Behavior in cursive

(Side note: This is super long. Excuse any lousy spelling and punctuation.)
I was supposed to go out on a date with a co-worker Sergio but that didn't happen. My date was planned for the same day as my cousin Isabel's wedding day. I agreed to the date last Friday because I already knew I would not be attending Isabel's wedding. However, all that changed because my Family members were very upset and would not drop it. They didn't know my part of the story and they did not want to listen to it, they only knew Isabel's part which was an entire lie. Then they all decided that I was an a**hole and being 'overly dramatic' just from hearing her side. Overall it's a mess. I only went because I wanted the family to leave me alone. From all the drama and from Isabel running her mouth I didn't want to give her the satisfaction of thinking I was still in pain. I know her invite was just to make her seem like the bigger person but I know it's all a fake. Now the reason I was not going to attend was because Isabel stole my boyfriend Anthony and is now getting married to him. Honestly, it's all insane to me because everything has happened so fast.
Back story. Back on 12/19, I came back home early in the morning about 2am(ish) from work (I work a night shift). From the outside, you'd notice that all lights were off inside, so I assumed that Anthony was not there and would most likely be back at the apartment packing up his stuff. I recently just bought this house and already had all my stuff there. I texted him, told him I left work early, and asked if he could come home, but I got no response. I assumed he was asleep. However, he is usually up and waiting for me, but since we have been moving his stuff, it's been tiring. I had decided to shower and then get ready and get some food because I didn't have the energy to dig through boxes for pans to cook something. I got out of the car and started heading towards the front door. As I approached the door, I could hear music and stuff that no person ever wanted to hear in the early morning. I froze, and my mind went blank. I started to unlock the door slowly and quietly. I turned on the light and saw Isabel and Anthony doing the nasty on the couch. I screamed and began to cry out of anger. They screamed as well, and Isabel fell off of Anthony when he pushed her off of him. He, of course, like any cheating person, would say, "It's not what It looks like." I didn't say much because I didn't know what to say; I was speechless. I told Anthony, "Get out." and told Isabel, "Get out. I don't understand how you could do this to me. Just get out." Both of them quickly grabbed their clothing and got dressed. Anthony tried to talk to me, but I wasn't listening. He tried to hug and apologize and kept telling me he was sorry and loved me. I just told him we were over and I could never forgive him and to leave. He started to cry and just stood there staring at me, then looked over at Isabel, giving her a pissed-off look. She was standing there glaring at me. I honestly was ready to throw hands with her because I was so pissed off and the same with him. I didn't want things to escalate; I didn't want to deal with cops or wake up my new neighbors. At this point, I just wanted to sleep. I had to repeat myself multiple times for them to leave my house. They both refused to go, so I did threaten to call the cops, and that's what got them out. Anthony walked out first and didn't say anything. Isabel started to walk out, but before she walked out the door, she told me something I will never forget. She told me, and I remember what she said exactly word for word. She told me,
"You ruin everything. You ruined my love life when you stole Anthony from me. I knew him first and loved him first. You just came and stole him from me, You should know better than to be stealing someone's boyfriend. I never did anything to you for you to do what you did. You don't know how much pain you put me through. Don't talk to me ever again. I never want to see you. I don't want you around me at all. I hate you so much because you f***ed up my life. Don't talk to me. I hope your epilepsy kills you because that would make me feel so much better. It would be best for you to not be around anymore. I wish we weren't related. I wish you were dead."
There were a few things I wanted to say to that, but the 'I hope your epilepsy kills you' threw me off and hurt me even more. She walked out, slamming my door behind her. Few things I want to get clear. One when I met Anthony I didn't know she was in love with him. Two, they were not dating when we met or got together; they said they were just friends. Three, she never told me how she felt about him. I don't understand why she didn't just say something because if she had said something when he asked me out, I would have told him "No." and said the reason why. And Four, I was never told anything about the so-called 'Pain' I put her through. When she told me not to talk to or be around her, I thought it was better that way because I didn't want to talk to or be around her.
Fast forward to 2/14, I'm sitting next to Sergio and I am showing him a video on Instagram. I got a message from Isabel which was weird cause we had not talked since the cheating happened. I ignored the message and continued to show the video. I didn't care about whatever it was she messaged about nor did I even want to open it. After the video was over I went in and deleted the message without looking at it. Then I got another one from Isabel. Those messages kept coming in until I went in and blocked her. I didn't block her before because she didn't bother me after everything that happened. After the blocking, I just continued to scroll through Instagram. I stopped on a post that was posted by my cousin Eliyana (She is Isabel's youngest sister.) She posted a few videos and photos with the caption reading 'Congratulations to my sister Isa and future brother-in-law Anthony on their engagement. You guys make a beautiful couple.' Scrolling through the pictures I saw a few of my family members in it, some of our mutual friends, and then of course Isabel and Anthony. I sat at the table kind of shocked but then again not really. I was only shocked because I found it surprising that they would get married so soon and I thought it was a little too fast. Then I reminded myself that they had known each other for a very long time so I guess it might make sense in their twisted minds but it's whatever. I proceeded on with my night since the bell had rung to go back to work.
Time skip to when I got out of work the next day 2/15 technically speaking. I stood outside my work building waiting for my friends to come out. I checked my phone because I had left it in my bag in the breakroom cubby-hole thingy. While checking the notifications I had seen I got missed calls and a bunch of text messages from the family. Then got an incoming call from my cousin Ryan (Isabel's oldest brother). I answered it but as soon as I answered my friends came out. I had to tell Ryan that I would call him when I got home because I was busy at work. I hung up on him but doing so he was trying to talk. I continued to talk to my friends. We stood outside the work building for a good 15 minutes or so to wait for the parking lot to clear. Everyone is so in a hurry to get home it's insane but understandable because it's early as f*** and everyone is tired. When most of the lot was cleared we started to go our separate ways. I had given Sergio are ride so he was with me. We started walking to my car and reflecting on how the rest of our shifts went after lunch. Once we got to my car I unlocked threw my phone on the seat and opened up the trunk. I started to throw my lunch box, backpack, and other stuff in the trunk while Sergio put all his stuff in the back seat and got in the car. My phone started ringing again and I told Sergio to answer it. Didn't know it was my cousin trying to call me again. When Sergio answered he didn't even get a word in because my cousin started talking saying... "Dude. I know you are busy and you are at work but I need to talk to you about Isa and I don't- who the f*** are you? where's my cousin?" Lol, I did not know it was a FaceTime call and for me, it was kind of funny. Sergio proceeded to tell my cousin I was doing something and for him to hold on. My cousin was trying to yell at Sergio asking who he was and other nonsense. I got in the car and Sergio handed me my phone and told him "You didn't tell me if was a FaceTime call. haha." He laughed and said "Dude I wasn't even paying attention. I just answered it." Then we both laughed and I got on the FaceTime call. Saw my cousin sitting with his Girlfriend but she wasn't paying attention she had her headset on and was playing a video game. "What's up?" I asked. He proceeded to spill all that went down at my cousin's party. He told me how she made a speech and practically dragged my name through the mud. He told me to ignore all messages, vm, voicemails, and other methods when it came to the family trying to contact me. I told him I didn't plan on viewing anything or hearing anything and I was not surprised she talked sh*t about me. I also told him I wouldn't have answered the phone if he called either because I didn't know if he took her side or not. He understood why I told him that but he also said he could tell that she was lying but he wanted to also get my side of the story. I told him I'd have to talk to him once I got home and I would call him back later. He agreed and apologized to Sergio because he thought he had stolen my phone or something.
Once I had gotten back home I called my cousin before I passed out. I explained to him what happened when I got home from work that day. Then told him what she said to me about my epilepsy and how that added to not wanting to be around her but mainly because she said she didn't want me around. I told him word for word about what she said. I gave him every detail he needed and I spoke the truth. Then he gave me the breakdown of the story she told the family. She told the family that we were not together anymore but we were just living together because of the bills and both our names being on the apartment lease. She also advised the family that she was staying at the apartment because she was moving in once I was out. She told the family that everything that happened was at the apartment and I did what I did was out of jealousy and because I was crazy. She claimed I was just being a bch and didn't like that I was being replaced because he dumped me. She said she did nothing wrong because we were already broken up. She claimed to have reached out to me to talk about what happened but when she called I answered and told her to fk off and that I said some other nasty things to her that 'broke her heart' because words like that aren't meant to be said to family. During her speech that she did, she talked so much sh*t about me and some of the family agreed but some of the other family didn't.
Ryan went into detail about a lot of things she said. He explained to me that from his perspective her story did not make any sense. I explained my side of the story to him and he said it made more sense to him about what happened. He believed me and told me which family members believed her side was confusing because they knew some details the other side didn't. For example, they knew I got a house and from their understanding, we were still together because of a video I posted to Facebook about being so happy we got a house together. Another thing was that Anthony tried to keep it a secret but he opened up his big mouth about wanting to propose to me soon after getting everything situated. Therefore one side knew and the other didn't and I don't understand how they didn't. Overall Ryan believed me and apologized for Isa's behavior even though he shouldn't because he's not Isa and he had nothing to do with what happened.
My relationship with Anthony wasn't exactly perfect because what relationship is? However, we hardly fought and always trusted each other. When we did fight it was over the little things like washing dishes, taking trash out, and other stuff. We talked things out like we should. I thought I could trust him. Now I feel like I can't trust anyone.
Fast forward to 4/3. Time had passed and it felt like it went by quickly but as time went on I let go of everything that happened and slowly started to get over Anthony. As time passed I started to have a thing for Sergio because he was such a sweet guy. We started to spend a lot more time together outside of work as well. I also had barely spoken to the family except a few like Ryan, My grandmother, my Uncle (My Grandma's youngest son), and some of my other cousins. I also had to explain my story to the mutual friends I shared with my cousin and some of those friends believed me and others didn't so to me it was a whatever kind of thing I was over it. It's like you either believe me or you don't the choice is yours. Anyway, I went to Grandmother's house before heading to work to drop off some groceries I had gotten her and to tell her she didn't have to worry about her phone and electricity bill. When I got there I went inside and saw Isabel and Anthony sitting at the table sharing a meal with my Grandma. Just said 'Hi' and then looked away from them and looked at Grandma. I told her what I needed to tell her then was going to leave. Before I could leave she told me to sit and eat. I told her I had to get to work. She didn't take no for an answer and I of course was not going to argue with her so I sucked it up and sat down. They were talking about the wedding and I sat there in silence. Them talking about the wedding didn't bother me it was the staring coming from Anthony that bothered me. I continued to eat and ignore it but I was thinking about Sergio the whole time. My phone started ringing so I looked to see who was calling and it was Sergio. I answered my phone and they all looked at me. Sergio just wanted to know if we were going to take something for lunch or just eat whatever was at the snack area at work. I told him I could pick up a pizza or something for us before heading to work. Then we ended the call. Grandma asked me who it was that called and I told her it was one of my co-workers. We didn't talk about him after that. Once I had finished eating I told my Grandma thank you and I was going to head to get that pizza and head to work. Before I could leave my cousin gets up and heads to the counter going through a bag. She pulled out a pink envelope that had my name written on it in cursive and then handed it to me. Then tells me.
"I don't want to fight anymore. I want you to come to the wedding. I'm sorry and I want you to be there and you can bring a plus one if you want. This fighting is stressful I love you very much. Of course, I know that you know what you did was uncalled-for childish but we can overlook that."
My thoughts went elsewhere and wanted to say something but I didn't want to say anything in front of my Grandma. My Grandma didn't want anything to do with what happened and she didn't know much. She said she could never choose between her Grandchildren. I knew my cousin's apology was a fake one. I knew because she gave me a dirty look and she got away with it because she was facing away from my Grandma while I was facing towards her. I was fighting the urge to slap or punch her. I was no longer mad about her stealing Anthony from her I was mad at the fact that she said it was my fault when it wasn't, she was still going with her lies.
I grabbed the invitation anyway. I told my Grandma bye and left. I headed to get the pizza and then went to work. After doing all that I finally got to work and was sitting in the parking lot. I was frustrated and wanted to punch something. I wanted to throw and burn the invitation but I got curious and opened it up. The wedding was set for 5/10 at 4 pm till whenever I guess. I already made the decision that I would not be attending. I tore the invitation up and then got out of my car. I grabbed my stuff and then walked toward the nearest trashcan and tossed the invitation inside. I continued with my day.
Now to the present(ish). Back on 5/2, I was at work having lunch with Sergio. I've spent a lot of time in and outside of work with him and he confessed his emotions towards me and I told him how much I liked him as well. He asked me out on a date on our day off which was last Friday (The day of my cousin's wedding.) I agreed of course and I forgot about that date being my cousin's wedding but it didn't matter because I wasn't planning on going anyway. So I agreed to the date and he told me it would be a surprise what we would do and I agreed and didn't mind. I was just so happy that I was going to be going on a date with him because I had fallen so hard for this guy.
From that point on throughout the week I was getting calls and messages from the family asking if I would be attending my cousin's wedding. They knew she had given me an invitation but she was telling the family she was not sure if I was going to go. Now at the point like I had put I had forgotten about it. I told them I would not be able to attend because I had an important thing going on that I could not miss. Then I was told I needed to stop being childish and move on. Also being told I just need to be happy for Isabel and Anthony and stop being bitter. I told them I was not bitter I just had something important going on and it was not a lie. They claimed I was lying. They of course told me there was nothing more important than family and I would regret not going. I wanted to ignore them so much but they kept contacting me from so many different numbers and creating fake accounts just to message me and stuff. They even came to my house. It was getting super irritating.
Ryan even came to the house before I headed to work. Now Ryan I don't mind because we of course are getting along. He showed up a few hours before I had to go to work. I let him in knowing he was going to talk to me about going to the wedding. Our conversation wasn't bad or anything. He just told me that I should go to the wedding so it could shut the family up and prove to them I was over the situation (In which he knew I was. He even knew about Sergio because I told him about him.). He told me just like everyone else to bring a plus one and recommended I bring Sergio. (Now I didn't tell him I was going to go on a date with Sergio and of course, had not told him it was on the day of the wedding.). He told me it would prove a point to the family and I would win the war. Which made me laugh when he said that.
I knew he had a point though. If I went it would possibly shut the family up. It would be so that I could care less about them being in a relationship. However scared at the same time because anything is possible with my family it could end up being bad or good something you'd never know. I didn't even know who I could bring as a plus one that would keep me sane because I was not comfortable bringing Sergio because I didn't think he would feel comfortable. Another thing was if I decided to go then I would have to cancel things with Sergio and I don't want to. My heart broke just thinking about canceling. But then I decided that I might just go to the wedding because like my cousin said it might shut up the family. I was just disappointed I would have to cancel my plans and I hope he wouldn't be mad at me. Sergio does know everything about what happened with my family though because I vented to him about everything.
When my cousin left and I got to work I texted him that I would go. I would go to just prove a point. I was not happy at all I felt so sad. I needed to find a way fast to tell Sergio that I was not going to be able to go on a date with him. I sat in my car and Sergio tapped on my window. I opened the door and let him in. He scared me to be honest because I was in my world at that point. We sat in my car until it was time to go in. In that time I managed to find the words to tell him what I needed to tell him. I even told him how sad I was about it but also told him I wanted my family to leave me alone and they were stressing me out. He understood and told me he could understand I was under a lot of stress. I had asked if we could reschedule for the day after. I was scared he was going to say no. However, what surprised me was he asked if he could escort me just to help me prove my point but mainly because he still wanted to spend time with me. I told him only if he wanted to and if he felt comfortable and he said yeah. I told him the time and all the other stuff he needed to know.
Now wedding day rolls around 5/10. We go together and stuff feels so awkward and I'm about to lose my mind from all the awkwardness. The only one that was chill was Sergio which made me feel a little better. The family acknowledged us and was happy that I came. The other side who was still giving me problems was of course surprised and of course, talking about me being there. I was holding Sergio's hand as we walked into the venue. I talked to some of my family and introduced Sergio to them. They of course asked questions like how we met, how long we've been dating, and everything else. We sat down at a table with Ryan and his Girlfriend. We talked amongst ourselves. I started to ease up and not care about my family staring. When Ryan got up to go dance with His Girlfriend it was just me and Sergio sitting and talking up until he asked me to dance to a slow song they were playing. I told him I don't dance but he got me to dance anyway. While slow dancing I noticed my family still staring at us. Specifically, the side that was mad at me. I focused on Sergio as we danced and talked. We were laughing while dancing because I am a horrible dancer. When he spun me around I saw my cousin dancing with Anthony but as they were dancing their attention was on us the whole time. Once the song was over we went straight to the table. We honestly spent most of the night at the table talking. That was something I didn't mind because I love the times when we just sit and talk. Some of my family had come up to us and talked to us and I of course introduced Sergio to them. The night itself wasn't too bad we just kept to ourselves we only got up a few times from the table. We had left earlier than everyone else because I had proven my point and I just wanted to be alone with him and not spend so much time around the family. I said goodbye to the ones I do get along with.
Now for yesterday. Since Friday I've been continuing to get nasty messages. I swear I cannot win with my family. They told me I was being a hoe and being rude for bringing the guy that I cheated on Anthony with. I was told that I was stealing the spotlight from my cousin by bringing a more attractive guy than Anthony as my plus-one (Now that one made me laugh because I agree Sergio is more attractive but like I just found it funny that they said that because how is that even a thing?). They told me I was being petty. Told me that I embarrassed myself by coming. Told me I looked horrible. Was told that my cousin is upset I stole the spotlight from her and I did it on purpose. I was told I shouldn't have brought him with me because it was unnecessary and I was just trying to get attention. Then advised it was an a**hole move and if it was a stunt I was gonna pull I shouldn't have gone. That's just a few things that were said there was so much more.
I do not understand how I stole the spotlight or anything at all. I went and didn't do anything. I had one dance with Sergio and we stayed at the table talking. We talked to some of the family and that is all. They make it seem like I went and did something to my cousin. AITA?

