Wax myrtle poisonous
Vax-narrative flip in progress as predicted in 2021?
2024.05.13 04:42 2023_CK_ Vax-narrative flip in progress as predicted in 2021?
The MSM is now being more open about vax injuries. But I suspect this was the plan all along.
https://celiafarber.substack.com/p/the-rats-are-jumping-ship-nyt-reports
A planned vax narrative-flip was supposedly leaked by an Elite back in 2021. The below was originally posted on GLP on 09/28/2021:
An "Elite" confided in me, what you are about to read about the covid end game will make everything crystal clear.I will not tell you who, or why. Let's just say I spent days with this person and they have a bolthole in NZ. It's the first time I've ever 'hung out' with a known, high net worth individual (billions). It was a chance encounter after doing some work for them in Queenstown. Dinner, drinks were had, and discussions took place. I was invited to hang at their place for the weekend. I am posting this now after processing it.
They were loose lipped and open with me but did say if I mention these things, that 'we never met'. But laughed and said no one would believe it anyway, so 'have fun', just keep their identity out of it.
They said we have nothing to worry about here, so in-spite of what they told me, he told me to consider myself one of the luckiest humans alive to be in NZ right now.
They asked if I took the vax, and were relieved when I said no. They said kiwis would get the antidote anyway but some will not make it to that point. Afterall, someone had to run things here 'for them'.
I initially asked what they thought the 'end game' was for all this covid stuff. They asked me what I thought it was, with great interest, but I wasn't close.
They basically said this..
-a plan was devised many years ago, and for many years that is all it was, a plan. They had to wait many years for the technologies available to make the plan viable. And to recruit the appropriate individuals.
-This is definitely about a new global government being put in place (details will continue)
-This new global government is already in place operating for years in complete secrecy, waiting on the sidelines, moving the chess pieces.
-The new government required some of the top minds on the planet, almost all of them came on board of their own free will and with a full belief in the cause of a new world government. In their view they are brute force saving humanity at all costs. I was told those who refused were dealt to, but in most cases, they would bring the person to the wider group and through discussions, they were convinced and became committed to the cause. Most times, these 'minds' were applying for fake jobs and going through psych evals etc as a first step.
-This plan is ongoing and the most complex global chain of events ever put into motion.
THE PLAN is essentially to turn every citizen of every country, violently against their own government. How they are doing this is pure genius and pure evil.
To achieve this plan, my chance encounter asked how would I do it?.. how would you turn every citizen of every country against their own government? I really have no idea. So they laid out the basics for me.
-There must be a global engineered 'sickness' -There must be mass fear, panic and paranoia -Leaders, Scientists and Media must converge on consensus of a treatment -that treatment would be essentially handed to them without them even realising it -Initially, there can only be few 'sanctioned' treatments, all other treatments must be deemed 'dangerous, unsafe and banned' -Leaders, Scientists and Media are manipulated, to believe this 'treatment' is the only option, the only way to keep you and your family safe. -Leaders, Scientists and Media in a sense, give you their word that this treatment is safe and effective
-Children were also targeted to inflict maximum pain and anger when it goes bad.
I found this part interesting. Our leaders, scientists and media are NOT complicit in this plan or actually part of this plan in any way. NONE of them, not even Fauci. They are mere fodder to these elites, serving a purpose then will be "discarded" or "fed to the angry" ! They have been played.
-The few outliers who question the 'treatment' are discredited in a variety of ways and censored -Sanctioned 'treatments' are biologics/poison that takes 2-3 years to be fully realised. -mRNA was the advanced technology they were waiting for. -Public messaging ensures people beg for the 'treatment' and line up for it.
We could say, the plan is well underway at this point and so far hugely successful. The mRNA uptake has been huge and the people all believe the 'treatment' is the only way back to normality.
I was told it has exceeded their wildest expectations!
WHAT NEXT?
This is where the final plan executes.
The tables turn on the vaccine narrative. I was told in time the vaccine will increase infection and increase death. That billions will die, and the people will be enraged and burn their governments to the ground. Their leaders, scientists and media will be torched, hunted and hung in the streets. BOTH sides will burn their governments to the ground. The pro-vax side, completely betrayed and dying will rage.. the non-vax side will rage for what their gov allowed to happen.
I was also told when this happens think "Mad Max" for a while, but think of NZ "Elysium". There are a few designated zones like NZ, but due to geography and infrastructure NZ is known as Zone 1.
Once the masses are free of government and all those who 'betrayed' them, and they have suffered enough. This is when the new global government will emerge as the great saviour. It will be an "easy sell" I am told.
This was my brain dump. I probably left out quite a bit. They waxed on about this but somewhat ignored direct questions.
They said they liked me and want me around when the dust settles, that I was hugely useful to them.
I dunno, part of me just thinks they were f'ing with me. I do feel better about being where I am right now.
submitted by 2023_CK_ to conspiracy [link] [comments]
https://celiafarber.substack.com/p/the-rats-are-jumping-ship-nyt-reports
A planned vax narrative-flip was supposedly leaked by an Elite back in 2021. The below was originally posted on GLP on 09/28/2021:
An "Elite" confided in me, what you are about to read about the covid end game will make everything crystal clear.I will not tell you who, or why. Let's just say I spent days with this person and they have a bolthole in NZ. It's the first time I've ever 'hung out' with a known, high net worth individual (billions). It was a chance encounter after doing some work for them in Queenstown. Dinner, drinks were had, and discussions took place. I was invited to hang at their place for the weekend. I am posting this now after processing it.
They were loose lipped and open with me but did say if I mention these things, that 'we never met'. But laughed and said no one would believe it anyway, so 'have fun', just keep their identity out of it.
They said we have nothing to worry about here, so in-spite of what they told me, he told me to consider myself one of the luckiest humans alive to be in NZ right now.
They asked if I took the vax, and were relieved when I said no. They said kiwis would get the antidote anyway but some will not make it to that point. Afterall, someone had to run things here 'for them'.
I initially asked what they thought the 'end game' was for all this covid stuff. They asked me what I thought it was, with great interest, but I wasn't close.
They basically said this..
-a plan was devised many years ago, and for many years that is all it was, a plan. They had to wait many years for the technologies available to make the plan viable. And to recruit the appropriate individuals.
-This is definitely about a new global government being put in place (details will continue)
-This new global government is already in place operating for years in complete secrecy, waiting on the sidelines, moving the chess pieces.
-The new government required some of the top minds on the planet, almost all of them came on board of their own free will and with a full belief in the cause of a new world government. In their view they are brute force saving humanity at all costs. I was told those who refused were dealt to, but in most cases, they would bring the person to the wider group and through discussions, they were convinced and became committed to the cause. Most times, these 'minds' were applying for fake jobs and going through psych evals etc as a first step.
-This plan is ongoing and the most complex global chain of events ever put into motion.
THE PLAN is essentially to turn every citizen of every country, violently against their own government. How they are doing this is pure genius and pure evil.
To achieve this plan, my chance encounter asked how would I do it?.. how would you turn every citizen of every country against their own government? I really have no idea. So they laid out the basics for me.
-There must be a global engineered 'sickness' -There must be mass fear, panic and paranoia -Leaders, Scientists and Media must converge on consensus of a treatment -that treatment would be essentially handed to them without them even realising it -Initially, there can only be few 'sanctioned' treatments, all other treatments must be deemed 'dangerous, unsafe and banned' -Leaders, Scientists and Media are manipulated, to believe this 'treatment' is the only option, the only way to keep you and your family safe. -Leaders, Scientists and Media in a sense, give you their word that this treatment is safe and effective
-Children were also targeted to inflict maximum pain and anger when it goes bad.
I found this part interesting. Our leaders, scientists and media are NOT complicit in this plan or actually part of this plan in any way. NONE of them, not even Fauci. They are mere fodder to these elites, serving a purpose then will be "discarded" or "fed to the angry" ! They have been played.
-The few outliers who question the 'treatment' are discredited in a variety of ways and censored -Sanctioned 'treatments' are biologics/poison that takes 2-3 years to be fully realised. -mRNA was the advanced technology they were waiting for. -Public messaging ensures people beg for the 'treatment' and line up for it.
We could say, the plan is well underway at this point and so far hugely successful. The mRNA uptake has been huge and the people all believe the 'treatment' is the only way back to normality.
I was told it has exceeded their wildest expectations!
WHAT NEXT?
This is where the final plan executes.
The tables turn on the vaccine narrative. I was told in time the vaccine will increase infection and increase death. That billions will die, and the people will be enraged and burn their governments to the ground. Their leaders, scientists and media will be torched, hunted and hung in the streets. BOTH sides will burn their governments to the ground. The pro-vax side, completely betrayed and dying will rage.. the non-vax side will rage for what their gov allowed to happen.
I was also told when this happens think "Mad Max" for a while, but think of NZ "Elysium". There are a few designated zones like NZ, but due to geography and infrastructure NZ is known as Zone 1.
Once the masses are free of government and all those who 'betrayed' them, and they have suffered enough. This is when the new global government will emerge as the great saviour. It will be an "easy sell" I am told.
This was my brain dump. I probably left out quite a bit. They waxed on about this but somewhat ignored direct questions.
They said they liked me and want me around when the dust settles, that I was hugely useful to them.
I dunno, part of me just thinks they were f'ing with me. I do feel better about being where I am right now.
2024.05.12 15:50 lastfreehandle How to figure out which parts are leather and which are plastic that only looks like leather?
 | I am washing the interior leather with 1. glycerin based balsam and 2. some kind of finishing wax. When Im sure its plastic I use pure ethanol (I don't use isopropyl because its poison, probably not very healthy to breathe in). Probably should get some kind of cockpit cleaner or something. submitted by lastfreehandle to AutoDetailing [link] [comments] I guess using any alcohol on leather is a big no-no? Is using leather stuff on plastic also a problem? How to tell the difference? My car is a landcruiser 150, other countries also call it prado. This is what the interior looks like: https://preview.redd.it/i77dkamu200d1.png?width=277&format=png&auto=webp&s=c88fb6ea076c5a77bc014f0d7cb649d701d0f4c8 My first guess was, that only the gear shift sock and the wheel are from real leather while the rest just looks like leather. Now Im not so sure.... |
2024.05.12 06:29 matthew19 Wax Myrtles have to be one of the best privacy hedge. Look at that volume.
 | submitted by matthew19 to landscaping [link] [comments] |
2024.05.11 23:03 Ok-Zucchini831 Son and I looking for ID
 | My son noticed these on a root ball of wax myrtle that was taken out a couple of months ago. Frisco Texas. Any help is appreciated. submitted by Ok-Zucchini831 to mushroomID [link] [comments] |
2024.05.11 00:19 Future_Ad_3485 Death Inc. Part Fourteen: The Battle Comes!
Popping up in a voodoo shop in New Orleans, a demon made of burlap made his way to the counter. His inky eyes glittered with excitement at my presence, a couple of his pins popping out. Fishing around the pocket of my jet black summer dress, a box of giant pins grazed against my fingertips. Setting the pins on the counter, Wisty shifted uncomfortably behind me. The voodoo doll demon's short stature had me smiling to myself. Mr. Dolls was a demon with the pension for the simple things.
“How is it going, Mr. Dolls?” I chirped cheerfully, hoping to get access into the Dark Market for a few supplies to seal those reapers into their final resting place. Feathers fluttered onto my shoulder, his beak kissing my cheek. Fluffing the top of his head, Mr. Dolls tucking them underneath the desk. Taking in all the basic supplies for any spell on the worn shelves, his hand slid over a rusting skeleton key. How long has it been since I visited the market?
“Have fun!” He bellowed in his deep southern accent, a Cheshire Cat grin spreading ear to ear with the peck to his cheek. A black iron door appeared in front of us, the brass knob turning on its own. Crossing the threshold, the door creaked shut behind us. A sea of rundown buildings greeted me, the stands lined with every magical tool and herb one could need. Fixing his black band t-shirt and ripped jeans, something told me that he felt out of place. Most of the people in the market wore clothing similar to ours, his fraying nerves relaxing visibly. Something reeked, my eyes scanning the chaos bustling about in front of me. Chewing on my lips, a tap on Feathers’ head sent him ahead to check things out. Hooking my elbow around his, his real smile lit up his features. Moving from stand to stand, ingredients were soon filling up my worn leather bag. A scream had our heads snapping in its direction, a corrupt reaper seconds from decapitating a random witch. Shoving the bag into Wisty’s chest, my fingers plucked my fans from my boot. Flicking them to their full length, shocked gasps passed like silent whispers the moment I pushed off the cobblestone street. Ruby moonlight bathed me, the shadowy reaper glancing up at me. Spinning my fans around my wrist, a blast of wind had him crashing into a pile of bricks. Landing gracefully, the shoppers scurried into the nearest buildings. Cart owners rolled their mobile shops into the closest alleyway, their livelihood depending on that alone. Admiring the amount of space, the rogue reaper rose to his feet with a hiss. Spinning his shadow scythe over his head, the reaper was so far gone that words were no longer an option. Raising my fans in the attack position, this battle was going to sting like a bitch. Charging at me, my fans blocked his scythe. Kicking me in the stomach, several of my organs burst. Blood rained in the sky, a building catching me. Glancing down at my stomach, a whimper escaped my lips at the broken pipe impaling me. Peeling myself off, inky blood pooled on the top of my boots. Hiding behind the wall, the reaper was hopping towards me. Chains blocked his path, my body sliding down the wall. A small demon child cried behind her mother, a sympathetic smile leaving my lips. Plucking my pocket watch out of my boot, my concentration lingered on the pipe and wall. Spinning the top, everything repaired itself. Struggling to my feet, a new plan of attack needed to be found. Noting the bag of sand in the corner, my brow raised with a sly grin.
“May I borrow your bag of sand? I promise to buy you another one after the madness is over.” I requested politely, my head bowing in shame at my blood staining their carpet. “And perhaps a carpet as well.” Opening the window, their shock filled eyes followed me climbing out the window. Heaving myself onto the roof, my eyes scanned the vast market for a viable plan. Salem flew past my head, my arm catching him. Setting him down gingerly, no wounds were visible. Fishing around my boot, a healing potion grazed the tip of my fingers. Offering him the vial, his trembling hand gulped it down. Swaying slightly, the reaper punched the walls behind him.
“Any weaknesses?” I inquired with a rub on his shoulder, his head shaking. My worst fear had been confirmed, the reaper was well beyond the normal level. Checking to see if the bag was still there, Salem’s protest fell on deaf ears the moment I leapt onto the next roof. Landing next to me, his rage was his weakness. Keeping to the shadows, we were just over him. Jumping off, my loud landing had his head snapping in my direction.
“Is the little reaper done with his temper tantrum!” I teased with a defiant grin, his temper flaring. Crashing towards me, sand exploded the moment it hit the street. Pirouetting around his shadowy form, a swift kick had him flailing in air. Twirling around to pick up speed, a tornado whistled to life around me. Feathers floated into the howling funnel of wind, an abrupt stop had him trapped in the death trap. Feathers cut into his skin, my fingers curling around the pocket watch. Speeding up the tornado, his screams grew louder. Inky blood poured from my nose, the screams dying down. The tornado died down, a pile of ash remaining where the reaper once stood. A gang of demons crunched behind me, sand crunching as I spun on my heels. Cocking my head to the left, hidden horror hid underneath my confident smile at the blade being pressed to a kid’s throat. Couldn't one thing go right today, damn it!
“I suggest you let the little guy go.” I threatened icily, my patience wearing thin. “If you don’t, Death is going to rain down on you.” Pushing the kid towards me, his parents called him over. Masked gang members fussed with their simple onyx masks, the hooded sweatshirt and jeans throwing me off. The leader sauntered forward, his seven foot stature had me doubting myself for a few spare moments.
“It’s not like you are in charge of the universe or anything.” He retorted bitterly, his visible lips curling into a smile at my visible rage. “Oh shit! You are in charge of the universe. So you are the infamous Asphodel, the one to kill. Do you know that Master Skull has an impressive bounty on your head?” Scoffing with an eye roll, the information was all I needed to know. Master Skull needed time to recover from his withdrawals.
“Your bitch of a boss can fight me himself.” I snapped impatiently, spinning my fans in my palms. “Is the money worth you dying?” Leaning his head back, a hearty laugh poured from his lips. Gritting my teeth, his level of disrespect had my temper flaring visibly. Clenching my jaw, Wisty popped up by my side. Cracking his knuckles, his chains whipped around him. Respect burned in their eyes for him, another wave of fury crashing through me. Did I not look authoritative enough to garner respect?
“If you know what’s good for you, your asses should leave and never come back.” Wisty warned with a low growl in his throat, the gangster breaking out into a fit of laughter. “So plan B it is, eh?” Cocking the safety, a bullet whistled by my head. Chains blocked a barrage of bullets, the idiots chose death over living. Splitting up, stealth would be my friend. One of the stand owners pushed out a sack of ash, my fingers curling around the top. Tucking my pocket watch back into my boot, wits would be my way out once more. Scaling a building, the sheer impact would create an incredible fog on the street. Hanging it over the ledge, footfalls echoed behind me. Releasing the sack, time slowed during the descent. Spinning on my heels, the precise edge of my fan cut through a gang member’s neck with ease. Smashing the heel of my boot into his head until it resembled brain and bone stew, the sack hit the street. Leaping over the ledge, the cloud obscured my landing. Dancing through the ash, spin after spin had demon heads bouncing off of my boots. Crashing into Wisty, my breath hitched at how handsome he looked in the chaos. Kissing each other passionately, scarlet painted my cheeks upon the release of his spell. Getting back into the battle, about a dozen of them remained. Dodging the attacks with ease, my light footwork was proving to be my friend. Muddy blood sprayed my face with every slice, the bodies hitting our feet. Decaying to ash, one demon remained. Skidding into the nearest alleyway, Wisty smashed into me. Every ounce of breath hitched at how close he was, his crooked grin causing my heart to flutter wildly. Seconds from flirting with me, the leader’s voice had our heads snapping in his direction.
“Nice work. If I didn’t know who you were then you would be hired in a heartbeat. Most people die within ten minutes of meeting us.” He mused darkly, his body paced back and forth in the thick of the cloud. Something seemed off, the damn trick looking like an illusion. The energy shifted, copies appeared in every space. Wisty sent out his chains, the real one seeming out of range. Glancing up, his body appeared over us. Spinning my fans in my palm, wind built up. Flicking them into his direction, a ball of air swirled around my boot. Releasing the ball of air with a swift kick, my fans’ speed tripled. Shock round his eyes at the sharp edges cutting him into three pieces. His head bounced off of mine, the torso splattering by our boots. His expensive shoes clanged with every clumsy strike on their way down. Decaying to ash before they could hit the street, his torso and head wasn’t far behind. Catching my fans in my eager palms, Wisty cupped my cheeks. What was going through his head right now?
“I love you so much right now! Nothing can describe how sexy you look at this very moment.” He flirted shamelessly, everyone coming out to see nothing but ash and an empty street. Gathering the souls into a bag, his steady hand dropped the bag of supplies into my hands. He wasn't this sweet unless he wanted something.
“Stay here until I ditch these bastards in Hell.” He pleaded with his palms pressed together, my ears pinning back. Shooting him a thumbs up, his chains whisking him away. Plopping down on the nearest bench, patience wore thin in my eyes. Lantern appeared next to me, his perfect waves floating up. What now! My bed was beckoning, the softness of the blankets gifting me rare moments of sweet slumber.
“Time for a meeting, council leader.” He announced with a big smile, hesitation burning in my eyes. “Wisty will meet us after he finishes up.” Huffing a bitter fine, his arm curled around my waist. Something was up, curiosity mixing with a dull fury. Narrowing my eyes in his direction, a nervous chuckle flooded from his lips. Zooming into the hallway outside the meeting room, his strong arms set me down. Holding his finger in the air, his head poked into the slightly ajar door. Smoothing out his robes, he cleared his throat. Why did he have such an odd expression?
“Don’t murder us but we wanted to celebrate your promotion.” He pleaded with another nervous chuckle, his hand pushing the door open. Mixed emotions flashed on my face, Mother Nature waving at me with Ravy in her arms. Taking in their usual outfits, my old man came in with a peanut butter flavored ice cream cake. The door opened again, Wisty stepping in with an apologetic smile on his lips. Waving at us, his fingers intertwined with mine. Spinning me around, his arm curled around my waist. Staring up at him with a look of disbelief, the idea had to be his and his alone.
“What brought on this?” I inquired with a cock of my brow, a sly grin brightening his exhausted features. Shrugging his shoulders, my father motioned for us to sit. Taking my seat at the head of the table, an empty chair remained. Tears welled up in my eyes, his name having been engraved in his seat. Silent tears stained my cheeks, tears pooling on the table. Covering my mouth, Wisty took my hand. Not sure what to do, his place would always remain here and in my heart.
“We wanted to remember him as well, my dear.” Mother Nature spoke with tears glistening in her eyes, her broken expression lingering on the chair. “Don’t leave us like him!" Kissing the top of Ravy’s head, a tainted feeling of hope came over the space. Something ate at me, Master Skull's plan proving to be insecure at best. Why wouldn’t he fight me himself? Fingers snapped in front of my face, Wisty staring into my eyes with the utmost concern. The lights flickered, arms ripping me away from the table. Falling through the dimensions, Master Skull’s boot met my stomach. A fountain of blood burst from my lips, my fingers clawing at the warm rock underneath me. Where the hell was I?
“Open up the seal or die right here!” He demanded venomously, throwing the bag of supplies into my face. Wicked laughter rumbled in my throat, our story would be ending today. Getting on my knees, this fucking bastard didn’t know the spell. Raising his leg over my head, my fingers caught his ankle. Not today, you freaking cockroach.
“As much as I like this little trip to a necessary location, you can’t tell me to do shit!” I barked back with a defiant grin on a determined face. “Try me.” Whipping him into the air, my muscles protested as I snatched the bag. Sprinting into a nearby cave, the supplies hit the smooth black surface. Dumping the ingredients into the special bowl, my fingers curled around my fans. Coughing up a glob of blood, the glob hit the top. Grinding it into a paste, my necklace floated over my head. Lowering itself into the bowl, the ingredients changed into a thin liquid. Waiting for the screams to pierce my ears, nothing came. The bracelet on my wrist glowed brighter, his magic protecting my ears. Something groaned in the distance, a ruby glow taunted me. Sprinting down the tunnels, the entrance to the reapers’ resting place threatened to open. Sinking to my knees, my fingers moved a mile a minute. Strange symbols came to life, the spell would seal their fate. Pressing my palms together, the next words flowed seamlessly from my lips.
“Blossom of Mother Nature! Blood of time! Flames of the Heaven! Wax of Life! Stone of Hell and Death! Combine to form the permanent seal to save us all!” I chanted boldly, Master Skull skidding in. “Take all the power you need from my humble soul!” Pressing my palms onto the stone, a bright blinded me as a black energy welded it shut. Master Skull smashed into me, his blade sliding in and out of me. Large pools splattered the walls, the spell almost finishing up. Waiting with bated breath, a blast of energy knocked us back. Rolling across the smooth surface, a quarter of my power remained. Twitching in the pool of my growing blood, another wave of energy signaled that realm being cut off from the other side. Striking me too fast for my body to heal, tears of joy flooded from my eyes. Voices called for me in the distance, Master Skull kicking me into the air. Every person that I met crashed into view, waves of water smashing Master Skull into the wall. Fighting him off with their weapons, Wisty caught me in his arms. Holding me until the wounds sealed shut, his tears splashed onto my face. Knowing what I was thinking, his head shook desperately.
“Don’t you dare even think about that!” He begged with wild sobs, his hands trembling underneath me. Ignoring him, he cried out as I jumped out of his arms. Sprinting towards the chaos, fresh tears streaming from my eyes. Happy images of my friends flashed in my eyes, my fans darkening to the deepest black. Giant feathers floated behind me, several organs bursting. Unlocking my limit, the situation at hand would be the very definition of an emergency. The others collapsed to the rock, a wall preventing him from getting to me. A gust of wind sent them all back, blood pouring from my eyes, ears and mouth. Holding my head up high, the universe was my responsibility.
“The universe needs saving, so let me do my damn job!” I shouted through a wall of tears, fresh cuts appearing on my skin. Humming to myself, the dance to end him began. Master Skull charged at me, his blade aimed for my throat. Spinning around his strikes, the energy built in the air. Horror rounded his eyes, elements of angel magic granting me the grace to strike his cheek. Stumbling back, clammy sweat drenched his skin.
“No! No!” He pleaded while scratching at his peeling face, the bastard backing into a wall. Pushing off the rock, my body flipped through the air. Fully expecting his defense, my boots twirled down his blade. Pushing off the hilt, rapid spins of my fans over my wrists had the feathers aimed for him. Flicking them towards his neck, the sharp edges cut through his neck like butter. Grabbing his head last minute, the fans weren’t the deadliest item. Hugging him close to me, harsh memories haunted my mind. Raising my hand in the air, a snap of my fingers had the feathers piercing us both. Attempting to push me off, every poison known to kill angels coursed through our bodies. Gripping him with all the strength I had in me, the feathers kept coming. Our blood mixed, one spell remained.
“Undo what was vowed.” I wheezed, his body collapsing into my arms. “Make my blood the deadliest venom. Strike the enemy underneath me.” Sinking to our knees, silent tears cascaded from my eyes as the venom took its hold on him. Foam poured from his lips, my trembling hands pulling his head onto my lap.
“Why?” He coughed with a weary smile, seeming happy to die. “Why give me a nice ending after all I did to you?” Smiling through the blood pouring from every hole in my face, my compassion could never let a soul receive a horrible ending. As much as I despised him, he looked so innocent in this tragic moment.
“No matter your sins, a peaceful ending is always deserved.” I whispered through another shiver, feeling death’s arms around my shoulder. “All I ever wanted was for the world to be peaceful. Lay with me until you draw your last breath, friend.” The landscape doubled, his hand dropping to the rock. Catching his soul, the poor guy deserved a chance. Struggling to my feet, the wall keeping the others from me glitched out. Limping over to the others, I pressed his soul into Lantern’s palms. Perhaps a better life would guide him in the right direction.
“His life was hell so give him a second shot down on Earth. Please.” I wept dejectedly, cupping my sides as protests parted his lips. “Don’t argue. I wouldn’t be any better than him if I didn’t do this. If he fucks up again, I will kill him myself.” Their faces blurred with my tears, a rough darkness stealing me away.
Standing in a field of stunning flowers, the colorful blossoms tickled my fingertips. A familiar voice had me spinning on my heels, a healthy looking Raveno ran his hand through his hair. Fussing with his suit, a sad smile lingered on his lips. Smashing into his body, his arms buried me into a desperate bear hug. Cupping my face, tears poured down his chin. Sliding his hand down to my bracelet, his head cocked to the left. Tracing his fingers over the cracks, pride glistened in his eyes.
“Now isn’t your time.” He sobbed softly, my head shaking. “Someday we will meet again but not today.” My lips parted in protest, his hand covering my mouth. Curling my hand around his, part of me wanted to stay.
“I didn’t die for you to die.” He spoke simply, tucking a loose piece of hair behind my ear. “Remember that I love you with all of my feathers and lead the universe in the right direction. Goodbye isn’t forever.” Our eyes flitted to the glowing crystals, a blinding light sending me out of the dimension.
Sucking in a deep breath, a quick glance around me had my bedroom walls greeting me. Swinging my feet over the edge of the bed, a simple white cotton dress hugged my body flawlessly. Stumbling into the elevator, the damn thing couldn’t move fast enough. Jaws hit the ground at the sight of me, half of them looking like they had seen a ghost. Long wild waves floated with each step, my mind wondering how much time had passed. Scanning the crowd for Wisty, my heart sank at the lack of his presence. Running through the market, the chaos died down at the door of my father’s home. Banging on the door, the color drained from my father’s face. Ravy recognized me, her tiny hands reaching for me. Clutching her close to my chest, a sigh of relief poured from my lips at how small she still was. Collapsing into his arms, his tears soaked the top of my head. Helping me in, his hands sat me down in the chair.
“How long has it been?” I choked out through a wall of tears, his trembling hands scrunching up the hem of his suit jacket. “How long?” Sinking into the chair next to me, his office door burst open. Wisty plucked me from my seat, his strong arms burying me into a bear hug. More tears dripped down my cheek, my wet eyes meeting his. Cupping my face, his hands shook as bad as my father’s. Kissing me feverishly, his hands refused to let my face go. Happy to see him, my heart fluttered with pure bliss.
“Don’t you ever pull that shit again.” He berated me with his real smile, his thumbs wiping away my tears. “You are lucky that Vivra was able to keep you in a coma.” Mumbling an earnest apology, the door burst open again. Wisty’s eyes rolled, the rest of the council fretting over me. Stepping back, he gave them space. Basking in the warmth, a noise had me bursting from their circle. Music played in the street, curiosity glistened in my eyes. Running over to the window, my real smile illuminated my features. A banner reading welcome back stole my heart away, Teas flipping into the room.
“Come along and celebrate the festival in your honor.” She chirped cheerfully, dropping my worn boots by my feet. Sliding them on as Sunny spun in, her palms pressed together. Letting them guide me into the next part of my life, the universe was mine to run.
submitted by Future_Ad_3485 to DrCreepensVault [link] [comments]
“How is it going, Mr. Dolls?” I chirped cheerfully, hoping to get access into the Dark Market for a few supplies to seal those reapers into their final resting place. Feathers fluttered onto my shoulder, his beak kissing my cheek. Fluffing the top of his head, Mr. Dolls tucking them underneath the desk. Taking in all the basic supplies for any spell on the worn shelves, his hand slid over a rusting skeleton key. How long has it been since I visited the market?
“Have fun!” He bellowed in his deep southern accent, a Cheshire Cat grin spreading ear to ear with the peck to his cheek. A black iron door appeared in front of us, the brass knob turning on its own. Crossing the threshold, the door creaked shut behind us. A sea of rundown buildings greeted me, the stands lined with every magical tool and herb one could need. Fixing his black band t-shirt and ripped jeans, something told me that he felt out of place. Most of the people in the market wore clothing similar to ours, his fraying nerves relaxing visibly. Something reeked, my eyes scanning the chaos bustling about in front of me. Chewing on my lips, a tap on Feathers’ head sent him ahead to check things out. Hooking my elbow around his, his real smile lit up his features. Moving from stand to stand, ingredients were soon filling up my worn leather bag. A scream had our heads snapping in its direction, a corrupt reaper seconds from decapitating a random witch. Shoving the bag into Wisty’s chest, my fingers plucked my fans from my boot. Flicking them to their full length, shocked gasps passed like silent whispers the moment I pushed off the cobblestone street. Ruby moonlight bathed me, the shadowy reaper glancing up at me. Spinning my fans around my wrist, a blast of wind had him crashing into a pile of bricks. Landing gracefully, the shoppers scurried into the nearest buildings. Cart owners rolled their mobile shops into the closest alleyway, their livelihood depending on that alone. Admiring the amount of space, the rogue reaper rose to his feet with a hiss. Spinning his shadow scythe over his head, the reaper was so far gone that words were no longer an option. Raising my fans in the attack position, this battle was going to sting like a bitch. Charging at me, my fans blocked his scythe. Kicking me in the stomach, several of my organs burst. Blood rained in the sky, a building catching me. Glancing down at my stomach, a whimper escaped my lips at the broken pipe impaling me. Peeling myself off, inky blood pooled on the top of my boots. Hiding behind the wall, the reaper was hopping towards me. Chains blocked his path, my body sliding down the wall. A small demon child cried behind her mother, a sympathetic smile leaving my lips. Plucking my pocket watch out of my boot, my concentration lingered on the pipe and wall. Spinning the top, everything repaired itself. Struggling to my feet, a new plan of attack needed to be found. Noting the bag of sand in the corner, my brow raised with a sly grin.
“May I borrow your bag of sand? I promise to buy you another one after the madness is over.” I requested politely, my head bowing in shame at my blood staining their carpet. “And perhaps a carpet as well.” Opening the window, their shock filled eyes followed me climbing out the window. Heaving myself onto the roof, my eyes scanned the vast market for a viable plan. Salem flew past my head, my arm catching him. Setting him down gingerly, no wounds were visible. Fishing around my boot, a healing potion grazed the tip of my fingers. Offering him the vial, his trembling hand gulped it down. Swaying slightly, the reaper punched the walls behind him.
“Any weaknesses?” I inquired with a rub on his shoulder, his head shaking. My worst fear had been confirmed, the reaper was well beyond the normal level. Checking to see if the bag was still there, Salem’s protest fell on deaf ears the moment I leapt onto the next roof. Landing next to me, his rage was his weakness. Keeping to the shadows, we were just over him. Jumping off, my loud landing had his head snapping in my direction.
“Is the little reaper done with his temper tantrum!” I teased with a defiant grin, his temper flaring. Crashing towards me, sand exploded the moment it hit the street. Pirouetting around his shadowy form, a swift kick had him flailing in air. Twirling around to pick up speed, a tornado whistled to life around me. Feathers floated into the howling funnel of wind, an abrupt stop had him trapped in the death trap. Feathers cut into his skin, my fingers curling around the pocket watch. Speeding up the tornado, his screams grew louder. Inky blood poured from my nose, the screams dying down. The tornado died down, a pile of ash remaining where the reaper once stood. A gang of demons crunched behind me, sand crunching as I spun on my heels. Cocking my head to the left, hidden horror hid underneath my confident smile at the blade being pressed to a kid’s throat. Couldn't one thing go right today, damn it!
“I suggest you let the little guy go.” I threatened icily, my patience wearing thin. “If you don’t, Death is going to rain down on you.” Pushing the kid towards me, his parents called him over. Masked gang members fussed with their simple onyx masks, the hooded sweatshirt and jeans throwing me off. The leader sauntered forward, his seven foot stature had me doubting myself for a few spare moments.
“It’s not like you are in charge of the universe or anything.” He retorted bitterly, his visible lips curling into a smile at my visible rage. “Oh shit! You are in charge of the universe. So you are the infamous Asphodel, the one to kill. Do you know that Master Skull has an impressive bounty on your head?” Scoffing with an eye roll, the information was all I needed to know. Master Skull needed time to recover from his withdrawals.
“Your bitch of a boss can fight me himself.” I snapped impatiently, spinning my fans in my palms. “Is the money worth you dying?” Leaning his head back, a hearty laugh poured from his lips. Gritting my teeth, his level of disrespect had my temper flaring visibly. Clenching my jaw, Wisty popped up by my side. Cracking his knuckles, his chains whipped around him. Respect burned in their eyes for him, another wave of fury crashing through me. Did I not look authoritative enough to garner respect?
“If you know what’s good for you, your asses should leave and never come back.” Wisty warned with a low growl in his throat, the gangster breaking out into a fit of laughter. “So plan B it is, eh?” Cocking the safety, a bullet whistled by my head. Chains blocked a barrage of bullets, the idiots chose death over living. Splitting up, stealth would be my friend. One of the stand owners pushed out a sack of ash, my fingers curling around the top. Tucking my pocket watch back into my boot, wits would be my way out once more. Scaling a building, the sheer impact would create an incredible fog on the street. Hanging it over the ledge, footfalls echoed behind me. Releasing the sack, time slowed during the descent. Spinning on my heels, the precise edge of my fan cut through a gang member’s neck with ease. Smashing the heel of my boot into his head until it resembled brain and bone stew, the sack hit the street. Leaping over the ledge, the cloud obscured my landing. Dancing through the ash, spin after spin had demon heads bouncing off of my boots. Crashing into Wisty, my breath hitched at how handsome he looked in the chaos. Kissing each other passionately, scarlet painted my cheeks upon the release of his spell. Getting back into the battle, about a dozen of them remained. Dodging the attacks with ease, my light footwork was proving to be my friend. Muddy blood sprayed my face with every slice, the bodies hitting our feet. Decaying to ash, one demon remained. Skidding into the nearest alleyway, Wisty smashed into me. Every ounce of breath hitched at how close he was, his crooked grin causing my heart to flutter wildly. Seconds from flirting with me, the leader’s voice had our heads snapping in his direction.
“Nice work. If I didn’t know who you were then you would be hired in a heartbeat. Most people die within ten minutes of meeting us.” He mused darkly, his body paced back and forth in the thick of the cloud. Something seemed off, the damn trick looking like an illusion. The energy shifted, copies appeared in every space. Wisty sent out his chains, the real one seeming out of range. Glancing up, his body appeared over us. Spinning my fans in my palm, wind built up. Flicking them into his direction, a ball of air swirled around my boot. Releasing the ball of air with a swift kick, my fans’ speed tripled. Shock round his eyes at the sharp edges cutting him into three pieces. His head bounced off of mine, the torso splattering by our boots. His expensive shoes clanged with every clumsy strike on their way down. Decaying to ash before they could hit the street, his torso and head wasn’t far behind. Catching my fans in my eager palms, Wisty cupped my cheeks. What was going through his head right now?
“I love you so much right now! Nothing can describe how sexy you look at this very moment.” He flirted shamelessly, everyone coming out to see nothing but ash and an empty street. Gathering the souls into a bag, his steady hand dropped the bag of supplies into my hands. He wasn't this sweet unless he wanted something.
“Stay here until I ditch these bastards in Hell.” He pleaded with his palms pressed together, my ears pinning back. Shooting him a thumbs up, his chains whisking him away. Plopping down on the nearest bench, patience wore thin in my eyes. Lantern appeared next to me, his perfect waves floating up. What now! My bed was beckoning, the softness of the blankets gifting me rare moments of sweet slumber.
“Time for a meeting, council leader.” He announced with a big smile, hesitation burning in my eyes. “Wisty will meet us after he finishes up.” Huffing a bitter fine, his arm curled around my waist. Something was up, curiosity mixing with a dull fury. Narrowing my eyes in his direction, a nervous chuckle flooded from his lips. Zooming into the hallway outside the meeting room, his strong arms set me down. Holding his finger in the air, his head poked into the slightly ajar door. Smoothing out his robes, he cleared his throat. Why did he have such an odd expression?
“Don’t murder us but we wanted to celebrate your promotion.” He pleaded with another nervous chuckle, his hand pushing the door open. Mixed emotions flashed on my face, Mother Nature waving at me with Ravy in her arms. Taking in their usual outfits, my old man came in with a peanut butter flavored ice cream cake. The door opened again, Wisty stepping in with an apologetic smile on his lips. Waving at us, his fingers intertwined with mine. Spinning me around, his arm curled around my waist. Staring up at him with a look of disbelief, the idea had to be his and his alone.
“What brought on this?” I inquired with a cock of my brow, a sly grin brightening his exhausted features. Shrugging his shoulders, my father motioned for us to sit. Taking my seat at the head of the table, an empty chair remained. Tears welled up in my eyes, his name having been engraved in his seat. Silent tears stained my cheeks, tears pooling on the table. Covering my mouth, Wisty took my hand. Not sure what to do, his place would always remain here and in my heart.
“We wanted to remember him as well, my dear.” Mother Nature spoke with tears glistening in her eyes, her broken expression lingering on the chair. “Don’t leave us like him!" Kissing the top of Ravy’s head, a tainted feeling of hope came over the space. Something ate at me, Master Skull's plan proving to be insecure at best. Why wouldn’t he fight me himself? Fingers snapped in front of my face, Wisty staring into my eyes with the utmost concern. The lights flickered, arms ripping me away from the table. Falling through the dimensions, Master Skull’s boot met my stomach. A fountain of blood burst from my lips, my fingers clawing at the warm rock underneath me. Where the hell was I?
“Open up the seal or die right here!” He demanded venomously, throwing the bag of supplies into my face. Wicked laughter rumbled in my throat, our story would be ending today. Getting on my knees, this fucking bastard didn’t know the spell. Raising his leg over my head, my fingers caught his ankle. Not today, you freaking cockroach.
“As much as I like this little trip to a necessary location, you can’t tell me to do shit!” I barked back with a defiant grin on a determined face. “Try me.” Whipping him into the air, my muscles protested as I snatched the bag. Sprinting into a nearby cave, the supplies hit the smooth black surface. Dumping the ingredients into the special bowl, my fingers curled around my fans. Coughing up a glob of blood, the glob hit the top. Grinding it into a paste, my necklace floated over my head. Lowering itself into the bowl, the ingredients changed into a thin liquid. Waiting for the screams to pierce my ears, nothing came. The bracelet on my wrist glowed brighter, his magic protecting my ears. Something groaned in the distance, a ruby glow taunted me. Sprinting down the tunnels, the entrance to the reapers’ resting place threatened to open. Sinking to my knees, my fingers moved a mile a minute. Strange symbols came to life, the spell would seal their fate. Pressing my palms together, the next words flowed seamlessly from my lips.
“Blossom of Mother Nature! Blood of time! Flames of the Heaven! Wax of Life! Stone of Hell and Death! Combine to form the permanent seal to save us all!” I chanted boldly, Master Skull skidding in. “Take all the power you need from my humble soul!” Pressing my palms onto the stone, a bright blinded me as a black energy welded it shut. Master Skull smashed into me, his blade sliding in and out of me. Large pools splattered the walls, the spell almost finishing up. Waiting with bated breath, a blast of energy knocked us back. Rolling across the smooth surface, a quarter of my power remained. Twitching in the pool of my growing blood, another wave of energy signaled that realm being cut off from the other side. Striking me too fast for my body to heal, tears of joy flooded from my eyes. Voices called for me in the distance, Master Skull kicking me into the air. Every person that I met crashed into view, waves of water smashing Master Skull into the wall. Fighting him off with their weapons, Wisty caught me in his arms. Holding me until the wounds sealed shut, his tears splashed onto my face. Knowing what I was thinking, his head shook desperately.
“Don’t you dare even think about that!” He begged with wild sobs, his hands trembling underneath me. Ignoring him, he cried out as I jumped out of his arms. Sprinting towards the chaos, fresh tears streaming from my eyes. Happy images of my friends flashed in my eyes, my fans darkening to the deepest black. Giant feathers floated behind me, several organs bursting. Unlocking my limit, the situation at hand would be the very definition of an emergency. The others collapsed to the rock, a wall preventing him from getting to me. A gust of wind sent them all back, blood pouring from my eyes, ears and mouth. Holding my head up high, the universe was my responsibility.
“The universe needs saving, so let me do my damn job!” I shouted through a wall of tears, fresh cuts appearing on my skin. Humming to myself, the dance to end him began. Master Skull charged at me, his blade aimed for my throat. Spinning around his strikes, the energy built in the air. Horror rounded his eyes, elements of angel magic granting me the grace to strike his cheek. Stumbling back, clammy sweat drenched his skin.
“No! No!” He pleaded while scratching at his peeling face, the bastard backing into a wall. Pushing off the rock, my body flipped through the air. Fully expecting his defense, my boots twirled down his blade. Pushing off the hilt, rapid spins of my fans over my wrists had the feathers aimed for him. Flicking them towards his neck, the sharp edges cut through his neck like butter. Grabbing his head last minute, the fans weren’t the deadliest item. Hugging him close to me, harsh memories haunted my mind. Raising my hand in the air, a snap of my fingers had the feathers piercing us both. Attempting to push me off, every poison known to kill angels coursed through our bodies. Gripping him with all the strength I had in me, the feathers kept coming. Our blood mixed, one spell remained.
“Undo what was vowed.” I wheezed, his body collapsing into my arms. “Make my blood the deadliest venom. Strike the enemy underneath me.” Sinking to our knees, silent tears cascaded from my eyes as the venom took its hold on him. Foam poured from his lips, my trembling hands pulling his head onto my lap.
“Why?” He coughed with a weary smile, seeming happy to die. “Why give me a nice ending after all I did to you?” Smiling through the blood pouring from every hole in my face, my compassion could never let a soul receive a horrible ending. As much as I despised him, he looked so innocent in this tragic moment.
“No matter your sins, a peaceful ending is always deserved.” I whispered through another shiver, feeling death’s arms around my shoulder. “All I ever wanted was for the world to be peaceful. Lay with me until you draw your last breath, friend.” The landscape doubled, his hand dropping to the rock. Catching his soul, the poor guy deserved a chance. Struggling to my feet, the wall keeping the others from me glitched out. Limping over to the others, I pressed his soul into Lantern’s palms. Perhaps a better life would guide him in the right direction.
“His life was hell so give him a second shot down on Earth. Please.” I wept dejectedly, cupping my sides as protests parted his lips. “Don’t argue. I wouldn’t be any better than him if I didn’t do this. If he fucks up again, I will kill him myself.” Their faces blurred with my tears, a rough darkness stealing me away.
Standing in a field of stunning flowers, the colorful blossoms tickled my fingertips. A familiar voice had me spinning on my heels, a healthy looking Raveno ran his hand through his hair. Fussing with his suit, a sad smile lingered on his lips. Smashing into his body, his arms buried me into a desperate bear hug. Cupping my face, tears poured down his chin. Sliding his hand down to my bracelet, his head cocked to the left. Tracing his fingers over the cracks, pride glistened in his eyes.
“Now isn’t your time.” He sobbed softly, my head shaking. “Someday we will meet again but not today.” My lips parted in protest, his hand covering my mouth. Curling my hand around his, part of me wanted to stay.
“I didn’t die for you to die.” He spoke simply, tucking a loose piece of hair behind my ear. “Remember that I love you with all of my feathers and lead the universe in the right direction. Goodbye isn’t forever.” Our eyes flitted to the glowing crystals, a blinding light sending me out of the dimension.
Sucking in a deep breath, a quick glance around me had my bedroom walls greeting me. Swinging my feet over the edge of the bed, a simple white cotton dress hugged my body flawlessly. Stumbling into the elevator, the damn thing couldn’t move fast enough. Jaws hit the ground at the sight of me, half of them looking like they had seen a ghost. Long wild waves floated with each step, my mind wondering how much time had passed. Scanning the crowd for Wisty, my heart sank at the lack of his presence. Running through the market, the chaos died down at the door of my father’s home. Banging on the door, the color drained from my father’s face. Ravy recognized me, her tiny hands reaching for me. Clutching her close to my chest, a sigh of relief poured from my lips at how small she still was. Collapsing into his arms, his tears soaked the top of my head. Helping me in, his hands sat me down in the chair.
“How long has it been?” I choked out through a wall of tears, his trembling hands scrunching up the hem of his suit jacket. “How long?” Sinking into the chair next to me, his office door burst open. Wisty plucked me from my seat, his strong arms burying me into a bear hug. More tears dripped down my cheek, my wet eyes meeting his. Cupping my face, his hands shook as bad as my father’s. Kissing me feverishly, his hands refused to let my face go. Happy to see him, my heart fluttered with pure bliss.
“Don’t you ever pull that shit again.” He berated me with his real smile, his thumbs wiping away my tears. “You are lucky that Vivra was able to keep you in a coma.” Mumbling an earnest apology, the door burst open again. Wisty’s eyes rolled, the rest of the council fretting over me. Stepping back, he gave them space. Basking in the warmth, a noise had me bursting from their circle. Music played in the street, curiosity glistened in my eyes. Running over to the window, my real smile illuminated my features. A banner reading welcome back stole my heart away, Teas flipping into the room.
“Come along and celebrate the festival in your honor.” She chirped cheerfully, dropping my worn boots by my feet. Sliding them on as Sunny spun in, her palms pressed together. Letting them guide me into the next part of my life, the universe was mine to run.
2024.05.10 23:32 FloofySkuntank Total Drama Not-Stars ep.15
 | Suggestion by Proofracer: Last time on Total Drama Not-Stars the remaining campers competed in a game of Say Uncle! First up was Anne Maria who shocked everyone by slapping every turtle away from her. In a confessional Anne Maria admits in a confessional that she was NOT happy about being the first boot. submitted by FloofySkuntank to TDEliminationTierList [link] [comments] Anne Maria selects Amy to get her face waxed by marshmallow, Amy passes and selects Sammy to get into a barrel of leashes. Sammy doesn’t pass. Amy laughs and Rodney gives Amy a glare that shuts her up. Trent goes next and has to wear wooden shorts with a wood pecker. He does fine till the wood pecker starts reaching skin and says uncle. B is selected to get his nose hairs plucked and is silent the whole time, relying on old tricks. B selects Bridgette to get squeezed by a boa constrictor. She says uncle. In a confessional B mentions he watched what happened to him at elimination and knows it’s because of Amy, Bridgette, and Katie. He says he can’t risk any of them getting immunity. Dawn is next and has to wear a shirt of live bees, naturally she is fine. Out of the five people left to pick she selects Katie. Katie has to survive 10 seconds with Sasquatchanakwa. Katie says uncle before she’s even let in. Rodney has to jump through a pit of skunks and fails, since he’s uncoordinated and a big guy. Beardo is selected next for New Age music and… actually bobs his head to the music. With only Harold or Brick left he chooses Brick to go next. Brick is tasked with getting his hair cut which he says is no problem… till he learns it has to be done with a chainsaw. He says uncle. Harold then has to eat ice cream without getting a brain freeze, he goes at a decent pace and is successful. In round two is Anne, Maria, Amy, B, Dawn, Beardo, and Harold. Harold is selected first and has to be electrocuted by eels, he tries to do it but does not handle the pain well, eliminating him. It goes back to Anne Maria who gets a poison ivy skin treatment… however her tanner is so thick the poison ivy can’t penetrate it, leaving no ill side effect. She selects Amy to go next. Chris says he’s out of dares and will recycle till just two of you are left. This time Amy gets the turtles and she says uncle when she’s unable to block them. B gets the marshmallow mask and once again doesn’t utter a sound. Though he’s stuck choosing two people he vibes with, he chooses Beardo to go next. Beardo has to do the barrel of leeches but can’t pull through. Leaving Dawn to go next. Dawn has to wear the wooden shorts and soothes the woodpecker long enough to pass. Dawn selects Anne Maria. Anne Maria has to get her nose hairs picked, she says this level of beauty detail is nothing to her. She selects B in return who has to get squeezed by a boa constrictor, he finally cracks, finding the snake to be too tight. Dawn and Anne Maria face off against a log rolling Russian bear. Dawn has to face them, while she tries to convince the bear to let her win, Molotov is extreme competitive and refuses to take a dive, having failed to connect with an animal for the first time, Dawn is thrown off and falls into the water, thankfully not being eaten by piranhas. Anne Maria wins invincibility. This gives time for everyone to talk before elimination. Brick goes up to Dawn and says he’s sorry he lost, the two enjoy each other’s company. Other people see this. Dawn and Brick finalizes their relationship. B pulls Trent aside and whispers an idea to him. Trent nods, thanks B and runs off. Trent runs over to Amy and said he’d like to alliance with her. Amy realizing this gives her control of a fourth of the votes accepts. Telling Trent she’s planning on eliminating a physical threat. In a confessional Trent reveals that he remembers these votes are read out loud. He works with Amy this time, then works with B to destroy the alliance from the inside for Ella. Beardo and Harold are discussing who to vote when Sammy and Rodney arrive. Sammy says she wants to thank Harold for his earlier advice by allying with him, and that she brought Rodney too. Rodney waves. In a confessional Harold admits he likes relying on his own skill but he’s made some good friends that don’t judge him. Out of the confessional he says that he would defend them as long as he can. B realizes he needs to hide in an alliance as well and, vibing well with Beardo, is able to join in Harold’s alliance. Giving them a massive swag over the votes. At elimination Chris reveals the votes to everyone much to most of their shock. Amy votes for Brick Anne Maria votes for Amy B votes for Amy Beardo votes for Brick Brick votes for Katie Bridgette votes for Brick Dawn votes for Katie Harold votes for Brick Katie votes for Brick Rodney votes for Amy Sammy votes for Amy Trent votes for Brick In a 2-4-6 vote Brick is eliminated. Harold says it’s nothing personal you were just the strongest player left physically. A few others nod their head. Dawn is devastated but Brick tells her that now that the game is over he can be with her more officially, he gives Dawn a kiss and Dawn playfully salutes him. In a confessional Dawn admits that if she wants to make Brick proud she has to get farther by finding an alliance as well before they take her out too. Next time the remaining eleven contestants will be searching for keys to treasure chests! Who will find the lucky chest with invincibility? Who will get nothing? And worst of all who will go home! That’s for YOU to decide! |
2024.05.10 20:14 Bekahelen Power On - Chapter 12
Chapter 12
Log. 22675.g Finally. It has been a few months, but we did it. The most annoying part was disabling the GPS and all other self-sabotage programs. After that, it was, eh, simple. Well, as it’s said, I am the idea-person. It's amazing to see how they work as a team. In the beginning there was a lot of prejudice against the Programmer, but it’s wonderful to see organic and artificial humans working together, as equals.
After a few drinks, Bobbie seemed to forget about the secret in the boot, and started asking Séra — who was also a bit drunk, against physician’s orders — about mechanics and batteries. It didn’t take long before they were designing wind turbines to attach to the car. Ganen had to admit, it was a hard conversation to follow, but Séra would always pause and explain something when she noticed a very confused face.
When Séra asked how Bobbie had trained or studied for being able to create such an amazing bike, the Mailer told them she had grown up with the Mail Bikers, surrounded by the most amazing motorcycles, and so she learnt from the best. The main Post Offices had their own forges and labs, so it was easy to get the parts.
— My parents tried to ship me away as a baby. — Bobbie said. — The Bikers found me in a box with no return address, so they decided to keep me and raise me.
— Oi, those are some nasty parents, eh. — Séra wanted to get her bandages off. They were scratching.
— Ah, well, I guess it happens. — The Biker shrugged. — I couldn’t care less, really. How ‘bout yours?
— Parents? — Séra confirmed. — I don’t remember much of them, they died of an illness when I was young. My aunt pretty much raised me by herself.
— Oh, I’m sorry. Is it a sore subject? — Bobbie was hesitant.
— Nah, don’t ya worry about it.
— So, what do you know about Tree City? — Ganen changed the subject; Bobbie might have not noticed, but Ganen heard the discomfort in Séra’s voice. — We don’t get many bikers around there.
— I don’t know much, because, with all due respect, you guys refuse to cut down trees and make some roads! — Bobbie laughed, she was having a lot of fun with those two. She had always struggled with making friends outside the Mail system, never being in one place for long, but she wanted to know Ganen and Séra better.
— You’re more than welcome to visit, if you want. — Ganen raised her brows.
— I’d love to visit! —She got some pen and paper from her bag, and wrote some coordinates. — Do you have a map? I can mark where you’ll generally find me. — Her thin black eyes sparkled with excitement.
— It’s in the car, I’ll get it. — Séra got up and walked to the door; thinking about her parents brought up some memories, and contrary to Ganen, she didn’t know if she wanted to remember. Some fresh air would be good.
She sat on the passenger's seat and looked at the night sky. Stars blinked throughout the dark blue and the path of the Sun and the Moon was even brighter. It had a different name in the past, something related to milk, which was really funny. Séra imagined a ginormous baby crawling in the sky while their bottle was dripping.
After a deep breath, she got the map and went back inside. Her body was still sore and she was quite aware they would need longer pauses to rest, but she was eager to continue her conversation.
Log. 20657.s We did it! In the end, we didn't even need a distraction. A hysterical person entered the hospital and we were able to paralyse a Robot Physician. We turned it off right away and stuck it in the caravan. It's so much easier when we can press a button! Especially when we know where the button is! It‘s been decades since I’d done something so scary and exciting! Now we have to figure out how to break into this thing.
Bobbie ended up spending the night in the girls’ house, and wasn’t the first to wake up. She rubbed her eyes a few times and slowly recognized Ganen’s and Séra’s voices from the kitchen. She got out of bed and adjusted her t-shirt; her pants were nowhere to be found, and she didn’t really care. The perfume of coffee was the only important thing at that moment.
— You’re awake. — Ganen was the first to notice her. — Sit down, Séra is making wildberry pancakes. It’s a rare sight!
— Are berries hard to find? — Bobbie yawned.
— Not around here, so we’ve got a lot of them! — Séra flipped one in the air. — How do you like yours?
— Ahn… cooked?
— Okay! — Séra laughed; it was indeed bad having them raw.
Ganen poured some coffee for the three of them and mentioned Ahda wanted to give them a “thank you” basket for how they helped finding the cure for the grain water wasting, and that would probably cover the resources they would need for a while.
