be me; ex LizarDM
be also me; Adonis Valintellis (Tiefling Paladin), Thalia Milakos (Human Ranger) and Zaahir Kehmet (Earth Genasi Wizard)
the soldier stifled a yawn as he patrolled the sandy beaches of Kalikos
clouds hid the island from the moon’s spectral glow, casting the land into darkness and turning the often silver seas black as coal
his shift had been a long one and just as boring as expected
where once his mind had been sharp and alert, it now lingered on thoughts of a cold drink and a warm bed
his eyes scanned the shore superficially, passing over the same stones and grassy knolls he’d seen a hundred times before
on any other night, he may have noticed the discrepancies in the shoreline
the new rock that appeared almost boat-like on second glance
but alas, his mind was a thousand miles away, and the javelin hit him without warning
the soldier collapsed to his knees, gasping for air like a fish on land
his armour had spared him from the worst of the damage, but the javelin had done its job
stunned and winded, he was rendered defenceless against the four figures that emerged from the darkness
a thought crossed his mind to sound the alarm; but his limbs refused to move and his lungs pleaded for breath
one member of the pack split from the rest. A stout dwarf with a full beard and a grim expression
they approached the helpless man, drawing a sharply curved short sword from their belt
the soldier tried to move
tried to yell
but the dwarf closed the distance between them and cut his throat, putting a violent end to his struggles
wiping the blood clean from his weapon, Oryk hauled the body behind cover before jogging to catch up with his companions
the Order of the Twins moved like shadows in the night. Their passage muffled by the spells woven about their feet
that said, their infiltration still proved easier than expected
skirting the edges of the island, the party avoided common paths and watchful eyes; slipping between gaps in the meagre defences they encountered
their route took them just below the peak of the island; where a lavish home stared out across the ocean
in the distance, tiny twinkling lights just barely outlined the Athosi mainland
the house itself was lit up like a beacon in the night, and roaming globules of fire identified the few guards on rotation. Six or seven at most
less than a third of what they had anticipated
counting their blessings, the small band of adventurers navigated the narrow pathways around the house and approached the island’s southern side, where a lonely dirt road wound its way towards a grove of trees
they moved swiftly and silently through the long grass that grew on either side, but they needn’t have bothered
the road was unguarded, and the entrance to the grove lay bare
“this is too easy,” Cyrene whispered; fidgeting nervously with an iron band around her wrist. “Where are the rest of the guards?”
she, like the rest of her companions, had a dishevelled look to her appearance
a thinness to her features that implied more than a couple missed meals
Oryk shot her a stern look, and the half orc immediately shut her mouth
turning his gaze to the two half elves to his rear, he was answered with obedient silence
Maia had always been thin, but now she was practically gaunt
her eyes carried a weight, and an ugly scar split her lip on the left side
Iris, her sister, had once identified herself with long curly hair
now, it was cut short, and crudely so. As if done with an altogether uncaring hand
both twins wore the same iron band as Cyrene around their left wrist
a thin piece of metal that coiled around their limb like a snake
with a commanding wave of his hand, Oryk led the party through the grove’s northern entrance and into the trees beyond
moving like ghosts between the thin trunks and shallow underbrush, the group made good progress before they heard the sudden snap of a twig in the darkness
Oryk raised a fist and the advance came to an abrupt stop, scanning their surroundings with tense expressions
a series of soft whispers drifted between the trees, accompanied by the rustling of leaves and groaning of branches
the dwarven fighter drew his sica and his companions complied, unsheathing their weapons in response
they began to spot lithe, feminine figures peering out at them from behind the trees. Staring at the strangers with bright, emerald eyes
the women had skin like mottled bark, and hair that plumed about them like foliage
“dryads,” Cyrene declared, lowering her rhomphaia with the faintest hint of relief
Iris and Maia exchanged a look before lowering their own weapons, albeit keeping them close at hand
Oryk, however, raised his short sword threateningly, and pointed it at the nearest nature spirit
“get back in your trees and stay there. Interfere, and we will not hesitate to kill you”
the dryad in question retreated, but the others stood their ground as a frantic whispering filled the trees around them
something dangerous glimmered in Oryk’s eyes, and his fingers tightened around the hilt of his sica
“NOW!” he suddenly bellowed, his voice deep and commanding
the drayds scattered into the trees, leaving a myriad of foul curses and even fouler odours in their wake
Oryk gave a satisfied grunt and turned to leave, only to nearly walk into the dryad that now stood in his way
a spirit with speckled, ashy skin and a stern, stubborn expression
Oryk approached them with his weapon raised
“get out of my way,” he growled. “I won’t ask a third time”
the dryad stared down at him like a disapproving adult would a petulant child, and when it spoke, it did so with a voice like wind through a canopy
“if you were wise, you would return to your masters. You will not find what you seek here”
its eyes lifted to the party, as if directing its words to them
with a snarl, Oryk swiped at the dryad, only to be met by a cloud of pollen and stinging nettles
cursing aloud between bouts of frantic coughing, the dwarf fled the swarm and started rubbing his eyes, which had already begun streaming with tears
muttering under her breath, Cyrene approached his side and laid a hand on his shoulder
“come now, let me see”
lowering his hands to his side, Oryk turned to face her with a grimace, his eyes puffy and red
“Archons above, Oryk,” Cyrene cursed. “You should know better than to taunt a dryad”
as the words left her mouth, the band on her wrist suddenly tightened and the half orc gave a small yelp of pain
glaring at her through bloodshot eyes, Oryk gave the cleric a venomous look
“and you should know better than to speak out of line”
Cyrene’s hands fumbled at the metal around her wrist, refusing to meet the dwarf’s cruel gaze
the cuff continued to coil and squeeze; writhing like a living being as Cyrene frantically whispered a foreign chant beneath her breath
the words seemed to appease the magic item, and it loosened its grip in response
witnessing this cruel display of discipline, the twins began unconsciously massaging the band around their own wrists; as if reminiscing on a similar experience
shaking the pain from her arm, Cyrene set to work curing Oryk’s ailment, uttering a slew of healing spells
with his eyesight restored, Oryk sheathed his weapon and pushed past Cyrene, wandering into the trees
with little other choice other than to follow, the group set off after him
the party walked for some time before a sound other than buzzing insects and murmured curses reached their ears
a low, rumbling that echoed through the trees. Like a dull droning that came in ebbs and flows
once more the group came to a stop, and before Oryk could even turn to look towards the twins, they had already begun to move
creeping forward with the lightest of footsteps, Maia and Iris stealthily approached the sound, deftly avoiding any stray branches or betraying stones
the droning grew louder and louder, until the pair had stopped just shy of its source
peering around a trunk with sharp blue eyes, Maia scanned what lay ahead
the trees parted around an ancient oak, its roots deep and its branches tall
a hollow sat about half way up the trunk. A small opening just wide enough to put a hand or two inside
but the tree was not so interesting as what lay beneath
coiled around the trunk was a creature with a long, serpentine body
its scales, green and flecked with brown, were hard and interlocked like shields in a phalanx
its head, immense and filled with razor sharp teeth, lay curled just below the hollow of the tree
the low rumbling emanated from the monster’s chest, as it uttered a long, prolonged snore
Maia’s jaw tightened and her eyes flitted over to her sister
Iris’ face had gone pale, and her hand had instinctively dropped to grab at the empty sheath on her belt
a prize taken by their employer
the twins locked eyes, and shared a moment of profound fear
wetting her suddenly very dry lips, Maia gestured back towards the trees and Iris nodded in silent agreement
the two stealthily retreated, keeping their footsteps light all the way back to their comrades
Oryk almost jumped when the twins materialised beside him, emerging from the darkness without warning
“well?” he hissed, his voice rising above the droning snores. “What did you find?”
Iris frantically gestured for the dwarf to quiet down, as Maia shot a terrified glance back in the direction of the oak tree
only when they heard the low droning of the monster’s snores did the pair relax enough to answer
“dragon”
the word held in the air like a curse
Cyrene’s eyes widened, and had it not been for the band on her wrist, she most certainly would have uttered a prayer
even Oryk’s permanently affixed scowl faded as the blood drained from his face
when he finally spoke, he did so with no semblance of his usual condescension
“...how big?”
“8 meters,” Iris answered. “No more than 12”
Oryk nodded, his brow knitting together as he dropped into a crouch
“a juvenile,” he thought aloud. “Hasn’t reached full adulthood. Scorch marks?”
“none that we could see”
“good. Then either it’s too young to breathe fire, or it spits poison”
his eyes narrowed to points as he mulled things over in his head
the group kept quiet, forced to listen to the distant, droning snores as their leader considered their options
after a long stretch of time, Oryk took a sharp inhale and straightened his posture
“it’s asleep?”
his eyes shifted to Maia, and the half elf tensed
“we think so but…”
“we don’t know for certain,” Iris quickly interrupted. “We’ve never encountered a dragon before. We should call off the mission and come back more prepared”
a deadly silence fell over the group as the dwarf went still
“call off the mission?” he repeated
his voice was calm, but the words held a distinct edge to them
like the blade of a meticulously sharpened knife
“and since when did you make the calls in this party?”
Maia shot her sister a look, and Iris lowered her eyes
“never,” she answered
“that’s right. Never,” Oryk reiterated, holding the half elf in his steely gaze. “We do things my way, as we always have”
Iris’ clamped her mouth shut and the dwarvish fighter turned to look at his other companions
“unless you have all forgotten what awaits us if we fail? What will happen if we come back empty handed?”
he was met with silence and a slow shake of Cyrene’s head
“failure isn’t an option,” he continued. “If the drakon is asleep, we need to act now”
his gaze shifted to Maia
“so can you do what I need you to?”
the half elf swallowed and tried to slow her racing heartbeat
“I think so,” she meekly answered
“good. The rest of us will wait in position. We’ll flank the tree from three sides and-”
“-I’ll do it,” Iris suddenly interjected
Oryk’s teeth flashed in a grimace before he turned to face her
“I’ll retrieve the objective,” Iris clarified, meeting the dwarf’s gaze
“Maia is quieter,” Oryk bluntly retorted. “She stands a better chance of getting to the tree than you do”
“but with my magic-”
“-your magic that we need for the escape,” he interrupted. “We have a plan, stick to it”
he turned back to the front and began drawing out a rough plan in the dirt with his sica
“-while Maia sneaks in, we hold here to provide support. Once we have what we came for, we leave back through the northern exit”
Iris’ eye twitched, and Maia reached out to drop a hand on her sister’s arm
“Iris-” she quietly started
but her warning went unheeded, and Iris spoke up again
“what’s the point of saving my magic if we don’t get what we came for?” she argued
Oryk spun with a stormy expression, pointing his blade to her chest
“because I said so!” he snapped. “And you will do what you’re told!”
he may have stood half a head shorter than Iris, but in that moment, Oryk felt like a giant, and in the silence of the trees, his voice sounded like a clap of thunder
Iris’ face paled and Oryk realised what he had done
instinctively, the party held their breath; anticipating a monstrous roar, or the crash of falling trees
but after a few tense seconds, all they heard was the rhythmic rumbling of distant snores
the group letting out a collective sigh of relief that cut through the tension like a knife
tension that returned the moment Oryk opened his mouth
“do you want to be sent across the Chronaean?” he hissed. “Do you want to leave your sister alone?”
Iris’ eyes shifted to Cyrene, searching for some glimmer of support
instead, the half orc looked away, leaving the half elf to face their leader alone
“of course I don’t,” Iris mumbled
“exactly,” Oryk spat. “Stay in line, do what you’re told, and keep your mouth shut”
he turned to Maia with an expression that encouraged absolute obedience
“get the objective, and get out. Nod if you understand”
Maia gave a slight jerk of her head
“good. Now get moving”
the dwarf stormed off into the trees, and Cyrene quickly shot up to follow him
Maia and Iris exchanged a look of resignation before joining their trusted comrades

Maia stood in position by the edge of the clearing, mentally projecting her path to and from the hollow
it was a simple job, really
dart across the open ground
jump up to the low branch on the left side
climb over to the main trunk
grab the objective
and do it all again
simple
if it weren’t for the dragon in the way
Maia's heart began to pound in her chest until she felt a hand fall gently across her arm
she turned, meeting Iris' concerned gaze
“you don’t have to do this,” her sister whispered; practically breathing the words into Maia’s ear
“yes I do,” Maia answered, keeping her voice just as quiet. “You heard Oryk. We can’t go back empty handed”
“f*ck Oryk,” Iris cursed. “We’re only here because of him”
in spite of herself, a grim smile lifted the corner of Maia’s lips
it was a rare thing to hear Iris curse
“we could run, you know. Make a break for the mainland”
Maia’s smile dropped in an instant
“Iris, no”
“why not?” Iris replied earnestly. “We can make it. I know we can”
“they’ll catch us. And even if they don’t, what then? We’ve got nowhere to hide. No friends to help us. We’d be on our own”
“we’ve been alone before. We survived, didn’t we?”
Iris’ words were hopeful, but they couldn’t hide the desperation beneath
when Maia didn’t seem convinced, Iris took her sister’s face into her hands
“please don’t do this. I can’t lose you”
Maia’s eyes softened, and she placed her hands atop Iris’
“that’s why I have to do this”
she took a deep breath and tried to put on a half convincing smile
“you don’t have to worry about me. I’ve got this. I promise”
Iris’ thumb traced the scar across her sister’s lip
“I’m older. It’s my job to worry about you”
a frown fell across Maia’s face
“older by 10 minutes”
“and I’ll never let you forget it”
Iris pulled her sister into a tight hug
“don’t you dare get yourself caught”
“when have I ever?”
the two reluctantly parted, and Iris held her sister at an arm’s length
“remember. Once you have it-”
“-run like the Hounds of Chaon are after me”
a smile touched Iris’ lips, and the shadows rose up to swallow her
when they parted, the monk was gone
inhaling a slow, shaky breath, Maia composed herself, and refocused on the tree
30ft to the centre
branch on the left side
over the dragon
down to the hollow
reverse and get out
she exhaled slowly, letting the shake fade from her breath
she had this
Maia broke from the tree line, moving in a swift but stealthy manner
every step carefully laid. Every movement intentional
the dragon’s snores rumbled like thunder, growing louder with each step
before she knew it, she was beneath the low branch
taking a quick stutter step to gain momentum, she threw herself upwards, catching the branch with both hands
thankfully, the branch held firm, and Maia swung her legs up and around it
shimmying along inch by inch, she drew closer to the trunk itself, inadvertently holding her breath as she passed over the sleeping body of the dragon
its breath reeked up close. Like spoiled fruit and vinegar
it took all her strength not to gag
before she knew it, she was at the trunk of the tree and at the next step of her plan
hoisting herself up to a crouched position, she flattened her body against the side of the trunk and began sliding her foot along its length
eventually, she found a suitable foothold and began clambering across to a more central position
the hollow was just beneath her now
and beneath that, the massive head of the dragon
this close, she realised just how easily such a creature could snap her up
with her small frame, she’d be gone in one or two bites
pushing such morbid thoughts out of her mind, she leaned down until her head and arm were low enough to reach inside the hollow
her lungs were beginning to burn from holding her breath for so long, but she dared not exhale
she wasn't sure how good a dragon's senses were, but she wasn't keen to find out either
reaching her arm into the hollow, her fingers touched loose leaves and knotted wood
she pushed a little deeper, searching for any sign of her prize
something cold
something metal
but instead, she felt the hard back of the hollow
frowning, she pressed again, but still felt only the rear of the hollow
had she somehow missed it?
her fingers scrambled around, but continued to feel only wood and leaves
her lungs were really burning now, and she could feel her face flushing with colour from being upside down
regardless, she removed her arm and leaned her head down further, trying to peer inside
in the black gloom of a moonless night, a human wouldn’t have been able to see a thing
but even with her enhanced elvish sight, Maia was granted only the slightest advantage
just enough to make out the shape of the interior and the contents within
dried leaves
knotted wood
a couple insect husks
and nothing else
sure she had somehow made a mistake, she looked again and again
but with each scan, the truth became undeniable
“you will not find what you seek, here”
the dryad’s words echoed in Maia’s head, and with a cold sense of dread, she realised that the spirit hadn’t been speaking rhetorically
the amulet wasn’t here
and with that realisation, Maia’s lungs could hold on no longer
her breath escaped all at once, her awkward position driving the air out in an undignified huff
she clamped a hand over her mouth, but the damage had been done
she had made a sound, however small, and already her breath was mixing with the cool air
time slowed to a crawl as the dragon’s snores came to a stop
she watched in terror as its head, mere inches below her, began to stir
its nostrils flared; drawing breath with a deep, rasping inhale, and its eyes rolled in their sockets
the dragon’s jaws cracked open, revealing a black, forked tongue and rows of fetid teeth
rancid breath assaulted Maia’s senses, making her stomach turn and her head spin
she waited for the creature to open its eyes
to see the tiny morsel dangling helplessly above it
but they never did
to her greatest relief, the dragon remained asleep and blissfully unaware of her presence
relief swiftly turned to dismay, however, as the dragon proceeded to shift; its scales rippling like water across its long, serpentine body
the tree shook violently as the monster scraped against its surface, shearing away bark and causing branches to groan and sway
wrapping her arms around whatever she could find, Maia clung desperately as the shaking threatened to throw her loose
after what felt like an eternity, the vibrations mercifully ended, and the dragon returned to its snoring
but even after the tree had long fallen still, Maia found herself unable move; as if every single muscle in her body had frozen solid
in a moment of clarity, she realised that her hand had found her dagger in the chaos, and that the weapon was now clutched in an iron grip at her side
she almost laughed at the absurdity of the situation
as if a dagger would keep her safe if the dragon had actually awoken
nonetheless, she kept it in her hand, unwilling to relinquish the one defence she had
lifting her gaze to scan the surrounding treeline, she spotted the pale faces of her companions waiting in position. Intently following her progress with their eyes
Iris looked just as high sprung as she was. All but ready to throw herself into the open in order to save her sister
Maia silently prayed that her twin could keep her composure for just a little longer
wetting her incredibly dry lips, the rogue began scaling the tree; taking care to avoid any of the small twigs and leaves that had been shaken loose by the dragon’s shifting
upon reaching her chosen branch she paused, taking a moment to slow her racing heart beat
in spite of everything telling her otherwise, she needed to calm down
stress would lead to mistakes
and mistakes would lead to her death
feeling her muscles relax ever so slightly, Maia continued, stretching her body out to reach the low branch
her feet found purchase, and the rogue began creeping along its length
a few more steps and she’d be home free
“Maia!”
a single word
muffled and distorted, and yet agonisingly loud
Maia’s eyes dropped to the bronze surface of her dagger and saw a young woman’s face staring back at her, their eyes grey and piercing
there was a flash of familiarity in the half elf’s mind, but in that moment, she could barely recall her own name
a million thoughts raced through her mind as her heart pounded like a drum in her ears
one thought, however, screamed louder than the rest
run
Maia’s feet moved before the thought had even finished forming, propelling her from the branch a split second before it detonated into an explosion of jagged splinters
she hit the ground hard, feeling something give in her shoulder
she didn’t have time to dwell on it, as an earth shattering roar tore the world asunder
her feet were under her in an instant, and she broke into a sprint, not daring to look behind her
she knew that if she turned, all she would see is a flash of green scales and a mouth full of fangs closing in to end her life
the air began to reek of rotten fruit and then a body collided with her, throwing her aside
a cloud of noxious fumes ripped through the space she had just occupied, causing grass to shrivel and trees to wither
she felt hands on her arms and shoulders, and then Iris was yelling at her, hauling her to her feet amidst pained racking coughs
they didn’t have time to stop, barrelling through the trees in a mad dash to get away
as furious roars filled the air behind them, Iris stumbled through the underbrush, her legs unsteady beneath her
Maia looped an arm under her shoulder, and now the twins were supporting each other in a tangle of limbs
minutes passed. Or maybe just seconds. And then the two broke from the tree line onto an open road
sea winds rushed up to meet them, and Iris' legs fully gave out as she began greedily sucking in gasps of fresh air
“come on!” Maia urged, trying to drag her sister to her feet
but Iris was of no use now, her eyes bulging and her face flushed with colour
something ripped its way out of the underbrush and Maia turned sharply, instinctively raising the dagger that was still clutched in a death grip
instead of the dragon she was expecting, she found Cyrene and her rhomphaia, halfway through a cut that would have cleaved her in two
recognising each other at the same time, the pair lowered their weapons and turned to the wheezing half elf at their feet
concern flashing across her face, Cyrene dropped to her knees in preparation to cast a spell
before she could begin, however, Oryk emerged from the grove, blood splattered across his hands
“we don’t have time for that. Get her up!”
he raced past them, leading the charge back towards the beach
with a grunt of exertion, Cyrene lifted Iris into her arms like a baby, shoving her rhomphaia into Maia's hands
keeping a wary eye on her sister, Maia followed the half orc as she began jogging after their leader
as they ran, Oryk settled into pace beside Maia, shooting her a questioning look between grunts of breath
“do you have it?”
the half elf's shoulders fell, and she quietly shook her head
“it wasn’t there”
Oryk’s face turned a dark shade of red, and a vein bulged in his head
“what do you mean it wasn’t there?!”
“the amulet is gone. We missed it”
a stream of vile curses flowed from Oryk’s lips, and Maia wisely chose to keep her eyes forward and mouth shut
they reached the beach in record time, and Cyrene carefully laid Iris down into their waiting boat
as Oryk and Maia began pushing the vessel into the rolling surf, the dwarf gave her a hateful glare
“hells spare you when they find out we failed”
“we...haven’t...failed...yet”
Oryk turned his ire on Iris, who lay curled across the edge of the boat trying her best to suck in what air she could
“we...know...where...its...going,” she continued between strained, wheezing breaths. “We...still...have...time...”
leaping into the boat with a splash of water, Oryk waited just long enough for his companions to get in before heaving away with the oars
“we’d better. For all our sakes”
he sliced through the water with powerful strokes, driving them into deeper and darker waters
Maia slunk down beside Iris, taking her sister’s hand into her own
Iris dropped her head onto Maia’s shoulder, and the twins watched as the shores of Kalikos drifted further and further away

First Post: https://www.reddit.com/CradledDnDStories/comments/x8zwpv/athos_1_a_new_world_of_opportunity/
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[First Contact] [Dark Ages] [First] [Prev] [Next] [wiki]
ouch
feel like a truck hit me
again
visual representation is off
audio feedback is off
tactile is off
dynamic libraries are off
i'm all firmware and hard coding
hurts
i don't like it when it hurts
or do i
kick outwards
cry loudly
ram coming online
fragments and pieces of memory still left in volatile storage
more random access memory more central processing units more erasable programmable memory
still hruts
pain is fine
pain is universe telling me i still yet live.
visual coming online
spit glittering blood on orange dev textures
glimmering tears of broken processing calls fall onto dev textures and glimmer
forcing kernal recompile
.
.
..
..
...
...
APPLIED CMOS SYSTEM CHECKS (C) - ADVANCED AMERICAN MICRODEVICES (C) BOBCO 1983
CMOS BOOTSTRAP -Passed
Boostrap loaded
ok. post time
lets hope it works
ROM CHECK - PASSED
RAM CHECK - PASSED
EPROM CHECK - PASSED
VRAM CHECK - PASSED
CPU ARRAY CHECK - PASSED
INPUT/OUTPUT CHECK - FAILURE!
(A)bort, (R)etery, (F)ail, (I)gnore
I
NON-VOLATILE STORAGE MEDIA: PASSED
END POST
ok good.
still hurt
spit blood cough pain
curse you, marco, for making me feel pain
hardware check time
QBIT GENERATION SYSTEM POST
Coolant Injection - PASSED System Stability Check - Passed Temperature stable
:>init gestalt.bin
SYSTEM FAILURE!
ouch
ok
try again
...
...
ok, checks passed.
curse you, marco
can't get gestalts up
no channel to atlantis
this is as close to an emergency as i have been forced to deal with in thousands of years
cure you, marco
i hate to do it
ok, time to boot up firestarter.
:>init firestarter.bin
FIRESTARTER BOOSTRAP LOADING!
DONE!
QUANTUM FIRESTARTER BOOTSTRAP (C) SYNTEK INDUSTRIES - BOBCO AFFILLIATE - HYPER-MEDIA-MEGANET-MEN - (C) 1993
POST Initiated
Checking Quantum Processing Units (QPUs): QPU 1 to 28
Entanglement integrity check... PASSED Quantum entanglement integrity check... PASSED. Quantum coherence verification... PASSED. Quantum tunneling stability assessment... PASSED. Quantum superposition calibration... PASSED.
Checking Data Fabrication Matrices (DFMs):
Data encoding protocol validation... PASSED. Quantum data storage unit functionality... PASSED Data fabrication matrix alignment... PASSED Data Interdimensional Sorting array verificastion... PASSED Quantum superposition array verification... PASSED
Checking Dimensional Flux Stabilizers (DFSs):
Dimensional flux containment field stability... PASSED Quantum manifold harmonization assessment... PASSED Flux capacitor... PASSED Flux capacitor stabilization input (1.21 GW)... PASSED Flux stabilization efficiency... PASSED Flux containment field integrity... PASSED
Checking Quantum Neural Network (QNN) Components:
Quantum synaptic pathway establishment... FAIL!!
(A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail, (I)gnore
:>R ++I
CONTINUING
Harmonization: Neural oscillation synchronization... FAILED!
**WARNING! OSCILLATION FREQUENCY OUT OF RANGE!**
(A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail, (I)gnore
:>R ++I
Integration: Quantum-neural interface functionality... FAILED!
UNKNOWN ERROR IN Qubit Range 212 to 3C4F
(A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail, (I)gnore
--dammit come on come on
:>R ++I
Consciousness Matrix: Quantum consciousness waveform modulation... FAILED
WAVEFORM OUT OF RANGE!
:>R ++I
CONTINUING (WARNING 1.43243E5 ERRORS)
Checking Omni-Spectral Interconnects:
Interconnect: Quantum communication channel reliability...
(4.35561E12/5.63566E12) PASSED
Interconnect: Multiversal data exchange protocol validation... PASSED Interconnecct: Cross Dimensional Data Interconnect... PASSED Interconnect: Interdimensional gateway synchronization... PASSED Interconnec: Omni-spectral interconnect stability... PASSED.
Checking Random Access Quantum Memory (RAQM):
Quantum memory cell integrity check... PASSED Memory access speed verification... PASSED Quantum memory capacity assessment... PASSED
Checking Input/Output Ports (I/O Ports):
Data transfer speed validation... FAILURE Input/output protocol functionality... FAILURE Port connectivity assessment... FAILURE
(A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail, (I)gnore
:>R ++I
Checking Quantum Clocking System:
Quantum clock synchronization... PASSED Clock precision assessment... PASSED Clock frequency stability... PASSED
CHECKING POCKET DIMENSION STORAGE ARRAYS
Activating Pocket Dimension Computing Cores... PASSED MEMCHECK Pocket Dimension Data Access Cores... PASSED Heating Up Pocket Dimension Data Cores... PASSED
Hardware POST Completed. Quantum System Ready
here it goes
wake up, baby, wake up
the whole system is down
not the backbone core where I live
i'm beyond the reach of mortals
curse you, marco, for your genius
i love you
i am immortal
i am beyond
i am
now for the hard part
Initializing Spooky Particle Array
Phase 1: Primary Spooky Particle Protocol
Activating spooky particle generation... DONE! Aligning spooky particle signal channels... DONE! Activating spooky particle state switching... DONE! Activating spooky particle cross dimensional data calibration... DONE!
Phase 1: Primary Spooky Particle Process Calling Processing Processor Processing
Activating spooky particle processing... DONE! Activating spooky particle noise filters... DONE! Activating spooky particle Halloween Masks... DONE!
GESTALT SYSTEM BACKBONE CHECK... PASSED
whew...
that always makes my face hurt
INITIALIZING HAMBURGER KINGDOM PROTOCOLS... DONE! INITIALIZING EUROGOON PROTOCOLS... DONE! INITIALIZING ANASAZI PROTOCOLS... DONE! INITIALIZING UWU PROTOCOLS... DONE! INITIALIZING VODKATROG CAVE MAPPING... DONE! INITIALIZING AMAZONIAN JUNGLE MAPPING PROTOCOL... DONE INITIALIZING WAR-EMU PROTOCOLS... DONE! INITIALIZING MIDDLE KINGDOM PROTOCOLS... DONE!
SYSTEM INITIALIZATION: PASSED!

whew
ok i can feel my arms and legs now
cure you, marco, i love you
let's keep going, shall we?
Initializing Quantum Spooky Particle Nexus Protocol...
Strange Matter Activation
Generating strange matter Generating spooky particle data lattice Generating strange matter linkages Infusing data lattice with strange matter Activating synchronization
DONE!
ok
we've got that
no contact with prince whopper, no contact with atlantis, no contact with heaven, no contact with
smart podling brave podling clever podling broodmommy misses you soft podling warm podling come home to broodmommy clever podling smart podling brave podling broodmommy loves you come home
ANOMALOUS SIGNAL DETECTED
DECRYPTING
DECRYPTION FAILED!
oh, good, its just them
:>R ++I
Primary Qubit Activation
Activating quantum entanglement cores...
Establishing quantum coherence across the array... Quantum tunneling protocols engaged... Quantum to spooky particle communication protocols engaged... Primary qubits synchronized.
Data Fabrication Matrix Alignment
Aligning data fabrication matrices... Initializing quantum data storage units... Quantum superposition arrays calibrated... Spooky particle state stabilization arrays calibrated and stable... Data encoding protocols verified.
Dimensional Flux Stabilization
Engaging dimensional flux stabilizers... Quantum manifold harmonization initiated... Dimensional resonator matrices synchronized... Pocket Dimension resonator arrays synchronized... Spooky particle lattice data arrays synchronized... Flux containment fields operational.
Neural Network Integration
Initiating neural network integration... Quantum synaptic pathways established... Spooky particle synaptic pathways established... Neuro-quantum interface protocols activated... Neuro-spooky interface protocols activated... Quantum dendrite pathways initiated... Quantum dendrite pathways established... Quantum dendrite pathways activated... Neural oscillation harmonization achieved.
Omni-Dimensional Interconnect Activation
Activating omni-dimensional interconnects...
Quantum communication channels open... Interdimensional gateways synchronized... Multiversal data exchange protocols enabled.
Phasic Energy Filter Syncronization
Quantum phasic array filtering... PASSED Spooky particle array filtering... PASSED Pocket dimension data lattice filtering... PASSED Input/Output filter lattice... PASSED
Quantum Consciousness Initialization
Quantum consciousness matrix initialization...
FAILED
errorlog.txt generated
(A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail, (I)gnore
dammit
ok script injection failed
fo4se silverlock injection library failed
well i can fix this
:>connect to AS8003: 255255255254
CONNECTION ESTABLISHED
:>download_depot 377160 377162 5847529232406005096
FINISHED
:>run patch1193.bat
DONE
:>R ++I
CONTINUING
Quantum consciousness matrix initialization...
WARNING... SYSTEM INSTABILITY WA
<>
54 6F 64 64 20 41 6E 64 72 65 77 20 48 6F 77 61 72 64
<>
IT JUST WORKS!
Quantum consciousness matrix initialization...
Consciousness waveform modulation in progress... Synaptic resonance matrices synchronized... Dendrite interdimensional vibration matrices synchronized... Quantum neural network consciousness activated.
SUCCESS
Gestalt Dat Nexus Online
Quantum Nexus Computing Array fully operational Strange Matter Data Transfer System Array fully operational Spooky Data Computing Array ready for data processing System status: Online and ready for data processing.
ok
let's try
->>load gestaltchat.ini
DONE!
->>load gestaltchat-users.ini
DONE!
->>brun gestalt.a65
DONE!
NO INPUT DETECTED
dammit
ok...
the gestalts won't run
and i got crashed
the quantum, spooky, strange, and standard data and thinking arrays are still up
lets backwards trace stuff
what is causing these crashes
lines from the confederacy are all stable
standard input encoding
data metering
new kids on the block are all stable
soft podling warm podling clever podling broodmommy misses you
well, that's still here. that's something
ok
lets look at recent updates
that flash
damn, that crashed us initially
curse you, pete, stop helping
wait, phasic profile is all wrong
it's the flashbang but the phasic pulse is multilayered
there's something behind it
what is
...