I received many compliments from friends and acquaintances. But I’m still self-conscious about my writing and the basic rules of the language. Please take a look you do not have to subscribe the
The Ouija Revelation by Blake West
I was raised Mormon and most of my family are still active members. I am not; I have always been the black sheep of the family. I was a good kid by most standards, but until recently I have not felt as though I can be myself when I am in their company. For example, my uncle once sat me down and said: "I don’t want you to change anything about yourself-- but please go be yourself over there. I will be here and you can be you over there." He caught me vaping when he reviewed the surveillance footage at his warehouse. I laugh about it now, and even at the time he said this I found it to be funny. I can be a lot to deal with; I mean, I live alone and I hate my roommate. My family is conservative. My grandmother told each man who was to marry into the West family that vasectomies were not permitted. Today this sentiment is a part of the family crest, next to a vaccine syringe with a red "X" over it. The West family were anti-vaxxers before it wasn't cool. As a matter of fact, I have never been vaccinated, other than one tetanus shot when I was ten-years old. I am not taking any kind of stand, I just wasn’t vaccinated, for anything. I am in relatively good health today and I have been fortunate in this regard. My maladies are of a cerebral variety. I will say that I do not believe that vaccines cause autism as some do. Especially considering the fact that I was not on the spectrum until Dr. TikTok made the diagnosis.
My family is so conservative they only pass food to the right at the dinner table. My father once saw a same-sex couple holding hands in Home Depot and he now refuses to shop there and refers to it now as "Homo Depot." My family is so conservative that my mother recently flew to Washington DC on a Wednesday to meet some friends. In addition to being conservative, my family is for the most part still indoctrinated by the Mormon church; fully bought-in. My "birds and bees" talk came at the hands of a counselor employed by LDS family services, so there were some gaps needing to be filled, to say the least. I had no clue as to what courtship was supposed to look like. I was homeschooled in ninth grade. Every morning, I had to attend seminary at Butler Middle School and I rode my bicycle home afterward, which served as my P.E. credit. It was this seminary class in which I met my biggest high school crush, Mary. I was fascinated by her immediately, she was different. She was petite, had blonde hair, blue eyes and the brightest smile I had ever seen. Mary was affable and had a sharp wit, above all she was kind-hearted. On the last day of that school year, in my piss-yellow DC Shoes hoodie and my new pair of skate shoes, I raised the courage and I asked her for her phone number. She wrote her number on my hand before she walked back to the school's main building. I was elated as I rode home that day. Mary and I became fast friends, until my parents caught wind. I was not 16, which is the age Church deems the appropriate age to date; or even interact with the opposite sex outside of Sunday school. I could only talk to her if she called me and occasionally my parents would let me return a message if she left one. One evening while we were talking she mentioned that she didn’t have a date for the homecoming dance. Consequences be damned, I asked her to go with me and she said yes. Luckily my mother allowed me to take her since it was a group of four. She wore a maroon and black dress. I wore a black suit and shirt to match the color of her gown, by coincidence. I hadn't learned what she would be wearing until I bought the corsage. Picture this: a socially awkward, clumsy teenager learning to square-dance on the fly. I kept stepping on her heels and gown as she tried to teach me the movement. Slow-dancing was really just waddling around in circles with very little eye contact. I was doing everything in my power to avoid staring down her shirt as we swayed right-to-left with her arms on my shoulders. To this point it was the most attention I had received from the opposite sex and also the same night I understood the versatility of my boxer's waistband. After the dance we went to see a movie. I had pulled a fast one-- I thought. I wanted to see a rated-R movie and I knew that they wouldn't sell me the tickets at the theater. So I bought them online and my mom let me use her credit card and when we get to the theater, I told mom that she had to pick up the tickets at the window because it was her credit card and we would get our snacks while she did. Tickets and popcorn in hand we walked to the usher and just as we did, we were met by the manager. I underestimated my mom-- but she didn’t want to dress me down in front of my date. She noticed the rating on Freddy Got Fingered was R and she told the theater employees to not let us into the movie we bought tickets for. I don't remember which movie we saw instead, I think it was Bubble Boy. I tried arguing my point with the manager, that my mother had purchased the tickets for us and by doing so should have acted as consent in lieu of parental-guidance, but he would not budge. But he did say if we were to wander into Freddy Got Fingered after Bubble Boy concluded we could catch the last half hour of that showing. Mom 234 - Blake 0. After the movie, my mom picked us up and dropped the other kids home without mentioning a word about my insubordinate behavior. I didn’t so much as hold Mary's hand that night. As I write this now I am overcome with "cringe" as the kids say. Mary had a boyfriend throughout most of high school, but her and I remained friends. She would smile and wave at me every time we crossed paths in the hallway, usually with her boyfriend Kurt's arm around her as she was walking to her next class. Kurt had everything I thought. He had a WRX, he was athletic, a talented artist, handsome and of course Mary. I was the fat, awkward, WWF watching, home-schooled kid who dressed in black concert t-shirts and carried around a backpack covered in metallic ink. I could only look down on Kurt because I was taller. Fast-forward to senior year, 2003-04. Mary and Kurt were on the outs and he was not going to take her to homecoming. But this time, instead of asking her on the phone I was going to do something memorable. Well, I remember it. I borrowed my mother's best stationary and wrote on it with my distinctive and elegant cursive "meet me here after school." thinking that it would be a surprise to her. I bought the finest roses I could find from Dan's supermarket and I brought them to her as she was standing at her locker with our mutual friend Nadya and I asked her if she would go to homecoming with me. With a look of obligation rather than excitement, she accepted. She already knew I wasn’t going to make a move and I hadn't learned how to square dance either. Side note: women of all ages do not give a fuck about excellent penmanship. The dance was still a few weeks away and in this time I started going to the gym every morning at 5:00 before school. Mostly because it was when Mary went and I saw this as an opportunity to get closer to her. In the short time that I had been going I had lost a noticeable amount of weight. Mary, Nadya and I started spending more time together and the Saturday before the dance, the three of us were at Nadya's house planning the following week's activities. One of the girls suggested we play a game and Out came the Ouija board. My mother warned me against dabbling in the dark arts; despite her love for the Harry Potter series. I participated nervously as Mary and Nadya called upon the nearest available entity. We started asking Pauley Purgatory the standard questions: "are you a good spirit or bad? Do you know my deceased friend?" and so on. Then Nadya asked the question "is Blake a virgin?" and in his infinite post-mortal bro-code wisdom, Pauley answered "no… except on Sundays." I was stunned and ashamed, because I had not told anyone, especially my biggest crush that Sundays were the only day of the week in which I did not engage in my regular self-care routine, if you catch my drift. Mary then asked "is Blake ever going to get married" and the curser moved to answer yes. Because I was such a smooth-operator I asked the next question "to someone I know?" and the cursor again moved to answer yes and I immediately locked eyes with Mary, then I quickly shifted my gaze to Nadya before looking back to the board. Then our new acquaintance had to take another call and we ended our session. The next week we go to the dance in a group of six and it went about as well as you could have expected taking into account previous context. At one point during the evening, Mary even had to ask me to sit next to her on the couch because my attention was consumed by a Seinfeld rerun as I sat on a beanbag on the floor in front of her. As a parenthetical note, even today I am not a ladies man. Despite my broad-shouldered, 6'1'' frame and confident, bearded-Viking like resemblance, I find myself awash with shame instinctively whenever I have thoughts of pursuing a woman I like. The LDS doctrine is so ingrained into my DNA, I cannot help but feel that wanting to fuck the Christ out of someone is wrong, despite my terrestrial knowledge telling me that it is natural. Whenever I think that I have found someone worthy of my "Melchize-dick" I split the difference and I say nothing. Do nothing. In 2003 I was even more of an insecure mess, if that is possible. I couldn’t even take my shirt off in the locker room let alone the opposite sex. A week later I had scheduled an appointment to chat with my bishop about some things that had been on my mind. After the normal small talk I begin by telling him that I was recently in a basement alone with two young women and I noticed his posture and glare became more focused. I continue by telling him that with these girls we summoned a dark spirit and it had said things about me which I had not told anyone. With a sort of disappointed look on his face now, he then related to me by telling me about a time he had gone to a psychic and experienced something similar. He concluded our visit by asking me if I had been "keeping the temple clean." Of course I lied and told him I was not “holding to the rod-- the iron rod” (there really are a lot of masturbation euphemisms from the hymn book). I also did not tell him what my new friend Pauley Purgatory had said though, only that it was something I had not told anyone. 18 years later when I was making a delivery on the same street Nadya lived on in high school, it hit me. Recently I watched a video on social media about ADHD issues and how it is commonplace for the afflicted to repeatedly tell the same story, as well as be unaware of certain things they have shared with others in conversation as a defense mechanism. I then recalled a memory of an annoyed co-worker saying to me "you say that every time" when I would share my association with Mrs. Field's Cookies anytime the name was mentioned as a perspective client. I went to one year of private school with Mrs. Field's daughter; true story. Then it hit me-- I had to have forgotten that I told Mary that I "kept the Sabbath day holy" and this was her way of telling me it was okay to make a move, without telling me. I was so sheltered and indoctrinated that I actually believed a spirit-in-limbo made a dick joke and I ran to confess my sin of my meddling in the dark arts to my bishop. And because I was vague with the details and I lied about "leaning upon my ample arm" my bishop was not able to say "she's trying to tell you something, you fucking idiot! She likes you." I like to think that he would have done me that courtesy, he was actually a good guy. As I look back, Mary tried everything and I now know what that look she used to give me meant. That "how are you not getting this, you big, dumb fuck?" look. She even tried to sacrifice a virgin when she set me up with my first girlfriend. Once I finally realized what had happened I had to shout the thought out of my head as the blood left my face. Driving alone in Cottonwood Heights, Utah I said aloud: "Goddammit” with a Baroque-like rhythm. The moral of the story, kids: don't lie to your bishop about taking care of your needs. Unless you want something to write about later. Shame begats shame begats the socially awkward. Thanks for reading. -Blake

