The stars in the night sky reflected across the windows, bending and warping around the curved perimeter. Each glimmer of starlight turned into dizzying fractals, melding together and slipping between the shards of broken glass with each shift of my gaze.
The result was honestly breathtaking.
At night, the eyesoriffic tower was beautiful. Its silhouette dared to embrace the star-studded cosmos, standing with a quiet dignity that defied its daytime mockery.
I felt Annabeth shuffle beside me.
Suddenly, her phone flashlight was on, illuminating a path through overgrown concrete to the tower. At the end of the path was the structure’s entrance— a gaping hole with no attempt to conceal the darkness within.
"WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?!" I yelled, spinning to face her.
"W... What do you mean?" she stuttered.
"Turn that off, you idiot," I explained, lowering my voice. "Someone might see the light and call the cops."
The light flicked off, Annabeth mumbling apologies.
I blinked away the afterimage of weeds eating through the concrete lot, silently cursing myself for being so ridiculously hostile toward her.
"Sorry," I mumbled.
"You're good, Donovan" she whispered, brushing her hand across my arm.
As we continued to the open doorway, the outside of the tower came into focus. It was far further dilapidated than I had realized— each accent of purple paint, faded and peeling, was bulging out from between the glass and steel like it was trying to escape. I rubbed a fingernail on the paint, revealing a soft, rotting wood beneath.
I entered the tower first, pausing to let my eyes adjust. The darkness of the doorway opened up into an atrium that must have once made for a magnificent entrance. It was shaped like a slice of pie, us standing near the crust, peering inward toward the center. Above was pitch black, not yielding any answers to just how high up this mighty room's ceiling stretched.
The musty scent that filled my nose was surprisingly welcoming— somewhere between the smell of fishing trips and century old bookstores. I took a deep breath, relishing in the soft stench.
I could vaguely make out wires dangling down from the ceiling of the atrium. They were impossibly long, stretching upward into the infinite gloom.
"They look like vines," Annabeth whispered, her voice a soft purr.
The air was thick with falling dust, filtering down from the abyss above, twirling between the wires in satisfyingly slow-motion. The falling dust made it even harder to see in the dark, leaving the walls on either side of the room foggy blobs. I waved my hand, sending fleeting dust spirals through the air.
I remembered seeing photos of the atrium online, taken on some of the earliest digital cameras ever made. Those pictures showed marble countertops, intricate wooden carvings, and lushly carpeted floors.
The room, as it stands today, is a barren husk of Sabe's vision. The carpet, only present in scattered clumps, was impossibly dark, soiled to the point of true black. It clung to the concrete foundation, viciously holding on for dear life in a losing battle.
I bent down to examine a clump of carpet in front of me, amazed by the absence of light reflecting back. It was like staring into a pit of nothing, a vague absence, an outline of something that should be there.
I poked the toe of my boot at it.
FPOOSH.
It exploded, erupting into my face.
I gagged instinctively, tasting the vile substance mix into my lungs. Annabeth slapped my back as I continued gagging and coughing, begging the mucus to tear itself free from my lungs and just fucking get out of my body because it feels like I'm dying oh GOD.
And eventually, it did.
The violent hacking subsided into slight wretching, then was gone.
"Are you okay?" Annabeth tested.
Do you think I'm fucking okay?
"What the fuck was that?" I spewed.
She bent over the clump of carpet. Underneath the blackened top layer that just violently erupted was a pale network of matted spiderwebs.
"Hmm..." she began, "It kind of looks like mycelium."
She met my raised eyebrow with an eye roll.
"You know, like the roots of a fungus or some shit, I don't know. I just saw the shrooms growing in Bryce's closet that one time he showed me his stash. This white stuff looks just like it. So I guess that makes this black stuff like the part of the shroom we eat, or whatever."
"Oh dip," I responded, nodding. "That makes sense. One time I saw a nature show about some plants that shoot their seeds everywhere when something touches them. It's probably just spreading its spores when we touch it."
"Yeah," she breathed, "pretty gnarly."
We shuffled deeper into the gloom, weaving between dangling cables and clumps of fungus. I felt a drop of moisture flick off a cable, sliding onto my arm.
I groaned. "Fuck. That cable was wet."
"Disgusting," she whispered back.
We made our way to the apex of the room, the center of the tower, revealing a rusted set of elevator doors leaning together like drunks at a quinceanera. The doorway to the stairs, however, beckoned to us with the same unobstructed, pitch-black allure that the tower's entrance emanated just minutes before.
In the dark, it's truly amazing how utterly void all open doorways look.
Upon stepping inside the stairwell, the world vanished. The only proof of having working eyes was a faint, vertical glow of light filtering through the door, abruptly fading into all-consuming black.
Every sound in the entire building bored through my soul, bouncing from wall to wall, ceiling to floor, echoing on and on for all of eternity. The stairwell, directly in the center of the decrepit hotel, was the focal point of every creaking floorboard, every popping nail, every howling gust of wind. It was as if I was holding up a monstrous conch shell to my ear— a deafening murmur of echoes in disarray, smelting together to form satanic harmonies.
"Whoa," Annabeth mumbled.
Her word cut through the other echoes, impossibly loud against their monotonous hum.
Instantly, the echo of her voice filled the stairwell, rising like the build up of a dubstep song until peaking, impossibly overwhelming for a few brief seconds. The echoes of her voice then faded as quickly as they arrived.
She put a hand to her mouth, the whites of her eyes barely visible in the glow coming from the doorway.
I reached out, placing a hand where her shoulder should be. There was not enough space for us to stand abreast in the stairwell, leaving us in a comically squished proximity. She was breathing rapidly, barely managing to stay silent. I squeezed, and her breathing quickly slowed. I felt her hand creep onto mine, and we stood for a minute, simply listening to the cries of the dying building echo around us.
As my eyes adjusted, I could make out a staircase spiraling up the curved wall. Clearly this was a service stairwell, as it is much too cramped for the likes of Sabe's guests. Only a few steps were visible through the darkness at a time, making the staircase feel even tinier than it already was. Luckily, no fungus grew on the stairs themselves, leaving the metal alone to rust.
Annabeth shuffled onto the first step, producing a small object from her pocket. She handed it to me, then pointed up the stairwell, careful to not send echoes through the cylindrical chamber again.
I brought it close to my eyes for inspection, straining against the lack of light.
A joint...
She wants to go to the roof and smoke.
A smile cracked my lips. Classic Annabeth.
Every couple stairsteps, there would be a doorway. Most of them let in a dim glow, offering a glimpse into what must have once been a custodial closet on each floor.
On floor 9, I tugged at Annabeth's hand. We made eye contact in the faint light coming from the doorway. I motioned through it, pointing to the nearly fungus free floor. I wanted to explore at least a little bit, to see if the closet circled around the stairwell or not.
I poked my head through the doorway, freeing myself from the overwhelming cacophony of echoes in the stairwell.
I verified that the closet did, in fact, curve around the circular staircase like a donut. A few steps in one direction led to a terrifying drop— the elevator shaft. Next to it, a sidewalk sized ledge led to an open door, giving a view of the floor's main hallway. The path looked safe— no fungus, cracks, or otherwise obvious defects— so I proceeded, treading as light as a fox, fumbling for Annabeth's hand behind me.
The main hallway ran between the custodial closet and the guest rooms, creating another donut ring around the central stairwell. Throughout the hallway, patches of fungus grew alarmingly close together, threatening to overtake the concrete.
"That stairwell was insane," Annabeth whispered.
I nodded. "Fuck yeah, I wonder what it was like when the hotel was actually open. Must have been miserable for the staff."
We weaved through the fungus filled hallway, coming to room 901. I glanced at Annabeth, raising my eyebrows. The door was slightly ajar, hanging from its one remaining door hinge. I pushed gently, eliciting a monstrous creak.
The room was empty, extending away to the outside in a familiar pie shape. The mold seemed to grow thinner in the room, leaving most of the exposed concrete safe to cross. At the far side, a floor to ceiling panel of windows looked out over our town.
I gasped, taking in the view. Never before had I seen our town from this high up. My eyes drew to the smokestacks by the river, their blinking lights ominously flickering over downtown. Individual streets ran in parallel lines away from the tower, lit with yellowing streetlights. Between the roads, tiny lights cast from window panes twinkled, blending with one another into a starscape of their own.
"Dude," I said. "Look at this."
No response.
I spun, looking for Annabeth, frantically scanning the room. My eyes had adjusted to the outside light, leaving me sightless.
"Annabeth," I hissed.
A cold tingle went up my spine, pulling at hairs on the back of my neck.
"Annabeth?"
Silence.
Silence.
Silence.
I crept back across the floor, now aware of the entire room at once. There was nowhere for her to be hiding. No desks, cans of paint, ladders, nothing. Just an empty room with patchy fungus growing on the cement.
Something must have happened.
I studied each fungal growth in the room as I passed by. Even with the light cast from the windows, the tops remained impossibly dark. Not a single feature was discernible— only an outline was visible.
Halfway to the door, a three foot wide hole led straight to floor 8. I could have sworn it wasn't there before. I peered into the opening, seeing straight through to the room below. From what I could see, it was identically empty.
"Annabeth," I tried again, nearing the door to the hallway.
"BOO!"
I stumbled backward, tripping over my own feet. I landed squarely on a patch of fungus.
FPOOSH.
I remembered to hold my breath, close my eyes, and plug my nose.
Annabeth cackled from the threshold of the doorway, standing over me with both hands on her forehead.
"You should have seen the look—" she began, breaking off into another fit of laughter.
"Shut up," I groaned, pushing to my feet. My entire body was covered in squishy fungus gunk. I pointed at the hole behind me, continuing. "You could have killed me."
"Blah, blah, blah," she mocked. "You're fine... you're just being a baby."
Annabeth gave me a playful shove, hands lingering for a moment overdue. Swatting her paws off me, I marched back to the stairwell. I led the rest of the way to floor 13, followed by her snickers.
As I reached the top of the stairs and stepped onto the 13th floor, my jaw dropped. It was a scene straight out of a surrealist painting. An enormous pool room lay before us. Glass walls extended up from the tile floors, creating a massive, clear domed perimeter. A swath of stars twinkled brilliantly through the clear ceiling, their light refracting through the glass, casting ethereal patterns onto the room's otherwise bleak surroundings.
The pool itself was a semi-circular cutout covering half the floor space, starting at ground level and deepening in a corkscrew motion. Its ceramic tiles, once probably a bright blue, were now tinged with patches of the same fungal growth we had come across on the lower floors. The growth was sparse here, though, letting the original floor design take prominence.
In the center of the room— on top of the staircase we just stepped out of— stood a circular pillar that extended up to the middle of the glass dome, like a spine holding up the entire tower. A small antenna jutted out from above the pillar atop the dome. Surrounding the antenna was a low fence, perhaps a safety measure for maintenance workers.
Annabeth, having finally contained her laughter, stepped beside me, her face illuminated by the soft starlight filtering in through the dome. She too stood silent, taken aback by the unexpected beauty of this forgotten space.
As we moved around the room, our steps echoed across the vast emptiness. With every patch of fungus we passed, the same eerie darkness hovered, the undulating mold standing stark against the ceramic tiles.
We made our way back to the central pillar. A ladder, carved into the pillar, connected to the glass ceiling with a trapdoor.
"To the roof?" Annabeth sang, rubbing her hands together in a goblin-like motion.
"Ladies first."
As she climbed above me, I couldn't help but crane my neck and drool. She slammed open the trapdoor, and we burst through to the roof.
The fenced-in area was covered with a dark spongy surface, gripping at my knees when I stood up. Wind whipped around us, carrying a chill that cut through my clothes and bit into my skin. With each gust, the antenna above us groaned and swayed, almost as if it were joining in a dance with an unseen partner.
We sat on the squishy rubber surface, comfortably in silence. I met her eyes, smiling dumbly. We passed the joint back and forth until it dwindled down, its ember glow flickering one last time before extinguishing completely. A familiar haze crawled through my thoughts, slowing the passage of time to a languishing crawl.
"Hey..." she started, "I think I've finally found inspiration for my next album."
I scooted closer to her, taking her hand. I knew the topic brought about an unusual timidity in her— a blemish in the badass persona she's so keen on presenting. She won't even talk to her own boyfriend about her music career.
"Yeah?" I floated.
She hesitated for a second, settling into the moment. I felt a tug at my crotch, suddenly all too aware of how pretty she looked in the moonlight. I took in every detail— the way her hair fell across her face, the pattern of her freckles, the soft speckling of stars reflecting across her eyes.
"I think you need to take off your shirt, first, though," she whispered, now inches from my face. "You're filthy."
I glanced down, remembering the fungal gunk that had soiled my clothes when she scared me.
Without warning, her hands slid under my shirt, warm and sure. I helped her yank it off, collapsing into her lips.