— I’d like to stop by Tara’s place before leaving, so we can say goodbye to them and Esha. — Séra added.
— Are you okay with leaving her with Tara and Ery?
— Yah, they’re good people. And I think she’ll be safer here than on the road with us.
Bobbie had heard the little girl’s story and, in the end, it wasn’t so different from hers — except for the whole almost getting killed part — and it was good to know she had also found a family for herself.
— I myself have to leave today. — Bobbie said. — There are a lot of letters to distribute.
— Oh! Are you going south? — Ganen bit her pancake.
— Yeah, and I think I might just personally deliver your letter to your aunt. — The Biker smiled. — I quite like the region. The plains are sooo good for riding! And some of the craters are large enough for a few spins.
Ganen looked a bit worried, even Séra stopped flipping pancakes and glanced at Bobbie. The Biker laughed, said it was easy; she’d been doing things like that since she was a child, so she had plenty of experience.
Breakfast was delicious and fun, Ganen and Séra promised to stop by the southern Post Office on their way back, to which Bobbie would look forward to.
— And if I’m not there, just wait a bit. — She grabbed a blue pin in the shape of an envelope from her bag and gave it to the couple. — Show them this if the Bikers give you any trouble. They’ll know it’s mine.
If they weren’t still hurting, they could have left together, but Séra needed a little more rest before hitting the road. They waved goodbye until Bobbie was out of sight, then walked slowly to Tara’s house.
Log. 20512.l We agreed that stealing a Robot Physician would be ideal.
Bobbie knew it was safer to ride with the visor down, but she loved the wind on her face, the green perfume of summer leaves, the landscape flying by her side. When she was on her bike, the world was hers to enjoy, and she felt free. A bird whose long wings could take her above the clouds to soar through the sky.
There was nothing better than sleeping below the stars, being awoken by the gentle morning sun, and enjoying the delicate dew drops on colourful petals. She liked meeting people — old and new — and seeing their smiles as they received their letters.
So when the farms started popping up around the fields, excitement filled her chest. She lowered the speed of her bike and stopped in front of a large wood and stone house. There wasn’t a Post Office in Mini Forest, so the Mail Bikers had to stop at each farm for their letters. Bobbie was one of the few who didn’t hate that area, so she knew the people quite well.
There was an old lady, Soña, who had the hairiest guinea pigs in the region, and her farm was famous for it. She always had many letters from her children, cousins, and siblings, and she would invite Bobbie for tea every time.
On her next stop, there was a child who would wait for her by the farm gate. A little boy, no older than 6 or 7, and he was excited to show her his first guinea pig: it had long wavy and rebel fur.
— Like your hair! — He pointed at Bobbie. — My mum said we can dye her fur blue, like your hair too! And I’ll name her Bluebie.
— That sounds adorable. — Bobbie laughed. — I used some indigo and henna to dye my hair, just test it first, to be sure it won’t give her any allergies.
— Okay! — He smiled, and his two front teeth were missing. The Mail Biker imagined if they would have grown by the next time she stopped there.
After the Mini Forest, there was a much bigger forest, and people had found it quite difficult to live there. If one was persistent, they could find a few people, mostly small families, who lived amongst the trees, but those would prefer to live unperturbed. It was a difficult path to go on foot or by vehicle, but Bobbie’s bike was designed for any terrain, and she ventured amongst the trees with no problem.
The travel rations were nutritious, but barely palatable, so when the biscuits Soña gave her were over, Bobbie stopped by a river to bathe and fish. The Mailers had trained her to be good at winging it, so it wasn’t hard improvising a fishing rod with some thread and a stick.
Even though unseasoned fish would taste better than the travel rations, Bobbie used to stock some seasonings in her bag — basil, rosemary, oregano, and salt — so her food was usually edible. Sometimes, it was even good! Not as good as Séra’s pancakes, though.
As the plains got closer, flowers started popping up more often, and she was forced to stop her bike, lay down on the grass, and smell the sweet little petals. Some people hated it, but she loved it. At night, myrtles opened their tiny white flowers and the air was thick with their fragrance. Bobbie could build a house there, and she would live happily ever after.
However, there was work to do, so she couldn’t laze around for more than a day. Back on her bike, she rode through the plains until craters started to change the landscape. It was said those holes on the ground were a result of the fight between the Sun and the Moon, when fiery chunks of the Sun fell and scorched the world.
Bobbie didn’t know whether the story was true or folklore, but she loved those craters nonetheless. They made cool ramps for radical manoeuvres. She liked riding in circles inside them until she could ride the walls of dirt and rock; the momentum would bring her out of it and back to the grass, then she would go to the next.
Eventually, someone from the Underground City would show up and get her letters, then she was free to ride back to the south Post Office. Bobbie wasn’t sure where the entrance to the city was, no outsider knew, and since she had to wait anyway…
— Time to find a large crater!
Some of them were large enough to make small lakes, they had fishes and frogs, a whole ecosystem. Some had moss and grass, insects, birds and rodents scattering around, and some were burnt so deep there was only burnt earth. Those were the ones Bobbie liked the most, and her eyes glistened when she found one much larger than she expected.
With a smile, she fastened her helmet, put down the visor, and sped her bike. Before she started, though, she thought it would be safer to leave her things behind — it wasn’t like anyone would show up and rob her — and she didn’t want her bags to open and let loose all her belongings and letters.
Once prepared, she sped up her bike and rode down the hole. The first spin was slow and careful, a test. The second was faster, the third had a flair and the fourth was full of little flourishes. There was no one to see, but she imagined Ganen and Séra would enjoy her show.
Thinking of them made her smile, Bobbie wanted to see the girls again, get to know them better and spend more time together. They were fun to be around. The Machine was terrifying, though, there was no way of being sure that thing wouldn’t just wake up one day and destroy the world, but she wanted to believe Ganen was right, the thing was broken and wouldn’t suddenly turn on.
And then her front wheel met a bump. Time seemed to slow down for a moment and Bobbie saw the edge of the crater too close for comfort. She had enough time to look back at the now unearthed rock before her bike crashed and the world disappeared before her eyes.
Log. 20508.o I still can't believe it, the Robot Physicians, the ones who should help us! It’s almost impossible to break into the network they use, because it’s an array network. It’d be possible to access some files, but ideally, it would be better to get one of the Physicians.
It had been about a week since Bobbie had left, and Séra was feeling up to driving again. She had fixed and reinforced the hasp in the boot, so that no one could break it, and Ganen’s arm was healing well, although the scar would probably be a bit gnarly.
Ahda had given them the thank-you basket, with enough food, drinks and water for about a week or two, depending on how they would ration it, now all that was left was saying their goodbyes. At the hospital, Ganen asked if they could take some penicillin for the trip — in case they had another situation — and Myra herself gave her a few flasks.
— We can make more on demand. — she explained. — And if it wasn’t for you, all of us would still be sick, so take as many as you need.
In their idle time, Séra also managed to attach a mini-cooling box into the car, so they could conserve the penicillin for longer and also have some fresh food and cold water every now and then. It would certainly make their trip more pleasant.
And when the sun rose on their last day in Bridge City, Séra and Ganen drove to Tara’s house for their goodbyes. The family had prepared a special lunch for them, and Esha had some trouble hiding her sad face while they were eating.
— Where are you two going now? — Tara asked.
— We’re headed south, so we’ll probably stop by Mini Forest for a day or two to rest, then continue. — Séra answered between mouthfuls.
— Are you coming back? — Esha whispered, her eyes almost didn’t reach Ganen’s.
— I believe so. Would you like us to stop by for a visit? — the woman answered with a soft, friendly tone.
Ensha nodded a few times, but there was still some sadness in her eyes.
After lunch, while Ery did the dishes, Séra asked Tara how the girl was doing, and her heart ached knowing that the kid was a bit insecure with both of them leaving. Ganen and her had talked about taking Esha along, but it would make their journey much more difficult. Besides, she was safer in Bridge City than in the middle of nowhere.
As they were about to leave, Esha held Ganen’s hand for a second and gave her a small, shiny crystal.
— What is this? — Ganen kneeled in front of her and asked with a sweet smile.
— It’s a present. Uhm, my mum, not Mrs. Tara and not the Immortal Mum, my real mum, she gave it to me when I was younger. It, uhm, it protects you. And I thought it was broken, because the Immortal hurt me, but then you two saved me, so I think it still works. — She looked into Ganen’s eyes and let out the shyest of smiles. — It’ll protect you.
— I’m sure it will. — Ganen hugged Esha and felt the girl’s little arms around her. — Thank you, Esha. If there is any problem, you can send us a letter, okay? It’s a bit expensive, but maybe if you talk to Bobbie she can give you a discount. — Ganen winked. — It’ll take a while for us to come back, but when we do, we’ll be sure to stop by, alright?
— Alright. — Esha nodded a few times, and her smile seemed real for the first time. — Thank you for saving me.
— Don’t worry about it, no child should go through something like that.
Esha hugged both Ganen and Séra one last time, and waved them goodbye until she couldn’t see the car anymore. It was Yigor who got her back in the house, when the boy asked if she wanted to play with the wooden cars and trucks. She nodded and Tara didn’t remind them of their homework; they could do it later that day.
They left in the afternoon, and once the city was far enough, Ganen plugged her music device into the car, and Séra smiled as they drove with lively old melodies. Ganen’s arm was still painful, but Séra’s cuts were mostly healed — and so were her guts.
They checked the map in order to follow Bobbie’s trail, and headed south. They wanted to stop by Mini Forest to talk to Ennath; in all honesty, Ganen wanted to see the mini-llamas once again. They were so adorable and fluffy, she even wondered if they could have one — a pet was much easier to care for than a young human.
The night came quicker than they expected, so Séra put up the tent whilst Ganen was fixing something to eat. She thought of how that whole experience was almost mystical. She had left her home more than two years ago without a date to return; at first, her goals were clear in her mind, she needed to escape her fate, but now, as she looked at Séra, there were more things Ganen wanted for her future than she could have anticipated.
— Whatcha looking at, love? — Séra sounded happy to have Ganen’s attention. — Is the tent crooked?
— Not at all, hun. — Ganen looked back to the food, she was embarrassed for being caught. — I like watching you work, that’s all. I want to remember every single thing.
— Every single thing sounds like a lot. — She hammered the last peg into the ground and looked at her job. It was good.
—It isn’t nearly enough, honey. — Ganen saw her lover walking towards her and closed her eyes in delight as she was hugged. — I love you so much.
— I love ya too. — Séra kissed her cheek. — And whatever you’re cooking smells amazing!
— I’m making a stew-soup-kind of thing. With the things that would spoil first. I hope it tastes as good as it smells.
— It’s usually how it works, ain’t it? — She got a bit confused.
— Have you ever eaten a flower? — Ganen got the pot out of the fire and set it on the floor. She had a curious and funny look as she waited for an answer.
— Not really. — Séra didn’t know what she was getting at.
— They don’t usually taste good.
Séra laughed and Ganen couldn’t help but laugh along; she was a child when she had a mouthful of tuberose. It wasn’t a pleasant experience. The dinner, however, was delicious; the meat chunks melted in their mouths and the vegetables still had a crunch to them.
They laid on the ground for a bit after eating, and the night was silent, the stars were their only company. Careful with her arm, Ganen rested on Séra’s chest and took a long breath, it was good being on the road again, without the fear of people finding the Machine — or being poisoned.
— Let’s clean up here, lock the car, and sleep in the tent? — Séra brought her back to reality.
— Yeah, let’s do that. I think the tent is more comfortable than the ground anyway. — Ganen’s laugh was interrupted by a long yawn.
— Go to the tent, I’ll lock the car and be right there with ya. — She gave her lover a tender kiss and pulled her up.
Log. 20465.k.b We need to find out why. Perhaps, if we find out the reason, we will be able to fix it! Sometimes it’s a system failure. If so... they call me a dreamer, but I think it might be possible! Who knows, even people’s memories might be there, somewhere...
Ganen’s eyes were closed, but her mind never stopped. Séra and her were old in her dreams, living in Tree City and walking around the tree-paths, then she looked around and couldn’t recognize anything. The trees, ever so familiar, were different and distorted, the sky was strange and the stars were not the ones she was used to.
She started looking for Séra, but the people didn’t have faces, their voices were unknown and their words, incomprehensible. Panic filled her chest and she started to scream, people grabbed her arms and tied her to a bed, she had no idea what was happening, where she was or who they were, until someone held her hand and called her “love”.
Ganen remembered one person, in the past, who would call her “love”, but it wasn’t the same person from the dream. She didn’t recognise those brown eyes, the freckles she used to know so well, or the dirty blonde hair around that face.
She woke up drenched in sweat, her heart was beating so fast it could jump out of her chest. At first, all around her was darkness and her panic grew until her eyes got used to the dim light. She saw Séra sleeping peacefully by her side and took a sigh of relief.
Biting her lip and trying her best not to cry, she laid down beside her lover once more and hugged her.
— I don’t want to forget you. — she whispered with tears in her eyes to the dead of night.
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Log. 22675.g Finally. It has been a few months, but we did it. The most annoying part was disabling the GPS and all other self-sabotage programs. After that, it was, eh, simple. Well, as it’s said, I am the idea-person. It's amazing to see how they work as a team. In the beginning there was a lot of prejudice against the Programmer, but it’s wonderful to see organic and artificial humans working together, as equals.
After a few drinks, Bobbie seemed to forget about the secret in the boot, and started asking Séra — who was also a bit drunk, against physician’s orders — about mechanics and batteries. It didn’t take long before they were designing wind turbines to attach to the car. Ganen had to admit, it was a hard conversation to follow, but Séra would always pause and explain something when she noticed a very confused face.
When Séra asked how Bobbie had trained or studied for being able to create such an amazing bike, the Mailer told them she had grown up with the Mail Bikers, surrounded by the most amazing motorcycles, and so she learnt from the best. The main Post Offices had their own forges and labs, so it was easy to get the parts.
— My parents tried to ship me away as a baby. — Bobbie said. — The Bikers found me in a box with no return address, so they decided to keep me and raise me.
— Oi, those are some nasty parents, eh. — Séra wanted to get her bandages off. They were scratching.
— Ah, well, I guess it happens. — The Biker shrugged. — I couldn’t care less, really. How ‘bout yours?
— Parents? — Séra confirmed. — I don’t remember much of them, they died of an illness when I was young. My aunt pretty much raised me by herself.
— Oh, I’m sorry. Is it a sore subject? — Bobbie was hesitant.
— Nah, don’t ya worry about it.
— So, what do you know about Tree City? — Ganen changed the subject; Bobbie might have not noticed, but Ganen heard the discomfort in Séra’s voice. — We don’t get many bikers around there.
— I don’t know much, because, with all due respect, you guys refuse to cut down trees and make some roads! — Bobbie laughed, she was having a lot of fun with those two. She had always struggled with making friends outside the Mail system, never being in one place for long, but she wanted to know Ganen and Séra better.
— You’re more than welcome to visit, if you want. — Ganen raised her brows.
— I’d love to visit! —She got some pen and paper from her bag, and wrote some coordinates. — Do you have a map? I can mark where you’ll generally find me. — Her thin black eyes sparkled with excitement.
— It’s in the car, I’ll get it. — Séra got up and walked to the door; thinking about her parents brought up some memories, and contrary to Ganen, she didn’t know if she wanted to remember. Some fresh air would be good.
She sat on the passenger's seat and looked at the night sky. Stars blinked throughout the dark blue and the path of the Sun and the Moon was even brighter. It had a different name in the past, something related to milk, which was really funny. Séra imagined a ginormous baby crawling in the sky while their bottle was dripping.
After a deep breath, she got the map and went back inside. Her body was still sore and she was quite aware they would need longer pauses to rest, but she was eager to continue her conversation.
Log. 20657.s We did it! In the end, we didn't even need a distraction. A hysterical person entered the hospital and we were able to paralyse a Robot Physician. We turned it off right away and stuck it in the caravan. It's so much easier when we can press a button! Especially when we know where the button is! It‘s been decades since I’d done something so scary and exciting! Now we have to figure out how to break into this thing.
Bobbie ended up spending the night in the girls’ house, and wasn’t the first to wake up. She rubbed her eyes a few times and slowly recognized Ganen’s and Séra’s voices from the kitchen. She got out of bed and adjusted her t-shirt; her pants were nowhere to be found, and she didn’t really care. The perfume of coffee was the only important thing at that moment.
— You’re awake. — Ganen was the first to notice her. — Sit down, Séra is making wildberry pancakes. It’s a rare sight!
— Are berries hard to find? — Bobbie yawned.
— Not around here, so we’ve got a lot of them! — Séra flipped one in the air. — How do you like yours?
— Ahn… cooked?
— Okay! — Séra laughed; it was indeed bad having them raw.
Ganen poured some coffee for the three of them and mentioned Ahda wanted to give them a “thank you” basket for how they helped finding the cure for the grain water wasting, and that would probably cover the resources they would need for a while.
— I’d like to stop by Tara’s place before leaving, so we can say goodbye to them and Esha. — Séra added.
— Are you okay with leaving her with Tara and Ery?
— Yah, they’re good people. And I think she’ll be safer here than on the road with us.
Bobbie had heard the little girl’s story and, in the end, it wasn’t so different from hers — except for the whole almost getting killed part — and it was good to know she had also found a family for herself.
— I myself have to leave today. — Bobbie said. — There are a lot of letters to distribute.
— Oh! Are you going south? — Ganen bit her pancake.
— Yeah, and I think I might just personally deliver your letter to your aunt. — The Biker smiled. — I quite like the region. The plains are sooo good for riding! And some of the craters are large enough for a few spins.
Ganen looked a bit worried, even Séra stopped flipping pancakes and glanced at Bobbie. The Biker laughed, said it was easy; she’d been doing things like that since she was a child, so she had plenty of experience.
Breakfast was delicious and fun, Ganen and Séra promised to stop by the southern Post Office on their way back, to which Bobbie would look forward to.
— And if I’m not there, just wait a bit. — She grabbed a blue pin in the shape of an envelope from her bag and gave it to the couple. — Show them this if the Bikers give you any trouble. They’ll know it’s mine.
If they weren’t still hurting, they could have left together, but Séra needed a little more rest before hitting the road. They waved goodbye until Bobbie was out of sight, then walked slowly to Tara’s house.
Log. 20512.l We agreed that stealing a Robot Physician would be ideal.
Bobbie knew it was safer to ride with the visor down, but she loved the wind on her face, the green perfume of summer leaves, the landscape flying by her side. When she was on her bike, the world was hers to enjoy, and she felt free. A bird whose long wings could take her above the clouds to soar through the sky.
There was nothing better than sleeping below the stars, being awoken by the gentle morning sun, and enjoying the delicate dew drops on colourful petals. She liked meeting people — old and new — and seeing their smiles as they received their letters.
So when the farms started popping up around the fields, excitement filled her chest. She lowered the speed of her bike and stopped in front of a large wood and stone house. There wasn’t a Post Office in Mini Forest, so the Mail Bikers had to stop at each farm for their letters. Bobbie was one of the few who didn’t hate that area, so she knew the people quite well.
There was an old lady, Soña, who had the hairiest guinea pigs in the region, and her farm was famous for it. She always had many letters from her children, cousins, and siblings, and she would invite Bobbie for tea every time.
On her next stop, there was a child who would wait for her by the farm gate. A little boy, no older than 6 or 7, and he was excited to show her his first guinea pig: it had long wavy and rebel fur.
— Like your hair! — He pointed at Bobbie. — My mum said we can dye her fur blue, like your hair too! And I’ll name her Bluebie.
— That sounds adorable. — Bobbie laughed. — I used some indigo and henna to dye my hair, just test it first, to be sure it won’t give her any allergies.
— Okay! — He smiled, and his two front teeth were missing. The Mail Biker imagined if they would have grown by the next time she stopped there.
After the Mini Forest, there was a much bigger forest, and people had found it quite difficult to live there. If one was persistent, they could find a few people, mostly small families, who lived amongst the trees, but those would prefer to live unperturbed. It was a difficult path to go on foot or by vehicle, but Bobbie’s bike was designed for any terrain, and she ventured amongst the trees with no problem.
The travel rations were nutritious, but barely palatable, so when the biscuits Soña gave her were over, Bobbie stopped by a river to bathe and fish. The Mailers had trained her to be good at winging it, so it wasn’t hard improvising a fishing rod with some thread and a stick.
Even though unseasoned fish would taste better than the travel rations, Bobbie used to stock some seasonings in her bag — basil, rosemary, oregano, and salt — so her food was usually edible. Sometimes, it was even good! Not as good as Séra’s pancakes, though.
As the plains got closer, flowers started popping up more often, and she was forced to stop her bike, lay down on the grass, and smell the sweet little petals. Some people hated it, but she loved it. At night, myrtles opened their tiny white flowers and the air was thick with their fragrance. Bobbie could build a house there, and she would live happily ever after.
However, there was work to do, so she couldn’t laze around for more than a day. Back on her bike, she rode through the plains until craters started to change the landscape. It was said those holes on the ground were a result of the fight between the Sun and the Moon, when fiery chunks of the Sun fell and scorched the world.
Bobbie didn’t know whether the story was true or folklore, but she loved those craters nonetheless. They made cool ramps for radical manoeuvres. She liked riding in circles inside them until she could ride the walls of dirt and rock; the momentum would bring her out of it and back to the grass, then she would go to the next.
Eventually, someone from the Underground City would show up and get her letters, then she was free to ride back to the south Post Office. Bobbie wasn’t sure where the entrance to the city was, no outsider knew, and since she had to wait anyway…
— Time to find a large crater!
Some of them were large enough to make small lakes, they had fishes and frogs, a whole ecosystem. Some had moss and grass, insects, birds and rodents scattering around, and some were burnt so deep there was only burnt earth. Those were the ones Bobbie liked the most, and her eyes glistened when she found one much larger than she expected.
With a smile, she fastened her helmet, put down the visor, and sped her bike. Before she started, though, she thought it would be safer to leave her things behind — it wasn’t like anyone would show up and rob her — and she didn’t want her bags to open and let loose all her belongings and letters.
Once prepared, she sped up her bike and rode down the hole. The first spin was slow and careful, a test. The second was faster, the third had a flair and the fourth was full of little flourishes. There was no one to see, but she imagined Ganen and Séra would enjoy her show.
Thinking of them made her smile, Bobbie wanted to see the girls again, get to know them better and spend more time together. They were fun to be around. The Machine was terrifying, though, there was no way of being sure that thing wouldn’t just wake up one day and destroy the world, but she wanted to believe Ganen was right, the thing was broken and wouldn’t suddenly turn on.
And then her front wheel met a bump. Time seemed to slow down for a moment and Bobbie saw the edge of the crater too close for comfort. She had enough time to look back at the now unearthed rock before her bike crashed and the world disappeared before her eyes.
Log. 20508.o I still can't believe it, the Robot Physicians, the ones who should help us! It’s almost impossible to break into the network they use, because it’s an array network. It’d be possible to access some files, but ideally, it would be better to get one of the Physicians.
It had been about a week since Bobbie had left, and Séra was feeling up to driving again. She had fixed and reinforced the hasp in the boot, so that no one could break it, and Ganen’s arm was healing well, although the scar would probably be a bit gnarly.
Ahda had given them the thank-you basket, with enough food, drinks and water for about a week or two, depending on how they would ration it, now all that was left was saying their goodbyes. At the hospital, Ganen asked if they could take some penicillin for the trip — in case they had another situation — and Myra herself gave her a few flasks.
— We can make more on demand. — she explained. — And if it wasn’t for you, all of us would still be sick, so take as many as you need.
In their idle time, Séra also managed to attach a mini-cooling box into the car, so they could conserve the penicillin for longer and also have some fresh food and cold water every now and then. It would certainly make their trip more pleasant.
And when the sun rose on their last day in Bridge City, Séra and Ganen drove to Tara’s house for their goodbyes. The family had prepared a special lunch for them, and Esha had some trouble hiding her sad face while they were eating.
— Where are you two going now? — Tara asked.
— We’re headed south, so we’ll probably stop by Mini Forest for a day or two to rest, then continue. — Séra answered between mouthfuls.
— Are you coming back? — Esha whispered, her eyes almost didn’t reach Ganen’s.
— I believe so. Would you like us to stop by for a visit? — the woman answered with a soft, friendly tone.
Ensha nodded a few times, but there was still some sadness in her eyes.
After lunch, while Ery did the dishes, Séra asked Tara how the girl was doing, and her heart ached knowing that the kid was a bit insecure with both of them leaving. Ganen and her had talked about taking Esha along, but it would make their journey much more difficult. Besides, she was safer in Bridge City than in the middle of nowhere.
As they were about to leave, Esha held Ganen’s hand for a second and gave her a small, shiny crystal.
— What is this? — Ganen kneeled in front of her and asked with a sweet smile.
— It’s a present. Uhm, my mum, not Mrs. Tara and not the Immortal Mum, my real mum, she gave it to me when I was younger. It, uhm, it protects you. And I thought it was broken, because the Immortal hurt me, but then you two saved me, so I think it still works. — She looked into Ganen’s eyes and let out the shyest of smiles. — It’ll protect you.
— I’m sure it will. — Ganen hugged Esha and felt the girl’s little arms around her. — Thank you, Esha. If there is any problem, you can send us a letter, okay? It’s a bit expensive, but maybe if you talk to Bobbie she can give you a discount. — Ganen winked. — It’ll take a while for us to come back, but when we do, we’ll be sure to stop by, alright?
— Alright. — Esha nodded a few times, and her smile seemed real for the first time. — Thank you for saving me.
— Don’t worry about it, no child should go through something like that.
Esha hugged both Ganen and Séra one last time, and waved them goodbye until she couldn’t see the car anymore. It was Yigor who got her back in the house, when the boy asked if she wanted to play with the wooden cars and trucks. She nodded and Tara didn’t remind them of their homework; they could do it later that day.
They left in the afternoon, and once the city was far enough, Ganen plugged her music device into the car, and Séra smiled as they drove with lively old melodies. Ganen’s arm was still painful, but Séra’s cuts were mostly healed — and so were her guts.
They checked the map in order to follow Bobbie’s trail, and headed south. They wanted to stop by Mini Forest to talk to Ennath; in all honesty, Ganen wanted to see the mini-llamas once again. They were so adorable and fluffy, she even wondered if they could have one — a pet was much easier to care for than a young human.
The night came quicker than they expected, so Séra put up the tent whilst Ganen was fixing something to eat. She thought of how that whole experience was almost mystical. She had left her home more than two years ago without a date to return; at first, her goals were clear in her mind, she needed to escape her fate, but now, as she looked at Séra, there were more things Ganen wanted for her future than she could have anticipated.
— Whatcha looking at, love? — Séra sounded happy to have Ganen’s attention. — Is the tent crooked?
— Not at all, hun. — Ganen looked back to the food, she was embarrassed for being caught. — I like watching you work, that’s all. I want to remember every single thing.
— Every single thing sounds like a lot. — She hammered the last peg into the ground and looked at her job. It was good.
—It isn’t nearly enough, honey. — Ganen saw her lover walking towards her and closed her eyes in delight as she was hugged. — I love you so much.
— I love ya too. — Séra kissed her cheek. — And whatever you’re cooking smells amazing!
— I’m making a stew-soup-kind of thing. With the things that would spoil first. I hope it tastes as good as it smells.
— It’s usually how it works, ain’t it? — She got a bit confused.
— Have you ever eaten a flower? — Ganen got the pot out of the fire and set it on the floor. She had a curious and funny look as she waited for an answer.
— Not really. — Séra didn’t know what she was getting at.
— They don’t usually taste good.
Séra laughed and Ganen couldn’t help but laugh along; she was a child when she had a mouthful of tuberose. It wasn’t a pleasant experience. The dinner, however, was delicious; the meat chunks melted in their mouths and the vegetables still had a crunch to them.
They laid on the ground for a bit after eating, and the night was silent, the stars were their only company. Careful with her arm, Ganen rested on Séra’s chest and took a long breath, it was good being on the road again, without the fear of people finding the Machine — or being poisoned.
— Let’s clean up here, lock the car, and sleep in the tent? — Séra brought her back to reality.
— Yeah, let’s do that. I think the tent is more comfortable than the ground anyway. — Ganen’s laugh was interrupted by a long yawn.
— Go to the tent, I’ll lock the car and be right there with ya. — She gave her lover a tender kiss and pulled her up.
Log. 20465.k.b We need to find out why. Perhaps, if we find out the reason, we will be able to fix it! Sometimes it’s a system failure. If so... they call me a dreamer, but I think it might be possible! Who knows, even people’s memories might be there, somewhere...
Ganen’s eyes were closed, but her mind never stopped. Séra and her were old in her dreams, living in Tree City and walking around the tree-paths, then she looked around and couldn’t recognize anything. The trees, ever so familiar, were different and distorted, the sky was strange and the stars were not the ones she was used to.
She started looking for Séra, but the people didn’t have faces, their voices were unknown and their words, incomprehensible. Panic filled her chest and she started to scream, people grabbed her arms and tied her to a bed, she had no idea what was happening, where she was or who they were, until someone held her hand and called her “love”.
Ganen remembered one person, in the past, who would call her “love”, but it wasn’t the same person from the dream. She didn’t recognise those brown eyes, the freckles she used to know so well, or the dirty blonde hair around that face.
She woke up drenched in sweat, her heart was beating so fast it could jump out of her chest. At first, all around her was darkness and her panic grew until her eyes got used to the dim light. She saw Séra sleeping peacefully by her side and took a sigh of relief.
Biting her lip and trying her best not to cry, she laid down beside her lover once more and hugged her.
— I don’t want to forget you. — she whispered with tears in her eyes to the dead of night.
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2024.05.10 04:34 Hobbits4Potates Well, this took a turn.
I have a massive headache so won't be doing much other than linking to these two posts, but I am very interested in this sub's take on these.
First post is about why MILs are the way that they are and it sparked a fairly decent discussion, which was then spun off into this post. The comments on that one turned far more contentious between the OP and someone who criticized her husband.
ETA: The second post and all of that OP's comments were deleted and Reve isn't picking them up, I guess. A quick summery is that the OP has a life threatening allergy. After she went NC with her MIL, the MIL sent them food containing one or more ingredients that the OP was allergic too. She didn't eat the food, but cleaned off the counter and came into contact with crumbs and ended up in the ER. It took her a month to recover. She then waxed poetic about how wonderful her husband is and how he respects her NC, while also lamenting that her MIL is coming to town and she is literally afraid that her husband will "fall for his mothers manipulations" and he will end up allowing her to come to his home.
When people pointed out that her husband has major issues (that he refuses to go therapy for) she became offended. When another person pointed out that him NOT being NC with his mother (who at this point in her very long comments the OP has accused of killing two other family members by poisoning) makes HIM a danger to her, even if just by being a point of contact, the OP lost her shit and said that because they called her husband a danger, everything they had to say was invalid. I said that she and the husband sound like they're trauma bonded from the way that she would excuse everything he does (or doesn't) do. Then she dirty deleted everything a couple hours after I posted here, which makes me think she must have been watching this sub, because no other comments were posted between me making this post and her deleting everything.
submitted by Hobbits4Potates to JustNoTruth [link] [comments]
First post is about why MILs are the way that they are and it sparked a fairly decent discussion, which was then spun off into this post. The comments on that one turned far more contentious between the OP and someone who criticized her husband.
ETA: The second post and all of that OP's comments were deleted and Reve isn't picking them up, I guess. A quick summery is that the OP has a life threatening allergy. After she went NC with her MIL, the MIL sent them food containing one or more ingredients that the OP was allergic too. She didn't eat the food, but cleaned off the counter and came into contact with crumbs and ended up in the ER. It took her a month to recover. She then waxed poetic about how wonderful her husband is and how he respects her NC, while also lamenting that her MIL is coming to town and she is literally afraid that her husband will "fall for his mothers manipulations" and he will end up allowing her to come to his home.
When people pointed out that her husband has major issues (that he refuses to go therapy for) she became offended. When another person pointed out that him NOT being NC with his mother (who at this point in her very long comments the OP has accused of killing two other family members by poisoning) makes HIM a danger to her, even if just by being a point of contact, the OP lost her shit and said that because they called her husband a danger, everything they had to say was invalid. I said that she and the husband sound like they're trauma bonded from the way that she would excuse everything he does (or doesn't) do. Then she dirty deleted everything a couple hours after I posted here, which makes me think she must have been watching this sub, because no other comments were posted between me making this post and her deleting everything.
2024.05.10 00:16 chainsawx72 MEGA-THEORY: The entire Creation War plot created from combining stories from Trapis, Shehyn, Skarpi, Hespe, and more.
Combining a TON of sources of information to try to make sense of the Creation War events.
A TIMELINE OF TEMERANT
This timeline suggests:
LUDIS = LADY PERIAL = LADY LACKLESS = ALOINE = NIGHTINGALE (NIGHT SONGSTRESS) = EMPEROR'S-OLDEST DAUGHTER / LADY IMPERIAL = SYMBOLICALLY NETALIA LACKLESS
LADY REYTHIEL = RETHE = LYRA = PERIAL'S YOUNGER SISTER = SYMBOLICALLY MELUAN LACKLESS
GOD TEHLU = IAX = FAIN = SYMBOLICALLY ARLIDEN
MENDA = MAN TEHLU = IAX'S CHILD = CINDER = TABORLIN = MASTER ASH = SYMBOLICALLY KVOTHE
ENCANIS= SELITOS/CTHAEH = TINKELISTENER
Haliax isn't the shadow or the knife-voiced, he is hamed to the shadow and has the knife in his mind.
TLDR:
HESPE'S STORY: Iax wants Ludis, Selitos' oldest daughter and heir to the Ergen Empire. Iax tricks Selitos. Selitos gets revenge by tricking Iax into creating the fae and taking Ludis there, so that he could claim she was stolen. Ludis goes to the fae because she likes Iax and his music. Selitos starts a war using that as the excuse, since other nobles wouldn't agree to a huge war over a petty dispute.
TRAPIS'S STORY: Ludis returns from the fae with Iax's son Tehlu who appears 17 from being in the fae for 36 days. Selitos explains this by claiming Tehlu is a child of their God Aleph. Tehlu is tricked by his mother's father Emperor Selitos into being an Amyr and fighting against Iax, unaware Iax is his father. Tehlu fights against demons/faens in the mortal realm. Tehlu chases the faens across the realm, killing them and banishing them, until he learns the truth and does Selitos 'a bad turn', helping save one innocent city and destroying the guilty Myr Tariniel instead.
SKARPI'S STORY: Lanre was the King of the Humans. They had no cities, no magic, no skill in naming. They were ravel, barbarians, with no civilization. They had man-mothers. They didn't have songs of power, so they sang openly and publicly. Selitos tricks Lanre into being his Amyr soldier to fight against Iax, when really Iax didn't do anything wrong. Lanre dies defeating Iax. Lady Lyra feels guilty for betraying Lanre, so she gives her immortality as a Knower to Lanre, making him Haliax, and bringing him back from the dead. Her immortality now gone, she passes a few years later of natural causes. Lanre kills himself in grief for 'taking her life' but finds that he cannot stay dead. However, while in the underworld, Lanre meets Iax learns the complete truth about Selitos's trickery. Lanre accepts the gift of Iax's additional power, and escapes hell and wreaks havoc on Selitos and the human-enslaving Knowers of Myr Tariniel. Selitos manages to save himself by stabbing his own eye and using the blood as a source and link to overpower Lanre and banish him and the other Chandrian. This leaves Selitos alone on Temerant as witness to events, and Selitos uses this opportunity to frame the Chandrian and keep them hunted, and similutaneously destroy all historical references to the truth. Ultimately, he creates Tehlinism and laws to arrest any who blasphemed by spreading true history, and 'human amyr' secretly infiltrating noble houses and universities and libraries to destroy copies of banned stories.
SOMETHING LIKE THAT. I'll keep working on this.
submitted by chainsawx72 to KingkillerChronicle [link] [comments]
A TIMELINE OF TEMERANT
- Aleph creates the world, or just discovers names.
- KVOTHE: In the beginning, as far as I know, the world was spun out of the nameless void by Aleph, who gave everything a name.
- Humans don't exist yet, but Knowers do. They are singers, name-knowers, naturally born with magic, live thousands of years, and don't require fathers for reproduction.
- FELURIAN: long before the cities of man. before men. before fae. there were... old name-knowers... there were never any human amyr.
- SHEHYN: Once there was a great realm peopled by great people... They were what Ademre was before we became ourselves. They sang songs of power and fought as well as Ademre do...
- PENTHE: Sometimes a woman ripens. It is a natural thing, and men have no part in it.
- KVOTHE: Felurian wasn’t the mine of information I’d hoped. She knew stories of the Amyr, but they were thousands of years old.
- CINDER: Who keeps you safe from the Amyr? The singers? The Sithe? From all that would harm you in the world?
- The Knowers have hundreds of cities called the Ergen Empire.
- FELURIAN: once, sitting on the walls of murella
- SKARPI: Belen, Antus, Vaeret, Tinusa, Emlen, and the twin cities of Murilla and Murella. Last was Myr Tariniel... hundreds of proud cities scattered through the empire... called Ergen... the world has never seen an empire as grand...
- SHEHYN: These people had a great empire. The name of the empire is forgotten. It is not important as the empire has fallen
- The capital of the Knower empire is Myr Tariniel, led by Selitos.
- SKARPI: Selitos was lord over Myr Tariniel... It sat among the tall mountains of the world like a gem on the crown of a king... Myr Tariniel, greatest of them all.
- SHEHYN: The one city was destroyed as well, but its name remains. It was called Tariniel.
- The Shapers arrive or are discovered, and they seek mastery that Selitos does not approve of.
- HESPE: One day, a tinker came down the road to Jax’s house.
- FELURIAN: then came those who saw a thing and thought... of mastery. they were shapers. proud dreamers... the old knowers realized no talk would ever stop the shapers.
- The greatest shaper tricks the greatest Knower, Selitos.
- HESPE: “She doesn’t belong to me. She belongs only to herself.” “Only the moon will do,” Jax said.... “If you were fond of it, you shouldn’t have gambled it away.” The tinker scowled as he handed over his hat.
- Selitos tricks Iax into making the fae and stealing the moon, and accidentally starting a war.
- BAST: Iax spoke to the Cthaeh before he stole the moon, and that sparked the entire creation war
- FELURIAN: they made... the faen realm... . a place where they could do as they desired....one shaper was greater than the rest... he stole the moon and with it came the war...
- HESPE: "I should make the moon come to me." “That’s not what I actually said,” the old man murmured. But he did so in a resigned way. Skilled listener that he was, he knew he wasn’t being heard...... And that is why the moon is always changing. And that is where Jax keeps her when she is not in our sky. He caught her and he keeps her still.
- SKARPI: The war was called the Creation War
- TRAPIS: There were many wars and other bad things in this time
- Ludis falls in love with Iax. She is brought with the moon to Iax, or the moon is brought with her.
- HESPE: He poured out a sweet song into the clear night sky... “One body,” the moon began, stepping forward eagerly.
- LAURIAN: (symbolic) He bound me with kisses and cords of chorded song. He robbed me of my virtue and stole me away
- One Temerant day equals half a year in the Fae, so that Ludis' son ages rapidly:
- CRAWLS AT 6 MONTHS : The day after he was born, Menda could crawl.
- WALKS AT 12 MONTHS: In two days he could walk.
- APPEARS 17 AFTER 18 YEARS: So everyone gathered together on the first day of the seventh span... Menda looked to be a young man of seventeen.
- NOTE: SPANS WERE 7 DAYS THEN: No, wait—there wasn’t any Mourning yet
- After years of war, only eight cities survive.
- SKARPI: The war had lasted so long that folk could hardly remember a time when the sky wasn’t dark with the smoke of burning towns... But eight cities remained.
- SHEHYN: In the empire there were seven cities and one city.
- The final major battle of the Creation War happens, the battle of Drossen Tor.
- SKARPI: at Drossen Tor there was the largest and most terrible battle of this large and terrible war.
- Lanre kills the beast
- SKARPI: Lanre stood alone against a terrible foe. It was a great beast with scales of black iron, whose breath was a darkness that smothered men. Lanre fought the beast and killed it.
- Lanre dies and comes back to life thanks to a new name, Haliax.
- SKARPI: From beyond the doors of death Lanre returned.... Mine is a new and terrible name. I am Haliax
- TRAPIS: You are no longer Rengen, now you are Wereth, the forger of the path.
- Iax is put beyond the Doors of Stone
- SKARPI: After the battle was finished and the enemy was set beyond the doors of stone
- FELURIAN: the first and greatest of the shapers... I will not speak of that one, though he is shut beyond the doors of stone.
- 7 YEARS: Lanre joins the Amyr and is separated from Lyra.
- SKARPI: Years passed... We considered you beyond reproach.
- TRAPIS: At the end of seven years, Tehlu’s feet had carried him all through the world.
- SAVIEN: six years with the Amyr means he came back to Aloine on the seventh year... Three years proving himself, three years training.
- The kings and queens of seven of those cities become traitors.
- TRAPIS: In the end, seven stayed on the other side of the line.
- JAKE: They were the first six people to refuse Tehlu’s choice of the path, and he cursed them to wander the corners
- SHEHYN: He poisoned seven others against the empire, and they forgot the Lethani. Six of them betrayed the cities that trusted them.
- JAKE: They were the first six people to refuse Tehlu’s choice of the path, and he cursed them to wander the corners—
- MARTEN: King Scyphus said, ‛Cowards! I will battle Taborlin with wizardry and best him!’
- DAYS 1-6: probably actually the same years just mentioned... six years Lanre/Savien is with the Amyr. The enemy convinces seven leaders to become traitors. Six leaders betray their own cities and the cities are destroyed.
- SKARPI: six cities destroyed
- TRAPIS: For six days Encanis fled, and six great cities he destroyed.
- SHEHYN: The enemy... poisoned seven others against the empire... Six of them betrayed the cities that trusted them. Six cities fell
- DAY 7: One city is saved by a traitor who remembers the Lethani (Lanre, or Lyra who dies and is replaced by Lanre.)
- SKARPI: But that meant all was not lost. One city still remained... They defended Belen from a surprise attack, saving the city from a foe that should have overwhelmed them.
- TRAPIS: But on the seventh day, Tehlu drew near before Encanis could bring his power to bear and the seventh city was saved.
- SHEHYN: One remembered the Lethani, and did not betray a city. That city did not fall.
- Day 8: Lanre returns to Lyra just before she dies. Lanre seeks even greater power to save her but fails, then kills himself, but can't stay dead.
- FELLING = cutting down (confirmed in Portuguese DIA DE SEGA = day of sickle)
- SKARPI: Deceit and treachery brought me to it, but her death is on my hands... But just as Lyra’s love had drawn him back from past the final door before, so this time Lanre’s power forced him to return from sweet oblivion.
- SHEHYN: Rethe lived only three days after that, with the grief-stricken Aethe tending her.
- TRAPIS: But on the eighth day Tehlu did not pause to sleep or eat. And thus it was that at the end of Felling Tehlu caught Encanis. He leaped on the demon and struck him with his forge hammer. Encanis fell like a stone
- SAVIEN: Savien, how could you know It was the time for you to come to me?... I cried for Sir Savien and Aloine, for love lost and found and lost again.
- DAEONICA ACT THREE: Felurian! What have I done? The adulation of my peers below has been a waste of hours. Could I recall the moments I have careless cast away, I could but hope to spend them in a wiser way, and warm myself in light that rivals light of day.’
- Day 9: Cinder and Lanre take Myr Tariniel and bind Selitos.
- REAVING = plundering (confirmed in Portuguese DIA DE SAQUE = day of looting)
- CTHAEH: Maybe this Cinder did me a bad turn once.
- SKARPI: Lanre arrived in Myr Tariniel. He came alone, wearing... a second skin of shadow. He had wrought it from the carcass of the beast he had killed at Drossen Tor.
- TRAPIS: and on the morning of the ninth day he came to the city of Atur... Though he had taken no rest nor a morsel of food, all through the ninth day Tehlu labored. While ten men worked the bellows, Tehlu forged the great iron wheel.
- Day 10: Lanre burns Myr Tariniel.
- CENDLING = burning (confirmed in Portuguese DIA DE PIRA = day of pyre)
- SKARPI: Myr Tariniel was burned and butchered... For a night and a day Selitos stood helpless
- TRAPIS: when the first light of the tenth morning touched him, Tehlu struck the wheel one final time and it was finished.... Tehlu laid the body of the demon on the wheel.... Tehlu sent men... to kindle a bonfire in the bottom of the deep pit
- DAEONICA ACT FOUR: ...famine and a fire. Till all around him desolation rings And all the demons in the outer dark Look on amazed and recognize That vengeance is the business of a man.
- Day 11: Selitos overpowers Lanre and banishes him.
- MOURNING = grieving (confirmed in Portuguese DIA DE PUTO = day of mourning)
- SKARPI: When the next day dawned on the blackened towers of the city, Selitos found he could move
- TRAPIS: When the morning of the eleventh day came, Tehlu went to Encanis a third and final time... and threw Encanis in... Both of them burned to ash in the pit in Atur.
- DAEONICA EXORCISM SCENE: Begone!... Trouble me no longer! I will set fire to your blood and fill you with a fear like ice and iron!... Leave this place clean of your foul presence... By the power of my name I command it to be so.
This timeline suggests:
LUDIS = LADY PERIAL = LADY LACKLESS = ALOINE = NIGHTINGALE (NIGHT SONGSTRESS) = EMPEROR'S-OLDEST DAUGHTER / LADY IMPERIAL = SYMBOLICALLY NETALIA LACKLESS
- Perial was touched (sexed) by a God (Iax) in a dream (the fae) and had a baby that aged quickly (raised in fae)
- PERIAL: Lady Perial is just a character. Lady Lackless is a real person
- ALOINE: Aloine was like a nightingale
- LADY: I wasn’t sure if there was a female counterpart to the title of Maershon.... Anything you wish to say to me you can tell my lady wife... The Maer’s new lady wife sent you this?
LADY REYTHIEL = RETHE = LYRA = PERIAL'S YOUNGER SISTER = SYMBOLICALLY MELUAN LACKLESS
- Rethe and Reythiel sound like 'wraith'. Lyra is dead...
- REYTHIEL: is in a play with Fain, who is in another play with Perial.
- KVOTHE: you played Lady Reythiel in The Swineherd and the Nightingale.
- KILLED BY THE MAN WHO LOVES HER
- RETHE: Rethe lived only three days after that, with the grief-stricken Aethe tending her. He gave her control of the school
- LYRA: Deceit and treachery brought me to it, but her death is on my hands.
- MELUAN: I know of her sister. Her family’s tragic shame. Run off and love a trouper. How terrible
GOD TEHLU = IAX = FAIN = SYMBOLICALLY ARLIDEN
- Tehlu was unhappy.
- Jax... never laughed.
- Some said the problem was that he never had any parents.
- How is it any different than parts of For All His Waiting? Like when Fain asks Lady Perial about her hat
MENDA = MAN TEHLU = IAX'S CHILD = CINDER = TABORLIN = MASTER ASH = SYMBOLICALLY KVOTHE
- The day after he was born, Menda could crawl. In two days he could walk.
- Menda/Tehlu had no mortal father and could crawl after 1 day, walk after 2 days, and looked 17 after 36 days... all of which makes perfect sense if one Temerant day = fae half year.
- He stood proud and tall, with coal-black hair and eyes
- his expression grew concerned behind his matte-black eyes.
- I saw pity staring at me with hollow eyes.
- But Tehlu stood forward saying, “I hold justice foremost in my heart (i.e. Tehlu isn't god)
- Possible hair color misdirection due to black turning gray, or due to soot hiding the gray: I would have bet a solid mark your hair was black.
ENCANIS= SELITOS/CTHAEH = TINKELISTENER
- ORACLE
- CTHAEH: "you're an oracle"...
- SELITOS: he could see any attack long before it came...
- TINKERS: are oracles (Offers boot wax, boots get wet. Offers strawberry wine, misses romantic Denna opportunity. Offers rope, hands get scraped from climbing.)
- SEE'ER
- CTHAEH: the Cthaeh does not lie. it has the gift of seeing... I am Cthaeh. I am. I see. ..... I can see ten feet through you.... Cthaeh can see the future. All futures.
- SELITOS: the story of a man who lost his eye and gained a better sight... Selitos could see its hidden name... Such was the power of his sight that he could read the hearts of men like heavy-lettered books... Using the power of his sight he kept watch... Selitos, I name you. May all your powers fail you but your sight... Now I see truer than before and my power is upon me.
- KNOWER
- SELITOS: Selitos knew that in all the world... Selitos knew with certainty... Selitos knew that Lyra was dead.
- CTHAEH: I am. I see. I know.
- LISTENER: It’s tricky, proper listening. But once you have it, you’ll know the moon... Skilled listener that he was, he knew he wasn’t being heard
- SPOKE TO IAX:
- CTHAEH: Iax spoke to the Cthaeh before he stole the moon, and that sparked the entire creation war.
- TINKER: One day, a tinker came down the road to Jax’s house.
- SPOKE TO LANRE:
- CTHAEH: Lanre spoke to the Cthaeh before he orchestrated the betrayal of Myr Tariniel
- SELITOS: They often kept each other’s council, for they were both lords among their people.
- BITING / SERPENTINE
- CTHAEH: I thought I saw a sinuous motion among the branches... “Kyxxs,” the Cthaeh spat an irritated noise... it has not bit you, and your eyes are clear, so all is well.
- ENCANIS: “What then?” Encanis hissed, his voice like the rasp of stone on stone... scratching and biting...
- SELITOS: Selitos’ words were cruel and biting
Haliax isn't the shadow or the knife-voiced, he is hamed to the shadow and has the knife in his mind.
- HAL-IAX: I am no longer the Lanre you knew. Mine is a new and terrible name.
- VOICE LIKE A KNIFE:
- ENCANIS: whose voice was like a knife in the minds of men.
- IN HALIAX'S MIND: the power he had taken up lay like a hot knife in his mind.
- DARKNESS:
- ENCANIS: the swallowing darkness... whose face was all in shadow.
- IN HALIAX'S MIND: bears the shadow's hame
- Full of anger, Aethe shot his arrow. It struck Rethe like a thunderbolt.
- Deceit and treachery brought me to it, but her death is on my hands.
TLDR:
HESPE'S STORY: Iax wants Ludis, Selitos' oldest daughter and heir to the Ergen Empire. Iax tricks Selitos. Selitos gets revenge by tricking Iax into creating the fae and taking Ludis there, so that he could claim she was stolen. Ludis goes to the fae because she likes Iax and his music. Selitos starts a war using that as the excuse, since other nobles wouldn't agree to a huge war over a petty dispute.
TRAPIS'S STORY: Ludis returns from the fae with Iax's son Tehlu who appears 17 from being in the fae for 36 days. Selitos explains this by claiming Tehlu is a child of their God Aleph. Tehlu is tricked by his mother's father Emperor Selitos into being an Amyr and fighting against Iax, unaware Iax is his father. Tehlu fights against demons/faens in the mortal realm. Tehlu chases the faens across the realm, killing them and banishing them, until he learns the truth and does Selitos 'a bad turn', helping save one innocent city and destroying the guilty Myr Tariniel instead.
SKARPI'S STORY: Lanre was the King of the Humans. They had no cities, no magic, no skill in naming. They were ravel, barbarians, with no civilization. They had man-mothers. They didn't have songs of power, so they sang openly and publicly. Selitos tricks Lanre into being his Amyr soldier to fight against Iax, when really Iax didn't do anything wrong. Lanre dies defeating Iax. Lady Lyra feels guilty for betraying Lanre, so she gives her immortality as a Knower to Lanre, making him Haliax, and bringing him back from the dead. Her immortality now gone, she passes a few years later of natural causes. Lanre kills himself in grief for 'taking her life' but finds that he cannot stay dead. However, while in the underworld, Lanre meets Iax learns the complete truth about Selitos's trickery. Lanre accepts the gift of Iax's additional power, and escapes hell and wreaks havoc on Selitos and the human-enslaving Knowers of Myr Tariniel. Selitos manages to save himself by stabbing his own eye and using the blood as a source and link to overpower Lanre and banish him and the other Chandrian. This leaves Selitos alone on Temerant as witness to events, and Selitos uses this opportunity to frame the Chandrian and keep them hunted, and similutaneously destroy all historical references to the truth. Ultimately, he creates Tehlinism and laws to arrest any who blasphemed by spreading true history, and 'human amyr' secretly infiltrating noble houses and universities and libraries to destroy copies of banned stories.
SOMETHING LIKE THAT. I'll keep working on this.