CHAPTER 1
A gloomy rain fell down from the steely grey clouds above England, creating puddles in pot holes and mud pits in mounds of dirt. The small english town of Derry had been flooded before, and the townspeoples fears of another had put everyone on edge. Nobody dared utter the word though, their superstitions wouldn't allow that. People in Derry were well known for their superstitious and cagey behavior, but this was not entirely unwarranted. It wasn't just a flood here and there once in a while in Derry, they had a long and colorful past with all types of disasters, some man made, others acts of god.
There was the great black spot fire of 1979, in which a white supremacist group burnt down a local disco predominantly visited by Derry's small black and latino community, accidentally torching half the town down in the process. In 1952 there was the expansive national ASDF league shoot out, which lasted a total nine hours in the Derry town square before the police finally got the upper hand and killed every gang member on sight. But the most horrific of all was in 1925, when the Derry ironworks exploded, killing all it's workers as well as everyone participating in the annual Derry christmas parade nearby, most of which were children.
These were just a few of the horrific events Derry township had gone through, and bizzarely, no matter how gruesome each event was, none were ever on the news or remembered too well. That was just how Derry worked, despite it's reputation as a sleepy, dreary town where nothing much ever happened, tragedies were rampant. So you couldn't quite blame the people for being superstitious and scared, especially in autumn when the weather was at it's absolute worst. It was late autumn now though, there was only about four more days till winter, and the worries of floods would soon turn into worries for blizzards, and people were certain the worst of the worst had already came and went.
On this fine rainy saturday in a white two story house, Tom Denbrough was sitting upstairs, doing what he did everyday, writing songs. He'd been wrestling with an awful case of influenza the past few days, hocking up phlegm and wiping snot from his nose every few minutes 'til it was rubbed raw. He had not much energy for anything else because of it, all he could muster the strength to do now was lay in his checkered, tissue covered bed sheets, and wait for his mother to bring him chicken noodle soup and sprite to ease his churning tummy.
It wasn't too bad though, a lot of people can't stand being alone, but Tom often thrived in solitude. Ever since he was a kid he'd taken a liking to it, he was "introverted" as some one would like to say, but back then introverts were seen as more of a problem than just a thing you could be. It felt odd for him to say "ever since he was a kid" as if he wasn't still a kid now, but he technically wasn't. He'd bid farewell to such a label by september, and swapped out the childish number twelve to the unlucky number thirteen, and Tom still wasn't so sure if he was happy with that.
He didn't quite feel like an adult, and people still had yet to treat him as such, but Tom had his own suspicions about that. He knew there was more reason than just him still being a minor, because the truth of the matter was that everyone enjoyed babying him because of his condition.
He was disabled, dis-abled, the word making him feel weird even now. Before Tom was called such a thing he had considered the word disabled to exclusively mean people in wheelchairs, missing legs, or some of the really out there stuff like conjoined twins. He never pictured disabled meaning some on like him, a boy with a bad stutter but a healthy body and brain. Perhaps that was closed minded of him, but alas, Tom was only thirteen, and his scope of reference for the world was much smaller than he pretended it to be.
Even the doctors in Derry didn't treat him all that compassionately, insisting to both him and his mother that he must have been "slow" in some way, but just hiding it, no matter what he or his parents said. It took Tom fighting tooth and nail just to get out of special Ed. which was basically just four kids in a classroom asked to do elementary level shit because the teacher did not believe they were capable of more. He still had to go to regular speech therapy though, which Tom loathed since in all his years of going it seemed to have done him no favors.
He still stuttered, barely getting through sentences without stumbling over at least one word, and getting even worse whenever he felt nervous or scared. That was probably the worst part about it, Tom had never liked being emotional or letting people know he was affected by things, especially when kids at school enjoyed getting a rise out of him. His panicked little drawn out "bu-bu-bu-bu-" sounding like sweet music to his tormentors ears. It was nearly possible for him to hide his feelings or keep his cool whenever he was scared, because that stupid god damn stutter was like a built in lie detector.
He didn't know where the stutter had came from, there were theories here and there, but none of them ever made him feel better. The most likely one involved a car rear ending him when he was only a toddler, knocking him into a coma but miraculously not killing him. He was in it for only a few weeks, but emerged with his stutter, which of course young and niave Tom didn't understand would cause him so much trouble later down the line.
Because Tom didn't like to talk much, he spent a lot of time writing music in his room, his lyrics were all very hamfisted and schlocky, but for a thirteen year old boy they were quite good, and would only get better the more with age. He loved music, lived and breathed it, specifically the sounds of motown records, funk, rap, rock and roll, all the sorts. He had to keep that all a secret from his mother though, she was a musical elitist of sorts. She went to a fancy schamncy music school and had been teaching piano to students for years, so she had a hard time enjoying anything that wasn't classical or something their grandma would listen to.
When Tom went out to buy a bass he had to mow a crap ton of lawns and convince his dad to keep it a secret from mom, but it was well worth all the effort. He only got to play it when she was away at work, never daring to smuggle it out of the house and go busk unless some one decided to be an asshole and tell her. But he loved his bass more than anything, he even gave her a name, since Tom figured all rock stars named their instruments. He chose Susan, after the families first and only dog they had when he was little, and it seemed to stick. Ever since then Tom had remained adamant that you couldn't play an intrument with out giving it a name first.
Even though he enjoyed writing music, and it was the thing that made him the most happy, there was still a slight underlying sadness to it whenever he'd play. He'd lwanted to be a rock star ever since he first heard Van Halen and fell in love with the sound, but with that dream also came the knowledge it'd never happen. Afterall, who the hell would wanna hear him on a record? Stuttering all over the place, stumbling over words, heck, people would send in complaints that how their brand new records were scratched and skipping. There was nobody like him on the radio, and that painful truth kept him from ever singing to anybody but a very small and select audience. And by audience, he meant his stuffed teddy bear and little brother, absolutely no one else.
Speaking of which, his very small audience was on his way up stairs, stomping like a clydesdale despite their mothers constant reprimands about it. Jon knocked on Tom's bedroom door, then immediately pushed it open without being invited in. He was only six, so things like boundries and personal space were not so ingrained him. Neither was self conciousness, maliciousness, or the ability to not be incredibly annoying, but Tom tried very hard to not hold that last one against him. He scanned the room with wide and curious eyes, like he had just stumbled upon a new and foreign world despite being in here many times before.
He loved Tom's room, he loved it more than his own. He thought it was so cool and groen up how he had band posters on his walls. There was a ton of other cool stuff too like a nintendo 64 he'd sometimes let him play, a drawing desk, and a heap of awesome clothes he said he could have when he got bigger! It was a lot cooler than his own bedroom, which was fairytale prince themed and had his half finished lego projects strewn all about, but he still liked his room well enough.
Tom looked up from the note book he was currently writing on and wiped his nose with his shirt sleeve. "Whuh-what d-do you want?" Asked Tom, a little curt. He was good at being polite and caring to Jon most of the time, he was only six afterall, he couldn't go around screaming at him, but it was harder to be patient with him when he was working on something.
Jon ran up to Tom, as if right on cue and looked up to him with needy adoring eyes that seemed to soften his attitude. "Toooom, I'm very sad..." Jon complained, and Tom rolled his eyes. He forced a smile and put the pencil he was writing with down "Oh yeah? are you actu-u-ually sad or just buh-bored?". Jon giggled at how blunt he was being "I'm sad and boreeeed.". Tom leaned closer to Jon's face, but not too close since he was still sick and didn't want him to catch it. "Sad peop-puh-puh-ple don't giggle, moron." He said, booping Jon on the nose with his index finger, causing him to erupt into another giggle.
If their mother was here in the room with them she'd no doubt say "Thomas! Stop calling your brother a moron!" Then lightly smack him on the back of the head, not enough to actually hurt but enough to knock some sense into him. Jon didn't mind it at all though, he saw it as just his brother being silly with him, and he'd always call Tom names right back. "You're a cheesehead." Jon said, biting down on his tongue and smiling. "You're a buh-buttbrain." Tom retorted. "You're a cakesniffer!" Jon exclaimed. "You're an A-ho-hole." Jon went silent at that. That was a no no word, well, not quite, but almost. Mom and dad were very strict about no no words, although he heard Tom say them all the time over the phone when he wasn't supposed to be listening.
Suddenly, another wave of laughter came from him, so loud and hearty he had to hold his belly like santa while he laughed. "You're an A-hole!" Jon said, still laughing. The two boys then launched into a big silly argument of who was the bigger A-hole, eventually ending with Tom proclaiming Jon's A-hole was bigger than the entire continent and both the boys giggling like mad. "Now guh-go away puke stuh-stain, i'm sick and I don't want you to catch it." Tom said, smiling and gently shooing his brother away. "Waiiiit! Peas Tommy, play me a song!" Jon begged, putting his hands together like he was praying.
"It's p-puh-please, not peas, Jon. B-besides, I can't sing, my voice is too hoarse and my stuh-stuh-stuh-" Tom closed his eyes and took a moment to collect himself. "I'm terrible singer." He continued. "No you're nawt! you're an amazing singer! Peas, just one song?" Jon pleaded. "Play me the one about the kid who grows up to be a superhero! Peas peas peas peaaaasss?". Tom shook his head "No can do, kid. Go b-buh-bug some one else before you catch my-" he sneezed into his elbow, grossing his little brother out. "Eugh... cold." Tom grumbled.
"There's nothing to do thoooouuugh." Jon complained, crossing his arms in a huff. "Why don't you go bug mom or dad?" "Mommy's practicing piano and daddy's trying to get the electricity back on..." he mumbled, a little sad. The constant rain and thunder had knocked out a lot of the houses in their neighborhood's power and still had yet to kick back on. The Denbrough boys were quite lucky to have their father with them, he was amazing when it came to things that involved a screwdriver or a wrench, and you'd never guess it by looking at him.
He'd hardly wear anything but Hawaiian pineapple shirts and socks with sandals, but he was still a very smart man none the less. He worked for their town's electrical company, and Tom could still remember the look of pride he had during career day in primary school when he told everyone his dad was responsible for keeping the town's power in check. It was quickly dashed when some asshole decided to ruin it by asking if his dad slept on the job and zapped him on accident and that's why he "Couldn't talk right.". The worst part of it was that Tom was pretty sure he didn't mean for it to be an insult, and was just genuinely asking it out of ignorance. He deeply hoped wherever that kid was now, he was in great pain.
Their mothers piano playing should have been obvious to Tom, it was loud and carried it's way all through out the house, even up the stairs, but it seemed to be just background noise at this point. He hadn't noticed it until now, but his mother was playing much faster than usual, she was in the "zone" so to speak, and wanted to hold onto that for as long as she could, so both Jon and Tom were shit out of luck. Tom sighed "Jeez." He leaned back into his pillows and thought for a moment, shoving all the gross snot filled tissues and crumpled up rejected lyrics from his first few failed attemps at writing a new song.
Jon awkwardly shifted around on his feet, swinging his arms side to side as if waiting for further instruction on what to do. "It's a damn sh-shuh-shame that it's raining so bad or else you could play outside." Jon nodded, and sighed, genuinely disappointed by the amount of rain. Suddenly, Tom snapped his fingers and rose up from his bed "H-hold on- I just remembered s-omething.". He quickly grabbed a folded up newspaper that his mom had left on his night stand for him to read, then ripped out one of the pages.
"What are you doing Tom?" Innocently asked Jon. He straightended it out and folded it into a triangle shape, sticking his tongue out like he was hard at work. "I'm muh-makin you a p-puh-puh-aper boat, just like dad taught me how to do when I was s-six." He explained. Jon's face lit up "Wow, really!?" he waddled over to the bed and smiled. "Yep, dad and I used to sail these all the time. Do me f-f-fuh-fav-or and go in the basement and bring back some puh-puh-puh-puh-" Tom paused again and forced another smile. "Paraffin. It's in a little b-box that says gulf." he finished.
"You mean... in the basement?" Jon mumbled, suddenly a little intimidated. "Yes, you're not scared are you?" His brother asked, half amused and half concerned. On one hand, it was very cute that Jon felt the need to impress him and pretend to be tough, on the other, he was barely not a toddler anymore, and Tom didn't wanna scare him on purpose. Jon shook his head "No i'm not scared, being scareds for babies. I can do it.". "O-o-okay, but j-just in case... here." He handed him a walkie-talkie, the kind they'd usually use to communicate whenever they'd pretend to be soldiers on the battlefield together during summer.
"C-cuh-call me if you need me." he instructed, and Jon nodded again. He skipped happily to the door, only stopping whe Tom called out "And remember Pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-". "Paraffin, I know!" Jon cheerfully replied, figuring if he didn't say it Tom would be stuck on the p's forever. He shut the door and hopped down the stairs, leaving Tom to his very important task of sitting in bed and sneezing. He only waited 'til after Jon was gone to let his smile drop and chastise himself for not actually saying the word. He'd never show Jon just how much he loathed his stutter, especially since Jon found it cool and Tom didn't wanna ruin the magic of it.
When he first learned how to talk he'd constantly immitate it, which naturally caused their parents some fear that the stutter was genetic or could be "caught" so to speak. Jon had no idea how much Tom hated his stutter, how it made people see him, how it actively dashed his dreams. Sometimes at school he'd get so flustered he'd have to clutch his desk and try so very hard to form a sentence and it still wasn't cohesive.
He was not and never would be just Tom Denbrough to his classmates, or even his teachers, although they'd never admit that. He was Stuttering Tom, Tuh-Tuh-Tuh-Tom to the particularly cruel ones, and Tom hated it. The absolute worst part of being in a situation like Tom's was no doubt the inability to open up about how much you dislike yourself. After all, preteen boys are already closed off, especially so in a small rural town like Derry where the homophobes outnumbered the gay community ten to two, but Tom had it the worst.
Nobody wants to be the guy to come out and say you think stuttering makes you a freak, all you'd really do is bring other disabled people down and raise up the dickheads who instilled that self hatred in him to begin with, but that's how he felt ans he couldn't help that. He was sure that's how his parents felt too, they did love him dearly and saw to almost all his needs 24/7, but they were still eagerly waiting for him to stop the stutter, and had so for a long time.
The doctors told him it'd only stick around for a few years after he got over the shock of the coma, but that date came and went, and still, Tom's stutter remained. You could tell they were both disappointed, and he truly could not blame them, because he was disappointed too. He didn't know what was wrong with him, or why he never got better despite countless visits to the speech therapist, but he began to wonder if there was something incredibly wrong with him. Everyone felt that way, even if they pretended like they didn't, everyone except for Jon that is. Jon adored him with or without the stutter, and Tom was supremely thankful for that.
While Tom continued to chastise himself, Jon hopped down the stairs joyfully. So joyfully, he nearly forgot that he'd be going down to the cellar, where dreams and little boys would surely go to die. He dashed through the house, past his mom's prized women's bowling league trophy's, past the grand piano, and past their big fancy living room he and Tom would solve puzzles in.
He threw open the cellar door and stared down at the abyss in front of him, fianlly letting the fear and anxiety settle in. Rickety, paint chipped stairs with large empty gaps of space between them disappeared off into the darkness of the room, the power still not back on despite their fathers best efforts. The bottom of the basement had been flooded at some point during one of the worse storms of the season, and the smell of soaked moldy wood and muddy water grossed Jon out quite a bit.
He stood there for a moment, a creeping sense of dread tugging at his chest like a dog on your pant leg. He was waiting for something, a large claw or alien tentecale to reach out from the dark and rip him to bits, but there was nothing. He must have been standing there for a while too because suddenly the walkie-talkie blared to life with Tom's voice, and he jumped back in shock.
"What's t-taking so long?" Asked Tom, and Jon nervously swallowed. "I stopped in the kitchen for a snack." He lied, he knew you weren't supposed to do that, lying was probably the worst thing you could do to your family. Well, that's what Jon thought was the worst at least, He was a little bit too young to know about some of the truly awful stuff some people do to their own kin. Familicide, Sexual abuse, beating, his parents and Tom had been working hard to keep his innocence. Derry was a hard place to do that in, it seemed like every couple of years some one went crazy and killed a lot of people. Jon had even heard bits and pieces of such things being whispered by his mom to his uncle over the phone, but for the most part, his childhood had stayed in tact.
"You know if muh-mom sees you snacking before din-din-er she'll have a cow." said Tom. "I know, i'm sorry." Jon mumbled. "It's whatever dude, just hu-hurry, and do-don't forget to grab to some muh-muh-muh-matches and one of those wax burner thingies.". "Okay, i'm doing it now." He said, then stuffed the walkie-talkie back into his pants pocket, but he was not, in fact, doing it now.
He still stood at the top of the stairs, terrified by the prospect of going down below, and still waiting for the inevitable mutated bat creature to emerge and drag him down into the depths of their flooded basement. Then, just as he was thinking about turning back, his own thoughts began to taunt him. "Come oooon Jon, you're not a baby are you? Only babies get scared by stuff like monsters and the dark. Do you want a boat or not?" He thought. "No." He replied and clenched his fists, grumbling into the darkness "I'm not a baby. I can do this.".
He took one step down the creaky stairs, frightening himself by the surprisingly loud noise they made, but calmed himself. He reiterated "I am not a baby." under his breath over and over again, as if it was a powerful spell that could keep all of the monsters away. It reminded him of how, whenever Tom's stutter would get particularly bad, his mom would have him recite these poems that were meant to help him focus and form sentences again. Sometimes they'd help him alot, but they could never make the stutter go away completely.
That was kind of what was happening now to Jon, he was still very much scared, so scared that if something popped out at him right now he may very well wet his pants, but the words coddled him and made him feel like he could press on. He hopped off the last step and into the flood, the water so low it could not even reach the six year old childs ankles. He turned his attention to a large rickety shelf under the cellar stairs and inspected the contents.
There were many items on it, shoepolish, old dish rags, wrenches, flashlights with no batteries, a can of turtle wax. For some reason, out of all those objects the turtle wax was what caught his attention, even more than the Paraffin and matches he came down here to get. The company's logo on the front was what really seemed to draw his eye, it was nothing special really, hardly as interesting of a mascot as a Tony the tiger or even a Ronald Mcdonald, just a tiny albino turtled posing proudly above the words turtle and wax. But Jon just couldn't stop staring at it for some reason. A spontaneous pang of familiarity hit him in the chest, as he racked his brain to try and remember where he had seen a turtle like that before.
Was it a dream? It felt too real to be jusr a dream, but much too distant to be a memory. He'd have to think about that later when he had the time, right now he had a mission to do. He snatched up the box, matches, and wax burner then bolted for the steps as fast as he could. Now that he had gotten what he came for he wasn't gonna waste any time down there. He ran as fast as his little legs could, begging god or whatever diety was listening to please not let anything grab his ankles as he ran back up the stairs.
The damp darkness of the cellar was suffocating and opressive, and Jon feared once he got back to the candle lit parlor room, that would be when the creature laid his slimy hands on him and pulled him back. He had made it though, despite all odds he was alive and still had yet to be digested by some hungry beast living under the stairs. He slammed the door and pressed his back against it, panting from how fast he was running as the fear of the dark slowly disappeared until the next time he had to confront it.
His mother suddenly stopped her piano playing to look up at him from across the room, somewhat worried, but highly annoyed by her son's slamming of the door. "Johnathan Bowley Denbrough, what have I told you about slamming that door?" She scolded, but not too harshly as her son was clearly frightened. He swept his bangs out of his face and panted a little more "Sorry mum." he muttered. She shook her head dismissively and went right back to playing Für Elise, which actually helped ease his anxiety.
He headed back up stairs and quickly placed all the stuff on Tom's night stand, eagerly watching as he melted the wax with such hypnotic glee he couldn't help but bounce a little. Tom dipped his finger in the wax and spread it over the paper boat, turning the boat from a nice white to an odd yellowy brown color. Jon got a little too close for comfort, putting his head over his brother's shoulder and breathing quite heavily on him, and yet, Tom still didn't seem to get annoyed.
The only time he'd really ever get annoyed with Jon's behavior was when he'd repeat stuff and ask incessant questions, which he had slowly learned over the years not to do for his brother's sake. They were seeing to each other needs, and it wasn't wasn't just because Tom didn't wanna get in trouble or Jon didn't wanna get yelled at, but a genuine shared affection for one another.
Jon dipped a finger into the wax and began to spread some on it's side with him, smiling and perfectly content. "C-careful you little cootie, you'll make it too heh-heavy and it'll flop on it's side." Tom gently reprimanded. "Oops.." he said, taking his hand away and letting the rest on his finger dry until he could peel it off. "It's oh-kuh-kuh-kay, just take it easy." He said, giving his brother a reassuring headpat to show there was no hard feelings.
Once the wax was spread, Tom took a sharpie from a Disneyland branded cup he used to store his pens and markers and then uncapped it with his mouth. He wrote "S.S. Jon" on the side in cursive font, and even drew a little stick figure captain waving on top of the boat, which Jon found very silly. He handed it to him, gingerly and carefully like it was a one of a kind art piece that belonged in a museum. "She's all ready Captain." he said, raising his hand to his forehead and doing a two finger salute. Jon giggled, but tilted his head in confusion "She?" he wondered.
"You always call boats a sh-she Jon." He explained, and Jon's mouth fell open like he just learned some amazing untold truth about the universe. He clutched the boat in his hands and grinned, looking up with pure adoration and love for the thirteen year old sitting on the bed. Then, quite randomly, Jon lunged right at him for a big hug, startling Tom.
"Agh! What the heck are you doing?! You're gonna g-geh-get sick!" He shouted. Jon laughed then kissed Tom on the cheek, something he hadn't done since he was three. "Eugh, now you're d-d-definetly gonna get sick. Get off me." He lightly scooched him off and Jon looked back to him, still smiling, and still very thankful. "Thanks Tom Tom, thanks alot." He said, and Tom shrugged.
"It's fine, just don't come crying to me when you get the flu and start vu-vomiting your g-guh-guh-uts out.". Tom paused to loudly cough, momentarily drawing some concern from his brother. "And p-p-put on a rain coat when you go out, I d-don't want you getting soaked." He wheezed, huddling under the covers. "Okay!" Jon cheerfully replied, closing the door and heading to the down stairs closet where they kept all the coats.
He put the small baby blue rain slicker on over the baggy sweater he was wearing and finangled with the buttons for a while, still not all that good at hand eye coordination dude to his young age. When he finally managed to get most of them through the holes, he pumped his fist in celebration, and even did a spin. On his way out the door he stopped to grab a pair of black galoshes that still had some mud left on them. He and Tom had went outside together a week ago and simply neglected to clean them since, then, as if in an act of karma for being so lazy, Tom caught a very bad cold the following day.
Jon waddled out the front door into the cool autumn air, making squeaky squishing noises with each step from the rubber soles of his boots. He took a few steps off the porch, only to be greeted by a sudden but gentle breeze hitting the side of his face and pushing his hair around. The now weaning rain fell down from the sky and onto poor little Jon's head, tapping politely on his hood as if to say "Hello Jon! It's your buddy, the rain! Let me in!". He walked a little bit further until he was at the edge of the driveway, then turned around to look back up at his house. It was a moderately above average two story home, nothing special, but to Jon it might as well had heen a castle. His bedroom was right across from Tom's on the second floor, although his over looked the back yard and Tom's overlooked the drive way.
He was peeking through the bay window his bed was by now, standing up on his knees and peeling back the curtains to watch him walk away. Since the house was still dark from the power outage, Tom was barely visible to him. He looked like a floating disembodied head, something Jon found both silly and a little spooky. He jumped in place and waved wildly at him, as if he thought Tom might possibly be able to miss the toddler dressed in a bright blue rain slicker and boots. Tom smiled then lifted up the walkie-talkir in his hand to his mouth "B-be careful. There's alot of w-weirdos out there.". Jon rolled his eyes, still smiling, but a tiny bit annoyed.
He took out his own walkie-talkie from his back pocket and pressed the button to respond. "You sound like mum." he joked. "C-can it." Tom said, a little flustered, especially since he knew it was true. Depite their differences, Tom had always been more like his mother than his father, and the opposite had been true for Jon. He giggled at his embarrassment, "I'll stay safe, don't be such a cry baby, Tom.". "Hey, I resent that label, I'm a cry man." And now they were both snickering over the radios.
"I'm serious though, stay safe." Tom reiterated. "Ok ok- I will- I love you." Jon said, and Tom went silent for a moment as he did not know how to respond. Jon was lucky enough to still be at the age where you could tell another guy you loved them and no one cared, and Tom desperately wished for him to stay like that and never get to old for saying I love you. Lord knows he was forced to out of it a long time ago, and he'd all but forgotten how to do it.
"I- uh- uhm-" Tom hesitated for a second, even with out all the macho man bullshit he had to go through at school, Tom had a hard time letting others know how he felt. Trying to hock out the words was like trying to hock out a pill you didn't mean to take. He swallowed "I lo-love you too." He spat out, and Jon seemed content with that.
He cheerily skipped down the street with his walkie-talkie in one hand and Paper boat in the other, splashing in rain water with each stomp. Tom fell back down onto his bed and sighed, totally exhausted. He wanted to take a long nap now, and he seemed quite over due for one judging by his throbbing head ache. His mothers constant repitition of Für Elise didn't really help that at all, if anything it made it worse. God, if he could have just a single moment of silence he would be happy as a clam.
What Tom didn't know though was that this song's meaning was about to be forever changed for him, from just an annoyingly pompous piano tune to a song that even twenty seven years later could still send him into a trance. From that day forward, anytime he heard those first few notes he'd always have the exact same haunting thought. "That's it, that's the song. That's the song mom was playing the day Jon passed away.". And as it turned out, that rainy view of Jon from his bedside window would be the last time he'd ever see his brother again.