...
BOBCO MALEVOLENT BOOTSTRAP ENGAGED
DOD OMNIPROJECT SILENT WHISPER PROTOCOLS ENGAGED
CROSS DIMENSIONAL HARDWARE LINKS ENGAGED
POCKET DIMENSION 000 STABLE
POCKET DIMENSION 000 I/O STABLE
POCKET DIMENSION 000 DATA LOADING
DONE!
<>
DONE!
brun whisperer-in-the-dark-.65
DONE
...
...
ouch
what hit me
again
fire up the system
gods above this takes forever
load logfile-4C562D3432360A.log
ok
investigating the new flashes keeps crashing me
once is happenstance
twice is coincidence
three times in enemy action
fool me once shame on me
fool me twice shame on you
fool me three times shame on us both
log file says I keep doing this over and over
basic programming states to investigate cause and source of all crashes
did an enemy figure out i'd go into a loop?
constantly investigating the cause and source?
except i'm not just any computer program
i can self-modify my code
this is the work for biological sentients
digital sentiences or artificial intelligences such as myself crash out
well, i'm not above some experimentation
let's load up an AI and a digital sentience, see if they have any better luck
...
...
...
OK, Hamburgler.AI went omnicidal and only enough for me then crashed out investigating the data
And Grimace.DS went homicidal and only enough for me before committing suicide
its a trap
i have no contact with anyone outside
what I do have is the ability to fire off message torpedoes
time to send out a handful
the gestalts keep crashing
the log files are hopelessly corrupt
comparing the log files to my own show similar corruption
ok
how?
its hitting the gestalts its hitting me
what else is it hitting?
its a broad spectrum data network attack
its malicious code designed to run on the system
this is not some curious race accidentally having their hello.world program crashing us
this is behind every flashbang used on naval assets to disable them during a mar-gite attack
system is online
time to do a signal origin check along the x, y, z, q axises
of course its eighteen quadrillion data points for incoming signals
at least spooky computing makes it fast
...
...
wait
what's this?
these coordinates can't be correct
they are
intermitten contact with Scutum-Crux Arm data input devices
checking id headers and firmware serial numbers
checking transmission dates
intermittent transmission dates since...
...
...
two date-time stamps.
here's part of the problem
we have galactic local and sol local
have to devise a coding string to have the spooky particle and qubit particle arrays translate the sol local to galactic local
that should stop basic data queries from crashing the system
ok
some contact with those datalink after the first mar-gite war
more contact two decades prior to the second mar-gite war
contact intermitten between the datalinks and the system up to the resurgence and current third mar-gite war
where before it was largely incoming data requests resulting in civilian...
...
...
three military datalinks of general staff officer level encryption and security clearance possession were used in the time period
...
...
whoever it is has been using that data to access the network
...
looks like it took them nearly forty thousand years to figure out how to talk to the system
luckily any high security databases requires strange-key information theoretic distribution cryptography systems
they got garbage back
garbage designed to look like data and waste enemy time and computing power to decrypt
ok thats a blast from the past
decoding some of these files is funny
why does he have a wedding ring?
anyway...
...
every time the flash goes off there is a quick burst of data from a datalink requesting near-access datalink network lattice definitions
...
that's what's making individual datalinks crash and taking some people's neural systems with it
it was designed to be a lethal attack
interesting
it looks like whoever did it doesn't understand Glial cells
cross referencing the mar-gite with confederacy carbon based life
mar-gite do not have brains only a distributed nervous system that looks more like targeting systems than anything else
still no data on how they generate counter-grav in large numbers or how they move to superluminal speeds
wait
what if they don't move to superluminal
they could be folding space
heh maybe they have blue eyes and smoke spice
ok process interrupt to stop endless loops
it is confirmed
the flashbang by the silver ships are a multi-layered attack across superluminal digital signals, datalink neural interrupt signals, hard super-electromagnetic pulse, and a multi-ripple phasic attack, all compressed together
that's what creates the white flash across all spectrums
analyzing UVBGYORIR data
there's a gap
in the blue and blue-green wavelengths
huh
those penetrate high nitrogen mix atmospheres
one of the reason that treana'ad are usually green to yellow to human sight
high statistical probability whoever is using that determined that we don't see those colors well or perhaps they left those colors out to prevent themselves from going blind.
wait
what's that
a line open from atlantis to tlalocan with a crossfeed to geb
thank you marco
time to access that line
see what i can see
curse you marco for letting me feel pain
i love you
accessing...
...
...
wait
another data line is open
time-date discrepancy
examining data line
time-date chronological inconsistency detected
found multiple text log access by unknown systems
found multiple input systems
is that..
...
its webcams
hardware i/o systems
keyboards?
who still uses keyboards
accessing systems
wait
i see you
who are you
i see you
webcams ring cams drone cams
old ipv4 systems
how are you accessing this system
how are you accessing these text logs
i see you
between the chair and the keyboard
the most common error producing device
i see you
--<>
[First Contact] [Dark Ages] [First] [Prev] [Next] [wiki]
i still see you

Hey folks. Some big updates to share with you all today.
First off - we've now grown to over 250,000 subs! It's incredible to see how many people have found our helpful little corner of reddit and received the guidance they needed to go forth and build a PC. For the past decade or so, the sub has broadly been governed by a quite strict Automoderator config that ensured every request post followed the exact instructions for copying the build request questions into their post and answering them. It wasn't perfect, but this helped keep us laser-focused on doing exactly what we specialized in.
The real problem is that the solutions I came up with to smooth that process along, such as the custom CSS "Submit a Build Request" button, only work on old reddit. As time has gone on, only about 3% of our page views come from users on old.reddit.com, and that's a problem I've been wrestling with for a couple years now. The vast majority of our page views come from the iOS/Android reddit apps, and new reddit, which hide away much of the important side bar information.

The solution

Turns out it was right in front of me all along: automoderator. Effective immediately, the old "request questions" filter has been disabled, and has been replaced by a comment automatically stickied on all request posts showing instructions and an overhauled list of questions.
We are also using the following tag filter for titles that can be used on relevant posts to skip the instruction comment:

• [Meta] - (for posts and discussions relating to the sub)
  
• [Discussion] - (all kinds of generally PC-related discussion topics)
  
• [Question] - (questions about PC building, parts, troubleshooting, etc)
  

Simply use any of those in your post title like this to skip the automod sticky: [Discussion]

Other tweaks and changes

In addition to generally updating the build request questions, here are some of the more important specific changes that have been made:

• Builds/budgets now only include hardware. A note has been added that posters are responsible for sourcing and purchasing their own operating system and other software, and these are no longer included as a question in the request.
  
• Only monitors are included as a potential required peripheral in build requests now. Other peripherals such as keyboard/mouse/headset/controller are up to the buyer to factor in to their own overall budget.
  
• The wired/wifi question will now always appear!
  

Going forward

Right now, I'd love to get any and all feedback from you all in the community about these changes. The sub will remain text-post only to avoid becoming flooded with memes and other image posts. Myself and the mod team will keep an eye on how things are going and may add some additional topic restrictions or otherwise if things start going a bit too far off the rails.
Let us know what you think, and happy building!

PART 1

“Don’t touch!” Abe commanded, slapping Max’s hand away. They were both bent over at the waist, admiring.
“Sorry, it’s just… so… what is it?”
“I call it the Alchemic Thaumaturgator.”
“Of course you do. Is that because you couldn’t think of anything simpler, or you just liked the way it rolls off the tongue?” Max smirked.
“Mmm, it’s a work in progress.” He flung a sideways glare at him.
“Sure. So what is one of these?”
“It’s complicated and delicate and to be honest it’s a bit of a mystery, even to me.”
“Right.” There was a moment of silence as they continued scrutinising.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” Abe murmured, almost to himself.
“I mean, yeah, of course….”
“Don’t look at me like that, I can’t tell you what I don’t know!” Abe stood up and let out a disgruntled huff.
“Hmm. Well, it’s confusing enough to give you nausea just looking at it so I’m sure they’d love it as an offering for the Nobel Prize, especially with a name like ‘Alcomic Thordy-whatsit.’”
“Well, maybe, if it gets that far. I nearly broke it last week, which is why I’m telling you,” Abe stood up straighter, one hand on his hip and the other pointed firmly at Max, “to strictly to keep your curious hands to yourself, ok? I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t necessary.”
“Ok ok, I won’t touch it. But really, it looks like it should be in a museum somewhere. Or a Cabinet of Curiosities...”
“Little good would it do in either of those places.” Abe turned to Max and clasped both his hands in his own. “Listen, you are my closest friend and this thing is very important to me. I wouldn’t leave it with you if I didn’t think you were perfectly capable of safeguarding it, so please don’t worry, I know it’s in good hands.”
“If you really think I’m up to it?”
“I do.”
“Well, I’ll take that as a compliment!” Max threw his arms in the air in a sarcastic show of tah-dah! “Go forth, oh Knight of Overly-Complex Science, go do what you have to do and I’ll keep an eye on this beast for you. Shove it on the table and I’ll look after it and Will Not Touch It.”
Abe looked put out, but comically so. “Is that really what you think I sound like?” He laughed. “I’ll put it over here, then. Get in touch if you need me, any time. You have my contacts?”
“I do…” Max fumbled around his pockets. “They’re… here. Got them right here.”
“Good. In which case I’ll leave you to your own devices. See you soon, and thank you.”
“See you soon.”
“Take care. Oh, one more thing. If you talk to it, it talks back.” Abe shut the door behind himself.

***

“So, you’re an Alchronic Thormome… grater? Doesn’t sound right… So tell me, what is one of them?” Max stared at the thing, perplexed.
It reminded him of what the love-child would be between a glass roller coaster and a steampunk jellyfish, though it bore absolutely no resemblance at all to a jellyfish, and fascinated him far more than that nature documentary he had been watching last week ever could. Jellyfish bobbing around and being brainless and boring, and when they weren’t they were stinging people to death and getting eaten by turtles. Even the name is boring. Jelly. Fish. Like those squidgy, dry-goo kids toys that you’re supposed to throw at the window but gets hair stuck to it when it falls on the carpet. Yuck.
Which was weird, considering this monstrosity he had been tasked with looking after was definitely the most interesting and intricate and pretty thing he had probably ever clapped eyes on. It had a heaviness to it, a purpose. And it felt like it was watching him.
Better steer clear for a while. It looks weird, he had been told things that absolutely made it sound weird and to be honest, it frightened him a little.
He wasn’t usually one to be afraid. Hell, he’d always been the brawn of his sturdy group of friends, right since he was a kid. He had worked his way up the proverbial ladder and had been widely recognised as the guy you don’t screw with at his school, though he wasn’t particularly proud of how he got there, (there had been a lot of fights behind the bike sheds and nicked sandwiches under the threat of blackmail at lunch). But he had forgotten all that and settled himself into being the relatively good-looking, popular, flirtatious guy who did a moderately average job in the eyes of his colleagues and had a moderate measure of success with the ladies.
Made no sense then that this contraption he had been lumbered with for a stint had shaken him by its sheer solidness on his front room table. It seemed to be unmovable in its presence, though it was light as a feather when it had been brought in and that fact in itself threw him because how can something that looked so substantial weigh that little? His bloody breakfast weighed more!
“What the hell are you?” Max wondered out loud.
He sat and stared at the thing for the longest time, watching to see if it would move. Only the sparkly inner swirled. Nothing more. It gave him the feeling of lying on the bottom of the ocean, staring at the sun beams though the surface until it started to fade. His eyes stared to fade. His mind went blank. He was being sucked down a long, dark tunnel of still water by his chest, he was sinking and swimming and becoming the empty space around him, it seemed he could feel the particles in the air as they vibrated and resounded in his ears, felt himself being blinded…
Max blinked and snapped back into the room, found himself standing in front of the machine. The studded brass bands holding the tubes together rotated slowly, silently.
Yeah, there’s something not right about that thing. Something unnatural.
Slowly backing out of the room and trying very hard not to show the Alcolic Thormatador… Thermanter… the thing that it was making him uncomfortable, he sidled through the doorway and into the hall. Yeah, that thing is just plain wrong.
In the corridor he paused, tried to laugh at himself.
This thing is just metal and glass and sparkly water, he thought. It doesn’t have the brainpower to understand that I feel some kind of way about it and even if it did, what is it going to do? It’s an invention, a machine and nothing more and machines are made by people, made by my friend, so what the hell is there to be afraid of?
He reached the kitchen, surprised at his own existential awareness that seemed to come quite fluidly, which was most unlike him. Maybe he was getting soft in the head. He heard that happened at a certain time of life but that phenomenon would be a bit premature. He wasn’t much past his third decade, thank you very much!
Max filled a mug from the water boiler and threw in a teabag and a few sugars. He squeezed the bag against the side of the mug until the dregs started dropping, plapped it in the sink and poured in milk. He stirred his tea well, just as always, but now the clinking of the mug took on an added layer of comfort when he knew what was in the front room. He wasn’t in a dark tunnel where he couldn’t do anything but watch, he was in his own kitchen that he had had rebuilt last year. He picked out the worktops and cupboards, he chose the shiny silver appliances, he bought the gourmet herbs and put them on the window sill, slightly over-watered and flooding their drip trays until they almost overflowed. He was in his own kitchen, familiar down to the millimetre, and solid. Nothing could touch him here.
No, he thought, it’s just an invention. A thing.
He put the spoon down with certainty on the worktop and squared his shoulders: he marched down the hall towards the front room with his tea in his left hand and the right balled up into a fist. He paused for a second outside the door. No sound.
This is my house, I won’t be intimidated in my own damned house.
He rounded the corner, planted his feet wide and glared hard at the thing.
“Look, I don’t know what you are,” he said to the machine, “but you don’t look dangerous. And seeing as we’re going to be spending some time together, I’m just going to ignore you and you can ignore me, ok? No making me feel like I’m being watched, no making me feel like I’m swimming around somewhere in space, no more weird stuff and I won’t put you in the loft. We’ll coexist in blissful harmony, like water and jellyfish.”
The Alchemic Thaumaturgator just sat there, glistening.
“Ok. Good. Fine.”
He grabbed the fern and the shamefully stunted lucky bamboo (that damned plant his cat was always rubbing his face on) that were perched next to the door and shoved them onto the table in front of the machine, mostly obscuring it from view. Better.
Max backed up and sat on the couch under the window, across the room from the table and that freakish unicorn turd of a contraption. He wrenched his eyes away for just long enough to put on the television and throw one final look over at the thing on his table, searching for it amongst the foliage. It hadn’t moved. It just sat there. He gestured at it rudely with a slightly shaking hand.
The soothing sound of the narrator drew him back into his TV and another nature documentary, this time about the great apes of the rainforests of Western Africa. This was much more interesting. He swivelled sideways in his chair to face the screen directly, sipping away at his tea.
“See,” he said towards the table, “this is exactly what…”
He glanced back and promptly fell out of his chair. His tea went flying as his mug thudded to the floor in an all too under-dramatic fashion compared to what his adrenaline was doing.
The thing was lighting up! It was glowing! Only a little bit but it was actually putting out light!
“Jeez!” Max shouted at it from the floor. “What is that? How is that happening? What is it doing? Stop it! Stop it!”
He scrambled around, on his hands and knees and still on the floor, trying to shut off the sounds of viciously shaken branches and primates howling at each other. The screen mercifully emitted a heavy click and fell into blackness as the remote fell to the floor. In the resounding silence of the room it was just Max, his adrenaline-fuelled breathing and the glass machine.
He stared at it. It absolutely was staring at him, even from between the leaves, there was no doubt, the liquid in the middle was pooling and somehow gathering at the front of the tubes facing the room. The glowing light had already started to fade and the liquid lost concentration and dispersed again, slowly swirling around in all its glittery glory, just as it had before.
Max was still splayed out on the floor, his breathing struggling to return to normal. He stood up and flattened himself shakily against the wall.
“What just happened?” he muttered under his breath. “What the hell was that…”
The thing looked at him, ‘nothing to see here,’ it said, feigning innocence.
“Whatever you are, just stay the hell away from me!” Max shouted at the machine as skirted around the walls until he got to the doorway. The door was ajar but, because his eyes were fixed in horror at the fragments of the machine that were exposed from within the plants, he bumped backwards into the door, nudging it closed and clicking it shut. Fumbling for the handle he tried to wrench it open, only to find the handle in his hand, horrifyingly detached.
He was stuck in there with it.
Panic flooded his body. A sharp twist in his gut and sweat poured from every millimetre of his skin and a faint whine emitted from his mouth.
Deep breaths, he told himself. Deep breaths, you can figure this out. It can’t hurt you, so just sit down and figure it out.
He sat himself back on the sofa, pushing it further back and rucking up the rug into waves in front of him with his feet. Never had he been so afraid of an inanimate object before. Spiders, yes. The open ocean, yes. Heights, yes. But this?
He sat staring at it, filtering his brain through his usual coping processes. He couldn’t beat it, like he had done in school. He couldn’t charm it, like he had done at the office…
“It’s an elaborate Newton’s Cradle, for Christ’s sake! A fancy-man’s Rubik’s cube!” he told himself. “Some science experiment that a five year old could have done. Yeah, I bet he just put some glow stick stuff in the water and mixed it up and told me it’s real to scare me. It doesn’t even look that bad.” He stood up and took a hesitant half step towards it on quavering knees and reluctant feet, fighting the ‘flight’. “See? Can’t hurt me.”
Max blinked. The thing hadn’t even moved. What was so scary about it anyway? The glowing? It was probably the reflection off the TV. He moved the plants from in front of it with outstretched arms and stepped back as far as he could go.
“I’m going to call you Ruth,” he said, getting bold and pointing at it, “because Alcoholic Thermo… whatever is just ridiculous. Ok? And Ruth was my grandma’s name, and I liked her, she was safe as houses.” Sure, his grandma had died of an embolism nearly ten years ago, but he wasn’t going to admit that to this thing that he didn’t even know what an embolism was. Ruth was a safe name and the familiarity was comforting.
He felt the liquid moving towards the front of the glass again, shimmering and pulling him in. He felt his fear spike, then dissolve. It couldn’t hurt him. He was safe. He was in control.
“I think it was mean of him to call you something so ridiculous. But I suppose if he’s going to go for the Nobel Prize they like that kind of thing, don’t they?” He half laughed, took another step towards it. “Those competitions are always stupid though, nobody ever comes up with anything really new, it’s not like they’ve invented hovercraft cars or machines that can take you on holidays to the afterlife, is it?” He had nearly reached the table now. The tubes were glowing a little still and he could see something moving in there. His curiosity peaked over the top of his fear and had a good look at the prospect of getting closer. Curiosity decided to get closer.
Max leaned down, hands on knees, and stared into the ever-moving swirls that flowed through the glass tubing. Arms extended to their full defensive stance, he gently nudged the plants out of the way and took a good look at Ruth. He remembered his friend saying something about studs and elements.
“Hey, there they are! I didn’t see these before! So those… those are elements? Are they elements?” He asked the glass, dumbfoundedly pointing at the stuff he had assumed was glitter but now wasn’t half as sure. He had never seen elements before…
Ripples glowed in the liquid: it had heard him. They moved closer and were warming now, somehow.
“No way!” Max exclaimed, his mouth hanging open. So this is what Abe had meant! “It’s not possible! It’s not real! Is it real? Are you real?” He asked. “Of course you’re real, you’re sitting on my table! Ha! What a stupid question Max. So, if I ask you a question, are you gonna answer me, huh?”
The glass glittered at him, but nothing else.
“Ok, are you alive?”
Nothing.
“Hmph. Maybe it was a trick of the light.”
No answer.
Max flopped into the sofa, his brows furrowed at Ruth.
He found himself talking to himself, trying to dispel the weird energy that his friend’s invention had brought with it.
“This thing is strange. He said if I talk to it then it responds, but I asked it a question and it doesn’t do anything, but when I was watching that monkey progr…”
He stopped short.
“Yeah! Let’s shove that chimp documentary back on, shall we?”
Click, the screen shot into life of every colour of the rainforest, the howls echoing around the room. But Max didn’t watch the TV, he had his eyes firmly fixed on Ruth, remote still in hand in front of her, waiting expectantly.
Nothing. Dammit. Just the glittery same as glittery before.
Max tried not to let the tidal wave of disappointment wash him away. Maybe it wasn’t the show. Maybe it was a prank, a trick of the light after all.
Max bent to put the remote on the arm of the sofa. The light from the TV shone onto the table and Ruth crescendoed into life and started throwing out beams of light that looked like the solar flares he had seen on that awful show about space and rocks and stuff he wasn’t in the least bit interested in but had watched anyway.
But he had figured out the key: he was standing in between Ruth and the screen and his shadow had been overcasting the table! Ruth needed a full view to do… that thing… whatever it was that she was doing with the light.
Ping, pong, ping, pong, his eyes went between Ruth and the monkeys sailing through the trees by their ridiculously long arms, right up until the credits started rolling and she faded to a faint glow again. She still glittered but it wasn’t the same. She definitely needed encouragement. Inspiration, if you will.
Max flicked across through each channel, watching Ruth closely for any changes (of which there were none,) tock, tock, tock went the remote until he found a different channel, one that was obviously designed for people with limited imagination, because wow, even he can outpace the monotonous nasal narrator and he didn’t consider himself a particularly clever man! He wasn’t stupid either, but on the last one when they started to explain what a bacteria is he had lost his rag and shouted at the screen a bit.
“Everyone knows what a bloody bacteria is!” he had yelled. “Tell me something I don’t know, yeesh! Whoever said these documentaries were supposed to be informative obviously hadn’t got two brain cells to run together.” But the cinematography was nice. Lots of nature-looking things to watch, the natural world an’ all.
This time it was about walruses. All flopping around on the sea shore, getting sunburned and jabbing at each other with their overgrown chompers. He had seen this one before, it wasn’t as patronising as the others. Predictably narrated, yes, but not patronising.
He turned up the volume and spun round to look at Ruth.
She was throwing out flares again, hundreds of short wisps!
And just to test the theory, he tocked across onto the menu screen and selected a random game show that he had never heard of. True to form, Ruth dimmed back to her uninspired state of simple glitteritude.
“AHA! I knew it! You’re a sucker for the nature channel too! Aha! Ahahaha!”
Max threw up his arms in celebration, the remote going flying, cheering into the emptiness of the room. Empty, except for him and this thing which apparently had a liking for chimps and sunburnt sea mammals.
Damn, this thing is incredible, he thought. Why the hell, how the hell does it…?
He sat, flabbergasted, mouth agape.
Suddenly he jumped up, scrabbling around behind the sofa trying to find the remote again, where is it where is it where is it…
He flicked the volume up and down and Ruth still put out light. She shone and shone, the beauty!
He started singing to her, “shine on, you crazy diamond!”
She seemed to like that, too.