2024.05.08 06:50 Reasonable_Deer_1710 It only took me 25 years, but I've reached my first level 50 ever!
 | I know it's less impressive now with a level cap of 125, and XP gain on live so much faster than it used to be. submitted by Reasonable_Deer_1710 to everquest [link] [comments] Back in the classic days, I mained a Druid that I had gotten to level 10 from classic to Scars of Velious - which was probably pretty slow even for then, but a mixture of being a kid (16) and not yet knowing how to level efficiently would do that to you. I also had a level 10ish Iksar Necromancer. Since I've sporadically and part time returned a few years ago, I've gotten a few characters up to around 25-45, between live and TLP's, including bumping my original Druid to 40+ But this run I've been in, I've been getting into a bit of a groove, and I finally crossed the threshold into level 50! Actually have since hit level 51 now as well. Not as huge of an achievement in 2024, but one that has been 25 years in the making. |
2024.05.08 04:54 Lord_Eastwood Mod Diary - #1: The State of the Empire
 | Greetings Kings and Queens of Calradia!This is Lord Eastwood, the lead dev on the Calradian Kings total conversion mod for Crusader Kings 3. I will open this first official mod diary with a fact: this mod has been in production for 3 years at this point. I have been through trying times in my personal life over those years, but eventually I came out of it and found an amazing group of people as passionate about this project as I am, and they helped push me to continue working on this. Because of that, I was able to accomplish much of the work I left behind for two years down into a matter of months. Further development of the mod took some personal time to do but we're getting closer to what I hope to be a full release by Q4 of this year. Yes, that's the latter quarter of this year (Oct-Dec).With that out of the way, let's get into the diary proper! ---------------------------------------------------------------------------An Empire in TurmoilIt is the year 1084. The peace of the last seven years has been suddenly shattered, by the death of Emperor Arenicos. Being found in a pool of his blood, his empire began to disintegrate in a matter of weeks. Borders were drawn up, and allegiances were made among the various Imperial families. Nobility stuck with nobility, the oligarchs stuck with their wealth, and the armies stuck to their generals.Civil war had at last come to the Calradic Empire. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------In this dev diary, we will go over, and explain what we've done to bring Calradia into Crusader Kings 3. For starters, let's recap the stories of the various kingdoms and empires.The Southern EmpireThe Ornian Fortress of LycaronThe Southern Empire, a claimant faction in the Civil War, had a long storied history with nobility dating back to the city-states that once dotted the landscape. Originally a much more diverse region of the Empire, its upper classes of society have gradual transitions towards favoring a hereditary form of government, over the republican traditions Calradia has upheld for centuries. This imperial claimant is personally led by, the widow of the late Arenicos, Rhagaea. Rhagaea comes from foreign nobility herself. She is the daughter of the late Padishah of the Darshi to the east and a niece of the late Drosios Neretzes (famed for "Neretzes' Folly"), through her mother. Although she leads the empire instead of her dead husband, she intends to marry their daughter, Ira, to a responsible consort, so that Arenicos' line doesn't end with his daughter. The fate of this particular Empire hangs on that. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------The Northern EmpireThe City of the Divine DecreeThe Northern Empire, another claimant faction in this civil war, is home to the Calradian Senate as well as the aristocratic families who tend to conveniently gain the most power from that system. The Senate itself is a tradition dating back to the first Calradian Kingdom founded by Calradios. Initially, as a council of advisors, all of whom were outcasts much like Calradios, the Senate evolved as an institution, particularly during the fall of the kingdom and the rise of the Republic. Eventually, the Senate would begin to wax and wane over the centuries until the rise of the empire. Now, those same families are making pushes to reinstitute the Senate as a major political organization to check the powers of the Emperor. Should their ambitions go any further, who knows what future would await the Calradians. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------The Western EmpireA City of Provincial Unsophistication, JalmarysThe Western Empire is the claimant faction hailing from the begotten and forgotten realm of the Calradic Empire. Less than two hundred years ago, Baravenos fell to the Vlandians and the push eastwards began. Though the capital was pushed eastwards before then, the loss of Baravenos sent shockwaves through the empire. Had the Empire lost Heaven's Mandate? Will the Empire live to see its glory days? Garios hopes so. Originally a soldier in Neretzes' legion, Garios rose to military prominence and popularity amongst his peers for his unorthodox views of politics. "I promise them that no Calradian soldier should again be led into battle by an emperor who knows so little of war." His general idea of an emperor would be someone elected by a selected body of soldiers; the soldiers, whose loyalty to the idea that "might make right" gives them the power to do. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------The Kingdom of VlandiaA Fisher's ParadiseVlandia, a land of people with uniquely diverse backgrounds, is the kingdom that now sits upon the former domain of Imperial land. Vlandians first arrived from overseas as mercenaries and others as adventurers. Regardless, Vlandian mercenaries were highly valued by the Empire for their renowned cavalry. However, when the silver reserves began to dry up, Imperials began to grant land to the mercenaries, which gave the Vlandians more restrictive domain over the western lands of the Empire. Eventually, Osric Iron-Arm, great-grandfather of the current king, seized the western territories from the empire and was proclaimed King of the Vlandians. Now, that same current king, Derthert, must deal with rebellious and hawkish vassals lest they turn their sights towards him. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------The High Kingdom of Battania\"Horse of the Ford\"A land steeped in mystery to outsiders, the lands of the Battanians have remained relatively untouched by outsiders for much of its history. The original inhabitants of the continent, the Battanians have fended off Calradian incursions for centuries, and have only recently had to deal with attempted incursions by the Vlandians and Sturgians. Such trying times have pushed the High Kings to exercise their authority much like the Empire, and the current High King, Caladog, exerts his where he deems fit. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------The Aserai SultanateBreadbasket of the WorldIn the burning wastes to the south, there are people adapted to the blistering heat of the sun's rays. These people are collectively known as the Aserai, named in honor of their legendary patriarch, Asera. In truth, the Aserai are a collection of numerous native tribes united in a tribal confederacy for common protection and cause. Only recently have they begun to unite, in light of the Empire's own dimming light, and have made for incursions into Empire territory. However, everything is not as it seems back at home. Interclan relationships can break apart at the sign of any conflict, and a strong and just leader is required to help mend these schisms. That is the role of Unqid, Sultan of the Aserai. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------The Grand Principality of SturgianBalgard, the White FortressFor a land hammered by winter, raids, and feasts, the Sturgian peninsulas are home to some of Calradia's hardiest people. Originally people who only existed in isolation among dark forests, the expansion of the Empire brought traders from new lands to this northern frontier. With that trade came the building of villages followed by cities, and the population was boosted by the arrival of adventurers, traders, steppe tribes, and Nords. Now, with this unique amalgamation of various identities rolled into one, the Sturgians fancy themselves an incredibly warlike people with a desire to hunt, feast, raid, and war. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------The Khuzait KhanateMakeb, the Gateway to the WestThe nomadic Khanate from the east, collectively known as the Khuzaits, is actually a collection of numerous tribes ranging from Nachaghan, Arkits, Khergits, and Karakhergits. United under the banner of Urkhun the Great some time ago, the nomadic armies of Urkhun marched, or fled, westward into the region of Lake Tanaesis in the eastern provinces of the Calradic Empire. Known for their swift horse archers, the lumbering beast is currently settled but who knows when it will stand back up for a further march west. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------Bringing the Cultures Over to Crusader Kings 3:An unfinished look at the culturesPosted above is of course a selection of all the cultures currently present in the game. Most, if not all of them, still need some further work done. Things like generated coat of arms, building gfx's, proper traditions, custom traditions, and localization are some of the things still required. In order to perfectly complement the cultures from Bannerlord into Crusader Kings, we first got an idea of the type of people they are. This is also the part I hate, making real-life comparison. Whenever we lacked information from Bannerlord itself, we took Norman inspirations for Vlandia, Turkic nomads for Khuzaits, Greek Byzantines for the Empire, etc. etc. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------Religion, the hot button topic:Unfinished faiths/religionsReligions and faiths were something entirely else to work on. We based Calradic off of a weird mix of Christianity (without the Christ unless you count the Darusism faith), Aserai off of pre-Islamic Semetic Arab religions (that was a mouthful), Khuzait faiths off of Tengrism. HOWEVER, we never intend (and I will uphold this statement) to make carbon copies of religions and faiths. It's unoriginal, uninspiring, and just downright uncreative. We want creativity and uniqueness to these religions while at the same time ensuring they feel real and right at home in Calradia. Some of the faiths you see here are very much incomplete and are a work-in-progress. Ghaavshism is just a placeholder Hindi religion for debugging purposes, Adenitism is a Calradic-version of Adamitism, please don't ask about the battanian_faith symbol because as I said, "Some of the faiths you see here are very much incomplete and are a work-in-progress." The Roadmap thus far...https://preview.redd.it/cp1meknwc4zc1.jpg?width=2986&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ba23728200b5ee8131a09868ad3b0d775f3c63cePlease don't mind the typo. This is a generalized overview of what I hope to have by release. It doesn't cover everything, and there are some things I'm still unsure about that might not make it in the end. IN ADDITION, there are absolutely a few things that need to be changed and tinkered between now and beta. When generating the provinces, we decided to use the county's name + an underscore and a number starting from 1 as a way to speed things up. An example given would be like Thractorae Castle as a county AND capital province, but then have several attached baronies named Thractorae_Castle_1, _2, etc. What we need is unique names that fit the lore and naming conventions for the factions in question. Vlandia and Battania the only areas of the map that do not have this issue, if I recall correctly. Some places even with names are not final, like entire counties named after the castle that happens to be their capital province. An example again is Thractorae Castle as the name of the capital province AND county. It's weird and could possibly be changed. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------The Map...Map w/ province mapsThe playable area of the map, including the visibile parts, are fully fleshed out with blended terrain paints, hills/mountains, and foliage. There may be a few missed spots where somewhere on the map, likely near a mountain, looks a little off. Stuff like this can be caught in the playtesting and reported to us directly to fix up. RIVERS are still a work in progress. Many areas of the map will be without rivers for some time, but they will fill up given time. Also, the placements of many baronies and such are not final either. By these, I mean the actual models for the holdings, siege weaponry, and the units on each province. This same thing goes for the sea provinces. You may experience some bugs in this regard but just be prepared to assist us with that when playtesting. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------Wait? Playtesting???Yes! This upcoming weekend, May 11th, the mod will being going into an open Alpha playtest!The primary purpose of this test is to first, and foremost, collect logs for errors/crashes so that we can work on not only compatching the mod to Legends of the Dead and other DLC, but we also want to ensure that your log folder doesn't become bloated over time. In the beginning of the playtest it might but that can be expected. JOIN THE DISCORD LINK BELOW TO ACCESS THE PLAYTESTING CHANNELS: The playtester role will give you access to the playtesting forum where you can create posts for anything you find. Pinned guidelines are also linked as well as a post to the download for the mod. Work with us to help improve this mod, and you can be personally responsible for getting this mod onto its own two feet. Who knows? Maybe playtesters can get a free one-time redeemable custom character somewhere in the world for their efforts. So what are you waiting for? Join the Discord @ https://discord.gg/CH9ATkrCQx and accept the playtester role for access to the playtest posts? The mod will be uploaded on Steam workshop so that anyone can try it out, but I HIGHLY RECOMMEND JOINING THE DISCORD FOR THIS PLAYTEST. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------Joining the Team.Please do consider joining the team if you are passionate about the longevity of this mod.We are in dire need of people with the capabilities to write/code in the ck3 syntax for events/decisions/misc. items. We are also in need of artists in both forms: 3D and 2D. 2D artists for man-at-arms, coat of arms, icons, traits, texture creation, UI design loading screens. Pick your poison. 3D artists for Bannerlord-inspired custom clothing and armor. As well as this, we would be incredibly grateful for someone who can make customized little units to march around on the map. Of course, I can either try to work on this or commission someone. With the parts of the map, that of which are currently playable, done, there may still be needed someone to come in and refine any parts of the map to smooth out any jank I missed. I certainly know one area of improvement are the coastlines. Some parts are leftovers from the original heightmap and therefore are a bit sharp and jank. |
2024.05.07 21:40 CIAHerpes Plausibility for a story
Would this story be acceptable for plausibility? If we say, "I made it out of there by ascending the silver spire" or whatever, and that it is a memory, does that suffice? The part 1 is below
But by seventeen, I had committed my first confirmed murder- a rival gang member and drug dealer who pulled a gun on me first. I had probably killed people before, but I never watched the news after a shooting or a stabbing to see the result. I wasn’t interested in the slightest.
In this case, I had just been slightly quicker than my rival and, a fraction of a second later, his forehead imploded like a smashed pumpkin in front of me, spraying bone splinters and brains all over the sidewalk. He stumbled forward a step before falling forward. His pistol went off in his dying hand, but it went low, the bullet disappearing with a crack into the nearby street. He fell forward with a dull thud, his legs kicking as if he were seizing.
The sidewalk of the dead end street we stood on spun around me for a moment. The many abandoned, rotting houses of the city loomed over us like hanging corpses. My ears gave a high-pitched shriek of tinnitus from the gunshots.
Nervous, I looked up and down the side street. The entire place seemed silent and dead. Then I heard voices nearby and saw lights turning on in the front yards and windows of houses. Without a moment of hesitation, I took off, sprinting blindly away from the crime scene, not caring much where I was going. Someone a few houses down came out, an old black man in his boxers and slippers. He saw me running and called out something in a quavering voice. I didn’t slow down for a moment.
Not long after, I heard the wailing of sirens off in the distance. They were drawing closer by the second. When the street abruptly ended in a cul-de-sac of mostly abandoned and dilapidated houses, I chose one at random and cut across its back yard, jumped over the rusted metal fence and kept on running, cutting across random yards and jumping more fences until I started making my way back towards downtown.
After about five minutes, I got to a street with a lot more traffic and people. Covered in sweat, I walked casually back towards my tiny, cockroach-infested apartment.
I thought I had gotten away with it. I thought I had been able to kill this worthless scumbag without anyone noticing. But there were more eyes glittering behind the veil than I realized at that moment.
I went back home- and that was the night I died and went to Hell.
***
I lived on the first floor in a building with falling-down rafters and a flat black roof like an infected scab. The paint on the outside was the color of vomit, the windows cracked and broken. Moreover, the place always smelled like Mexican food and chemicals, and every night, I would hear gunshots and panicked screams outside.
I sat down at the table and opened a beer. The ancient CRT TV was on, showing some old horror movie from the 1970s. I took a deep breath, relieved. I didn’t expect a thing to happen at that moment.
Suddenly, my door burst open as if someone had fired a cannonball at it. I nearly jumped out of my skin. Standing there, I saw a dozen black police in SWAT gear holding rifles. The laser sights jumped and danced across the floor before they converged on my head and chest. Someone screamed something in a hoarse voice, but I didn’t understand. The words sounded garbled, like the whispering of a demon. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion.
I fell back in my chair in surprise. A single breath later, one of them opened fire. I felt the first bullet crash through my left shoulder, felt the bone shatter and the flesh explode behind it, warm blood running down my back and chest.
The next moment, others joined in. I didn’t feel the bullet that smashed into my head and sent me to Hell. It moved fast, faster than my nerves. It must have moved as fast as death itself.
The blackness descended on me like a cloud.
***
I don’t know how much time passed. It seemed like an eternity, full of freezing darkness and screams that came from everywhere and nowhere. I remember coming awake suddenly, standing before a face formed from blinding white light. I was healed without any signs of wound or blood from the gunshots. I found myself standing naked and alone in the freezing winds.
I was shivering, my arms wrapped protectively around my chest as I stood on a flat plain of cracked, gray stone. The wind whipped around me as if I were in a hurricane, blowing sand and dust across the eternal plains. The features of the endless face constantly melted and shifted, spiraling out with bolts of lightning that cracked and sizzled all around the hurricane of light. The face seemed to stand miles high with eyes that spun like the Sun.
“Where am I?” I whispered in terror. The face of infinite light stared down at me with a blinding intensity. It seemed to see every thought, every feeling, every memory. I could feel it looking through me as if I were glass.
“You are in the Bardo,” the being said in a voice like an exploding nuclear bomb. “I am the one who sees. I am GOD, the creator of the universe and all who live within it. In the end, to Me you will always return. Did you not know you would one day have to stand here?” I shook my head.
“No… I… I…” I stuttered in terror, unable to respond.
“I have seen your evil, for indeed, I am closer to you than your own jugular vein, your own heart. Did you not see the suffering of those who harmed the innocent, those who murdered and stole and lived their lives wallowing in filth? Did you not see them get wounded, shot, stabbed, strangled and imprisoned? Did you not see them die in their evil and return to Me?”
“I did,” I admitted. “Many times.”
“And yet you have fallen into the sickness yourself,” God said in a voice like a rushing waterfall. Fury and anger seemed to seethe from him. Dozens of bolts of lightning flashed out from all sides of that radiant face. “For this, you must be purified. Your soul must be cleansed with fire. For that is the fate of those who harm the innocent- they fall down to the bottomless pit, to the blazing inferno whose fuel is men and stones. The flames eat them all greedily, and then the fires cry out to Me for more.”
My body felt like it was covered with stinging hornets. Excruciating pins and needles ran all up and down my legs and arms. I looked down, seeing a swirling dark hole opening up underneath me in the field of gray stone, spitting out drops of liquid blackness. They splashed upwards, burning through my skin like napalm, but no blood came out. It was as if my body were dissolving into dripping shadows that pulled me downwards. I felt myself slowly falling through the eternal stone plain as unseen hands dragged me away. As I descended, I heard the voice of God one last time.
“Down into the pit you will go, to the valley of wailing and the lake of flames where the damned scream for peace that never comes, to the city of shadows, to Naraka…”
***
Beneath me, the shadowy tunnel descended. I fell through it like lightning. Everything spun around me at an incredible speed. Suddenly, I broke through something, some invisible barrier in the endless darkness. I found myself falling through a cloud of suffocating smoke, and then the world opened up all around me.
A blood-red sky with thick black clouds extended out in all directions. I glimpsed a world of sharp cliffs and rivers of lava that wound their way down mountains of obsidian.
I fell through the middle of the sky at a tremendous speed, the wind whipping around my ears like a hurricane. A scream ripped its way out of my throat, but I was traveling so fast I could barely hear it as the echoes disappeared above me. Below me was what looked like a massive lake filled with blood about half a mile wide, and it was coming up to meet me fast. Many struggling bodies writhed in the currents, trying to claw their way out. I crashed through the surface at an incredible speed, going deep under the warm crimson waves.
The bloody water of the lake filled my mouth and nose with the overwhelming taste of copper and iron. I started trying to swim back up to the surface, frantically kicking and pushing with my arms and legs. I opened my eyes, and the salty blood stung them. It looked like I was peering through a translucent red film into a world of deep-sea abominations. Long snakes with two heads swam all around me, snapping and biting at each other and any legs or arms nearby. I saw them drag people down one by one, wrapping their slick bodies around their struggling victims as they drowned.
I broke through the surface, inhaling deeply. I was worried about the snakes and whatever else was slinking around down there. Thousands of people treaded water in the massive lake, trying to make their way to the shores. The nearest person to me was only ten feet away, a young woman with panicked eyes and wavy black hair. As I watched her, she gave a scream of terror and then was dragged under the surface, struggling and kicking. She never reappeared.
All around me, I smelled the fetid rot of decaying bodies. There must have been thousands and thousands of corpses at the bottom of this bloody lake. Some of them floated on top of the surface, rancid and swollen, their sightless eyes staring up at the fiery sky. The surface of the lake constantly bubbled and writhed, though whether this was from the rotting of so many bodies or from hidden monsters breathing under the surface, I didn’t yet know.
Frantically, I looked around for the nearest shore to get out of the danger. I saw that if I swam past the direction where the young woman had been, I would only have to go about two hundred feet. But my heart hammered in my chest as I remembered her being dragged under, her frantic, panicked struggling. What if the same creature was waiting over there, waiting for someone like me to try to swim over?
There were dozens more people between me and the nearest shore. Most of them climbed out, dripping drops of crimson onto the black volcanic sands of the beaches. I made my way as fast as I could in that direction, deciding to take my chances with the snakes. Otherwise, I would have to swim at least four times as far to get to the next nearest beach, which also swarmed with masses of naked people clawing their way out of the bloody lake.
A small group of people was concentrated only twenty feet away, three men who were swimming in the same direction I was. One started screaming suddenly. A purple tentacle the color of an old bruise broke through the surface of the water. To my horror, I saw it had black spikes that clicked and clacked together all along its massive arms. The spikes resembled long, hollow hypodermic needles.
The screaming man tried to swim in the opposite direction, but the tentacle wrapped around him, pulling him above the water. It tightened like a boa constrictor, the black spikes stabbing into his chest and stomach. Countless punctures opened up all along his body. The black spikes flexed, and his ribcage ripped open with a wet, ripping sound. The man’s screams abruptly cut off as his head lolled. With a sucking sound, the hollow spikes began drinking, consuming the man’s spurting blood with a sound like an inhalation of air. Slowly, almost lazily, the tentacle began dragging his limp corpse under the surface, back towards the main body of whatever monstrosity it belonged to.
The other two gave panicked sobs as more purple tentacles broke through the surface of the lake. Frantically, I started swimming around them, giving them a wide berth. Within seconds, the other two men were dragged under, deep stab wounds opening in their bodies as the hollow spikes drank greedily with loud sucking sounds.
“Fuck!” I cried, horrified. I felt something brush past my leg, something slimy and eel-like that writhed and slithered under the opaque crimson surface. In horror, I felt its slimy skin wrap around my leg, at first loosely slithering, then tightening. Two black faces with white, lidless eyes rose out of the water, the faces of serpents with fangs like switchblades. I saw both heads were connected to a single slithering body, one that wrapped slowly around my legs and arms, strangling me. Screaming, I felt its fangs dig into my neck. As the twin pairs of lidless white eyes stared at me, I tried to fight, tried to raise my arm, but it was far too strong. It dragged me under the surface.
Struggling against the beast, feeling its poison coursing through my bloodstream like lava, I drowned in the lake of blood. The experience of drowning is horrifying beyond all measure- the overwhelming fear and anxiety when you realize you have no air, the sensation of inhaling the bloody water, the sensation of dying. My vision turned black as a suffocating, clenching fist squeezed my heart. It felt like it took an eternity, but it was probably only a couple minutes at most. Death came over me then, cold and filled with small, suffocating agonies. That was the first time I died in Hell, but it would not be my last.
For in Hell, as I quickly learned, you never truly died, but were just thrown back to the beginning.
***
I felt myself falling again through the black clouds, the Lake of Blood beneath me. It all repeated like before. I screamed as I fell through the water at an incredible speed. Eldritch monstrosities were dragging people under the surface all around me. As quickly as I could, I swam towards the nearest shore. I dared not look down, didn’t dare slow for a single moment. A few times, I was nearly swiped by large, writhing tentacles, but they found other shrieking victims nearby to my immense relief.
I didn’t want to die ever again. It was a horrible sensation, though one that I would, sadly, become used to. Death followed me like a shadow, and starting over in Hell was always a nightmare.
I gave a gasp of joy when my feet touched bottom. Running through the rippling currents of blood, naked and gasping, I came upon the black sands of the shore. Looking around the lake, I saw there were four beaches, seemingly placed at each point of the compass underneath the spinning, blood-red sky.
At the end of each of the black sands lay a sparkling silver gate fifty feet tall and hundreds of feet across. The thin strands of silver intertwined like the fine filaments of a spiderweb, spiraling around each other in graceful, curving arches. Embossed over the top were the words, “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.” No one seemed to pay the gate any mind. Naked crowds of struggling people stumbled through it onto the streets of Hell, streets that were paved with human bones and stretched off to the horizon.
Skyscrapers made of obsidian with spiraling windows like the murderholes of a castle stretched hundreds of stories up into the blood-red sky. As I staggered out, pressed body to body in the thick crowd of crying, wailing people, I saw ahead of us the second mortal danger of Hell.
There were countless gangs of mostly men gathered on the streets of bone, the desperate soldiers of this apocalyptic wasteland. They huddled together in groups of ten or twelve, attacking and murdering random people who tried to sprint past from the Lake of Blood. They wore crude leather tunics and pants that looked like they were made from human skin. Some wore crude masks of human skin on their faces, ragged patches of flesh that had been cut from the bodies of the dead. They stared out with cold, emotionless eyes through the holes in the dried, leathery skin, surveying the surging crowds like lions surveying their prey.
They held primitive weapons in their hands, clubs and maces made from bone, swords sharpened from obsidian glass and even wooden spears. The wood looked strange and dark, almost like mahogany. Next to them were fires with sharpened spits of roasting human meat. The fat dripped off the dismembered arms and legs sizzling over the flames. It gave off a smell like roast pork that permeated the area, rising up in thick, fragrant clouds.
I followed the surging crowds, watching in horror as the groups of armed men attacked and killed random passersby in the crowd, dragging their limp bodies next to the fires where they stacked the unconscious or dead people in stacks like cordwood. I figured they would inevitably roast their flesh for food or make pale leather armor from their dead skin. I felt myself being pushed over in the direction of the nearest group of armed thugs. A few of the nearest men wore masks made of people’s faces, though those behind them did not, only wearing the crude leather armor instead.
One of them standing only ten feet away met my eyes, his cold killer’s gaze boring through me. The mask of skin made him look like some monster from a horror movie, with its ragged, mutilated edges and garish black stitches. He took a step towards me, raising a short spear made from a human leg bone and sharpened to a blood-stained point.
In panic, I looked around, seeing a young woman in her early twenties standing next to me. She was looking straight ahead with panic and terror in her eyes, not paying any attention to me or the men that crept towards us. With all of my strength, I shoved the woman towards the masked killer. She stumbled back in surprise, falling into the man’s weapon. His bone spear stabbed through her stomach. She looked down at her naked body in horror when the point emerged from her navel, dripping rivers of blood down her trembling legs. As she spit up trickles of blood and collapsed to her knees, I ran. A sickening crack rang out behind me like a shattering of bones, and I knew they had murdered the young woman.
I sprinted away from the gangs of cannibal killers as fast as I could, which wasn’t very fast considering how many naked, screaming bodies pressed in all on me from all sides. I felt myself being carried forward by the surging masses towards the silver gate. Hanging from the delicate silver threads, I saw signs written in many languages. I found one in English and started reading it with rapt attention, even as I was relentlessly pushed forward and elbowed and kicked.
I still remember what it said by heart.
“Rules for Naraka:
Immediately outside the gate, the beach turned into a road paved with bones. Leg bones and arm bones were laid side by side, yellowing and drying under the dark crimson sky. Skulls embedded in the center of the road grinned up at me, laughing at silent secrets I could never hope to comprehend.
Naked and barefoot, I sprinted down the road of bones between massive skyscrapers of black obsidian and gleaming red volcanic rock. People started to thin as the survivors scattered in all directions. I felt the sharp points of bone stabbing into the soles of my feet.
That was the moment the sirens began their eerie wailing, rising and falling in a dissonant cacophony, slower and deeper than any tornado siren I had ever heard. It sounded almost like a whale call, stretching out over the infernal city. They sounded from all around us, seemingly ringing out from thousands of speakers hidden throughout the obsidian towers.
I looked up suddenly. The crimson sky had changed rapidly, forming into a cyclone that swirled overhead in great black and red spirals. It met in a fiery eye at the center. As I looked up, I saw glowing orange hail soaring through the air, leaving behind streaks like thousands of comets. It fell towards the naked masses of tens of thousands of bodies pressed together on the streets.
At that moment, I remembered the rules. Some of the others apparently hadn’t read them during the panic and horror of the escape from the Lake of Blood, and they continued surging forward down the road as fire began to fall like drops of napalm all around us. Wails of agony rose up from those who were covered in the glowing lava. The people in the front of the crowd immediately fell under the heat and destruction of the firestorm. Their hair lit on fire, their skin melted and blackened, and still more fire rained down from the sky, sweeping relentlessly in our direction.
I saw an obsidian skyscraper with a great, open archway only a couple hundred feet away. The nearest of the crowd scrambled to find cover under the safety of the building. I sprinted along with them. As I reached the threshold, I felt the first burning drops of magma land on my back. I screamed as I smelled my own skin cooking and my own hair burning, and then I was through the archway. I fell, rolling on my back, trying to put out the sizzling fires that burned me like some corrosive acid.
I felt rivers of warm blood running down my back as more people ran past me, deeper into the hall. The skyscraper was massive, not only in height but in width. The hallway ran for hundreds of feet, disappearing into doorless thresholds on both sides cleaved out of the obsidian, as if the entire structure had been carved from one enormous piece of glassy stone. In the center of the hallway, it opened up into a spiraling staircase.
I looked up abruptly to see three men wearing masks made of human skin standing over me, each holding primitive bone spears in their filthy, blood-stained hands. They looked emaciated, wasted away, like the walking corpses of a death camp. To my utter astonishment, even through the layer of dried, ragged skin, I recognized one of them. It was in his gray eyes, and the twisting dragon tattoos that covered his arms and chest instantly brought a flash of memory.
“Shooter,” I said as they raised their weapons. “Shooter, it’s me. Remember me? It’s Richie.” He froze in place, looking down at me with widening eyes.
“Holy shit, Richie?” he said, tearing the mask off. “What are you doing here?” It was an absurd question, of course. What were any of us doing here?
The last time I had seen Shooter, he had been sitting a pile of blood in his car. He was one of the designated gunman for the Solid Ones, the gang we had both joined when we were young. The amazing luck of finding another Solid in this place of death was astounding. But, then again, I had known many people who had died, and I had a feeling the vast majority were here somewhere.
“I guess I died,” I said sheepishly, giving him a faint half-smile. The other two men standing by his side lowered their weapons. “Fucking pigs came in and shot me.”
“Ah, yeah,” he said, unsurprised. “They do have a tendency to do that.” He gave a low laugh. I took a long look at Shooter, who was wearing the pale skin of some unknown victim or victims of this place of agony. He reached a trembling hand down and pulled me up from the smooth surface of this strange skyscraper. More naked, scared people continued to stream past us as the sirens continued their infernal shrieking outside. Many of them had horrific burns all over their body, and a few were clearly on the verge of death by the time they had made it inside.
Farther down the hall, another ten men wearing the same garb as Shooter came towards us, holding sharpened swords of obsidian and thick clubs made of bone. Shooter put his hands up.
“Hey, I know this guy,” he said calmly, motioning over to me with an apathetic wave of his head. “He was in the same gang as me! We used to go around having a great time, I’ll tell you. Remember that time we shot at that cop and he pissed himself?” He gave a racuous laugh at that. I smiled as the memory flooded back. Shooter had definitely hit him, though I think I probably missed. I remembered the blood soaking over the arm of cop’s uniform as he lay there, gasping and turning white, his face looking bloodless and shocked. Shooter and I had run away, high-fiving each other and grinning like maniacs.
“Yeah, I do,” I said, grinning. The other men surrounded me in a semi-circle. Shooter knelt down and extended a hand to me, helping me off the ground.
“Well, you’re in good company,” he said. “Here, we can do whatever the fuck we want. What’s going to happen, after all? It’s not like we can be sent to Hell.” He laughed, and that laughter writhed with the insanity and bloodlust that seemed to be eating him from the inside like a cancer.
***
“We still need to take him to the Sergeant,” one of the masked men next to Shooter said. “We can see if he has the right stuff needed to fight with us.”
“What happens when you guys die?” I asked. “I mean, obviously, you restart at the Lake of Blood, but how do you find your way back to your gang?” Shooter shrugged.
“We always find each other again eventually,” he said. “It’s not like there’s any lack of time here. All we have is time- and fresh meat, of course. There’s always more fresh meat streaming in through the Lake of Blood. We can take whatever we need from them…” The wailing of the sirens suddenly ended as he spoke. I looked around, seeing burnt and dying people still struggling into the front hallway of the skyscraper. The smell of burning hair and searing flesh filled the entire area.
“Come on,” one of the men said. His voice was gruff, as if he had been chainsmoking five packs a day since he was a little kid. “The Sergeant is on the top floor. You’ll have to talk to him.” I nodded, knowing they would certainly kill me if I did not join their group.
But at that moment, something much worse than dying, blackened bodies crawled in through the archway. I saw it before the group of men did. Instinctively upon glimpsing it, I knew it was something terrible, something that could only live in the depths of a psychotic’s nightmare.
It stood nearly ten feet tall. Its skin was as pale as a writhing maggot. On its hairless face, I saw no eyes, no nose, no ears, just smooth, bone-white skin. It had thin lips tied together with black thread, the garish stitches poking out from the ragged, bloodless flesh. Its arms and legs looked inhumanly long and thin. Its ribs and spine jutted out as if it were a starving, rabid animal. From all around its body, an inhuman wailing started, as if dozens of demonic voices were shrieking in unison. Yet its mouth stayed firmly closed, still stitched shut.
Its fingers jutted out like railroad spikes, each a foot long. As its screaming intensified, it ran towards us, crushing the dying and injured under its naked, twisted feet. I stared into its pale, bloodless face, and even though it had no eyes, it felt like it stared straight back at me, looking into my soul.
“Don’t look at it!” Shooter screamed next to me, turning his face away. The rest of the men closed their eyes or turned away, backpedaling away from the abomination. “It will take on the shape of what you fear most! It’s a Screamer!” But it was too late. At that moment, something strange happened to the pale, naked body of the Screamer. It rippled like a mirage sizzling off the sands of a desert. Its body squeezed and contorted as the distorted shrieking around its pale, naked body grew louder and more insane.
Thin stalks of black, spidery legs began jutting out of the sides of its chest. Its face melted like wax as glittering compound eyes sprouted from the top of its head. Within seconds, it had turned into a massive spider, a black widow whose head nearly scraped the ceiling twenty feet above us. The red hourglass on its back shone brightly, as if in reminder of the imminent death it brought to anyone it touched.
I hate spiders. I’ve always hated spiders. When I saw that skittering, crawling monstrosity, something in me broke. I sprinted towards the group of men who were trying to do their best to escape without looking directly at the Screamer, hoping that the spider would choose one of them instead of me. But I heard its massive bulk following closely behind me. I could feel its insectile breath on the back of my neck.
Naked and frantic, I sprinted behind the nearest of the men and used the same tactic I had used escaping through the silver gate: I pushed the unsuspecting figure towards the abomination that rushed towards us in a blur, its eight legs pounding the glassy floor with reverberating thuds.
Drops of clear venom dripped from its fangs as it grabbed the struggling man. It bit deeply into his leg, and as the venom dripped onto his skin, it seemed to eat through his flesh like some sort of acid. The man screamed as red streaks rapidly spread up his leg throughout the rest of his body. His teeth began chattering and his pupils dilated as he stared at me accusingly. But he did not die.
The spider grabbed him and dragged him away down the hallway, down to wherever the victims of the Screamers go. I saw a dozen more of the pale, faceless monstrosities rushing in to take his place. The men looked up, and the Screamers erupted into monstrous shapes: giant, slithering snakes, a floating eyeball with black, squid-like tentacles writhing around its central mass, enormous brown recluses and black widows and faceless Grim Reapers who floated over the ground in black robes. The overwhelming sense of fear and panic I felt at that moment still stays with me to this day, and even though this happened a couple days ago and I did eventually make it out of that den of horrors, it still leaves a deep scar across my mind.
As visions from a nightmare approached us, I turned and ran.
submitted by CIAHerpes to NoSleepAuthors [link] [comments]
I died and went to Hell. Next to the Lake of Blood, I found a list of rules [part 1]
Throughout my life, I was always a piece of shit. From an early age, I joined a gang and started selling drugs. Anything from weed to heroin to crack sold itself, but on the unforgiving streets of the city, a single mistake could be fatal. I always carried a cheap burner pistol that I could throw away after using it. I know quite a few friends and acquaintances who died from drugs I sold them- some overdosing, others crashing their cars while high. A couple of them committed suicide during opiate withdrawals. One got cut in half by a train while nodding off.But by seventeen, I had committed my first confirmed murder- a rival gang member and drug dealer who pulled a gun on me first. I had probably killed people before, but I never watched the news after a shooting or a stabbing to see the result. I wasn’t interested in the slightest.
In this case, I had just been slightly quicker than my rival and, a fraction of a second later, his forehead imploded like a smashed pumpkin in front of me, spraying bone splinters and brains all over the sidewalk. He stumbled forward a step before falling forward. His pistol went off in his dying hand, but it went low, the bullet disappearing with a crack into the nearby street. He fell forward with a dull thud, his legs kicking as if he were seizing.
The sidewalk of the dead end street we stood on spun around me for a moment. The many abandoned, rotting houses of the city loomed over us like hanging corpses. My ears gave a high-pitched shriek of tinnitus from the gunshots.
Nervous, I looked up and down the side street. The entire place seemed silent and dead. Then I heard voices nearby and saw lights turning on in the front yards and windows of houses. Without a moment of hesitation, I took off, sprinting blindly away from the crime scene, not caring much where I was going. Someone a few houses down came out, an old black man in his boxers and slippers. He saw me running and called out something in a quavering voice. I didn’t slow down for a moment.
Not long after, I heard the wailing of sirens off in the distance. They were drawing closer by the second. When the street abruptly ended in a cul-de-sac of mostly abandoned and dilapidated houses, I chose one at random and cut across its back yard, jumped over the rusted metal fence and kept on running, cutting across random yards and jumping more fences until I started making my way back towards downtown.
After about five minutes, I got to a street with a lot more traffic and people. Covered in sweat, I walked casually back towards my tiny, cockroach-infested apartment.
I thought I had gotten away with it. I thought I had been able to kill this worthless scumbag without anyone noticing. But there were more eyes glittering behind the veil than I realized at that moment.
I went back home- and that was the night I died and went to Hell.
***
I lived on the first floor in a building with falling-down rafters and a flat black roof like an infected scab. The paint on the outside was the color of vomit, the windows cracked and broken. Moreover, the place always smelled like Mexican food and chemicals, and every night, I would hear gunshots and panicked screams outside.
I sat down at the table and opened a beer. The ancient CRT TV was on, showing some old horror movie from the 1970s. I took a deep breath, relieved. I didn’t expect a thing to happen at that moment.
Suddenly, my door burst open as if someone had fired a cannonball at it. I nearly jumped out of my skin. Standing there, I saw a dozen black police in SWAT gear holding rifles. The laser sights jumped and danced across the floor before they converged on my head and chest. Someone screamed something in a hoarse voice, but I didn’t understand. The words sounded garbled, like the whispering of a demon. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion.
I fell back in my chair in surprise. A single breath later, one of them opened fire. I felt the first bullet crash through my left shoulder, felt the bone shatter and the flesh explode behind it, warm blood running down my back and chest.
The next moment, others joined in. I didn’t feel the bullet that smashed into my head and sent me to Hell. It moved fast, faster than my nerves. It must have moved as fast as death itself.
The blackness descended on me like a cloud.
***
I don’t know how much time passed. It seemed like an eternity, full of freezing darkness and screams that came from everywhere and nowhere. I remember coming awake suddenly, standing before a face formed from blinding white light. I was healed without any signs of wound or blood from the gunshots. I found myself standing naked and alone in the freezing winds.
I was shivering, my arms wrapped protectively around my chest as I stood on a flat plain of cracked, gray stone. The wind whipped around me as if I were in a hurricane, blowing sand and dust across the eternal plains. The features of the endless face constantly melted and shifted, spiraling out with bolts of lightning that cracked and sizzled all around the hurricane of light. The face seemed to stand miles high with eyes that spun like the Sun.
“Where am I?” I whispered in terror. The face of infinite light stared down at me with a blinding intensity. It seemed to see every thought, every feeling, every memory. I could feel it looking through me as if I were glass.
“You are in the Bardo,” the being said in a voice like an exploding nuclear bomb. “I am the one who sees. I am GOD, the creator of the universe and all who live within it. In the end, to Me you will always return. Did you not know you would one day have to stand here?” I shook my head.
“No… I… I…” I stuttered in terror, unable to respond.
“I have seen your evil, for indeed, I am closer to you than your own jugular vein, your own heart. Did you not see the suffering of those who harmed the innocent, those who murdered and stole and lived their lives wallowing in filth? Did you not see them get wounded, shot, stabbed, strangled and imprisoned? Did you not see them die in their evil and return to Me?”
“I did,” I admitted. “Many times.”
“And yet you have fallen into the sickness yourself,” God said in a voice like a rushing waterfall. Fury and anger seemed to seethe from him. Dozens of bolts of lightning flashed out from all sides of that radiant face. “For this, you must be purified. Your soul must be cleansed with fire. For that is the fate of those who harm the innocent- they fall down to the bottomless pit, to the blazing inferno whose fuel is men and stones. The flames eat them all greedily, and then the fires cry out to Me for more.”
My body felt like it was covered with stinging hornets. Excruciating pins and needles ran all up and down my legs and arms. I looked down, seeing a swirling dark hole opening up underneath me in the field of gray stone, spitting out drops of liquid blackness. They splashed upwards, burning through my skin like napalm, but no blood came out. It was as if my body were dissolving into dripping shadows that pulled me downwards. I felt myself slowly falling through the eternal stone plain as unseen hands dragged me away. As I descended, I heard the voice of God one last time.
“Down into the pit you will go, to the valley of wailing and the lake of flames where the damned scream for peace that never comes, to the city of shadows, to Naraka…”
***
Beneath me, the shadowy tunnel descended. I fell through it like lightning. Everything spun around me at an incredible speed. Suddenly, I broke through something, some invisible barrier in the endless darkness. I found myself falling through a cloud of suffocating smoke, and then the world opened up all around me.
A blood-red sky with thick black clouds extended out in all directions. I glimpsed a world of sharp cliffs and rivers of lava that wound their way down mountains of obsidian.
I fell through the middle of the sky at a tremendous speed, the wind whipping around my ears like a hurricane. A scream ripped its way out of my throat, but I was traveling so fast I could barely hear it as the echoes disappeared above me. Below me was what looked like a massive lake filled with blood about half a mile wide, and it was coming up to meet me fast. Many struggling bodies writhed in the currents, trying to claw their way out. I crashed through the surface at an incredible speed, going deep under the warm crimson waves.
The bloody water of the lake filled my mouth and nose with the overwhelming taste of copper and iron. I started trying to swim back up to the surface, frantically kicking and pushing with my arms and legs. I opened my eyes, and the salty blood stung them. It looked like I was peering through a translucent red film into a world of deep-sea abominations. Long snakes with two heads swam all around me, snapping and biting at each other and any legs or arms nearby. I saw them drag people down one by one, wrapping their slick bodies around their struggling victims as they drowned.
I broke through the surface, inhaling deeply. I was worried about the snakes and whatever else was slinking around down there. Thousands of people treaded water in the massive lake, trying to make their way to the shores. The nearest person to me was only ten feet away, a young woman with panicked eyes and wavy black hair. As I watched her, she gave a scream of terror and then was dragged under the surface, struggling and kicking. She never reappeared.
All around me, I smelled the fetid rot of decaying bodies. There must have been thousands and thousands of corpses at the bottom of this bloody lake. Some of them floated on top of the surface, rancid and swollen, their sightless eyes staring up at the fiery sky. The surface of the lake constantly bubbled and writhed, though whether this was from the rotting of so many bodies or from hidden monsters breathing under the surface, I didn’t yet know.
Frantically, I looked around for the nearest shore to get out of the danger. I saw that if I swam past the direction where the young woman had been, I would only have to go about two hundred feet. But my heart hammered in my chest as I remembered her being dragged under, her frantic, panicked struggling. What if the same creature was waiting over there, waiting for someone like me to try to swim over?
There were dozens more people between me and the nearest shore. Most of them climbed out, dripping drops of crimson onto the black volcanic sands of the beaches. I made my way as fast as I could in that direction, deciding to take my chances with the snakes. Otherwise, I would have to swim at least four times as far to get to the next nearest beach, which also swarmed with masses of naked people clawing their way out of the bloody lake.
A small group of people was concentrated only twenty feet away, three men who were swimming in the same direction I was. One started screaming suddenly. A purple tentacle the color of an old bruise broke through the surface of the water. To my horror, I saw it had black spikes that clicked and clacked together all along its massive arms. The spikes resembled long, hollow hypodermic needles.
The screaming man tried to swim in the opposite direction, but the tentacle wrapped around him, pulling him above the water. It tightened like a boa constrictor, the black spikes stabbing into his chest and stomach. Countless punctures opened up all along his body. The black spikes flexed, and his ribcage ripped open with a wet, ripping sound. The man’s screams abruptly cut off as his head lolled. With a sucking sound, the hollow spikes began drinking, consuming the man’s spurting blood with a sound like an inhalation of air. Slowly, almost lazily, the tentacle began dragging his limp corpse under the surface, back towards the main body of whatever monstrosity it belonged to.
The other two gave panicked sobs as more purple tentacles broke through the surface of the lake. Frantically, I started swimming around them, giving them a wide berth. Within seconds, the other two men were dragged under, deep stab wounds opening in their bodies as the hollow spikes drank greedily with loud sucking sounds.
“Fuck!” I cried, horrified. I felt something brush past my leg, something slimy and eel-like that writhed and slithered under the opaque crimson surface. In horror, I felt its slimy skin wrap around my leg, at first loosely slithering, then tightening. Two black faces with white, lidless eyes rose out of the water, the faces of serpents with fangs like switchblades. I saw both heads were connected to a single slithering body, one that wrapped slowly around my legs and arms, strangling me. Screaming, I felt its fangs dig into my neck. As the twin pairs of lidless white eyes stared at me, I tried to fight, tried to raise my arm, but it was far too strong. It dragged me under the surface.
Struggling against the beast, feeling its poison coursing through my bloodstream like lava, I drowned in the lake of blood. The experience of drowning is horrifying beyond all measure- the overwhelming fear and anxiety when you realize you have no air, the sensation of inhaling the bloody water, the sensation of dying. My vision turned black as a suffocating, clenching fist squeezed my heart. It felt like it took an eternity, but it was probably only a couple minutes at most. Death came over me then, cold and filled with small, suffocating agonies. That was the first time I died in Hell, but it would not be my last.
For in Hell, as I quickly learned, you never truly died, but were just thrown back to the beginning.
***
I felt myself falling again through the black clouds, the Lake of Blood beneath me. It all repeated like before. I screamed as I fell through the water at an incredible speed. Eldritch monstrosities were dragging people under the surface all around me. As quickly as I could, I swam towards the nearest shore. I dared not look down, didn’t dare slow for a single moment. A few times, I was nearly swiped by large, writhing tentacles, but they found other shrieking victims nearby to my immense relief.
I didn’t want to die ever again. It was a horrible sensation, though one that I would, sadly, become used to. Death followed me like a shadow, and starting over in Hell was always a nightmare.
I gave a gasp of joy when my feet touched bottom. Running through the rippling currents of blood, naked and gasping, I came upon the black sands of the shore. Looking around the lake, I saw there were four beaches, seemingly placed at each point of the compass underneath the spinning, blood-red sky.
At the end of each of the black sands lay a sparkling silver gate fifty feet tall and hundreds of feet across. The thin strands of silver intertwined like the fine filaments of a spiderweb, spiraling around each other in graceful, curving arches. Embossed over the top were the words, “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.” No one seemed to pay the gate any mind. Naked crowds of struggling people stumbled through it onto the streets of Hell, streets that were paved with human bones and stretched off to the horizon.
Skyscrapers made of obsidian with spiraling windows like the murderholes of a castle stretched hundreds of stories up into the blood-red sky. As I staggered out, pressed body to body in the thick crowd of crying, wailing people, I saw ahead of us the second mortal danger of Hell.
There were countless gangs of mostly men gathered on the streets of bone, the desperate soldiers of this apocalyptic wasteland. They huddled together in groups of ten or twelve, attacking and murdering random people who tried to sprint past from the Lake of Blood. They wore crude leather tunics and pants that looked like they were made from human skin. Some wore crude masks of human skin on their faces, ragged patches of flesh that had been cut from the bodies of the dead. They stared out with cold, emotionless eyes through the holes in the dried, leathery skin, surveying the surging crowds like lions surveying their prey.
They held primitive weapons in their hands, clubs and maces made from bone, swords sharpened from obsidian glass and even wooden spears. The wood looked strange and dark, almost like mahogany. Next to them were fires with sharpened spits of roasting human meat. The fat dripped off the dismembered arms and legs sizzling over the flames. It gave off a smell like roast pork that permeated the area, rising up in thick, fragrant clouds.
I followed the surging crowds, watching in horror as the groups of armed men attacked and killed random passersby in the crowd, dragging their limp bodies next to the fires where they stacked the unconscious or dead people in stacks like cordwood. I figured they would inevitably roast their flesh for food or make pale leather armor from their dead skin. I felt myself being pushed over in the direction of the nearest group of armed thugs. A few of the nearest men wore masks made of people’s faces, though those behind them did not, only wearing the crude leather armor instead.
One of them standing only ten feet away met my eyes, his cold killer’s gaze boring through me. The mask of skin made him look like some monster from a horror movie, with its ragged, mutilated edges and garish black stitches. He took a step towards me, raising a short spear made from a human leg bone and sharpened to a blood-stained point.
In panic, I looked around, seeing a young woman in her early twenties standing next to me. She was looking straight ahead with panic and terror in her eyes, not paying any attention to me or the men that crept towards us. With all of my strength, I shoved the woman towards the masked killer. She stumbled back in surprise, falling into the man’s weapon. His bone spear stabbed through her stomach. She looked down at her naked body in horror when the point emerged from her navel, dripping rivers of blood down her trembling legs. As she spit up trickles of blood and collapsed to her knees, I ran. A sickening crack rang out behind me like a shattering of bones, and I knew they had murdered the young woman.
I sprinted away from the gangs of cannibal killers as fast as I could, which wasn’t very fast considering how many naked, screaming bodies pressed in all on me from all sides. I felt myself being carried forward by the surging masses towards the silver gate. Hanging from the delicate silver threads, I saw signs written in many languages. I found one in English and started reading it with rapt attention, even as I was relentlessly pushed forward and elbowed and kicked.
I still remember what it said by heart.
“Rules for Naraka:
- Those who are damned will be fed from the fountain of life. GOD will ensure your rebirth at the Lake of Blood. Though death may crush you over and over, there will be no rest.
- Stay away from the Screamers, the faceless ones who roam the land. Those who are taken by the Screamers will know endless torment and madness in the caverns deep under the ground.
- When the sirens in the center of Naraka wail, the firestorms are coming. Seek shelter immediately.
- Those rare ones who ascend the silver spire at the end of Naraka may find salvation, even in the city of shadows.”
Immediately outside the gate, the beach turned into a road paved with bones. Leg bones and arm bones were laid side by side, yellowing and drying under the dark crimson sky. Skulls embedded in the center of the road grinned up at me, laughing at silent secrets I could never hope to comprehend.
Naked and barefoot, I sprinted down the road of bones between massive skyscrapers of black obsidian and gleaming red volcanic rock. People started to thin as the survivors scattered in all directions. I felt the sharp points of bone stabbing into the soles of my feet.
That was the moment the sirens began their eerie wailing, rising and falling in a dissonant cacophony, slower and deeper than any tornado siren I had ever heard. It sounded almost like a whale call, stretching out over the infernal city. They sounded from all around us, seemingly ringing out from thousands of speakers hidden throughout the obsidian towers.
I looked up suddenly. The crimson sky had changed rapidly, forming into a cyclone that swirled overhead in great black and red spirals. It met in a fiery eye at the center. As I looked up, I saw glowing orange hail soaring through the air, leaving behind streaks like thousands of comets. It fell towards the naked masses of tens of thousands of bodies pressed together on the streets.
At that moment, I remembered the rules. Some of the others apparently hadn’t read them during the panic and horror of the escape from the Lake of Blood, and they continued surging forward down the road as fire began to fall like drops of napalm all around us. Wails of agony rose up from those who were covered in the glowing lava. The people in the front of the crowd immediately fell under the heat and destruction of the firestorm. Their hair lit on fire, their skin melted and blackened, and still more fire rained down from the sky, sweeping relentlessly in our direction.
I saw an obsidian skyscraper with a great, open archway only a couple hundred feet away. The nearest of the crowd scrambled to find cover under the safety of the building. I sprinted along with them. As I reached the threshold, I felt the first burning drops of magma land on my back. I screamed as I smelled my own skin cooking and my own hair burning, and then I was through the archway. I fell, rolling on my back, trying to put out the sizzling fires that burned me like some corrosive acid.
I felt rivers of warm blood running down my back as more people ran past me, deeper into the hall. The skyscraper was massive, not only in height but in width. The hallway ran for hundreds of feet, disappearing into doorless thresholds on both sides cleaved out of the obsidian, as if the entire structure had been carved from one enormous piece of glassy stone. In the center of the hallway, it opened up into a spiraling staircase.
I looked up abruptly to see three men wearing masks made of human skin standing over me, each holding primitive bone spears in their filthy, blood-stained hands. They looked emaciated, wasted away, like the walking corpses of a death camp. To my utter astonishment, even through the layer of dried, ragged skin, I recognized one of them. It was in his gray eyes, and the twisting dragon tattoos that covered his arms and chest instantly brought a flash of memory.
“Shooter,” I said as they raised their weapons. “Shooter, it’s me. Remember me? It’s Richie.” He froze in place, looking down at me with widening eyes.
“Holy shit, Richie?” he said, tearing the mask off. “What are you doing here?” It was an absurd question, of course. What were any of us doing here?
The last time I had seen Shooter, he had been sitting a pile of blood in his car. He was one of the designated gunman for the Solid Ones, the gang we had both joined when we were young. The amazing luck of finding another Solid in this place of death was astounding. But, then again, I had known many people who had died, and I had a feeling the vast majority were here somewhere.
“I guess I died,” I said sheepishly, giving him a faint half-smile. The other two men standing by his side lowered their weapons. “Fucking pigs came in and shot me.”
“Ah, yeah,” he said, unsurprised. “They do have a tendency to do that.” He gave a low laugh. I took a long look at Shooter, who was wearing the pale skin of some unknown victim or victims of this place of agony. He reached a trembling hand down and pulled me up from the smooth surface of this strange skyscraper. More naked, scared people continued to stream past us as the sirens continued their infernal shrieking outside. Many of them had horrific burns all over their body, and a few were clearly on the verge of death by the time they had made it inside.
Farther down the hall, another ten men wearing the same garb as Shooter came towards us, holding sharpened swords of obsidian and thick clubs made of bone. Shooter put his hands up.
“Hey, I know this guy,” he said calmly, motioning over to me with an apathetic wave of his head. “He was in the same gang as me! We used to go around having a great time, I’ll tell you. Remember that time we shot at that cop and he pissed himself?” He gave a racuous laugh at that. I smiled as the memory flooded back. Shooter had definitely hit him, though I think I probably missed. I remembered the blood soaking over the arm of cop’s uniform as he lay there, gasping and turning white, his face looking bloodless and shocked. Shooter and I had run away, high-fiving each other and grinning like maniacs.
“Yeah, I do,” I said, grinning. The other men surrounded me in a semi-circle. Shooter knelt down and extended a hand to me, helping me off the ground.
“Well, you’re in good company,” he said. “Here, we can do whatever the fuck we want. What’s going to happen, after all? It’s not like we can be sent to Hell.” He laughed, and that laughter writhed with the insanity and bloodlust that seemed to be eating him from the inside like a cancer.
***
“We still need to take him to the Sergeant,” one of the masked men next to Shooter said. “We can see if he has the right stuff needed to fight with us.”
“What happens when you guys die?” I asked. “I mean, obviously, you restart at the Lake of Blood, but how do you find your way back to your gang?” Shooter shrugged.
“We always find each other again eventually,” he said. “It’s not like there’s any lack of time here. All we have is time- and fresh meat, of course. There’s always more fresh meat streaming in through the Lake of Blood. We can take whatever we need from them…” The wailing of the sirens suddenly ended as he spoke. I looked around, seeing burnt and dying people still struggling into the front hallway of the skyscraper. The smell of burning hair and searing flesh filled the entire area.
“Come on,” one of the men said. His voice was gruff, as if he had been chainsmoking five packs a day since he was a little kid. “The Sergeant is on the top floor. You’ll have to talk to him.” I nodded, knowing they would certainly kill me if I did not join their group.
But at that moment, something much worse than dying, blackened bodies crawled in through the archway. I saw it before the group of men did. Instinctively upon glimpsing it, I knew it was something terrible, something that could only live in the depths of a psychotic’s nightmare.
It stood nearly ten feet tall. Its skin was as pale as a writhing maggot. On its hairless face, I saw no eyes, no nose, no ears, just smooth, bone-white skin. It had thin lips tied together with black thread, the garish stitches poking out from the ragged, bloodless flesh. Its arms and legs looked inhumanly long and thin. Its ribs and spine jutted out as if it were a starving, rabid animal. From all around its body, an inhuman wailing started, as if dozens of demonic voices were shrieking in unison. Yet its mouth stayed firmly closed, still stitched shut.
Its fingers jutted out like railroad spikes, each a foot long. As its screaming intensified, it ran towards us, crushing the dying and injured under its naked, twisted feet. I stared into its pale, bloodless face, and even though it had no eyes, it felt like it stared straight back at me, looking into my soul.
“Don’t look at it!” Shooter screamed next to me, turning his face away. The rest of the men closed their eyes or turned away, backpedaling away from the abomination. “It will take on the shape of what you fear most! It’s a Screamer!” But it was too late. At that moment, something strange happened to the pale, naked body of the Screamer. It rippled like a mirage sizzling off the sands of a desert. Its body squeezed and contorted as the distorted shrieking around its pale, naked body grew louder and more insane.
Thin stalks of black, spidery legs began jutting out of the sides of its chest. Its face melted like wax as glittering compound eyes sprouted from the top of its head. Within seconds, it had turned into a massive spider, a black widow whose head nearly scraped the ceiling twenty feet above us. The red hourglass on its back shone brightly, as if in reminder of the imminent death it brought to anyone it touched.
I hate spiders. I’ve always hated spiders. When I saw that skittering, crawling monstrosity, something in me broke. I sprinted towards the group of men who were trying to do their best to escape without looking directly at the Screamer, hoping that the spider would choose one of them instead of me. But I heard its massive bulk following closely behind me. I could feel its insectile breath on the back of my neck.
Naked and frantic, I sprinted behind the nearest of the men and used the same tactic I had used escaping through the silver gate: I pushed the unsuspecting figure towards the abomination that rushed towards us in a blur, its eight legs pounding the glassy floor with reverberating thuds.
Drops of clear venom dripped from its fangs as it grabbed the struggling man. It bit deeply into his leg, and as the venom dripped onto his skin, it seemed to eat through his flesh like some sort of acid. The man screamed as red streaks rapidly spread up his leg throughout the rest of his body. His teeth began chattering and his pupils dilated as he stared at me accusingly. But he did not die.
The spider grabbed him and dragged him away down the hallway, down to wherever the victims of the Screamers go. I saw a dozen more of the pale, faceless monstrosities rushing in to take his place. The men looked up, and the Screamers erupted into monstrous shapes: giant, slithering snakes, a floating eyeball with black, squid-like tentacles writhing around its central mass, enormous brown recluses and black widows and faceless Grim Reapers who floated over the ground in black robes. The overwhelming sense of fear and panic I felt at that moment still stays with me to this day, and even though this happened a couple days ago and I did eventually make it out of that den of horrors, it still leaves a deep scar across my mind.
As visions from a nightmare approached us, I turned and ran.
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2024.05.06 02:22 CrazyR0cky The Recluse In My Room Won't Stop Talking To Me...