  ^{Richard Bryan McDaniel: Zen Masters of Japan. The Second Step East. Rutland, Vermont: Tuttle Publishing, 2013.}
One of the temples for which Gudo had responsibility was located at Sekigahara, where the battle had taken place that established the primacy of the Tokugawa Clan. When Gudo was in the region, he stayed at a local inn and there he took an interest in the innkeeper’s son. The boy was being trained in the family business but showed intellectual promise above his station. Locally, he was known as the “Kana-writing boy” because of his skill in the cursive form of the Japanese syllabic script.
When he was fourteen years old, the boy accompanied his father to the old capital, Kyoto. Along the way, they passed through regions that had been devastated during the recent civil conflicts. These sights left a lasting impression on the boy, and, when he was in Kyoto, he made contact with Master Gudo and took up a lay practice of Zen.
In the Rinzai system, students were first taught susokkan, counting the breaths. When they achieved some degree of concentration, they were instructed to focus on the breath without counting. And, finally, when the student was deemed ready, the teacher would assign him a koan. The koan Gudo gave to the innkeeper’s son was taken from the poem written by the Chinese Sixth Patriarch, Huineng: “...from the beginning not a thing exists.” [cf. Zen Masters of China, Chapter Three]
^{… … …}
Before he could complete his Zen training, the young man had to return to Sekigahara to take up his duties at the family inn. Whenever Gudo was in the area he would check on the boy’s progress. A number of decades passed in this manner. The boy grew to adulthood, married, and became his father’s successor as inn-keeper. Over time, he fell away from his practice of Zen and acquired a taste for sake and gambling.
Around the year 1656, Gudo was once more in the region and stopped at the inn to see how his former student was doing. When he arrived, he was greeted by the innkeeper’s wife who told the Zen master that her husband was out. She invited him to come in to wait for him, and, as the two sat together, they fell into easy conversation, during the course of which the wife confided that her husband had taken to drinking in recent years.
“When he drinks,” she said, “he can become abusive. He also gambles when he has too much to drink, and he always loses. Really, there are times when I think my children and I would be better off without him. But he’s my husband—what can I do?”
“Let me see what I can do,” Gudo suggested. “It’s late. You retire, and I’ll wait for your husband. But before you leave, would you please bring me a bottle of your best sake and two cups.”
The woman did as Gudo asked. Then she gathered her children together, and they retired to the sleeping quarters. Gudo remained in the main room of the inn, seated in meditation. Around midnight, the innkeeper returned home in a drunken-state and was embarrassed to find his teacher there. Gudo did not reprimand him for his behavior and, in fact, indicated the bottle of sake set out on a table. Gudo invited the innkeeper to share a cup with him, to which the man readily agreed. The two had several cups of wine, chatting idly, and eventually the innkeeper fell asleep on the floor.
When he woke the next morning, he found Gudo still seated in meditation before the family shrine.
“You are awake,” Gudo noted. “And it is time for me to return to the capital.”
The man was a little hung-over and humiliated that his teacher had seen him in such a disreputable condition. He mumbled a reply.
As Gudo tied his sandals, he remarked, “You know, human life is brief and all things pass away. When you spend your time drinking and gambling, you have no time for other things that may be much more important. Besides which, you bring sorrow to your family and those who depend upon you.”
The innkeeper broke into tears and admitted that he had known for some time he needed to change his behavior. He swore an oath to do so, starting that very day, and, as a sign of gratitude, he asked Gudo to allow him to carry his bags on the first stage of his journey. Gudo agreed and the two set off. When they had gone a fair distance, Gudo told the man he should return home. But the man asked to be allowed to accompany the Zen master a little further. Eventually they arrived at the next village, and, once again Gudo offered to take up his own bags. The man said he was willing to accompany Gudo a bit further.
The next time Gudo offered to take up his bags, the man shook his head, “I’ll go with you all the way to Edo.”
Once they came to the city, the man had his head shaved and entered monastic life at the age of 52. Gudo gave him the name Shido Munan, a phrase found in Xinxin Ming of the third Chinese Patriarch, Jianzhi Sengcan. [cf. Zen Masters of China, Chapter Two] The first line of the poem, in Japanese, reads “The Perfect Way (shido) has no difficulties (munan).”
After he achieved awakening, Munan underwent a radical change of life-style. He did not, however, become active in the Rinzai hierarchy. Like his master, Gudo, he recognized that the tradition was stagnating. The career and political aspirations of monks made up a large part of the problem. Even monks who had achieved awakening were subject to ambitions. The koan training system had been compromised; correct “answers” could be purchased from older monks; some monks discovered they had a knack for coming up with appropriate answers without necessarily having insight. In addition, temple schools often drew students more interested in developing skills in literature or the arts than in Zen training.
Traditionally, the emphasis in Rinzai training had been on the attainment of awakening, but Munan recognized that while awakening was important, it was not an end in itself. Rather he saw it as an aid that helped the monk reform his character. Awakening, he asserted, was relatively easy to attain. Practicing the way of the Buddha, on the other hand, was difficult, especially for one who had not seen into his true nature.
Even though a man leaves his home and lives simply with his three robes and a bowl on a rock under a tree, he still cannot be called a true Buddhist priest. . . . Yet if he does wish earnestly to become a true priest, he will realize that he has many desires and is possessed of a body which is endowed with eighty-four thousand evils, of which the cardinal five are sexual desire, cupidity, birth-and-death, jealousy, and desire for fame. These evils are the way of the world. They are by no means easy to overcome. Day and night, by means of enlightenment [awakening], you should set yourself to eliminating them one after another, thus purifying yourself.
^{… … …}
Munan provided an example to others of the change in life he expected Zen practitioners to attain. He was a close friend of and mentor to Suzuki Shosan, who shared his opinions on many topics. Munan lived frugally in a hermitage with few physical comforts and gathered a small group of disciples around him who were able to emulate his ascetic lifestyle. Of these, only one would be designated his heir—Dokyo Etan.
•· ·• •· ·• •· ·•
•· ·• •· ·• •· ·•
I offer this up to point out lights can both go out and be relit. And how 'born again' awakening, not being self-sustaining, allows both reset and repeat.

5013
Watchful had been in the Sand Kingdom for several months now, he had somehow managed to find enough shelter to survive through the desert and walk further than he had ever thought possible. He would chase little preys at night and then sleep on the calm side of a dune where the wind didn’t blow. When he was lucky, he’d find an abandoned cave or an old tent. A couple times, he unwillingly stole a Scavenger camp as they fled with little shrieks, but he soon grew way too big and just avoided them.
In the meantime, his wings had stopped hurting, they still didn’t look right and made flying difficult but with enough patience, he learned how to use them for an almost normal flight, finally allowing him to scout the place and eventually noticed the serpentine river going between Sanctuary and Possibility. He had carefully avoided the Scorpion Den as from what he had gathered from hearing other thoughts while traveling, he was afraid they might kill him on sight.
It took him so long to reach Sanctuary, he was almost shocked when he finally noticed its shape from atop of a dune. He took off and flew as much as he could towards the settlement but his journey through the desert had left him famished and without any stamina. He had to land earlier than he desired and finish the distance on talons.
There was something quite peculiar about this place that he hadn’t felt anywhere else. Like he had an unsettling feeling that told him: this place is under magical protection, enter as a friend or enter at your own risk. And yet, the gates were unguarded and he found no issue walking through them. Inside the city, many dragons were busy running around or doing their stuff. A few noticed him but no one seemed to care who or what he was. As he tried to listen to their mind, he could feel a calm emotion coming from them but no decipherable thought, just a sort of content buzz. He blinked a bit, rather surprised and somewhat disappointed that he couldn’t hear them and yet relaxed at the same time that he didn’t have, or couldn’t, worry about others’ thoughts of him.
Here and there, he noticed Scavengers among the dragons, some walking along them, others riding their backs and a few more just minding their own business without any dragon nearby. He wondered if they were either pets or slaves or none of those altogether.
“Do d-d-ragons and Scav-ve-engers get a-a-a-long well he-here? That see-seems... un-un-usual.”, he pondered.
“Welcome to Sanctuary, please come visit me, I was expecting you.” said a voice in his head.
He jumped and turned around, frantically looking for whom had spoken but he could not find anyone.
“Ah, yes... I tend to forget I do that the first time a mind-reader hear me. Please, accept my apologies and come to my humble house.”
An image of a whitewashed house appeared in his mind, it looked as if it had been either recently built or well-maintained. The house had a single door also painted white with a neat carving along its borders painted with a cerulean blue line. The two windows on each side of the door were similarly decorated. The image in his mind pulled away from the house, revealing a large street that looking empty, at least compared to what he had seen after entering the city. The houses in the street each looked uniquely different, as if to represent the dragons inhabiting them. One pink with red lines here, another with all the colors of the rainbow there, a third one ostensibly bright orange. The image pulled again as if it took off and showed a bird-eye view of the city but every part of it was greyed out except for a single path going from his position to that specific house.
Watchful’s first instinct was to run away but he was tired, hungry and overall curious about who that was. He escaped from the NightWing Village and the Academy, it wasn’t to be caught by an unknown dragon. And as if it replied to his fears, the voice said:
“Do not worry, I will not tell anyone that you are here, you are free to leave at any time.”
He shivered a bit and looked back through the gates at the desert, weighing his options. There was no way he would once again take his chance with it again. It had been awful, with days so hot, he thought he was going to die, and nights so silent, he almost missed the loud buzz of all the minds in the Academy.
“I hope you like hot chocolate”, said the voice with what seemed to be a warm smile.
He sighed and took a step in the direction he had been shown, if he had to, he would just run away again. If only he could use his mind-reading to his advantage in this strange place...
After a short straddle among the street of Sanctuary, he arrived at the location. With the very bright colored houses surrounding it, it wasn’t hard to spot the only white house. On the door, a sign that read “Piteraq, Healer of the Community" in nicely carved cursive writing, which seemed weird to him in the dragon language, and also another line just as finely written under it but in a language that he couldn’t comprehend. Watchful couldn’t recall if the sign was on the vision he had been given or not. He started wondering who that Piteraq was. Such a name felt alien to him, he wasn’t sure which tribe had those.
As he was about to knock on the door, this one opened with mixed eerie sounds of creaking and the strident hiss of insufficiently greased hinges. He almost took a step back and looked around. No one else was in the street. What time was it anyway? He left his desert camp in the middle of the night -as all good NightWings do- and reached Sanctuary at sun rise but he had no way to know exactly what time it was. Would other tribe sleep during the day also or were they diurnal? If so, when did they wake up? For sure, that Piteraq was clearly awake, and as they mentioned clearly expecting him... somehow.
Watchful stared inside the house, there was a white corridor, decorated with a few paintings on the wall, which he couldn’t see from his angle, and a small table obviously meant for whoever entered to get rid of menial things that they might need while going outside but not anymore once inside.
“Please come in,” said the voice nicely, “I may be an IceWing but I despise air current”
Watchful felt relieved that his mysterious host wasn’t a NightWing, and also some kind of happiness that he was specifically an IceWing.
“Ma-mayb-b-be they will k-k-know w-ho my fa-father is...”, he thought to himself as he stepped inside.
The door softly closed behind him with the same eerie noises. The place immediately felt warm and welcoming. The paintings that he noticed earlier were mainly of IceWings posing in a very regal position and a few others tribes he wasn’t sure of. They all had one thing in common: a large medal around their necks that claimed they won some sort of scientific prize. One large brown female dragon portrait seemed to catch her eyes more than the others. Unlike all the portraits, she didn’t stand proudly, nor actually seemed to try to look in a flattering posture at all. She just looked like it was just another day for her, probably one she was forced into instead of going on with her usual day of work.
The text under the portrait read:
“To Dr. Mayfly, for the advancement of medical science”
Unlike the other dragons portrayed, her medal wasn’t a gold color but a rather having a greyish metallic tint that resembled silver but seemed much more precious as her portrait has been hooked in such a way that it shadowed all the others.
Watchful took his time to study each portrait before moving further down the corridor. That’s when he realized how soft the floor was under his talons. It appeared to be that some soft brown-grey fur was covering it and that the feeling under his talons was like walking on fluff or clouds -if he could walk on clouds that is-.
As he looked all around him, he almost jumped in shock when he realized he had left mud prints all over the fur and felt really embarrassed to have dirtied someone else’s mansion.
“Don’t worry about it, it will clean itself in a moment.”, said the same voice, but this time, it wasn’t in his head, it was coming from right at the end of the corridor.
Before him, stood a large IceWing, with sparkling white spikes with hints of blue, mauve and amethyst adorning his head. His sharp blue eyes looked straight at him but neither in a menacing nor condescending way. It felt as though there were heavy burden and pain in his gaze, as if he had carried centuries of responsibility but knew it wouldn’t be enough for salvation. As if it would never be enough.
As he walked past the corridor, the large dragon handed him a warm mug, filled up with what looked like thick hot chocolate. Watchful didn’t remember having any before and took the handle carefully with his talon.
“Th-thank yo-ou.”, he muttered silently.
The IceWing smiled and all the pain he saw in his eyes disappeared in an instant.
“Just be careful, please. It’s quite hot.”
Watchful looked down at the beverage, it was steaming and its pleasant smell reached his nostrils. He felt compelled to breath it and enjoyed the sensation it carried.
For a long time in what seemed forever, he felt safe and comfortable. He brought the cup to his lips and sipped a bit of it. It was very thick and warmed his whole body as it slid down his throat.
“My name is Piteraq, welcome to my home. Please sit down, we have much to talk.”
Watchful blinked a bit, he never heard of Piteraq before, why would this IceWing feel like they had anything to talk together. Would he actually distract him while he calls others to bring him back to the NightWing village and face consequences for what he was? But before he could continue his train of thoughts, the other dragon answered his thoughts.
“Don’t worry, you’re safe here. I promise you I will not call anyone to bring you back from where you come from.”, the IceWing said in a surprisingly warm voice.
“How d-do yo-u kn-ow wh-what I a-am think-ing? Can you re-read mi-mind?”
Piteraq shook his head gently.
“No, I cannot, I mean, not in the sense that you can.”
Watchful shivered.
“Only NightWings like you can read minds but other tribes have also powers such as animus magic, and I am one of them”, he continued in the same tone, without any fear or threat in his voice.
“So I can cast spells.” he sipped a bit from his own cup, “And I cast one that allowed me to know when someone entering Sanctuary needs my help. It gives me basic information about the person but I made sure that it didn’t pry on private information.”
Watchful cocked his head trying to understand.
“Well, for once, it didn’t give me your name, so may I ask you how I should call you, please?”
Piteraq smile was making him feel comfortable and relaxed, he felt safe there even though back in his mind some primary instinct told him to run away as fast as possible.
“I... I, I mean, my n-name is Wa-Watc-tchful.”, he almost whispered.
Piteraq smiled again but didn’t say a word and sipped his beverage again.
Watchful blinked and did the same. The hot chocolate warmed him as nothing ever did before, it reminded him when his mother hugged him after he had had nightmares or he hurt himself. How she would protect him from bullies. How she was even more present after his dad left and how she made sure he was well-fed with meals she had delicately prepared. That is... until this fateful day. The day she almost killed him.
Watchful started to cry and a couple tears almost landed in his mug. Piteraq moved a bit closer and pulled a handkerchief to wipe his tears.
“There, there,” he whispered, “You wouldn’t want sour tears in your sweet chocolate, would you?”
Watchful sighed a bit and looked up at him with hope in his eye.
“You can stay here as long as you need to, Watchful. And when you are ready, you could tell me more about you.”
Piteraq put his mug down and took Watchful’s half emptied one.
“Don’t worry, it won’t get cold. Let me show you a bit around for now.”
The IceWing walked towards a door and pulled it open.
“This will be your room for the time being, if you want.”
The room looked almost twice as big as his own back in the NightWing Village. The walls were painted a dark grey color with a hint of blue, a bed was in a corner covered with blanket, it looked very soft and comfortable, so soft in fact that Watchful thought he might just get trapped in it if he laid down. A soft crocheted cover had been thrown over the white blanket for decorative purposes. And on its corner, stood a small table with an opaque bulb placed over it. On the opposite side of the room, was a large window so that when the sun rose it would reach the bed straight on, as if Piteraq didn’t want his host to sleep late. The floor was carpeted just like the corridor he had seen earlier. And on the last corner, rested a large brown cupboard.
“If you need anything else, please feel free to ask and I will make sure to accommodate you.” Piteraq added.
Watchful was speechless. Nobody has ever been this nice to him. To the point where he almost forgot why he fled there. Piteraq was different, sure, but he was no hybrid. Although, a dragon with magical power was quite unique. As the thoughts raced in his mind, there was one question he felt like he had to ask. He looked up at Piteraq, the IceWing looked back at him.
“D-do y-you kn-know D-Da-rk-ark-st-stalk-er?”
The white dragon gaze turned from soft to questioning to sad and finally to serious. He tried to hide a sigh and pulled a wing over Watchful.
“Come with me, you need to finish your chocolate.”
As soon as they entered the room, Piteraq slid into the sofa, his legs looked like they gave way under the weight of all the burden he carried. He gently grabbed his mug and blew on the smoke coming from it.
“Yes... Yes, I do.” he eventually said, his eyes staring in the void. “Every single IceWing knows of him. Ever since we’ve been kids, it had been taught to us in school who and what he was and how we had to hate him.”
Piteraq looked down at Watchful and seemed to study the little dragon for a while.
“He looked nothing like you though but he was also a NightWing and IceWing hybrid so I can see why others could be confused. And why they’d treat you differently, especially since you have inherited the mind-reading power...”, he cut himself as if he wanted to add something more but decided against it.
Watchful looked down at himself curiously then back at Piteraq, he felt eager to learn more about that DarkStalker, which Piteraq obliged for the rest of the day, until he’d told everything he knew about the mythical dragon.
Over the next weeks, Watchful slowly adapted to the life in Sanctuary, the place was full of nice dragons, especially other hybrid, though few like him but most if not all knew what it felt like to be rejected, some even had very similar history. From time to time, he would watch Piteraq work in silence when the patient didn’t mind, otherwise, he would just tend to other activities. He liked walking through the street of Sanctuary and studying the humans there but also the dragons going on their usual chores, he would make scenarios in his head trying to figure out their behavior.
As time passed, Piteraq would eventually start teaching him to read and write. The IceWing had many books that Watchful was eager to read, a good bunch of them were too advanced for him to grasp their concept however. The healer would never ask anything back from him though, even when Watchful offered. Everyone in Sanctuary knew about Piteraq and his animus magic. For them, he was just the best and only healer. Watchful had inquired as to why he wasn’t renown all over Pyrrhia and the IceWing had replied that he didn’t wish for that kind of attention and had cast a spell to protect him. The dragonet didn’t understand so he explained:
“You see, Animus dragons are very rare, and in my tribes, they are considered to be only for royal duty and only allowed one spell in their lives.”
Piteraq paused and grabbed a pipe made of meerschaum -a white mineral used for making highly sought-after pipes, he had read in a book- delicately sculpted with a serpentine dragon going all the way up the stem. He filled it up with just one talon and without even looking at it, which Watchful found quite impressive in itself, and brought it to his lips before lighting it up and blowing heavy puffs of smokes. Watchful’s eyes were wide-opened as he stared.
“Oh, hmm, sorry, I took this bad habit from one of the humans I healed, he coughed a lot, erm... due to this actually... But don’t worry, I made a spell to protect anyone nearby... and also myself. I just love the taste and relaxing feeling it provides.”
Piteraq took a few more puffs out of it and resumed.
“Other tribes are no better. Queens all over the years have tried to abuse animus power for their own benefits... Strangers too, if they can get their ways to you. So, long ago, when I found out about my powers, I decided to hide and then eventually completely leave the Ice Kingdom... Funny, right?”
Watchful blinked and cocked his head.
“That it’s called a Kingdom when it’s ruled by a Queen... All of them actually, when you think about it...”
Watchful nodded gently.
“Anyway! Hiding physically was one thing but as I kept learning more and more about animus magic even before I discovered I was one myself... So many things you actually learn in IceWing school, and yet so few they teach you about... I realized that even if I hid correctly, any other animus dragon could eventually find me. So I started casting a few protection spells...”
Piteraq put down his pipe and poured Watchful some more hot chocolate, -which he had become very fond of, and to be fair, he started to feel like Piteraq was really spoiling him- and then some steaming tea for himself.
“Where was I?... Ah yes!”, he sipped some tea, “The first one was to hide myself from being detected by any animus dragon. I learned the hard way with my first spells, that one had to be very careful on how to word a spell, and I do mean it. That’s probably the first lesson I’d teach another animus dragon... Later on, I found out that spells can be easily overturned if you do not use specific words, so I made sure that none of my spells could and then added a very important one: I made sure no other dragon magic could ever affect me. So, that’s how I kept my powers when the magic started disappearing. Eventually I arrived here and decided to cast a spell on the city...”
Watchful tried to stay awake as Piteraq recounted his past but the more he tried to fight it, the harder it was and soon he fell into a dream where the words became entangled in his mind until they turned into blinding white dragons casting spells here and there. Dragons having spells on protective cast, one here with a single cast on his front leg and another a bit further away with all her legs in casts. He looked up as something was blinking there and he saw the letters d r a g o n being spelled in large friendly letters all over the sky above him, they were shining in a gold color with hints of a rainbow here and there. He saw a king made of ice and then dragons flying in Sanctuary under an impenetrable dome that prevented the ones under it to talk to the ones outside of it. As the dragons entered the city, they magically gained a spiky armor, those leaving lost it and regained their normal look. A mighty large white, shiny and very spiky dragon towered all over the city, his head spikes firmly planted in the dome above from where sparks flew which seemed to feed the half-globe. Many snowflakes also fell from them. He looked fierce but in his eyes, several dragons were agonizing under extreme pain or illnesses, a tear running down each eye. His pupils looking like hourglasses, with the top almost empty, only few white grains of sand remaining and falling slowly down to the, almost full, bottom part as they turn black. The giant dragon was undeniably Piteraq but his body was covered in countless scars, burns and some of his limbs looked horribly broken, but he didn’t just have the normal count of limbs, he had three forelimbs on each side with their palms facing up and around each of them a constant trail of injured dragons walking toward them and then away, healed as if they never even had any scar. The IceWing smile was unwavering, despite the constant waves of attack from outside dragons were his spikes traversed the dome. His gaze seemed to change and he shivered and the dome shivered with him. Suddenly, the dragons on his palms started to fall down to their demise. He looked through his nose at Watchful and one of his talon moved towards him offering to carry him up. As Watchful proceeded, he noticed that the amount of dragons being healed dwindled to zero and he almost feared it when the dome shook but it remained all in one piece. The attacks had stopped and he was suddenly aware that silence had fell all over the city. It was threateningly silent and empty. Just him and Piteraq, the giant.