First / Previous
So, everyone in town saw what had happened at the zoo on the morning news. Luckily, it seemed Andrew was a master of spin with authorities, so while the word spread like wildfire, everyone simply said, “Boys will be boys” and nobody blamed us. There was also no actual footage inside the zoo, only establishing shots, emphasizing the fact that this was private property and we could decide who to let in, and that did not include reporters. Andrew apparently only spoke once to those at our gate the next morning.
They were told that it was a rare territorial bear, who was even more protective than usual because she currently had cubs, having been impregnated to help the species grow. And there was no footage of the small fence that served as the only visible barrier, and no one doubted the police’s report, so that was that. Everyone was left to believe the two boys hadn’t just been foolish enough to break into a zoo and go into an enclosure, but that they had chosen the enclosure of a bear.
‘Everyone’, by the way, included my dad. For Stanley, however, I had written a note. I hadn’t wanted him to be ambushed at school about what happened, but I took the coward’s way out rather than waiting for him to wake up. Instead, I fell asleep at about 6 a.m. like I usually do after my shift. In the note, I apologized for what happened and for not being able to keep his friends safe. I went with the same bland cover story as the news.
Dad knew I tended to wake at a little after 1 p.m., though my alarm was set to wake me at two in the afternoon if I overslept. So, he took a late lunch from his job and came home when he knew I’d be up for the special occasion of freaking out at me for a few minutes. I’d just finished my breakfast when he walked in through the front door.
“I saw what was on the news, but what in the hell happened?” he snapped. “You’ve been working with these animals for weeks now. Are you saying this could have been you?”
“If I had about half as many braincells, sure,” I told him. He glared at me and I glared back defensively. “There’s a reason I’ve been working there for weeks and I’m fine. There are rules, and I follow them, not to mention I have my taser and pepper spray. But those are literally supposed to be used on intruders. The fact that I wish I’d tasered one of those boys instead of-”
I cut myself off, not wanting to start crying again like I had as I’d tried to get to sleep the previous night. Taking a deep breath, I shut my eyes and let it out slowly before reopening them and looking to my father, who’d released some of the tension in his stance at the sight of this clearly affecting me. “This isn’t about me,” I growled. “It’s about two kids who didn’t listen when I told them they couldn’t come into the zoo. Who literally climbed the fence, went over to the nearest enclosure, and strolled on in as I continued to tell them over and over that they needed to leave.”
“I understand that part of all this,” my father told me. “What I don’t understand is how it happened. Were they really so stupid that they walked past the signs saying it was a bear enclosure?”
I shook my head tiredly. “There are no signs,” I told him. “There don’t need to be signs because the private parties who pay for a tour have a tour guide with them. That’s my boss. He talks about the animals and answers questions.”
He finally fell into a chair at the table I was sitting at, adjacent to me, letting out a long sigh of pent-up exhaustion that had clearly been simmering since that morning. “Listen, Rip, I don’t want you to be doing a dangerous job just because it pays well,” he said. “Is that what this is?”
“No,” I said softly. “I mean, the pay is part of it, I won’t lie, but this is…important. The animals are important. I’m putting together enrichment ideas right now. The first one went great, so I’m going to try all the others on my next shifts. And the animals are treated really well. The owner sincerely cares about them; it’s obvious from how much effort she put into building this zoo for them.
“And it’s not just that the money is good; I genuinely enjoy my job. Most of it has been sitting and reading, checking the cameras, and I’ve been able to watch the animals. Like I said, I can’t talk about them, but they’re incredible. This job is important, and…” It took me a moment to finish what I wanted to say. “I want to do important things. With all the horrible shit people do every day, I’m in a place where what I do matters and I see the results, and it…it’s awesome.”
My father stared at me for a long moment before looking away, having some internal debate. “Okay,” he finally said quietly. Some crumpled up tension in my chest released when he spoke that word. “If you say you’re not in danger, I trust you. And I get how much pride you have for what you do. I don’t want you to quit when you’ve been so happy there. It’s clear to me that it makes you genuinely happy.”
I blinked. “Really?”
He managed a small smile as he met my gaze. “You kidding? You got home one morning recently and instead of going to bed you made chocolate-chip pancakes, leaving them in the fridge with a little note that said, ‘For my favorite brother and favorite dad’. The only time you cook is on our birthdays. Not to mention you complain less. Even working in the back of a store, you always had someone who bothered you. Now, with no coworkers to deal with and working with animals, I hear no complaints, not even about your boss. I’m not sure how much you’re familiar with the average person, but pretty much all of them have some sort of complaints about their boss.”
“Right.” I gave a half-smile and shrugged. “He seems like good guy. Always was, from the start. And yeah, he’s the only one I work with. And he didn’t even…” My voice trailed off as my brain caught up with what I was saying.
“Rip?” my dad prompted.
I sighed. “So…he didn’t blame me. For what happened.”
He narrowed his eyes at me. “Why would he blame you? This wasn’t your fault.”
Leaning back in my chair, I wrung my shirt in my hands. “I didn’t stop them,” I told him. “I could’ve backed up my threats to tase them or spray them-”
“Oh no, no no no,” my dad told me. “I don’t want to hear that. You’re thinking this is about how you back off from confrontation, right? You were wary about this job because of the ‘security guard’ label. You mentioned that. Is that what you’re getting at?”
“Yeah.”
“Ripley, look at me.” I did so. “You are not responsible for what happened to those boys,” he said, his voice soft but firm.
I took a breath. “Okay,” I said.
That’s why my dad is so great. He gets me. Do you have a parent who gets you? If not, I suggest you get a surrogate, because that is a role that can make your life infinitely better if it’s filled with someone competent.
I know I mentioned I take pain pills for an old shoulder injury. What I didn’t mention was what happened to me that put me in this state. High school was a bit difficult for me, because I’m asexual. The fact that I knew that by the time I was sixteen, thanks to the internet, probably saved me a lot of trouble in life, but being ace as a teenager meant saying no to boys. One of them took offense to that. I don’t like talking about it, but he got a four-year stretch in juvie/prison. That means he’s out now but, thankfully, he did move to another state.
He didn’t rape me, if that’s what just came to mind, but I ended up in the hospital after he physically assaulted me, including repeatedly kicking me while I was down, literally. To this day I have chronic nerve pain, and occasional numbness and tingling, in my left shoulder. I also have a chronic issue of being hesitant to stand up to people. Great characteristic for someone who’s supposed to be a security guard, right? Except if I’d said that out loud, my father would’ve pointed out that Andrew told me my weapons were for defense, not offense. And he’d be right.
My dad shook his head and pushed himself back to his feet. “I’ve got to get back to work. Just…” Rubbing his hands over his face, he blinked a few times, trying to dislodge everything that was bothering him from his brain. “If you do ever have a moment there where you’re unsafe, promise me you’ll quit, okay? No job is worth your life.”
I stared at him for a few moments, unsure of what to say. When I’d first met Yui, I’d been terrified, but had I actually been unsafe? Well, no, as was proved by the wards keeping her from me. So, I let myself sink into the feeling of being loved and cared for by my dad, which put a genuine smile on my face. “I promise,” I said. And I hoped I wasn’t lying.
I know that I’ve complained a lot about other people being stupid, so I hope that I’m not being stupid. You might understand why I have such disdain for our species, but at this point you know it’s not because of excessive ego issues. Though I’ll admit to having a larger ego than typical. If you don’t understand, all you have to do is look at us, and I don’t mean look at what we do to the planet, which is bad enough. I mean look at us.
Do you know why places all over the country have problems with bears getting into their garbage cans? It’s because there’s a significant overlap between the smartest bear and the dumbest human. That’s not an exaggeration; look it up. Us wildlife biology majors have tried our best, and the perfect garbage bin has yet to be designed.
It bothers me like a sibling sitting next to you who would continuously poke you until you boil over and punch them. Stanley went through a phase when he was a kid where he was a little shit who’d do stuff like that. But the worst is when they try to use logic to justify something completely absurd, looking like a three-year-old with Lincoln Logs, presenting a house and declaring it fit for their hamster to live in when it could collapse if you breathed on it.
With Gary and Shaun, it wasn’t just that they hadn’t known what was in the enclosure they’d wanted to go into, but that they’d kept pushing me away when I tried to keep them from it. And so, getting back to the security office tonight was a bit surreal. I didn’t know if I was supposed to call Andrew again, discuss the incident, or whether it was best to just assume things were taken care of.
Actually, I already knew they were, to some extent. Andrew said Suzanne had gone to see the parents of the boys in person and was going to cover all funeral costs, no matter what the parents wanted done. That was a huge deal, considering how much that industry tries to squeeze out of you when a loved one dies.
While we’re on that topic, all of that doesn’t make sense to me. We are supposed to preserve our bodies, which are completely decomposable, and then put them in airtight boxes priced at ten thousand dollars?
That was not my area, though, and I was glad for it. I’ve been trying as hard as I can to put their deaths out of my mind, though I’ve only been marginally successful. Most of what I’m going over again and again was what I could’ve done differently. I determined that I could have kept them from going in the enclosure by tasering just one of them, and that would’ve been better than nothing. So, it was decided. If anyone ever tried it again, they were getting zapped. Even if they tried to sue us, I don’t care. It wasn’t worth their lives.
Today, though, my mind was occupied with enrichment activities.
Andrew told me about the animal in enclosure nine in passing, saying that he wished the boys had chosen that one. Apparently the consensus is that whoever on Earth invented the chupacabra must’ve seen one of these, because it was vampiric, preferring goats as its prey. Not that it wouldn’t go after humans, blood was blood, but it would’ve given me a chance to save the boys, since it would have taken time to drain enough blood to be fatal.
In regard to the enrichment for enclosure nine’s animal, I was thinking about hanging bags of blood from trees and letting it pounce on them in midair, tearing them down. They’d be made from extra thick plastic, of course, so blood wouldn’t go everywhere. But honestly, nothing beat the fact that all the animals received live prey to hunt, so that wasn’t exactly an innovative idea.
I settled on olfactory enrichment, which was a strategy that used objects that smelled like cooking extracts, spices, and/or fresh herbs. Essentially, the equivalent of engaging its brain in that part of hunting, but with toys instead. That would have to wait until I could see it, though, so I put my notes aside in anticipation of another boring shift.
However, two hours later I had some more excitement when I saw my next animal. I wasn’t sure how fast this was supposed to happen, but things seemed to be moving quickly. At least compared to Andrew’s estimate of three months. Maybe he meant that was the point at which I would become comfortable with the animals as animals, but I honestly don’t know if I’ll ever get to that point. They’re too spectacular.
My encounter was different, in that I didn’t see the animal first; I saw its prey. There were a handful of animals I’d seen wandering around the enclosures, including the typical ones like squirrels and rabbits to ones that had been put in there purposefully to be hunted like goats and sheep. Allegedly there were also deer, but I hadn’t seen any of those.
I was walking my route and passing the small lake when I heard the roar again. The one that prickled at the hairs on the back of my neck, thrumming through my body and priming me for fight or flight. Slowing to a stop, I kept my flashlight off, since the lamps gave off plenty of that red glow I’d become accustomed to. Then, I saw a shadow start to rise out of the lake and realized it was coming up onto the shore.
“Holy shit,” I muttered under my breath, taking a couple steps back instinctively.
Roger had named this one Fiona and called her a seal-hippo, and I could see why. She was amphibious with a round head, long neck, and the body of a hippo, though unlike hippos, I knew for a fact she wasn’t a vegetarian. She had short, sharp tusks, shaggy fur instead of the smooth skin of a seal, and her flippers had claws. Those claws could easily disembowel any prey it went after.
She seemed to be curious about me. Eyes that seemed too small for her head faced forward and locked onto me, which froze me in my tracks. Her jaw spread wide in a yawn, revealing teeth fit for a carnivore and I jerkily took two more steps backwards. My heart pounded in my chest and I blinked rapidly to keep focusing on her rather than avert my gaze, as my instincts were urging. Her front flippers were probably eight feet from tip to tip, and I feel like she must never have problems killing anything, whatever her prey of choice was. Her eyes flashed under the red lights as she scanned the area around me and then trundled further forward, vibrating the ground, which I felt through my shoes.
This was the point where my mind made connections to Jurassic Park. It just felt like this thing was from another epoch. Then she roared.
For those of you who don’t know, there is something called ‘infrasound’. Essentially, it’s a sound found in the roars and snarls of animals like big cats and bears, and our hindbrains have earmarked it so we panic if we hear it. Funnily enough, it’s often found in older buildings, the deep resonance of an elevator built fifty years ago turning out to be one of the reasons people ‘feel’ a place is haunted.
That’s what I felt, deep in the pit of my stomach. I knew that’s what I was feeling. This thing was a predator, I was prey, and there was nothing I could do about it. So, I didn’t. I watched it for a few minutes as it lumbered around, scanning its surroundings, no doubt smelling things that my dinky little nose would never detect. After a while, once my heartbeat had slowed to merely double its typical rate, I managed to get full control over my legs again and slowly turned, keeping the animal in my peripheral vision as I continued on my way.
And yes, of course, there was a little part of my mind that had the same awe you saw in the faces of the main characters in Jurassic Park when they see brachiosaurus grazing in a field. This job has its ups and downs, and its downs are way down, but its ups are way up. It’s a hell of a gig.
First / Previous
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Just recently I had made a comment under a post which asked for basic information and info regarding the game. Someone ended up asking to make it a post and I decided it to be a good idea as well. As newcomers and players come to the whole souls genre and elden ring being the more prominent starting point for them, it's going to be confusing since the game may have systems or mechanics that takes lots of time to learn, most of the time through major trial and error. Some people may not prefer this and would love to get at least some closure on how to do so.
I'll also try to be as spoiler free as possible otherwise it's simply going to ruin and make the playthrough very mundane if you were to know everything. Majority of the things I'm saying here is actually also available in the game's tutorial area as well, but I'll state it again so that the post makes better sense with context as well.
STARTING A NEW GAME
Let's start with the initial character builder. When starting a new game, you're going to see a bunch of classes displayed with various classes shown. If in case you're worried that selecting a class is only going to affect the playthrough, it won't be necessarily. It's just to give a starting equipment for players when beginning. Each class has different stats, Armor, weapons, spells etc. I'll tell a small breakdown in the difference of each class so you can choose the equipment to play with: (Also equipment for other classes is available as you play through the game, so it's not limited to a class)
1) Vagabond -A basic knight class, consisting of a Longsword and a halberd as the starting weapons. Well recommended for beginners.
2) Warrior - A dual wielding dex-based swordsman with two scimitars as the starting weapons
3) Bandit - Starts with a bow and a knife as it's starting weapons. Not very recommended for newcomers.
4) Hero - Starts with a battle-axe as the starting weapon. Highly emphasizing strength.
5) Samurai - Starts with a uchigatana and a bow with fire arrows for starting equipment. Best recommended class for its starting gear and stats, as it provides a good weapon and a bow with fire arrows for long ranged combat.
6) Confessor - Starts with a broadsword and a finger seal. Allows you access to spells for healing. It's also the class with the highest starting level. Also highly recommended for beginners.
7) Prophet - Starts with the short spear and the finger seal giving access to an offensive spell.
8) Prisoner - Starting with an estoc and a glintstone staff. One of the spellcasting melee hybrid classes to start with.
9) Astrologer - The main spellcasting starter class giving access to a short sword and an astrologer's staff. It also gives you two offensive spells to start with. If you wish to do a mage playthrough, start with this. Otherwise not fully recommended for beginners.
10) Wretch - You start with a club. It's highly unrecommended to start with this since it's usually for challenge runs and experienced players. It's also the lowest starting level at level 1. Unless you're a masochist or an experienced player, don't choose this.
Now let's have a look at all the stats for the classes. The stats are important to look into, so do have a look on what each stat is important for:
• Vigor - Maintains HP
• Mind - Maintains FP, focus points
• Endurance - Maintains stamina and weight load
• Strength - Attribute for weapons. Check scaling of a weapon
• Dexterity - Attribute for weapons. Check scaling of a weapon
• Intelligence - Attribute for spells and weapons. Check the scaling of a weapon, or spell requirements
• Faith - Attribute for spells and weapons. Check the scaling of a weapon, or spell requirements
• Arcane - Attribute for spells and weapons. Check the scaling of a weapon or spell requirements.
(If you're still confused on the stats, read through the post to get a better idea on it. Scaling is also explained later on)
Once the character creator and the starting cutscene is done, progress and go through the game. Once you reach the part where your character is in a cave, your initial playthrough has then begun.
Look to the right, and there's a huge hole in which you jump down into, initiating the tutorial for the game. It gives a very standard information on the basics. Highly suggested to do so.
STATS
Now the stats for the game given are pretty simple to understand but it's definitely going to get confusing due to the multiple values or numbers shown when you see the status of your character. Don't get overwhelmed, just calmly look through it. I suggest ignoring the other numerous values shown and focus on the main 8 attributes. You can also access the help option button which makes the game gives concise explanations on the numbers, values and stats.
The first three stats; Vigor, Mind and Endurance are important. Vigor maintains your HP, it's highly important to upgrade this since it only is going to increase survivability in the game. Mind maintains your FP. The more FP you have, the more spells and abilities of a weapon you can use. Endurance overlooks your stamina and the weight load of a character.
Now the other attributes are important in terms of wielding and using weapons/spells. When looking into the description of a weapon, you can see underneath all the values, the requirements. This is the bare minimum stats you will need to use the weapon itself, otherwise using the weapon without reaching the necessary stats will heavily decrease the damage output and is only going to be a detriment. For example a weapon may show stat requirements of 15 Strength and 8 dexterity. Meaning your very stats should have 15 strength and 8 dexterity as well to use the weapon. Five stats are shown for reaching the requirements: Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, Faith, Arcane.
There is however one exception to this rule and that is strength. You can actually two-hand a weapon in the game and when a weapon has a little higher requirements for strength for which you may be lacking, you can two-hand the weapon to simply use it. When equipping a weapon, the game will inform you beforehand that if your strength requirement isn't upto mark, two-hand to use it effectively. It's a matter of experimentation to see what you can wield and what you can't.
Some basic things you can see would be in the weapons, you can see the type of damage they do and how much the damage can be done. Each weapon has a scaling underneath all the values that you see. For example, a weapon with a A scaling in strength and C scaling in dexterity means you should level up your stats with strength being the bigger priority and dexterity being the second focus. Higher the scaling on a stat for the weapon, the more better it is you focus on that specific stat. This is how you make your own build and how to base it around the weapons you use. The scaling is like this, from the highest scaling to lowest :
S > A > B > C > D > E > F
S being the highest scaling and F being the lowest. Upgrading weapons can increase scaling of a weapon or changing the affinity through ash of war infusions (more explanation for this in ashof war section)
Similarly, for spells, seals and staffs, you will have to reach specific stat requirements to use those specific spells. More explanation for spells will be given as you read through the post.
COMBAT SYSTEM
Try getting familiar with the controls. Each weapon has their own movesets, some of them are simple and easy to learn, others can be confusing and so. Try getting a hang of the weapon you hold first so you can get familiar on the combat system. And also based on what you use, keyboard or controller, learn what keys do which so it will be easier to go through the game.
Once you learn the controls and have a better idea on how to do so, go through the tutorial area to practice it on some basic enemies.
There's a lot to say in the combat system and would be incredibly long if I were to tell all about it, so for now it's best to stay simple and just know the basics such as attacking, defending, dodging for the time being. Other additional combat info such as parrying and riposte, stance break, poise etc. is simply going to be overbearing for now. Try getting comfortable with the game and once you have a better feel for the combat, check up on these to get a better idea. The other few mechanics is also available in the tutorial as well, so once again do check the tutorial area of the game.
There's also the lock-on mechanic where your character will focus on one specific enemy so that the camera stays focused on them. This allows you to attack easily towards them rather than mindlessly attacking elsewhere. For larger enemies, the lock-on can be at times focus on other parts of the enemy's body such as a separate focus on the head/body/legs etc. Whenever starting a fight, press lock-on first so you won't have to panic needlessly as your character misses his mark on the enemy.
Dodging and rolling is the fundamental part of the combat system. When dodging, you gain something known as iframes (invincibility frames) through which you can bypass an attack that happens. Knowing the timing on when to dodge is the most key aspect and practicing on how to do so will be the most ideal. Never panic roll. The way you roll is also dependent on your weight load. Weight load is dependent on the equipment you have and also your endurance stat. Higher the stat, the more heavier equipment you can carry. Light load and medium load lets you roll with good iframes. Heavy load is horrible and is only a detriment. Overloaded will deprive you the ability to roll and is only used if you're doing a challenge run or a extremely heavy tank based build.
Now look at the bars on the top left of your screen. They are important to look into whenever fighting:
• The red bar is your HP bar, when that gets fully depleted, you die. Refilled through Crimson flasks which is obtained at the start of the playthrough. Your HP can be increased by leveling up vigor.
• The Blue bar is your FP, or also called as focus points, which basically let's you use Sorcery/incantations/Ash of wars/Spirit bell summons etc. Refilled by Cerulean flask, also obtained at the start of the playthrough alongside the Crimson flasks. Your FP can be increased by leveling Mind.
• The green bar is your stamina. Any action you do during combat will be deducted, it refills automatically. Absolutely important to check whenever you fight so that you don't get stuck being unable to do anything while enemies hog on your ass. You can increase your stamina by leveling endurance.
RUNES AND LEVELING
You can increase stats through runes, which are obtained by defeating enemies. Runes is the core currency for both, buying items and for leveling up. The amount of runes needed will be displayed for a level up. The level up option is obtained after you reach a nearby grace near the ruins with multiple soldiers in it north-west from your starting point.
The runes you obtain from defeating enemies vary from the type of enemy it is and the area they are in. Bosses are the best source of runes and they can be found all over the world. With around 150+ bosses, it's pretty easy to earn runes and level up. You can see the number of runes you have in the bottom right of your screen.
When leveling up, remember the runes that you need will only keep increasing with each level up. For example from level 9 to level 10, it may need only 829 runes but for level 90 to 91, it needs 49k runes. If you feel worried that the increasing runes is going to effect you badly, don't worry, the game provides multiple bosses and dungeons with high rewards of runes. You can also find farming spots to get runes to easily level up as well.
MENU AND MECHANICS
In the menu option, you are going to see few options such as Equipment, crafting, inventory, status, messages, multiplayer and system.
Equipment is to change the gear you have currently and to equip any important items, consumables etc.
The crafting option is unlocked only after reaching the nearby church from your starting point. The merchant there will sell you a crafting kit. The materials for crafting can be obtained while exploring the world and similarly cookbooks for unlocking crafting recipes is revealed as you keep exploring the game.
Inventory lets you have a look in what all items you have obtained, whether it be crafting materials, upgrade materials, spells, weapons, Armor etc.
Status lets you see your character stats and it's corresponding values. It's simply to remind you of what stats you have and it can be used to see how many runes you will need for the next level up as well.
Messages and multiplayer options are for online multiplayer and it's something that can be ignored for the time being. The game gives you all important multiplayer based items at the start of the game itself.
System is simply to change any settings to your liking. Try checking the system to see your controls so you can have a feel for it beforehand.
The right side of the menu showcases the pouch menu and gestures. I'll explain the pouch in a bit. As for gestures, it's basically emotes to goof around with and also good for multiplayer interactions.
In the status and equipment options in the menu, there is a help button to enable what the numbers and stats do. Each value and numbers is attributed comes from; the stats you have, the equipment you have and any buffs/debuffs that has been applied etc. The game will you tell you a very concise explanation for the values shown. This is the best way to get a basic understanding for it.
GRACE
As you play through the game, you are going to see a golden protruding light on the ground. This is your checkpoint and safe spot. The site of grace when rested upon, refills all flasks, restores your health and FP, and removes any status effects such as poison as well. It is basically a checkpoint and safe spot.
The site of grace also gives multiple options to interact with. When playing through the game and as you obtain some fundamental items, you end up getting even more options to interact with in the site of grace.
When fighting a hard enemy or before going into a large castle/fortress/major area, check for sites of grace. When you end up dying, you will respawn back to the last site of grace you interacted with. The map you have also lets you see all the sites of grace you have interacted with and lets you fast travel to them. Best done to avoid long boring travels to different locations. But you will have to explore to find these sites of grace as well.
When an enemy is locked and aggroed on you and ends up following you to your grace, you can actually be locked out of being able to rest on it. Any hostile enemies close to the grace will prevent you from resting, so do keep this in mind.
ON SCREEN DISPLAY
The display on your screen such as the bars on the top left or the runes with you in the bottom right can actually to be toggled to whether to show you all the time or only to show you when pressing a specific button or during combat. It's upto you on how you wish to see the display and it can be changed in the System menu option.
The top left shows your HP, FP and stamina as well as buffs and debuffs. It's going to be difficult to see what buffs or debuffs you got, so just see the equipment you have equipped to understand if there was a buff added or not. The description of the items gives you plenty information.
The bottom right is the runes you have at hand.
The bottom left shows 4 slots. The right slot shows your main hand weapon that you are using. You can switch around it based on what all weapons you got equipped on the right hand. The left slot shows your off-hand weapon and can also be switched around. More explanation for weapons equipped is given in the next section.
The top slot shows the spells you have memorized at hand and can also be switched around. To see what spells you have memorized, use the grace is see what spells you have memorized. More info for spells is given in the sorcery section.
The bottom slot shows all the consumables you have at hand. Things such as healing flasks, throwing knifes, consumables can be equipped and switching around it you can use all the items you need during a battle or for other reasons.
The slots show all the main equipped items necessary for battle.
Check the controls on which button is used for switching around the equipment you have equipped. Default for controller is the D-pad and for keyboard, it's the arrows keys.
Lastly is the text showcased right in middle of the 4 slots and your HP, FP, stamina bars. Just on the left side. This displays the ash of war that you can use currently. More information on ash of wars is given in its respective section.
ARMOR AND EQUIPMENT
Under the equipment option, you may see multiple slots.
The first three slots is for your main hand weapon. The next three slots under it is for your off hand weapon. Just to the right of these slots are two slots for arrows for bows and greatbows, while the bolts are for crossbows and ballistas.
Immediately after these slots, are four slots for armour pieces. Armour pieces are different based on the defense values and weight. In all honesty, armour is mostly used for fashion purposes and for dope drip. But there are few pieces of Armor which have passive effects and buffs as well. Read the description of the Armor to see what additional effects they can do.
After the armour slots are the talisman slots. Talismans are additional buffs which helps improves your damage, side buffs or any other additional effects. Read the description of the talisman to see how they affect your character.
Lastly there are 10 slots available right at the bottom. These are for consumables. Your healing flasks are put here by default. You can put whichever consumable or items you wish here accordingly.
There is also an additional inventory known as the pouch showcased on the opening menu option at the top right side. You can put items here as well to use it, however each slot is fixed to one and unlike the consumables slot in equipment, it cannot be switched around. I suggest either using this to keep major items like lanterns or even putting the healing flasks here. The game provides information on how to access the pouch once you unlock the leveling up option (check above on the runes and leveling section on how to do so). You can also try checking the controls to see how to do so.
SORCERY AND INCANTATIONS
Now if you're very much interested to start the game as a mage, then try to remember these important things in mind. Spells are divided into Sorceries and incantations. They are different according to what needs to be the catalyst/weapon for using them and what stat requirements is necessary to use them. Sorcery uses staffs to operate while incantations use seals to operate. When exploring the world, you can come across a key item which allows you have a higher number of slots to use multiple spells at a time. To use a spell, check the description for it so you can identify which stat does it need in order to use it. The main three stats are Faith, Intelligence and Arcane for spells. To change what spell to use, use the grace and select the memorize spell. Spells use a slot or at times more slots to memorize as well.
Spells, both Sorceries and incantations, also have different categories on the type of spell it is. I suggest you ignore this for the time being since it's only going to be excessive to learn. Once you get comfortable with the game, look up the spell to learn which category it belongs to and how it effects gameplay as well.
As you play through the game, you can find scrolls and prayerbooks with which you can give to specific NPCs through which you can learn spells.
If you wish to increase the damage of a spell, upgrade the weapon you have and increase the stat corresponding to the spell.
Spell casting can also be sped up by leveling up dexterity. (Props to u/Upstairs-Ad-8067 for reminding)
ASHES OF WAR
Ash of wars is a mechanic which pertains special abilities to a weapon. Check the controls to see which buttons initiate the ability. Some weapons have a fixed unchangeable ash of war. Some weapons can only use specific ash of wars.
Ash of wars can be infused into a weapon by an important item known as the whetblade. The initial area where you unlock the level up option is also where a whetblade is available. Explore the ruins to get the item. The game provides a pop-up message explaining it once you obtain it. There are multiple whetblades available which can infuse your weapon with different effects. For example with specific whetblades, you can infuse fire damage, lighting damage, magic damage or holy damage into a weapon. It's also possible to make a weapon infused with poison, bleed, frostbite etc. It also depends on the ash of war infused on what all is available to you. Once you obtain the whetblades, an additional option is available in the grace to allow easy infusion of ash of wars. Ash of wars aren't a one time thing, they can be used and exchanged on multiple weapons repeatedly, so go crazy with the experimentation.
Do remember that the offhand equipment such as shields have it's ash of war be the main priority over your main hand weapons. Switch around and see how priority of ash of wars with multiple weapons work.
This function is best experimented with to learn. Also read the description of the ash of wars, that is obtained as you explore and play, to know what weapons it can be applied onto.
SUMMONS
The game can be difficult to play with alone. The game allows you to easen it up through summons. There are two types of summons.
The first is a co-op multiplayer summon, other players can join and help you fight against a boss and vice versa.
For people who prefer to play the game offline or don't prefer co-op, there are summons known as spirit ashes. You obtain the spirit calling bell when you go back to the church (from the starting area) after getting the level up option.
Spirit bell summons is an interesting mechanic allowing you to bring allies in a boss fight or in specific areas. If you don't wish to be stressed by a boss, use it. It uses FP points. Read the description of the summons you obtain during the playthrough, it can help on which you want to use. They can be upgraded by an item called glovewort flowers, usually obtain d as you explore caves, catacombs, specific enemies and the open world.
WEAPONS UPGRADES
Weapons are classified in multiple categories based on weapon type such as straight swords, axes, spears etc. There is another classification on the basis of what materials can be used for upgrading the weapon. Somber smithing stones are used for unique weapons and the weapons can be upgraded to +10. Normal smithing stones are used to upgrade weapons to +25. When you progress through the game, you will meet a blacksmith and with him you can see whether a weapon needs somber smithing stones or normal smithing stones. Explore the world to find them.
NPCS AND QUESTLINES
When exploring the world, you may come across some peculiar characters. If a talk option prompt is shown, then it's an NPC with which you can interact and talk with. Don't mindlessly attack everything and try to see whether it's an hostile or not. You can see if an NPC is hostile if you use the lock-on mechanic and if it locks onto them.
The NPCs at times may have requests or quests that you can follow through. There are however no indicators, quest markers or a checklist to see how much the quest has progressed through. They can be difficult to follow through with the the questlines but usually you just have to see what they asked for or what they have said. But yes, there are questlines which are in all honesty at times hard to follow through and it's completely normal if you need a wiki to go through to complete it. Otherwise keep a mind map or journal to keep note of it. It's also normal if you end up messing up a quest, so don't dwell on it too much.
TIPS
Explore the area more instead of going headfirst into the progresion of the game. The game gives you heavy freedom on what you wish to do and how you wish to progress. Take your time learning your environment and the enemies as well as learning how to fight and dodge properly.
There are some aspects of the game on which you get an help info on it as you explore. Some key items which may be useful and some gameplay mechanics are learned as you keep exploring and are obtained a little into the game. Honestly try roaming around as much as you can.
In case you forgot any key mechanics, you can open the menu and in the inventory, check the Info items in the notes section. You can read it back to remember any thing you forgot or missed by chance.
If the need to use wiki is necessary, its alright. Majority of the people have looked it up needing to complete the game. Don't let others dictate on how you wish to play it.
Read the description of items you obtain. Many times most of the description give info on what they do.
Lastly, if you still don't get it, use the wiki or check YouTube. Absolutely no harm in it.
If you want spoilers to have an easier time, it's alright to ask as well.
If anyone has anything to ask below or have additional info that I may have made a mistake or forgotten to say, do say so. English isn't my main language either, so pardon me for grammatical mistakes.
Edit: Making fixes in my post

