Welcome to the Reverse: 1999 Daily Questions Megathread!

Please use this thread to ask any general inquiries about Reverse: 1999. Also, kindly search keywords under this thread as your questions may have already been answered by other Timekeepers.
Community Guides

• General Community Guide (tierlists, teambuilding, puzzle solutions, etc.)
• Income/Saving Guide
• Prydwen (tierlists, guides, character info, etc.)

Cheat Sheets

• 6-star Psychubes
• 5-star Psychubes
• Investment Priority
• Farming Stages
• Resonance Builds, Resonance Costs
• Material Crafting Requirements

Tools

• Planner & Summon Tracker

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• Reverse: 1999 EN Wiki
• GameKee CN Wiki
• HuiJi CN Wiki
• bilibili CN Wiki

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ):
Q1. Should I re-roll?

• This depends on how much time you have to dedicate to re-rolling. In general, all three of the beginner banner characters are great, and you have options of doing shortelonger re-rolls, as per this guide.

Q2. Why is my answer incorrect in for the trail puzzle?

• Try to answer with proper letter casing - the answers are case-sensitive.

Q3. When is the daily reset?

• The game resets at 10:00 UTC, please refer to this timer.

Q4. Does pity transfer over to the next banner?

• Yes, pity should transfer over to the next banner of the same type.

Q5. How should I build my team?

• In general, teams consist of a single damage dealer that get supported by support-type characters, but there are many variations. We encourage you to take a look at some of the guides above!

Q6. Can I re-watch the cut-scenes/story?

• From the main screen/lobby, refer to the left icon below the Bank, go to Atlas, then go to the Story Review. This does not currently apply for event stories, unfortunately.

Q7. Are multiple copies of a certain character necessary?

• This will depend on a character-by-character basis. In general, however, there should not be a large importance on getting duplicate copies of a character.

Q8. When should I stop leveling characters?

• Please refer to the investment guide listed above.

Q9. What should I purchase in the Psychube Shop (Thought Elements/Thoughts in Eternity)?

• Do not buy the 5-star psychubes, as we will eventually get enough 6-stars.
• Prioritization order:

1. LF Polarization
2. Englighten I
3. Enlighten II

Q10. What should I prioritize in the Oneric Shop (Oneric Fluid)?

• Prioritization order:

1. Monthy Brief Cacophony
2. Crystal Casket
3. Permanent Brief Cacophony (or Moment of Dissonance to craft Brief Cacophony if needed)
4. Sonorous Knell

Misc Questions
M1. Are macros and auto-clickers allowed?

• No. They are against the game's terms of service; any usage will risk the potential of being banned.

​

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I’m speechless. For how incredible 1.0 is, I am shocked that the throne of darkness doesn’t actually function as a throne.
We upgrade from wooden coffin to stone coffin, regular production buildings to advanced production buildings, but we cant upgrade from regular throne to Dracula’s throne to command our army?
Surely this was just missed.
Info appreciated.

Hey folks, hello again. I took a bit longer this time to update (Part 1 and Part 2 here) you but at least I bring good news: this weekend, I got the definitive answer from the prison's legal department, and now I know how much I can tell (and I believe it's enough). For your information, after this incident and my eventual release from prison, I haven't contacted anyone I met behind bars, except of course for my wife, Linda. The point is, even after all these years, this story has troubled me a lot, and since my first post, I've become even more paranoid. Finally, this morning, I went out to get the mail but as soon as I opened the door, I came face to face with a small untouched white envelope, except for two identical characters stamped on its surface: 11. Linda is sleeping, and I don't want to worry her, I'm at the kitchen counter thinking about what to do with this envelope while reliving the final events of all this mess, of what was really inside cell 11.
It was morning, and there I was in my cell, in a scene poetically similar to this. I held a playing card, an 11 of clubs. I later searched for such a card online, but found nothing. It was strange, very well made. Before I could reflect more deeply on this, one of the guards passed by our corridor, opening the cell doors for our breakfast.
So, slowly, as if in a trance, I got up from bed and put the playing card in my pocket. Somehow, the card seemed to heat up in my pocket, I could feel the heat increasing and increasing, almost burning my skin. It was a strange stupor, almost drunken, I could even swear I smelled ether lingering in the air as I staggered to the cafeteria.
I slumped into the seat as I placed the tray on the table. Old Munford looked at me in a friendly manner:
"Overdid it yesterday, lad? Your hangover face is priceless."
I forced a weak smile in response to Munford's comment, trying to seem normal despite the whirlwind of thoughts racing through my mind. The heat still burned in my pocket, an uncomfortable sensation that seemed to be intensifying with each passing moment.
"No, nothing much," I muttered, looking away to my food tray. "Just didn't sleep very well."
Munford seemed satisfied with my response and turned his attention back to his own meal. As I stirred the food without really eating, struggling to maintain my composure, I began to think about what to do.
My thoughts were interrupted when Francis joined us at the table, his usual smile lighting up his face. He looked at me with a questioning expression.
"Hey man, everything okay? You look awful."
"I think it was the heat, or maybe something I ate last night."
Francis frowned. Unlike the elder, he clearly wasn't convinced by my superficial explanation.
"Some of the guys told me they saw Bob talking to you last night. Did he do something?"
The question caught me off guard. All this news about the playing card had prevented me from thinking about the strange interaction with Bob since the previous night, but now the memories began to resurface, mixed with the heat sensation coming from my pocket.
"Oh, it was nothing," I said quickly, trying to sound casual. "Bob was just being a bit... Bob."
I felt Francis's gaze linger on my face for a moment.
"If he does anything, you know you can talk to us, right? I know he's one of ours, but that doesn't mean I'll go easy on him."
I analyzed the options for a moment, reflecting on everything. Well, now it seemed to make sense, a prank by Bob, or an attempt to intimidate me...
"There's... something, Francis," I said in a low tone, feeling tense about the confession I was about to make. "Last night, after the card tournament, I... I ran into Bob in the hallway. He was questioning me about the tournament, accusing me of cheating."
Francis's face hardened at my words, a displeased expression passing over his features.
"Cheating? And you?"
"I swear I played fair," I replied quickly, the pressure building inside me. "But he was convinced I had some advantage, and... well, things got a bit tense... He walked away, and this morning I found this in my cell."
Deciding to omit the encounter with Tulley, I got straight to the point, pulling the card out of my pocket and placing it on the table. I could feel it almost incandescent now.
Munford looked at the card for a moment, his gaze narrowing as he studied it. The heat emanating from it was almost palpable, a strange aura that seemed to envelop the table.
"Is that... an 11 of clubs?" he murmured, his voice tinged with surprise and suspicion.
I nodded, my own confusion mingling with growing anxiety.
"Yes... I don't know, maybe Bob did this to scare me, to show that he has access to my cell, or to try to provoke me, knowing my fear of cell 11..."
My words were cut off when the guard's voice echoed through the cafeteria, interrupting our conversation as he announced that the meal period was over.
Francis looked at me with a serious expression.
"We'll talk about this later," he pointed to the card. "Mind if I take it with me?"
I nodded.
"No problem, feel free."
We began our march back to the cells, and I couldn't help but exchange glances with old Munford. He seemed to hesitate on the matter, as if he wanted to say something but was afraid. I made a mental note to speak with him as soon as possible. Our yard time would be in the next 4 hours, and I spent half of that time trying to ponder what had happened.
I don't know how long it took, but I fell asleep, sitting, with my back pressed against the wall of my cell. The dream, or rather, nightmare resulting from this was a disturbing experience.
I found myself standing, walking through the prison corridors in a way that seemed endless. The walls seemed to close in around me, creating a claustrophobic labyrinth that I couldn't escape. Every door I tried to open was locked, and the sound of footsteps echoed behind me, as if someone were following my every step.
Finally, I reached a door that was ajar, a dim light emanating from within. With a knot in my stomach, I pushed it slowly, revealing what seemed to be cell 11. But something was terribly wrong. A man was there, his back to me. Disheveled, uneven hair, a hunched posture, he was crouched down, rummaging through something I couldn't see, seemed to regurgitate. Suddenly, he stopped. He slowly got up and then looked at me.
Somehow, I knew that man was that prisoner, the one who had committed those atrocities and painted the eye on the damn cell. I noticed something dripping from his mouth, forming a red puddle in the center. On the wall, what seemed to be an incomplete sketch of the dreaded painting was there.
I watched, hypnotized by the horror before me, as the man slowly raised his trembling hand towards his face. Drops of that dark liquid dripped from his fingers, echoing in the oppressive silence of the cell. It was as if the very air was tainted with that impurity.
Before I could fully process what was happening, he began to move towards me, his irregular steps echoing like the distant clinking of chains. A visceral panic seized me, preventing me from retreating as he came closer and closer, his distorted figure gaining sharper contours as he advanced through the gloom. I could now smell the terrible scent he had, not just as something rotten, but a pure and concrete smell of death.
"Who... who are you?" My own voice sounded weak and trembling.
The man didn't answer. Instead, he kept advancing, his empty eyes seeming to pierce my soul. My heart was now pounding uncontrollably in my chest, a deafening cacophony that seemed to fill the entire space of the cell. I was about to retreat, to beg for mercy, when a voice whispered in my mind, a distorted echo reverberating like the sigh of a ghost:
"You... can you see? The watchful eye. He wants you. He liked looking at you."
The sound of my own breath echoed in the silence that followed, a dissonant note of fear and desperation. I wanted to scream, to run, to escape this living nightmare, but I was paralyzed by the terror that enveloped me like a coffin.
It was then that I woke up, gasping and covered in sweat, the echo of the whisper still resonating in my mind like a distant echo of a nightmare. For a moment, everything around me seemed distorted and unreal, a fleeting mirage, and then, I startled again. Munford was standing in front of my cell, staring at me with curiosity.
"Are you okay, son?" the old man asked in a soft voice, as if trying to calm a frightened animal.
I shook my head slowly, trying to gather my thoughts amidst the whirlwind of information.
"I... I think so," I murmured, my voice sounding strange and distant even to myself. "I had a horrible nightmare... It felt so real."
Munford nodded understandingly, his eyes fixed on mine.
"Yeah, the situation isn't good... but I came to talk about that letter, earlier in the cafeteria."
"Oh yeah, what about it?"
"Let's just say I've never seen a card like that, but the energy coming from it, oh yeah, I've seen that before."
"What do you mean?"
"You know, a few years ago, there was a murder in one of the cells. This was before Francis arrived, we didn't have much organization, lynchings were common, and in an attempt to reduce these incidents, we decided that the main suspect, a newly captured serial killer, would be forcibly transferred to cell 11. It was one of the most terrible incidents I've ever witnessed in here. And do you know how that man was known?"
I shook my head negatively. Munford leaned his hands on two bars, bringing his face closer to the center of them.
"The Card Cutter."
A wave of shivers ran down my spine.
"He used to leave playing cards as a kind of signature on the bodies of his victims. They say he would choose the card based on the person or the method of murder. So, when he was put in cell 11, things got even weirder."
"What happened to him?" I asked, a bittersweet and macabre curiosity in my mouth.
Munford sighed heavily, looking at a fixed point this time.
"A few weeks after being transferred, he was found dead in his cell. Hung with sheets. And next to his body..."
"What was it?" I could barely breathe as I listened.
"A playing card. An ace of spades, if I'm not mistaken. And that cell... well, since then, no one wants to stay there. They say it does something to people, kills them."
The shock of Munford's revelation reverberated in my chest, trembling as I thought about what could happen to Guard Tulley from now on, or worse, what could happen to us.
"So you think this card is... a warning?" I asked, my voice barely more than a whisper, staring into the old man's green eyes.
Munford nodded slowly, responding more to himself than to me.
"I can't say for sure, but it's a possibility to consider."
I swallowed hard.
"What should we do then?"
He fell silent for a moment, as if pondering his words carefully.
"I have no idea. I guess all we can do is keep quiet; we don't want to scare the other inmates. Francis doesn't believe in these things, so I won't waste my time trying to convince him, and I advise you to do the same. Maybe if we just keep pretending that nothing is happening, things will sort themselves out. But remember: whatever this force is, it wants to take you to the cell, wants you to face the eye. Resist those urges, okay?"
The clock struck 12:30. Time for yard time. I walked with Munford to the yard, the sun burning our heads as we stepped outside, futilely trying to erase the worry from our minds.
As I watched the other inmates spreading out across the yard, trying to appear normal, I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned to find Bob, his voice low and threatening.
"What did you tell Francis?" he whispered, he was behind me, and I couldn't see him.
The flesh on my back trembled and twisted, the fluid of fear rising up to my brain.
"I don't know what you're talking about, Bob," I replied firmly, trying to sound confident.
He paused for a few seconds.
"You cheat first, and now, you make up lies about what I did or didn't do."
"I think there's a misunderstanding-"
"Shut up!" his voice rose sharply "I'm just here to say that I'm not a kid, I don't go around sending playing card letters or anything like that. I didn't threaten you with that thing, but now I am, and in a very direct way, and if I were you, I'd sleep with one eye open."
He was dead serious, and the threat was as clear as day. But what could I do? Confront Bob directly like Francis? That could mean he wasn't trustworthy... My thoughts were interrupted by the guard watching us.
"You two, no contact!" he shouted.
"No problem here, officer," Bob said, pulling me into a hug that felt more like an attempted chokehold.
I tried to pull away unsuccessfully, and the officer seemed to simply not care.
"Okay, but we'll be watching," he turned away, and Bob shoved me against the yard bars.
"Listen here, Bob," I began, my voice firm, confused about where this courage had even come from. "I don't know what you're up to, but I won't stand still while you try to intimidate me. If you have something to say, then say it like a man. Otherwise, leave me alone." I pushed him away with my hand.
"You're a fool, you know that?" he muttered.
"I'm not looking for trouble, but if you want it, you'll get it. Let's just leave it be, okay? If anything happens to me, I'll make sure some people know and-"
My assailant's hand closed around my neck, tightening. I squirmed, struggling to breathe as I desperately tried to free myself from his grip.
"Going to call daddy? Look, Francis may have that whole attitude, but he won't do anything to me, or any of the guys," he remarked.
I noticed the usual group of big guys who hung around with Francis, they were watching us from afar, seeming to distract the boss.
"He's getting out in two months...but honestly, I don't think I need to wait that long."