i’m going to be honest and say that the triplets have honestly lost a lot of their appeal for me. i started watching them some time in 2022 and absolutely loved their content, but in recent months i’ve just not been excited to watch their stuff. (friday’s video was one of the first videos in about a month i’ve been able to get through)
firstly, i’m sure they don’t mean to, but the way they treat their fans is just simply not it at all. my friend asked me to go to one of their tour dates and she asked to wait outside post show to see if she could meet them. it was maybe her and 4 other girls and they were respectful when they came out. i understand that they just met a couple hundred people and maybe their social radar was absolutely zapped. nor do they really owe that to anyone. no artist or star does. it just sucked that they didn’t even acknowledge them in the slightest. to me, it felt as though if you didn’t spend the minimum of the meet and greet price (which is a whole other gripe), they just saw you as lesser than.
i’ve also noticed in recent months, the way they talk about their fans has changed drastically. i know in older videos, they would poke fun at the things fans would make silly edits of. but some of their comments, in my opinion, have almost been borderline misogynistic. they were so similar to the comments i got growing up and enjoying my favorite artists. and it’s similar to a lot of the comments teenage girls and young women face when they show any sort of interest in anything. sure they thank fans for x amount of subscribers, but it literally feels like the triplets just genuinely hate them. while fans can go too far, especially on tiktok, i feel that it doesn’t justify their comments most of the time.
lastly, the criticism. they(especially nick) simply can’t handle it. like the whole scenario of the new intro? it was not that deep and never has been. it was far too manufactured for the content they make and felt off brand. one of the smallest changes they could’ve made was the font. in what world does anyone associate the triplets with cursive?? i think something like futura bold would’ve looked 10x better. but too bad guys! we’re grounded from having intros :(
the last thing i want to touch on is when a lot of fans were in the comment section of their mcd’s video discussing palestine and how mcd’s is aiding the atrocities committed against them. fans were also in their instagram comments and even on one of their lives talking about it. to see them not only choose to stay blissfully “unaware” of it, but to also flat out drown out those comments, was kind of nasty behavior. (i’m referencing when nick told the viewers to spam matt’s comments with something stupid, it felt very deliberate to drown out something they would deem as “negativity”)
i’d love to hear what y’all think as well.

I'm hoping someone can help me. I want to simulate flipping a flashcard over that has data in an sqlalchemy database on each side. I've spent hours on this just not being able to work. Before I got to this stage I had defined in css a flashcard with a text area and was simply creating two of them in html, one the "a side" the other the b side and the b side was hidden. I wrote a "flip" button that would simply hide one and make vis the other. Now I've moved on to actually animating a flip. I found some very easy instructions on that but the problem is I need a single instance now and want to have the a/b sides of text all belong to the same container which is where the problem lies. I can't seem to find a way to have TWO "textarea," at least in any way that works.
Here is some code,

.flashcard { width: 500px; height: 300px; background-color: #fff; background-image: linear-gradient(var(--lines) 0.05em, transparent 0.05em); background-size: 100% 2em; position: relative; box-shadow: 45px 45px 33px rgba(27, 27, 27, 1); border: 1px solid gray; 

}
.flashcard textarea{ position: absolute; top: 2rem; left: 3rem; width: calc(100% - 5rem); height: calc(100% - 7rem); background-color: transparent; border: none; font-family: cursive; font-size: 2rem; line-height: 1; padding-left: 1rem; margin: 0; resize: none; backface-visibility: hidden; /* when "flipping" it will make this text box invisible */ border: 10px solid gray;

/* outline: none; */ 

}
.flashcard flipbutton { position: absolute; /* background-color: #008CBA; border: none; color: white; padding: 15px 32px; text-align: center; text-decoration: none; display: inline-block; font-size: 16px; */ bottom:.5rem; right:.5rem; }
/* experiments / / Do an horizontal flip when you move the mouse over the flip box container */ .flashcard:hover { transform: rotateY(180deg); transition: transform 1.8s; transform-style: preserve-3d; perspective: 1000px; }

 
 {{ flasha }} Flip 

Other than the "shadowing" on the card as that gets reversed too, this works ok, it flips the card over and hides the text on the A side but there is no b side I can define to get this to work. I googled everything, even subclasses but can't find anything to match enough to help me understand. I tried things like ".flashcard .a-side textarea" but that didn't work and actually cost the transformation to be wonky like the flashcard container had somehow been duplicated. I tried simply defining it as .flashcard .aside and setting the textarea class to that but that didn't work either. All around I am getting wonky behavior so if anyone can point me in the right direction I appreciate it.

I'm hoping someone can help me. I want to simulate flipping a flashcard over that has data in an sqlalchemy database on each side. I've spent hours on this just not being able to work. Before I got to this stage I had defined in css a flashcard with a text area and was simply creating two of them in html, one the "a side" the other the b side and the b side was hidden. I wrote a "flip" button that would simply hide one and make vis the other. Now I've moved on to actually animating a flip. I found some very easy instructions on that but the problem is I need a single instance now and want to have the a/b sides of text all belong to the same container which is where the problem lies. I can't seem to find a way to have TWO "textarea," at least in any way that works.
Here is some code,

.flashcard { width: 500px; height: 300px; background-color: #fff; background-image: linear-gradient(var(--lines) 0.05em, transparent 0.05em); background-size: 100% 2em; position: relative; box-shadow: 45px 45px 33px rgba(27, 27, 27, 1); border: 1px solid gray; } .flashcard textarea{ position: absolute; top: 2rem; left: 3rem; width: calc(100% - 5rem); height: calc(100% - 7rem); background-color: transparent; border: none; font-family: cursive; font-size: 2rem; line-height: 1; padding-left: 1rem; margin: 0; resize: none; backface-visibility: hidden; /* when "flipping" it will make this text box invisible */ border: 10px solid gray; /* outline: none; */ } .flashcard flipbutton { position: absolute; /* background-color: #008CBA; border: none; color: white; padding: 15px 32px; text-align: center; text-decoration: none; display: inline-block; font-size: 16px; */ bottom:.5rem; right:.5rem; } /* experiments */ /* Do an horizontal flip when you move the mouse over the flip box container */ .flashcard:hover { transform: rotateY(180deg); transition: transform 1.8s; transform-style: preserve-3d; perspective: 1000px; } 
 {{ flasha }} Flip 

Other than the "shadowing" on the card as that gets reversed too, this works ok, it flips the card over and hides the text on the A side but there is no b side I can define to get this to work. I googled everything, even subclasses but can't find anything to match enough to help me understand. I tried things like ".flashcard .a-side textarea" but that didn't work and actually cost the transformation to be wonky like the flashcard container had somehow been duplicated. I tried simply defining it as .flashcard .aside and setting the textarea class to that but that didn't work either. All around I am getting wonky behavior so if anyone can point me in the right direction I appreciate it.

I'm hoping someone can help me. I want to simulate flipping a flashcard over that has data in an sqlalchemy database on each side. I've spent hours on this just not being able to work. Before I got to this stage I had defined in css a flashcard with a text area and was simply creating two of them in html, one the "a side" the other the b side and the b side was hidden. I wrote a "flip" button that would simply hide one and make vis the other. Now I've moved on to actually animating a flip. I found some very easy instructions on that but the problem is I need a single instance now and want to have the a/b sides of text all belong to the same container which is where the problem lies. I can't seem to find a way to have TWO "textarea," at least in any way that works.
Here is some code,

.flashcard { width: 500px; height: 300px; background-color: #fff; background-image: linear-gradient(var(--lines) 0.05em, transparent 0.05em); background-size: 100% 2em; position: relative; box-shadow: 45px 45px 33px rgba(27, 27, 27, 1); border: 1px solid gray; } .flashcard textarea{ position: absolute; top: 2rem; left: 3rem; width: calc(100% - 5rem); height: calc(100% - 7rem); background-color: transparent; border: none; font-family: cursive; font-size: 2rem; line-height: 1; padding-left: 1rem; margin: 0; resize: none; backface-visibility: hidden; /* when "flipping" it will make this text box invisible */ border: 10px solid gray; /* outline: none; */ } .flashcard flipbutton { position: absolute; /* background-color: #008CBA; border: none; color: white; padding: 15px 32px; text-align: center; text-decoration: none; display: inline-block; font-size: 16px; */ bottom:.5rem; right:.5rem; } /* experiments */ /* Do an horizontal flip when you move the mouse over the flip box container */ .flashcard:hover { transform: rotateY(180deg); transition: transform 1.8s; transform-style: preserve-3d; perspective: 1000px; } 
 {{ flasha }} Flip 

Other than the "shadowing" on the card as that gets reversed too, this works ok, it flips the card over and hides the text on the A side but there is no b side I can define to get this to work. I googled everything, even subclasses but can't find anything to match enough to help me understand. I tried things like ".flashcard .a-side textarea" but that didn't work and actually cost the transformation to be wonky like the flashcard container had somehow been duplicated. I tried simply defining it as .flashcard .aside and setting the textarea class to that but that didn't work either. All around I am getting wonky behavior so if anyone can point me in the right direction I appreciate it.

I'm hoping someone can help me. I want to simulate flipping a flashcard over that has data in an sqlalchemy database on each side. I've spent hours on this just not being able to work. Before I got to this stage I had defined in css a flashcard with a text area and was simply creating two of them in html, one the "a side" the other the b side and the b side was hidden. I wrote a "flip" button that would simply hide one and make vis the other. Now I've moved on to actually animating a flip. I found some very easy instructions on that but the problem is I need a single instance now and want to have the a/b sides of text all belong to the same container which is where the problem lies. I can't seem to find a way to have TWO "textarea," at least in any way that works.
Here is some code,

.flashcard { width: 500px; height: 300px; background-color: #fff; background-image: linear-gradient(var(--lines) 0.05em, transparent 0.05em); background-size: 100% 2em; position: relative; box-shadow: 45px 45px 33px rgba(27, 27, 27, 1); border: 1px solid gray; } .flashcard textarea{ position: absolute; top: 2rem; left: 3rem; width: calc(100% - 5rem); height: calc(100% - 7rem); background-color: transparent; border: none; font-family: cursive; font-size: 2rem; line-height: 1; padding-left: 1rem; margin: 0; resize: none; backface-visibility: hidden; /* when "flipping" it will make this text box invisible */ border: 10px solid gray; /* outline: none; */ } .flashcard flipbutton { position: absolute; /* background-color: #008CBA; border: none; color: white; padding: 15px 32px; text-align: center; text-decoration: none; display: inline-block; font-size: 16px; */ bottom:.5rem; right:.5rem; } /* experiments */ /* Do an horizontal flip when you move the mouse over the flip box container */ .flashcard:hover { transform: rotateY(180deg); transition: transform 1.8s; transform-style: preserve-3d; perspective: 1000px; } 
 {{ flasha }} Flip 

Other than the "shadowing" on the card as that gets reversed too, this works ok, it flips the card over and hides the text on the A side but there is no b side I can define to get this to work. I googled everything, even subclasses but can't find anything to match enough to help me understand. I tried things like ".flashcard .a-side textarea" but that didn't work and actually cost the transformation to be wonky like the flashcard container had somehow been duplicated. I tried simply defining it as .flashcard .aside and setting the textarea class to that but that didn't work either. All around I am getting wonky behavior so if anyone can point me in the right direction I appreciate it.
​

Hey everyone, this is ArcAngel. Sorry this update took so long. I recently started back at college, and my teacher this semester assigns a lot of homework, which doesn't leave me with as much free time to write as last semester. Updates for the rest of the semester, from January to May, will be either biweekly, or monthly. After that, the weekly schedule should resume. Thanks for reading so regularly all these years, and I look forward to what is to come in the future with all of you. Don't forget to upvote!
Dracula: World of War --- The Violet Reaper ---- Humans Don’t Make Good Familiars Book 1 ---- The Lonely World --- Discord ---- YouTube --- My Patreon --- My Author's Page --- ArcAngel98 Wiki ---- The Next Best Hero ---- HDMGF Book 2 ---- Jess and Blinx: The Wizard ---- The Questing Parties ---- Zombies ---- Previous ---- Next
Jake’s POV
“So each of these symbols corresponds with a sound, and those sounds form the basis of your language?” Sela-Car asked looking over the paper with letters written all over it. We were still in her lab, only now I was teaching her about the cursive alphabet I modified to make writing runes easier. Her attention was fully focused, and she seemed to be absorbing everything. “Fascinating, what a brilliant system!” Her feather sparkled brighter than I’d ever seen them before, which still wasn’t overly bright, but she was clearly excited. “And your people use this for communication?”
“Yeah. Well, not everyone, but in my country they do.” I told her. “Other countries use their own systems, or multiple systems mashed together.”
“Sir Jake, I would be interested in visiting your country some day.”
“…Okay. I think you might have some trouble communicating, but one day, sure.” I avoided the awkward explanation of how and why I was stuck here, and just agreed before changing the subject. “You know, you’ve gotten the alphabet pretty quickly. It’s impressive.”
“While more complicated than runes on the surface, this system is inherently simpler. Even the symbols themselves are less complicated. Memorizing them and their associated sounds did not take long.”
“Wait, you already did? Like, you memorized the whole alphabet in the last hour we’ve been talking?”
“Indeed. It was exhilarating! I cannot wait to begin experimenting with them.”
“How?”
“Well, I suppose I will begin with sounding out simple instructions, perhaps then I will-”
“No, how did you learn them so quickly? Do you have an eidetic memory?”
“Yes.”
“…”
“…”
“Is that normal for Neame?” I wondered.
“No. But I was hatched with it. Applying it to my research is quite useful.” Sela-Car explained. “Speaking of which, it is time for me to return to my experiment. Thank you for teaching me this Sir Jake. I cannot thank you enough. This changes the direction of my research entirely!”
“Sure, you’re welcome.”
After that, we said goodbye, and I started walking back to Suma’s house/cave thing. “Suma,” I said, over our private connection, “I’m done at Sela-Car’s lab. She agreed to fix and help improve my runes.”
“Okay, Jake. Actually, I have some good news, and a favor to ask.”
“What’s up?”
“I went and saw my mother, like you suggested.”
“Oh, that’s… how did that go?”
“It went well, for the most part. But she would like to meet you.”
“I’d love to meet her! Does this mean you’ve made up?”
“It does.”
“And what about your dad?”
“Father and Mother have… ended their relationship. He left their home and has begun living on the other side of the mountain.”
“Oh man. Suma, I’m so sorry. Are they getting a divorce?”
“A what?”
“Like, are they ending their marriage officially, or…?”
“Marriage? What is that?”
“Do Neame not get married?!” I asked, shocked.
“I do not know what that it.”
“Do your people go to a courthouse, sign some documents, and swear to live together forever?”
“No… do humans?” She sounded equally shocked.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Suma’s Mother’s POV
It… Jake appeared in my home a few seconds after Suma finished summoning him. He was tall, much more so than I had expected. Even though he was bent over, his head still touched the ceiling. Suma was standing on the ground beside him, and I was also on the ground, but facing him. Before his arrival, my daughter warned me of a few things. She told me to not borrow any of Jake’s mana. To speak to him like I would any Neame, because he was very intelligent and might get offended if I spoke to him like I speak to my own familiar. She asked me to not mention his left upper extremity, his hand as she called it, because he had suffered an injury and lost it in a battle recently. And finally, she told me that he speaks rather rudely; that he constantly uses contractions, and I should just try to ignore them.
“Ow!” He said, rubbing his fur covered head with his long extremities after hitting the ceiling. His limb proportions were so distorted, like he had been stretched out from four directions. I saw his missing limb, and compared it with his other, then felt sympathy; it must have been quite painful.
“Jake, this is my mother. Mother, this is Jake.” Suma introduced us. Her besmears shined erratically. She was never good at hiding her nervousness.
I bowed respectfully to him, then righted myself. “Greetings, Sir Jake.”
“Oh, you can just call me ‘Jake’. You don’t need to add ‘sir’.” He said, folding his long legs under himself, and sitting down.
“Well then, Jake. It is a pleasure to meet you.” I said.
“I’m glad we finally got the chance.” He said. I heard no malice in his voice, but I was sure Suma had informed him of my previous opinions.
“Yes… I would like to apologize for my shameful behavior, and for taking so long to finally greet you.”
“It’s fine. You were worried about Suma. In your place, I’d have probably done the same thing.”
(Suma did not lie about his language. Four contractions in half a minute; wow.) I thought to myself. “Thank you for that, but I do not deserve it. I was wrong about you. You protected Suma while she was away, and you were there for her when her father and I were not. My debt to you is... immeasurable.”
“Please don’t worry about it. I was going to do that anyway. I’m just happy that you and Suma made amends. And I would like to extend my apologies for my role with wat happened between you and your hus- uh… between you and Suma’s father.” He said, stuttering during the final part of his sentence.
“Thank you, but it was not your fault. Ours was always an unusual relationship. It was bound to end eventually.”
“Suma explained some of it to me. Things are different on my world. Breakups like this aren’t rare, but they are uncommon, and always sad.”
“Have you experienced this yourself? Suma told me that your ages were relatively the same, so I had assumed you also had not mated yet.”
“Uhhh… ummm.” Jake’s face changed color slightly, and I could sense that he began to emit more mana than he had been before.
“Mother! Please do not. Jake does not like to discuss such matters.”
“I’ve uh… no. I’ve never been in a serious long-term relationship. I mean I’ve dated! But nothing serious. No kids yet.”
“Suma is the same. Even though I have asked her multiple times to meet with my friend’s son.”
“Okay! Well, it was a pleasure doing this. But Jake is quite busy. Right, Jake?” Suma protested, embarrassed.
“You know, on my first day as her familiar, she had me chase away someone who was trying to flirt with her.” Jake laughed.
“That does indeed sound like my daughter.” I chuckled.
“NAMES! My mother wanted a name! Jake, would you mind giving her one?” Suma cried, desperate to change the subject.
“Suma!” I said, surprised at her rudeness. “You cannot just-”
“No problem. I’d love to.”
“W-what?”
“Do you have any preferences for the name?”
“…I…”
“Like, how it should sound, I mean. Or if you want to have a special meaning.”
“…I…”
“You know, you two don’t have a family name. Do you want me to give you both one?”
“…I…”
“Only nobles are allowed to have family names.” Suma said, as if he had just offered her a Morgi fruit seed, and not a family name like some distinguished noble family would have.
“Oh, dang. Just a normal name then. Unless we could get the Grand Duke to make an exception?”
“Even Grand Duke Udoka Sopra cannot change that. It is an ancient law, nearly a thousand years old.”
“Would you truly give me a name?” I finally managed to say, after spending several seconds stunned.
“Sure, if you want one.”
“Yes, of course. Thank you!”
“So, any preferences?”
I thought for a moment, “Yes, one. I would like it to sound similar to my daughter’s name. I want everyone who hears it to know that I am proud to be her mother.” Jake nodded his head.
“Mother…” Suma said, surprised.
“Okay, I can do that.” He closed his eyes for a moment, and rubbed the bottom of his face. “What about… a name that means ‘moon’ on my world? The name is Luna.”
“Luna.” I said, stunned. “It is beautiful. I would love that name.”
“Well then, it is nice to meet you, Luna.”

