Freaky truth | | FreakyDeakyPod

Since I'll be turning 25 years old in a few days, two of my aunts said it's time for me to get a girlfriend. Up until this point, I've been single my entire life and have never been in a serious relationship either.
I've also never had my first kiss, and I'm still a virgin, too. They told me they feel bad for me and believe I need some help meeting a woman since I'm painfully shy and extremely socially awkward. Aunt No. 1 said she's looking for young, single women through the work she does with her church.
However, she only knows two singles at the moment. She believes I need a religious woman in my life and plans to ask her church friends for any leads on single women in my age group.
Aunt No. 2 isn't really focused as much on religion as Aunt No. 1. My second aunt said I need to experience intimacy in the bedroom and stop letting my body's best years go to waste being a virgin.
So, this aunt said she's going to try to find me someone who's freaky, open minded and patient enough to let me learn all the things I haven't experienced yet inside and outside of the bedroom.
As you can see, my aunts have different visions on the right woman for me. But they both share the same opinion on one thing. They told me that at 25 years old, I'm running out of time to find a good woman to settle down with because they're all getting taken by other men.
For some reason, they fear that I'll have fewer options as I continue to get older and stay single. So, they think it's an important time for me right now to start dating, or it may become even more difficult for me to find someone special in the future.
Aunt No. 2 said she fears that being an older virgin will only turn women off and thinks it'll get worse as I get older. Aunt No. 1 isn't concerned about my lack of experience with intimacy ruining my future chances, but she thinks my lack of relationship experience in general will hurt me.
Are my aunts being truthful, or could they be totally off on this one? Would love to get some feedback!

Having read a comprehensive book detailing the Hart Family/ Stampede Wrestling, as well as books by Bret Hart, Bruce Hart and Dynamite Kid, I can say it was great to hear from someone who was spoken about in all those books. It is fascinating to see all the intersecting points of view when it comes to anything Hart Family related.
Bret Hart book
Bruce Hart book
History of Stampede Wrestling book
History of the Hart Family as documented in various books
Dynamite Kid book
This book was short and a quick read, but you could tell it was written with honesty and truth. She doesn't shy away from her own mistakes and issues while detailing the own POV on a relationship where most people have only heard from Bret.
As always, it's done in chronological order. I hope you find it as interesting as I did...
Julie had a truly wild and horrific youth experience between being sent to juvenile detention centers and dealing with genuinely abusive step parents. She is honest and critical of her own behaviors as well and doesn't like the choices she made. I grew up in the area where she spent her teenage years, and I can confirm that the seedy ghetto areas of Saskatchewan are genuinely gross and terrifying places to be when you're young and directionless.
She talks about how she was r*ped while hitchhiking as a teenager and got pregnant. She gave the baby up for adoption and tried to press charges but got cold feet and ran to another neighboring city. She was afraid the man who assaulted her would escape the charges and come after her again. She was young and naively thought that if she had just switched towns, she could escape everything. When a cop found her, he accused her of running because she was lying about the assault. This type of bullshit is why women don't come forward.
Julie was working in Regina, Saskatchewan, at the arena where wrestling was held when it came in town. That's where she first saw Bret Hart, and Bret saw her too. He ended up asking her boss Gil to introduce the two. Bret spoke about this in his book, too, how Julie caught his eye while he was in the ring. Gil later warned Julie that dating a wrestler is risky because they have a lot of "stops on the road." Julie didn't understand that Gil wasn't criticizing or accusing Bret of anything, but how he knew how wrestlers were on the road, in terms of meeting women.
Julie speaks favorably on how Bret treated her younger sister Michelle (the future wife of Dynamite Kid) but I remember in Bret's book, him describing in detail how attracted he was to the underage Michelle when he met her. Julie says Bret treated her like a sister, and her book came out after Bret's, so I'll take her word for it.
Julie moved in with Bret in Calgary just a few months into their relationship and she remembers being a wreck of nerves and anxiety ay the start, unable to cook or even attend the big Hart Family Sunday dinner. Eventually, Bret got her out to the Hart house where she met Stu and Helen Hart. Helen was a sweetheart, but she remembers Stu eying her up and down, with Julie saying, "He gave me the once over." Adding, "Stu judged women on their teeth and legs." She said Stu stared at her teeth and legs as if she were a race horse he was inspecting.
Julie remembers how Stu would turn any conversation into something about wrestling. She mentioned being a Saskatchewan Roughrider fan (Canadian football team), and Stu went on a rant about Gene Kiniski, who briefly played for the Edmonton Eskimos This made me chuckle as Stu and Gene had a but of a rough relationship since Stu gave up on Gene when he was a rookie and hurt his knee. Gene went to Toronto where "Whipper" Billy Watson essentially turned Gene into the big name star he was known for.
In Bret's book, he described the first night Julie came to the Sunday Hart dinner and when Julie passed on the salad, Bret's sister Diana Hart snapped on her saying, "What, you're too good for fuckin' salad!?" Bret says his mom responded by saying to Julie, "So you met Bret's sister Diana." In Julie's book, she describes this event as well but doesn't mention the funny line from Helen. She says Bret just took Julie and decided to leave immediately. Bret's other sister, Georgia, followed them outside and apologized on behalf of Diana and excused Diana by pointing out how pregnant Diana was at the time.
Julie actually puts over Diana quite a bit and says she actually came to admire Diana for how outspoken she was. She says Diana had a great style and was a gifted artist. After reading so many Hart related books, it's refreshing to hear something positive about Diana. Diana is the "Black sheep" who married "The British Bulldog" Davey Boy Smith. Diana would write a scandalous and legal minefield of a book in 2001 called "Under the mat." It was quickly pulled from shelves after Owen Hart's widow Martha threatened legal action over what was said about her and Owen. Bret and Bruce Hart also denounce the book, calling it mostly lies, but not everything can be written off as fiction, including stories, some wild stores about Dean Hart. I desperately need this book.
Julie said she never got over the sight of Bret Hart eating an avacado as if it were an apple.
While Bret was in Japan wrestling with his brother Keith, Julie said she spent a lot of time with Keith's girlfriend. It was Keith's girlfriend who smartened Julie up to how wrestling works. Up to this point, she believed it to be legit, and even Bret had been selling it like this to her. She was furious, and when Bret called, she told him they were done and hung up on him. The next day, Bret's older brother Bruce stopped by to help her understand kayfabe and how silly it all was. Julie says she ended up feeling bad for reacting like that and yelling at Bret, but she says he forgave her immediately. Bret tells this same story in his book, adding details of how Julie would worry and stress about Bret Hart being brutalized every night.
Here's something I dont remember from Bret's book. He knocked up Julie very early into their relationship, and Julie got an abortion. She said they both weren't ready for being parents, but Julie says she was deeply saddened by their choice. She never expressed these misgivings with Bret, and assumes Bret was relieved, she didn't make it any more difficult on them. To Bret's credit, maybe he didn't mention it in his book for Julie's benefit. Or he did mention it very briefly, and I missed it.
Julie remembers accompanying Bret on a trip overseas where they went to a freaky sex show place where they had "baby tigers and lions and torture rooms."" She says at one point Bret got tied up on a table and was playfully whipped.
On this trip, Julie remembers a woman hitting on Bret right in front of her and had to yell at her to back off while Bret laughed. Julie was pissed and made them go back to the hotel. Once there, Julie was mouthing off to Bret before he grabbed her and "bodyslammed" her into the flower bed. He offered to help her up afterwards but she told him to fuck off.
A week later Bret came home smelling of perfume and Julie says she just snapped. She said she grabbed him and dug her finger nails into his face and eyes. She says Bret later would tell her that he never saw her the same after this incident. I don't remember Bret describing Julie ever getting physical like that in his book, but he did describe a lot of shouting matches.
Julie says she and Bret got married after her younger sister and Dynamite Kid. She says they got married in secret because Bret didn't like his siblings much and said they didn't deserve to be part of it.
When Julie was pregnant again this time they felt ready to start a family. Though Bret made Julie not tell anyone for the first 5 months of her pregnancy and when he "told" his parents, it was through a letter he left on their bed before he left for a wrestling tour. Julie remembers feeling hurt by this because Bret would say his parents always wanted their children to start families with someone who had money, a significant name and an education. Julie had none of those things and while she doesn't say it, you get the feeling that she thinks Bret was ashamed or embarrassed by her.
When she got pregnant again, she says Bret was mad at her for not being more careful with birth control. She says she became very irritable and bitchy throughout the pregnancy and always found something to be mad at Bret for. She is super critical of her behavior here and doesn't excuse it.
The night she gave birth, Bret left to go out for drinks, despite Julie asking him not to in case her water broke. When she woke up at 5am to her water breaking, she was furious that Bret didn't come home yet and had to call a friend to get her to the hospital. Bret was a no-show for her entire delivery and missed his second child being born. Julie says she was furious and seriously considered divorcing him then.
When Bret started touring with WWF, he was gone for much longer periods of time and this strained their marriage. Working for WWF really put a strain on Bret and filled him with confidence issues as well. She said between his self doubt and her loneliness, their marriage was barely holding on.
She remembers how Bret would call from the road and bemoan about how lonely he was. I'm reminded of his book, how he would complain about feeling lonely, then complain that the guilt of cheating on Julie was too much.
Julie says she got a literal itch and went to a doctor who told her that she caught "something" from a public washroom. A suspicious Julie went home and threw all her bedding in the garbage and then thought to check on her suspicion. She looked through their phone bills to find that Bret was placing a ton of calls to a girl from New Jersey and that he even kept the receipt for a Christmas present he bought this girl!
Julie describes how Bret called and she just screamed "I want a divorce!" Before she hung up and ripped the phone cord out of the wall. Eventually she agreed to go meet him and they started yelling at each other in a parking lot after a show. She says at one point Bret through a can of budweiser at her head, hitting her! She says wrestler Les Thorton got between the two and tried to calm them down. She remembers screaming how she won't get in the car with Bret and Bret yelled back, "Don't be stupid, get in the car! Your embarrassing yourself!" She says Bret later said the girl meant nothing to him and Julie should be greatful that Bret isn't addicted to drugs. Wild. At one point when they were back in the hotel room, a girl called the room asking for Bret and Julie snapped, breaking a lamp.
In Bret's book, he described how he decieved both Julie and this girl from New Jersey, neglecting to tell this side girl that he was married until she was head over heels in love with him. Bret talks about how tough this was for him and says that Stu and Helen Hart talked Julie out of leaving him.
Julie says their relationship was never the same after the affair. She couldn't trust him again.
Julie says when her grandmother died a few months after the affair, Bret was calling her everyday to check in but she said "I couldn't have cared less about those calls."
Julie says it was around this time that she and Bret started to regularly do cocaine. She said the coke helped her not think about the affair and how she would ask Bret to score some if she couldn't get it out of her head. She said she would do coke and sleep in the car just to avoid Bret. She suggests this all slowed down when Vince started cracking down on coke use with drug tests.
She speaks highly of Vince McMahon, this book was written in 2013, and she is greatful for what Vince was able to provide for her family and the opportunity he gave Bret. She says when she first met Vince, he was wearing a suit and sneakers. When she asked Bret why he wore sneakers, Bret said "so he can get around." During the show she noticed Vince was all over the place during matches, never sitting still and always running around from one person to another.
Julie remembers meeting Ozzy Osbourne at Wrestlemania 2 and "marking out" because he was her idol as a teenager. After the show, she says Ozzy was present as everyone had drinks at the hotel and Dynamite Kid spiked her drink. She said she could barely stand and Dynamite just laughed at her the whole time.
Julie notes how devoted Bret was to making sure his kids had the best toys, and how Bret would drive to every toy store before Christmas and find what the kids wanted. She appreciates this but also wishes Bret didn't miss so many plays and dances and activities due to his schedule. She was starting to really resent wrestling and wanted Bret to quit. She hated having this big house that felt empty most of the time without Bret home. In Bret's book, he wanted her to get a job to fix her loneliness.
She says her 3rd pregnancy was easier than her second and Bret was very sweet to her and praised how good she looked.
Julie brings up how devastated Bret was when his brother Dean died in 1990. She remembers watching him wrestle the next night at Survivor Series ppv and seeing the pain on his face. Bret talks about how tough this was in his book and how much shame he felt. Dean needed a kidney transplant and none of the Hart brothers stepped up. Bret didn't want to derail his career. Though you can't blame anyone more than Dean himself, who was stubborn and often went against doctors orders, so even with a mew kidney, Dean may have still died.
Julie talks about continuing her partying and drug lifestyle into the early 90s when she would party with a local band and inviting them to live at her house. She said Bret was very understanding and never pushed her for details on those nights out. Some nights Bret would watch the kids all night while Julie was getting fucked up and partying.
On of those musicians, Marc, was very close with Julie and while Julie never says she hooked up, she does say her younger sister Michelle did hook up with Marc, a bunch of times in secret. She doesn't specify if this was before or after Michelle left Dynamite Kid, but she says Marc did move in with Michelle and help her with the kids. This would have been after Dynamite went back to UK, since I'm sure Dynamite would have kicked the door down and attempted to murder Marc if this were in the final months of of Michelle and Dynamite's marriage.
Julie's brother committed suicide and Julie didn't have the support system around to prevent her from spiraling into heavy drinking.
In 1996, Bret Hart was filming a movie (Sinbad) in South Africa and halfway through, asked Julie to come join him. Julie is very honest about how she was self sabatoging her life at this point but was still deeply in love with Bret. She was excited to read an early draft of some Shakespeare work that was at a museum, but Bret couldn't be bothered to go with her so she went by herself.
She says her and Bret shared a perfect moment watching the sun set, but Bret got mad at her when she decided to record it.
Julie describes sneaking cigarettes because Bret didn't know she picked the habbit up again.
The trip ended when Julie was asking Bret something but he just ignored her several times in a row. When she finally looked at what had his attention, she saw he was gawking at a topless sunbather on the beach. She stormed off to the hotel room after telling Bret to show her more respect than that. Julie says Bret followed her to the room, with him saying she always ruins these trips. When Julie started packing her bags, she says Bret pushed her hard onto the bed. She started spewing insults at him, before, she says, Bret grabbed her by the hair and threw her from the bed and onto the floor! Julie says she started crying and demanding that Bret get her home immediately or else she would find someone who would. Bret screamed at her "Get the fuck out! I've had it with you! We're fucking done! I will put you on a plane tonight, but don't expect to win me back!"
Having read Bret's book, he does mention the trip to South Africa where he filmed the Sinbad movie. But Bret makes no mention of inviting Julie on the trip and instead points out how it coincided with a WWF tour in South Africa at the same time. Bret does talk about how the Dutch found the area and how beautiful itnwas there, which was something Julie mentioned as well that Bret talked about. Bret does mention getting a lot of ladies phone numbers on the last few days of the trip and seeing a drunk Yokozuna swapping spit with some South African PR woman when they were both very drunk. Bret makes no mention of Julie being there or how he got physical with her.
The Hart's always try to shy away from controversial truths, just ask any one of them where Bruce Hart met his wife. They will all say at a wrestling show, and neglect to mention how Bruce Hart was a 33 year old substitute teacher who knocked up his 17 year old student. Gross. (I'll never not bring this up when talking about the Hart's btw)
Julie talks about Mathew Hart, Georgia and BJ's son who died in 1996 from Necrotizing Fasciitis, a legitimate flesh eating virus. From everyone's account, the poor boy suffered for 2 weeks until he died. Julie says she and Bret took their kids on vacation when the poor kid died. A lot of people act as though the Hart Family curse started at the Screwjob in 1997, but really it started with Dean in 1990 and Mathew in 1996.
Julie remembers how gleeful Bret was when he called her up and bragged about giving a drunken Vince McMahon his tag team finishing move. Julie warned Bret that Vince wasn't the type to forget that and she suspects that it played a part in the screwjob. This sounds silly imo but what do I know, I found it an interesting and unique take if nothing else.
Julie remembers the morning of the 1997 Survivor Series ppv, someone warned Bret that Vince and Shawn were seen the night before talking and getting into an elevator together.
Julie says she and her lawyer were sitting somewhere in the arena as the Montreal Screwjob happened. Julie says she got up, looking at the monitor and said, "Holy shit, that's not supposed to happen!" And her lawyer, also shocked, said, "No, it is not."
Julie says she and the layer had to sprint to catch up to Bret and Vince and she describes her scolding of Triple H and Shawn Michaels, saying the words just poured out of her. It's maybe the most memorable scene of that documentary, watching Triple H and HBK shrink into children as Julie dresses them down.
Julie says the 1997 holidays were anything but cheerful and says she was boozing a lot and doing coke "from time to time."
Julie wanted to get a nanny or house keeper but Bret refused and put his foot down on the subject.
Julie says Bret asked for a divorce in early 1998 and she handled it poorly. She is critical of her immediate response to run away from home and stay at a hotel. When she returned home for clothes, her confused daughter asked her what was going on and a rageful Julie said "Your dad wants a divorce and I can't stay in the same house as him anymore! Julie says she was so blinded by her anger she didn't see the damage she was doing then.
Julie says that the Wrestling with Shadow's documentary crew needed Julie and Bret to reshoot something that didn't come out right when they originally shot it. So Julie and Bret had to pretend to be a in a marriage again talking things out about Bret's career. Julie says her and Bret slept together after they shot the scene and she was hurt when Bret said afterward, "One for the road, I guess."
The next time she heard from Bret, he told her to get a lawyer because he had one already.
Julie says she and Bret spent many nights yelling at eachother over the phone, with Bret calling her a whore and saying he didn't take all those bumps so Julie to take all his money. This is a statement Bret would repeat a lot to Julie over the years of them fighting. He would call her a money grabbing whore and how he didn't take a bunch of bumps so Julie could end up with the money.
Just as Julie was ready to sign custody papers, Bret's personal assistant contacted Julie and told her that Bret had been seeing some girl in the States for months. The assistant said she felt guilty arranging their meetups behind Julie's back. Julie said she later told Bret that she isn't signing shit and she needed to contact her lawyers with the new developments. She said Bret first tried denying it, calling his assistant jealous and a liar. Then Bret blamed Julie because Bret said he "couldn't get past her traumatic past." What the fuck Bret, I'm pretty sure he is referring to Julie being sexually assaulted as a teenager. (He makes this clear later in the book) Then he bragged about his new girl looking better than Julie and being younger than Julie, with Bret also saying the kids will love the new girl. Bret even later said Julie was getting heavier and letting herself go.
Pretty wild story here. Julie says that Bret started neglecting the kids, even when he was in town, and often skipped out on seeing them altogether. For Canada Day 1998 Bret promised to take them out and to the fireworks. Julie says they waited all day, expecting a fun evening with their dad. But Bret didn't show up with their friend Dean, until after 9pm, (stoned and drunk according to Julie) after Julie tried to call Bret repeatedly and got no answer.
Julie isn't proud of this, but says before Bret arrived that night, Julie had sat the kids down and told them Bret was off smoking pot with a new girlfriend. Julie knew immediately she shouldn't have said it, she saw her kids starting to cry and knew she tarnished how they look at their dad.
Bret was pissed off that Julie decided to take the kids to the fireworks, and when Julie had herself and the kids in the car, an enraged Bret started punching the drivers side window until Julie agreed to get out and talk.
Bret grabbed and dragged her off around the corner of the house where Julie defiantly told him that the kids know he smokes pot and is seeing someone else.
Julie says Bret snapped, slammed her hard up against the wall and yelled, "You bitch! I hate you! I hate you!" Then Julie claims that Bret grabbed her by the throat and slammed her on the ground where he continued to choke her until their son Blade came around the corner and screamed at Bret to get off his mom!
As Julie was catching her breath, their friend Dean, who was still there and in shock, tried to help Julie up. Bret took off with their son Blade and a panicked Julie called the police. She foolishly said to the 911 opperater that her husband pro wrestler, Bret Hart, had taken her child againt her will. The police arrived and seemingly didn't know who Bret was, tried to get Julie to press charges. The police were able to call Bret and convince him to bring the kid to the police station, so the cops could bring him home. Bret makes no mention of this in his book.
Julie says Bret stopped by the next day and apologized and tried to ask her to sit down for coffee. Julie explained how they scarred their children for life the night prior and she wasn't interested in speaking to him in friendly terms yet.
Julie defends Bret a bit by saying she could see in person that she wasn't the cause of his anger and that he was just deeply angry and disappointed with things. This would be 1998 and even Bret describes how bitter and despondent he was at this time. Julie says he stopped being around the kids and it hurt them, especially their boys Blade and Dallas who started getting a chip on their shoulders and seeking conflict. One time Julie asked Dallas about Bret and Dallas said, "He never calls and is never around."
Julie says things were getting stable but she and Bret started secretly sleeping together again and complicated things. She says Bret would pick her up and drove to a seedy part of town before casually dropping her off at home after. She says she was initially amused by this but eventually began to wonder how many other women Bret does this with. It made her feel uncomfortable to say the least.
One time as she was being dropped off, Julie asked Bret if he was happy. Bret said no and that he couldn't get happy. Then Bret asked if Julie was seeing anyone, but didn't let her answer, he just said "of course you are." Julie realizes now that Bret was suffering some deep depression and at the time she mistook codependency for love.
Eventually Bret's other girlfriend caught wind of his and Julie's rendezvous and made Bret break things off. Julie could hear the woman on the other end of the line when Bret called to inform Julie that they need to set boundaries in their relationship now.
Julie says Bret once called her to say he tested for hepatitis and that Julie should get checked out as well.
Julie later found out that the girl Bret was seeing was nearly the same age as their daughter.
Julie says her and Bret continued to sleep together behind his girlfriends back though, with Bret always asking for "coffee" before making a move, which Julie always reciprocated.
Bret would break up with his girlfriend near the end of 1998 and ask Julie if he can spend the holidays with her and the kids. Julie relents, and soon they seem to be trying to salvage their relationship with Bret more present then he ever has been.
Soon after the new year, Bret and Julie take a trip together to Hawaii. Julie finally builds up the courage to ask Bret what he thinks of them getting back together, and Bret says he doesn't want to get "trapped" again. Julie snapped and said, "That's it I'm done, I can't keep playing these games with you!"
During this conversation, as Julie was walking away, Bret randomly said, "My therapist said that sometimes girls, like the ones your age when all that stuff happens to you, they like it." Julie burst into tears and ran out of the room. What the fuck Bret, to imply that that when his wife was a 16 year old girl, she liked getting r*ped!
Helen Hart died a few weeks after 9/11 in 2001. She was from New York, and Julie remembers how devastated Helen was following the September attacks. Helen went back to New York a few weeks later to visit her sister, but due to the border concerns, she was held up for hours after her plane landed back in Calgary. She wasn't able to reach her insulin and eventually went into a coma.
Helen was on an off ventilation a few times while at the hospital, and one day Alison (Bret's sister) called and told him to come visit asap, because Helen was back on a ventilator and it wasn't looking good. Bret thought Alison being an alarmist and decided to visit the next day. Julie says she wishes they had visited that night, because Helen passed away a few hours later.
One afternoon, Julie came home to find her son Dallas on the phone, when she asked him who he was speaking to, Dallas said, "It's dad, but he sounds drunk." Bret told Julie that he fell off his bike and couldn't get up. He wasn't speaking clearly and couldn't properly explain where he was. Julie and her daughter Beans, drove around looking for Bret based off his perception and directions.
Julie and Beans found him laying casually in the grass, as if he was resting. She said one of Bret's eyes was wide open and the other was closed, and half his mouth was dropping. She struggled to move him as he slurred his words and insisted he was fine. Eventually an ambulance was called and Bret was loaded in.
Julie says the stroke changed him, made him mooder and more depressed. She isn't casting judgment, just pointing out changes she noticed as she spent every day at the hospital with him, helping to feed and cloth Bret, even helping him to the bathroom.
Julie remembers one night that Bret confided in her that he feared he got a stroke as punishment for all the bad things he done. He told her that the morning he got a stroke, he was planning on signing the divorce papers.
Several months later, with Bret moving aorund more, he spent Easter with Julie and the kids, but Julie found an email from some woman in Italy, directed to Bret and it suggested some heavy sexual stuff. Julie felt stupid and used again. When she confronted him on it, he denied anything and she reluctantly believed him.
A week later as Bret prepared for a trip, she found a plane ticket to Italy, when she asked Bret where he was going, he said England. Julie drove him to the airport and told him to get the fuck out.
Bret went to Italy to be with a fan he met at a contract signing, who was obsessed with him since she was a little girl. Julie says she is exactly what Bret needed to feel like the Hitman again. After reading Bret's book, this assessment is completely accurate.
The Italian woman's name was Cynthia and she was also just a year older than Bret's daughter Jade. Julie said Jade had the hardest time accepting Cynthia, whom Bret was determined to integrate into the family.
When Bret's dad Stu died, Julie remembers how she, Bret and Stu's granddaughter Jenni all stood by the bed and watched as he passed. She remembers how she kissed his cheek and told him he could go see Helen now, he didn't need to be here and longer. I remember the speech Stu gave at Helen's funeral, with one line in particular staying with me, "I'm glad for the time I had with her," he said full of love, but his pain was on display too, "Ill never get over this" he finished solemnly, "I don't have enough time."
Julie remembers one day that their son Blade called her from Bret's house, begging for her to pick him up. Blade and Bret started arguing about Cynthia, with Bret saying to his own son, "Don't make me pick between you and Cynthia, because I'll pick Cynthia! And if you don't like it you can get the fuck out!"
Julie started calling Bret "Hitman" when he acted like this to his children, with Julie telling them that their father still loves him and not to worry about what The Hitman says, because it's coming from a broken mind.
One day after Julie bought a house, Bret randomly showed up with a turkey and tried to hit on her. Julie found it amusing and asked him if Cynthia knew he was there. Bret tried to make a move on her but Julie made it clear that won't happen so Bret left. As he left, he told Julie, "I still have cravings for you and I'm not sure I'll ever get over them." To which Julie just cooly responded with, "You will."
After Bret left that day, Julie called his assistant who confirmed that Cynthia was literally on a plane back to Italy right then. Julie laughed at how pathetic it was for Bret to say goodbye to Cynthia and then an hour or two later, show up at Julie's with a turkey and looking for sex.
Bret secretly married Cynthia and months later told the kids after the fact. Their son Blade was so furious he could barely speak to Julie when he got home and eventually blurted out, "Dad married that girl!" Their other son Dallas was also furious and explained how Bret callously told the kids "tell your mom, make sure you tell your mom." He was clearly trying to hurt Julie and used the kids to do so.
When Bret was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2006, Julie insisted on going and told Bret if he doesn't find a way for her to be there, then she would call Vince McMahon herself and arrange it. Bret promised her she would be there but asked her to be discreet about it.
Julie got asked to do an online interview leading up to the Hall of Fame, and she let slip that she would be at the show to support Bret. Later, an irate Bret called her, yelling about how she was supposed to be discreet. Julie clued in on the fact that Bret didn't tell his new wife yet about Julie coming and now he was in hot water. In the end, Bret refused to allow Julie to come to the Hall of Fame to support him.
In Bret's Hall of Fame speech, he just talked about his new wife and how Cynthia was there for him after his stroke and just put her over big. He didn't mention Julie and only mentioned 2 of his 4 children. She says her children were extremely hurt by this and calls it the ultimate betrayal.
Julie started running low on money in 2008 and even attempted to be on a reality show. It was all a BS scam though and she had to invest money into it and eventually it all fell through. She speaks of this with a bit of shame while framing it as something she learned from.
Julie was facing bankruptcy and foreclosure on the house, so as a last resort, she called Bret. She asked him for 9 grand to cover 3 mortgage payments so she can sell the house. Bret chastised her for having money problems before ultimately saying no. He suggested that she rent the house out or have the kids pay rent. As they left, Julie warned him that if she loses the house, Bret may need to take the kids at him place. She doesn't say what he said to this, but she does say, "His response was too cruel to put into writing." Good lord, considering all she told so far, I wonder what Bret said that was so bad, Julie didn't want to even write it down?
Julie does point out that Bret didn't owe her a damn thing and she was in this situation by her own doing. Julie felt like she was letting her kids down most of all.
Julie would move in with her daughter Beans where they split the rent together. She got a job making $14/hour working as a janitor at a local middle school and Julie notes that she was living well below the poverty line.
Julie remembers how absurd it was for her to show up to her janitor job driving a Lexus.
Julie ended up selling her Lexus to her daughter Beans, and Julie bought herself a 1999 Sunfire. It was the first car she ever bought with her own money.
Julie's father died in 2012 and Julie says she wrote a letter to him, promising to make him proud, and stuffed it inside his coffin.
Julie says she spends most of her days being a grandma to Jade's daughter and how grateful she is to be close to her kids still.
Bret can't say the same, Julie notes how he travels alone or with his wife and never offers invites to his kids. She says it breaks her heart to see how far Bret drifted away from their children, even if all her kids insist that they don't care. This was in 2013, so potentially Bret and his kinds could have a better relationship by now.
Julie spends the last several pages of the book detailing her kids and all the ways she loves them. You can tell she is a mother first and foremost, you can tell she loves them unconditionally. Jade, Dallas, Beans and Blade, weird names for kids but I also have a weird name so I can't judge.