***
When we got back to the truck, I was still high enough to see everything in slow motion. Before pulling out of the parking lot, Annabeth and I regurgitated the events of our urban exploration, trying to show our significant others what fun they missed out on. It goes without saying that part of the story was intentionally omitted.
Ellie and Josh were unamused. Their lack of adventure will forever be a mystery to me.
We swung out of the lot, hopping onto the highway headed into town. I swayed between lanes, struggling to keep the double-yellow lines in focus.
"Are you sure you're good to drive?" Ellie asked, gripping the armrest.
"I'm fine," I slurred.
Seconds later, another truck materialized in front of us. I swerved to avoid it, then everything went black.
***
I woke up to a strong hand pulling me out of the window. My truck was upside down, the roof completely caved in.
I groaned. "Aww... fuck...."
The person who pulled me out looked like the kind of guy to chew tobacco and spit wisdom. His fishing cap cast a deep shadow across his eyes in the moon's glow, concealing his gaze. He was an old timer, that's for sure, one of those folk who came during the coal rush and decided to stay when all was said and done. I could see his truck— the same truck I saw moments before the crash— pulled into the shoulder of the highway with its blinkers on.
"Easy now," he reassured, his voice like gravel under a boot. "Anyone else inside?"
I nodded, unable to speak.
I plopped onto the grassy slope embarking off the side of the road. The old man pulled their mangled bodies out, one by one.
The countryside shrank around me. I felt the corners of my vision pulling in, the weed in my system straining the limits of shock I could take before melting down.
"I'm sorry, son," he whispered, his voice carrying the weight of my guilt. "The police will be here soon. Don't you worry."
The police.
I stood up. I knew exactly how the police treated people with my skin color in this town.
I ran.
"Hey now!" the man hollered.
I kept running.
Away from my truck, away from my dead friends, away from the police.
I ran until my breath came in ragged, uncontrollable huffs. I flopped to the ground, laying on the cool concrete, cradling my head with my hands. Blood flowed between my fingertips, pooling onto the pavement.
I laid there until police sirens wailed through the night, rapidly approaching. They stopped at the wreck, leaving me in silence. Moments later, the sirens picked up their mournful song again, heading toward me.
I sat up.
I was back in the lot of Sabe's Tower. Only then did I realize how little distance I really ran from the wreck— a couple hundred yards at most.
Four, five, maybe even six sirens filled the air. They were all coming for me. They knew what I had done.
I bolted from my position on the concrete. I could hide in the tower. No way the cops would look for me in that rotting place. They wouldn't dare.
I squeezed through the gap in the fence, same as before, vaulting past the
DO NOT TRESPASS ALONE
signs in a fluid lunge. The sirens behind me screamed into the night, melding together into a continuous doomsday chant.
Red and blue lights filled the lot. I hit the ground right in front of the gaping entrance to the tower, praying that the weeds poking through the concrete would be enough to mask my form. I army crawled, inch by inch, dragging myself across broken bottles and plywood shrapnell, until I was safely in the darkness of the tower.
In.
Out.
I breathed.
In.
Out.
A police cruiser parked in the lot. Its siren drowned out all other wails for a moment before shutting off. A chubby white officer hopped out, surveying the scene. His gaze came to rest on the spot where I had lain. He squatted down, raking a finger through the pool of blood I left behind. He took a few steps toward the tower, squatting down yet again. Another splotch of blood, no doubt.
His voice floated through the plaza, slightly nasal and a little out of breath. "Dispatch, this is officer Chetty, badge number 741. I'm on the scene at 1019 Pleasant Valley Lane, in the lot of Sabe's Tower. I've located a pool of fresh blood that may be linked to our hit-and-run suspect. Possible injury, suspect could be close. Requesting immediate backup and forensics for evidence collection."
Fuck.
I wormed my way further into the tower's belly, sliding between patches of fungus like a mouse in a snake pit, heading for the stairwell. I had to ascend, to find some nook or cranny out of reach of the pursuing officers. The godforsaken tower was one big game of hide and seek, only this time, losing meant far worse than a bruised ego.
Something gurgled in the darkness.
My blood froze. I halted, my heart hammering a tattoo against my ribs. Holding my breath, I strained my senses, eyes peering into the graying murk, searching for the source of the sound.
It came again, a wretched retching, like an animal choking on its own vomit. Hacking, gurgling, bubbling wetness bursting through strained vocal chords, a sound of fading vitality. It was coming from near the door, just outside the meager halo of light slipping through the hole.
A wet line smeared across the back of my neck. A yelp escaped my lips before I realized it was just a cord dangling from the ceiling.
At my yelp, the gurgling paused.
A heavy hush fell over the place, the quietude of the hunted.
I could faintly make out echoes emanating from the stairwell, only a few feet behind me.
The gurgling continued, sucking at the thick air. It began to drag itself forward through the fungus covered floor— a slow, steady, rhythmic drag against the concrete.
FPOOSH.
A geyser of spores bloomed, mingling with swirls of dust in the meager light. The creature, or whatever it was, did not slow its approach. Out of the darkness, a form began to shape— a silhouette clawing its way toward me.
FPOOSH.
I could see this eruption envelop the mass on the floor. One hand appeared, then another. Its fingers scrabbled over the concrete, searching for any purchase to grip. They flexed, heaving the thing even closer.
A mop of curly hair appeared between the hands. A body, face down. It pulled itself closer, into another fungal growth, grinding its face through the rough concrete.
FPOOSH.
A knife protruded from its back. The handle jutted upward, a grim totem amidst the grime and gore. I shuddered, involuntarily taking a step closer to the stairwell.
It looked up at me.
Or rather, Josh looked up at me.
I stared back, mouth agape.
His face was nearly sanded off from the concrete. His nose took the worst of it, ground down to the bone, leaving only two sucking, gurgling holes between his eyes. His cheeks were a mangled mess of blood and rocks, viscous red flowing freely to the tip of his chin before dribbling off. The chunks of meat hanging where lips should have been flapped against his teeth with every jerky motion, tethered to his face by all too little strands of flesh. Beneath them, his teeth showed bright red and white in a perpetual grimacing smile.
"Josh?" I managed to whisper, my voice a frightened squeak.
Josh opened his mouth as if to respond, ripping both cheeks in half. He hacked, gurgling, spitting up blood that came from deep within his torso. He slowly cocked his head to the side, but instead of stopping at a slant, he kept twisting his neck until bones started to crack and his head dangled upside down.
His mangled, upside down head swung limply as he pulled himself to his knees, his neck like jelly. He wasn't wearing the same clothes he was wearing earlier tonight— no, he was wearing clothes from the night Annabeth first cheated on him with me. He was at a Villanova game, supporting his favorite team since birth. Annabeth knew he would be gone for the weekend, so we took our chance. I was still at her place when he came back, wearing his Collin Gillespie jersey and reeking of beer.
Now in front of me, his prized jersey was in tatters, torn to ribbons by the concrete. He groaned, shuffling and reaching for me with bloody fingers.
I bolted into the stairwell, taking the steps two at a time. I pushed myself faster and faster until the door to floor 9 loomed to my side. I didn't pause for a moment, pushed forward by the gurgling echoes reverberating from below.
My thighs, weak from the frantic climb, begged for a break. I wobbled into the hallway, painfully tip-toeing through the fungus. The door to 901 beckoned ahead, hanging open like it had been awaiting my hasty return.
I stumbled over the threshold when Annabeth's singing filled the room. "Oh, Donovan!"
I froze.
Outlined against the window was a two-headed beast. One face belonged to Annabeth, the other to Ellie. The creature swayed, an obscene dance of bare, fused flesh. It wore no clothes, as if to mock God himself. It had two sets of everything— eight appendages total, like a humanoid arachnid. Annabeth's breasts, now side by side with Ellie's, put Ellie to shame, even now.
Annabeth crooned again, "Oh, Donovan!" each syllable laced with acid and honey. The sound made my skin crawl as it floated through the silent room.
"You always did want more, didn't you Donovan?" Ellie sneered, a harsh grin splitting her face.
Annabeth spat, "More than Ellie could give. More than anyone could give."
The thing dropped to the floor with a thud. All eight limbs moved in unison as it crawled.
"Isn't this what you wanted? Both of us at the same time?" Their voices tumbled over each other, mouths moving in synchrony. Together, their laughter filled the hollow room. "Don't you like the thrill, Donovan? Don't you like playing with fire?"
The thing scurried at me, jumping over fungal growths with powerful leaps. The sudden movement broke my paralyzation, spurring my legs to action. I darted into the closet and through the stairwell door, into the gurgling echoes.
Back down the stairwell I ran, the two headed beast in pursuit. Both girls snarled, hindered by their conjoined size in the narrow passageway. Their struggle echoed through the stairwell, mixing with the gurgling. I fled further down, needing to put distance between that thing and me.
I stopped dead in my tracks between floors 2 and 3.
Josh was there, leaning against the wall with the knife removed from his back, now grasped tightly in his hand. I staggered back up the stairs, instinctively retreating, narrowly avoiding the blade as he lunged at me.
Glancing up, I caught a flash of pale skin bearing down on me, cutting off my escape. My only way out was the door to floor 3. I charged through the closet, leaving the echoes behind me.
Floor 3 was empty— no walls, only fungus and windows. The atrium loomed to my left, a pie shaped hole missing from the floor and ceiling. I backed away from the door, eyeing the dangling cords hanging in the atrium.
Maybe... Just maybe....
Josh stumbled from the stairwell, filling the air with his wet slurping. Annabeth and Ellie followed, scrambling toward me.
I didn't have time to think.
I jumped, grasping at the dangling wires, praying they would hold my weight.
Time stuttered, hanging suspended like an icicle on a winter's morning. The world spun in a dizzying blur as I twisted, fingers stretching for a grip. Panic clawed its icy fingers up my spine, but it was the surprise that struck me most. The simple disbelief that this was happening.
A wire found its way into my hand, snapping without slowing my fall.
The wind whooshed past, ripping the breath from my lungs. Above me, the third floor retreated, its grimy concrete replaced by a view of the atrium's ceiling, wires swinging back and forth from my desperate escape.
Then came the sensation of falling. It's a feeling that strikes a primal chord, an orchestra of fear and adrenaline that means the end of a life. My stomach lurched, free-falling alongside me, while the rest of my body seemed to hover in a state of disbelief.
The impact came as both a shock and an inevitability. There was a moment of sheer, undiluted pain, a soundless scream reverberating through my very bones. It felt like being shattered from the inside out, an explosion of agony that started from my back and radiated outwards. An iron-hot spike of pain shot through me, and then, a chilling void as everything below my waist slipped into a terrifying numbness.
The echo of my body's collision rang in my ears as the world spun into a disorienting whirl of blurs, shadows, and pain. The cold concrete beneath me felt real, solid, a chilling contrast to the sudden loss of sensation in my legs.
In the throbbing silence that followed, I understood. I had fallen. I was broken. I lay sprawled on the atrium floor, gasping, the world tilting dangerously in my vision.
Annabeth and Ellie emerged from the staircase, scrambling across the atrium floor. Red and blue police lights filtered through the tower’s windows, making shadows dance between the monster's eight limbs. Josh wasn't far behind, still clutching onto the bloody knife, head rolling upside down between his shoulders.
"Police, we're coming in!" a familiar nasally voice shouted.
The moment officers stepped foot in the tower, the monsters vanished in a spray of spores.
X
2023.06.03 16:49 Proletlariet Thirteenth Doctor - Comments
TARDIS
The TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimensions in Space) is a Type 40 time capsule the Doctor nicked many years and regenerations ago. It travels throughout space and time by passing through a space-time vortex and is dimensionally-transcendental (bigger on the inside than the outside).Space Travel
- Lands underground.
- Smashes Graham's wooden chair when she lands in his living room.
- Crosses the Judoon's enforcement field surrounding Gloucester by syncing the TARDIS within its refresh rate and slipping in unnoticed.
- Lands inside a plastic trash structure that's located deep in the Indian Ocean .
- Rescues a man trapped in a deteriorating space shuttle by materializing around him the moment before its total destruction then dematerializing away.
- Lands inside the Passenger-form, a pocket universe concealed in a humanoid which the TARDIS doesn't like being inside.
- Dematerializes away in time to avoid the pull of a magnetically-charged implosion.
- Lands safely inside a volcano.
- Saves Ace from falling to her death by materializing side-up to catch her.
- Travel is not always instantaneous as it takes 4 minutes to get to Japan from the UK.
- Cannot access the alternate dimensions.
- The temporal residue covering Karvanista's ship makes it difficult but not impossible for the TARDIS to materialize inside it.
- The strength of the Flux's pull prevents the TARDIS from landing inside a Sontaran spaceship about to be consumed by it.
- The CyberMasters use a blocking field to keep the TARDIS from materializing inside the space train their hijacking.