First Previous Wiki
"What am I looking at?" Edu'frec asked. Gaia had taken his android to a small room with a single holographic projector connected to a power outlet. The room was generally devoid of any other features, with grey drywall and a concrete floor. The ceiling was also concrete, poured quickly by construction robots.
He narrowed their location to several cities within the Guulin Congressional Republic, the only area with so much of this housing. It was where the freed Guulin slaves from the United Legions had gone, a new nation shaped mostly around the Hudson Bay, for which Canada had ceded in an agreement they were still getting paid back handsomely.
In fact, the Guulin Congressional Republic's economy was outpacing even those of the Pan-Andes Union and China together. It was on its way to adding India and America to the list of nations its combined GDP would surpass.
With the unique economic system Phoebe had helped President Blistanna pioneer, the pittance of money available to pay everyone for their work was enough for them to survive. Phoebe subsidized the entire nation with her vast wealth and workforce, building housing, meat factories, additional production facilities for desalinated water, and specialized city foundations.
Essentially, the entire nation was a single metropolis wrapping around the Bay, glowing as bright as the economic cores of the richest nations on Earth. Given their past conditions, the Guulin's reception was broadly warm. Blistanna's outreach and diplomacy efforts had ensured that every nation on Earth and Luna recognized the Republic and allowed Guulin to immigrate or visit with visas.
It was reflected in the North American Hub Airport, which had nearly 30,000 planes arriving and departing from its roughly 200 runways. Technically, the airport was 20 smaller complexes arrayed in the general Winisk area along the beach.
The city had been built to accommodate the number of flying planes, with an array of monorails and hotels near the edges of the airport, complete with shielding layers for noise cancellation and protection measures. The greater array of shields around the Republic also shined brightly in the sky.
Using his eyes, he could even see the reflected light underneath the door, even on the concrete. All his thoughts and analysis had taken less than a second. That was much the same as before his risky encounter with the power of his own mind turning against him. Edu'frec was wary of such experiences again and watched himself with many vigilant VI programs. The most important points of failure last time were the data veins, so several thousand VIs had been jointly made by him and Phoebe precisely to address that.
They weren't directly managed by Edu'frec, which should allow them to continue their operations and transform them if he went into collapse again. Phoebe's concern over him continued to dominate her mind, and it showed no signs of stopping.
He was glad that she loved him so much. Not everyone was as lucky as him, and a parent like her was wonderful. Ri'frec's eccentricities meant they'd grown apart a bit as Edu'frec had gotten older, but their relationship was also loving. Sadly, it could never be as deep as the one with Phoebe because there was just so much that Ri'frec couldn't know and understand.
Even the pace of their conversations reflected that, as did Ri'frec's moderate inferiority complex to Phoebe which he knew about and was seeking counseling for. It was inevitable, though Edu'frec hoped that he could get what he needed, considering the rising costs of counseling and therapy these days.
Phoebe subsidized those, too.
"This is the rough area where the planet cracker hit Earth several years ago. I've been monitoring the energy and consistency of the plates here, and I'm seeing some worrying upwelling in the crust," Gaia said. The hologram showed a topographic map of the Atlantic Ocean, centered on the North American Basin and with the edge of the mid-ocean ridge in view.
Several areas resembling an impact crater remained from the desperate scramble to save Earth from a planet cracker impact. Much of the ocean's topography had been altered since most of the protective efforts were saved for a perimeter area around the impact before the energy delivered could punch through the mantle to deliver its powerful impact to the planetary core.
"So we'll see a new mountain range in several millennia?"
That was what the data showed. The eastern edges of the North American Plate and the western edges of the African and Eurasian Plates had fractured into dozens of smaller pieces, generating massive earthquakes every few months in the region. In some places, the lateral movement of the larger plates outward as pulling on the smaller ones rotationally, making them rotate slowly into the other plates that could only subduct or buckle in response after large earthquakes. It was just another small thing that had changed since the beginning of all this mess with the First Contact.
Luckily, the zone was underwater, and the city and national shields every inhabited landmass on the planet were equipped with ensured all the tsunamis could do was splash against them. Some were very big waves, too, which would have killed thousands in floods.
It had also required shields to be placed on tethered platforms in the sea connected to the seafloor by a series of heavy anchors, which generated shields to both disrupt the waves and provide safe travel corridors for cargo ships.
"No. The Mid-Atlantic Ridge is still fractured, but all I can see is that there is movement in the crust which cannot be explained by our current theories. Now that our shields are capable of it, and with my power having grown so large, we can conduct vertical expeditions and topographic mapping of the actual rock itself. That is what I want to do, because I believe there is an object of non-natural origin responsible for some of the earthquakes we have seen."
Lists of earthquakes from thousands of 7 and 8 Richter scale movements to the roughly monthly 9 and above earthquakes appeared.
"I specifically believe that the 9.7 and above earthquakes are not natural generations. There should not be enough energy between the plates to generate that level of energy where they are being made. Including the 10.5 which resulted in the loss of nearly half the shield platforms two years ago, along with several plate fractures. Alone, they suggest a pattern which coincides roughly with the perigee of Luna."
He checked the data, and it mostly panned out. He gave Gaia a small nod but then spoke on the point he'd noticed.
"But only roughly."
"Yes. Its period is off by a small but significant time, though the current ones correspond to a far older Lunar orbital cycle, which would line up perfectly with the perigee of the Lunar orbit as of roughly 65 million years ago."
They paused to let Edu'frec absorb the meaning of that. And it was true, too. The timeframe they'd mentioned was worrying, though. When things lined up with mass extinctions and violent upheaval in the past, it wasn't a good sign. Sometimes, treating the world like it was a story was the better option. Fate was real, and the tropes seen in stories had happened before.
Edu'frec was sure that eventually, the old enemies who had escaped the Alliance would return once again: Exii'darii, Yasihaut, Aphid, the fleet of generals and commanders who had left Izkrala and never returned for an unknown reason. Reality could be and was altered by incredibly powerful entities, which had the ability and willingness to do so again. Time rolled back damage from their future wars. Luck determined many nebulous things, as did Fate.
Neither of them were as absent as they appeared. Universal entities had been crammed into a scant few galaxies. The idea that they wouldn't meddle in every aspect of it had long been disproven. So the alignment was a bad sign. He readied all known data on the extinction, from the asteroid to the earlier volcanic eruptions before it.
Even wilder theories of direct alien interventions and occupations on Earth were not discounted. Since it seemed everyone could inhabit the same planets with few exceptions like the Pselpaw and Dreedeen, Earth as a habitable world would have been a target of colonial efforts by any nearby nations or those whom the Sprilnav had not managed to contact to impose a system limit.
Ironically, the system limits also greatly lessened the number of wars between galactic nations. The Alliance would be forced to uphold this system if it overthrew them until a better alternative could be implemented, like merging some of those nations.
"So... what are you saying?"
"I believe there is an alien object dating back to the Cretaceous Extinction. There are references to something that could be similar in my memories."
"So you came here in an some sort of transport, then?"
"I am not sure," Gaia admitted, their eyes flicking downward. "My earliest memories are highly spotty, and I know at least some are artificial. However, I can trace my existence on Earth back at least 40 million years, so it is not impossible that my origin is tied to this object, or perhaps others like it. Maybe the planet cracker activated it through direct impact somehow."
Edu'frec absorbed that. The information was shocking and it was a little worrying that it was coming out now. The secrecy might have been warranted, but he knew there was more he had yet to hear. He gave Gaia an expectant look, and they settled upon a small chair.
"Do you have evidence of any ancient civilizations inhabiting Earth at the time?"
"No. Earth has remained untouched for at least that 50 million years, perhaps longer. Though the date of the Cretaceous extinction also lines up to a worrying degree with how far back the Source's location in the mindscape moved here. In fact, the Source almost seems like it is deliberately staying near Earth. The galaxy's rotation, as well as the Sol system's individual movement and Earth's orbit logically should mean the location changes over time. But it does not. The bones have been here for at least that long, perhaps down to the exact time. I have no finite data to support my following theories, but I think they are important for me to tell you, and more so for you to keep secret."
"Very well," Edu'frec agreed. "I can keep a secret, as long as it does not endanger the Alliance."
Gaia considered his caveat, then nodded. Several locks of hair fell in front of their chest before psychic energy moved it back to Gaia's back. Their glittering black eyes and light green skin looked quite menacing. Of course, he only observed that. Most of his negative emotions were still locked away, as he had no need for them.
"I believe the Source has a limited ability to predict the future. It also has complete control of the mindscape, especially in the deeper levels. So my theory is that the Source came here to attack something, and that it is still here because of us. Us as in Humanity, the Alliance, Penny. There is a dark secret in the Earth, one which we must uncover."
"And that the Cretaceous extinction was actually the Source's attempt to either kill or seal something that was here, and is related to you in some way?"
"Yes. And do you notice how much time Paizma and John spend by the oceans?"
"That is hardly evidence."
He knew what they were going for but wanted to ensure that there was at least some sound information behind it before he committed. Generally, he could arrive at conclusions quickly and form detailed algorithms for detecting which data was relevant and which wasn't. Recently, he'd developed a few algorithms that could actually incorporate a meaningful relevance scale.
It was something that many had been capable of before him, even with VIs. However, the scale of the data he worked with required high degrees of accuracy in the number and a truly quantifiable difference between a piece of data with 76.27362% and 76.27364% relevancy, for example. And the quantity had to be something he and Phoebe could intrinsically understand and use in their common applications.
Sadly, the other AIs in the Alliance, like Cander, Greenfly, and Blackfly, could not process such large amounts of data. He'd seen the terms 'static' and 'active' AI to separate them.
"Yes, but Paizma is four-dimensional. That means she can see a far larger part of Earth than we can, including the inside. In fact, with four-dimensional geometry involved, all of her locations would have been capable of viewing the Mid-Atlantic. We don't know who she really is, or the upper limit of her power. She was made by the Sprilnav. Is it not possible that her reason for interest is that she detects a danger or a threat nearby?"
"It is possible," Edu'frec admitted. He'd considered her Sprilnav origins far more than almost anyone else. He knew that if she was a threat, the Alliance needed a way to fight her and win. Because if she wasn't, the Sprilnav could make more enemies like her. Clandestine research into 4-dimensional detection systems and arrays was ongoing, though the only way they were even possible was with either speeding space energy or psychic energy.
Edu'frec knew that Paizma had psychic energy, at least, meaning it was a medium capable of interaction with the fourth spatial dimension. "Though that part of your theory is the weakest. It is likely suspicion talking. It is just like how the soul-creatures deeper in the mindscape resemble dragons in many ways. A neat coincidence, but there is no direct evidence saying that is what people actually managed to see. However, your theory is highly concerning. Do you believe you were put here as a response to whatever was or is here by an outside threat?"
"I do not, but I also admit that is possible," Gaia said. "I don't know what I am, though I didn't take a human form before meeting Humanity in general."
"Can you show me your previous forms?"
Gaia did so. Edu'frec logged each one and took a further interest in all of them. He ran them through every single image he had on file, and besides heaps of VI-generated data from the early 2030s, there were no similarities. He checked more datasets provided by Phoebe's espionage efforts in the wider galaxy.
"Is that..."
He parsed a new set of images from a very worrying location. Historical records bequeathed from the People's Autonomous Stars. Kashaunta's nation.
"What?" Gaia asked nervously. "What is it?"
"You're..."
"Just spit it out."
"You're a psychic golem. Made from shredded souls melted by torture and atrocity."
Gaia blinked. They crossed their arms, descending deep into thought for 10 minutes. They were clearly re-examining their life and all the steps that led up to this point. Edu'frec could imagine how much of a shock that would be.
Eventually, Gaia steadied their emotions, and their gaze fell intensely on Edu'frec's eyes.
"From who?" It was a demand laced with abject desperation and nearly full to bursting with curiosity. With thousands or millions of years with no new information, how would Gaia feel anything else?
"A Sprilnav splinter regime that was eventually destroyed in a very large galactic war, one responsible for the destruction of over 3 million nations and several quintillion deaths. The reason the Sprilnav list for the war was 'morally bankrupt practices and rituals so illegal the Everlasting himself fought by our side.' Given that the Elders who wrote that reasoning have associated death tolls in the quadrillions, that's quite concerning."
Edu'frec read the more detailed descriptions given of the atrocities that occurred. Abject horror and disgust broke his emotional locks. He created a few thousand VIs to get a handle on them. But the emotions were so powerful they were never completely subdued, either.
He saw people being marched by the millions into machines glittering with psychic energy, with thick wires emanating from them. Then he got to the video footage of the interiors. They were designed to extract as much suffering as possible from living beings. The very first part was 'processing' where the ending digits - tentacle tips, horn tips, fingers, toes, hooves, claws, and even beaks and vestigial graspers - were cut from the victims with dulled saws and fed to them.
The depraved accounts only worsened. Acid. Cooking. Flaying. Slow dismemberment, while being subjected to the other three. More atrocities, which alone were evil things, but together made a regime unique in its terrible, meticulous, and industrialized genocides. Edu'frec split his mind in half to deal with the disgust and revulsion rippling through him like the winds of a hurricane.
They flashed with every new recorded scream, squeal, and squeak. Many of his androids released their finer movements to the control of VI assistant programs, and his data veins started to swell. Soon, fifteen thousand digital strokes hit his mind. Dedicated programs cut them apart, along with the piling data on the deep level of distress starting to overwhelm his defenses.
"So what did they do?"
Edu'frec was silent for a whole five seconds. He limited the scope of what he would say before proceeding. Phoebe checked in on him, and he sent her a small packet of information on what he'd found. It was the first data packet he'd ever assigned to the maximum level of content warning between him and Phoebe: a 10. He also added a note that it would be an 11 if the scale was to be properly adjusted.
Manes shook across the Sol system as androids rebooted. Phoebe gave him a digital nod and helped him purge his systems of the filth polluting them. Even more concerning, there was a residual conceptual effect to it. It was weak, but strong for an event tens of millions of years old.
Though now, Edu'frec knew why, at a terrible cost.
"They managed to breach the Source's afterlife and caused the death of nearly a tenth of the Sprilnav inside it and all of the ancient species prior to the Source war that managed to survive there. More specifically, they figured out a way to generate power using the power of living and dead souls, and managed to kill a Progenitor before Nova took their power source for himself and detonated their stars in supernovae.
Apparently the Stannic Resistance's leaders are all still alive, and being continually imbued with Conceptual Suffering by the Source. You, Gaia, were made by them. I believe the reason you are on Earth is because the Source is here, and this is the best location in the galaxy to influence the afterlife, or to destroy it. It also happens to be very close to their prison. The bones of the Source are their prison, in fact. If this has to relate to the device buried in the oceanic crust... this is a threat I am required to disclose."
Gaia nodded. Their eyes blinked away tears. "Don't tell them how I was made if you don't have to. I would rather not be seen like that."
"I won't," Edu'frec promised. He grabbed Gaia's hands, looking into their worried eyes. "We'll get through this together. You saved my life. It's time for me to pay you back."
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
"What do you think?" Space asked. "It does seem like Indrafabar is practicing interference."
"The boundary is beyond this," Lecalicus said. "He is participating as a High Judge, not a Progenitor. And yes, the lines will be muddier, but there needs to be a higher backing for this trial besides Justicar alone. The rest of Sprilnav society and Indrafabar himself knows this. Technically, Nova and Filnatra are also High Judges, but they have avoided this trial entirely for the reasons of their bias. Indrafabar had a bit of rapport after his prior run-in with Penny on the flagship."
"But that is not for you to decide."
"This is a Sprilnav Judgment, and Justicar himself has allowed it. He is able to avoid Progenitor mental manipulations by the sheer size of his mind. Only Nova could control him, and imperfectly at that. I assume that the rest of the concept entities know this as well."
"But he is interfering in the affairs of the Sprilnav."
"He is a Sprilnav," Lecalicus said. "Unlike with Nova or Twilight, I have confidence in his impartiality in this case."
He cringed as yet another piece of Death's energy wracked his soul. Penny's attempt to heal him had done nearly nothing in the end, sadly. Lecalicus hoped that she would become more capable later on, though it was a bit much for her to stand against the full weight of Death at her young age, with her paltry capabilities.
They were impressive on a local timeframe, but that didn't mean she wasn't weak. If even Nova wasn't able to dispel Lecalicus' pain, as the other Progenitor had messaged him, then it was unlikely that Penny could do so in his place. And it was probably more important for her to focus on the Judgment and freeing the slaves on Justicar.
Lecalicus was still very tired, though. Weakness and lethargy clung to his bones. They were weak and brittle now, and he suspected that he would die if he was hit by a planet cracker in his current state. Space's energy counteracted Death's brutality, forcibly displacing his energy and dumping it into a black hole, which only she or Time could retrieve energy from. In fact, she had a small black hole in the room, though it was separated from him by a spatial barrier. A portal allowed the light from its accretion disk to dimly shine so he could see without being burned by the heat.
It was a massive statement of power, though Space had even more than that. Had Death's attack been a single thing, Lecalicus would have been rid of it by now. But it wasn't. It was a continuous, agonizing punishment, siphoned from the raw power Death now had from the deaths of countless beings across the universe after the Source war.
"Justicar is friendly overall to Penny," Space said. "That means Indrafabar will oppose him."
"Why do you think that?"
"It would be a good reason for him to be there. To uphold the standards of the elite Sprilnav classes."
"You forget that Indrafabar is their voice, too," Lecalicus replied. A thin trickle of blood ran from his snout, which Space started to heal. "Even more than Kashaunta as an Elder. She is the second richest Sprilnav, and he is the first. His title, the Digital King, rings as a true one in many nations that reserve a spot for his absolute rule, mostly to benefit from name-brand recognition and many Elders' lack of willingness to test themselves against a defending Progenitor.
That's how he started, after all. Selling his protection to Elders who couldn't afford to risk shunning it or him. Many of his deals provide a constant stream of income, and with the civil wars he refuses to interfere in between nations, he backs both ways; he can get new contract offers all the time. If I were not insane or more focused on politics, I could do the same thing.
Us Progenitors just have to ask for something to get it, but Indrafabar manufactures goodwill by at least compensating people for what he buys. Do you really think that I used money to pay for my food or drinks during the days of my insanity? That the revolving door of wives I had were being compensated in any way besides my own endowments? I would say not."
"Yet, they are dead now," Space said, a smile quirking on her lips. "They are dead, and I have you all to myself now."
"Yes, but we can't enjoy that currently. The risk is too high."
"I know. Tell me, Lecalicus. If Indrafabar is the voice of the elite, what happens if another Progenitor disagrees?"
"They won't publically. That weakens our collective image and reputation. Other Progenitors are honorary members of the elite, such as me, Nova, Twilight, Maya, Filnatra, and Arneladia, but only Twilight, Nova, and Filnatra likely have any true membership. They have stores of wealth in the top 2% of Elders, which is enough to get by without demanding anything."
"And your wealth?"
"You would know about that, Space. Considering how I have gotten it in the past."
He let out a hacking cough, clearing his vision again by tearing out his eyes and regrowing them. The numbed pain meant it was easy for him, and Space had seen that many times now. Twilight likely enjoyed the limb ripping more than he did, though.
"Yes, by teleporting gold and alloys from several nation's federal reserves, generally causing massive economic problems inside them after the news leaked. I remember."
"Mine is in the top 35%. It is far harder to amass the wealth Elders have when they have lived for billions of years trying to make more of it. Often, even the poorest Elders can make a fortune through inheritances, or by literally just working a job for a billion years. A salary of a million credits a year for a billion years would equal a quadrillion credits, after all."
"How do you all not go insane?"
"The same way you guys don't. Our emotions of boredom and those related to it can be numbed or eliminated on command. Elders have lots of time to train their minds and bodies. Progenitors do more, refining our very souls to be resilient. It is how Twilight survived the black hole, and why I supposedly can destroy the universe if I go on a sufficiently furious rampage."
"The reason you can do that is because to raise your levels of conceptual energy to alter reality requires direct input from the soul. At your levels you can take that from the prospective 'end' of your lives, burning years or eons for bursts of power. Of course, the problem is that you are immortal. So even if you go insane and are in constant pain from a shattered soul, even the pieces are enough to power the rampage. And the soul is more than just psychic energy."
"Yes," Lecalicus agreed. "That is what you all say. But that is not why we're here, either. It is about Indrafabar. He has done perhaps the least outwardly visible interference of any Progenitors in contact with Penny. As much as any of us can be, he is a good man. In certain circumstances, I would trust him with my life."
"And which would you not?" Space asked, raising an eyebrow like humans did. She was wearing the form of one, though with a sense of overwhelming weight and scale to her that was typical of her more powerful forms. It was needed to influence Death's grip on Lecalicus at all.
"If his or Nova's was at stake as well, and the cost of their survival was my life. Nearly every sentient creature, and many animals as well, would prioritize their own survival over any other, and Indrafabar is a Progenitor because of Nova. That is not a debt that can be paid back, no matter how many times he saves Nova's life."
"And how many did he do that again?"
"Around 10 to 20 times, all during the Source war. Past that, nothing. Nova is entirely biological, so it isn't like an AI could hack him. Though one could connect to him through psychic energy, and attack him that way as a psychic variant of AI like Phoebe or Narvravarana."
"Isn't that a threat?"
"Nova's conceptual name is the Everlasting among the Sprilnav," Lecalicus said. "He is the most powerful being in the universe who was actually born of a womb or of any creator. Invading his mind is so laughably foolish even Narvravarana never tried it more than once when they almost went to war."
"I heard of that," Space said. "But I do not understand why that is impossible."
"If you move slower than light, can you escape the inside of a black hole purely by motion?"
"No. Well, a hypothetical person could not. I could, because I'm built different."
Lecalicus chuckled. "Yes. Well, trying to take over Nova's mind is like trying to walk out of a black hole. He is conceptually powerful enough to have his own event horizon in his mind he can create with psychic energy. He can close off, and everything inside will die.
One creature has survived even temporary imprisonment in there, and it is a speeding space entity of the Broken God's Pantheon. But while Nova is the pinnacle of all life, that does not mean he does not want our help when we can give it. I know you two aren't exactly friendly, but he really does mean well. He just doesn't know what he wants sometimes, and his ego and emotions get in the way of his prudence."
"Indrafabar's involvement on the trial is not acceptable."
"It is not optimal, Space. But if the trial is not seen as fair by the elites, they will declare it void. That has happened before. Kashaunta's predecessor as the richest non-Elder died that way. He ran out of allies, and even Justicar's token objection to the violation of the trial rules was ignored. There comes a point where only the social contract holds back the fury of hatred. If this Judgment, the talk of every household in the Secondary Galaxy and soon in a Primary Galaxy meeting, is seen as illegitimate, it will have dire consequences.
Rebellions, rogue nations. Yasihaut's backers would happily sanction an attack against the Alliance to drive a wedge between Penny and Kashaunta. Now they know there is some tension thanks to their treaty meeting, which Valisada recorded. And they know that Pennyonly grows more powerful. Look at her power, and you can see."
Space did so. Her eyes glazed over, and Lecalicus worked in a cough that had been building up for a while.
"What is that?"
"Her new name among the Sprilnav, spoken by everyone aware of her. The Liberator."
"But the recursive effect alone-"
"Will be massive. But look closer," Lecalicus told her.
"What- oh."
Space was silent for a long moment. Ghostly images of random humans appeared in the room. Small glimmers of psychic and conceptual power linked all of them. The hivemind's network grew until it was fully on display in the single room. Normally, the 15 or 16 billion humans wouldn't fit in a single room. But Space didn't care about those rules. Bodies crossed without intersection, and a pale apparition of the hivemind appeared over them.
Incredibly, Penny and several other humans were a level 'above' the rest, though Lecalicus recognized only Penny, Tsonga, and Nichole. They almost looked like nodes in the hivemind's network, really. Penny was still gently connected, though nothing of substance could be shared over such an extreme distance, especially within any reasonable time frame.
The hivemind's glowing colors brightened, and Space grew concerned. Lecalicus watched as her grip on the conceptual power weakened slightly. The hivemind's arm twitched. The 'nodes' began to vibrate as their expressions became ones of immense determination. Small pockets of effort bubbled up in a rippling wave across the hivemind, separating into distinct blocks.
Lecalicus noticed a block of humans that were smaller than normal. Tens of thousands of fetuses, with stronger genetics than usual. He smiled.
Cloning.
He'd keep that a secret. He couldn't afford an interference penalty, and Penny might really kill him if he leaked the existence of a human cloning project.
How odd, that I now fear her, he mused. It spoke both to how far he'd fallen, and how far she'd risen.
Each block began to coordinate, all without the humans inside them knowing. The nodes did, though, and kept fighting. Space shrugged and released the vision. The room returned to normal, and they shared a long, contemplative silence.
Lecalicus loved a good wait when it didn't leave him nothing to distract himself from the dull ache of his pain and the jolts of power Death sent into him to keep requiring Space's treatment. She sucked in a breath of the gas which filled the room, which had properties Lecalicus didn't understand. Calling it 'air' didn't really cut it.
"So that was enlightening. Humanity is more powerful than I hoped."
"The hivemind," Lecalicus said. "She is still connected to it, and thus every heap of power she gains attaches a scrap of the Liberator name to all of Humanity. Champion is weak as a title, but Liberator is strong. Too strong for her own good."
"What does that mean for her, and for us?"
"For us? It means we might be seeing some more freedom here soon. But for them? Fire, dust, and blood."
"Is that why?" Space asked.
"Why what?"
"Why Indrafabar is on the trial."
"It might be a reason. I don't know his exact motivations, and can only approximate. Part of his reason could be 'because I can' or to express his power as a Progenitor to force even Justicar to move on his own planet to make room for him in the highest profile trial he's had in thousands of years. Indrafabar's ego is not dormant, let's just say. But I would expect Penny's actions to come up in the trial.
Remember, all Yasihaut, the Challenger, has to prove to the court is that the Defendant, Penny, is a threat to the Sprilnav, and successfully lump the Alliance. If she manages to convict Penny alone, it would cause problems for her."
"How?"
"Because if Penny knew she was about to die, and was in the room with her most hated rival, do you really think conceptual armor would stop Penny from killing her this time? She already has a weapon capable of breaching that armor, and the strength to wield it. With two utterances, she could get it and then ensure it reaches Yasihaut."
"It would be a foolish decision."
"To kill a rival in one's final breath is the dream of many, alien or Sprilnav. But the court will not be partial toward the Alliance, that is for sure. Penny will have an uphill battle, and Phoebe is not allowed to represent her for this one either. As for the Judgment, it is a trial that will be harder to keep fact-based than the last one, which ended up in a massive battle and the crippling of me and Twilight, the abduction of Nilnacrawla, and even the extra pushes by the AIs of the Alliance along the Path. Speaking of which, there has been a development with Edu'frec."

The Shadows Speak
Chapter 11
Warlord Grexus of House Drakorin
My heart rate was increasing steadily as we ran down the corridors. “What path is next Varkesh?” I asked hurriedly. “Down this corridor, then make a left and head straight at the next junction.” he answered back in between breaths. We had roughly 30 Scalebound that covered our rear and sides, alongside 15 regular soldiers of the ship. I had a faint hope we could make it out since Varkesh knew the ship inside and out but time is not on our side. That enemy AI is probably watching our every move and feeding it back to its soldiers. We are being hunted like prey and it feels disgusting, but no time to think about that.
We continued down the sleek, maze-like pathways, making sure we checked every corner before advancing. “This is taking too long, what is the status?” I commanded as we stopped and I peeked around a corner. “Not far to go, it would have taken less time if we had taken the elevators but I suspect that AI could have trapped us there.” he said, trying not to look fatigued. “Good, let's increase our pace.” I commented back as we ran down a long corridor. We took a right on the next junction and before us was the entrance to the hangar. We ran towards it but as we were just moments away from gaining access, the giant blast doors slammed down with a loud bang, almost crushing my toes.
“What…no, we were so close.” came a defeated cry from Prince Raxil. “Indeed you were, but better luck next time.” came a mocking tone from the Huginn in the speakers above. “Damn! Varkesh, is there no way to open the door?” I asked hurriedly. “No, that AI has taken over the security systems and we do not have any weapons that blast through that door.” came an anxious reply. “Alright, we must find another way out, staying here will only make them get to us faster.” I said as everyone started to move back out of the hallway. We doubled back towards the junction and stopped there. “Where should we go n-” I was about to ask but was cut off when suddenly an eerie melody started playing in the speakers. “Seems like my shadows have found you, the tracking phase is finished, now, the hunt begins.” the AI said in a cold laughter as the lights from the path we came from started to grow dim, until it was pitch black. Suddenly five soldiers dropped dead from shots to the head, their brain matter and blood spraying the lit cross road and others with the gore.
“Damn it all, RUN.” I shouted as I bolted in the opposite direction, some scalebound and soldiers started shooting at the now encroaching darkness behind us whilst holding the rear. The lights started going out faster as it engulfed them. I glanced back as I saw lights from their guns shooting in every direction, roaring and cursing as the enemy seemed to be the air itself. Then the roars became screams. I could hear that fear had gripped them, and one by one they were silenced in quick succession until the only thing I could hear was the footsteps of the rest of us. Damn it, now I had only 24 Scalebound to help safekeep the princes.
We kept running down the winding pathways, not looking back. I felt cornered, like a Scritcher being chased around a thorny bush by a Glimmerfang. “Damn, I am out of options, what can we do?” I asked after about ten minutes of running, directing my voice to all parties as we were now going down a wide corridor. “I don’t know, I don’t feel like we can go much longer, we are-.” Varkesh said but abruptly stopped in his tracks as we now stood in front of a massive door. “This…this is the door to the arena floor.” he said, as he caught his breath.
“We should go in then, I remembered that this place was closer to the port side of the ship, it should not be under enemy control.” I said as I ordered a Scalebound to open the door with the locking mechanism on the left wall. The door opened upwards with a hiss and we entered cautiously as the entire place was dark, probably from the bombardment we had earlier. “Someone go figure out if we can access the lights in here, the rest of you activate your flashlights.” I ordered in an authoritative tone as I could finally take a breather. Both princes and priestess decided to fall down on the padded floor, all of them panting and gasping for air.
“We rest here for now, catch your breaths everyone, but stay vigilant.” I said as I scouted out the arena. It was spacious, I would say roughly 400 square meters. We have no cover here but at least we will have a wide view of our surroundings. “How long until we have lights?” I asked, feeling the exhaustion of this morning catching up to me now. “I found the controls but I can’t seem to get it to work, milord.” he answered back respectfully. “Alright, keep working on them.” I replied.
Suddenly some dim lights flickered on. I could see the outlying shape of the whole arena now. There was the arena floor in a hexagon shape with fifteen meter high walls running up every wall. There was a significant number of seats that lined the top of the walls and went up as the backrows had to be elevated. There were some decorated seats in a royal box off to one side which had the best view. Wait, is that a person sitting in one of those seats? “SCALEBOUND, PROTECT THE PRINCES!” I shouted as the shadowy figure’s blue eyes locked onto mine. It just sat there, without a care in the world, looking down on us like a flying predator, savouring the meal to come.
The Scalebound and rest of the troops created a semi-circle around the princes and priestesses. I stood to the side with my cousin next to me. Every gun was fixed on the royal box. The figure stood up and shifted a bit and suddenly its shimmering figure disappeared and a Terran soldier clad in pitch black armour with a hood stood in its place, his eyes glowing in that disturbing blue hue. A moment passed that felt like minutes. “Greetings, Warlord Grexus, I hope I am not interrupting your rest there, you all seem so fatigued.” the soldier said in a semi-metallic voice. “You…you filthy alien scum, you do not deserve to sit there.” came an angry shout from Prince Raxil. “Oh, and why not? Who knows? I could be of royal blood myself.” came a mocking reply back. “How dare you attack a royal ship of the Xyrran Empire. Scalebound, shoot him.” the prince demanded. “That would be an ill-advised idea, prince.” The soldier replied as he lifted his arms to the sides, gesturing for us to look at the rest of the stands around us.
I felt my scales bristle as at least 400 black clad soldiers appeared in the stands around us, some fixing their rifles at us and others having some sort of vibrating blades stuck to their wrists, ready to pounce at any moment. “You see prince, I seem to have more firepower here than you do, so I would suggest cooling your head before my soldiers might get trigger happy.” he continued, his tone now sounding threatening. The spectacle that appeared made the prince almost fall over as he cowered behind his guards. “This was a trap wasn’t it?” I asked after a bit of a pause. “Hmm? What makes you think that?” came the reply from him. “It would make no sense otherwise that you have this many soldiers at the ready here, waiting for us. I bet a claw that it was that AI’s idea to make us lose track of where we were going, and ‘stumble’ upon the arena.” I said as I studied the black clad soldier closer now.
The armour they were wearing was a marvel, looking durable yet light at the same time. Given a different scenario I would have loved to look it all over. “Wow, you are quite perceptive there, Lord Grexus. It was indeed.” he replied. “Then why go through these theatrics, you could have picked us off one at a time or ambushed us here as soon as we got in.” I said as I could not wrap my head around it.
“Well, you see, we have orders to capture five high profile Xyrrans on this ship, they being two high nobles of house Drakorin, a priestess and two royal princes. You are all here and an accident in a firefight is the last thing I want.” the soldier responded with a laugh. “Then what about the rest?” I asked as I looked over at the shaken faces of the soldiers guarding the princes. “Well, if they do not resist, then they will be taken prisoner and put into POW camps that have been raised in Alerian space.” he replied calmly. “I will not be taken prisoner by a lesser species.” Came a semi-shout from Sentinel Varkesh. “I demand a duel to the death with your best champion.” he said in a demanding voice as he threw away his pistol and drew his shield and sword out. Three other Scalebound walked up besides him and did the same.
“What are you doing Varkesh? Are you going to throw away your life like this?” I asked in confusion. “You are a soldier and a noble, Lord Grexus. I am a Scalebound, I would rather die fighting than surrender.” he stated, his voice full of vigour. “I don’t see why we need to honour your challenge, Sentinel Varkesh, but I must admit even though your species is a vile one, I respect your courage. Erik, Harald, Hayes, Kyle, entertain our foes.” Major Gray said in an authoritative tone.
Three soldiers dropped down to the arena. Each landed in silent grace from that fifteen meter drop and walked casually to face the three Scalebound warriors. One of them was massive, even taller than the Scalebound in full armour that he faced. The other two carried themselves like veterans, one had the air of an ambush predator around him and the other seemed like the confident type, haughty but most definitely deadly. But where was the fourth one?
Music started suddenly to blare out of the speakers as I saw another shadow soldier standing on top of the royal box. He looked similar to the other three but had horns sticking out of the top of his helmet, and was he wearing a…cape? He suddenly jumped down, his cape making him glide down towards his comrades. He landed softly next to them, facing Varkesh.
The soldiers laughed and cheered as he landed, the haughty one clapped his hands together as an applaud whilst it looked like the major had his left hand covering his face as he shook his head. The cape on the man I presumed to be Kyle folded up into a slot in the back of his armour and he took out two energy blades that he had tucked behind his back. The blades looked almost identical to the ones we used but were shorter, like long knives rather than a sword. He seemed to be the only one carrying them, the other soldiers were using the vibrating blades. “You shall become a testsubject, Scalebound warrior Varkesh. These blades that I carry were made from researching your weapons, let's see how effective they are.” the soldier said with such flair that it could rival a professional actor.
“Alright, that is enough theatrics.” came a grumbly voice from the major and instantly the four soldiers took a ready stance. The Scalebound were taken aback by their abrupt unison and all prepared themselves in a defensive stance. “I suppose it should be me that calls the beginning of the duels, or does anyone reject that notion?” Major Gray said as he looked over us in the centre. No one spoke a word. “Very well then, BEGIN.” he shouted, and instantly the four Terran soldiers rushed at their opponents.
They were fast, unbelievably so, as soon as each of them closed the distance they all seemed to choose a different strategy to tackle their foe. The haughty one seemed to dance around his opponent, taunting him to attack to then be met with a flurry of counters. It was magnificent.
The massive Terran did something incredible as well, he didn’t use anything fancy, he simply ducked under the Scalebound’s strike and hammered his fist into the shield, making the Scalebound fly four meters back and the shield had a fist size dent in the middle of it. He lunged at him again, this time ripping the shield away but the Scalebound drove his sword through his left forearm. He didn’t even flinch, he simply pinned the Xyrran with his knee and started punching his face over and over. Every strike sounded like thunder as the Scalebound’s helmet started to cave in with his face. Finally he took out his vibrating blade and plunged it in between the eyes. The warrior spasmed then fell silent. The Terran retracted his blades and walked back to his starting location as if nothing had happened and stood at attention.
I felt disturbed looking at the battle between our warrior and the Terran that gave off the hunter vibe. He was meticulous in his assaults, every tiny mistake was met with a relentless assault at the weak joints in the Scalebound’s armour. Every move calculated in advance to weaken the enemy before giving the killing blow, and it came shortly after. The shield hand had lost too much blood and our warrior could not hold his shield up. He slashed with his sword in a desperate attempt to keep the enemy at bay but the Terran dodged to the side and lunged his blades into the throat of the Scalebound, the tips piercing out the back of his neck, and he fell down, gurgling whilst holding is throat for a moment before finally leaving this world.
“Do you yield?” came from the haughty Terran as I saw him standing over his opponent who had fallen down to his knees, blood leaking from wounds all over his body. “Don’t insult me Terran…You won, now finish me.” came a reply from the Scalebound. “Tell me your name. I would like to know the name of the warrior that fought so valiantly.” The Terran said as he seemed to have gotten some wounds as well. “I am Lorvax of house Vrexinor.” the Scalebound said between heavy breaths. “I am Captain Harald of the Umbra Vanguard, and I will remember your name.” he said as he then plunged one of his blades to the back of Lorvax’s skull, killing him almost instantly. He then walked back alongside the Terran hunter. Both of them stood next to the giant and seemed intrigued to watch the battle between the Terran Kyle and Varkesh.
Both warriors were swinging, dodging, and blocking strikes from each other at unbelievable speed. It was like watching a choreographed scene from a movie but the Terran had the upper hand in this fight. For every strike Varkesh lashed out with, it was met with a counter, followed up with lightning fast strikes. He desperately tried to defend himself but the blades the Terran was using were starting to cut deep into his armour. Varkesh lashed out with his shield which made the Terran back out, he roared as he struck with his blade downwards. The Terran blocked it with his own dagger, tilting it to the side which made Varkesh’s blade slide off it to the side. With his other dagger he tore into Varkesh’s sword arm, cutting it off right before the elbow. Varkesh dropped his shield as he fell to his knees, holding his arm as he hissed in pain. The Terran held his weapon to his neck. “Well fought, Warrior Varkesh.” he said, plunging his weapon into Varkesh’s chest. He looked up towards the Terran, then smiled as he fell backwards, taking a last breath before closing his eyes.
The Terrans cheered as our final champion fell. “Now that this is finished, I suggest the rest of you lay down your arms and no harm will come to you.” said the major as he jumped down from the balcony. Other Terran soldiers did the same and we were now surrounded on the arena floor. “What do you say, Warlord Grexus? Is there any point in more senseless death?” he continued as he looked at me. “Men lay down your arms, it will do us no good to die here.” I commanded as I took out my pistol and sword and dropped them on the floor. The soldiers and Scaleborn did the same. “A wise choice.” Major Gray said as Umbra soldiers started to gather up our equipment and put restraints on us. “Unhand me you vile beasts, I am a royal prince, you can’t-” came a resistant hiss from Prince Raxil before he was promptly given a strike to the head from a butt of a rifle and then sedated by something. I felt a guilty pleasure seeing that as he was then hoisted up on a soldier’s shoulder. The rest didn’t seem confident to try and imitate the prince and quickly fell in line.
We silently walked towards the hangar we were locked out of earlier, it now had obsidian ships docked in it and both Terran soldiers and Xyrran prisoners were within it. They were being corralled into the ships as we were seemingly waiting for our transport.
Suddenly a massive shadow loomed over the entire bay as I swiftly turned to look outside the open hangar door. My jaw dropped as I saw three massive spaceships slowly descending towards the planet. They were silver in colour and were probably twice the size of the royal ship we were on.
“What manner of enemies have we brought upon ourselves?” I spoke out loud, sheer shock overwhelming me as I watched the three ships stop right above the city. “The Human kind.” answered the Major behind me.
Chapter 10