"Wade! Good to see you back buddy!" Nathan said aloud as he and F approached Wade and Tina, the two breaking their embrace before looking to their friends.
Wade chuckled a bit as he responded to Nathan's greeting, Tina giving a pleasant smile as she stood behind him. "Same to you, man. How're things here?"
"Better than any words I could use for the situation!" Looking behind him, he gazed at a group of the worker drones that were rescued from the factory, having been brought aboard in order to transport them to a safer location. Their faces were of varied gratefulness and smiles as they made conversation with some of the troops onboard. "The rescue-ees are happy to be out of that place, far as I can tell!"
"They sure look like it." Wade said with a pleased smile, admiring the success of his and the Coalition's efforts as Nathan's friend Kurtis came over to the four.
Catching sight of Tina, the veteran drone gave a sly look as he correctly guessed the identity of Wade's accomplice. "Oh, and I see you found your girl you were telling me about."
The drone in question gave a blush of embarrassment as Wade held her hand, chuckling smugly as he introduced Tina. "Ah, yeah. Nathan, Kurtis, F, this is my girlfriend Tina. She's one of the best pilots I've met and known in my life, along with her sister Jasmine."
Tina's blush intensified heavily at Wade's words, a laugh breaching her mouth as she spoke to Wade's colleagues. "Well, I don't like to boast, but my sister and I DID fly for the military a while back."
Nathan and Kurtis gave impressed laughs as F chuckled at the amusing meeting, the former of the duo speaking as he shook Tina's hand. "Heh, well it's a proud pleasure to meet you, Miss Tina! You've got quite the partner with you, I'd say. He helped save F and Gerard from an accident during our time on Ceres."
Tina raised a hand to her mouth in shock as she looked to Wade, surprised by the news of his heroics at his new job before chuckling. "Well, it's not too surprising, I'd probably be dead if he didn't come in to help us." Remembering that F was involved in her rescue too, she glanced to the disassembly drone before quietly adding, "You too, darling."
F gave a thankful smile at the pilot drone as Wade spoke up on Tina's statement on her rescue. "Well, I'd also be done for if you didn't save me back there, with that disassembly drone squad." Tina nodded as Nathan looked to the drone couple in surprise at their stated feat.
"More of them? How many? Three? Fo-" The miner drone asked as Wade answered him mid-sentence.
"Three, and they put up a nasty fight. One almost got me before Tina shot at her with one of those guns these militia guys brought. A trooper must've dropped it during the fighting." Nathan gave an uncomfortable look of shock as Wade added, "One of them looked kinda like you too."
Tina pulled out her gun before holding it at attention, Nathan nodding in admiration of her efforts as she spoke up. "Think I could keep this one? We pilots usually carry sidearms like these, but I lost mine when they kidnapped me aboard the station in orbit."
Nathan and Kurtis looked to each other before nodding in agreement. "Sure, gonna need a holster though. Wouldn't want it to fall out that nice coat there, would we?" While Nathan gave his answer, Kurtis was already heading to the storage bays at the back of the ship, planning on grabbing the sizable holster wrap for Tina's weapon.
"Of course." Tina replied as Kurtis grabbed the desired gear, shutting the cargo door as he returned to the group. Taking the holster in her hand, she handed the pistol to Wade before speaking in between her efforts to attach the holster to her upper leg. "Thanks for the compliment, by the way."
"Don't mention it." Nathan replied back as F stepped up in between the group, wanting to add her own praise as the group looked to her.
"Glad to see so many together in arms here, especially when it's work colleagues like the boys here." Looking to Tina, she continued. "And Nathan's right, Miss Tina. Your partner is quite the guy, I'm a little surprised he didn't join the service. Him and his brother would've made great men if they fought in the ranks."
The positive air was quickly shattered upon the mention of Ron. Nathan, Wade, and the others all looked to F as her eyes became golden rings, the warrior drone realizing her mistake too late as she began to raise a hand to her face.
"...Yeah. Yes, we sure would have." Wade said solemnly, nodding lightly with a slight smile in his attempt to lighten the comment and, in turn, the mood. His smile faltered once again as he saw the others still frowning in sorrow, Wade joining them shortly after before remembering something. "Uh... Nathan? You did bring his body back here, right?"
Nathan nodded hesitantly as he glanced to the cargo bays at the back of the ship. "Yeah, I uh... We put him near the others we managed to recover before we left."
Tina listened with concerned eyes as she held tightly onto Wade's hand, the former worker drone tightening his own grip while speaking further to Nathan. "Good. Maybe, after this is all over, we can... Make preparations for a service. Ron deserves that at the least."
"So... h-he's in one of... those?" Tina asked dreadfully, observing the body bags lying next to each other in front of one of the cargo bay doors before looking back to Nathan, who looked down at the floor before replying.
"...Yep." Initially, Tina started to move, morbidly concerned over Ron's exact fate before stopping herself, still holding Wade's hand as she stood next to him again. Catching a glimpse of her attempt to see Ron, Nathan raised a digital eyebrow at her. "You, uh... want to see him?"
Wade looked down to Tina, who returned the gesture as they pondered over the uncomforting idea. She admittedly didn't want to see Ron, fearful of seeing what was left of him after that battle, but in a twisted way, knowing Wade wouldn't lie to her about a close relative like Ron being dead, she desperately felt the need for even the slightest sense of closure.
Looking to each other, Tina finally built her strength up, giving the faintest nod to Wade as her answer. Accepting her willingness, Wade slowly looked to Nathan, who needed no further gestures or words as he slowly walked over to the body bags, Wade, Tina, and their colleagues in tow. Upon reaching the bags, Nathan knelt down as his friends stopped behind him, Wade and Tina watching as he slowly unzipped the bag open. Despite her effort to be brave, Tina couldn't help but let out a horrified gasp upon seeing Ron's body, immediately noticing the large wound with dark, dried blood at his chest.
Nathan shook his head in dismay as he looked upon the sight of his fallen friend in the flayed bag. "It was when we made our second attempt in raiding the factory back there. We... We managed to pass through most of the halls without much trouble, but... we we're ambushed as we got close to the conversion room."
"G, the disassembly drone that helped the company abduct me, attacked us, along with several other troopers he brought with him." Wade added, him and Tina holding each other tightly as he continued. "We fought them off well enough, but G got an upper hand on me. He almost killed me, but.... Ron got in the way." Tina felt herself beginning to cry as she collapsed into Wade's chest, the former worker drone embracing her ever more tightly as she wept for their friend.
F shook her head in dismay, disappointed in herself as she spoke up. "I could've saved him, if I hadn't let myself get beat down like that. I-"
"F!" Wade said sternly, F ceasing her self-degrading as he tried to ease her guilt. "We did the best we could. If anything, it could've gone a lot worse."
Kurtis patted F on her back as he spoke up on his co-worker. "He was a good man, tried to bring out the best in people. Taught Wade that ideal well, too." He looked to Wade with a smile, the drone taking the compliment with the same gesture as he lightly patted Tina on her back too.
"*sniff* Y-Yes... He d-did try to make life brighter with his actions." Tina croaked as she slowly lifted her head up off of Wade, wiping the digital drops off her face as she added, "He... Him and Wade did well to so many with their farm they had back home, Jasmine and I helped transport their harvests all across the colonies."
The group gave looks and nods of admiration at the labor Tina described, Wade nodding in affirmation as he added, "Yeah, we held that place up for a long while. But if it weren't for the recent storms that ran through this place, we probably would still be farming." He began to chuckle slightly as he noted the events after the storm. "Heh, then again, we probably wouldn't have gone to Ceres if that was the case. So, I'm quite glad life changed our course on that endeavor."
Nathan was about to speak on the matter, but was stopped as Kelly walked out of the cockpit area, speaking to Wade specifically. "Mr. Wade? Our operative and her boss wants to see you and some of your team, says it's about the trouble you and the others went through."
Wade and Tina looked to each other with raised eyebrows before looking to their friends, F raising a hand as she spoke to the couple. "Well, you heard her. Let's get up there." Looking to Nathan, she motioned for him to follow her before glancing to Kurtis, who nodded to her before kneeling down to seal Ron's body bag.
Turning back to Wade and Tina, F smirked at them as they quickly made their way up to the small bridge of the ship, Tina speaking to Wade about the interior and where to go. "I do remember these ships a bit, now that I think about it. There should be a smaller room at the top above us. Come on."
Holding her hand, Wade and Tina made their way into the cockpit, F and Nathan close behind as the four walked up the small steps to the pilot seats. Right next to the ascending steps were another set of such steps, albeit going the other way into another room as Tina mentioned. The lover drones walked up the second set of steps as they entered the room, catching the sound of a conversation in their ears.
"Yeah Tess, they did a number on the security forces from what I've been told by Mr. Kurtis. He seems quite pro-" J stopped as she heard a startled gasp coming from the entrance near the cockpit, spotting her requested visitors as they took notice of her.
Wade, however, was immediately in shock, Tina also spooked by the familiar face as her love drew a sword before holding it out defensively. F and Nathan looked to the two in surprise as the former raised her arms slightly as to calm down Wade, knowing this J wasn't an enemy.
"Whoa there, easy now." The human hologram said with her hands raised as Wade and Tina gave a faint glare at J, who stared unamused with her hands to her hips.
Easy, Mr. Wade. I'm a friend." J stated as Wade kept his blade trained at her.
"Didn't we just kill you out there earlier?" Tina asked as she held onto Wade's arm, J smirking as she took in the amusing detail.
"Oh, yes. I believe you must've taken out one of my clones, not surprised. I killed a few myself back there." The corporate drone replied as Wade lowered his sword, surprised at J's words as she looked to him.
"Clones?" Tina said in bewilderment, confounded by the idea of multiples of the same drone running around.
"So, there's more of you?" Wade asked as he swapped his sword back for a hand.
"Indeed there are, Mr. Wade. Effective disassembly drones get cloned more often." J answered as she cringed slightly, remembering part of the reason she ended up here. "Though, admittedly I wasn't efficient enough recently. I'm a clone of one of the old units dispatched about two decades ago, before the Disassembly Division was officially instated."
Tina raised an eyebrow at J's explanation. "Recently? If you were away all that time, what could've possibly stopped you now?"
The murder drone groaned in slight annoyance as she reluctantly explained her answer. "Well, the colony we were supposedly sent to wipe out was quite persistent. During one of our raids, some brat with a ray gun blasted me in two." Regaining her composure, J flicked her hair with a smirk. "Then again, my clones should be better than they are, the Administrator seems to have a dislike towards me, as far as I can tell."
Wade and Tina glanced at each other as they took in the news, perplexed at the story they were hearing as the former spoke up. "Well, I sure hope so. Your clone didn't put up as much of a fight as I was expecting."
"Right..." J said with a look of disappointment before clearing her throat. "But besides that, we don't have time for THAT kind of backstory. We've got a lot of talk to do, Mr. Wade."
The holographic human raised a finger, drawing Wade and Tina's attention as she spoke. "Say, didn't J tell me about a human friend you had? A 'brother' guy?"
J nodded as she now also became curious over their missing acquaintant. "Ah yes, Ron, I believe. Do you know where he is, Wade?"
The two drones looked down in sorrow as Wade answered in dismay. "He uh... he didn't make it."
J allowed a concerned look to breach her shield of confident pride as her human friend spoke up, sounding sad at the news. "Oh, I uh, I'm sorry to hear that, Mr. W- er... Carter."
"It's alright," Wade replied as he held Tina's hand, looking up to J and the hologram before continuing. "at least he's not hurting anymore."
"My... condolences, Mr. Carter." J said, calling Wade by his last name now as she recovered from the tragic news. "But, it seems you've found someone else important. Who's your friend?"
Wade perked up a bit as he prepared to introduce Tina again. "Ah, yes. This is Tina Fowley, my girlfriend. She was among those captured by the company, I got her out before they could turn her, however."
"She's a pilot too." Nathan chirped from behind Wade, J and her boss stifling laughs as they took in the amusing description of Wade's partner.
"Well, she's quite the cutie, I'll say." The holo-human said in amusement, Tina blushing at the compliment as J spoke as well.
"Indeed she is, good find, Mr. Carter." Chuckling to herself, she remembered that she hadn't even formally met Wade earlier, prompting her to return the effort. "Well, now's as good a time as any to introduce ourselves." Looking to the hologram, J spoke. "Though you probably know who I am, name's J. And this is my boss, Tessa."
Looking to the human girl with a pleasant smile, he spoke to her. "Well, pleased to meet you, Mrs. Tessa."
"Good to meet ya too, Wade!" Tessa replied energetically before bringing herself back to a more serious stance, Wade and Tina feeling a bit surprised by the change of air as she spoke further. "And as much as I hate to cut the pleasantries so short, J and I have some important things to brief you on. So, take a seat and get comfy, everyone."
Noting the pair of chairs in front of the small table J and Tessa were standing on the other side of, the couple took them as Nathan and F stood behind them, simply listening in as J began to explain the matter at hand. "So, you both are probably wondering what this whole mess was all about, correct?"
The two drones nodded as Tina spoke up. "I heard it was having to do something with being recruited for the Disassembly Division, that group you spoke of a second ago. Why did they need to steal me away from my sister up there?"
"Well, the thing is, they didn't." Tessa answered, putting her hands to her hips as her companion explained further.
"Indeed, a simple memory transfer and body scan would've sufficed, but it seems the Administrator was in a bit of a rush." Crossing her arms, J continued in disgruntlement. "From what we gathered, this was done by her as per request by the company CEO, Mr. Jenson. He wanted the Administrator to recruit more drones under a new model of disassembly drone, with slight upgrades that would presumably remove most of the persistent issues each of us have." Shaking her head in disappointment, J finished with, "But, it's clear she cared little for how they were acquired, and way too far overboard with her efforts."
Wade held back his anger as he felt his certainty on the ones responsible grow with J's explanation. "So, it's true? Your people did all this? Got my brother and countless others killed for us?"
The corporate drone seemed to give a sluggish wave of her hand as she replied to Wade. "Well, you see, this whole ordeal is much more complex than it seems." Readying a holo-projector from her hand as it showed the image of a worker drone, dressed in a maid uniform. The hair was silver, two strips of it going down the sides of its head, as well as bearing a bow at the top of it all. Though the hologram made it hard to tell certain details, the drone's eyes appeared faintly as yellow through the blue hue from the hologram light.
Wade, Tina, and their companions eyed the seemingly innocent worker drone in puzzlement as J spoke again. "Now, you should count yourselves lucky, cause what I'm about to tell you is something corporate wouldn't let me spew out to anyone under certain statuses." Looking to Tessa, she continued with a sly smirk. "Then again, it'd probably be forced out of us anyway later on even if we didn't decide to tell you. So, now would be the best time to give you a run-down of the truth we have to share."
"Truth?" Wade asked with a raised hand, J nodding in affirmation before replying.
"Yes." Clearing her throat, J began. "You see, the Administrator was not a creation of JCJenson. At least, not in the way they intended. In fact, she was once a normal worker drone, just like you and I were." Wade raised an eyebrow as J's holo-projector shifted to show a building, a large, very old looking manor that went up a couple of stories high. As Wade and his cohorts observed the structure, J continued her story about her and this Administrator's origins.
"A long time ago, at this place we'll call Elliott Manor, my boss, who was still a child at the time, brought in a few worker drones left outside in a dump near the mansion, mostly composed of scrapped worker drone bodies. Upon bringing us in, Tess would fix us up so we could be her friends. I myself, along with three other drones, were her closest companions. Her family weren't so keen on having us around, but, to keep their daughter happy and to make us useful, Mr. and Mrs. Elliott put us to work keeping the place tidy." The disassembly drone's projector shifted again to show J and her three fellow workers, dressed in the same maid attire J was shown in earlier. Wade and Tina stared at two of them, as they resembled the disassembly drones they fought earlier, most notably N and V.
"Among the four of us here, THIS one would be the biggest problem." The hologram zoomed into the worker drone displayed earlier, postured in a strange, slouched over posture.
"Her name is Cyn, and, unlike J, V and N there, she was more broken than I had surmised back then. Spoke like some old artificial voice generator thing." Tessa stated, pointing at the highlighted drone before Tina decided to speak up on the backstory.
"How broken? Was there something wrong with her coding?" She said as she put a hand to her core.
J nodded lightly as she gave her answer. "Most likely. Do you remember the protocol tape for proper disposal of worker units? Seen it at all?"
Tina and Wade shivered a bit as they thought of the presumed tape J spoke of, dread creeping in from their memories of seeing it as the latter of the duo answered. "I think so, once during a little maintenance time I had years back. I think it was called... 'Zombie Drones'?"
"That's exactly the one." J said with a nod before continuing. "Well, if you saw it all the way through, the pie chart diagram points out the outcomes for OS complications should a worker core be improperly terminated. Out of those outcomes, the smallest, least likely one was 'potentially hazardous mutations'." Pointing to Cyn on the hologram, J continued further. "As for Cyn here, she befell said mutations, and they would come to not only affect her, but all of us at the manor too."
Tina's eyes went wide as she started to click the pieces together, recalling herself reading up on the incident J was hinting at years earlier during a class she took at the college she and Wade attended. "Wait... You, you don't mean SHE was the one who caused the Elliott Gala Massacre?"
J nodded in affirmation as Wade spoke up, confused at the revelation. "Wait, I remember looking into that too. Didn't the news say it was some mass murderer that did it?"
"That they did." Tessa replied as she added to the story. "However, that was a cover-up by the company to hide part of what really happened."
Pulling up what appeared to be a large room full of people inside, J explained the tragedy shown on the projector. "Tessa's parents didn't treat the drones under their service well, and Cyn seemed to despise them for it. On that day during a gala hosted by the Elliotts, Cyn, utilizing the mutations I mentioned, slaughtered the entire attending party there." Glancing to Tessa, J finished with, "Tess and I tried to stop her, but... it was too late."
Holding their hands to their mouths, Wade and Tina looked on in horror, Nathan and F sharing similar dismay as the four looked to Tessa. Knowing their desire to hear how she was spared, Tessa spoke to them. "Despite seeing her kill my parents and everyone in that room with my own eyes, Cyn spared me from the carnage. Took me away to some place so I could be kept quiet."
Raising a hand, F spoke up. "Well, wait a minute, how did Cyn join the company after all that?"
"Good question." J replied, pulling up an image of Cyn and a man, whom Wade recognized as Halloway before the corporate drone explained. "Upon the arrival of law enforcement and agents sent by the company, they found Cyn, who had already turned me and the other worker drones from the manor into the first disassembly drones. After some chatter between the two, Dr. Edgar Halloway, a simple materials recovery officer at the time, struck a deal with her. Talking with the authorities, they managed to convince them to keep the incident on the down low while they took Cyn and her drones in for study. Through said study, addition of protocols and official installation of Cyn into higher company positions, not to mention the creation of the Disassembly Drone Division, the rest is history."
The four drones looked on in stunned shock, taking in Tessa and J's story with unease as Wade spoke up. "So, this new body, the crazy shit that we just went through... it's all cause of this Cyn being? And those who are helping her?"
"That's right." J answered as Tina raised a finger, still concerned over the capabilities of the Administrator as she spoke.
"But, how did she convert you all into what you are now? What were these 'mutations' exactly?"
Tessa sighed a bit as she prepared to explain the origins of this horrible program. "Well, from what information I could gather before I got out of Cyn's clutches a while back, the researchers put to work studying Cyn and her abnormalities came to regard the latter as some kind of program, which grew stronger and more capable quite fast as it was kept under the company's leash. Eventually, they gave it a name: AbsoluteSolver." Pulling out what looked like a smartcomm, Tessa flicked her finger over it as she explained further. "Despite all logic, the AbsoluteSolver program, or, Solver, could generate various things out of thin air, as well as manipulate objects and living beings in many ways. To be blunt, it's like some kind of freaky magic powers for drones.
"Seeing that they could learn a lot from this program, as well as use Cyn's abilities to wring out all kinds of products and items for them to sell and use, the company instated the Solver Project, a research group dedicated to understanding the AS and its potential." Raising a finger, Tessa looked to Wade as she finished her explanation on the Solver. "Said program has been branched out to several other planets over the years, helping to spread this virus as far as possible for purposes we're certain aren't good, given that one of those planets got devastated by an experiment one of the teams did involving the virus."
The news that this infection brought harm to one of the colony worlds didn't sit well with the lover drones, both of them looking on in dismay as J gave more details. "And with that in mind, this recent effort has only cemented our belief that Cyn is up to something sinister. So once we reach the base here in Nevada, we have to make preparations for bringing this Solver Project to a halt... BEFORE it can harm any more people."
Smirking deviously, Tessa raised a finger as she glanced to Wade, who looked to her with concern as she spoke. "By the way Mr. Carter, that Halloway guy you ran into earlier? He leads one of the main teams working on the project."
Wade scoffed in annoyance he was reminded of that man. "Doesn't surprise me, seemed like he was really close to the Administrator from what I saw." Then, thinking on the reason for this briefing he was attending, Wade looked to J and Tessa curiously. "Why are you telling us this?"
J crossed her arms as she explained. "Because, Mr. Carter, YOU are the only disassembly drone we managed to recover from that place. And, given your exceptional performance there, your help would be much appreciated in our mission."
"Mission?" Tina said with a raised eyebrow. "So we're not done yet?"
"For us, not in the slightest. We've got some explaining to do with the government officials stationed at the base we're heading to. As for you all," J answered before looking to the four, all of them returning the glance as she continued. "...that depends on what you all have to say. Can you lend us a hand?"
Glancing to each other, Wade and Tina gazed into one another before nodding in agreement, turning back to J and Tessa before giving their decision. "Well, after what I just went through, and what happened to my brother... I'm sure as hell gonna bring those bastards to justice in one form or another."
"Yes, Wade and I have some talking to do with this 'Dr. Halloway' fellow before this is all over." Tina added, her and Wade holding each others hand as J gave a smirk at their vigorous determination.
"I'm glad to hear you two feel the same on the matter." J said as Tessa put her hands to her hips, slumped slightly as she spoke in a disappointed tone.
"Unfortunately, it may be a minute before we see some action. Once we reach the base, you all will find a place to rest for the time being. Since it's a military base, it should be safe from any major retribution attempts by those blokes at the company." Pulling out her smartcomm again, she continued once more. "As for us, we'll talk to the leaders there and see what their decision will be on the matter."
The quartet seemed to grow concerned over that last part, Nathan raising a hand before speaking his mind. "So, if they say no? Does that mean...?"
J and Tessa glanced to each other before the former answered the veteran drone. "Well, in that case, while it will be harder without official military support, the Coalition will take us wherever we need them to in order to put a stop to the Administrator. Shouldn't be much to worry about."
Taking this somewhat comforting news to heart, Tina and Wade nodded in understanding before the latter spoke to the operatives. "Well, that's good to hear. Whenever you do get an answer, give us a heads up."
"We will, Mr. Carter." J replied to Wade before shifting in her stance, Wade and his friends standing up together as their disassembly drone superior spoke once more. "With all that said, you're all dismissed. If you have any more questions, don't hesitate to ask."
"Thanks for clearing this up, Mrs. J. You too, Tessa." Wade said gratefully before turning to the exit, Tina walking with him as F and Nathan walked over to the operatives.
"Wade? Do you mind coming down to the bay below? I... I have something to show you." Wade nodded to her before they made their way down, the four people behind them continuing the chatter as the couple went to have their long overdue privacy.
Stepping out of the cockpit behind them, Wade and Tina sighed in comfort as they saw the troops busy with their tasks, not giving a glance to the two as they walked close to the sealed door of the transport. Admiring the enormous view the large window in the door gave for a moment, the two drones looked to each other as Tina dug into her pocket. "I was hoping to do this when we got back home, but... I got this from Eridanus while I was visiting." Finding her token of love to Wade, she pulled out the small box she showed off on the call earlier, opening it to reveal her present.
Wade admired the blue gemstone with wide eyes as Tina pulled it out with great care. "Wow... It's beautiful."
Tina chuckled as she extended the gem's necklace band out. "I knew you would, I just happened to stumble upon it while exploring the forest during a tour." Putting the two necklace bands around Wade's neck, she clipped the present together before pulling her arms back, adoring Wade's new add-on as she finished her sentence. "I felt it would be something nice for you to remember me by, while we're away from each other."
Wade smiled at Tina as he expressed his appreciation for the gift. "It certainly will." Stiffling a chuckle, the former worker drone held Tina's hand holding the box as he spoke further. "But, no matter how far apart we are, nothing could fill the space you hold in my heart."
"Same in mine, dear." Tina replied as she gazed into Wade's eyes, noting the faint green in his yellowed visor as she looked on in hopeful amusement. "And yet, even after all they did, I can still see those eyes. Changed from the soft, cool grass to the warmth of a blazing sun." She said while putting the box away, then placing a hand onto Wade's face as he looked off with a blush.
"Tina, I..." Wade began, unsure of how to put his thoughts to words as he tried to find them. "I don't know what they did to me, but I won't let it ruin our relationship." Holding her shoulders, Wade spoke to Tina further. "You're the most beautiful being I've seen in the whole universe, your warmth, your flight prowess... I want to protect that. I want to protect you."
"Oh, Wade." Tina murmured as the two touched their heads to one another, holding each other close in their efforts to provide affection. Such affection intensified as the two joined their metal lips, sharing a long kiss as they enjoyed their moment of awkward romance together.
...
Location: New Nellis Staryards, Nevada
The Chameleon transports zoomed over the large military air base as they arrived at their destination, several A-20 planes flying about over the base as they either carried out flight sorties or, more likely, investigated the arriving craft coming towards the base. After about an hour of flying over the country, the Coalition-USN task force finally arrived at the designated area to begin unloading their rescued drones to an area they could be protected more efficiently.
As the transport began to descend, Wade, Tina, and their friends observed the sight outside the window, spotting several landed aircraft and even a few docked warships. They admired the many ships resting for repair and refurbishment while they prepared to land and disembark for the base outside.
In the small bridge of the dropship, one of the two pilots tapped a button on the control panel, putting a microphone to their mouth before speaking into it. "Base Control, this is Transport Chi-729-B, we've got assets from the recent op lead by Captain Preston aboard. Request permission to land."
"Permission granted, Chi-729. Welcome back." The officer on the other end replied as the transport descended further, two lightningrod jets breaking off as they permitted the craft to land on their grounds below them.