I couldn't breathe. Fighting against the grip on my neck, my eyes desperately searched for any help.
"Let him go!" The guard shouted from afar, starting to make his way down the stairs to reach us.
Bob didn't obey. I felt my body losing strength, so I did what I could: I focused my strength into a clenched fist and punched the bastard in the stomach, aiming right at his gut. And judging by his expression, it worked. I saw him lean over, his hands releasing my body and being placed on his belly.
I knew if I let it slide, he would come back and continue to harass me, so that had to be a definitive response to the jerk that I wasn't an easy prey. I lunged at him again, this time with a well-aimed kick to his knee, trying to destabilize him. He staggered backwards with a groan of pain, falling to his knees on the yard ground.
The other prisoners now realized what had happened, and soon their shouts in a circle were audible.
"Go, get him! Don't hold back! Finish this guy off!"
I lunged at Bob, raising my hand time after time to punch him. He didn't take it lightly, grabbing my right hand as I prepared to hit him; I could feel the pressure applied to the joints, my fingers starting to crack, and I could feel them tense, about to break. In desperation, I threw myself onto him with the only weapon I had left: my teeth.
I felt the flesh of his neck between the rows of teeth in my mouth. Without thinking and trying to loosen the grip on my hand, I pressed on the pearly bones harder and harder, feeling them slide against the skin, the metallic taste slowly emerging as the flesh was torn.
The scene around me seemed blurry, as if I were watching everything happen from afar, in slow motion. Bob's scream echoed through the yard, mixing with the encouragement shouts from the other inmates. I felt a mix of adrenaline and horror as my teeth sank into his neck flesh, a strange feeling of power and disgust.
While still hunched over that bloody man, I felt the blows on my back: it was the guards. Their batons striking time after time as the adrenaline rush passed, and I now began to feel the pain. Without resistance, I let myself be pulled away. Bob wasted no time and moved away, stumbling as he covered the wound.
"YOU SCUMBAG, WHAT KIND OF ANIMAL ARE YOU?"
As I was being taken away, everything around me seemed blurred, as if I were in a state of stupor. The voices of the other inmates echoed in my ears, mixed with images of the fight that had just occurred. I still felt the blood running through my mouth, dripping lightly onto the ground and forming a trail of red dots marking my path. However, before we left the yard, our warden arrived at the scene, and the guards stopped, my arm uncomfortably twisted behind my body.
"What's going on here?" His voice was calm, but there was an unquestionable tone of authority in his words.
"He... he bit a detainee, sir," one of the guards explained, firmly holding my arm.
The warden looked at me, his eyebrows furrowed in disapproval.
"Why did you do that?"
My mind was spinning, trying to find a coherent explanation for what had happened. I knew it would be useless to tell about Bob's threat, about the playing card, about the fear he had instilled in me. So, I found the most plausible words I could gather:
"He... he provoked me, sir," I murmured, my voice trembling. "I... couldn't take it anymore. He was intimidating me, threatening me, and I... I lost control."
The warden looked at me for a long moment, as if assessing my words. Finally, he sighed, seeming resigned, approaching me with slow, steady steps.
"No, you did that because you're an animal."
He gave me two pats on the cheek, then wiped the blood running from my mouth.
"Take this one to solitary."
The prisoners began to shout, a real noisy commotion. I trembled at the thought of being locked up there. No one came back the same from solitary, but at that moment, I really think I'd prefer to go there than what was to come.
"But sir," one of the guards said, causing the inmates to fall silent in an attempt to hear something, "The solitary is occupied..."
The warden frowned, clearly irritated by the interruption.
"Then take him to cell 11," he ordered, his voice cold and authoritative.
That was the final blow, causing the uproar to become widespread, with even some inmates needing to be subdued with tear gas. I could see as I was pushed, Munford looking at me, a worried and distressed expression on his face; he said something I couldn't understand amidst the noise.
With my heart pounding erratically in my chest and my mind clouded with fear and uncertainty, I was led by the guards towards cell 11. Each step felt like it weighed tons, as if I were walking towards the abyss. I could feel the stares of the other inmates watching the scene, some with expressions of shock, others with a mixture of curiosity and indifference.
Finally, we arrived, and by this point, I was sweating uncontrollably; they opened the cell and threw me inside. My eyes instinctively closed as I fell to the ground. I didn't want to look at it. I got up, still blinding my vision, slowly groping around until I found the bed. I lay on it and turned to the wall beside it, my face as close as possible.
Lying on the hard bed, I could feel my heart beating so loudly that it seemed to echo off the concrete walls around me. Each beat was a pulsating reminder of my situation. I tried to push away the thoughts, but it was like trying to hold back a raging river with bare hands. All the while, I heard stories, heard things about that place, and now I was there, cornered by circumstances beyond my control.
Gradually, I noticed the thick layer of sweat forming around me. I could even feel my pores opening, pouring the water from my body in an attempt to cool myself in that stuffy, hot environment. I couldn't help but think about the heat of the card and... about Francis. He still had the card. Wasn't that dangerous? I fixated on musings about it.
In my feverish frenzy, time seemed to stretch infinitely in that dark cell, minutes dragging on like hours as I struggled to maintain my sanity. Every sound, every shadow was a source of growing anxiety until somehow, I fell into a deep sleep, dreamless this time.
I woke up in the middle of the night, with a faint noise coming from behind the heavy steel door. At first, I feared, wondering what it could be, but as soon as I regained my senses, I remembered where I was, and frankly, nothing outside could be worse. I cautiously approached the source of the sound, trying to listen better, when a "Hey, kid, it's me!" sounded whispered.
"Munford! Munford, I'm glad you're here, knew you wouldn't abandon me."
"Ha, I know, I know," he sounded nervous, perhaps hiding from the guards. "Look, I'd help you out, but I can't get it open from this side, try it there." A small plastic rectangle slid through the door gap. A credit card... I remembered I had done this many times before.
I grabbed the card and started working, carefully sliding it into the lock. Each movement was made with the precision I gained from years of street experience, trying not to make any noise that could attract the guards' attention. My mind was racing, and the tremor it transmitted to my fingers made motor coordination difficult.
Finally, after several minutes of trial and error, I heard a soft click, and the door opened slowly. I could smell the fresh air from the corridor and was already about to smile when, along with the bright light of a flashlight, I saw Bob, now with his neck and shoulder bandaged, along with three more of his cronies. Munford was being held by one, who held an improvised knife to his neck.
"Sorry, kid, they forced me," the old man lamented.
"Not so fast, princess." Bob pushed me inside, onto the floor, and then he entered with one of his cronies, closing the door behind him and illuminating me with the halo of his flashlight.
"What's up, Bob, can't you leave me alone?"
"You wanted to settle things, didn't you? Well..." he pointed to his wound. "You just signed your death warrant! But first, I'm going to make sure to pull out all your teeth and make you swallow them."
He lifted me by the collar of my shirt and landed a punch with his heavy hand. I felt dizzy, seeing stars, curling up into a fetal position. His laughter was now a terrifying melody to me.
"Look at this crybaby. Where did your bravery go?" He kicked my stomach, and I'm sure he found it an ironic poetic justice.
His cohort laughed until the beam of his flashlight shifted away from me.
"Hey Bob, what's that over there?" He said, simultaneously pointing with his finger and the flashlight.
Even though it was on the wall behind me, I knew what it was. I saw Bob straighten up to face it, becoming petrified. He and the other, standing there, mouths agape. I waited for seconds, counting mentally and holding my breath, expecting anything, but nothing. Until suddenly, I began to see small puddles forming under their lower eyelids, dark marks... of blood.
The red tears started to stream down their faces like large crimson waterfalls. Soon, they began to make a noise... a familiar noise, which made my mind freeze as I felt my toes curling inside my shoes and my mouth trembling uncontrollably. It was the same sound as Tulley's. They were now allowing these moans to escape their throats and resonate in the tight concrete walls.
I had to do something. I began slowly to pass by them, trying to edge around. When, however, I was almost reaching the door, I could see their shadows turning slowly in my direction. The tension in the air was palpable, as if it could be cut with a knife. I held myself back from trembling as I tried to maintain composure in front of those men, whose bloodshot eyes were now fixed on me, full of terror and despair.
"What... what's happening?" My voice came out in a trembling whisper, barely able to make myself heard.
Bob and his cohort remained silent. They began to walk towards me, and in desperation, I opened the cell door and slammed it loudly behind me, not caring about attracting the guards' attention. As I looked around, I actually noticed that this was a concern I didn't need to have.
The environment where I was wasn't what I expected, from the prison corridor. It was actually another cell. I stopped for a moment, confused, only to be surprised by a figure in the center of it. A man in a straitjacket looking at me with a petrified smile.
"I've been waiting for you," he said. His voice was blood-curdling, sounding like someone scratching a chalkboard with their nails or scraping a fork on a glass plate.
I tried to open the door but it was stuck. When I turned around again, he was leaning, his face inches from mine, eyes bloodshot. I almost fell backward. He laughed. It was like the last time, he had his mouth covered by a sticky red mass that dripped, probably serving as material for the painting, which now displayed an almost complete surreal eye. He turned and walked to the painting, and then he regurgitated it again. Since his hands were tied, he used his tongue as a brush, finishing the last line of the drawing.
"This," he whispered. "Is my masterpiece."
I was trembling. I had forgotten Munford's advice, and now I found myself petrified, just like the others, staring at the eye. I don't know how much time passed, but I felt like it was hours, days... years. All in the blink of an eye, or rather, in a stare without a single blink.
I tried in vain to regain my composure. Scenes of horror penetrated my mind. Cadavers, bodies marked by playing cards. Criminals, inmates being violently beaten with batons, pepper spray, and all sorts of luxuries the police can serve, I saw gang fights, blood, death, and abuse. I saw people being killed inside the prison. Each scene of violence that each of those who looked had already witnessed. My legs were no more than reeds in the wind now, and I just wanted to run away and scream, cry, and sleep to never wake up again. I tried to scream but the man came to me, placing his foot over my mouth.
"Shhh... you need to see."
He repeated this indefinitely. "need to see, need to see, need to see, need to see"
With superhuman effort, I managed to free myself from the weight of his foot on my mouth, but I could barely articulate coherent words. My voice came out trembling and weak when I finally managed to speak:
"What do you want from me? Why are you doing this?"
He simply continued smiling, as if my words were just another piece in his sadistic game. Then, with a quick and fluid movement, he approached me, so close that I could feel his fetid breath and the metallic smell of blood dripping from his mouth.
"Your mind is a fascinating playground," he murmured, his voice echoing in the claustrophobic space of the cell.
I felt tears running down my cheek, and I knew what color they were. I stood there, in shock, staring at the large painted eye, while my entire being was eaten alive in fear and dread. I don't know how much time passed, maybe the entire age of the universe, eternity, who knows. I woke up on the infirmary bed. Wires connected to my arm while a machine reproduced the "beeps" of my heart.
I looked to the side, seeing the green eyes of nurse Linda looking at me, concerned.
"Are you okay?"
"You need to see," I said, not even wanting to.
She frowned, evidently confused by my response. Linda seemed hesitant, as if she were trying to decide whether to ask more or simply ignore my strange statement. I could see the concern in her eyes, but also a certain curiosity, as if something inside her was intrigued by what I had to say.
"What do you mean by that?" She finally asked, her soft voice echoing in the silence of the infirmary.
I sat up slowly on the bed, feeling a wave of dizziness pass over me. My mind was still cloudy, as if I were struggling to emerge from a deep nightmare. I tried to articulate my words as coherently as possible.
"I... I saw things," I murmured, my voice still trembling. "Terrible things. In the cell... in there... something... something is wrong."
Linda watched me with a serious expression, her green eyes analyzing me carefully. She seemed to understand that something serious had happened, but couldn't fully comprehend what I was trying to communicate.
"Look... you and the others had a collective hallucination in that cell... The director has already arranged for an investigation, but we suspect carbon monoxide poisoning, we've already talked to him about the lack of windows in that place, but it seems he doesn't listen."
I stopped, confused by that information. Was I hallucinating? Well, maybe I would even think that if it weren't for what followed. A man in a dark suit entered. He had a serious and intimidating expression, and he asked Linda to leave.
"Listen here, young man, you're lucky to have come back. The others are catatonic... and probably won't come back to themselves. That's why your cooperation is extremely important, and we need to know: what did you see?"
I stumbled, recounting as much information as I could remember, from Tulley to Bob. The man listened to me without making any expression. After that, he took a radio that was hanging from his blazer and said some words that I didn't quite understand, something like "Ceter," "Queter"... and then he took a clipboard, handing it to me.
"This is your letter of freedom. Our proposal is as follows: We release you from prison and in exchange, you don't open your mouth about the specific events mentioned here," he pointed to the clauses.
That was five years ago, and given my freedom, you must imagine that not everything that happened is transcribed here, but the most important parts are. I ended up visiting Munford a few times after that, and I was horrified to discover that Francis, on the eve of his release, hanged himself with the bedsheet. The old man and I stared at each other after this discovery, in a mutual silent understanding. Shortly after, they closed not only the cell, but our entire pavilion, relocating the inmates. I never saw Munford or any of the others again after that. My nightmares persisted, but in recent months they have been much less frequent, and I think I might be slowly healing.
I wanted to say that this story ends well, with my rehabilitation. A troublesome prisoner full of stories becoming a family man. And it would be, if it weren't for the last 15 minutes of this morning. I believe you may remember that I received a letter this morning like that cursed number. I left it on the counter in the living room while I came here, to have breakfast and finish reporting this to you. When I finished the last paragraph, I went back to the room, but now, it seems like the whole nightmare is back.
I felt the tears, transparent this time, forming in my eyes. In the center of the room right now is Linda, holding the letter, looking at something in it that I can already imagine. She's standing there, wet and red stains on her face, I can hear her whispering "You need to see... need to see," and by God... I can see...