- After separating from the Doctor, TARDIS starts phasing in and out of time in the exact same location which made it a legend to the settlers of Desolation because it only appears every thousand rotations in a ghostly form.
- Returns her companions to Sheffield only half an hour after they left Earth.
- Takes her companions to 19 News Years Eve displays in a row, across different centuries and planets.
- Not all points in history are fixed. After visiting an undesirable future for Earth and the human race, the Doctor assures her companions that it's just one of several possible futures that can be averted.
- Inadvertently creates a time loop at a storage facility when put into reset-mode.
- Travels two centuries in the future in the exact same spot.
- Brings Dan from the future back in time for his date.
- Has a tendency to land earlier or farther than the intended time, ranging from a matter of minutes, hours, months, decades and even centuries
- The Doctor cannot prevent a man's death in the past because it led to Yaz's birth who brought them there in the first place. On the other hand, it's imperative to keep a historical figure from prematurely dying as it would have great ramifications for the human race.
- The Doctor warns her companions not to interfere with the fabric of history before doing exactly that.
- Can't get too close to a past version of itself because it might cause a temporal feedback loop.
- A geo-magnetic disturbance pulls the TARDIS off course by several centuries.
- The cloister bells signal events of an extreme nature, such as the the Flux's approach and the Doctor's upcoming regeneration.
- A protective air bubble surrounds the TARDIS so the Doctor and her companions can safely peer outside with the doors open into space or underwater. The Doctor and Yaz could even safely sit on top of the TARDIS while eating ice cream. The Doctor once opened a "vacuum corridor" small enough that only a Kaled mutant would be affected by a supernova without harming anyone else onboard (that is until the corridor started expanding so they had to hurry things up).
- The Doctor implies the TARDIS has an intruder alert that sounds similar to a doorbell.
- All TARDISes can blend in with their surroundings through a Chameleon Circuit. The Doctor's TARDIS is permanently stuck as a 1960's police box after its circuit malfunctioned long ago.
- Has a net and mattress catch the Doctor and Yaz when they fall inside.
- The Doctor reboots the TARDIS to expel a Weeping Angel from it.
- UNIT are unable to open it.
- Several entities have managed to breach the TARDIS in different ways:
- A Kerblam! teleport pulse enters the TARDIS without the Doctor's approval.
- A Kasaavin nearly breaches the TARDIS before the Doctor sends it into flight.
- The Eternal Zellin teleports inside the TARDIS.
- The Judoon not only transport themselves into the TARDIS but also transport her into a prison cell.
- A Weeping Angel enters the TARDIS and seizes control of it.
- A Dalek traitor managed to bypass the TARDIS firewall to communicate with the Doctor via hologram.
- The instability of time due to the Mouri's weakened condition causes adverse effects on the TARDIS such as navigational issues, leakage, webbing, and structural irregularities in its interior and on its exterior. All these issues were cleared up when the Doctor set the TARDIS to self-reset.
- The Ravagers psychically hijack the TARDIS and force it to land in the Temple of Atropos.
- The TARDIS' telepathic circuits can locate destinations of psychic and psychological relevance.
- Connects with an old wristwatch to pinpoint the time and place it broke.
- Gets the coordinates of several displaced planets from the Ux, reading their minds as well as harnessing their psychic abilities.
- Finds the source of psychic power that's been communicating with Graham in his dreams.
- The Doctor intends on using it to check her mind.
- Answers the call of the Doctor's sonic.
- Links Yaz's phone to the TARDIS to locate a woman whose number is on it.
- After the Recon Scout Dalek blocks her navigation system, the Doctor establishes a biofix on it using its DNA sample and forces it to communicate with her through a hologram (though the Dalek ends up blocking that too).
- Accesses CCTV, GPS and number plate tracking to keep up with the Recon Scout Dalek. When those methods fail, she switches to satellite monitoring which brings her to its eventual destination.
- Tracks the Recon Scout Dalek from the huge heat signature resulting from its massacre of an army.
- Locks onto Yaz's commdot signal to land at her location.
- Traces Dalek DNA to a facility in Japan.
- Locates Karvanista's spaceship.
- Locates Vinder through his phone signal.
- Locates the planet where a "child" was teleported to.
- Finds where the Master is keeping the Doctor through his transmission signal.
- Can't track the Sea Devils' vessel because they masked their route.
- Has a forcefield capable of blocking a shot from a temporal displacer. and a Dalek's blast. This shield can also be extended to protect a larger structure, like Wardenclyffe tower.
- Stands beside a supernova long enough for it to disintegrate a Dalek mutant.
- Gets pulled into the heart of the Flux - a massive space hurricane that can disintegrate entire planets in its path - which merely displaces the TARDIS to the past. The collision also disrupted the Flux and impeded its path of destruction.
- Withstands the destruction of a multi-story building without any visible damage.
- Ends up inbetween the jaws of a giant sea monster.
- The Master threatens to trap the TARDIS in a blackhole for eternity, implying it would not be destroyed by one.
- The Twelfth Doctor's explosive regeneration energy causes significant damage to the TARDIS interior, which forcibly ejects the Thirteenth Doctor in response.
- Contains a microphone that has connected with a Dalek out of its casing, Captain Jack's vortex manipulator and Vinder's emergency communicator.
- A holographic interface receives calls from other spaceships and places like Madagascar and UNIT HQ.
- Can view outside activity through a wall screen.
- Views Earth's outer atmosphere through a sort of periscope.
- Reveals that a sample of alien residue is from a Kaled mutant.
- Scans a sewer for non-terrestrial life.
- Deciphers an image containing Agent O's location and sets the coordinates.
- Scans a building for life signals to make sure its safe, but didn't register a hostile hazmat alien.
- Claims that a strand of hair doesn't exist, because it belongs to a creature brought to life from a woman's nightmares.
- Senses traces of altron energy in 1955 Alabama.
- Receives multiple distress signals and senses psychotrophic waves from the planet Ranskoor Av Kolos.
- Keeps an alarm ready for incidents happening on Earth.
- Detects the heat of an explosion caused by the Recon Scout Dalek and the alien itself flying away from it.
- Reports a Dalek absorbing the UK's power and shutting off everyone's internet connection.
- Receives alerts across three continents on Earth.
- Senses the Flux approaching which it signals with the Cloister Bell.
Remote Transportation
- Sends a group of displaced planets back to their original position by extending and splitting the TARDIS' dematerialization field.
- Teleports the Passenger-form in front of the TARDIS to absorb the rest of the Flux.
- Provides a visual aid for the Doctor's presentation on Rosa Parks.
- Has a custard cream dispenser.
- Synthesizes an antidote to Praxeus without the Doctor's supervision.
- Contains a recess where the Doctor stores her biomodule deep in the TARDIS.
- Rolls out a high-tech ladder that straightens itself so they can climb down onto a high speed space train.
- Argues with the Doctor.
- Decodes a Quantum Flux Lock that goes through a hundred billion combinations per millisecond.
- Tends to bring the Doctor not where she wants but where she's needed.
- Deciphers a psychic transmission of data.
- Contains a databank with historical records which the Doctor can get a destination from based on an input of citeria.
- Protests when the Master tries to fly it.
- The TARDIS exploding could mean the end of the world.
- Changes its outer and inner appearance after the Doctor's regeneration damaged it.
- Translates local languages for TARDIS inhabitants wherever or whenever they land.
- Has clap-activated lights.
- Houses a wardrobe hall in case Team TARDIS need to blend in.
- In a last ditch effort to stop the Flux, the Doctor sics a beam of Time Vortex energy at it to no avail.
- Uses her TARDIS's power to jump start the Master's TARDIS.
Sonic Screwdriver
The Doctor's version of a Swiss Army knife but without the knives or Swiss Army. The trusty Sonic Screwdriver functions as a scanner, door opener, machine operator and whatever ridiculous need arises.Scanning
Temporal-Spatial
- Scans the recall circuit of Tzim-Sha's transport device to map the distance it traveled the universe.
- Determines the year.
- Tells the Doctor that they have not entered another world, which is correct because they're in the zone between worlds.
- Reveals that an ornate box is not from Earth.
- Finds a worrying lack of spacial-temporal readings at the Temple of Atropos.
- Detects retro-temporal manifestations in a tunnel system caused by the Flux and determines that a particular door is a safe passage out.
- Tells the city, year and time of the place the TARDIS wasn't meant to land on.
- Confirms that an empty seafloor is the exact coordinates of a pirate ship they intended to land on.
- Reveals the function and biomechanic nature of the Gathering Coil.
- Confirms the Doctor's suspicion that Ilin is just a hologram being projected from far away.
- Reveals that armed guards are robots instead of organic lifeforms and what kind of robot they are.
- Shows the components of an alien dust as a combination of various, densely-compacted chemicals and billions of DNA fragments.
- Shows that an alien in human form is, in fact, not human.
- Explains the meaning of a Judoon alarm.
- Shows that Commander Gatt is Gallifreyan.
- Determines that an underwater structure of plastic trash is an alien construct, but not an alien colony.
- Shows the composition of bone powder.
- Reveals that a mist cloud is not natural mist.
- Shows the number of seconds before a mine detonates.
- Scans a decapitated Kerb!am man head then a computer to learn that the company's system directed all its control into that one robot.
- Scans a room to find teleportation hardware that's been building up huge amounts of power for one big transmat.
- Confirms that the Recon Scout Dalek's transmission didn't send.
- Discovers that an Orb of Thassor has been repurposed but can't determine what for.
- Learns that a spaceship is powered by organic fuel cells.
- Reveals the type of malfunction affecting an unstable spaceship.
- Finds the power source of a spaceship and that it's secured by a quantum fluctuation lock.
- Gets contradictory information from a super-dense container.
- Discovers flesh-eating microbes living in the waters of Desolation.
- Reveals Krasko's neural restrictor in his brain.
- Reveals microscopic bombs within sheets of bubble wraps.
- Scans the Lone Cyberman's compressed corpse to find the Death Particle still active within it.
Energy
- Finds traces of altron energy on Rosa Parks.
- Finds a psychic signal being emanated from a bunch of detached fingers towards an orb.
- Scans the Flux from a distance to find that it disobeys every law of time and space.
- Finds alien pulse fields in 17th century China.
- Gets nothing unusual from scanning the residue of hostile alien mud.
- Scans a girl suspected of witchcraft to find nothing unusual.
- Can reveal how somebody was killed and the type of weapon used.
- Gets a disorganized series of readings from scanning a ruin on Desolation.
- A dense compound overloads the sonic with too many inputs when she tries to scan it.
- Doesn't get a reading from a Thasaavin.
- Fails to decrypt the bioshield the Fugitive Doctor used to appear human.
- The cloaking technology used to hide Percy Shelley is so large it interferes with the sonic's readings while at Villa Diodati.
- The Cybermen use a jamming signal to prevent her from getting intel on them.
Activation
- Opens up a holographic projection of Tzim-Sha's next victim through his Gathering Coil.
- Activates her homemade transporter.
- Unlocks the Thijarian's infobank.
- Activates the Thijarians' transmat technology to leave their base and to send them away.
- Takes Twirly the Robot off sleep mode.
- Readies grenades to explode if she's threatened.
- Turns her neck communicator on and off.
- Turns on the Ux prisoners' neural balancers.
- Inadvertently beams herself and her team up into an alien temple.
- Triggers the Silver Lady to draw the Kasaavin's attention.
- Activates her Braxium Bouncer.
- Inadvertently reveals the power source of Zellin's ship.
- Unintentionally triggers Karvanista's trap.
- Turns on the Mouri's pedestal.
- Switches on her makeshift CCTV with an added slap.
- Plays a Sontaran transmission recorded on Bel's baby monitor.
- Turns on the Sea Devil's base to set sail.
- Activates her companions' nano-implants.
- Removes the DNA bombs from her friends and herself then puts them back in the Gathering Coil that implanted them in the first place, causing Tzim-Sha to detonate them on his own body when he absorbs the Coil's data.
- Stabilizes the TARDIS when it's stuck phasing in and out of time and space.
- Syncs the digital map on a handheld device to a building's computer.
- Accesses the Tsuranga's computer systems that patients are restricted from.
- Sets the timer of a bomb.
- Edits an electronic clipboard so her arrival to Kerblam appears scheduled.
- Swaps the settings on her and Graham's ankle braces designating their jobs.
- Hijacks a delivery bot's teleportation circuit and later does the same with the company's prototype robot.
- Modifies a piece of the Morax's tree so she can reactivate their prison.
- Summons the TARDIS using power from Tzim-Sha's technology.
- Accelerates the decoding process on the Vor website.
- Accesses the databanks on the Master's TARDIS.
- Accelerates the charge time of a teleporter from 1 minute to 10 seconds.
- Turns the Orb of Thassor into a communicator between her and the Skithra Queen.
- Transfers the readings from a blood sample onto a laptop.
- Merges three different phone calls into one so she can address all her companions at once.