I’m just curious by the way. I’ve heard that some people have these freaky mind games to catch people’s attention and actually getting them to obsess about them. There are some pretty edgy ones that I’ve heard that are clearly bullshit but truth is, I do know some people who always happen to have lots of people around that are crazy for them

TL;DR my relationship fell apart because of bad communication on my part, but now I'm thinking of something slightly similar that was done to me and it's bugging me and I'm wondering if I'm right to feel this way
Buckle up coz this is going to be really long and winding because I need to be clear and transparent about everything that happened that got me to this point and will not settle for only giving half the story.
I (36m) recently went through a breakup with my (28f) partner. The cause? A combination of miscommunication and then sealing the deal with a lie due to panic that came out in the wash during the same conversation when I confessed.
Yeah, I know it was a shitty thing to do and I am an asshole for that; but at the Time when put on the spot with the threat of your relationship being over already being thrown at you and freaking out because of the words that are being used, sometimes you do stupid shit because of the fear of losing someone or something.
For context, we had been together since 2022 and started off casual and quickly became romantically involved. when we first met I was in something of a hierarchical structure with a mono partner which I eventually learned was not working for me, as well as having one other partner.
Over the Time we were together, the other two relationships fell apart for different reasons and we were our only relationships that we had.
When it was just us in the last quarter of 2023, we spent a lot of Time talking about how we wanted to practice things in our relationship and discussions about communication and boundaries were had and for all intents and purposes it seemed like we were on a similar wavelength. Neither of us had any dates or hook ups or anything like that for the rest of the year while we were doing this and this year we were going to start trying to put things into practice based on what was talked about.
One of the things we talked about was keeping each other informed of when we were catching up with people. Seems easy enough, right?
I'll be the first to admit that I stumbled and tripped on my own shoelaces right out the gate in the first week of 2024 after we gave each other the green light; when I caught up with an ex-meta during my own private Time and we ended up hooking up. At the Time it happened, I thought nothing of it because it was during my own private Time and failed to remember that part of our discussions had been to keep each other informed of when we were catching up with people, regardless of if it was actually a hook up or not.
Ironically enough, the following day I was informed by her of what would end up being a very similar scenario. Brain still didn't click (The AuDHD was strong to say the least)
It wasn't until a couple weeks later when having a self check in voice journal session that I realised "oh shit!”
Now, once upon a Time I would have kept my mouth shut and never let it see the light of day and no one would have been any the wiser; but I wasn't that person anymore. I needed to take accountability and knew there was every possibility that it could end my relationship and was ready to deal with that consequence.
So I told her. Needless to say there was a lot of hurt and was told I was a cheater because of it. The decision was made, though, to try and work on rebuilding that trust and do better.
Weeks went on and it became apparent and was even verbalised that trying to get past it was hard for her and had even admitted that there had been a couple Times since that admission that she'd check our life360 connection to see if I was actually at my home or wherever I was meant to be at the Time.
I expressed how I was not ok with that, but at the Time the response effectively summed up to "you broke my trust and did this, so yeah, it's made it hard for me to trust you when you say things"
After that discussion, though, it stopped but there was occasions where in the future topics that should have been focused on in a vacuum would have this situation be bled back into the discussion and not by me.
Fast forward a couple months and my partner meets someone new (30m) who they start to go on dates with and the emotional whiplash for me of how unstable things are in our relationship while the start of NRE comes into play. Jealousy isn't something that comes up a lot for me overall (I am normally a very compersion based person) so in the context of where we were at, it kinda hit in unexpected ways.
I was assured however that as long as my partner and I communicate she would do her best to work with me through things because it was a new experience for her to being the hinge partner for the first Time.
Being vulnerable about how I was feeling at different points, however, didn't end up being as well supported as one may have hoped. I know to a certain extent that if I had built up a better support network first to filter some of my feelings through first and then brought them to her, in theory there may have been more space for them but I didn't have that kind of support network and I was being very raw with her on some stuff but I never did it in an attempt to make it her problem. I even recognised then that a lot of it was up to me. There were just certain affirmations or reassurances or signs of affection that I would ask for that would be met with resistance.
Part of the reasoning being given amounting to "it's hard to do those things sometimes because of how I'm still feeling about how you hurt me. There's actually a really small part of me that hates you"
To abbreviate an already long story I eventually met my meta and we got on fine at a birthday party I put on for our partner and it was all good. I did hit an overstimulation wall though near the end of the night that I tried to break through but just couldn't and I was then accused of ruining her party by both her and her mother and the idea that I was trying to make it all about me, which was so far from the truth because I knew how important this birthday was for her and even said at one point that all I want is for her to have a good Time and that I would be ok and not to worry about me too much.
Anyway, I meet an interesting new person at a poly social gathering the next day that we were at (my partner was extremely emotionally numb due to the fallout of the night before, but my meta made it to the same social event and helped bring her back to an emotionally happier place that I knew I couldn't since I was the one she was upset with) and myself and this person get to flirting and talking and I mention to my partner as part of our communication arrangements that we were going to meet up for a date.
Turns out this person was actually a friend of my meta and they, along with my partner, took me aside and talked to me about them and tried to inform me about this person's situation and everything. I appreciated it, though it felt more like a warning or disclaimer at the Time and we moved on since I like to make my own judgements about people on my own terms (considering how some of my meta's friends tried to pass judgement on our partner before they started dating and warn him away from her and he chose to judge for himself, I figured that would have at least been recognised in kind).
Following week: Friday night my partner is meant to be having date night with my meta. Earlier that day we were talking about communication again and specifically about trying to keep each other informed. I also very deliberately ask, because I'm so afraid of messing up again, for her to explicitly tell me what she needs to not have something come up as a breach of trust. I'm on a mission to try and prove to myself and to her that I can do this right.
There's resistance to this idea because as she put it this would just give me a way to stand right at the edge of her boundaries without breaking them and make her intentionally make her uncomfortable; Almost like an "I'm not touching you" thing around her boundaries.
The conversation is shelved because she's about to start her date night and so I let her be and send her off with a "have a good Time I'll see you tomorrow" that gets left on read with no reactions or anything which is not a common practice for her.
Now as part of the adjustment period before the birthday, I did have room to text still even when they were together in what was called the "teething" phase. After the birthday I mentioned I was 100% ok with things now and to me that also meant that I could be comfortable with doing full radio silence during dates out of respect for their relationship.
Later that evening I'm talking to the person from the social event and they're stuck with train delays. Our first proper date isn't for another few days, but I offer them a ride back to where they left their car since I have the Time and means to do so.
We do this, but we end up hanging out a little longer than just me dropping them off and we get to talking and hanging out and that eventually leads to making out and a little heavy petting. After we finally parted ways, even though for me I was trying to be respectful of my partner and metas relationship by being radio silent to not interrupt their Time together I couldn't shake this feeling that this was somehow another fuck up against my name and even said so to myself.
The next day, turns out that was the case. The person I saw had sent a message to my meta about how they really liked me before I'd even sent a good morning message and so when I did I got "do you have something you need to tell me?" And I said that yes, I saw them and gave them a lift home. I didn't plan on hiding it at all and just tried to respect her date night.
Turns out that the keep each other informed bit was meant to be no matter what: no matter who she was with, what she was doing, if she was on a date night or not, send a message so it was at least there....the kind of explicit information I was asking for so that it at least existed.
We meet up later that evening and once she finally settles in and we start talking one of the first things asked/said was "so did anything happen? Coz if it did then that's just the nail in the coffin and we're done"
I panic. Say it was nothing more than a kiss, that's it (dumb I know, like REALLY FUCKING DUMB) but eventually as we're talking I come clean about the heavy petting part and just like that it's over. There's intense discussion, crying, anger, all of it and like that it's done.
That's my story.
If you're still here you're probably wondering what the thing is that's getting to me.
So a few weeks prior my ex and my meta were spending their first full weekend together which was freaky for me for a while because it really was a sign that things were getting serious and things were still very limbo like. Anyway, that goes off fine.
Remember that life 360 app? Well I never had made any modifications to any of the notifications, primarily because I never was actively using it as such: it was just there; so I would get notifications about whenever my ex had gotten to work safely or to wherever and it was just a thing that would crop up.
On the Monday after the weekend they'd had together, I'm running a D&D campaign with friends and my phone mentions my ex had just completed a long drive and I was a little confused. So I, stupidly curious, looked and it turned out that she had gone back to her metas place. So I asked her about it. Last minute dinner plans she was invited to. No heads up before hand and likely if I kept messaging over the night I'd have either been told midway through or told the following day or something.
Ironically enough, on review, I ended up being the one that in the moment of being a little cut by the experience mentioned the idea of being more informative about last minute plans and then completely forgot I'd ever said it.
But yeah, that's what's tickling my brain. Would what she did at the Time still count as "not keeping the other person informed ahead of Time no matter what" which was the standard I was being held to and so, by that definition have counted as being cheated on?
Is that why I'm feeling funny about it even if it was my actions that I accept ended our relationship?
(I'm REALLY sorry about the goddamned novel I've written out here, but I was not going to let myself pretend that I didn't make mistakes and do shitty things, too and not paint a whole picture. Thanks if you made it to the end though)

“Wake the fuck up, man.”
Haruki Fujita slipped out of a hallucination. The hallucination was mindless. It featured a name moments before something killed him, extraterrestrial and horrible from head to toe. Slimy and predatory. The most of it cybernetic. He was dying, with blood gushing out of his neck, but that wasn’t what killed him, at least not immediately, because his intestines were pulled out of his stomach, and that was what killed him.
He watched the blue solar panel wing curve outward from the steel hull of the International Space Station, and he frowned bitterly. From the sensation of death, Haruki Fujita had a sickening gut feeling.
“Stefan Bossi!” he cried out, alarmed.
The name lingered in his mind. He remembered it from his hallucination. He idly watched one of his gloves floating across the room and stopped in front of his computer screen. No reason was known to him why he remembered that name; he remembered nothing more. There was a brief rush—he had time to think about programming languages and decoding radio frequencies, though none of the government organizations he hacked into proved extraterrestrial in origin, but Haruki was convinced by the bizarre nature of the sounds. He didn’t really care about the scientists at SETI, many doctors, and the best professors in the world who regarded them as a hoax. And those who didn’t view the evolution of Earth from an intergalactic perspective that was terraformed over billions of years by otherworldly entities.
“Stefan Bossi!” he said again, grabbing the floating glove with his cold hand and looked at it, trying to decide the significance of the name from his hallucination. Instantly he felt his fingers were freezing from the cold. As Haruki watched the storage bay where he was hiding, his fingers slipped into the glove and strapped the Velcro. “Stefan Bossi! Stefan Bossi!” It seemed to be all he could remember.
Even trapped in the confusing vise of the illusion, Haruki felt an intense fear—this was what an extraterrestrial predator looked like while it slaughtered him. It was a look that filled him with horror.
Another radio frequency echoed from his computer, this one echoing like the mating call of a dolphin, and that excited him. With another “Stefan Bossi!” he stared out of the window and watched the sun disappear behind the Earth, he lost focus; and although it was only an hour after bedtime—another exciting six hours while everyone was deep asleep—the red glow of the computer screen had so hindered his thoughts that he was distracted while staring. And he slipped back into that mindless hallucination.
When Haruki managed to wake up, he realized it was hours later, in the bosom of the night. He glimpsed over the UPS batteries and saw a loose terminal that looked like a collection of fireflies floating in the antigravity of space.
After a while, he hovered upright and spoke.
“Stefan Bossi!”
Incredibly, he did not know why.
Haruki swallowed and looked at the wall, thinking: I’m going to die.
For a moment his mind seemed to separate from his physical body—it was not fear, or angst; it was terror. He was reminded by the physical sense of nausea as he swallowed the bitter taste in his mouth, and it occurred to him that he had just experienced a completely new level of fear.

The first argument about faith in the Fujita household—the first one Haruki got a hiding for, at least—happened on an Easter weekend in April. It was a big argument; even the greatest spanking couldn’t change his mind. Only his stepbrother shared his sentiment; Nic Chagall was in the bathroom brushing his teeth and listening to his sulking. This was fortunate because, in those days, there was no way to get ungrounded by a Japanese father.
The circumstances that, slipping out of a deep trance at night onboard the ISS, Haruki had spoken aloud a name that he had no memory of. And it hardly aroused enough curiosity to investigate the phenomenon.
Weird he thought, and got a little shiver; as if to confirm the opinion that the vision was indeed supernatural, he slipped into a trancelike daze. He realized with blank, distant eyes that for the first time the hallucination was no longer mindless.
Now he was walking onboard an abandoned spaceship pondering why the microgravity did not affect his arms and legs; he became aware that he was being watched from the shadows of the spaceship.
Haruki looked around quickly and saw a strange light with a red glow. He would have closed his eyes, but it fascinated him, and now it felt as if he had no idea where to go or why he was there; he did not know. Everything seemed so natural and real, as is the case with hallucinations. The revelation of being onboard an alien ship stopped bothering him, and the questions faded.
He screamed very loudly—the light must have done something to him because he could not remember being able to hear himself, and his lips didn’t twitch.
Soon, he came to a parting of ways; he saw a staircase leading to the lower deck, which had the appearance, in fact, of having long been abandoned. He sensed it led to something evil, yet he went down without hesitation, urged by some unstoppable force. He swallowed and descended the staircase, now convinced that the spaceship was haunted by invisible existences that he could not picture in his mind.
“What?” From behind the giant steel columns on his lefthand side, he heard broken and incoherent echoes of a radio frequency that he somewhat recognized. It sounded to him like fragmentary utterances of an evil conspiracy against his body and mind.
He swallowed again, holding onto the handrailing to steady himself. Haruki pointed at something lurking in the darkness, now believing it was watching him—an apparition so utterly intergalactic that he felt a pause in his breathing and a chill in his bones.
But for a long time, nothing came. He wanted to know why the haunted spaceship through which he journeyed was lit with a red glimmer having no point of origin. It appeared as if the mysterious light didn’t cast a shadow, and he thought about its neon color. Everything seemed a little brighter now, and he stood rooted with that cold feeling squeezing his lungs that reminded him of the alien presence.
A shallow pool in a bent depression met his eyes with a sloppy mess. He tumbled forward and plunged with his gloves into it and then looked at the thick slime of juices and placenta on his fingers with a different kind of horror.
Slime, he then observed, was around him everywhere. The walls towering grimly on either side revealed it in blots and splashes on the big, rusted panels. Bundles of sloppy racks that stretched over the walkways were hoarded with conductor cables and splattered as with placenta—glowing red. Robbing the place of its significance covered in heaps of crimson, slime dangling like slurry with its coagulations.
Sweat ran down his forehead and burned his eyes. He tasted a mixture of salt and minerals in his mouth. The shivering would not stop. Fear was like the ultimate curse. He thought: There is a point where the physical symptom of fear becomes unbearable: I have passed that point already.
It felt as if everything was in compensation for some crime that he could not remember. He believed he was a person of integrity; if he had murdered someone he would have remembered it, and a little introspection would have revealed the person he had supposedly harmed. The discovery of the menaces and mysteries of his surroundings was an added horror, tracing his steps backward in his mind.
And just how vainly could he reproduce the moment of his wrongdoing, here standing knee-deep in the slime? But suddenly the memories flashed tumultuously into his brain, picture after picture, only causing confusion and obscurity, and in no picture could he catch a glimpse of what he had done wrong.
But just because it hadn’t been remembered didn’t mean it didn’t happen. This failure to conceive only heightened his terror; he felt like a failure who had lost something in the dark without knowing what.
He grabbed his knees, shuddering,
(think of a way to kill yourself, think of a way to make it stop)
and sank his gloves into his spacesuit as hard as he could. He looked down, weak and flimsy knees rattling like a dog, tongue stuck into his cheek, and his posture heavily slanted with baleful character. It felt as if everything in sight conspired against his peace; from overhead and all around came the audible and startling echoes: the growl of a creature so obviously from outer space—that he could take it no more, and with a great effort to break the curse that bound his arms and legs to procrastination, he shouted from the depths of his lungs.
“Reveal yourself!”
His voice echoed with a hollow clang, it went stuttering and stammering, but of course he could not know what evils might lurk on the ship. He would only assume that, because his voice broke and echoed into an infinite multitude of unfamiliar sounds, the ship must have been large enough to have traveled from another galaxy or dimension.
I will not go down without a fight. There may be frequencies that are malignant and haunting this accursed ship. I shall decipher them and blot them down. The monster shall forget about my wrongs, the suffering that I endure—I, a worthless astronaut, a medic, and a computer programmer!
Haruki removed a flashbeam from his spacesuit; it felt warm when he switched it on. He pointed the beam at the wall and heard intimidating radio frequencies echoing against the steel.
Why, yes, I shall take off my glove—dip it into a heap of slime and write against the wall.
He had hardly touched the surface of the steel with his finger when a wild, evil reverberation of growling broke out at a considerable distance behind him, and growing ever louder, seemed approaching ever nearer. It was a soulless, heartless, and unpleasant growl, like that of a predator terrorizing its prey. It was a growl which culminated in an unearthly roar close at hand, then died away by slow gradations. Maybe the accursed being that uttered it had retreated over the shimmer back to the dimension where it had come from. But maybe this was not the case—it might still be nearby and ready to attack at any moment. Fuck knows he spent a long time waiting for something to happen.
You should be moving, Fujita.
Maybe walking, maybe running. Either way it was better than just standing there and doing nothing.
A strange sensation began to take possession of his body and his mind. He could not have said which, if any, of his senses were affected; he experienced it as a hunch—an unconscious mental awareness of some extraterrestrial presence—some alien malevolence different in kind from the visible existences that glitched around him, and superior to humans in power. He knew that it had uttered that hideous growl. And now it felt as if it was approaching him; from what direction he had no idea—dared not speculate.
Haruki closed his eyes and stared at the back of his eyelids. All his former fears had combined or amalgamated into a gigantic terror that now held him in thrall. Apart from that, he had but one mission: to convert the frequency stuck in his head into code, echoing the haunted spaceship, before the extraterrestrial monster blessed him with eternal silence. And now he lifted his slimy finger, idly thinking of computer codes such as Java, C++, and R . . .
Should I write it down?
Should I write at all?
A soft, freaky sound escaped his throat. The face of the astronaut was sickly terrified, the pale face now augmented with a plan of action.
His body started to move rapidly, finger oozing slime without renewal, arm waving in the thin air like a graffiti artist. Two minutes later, at the last part of the script, his arm fell to his side, glove to the air. He was powerless and could not move or cry out; he found himself staring at a wall of illegibly written script, the code representative of the ultimate frequency haunting this spaceship. At that moment Haruki almost believed it: that he was earmarked for death.
He had never been so scared in his life.
The symbols were glowing against the reddened wall written at an angle, the slime, and the acrid smell of the place. He clamped his teeth against each other and tried to focus his mind on what he had written; the code was all he could think of.

