The kill streak counter seems to be a bit broken? Like, sometimes I'll lob a volley of grenades into a swarm of bugs and clearly kill them, but the little kill streak counter won't trigger unless I direct impact them. Or I'll clearly shoot a devastators face off with the AMR and no number will pop up. This is especially apparent when using Stratagems like the 500kg bomb or Orbitals. I'll throw it in, it'll blow up, and clearly kill stuff but the counter won't show up. But also, 30% ish of the time it works normally?
Not a super pressing issue, but weird and a little annoying. I'd like to see this fixed, because it's pretty important to know whether or not I kill a charger with a 500kg before the partical effect clears, along with many other situations where that feedback would be helpful. I'm really trying to avoid sounding like one of the many "woe is me everything is broken" people on here, so sorry if it came across that way, I was just a little confused about this issue and whether or not it's a skill issue or a bug.

Beginnings. Illustrious. Vivacious. Monstrous. Scintillating. Star-Studded. Nautical. Creeping. Vainglorious. Luminous. Villainous. Venerable. Exuberant. Esteemed. Legendary…. Epic. Wonderful, Briliant, Victorious, Foundational, Iconic!!! Champions. Sixteen of them. One prize. One Ultimate Champion. Who will beat all other winners and become the ultimate winner themselves? As we get ready to close the curtain one last time on Bunny’s Big Brother, let’s find out who is the Shining Star of our champion cast in Bunny’s Pokémon Big Brother CHAMPION ROYALE!
Season Finale: CHAMPION ROYALE!!!
Meet the Cast:
Season 1 – Lance the Escavalier
Season 2 – Carlos the Pangoro
Season 3 – Nickels the Nickit
Season 4 – Xio the Meowscarada
Season 5 – Selene the Lampent
Season 6 – Candy the Wigglytuff
Season 7 – Splaatz the Stunfisk
Season 8 – Dirk the Kricketune
Season 9 – Echo the Arctibax
Season 10 – Mobee the Bewear
Season 11 – Professor Bane the Crobat
Season 12 – Lisette the Solrock
Season 13 – Maeva the Chimeco
Season 14 – Dayley-Jane the Dewgong
Season 15 – DJ Volt Switch the Emolga
Season 16 – Benedict the Chespin
Intro: We are reporting live at the site of Bunny’s Pokémon Big Brother Finale House! The crowd is thick and loud as fans from all over are excited to watch the sixteen champions enter the house LIVE! We stand in Poketopia, home of the Battle Revolution! The Shining Neon Colloseum, in a penthouse suite in the grand city is where the final bout will begin! Here come the Legendary Sixteen right now!!!! Lance the original winner is so stunning in his armor! Carlos has evolved and looks much tougher. Nickels is strutting in conifdent as ever next to Xio, who looks completely unphased by all of the winners around her! Selene fits right in with the bright lights. Looks like Candy is evolved as well and—OH—she tripped over Splaatz. That’s embarrassing and you can tell she isn’t happy even if she’s putting on a smile. Dirk and Echo are next, both eyeing up the competition already. Echo being evolved now already ups his threat level. Mobee gets an uproarious cheer from the crowd! And WOW the Professor gracefully glides over the crowd! He really did escape capture back in Mazda’s Season. Lisette seems to be meditating and Maeva is pumping herself up. She looks a bit snooty now that we know how she really is but we are eager to see how she plays. Dayley-Jane gets another huge cheer from the crowd. She really is a lovable gal ain’t she? DJ clicks a track on the DJ booth to keep one last song playing but then hops out to join the entourage. She’s still keeping up her day job too, so inspiring! Finally, Benedict walks up. Unlike the others, he looks somber. Wonder what his deal is? Oh well, let’s watch them all compete in the bright stadium for the first HOH!
First HOH: In this bright lights HOH, the houseguests all race to complete a task, with the first to complete it knocking someone out of the running. In the first heat, Maeva clears first and knocks out Bane because he came in second and is a huge comp threat. In the next round, Echo wins and takes out Maeva, who just won. Splaatz wins round three by accident and takes out Day, who was big on his original season. Candy wins next and takes out Nickels. Xio takes out DJ, followed by Benedict winning and immediately knocking Xio out. Candy wins again and takes out Dirk. Echo then wins again to take out Candy before she gets too much momentum. Carlos wins and takes out Lance, Mobee then wins and takes out Carlos, Benedict then wins and takes out Mobee! Splaatz wins again and takes out Selene as she is hiding in the background. Lisette wins the next round to take out Benedict. In the final three, Echo wins again and takes out Lisette, as she did a good job hiding til then. In Splaatz versus Echo, the fish surprisingly keeps up with the dragon and at the last second, takes over?!?!?! Splaatz is the first HOH!
Week 1: Splaatz is very confused how he won that last round but Echo comes up and congratulates him. The two get along well and Splaatz works up the courage to ask to be in an alliance, which the dragon happily agrees. Bane goes to Candy to tell her that the villains need to stick together, she agrees and they grab Maeva. She is initially reluctant, not trusting Bane, but she agrees eventually. Mobee goes to monitor the living room like before and DJ flies up to him. They end up chatting and realize they enjoy each other. At the nomination ceremony, Splaatz has decided to put up DJ and Dirk, saying how he doesn’t want to make too much waves and this seems to be the way to do it best. Dirk is unamused and DJ is frightened. Echo gets suspicious of Bane and shares his thoughts with Nickels, they pull in Carlos to form an anti-villain alliance. Benedict eavesdrops and plans his next move. He goes up to Nickels and makes up how Dirk must be playing the villain this time, because he is acting weird. Nickels considers his approach but ultimately decides to trust him as an alliance member. At the veto, Carlos, Echo, and Mobee all play but it comes down to Carlos and Splaatz. Splaatz ends up winning again but while actually trying and is exuberant! DJ pleads with him but he ultimately keeps his noms the same.
After the veto ceremony, Benedict tells DJ to do as he says and trust him, as Gigi did. She agrees and starts buttering up to the villains. She gets Candy to be even nicer to the house and apologize to Splaatz. She also helps Bane create a new game. Meanwhile, Benedict starts prodding Dirk and Day, causing them to be at odds with each other. Dirk eventually snaps and lashes out at Day, shocking everyone. Maeva can tell something fishy is happening but rolls with it since it is week one. At the eviction ceremony in the glittering colosseum, the two nominees tell why they should stay. Dirk is more bitter while DJ stays heartfelt, convincing everyone but a suspicious Maeva. In the end, by a vote of 12 to 1… Dirk, you have been evicted.
Week 2: The next HOH is a high flying roulette-themed obstacle course, based off of the Neon Colosseum’s roulette rules. DJ and Mobee work together to get to the end but Nickels keeps up with them. In the final stretch, Mobee sees Nickels catching up and throws DJ, giving her just enough of an edge to win the HOH! Nickels and Maeva both approach DJ to tell her their suspicions on Benedict’s behavior. At first, they fight, but realizing they have the same goal causes them to cut it out long enough to tell her. DJ is reluctant but Maeva reminds her how he betrayed Gigi and she is firm. Benedict and Carlos become the nominees. Day, Echo, and Maeva play in the veto and Echo actually manages to come out on top over Day. Echo talks with Nickels about saving Carlos but she is hesitant, telling him that Carlos makes a good pawn next to benedict because everyone likes Carlos. He ends up not using it. During the week, Benedict begins making breakfast early, irritating his roommate Carlos and causing him to be grumpier. Xio confronts Benedict for this, telling him he is purposefully making Carlos mad and it’s brutal. He tells her he doesn’t understand the problem if Carlos doesn’t like breakfast. She sneers but doesn’t have a comeback. The next day, Benedict holds a house meeting. He apologizes if he’s been rubbing people the wrong way but he is just trying to fit in since he is newer. Lisette says that everyone should give him a chance, which the villains, Selene, and Mobee agree with. Echo, Carlos, Nickels, and Maeva are all hesitant. At the eviction ceremony, Carlos is grumpy and bitter and doesn’t do much to defend himself. Benedict, again apologizes. In a 9 to 3 vote… Carlos is evicted.
Week 3: Several house membets are completely shocked by Carlos going home, including HOH DJ and his two allies, Nickels and Echo. Also surprised is Xio. The next HOH is an endurance comp called the floor is lava based off of the Lava Colosseum! Mobee, Splaatz, and Xio are the last three remaining. Knowing she was on the outs of the last vote, Xio fights hard to survive, fighting her pain. Splaatz eventually drops and Mobee remains with Xio. Eventually, Mobee drops and Xio wins! Xio already knows her noms. She puts up Benedict next to Selene, as she was one of the people vouching for him last round. Benedict chooses to stay back and not make too much of a scene this round, lest he blow up his cover. Meanwhile, DJ and Mobee plan how to move forward. Maeva is listening in to this convo and realizes how close they are. At the veto, a mental comp, Selene ends up winning by a landslide, saving herself. Maeva rushes to Xio about the DJ and Mobee situation, and points out how Mobee is a comp threat as well. Xio decides Mobee is a good replacement, as he is likeable and a good pawn next to Benedict. Mobee holds a house meeting and cries during it, thinking he was doing so much better at being friendly this time. Maeva calls him out for his crocodile tears and argues that he is putting on an act. Lisette calls out Maeva for being so harsh and chastises her for being such a villain. Maeva asks her if she is planning on voting for him to stay and she is silent, but says that shouldn’t matter. Maeva retorts and says it’s not jury so jury management doesn’t exist yet. At the eviction, Mobee is shaking next to a smug Benedict. Benedict’s speech touches on how Mobee doesn’t seem ready for the big leagues. The bear gets up angrily and almost picks up Benedict, shocking everyone. He stops himself and realizes what he did. The vote comes in and by a vote of 8 to 3, Mobee, you have been evicted.
Week 4: The next HOH begins as they houseguests must ascend a glimmering rock wall, themed after the Crystal colosseum. Day and Maeva take an early lead but are caught up by falling rocks. Lisette closes the gap and eventually surpasses Maeva. Day and Lisette race for the end and… Lisette win! Lisette in her HOH room ponders about who to put up and ally with. She turns to Xio, Day, and Selene as her allies. The Witch’s Coven, as they call themselves, wants to shift the focus, as Benedict is doing too well at not going home. Instead, Lisette targets Maeva, who is playing sneaky, as well as Benedict’s ally, Echo. Bane laughs at Maeva being on the block and she is enraged with him. He says “it doesn’t matter since it’s not jury yet.” Having her own words turned on her, Maeva storms out and swears she will get revenge on him and Candy. At the POV, the witches’ coven is playing with three members and Xio ends up winning! She chooses to keep the nominations the same. Splaatz goes to Lance to tell him how much it means to be there with one of his heros, but Lance mishears him and calls him out for calling him a rude name. The two get in a petty argument where Lance’s bad hearing keeps making things worse. Meanwhile, Maeva tries to get the vote off of her by spreading anti-Benedict propaganda around the house. Day has a change of heart about this and wants to vote out Echo, even while her alliance is targeting Maeva. Benedict, aware his name is still out there, pleads to DJ not to vote out his ally. At the eviction, Maeva thinks she has done enough work but the vote comes out and is a 5 to 5. The Coven is shocked, one of their own must have flipped. But Lisette gets to break the tie, and is all too happy to evict her target, Maeva.
Week 5: The next HOH is themed after the Sunset colosseum, and sees the houseguests racing to stack piles of rubble. Echo, DJ, and Xio make the highest stack but DJ’s crumbles before the time limit. Both wanting to take control, Echo and Xio try really hard to build the highest. The timer buzzes aaaand Echo is the winner! Benedict instinctively high fives Echo and celebrates with him. Later, Nickels is peeved that Echo is so publicly working with Benedict. Echo tells her she had the opportunity to have a good ally but she chose to burn that bridge and that’s her fault. Offended, she tells him to make that alliance with Benedict work out but she won’t be part of it. Echo is saddened, but doesn’t want to put Nickels up. Instead, he shifts the target to former villains, with Bane being the target and Selene going up next to him. Xio cheers that Selene could be going home, making the Lamp angry at her, since they were supposed to be working together. Benedict goes on to win the veto and vows to Echo not to use it. However, at the veto ceremony, he uses it to save Selene, shocking everyone as he winks at Xio. Echo then solidifies this by putting Xio up. Selene goes to her to tell her she is sorry for their misunderstanding but they work together. Candy turns to Lisette and tells her she is tired of working with Bane and if she helps her get the Professor out this week, she will work with her. Lisette agrees, knowing everyone wants Bane out anyways. At the eviction, Xio seemingly patches things up with everyone. The vote comes in, by a unanimous vote… Bane, you are evicted.
Double Eviction: Surprise! The Jury starts tonight and the next HOH is beginning right now with one more person leaving! A quiz colosseum is held in the Sunset colloseum, with one miss causing someone to be out of the running. It comes down to DJ, Nickels, and Lisette. But Lisette gets the last question right and the other two miss, with Lisette winning her second HOH. Lisette puts up Nickels and Day. Nickels because she is playing a lowkey game but making waves in the Benedict situation. Day because she wavered on her vote for Benedict. She doesn’t put down Benedict as he is good for drama and polarizing the house, which is good for her game. Nickels wins the veto and takes herself off. Lisette decides to put up Splaatz, because she is worried he will fumble his way to the end. Most people seem to share this idea except for Echo, who wants to wotk with Splaatz. The vote comes in. By a vote of 7 to 1… Splaatz, you have been evicted and will be moving into the jury house.
Week 6: The Next HOH begins as a race through the mysterious mansion in the courtyard colosseum. No one can tell where anyone is but Candy comes out first and wins! As HOH, Candy calls in Benedict. She tells him he has been playing a sloppy and obvious villain game and he is gonna get evicted too soon if he doesn’t simmer down and get some real allies. He is shocked and admits he just wants to win. She says they all do and the least they can do is help each other. She says she will help him if he keeps causing more chaos and also gets DJ on their side. He agrees and talks to DJ. The squirrel is hesitant but decides it would be a great way of getting revenge on Benedict if she gets the chance. Candy puts up Lance as the pawn next to her target, Xio, who has been against Benedict’s chaos this whole game. DJ goes on to win the veto and chooses to not give Candy any suspicion by not using it. Meanwhile, the witches coven fractures, with Day not agreeing with Lisette and Xio feeling not supported on the block by Selene. DJ infiltrates this meeting after storms out, telling them about Xio being the real target but she has a plan to keep her without drawing suspicion if they can get Day to play nice. Xio borrows an item from Lisette and breaks it. Lisette then goes to “rant” to Day, who is being nice with her, thinking they both will vote Xio. Echo, meanwhile, confirms his alliance with Benedict, and feels like he is finally gaining more traction. But the house takes this the wrong way. At the eviction, the vote comes in, and by a vote of 4 to 3… Lance, you have been evicted.
Week 7: The next HOH begins, a waterfall diving competition, based off of the Waterfall Colosseum. Whoever makes the biggest splash wins! With her natural watery prowess, Day dives in and wins the HOH! Day is approached in the HOH by Candy and Benedict, who ask her to work with them. DJ sees whats happening and goes back to Lisette and Selene. The two talk and realize that they can’t beat Benedict’s control of the house by just going against him, but they have to work with him. So the three of DJ, Lisette, and Selene enter the HOH “accidentally” and propose the six will control the house. They say they want Echo to go on the block, as he is getting too good at the comps. Benedict is hesitant but Candy nudges him, as secretly this will be great for her game. He agrees and tells Day he won’t be mad if this happens. Echo goes up next to Nickels. The two former allies face off in the veto, both bitterly making jabs at the other for turning on them. It comes down to just the two nominees and… Echo edges her out, winning the veto. Echo saves himself and puts the power in Day’s hands to put up a replacement. Her choice is the person not in her alliance who has made affronts to her, Xio. Lisette has the whole house do tarot readings to ease the tension which goes down well. Lisette gets the Sun, a symbol of positivity and creativity. Benedict draws the Moon, symbolizing Illusion and inner conflict. He shudders when the white moon of the card turns red in his hands. Echo draws the Fool, a card of new beginnings but also endings. Selene draws death, the card of change in the game. Nickels draws the Hermit, a card of isolation and reflection. Candy draws the Lovers, with the card representing connections and pairs, symbolizing her manipulation of Benedict. Day draws Strength, a card of inner strength and Willpower. Xio draws the Tower, representing sudden downfall and incredible sudden changes. She shudders and uses the moment to apologize to everyone, saying she wants to be a beacon of hope but got lost. The house receives this well. Benedict considers flipping to Xio because of her show of faith being bad but Candy reminds him that Xio is on the bottom of the pecking order on that side, likely meaning they don’t even have to take her out. He relents and the eviction goes through. The vote comes in and by a vote of 5 to 1, Nickels you have been evicted.
Week 8: The Next HOH begins in the Sunny Park colosseum, with contestants having to hunt for pellets and use them to knock out targets. DJ and Echo prove the most adept but in a last second victory, Echo wins. Benedict goes to Echo in the HOH but Echo has realized too late that Benedict is working with everybody, even causing him to turn on Nickels. Benedict doesn’t try to hide his smug smirk as he agrees and walks out, daring him to put him on the block. He feels this must be hiding something and starts asking around the house for their opinions. Xio reveals the existence of the Witches Coven, and how they have been together for weeks, including saving her last week. Knowing of this alliance, Echo saves Xio and puts up Selene and Day. At the veto, Selene wins. Selene approaches Echo, telling him she knows of someone playing both sides, revealing DJ trying to play double agent. After she pulls herself off the block, DJ goes up as the replacement. Candy works on ingratiating herself with the outsiders in Xio and Echo, trying to forge paths ahead. But is unsuccessful at breaking Echo. Echo is accosted by DJ for putting her up over Benedict. He asks her to say why she was double crossing and she says its because she was trying to sabotage Benedict. If anything, Day, Selene, and Lisette should be the real double agents. Echo goes to rage to Selene for how she tricked him but she swears it was the truth completely, and he chose to believe it in a negative light, not her. Day joins the fight and lashes out at Xio and Selene for being the reason she is on the block. Lisette stays out of it, knowing the time to jump ship is coming up. At the eviction, Dj and DayJay give their pleas, but the votes are tallied. By a unanimous vote… Dayley-Jane, you have been evicted.
Double Eviction!!: Second double eviction because you know we gotta! The HOH starts with a lightning round of dodgeball on wooden poles. Selene is knocked out first. Then DJ gets knocked out by Candy. Lisette falls off on her own. Xio goes after Benedict but is taken out by Candy. Then Candy expertly dodges and takes out Benedict, winning the HOH. She nominates the two people who are on the bottom of the pecking order, Echo and Xio. The veto plays out with Benedict winning. Echo pleads for Benedict to help him out, as they were friends. Benedict doesn’t even look him in the eye as he chooses to not play the veto. Echo pleads to the voters to let him keep playing and he will take out Benedict, but Lisette and Selene have basically already jumped ship and moved on. The vote comes in, and by a vote of 4 to 0… Echo, you have been evicted.
Week 9: With Six houseguests remaining, they are taken to the Gateway colosseum to have mock Pokemon battles. In the first round, Xio beats Lisette and Selene beats DJ, with Benedict drawing a spot in the top 3. In a first to win two times in a row scenario, Selene beats both and comes out victorious. Selene and Lisette decide that they have to cut ties and work with the more devious players to have a better shot at the end. Selene puts up DJ and Xio, with DJ being the target. Benedict is alone in his room when he hallucinates more blood on his paws. He shouts and Xio comes in to see whats up. She helps him calm down and he realizes he is down a bad path. She helps him calm down and he thanks her, even with him harassing her all game she still helped him. Candy witnesses the two help each other out and is beyond irritated, she goes to Selene, who is still iffy on Xio, to warn her. At the veto, Candy wins it. She takes off DJ and Selene spitefully puts up Benedict, who trembles going to the block. Lisette confronts Selene for making such a rushed decision, as the goal was to keep Benedict and his threat around longer. At the eviction, Benedict argues that he has realizes how the game has changed him and he wants to prove how he changed. Lisette doesn’t believe him but DJ seems to be enamored. The vote comes in, and by a vote of 2 to 1… Xio you have been evicted.
Week 10: Five stars remain and there are five points in the Stars of the Main Street colosseum, where the houseguests go to do a full BPBB quiz! Lisette misses one question and gets behind as the other get ahead. It comes down to a tie-breaker between Dj and Benedict and the winner is… DJ! Benedict goes to apologize to DJ for real and she forgives him, happy to see his true self back again. She feels played by Selene and Candy so they go on the block. Lisette is still suspicious of Benedict and starts watching him for suspicious activity, noticing him look at his paws a lot. She decides to talk to him with the ruse of working together. At the veto, DJ wins again and claims her game, choosing not to use the veto. Realizing the danger they are in, Selene and Candy go to their respective closest allies, Benedict and Lisette. The two touch base with Benedict telling Lisette he is fine voting Candy with her, as he doesn’t want to force DJ to have to break a tie. At the eviction, the votes are read and by a vote of 2 to 0… Selene, you have been evicted. Benedict looks over at Lisette with a shocked look, realizing she caught on to him.
Week 10: As the final HOH starts, the houseguest are in the Stargazer colosseum for an epic triathlon of quizzes, endurance, and races. In the first part, Benedict pulls ahead, with Lisette on his tail. He falls behind in part two, giving Lisette and Candy a chance to catch him. The three are neck and neck in part three but Lisette comes out on top! Benedict goes to Lisette on her HOH to grovel but she stops him, saying she misheard the vote last week and though the vote was for Selene anyways so its good he didn’t make poor DJ break the tie. He feels reassured and goes back out. Lisette puts up DJ and Candy as the nominees. Lisette reassures DJ about how Benedict likes her and she wouldn’t go home. Benedict touches base with Lisette, claiming that he knows DJ has too much social traction and needs to go next because of this. On his way out, Candy enters the room and chats with Lisette. She says that the noms should stay the same so DJ can be evicted for sure this week. Lisette doesn’t trust her and tells her to her face she is no better than Benedict, but is powerless without him. The two stare each other down. At the veto, Lisette wins it, and Benedict sighs a sigh of relief. But Lisette shocks everyone by saving Candy and puts up Benedict. Lisette calls him out for faking his turnaround to play with everyone’s emotions. He breaks down, claiming his intense want, no, NEED to win the game. He can’t get it out of his head and it burdens him with the thoughts of betrayal, including the allies he betrayed this season, with Nickels, Echo, and even Xio who showed him so much kindness leaving because of him. DJ is in tears and even Candy can’t watch. Afterwards, Benedict goes to his only real ally, Candy. He begs her for advice on how to get out of this, as she helped him so much. She looks him in the eye as she tells him that he did this to himself. At the eviction, Candy gets the sole vote to evict and casts it to evict, Benedict.
The Reunion: Folks we are live again right outside the Neon Colosseum for the Finale of Bunny’s Pokémon Big Brother Champion Royale! Our Sixteen winners have been whittled down to three and it is not what we expected at all! In a house where everyone wants to be the biggest truck on the highway, we have three mid-sized sedans who have slipped through the gaps and swept their way to the end. DJ VOLT SWITCH, Elesa’s iconic Emolga who created the jams we are listening to even right now! She plays up her social game very well with honesty and loyalty, but is no slouch in the competitions. Though she has been left out of some secrets in the game, she was well=liked in the house and leveraged her position between alliances to get information! Sweet Candy the Wigglytuff who played Sickly Sweet last but downright Sick this time. She got in close with all of the villains but managed to be the cherry flavored licorice that was easier to manage. She avoided detection aligning with big villain Benedict and hiding behind the scenes of his chaos, even almost controlling his moves at points. The Sunstone herself, LISETTE the Solrock, who foresaw victory once, but is this a double reading? Lisette bided her time throughout the game, getting whatever information she could and waiting to play it until the time was right. She was at the center of multiple alliances but always stayed just far enough away from the drama that no one was even targeting her. The Sun? No Lisette is after The World!
Joining us on stage now are the 9 jurors! Starting with Splaatz—Ope watch your step, you gotta be careful or else you’ll trip. Here comes Lance the OG! Though he is old he is still our knight in shining armor. Nickels struts up so casually ooh lala. Here comes Echo, kind of sheepishly, don’t be shy buddy! Day gracefully swims up on stage, still to audience cheering. Wait, the cheering is getting louder? Oh it’s Xio! She is surprisingly well-received. Selene keeps the applause growing. She seems to be goading the audience on with her behavior, not wanting to stay out of the spotlight hmm. And then—oh wow I can’t hear anything with the thunder of the crowd for… Benedict? Interesting outcome here that our little villain has become a real crowd pleaser. Even as he walks to his seat with his head held low.
The jurors speak with our lovely reporter. Lance speaks about how great it was to come back and how this game is way changed from when he won season 1. Xio and Nickels agree, but they still worked hard to adapt to the changes. Selene scoffs a bit, another early winner, she notes that herself and Candy were very well integrated, they just needed to change their approach. Xio says it was much harder playing from the bottom rather than the top and it was a fight, but she had a ton of fun doing so. Day mentions she felt the same way. A house full of winners is not to be underestimated for a second, as they all could be planning many different things behind each other’s backs. Splaatz is—oh he’s asleep… moving on. Nickels asks Echo about how he changed his game this time, and why he turned on her. He apologizes, saying he was blinded by seeing opportunities with Benedict because he didn’t fight with him, only told him what he wanted to hear. And he realized too late that that was a ruse. She accepts his apologies and all eyes turn to Benedict. He looks up, seemingly just noticing eyes are on him. He looks down at his paws. “All I’ve seen since last season is blood on my paws. The need to win never left me. I had to do it at all cost. I lost myself in that game and resorted to every trick in the book to make the winners trust me. And it worked… but I fell deeper and deeper down the hole. And now, I don’t feel like I deserved to win at all.” Xio jumps up and makes him look up. “You deserved your win as much as we all deserved ours. It’s a game, it doesn’t have to define you. You define you, so get up and prove it.” Benedict is in disbelief that Xio is still defending him. “You hear that crowd? They were entertained, we entertained them! Your devioushness entertained them! You gave them a show by tricking a bunch of winners, so own up to it and be the entertainer we know you are.” He gives off a small, barely noticeable,but definitely real this time, smile. Xio turns to the crowd “ARE YOU GUYS READY FOR OUR FINAL THREE???” The crowd erupts in excitement!! “THEN GET READY BECAUSE HERE THEY ARE!!”
Final HOH Part 1: The HOH opens on top of the rotating Roulette wheel in the Neon Colosseum, with the audience now filled and the three houseguests circling in the middle, holding on for dear life. At the same time, they are throwing dodgeballs at each other. Candy is targeting Lisette out of spite, putting on a performance for the audience about how Lisette is a traitor to their alliance. DJ is caught in the crossfire but expertly dodges. She manages to catch a ball that Candy threw and chucks it back, knocking her out. Lisette smiles at DJ but DJ knows she still has to win. She tells Lisette she is sorry but she is done working with people and has to take her game into her own hands, not relying on others to fail but herself to succeed. Lisette agrees, but she wants to be the one to succeed. Lisette lobs a ball at Dj and knocks her out, winning Part 1.
Final HOH Part 2: Part begins with Candy and DJ on the Rotating Roulette platform again, racing around to land the colored balls in order of the competitions and the winners of each one. DJ takes an early lead, having been very aware of the game the whole beginning. Candy struggles at first but when she catches up to leaving the villains alliance and joining Benedict, she takes off, knowing how well she played Benedict as her own puppet that she controlled votes for that she easily crushes the midgame part. Her lead takes her ahead on time going into the endgame. DJ misses a key vote and has to go back, but Candy remembers who saved Benedict countless times, and gets it right, winning part 2.
Final HOH Part 3: The crowd is in uproars as Candy and Lisette reach the stage for final quiz, again on our roulette platform (we paid a lot of money for that). Each juror question goes by, with Lisette and Candy answering in tandem, Both get question after question correct, eventually reaching the last question about Benedict. The crowd is shocked as they both answer together again and… get it wrong. Well, that’s anticlimactic. Benedict sighs, no one knew his true self. But the tie-breaker is revealed, how many rotations has the rotating platform made? With both answering two numbers away from each other, Candy goes just over, eliminating her, and crowning Lisette the final HOH. Lisette has both DJ and Candy in front of her. She doesn’t say much but looks at them. She says that DJ played an impeccable social game and is incredibly loved by the fans and the house. Candy, meanwhile, played a strategic game and almost fooled her a couple times. She turns to Candy “I made a gamble with bringing a social threat to the end before with Amni, but not this time. Candy, let’s give em a show.” And casts her vote to evict DJ.
The Jury Questioning: DJ isn’t shocked, she did a lot this time around and knew she made herself a bigger threat. She exits the house and gets cheers from the audience! She hops to the DJ booth and begins playing the final epic track for the showdown between Candy and Lisette. Both have been in this position before in the final 2 and both have won, but now, only one can become a two-time winner and be crowned the ultimate Champion! Lisette opens with her speech first. She pitches her game strong, how she gravitated towards groups in the early game without committing too strongly, so she didn’t go down with the ship. She still managed to control so many votes in the house by having reach with her Witches Coven and eventually jumping ship and siding with Benedict, as she knew he was under Candy’s thumb and she could infiltrate that alliance to get to the end and destroy it. The jury is impressed by her showing and all eyes turn to Candy. Candy starts saying how she knew her game was already known going into the house and she had to play different. Her main strategy was to fall into the background and connect with the players playing sloppier than her so she could be the puppetmaster and sneak to the end. And for her, that was found in Benedict, who she found it very easy to manipulate. She is the villain they all knew she was but she wasn’t targeted because of her great strategy. She saved Benedict’s game and carried him to the end so that she could have a guaranteed extra life in the endgame with him. Murmurs arise from the jury, Benedict looks incredibly hurt. Xio asks Candy what her biggest move was outside of controlling Benedict. Candy says that she made sure that the villains she worked with got cut before she could get too powerful, even working with Lisette to get out Bane and Maeva. DJ gets up from the booth and asks Lisette why she went to the end with Candy instead of her if she thought Candy was going to be tougher. Lisette clarifies that she thought Candy would be good at explaining her game, but she knows not to rely on other’s failing but on herself to succeed, and DJ has a great story and was well-loved and if she wanted to win, she had to cut DJ and masterfully explain her game to the jury. Benedict finally speaks up to ask Candy if he meant anything to her at all throughout the game. She hesitates, caught off guard, before replying in all honesty that, she wanted to mentor him to be a better player. He says he did well enough for making it to the end twice and didn’t need her to do all that. In their final speeches, Candy says that she used other people as her pawns and navigated a really good game to make it to the end hidden amongst the other players. Lisette says that she played a perfect game, not even touching the block and noting that she has not received a vote against her in either of her games, this one being perfect. She finishes by saying how she played more up front and aggressive to counter the sneakier players of the season and did not back down from the threats that all the winners possessed. The jury is impressed and goes to cast their votes.
Jury Voting: Splaatz says he had a fun time playing again and wants to vote for someone who played really good, even showing him more how to play. Lance says that while some people are old school, some people are REALLY old school, but can still play with the best of the best and be even better. Nickels says she is honored to be in the winners season but one winner played like how she thinks a winner should. Day says she worked with both finalists, but she always felt the house pulling towards one player, as the sun has a lot of gravity and control over the tides. Echo says point blank that he felt the manipulation from both sides, but one felt malicious, and another felt like game, and he knows which he respects more. Xio says that some lines shouldn’t be crossed. Selene says that she was honored to be so thoroughly outplayed, turning from the Queen to the Pawn who was merely a stepping stone in someone elses game, it was thrilling. Benedict silently casts his vote. DJ cues the final tune before hopping down with her vote, saying that it should be obvious. The votes come in… by a vote of 9 to 0… the winner is…
Winner: Lisette!
Runner-Up: Candy!
Confetti cannons and flamethrowers start lighting up the sky with neon streams shining bright all over the sky! Though it is the dead of night, it is as bright as the sun, and Lisette is feeling absolutely radiant. Candy sits in shock, in disbelief. Lisette throws her the Lovers card again. “You misread it the first time so maybe you can learn before you try to tell the fortune teller what her fortune is.” Candy throws the card on the ground in anger and pouts. The jurors go and cheer for Lisette, the ultimate champion and two time winner, STILL having never received a single vote to evict in two entire seasons. The fan favorite vote comes in and… IT’S A TIE???
Fan Favorites: Benedict and Xio!!!
Benedict goes up to Candy, still fuming, and looks her in the eyes. “You know what, you really did teach me something. You taught me that some people never change, but I don’t have to be one of them.” Xio comes up and takes Benedict back to the celebration, sticking her tongue out at Candy as she leaves. The party goes through the night. The sun eventually rises, as Lisette has risen to the top of the competition, as this era of Bunny’s Pokemon Big Brother has come to an end.
My Thoughts: I enjoyed this season a lot. It kept me on the edge as the winners played their games again, some way better than others. Gameplay-wise, I think I preferred last season but I think it’s more so because of the subtle moves made in the dark as no one wanted to be too big of a target. The villains ended up flopping early, which kind of was to be expected, given that everyone else is a relaly smart player to have won. Candy surprised me this time, sneaking in to take over Benedict, being a key player in his storyline, even a bigger villain than he tried to be. It really helped me tie up the storyline really well and I like how it happened. She also played a stellar game again, controlling things from the chaos in the shadows. The other side of the house was not slouching though. Lisette, Selene, Xio, and Day all played smart games, not committing too much to each other but still working well enough to not crumble. Lisette as a winner for this season is great! She put in work to keep her position, as it was in danger of falling apart so much. She leveraged every ally she had and every competition she had to get forward every week. And it worked as she got to the end without hitting the block AGAIN and played a PERFECT game, not receiving a single vote to evict and getting every vote to win. She did that in a winner season too, ultimate winner for sure!
So whats next? Well... that's the end. I knew since the beginning that Season 17 would be the end but it coming up still feels so weird. I am about to start a busy summer and don't have as much time for all of my hobbies but I still feel sad finishing this series. I think I am going to make a series epilogue soon so stay tuned for that but... otherwise that's it. I thank you all again so much for sticking with me the whole time, it's been a wonderful journey!