Part One
The recluse in my room won't stop talking to me. I don't even know when it started. Once it did though, it became more and more frequent. At first I thought, maybe I was going crazy. However I had always been a bit on the mentally unwell side, to put it lightly. I was diagnosed with anxiety and depression in six grade. The psychiatrist said it was like I was put together wrong. The thing is he didn't just mean my internal organs, nor did he simply mean the thoughts in my head; but like something deep to the core of my very atoms was wrong. Was gross. War rotten. Was nasty. Then.. when I met Dr. Peterson is when he told me I have something against people. He told me that I seemed to have disdain for those around me. That my pain was caused by me in many ways. He wasn't wrong of course, but he could never figure out why exactly I ended up this way, and of course I could never tell him. When you tell doctors the truth, they try to hurt you. The try to send you away to that place. To the dark side of the earth. I will NOT go there again. I will not go there again. I will not go there again. I will not go there AGAIN.
So, I lied. I Said I didn't know what he meant, and that I just like to keep to myself. He wasn't wrong of course. I did have a disdain for the humanly figure. Disdain for the small minded ants that wandered the broken halls of past men many times their equal. They stand in the disrepair, and wallow in it. Not me. I could never. I am not, them. I will never be them. I will however be leaving soon. So, I needed to get this out. You might not be able to tell, but I am terrified. I am terrified of him. I am terrified of it. I am terrified of me. However, I am most terrified of the spider. No matter what it says to me. The brown recluse that follows me into my dreams, it tells me to not fear it. It tells me to not fear it while it plunges it's incisors down into my forearm, and pushes the venomous liquid out of it's body into mine. Sucking away the little life I have, while plunging in new disease on top of disease. In order to understand my fear, to understand my pain, to understand the bottomless stairs to the lair of hell which innocent souls go. Then let me go back. Let me go back. Let me go back. Let me go back.
I was thirteen when I was diagnosed with an auto immune disorder, I wasn't surprised, even back then. Sickness, disease, and torture seemed to follow members of my family wherever they went. Take my grandmother for example. She had led a very good life. A modest, God fearing life. Ya know where that got her? Laying six feet deep, after a years long struggle from oral cancer. The woman never chewed tobacco in her life, never so much as laid a finger on any drug, and never did anything bad to anyone in her entire life. Yet, she still moved onward to the dark abyss that we call death. Now I'm alone. I'm alone, and that spider knew it. It knew when I was watching it. It knew when I was thinking about it even. It knew. It always knew. It knew that the one person I had left, was gone.
My grandmother was my favorite person. She helped me when I needed it most. She came to me when I was down. She came to me when I was blue. She came to me, when the spider wouldn't leave and wanted you. Now she sits down, down down down. Down in the murky waters of soot and sand. I will go down there one day too. Honestly, I hope I go down further. I would rather burn in hell for the reset of eternity than allow my consciousness to go straight into an endless abyss of darkness and loneliness coagulating into the oozing mud that is the pitch black. It isn't my choice though now is it. See my grandmother always terrified me. This is one of the reasons that I love what scares me. I love the excitement. I love the thrill, but I also loved her. My grandmother was a child of four. She was a beautiful girl, but her mother hated her for it. As the eldest, her mother would always tell her that she had a face only a mother could love. That no man should ever want her.
When she entered high school though, that wasn't quite true. When she finally found a man that she cared for, her mother enraged with jealousy of her beauty, youth, and freedom decided to rob her of it. She decided that if she should suffer, so should her daughter. So, she went into the kitchen and grabbed a pot. She seared it on the low burning flame, and added oil until it popped. Then when my grandmother came home, she splashed a pot of boiling oil on the side of her face. It caused the skin of half of her face to melt, and droop downward like melting wax. Only for the oil to leave her face and the skin that melted downward hardened in various spots. Creating this crater effect on half of my grandmother's face. My great grandmother finally made her wish and statements come true, my grandmother had a face only a mother could love. That was until I came along. I see my grandmother for what she is. A beautiful woman, with the soul of an angel and the face of a loving goddess. As I said before, tragedy and despair follow my family like vultures. Waiting for dead corpses to pile up so that they might chew away at the last remaining fabric of their skin.
Most people think of me as an outcast. I never cared. I always thought that the best thing I could be, is alone. I was always sick everyone said. No one knew quite how sick I was, or what type of illness I bear. People told me I had my weaknesses, like my immune system. My immune system has always been somewhat confused, it seems to think that I am the foreign body. That mere consumption provide enough reason, to rid the body of itself. This caused me much pain, mentally and physically. However, no one told me I also had my strengths. I had to find that out for myself. See when no one bothered me, my brain could be set free. I could see anything I wished. Feel anything I wanted to. It all started when I was very young. I used to sit in my room for hours and talk to my friends, some of them more real than others. I had a friend named Koby. He was my most real friend.
I met Koby at elementary school, a private school where everyone except me was laced with hundred dollar bills. Koby’s family was also wealthy, but he was different from other people too. He didn’t understand when people made fun of him, why people made fun of him. He was naïve. Me on the other hand, I watched everyone. Judged everyone, just like they judged me. I got a cheaper entry in to my school due to my grandmother working at the school office. After summer ended people would come into class and the teacher would inevitably ask “What did you do this summer class?”. Everyone else either went to Greece, Italy, Rome, Japan, or some other foreign country. They were different than me, and they made sure I knew it. Not Koby though. Koby never asked me about my money, and we liked some of the same things. People would tease us and call us gay, because we liked “girly shows on the Disney channel”. We both came from a perspective of liking what we like unapologetically, at first.
We did indeed have a close and personal friendship, the kind young boys who care not about societal boundaries have. We would throw each other over one another’s heads in his pool mimicking wrestling moves. Imitating Randy Orten, and Brock Lesnar as if we were lumbering monsters of flesh and bones. Sometimes we would get hurt, bang our head in to the wrong object, or hit something too hard; only to console each other as to not cry and get in trouble. We also would make short films that ranged from comedy to action, and we replicated the bad language we saw online. We loved choreographing fake sword fights, and I always loved living as a swordsman in my head. Imagining chopping apart opponents, limb by limb as I dismantle their world and build my own. I also always wanted to act. I thought I was quite good at keeping on masks. Never relenting on an unending character, the likes of which only I know are fake. Koby and I didn’t see eye to eye on a lot though. He was a huge fan of childish games, while I liked things to be a bit more advanced and difficult. He thought random curse words were funny, while I felt my taste a little more sophisticated. Did I feel superior to him? In some ways yes. It didn’t matter though, what mattered is they didn’t like him almost as much as they hated me. That helped us bond.
Then one day something changed. Koby changed, he became one of them. Koby began to play into their jokes. Tried to be what they wanted him to be, a clown. The bullying got worse, and worse. It started with calling us gay, use the f slur towards us, and other homophobic slurs. It then turned in to physical violence. People slapping us, using us as punching bags. I was a big kid. I think they enjoyed the idea of having power over someone larger than them.
One day during basketball, we were playing knock out. During Koby’s turn, one of the kids James went up to him and punched him directly in the eye. He did this due to being “knocked out” moments prior in the game by Koby. Having had enough, I immediately threw my basketball at the kids head, and moved to begin smashing his skull with my bare knuckles. Gnarling, and utilizing years of frustration I lunged at James. Rather than joining me in fighting him, Koby stopped me. He stood between me and James. He apologized to James profusely begging for his forgiveness, and scolded me. Told me how evil I was for simply fighting back. I had never felt more embarassed. More betrayed. The person I called a friend, would stop me from protecting him, and make me look like a weak fool in front of everyone. He cared more about his image to them, the people who didn’t like him to begin with than the will and anger his own “friend”. I would never stoop so low as to let the people who berated me, who hurt me choose who I become or what actions I take. That’s when I realized my “real” friend, wasn’t so real at all. I gladly accepted that I would never protect another being again.
After he stopped me, he became close with the people we once loathed. He would go on to spend time with them, join their clubs, go to their birthday’s. He was no longer the Koby I was once tolerated, and was now something very different. I hated him, at first. That was until he became comfortable enough with them, so comfortable he told them my deepest darkest secrets. The boys that had been scolding us, making us feel like nothing for years, he told them of my abuse. He told them of my desires, and of my fears. He told them who I enjoyed spending time with, what kinds of media I enjoyed, and what goals I had. He told them. That is what matters, and that is unforgivable. When I told him that what I thought about him, when I let him know how small of an ant he truly was to me, that’s when the voices around me became more than real. In a way they were the truth. They never lied to me. They always told me what I needed to hear, not what I wanted to hear. They never judged me when I was wrong. So, when I was by myself… I was never truly alone. Some of them have names, others are a faint whisper. An echo of the wills of the past. A presence, that is not quite understood.
See I grew up in a trailer park. That is why the rich kids would never like me. I wore the same tattered uniform to school every day. Never having enough change to purchase a hot lunch, always begging the school for free food just to eat for that day. I never really thought much of my family’s money, or lack thereof. I somewhat liked living at the trailer park. I had acquaintances of all backgrounds, ethnicities, nationalities, languages you name it. However, people knew of me, but no one knew me. I would put on a front, and call myself by different names just to toy with people. Sometimes I would do different accents, to see how long it would take for someone to realize how fake it was. I always liked playing tricks on people, it’s one thing that often alienated me more than anything else. I didn’t care. I saw it as more of an art than anything. Plus never letting anyone in on the joke, made it all the more special. Only I could control what others knew of me. I was the bottle neck for that pipeline of information.
One trick I used to play on my neighbor Darren was exceedingly hilarious, but he didn’t like it much at all. He had a cat, it was a black and white cat named Moo that loved all the kids in the neighborhood. Except me. It would always scratch at me when it saw me, hiss like I was some monster. One thing that no one liked however, is that this cat meowed as loud as a Bostonian woman in the middle of an orgasm. Every single night, throughout the neighborhood it would whale on. It kept me up at night as a child, and made my dog anxious too. I always prayed that cat would get hit by a car, or smashed by a falling anvil. One day my wish must have come true. One day, the cat stopped meowing. Some say the cat got skittish, ran off, and got lost. I think differently. I think someone killed that cat. Someone took matters into their own hands, and good for them. When there is an annoyance, I say end it. People always get so sentimental over things like death. I find death to be peaceful, inviting. Warm.
However, even with Moo gone Darren and I still didn’t get along. He hated my dog, and blamed me for his cat going missing. So, one night I found an old recording on my phone. It was the cat meowing in the backyard. So I took my speaker over to Darren’s house, and played it at just the right volume to make it sound like the cat was at his gate. He got up moments later, and ran downstairs, searching for his cat. The way his face shimmered with mere glimpses of hope, and happiness only to give way to utter defeat and despair really put a smile on my face. The deep smile he had, turning in to a frightful scowl made my night perfect. His misery for some reason provided me with a level of comfort, knowing I could control someone’s emotions with such ease. It felt right. It felt like a power, that I deserved. Darren later that week would tell all the neighbors, and the neighbors started keeping an eye out too. The cat was never found, so they say. I think differently.
These days I don’t play many tricks on people at all. These days I’ve lost my power. I stay inside, away from those who can harm me. Free from everything of the societal world. Free to roam the mind that I so desperately aimed to understand in it’s entirety. Voices, that need to be satiated with conversations only I can have with myself. This is the only way to truly escape. The only way to be truly, and utterly free.
Day 3
I sit here on my couch. Staring at a blank screen ahead of me. Thinking not of the future, but of the past. I look fondly on my childhood memories. Moments with my parents where we would go on glorious adventures, filled with frights and delights all the same. One I recall is going to Bodega Bay with my father. We were roaming through beach caves, as the tide began to rise. I was with another child I met on the playground, and at a moments notice we were nearly trapped in the cave unable to get out. Luckily the other child’s father was able to get in the cave, and get us out. I hate to think what might have happened, had that man not been there on that day.
I think fondly of my school memories. While I had some friends, I mostly stuck to my studies. I was able to move forward, and at least pass my classes with relative ease. I always procrastinated, which gave me a lot of anxiety. I continued to do so anyway. By the time I reached high school I was able to graduate at 16. This made me ecstatic, because I no longer had to attend the high school that bored me so deeply. I was then able to take online classes for school, limiting my contact with others. Most see this as negative, I loved it dearly. I always felt I excelled when I worked on my own, rather than in teams. They always slowed me down anyway.
Today I sit quietly, in silence. Except for the sound of a child. The neighbor downstairs keeps a little brat that begs for attention all day long. Sometimes that baby reminds me of my neighbors cat when I was a child. It’s a long story, maybe we’ll get to it some other time.
Considering this to be the case, I was also still what you might consider to be anti-social. I did not like people, and most people did not like me. Once I learned how much I loved spending time with myself, this seemingly just got worse. Once I entered high school I realized how different I still was. No one here was significantly richer than anyone else, but I still felt a barrier separating me from them. I did find a small group of misfits however, to waste my time with at lunch. Even then I often still sat silently, while everyone else clambered on.
Even in this group, I still felt utterly alone. What I did enjoy however, was that my mere presence to them was somewhat of a trick. I did not care for these people. Yet they seemed to believe that simply because I was there, that I somehow cared about them. They also seemed to enjoy the embodiment of mystery I took on. I would rarely provide any information about myself, and when I did I would still commonly lie. Lie about who I had been with, what I had done, what I accomplished, what I had faith in. They believed it, for a time.
It all started to come apart, when Jada came around. Jada always seemed to take an interest in me. I didn’t really understand why. I never paid her any attention, and when I did it was always quick, simple, and to the point. Maybe my lack of interest in her, is what caused her interest in me. Either way, it wasn’t a good decision for her. I never have cared much for how my actions effected others. Nor have I ever really considered what would happen, if my lies were to be discovered. It just doesn’t matter to me, and typically I don’t stay around others long enough to be figured out anyway. Jada however, stuck to me like glue.
Anywhere I would go she would follow, with sad puppy dog eyes. Begging for attention. To be honest on some level I thought it was quite adorable, but also relished in the idea that I might be able to exert some sort of romantic power over someone. She was going to provide that to me. So, I fed in to her ways. I told her what she wanted to hear. I told her that she made me feel ways no one else ever had, which was completely fabricated. Pulled from thin air. I did not love this girl. I loved what she could do for me. I loved how I could make myself feel with her, and now that I had a taste of it I loved that power. That was, until she started to push back.
For a while I thought I was untouchable, I thought no one could break the spell I had on Jada. Any time I would ask her to be somewhere, she would be in an instant. It did not matter the time or the place. I could tell her any lie, ask her to complete any task and she would believe it or complete it. I had her fully in the palm of my hand with a firm grasp, until others in our little group started to get in to her head. They started to realize that some of my stories, didn’t quite add up. They saw how Jada spent her time with me. How she was at my every beck and call. That she would give up anything for me, yet I would give up nothing for her. They were jealous. They wanted to have that control over somebody, but they never could. They were never smart enough, never talented enough to do so. They told her that I was no good for her, that I was using her.
Make no mistake, I was using her. Isn’t that what love is? One using another person, to find some bliss. Some happiness which they can’t find elsewhere? Why am I wrong for doing the same. She provided me pleasure, I provided her with some in return. Sounds like a fair transaction to me. Besides, who are they however to interfere with my life. With my people. With my toys. When she finally told me she never wanted to see me again, I knew she was lying. She wanted me more than ever. Wanted to fix me. Wanted to make me hers, but she would only ever be mine to toy with. I was unfixable, because I wasn’t broken. It was everyone else that needed fixing, I was simply playing the game. Not long after Jada said that to me, I was excised from our group.
They thought of me as a dirty liar, who they couldn’t trust. It’s not my fault I played with those who are easily fooled, preyed on what made them weak. I was simply showing them what they were doing wrong. What they could do better. I knew from then on that the only person who understood me was the people I spoke to when I as alone. They knew me better than I knew myself. They knew what I wanted, what I could do. They had faith in me. That’s when I knew I needed to keep myself low. Put away. Kept neatly in a box, so that way I could ascertain my full potential. Once again I realized, only then could I be free. People, even as my toys were more detrimental to me than anything else. I loved being alone, but more importantly I thrived in it.
Once I started staying away, keeping to myself. I realized love was not what I had been told. Love was not for others, but for the feeling one can attain from the power it provides. With other humans that power is fleeting, but with one’s self it remains until your eminent death. With only myself in my home is when I found my first true love aside from loneliness. Cutting. Utilizing a blade to make the marks on my skin which I now define as art. A knife’s place is meant to be against the skin of a being. It fits so fluidly down the fold of one’s figure, like a figure skater dancing around an icy path with the blades on their feet. Leaving behind trails of love, despair, pain, and joy.
I swear it was an accident at first. I was in the kitchen one day, angry that I couldn’t understand myself. Why I felt the way I felt about life. Angry that I felt abandoned, without a mentor to assist me in both my strengths and my weaknesses. That’s when I instinctively took a knife angled it directly downward with both hands grasping it, and I slammed it straight down in to a cutting board. Little did I know that my hand would slide on to the knife as the impact was made with the board. My white tendons on the left side of my inner right palm, sliced open. Bleeding profusely.
My anger swelled in that moment, and manifested in immense pain that synergized and gave me something I had never quite felt like that before. Euphoria. Pure, and utter bliss. In that moment I felt aroused, excited, ready for something to happen. Nothing did. As my feelings of euphoria began to fade away, I was left with the slide in my hand from the blade. Blood dripping all over the cutting board, and the counter beside it. Crimson red splattered behind the board, leaving a bloody mess to clean up. I quickly applied pressure, and got a bandaid from the bathroom sink. Applied it, and sopped up the red stained tile with paper towels. As I did so it occurred to me, that feeling can be replicated again. All I needed was a knife, and a will to achieve nirvana. With blood spilt, it would be far easier the next time.
Day 5
Today I find myself on the floor of the kitchen. Staring at the ceiling, thinking of past relationships. The wrongs, the rights. What I did, what I didn’t do. What could have been, and what never will be. These things I find fascinating as a self-exploration exercise. What could I have done wrong to the woman that I once said I loved, so much so that she deems it necessary not to speak to me again. Did I do anything wrong to begin with? Is it true that she will never speak to me again? I find it doubtful, although I do not put myself in high regard on this situation either. I called her my baby doll, because that is what she is for me. I just want her back. Sometimes. However, I want her back for me. She wants me back for her. Maybe we can meet in the middle.
I think of my parents and what they didn’t do for me as a child. They weren’t model citizens, but they also weren’t terrible parents. They just didn’t know how to raise a child, and honestly who the hell does? I fault them not for what they did, but for allowing themselves to have a child in the first place when they were not ready. Bringing a child in to a world you are not prepared for let alone them, is downright despicable. A selfish and vile act of pure arrogance of nature. The arrogance of two to think love is enough to fill the stomach of their child.
Children deserve to be nourished and cared for. They deserve to prosper and have what is needed at their fingertips to grow. Anything below what you are most capable of is a disappointment, however being short of the basic necessities is abuse. This is why I would never have a child, I am not ready nor am I sure that I could truly care. If I could not care, but fake it would that be equally meaningful as a father who truly loves their child? Is it a father a child needs? Or does a child just need a figure. Someone, anyone to emulate. For finding your own way, and your own emulation in the world is the scariest task one might undergo.
Take the child downstairs for example. It cries non-stop, yet the parents do nothing to satiate the child. Whaling on and on. I could never understand bearing your carbon copy, only to neglect them. Why copy yourself to begin with. Let the branch of life come to an end. Let it fizzle out of the universe alongside that great big ball of fire we call a sun. Let us fizzle out like the final firework in the night sky during a Fourth Of July display. Burning ever so slightly less until the stars of the galaxy swallow the light whole, leaving nothing left to be devoured.
At 3 years old, I had my first encounter with this terrestrial alien. The spider that bit me injected me with enough poison to kill a small horse, so the doctor laid me down; She looked over, and with a big smile she said those famous words. “This won’t hurt a bit”. She put no numbing injections, she simply wiped the site clean, and began cutting. Sawing away at my tiny toddler stomach, slowly making their way through layers of fresh, soft, smooth skin. I remember nothing but warm tears streaming down my face as I screamed at the top of my lungs. Screaming at a rate I as a child had not even yet known. The screams of pain, they are unique. People can attempt to mimic them, but the true scream of torture and death is one so blood curddling that it makes your skin crawl. As a child you know only playful screams, this was my first introduction to what pain in the real world looked like. I just so happened to be it’s next patient.
I remember the pain, the cold feeling of blood pouring down my side, and screaming for my father. Yet, my father was the one to hold me down when I started kicking at the doctor from the pain. Rather than force them to stop cutting into a child without some type of anesthetic, he continued to hold my arms and legs as the doctor cut away. My greatest support system, to betray me in such a way. To take the trust of a child and crush it. After that session, I never trusted doctor’s again. I surely, never trusted a spider. That was until now.
That’s because even if the spider in my room were poisonous… It meant me no harm. Even if it did need to nest, and lay eggs it would not do so in my body. Even if it needed sustenance, it would not come in my direction. At least, that’s what it told me. That's what it told me as it's incisors pinched it's way into my arm once again, numbing the area unlike the doctor that went to work on me as a child. As I stare into it's eyes, I realized... I was scared. I was more than scared, for once... I was terrified. For my entire life, I was the one to induce fear in others. Now, that fear was being induced in me. So I am here. I am here to tell you. Until I am not. Let these words keep you from the spiders. Do not talk to them. Do not listen to them.
Do not be afraid. Even though deep down... fear consumes me.
submitted by CrazyR0cky to Horror_stories [link] [comments]
The recluse in my room won't stop talking to me. I don't even know when it started. Once it did though, it became more and more frequent. At first I thought, maybe I was going crazy. However I had always been a bit on the mentally unwell side, to put it lightly. I was diagnosed with anxiety and depression in six grade. The psychiatrist said it was like I was put together wrong. The thing is he didn't just mean my internal organs, nor did he simply mean the thoughts in my head; but like something deep to the core of my very atoms was wrong. Was gross. War rotten. Was nasty. Then.. when I met Dr. Peterson is when he told me I have something against people. He told me that I seemed to have disdain for those around me. That my pain was caused by me in many ways. He wasn't wrong of course, but he could never figure out why exactly I ended up this way, and of course I could never tell him. When you tell doctors the truth, they try to hurt you. The try to send you away to that place. To the dark side of the earth. I will NOT go there again. I will not go there again. I will not go there again. I will not go there AGAIN.
So, I lied. I Said I didn't know what he meant, and that I just like to keep to myself. He wasn't wrong of course. I did have a disdain for the humanly figure. Disdain for the small minded ants that wandered the broken halls of past men many times their equal. They stand in the disrepair, and wallow in it. Not me. I could never. I am not, them. I will never be them. I will however be leaving soon. So, I needed to get this out. You might not be able to tell, but I am terrified. I am terrified of him. I am terrified of it. I am terrified of me. However, I am most terrified of the spider. No matter what it says to me. The brown recluse that follows me into my dreams, it tells me to not fear it. It tells me to not fear it while it plunges it's incisors down into my forearm, and pushes the venomous liquid out of it's body into mine. Sucking away the little life I have, while plunging in new disease on top of disease. In order to understand my fear, to understand my pain, to understand the bottomless stairs to the lair of hell which innocent souls go. Then let me go back. Let me go back. Let me go back. Let me go back.
I was thirteen when I was diagnosed with an auto immune disorder, I wasn't surprised, even back then. Sickness, disease, and torture seemed to follow members of my family wherever they went. Take my grandmother for example. She had led a very good life. A modest, God fearing life. Ya know where that got her? Laying six feet deep, after a years long struggle from oral cancer. The woman never chewed tobacco in her life, never so much as laid a finger on any drug, and never did anything bad to anyone in her entire life. Yet, she still moved onward to the dark abyss that we call death. Now I'm alone. I'm alone, and that spider knew it. It knew when I was watching it. It knew when I was thinking about it even. It knew. It always knew. It knew that the one person I had left, was gone.
My grandmother was my favorite person. She helped me when I needed it most. She came to me when I was down. She came to me when I was blue. She came to me, when the spider wouldn't leave and wanted you. Now she sits down, down down down. Down in the murky waters of soot and sand. I will go down there one day too. Honestly, I hope I go down further. I would rather burn in hell for the reset of eternity than allow my consciousness to go straight into an endless abyss of darkness and loneliness coagulating into the oozing mud that is the pitch black. It isn't my choice though now is it. See my grandmother always terrified me. This is one of the reasons that I love what scares me. I love the excitement. I love the thrill, but I also loved her. My grandmother was a child of four. She was a beautiful girl, but her mother hated her for it. As the eldest, her mother would always tell her that she had a face only a mother could love. That no man should ever want her.
When she entered high school though, that wasn't quite true. When she finally found a man that she cared for, her mother enraged with jealousy of her beauty, youth, and freedom decided to rob her of it. She decided that if she should suffer, so should her daughter. So, she went into the kitchen and grabbed a pot. She seared it on the low burning flame, and added oil until it popped. Then when my grandmother came home, she splashed a pot of boiling oil on the side of her face. It caused the skin of half of her face to melt, and droop downward like melting wax. Only for the oil to leave her face and the skin that melted downward hardened in various spots. Creating this crater effect on half of my grandmother's face. My great grandmother finally made her wish and statements come true, my grandmother had a face only a mother could love. That was until I came along. I see my grandmother for what she is. A beautiful woman, with the soul of an angel and the face of a loving goddess. As I said before, tragedy and despair follow my family like vultures. Waiting for dead corpses to pile up so that they might chew away at the last remaining fabric of their skin.
Most people think of me as an outcast. I never cared. I always thought that the best thing I could be, is alone. I was always sick everyone said. No one knew quite how sick I was, or what type of illness I bear. People told me I had my weaknesses, like my immune system. My immune system has always been somewhat confused, it seems to think that I am the foreign body. That mere consumption provide enough reason, to rid the body of itself. This caused me much pain, mentally and physically. However, no one told me I also had my strengths. I had to find that out for myself. See when no one bothered me, my brain could be set free. I could see anything I wished. Feel anything I wanted to. It all started when I was very young. I used to sit in my room for hours and talk to my friends, some of them more real than others. I had a friend named Koby. He was my most real friend.
I met Koby at elementary school, a private school where everyone except me was laced with hundred dollar bills. Koby’s family was also wealthy, but he was different from other people too. He didn’t understand when people made fun of him, why people made fun of him. He was naïve. Me on the other hand, I watched everyone. Judged everyone, just like they judged me. I got a cheaper entry in to my school due to my grandmother working at the school office. After summer ended people would come into class and the teacher would inevitably ask “What did you do this summer class?”. Everyone else either went to Greece, Italy, Rome, Japan, or some other foreign country. They were different than me, and they made sure I knew it. Not Koby though. Koby never asked me about my money, and we liked some of the same things. People would tease us and call us gay, because we liked “girly shows on the Disney channel”. We both came from a perspective of liking what we like unapologetically, at first.
We did indeed have a close and personal friendship, the kind young boys who care not about societal boundaries have. We would throw each other over one another’s heads in his pool mimicking wrestling moves. Imitating Randy Orten, and Brock Lesnar as if we were lumbering monsters of flesh and bones. Sometimes we would get hurt, bang our head in to the wrong object, or hit something too hard; only to console each other as to not cry and get in trouble. We also would make short films that ranged from comedy to action, and we replicated the bad language we saw online. We loved choreographing fake sword fights, and I always loved living as a swordsman in my head. Imagining chopping apart opponents, limb by limb as I dismantle their world and build my own. I also always wanted to act. I thought I was quite good at keeping on masks. Never relenting on an unending character, the likes of which only I know are fake. Koby and I didn’t see eye to eye on a lot though. He was a huge fan of childish games, while I liked things to be a bit more advanced and difficult. He thought random curse words were funny, while I felt my taste a little more sophisticated. Did I feel superior to him? In some ways yes. It didn’t matter though, what mattered is they didn’t like him almost as much as they hated me. That helped us bond.
Then one day something changed. Koby changed, he became one of them. Koby began to play into their jokes. Tried to be what they wanted him to be, a clown. The bullying got worse, and worse. It started with calling us gay, use the f slur towards us, and other homophobic slurs. It then turned in to physical violence. People slapping us, using us as punching bags. I was a big kid. I think they enjoyed the idea of having power over someone larger than them.
One day during basketball, we were playing knock out. During Koby’s turn, one of the kids James went up to him and punched him directly in the eye. He did this due to being “knocked out” moments prior in the game by Koby. Having had enough, I immediately threw my basketball at the kids head, and moved to begin smashing his skull with my bare knuckles. Gnarling, and utilizing years of frustration I lunged at James. Rather than joining me in fighting him, Koby stopped me. He stood between me and James. He apologized to James profusely begging for his forgiveness, and scolded me. Told me how evil I was for simply fighting back. I had never felt more embarassed. More betrayed. The person I called a friend, would stop me from protecting him, and make me look like a weak fool in front of everyone. He cared more about his image to them, the people who didn’t like him to begin with than the will and anger his own “friend”. I would never stoop so low as to let the people who berated me, who hurt me choose who I become or what actions I take. That’s when I realized my “real” friend, wasn’t so real at all. I gladly accepted that I would never protect another being again.
After he stopped me, he became close with the people we once loathed. He would go on to spend time with them, join their clubs, go to their birthday’s. He was no longer the Koby I was once tolerated, and was now something very different. I hated him, at first. That was until he became comfortable enough with them, so comfortable he told them my deepest darkest secrets. The boys that had been scolding us, making us feel like nothing for years, he told them of my abuse. He told them of my desires, and of my fears. He told them who I enjoyed spending time with, what kinds of media I enjoyed, and what goals I had. He told them. That is what matters, and that is unforgivable. When I told him that what I thought about him, when I let him know how small of an ant he truly was to me, that’s when the voices around me became more than real. In a way they were the truth. They never lied to me. They always told me what I needed to hear, not what I wanted to hear. They never judged me when I was wrong. So, when I was by myself… I was never truly alone. Some of them have names, others are a faint whisper. An echo of the wills of the past. A presence, that is not quite understood.
See I grew up in a trailer park. That is why the rich kids would never like me. I wore the same tattered uniform to school every day. Never having enough change to purchase a hot lunch, always begging the school for free food just to eat for that day. I never really thought much of my family’s money, or lack thereof. I somewhat liked living at the trailer park. I had acquaintances of all backgrounds, ethnicities, nationalities, languages you name it. However, people knew of me, but no one knew me. I would put on a front, and call myself by different names just to toy with people. Sometimes I would do different accents, to see how long it would take for someone to realize how fake it was. I always liked playing tricks on people, it’s one thing that often alienated me more than anything else. I didn’t care. I saw it as more of an art than anything. Plus never letting anyone in on the joke, made it all the more special. Only I could control what others knew of me. I was the bottle neck for that pipeline of information.
One trick I used to play on my neighbor Darren was exceedingly hilarious, but he didn’t like it much at all. He had a cat, it was a black and white cat named Moo that loved all the kids in the neighborhood. Except me. It would always scratch at me when it saw me, hiss like I was some monster. One thing that no one liked however, is that this cat meowed as loud as a Bostonian woman in the middle of an orgasm. Every single night, throughout the neighborhood it would whale on. It kept me up at night as a child, and made my dog anxious too. I always prayed that cat would get hit by a car, or smashed by a falling anvil. One day my wish must have come true. One day, the cat stopped meowing. Some say the cat got skittish, ran off, and got lost. I think differently. I think someone killed that cat. Someone took matters into their own hands, and good for them. When there is an annoyance, I say end it. People always get so sentimental over things like death. I find death to be peaceful, inviting. Warm.
However, even with Moo gone Darren and I still didn’t get along. He hated my dog, and blamed me for his cat going missing. So, one night I found an old recording on my phone. It was the cat meowing in the backyard. So I took my speaker over to Darren’s house, and played it at just the right volume to make it sound like the cat was at his gate. He got up moments later, and ran downstairs, searching for his cat. The way his face shimmered with mere glimpses of hope, and happiness only to give way to utter defeat and despair really put a smile on my face. The deep smile he had, turning in to a frightful scowl made my night perfect. His misery for some reason provided me with a level of comfort, knowing I could control someone’s emotions with such ease. It felt right. It felt like a power, that I deserved. Darren later that week would tell all the neighbors, and the neighbors started keeping an eye out too. The cat was never found, so they say. I think differently.
These days I don’t play many tricks on people at all. These days I’ve lost my power. I stay inside, away from those who can harm me. Free from everything of the societal world. Free to roam the mind that I so desperately aimed to understand in it’s entirety. Voices, that need to be satiated with conversations only I can have with myself. This is the only way to truly escape. The only way to be truly, and utterly free.
Day 3
I sit here on my couch. Staring at a blank screen ahead of me. Thinking not of the future, but of the past. I look fondly on my childhood memories. Moments with my parents where we would go on glorious adventures, filled with frights and delights all the same. One I recall is going to Bodega Bay with my father. We were roaming through beach caves, as the tide began to rise. I was with another child I met on the playground, and at a moments notice we were nearly trapped in the cave unable to get out. Luckily the other child’s father was able to get in the cave, and get us out. I hate to think what might have happened, had that man not been there on that day.
I think fondly of my school memories. While I had some friends, I mostly stuck to my studies. I was able to move forward, and at least pass my classes with relative ease. I always procrastinated, which gave me a lot of anxiety. I continued to do so anyway. By the time I reached high school I was able to graduate at 16. This made me ecstatic, because I no longer had to attend the high school that bored me so deeply. I was then able to take online classes for school, limiting my contact with others. Most see this as negative, I loved it dearly. I always felt I excelled when I worked on my own, rather than in teams. They always slowed me down anyway.
Today I sit quietly, in silence. Except for the sound of a child. The neighbor downstairs keeps a little brat that begs for attention all day long. Sometimes that baby reminds me of my neighbors cat when I was a child. It’s a long story, maybe we’ll get to it some other time.
- Nicholas Anderson
Considering this to be the case, I was also still what you might consider to be anti-social. I did not like people, and most people did not like me. Once I learned how much I loved spending time with myself, this seemingly just got worse. Once I entered high school I realized how different I still was. No one here was significantly richer than anyone else, but I still felt a barrier separating me from them. I did find a small group of misfits however, to waste my time with at lunch. Even then I often still sat silently, while everyone else clambered on.
Even in this group, I still felt utterly alone. What I did enjoy however, was that my mere presence to them was somewhat of a trick. I did not care for these people. Yet they seemed to believe that simply because I was there, that I somehow cared about them. They also seemed to enjoy the embodiment of mystery I took on. I would rarely provide any information about myself, and when I did I would still commonly lie. Lie about who I had been with, what I had done, what I accomplished, what I had faith in. They believed it, for a time.
It all started to come apart, when Jada came around. Jada always seemed to take an interest in me. I didn’t really understand why. I never paid her any attention, and when I did it was always quick, simple, and to the point. Maybe my lack of interest in her, is what caused her interest in me. Either way, it wasn’t a good decision for her. I never have cared much for how my actions effected others. Nor have I ever really considered what would happen, if my lies were to be discovered. It just doesn’t matter to me, and typically I don’t stay around others long enough to be figured out anyway. Jada however, stuck to me like glue.
Anywhere I would go she would follow, with sad puppy dog eyes. Begging for attention. To be honest on some level I thought it was quite adorable, but also relished in the idea that I might be able to exert some sort of romantic power over someone. She was going to provide that to me. So, I fed in to her ways. I told her what she wanted to hear. I told her that she made me feel ways no one else ever had, which was completely fabricated. Pulled from thin air. I did not love this girl. I loved what she could do for me. I loved how I could make myself feel with her, and now that I had a taste of it I loved that power. That was, until she started to push back.
For a while I thought I was untouchable, I thought no one could break the spell I had on Jada. Any time I would ask her to be somewhere, she would be in an instant. It did not matter the time or the place. I could tell her any lie, ask her to complete any task and she would believe it or complete it. I had her fully in the palm of my hand with a firm grasp, until others in our little group started to get in to her head. They started to realize that some of my stories, didn’t quite add up. They saw how Jada spent her time with me. How she was at my every beck and call. That she would give up anything for me, yet I would give up nothing for her. They were jealous. They wanted to have that control over somebody, but they never could. They were never smart enough, never talented enough to do so. They told her that I was no good for her, that I was using her.
Make no mistake, I was using her. Isn’t that what love is? One using another person, to find some bliss. Some happiness which they can’t find elsewhere? Why am I wrong for doing the same. She provided me pleasure, I provided her with some in return. Sounds like a fair transaction to me. Besides, who are they however to interfere with my life. With my people. With my toys. When she finally told me she never wanted to see me again, I knew she was lying. She wanted me more than ever. Wanted to fix me. Wanted to make me hers, but she would only ever be mine to toy with. I was unfixable, because I wasn’t broken. It was everyone else that needed fixing, I was simply playing the game. Not long after Jada said that to me, I was excised from our group.
They thought of me as a dirty liar, who they couldn’t trust. It’s not my fault I played with those who are easily fooled, preyed on what made them weak. I was simply showing them what they were doing wrong. What they could do better. I knew from then on that the only person who understood me was the people I spoke to when I as alone. They knew me better than I knew myself. They knew what I wanted, what I could do. They had faith in me. That’s when I knew I needed to keep myself low. Put away. Kept neatly in a box, so that way I could ascertain my full potential. Once again I realized, only then could I be free. People, even as my toys were more detrimental to me than anything else. I loved being alone, but more importantly I thrived in it.
Once I started staying away, keeping to myself. I realized love was not what I had been told. Love was not for others, but for the feeling one can attain from the power it provides. With other humans that power is fleeting, but with one’s self it remains until your eminent death. With only myself in my home is when I found my first true love aside from loneliness. Cutting. Utilizing a blade to make the marks on my skin which I now define as art. A knife’s place is meant to be against the skin of a being. It fits so fluidly down the fold of one’s figure, like a figure skater dancing around an icy path with the blades on their feet. Leaving behind trails of love, despair, pain, and joy.
I swear it was an accident at first. I was in the kitchen one day, angry that I couldn’t understand myself. Why I felt the way I felt about life. Angry that I felt abandoned, without a mentor to assist me in both my strengths and my weaknesses. That’s when I instinctively took a knife angled it directly downward with both hands grasping it, and I slammed it straight down in to a cutting board. Little did I know that my hand would slide on to the knife as the impact was made with the board. My white tendons on the left side of my inner right palm, sliced open. Bleeding profusely.
My anger swelled in that moment, and manifested in immense pain that synergized and gave me something I had never quite felt like that before. Euphoria. Pure, and utter bliss. In that moment I felt aroused, excited, ready for something to happen. Nothing did. As my feelings of euphoria began to fade away, I was left with the slide in my hand from the blade. Blood dripping all over the cutting board, and the counter beside it. Crimson red splattered behind the board, leaving a bloody mess to clean up. I quickly applied pressure, and got a bandaid from the bathroom sink. Applied it, and sopped up the red stained tile with paper towels. As I did so it occurred to me, that feeling can be replicated again. All I needed was a knife, and a will to achieve nirvana. With blood spilt, it would be far easier the next time.
Day 5
Today I find myself on the floor of the kitchen. Staring at the ceiling, thinking of past relationships. The wrongs, the rights. What I did, what I didn’t do. What could have been, and what never will be. These things I find fascinating as a self-exploration exercise. What could I have done wrong to the woman that I once said I loved, so much so that she deems it necessary not to speak to me again. Did I do anything wrong to begin with? Is it true that she will never speak to me again? I find it doubtful, although I do not put myself in high regard on this situation either. I called her my baby doll, because that is what she is for me. I just want her back. Sometimes. However, I want her back for me. She wants me back for her. Maybe we can meet in the middle.
I think of my parents and what they didn’t do for me as a child. They weren’t model citizens, but they also weren’t terrible parents. They just didn’t know how to raise a child, and honestly who the hell does? I fault them not for what they did, but for allowing themselves to have a child in the first place when they were not ready. Bringing a child in to a world you are not prepared for let alone them, is downright despicable. A selfish and vile act of pure arrogance of nature. The arrogance of two to think love is enough to fill the stomach of their child.
Children deserve to be nourished and cared for. They deserve to prosper and have what is needed at their fingertips to grow. Anything below what you are most capable of is a disappointment, however being short of the basic necessities is abuse. This is why I would never have a child, I am not ready nor am I sure that I could truly care. If I could not care, but fake it would that be equally meaningful as a father who truly loves their child? Is it a father a child needs? Or does a child just need a figure. Someone, anyone to emulate. For finding your own way, and your own emulation in the world is the scariest task one might undergo.
Take the child downstairs for example. It cries non-stop, yet the parents do nothing to satiate the child. Whaling on and on. I could never understand bearing your carbon copy, only to neglect them. Why copy yourself to begin with. Let the branch of life come to an end. Let it fizzle out of the universe alongside that great big ball of fire we call a sun. Let us fizzle out like the final firework in the night sky during a Fourth Of July display. Burning ever so slightly less until the stars of the galaxy swallow the light whole, leaving nothing left to be devoured.
- Nicholas Anderson
At 3 years old, I had my first encounter with this terrestrial alien. The spider that bit me injected me with enough poison to kill a small horse, so the doctor laid me down; She looked over, and with a big smile she said those famous words. “This won’t hurt a bit”. She put no numbing injections, she simply wiped the site clean, and began cutting. Sawing away at my tiny toddler stomach, slowly making their way through layers of fresh, soft, smooth skin. I remember nothing but warm tears streaming down my face as I screamed at the top of my lungs. Screaming at a rate I as a child had not even yet known. The screams of pain, they are unique. People can attempt to mimic them, but the true scream of torture and death is one so blood curddling that it makes your skin crawl. As a child you know only playful screams, this was my first introduction to what pain in the real world looked like. I just so happened to be it’s next patient.
I remember the pain, the cold feeling of blood pouring down my side, and screaming for my father. Yet, my father was the one to hold me down when I started kicking at the doctor from the pain. Rather than force them to stop cutting into a child without some type of anesthetic, he continued to hold my arms and legs as the doctor cut away. My greatest support system, to betray me in such a way. To take the trust of a child and crush it. After that session, I never trusted doctor’s again. I surely, never trusted a spider. That was until now.
That’s because even if the spider in my room were poisonous… It meant me no harm. Even if it did need to nest, and lay eggs it would not do so in my body. Even if it needed sustenance, it would not come in my direction. At least, that’s what it told me. That's what it told me as it's incisors pinched it's way into my arm once again, numbing the area unlike the doctor that went to work on me as a child. As I stare into it's eyes, I realized... I was scared. I was more than scared, for once... I was terrified. For my entire life, I was the one to induce fear in others. Now, that fear was being induced in me. So I am here. I am here to tell you. Until I am not. Let these words keep you from the spiders. Do not talk to them. Do not listen to them.
Do not be afraid. Even though deep down... fear consumes me.
2024.05.03 09:27 SleipnirRanch Painful events at work are stuck on a loop in my head.
This will be a very long read and i'm sorry. I think that i have some kind of Autism, i am a very alone person, i have no family or close friends and have nobody to speak to. I need to get this out and maybe some kind of advice. I want to stop thinking about this situation that unfolded at my workplace, and i can't , i want to erase it and pretend none of it happened, but i'm obsessed over it and every new piece of information i get about it resparks my mind and the wheels start turning and it's driving me crazy.
I (42M) started work at a new shop nearly 2.5 years ago. There was a woman (30ishF) already working there in the department i was assigned to. I was to work 2nd shift on the 2 machines in our department and her and the department Lead (65M) would be on 1st. I of course had a huge crush on her. She was pretty, kind, cooperative, and overall a good employee and coworker. She was very popular and lots of the guys in the shop would go out of there way to get their chance to flirt with her for a few minutes every day. She was not overtly flirtatious back, but was nice about it though seemed generally disinterested in them. Her fiance and father to one of her kids had died suddenly about a year ago right after her kids birth. She had another kid whose father had also died a long time ago, and she had also inherited a 3rd child who had been one of her baby daddies kids and was just left with her. Unsure where that kids mother was or why nobody else took him. A handful of times for the first year i worked with her, i thought that she had tried to flirt with me. I being some kind of autist would just stare back at her blankly unsure if she was joking or what i was supposed to say. Little things like touching my arm or whispering a joke in my ear. I never saw her act like that to other guys and she would do that to me sometimes in front of other people or in plain view. Nothing really crazy, just little friendly things. It hurts now thinking about that.
For 6 months i worked on 2nd, and when the department Lead was out with a surgery and recovery i was brought to 1st for 4 months starting in the Summer of 2022. While on 1st we worked very closely and i considered her to be a friend. I could not have spoken more highly of her and her work and told the manager and her multiple times what a good job she did. We worked well as a team, i had more experience and she knew the product we made and the way the company worked better. She also had a good skill at organizing and getting things from other departments done for us. I never seriously thought about trying to ask her out although i did really like her, she was a single mom with 2 kids and a 3rd kid that one of her baby daddies just kind of left her when he died (cause unknown). I really wasn't interested in that level of both red flags and chaos. I did really like her though and cared for her as a coworker and friend.
While the Lead was out another Senior (60M) worker came and helped out and trained. That Senior worker and our department Lead were Bitter Enemies. Senior daily and continuously whispered in her ear about how horrible Lead was and that she didn't know anything because she had been trained so poorly. He didn't transfer to our department but was over there all the time. He helped me out some too, but i was generally more experienced and used to working on my own, and Senior was definitely more interested in helping her out anyways. Lead also was a very abrasive and difficult person to work with and wasn't particularly bright and so i didn't really think much of this. When Lead came back in the Fall 2022 she refused to work with him or do what he said and would instead defer to Senior.
The company was in the process of replacing the older machines with new ones. In Winter of last year they shut down one of the 2 machines so the new 1 could be brought in. The Lead had come back and would stay on the old machine until the new one was up and running. I would stay on the old machine and transfer to the new one for 2nd once it was up and running, she was transferred to cross train on other machines with the intention of bringing her back to the old machine when the Lead was moved to the new. This went on during the Summer of last year. Something happened. She nosedived hard while she was in the other departments cross training. Nobody liked her or wanted to work with her. And most of the people she worked with complained about her. I heard bits and pieces at first from her and then others while on 2nd shift, but did not get a full picture of what was going on until months later.
I began to have problems with Senior, i would ask him to fix mistakes he had made or question something he had done and he would just flat out refuse and tell me i was wrong without even looking at what i had said. I complained to Her about it thinking maybe she would help me out, and instead she ran to Senior and told him i was messing up his work without listening to what i told her. She became suddenly distant after that and quit speaking to me. She wasn't my Best friend and i had only known her at that point for about a year and half, and i was back on 2nd shift, so i really didn't think TOO much about it, but it kind of pissed me off. A month later since she didn't have a real workstation so the management asked her to pick through the tooling and throw away tools that we no longer needed or were worn out. She went through the tooling and threw away tools based on if it would piss off Lead or not and said nothing to me or apparently anyone else about doing it. She threw away tools (that yes were worn, but were custom made and we had no replacement for) that i used all the time, and never said a word to me about it. I was extremely angry about this for weeks.....leading up to her returning to my department and Lead being moved to the New Machine, August of last year.
When she came back, the cold attitude subsided but only a little. When i walked in on the first day she smiled at me and said "i'm back!" kind of gleefully. I felt extremely bad but i could not hide the look on my face of worry and anxiety of what i was suspecting was about to start. I don't know if she caught it or not, she said nothing. And of course immediately problems started. The Senior (who was a senior employee but in no was was any kind of manager) just kind of took over the department with her on 1st shift. She was refusing to let me finish jobs she had started on 1st and instead would tear the setup down when i came in and i would have to work on something else from scratch. This was a huge waste of time and with the department halved and the Lead and Management struggling to get the new machine up and running properly kept pushing us further and further behind. She began not speaking much to me again and continued to refuse to cooperate with me.
Then one day i came in and there was a job sitting there set up and she was going to let me run and finish. She showed me how to run it and left. It was fucked. It was done wrong. It didn't work. I identified the problems and fixed it (which took a lot of extra time and effort) and moved on to something else, and left a note for her about how to avoid the same mistake. This did not go over well. When i came in the next day i tried to talk to her about what had happened. Her and Senior were waiting for me to bring it up and both began berating me and badgering me in stereo. They said i was wrong, that me and the other guys on 2nd shift didn't know what we were talking about, there was nothing wrong with that job, i screwed it up, it had nothing wrong with it when she left and i should have just ran it as it was. It went on for some time. My favorite was her telling me that she didn't have to Deburr anything because she had too much going on. And at some point i told Senior "You Are Wrong" he literally Disassociated and i could see his consciousness leave his body and flutter away. They had set up another similar job that i was supposed to do (after a month of not being allowed to work on jobs that she had been working on). They made the same mistake with the same wrong result.
I want to stress at this point that for over a year and nearly another half of one i had never had even the smallest of problems with her, the last month of 2021, a full year of 2022, and several months into 2023, no issues at all. I had had a great deal of respect for her and was very impressed with her. We were friends, texted eachother, joked with eachother, and helped eachother with projects. Up until the summer of 2023, just 4 months prior.
The next day i came in Senior aggressively stopped me. He told me that She was having a family problem (no idea, never got any clue what it was about. though it sounded serious) and would be out for the next few days, she was here today but i was not allowed to go to my workstation. I had to stay away from her and was not allowed to talk to her and had to wait for her to leave, i Upset Her Too Much and she was already upset because of whatever her family problem was. Keep in mind, neither of these people were my Boss. I complied but was MotherFUcking up a storm at whoever happened to walk by not far away. No idea how much of it she heard though i could see her do a few double takes out of the corner of my eye. I am a very quiet person, i think autistic to some degree, i have resting angry face, deep sunken eyes and a usually furrowed brow, stoic and stone faced, not a very large person, but bigger than most and broad shouldered, i have a thick beard and keep my mustache waxed and curled slightly at the ends (like the meme). I have found that new people often are afraid of me or think i am a bad person or are nervous around me, but people who know me for awhile think of me as a very polite and quiet person. But when i lose my temper people turn the other way.
I was furious my entire shift and furious still when i went home. The next morning i came in early and went to HR and told them what had been going on. Senior is friends with the production manager outside of work so gets special treatment, but she is not. After talking to HR, who called Production Manager up during the middle of my explanation, He agreed with all of my reasoning and said what i was saying was just basic machining and HR said i was right, they were not my boss and could not tell me when i could start my shift or where i could go. i felt incredibly guilty, even ashamed afterwards. For well over a year i had really liked this girl, not just as a woman, but as a friend and co worker. I did not understand why she suddenly seemed to hate me. A few days later they were going to speak to her when she returned. I caught her before that and warned her, i tried to be apologetic and wanted her to know that if all of what was going on had been Seniors fault and not hers to please let me know if she gets in trouble, i would go back to HR and the manager and try to smooth things over. She didn't seem to care in the slightest, and admitted that she was the one who put Senior up to telling me to stay away from her that day. I thought about this over the weekend and was sick to my stomach over it, angry and confused.
I decided that since she didn't want me talking to her that i just wouldn't, i didn't say anything to her for several weeks. She went back to refusing to let me finish jobs that she had started, and Senior said something to me about how it was good that i wasn't talking to her anymore. HR and the production manager had a meeting with her, and i have no idea what was talked about, even now, but to some degree or another she was told she was wrong. Other people had complained about her behavior over the last few months, but this was the first time it had turned into such an argument. I had a reputation for getting along with everyone and being dependable, everyone on 2nd and Lead had all said that i was easy to get along with.
A Week went by and 2 new problems started. She would leave things set up in the machine......with no instructions, half done, not secured properly and with "Not Open, Do Not Touch" written in magic marker across the parts or tooling. I had to use the machine, it was my work station and my job and she knew i was coming in to work each night. Multiple times i had to take the machine set up apart, but every time i contacted management to explain what was going on and get their approval, i would take what she had left out and set it in a cart, with a note that just said "See Foreman in the morning" as he would have the details of why this was done. She then refused to do a job that i had left in the machine, but that i had left detailed notes and instructions about, instead pushing it off to the side, but without talking to a manager about it. Once again i blew up. I yelled at her directly this time, i went into the Foremans office and yelled at him (he was generally useless, which is why i hadn't bothered with telling him about the other problems, but he existed at that point and that was reason enough for me to yell at him). I told both of them i wouldn't touch that job, never, no fucking way was i going to set that up again. It was 90% done, all she had to do was hit the green button and wait 25 minutes. If anyone didn't like it they could fire me. The next day when i came in it was done. The Foreman had a meeting with her. Never found out what was said or talked about. Nobody talked to me.
I was embarrassed for losing my temper again and still felt bad for getting her in trouble and raising my voice at her. I know people are afraid of me, i know how my voice changes. I know when i'm yelling at someone people can hear everything i'm saying from a block away. I have over the years put a lot of effort into not losing my temper, but there are times i can't. She began speaking to me again after that. For the purpose of snapping at me and sniping at me. I tolerated it to some extent and tried (although not very hard) to segway it into us talking about work and projects, hoping to get her to cooperate with me again, with very little success.
Then she started threatening me.
Not to harm me or something, she threatened to destroy my work. She said if i left anything in the machine she would just tear it apart and move on to "that" project, which was just some job she specifically wanted to work on. She said it, but said it in a almost friendly tone, not being really hostile or mean about it, just telling me it matter-o-factly. I let it slide once, i thought "ok, maybe that specific job is really hot and management is pushing for it", i said ok, and made sure to run quick jobs to not tie the machine up. She said it to me again the next day. This time with a more snotty tone. I of course made a face, she tried to back peddle and said "well maybe if you just......something something" in a quiet voice. I didn't snap at her or fight about it, i said ok again....but i stewed up big time about it over my shift. It's things like that, the going back and forth from being nice to being horrible suddenly and without warning that makes it all stick out "she sounded timid and sorry just for a second....what is going on? did i over react? did i miss something, did i, should i, why" in my head over and over in a circle. During this fighting at some point or another, i had said "yeah, i really don't want to work here anymore". The comment got brought back up again somehow, not during the worst parts, but after the fighting had started, and i then said "well, i looked, but i think i'll stay here for now instead", she got giddy, she looked genuinely happy that i had said that and did a few bounces smiling, this was before the big blow ups but after she had started being nasty to me. I remember things like that and it makes everything worse.
After she threatened to tear my work apart the 2nd time, and i stewed over it, the next day i came in early and went to the Union Steward. She and Senior knew something was up. They were both got really quiet when i walked past them, and i could see them whispering and looking at me. She looked dejected and sad.
Me and the Union Steward went and talked to the Production Manager. I told both of them what had happened over the past few weeks. I tried very had to make sure he understood that she had been a very good person to work with most of the time i had worked with her, he told me he knew that, i had said that the last time i spoke to him about her. The Union Steward was Adamant that this was being instigated by Senior, he called him Poison during the meeting. The Production Manager, i said already was friends with "Poison" outside of work, told me that he was going to talk to Her again.
This time she was Written up and was put on Probation. I don't know what was talked about at that meeting except for 1 thing. Union Steward told me afterwards that she complained i had yelled at her. I felt sick hearing that. So ashamed. I went up to talk to her, i told her i was sorry, that i wished i hadn't had done that. We started to have a short, loud, but more or less polite conversation. She was angry she had been written up, she informed me that we could work together but were no longer "friends", i told her we had not been friends for months. She started telling me why she had done some of the things she had been dong (though i don't think i got the full story at all, but it was scratching the surface of the truth). She said she wasn't letting me finish jobs she had started because thats what Senior had told her to do, "they" not managers, had decided i couldn't handle those big complicated jobs, she told me she had stopped talking to me because i had "bitched too much" (meaning i had complained about Senior to her a few times a few months ago), She said she didn't see what the big deal was about her refusing to finish the job i had set up because "it was a quick set up", and generally she really honestly didn't understand how anything she had been doing had been wrong, even though managers had talked to her at least 3 times about it. They weren't just dumb excuses, she was really confused and didn't get it, it just didn't seem like an act to me at all. She had just been doing what Senior had told her to do. At the end of it both of us had tears in our eyes and then she fled out of the building because she had already stayed late.