Haruki Fujita heard footsteps in the hall. He grabbed a blanket from the bottom of his bed and used it to cover his stepbrother, who was bundled up and lying naked with his knees pulled up to his chest, shivering.
Their father came out of the dark to switch off their light. His wife followed, passed the room with a bottle of wine, and headed down the hall. Haruki lay silent for a moment, not moving, he was aware that something important and significant was being celebrated of which they were not informed. The door of their room closed softly against the clip as his father pulled it. Then came the sound of shouting.
“You’ve bought another Porsche,” his mother said.
“The hospital pays for it, you know,” Chin Fujita replied.
Haruki heard her footsteps march up and down the room before she went to the bathroom and opened the water to wash her hands.
“You are wasting our time on Haruki.”
“No, honey, he will become a doctor someday.”
“What about my boy?”
“He’s not interested, but I think he will pass his exam next week and become a medic like Haruki. I can tell from his aptitude tests, and his EQI is off the charts.”
“Another Porsche, I can’t believe it?”
“I know. You weren’t supposed to find out. It was a surprise. I got the GT3-RS for you; that explains the black.”
Haruki could have cared less about his father wasting his money on that bitch of stepmother. Not giving a fuck was good, but—
“What did I do to deserve another black beauty? No really—is it mine?”
The sound of broken glass woke Nicklaus up. Now looking at the swimming pool in his room, he said, “They’re fighting again . . . Haruki. It’s going to be a long night if they cannot sort out their shit.”
“Are you awake?”
Nic raised his head, which was tucked under the blanket, and kissed Haruki on the forehead.
“You should tell him about your talent.”
“I have absolutely no talent.”
“But you are good at computer programming. I can see the character of Mister Anderon from the movie in you.”
That was when Haruki grew excited. “I would like to make my hero proud.”
“You have lived in the Matrix for your entire life—by which you have become a prodigy and a part-time hacker.”
Maybe even a carbon copy.
“That is nice of you, Nicky. I’m glad you are proud of me since he is on the point of giving up, calling me the family disgrace, and long since dubbed me a worthless gamer. That bitch thinks I am a black sheep and says that I have a psychological imbalance, whatever that means. She said that I have missed my vocation to become a doctor.”
“But you are smart, like your dad. I like it that you are a devoted cybernetic criminal.”
“A hacker sounds better—”
And another glass broke in the room next to them. Their father opened the balcony door, probably to smoke a cigarette. When Haruki looked up this time, he saw joy and excitement on his stepbrother’s face. He was only two years younger, after all. Nic gave him a playful smile, then went back under the blanket where he could finish what he had started.
“Nicky, for God’s sake—stop it and try to focus—”
Yet it had always bothered Haruki that they were stepbrothers. Although Nic was a devoted fan of the great Keanu Reeves so generally and justly admired for his hair. Nic had always taken care to conceal his weakness from all eyes but those who shared his passion. And their common profession as medics was an added bond between them.
Maybe Nic will understand if I tell him the truth. He cannot come with me to New York.
He toyed for a moment with a lock of Nic’s hair which had escaped from its pins, and said, with an effort of calmness in his voice:
“Would you be okay with me leaving for a few months to look for a job, Nicky?”
It was clearly needful for Nic to put his arm across his eyes without making an instant reply. Evidently he would mind; and the tears sprang into his large brown eyes as corroborative testimony.
“Ah, my brother,” he replied, looking up at his face with tenderness, “I knew this was coming. Did I not lie awake half of the afternoon weeping because, during the other half, Keanu Reeves had come to me in a dream.”
It was the great actor, Haruki Fujita would know if his stepbrother was lying, which he wasn’t.
“Neo?” he whispered. His lips were beginning to shiver again, but in the dim light of the swimming pool Nic barely noticed.
“Yes, and standing next to the computer screen—young, too, and handsome as in the first movie—pointed to your picture on the wall? I could not see your face when I looked since you were uploaded into the Matrix, such as at the end of the flick. You can smile at this, but you and I, dear, know that such things are no joke.”
Haruki’s life would be in trouble not because he was uploaded into the program but because his face was missing (and so he believed it to be an actual dream); why the hero would point to his picture on the wall baffled his mind.
“And I saw within the glowing code the wound of a blade on your throat, Haruki—forgive me, but we do not hide things from each other. Perhaps you have another interpretation. Perhaps it does not mean that you will go away. Or maybe you will take me with you?”
“I think it foreshadowed a simpler, surely less tragic, meaning like a visit to the great robot city in Zion. But please don’t try to stop me from leaving.”
“Are there not enough medics in New York?” Nic Chagall continued before his stepbrother could stop him— “Trinity discovered the truth with a broken heart? Look—my chest is ripped open; and I am almost sure that I will die in your absence.”
No—not like this.
Too sad.
Might break them apart.
The throbbing in his chest was more persistent; the next moment Haruki held out his hands but he was afraid that Nic would reject his request for affection. His hands lingered. There was a brief interval of silence. It sounded like their parents were making out again. It was warming up according to their breathing, but if his suspicions were correct, they would go on for the rest of the night. Nic refused to take his hands.
How long before his cold hands revealed the pain in his heart and his emotional scars manifesting in the form of tears, the hacker was unable to cry. How long before they would see each other again?
Three months? A year?
That would be the length of his pain, Haruki thought, and his lips began to shudder. By the time his lips stopped shaking, and it was not until a considerable time later that he realized he would have to leave his brother behind.
“I suppose I’ll have to go.”
Watching Nic, he felt the warmth of his affection for him that his blank expression denied. The weight pressed heavily on his shoulders as he watched his stepbrother cope with it in his own kind of way.

While job hunting in downtown Brooklyn after three months, Haruki was taking cover under a bridge one thunderstorm night, waiting for his weed to be delivered. The storm was well underway now, and no longer raining but pouring. He believed he understood the economic difficulties brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic—since he hadn’t found a job yet—but as the homeless people kept multiplying (he could see more and more people each week), he began to gain a different perspective in terms of earning an honest paycheck.
To his right, through the maze of squatters and bonfires toward the parking lot, he saw a black Lincoln Continental. Haruki noticed a driver with white hair holding the steering wheel like a woman (shit, he thought, she looked exactly like the driver from The Matrix) with her long nails and black leather jacket.
“What the hell?” he asked, sounding smoked as usual.
The car first drove around and then pulled right up to him. He thought of asking the driver if she had also ordered some weed—her eyes were looking mighty red—and decided he didn’t want to have that conversation now. He turned his attention toward the backseat where another woman with a crying baby had been watching him. At first he thought she looked familiar. Then he looked again and saw she was actually a transvestite, rocking the baby in his arms.
“You need to come with us,” the transvestite said. “We heard you are looking for a job?”
“We don’t have much time, Elon,” the driver added.
He thought of Nic back home and imagined he would make his stepbrother proud when breaking the news. He resisted the urge to question the man about the job . . . or even ask them who they were. His clever plan to look for a job in the big city was pretty screwed up and turned out to be a great mistake.
The crying increased, louder.
“We are subcontracting for NASA,” Elon said. He showed his badge to prove it.
“Really?”
“Come.”
“Now?”
“You know we are the real deal, right?”
“Shit, no. I didn’t expect it to happen like this.” Failing to hide the doubt on his face. Or the glimmering sweat on his forehead. Maybe from the weed or the rain. Maybe both.
“Your father said you’re the best medic in the field, but legislation makes it impossible with your qualifications. Your father has pulled some strings for you to work through us. The danger pay is good. Since you’ll be working in space.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“No, really.”
“Space?”
“You will be working on the International Space Station for three months on and three months off, both of you.”
Haruki didn’t hear it. Till it registered. “Both?”
“Both of the Fujita boys will be going to space!”
Haruki brightened. NASA also recruited his stepbrother to join the crew, and two weeks later, the two brothers were reunited in the microgravity of space.
Though happy to be together, Haruki was no less proud in spirit that he had been onboard the ISS for weeks that felt like an eternity. He gladly enjoyed the company of his stepbrother, and it was while living onboard the ISS, awaiting news and orders from ground control, that he had slipped into a trance.

The hallucination came back to Haruki Fujita, haunting enough, as he stood on board the spaceship with his back against the reddened wall, hands at his side. He had to lift his head upward slightly to confront his enemy. Well . . . actually, he had to lift his head more than slightly. The thing was large. So large that he couldn’t even see the extraterrestrial beast. In case you didn’t notice the predator reminds me of Nicky, but ten times more horrible! A monster that stirred no love nor longing in my heart, but strangely its presence evoked pleasant memories of my happy childhood—with all kinds of sentiment. The tender emotions were swallowed up in fear.
Haruki tried to run away, but his boots were saturated with slime. He was unable to pull his legs out of the mess. His arms drifted uselessly in the air; of his eyes only he remained in control, and these he dared not remove from the glowing ember of his enemy.
He stared at it.
Was it cybernetic?
Shit, it looked like it was.
Anyway, it seemed biological and that most dreadful of all existences—a robot with predatory limbs! In its blank stare, he noticed neither love, pity, nor artificial intelligence—nothing to which he could address an appeal for mercy.
An appeal won’t be a lie, he thought.
The sight of it evoked no happy memories. If he could have reached it he would have grabbed it. If he could have reached it he would have tried to stick his finger into its glowing eye. But his inaction only made the situation more terrifying with the red glow on his forehead.
For a time, which seemed so long that the Earth grew bleak with crime and murder, and the haunted ship, having miscalculated its destination in this monstrous height of its terrors, faded out of his consciousness with all its sights and sounds, the predator invaded his space, regarding him with the brutal malevolence of a cybernetic monster.
Quivering with panic, Haruki lifted his head so he could peer into its mouth, double-edged razor blades, rows and rows of them like a predator with a mouthful of fangs chipped but otherwise deadly.
“I see.”
It sat down. The ship rocked a little. Haruki guessed that the beast might weigh as much as thirty tons. It had come from a universe where there were different alloys, shapeshifting metal . . . also advanced composites were used in its construction, some organic materials like flesh and exoskeleton, the biological part of the organism was infected with a wicked cancer.
The monster roared at him, promising annihilation.
He moved back. The monster came forward. That made Haruki very uncomfortable.
“Shit!” Haruki didn’t take any pleasure in the way this was going if not for the brutal nature of his enemy; as solid as a piece of machinery and ferocious, it transformed itself grinning with its one eye missing, about to deliver him to the universe and convert him into stardust.
The thing’s mouth grew sly, confronting him to admit a dirty, dirty secret. Its grin became a smile. Strangely, the venom oozed out of its tongue. This is what it looks like, he thought, if a species faces its ultimate extinction even worse than those robots from the movie. This is what it looks like just before the end of humanity.
“No . . .”
The beast thrust its limbs forward and sprang upon him with outrageous ferocity! The act released Haruki’s physical energy without affecting his willpower to fight back. And his pain was blocked out by an overdose of hydrofluoric acid at the same time something leeched onto his brainstem, his flimsy body and dangling arms powered with a blind, inanimate mind of their own, became weak and puny.
“Not like this . . . I can’t die like this . . . and what about . . . wait!”
For an instant he seemed to see this supernatural contest between an infected robot and a dying human only as a spectator—such fantasies of hallucinations.
He looked at the wall crying like a girl, leaving the predator and its claws to finish him off. Then he regained his willpower almost as if by a leap forward into his body, and the visionary now had an accurate will as alert and fierce as that of the predator.
“Leame dafuckalone!”
He tried to fight back. The hacker’s return. But how can a human compete with a creature of extraterrestrial origins? He supposed a boy who was being killed by an alien monster might feel something like pain as he lay regarding his gushing main artery with a cold surprise. The programmer’s skill is the programmer’s weakness.
“No!” His neck bled like a slaughtered animal. His worthless hands were clasped at his sides.
Despite his struggles—despite his strength and willpower, which seemed wasted in the void of space, he felt the sharp claws thrust into his throat and brain, many times. Falling backward to the sheet metal, he saw through his cracked visor the grey and dusty surface of the Moon within an arm’s reach of his own, and then everything was black. The sounds of the unearthly radio frequencies in the distance—the dolphin’s cry, a sharp, far growl declaring the end, and Hariki Fujita imagined he was dead.

The International Space Station is that kind of place that when you are there, you must take it all in, but after Peggy grabbed Jameson by the arm and ordered him to come with her, there was no time to take it all in. The airlock closed behind them, and Peggy knew they were getting close.
“How far is it?” Jamason asked, as they hovered along, their feet stirring particles of dust in the microgravity beneath their soles.
Peggy looked at him, suspiciously, recalling that he had agreed to go with her without informing ground control of their whereabouts.
“Only a few feet further,” Peggy answered. She led the way toward the old storage bay with its battery banks and electrical inverters, accumulating backup electricity in case of an emergency.
“What is going on,” he said as they hovered through the west hanger where corrosion and dilapidation gradually increased and passed through the narrow arch into the dark, freezing aerospace shadows.
“You know Haruki Fujita?” she said, feeding her companion’s curiosity with as little information as possible. The name was disturbing, and Peggy felt her neck spasm a little.
“The Jap who plays with his stepbrother’s hair? I know him; he ruined a month of my work after the botanicals died from his intrusion. There is an HR complaint lodged against him for interfering with my plants, but ground control refuses to believe it. You will believe me when—”
“I believe you, okay. Because he has been hacking into the servers for a long time. He works at night in the dilapidated capsule.”
“The asshole! So that’s where the acidic atmosphere that killed my plants came from.”
“You might have imagined that NASA’s security checks would have picked up a cybernetic criminal who could hack their instrumentation.”
“The very last person I would have suspected.”
“Yesterday afternoon I was issued a job card to check the battery terminals. To my surprise I found something else in there, I found ‘a computer of him’ in there.”
“So you caught him red-handed?”
“Damn it! He frightened me. Something growled from behind me—it literally gave me goosebumps. I’m lucky that I wasn’t there ten minutes earlier. Oh shit, he was dying, and I thought the blood floating in space was proof enough that I wouldn’t be able to save him.”
Hovering in the cramped hanger shoulder to shoulder, Peggy glanced at him. The boy’s eyes were so dark they seemed black, only by her flashbeam did they turn indigo blue. She noticed her death-grip on the torch, her gloves couldn’t release their hold even consciously.
“I need to show you the body so that we can devise a plan of action,” the engineer explained. “I thought it was safe for us to check out the corpse during the day.”
“Are you sure the Jap is dead?” said the biologist. “The light in there may have obscured your visibility and conclusion. If he was unconscious he might still be alive.”
“Well, he seemed very dead to me.” She glanced sideways at the boy, and felt a flare of disappointment. She knew deep down in her being that Haruki was gone, one of the first dead bodies she ever encountered. She had to admit that such a bloody, gruesome, and unsettling scene she had never seen in all her years as a first aider or electrical engineer.
“Alright,” Jameson said; “we will go and look at him,” and he added, in the words of a caring person, “we should keep this between us—I mean, if young Nic Chagall ever finds out about his stepbrother it would kill him. By the way, I heard the other day that ‘Nic’ was not his real name.”
“What is?”
“I cannot remember. I had lost interest in the introvert, and it did not grab hold in my memory—something like Nicklaus. The medic who enrolled in the space program joined his stepbrother after he was abandoned. But Haruki, on the other hand, had joined in search of extraterrestrial technology. Can you believe that there are people who still believe in aliens nowadays? Clearly you are not a believer.”
“Obviously.”
“But wandering about your faith, what do you believe in then? Your boyfriend mentioned what the name was called and said it was scientific in nature.”
“We don’t have a name yet.” Peggy was reluctant to argue without facts about something so important as that. Bossi bases his beliefs on the Principia Mathematica. Isaac Newton was the founder of a philosophy that was only recently made public. A few fragments of his work provide scientific evidence based on experimentation. But anyhow, here is the storage bay.”
She looked at him sharply to see if he was prepared. His face, however, was wearing an expression of frozen panic. His lips and nostrils were rimmed with deep purple, and there were shadows in his dark eyes, like the shapes of a reptile streaking into two hard lines.
“Lemme show you where I found the body,” she said, “this is the place.”
As the two astronauts made their way through the blood of hovering crimson, they suddenly stopped and lifted their flashbeams to the height of the wall, uttered a low note of surprise, and stood motionless, their eyes fixed upon something weird. As far as Peggy could see the wall was covered with inscriptions, though she did not yet understand what she was looking at. A moment later she moved cautiously forward, aiming for the inverters.
Behind the inverter of an enormous height hovered the spacesuit of another astronaut. Standing silent beside it, Peggy noted such particulars that immediately took her attention—the suit was empty, the body missing, the clothing still inside; whatever most probably and strangely happened to this astronaut must have been unearthly.
The suit floated upon its back, the nametag—Nic Chagall. One arm was twisted in circles, the other stretched, but the latter was ripped off brutally, with the missing piece stuck to the helmet. The other arm was severely bent. The whole attitude of the suit was that of desperate but weak resistance to something.
Nearby drifted the disemboweled stepbrother with his naked finger stretched out, stained and blotched, and the floor had been scribbled with blood into symbols all over the corroded floorplate; next to his suit was unmistakable the footprint of an alien entity.
A glance at the empty spacesuit’s missing glove and boots made the nature of the struggle even more mysterious. While the suit and helmet were clean, the arms and legs were red—almost black. The oxygen hose stuck against an inverter, and the suit was twisted and turned backward, opposite any natural posture.
From behind Haruki’s cracked helmet his eyes had popped, bloody and gruesome. The throat showed horrible penetrations; not mere fingermarks, but lacerations and stab wounds inflicted by animal claws that must have buried themselves in his bleeding flesh, maintaining their terrible grip long after death. His throat, chin, and face were soggy; the material saturated; drops of blood had gathered like condensate inside his visor, bloodstained hair and cheeks.
All this the two astronauts observed without speaking—almost frozen. Then Jameson said:
“Poor Haruki! He got what he deserved.”
Peggy was vigilantly inspecting the storage bay. Her flashbeam was held in both hands and at full brightness, and her gloves were clenched around the handle.
“The work of a murderer,” she said, without removing her eyes from the surrounding inverters. “It was done by Nic—Chagall.”
Something half-hidden by the cable racks behind the inverters caught Peggy’s attention. It was the wall. She looked at it while lifting her flashbeam. It contained the code of computer and upon the entire wall the name “Stefan Bossi.” Written in blood over and over again—scribbled as if in haste barely legible—were the following lines, which Peggy read silently while her companion started scanning the dark confines of the enclosure and hearing a commotion from inside the bloody spiderwebs dangling from the wall.

public class Main {
public static void main(String[] args) {
String originalName = “Stefan Bossi”;
System.out.println(“Original name: “ + originalName);

// Reversing the name
String reversedName = new StringBuilder(originalName).reverse().toString();
System.out.println(“Reversed name: “ + reversedName);

// Converting to uppercase
String upperCaseName = originalName.toUpperCase();
System.out.println(“Uppercase name: “ + upperCaseName);

// Swapping first name with last name
int spaceIndex = originalName.indexOf(‘ ‘);
String firstName

“Bossi Stefan—”
Peggy stopped reading; there was no more to read. The code broke off in the middle of a line.
“What a flawless Java script,” she said, since she was somewhat of a programmer herself. With extraordinary patience she stood looking at the wall.
“Who’s Java?” Jameson asked rather confused.
“Computer code, a script that was written to play around with two words—a very jolly script indeed. Coded in first generation; I know the language. The script repeated my boyfriend’s name, but it must have been by mistake.”
“Your boyfriend?” Jameson said. “Let us go back; we must share this information with ground control.”
Peggy said nothing but nodded in compliance. Staring at the inverter behind the empty spacesuit of the missing astronaut with the oxygen hose entangled, she saw that the absent glove was stuck (or rather glued) to the vertical surface by some slimy substance drooling from the melted plastic. She took her torch to illuminate it into view. It was an oozing mess, and painted on the panel were the hardly decipherable words, “Peggy Lance.”
“Peggy Lance!” exclaimed Jameson, with sudden animation. “Why, that is your name—not Stefan Bossi. And—curse your soul! How it all comes together—the murderer’s name is Peggy Lance!”
“There is something weird going on here,” Peggy said. “I deny anything of the kind.”
There came to them from inside the wall—seemingly from a great distance—the sound of a growl, a high-pitched, frequency, cybernetic echo, which had no more joy than that of a predator prowling at its prey; a growl that originated from far away, closer and closer, distinct, more explicit but brutal, until it faded away outside the audible distance of their hearing; a growl so unnatural, so extraterrestrial, so morbid, that it filled those freaked out astronauts with a sense of dread unspeakable! They did not move their torches nor think of them; the menace of that horrible sound was the kind not to be disturbed by light. As it had originated out of solid metal, to die away grimly; from a culminating frequency that had seemed almost in their head, it retreated into the distance until its soft echoes, cybernetic and mechanical to the last frequency, faded into silence at an immeasurable distance.

Okay, I’m about to post something that is going to make me sound crazy and probably at the same time get a bunch of hate. First off, I had no idea this was a trend or even a thing. I don’t use Social Media apart from FB to keep in touch with distant family. I’m in my early 40s. Have a wife and 5 kids with another on the way. I pretty much live a normal life. This “trend” might have some truth to it. Now hear me out. Honestly, I believe that most of these, 99% of these are just people jumping on the band wagon. Especially the fictional universe ones. However, I have gone through a very freaky experience and I’ve been doing it my whole life. I have only tried to explain this to one other person, my ex wife, and I was never able to articulate exactly what going on. So sometime in high school I woke up in a different place. It was both familiar but different. It felt like I knew this place, but everything was foreign, if that makes any sense. I was me, but I looked different. Everyone around me I recognized as being the same people from here but they too looked different. This other place was referred to as earth, but the map did not look like ours. Society didn’t function like ours. I lived here for a few months adjusting and remembering my childhood in this new place (reality b). With time our reality (reality a) became a distant memory. Like a dream that I had a hard time remembering. Until I woke up back here (reality a). Freaked out, it took me some time to get adjusted. I had to go to school that morning after living a completely different life. Needless to say it was very traumatizing and I thought I was crazy. I didn’t tell anyone because I didn’t want to be seen as crazy so I delt with it. This would go on. Living a few months in reality b and then a few months in reality a. each time I would wake up exactly where I left off in the previous reality. I would be in reality a for a few months then jump to realty b. in reality b I would live until I reached the age I was in reality a then jump back to reality a. ya I called it jumping in my head. It gets complicated and confusing trying to keep details straight in my head. The only thing that helps is reality b is so radically different then here. This went on until my early 20s when I missed a jump. This time in reality b when I reached the age I was in reality a I didn’t jump. I thought maybe this was it. I’m done. Now I’m stuck in reality b. which sucked because my life in reality b was horrible. But I did jump back to reality a almost a year later. From now on they would not play catch up. They would start staggering. I couldn’t tell when I was going to jump back anymore. Also this made it really confusing as to which one was the original one. Eventually in my late 20s I jumped to reality b but stayed there for almost 8 years. I jumped back into my late 20 year old body in reality a after being in my late 30s in reality b. this was a mind fuck and almost broke me. It took me weeks to get re adjusted. So much had happen in reality b. I had lost a hand for crying out loud. I’ve been living here in reality a ever since. I’m now in my early 40s and the catch up window passed years ago. I honestly hope it never happens again. That other place is not nice. Its nice for some but that vast majority have a shitty existence. I don’t know maybe I am crazy. I just know this is what I have been dealing with. I’ve never shared and I’m not even sure I want to do this. Don’t be surprised if I delete this in a few hours after I come to my senses. Dealing with this terrifying experience for 20 plus years has led me to research any possible reason for this other than the obvious, I’m crazy. Which I haven’t ruled out. There is so much about the brain that we don’t understand. I have a very analytical mind that is very logic driven. What I can piece together is the following; Assuming the multiverse theory is correct and that our big bang could give rise to life due to the unique law of that govern the physics. If you alter any one of those laws just a little, life could not exist. This means that any other reality must follow our law. Now a different big bang could give rise to totally different set of laws, but this would lead to a dead universe. This means that shifting to a fictional universe (i.e. wizarding world) is impossible. Any other reality must behave exactly like our own. You would only be able to shift to realities that exist in a big bang that created the exact same law as ours.

Okay, I’m about to post something that is going to make me sound crazy and probably at the same time get a bunch of hate. First off, I had no idea this was a trend or even a thing. I don’t use Social Media apart from FB to keep in touch with distant family. I’m in my early 40s. Have a wife and 5 kids with another on the way. I pretty much live a normal life. This “trend” might have some truth to it. Now hear me out. I believe that most of these, 99% of these are BS. However, I have gone through a very freaky experience and I’ve been doing it my whole life. I have only tried to explain this to one other person, my ex wife, and I was never able to articulate exactly what going on. So sometime in high school I woke up in a different place. It was both familiar but different. It felt like I knew this place, but everything was foreign, if that makes any sense. I was me, but I looked different. Everyone around me I recognized as being the same people from here but they too looked different. This other place was referred to as earth, but the map did not look like ours. Society didn’t function like ours. I lived here for a few months adjusting and remembering my childhood in this new place (reality b). With time our reality (reality a) became a distant memory. Like a dream that I had a hard time remembering. Until I woke up back here (reality a). Freaked out, it took me some time to get adjusted. I had to go to school that morning after living a completely different life. Needless to say it was very traumatizing and I thought I was crazy. I didn’t tell anyone because I didn’t want to be seen as crazy so I delt with it. This would go on. Living a few months in reality b and then a few months in reality a. each time I would wake up exactly where I left off in the previous reality. I would be in reality a for a few months then jump to realty b. in reality b I would live until I reached the age I was in reality a then jump back to reality a. ya I called it jumping in my head. It gets complicated and confusing trying to keep details straight in my head. The only thing that helps is reality b is so radically different then here. This went on until my early 20s when I missed a jump. This time in reality b when I reached the age I was in reality a I didn’t jump. I thought maybe this was it. I’m done. Now I’m stuck in reality b. which sucked because my life in reality b was horrible. But I did jump back to reality a almost a year later. From now on they would not play catch up. They would start staggering. I couldn’t tell when I was going to jump back anymore. Also this made it really confusing as to which one was the original one. Eventually in my late 20s I jumped to reality b but stayed there for almost 8 years. I jumped back into my late 20 year old body in reality a after being in my late 30s in reality b. this was a mind fuck and almost broke me. It took me weeks to get re adjusted. So much had happen in reality b. I had lost a hand for crying out loud. I’ve been living here in reality a ever since. I’m now in my early 40s and the catch up window passed years ago. I honestly hope it never happens again. That other place is not nice. Its nice for some but that vast majority have a shitty existence. I don’t know maybe I am crazy. I just know this is what I have been dealing with. I’ve never shared and I’m not even sure I want to do this. Don’t be surprised if I delete this in a few hours after I come to my senses. Dealing with this terrifying experience for 20 plus years has led me to research any possible reason for this other than the obvious, I’m crazy. Which I haven’t ruled out. There is so much about the brain that we don’t understand. I have a very analytical mind that is very logic driven. What I can piece together is the following; Assuming the multiverse theory is correct and that our big bang could give rise to life due to the unique law of that govern the physics. If you alter any one of those laws just a little, life could not exist. This means that any other reality must follow our law. Now a different big bang could give rise to totally different set of laws, but this would lead to a dead universe. This means that shifting to a fictional universe (i.e. wizarding world) is impossible. Any other reality must behave exactly like our own. You would only be able to shift to realities that exist in a big bang that created the exact same law as ours.