- Projects a laptop's display onto a TV and controls it.
- Accesses the data from Dan's phone not only threw computer screens but also across a different century.
- Keeps a flashlight shining on Weeping Angel when they start draining its power.
- Reverses the polarity of the neutron flower of a brain scan device to stun some Weeping Angels.
- Disengages Karvanista's ship from the rest of the Lupari fleet.
- Sonics a Sea Devil's high-tech sword out of his hand.
- Steadies a space train.
- Removes the perception filter cloaking Krasko's gear.
- Temporarily jams a Dalek's gunstick. She attempted this a second time, but it failed because the Daleks adapted.
- Deactivates the TARDIS' shield.
- Turns off the alarm sensors on Barton's plane.
- Removes the Master's perception filter making him appear Aryan to the Nazis.
- Partially shuts down Karvinsta's ship and deactivates his weapon then reactivates the former.
- Remotely damages a building's circuit box to kill the lights.
- Removes the consciousness shield disguising the Qurunx as a human child.
- Fails to prevent a sonic mine from detonating.
- Seemingly unable to stop the Kerblam man from assaulting Charlie.
- Fails to stop a hostile Sat Nav.
- The Master sonic-proofed his bomb to keep her from disabling it.
- Tracks the source of altron energy over miles.
- Tracks the Thijarians after they teleported away and where their base is.
- Follows an unusual energy reading that leads her to Nikola Tesla.
- Points to the Fugitive Doctor's buried TARDIS when scanned cover a large area.
- Detects two nearby Cybershuttles landing in the area.
- Finds traces of non-terrestrial weapon dispersals at Dan's flat.
- Senses the Lupari fleet approaching.
- Reacts to nearby psychic readings and leads her to them.
- Detects a temporal disturbance on another floor.
- Detects a second Dalek in the building.
- Manipulates doors from the past, present and future.
- Opens a "big lock door".
- Turns the wheel of a hatch.
- Opens and closes electronic sliding doors.
- Unlocks a row of padlocks.
- Fries an electronic keypad to access a restricted section.
- Unlocks a filing cabinet.
- Releases Twirly from his exhibit.
- Unbolts a door.
- Opens the doors of an airplane hangar.
- Opens and closes an airplane's cargo hatch.
- Forces an auto-locked door open.
- Unlocks an electronic cage and locks it when the Alpha Dreg is contained.
- Locks a hatch door.
- Frees herself from futuristic cuffs.
- Opens up a Cyberfighter from a distance.
- Opens an unmanned TARDIS.
- Unshackles a Sontaran.
- Opens the hatch on a train.
- Unties a piece of rope.
- Freezes the mirror gateway to the Anti-zone during a movement, seals it to stop its inhabitants from pursuing them further, opens it up again by reversing the polarity of the neutron flow and finally blocks it for good by smashing the mirror.
- Lowers a glass cage on a Kasaavin.
- Drops a grate on a Skithra.
- Puppeteers Zellin's fingers to use them against him and Rakaya.
- Removes a circuit panel.
- Incapacitates the Grand Serpent.
- Stabilizes her earring when its pulled by a strong geomagnetic force.
- Doesn't affect the Remnants.
- Hides the notes she wrote in marker pen and reveals it when the coast is clear.
- Reveals the mechanical inner workings of an alien tree.
- Reveals an invisible forcefield.
- Capable of automatic self-repair, a feature which surprised even the Doctor.
- Audio records the Master's planned double-crossing of the Thasaavins.
- Sounds an alarm that can be heard over great distances.
- Doubles as a flashlight.
- Messes with her and some humans' life signals the Daleks use to track them in order to mislead them.
2023.06.03 16:48 Proletlariet Thirteenth Doctor
Respect the Doctor
🎵"Bit of adrenaline, dash of outrage, and a hint of panic knitted my brain back together. I know exactly who I am. I'm the Doctor. Sorting out fair play across the universe. Now please. Get off this planet while you still have a choice."
So you've come to see my respect thread? mmmm I love respect threads. In fact, I invented them right after 4 slice toasters. So... where was I? Oh, that's right. Me. Doctor, the Doctor. I was born on this little planet on the Constellation of Kasterborous... or was I? Things get a bit complicated there... where I came from or who I am. I've been lots of people, some of them I don't even remember. The person reading this might be the Doctor too (?)... Anyway, back on point. The person who I am now is an easy-going travelehigh-speed engineebiscuit-lover. Me and my fam explore the universe in muh good old TARDIS, righting wrongs and chilling like there's no tomorrow (which is a possibility wink-wink). I'm happy to be your bezzie mate if you play nicely, but if not --- well, you'll get an idea if you keep reading. (scronch)Source Key
Hover over a feat to view its source.- Doctor Who (2005) series # episode # = S#E#
- Twice Upon A Time = TUAT
- Resolution = R
- Revolution of the Daleks = RotD
- Eve of the Daleks = EotD
- Legend of the Sea Devils = LotSD
- The Power of the Doctor = PotD
Intelligence
Technological AptitudeUnderstanding Technology
- Assures the "safe" crash-landing of a spaceship.
- Identifies the futuristic technology used by Krasko as well as their limitations.
- Identifies the various technology stolen by the Skithra.
- Makes correct conclusions about a spacecraft beyond even her level of technology and puts the techno jargon involved into understable terms.
- Identifies the technology at the Sea Devils' base and how it keeps the place airtight under the sea.
- Works the Tsuranga's touchscreen controls.
- Uses the Thijarians' own transmat locks to keep them out of Umbreen's farm.
- Uses Kerb!am's prototype robot to hack into the system and prevent an act of terrorism.
- Uses an alien space shuttle to distribute the antidote to Praxeus all over Earth.
- Operates a ship's computer using harp controls.
- Pilots a cyberfighter which uses an unothrodox control scheme.
- Uses a 1960's brain scan device to stun some Weeping Angels.
- Pilots a Lupari ship.
- Uses the Master's TARDIS to bring his cyber-conversion planet to 2022 and thwart his plan to erupt all of Earth's volcanos by converting the lava into steel.
- Crafts her own sonic screwdriver out of Stenza technology and spoons.
- Builds a transport pod out of various electronics to send her to the TARDIS, only to end up sending her companions and herself into outer space because the TARDIS had relocated to a planet out of orbit.
- Builds an ionic membrane from scratch and claims she could make a human out of crayons and half a can of spam.
- Rigs up a cloaking bypass in a minute to access to the Orb of Thassor's data.
- Helps Nikola Tesla finish Wardenclyffe Tower so they could use it to banish the Skithra from Earth.
- Rigs up a CCTV out of a 1960's television and some odds and ends found in her pockets.
- Reboots Ryan's phone into a tracking device.
- Reprograms the Master's Kasaarvin-summoning device to shut down when it detects the Kasaarvin.
- Thwarts the Sea Devils by rigging their power core to implode.
- Stuns the Gathering Coil with a loose cable upon first seeing it then stuns it again later by overloading its sockets with a more elaborate setup.
- Deactivates a group of self-rebooting sniperbots using an EMP found inside of the destroyed bots.
- Disables the security system inside Karvanista's ship using the Hopper virus.
- Teaches Victorian soldiers to sabotage the Sontarans' life support systems.
- Deactivates a space train's electromagnets to make a group of CyberMasters float away.
- Tunes up the TARDIS' wiring in her spare time.
- Figures out how to repair a transport pod by mutating a necessary fuel source.
- Fixes Vinder's ship in a hurry.
- Decrypts an obscure alien code from an interdimensional species.
- Hacks the guest list of Daniel Barton's party to get invites.
- Types up a debug script in an alien dialect to neutralize the Hopper virus.
- Recognizes that a tent is holographic upon first glance.
- Recognizes that a building's life support systems have been disabled from the noises heard.
- Can tell what setting Krasko's temporal displacer is on from behind her back.
- Identifies Krasko as a former prisoner of the Stormcage Containment Facility from a wrist tattoo.
- Sees the connection between a series of spider-related incidents occuring all over Sheffield.
- Realizes that the hospital she's being treated at is a spaceship from the vibrations present. Though her wooziness causes her to take a while to figure this out.
- Reaches multiple conclusions about the mud zombies from observing one.
- Notices that something is up with a random house seen from afar.
- Notices that there's another person present with Erik when he claims otherwise.
- Roughly guesses the century she's been transported to while recovering from a daze.
- Points out that a "linen cupboard" is not really a linen cupbard.
- Discovers a secret tunnel that the current homeowner was not aware of.
- Exposes Tzim-Sha as a cheat.
- Figures out why Krasko uses non-hostile means to prevent the Montgomery bus boycott.
- Realizes what the P'ting's intention is by hijacking Tsuranga.
- Figures out that Becka Savage is infected with an alien creature.
- Discovers that a ducking stool is a piece of alien technology.
- Realizes that the dimension she entered is a Solitract by remembering a bedtime story from childhood.
- Realizes that the Recon Dalek mutant is revived by ultraviolet light and recalls this fact when it's used again to send a bunch of them into their casings.
- Forces the Master to give up his ruse when she notices a discrepancy between his words and the information she read about the man he's impersonating.
- Works out the Kasaavin's grand scheme.
- Learns about the Dreg's capabilities from the measures taken against them.
- Discovers the key to destroying the CyberMasters from something uttered by the Lone Cyberman.
- Deduces that they have ended up in the middle of the Crimean War.
- Gets interrogated by the Grand Serpent and manages to learn more about him than he does about her.
- Figures out the Sontaran's strategy against the Daleks and Cybermen.
- Deduces what the Sea Devils' ultimate goal is.
- Gives Ryan some moral support to overcome his dyspraxia.
- Gets information from Rosa Parks by pretending to be a market researcher.
- Negotiates with an untrustworthy alien.
- Encourages her companions to reject the Solitract's allure before convincing the Solitract itself to release her.
- Coaxes Paltraki into trusting her after his mind was disturbed by psychotropic waves.
- Uses Noor Inayat Khan to frame the Master as a double agent to the Nazis.
- Forces the Alpha Dreg to let her and Bella go using its dependency on carbon dioxide.
- Tricks the Skithra Queen into holding a teleportation device.
- Posing as an imperial regulator, she negotiates with a Judoon captain using both real and made-up legal jargon.
- Helps Tahira conquer her fear so she can control her nightmare monster.
- Defeats the Death Squad Daleks by luring them into what appears to be her TARDIS, only to reveal that it's another TARDIS which she has rigged to self-destruct with them inside.
- Persuades an Ood to go against his superior's wishes and help her.
- Uses a Sontaran commander's obsession with human snacks to get two allies onto the Sontaran ship.
- Lures a Sea Devil into a trap.
- Fails to convince King James that she's not a witch, but likely sows enough doubt in his mind to prematurely end her trial.
- Destroys the Remnants by igniting a cigar in a field of acetylene.
- Isolates a giant spider using vinegar and garlic.
- Alleges she used spider web to stop a plane in flight with Amelia Earheart.
- Contains a swarm of giant spiders by luring them into a panic room using the vibrations of loud music.
- Kills two birds with one stone by feeding the P'ting the Tsuranga's bomb, thereby sating its hunger for energy and containing the explosion.
- Puts together a chemistry set on a Punjabi farm in the 1940's to analyze a sample her sonic couldn't.
- Uses peanut butter as a mechanical lubricant.
- Uses a car's rear-view mirror to reflect a deadly laser.
- Forms a circle of fire out of the chemicals in Thomas Edison's factory.
- Diagnoses General Cicero with Pilot's Heart.
- Can identify the exact cause of death of victims of alien attacks through a quick examination.
- Treats Ryan for the Hopper virus the moment he contracts it.
- Leads a team to develop a cure for Praxeus.
- Can't help Graham with his cancer worries because of... um, social awkwardness(?).
- Places instructions onto Barton's plane in the past to help her companions pilot it in the present when it almost crashes. Her prediction of their responses is so accurate it makes the recording she left resemble a live conversation.
- Gets rid of the Defense Drone Daleks by summoning the Death Squad Daleks to wipe them out, knowing they would prioritize eradicating "impure" Daleks over harming humans.
- Quickly devises a formation for the Lupari ships to successfully defend Earth from the Flux.
- Hijacks the Sontarans' plot to eliminate the Daleks and the Cybermen using the Flux to get rid of all three forces at once.
- Comes up with a plan to break a time loop and dispose of the Daleks pursuing them at the same time.
- Uses Venusian Aikido to temporarily paralyze or render humanoids unconscious.
- Translates an alien language without the TARDIS.
- Claims she is a doctor of many things.
- Thanks to Harry Houdini, she single-handedly escapes when chained to a ducking stool and submerged in cold water.
- Impractically summons her sonic screwdriver from her coat pocket into her hand with both arms tied.
- Tails a Sontaran without being spotted.
- Thinks at such a fast rate her surroundings appear slowed while inner-monologuing.