First - Previous
Sorry for the gap in posts. I have scrapped at least six version of this. I am almost happy with this one. I had a different ending, but decided to go with what I have now. I think it is better.
I am also about to get a full knee replacement. I was supposed to get it done on April 2, but things got in the way. I have been working on getting my house in order for someone who cannot walk. It has been a bigger chore than I thought. I also have been learning OnShape to design stuff with my 3D printer. I have even designed the Star Wanderer from Chapter 2. I am working on the Behemoth. I could not get the images to post here for some reason, but if you want to go see them in OnShape, here are the links to two of the ships.
https://cad.onshape.com/documents/1f4578581cf2ad6552b1d3a9/w/409acb296ee94b206655e899/e/e8210e7e7653f5e07402416a
https://cad.onshape.com/documents/e8b75276d1581baf4a12d234/w/9014167e3d03cf585531cafe/e/3d1bd1b3d973f84397b0969f
“… Allighetti …Mark, are you still with us?” I regained consciousness with Burns shaking me violently.
“Gyah. Stop! Yeah, I’m alive,” I spit blood and shook my head to clear the mental fuzz. “I think I have a concussion.”
The last missile strike had driven deep into the ODP’s hull, making it all the way to the missile feed system where we’d already been working to repair damage.
Burns accessed my suit’s med panel. “You got it right in one. Your suit’s a bit damaged. The autodoc is offline. Here…”
He overrode my suit with his, and I could already feel the auto-administered meds kicking in. The pain was still there, but bearable, and the fuzziness receded a bit.
“Thanks. I feel better already.”
I pulled the damage control system with my suit’s AI and checked what else just got damaged. It was more red than green.
“Shit. The station keeping drive is offline. Orbit is destabilized. If we don’t get it back online in… fifteen minutes, we are done,” I growled. “With everything damaged now, I don’t think we can repair the damage with the skeleton crew we have.”
“We better get on it then,” Burns replied.
“Skipper,” I tried to raise Commander Kowitzci. “Skipper? Chief Hanson? Anybody on the command deck? Simonetti? Can you hear me?”
“I hear you, sir,” Simonetti replied. He and Spec-One Zebediah Abrahams were on deck three repairing the power feeds to missile batteries six, seven, and eight. Six launchers made up each battery, so that was eighteen missile tubes out of action. A small percentage of the fleet’s launchers, but we only have twenty batteries. Those missiles were fifteen percent of our throw weight.
“Well, that means station coms are online and the CIC isn’t answering. We gotta get people in there. Drop what you are doing and head that way.” I’ve known the skipper most my life. There’s no way I could not go and make sure he is alive or not.
“Valencia, what’s your location?”
“We’re on deck seven, installing a new targeting computer for point defense group ten. Why?”
“That’s what I thought. You are closest to the CIC. Head down there now,” I ordered. “You’ll probably beat us, but if it is bad as I think, we’re going to need all the help we can get.”
“On my way,” he replied.
“We will meet you there.”
Burns grabbed my hand and helped me up. “Is this the right call? If we don’t get station keeping back online, we’re going down hard.”
“This bucket is going down no matter what we do. I am the senior surviving officer. Or at least the surviving officer who has working coms, so I get to make the call. We’re abandoning ship. We have ten minutes to find any injured and get them out.” I triggered the command through my suit’s coms. Across the ship, the lights switched from condition red for active combat to condition blue for abandon ship. Every crewman’s suits coms buzzed with the abandon ship order and ten minute timer.
“Shit.” I felt the same way. Nobody wants to abandon ship.
I headed to the lifts to get to the command deck as I pulled up the station schematics with the location of every crewman’s last known location, then filtered for who was not responding.
“We have the six people on the command deck unresponsive, Burkett and Torres in fusion one and Chief Khan in magazine one. Get down to mag-one and check on him,” I ordered.
Burns left without another word. I trusted him to get it done.
“Fletcher?” Senior Specialist Jason Fletcher and Specialist Second Class Dinah Moretti were in magazine three and the closest to fusion one.
“Yessir?”
“Burkett and Torres aren’t responding. Get down to fusion one. Check on them and get them out if you can.”
“We got it, boss,” Fletcher replied. “Go get the skipper.”
I was surprised. He must have been monitoring the channel. Fletcher and I had never really gotten along. He always irritated me with his slacking off, obnoxious sense of humor, and need to be the center of attention. But he had surprised me in the past few days. When the shit hit the fan, the man had buckled down and performed spectacularly. I guess getting shot at for real changes your attitude. He was still an ass, but now he was a hard working ass.
I set my coms to the full crew channel. “All personnel. Abandon ship. Find any injured crew you can and get them out. We have ten minutes until I set the scuttling charges.”
Whenever an ODP is damaged enough to abandon ship, it had to be scuttled or the whole core goes to the planet in one huge chunk. Scuttling the station meant it would be in over two dozen pieces that could burn up almost completely on reentry.
I made it to the central lifts, which were offline. The door still had power and my override code opened it. But I still had to climb nine decks to the command deck. Luckily the lifts are one of the few places aboard that do not have artificial gravity. It was just a matter of jumping in and pulling myself hand over hand.
“Mark,” Valencia often ‘forgot’ that I was now an ensign. I chose not to say anything, again.
“Go.”
“There is shit-ton of damage up here. The main lifts are shot to shit and there is debris blocking my way from lift two. I am going to try lift three.”
An Orbital Defense Platform is nothing more than a long cylinder with the missile launchers, energy weapons, sensors, and shields on the top and the external magazine and its docking systems at the other end. The station has twenty eight decks and is divided into four quarter ‘pie’ sections. The main personnel and missile lifts are located at the spine, in the exact center of the hull. Lift two serves the Bravo Section of the station and were near the exterior hull. Lift three is the next one around the outer hull serving Charlie Section.
“Roger. I’m in the main lift shaft now. I am climbing past deck eighteen.”
“You might beat me there,” Valencia replied.
“Do your best. If you can’t get there in five minutes, get to an escape pod and go.”
“Boss,” Simonetti’s voice cut into the conversation. “We can’t make it to the command deck. There’s a gaping hole between us and you.”
The damage from the most recent hits had reached deep into the hull, even as far as the central lifts. I’d passed multiple holes, from size of my fist to several that I could walk through.
“I understand. Abandon ship,” I ordered. “I will see you dirtside.”
“Shit. Are you sure? It might be risky, but we can go EVA to reach you. It is only about thirty meters.”
“No. And do me a favor. If I don’t make it, but a round in my memory.”
“Mark, you are to damned dumb to die. You can buy the round. See you on the surface. Good luck.”
“Thanks, I think.” As I climbed through some mangled lift guiderails my suit’s Geiger counter went crazy. The suit’s shielding could protect me in the short term, but I don’t want to hang out here for very long. The last few meters were difficult. I had to use my plasma cutter to remove a piece of shattered bulkhead that blocked my way. I looked at my chrono as I slipped into the command deck and saw I had five minutes… Just five minutes.
The command deck was a scene from hell. I saw at least one body and several body parts floating in the zero-g. “I’m in. What’s your status Valencia?”
“Almost there.”
I found Commander Kowitzci’s body pinned under a heavy beam that had collapsed from the ceiling and checked his suit’s medical panel. “The skipper’s still alive.”
I jumped in surprise when he grabbed my hand. I could see his lips moving but, I couldn’t hear anything. I pressed my faceplate against his, hoping the direct contact would allow sound to bridge between us.
“I got you, sir. The station’s done. I’ve given the order to abandon ship.”
“Go. Get yourself out. That’s an-”
“Don’t! Don’t give me that order, skipper, because I will disobey it.”
“I’m pinned and I cannot feel my legs. Even if you get me out, I am dead weight. Save yourself.”
“Skipper, I’ve known you since I was nine and Angus is one of my best friends. If you think I am going to tell him that I left you here to save myself, even if you ordered it, think again. Now, Valencia is almost here. Between the two of us we should be able to get you out. Hang tight. I am going to check on Chief Hanson.”
Chief Petty Officer Kenzie Hanson is one of the system’s best engineers. Unlike most of the crews, she is active Navy and had spent most of her career on these things. ODP 9 was not her normal duty station, but someone in operations had the brilliant idea to send her here to replace Chief Maartens.
Having someone with her experience coordinating damage control freed me and my people to fix what we could. Which in the end was not much, or at least not enough. The incoming missile fire had kept coming regardless of what the fleet did. It had turned into a battle of attrition, and while we had more resources than they did, our problem was that planets can’t dodge. The enemy could stay further out-system and lob missiles until they ran out, and we had no choice but to defend Verdigris, no matter what the costs.
“Hey, boss!” Valencia finally made it to the command deck. It brought a wave of relief.
“Glad you could finally join us. The skipper is pinned. Hansen is unconscious but alive. Check on Dahl and Ski.”
PO1 Grace Dahl and Master Specialist Gustavus Wasnewski were still strapped into their chairs at the tactical station.
“What about Dunagin and Stavros?” He asked.
“KIA.”
Hansen’s med panel showed she was alive, just unconscious. I released her shock frame and pulled her free. The command deck’s six escape pods were spaced along the outer bulkhead. Each pod could hold ten people. A redundancy in case any were damaged.
“Shit. Stavros is dead and Dahl’s suit already hit her with hybernol.” I could hear the simmering anger in Valencia’s voice. Stavros had been a good friend to all of us.
“Get her to a pod,” I ordered.
“What about Stav?”
“I am sorry, man, but the living are our priority.” I struggled to pull Hansen across the deck. Damn I am tired.
“I ain’t leaving him here. Not like this. I just can’t.”
“Fuck. If you can manage it… then do what you gotta do.” I didn’t have time to argue. Valencia could be a stubborn little shit when he wanted.
I was tired. Maybe that is why it took me so long to realize this rescue effort would be easier in zero-g.
I triggered the all hands channel and announced, “Clamp up, people. I am cutting internal gravity.”
I did not wait for any replies and quickly pulled up the control systems on my suit’s computer. With a few quick gestures, cut the power to the artificial gravity system. Pulling Hansen got easier immediately. Now I just had to fight mass and momentum without gravity’s negative effects.
I got her into the escape pod and returned to the skipper. My chrono showed I had less than two minutes to get him free or we might both die. I chose not to think to hard on that. I could be a stubborn little shit, too. He was still pinned under the beam, but it shifted a bit when I pulled with everything I had. It made me wish I had an Österlenlender here to help. One of those walking tanks could move like it was a paperweight.
I put everything I had into it, closing my eyes and grunting with the strain. I could feel the veins popping in my forehead. Then, the beam moved. I opened my eyes and saw Valencia next to me putting everything into helping me lift. The skipper managed to wiggle free, but we could see he was hurt pretty bad.
Valencia pulled the commander free, and I released the beam that slowly fell back to the deck. It took only a few seconds to get into the escape pod. Somehow, we managed to make the ten minute deadline.
Once the wounded were strapped in, I initiated the self-destruct sequence. It was SOP when something this size was abandoned in orbit. The smaller the size of the debris, the better chance it has to burn up on reentry. No need to add anything else to the planet’s woes.
“Attention. All hands, abandon ship. Self-destruct is set for one minute. Abandon ship, abandon ship, abandon ship, abandon ship. God speed.”
With that, I sealed the escape pod hatch and went to hit the eject button. But before I could, our luck ran out. Another wave of missiles detonated against our failing shields. The x-ray laser warheads mercilessly bored deep into the station. My suit’s radiation warning went off, letting me know my exposure had reached critical levels. The energy imparted by the lasers hit with physical force, blowing through the station’s armor and superstructure like a toddler ripping into a Christmas present.
Debris flew across the command deck and flames licked at my back. The explosion threw me into the back wall of the escape pod, painfully knocking the wind out of me. I tried to sit up but could not. My legs just wouldn’t work. I looked down, finally noticing the jagged spear of chromilstyn sticking out of my chest.
“Aw, shit.” It was the last words I said.

Tank role. Beefy insectoid-looking lady hero.

Abilities

Passive: Every so often (5s?), generate enough parts to construct an omnic beetlebot. Each is a roughly-beaver-sized robotic cute beetle friend with 125hp. Five beetlebots maximum (constructing a sixth beetlebot will make the oldest one blow up). Stops generating when five beetlebots have been stored.
Left-click: Laser shotgun. Red beams with medium range, wide spread. One central beam surrounded by eight others evenly spaced in an octagonal pattern. Clicking once activates the lasers for two seconds, during which time they deal continuous damage.
Right-click: Lob a beetlebot in a grenade-like arc. Launched beetlebots bounce until they hit a flat surface, then deploy.
1, 2, 3: Select the next beetlebot type to construct. Up to five can be queued.