Not for a second do I think it’s just a coincidence that Kendrick Lamar drops the sickest disses the same week I rack up two major wins.
Damn. I wish I could meme with someone about the rap beef, I’m over here laughing to my damn self on these Drake re-enactments 💀💀💀 and how fucking lit the scene is right now. Whatevs, good thing I’m my own best friend.
Kendrick literally rapped the preamble of my current wins.
“But don’t tell no lie about me, and I won’t tell truths about you”
Fuck you, psycho narc. Thought you could try to ruin me and leave me to die? I burn my own wings to raise from the ashes higher than the last time. I don’t turn the other cheek. I match the energy in truth.
Now let’s see what you do with your struggle created from within that is being brought to light for all to see. Revocation of licensure and common sense decisions as a matter to kin is now ensured in my favor. Locked and loaded, maam. Ready?
💅 always, with faith.
Remember, you started it.
“Put the wrong label on me, I'ma get 'em dropped, ayy Sweet Chin Music and I won't pass the aux, ayy How many stocks do I really have in stock? Ayy One, two, three, four, five, plus five, ayy Devil is a lie, he a 69 God, ayy Freaky-ass niggas need to stay they ass inside, ayy Roll they ass up like a fresh pack of 'za, ayy City is back up, it's a must, we outside, ayy”
Hahahahaha!! BITCH!!!!
Oh no.
I’ve upset someone letting them know I didn’t feel the same. I just knew it wasn’t what I wanted in the long run. Like I know all of me, I’m cool yo. That’s what kept limerence in that previous situation, no one’s ever asked like I do. Pretty cool for what it was, I’d like that appropriately. If all these different pieces of what I want exist, I’ll hold out till it’s an amalgamation of all. It’s nice, I just sit and attract. I’m not looking, but I’m open. And if it doesn’t, it just doesn’t. I’m in my “yes” era, because I trust that I can understand my values enough to detect within the time I’d like. Though people don’t understand and get upset with me, but I’m only bending a bit, if you keep pushing, I’ll see myself out.
I only choose me first. I don’t stay quiet. I made my complaints heard. Now if you think I’ll pick up your slack, I’ll remind you what you should be doing, don’t worry. Don’t get mad, do your job. Yes, I’m great with the kiddos, don’t mean I am the only one dealing with the meltdowns. If you can’t manage, dip, Miss. Work recognition feels so good.
Y’all giving me the silent treatment after establishing boundaries ain’t hitting like y’all think it is 🤣 it’s a vacation from your bitchass.
Energy equivalency has infiltrated the familial layer. Now they’re all seeing what I contributed to them and now only do for myself. I couldn’t walk, where were you? You watched me deteriorate, now passive aggressive when I establish I will never be that again, without any help from you. Dear parents, raise yourselves. I did. Brother, expect nothing from me, as I receive from you.
Estoy enfocada. Me, bb, fur bb, & All. 5-year plan, I’m getting us out.
Me moving in ways for my best benefit while retracting societal pressures to conform is truly something I can feel ascending within me.
I choose me. And me chooses, I. Thank You, All.
TTYL! Ima go get what I want.

So I've been wanting to put this somewhere online for a while now in the hopes people can see it to see if anyone out there takes it seriously im talking like the airforce and such. I've had several extratresstrial encounters and it has been approximately 20 or so years since I have had my first one. First of all let me tell you that these things are not from another galaxy but another dimension. What dimension you might ask? Well it's the one every single sentient being can recall while they sleep as dreams. These things I will call them because they are more like energy than a phisical being. Observe us in our dreams and see how vivid our imaginations are to see if we are capable to communicate with them. These things literally taught me how to lucid dream. how to create anything and everything I could possibly imagine. Its almost like they have been training me to increasingly get better at it. Might I add to you the only reason they started talking to me is because i taught myself how to be able to fly all on my own and could travel across the world in the blink of an eye. Freaky thing is I ended up scaring alot of people and I mean ALOT. Because I would show them I can fly and I could teach people how to do it. Every single night I have these dreams and they always start off where I was when I woke up in them. After a while I started to notice things that looked like planes started to follow me. One day I came back to my parents telling me I need to hide but couldn't explain why. Over the span of many more dreams these things that were teaching me how to lucid dream. told me it's possible to have that kind of ability in the phisical world. to create anything just by using your mind and truely believeing what I want to be real. I was told I could bring them here by waking up while simply being connected to them (touching them). So I did, and I mean I did it for ALOT of these things. Pretty soon I've been noticing alot of hauntings and paranormal and extraterrestrial videos and it has me freaking out. These things I talked to are literally here now and what's even stranger is they are teaching me how to potentially create a form of technology that this world desperately needs. When I was younger I never knew what UFOs looked like until all the stuff has been hitting the news like crazy. Those things that I've been talking to and taken here first contacted me in those same weird disc and pill like machines when I was soaring through the sky in my dreams. They said that they want to help me create forcefeild technology by using soundwaves and magnets. These things also listen to be I asked them if there was any way to stop a nuclear apocalypse from happening in my world and they responded "it will be done". Then I see all that weird shit about all the UFOs over military bases all over the world. I'm increasingly becoming more and more suspicious of these coincidences as I've never believed in them. until time and time again i kept asking these things to make appearances and help me keep everything in existence safe just because i want to dont care for anyones opinion to try and talk me out of it. They literally want me to help the governments repair their ships they shot down. im allegedly the only one who they can communicate with. who has a mind open enough for them to work through. They said another was extremely close but died before his work was ever finished. I believed that person to be Nikola tesla as his experience with these things has been nearly identical to the ones I am now seeing in my dreams that he used to see in his. But what I really wonder is who will truthfully believe me when it's like these things scare some people so bad. they have started doing everything they can to make people look crazy from drugs and mental illness to try and stop whatever they're trying to do for us by using me. What's even weirder is people in black suits started to follow me in my dreams trying to kidnapp me. when I kept escaping them after a few more dreams there are now literally terrifying like cryptid beings that stalk me in these dreams like they are trying to stop me by any means possible from bringing this knowledge to humanity. The last thing the beings of energy told me in the sky is It's only a matter of time before the asteroid I believe to be apothis threatens our very existence on this world we call home. I take my dreams very seriously as should most people but at this point. Tick tock people if I was joking I wouldn't be looking for approval. And if I was crazy I would be screaming this on a street corner so you tell me people of power? I'd say we have a hell of alot to lose without my help and I don't even want the public to know who I am. All I can say is if you really want to get those UFOs up and working again FIND ME. It's your job isn't it?

Hi, this is a throwaway account. I’ve never posted on Reddit before so please be kind ): I’m sure I’m going to ramble and go in circles so I’m sorry, I just have a lot on my chest and no one to talk to in detail about it. I AM going to go into detail about what I saw because it bothers me, just in case that’s potentially triggering to anyone.
I’m 24, my bf is 25. We’ve been together about 3 years now. We are long distance (see each other every other weekend, but more frequently / for longer periods of time recently). At the beginning of our relationship I said I do not want porn in my relationship and found it morally wrong / harmful to women etc. He said okay and I didn’t really worry about it or have reason to since. About a month (maybe 2) ago I looked through his Reddit history and….yeah. Most of it was centered around “bimbos” and big boobs / butts and just unrealistic body types. It was mostly just the girl too which…hurts more than if it was just normal porn tbh. Mostly photos and short videos, mostly from bigger subreddits. Sometimes from specific “creators” accounts.
I broke down. He assumed I was breaking up with him. He cried. Drove me all the way back to my house (I usually take the bus, he hates driving). I always told myself I’d break up with a partner if this ever happened but…I just couldn’t. I can’t. He did and does seem genuinely sorry, which maybe I’m naive but I’ve also known this man for years.
Here’s his story / explaination I guess:
He said he stopped when we started dating. I’d send him nudes and he’d look at those. I stopped after about a year bc confidence issues / stress I guess. He never asked me for nudes, but I would send them on Snapchat as they made me feel sexy etc and he would save them in the chat yada yadda. He says he was stressed and having trouble sleeping and he was too nervous about offending me to ask for more pictures so he went to Reddit / porn websites. He says he only did it about once a week (which matches the timeline of what I saw in his Reddit history) and it was only one 5-10 “session” where he’d look at / watch as much as possible, finish, and go to sleep.
He says it was always multiple girls, that it was never just one. He’d just flip through to see as much as he can while doing it. He’d find a girl on Reddit and look her up online to see her naked. He says he was seeking out videos of “actual” sex (woman and man) but a lot of the pics I saw were women just…showing off. Sometimes they were completely dressed and he’d still look them up I guess. The videos too…just women shaking ass etc. Some videos of like, “traditional” porn with men doing thing….I didn’t see any like…solos of woman touching themselves or anything but I guess if you’re masturbating to them being naked and shaking the goods you’re still getting off to just the woman regardless of what you say you were googling or whatever. He says he was exposed to porn since childhood (like most men) and it just became….a thing. He’d have trouble sleeping or be stressed and there you go I guess. He says it started with “normal” stuff and then it just got more deranged as the addiction progressed and that’s when it turned into the bimbo content that he’d been watching the last 2-3 years.
He says he stopped, that he didn’t realize how hurtful it was and how bad it would destroy me. He said he assumed we’d move in together and he’d never watch it again because he’d have me all the time, but I who knows if that would actually happen? He might’ve, he might genuinely believe he would’ve, but at the same time I was also just a text away. He says it was Reddit and whatever websites google took him to / regular porn sites. He says he never spoke to anyone or paid for anything to which I believe him. He says over and over that he didn’t have favorites and he’d never intentionally go back to the same girls besides occasionally ending up on certain big content creators pages through other subs after a few months just to see the “new stuff.” Which again, from what I saw in his history I did see like…one porn star more than once but not excessively. I did see specific girls pages that he was on but he swears he’d scroll for a minute and go somewhere else. He swears he never just stayed at one girls page to get off to her. He swears he didn’t really look at their faces or think they’re pretty…he says his addiction just had him seeking out hyperfeminine body parts etc. Could he even be telling the truth?? I want to believe him…
There were also upvotes, which hurts, but he swears to hell and back that it was accidentally while scrolling to which..there were downvotes too so maybe?? But it all still hurts.
Since DDay happened he has deleted Snapchat and Reddit. I’ve gone through his phone extensively and haven’t phone and haven’t found anything each time. He’s been nicer, more caring, less miserable in general. The sex has been better. He treats me exactly how I want and goes out of his way to show me I’m loved. Goes out of his way to tell me I’m beautiful / make sure I notice him looking at me / leaving the light on etc during sex. In that aspect - how I’m treated, the communication, our sex life, affection, date planning, etc…it’s been wonderful. Better than before even. I’d say we’re having more sex than we used to but that might just because I’m less tired and spending more time with him.
I was doing good for a while, but I spiraled recently. I went through all the screenshots and accounts and things he’s looked at and compared myself etc. I can’t look at myself at all. I feel silly trying to dress nice or do my makeup or wear lingerie. Any attempt to be pretty or feel sexy just…makes me feel like a pig in lipstick. I haven’t been eating, my mental health is deteriorating (which, is not only because of this…I recently lost my father, gotten diagnosed with a rare disease, had emergency surgery, constant appointments and procedures, not able to work and losing money because of it….all in the span of a few months so…I’m a mess. But this isn’t helping.) I don’t know how to let it go. I keep searching for pain…looking things up. Getting triggered. I have stepped away from certain online spaces and have been doing a little better with that the past few days but it’s a struggle.
I don’t look like those women. I’m chubby. I have love handles and a tummy. I have big boobs but they sag. My butt is a but flat imo. I have stretch marks. I have thin hair and small lips, a chubby face. Yeah there was some variety in what those women looked like but they all had the same giant, perfectly perky, round assets. Perfect makeup. I am nothing like that. He says that I am the most attractive person to him and always have been but how could I believe that? He says he loves my tummy and my boobs and what I look like and sound like and he loves having sex with me. He swears he doesn’t “have a type” besides me. But how can I be his type when he was pretty much exclusively looking at bimbos ?? Yes I know he loves me for me and he can’t separate me from my appearance, which yeah, good, I want him to see me as a human and his love buuut I also want to be lusted over and feel undesirable, like he can’t hold back or stop himself like with porn…I just feel like I wasn’t enough for him, that I’m not his type. Plus I can’t…do what the women in porn do. I’m not that flexible or “freaky”, I can’t go downtown and look hot doing it like they do. A lot of them were getting … finished on…which maybe a coincidence but he’s never done that or expressed wanting to do that to me…I feel like I’m don’t live up to his fantasies.
He says he looked at / has always looked at / has always liked “thick” girls (he considers me thick) but thick girls online just have big butts and thighs and no tummy and are still so much prettier.
I also hear a lot of people say that if he cheats with porn he would’ve cheated irl if he had the opportunity and idk if I believe it but still that hurts so much ): How do I cope?? Am I stupid for staying? Is he guaranteed to relapse ? Is there more we should be doing to heal??
I’m sorry for the long post, I’m just in the worse mental state I’ve ever been in, and I feel destroyed and lost. Any advice or kind words are appreciated so so much.
****Edited to add more information and fix typos once I read it over

Two tall slender cryptids moving forward in the rhythmic spasmodic manner of a preying cat or scurrying lizard, in this video of audio interview at bottom link below, witness Josh who “worked in the military for 17 yrs” reports that “around 11 o’clock that night,” the same night as the 2023 APR 30 11:49 PM Las Vegas Backyard alien spacecraft incident in the city to the South, him and a friend saw another one in the sky and he says that, “It was the exact same colored lights, this bluish greenish light that we saw and then these guys got this crazy story that there were like these 8 or 9 foot tall naked creatures in their backyard which sounds ridiculous!; but, I’m telling you Adam, that’s exactly what we saw on the dirt road.” Josh’s testimony, “Me and my buddy of 30yrs . we’re up in the mountains North of Las Vegas in a place called Dead Horse Ridge . It’s on the edge of the testing facility for the Air Force. . The ground lit up. . It was so bright like a shooting star . It was so intensely bright . It wasn’t shooting across the sky . It was kinda like floating . I went and grabbed my night vision. I have one of those Sightmark HD night vision scopes.” Josh later mentions that he didn’t realize that what he was about to see next might be related to the bright light in the sky thus he never suspected the possibility that it could be aliens. He says, “On the road coming up to where we are I could see a couple ‘people’ . I started zooming in on them with my night vision and I turned my infrared illuminator on and I could see that it was two ‘guys’ . It was very weird. . Why didn’t they just drive up here? Why did they walk? . He[buddy] wanted to look through my night vision and I let him and I went to my truck and I grabbed some protection . They didn’t have any flashlights and they’re walking up a dirt road towards us in the middle of nowhere literally 2 hrs out on this dirt road up in the mountains . It was very strange. . My friend was the one who [said,] “But, they don’t have clothes on!,” and then I was like, “What!” . When I saw them through the scope before I handed it to my buddy . one of them it seemed like looked right at me through the scope and when it did for that second I was frozen. I was like--the hair on the back of my neck stood up. . It seemed like he looked right at me . and that’s when I handed him the scope and went to the back of my truck and grabbed my protection. . I stayed up until the sun came up. That’s how traumatizing it was. Like, I did not want to go to sleep. I stayed up all night. My adrenaline was pumping. . They were slender and very tall and really scary looking through my night vision, enough for me to grab protection, and they were in the middle of the desert in the middle of the mountains in the middle of the night with no lights. . When I looked at them through the night vision, you know when a cat’s kinda like in the grass in your yard stalking a bird it’ll take a couple steps and then stop and its tail will move and it will take a couple steps and stop and its tail--that’s how they move. They like moved like animated like claymation and then they stopped and froze and then they took a couple more—it was sooo freaky! That’s why I got freaked out.” The interview ends without a description of how the event ended, without explanation of how, why, and when both parties departed away from each other. A follow-up interview may yield more answers and Josh's buddy may have his version that fills in any gaps in the story with additional details that are insightful.
Intermittent spasmodic movement forward with regular rhythm is characteristic of a preying cat or scurrying lizard. It's an indication that they may be reptilian consistent with the Nazca alien mummies of Peru that were discovered in 2015 and confirmed by scientific analysis to be tridactyl reptiles. Josh was probably more disturbed to see this abnormal movement when his assumption was that these were humans moving in a bizarre manner that he has never witnessed any human perform in his lifetime. The speed at which the creatures start and stop moving may be impossible for any human to perform thus mind-boggling to witness when the mindset is that these are humans. If he had considered that these might be aliens then he may have expected the unusual and have been unstartled by it. That’s another reason why public disclosure of the alien presence must happen; because, it’s desensitizing and calming.
When the alien looked in his direction at the precise moment that he focused all of his attention on the alien through an optical scope from a distance, if not an accidental coincidence, then the alien was alerted of a human presence by some means. Can they hear movement at a farther distance than humans like a cat, dog, or reptile? If Josh was silent then did they detect the technology he was using to view them? How would they do that? Aliens would likely have more advanced night vision and infrared technology that may include detection capability of the same tech in use by others. Some say those technologies came from them through reverse engineering of crash retrievals. Earth reptiles such as snakes have thermal detection pit organ sensors in their face to identify the heat signature of both predators and prey from about twenty feet away. Can alien reptiles utilize heat sensory detection to identify other organisms at a farther distance than domestic reptiles and do so both with and without the assistance of technology?
Most who assert that they encountered the quadridactyl Grey alien species in particular usually report that they experienced a message projected into their mind from them. It’s usually said to be a one-way communication because the alien is telepathic while the human is not. However, the government has hired psychics and paid them thousands of dollars per day because they consistently produce accurate results when asked to describe in detail what is occurring at an unseen location far away such as an adversary nation’s secret hidden military base. Their extraordinary talent at describing the most secretive unknown details that are later confirmed true is easily assumed to be educated or lucky guessing and that may be true of many so-called psychics; but, the best of them insist that they are able to project their consciousness to a location and view it from a distance and their repeated success at it seems to be validating. If there is any truth to that claim then it presents a possibility for how an alien could detect an unseen and unheard human at great distance but not be able to do so until all human attention, focus, and concentration, is intensely directed toward them. When the alien responds timely at the precise moment that focused attention on them is most intense, the human thereby discovers that they have an ability to project their consciousness across a distance, an ability they didn’t know they had and assumed was impossible. Although, Josh and the rest of us may never realize that’s what happened because it defies conventional understanding of human limitation and is too amazing to be believable. Did the alien see him ‘because’ he saw the alien?
What do multiple incidents of spacecraft and aliens on the same night in the same area share in common revealing they are related? We can attempt to figure out what they were trying to accomplish by looking for a consistent pattern of behavior among multiple similar incidents. When those similar or identical incidents occur close in time and place then there is a greater probability of our conclusions being accurate. Both the Backyard and Dead Horse Ridge incidents occurring before midnight April 30 happened within an hour or two of each other and both in the Las Vegas, Nevada area. Josh says, “within like two hours of when we seen it.” Since they may utilize the same technology, both are said to involve a blue-green light in the sky and one of them has video proof of it. Both blue-green lights in the same area around the same time were followed by reports shortly after from multiple witnesses describing tall naked creatures appearing shortly after the same color light was seen and one of them has video proof of both the craft and the cryptids in confirmation right here: https://www.reddit.com/StrangeEarth/comments/1ch4ns0/2023_las_vegas_backyard_ufo_and_its_occupants/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button The similar details consistent among both incidents have the effect of corroborating both reports supporting the legitimacy of both. What these sightings share in common indicates that they both involve the same spacecraft model or same spacecraft technology that is piloted by the same species or same group of different species occurring around the same time around the same place because they are on the same mission attempting to accomplish the same tasks or different tasks in support of the same mission objective.
If there’s anyone that doesn’t think two is enough then how about four? There are another two sightings in the same city around the same time that may be the same group on the same mission. They are not on the same day but rather days apart; but, both are in Las Vegas. One occurred April 25 2023 over the city at night, recorded on video and reported by a local news channel 8 News Now. The other reportedly occurred May 16 2023 in a vacant dirt lot and was reported by 911 emergency call with the responding officer being said to have recorded the landed spacecraft for a few minutes on both body-cam and dash-cam before it flew away. The witnesses describe it as having a green glowing light. Was it a blue-green glowing light? Would some call it blue and others call it green? Was the green glowing Dirt Lot craft the same model of spacecraft as the other two blue-green ones five days later on April 30 2023? Did it make use of the same blurry cloaking technology to obscure view of it as the Backyard one did? The earlier Over City incident is different in three ways. It’s a swarm of five or more crafts hovering for awhile and all of them are a spectacular rainbow of changing colors in addition to green with no apparent landing. These differences make it unclear what relationship this sighting has to the others outside of involving the same area days apart. More information is needed to figure out what’s going on. For further examination a more complete description of both incidents with photos and video link to the crafts in flight and formation is here: https://www.reddit.com/LasVegasAliens/comments/1cd4ufz/proximity_in_time_and_location_how_many_othe?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button There are more reports of blue-green lights in the sky on April 30 in Nevada but are there more reports of close encounter of the 3rd kind May 1? If all of them landed then there might be.
Why were they here? What is there that would be of interest to them? What all of these incidents share in common is the same location of Las Vegas and the surrounding area, a place full of military bases that are confirmed to specialize in advanced aeronautics development, weapon testing, and mass storage of nuclear weapons. Some of those are Tonopah Test Range and Creech Air Force Base. The infamous Groom Lake Area 51 S2 S4 that is known to develop advanced stealth aircraft is said by employees there to have stored and examined several alien spacecraft in attempted reverse engineering and flight tested at least one of them the "Sport Model." Some employees there have produced photos and videos of both operational craft and living creatures that they say resided there decades ago. Other employees claim that Nellis Air Force Base has hosted a population of aliens. There are claims that humans and aliens were and perhaps still are working alongside each other in cooperation at these bases. So, that establishes at least three interests that aliens would surely have in the Las Vegas area. Their people are there. Their vehicles are there. The weapons that could destroy both us and them are there. Was anything happening there with any of those three things in the Spring of 2023 that would explain why they all showed up then? Are there any reports of them flying over any of the bases then? That would make the nature of their interest in this area more clear.
What were they trying to do? Did they succeed in their effort? It’s expected that they would make an effort to recover their personnel and vehicles collecting and piling up at our bases through the passing decades since the 1940s. This might happen in agreed cooperation or by force and maybe both have occurred? There are claims of an exchange program since the 1960s where their people come here in exchange for our people going ‘there.’ It’s said that most return while some choose to remain. It’s surprising that there aren’t more reports of them forcibly recovering their craft and crew. It’s so rare for them to come back for it that some think they are abandoning their stuff in generosity as a gift to us! It could be that they don’t value their stuff as much as we value ours. Some of those personnel are said to be expendable robots or androids. They would send here whatever they designed to be discarded in the same way that we send robots to Mars. While they may have no concern about the inconsequential, it is reasonably expected that they would surely be concerned about anything consequential to themselves such as us using our technology or theirs or both in a manner contrary to their interests. There is the claim that they only share a small scrap of their benign technology with us in exchange for a massive sacrifice of biological material(in part or in whole) and other valuable precious resources that we never get back after it leaves the planet forever. It’s said that we are on the losing end of a bad deal. Pillaging of the planet, we can’t fix it until it’s no longer a secret and then the public demands remedy. Is preventing us from solving a problem the sole purpose of secrecy? What did these visitors give or take from us in Las Vegas in the Spring of 2023?
Why does it matter? What impact does it have on us that can't be ignored? The consequential military technology that our government wants most of all from them is said to be withheld from us in understandable fear that we might misuse it as usual. There is debate over whether that is for our sake or theirs. Are they protecting us from ourselves, protecting themselves from us, or both? They seldom appeared and usually avoided us when they did appear up until the mid 1940s when the bomb was invented and dropped; after which, they have been swarming around the world in surveillance ever since hovering over military bases and military vehicles and ships involving nuclear power and nuclear weapons and sometimes disabling them. Sightings increased after the bomb. When terrestrial nations do the same our military officials wonder if the aerial surveillance is an effort to map the location of the only weapons that can reliably protect us in preparation to disable all of them later all at once before safely launching the planned invasion and occupation by blocking the certainty of a nuclear counterstrike. We can’t conclude that the same surveillance by extra-terrestrial nations is also for that same purpose when, logically, even if they had planned to avoid humanity forever with no interest in ownership of Earth, we may have forced them not to by simply acquiring a weapon capable of destroying their entire civilization and then acquiring their vehicles that could deliver it there. After which, they are compelled to take either defensive or offensive action in mitigation of the emerging threat. Since we can’t know if the response will be defensive or offensive, we must never make the same mistake as Ukraine in being persuaded to surrender our only salvation from invasion by any nation near or beyond. I wish it could be said with certainty that humanity will never be an 'unjustified' threat in the cosmos; but, we must be undefeatable in defiance of extinction or slavery, ensuring the continuance of our survival and endurance of our liberty. That's why it matters. That's why we must be capable of defending the weapons that defend us and must sooner discover the intentions of our many neighbors in the universe.
2023 JUN 9 'THEY ARE 100% NOT HUMAN" NEW: MULTIPLE SIGHTINGS IN VEGAS by Marfoogle News https://youtu.be/1vGtaSj8b7Y?si=h1NrmkLU21qGJ5xA APR 30 Dead Horse Ridge alien spacecraft and aliens witness Josh

Me 21F and my now ex bf 23M just broke up on good terms and we were talking about our sex lives and he confessed he didn't enjoyed eating my 🐱 but other than that our sex was very great. And no matter how hard I try to ask to see if it the smell or what's wrong but he not telling me and just said "it just different, maybe cuz I'm Asian" (I'm the first Asian girl he ever got with).
Don't get me wrong our sex was great, he goes crazy with my head skill he said and I can tell. In a whole year of dating he always love to get head and be freaky about it and he ate me out like 2 times in the beginning of the relationship and he does have a bad nose so he blamed on the nose. Now that I know the truth, it make me so insecure.....