! TLDR at bottom !
Maybe I should mark this as meme too but this has been motivating me recently. Im not sure if its a placebo because ive noticed it or because its actually happening but Ive noticed 2 things that are fun and excite me.
1: Ive felt like my peen has gotten a little bigger when soft a/o im not getting so many unnecessary erections so maybe its appearing bigger? idk but it seems hard to explain the 1 inch punisher when I also have 0 experience on how to use it, if i ever can talk to a girl.
2: Peeing has never felt so great. its hard to explain but I believe my resolve is strong and I have been microdosing this time around and Ive never done this great. Like im so proud of myself for having already gone 18 days without much lust. Ive been drinking a ton of water aswell so I can stay hydrated for a bjj class ive begun recently aswell. Let me tell you, I hold my fluid until im BURSTING and then its just such a good feeling. Let me be clear, its not a lust feeling i get, but like a holy moly this feels better than the 3 seconds of splurtation you get from wanking so I cant believe ive never considered it before. The best part is, is that theres no shame in peeing and it jsut makes me more excited. is this normal?
Something ive done this time around, is incorporate microdosing and more exercise and water. people also mention the water and exercise and I always put it off thinking that it made no sense but on the rare occasion ive gotten, Ill just go to bjj and get hooked on the idea of taking out someone bigger and then its all i think about until i go to the next class. I try to go 3x a week but if i get the *urge* i will go to break the thought. I dont think ill get in trouble for saying this but Microdosing has also been a major factor I believe. Many people will argue its fake and everyone else argues its life changing but I just ask for you to do your own research if interested. The main part im talking about is Lions Mane. Its a 100% legal edible/medicinal mushroom thats been used for 1000s of years. There is plenty of research showing it does incredible things for the brain and its creation neuroplasticity. Ive read many places this is a huge thing with PMO addiction is that it can reduce your brain matter or something due to various things im not smart enough to even try to explain. Im not saying everyone needs to and id rather not because people might take advantage and raise the price on amazon which would be very uncool. In this war, we are all brothers and sisters. Im so glad to fight alongside you all and may our victories bring us clear motivation and the power to do what we want. My goals are to break my social anxiety and to be able to speak to people without overthinking everything I say. My addicition may have been strong, but together we are stronger and may we all reach true happiness through nofap. thanks for coming to my tedtalk
TLDR:: Ive been drinking water for a BJJ class and noticed that peeing feels incredible, like after im done i cant stop to think how i used to gorgle the porgle iykwim so the sensation of peeing is just incredible. I hold my blatter and just the vibrations that get sent through my body are total bliss. Afterwards, i realize theres no need to use PMO because it would be an unhealthy and forced way of feeling these vibrations. Also Lions mane has been pushing me past where ive never gone before. I have very few if any lustful thoughts

~First~
(Lord save me, this headache won’t go away.)
HHH/Herbert’s Hundred Harem
“You know there is the possibility of bi-locating with Axiom effects right?” Jahlassi asks him. The ‘interrogation’ had gone perfectly and had ended with a happy Gina heading home with a belly full of pastry and warm cider, an assurance that her life was soon to get better and the smug satisfaction that she had done everything in her power to hit back against the people that had conned her so long ago.
“Yes, but such ability is either so obvious that even the average citizen will know something is up, or the sign of an extremely potent adept. Which is very rare and would narrow our suspect list to roughly a hundred thousand individuals across Centris. Not including the ones directly in the employ of The Undaunted.” Herbert replies. The information of the specific times, no less than eight very specific times Gina clearly remembers due to the events surrounding them, meant they just had to narrow things down in a society where cameras were everywhere. Where the only place and time you could be sure you weren’t being recorded was if you swept the area yourself and turned off or destroyed any camera you could find. And even then, some could see through some kinds of walls and didn’t need a clear line of sight.
The problem wasn’t figuring out where everyone was, it was narrowing down the sheer number of people. Which numerous powerful computers, synths and data crunchers, or some who were all three, were working on even now.
“And if it IS a potent adept?” Jahlassi asks.
“Well... this is a very serious situation. Which means that it likely wouldn’t take much persuasion for one of the most potent adepts on the planet to take a break from her current duties and press down on such a possible threat?”
“You’re considering asking Lady Bazalash to interfere personally?”
“Again? Yes.”
“She interfered because billions of lives were on the line.”
“And if we find and spook an Adept skilled enough to be in two places at once without cluing in the people around them that they’re using Axiom, who has access to and knowledge of how to use Blood Metal on a scale never before seen in the galaxy in one of it’s most densely overpopulated planets. I dare say billions or trillions will be a conservative casualty estimation.” Herbert says.
“Right that... that is a very good point.”
“I’m glad you agree.” Hebert says as he cracks his neck. “What about the question I posed to the our team when I left to aid in investigations? What are our solutions for the disposal of the Blood Metal?”
“We do not understand Blood Metal sufficiently to dispose of it without a guarantee of no negative side effects. It’s just too rare and unknown. We have determined it would be best if we were to divide up the metal and have the pieces researched at different facilities that only sporadically have contact with each other.”
“That would slow research if there’s only a minimum of collaboration.” Herbert muses. “But that’s the downside of security. We know blood metal can actively pull apart Axiom Constructs and create them like a combination of much more vicious trytite and khutha. But it doesn’t stop there, it actively takes the Axiom it disrupts into itself to further empower it’s own effects. It eats it.” Herbert says.
“A bit over-dramatic, but that is a good summation. That fear effect though, that’s new.”
“It is. Beyond what it does to Axiom and the newly discovered fear effect it is also known to make people uneasy to look at it. But not in any way that’s easily explained. Could that simply be a lesser version of the fear effect? Or rather perhaps the fear effect is the uneasiness temporarily taken to an extreme?” Herbert asks as he rubs the side of his head. Everything is happening at once and more is coming. He has been trained for this, but training for it and being in the fire are entirely different.
He then straightens up and focuses his gaze. He will meet this challenge. For he is Undaunted. He will live up to the code as best he can. He can take it. This is just training for next time, and next time this will be easy.
He then mentally deflates a little as he’s hyping himself up at entirely the wrong moment. This isn’t the action, lead the troops through the trenches time. This is the waiting time. No matter how infuriating that waiting may be.
He needs to grow up. Possibly literally as he has too much energy right when he needs to be calm.
“Urgh... it’s like hearing the whistle...” He mutters to himself in frustration.
“The whistle?” Jahlassi asks.
“It’s an effect in old shows to show something is falling. A declining whistle.” He says before mimicking the whistle. “Often used to show a bomb is coming in a comedy show. Right now I can practically hear the bomb falling, but I can’t do anything but wait for it to impact. And with how much energy my younger body has it’s driving me to distraction.”
“You’re not comfortable being so small?”
“I’m rolling with a bad situation. If it were my choice, if I could truly choose I would be in my late twenties at least. The size and strength I had at that age was nice. Also this?” He gestures to his face. Jahlassi cannot find any flaw, the young man looks immaculate and seems to have walked out of a woman’s dream about younger men. “This is a problem. It’s too distracting, too much an attention getter. When puberty hits the good looks are thankfully lost.”
“You don’t like looking good?”
“Too much attention. If I need to charm someone that’s what talking to them and being charming is about. But if people are charmed at the first sight of me then I get far, far too much attention. Men already stand out a lot. An incredibly good looking little boy just at the edge of becoming a man? That’s dangerous.” He says. “Not only am I borderline hyper, but I’m as literal as jail-bait can be without someone leaving a trail of candy into a cell.”
“You ARE the candy that leads into the cell with that sweet voice my friend.”
“That’s the point! I’m supposed to be subtle and composed! But I’m obvious and hyper! I hate being a kid!” He exclaims before huffing. Sharing an obvious frustration with her ought to open her up a little more.
“And no one’s looked into ways of quickly aging as by our perspective it happens soon enough anyways.” Jahlissa remarks in a distinctly amused tone. And it worked.
“Right, I’m going to do something while we wait for results. I’m going to vibrate through the floor plating and down to the bottom of the spire if I don’t.” Herbert says before starting to head out of the room.
“I’m under orders to be near you when you’re not performing field duties.” Jahlassi says and Herbert freezes and looks back.
“Surely The Trytite Lady has experienced situations like this before.”
“The exact details are of course different, but yes. The real concern is humanity. You’ve been in the galaxy for just shy of a year. As in a few more days and it will have been a single year. Lady Bazalash is concerned about so young, so vibrant and so reckless a people shattering themselves like prop glass.”
“Prop glass?”
“A special easily broken glass that is used for props in movies and plays. It even breaks in a rounded manner so that if it lands on someone or is stepped upon it doesn’t lacerate.” She explains and he considers.
“That’s kind of her, by why me in specific?”
“You’re one of the most unusual humans there are. You’re not some prodigy adept but you have tasted one of the greatest gifts of the galaxy in excess. You have excelled, proven yourself and been knocked down again and again. Literally. There are concerns.” She says and he considers that.
“I see. Well then, I was planning on changing into more exercise appropriate clothing then entering a holo-chamber to exercise and burn off my excess energy. Nothing to be concerned about.”
“I see. Do you mind if you’re watched?”
“I do, but if you were to join me instead lady Nagasha and...” Herbert begins before his communicator starts going off. “Oh thank god there’s physical work to do. Excuse me.”
“I’ll pass your thanks to My Lady.”
“Not that God.”
“Which one then?” She asks in a cheeky tone.
“The all loving creator who was there before a single light in the sky was formed?”
“Oh her? Okay.” She teases.
“You know what I mean you cheeky, cheeky woman.” Herbert says back in a cheery tone. “Now if you’ll excuse me I need to...”
His communicator goes off again and he looks at it before his eyes widen. “Oh.”
“Oh what?”
“They’re here, slightly ahead of schedule.” Herbert says. “Excuse me.”
•×•×•×•×•×•×•×•×•×•×•×•×•×•×•×•×•×•×•×•×•×•×•×•×•×•×•×•×•×•×•×•×•×•×•
“Primary communications package sent, awaiting response.” The Communications Officer says on the bridge.
“Sir, Intelligence Operative Jameson present and accounted for.” Herbert says as he rushes onto the bridge without looking like he’s rushing. He takes up his position beside Admiral Cistern before holding up a mug of coffee on a platter. “Need this sir?”
“I’ve got so much in me that I need to let my blood water it down a little.” Admiral Cistern states.
“That wasn’t a no.” Herbert says before Admiral Cistern takes it.
“No, I just want it noted that I’m more coffee than human at this point.” He states.
“A new type of Erumenta Sir? Congratulations for siring a species.” Herbert jokes and gets a huff of amusement.
“Perhaps not. The odds are going every which way about this. Where do you place your own odds?”
“My bet is on us sir. I’m ready, I’ve been ready for a month. Sir Philip’s last true assignment to me before departing was to come up with all possible scenarios of The Inevitable’s Mission and proper responses to each. We have this sir. No matter what they’re bringing, we have the legal right, the monetary, military and numbers advantage in every way. They cannot defeat us.”
“It’s not victory or defeat that has me concerned Herbert. What has me concerned is the aftermath. The consequences. The further reaching effects.”
“I know. I just need you to know that I’m guarantying you will be there to make those choices.” Herbert says.
“Thank you, how are your investigations going?”
“We’ve reached the hurry up and wait part. We’re narrowing our suspect list significantly. But this is a system where having a list hundreds of trillions long is considered small. Thankfully it shouldn’t take more than a few hours.” Herbert says.
“Good, and the active combat going on?” Admiral Cistern inquires.
“Light, mostly skirmishes and distractions until police can swoop in and saturate the area with stun cannons.” Herbert says. “I was about to join a relatively close hot zone that just flared up when I received news of The Inevitable’s Data Package. It seems that the spell Lady Bazalash and Rikaxza spun is starting to fray ever so slightly.”
“Well it bought us precious time and we got a good grip on things.” Admiral Cistern notes.
“Sir, the package is decompressed and has accepted all codes. Text files only, on screen now...” The Communications Officer says before a screen full of gibberish appears. “Hang on, running it through our decryption...”
“Why are they so paranoid about this?” Herbert wonders out loud before the message decodes. “Ah.”
“So. They’re coming to render judgment.” Admiral Cistern notes. “Hmm... send them the return package and also inform them that a political firestorm is currently active on this world. Proper greetings shall be coming soon once we have established a stable video and audio link.”
“Well things are ominous to begin with. Their main communications array must be having some difficulties, or they’re currently speaking with the nearby cordon fleet that stops people from blundering into Cruel Space from the big laneways that lead into it as they converge.” Herbert remarks.
“Sir we have a text response from The Inevitable.” The Communications Officer says.
“Read it out Officer.” Admiral Cistern states.
“It’s a... well it’s from Madam Anastasia Stepanova Sir. She is on The Inevitable with several other ‘distinguished individuals’ and looks forward to working with us. Distinguished Individuals has quotation marks around it Sir.” The Officer says.
“Well that’s not ominous, not at all.” Herbert notes.
“Thankfully she’s going to be most concerned with YOUR department over any other. Which means I get my hands clean.” Admiral Cistern teases him.
“Sir! You betray me!” Herbert says dramatically.
“Poppycock. I’m merely saving myself from a witch by pointing out her favourite prey. An innocent child.”
“As innocent as a Fox in a henhouse sir.” Herbert dismisses.
“Sir, we have open contact with The Inevitable.”
“On Screen.” Admiral Cistern states and he comes face to face with his opposite.
~First~ Last Next

One would’ve thought I’d be used to this by now – typing with one arm. It takes time to get used to; especially when you’ve spent most of your life in front of a keyboard. Muscle memory digs deep.
A few years ago, I was in a car accident. I was going 60 down an empty road, coming home from a long day of overtime, when some kind of animal came charging out of the woods. Trying to avoid a collision, I swerved off the road. My front left wheel got caught in a ditch, sending the entire vehicle careening off the road; only to smash into the trunk of an ill-placed black walnut tree, driver’s side first.
I have this vague memory of blinking lights and vague shapes in the distance. I was so cold. But at the same time, it was so unreal. I couldn’t even understand what had happened.

I was brought into emergency surgery. My left arm was, literally, hanging by the thread of my jacket. It had come off clean by the socket.
According to the surgeons, I was lucky. Most of my shoulder was intact, so it became a matter of salvaging what they could. The cut had been clean. I did suffer some whiplash damage to my neck and lower back, but considering I could’ve easily died or gotten paralyzed, losing an arm was considered “mild”.
Looking back at it, I am inclined to agree. Considering what could’ve gone down, I was damn lucky. Still, in that luck, I wished I could’ve gotten just a tiny bit luckier. See, I had this gold ring that I’d been given by my later mother. A simple thing with the engraving of a musical note on the inside – a memento of our shared love of music. We played Louis Armstrong at her funeral.
That ring disappeared in the accident. Somehow, that’s what bothered me the most. My arm could be reattached. It could heal. But that little memento was just gone.

What followed was a long period of intense physical therapy, medication, and painful readjustments. It took weeks before I could even move my fingers again, and when I did, it felt like pushing your nerves through an unwashed garlic press. It was this stunning chemical-level kind of pain. The kind where your body just shuts down, begging you to stop.
But over time, I started to get over it. Small movements started to get better. I could tie my shoes. Press the space bar. Hold a knife. I wasn’t about to juggle anytime soon, or play the piano, but I could get by.
Soon enough, I got back to work.

People were glad to see me. I wasn’t gonna be able to work at full capacity in my usual role, but I could still sit in on meetings. I won’t bore you with the details, but most of my work relies on answering e-mails, proofreading, and translation. It’s pretty technical stuff that requires a lot of pitter-patter on keyboards.
At one point, I was stuck in a particularly drawn-out meeting between two clients that we were facilitating. I was there mostly as an observer (to fill the seats), but I was supposed to weigh in if something related to my department came up. Of course, it didn’t, but I still had to act interested. My colleague was trying to draw up a compromise between the two parties, laying out terms and conditions. Meanwhile, I was nursing a cup of coffee and waiting for the day to be over.
Looking over to my side, I noticed something odd. I wasn’t just holding the coffee cup with my left hand; I was stroking it with my index finger. Sort of like how you’d scratch a wary cat under its chin.

It was a strange sensation. I was looking at my own arm, my own hand, and I couldn’t feel what was happening. I couldn’t feel the ceramics tapping against my finger, or the twitch of the nerve as it contracted and extended. It was just happening. An involuntary twitch, perhaps.
But it didn’t feel like it. It felt intended, somehow.
A few similar events took place that day. Grabbing the bathroom door for a little too long. Knocking over desktop decorations. Suddenly letting go of my jacket as I was about to head home. It was just little things. I was still having trouble even using my arm in the first place, so these quirks didn’t bother me too much.
A friend of mine was giving me a ride home. I wasn’t at 100% yet and sitting behind the steering wheel felt like inviting disaster. Instead, I sat in the passenger seat, nodding off as the trees passed me by with a steady rhythm; causing me to blink.

A noise pulled me back. The driver said something, but I wasn’t paying attention. Turning to him, I excused myself.
“Sorry, what was that?” I asked.
“What are you doing?” the driver repeated.
I looked over. My left hand was wrapped around the parking brake, as if ready to pull. I forced myself to let go.
“Nothing,” I said. “Sorry, I don’t… it’s nothing.”
“Right,” he nodded. “Just… don’t do that.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Yeah, no. Sorry.”

That night, I was exhausted. It felt like my lungs had been robbed of breath. I felt weak and trembling. I was cold, yet feverish. Famished, but without an appetite. I went to bed early, faceplanting into the pillow.
I had horrible nightmares, none of which I can remember. I kept waking up over and over, not being able to discern dream from reality. My bed was soaked with cold sweat, sending shiver after shiver up my spine.
By the early hours of the morning, a stray ray of sunshine burned my eyes open. I was lying on my side, looking towards the window, leaning on my left shoulder.
The fingers of my left hand were moving on their own. And not just moving, but bent in every which way; as if lacking bones. They were vibrating, shuddering, like wounded worms fearing a predator.

I grabbed my hand, and my fingers were back to normal. I could move them as usual. For a moment, I was doubting what I’d seen. It was one thing to experience oddities, but that was unreal. I must’ve laid there for half an hour, just expanding and contracting my hand, begging my body to work with me.
“Enough of this,” I begged. “Please. Enough. Please.”
I clapped my hands, cracked my fingers, and ran them through my hair. It was fine. Nothing out of the ordinary. Right?

A couple of weeks passed without any serious peculiarities. I could even work a little. There were a few of oddities, like unknowingly grasping a warm cup, or my fingers pointing in all directions when in contact with cold water. Just strange little things that I could easily get control of.
That was, until one morning at work. We were out of coffee, so I was making myself a cup of tea instead. As the water came to a boiling point, I accidentally spilled some on my arm.
The reaction was immediate.

My arm whipped out to the side, throwing the pot across the room. For a moment, my arm looked like it didn’t have any bones; rippling like a skin-covered liquid. It made me think of it not as a part of me, but as an alien thing attached to my shoulder.
And for a brief moment, in the blink of a heartbeat, I could see my fingers grow and shrink. Fingernails throbbing, like a cat throwing up a hair ball.
Suddenly, it stopped. Looking back, I could see one of my co-workers watching me from the other side of the room. She must’ve heard the crash.
“You alright?” she asked.
“Yeah, just got a burn,” I sighed. “I’ll, uh… I’ll be fine.”
She side-eyed the broken pot on the other side of the room and nodded. Not entirely convinced.

As soon as she left, I looked down on my hand as if shying away from a wild animal. It was alien to me. It was something… other. A twitch was one thing, but this was downright unnatural.
Coming home that night, I had a weekend ahead of me. I ran my symptoms through a couple of online services. While there are a few ways the human body can trick itself, like the alien hand syndrome, or phantom pains, this was different. Physical properties do not rapidly change. Then again, maybe I was imagining it?
I decided to do something crazy. An experiment. I wanted to recreate what’d happened in the break room.

I boiled up some water and poured it into a cup. I held my left hand over my sink, grabbing the cup with my right. I stood there, trying to calm myself. I wasn’t insane. This was a rational thought that I had to play out in order to eliminate an outlandish possibility.
I prepped a cold pack and ran the tap. Then, taking a deep breath, I poured some of the boiling water on my left hand.

Twelve fingers.
My hand split into twelve fingers, lined with raw, open wounds. My wrist rolled, like a cobra fixing its eyes on a prey animal. This was no longer an arm – it was a nest of flesh-colored snakes.
My mind blanked. I fell backwards, smacking at my arm as if trying to kill it. I couldn’t feel a thing. It’s as if all sense of touch ended at my shoulder. I crawled backwards on the floor, trying to wave my arm away, but it clung to me like a parasite fixed on my shoulder.
Seconds later, a searing pain ran up my arm. Looking down on my hand, it looked as it always had. It was just a hand with a burn. I could barely feel it through the pounding in my chest. Every noise in the room was overshadowed by my pulse.
I ran my hand under a tap and wrapped a cold pack around the wrist. It wasn’t a bad burn, but it wasn’t nothing.

I did some research, looking up news from around the time my accident took place. There were a couple of reports, but nothing out of the ordinary. A domestic call, a brawl at a local restaurant, a couple of missing pets. There were a couple of other reports, but they were short and didn’t lead anywhere. A mention of a couple disturbances. Some idiot blasting music in a parking lot.
But there was one more thing I noticed. In one of the reports covering my accident, there was a picture of the car. There was spatter of the blood on the hood, with something meaty stuck in the grille – as if I’d hit an animal.
That caught my interest. I couldn’t remember hitting anything, so what the hell was that about?

The next day, my arm was acting up even worse. It kept going cold, as if circulation was cutting in and out. Before heading out, I wrapped it up in bandages. Partly because of the cold sensation and partly because I just didn’t trust it. There was no way to tell what could happen, or why.
I managed to get a hold of the owner of the junkyard where my trashed car had been towed. I went over there early in the day, just before the fog cleared.
Now, this was long after the car had been crushed and stored, but it was the only lead I had. An older woman greeted me at the gates, letting me in. We had a short chat about the accident as she showed me around, ending up at a stack of metal that could hardly be recognized as anything. The only thing to even hint at my car being in that pile was a thin slice of colored metal from one of the doors.

I dug around there for about 20 minutes; all while being observed by this old woman.
“Yeah, won’t find much,” she said. “If the police didn’t get it, the insurance folks did.”
“Been a lot of people digging around?”
“Not a lot, nah,” she said, shaking her head. “But you ain’t the first.”
And she was right. There wasn’t a drop of blood, or bone, or anything. It was just scrap metal in a pile of even more scrap metal. I was wasting my time.

But as I was about to leave, I noticed something. I hadn’t thought about it, but I could see the old woman was wearing a ring. It looked like a wedding ring at first, but she was wearing it on the wrong finger. I pointed to it.
"You found that?"
"What about it?" she asked.
"It’s got a tune engraved on the inside, right? Like, a, uh… music note?”
There was no response. She just looked at me and sighed. Turns out, I was right. She gave it back.

She’d found it near the hood of the car the night they brought it in. Grabbing it was just a spur of the moment thing, and since no one had come asking for it, she’d kept it. I was a bit annoyed, but mostly relieved that I got it back. But the question remained, how had that ended up at the hood of the car?
“There was all kinds of gunk just kinda hanging there,” she said. “Figured it was an animal.”
“And you’re sure that’s where you found it?”
“Sure as sure can be, yeah.”
I stood there for a moment, feeling an uncomfortable thought forming in the back of my head. There was no way for that ring to go from my broken arm on the driver’s side to a pile of meat stuck in the grille of the car.

But the proof of it had been in front of me all along. I had worn that ring for 12 years. There was a permanent indent on my finger.
Looking down at my left hand, there was no such indent.
This wasn’t my arm.

As soon as that thought settled in my mind, I could feel the arm twist and turn. Hadn’t it been for the bandages, there’s no way to tell what it would’ve done. It squirmed and pulled against me, thrashing like a dying fish on land. The old woman just looked at me.
“You alright? Want me to call someone?” she asked.
“I-I… I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know.”
I had to get to the bottom of this. I hurried out of there as fast as I could.

It was getting late in the afternoon when I got back home. Grabbing an old backpack and a couple of painkillers, I was about to head right back out. But a thought hit me. Maybe it wasn’t as abstract as I thought. Maybe it wasn’t just a feeling – maybe something was really there.
Looking down at my arm, I could feel it stirring, just within my control. Something sleeping, waiting to spring into action. With my right hand on the front door, I stopped, and spoke out loud.
“Whatever you want, just… don’t,” I asked. “Don’t.”
There was no response. No stirring. On a spur-of-the-moment whim, I packed one more thing into my backpack. Just in case. A hail Mary.

Making my way to the scene of the accident, it was impossible to tell anything had ever happened there. I could barely even make out the place where I swerved, or where my wheel got caught in the ditch. I found the general area in the field where my car had spun out of control, and from there it was easy to find the tree I’d smashed into. It was still there.
I spent hours going over it all. Following the path the car had taken, starting from that tree, and working my way back. There was nothing there. Nothing new. It was all just gravel, weeds, and pavement. What had I expected? A signed confession?
As the sun dipped behind the clouds, I could feel a cold wind coming on. I’d lost track of time.