- Sword-fights handedly with a Sea Devil.
Mental Abilities
Mental Resistance & Willpower- Quickly overcomes of the nightmare-inducing power of Zellin.
- Identifies a perception filter and instructs a group of humans to move past it.
- Breaks out of the Matrix by overloading it with the memories (stock footage) of her past lives.
- Communicates with the Master over a long distance.
- Looks into a Dreg's mind to learn their origin.
- Shows Commander Gatt the future of Gallifrey.
- Looks into Percy Shelley's mind so she can learn something his mental state prevents him from telling her.
- Attempts to locate the Master by linking with his mind, however he senses this and misleads her in response.
- Enters Claire's mental space to communicate with the Weeping Angel inhabiting her mind.
- After being split thrice, the three Doctors network with each other.
- Wipes Noor Inayat Khan's and Ada Lovelace's memories of her.
- Performs an "Old Time Lord Trick" on Percy Shelley to extract the Cyberium from him; mentally simulating his death to trick the Cyberium into leaving its host.
- Receives the Thijarians' telepathic message, though it is painful for her.
- Senses the Kasaavin approaching even though the sonic can't detect them.
- Gets a vibe of unrelenting evil in Villa Diodati.
- Sees and feels the universe breaking down from the Flux.
- Finds her biomodule from hearing it reach out to her - a noise that an Ood (a telepathic being) could not hear.
- Feels that the time loop they're trapped in is shortening with each loop.
- Like all Time Lords, the secret of the Timeless Child hides deep in her memories.
- When made to relive a past event as the Fugitive Doctor, she converses with her past self after seeing the physical difference in the mirror.
- After the Master hijacks her regenerations, the Doctor's mind enters a subconscious plane where she is met by manifestations of her past incarnations. They inform her that even though her body has changed, the forced regeneration has not yet passed its threshold and can still be reversed.
Physical Attributes
Strength- Frees an elderly woman chained to a ducking stool then drags her out of the water.
- Pushes one end of a ducking stool from a lake.
- Keeps a Skithran from busting through a door.
- Keeps both her companions from drifting away in space.
- Leaps from one crane to another.
- Strategically avoids being shot by robot drones as she flees the area.
- Avoids Dalek blasts at point-blank range and rolls into cover.
- Draws that same Dalek's fire so her companions can close in on it.
- Ducks under a close-range laser blast.
- Sidesteps a shot from a Silurian blaster.
- Ducks under a trio of swarming Cyberdrones.
- Flips herself upside-down to right-side up onto a gravity bar, utilizing tricks she learnt at a high-gravity workshop.
- Moves fast enough to pull her companions and herself into the center of the Time Force before Swarm could vaporize Yaz.
- Dodges lasers from behind the moment she enters the area.
- Ducks under sudden Dalek blasts from behind.
- Does a front-flip while avoiding a Sea Devil's sword swipes.
- Steps away from the energy blast of a CyberMaster that just transmatted in.
- Avoids blasts from multiple CyberMasters as she flees into the TARDIS.
- Dodges a close-range Dalek blast.
- Remains in good spirits when an electric shock violently shoves her backwards (thought this likely due to her post-regeneration rush).
- Recovers from the vacuum of space faster than her human companions.
- Tries to hold back an explosion big enough to take out an airplane's cockpit with only its door to shield her.
- Travels in warp drive without adverse effects.
- Her biology can withstand the Time Force that would be overwhelming for humans, allowing her to briefly jump into Dan and Yaz's timestreams. However, the pressure would eventually kill her.
- Feels the DNA bombs in her collarbone that none of her companions notice.
- Determines that they've landed in Norway by tasting the grass.
- Discovers an alpaca farm 25 miles away by tasting the soil.
- Determines the century a skeleton originates from by tasting its boney powder.
- Tastes the residue of a stun cube used by the Lupari.
- Incorrectly deduces the decade from sniffing a man's coat, noting he must have owned it for a while.
Time Lords can survive fatal injuries through the process of regeneration whereupon every cell in their body is rewritten, radically transforming their appearance and personality. This regeneration produced some interesting changes...
- This ability is restricted to 12 regenerations across 13 incarnations. Due to the Doctor gaining a second regeneration cycle and the whole Timeless Children revelation, this limit might no longer be in play.
- Excess regeneration energy affords a Time Lord a degree of invulnerability within the first few hours of their regeneration. The newly-regenerated Thirteenth Doctor fell from her airbourne TARDIS in the stratosphere down to a nearby train, crashing through its roof and getting up completely fine.
- Side-effects following regeneraiton include memory loss, fainting and slowed movement.
- The Master uses a machine to force her to regenerate into him so he could go around the universe causing destruction in the Doctor's name. This process was reversed shortly after using the regeneration energy from his CyberMasters.
- Regeneration can be temporarily delayed without suffering negative effects, which the Thirteenth Doctor did for a little while to eat ice cream.
- The Thirteenth Doctor's regeneration into the Fourteenth Doctor was unique from past regenerations in two respects; firstly being that this form strongely resembled her Tenth incarnation instead of a totally new body and secondly in that it also changed the Doctor's clothing (the only other time this happened was the First Doctor's regeneration into the Second).
- Has two hearts and therefore two pulses.
- Has a much longer lifespan than humans. In this body, she spent several decades imprisoned without visibly aging.
- The Cyberium chooses her as a host over the Lone Cyberman.
Equipment
Get the full rundown of the TARDIS and Sonic Screwdriver in the comments
Psychic PaperThe psychic paper is a blank piece of paper that telepathically projects the Doctor's thoughts into the eyes of whom she presents it to.
- Poses as a crisis investigator to get answers from Jack Robertson.
- Gains employment at Kerb!am by presenting fake references.
- Seizes control of a witch hunt by posing as a Witchfinder General.
- Gain access to Tranquility Spa's command centre by posing as a Pan-Galactic Standards and Practices officer with several areas of expertise under her belt.
- Claims to be part of the Institute of Psychic Investigation to intervene in Professor Jericho's psychic experiments.
- Claims to be members of the local council when investigating a storage facility.
- Gives Ryan and Graham their own psychic papers so they can continue investigating strange goings-ons without her.
- Fails to pass her off as the Witchfinder General to King James due to his sexism so she is instead designated the Witchfinder's Assistant.
- Doesn't work when wet.
- Makes her companions scour a junk planet for spare part using modified metal detectors.
- Gains a comm dot at Tsuranga which she and her companions use on another occasion.
- Uses neural balancers so she and her companions can enter the planet Ranskoor Av Kolos without succumbing to its psychotrophic waves. She later uses them to block the Ux's psychic signal.
- Prepares communicators, codebreakers, trackers, grenades and a remote-detonated bomb during their visit of Ranskoor Av Kolos.
- Gives a woman some medicine to help her recover from Dalek possession.
- Wears an O2 cannister when forced to brave Orphan 55's hostile environment.
- Uses a Braxium Bouncer Mk III to teleport herself, Yaz and Nikola Tesla out of the Skithra's spaceship and then later to send the Skithra Queen back inside the ship.
- Uses a device to take an instant blood sample from a Praxeus patient.
- Carries a flip phone (presumably boosted by the sonic) to contact her companions across time and space.
- In their fight against the Cyberman, she equips her companions with technology that unsuppress the Cybermen's emotions, project gold particles which Cybermen are allergic to and generate forcefields.
- Attacks the Lone Cyberman with a grenade.
- Owns a pair of voice-activated handcuffs, but they aren't very responsive as they were likely set up by a past incarnation.
- Hands Vinder a communicator with a direct line to the TARDIS.
- Owns at few copies of the orange spacesuit she acquired in her Tenth incarnation.
- Places a small device on a Dalek traitor's casing to extract the information about its race's plans.
- Leaves Yaz a device which projects a recorded adaptive hologram of the Doctor to give her guidance after two weeks of no contact. The hologram was later upgraded into a fully-interactive AI made from the Doctor's data collected over thousands of years which only activates during the gravest of emergencies. The Doctor imprinted this AI onto Yaz, Tegan and Ace via sonically-triggered nano-implants resembling static electricity.
- This hologram can perceive its surroundings through the ocular nerves of the Doctor's companions.
- The hologram is predictably intangible so lasers harmlessly pass through it. The CyberMasters were also unable to recognize it as a hologram.
- The hologram's interface will inadvertently change according to the emotional memory of who it's addressing in the moment, causing it to resemble past Doctors to past companions like the Fifth to Tegan Jovanka and the Seventh to Ace. It also willingly assumed the form of the Fugitive Doctor to fool the Master even though her history is shrouded in mystery.
- Lends Graham a pair of sunglasses she got from either Audrey Hepburn or Pythagoras.
- Writes with a special marker pen that can be concealed by the sonic.
- Uses a stethoscope to auscultate people and places.
- Uses chalk to write up a message for her companions without letting a blind girl know.
- Unravels some string so they don't get lost in the Anti-zone.
- Gives Ryan a ginger humbug to help him recover from motion sickness.
- Hits a Sontaran's probic vent with a slingshot.
Miscellaneous
- Opposes the use of firearms, even against robots and mutant spiders, but is fine with using explosives to take out structures.
- Has Elvis' phone number.
- Strongly implied that she's the mysterious street artist Banksy.
- Featured in a whole chapter or volume in the Book of Celebrants.
- Officiated Albert Einstein's wedding and Yaz's grandmother's first wedding.
- Claims to have invented wellies.
- Keeps companions around to show off.
- Lord Byron fancied her.
- Was arrested and imprisoned by the Judoon for at least seven thousand offenses. In that time, she recited Harry Potter to entertain herself which really shows how out of the loop she was with human affairs.
- The very notion of meeting the Doctor is enough to convince a stubborn Sontaran to agree to her terms.
- Bit narcissistic.
"She was the universe."
2023.06.03 16:21 Whole-View-7144 15 things I truly hope DMZ change in season 4
I have play DMZ since season 1. There are plenty of things that I think are very unfair, frustrating or stupid. Below are some ideas that I think can improve the gameplay and I really hope they can change it in season 4.
submitted by Whole-View-7144 to DMZ [link] [comments]
- Plead reworks. Players can plead only when either 1. team eliminated, or 2. all team mates are very far from you, or 3. you stay dead for more than 5 minutes. Also, no instant pick up. (to encourage team loyalty, prevent people abusing plead)
- You must equip a weapon before entering building 21
- Change the loot and pick up to different buttons. Also, add an "use" button before using kill streak. (It is too easy to click the kill streak button accidently in console).
- Increase marksman rifle and melee weapons damage to AI. Increase smg ammo reserve.
- Disable chat before loading into the game
- Loading screen shows teammates mission and active duty
- Increase out of boundary time limit
- Secure Intel contract shows all bosses location
- Make 3-plate vest harder to barter (comm vest is too easy to make). Also, add heavy chopper fuel to the barter system.