We meet again, Redditors.
Once more, it's me, the small-town Minnesota cop with an unfortunate penchant for getting himself mixed up with the bizarre, possibly supernatural, and sometimes downright terrifying things that occasionally happen when he's not busy handing out speeding tickets, breaking up bar fights and once in a while throwing a drunk farmer in a jail cell for giving his wife a broken nose because the Vikings lost to the Giants during the big game.
They say bad things come in threes, so I suppose I should have seen this coming. Yes, it happened once again to Yours Truly.
But after this time, I'm giving serious thought to just calling it quits and ending my career in law enforcement, maybe getting a job as a park ranger or a fishing guide.
This one was the worst one yet. Worse than the Garrity disappearance back in '14 and my strange encounter with the mysterious young woman who called herself Shirley Anne McDougall back in '19. Worse than both of them combined, even.
I've pretty shaken up by this recent one. Hell, to be perfectly honest, I'm fucking scared. Not so much by what happened, but by the implications of it. If there's any truth to this one, then...well...
It happened last Friday night. I wasn't even on duty when it happened; it was my night off.
Things have changed since the last time we got together. The Chief retired last fall after over forty years. Ostensibly it was because of "health issues"...but I have my doubts. He still seemed pretty spry and healthy the last time I saw him at the retirement party we threw him at the station. He took his wife and moved to Colorado to "live out [his] golden years as God intended, with a fishing rod in one hand and a can of Hamm's in the other," as he put it. He was grinning when he said it, but it seemed a little forced, and there seemed to be some other expression lurking beneath the grin, and in his eyes. Something dark and haunted.
I think maybe the denouncement of the McDougall case was the last straw for him (they ID'd the skeleton they found in the trunk of that rusted old Buick through old dental records and DNA after "someone" provided the State Police with an "anonymous" tip to the young woman's identity...and yep, sure enough, it was Shirley). I don't think it was just her and poor old Mrs. Garrity that was getting to him, either. I have to remind myself that the Chief had been on the force a hell of a lot longer than me and Jerry and Pete and Vance...and God only knows what he encountered during that time. He probably has his own share of stories to tell, if he was so inclined.
Anyway, when the Chief stepped down, Vance took his place due to seniority. He's a competent cop with enough experience to make a decent replacement, but it's just not quite the same, and I don't think I'll ever think of him as the Chief.
Vance's first order of business (with the Town Council's approval) was to expand the police force in order to keep up with the town's increasing population. He hired three new officers. He also persuaded/pressured the Council to increase the Police Department's budget, and with the extra funds we got some much-needed newer cruisers, gear and even radios. The downside to all these improvements was that with three extra warm bodies there weren't as many hours to go around, so my work schedule had been cut back some. I can't really complain. I'm a single guy, I own my own place, and town living is cheap. Plus, I really did need a break.
So last Friday night I was driving down one of our many rural country roads on my way into town with no other objective than to buy a case of beer and get drunk watching TV. It was just past eight P.M., a pleasant spring evening with a clear, starry sky.
I had the radio on, listening to an old BlackHawk song I liked as a kid (the one about the guy whose friend moved up in the mountains to paint the world).
I glanced at the dashboard clock and saw it was 8:08 P.M. I reached for a cigarette from the pack of Winstons on the passenger seat.
Suddenly there was a blinding flash of light that filled all the windows of my car. Bright, white light that seemed to fill the entire world. It was like being at ground zero at the moment of a nuclear explosion, in the millisecond before the blast vaporizes your entire body.
I shouted and slammed on the brakes, raising an arm to shield my face, squeezing my eyes shut. I thought for sure I was about to die.
The BlackHawk song playing on my radio cut off abruptly.
I sat there for probably at least a minute, my heart racing, hearing nothing but silence. Finally, I cautiously opened my eyes. The light was gone. Everything was back to normal.
"Jesus," I muttered to myself, "what the fuck was that?"
Bewildered, but relieved to be alive, I put my foot back on the gas pedal...
But my car wouldn't move. The engine had stopped. I turned the key over and over again, but it wouldn't start. My car was dead.
"Shit!"
I got out, popped the hood, and raised it to inspect the engine. My car was only three years old and I had just had it serviced last month. I couldn't figure out what the hell was wrong with it...but then again, I am a police officer, not an auto mechanic.
Frustrated, I pulled off my phone to call Triple A... but my phone wouldn't turn on. Like my car, it was also dead. Even though the battery was still more than half charged.
Now I was really getting pissed off. I was still three miles from town, stranded in the middle of nowhere with no way to call for help. This was turning into a pretty shitty evening.
I stood there for a couple minutes and was just about resigned to the fact that I was going to have to walk the rest of the way into town to call a tow truck, when fortune smiled.
I saw a pair of headlights coming down the road, approaching from the direction of town.
I waved down the driver, and as the car got closer, I realized it was one of the town's new police cruisers. It slowed down and I saw the driver was none other than my regular partner Jerry.
I didn't spare the time to consider what an unusual coincidence this was, I was just overjoyed that now I didn't have to go on foot to get my car towed. My relief was short-lived though. Before I could open my mouth to explain my troubles, I saw the look on Jerry's face. He looked deeply worried, and more than a little scared.
"Jesus Christ!" he said when he saw me. "Where the fuck have you been? We've been tryin' to get ahold of you for almost an hour!"
"Bad luck. My car broke down and my phone di--..." I stopped abruptly as his words registered. "Wait, what the hell do you mean 'almost an hour'? My phone just died like ten minutes ago!"
"Vance's been ringing your phone since 8:15. I even tried calling you myself. I was heading your way to see what the hell happened to you!"
I looked at him, confused. "Jer, I've only been stuck here for ten minutes at most."
"Well, maybe your phone conked out before your car did and you didn't notice."
"No, it happened almost simultaneously. It was the craziest fucking thing. What the hell time is it anyway?"
He glanced at his dashboard. "9:06."
This threw me for a loop. "What? Jerry, that shit is not possible! I saw the time right before my car broke down. It was 8:08. There's no way I've been standing here for the better part of an hour!" I was so bewildered by now that I had almost entirely forgotten about that strange, blinding flash of light that had seemed to presage my car breaking down.
"Shit, man, I don't know what to tell you," Jerry answered with a shrug. "All I know is we've been trying to get ahold of you for damn near an hour."
"Why have you been trying to call me?" I asked him with slowly dawning trepidation.
Jerry looked at me gravely. There was an all-too-familiar expression of fear on his face. One I recognized from that day nearly a decade before, when we had driven out to Mrs. Garrity's farmhouse.
"Something's happened to the Barker Family," he said. "They're missing. It looks like a home invasion/abduction type deal."
"Shit," I muttered. The Barkers in question were John and Sophie, a couple who lived on the outskirts of town (coincidentally, not terribly far from where old Mrs. Garrity had once lived) and their three children. John Barker worked at a tractor supply store in the next town.
He continued: "The Chief"--meaning Vance--"wants everyone available. It's an all-hands-on-deck situation." He looked away from me, gulping nervously. I could tell he was holding something back.
"What aren't you telling me, Jer?" I asked him warily.
He sighed. His expression was almost apologetic. "You better brace yourself. It looks like another weird one."
I groaned.
"Get in. I'll fill you in on the way."
*****
On the drive to the Barker house, Jerry told me what had happened.
Just after eight, the town dispatcher, Monica (our old dispatcher Karen died peacefully two years back) received a relay call from 911. The Barker's youngest daughter, Chloe (six) said she was locked in her parents' room and that someone was inside her house. When asked if she could describe the intruders, all she could say was that "the gray men" had taken her family and they were in the house looking for her. Before the 911 operator could ask her anything else, Chloe had begun to scream piercingly in panicked horror. Then the line had gone dead.
Pete and Joe had been sent, along with two of the new town cops, Brandon and Lars (a big blond Swedish guy) as back-up. They had arrived at the Barker residence no more than five minutes after the call had been made, but there was no sign of the Barkers. All five of them, John, Sophie, Chloe, Jessica (nine) and Max (fourteen) were gone. But what they did find there was disturbing. After clearing the house, they had called Vance.
"What did they find?" I asked Jerry.
"You'll see for yourself in just a couple minutes," he told me, gesturing out the windshield. I looked and saw we were already almost at the Barker's house. The place was encircled with cop cars, blue and red lights strobing.
Jerry parked and we got out. The whole town police force was gathered, along with some Detectives from the city, plus a forensics team from the State Police, taking pictures and collecting evidence.
Jerry led me towards the house, but a burly State Trooper blocked my way with a stern expression. "Closed crime scene," he barked in an officious tone.
I was confused for a second, then realized -- because I technically wasn't on duty -- that I wasn't in uniform.
"It's cool," Jerry told him, "He's a cop."
The Trooper raised a suspicious eyebrow but finally stepped aside.
We went up the front porch. The door was standing wide open but was blocked with crisscrossing strips of yellow Crime Scene tape. It was dark inside; the power was off.
"Check this out," Jerry said, and took out a flashlight, switching it on and shining it on the front door.
"Whoa," I said, surprised, "what the hell?"
The doorknob was missing from the front door, leaving only an empty hole. Except, I registered after a split-second, it wasn't missing; it was melted. A trail of liquified steel (that had since cooled and rehardened) led down from the doorknob hole to a puddle on the floor, like candlewax.
"It gets weirder," Jerry told me. "The electricity's out in the house, but it doesn't look like an outage. Seems like it was a power surge of some kind. All the lightbulbs inside are burst."
Hearing heavy footsteps approach behind us, we turn and saw Vance ascending the porch steps.
"Thank God," he said upon seeing me. "Where the hell have you been? I was starting to worry you vanished right along with the Barkers!"
I explained to him my car troubles and how Jerry had just happened along at the right time.
"Afraid you can't go in there just yet," he told me when I finished. "Not until after the state boys are finished searching for clues."
"What did Pete and Joe find in there?" I asked him.
"Well, Jerry probably already told you, the power's out. But that's not all. Looks like there was some kind of stand-off in there. Some of the windows and doors were barricaded. And they found a pile of spent .30-30 shells and a rifle on the floor of the living room -- probably John Barker's rifle. But no sign of who -- or what -- he was shooting at. Upstairs, the doorknob of John and Sophie's bedroom, where their little girl made the call, is melted, just like that..." he indicated the front door. "The phone was off the hook, dangling on its cord. Pete says it was stilling swinging when he and Joe entered the room...like she had just dropped it. If they had just gotten there maybe a minute sooner..." He shook his head sadly.
Something about what he had just told me didn't seem right.
"You said the phone was off the hook -- you mean the girl called 911 on a landline?"
"Yeah."
"Why didn't they call for help on their Smartphones? Everybody's got one these days. It wasn't like they were caught off-guard; they had enough time to try barricading the house."
Vance shrugged. "Who the hell knows? Nothing about this seems to make much sense."
"Is that it?" I asked him.
"No. There's more. Come with around back, I want you to see something."
Vance led me around the house into the back yard. I began to detect a smell in the air, the smoky smell of burnt vegetation. A smell I associated with burning leaves in autumn.
There were more cops and Forensics back here, most of them crowded around something about thirty yards in the rear of the house.
"First, look at this," Vance told me, and pointed to a wooden doghouse beside the back porch. I looked...and halted in my tracks.
"Jesus!"
The doghouse was squared off with more Crime Scene tape. A large German Shepard was sprawled on the ground, half in and half out of the doghouse. It was dead, its mouth open, teeth bared in a frozen snarl. Its eyes were wide open and staring blankly at nothing. There were no marks on its body, no blood, no immediately apparent cause of death.
"It was still warm when Pete and Joe found it," Vance told me.
"What the hell happened here?" I said, mostly to myself.
"You think that's weird? You ain't seen nothin' yet," Vance said grimly. He gestured with his head toward the crowd gathered at the edge of the back yard.
I approached, and the closer I got, the stronger that smoky burning-leaves smell became.
The officers were formed in a loose circle around the perimeter of something, taking pictures and recording videos with their phones. I reached them...and saw what was holding their attention. I stood, staring dumbly in shock and incomprehension.
Sawhorses had been set up, cordoning off a perfect circle of scorched, blackened earth, about fifty feet in diameter. The grass had been charred to a fine black powder that was still faintly smoking.
*****
I rode with Vance back to the municipal building in town, where the police station was located. By then the story had broken to the nearest news outlets and there was something of a "media circus" (if you could call three news vans and a corresponding number of reporters and cameramen a circus) outside, along with a number of curious locals. We ignored their questions and entered the municipal building.
I changed into a spare uniform I kept in my locker. The State Police had already issued a state-wide alert for the missing family. The detectives were going to conduct door-to-door interviews with the Barkers' closest neighbors. Vance wanted the town police force to patrol the backroads and be on the lookout for anything that could prove useful in the investigation...in other words, busywork, so we didn't feel like a bunch of dumb hicks standing around with our thumbs up our butts while the "real" police did all the important work.
I entered Vance's office and found him sitting at his desk, in the middle of a conversation with Pete and Joe, who stood on the other side. Vance was telling them how he had just gotten a call from the FBI. A couple suits from the Saint Paul branch of the Bureau were on their way.
At this Pete smirked at Joe and began to whistle the X-Files theme, which annoyed Vance who told him to knock it off. Vance reminded him that five people, including three children, were missing and this was not the time for joking around.
Abashed, Pete apologized.
"Anyway," Vance went on, "I want you and Joe to cruise the roads North of town. Brandon and Lars are already covering the South roads. You"--he pointed at me--"are going to ride with Jerry and--"
Just then the radio unit on Monica's desk crackled to life. Lar's lightly Swedish-accented voice come through the speakers. "Come in, Dispatch, this is Unit 2. Come in, Dispatch, this is Unit 2. Do you copy? Over."
Monica spoke into the microphone. "Copy, Unit 2, this is Dispatch."
"Dispatch, is the Chief there? Over."
"Unit 2, this is Dispatch, yes, he's right here at his desk, over."
"Uh, Dispatch, I need to speak to the Chief urgently, we have a situation out here on Route 9 three miles out of town. Over."
At the word "situation" we all tensed up a bit.
Vance got up and quickly crossed over to Monica's desk. He leaned close to the microphone. "Unit 2, this is Vance. What do you mean by 'situation?' Over."
"Uh, me and Brandon found one of them."
Vance's face paled. I felt a skittering sensation in my guts.
"Unit 2, what do you mean you found one of 'them'? Clarify. Over."
"We found one of the Barkers. The boy, Max. He's alive. Me and Brandon came on him wandering down the side of the road, naked. He's in bad shape. In shock, I think."
"Jesus Christ," I heard Pete whisper.
Lars went on: "We're taking him back to the station right now. Be there in about twenty minutes. Over."
"Copy, Unit 2," Vance said with forced composure, looking stunned by this development. "Bring him in through the rear door, there's kind of a crowd outside and we don't need any unwanted attention. Over and out."
"Roger, Chief. Over and out."
*****
Twenty minutes later, Lars and Brandon guided fourteen-year-old Max Barker, naked except for a blanket wrapped around him, down the rear service corridor of the Municipal Building and into the Chief's office. Vance had already radioed out the news on the police frequency.
Lars wasn't kidding, the kid was a mess. He just shuffled along, moving almost automatically, like a robot. His face was completely blank, mouth gaping dumbly open, eyes vacant. Catatonic.
They gently seated him on a couch. Vance dismissed Joe, Lars and Brandon, telling them to go outside to control the crowd, which was getting agitated (apparently one of the news vans had picked up word that one of the Barkers had been found on their scanner).
They closed the door behind them, leaving only me, Pete, Vance...and the boy himself.
Vance dragged up a chair and sat facing Max. "Max?" he asked him very softly.
Max didn't respond.
"Max? Can you hear me? You're in the police station. It's alright, son, you're safe now."
No response. The boy didn't even seem to blink.
"What happened to you, Max? What happened to your family?"
Nothing.
"Max, please, you have to tell us what happened tonight. It's very important that we know so we can find the rest of your family. The sooner we know, the sooner we can help them."
There was a very low, inaudible mumble. It took a moment for me to realize it had come from Max himself.
"What was that, Max?" Vance asked, sounding encouraged. He leaned closer. "Please, Max, speak up."
"You can't..." A weak rasp. Max swallowed hard, and tried again, straining, forcing his voice to work. "You can't help them. They're gone."
He began to tremble. Tears ran down his cheeks. His tremble became a shudder, causing the blanket pulled around his shoulders to fall down a little, revealing something. Something odd. A small, perfectly rectangular patch of raised pink skin just below his left collar bone. It was about the size of a domino. It looked like a welt or a burn and appeared very fresh.
Vance pointed at the mark on Max's shoulder. "How did you get that, Max?"
"They did it to me."
"Who?"
Max's next words made my skin shudder. "The sky people. That's how they keep track of us."
He looked at Vance with an agonized, horrified expression, cheeks streaked with tears. "They took us. Just like they did last time. But this time, they didn't bring us back. They kept my family. They would have kept me too, but I tricked them. I played dead. They dumped me. They need to keep us alive until..."
He didn't finish. His shuddering worsened.
"Until what, Max?" Vance pressed him.
Max was silent. Then suddenly he began to scream hysterically in a panic, making us all jump. He thrashed around wildly, his face suddenly crazed.
"They're going to come back for me! Don't you understand? They thought I was dead, but they'll find out I tricked them and then they'll come back, they'll come back, THEY'LL COME BAAAAACK!"
Vance turned to me, alarmed. "Call an ambulance, now!"
I pulled out a phone but before I could dial 911 the door to the office slammed open. Two tall, muscular men in matching black suits and black ties over starched white shirts stood in the doorway. They had identical crewcuts. Their faces were clean-shaven and totally expressionless.
"Hey!" Vance said, surprised and angry, "Who the hell are you?"
"We're with the Government," one of the men replied in a flat, calm voice.
"We're taking over this investigation," the other said.
"Now wait a minute!" Vance protested, "I'm the town Police Chief here! I'm in the middle of interviewing a witness--"
"Mr. Barker will be coming with us," the first man overrode him, his voice a monotone, his face perfectly neutral.
"Goddamnit, this is my jurisdiction!"
"Our authority exceeds your jurisdiction," the second told Vance.
Vance stood up to confront them, pointing his finger. "You can't just come in here and--"
With shocking speed, the first black-suited man grabbed Vance by the front of his shirt and spun him around, pinning him face-first to the wall.
"Hey, get your fucking hands off me!"
Vance struggled, but the man was stronger. He held him firmly while the second black-suited man crossed the office to where Max was sitting. He had stopped freaking out by then and was just whimpering quietly, seemingly in a daze.
Me and Pete just stood speechless, watching this transpire with disbelief. I wanted to speak up, wanted to come to Vance's defense, but was intimidated into inaction. These guys didn't look like someone you wanted to mess around with.
The second man helped Max to his feet and, with his arm draped over the boy's shoulder, led the boy unresistingly out of Vance's office.
The first man released Vance and followed after his partner, leaving the room without a word, gently closing the door behind him.
Vance smoothed out his shirt, pissed off and outraged at being manhandled.
"Sons of bitches! I can't believe they did that! I'm going to report their sorry asses to their field office for assaulting an officer!"
"What are we going to do now, Chief?" Pete asked him. "That kid was our only lead on whatever the hell's going on."
"Damned if I know," Vance muttered, running his fingers through his hair, still flustered. "It's out of our hands now. The Feds have taken over."
Just then someone rapped on the office door.
"Great, what now?" Vance snapped in irritation. He opened the door.
A young man and woman in business suits, very clean-cut and professional looking, stood there. Both of them holding badges. "Chief --?" the man asked.
"Yeah, who are you?" Vance inquired bluntly.
"I'm Agent Daniel Smithfield, this is my partner, Agent Kira Dellaney. We're from the FBI."
"What?! Wait a minute!" Vance exclaimed, thunderstruck, "if you're FBI, who the hell were those other guys?!"
The two agents glanced at each other, confused.
"What 'other guys'?" the female agent said.
"Those two big guys in black suits! They were just here not five minutes ago! They took the Barker kid with them!"
The two agents looked at each other again, then back to Vance, perplexed and troubled.
"We don't know who you're talking about," the male agent replied. "There are no other agencies involved in this case that we're aware of. We just arrived in your town less than half an hour ago."
The three of us, me, Pete and Vance, gaped speechlessly at the two FBI agents, utterly baffled.
*****
It's been five days. Still no leads on the case, and no sign of the missing Barker Family. And no idea who those goons in suits were who absconded with Max, or what they wanted with him, or where they could have taken him.
One interesting fact came to light after they finished investigating the Barker house: not only was the house's electrical system completely blown out, but also so was every portable battery-powered device within the house...including the family's mobile phones. That's why the 911 call was made on a landline phone, one of those old non-electric rotary-dial ones, which apparently wasn't affected by...whatever it was that happened there last Friday night.
I don't think anyone's going to find the Barkers. Not us, not the State Police, not the city cops or the Feds or anyone else. I think we're looking a little too close to home, and the Barkers are somewhere far, far away.
I don't know what the "sky people" wanted with them, but I have a bad feeling their intentions are not good.
Like I said at the beginning, this is probably going to be last time I have to deal with one of these freaky cases; I'm seriously considering turning in my badge and moving as far away from Minnesota as possible.
But I wonder if it makes any difference where I go or how far I travel.
You see, what really frightens me about all of this isn't just what happened to the Barkers. It's what I found the morning after, when I was shaving. I spotted something in the mirror. Something on my left shoulder. A perfect rectangle of slightly raised, irritated skin, about the size of a domino.

I really like late 90s/early 00s type rom-com movies. It should be preferably highschool/teen but thats not a necessity since a lot of my favorites are about two co-workers.
For tropes, i love forbidden romance and maybe like an angsty slow burn because of betrayal or something. The bet trope or forced to be together trope is definitely one of my favorites as you may be able to tell from the list I've given.
I don't mind a higher age rating but 'The Notebook', 'La La Land' and 'Grease' are movies that for some reason I do not like. I also liked 'A Walk To Remember' a lot but I did not finish it as the main character dies and I do not want to see that.
This is the list of movies that I like and how high i would rate them next to the title in brackets out of a ten:
Movies [ ] - 10 Things I Hate About You (10) [ ] - 13 Going on 30(8) [ ] - 27 Dresses(10) [ ] - A Walk to Remember(10 but death) [ ] - Anyone But You (6.5) [ ] - Bride Wars(8) [ ] - Bring It On(7) [ ] - Can't Hardly Wait(10) [ ] - Cinderella Story(9) [ ] - Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen(9) [ ] - Edge of Seventeen(7) [ ] - Freaky Friday(9) [ ] - Heather(8) [ ] - He's All That(7) [ ] - How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days (10) [ ] - John Tucker Must Die(8) [ ] - Jawbreaker [ ] - Legally Blonde(9) [ ] - Mean Girls(10) [ ] - Never Give Up (10) [ ] - Not Another Teen Movie(8) [ ] - Princess Diaries(9) [ ] - Princess Diaries 2(10) [ ] - She's All That(9) [ ] - She's the Man(10) [ ] - Sixteen Candles (7) [ ] - Superbad(7) [ ] - The Devil Wears Prada(10) [ ] - The DUFF(9) [ ] - The Hot Chick(10) [ ] - The Proposal(10) [ ] - The Ugly Truth (10) [ ] - Girl Next Door(9) [ ] - First Daughter (8) [ ] - The Proposal (10) [ ] - Drive Me Crazy(10)