Jynx walked through the eastern gate of Qadar. She paused for a moment, expecting to see the rows upon rows of stone statues. Instead, she found a large colleseum. The statues each supporting a stone arch. She looked up at Shamrock. “Things change, even here. I suppose.”
Shamrock nodded. “That they do, but this is a more recent, and temporary change, or so I am told.”
“Good.” Jynx said. “I liked the statues. Reminds me of River.”
“For sure.” Shamrock said. “So, It’s your first time back in Qadar for a few hundred thousand years. Where to first?”
“Don’t we have somewhere to be?” Jynx asked.
Shamrock laughed a bit. “Karhma will wait.” Sham said. “Besides, the festivities won’t start for a few more days, we have pleanty of time.”
Jynx gave him a sad, hopefull smile. “Can you take me to visit the grave?”
“Somehow, I knew you were going to ask that.” Sham said, placing his hand on her shoulder. “Sure.. Here we go.”’
The two simply vanished from the street in the morning light.
Following them through the gate, a group of eight walked through, earning hard looks from the Vanguard. Once in the city fully, the leader of the group stopped, and turned around looking to make sure they all managed to pass the gaurds.
“What is it, Father?” a young, perhaps twenty year old woman asked the leader.
“Just making sure your brothers don’t ruin everything.” He responded. “I’ve waited to long to enter this city, just to have one of them disturb my plans.”
The rest of the group gathered with no issue. The woman looked back to her father again. “Speaking of your plans, Father. What now?”
“It is imperative, that you all win the games.” He instructed intensly. “The Labyrinth is a treasure trove of powerful magic, and valuable artifacts. This is our best chance of getting a piece. The City Wayfinders are two distracted with these rediculous games to monitor the comings and goings of simple contestants, merchants and visitors. Otherwise, we would never have been allowed entry. Which makes it the perfect chance to complete my collection.” He straightened the cloak on his shoulders, and made a few minor adjustments to some small pieces of equipment on his person. It seemed these motions were almost unintentional.
“Father, Venriath Skyweaver has been dead for more than a hundred millenia.” The woman said. “You’re sure there is anything left? His grave would surely have been scavanged by now.”
The man gave his daughter a scathing look. “I’ve been collecting his artifacts my entire life!” He snapped in anger, but forcing himself not to shout. He smoothed the fabric of his cloak again. “I’ve collected his cloak. The one that denoted the First Skyweaver of Qadar.” He opened the inside of the cloak to show several wands. “I’ve collected one of every original wand he ever made.” He showed his belt. “This is Venriath’s personal component belt, as well as the last spell book he inscribed for his last student.” His daughter flinched as she caught a look of mania in his mind as he took her by the shoulders. “His Spell book? Nowhere. It has to be here. There are multiple accounts that mention he was buried with ‘His greatest treasure’. The Greatest treasure of any enchanter, is their spell book! Now, This may take a few days. You and your brothers only need to concern yourself with the Games. You must win. I will meet you in The Inn when I’ve recovered the book. Go now, and get yourselves registered.”
“Yes Father.” She said. She glanced over her shoulder, and gave her brothers a ‘Follow Me’ signal, as they headed toward the Colloseum.
The Father watched them for a moment, before heading toward the great silver fence of the Punishment.
****************************************************************************
Jynx and Shamrock appeared at the edge of a large lake, under the city. Even though they were distinctly under ground, the lake shone with the reflection of a full moon. Shamrock gave the moon a coy wink, and led Jynx through the nearby passageway. “This way.” he said.
“Was that Luna?” Jynx asked.
“Sort of.” Shamrock explained as she caught up with him. “The pool is a physical manifestation of the reflection of her power.” He said, then stopping and going over the words in his head again. “Yeah, pretty sure that’s what he said. Anyway, the way Karhma explained it was that, I can come here and communicate with her. It was placed here before I was a Prime. Now, I can go where ever, when ever. In fact, it’s not impossible to be in several places at once.” He scratched at his head. “Though, that’s a little tough, and confusing sometimes.”
“It’s not for everyone.” Jynx said, sympethetically patting him on the shoulder. “I wouldn’t like that either.”
“Anyway, It’s not like we won’t see Luna soon. She’ll be coming with the rest tomorrow.” Sham said.
“Left here. Watch the floor, it’s spikey.” He lightly stepped through several flag stones, and reached down and subtly disarmed the trap. As several spikes slowly raised from the floor. Jynx stepped around them.
“Thank you.” She said. “So, I get that you can probably stay in the Dojo, but where is Luna, and everyone else staying? I mean.. Holy ground and all that.”
“Qadar is neutral ground.” Sham said. “Only the Temples are claimed. Those of us that helped build the city have free movement here.. Well, Mostly anyway.” He pointed to a right hand door. “Through there. Anyway, with all the people coming into town, I think most of us are staying with Karhma.”
Jynx nodded. “I assume I am too?”
“Yup.” Sham said. “Unless you don’t want to wear the disguise.”
“Disguise?” Jynx asked.
“We’re Here!” Shamrock said, opening a door. He waived his hand and the torches all lit in the very VERY large room. “The Skyweaver family Mausoleum. Well, the first one, anyway. You two were the first, so, you’ll be in the back.”
The two of them walked between rows and rows of stone sarcophagui. At the back, on a raised dais. Were two ornate Stone graves.
“Left, or right?” Sham asked Jynx.
“What?” Jynx asked, trying to read the inscriptions. They were simply too old, all the definition had faded, making most of the identifying words illegible.
“Was he buried to your left? Or on your right?” Shamrock reiterated.
Jynx stared at him with an ‘Are you kidding me?’ expression. “I dunno Master.. I was dead. By the time I was buried here, Venriath and I were already born out in the Emerald Coast.”
“Oh, Yeah.. Sorry.” Sham said. He lifted the lid off of the coffin on the right. “Nope.. That’s you.”
“How can you tell?” Jynx asked as they looked at the dust and bones in the coffin.
“Venriath was taller than that.” Sham said with a shrug. He pulled the lid off of the other grave. “Here he is… Oh, interesting.. What’s that glow? Do you know?”
Jynx looked into the coffin and smiled. Around the neck of Venriath’s skeleton, with a single hand covering it, was a small gentle glowing. Jynx remembered. “He made us these.” She reached into her own grave, and gently took an identical necklace out of her grave. Hers was not glowing. “It was to show us that we were still alive. No matter where you would send us.” She gently placed the gold chain around her neck. “He told me that if it ever stopped glowing, and I was in trouble, that I should break it.”
“What will that do?” Shamrock asked.
“I don’t know.” Jynx said with a shrug. “Venriath, Felix and Vyneran worked for a a week to make them. So, we can imagine that a lot of magic went in to their creation. Honestly, the fact that his still glows is impressive. I’m surprised it still has enough magic after all this time to read my vitals, let alone glow.”
Shamrock laughed. “Well, you know Venriath. Everything he did on purpose was build to last.”
Jynx laughed too, and she put her hand on her own necklace at her throat. “I miss you.” she said, with a small tear as she looked at his bones in the grave.
Jynx realized that Shamrock had stopped laughing. She looked up, hoping she hadn’t ruined a good reminiscing with her tears. He wasn’t looking at her with concern. His eyes were glued to the entance of the Mausoleum. “We’re not alone here.” He said to her. He raised his voice. “I know you are there. Why don’t you show yourself, and you can tell me why you’ve disturbed this place. I must give you compliments. That must be one heck of an invisibility spell, to trick my eyes at all.”
Melting into view, as a powerful invisibility spell was dropped, a large man appeared. Grey streaks showed in his dark hair, and neatly trimmed beard. Jynx glanced at Shamrock. “Master.. That’s Venriath’s cloak..”
“I know, Jynx.” Shamrock reached for the hilt of Clover. “State your business.” He demanded from the man.
“I’m just here as an observer.. A fan, of Master Skyweaver.” He said with a grin. “I wasn’t expecting tomb guards..” He said. Jynx and Shamrock noticed the man was beginning to grow into immensity. His face elongated and his teeth enlarged into pointed dagger like teeth. His green eyes grew, and the pupil changed to a draconic slit. “How entertaining.” His voice grumbled, now deep and sibilant.
“Dragon.” Shamrock noted to Jynx. “Really old one too.”
“I noticed.” Jynx said. “What do we do? I have my pistol.. but most of my toys are with my luggage.. at Karhma’s house, apparently.. With my disguise.”
Shamrock looked at the slowly changing Dragon. He saw the green scales, and could smell the acrid poision breath. He relaxed his hand, letting it drop from the hilt of Clover. “Nothing.”
Jynx gave him an incredulous look.. “What?!? Aren’t you the one always itching for a fight? There is an Ancient Green Dragon, equiped with Venriath’s gear.. That actually may be able to hurt you. And you saw we do nothing?”
Sham shrugged at her. “I’m just as surprised as you are. But, the gut is telling me, that if I don’t do anything, It will work itself out.”
Jynx looked back at the dragon. Now fully transformed and filling the large Mausoleum. It moved forward, slowly. Crushing some of the Sarcophagai under it’s clawls, she could see the venom dripping from his teeth. “Ok Master.. Enough fun.” she said, backing up to the wall and sinking down, crouching. She drew her revolver, and placed a hand over her necklace.
“I’m not playing.” Shamrock said, His stance was casual, and he watched the Dragon with interest, ready to see what would happen. “I’m serious.. If I do nothing, it will give us the best result. Wierd I know, but I’ve learned to trust the gut.”
Jynx glanced at Shamrock, and leveled her pistol, firing two shots. The dragon laughed as the shots glanced off a shield of force, eminating from his cloak.
“Ah.. Fuck it.” Jynx said, and she crushed her necklace.
*************************************************************************
The ancient elf puttered around his apartment. He watched the skiffs fly by, people off on there way to various corperate jobs, or just out on the town. He smiled enjoying the few minutes left in his morning. He poured himself a cup of coffee, and sipped, sighing with pleasure as he shuffled his way to his bedroom. He checked his watch, just a couple more minutes. He laid down in his bed, smoothing his sheets and adjusting his suit as he lay on his back. He looked to his end table, at a picture of his wife, who had passed some five years ago now. “I’ll see you soon, dear.” He said to the picture, as he made himself comfortable. He checked his watch again. Thirty seconds the timer told him. He had enjoyed his time here in The Expanse, but he was excited for another run through Rammanaria. He closed his eyes, and drifted off to sleep. His watch beeped, as his timer ran out. It was two or three days, before anyone had come. It was his Grandson that turned off the timer.
He opened his eyes, as he felt the shift. He had been through this before. Many times before. However, this time, was different. Usually, he would awaken in the quaint little resteraunt, “The Swans Littlest Parade”.. This time, He was out in the astral expanse, out amoung the stars. He looked around, and found his old friend waiting for him. “Hi Stabby!” He said, greeting the man with a warm hug.
“Hi Venriath.” Stabby said, hugging his friend.
“Where’s Jynx? She’s usually here waiting for me.” Venriath said, looking around. “Did she head on already?”
“Yeah.. In a matter of speaking.” Stabby said, awkwardly shifting his weight. “You seem to have your memories in order quickly this time. You sure you don’t need a minute?”
“No,” Venriath said. “I’ve found that the times when I accept what’s happening, it’s a much easier transition. I was super old this time anyway, so I was ready. How many times is this, anyway?”
“We’re somewhere in the two hundreds.. Maybe three. Sometimes you don’t survive through puberty.” Stabby said. “If you’re set then, Let’s get to business.”
“Are you late for an appointment? Usually there’s a dinner, some laughs before we get to the choices.” Venriath said. “I mean.. I know what I’m choosing if that will speed things up for you. Send me on to Rammanaria.”
Stabby looked at his toes.. “About that… Hehe..”
Venriath squinted in suspicion. “You’re a bit more awkward then normal. What’s going on? Am I not able to go to Rammanaria for some reason?”
“Oh no.. You can go..” Stabby said. “It’s just.. different set of choices than normal.”
“Go on.” Venriath said.
“So.. You can go and be born like normal.” Stabby said.. “Or.. Cause you’re a friend.. Umm.. Jynx broke her necklace…”
“You mean one of the decendants?” Venriath said. “Jynx and I have been dead for.. I dunno.. a couple hundred thousand years? She can’t have broken it.”
“Yeeeeaaahhhh.. So.. When She passed in your last life? Yeah, so, she was called by Shamrock to be his herald. So, she got her old memories and all that jazz.” Stabby shuffled uncomfortably again. “But.. She broke the necklace.. and the spell is active. This whole conversation is taking place in a Pico second.. but, we don’t have a lot of time.”
“Send me to her.” Venriath said immediately.
“So theres a few things you should know.” Stabby said.
“Don’t care. Give me the highlights.” Venriath said.
“Cool.” Stabby said, handing Venriath a helmet and some goggles. “First.. This is gonna suck. There is a reason there is time limits on ressurection spells. Put these on.. You’ll thank me later. Second.. I don’t have the time to listen to your stories and record it for posterity this time.. So you’re keeping them.”
“Oh, of my past life?” Venriath asked.
“All of your past lives.” Stabby said. “So, you’re gonna have a migrain for a few days. But, with all that experience, you’ll be right up there with Felix.. You may even have a few tricks he’s never seen.”
Venriath considered that a win. Getting a leg up on Astarte was hard. “I’m ok with that.. What else?”
“Jynx is tied to Shamrock’s thread. And you will still be Sham’s avatar.” Stabby said. “That means.. You’re not going to be able to ‘retire’ again.. at least, not together.”
“That’s fine. After that first run, I realized that dying and the afterlife aren’t as cool as they are cracked up to be.” Venriath said, then remembering who he was talking to. “No offense, Stabby.”
“None taken.” Stabby placed a strange device on Venriath’s chest. “This, is just a little music for the trip.. It’s the Latest single from ‘Slashley and the Red Crayon Raiders’ out from Port Sparx.” He reached up above his head, and pulled a glowing green thread from nowhere, he took the Spirit thread from the back of Venriath’s neck. “Last thing..” He said as he tied the threads together.. He held out the remaining length of Venriath’s Spirit thread… “How old do you want to be? Remember, this is Venriath’s old body.. so.. Elf..”
“I know.. Umm.. I would say.. 140 years?” Venriath said. “I was really good looking at 140.”
Stabby cut the spirit thread. “Ok.. That will do it. Let me know when you’re ready.”
Venriath settled his helmet on his head, and lowered his goggles. He took a deep breath. “Hit me.” He said.
Stabby reached out, and pressed the play button on the device on Venriath’s chest. “Ok.. Warning, you’re going in hot. Big Ancient Dragon. Good luck.”
“Wait, What?” Venriath asked.
Stabby smiled and gave the green thread a little tug, and let go.
https://youtu.be/zEIaVvy73Is
Venriath screamed as he was yanked by the back of his neck off through space. He narrowly dodged asteroids, he could feel the heat of passing stars. He passed over the Toblerittles system in the center of the expanse as he careened through nebulas. After another couple of seconds, he passed over the lights of Port Luna, and then felt himself start to pull apart as he passed in between several black holes. He began to hurtle toward Rammanaria. He could see the headlands, and simply dove head first directly into Qadar.
************************************************************************
The Dragon inhaled deeply, ready to spray his breath and fill the room. He paused as one of the Sarcophagai burst into emerald flames. A Skeletal hand reached out of the flames, and made a motion. Suddenly the dragon’s mouth was held closed. Flesh began to coat the hand, and to the Dragon’s surprise, a healthy young Venriath Skyweaver stepped from the Flames. “So nice of you to bring me my things.” Venriath said to the Dragon.
He spoke a single word, and he was suddenly clad in his gear, The Dragon now stripped of his collection. “As for threatening my wife? I’m sorry.. I simply cannot have that.”
Venriath quickly crafted a simply zypher cube around the dragon’s head, and cast a single razor. The Dragon’s head fell from it’s neck, thudding into the floor. As the neck began spewing blood all over the room.
Shamrock looked at the shocked Jynx.. “See.. I didn’t have to do anything.”
Venriath turned and swepth Jynx into his arms, kissing her soundly. “Sorry I’m late. I need a drink.”
*************************************************************************
Felix poured over the plans. He frustratedly ran his finger through his hair, and rubbed his eyes. He heard his door open and someone step in. “I don’t suppose you know how to power a healing matrix for two weeks, without using blood sacrifice?” He asked out loud, not caring who it was.
“You could always use diamonds.” a familiar voice said. “If you link the matrix to a central location, you could simply add new diamonds as the originals are used.”
“Yes Venriath.. I know that, but we don’t have that many diamonds.” Felix said, looking up to see Venriath pouring a drink. He suddenly went pale, realizing that Venriath had been dead for eons.
Venriath walked over to Felix’s cabinet. He placed his foot against the bottom, and tapped the drawers in a specific order, then turned around, placed his back against the corner of the cabinet, and used his elbow to pop one of the drawers. It slid open, revealing hundreds of Diamonds..
“Looks like you have enough to me.. “ Venriath said, sipping his drink.
“But.. but.. bu..” Felix trailed off as he looked as his dead friend.