- Tac-map icon filter (e.g. only show helo, contract, etc)
- Allow operators use hand gun when being down
- Stronghold guards drop riot shield. Juggernaut drops mini gun
- Contract cannot be cancelled. (Reason: the cargo delivery contract gives you $18000 LTV for free)
- Infil Koschei complex directly
- Remove all those p2w bundles
2023.06.03 12:44 dushyantvarma1 TRAVEL PHOTOGRAPHY: CAPTURING MEMORIES AND MOMENTS ON ROAD DUSHYANT VARMA SHILLONG
 | submitted by dushyantvarma1 to u/dushyantvarma1 [link] [comments] https://preview.redd.it/zl9eisic8s3b1.jpg?width=1024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0d5c67069779b506c782898f8c3d4ede8c18ddc0 Traveling is an exhilarating adventure that allows us to explore new places, experience different cultures, and create lasting memories. And there's no better way to preserve those memories than through the art of travel photography. In this blog post, we will delve into the captivating world of travel photography and how it enables us to capture the essence of our journeys. Along the way, we'll also discover the inspiring work of Dushyant Varma Maharani Bagh, a talented travel photographer who has mastered the art of capturing unforgettable moments on the road. The Power of Travel Photography Travel photography is more than just capturing pretty pictures; it is a means of storytelling, a way to transport viewers to the places we have visited and allow them to experience the emotions and beauty we encountered along the way. Dushyant Varma Maharani Bagh, an accomplished travel photographer, understands the power of photography in preserving memories and capturing the soul of a destination. The Journey Begins: Dushyant Varma's Adventures Let's embark on a visual journey through the lens of Dushyant Varma, whose exceptional photography has taken him to breathtaking locations worldwide. From vibrant cityscapes to serene landscapes, Dushyant's portfolio is a testament to his keen eye for detail, composition, and the ability to capture the essence of a place. Mastering the Art of Composition One of the key elements of travel photography is composition. Dushyant Varma's photographs exhibit his mastery of framing and composing his shots to create visually striking images. Whether it's using the rule of thirds, leading lines, or incorporating a unique perspective, Dushyant's photographs showcase his ability to create captivating compositions that draw viewers into the scene. Embracing Natural Light Lighting is a crucial aspect of photography, and Dushyant Varma Southern Avenue skillfully uses natural light to enhance the mood and atmosphere of his images. Whether it's the soft golden glow of sunrise, the dramatic shadows during sunset, or the gentle light filtering through a forest, Dushyant understands how to harness the power of light to create stunning visuals. Capturing Authentic Moments Travel photography is not just about capturing landscapes and iconic landmarks; it's also about documenting authentic moments and the people we encounter on our journeys. Dushyant Varma Southern Avenue's photographs often feature candid shots that showcase the local culture, traditions and the human element of travel. These images add depth and storytelling to his portfolio, giving viewers a glimpse into the lives of the people he has encountered along the way. Telling Stories through Travel Photography Each travel photograph has a story to tell. It could be a photo of a bustling street market, a serene mountain landscape, or a close-up of a person's face reflecting a unique emotion. Dushyant Varma Shillong's photography encapsulates the stories of the places he has visited, allowing viewers to connect with the destinations and experience the moments captured in his images. Preserving Memories for a Lifetime Travel photography serves as a visual diary to preserve memories and share them with others. Dushyant Varma Shillong's work exemplifies the power of photography in capturing fleeting moments and transforming them into timeless memories. By documenting our travel experiences through photography, we can revisit those cherished memories and inspire others to embark on their own adventures. The Importance of Patience and Timing Travel photography often requires patience and the ability to wait for the perfect moment. Whether it's capturing a stunning sunset, waiting for the right subject to enter the frame, or patiently observing the scene to capture candid moments, timing is key. Dushyant Varma Maharani Bagh's work showcases his patience and dedication to capturing those decisive moments that make his photographs truly extraordinary. Experimenting with Different Techniques Travel photography offers endless opportunities for experimentation. Don't be afraid to try different techniques such as long exposure, panning, or using filters to add creative effects to your images. Dushyant Varma Maharani Bagh's portfolio demonstrates his willingness to push boundaries and experiment with various techniques to bring a unique perspective to his travel photographs. The Role of Post-Processing Post-processing plays a significant role in travel photography, allowing photographers to enhance the mood, colors, and overall impact of their images. However, it's essential to maintain a balance and avoid excessive editing that can detract from the authenticity of the scene. Dushyant Varma Southern Avenue's photography showcases his skillful use of post-processing techniques to bring out the best in his images while preserving the integrity of the original scene. Conclusion Travel photography is a captivating art form that enables us to capture the beauty, emotions, and essence of our journeys. Through the lens of Dushyant Varma Shillong, we have explored the world of travel photography, witnessing the breathtaking landscapes, vibrant cultures, and authentic moments he has captured. As you embark on your own travel adventures, remember to take your camera along, open your eyes to the wonders around you, and let the magic of travel photography preserve your cherished memories for a lifetime. |
2023.06.03 10:51 Kami1996 The Nine Hells: Nessus
I literally sit beneath eight tiers of scheming ambitious entities that represent primal law suffused with evil. The path from this realm leads to an infinite pit of chaos and evil. Now, tell me again how you and your ilk are the victims in this eternal struggle. - Asmodeus (Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes)
The plane of Nessus is incredibly unique compared to the other planes of the Nine Hells. This plane floats in a swirling crimson void that encompasses them from all directions. The plane itself is flat in its surface, devoid of trees or changes in elevation. The desolate plane, unlike any other plane of Baator, is finite in its size. It stretches 2,500 miles from east to west and 1,100 miles from north to south. The flatness of the plane leaves no place for any creature to hide.
A system of crisscrossing gorge and canyons marks the only true changes in elevation in the plane. In these gorges, canyons, and the network of caves that connect them, live the billions of devils of Nessus. These structures have an infinite amount of space even given the finite nature of the plane. These gorges and canyons often cross, forming towering plateaus.
The canyons and gorges are each distinct and travel to specific locations. However, they all look exactly alike. More importantly, most of these canyons are missing from most maps of the plane. A few maps that were drawn by suicidal or brave adventurers can be found but tend to be extremely pricey. A map of a square mile section of Nessus can easily cost as much as a small castle.
A few of these canyons have bridges that span them. These few bridges are heavily guarded by Asmodeus's elite guards and a host of traps. Rare unguarded bridges are death traps that will inevitably break and send any crosser to their death. The shallowest canyon is 200 feet deep, and the remaining canyons and gorges are usually deeper. Devils in Nessus who cannot fly are encouraged to stick close to the caves and crevasses. In emergency situations, the devils must climb the walls using some sparse handholds or frayed ropes. It is not uncommon for devils to fall to their deaths as a result.
Directions in Baator are unlike the directions of the Material Plane. The strange nature of these planes makes the standard compass rose useless. Most Archdukes simply established the standard compass as a means of travel and mapping for their own planes, arbitrarily assigning a point as north. Asmodeus however, decrees that his own castle should be the northern most point despite its central location on the plane. The strange decree further complicates maps of Nessus making navigating the plane even harder.
When the Gods discovered that Asmodeus and his devils were luring mortals into disobedience and corruption, they once again put Asmodeus on trial. When the trial proved useless and Asmodeus was acquitted of the charges, the Gods were furious. They threw the devil back to Baator, sending him hurling from the tip of Celestia.
When Asmodeus crashed into Baator, the force of the impact tore a stretch of the initial plane and killed many of the plane's original inhabitants and mutilated many of the others who were not powerful enough to withstand the impact. As the devil continued to fall with his stretch of the original Baatorian plane, the devil carved new planes. Eight new planes formed before the devil and the plane he had rent from the original stopped falling. Asmodeus continued to fall deep into the plane till he came to rest under a massive pile of rubble, bleeding and badly hurt, in the deepest part of Nessus, which came to be known as the Pit.
When the devil eventually recovered, he made this deepest, finite plane his home as a reminder of his fall. From Nessus, the Arch-Devil slowly retook control of the remainder of Baator and resumed his lawful duties.
The creation of the plane of Nessus was not known to the mortal races for millennium. Asmodeus is a jealous guard of his plane and entrance to Nessus requires a letter of permission from the Arch-Devil himself. The first documentation of the plane of Nessus for the Prime Material Plane comes from the philosopher, Philogestes. Philogestes sold his own soul to Asmodeus for the opportunity to document information about Baator. Though, he was given permission to observe and record details about the plane of Nessus, Philogestes could not detail everything. Much of Nessus remains a mystery to those who dwell on the Material Plane.
For those who have not received a personal invitation, the only way to enter the plane would be through the plane prior to it, Cania. From Cania, adventurers could sail along the River Styx into Nessus. This path is extremely perilous. For starters, the river is incredibly difficult to navigate. Directions in the Nine Hells are confusing. It is just as likely that sailing along the river could lead to Maladomini. Additionally, the river’s currents are unpredictable, forming whirlpools, eddies, and undertows that can challenge even the most experienced sailors. Moreover, the Styx is guarded by roaming bands of devils as well as undead which are drawn to any sources of life. The river is also known to create illusions and mirages which can mislead travelers. It would be advisable to hire a devil in Cania to act as a guide on the waters.
Asmodeus, a tall, red-skinned devil, with dark horns and elegant clothing is the Lord of Nessus. Known as the Dark One, the Lord of Lies, and the Prince of Evil, Asmodeus is the Arch-Devil of Baator. He rules the plane with an iron fist of law and conducts himself in a soft-spoken, articulate, and ruthlessly logically. Those who look closely at the Arch-Devil will notice that though the devil holds himself with poise and elegance, he is covered in injuries that have not healed. These injuries were sustained by Asmodeus when he was thrown from Celestia. Asmodeus carries himself in public as though the injuries no longer affect him, however they still hurt tremendously, and Asmodeus focuses much of his energy on recovering from the injuries.
Asmodeus is the undisputed master of Baator and exercises complete control over the plane. The Arch-Devil can alter any of the planes at will and can also alter the forms of any of the other Archdukes of Baator. In some cases, he can also kill the others, which causes some of the Archdukes to fear him greatly. With his dominance over Baator, Asmodeus spends much of his time focused on the conquest of other planes, especially the Prime Material Plane and Celestia. Asmodeus receives the energy from any soul collected by any devil or Duke of Baator. For the time being, He spends his time using the energy to heal his own wounds. Once his wounds have healed, Asmodeus intends to use the collected Divine Energy to forge a temporary truce with the Demons and use the truce to destroy the forces of Good once and for all.
Asmodeus is a schemer in every sense. The devil is a smooth talker who only engages with non-devils to corrupt them. One example of such a corruption is the corruption of Zariel, a celestial, into the once Archduke of Avernus. Asmodeus is one of the few devils to never father any Cambion, considering himself far superior to any such creature. A few tieflings also receive the blessing of Asmodeus. These tieflings are far more intelligent than any other and are given a superior mastery over fire. These tieflings are resistant to flames from any creature except those commanded directly by Asmodeus.
In addition to his unsurpassed intellect and charm, Asmodeus is an unmatched combatant, well-versed in both magic and weapon-craft. Asmodeus earned his fame when prior to the creation of Baator, the then-angel was ambushed by a demon invasion without his troops. The Gods sent an army of angels to defend the invasion, believing Asmodeus to have been overwhelmed. The angels arrived too late, however. Instead of finding an army of demons, the angels found that Asmodeus kept the invasion at bay and even pushed the defense into an offense into the Abyss, bolstered by their reinforcement. Though the Archdevil has not fought at the front lines of the Blood Wars, his combat prowess has not decreased.
Once a year, the Arch-Devil holds a feast at his palace in Nessus's Pit, Malsheem. To this feast, the Arch-Devil invites the other Archdukes, devils who have earned a seat of honor, and a few select mortals that have earned his respect or interest (for better or worse). The feast is an enormous affair, and the only time of the year when the pathway to the palace becomes available for creatures other than the Dukes of Nessus to traverse, though it is still heavily guarded to prevent intruders from reaching the palace. The purpose of the Feast is to serve to touch base with the dukes to ensure that Asmodeus's plans are going according to plan, to ensure Hell's superiority in the Blood War, reward devils who have performed exceptionally enough to gain the Lord of the Nine's attention, and to contract mortals who may be useful to himself. These feast feature extravagant performances, a plethora of delicious food and drink, and as much vice as any being could desire.
Adramalech is the right-hand of Asmodeus and serves as the Arch-Devil’s chancellor. His preferred form is that of an elderly human man with a gray beard. His eyes change color to reflect his mood, green when he’s happy and orange when upset and black all other times. In this form, the only features to identify him as a devil are two small, crimson horns that protrude from his head and a single forked tail. He prefers to dress in hues of green and purple.
This devil is tasked with maintaining all records regarding the Nine Hells. In this role, he constantly updates the number of souls collected, the various contracts that exist between devils and mortals, and presides over the court of Devils which settle disputes regarding contracts. Adramalech also tracks every torment caused to devils and the names and locations of any devils not in the Nine Hells. Somehow, despite this busy schedule, Adramalech also finds time to maintain an extensive spy network among the pit fiends which collect information. Adramalech stores this information and the true names of all devils in a tome he calls “The Infernal Record” which is colloquially known to mortals as the “Book of Fire”. Adramalech finds stress relief by torturing the souls of mortals in an extensive dungeon network which lies below Fortress Nessus. He especially despises Humans and Elves and takes special joy in causing them pain.
Adramalech has full authority to give orders to devils. This power was given to Adramalech because he is the only devil in the Nine Hells who shows no desire to usurp the Asmodeus. As a notably weak devil, Adramalech understands that even if he were to somehow become an Arch-Duke or Arch-Devil he would be easily overthrown. Instead, he enjoys the power and control he wields over the Nine Hells from the safety of Asmodeus’s right hand. Adramalech enjoys a small cult of followers in the Prime Material Plane who kidnap and sacrifice human and elf children to him. Because Adramalech is so physically weak, he is constantly guarded by a legion of Pit Fiends.
Phongor is the left-hand of Asmodeus and a rival of Adramalech. This devil usually resembles a human male with pink skin and eyes which glitter even in the shadows. He has oily black hair, two small twisting black horns, and red hooves for feet with a similarly colored tail.
Phongor serves as Asmodeus’s Chief Inquisitor. It is his duty to uncover secrets or to find information that Asmodeus wishes to find. Phongor is considered the most feared devil in Baator after Asmodeus because of his penchant for torture, his prowess in combat with a wickedly sharp whip, and his ability to sniff out secrets.
Phongor’s rivalry with Adramalech is because he knows that the Record Keeper does not know his true name. Adramalech frequently sends spies to try to find Phongor’s true name as it is the only one, he does not know. In response, Phongor sniffs out these spies and viciously kills them because he knows that his secret allows him to maintain an even position of power in Nessus with the Chancellor. His prowess at finding information for Asmodeus means that he holds equal value currently for the Arch-Devil. Phongor spends much of his time ensuring that Asmodeus is well informed regarding the events of every plane. To do so, he has enlisted some of Adramalech’s spies to work for him and tortures information out of other creatures as he needs.