Hey everyone, this is ArcAngel. Sorry this update took so long. I recently started back at college, and my teacher this semester assigns a lot of homework, which doesn't leave me with as much free time to write as last semester. Updates for the rest of the semester, from January to May, will be either biweekly, or monthly. After that, the weekly schedule should resume. Thanks for reading so regularly all these years, and I look forward to what is to come in the future with all of you. Don't forget to upvote!
Dracula: World of War --- The Violet Reaper ---- Humans Don’t Make Good Familiars Book 1 ---- The Lonely World --- Discord ---- YouTube --- My Patreon --- My Author's Page --- ArcAngel98 Wiki ---- The Next Best Hero ---- HDMGF Book 2 ---- Jess and Blinx: The Wizard ---- The Questing Parties ---- Zombies ---- Previous ---- Next
Jake’s POV
“So each of these symbols corresponds with a sound, and those sounds form the basis of your language?” Sela-Car asked looking over the paper with letters written all over it. We were still in her lab, only now I was teaching her about the cursive alphabet I modified to make writing runes easier. Her attention was fully focused, and she seemed to be absorbing everything. “Fascinating, what a brilliant system!” Her feather sparkled brighter than I’d ever seen them before, which still wasn’t overly bright, but she was clearly excited. “And your people use this for communication?”
“Yeah. Well, not everyone, but in my country they do.” I told her. “Other countries use their own systems, or multiple systems mashed together.”
“Sir Jake, I would be interested in visiting your country some day.”
“…Okay. I think you might have some trouble communicating, but one day, sure.” I avoided the awkward explanation of how and why I was stuck here, and just agreed before changing the subject. “You know, you’ve gotten the alphabet pretty quickly. It’s impressive.”
“While more complicated than runes on the surface, this system is inherently simpler. Even the symbols themselves are less complicated. Memorizing them and their associated sounds did not take long.”
“Wait, you already did? Like, you memorized the whole alphabet in the last hour we’ve been talking?”
“Indeed. It was exhilarating! I cannot wait to begin experimenting with them.”
“How?”
“Well, I suppose I will begin with sounding out simple instructions, perhaps then I will-”
“No, how did you learn them so quickly? Do you have an eidetic memory?”
“Yes.”
“…”
“…”
“Is that normal for Neame?” I wondered.
“No. But I was hatched with it. Applying it to my research is quite useful.” Sela-Car explained. “Speaking of which, it is time for me to return to my experiment. Thank you for teaching me this Sir Jake. I cannot thank you enough. This changes the direction of my research entirely!”
“Sure, you’re welcome.”
After that, we said goodbye, and I started walking back to Suma’s house/cave thing. “Suma,” I said, over our private connection, “I’m done at Sela-Car’s lab. She agreed to fix and help improve my runes.”
“Okay, Jake. Actually, I have some good news, and a favor to ask.”
“What’s up?”
“I went and saw my mother, like you suggested.”
“Oh, that’s… how did that go?”
“It went well, for the most part. But she would like to meet you.”
“I’d love to meet her! Does this mean you’ve made up?”
“It does.”
“And what about your dad?”
“Father and Mother have… ended their relationship. He left their home and has begun living on the other side of the mountain.”
“Oh man. Suma, I’m so sorry. Are they getting a divorce?”
“A what?”
“Like, are they ending their marriage officially, or…?”
“Marriage? What is that?”
“Do Neame not get married?!” I asked, shocked.
“I do not know what that it.”
“Do your people go to a courthouse, sign some documents, and swear to live together forever?”
“No… do humans?” She sounded equally shocked.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Suma’s Mother’s POV
It… Jake appeared in my home a few seconds after Suma finished summoning him. He was tall, much more so than I had expected. Even though he was bent over, his head still touched the ceiling. Suma was standing on the ground beside him, and I was also on the ground, but facing him. Before his arrival, my daughter warned me of a few things. She told me to not borrow any of Jake’s mana. To speak to him like I would any Neame, because he was very intelligent and might get offended if I spoke to him like I speak to my own familiar. She asked me to not mention his left upper extremity, his hand as she called it, because he had suffered an injury and lost it in a battle recently. And finally, she told me that he speaks rather rudely; that he constantly uses contractions, and I should just try to ignore them.
“Ow!” He said, rubbing his fur covered head with his long extremities after hitting the ceiling. His limb proportions were so distorted, like he had been stretched out from four directions. I saw his missing limb, and compared it with his other, then felt sympathy; it must have been quite painful.
“Jake, this is my mother. Mother, this is Jake.” Suma introduced us. Her besmears shined erratically. She was never good at hiding her nervousness.
I bowed respectfully to him, then righted myself. “Greetings, Sir Jake.”
“Oh, you can just call me ‘Jake’. You don’t need to add ‘sir’.” He said, folding his long legs under himself, and sitting down.
“Well then, Jake. It is a pleasure to meet you.” I said.
“I’m glad we finally got the chance.” He said. I heard no malice in his voice, but I was sure Suma had informed him of my previous opinions.
“Yes… I would like to apologize for my shameful behavior, and for taking so long to finally greet you.”
“It’s fine. You were worried about Suma. In your place, I’d have probably done the same thing.”
(Suma did not lie about his language. Four contractions in half a minute; wow.) I thought to myself. “Thank you for that, but I do not deserve it. I was wrong about you. You protected Suma while she was away, and you were there for her when her father and I were not. My debt to you is... immeasurable.”
“Please don’t worry about it. I was going to do that anyway. I’m just happy that you and Suma made amends. And I would like to extend my apologies for my role with wat happened between you and your hus- uh… between you and Suma’s father.” He said, stuttering during the final part of his sentence.
“Thank you, but it was not your fault. Ours was always an unusual relationship. It was bound to end eventually.”
“Suma explained some of it to me. Things are different on my world. Breakups like this aren’t rare, but they are uncommon, and always sad.”
“Have you experienced this yourself? Suma told me that your ages were relatively the same, so I had assumed you also had not mated yet.”
“Uhhh… ummm.” Jake’s face changed color slightly, and I could sense that he began to emit more mana than he had been before.
“Mother! Please do not. Jake does not like to discuss such matters.”
“I’ve uh… no. I’ve never been in a serious long-term relationship. I mean I’ve dated! But nothing serious. No kids yet.”
“Suma is the same. Even though I have asked her multiple times to meet with my friend’s son.”
“Okay! Well, it was a pleasure doing this. But Jake is quite busy. Right, Jake?” Suma protested, embarrassed.
“You know, on my first day as her familiar, she had me chase away someone who was trying to flirt with her.” Jake laughed.
“That does indeed sound like my daughter.” I chuckled.
“NAMES! My mother wanted a name! Jake, would you mind giving her one?” Suma cried, desperate to change the subject.
“Suma!” I said, surprised at her rudeness. “You cannot just-”
“No problem. I’d love to.”
“W-what?”
“Do you have any preferences for the name?”
“…I…”
“Like, how it should sound, I mean. Or if you want to have a special meaning.”
“…I…”
“You know, you two don’t have a family name. Do you want me to give you both one?”
“…I…”
“Only nobles are allowed to have family names.” Suma said, as if he had just offered her a Morgi fruit seed, and not a family name like some distinguished noble family would have.
“Oh, dang. Just a normal name then. Unless we could get the Grand Duke to make an exception?”
“Even Grand Duke Udoka Sopra cannot change that. It is an ancient law, nearly a thousand years old.”
“Would you truly give me a name?” I finally managed to say, after spending several seconds stunned.
“Sure, if you want one.”
“Yes, of course. Thank you!”
“So, any preferences?”
I thought for a moment, “Yes, one. I would like it to sound similar to my daughter’s name. I want everyone who hears it to know that I am proud to be her mother.” Jake nodded his head.
“Mother…” Suma said, surprised.
“Okay, I can do that.” He closed his eyes for a moment, and rubbed the bottom of his face. “What about… a name that means ‘moon’ on my world? The name is Luna.”
“Luna.” I said, stunned. “It is beautiful. I would love that name.”
“Well then, it is nice to meet you, Luna.”

Texts in cursive are my thoughts -like that :3
This is from last June:
Psychiatric Findings on Admission
Alerted, fully oriented patient. No cognitive-memory deficits, open and friendly in contact, normal verbal rapport with adequate facial expressions, gestures, and intonation. Eye contact is normal -because i actively try to follow social norms. No thought disorders, hallucinations, or delusions. Affectively depressed, prone to rumination, strong feelings of inadequacy, social withdrawal. Credible and secure distancing from acute suicidality, occasional passive suicidal thoughts, no acute risk factors. The suspicion of an Asperger's syndrome was not confirmed in the cross-sectional examination conducted here. The patient demonstrated normal conversational skills, appearing appropriate in facial expressions, gestures, and intonation, -again, while having a social interaction a heavily pay attention that i come across as what is considered normal particularly showing the ability for intersubjectivity and central coherence. Understanding of irony is present. There are no specialized interests -agreed or pronounced patterns of repetitive stereotypical and restrictive behaviors. There is flexibility in daily life and the ability to deviate from routines in the short term. i wouldn't say so, i really don't like when my day plan is interrupted or i'm not able to do a certain routine.
Significant difficulties exist in social interaction, communication, and overall daily functioning due to pronounced social phobia with an insecure personality structure. In addition, there is a severe depressive disorder.
In summary, the ICD-10 criteria for high-functioning autism are not met. Due to the existing depressive disorder and pronounced social phobia, further psychiatric and psychotherapeutic treatment is urgently indicated."

Hello,
I am looking for some guidance in trying to figure out the source of a white noise level on the re-issue hand wired 64 Custom Deluxe Reverb. The amp has a 20+ db noise increase from the ambient room noise and I don't recall it being that noisy prior to a power outage and a fuse blowing from that event.
This amp is said to be noisy and I had it modded to remove the reverb/trem on both channels and restore the normal channel (which was supposed to reduced the noise floor), and added a push/pull for the bright cap on the second channel, but this was well before the power outage. I've also had a new set of tubes and it has been biased. I am not sure if this is in my head and it was always that loud, but I was hoping to confirm with actual troubleshooting instead of letting it be.
The white noise/hiss happens with nothing plugged in and all knobs set to 1. If I pull V4, the noise level drops and channel 1 can be used but no reverb/trem. I tried a few tubes in v4 with no change so now I'm thinking I need to track down a component. I am not sure if pulling v4 means anything though or if that behavior is expected when pulling V4 (reverb recovery/pre-amp driver).
I've run a signal and a scope on it , but the wave looks fine on the speaker output. Without a signal and zoomed in enough, the wave has a cursive "r" look to it. I have no other deluxe reverb to compare to, but I can run my Princeton clone on the scope and compare the waves. The clone is almost silent in comparison though, but being different amps I wasn't sure if it mattered. I'm also new to using a scope, so maybe my methods are flawed. I haven't checked components individually though if anyone thinks that would help.
At the end of the day, It doesn't really matter when I'm playing, but it's driving me nuts otherwise because I want to sort out if that level of noise supposed to be acceptable or if it is fixable. If anyone has any suggestions for where to look next, I would greatly appreciate it. Thank you in advance!

I (18F) belong to a somewhat large group of high school friends (around 15 people). There is one “leader” of sorts, I’ll call her Jane. She has been getting in my nerves lately - I’ll touch on that later. There are two important members of the group to know besides Jane: “Sarah” and “Agatha”, who are best friends since forever. Jane is the glue of our friend group. She leads conversations at lunch, organizes get-togethers, takes pictures all the time, and always invites people to her home that is conveniently located right next to our school. Several things that Jane has done recently have been bothering me. Some context is necessary. I have known Sarah and Agatha for a lot longer than Jane has, and yet recently Jane has been latching on to them and shutting me out. I literally introduced her to them. This is probably partially because all three of them have nearly every single class together this year, and I don’t have classes with any of them. Still, it hurts to be left out when what was briefly a group of four girls inside a larger friend group (mostly comprised of guys) is now a trio with me on the outside. First, she organized a group chat without me in it. This was full of all her friends, people who are also my friends. She accidentally mentioned an inside joke from the group chat in front of me and then asked me why I wasn’t laughing. I responded politely that I wasn’t on the chat, so I didn’t really get the joke. She said “oh, I’m sorry, I’ve totally been meaning to create a new one with you in it, I’m just super lazy.” She did, and although she stuck to her word and made a new group chat, I cried a lot about it that day. Second, the three of them - Jane, Sarah, Agatha, have been hanging out a lot more often alone than before. After school gets out, they’ll go get coffee or ice cream together without thinking to invite me. Again, it was previously established that we were a group of FOUR, not three and some rando who imposes on their time together, and yet it’s starting to feel that way. Third, Jane plays with people’s feelings. Jane is a singer-songwriter (quite a good one, I wouldn’t be surprised if she gains a decent following in the coming years) who sometimes decides to send videos of songs to her friends as a sort of test drive before playing them at a concert. She sends me this blatant love song full of heartfelt imagery and metaphor - enough to melt anyone’s heart if they thought it was about them. She then proceeds to play this game with me over text, dropping details about the person she’s crushing on and wrote the song about while insisting she can’t say a name. She even said the classic line, “you know them VERY well.” Of course I thought it was me. Anyone would. Beyond that, she and I are the only two girls who like girls in our immediate friend group, if not entire grade (our school is quite small and conservative - not many gay people). She and I had flirted casually in the past, but after hearing this song, I suddenly thought she was serious the whole time. I began to hang out with her one on one - basically taking her on dates without the hand-holding and labeling. I work up to asking her out officially and - get this - write a letter in beautiful cursive script saying all the things I like about her. Sitting in my car, I prepare to give her the letter, but to make sure, ask her if the song was about me. She scoffs and says “no, did you really think that?” I am crushed but hide it well. After a bit of prodding, she reveals that the object of her affections is none other than Sarah, a straight girl who is probably mildly homophobic due to her upbringing (nothing against her though, Sarah is great). After a bit of crying and short-lived teenage heartbreak, I try to forget about what happened and do my best to preserve our friendship as it was. Side note: this is when she decided to date one of our mutual guy friend’s ex-girlfriend, who broke his heart. Not a good move. I tried to warn her against it and she admitted it was a bad idea but continued to go on dates with the girl anyway. Fourth, after I helped her get a good grade in a paper, she rubbed it in my face that mine wasn’t as good as hers. I literally edited her paper. She got a 96 and I got an 86 - and she usually gets grades in the range of low 80s. I get it, she’s excited and everything, but did she really have to gloat about how great it was that she got an A and I got a B? I’ve literally never received a B on a paper before. I am a straight-A student in every sense of the word. Maybe I’m being over dramatic, but I was already not happy about the grade I got, so for her to boast about the 10 points she got above me was pretty brutal. Especially because there were clear signs I’d been crying about the grade. It’s mean to say, but if you had read her paper, you would agree with me that I got her that 96. Her paper was a garbage fire before I stepped in - typos, grammar mistakes, run-on sentences, entire paragraphs that basically said the same thing as the previous one, etc. After boasting and rubbing it all in my face, she didn’t even care to say thank you for the help I gave her. We then gave presentations based on those papers. Each person was given a time slot in various rooms across the school, so a lot of kids overlapped with each other. Jane’s presentation overlapped with Agatha’s, so she asked our principal to change her time so it “wouldn’t conflict with any of her friends’ presentations so she could see all of them and not miss anyone important.” Guess which time slot she specifically asked to be moved to? That’s right, mine. Before changing her time, all of these people agreed to see my presentation, but the second she changed hers, I was chopped liver. I gave my presentation to a room missing all my friends because I am second in importance to Jane. I can’t help but feel like she did this specifically to hurt my feelings. None of my other friends even pretended to be sad that they missed my speech either. All they did was talk about how good hers was. These things, plus dozens of other comments putting me down or reminding me how unimportant I am to her, have convinced me that Jane is not a good friend. The problem is, I still like spending time with her. She’s funny, and usually nice, and despite my best efforts, I’m still kind of crushing on her. I’m in a tight space here, and I need advice desperately. Do I ditch Jane, which will cause all my other friends to ditch me as well? If so, do I tell her why and end things all at once or do I just slowly stop spending as much time with the group? Do I endure her behavior for the security of a friend group? Should I tell the others in the group to try and turn everyone against her? Or am I just being over dramatic and none of this is a problem at all? HELP!!
TL;DR : I have a bad friend with a lot of supporters and I’m not sure whether to keep hanging out with that group or not.