Me and Lila always carved dozens of jack o’ lanterns every October, so they’d absolutely saturate our lawn on Halloween night. It was our thing. But looking back on it, now that I’ve lost her, I just feel bad for the pumpkins. I almost relate to them, somehow. The way they were carved up, had everything of substance inside of them torn out, and left as hollow, rotting shells with forced smiles.
Needless to say, I didn’t cope with her death well. I didn’t want to cope with it. I wanted the world to drown in the black sludge of my grief. I loathed the people I saw going about their lives, unaware that the world had already ended the moment Lila died. The Earth shouldn’t keep spinning. Life shouldn’t go on. Not without her.
Even my relatives bringing me along on a trip to Kauai only made it worse. The most gorgeous place on Earth, and it made me sick with hatred. Nothing that beautiful deserved to exist if Lila wasn’t ever going to get to see it. It wasn’t fair.
I thought I’d never enjoy or care about anything again. Then I discovered media preservation.
It started with taking some of Lila’s old VHS tapes to a video repair place to fix some issues with the footage before it’s digitized. The job fascinated me. In a universe based on entropy, where everything inevitably fades away and is forgotten… restoring something lost is like snatching it from the jaws of death, right? Like flipping the bird to the universe and its so-called ‘natural order’. People die, but information doesn’t have to.
Now, it doesn’t matter how small — be it some god-awful plug-and-play licensed game, or a cereal commercial from 80’s — it’s my mission to recover it in as high a quality as I’m able, and make sure it’s freely available online for as long as possible.
A couple weeks ago, I came across a big haul. Four boxes of old VHS tapes offered up on E-Bay for dirt cheap. Most of the tapes were just recordings of Cheers episodes already preserved in higher qualities, but one Maxell E-240 caught my interest.
First of all, I’d never seen one so melted. Sure, sometimes they were left in an attic too long, and the colors and audio start to degrade. But this one looked like it had survived a house fire. It was covered in soot and the smell of smoke, and had the overall shape of a chocolate bar left out in the sun a little too long.
Second was the label, which read in neat sharpie: ᴇᴘɪꜱᴏᴅᴇ 4,679,329 ᴍᴀʀ 8 2035.
The casing was so disfigured, I had to bust it apart just pull out the tapes and respool them in a fresh cassette. I tried to iron out the creases in the tape as best I could, but I had no illusions about it accomplishing much — the mylar surface had been irreparably warped in places by whatever fire had half-melted the thing.
Imagine my despair at the sight of that dreaded ‘ɴᴏ ꜱɪɢɴᴀʟ’. I could clearly see the tape wasn’t blank, yet no amount of adjusting the tracking or trying different TVs or VCRs accomplished anything. Just as I was about to give up, though, the thing just suddenly started playing properly at the exact instant the clock struck 3 AM, as if it had only now decided to work. My all-nighter had paid off.
I didn’t dwell on the fact that this ‘miracle fix’ had been impossible. If I’d had any sense, I’d have torn the horrid thing out of my VCR and buried it beneath holy ground. Instead, fool I was, I sat down and watched.
At first, the thing seemed unwatchable. The audio was so distorted that the show’s theme song emerged as a low, crackling, staticky wail that made my head throb, and the logo was completely indistinguishable through the flickering and interference. I thought it was a lost cause for a moment. But then a figure appeared and cleared away the static, like Moses parting the Red Sea.
It was the sight of the show’s host that hooked me. He was just… perfect. Perfect in every way. I knew it just looking at him. Infinitely handsome and likable and charismatic, and he always said the exact perfect thing. The only issue is, I don’t remember a single thing about him now, in the same way you can’t remember a dream that seemed so clear to you while you were experiencing it. He just appears in my memory as this abstract blur in a sharp suit. Yet at the time, I was awestruck, even before he said a single word.
I can’t even remember a word he said. It was like he was speaking another language, one I felt as opposed to heard. I’ll try and transcribe it as best I can into words, but know that it’s only a pathetic imitation.
“... for another night of laughs, prizes, and fun for the whole family, with your host, #####!” I noticed that the audio and visual distortion seemed to suddenly intensify the instant he said his name, rendering it completely illegible. Idiot I was, I figured that was a coincidence. “Tonight is a night of celebration, folks, because thanks to the support of loyal viewers like you, we have just been approved for, get this: two hundred thousand more seasons!”
The “live studio audience” went wild with applause. I put that in scare quotes because, as far as I could tell, besides the host, the studio seemed completely empty. As if he was standing on a plain white stage that extended outwards into infinite darkness on all sides.
“For those just joining us, the game here is simple…” He explained that this was some sort of a trivia show. Every time a guest got an answer wrong, it brought them a little closer to some sort of unspecified ‘punishment’. And if they got it right? He smirked. “Well, they get to delay the inevitable.”
I wondered what he meant by ‘inevitable’. I didn’t have to wonder long.
The host gestured to a curtain that hadn’t been there moments ago, which raised to reveal a middle-aged man. You know the type — bushy mustache, gray hair, round-rimmed glasses. Kind of guy you’d have doing your plumbing. He couldn’t look any more out of place stood up and restrained in that — what the hell is that?
I recognized that metal coffin-looking thing from a medieval torture museum I went to once. The iron maiden. The lid hung open, countless long, needle-like blades poking inwards, threaten to poke a million new holes in him if it was shut.
His situation was not lost on him. “Where… where am I? What the hell is this!?”
“Oh, lucky guess!” The host ‘joked’. More canned laughter. “I know you always loved watching those trivia shows, Malcolm? Weren’t you always sitting there, grinding your teeth, seething that it wasn’t fair? That you should be the one up on stage, winning big?”
The man paused. Even he seemed mesmerized by the unreal perfection of the host before him. “I… this is a… game show?”
“All you have to do is answer a few questions! Think you can handle that, Malcolm?” He pulled out a cue card without waiting for an answer. “And our first question! What were you doing the night of February 18th, 1998?”
The man seemed baffled. “Just… sat on my couch watching the NFL, I think? I’m not sure how I’m supposed to remember —“
He let out a startled squeal as a horrid buzzer sounded. On cue, the lid slid a third of the way closed, making him flinch. “Oooh, I’m afraid that’s the wrong answer, Frank! But you know what? I’ll give you one more chance. What were you —“
“Following a girl home!” The man cried out. “F-from the bar. There, are you happy?”
“Cor-rect!” The canned audience began cheering! “Such honesty! Now, our second question: just what were you carrying while you followed her?”
He hesitated for a little too long. And then the buzzer sounded again, and the lid slid so near to closing that its blades began poking uncomfortably against his skin. He tried to press himself against the back of the maiden as well as his restraints would allow. “Jesus! Okay! A knife, a knife!”
“Awww, if only you’d said that just a second earlier!” Another big question. “Our third question: why, Malcolm? Why did you do it?”
That set Malcolm off. He started thrashing, clawing, screaming. “Let me out of this thing, you maniac! You can’t do this to me! Do you know who I am? Is this some sort of sick joke? My lawyers will have your head for this, you—“
And then the buzzer. All of a sudden, the lid slammed shut full-force, and the man was utterly silenced save for an unnatural, drawn-out wheeze. “Another wrong answer, Malcolm! I’m afraid I was looking for: ‘because if I can’t have her, no one can’!”
I admit it. I laughed. Out of shock more than anything. How was this allowed on TV? I took it as some sort of dark comedy show, and it was kind of satisfying to see that freaky character get his comeuppance. Still, there was something unnerving to me, seeing the man’s eyes through the openings in the maiden. Wide and red and terrified. They just looked a little… too real.
But the maiden disappeared as quickly as it came, before I could dwell on it too much. “Oh, envy! Definitely one of my favorite sins.” More laughter. “Stay tuned, folks! We’ve still got a night of fun and games in store for you! But first… how’s about a word from our sponsors?”
Cut to a corporate logo which I again couldn't recognize.
“This segment was made possible by Buer Health, which has recently announced a brilliant new initiative to protect our citizens from skin cancer by removing their skin completely.”
The camera cut to a massive industrial building, resembling a solid concrete cube around 50 meters in width and height. Its surface bore arcane symbols etched using carvings of wailing, tormented faces. The host would occasionally be rendered inaudible by a deafening metallic scraping from within, though he didn’t seem to notice. The only protrusion from the building’s cubic shape was a single smokestack, belching a scarlet red smoke into the atmosphere. A queue of gaunt figures waited at the entrance, herded and coerced by their grim overseers, and there were no words to describe the procession of scarlet ghouls limping out the building’s other end.
“Owing to the nonlinearity of time, the brand new Grand Skinpeeling Machine has spontaneously appeared several years before construction deadlines, and indeed, before it was even conceived of by anyone in our timeline. People have rushed all the way from Malebolge just to try this miracle of technology out on opening day, and so far, the reviews have been stellar!”
He shoved his microphone in the face of a shambling thing that could only scarcely be called a human. Tatters of flesh clung to its exposed musculature, blowing in the wind. Its eyes were the only hint of color in that sea of bloody red, and they were wide, white and terrified. The thing screamed and wailed for as long as it could before the last tendons connecting its jaw to its face snapped, and it was left to choke and gurgle.
“An amazing wail! The results speak for themselves, folks. The Grand Skinpeeling Machine is a hit!”
So far, I was still laughing along and having a good time. The sight of the next ‘guest’, however, started making me nervous.
It was an old lady.
She couldn’t be a day younger than sixty, the sort of sweet elderly woman who in a just world would be cooking chocolate chip cookies for her grandchildren in a comfy cottage somewhere. But here she was, tied to a metal chair, eyes wide, shaking like a leaf. Unlike the last contestant, she seemed to know exactly what was happening.
“In exchange for our loving endorsement, they’ve agreed to loan us one of their star employees. Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for: the Liqisma!”
Something slunk from the darkness far behind her — or perhaps it’d be more apt to say that the darkness birthed it whole-cloth. It was like a living shadow, and it took my eyes a moment to register what I was even seeing.
How do I even begin describing this creature? I could say it looked almost human, or at least like something that may have been human long ago. Or I could start with its skin, which was all black and shiny as latex and seemingly smooth on first glance, but if you looked closer you’d realize it was covered in a million tiny reptilian scales, almost like a shark. Its head was a bald man’s, utterly devoid of any distinguishing features, like the basic stock template for a human being. It was notable only for a complete lack of pupils and irises, its eyes a pure white.
Its body defied basic biology in so many key ways, I had to stare it at for what felt like an eternity just to wrap my mind around its physiology. It was at least five or six meters long, by my estimate, composed of multiple human torsos stacked one on top of the other like segments of a centipede, each melding with the ones around it at the waist and shoulders. Each torso sported a pair of short, stubby arms that propelled it with terrifying grace. It ended with a pair of human legs, perpetually bent on their knees, beneath a ‘tail’ that looked more like its coccyx was poking free from its body.
The old last could clearly hear it, and kept futilely trying to turn her head around enough to get a peek at what stood behind her. I mouthed uselessly, don’t. You don’t want to know.
“Glad you could join us again, Miss Wethersby! Judging by our ratings last week, you seemed to have been a fan favorite!”
Her voice was so soft, I could barely hear it below the static. “Oh, God. Please, why won’t you people let me go? I’ve told you, I’ve never done anything, never hurt anybody. There must be some sort of—”
He waved a hand over her, and it seemed to forcefully snap her mouth shut. “Please, Miss Wethersby, save your breath for our questions!” Another cue card. “Your first question, my friend: where did you and your husband buy your first home?”
She had to think about it for a long time. Eventually, she cried out, “Alabama! Tuscaloosa, Alabama!”
“Ding ding ding! Why, you’re already doing better than our first contestant! Next question: what breed of dog was your childhood pet?”
She had a pained look on her face as she thought. Eventually, a timer started ticking down. It wasn’t visible, so it wasn’t clear how much time she had left exactly, but the sound it made got more shrill and high-pitched with every second. “Miss Wethersby, need I remind you that we have a time limit on this show?”
A tear ran down her cheek. “I… I keep telling you people, I don’t know. I have dementia, I can’t remember, please—”
That buzzer again. “I’m afraid that was the wrong answer! Liqisma?” The old lady shuddered at the sounds of hundreds of feet drawing a little closer to her. “Now, your first grandchild. What did he look like? What color were his eyes? His hair?”
She was crying harder now, like it hurt her that she couldn’t remember something so dear to her. “I told you I can’t remember! Why are you doing this to me!?”
“If you don’t remember them, why would they remember you?” The host mocked as the buzzer sounded, and the beast drew a little closer. “Really, do you believe they still even think about you? Or do you think they’re glad that the old bag of bones isn’t there sucking up their inheritance?”
This went on for… God, it could have been an hour. I was glued to the screen all the while, frozen with terror, praying for this nightmare to just end, for her to make it out okay somehow. He poured over every little detail of the life she lived and the people she loved, delighting in how little of it she could still recall.
And the thing grew closer, and closer… until she finally felt multiple pairs of hands resting upon her shoulders. The thing was looming over her now, and a long, black tongue a few feet in length emerged from its mouth and ran trails of dark saliva over the back of her head. She looked broken down, eyes raw from crying, and I could tell by the dampness of her dress that she’d wet herself.
“Now, Miss Wethersby, our time here has been fun, but I do believe it is time for our final question. Tell me, what is the name… of your only son?”
She couldn’t even answer anymore. She just stared ahead, like her mind was a million miles away. He cackled as the buzzer sounded one final time, and threw his cue cards aside. “Thank you for playing, Miss Wethersby. Better luck next time.”
I would say the thing unhinged its jaw like a snake, but that’d be an understatement. The way the thing’s face malformed and wrinkled and stretched as it opened its maw, it no longer looked even remotely human. Its jaws must have parted at least thirty centimeters apart, revealing a second, pharyngeal pair of jaws that lashed out and gripped the woman’s skull, pulling her headlong into that darkness.
I could hear bones crunching and snapping as its throat constricted down around her body, peristaltic muscles compacting her into a meat slurry, bit by bit. Yet she just wouldn’t die. Even as her skull and upper body were already crushed and compacted, organs and muscles pressed into mulch, she still kicked her legs, twitched her fingers, let out a gurgling that must have been some attempt at screaming. She was squirming even as the beast snapped its jaw shut around the last of her, condemning her to whatever torments awaited her inside the creature.
And all the while, that horrible laughter. “Don’t worry, folks! She’ll be back next week! And the next. And the next…”
Needless to say, I wasn’t having fun anymore. In fact, I had to turn away and fight the urge to throw up. I stood, about to turn the TV off and —
“Ah, ah, ah! Don’t touch that dial, now!” I froze. There was something chilling about the way he said that, staring right into the screen as if reacting to what I was doing. I hated that grin on his face. “The real show is just beginning.”
And with the barely restrained excitement of a child on Christmas morning, he yanked back another curtain, and I recognized everything.
I recognized that crappy bootleg knockoff Always Sunny in Philadelphia jacket that was so gaudy and terrible it instantly became her favorite thing in her wardrobe. I recognized those subtle hints of slight acne she disguised as fake freckles. I recognized the way her gray eyes would remind me of those overcast mornings at the beach at Hilton Head and pointing out all the cannonball jellyfish washed up on the sands. I recognized that tattoo of the name ʀᴏᴄᴋʏ, how I’d held her all night long as she cried into my shirt after her childhood cat had died.
It was Lila.
I shuddered, gasped, fell from my seat as if I’d been punched in the stomach and the air had been knocked out of me. I couldn’t breathe. This couldn’t be real. I was dreaming right now. I must be. I just had to wake up.
But I couldn’t wake up. Nothing I could do dispelled the sight of her curled up in that… that thing. That bronze statue of a bull, horns jutting on either side of a head that roaring silently up at the heavens, all while the love of my life was locked in its hollowed out belly, visible only through a pane of glass. I could hear her cry out in shock at where she’d found herself, and every whimper felt like it drove a knife through my chest.
The host soaked in the moment. It was ecstasy for him, the suffering of it all. He stared dead into the camera like he was looking right at me as she called, “What is this? Where am I?”
“Why, I have good news, my dear Lila! You’re exactly where every American dreams of being: you’re on TV.” He pointed to the camera. “And we have a very special guest in the audience tonight. Your very own beloved Jackson!”
I shuddered, hearing my own name ooze from his fetid lips. His façade of perfection was slipping, and there was something so profoundly ugly beneath it. Her eyes snapped to the camera, confused, despairing. “Jackson? Baby? What — what’s happening? What is this?”
I don’t know, I thought, gripping the sides of the TV so hard my knuckles turned white, but I’m going to get you out of there, baby. I’m going to find whoever did this and I’m going to bury them all so far beneath that studio that they’ll never-
“I’m afraid Jackson hasn’t joined us quite yet, my dear. But if you truly love him, surely you’ll give him a show to remember, won’t you?” He taunted her. “All I want, after all, is to ask you a few questions! In fact, I’ll offer you a special deal: get even a single answer right, and I’ll let you go free! But get one wrong and, well…”
On cue, a fire was lit beneath her. Small, smoldering for now, but she whimpered as she noticed the heat. We both realized in that instant what this was. By now, I was screaming things I can’t repeat here, and slamming my hands against the TV screen as if I could reach through and save her.
She bit her lip and acquiesced. Not like she had any room to argue. The host grinned and readied a cue card. “Your first question: where are you, Lila?”
“I… I don’t know. How am I supposed to know?”
“You do know, Lila. You know exactly where you are.” He smirked at her. “Here’s a free hint: what’s the last thing you remember, before you woke up here?
She thought about it… and choked back a sob, visibly shaking as the realization slowly settled in. “But… but why? I… I…”
The horrible wail of the buzzer cut her off. “Oooh, too bad! I’m afraid you’ve run out of time!”
Seemingly as if on its own, the fire doubled in size. Sparks licked the belly of the bronze bull, and began to ever-so-slowly heat the surface. She pawed around in the tight confines, searching for any reprieve from the scalding heat all around her as the metal grew hot like it’d been left out in the sun on a summer’s day. “Please! Oh, God, let me out of this thing! It hurts! It hurts!”
The host seemed to breathe in her pain as if stealing a moment’s indulgence. “Now that there is no doubt about where you are, my dear, let us proceed to the second question.” He switched to his next card. “Did you believe in God, in the end?”
“O-of course!” She pled her case as if she was being tried in court. “My entire life… every day I gave to the poor, helped the sick, did whatever I could to honor Hi-“
“I’m afraid you misunderstood my question. I asked, did you believe in him at the end? The very moment your pitiful little life was snuffed out?”
“I always believed! I’d never forsake Him!”
“Yes, yes, I know. You lived a good and holy life, didn’t you?” He cackled. “But what of the very end? You and your little husband were so excited to deliver your first little baby boy. But o, tragedy! It all went wrong, didn’t it? Your precious little boy didn’t make it through childbirth… and you followed closely behind.”
“That whole business with the botched pregnancy, it was… what do you call it? Ah, yes. A ‘test of faith’. And I’m afraid you failed. In your final moments, you watched the light fade from your child’s eyes, and you assumed — wisely, in my humble opinion — that no ‘kind’ and ‘loving’ God would allow something like that to happen.” He laughed. “Funny how after a lifetime of dutiful service, all it takes is one little mistake at the end… to bring you here. To us.”
I’d never seen such depths of despair in a person’s eyes. Such emptiness. Like with every word, he’d been scooping out another piece of her until she was hollow. And then that buzzer roared again, more shrill than ever, and I could barely see her little window through the smoke and flames. The belly of the bull was turning orange in places, and I could hear her flesh start to sizzle like meat on a grill. There are no words for the noises she made. No words at all.
“And our last, final question,” he continued. “What were your last words to your poor, beloved Jackson?”
“I love you!” I called out the answer. Bloody fingerprints stained the TV screen from my slamming my hands against it, as I screamed the answer over and over. “I love you, I love you, I love you!” At some point, I forgot that there was ever a question. I was just screaming it at her as if hoping that she could hear it, that it could bring her a modicum of comfort in that place.
The buzzer sounded again. I couldn't bring myself to look. All I could hear was the roaring of the bull, and the steam rising from its bronze nostrils.
The curtain fell. Silence drowned the sound. The host dropped all pretense that he hadn’t been speaking directly to me. “Now, Jackson. You just might be one of my new favorite audience members this show had ever had. I know this must have been hard for you. But if you’ll just stay tuned, I have one more show I know you’re certain to love!”
I didn’t bother to touch the remote. After all, nothing could be worse than what I’d just seen, right?
Wrong. Horror wracked me as the curtain rose, and I saw the man chained to a chair. I pulled away like a caveman witnessing fire, cringing and stuttering, face wet with sweat. It was the sort of fear that worked its way into your bones like a bad chill, that left you shaking, teeth chattering.
It was me.
An older me, sure. But not by much. Ten years, maybe. A gaunt and hollow version of me, one twisted by ten years of depression and hard drugs. But it was unmistakable.
His eyes widened as he recognized the host. “Oh — oh God, God please no! It can’t be — oh Christ, let me out of this chair, you —“
“Come, now! We wouldn’t want to use the lord’s name in vain, would we? I mean, that would be a sin!” The host laid a hand on the other me’s shoulder. “It may have been a few years since you watched our program, but I’m sure you remember the rules, don’t you, old friend?”
The other me was wordless, on the verge of hyperventilating, just as I was. The host was giddy with delight. “Now! Our first and only question is one I’m sure our viewer will be very interested in: what sins, exactly, do you think landed you here?”
The other me tried to speak, but the words caught in his throat. I could see it in his eyes. The years of self-destruction, the bitter hopelessness, the whirlpool of nihilism and vice and decay. The suffocating depths of a man. The darkness. How could he put it into words?
The sound of the buzzer was like a pig’s squeal. “Mmm, I’m afraid that our viewer is going to have to figure that out for himself! In the meantime, your punishment? Well, we wouldn’t want to spoil anything…”
The curtains slowly began to fall just as a couple other of those black, grotesque monstrosities emerged from the darkness. The curtain covered them all before I could get a good look at their obscene, twisted, asymmetrical figures. All I could hear was the crunching, the sound of skin tearing like paper, the screaming that went on for longer and louder than a human throat or vocal chords could endure.
The image and audio were beginning to distort, glitch, burn away. The tapes were physically melting as they played. My VCR was starting to overheat, sparks pouring from its front panel. The host voice jumped around in tone, his voice fading into the static blur as the tapes bubbled and boiled and distorted. “But, my friends, I’m afraid that concludes tonight’s episode of our show! So, with a final farewell to our dear, beloved viewer, Jackson…”
Just before the image melted away, the camera seemed to jump forward until his face filled the screen, his eyes piercing into mine as he cackled in that singsong voice.
“See you sooooon~”