1. Shield-bot: ~300hp shield on top shaped and styled like an elytron (hardened forewing of beetles). Shield is taller than it is wide, and is not quite big enough to fully cover a Reinhardt. Shield is flipped-down by default, and flips up only when enemies are in LOS. Shield regenerates quickly while flipped down. It moves slightly slower than default hero speed when shield is flipped up, and at default hero speed when shield is flipped down. Behaviour - follows nearest ally until an enemy enters its LOS, then faces the enemy and flips up its shield, then continuously tries to position itself between its chosen ally and that enemy. If there are multiple shield-bots out at once, each will choose a different ally to protect.
   
2. Boom-bot: Red blinking lights on top. Blows up when near an enemy, dealing 125 AoE damage. It moves slightly faster than default hero speed. Behaviour - sits still until an enemy enters its LOS, then scuttles to intercept the first-spotted enemy. If a nearby enemy behind a wall has been spotted by a Scout-bot, a Sym turret, or Sombra's hack, it will move to intercept that enemy.
   
3. Scout-bot: Bristling array of telescopic lenses and antennae on top. Provides vision of all non-still enemies in its sight range to all allies. It moves at default hero speed. Behaviour - if an enemy in motion or the enemy spawn doors are in its LOS, sits still and peers menacingly at them, while continuously adjusting lenses and antennae (subtle movements and camera sounds to promote interaction). If no enemies are in LOS, hugs the nearest wall then moves along the wall either left or right, whichever brings it closer to the enemy spawn.
   

E: Send out a flying dropship beetle with all your queued beetlebots in it. It will fly in a straight line over all terrain, dropping beetlebots in the order you queued them at regular intervals onto solid ground (ie. not into holes).
Shift: Shift-click commands all your beetlebots to move to the selected location before continuing their regular behaviour. Shift-click-drag moves them into the selected arc-shaped formation. Tapping shift cancels the move command.
Ult: Transform into beetlebot hive-queen mode for 25s, gaining armour and a large spherical bubble shield centered on your carapace. Double beetlebot regeneration rate. Replace your left-click with a sweeping melee claw attack. You and your beetlebots gain movespeed and can walk on walls and ceiling for duration.

The nonstop pitter-patter of the cold rain against my bedroom window set the mood. I found myself rubbing my eyes, unable to follow the now swaying lines. My book was a jumbled mess of dyslexic text. I spent another minute trying to decipher the words, but my exhausted state of mind could not put meaning to them. I folded the top right corner of the page and gingerly placed Bram Stoker’s, Dracula, back on the windowsill.
I must've dozed off at some point because I found myself dreaming. Eyes. Red eyes the size of saucer plates peered into the depths of my soul. No matter how hard I tried to look away, I could not break the gaze. I felt as if I was staring into the abyss itself, a black hole pulling me into its inky embrace. That peculiar dream held me captive for God only knows how long.
The fear was overwhelming. It held me fast, like quicksand I found myself descending into the blackness. It was the first rays of light that finally broke my standstill, as if my body was frozen solid and the warmth of the sun was slowly dethawing my bones. I remained sitting in my armchair for a moment, letting the effects of the queer dream wash over me.
Finally, my mind began to return to a semblance of normality. I glanced outside to see the sun dancing happily in the orange and yellow of the fall leaves. My heart leapt at this sight. Shortly with the resilience of youth, I found myself forgetting entirely about the uncanny daydream. With a shout of glee, I found myself barreling down the staircase three at a time. No longer a care in the world, rushing towards blind adventure.
In school we had been reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s, Treasure Island, and I had been convinced there was buried treasure somewhere in my backyard. My first attempt was a five-foot deep pit. The buried treasure wasn't found, but I did succeed in severing our sprinkler system. The hole was shortly filled with water, and my parents put a stop to my digging efforts. At least it put a stop to my digging in the yard. I was too stubborn to give up on my dreams of finding pirate treasure to entirely stop.
I went into my dad’s shop, pilfered a flat head shovel and trekked down the trail where I could resume my search without my parents' oversight. Looking for the tell-tale signs of pirate interference, I found myself wandering off the beaten path. That is when I saw it. It was the largest oak tree I’ve ever seen. Massive, barren branches loomed over me like the hands of a twisted god. For some reason, that daydream came back to the forefront of my mind.
With the clarity of scared eyes, I saw a rickety cross held together by ancient twine fraying at the ends. A spark of excitement burned away all my concerns. Quickly, I clambered down the hill to the base of that giant oak to get a better look at the marker. At closer inspection, I saw one name carved into the base of the cross. It said, “Victor P. Alexandre.” It didn’t sound like a pirate's name, but still it was worth investigating. After all, one place was as good as another.
That first day, I shoveled loose dirt and clay for nearly 8 hours. The hole was larger and deeper than I had ever managed in the past. Even still, I found nothing. No buried treasure. No time capsule. Nothing of interest whatsoever. I was on the verge of giving up, when my shovel suddenly hit with a clink. Uncaring, I threw it aside and slowly began to sift through the loose dirt. To my utter shock, my hands felt a smooth surface.
Using the water from my bottle I washed the dirt away, scrubbing it clean with my hands. The surface was white as bone, yet it was flat. At closer glance, I realized it was smooth marble. My heart was beating fast. If this wasn't hidden treasure, God only knew what else it could be. That second day, I dug like my life depended on it. The marble slab was bigger than I had expected, already I had exposed nearly four feet of it. The day was growing short, and the shadows had been growing longer, yet even still, I found myself scouring that slab.
Right before the day turned to night, my hand ran across a large padlock. One of those old-fashioned, cast-iron locks. The heavy ones. It was rusted and the metal was beginning to flake, but still, I couldn't break it. I tried to smash it off with the pointed end of the shovel, yet it resisted my attempts. I heard my mother's voice calling to me.
I went scurrying towards the sound of her voice, doing my best to brush clean the dirt off my arms and legs. I mustn't have done a good job, because as her suspicious eyes fell upon me, I saw disappointment flash in them.
She looked me up and down and said, “Jack Dempsey, did you cut any more sprinkler lines this time?”
With a sheepish grin I responded, “No ma’am.”
She gestured towards the bathroom and said, “Wash up before your father sees.”
Immediately I obeyed, not wanting to push my luck. The rest of the night was uneventful. I slept like a babe. It was the last full night’s sleep I’ve had since, the final night not plagued by monsters and nightmares.
I was woken by the first tentative rays of the morning light. The excitement of my find robbed me of my ability to sleep in. It was a Saturday morning and not a cloud was in sight. The wind was blowing in playful gusts tugging at my hair and the folds of my clothes. It was the sort of morning I'd dedicate to the flying of kites, yet today something else had my full attention. My mind raced at 100 miles per hour, fantasizing of all the possibilities. What lies under the marble floor? It must be something of great value to be buried so deep and guarded by such a lock. I thought that perhaps it was a treasure cove, hidden by conquistadors. Maybe it was a secret entrance to a hidden civilization. The possibilities were endless, only limited by my willingness to imagine.
My idea was simple. If I couldn't break it off with brute force, then I'd cut it off with a grinder in my dad’s shed. To my great amusement I had seen him cut off the heavy lock I used for my bike when I lost the key a year prior. Luck was on my side that day, or perhaps it was misfortune.
With a hollow thump, I leapt carelessly down into the hole. Those eyes flashed feverishly bright into my mind. The sudden feeling of fear almost made me clamber back the way I came. As suddenly as it came, it passed.
The curiosity of a ten-year-old was too great for any reservations I might’ve had. Within moments, I found myself cutting away. The grinder cut through the metal as if it was butter, showering the pearly white marble with orange sparks. A thunderclap brought me back to my senses. With a start, I nearly dropped the still spinning grinder. I looked up to see thick, black clouds beginning to roll their way towards me. It wasn't supposed to rain today. Yet, the inky blackness barreled towards me blocking the sun’s brilliant rays.
The light all around me seemed to dim. It felt as if time itself fast forwarded, stranding me in dusk. It was eerie, and a little shiver erupted all over my body. The storm seemed to be triggered by the cutting of the lock. But that's not possible; it can't be possible. Yet even so, I couldn't divert my mind from this line of thought. It was preposterous, but there was no storm before and now there is.
I heard a grinding, crunching noise and felt the slab beneath my feet begin to slide open. To my horror, I felt the ground give way, and then I slid into pitch darkness. I rolled a couple of feet and ended up sprawled on my back. The darkness down there was almost complete, except a single ray of light that peeked through the opening of the marble slab. I saw nothing down there, but I couldn't shake the feeling as if I was being watched. It felt as if the darkness had eyes peering at me from all sides.
I didn’t remain down there long. I couldn’t take the silence anymore. I kept imagining Dracula staring at me from the comfort of the shadows, his heart remaining eternally still. No need for it to beat, when one is already dead. I clambered up the steep incline as if my life depended on it, for all I knew it did. I didn’t stop running until I was safely in my room under my bed. I know it was silly, but I couldn't shake the feeling as if I narrowly escaped death.
I determined that tomorrow morning I would refill the hole and never look at that marble slab again. Now with a plan of action set into place, my fear began to lessen. When my parents finally made it back home to fix supper, I had forgotten about my near-death experience. I ate my meatloaf and broccoli and had a large bowl of ice cream, while I watched SpongeBob on the television.
When bedtime came, I didn’t even argue with my parents about staying up later. I did something that night that I had never done before. I grabbed my mom's hand pulling her down to me and kissed her directly on the forehead, then I walked to my dad and repeated the sentiment. I looked each of them in their eyes and said, “You guys are the best parents a child could ask for. I want you to know I love you.” Tears welled up in my mom’s eyes and even my dad looked close to waterworks. Something happened in the silence that preceded. Our relationship matured. I had seen them and accepted them as the individuals they were, not as the parents who exist for my well being. We had looked into each other's eyes and acknowledged one another.
I think fondly of this memory, and I thank God that I had this one final moment to make known all that my childish mind thought but didn't have the ability to put into words. It was a tender moment, and it was the last time I saw my parents breathing.
I fell asleep almost the moment my head hit the pillow. It was a deep sleep, the kind in which there are no dreams. The kind that leaves you well rested and excited for the next day. But it wasn't the morning when I woke up.
This watch of the night goes by many names; the dead of night, the witching hour, midnight, the time the moon goes to rest. They all mean the same thing; it's the period in which the night is darkest, and the hope of morning is nearly nonexistent. This is the time owned by the nightmares, where the boogey man walks freely.
It was a gentle tapping on my window that awoke me. My body became stiff, and I couldn't move. Fear paralyzed me and I lay in my bed, senses hyper alert. I remained there hoping it was a branch against the window but knowing better. The window in my room was directly above my head. With very little effort I could be certain of the cause of the sound. I didn’t want to be certain. I'd rather lay trying my best to convince myself it was caused by some ordinary means, than look and see the glowing red eyes of Dracula.
And in one way or another, I knew it was him. I was certain I’d look up and see his pale face shining as pristine as the marble slab that must be his resting place. As the night crawled along, the scratching only got louder until it was nearly deafening. It was then that my curiosity got the best of me. I couldn’t fight the urge any longer. It was like a scratch your mom told you not to itch; the more you thought about it, the harder it was to ignore. My eyes flung wide, and I looked up.
I could hardly believe what they saw. There on the other side of the glass was my old kite, the red and blue one that came loose and flew away a few weeks ago. I thought my fear would ease learning the source of the awful sound, but there I remained unable to get those red eyes out of my mind. The kite didn’t help persuade me of the silliness of my fears, in fact, it solidified them, as if it gave some sort of credence.
My alarm clock on my nightstand ticked slowly, and I watched as the digital numbers changed. Each minute seemed to take hours. Slowly the night’s grasp yielded to the onslaught of the coming day. The darkness faded leaving pockets of thick shadow cast by the steady rising of the orange sliver on the horizon. Even these strongholds of the night were unable to stand in the face of such an overwhelming adversary, and shortly I was left in the shining light of morning.
I made a decision while I was warring with my fear. I was going to tell my parents about the marble slab and what I had done. They would know what to do. In fact, they would probably tease me for letting it scare me, but at that point I didn’t care. I would have welcomed the lighthearted jokes made at my expense. It would mean my fears weren't reasonable ones. All would go back to normal, and I’d be another kid who had a silly nightmare.
The nightmare began in my parents' bedroom. I barged into their room hoping to receive the comfort I so needed. I found everything but comfort there. The room was entirely normal, except it lacked the presence of my sleeping parents. They were gone. I went into their bathroom thinking they might’ve gotten up early. It was empty. As I made my way back into the room, I noticed the window nearest their bed was open. Lying on the windowsill was an enormous droplet of blood.
My heart dropped and I knew exactly where they’d be. Dracula hadn’t intended to get me; he wanted my parents. The kite was a distraction, a way to settle my rational mind. I was right to fear, if only I had feared enough to run straight to my parents' room. Would things be different now? I think they might. In my book, belief was the only way to combat vampires, and children have a knack for it. He must've known I'd never let him in my room. But tonight, he can come freely for me.
My parents. I failed them. No, I killed them. I never should've opened that door. I should've buried the hatch closed the moment I saw it. Of course, it was a grave. It had the marker above it and all. I’m an idiot, a God’s damned fool. The marker. What did it say on it? “Victor P. Alexandre.” So, this isn't Dracula after all, but in a way he still is. He can be killed the same way.
It took me the remainder of the day to gather the required materials. I found garlic cloves in the spice cabinet, my family are catholic, so it was no difficulty finding a cross, the thing that took me the longest was making the wooden stakes. In the end, I used the legs of our kitchen table filed down to a nasty point. As an afterthought, I grabbed the massive padlock my dad used on his shed sometimes. It never hurts to have a backup.
I followed the blood droplets of my parents to the hole I dug. I remained staring down at the marble slab, now drenched in my family’s life blood, unable to move from the spot. I watched in horror as the sun slowly began to make its descent, knowing that my chance was slipping between my fingers. A thought occurred to me. What if my parents are down there? Will I be able to look them in the face while I slide a stake through their heart?
Call it what you want, but a few minutes before the sun sank behind the horizon, a metallic glint caught my eyes. At closer examination, it was the little silver cross necklace my mom always wore. This spurred me into action, as if someone poked me with a red-hot brand. It burned my fears away and left me with a numb sense of responsibility.
Without a second thought I launched myself down into the hole scooping up my mom’s pendant and ignited the flashlight. I didn’t have much time; the sun was falling. The shadows were lengthening. My heart beat a steady staccato against the inner walls of my chest. I was scared my damn heartbeat would wake the creatures giving me away. But I didn't have time to worry, so I didn’t. In a clarity unlike anything I've experienced before or since, I made my way through the opening of the sepulcher.
As I moved forward, I couldn’t help but think that I had been swallowed alive by some mythic monster. Jonah in the belly of the whale, I suppose. The darkness closed in on me and the faint glow cast by my flashlight only went about 4 feet in front of me. It looked as if I was in a catacomb. Urns and vases lined the walls on each side of me. Every few feet or so was a nook that held an empty casket. Panic seized my limbs, threatening to lock them up for good. What if he’s behind me or hiding in one of those alcoves? I was afraid to breathe or make any sudden noises. Thoughts of waking him and having to face him upright nearly stopped me in my tracks.
It was the sound of my parents' voices that pushed me forward. They gave me the resolve to see this thing through. I heard my mom tell me, “If not you, then who?” and the strong voice of my father admonishing me, “Do the right thing, even if it’s hard.” And so, I kept moving one step at a time, my footsteps being muffled by the suffocating blackness. Before I knew it, I was there looking at three closed caskets.
There was a grand coffin in the middle, the others were near the two side walls. I knew immediately which one would contain Viktor. I walked straight to it, then hesitated and opened the one against the right wall. My mom was in it. She looked to be sleeping, nothing out of the ordinary besides two small puncture marks on the side of her throat. The coffin against the left wall held my dad. Tears filled my eyes, and I knew they had been turned. I stood there, a stake in my hand, not quite able to plunge it deep into the heart of the woman who gave birth to me.
I closed the casket, making my way to the coffin of the monster who took my parents. I looked forward to shoving a stake through his heart, and as I opened the lid a wicked smile was plastered on my face. The smile evaporated the moment I looked and saw that it was empty. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I heard rich laughter echoing down the hallway directly behind me.
“I must admit, you've surprised me. I’ve had fools rush in here before trying to kill me, but usually they are glory seekers. This is a first. I’ve never come across a child brave enough to meet me in the dark,” purred Viktor in a smooth, slightly European accent.
Maybe it was the anger, maybe it was my body being unable to process the fear; regardless, my voice came out strong and confident, when I said, “And that’s why I’ll succeed, where others failed.”
Viktor began laughing, wiping tears from his eyes. “May I know the name of the person who will be the death of me?” asked the vampire, a cruel smile beginning to form on the pale landscape of his face.
“The name is Jack Dempsey and those people you killed last night were my parents.”
“Ahh, I see. It’s rage that brings you down into my domain. Your anger may have temporarily burned your fear away, but before I am done with you, it will come crawling back. I will make you envious of the stillborn. Your blood will bring me back to full strength,” snarled Viktor.
Mouth running unchecked, I shot back, “I don’t need to be an adult to put a stake through your cowardly heart. After all, I’m not the one who locked himself away, too scared of being bested.”
“I wasn’t hiding you fool; I was locked in here by foes much cleverer than yourself. They weren’t stupid enough to think they could take me on their own. They locked the entrance and buried my whole sepulcher, until you haphazardly released me,” said the vampire.
I gulped knowing that he was at least partially correct. I had released him, and my parents were the ones who paid the price. This was my cross to carry. My mess to fix. By God, I was resolved to see this thing through till the end.
Without warning I lobbed a whole clove of garlic directly at his face. The creature ungodly fast swatted it away with one hand, hissing as it made direct contact with his skin. I saw a nasty burn appear suddenly on the flesh of that hand. I had time for a moment of triumph, before the creature blurred towards me.
He struck me with the back of his hand sending me sprawling into the coffin that held my mother. I heard a bone crack in my ribs when I made contact. Pain filled my body, and I cried out. This seemed to please the vampire as he slowly stalked towards me, my backpack filled with supplies held in his left hand. The stake I had been holding flew out of my hand when he hit me, and I was left with nothing to stop his advance.
He knew this too; I saw it in the smug smile he wore across his face. It was done, my parents died because of me. I couldn’t even get revenge on their killer. I had failed them. And now, this creature was going to rip me apart slowly, enjoying every moment of it.
My mom’s voice cut through all my fears, and I heard her say, “I gave you my necklace, now kill this motherfucker.”
My hand reached to my neck, and I felt the comfort of the cold silver against my skin. With one smooth motion I pulled it off, concealing it in my left hand. I knew I’d have to time it right. I would get only one chance at this, I had to make it count. The element of surprise was working in my favor, but even still the creature was fast as hell. I’d have to let him get close, painfully close before I struck.
I gave him what he desired most, I pleaded for my life. “Please, I didn’t mean it. Have mercy on me. I’ll serve you. I’ll do anything you need me to. I let you out, didn’t I?”
Viktor smiled a smile filled with pointed teeth. I shuttered; it wasn’t hard to act. I truly was terrified. This seemed to please him. He laid his well-manicured hands on my shoulder, holding me like a father holds his son.
“You have been very helpful to me; I can think of one way you can be even more useful,” said Viktor.
He leaned in almost as if he was going to kiss me, then at the last moment he bent his head back as if he was a snake preparing to strike. I expected him to do this, and with one fluid motion I shoved the crucifix directly down the throat of the creature. His sharp teeth cut my hand into ribbons, but the moment the silver touched his throat it erupted in blue flames. I watched in fascination as the vampire's head began to melt, then disintegrate. Within about thirty seconds the entire body of the vampire was reduced to ashes.
My mom’s necklace remained sitting on top of the pile of ash. I reached down and pocketed it. I breathed a sigh of relief, then I looked at the other two caskets. Tears made my vision swim. This is impossible. How am I supposed to kill the people who raised me?
I opened my mom’s casket again; she looked so beautiful laying in perfect peace. They looked happier than they had in years. The wrinkles beginning to form under her eyes were gone, smooth skin replaced it. Bottle that formula and sell it. For one low price of drinking a vampire's blood, you too can have skin that shines bright in the moonlight.
Something caught my eye. I looked down at the now torn backpack and saw the massive padlock I had taken from my dad’s shed. An idea sprung into my mind. Maybe I don’t have to kill them. I can lock them up and re-bury them. The night was nearly here, and a decision needed to be made. In a moment of weakness, I chose.
It was well past midnight when I finished packing the rest of the loose dirt back into the hole. Shortly after I started, I could hear a clawing noise coming from within. I didn’t so much as stop for a water break. When the hole was half filled, I couldn’t hear the cries of my parents anymore. Although I do hear them in my dreams sometimes.
The moon was hidden behind rain clouds, making it difficult to see. In my mad scramble out of the catacombs, I dropped my flashlight. I began my long trek back home, no longer fearing the shadows in the night.

So I was playing tonight using a different loadout than I normally would, and tried the punisher plasma and an energy shield backpack. I drop, start killing everything's fine, I drop my equipment, put on the shield and go to attack...BOOM! I blow up as soon as I shoot, I thought I got hit by artillary, NOPE, shot again, BOOM! and again, BOOM! My buddy suggested taking off the backpack...I was like NOOOOO! That couldn't be it could it? YUP! For FREEDOM it sure WAS LOL! The energy lob from the Punisher only punishes the user when paired with a personal shield.

im a pg and nearly no not nearly, EVERY. SINGLE. GAME. I play it never fails when someone is inbounding the ball to me they just tap their x/a button as fast as they can and then blame me when I start to run off to try and fake my defender.
Like my shooting guards next to me, there’s a option right there, or you know, USE A BOUNCE PASS OR LOB PASS.
Two of the most simple mechanics and people overlook them every single game. It blows my mind how many turnovers they could have avoided if they’d simply tap o/b or triangle/y instead of spamming pass and then blaming me or the shooting guard.