While Adramalech and Phongor serve as Asmodeus’s right and left-hand respectively, his favorite servant is his executioner, Alastor the Grim. A horrifically scarred and broken winged pit fiend, Alastor is considered the strongest of the Pit Fiends. Rumored to be one of the first devils born from Asmodeus’s blood, Alastor the Grim does not speak or act independently of his master. He always accompanies the Arch-Devil acting as a bodyguard and as the executioner for whomever displeases Asmodeus. It is a common belief that if the Nine Hells were destroyed and Asmodeus could only save one creature other than himself, he would choose Alastor the Grim. Alastor the Grim also commands the personal armies of Asmodeus.
There are always six generals in Nessus for Asmodeus’s armies. These generals are constantly changing as the devils vie for power and control.
The first major geographical feature of Nessus is the river Styx, which enters Nessus through a hidden (and heavily guarded) location from Cania. The river reaches its lowest point in Nessus in a lake known as the “Forgotten Lake”. From here, it sinks into the plain and drips into Gehenna (an outer plane not connected to the Nine Hells).
The Forgotten Lake is rumored to be the place that beautiful memories go to die. When mortal souls are first brough to the Nine Hells, their memories are stripped from them and sent here. Here, the thoughts are broken down and destroyed. Should a creature look into the waters, they will see beautiful memories that slowly corrupt into fiendish nightmares.
Several other rivers also off shoot from the river Styx to fill the rest of Nessus. One of these, indistinguishable from the others, is the river Lethe whose waters are known to cause complete memory loss.
Several notable gorges are also spread throughout the plane. Reaper’s Canyon is Nessus’s canyon of death. Here, no injuries heal, and death finds creatures twice as quickly as elsewhere. Sicknesses and disease are far more powerful. Another canyon is known as Hell’s Lips and is the epitome of gluttony. Mortals that find themselves here may become overcome with insatiable thirst and hunger. One fissure that travels from north to south on the plane is “The Nest”, which houses hundreds of nests for fiendish wasps.
The most noticeable geographic location in Nessus is the large winding canyon that sinks deeper and deeper into the plane, The Serpent’s Pass. This canyon, carved from Asmodeus’s fall, carves to the deepest point of Nessus, which in unknown even to most devils.
At the center, and northern most point, of the plane is a large pit which houses the city of Malsheem. Built from stone and Baatorian green steel, the city stretches in multiple layers along the gorge. Over time, the ever-expanding city has slowly begun to form tunnels into the walls and floor of the pit. This large structure, designed by Asmodeus, is home to millions of devils, perhaps the strongest in the nine hells. Here, Asmodeus keeps his personal army, waiting to conquer the planes with it. At the center of the city of Malsheem is the Fortress Nessus.
Fortress Nessus sits at the deepest point of the Serpent’s Coil but rises far above the rest of the plane. Decadent and bleak, the fortress seems to be a failed recreation of the home of the Gods. Here, Asmodeus resides and rules. The fortress has not been mapped previously and seems uninhabited at all times of the day. Despite its appearance, the fortress is teeming with devils and dangers. Below the fortress is an extensive dungeon which houses the souls of humans and elves for Adramalech to torture. Fortress Nessus also houses the Infernal Records.
The last location of note for Nessus is Tabjari, which lies in Reaper Canyon. Tabjari is a copper citadel which serves as the library, vault, and armory for Asmodeus. Tabjari is nearly impossible to enter. Its entrance is a highly guarded secret. The entire structure is heavily guarded by traps, magic, and devils. The security of Tabjari is even greater than the security in Fortress Nessus because it houses Asmodeus’s greatest treasure, one of the original copies of the Pact Primeval.
The first great mystery of Nessus is how to enter the plane. Though there is an entrance via the river Styx, this passage would require that adventurers travel through the other 8 planes of Baator to find their way into Nessus. Still, this river entrance is hidden and extremely well-guarded. Finding and mapping this location would make one rich beyond definition.
Another great mystery of Nessus comes from a rumor that Asmodeus is still greatly weakened by his wounds. A common rumor within the Outer Planes is that Asmodeus’s true form lies still broken and beaten within Fortress Nessus. Many of the other Archdukes and the Demon Princes of the Abyss spend a significant amount of time trying to find out if the rumor is true (and the location of Asmodeus’s true form) with the hopes of conquering the 9 hells.
The fortress Nessus hold many other secrets, such as information about the weaknesses of the Archdukes, that could hold much value for any being that could find them.
Tabjari holds one of the original copies of the Pact Primeval, which provides the place around it with enormous power. In this place, magic is said to achieve feats that would be otherwise impossible. For this reason, its location is deeply sought. Additionally, the copy itself provides significant strength to the devils. If it were to be stolen, it would greatly turn the tide of the Blood War in favor of the Abyss.
For those who attempt to sneak onto Nessus, stealth is the best option. The plane teems with a seemingly infinite number of the deadliest devils in the nine hells. Direct confrontation with a small group will only draw more of them towards a party. Additionally, it would be wise to find some way to carry provision onto the plane because food is sparse. Nessus is also covered in a dense fog of noxious fumes which make breathing difficult. Adventurers should account for this trait and find some way to filter their breathing as needed.
Large fiend, neutral evil
Armor Class: 17 (natural armor)
Hit Points: 129 (13d10 + 52)
Speed: 50ft., fly 50ft.
Saving Throws: DEX +6, CON +8 Skills: Perception +4, Stealth +6 Damage Resistances: Cold, Fire Damage Immunities: Poison Damage Vulnerabilities: Radiant Condition Immunities: Poisoned, Sleep Senses: Darkvision 60ft., passive Perception 14 Languages: Infernal, Common
Traits
Devils Sight. Magical darkness does not impede the hell hound.
Actions
Multiattack. The hell hound makes two attacks: one with its bite and one with its claws.
Bite. Melee Weapon Attack: +9 to hit, reach 10 ft., one creature. Hit: 17 (2d10 + 6) piercing damage.
Claws. Melee Weapon Attack: +9 to hit, reach 5 ft., one creature. Hit: 13 (2d6 + 6) slashing damage.
Hellfire Breath: (Recharges 5-6). The Nessian Hell-Hound unleashes a 10 ft cone of fire that deals 40 (9d8) fire damage. Creatures caught in the cone must make a DC17 dex save, taking half damage on a successful save.
With this, I have finally finished an entry for each of the Nine Hells for the Atlas project. I started writing about the Nine Hells in 2018, five years ago. After 4 years of writing and rewriting this article, it’s finally done which is a weird feeling. Nessus was especially hard to write about because I wanted it to feel dangerous, mysterious, and hard to understand. Hopefully, this is useful to some people. Moving forward, I’m planning to update the older entries with better information.
Check out my previous entry for the Atlas of the Planes project: Cania
Write Your Own Atlas Entry!
submitted by Kami1996 to DnDBehindTheScreen [link] [comments]
A system of crisscrossing gorge and canyons marks the only true changes in elevation in the plane. In these gorges, canyons, and the network of caves that connect them, live the billions of devils of Nessus. These structures have an infinite amount of space even given the finite nature of the plane. These gorges and canyons often cross, forming towering plateaus.
The canyons and gorges are each distinct and travel to specific locations. However, they all look exactly alike. More importantly, most of these canyons are missing from most maps of the plane. A few maps that were drawn by suicidal or brave adventurers can be found but tend to be extremely pricey. A map of a square mile section of Nessus can easily cost as much as a small castle.
A few of these canyons have bridges that span them. These few bridges are heavily guarded by Asmodeus's elite guards and a host of traps. Rare unguarded bridges are death traps that will inevitably break and send any crosser to their death. The shallowest canyon is 200 feet deep, and the remaining canyons and gorges are usually deeper. Devils in Nessus who cannot fly are encouraged to stick close to the caves and crevasses. In emergency situations, the devils must climb the walls using some sparse handholds or frayed ropes. It is not uncommon for devils to fall to their deaths as a result.
Directions in Baator are unlike the directions of the Material Plane. The strange nature of these planes makes the standard compass rose useless. Most Archdukes simply established the standard compass as a means of travel and mapping for their own planes, arbitrarily assigning a point as north. Asmodeus however, decrees that his own castle should be the northern most point despite its central location on the plane. The strange decree further complicates maps of Nessus making navigating the plane even harder.
DISCOVERY
Nessus was the first layer of Baator to be created and was the original plane of Hell to be created when the Gods of Celestia signed the Pact Primeval. The plane was granted to Asmodeus and his ilk by the Gods so they would not have to witness the punishment rendered to mortal souls. On the plane, the devils first began their plans to corrupt mortals. It was on this original plane that these devils, still somewhat angelic in nature, worked with the Ancient Baatorians to administer their justice. The plane, bleak and barren, was slowly built up and expanded into a tiered infinite plane. The plane was rapidly built into a major factory for manufacturing more devils and harvesting divine energy from the mortal souls that the devils corrupted. The only brief delay in construction of the plane came during a short, but vicious, war between Mephistopheles, the former right hand of Asmodeus, and the Arch-Devil. After the war ended, the construction began anew and the two made amends.When the Gods discovered that Asmodeus and his devils were luring mortals into disobedience and corruption, they once again put Asmodeus on trial. When the trial proved useless and Asmodeus was acquitted of the charges, the Gods were furious. They threw the devil back to Baator, sending him hurling from the tip of Celestia.
When Asmodeus crashed into Baator, the force of the impact tore a stretch of the initial plane and killed many of the plane's original inhabitants and mutilated many of the others who were not powerful enough to withstand the impact. As the devil continued to fall with his stretch of the original Baatorian plane, the devil carved new planes. Eight new planes formed before the devil and the plane he had rent from the original stopped falling. Asmodeus continued to fall deep into the plane till he came to rest under a massive pile of rubble, bleeding and badly hurt, in the deepest part of Nessus, which came to be known as the Pit.
When the devil eventually recovered, he made this deepest, finite plane his home as a reminder of his fall. From Nessus, the Arch-Devil slowly retook control of the remainder of Baator and resumed his lawful duties.
The creation of the plane of Nessus was not known to the mortal races for millennium. Asmodeus is a jealous guard of his plane and entrance to Nessus requires a letter of permission from the Arch-Devil himself. The first documentation of the plane of Nessus for the Prime Material Plane comes from the philosopher, Philogestes. Philogestes sold his own soul to Asmodeus for the opportunity to document information about Baator. Though, he was given permission to observe and record details about the plane of Nessus, Philogestes could not detail everything. Much of Nessus remains a mystery to those who dwell on the Material Plane.
Travel
The easiest way to travel to Nessus is to be invited by the Arch-Devil onto the plane. Very few mortals have ever received this privilege.For those who have not received a personal invitation, the only way to enter the plane would be through the plane prior to it, Cania. From Cania, adventurers could sail along the River Styx into Nessus. This path is extremely perilous. For starters, the river is incredibly difficult to navigate. Directions in the Nine Hells are confusing. It is just as likely that sailing along the river could lead to Maladomini. Additionally, the river’s currents are unpredictable, forming whirlpools, eddies, and undertows that can challenge even the most experienced sailors. Moreover, the Styx is guarded by roaming bands of devils as well as undead which are drawn to any sources of life. The river is also known to create illusions and mirages which can mislead travelers. It would be advisable to hire a devil in Cania to act as a guide on the waters.
THE LOCALS
Nessus is different from the other layers of Baator because it has a much higher proportion of the greater devils compared with the lesser devils. The most common kind of devil that is found on Nessus is the pit fiend, though horned devils are a close second. In addition to devils, a few other creatures traverse the planes of Nessus. While hellhounds are a common beast in Nessus, a special breed of hellhound known as the Nessian hellhound roams the plane. These are far more vicious and deadly than the original hellhound. The Nessian hell-hounds form packs with the regular hellhounds and hunt the plane for intruders or lesser devils. There are a few other fiendish beasts that are not devils on Nessus, but there are no mortals who live here.Asmodeus, a tall, red-skinned devil, with dark horns and elegant clothing is the Lord of Nessus. Known as the Dark One, the Lord of Lies, and the Prince of Evil, Asmodeus is the Arch-Devil of Baator. He rules the plane with an iron fist of law and conducts himself in a soft-spoken, articulate, and ruthlessly logically. Those who look closely at the Arch-Devil will notice that though the devil holds himself with poise and elegance, he is covered in injuries that have not healed. These injuries were sustained by Asmodeus when he was thrown from Celestia. Asmodeus carries himself in public as though the injuries no longer affect him, however they still hurt tremendously, and Asmodeus focuses much of his energy on recovering from the injuries.