By what means the papers out of which I have made a connected story came into my hands is the last point which the reader will learn from these pages. But it is necessary to prefix to my extracts from them a statement of the form in which I possess them. They consist, then, partly of a series of collections for a book of travels, such a volume as was a common product of the forties and fifties. Horace Marryat's Journal of a Residence in Jutland and the Danish Isles is a fair specimen of the class to which I allude. These books usually treated of some unfamiliar district on the Continent. They were illustrated with woodcuts or steel plates. They gave details of hotel accommodation, and of means of communication, such as we now expect to find in any well-regulated guide-book, and they dealt largely in reported conversations with intelligent foreigners, racy innkeepers and garrulous peasants. In a word, they were chatty. Begun with the idea of furnishing material for such a book, my papers as they progressed assumed the character of a record of one single personal experience, and this record was continued up to the very eve, almost, of its termination. The writer was a Mr. Wraxall. For my knowledge of him I have to depend entirely on the evidence his writings afford, and from these I deduce that he was a man past middle age, possessed of some private means, and very much alone in the world. He had, it seems, no settled abode in England, but was a denizen of hotels and boarding-houses. It is probable that he entertained the idea of settling down at some future time which never came; and I think it also likely that the Pantechnicon fire in the early seventies must have destroyed a great deal that would have thrown light on his antecedents, for he refers once or twice to property of his that was warehoused at that establishment. It is further apparent that Mr. Wraxall had published a book, and that it treated of a holiday he had once taken in Brittany. More than this I cannot say about his work, because a diligent search in bibliographical works has convinced me that it must have appeared either anonymously or under a pseudonym. As to his character, it is not difficult to form some superficial opinion. He must have been an intelligent and cultivated man. It seems that he was near being a Fellow of his college at Oxford—Brasenose, as I judge from the Calendar. His besetting fault was pretty clearly that of over-inquisitiveness, possibly a good fault in a traveller, certainly a fault for which this traveller paid dearly enough in the end. On what proved to be his last expedition, he was plotting another book. Scandinavia, a region not widely known to Englishmen forty years ago, had struck him as an interesting field. He must have lighted on some old books of Swedish history or memoirs, and the idea had struck him that there was room for a book descriptive of travel in Sweden, interspersed with episodes from the history of some of the great Swedish families. He procured letters of introduction, therefore, to some persons of quality in Sweden, and set out thither in the early summer of 1863. Of his travels in the North there is no need to speak, nor of his residence of some weeks in Stockholm. I need only mention that some savant resident there put him on the track of an important collection of family papers belonging to the proprietors of an ancient manor-house in Vestergothland, and obtained for him permission to examine them. The manor-house, or herrgård, in question is to be called Råbäck (pronounced something like Roebeck), though that is not its name. It is one of the best buildings of its kind in all the country, and the picture of it in Dablenberg's Suecia antiqua et moderna, engraved in 1694, shows it very much as the tourist may see it to-day. It was built soon after 1600, and is, roughly speaking, very much like an English house of that period in respect of material—red-brick with stone facings—and style. The man who built it was a scion of the great house of De la Gardie, and his descendants possess it still. De la Gardie is the name by which I will designate them when mention of them becomes necessary. They received Mr. Wraxall with great kindness and courtesy, and pressed him to stay in the house as long as his researches lasted. But, preferring to be independent, and mistrusting his powers of conversing in Swedish, he settled himself at the village inn, which turned out quite sufficiently comfortable, at any rate during the summer months. This arrangement would entail a short walk daily to and from the manor-house of something under a mile. The house itself stood in a park, and was protected—we should say grown up—with large old timber. Near it you found the walled garden, and then entered a close wood fringing one of the small lakes with which the whole country is pitted. Then came the wall of the demesne, and you climbed a steep knoll—a knob of rock lightly covered with soil—and on the top of this stood the church, fenced in with tall dark trees. It was a curious building to English eyes. The nave and aisles were low, and filled with pews and galleries. In the western gallery stood the handsome old organ, gaily painted, and with silver pipes. The ceiling was flat, and had been adorned by a seventeenth-century artist with a strange and hideous "Last Judgment," full of lurid flames, falling cities, burning ships, crying souls, and brown and smiling demons. Handsome brass coronæ hung from the roof; the pulpit was like a doll's-house, covered with little painted wooden cherubs and saints; a stand with three hour-glasses was hinged to the preacher's desk. Such sights as these may be seen in many a church in Sweden now, but what distinguished this one was an addition to the original building. At the eastern end of the north aisle the builder of the manor-house had erected a mausoleum for himself and his family. It was a largish eight-sided building, lighted by a series of oval windows, and it had a domed roof, topped by a kind of pumpkin-shaped object rising into a spire, a form in which Swedish architects greatly delighted. The roof was of copper externally, and was painted black, while the walls, in common with those of the church, were staringly white. To this mausoleum there was no access from the church. It had a portal and steps of its own on the northern side. Past the churchyard the path to the village goes, and not more than three or four minutes bring you to the inn door. On the first day of his stay at Råbäck Mr. Wraxall found the church door open, and made those notes of the interior which I have epitomized. Into the mausoleum, however, he could not make his way. He could by looking through the keyhole just descry that there were fine marble effigies and sarcophagi of copper, and a wealth of armorial ornament, which made him very anxious to spend some time in investigation. The papers he had come to examine at the manor-house proved to be of just the kind he wanted for his book. There were family correspondence, journals, and account-books of the earliest owners of the estate, very carefully kept and clearly written, full of amusing and picturesque detail. The first De la Gardie appeared in them as a strong and capable man. Shortly after the building of the mansion there had been a period of distress in the district, and the peasants had risen and attacked several châteaux and done some damage. The owner of Råbäck took a leading part in suppressing the trouble, and there was reference to executions of ringleaders and severe punishments inflicted with no sparing hand. The portrait of this Magnus de la Gardie was one of the best in the house, and Mr. Wraxall studied it with no little interest after his day's work. He gives no detailed description of it, but I gather that the face impressed him rather by its power than by its beauty or goodness; in fact, he writes that Count Magnus was an almost phenomenally ugly man. On this day Mr. Wraxall took his supper with the family, and walked back in the late but still bright evening. "I must remember," he writes, "to ask the sexton if he can let me into the mausoleum at the church. He evidently has access to it himself, for I saw him to-night standing on the steps, and, as I thought, locking or unlocking the door." I find that early on the following day Mr. Wraxall had some conversation with his landlord. His setting it down at such length as he does surprised me at first; but I soon realized that the papers I was reading were, at least in their beginning, the materials for the book he was meditating, and that it was to have been one of those quasi-journalistic productions which admit of the introduction of an admixture of conversational matter. His object, he says, was to find out whether any traditions of Count Magnus de la Gardie lingered on in the scenes of that gentleman's activity, and whether the popular estimate of him were favourable or not. He found that the Count was decidedly not a favourite. If his tenants came late to their work on the days which they owed to him as Lord of the Manor, they were set on the wooden horse, or flogged and branded in the manor-house yard. One or two cases there were of men who had occupied lands which encroached on the lord's domain, and whose houses had been mysteriously burnt on a winter's night, with the whole family inside. But what seemed to dwell on the innkeeper's mind most—for he returned to the subject more than once—was that the Count had been on the Black Pilgrimage, and had brought something or someone back with him.
You will naturally inquire, as Mr. Wraxall did, what the Black Pilgrimage may have been. But your curiosity on the point must remain unsatisfied for the time being, just as his did. The landlord was evidently unwilling to give a full answer, or indeed any answer, on the point, and, being called out for a moment, trotted off with obvious alacrity, only putting his head in at the door a few minutes afterwards to say that he was called away to Skara, and should not be back till evening. So Mr. Wraxall had to go unsatisfied to his day's work at the manor-house. The papers on which he was just then engaged soon put his thoughts into another channel, for he had to occupy himself with glancing over the correspondence between Sophia Albertina in Stockholm and her married cousin Ulrica Leonora at Råbäck in the years 1705-1710. The letters were of exceptional interest from the light they threw upon the culture of that period in Sweden, as anyone can testify who has read the full edition of them in the publications of the Swedish Historical Manuscripts Commission. In the afternoon he had done with these, and after returning the boxes in which they were kept to their places on the shelf, he proceeded, very naturally, to take down some of the volumes nearest to them, in order to determine which of them had best be his principal subject of investigation next day. The shelf he had hit upon was occupied mostly by a collection of account-books in the writing of the first Count Magnus. But one among them was not an account-book, but a book of alchemical and other tracts in another sixteenth-century hand. Not being very familiar with alchemical literature, Mr. Wraxall spends much space which he might have spared in setting out the names and beginnings of the various treatises: The book of the Phœnix, book of the Thirty Words, book of the Toad, book of Miriam, Turba philosophorum, and so forth; and then he announces with a good deal of circumstance his delight at finding, on a leaf originally left blank near the middle of the book, some writing of Count Magnus himself headed "Liber nigræ peregrinationis." It is true that only a few lines were written, but there was quite enough to show that the landlord had that morning been referring to a belief at least as old as the time of Count Magnus, and probably shared by him. This is the English of what was written: "If any man desires to obtain a long life, if he would obtain a faithful messenger and see the blood of his enemies, it is necessary that he should first go into the city of Chorazin, and there salute the prince...." Here there was an erasure of one word, not very thoroughly done, so that Mr. Wraxall felt pretty sure that he was right in reading it as aëris ("of the air"). But there was no more of the text copied, only a line in Latin: "Quære reliqua hujus materiei inter secretiora" (See the rest of this matter among the more private things). It could not be denied that this threw a rather lurid light upon the tastes and beliefs of the Count; but to Mr. Wraxall, separated from him by nearly three centuries, the thought that he might have added to his general forcefulness alchemy, and to alchemy something like magic, only made him a more picturesque figure; and when, after a rather prolonged contemplation of his picture in the hall, Mr. Wraxall set out on his homeward way, his mind was full of the thought of Count Magnus. He had no eyes for his surroundings, no perception of the evening scents of the woods or the evening light on the lake; and when all of a sudden he pulled up short, he was astonished to find himself already at the gate of the churchyard, and within a few minutes of his dinner. His eyes fell on the mausoleum. "Ah," he said, "Count Magnus, there you are. I should dearly like to see you." "Like many solitary men," he writes, "I have a habit of talking to myself aloud; and, unlike some of the Greek and Latin particles, I do not expect an answer. Certainly, and perhaps fortunately in this case, there was neither voice nor any that regarded: only the woman who, I suppose, was cleaning up the church, dropped some metallic object on the floor, whose clang startled me. Count Magnus, I think, sleeps sound enough." That same evening the landlord of the inn, who had heard Mr. Wraxall say that he wished to see the clerk or deacon (as he would be called in Sweden) of the parish, introduced him to that official in the inn parlour. A visit to the De la Gardie tomb-house was soon arranged for the next day, and a little general conversation ensued. Mr. Wraxall, remembering that one function of Scandinavian deacons is to teach candidates for Confirmation, thought he would refresh his own memory on a Biblical point. "Can you tell me," he said, "anything about Chorazin?" The deacon seemed startled, but readily reminded him how that village had once been denounced. "To be sure," said Mr. Wraxall; "it is, I suppose, quite a ruin now?" "So I expect," replied the deacon. "I have heard some of our old priests say that Antichrist is to be born there; and there are tales——" "Ah! what tales are those?" Mr. Wraxall put in. "Tales, I was going to say, which I have forgotten," said the deacon; and soon after that he said good night. The landlord was now alone, and at Mr. Wraxall's mercy; and that inquirer was not inclined to spare him. "Herr Nielsen," he said, "I have found out something about the Black Pilgrimage. You may as well tell me what you know. What did the Count bring back with him?" Swedes are habitually slow, perhaps, in answering, or perhaps the landlord was an exception. I am not sure; but Mr. Wraxall notes that the landlord spent at least one minute in looking at him before he said anything at all. Then he came close up to his guest, and with a good deal of effort he spoke: "Mr. Wraxall, I can tell you this one little tale, and no more—not any more. You must not ask anything when I have done. In my grandfather's time—that is, ninety-two years ago—there were two men who said: 'The Count is dead; we do not care for him. We will go to-night and have a free hunt in his wood'—the long wood on the hill that you have seen behind Råbäck. Well, those that heard them say this, they said: 'No, do not go; we are sure you will meet with persons walking who should not be walking. They should be resting, not walking.' These men laughed. There were no forest-men to keep the wood, because no one wished to hunt there. The family were not here at the house. These men could do what they wished. "Very well, they go to the wood that night. My grandfather was sitting here in this room. It was the summer, and a light night. With the window open, he could see out to the wood, and hear. "So he sat there, and two or three men with him, and they listened. At first they hear nothing at all; then they hear someone—you know how far away it is—they hear someone scream, just as if the most inside part of his soul was twisted out of him. All of them in the room caught hold of each other, and they sat so for three-quarters of an hour. Then they hear someone else, only about three hundred ells off. They hear him laugh out loud: it was not one of those two men that laughed, and, indeed, they have all of them said that it was not any man at all. After that they hear a great door shut. "Then, when it was just light with the sun, they all went to the priest. They said to him: "'Father, put on your gown and your ruff, and come to bury these men, Anders Bjornsen and Hans Thorbjorn.' "You understand that they were sure these men were dead. So they went to the wood—my grandfather never forgot this. He said they were all like so many dead men themselves. The priest, too, he was in a white fear. He said when they came to him: "'I heard one cry in the night, and I heard one laugh afterwards. If I cannot forget that, I shall not be able to sleep again.' "So they went to the wood, and they found these men on the edge of the wood. Hans Thorbjorn was standing with his back against a tree, and all the time he was pushing with his hands—pushing something away from him which was not there. So he was not dead. And they led him away, and took him to the house at Nykjoping, and he died before the winter; but he went on pushing with his hands. Also Anders Bjornsen was there; but he was dead. And I tell you this about Anders Bjornsen, that he was once a beautiful man, but now his face was not there, because the flesh of it was sucked away off the bones. You understand that? My grandfather did not forget that. And they laid him on the bier which they brought, and they put a cloth over his head, and the priest walked before; and they began to sing the psalm for the dead as well as they could. So, as they were singing the end of the first verse, one fell down, who was carrying the head of the bier, and the others looked back, and they saw that the cloth had fallen off, and the eyes of Anders Bjornsen were looking up, because there was nothing to close over them. And this they could not bear. Therefore the priest laid the cloth upon him, and sent for a spade, and they buried him in that place." The next day Mr. Wraxall records that the deacon called for him soon after his breakfast, and took him to the church and mausoleum. He noticed that the key of the latter was hung on a nail just by the pulpit, and it occurred to him that, as the church door seemed to be left unlocked as a rule, it would not be difficult for him to pay a second and more private visit to the monuments if there proved to be more of interest among them than could be digested at first. The building, when he entered it, he found not unimposing. The monuments, mostly large erections of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were dignified if luxuriant, and the epitaphs and heraldry were copious. The central space of the domed room was occupied by three copper sarcophagi, covered with finely-engraved ornament. Two of them had, as is commonly the case in Denmark and Sweden, a large metal crucifix on the lid. The third, that of Count Magnus, as it appeared, had, instead of that, a full-length effigy engraved upon it, and round the edge were several bands of similar ornament representing various scenes. One was a battle, with cannon belching out smoke, and walled towns, and troops of pikemen. Another showed an execution. In a third, among trees, was a man running at full speed, with flying hair and outstretched hands. After him followed a strange form; it would be hard to say whether the artist had intended it for a man, and was unable to give the requisite similitude, or whether it was intentionally made as monstrous as it looked. In view of the skill with which the rest of the drawing was done, Mr. Wraxall felt inclined to adopt the latter idea. The figure was unduly short, and was for the most part muffled in a hooded garment which swept the ground. The only part of the form which projected from that shelter was not shaped like any hand or arm. Mr. Wraxall compares it to the tentacle of a devil-fish, and continues: "On seeing this, I said to myself, 'This, then, which is evidently an allegorical representation of some kind—a fiend pursuing a hunted soul—may be the origin of the story of Count Magnus and his mysterious companion. Let us see how the huntsman is pictured: doubtless it will be a demon blowing his horn.'" But, as it turned out, there was no such sensational figure, only the semblance of a cloaked man on a hillock, who stood leaning on a stick, and watching the hunt with an interest which the engraver had tried to express in his attitude. Mr. Wraxall noted the finely-worked and massive steel padlocks—three in number—which secured the sarcophagus. One of them, he saw, was detached, and lay on the pavement. And then, unwilling to delay the deacon longer or to waste his own working-time, he made his way onward to the manor-house. It is curious," he notes, "how on retracing a familiar path one's thoughts engross one to the absolute exclusion of surrounding objects. To-night, for the second time, I had entirely failed to notice where I was going (I had planned a private visit to the tomb-house to copy the epitaphs), when I suddenly, as it were, awoke to consciousness, and found myself (as before) turning in at the churchyard gate, and, I believe, singing or chanting some such words as, 'Are you awake, Count Magnus? Are you asleep, Count Magnus?' and then something more which I have failed to recollect. It seemed to me that I must have been behaving in this nonsensical way for some time." He found the key of the mausoleum where he had expected to find it, and copied the greater part of what he wanted; in fact, he stayed until the light began to fail him. "I must have been wrong," he writes, "in saying that one of the padlocks of my Count's sarcophagus was unfastened; I see to-night that two are loose. I picked both up, and laid them carefully on the window-ledge, after trying unsuccessfully to close them. The remaining one is still firm, and, though I take it to be a spring lock, I cannot guess how it is opened. Had I succeeded in undoing it, I am almost afraid I should have taken the liberty of opening the sarcophagus. It is strange, the interest I feel in the personality of this, I fear, somewhat ferocious and grim old noble." The day following was, as it turned out, the last of Mr. Wraxall's stay at Råbäck. He received letters connected with certain investments which made it desirable that he should return to England; his work among the papers was practically done, and travelling was slow. He decided, therefore, to make his farewells, put some finishing touches to his notes, and be off. These finishing touches and farewells, as it turned out, took more time than he had expected. The hospitable family insisted on his staying to dine with them—they dined at three—and it was verging on half-past six before he was outside the iron gates of Råbäck. He dwelt on every step of his walk by the lake, determined to saturate himself, now that he trod it for the last time, in the sentiment of the place and hour. And when he reached the summit of the churchyard knoll, he lingered for many minutes, gazing at the limitless prospect of woods near and distant, all dark beneath a sky of liquid green. When at last he turned to go, the thought struck him that surely he must bid farewell to Count Magnus as well as the rest of the De la Gardies. The church was but twenty yards away, and he knew where the key of the mausoleum hung. It was not long before he was standing over the great copper coffin, and, as usual, talking to himself aloud. "You may have been a bit of a rascal in your time, Magnus," he was saying, "but for all that I should like to see you, or, rather——" "Just at that instant," he says, "I felt a blow on my foot. Hastily enough I drew it back, and something fell on the pavement with a clash. It was the third, the last of the three padlocks which had fastened the sarcophagus. I stooped to pick it up, and—Heaven is my witness that I am writing only the bare truth—before I had raised myself there was a sound of metal hinges creaking, and I distinctly saw the lid shifting upwards. I may have behaved like a coward, but I could not for my life stay for one moment. I was outside that dreadful building in less time than I can write—almost as quickly as I could have said—the words; and what frightens me yet more, I could not turn the key in the lock. As I sit here in my room noting these facts, I ask myself (it was not twenty minutes ago) whether that noise of creaking metal continued, and I cannot tell whether it did or not. I only know that there was something more than I have written that alarmed me, but whether it was sound or sight I am not able to remember. What is this that I have done?" Poor Mr. Wraxall! He set out on his journey to England on the next day, as he had planned, and he reached England in safety; and yet, as I gather from his changed hand and inconsequent jottings, a broken man. One of several small notebooks that have come to me with his papers gives, not a key to, but a kind of inkling of, his experiences. Much of his journey was made by canal-boat, and I find not less than six painful attempts to enumerate and describe his fellow-passengers. The entries are of this kind: "24. Pastor of village in Skåne. Usual black coat and soft black hat. "25. Commercial traveller from Stockholm going to Trollhättan. Black cloak, brown hat. "26. Man in long black cloak, broad-leafed hat, very old-fashioned." This entry is lined out, and a note added: "Perhaps identical with No. 13. Have not yet seen his face." On referring to No. 13, I find that he is a Roman priest in a cassock. The net result of the reckoning is always the same. Twenty-eight people appear in the enumeration, one being always a man in a long black cloak and broad hat, and the other a "short figure in dark cloak and hood." On the other hand, it is always noted that only twenty-six passengers appear at meals, and that the man in the cloak is perhaps absent, and the short figure is certainly absent. On reaching England, it appears that Mr. Wraxall landed at Harwich, and that he resolved at once to put himself out of the reach of some person or persons whom he never specifies, but whom he had evidently come to regard as his pursuers. Accordingly he took a vehicle—it was a closed fly—not trusting the railway, and drove across country to the village of Belchamp St. Paul. It was about nine o'clock on a moonlight August night when he neared the place. He was sitting forward, and looking out of the window at the fields and thickets—there was little else to be seen—racing past him. Suddenly he came to a cross-road. At the corner two figures were standing motionless; both were in dark cloaks; the taller one wore a hat, the shorter a hood. He had no time to see their faces, nor did they make any motion that he could discern. Yet the horse shied violently and broke into a gallop, and Mr. Wraxall sank back into his seat in something like desperation. He had seen them before. Arrived at Belchamp St. Paul, he was fortunate enough to find a decent furnished lodging, and for the next twenty-four hours he lived, comparatively speaking, in peace. His last notes were written on this day. They are too disjointed and ejaculatory to be given here in full, but the substance of them is clear enough. He is expecting a visit from his pursuers—how or when he knows not—and his constant cry is "What has he done?" and "Is there no hope?" Doctors, he knows, would call him mad, policemen would laugh at him. The parson is away. What can he do but lock his door and cry to God? People still remembered last year at Belchamp St. Paul how a strange gentleman came one evening in August years back; and how the next morning but one he was found dead, and there was an inquest; and the jury that viewed the body fainted, seven of 'em did, and none of 'em wouldn't speak to what they see, and the verdict was visitation of God; and how the people as kep' the 'ouse moved out that same week, and went away from that part. But they do not, I think, know that any glimmer of light has ever been thrown, or could be thrown, on the mystery. It so happened that last year the little house came into my hands as part of a legacy. It had stood empty since 1863, and there seemed no prospect of letting it; so I had it pulled down, and the papers of which I have given you an abstract were found in a forgotten cupboard under the window in the best bedroom.