After that she did a 180, at least with me. She overnight became professional and cooperative and communicative again. I had a few talks with Union Stewards (there were 2 of them). I said she was behaving and doing ok, but that i didn't trust her. There was not even the slightest hint of her being sarcastic, or disingenuous at all, but why was the change so sudden? She NEVER apologized for anything, or ever admitted that anything she had done was wrong, but it Stopped Completely. One of the fallouts was that we were Not to work on new jobs on the Old Machine, all New Jobs were to go to the New Machine as to not waste time figuring out a procedure on a machine that they were getting rid of. As a result Senior was almost completely out of our department, no longer assisting in new set ups or programs.
She started to do much better. We were getting along again like none of that stuff over the past few months had happened. But she was under probation. She kept getting in slight trouble for small things that nobody would have ever said anything about if she had done them a year ago. She screwed up a few jobs (this is not a big deal at all, we ALL do this, it just happens, mistakes) but she wasn't honest about how the jobs got messed up and tried to blame it on Lead for bad programming, even though he had nothing to do with it and wasn't even over there. They wanted "new" jobs to be taken to the new machine, but there was a gray area, what about old jobs that needed reworked and evaluated? Nobody had an answer, she took those jobs to the new machine. Not on purpose, but i worked on many of those jobs on 2nd and it wasn't a big deal at all, and it made her look incompetent, which she wasn't really. The last problem was her Apprenticeship. Company has a program and if you meet all the requirements they would sign off on your Hours for school, and they also paid your tuition while going to school. I never enrolled or did that, i had learned everything on the job, but she was in the middle of the program. Part of it was getting hours doing different things in the shop (a lot of dirty jobs nobody wanted to do). She refused to do them. Said she had a doctors note ( i don't think she did). They had already paid her tuition, now she wasn't going to get her hours signed off on.
Finally one night in November the Old Machine died. Gears Melted. I will never forget the last conversation i had with her. I was sent for cross training on another machine while they were deciding to just get rid of the old machine or try to keep it limping along since the New Machine was not ready. Me and her talked about this and she said nobody had told her what she was to be doing, she just decided to go cross train on another machine until someone told her. She smiled when she said that and she looked so beautiful. I don't think she knew at all that they were going to fire her the next day.
When i came in that day her tool box was gone. I thought it had just been moved while they worked on the broken machine. Someone told me she had just left, crying, i had missed her. When i heard, i felt sick, i got sick, i became physically ill for days. I felt such horrible guilt. I hadn't wanted her fired, i didn't even want her in trouble, but she wouldn't speak to me, i couldn't explain to her why what she was doing was wrong. I thought it was all my fault and that she didn't deserve it really, she had been good at her job and a good person to work with 90% of the time i had worked with her, and i had yelled at her and got her in trouble. I tried to call her, i wanted to check on her and see if she was ok and tell her if there was anything i could do to help her out i would. She had blocked my phone number.
I continued to work on the crippled machine at a snails pace for a few months over the rest of 2023. I was then moved to 1st shift to cross train on a few different machines the past 3 months when they finally scraped out the Old Machine.
While on 1st shift i heard things i had not heard before. There was a rumor that had spread all over the shop that she had been sleeping with Senior. That she had slept with him in exchange for him doing her work for her. I am 80% sure this just a rumor. This is why the people in other departments she had been sent to had refused to work with her and didn't want her around. She had also been sleeping with the IT guy from the office area, it's not a rumor but they had been sneaking around together and got seen by a few people. I guess i knew she was seeing someone, but i didn't care much at that point, we had stopped speaking for awhile and we had never hung out outside of work or anything, although i liked her, it just wasn't compatible or a good idea, so i never pursued it or would have. Didn't know it was someone at work. The Rumor that she was sleeping with Senior had sprung out of her coming in a few times with Hickies and being giddy, by then she had started working with him closely and a few guys resented this. They said things to her about it, they then found out she was sleeping with the IT guy and i think that several people said mean things to her about that too, under their breath, while walking past her, just with in earshot. I think she hadn't defended herself or said anything about the Rumors about her and Senior because her and IT guy wanted to keep it quiet, and she didn't want to "out" him. IT guy was married.
When i complained about Senior not fixing his mistakes to her trying to get her help, it had been at the Peak of the rumors going on about her and Senior. I knew none of this while we were having problems. I think She Took my complaint as i had joined in on the harassment and bullying. I think she thought i had betrayed her and was stabbing her in the back. That is why she was suddenly cold to me, thats why she didn't want to work with me. Further, Senior had been instructing her, but when he found out she was sleeping around with someone else at work he started telling her to do things wrong on purpose, he was purposefully trying to make her look bad and wanted her fired out of jealousy and being spurred. This conclusion i have is not fact, it is what i pieced together as best as i could.
I have never spoken to her since she was let go, and no longer have any way to contact her. I'm not sure if i would want to, and i'm not sure if she ever came back to work there again if i would be angry i had to work with her again or happy, or sad, or what. It just all goes around and around in my head, and i try to focus on other things, let it go, forget about it, but someone complains about something Senior is doing, or i have to get something from IT guy, or someone brings up some part of it, and it all spills back out into my head. I want it to go away.
I'm sorry that this is so long, but it's the details that are important, they are whats driving me crazy, and not knowing the real answers to why everything went so bad.
TLDR: Had a good friendship with a coworker turn horrible, she became nasty to me for basically no reason and was so belligerent towards me that she eventually got fired, i feel horrible guilt and confusion over the entire series of events.
submitted by SleipnirRanch to helpme [link] [comments]
I (42M) started work at a new shop nearly 2.5 years ago. There was a woman (30ishF) already working there in the department i was assigned to. I was to work 2nd shift on the 2 machines in our department and her and the department Lead (65M) would be on 1st. I of course had a huge crush on her. She was pretty, kind, cooperative, and overall a good employee and coworker. She was very popular and lots of the guys in the shop would go out of there way to get their chance to flirt with her for a few minutes every day. She was not overtly flirtatious back, but was nice about it though seemed generally disinterested in them. Her fiance and father to one of her kids had died suddenly about a year ago right after her kids birth. She had another kid whose father had also died a long time ago, and she had also inherited a 3rd child who had been one of her baby daddies kids and was just left with her. Unsure where that kids mother was or why nobody else took him. A handful of times for the first year i worked with her, i thought that she had tried to flirt with me. I being some kind of autist would just stare back at her blankly unsure if she was joking or what i was supposed to say. Little things like touching my arm or whispering a joke in my ear. I never saw her act like that to other guys and she would do that to me sometimes in front of other people or in plain view. Nothing really crazy, just little friendly things. It hurts now thinking about that.
For 6 months i worked on 2nd, and when the department Lead was out with a surgery and recovery i was brought to 1st for 4 months starting in the Summer of 2022. While on 1st we worked very closely and i considered her to be a friend. I could not have spoken more highly of her and her work and told the manager and her multiple times what a good job she did. We worked well as a team, i had more experience and she knew the product we made and the way the company worked better. She also had a good skill at organizing and getting things from other departments done for us. I never seriously thought about trying to ask her out although i did really like her, she was a single mom with 2 kids and a 3rd kid that one of her baby daddies just kind of left her when he died (cause unknown). I really wasn't interested in that level of both red flags and chaos. I did really like her though and cared for her as a coworker and friend.
While the Lead was out another Senior (60M) worker came and helped out and trained. That Senior worker and our department Lead were Bitter Enemies. Senior daily and continuously whispered in her ear about how horrible Lead was and that she didn't know anything because she had been trained so poorly. He didn't transfer to our department but was over there all the time. He helped me out some too, but i was generally more experienced and used to working on my own, and Senior was definitely more interested in helping her out anyways. Lead also was a very abrasive and difficult person to work with and wasn't particularly bright and so i didn't really think much of this. When Lead came back in the Fall 2022 she refused to work with him or do what he said and would instead defer to Senior.
The company was in the process of replacing the older machines with new ones. In Winter of last year they shut down one of the 2 machines so the new 1 could be brought in. The Lead had come back and would stay on the old machine until the new one was up and running. I would stay on the old machine and transfer to the new one for 2nd once it was up and running, she was transferred to cross train on other machines with the intention of bringing her back to the old machine when the Lead was moved to the new. This went on during the Summer of last year. Something happened. She nosedived hard while she was in the other departments cross training. Nobody liked her or wanted to work with her. And most of the people she worked with complained about her. I heard bits and pieces at first from her and then others while on 2nd shift, but did not get a full picture of what was going on until months later.
I began to have problems with Senior, i would ask him to fix mistakes he had made or question something he had done and he would just flat out refuse and tell me i was wrong without even looking at what i had said. I complained to Her about it thinking maybe she would help me out, and instead she ran to Senior and told him i was messing up his work without listening to what i told her. She became suddenly distant after that and quit speaking to me. She wasn't my Best friend and i had only known her at that point for about a year and half, and i was back on 2nd shift, so i really didn't think TOO much about it, but it kind of pissed me off. A month later since she didn't have a real workstation so the management asked her to pick through the tooling and throw away tools that we no longer needed or were worn out. She went through the tooling and threw away tools based on if it would piss off Lead or not and said nothing to me or apparently anyone else about doing it. She threw away tools (that yes were worn, but were custom made and we had no replacement for) that i used all the time, and never said a word to me about it. I was extremely angry about this for weeks.....leading up to her returning to my department and Lead being moved to the New Machine, August of last year.
When she came back, the cold attitude subsided but only a little. When i walked in on the first day she smiled at me and said "i'm back!" kind of gleefully. I felt extremely bad but i could not hide the look on my face of worry and anxiety of what i was suspecting was about to start. I don't know if she caught it or not, she said nothing. And of course immediately problems started. The Senior (who was a senior employee but in no was was any kind of manager) just kind of took over the department with her on 1st shift. She was refusing to let me finish jobs she had started on 1st and instead would tear the setup down when i came in and i would have to work on something else from scratch. This was a huge waste of time and with the department halved and the Lead and Management struggling to get the new machine up and running properly kept pushing us further and further behind. She began not speaking much to me again and continued to refuse to cooperate with me.
Then one day i came in and there was a job sitting there set up and she was going to let me run and finish. She showed me how to run it and left. It was fucked. It was done wrong. It didn't work. I identified the problems and fixed it (which took a lot of extra time and effort) and moved on to something else, and left a note for her about how to avoid the same mistake. This did not go over well. When i came in the next day i tried to talk to her about what had happened. Her and Senior were waiting for me to bring it up and both began berating me and badgering me in stereo. They said i was wrong, that me and the other guys on 2nd shift didn't know what we were talking about, there was nothing wrong with that job, i screwed it up, it had nothing wrong with it when she left and i should have just ran it as it was. It went on for some time. My favorite was her telling me that she didn't have to Deburr anything because she had too much going on. And at some point i told Senior "You Are Wrong" he literally Disassociated and i could see his consciousness leave his body and flutter away. They had set up another similar job that i was supposed to do (after a month of not being allowed to work on jobs that she had been working on). They made the same mistake with the same wrong result.
I want to stress at this point that for over a year and nearly another half of one i had never had even the smallest of problems with her, the last month of 2021, a full year of 2022, and several months into 2023, no issues at all. I had had a great deal of respect for her and was very impressed with her. We were friends, texted eachother, joked with eachother, and helped eachother with projects. Up until the summer of 2023, just 4 months prior.
The next day i came in Senior aggressively stopped me. He told me that She was having a family problem (no idea, never got any clue what it was about. though it sounded serious) and would be out for the next few days, she was here today but i was not allowed to go to my workstation. I had to stay away from her and was not allowed to talk to her and had to wait for her to leave, i Upset Her Too Much and she was already upset because of whatever her family problem was. Keep in mind, neither of these people were my Boss. I complied but was MotherFUcking up a storm at whoever happened to walk by not far away. No idea how much of it she heard though i could see her do a few double takes out of the corner of my eye. I am a very quiet person, i think autistic to some degree, i have resting angry face, deep sunken eyes and a usually furrowed brow, stoic and stone faced, not a very large person, but bigger than most and broad shouldered, i have a thick beard and keep my mustache waxed and curled slightly at the ends (like the meme). I have found that new people often are afraid of me or think i am a bad person or are nervous around me, but people who know me for awhile think of me as a very polite and quiet person. But when i lose my temper people turn the other way.
I was furious my entire shift and furious still when i went home. The next morning i came in early and went to HR and told them what had been going on. Senior is friends with the production manager outside of work so gets special treatment, but she is not. After talking to HR, who called Production Manager up during the middle of my explanation, He agreed with all of my reasoning and said what i was saying was just basic machining and HR said i was right, they were not my boss and could not tell me when i could start my shift or where i could go. i felt incredibly guilty, even ashamed afterwards. For well over a year i had really liked this girl, not just as a woman, but as a friend and co worker. I did not understand why she suddenly seemed to hate me. A few days later they were going to speak to her when she returned. I caught her before that and warned her, i tried to be apologetic and wanted her to know that if all of what was going on had been Seniors fault and not hers to please let me know if she gets in trouble, i would go back to HR and the manager and try to smooth things over. She didn't seem to care in the slightest, and admitted that she was the one who put Senior up to telling me to stay away from her that day. I thought about this over the weekend and was sick to my stomach over it, angry and confused.
I decided that since she didn't want me talking to her that i just wouldn't, i didn't say anything to her for several weeks. She went back to refusing to let me finish jobs that she had started, and Senior said something to me about how it was good that i wasn't talking to her anymore. HR and the production manager had a meeting with her, and i have no idea what was talked about, even now, but to some degree or another she was told she was wrong. Other people had complained about her behavior over the last few months, but this was the first time it had turned into such an argument. I had a reputation for getting along with everyone and being dependable, everyone on 2nd and Lead had all said that i was easy to get along with.
A Week went by and 2 new problems started. She would leave things set up in the machine......with no instructions, half done, not secured properly and with "Not Open, Do Not Touch" written in magic marker across the parts or tooling. I had to use the machine, it was my work station and my job and she knew i was coming in to work each night. Multiple times i had to take the machine set up apart, but every time i contacted management to explain what was going on and get their approval, i would take what she had left out and set it in a cart, with a note that just said "See Foreman in the morning" as he would have the details of why this was done. She then refused to do a job that i had left in the machine, but that i had left detailed notes and instructions about, instead pushing it off to the side, but without talking to a manager about it. Once again i blew up. I yelled at her directly this time, i went into the Foremans office and yelled at him (he was generally useless, which is why i hadn't bothered with telling him about the other problems, but he existed at that point and that was reason enough for me to yell at him). I told both of them i wouldn't touch that job, never, no fucking way was i going to set that up again. It was 90% done, all she had to do was hit the green button and wait 25 minutes. If anyone didn't like it they could fire me. The next day when i came in it was done. The Foreman had a meeting with her. Never found out what was said or talked about. Nobody talked to me.
I was embarrassed for losing my temper again and still felt bad for getting her in trouble and raising my voice at her. I know people are afraid of me, i know how my voice changes. I know when i'm yelling at someone people can hear everything i'm saying from a block away. I have over the years put a lot of effort into not losing my temper, but there are times i can't. She began speaking to me again after that. For the purpose of snapping at me and sniping at me. I tolerated it to some extent and tried (although not very hard) to segway it into us talking about work and projects, hoping to get her to cooperate with me again, with very little success.
Then she started threatening me.
Not to harm me or something, she threatened to destroy my work. She said if i left anything in the machine she would just tear it apart and move on to "that" project, which was just some job she specifically wanted to work on. She said it, but said it in a almost friendly tone, not being really hostile or mean about it, just telling me it matter-o-factly. I let it slide once, i thought "ok, maybe that specific job is really hot and management is pushing for it", i said ok, and made sure to run quick jobs to not tie the machine up. She said it to me again the next day. This time with a more snotty tone. I of course made a face, she tried to back peddle and said "well maybe if you just......something something" in a quiet voice. I didn't snap at her or fight about it, i said ok again....but i stewed up big time about it over my shift. It's things like that, the going back and forth from being nice to being horrible suddenly and without warning that makes it all stick out "she sounded timid and sorry just for a second....what is going on? did i over react? did i miss something, did i, should i, why" in my head over and over in a circle. During this fighting at some point or another, i had said "yeah, i really don't want to work here anymore". The comment got brought back up again somehow, not during the worst parts, but after the fighting had started, and i then said "well, i looked, but i think i'll stay here for now instead", she got giddy, she looked genuinely happy that i had said that and did a few bounces smiling, this was before the big blow ups but after she had started being nasty to me. I remember things like that and it makes everything worse.
After she threatened to tear my work apart the 2nd time, and i stewed over it, the next day i came in early and went to the Union Steward. She and Senior knew something was up. They were both got really quiet when i walked past them, and i could see them whispering and looking at me. She looked dejected and sad.
Me and the Union Steward went and talked to the Production Manager. I told both of them what had happened over the past few weeks. I tried very had to make sure he understood that she had been a very good person to work with most of the time i had worked with her, he told me he knew that, i had said that the last time i spoke to him about her. The Union Steward was Adamant that this was being instigated by Senior, he called him Poison during the meeting. The Production Manager, i said already was friends with "Poison" outside of work, told me that he was going to talk to Her again.
This time she was Written up and was put on Probation. I don't know what was talked about at that meeting except for 1 thing. Union Steward told me afterwards that she complained i had yelled at her. I felt sick hearing that. So ashamed. I went up to talk to her, i told her i was sorry, that i wished i hadn't had done that. We started to have a short, loud, but more or less polite conversation. She was angry she had been written up, she informed me that we could work together but were no longer "friends", i told her we had not been friends for months. She started telling me why she had done some of the things she had been dong (though i don't think i got the full story at all, but it was scratching the surface of the truth). She said she wasn't letting me finish jobs she had started because thats what Senior had told her to do, "they" not managers, had decided i couldn't handle those big complicated jobs, she told me she had stopped talking to me because i had "bitched too much" (meaning i had complained about Senior to her a few times a few months ago), She said she didn't see what the big deal was about her refusing to finish the job i had set up because "it was a quick set up", and generally she really honestly didn't understand how anything she had been doing had been wrong, even though managers had talked to her at least 3 times about it. They weren't just dumb excuses, she was really confused and didn't get it, it just didn't seem like an act to me at all. She had just been doing what Senior had told her to do. At the end of it both of us had tears in our eyes and then she fled out of the building because she had already stayed late.
After that she did a 180, at least with me. She overnight became professional and cooperative and communicative again. I had a few talks with Union Stewards (there were 2 of them). I said she was behaving and doing ok, but that i didn't trust her. There was not even the slightest hint of her being sarcastic, or disingenuous at all, but why was the change so sudden? She NEVER apologized for anything, or ever admitted that anything she had done was wrong, but it Stopped Completely. One of the fallouts was that we were Not to work on new jobs on the Old Machine, all New Jobs were to go to the New Machine as to not waste time figuring out a procedure on a machine that they were getting rid of. As a result Senior was almost completely out of our department, no longer assisting in new set ups or programs.
She started to do much better. We were getting along again like none of that stuff over the past few months had happened. But she was under probation. She kept getting in slight trouble for small things that nobody would have ever said anything about if she had done them a year ago. She screwed up a few jobs (this is not a big deal at all, we ALL do this, it just happens, mistakes) but she wasn't honest about how the jobs got messed up and tried to blame it on Lead for bad programming, even though he had nothing to do with it and wasn't even over there. They wanted "new" jobs to be taken to the new machine, but there was a gray area, what about old jobs that needed reworked and evaluated? Nobody had an answer, she took those jobs to the new machine. Not on purpose, but i worked on many of those jobs on 2nd and it wasn't a big deal at all, and it made her look incompetent, which she wasn't really. The last problem was her Apprenticeship. Company has a program and if you meet all the requirements they would sign off on your Hours for school, and they also paid your tuition while going to school. I never enrolled or did that, i had learned everything on the job, but she was in the middle of the program. Part of it was getting hours doing different things in the shop (a lot of dirty jobs nobody wanted to do). She refused to do them. Said she had a doctors note ( i don't think she did). They had already paid her tuition, now she wasn't going to get her hours signed off on.
Finally one night in November the Old Machine died. Gears Melted. I will never forget the last conversation i had with her. I was sent for cross training on another machine while they were deciding to just get rid of the old machine or try to keep it limping along since the New Machine was not ready. Me and her talked about this and she said nobody had told her what she was to be doing, she just decided to go cross train on another machine until someone told her. She smiled when she said that and she looked so beautiful. I don't think she knew at all that they were going to fire her the next day.
When i came in that day her tool box was gone. I thought it had just been moved while they worked on the broken machine. Someone told me she had just left, crying, i had missed her. When i heard, i felt sick, i got sick, i became physically ill for days. I felt such horrible guilt. I hadn't wanted her fired, i didn't even want her in trouble, but she wouldn't speak to me, i couldn't explain to her why what she was doing was wrong. I thought it was all my fault and that she didn't deserve it really, she had been good at her job and a good person to work with 90% of the time i had worked with her, and i had yelled at her and got her in trouble. I tried to call her, i wanted to check on her and see if she was ok and tell her if there was anything i could do to help her out i would. She had blocked my phone number.
I continued to work on the crippled machine at a snails pace for a few months over the rest of 2023. I was then moved to 1st shift to cross train on a few different machines the past 3 months when they finally scraped out the Old Machine.
While on 1st shift i heard things i had not heard before. There was a rumor that had spread all over the shop that she had been sleeping with Senior. That she had slept with him in exchange for him doing her work for her. I am 80% sure this just a rumor. This is why the people in other departments she had been sent to had refused to work with her and didn't want her around. She had also been sleeping with the IT guy from the office area, it's not a rumor but they had been sneaking around together and got seen by a few people. I guess i knew she was seeing someone, but i didn't care much at that point, we had stopped speaking for awhile and we had never hung out outside of work or anything, although i liked her, it just wasn't compatible or a good idea, so i never pursued it or would have. Didn't know it was someone at work. The Rumor that she was sleeping with Senior had sprung out of her coming in a few times with Hickies and being giddy, by then she had started working with him closely and a few guys resented this. They said things to her about it, they then found out she was sleeping with the IT guy and i think that several people said mean things to her about that too, under their breath, while walking past her, just with in earshot. I think she hadn't defended herself or said anything about the Rumors about her and Senior because her and IT guy wanted to keep it quiet, and she didn't want to "out" him. IT guy was married.
When i complained about Senior not fixing his mistakes to her trying to get her help, it had been at the Peak of the rumors going on about her and Senior. I knew none of this while we were having problems. I think She Took my complaint as i had joined in on the harassment and bullying. I think she thought i had betrayed her and was stabbing her in the back. That is why she was suddenly cold to me, thats why she didn't want to work with me. Further, Senior had been instructing her, but when he found out she was sleeping around with someone else at work he started telling her to do things wrong on purpose, he was purposefully trying to make her look bad and wanted her fired out of jealousy and being spurred. This conclusion i have is not fact, it is what i pieced together as best as i could.
I have never spoken to her since she was let go, and no longer have any way to contact her. I'm not sure if i would want to, and i'm not sure if she ever came back to work there again if i would be angry i had to work with her again or happy, or sad, or what. It just all goes around and around in my head, and i try to focus on other things, let it go, forget about it, but someone complains about something Senior is doing, or i have to get something from IT guy, or someone brings up some part of it, and it all spills back out into my head. I want it to go away.
I'm sorry that this is so long, but it's the details that are important, they are whats driving me crazy, and not knowing the real answers to why everything went so bad.
TLDR: Had a good friendship with a coworker turn horrible, she became nasty to me for basically no reason and was so belligerent towards me that she eventually got fired, i feel horrible guilt and confusion over the entire series of events.
2024.05.03 06:02 CringeyVal0451 The Prematurely Popping Butt-Blasting Hobbit (Married Mary, Part 8C)
Last time, Dennis showed up at my door in the middle of the night... DRUNK. Up to that point, he’d claimed to be a virtuous teetotaler, but something had apparently gone amiss. He staggered into my apartment, hurled tequila all over the place, and claimed to have pooped his pants. Neither seeing nor smelling evidence of dookie, I surmised that he was pretending to need clean underpants because he wanted to wear mine for some damn reason. And my lovesick, dong-struck, smitten AF ass was flattered.
The freshly showered, drunken little horned-up weasel finally stretched out on the couch, wearing a pair of my black boyshots. His semi-alert junk was pitching a tent, and the sack was hanging out of the small undergarment that wasn’t made to contain a male package. He kept slurring something about certain body parts being blue. I knew better. Mr. Butt-Blaster over there was in the Psych Research program, while I was in the MFT/Sex Therapy program, although we had to take a few of the same classes. Having some sex therapy training under my belt, I knew for sure that BBs are a MYTH. Genito-pelvic pain resulting from prolonged and unreleased arousal may feel subjectively painful to a small number of delusional horndogs (although self-report measures are notoriously unreliable). However... more often than not, manipulative horndogs use blue balls to coerce potential partners into pity bangs, pity tugs... pity what-have-yous. And I have receipts. Or as we say in academia... REFERENCES.
Me: Dude, that’s not a real condition. Plus, your... stuff’s hanging out of my underwear. Nothing’s blue. I’d feel better if you covered yourself with that blanket.
Dennis: It’s real, I swear! I’m in so much pain!
Me: Go yank it in the bathroom if it’s bothering you so much.
Dennis: But that’s a sin.
Me: Oh for fuck’s sake. I won’t tell Jesus.
Dennis: I need to call my friend first. We gotta paray. Pray.
Me: You need to sleep it off. You can paray in the morning.
I covered him up with the blanket as he continued to mumble about his private parts. I think I heard him apologize for being drunk, but I don’t know if he was talking to me or to Jesus. No matter. I got in bed and stared at the ceiling, both irate and elated that Dennis was on my couch. I didn’t sleep at all.
As the dawn crept through the curtains and provided a gentle golden glow in my little studio apartment, I heard The Golden God stir. Footsteps. I heard the bathroom door close. Water running. Toilet flushing. There was a bit more rustling around. And then I heard the door open. I watched through half-closed eyes as he tip-toed towards the door in clothes that still looked damp. He gingerly turned the deadbolt.
Me: Sneaking out?
Dennis jumped. “Uh. No. I didn’t want to wake you.”
Me: You really think I’d be able to sleep? I’ve been writing stories in my head all night. You’re in them...
Dennis. Sweet! Can I play myself in the movie version?
I glared at him, but I don’t think he could see my face clearly. His glasses were perched on top of his head.
Me: Anything you’d like to say to me?
Dennis: Honestly, babe. I don’t remember much. I think they goofed and put alcohol in my drink even though I ordered a virgin.
Me: Don’t call me babe.
Dennis. Oh. Okay. Sweetie, I really don’t remember last night.
Me: Do you remember the past MONTH? You asked me for a really revolting sexual favor, I declined, and you dropped off the face of the Earth. It really hurt my feelings. Am I nothing more to you than a butt to screw?
Dennis: Noooo! Babe! Uh. Sweetie... It was just an idea. I love you and I... (He said some more words, but that Delphic L-bomb was making the blood rush through my ears to the point where I couldn’t hear anything else he was saying.)
He was leaning down to kiss me when I floated back into my body. “What?”
Dennis: See you next week?
Me: Ummmm.. Yeah. Text me the details. I’m half-asleep and I’m not sure I’ll remember.
Dennis. I got you, babe.
Me: Hold up. Are you still wearing my underwear?
Dennis grinned. “Yep!”
I shook my head, laughing a little and feeling slightly flattered that he wanted to keep something of mine so close to himself. “Keep them. Consider them a reminder of the treacheries of tequila.”
He nodded, kissed my hand, and sauntered out the door. What the actual fuuuuu had just happened???
Girl Talk
The next evening, I met up with Lucy and two of her friends from a recent show, Pick-Me and Doormat. These three had bonded over a shared burning desire for a forever love. Out of the three, Lucy remained the most jaded and skeptical. After all, she could override her own desires and read people well enough to discern the possibility that Scooter (her crush) was a skin-fluter. Skin-flautist? He was GAY. He’d at least had the decency to come out to her when he picked up on her romantic feelings for him. But Scooter was still deep in the closet to the rest of the world, though.
Doormat: Lucy, what’s going on with Scoots??? You guys would make suuuuuch a cute couple.
Lucy: Yeah, that’s not happening. He’s got too much baggage from his ex-wife.
Pick-Me: Well, maybe you could find out what she did to run him off and do the exact opposite???
Lucy: Yeah, I don’t have the money for that...
(Lucy and I both laughed. Doormat and Pick-Me didn’t get the joke.)
Lucy: Okay, Val. These are my boy-crazy backstage gal pals. Present your case!
Me: The whole case? As in... butt stuff...
Lucy: No! Maybe no butt stuff with this crowd.
Pick-Me giggled. “Butt stuff? I can handle talking about that. What’s going on? Your guy wants to try anal?”
Lucy: Okayyyyy... Apparently they’re fine with it?
Me: Yeah. But that’s not even the worst of it. He disappears. And then he reappears acting like nothing was ever wrong. And he’s a religious fanatic when it’s convenient, but he’s never mentioned actually going to church. He doesn’t even wear a cross. And he lied about this summer camp...
Doormat: Girl, just give him the booty!!! That’s why he’s being shifty. He wants something taboo. Most guys need to feel like they’re bending the rules a bit.
Me: Yeah, but I don’t...
Pick-Me: Do you love this guy or not? At least try things his way.
(Yeah, that thought had unfortunately already occurred to me. And I’d dismissed it.)
Lucy: I don’t know. Ladies, we’ve gotta consider her personal limits. Then again, if you really think it’ll land you the love of your life, what’s 30 seconds of discomfort?
Pick-Me and Doormat giggled.
Me: It’s not always that quick....
Lucy: Okay, girl. But George Gay and I have already started scripting a sketch called “The Prematurely Popping Butt-Blasting Hobbit!” We’re doing it in a show at The Imp as soon as it’s ready! And I talk about him in my stand-up. He’d be good at border control ‘cause he’s a MINUTE MAN. A miniature Minute Man. He’s already a one-pump chump, and he seriously wants to put it in the donut instead of the eclair??? “Hey babe... Sorry I haven’t called. How about we... Uhhhh! Uhhhh. Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Damn. I didn’t even get my pants off! But I at least I GOT MY ROCKS OFF.”
I tapped her on the head with my straw, secretly trying not to laugh. “RUDE! Please never let him hear that.”
Lucy: I promise you that no good Christian boy would ever come to an open mic night at The Raunch Room. Or a show at The Imp. That place has gotten vile. The other girl in our troupe up and quit, and the director replaced her with this fatass sex manic. She’s disgusting. She’s obsessed with George Straight and she won’t stop going on about how much she needs some Georgie Porgie sexy time... Because she’s got “blue lips.” And then she sits there in her micro-miniskirt with her fleshy hoo-hah hanging out, rambling on about all this freaky stuff she wants to do with this dude who’s like my freakin’ brother. I can’t stand it.
Me: Gross.
Pick-Me: Wait... Lucy, did you say Denny’s a good Christian boy? Val, you have to reel him in!!!
Me: That’s the problem... I’m not sure I believe him when he says he’s a Christian. George Gay thinks he’s using religion as an excuse to ask for weird stuff in the sack.
Doormat: I bet he’s totally a Christian. They make the best husbands. You do what you gotta do to lock this one down! And if you can’t give him exactly what he wants in bed, give him something close. He’s a man. You can’t blame him if he goes looking for it elsewhere.
(I felt my fists clenching. Pick-Me and Doormat were making my brain implode.)
Me: Or maybe I need to admit that I’m not right for him and walk away? I mean, that sounds impossible right now, but I think it’d be for the best in the grand scheme of things.
Pick-Me: Nooooo! As a woman, it’s your duty to make yourself into exactly what your man wants. It sounds old-fashioned, but old-fashioned WORKS. That’s why our grandparents never got divorced!
(Yeah, I’m not sure Grandpappy was running around trying to put in in Granny’s hiney.)
How (NOT TO) Prepare for a Date
My lovestruck brain convinced my lovestruck ass to prepare itself for the possibility of an invasion. Dennis had texted me that he was coming over on Saturday night around 8:00 PM, and that he wanted nothing more than conversation and respectful making out. But he also asked me to wear lingerie...
On Friday, I went to Victoria’s Secret and abused my credit card with a very pretty, very flattering halter teddy with Swarovski crystals adorning the plunging neckline. I’m pretty flat-chested, but I’m also short-waisted, so the plunge gives the illusion of length. Once I was all set for lingerie, I got my hair professionally done, extensions and all. Then I went to the dentist and had my teeth whitened with medical grade lasers. This plunged me even further into debt, and it hurt like hell. I was crying and shaking by the end of the procedure. And my teeth hadn’t been even slightly yellowed beforehand. But I wanted Hollywood-caliber blinding white teeth.
And then, feeling like I’d just been punched in the mouth, I went to the day spa to have every bit of body hair removed, save my eyebrows. Dennis disparaged body hair on women, even the vellus hair (peach fuzz) that tended to crop up when you’re a bit malnourished. So I had everything waxed. And when I emphasize the word “everything,” I’m not just talking about my crotch and my armpits. I’m talking about my forearms. My back. My cheeks. My toes. It was like he wanted a plastic doll. And I was more than willing to get as close to that as I possibly could.
And, listen. I know this was dumb AF. No matter how much I abused my credit card with flattering garments and beauty services and cosmetic dentistry, I’d never be “Hollywood Hot.” I was “regular person attractive with a former scene kid slant,” which basically meant that nerds, theatre weirdos, and recovering scene kids found me irresistible, normal attractive dudes flirted with me some, gross guys gushed over me (although I still didn’t know how to describe or even identify a bona fide neckbeard... remember this was the 20-tweens), and image-conscious posers didn’t give me the time of day because I was a bit weird.
And I’d always been relatively fine with the way I looked until Dennis and his hot and cold whiplash got into my head. If only I were Hollywood Hot enough to serve as a trophy on his arm, maybe he’d consistently pay attention to me? BARF. And sure, I had considered that our personalities didn’t quite mesh. Even so, he kept calling (sporadically) and I kept answering (faithfully), so I decided to focus on something that I could pretend to have some semblance of control over... I could waste a shit-load of money on superficial crap that most straight guys probably wouldn’t even notice (but that might make me feel more confident in my own unnaturally hairless skin). Oh, and then there was the butt stuff...
On Saturday morning, I went to the Sal Paulo Center for Wellness and Healing and got my very first high colonic... just in case. I wish I had a disgusting story to share, but it actually wasn’t that big of a deal. My colon hydro-therapist was named Harmony, and she was able to put me at ease. I explained that I might try anal sex with my boy... with a guy I was dat... With this guy I’d been kinda seeing. So I wanted to be clean. Harmoney enthused, “Oh, that’ll be fun! But these are sooo good for you, even if you’re not planning on having visitors in there. A high colonic flushes out years and years of toxins that get trapped in the pockets of your large intestines.
This was complete BS, but Harmony was really sweet and she did a good job of keeping my mind off what was happening. Ultimately, it wasn’t painful (just a bit uncomfortable), and I did feel better and lighter and more energized when it was over. Probably no different than the way the average person would feel after taking a giant dump. Before I headed home, I popped by another salon for eyelash extensions, a mani/pedi, and a bottle of snake oil that was allegedly packed with pheromones. Well then... I suppose I was as prepared as I could be. Lightheaded and woozy from the emptying of my lower intestines, combined with the fact that I hadn’t eaten anything since Wednesday of that week, I made the long drive back to my apartment in Wellsprings and started tidying up.
As the 8:00 hour grew nearer, I wiggled into the halter teddy. I checked my hair and makeup. I changed my shoes three times. And I poured myself a small glass of Rosé to take the edge off. I gently brushed my insanely white (and incredibly sensitive) teeth and gargled with Listerine so that Dennis wouldn’t be able to smell booze on my breath... and to counteract any fasting-related halitosis that might have been present. The clock said 8:15, so I dimmed the lights, lounged on the couch, and waited.
He never showed.
Laugh at me. I’m not kidding. Please laugh. Or at least cringe. This was some of the dumbest BS I’ve ever done in an effort to please some dude. And then to get stood up... It felt like the end of the fucking world at the time, but it just seems pathetic when I look back on it. Although... to give my lovesick younger self some grace, it really was a pretty harsh blow to my little ego. I mean, at least call to cancel! Right?! Oh, that’s too much to ask from a spiritually confused young man? Okaaayyyyy... For whatever it’s worth, I wore the halter teddy for Axton a few years later and he seemed to really appreciate it. He also didn’t give a fuck about the peach fuzz on my forearms. M’kay, back to the story!
Stood Up? Stand-Up!
George and Lucy soon figured out what was going on, came over with hard liquor and a carton of Marlboro Lights, listened to me cry, shared some of their own stories of being sorely disappointed by men, and cracked me up with their “Prematuely Ejaculating Butt-Blasting Hobbit” sketch... which would eventually lead to me becoming a regular at The Imp. But, in the meantime, how did I cope with the crushing disappointment that seemed to permanently permeate my mind long after The Golden Weasel went completely radio silent... AGAIN?
Well, once we were in tech week for Cats, I barely had time to eat or sleep, let alone obsess over Dennis. And once the show opened, I took up smoking again, I dyed my hair purple, and I had a green finch, a linnet bird, a nightingale, and a blackbird tattooed on my ribs to commemorate my first leading role in a semi-professional production. It’s a very pretty and meaningful tat, and I’ve never regretted it. I loved having purple hair, although I eventually got tired of the upkeep. And I finally managed to quit smoking for good just last year. That may have been the hardest freakin’ thing I’ve ever done. But I’m a soprano again!!! In my world, that’s very, very important.
So... About halfway through the run of Cats, my phone rang at 2:00 AM. It was a number I didn’t recognize. 716 area code. Must have been a wrong number. I pressed Ignore and rolled over. The phone rang again. Same number. Again. Same number. Why the hell am I trying to create suspense??? I finally answered the butt-fucking weasel’s call.
Me: Who the fuck is this???
Dennis: Uhhh... Hey, babe. Good to talk to you, too!
Me (with as much venom as I could muster): YOU. I had written you off as a lost cause.
He laughed. “Nah, babe. I told you. I’m staying with my bro here in Buffalo. But I’m coming back to Cali in a few weeks. Whatcha... wearing?
Me: Dennis, it’s 2:00 AM...
Dennis: Ah. Darn it. It’s 11:00 here. Didn’t think about the time difference.
Me: Yeah, well. I have a matinee tomorrow. If you really wanna talk to me, call me tomorrow evening.
Dennis: Sa-sweet! What show ya doing?
Me: Cats. I told you that.
Dennis: Ew. Nobody likes that play anymore!
Me: I DO. Our audiences seem to.
Dennis: Hey, you wanna hear about the show that I just helped direct here in New York?
Me: Tomorrow.
I hung up on him and silenced my phone.
But he didn’t call the next evening. Midway through the following week, I tried to call the 716 number. No answer. I had fumed and stewed and cursed his name and gotten dangerously intoxicated and written about a hundred pages of scorned woman rage after he’d stood me up. But in time, I put my focus into rehearsals. I planned activities with my parents and my brothers since they were coming to Wellsprings to see Cats. I got back into burlesque. I enjoyed mocking “the weasel” with Darius during my voice lessons and I admitted that he’d been absolutely right about the intolerably arrogant character of the man I’d idealized. And while I wasn’t taking summer classes, I looked forward to the classes I’d be taking in the fall. Things had evened out, and I had pretty much gone back to being my perky, happy-go-lucky self.
And then Dennis rang again, claiming to be back in town. He claimed he was desperate to see me. I caved and agreed to meet him at his place. Things got spicy. And then he clutched his nuts, hung his head and begged me to whip him as he wept over his wicked sin of desire. NO. A little light BDSM (just for fun) between consenting adults isn’t shocking or off-putting to me. But this felt unhealthy.
Even students of psychology battle with mental health issues just as med students sometimes get physically ill. Dennis needed help. My best guess was that he needed some combination of psychological and spiritual counseling, but I’m not sure that an ideal hybrid exists. I tried to assure him that I was perfectly happy to avoid engaging in anything “intimate,” I offered to lend an ear, and I assured him that I didn’t think less of him because he had certain *ahem* fantasies. But he banished me, accusing me of being a wicked siren.
And my head was re-fucked after that bizarre encounter. So before long, due largely to my insistence on making things much, much weirder than they needed to be, things... got suuuuuper weird. Still dazed by Dennis’ bizarre behavior and ensuing radio silence, I decided to take drastic measures in an attempt to forget about The Golden God once and for all. That drastic measure was... Scumbanger. I’d rather not talk about that again. It’s embarrassing. Apologies to anyone who applies Rule 34 to Cats. No smut for you!
But fun random fact! Furries are NOT into Cats (the musical). They despise it. Mainly because the actors in Cats don’t wear fur suits (we wore elaborately decorated leotards and tights). And the actors in Cats have human faces (we were wearing heavy makeup, but you could still completely tell that we were people). There isn’t the anonymity that a “fursona” would allow. So, no. We didn’t have to deal with any furries yanking it in the audience or skulking around by the stage door.
Let’s pop back over to The Imp! Once Cats had opened, it was much, much easier to see the weeknight shows. The improvers were elated since George Gay’s rehearsal schedule (which was the same as mine) no longer forced them to rehearse during absurd hours. And once “The Prematurely Popping Butt-Fucking Hobbit” was ready to perform, I started seeing shows at The Imp on the regular.
It was tons of fun at first! Moe hadn’t disclosed to me that I was in his boom-boom crosshairs, so I thought he was just some eccentric old dude who made up bizarre stories using tarot cards as prompts. The fatass sex maniac that Lucy had told me about was terrible at improv. But holy crap... I laughed my ass off at her outfits, and at the fact that she often got onstage, plopped down with truckloads of grub, and proceeded to engage in what we’d now call a “muckbang” while the real comedians acted out a sketch. Was she ahead of her time???
Within the month, Cats wrapped up. Moe divulged his disgustingness and pitched a hissy fit because he was being rejected by an “older woman.” Even so, I continued to spend my Thursday nights at The Imp, careful to avoid Moe and determined to keep a safe distance from Mary. But the fall semester was upon us before I’d had enough time to get Dennis out of my system.
I’m embarrassed to admit that Moe had given me a “love banishing” spell that involved a candle, a pendulum, a few drops of my own blood, and myrrh oil. He’d passed on this “super chill Wiccan bro wisdom” before he revealed his romantic intentions, and he lorded his generosity of spirits and spells over me when I rejected his advances. Whatever. I still nicked my skin, mixed the blood with myrrh, smeared it on the pendulum and let the pendulum swing over the flame, allowing the ideomotor effect to “magically” push the pendulum clockwise or counterclockwise depending on what I wanted to hear. If I’m being brutally honest, it comforted me in those moments.
The Fall Semester (just before the events of Married Mary)
The golden weasel, prematurely popping butt-blasting hobbit, religious fanatic horndog, women’s underwear wearing weirdo... indeed resurfaced when our class schedules forced him to. We had Biological Psychology together, which didn’t exactly thrill me. That had been my favorite class as an undergrad, and I was psyched to experience the grad school version. I wasn’t about to let Dennis ruin it for me. So I vowed to keep my contact with him purely surface level. Even if that meant busting out Moe’s bullshit spell every week after class.
Of course, Dennis tried to yank me around a little more once the fall semester was in full swing. Though it was heartbreaking to keep him at arm’s length (and though I faltered many times), I realized that I simply liked him more than he liked me. And that was nobody’s fault. We met. We clicked. We low-key dated. We hooked up. And it all meant one thing to me and quite another thing to him. The longer things carried on and the more opaque the emotional connection became, the harder I tried and the harder I loved. Meanwhile, he slacked off and loved far more lightly (if indeed at all). My feelings waxed as his waned. Yes, he should have manned up and had a conversation about his waning feelings with me. That would have suuuuucked in the moment, but it would have saved me heaps of heartache in the long run.
The Diary...
Where did I go wrong with Dennis??? I think I went wrong right off the bat when I dreamt up my own version of him, fell madly in love with it, and then gave that pompous ass undue attention and too much forgiveness because he was the avatar of the dream guy I’d invented. It’s happened to me before. I think I’ve been in love with fictional characters (mostly my own) more times than I’ve been in love with real human beings.
Is that weird? It’s probably weird. I’ve also heard it’s an aro/ace thing. I’m grey aro and grey ace in case anyone’s confused by my undying love for Dennis and the crrrrazzzy hot sex with Axton. Oh, I left that part out of the Funky epilogue, didn’t I? Best to keep those details private. And I’m not gonna launch into an explanation about what “grey aro/ace” means. I realize that it’s annoying to go on about such things. If you know, you know. If you don’t, you probably don’t care. I’m not offended at all. It’s a completely understandable indifference.
So what else went wrong with Dennis? Does he deserve to get tarred and feathered, drawn and quartered, locked in the stocks to have rotten food thrown at his face? I don’t think so. I think he might have been on the spectrum. I think he was far less experienced than he let on when we entered into something vaguely resembling a romance. Eventually, I succeeded in backing away from him, although I never dramatically cut ties. That would have required giving him more undeserved attention. I simply allowed myself to lose touch with him.
Am I angry that he led me on? Not anymore. Early into the fall semester, he tried to recreate the vibe we’d had initially, but I just couldn’t trust him. I still liked him more than I cared to admit, but I politely refused his quasi-romantic advances... for the most part. But as I slipped a few times and found myself alone with him (resulting in varying degrees of intimate contact), a bizarre new behavior emerged. Dennis would sometimes ignore me at school. Grad school? Nah, son. We were back in middle school. It was infuriating. The ignoring usually happened when things had gotten spicy between us. But it wasn’t consistent. Sometimes, he was extra sweet and touchy-feely after things got spicy. It was unpredictable, inconsistent, senseless, smokin’ hot, ice cold, and completely maddening.
And I captured every little thing that transpired between us in that dreadful, dramatic diary of mine, which was brimming with saccharine statements about my undying adoration of... Dennis? The Golden God? The Golden Weasel? The Prematurely Ejaculating Butt-Blasting Hobbit? His moniker depended on my mood. I often took inspiration from Sex and the City and tried to write like Carrie when she was pining over Big. I wrote terrible poems. I tried to close the door on Dennis by writing a definitive ending to our dalliance. I tried to rewrite some of the more confusing interactions and make them make sense. I cried myself to sleep in an effort to maximally suffer because I still believed in the notion that one must reach a “suffering quota” before she’s earned the right to be happy. That’s total BS.
But now that Dennis was partially reinforcing my pining, the emotional high was off the charts whenever he would randomly pop up and express romantic desires. The high was even higher when he continued to acknowledge my existence following an expression of romantic desires. I briefly became a Behaviorist and worked privately with one of my professors to research schedules of reinforcement and the Partial Reinforcement Extinction Effect in relation to a phenomenon that Dr. Helen Fisher calls “frustration attraction.” In layman’s terms, we were researching The D.E.N.N.I.S. System. So my unintentionally hilarious giga-cringe diary also included crap-tons of research notes, many of which were terrible ideas. If you’ve ever made notes on a project, you know that the cutting room floor is there for a reason. As for me? I had accidentally saved my cutting room floor as a word document...
A year or so later, Funky hacked into my computer, found my diary, and posted it to Tumblr. I wouldn’t find out about this “publication” until a few years after I dumped Funky. And by that time, an older, even weaslier version of Dennis had seen it... More on that in The Abridged Goblinization.
Pre-Funky
I suppose I have to close this out with a small mention of Whiskers. Ugghhhh... He didn’t leave much of an impression on me until he upped his game and got waaaaay more obvious with the flirting. My head was rammed so far up Dennis’ ass (even when I hated him... perhaps most of all when I hated him), I paid no attention to any other man. With the obvious exception of the superficial attention I paid to Scumbanger.
At some point, once Mary fully loathed Whiskers and once Whiskers was able to socialize freely without Mary keeping tabs on him, I basically told him exactly what I wrote in this post about my feelings waxing while Dennis’ waned, and how I was working on accepting things for exactly what they were instead of what they might have been under different circumstances, blah, blah, blah. He sniffed out my weakness and put on this creepily consistent “attentive, emotionally available guy” act. It didn’t work on me at first because I still thought Whiskers was butt-ass ugly. But then I checked myself for being shallow and decided to give him a chance since he’d been consistently kind for several months.
After some awkward initial missteps, Whiskers (now Whisky, not yet Funky) and I got along really well and I felt proud of myself for finally being able to enjoy male attention from someone other than Dennis. I gave myself too much credit for helping Whisky escape the crazy clutches of Mary, and I broke Girl Code when I dated the bearded giant (even though Mary had been through four new men since the night of the Christmas show... and was still MARRIED). Girl Code is tricky when you’re dealing with a delusional maniac. Some would probably say that I didn’t break Girl Code. Mary said that I did. And that had some suuuuuper dramatic consequences that I’ll touch on later.
I neglected to mention this in the first Dennis chapter, but it's relevant to the story; so I'm mentioning it now. Remember how I wasn’t able to sleep next to Dennis at first because I didn’t feel comfortable enough (even though I was fine with banging him). Was that weird? It seemed a little weird to me. And I had a long think about it after I began to accept that Dennis was a douche. So I made up a new rule. No banging until I felt comfortable enough with the guy to literally sleep next to him.
I broke that rule with Scumbanger. Of course, I wasn’t trying to have a relationship with that dreamy, depthless douchebag. I also broke that rule with “Whisky.” Once. And by the time he convinced me that he had simply been too “in his head” because he cared so very much, I flat-out told him that I wasn’t going to bed him again unless I reached a point where I felt more comfortable with him. And... Dude managed to make me feel at ease. Was this an act? Of course! But how was I supposed to know it was an act? Especially when he was being infinitely kinder and more attentive to my emotions than Dennis had ever even come close to being? It honestly felt like an improvement in the beginning.
So. I fell asleep inFunky’s Whisky’s bed one night. And I took that to mean that I must have trusted him and that he might be worth considering as a legitimate romantic partner. I had established a boundary for myself long before things got real with that masked beard. And although I had faltered a few times, I felt like I was finally getting it right. A few more platonic sleepovers, and I felt confident that I had somehow walked into a hidden gem of a relationship. I was dating a guy who wasn’t my typical “type” (theatre weirdo/attention-seeking pretty boy). But he had been consistently kind. Even when he was weird at first, he was awkward and apologetic. And once things settled down and I convinced him to stop worrying about boom-boom and focus on being a genuine gentleman... He did just that. It was honestly a legitimately enjoyable companionship. AT FIRST.
And that’s how it began. Dennis, by being a middling piece of shit, had paved the way for Funky, a bona fide piece of shit alcoholic psycho, to do his very convincing impression of a normal human being (an impression that he’d honed over the many years he’d spent as Vert’s maître D), to seem like an improvement over the last guy and the guy before... Which resulted in a sense of accomplishment and personal growth when I began to catch feelings for this "hidden gem of a man." Or so I thought.
I’m still not sure if these chapters really explain anything... I think if you’re determined to dismiss my reality, you’ll never accept anything I say. I spent a few weeks writing very defensive entries in my journal, and I think I got all the poison out. So that wasn’t intended to be a passive-aggressive statement. Just a statement that hopefully demonstrates my current understanding of human nature. On the flipside, if you’re already an ally to me, you probably didn’t need this long-winded explanation in order to feel some semblance of empathy. But hopefully it was a little bit funny?
So is Dennis an entertaining character? I’m breaking the fourth wall and asking ReddX as well as the audience. Because I personally feel like this trash fire of a relationship belongs in the book version. And I’m already deep into the re-writes, so the Dennis mess is woven in from the get-go. Also... I’m not dropping any hints that Whiskers is pre-Funky. I think letting the audience in on Whiskers' future identity creates more confusion than comedy. Plus, it's probably not that hard to figure out, so I should let the audience/readers solve that mystery. I’m totally open to constructive feedback! Even if you're politely saying that I suck, I'll take it in stride and try to do better.
Alright. I’ve taken you very patient people on the lamest romantic journey of my life! And with that out of the way, let’s go have a drink at nasty-ass Beer Goggles next time! That's Married Mary (Part 9), which I posted several months back, before I decided to shoehorn the Dennis debacle into the story. Sorry if that creates any confusion. And thank you, as always, for being here!!!!
And here are some peer-reviewed articles debunking BLUE BALLS!!!
https://academic.oup.com/smoa/article/11/2/qfad016/7148610
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Peter-Anderson-38/publication/10707600_Tactics_of_sexual_coercion_When_men_and_women_won't_take_no_for_an_answelinks/59874c9745851560584cede8/Tactics-of-sexual-coercion-When-men-and-women-wont-take-no-for-an-answer.pdf
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The freshly showered, drunken little horned-up weasel finally stretched out on the couch, wearing a pair of my black boyshots. His semi-alert junk was pitching a tent, and the sack was hanging out of the small undergarment that wasn’t made to contain a male package. He kept slurring something about certain body parts being blue. I knew better. Mr. Butt-Blaster over there was in the Psych Research program, while I was in the MFT/Sex Therapy program, although we had to take a few of the same classes. Having some sex therapy training under my belt, I knew for sure that BBs are a MYTH. Genito-pelvic pain resulting from prolonged and unreleased arousal may feel subjectively painful to a small number of delusional horndogs (although self-report measures are notoriously unreliable). However... more often than not, manipulative horndogs use blue balls to coerce potential partners into pity bangs, pity tugs... pity what-have-yous. And I have receipts. Or as we say in academia... REFERENCES.
Me: Dude, that’s not a real condition. Plus, your... stuff’s hanging out of my underwear. Nothing’s blue. I’d feel better if you covered yourself with that blanket.
Dennis: It’s real, I swear! I’m in so much pain!
Me: Go yank it in the bathroom if it’s bothering you so much.
Dennis: But that’s a sin.
Me: Oh for fuck’s sake. I won’t tell Jesus.
Dennis: I need to call my friend first. We gotta paray. Pray.
Me: You need to sleep it off. You can paray in the morning.
I covered him up with the blanket as he continued to mumble about his private parts. I think I heard him apologize for being drunk, but I don’t know if he was talking to me or to Jesus. No matter. I got in bed and stared at the ceiling, both irate and elated that Dennis was on my couch. I didn’t sleep at all.
As the dawn crept through the curtains and provided a gentle golden glow in my little studio apartment, I heard The Golden God stir. Footsteps. I heard the bathroom door close. Water running. Toilet flushing. There was a bit more rustling around. And then I heard the door open. I watched through half-closed eyes as he tip-toed towards the door in clothes that still looked damp. He gingerly turned the deadbolt.
Me: Sneaking out?
Dennis jumped. “Uh. No. I didn’t want to wake you.”
Me: You really think I’d be able to sleep? I’ve been writing stories in my head all night. You’re in them...
Dennis. Sweet! Can I play myself in the movie version?
I glared at him, but I don’t think he could see my face clearly. His glasses were perched on top of his head.
Me: Anything you’d like to say to me?
Dennis: Honestly, babe. I don’t remember much. I think they goofed and put alcohol in my drink even though I ordered a virgin.
Me: Don’t call me babe.
Dennis. Oh. Okay. Sweetie, I really don’t remember last night.
Me: Do you remember the past MONTH? You asked me for a really revolting sexual favor, I declined, and you dropped off the face of the Earth. It really hurt my feelings. Am I nothing more to you than a butt to screw?
Dennis: Noooo! Babe! Uh. Sweetie... It was just an idea. I love you and I... (He said some more words, but that Delphic L-bomb was making the blood rush through my ears to the point where I couldn’t hear anything else he was saying.)
He was leaning down to kiss me when I floated back into my body. “What?”
Dennis: See you next week?
Me: Ummmm.. Yeah. Text me the details. I’m half-asleep and I’m not sure I’ll remember.
Dennis. I got you, babe.
Me: Hold up. Are you still wearing my underwear?
Dennis grinned. “Yep!”
I shook my head, laughing a little and feeling slightly flattered that he wanted to keep something of mine so close to himself. “Keep them. Consider them a reminder of the treacheries of tequila.”
He nodded, kissed my hand, and sauntered out the door. What the actual fuuuuu had just happened???