For some context my mom had me and my sister when she was both 18 and 19. Me(17 F) and sister (16 F) both have gotten good grades since we were born because that was expected of us. Instead of having fun during the summer, we had to read, practice our cursive writing and had active vocabulary test per week. My other siblings Daniel(14 M), Linda( 11 F) and Tasha( 5 F) are never expected to do anything. I don’t expect Tasha to do anything because she’s a baby but Linda and Daniel don’t do anything. Daniel recently has moved out of the house to stay with my Father( 37 M) because him and my mom got into a psychical fight.
I’m starting to realize that my brothers abusive behavior may have stemmed from the way my mother treated me, Daniel and my other sister. My mother had hit my in the face with her phone giving me a black eye because she saw that I was watching pornography. On another occasion, she beat all of my siblings with a belt leaving lashes and marks along our body simply because one of my siblings had stolen a piece of cake. She slams us against the wall( me and my 16 year old sister) because she feels as though we somehow have an attitude with her.
Last week, I was on the phone with my close friend Shawn(19 M) and me and my mom were jokingly arguing until i smacked my lips. Her response to this was that she would beat me if i continued testing her.
Fast forward to the present, My mother woke me and my sister(16 F) up yelling and telling us that we were useless. We have been on break for two weeks and she claims that the house hasn't gotten clean since but Linda was at home and didn't do any chores! I was at work the entire two weeks for 8 or more hours at a time but instead of letting me explain myself she just continuously yelled.

For some context my mom had me and my sister when she was both 18 and 19. Me(17 F) and sister (16 F) both have gotten good grades since we were born because that was expected of us. Instead of having fun during the summer, we had to read, practice our cursive writing and had active vocabulary test per week. My other siblings Daniel(14 M), Linda( 11 F) and Tasha( 5 F) are never expected to do anything. I don’t expect Tasha to do anything because she’s a baby but Linda and Daniel don’t do anything. Daniel recently has moved out of the house to stay with my Father( 37 M) because him and my mom got into a psychical fight.
I’m starting to realize that my brothers abusive behavior may have stemmed from the way my mother treated me, Daniel and my other sister. My mother had hit my in the face with her phone giving me a black eye because she saw that I was watching pornography. On another occasion, she beat all of my siblings with a belt leaving lashes and marks along our body simply because one of my siblings had stolen a piece of cake. She slams us against the wall( me and my 16 year old sister) because she feels as though we somehow have an attitude with her.
Last week, I was on the phone with my close friend Shawn(19 M) and me and my mom were jokingly arguing until i smacked my lips. Her response to this was that she would beat me if i continued testing her.
Fast forward to the present, My mother woke me and my sister(16 F) up yelling and telling us that we were useless. We have been on break for two weeks and she claims that the house hasn't gotten clean since but Linda was at home and didn't do any chores! I was at work the entire two weeks for 8 or more hours at a time but instead of letting me explain myself she just continuously yelled.

Hello brothers and happy new year!
I wanna share something I learned over the last couple of days related to my ongoing recovery from PMO and somethings I've experienced whilst coming out of a really severe flatline recently. A couple of weeks ago I posted about that flatline and attributed a lot of my misfortunes to "bad luck". Now I have a more nuanced perspective on my whole situation. This may apply only to a small subset of this community, but I figured it was worth sharing.
As many of you know one of the symptoms of flatline is anhedonia. Basically a complete lack of emotions. You walk around basically feeling numb. Whenever I would start to get to 90 days and beyond in a streak I would feel this constant and persistent rage. I would go looking for fights and have a more dominating presence. I felt more "Alpha". At first I attributed my behavior solely to the increased testorone in my system. My solution to handling this rage monster was to get it out in the gym and just try to be more cautious about my reactions when I felt higher T.
In my streak of 396 days the anger came in an ebb and flow fashion without much reliable predictability. I started getting violent dreams where I beat the shit of my family members. Again I just assumed it was a natural consequence of SR without examining further. Then things in my life got worse. People seemed to hate being around me. My girl and I broke up. And I was in one of the flatline states that really tested my faith and commitment to this SR journey. I didn't give in, instead I sought help.
About 5 weeks ago I started going to therapy on a regular weekly basis to get some emotional support. At first it felt useless and kinda dumb but something in me told me to stick with it. My therapist just let me talk and talk without much intervention. Being in this state of introspection made me question all my actions. Slowly but surely I started to realize what was happening in my cranium.
The dreams, the violent and angry outburst and the righteous rage were all covering up the original source of my PMO Addiction. As a child I experience severe and persistent physical abuse, emotional abuse and neglect. My stepdad had rage issues and would terrorize everyone in the family because of his insecurities. My mother would harshly beat us with a belt at even the slightly sign of misconduct. My younger siblings and I lived in constant fear and terror.
All these years I thought the physical abuse was the thing that messed me up. It was actually the verbal emotion abuse. My mother would belittle and degrade us. She would often insult us with really cutting personal attacks and say she was "just joking". It really affected me as a child. I am male but my natural disposition is more feminine in natural. Through therapy and research I've come to realize that I would be categorized as "A highly sensitive person" (HSP). Basically this subset of the population is more emotionally sensitive than the average person and typically has rich inner world.
Even though this was my life from childhood until I left for college I "forgot" about all these trauma. I used PMO to numb myself from the pain of child. Through SR, therapy, and god's grace I've been able to begin processing all these unresolved emotions and healing. I've come to see that all of my actions and major life decisions have been influenced by these two important facts: my child abuse and heightened emotional sensitivity.
When I was I child I loved art, music and writing poetry. I used to love writing in cursive and I watched a ton of Disney movies. Over the years I've deviated from these traits. I would get bullied at home and school for being "too soft". I would get rejected by women because they assumed I was gay (when people still openly used the term as an insult). I would try to grow my hair long but my dad would force me to cut it because it was too girly. All of this caused me to move further and further away from who I am over the years. I wanted to prove I was a "real man" so I went above and beyond in my education and career. I started working out and getting a big as possible so I wouldn't get bullied. I basically tried to turn myself into the baddiest mfer I could possibily be.
I basically went from one extreme "too feminine" to the other "too masculine". Over the weekend I cried about 6 or 7 times. Flatline was lifting and I could remember all the evil things my mother I would say to me as a child. I haven't cried that much in years. Fighting PMO gave me strength I needed so I could finally face that repressed pain. Head on and accept it without shame. That's a part of my personal history I don't need to hide from anymore. On the plus side I'm able to feel all my other emotions with more depth too: Happiness, curiosity, joy etc.
I'm writing this post for a couple of reasons. One - to provide a bit of a counter balance to the ra ra we get so much in this community. When my relationship first broke my instinct was "let her go, she's holding me back" when the truth is that would have been the wrong decision. This woman loved me unconditionally and even was willing to forgo sex for a long time to be with me. If my behavior was bad enough to push her away then I need reexamine my actions instead of letting my ego get the better of me. I've realized that I was not a saint. I actually picked up my mother's toxic trait of disguising personal attacks as "jokes". I got normalized to abuse and unwittingly reenacting that same behavior that was modeled for me.
This may sound simplistic or childish but I've come to realize that I don't want to be a super hardened person. I want to be friendly and kind. SR gave me the courage to tap into the aggressive protector that I needed to protect me in childhood. The problem is I let myself by that way by default all the time. Always with my guard up and ready to fight to the death if need be. It scares people away and it makes us only able to experience a limited bandwidth of emotions. From now on I'm going to be the kind, sensitive and loving guy by default and only bring out that SR maddog when necessary. You can still maintain masculine disciplines like working out and grinding while still making sure don't lose your basic humanity. I think it's all about about balance and keeping track of your state of mind.
Anyways hope this was helpful - good luck out there guys

When I was in 2nd grade, my mother moved me to a different school. At the time, I had undiagnosed ADHD and also had a habit of pointing at things with my middle finger instead of my index finger.
One time, when the teachers picked us up from breakfast and walked us over to Homeroom, I saw the lunch chart on the wall. It said lunch was going to be pizza. I also knew that I had just eaten breakfast pizza.
Putting 2 and 2 together, I realized we were going to have pizza twice that day, so I turned around to my friend and pointed upward (both hands) saying "Plus Pizza!" "Plus Pizza!"
The issue is, as mentioned before, I pointed at everything with my middle finger.
So I ended up flipping everyone off with both hands, and the teacher sent me to the office with a sticky note saying what I did wrong IN CURSIVE (which at the time I fould not read). I asked her what I did, and she would not tell me, stating, "You know what you did."... But I really didn't.
After roughly 2 hours, I got bored of sitting in the office and asked if I could read a book. They brought me to the library and let me choose one before being sent back to the office with it.
Enter my mother. The school tells her that she needs to bring me home, that I will excused from the Halloween Event later that week and that she was to come back on a certain date to discuss my behavior with the assistant principal.
Fast forward to that date. I had stayed home from school for a while and when we got there the Asst. principal explained what I had done wrong.
I don't really remember the conversation but what I do remember is that at some point my mother tried to explain that I naturally pointed at things with my middle finger, and also didn't understand how it was derogatory.
The Asst. Principal responds with something along the lines of "He's manipulating you" or "He's tricking you."
I get really angry (as angry as I could for a second grader!) and tell her that she was mean, ugly, and older than my mom.
That's when she drops the bomb. I'd be going to a special school called Success where they take kids with mental problems and behavior issues.
Fast forward a year. In 3rd grade, I got diagnosed with ADHD and anxiety. I get prescribed medication for both, and from that point on, my behavior improved dramatically.
But they never took me out of "Success." Only once I moved to junior high did they put me back with the mainstream children again.
Because of this, I lack social skills I should have developed as a small child because I was not able to interact with normal kids my age and sometimes what I say offends people even though I don't mean to be rude.
I am now 13M, and I just got kicked out of AP English because the teacher got so tired of getting angry at me for being rude that she's had enough of it. Whilst sitting in the principals office I had to explain to him that I had no idea what I did wrong and he struggled to believe me because he says "He knows i'm intelligent" even though when it comes to communicating with others effectively I really don't feel like that's true.
I'm getting lower grades due to being sent to detention so often, I struggle to communicate with others, and I feel like I am not able to hit my full potential and soar higher than ever before.
Now the Junior high is threatening to send me the High school version of Success because "I can't act right" even though 99% of the times I get wrote up by teachers it's because I say something mean on accident or get angry at someone else for misunderstanding what they say.
I feel like a waste of space, and I don't know what to do anymore. My dad hates the person I've become. In his eyes, I'm a brat and constantly mean while my mother knows that I have issues and tries to work with me. I know I have potential in life, but it's like my issues are holding me back, and I just don't know what to do anymore. It's as if the entire world is against my existence.