Welcome to the Reverse: 1999 Daily Questions Megathread!

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Sober Song #190
Mama - My Chemical Romance
​
Today was Mother’s Day for the USA, so happy Mom Day to everyone who celebrated it. I talked about my actual relationship with my own mom in post #176 (“Your Mother Should Know”) and this song has nothing at all to do with that. It just came to mind because of the day and it is a song I really like, but of course I had to do some thinking about how it actually relates to or supports my sobriety. It does remind me of how I hid my addiction from my parents for a long time because I didn’t want to alarm or worry them (“Stop asking me questions, I'd hate to see you cry”). It occurred to me what a stupid idea that was on the night I had a friend take me to the ER because I was concerned about withdrawal symptoms. I cried in the car as my friend drove, suddenly scared that I could die never having told my parents what was happening. It also makes me think of all the pressure I put on myself to be successful or perfect or something like that. My parents didn’t actually put this pressure on me; I did it to myself. But it still felt like I was doing it for them on some level and could never quite win (“You should've been, I could have been a better son”).
​
The main thing I enjoy about this song is how batshit insane it sounds. This effect is really enhanced by a video of MCR performing it live in Mexico City back when they were at peak popularity. The lights and fire on the stage are fantastic and lead singer Gerard Way has his unhinged stage presence ratcheted up to 11. I think the song also has a theme of existential dread to it (“Oh well, now, Mama, we're all gonna die / Mama, we're all gonna die”), which is such a vibe for me. However, in contrast to a lot of my other favorite angsty songs, “Mama” doesn’t waste much time weeping over the possible meaninglessness of life. Instead, it leans into the tragic absurdity with dark humor (“Mama, we all go to Hell / It's really quite pleasant except for the smell”) and aggressively callous acceptance (“So raise your glass high, for tomorrow, we die”). The album version of the song ends with tinny, clownish music and the sounds of melodramatic sobbing, but the live performance I mentioned features Way laughing maniacally and saying “A surprise party…for me!? You shouldn’t have…” before he saunters away into the darkness. Sometimes that’s the only type of reaction that seems appropriate for life’s “surprises”.
​
Mama, we all go to Hell
Mama, we all go to Hell
I'm writing this letter and wishing you well
Mama, we all go to Hell
Oh well, now, Mama, we're all gonna die
Mama, we're all gonna die
Stop asking me questions, I'd hate to see you cry
Mama, we're all gonna die
​
And when we go, don't blame us, yeah
We'll let the fires just bathe us, yeah
You made us oh so famous
We'll never let you go
And when you go, don't return to me, my love
​
Mama, we're all full of lies
Mama, we're meant for the flies
And right now, they're building a coffin your size
Mama, we're all full of lies
​
Well, mother, what the war did to my legs and to my tongue
You should've raised a baby girl, I should've been a better son
If you could coddle the infection, they can amputate at once
You should've been, I could have been a better son
​
And when we go, don't blame us, yeah
We'll let the fires just bathe us, yeah
You made us oh so famous
We'll never let you go
​
She said, "You ain't no son of mine
For what you've done, they're gonna find
A place for you and just you mind your manners when you go
And when you go, don't return to me, my love," that's right
​
Mama, we all go to Hell
Mama, we all go to Hell
It's really quite pleasant except for the smell
Mama, we all go to Hell (One, two, three, four)
​
Mama, Mama, Mama
Mama, Mama, Mama, Ma
​
"And if you would call me a sweetheart
I'd maybe then sing you a song"
But there's shit that I've done with this fuck of a gun
You would cry out your eyes all along
​
We're damned after all
Through fortune and flame, we fall
And if you can stay, then I'll show you the way
To return from the ashes you call
We all carry on (We all carry on)
When our brothers in arms are gone (When our brothers in arms are gone)
So raise your glass high, for tomorrow, we die
And return from the ashes you call
​
A surprise substance abuse problem…for me? You shouldn’t have. IWNDWYT <3