Girl Talk
The next evening, I met up with Lucy and two of her friends from a recent show, Pick-Me and Doormat. These three had bonded over a shared burning desire for a forever love. Out of the three, Lucy remained the most jaded and skeptical. After all, she could override her own desires and read people well enough to discern the possibility that Scooter (her crush) was a skin-fluter. Skin-flautist? He was GAY. He’d at least had the decency to come out to her when he picked up on her romantic feelings for him. But Scooter was still deep in the closet to the rest of the world, though.
Doormat: Lucy, what’s going on with Scoots??? You guys would make suuuuuch a cute couple.
Lucy: Yeah, that’s not happening. He’s got too much baggage from his ex-wife.
Pick-Me: Well, maybe you could find out what she did to run him off and do the exact opposite???
Lucy: Yeah, I don’t have the money for that...
(Lucy and I both laughed. Doormat and Pick-Me didn’t get the joke.)
Lucy: Okay, Val. These are my boy-crazy backstage gal pals. Present your case!
Me: The whole case? As in... butt stuff...
Lucy: No! Maybe no butt stuff with this crowd.
Pick-Me giggled. “Butt stuff? I can handle talking about that. What’s going on? Your guy wants to try anal?”
Lucy: Okayyyyy... Apparently they’re fine with it?
Me: Yeah. But that’s not even the worst of it. He disappears. And then he reappears acting like nothing was ever wrong. And he’s a religious fanatic when it’s convenient, but he’s never mentioned actually going to church. He doesn’t even wear a cross. And he lied about this summer camp...
Doormat: Girl, just give him the booty!!! That’s why he’s being shifty. He wants something taboo. Most guys need to feel like they’re bending the rules a bit.
Me: Yeah, but I don’t...
Pick-Me: Do you love this guy or not? At least try things his way.
(Yeah, that thought had unfortunately already occurred to me. And I’d dismissed it.)
Lucy: I don’t know. Ladies, we’ve gotta consider her personal limits. Then again, if you really think it’ll land you the love of your life, what’s 30 seconds of discomfort?
Pick-Me and Doormat giggled.
Me: It’s not always that quick....
Lucy: Okay, girl. But George Gay and I have already started scripting a sketch called “The Prematurely Popping Butt-Blasting Hobbit!” We’re doing it in a show at The Imp as soon as it’s ready! And I talk about him in my stand-up. He’d be good at border control ‘cause he’s a MINUTE MAN. A miniature Minute Man. He’s already a one-pump chump, and he seriously wants to put it in the donut instead of the eclair??? “Hey babe... Sorry I haven’t called. How about we... Uhhhh! Uhhhh. Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Damn. I didn’t even get my pants off! But I at least I GOT MY ROCKS OFF.”
I tapped her on the head with my straw, secretly trying not to laugh. “RUDE! Please never let him hear that.”
Lucy: I promise you that no good Christian boy would ever come to an open mic night at The Raunch Room. Or a show at The Imp. That place has gotten vile. The other girl in our troupe up and quit, and the director replaced her with this fatass sex manic. She’s disgusting. She’s obsessed with George Straight and she won’t stop going on about how much she needs some Georgie Porgie sexy time... Because she’s got “blue lips.” And then she sits there in her micro-miniskirt with her fleshy hoo-hah hanging out, rambling on about all this freaky stuff she wants to do with this dude who’s like my freakin’ brother. I can’t stand it.
Me: Gross.
Pick-Me: Wait... Lucy, did you say Denny’s a good Christian boy? Val, you have to reel him in!!!
Me: That’s the problem... I’m not sure I believe him when he says he’s a Christian. George Gay thinks he’s using religion as an excuse to ask for weird stuff in the sack.
Doormat: I bet he’s totally a Christian. They make the best husbands. You do what you gotta do to lock this one down! And if you can’t give him exactly what he wants in bed, give him something close. He’s a man. You can’t blame him if he goes looking for it elsewhere.
(I felt my fists clenching. Pick-Me and Doormat were making my brain implode.)
Me: Or maybe I need to admit that I’m not right for him and walk away? I mean, that sounds impossible right now, but I think it’d be for the best in the grand scheme of things.
Pick-Me: Nooooo! As a woman, it’s your duty to make yourself into exactly what your man wants. It sounds old-fashioned, but old-fashioned WORKS. That’s why our grandparents never got divorced!
(Yeah, I’m not sure Grandpappy was running around trying to put in in Granny’s hiney.)
How (NOT TO) Prepare for a Date
My lovestruck brain convinced my lovestruck ass to prepare itself for the possibility of an invasion. Dennis had texted me that he was coming over on Saturday night around 8:00 PM, and that he wanted nothing more than conversation and respectful making out. But he also asked me to wear lingerie...
On Friday, I went to Victoria’s Secret and abused my credit card with a very pretty, very flattering halter teddy with Swarovski crystals adorning the plunging neckline. I’m pretty flat-chested, but I’m also short-waisted, so the plunge gives the illusion of length. Once I was all set for lingerie, I got my hair professionally done, extensions and all. Then I went to the dentist and had my teeth whitened with medical grade lasers. This plunged me even further into debt, and it hurt like hell. I was crying and shaking by the end of the procedure. And my teeth hadn’t been even slightly yellowed beforehand. But I wanted Hollywood-caliber blinding white teeth.
And then, feeling like I’d just been punched in the mouth, I went to the day spa to have every bit of body hair removed, save my eyebrows. Dennis disparaged body hair on women, even the vellus hair (peach fuzz) that tended to crop up when you’re a bit malnourished. So I had everything waxed. And when I emphasize the word “everything,” I’m not just talking about my crotch and my armpits. I’m talking about my forearms. My back. My cheeks. My toes. It was like he wanted a plastic doll. And I was more than willing to get as close to that as I possibly could.
And, listen. I know this was dumb AF. No matter how much I abused my credit card with flattering garments and beauty services and cosmetic dentistry, I’d never be “Hollywood Hot.” I was “regular person attractive with a former scene kid slant,” which basically meant that nerds, theatre weirdos, and recovering scene kids found me irresistible, normal attractive dudes flirted with me some, gross guys gushed over me (although I still didn’t know how to describe or even identify a bona fide neckbeard... remember this was the 20-tweens), and image-conscious posers didn’t give me the time of day because I was a bit weird.
And I’d always been relatively fine with the way I looked until Dennis and his hot and cold whiplash got into my head. If only I were Hollywood Hot enough to serve as a trophy on his arm, maybe he’d consistently pay attention to me? BARF. And sure, I had considered that our personalities didn’t quite mesh. Even so, he kept calling (sporadically) and I kept answering (faithfully), so I decided to focus on something that I could pretend to have some semblance of control over... I could waste a shit-load of money on superficial crap that most straight guys probably wouldn’t even notice (but that might make me feel more confident in my own unnaturally hairless skin). Oh, and then there was the butt stuff...
On Saturday morning, I went to the Sal Paulo Center for Wellness and Healing and got my very first high colonic... just in case. I wish I had a disgusting story to share, but it actually wasn’t that big of a deal. My colon hydro-therapist was named Harmony, and she was able to put me at ease. I explained that I might try anal sex with my boy... with a guy I was dat... With this guy I’d been kinda seeing. So I wanted to be clean. Harmoney enthused, “Oh, that’ll be fun! But these are sooo good for you, even if you’re not planning on having visitors in there. A high colonic flushes out years and years of toxins that get trapped in the pockets of your large intestines.
This was complete BS, but Harmony was really sweet and she did a good job of keeping my mind off what was happening. Ultimately, it wasn’t painful (just a bit uncomfortable), and I did feel better and lighter and more energized when it was over. Probably no different than the way the average person would feel after taking a giant dump. Before I headed home, I popped by another salon for eyelash extensions, a mani/pedi, and a bottle of snake oil that was allegedly packed with pheromones. Well then... I suppose I was as prepared as I could be. Lightheaded and woozy from the emptying of my lower intestines, combined with the fact that I hadn’t eaten anything since Wednesday of that week, I made the long drive back to my apartment in Wellsprings and started tidying up.
As the 8:00 hour grew nearer, I wiggled into the halter teddy. I checked my hair and makeup. I changed my shoes three times. And I poured myself a small glass of Rosé to take the edge off. I gently brushed my insanely white (and incredibly sensitive) teeth and gargled with Listerine so that Dennis wouldn’t be able to smell booze on my breath... and to counteract any fasting-related halitosis that might have been present. The clock said 8:15, so I dimmed the lights, lounged on the couch, and waited.
He never showed.
Laugh at me. I’m not kidding. Please laugh. Or at least cringe. This was some of the dumbest BS I’ve ever done in an effort to please some dude. And then to get stood up... It felt like the end of the fucking world at the time, but it just seems pathetic when I look back on it. Although... to give my lovesick younger self some grace, it really was a pretty harsh blow to my little ego. I mean, at least call to cancel! Right?! Oh, that’s too much to ask from a spiritually confused young man? Okaaayyyyy... For whatever it’s worth, I wore the halter teddy for Axton a few years later and he seemed to really appreciate it. He also didn’t give a fuck about the peach fuzz on my forearms. M’kay, back to the story!
Stood Up? Stand-Up!
George and Lucy soon figured out what was going on, came over with hard liquor and a carton of Marlboro Lights, listened to me cry, shared some of their own stories of being sorely disappointed by men, and cracked me up with their “Prematuely Ejaculating Butt-Blasting Hobbit” sketch... which would eventually lead to me becoming a regular at The Imp. But, in the meantime, how did I cope with the crushing disappointment that seemed to permanently permeate my mind long after The Golden Weasel went completely radio silent... AGAIN?
Well, once we were in tech week for Cats, I barely had time to eat or sleep, let alone obsess over Dennis. And once the show opened, I took up smoking again, I dyed my hair purple, and I had a green finch, a linnet bird, a nightingale, and a blackbird tattooed on my ribs to commemorate my first leading role in a semi-professional production. It’s a very pretty and meaningful tat, and I’ve never regretted it. I loved having purple hair, although I eventually got tired of the upkeep. And I finally managed to quit smoking for good just last year. That may have been the hardest freakin’ thing I’ve ever done. But I’m a soprano again!!! In my world, that’s very, very important.
So... About halfway through the run of Cats, my phone rang at 2:00 AM. It was a number I didn’t recognize. 716 area code. Must have been a wrong number. I pressed Ignore and rolled over. The phone rang again. Same number. Again. Same number. Why the hell am I trying to create suspense??? I finally answered the butt-fucking weasel’s call.
Me: Who the fuck is this???
Dennis: Uhhh... Hey, babe. Good to talk to you, too!
Me (with as much venom as I could muster): YOU. I had written you off as a lost cause.
He laughed. “Nah, babe. I told you. I’m staying with my bro here in Buffalo. But I’m coming back to Cali in a few weeks. Whatcha... wearing?
Me: Dennis, it’s 2:00 AM...
Dennis: Ah. Darn it. It’s 11:00 here. Didn’t think about the time difference.
Me: Yeah, well. I have a matinee tomorrow. If you really wanna talk to me, call me tomorrow evening.
Dennis: Sa-sweet! What show ya doing?
Me: Cats. I told you that.
Dennis: Ew. Nobody likes that play anymore!
Me: I DO. Our audiences seem to.
Dennis: Hey, you wanna hear about the show that I just helped direct here in New York?
Me: Tomorrow.
I hung up on him and silenced my phone.
But he didn’t call the next evening. Midway through the following week, I tried to call the 716 number. No answer. I had fumed and stewed and cursed his name and gotten dangerously intoxicated and written about a hundred pages of scorned woman rage after he’d stood me up. But in time, I put my focus into rehearsals. I planned activities with my parents and my brothers since they were coming to Wellsprings to see Cats. I got back into burlesque. I enjoyed mocking “the weasel” with Darius during my voice lessons and I admitted that he’d been absolutely right about the intolerably arrogant character of the man I’d idealized. And while I wasn’t taking summer classes, I looked forward to the classes I’d be taking in the fall. Things had evened out, and I had pretty much gone back to being my perky, happy-go-lucky self.
And then Dennis rang again, claiming to be back in town. He claimed he was desperate to see me. I caved and agreed to meet him at his place. Things got spicy. And then he clutched his nuts, hung his head and begged me to whip him as he wept over his wicked sin of desire. NO. A little light BDSM (just for fun) between consenting adults isn’t shocking or off-putting to me. But this felt unhealthy.
Even students of psychology battle with mental health issues just as med students sometimes get physically ill. Dennis needed help. My best guess was that he needed some combination of psychological and spiritual counseling, but I’m not sure that an ideal hybrid exists. I tried to assure him that I was perfectly happy to avoid engaging in anything “intimate,” I offered to lend an ear, and I assured him that I didn’t think less of him because he had certain *ahem* fantasies. But he banished me, accusing me of being a wicked siren.
And my head was re-fucked after that bizarre encounter. So before long, due largely to my insistence on making things much, much weirder than they needed to be, things... got suuuuuper weird. Still dazed by Dennis’ bizarre behavior and ensuing radio silence, I decided to take drastic measures in an attempt to forget about The Golden God once and for all. That drastic measure was... Scumbanger. I’d rather not talk about that again. It’s embarrassing. Apologies to anyone who applies Rule 34 to Cats. No smut for you!
But fun random fact! Furries are NOT into Cats (the musical). They despise it. Mainly because the actors in Cats don’t wear fur suits (we wore elaborately decorated leotards and tights). And the actors in Cats have human faces (we were wearing heavy makeup, but you could still completely tell that we were people). There isn’t the anonymity that a “fursona” would allow. So, no. We didn’t have to deal with any furries yanking it in the audience or skulking around by the stage door.
Let’s pop back over to The Imp! Once Cats had opened, it was much, much easier to see the weeknight shows. The improvers were elated since George Gay’s rehearsal schedule (which was the same as mine) no longer forced them to rehearse during absurd hours. And once “The Prematurely Popping Butt-Fucking Hobbit” was ready to perform, I started seeing shows at The Imp on the regular.
It was tons of fun at first! Moe hadn’t disclosed to me that I was in his boom-boom crosshairs, so I thought he was just some eccentric old dude who made up bizarre stories using tarot cards as prompts. The fatass sex maniac that Lucy had told me about was terrible at improv. But holy crap... I laughed my ass off at her outfits, and at the fact that she often got onstage, plopped down with truckloads of grub, and proceeded to engage in what we’d now call a “muckbang” while the real comedians acted out a sketch. Was she ahead of her time???
Within the month, Cats wrapped up. Moe divulged his disgustingness and pitched a hissy fit because he was being rejected by an “older woman.” Even so, I continued to spend my Thursday nights at The Imp, careful to avoid Moe and determined to keep a safe distance from Mary. But the fall semester was upon us before I’d had enough time to get Dennis out of my system.
I’m embarrassed to admit that Moe had given me a “love banishing” spell that involved a candle, a pendulum, a few drops of my own blood, and myrrh oil. He’d passed on this “super chill Wiccan bro wisdom” before he revealed his romantic intentions, and he lorded his generosity of spirits and spells over me when I rejected his advances. Whatever. I still nicked my skin, mixed the blood with myrrh, smeared it on the pendulum and let the pendulum swing over the flame, allowing the ideomotor effect to “magically” push the pendulum clockwise or counterclockwise depending on what I wanted to hear. If I’m being brutally honest, it comforted me in those moments.
The Fall Semester (just before the events of Married Mary)
The golden weasel, prematurely popping butt-blasting hobbit, religious fanatic horndog, women’s underwear wearing weirdo... indeed resurfaced when our class schedules forced him to. We had Biological Psychology together, which didn’t exactly thrill me. That had been my favorite class as an undergrad, and I was psyched to experience the grad school version. I wasn’t about to let Dennis ruin it for me. So I vowed to keep my contact with him purely surface level. Even if that meant busting out Moe’s bullshit spell every week after class.
Of course, Dennis tried to yank me around a little more once the fall semester was in full swing. Though it was heartbreaking to keep him at arm’s length (and though I faltered many times), I realized that I simply liked him more than he liked me. And that was nobody’s fault. We met. We clicked. We low-key dated. We hooked up. And it all meant one thing to me and quite another thing to him. The longer things carried on and the more opaque the emotional connection became, the harder I tried and the harder I loved. Meanwhile, he slacked off and loved far more lightly (if indeed at all). My feelings waxed as his waned. Yes, he should have manned up and had a conversation about his waning feelings with me. That would have suuuuucked in the moment, but it would have saved me heaps of heartache in the long run.
The Diary...
Where did I go wrong with Dennis??? I think I went wrong right off the bat when I dreamt up my own version of him, fell madly in love with it, and then gave that pompous ass undue attention and too much forgiveness because he was the avatar of the dream guy I’d invented. It’s happened to me before. I think I’ve been in love with fictional characters (mostly my own) more times than I’ve been in love with real human beings.
Is that weird? It’s probably weird. I’ve also heard it’s an aro/ace thing. I’m grey aro and grey ace in case anyone’s confused by my undying love for Dennis and the crrrrazzzy hot sex with Axton. Oh, I left that part out of the Funky epilogue, didn’t I? Best to keep those details private. And I’m not gonna launch into an explanation about what “grey aro/ace” means. I realize that it’s annoying to go on about such things. If you know, you know. If you don’t, you probably don’t care. I’m not offended at all. It’s a completely understandable indifference.
So what else went wrong with Dennis? Does he deserve to get tarred and feathered, drawn and quartered, locked in the stocks to have rotten food thrown at his face? I don’t think so. I think he might have been on the spectrum. I think he was far less experienced than he let on when we entered into something vaguely resembling a romance. Eventually, I succeeded in backing away from him, although I never dramatically cut ties. That would have required giving him more undeserved attention. I simply allowed myself to lose touch with him.
Am I angry that he led me on? Not anymore. Early into the fall semester, he tried to recreate the vibe we’d had initially, but I just couldn’t trust him. I still liked him more than I cared to admit, but I politely refused his quasi-romantic advances... for the most part. But as I slipped a few times and found myself alone with him (resulting in varying degrees of intimate contact), a bizarre new behavior emerged. Dennis would sometimes ignore me at school. Grad school? Nah, son. We were back in middle school. It was infuriating. The ignoring usually happened when things had gotten spicy between us. But it wasn’t consistent. Sometimes, he was extra sweet and touchy-feely after things got spicy. It was unpredictable, inconsistent, senseless, smokin’ hot, ice cold, and completely maddening.
And I captured every little thing that transpired between us in that dreadful, dramatic diary of mine, which was brimming with saccharine statements about my undying adoration of... Dennis? The Golden God? The Golden Weasel? The Prematurely Ejaculating Butt-Blasting Hobbit? His moniker depended on my mood. I often took inspiration from Sex and the City and tried to write like Carrie when she was pining over Big. I wrote terrible poems. I tried to close the door on Dennis by writing a definitive ending to our dalliance. I tried to rewrite some of the more confusing interactions and make them make sense. I cried myself to sleep in an effort to maximally suffer because I still believed in the notion that one must reach a “suffering quota” before she’s earned the right to be happy. That’s total BS.
But now that Dennis was partially reinforcing my pining, the emotional high was off the charts whenever he would randomly pop up and express romantic desires. The high was even higher when he continued to acknowledge my existence following an expression of romantic desires. I briefly became a Behaviorist and worked privately with one of my professors to research schedules of reinforcement and the Partial Reinforcement Extinction Effect in relation to a phenomenon that Dr. Helen Fisher calls “frustration attraction.” In layman’s terms, we were researching The D.E.N.N.I.S. System. So my unintentionally hilarious giga-cringe diary also included crap-tons of research notes, many of which were terrible ideas. If you’ve ever made notes on a project, you know that the cutting room floor is there for a reason. As for me? I had accidentally saved my cutting room floor as a word document...
A year or so later, Funky hacked into my computer, found my diary, and posted it to Tumblr. I wouldn’t find out about this “publication” until a few years after I dumped Funky. And by that time, an older, even weaslier version of Dennis had seen it... More on that in The Abridged Goblinization.
Pre-Funky
I suppose I have to close this out with a small mention of Whiskers. Ugghhhh... He didn’t leave much of an impression on me until he upped his game and got waaaaay more obvious with the flirting. My head was rammed so far up Dennis’ ass (even when I hated him... perhaps most of all when I hated him), I paid no attention to any other man. With the obvious exception of the superficial attention I paid to Scumbanger.
At some point, once Mary fully loathed Whiskers and once Whiskers was able to socialize freely without Mary keeping tabs on him, I basically told him exactly what I wrote in this post about my feelings waxing while Dennis’ waned, and how I was working on accepting things for exactly what they were instead of what they might have been under different circumstances, blah, blah, blah. He sniffed out my weakness and put on this creepily consistent “attentive, emotionally available guy” act. It didn’t work on me at first because I still thought Whiskers was butt-ass ugly. But then I checked myself for being shallow and decided to give him a chance since he’d been consistently kind for several months.
After some awkward initial missteps, Whiskers (now Whisky, not yet Funky) and I got along really well and I felt proud of myself for finally being able to enjoy male attention from someone other than Dennis. I gave myself too much credit for helping Whisky escape the crazy clutches of Mary, and I broke Girl Code when I dated the bearded giant (even though Mary had been through four new men since the night of the Christmas show... and was still MARRIED). Girl Code is tricky when you’re dealing with a delusional maniac. Some would probably say that I didn’t break Girl Code. Mary said that I did. And that had some suuuuuper dramatic consequences that I’ll touch on later.
I neglected to mention this in the first Dennis chapter, but it's relevant to the story; so I'm mentioning it now. Remember how I wasn’t able to sleep next to Dennis at first because I didn’t feel comfortable enough (even though I was fine with banging him). Was that weird? It seemed a little weird to me. And I had a long think about it after I began to accept that Dennis was a douche. So I made up a new rule. No banging until I felt comfortable enough with the guy to literally sleep next to him.
I broke that rule with Scumbanger. Of course, I wasn’t trying to have a relationship with that dreamy, depthless douchebag. I also broke that rule with “Whisky.” Once. And by the time he convinced me that he had simply been too “in his head” because he cared so very much, I flat-out told him that I wasn’t going to bed him again unless I reached a point where I felt more comfortable with him. And... Dude managed to make me feel at ease. Was this an act? Of course! But how was I supposed to know it was an act? Especially when he was being infinitely kinder and more attentive to my emotions than Dennis had ever even come close to being? It honestly felt like an improvement in the beginning.
So. I fell asleep in
And that’s how it began. Dennis, by being a middling piece of shit, had paved the way for Funky, a bona fide piece of shit alcoholic psycho, to do his very convincing impression of a normal human being (an impression that he’d honed over the many years he’d spent as Vert’s maître D), to seem like an improvement over the last guy and the guy before... Which resulted in a sense of accomplishment and personal growth when I began to catch feelings for this "hidden gem of a man." Or so I thought.
I’m still not sure if these chapters really explain anything... I think if you’re determined to dismiss my reality, you’ll never accept anything I say. I spent a few weeks writing very defensive entries in my journal, and I think I got all the poison out. So that wasn’t intended to be a passive-aggressive statement. Just a statement that hopefully demonstrates my current understanding of human nature. On the flipside, if you’re already an ally to me, you probably didn’t need this long-winded explanation in order to feel some semblance of empathy. But hopefully it was a little bit funny?
So is Dennis an entertaining character? I’m breaking the fourth wall and asking ReddX as well as the audience. Because I personally feel like this trash fire of a relationship belongs in the book version. And I’m already deep into the re-writes, so the Dennis mess is woven in from the get-go. Also... I’m not dropping any hints that Whiskers is pre-Funky. I think letting the audience in on Whiskers' future identity creates more confusion than comedy. Plus, it's probably not that hard to figure out, so I should let the audience/readers solve that mystery. I’m totally open to constructive feedback! Even if you're politely saying that I suck, I'll take it in stride and try to do better.
Alright. I’ve taken you very patient people on the lamest romantic journey of my life! And with that out of the way, let’s go have a drink at nasty-ass Beer Goggles next time! That's Married Mary (Part 9), which I posted several months back, before I decided to shoehorn the Dennis debacle into the story. Sorry if that creates any confusion. And thank you, as always, for being here!!!!
And here are some peer-reviewed articles debunking BLUE BALLS!!!
https://academic.oup.com/smoa/article/11/2/qfad016/7148610
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Peter-Anderson-38/publication/10707600_Tactics_of_sexual_coercion_When_men_and_women_won't_take_no_for_an_answelinks/59874c9745851560584cede8/Tactics-of-sexual-coercion-When-men-and-women-wont-take-no-for-an-answer.pdf
2024.05.03 02:04 Only--East How do i keep roaches out of my room?
I am terrified of roaches, and we found out a few days ago we have the beginnings of a mild infestation.... At least I hope it's mild.. I haven't slept properly in days, my lights in my room always being on to try and urge the fuckers to stay away from my room. I'm burning lavender wax melts rn cause I saw that they don't like that smell.
I'm terrified that one's going to come in my room and crawl on me when im sleeping. We've set up roach motels and put poison gels in the corners of the rooms... Not on the floor though cause I don't want my dog getting it.
I may be paranoid, my mom thinks I'm just being over anxious about it and that I need to get over it because it is what it is.. I would actually lose my mind if one crawled on me or got dangerously close to me like, screaming and crying and stuff... What else can I do to safeguard myself because I don't want them anywhere near me.
submitted by Only--East to NoStupidQuestions [link] [comments]
I'm terrified that one's going to come in my room and crawl on me when im sleeping. We've set up roach motels and put poison gels in the corners of the rooms... Not on the floor though cause I don't want my dog getting it.
I may be paranoid, my mom thinks I'm just being over anxious about it and that I need to get over it because it is what it is.. I would actually lose my mind if one crawled on me or got dangerously close to me like, screaming and crying and stuff... What else can I do to safeguard myself because I don't want them anywhere near me.
2024.05.02 01:30 JN_qwe What tree is this?
 | A neighbor gave me this tree but he couldn’t remember what specie this is. I googled and it seems either a wax Myrtle or bay laurel. This has been on my mind all day long so any suggestions are welcome. submitted by JN_qwe to plants [link] [comments] If it is a bay laurel, I will probably need to give it away because Google said its leaves are poisonous to dogs. |
2024.05.01 14:39 2012XL1200 Southern Wax Myrtle Alternatives?
I have had great successes with southern Wax Myrtle in my heavy clay/limestone soil near a perennial creek.
Ive got a spot in my yard I'm trying to fill, but want to add a little diversity to my garden.
Are there any clay soil tolerant, evergreen, and fast growing trees/shrubs (preferably native)?
EDIT: Needs to be dog friendly***
submitted by 2012XL1200 to AustinGardening [link] [comments]
Ive got a spot in my yard I'm trying to fill, but want to add a little diversity to my garden.
Are there any clay soil tolerant, evergreen, and fast growing trees/shrubs (preferably native)?
EDIT: Needs to be dog friendly***
2024.05.01 06:29 CIAHerpes I died and went to Hell. Next to the Lake of Blood, I found a list of rules [part 1]
Throughout my life, I was always a piece of shit. From an early age, I joined a gang and started selling drugs. Anything from weed to heroin to crack sold itself, but on the unforgiving streets of the city, a single mistake could be fatal. I always carried a cheap burner pistol that I could throw away after using it. I know quite a few friends and acquaintances who died from drugs I sold them- some overdosing, others crashing their cars while high. A couple of them committed suicide during opiate withdrawals. One got cut in half by a train while nodding off.
But by seventeen, I had committed my first confirmed murder- a rival gang member and drug dealer who pulled a gun on me first. I had probably killed people before, but I never watched the news after a shooting or a stabbing to see the result. I wasn’t interested in the slightest.
In this case, I had just been slightly quicker than my rival and, a fraction of a second later, his forehead imploded like a smashed pumpkin in front of me, spraying bone splinters and brains all over the sidewalk. He stumbled forward a step before falling forward. His pistol went off in his dying hand, but it went low, the bullet disappearing with a crack into the nearby street. He fell forward with a dull thud, his legs kicking as if he were seizing.
The sidewalk of the dead end street we stood on spun around me for a moment. The many abandoned, rotting houses of the city loomed over us like hanging corpses. My ears gave a high-pitched shriek of tinnitus from the gunshots.
Nervous, I looked up and down the side street. The entire place seemed silent and dead. Then I heard voices nearby and saw lights turning on in the front yards and windows of houses. Without a moment of hesitation, I took off, sprinting blindly away from the crime scene, not caring much where I was going. Someone a few houses down came out, an old black man in his boxers and slippers. He saw me running and called out something in a quavering voice. I didn’t slow down for a moment.
Not long after, I heard the wailing of sirens off in the distance. They were drawing closer by the second. When the street abruptly ended in a cul-de-sac of mostly abandoned and dilapidated houses, I chose one at random and cut across its back yard, jumped over the rusted metal fence and kept on running, cutting across random yards and jumping more fences until I started making my way back towards downtown.
After about five minutes, I got to a street with a lot more traffic and people. Covered in sweat, I walked casually back towards my tiny, cockroach-infested apartment.
I thought I had gotten away with it. I thought I had been able to kill this worthless scumbag without anyone noticing. But there were more eyes glittering behind the veil than I realized at that moment.
I went back home- and that was the night I died and went to Hell.
***
I lived on the first floor in a building with falling-down rafters and a flat black roof like an infected scab. The paint on the outside was the color of vomit, the windows cracked and broken. Moreover, the place always smelled like Mexican food and chemicals, and every night, I would hear gunshots and panicked screams outside.
I sat down at the table and opened a beer. The ancient CRT TV was on, showing some old horror movie from the 1970s. I took a deep breath, relieved. I didn’t expect a thing to happen at that moment.
Suddenly, my door burst open as if someone had fired a cannonball at it. I nearly jumped out of my skin. Standing there, I saw a dozen black police in SWAT gear holding rifles. The laser sights jumped and danced across the floor before they converged on my head and chest. Someone screamed something in a hoarse voice, but I didn’t understand. The words sounded garbled, like the whispering of a demon. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion.
I fell back in my chair in surprise. A single breath later, one of them opened fire. I felt the first bullet crash through my left shoulder, felt the bone shatter and the flesh explode behind it, warm blood running down my back and chest.
The next moment, others joined in. I didn’t feel the bullet that smashed into my head and sent me to Hell. It moved fast, faster than my nerves. It must have moved as fast as death itself.
The blackness descended on me like a cloud.
***
I don’t know how much time passed. It seemed like an eternity, full of freezing darkness and screams that came from everywhere and nowhere. I remember coming awake suddenly, standing before a face formed from blinding white light. I was healed without any signs of wound or blood from the gunshots. I found myself standing naked and alone in the freezing winds.
I was shivering, my arms wrapped protectively around my chest as I stood on a flat plain of cracked, gray stone. The wind whipped around me as if I were in a hurricane, blowing sand and dust across the eternal plains. The features of the endless face constantly melted and shifted, spiraling out with bolts of lightning that cracked and sizzled all around the hurricane of light. The face seemed to stand miles high with eyes that spun like the Sun.
“Where am I?” I whispered in terror. The face of infinite light stared down at me with a blinding intensity. It seemed to see every thought, every feeling, every memory. I could feel it looking through me as if I were glass.
“You are in the Bardo,” the being said in a voice like an exploding nuclear bomb. “I am the one who sees. I am GOD, the creator of the universe and all who live within it. In the end, to Me you will always return. Did you not know you would one day have to stand here?” I shook my head.
“No… I… I…” I stuttered in terror, unable to respond.
“I have seen your evil, for indeed, I am closer to you than your own jugular vein, your own heart. Did you not see the suffering of those who harmed the innocent, those who murdered and stole and lived their lives wallowing in filth? Did you not see them get wounded, shot, stabbed, strangled and imprisoned? Did you not see them die in their evil and return to Me?”
“I did,” I admitted. “Many times.”
“And yet you have fallen into the sickness yourself,” God said in a voice like a rushing waterfall. Fury and anger seemed to seethe from him. Dozens of bolts of lightning flashed out from all sides of that radiant face. “For this, you must be purified. Your soul must be cleansed with fire. For that is the fate of those who harm the innocent- they fall down to the bottomless pit, to the blazing inferno whose fuel is men and stones. The flames eat them all greedily, and then the fires cry out to Me for more.”
My body felt like it was covered with stinging hornets. Excruciating pins and needles ran all up and down my legs and arms. I looked down, seeing a swirling dark hole opening up underneath me in the field of gray stone, spitting out drops of liquid blackness. They splashed upwards, burning through my skin like napalm, but no blood came out. It was as if my body were dissolving into dripping shadows that pulled me downwards. I felt myself slowly falling through the eternal stone plain as unseen hands dragged me away. As I descended, I heard the voice of God one last time.
“Down into the pit you will go, to the valley of wailing and the lake of flames where the damned scream for peace that never comes, to the city of shadows, to Naraka…”
***
Beneath me, the shadowy tunnel descended. I fell through it like lightning. Everything spun around me at an incredible speed. Suddenly, I broke through something, some invisible barrier in the endless darkness. I found myself falling through a cloud of suffocating smoke, and then the world opened up all around me.
A blood-red sky with thick black clouds extended out in all directions. I glimpsed a world of sharp cliffs and rivers of lava that wound their way down mountains of obsidian.
I fell through the middle of the sky at a tremendous speed, the wind whipping around my ears like a hurricane. A scream ripped its way out of my throat, but I was traveling so fast I could barely hear it as the echoes disappeared above me. Below me was what looked like a massive lake filled with blood about half a mile wide, and it was coming up to meet me fast. Many struggling bodies writhed in the currents, trying to claw their way out. I crashed through the surface at an incredible speed, going deep under the warm crimson waves.
The bloody water of the lake filled my mouth and nose with the overwhelming taste of copper and iron. I started trying to swim back up to the surface, frantically kicking and pushing with my arms and legs. I opened my eyes, and the salty blood stung them. It looked like I was peering through a translucent red film into a world of deep-sea abominations. Long snakes with two heads swam all around me, snapping and biting at each other and any legs or arms nearby. I saw them drag people down one by one, wrapping their slick bodies around their struggling victims as they drowned.
I broke through the surface, inhaling deeply. I was worried about the snakes and whatever else was slinking around down there. Thousands of people treaded water in the massive lake, trying to make their way to the shores. The nearest person to me was only ten feet away, a young woman with panicked eyes and wavy black hair. As I watched her, she gave a scream of terror and then was dragged under the surface, struggling and kicking. She never reappeared.
All around me, I smelled the fetid rot of decaying bodies. There must have been thousands and thousands of corpses at the bottom of this bloody lake. Some of them floated on top of the surface, rancid and swollen, their sightless eyes staring up at the fiery sky. The surface of the lake constantly bubbled and writhed, though whether this was from the rotting of so many bodies or from hidden monsters breathing under the surface, I didn’t yet know.
Frantically, I looked around for the nearest shore to get out of the danger. I saw that if I swam past the direction where the young woman had been, I would only have to go about two hundred feet. But my heart hammered in my chest as I remembered her being dragged under, her frantic, panicked struggling. What if the same creature was waiting over there, waiting for someone like me to try to swim over?
There were dozens more people between me and the nearest shore. Most of them climbed out, dripping drops of crimson onto the black volcanic sands of the beaches. I made my way as fast as I could in that direction, deciding to take my chances with the snakes. Otherwise, I would have to swim at least four times as far to get to the next nearest beach, which also swarmed with masses of naked people clawing their way out of the bloody lake.
A small group of people was concentrated only twenty feet away, three men who were swimming in the same direction I was. One started screaming suddenly. A purple tentacle the color of an old bruise broke through the surface of the water. To my horror, I saw it had black spikes that clicked and clacked together all along its massive arms. The spikes resembled long, hollow hypodermic needles.
The screaming man tried to swim in the opposite direction, but the tentacle wrapped around him, pulling him above the water. It tightened like a boa constrictor, the black spikes stabbing into his chest and stomach. Countless punctures opened up all along his body. The black spikes flexed, and his ribcage ripped open with a wet, ripping sound. The man’s screams abruptly cut off as his head lolled. With a sucking sound, the hollow spikes began drinking, consuming the man’s spurting blood with a sound like an inhalation of air. Slowly, almost lazily, the tentacle began dragging his limp corpse under the surface, back towards the main body of whatever monstrosity it belonged to.
The other two gave panicked sobs as more purple tentacles broke through the surface of the lake. Frantically, I started swimming around them, giving them a wide berth. Within seconds, the other two men were dragged under, deep stab wounds opening in their bodies as the hollow spikes drank greedily with loud sucking sounds.
“Fuck!” I cried, horrified. I felt something brush past my leg, something slimy and eel-like that writhed and slithered under the opaque crimson surface. In horror, I felt its slimy skin wrap around my leg, at first loosely slithering, then tightening. Two black faces with white, lidless eyes rose out of the water, the faces of serpents with fangs like switchblades. I saw both heads were connected to a single slithering body, one that wrapped slowly around my legs and arms, strangling me. Screaming, I felt its fangs dig into my neck. As the twin pairs of lidless white eyes stared at me, I tried to fight, tried to raise my arm, but it was far too strong. It dragged me under the surface.
Struggling against the beast, feeling its poison coursing through my bloodstream like lava, I drowned in the lake of blood. The experience of drowning is horrifying beyond all measure- the overwhelming fear and anxiety when you realize you have no air, the sensation of inhaling the bloody water, the sensation of dying. My vision turned black as a suffocating, clenching fist squeezed my heart. It felt like it took an eternity, but it was probably only a couple minutes at most. Death came over me then, cold and filled with small, suffocating agonies. That was the first time I died in Hell, but it would not be my last.
For in Hell, as I quickly learned, you never truly died, but were just thrown back to the beginning.
***
I felt myself falling again through the black clouds, the Lake of Blood beneath me. It all repeated like before. I screamed as I fell through the water at an incredible speed. Eldritch monstrosities were dragging people under the surface all around me. As quickly as I could, I swam towards the nearest shore. I dared not look down, didn’t dare slow for a single moment. A few times, I was nearly swiped by large, writhing tentacles, but they found other shrieking victims nearby to my immense relief.
I didn’t want to die ever again. It was a horrible sensation, though one that I would, sadly, become used to. Death followed me like a shadow, and starting over in Hell was always a nightmare.
I gave a gasp of joy when my feet touched bottom. Running through the rippling currents of blood, naked and gasping, I came upon the black sands of the shore. Looking around the lake, I saw there were four beaches, seemingly placed at each point of the compass underneath the spinning, blood-red sky.
At the end of each of the black sands lay a sparkling silver gate fifty feet tall and hundreds of feet across. The thin strands of silver intertwined like the fine filaments of a spiderweb, spiraling around each other in graceful, curving arches. Embossed over the top were the words, “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.” No one seemed to pay the gate any mind. Naked crowds of struggling people stumbled through it onto the streets of Hell, streets that were paved with human bones and stretched off to the horizon.
Skyscrapers made of obsidian with spiraling windows like the murderholes of a castle stretched hundreds of stories up into the blood-red sky. As I staggered out, pressed body to body in the thick crowd of crying, wailing people, I saw ahead of us the second mortal danger of Hell.
There were countless gangs of mostly men gathered on the streets of bone, the desperate soldiers of this apocalyptic wasteland. They huddled together in groups of ten or twelve, attacking and murdering random people who tried to sprint past from the Lake of Blood. They wore crude leather tunics and pants that looked like they were made from human skin. Some wore crude masks of human skin on their faces, ragged patches of flesh that had been cut from the bodies of the dead. They stared out with cold, emotionless eyes through the holes in the dried, leathery skin, surveying the surging crowds like lions surveying their prey.
They held primitive weapons in their hands, clubs and maces made from bone, swords sharpened from obsidian glass and even wooden spears. The wood looked strange and dark, almost like mahogany. Next to them were fires with sharpened spits of roasting human meat. The fat dripped off the dismembered arms and legs sizzling over the flames. It gave off a smell like roast pork that permeated the area, rising up in thick, fragrant clouds.
I followed the surging crowds, watching in horror as the groups of armed men attacked and killed random passersby in the crowd, dragging their limp bodies next to the fires where they stacked the unconscious or dead people in stacks like cordwood. I figured they would inevitably roast their flesh for food or make pale leather armor from their dead skin. I felt myself being pushed over in the direction of the nearest group of armed thugs. A few of the nearest men wore masks made of people’s faces, though those behind them did not, only wearing the crude leather armor instead.
One of them standing only ten feet away met my eyes, his cold killer’s gaze boring through me. The mask of skin made him look like some monster from a horror movie, with its ragged, mutilated edges and garish black stitches. He took a step towards me, raising a short spear made from a human leg bone and sharpened to a blood-stained point.
In panic, I looked around, seeing a young woman in her early twenties standing next to me. She was looking straight ahead with panic and terror in her eyes, not paying any attention to me or the men that crept towards us. With all of my strength, I shoved the woman towards the masked killer. She stumbled back in surprise, falling into the man’s weapon. His bone spear stabbed through her stomach. She looked down at her naked body in horror when the point emerged from her navel, dripping rivers of blood down her trembling legs. As she spit up trickles of blood and collapsed to her knees, I ran. A sickening crack rang out behind me like a shattering of bones, and I knew they had murdered the young woman.
I sprinted away from the gangs of cannibal killers as fast as I could, which wasn’t very fast considering how many naked, screaming bodies pressed in all on me from all sides. I felt myself being carried forward by the surging masses towards the silver gate. Hanging from the delicate silver threads, I saw signs written in many languages. I found one in English and started reading it with rapt attention, even as I was relentlessly pushed forward and elbowed and kicked.
I still remember what it said by heart.
“Rules for Naraka:
Immediately outside the gate, the beach turned into a road paved with bones. Leg bones and arm bones were laid side by side, yellowing and drying under the dark crimson sky. Skulls embedded in the center of the road grinned up at me, laughing at silent secrets I could never hope to comprehend.
Naked and barefoot, I sprinted down the road of bones between massive skyscrapers of black obsidian and gleaming red volcanic rock. People started to thin as the survivors scattered in all directions. I felt the sharp points of bone stabbing into the soles of my feet.
That was the moment the sirens began their eerie wailing, rising and falling in a dissonant cacophony, slower and deeper than any tornado siren I had ever heard. It sounded almost like a whale call, stretching out over the infernal city. They sounded from all around us, seemingly ringing out from thousands of speakers hidden throughout the obsidian towers.
I looked up suddenly. The crimson sky had changed rapidly, forming into a cyclone that swirled overhead in great black and red spirals. It met in a fiery eye at the center. As I looked up, I saw glowing orange hail soaring through the air, leaving behind streaks like thousands of comets. It fell towards the naked masses of tens of thousands of bodies pressed together on the streets.
At that moment, I remembered the rules. Some of the others apparently hadn’t read them during the panic and horror of the escape from the Lake of Blood, and they continued surging forward down the road as fire began to fall like drops of napalm all around us. Wails of agony rose up from those who were covered in the glowing lava. The people in the front of the crowd immediately fell under the heat and destruction of the firestorm. Their hair lit on fire, their skin melted and blackened, and still more fire rained down from the sky, sweeping relentlessly in our direction.
I saw an obsidian skyscraper with a great, open archway only a couple hundred feet away. The nearest of the crowd scrambled to find cover under the safety of the building. I sprinted along with them. As I reached the threshold, I felt the first burning drops of magma land on my back. I screamed as I smelled my own skin cooking and my own hair burning, and then I was through the archway. I fell, rolling on my back, trying to put out the sizzling fires that burned me like some corrosive acid.
I felt rivers of warm blood running down my back as more people ran past me, deeper into the hall. The skyscraper was massive, not only in height but in width. The hallway ran for hundreds of feet, disappearing into doorless thresholds on both sides cleaved out of the obsidian, as if the entire structure had been carved from one enormous piece of glassy stone. In the center of the hallway, it opened up into a spiraling staircase.
I looked up abruptly to see three men wearing masks made of human skin standing over me, each holding primitive bone spears in their filthy, blood-stained hands. They looked emaciated, wasted away, like the walking corpses of a death camp. To my utter astonishment, even through the layer of dried, ragged skin, I recognized one of them. It was in his gray eyes, and the twisting dragon tattoos that covered his arms and chest instantly brought a flash of memory.
“Shooter,” I said as they raised their weapons. “Shooter, it’s me. Remember me? It’s Richie.” He froze in place, looking down at me with widening eyes.
“Holy shit, Richie?” he said, tearing the mask off. “What are you doing here?” It was an absurd question, of course. What were any of us doing here?
The last time I had seen Shooter, he had been sitting a pile of blood in his car. He was one of the designated gunman for the Solid Ones, the gang we had both joined when we were young. The amazing luck of finding another Solid in this place of death was astounding. But, then again, I had known many people who had died, and I had a feeling the vast majority were here somewhere.
“I guess I died,” I said sheepishly, giving him a faint half-smile. The other two men standing by his side lowered their weapons. “Fucking pigs came in and shot me.”
“Ah, yeah,” he said, unsurprised. “They do have a tendency to do that.” He gave a low laugh. I took a long look at Shooter, who was wearing the pale skin of some unknown victim or victims of this place of agony. He reached a trembling hand down and pulled me up from the smooth surface of this strange skyscraper. More naked, scared people continued to stream past us as the sirens continued their infernal shrieking outside. Many of them had horrific burns all over their body, and a few were clearly on the verge of death by the time they had made it inside.
Farther down the hall, another ten men wearing the same garb as Shooter came towards us, holding sharpened swords of obsidian and thick clubs made of bone. Shooter put his hands up.
“Hey, I know this guy,” he said calmly, motioning over to me with an apathetic wave of his head. “He was in the same gang as me! We used to go around having a great time, I’ll tell you. Remember that time we shot at that cop and he pissed himself?” He gave a racuous laugh at that. I smiled as the memory flooded back. Shooter had definitely hit him, though I think I probably missed. I remembered the blood soaking over the arm of cop’s uniform as he lay there, gasping and turning white, his face looking bloodless and shocked. Shooter and I had run away, high-fiving each other and grinning like maniacs.
“Yeah, I do,” I said, grinning. The other men surrounded me in a semi-circle. Shooter knelt down and extended a hand to me, helping me off the ground.
“Well, you’re in good company,” he said. “Here, we can do whatever the fuck we want. What’s going to happen, after all? It’s not like we can be sent to Hell.” He laughed, and that laughter writhed with the insanity and bloodlust that seemed to be eating him from the inside like a cancer.
***
“We still need to take him to the Sergeant,” one of the masked men next to Shooter said. “We can see if he has the right stuff needed to fight with us.”
“What happens when you guys die?” I asked. “I mean, obviously, you restart at the Lake of Blood, but how do you find your way back to your gang?” Shooter shrugged.
“We always find each other again eventually,” he said. “It’s not like there’s any lack of time here. All we have is time- and fresh meat, of course. There’s always more fresh meat streaming in through the Lake of Blood. We can take whatever we need from them…” The wailing of the sirens suddenly ended as he spoke. I looked around, seeing burnt and dying people still struggling into the front hallway of the skyscraper. The smell of burning hair and searing flesh filled the entire area.
“Come on,” one of the men said. His voice was gruff, as if he had been chainsmoking five packs a day since he was a little kid. “The Sergeant is on the top floor. You’ll have to talk to him.” I nodded, knowing they would certainly kill me if I did not join their group.
But at that moment, something much worse than dying, blackened bodies crawled in through the archway. I saw it before the group of men did. Instinctively upon glimpsing it, I knew it was something terrible, something that could only live in the depths of a psychotic’s nightmare.
It stood nearly ten feet tall. Its skin was as pale as a writhing maggot. On its hairless face, I saw no eyes, no nose, no ears, just smooth, bone-white skin. It had thin lips tied together with black thread, the garish stitches poking out from the ragged, bloodless flesh. Its arms and legs looked inhumanly long and thin. Its ribs and spine jutted out as if it were a starving, rabid animal. From all around its body, an inhuman wailing started, as if dozens of demonic voices were shrieking in unison. Yet its mouth stayed firmly closed, still stitched shut.
Its fingers jutted out like railroad spikes, each a foot long. As its screaming intensified, it ran towards us, crushing the dying and injured under its naked, twisted feet. I stared into its pale, bloodless face, and even though it had no eyes, it felt like it stared straight back at me, looking into my soul.
“Don’t look at it!” Shooter screamed next to me, turning his face away. The rest of the men closed their eyes or turned away, backpedaling away from the abomination. “It will take on the shape of what you fear most! It’s a Screamer!” But it was too late. At that moment, something strange happened to the pale, naked body of the Screamer. It rippled like a mirage sizzling off the sands of a desert. Its body squeezed and contorted as the distorted shrieking around its pale, naked body grew louder and more insane.
Thin stalks of black, spidery legs began jutting out of the sides of its chest. Its face melted like wax as glittering compound eyes sprouted from the top of its head. Within seconds, it had turned into a massive spider, a black widow whose head nearly scraped the ceiling twenty feet above us. The red hourglass on its back shone brightly, as if in reminder of the imminent death it brought to anyone it touched.
I hate spiders. I’ve always hated spiders. When I saw that skittering, crawling monstrosity, something in me broke. I sprinted towards the group of men who were trying to do their best to escape without looking directly at the Screamer, hoping that the spider would choose one of them instead of me. But I heard its massive bulk following closely behind me. I could feel its insectile breath on the back of my neck.
Naked and frantic, I sprinted behind the nearest of the men and used the same tactic I had used escaping through the silver gate: I pushed the unsuspecting figure towards the abomination that rushed towards us in a blur, its eight legs pounding the glassy floor with reverberating thuds.
Drops of clear venom dripped from its fangs as it grabbed the struggling man. It bit deeply into his leg, and as the venom dripped onto his skin, it seemed to eat through his flesh like some sort of acid. The man screamed as red streaks rapidly spread up his leg throughout the rest of his body. His teeth began chattering and his pupils dilated as he stared at me accusingly. But he did not die.
The spider grabbed him and dragged him away down the hallway, down to wherever the victims of the Screamers go. I saw a dozen more of the pale, faceless monstrosities rushing in to take his place. The men looked up, and the Screamers erupted into monstrous shapes: giant, slithering snakes, a floating eyeball with black, squid-like tentacles writhing around its central mass, enormous brown recluses and black widows and faceless Grim Reapers who floated over the ground in black robes. The overwhelming sense of fear and panic I felt at that moment still stays with me to this day, and even though this happened a couple days ago and I did eventually make it out of that den of horrors, it still leaves a deep scar across my mind.
As visions from a nightmare approached us, I turned and ran.
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But by seventeen, I had committed my first confirmed murder- a rival gang member and drug dealer who pulled a gun on me first. I had probably killed people before, but I never watched the news after a shooting or a stabbing to see the result. I wasn’t interested in the slightest.
In this case, I had just been slightly quicker than my rival and, a fraction of a second later, his forehead imploded like a smashed pumpkin in front of me, spraying bone splinters and brains all over the sidewalk. He stumbled forward a step before falling forward. His pistol went off in his dying hand, but it went low, the bullet disappearing with a crack into the nearby street. He fell forward with a dull thud, his legs kicking as if he were seizing.
The sidewalk of the dead end street we stood on spun around me for a moment. The many abandoned, rotting houses of the city loomed over us like hanging corpses. My ears gave a high-pitched shriek of tinnitus from the gunshots.
Nervous, I looked up and down the side street. The entire place seemed silent and dead. Then I heard voices nearby and saw lights turning on in the front yards and windows of houses. Without a moment of hesitation, I took off, sprinting blindly away from the crime scene, not caring much where I was going. Someone a few houses down came out, an old black man in his boxers and slippers. He saw me running and called out something in a quavering voice. I didn’t slow down for a moment.
Not long after, I heard the wailing of sirens off in the distance. They were drawing closer by the second. When the street abruptly ended in a cul-de-sac of mostly abandoned and dilapidated houses, I chose one at random and cut across its back yard, jumped over the rusted metal fence and kept on running, cutting across random yards and jumping more fences until I started making my way back towards downtown.
After about five minutes, I got to a street with a lot more traffic and people. Covered in sweat, I walked casually back towards my tiny, cockroach-infested apartment.
I thought I had gotten away with it. I thought I had been able to kill this worthless scumbag without anyone noticing. But there were more eyes glittering behind the veil than I realized at that moment.
I went back home- and that was the night I died and went to Hell.
***
I lived on the first floor in a building with falling-down rafters and a flat black roof like an infected scab. The paint on the outside was the color of vomit, the windows cracked and broken. Moreover, the place always smelled like Mexican food and chemicals, and every night, I would hear gunshots and panicked screams outside.
I sat down at the table and opened a beer. The ancient CRT TV was on, showing some old horror movie from the 1970s. I took a deep breath, relieved. I didn’t expect a thing to happen at that moment.
Suddenly, my door burst open as if someone had fired a cannonball at it. I nearly jumped out of my skin. Standing there, I saw a dozen black police in SWAT gear holding rifles. The laser sights jumped and danced across the floor before they converged on my head and chest. Someone screamed something in a hoarse voice, but I didn’t understand. The words sounded garbled, like the whispering of a demon. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion.
I fell back in my chair in surprise. A single breath later, one of them opened fire. I felt the first bullet crash through my left shoulder, felt the bone shatter and the flesh explode behind it, warm blood running down my back and chest.
The next moment, others joined in. I didn’t feel the bullet that smashed into my head and sent me to Hell. It moved fast, faster than my nerves. It must have moved as fast as death itself.
The blackness descended on me like a cloud.
***
I don’t know how much time passed. It seemed like an eternity, full of freezing darkness and screams that came from everywhere and nowhere. I remember coming awake suddenly, standing before a face formed from blinding white light. I was healed without any signs of wound or blood from the gunshots. I found myself standing naked and alone in the freezing winds.
I was shivering, my arms wrapped protectively around my chest as I stood on a flat plain of cracked, gray stone. The wind whipped around me as if I were in a hurricane, blowing sand and dust across the eternal plains. The features of the endless face constantly melted and shifted, spiraling out with bolts of lightning that cracked and sizzled all around the hurricane of light. The face seemed to stand miles high with eyes that spun like the Sun.
“Where am I?” I whispered in terror. The face of infinite light stared down at me with a blinding intensity. It seemed to see every thought, every feeling, every memory. I could feel it looking through me as if I were glass.
“You are in the Bardo,” the being said in a voice like an exploding nuclear bomb. “I am the one who sees. I am GOD, the creator of the universe and all who live within it. In the end, to Me you will always return. Did you not know you would one day have to stand here?” I shook my head.
“No… I… I…” I stuttered in terror, unable to respond.
“I have seen your evil, for indeed, I am closer to you than your own jugular vein, your own heart. Did you not see the suffering of those who harmed the innocent, those who murdered and stole and lived their lives wallowing in filth? Did you not see them get wounded, shot, stabbed, strangled and imprisoned? Did you not see them die in their evil and return to Me?”
“I did,” I admitted. “Many times.”
“And yet you have fallen into the sickness yourself,” God said in a voice like a rushing waterfall. Fury and anger seemed to seethe from him. Dozens of bolts of lightning flashed out from all sides of that radiant face. “For this, you must be purified. Your soul must be cleansed with fire. For that is the fate of those who harm the innocent- they fall down to the bottomless pit, to the blazing inferno whose fuel is men and stones. The flames eat them all greedily, and then the fires cry out to Me for more.”
My body felt like it was covered with stinging hornets. Excruciating pins and needles ran all up and down my legs and arms. I looked down, seeing a swirling dark hole opening up underneath me in the field of gray stone, spitting out drops of liquid blackness. They splashed upwards, burning through my skin like napalm, but no blood came out. It was as if my body were dissolving into dripping shadows that pulled me downwards. I felt myself slowly falling through the eternal stone plain as unseen hands dragged me away. As I descended, I heard the voice of God one last time.
“Down into the pit you will go, to the valley of wailing and the lake of flames where the damned scream for peace that never comes, to the city of shadows, to Naraka…”
***
Beneath me, the shadowy tunnel descended. I fell through it like lightning. Everything spun around me at an incredible speed. Suddenly, I broke through something, some invisible barrier in the endless darkness. I found myself falling through a cloud of suffocating smoke, and then the world opened up all around me.
A blood-red sky with thick black clouds extended out in all directions. I glimpsed a world of sharp cliffs and rivers of lava that wound their way down mountains of obsidian.