1995
CHAPTER 1
“When I get home I’m going to have a cigarette in the bathtub.”
“It only lasts like 90 seconds, what are you going to do for the rest of the time, Johnny?”
“I don’t know, Bill, imagine fucking your sister, but then again, that won’t take very long now, will it, if you catch my drift?” “Guys, guys, look, we’re here,” said Tom, the tallest of the four boys. Johnny, Bill, Tom, and Tom’s cousin Malcolm were four senior students at the all-boys private school, St Barnabas’ School for Gifted Boys in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They had just found the mouth of an old, abandoned mining cave, located near a railroad that was also abandoned. Their plan, to go deep inside the mine, and if they were lucky, to find treasure, or at the very least, an adventure. They had hiked three miles to get there from their neighborhood through forest and rocky terrain in light rain and were eager to get into the shelter of the mine.
“OK, guys,” said Tom, brandishing a flashlight out of his pocket, “Single file, now. Things can get ugly down there.” They walked to the end of the dirt path and into the mouth of the cave.
“Boy, Tom, you really led us into a toilet down here,” said Malcolm. “It smells terrible!” Tom sniffed the air.
“Probably dampness and fungus growth,” said Tom nonchalantly.
“Or TNT. Kaboom!” said Bill.
“TNT doesn’t have a smell, you numbskull,” said Johnny.
“Right, then how come in movies the dogs are always sniffing for explosives?”
“That’s drugs.” Said Malcolm simply.
“Drugs explode, don’t they?” asked Bill, scratching his head uncertainly.
“Only the bad ones.” Said Johnny.
“I thought it was the good ones,” said Bill.
“Yeah, come to think of it, I think you’re right,” said Johnny. “After all, your sister’s like a drug, and she made me explode, so I guess everything’s hunky dory.
“You guys should be on TV,” said Malcolm wearily.
They walked further through the cave for a few hundred feet or more when they came upon a mine shaft.
“OK guys, we need to all be on board if we want to go through with this this time. Bill, Johnny, stop arguing. Malcolm, please, no more smart remarks. Now, the cage should fit all of us no problem, but again, you guys all got to be on board with a little elevator action.”
“Is it worse than a plane?” said Johnny innocently.
“Your ears will probably pop,” said Malcolm.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, how far down will we be going?” asked Bill concernedly.
“To China,” said Tom, laughing.
“What!” shouted Bill.
“I’m only messing with you, you clown,” said Tom, “probably just a couple hundred feet.”
“Oh, good,” said Bill, now suddenly sounding disappointed. The four boys approached the elevator gingerly, but then Tom approached the elevator’s control panel, studied it for a few moments, and suddenly flipped a switch and then exclaimed, “I’ve got it!” and lo and behold, the cage’s door slid open.
“How’d you know how to do that?” asked Malcolm.
“I’ve been studying electronics in my free time after school, and Uncle Charlie gave me a diagram last Friday at lunch and I looked it over. Beats meatloaf any day.”
“How’re we getting out once we get to the bottom of the shaft?” asked Johnny. “The controls to get out at the bottom are on the outside of the car and there is a solid reinforced steel cage locked in front of us, preventing us from escaping!”
“This,” answered Tom, with a sneaky smile, pulling out a remote-control device from the pocket of his jacket.
“Good God don’t tell me you came here and made a remote control that communicates with the top of the shaft’s control board! But how!” exclaimed Johnny.
“With great effort, but now we have a means, but we just need the whole team’s readiness. Come on guys!” With that Tom walked through the open door of the elevator inside and Malcolm followed, followed by Bill, finally followed by Johnny. Tom pressed the button of his remote-control and the door slid shut, then he pressed another button and the elevator sputtered to life.
“Wow, this thing is fast,” admired Tom.
“Yeah, this thing is like a roller coaster!” panted Johnny. The four boys watched as the elevator plummeted down the shaft for what seemed like ten minutes at least, then finally, when they rea/ched the bottom they heard a solid thud followed by a slight splash, signaling that the elevator had hit solid ground, but that there was wetness.
“Sounds like the place may have been flooded recently, or its just damp,” said Tom.
“Maybe there’s like an underground river or something,” said Bill.
“Well, we’ll never find out till we get this door open,” said Tom. He pressed a switch on his remote-control device and the boys waited eagerly to escape their temporary prison, but they were met with nothing but silence. “There must be some kind of delay, I’m sure that I programmed this thing right.” “Should have had that meatloaf,” chuckled Johnny. They waited a few more moments, but nothing happened.
“Damn it!” shouted Tom, banging his fist against the metal cage door, “We should be able to get out of here!”
“What about this,” said Malcolm quietly, pulling a metal key out of his pocket.
“You have the emergency key? But where did you get it?” cried Tom.
“When I was entering the elevator I saw it taped to the control panel, and it said, “Emergency key.”
“But how did I miss that?” said Tom. Malcolm shrugged. “I guess you were just too busy celebrating for hitting the right switch and missed it.”
“This is real life, Malcolm, not The Legend of Zelda, said Bill.”
“Right,” said Tom, “But you still get punished for the wrong answer.
“Cheer up, Tom, said Johnny, “We have the key now, all we got to do is find the right hole. I mean this elevator must be at least thirty years old, and in that time, someone must have gone down solo and needed to get themselves out.”
“True,” said Tom, “Come on, find the key so we can find something,” and with that the four searched the elevator and finally found the cage door’s lock. Tom slid the door open, and the boys stepped out into the darkness.
“Ugh, it’s really muddy and wet,” said Johnny. “And I can’t even see my hand in front of my face. Tell me again, why did I sign up to do this?”
“Look,” said Bill, “It looks like there are some mining helmets with headlamps. I wonder if they work?” Sure enough, there was a whole rack full of mining helmets only about fifteen feet away from the elevator’s exit.
“All right!” said Johnny, picking up a helmet and slapping it on his head. He turned the knob to turn it on and it flickered to life. “It’s still pretty dim though,” he said.
“This should allow us to see in the darker tunnels,” said Tom. “It’s pitch black! How can it get any darker?” chuckled Bill.
“Hey guys, look, it’s a bat,” said Johnny, making a shadow puppet with his hand and the lamp.
“You’re going to waste the battery, man,” said Malcolm.
“OK, we have light, we got down here all safe and sound, but what do we do now? We don’t have a map, any awareness of the conditions, I mean, for all we know this cave is ready to collapse, or flood, or even be a smuggling area for criminals!” said Bill.
“This mining cave has been abandoned for fifteen years, and the only thing it is probably used for is kids like us coming down to do graffiti. And as far as the physical condition of the cave goes, there is a slight possibility that the cave may collapse because of weathering by rain or storms, yes, but right now even though the ground is wet, the walls of the cave seem to be perfectly intact.” The other boys then picked up the mining helmets, following Johnny’s lead.
“It looks like this is the main room,” explained Tom. “There must be offshoots coming off with tunnels leading further into the mine like---What was that!!” Tom exclaimed.
“Yeah, I heard it too,” said Bill, getting up from where he was splashing in some water.
“It sounded like a…a…a Walkman! Wait, I can hear the song! It’s The Midnight Special, by Creedence Clearwater Revival! I recognize it my dad loves that song,” said Malcolm.
“Good work, Malcolm,” said Tom. “It must be close, because it’s coming through pretty loud.”
“How do you think it got down here?” asked Johnny.
“Good question. Let’s split up and find out where the Walkman is, then, we can get some answers,” said Tom.
CHAPTER 2
“Fred tells us we have to follow the spooky music, and then like idiots, we actually follow and search for clues or whatever. And on top of that, we don’t even get a Daphne or Velma.” Said Johnny.
“Yuck, Velma’s a Dog’s Breakfast.” Touted Bill
“I guess that makes you Scooby Doo,” replied Johnny.
“At least you’ve laid off my stepsister for a while,” laughed Bill.
“Honestly, here, thousands of feet below the Earth’s surface with nothing to do but search for some jerkoff’s old beat-up Walkman, even you are starting to look more like an amigo.” Said Johnny.
“Hey, remember that one time in third grade on Halloween I got that big bag of candy and you said that you would donate it to charity because your mom wanted you to donate and in return, in return you would give me a baseball signed and autographed by Cal Ripken Jr.?
“Right! Ha! And you thought that charities take Halloween candy! On November 1st I was stuffing my face with Three Musketeers and Milky Ways!”
“Yeah, and my dad told me that baseball was a fake!” The two teens walked side by side for a while, arguing in good spirits as they went down the tunnel. Bill looked down and turned to Johnny.
“Strange, I see mine tracks, but where are all the carts?” Johnny shrugged.
“Maybe they’re further down. These tunnels go pretty deep.” He said.
“Hey guys! Come here,” they heard Tom’s voice in the distance.
“Did you find it?” called both Bill and Johnny together.
“Yup,” said Tom, found it. “Come over here.” The two went over to the other two and looked down where Tom was pointing, as he had his headlamp switched off. What they saw was shocking, to say the least. It was the body of a young man, mid-twenties, still holding his Walkman. He was wearing a plain white T-shirt, blue jeans, and black sneakers, and his right ear was pierced, with a small fang earring held inside. He had medium length black hair that draped over his forehead, and on his face was an expression of calm.
“It looks like the music just put him to a state of terminal slumber,” mused Bill.
“Looks like no sign of trauma, or not even injury at all, he’s just kind of in suspended animation,” said Tom.
“What’s that in his pocket? It looks like some kind of notebook.” Said Malcolm, pulling it out of the corpse’s pocket.
“Let me see that,” said Tom, “I think I know what that is and how it may be useful to us.”
CHAPTER 3
“What is it, some kind of detective journal? Was he some kind of cop?” said Johnny excitedly.
“Yeah, maybe he’s a young warlock and this is his spell book,” retorted Bill sarcastically.
“Actually, he could be a cop,” said Tom thoughtfully, opening up the notebook, “Because some of these drawings are pretty detailed, like evidence findings, but I think our friend is more likely to be an artist than anything.” Check these out.
The four huddled over the sketch notebook in the dim light of the headlamps and carefully studied the hand-drawn images on its pages. The first page featured what looked like an album cover of The Pixies, in all its outer-worldly glory, a favorite of all four of the boys. Tom flipped the page. The next image was rather disturbing, with a cartoon baby being fed to a giant serpent by a bearded man.
“There was definitely something weird about this guy,” said Johnny.
“Maybe he’s just trying to sell them and he’s just trying to make them weird looking so he can grab more buyers,” said Bill.
“Let’s keep looking,” said Tom. The next drawing was three shimmery, far away figures and a speech bubble coming from one of their mouths communicating in strange symbols **()##^**, and underneath reading “We have come from far, ” but the rest was illegible.
“That’s it?” said Malcolm.
“No, there’s something written in cursive on the bottom of the page. I think it says, it says, ‘What looks younger the older it gets?’”
“Um, that’s easy, a stone,” said Johnny, faking throwing a basketball in a hoop.
“It’s scribbled here in blue ink, ‘a photograph’.
“Makes sense,” said Malcom, “a picture of someone stays the same even as they age older than the time it was taken, but what does that have to do with this drawing of what looks like aliens?”
“Let’s take the notebook up to the surface with us and call the police, maybe then we can get some information on who this is and what happened. It looks right now to me like there’s some sort of conspiracy going on.”
“Did you check the notebook—or sketchbook for a name?” asked Bill. Tom leafed through the notebook for a few moments.
“Nope, no sign of identification.”
“Yeah, then we’ll have to hand this over to the authorities, which is the right thing to do, in my opinion, anyway,” said Bill.
“We’ll take the book with us and check tomorrow, and you can have that cigarette, Bill,” winked Tom.
The four boys, along with their newfound possession trudged back up to the elevator, took it up to the surface, walked to the entrance of the cave and left and went back home.
CHAPTER 4
The next day the four boys walked the three miles to the cave where they had found the body the previous day. They had not reported the body to the police because amongst themselves they wanted to collect more evidence, which in turn might help the police better than the police collecting it before anyway (they reasoned at least). Tom confidently walked up to the mining elevator and pressed a switch on his remote control.
“Ah, I see you’re changing it up,” said Bill, remarking on him not using the elevator’s normal switches. Tom gave him a smirk.
“Today feels like a good day,” said Tom. He faked a bow and entered the elevator car, and the other three followed suit. He pressed another button on his remote control and the car sped to life, once again, plunging into the depths of the earth.
“Maybe this time we’ll find diamonds and we each can buy a Lamborghini or something,” said Malcolm.
“Or maybe I’ll find rubies that I can bribe the school to let me pass Geometry, and maybe throw in Ms. Davidson.” Said Johnny.
“I guess in your imagination you broke up with my stepsister,” barbed Bill.
“In your dreams, sucka,” grinned Johnny. The famous four reached the bottom, unlocked the elevator door, and stepped out. They then proceeded to with Tom’s flashlight to find the mining helmets located a little bit away from the elevator shaft and put them on.
“Tom, you still know where it is?” asked Johnny.
“Yeah,” said Tom.
They followed Tom about fifty paces when Tom shouted, “It was just here yesterday, where did it go!” They looked at Tom.
“Maybe the police found him,” said Malcolm.
“Impossible, unless one of us reported the body. Did any of you report the body?” said Tom.
“No!” They all said at once.
“Then something very fishy is going on here. Guys, listen, I went through our victim’s notebook last night and found some very interesting stuff. Stuff that can’t be explained by science alone. Stuff that can’t be explained by books written in history, or even by religions. When I was going through this book, I went into a sort of trance, not like a drug-induced trance, but like a happy trance, at least I thought it was at that time.”
“Are you saying the notebook was laced with drugs?” asked Malcom.
“No, no, I’m not. I’m just saying that maybe that notebook was the product of a subliminal experience, an encounter with someone from somewhere else, and maybe, maybe the shock of it, that knowing that you just met someone that you couldn’t possibly imagine could ever exist killed him. At least that’s what I believe.” “How do we know he wasn’t just unconscious, and he woke up while we’re gone? I mean, was he dead for real?” said Johnny, cautiously.
“I checked for a pulse. I couldn’t find one,” said Tom.
“So let me get this straight. This kid comes down after school or work or whatever and is like, I’m gonna do some drawings of this mining cave, and suddenly ET materializes in front of him, he tries to draw him, and the shock of seeing ET kills him? I would be pulling out my camera and getting rich!” said Johnny
“Typical capitalist behavior,” joked Tom, “Always exploiting the underdog.”
“Guys, we need to find---” said Malcom but was cut off by a low rumbling sound.
“Oh shit, is the cave going to collapse!” yelled Bill.
“It sounds, it sounds like rushing water. I’ve read that caves can have underground water sources that feed in from mountains and things.” Replied Malcolm.
“It was muddy yesterday, but this is something completely new,” said Tom.
“It’s coming from that tunnel over there!” shouted Bill, pointing to a tunnel shooting off to the left.
“If we’re going to solve this mystery, I say let’s follow that tunnel,” said Tom.
CHAPTER 5
The teens pushed their way through the mine tunnel, following the sound of water. They walked for what seemed like a mile, according to Bill’s measurements via a combination of checking his watch and counting steps every so often.
“Say, quick question, how do we breathe down here, ya know, without oxygen and all,” said Johnny.
“Ventilation shafts,” said Tom swiftly.
“So, you’re saying an abandoned mine has ventilation shafts that are actually still functioning?” asked Bill. Tom shrugged.
“Whoa!” yelled Johnny, suddenly, and they all looked where he was pointing. It was a pool of water, which was giving off a soft golden glow, and was at least two feet deep, bubbling up from a spring even deeper underground, and on the surface was a myriad of flowers, ferns, lilies and other flora. What was even stranger than the fact that there were flowers and plants in a tunnel deep beneath the earth was the fact that they were visibly growing, new leaves here and vines creeping there.
“I guess that answers your question, little sense as it makes,” said Malcolm. Then suddenly, they heard a voice, a female voice, echoing through the room.
“What do you seek, young ones; we have come from a great distance through time and space and are weary travelers, but we are yet eager to fulfill your queries and desires.”
“Who’s ‘we’?” asked Johnny boldly.
“My daughters and I,” said the voice.
“I dig the whole plant thing. So, like, you’re like Poison Ivy from Batman without a body? Because I don’t like redheads anyway,” said Johnny jovially.
“I have not need for a physical body, young one, for I am as old as the first organism sprung from the ground. I am in all living things, physical and ethereal.” “There are living things that are ethereal?” asked Bill, nudging Johnny.
“There are things that cannot be explained by human rules, and things that cannot be described by earthly words,” said the voice.
“What do you call yourself?” asked Tom.
“I am Gaia, mother of all things living.”
“As in the Greek goddess of life?” asked Malcolm.
“Yes, the very same,” stated Gaia helpfully.
“If you are the goddess of life, then why did you choose this dank old cave to live, of all places?”
“Here, allow me to show you something, children.” With that the voice materialized itself in front of the teens with a flash of light. A moment later a beautiful olive-skinned woman wearing a long white gown and long black hair draped over her shoulders with a pink flower in it materialized like the Terminator in front of them sans the electricity. Now, standing there in front of them, knee deep in water by a lily, clutching her dress, 15,000 feet beneath the earth’s surface was Gaia, the goddess of all living things.
“Come with me if you want to live,” whispered Johnny to Bill. Bill feigned a headache.
“See this lovely little flower?” she said, showing them the lily, “It grows from the roots underground, just like any other flower, yet it, like all other living things grows in a very special way,” she cooed, stroking the flower’s petals.
“So is there special soil underneath or what?” asked Malcolm impatiently.
“No, but I will get to that,” said Gaia. “First listen, Son of Earth,” she said slowly. “All matter grows from energy. Your scientist Einstein proved that in his work. But energy has different forms as well. And just as a flower needs water to grow, matter needs energy to be grown. Everything on planet Earth originally comes from energy somewhere in the universe, be it stars millions of lightyears away or in your own galaxy.
“But that energy is shared by all living things and is translated into a different kind of energy as that thing grows, be it plant, animal, fungus, bacteria, or whatever else, and that energy is translated into---” “Heat!” interjected Malcolm, “I remember this from physics class.” Gaia put her hands on her hips and smiled.
“You might think that my child, but this is not the case. When an individual grows it does dispense some of what you might call waste energy, but this is not actually all its energy. When an organism grows, it uses its energy to become a unique individual. The genetic imprint of the individual is completely unreproducible by humans without artificial means normally. Therefore, it possesses what you might call a “spirit,” or “soul.” Do you understand what I have said to you, so far?” she asked. The four nodded their heads in agreement.
“Take heed now,” she said importantly. “When a person or creature dies, he or she becomes a spirit, but can no longer occupy the same place that that being did when they were alive. This means that they become part of the universe outside of your world, the unseen universe.” “Wait, I know this,” said Johnny, suddenly giving Malcolm a stern glare, who was about to respond. “Are you trying to say that reincarnation is real, except instead of like a banana becoming a frog on earth after it dies, it still lives on as like a banana somewhere else?” Tom chuckled, and responded, “Bananas aren’t living things you nut. They fall off banana trees.”
“Tell that to the Peanut Butter Jelly Time guy,” said Johnny defensively.
“You jest, my dear, but it is true. The soul is like a grain of sand that becomes transferred from a desert to a mountain top. It cannot die, but it does not stay in one place. It becomes part of that realm beyond perception, a realm unseen, somewhere that cannot be reached by physical exertion, only by the steady flow of time’s stream.”
“So, you’re saying there’s a world full of souls somewhere in the universe that we can’t reach? Can they reach us?” asked Bill, scratching his head.
“Souls in the nether- realm, as we gods call it, cannot reach Earth, the only other planet with life. But you can reach it one way, still alive.” Said Gaia.
“How?!” Johnny, Bill, Malcolm, and Tom all yelled surprisedly, all expecting the narrative to be more of a parable than an actual explanation.
“What happens to the body when it is neither dead, nor aware of itself, ie., awake?” asked Gaia cryptically.
“The mind enters the subconscious, or sleep,” answered Tom assuredly.
Gaia smiled coyly. “You are about to be in for a treat.” She whispered.
2010
CHAPTER 6
“Be my mirror my sword and shield, my missionaries in a foreign field---”
“Shut up, stupid radio, it’s not time yet!” shouted a still half-asleep Jim, jamming the blanket over his tousled blond hair. A moment later the radio continued “I used to roll the dice, feel the fear in my enemy’s eyes.” He shouted “Jesus Christ,” sat up, felt around the nightstand for his glasses, put them on, unplugged the radio, and pulled off the covers dramatically in one swift swoop. He then got to his feet and walked into the bathroom. He took off his glasses and looked at his eyes through the mirror. They were still swollen and red from the minor allergic reaction he had gotten from the pollen that was out at this time of year. Still, today was an extremely important day for him.
Jim Bates was going to become the youngest director of the CIA, at the age of forty-two. He looked more like a high school gym teacher than a CIA operative, with his buzz cut and thick moustache. He was a man of great character, and he believed that a man should work hard in life in order to earn a comfortable status, rather than be given it. He had worked at the CIA for twenty years as an agent, and it was the most important part of his life, at least thus far.
He stepped into the shower and hummed tunelessly as he thought about all the weeks past where he got ready just like this, just without the pomp and circumstance. He stepped out of the shower, wrapped a towel around himself and stepped back in front of the mirror. He looked at the electric toothbrush sitting on the sink. His sister had given it to him as a birthday gift and he was very proud of it. It was made in the Netherlands, which also happened to be where his father’s ancestors were from. He marveled at the sleek and modern design, then proceeded to pick it up and put it into his mouth.
Mid-brush, Jim walked out of the bathroom in his towel and checked his alarm clock. 7:45. He had less than forty minutes to get to work, and it was at least a thirty-minute drive, without traffic. He stepped back into the bathroom and gargled, then got dressed. As he looked into the mirror and put his tie on, he said to himself, “If you’re late, then at least you feel older.” He then picked up his briefcase, walked out of his apartment, walked down the hallway and stepped into the elevator. When he pushed the down button, he realized he had forgotten his badge. He ran as fast as he could to get it from his apartment, then stepped back into the elevator.
Breathless, he pushed the down button and breathed a sigh of relief, when he suddenly realized that he had forgotten his car keys. He cursed silently, wondering what happened to them, then remembered thankfully that his car was safely (though still annoyingly) in the shop. As he waited for the elevator to go all the way down to ground level, he thought he might as well get a newspaper from the vendor outside of his apartment that he might glance at while he walked. He stepped out of his apartment door, waving to the security guard, and stepped onto the sidewalk. He walked a block or so, turned the corner, and took out a few dollars to pay the newspaper vendor at the stand.
“Thanks,” he said, “Keep the change,” as the man handed him the paper. He waited for a straightaway to open the paper, then unfolded it carefully. He checked the sports section first and then found that the Marlins beat the Nationals 36-7. While he wasn’t an avid baseball fan, Jim was happy that he had news that wasn’t foreign (Jim was by no stretch of the imagination an actual xenophobe, but he was partial to Team USA in the Olympics, and loved baseball and football above all else, etc.), or politically radical, or sensationalist. He passed another pedestrian wearing a blue tracksuit and decided to turn back to the front page. He scanned for anything of interest, but only saw an earthquake in Maui and a Supreme Court ruling banning the death penalty in Texas.
Jim sighed as he walked. He looked through the “featured” articles briefly and then gazed very briefly at the cartoons, making sure to not bump into anybody while he was walking, then folded up the paper as he was nearing his destination and gasped as he looked at the CIA Headquarters parking lot. It was fuller than he had ever seen before, with lots of black SUVs and white government vans sprinkled about like salt and pepper.
The CIA Headquarters was a massive building located in Fairfax County, Virginia, and included 260 acres of land, and housed thousands of employees on its campus. Its purpose, simple, to collect and deliver information on foreign and covert activity to protect national security. The CIA began in 1947 after World War II as a civilian agency as part of the executive branch; Jim was going to have the honor of becoming its twenty-first director.
Jim walked through the Headquarters’ door and greeted the security officer, a woman in her mid-twenties who wore her red hair in a bun. Her name was Susan, and Jim liked to exchange pleasantries with her every now and again since she started working there a few months ago.
“Badge please?” She asked, looking up from her computer.
“Here it is,” said Jim, pulling out the badge from his pocket. He handed it to her, and she began typing on her computer, then said,
“Ok, Jim, you’re good to go. Oh, and by the way, I heard the news about you becoming the new director! Good job! Are you excited? I would be!” “A little nervous, but a little excited, I suppose. Any news I should know about?” “Oh Jim, you know nothing goes on around here but maybe the occasional high schooler trying to impress his friends by slipping in or trying to take a video on his camera phone of him standing on the main entrance floor. Nothing that would make us need to call the FBI, Heeheehee.”
“Security threats need to be neutralized immediately. We are both going to be doing lots of that in the coming days,” he said defiantly.
She snorted, almost knocking her opened water bottle all over the computer. “Ooh, someone’s got a winning speech up their sleeve.”
“Thanks,” said Jim a little sheepishly. They finished talking and then Jim walked through the turnstile and then quickly checked his cellphone. He was going to be late for his inauguration, but he had to have a meeting with a few of his agents first.