Hello World - So I wrote a letter to the person that led me into SCJ. Totally forgot the word they used for this and that is so exciting!!! I love forgetting them! Please don't tell me. Anyways, I had known her my whole life and a lot of shitty things went down when I left and lately I had just been getting a haunting sense of injustice towards the whole story and I needed to write out how I was feeling. Turns out, it was really cathartic. It helped me immensely. I know that there must be so many people out there who have been wronged by SCJ and have left the cult with their lives in tatters and so I wrote this for you too. You are treasure! You're worthy of new love and friendship. You’re a shining star too, damn it! Just thought someone should remind you.
Love,
Steorra
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
To Whom It May Concern,
For three years now, I’ve never felt the need to remember anything from the era of you. It surely wasn’t easy to move on from you, but I did it. You hadn’t crossed my mind in so long. Then recently, I’ve had these annoying splashes of bitter memories that turn up in my life after all this time. Stirring up, once again the desire for justice that I had to lay down a long time ago. I mean if we could put every moron who wasted our time in prison, mediocrity would cease to be, but ALAS (you always hated that word) you’re still out there. So, I moved on. I had to. That was winning in a way I never knew I needed to learn. Yet, this feeling scratches at the door anew in traumatic mystery. The only thing that’s really changed since rebuilding after you is that I started writing. However, I’ve never written about you.
At the beginning of this story, your words of eloquence secretly dripping with malice and ill-intent, entrapped me into a multi-year mental, physical, spiritual, and emotional jail sentence. Truly, if there was a tangible definition of “love-bombing” it wouldn’ be some romantic affair. It would be you. You preyed upon my fragile heart that was experiencing burn-out after years in ministry. You took that as the perfect opportunity to build up your empire from my ashes. Blaming the church for every hard thing I experienced along the way and providing the comfort and shoulder to cry on that I needed. You manipulated me into doubting my faith, my community, my family and you did it all with your fancy parable studies and promises of a heavenly future.
Well. Maybe if your words got me into this whole mess, maybe words can help me hammer the final nail into this coffin-like story once and for all. In all honesty, my words have been timid, scared, and shaken since you shattered me and left me to pick up the pieces all by myself. But I did it. I picked up every piece and rebuilt it. I rebuilt a life I can be proud of. I don’t have a life of luxury by any means, but I have a new sense of dignity and fight I never knew I could have. Dignity. Now there’s something you’ll never understand, so I’ll just move on.
Since you, everyone on the outside thinks I’m delayed in livelihood. They don’t always say it out loud, but it’s written all over their faces. Even someone like you could see it. They think I’m behind in life because I don’t have a list of things I can post on my facebook marking the monuments of a thriving christian life. But it’s because they don’t know. They are completely unaware that while they were living their lives with minor obstacles, my twenties were a full blown quiet war in constant brainwashing combat. A silent war; still bloody, deadly, filled with casualties and loss that even the strongest of men couldn’t withstand. It shattered the best of fiery faith and struck with deceptions full of the strongest poison earth could offer. And I fought like hell to thrive, then to survive, and then to flee when the walls of my life were burning down all around me. I dragged myself from their smoke, fire, and deception to the edge of the battlefield and overcame it. My flag was left standing, but none of my “friends” were left standing beside me. Not even my “best friend.”
But no war is really over when it’s over. Soldiers who return from combat deal with wounds, scars seen and unseen, trauma, fear, invisible enemies all around them and inside them triggered by the smallest of things in everyday life. If figuratively that was the war and I was the last soldier standing, I returned home to a world that was completely contaminated by your warfare. I can’t listen to my favorite song anymore, because it makes me think of you and the nights sitting on the floor of my kitchen bruising my arms and soaking the night with sorrow I didn’t know my body could hold. Wondering where my friend had gone.
Since you, victory wasn’t immediate. I lost everything in the war. Just as you intended. Family, community, romance, purpose, and childhood. I bet that doesn't even keep you up at night. You would need a conscience for that. You have known me since I was three. You had the trust that only a lifetime could grow. Looking back now, that was really the only way I was ever going to join your backyard cult. Following someone I loved. I’ve come to believe from this experience that childhood betrayal is the worst kind of betrayal. You see, you took all of my youth and you don’t even care. The thought that I could have had an upbringing without you and all the heartbreak you caused makes me so angry because I want that SO BADLY. Instead I live in the aftermath of the nightmare that was you. Haunting the nostalgia of my life with every detail that led up to being sacrificed on the altar you helped them construct. They turned me into a warning and a lesson against “rebellion.” But you basically authored the whole story until I was a lifetime of being the victim in a tragic tale I can’t rewind. You are my wild regret in life.
So that was a little taste, but here’s what I truly think of you after hurting me for all those years. I hope you make it to the top of this ladder you’re climbing. I hope you reach all the glory you wanted. You left every dream you had and everyone in your life behind to do it, so I hope you get it. I hope they praise your name, give you an office, a title, a class, a spouse, a child, all the fruit your heart could desire. At the top of your dream when you least expect it, I hope someone kicks that ladder out from underneath you and lets you dangle in an endless uncertainty until you finally plummet into the deepest darkest loss you’ve ever known. Just like you did to me.
I hope you get 10x as far as I did…. before they betray you and leave you out in the cold without an apology or a bit of credit in your direction. I hope no one helps you heal and you have to do it all alone. I hope you start hurting yourself because you have no where to place the blame but on your own head. I hope you question your own intelligence and wonder where it all went wrong. I hope you sob on your kitchen floor. I hope they come to your door and ask you “what’s wrong?” like they have no idea why you could have slipped into these wildly uncalled for emotions. I hope they blame it on your humanity and gas light every desire you have to be seen and heard. Just like you did to me.
…and I hope everyone forgets you. Just like you did me.
Long after you’ve healed and moved on. I hope a figurative Mt. Vesuvius blankets that backyard cult you loved in an unrecognizable layer of ash and poisonous gas and fades out from existence of this world. It’ll seep through bars of the earth into Hades forever condemned and forgotten. Just like you….and just like you did to me.
Anyways. *Takes deep breath.* I live by the water now. It’s really peaceful. There’s no running, no toiling, no drama, no noise. It’s the kind of quiet you said we’d never have until it all ended, but here it is. I like to write here. I have a dog. He’s a good friend. You could learn a lot from him. He’s really loyal and he never eats his own vomit.
I see God in every wave, tree, and animal here. A beautiful reminder that not everything we were reading was false. Just all the parts they made up and exploited vulnerable people with.
There is a part of me that knows there’s a truth underneath this story that I haven’t mentioned yet. A piece that would give you some credit. It’s true, I would not be as strong as I am today without you in my story. I would not be as thoughtful. Careful. Hard working. Discerning. Hell, I wouldn’t have started writing. I now write stories of hope. True friendship. Redemption. Gratefulness. Don’t worry, you’ll never be making a cameo in any of my work unless I need a back-stabbing-20-something-bitch who drives a janky Honda around the suburbs and can’t afford her $6 cup of trendy coffee. It’s funny to think you all think the great betrayer is Mr. Oh. Oh no, it’s you, you crusty bitch, and I wouldn’t be paranoid of people taking advantage of me without you. I would still be naive, innocent, childlike, and hopelessly good-hearted.
So while you were trying to tear down my life and steal my happiness, I’ve rebuilt parts of me that are now unshakable. I’ve found a purpose that brings me pure joy. I help people. I spend time with my family. So thank you. From the bottom of my heart. You gave me the fight inside of me to get here. I’m unstoppable now. I don’t laugh as much as I used to, but I’m working on that. I’ll get there. Don’t worry. You can’t have that either, sorry.
Let’s talk about your “group” for a minute. I played by their impossible rules because they promised endless paradise, but the gods of your backyard cult were so weak. They're all just narcissists that like to hear themselves talk, but the voices of basement dwellers and secret keepers aren’t noble. They’re scared of losing their precious power and they were just wrong. At the end of the day, they were just dumb kids who followed wolves into pastures to lose the uniqueness God created for them.
Foundationally, there’s no point to a heaven that isolates, shuns, and abandons. No one wants your mascot-serving gospel. The heaven they showed us was black and white. We were never supposed to be contained within perfect lines and marketed by race. We were supposed to walk with God in the Garden of Eden in the beautiful mystery of wild creation. I hope heaven is a kaleidoscope of color, people, and joy and absolutely nothing like the one you tried to film and show us all.
By the way, I only teach elementary math here, but I’m pretty sure your numbers are wrong, but hey! What do I know? I’m just a “star that fell from heaven!” Thank goodness too. After I “fell,” I learned to shine without you. I did it all by myself and I might not be in the sky anymore, but I’m pretty beautiful walking around all these earthlings if I do say so myself. A couple of scars here and there, but you don’t get any of the profits of this light, this strength, and this peace. I earned that and I protect it pretty “religiously.”
To your group, I was a lost cause to their superior cause. Too fucked in the head to be helped. My human anxiety was just too big for their god. Turns out that big anxiety saved my life. Also, it turns out their god was really small because my God met me with huge, sovereign arms and prodigal joy when I finally returned home. Truth is, Calvary says I’m not hard to love, but treasure just wasn't made for everybody.
Now, I’m about to turn 30 in a few days and I’ve been reminiscing about all the childhood memories tainted by your presence, so I decided to make new ones. I’m going to WASTE a whole day riding roller coasters for my birthday. Watch the movies and listen to the music you never approved of. Wear cheetah print converse. Get a tattoo?? Dye my hair an UNNATURAL color?? Wear earrings everywhere!! Drink my wine in public. You know. Go TOTALLY crazy. Try to be young again. For me. For kid me.
So thank you. I’m here because of you and I’m going to have so many more days and memories without you that I look forward to. I will never take that for granted. Like you did me. Cuz I'm a shining star, bitch!
Love,
Your Shining Star ✨

Sorry, I know there's a Shadow Tower Reddit, but it seems to get no activity.
My issue is while I'm doing okay in terms of fighting and building up healing potions (and I found the hidden path from the healing fountain to the smithy so that was huge) I keep kind of running in circles?
I made a bit of progress yesterday, went to Fire World, killed Abraxas, went through the gate, got a fire key and a flaming key, went through another portal and that seems to have eventually led me back to the tower itself. But I just keeping going in loops. I killed the weird dwarf and freed the lady who hates humans from her... ice coffin thing?
A serious issue is that I am absolutely terrible at making mental maps, sometimes I'll take a wrong turn using the water fountain -> smithy thing a few times, and that's only a couple of turns!
I tried looking up maps, but the only one I found was a more generalized world map that just kind of listed large areas, but not how anything connects. Can't seem to find any actual maps with individual room layouts or anything. I'm worried this game is gonna take me 5x longer than usual just due to my awful sense of direction.

Hello, I cannot seem to find a way to optimize my plot space for a practical and efficieng layout.
I tried to check some online guides but either they're outdated or they don't really explain how to build a base from scratch in an optimal way.
Like how many "rooms" should I prepare? - workshop - forge - alchemy lab - library - prisons - gem-cutting lab - servants + throne room - castle heart + coffin room (?)
Did I miss something? How do I organize space for all these production environments? Also I need a storage room, where do I put it?
How do people generally approach base layout? Cause I'm completely lost.

When I was 12, my “dad” (Mark) admitted to having me just to get money. (I could go on and on about the build-up, but I’ll try and keep things to a minimum)
Mark was always Machiavellian in nature. Even when I was little, I would catch glimpses of it on occasion. I took the lion’s share as the middle child, my older brother and sister were only ignored and used to vent. My younger brother, meanwhile, was the golden goose who was pampered all his life.
Every chance Mark got to bring harm my way, he took. I learned to swim because he took me out on a boat and threw me into the water, then turned on the motor to create some distance. The currents dragged me under and I remember everything starting to fade, before I suddenly bolted upward and gasped for air. I was probably two or three, before pre-k, that’s all I remember.
Another time, he walked off without me at the airport, told me to find the right gate or he would leave without me. Thankfully, I was able to find my mother, who dropped us off, and she was able to get me to the gate. I was punished for getting help by not being given food or water for the duration of the trip.
He would do that sort of thing all of the time. He used to call them games, but eventually he just started saying they were tests to prove how great I was, and to show the little soldier he was making me into. It was just his way of elevating himself. His accomplishments were his, mine were just his.
Mark would end up getting injured and filed a lawsuit, winning and getting a settlement. To get more money, he developed a drug problem, but kept it hidden. He fought tooth and nail in the divorce to get partial custody of us.
When he got a place of his own, the siblings each got their own room, except for me. I was made to sleep underneath the deck outside, a “camping experience.” One day, my dog ran out and I was told to find him and bring him back. The next week, the dog was gone for good. He started taking away the things that I enjoyed, telling me to focus on my studies and exercises.
We would “wrestle” every day. He would bend my arms back until they snapped, or hold me in a chokehold until I passed out. Once, he even handcuffed me to the refrigerator and told me to find a way to bust out. I ended up discovering how to dislocate my thumbs and slip out.
When I turned twelve, he kicked everything into high gear. Instead of the stairway, I had to sleep in a small crawl space that couldn’t have been three feet high. There were sharp rocks in it and I was told not to cut myself.
He had me read both versions of the Art of War, then give a summary of both. He then explained that he and my mother were in a legal battle for money resulting in the lawsuit. He wanted to use me to testify against her. He said that all I ever was and will be is because of him, and that I owe him.
I ended up playing along, buying time to collect dirt on him. I had hidden cameras scattered throughout the house to show how he treated us. Then, I gave him the choice to either drop the lawsuit or fail.
He tried to threaten me, but I ended up just using the same choke-hold on him, and then pushed him backwards. I finally asked why he even bothered to have us. That’s when he said it was all for money. When I asked why my younger brother was the golden one and why I got the harsh treatment he said it was because of his mother. He could only get his inheritance if he had a son who went into the Marines and continued the family legacy.
He said my older brother didn’t have the “family fire” in his eyes and thought he would be too weak and kill himself before he ever succeeded. The nail in the coffin was when he revealed the younger brother was just insurance. I opened the door and left on my brother’s bike, making my way to my mother’s.
He decided to move and sign off his rights. He sent a letter not long after, where he said everything good that happened was because of him. Sure enough, I was removed from the AP program and my high school applications were canceled, leaving me to pick up the pieces. I was originally going to skip seventh and eighth grade, but now I had to do them due to how quickly everything unraveled.