A steward flanked by a pair of guards rushed into the royal Library. The princesses honor guards stopped them short of approaching the princess any closer.
"That is close enough." Leon, the man had his hand on the hilt of his sword, "Make your report."
"Princess?" The steward wondered if he should speak aloud.
"Speak Gerald, what news." She looked up from her book, pinning down where she was on the page with a finger to make eye contact with him, and not lose her place.
Gerald straightened himself out, and cleared his throat. "The Royal Scryers say Knight Vision is surrounded, beat down, and nearing his end. He and Razdeline have completed the mission, but will not likely survive to return home. I'm sorry."
Leon clicked his tongue. Sadao the elf sorcerer, also one of her royal guards, pursed his lips and furrowed his brow.
"Thank you steward," The Princess replied calmly. "You may leave now."
Gerald didn't hide his offense well, but he did make an about face and leave the room with his two guards without delay.
After the door slammed shut behind him, the princess hopped into action. "Sadao what do you know about teleportation spells? Or maybe flight spells? We're going to go rescue them."
The dark haired elf smiled. "I know enough about teleportation spells to not try them without more preparation than we've time for. Leon, are you ready to fly."
Leon groaned, "No. Maybe... fine."
Leon hopped up and down a little, shook out his hands. Hyping himself up for being hit with flight magic, he stretched his neck left, then right.
Sadao sighed with elvish disdain, "Are you done being dramatic Leon?"
"Yes." Leon stopped hopping up and down and put his hands out wide. Sadao cast his flight spell on Leon, and the other man lifted off the floor.
"Princess?" Sadao asked her.
"I can do my own, your lessons haven't been for nothing, master elf." The princess smiled and with a gesture cast a spell of flight on herself. Sadao likewise lifted up, and the three of them flew upward toward where they could find an opened window and escape the library, and the castle alike.
As they flew Sadao brought himself close enough to the princess to speak over the rushing wind. "Princess, now that we've directly disobeyed your father's direct orders not to allow you to leave the castle, I suspect upon our return we shall all be dismissed from your service. That said, I feel I should admit a certain truth to you. Knight Vision is actually our little group's leader. He taught us all magic, Razdeline, Leon and I all learned to do amazing things with magic, we can each do things like you can do."
"Awwww man! Are you telling her? You told her!" Leon flew within shouting distance.
The princess took a moment while they kept flying toward where Knight Vision and Razdeline were fighting for their lives against the remnants of the dark lord's forces.
"So... is he a better sorcerer than you?" She asked of Sadao.
"Yes!" Sadao answered, dead serious.
"Ehhhh, I dunno man, you're pretty close these days." Leon said.
"Fine, but he's still a better swordsman than me." Sadao said.
The princess laughed, and then she realized they were coming up their target for a landing. "Lets see what those lessons were worth in real combat"
Leon landed first with an explosion of magical force, throwing undead in all directions and clearing a landing space for the princess. "The Jig is up boss, we're done pretending."
Knight Vision was back to back with Razdeline, a pile of enemy corpses slowly growing around them. The problem with the dark lord'd forces being that they don't tend to stay dead if you don't burn them, or magically dispel the necromancy, the corpse wall was wriggling, trying to crawl apart into individual opponents again.
"Oh thanks the Stars!" Knight Vision stood up to his full two meters of height and made an overhand strike with his sword, burying it into a large undead's head where he left it as he kicked the thing away.
He snapped his fingers and summoned his own staff, it thrummed with power, much stronger than anything the princess had felt before. Sadao's staff had been impressive enough.
"Razdeline help me get this stupid fucking shield off my arm." Knight Vision said, and before he could finish slamming his staff one handed into the ground to put up a magical barrier around the five of them she was on him removing the shield's straps.
She threw his shield as a weapon to behead a zombie that was pounding on the barrier. Then she threw her own shield and started shedding the heavy plate armor typical of knights in this land. Leon helped her strip down into just her magic robes, protective as the plate, and not nearly as restrictive. Then the two of them stripped the plate from Knight Vision.
While they had done that, Sadao and the princess unleashed magical mayhem on the swarm of undead pounding on the barrier. Sadao started with a fire spell, setting a swathe of them on fire, and the princess answered by making hands of stone grasp all their legs to keep them from escaping. A moment later a blast of lightning was followed by slice of kinetic force at head level that removed dozen of undead heads.
"Nice shot princess, I see Sadao hasn't let you slack on the lessons in the last few weeks. Thanks for the rescue." Knight Vision's deep voice made the princess blush.
"I couldn't let my gorgeous Knight die." She said.
"Well I'm glad you came, because I was just about to say damn the politics of it myself. Speaking of." Knight Vision did what earned him that Moniker, an blinked his Vision on.
Razdeline grabbed hold of his staff and took over maintaining the barrier. She knew that look on his face well enough. He was seeing the flows of magic, witnessing the invisible flows that sit just out of sight.
"The Royal Scryers sure have a lot of sensors out today." He said, and casually started flicking them out of existence with a touch of magic to each. It's fairly easy to each out and touch magic with magic, especially if you can see it.
Once they were all gone, he said, "So princess it seems that those succession problems you were worried about are going to be here a lot faster than you'd wanted. How do you want to proceed."
The princess smiled, a somewhat wicked smile. "Knight Vision, If I'd realized you were as powerful of a team as you lot are earlier, I might have just asked you to help with an illegal coup... but the prophecy is clear, the royal contender whose champion defeats the dark lord should be married to their champion and rule the land."
"MARRIED?!" Razdeline almost lost focus on the barrier. "Married? You didn't tell us that part before..."
"Yes, I am to marry whoever dealt the killing blow to the dark lord. Knight Vision I'm sorry I didn't tell you before, but you... wouldn't mind would you." The princess blushed and for a moment stopped throwing balls of flame at the mess of undead outside the barrier.
Leon snatched the staff from Razdeline and took over the barrier, always the quickest on the uptake. Knight Vision started laughing uproariously, not the reaction the princess had hoped for. Sadao shook his head, and continued to lob arcane assaults into the mob of undead. Razdeline dropped to one knee and took the princesses hand.
"It was me." She said, barely loud enough to be heard over the roaring flames tearing through the zombies. Louder this time, "I- I killed the Dark Lord. I cut his damn head off, twice. Smashed his damned phylactery too."
Razdeline, the brutish woman, covered in scars and more muscular than most men. Razdeline, the woman whom the princess immediately hated because she was everything she wasn't ever allowed to be. Most of all the princess hated Razdeline right away because she got to spend so much time with Knight Vision, and the princess was smitten with the big man. Razdeline had killed the dark lord... by any and all measures one could make. And the Royal Scryers had seen it.
"Princess Ellia, will you marry me?" Razdeline said.
Ellia's knees went weak. She had never considered that she could marry a woman... what a wonderful idea. Knight Vision was a beautiful man, but Razdeline, well... she did kill the Dark Lord, and she'd know her way around a woman's body surely... The sudden flood of inappropriate thoughts almost made the princess faint. Razdeline swooped in and held the princess, keeping her from falling to the ground.
"Oh yes! Yes I will!" The princess said, and kissed Razdeline on the mouth, which caused the big burly woman to blush bright red.
Knight Vision took back possession of his staff and asked new lovebirds, "You ready to fly?"
"Sure thing boss!" Razdeline said, scooping up her princess in... well a princess carry, and launching into the sky with her flight spell.
Leon, Sadao, and Knight Vision followed the women into the sky, abandoning the horde of undead. Together they flew and toward the kingdom's capital. There was a Royal wedding to plan, and probably a few rebellious factions to squash, and a at least one king to bring to heel if he didn't want to follow the prophecy.

The war room was silent. Lymlok stood on the balcony, arms resting on the wooden railing, staring into the distant horizon.
"I still don't understand. What ungodly spell have they used to attack the Home Tree? Have you humans discovered some new arcane arts?" The elven prince turned around, locking eyes with Duke Perriman.
"What? No, your Highness. No human magic can rival that of the elves, surely you know that!" The man defended himself, raising both his hands and shaking his head.
"Then how? How did they pierce the magic barrier and blew a hole in the Home Tree?" The Elf hissed, walking back inside and sitting down, eyes still locked on the Duke.
The unpleasant silence was interrupted by Tarik, the Forgelord of the Southern dwarven guild. "Because they have not used any magic. It was a physical attack, that bore a hole in your fort.
Lymlok looked ready to erupt. "A physical-? A physical attack?! You're telling me that they, what, just decided to lob a rock at the Home Tree at great speed?! You honestly expect me to believe that dwarf? Or has your head finally filled up with enough dirt to stop your brain from working?"
The dwarf was unfazed by the prince's outburst, waiting for him to finish before continuing his explanation. "It is the only thing that makes sense. A magic barrier prevents magical attacks, but allows physical objects to pass through. So far, the entire arsenal we've encountered has been nothing but physical weaponry. From their loud sticks that shoot lead, to their exploding orbs."
"That is impossible. No such contraption exists!" The elf slumped into his chair, rubbing his temple in exhaustion.
"The attack came from the field of Vatur. I do not know what has done it, as no one has been able to send any scouts. Ever since the murder apes breached the portal gate a few months ago, not even a bird can fly across the sky without getting shot down. We've sent scouts. They've either failed to get close enough to report anything or they've failed to return at all." Duke Perriman said, finally finding his voice.
"It is a fortress of metal. An entire construction designed with the singular goal of destruction from a distance no spell can reach." A female voice, smooth as honey, filled the war room. An elven woman, adorned in a royal gown with wreath around her head, was carried into the room and sat down at the head of the table.
"Claudia. You should be resting. I'm sorry if my voice woke you up, I got carried away." Lymlok stood up, but his sister waved him to sit back down, before turning her gaze towards the Duke.
"You. Out of my sight. I can't stand to have you in my presence." She hissed, every word filled with venomous hate. Claudia hated humans with a passion unrivaled by any other elf in the kingdom of her father. Even though she knew that men like Duke Perriman were allies of the elves, they looked exactly like the invading Murder Apes, as elves and other species took to calling the non-magic having invaders from the other side of the portal gate. And those very humans cost her more than she was ever willing to give.
"At once my Lady." Perriman bowed and left the war room with urgency in his step.
"You know what it is?" Asked Tarik.
"Yes. I was there with Eothen last autumn, when the invaders attempted to bring in that monstrosity through the portal. It was their first and so far the only successful time they brought anything larger than infantry and their small, armored vehicles." The elven princess replied.
Lymlok flinched at the mention of his late brothers name, but did not dare interrupt his older sister, as she began to tell them what happened that night.
The rain poured down relentlessly for the last several days. The ground felt so loose, the soldiers felt like they might sink into the mud with each step. The entire outpost was on high alert, as this was the longest a portal gate has ever been kept open, drawing unwanted attention from the various different scouting parties, especially the elves.
A scouting party, led by none other than Claudia herself, watched over the outpost for days. The humans were laying down metal tracks, leading from the center of the outpost to the portal gate. They worked day and night, as if on a tight schedule, putting down the massive beams of steel. The elves of the Vatur kingdom were no strangers to the contraptions of the invaders. From their heavy armors immune to arrows, to their armored vehicles. But whatever they were trying to bring through the portal gate, it would surely be massive.
The Vatur field, named after the kingdom in which it was situated, held one of the biggest portal gates on the western side of the continent. So it was no surprise that the invaders did everything they could to secure it as their outpost. Claudia cursed her father for not listening and securing such a valuable asset sooner. But now it was too late for that. It was up to her and her brother Eothen, to drive the Murder Apes away from the portal.
Her train of thought was interrupted by the loud noise of heavy machinery. Generators working at maximum capacity to ensure the stability of the portal. The elf princess watched, eyes wide in horror, as a fortress of metal slowly came into view. It moves slowly, on massive metal wheels, along the rails that were placed on the ground.
"Brother!" She yelled for Eothen.
The elf prince, the oldest of the 3 siblings and next in life for throne, was already ahead of her in thought. If they allowed the humans to bring that thing into their world, they would be sentencing their kingdom and its people to death.
"I know. We have to stop it. Information gathering be damned, it's now or never." Eothen nodded, before blowing a whistle, sounding to the remainder of his troops, further back front he scouting party, that the time to strike is now.
The high pitch whistle sound was drowned out by the heavy rain, but the motion detectors caught on just in time for the humans to not be entirely caught off guard by the flurry of arrows that came from the woods. The elves descended on the outpost as heavily as the rain storm, arrows and spells let loose in as rapidly as possible. They knew where to aim, arrows hitting between the armor plates of their enemies, dropping them while they were still confused.
Humans responded in kind, machinegun sentries lighting up the area, gunning down as many elves as their instruments could detect. The rainfall made their aiming less accurate, allowing Eothen and his troops to get into the encampment. His heart sank to his stomach, witnessing the massive fortress up close.
"Protect the generators! The rail cannon is almost through the portal, we need to keep it at 100% output for a little longer!" Shouted the human soldiers to one another, trying to be louder than the storm.
"The buzzing machinery! They hold the portal steady! We need to-!" Before the prince could finish giving out the order in his native tongue, his ears twitched, warning him of an approaching attack. Eothen turned to face the danger, only to be met with a metal fist to the side of the face, sending him down into the mud. Nearby troops rushed to his aid, but were gunned down before they could even draw their swords. Eothen shook his head, spat out blood and a tooth onto the ground and slowly rose to his feet, turning to meet his opponent.
Before him stood a mean looking man, his missing left eye and arm replaced by prosthetics. Just by looking at it, the fake left arm was not just as compensation. It was undoubtedly fashioned as a replacement for the guns the humans usually used as their weapons. In addition to his left arm, a large handgun hung from his left thigh and a Doramite axe from the other. The elven prince heard of these humans before. They were labeled as War Hounds by their peers, and were usually the first ones sent into an area to clean it up of any resistance. Instead of fear, the elf felt excited to hone his skills against such a capable opponent.
As the shock factor of their assault wore off, the elven casualties grew and their chances of successfully preventing the rail cannon from passing through the portal diminished. Humans focused all their efforts on guarding the generators, even at the cost of their own lives. Claudia was left with a difficult choice to make. Escape and warn her father of the threat, or stay and try to prevent it even at the cost of their life?
Be it luck or non, that choice was made for her. The metal fortress stopped to a screeching halt, as the first of its 4 heavy anchors bore into the soil. Their assault had failed, despite the numerous invader casualties. Her brother held his own against the Hound, but his backup laid dead on the ground. "Claudia! Retreat! Warn father!" Shouted Eothen, before receiving a right hook that knocked him to his knees.
"Don't bother. You are not leaving this place alive." said the human, watching the elf rise off the ground again while chanting something. "And neither are they."
The prince did not need to speak the humans language to understand the implication of what was said. He channeled all the magic he could muster, aiming it straight at the mans chest with the intention of blowing him up from the inside. Sadly for the elf, the invading humans came from a world where magic did not exist, so they were highly resilient to magic, if not outright immune to most forms of it. The metal fist once more struck Eothen across the face, before grabbing him by neck and lifting him onto his feet.
"Nice try hippie. Allow me to reward the effort with a display." Said the human, turning the elf so they were both facing in the same direction. He watched his sister and the remaining few soldiers flee back towards the safety of the woods.
"Wonder if I can make the shot with my janky left eye?" Grinned the man, pulling out the handgun from his belt and aiming it at fleeing Claudia. With what fight Eothen had left in him, he elbowed the man to the face as he was about to take shot. The gunshot rang out, following by his sisters pained scream in the distance.
"At least the shot didn't kill her on the spot." Was all that the elf could think of, as the metal hand that gripped his neck tightened. A loud snap and his world went black.
Lymlok sat in silence, tears welling in his eyes as his older sister finished her story. His rage grew by the minute.
"I see. What a monstrous contraption." Nodded the dwarven Forgelord.
"After they had fired it once, doing the damage that they did, we acquired aid from Duke Perriman to help us raise a physical barrier to stop any subsequent shots from the rail cannon." Claudia said, pointing outside the window to a wall of heavy and thick trees that now served as a physical protection of the Home Tree.
"And your... legs?" Tarik asked cautiously.
"The bullet, as they call them, isn't as easy to remove as an arrow. And none of the elves with me at the time could safely remove it. They managed to heal me enough to keep me alive. By the time I was brought to the royal healer, it was already too late for me." The princess sighed, looking down at her limp legs.
"Everything below the hips, useless. Paralyzed. I begged the healer to end me on the spot, but he refused. I thank him for it. Even like this, I can live long enough to see the head of the bastard that took my brother and my legs hanging from my window." She hissed, wiping her eyes before the tears started rolling down her cheeks.
"At the very least, our father was properly warned and had spread the word to other kingdoms. Every possible portal gate is now heavily guarded and watched over. Not a single weapon like that, nor a single human, will ever set foot on this world again." Claudia's younger brother spoke, composing himself at last.
"So now we ask you, Sir Dwarf, how possible is it for us to construct such a weapon? To use against the Murder Apes?"
"I see." Sighed Tarik. "That is why you invited me. I cannot promise much, but the Southern Dwarf Guild will aid you with everything we have."
(Creator's note: Howdy. Finally got some time in ages to write stuff again. Starting to piece this world together, hopefully it comes out decent. Also, if anyone knows how to put more spaces between lines, please let me know, because on this new Reddit format, no matter how many enters I hit, it always gets mushed together.)

Let’s start this with this.
Individual guard defense is not very important.
The key to any good defense is a big man anchoring the paint and discouraging drives. That eliminates 1/3rd of the court for opposing defenses.
From there, a good game plan will force guys into lower % shots they aren’t comfortable with.
Those are the bones of a good defense and it’s why the Starting lineup is good defensively despite brooks inability to move his feet well and Beasley being terrible. Dame has been much improved on defense and it’s probably why he’s been worse this season on offense and is banged up going into the playoffs.
Giannis is elite at rotating and closing out on the PNR to contain lobs and dunks.
The problem is two things in particular.
Starting Dame & Beasley. While it’s possible to have a good defense, it makes it much harder because you are asking Brook to do two things, contain the drive AND protect rim. Very few guys can do that, especially guys as slow as Brook so you need giannis to do it, which means Brook needs to close out to the corner when giannis rotates which he simply cannot do.
If there was containment at the POA in the first place, this wouldn’t be an issue and Brook can do what he does best, swat shots. That’s why we looked far better with Beverly starting, but even he’s aging and considerably slower on D than he used to be.
The second & biggest problem imo is Bobby.
Bobby is a terrible rim protector. Normally this is okay if the big can move his feet, that way you can run dudes off the 3 point line and have help rotate to contest at the rim. Bobby cannot do that.
Because of Brooks rebounding woes, you have to play Bobby or giannis with him to grab boards and this fucks up our rotations, and creates a scenario where you cannot just run the same defensive principles. Our players have to consciously remember what the scheme is depending on which combination of bigs is on the court.
Thats why we blow so many easy rotations and why Brook is often seen complaining under the rim after a rotation is blown.
Bobby playing takes minutes from our youth like Ajax. Bobby cannot anchor a good defensive bench unit. Bobby on the eye test alone is a poor defender and every single advanced statistic backs it up.
Yes Brook is limited, but what he CAN do he is very good at and is useful. Bobby’s skill set, even if he was good at it (he’s not), is not useful whatsoever to a team with 3 offensive supernova all stars on it.
Bobby has perceived value and is on a good contract. Replacing him with a Vanderbilt type and getting a defensive minded 2 guard who can start like Javon Carter or Davion Mitchell or Dennis smith Jr while retaining Pat Bev for bench minutes would make this team infinitely better.
Ik it sounds convenient to say the 6th man is our achilies but he is. We have the worst bench in the nba before giannis was injured, but somehow a 6MOTY candidate.
This makes no sense.
It’s because Bobby is actually not good for this team and ridding purely on perception/vibes.

Spanish F/C Izan Almansa declared for the NBA Draft this week: https://twitter.com/lockedinfstatus/1782817813733716216 Born in Murcia to a Spanish mom and American dad who played professional basketball in Spain, Almansa has been on the radar for a while. Almansa was a member of Real Madrid's youth program, and won MVP of the U-17 FIBA World Cup, U-18 FIBA European Championship, and U-19 FIBA World Cup for Spain from 2022-23, winning Silver, Gold and Gold medals respectively.
Almansa was a member of Overtime Elite for two years in America from 21-23 before playing with the Ignite this season. He is 6'10 with a 7'0.5 wingspan. He's got a solid frame but he's not a wide body. He's definitely on the smaller side for a C. Almansa has nice mobility and coordination for a big man and short area quickness but isn't the most explosive or have the most speed.
Almansa has proven himself to be an excellent player at the FIBA level but of course the questions always are how it translates to NBA basketball. The biggest strength of Almansa's game is his playmaking ability and feel. His ability to find guys out of the short roll is a weapon. Cutters, shooters, dump offs. He has the ability to push the ball in transition and find guys as a distributor. He's got very good passing feel out of the post. He plays at a more cerebral pace and will patiently manipulate the defense and draw the help and pass out to create the open look from the perimeter. He can find guys off his own creation too from the perimeter...he's one of the best big men in this class on executing the bounce pass to cutters. If he doesn't have something going in the post, he'll either pass it back out and screen or he'll dribble it out of the post and execute a dribble handoff. He's a good decision maker, making him someone that'll be effective in the DHO game, he also will fake the handoff and drive which is an added wrinkle, and he's a big you can use as a facilitator at the top of the key.
Almansa's coordination aids his ability to finish in the PnR. He's mobile and fluid with the ball in his hands. He's got a lot of craft around the rim and the ability to finish with both hands. He's got good timing as both a passer and finisher in the PnR and in general...he's an instinctual basketball player. He hits guys in their pocket as a passer, he keeps his head up and maintains solid court awareness and vision in the short roll giving him the ability to find cutters, he moves the ball and is unselfish, and as a finisher he does a good job using the glass and getting the ball up quickly.
On the downside, Almansa's lack of explosiveness and significant quickness means he can get his shot blocked as a roller a decent amount. He doesn't always quite get all the way to the rim as a roller, but overall he's a good finisher in the short PnR. He's a lob threat in the PnR with his timing and ability to get off the floor when he can load up. He's a very smart cutter and someone who knows how to make himself available for easy baskets at the rim. He knows how to stay available for his ballhandlers down low. He's also a good offensive rebounder with a nose for the ball and a strong motor. Although he's not the highest flyer, he gets off the floor quickly, which also aids his finishing. He's a good screener and is decisive when slipping screens, and on ghost screens, when diving to the rim. He's willing to do the dirty work which is something you can't always say for youngsters.
It's in the long PnR and as a self-creator where you see Almansa's athleticism drawbacks hurt him. He just doesn't get to the rim quickly enough and doesn't explode to it. He's a good ballhandler when he has space but he's shaky when creating for himself in the halfcourt from the perimeter, loses the ball a fair bit, and is a strip/tie up candidate. He has his moments of being able to self-create from the outside where his mobility and coordination really shine but overall he was a bad finisher on shots non-assisted. He does do a good job off rips finding guys as a passer, teammates know to stay moving and keep themselves presentable as an option if he has the ball.
He has a slow and pretty stiff jump shot and made around 20% of 3's and sub-60% from the free throw line, it's not his game and he knows it. All of this makes him a limited all-around scorer at this stage. Almansa's scoring is gonna come from put backs, layups/dunks at the rim, and PnR play finishing for the most part. He does have a nice post game...good footwork and finishes with both hands. He uses his shoulders to create space well in the post. Has a few counters, likes the drop step...not a wizard in the post, doesn't have many counters, but does the basics well and doesn't really waste dribbles nor is someone you can speed up into mistakes too often.
Almansa is somewhat of an enigma as a defender. He has good short area quickness but below average long range quickness. People have talked him up as a switch guy. He is someone who hedges well. He will hedge high and even trap and be someone who suffocates ballhandlers with his short area quickness. As a PnR defender, he's someone who can show at the level and show pretty high but I think he's at his best as a soft drop big. He has enough mobility in the soft drop to contain a ballhandler in these situations, and recover to his man. He has some really nice possessions as a soft drop defender containing ballhandlers. He's not nearly as good recovering to his man when he's playing aggressively on the perimeter...he can really struggle with PnP bigs and athletic bigs who quickly dive to the rim. He just doesn't have the athleticism to recover fast enough, and he doesn't have the size to impact the play on the big inside. If he's switching in these situations, he can get his feet crossed, and also isn't the strongest to be able to contain the ball.
He tends to give up a lot of space to the ballhandler in a pure perimeter switch situation. He has gotten blocks in these situations when guards settle and uses his length effectively. Because he gives up space and relies on his length he doesn't give up a huge amount of blow bys in these situations. He understands his strengths and weaknesses.
As a deep drop big, he does a good job keeping his hands up. He does a good job keeping his hands up in general, in the PnR as well, on ballhandlers, in passing lanes, he keeps his hands up and active to serve as a disruptor which is an savvy trait. He does a good job staying tall and protecting the rim, remaining vertical. Guys take a lot of floaters vs rim attempts, which is what you want, but when guys do get all the way to the rim, he's meh as a rim protector. He doesn't really have the size/strength/length/athleticism to be an elite rim protector or post defender and can be swallowed up by physicality and size on both ends.
He does have good awareness. He reads what the ballhandler is gonna do, he does a good job rotating after passes and he does a good job rotating on the weak side and rotating in general defensively, he has a high IQ. He anticipates passes well as a defender. He nabs some weakside blocks and he nabs blocks reading lobs his way in the PnR in drop but combining is Showcase+Regular season numbers averaged right around only a block a game, a little less. He's a good defensive rebounder but not an incredible one either. He boxes out, but doesn't get many rebounds outside of his area.
Izan Almansa has been one of the best youth international basketball players really of all time by accolades and certainly the last half decade. He's now about to enter a new chapter in his career---professional basketball at the NBA level. He has skills that will translate to the league and holes in his game that are very concerning but playmaking 6'10 bigs...that's all the rage these days. He has so much experience at different levels of basketball and is still only 18 years old...he's certainly not a finished product. Are you all Thumbs Up, Down, or Across, on Izan Almansa?