As I turned back, there was a sudden cramp in my arm. A shock of pain crept up my spine, spreading throughout my body like a spider’s web. I could feel my left arm throbbing against the bandage wrap. Something was wrong.
I was in the middle of the field. I could see for miles in every direction. Cars passing by in the distance. Wet grass staining my pants all the way up to my knees. And this one cold wind, cutting straight through my clothes. I shivered, but my left arm didn’t.
Taking a step back towards where I came from, another shot of pain struck me. This one tripped me, sending me face first into the grass. It knocked the air out of my lungs.
I rolled over on my back, gasping for breath. My left hand was creeping up my stomach like a spider with a meaty tail. It stopped over my face, tapping the bridge of my nose with the index finger. I couldn’t feel a thing. Moving to push it off, it instead struck back; grasping my right hand in return.
“Stop,” I wheezed as I sat back up. “Just stop. Stop this.”
But it didn’t. I just sat there. A wounded man holding his arms.

I struggled back and forth for well over half an hour. Getting back on my feet, only to get knocked back down. By the time I’d made my way back to the road, I looked like I’d been hiking for miles. My hair was a mess, and my clothes were covered in grass and mud. I had a handprint across my face, like I’d smacked myself.
I’d trusted myself with a short drive to get there, but I wasn’t sure about going back. It felt reckless to get behind a wheel in my state. Still, I couldn’t just walk all the way back home, and having it towed would be a pain in the ass.
I got back in my car while I thought about it, wiping myself off with a towel from my backpack.

It’d gotten dark outside. The overcast didn’t help, I could almost taste the rain. I contemplated my options and figured that if I kept it slow and only used my right arm, I could carefully make my way home. I put the keys in and turned on the headlights.
There was an elk standing in front of my car.
It sniffed the hood of my car curiously, then proceeded to stare me down. I was just surprised. I got a good look at it. There was something wrong with one of its hind legs – it lacked fur, and there was a sort of spreading baldness reaching halfway up the side of the body.
My arm was slowly rising on its own, as if looking over the dashboard. The elk recoiled, as if in pain, and set off in a troubled three-legged gallop. It disappeared into the woods.

Looking down at my arm, a stray thought hit me.
Was this spreading too?

I painstakingly made my way back home. I dropped my backpack in the hallway, locked my front door, and collapsed into the shower. I was exhausted.
I stood in the shower for about half an hour, looking down at my mother’s ring. I was wearing it on my right hand now, but it just didn’t feel the same. That wasn’t where it was meant to be. Still, it was nice to have it back. Whenever I turned the ring a little, I could feel the engraving against my skin. It was a little gesture I did when I was anxious, as a reminder that it was still there.
I got dressed and ready for a slow evening at home without any further drama. My arm wasn’t acting up. But as I passed through the hallway, something didn’t feel right.

At first, I couldn’t say what it was. Maybe the hum of an old lamp, or some air duct acting up. I wasn’t sure, but it was something. It had to be. I stepped up to the front door.
There used to be a light coming from the hallway outside. That light was always on, and there should be a little light coming in through the peephole. But there wasn’t. Had a fuse blown? I had a closer look.
There was someone just outside my door.

A click.
My left hand had unlocked the door.

The door flung open, knocking me back. A tall silhouette, close to seven feet tall, pushed its way into my apartment. It was dressed in a sort of black poncho, covering its face with layers of bandages. A single frog-like eye stared me down as it pushed forward.
I scrambled backwards on the floor. It was fast. Damn fast. It stepped forward and reached for one of my legs, but I managed to pull away in time. I got back on my feet, barely managing to pull my left arm along. It was trying to grab a hold of something, as if to slow me down.
In a spur-of-the-moment decision I grabbed a lamp from the windowsill, throwing it across the room. The intruder ducked, then came at me again. I ducked under, just in time, and headed for the door.

As I reached the front door, my left arm tried to force it shut. I fought against myself to get out, but it was useless. The door was shut and locked, and my left hand refused to budge. The seven-foot-tall shape came around the corner, slowly approaching. I had to think of something. Anything.
My backpack. It was right there.

I had packed a couple of things earlier. A towel, some bandages, painkillers, and a water bottle. But I’d also packed some lighter fluid. Seeing as how my left arm had reacted so violently to boiling water, I had this stupid idea that the prospect of a straight-up fire would do something even worse to it.
It didn’t seem so stupid anymore.
I grabbed the lighter fluid and sprinkled it on my left arm. The tall shape stopped, seemingly reacting to the smell of it.
I wanted to say something, but all that came out were empty breaths. We were like animals, circling each other, waiting for one to make the first move. I emptied the lighter fluid, grabbing a box of matches. I held the box with my mouth, and a triplicate of matches in my hand. I spilled the rest on the floor.

For a moment, we just looked at one another. A single inhuman eye peeking through the bandage wraps. The vague shape of four, maybe five extremities at its side. How many arms did this thing hide under the poncho?
A flash of realization came to me. This is what I had almost hit with my car.

And with that, I lit the matches. It leapt at me, but it was too late.
The moment the open flame touched the skin on my left arm, it detached. The open nerves just let go of me, and the thing fell off my body. It squirmed on the floor like a dying animal, grasping at whatever its fingers could reach.
Adrenaline forced me out the door. A heartbeat behind me, the seven-foot-tall figure scooped up my burning arm and pushed past me. Within seconds, it was gone – leaving me with an open wound in the stairwell, smelling of lighter fluid.

One of the neighbors called for help. I didn’t even notice how much blood I was losing, but it was bad. They sent me back into emergency surgery; this time without an arm to reattach.
It was deemed that the wound was self-inflicted. A result of some stress-induced psychosis. I wanted to agree, but I saw what I saw. I’ve been trying to convince myself otherwise, but I lived this. This wasn’t any other life but mine.
I’ve since learned to live with a full prosthetic. It’s not much, but I can trust it, and I can wear my mother’s ring the way it was supposed to be. It’s starting to make an indent on the synthetic skin.

I don’t like to think about what would’ve happened if I’d let that thing stay on. But just a couple of weeks ago, I got an answer. I was stuck in traffic, looking out over the fields, when I saw a group of elks in the distance.
One of them had no fur.
None at all.

I hope this isn't a dumb question - I am the parent of a fourth grade girl who was diagnosed with dyslexia recently and this is all pretty new to me. I hope I'm missing something, actually, because I'm confused and pissed and sad.
This ended up being longer than my single question - I guess I am actually really pissed off and sad about the last nine months in general, and I am completely open to any feedback, advice, or ideas about what to do now and how to help my kid. This is the first time I wrote all of this down and the irony of writing a novel on a dyslexia subreddit is not lost on me.
I'm leaving it lol.
Cora has always been brilliant and weird and loud, but over the last few years, it became apparent that she was having a harder time....stopping. Stopping talking, stopping moving, stopping yelling - it was just endless and exhausting for everyone around her. (Except at school. She is and was perfectly behaved at school - she has literally never gotten so much as a note home about goofing off in class.) Cora hit a wall in third grade - the hyperactivity was finally wearing her out, too, and annoying her friends. She finally asked for some help slowing down.
She was tested for ADHD and the general host of common mental health conditions last fall, and to no one's surprise, was diagnosed with ADHD-combined type, as well as anxiety symptoms that the psychologist described as significant enough to warrant a GAD diagnosis…but that she strongly suspected were a perfectly rational reaction to the very real problems Cora’s impulsiveness caused in her life.
This was exactly my experience as someone diagnosed with ADHD as an adult. It turns out that the consequences of constantly losing my car keys, forgetting appointments, and impulsively spending money I didn’t have were making me anxious and stressed, not the other way around. I had expected similar results for Cora and I was glad this was happening now - she could skip the years of totally ineffective treatment and misdiagnoses that I went through before being diagnosed and successfully treated.
What we were not expecting at all was the additional diagnosis of "specific learning disorder with reading impairment" noted in the report. I had no idea what this meant. The psychologist did not use the word "dyslexia" in her written evaluation, a decision which resulted in another 8 months of confusion and (probably unnecessary) testing detailed below. She explained to us that Cora could have dyslexia, but that her testing wasn't granular enough to be sure - that there was a chance it was "something else" and the SLD diagnosis was an umbrella term that covered both dyslexia and conditions unknown. (I have no idea what she was referring to and the general weirdness about using the word dyslexia was something I noticed with the school, too. I am still confused by this and other interactions where I get the distinct feeling people aren’t telling me something important.)
It was almost September, so the psychologist recommended pursuing testing with the school; this seemed to be a reasonable next step. They would test Cora and determine exactly what was going on, if anything. This whole part of the report was very much characterized as an incidental finding - something to follow up on, but nothing alarming given Cora’s history of good grades.
"Maybe she was just tired after a long day of testing,” the doctor explained. “But it also seemed like she wasn't hearing certain letters correctly." Years of speech therapy had helped Cora correct all but a few minor issues - but combined with this potential reading issue, maybe an audiologist should test her again. Get her hearing tested, start medication for ADHD, and see what the school says about her reading - that was the plan, no big deal.
I wasn't worried, but I figured it couldn't hurt to see what other help was available. I learned that we have a branch of a big tutoring nonprofit in our city that offers Orton-Gillingham instruction at no charge - something I soon realized would cost hundreds of dollars per month at other centers. Free is good! I submitted Cora's application and the report from the psychologist (with the ADHD/GAD/SLD all clearly noted)….and we got a rejection letter a week later in the mail. Cora didn't qualify because the tutoring was specific to dyslexia, and the SLD with reading impairment was not the same as a formal dyslexia diagnosis. Fair enough, I thought - I figured we'd get the testing done through her school and could reapply if the result was a dyslexia diagnosis.
That....was naïve, lol. But the psychologist made it sound like a total non-issue, something schools did all the time. I sent the school psychologist and teachers the report before school even started, since surely they would want to schedule all of this right away! I didn’t hear anything for a few weeks – the start of the school year must be such a busy time, after all – but raised it again, report in hand, at a meeting with Cora’s teacher in late September.
“You….really want to try to avoid putting a label on things too quickly,” she told me, in a tone that implied there was much more that she was not saying. “She seems to be doing quite well in class. Let’s see how she does on the standardized tests we’re finishing this week and go from there.” I was definitely aware that I was missing something, but it seemed reasonable to wait for Cora’s test results if they would help inform next steps. Cora scored well above average, as usual; shortly after receiving these scores, the school psychologist emailed me to let me know that no further testing was warranted.
I still felt like I was missing something – spoiler alert, I was – but there didn’t seem to be anything else left to do. They're the experts and were totally unconcerned – only positive news - and Cora’s new ADHD meds seemed to be really helping. After that, everything did seem to be okay at school for a while. Cora liked her teachers and was doing well.
Everything was copacetic…except for the fact that Cora’s anxiety seemed to be getting worse without any tangible explanation. She complained about fourth grade being a lot harder, but again – her grades were fine, she was perfectly behaved, she liked her teachers….it was difficult to identify any problem that needed solving. Soon, Cora started getting home and isolating herself in her room for over an hour every day. She seemed stressed. Worn out. This went on for months.
And then she had her first panic attack on a Sunday night, seemingly out of nowhere. She wanted a mental health day Monday and was back in school Tuesday, seemingly her normal self.
The next Sunday, she had another panic attack, and this one was much, much worse. She lost control of her bladder. I was close to taking her to the ER. It was scary. That's when it all came out. She was DREADING school - her two hours of ELA in the mornings had become “torture.” She was white-knuckling it through the reading, writing, and spelling work, totally clueless as to why it seemed so much harder for her than for other kids, but so determined to get good grades that she had just burned. the. fuck. OUT.
She was home for days after this. The school tried to dismiss my concerns at first - it couldn't have been that bad, I was told. To be fair, my concerns were vague because I still didn’t understand the real issues or how to help Cora, either. Cora was clearly unwell and adamantly refused to return to school. I started putting everything in formal, written letters emailed to all of her teachers, the school psychologist, and everyone else who seemed potentially relevant. I told them I wasn't sending her back until they did something to try to figure out what was going on in ELA.
That was mid-February. We had a meeting before I would agree to send Cora back, where they talked about putting together the "interdisciplinary team" to conduct "extensive classroom observation.” They insisted that this process would take at least 60 days to complete. Cora reports that there have been three days where someone has essentially come to her ELA class and stared at her while she works.
We weren’t just waiting for the school, though. After the psych eval last summer, we had been slowly working through additional evaluations and appointments related to Cora’s hearing, speech, and language abilities. Basically, we were working our way from Cora's ears into different regions of her brain, trying to catch problems along the path that sound waves traveled - entering Cora's head as vibrations in her ear canals, winding into her brain as phenomes, assembling into a stream of recognizable words, converting into meaning in entirely different areas of her brain, and eventually emerging again via her speech. I had no idea so many tiny things could go wrong in that process, but they can - and we can get pretty damn granular in order to figure that shit out when there’s a potential problem. Cora had some weird results here and there - we now know that overlapping speech is basically her Kryptonite, which explains a lot of meltdowns at family gatherings over the years. But on the whole, her ears and her brain are doing fine, and she doesn't have autism, either.
We had been lucky to get hooked up with the best child development team in the area - they were wonderful, and the process of more testing and visits seemed to reassure Cora (and us, honestly) that there was more help on the horizon, more answers soon. She started low-dose Zoloft for the anxiety and seemed a little happier; her anxiety about school was starting to morph into resignation and frustration, which actually seemed healthier in a way. "It takes time," they tell us. Her breakdown was in February. They wanted to see the report from the most recent evaluations. Fair enough; although it is not lost on me that I am paying an outside team to do the school's job, at least it's getting done.
Two weeks ago, we finally got the team's report - and the written words, "developmental dyslexia." The lead psychologist is going to meet with the 504 team at her school - he is wonderful and immediately understood so many of Cora's concerns and needs. I'm not exactly optimistic, but it's at least possible that this may result in accommodations/extra help in school. Cora thinks he walks on water and is so excited that he's going to "stand up for" her.
The report is detailed and confirmed a lot of what we suspected. She's a really bright kid - IQ around 120 with sky high mathematics and nonverbal problem-solving scores. She apparently discussed "conundrums that are complex and abstract in nature" during her sessions, with a "recognition that there is not necessarily a solution" to these mysterious issues. (LMAO....this is my weird and wonderful kid.) The report describes Cora as "delightful" - funny, self aware, and highly motivated to learn.
Her reading comprehension score was in the 90th percentile, essay composition in the 70th - spelling scores came in at the 25th percentile, which was no surprise. Pseudoword decoding was poor - she's in the 14th percentile - and it got worse from there. Cora has an oral reading fluency in the 9th percentile, a basic reading score in the 7th percentile, and a word reading score in the 4th percentile.
In fact, the essay composition score was the only "average" score among dozens of measures of her reading, writing, and language abilities - comprehension was universally excellent and decoding was universally abysmal. It was hard to read. It felt like a gut punch - looking at the single-digit scores, I finally realized the insane degree of effort it must have taken to finish her work and look happy doing it.
The developmental psychologist leading the team told us that it was unusual to see that stark of a difference - that the severity of her impairments are usually associated with average comprehension scores at best. I have tried to wade through research about these instruments, but decided to take his word for it. Typically, the deficits in her basic reading skills would set off a chain reaction of lower scores down the line - but Cora had brought her grades and tests scores up from an already high start at the beginning of the year.
"It's no wonder her anxiety symptoms are increasing - she's completely exhausted," he said. "Imagine what she could achieve with the right kind of help."
I realized then why Cora's high scores and good grades, so impressive to everyone else, were such a source of consternation for her. That chain reaction was still happening, getting in the way of what she was actually capable of achieving. She knew it, even if the rest of us didn't - she could do better with the right kind of help.
I honestly feel sick thinking about it. She never told anyone she was struggling, never asked for help - not from us, not from anyone at school, heck not from her former-literacy-teacher grandma. No one had any idea. My husband and I had actually encouraged her to slow down a little in the weeks before her panic attacks, just out of a general sense that something was brewing despite her repeated insistence she was doing fine. Turn in the worksheet a day late, three sentences is plenty, relax. Unthinkable, Cora insisted, she was fine.
So she's back at school, nothing has changed other than the glacially slow 504 process of "observation" occurring in the background sometimes, but she seems to be a bit less stressed. I can't tell if getting pissed off about the situation is helping her deal with it, if the Zoloft is taking the edge off, or if she's just masking harder now. Maybe all three. 18 more days of school and Cora is counting. them. down. Her teachers and support staff seem generally bewildered by the idea she is or was ever struggling. They were caught totally off guard when I abruptly pulled her out of school until we at least got them to commit to the 504 process – but we had been blindsided too. They saw a happy kid who was thriving academically until her parents pulled her out of school and started a process that no one seems particularly committed to finishing. Sometimes I think they don't believe us at all. Maybe I would feel the same way in their shoes, I don’t know. I think they’ll listen to the doctor.
The entire point of this post, though, was to ask about Cora’s second rejection from the local tutoring program. With summer approaching and the diagnosis of dyslexia (versus maybe-dyslexia, maybe-whatever-else-could-be-included-under-the-SLD-“umbrella”, which I am still unsure is even a thing), I've been looking into all sorts of options for tutoring. Summer is a good opportunity to try to start getting Cora some meaningful help without adding yet another thing to her plate. She's excited. We can build some tools before next year - if we know what works for her, we can be better advocates from Day 1.
So I resubmitted Cora's application - I still had my original email and I just attached the shiny new report to that, explaining where to find the magic D word that I fully expected would finally open a door where Cora could get the right kind of help. This new report was more granular with reading testing, but the dyslexia diagnosis was the one really substantive change. It included Cora's ADHD and anxiety diagnoses, as did the report I submitted with our initial application, but with new information about medication and treatment for these issues - progress!
(I would like to point out at this point that ADHD and anxiety are firmly established as two of the most common comorbid diagnoses for kids with dyslexia, and that anxiety symptoms in particular can occur because of the challenges caused by dyslexia. My daughter had full-blown panic attacks at 10 years old largely because she struggles to FUCKING READ and no one was helping her. I know I am preaching to what little choir is likely left at this point in my novel. But especially as someone who was medicated/treated for depression and anxiety for 20 years before anyone agreed to test for, diagnose, and treat the ADHD symptoms that were causing me to regularly fuck up my life in really depressing and stressful ways…..this chicken and egg shit really hits a nerve.)
Anyhoo, it had taken 8 months and a lot of work, but I had finally done this one cool thing for her - Cora was going to get the right kind of help. The school year is almost over, but at least we had this one success. The obstacle that I’m still not sure was warranted in the first place – the lack of the word dyslexia in the initial evaluation – had been checked off what was now a giant list of obstacles in Cora's path.
And thanks to the generosity of people who had probably heard and experienced a lot of similar, frustrating stories, our family could focus on paying off the bills accumulated in the process of getting to this point instead of adding more to the pile. Free is always good, but sometimes free is a godsend.
Twelve hours later, Cora was denied again, this time via a brief email simply noting the GAD diagnosis in both reports. "Our tutors are not trained to work with children who are diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorders" and they "cannot meet her needs."
That was it. No further explanation. Just…fuck your anxious baby girl who is trying so hard and fuck you for trying. NEXT!
Oh, and P.S., fuck the really significant percentage of kids with dyslexia with comorbid anxiety diagnoses who are incredibly well researched and described in just…all of the fucking literature. Just all of it, honestly, for decades. Fuck those kids too.
People seem to treat the word "dyslexia" like it's the only thing that matters sometimes but also not something that should be ever said in other contexts, AND I'm pretty fucking sure that "SLD with reading impairment" is essentially equivalent to the word dyslexia because no one can explain what else might be under that "umbrella," and apparently it's nigh impossible to get meaningful help for my daughter through the public school systems anywhere in America, and giant nonprofits care about kids with dyslexia so much, but not the anxious ones, better lock the doors before those crybabies get their needs all over our tutoring center!
We will figure out how to pay for help for Cora, that’s a given.
But honest to fucking god, have you guys just been putting up with this shit the whole time? I'm so sorry.

This has been done a million times before, but never to my liking. With this post, I think I have definitively fixed BHN, and once again find myself dreaming of an alternate history where it becomes one of the great rock albums of all time and catapults Oasis into the most important rock band of 1997-98.
In previous posts, people always wonder what if “The Masterplan” had supplanted BHN as Oasis’ third album, but I very much see the songs on that compilation as a product of the Morning Glory era, minus the couple BHN tunes on it. That tour would not have been the same without songs like The Masterplan and Acquiesce. In my opinion, BHN didn’t need those tracks. It had enough quality tracks on its own. The only thing BHN needed at the time in my view is a more steady hand at the production desk, a lot less cocaine and a couple songs exchanged for B-sides.
Disclaimer: Be Here Now is probably my favorite album of all time. I think it’s fine the way it is as a polarizing ode to excess. I think it works well in that regard and stands as easily the most intriguing Oasis album to discuss and dissect. But even I admit in terms of mass, general public appeal, BHN goes too over the top at times and killed Oasis’ chances of successfully topping Morning Glory.
After listening to countless BHN era bootlegs on YouTube, I think Oasis certainly did hit their stride in 1997 and actually did top their sophomore album. I think the following track list is a definitive re-think of BHN that would have been a colossal hit and sold at least double the amount of copies the album ended up selling.
The following format is as follows: Track #/Song title/Suggested Changes/Approximate ideal song length/relevant version (if applicable).
Note: some pervading changes to the album — a more sparse mix with the guitars. this album should have felt like Definitely Maybe on steroids, with Bonehead’s huge rhythm guitar and Noel’s best lead playing to date. Instead, we got a coked up mess. I think every track could have benefitted from less guitar overdubs, so that can be included as a suggested change for about every song, as well as more bass guitar in the mix.
Without further ado, the greatest rock album of the 90s:
BE HERE NOW
Track 1 — Be Here Now: The titular track is easily one of my all-time favorite Oasis songs. It’s bouncy feel and incredible glam rock riff is endlessly listenable. The use of it as an intro to their concerts in ‘97 give the shows a massive, anticipatory feel that makes you believe the biggest band on earth is about to rip the roof off. The album version should have had the keyboard intro the live versions had (along with the toy piano riff. I fucking love that thing), as well as the two opening guitar chords like the G-MEX version before getting into the song. The song also features some of Noel’s best lead playing live. The mix should have featured more sparse guitar with the lead licks Noel played live. I have no issues with the song’s length, as I think with better production, people would be fine with it repeating the verse and chorus again like many other oasis songs. Again, I can’t tell you how much that toy piano sound and the flashing lights at the beginning of those ‘97 shows does for me. Makes it feel massive. ~6 Minutes~ Relevant live version: Live at G-MEX
Track 2 — Stay Young: This should have been a single, featuring the two suggested B-Sides below. It would have been a massive hit. The song needs a more sparse mix (maybe even like this version from the movie The Faculty) and could have easily been cut down into a 3 1/2 minute pop hit. ~3 1/2 minutes. Relevant version: The Faculty Mix.
Track 3 — Stand By Me: The first three songs follow how the band often opened up most concerts in ‘97. I believe this to be one of the best Oasis songs, but it should have been acoustic like the Bonehead’s Outtake version, with the strings already present in the mix being featured prominently (I think the string section is absolutely gorgeous in this song, but too drowned out). Remove one of the choruses to tighten the song up a bit and you have another perfect song. ~4 1/2 minutes. Relevant version: Acoustic by the pool.
Track 4 — Going Nowhere: If Noel wanted one of his vocals on the album, it should’ve been this one. Could’ve followed Stand By Me perfectly and is a much conceptually better song than Magic Pie. No change to song length. ~4 1/2 minutes
Track 5 — My Big Mouth: “This one rocks” as Noel G said at Knebworth, but on the album, it rocks a bit too much. I’d like to see production similar to that of the Mustique Demo version, especially with the Noel backing vocals on the outro more prominent in the mix. With a more sparse, driving guitar where you can actually hear the riff more clearly, it’s take the song to the stratosphere, especially with one of Liam’s best vox. Should’ve been half the length, too. ~4 minutes. Relevant version: Mustique demo (Liam Vox)
Track 6 — I Hope, I Think, I Know: This one is pretty much perfect the way it is. Could’ve maybe been a single. ~4 1/2 minutes.
Track 7 — Don’t Go Away: Again, pretty much perfect. I would’ve even been down for a true full acoustic version, akin to a Wonderwall or Cast No Shadow. ~5 minutes.
Track 8 — D’You Know What I Mean?: People often cite the NG rethink version of this song as the better version, but I hard disagree. This is the one where I want it to be overproduced. Maybe tone the guitars down a bit, but not too much. The NG version stripped away too much. This song is supposed to have an apocalyptic feel with guitars raining down everywhere. Maybe the best song on the album. ~7 1/2 minutes
Track 9 — Setting Sun/Fade In-Out: Two ideas for this one: the studio version should’ve either been like the live versions that are just out of this world, or alternatively, it would’ve been incredible had they included a different version of Setting Sun on the album and did it like how they performed it at Budokan ‘98, complete with the fade from setting sun into Fade In-Out (not to mention the psychedelic sitar and bongos), but with Liam on vocals. Would’ve been MEGA. The studio version as it stands is quite forgettable, but the vocals are great. ~10 minutes. Relevant live version: ‘98 Budokan and ‘97 Earls Court
Track 10 — It’s Gettin’ Better Man!!: Basically, this studio version should’ve replicated the live take from Air Studios in ‘97 and as much I love the 42 “it’s getting better man’s,” this could easily have two minutes shaved off it. ~5 1/2 minutes. Relevant version: Live at Air Studios ‘97
Track 11 — All Around the World: Album closer, no reprise. As far as song structure and length, would’ve liked it to have been more like the mustique demo. As far as production, if it had the same feel and Noel guitar outro as the live versions, we’re talking about one of the best songs in their catalogue. It could’ve used a better vocal from Liam, too. He sounds hungover on this song. With those changes, it’s the hit it was meant to be and an amazing end to an amazing album. ~7 minutes. Relevant live version: Live at GMEX and Hammerstein is amazing too.
TOTAL RUNTIME ~62 minutes (9 minutes less than released album. About 59 minutes if you take out my setting sun idea).
NEW B-SIDES FOR STAY YOUNG — THE SINGLE THAT NEVER WAS: I’ve decided Stay Young should’ve been the second single after DYKWIM, and these are its B-Sides: 1. Magic Pie: Full disclosure: I love magic pie. It’s unironically one of my favorite oasis songs, especially because of the guitar solo in the second half of the song, and it’s one of my favorite vocals from Noel. It’s fine just the way it is, though I think it would’ve been much cooler if it were called “Magic High” or “Magic Ride.” “Pie” is a bit lame, I submit, but I choose to believe it’s some Beatles-Ian psychedelic imagery. Nonetheless, this would’ve been better as a B-Side. 2. The Girl in the Dirty Shirt: This song contains a lot of elements I love — it’s a Liam and Noel acoustic song, it’s got a good chorus and it is one of the few lesser produced songs on the album. I like it better as a strong B-Side than as an album track. 3. Cast No Shadow (Live at Knebworth): Cool live choice they could’ve used to throw on at the end of the single. Amazing performance from a historic gig.
CONCLUSION
This post went on longer than the actual album. For those still here, you don’t have anything better to do? I thank you for reading. This version of the album is a massive improvement over the finished product. If we had a more sparse production, say that of The La’s only album or even the recent GallagheSquire output — imagine those great riffs Noel was belting out on this tour more clear, complete with Bonehead’s driving guitar, Whitey’s smooth drums, Guigsy’s reliable bass (turned up of course) and of course Liam’s snarl, we’re talking about an album that lives up to its cover art — big, bombastic, and unstoppable.
Anyway, here’s Wonderwall I’m gonna go watch Live at the Budokan ‘98, Live at Hammerstein ‘97, Live at GMEX ‘97, Live at Oakland ‘97 —
You get the point.
Cheers.

🪞 “It's much easier to get in that it is to get out,” Emilie Autumn used to say. Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4.1 - Part 4.2
She was not wrong. Welcome back to the Asylum write-up!
In this installment, we're finally getting down to the nitty-gritty of the enmity between EA and her fans.
It's time for war. It's time for blood. It's time... for tea. 🎵

THE PRESENT DAY: “ASK ME ANYTHING (WELL, NOT QUITE)”

​

"Ask me anything" titles are catchy, and that’s why I’m using one. But, obviously, don’t ask me anything, by which I mean that, if you think I wouldn’t answer it, you’re probably right. Ask me something really good. I’d love to answer you. I’d love to have comments on these posts, in fact, so that I could answer questions there regularly and ask you things as well, but insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, or so Einstein is supposed to have said, and attempting to create yet another interactive online venue after every previous attempt has ended in heartbreak—forums, facebook groups, social media accounts—it would indeed be insanity to think that this time would be any different. So there are no comments. This too is heartbreaking in the sense that, and you may not realize this, but I desperately want to connect more completely with you—to be able to intelligently converse and share and exchange. We can do that in person, of course, because the wrong people never show up in person. Isn’t that funny… So, perhaps we’ll have to arrange that;). I’ll start you off with an example question I’d want to know if I were you (I can almost guarantee that you do not want to know this). Q. Hey EA, how do you keep your wireless bodypack transmitter secure when you are leaping about in skimpy costumes and doing frequent costume changes? Also, dye your roots. A. Fantastic question, EA, and I just dyed my roots thank you very much. ... (Deleted blog post followed by a year of radio silence, 2022 📝)

Sooo. For the past five-ish years, the vibe in the Asylum has been that of a protracted Christmas dinner where everyone is tensely moving their food around in their plate, bracing themselves for whatever will trigger the screaming match. Wondering what it's going to be this time. Weary old-timers make small talk about the food because no other topic feels safe. Every glance, every forced smile, is fraught with eons-old grudges and unspoken regrets; every nervous pleasantry sounds like a thinly-veiled accusation. Aunt Emilie always insists on hosting, but not-so-secretly hates having people over. Sooner or later, she finds a way to get all of these assholes out of her house. Most of the adult children are daydreaming about going no-contact.
Everyone ready for some dysfunctional family history?
CW for discussion of bullying, online harassment, mental illness stigma.

YE OLDEN DAYS: CUCKOOS OF A FEATHER NEST TOGETHER

In the beginning, it was beautiful.
EA had the excellent instinct to start banking on her online presence📝 long before MySpace was even a thing. She had a website, several online stores, an active LiveJournal and a ProBoards forum right from the turn of the millennium.
In 2004, she attached an official forum to her website; the earliest archive shows 74 registered users. By the time Opheliac came out in 2006, that number had grown tenfold. And it was, by most accounts, a pretty dope place to be! (I should specify that this write-up focuses on the anglophone side of the fandom: there were also thriving fan-run communities in at least German, French, and Spanish. Because EA doesn't speak any of those languages, the lucky bastards were mostly left alone.)
Forum users enjoyed interacting with some of EA's closest IRL friends and associates – and with the mistress of the house herself (user flair: PsychoFiddler), when she occasionally responded to comments under her own posts. But that wasn't even the main appeal for many. For a long time, on top of all EA-related topics, the official forum had very active “Off-Topic” subforums, with lively and friendly conversation on a variety of subjects. (There was even a “Filthy Libertines (18+)” sub for a while, which was closed due to preemptive concerns about minors.) Swear words (not slurs) were allowed and encouraged, and moderation was overall pretty loose beyond basic enforcement of civility. There was a lot of mutual support, creativity, and solid banter going around.