The military base doesn’t exist.
Not officially.
It’s a rusted-out corpse of abandoned hardware, a veritable graveyard of fallen soldiers and crumbling structures. Hidden twelve miles deep in the jungles of South America, there’s no reason anybody should be here. None. So why did I find a woman half-dead on the ground? It’s a question I want answered.
She’s sitting across from me. Her eyes are downcast, her blouse is torn and her copper cheeks are flecked with spots of red. I don’t know if the blood belongs to her or somebody else, but I figure by the end of this, I’ll have a pretty good idea.
“Tourist?” I ask.
She gives me a hard stare. It’s quiet. Unyielding. She’s not certain who I am, and judging by the look in her eyes, she’s running a series of probabilities. It’s the black suit that does it. Always. People see the suit, they see the briefcase, and their imagination spins into overdrive.
I try another question. “Did you come alone?”
She shakes her head. Her mouth is a thin line, defiant and uneasy. The legs of her chair squeal as she rocks back and forth, giving motion to her anxiety. She’s considering the possibility that this is her last day on earth. Her last hour.
If I’m being honest, it might be.
“How many were with you?”
“Lots,” she says quickly. “They're still around. They know where I am, know where we are right now and–”
“I doubt that.”
Her voice stumbles.
“If anybody was with you, then chances are they’re already dead. Jobs like this? They’re usually bloodbaths. Massacres. They’re not the sort of places you expect to find survivors, much less unarmed ones.”
She swallows. “Who are you?”
“A friend.”
“Some friend. I don’t know the first thing about you.”
“Funny. I was about to say the same thing.” I reach into my briefcase and pull out my clipboard, centering it on my lap. On it are questions. They’re the sort of questions whose answers are typically written in blood. “How about you and I get to know each other?” “If you think I’m gonna just tell who I am–”
“I don’t care who you are. I care about what you're doing here, miles deep in the jungle, sitting in a military base that doesn’t exist.” I press my pen to the clipboard. “How about you fill me in?”
The woman’s eyes narrow. Her slender hands ball into tight fists. If I had to guess, she’s not used to feeling this vulnerable, this powerless. “And if I leave?” she says, standing up. “What then? Are you going to cuff me to a pipe?”
I smile. “Why bother?”
The corner of her mouth twitches.
“You’re not going to leave,” I tell her. “You wouldn’t dare.”
For a moment, my eyes dance with hers, and in their fire I see something– some buried ember of fear. It’s unmistakable. “You know better than I do what’s out there,” I say. “So go ahead. Walk out that door if you think you’re safer outside. I won’t stop you.”
I wait for her to move, but she hesitates. They always hesitate.
“Maybe you’re right," I say. "Maybe I’m not a friend, but I’m the closest thing you’ll find to one for miles, so if I were you, I’d quit worrying about me. I’d start worrying about what it is I’m doing here.”
“Meaning?”
I wave my hand toward the broken window. Outside are rusted humvees. A crumbling barracks. Outside is a road so overgrown that tiny trees are sprouting from cracks in the concrete, while clutches of moss do their best to hide old rifle rounds. “Places like this aren't left to rot without a good reason. Soldiers are trained to fight. They aren't trained to flee into the jungle, leaving their equipment and assets behind." I gesture broadly. "Look around. This base was evacuated in a hurry, and that begs the question– why? More importantly, why did I find you in the middle of it?”
Her eyes dart outside. Her pupils are dilated in a cocktail of adrenaline and anxiety. “If I tell you… then you’ve gotta tell me something first.”
“Tell you what?”
“Who you are,” she says, voice trembling. “I want to know what’s really going on here. The truth. I’ve been lied to enough today.”
Have you? I study her. The truth of my work isn’t something people want to hear about– not really. They might think they do. They might think they’re ready to open Pandora's Box, to see the dark underbelly of reality, but it’s rarely the case.
Still, the woman strikes me as stubborn. If pulling back the veil can get her talking, then maybe it’s worth the existential crisis. I slip a hand inside my jacket, pull out my badge and toss it to her. She catches it, just barely. “There you go,” I say. “Everything you need to know about me, right down to my height and birthday."
She appraises the badge. Her eyes move across the laminate once, twice, then snap back up to me, suspicious. “This says you work for an organization called The Facility. I’ve never heard of it.”
“That’s the idea. We’re a shadow contractor. The less people know about us, the easier it is to do our job.”
“And what is that job?”
“Anomalies,” I tell her. “We investigate Events of supernatural origin. They’re typically caused by entities– things you’d recognize as monsters, or urban legends. My job is to hunt those things. Capture them.”
She shakes her head. "Why?”
“That’s a complicated question. The short answer is that it’s necessary. The long answer is that you’ll sleep better not knowing." I lean forward, flaring my jacket behind me, letting the woman get a glimpse of the pistol on my hip. "Fact is, I came here tonight to investigate an Event, but instead I found you. I’d like to know why that is.”
Her eyes drift to the window. She’s wearing the expression of a woman who was praying her nightmare was all in her head, that whatever she saw today was the product of acute psychosis, a little bit of neurological sabotage and nothing else. Now she’s considering that maybe there’s something more here. Maybe she’s not as crazy as she hoped she was.
“What’s your name?” I ask.
She bites her lip. Her voice is quiet, almost a whisper. “Maria.”
“You look like you’re having a hard time processing things, Maria.”
“You don’t know what I saw…” she mutters. “You have no idea…”
“I hear that a lot.” I pull out a pack of smokes, slip one between my lips. I light it and the nicotine tastes sweeter than heroin. It ripples through my body like emotional morphine, and just like that, the next part gets a little easier. “Between you and me, my father was killed by an entity, Maria. I watched him die.”
Her eyes meet mine. They’re wide. This wasn’t the emotional curveball she was expecting, and that’s exactly what makes it effective. Always.
“Happened when I was seven," I tell her. "I saw the whole thing from under my bed, cowering. A creature had him in its grip. Some tall man with two faces. He lifted him up to the ceiling and turned to me, asked what my favorite nightmare was, and then he tore my father in two. Like paper mache.”
I blow out a plume of smoke and it hangs in the air between us. Then I take another long drag. The truth is, I hate this story. I hate it more than anything else in the entire world. It’s a memory I’ve gone my entire life trying to forget, but in moments like these, it’s the most valuable piece of history I own. Even now, it’s working its black magic. I watch Maria’s posture shift. Her shoulders fall, slumping forward in horrified disbelief. She’s doing the human thing and empathizing with me, sharing a piece of my pain, and that’s exactly what I need her to do.
“Is that how this so-called Facility found you?” she asks.
“It is.”
Her eyes are staring a hole into the concrete floor. She looks distant. Haunted. “I’m so sorry,” she says.
I ash my cigarette. “Don’t be. It’s ancient history. The point I’m trying to make is that when you’ve seen an entity kill somebody, it stays with you. You recognize the scars. And right now, I see those scars all over your face.”
She doesn’t speak. She looks out the window, out across the military ruins to a rusty steel wheel rising from the dirt. It's bolted to a hatch that leads underground. One she’s been stealing glances at for the better part of our conversation.
“That bunker,” I say. “I found you lying beside it, bleeding and barely conscious. Something happened down there, didn’t it?”
A moment passes. Her eyes are narrowed in focus, like she’s weighing her options. Calculating outcomes. Eventually, she takes a breath. Asks a question. “You said that you hunted entities… Well, what about demons?”
“What about them?”
“Do they exist?”
I crack a grin. “Depends who you ask. Are you saying that you saw one down there?”
“I’m not sure,” she says at length. “Maybe not a demon but… something like it.” She stops. Her teeth dig into her lip, and then she says something that shocks even me. “I think I saw the devil. Satan.”
“Satan?” I say, whistling. “Now that’d be something.”
“You think I’m nuts,” she mutters, shaking her head. “I knew you would… Everyone will…”
“I don’t think you’re nuts. Not yet." I take one last drag on my cigarette, burn it to the filter and flick it to the floor. "The truth is, The Facility’s been tracking strange activity in the area. A lot of it. Entities are being drawn to this base, being pulled in from nearby regions like moths to a flame, only to vanish without a trace. I'm talking about heavy hitters. Nightmare fuel. These aren’t the sort of entities that we can destroy, much less contain, so the fact that they’re dropping off the face of the Earth is starting to get concerning.” I thumb to the broken window. “This base? It’s the Bermuda Triangle for boogeymen. I’m here to find out why.”
She shrinks in her seat. “Jesus… Do you think it has something to do with what I saw?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. I won’t know until I get more details, and that means I need to know what you’re doing here.”
"Here?” she says, glancing at the bunker. “Get me out of here, and I’ll tell you whatever you want.”
"Not possible. We do this before nightfall. There’s no other way.”
What Maria doesn’t realize is that this entity likely already has her scent. Sooner or later, it’s going to return for her. When that happens, I need every advantage I can get– and that means understanding just what happened here.”
“Hang on,” she sputters. “What happens at nightfall?”
“Keep derailing my investigation, and you’ll find out.” I scratch her name onto the clipboard. “Now start talking. We’re losing daylight.”
She runs a frantic hand through her hair. “Christ. Alright,” she says, voice cracking. “Let me think for a second. It started a couple weeks ago, I think. A reader sent in a tip about this place–”
“Slow down. A reader?”
“Right, fuck. I'm a journalist. I work for an online paper, and we solicit tips for our stories. Usually scandals. Corruption. It's mostly political stuff… but a couple weeks back, a man sent in something bizarre.”
“That man have a name?”
“John.”
“Just John?”
Her voice breaks. “Yes.”
I write it down.
She continues. “John said he'd been hearing screaming, that his whole village had, coming from somewhere in the jungle nearby. Military was in the area. They were sending convoys through the village in the dead of night, with their headlights off to avoid drawing attention to themselves.
Apparently they were all driving up an old road, one that hadn't been used in decades. John knew the road. He knew it led to an old military base… one that used to conduct illegal experiments."
I lean back. "What kind of experiments?"
"The human kind. Genetic stuff. DNA splicing, mutating– you name it."
“Seems weird John would know that.”
“He used to work there,” she explains. “A long time ago, during the Cold War.”
I frown. “The nearest village is twelve miles away. Nobody is hearing screaming at that distance."
“That’s just it. They didn’t hear screaming from the base, they heard it from the jungle. John said it sounded just like it used to when he worked there. Guttural. Animalistic. He could tell that the people screaming had been experimented on, and that they were being let loose in the jungle."
"Let loose?"
"Yeah. I guess they'd send out test subjects, then release other experiments, more advanced ones, to hunt them down.
"What for? To test their capabilities?"
“Partly,” she says darkly. “But mostly for food.”
I chew on the tip of my pen. "Cannibal humans, genetic testing, a massive military cover up– sounds like Pulitzer Prize material."
She folds her arms, gives me a scathing look. “Is that sarcasm?”
“Not at all. Give me John’s age.”
“Not sure,” she says. “Seventy, maybe? He was in good shape. Fit. But he looked rough.” “Rough?”
“I just mean he looked like he’d been through the ringer. Had a hard life. His skin was leather, and he was missing half of his teeth. His hair was a tangled mess. I’m pretty sure I saw lice moving in his beard.” She pauses. “And his eyes…. His eyes were unnerving.” “Describe them.”
“Well, they were pale– paler than the moon. And every so often they’d sort of pulse, almost bulge out of their sockets. I hate to say it, but he looked freaky.”
“And John brought you here, to this base?”
She nods.
“And where’s John now?”
“He’s…” Maria’s eyes drift to the bunker. “He’s dead. Down there.”
Could’ve guessed. I follow her gaze and the steel hatch is turning crimson in the setting sun. My stomach twists. What I don’t tell Maria is that entities are most active after nightfall. If I don’t solve this mystery soon, then the answer is likely going to come find us– and I’m not sure I like our chances of survival.
“That hatch,” I say. “I'm guessing that's how you and John entered the bunker.”
“Yes.”
“Describe the interior.”
Maria takes a second. She furrows her eyebrows, as though thinking back. “It was narrow,” she says slowly. “Like a tall cylinder. I remember standing at the top of the hatch and looking down into a dark pit that stretched forever. John got on the ladder and told me to follow. He said it’d be a bit of a descent, but once we were down there, he was certain we’d find the evidence we’d need to blow the conspiracy wide open.”
“What state was the bunker in?” I ask. “John implied operations had resumed, but did it appear that way?”
“No…” she says. “Frankly, the condition was awful. It looked like the bunker had been abandoned since the Cold War. Moss crept up the walls and the ladder rattled with every step we took. The place was a deathtrap. Every time I put my foot down, I half-expected the ladder to snap.”
Odd. One would think John would clue in after seeing the state of the bunker that it wasn’t fit for operation. Then again, John strikes me as a man not altogether there. He might have been mentally ill. Out of his mind. Based on Maria’s description of him– the pale eyes, chilling demeanor– I can’t help but wonder if John wasn’t so much an employee of the program as he was a test subject.
Maria continues. “About fifty feet down the ladder, we started to see catwalks. Dozens of them. They extended off the ladder in every direction, leading to various entrances along the interior.” She trails off, as if collecting her thoughts. When she speaks again, her voice is hoarse. Quiet. “The entrances were welded shut. All of them. It’s like they were trying to keep something trapped inside… like they didn’t want it getting out.”
“All of the entrances?” I ask.
“No,” she says, tugging nervously at her sleeve. “Not all of them. One was different. We found it at the bottom of the ladder, half-submerged in rainwater. The flooding only came up to our knees, so we were able to wade through easily enough but…” Her fingers dance across her jeans. They pick at the fabric.
“But what?”
“It was torn open,” she breathes. “The entrance, I mean. It was warped outward like something had clawed its way out of the bunker, pulled it apart like a tin can. I’m talking about inches of steel here. Enough to shrug off the shockwave of a nuclear warhead– I mean fuck, what could do that?”
For the first time, I feel the ghost of fear creep through me. It’s subtle. Insidious. If what she’s describing is true, then there are two, maybe three entities I’m aware of with that capability. All three are impossibly violent. Vicious. Official policy to avoid contact at all costs. If such avoidance isn’t possible, then policy dictates the elimination of all witnesses to ensure the preservation of social order.
I look to Maria. She’s covered in bruises, blood and judging by the way she’s cradling her arm, probably has at least one fracture. She’s already suffered a nightmare. I wonder if I’ll have the courage to put her down if the time comes.
“The door,” I say, hoping she doesn’t hear my voice crack. “John used to work there. He must have had thoughts on the damage.”
She snorts. “He said it was explosive charges. He said the military probably breached the door to get inside when they restarted their science project, but I knew that couldn’t be true. First of all, the door was warped outward– not inward. More than that, there wasn’t a shred of explosive damage in the area.”
“I’m assuming these were observations you shared.”
“Of course. John didn’t care though, just changed the subject– asked me if I had any skeletons in my closet. Asked me if I’d ever hurt people, or considered it and–”
“What?”
“Yeah, I know,” she says, laughing in disbelief. “Talk about a left turn into what the fuck. I shrugged it off. I mean, I knew John had demons in his past– maybe he was looking for a little absolution from me. It’s not like he sounded threatening. He almost asked the questions casually, like he was hoping we could start a conversation, forgive each other for our sins, sorta thing. He didn’t press the subject. Maybe if he had, though, things would’ve been different.”
She sighs. Her eyes shift to the bunker, hazy with memories. “He helped me squeeze through the damaged doorway, and we continued on. All the passages were flooded down there, utterly dark. We sloshed through countless corridors, our headlamps reflecting off the black water and making shadows against the walls. It creeped me out. It felt like we weren’t alone down there because I’d keep seeing movement out of the corner of my eye.”
Movement. I wonder if she really was just seeing things, or if there had been something down there, stalking them even then. “Anything stand out as interesting in those corridors?” “In some sense, all of it was interesting,” she says. “The whole place was like a buried time capsule. In the rooms we passed I saw ancient magazines and peeling posters. I saw little relics from the 70s or earlier, some floating in the water, others sitting on dusty tables and countertops– even keepsakes, like lockets, wedding rings. Even the desks were full of soggy documents. Classified ones. Seemed strange they’d just leave all that behind.”
She takes a deep breath. “We passed through a series of maze-like corridors, then climbed a ladder that finally got us out of that floodwater. It felt nice to be on dry ground again, but the new chamber…” A shiver runs through her. “It was narrow to the point of being claustrophobic, and all along its walls were streaks of dark paint. The air felt musty. Rancid. But it wasn’t until we turned the corner that–” She stops suddenly, her expression paling.
“Maria,” I press. “What happened when you turned the corner?”
A moment passes. When she speaks again, her voice is hoarse. “Something crunched under my foot,” she says. “Bones. The passage was full of them. Skeletons were piled a foot high. It looked… It looked like they’d died scrambling over each other, like they were trying to reach the ladder and escape something. That’s when I realized the streaks along the walls weren’t paint. They were blood. Old and brown.”
My heart thrums. Could this be evidence of John’s so-called experiments? “Did the bones appear to be mutated at all?”
Maria nods, slowly. “Yes. Some more than others. One skull could’ve belonged to a man, but its jaw was elongated, like a horse’s. A single, twisted horn curved out of its forehead. Another was… another was flat. Square. It looked like somebody had rolled a person’s head under a tractor, but it had dozens of eye sockets. Multiple mouths.”
She brings a hand to her mouth. Gags. She looks like she might be sick, and I can’t blame her. I’m beginning to feel a little light-headed myself, though for another reason. Outside, we’re losing light. Night is fast approaching, and I’m worried it might be bringing something that I’m not yet ready to deal with. Something violent. Deadly.
“What was John’s reaction to the bones?” I ask, swallowing my dread.
“His reaction?” she mutters. “Jesus… Well, he picked one up– another skull. This one looked like it could’ve belonged to a woman, maybe, but where the mouth should have been was something else entirely. Mandibles. Like a wasp, or an ant. Whatever it was, it got John excited. His eyes did that creepy thing where they bulged from his sockets, and down there in the dark, I swear they even glowed. He held the skull up, just inches from my face and asked me how it made me feel. I could hardly focus on his words. His breath smelled like rot. Decay. He pressed me against the wall, but I shoved him off. He came back at me, and I took a swing at him– caught him across the jaw because I wasn't taking any chances down there. That dazed him. He stumbled, spat out some blood.”
An altercation. A new, unexpected wrinkle to her story that isn’t giving me any solutions to save our lives. Still, John is a curious individual. He was right about the experiments. If he’s dead, then I wonder what role he played in all of this… “How did John react to you hitting him?”
“He got weird,” she says, shaking her head. “Like fucking bizarre. He started mumbling nonsense, then shouting that I was being cruel, evil, like those monsters all over the ground. He cried. He whimpered that he was hurt, and that he brought me here as a favor, but now I was betraying him.” Maria pauses, as if she’s trying to make sense of her own story. “It was so strange. The way he was shouting didn’t sound angry, but almost performative. He kept calling me a monster like he was trying to get somebody’s attention.”
“And did he?”
Her mouth falls open as if to say no before a sudden realization flickers across her eyes. “Yes…” she breathes. “Oh God, I didn’t notice at the time but yes. Right after the shouting, we heard a clanging sound. It echoed through the passage. Whatever it was, it sounded distant. Far off, like it was coming from the entrance to the bunker, from that long ladder.”
“How did you react?”
“I didn’t know what to do. I mean, hell, I don’t think I believed it was really happening. We were miles deep in a jungle in a military base that by all accounts didn’t exist. Who the hell could be coming down the ladder?”
“And John’s reaction?”
“He grabbed my hand. Swore. He said the military must’ve figured out we were there, that they were coming to capture us, or kill us, or turn us into one of their newest abominations– who the fuck knows. He told me he knew a place where we could hide. We fled down passages that twisted and turned like a labyrinth. I followed his lead. At that point I had no idea where we were, no idea how to find my way back. He was my lifeline. My only shot. But the entire time we ran… I heard something rumbling in the dark.”
“Something human?”
“Do humans howl?”
Goosebumps trace my skin. No. They certainly don’t. “Maria,” I say, “this is important. What did the howl sound like– a wolf, or maybe a hyena?” This could be my chance to identify this thing. To figure out what it is we’re up against, and save our lives.
But she shakes her head. She shakes her head and I hate her for it. “No,” she tells me. “It didn’t sound like anything alive. It sounded artificial, electronic. It howled like a microphone screams with feedback, all high-pitched and ear-splitting.”
My grip tightens, cracking the plastic shell of my pen. Maria’s description doesn’t sound like any entity I’m familiar with, and that’s making me frustrated and terrified. “This place John mentioned,” I say, swallowing. “The place he said you’d be safe– where was that?” The color in her face washes away. “A wide room, shaped like a pentagon. All along the wall were slots. Gun turrets. They were abandoned, rusted out like everything else there but it was the words written all across the walls that made my blood go cold…”
Her voice trails off. She tries to finish her thought, but it comes out as a sob. She drops her face into her hands and the tears come out like a torrent, messy and loud. I give her a moment to let it out, to collect herself, but the truth is I’m not sure it’s a moment we can afford.
Outside, the sun is missing. It’s gone. The last scraps of daylight are making crooked shadows out of the treeline, spilling them across the base like decrepit fingers, reaching toward us like hungry phantoms.
My eyes find my clipboard. I scan it. I review the details I’ve recorded in search of some clue, some revelation that might get us out of this alive, but my writing is a mess. It’s uneven. It occurs to me that my hand has been shaking, that even now my palm is slick with sweat.
“I’m sorry,” Maria sniffles, wiping her nose on her sleeve. “I’m sorry…”
“It’s okay.”
It isn’t.
“You said there were words on the wall. What did they say?”
“Sector 5…” she says, taking a shuddering breath. “Sector 5: Feeding Trough. And the room… Oh god, there were corpses everywhere. They were scorched. Burned. They were half-devoured, rotting away, with maggots pouring out of their skin. The scent was… Nothing in the world smelled more terrible, more revolting.”
“Corpses,” I say, heart pounding. “Like the ones you saw before? Genetic experiments?”
“You said something earlier. Something about missing monsters… Disappearing entities…”
I lean forward. "What about it?"
Her eyes get wide. The contours of her face twist with the onset of dawning horror. “I think I found them,” she says, her voice barely a whisper. “I think I found all of them down there.”

This subreddit is pretty dead, but I want to share.
I recently finished a year-long game of Continuum, covering around twenty play sessions. I was a player in this group, and the GM or other players might chime in, but I wanted to talk about my group’s experiences and my thoughts about the game.
We weren’t quite playing the game according to the rules, but the differences weren’t super severe. For the sake of sanity, we reduced the leveling requirements considerably, both for traditional learning and instant skilling. This contributed to how insane things got, but it didn’t make or break anything (except for psychic powers- without easier stat XP gain, we wouldn’t have ever had access to clairvoyance, telepathy, or pyrokinesis).
The modified XP system that we used was that if you fill in 10 “clocks” you level a skill, the instant skilling times are for one competency level, and that filling in 10 small clocks levels a stat as well.
Tips and Tricks:
Our group figured out some horrible things. In approximate order of introduction:

Roleplaying – Time Combat gets a lot easier (and harder) when you don’t abstract it out.
The Internet – Fruning and oracling is nearly impossible at low span, but you can just google stuff. This can be incredibly helpful for time combat.
Booze Spanning – If you get spanners drunk, it becomes considerably more dangerous for them to span up or down, but it doesn’t block level spans. Still useful.
Fentanyl Dart – Seeking to capture some targets alive, we realized that using a strong drug could reliably knock people out, if we then applied first aid. It didn’t let us interrogate people, but it did allow for nonlethal attacks, at least for a while (eventually, the GM started introducing immune characters to nerf this).
Starfishing – If you want to travel a long distance, outside your span range, including over water, you can simply do it one bit at a time. The original idea was to lay on your back in the ‘starfish float’ position and then span towards your destination as fast as possible, floating in the water in between, but this isn’t needed. You can simply span vertically upwards into the sky and then span towards your destination, making sure to span vertically upwards to cancel your falling between spans. If you’re worried about being seen, I would recommend carrying a piece of diffractive material, which will camouflage you against the sky, or flying above visual range.
Hypnosis – Hypnosis is incredibly useful for post-misadventure cleanup, since you can use it to clean up the memories of witnesses. It can also be used more directly, but it’s not very effective against high-level spanner enemies.
Span Bombing – If your GM allows you to span with the fluids surrounding you (the book’s guidance is contradictory, we decided), then you can span with a room’s worth of air. Air masses approximately 1.25 kg/m^3 at sea level, so you can calculate the maximum size of room that you can span with the air in. When you span into wherever you’re going you instantly double the air pressure, causing the room to explode. The GM vetoed this one and it seems to be against at least the spirit of the rules.
De-timing Time Combat – Time Combat becomes considerably simpler and easier if you immediately kill the opposing combatant (i.e. shoot them before they can span out).
Massive Overkill – In conjunction with step 8, it is often important to kill your enemy in one stage of combat. This becomes trivial once you hit Quick 5+ and a rating in a firearm of 10 or greater (this is actually surprisingly easy to get- if you’re at Mind 7, the minimum for psychic powers, then you only need a rating of Master) then you can reliably do at least 1 lethal IP per person per stage, but as high as 7 if using assault rifles. Similarly, body + high martial arts skill can be absolutely deadly. If the environment permits it, the use of explosives, flamethrowers, and other AOE weapons can be extremely useful, especially when fighting darters.
Using Vehicles – Want to move something too heavy for your span? Just drive! Or fly!
Clairvoyance Spam – Clairvoyance is the first really, really broken trick. By spamming clairvoyance, you can avoid traps and unexpected enemy encounters. It can also be used to find enemies fleeing from combat.
Pyrokinesis – Pyrokinesis is really, really strong. At mind 8, you get to Journeyman and can manipulate 8 cubic feet of space, changing the temperature by 1 degree Celsius per second. With this, you can kill any baseline human being, or an entire room of human beings, in about 4 seconds (2 stages), by raising the temperature of their brain to lethal levels AND you can lower body temperature to nonfatally knock people unconscious. Furthermore, if you have time, you can use this to create a powerful bomb, by using a pressure resistant container full of water and heating up the water to an extreme temperature (i.e. plasma) over the course of a few hours while holding the container temperature constant. Also, at this level, you can only fail on a blunder. With grandmaster pyrokinesis, you are a god of destruction and can instantly boil anyone that pisses you off.
Just Breaking Their Neck – Our party had a character who was heavily spec’d out for martial arts, and we realized that since his body was still average, he would have to have a good mastery of pressure points and technique. The logical implication, permitted by our GM, is that with a good roll he could nonlethally break the neck of an enemy. Per the GM section, an intact spine is needed for spanning, which provides another way to contain spanners.
Fentanyl Dart 2, Polonium Boogaloo – If you’re worried about someone spanning, we realized that injecting a strong radiation emitter (we went with polonium) into your target would inflict frag on span. Of course, you need to get polonium, which opens you up to a lot of frag later on. Also, we weren’t sure if you would be fragged from spanning with polonium carried in a lead-lined container (the book was unclear on it).
Superconducting Frag Machine – Strong EM fields can cause frag (and it’s a pain in the ass to have fixed!), so using superconducting tape cooled with liquid nitrogen (which can be purchased online IRL) lets you cause frag to anyone who spans in a certain area. We didn’t get around to it, but we talked about using it to contain spanners (with appropriate physical restraints).
The Almighty Slipshank – Warning: Read no further if you are a player and don’t want to be tempted with evil powers. >! I’m serious, this is horrible and it makes nearly anything trivial if you’re willing to pay the price.!< A careful reading of the Slipshank rules says that you can “find any known object to be wherever [you] [want] it at the Level [you’re] currently at.” This is horribly broken. In one example of this, a fight was ended summarily by slipshanking an explosive device under the enemy combatant’s feet- in the process of exploding. This is because there are no rules about the disposition of a slipshanked object, and logically you could set up a device to explode when you place it, knowing the time you want it to explode. This is simply rules-as-written and can be used to do some absurd things, as will be discussed later.