Previously I’ve utilized a Markov Chain text generator to make faux patch notes, please see some new notes while we await the Ringmaster patch.

GENERAL CHANGES:
Added rosh pit to secret shops - Roshan now moves between the four, randomly, constantly
Added new time of day: Dawn - at Dawn all Spell Amp is increased by 30%
Added 3 new trees to Radiant and River
Melee hero block reworked: now 20% chance to block all 40% of damage.
New Damage type: Mystical. Reduced innately by 30, with an added 5% reduction for every 10% evasion the target has. If target is intelligence hero, reduced by 25 more. If Strength hero, increased by 33%.
New Status Debuff: Hungry.
Occurs after 45mins and affects all units. Improves movement speed, attack speed by 5%.
After 1.5 hours becomes Famished. (5% -> 20%)
After 3 hours becomes Starving (20% -> 700%)
If a hero is considered a carry, they have -40gpm. If they are considered a support, they have a free ward slot.
Twin Gates now have a 10% chance to fail, wasting the mana and channel time. It also has a 3% chance to teleport to a random location in the map.
New Mud locations added to map, slowing units that walk through. Mud is increased near river. After 30 minutes mud becomes quicksand which roots units for 6 seconds unless freed by ally (channel: 2s)
Jungle locations (Well, Mines etc) are now enterable and have jungle camps inside that can be farmed. Aura Benefits are amplified doubly when inside. Each location has a boss monster that spawns at the 40 minute mark. Does not respawn.
Mines: Skeleton Foreman: drops Ancient Pickaxe (Active: dig for a neutral item. Chances of a higher tier item are lower. These neutral items can be equipped in regular item slots. CD: 70)
Graveyard: Gravekeeper: Drops Malevolent Mace. (Passive: when hitting a target 3 times consecutively, curse a random item slot disabling it for 5 seconds (both active and passive)
Well: Mr. serendipity: Drops Lucky Coin (Active: 50% chance for invulnerability for 5s, 50% chance for -1/2 max HP. CD: 13)
Statue: Stoic Fighter: drops Stone Fist Wrecker (Passive: every 17 seconds your next attack stuns for 2 seconds and reduces HP by 17% of max)
Maximum hero level increased to 45. XP per level reduced by 75%
Flag bearer Creep now deals 60-300 damage. It also gains an Aura that reduces enemy Flagbearer creeps damage by 400.
Destroying barracks now instantly spawns one ally creep at the barrack location for every other barrack destroyed.
All staircases are wider by 200%. Moving up stairs slows movement speed by 24%, moving down stairs has a 7% chance to trip and fall.
Ward vision on hills now increased by 1700
Tier 1 towers model size reduced by 20%
Tier 2 towers now lose true sight
Tier 3 towers now have 3 attacks by default (Glyph adds 30)
Tier 4 towers now are combined, having 4x range, damage, and health.
Random Weather Effects now added (at 25 minute mark applies one, lasts rest of game)
Rain:
increase river to cover 1/3 of map.
Movement in river for fish units decreased.
Can fish in river by purchasing Rod (1000g). Channel for 7 seconds to obtain fish. (40% +50g, 30% gain random rune effect, 20% gain full HP+Mana, 10% gain fish unit (4700 hp, 200 dmg.)
Tornado:
Random 700 AOE stuns occur around map. Stun duration: 4
1/4 of trees are permanently destroyed
Flying units now move faster but potentially randomly.
Sun:
Improved regen by 5%
Vision increased by 600
Fire type attacks empowered by 200 damage or 30% effectiveness, whichever is better.
Flurry:
Snowmen appear constantly. If damaged either gain 30gold or lose 50 hp.
At 50 mins. Christmas visitor arrives. All heroes get a random item depending on their damage (less = better gift. The hero with most gains coal (does nothing, takes up item slot). In visitors area there is no combat allowed or the visitor attacks and insta-kills.
Small snowflakes appear on the screen. Have to be rubbed away with the mouse to remove.

Added new area to map, Sanctum. Located Between Ancient and fountain, provides flat -150 damage block to enemy units within sanctum.
When all tier 3 towers are destroyed on the map, instantly a unit is summoned in the center of the map. If destroyed, applies a corrosion effect to all buildings of enemy team, reducing armor to 0.
New roshan drops:
4 kills: omega rune (all rune effects, non dispellable)
5 kills: airdrop (after 3 second delay, teleports all allies around the user to any spot on map)
6 kills: instant death (kills a unit instantly, disables buyback)
7 kills: shopkeeper’s lease (disables using shops from enemy team)
8 kills: Game End. The team who killed roshan now apply an effect to any units/buildings they attack permanently reducing regen by 101%. Stops roshan from spawning.
New Base Structure. Defense Tower. Replacing the 5 statues in the base, these towers each apply a -12% damage reduction to the ancient while alive. These are only now destroyable after the t4 tower is destroyed.
Jungle Changes:
New Neutral Creep Camp (Medium): Merfolk Raider. Ability: Teleport enemy to river (CD: 15). Merfolk Minor x3 Ability: Reduce mana by 65 per attack
New Neutral Creep Camp (Ancient): Cyclops (1 unit). Has 5000 hp. Ability: Eye Beam - Deals 1000 to targeted area (AOE: 500) on ground after 4 second delay. CD: 7
New Neutral Camp (Easy): Squirrel Squad (x7). HP: 10. Ability: Nut - Deal 40 damage to nearby Creep unit. CD: 2
New Neutral Camp (Hard): Reapers (x2) HP 890. Ability: Reaper (CD:7 slice all enemies in AOE, increasing item cooldowns by 8 and applying hp regen to instead be negative for 3 seconds)
Neutral Camps now respawn double if there is a ward in the camp box instead of spawn being blocked.
Neutral Camp box size reduced by 55%
Neutral Creeps have a 10%. Chance to drop Shared Tango. Chance increases by .1% after every minute. These tangoes do not expire and stack infinitely. Upon obtaining 100, can build tango tree in base that applies 7hp/s to all allied units. Tree can be cut.
Pulling camps now bannable offense
Wards reworked.
Observer: 2 max. Vision 3000
Sentry: 400 max. Vision 12
There must be a hero of each attribute in a given team comp. If not abided by, enemy base gains trebuchet which can be manned to lob boulders. Can damage building. Cooldown on attack: 45s. Deals 25% max hp to building. Ignores backdoor protection, but still must damage buildings sequentially.
There is a hidden flag for each team, randomly placed at the start of the match. If a team finds their flag and returns to their fountain, all of their lanes now spawn a new unit, Bombardier, which attacks in AOE and deals increased damage to buildings.
Side Shops readded, now next to Tormentor. Can buy Tormentor shard for 5000g. After obtaining 10, gives hero the tormentor passive.
Items:
Tome of Knowledge brought back and renamed to Tomb of Knowledge. Now targets enemy unit and banishes them for 20 seconds. They gain XP equal to the current minute per second while banished.
Blink Dagger cost increased to 4000 Range increased to 2000 Cooldown decreased to 11.5
Eul’s Scepter now can be used while disabled. After landing, movement speed is decreased by 20% for 3 seconds and then increased by 40% for 3 seconds.
Vanguard now builds from Ring of Protection, Heart of Tarrasque, and Recipe
Magic Wand max charges increased by 39
Kaya can only be used by women
Solar Crest effects now increased by 30% during day.
Maelstrom damage increased by 15 per jump
New item: Leash (Active: CD 23, attach to an enemy unit. They are unable to get away for 2.3 seconds)
New item: Smite Scimitar (Active: CD 65. Destroy an enemy unit. If they are a hero, instead they become silenced, rooted, and disarmed for 4 seconds. If targeting a hero, the CD is increased to 120)
New item: Plate of Divinity: (Passive: damage block 90, regen 50, evasion 15, magic resist 10. Damage of your spells and attacks reduced by 50%)
New item: Dagger Thorn (Active: 8 seconds. Shoot a projective (skill shot) forward from your hero. If unit is hit, it is poisoned for 8 seconds, slowing by 10% increasing by 10 each second. After poison wears off, unit receives 100 damage)
New item: apron of the smith (PASSIVE: all items you make gain a +1 modifier, increasing their stats and effects by 1%. Allies can buy items from your location for 1% more cost.)
Gem of true sight now applies true sight to both teams when dropped. Every minute on the floor it increases this AOE by 200.
Ironwood Branch now has a 10% chance to be Mango Tree and a 5% chance to be an Ironwood Branch Tree (spawns respective items every 40s)
Dagon now gains effects per level: 2: bouncing shot (1 bounce) 3: aoe around each target 4: bounces twice 5: bounces 5x and aoe increased
Divine Rapier now has a third toggle that applies the other two toggles simultaneously.
Daedalus critical damage reduced to 130%
New item: Hoof of Defiance: spawns horse unit which can be ridden improving movement speed by 120. Has chance to disobey orders.
Chainmail now increased to +8 armor but has chance to act as if it is +0 armor
Tangos can no longer eat trees
TP scrolls channel time is now reduced for every hero that has teleported to the building. (3, 2, 1, 0, if a fifth unit TPs it is instant and also reduces all CDs to 0)
New Item: Magistrate of Magic: Increases spell CDs by 2 BUT casts a lesser version of the spell 2 seconds after your cast. Magistrate follows hero around and is unforgettable.
Urn of Shadows can now be cast on creeps, making the damage over time effect hurt all enemy units in a 600 aoe from the unit
Radiance now can be upgraded. Frost Fire. Additional slows enemies by 2% for every second they are affected by burn. If it reaches 100% slow, the unit is instantly killed.
Healing Salves can now be used on undead units, apply damage instead of healing.
Buckler now has an active. Gain +130 armor for .25 seconds (CD:200)
Vladamir’s Offering has an active. Destroy item, but gain permanent aura around self, at 25% efficiency. However, the unit has a -20% hp penalty as well.
New Universal Blink, builds from blink, all +10 stat items and ultimate orb. Every use swaps between the other three effects from the stat blink daggers, at 75% effect.
Assault Cuirass now upgrades all siege units around it to siege towers. Weaker damage vs towers, but upon destruction spawns 3 special agent creeps that solely target buildings with immense power.
Scythe of Vyse now turns unit into Boar at nighttime. They are uncontrollable and automatically attempt to gore the nearest ally. Duration increased to 3.5 seconds. Gore deals 75 damage and can occur every .5 seconds.
Hand of Midas can target enemy heroes, turning them into gold statue. They can be picked up by enemy units and brought back to fountain. If so, they are restored and the enemy team gains 500g. Only one gold statue per team allowed at a time.
Glove of haste: Removed
HEROES:
New hero: Ringmaster
Q: three ring circus: spawn one of three different animals, randomly.
Elephant: stuns enemies around in AOE Monkey: throws at enemy, slowing and poisoning Seal: disarms and repositions enemies.
Units last long enough to have 3 spawned at once. (CD: 12, duration: 38)
W: cannon shot: shoot self out of cannon, moving large distance and sucking all enemies at location towards Ringmaster. They also gain the debuff, showstopper. For every command they perform, they have a 20% chance to not do the action. If this occurs, they receive 200 damage and cannot attempt that action for .5 seconds.
CD: 20
E: juggler: PASSIVE. Has 7 colorful balls he juggles which can be seen in his hud, rotating every .8 seconds. Every attack he throws the current ball.
RED: 110% crit BLUE: slow .6s YELLOW: disarm and silence .8s GREEN: poison for 2s, 40 dot PURPLE: -150 mana burn WHITE: heal self 100 BLACK: -7% max hp to target
R: bring in Clown. Summons Clown to help. Lasts 60s, CD, 180
Clown has abilities.
Q: Banana. Puts banana on floor. Enemy can trip and slid if stepped on (CD3, duration 30)
W: Pizzaz PASSIVE. Moves through units. If doing so, swaps two of their items locations and attacks for 100/200/300 (can occur every 1s) Cannot conventionally attack.
E: Honk nose. Aoe 500. Lowers cooldowns by 2 for allies and increases by 2 for enemies. Cooldown 3. When honk occurs, it deafens enemy hearing.
R: Circus Tent. Puts down tent. Enemies in 1000 AOE run to tent to see show. They can leave but must pay 300g x X0:00 minute for ticket to do so. Tent lasts 12s