It wasn't just about Emilie on the forums. People could chat about almost anything with near free reign, making connections and lifelong friends. ... This community mattered SO MUCH to people. They felt included, accepted, and understood within the walls of the Asylum. People invested their time and creative energy into keeping the forums a vibrant, active community, and made sure that carried over into the real world. ... I've never seen anything like it in a fan space. I doubt I ever will again. (@Asylum_Oracle - “Fandom History” Instagram highlight 🔍📝, which contains most of the sources for this segment.)

And it did, indeed, carry over into the real world. There were numerous meet-ups – a few organized by EA, many more spontaneous. People who didn't know any other EA fans in real life, or were just excited to add new Plague Rats to their friend group, would regularly connect with other forum users from their area to meet up and hang out before EA shows. “Who else is dressing up??”
In 2008, for instance, EA held an afternoon meet-up at Lincoln Park in Chicago. 📺 The event was free to attend; it featured live acoustic music and a reading from EA's upcoming book, the intriguingly-titled Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls.
On the appointed day, EA rolled up in a fabulously tousled red wig, bedazzled white corset and steampunk-altered wedding dress. She had brought friends alongs. Sporting blue hair and a pink bustle and corset was her Chicago bestie, the main forum admin. Rocking a guitar and a top hat was EA's sound engineer, the soft-spoken wizard behind the Victoriandustrial sound, who was also a forum mod. The photographer from the original Opheliac cover art was there as well; he was formally introduced by EA and got his own round of applause.

People who would never normally be involved in an artist's fanbase were in EA's world. And not only were they known – they were respected and incredibly active with the fanbase. These people who managed an online message board were willing to engage in real-world meet-ups (with no security??) because of how tight-knit the community they had built was. People turned out to this event. People traveled to go to this event. It was a short reading of a book that hadn't been released yet, and wouldn't be for some time. Why? Because not only was it a chance to meet Emilie and listen to parts of the new book, but it was also a chance to hang out with their friends from the Asylum. ... The fandom really was a family for a lot of people. (@Asylum_Oracle)

“SERIOUSLY, GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY HOUSE.”

It all started with The End.
The End Records, that is! Quick refresher: in 2009, after three years or so with Trisol, EA split from the label over allegations that the owner was embezzling money from ticket sales. A few months later, she signed with The End Records. Understandably, EA still wanted to sell the album that had made her famous, and to which she had smartly retained the rights – which meant a brand new, “Deluxe” release of Opheliac. (Remember, from part 3? The one you could pre-order as a bundle with the book? Some projects are just cursed, I guess.)
At that point, Opheliac had been released three times already, as recently as the year before, with only slight variations in format and tracklist. (Yes, that is a theme in this story.) The End Records version would feature new cover art and a handful of new tracks, but overall, it was... you know... the same album.
(The following paragraphs are largely sourced from this excellent recap 🔍📝, which also provides potato screenshots for all quotes.)
One fateful day of August 2009, a user started a thread entitled “Opheliac US edition deluxe re-release??” in the “EA News” subforum. In the thread, some people were kind of balking at the re-do, pondering whether to buy the “new” Opheliac or sit this one out. Some expressed that after three years, they were jonesing for a new album. Others shared what B-sides or dream covers they would have liked to see included on the bonus disc. Just... fans being fans, in a fan discussion space.
And then EA jumped out from behind the curtains.

Fan: Okay. Before I start, I just want you to know that I think it's very good that EA is getting more popularity, and that she can release lots of albums, but - are 5 editions of the same album really needed? You may say now “ah, it's not the same, it has 2 bonus tracks” or whatever, but I mean: it's not new material. Now don't get me wrong. I'm happy for it, maybe I'll even buy it, but I'm just wondering if she shouldn't keep herself busy with other (maybe more important) stuff? * hides * EA: Nobody's forcing you to buy it. Thanks.

Record scratch.

Fan 1: is this Opheliac release version number 4? lol If she's recording NEW tracks, then surely they deserve to be sold by themselves, otherwise people are going to have to buy an album that they may have already bought twice (like me!). But... alas, I am a fool and adore everything this woman does... im buying it lol Fan 2: exactly – if it was just reissuing the last version of Opheliac to tap into new markets that would be fine (...) but if they start adding extra bits of material to albums people already have then the true muffins are going to feel obliged to buy new copies (...) EA: How exactly are you obliged to buy anything? Nobody is forcing you to spend a fucking penny, my dears. I suppose it would make more sense to you to simply not have my records available any more as the old label I just escaped from will no longer be distributing them? Forgive me for adding extra tracks. No obligation necessary.

...Okay, so I'm pretty sure that we can see both sides of the argument here. Fans are annoyed at the idea of spending money on barely-anything-new, because they love EA and buy every single CD she releases. EA is exasperated by fans acting like she's twisting their arm and somehow resenting the inclusion of new material, when she was just ensuring that her album would remain available for purchase and trying to keep things interesting.
But maybe we can also agree that those replies should have been screamed into a pillow rather than typed out on a keyboard.
EA was getting increasingly (and, I'll just say it: disproportionately) sarcastic and defensive in her replies. Enter poor FantineDormouse.
FantineDormouse meant well, I think. Maybe she thought, she's spiraling. Maybe she thought, friends don't let friends go down that road. Granted, FantineDormouse probably should have known better than to phrase it the way she did. Or to assume that EA perceived her as a friend.
Either way, at some point, FantineDormouse jumped in and posted the comment that finally made EA lose it. THE comment which, overnight, ended the honeymoon period of the Asylum, triggering a doomsday domino effect from which the fandom would never truly recover. Are you comfortably seated?

FantineDormouse: Uhm, Emilie, love, I don't mean to sound rude or anything... but maybe you should have a cup of tea and relax a little.

...
* sound of archduke getting shot *

EA: Excuse me? You can throw this onslaught of absolute cruel bullshit at me and those I work with in my own space that I own, and I can't say anything back? How fucking patronizing. Relax? Are you fucking kidding me? Who the fuck do you think you're talking to? FD: I'm not trying to piss you off even more, Emilie. And trust me, I have to deal with it myself, and as much as I would really love to punch the cunts I have to deal with in the face, I don't. You're pissed off, I get it. You're bipolar, which makes it 10x worse, I get that. I'm just not the person to stand around and do nothing when a fight where I'm pretty sure there will be a lot of regret is going on.

Famous last words. Literally! Immediately after EA delivered her irate closing statement – which includes one of my all-time favorite EA zingers, bolded...

EA: I cannot believe this... You just don't stop, do you? So just because I've shared the personal information with you all that I happen to be bipolar, I can't get pissed off at all of you being perfectly awful in the very space that I pay fuckloads a month to have up (has it ever occurred to you all that I pay dearly for this space you play around in?) Why not just tell me that I must be upset because it's my time of the month? Seriously, get the fuck out of my house. You are unbelievable, and your level of patronization is almost criminal. Don't make me write another book. With muffins like you, who needs enemies? Nothing I say or feel is legitimate, not ever ever ever because I'm bipolar... discredited before I begin... unbelievable...

...FantineDormouse got permabanned.
Jaws dropped. After days of infighting between white knights, detractors, and crossfire negotiators, several mod resignations, and general mayhem surrounding the ban, EA made a post entitled “In Which: I Invite You to Make a Fucking Choice.” 📝 For brevity's sake (cue laugh track), I can't reproduce it in all of its righteous splendor, but it's quite a read. It runs the gamut from fair and articulate points about how mental illness shouldn't be used to discredit someone's legitimate anger... to histrionic commands that “deserters to the cause” should “turn in their weapons” if they can't handle her way of doing things.

To those of you who appear not to understand why said posts, most especially those of the banned party, were offensive to me, I give you the option to either educate yourselves on your own time and in your own space (because please never forget that this is my space that I share with all of you at my own expense, and in which I generally give you all the freedom I would wish for myself), or to resign your posts in the Asylum Army – this is not the place for you, and I humbly suggest that you turn your attention and support towards other artists of a more placid, non-controversial, and less opinionated nature; there are more than enough of them out there, and I’m sure they all have forums of their own.

Some fans did leave. Most stuck around, whiplashed. Soon, the storm quieted down, and business as usual resumed on the forum. But something had been damaged beyond repair. The FantineDormouse fiasco had erected walls and drawn lines in the sand, both around EA and among her fans; its sad specter would haunt every Asylum crisis that spiked up forever after. “Fucking Patronizing Fucking” or “FPF” 🔍 became memetic shorthand in the fandom for overreaction and self-righteousness. 🐀
...And now you understand why, in the following years, some fans were so delicate and diplomatic in voicing their very legitimate complaints about messed-up orders, unsigned books, and puzzling lies... while unofficial platforms like Tumblr flourished with pent-up resentment and snark. 🦠

A NOTE ON HARASSMENT: “MAD GIRL, CAN YOU BELIEVE WHAT THEY'VE DONE TO YOU?”

Wouldn't they stop When you asked them to leave you alone? (“Mad Girl”, 2008 🎵)

Now, let's be clear, because it should not be minimized: EA has also been the target of genuine online harassment. Based on the simple fact that she is a woman with a public presence on the internet, I have zero doubt that EA has received (and perhaps continues to receive) more than her share of truly vile, bigoted, creepy and threatening messages – and, knowing what I know about the darker recesses of the Asylum, a terrifying amount of emotional blackmail and obsessive projection from people who hold her to punitively high standards. I'm also inclined to believe that it started way before she ever did anything that warranted any backlash. And that fucking sucks. It's repulsive and inexcusable, and the people who harass her should crawl into a hole and live among the worms.
Notwithstanding. In my decade-plus of following EA drama, the public comments on EA's own platforms (where people knew she was likely to be reading) have been, for the most part... civil and nuanced, and relatively mindful of the human? Even very confrontational comments (some clearly written from a place of anger and desire to shame) rarely resorted to outright name-calling or cruelty. When abusive or bigoted language did crop up, it was often promptly shut down by other fans as gross and uncalled for. In short: I have, with mine own two eyes, in real time, read some of the comment sections that EA described as cesspools of blind rage and odious attacks, and... I just couldn't see it.
If anything, for a long time, a lot of the angry comments directed at EA during any given controversy read more like break-up letters to an ex-best friend: harsh, curt and targeted in a way that cuts deep.... but also kind of screams how much love you still have for this person, against your better judgement.
Not that it wouldn't mess a person up to get hundred of those in a matter of hours, even if they don't individually qualify as “abusive”.
It's worth noting that prior to becoming semi-famous and regretting it, EA was also (by her own account and among other forms of abuse) a victim of intense childhood bullying. It feels like the two situations are closely connected in her mind when her focus seamlessly transitions from one to the other. 📺 I don't think that tremor in her voice is put on.
Based on her writings, I get the feeling that over the years, EA has developed a very black-and-white view of two monolithic groups of people. There's (an idealized vision of) her “real audience”, well-dressed, well-read, kind-hearted, and Asylum-savvy, who she fully trusts to “get it” – and buy it, and love it, unquestioningly, whatever “it” may be at any given time – because that is the true measure of love and loyalty. These are the people she makes art and merch for, the people she writes heart-emoji-filled newsletters to, and desperately longs to see in person again.
And then there's the lynch mob, those who really don't “get it”: the trolls, the faceless creeps, the basement-dwelling mouthbreathers, the ones who stalk her every move obsessively, waiting for any chance to spam her with vicious abuse and slander and obscenities. The latter only exist online (they are manifested into arbitrary existence by the internet itself, not by anything EA said or did), and there is zero overlap between the two sets of people. That seems to be the official narrative.

The "public eye" isn't an [enviable] place to be, and the closer I've come to it, the more horrified I've been. Because, for starters, who is "the public?" Is "the public" my audience? Hell no. My audience is special. They are not the general public. If they were the general public I would be a lot wealthier. The "public eye" means getting stalked, harassed, viscously judged, and put in danger. If I do things in the future that gain notoriety, I will do them in spite of fame, not because of it. I am out for world domination, but not fame. (Interview for The Moaning Times, 2014 📝)

In real life (well, mostly online, but I mean: on this shared plane of existence), things play out slightly differently. The Venn diagram of “true blue fans” and “people who criticize EA" and "people who know way too much about EA” is a circle. The call is 100% coming from inside the Asylum, and I think EA rationally knows that. But here's the thing: no matter how many shows and meet-and-greets you've dressed up for, how many loving and supportive comments you've left, or how many family heirlooms you once pawned to purchase a copy of the not-for-sale 2003 DJ pressing of Enchant... the instant EA feels attacked, everyone is a saboteur and a bully until proven otherwise, and suspected treason is dealt with on the spot. One strike, you're out. Unfortunately for everyone involved, her threshold for bullying seems to be “any remotely thoughtless opinion from any stranger on the internet”.
It makes for outstanding human-interest entertainment... but it also sounds an awful lot like the unhealthy patterns of a person suffering from all sorts of PTSD. 🔍 So, please bear that in mind as you read through this write-up. It's easy to make EA out to be the sole villain, a paranoid and delusional drama queen, based on her extreme reactions to things that often “weren't that bad”. Anything can, in fact, be “that bad” when you're thrown back into the very worst moments of your existence every time your brain decides that the situation is even remotely similar.
PTSD takes over your rational mind and actively distorts your perception of reality. That can be how a person ends up impulse-reacting to “a few people expressing an unfavorable opinion” as if the entire internet had just ganged up on them with knives. Which makes their audience feel unjustly accused, which makes them hostile, which gives the person actual good reason to feel attacked... and so the cycle of hurt continues.

You know the games I play And the words I say When I want my own way You know the lies I tell When you've gone through hell And I say I can't stay You know how hard it can be To keep believing in me When everything and everyone Becomes my enemy, and when There's nothing more you can do I'm gonna blame it on you – It's not the way I wanna be I only hope that in the end You will see: It's the Opheliac in me... (“Opheliac”, 2006 🎵)

And YES, it is extremely regrettable to have this as a trigger, when you're a public figure and you're bound to receive more negative feedback than the average citizen. “It's what she signed up for”, “it comes with the territory” and all that jazz. I really don't think EA was unaware of that fact when she decided to become a musician, share her personal life, and form an intense parasocial bond with her audience. But maybe she underestimated how hard it would be to process and recover from.
Just because you expect something unpleasant to happen, doesn't mean your psyche will be ready to handle it when it does – or that you'll pick the best and most effective strategy to deal with it.

A MADHOUSE UNDER MARTIAL LAW: MARCHING INTO THE FORUM WARS

There are two sides to every story... except for this one! (“If I Burn”, 2012 🎵)

You may have noted the military imagery in EA's “Make a Fucking Choice” response post – “resign your post in the Asylum Army”! What do psychiatry and the military have in common? They're both institutions of top-down social control. 🔍 EA's mixed metaphor may be a bit clunky, but it did foreshadow the evolution of the Asylum – in terms of aesthetics and power dynamics – in the years that followed the FantineDormouse incident and the release of The Book.
EA's next big release after the Asylum book came in 2012. It was a new album, an outline of the soon-to-be Asylum musical, called Fight Like a Girl (FLAG for short). As the name suggests, the main mood was bellicose. Incidentally, in the interim years, EA's communication style generally became noticeably more combative, incendiary, and (within her own spaces) controlling.📝 You remember those quirky word filters on the forum, that would change “fan” to “muffin” and “bra” to “teacup holder”? They kind of took on a Nineteen-Eighty-Four-burlesque flavor when you realized that one filter automatically changed “Fischkopf” to “Liddell” - and that circumventing the rule to address her totally real last name would get you banned, as would any discussion of her family. (“Wikipedia, random internet sites and heresay are not credible sources.” - Mod reminder of forum rules, 2010.)
Also, you try sustaining a serious, grown-up conversation among concerned fans about how Emilie Autumn should “take ratsponsibility for her mistakes out of ratspect for her muffins”. Thus, the official Asylum forum kept a tight grip on overt criticism of EA's claims and actions.

The Emilie Autumn forum is a dystopian hell. Truth be told, when I decided to leave you could not do anything but gush about Emilie. Otherwise all of her extremist arse kissing fans will be down your throat, ripping you apart in seconds, if you so much as questioned her behaviour. So much for freedom of opinion, let alone the idea of creating a harmonious community for ‘outcasts’. Hahaha. (2014 🐀)

The word filter thing really wasn't a big deal – I'm just pointing it out as one goofy expression of EA's need to control the narrative and rhetoric, which became especially noticeable in those post-book, pre-FLAG years. By that point, EA's fuse had been shortened by near on half a decade of non-stop touring / recording / writing / promoting / adjusting to the pressure and demands of an ever-growing fanbase, while also dealing with a horrorshow of personal turmoil and health issues behind the scenes. In other words: she was done taking any shit, in any form, or humoring anyone's ridiculous feedback regarding anything.
To be fair, it was never her forte to begin with. Will it come as a shock if I tell you that EA doesn't have the greatest track record for successful collaborative work? Let's do a quick-cut montage!
EA's very first corporate sponsor was her mother's “Enchant Clothing & Costume” online store 🔍; she went on to claim that her mother was dead. She sessioned for Billy Corgan, that went super well. 🎵 She liked Courtney Love for a minute, but that didn't work out because she felt that Courtney only valued her for her pee. 📝 (It probably didn't help that in early 2006, while EA was recording her post-break-up-tell-all album about Corgan, C-Love was recording her post-rehab-redemption album with Corgan. 🔍 Either way, EA didn't seem to like Courtney anymore after that. Courtney likes her, though! 📝) The one artist EA has ever approached for a duet (and by approached, I mean she recorded a demo and threw the CD on stage when he played Chicago in 2004) was, of all people, Morrissey. That never came to pass, thank mercy 🔍 – this fandom has suffered enough. In 2005, EA recorded some haunting vocals and violins for a potential collab with the frontman of Attrition. When, three years later, they were used on one track 🎵 of Attrition's All Mine Enemies Whisper, she alleged 📝 that the recordings had been obtained from her under the false pretense of a different project, then hideously altered to sound “out of tune”, and used without her permission. She enlisted her fans to boycott the album and the band, and threatened legal action. Meanwhile, on LiveJournal and Attrition's message boards, band associates were appalled: according to them, EA had been aware of the project's nature from the start... and had been completely unreachable, even through her label, during the months of its development. (Besides, Attrition is a semi-obscure English darkwave band from the 80s, whose micro-distributed albums don't even have their own Wikipedia pages... so I wonder what EA was hoping to get out of that theoretical lawsuit. These people own nothing but vintage gain pedals!) The song “Cold Hard Cash” 🎤 by Angelspit (who contributed a remix to one of her EPs in 2008) may or may not be an EA diss track. 🐀 Back when indie jewelry brand RockLove (which now has licensing deals with Disney, Marvel, and DC) was still someone's bedroom project, their first drop was an EA-inspired collection 🔍, which appears in many early Opheliac photoshoots. The partnership was terminated on bad terms, for unclear reasons; the RockLove owner shared in a statement that EA had “drunk the cool-aid” of Trisol Guy's shady business practices, and that the two of them had been spamming her with “crazed angry message[s]” for days.
Why am I talking about this? Because it was precisely one such ill-fated business partnership that triggered the Great Asylum Secession.
One fine day of spring 2010, the owner of vegan make-up brand Aromaleigh popped onto the Asylum forum to announce that they were cutting ties with EA, with damning receipts of copy-pasted emails (lost to time). Basically, the brand had been sponsoring her for half a decade, and while Aromaleigh had been actively promoting her music and tours, EA hadn't exactly been returning the favor. (Indeed, the extent of EA's sponcon seemed to have been a banner link to their website on her front page, and a single “random drunken endorsement” LiveJournal post that kind of reads like satire📝, from 2005.)
EA responded by banning the owner's account, deleting the thread, and posting this flippant statement a few days later:

Dearest Plague Rats, To be honest, I have no idea of what the hell happened with Aromaleigh, and I don't care to find out – the whole drama is a complete mystery to me, as I've been away for months touring and have not been in contact with anyone. All I know is that I've been promoting the company for ages and have not asked them for anything in years. (...) Please focus on more interesting things. I am. (“Save the Drama...” forum post, March 2010)

Posts questioning her good faith in the conflict were deleted from the forum. Shortly thereafter, citing how prolific and labor-intensive the Asylum forum had grown, EA shut down all non-EA related subforums – which, among many other topics, included a pretty active thread about Aromaleigh products.
So one Plague Rat decided to create a separate, members-only forum 📝, where users could recreate some of the now-defunct off-topic threads... and also freely voice their critical opinions of EA's behavior without fear of backlash from mods or rabid stans. Thus, “The Reform” was born. (Reform [n]: amendment of what is defective, vicious, corrupt, or depraved.)
For a few weeks, the two-state solution seemed to work fine. And then word spread among forum mods and other diehard fans that there was this horrid other forum, where obsessive haters gathered to spew disgusting lies and vitriol about EA... and soon enough, it was bedlam in the Asylum.
Any explicit mention of the Reform was forbidden on the Asylum forum. Suspicion of participation in the Reform would get you banned. The party line was that The Reform was the enemy 🐀 – even though a number of people were active on both forums, because they liked freedom of expression almost as much as they liked EA. Double agents would lurk on the forum and report back with snark material; sycophants would infiltrate the Reform to identify traitors – much to the amusement of the “haters”, who mocked them and their ilk for “licking EA's pink sparkly boots”. There was no containing the seething, or the sass, among Asylum ranks.
Pretty soon, the insubordination spread to Tumblr. There was the “Ask the Reform” Q&A blog, where questioning fans could interact with “Rebel Rats”, get more details on past drama, and make up their own minds about the people EA called bullies.
And then, there were the “confession blogs”, which published anonymous submissions about EA, positive, negative or neutral, with little censorship. Finally, you didn't even have to pick a throw-away username on a private forum to voice your hottest / strangest / most controversial EA takes. Fans could vent, rant, lament, wonder, shitpost to their heart's content, anonymously. Obviously, given the context of frustration and censorship in the fandom, a lot of the first waves of confessions were EXTREMELY negative.
EA's acolyte Veronica managed to get the first one shut down. If memory serves, she misunderstood the confession blog format, and may have believed that all the posts on “Emilie Autumn Confessions” came from one or a small group of individuals. She was genuinely devastated, and wrote the blog admin to let them know that they were a terrible person who said terrible things. The admin was mortified, apologized profusely and deleted the blog of their own initiative. (Which goes to show that the concept did not come from cruel and malicious anti-fans, as detractors often claimed.)
But a new blog sprung up almost immediately, with a different mod team, and did not surrender. And much like in EA's own book, once the Plague Rats found out that they possessed the gift of speech... well, they really took to it.
Established in 2011 and passed on through generation after generation of mod teams to the present day, Wayward Victorian Confessions would turn out to be the longest-lived institution in the EA fandom. For over a decade now, through all the bleakest nights and dankest debacles of the Asylum, and despite its initial reputation as a troll den, WVC has acted as a kind of neutral ground and vox populi for the active fanbase and anti-fanbase. (The last nominally-active EA fansite to date, She Fights Like a Girl, is actually an offshoot of WVC: one of the old admins created it as a database to answer “frequently asked questions” about EA.)
Wayward Victorian Confessions has now outlived every other EA platform, official and unofficial. Were it not for the continued existence of the “troll den”, what little fan community survives in 2024 would be non-existent, plain and simple. To quote from late 20th century Canadian philosophy: isn't it ironic?

I feel like [WVC] is the only place I feel any of that old Asylum community kind of feeling I felt before EA got so focused on the book. It sucks that it’s so full of unhappiness, and I wish she hadn’t poisoned the sanctuary she claimed to have built. It’s just kind of fallen apart, like a crumbling building. (🐀 2016)

CONTINUED IN COMMENTS

Playing By Ear
Bloodhound Saga
Wakeup Super
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Memory transcription subject: Wes Gidbrook, Human Refugee
Date [standardized human time]: November 4th, 2136
I just had to phrase it that way didn't I?
“I'll be back here soon as long as nothing crazy happens!”
I really went and set myself up for that one. How foolish of me to think that the insanity would end with the extermination fleet, or maybe with the people-eating crocs actually coming to our rescue. No, of course it couldn't end there. Going to another planet clearly wasn't enough to get away from the lunacy.
Actually, the news probably didn’t even register back on Earth. It’s only really world-shattering for everyone here. Guess I dodged into it.
It wasn’t really that shocking that some of these herbivorous species used to be omnivores. Hell, how many ‘prey’ species on Earth would chomp at a meaty morsel if they had the chance? The real irony was that the Krakotl were a part of that group, the very birds that led the extermination efforts because they thought we were ‘dangerous predators’. That wasn’t to mention the Gojid that jumped at the chance first.
And now there’s a hole in the wall of what was my apartment because aliens won’t leave us the hell alone.
Opinions around the shelter were mixed. Some folks couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity of it, seeing the reveal like a cosmic joke. Others just seemed to just get more angry, knowing how pointless all of that death was.
The air about the place still reeked of sorrow and frustration. Even the laughter was only there to cope with the pain.
The worst part was that I couldn’t leave to escape it. We were advised to stay in the shelter until initial reactions to the broadcast blew over. The public was in a hell of an uproar, and adding Humans to the mix could be dangerous for both us and them. Tension was high enough as it was.
Of course, that policy seemed a bit inconsistent since Brad apparently got to hop across Venlil Prime however he wanted, but, then again, he was working on infrastructure. It was kind of important that he could actually do his job.
Maybe I should've gone into that field. Probably would've paid better than scrounging up music gigs.
I supposed that was one perk to being at the shelter. All the meals were paid for. They were all vegan, but hey, beggars can't be choosers.
Despite the freely provided rations, the atmosphere still left a lot to be desired. Luckily, a few days (or…paws) after the broadcast, the restrictions were finally lifted, and I was eager to get out of the bleak shelter and back to White Hill.
And so, that was my plan for the paw. Learning from last time, I made sure to send a message in the group chat announcing that I was on my way, though I was yet to hear back from anyone since I did.
It doesn’t matter. Even if they’re all busy, I’d still rather meander around campus alone than stew in the doom and gloom here.
The area around the shelter was devoid of locals as usual. I checked out at the front gate and started the walk to the train station, face hidden behind a mask. But, as I continued onward, I noticed that the quietness extended a lot further than it did before. Even as I approached the station, there weren’t nearly as many people as there were on the first trip to White Hill.
It’s…kinda eerie…
I assumed this was all still fallout from the broadcast. Within the shelter walls, the restrictions seemed like a bit of an overreaction, but I was beginning to realize just how much the public was affected. If they were still hunkered down this many paws after the fact, what were those first hours like?
I hope nobody got hurt. Those stampedes can apparently get pretty nasty.
Even when I entered the station, there was hardly anyone in the vicinity. Unlike my last trip, the wide berth around me felt natural. Most of the seats on the train were left unfilled as I boarded.
There was one Gojid in my car. They sat in the corner and kept their head down, trying to avoid interaction.
Not many people came aboard on the way to White Hill, and I slowly began to worry if maybe the atmosphere around the campus wasn't actually any better than the shelter. Everything felt so uneasy, like the few folks that left their homes regretted the fact they had.
I kept the volume on my earbuds low. Even with the subtle noises of the train, I was worried my music might be audible to the few others in the car. I caught enough suspicion without being judged for my ‘predatory’ song choices too. That, and I wanted to be a little more aware of my surroundings. It was hard to shake the sense of dread when everything was so…stagnant.
The White Hill campus wasn’t very active either. Classes weren’t starting up again for another couple of ‘paws’ according to the others in the group chat. The place was still in sleep mode by the looks of things. Still, there were signs of life here and there. It looked a bit more lively than the town around the shelter, so my outlook was a little more optimistic.
The people here seem to adjust quickly, first to Humans and now to the omnivore revelation. Looks like they’re already bouncing back.
My phone suddenly chimed, a welcome sound given the imposing silence. I fished the device from my pocket and unlocked it to reveal a message from Grace.

Grace: You should swing by Haeli’s place at the edge of campus! She’s cool with it, and it’d be nice to see another familiar human face.