Asmodeus is the undisputed master of Baator and exercises complete control over the plane. The Arch-Devil can alter any of the planes at will and can also alter the forms of any of the other Archdukes of Baator. In some cases, he can also kill the others, which causes some of the Archdukes to fear him greatly. With his dominance over Baator, Asmodeus spends much of his time focused on the conquest of other planes, especially the Prime Material Plane and Celestia. Asmodeus receives the energy from any soul collected by any devil or Duke of Baator. For the time being, He spends his time using the energy to heal his own wounds. Once his wounds have healed, Asmodeus intends to use the collected Divine Energy to forge a temporary truce with the Demons and use the truce to destroy the forces of Good once and for all.
Asmodeus is a schemer in every sense. The devil is a smooth talker who only engages with non-devils to corrupt them. One example of such a corruption is the corruption of Zariel, a celestial, into the once Archduke of Avernus. Asmodeus is one of the few devils to never father any Cambion, considering himself far superior to any such creature. A few tieflings also receive the blessing of Asmodeus. These tieflings are far more intelligent than any other and are given a superior mastery over fire. These tieflings are resistant to flames from any creature except those commanded directly by Asmodeus.
In addition to his unsurpassed intellect and charm, Asmodeus is an unmatched combatant, well-versed in both magic and weapon-craft. Asmodeus earned his fame when prior to the creation of Baator, the then-angel was ambushed by a demon invasion without his troops. The Gods sent an army of angels to defend the invasion, believing Asmodeus to have been overwhelmed. The angels arrived too late, however. Instead of finding an army of demons, the angels found that Asmodeus kept the invasion at bay and even pushed the defense into an offense into the Abyss, bolstered by their reinforcement. Though the Archdevil has not fought at the front lines of the Blood Wars, his combat prowess has not decreased.
Once a year, the Arch-Devil holds a feast at his palace in Nessus's Pit, Malsheem. To this feast, the Arch-Devil invites the other Archdukes, devils who have earned a seat of honor, and a few select mortals that have earned his respect or interest (for better or worse). The feast is an enormous affair, and the only time of the year when the pathway to the palace becomes available for creatures other than the Dukes of Nessus to traverse, though it is still heavily guarded to prevent intruders from reaching the palace. The purpose of the Feast is to serve to touch base with the dukes to ensure that Asmodeus's plans are going according to plan, to ensure Hell's superiority in the Blood War, reward devils who have performed exceptionally enough to gain the Lord of the Nine's attention, and to contract mortals who may be useful to himself. These feast feature extravagant performances, a plethora of delicious food and drink, and as much vice as any being could desire.
Adramalech is the right-hand of Asmodeus and serves as the Arch-Devil’s chancellor. His preferred form is that of an elderly human man with a gray beard. His eyes change color to reflect his mood, green when he’s happy and orange when upset and black all other times. In this form, the only features to identify him as a devil are two small, crimson horns that protrude from his head and a single forked tail. He prefers to dress in hues of green and purple.
This devil is tasked with maintaining all records regarding the Nine Hells. In this role, he constantly updates the number of souls collected, the various contracts that exist between devils and mortals, and presides over the court of Devils which settle disputes regarding contracts. Adramalech also tracks every torment caused to devils and the names and locations of any devils not in the Nine Hells. Somehow, despite this busy schedule, Adramalech also finds time to maintain an extensive spy network among the pit fiends which collect information. Adramalech stores this information and the true names of all devils in a tome he calls “The Infernal Record” which is colloquially known to mortals as the “Book of Fire”. Adramalech finds stress relief by torturing the souls of mortals in an extensive dungeon network which lies below Fortress Nessus. He especially despises Humans and Elves and takes special joy in causing them pain.
Adramalech has full authority to give orders to devils. This power was given to Adramalech because he is the only devil in the Nine Hells who shows no desire to usurp the Asmodeus. As a notably weak devil, Adramalech understands that even if he were to somehow become an Arch-Duke or Arch-Devil he would be easily overthrown. Instead, he enjoys the power and control he wields over the Nine Hells from the safety of Asmodeus’s right hand. Adramalech enjoys a small cult of followers in the Prime Material Plane who kidnap and sacrifice human and elf children to him. Because Adramalech is so physically weak, he is constantly guarded by a legion of Pit Fiends.
Phongor is the left-hand of Asmodeus and a rival of Adramalech. This devil usually resembles a human male with pink skin and eyes which glitter even in the shadows. He has oily black hair, two small twisting black horns, and red hooves for feet with a similarly colored tail.
Phongor serves as Asmodeus’s Chief Inquisitor. It is his duty to uncover secrets or to find information that Asmodeus wishes to find. Phongor is considered the most feared devil in Baator after Asmodeus because of his penchant for torture, his prowess in combat with a wickedly sharp whip, and his ability to sniff out secrets.
Phongor’s rivalry with Adramalech is because he knows that the Record Keeper does not know his true name. Adramalech frequently sends spies to try to find Phongor’s true name as it is the only one, he does not know. In response, Phongor sniffs out these spies and viciously kills them because he knows that his secret allows him to maintain an even position of power in Nessus with the Chancellor. His prowess at finding information for Asmodeus means that he holds equal value currently for the Arch-Devil. Phongor spends much of his time ensuring that Asmodeus is well informed regarding the events of every plane. To do so, he has enlisted some of Adramalech’s spies to work for him and tortures information out of other creatures as he needs.
While Adramalech and Phongor serve as Asmodeus’s right and left-hand respectively, his favorite servant is his executioner, Alastor the Grim. A horrifically scarred and broken winged pit fiend, Alastor is considered the strongest of the Pit Fiends. Rumored to be one of the first devils born from Asmodeus’s blood, Alastor the Grim does not speak or act independently of his master. He always accompanies the Arch-Devil acting as a bodyguard and as the executioner for whomever displeases Asmodeus. It is a common belief that if the Nine Hells were destroyed and Asmodeus could only save one creature other than himself, he would choose Alastor the Grim. Alastor the Grim also commands the personal armies of Asmodeus.
There are always six generals in Nessus for Asmodeus’s armies. These generals are constantly changing as the devils vie for power and control.
NOTABLE LOCATIONS
There are two types of notable locations on the plane of Nessus: geographical features and infernal constructions.The first major geographical feature of Nessus is the river Styx, which enters Nessus through a hidden (and heavily guarded) location from Cania. The river reaches its lowest point in Nessus in a lake known as the “Forgotten Lake”. From here, it sinks into the plain and drips into Gehenna (an outer plane not connected to the Nine Hells).
The Forgotten Lake is rumored to be the place that beautiful memories go to die. When mortal souls are first brough to the Nine Hells, their memories are stripped from them and sent here. Here, the thoughts are broken down and destroyed. Should a creature look into the waters, they will see beautiful memories that slowly corrupt into fiendish nightmares.
Several other rivers also off shoot from the river Styx to fill the rest of Nessus. One of these, indistinguishable from the others, is the river Lethe whose waters are known to cause complete memory loss.
Several notable gorges are also spread throughout the plane. Reaper’s Canyon is Nessus’s canyon of death. Here, no injuries heal, and death finds creatures twice as quickly as elsewhere. Sicknesses and disease are far more powerful. Another canyon is known as Hell’s Lips and is the epitome of gluttony. Mortals that find themselves here may become overcome with insatiable thirst and hunger. One fissure that travels from north to south on the plane is “The Nest”, which houses hundreds of nests for fiendish wasps.
The most noticeable geographic location in Nessus is the large winding canyon that sinks deeper and deeper into the plane, The Serpent’s Pass. This canyon, carved from Asmodeus’s fall, carves to the deepest point of Nessus, which in unknown even to most devils.
At the center, and northern most point, of the plane is a large pit which houses the city of Malsheem. Built from stone and Baatorian green steel, the city stretches in multiple layers along the gorge. Over time, the ever-expanding city has slowly begun to form tunnels into the walls and floor of the pit. This large structure, designed by Asmodeus, is home to millions of devils, perhaps the strongest in the nine hells. Here, Asmodeus keeps his personal army, waiting to conquer the planes with it. At the center of the city of Malsheem is the Fortress Nessus.
Fortress Nessus sits at the deepest point of the Serpent’s Coil but rises far above the rest of the plane. Decadent and bleak, the fortress seems to be a failed recreation of the home of the Gods. Here, Asmodeus resides and rules. The fortress has not been mapped previously and seems uninhabited at all times of the day. Despite its appearance, the fortress is teeming with devils and dangers. Below the fortress is an extensive dungeon which houses the souls of humans and elves for Adramalech to torture. Fortress Nessus also houses the Infernal Records.
The last location of note for Nessus is Tabjari, which lies in Reaper Canyon. Tabjari is a copper citadel which serves as the library, vault, and armory for Asmodeus. Tabjari is nearly impossible to enter. Its entrance is a highly guarded secret. The entire structure is heavily guarded by traps, magic, and devils. The security of Tabjari is even greater than the security in Fortress Nessus because it houses Asmodeus’s greatest treasure, one of the original copies of the Pact Primeval.
MYSTERIES
There are many mysteries with the plane of Nessus for the curious adventurer to find, though at great personal risk. Many of these mysteries remain because adventurers who chose to explore the plane did not return.The first great mystery of Nessus is how to enter the plane. Though there is an entrance via the river Styx, this passage would require that adventurers travel through the other 8 planes of Baator to find their way into Nessus. Still, this river entrance is hidden and extremely well-guarded. Finding and mapping this location would make one rich beyond definition.
Another great mystery of Nessus comes from a rumor that Asmodeus is still greatly weakened by his wounds. A common rumor within the Outer Planes is that Asmodeus’s true form lies still broken and beaten within Fortress Nessus. Many of the other Archdukes and the Demon Princes of the Abyss spend a significant amount of time trying to find out if the rumor is true (and the location of Asmodeus’s true form) with the hopes of conquering the 9 hells.
The fortress Nessus hold many other secrets, such as information about the weaknesses of the Archdukes, that could hold much value for any being that could find them.
Tabjari holds one of the original copies of the Pact Primeval, which provides the place around it with enormous power. In this place, magic is said to achieve feats that would be otherwise impossible. For this reason, its location is deeply sought. Additionally, the copy itself provides significant strength to the devils. If it were to be stolen, it would greatly turn the tide of the Blood War in favor of the Abyss.
SURVIVAL
Surviving Nessus is horrendously difficult for those that have not been personally invited by Asmodeus. Travelers should equip themselves with means of surviving some of the hottest temperatures in the planes, second perhaps only to the plane of fire. Likewise, they should equip themselves to survive frigid temperatures that exist in some of the gorges. Because Nessus is finite, it can be more easily mapped than any other planes. Perhaps a daring adventuring group would be able to find some enemy of Asmodeus who has a map of the plane. Another duke of the nine hells may have such a map and forming a pact with one may be wise for finding a way through Nessus without Asmodeus’s permission. If not, the safest way to traverse the plane would be to make some pact with the Arch-Devil.For those who attempt to sneak onto Nessus, stealth is the best option. The plane teems with a seemingly infinite number of the deadliest devils in the nine hells. Direct confrontation with a small group will only draw more of them towards a party. Additionally, it would be wise to find some way to carry provision onto the plane because food is sparse. Nessus is also covered in a dense fog of noxious fumes which make breathing difficult. Adventurers should account for this trait and find some way to filter their breathing as needed.
Toolkit
Nessian Hell-HoundLarge fiend, neutral evil
Armor Class: 17 (natural armor)
Hit Points: 129 (13d10 + 52)
Speed: 50ft., fly 50ft.
CR: 10 (5,900 XP)
| STR | DEX | CON | INT | WIS | CHA |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| [+6] | [+3] | [+5] | [-3] | [+1] | [+0] |
Traits
Devils Sight. Magical darkness does not impede the hell hound.
Actions
Multiattack. The hell hound makes two attacks: one with its bite and one with its claws.
Bite. Melee Weapon Attack: +9 to hit, reach 10 ft., one creature. Hit: 17 (2d10 + 6) piercing damage.
Claws. Melee Weapon Attack: +9 to hit, reach 5 ft., one creature. Hit: 13 (2d6 + 6) slashing damage.
Hellfire Breath: (Recharges 5-6). The Nessian Hell-Hound unleashes a 10 ft cone of fire that deals 40 (9d8) fire damage. Creatures caught in the cone must make a DC17 dex save, taking half damage on a successful save.
Check out my previous entry for the Atlas of the Planes project: Cania
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2023.06.03 05:10 Bmmick 2017 Kia Optima Help
 | My kia the other day wouldn’t go in to drive but it did have reverse. I figured its more electrical now so i disconnected battery to reset the system. I ended up making it lose reverse. So i figured thats a good sign its not the actual transmission going out but rather something electrical. I got it going now after a over night reset and it finally threw this code. Just curious if anyone had experienced this and what the fix was? submitted by Bmmick to kia [link] [comments] |