I fell through the middle of the sky at a tremendous speed, the wind whipping around my ears like a hurricane. A scream ripped its way out of my throat, but I was traveling so fast I could barely hear it as the echoes disappeared above me. Below me was what looked like a massive lake filled with blood about half a mile wide, and it was coming up to meet me fast. Many struggling bodies writhed in the currents, trying to claw their way out. I crashed through the surface at an incredible speed, going deep under the warm crimson waves.
The bloody water of the lake filled my mouth and nose with the overwhelming taste of copper and iron. I started trying to swim back up to the surface, frantically kicking and pushing with my arms and legs. I opened my eyes, and the salty blood stung them. It looked like I was peering through a translucent red film into a world of deep-sea abominations. Long snakes with two heads swam all around me, snapping and biting at each other and any legs or arms nearby. I saw them drag people down one by one, wrapping their slick bodies around their struggling victims as they drowned.
I broke through the surface, inhaling deeply. I was worried about the snakes and whatever else was slinking around down there. Thousands of people treaded water in the massive lake, trying to make their way to the shores. The nearest person to me was only ten feet away, a young woman with panicked eyes and wavy black hair. As I watched her, she gave a scream of terror and then was dragged under the surface, struggling and kicking. She never reappeared.
All around me, I smelled the fetid rot of decaying bodies. There must have been thousands and thousands of corpses at the bottom of this bloody lake. Some of them floated on top of the surface, rancid and swollen, their sightless eyes staring up at the fiery sky. The surface of the lake constantly bubbled and writhed, though whether this was from the rotting of so many bodies or from hidden monsters breathing under the surface, I didn’t yet know.
Frantically, I looked around for the nearest shore to get out of the danger. I saw that if I swam past the direction where the young woman had been, I would only have to go about two hundred feet. But my heart hammered in my chest as I remembered her being dragged under, her frantic, panicked struggling. What if the same creature was waiting over there, waiting for someone like me to try to swim over?
There were dozens more people between me and the nearest shore. Most of them climbed out, dripping drops of crimson onto the black volcanic sands of the beaches. I made my way as fast as I could in that direction, deciding to take my chances with the snakes. Otherwise, I would have to swim at least four times as far to get to the next nearest beach, which also swarmed with masses of naked people clawing their way out of the bloody lake.
A small group of people was concentrated only twenty feet away, three men who were swimming in the same direction I was. One started screaming suddenly. A purple tentacle the color of an old bruise broke through the surface of the water. To my horror, I saw it had black spikes that clicked and clacked together all along its massive arms. The spikes resembled long, hollow hypodermic needles.
The screaming man tried to swim in the opposite direction, but the tentacle wrapped around him, pulling him above the water. It tightened like a boa constrictor, the black spikes stabbing into his chest and stomach. Countless punctures opened up all along his body. The black spikes flexed, and his ribcage ripped open with a wet, ripping sound. The man’s screams abruptly cut off as his head lolled. With a sucking sound, the hollow spikes began drinking, consuming the man’s spurting blood with a sound like an inhalation of air. Slowly, almost lazily, the tentacle began dragging his limp corpse under the surface, back towards the main body of whatever monstrosity it belonged to.
The other two gave panicked sobs as more purple tentacles broke through the surface of the lake. Frantically, I started swimming around them, giving them a wide berth. Within seconds, the other two men were dragged under, deep stab wounds opening in their bodies as the hollow spikes drank greedily with loud sucking sounds.
“Fuck!” I cried, horrified. I felt something brush past my leg, something slimy and eel-like that writhed and slithered under the opaque crimson surface. In horror, I felt its slimy skin wrap around my leg, at first loosely slithering, then tightening. Two black faces with white, lidless eyes rose out of the water, the faces of serpents with fangs like switchblades. I saw both heads were connected to a single slithering body, one that wrapped slowly around my legs and arms, strangling me. Screaming, I felt its fangs dig into my neck. As the twin pairs of lidless white eyes stared at me, I tried to fight, tried to raise my arm, but it was far too strong. It dragged me under the surface.
Struggling against the beast, feeling its poison coursing through my bloodstream like lava, I drowned in the lake of blood. The experience of drowning is horrifying beyond all measure- the overwhelming fear and anxiety when you realize you have no air, the sensation of inhaling the bloody water, the sensation of dying. My vision turned black as a suffocating, clenching fist squeezed my heart. It felt like it took an eternity, but it was probably only a couple minutes at most. Death came over me then, cold and filled with small, suffocating agonies. That was the first time I died in Hell, but it would not be my last.
For in Hell, as I quickly learned, you never truly died, but were just thrown back to the beginning.
***
I felt myself falling again through the black clouds, the Lake of Blood beneath me. It all repeated like before. I screamed as I fell through the water at an incredible speed. Eldritch monstrosities were dragging people under the surface all around me. As quickly as I could, I swam towards the nearest shore. I dared not look down, didn’t dare slow for a single moment. A few times, I was nearly swiped by large, writhing tentacles, but they found other shrieking victims nearby to my immense relief.
I didn’t want to die ever again. It was a horrible sensation, though one that I would, sadly, become used to. Death followed me like a shadow, and starting over in Hell was always a nightmare.
I gave a gasp of joy when my feet touched bottom. Running through the rippling currents of blood, naked and gasping, I came upon the black sands of the shore. Looking around the lake, I saw there were four beaches, seemingly placed at each point of the compass underneath the spinning, blood-red sky.
At the end of each of the black sands lay a sparkling silver gate fifty feet tall and hundreds of feet across. The thin strands of silver intertwined like the fine filaments of a spiderweb, spiraling around each other in graceful, curving arches. Embossed over the top were the words, “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.” No one seemed to pay the gate any mind. Naked crowds of struggling people stumbled through it onto the streets of Hell, streets that were paved with human bones and stretched off to the horizon.
Skyscrapers made of obsidian with spiraling windows like the murderholes of a castle stretched hundreds of stories up into the blood-red sky. As I staggered out, pressed body to body in the thick crowd of crying, wailing people, I saw ahead of us the second mortal danger of Hell.
There were countless gangs of mostly men gathered on the streets of bone, the desperate soldiers of this apocalyptic wasteland. They huddled together in groups of ten or twelve, attacking and murdering random people who tried to sprint past from the Lake of Blood. They wore crude leather tunics and pants that looked like they were made from human skin. Some wore crude masks of human skin on their faces, ragged patches of flesh that had been cut from the bodies of the dead. They stared out with cold, emotionless eyes through the holes in the dried, leathery skin, surveying the surging crowds like lions surveying their prey.
They held primitive weapons in their hands, clubs and maces made from bone, swords sharpened from obsidian glass and even wooden spears. The wood looked strange and dark, almost like mahogany. Next to them were fires with sharpened spits of roasting human meat. The fat dripped off the dismembered arms and legs sizzling over the flames. It gave off a smell like roast pork that permeated the area, rising up in thick, fragrant clouds.
I followed the surging crowds, watching in horror as the groups of armed men attacked and killed random passersby in the crowd, dragging their limp bodies next to the fires where they stacked the unconscious or dead people in stacks like cordwood. I figured they would inevitably roast their flesh for food or make pale leather armor from their dead skin. I felt myself being pushed over in the direction of the nearest group of armed thugs. A few of the nearest men wore masks made of people’s faces, though those behind them did not, only wearing the crude leather armor instead.
One of them standing only ten feet away met my eyes, his cold killer’s gaze boring through me. The mask of skin made him look like some monster from a horror movie, with its ragged, mutilated edges and garish black stitches. He took a step towards me, raising a short spear made from a human leg bone and sharpened to a blood-stained point.
In panic, I looked around, seeing a young woman in her early twenties standing next to me. She was looking straight ahead with panic and terror in her eyes, not paying any attention to me or the men that crept towards us. With all of my strength, I shoved the woman towards the masked killer. She stumbled back in surprise, falling into the man’s weapon. His bone spear stabbed through her stomach. She looked down at her naked body in horror when the point emerged from her navel, dripping rivers of blood down her trembling legs. As she spit up trickles of blood and collapsed to her knees, I ran. A sickening crack rang out behind me like a shattering of bones, and I knew they had murdered the young woman.
I sprinted away from the gangs of cannibal killers as fast as I could, which wasn’t very fast considering how many naked, screaming bodies pressed in all on me from all sides. I felt myself being carried forward by the surging masses towards the silver gate. Hanging from the delicate silver threads, I saw signs written in many languages. I found one in English and started reading it with rapt attention, even as I was relentlessly pushed forward and elbowed and kicked.
I still remember what it said by heart.
“Rules for Naraka:
- Those who are damned will be fed from the fountain of life. GOD will ensure your rebirth at the Lake of Blood. Though death may crush you over and over, there will be no rest.
- Stay away from the Screamers, the faceless ones who roam the land. Those who are taken by the Screamers will know endless torment and madness in the caverns deep under the ground.
- When the sirens in the center of Naraka wail, the firestorms are coming. Seek shelter immediately.
- Those rare ones who ascend the silver spire at the end of Naraka may find salvation, even in the city of shadows.”
Immediately outside the gate, the beach turned into a road paved with bones. Leg bones and arm bones were laid side by side, yellowing and drying under the dark crimson sky. Skulls embedded in the center of the road grinned up at me, laughing at silent secrets I could never hope to comprehend.
Naked and barefoot, I sprinted down the road of bones between massive skyscrapers of black obsidian and gleaming red volcanic rock. People started to thin as the survivors scattered in all directions. I felt the sharp points of bone stabbing into the soles of my feet.
That was the moment the sirens began their eerie wailing, rising and falling in a dissonant cacophony, slower and deeper than any tornado siren I had ever heard. It sounded almost like a whale call, stretching out over the infernal city. They sounded from all around us, seemingly ringing out from thousands of speakers hidden throughout the obsidian towers.
I looked up suddenly. The crimson sky had changed rapidly, forming into a cyclone that swirled overhead in great black and red spirals. It met in a fiery eye at the center. As I looked up, I saw glowing orange hail soaring through the air, leaving behind streaks like thousands of comets. It fell towards the naked masses of tens of thousands of bodies pressed together on the streets.
At that moment, I remembered the rules. Some of the others apparently hadn’t read them during the panic and horror of the escape from the Lake of Blood, and they continued surging forward down the road as fire began to fall like drops of napalm all around us. Wails of agony rose up from those who were covered in the glowing lava. The people in the front of the crowd immediately fell under the heat and destruction of the firestorm. Their hair lit on fire, their skin melted and blackened, and still more fire rained down from the sky, sweeping relentlessly in our direction.
I saw an obsidian skyscraper with a great, open archway only a couple hundred feet away. The nearest of the crowd scrambled to find cover under the safety of the building. I sprinted along with them. As I reached the threshold, I felt the first burning drops of magma land on my back. I screamed as I smelled my own skin cooking and my own hair burning, and then I was through the archway. I fell, rolling on my back, trying to put out the sizzling fires that burned me like some corrosive acid.
I felt rivers of warm blood running down my back as more people ran past me, deeper into the hall. The skyscraper was massive, not only in height but in width. The hallway ran for hundreds of feet, disappearing into doorless thresholds on both sides cleaved out of the obsidian, as if the entire structure had been carved from one enormous piece of glassy stone. In the center of the hallway, it opened up into a spiraling staircase.
I looked up abruptly to see three men wearing masks made of human skin standing over me, each holding primitive bone spears in their filthy, blood-stained hands. They looked emaciated, wasted away, like the walking corpses of a death camp. To my utter astonishment, even through the layer of dried, ragged skin, I recognized one of them. It was in his gray eyes, and the twisting dragon tattoos that covered his arms and chest instantly brought a flash of memory.
“Shooter,” I said as they raised their weapons. “Shooter, it’s me. Remember me? It’s Richie.” He froze in place, looking down at me with widening eyes.
“Holy shit, Richie?” he said, tearing the mask off. “What are you doing here?” It was an absurd question, of course. What were any of us doing here?
The last time I had seen Shooter, he had been sitting a pile of blood in his car. He was one of the designated gunman for the Solid Ones, the gang we had both joined when we were young. The amazing luck of finding another Solid in this place of death was astounding. But, then again, I had known many people who had died, and I had a feeling the vast majority were here somewhere.
“I guess I died,” I said sheepishly, giving him a faint half-smile. The other two men standing by his side lowered their weapons. “Fucking pigs came in and shot me.”
“Ah, yeah,” he said, unsurprised. “They do have a tendency to do that.” He gave a low laugh. I took a long look at Shooter, who was wearing the pale skin of some unknown victim or victims of this place of agony. He reached a trembling hand down and pulled me up from the smooth surface of this strange skyscraper. More naked, scared people continued to stream past us as the sirens continued their infernal shrieking outside. Many of them had horrific burns all over their body, and a few were clearly on the verge of death by the time they had made it inside.
Farther down the hall, another ten men wearing the same garb as Shooter came towards us, holding sharpened swords of obsidian and thick clubs made of bone. Shooter put his hands up.
“Hey, I know this guy,” he said calmly, motioning over to me with an apathetic wave of his head. “He was in the same gang as me! We used to go around having a great time, I’ll tell you. Remember that time we shot at that cop and he pissed himself?” He gave a racuous laugh at that. I smiled as the memory flooded back. Shooter had definitely hit him, though I think I probably missed. I remembered the blood soaking over the arm of cop’s uniform as he lay there, gasping and turning white, his face looking bloodless and shocked. Shooter and I had run away, high-fiving each other and grinning like maniacs.
“Yeah, I do,” I said, grinning. The other men surrounded me in a semi-circle. Shooter knelt down and extended a hand to me, helping me off the ground.
“Well, you’re in good company,” he said. “Here, we can do whatever the fuck we want. What’s going to happen, after all? It’s not like we can be sent to Hell.” He laughed, and that laughter writhed with the insanity and bloodlust that seemed to be eating him from the inside like a cancer.
***
“We still need to take him to the Sergeant,” one of the masked men next to Shooter said. “We can see if he has the right stuff needed to fight with us.”
“What happens when you guys die?” I asked. “I mean, obviously, you restart at the Lake of Blood, but how do you find your way back to your gang?” Shooter shrugged.
“We always find each other again eventually,” he said. “It’s not like there’s any lack of time here. All we have is time- and fresh meat, of course. There’s always more fresh meat streaming in through the Lake of Blood. We can take whatever we need from them…” The wailing of the sirens suddenly ended as he spoke. I looked around, seeing burnt and dying people still struggling into the front hallway of the skyscraper. The smell of burning hair and searing flesh filled the entire area.
“Come on,” one of the men said. His voice was gruff, as if he had been chainsmoking five packs a day since he was a little kid. “The Sergeant is on the top floor. You’ll have to talk to him.” I nodded, knowing they would certainly kill me if I did not join their group.
But at that moment, something much worse than dying, blackened bodies crawled in through the archway. I saw it before the group of men did. Instinctively upon glimpsing it, I knew it was something terrible, something that could only live in the depths of a psychotic’s nightmare.
It stood nearly ten feet tall. Its skin was as pale as a writhing maggot. On its hairless face, I saw no eyes, no nose, no ears, just smooth, bone-white skin. It had thin lips tied together with black thread, the garish stitches poking out from the ragged, bloodless flesh. Its arms and legs looked inhumanly long and thin. Its ribs and spine jutted out as if it were a starving, rabid animal. From all around its body, an inhuman wailing started, as if dozens of demonic voices were shrieking in unison. Yet its mouth stayed firmly closed, still stitched shut.
Its fingers jutted out like railroad spikes, each a foot long. As its screaming intensified, it ran towards us, crushing the dying and injured under its naked, twisted feet. I stared into its pale, bloodless face, and even though it had no eyes, it felt like it stared straight back at me, looking into my soul.
“Don’t look at it!” Shooter screamed next to me, turning his face away. The rest of the men closed their eyes or turned away, backpedaling away from the abomination. “It will take on the shape of what you fear most! It’s a Screamer!” But it was too late. At that moment, something strange happened to the pale, naked body of the Screamer. It rippled like a mirage sizzling off the sands of a desert. Its body squeezed and contorted as the distorted shrieking around its pale, naked body grew louder and more insane.
Thin stalks of black, spidery legs began jutting out of the sides of its chest. Its face melted like wax as glittering compound eyes sprouted from the top of its head. Within seconds, it had turned into a massive spider, a black widow whose head nearly scraped the ceiling twenty feet above us. The red hourglass on its back shone brightly, as if in reminder of the imminent death it brought to anyone it touched.
I hate spiders. I’ve always hated spiders. When I saw that skittering, crawling monstrosity, something in me broke. I sprinted towards the group of men who were trying to do their best to escape without looking directly at the Screamer, hoping that the spider would choose one of them instead of me. But I heard its massive bulk following closely behind me. I could feel its insectile breath on the back of my neck.
Naked and frantic, I sprinted behind the nearest of the men and used the same tactic I had used escaping through the silver gate: I pushed the unsuspecting figure towards the abomination that rushed towards us in a blur, its eight legs pounding the glassy floor with reverberating thuds.
Drops of clear venom dripped from its fangs as it grabbed the struggling man. It bit deeply into his leg, and as the venom dripped onto his skin, it seemed to eat through his flesh like some sort of acid. The man screamed as red streaks rapidly spread up his leg throughout the rest of his body. His teeth began chattering and his pupils dilated as he stared at me accusingly. But he did not die.
The spider grabbed him and dragged him away down the hallway, down to wherever the victims of the Screamers go. I saw a dozen more of the pale, faceless monstrosities rushing in to take his place. The men looked up, and the Screamers erupted into monstrous shapes: giant, slithering snakes, a floating eyeball with black, squid-like tentacles writhing around its central mass, enormous brown recluses and black widows and faceless Grim Reapers who floated over the ground in black robes. The overwhelming sense of fear and panic I felt at that moment still stays with me to this day, and even though this happened a couple days ago and I did eventually make it out of that den of horrors, it still leaves a deep scar across my mind.
As visions from a nightmare approached us, I turned and ran.
2024.05.01 06:27 CIAHerpes I died and went to Hell. Next to the Lake of Blood, I found a list of rules [part 1]
Throughout my life, I was always a piece of shit. From an early age, I joined a gang and started selling drugs. Anything from weed to heroin to crack sold itself, but on the unforgiving streets of the city, a single mistake could be fatal. I always carried a cheap burner pistol that I could throw away after using it. I know quite a few friends and acquaintances who died from drugs I sold them- some overdosing, others crashing their cars while high. A couple of them committed suicide during opiate withdrawals. One got cut in half by a train while nodding off.
But by seventeen, I had committed my first confirmed murder- a rival gang member and drug dealer who pulled a gun on me first. I had probably killed people before, but I never watched the news after a shooting or a stabbing to see the result. I wasn’t interested in the slightest.
In this case, I had just been slightly quicker than my rival and, a fraction of a second later, his forehead imploded like a smashed pumpkin in front of me, spraying bone splinters and brains all over the sidewalk. He stumbled forward a step before falling forward. His pistol went off in his dying hand, but it went low, the bullet disappearing with a crack into the nearby street. He fell forward with a dull thud, his legs kicking as if he were seizing.
The sidewalk of the dead end street we stood on spun around me for a moment. The many abandoned, rotting houses of the city loomed over us like hanging corpses. My ears gave a high-pitched shriek of tinnitus from the gunshots.
Nervous, I looked up and down the side street. The entire place seemed silent and dead. Then I heard voices nearby and saw lights turning on in the front yards and windows of houses. Without a moment of hesitation, I took off, sprinting blindly away from the crime scene, not caring much where I was going. Someone a few houses down came out, an old black man in his boxers and slippers. He saw me running and called out something in a quavering voice. I didn’t slow down for a moment.
Not long after, I heard the wailing of sirens off in the distance. They were drawing closer by the second. When the street abruptly ended in a cul-de-sac of mostly abandoned and dilapidated houses, I chose one at random and cut across its back yard, jumped over the rusted metal fence and kept on running, cutting across random yards and jumping more fences until I started making my way back towards downtown.
After about five minutes, I got to a street with a lot more traffic and people. Covered in sweat, I walked casually back towards my tiny, cockroach-infested apartment.
I thought I had gotten away with it. I thought I had been able to kill this worthless scumbag without anyone noticing. But there were more eyes glittering behind the veil than I realized at that moment.
I went back home- and that was the night I died and went to Hell.
***
I lived on the first floor in a building with falling-down rafters and a flat black roof like an infected scab. The paint on the outside was the color of vomit, the windows cracked and broken. Moreover, the place always smelled like Mexican food and chemicals, and every night, I would hear gunshots and panicked screams outside.
I sat down at the table and opened a beer. The ancient CRT TV was on, showing some old horror movie from the 1970s. I took a deep breath, relieved. I didn’t expect a thing to happen at that moment.
Suddenly, my door burst open as if someone had fired a cannonball at it. I nearly jumped out of my skin. Standing there, I saw a dozen black police in SWAT gear holding rifles. The laser sights jumped and danced across the floor before they converged on my head and chest. Someone screamed something in a hoarse voice, but I didn’t understand. The words sounded garbled, like the whispering of a demon. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion.
I fell back in my chair in surprise. A single breath later, one of them opened fire. I felt the first bullet crash through my left shoulder, felt the bone shatter and the flesh explode behind it, warm blood running down my back and chest.
The next moment, others joined in. I didn’t feel the bullet that smashed into my head and sent me to Hell. It moved fast, faster than my nerves. It must have moved as fast as death itself.
The blackness descended on me like a cloud.
***
I don’t know how much time passed. It seemed like an eternity, full of freezing darkness and screams that came from everywhere and nowhere. I remember coming awake suddenly, standing before a face formed from blinding white light. I was healed without any signs of wound or blood from the gunshots. I found myself standing naked and alone in the freezing winds.
I was shivering, my arms wrapped protectively around my chest as I stood on a flat plain of cracked, gray stone. The wind whipped around me as if I were in a hurricane, blowing sand and dust across the eternal plains. The features of the endless face constantly melted and shifted, spiraling out with bolts of lightning that cracked and sizzled all around the hurricane of light. The face seemed to stand miles high with eyes that spun like the Sun.
“Where am I?” I whispered in terror. The face of infinite light stared down at me with a blinding intensity. It seemed to see every thought, every feeling, every memory. I could feel it looking through me as if I were glass.
“You are in the Bardo,” the being said in a voice like an exploding nuclear bomb. “I am the one who sees. I am GOD, the creator of the universe and all who live within it. In the end, to Me you will always return. Did you not know you would one day have to stand here?” I shook my head.
“No… I… I…” I stuttered in terror, unable to respond.
“I have seen your evil, for indeed, I am closer to you than your own jugular vein, your own heart. Did you not see the suffering of those who harmed the innocent, those who murdered and stole and lived their lives wallowing in filth? Did you not see them get wounded, shot, stabbed, strangled and imprisoned? Did you not see them die in their evil and return to Me?”
“I did,” I admitted. “Many times.”
“And yet you have fallen into the sickness yourself,” God said in a voice like a rushing waterfall. Fury and anger seemed to seethe from him. Dozens of bolts of lightning flashed out from all sides of that radiant face. “For this, you must be purified. Your soul must be cleansed with fire. For that is the fate of those who harm the innocent- they fall down to the bottomless pit, to the blazing inferno whose fuel is men and stones. The flames eat them all greedily, and then the fires cry out to Me for more.”
My body felt like it was covered with stinging hornets. Excruciating pins and needles ran all up and down my legs and arms. I looked down, seeing a swirling dark hole opening up underneath me in the field of gray stone, spitting out drops of liquid blackness. They splashed upwards, burning through my skin like napalm, but no blood came out. It was as if my body were dissolving into dripping shadows that pulled me downwards. I felt myself slowly falling through the eternal stone plain as unseen hands dragged me away. As I descended, I heard the voice of God one last time.
“Down into the pit you will go, to the valley of wailing and the lake of flames where the damned scream for peace that never comes, to the city of shadows, to Naraka…”
***
Beneath me, the shadowy tunnel descended. I fell through it like lightning. Everything spun around me at an incredible speed. Suddenly, I broke through something, some invisible barrier in the endless darkness. I found myself falling through a cloud of suffocating smoke, and then the world opened up all around me.
A blood-red sky with thick black clouds extended out in all directions. I glimpsed a world of sharp cliffs and rivers of lava that wound their way down mountains of obsidian.
I fell through the middle of the sky at a tremendous speed, the wind whipping around my ears like a hurricane. A scream ripped its way out of my throat, but I was traveling so fast I could barely hear it as the echoes disappeared above me. Below me was what looked like a massive lake filled with blood about half a mile wide, and it was coming up to meet me fast. Many struggling bodies writhed in the currents, trying to claw their way out. I crashed through the surface at an incredible speed, going deep under the warm crimson waves.
The bloody water of the lake filled my mouth and nose with the overwhelming taste of copper and iron. I started trying to swim back up to the surface, frantically kicking and pushing with my arms and legs. I opened my eyes, and the salty blood stung them. It looked like I was peering through a translucent red film into a world of deep-sea abominations. Long snakes with two heads swam all around me, snapping and biting at each other and any legs or arms nearby. I saw them drag people down one by one, wrapping their slick bodies around their struggling victims as they drowned.
I broke through the surface, inhaling deeply. I was worried about the snakes and whatever else was slinking around down there. Thousands of people treaded water in the massive lake, trying to make their way to the shores. The nearest person to me was only ten feet away, a young woman with panicked eyes and wavy black hair. As I watched her, she gave a scream of terror and then was dragged under the surface, struggling and kicking. She never reappeared.
All around me, I smelled the fetid rot of decaying bodies. There must have been thousands and thousands of corpses at the bottom of this bloody lake. Some of them floated on top of the surface, rancid and swollen, their sightless eyes staring up at the fiery sky. The surface of the lake constantly bubbled and writhed, though whether this was from the rotting of so many bodies or from hidden monsters breathing under the surface, I didn’t yet know.
Frantically, I looked around for the nearest shore to get out of the danger. I saw that if I swam past the direction where the young woman had been, I would only have to go about two hundred feet. But my heart hammered in my chest as I remembered her being dragged under, her frantic, panicked struggling. What if the same creature was waiting over there, waiting for someone like me to try to swim over?
There were dozens more people between me and the nearest shore. Most of them climbed out, dripping drops of crimson onto the black volcanic sands of the beaches. I made my way as fast as I could in that direction, deciding to take my chances with the snakes. Otherwise, I would have to swim at least four times as far to get to the next nearest beach, which also swarmed with masses of naked people clawing their way out of the bloody lake.
A small group of people was concentrated only twenty feet away, three men who were swimming in the same direction I was. One started screaming suddenly. A purple tentacle the color of an old bruise broke through the surface of the water. To my horror, I saw it had black spikes that clicked and clacked together all along its massive arms. The spikes resembled long, hollow hypodermic needles.
The screaming man tried to swim in the opposite direction, but the tentacle wrapped around him, pulling him above the water. It tightened like a boa constrictor, the black spikes stabbing into his chest and stomach. Countless punctures opened up all along his body. The black spikes flexed, and his ribcage ripped open with a wet, ripping sound. The man’s screams abruptly cut off as his head lolled. With a sucking sound, the hollow spikes began drinking, consuming the man’s spurting blood with a sound like an inhalation of air. Slowly, almost lazily, the tentacle began dragging his limp corpse under the surface, back towards the main body of whatever monstrosity it belonged to.
The other two gave panicked sobs as more purple tentacles broke through the surface of the lake. Frantically, I started swimming around them, giving them a wide berth. Within seconds, the other two men were dragged under, deep stab wounds opening in their bodies as the hollow spikes drank greedily with loud sucking sounds.
“Fuck!” I cried, horrified. I felt something brush past my leg, something slimy and eel-like that writhed and slithered under the opaque crimson surface. In horror, I felt its slimy skin wrap around my leg, at first loosely slithering, then tightening. Two black faces with white, lidless eyes rose out of the water, the faces of serpents with fangs like switchblades. I saw both heads were connected to a single slithering body, one that wrapped slowly around my legs and arms, strangling me. Screaming, I felt its fangs dig into my neck. As the twin pairs of lidless white eyes stared at me, I tried to fight, tried to raise my arm, but it was far too strong. It dragged me under the surface.
Struggling against the beast, feeling its poison coursing through my bloodstream like lava, I drowned in the lake of blood. The experience of drowning is horrifying beyond all measure- the overwhelming fear and anxiety when you realize you have no air, the sensation of inhaling the bloody water, the sensation of dying. My vision turned black as a suffocating, clenching fist squeezed my heart. It felt like it took an eternity, but it was probably only a couple minutes at most. Death came over me then, cold and filled with small, suffocating agonies. That was the first time I died in Hell, but it would not be my last.
For in Hell, as I quickly learned, you never truly died, but were just thrown back to the beginning.
***
I felt myself falling again through the black clouds, the Lake of Blood beneath me. It all repeated like before. I screamed as I fell through the water at an incredible speed. Eldritch monstrosities were dragging people under the surface all around me. As quickly as I could, I swam towards the nearest shore. I dared not look down, didn’t dare slow for a single moment. A few times, I was nearly swiped by large, writhing tentacles, but they found other shrieking victims nearby to my immense relief.
I didn’t want to die ever again. It was a horrible sensation, though one that I would, sadly, become used to. Death followed me like a shadow, and starting over in Hell was always a nightmare.
I gave a gasp of joy when my feet touched bottom. Running through the rippling currents of blood, naked and gasping, I came upon the black sands of the shore. Looking around the lake, I saw there were four beaches, seemingly placed at each point of the compass underneath the spinning, blood-red sky.
At the end of each of the black sands lay a sparkling silver gate fifty feet tall and hundreds of feet across. The thin strands of silver intertwined like the fine filaments of a spiderweb, spiraling around each other in graceful, curving arches. Embossed over the top were the words, “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.” No one seemed to pay the gate any mind. Naked crowds of struggling people stumbled through it onto the streets of Hell, streets that were paved with human bones and stretched off to the horizon.
Skyscrapers made of obsidian with spiraling windows like the murderholes of a castle stretched hundreds of stories up into the blood-red sky. As I staggered out, pressed body to body in the thick crowd of crying, wailing people, I saw ahead of us the second mortal danger of Hell.
There were countless gangs of mostly men gathered on the streets of bone, the desperate soldiers of this apocalyptic wasteland. They huddled together in groups of ten or twelve, attacking and murdering random people who tried to sprint past from the Lake of Blood. They wore crude leather tunics and pants that looked like they were made from human skin. Some wore crude masks of human skin on their faces, ragged patches of flesh that had been cut from the bodies of the dead. They stared out with cold, emotionless eyes through the holes in the dried, leathery skin, surveying the surging crowds like lions surveying their prey.
They held primitive weapons in their hands, clubs and maces made from bone, swords sharpened from obsidian glass and even wooden spears. The wood looked strange and dark, almost like mahogany. Next to them were fires with sharpened spits of roasting human meat. The fat dripped off the dismembered arms and legs sizzling over the flames. It gave off a smell like roast pork that permeated the area, rising up in thick, fragrant clouds.
I followed the surging crowds, watching in horror as the groups of armed men attacked and killed random passersby in the crowd, dragging their limp bodies next to the fires where they stacked the unconscious or dead people in stacks like cordwood. I figured they would inevitably roast their flesh for food or make pale leather armor from their dead skin. I felt myself being pushed over in the direction of the nearest group of armed thugs. A few of the nearest men wore masks made of people’s faces, though those behind them did not, only wearing the crude leather armor instead.
One of them standing only ten feet away met my eyes, his cold killer’s gaze boring through me. The mask of skin made him look like some monster from a horror movie, with its ragged, mutilated edges and garish black stitches. He took a step towards me, raising a short spear made from a human leg bone and sharpened to a blood-stained point.
In panic, I looked around, seeing a young woman in her early twenties standing next to me. She was looking straight ahead with panic and terror in her eyes, not paying any attention to me or the men that crept towards us. With all of my strength, I shoved the woman towards the masked killer. She stumbled back in surprise, falling into the man’s weapon. His bone spear stabbed through her stomach. She looked down at her naked body in horror when the point emerged from her navel, dripping rivers of blood down her trembling legs. As she spit up trickles of blood and collapsed to her knees, I ran. A sickening crack rang out behind me like a shattering of bones, and I knew they had murdered the young woman.
I sprinted away from the gangs of cannibal killers as fast as I could, which wasn’t very fast considering how many naked, screaming bodies pressed in all on me from all sides. I felt myself being carried forward by the surging masses towards the silver gate. Hanging from the delicate silver threads, I saw signs written in many languages. I found one in English and started reading it with rapt attention, even as I was relentlessly pushed forward and elbowed and kicked.
I still remember what it said by heart.
“Rules for Naraka:
Immediately outside the gate, the beach turned into a road paved with bones. Leg bones and arm bones were laid side by side, yellowing and drying under the dark crimson sky. Skulls embedded in the center of the road grinned up at me, laughing at silent secrets I could never hope to comprehend.
Naked and barefoot, I sprinted down the road of bones between massive skyscrapers of black obsidian and gleaming red volcanic rock. People started to thin as the survivors scattered in all directions. I felt the sharp points of bone stabbing into the soles of my feet.
That was the moment the sirens began their eerie wailing, rising and falling in a dissonant cacophony, slower and deeper than any tornado siren I had ever heard. It sounded almost like a whale call, stretching out over the infernal city. They sounded from all around us, seemingly ringing out from thousands of speakers hidden throughout the obsidian towers.
I looked up suddenly. The crimson sky had changed rapidly, forming into a cyclone that swirled overhead in great black and red spirals. It met in a fiery eye at the center. As I looked up, I saw glowing orange hail soaring through the air, leaving behind streaks like thousands of comets. It fell towards the naked masses of tens of thousands of bodies pressed together on the streets.
At that moment, I remembered the rules. Some of the others apparently hadn’t read them during the panic and horror of the escape from the Lake of Blood, and they continued surging forward down the road as fire began to fall like drops of napalm all around us. Wails of agony rose up from those who were covered in the glowing lava. The people in the front of the crowd immediately fell under the heat and destruction of the firestorm. Their hair lit on fire, their skin melted and blackened, and still more fire rained down from the sky, sweeping relentlessly in our direction.
I saw an obsidian skyscraper with a great, open archway only a couple hundred feet away. The nearest of the crowd scrambled to find cover under the safety of the building. I sprinted along with them. As I reached the threshold, I felt the first burning drops of magma land on my back. I screamed as I smelled my own skin cooking and my own hair burning, and then I was through the archway. I fell, rolling on my back, trying to put out the sizzling fires that burned me like some corrosive acid.
I felt rivers of warm blood running down my back as more people ran past me, deeper into the hall. The skyscraper was massive, not only in height but in width. The hallway ran for hundreds of feet, disappearing into doorless thresholds on both sides cleaved out of the obsidian, as if the entire structure had been carved from one enormous piece of glassy stone. In the center of the hallway, it opened up into a spiraling staircase.
I looked up abruptly to see three men wearing masks made of human skin standing over me, each holding primitive bone spears in their filthy, blood-stained hands. They looked emaciated, wasted away, like the walking corpses of a death camp. To my utter astonishment, even through the layer of dried, ragged skin, I recognized one of them. It was in his gray eyes, and the twisting dragon tattoos that covered his arms and chest instantly brought a flash of memory.
“Shooter,” I said as they raised their weapons. “Shooter, it’s me. Remember me? It’s Richie.” He froze in place, looking down at me with widening eyes.
“Holy shit, Richie?” he said, tearing the mask off. “What are you doing here?” It was an absurd question, of course. What were any of us doing here?
The last time I had seen Shooter, he had been sitting a pile of blood in his car. He was one of the designated gunman for the Solid Ones, the gang we had both joined when we were young. The amazing luck of finding another Solid in this place of death was astounding. But, then again, I had known many people who had died, and I had a feeling the vast majority were here somewhere.
“I guess I died,” I said sheepishly, giving him a faint half-smile. The other two men standing by his side lowered their weapons. “Fucking pigs came in and shot me.”
“Ah, yeah,” he said, unsurprised. “They do have a tendency to do that.” He gave a low laugh. I took a long look at Shooter, who was wearing the pale skin of some unknown victim or victims of this place of agony. He reached a trembling hand down and pulled me up from the smooth surface of this strange skyscraper. More naked, scared people continued to stream past us as the sirens continued their infernal shrieking outside. Many of them had horrific burns all over their body, and a few were clearly on the verge of death by the time they had made it inside.
Farther down the hall, another ten men wearing the same garb as Shooter came towards us, holding sharpened swords of obsidian and thick clubs made of bone. Shooter put his hands up.
“Hey, I know this guy,” he said calmly, motioning over to me with an apathetic wave of his head. “He was in the same gang as me! We used to go around having a great time, I’ll tell you. Remember that time we shot at that cop and he pissed himself?” He gave a racuous laugh at that. I smiled as the memory flooded back. Shooter had definitely hit him, though I think I probably missed. I remembered the blood soaking over the arm of cop’s uniform as he lay there, gasping and turning white, his face looking bloodless and shocked. Shooter and I had run away, high-fiving each other and grinning like maniacs.
“Yeah, I do,” I said, grinning. The other men surrounded me in a semi-circle. Shooter knelt down and extended a hand to me, helping me off the ground.
“Well, you’re in good company,” he said. “Here, we can do whatever the fuck we want. What’s going to happen, after all? It’s not like we can be sent to Hell.” He laughed, and that laughter writhed with the insanity and bloodlust that seemed to be eating him from the inside like a cancer.
***
“We still need to take him to the Sergeant,” one of the masked men next to Shooter said. “We can see if he has the right stuff needed to fight with us.”
“What happens when you guys die?” I asked. “I mean, obviously, you restart at the Lake of Blood, but how do you find your way back to your gang?” Shooter shrugged.
“We always find each other again eventually,” he said. “It’s not like there’s any lack of time here. All we have is time- and fresh meat, of course. There’s always more fresh meat streaming in through the Lake of Blood. We can take whatever we need from them…” The wailing of the sirens suddenly ended as he spoke. I looked around, seeing burnt and dying people still struggling into the front hallway of the skyscraper. The smell of burning hair and searing flesh filled the entire area.
“Come on,” one of the men said. His voice was gruff, as if he had been chainsmoking five packs a day since he was a little kid. “The Sergeant is on the top floor. You’ll have to talk to him.” I nodded, knowing they would certainly kill me if I did not join their group.
But at that moment, something much worse than dying, blackened bodies crawled in through the archway. I saw it before the group of men did. Instinctively upon glimpsing it, I knew it was something terrible, something that could only live in the depths of a psychotic’s nightmare.
It stood nearly ten feet tall. Its skin was as pale as a writhing maggot. On its hairless face, I saw no eyes, no nose, no ears, just smooth, bone-white skin. It had thin lips tied together with black thread, the garish stitches poking out from the ragged, bloodless flesh. Its arms and legs looked inhumanly long and thin. Its ribs and spine jutted out as if it were a starving, rabid animal. From all around its body, an inhuman wailing started, as if dozens of demonic voices were shrieking in unison. Yet its mouth stayed firmly closed, still stitched shut.
Its fingers jutted out like railroad spikes, each a foot long. As its screaming intensified, it ran towards us, crushing the dying and injured under its naked, twisted feet. I stared into its pale, bloodless face, and even though it had no eyes, it felt like it stared straight back at me, looking into my soul.
“Don’t look at it!” Shooter screamed next to me, turning his face away. The rest of the men closed their eyes or turned away, backpedaling away from the abomination. “It will take on the shape of what you fear most! It’s a Screamer!” But it was too late. At that moment, something strange happened to the pale, naked body of the Screamer. It rippled like a mirage sizzling off the sands of a desert. Its body squeezed and contorted as the distorted shrieking around its pale, naked body grew louder and more insane.
Thin stalks of black, spidery legs began jutting out of the sides of its chest. Its face melted like wax as glittering compound eyes sprouted from the top of its head. Within seconds, it had turned into a massive spider, a black widow whose head nearly scraped the ceiling twenty feet above us. The red hourglass on its back shone brightly, as if in reminder of the imminent death it brought to anyone it touched.
I hate spiders. I’ve always hated spiders. When I saw that skittering, crawling monstrosity, something in me broke. I sprinted towards the group of men who were trying to do their best to escape without looking directly at the Screamer, hoping that the spider would choose one of them instead of me. But I heard its massive bulk following closely behind me. I could feel its insectile breath on the back of my neck.
Naked and frantic, I sprinted behind the nearest of the men and used the same tactic I had used escaping through the silver gate: I pushed the unsuspecting figure towards the abomination that rushed towards us in a blur, its eight legs pounding the glassy floor with reverberating thuds.
Drops of clear venom dripped from its fangs as it grabbed the struggling man. It bit deeply into his leg, and as the venom dripped onto his skin, it seemed to eat through his flesh like some sort of acid. The man screamed as red streaks rapidly spread up his leg throughout the rest of his body. His teeth began chattering and his pupils dilated as he stared at me accusingly. But he did not die.
The spider grabbed him and dragged him away down the hallway, down to wherever the victims of the Screamers go. I saw a dozen more of the pale, faceless monstrosities rushing in to take his place. The men looked up, and the Screamers erupted into monstrous shapes: giant, slithering snakes, a floating eyeball with black, squid-like tentacles writhing around its central mass, enormous brown recluses and black widows and faceless Grim Reapers who floated over the ground in black robes. The overwhelming sense of fear and panic I felt at that moment still stays with me to this day, and even though this happened a couple days ago and I did eventually make it out of that den of horrors, it still leaves a deep scar across my mind.
As visions from a nightmare approached us, I turned and ran.
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But by seventeen, I had committed my first confirmed murder- a rival gang member and drug dealer who pulled a gun on me first. I had probably killed people before, but I never watched the news after a shooting or a stabbing to see the result. I wasn’t interested in the slightest.
In this case, I had just been slightly quicker than my rival and, a fraction of a second later, his forehead imploded like a smashed pumpkin in front of me, spraying bone splinters and brains all over the sidewalk. He stumbled forward a step before falling forward. His pistol went off in his dying hand, but it went low, the bullet disappearing with a crack into the nearby street. He fell forward with a dull thud, his legs kicking as if he were seizing.
The sidewalk of the dead end street we stood on spun around me for a moment. The many abandoned, rotting houses of the city loomed over us like hanging corpses. My ears gave a high-pitched shriek of tinnitus from the gunshots.
Nervous, I looked up and down the side street. The entire place seemed silent and dead. Then I heard voices nearby and saw lights turning on in the front yards and windows of houses. Without a moment of hesitation, I took off, sprinting blindly away from the crime scene, not caring much where I was going. Someone a few houses down came out, an old black man in his boxers and slippers. He saw me running and called out something in a quavering voice. I didn’t slow down for a moment.
Not long after, I heard the wailing of sirens off in the distance. They were drawing closer by the second. When the street abruptly ended in a cul-de-sac of mostly abandoned and dilapidated houses, I chose one at random and cut across its back yard, jumped over the rusted metal fence and kept on running, cutting across random yards and jumping more fences until I started making my way back towards downtown.
After about five minutes, I got to a street with a lot more traffic and people. Covered in sweat, I walked casually back towards my tiny, cockroach-infested apartment.
I thought I had gotten away with it. I thought I had been able to kill this worthless scumbag without anyone noticing. But there were more eyes glittering behind the veil than I realized at that moment.
I went back home- and that was the night I died and went to Hell.
***
I lived on the first floor in a building with falling-down rafters and a flat black roof like an infected scab. The paint on the outside was the color of vomit, the windows cracked and broken. Moreover, the place always smelled like Mexican food and chemicals, and every night, I would hear gunshots and panicked screams outside.
I sat down at the table and opened a beer. The ancient CRT TV was on, showing some old horror movie from the 1970s. I took a deep breath, relieved. I didn’t expect a thing to happen at that moment.
Suddenly, my door burst open as if someone had fired a cannonball at it. I nearly jumped out of my skin. Standing there, I saw a dozen black police in SWAT gear holding rifles. The laser sights jumped and danced across the floor before they converged on my head and chest. Someone screamed something in a hoarse voice, but I didn’t understand. The words sounded garbled, like the whispering of a demon. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion.
I fell back in my chair in surprise. A single breath later, one of them opened fire. I felt the first bullet crash through my left shoulder, felt the bone shatter and the flesh explode behind it, warm blood running down my back and chest.
The next moment, others joined in. I didn’t feel the bullet that smashed into my head and sent me to Hell. It moved fast, faster than my nerves. It must have moved as fast as death itself.
The blackness descended on me like a cloud.
***
I don’t know how much time passed. It seemed like an eternity, full of freezing darkness and screams that came from everywhere and nowhere. I remember coming awake suddenly, standing before a face formed from blinding white light. I was healed without any signs of wound or blood from the gunshots. I found myself standing naked and alone in the freezing winds.
I was shivering, my arms wrapped protectively around my chest as I stood on a flat plain of cracked, gray stone. The wind whipped around me as if I were in a hurricane, blowing sand and dust across the eternal plains. The features of the endless face constantly melted and shifted, spiraling out with bolts of lightning that cracked and sizzled all around the hurricane of light. The face seemed to stand miles high with eyes that spun like the Sun.
“Where am I?” I whispered in terror. The face of infinite light stared down at me with a blinding intensity. It seemed to see every thought, every feeling, every memory. I could feel it looking through me as if I were glass.
“You are in the Bardo,” the being said in a voice like an exploding nuclear bomb. “I am the one who sees. I am GOD, the creator of the universe and all who live within it. In the end, to Me you will always return. Did you not know you would one day have to stand here?” I shook my head.
“No… I… I…” I stuttered in terror, unable to respond.
“I have seen your evil, for indeed, I am closer to you than your own jugular vein, your own heart. Did you not see the suffering of those who harmed the innocent, those who murdered and stole and lived their lives wallowing in filth? Did you not see them get wounded, shot, stabbed, strangled and imprisoned? Did you not see them die in their evil and return to Me?”
“I did,” I admitted. “Many times.”
“And yet you have fallen into the sickness yourself,” God said in a voice like a rushing waterfall. Fury and anger seemed to seethe from him. Dozens of bolts of lightning flashed out from all sides of that radiant face. “For this, you must be purified. Your soul must be cleansed with fire. For that is the fate of those who harm the innocent- they fall down to the bottomless pit, to the blazing inferno whose fuel is men and stones. The flames eat them all greedily, and then the fires cry out to Me for more.”
My body felt like it was covered with stinging hornets. Excruciating pins and needles ran all up and down my legs and arms. I looked down, seeing a swirling dark hole opening up underneath me in the field of gray stone, spitting out drops of liquid blackness. They splashed upwards, burning through my skin like napalm, but no blood came out. It was as if my body were dissolving into dripping shadows that pulled me downwards. I felt myself slowly falling through the eternal stone plain as unseen hands dragged me away. As I descended, I heard the voice of God one last time.
“Down into the pit you will go, to the valley of wailing and the lake of flames where the damned scream for peace that never comes, to the city of shadows, to Naraka…”
***
Beneath me, the shadowy tunnel descended. I fell through it like lightning. Everything spun around me at an incredible speed. Suddenly, I broke through something, some invisible barrier in the endless darkness. I found myself falling through a cloud of suffocating smoke, and then the world opened up all around me.
A blood-red sky with thick black clouds extended out in all directions. I glimpsed a world of sharp cliffs and rivers of lava that wound their way down mountains of obsidian.
I fell through the middle of the sky at a tremendous speed, the wind whipping around my ears like a hurricane. A scream ripped its way out of my throat, but I was traveling so fast I could barely hear it as the echoes disappeared above me. Below me was what looked like a massive lake filled with blood about half a mile wide, and it was coming up to meet me fast. Many struggling bodies writhed in the currents, trying to claw their way out. I crashed through the surface at an incredible speed, going deep under the warm crimson waves.
The bloody water of the lake filled my mouth and nose with the overwhelming taste of copper and iron. I started trying to swim back up to the surface, frantically kicking and pushing with my arms and legs. I opened my eyes, and the salty blood stung them. It looked like I was peering through a translucent red film into a world of deep-sea abominations. Long snakes with two heads swam all around me, snapping and biting at each other and any legs or arms nearby. I saw them drag people down one by one, wrapping their slick bodies around their struggling victims as they drowned.
I broke through the surface, inhaling deeply. I was worried about the snakes and whatever else was slinking around down there. Thousands of people treaded water in the massive lake, trying to make their way to the shores. The nearest person to me was only ten feet away, a young woman with panicked eyes and wavy black hair. As I watched her, she gave a scream of terror and then was dragged under the surface, struggling and kicking. She never reappeared.
All around me, I smelled the fetid rot of decaying bodies. There must have been thousands and thousands of corpses at the bottom of this bloody lake. Some of them floated on top of the surface, rancid and swollen, their sightless eyes staring up at the fiery sky. The surface of the lake constantly bubbled and writhed, though whether this was from the rotting of so many bodies or from hidden monsters breathing under the surface, I didn’t yet know.
Frantically, I looked around for the nearest shore to get out of the danger. I saw that if I swam past the direction where the young woman had been, I would only have to go about two hundred feet. But my heart hammered in my chest as I remembered her being dragged under, her frantic, panicked struggling. What if the same creature was waiting over there, waiting for someone like me to try to swim over?
There were dozens more people between me and the nearest shore. Most of them climbed out, dripping drops of crimson onto the black volcanic sands of the beaches. I made my way as fast as I could in that direction, deciding to take my chances with the snakes. Otherwise, I would have to swim at least four times as far to get to the next nearest beach, which also swarmed with masses of naked people clawing their way out of the bloody lake.
A small group of people was concentrated only twenty feet away, three men who were swimming in the same direction I was. One started screaming suddenly. A purple tentacle the color of an old bruise broke through the surface of the water. To my horror, I saw it had black spikes that clicked and clacked together all along its massive arms. The spikes resembled long, hollow hypodermic needles.
The screaming man tried to swim in the opposite direction, but the tentacle wrapped around him, pulling him above the water. It tightened like a boa constrictor, the black spikes stabbing into his chest and stomach. Countless punctures opened up all along his body. The black spikes flexed, and his ribcage ripped open with a wet, ripping sound. The man’s screams abruptly cut off as his head lolled. With a sucking sound, the hollow spikes began drinking, consuming the man’s spurting blood with a sound like an inhalation of air. Slowly, almost lazily, the tentacle began dragging his limp corpse under the surface, back towards the main body of whatever monstrosity it belonged to.
The other two gave panicked sobs as more purple tentacles broke through the surface of the lake. Frantically, I started swimming around them, giving them a wide berth. Within seconds, the other two men were dragged under, deep stab wounds opening in their bodies as the hollow spikes drank greedily with loud sucking sounds.
“Fuck!” I cried, horrified. I felt something brush past my leg, something slimy and eel-like that writhed and slithered under the opaque crimson surface. In horror, I felt its slimy skin wrap around my leg, at first loosely slithering, then tightening. Two black faces with white, lidless eyes rose out of the water, the faces of serpents with fangs like switchblades. I saw both heads were connected to a single slithering body, one that wrapped slowly around my legs and arms, strangling me. Screaming, I felt its fangs dig into my neck. As the twin pairs of lidless white eyes stared at me, I tried to fight, tried to raise my arm, but it was far too strong. It dragged me under the surface.
Struggling against the beast, feeling its poison coursing through my bloodstream like lava, I drowned in the lake of blood. The experience of drowning is horrifying beyond all measure- the overwhelming fear and anxiety when you realize you have no air, the sensation of inhaling the bloody water, the sensation of dying. My vision turned black as a suffocating, clenching fist squeezed my heart. It felt like it took an eternity, but it was probably only a couple minutes at most. Death came over me then, cold and filled with small, suffocating agonies. That was the first time I died in Hell, but it would not be my last.
For in Hell, as I quickly learned, you never truly died, but were just thrown back to the beginning.
***
I felt myself falling again through the black clouds, the Lake of Blood beneath me. It all repeated like before. I screamed as I fell through the water at an incredible speed. Eldritch monstrosities were dragging people under the surface all around me. As quickly as I could, I swam towards the nearest shore. I dared not look down, didn’t dare slow for a single moment. A few times, I was nearly swiped by large, writhing tentacles, but they found other shrieking victims nearby to my immense relief.
I didn’t want to die ever again. It was a horrible sensation, though one that I would, sadly, become used to. Death followed me like a shadow, and starting over in Hell was always a nightmare.
I gave a gasp of joy when my feet touched bottom. Running through the rippling currents of blood, naked and gasping, I came upon the black sands of the shore. Looking around the lake, I saw there were four beaches, seemingly placed at each point of the compass underneath the spinning, blood-red sky.
At the end of each of the black sands lay a sparkling silver gate fifty feet tall and hundreds of feet across. The thin strands of silver intertwined like the fine filaments of a spiderweb, spiraling around each other in graceful, curving arches. Embossed over the top were the words, “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.” No one seemed to pay the gate any mind. Naked crowds of struggling people stumbled through it onto the streets of Hell, streets that were paved with human bones and stretched off to the horizon.
Skyscrapers made of obsidian with spiraling windows like the murderholes of a castle stretched hundreds of stories up into the blood-red sky. As I staggered out, pressed body to body in the thick crowd of crying, wailing people, I saw ahead of us the second mortal danger of Hell.
There were countless gangs of mostly men gathered on the streets of bone, the desperate soldiers of this apocalyptic wasteland. They huddled together in groups of ten or twelve, attacking and murdering random people who tried to sprint past from the Lake of Blood. They wore crude leather tunics and pants that looked like they were made from human skin. Some wore crude masks of human skin on their faces, ragged patches of flesh that had been cut from the bodies of the dead. They stared out with cold, emotionless eyes through the holes in the dried, leathery skin, surveying the surging crowds like lions surveying their prey.
They held primitive weapons in their hands, clubs and maces made from bone, swords sharpened from obsidian glass and even wooden spears. The wood looked strange and dark, almost like mahogany. Next to them were fires with sharpened spits of roasting human meat. The fat dripped off the dismembered arms and legs sizzling over the flames. It gave off a smell like roast pork that permeated the area, rising up in thick, fragrant clouds.
I followed the surging crowds, watching in horror as the groups of armed men attacked and killed random passersby in the crowd, dragging their limp bodies next to the fires where they stacked the unconscious or dead people in stacks like cordwood. I figured they would inevitably roast their flesh for food or make pale leather armor from their dead skin. I felt myself being pushed over in the direction of the nearest group of armed thugs. A few of the nearest men wore masks made of people’s faces, though those behind them did not, only wearing the crude leather armor instead.
One of them standing only ten feet away met my eyes, his cold killer’s gaze boring through me. The mask of skin made him look like some monster from a horror movie, with its ragged, mutilated edges and garish black stitches. He took a step towards me, raising a short spear made from a human leg bone and sharpened to a blood-stained point.
In panic, I looked around, seeing a young woman in her early twenties standing next to me. She was looking straight ahead with panic and terror in her eyes, not paying any attention to me or the men that crept towards us. With all of my strength, I shoved the woman towards the masked killer. She stumbled back in surprise, falling into the man’s weapon. His bone spear stabbed through her stomach. She looked down at her naked body in horror when the point emerged from her navel, dripping rivers of blood down her trembling legs. As she spit up trickles of blood and collapsed to her knees, I ran. A sickening crack rang out behind me like a shattering of bones, and I knew they had murdered the young woman.
I sprinted away from the gangs of cannibal killers as fast as I could, which wasn’t very fast considering how many naked, screaming bodies pressed in all on me from all sides. I felt myself being carried forward by the surging masses towards the silver gate. Hanging from the delicate silver threads, I saw signs written in many languages. I found one in English and started reading it with rapt attention, even as I was relentlessly pushed forward and elbowed and kicked.
I still remember what it said by heart.
“Rules for Naraka:
- Those who are damned will be fed from the fountain of life. GOD will ensure your rebirth at the Lake of Blood. Though death may crush you over and over, there will be no rest.
- Stay away from the Screamers, the faceless ones who roam the land. Those who are taken by the Screamers will know endless torment and madness in the caverns deep under the ground.
- When the sirens in the center of Naraka wail, the firestorms are coming. Seek shelter immediately.
- Those rare ones who ascend the silver spire at the end of Naraka may find salvation, even in the city of shadows.”