The Story (Spoilers Ahead!):
I was invited to the Continuum game by a friend of mine, who I was in a different campaign with. Initially, I felt like it wouldn’t be possible, but when I found out it was a game of Continuum I made time.
My character was Jacob T. Schweikert, who I was setting up as a lovable rogue, a thief (cat burglary style) and electrician’s apprentice from 2006. My friend played as Beau Dixon, a schoolteacher who was very smart but physically inept. We had an intentional self-insert (with a good faith attempt to stat out the character accurately) with Jack and then a less experienced player created Rowan, who was an arms dealer and ex-special forces character.
My thought at the beginning was that we were going to be a pretty balanced party, with different archetypes and niches. It didn’t quite work out like that.
The campaign started in 2021, in Cincinnati, Ohio, just after we were Invited to Dance and woke up at a transchronal spanner party, during the COVID-19 pandemic (taking advantage of the empty buildings). It was the four of us, and a man from the 70s named Bart, who showed up in disco garb.
We relaxed, got some (nonalcoholic) drinks, and tried to enjoy the party and introduce ourselves, but then, there was a commotion outside. Everyone ran out, and saw an older version of Bart span in, panicking, while Rowan spanned in and shot him in the head.
The Bart that was there with us immediately freaked out and spanned away, leaving us all rather confused. We tried to gather some information, and there was a cool little bit where the bartending was being collectively done by a bunch of geminis of the bartender, who was just called “Bar Tender”.
We saw a few interesting faces, including an apparent neanderthal spanner and a Joan of Arc Gemini who showed up to investigate the shooting. There was also a concert going on, with famous artists collected from across time. The neaderthal told us to go backstage, so we did, and we saw Bart show up, shoot at the stagehands, and chop ones’ hand off, and when we investigated the body from earlier we found this strange bracelet device, along with plans for it.
After picking it up, a bunch of Exalted rolled up and got all mad about us having it, and basically told us that it was our mess, giving us the bracelet back. Apparently, it was a high power artifact that lets you span with levelers, and if we misused it we were promised a personal-style fragging out.
Then, we were dumped in 1992 by one of the Exalted, and Jacob took a point of frag. After contemplating as a party, we realized that Jacob’s family had a breakin that day, and nobody was hurt, so we broke into his child self’s house to see what was going on.
One trick I liked here is that since we were dumped in 1992 with no prep, there were a lot of difficulties that were fun to work around. We couldn’t really spend money, use our IDs, or anything, and most of the characters weren’t even born yet!
Turns out, there was this creepy guy in the front yard with a van, so we kicked his ass and drove away with him, while staging the house like Jacob remembered it being. We also did some spanner shenanigans to rob a liquor store and got the dude absolutely wasted, to prevent him from spanning out (first goofy trick!). Turns out, Bart had been breaking convicted criminals out of prison who were still imprisoned in the consensus timeline, so we’d have to return them to prison.
We realized that we’d probably have to time combat Bart, so we got in touch with the local corner, which, as it turns out, was our corner, located out of Generic Apartment Complex (its literal name). The man in charge was called Doug, the Question Man, and he was a complete jackass who would span with people by kicking them in the shins. A fun character! We also got some basic supplies, and Jacob got his hands on a copy of Continuum™. Besides the PCs, there was another person in the corner, a woman named Angelique, a 6’6” or so amazon who was a middle Aquarian from some time in the future, and who was on “house arrest” for unknown reasons. The party then realized that being an early/cusp Aquarian is the worst of all worlds, since the non-aquarians hate you for being an aquarian, and the “real” aquarians hate you for not being psychic.
Jack got some information on Bart using “research”, which I’m pretty sure was using the abstract time combat mechanics. Turns out, he just spanned in, grabbed people, and spanned out with them, for 5 prisoners total. Apparently they worked together after relesaae, and they were all held in solitary confinement, so we only know what happened because Bart spanned in and out of the hall a bunch.
We oracle the prison, and we found blueprints and got the names of the prisoners along with the security systems, with motion and hourly IR sensor checks. Turns out, one prisoner was ONLY known as Prisoner #5, and there were no photos of him, which was ominous. We spent some time looking into the prisoners more, and got armed up, and went in.
We spanned directly into Prisoner #5’s cell, between the IR checks. He wasn’t there, so we were looking around, everybody was super paranoid.
Turns out, he was on the ceiling, wearing one of those creepy “comedy” masks. He jumped on us and turned out to be a serious death machine, easily thrashing everybody in the party. We realized that we had to move him out to avoid running into Bart while fighting him, so we spanned to the corner and talked to Doug, who was like “oh god oh fuck” and had us bring Prisoner #5 to him using the Atlantean bracelet. Then, he gave the override code: one. As it turns out, Prisoner #5 was some sort of weird future android, and he would span to his cell when it was safe.
Then, Bart pulled up, and we kicked his ass. This should have caused frag and forced us to go to a whole bunch of trouble, but the GM was new at running the system so we didn’t see the issue. The day was saved!
Then, because we beat up Bart, we kept him sedated and went with him to Doug, who helped us artificially up-age him with the bracelet, and then we put the bracelet on him and spanned to the party. There, the bartender revealed himself to actually be “Bart Ender”, and woke him up and sent him to die.
We all went back to our lives for a while, doing the cover story thing. Jacob graduated from electrician’s apprentice to a full electrician and things went well. The cover story thing never quite made sense for Rowan, since he was a spec ops supersoldier arms dealer or something, but you know, we did non-Continuum character stuff.
Then, we got a letter in the corner, with coordinates, which were for an apparently uninhabited island in the Pacific.
I proposed that the group starfish to Hawaii, and this led to extreme controversy. Everybody thought the idea was ridiculous, which is fair. Instead, our characters flow commercial. In the airport, we saw three people following us.
There were two men, who were doing their best to look inconspicuous wearing 1800s clothes through an airport, and a woman in a suit, and she actually clocked one of Jacob’s geminis in the airport, so we realized we’d have to clean that up. We also investigated the two Victorians, who were named Henry Holmes and James Watson, and found out the woman was FBI Agent Enola Pistole which is about my favorite name ever.
Once we got to Hawaii, we bought a boat, but then we realized that it had been sabotaged before we were ready to depart. We stocked up on gear (lots of guns, four large empty crates that we left unguarded for a while. We investigated the boat, and found out that Watson was the one who sabotaged the boat, and agent Pistole came up to us and tried to interrogate us, but we boated away before she got around to it.
As it turned out, the island wasn’t anything like the Google Earth pictures, it was aa whole archipelago, with a big volcano, too. Most islands were barren, but one had trees, and we saw a fire on the beach and some guys in SWAT gear. They tried to take us prisoner, but we knocked them out. I think that might have been the first use of the fentanyl dart but it might have been more “manual”. Interestingly, their uniforms had an eye of providence logo, which we thought was weird.
Going onto the island, there was a primitive village, and there was a kid and a samurai. We tried to quietly knock out the kid but he ran for the guards, and the samurai started fighting us, along with a whole bunch of people who started running through the village and fleeing the scene.
The samurai was a darter, so he would dodge bullets and stuff, which was a pretty cool fight. In the end, we lobbed a grenade at him and that did the trick. Beau actually got downed in the process, so we brought him back to the ship, and put him in a closed room. Then, a gemini occurred.
Beau’s elder arrived, and stabilized the junior (a whole new kind of self-care), before joining the adventure. The time loop was that after Beau recovered in Hawaii, he went back, learned medicine, stowed away aboard the ship to go to Hawaii, and then joined the adventure.
There were a few other fights, and we made our way to a cave in the center. The village was still in chaos, but it seemed like they were guarding the cave.
Naturally, Jacob knew what to do. He spanned back to the ship, and slipshanked a flamethrower. Then, he walked back, and cleared out the cave.
I didn’t realize this at the time, but the cave was actually full of defenseless civilians. This is where the evil part of the campaign began, assuming we didn’t kill the child earlier (I might be misremembering). So Jacob had a kill count in the dozens.
Investigating the cave, we found a mysterious device, and we called Doug about it. He told us to smash it, and then when we did, the Continuum showed up in FORCE. Hundreds of spanners showed up and spanned out with the different people on the island, clearing things out. The party was commended for our good work while Beau had a mental breakdown about all the dead kids.
We went back to Hawaii and Agent Pistole had questions for us. We knocked her out and gave her the extraordinary rendition treatment, bringing her out to sea. Apparently she had an anonymous tip involving a photo from the future and an old woman, involving a “murder hotel” in Cincinnati. She was also shocked to see Jacob, who was apparently a missing person since the early 2000s, somehow, which meant that his yet was going to get interesting.
The Holmes thing was apparently a copycat of the H. H. Holmes murder castle- at least from her point of view. As it turns out, our Holmes was the original guy, too, pulled into the future.
To deal with the Agent Pistole situation, we contacted Angelique, who rolled up in a sportscar. Being an aquarian, she hypnotized Agent Pistole, and that was when I realized that hypnosis is actually stupid OP.
To deal with the Holmes/Watson problem we jumped Watson when he was sabotaging the boat, hit him with the fent dart, and then dragged him to some random shed to interrogate him after boozing him up. He had a creepy vintage surgical set, and said he was taking orders from someone in a group called the Order of the Hourglass. Then, he tried to span out, vanishing for a moment before reapparing and splitting into two parts, before those parts caught on fire.
After that, we went back to Cincinnati to investigate the murder hotel ourselves. It was in a strange mixed-use building, with a McDonalds and stuff, and seemed medium-nice. We considered renting a room, but then we realized that Holmes was running the counter.
We hit him with the ketamine dart and he went down, and a gunfight broke out. Some civilians were killed by Rowan. We assumed that Holmes was down for the count, but then, he was fine again- a new trick by the GM to nerf the fent dart. Then, he hid under his desk, and disappeared, leaving his clothes behind.
After a minute of confusion, we realized that he had spanned down, under the building. There was a strange maze of passages down there, and he wasn’t anywhere to be seen. Clearly, his span range wasn’t very good, but he was hiding somewhere in the maze.
But we realized that we could simultaneously search every space at once, by spanning down. So Jacob immediately found him running for an exit, buck naked, and we gunned him down. Watson also showed up, and revealed himself to be Jack the Ripper. The idea of a killed antagonist showing up again isn’t that shocking, but we weren’t totally sure what to do about him. We ended up knocking him out and dragging him outside, before setting the building on fire and leaving him.
The next session, we were in the corner, and there was an explosion that demolished a high-rise downtown, and we all took a point of frag. After investigating, we found that a janitor had been persuaded to place a bomb in the building. We got the bomb, and it turned out to be covered in a bunch of gear that we’d used, including darts, bullets, a grenade, and some dynamite (which belonged to Doug). We replaced it with a bomb that didn’t include any of our personal equipment, and found out that the janitor was given the device at the local airport.
So we went there, and of course, it was Bart. By this point in the campaign, our party’s appearance was enough to give Bart a panic attack, and we dragged him into a bathroom to talk to him. He basically said that we told him to set it up, which confused us, and he said that he wasn’t going to cause us any frag and spanned away.
We realized that Bart was probably hiding in one of the two remaining crates aboard the ship (there were a lot of jokes about that). We went there, gave him the stuff to make the bomb (which we got from different places), and then threatened to frag him out if he didn’t set up the bomb, so it all worked out.
Jack, who started with a rank in dreaming, had an ominous dream where he saw some ominous shit. Specifically, a gigantic crack splitting open the night sky. This was considered to be “very bad”.
Jacob got a letter from a hospital, addressed to his fake ID. Turns out, it was Prisoner #5, who had gone into a coma in prison. He was in the hospital, and Jacob was the emergency contact.
So we pulled up, feeling very paranoid about the whole thing. Turns out, Prisoner #5 just wanted to talk, and we spoke with him. The nurses were VERY freaked out, because the comedy mask thing was fused to his face on the skeletal level, but other than that he appears perfectly human, which was freaky.
Prisoner $5 explained that some bad shit was going to go down, and that his usual job was to kill people who weren’t supposed to exist- those born because of time manipulation. The people on the island were like that, too. He also said that some things were going to happen, and eventually we’d need to fight him because he would be subverted, but he said that whatever he did, his actions would never cause frag.
He also told us to investigate a company called Hourglass Inc., a shipping company, and we were told to leave before he made his escape.
Hourglass Inc. turned out to be a shipping company, with headquarters in town, so we broke in. We were all keyed up, but the place was totally empty, except for a single security guard (hit him with the fent dart) and the boss, who was just working in his office.
We pulled up on the boss and figured that we should talk to him before we fight him. He seemed like he didn’t know what was going on, and started panicking, so we tried to talk to him.
Then boom, he hits Jacob with a magic wand type vessel, doing a whole bunch of damage. He’s also able to stop us from shooting at him when he looks at us. We’re freaking out, but Beau’s player has an idea, and says everyone should leave.
Turns out, Beau was carrying a bandolier of grenades, and talks for a while, before spanning away. Leaving a whole pile of grenades behind, cooked and ready to blow.
The office is full of meat paste, along with the magic wand vessel and a ~~sonichu medallion~~ medallion-shaped vessel of cursed energies that makes him impossible to target when he concentrates. Beau puts on the medallion and blacks out briefly, with voices speaking to him and walking in the desert, and we decide it’s best to give it to the Quickers, who pull up and put it in Cold Storage, along with the wand.
I was concerned that he faked his own death, so Jacob spanned back down and shot Machiavelli through the head the moment after Beau spanned out, before he had the chance to disappear. The GM confirmed that Machiavelli was going to fake his death, so chalk a win up for paranoia.
From documents we found at Hourglass, Inc. we knew that the island was a lot more serious, but we came up with a plan. Using our “One Big Score” money, we bought an An-26, hazmat suits, and chemical weapons, along with nerve agent treatments, skydiving equipment, and guns.
Our plan was to fly over from Greenland, since the island was in the Atlantic, after bribing an airfield to let us fly out. Around this time, Beau developed clairvoyance, which proved to be OP. A spanner showed up on the wing, and we ended up grabbing him and defusing a bomb he planted, and the guy was carrying a shitload of knives and a blade fan, with order of the hourglass tattoos, too. Turns out, he was from Shogunate-era Japan. He told us that they had hostages, and ended up spanning away, which was fine.
It was fine, because we dispersed nerve gas over the island and then parachuted in, wearing hazmat suits and dosed up to the gills with BCHE in case we ended up getting hurt.
Searching the island, we found three buildings which were protected against nerve agents, and we broke in, fighting our way through. Once your characters have instant skilled up to master in firearms, the combat becomes really easy, so we were just powering through these guys.
We found strange devices, and a room with clerks (gave them an “antidote”- in truth, nerve agents do have treatment regimens but they won’t save your life on their own). There was a comms array on the roof, which Jack shut down and took the computer for, and there was a particle accelerator in the basement and a span jammer. We destroyed the span jammer, but this time, the Continuum didn’t show up. And worse, it was guarded by a man with a spear, who was teleporting all over the place. He ended up getting killed, but Jacob had a spear in his side, so he spanned out to the ocean since he was very close to death, and floated there, waiting for the end of the fight and calling for backup.
Meanwhile, the spear guy was actually still fighting, in a huge swarm of geminis, and running around in the nerve gas cloud without any protective gear. Shitloads of his geminis were dying, but he just kept going, ignoring the frag. Not sure about the mechanics of that, but it was a cool scene. The rest of the party ran underground to avoid fighting him, and they found the other span jammer, guarded by Machiavelli!
When confronted, he said that he had been killed, and killing him there would lead to second death, but we didn’t believe it, since we thought he had been replaced by a body double. So we killed him, causing a second death and giving us all hella frag. But the span jammer went down, and the Continuum showed up again, and this time along with a single Inheritor ship, doing who knows what. All the survivors were spanned out, and it turns out that the hostage thing was just a bluff. The frag from the second death was also suddenly resolved, and we got a first-edition copy of The Prince for our trouble. The Inheritors left after grabbing all the really weird tech, but also endowed us with span two.
Due to player absence, we retconned that Beau had been KO’d by a falling coconut on landing (with a body of two, it was plausible). He had bizarre dreams of stars moving in the sky, being stalked by semi-human figures, and explosions. Very ominous. Very scorpiod.
We searched the island, and found some stuff, but nothing super significant.
Then, we realized that we could get more information about what was going on by investigating the spooky dream. We all instant skilled dreamsharing, and we went down. Then, we did some fuckery , and Beau dreamshared his junior, unconscious self, getting access to the dream, letting us double check that they were, in fact, scorpiods.
As a little diversion, we then had to pay off our debt to the moneychangers for the whole plane-nerve agent thing. They asked us to do a favor, intimidating some IRS agents that were involved in moneychanger laundering schemes and thinking of betraying them.
It was in DC, so we flew over using the starfish method. It was fun, since we were like “yeah we’ve killed hundreds of people, we know where you live,” yada yada. Also one of the guys in the IRS asked us to kill his coworker for being a bad person, and the Continuum agreed that she was so horrible that we had to do it, and she really was that horrible. So we killed her.
At span 2, it was about time for Jacob to fake his death, so we wrapped that up to avoid future confusion about the missing persons thing. Then, the whole party got an invite to Foxhorn, and we decided to call our corner “The Waffle House”. And picked up a waffle maker.
Of course, the corner was always foxhorn, an we got some welcome gifts (defusal kit, mind reading machine, scannesyrxis). The mind reading machine was a HUGE benefit for our party, since it meant that we went from “shoot first, ask questions of the junior” to “shoot first, ream the dead body with the mind scanner”.
Another ominous dream happened, this time about a child crying in a hospital, while shadowy figures stands around, Beau also dreamed of being in a desert, watched by 7 figures…
We realized that we could find out more by investigating the vessel dream, so we went back in time and dreamshared with Beau while he was blacked out. Turns out, the vessel was mae from a boy named David, and he dreams of wandering in the desert. He’s from another time, and doesn’t know of any other part of history. Said some ominous shit about “the hour approaches” and “the door will open”.
Jack and Beau investigated Machiavelli’s office, did some stuff that Jacob wasn’t told about (due to his rather questionable ethics), and Angelique taught Jacob hypnosis in exchange for mind wiping some random preteen girl (he didn’t ask questions). At this point, Jacob was being characterized as a dangerous maniac and psycho.
Turns out, there was some dangerous kid that Angelique was holding in a containment field in an abandoned warehouse. She was a crasher, and Beau was trying to cheer her up with dreamsharing, which didn’t work at all. Some conversation involving the kid also confirmed that a scorpiod king was involved, which had us all spooked.
Jacob was called in after a bunch of smoke grenades showed up, so he pulled up in HAZMAT and with a gun. Turns out, warehouse is being attached by some ninja looking individual, and they’re trying to shut down the field and free the child.
Jacob resolves the situation in the simplest way possible- he shoots the child. The ninja spans away. We take down the field, and the girl’s cells aren’t decaying, for unknown reasons.
Suddenly, there’s a knife at Jacob’s throat, and a buzzing magnet against his back. He spans anyway, and domes the person in the head, a dangerous Narcissist operative called the Shadow. Reaming shows that the ninja has a memory that’s largely been wiped, leaving only her skills, so good for us. The child resurrects and spans out, but we recovered the vessel that let her resurrect, an old musket and musket ball. If you’re shot with the musket ball, it creates a ‘save state” for your body, that you can return to, and Machiavelli had it. Pretty cool stuff, it goes into cold storage.
Jacob spends like a year in recovery after this. There was a sidequest where Angelique asks us to pick up a loaf of wonderbread from the store, and we end up having to fight the staff of a Walmart, one at a time. Turns out, it’s a creature called a Dream Ghoul (named by the players) which was released by dreamsharing with the vessel. The ghoul possesses sleeping people, but we end up trapping the ghoul in a body and have it sent to cold storage, hopefully this time for good.
We get the bread to Angelique- resolving some frag that she had- and we’re not totally sure what to do. We consider tracking down the shadow, but we decide to do a little diversion- investigating the decades of the 21st century.
We jump into each decade, and we find that the Waffle House is eventually succeeded by another group, The Evils of War, who carried on our legacy of war crimes. Beau gets pyrokinesis around this time. In 2040, we met an early inventor of time travel, an Aquarian, who is being blackmailed by the president. The Continuum tasks us with stopping this, so we threaten the future president, Yevin (pronounced Kevin) Carlsbad into letting him go. Pyrokinesis is used horrifically for this. To prepare for future shenanigans, we pick up a super-pressure-resistant container that can become less resistant on command, and bring it to the past- fortunately, no nanotech, and we just keep it in the corner.
Jacob gets a bloodstained letter on special letterhead, but preempts the plot point by spanning there, writing the letter, getting blood on it, and sending it down in time. We were very nervous about the scorpiod kings, although I had a theory for beating them.
Instead, we visited Bart, since he did leave us with a bit of a loose end.
We found a bar, where dozens of geminis were all enjoying themselves with geminis of a woman, named Cassandra. He was very on edge to see us, but we talked to him for a while, and out of character I was glad that he had some good things happen to him in his life.
One of the geminis told us about a secret Order of the Hourglass base- the last one- which he’d give us the address to if we agreed not to visit a hospital room in a maternity ward at a specific date and time. We agreed. Jacob immediately contacted the Continuum, and went to the coordinates, which were for an island in a lake in Northern Canada.
We took the plane again, and Beau filled the container with water and then concentrated on it for the entire trip using pyrokinesis. The flight was long, and the temperature rose by 3600 degrees Celsius every hour. When we got to the island, we threw the container out the back, and switched it into “weak to pressure” mode, causing every building on the island to be flattened and all structures destroyed.
Mission complete, we returned to Cincinnati, and Bart was aghast to learn that, in fact, every time we went to one of those islands we really did a lot of murdering.
There was a brief intermission where we defused a problem in our yets. In the Shadow’s memories, we fought her and lost. So we talked to the thespians and they helped us fake losing the fight, in exchange for getting good footage of it to post on DreamHub (explained below).
Then, there was only one thing left to do. We showed up to the maternity ward. Bart wasn’t there, but his partner (or wife?) was, and the shadow showed up, and took away the newborn child. Beau briefly put the woman into hypothermic shock while we tried to fight the shadow, but she skedaddled, and so we decided to talk to Cassandra.
But as soon as she was unfrozen, she downed Beau (body of 2) instantly and hurt the rest of the party with a psychic screech. It was the first fight where we didn’t land the first hit,and it was brutal because of the quick penalties. She fled the room, and I decided to unveil my secret ace in the hole: the slipshank strategy. This instantly killed Cassandra, ending the fight, and we did a brief cleanup and took the time to rest before we tracked down the Shadow.
Clairvoyance let us find the Shadow’s span destination, and we tracked her for a while, until we found where she left the baby, at an orphanage.
We went there, and were going to take the baby, when Angelique showed up, working at the orphanage.
She explained that the baby was her, and she was forbidden from spanning while she was being retrained by the continuum. And she said that we actually missed the real plan of the Order of the Hourglass. She gave us a time and a place, and told us to come loaded for bear.
The group set up a particle accelerator for polonium manufacturing and got prepped. At this point, we were feeling pretty strong, so we weren’t worried. I also came up with a demented scheme to deal with Prisoner #5, since we knew we were going to fight him in the final battle, and that he was pretty strong.
There was another strange machine, and the Shadow, and Prisoner #5, in an abandoned railyard. When they saw us, the Shadow started working, and Prisoner #5 approached, but I activated my stupid bullshit plan to immediately resolve the Prisoner #5 problem: beaming a “factory reset” into his brain (this is something that’s indirectly established as possible in the GM section of the rulebook). This instantly took him out of the fight, although sadly didn’t turn him to our side.
In the meantime, the shadow activated the machine, and it began to pulse. Beau froze her brain, knocking her unconscious, but the machine was already active. We hit her with the fentanyl/polonium cocktail dart, for good measure. Another gemini showed up, and we did the same thing. We also tried destroying the machine, dropping rubble on it, whatever we could find.
Angelique was actually there for the fight- but she was occupied with fighting the gemini spear guy, and we were pretty glad that she was holding that down.
Unfortunately, the machine reached completion, shrinking down into a singularity and then exploding outwards.
There was a man with no eyes standing before us. The scorpiod king had arrived.
Now, this was the failstate of the campaign, but I think that we actually didn’t reach it naturally. I told the GM that I had a plan to defeat a scorpiod king, and he didn’t believe me.
So I executed the plan.
Now, in Continuum, spanning at ground zero of a nuclear explosion actually applies frag if you do it before the explosion, so it’s impossible to slipshank a nuclear explosion to your location if you’ve spanned. But the slipshank doesn’t have to be close.
In the 1960s, the United States government was big into nuclear weapons research, and one of their more interesting project was the Casaba-Howitzer directed nuclear weapon. There are details on Wikipedia, but basically, it’s a nuclear weapon that shoots an intense plasma beam in one direction. From what I’ve read, it was never built in real life. But Continuum establishes that there is a nuclear war in the future, and this weapon is considered technically plausible. We traveled to the future.
The plasma beam created by a Casaba-Howitzer nuclear device travels at nearly the speed of light. Therefore, it could be extremely close to you without you knowing. Scorpiod Kings have high stats. But not that high- No Eyes has a body of 15 and a quick of 25. The quick of 25 means that he goes ~2.5 times in each stage. That means that his reactions are fast. But not nanosecond fast.
A body of 15 is tough. But 9 IP is stated as the damage for a “LAW rocket to the face”. Compared to a gigantic pillar of plasma, reaching down from the heavens?
So, Jacob spent one frag, slipshanked a nuclear strike, and prayed for Inheritor intervention. It came. The party was transported into space, watching the enormous flash of light. The beam was relatively directed, but inheritor cleanup would be needed just for the satellites ruined alone.
Then, they were returned to Earth. But Jacob was presented with his own dead body, a piece of rebar forced through his chest.