ABADDON: Silenced heroes in a 300 Aoe are forced to attack you.
Alchemist: when attacking a unit with Chemical Rage, steal 3 gold per attack.
AA: if any enemy stunned by Cold Feet is attacked by Chilling Touch, it extends the duration by 5 seconds.
AM: new Aghanim. When using ultimate, all affected lose one random spell for 30s. Each time they are affected by this the duration increases by 45s.
Arc Warden: Clone can now clone, but for each instance all units lose 5% max HP.
Axe: each culling blade stack increases call and helix AOE by 10
Bane: enemies affected by any of banes abilites can spawn hallucinations around hero. Enemy has a 25% chance to get attacked by hallucination, and a 25% for their attack/ability to instead target hallucination.
Batrider: Bat ages as game goes on. Starts as child -> adolescent-> adult -> middle aged -> elder -> imminent -> dead. 10 minutes per stage.
Child: -70% stats Adolescent: +20% Adult: + 40% Middle Ages: 0% Elder: -50% Imminent: -99% Dead: batrider now walks, is renamed Walker, and cannot use Firefly.
Beastmaster: Roar now applies 2 stacks of axes for every ally unit in a 400 aoe from the target.
Bloodseeker: applying Blood Rite now spawns 6 candles in a circle around the area. If not destroyed within 9 seconds (1 attack), it summons a blood demon unit for 10 seconds. This demon in uncontrollable and attacks the nearest unit quickly, dealing .7% max HP per attack, attacking 6 times a second.
Bounty Hunter: New Aghanim Shard. Bounty Poster. Can post poster on cliffs. Enemy units that pass by the poster automatically reveal that unit for 45 seconds. Additionally they amplify all gold Bounty Hunter receives by 150%. 3 posters can be present at one time.
Brewmaster: units all have a drunkenness gauge if Brewmaster is in the game. All of his abilities (including primal split) cause a certain level of drunkenness. As that meter increases, a % modified applies to: ability cooldowns, movement speed, and vision (screen gets slightly blurry)
Bristleback: ultimate ability now is an active. Brawl. Pressing causes all units in a 600 AOE (allies included) to uncontrollably attack each other for 7 seconds. No item passives will apply. If someone is killed, they pay their death gold loss to their killer, they also spawn with a movement speed penalty of 80% for 10 seconds and cannot TP during that duration.
Broodmother: when enemy trips the Aghanim’s snare, 10 mega spiders instantly come upon the enemy and begin attacking them. They are equal in strength to 1.5 spiderlings each.
Centaur Warrunner: now has innate passive with his ultimate. Routing Flank. When ulting, if coming from enemies backside, they are feared for 3 seconds and weakened, applying -40% all damage for 5 seconds. If coming to the enemies side, only the weakened effect occurs (for 3 seconds).
Chaos Knight: upon using ultimate, each of his illusions have a chance to be one of the four horsemen, applying a new effect.
War: +100% damage Famine: reduce enemy regen by 70% Death: applies 8% max hp per attack Disease: attacks lower armor and magic resistance by 20% for 2 seconds
Chen: can now control any hero that is an animal for 5 seconds. Able to use any non-ultimate ability.
Clinkz: Skeletons when destroyed spawn Flame Bones. If enemies touch flame bone they receive 65 damage per second until they enter the river.
Clockwork: can purchase a unique item from the shop, battery pack. This amplifies his power by 30% but wears over time. Only going to fountain recharges.
Crystal Maiden: when in game randomly adds snow effects to the map. This makes it so that when snowing her abilities apply additional effects. (3 novas in a line, frostbite is AOE of 300, mana aura provides max mana (permanant),when ulting, two smaller ultimates move around the map at fast speeds). If the random weather effect is Flurry, these are increased further.
Dark Seer: when casting his ultimate, it spawns a wall at the casted location and at every location casted previously. Can duplicate creeps and neutrals now.
Dark Willow: can cast cursed crown on a tree to apply the effects around it. This curses the tree disabling it from being destroyed. Any abilities cast within 300 from the tree are improved. (Brambles spawn around cursed trees, cursed crown deals +80 dmg per cursed tree, shadow realm increased by .05 duration, fear applies in 200 aoe from cursed trees, and each cursed tree spawn a weaker bedlam)
Dawnbreaker: has innate passive. Map is always sunny weather. Applying 3% blind to all enemy units.
Dazzle: changed Aghanim’s shard. Now puts hexes enemy units affected by poison touch. When attacked, applies a random increase to the cooldown of each enemy ability currently on cooldown. Range: .25 - 4s
Death Prophet: new AGHANIM: when killed, spawns a crypt while she is dead. This can cast crypt swarm in the four cardinal directions, has a permanent silence aura around it, and has 3, 7, 11 ghosts circling it. It can only be destroyed by being attacked once by 3 different enemy heroes. When attacked it soul siphons the hero.
Disruptor: new Shard: spawns a tornado that moves randomly around disruptor. It banished the enemy hero affected for 10 seconds. All Cooldowns dont tick down while affected and any effects from disruptors abilities are delayed until being unbanished.
Doom: while doomed, disables voice and text chat. Additionally disables any purges of other detrimental effects affecting the doomed unit.
Dragon Knight: new SHARD: Dragon Nest. Plant nest on a hill. It spawns whelps every 60s that push the nearest wave by casting fireball. Egg can be destroyed and can be seen from low ground.
Drow Ranger: Marksmanship reworked. Now when you attack an enemy unit. Debuffs them. For every subsequent ranged Unit that attacks them, they lose (2 -> 4 -> 8 -> 16 etc) % max hp. Each unit can only apply once per 60s.
Earth Spirit: new Aghanim: terraform. Turns remnant into a mountain. This is 2 regular ward cliffs with a taller higher cliff between them. Enemies on the cliff have 80% miss chance from being in the clouds, and lose 20% mana every second. If they get down from the cliff in any way, they lose 60% max hp from fall damage. Allies on the cliff gain: 400 attack range, 100% accuracy, and become “one with earth” a buff that gives them an automatic burrow for 2 seconds upon reaching 10% hp. They can move while burrowed at 3x speed. Buff lasts 20s
Earthshaker: can activate aftershock to create a small ripple. This get bigger every time he casts a spell. Expires if a spell doesn’t get cast within 7 seconds. Ripple slows enemies by 10%, increases by 200 aoe each cast. It also does 20 damage + 30 per subsequent cast.
Elder Titan: Astral Sprit can now attack and cast spells, including astral spirit. This can continually reoccur but they get weaker by 25% each time.
Ember Spirit: Burns trees he passes by. Trees take 200% longer to return once burned. Ashes from burned trees can be ran over to absorb. Doing so increases ember spirits health by 3, and his regen by .25
Enchantress: Impetus now pushes the enemy unit forwards upon being hit. If they collide with enchantress, they receive a debuff amplifying pure damage by 200% and then are knocked away by 2000 range. Enchantress can target anyone she kicks away for 10 seconds unconditionally.
Enigma: new SCEPTER: omniverse. Creates a realm on the map on the enemy secret shop. One use per game. When enigma enters, he can select one aspect from either an enemy or ally hero. He gets a choice modify that negatively or positively (example: ally Torrent AOE +80 / enemy hand of god -300 heal / +500 ally Warlock HP) He then returns to reality. This has a 300s cooldown, and he must enter the omniverse to do so again.
Faceless Void: each time faceless void bashes an enemy he gains 1 stack of “times up” upon having 100 stacks, the enemy respawn timer and buyback cost is increased by 50%.
Grimstroke: new SHARD. When active, grimstroke can draw on the map, three strokes. Each stroke replicates on the real map, damaging enemies (100 , 500 , 1000). If they are hit with two strokes, they gain +2s to their TP channels. If they are hit with 3 strokes, they gain +5s instead. Debuff PERMANENT. CD: 120
Gyrocopter: At nighttime ultimate is different. shoot a firework off. This dazzles all enemies for 5 seconds as they gaze towards it. Similar to Ignuus Fatus.
Hoodwink: added palm trees in the map. If next to a palm tree increases damage by 300.
Huskar: inner fire AOE increased the lower huskar’s HP is. If enemy is affected by inner fire and they are ult’d, they become taunted. New Scepter: minimalize. Become 1 HP and miniature model size (Weaver Beetle). Immune to damage for 2 seconds.
Invoker: swap E and R. E now invokes. R is exort. If invoker ever casts the same combination he already has, he gains a stack of inferiority. This does nothing but at 10 stacks he loses one orb.
IO: can no longer tether to allies on IOs team’s side of the map. Can tether to enemies applying negative benefits.
Jakiro: aghanim’s scepter: head. Gains a new head. Choose between Poison, Electricity, or Air. Gives new “liquid” attack and applies effect to ultimate.
Liquid poison: -20% mana, movement speed, and cooldowns
Liquid Electricity: make the target hop around uncontrollably for 3 seconds
Liquid air: blow an enemy item away to be grounded. The item will be closest to that hero so they are more inclined to pick back up.
Poison Macro: add -max hp loss (5%) per second while in area. Returns overtime after 12 seconds
Electric Macro: if enemy casts spells or attacks in area, they are stunned 1.5 seconds
Air Macro: Jakiro can move AOE around using new hotkey. Can be moved every 2 seconds. Increases girth and length by 150%
Juggernaut: Removed
Keeper of the Light: all AOEs increased by 100% during day and reduced by 50% at night. For each subsequent day increase all AOEs by 10%
Kunkka: if casting torrent storm in river, uplifts the entire river.
Legion Commander: when dueling all units spectate forcibly. If so, all heroes gain +10 duel damage. If any interrupt, they will taunt all other heroes to attack them for 3 seconds.
Leshrac: new Innate: has damage reduction based on the # of 7s in the timer. 25% per 7.
Lich: casting Frost blast applies a -1% slow that is only dispelled by death. Getting a kill with chainfrost makes all current stacks permanent.
Lifestealer: rage is now a passive that occurs when attacked. Cooldown: 8 seconds, duration: 2.
Lina: light strike array applies a debuff to units in the dead center. This enables all spells to crit for 175%
Lion: hexing enemy units can turn them into:
50% Fish: normal
20% Squid: inks all nearby allied units, making them slowed by 25% and causes them to have a 2 second delay to all item actives. Movement is propulsion every 1 second.
20% Shrimp: shrinks unit to 3% model size. If an enemy unit runs over this shrimp, they have a chance to consume, killing the shrimp.
10% Whale: increases unit size by 1000%. Bumps all units away. Cannot move. As this unit is damaged, blubber falls off and after a 2 second fall delay can crush allies to the Whaled unit, dealing 30% max hp.
Lone Druid: Spirit Bear can no longer carry items, but has attributes per level increased by 6x.
Luna: Has a chance when ulting to have the moon crash into the area around Luna. This deals damage equal to all Lunar Beams all at once. Once this happens, all of Luna’s abilities are permanently weaker. (Chance: 4%)
Lycan: Lycan’s courier is a wolf. The courier can attack units and has 4x the hp (4 melee attacks, 8 ranged). Courier wolf applies wolf disease on attack, increasing enemy fury, giving them a chance of 7% for their auto attacks to target a nearby ally. (Duration: 4, stacks)
Magnus: Reverse Polarity interrupts all enemy actions upon cast, globally. The unit then must do three different actions before being able to do any action twice. Afterwards, they are recovered from the disability.
Marci: new scepter: scoot. Whistles, having one ally sped up to sprint to Marci’s side, regardless of their location. Then they both gain unleash simultaneously. For each barrage, they both gain +20 damage and +5 armor. 6 total barrages.
Mars: Mars gains a quest to find the missing children. They are scattered around the map captured by enemy creeps. For each found, the creeps at the other children get stronger. Each child becomes a Follower of Mars that follows him, being untargetable. They sing his theme song, giving him improved status resistance (up to 80% with all 8 children)
Medusa: gains a new innate toggle: snake shot. Turns arrows into snakes. These deal less damage (30%) but they bite onto enemy heroes. Once bitten they slow down the enemy base attack time by .01 for each snake. Only through death or an antidote obtained by 3 materials from cut down trees can they be removed.
Meepo: has 4 unique Meepo Mounds at the cardinal directions of the map. Meepo can go to and travel between, after channeling for 7 seconds. He has a chance to find gold (50) or diamonds (500) when traveling.
Mirana: when in moonlight shadow, the first ability cast by all ally units does not reveal their location.
Monkey King: when using Tree Leap, places a banana in the inventory of the enemy, overwriting an item randomly. The unit will need to press the hotkey for that item to eat the banana to reveal the item, so that it can further be usable. Eating the banana takes .5s
Morphing: can now morph into Roshan.
Muerta: new SCEPTER: guitar. Plays music on guitar. Replaces all ability hot keys with strings on guitar. Playing notes damages all enemies in 800 aoe. Missing a note ends the song. If all notes are correctly played, deals added damage to all enemies and deafens them for 5 seconds.
Naga Siren: when singing, slowly sucks all enemies towards the middle of the song aoe. Any enemies at middle upon song end receive 3 second stun
Natures Prophet: now must teleport adjacent to a tree.
Necrophos: can pray at the dead bodies of heroes, gaining a chance being blessed by the dead god. If blessed, gains 0s Q cooldown. Lasts until death.
Nightstalker: when in aghanim’s aoe, makes night time timer and ultimate duration not tick down.
Nyx Assassin: can buy a unique Dagon Nyx. Recipe costs 5000 gold. Increases damage to 1200.
Ogre Magi: can now multicast non targeted items. Shiva guard, multiple blasts. Glimmer: targets multiple allies. Phase Boots: longer duration.
Omni knight: when killing dire heroes, gains +1 faith. Increasing armor by 2, and hp by 50. When killing radiant heroes, the reverse occurs.
Oracle: new innate: can activate an ability to see the movement of enemy cursors for 5 seconds.
OD: steals 2% maximum mana whenever killing an enemy. If enemy has below 500 mana past 45 mins, they are permanently killed.
Pangolier: when enemies attack him, his muscles can bounce attacks off of him. This causes enemy to be confused, reversing their mouse movements for 4 seconds. Chance to proc: 10%
PA: has a 15% chance to dodge all attacks, immune to true strike. Buildings can no longer miss attacks. When an attack is missed, can riposte by swiftly pressing the R key. Doing so leaps to enemy and instantly crits.
Phantom Lancer: can no longer burn enemy mana via diffusal blade. Now illusions can bash and cleave however.
Phoenix: if egg is destroyed or explodes, temporarily increases all vision by 3000. After 5 seconds, reduces all vision TO 200 for 5 seconds due to immense sun exposure.
Primal Beast: when throwing rocks, rips from ground creating a hole permanently. This causes creeps to have to construct a bridge to pass over; taking 60s to do so uninterrupted. Heroes can carefully tread over but have a chance to stumble.
Puck: whenever casting phase shift, purges all effects. Can be cast while disabled or silenced. Cooldown increased to 45s.
Pudge: flesh heap stacks now only occur from kills, but apply +10 strength. Creep kills provide .01 strength.
Pugna: enemies zapped by nether ward have the corresponding spell mana cost increased by 2 permanently.
Queen of Pain: enemies damaged by poison dagger scream every time damage procs, revealing their location through fog. If they are damaged by scream of Pain, they scream louder, silencing themselves for 4 seconds. If during the silence they are hit by Sonic Wave they scream again, even louder. This increases the silence to 12 seconds and is undispellable.
Razor: now is melee and ranged. simultaneously able to buy dragon lance and skull basher.
Riki: immune to gem of true sight.
Rubick: when stealing spell, if you kill an enemy with the spell 3 times, they lose that spell permanently. All stolen spells enter a spell book that will need to be clicked through to swap between spells (CD: 3)
Sand King: can erect pyramid. If near pyramid, sand king loses the ability to be damaged by magic. Pyramid lasts 20 seconds. Cooldown: 45. Erect length: 4
Shadow Demon: disruption becomes AOE banishing multiple heroes at once creating 2 illusions of each. 1 illusions will always been a shadow terror, attacking Shadow Demon himself vigorously.
Shadow Fiend: kills with passive apply permanent -1 armor to unit. Every 10 attacks against a building apply -1 armor as well to all enemies around it. If an enemy is at 0 armor or lower, shadow fiend deals 50 extra damage per negative armor.
Shadow Shaman: ether shock has a 10% chance to summon a serpent ward. Serpent wards can now slither towards enemy buildings. If a serpent ward is denied, it summons 2 new serpent wards in its place.
Silencer: Global Silence increases in duration by .5 every time it is cast.
Skywrath Mage: when killed, summons a son. Son can cast spells at 5% efficiency. If son is killed, skywrath mage acts at 50% efficiency until his next death.
Slardar: Bashing enemies have a chance to deal brain damage. Making them lose 3 intelligence. Chance: 4%
Slark: dark pact now applies debuff to enemies. When they debuff slark they lose 5 vision.
Snapfire: scattershot now shoots 8 projectiles that scatter in a much more vigorous pattern. These deal 12% max however. Range reduced to 150
Sniper: assassinating an enemy hero increases sniper attack and cast ranges by 50. After 10 stacks, stops increasing but makes assassinate unavoidable even via banishment.
SPECTRE: desolate damage increased by 400 if enemy is 4000 or more greater away from an ally hero.
Spirit Breaker: nether strike now can be cast while charging increasing damage and knockback by 300%
Storm Spirit: static remnant poses now change effects:
Laying down: +200 aoe T Pose: +150 damage Waving: root .6s Squatting: stun .2s Laughing: silence 3s
Sven: great cleave now cuts enemy Hp in half. Can only affect each unity once every 300s.
Techies: all abilities have a chance to be a dud or to be empowered. (10% and 10% respectively).
Templar Assassin: psi blades now deal magical damage, and can crit.
Terrorblade: there is a permanent terrorblade illusion in the enemy fountain. Unkillable. It will attack all enemies in the fountain, hindering their regen speed.
Tidehunter: at 60:00, a new golden anchor spawns in the rivers if picked up, replaced his current anchor and improves damage by 200, giving +25g each time he attacks. If enemy picks up, they deny from Tidehunter and gain +2000 gold.
Timbersaw: can pay 2000g for trip to psychiatrist. After session, for 120s gains immunity to all disables.
Tinker: can rearm buyback. Additionally, can now teleport to a special workshop, inaccessible to anyone else. In workshops can improve items by different aspects for differing costs. (Cast Range, Damage, mana cost, disable duration)
Tiny: can toss buildings, trees, cliffs, and stairs. Moving their location until tossed again.
Treant Protector: enchanted trees now vine whip enemies that come near. Having a 5% chance of stealing the items: Quelling Blade, and a 1% chance of stealing Gem of True Sight.
Troll Warlord: allies getting kills adjacent to troll gain battle XP. After 7 kills they become Warlord. Example: Warlord Warlock. Gives ally fervor, with max stacks of 4.
Tusk: Walrus Punch has an increase critical strike against enemies units that are above 50% hp but below 85% hp. Damage increase +80%. For enemy units under 5% hp, if they are killed, a walrus spawns for 15 seconds that attacks enemy units.
Underlord: Firestorm is now blue and deals mana damage instead of HP
Undying: now always respawns from his current location instead of the fountain. Upon respawning, automatically casts all 4 abilities to the closest unit.
Ursa: fury swipes cause 1% max hp loss per stack instead of added damage.
Vengeful Spirit: wave of spirit fears enemies for 3 seconds. If they are damaged by magic missile, increases duration by 3.
Venomancer: poison sting increases in damage every second. Even if reapplied. +4 damage per second. Duration increased to 40 at level 25.
Viper: viper strike now stuns. If the enemy does not die from the effect, they gain a debuff increasing the duration of subsequent viper strikes by 30%. Loses all stacks upon death.
Visage: armor randomly changes, constantly. From a range of -30 and +55 of the true value.
Void spirit: astral step distance increased to 3000. If void spirit kills an enemy this is increased by 200.
Warlock: Grimoire is now a targetable unit that follows Warlock around. If destroyed, warlock can no longer cast abilities for 30s until it respawns. If it is destroyed 4-6 times (random amount). It summons the eternal dread demon. Unkillable monster that deals immense damage.
Weaver: geminate attack has a chance to shoot an extra projectile. +.25% chance per geminate attack used in the game.
Windranger: gale force is now a passive that always follows wind ranger around. AOE decreased by 50.
Winter Wyvern: winter’s curse applies a disease to the affected units. They slowly lose willpower after attacking their allies and grow in insanity. Their abilities will randomly swap locations, items will fail to work, and casting spells loses health in addition to mana. The disease is only healed by all 5 heroes moving at least 2000 range away from each other.
Witch Doctor: maledict has a chance to affect allies. Voodoo restoration has a chance to heal enemies. Death Ward is now basic ability but attacks 10% slower. Paralyzing Cask is now ultimate, and bounces 30 times. Stunning for 1 second each.
Wraith King: mortal strike remove aegis of the immortal from enemy units. Cooldown increased by 20, damage increased to 600%. However, any accuracy the target has is multiplied by 2; this attack cannot have accuracy applied to it.
Zeus: All abilities have a chance of targeting a nearby tree instead. Chance: 15%.

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:

1. Roleplaying – Time Combat gets a lot easier (and harder) when you don’t abstract it out.
   
2. 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.
   
3. 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.
   
4. 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).
   
5. 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.
   
6. 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.
   
7. 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.
   
8. 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).
   
9. 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.
   
10. Using Vehicles – Want to move something too heavy for your span? Just drive! Or fly!
    
11. 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.
    
12. 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.
    
13. 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.
    
14. 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).
    
15. 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).
    
16. 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.

I'm a Rep 15 LOB main since I started playing, and while I don't think he's as absymal as people say, he does feel somewhat samey sometimes. I'm no game balance expert, so take this with a grain of salt or tell me what should be improved. So, I have proposed a list of changes to spice things up:
Main

1. Chain and Finisher Heavies can be softfeinted into a slightly faster longarm. Dunno the speed but however fast it needs to be to not allow a feint out of parry and then dodge.
   
2. Heavy Openers + FU Light = 26 Total, UB Finisher Heavies + FU = 30 Total, UB LP Heavies + FU = 32 Total
   
3. Zone can be softfeinted into Impaling Charge, or out of neutral by dodging and then heavying.
   
4. Impaling charge acts as a chain ender like Glad's skewer, on wallsplat having an animation where he slams into the opponent into the wall, dealing 10 damage on initial hit, and an extra 12 with the wallsplat.
   

Shits & Giggles / Extra

1. Superior block on forward dodge where he glances off their blow with his gauntlet armour, leading into a shove.
   
2. Allguard (lmao idk) where he deflects the opponents weapon away with the halberd, and on GB input, follows up with a quick shove (chain ender) that blinds and deals 14 damage. Not really mean to be effective, I just liked the BM of his heavy parry lights.
   

Makula shifts forward, slipping around the edge of the door and taking advantage of her slimmer armor to get out towards the front. This wasn't her first time clearing a building, and she'd actually had the time to be trained properly on this type of operation since then. Simple math, just like Jerry had taught her back on the Pillars of Ascension prior to the raid on the terrorist hideout in the warrens.
Speed x Violence = Victory.
Cannidor were plenty fast and brought plenty of violence with them so it was just a matter of dishing out enough pain that the bad girls tapped out as quickly as they could.
Her shotgun comes up to her shoulder and she works the action like a mad woman, sending buckshot down range to knock pirates off their feet like something out of a cheesy Earth action movie.
It had taken a couple decades, from what the humans told her, but the Great White Shark could finally deliver on human action movies' promises of the lethal potential and sheer physical impact of a shotgun.
Makula grins to herself as she complies with an order from Jaruna, throwing herself into a position to cover the rest of the girls as Jaruna kicks a door through it's frame and the sounds of gunfire fill the air once again.
Prefab interior construction like this simply didn't have a chance of holding up to a Cannidor's raw strength, never mind a Cannidor in power armor.
A group of pirates rush to respond to the ruckus and Makula's shotgun swings into line before she even finishes shouting "Contact!" into her microphone.
The shotgun thunders and the mighty action's sound of advanced alloy metals slamming together as another brass case is rammed into the breach echoes down the hallway, heralding another swarm of buckshot going down range before Joan and Khutulun step in and join them.
6.5 Creedmoor rounds swarm from the minigun on Joan's right arm, followed by a couple long bursts of 5.56 from Khutulun's twin micro guns. More pirates means lasers joining the party as the trio start to advance up the hallway, firing as they go. Their back mounts start to open up, and Makula finds herself momentarily jealous of the raw firepower afforded to a warrior in power armor... but doubles down, gets behind her shotgun and empties another magazine. She could get power armor one day too. She just had to prove herself.
Once she figured out who she wanted to prove herself to anyway.
The pace only picks up faster and faster, leaving Makula tapping axiom like she was trying to breathe after a hard sprint just to keep going. Her conditioning was okay, but this kind of fighting was something else entirely!
Zraloc plows through a wall with a roar, joining them in the main hallway more or less on top of an unfortunate pirate who had numerous broken bones from ending up in front of and under a charging Cannidor warrior. The rest of the 'Hewers were champing at the bit behind Zraloc, absolutely spoiling for a fight. Most of them were sporting some fresh sprays of blood across their armor for them to paint over later to add a little more of the usual red back to the strong purple hues that dominated their gear after the fight with the Narlabore.
They round a corner and immediately come under fire from a defensive strong point the pirates had cobbled together. There had to be at least forty pirates cowering behind the thing and it's selection of heavy weapons. Against normal infantry it might have been enough. Against a half dozen Cannidor it might have slowed them down. Jaruna had a full platoon and then some of Cannidor. If they could be a little less 'gentle' with the pirate structures in the name of rescuing the slaves and hostages, they'd have flattened this shit hole in a blink!
If Jaruna hesitated in the face of the threat for a second, Makula didn't see it. Laser and plasma fire splash against her shields and the shields of the other Cannidor as Jaruna draws her massive hunk of metal that she calls a sword.
"Charge!"
No coordination needed. No checks. No confirmation. Pure trust in each other as Jaruna surges forward at the tip of the spear with the rest of her troops right behind her, shoulder weapons firing as they go. Zraloc even goes to all fours, surging ahead as the laser repeaters on her tail spew coherent light as fast as their systems can cycle, roaring with pure joy as they close the distance under the hail of increasingly desperate fire from the pirates.
Ten yards to contact.
Makula switches off her shotgun and draws her pistol and war mace. The Tiger comes up and lobs one its Cannidor scale high velocity pistol rounds down range. 15mm Cannidor was a nasty, nasty round, hand developed by Wichen Bridger with Jaruna's input for 'big' girls to have a proper side arm. The little baby cannon round smashes through laser repeater and takes out the gunner, leaving Makula grinning viciously as she unloads the rest of the magazine before shoving the pistol back in its holster and taking a two handed grip on her mace.
Five yards.
Makula hears the roar of Crimsonhewer chain blades revving and for a brief moment it almost sounds like music.
Three yards.
Zraloc's plasma cannons erupt in a river of flames, flooding the first ranks of the pirates with the fury of a star as the Hewers let out a ferocious war cry that sends shivers down Makula's spine.
Two yards.
A grenade someone threw explodes in the pirate's back lines, wounding and distracting more than anything.
One yard.
Impact.
They blow through the hastily made defenses like they aren't even there, several thousand pounds of alloy armor and Cannidor muscle pushing past the weapons emplacements without a second thought.
Makula's immediately among the pirates and lashes out with her mace once, smashing a woman with all the strength she could muster and crumpling her like paper before she remembers to ignite the weapon's axiom field.
A stupid mistake.
There'd be time to berate herself for it later if she survived. Instead of thinking about it she turns the arc of her swing into the cocking motion for her next blow, bludgeoning her way through pirates like a child smashing her way through her toys as glee floods her heart.
This is what it meant to be Cannidor as her mother had taught her. Glorious, beautiful battle. What could be better? What could be more satisfying? Makula's battle blood sings in her veins in a way that no drug, no mere alcohol could ever match as she does her best to roar. It wasn't quite where it would be when she fully matured, but her blade sisters answer her anyway, sending a tremor of fear through many of the nearest pirates.
Fear.
Makula pounces on the fear like a predator detecting a moment's weakness in her prey, sweeping two Tret before her like her mace was a scythe and she was harvesting wheat. It was almost making her angry. Surely. Surely someone in this group of trash could provide a decent challenge! There had to be- A Snict's blade arm intercepts her mace and suddenly she's on the back foot as she's successfully parried.
At last!
Makula grins behind her face plate. Finally, someone worth her time had bothered to show up ready for an actual fight instead of just culling a dangerous local animal!
She swings out hard, smashing one of the Snict's secondary shoulders, leaving one of the woman's manipulation arms limp and dangling as she follows up with a massive overhand blow.
The Snict crosses her blade arms over her head, flooding them with axiom as she checks Makula's blow, then shifts the blades to lock behind the head of her mace, twisting the weapon out of her hand!
For anyone else that might have been a problem, but Makula had been trained from birth to be a Cannidor warrior. Not just a soldier. Not a thug. Not hired muscle. Not a merc. A warrior.
It meant something special in Cannidor space, and Makula knew she'd measure up to someone's standards if she had the chance.
Instead of panicking. Or backing up. Or trying to switch to a ranged weapon, Makula piles in and upper cuts the Snict woman so hard she's fairly certain she broke her jaw, as Makula's left hand goes for her knife. The human style blade flashes from its sheath and cuts the Snict from her side up across her chest to get it into position for her actual attack.
A favorite lesson of her mother. Never just move a weapon when you can strike with it instead.
Knife in position her right hand grabs the pommel and she pushes forward not just with her arms but her whole body, tying up the Snict's arms at extreme close quarters as the massive blade slams into the insect like alien's throat! Makula twists the weapon and yanks clear leaving the Snict to slump to the floor, her head nearly removed from her shoulders.
Makula moves clear, getting a wall to her back so she can assess the situation, and watches as the last of the pirates is felled by Khutulun, her axiom fists throwing the unfortunate pirate through a nearby wall with a sickening crunch.
She looks down at her new knife and smiles. She hadn't expected to sever the spinal column with her attack, but this thing pierced through the Snict like a hot knife through butter. A beautiful weapon.
She would have to send a message of thanks to Tir'Shan's family for such a marvelous blade... and inform them that the weapon had saved her life. A slight embellishment perhaps, but close enough, and it would hopefully please the grieving family that the blade was being wielded in their loved one's name.
A charge of axiom through the blade cleanses it of blood, and she whispers a brief prayer for Tir'Shan's soul, and for her eight unhatched children before sheathing it. She draws her pistol and reloads, keeping it in hand as she starts to look for her mace.
Jaruna chuckles. "Looking for this?" She tosses Makula's mace to her, and Makula swears she can see Jaruna's smile behind her armored helmet.
"Use that wrist strap next time so you don't get disarmed so easily kid... nice work otherwise. That knife work was damn good."
"I'll say." Zraloc nods. "Damn fine movement. Saw it out of the corner of my eye. Hopefully someone caught that on video so we can play that one back in the bar after debrief."
"Got it!" calls one of the Crimsonhewers. "It was gorgeous. Full flow state. Little Makula ain't so little girls. She certainly fights like a big girl!"
"Cori got some good hits in too! Guess Apuk really don't need power armor! Hah. Damn near punched a fireball through this Drin's chest! Ain't seen shit like that outside a video game!" Another shouts. That one sounded like Tibora, one of the 'Hewers Makula didn't know well.
"Bull figured out how to use his chain blade too, Zraloc you and the other Stone girls are gonna have to break the red paint out for your hubby! He damn near took a bath!" Krakodi maybe?
With her pulse pounding in her ears Makula couldn't be entirely sure as she gets her mace back into place, holsters her pistol, then draws her shotgun, dropping the mag and loading a fresh magazine of buckshot nearly on auto pilot as she slowly catches her breath.
"Alright. Enough back slappin. We got work to do." Jaruna points towards a double door. "Slaves should be through that door. We got some friends in the area already so make sure you don't hurt any slaves or hurt any friendlies. Sides! I don’t want the battle princesses getting there first! Move out!"
The Cannidor troops burst through the door more or less as Ghorza and the power armored soldiers of Paladin company blow through another door to the right, coming from the other major point of entry on the building clearly.
They found themselves in a big greenhouse of some sort. Maybe it had been a recreational garden at one point, or for food production, but now it appeared to be for drug manufacturing. A quick sweep of the room reveals some slave pens to the far left... and a look behind the axiom barriers tells her that a lot of the slaves were Cannidor!
That was shocking enough that it almost manages to distract Makula for a second, but she keeps sweeping, eventually focusing on the structure in the middle towards the far wall as a public address system crackles to life.
"Stop where you are! I don't know who you whores are, but if you think you can just do this to one of the Hag's operations you got another thing coming!"
A Merra pirate steps into view, a plasma pistol pressed squarely to a Cannidor bull's head as she drags him forward on a chain, his limbs bound with manacles to keep him moving on his hands and knees, his teeth wrapped in a protective coating... the ultimate humiliation for any Cannidor, especially a rather proud looking bull like the one the Merra was dragging around.
"You sluts are gonna back up and let me and my girls get to one of our ships or I start killin slaves. You make a hostile move towards me and mine and I start killin the really valuable slaves. I'm sure you don't want to see this handsome piece of dead weight with a hole in his head."
Makula's eyes sweep the structure, picking out more pirates. Even without the threat to civilians, this fight was gonna get bloody real fast if they had to press this. Even for power armored troops, charging two hundred yards at a fortified structure with no cover was not a fun time.
However, even as Makula watches, she learns that assaulting the structure would not be how her day was going to end.
Pirates start disappearing across the structure, yanked back into darkness. She quickly forces herself not to respond or react, doing her best to look like a dumb founded cop or something as what she presumes were JSOC commandos 'vanish' a few dozen pirates in the blink of an eye.
The Merra woman doesn't even have time to realize something was amiss, until a boot impacts the back of her knees sending her forward even as a hand grabs hold of her hair, stretching her neck out perfectly for a kukri fighting knife to swing out of the darkness and take her head from her shoulders in a single flash of it's massive blade.
The commando steps out of her cloak and raises both the knife and head so all can see it.
"JAI MAA KALI! AYO GHORKALI!"
Makula grins. She knew that voice! Neysihen! She also knew what that war cry meant. It was a human war cry, in the language of a land called Nepal.
Hail to the goddess of war and destruction, the Gurkhas are upon you.
She'd heard it once before, when Jerry had killed one of his assailants in the plaza shoot out video where he'd met Jaruna.
Jerry. Just thinking about his name warms her up slightly and her mental picture of him sticks in her mind for a minute as Jaruna starts issuing orders to secure the area and start freeing slaves, with Makula complying more or less on auto pilot.
She wasn't entirely sure about the true course of her life still, but now, she was sure of one thing. She knew where her loyalty was. Where her heart wanted to be. Which meant, above all… She needed to talk to Jerry.
First Last Next