Immediately outside the gate, the beach turned into a road paved with bones. Leg bones and arm bones were laid side by side, yellowing and drying under the dark crimson sky. Skulls embedded in the center of the road grinned up at me, laughing at silent secrets I could never hope to comprehend.
Naked and barefoot, I sprinted down the road of bones between massive skyscrapers of black obsidian and gleaming red volcanic rock. People started to thin as the survivors scattered in all directions. I felt the sharp points of bone stabbing into the soles of my feet.
That was the moment the sirens began their eerie wailing, rising and falling in a dissonant cacophony, slower and deeper than any tornado siren I had ever heard. It sounded almost like a whale call, stretching out over the infernal city. They sounded from all around us, seemingly ringing out from thousands of speakers hidden throughout the obsidian towers.
I looked up suddenly. The crimson sky had changed rapidly, forming into a cyclone that swirled overhead in great black and red spirals. It met in a fiery eye at the center. As I looked up, I saw glowing orange hail soaring through the air, leaving behind streaks like thousands of comets. It fell towards the naked masses of tens of thousands of bodies pressed together on the streets.
At that moment, I remembered the rules. Some of the others apparently hadn’t read them during the panic and horror of the escape from the Lake of Blood, and they continued surging forward down the road as fire began to fall like drops of napalm all around us. Wails of agony rose up from those who were covered in the glowing lava. The people in the front of the crowd immediately fell under the heat and destruction of the firestorm. Their hair lit on fire, their skin melted and blackened, and still more fire rained down from the sky, sweeping relentlessly in our direction.
I saw an obsidian skyscraper with a great, open archway only a couple hundred feet away. The nearest of the crowd scrambled to find cover under the safety of the building. I sprinted along with them. As I reached the threshold, I felt the first burning drops of magma land on my back. I screamed as I smelled my own skin cooking and my own hair burning, and then I was through the archway. I fell, rolling on my back, trying to put out the sizzling fires that burned me like some corrosive acid.
I felt rivers of warm blood running down my back as more people ran past me, deeper into the hall. The skyscraper was massive, not only in height but in width. The hallway ran for hundreds of feet, disappearing into doorless thresholds on both sides cleaved out of the obsidian, as if the entire structure had been carved from one enormous piece of glassy stone. In the center of the hallway, it opened up into a spiraling staircase.
I looked up abruptly to see three men wearing masks made of human skin standing over me, each holding primitive bone spears in their filthy, blood-stained hands. They looked emaciated, wasted away, like the walking corpses of a death camp. To my utter astonishment, even through the layer of dried, ragged skin, I recognized one of them. It was in his gray eyes, and the twisting dragon tattoos that covered his arms and chest instantly brought a flash of memory.
“Shooter,” I said as they raised their weapons. “Shooter, it’s me. Remember me? It’s Richie.” He froze in place, looking down at me with widening eyes.
“Holy shit, Richie?” he said, tearing the mask off. “What are you doing here?” It was an absurd question, of course. What were any of us doing here?
The last time I had seen Shooter, he had been sitting a pile of blood in his car. He was one of the designated gunman for the Solid Ones, the gang we had both joined when we were young. The amazing luck of finding another Solid in this place of death was astounding. But, then again, I had known many people who had died, and I had a feeling the vast majority were here somewhere.
“I guess I died,” I said sheepishly, giving him a faint half-smile. The other two men standing by his side lowered their weapons. “Fucking pigs came in and shot me.”
“Ah, yeah,” he said, unsurprised. “They do have a tendency to do that.” He gave a low laugh. I took a long look at Shooter, who was wearing the pale skin of some unknown victim or victims of this place of agony. He reached a trembling hand down and pulled me up from the smooth surface of this strange skyscraper. More naked, scared people continued to stream past us as the sirens continued their infernal shrieking outside. Many of them had horrific burns all over their body, and a few were clearly on the verge of death by the time they had made it inside.
Farther down the hall, another ten men wearing the same garb as Shooter came towards us, holding sharpened swords of obsidian and thick clubs made of bone. Shooter put his hands up.
“Hey, I know this guy,” he said calmly, motioning over to me with an apathetic wave of his head. “He was in the same gang as me! We used to go around having a great time, I’ll tell you. Remember that time we shot at that cop and he pissed himself?” He gave a racuous laugh at that. I smiled as the memory flooded back. Shooter had definitely hit him, though I think I probably missed. I remembered the blood soaking over the arm of cop’s uniform as he lay there, gasping and turning white, his face looking bloodless and shocked. Shooter and I had run away, high-fiving each other and grinning like maniacs.
“Yeah, I do,” I said, grinning. The other men surrounded me in a semi-circle. Shooter knelt down and extended a hand to me, helping me off the ground.
“Well, you’re in good company,” he said. “Here, we can do whatever the fuck we want. What’s going to happen, after all? It’s not like we can be sent to Hell.” He laughed, and that laughter writhed with the insanity and bloodlust that seemed to be eating him from the inside like a cancer.
***
“We still need to take him to the Sergeant,” one of the masked men next to Shooter said. “We can see if he has the right stuff needed to fight with us.”
“What happens when you guys die?” I asked. “I mean, obviously, you restart at the Lake of Blood, but how do you find your way back to your gang?” Shooter shrugged.
“We always find each other again eventually,” he said. “It’s not like there’s any lack of time here. All we have is time- and fresh meat, of course. There’s always more fresh meat streaming in through the Lake of Blood. We can take whatever we need from them…” The wailing of the sirens suddenly ended as he spoke. I looked around, seeing burnt and dying people still struggling into the front hallway of the skyscraper. The smell of burning hair and searing flesh filled the entire area.
“Come on,” one of the men said. His voice was gruff, as if he had been chainsmoking five packs a day since he was a little kid. “The Sergeant is on the top floor. You’ll have to talk to him.” I nodded, knowing they would certainly kill me if I did not join their group.
But at that moment, something much worse than dying, blackened bodies crawled in through the archway. I saw it before the group of men did. Instinctively upon glimpsing it, I knew it was something terrible, something that could only live in the depths of a psychotic’s nightmare.
It stood nearly ten feet tall. Its skin was as pale as a writhing maggot. On its hairless face, I saw no eyes, no nose, no ears, just smooth, bone-white skin. It had thin lips tied together with black thread, the garish stitches poking out from the ragged, bloodless flesh. Its arms and legs looked inhumanly long and thin. Its ribs and spine jutted out as if it were a starving, rabid animal. From all around its body, an inhuman wailing started, as if dozens of demonic voices were shrieking in unison. Yet its mouth stayed firmly closed, still stitched shut.
Its fingers jutted out like railroad spikes, each a foot long. As its screaming intensified, it ran towards us, crushing the dying and injured under its naked, twisted feet. I stared into its pale, bloodless face, and even though it had no eyes, it felt like it stared straight back at me, looking into my soul.
“Don’t look at it!” Shooter screamed next to me, turning his face away. The rest of the men closed their eyes or turned away, backpedaling away from the abomination. “It will take on the shape of what you fear most! It’s a Screamer!” But it was too late. At that moment, something strange happened to the pale, naked body of the Screamer. It rippled like a mirage sizzling off the sands of a desert. Its body squeezed and contorted as the distorted shrieking around its pale, naked body grew louder and more insane.
Thin stalks of black, spidery legs began jutting out of the sides of its chest. Its face melted like wax as glittering compound eyes sprouted from the top of its head. Within seconds, it had turned into a massive spider, a black widow whose head nearly scraped the ceiling twenty feet above us. The red hourglass on its back shone brightly, as if in reminder of the imminent death it brought to anyone it touched.
I hate spiders. I’ve always hated spiders. When I saw that skittering, crawling monstrosity, something in me broke. I sprinted towards the group of men who were trying to do their best to escape without looking directly at the Screamer, hoping that the spider would choose one of them instead of me. But I heard its massive bulk following closely behind me. I could feel its insectile breath on the back of my neck.
Naked and frantic, I sprinted behind the nearest of the men and used the same tactic I had used escaping through the silver gate: I pushed the unsuspecting figure towards the abomination that rushed towards us in a blur, its eight legs pounding the glassy floor with reverberating thuds.
Drops of clear venom dripped from its fangs as it grabbed the struggling man. It bit deeply into his leg, and as the venom dripped onto his skin, it seemed to eat through his flesh like some sort of acid. The man screamed as red streaks rapidly spread up his leg throughout the rest of his body. His teeth began chattering and his pupils dilated as he stared at me accusingly. But he did not die.
The spider grabbed him and dragged him away down the hallway, down to wherever the victims of the Screamers go. I saw a dozen more of the pale, faceless monstrosities rushing in to take his place. The men looked up, and the Screamers erupted into monstrous shapes: giant, slithering snakes, a floating eyeball with black, squid-like tentacles writhing around its central mass, enormous brown recluses and black widows and faceless Grim Reapers who floated over the ground in black robes. The overwhelming sense of fear and panic I felt at that moment still stays with me to this day, and even though this happened a couple days ago and I did eventually make it out of that den of horrors, it still leaves a deep scar across my mind.
As visions from a nightmare approached us, I turned and ran.
2024.05.01 06:27 CIAHerpes I died and went to Hell. Next to the Lake of Blood, I found a list of rules [part 1]
Throughout my life, I was always a piece of shit. From an early age, I joined a gang and started selling drugs. Anything from weed to heroin to crack sold itself, but on the unforgiving streets of the city, a single mistake could be fatal. I always carried a cheap burner pistol that I could throw away after using it. I know quite a few friends and acquaintances who died from drugs I sold them- some overdosing, others crashing their cars while high. A couple of them committed suicide during opiate withdrawals. One got cut in half by a train while nodding off.
But by seventeen, I had committed my first confirmed murder- a rival gang member and drug dealer who pulled a gun on me first. I had probably killed people before, but I never watched the news after a shooting or a stabbing to see the result. I wasn’t interested in the slightest.
In this case, I had just been slightly quicker than my rival and, a fraction of a second later, his forehead imploded like a smashed pumpkin in front of me, spraying bone splinters and brains all over the sidewalk. He stumbled forward a step before falling forward. His pistol went off in his dying hand, but it went low, the bullet disappearing with a crack into the nearby street. He fell forward with a dull thud, his legs kicking as if he were seizing.
The sidewalk of the dead end street we stood on spun around me for a moment. The many abandoned, rotting houses of the city loomed over us like hanging corpses. My ears gave a high-pitched shriek of tinnitus from the gunshots.
Nervous, I looked up and down the side street. The entire place seemed silent and dead. Then I heard voices nearby and saw lights turning on in the front yards and windows of houses. Without a moment of hesitation, I took off, sprinting blindly away from the crime scene, not caring much where I was going. Someone a few houses down came out, an old black man in his boxers and slippers. He saw me running and called out something in a quavering voice. I didn’t slow down for a moment.
Not long after, I heard the wailing of sirens off in the distance. They were drawing closer by the second. When the street abruptly ended in a cul-de-sac of mostly abandoned and dilapidated houses, I chose one at random and cut across its back yard, jumped over the rusted metal fence and kept on running, cutting across random yards and jumping more fences until I started making my way back towards downtown.
After about five minutes, I got to a street with a lot more traffic and people. Covered in sweat, I walked casually back towards my tiny, cockroach-infested apartment.
I thought I had gotten away with it. I thought I had been able to kill this worthless scumbag without anyone noticing. But there were more eyes glittering behind the veil than I realized at that moment.
I went back home- and that was the night I died and went to Hell.
***
I lived on the first floor in a building with falling-down rafters and a flat black roof like an infected scab. The paint on the outside was the color of vomit, the windows cracked and broken. Moreover, the place always smelled like Mexican food and chemicals, and every night, I would hear gunshots and panicked screams outside.
I sat down at the table and opened a beer. The ancient CRT TV was on, showing some old horror movie from the 1970s. I took a deep breath, relieved. I didn’t expect a thing to happen at that moment.
Suddenly, my door burst open as if someone had fired a cannonball at it. I nearly jumped out of my skin. Standing there, I saw a dozen black police in SWAT gear holding rifles. The laser sights jumped and danced across the floor before they converged on my head and chest. Someone screamed something in a hoarse voice, but I didn’t understand. The words sounded garbled, like the whispering of a demon. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion.
I fell back in my chair in surprise. A single breath later, one of them opened fire. I felt the first bullet crash through my left shoulder, felt the bone shatter and the flesh explode behind it, warm blood running down my back and chest.
The next moment, others joined in. I didn’t feel the bullet that smashed into my head and sent me to Hell. It moved fast, faster than my nerves. It must have moved as fast as death itself.
The blackness descended on me like a cloud.
***
I don’t know how much time passed. It seemed like an eternity, full of freezing darkness and screams that came from everywhere and nowhere. I remember coming awake suddenly, standing before a face formed from blinding white light. I was healed without any signs of wound or blood from the gunshots. I found myself standing naked and alone in the freezing winds.
I was shivering, my arms wrapped protectively around my chest as I stood on a flat plain of cracked, gray stone. The wind whipped around me as if I were in a hurricane, blowing sand and dust across the eternal plains. The features of the endless face constantly melted and shifted, spiraling out with bolts of lightning that cracked and sizzled all around the hurricane of light. The face seemed to stand miles high with eyes that spun like the Sun.
“Where am I?” I whispered in terror. The face of infinite light stared down at me with a blinding intensity. It seemed to see every thought, every feeling, every memory. I could feel it looking through me as if I were glass.
“You are in the Bardo,” the being said in a voice like an exploding nuclear bomb. “I am the one who sees. I am GOD, the creator of the universe and all who live within it. In the end, to Me you will always return. Did you not know you would one day have to stand here?” I shook my head.
“No… I… I…” I stuttered in terror, unable to respond.
“I have seen your evil, for indeed, I am closer to you than your own jugular vein, your own heart. Did you not see the suffering of those who harmed the innocent, those who murdered and stole and lived their lives wallowing in filth? Did you not see them get wounded, shot, stabbed, strangled and imprisoned? Did you not see them die in their evil and return to Me?”
“I did,” I admitted. “Many times.”
“And yet you have fallen into the sickness yourself,” God said in a voice like a rushing waterfall. Fury and anger seemed to seethe from him. Dozens of bolts of lightning flashed out from all sides of that radiant face. “For this, you must be purified. Your soul must be cleansed with fire. For that is the fate of those who harm the innocent- they fall down to the bottomless pit, to the blazing inferno whose fuel is men and stones. The flames eat them all greedily, and then the fires cry out to Me for more.”
My body felt like it was covered with stinging hornets. Excruciating pins and needles ran all up and down my legs and arms. I looked down, seeing a swirling dark hole opening up underneath me in the field of gray stone, spitting out drops of liquid blackness. They splashed upwards, burning through my skin like napalm, but no blood came out. It was as if my body were dissolving into dripping shadows that pulled me downwards. I felt myself slowly falling through the eternal stone plain as unseen hands dragged me away. As I descended, I heard the voice of God one last time.
“Down into the pit you will go, to the valley of wailing and the lake of flames where the damned scream for peace that never comes, to the city of shadows, to Naraka…”
***
Beneath me, the shadowy tunnel descended. I fell through it like lightning. Everything spun around me at an incredible speed. Suddenly, I broke through something, some invisible barrier in the endless darkness. I found myself falling through a cloud of suffocating smoke, and then the world opened up all around me.
A blood-red sky with thick black clouds extended out in all directions. I glimpsed a world of sharp cliffs and rivers of lava that wound their way down mountains of obsidian.
I fell through the middle of the sky at a tremendous speed, the wind whipping around my ears like a hurricane. A scream ripped its way out of my throat, but I was traveling so fast I could barely hear it as the echoes disappeared above me. Below me was what looked like a massive lake filled with blood about half a mile wide, and it was coming up to meet me fast. Many struggling bodies writhed in the currents, trying to claw their way out. I crashed through the surface at an incredible speed, going deep under the warm crimson waves.
The bloody water of the lake filled my mouth and nose with the overwhelming taste of copper and iron. I started trying to swim back up to the surface, frantically kicking and pushing with my arms and legs. I opened my eyes, and the salty blood stung them. It looked like I was peering through a translucent red film into a world of deep-sea abominations. Long snakes with two heads swam all around me, snapping and biting at each other and any legs or arms nearby. I saw them drag people down one by one, wrapping their slick bodies around their struggling victims as they drowned.
I broke through the surface, inhaling deeply. I was worried about the snakes and whatever else was slinking around down there. Thousands of people treaded water in the massive lake, trying to make their way to the shores. The nearest person to me was only ten feet away, a young woman with panicked eyes and wavy black hair. As I watched her, she gave a scream of terror and then was dragged under the surface, struggling and kicking. She never reappeared.
All around me, I smelled the fetid rot of decaying bodies. There must have been thousands and thousands of corpses at the bottom of this bloody lake. Some of them floated on top of the surface, rancid and swollen, their sightless eyes staring up at the fiery sky. The surface of the lake constantly bubbled and writhed, though whether this was from the rotting of so many bodies or from hidden monsters breathing under the surface, I didn’t yet know.
Frantically, I looked around for the nearest shore to get out of the danger. I saw that if I swam past the direction where the young woman had been, I would only have to go about two hundred feet. But my heart hammered in my chest as I remembered her being dragged under, her frantic, panicked struggling. What if the same creature was waiting over there, waiting for someone like me to try to swim over?
There were dozens more people between me and the nearest shore. Most of them climbed out, dripping drops of crimson onto the black volcanic sands of the beaches. I made my way as fast as I could in that direction, deciding to take my chances with the snakes. Otherwise, I would have to swim at least four times as far to get to the next nearest beach, which also swarmed with masses of naked people clawing their way out of the bloody lake.
A small group of people was concentrated only twenty feet away, three men who were swimming in the same direction I was. One started screaming suddenly. A purple tentacle the color of an old bruise broke through the surface of the water. To my horror, I saw it had black spikes that clicked and clacked together all along its massive arms. The spikes resembled long, hollow hypodermic needles.
The screaming man tried to swim in the opposite direction, but the tentacle wrapped around him, pulling him above the water. It tightened like a boa constrictor, the black spikes stabbing into his chest and stomach. Countless punctures opened up all along his body. The black spikes flexed, and his ribcage ripped open with a wet, ripping sound. The man’s screams abruptly cut off as his head lolled. With a sucking sound, the hollow spikes began drinking, consuming the man’s spurting blood with a sound like an inhalation of air. Slowly, almost lazily, the tentacle began dragging his limp corpse under the surface, back towards the main body of whatever monstrosity it belonged to.
The other two gave panicked sobs as more purple tentacles broke through the surface of the lake. Frantically, I started swimming around them, giving them a wide berth. Within seconds, the other two men were dragged under, deep stab wounds opening in their bodies as the hollow spikes drank greedily with loud sucking sounds.
“Fuck!” I cried, horrified. I felt something brush past my leg, something slimy and eel-like that writhed and slithered under the opaque crimson surface. In horror, I felt its slimy skin wrap around my leg, at first loosely slithering, then tightening. Two black faces with white, lidless eyes rose out of the water, the faces of serpents with fangs like switchblades. I saw both heads were connected to a single slithering body, one that wrapped slowly around my legs and arms, strangling me. Screaming, I felt its fangs dig into my neck. As the twin pairs of lidless white eyes stared at me, I tried to fight, tried to raise my arm, but it was far too strong. It dragged me under the surface.
Struggling against the beast, feeling its poison coursing through my bloodstream like lava, I drowned in the lake of blood. The experience of drowning is horrifying beyond all measure- the overwhelming fear and anxiety when you realize you have no air, the sensation of inhaling the bloody water, the sensation of dying. My vision turned black as a suffocating, clenching fist squeezed my heart. It felt like it took an eternity, but it was probably only a couple minutes at most. Death came over me then, cold and filled with small, suffocating agonies. That was the first time I died in Hell, but it would not be my last.
For in Hell, as I quickly learned, you never truly died, but were just thrown back to the beginning.
***
I felt myself falling again through the black clouds, the Lake of Blood beneath me. It all repeated like before. I screamed as I fell through the water at an incredible speed. Eldritch monstrosities were dragging people under the surface all around me. As quickly as I could, I swam towards the nearest shore. I dared not look down, didn’t dare slow for a single moment. A few times, I was nearly swiped by large, writhing tentacles, but they found other shrieking victims nearby to my immense relief.
I didn’t want to die ever again. It was a horrible sensation, though one that I would, sadly, become used to. Death followed me like a shadow, and starting over in Hell was always a nightmare.
I gave a gasp of joy when my feet touched bottom. Running through the rippling currents of blood, naked and gasping, I came upon the black sands of the shore. Looking around the lake, I saw there were four beaches, seemingly placed at each point of the compass underneath the spinning, blood-red sky.
At the end of each of the black sands lay a sparkling silver gate fifty feet tall and hundreds of feet across. The thin strands of silver intertwined like the fine filaments of a spiderweb, spiraling around each other in graceful, curving arches. Embossed over the top were the words, “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.” No one seemed to pay the gate any mind. Naked crowds of struggling people stumbled through it onto the streets of Hell, streets that were paved with human bones and stretched off to the horizon.
Skyscrapers made of obsidian with spiraling windows like the murderholes of a castle stretched hundreds of stories up into the blood-red sky. As I staggered out, pressed body to body in the thick crowd of crying, wailing people, I saw ahead of us the second mortal danger of Hell.
There were countless gangs of mostly men gathered on the streets of bone, the desperate soldiers of this apocalyptic wasteland. They huddled together in groups of ten or twelve, attacking and murdering random people who tried to sprint past from the Lake of Blood. They wore crude leather tunics and pants that looked like they were made from human skin. Some wore crude masks of human skin on their faces, ragged patches of flesh that had been cut from the bodies of the dead. They stared out with cold, emotionless eyes through the holes in the dried, leathery skin, surveying the surging crowds like lions surveying their prey.
They held primitive weapons in their hands, clubs and maces made from bone, swords sharpened from obsidian glass and even wooden spears. The wood looked strange and dark, almost like mahogany. Next to them were fires with sharpened spits of roasting human meat. The fat dripped off the dismembered arms and legs sizzling over the flames. It gave off a smell like roast pork that permeated the area, rising up in thick, fragrant clouds.
I followed the surging crowds, watching in horror as the groups of armed men attacked and killed random passersby in the crowd, dragging their limp bodies next to the fires where they stacked the unconscious or dead people in stacks like cordwood. I figured they would inevitably roast their flesh for food or make pale leather armor from their dead skin. I felt myself being pushed over in the direction of the nearest group of armed thugs. A few of the nearest men wore masks made of people’s faces, though those behind them did not, only wearing the crude leather armor instead.
One of them standing only ten feet away met my eyes, his cold killer’s gaze boring through me. The mask of skin made him look like some monster from a horror movie, with its ragged, mutilated edges and garish black stitches. He took a step towards me, raising a short spear made from a human leg bone and sharpened to a blood-stained point.
In panic, I looked around, seeing a young woman in her early twenties standing next to me. She was looking straight ahead with panic and terror in her eyes, not paying any attention to me or the men that crept towards us. With all of my strength, I shoved the woman towards the masked killer. She stumbled back in surprise, falling into the man’s weapon. His bone spear stabbed through her stomach. She looked down at her naked body in horror when the point emerged from her navel, dripping rivers of blood down her trembling legs. As she spit up trickles of blood and collapsed to her knees, I ran. A sickening crack rang out behind me like a shattering of bones, and I knew they had murdered the young woman.
I sprinted away from the gangs of cannibal killers as fast as I could, which wasn’t very fast considering how many naked, screaming bodies pressed in all on me from all sides. I felt myself being carried forward by the surging masses towards the silver gate. Hanging from the delicate silver threads, I saw signs written in many languages. I found one in English and started reading it with rapt attention, even as I was relentlessly pushed forward and elbowed and kicked.
I still remember what it said by heart.
“Rules for Naraka:
Immediately outside the gate, the beach turned into a road paved with bones. Leg bones and arm bones were laid side by side, yellowing and drying under the dark crimson sky. Skulls embedded in the center of the road grinned up at me, laughing at silent secrets I could never hope to comprehend.
Naked and barefoot, I sprinted down the road of bones between massive skyscrapers of black obsidian and gleaming red volcanic rock. People started to thin as the survivors scattered in all directions. I felt the sharp points of bone stabbing into the soles of my feet.
That was the moment the sirens began their eerie wailing, rising and falling in a dissonant cacophony, slower and deeper than any tornado siren I had ever heard. It sounded almost like a whale call, stretching out over the infernal city. They sounded from all around us, seemingly ringing out from thousands of speakers hidden throughout the obsidian towers.
I looked up suddenly. The crimson sky had changed rapidly, forming into a cyclone that swirled overhead in great black and red spirals. It met in a fiery eye at the center. As I looked up, I saw glowing orange hail soaring through the air, leaving behind streaks like thousands of comets. It fell towards the naked masses of tens of thousands of bodies pressed together on the streets.
At that moment, I remembered the rules. Some of the others apparently hadn’t read them during the panic and horror of the escape from the Lake of Blood, and they continued surging forward down the road as fire began to fall like drops of napalm all around us. Wails of agony rose up from those who were covered in the glowing lava. The people in the front of the crowd immediately fell under the heat and destruction of the firestorm. Their hair lit on fire, their skin melted and blackened, and still more fire rained down from the sky, sweeping relentlessly in our direction.
I saw an obsidian skyscraper with a great, open archway only a couple hundred feet away. The nearest of the crowd scrambled to find cover under the safety of the building. I sprinted along with them. As I reached the threshold, I felt the first burning drops of magma land on my back. I screamed as I smelled my own skin cooking and my own hair burning, and then I was through the archway. I fell, rolling on my back, trying to put out the sizzling fires that burned me like some corrosive acid.
I felt rivers of warm blood running down my back as more people ran past me, deeper into the hall. The skyscraper was massive, not only in height but in width. The hallway ran for hundreds of feet, disappearing into doorless thresholds on both sides cleaved out of the obsidian, as if the entire structure had been carved from one enormous piece of glassy stone. In the center of the hallway, it opened up into a spiraling staircase.
I looked up abruptly to see three men wearing masks made of human skin standing over me, each holding primitive bone spears in their filthy, blood-stained hands. They looked emaciated, wasted away, like the walking corpses of a death camp. To my utter astonishment, even through the layer of dried, ragged skin, I recognized one of them. It was in his gray eyes, and the twisting dragon tattoos that covered his arms and chest instantly brought a flash of memory.
“Shooter,” I said as they raised their weapons. “Shooter, it’s me. Remember me? It’s Richie.” He froze in place, looking down at me with widening eyes.
“Holy shit, Richie?” he said, tearing the mask off. “What are you doing here?” It was an absurd question, of course. What were any of us doing here?
The last time I had seen Shooter, he had been sitting a pile of blood in his car. He was one of the designated gunman for the Solid Ones, the gang we had both joined when we were young. The amazing luck of finding another Solid in this place of death was astounding. But, then again, I had known many people who had died, and I had a feeling the vast majority were here somewhere.
“I guess I died,” I said sheepishly, giving him a faint half-smile. The other two men standing by his side lowered their weapons. “Fucking pigs came in and shot me.”
“Ah, yeah,” he said, unsurprised. “They do have a tendency to do that.” He gave a low laugh. I took a long look at Shooter, who was wearing the pale skin of some unknown victim or victims of this place of agony. He reached a trembling hand down and pulled me up from the smooth surface of this strange skyscraper. More naked, scared people continued to stream past us as the sirens continued their infernal shrieking outside. Many of them had horrific burns all over their body, and a few were clearly on the verge of death by the time they had made it inside.
Farther down the hall, another ten men wearing the same garb as Shooter came towards us, holding sharpened swords of obsidian and thick clubs made of bone. Shooter put his hands up.
“Hey, I know this guy,” he said calmly, motioning over to me with an apathetic wave of his head. “He was in the same gang as me! We used to go around having a great time, I’ll tell you. Remember that time we shot at that cop and he pissed himself?” He gave a racuous laugh at that. I smiled as the memory flooded back. Shooter had definitely hit him, though I think I probably missed. I remembered the blood soaking over the arm of cop’s uniform as he lay there, gasping and turning white, his face looking bloodless and shocked. Shooter and I had run away, high-fiving each other and grinning like maniacs.
“Yeah, I do,” I said, grinning. The other men surrounded me in a semi-circle. Shooter knelt down and extended a hand to me, helping me off the ground.
“Well, you’re in good company,” he said. “Here, we can do whatever the fuck we want. What’s going to happen, after all? It’s not like we can be sent to Hell.” He laughed, and that laughter writhed with the insanity and bloodlust that seemed to be eating him from the inside like a cancer.
***
“We still need to take him to the Sergeant,” one of the masked men next to Shooter said. “We can see if he has the right stuff needed to fight with us.”
“What happens when you guys die?” I asked. “I mean, obviously, you restart at the Lake of Blood, but how do you find your way back to your gang?” Shooter shrugged.
“We always find each other again eventually,” he said. “It’s not like there’s any lack of time here. All we have is time- and fresh meat, of course. There’s always more fresh meat streaming in through the Lake of Blood. We can take whatever we need from them…” The wailing of the sirens suddenly ended as he spoke. I looked around, seeing burnt and dying people still struggling into the front hallway of the skyscraper. The smell of burning hair and searing flesh filled the entire area.
“Come on,” one of the men said. His voice was gruff, as if he had been chainsmoking five packs a day since he was a little kid. “The Sergeant is on the top floor. You’ll have to talk to him.” I nodded, knowing they would certainly kill me if I did not join their group.
But at that moment, something much worse than dying, blackened bodies crawled in through the archway. I saw it before the group of men did. Instinctively upon glimpsing it, I knew it was something terrible, something that could only live in the depths of a psychotic’s nightmare.
It stood nearly ten feet tall. Its skin was as pale as a writhing maggot. On its hairless face, I saw no eyes, no nose, no ears, just smooth, bone-white skin. It had thin lips tied together with black thread, the garish stitches poking out from the ragged, bloodless flesh. Its arms and legs looked inhumanly long and thin. Its ribs and spine jutted out as if it were a starving, rabid animal. From all around its body, an inhuman wailing started, as if dozens of demonic voices were shrieking in unison. Yet its mouth stayed firmly closed, still stitched shut.
Its fingers jutted out like railroad spikes, each a foot long. As its screaming intensified, it ran towards us, crushing the dying and injured under its naked, twisted feet. I stared into its pale, bloodless face, and even though it had no eyes, it felt like it stared straight back at me, looking into my soul.
“Don’t look at it!” Shooter screamed next to me, turning his face away. The rest of the men closed their eyes or turned away, backpedaling away from the abomination. “It will take on the shape of what you fear most! It’s a Screamer!” But it was too late. At that moment, something strange happened to the pale, naked body of the Screamer. It rippled like a mirage sizzling off the sands of a desert. Its body squeezed and contorted as the distorted shrieking around its pale, naked body grew louder and more insane.
Thin stalks of black, spidery legs began jutting out of the sides of its chest. Its face melted like wax as glittering compound eyes sprouted from the top of its head. Within seconds, it had turned into a massive spider, a black widow whose head nearly scraped the ceiling twenty feet above us. The red hourglass on its back shone brightly, as if in reminder of the imminent death it brought to anyone it touched.
I hate spiders. I’ve always hated spiders. When I saw that skittering, crawling monstrosity, something in me broke. I sprinted towards the group of men who were trying to do their best to escape without looking directly at the Screamer, hoping that the spider would choose one of them instead of me. But I heard its massive bulk following closely behind me. I could feel its insectile breath on the back of my neck.
Naked and frantic, I sprinted behind the nearest of the men and used the same tactic I had used escaping through the silver gate: I pushed the unsuspecting figure towards the abomination that rushed towards us in a blur, its eight legs pounding the glassy floor with reverberating thuds.
Drops of clear venom dripped from its fangs as it grabbed the struggling man. It bit deeply into his leg, and as the venom dripped onto his skin, it seemed to eat through his flesh like some sort of acid. The man screamed as red streaks rapidly spread up his leg throughout the rest of his body. His teeth began chattering and his pupils dilated as he stared at me accusingly. But he did not die.
The spider grabbed him and dragged him away down the hallway, down to wherever the victims of the Screamers go. I saw a dozen more of the pale, faceless monstrosities rushing in to take his place. The men looked up, and the Screamers erupted into monstrous shapes: giant, slithering snakes, a floating eyeball with black, squid-like tentacles writhing around its central mass, enormous brown recluses and black widows and faceless Grim Reapers who floated over the ground in black robes. The overwhelming sense of fear and panic I felt at that moment still stays with me to this day, and even though this happened a couple days ago and I did eventually make it out of that den of horrors, it still leaves a deep scar across my mind.
As visions from a nightmare approached us, I turned and ran.
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But by seventeen, I had committed my first confirmed murder- a rival gang member and drug dealer who pulled a gun on me first. I had probably killed people before, but I never watched the news after a shooting or a stabbing to see the result. I wasn’t interested in the slightest.
In this case, I had just been slightly quicker than my rival and, a fraction of a second later, his forehead imploded like a smashed pumpkin in front of me, spraying bone splinters and brains all over the sidewalk. He stumbled forward a step before falling forward. His pistol went off in his dying hand, but it went low, the bullet disappearing with a crack into the nearby street. He fell forward with a dull thud, his legs kicking as if he were seizing.
The sidewalk of the dead end street we stood on spun around me for a moment. The many abandoned, rotting houses of the city loomed over us like hanging corpses. My ears gave a high-pitched shriek of tinnitus from the gunshots.
Nervous, I looked up and down the side street. The entire place seemed silent and dead. Then I heard voices nearby and saw lights turning on in the front yards and windows of houses. Without a moment of hesitation, I took off, sprinting blindly away from the crime scene, not caring much where I was going. Someone a few houses down came out, an old black man in his boxers and slippers. He saw me running and called out something in a quavering voice. I didn’t slow down for a moment.
Not long after, I heard the wailing of sirens off in the distance. They were drawing closer by the second. When the street abruptly ended in a cul-de-sac of mostly abandoned and dilapidated houses, I chose one at random and cut across its back yard, jumped over the rusted metal fence and kept on running, cutting across random yards and jumping more fences until I started making my way back towards downtown.
After about five minutes, I got to a street with a lot more traffic and people. Covered in sweat, I walked casually back towards my tiny, cockroach-infested apartment.
I thought I had gotten away with it. I thought I had been able to kill this worthless scumbag without anyone noticing. But there were more eyes glittering behind the veil than I realized at that moment.
I went back home- and that was the night I died and went to Hell.
***
I lived on the first floor in a building with falling-down rafters and a flat black roof like an infected scab. The paint on the outside was the color of vomit, the windows cracked and broken. Moreover, the place always smelled like Mexican food and chemicals, and every night, I would hear gunshots and panicked screams outside.
I sat down at the table and opened a beer. The ancient CRT TV was on, showing some old horror movie from the 1970s. I took a deep breath, relieved. I didn’t expect a thing to happen at that moment.
Suddenly, my door burst open as if someone had fired a cannonball at it. I nearly jumped out of my skin. Standing there, I saw a dozen black police in SWAT gear holding rifles. The laser sights jumped and danced across the floor before they converged on my head and chest. Someone screamed something in a hoarse voice, but I didn’t understand. The words sounded garbled, like the whispering of a demon. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion.
I fell back in my chair in surprise. A single breath later, one of them opened fire. I felt the first bullet crash through my left shoulder, felt the bone shatter and the flesh explode behind it, warm blood running down my back and chest.
The next moment, others joined in. I didn’t feel the bullet that smashed into my head and sent me to Hell. It moved fast, faster than my nerves. It must have moved as fast as death itself.
The blackness descended on me like a cloud.
***
I don’t know how much time passed. It seemed like an eternity, full of freezing darkness and screams that came from everywhere and nowhere. I remember coming awake suddenly, standing before a face formed from blinding white light. I was healed without any signs of wound or blood from the gunshots. I found myself standing naked and alone in the freezing winds.
I was shivering, my arms wrapped protectively around my chest as I stood on a flat plain of cracked, gray stone. The wind whipped around me as if I were in a hurricane, blowing sand and dust across the eternal plains. The features of the endless face constantly melted and shifted, spiraling out with bolts of lightning that cracked and sizzled all around the hurricane of light. The face seemed to stand miles high with eyes that spun like the Sun.
“Where am I?” I whispered in terror. The face of infinite light stared down at me with a blinding intensity. It seemed to see every thought, every feeling, every memory. I could feel it looking through me as if I were glass.
“You are in the Bardo,” the being said in a voice like an exploding nuclear bomb. “I am the one who sees. I am GOD, the creator of the universe and all who live within it. In the end, to Me you will always return. Did you not know you would one day have to stand here?” I shook my head.
“No… I… I…” I stuttered in terror, unable to respond.
“I have seen your evil, for indeed, I am closer to you than your own jugular vein, your own heart. Did you not see the suffering of those who harmed the innocent, those who murdered and stole and lived their lives wallowing in filth? Did you not see them get wounded, shot, stabbed, strangled and imprisoned? Did you not see them die in their evil and return to Me?”
“I did,” I admitted. “Many times.”
“And yet you have fallen into the sickness yourself,” God said in a voice like a rushing waterfall. Fury and anger seemed to seethe from him. Dozens of bolts of lightning flashed out from all sides of that radiant face. “For this, you must be purified. Your soul must be cleansed with fire. For that is the fate of those who harm the innocent- they fall down to the bottomless pit, to the blazing inferno whose fuel is men and stones. The flames eat them all greedily, and then the fires cry out to Me for more.”
My body felt like it was covered with stinging hornets. Excruciating pins and needles ran all up and down my legs and arms. I looked down, seeing a swirling dark hole opening up underneath me in the field of gray stone, spitting out drops of liquid blackness. They splashed upwards, burning through my skin like napalm, but no blood came out. It was as if my body were dissolving into dripping shadows that pulled me downwards. I felt myself slowly falling through the eternal stone plain as unseen hands dragged me away. As I descended, I heard the voice of God one last time.
“Down into the pit you will go, to the valley of wailing and the lake of flames where the damned scream for peace that never comes, to the city of shadows, to Naraka…”
***
Beneath me, the shadowy tunnel descended. I fell through it like lightning. Everything spun around me at an incredible speed. Suddenly, I broke through something, some invisible barrier in the endless darkness. I found myself falling through a cloud of suffocating smoke, and then the world opened up all around me.
A blood-red sky with thick black clouds extended out in all directions. I glimpsed a world of sharp cliffs and rivers of lava that wound their way down mountains of obsidian.
I fell through the middle of the sky at a tremendous speed, the wind whipping around my ears like a hurricane. A scream ripped its way out of my throat, but I was traveling so fast I could barely hear it as the echoes disappeared above me. Below me was what looked like a massive lake filled with blood about half a mile wide, and it was coming up to meet me fast. Many struggling bodies writhed in the currents, trying to claw their way out. I crashed through the surface at an incredible speed, going deep under the warm crimson waves.
The bloody water of the lake filled my mouth and nose with the overwhelming taste of copper and iron. I started trying to swim back up to the surface, frantically kicking and pushing with my arms and legs. I opened my eyes, and the salty blood stung them. It looked like I was peering through a translucent red film into a world of deep-sea abominations. Long snakes with two heads swam all around me, snapping and biting at each other and any legs or arms nearby. I saw them drag people down one by one, wrapping their slick bodies around their struggling victims as they drowned.
I broke through the surface, inhaling deeply. I was worried about the snakes and whatever else was slinking around down there. Thousands of people treaded water in the massive lake, trying to make their way to the shores. The nearest person to me was only ten feet away, a young woman with panicked eyes and wavy black hair. As I watched her, she gave a scream of terror and then was dragged under the surface, struggling and kicking. She never reappeared.
All around me, I smelled the fetid rot of decaying bodies. There must have been thousands and thousands of corpses at the bottom of this bloody lake. Some of them floated on top of the surface, rancid and swollen, their sightless eyes staring up at the fiery sky. The surface of the lake constantly bubbled and writhed, though whether this was from the rotting of so many bodies or from hidden monsters breathing under the surface, I didn’t yet know.
Frantically, I looked around for the nearest shore to get out of the danger. I saw that if I swam past the direction where the young woman had been, I would only have to go about two hundred feet. But my heart hammered in my chest as I remembered her being dragged under, her frantic, panicked struggling. What if the same creature was waiting over there, waiting for someone like me to try to swim over?
There were dozens more people between me and the nearest shore. Most of them climbed out, dripping drops of crimson onto the black volcanic sands of the beaches. I made my way as fast as I could in that direction, deciding to take my chances with the snakes. Otherwise, I would have to swim at least four times as far to get to the next nearest beach, which also swarmed with masses of naked people clawing their way out of the bloody lake.
A small group of people was concentrated only twenty feet away, three men who were swimming in the same direction I was. One started screaming suddenly. A purple tentacle the color of an old bruise broke through the surface of the water. To my horror, I saw it had black spikes that clicked and clacked together all along its massive arms. The spikes resembled long, hollow hypodermic needles.
The screaming man tried to swim in the opposite direction, but the tentacle wrapped around him, pulling him above the water. It tightened like a boa constrictor, the black spikes stabbing into his chest and stomach. Countless punctures opened up all along his body. The black spikes flexed, and his ribcage ripped open with a wet, ripping sound. The man’s screams abruptly cut off as his head lolled. With a sucking sound, the hollow spikes began drinking, consuming the man’s spurting blood with a sound like an inhalation of air. Slowly, almost lazily, the tentacle began dragging his limp corpse under the surface, back towards the main body of whatever monstrosity it belonged to.
The other two gave panicked sobs as more purple tentacles broke through the surface of the lake. Frantically, I started swimming around them, giving them a wide berth. Within seconds, the other two men were dragged under, deep stab wounds opening in their bodies as the hollow spikes drank greedily with loud sucking sounds.
“Fuck!” I cried, horrified. I felt something brush past my leg, something slimy and eel-like that writhed and slithered under the opaque crimson surface. In horror, I felt its slimy skin wrap around my leg, at first loosely slithering, then tightening. Two black faces with white, lidless eyes rose out of the water, the faces of serpents with fangs like switchblades. I saw both heads were connected to a single slithering body, one that wrapped slowly around my legs and arms, strangling me. Screaming, I felt its fangs dig into my neck. As the twin pairs of lidless white eyes stared at me, I tried to fight, tried to raise my arm, but it was far too strong. It dragged me under the surface.
Struggling against the beast, feeling its poison coursing through my bloodstream like lava, I drowned in the lake of blood. The experience of drowning is horrifying beyond all measure- the overwhelming fear and anxiety when you realize you have no air, the sensation of inhaling the bloody water, the sensation of dying. My vision turned black as a suffocating, clenching fist squeezed my heart. It felt like it took an eternity, but it was probably only a couple minutes at most. Death came over me then, cold and filled with small, suffocating agonies. That was the first time I died in Hell, but it would not be my last.
For in Hell, as I quickly learned, you never truly died, but were just thrown back to the beginning.
***
I felt myself falling again through the black clouds, the Lake of Blood beneath me. It all repeated like before. I screamed as I fell through the water at an incredible speed. Eldritch monstrosities were dragging people under the surface all around me. As quickly as I could, I swam towards the nearest shore. I dared not look down, didn’t dare slow for a single moment. A few times, I was nearly swiped by large, writhing tentacles, but they found other shrieking victims nearby to my immense relief.
I didn’t want to die ever again. It was a horrible sensation, though one that I would, sadly, become used to. Death followed me like a shadow, and starting over in Hell was always a nightmare.
I gave a gasp of joy when my feet touched bottom. Running through the rippling currents of blood, naked and gasping, I came upon the black sands of the shore. Looking around the lake, I saw there were four beaches, seemingly placed at each point of the compass underneath the spinning, blood-red sky.
At the end of each of the black sands lay a sparkling silver gate fifty feet tall and hundreds of feet across. The thin strands of silver intertwined like the fine filaments of a spiderweb, spiraling around each other in graceful, curving arches. Embossed over the top were the words, “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.” No one seemed to pay the gate any mind. Naked crowds of struggling people stumbled through it onto the streets of Hell, streets that were paved with human bones and stretched off to the horizon.
Skyscrapers made of obsidian with spiraling windows like the murderholes of a castle stretched hundreds of stories up into the blood-red sky. As I staggered out, pressed body to body in the thick crowd of crying, wailing people, I saw ahead of us the second mortal danger of Hell.
There were countless gangs of mostly men gathered on the streets of bone, the desperate soldiers of this apocalyptic wasteland. They huddled together in groups of ten or twelve, attacking and murdering random people who tried to sprint past from the Lake of Blood. They wore crude leather tunics and pants that looked like they were made from human skin. Some wore crude masks of human skin on their faces, ragged patches of flesh that had been cut from the bodies of the dead. They stared out with cold, emotionless eyes through the holes in the dried, leathery skin, surveying the surging crowds like lions surveying their prey.
They held primitive weapons in their hands, clubs and maces made from bone, swords sharpened from obsidian glass and even wooden spears. The wood looked strange and dark, almost like mahogany. Next to them were fires with sharpened spits of roasting human meat. The fat dripped off the dismembered arms and legs sizzling over the flames. It gave off a smell like roast pork that permeated the area, rising up in thick, fragrant clouds.
I followed the surging crowds, watching in horror as the groups of armed men attacked and killed random passersby in the crowd, dragging their limp bodies next to the fires where they stacked the unconscious or dead people in stacks like cordwood. I figured they would inevitably roast their flesh for food or make pale leather armor from their dead skin. I felt myself being pushed over in the direction of the nearest group of armed thugs. A few of the nearest men wore masks made of people’s faces, though those behind them did not, only wearing the crude leather armor instead.
One of them standing only ten feet away met my eyes, his cold killer’s gaze boring through me. The mask of skin made him look like some monster from a horror movie, with its ragged, mutilated edges and garish black stitches. He took a step towards me, raising a short spear made from a human leg bone and sharpened to a blood-stained point.
In panic, I looked around, seeing a young woman in her early twenties standing next to me. She was looking straight ahead with panic and terror in her eyes, not paying any attention to me or the men that crept towards us. With all of my strength, I shoved the woman towards the masked killer. She stumbled back in surprise, falling into the man’s weapon. His bone spear stabbed through her stomach. She looked down at her naked body in horror when the point emerged from her navel, dripping rivers of blood down her trembling legs. As she spit up trickles of blood and collapsed to her knees, I ran. A sickening crack rang out behind me like a shattering of bones, and I knew they had murdered the young woman.
I sprinted away from the gangs of cannibal killers as fast as I could, which wasn’t very fast considering how many naked, screaming bodies pressed in all on me from all sides. I felt myself being carried forward by the surging masses towards the silver gate. Hanging from the delicate silver threads, I saw signs written in many languages. I found one in English and started reading it with rapt attention, even as I was relentlessly pushed forward and elbowed and kicked.
I still remember what it said by heart.
“Rules for Naraka:
- Those who are damned will be fed from the fountain of life. GOD will ensure your rebirth at the Lake of Blood. Though death may crush you over and over, there will be no rest.
- Stay away from the Screamers, the faceless ones who roam the land. Those who are taken by the Screamers will know endless torment and madness in the caverns deep under the ground.
- When the sirens in the center of Naraka wail, the firestorms are coming. Seek shelter immediately.
- Those rare ones who ascend the silver spire at the end of Naraka may find salvation, even in the city of shadows.”
Immediately outside the gate, the beach turned into a road paved with bones. Leg bones and arm bones were laid side by side, yellowing and drying under the dark crimson sky. Skulls embedded in the center of the road grinned up at me, laughing at silent secrets I could never hope to comprehend.
Naked and barefoot, I sprinted down the road of bones between massive skyscrapers of black obsidian and gleaming red volcanic rock. People started to thin as the survivors scattered in all directions. I felt the sharp points of bone stabbing into the soles of my feet.
That was the moment the sirens began their eerie wailing, rising and falling in a dissonant cacophony, slower and deeper than any tornado siren I had ever heard. It sounded almost like a whale call, stretching out over the infernal city. They sounded from all around us, seemingly ringing out from thousands of speakers hidden throughout the obsidian towers.
I looked up suddenly. The crimson sky had changed rapidly, forming into a cyclone that swirled overhead in great black and red spirals. It met in a fiery eye at the center. As I looked up, I saw glowing orange hail soaring through the air, leaving behind streaks like thousands of comets. It fell towards the naked masses of tens of thousands of bodies pressed together on the streets.
At that moment, I remembered the rules. Some of the others apparently hadn’t read them during the panic and horror of the escape from the Lake of Blood, and they continued surging forward down the road as fire began to fall like drops of napalm all around us. Wails of agony rose up from those who were covered in the glowing lava. The people in the front of the crowd immediately fell under the heat and destruction of the firestorm. Their hair lit on fire, their skin melted and blackened, and still more fire rained down from the sky, sweeping relentlessly in our direction.
I saw an obsidian skyscraper with a great, open archway only a couple hundred feet away. The nearest of the crowd scrambled to find cover under the safety of the building. I sprinted along with them. As I reached the threshold, I felt the first burning drops of magma land on my back. I screamed as I smelled my own skin cooking and my own hair burning, and then I was through the archway. I fell, rolling on my back, trying to put out the sizzling fires that burned me like some corrosive acid.
I felt rivers of warm blood running down my back as more people ran past me, deeper into the hall. The skyscraper was massive, not only in height but in width. The hallway ran for hundreds of feet, disappearing into doorless thresholds on both sides cleaved out of the obsidian, as if the entire structure had been carved from one enormous piece of glassy stone. In the center of the hallway, it opened up into a spiraling staircase.
I looked up abruptly to see three men wearing masks made of human skin standing over me, each holding primitive bone spears in their filthy, blood-stained hands. They looked emaciated, wasted away, like the walking corpses of a death camp. To my utter astonishment, even through the layer of dried, ragged skin, I recognized one of them. It was in his gray eyes, and the twisting dragon tattoos that covered his arms and chest instantly brought a flash of memory.
“Shooter,” I said as they raised their weapons. “Shooter, it’s me. Remember me? It’s Richie.” He froze in place, looking down at me with widening eyes.
“Holy shit, Richie?” he said, tearing the mask off. “What are you doing here?” It was an absurd question, of course. What were any of us doing here?
The last time I had seen Shooter, he had been sitting a pile of blood in his car. He was one of the designated gunman for the Solid Ones, the gang we had both joined when we were young. The amazing luck of finding another Solid in this place of death was astounding. But, then again, I had known many people who had died, and I had a feeling the vast majority were here somewhere.
“I guess I died,” I said sheepishly, giving him a faint half-smile. The other two men standing by his side lowered their weapons. “Fucking pigs came in and shot me.”
“Ah, yeah,” he said, unsurprised. “They do have a tendency to do that.” He gave a low laugh. I took a long look at Shooter, who was wearing the pale skin of some unknown victim or victims of this place of agony. He reached a trembling hand down and pulled me up from the smooth surface of this strange skyscraper. More naked, scared people continued to stream past us as the sirens continued their infernal shrieking outside. Many of them had horrific burns all over their body, and a few were clearly on the verge of death by the time they had made it inside.
Farther down the hall, another ten men wearing the same garb as Shooter came towards us, holding sharpened swords of obsidian and thick clubs made of bone. Shooter put his hands up.
“Hey, I know this guy,” he said calmly, motioning over to me with an apathetic wave of his head. “He was in the same gang as me! We used to go around having a great time, I’ll tell you. Remember that time we shot at that cop and he pissed himself?” He gave a racuous laugh at that. I smiled as the memory flooded back. Shooter had definitely hit him, though I think I probably missed. I remembered the blood soaking over the arm of cop’s uniform as he lay there, gasping and turning white, his face looking bloodless and shocked. Shooter and I had run away, high-fiving each other and grinning like maniacs.
“Yeah, I do,” I said, grinning. The other men surrounded me in a semi-circle. Shooter knelt down and extended a hand to me, helping me off the ground.
“Well, you’re in good company,” he said. “Here, we can do whatever the fuck we want. What’s going to happen, after all? It’s not like we can be sent to Hell.” He laughed, and that laughter writhed with the insanity and bloodlust that seemed to be eating him from the inside like a cancer.
***
“We still need to take him to the Sergeant,” one of the masked men next to Shooter said. “We can see if he has the right stuff needed to fight with us.”
“What happens when you guys die?” I asked. “I mean, obviously, you restart at the Lake of Blood, but how do you find your way back to your gang?” Shooter shrugged.
“We always find each other again eventually,” he said. “It’s not like there’s any lack of time here. All we have is time- and fresh meat, of course. There’s always more fresh meat streaming in through the Lake of Blood. We can take whatever we need from them…” The wailing of the sirens suddenly ended as he spoke. I looked around, seeing burnt and dying people still struggling into the front hallway of the skyscraper. The smell of burning hair and searing flesh filled the entire area.
“Come on,” one of the men said. His voice was gruff, as if he had been chainsmoking five packs a day since he was a little kid. “The Sergeant is on the top floor. You’ll have to talk to him.” I nodded, knowing they would certainly kill me if I did not join their group.
But at that moment, something much worse than dying, blackened bodies crawled in through the archway. I saw it before the group of men did. Instinctively upon glimpsing it, I knew it was something terrible, something that could only live in the depths of a psychotic’s nightmare.
It stood nearly ten feet tall. Its skin was as pale as a writhing maggot. On its hairless face, I saw no eyes, no nose, no ears, just smooth, bone-white skin. It had thin lips tied together with black thread, the garish stitches poking out from the ragged, bloodless flesh. Its arms and legs looked inhumanly long and thin. Its ribs and spine jutted out as if it were a starving, rabid animal. From all around its body, an inhuman wailing started, as if dozens of demonic voices were shrieking in unison. Yet its mouth stayed firmly closed, still stitched shut.
Its fingers jutted out like railroad spikes, each a foot long. As its screaming intensified, it ran towards us, crushing the dying and injured under its naked, twisted feet. I stared into its pale, bloodless face, and even though it had no eyes, it felt like it stared straight back at me, looking into my soul.
“Don’t look at it!” Shooter screamed next to me, turning his face away. The rest of the men closed their eyes or turned away, backpedaling away from the abomination. “It will take on the shape of what you fear most! It’s a Screamer!” But it was too late. At that moment, something strange happened to the pale, naked body of the Screamer. It rippled like a mirage sizzling off the sands of a desert. Its body squeezed and contorted as the distorted shrieking around its pale, naked body grew louder and more insane.
Thin stalks of black, spidery legs began jutting out of the sides of its chest. Its face melted like wax as glittering compound eyes sprouted from the top of its head. Within seconds, it had turned into a massive spider, a black widow whose head nearly scraped the ceiling twenty feet above us. The red hourglass on its back shone brightly, as if in reminder of the imminent death it brought to anyone it touched.
I hate spiders. I’ve always hated spiders. When I saw that skittering, crawling monstrosity, something in me broke. I sprinted towards the group of men who were trying to do their best to escape without looking directly at the Screamer, hoping that the spider would choose one of them instead of me. But I heard its massive bulk following closely behind me. I could feel its insectile breath on the back of my neck.
Naked and frantic, I sprinted behind the nearest of the men and used the same tactic I had used escaping through the silver gate: I pushed the unsuspecting figure towards the abomination that rushed towards us in a blur, its eight legs pounding the glassy floor with reverberating thuds.
Drops of clear venom dripped from its fangs as it grabbed the struggling man. It bit deeply into his leg, and as the venom dripped onto his skin, it seemed to eat through his flesh like some sort of acid. The man screamed as red streaks rapidly spread up his leg throughout the rest of his body. His teeth began chattering and his pupils dilated as he stared at me accusingly. But he did not die.
The spider grabbed him and dragged him away down the hallway, down to wherever the victims of the Screamers go. I saw a dozen more of the pale, faceless monstrosities rushing in to take his place. The men looked up, and the Screamers erupted into monstrous shapes: giant, slithering snakes, a floating eyeball with black, squid-like tentacles writhing around its central mass, enormous brown recluses and black widows and faceless Grim Reapers who floated over the ground in black robes. The overwhelming sense of fear and panic I felt at that moment still stays with me to this day, and even though this happened a couple days ago and I did eventually make it out of that den of horrors, it still leaves a deep scar across my mind.
As visions from a nightmare approached us, I turned and ran.