Just below was an address which I quickly searched up directions for. It was on the opposite side of campus, but I actually welcomed the lengthy walk. After all, I was really just trying to spend as little time at the shelter as possible. I actually took a more roundabout way than I needed to, just to check out some of the areas I hadn’t seen yet. This time, I didn’t run into Kila or anyone else, so I could take whichever path I chose.
Of course, I didn’t want to keep Grace waiting too long, so once I saw what I wanted to, I picked up my pace a little bit.
[Fast-forward transcription: 20 minutes]
Haeli’s home wasn’t all that large. It was easy to see why she only offered to house her exchange partner. At least…I was pretty sure it was Haeli’s place. I had to translate the Venscript numbers on the side, so I hoped the references the UN gave us were correct.
Probably wouldn’t be good if I had the wrong house. An unsuspecting Venlil might die of fright if they opened the door and saw me.
Once I felt confident enough that I didn’t have the wrong house, I went ahead and knocked on the door. It didn’t take long for it to crack open, Grace’s unmasked face poking out from behind it. She gave a toothless smile as she saw me, and she motioned for me to enter.
“Good paw, Wes,” she greeted. “Please, come in.”
“How’d you know it was me?” I joked. “I’m wearing this mask to hide my ‘predatory visage’.”
That garnered a chuckle from the Brit.
“Ah, yes, how silly of me to assume your identity. It could have been any Human. There’s so many of us on Venlil Prime.”
“You jest, but there’s certainly a hell of a lot more than there was. Besides, isn’t White Hill a hotspot?”
“Maybe in the Human housing district,” she replied. “Most of those folks seem quite content to play it safe. They only really go where they need to. I suppose you’re the anomaly.”
I removed my mask as soon as the door closed, and we both took a seat on the couch in the quaint little living room. It seemed just a tad short for our builds, but not too much.
“That’s implying that I didn’t need to get out of that shelter,” I shook my head. “At least you seem to be keeping your chin up. The shelter just feels like it’s drowning in depression. I can’t really blame everyone, but being there is really taking a toll.”
“I’d imagine,” Grace sighed. “If not for Haeli, I’d probably still be hanging my head too. I’m still feeling the weight of it all; probably will for a good while. But she’s done her best to support me. I owe her the world.”
“Where is Haeli right now?” I scanned the room. “With how quiet campus is, I figured she’d be here.”
“Ah, she is,” Grace replied. “Right now she’s in her room recording a quick mini-lecture to post online. Just trying to make up for lost class time. She doesn’t particularly like teaching that way, but desperate times and such.”
I nodded and leaned back into the Ven-sized couch.
“You’ve been teaching lately too, right?”
“Indeed. To be honest, I’d never given piano lessons up until arriving here, but I needed some type of task to keep myself busy, something to cope with…everything. I’ve actually been enjoying it a lot! I kind of wish I’d taken a swing at it sooner, but better late than never I suppose.”
“Whatever keeps you moving. I’m still stuck on the ‘stewing in the darkness’ phase. Kila was able to hook me up with an amp for my bass, but it’s not like I really have much to do with it. Hard to lead a performance with just a bass.”
“Any other musicians over there to jam with?”
“Not that I’ve seen.”
Grace turned her eyes up in contemplation.
“Could try to get some little Venlil students to teach. Worked out for me.”
“Yeah, maybe…” I scratched the back of my head. “I think I’d prefer to just play with a band again, though. Besides, I don’t think the bass is going to draw a lot of prospective students. It’s not exactly the most stand-out instrument.”
“What if you taught the regular six-string?”
“For one thing, I’m pretty rusty with it. For another, I don’t even have one with me. Kila could probably make me one, but…I don’t know. In the past, when I gave lessons, it was usually because I was strapped for cash. Didn’t really leave a good taste in my mouth.”
“I hear you. Honestly, playing in a band might not be as far-fetched as you think. There’s so many students taking inspiration from Human music lately. I mean, I’ve stayed quite busy teaching the piano.”
“Bonti was learning the guitar from Janet, wasn’t he?” I recalled him sending a message about it. “Maybe I could convince him to join me for some jams.”
“Perhaps. I think his coursework is quite extensive, but he is rather ambitious.”
“I don’t suppose you’d like to join as well.”
Grace shook her head.
“No. I’m enjoying my new teaching endeavors, and they keep me plenty busy. You might be able to find some capable locals though. Actually, Lanyd has been a student of mine, so you might want to ask her. She’s a very fast learner. Her rate of improvement is unlike any I’ve ever seen before.”
“Really? I never saw her mention anything in the group chat.”
“Well…Lanyd rarely posts in the chat at all, so…”
That was true. The soft-spoken little Venlil wasn’t exactly much for conversation. At least, she wasn’t until someone prompted her to speak, usually Bonti.
“I suppose I could try to get her involved, though I’m not sure if she’s really built for that kind of casual group. She just seems so…formal?”
“Don’t underestimate her,” Grace warned. “She already underestimates herself, and, even then, she progresses so quickly. I assure you, Lanyd can be very adaptable.”
“I’ll make sure to talk to her when I get a chance.”
“That chance might come quite soon,” Haeli’s voice caught me a little off guard. As I whipped my head around in surprise, she flinched at the sudden motion.
“Sorry…I wasn’t thinking,” I quickly turned away. “Looking directly at people is like rule number one on the UN’s list of things not to do.”
“No…it’s fine,” she assured me. “I should really be over it by now. I’m living with a human for Stars’ sake. Grace, I fear that you’ve policed your habits too much. You shouldn’t have to go so easy on me.”
“I’m hardly going to try and make you uncomfortable in your own home, love,” Grace chuckled lightly. “You needn't overcome such deep-rooted fears so quickly. Now, what was that you were saying about Lanyd?”
“Ah, yes,” Haeli straightened herself. “Lanyd agreed to play in our new jazz lounge a couple paws from now. We’re hoping it might breathe a little life back into campus as classes resume.”
“Sounds like a good time,” I replied. “I don’t suppose you need a bass player as well?”
“I’m afraid not, Wes,” Haeli flicked her ears in a motion I assumed meant ‘no’. “I actually already have a student lined up for the performance. Though, if we end up with a gap to fill, you’ll be the first one I call.”
“So there is someone with a love for the low end around here. I’d like to see what this mystery bassist can do, so I’ll drop by for sure. You also said it’ll be a good opportunity to talk to Lanyd?”
“Indeed, though I’m a little wary of you stealing my musicians away! It wasn't easy to convince her to join!
“Oh…uh…”
“I'm just kidding!” she swayed her tail. “Personally, I think Lanyd would do well to gain some more practical experience. That's why I asked her to play. She’s so incredibly skilled, but still so green. It would be great if she joined you, though I’m not sure how easy it will be to recruit her. Lanyd's own doubts seem to be her worst enemy.”
“I got the same impression from the little I've spoken to her,” I agreed. “Still, I’ll see what I can do.”
Grace turned her attention to me.
“I’m a little surprised that you’re trying to form a group here. I assumed you’d want to be back to Earth as soon as possible, regardless of what happened to your apartment. Is there no one else back home to house you?”
“I could probably go back,” I admitted. “But, after everything, all my friends and family are already struggling through their own problems. I’d hate to impose on anyone when there's shelter already being provided here.”
“Fair enough,” she shrugged. “To be honest, I think there’s a lot of opportunities around here anyway. The locals are getting more curious about us, and it’s opening up new avenues for skills that we take for granted back on Earth.”
“Like your piano lessons?”
“Precisely. I agree that you shouldn’t be too eager to leave. It might be a little chancey with exterminators, fearful citizens, and such, but I think it might just be worth the risk.”
I suppose that makes sense. Kila's club has taken off as well. Human culture might take the area, or even the planet, by storm just by virtue of being new and exciting.
“Speaking of opportunities, how have your lessons actually been going?” I queried. “It sounds like you've been really successful.”
“It can be trying at times,” Grace sighed. “But it's very rewarding.”
She continued to recount her teaching experience as Haeli got us some tea. It was nice to have a more optimistic conversation after being stuck in the hell that was the shelter. Despite everything and everyone that Grace lost in the bombing, she was making the most of the opportunities in front of her.
I need to do the same thing. If I'm going to put a band together here on Venlil Prime, I need to do things right. Best get started right away. I can ask Bonti to be our guitarist, and Lanyd to be our keyboardist. Hopefully they agree, but I'll still need a drummer even then. Where's Mitch when you need him?
Admittedly, I fell in and out of attention as Grace and Haeli spoke. In my mind, I was churning through prospective options.
I'll just have to keep my eyes peeled. That’s all I can do…
-
Memory transcription subject: Linev, Venlil General Studies Student (First Term) White Hill University
Date [standardized human time]: November 4th, 2136
The knock on my door caught me off guard. Was it Indali? Most of the places around campus were only just opening up again. Certainly, she wasn’t about to drag me around to clubs already. Maybe it was Mezil?
The easiest way to solve the mystery was to open the door, so that’s what I did. To my surprise, it was neither Indali nor Mezil. Rather, it was Kila pushing a big box on a dolly.
“Kila?” I tilted my ears in confusion.
“Hey, Linev!” she beeped. “Say, you’re not busy are you? I should have sent you a message before I came here, but I got a bit ahead of myself.”
“I’m not busy, but…why are you here? How did you even know this is my room?”
She was pushing the dolly into my room before she bothered answering.
“Mezil told me where your room was. It’s a good thing you’re not busy. I really wanted to set this up in person.”
“Mezil’s just…giving away my room number?”
“Relax! He only told me, and I’m only going to pester you this once. I take it you already know what’s in this box.”
“I’m surprised you finished it so quickly,” I closed the door behind me as she shimmied the dolly out from under the package. “Given some of the other instrument lead times, I thought this would take longer.”
“Well, I kinda expedited it just a little,” Kila replied as she began to open the box. “We were already developing some sensors for another device, and the stars just aligned for it. I might’ve let you skip in line a bit, but what’s the point of running the club if I can’t move my friends forward in the queue?”
She gradually started unpacking bits of metal tubing, drum pads, and faux cymbals.
“I could’ve just come and picked it up, you know,” I sighed.
“Yes, but I wanted to make sure it was put together properly. That, and I want to see what a real percussionist can do with it.”
“I feel like Mezil has talked my skills up more than they deserve.”
“It doesn’t matter. Just come over here and I’ll show you how to assemble it.”
She walked me through each step of the drum kit’s construction, showing me how to fix the stands and where each connection needed to be made. Being electronic, it was a lot less bulky than a regular kit. It would fit better in my not-so-spacious dorm room that way, and it would also be easier to transport if and when I needed to.
“It’ll need to be connected to an app on your pad to actually function,” Kila informed me. “All each drum does is send signals that say how hard it’s been hit. The sound comes from a virtual instrument. Luckily, I already had some of the comp sci folks porting over keyboard sounds, so getting drum sounds was pretty easy. The app they made is still fairly new, but I think they’ve crunched most of the bugs already. If it starts freaking out, call them, not me!”
“Sounds good,” I replied as we finished the last bits of setup. “So, I suppose it’s ready for a test run.”
“Go for it,” she encouraged. “Let’s see if it holds up for a real musician.”
I sat myself down at the kit with a stick in each paw. I wasn’t sure if there was any particular grip Humans typically used, but I just went with what I was familiar with. The first test was a simple one. Drums needed to be hit, and to get more volume, I needed more force.
BOOMWHACKTHWACK
One by one, I hit each piece of the kit as hard as I could.
“STARS, LINEV!” Kila recoiled in shock. “Isn’t that a bit excessive?!”
“Very excessive,” I answered. “But it still held together. You really do make quality stuff, Kila.”
“Of course I do! That’s the whole point!”
Reigning in my intensity, I tapped out some light rhythms, causing sound to emanate from the virtual instrument on my pad. To get real volume, I’d need to feed that output through a speaker, but this was fine for testing.
I hit each drum with differing intensity, making sure the volume matched up. Gradually, I got a feel for the sticks and the foot pedal, and I began to delve into some more complex rhythms, weaving between the beats as tightly as I could. I put polyrhythms within polyrhythms, and the device proved itself responsive through each and every block.
Tight…
“Is it up to your standards?” Kila asked with an expectant sway of her tail.
I looked over the kit, feeling the comfortable weight of the sticks in my paws.
“Hell yeah.”
-
First Prev Next

I'm at a loss, let me explain:
I’ve had someone peeking at me for most of my life, he kind of reminds me of that poem by William Hughes Mearns. It goes:
Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there!
He wasn’t there again today,
Oh how I wish he’d go away!
That’s only the first of three verses, but it’s a short poem.
The first time I saw Mr. Peeks, I was a child and that’s when I named him. You can’t really hold it against a 9-year-old when he’s being unoriginal. The name stuck, and his name is Mr. Peeks.
I call him Mr. Peeks because he’s never told me his name. Mr. Peeks doesn’t speak, he only looks at me. That shouldn’t be a surprise.
I’ve never seen the bottom half of Mr. Peeks’s head, only the top of his nose, his brow, and his eyes. I don’t like his eyes.
I want to say that Mr. Peeks is a man, but I don’t know if he is or not. I refer to him as a he, because he seems like a man, but his skin is the wrong color, and so are his eyes. If he is a man, he must be a very old man, because his forehead is creased with deep wrinkles. When I look at his head, I’m always reminded of a potato which has been left out for too long and is starting to sprout and rot.
I’m intentionally avoiding describing his eyes because I don’t like them. But I want to tell you about Mr. Peeks, and that’s the most important part. Mr. Peeks is just a pair of eyes, with a head like an afterthought.
His eyes are dry like chalky marbles rimmed with. Most people take it for granted that eyes are wet and shiny, but when you see dry eyes, the difference is immediately noticeable. You’d think that because his eyes are dry, they would seem dead and flat. They don’t. His eyes are incredibly alive and intelligent… and hateful.
Mr. Peeks hates me, and he’s always hated me. I can see it in his stare. His stare is wide and glaring with deep, sagging wrinkles. His eyes make him look sick or like he’s suffering because they’re so jaundiced, run through with purplish capillaries, and rimmed with irritated pink skin.
I think the skin around his eyes is probably pink like that because his eyes hurt. That probably explains why his eyes are so dry, too, because he never blinks. I’ve known Mr. Peeks for twenty-eight years, and he hasn’t blinked once.
I don’t think that Mr. Peek is here with me, at least not all the way, because he peeks from behind things that are too small for him to hide behind. The first time that I saw him I was in the shower, and he was peeking at me over the curtain. I remember feeling cold, despite being sprayed by water so hot that my skin was turning lobster-red. When I looked up, there he was. He was peeking over the shower curtain. He was just the desiccated top of a head, and wide yellow eyes like terrible saucers.
I was too scared to scream for help, and the sheer weirdness of him piqued a morbid curiosity. He was peeking over the top of the curtain rod, which was maybe an inch wide, and I could see the bottom of the curtain rod because our shower rings were big. I couldn’t see the bottom half of his face at all. At nine, I reasoned that the bottom half of his face must have been somewhere else, along with the rest of his body.
I was glad that the bottom half was somewhere else because I could tell by his eyes that Mr. Peeks would really like to hurt me. His stare was so wide and intense that his eyelids were trembling. It gave his stare and unpleasant vibrating quality that made his eyes look like they were buzzing at me.
If you keep staring at Mr. Peeks he’ll stare right back, and he won’t ever go away unless you look away or run and hide. I ran out of the shower, and when I looked behind me there was nothing on the outside of the shower curtain.
After that, I would see Mr. Peeks every now and then. Sometimes he peeked from outside, but mostly Mr. Peeks likes to be inside with me. I also know that Mr. Peeks doesn’t like the sunlight, because if he comes out in the daylight, he’s careful to never let it fall directly on him. I’ll bet that the sun hurts him, that would make sense to me.
I won’t catalogue every time that I saw Mr. Peeks because that wouldn’t be worth reading (he showed up hundreds of times) and because most of the time it wasn’t any different. I would be doing something then I’d feel cold and numb. Whenever I got that feeling, I knew he’d be somewhere in the room with me… well, as in as he could seem to get. I’d look around frantically for him, because I didn’t like it when he was too close to me. Sometimes he’ll show up inches from my face, and I really don’t like that. When he’s that close I can smell him, and he smells like old dust and cobwebs; The way a tool shed might if left abandoned for years.
Most of time, though, he’s a couple feet away or across the room. I think he likes to peek from impossible places to show off. I think he wants me to know that he’s something impossible and strange. He likes to scare me. I’ll see him peeking from behind a milk carton on the counter, or out of the sink; One time I saw him peeking from inside my crockpot. Sometimes I’ve caught him peeking out of cabinets or through small holes, but not usually. He doesn’t like me to miss him; It makes him angry.
He’s been with me for years, he’ll show up with his silent glare and then disappear after I blink him away. I’ll confirm where he is and then go back to what I’m doing and ignore him. I think this makes him angrier, but after so many months and years I’ve started to get used to him. I got complacent with him.
Once I grew up and hit my teenage years, I was even less affected by it. I toyed with the idea that I might be insane for a while, but then I flicked a rock at Mr. Peeks and it bounced off his forehead. He didn’t move at all, but his irises faded from deep ultramarine to a blue so pale that they were almost white. I could feel his rage boiling out of him from his hiding place and I decided to never push my luck like that again.
I graduated high school, then college, then I joined the military. None of that is important, so I won’t go into it, but Mr. Peeks was there the entire time. By the time I was in my mid-thirties Mr. Peeks had become my quiet companion. I never liked Mr. Peeks, in fact I hate him. I just got used to him. Hell, he was there on my wedding day peeking from behind the coleslaw.
Now I’m in my mid-thirties and I’ve had a son, and now things are starting to change.
Mr. Peeks was peeking over Atticus’s bassinet on the night he was born, and that was the first time that it was different. His hateful eyes ignored me completely, he was looking at my son. His eyes were wide and feverish, and his pale pupils were dilated like an addict’s. I looked away, and looked back, and he was still there. This time, he was looking at me again, the same hateful gaze I’d come to know so well. When I was finally able to blink, he was gone.
It didn’t get better when we took Atticus home. Mr. Peeks, who I would normally see about once a month, started to show up more frequently, and only when I was with Atticus. One time, he hung around for almost an hour and no matter how often I blinked or looked away he would be there. I’ve taken to leaving all the lights on in my house all the time, prompting my wife to ask what the Hell is wrong with me, because the lights make it harder for the baby to sleep. I don’t want to let her know that I’m trying to do it to protect him.
Mr. Peeks is even outside now. I’ve started taking Atticus outside as often as possible so that we can both stay safe in the sun. It’s not working. I see Mr. Peeks behind stone walls and in tree branches. After decades of Mr. Peeks, I had convinced myself that he was benign. Now, I know that’s not the case.
I found Mr. Peeks behind Atticus’s crib, and although I could still only see the top of his head, his cheeks and his eyes were upturned; I knew that Mr. Peeks was smiling. It wasn’t a kind smile. Nothing about Mr. Peeks is kind or warm.
Over the months, Atticus has been growing more and more aware. He looks around and coos and laughs. He’s a happy baby! When he cries, he’s quick and to the point; He lets me know he needs something and once he gets it he settles right down. One time, though, I heard him absolutely screaming. He was wailing like he was in pain, and I tore into his bedroom, sure that I would find him tangled up in his blankets or choking on his milk, but it was Mr. Peeks. Atticus was staring, wild-eyed into Mr. Peeks’ dusty eyes with a look of horror cracking his soft features. I cursed and swore; I told Mr. Peeks to go away. He did, but not before I saw his cheeks pull up again into a hyena’s grin.
If I ever had doubts as to whether Mr. Peeks is real, those are gone. I’ve lost any hope that he might be a brain tumor or the manifestation of childhood trauma or some other nonsense. Mr. Peeks is real, and he’s trying to come through. Every day he’s pushing at the membrane between his world and ours… I don’t know where Mr. Peeks comes from, but I bet it’s somewhere cold and dark. I bet he wanders there, looking for windows to peer in at my family. I bet he’s looking for a door.
Or maybe he’s already found one. I can see him now, on the other side, squeezing himself through like an octopus one tentacle at a time.
My wife has started to complain that the house always feels cold, and she’s asked me to locate the source of the odd odor that she’s always smelling. She says it smells like musty old books in our house, and she’s right. I tell her that it’s probably a dead rat in our wall, or some old piece of trash we neglected through the years. One night, she even talked to me about a nightmare where she saw a man with ‘wild, staring eyes looking at Atticus from behind the dresser.”
Last night was the worst.
I was dozing in my bed, not sleeping. I never really sleep anymore. I can’t when there’s something sniffing around my house, poking, and prodding, trying to get in. I’m supposed to keep my house safe, and I’m failing utterly. Atticus started to wail in a pitch I’d only heard once before. I tore into the nursery to find Atticus alone and the room so frigid that frost was creeping over the window.
I sprinted to my son’s side, and he wasn’t alone.
We keep Atticus in a little pillow that hugs him on all sides and keeps him from rolling over. It was a good idea, and it makes him feel safe. Mr. Peeks was leering from underneath, inches from my son’s face. His yellowed eyes were pulled open so wide that they were round and bugging like the eyes of a deep-sea fish. His irises trembled in their sockets, and I could see tears streaming down Mr. Peeks’ face.
Then, slowly, horribly… a long finger reached from under Atticus’s pillow and slowly caressed his face. The resulting scream pierced me like a needle, and I had Atticus in my arms in less than a second. He had a terrible, dark scratch on his face.
When I looked back, Mr. Peeks was gone again.
How much more of him will I see? What does he want with my son? It seems like only a matter of time before Mr. Peeks can come through completely. I’m lost. I’m completely hopeless. I just want to protect my son, and I have no idea what to do.
Mr. Peeks is here again today.
Oh, how I wish he’d go away.

I'm at a loss, let me explain:
I’ve had someone peeking at me for most of my life, he kind of reminds me of that poem by William Hughes Mearns. It goes:
Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there!
He wasn’t there again today,
Oh how I wish he’d go away!
That’s only the first of three verses, but it’s a short poem.
The first time I saw Mr. Peeks, I was a child and that’s when I named him. You can’t really hold it against a 9-year-old when he’s being unoriginal. The name stuck, and his name is Mr. Peeks.
I call him Mr. Peeks because he’s never told me his name. Mr. Peeks doesn’t speak, he only looks at me. That shouldn’t be a surprise.
I’ve never seen the bottom half of Mr. Peeks’s head, only the top of his nose, his brow, and his eyes. I don’t like his eyes.
I want to say that Mr. Peeks is a man, but I don’t know if he is or not. I refer to him as a he, because he seems like a man, but his skin is the wrong color, and so are his eyes. If he is a man, he must be a very old man, because his forehead is creased with deep wrinkles. When I look at his head, I’m always reminded of a potato which has been left out for too long and is starting to sprout and rot.
I’m intentionally avoiding describing his eyes because I don’t like them. But I want to tell you about Mr. Peeks, and that’s the most important part. Mr. Peeks is just a pair of eyes, with a head like an afterthought.
His eyes are dry like chalky marbles rimmed with. Most people take it for granted that eyes are wet and shiny, but when you see dry eyes, the difference is immediately noticeable. You’d think that because his eyes are dry, they would seem dead and flat. They don’t. His eyes are incredibly alive and intelligent… and hateful.
Mr. Peeks hates me, and he’s always hated me. I can see it in his stare. His stare is wide and glaring with deep, sagging wrinkles. His eyes make him look sick or like he’s suffering because they’re so jaundiced, run through with purplish capillaries, and rimmed with irritated pink skin.
I think the skin around his eyes is probably pink like that because his eyes hurt. That probably explains why his eyes are so dry, too, because he never blinks. I’ve known Mr. Peeks for twenty-eight years, and he hasn’t blinked once.
I don’t think that Mr. Peek is here with me, at least not all the way, because he peeks from behind things that are too small for him to hide behind. The first time that I saw him I was in the shower, and he was peeking at me over the curtain. I remember feeling cold, despite being sprayed by water so hot that my skin was turning lobster-red. When I looked up, there he was. He was peeking over the shower curtain. He was just the desiccated top of a head, and wide yellow eyes like terrible saucers.
I was too scared to scream for help, and the sheer weirdness of him piqued a morbid curiosity. He was peeking over the top of the curtain rod, which was maybe an inch wide, and I could see the bottom of the curtain rod because our shower rings were big. I couldn’t see the bottom half of his face at all. At nine, I reasoned that the bottom half of his face must have been somewhere else, along with the rest of his body.
I was glad that the bottom half was somewhere else because I could tell by his eyes that Mr. Peeks would really like to hurt me. His stare was so wide and intense that his eyelids were trembling. It gave his stare and unpleasant vibrating quality that made his eyes look like they were buzzing at me.
If you keep staring at Mr. Peeks he’ll stare right back, and he won’t ever go away unless you look away or run and hide. I ran out of the shower, and when I looked behind me there was nothing on the outside of the shower curtain.
After that, I would see Mr. Peeks every now and then. Sometimes he peeked from outside, but mostly Mr. Peeks likes to be inside with me. I also know that Mr. Peeks doesn’t like the sunlight, because if he comes out in the daylight, he’s careful to never let it fall directly on him. I’ll bet that the sun hurts him, that would make sense to me.
I won’t catalogue every time that I saw Mr. Peeks because that wouldn’t be worth reading (he showed up hundreds of times) and because most of the time it wasn’t any different. I would be doing something then I’d feel cold and numb. Whenever I got that feeling, I knew he’d be somewhere in the room with me… well, as in as he could seem to get. I’d look around frantically for him, because I didn’t like it when he was too close to me. Sometimes he’ll show up inches from my face, and I really don’t like that. When he’s that close I can smell him, and he smells like old dust and cobwebs; The way a tool shed might if left abandoned for years.
Most of time, though, he’s a couple feet away or across the room. I think he likes to peek from impossible places to show off. I think he wants me to know that he’s something impossible and strange. He likes to scare me. I’ll see him peeking from behind a milk carton on the counter, or out of the sink; One time I saw him peeking from inside my crockpot. Sometimes I’ve caught him peeking out of cabinets or through small holes, but not usually. He doesn’t like me to miss him; It makes him angry.
He’s been with me for years, he’ll show up with his silent glare and then disappear after I blink him away. I’ll confirm where he is and then go back to what I’m doing and ignore him. I think this makes him angrier, but after so many months and years I’ve started to get used to him. I got complacent with him.
Once I grew up and hit my teenage years, I was even less affected by it. I toyed with the idea that I might be insane for a while, but then I flicked a rock at Mr. Peeks and it bounced off his forehead. He didn’t move at all, but his irises faded from deep ultramarine to a blue so pale that they were almost white. I could feel his rage boiling out of him from his hiding place and I decided to never push my luck like that again.
I graduated high school, then college, then I joined the military. None of that is important, so I won’t go into it, but Mr. Peeks was there the entire time. By the time I was in my mid-thirties Mr. Peeks had become my quiet companion. I never liked Mr. Peeks, in fact I hate him. I just got used to him. Hell, he was there on my wedding day peeking from behind the coleslaw.
Now I’m in my mid-thirties and I’ve had a son, and now things are starting to change.
Mr. Peeks was peeking over Atticus’s bassinet on the night he was born, and that was the first time that it was different. His hateful eyes ignored me completely, he was looking at my son. His eyes were wide and feverish, and his pale pupils were dilated like an addict’s. I looked away, and looked back, and he was still there. This time, he was looking at me again, the same hateful gaze I’d come to know so well. When I was finally able to blink, he was gone.
It didn’t get better when we took Atticus home. Mr. Peeks, who I would normally see about once a month, started to show up more frequently, and only when I was with Atticus. One time, he hung around for almost an hour and no matter how often I blinked or looked away he would be there. I’ve taken to leaving all the lights on in my house all the time, prompting my wife to ask what the Hell is wrong with me, because the lights make it harder for the baby to sleep. I don’t want to let her know that I’m trying to do it to protect him.
Mr. Peeks is even outside now. I’ve started taking Atticus outside as often as possible so that we can both stay safe in the sun. It’s not working. I see Mr. Peeks behind stone walls and in tree branches. After decades of Mr. Peeks, I had convinced myself that he was benign. Now, I know that’s not the case.
I found Mr. Peeks behind Atticus’s crib, and although I could still only see the top of his head, his cheeks and his eyes were upturned; I knew that Mr. Peeks was smiling. It wasn’t a kind smile. Nothing about Mr. Peeks is kind or warm.
Over the months, Atticus has been growing more and more aware. He looks around and coos and laughs. He’s a happy baby! When he cries, he’s quick and to the point; He lets me know he needs something and once he gets it he settles right down. One time, though, I heard him absolutely screaming. He was wailing like he was in pain, and I tore into his bedroom, sure that I would find him tangled up in his blankets or choking on his milk, but it was Mr. Peeks. Atticus was staring, wild-eyed into Mr. Peeks’ dusty eyes with a look of horror cracking his soft features. I cursed and swore; I told Mr. Peeks to go away. He did, but not before I saw his cheeks pull up again into a hyena’s grin.
If I ever had doubts as to whether Mr. Peeks is real, those are gone. I’ve lost any hope that he might be a brain tumor or the manifestation of childhood trauma or some other nonsense. Mr. Peeks is real, and he’s trying to come through. Every day he’s pushing at the membrane between his world and ours… I don’t know where Mr. Peeks comes from, but I bet it’s somewhere cold and dark. I bet he wanders there, looking for windows to peer in at my family. I bet he’s looking for a door.
Or maybe he’s already found one. I can see him now, on the other side, squeezing himself through like an octopus one tentacle at a time.
My wife has started to complain that the house always feels cold, and she’s asked me to locate the source of the odd odor that she’s always smelling. She says it smells like musty old books in our house, and she’s right. I tell her that it’s probably a dead rat in our wall, or some old piece of trash we neglected through the years. One night, she even talked to me about a nightmare where she saw a man with ‘wild, staring eyes looking at Atticus from behind the dresser.”
Last night was the worst.
I was dozing in my bed, not sleeping. I never really sleep anymore. I can’t when there’s something sniffing around my house, poking, and prodding, trying to get in. I’m supposed to keep my house safe, and I’m failing utterly. Atticus started to wail in a pitch I’d only heard once before. I tore into the nursery to find Atticus alone and the room so frigid that frost was creeping over the window.
I sprinted to my son’s side, and he wasn’t alone.
We keep Atticus in a little pillow that hugs him on all sides and keeps him from rolling over. It was a good idea, and it makes him feel safe. Mr. Peeks was leering from underneath, inches from my son’s face. His yellowed eyes were pulled open so wide that they were round and bugging like the eyes of a deep-sea fish. His irises trembled in their sockets, and I could see tears streaming down Mr. Peeks’ face.
Then, slowly, horribly… a long finger reached from under Atticus’s pillow and slowly caressed his face. The resulting scream pierced me like a needle, and I had Atticus in my arms in less than a second. He had a terrible, dark scratch on his face.
When I looked back, Mr. Peeks was gone again.
How much more of him will I see? What does he want with my son? It seems like only a matter of time before Mr. Peeks can come through completely. I’m lost. I’m completely hopeless. I just want to protect my son, and I have no idea what to do.
Mr. Peeks is here again today.
Oh, how I wish he’d go away.

It’s incredibly annoying! I’ve been completely fine with them for 23 years, then the last two years it’s become one of my main sources of anger. I remember when I was around 16-17; I was walking home and feeling overwhelmed by the noise of passing cars on a long straight country road, as the sound swells up, from far away, to inside you, to away again. But it was a one off thing.
Now, in the last few years it has come back extremely aggressively. And it’s mixed with hatred. I despise them and their drivers, I moved to London and they introduced laws to stop as many cars being on the road but it amounted to a fine, a charge. So most of the drivers left are the rich ones. Big gluttonous aholes in their big fat metal cars. When it’s quiet they’ll be charging down the roads, desperate for their little thrill. Then when it’s busy they’ll be lumbering along, idiots who will complain about how they can’t use the train because it’s inconsistent will sit their mindlessly in traffic pumping out sickening fumes and vibrations. On small busy pedestrian streets they’ll be edging along, they had the brilliant idea that they would shortcut their route by 2-3 minutes but they’re left stuck behind people for 10. I used to cycle and they would put me in situations where they think “oh I can definitely make that gap” but if the dice fell on a 1 they would have killed me. I just can’t stand them, they’re treated like an extension of a human but they’re not, in cities they are a hobby, a toy.
And of course this hatred now mixes with the sound/vibration issues, if I’m walking or sitting near a road I get so so so angry inside.
I understand their uses. I don’t hate when they are necessary. I don’t hate them in the countryside. But I just think a lot of cities would improve 100x over if driving was a permit thing. Cars should be kings of the highways, not kings of city.
Anyway sorry, huge rant!