Warning; long as shit
So for background i (15M) had a gf (15F) up until roughly 2 days ago. It was a long distance relationship, me and her met while she was on holiday in the town i am currently located in and the relationship was for abouts half a year.
The reason she got with me, i presume, was because i was in a horrible position in life. So at 15 due to multiple problems i was an alcoholic for a while and was at the time suicidal, i still am. On that day i met her i was on the hills in the countryside not far off of a trail holding an improvised device that would lob a knife at roughly 30mph at my head. She found me, talked me out of it and asked what caused my motivation for this. I explained and she said she kinda liked me and wondered if i wanted to get in a relationship with her. She revealed she was poly and i, quite frankly, hate poly stuff. I think it's glorified cheating. Not think, i know it is. I said "sure but you oughta cut the poly stuff if you wanna get with me". So she said she would. For a while i was recovering and she would smother me woth love, i sent her an amethyst heart with a marriage proposal for the future (seems a bit overkill but i really liked her and sent it to confirm i wanted to have my future with her and her only) and a sketchbook full of illustrations of pretty flowers.
Fast forward to 2 days ago and i was down in the dumps again, feeling extremely suicidal for complicated reasons and she knew that. She then revealed she was fucking 3 guys and a girl behind my back for 3 months and said she made the amethyst heart blunt and used it as a butt plug and at one point tried to use the sketchbook to clean cum stains from another guy on her bed. That night i tried to kill myself with an old Thompson contender i found in the attic. The only reason i failed is because the powder had expired (it was an original model 45/70 contender that had been sitting in the attic presumably from the 1970s onward) otherwise if that ammo was new I wouldn't really be here, more or less parts of me would be on my wall.
So how did i respond to this? Well i had the contacts of all her friends and more or less told them. They spread the information through her school, her whole family found out and from what i know she was doing everybody separately because they all dumped her once they found out. All in 2 days. She recently came back to me all "please come back I'm sorry i did that to you, i didn't realise how bad my actions were blah blah" all that crap. I said she knew i was at my worst and she tried to preform the killing blow (she admitted to this and said she just wanted me off the table so she could have more sex) and i said "if you wanted the killing blow, you got it" and sent her a photo of the contender. She called, sounding hysterical and i just opened a bottle of vodka on call, drank some of it and said hopefully it's a lesson in being a good person, hung up and blocked her. She doesn't know any of my social medias. As for the contender, today i handed that thing to the police stating i found it in a box under pile of old shit in the attic (this is true) and thought it'd be morally correct to hand it to people who can dispose of the thing. I was rewarded personally by an officer with 5 bucks for being a good kid and i spent it all of sodas. Rn I'm sitting here, i mixed my vodka with a bit of baikal (Eastern European soda) and i feel completely emotionally numb. I might explain what issues lead me to be like this in the comments.
My 5 friends all say i am not the asshole and that what i did was "teaching a lesson about what cheating can lead the cheated to resort to". I personally don't give three fifths of a shit about whether I'm morally correct or not and i just want to know if I'm even morally correct in the first place or if I'm associated with psychopaths. Go ahead and call me what you want, chances are my family calls me worse so idc.
Edit: i realised my title may be confusing. I was meant to write "cheating"

Hi everyone,
A few weeks ago I OneGuy'd Hasan while he was discussing Israel/Palestine. In doing so, he made a few blatantly false claims about the 1948 war and the refugee crisis, and what Benny Morris's work says about it.
Here are some clips:

But Benny Morris's early work basically detailed out a planned attempt of ethnic deplacement. Which is the Nakba, it is true. [...] Benny Morris, later on, in his career, took this weird turn, where he could not obviously disparage his previous work which was very important for Israeli history, and basically started saying 'yeah sure it was forcible ethnic displacement, it was deliberate, but it was a good thing.' In the simplest terms yes, he was one the people who uncovered some of the atrocities in the Nakba, or the deliberacy of the atrocities in the Nakba, but turned around and said it was kinda chill, because there was nothing we could do as Israel, you know what I mean?

In this clip, Hasan claims that Benny Morris described the Nakba as a preplanned, deliberate policy of forced ethnic displacement.

Me: "It wasn't planned and designed, again, there is zero evidence of that." H: "Yes it was, dood! Plan Dalet is exactly that, and that comes from Illan Pape's work, which originally was considered controversial, and maybe even false, one of his actual research associates was the one who then went and fucking interviewed the people and now we know, because the people who did Plan Dalet were there, they were alive. They're still alive! So no, it is not fucking wrong at all, what I'm explaining to you is not wrong at all. You just want it to be wrong, you act like this is a contentious conversation, when all you're doing is just trying to wash away atrocities" Me: "Nope, Plan D was a military operation that called for expulsion of villages used as military bases along major routes and border regions. It was a military plan" H: "Yes! Yes, and these were not villages being used as military bases, you're fucking lying."

Here Hasan claims that Plan D was the plan for ethnic expulsion, and that the villages the Haganah expelled were not of military signficance.
There's a problem here. All three of these claims are wrong! There was no preplanned deliberate policy of forced ethnic displacement, and Benny Morris certainly never claimed there was. Also, Plan D was not an expulsion plan, it was a military plan (which did contain components permitting expulsion of villages that were a strategic threat), and many of the Arab villages were serving as bases from which raids were carried out on Yishuv convoys that supplied their settlements.
This all needs to be substantiated. So, to do this, I went through my copy of The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited and compiled a narrative, primarily driven by quotes from Benny, in context that explains what happened during 1948 with refugees. I will try to bring up key points in this post, but it is really hard to do the conflict justice in a reddit post. My document is over 100 pages. I didn't intend for it to get this long, but I didn't want to leave stuff out. What you REALLY should be doing though is reading Benny's actual book! It's super interesting, and will be way better than my document.
Anyways, here is the document, have fun:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Vti98t-M-_hFEfN8KvNZR4QDMm4Ut5SdLbV38Qj1RWo/edit?usp=sharing
Plan Dalet
I'm going to start out of order and begin with Plan Dalet, since I can just insert my section from the document into this post.
Plan Dalet (or Plan D) is often pointed to when the question of policy is raised. According to many proponents of the systematic policy position, Plan Dalet is a plan outlining the Yishuv and then Israeli policy of systematic expulsion. However, when examining Plan D’s actual content, and implementation, this does not seem to be the case. To understand Plan Dalet, it is important to first paint the context in which it was drawn up. The Yishuv was facing an impending invasion from all sides by the Arab states, it’s internal supply lines were under constant threat, and Jerusalem itself was almost completely cut off from the rest of the Yishuv’s controlled territory. Benny writes that with this background,

a blueprint for securing the emergent Jewish state and the blocs of settlements outside the state’s territory against the expected invasion on or after 15 May. The battle against the militias and foreign irregulars had first to be won if there was to be a chance of defeating the invading armies. To win the battle of the roads, the Haganah had to pacify the villages and towns that dominated them and served as bases of belligerency: Pacification meant the villages’ surrender or depopulation and destruction. The essence of the plan was the clearing of hostile and potentially hostile forces out of the interior of the territory of the prospective Jewish State, establishing territorial continuity between the major concentrations of Jewish population and securing the future State’s borders before, and in anticipation of, the invasion. The Haganah regarded almost all the villages as actively or potentially hostile.
[...]
The Haganah units generally followed the strategic and tactical guidelines set down in the plan; but, in part, the operations were also dictated by the specific requirements of situation and peril. Plan D augured a quick end to the civil and guerrilla war between the thoroughly intermixed populations and a switch to the straightforward or almost straightforward conventional warfare that was inaugurated by the Arab invasion of 15–16 May. (P. 163-167)

Plan D is a plan to secure the Jewish state’s supply lines and frontier in anticipation of the Arab invasion. Benny goes on to say, quite firmly, that Plan D was not an expulsion plan:

Plan D was not a political blueprint for the expulsion of Palestine’s Arabs:1 It was governed by military considerations and geared to achieving military ends.
[...]
The plan was neither understood nor used by the senior field officers as a blanket instruction for the expulsion of ‘the Arabs’. But, in providing for the expulsion or destruction of villages that had resisted or might threaten the Yishuv, it constituted a strategic–doctrinal basis and carte blanche for expulsions by front, brigade, district and battalion commanders (who in each case argued military necessity) and it gave commanders, post facto, formal, persuasive cover for their actions. However, during April–June, relatively few commanders faced the moral dilemma of having to carry out the expulsion clauses. Townspeople and villagers usually fled their homes before or during battle and Haganah commanders rarely had to decide about, or issue, expulsion orders (though they almost invariably prevented inhabitants, who had initially fled, from returning home after the dust of battle had settle. (P. 164)

Furthermore, the battles and operations that took place in line with Plan D were often not viewed as a clearcut execution of the plan, instead being operations responding to local conditions. Again, Benny notes:

The plan was neither understood nor used by the senior field officers as a blanket instruction for the expulsion of ‘the Arabs’. But, in providing for the expulsion or destruction of villages that had resisted or might threaten the Yishuv, it constituted a strategic–doctrinal basis and carte blanche for expulsions by front, brigade, district and battalion commanders (who in each case argued military necessity) and it gave commanders, post facto, formal, persuasive cover for their actions. However, during April–June, relatively few commanders faced the moral dilemma of having to carry out the expulsion clauses. Townspeople and villagers usually fled their homes before or during battle and Haganah commanders rarely had to decide about, or issue, expulsion orders (though they almost invariably prevented inhabitants, who had initially fled, from returning home after the dust of battle had settle. (P. 165)

When we examine decisions taken in the early rollout of Plan D, we can see that an ethnic expulsion policy was not on the minds of commanders. The most telling example of how Plan D policy was shaped in practice is the battle over the village of Qastal. After taking over the village, the local commander had to decide whether to destroy it. Ultimately, he opted against this move, which backfired:

Operation Nahshon began, in effect, with the Palmah Fourth Battalion’s unopposed conquest of al Qastal on the night of 2\3 April. The village, which dominated the approach to Jerusalem, had for weeks been involved in hostilities. On 16 March it was raided by Palmah troops. On 1 April, militiamen attacked Jewish positions around Motza. Haganah counter-fire and fear of assault resulted in the flight that night of almost all of Qastal’s inhabitants. The Haganah feared that foreign irregulars would occupy the village, so Palmah troops moved in in the early hours of 3 April. The troops were instructed that ‘if there is no opposition, do not to blow up the village’s houses’. This conformed to the Plan D guideline not to destroy villages that offered no resistance. The commander at the site appealed against the order, saying that leaving the houses intact made ‘the defence of the place difficult’. But permission to raze the village was not granted
[...]
And, indeed, on 8 April, the site was retaken by Arab irregulars following repeated assaults; among the dozens of Arabs killed was ‘Abd al Qadir al Husseini, the Palestinian Jerusalem District OC, who was shot while walking toward a Palmah-held house during a lull in the fighting.542 The ‘mistake’ – of not demolishing Qastal after its initial conquest – was rectified on 9 April, after the village fell to a renewed Palmah attack: ‘The blowing up of all the houses not needed for defence of the site was immediately begun’, reported the commander. (P. 234-235)

The Haganah found that destruction of villages would simply be the sounder military course of action when it came to potentially hostile villages, and so “the lesson of Qastal was extended to other sites.” (P. 235) Leaving them empty could cost them more men and time when they would have to retake it from new occupants. The text of Plan Dalet itself is also important to look at. When we examine it, we find, not a document detailing an ethnic cleansing policy, but instead a military plan, focused on the duties of the armed forces throughout the war. Expulsion and destruction of villages is only mentioned in two sub-sections related to the “Consolidation of Defense Systems and Fortifications”, as well as the “Control of Main Transportation Arteries on the Regional Level”. It is a short outline of military doctrine, and can be viewed in translation here:
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/plan-dalet-for-war-of-independence-march-1948
Phases of the Refugee Crisis
For the phases, I'm just going to bullet points, mostly leaving out quotes. Please read the document if you'd like to see extensive quoting and further information.
Phase 1 - Arab Exodus December 1947 - March 1948
Civil war breaks out immediately following the passing of the UN partition resolution and subsequent Arab rejection. Initially people are not sure if this is going to be another small scale conflict, or the full-fledged civil war it ended up becoming. This period is characterized by Haganah defensiveness, limited to protecting traffic and making retaliatory strikes. Meanwhile, Husseini is consolidating his role as leader of the Palestinian faction and calling for violence against the Yishuv. We primarily see the flight of the upper and middle classes of Palestinian society during this wave.
Jerusalem
Here we see a common theme. cycles of violence and fear of violence contributed to panic in Palestinian society, particularly because of the communities in Western Jerusalem's vulnerability to Jewish attack (as most Jews lived in the west.) Furthermore, the social structures that may have helped maintain morale were themselves fractured as the Husseini's took the opportunity to persecute their enemies.
Jaffa
Jaffa was a mostly Arab city stuck deep in the Jewish heartland. Due to this, there was no pressing need for the Haganah to attack the city, as long as it could be isolated. Furthermore, any attempt to conquer the city would likely be opposed by the British, resulting in their intervention. As such, it was just kept under siege, with some exceptions. Because of the isolation of Jaffa, the local population negotiated a partial lifting of the siege/blockade to keep their economy afloat, particularly with respect to the citrus trade. This was mutually beneficial for the Yishuv as well, so a deal was hinted at. A deal was never reached, but the citrus trade wasn't curtailed by the Haganah. It should also be emphasized that the Haganah's relationship with the Arab population doesn't seem to reflect concrete ideas of transfer at this point. Eventually, most of the middle class fled, leading to a collapse of society and the local economy, precipitating conditions for flight.
Haifa
Haifa was the largest mixed city prior to the war, and also an important place for the British. The British were planning to do their withdrawal through the city's port, so the Haganah were hesitant to start any major battles for the city. With that being said, conflict still arose. Most flight during this period was due to violence. This violence would often be sparked by Husseini gunmen, which would prompt an over the top IZL response, perpetuating a cycle of violence. As in other places, the upper and middle classes fled, creating dire economic conditions for the general population.
Rural Communities
During this time period Palestine also saw flight from the Rural communities (although not nearly as much as we'll see in later phases.) Understandably, this primarily took place in the Jewish core areas, since morale would be lowest, and they would face the most harassment and lack of connection in these areas.
As in the cities, we would see an Arab attack, and a large Haganah reprisal in response. Furthermore, Husseini men would commandeer villages and use them as bases to take shots at Jews, prompting the Haganah to harass the viliages.
It should be noted, that the breakdown in relations did not all start from the Arab side. The village of Sheikh Muwannis had made a pact with the Haganah to help ward off the IZL and LHI, but despite this they kidnapped people from the village, showing villages that they could not trust the Haganah to keep them safe.
Phase 2 - Mass Exodus April - June 1948
Phase 2, is in my opinion, the most critical of all the phases of flight. Here is where the tone is set for the rest of the crisis. The Yishuv goes on the offensive, with devastating results. Furthermore, this is where the infamous "Plan D" comes into action, which is often what people who claim there was a general preplanned expulsion policy point to. However, it is also worth keeping in mind the desperation the Yishuv felt at this time. A large chunk of the Jewish population in Palestine was cut off from the Yishuv, as supply routes to Jerusalem were blocked (The cabinet even debated evacuating Jerusalem, which could have been a deathblow to the emerging Jewish state.) Arms were still scarce, with the British arms embargo still in force (but smuggling operations enabled the Haganah to stockpile enough arms to mount offensive operations.) The clock was counting down until the Arab states would attack. All of this contributed to a massive change in the Palestinian landscape during this phase.
It cannot be emphasized enough that the harassment of Yishuv supply convoys was having a detrimental effect on Yishuv's ability to supply its various settlements. Here's Benny:

In the countryside, the Arabs gained the upper hand by intermittently blocking the roads between the main Jewish population centres and isolated communities, especially west Jerusalem, with its 100,000 Jews, the Etzion Bloc, south of Bethlehem, and the kibbutzim in western Galilee and the northern Negev approaches. The introduction by the Haganah of steelplated trucks and buses in escorted convoys was more than offset, by late March, by improved Arab tactics and firepower. Moreover, the gradual British military withdrawal and continuing IZL-LHI attacks on British troops resulted in increasing British inability (and reluctance) to protect Jewish traffic. In a series of major successful ambushes in the last days of March, irregulars trapped and destroyed the Khulda, Nabi Daniel and Yehiam convoys, severely depleting the Haganah’s makeshift armoured-truck fleet. Ben-Gurion feared that now-besieged west Jerusalem might fall. (P. 66)

Operation Nahshon
As discussed above, at this time, the big thing on Yishuv leadership's mind was the dire supply situation in Jerusalem. The roads were blocked by hostile Arab militia in the surrounding villages. They tried to use armed convoys that could push through to Jerusalem to resupply them, but recent convoy ambushes had shown that this strategy was unreliable and now potentially impossible with a huge portion of their armored car fleet out of commission. A new strategy was needed. It is in this context that Operation Nahshon comes into being. Operation Nahshon instead called for the Haganah to clear supply routes to Jerusalem in order to allow convoys to push through unimpeded.
To accomplish this task, Operation Nahshon's initial orders called for the setting of ambushes near Arab villages to prevent Arab irregulars from attacking convoys. However, these orders soon changed (as such a plan was unrealistic.) Soon new orders were issued, which stated:

`all the Arab villages along the [Khulda–Jerusalem] axis were to be treated as enemy assembly or jump-off bases’. (Plan D had specified that villages so defined, if offering resistance, should be destroyed and their inhabitants expelled.) The Nahshon orders called, during the first stage of the operation, for the conquest of three Arab villages at the western entrance to the Jerusalem corridor – Deir Muheisin, Khulda and Seidun. But elsewhere, the order spoke only of setting up ambushes or hilltop positions near villages (such as Saris and Beit Thul), to prevent their militiamen from reaching the road or the evacuated British Army base at Wadi Sarar. The order aptly reflected the ambiguity that briefly prevailed in the high command with respect to the treatment of Arab villages. (P. 233-234)

I'd like to highlight the "ambiguity" claim. There is tension here about how Arab villages are actually going to be handled on a policy level. On the one hand, we are treating some as enemy bases that, if resisting, must be destroyed, while on the other hand, a large chunk of villages are simply to be left alone.
However, comanders were confused by these orders, and asked for clarification, giving us the following:

1) If securing the Jerusalem road requires that our units take control of villages whose inhabitants have abandoned them – it must be done.
2) Regarding villages not abandoned by their inhabitants and that securing the road requires that they be isolated and surrounded and intimidated by our units – it should be done (P. 234)

The troops' actions during this operation also reflected this hesitancy regarding expulsive measures. As noted above in the Plan Dalet section, the village of Qastal was conquered but not destroyed, which turned out to be a mistake. Soon, Arab units retook the village, forcing it to be taken by the Haganah again. This lesson was learned, and the Haganah became more aggressive afterward.
Operation Nahshon succeeded in getting convoys through to Jerusalem, but this did not end up being permanent, as raids continued from other villages along the Jerusalem - Tel Aviv Corridor.
We see in Operation Nahshon the beginnings of the aggressive, expulsive moves of the Haganah, but it does not seem to have been in terms of any ethnic cleansing policy. Instead, it was motivated by military necessity and interests. Furthermore, there was hesitancy to even go down this route, but this hesitancy faded away as the war went on.
Deir Yassin
This is the massacre everyone here's about. A disgusting event that had a huge impact on the refugee crisis. Hasan did bring up Deir Yassin in his little rant, but what he described was a gross mischaracterization of events. Deir Yassin was not a planned massacre. And there certainly was no policy of massacre. Deir Yassin was an operation carried out by the IZL and LHI, with the reluctant support of the Haganah.

The attackers encountered unexpectedly strong resistance and, being relatively inexperienced, suffered four dead and several dozen wounded before pacifying the village after a full day of fighting. The units had advanced from house to house, lobbing grenades and spraying the interiors with fire, in the routine procedure of house-tohouse combat. They blew up several houses with explosives. The attackers shot down individuals and families as they left their homes and fled down alleyways. They apparently also rounded up villagers, who included militiamen and unarmed civilians of both sexes, and murdered them, and executed prisoners in a nearby quarry.
[...]
he weight of the evidence suggests that the dissidents did not go in with the intention of committing a massacre but lost their heads during the protracted combat. But from the first, the IZL’s intention had been to expel the inhabitants. (P. 237-238)

So, in Benny's opinion, while this massacre was horrible, the IZL did not go into the village with the intention of massacring. It was something that was borne out of the frustration of highly regarded, undisciplined young larpers.
The other thing to mention about Deir Yassin are the responses from various factions. The Haganah was horrified by the massacre and worried about its effect on public opinion and its international standing. It immediately dispatched an apology to the king of Jordan. The IZL and LHI, on the other hand, decided to go in a different direction. Probably as a way to justify their barbarity, they bragged about its effect on Arab morale, with Begin, the head of the IZL, claiming that this event was responsible for the large waves of flight. The Arabs responded by broadcasting this event and inflating the casualty count. They saw this as a potential rallying cry, hoping people would be energized to avenge their fallen countrymen. Instead, this had the opposite effect, demoralizing villages and making them prone to flight, fearing another massacre.
The Haganah, IZL and LHI all were complicit in this massacre, and should be condemned, but it is simply untrue to say that this was a planned event, and it is certainly not okay to extrapolate and claim the Haganah had a massacre policy.
Mishmar Ha'emek
Mishmar Ha'emek was a Kibbutz that the ALA attempted to conquer from 4-15 April, 1948. Benny writes that

It began as a desperate Jewish defence and turned into a Haganah counteroffensive conforming with Plan D guidelines. (P. 240)

It is also important for our expulsion investigation, since

The available evidence indicates that here, for the first time, Ben-Gurion explicitly sanctioned the expulsion of Arabs from a whole area of Palestine (though, as we shall see, the expulsion was largely preempted by mass flight sparked by the fighting) (P. 240)

Could this be the policy we're looking for?
When planning a counterattack, Ben-Gurion claims that the villagers of Mishmar Ha'emek came to him and said the following:

"[The villagers] said that it was imperative to expel the Arabs [in the area] and to burn the villages. For me, the matter was very difficult. [But] they said that they were not sure [the kibbutz could hold out] if the villages remained intact and [if] the Arab inhabitants were not expelled, for they [i.e., the villagers] would [later] attack them and burn mothers and children" (P. 241)

However this story was used in the context of a political debate with Ben-Gurion's more dovish rivals, the Mapam, so it's veracity is questionable. Benny points out that regardless of this story:

In reality, HGS began thinking of destroying the villages around the kibbutz shortly after Qawuqji launched his attack. On 5 April, HGS\Operations instructed the Golani Brigade: ‘You must tell the following villages . . . that we cannot assure their safety and security, and that they must evacuate forthwith.’ Among the four villages named were Abu Shusha, next to Mishmar Ha‘emek, and Daliyat al Ruha and Rihaniya, 4–5 kilometres to the west-northwest.
Ben-Gurion and HGS decided to reject the ALA proposal [to surrender the Kibbutz], to mount a comprehensive counterattack, and to drive the ALA and the Arab inhabitants out of the area and level their villages, permanently removing the threat to Mishmar Ha‘emek and denying an invading force from Jenin easy passage to Haifa (P. 241)

The Arab-ness of the villages may have played a role in Israeli thinking, but the key thing being emphasized here seems to be security, and strategic initiative. if this area is cleansed, the Haganah will not have to worry about attacks in the rear. So here we don't find our blanket policy.
Operation Yiftah
Here we have another operation in line with Plan D to secure the Galilee:

During the second half of April and in May, as part of Plan D, the Haganah secured the border from Metula to the Sea of Galilee in expectation of the Syrian invasion. In the course of Operation Yiftah, as it was eventually called, the Arab population of eastern Galilee – earmarked for Jewish sovereignty in the partition resolution – was evicted. (P. 248)

It is worth noting that the operation order gave no specific instructions for what to do with the civilian population:

In the operational order, the objective was defined as ‘gaining control of the Tel-Hai area and its consolidation in preparation for invasion from outside’. The order made no mention of policy toward the civilian population. (P. 248)

So you can't really speak of a blanket policy directive here, but by this time, you could possibly make an argument about the expectation of officers that this is just what you do. That being said, they were concerned more with the coming invasion, this is likely what was at the forefront of all decisionmakers' minds.
To see why eviction may have been seen as a military necessity, Benny spells out the situation for us:

The campaign, in effect, began with two failed Palmah assaults, on 15 and 20 April, on the Nabi Yusha police fort on the southwestern end of the Galilee Panhandle. HGS then appointed Yigal Allon to take charge. He had the equivalent of two undermanned battalions; he faced dozens of Arab villages, the town of Safad and highly permeable borders with Syria and Lebanon. To judge from his report of 22 April and his subsequent actions, Allon concluded that completely clearing the area of Arabs was necessary to secure the frontier. (P. 248)

Operation Ben-'Ami
Here we have another Plan-D style operation worth mentioning. Benny describes it as follows:

The last major Haganah operation launched before the termination of the Mandate, in line with Plan D’s provision for securing blocks of settlements outside the partition borders, was Carmeli’s thrust up Western Galilee to the Lebanese border. Called Operation Ben-‘Ami, the offensive, carried out in two stages between 13 and 22 May, saw the capture of all the villages along the coast road from just south of Acre to Rosh Haniqra-al Bassa and a few to the east of the road, and the flight of almost all their inhabitants. The operation’s main aim was to resupply and reinforce the settlements in Western Galilee – Nahariya and a number of kibbutzim – to extricate noncombatants, in view of the impending pan-Arab invasion, and, in general, to secure permanent Jewish control of the area. The orders specifically called for the conquest and demolition of the main targeted villages, al Bassa, al Zib and al Sumeiriya,715 but did not explicitly refer to the prospective fate of the region’s Arab inhabitants. In all likelihood, Carmel, who commanded Ben-‘Ami, desired a complete evacuation. (P. 252)

Very similar in nature to Yiftah.
The South
In the south, the Haganah assumed a more defensive posture. Here the Haganah had to prepare for its most dangerous foe, the Egyptian Army. In maintaining this defensive posture, the Haganah would also

[mount] sporadic, local attacks on the peripheries of their zones, usually with specific tactical aims, to facilitate defence against expected or continuing Egyptian advances. These attacks, especially those east of Majdal (Ashkelon) and Isdud by Giv‘ati, caused the flight of tens of thousands of local inhabitants. (P. 254)

Wide discretion was given to the brigades operating here with respect to local villages:

Plan D’s guidelines to the Giv‘ati Brigade gave Lt. Col. Avidan wide discretion. In order to stabilise his lines, the plan stated ‘you will determine alone, in consultation with your Arab affairs advisers and Intelligence Service officers, [which] villages in your zone should be occupied, cleansed or destroyed’.733 During May – early June, before and after the invasion, Avidan moved to expand his area of control westwards and southwards (P. 254)

Another thing worth noting, often when local villages surrendered to the Haganah, they would flee rather than stay, since

they feared that they would be branded traitors for surrendering (P. 255)

As the Arab Invasion date approached, the Haganah found it necessary to clear a zone along the border to deny the enemy bases of operations.

That day, the clearing of the southern end of Giv‘ati’s zone of operations, in anticipation of invasion, began in earnest with the launching of ‘Operation Lightning’ (Mivtza Barak). The objective was "to deny the enemy a base for future operations . . . by creating general panic and breaking his morale. The aim is to force the Arab inhabitants ‘to move’ . . . It can be assumed that delivering a blow to one or more of these [population] centres [i.e., Majdal, Isdud or Yibna] will cause the wandering [i.e., exodus] of the inhabitants of the smaller settlements in the area. This possibility is likely especially in view of the wave of panic that recently swept over [the Arabs of] the country" (P. 256)

Haifa
One of the most important events of the refugee crisis was the fall of Haifa. Haifa "accounted for some 10 per cent of the Arab refugee total." (P. 186) The major exodus, as in other places, was preceded by flight of the Arab middle and upper classes, including political leadership.

The mass exodus of 21 April – early May must be seen against the backdrop of the gradual evacuation of the city by some 20,000–30,000 of its inhabitants, including most of the middle and upper classes, over December 1947 – early April 1948; most NC members and municipal councillors, and their families, were among the departees. (P. 187)

Arab morale here was low, since it was surrounded by Jewish territory, making it economically and politically isolated. Additionally, its leadership was ineffective and prone to infighting, which was problematic when facing a united Yishuv leadership. Making matters worse, this fractured leadership was unable to pay the foreign militias that were stationed in Haifa, creating further tensions, and leading to the flight of many members of these militias.
The fighting escalated when the British decided to retreat from their key positions in the middle of the city, which marked the border between Arab and Jewish neighborhoods. In response, both Haganah and Arab militias fought brutally over the vacant positions. The Haganah launched "Operation Passover Cleansing", which had the goal of taking these positions. They made gains, and began mortaring Arab neighborhoods to try and put pressure on the Arab militias to withdraw. They made unexpected breakthroughs, and were in a position to negotiate the surrender of the Arab part of the city. The local Yishuv leaders had no intention of expelling the Arab population here, and this is one of the rare instances where the local Arab leadership actually ordered an evacuation. The local Yishuv leadership actually pleaded with the Arabs to stay, but the Haganah was happy to see them go.
Jaffa
Another major city in the heart of the Jewish partition was Jaffa. This time, the IZL would be the one undertaking the offensive, against the best wishes of the Haganah. In doing so, the IZL would draw the British into a direct confrontation. The IZL was looking for a place to make its mark, showing it was not the lapdog of the Haganah. It decided on Jaffa,

which they viewed as a ‘cancer’ in the Jewish body politic and as the scourge of Tel Aviv, the IZL’s power base. (P. 212)

At this point, Jaffa was already heavily demoralized. Placed in the heart of the Jewish part of Palestine, its economy was severely hampered and, as usual, saw the flight of their middle and upper classes.
The IZL first assaulted neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city and faced heavy resistance. They then began to attack Jaffa proper, where they were indiscriminate in their shelling, leading to them being chastised by the British for their recklessness. Soon Jaffa fell.
However, the British had just seen Haifa fall and were worried about their perception of the neighboring Arab states and did not want to be seen as biased toward the Yishuv. So they decided to intervene, attacking the IZL with spitfires and the boats in the harbor, retaking the city. But it was still too late, the Arab population was fled, and the Haganah eventually occupied what remained.
(1/N) POST CONTINUED IN COMMENTS
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The sound of… everything fades away before the sounds of the whipping wind around her drop pod as its engine blitzes her towards the planet at high speed. Signs of enemy anti air fire start the pod dancing, swinging her around violently as her stomach tries to rebel.
Drop pods were somewhat disposable, and inertial dampeners cost a fair bit, were fairly large, and had a significant power draw that a pod simply couldn’t support. So you just had to be as bad a bitch as you thought you were.
Combat was the test of a fighter. Dropping, a true drop, was the test of a warrior.
Makula grits her teeth and focuses as the pod’s rudimentary synthetic intelligence reads off air speed and altitude readings every few seconds. She has some limited steering capacity but the majority of this process is automated.
She and the pod wouldn’t be making the last bit of the trip together anyway.
The altitude flashes by and the pod begins going through its automated sequences, dispensing counter measures and deploying an initial drag chute that briefly puts her stomach somewhere around her ankles with a lurch that made an air car wreck she’d been in seem pleasant by comparison. The sequence would be longer and more involved but they weren’t doing an orbital insert. They had orbital control so there was no need to incur the extra risk inherent in making reentry in a drop pod.
Faster. Faster.
Something hits her pod and she panics slightly as the fragile little coffin of metal veers off course before the onboard VI corrects her flight path. She checks her gear again and gulps quietly. She’d be deploying in a few seconds. She just had to hold on for a little bit longer…
Before she even knows it she hits the next stop in her quick trip to the surface of this shitty little planet and with a hard yank of another drag chute she explodes out of the drop pod, with a last round of countermeasures and sensor confusing materials exploding into the air with her as she soars through the sky.
All the stress of the pod falls away and for one glorious moment in dawn’s light Makula’s heart sings like nothing ever before. It was the addictive part of dropping, the sensation right as you left the pod and the siren song of battle was only seconds away. Every veteran got misty eyed when they talked about it, and now Makula knew exactly what they meant.
She didn’t have time to fuck around however. She had work to do. Old Cannidor didn’t have a ton of weapons they could use from this altitude, but they could and should scan the battle field they were dropping into, to inform their movements on landing along with doing the other minor things she had to do to prepare for landing.
A thought activates the system that would cushion her landing, something she wouldn’t need if she earned her power armor one day, and another has her sensors drinking deep from everything they can reach as she sweeps the most critical sensors of all across the pirate compound. She was about 500 yards from the deck and falling fast.
A reflection of light on armor catches Makula's eye and she picks out a markswoman on one of the buildings. Out of range of her plasma cannon, her shotgun might take too long to deploy, instead she lets the plasma cannon dangle on its sling and goes for her pistol. With its armor integration and other goodies, the already long range Tiger pistol was just down right mean in the hands of someone who'd been practicing and Makula had been very diligent about practicing.
A Cannidor in power armor could have used her armor's jump jets to maneuver, maybe even drop straight in on the enemy target, but that was another toy Makula had to earn. Instead she spreads her limbs out a bit to resist the air more aggressively and the pistol comes up as she stabilizes, breathes, and fires three well aimed shots in the literal blink of an eye. The original 7.5mm special rounds could pierce human ceramic armor rated for kinetic rifle rounds at certain ranges. the 15mm rounds for the 'big' version could pierce armor rated for human tanks.
For galactic armor that only thought of kinetics incidentally, or relegated them to energy shield duty for the combatants who could afford them? The damn things might as well be piercing through a fluffy pastry.
The shields wouldn't have really helped either. These modified rounds had a trytite penetrator and a slight axiom charge for just that, and they hammer the pirate sharpshooter in her center of mass, sending her well tuned laser rifle flying back on the roof.
A hundred and seventy five meters. Not bad at all.
The laser rifle would make a good trophy, an idle part of her brain notes, and Makula marks the location with her armor's systems. Hell. If it was nice enough it might even be a good addition to her kit! Waste not, want not, as her mother had endlessly reminded her.
Pistol returned to holster, plasma cannon back in her hands, Makula quickly aligns her body and lands in a crouch, immediately hurling herself forward into the nearest bit of cover, a decently thick stone wall before she assess and dashes forward, catching up with her new blade sisters easily enough.
"Nice shooting, Tex." Chortles Joan over their squad net.
"Damn skippy. Good eye kid. In the damn air too! Hah! Saving that helmet cam footage for a greatest hits compilation for the company." Jaruna concurs, warming Makula slightly with her praise. "Get ready, we're about to hit the walls right after some orbital fire support lands, expect shit to get hairy from all angles."
Makula double checks her shields and digs the toes of her armored boots into the dirt. She thought she was ready for whatever the world could throw at her.
She was wrong.
The 'rods from god' as humans liked to call them were... impressive in their way. A kinetic kill weapon only notable for their resource cost, they barely needed guidance. They didn't need propulsion. They just needed mass, a target and a comparatively gentle nudge from a special launcher to send them on their way.
The Undaunted liked them so much that they even came in multiple sizes, and had proliferated them widely through the fleet after a successful use against some sort of monster on a world Makula had never heard of.
She had wondered what exactly the things could do that a plasma cannon couldn't... but after the world shakes around her from the raw kinetic fury of the 'light weight' rods impact, she's not wondering anymore.
"Go! Go! Go!"
Jaruna calls, and Makula quickly obeys, throwing herself out of cover and racing forward to the shattered remains of the main gate. The rods had destroyed two fortified pill boxes, the gate, and around sixty feet total of wall between them, leaving only rubble in their wake.
Very light weight then. The big ones could apparently erase this whole facility off the map.
Makula swears she can hear another volley of rods coming in, even as she turns the corner and charges into the breach. In a split second the world erupts with laser fire from all angles and Makula finds herself tracking and firing nearly on autopilot, burning down pirates just as fast as her plasma cannon could cycle.
They were damn everywhere!
One woman pops out of a stairwell with a laser repeater and stitches Makula and company with high energy pulse laser shots before ducking clear to avoid return fire.
A lethal surprise for regular grunts. Less so for power armor or Makula's power armor grade shield unit. She stops, pivots and has her plasma cannon switched to grenade launcher mode in a blink, bouncing a plasma grenade around the corner to a shriek of surprise from the pirate, before the orb of explosive star fire detonates and there's nothing but silence.
She lobs another grenade into a improvised fighting position with another laser repeater and revises her opinion on indirect fire weapons... and raises her opinion of Jerry Bridger's tactical acumen again.
The Cannidor way she'd learned would have been to charge through that door and rip the gunner's spine out then beat them with it. The grenade launcher seemed like a far more efficient option. Less satisfying, but with the sheer volume of pirates to put down, that level of personal attention would just wear her out.
Another point in favor of Jerry and Jaruna's lessons on combat efficiency.
Maybe she could get something bigger in terms of indirect fire weapons when she got her power armor? Boudicca had a massive rail gun... was there an armor mount for a plasma mortar available? Makula makes a note of that idea for later, taking full advantage of her existing armor implants as voices on the comm and her hard suit's HUD alert her to a new armored threat entering sensor range.
She flows like water in a way she'd have been hard pressed to imagine before Jaruna had started training her. Her plasma cannon's locked into its mount and her shiny new shotgun is in her arms as a trio of 'armored fighting vehicles' roll towards them, with mech suits advancing in their wake. Makula recognized them for what they were, what the humans would call a 'technical,' upgunned and up armored utility vehicles.
A model Makula had worked on before as it happened. A galactic favorite for more primitive areas where hover or flight focused vehicles were overkill, or maintenance was projected to be too much of a pain in the ass or too expensive.
A slight static charge in the air tells her that Boudicca's charging her rail gun for a shot that would do nasty things to a battleship, never mind a lightly armored tactical vehicle, but the one out in front was still a threat. It was closing fast, and Boudicca had maybe thirty seconds left for a full charge. She knew her blade sister always preferred a full charge for her first rail gun round of an engagement. Not just because it was supremely destructive, which it was... but more importantly Boudicca said it was about sending a message.
Makula's favorite new toy snaps up to her shoulder, and she feels the firm push of the high velocity HEDP round leaping from the barrel as she racks the action, sending the massive brass shell casing flying.
Racking a pump action shotgun was a very satisfying motion.
Not quite as satisfying as her HEDP round slamming into and through the light armor plate over the lead vehicle's cockpit glass, killing the driver in an explosion of shrapnel.
The second actually misses, going under, skipping one then bouncing slightly in the half second before it detonates from impact, shredding the front motors and lifting the vehicle into the air, flipping it end over end and leaving Makula with her mouth hanging open when Boudicca's rail gun finishes its charge.
"Slash!" Boudicca calls, the word was the brevity code for large caliber rail guns being fired in any capacity, heralding the dense metal dart hurtling down range and deconstructing the third vehicle with raw kinetic fury.
Fuck that was cool.
Makula 'applauds' Boudicca's efforts by emptying her first mag of HEDP, dropping a trio of mech suits as Boudicca charges up again and annihilates the last technical, the round piercing straight through it to go straight through the cockpit of a mech, 'flicking the light switch' as Makula's mother used to call it, because the mech just dropped and didn't even twitch. The pilot had been dead before she could even register something had happened.
The magazine from Makula's shotgun hits the deck as she slams home a new one, racking the action and opening up with another 40mm dose of high explosive hate and discontent.
"All points this is control, battle space drones are active, command hard suits and power armor should now be receiving advanced telemetry."
Makula, having had a command module upgrade applied to her hard suit to help her get used to the kind of information that a power armor's mighty computers would feed her mind one day, quickly pulls up the mental 'grid' even as she pushes forward to some hard cover. As she watches, a group marked as 'JSOC' designates two clusters of markers as enemy infantry and their ANGLICO controller uses the same system to lay out approach vectors for the orbiting gunships to rain some hell down on the pirates.
"Heh. Wrong galaxy brotherfuckers."
Makula chuckles to herself as she looks up and watches one of the Huscarls roll in, lasers and plasma cannons raining fire even as the 40mm cannon lets loose in long bursts with a deep seated roar.
She'd been disappointed to learn the cannons used caseless ammunition, a case from one of the super cannons had sounded like a cool souvenir.
Just then a marker pops up in Makula's HUD, Jaruna had set a beacon for them.
"Shark platoon, get your rumps to my beacon. Lots of bad guys between us and them, but that's the main facility, so let's get in there and break some heads. The regular grunts are starting their push which means we need to stay out in front."
Makula acknowledges with a double click of her mic and jumps out of cover, pushing forward as she opens up with another HEDP round on an auto turret that smoothly slides out of the wall panel it'd been hiding in, mulching the thing before it can fire.
"These pirates have all sorts of nasty surprises." Makula notes.
"Well if they were honorable warriors they wouldn't be pirates. Besides this is battle, not a school sports day." Khutulun notes before cutting loose with a burst from her 25mm autocannon, separating a Snict pirate's torso from her waist and pulverizing two other pirate's chest cavities.
As Shark platoon advances, resistance increases drastically. These pirates were damn well equipped to Makula's knowledge of such people. The few pirates that dropped into the Warrens back on the third Pillar where she'd grown up had never exactly impressed her with their kit.
Even if her mother hadn't raised her to despise that sort of armed rabble, they struck Makula as idiots with poor quality, but flashy weapons. Dangerous to be certain, but not professionals. Dangerous primarily for how impulsive or inconsistent they could be.
Some of these pirates were actually proper soldiers... and that made Makula rather excited, even as a volley of heavy weapons fire saw the Cannidor ducking into heavy cover.
Two of the buildings in front of them, out buildings to the main building that was their target, had apparently been heavily fortified, but all the interesting bits had been kept firmly undercover and possibly even electronically shielded with the same kinds of kit smugglers used to hide cargo, letting these strong points survive the Undaunted air power.
Makula increases her opinion of these pirate's intelligence again. They were damn clever.
It was going to be fun to finish stomping them a new mud hole!
"Jaruna to Nikita, we're facing heavy resistance at the main building. Are you taking your sweet time sniffing flowers or are you going to join us?"
"We're coming, we got bogged down on both flanks on landing. Solid defensive positions that were under cover from the fighters and the drones. Like what you’re facing." Nikita responds, the sound of an explosion echoing across the company command net. "I've sent you some help though. They should be able to knock out the defensive positions and loosen things up for you to continue."
"What kind of-"
Jaruna's voice cuts out as four Apuk bound in from nearby, two each slamming down through the roofs of the buildings. Immediately weapons fire from the building ceases, enabling Makula to surge forward with the rest of Shark platoon. The occasional burst of warfire out of a window or through the stone indicates the Apuk commandos progress. One wall on the left most building explodes in a burst of brilliant emerald green and an unfortunate pirate flies about fifty yards from the building by the sheer force of the blow.
By the time the four women emerge, the formerly fortified buildings are reduced down to rubble, and the Cannidor are only just making it to the buildings! Makula makes another note to see if she can beg for some training from the Apuk warriors. She wasn't sure if she had the axiom talent to do some of the things they did, but that shit was down right cool!
Another choice that would have horrified her mother. It was the old way or no way... but more and more Makula was determined to do things her way.
Whatever that might mean.
"Move up! Can’t let the princesses have all the fun!"
Jaruna's voice spurs Makula into action and she surges forward again, pounding hell for leather to the entrance of the building, staying wide of the large double doors. Working almost on mental autopilot she drops the magazine in her shotgun, and racks the action, catching the HEDP shell and shoving it into it's magazine again before tucking it away in a mag pouch and pulling out one of the mags that was filled with gleaming shells of Undaunted blend buck shot. She racks the slide, savoring the sound again.
"Time for some close encounters."
She calls, drawing chuckles from the other Cannidor for her enthusiasm.
Jaruna reaches over, and smacks her on the back. "That's the spirit." Then looks over her shoulder, calling out to one of the Apuk warriors. "Hey, Princess. Care to knock real loud for us?"
An Apuk battle princess that Makula had seen a few times, steps forward and cracks her knuckles, a meat eating grin plastered across her otherwise delicate and regal face. The one eyed warrior princess strides forward and starts to call a massive amount of green warfire. Enough that Makula could feel the heat through her armor!
Makula had thought she'd gotten the measure of the Apuk's native axiom technique with Dar'Vok and Jerry, but this was another level entirely! She hadn't understood just how much they'd been holding back.
Instead of burning the locking mechanisms to slag or whatever, Princess Miri'Tok burns through the entire armored door with all the care someone might take burning through a tissue, easily opening a hole for the waiting Cannidor to pile through at full speed.
"Breaching! Go!"
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Why tf does the explosive crossbow not blow up bug holes or fabricators? It literally lobs grenades. The Eruptor can but it can't? Inconsistencies like this really irk me.