Quick note for Charlotte before I start: Hi! I found you at a pretty pivotal part of my life where I actually had the time and space to figure out who I am. Something about watching you be so authentically you made that process easier. I've always been a bit of a class clown type and seeing that displayed to the max on your videos made me relate and fall in love with you (in like, a big sister I never had way), almost instantly. So, thank you for everything you do. Sure it may just be silly videos, but they've definitely changed my life.
Alright enough with my sappy sh*t. Here's the tea, it's a doozy.
I've been with my boyfriend, let's call him Apollo, for three years as of last March. How we got together is honestly a whole other story that I'd love to share, although I didn't think it fit any of your categories, so I went with this instead.
Let's bring in the star of the story, his grandma. Let's call her Wendy.
Wendy raised my boyfriend, and due to losing his adoptive dad when he was 15, she latched onto him very intensely. He is now the only member of their family that still tries to take care of her. Everyone else treats her like a bank (ridiculous considering she's on a fixed income).
With all that in mind, I tried my best to give her the benefit of the doubt. Despite endless stories of her emotional and verbal abuses that she dishes out to Apollo pretty regularly. If anything they've gotten more constant and worse over the years I've known them.
After losing my own home last spring (again, another long story), I moved in with them. Our agreement before I moved in was that I'd pay $1000 a month if she cleared out their extra room so I could have an office. Essentially $500 per room counting Apollo's bedroom.
A important bit of context: the Fall before I moved in, Wendy started talking about moving into an apartment. An idea that never made sense considering they own a 3 bedroom, double wide mobile home. So they only have to pay the rent for the lot. This means that their home became cluttered with packed boxes and remains basically the same to this day.
The extra room was filled up with a bunch of boxes, a huge old fashioned entertainment cabinet, and a bed Apollo's cousin (River) had used when the room was his.
Shortly after moving in, I tried to help start the process of emptying the room. This swiftly got turned into an argument. She essentially started acting like we were trying to put her in the corner and take over. A sentiment I found hilarious since her behavior basically made it so I just hid in the bedroom or outside whenever I was home. I was forced to put everything but my basic necessities (and my cat [Ivy] and her stuff) into a storage unit and never got to have my office.
Within a week of living there, I heard a argument break out between Apollo and Wendy. Something I had already grown used to. Due to having a bad anxiety reaction to yelling/arguments, I usually tried my best to ignore it and just turn up the TV a bit when this happened. This time, however, I muted it and listened in. Just in time to hear her admit that she wanted us to break up.
Despite my allergy to confrontation, I flew out of bed and into her face in a matter of seconds. This happened at like, 2 in the morning on a work night, so I was beyond pissed at this point. (I work on special needs buses, so I wake up at 5.)
I almost left that night, but Apollo calmed me down. Frankly I had no where else to go, especially not anywhere that could home both of us and our cats (he has a cute orange boy named Poncho). So I stayed.
After a couple months of paying the $1000, I made a deal with Wendy. I would start doing yard work, but I was only paying $500 from now on. A deal I figured was a win-win because gardening is super satisfying to me, and it made me feel better to feel like I actually had control over something. I could help make my "home" better.
I didn't realize what a project I had signed up for. TLDR: There was a mint army that had evaded defeat for years, moss all over the entry sidewalk and the bricks around the flower beds, more weeds than grass in the lawns, and roots of a bush that ran through the majority of the smaller of the 2 lawns. Legit some roots were 5 feet long and almost 4 inches at the thickest parts. It felt like I was pulling small children out of the dirt.
The entire time I lived there I was pretty miserable. Especially since I have a bit of religious trauma and Wendy thinks she's a Christian so there was religious imagery everywhere. I couldn't even escape it in Apollo's room due to a bunch of cross necklaces hanging about and a angel above the window. I had already made up my mind, largely due to the religious factor, that I didn't want to let her near our kids I hope to have in the future. I don't trust her farther than I can throw her. I definitely wasn't cool with the concept of her trying to influence my babies.
She sealed her own coffin last September though.
Important context: I was under extremely high stress. My first paycheck of the school year got screwed up and pushed back a month. I had just gotten assigned to my first bus route (prior to that I was a substitute), and the bus driver just decided to hate me for no reason. My uncle drowned, and less than a week later my maternal grandma (a.k.a. my childhood best friend) died.
I heard the news about my grandma on a Tuesday, on Friday I had to leave work early and go to urgent care due to abdominal pain. They told me it might be my gallbladder, but to wait and see if it would pass on it's own or go to the emergency room if it got worse.
This was a last straw for me, and after some stupid argument I don't even remember anymore, I left to go stay with my family for a bit when they came to bring me soup. I just wanted to be with my mom and get away from Wendy and the awful energy of the house for a bit.
On Sunday I woke up in even worse pain. My mom took me to the emergency room and I was given pain killer. They investigated and told me I didn't have any gallbladder stones, but instead a build up of sludge (the sludge turns into the stones usually). Sludge is a lot harder to pass than stones, hence all the pain. I left with a doctor's note for the next 2 days, and decided to stay with my family for one more day.
On Monday night I went home. The next morning I slept in and woke up to find out that Wendy was kicking me out. Due to my paycheck problem I had been unable to give her rent cuz I had to prioritize gas money so I didn't lose my job. She blamed the decision on that, but considering she let River's brother (who was a druggie) stay there for 6+ months without contributing a dime, I don't believe it for a second.
That night my mom and I were talking and she disclosed that Wendy had left her a voice-mail on Sunday. One she didn't see until Tuesday morning. Wherein Wendy essentially told my mom she had to take me back because I was a burden.
I still don't even know how she got my mom's number. But I was beyond pissed.
I immediately walked away to call Wendy. Maddeningly she answered and tried acting all sweet. Over the course of our 2 phone calls, the b!tch kept hanging up on me, she claimed "I still care about you, but you need to pay your bills." (Pretty rich coming from someone I had to save from having their power and/or internet getting shut off several times.)
On my last call, she sent it straight to voice-mail. I bitterly called her a coward and promised someday, I'd take the boys away and leave her alone the way she f*cking deserves.
I've now been living in the living room of my family's apartment for 7 months. Part of which I slept on a air mattress that left my @ss on the floor most of the night, and most of which I've made do with a pile of every spare blanket I could find. Although recently I finally managed to afford a mat to upgrade my sleep situation so that's nice.
The plan now is to save up for an apartment for Apollo and I. After I save up for a car since mine decided to go kaput a month ago. (Cuz of course I didn't have enough problems already right?) Then we'll start our life together and never look back.
So, AITA for wanting to cut Wendy out of our lives? I rest my case before the honorable Judge Charlotte. Thanks for reading! c:

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

Imo it’s such ambitious sequel because Halloween 5 tries to be a story about a cursed princess who overcomes her curse and tries to free her uncle of his. Allow me to try and explain why I believe that
In the original cut of the film before it was re-shot. Michael is awakened on a slab by a dark magician, or warlock, if you will. Dr. Death as he’s been dubbed by fans
Why that scene works where the re-shot one in the theatrical version doesn’t, is because Michael’s mask has elongated, almost classically attractive features. It’s not a coincidence. It’s also not a coincidence that he looks somewhat attractive and has classically handsome features without the mask. As if…he’s a prince…a cursed prince being awoken once more. That fits with the ideas, a hermit holding Michael hostage just doesn’t.
Like, pay attention to the Halloween costumes the characters are wearing: The Devil, Werwolf, Little Red Riding Hood, Jamie is a princess, Billy is a pirate, etc. Classical fairytale staples. These are deliberate choices. The film was shot in 1989. The costumes could’ve been Reagan, a Ghostbuster, a Star Wars character; but they weren’t. If it was a weird one off then you could argue it’s merely a coincidence, but where there’s smoke…there’s fire. And all of these motifs are little campfires.
When Loomis confronts Michael in the woods with the fog rolling and Michael partially concealed by trees, tell me that shot isn’t framed and set up like something out of a fantasy movie.
There’s a pov shot of Michael watching Jamie from across the street. The shot is of Jamie in the “castle” turret combing her hair(rapunzel), the castle is guarded by police(knights) until they’re called away. Jamie and her cop/knight attempt to rappel down the castle turret on a rope(rapunzel again), the castle has a booby trap(courtesy of Dr. Loomis), Jamie lays in a coffin like sleeping beauty while Michael stands over her, Jaime the princess tries to reach her uncle and manages to draw out a rare moment of vulnerability and regret before the evil reclaims him; and then the film ends with Michael in a dungeon.
And finally notice how there’s fire on some of the bars of the dungeon…as if they’re torches.
Now…does it succeed in this vision? Ehhh.
But it tried something unique for the franchise.
Now let’s be clear do I think Girard set out to make an exploitation film that is also at its core a fairytale?
Who’s to say?
I think it’s possible that he saw that the building they were using as the Myers house looked sort of like a castle and perhaps he thought something along the lines of “Hmmm maybe I could make do with what I have and take advantage of this and put a unique spin on the movie, while I’m at it.”
I’ve heard the Dr. Death scene was re-shot because the producers thought that Girard was making some bizzare choices and they wanted it to feel like a proper follow up to Halloween 4.

Imo it’s such ambitious sequel because Halloween 5 tries to be a story about a cursed princess who overcomes her curse and tries to free her uncle of his. Allow me to try and explain why I believe that
In the original cut of the film before it was re-shot. Michael is awakened on a slab by a dark magician, or warlock, if you will. Dr. Death as he’s been dubbed by fans
Why that scene works where the re-shot one in the theatrical version doesn’t, is because Michael’s mask has elongated, almost classically attractive features. It’s not a coincidence. It’s also not a coincidence that he looks somewhat attractive and has classically handsome features without the mask. As if…he’s a prince…a cursed prince being awoken once more. That fits with the ideas, a hermit holding Michael hostage just doesn’t.
Like, pay attention to the Halloween costumes the characters are wearing: The Devil, Werwolf, Little Red Riding Hood, Jamie is a princess, Billy is a pirate, etc. Classical fairytale staples. These are deliberate choices. The film was shot in 1989. The costumes could’ve been Reagan, a Ghostbuster, a Star Wars character; but they weren’t.
When Loomis confronts Michael in the woods with the fog rolling and Michael partially concealed by trees, tell me that shot isn’t framed and set up like something out of a fantasy movie.
There’s a pov shot of Michael watching Jamie from across the street. The shot is of Jamie in the “castle” turret combing her hair(rapunzel), the castle is guarded by police(knights) until they’re called away. Jamie and her cop/knight attempt to rappel down the castle turret on a rope(rapunzel again), the castle has a booby trap(courtesy of Dr. Loomis), Jamie lays in a coffin like sleeping beauty while Michael stands over her, Jaime the princess tries to reach her uncle and manages to draw out a rare moment of vulnerability and regret before the evil reclaims him; and then the film ends with Michael in a dungeon.
And finally notice how there’s fire on some of the bars of the dungeon…as if they’re torches.
Now…does it succeed in this vision? Ehhh.
But it tried something unique for the franchise.
Now let’s be clear do I think Girard set out to make an exploitation film that is also at its core a fairytale?
Who’s to say?
I think it’s possible that he saw that the building they were using as the Myers house looked sort of like a castle and perhaps he thought something along the lines of “Hmmm maybe I could make do with what I have and take advantage of this and put a unique spin on the movie, while I’m at it.”
I’ve heard the Dr. Death scene was re-shot because the producers thought that Girard was making some bizzare choices and they wanted it to feel like a proper follow up to Halloween 4.

I dont know exactly what the issue is, but i can say with certainty that a lack of romantic success is a large portion of my lack of motivation. That and the state of our world. We'll start with the state of the world. The future is more uncertain than it has been since around the 60's i think, but coupled with economic hardship instead of a booming labor economy. A great war is possibly on the horizon, the climate collapse is finally accelerating to the point where folks cant just ignore it. Robots an AI are destabilizing labor all while the 1% is sucking more from us than ever before. Property, cars and houses, are more expensive than ever, while jobs are returning less and less on the investment you lay out in university.
For me personally, I'm insanely blessed with an upper middle class family that can take care of me, even through the coming trials, provided our household isnt literally destroyed in some Civil conflict or from some horrid tornado. This gives me a path of very low resistance where i can kind of just coast until im dead i guess, never having to bust my butt to find food or shelter. A life of mediocrity some would call it. The question becomes, why try and rise above the life that is handed to me and achieve something. This is the CRITCAL part right here, for me theres only 2 reasons to try and achieve in life, beyond just surviving which i currently have covered thanks to the circumstance of my birth - thank the maker - Personal reputation and clout or to find a mate. frankly i dont care enough about clout to work hard to build a legacy, im content just experiencing the world and history. That leaves the only possible motivator for achievement for me being the search for a mate. So onto that ol chestnut.
I am of course, yet another, 25 year old on self who has never had a girlfriend. (daring today arent we ) Not for a lack of trying though. Im not the standard case i dont think, of untouched unwashed virgin. Ive gone on plenty of dates, have slept with several women at this point, just never had sex. Ive also never slept with a date, always a hook up kind of situation. This might seem odd, but i think im slightly defective in the sexuality department, i need an emotional connection and commitment for my sexual biology to function properly. Which is to say that johnny doesnt work unless shes my girlfriend. I have tried and i have failed. Thats all well and good, excpet that i cant seem to ever get a girl past a second date. Idk what it is but ive had like 5-6 second dates but never a third date. Folks would say that it must be something to do with me, which is very possible, yet after YEARS of trying to suss out what my problem is and trying to improve i still cant succeed. And now im getting to the age where just being handsome and charming isnt enough anymore, you also need to have SOME kind of clout behind your name, at least to find the kind of girl im looking for. From my perspective, i couldnt wow a chick when we were in our poor ass early 20s theres essentially 0 chance of me wowing her in our late 20s as a broke joke who doesnt even know how to kiss properly :(. Ive kissed several girls but only briefly, i prolly have about 20-30 minutes of life time kissing experience, and 98% of that was while drunk as piss lol. I went on date last week that went well, all up until the smooch. It was BAD lmfaooo, i was thinking god dammit idk what im doing and sure enough she didnt want to see me again after :(. That date i feel like is the final nail in my dating coffin. No girl is gonna want some guy who doesnt know the basics.
So here i am essentially hopeless, i mean im employed rn and am working on my pilots license so its not all gloom, but honestly im so demoralized from the unending romantic Ls i can hardly be bothered to even try and date anymore. And that loops back into me not being motivated at all anymore. I cant get a girl, so why do anything? ill never have a family, so why work and build wealth? I have no one to fight for, so why fight? Fight for yourself theyll say. I DONT CARE ABOUT MYSELF. If can get 1400 calories a day and watch the news im okay with my life. I NEED someone to fight for. I studied anthropology and History in university so i like to think how i would've faired historically. Its not a fun thought :(. Its not fun becuase in pretty much any other time or culture I wouldve been considered a prime mate and likely wouldve been life long paired before 20. I think mentally i literally NEED a woman to fight for, biologically. Without that, going back all the way to pre neolithic era, i think i would've just left my village to either die alone or find a place else where. In the modern era, i just sit and exist, going through the motions unsure of why im doing anything at all, for what is the point if youre not leaving anything for anyone.
I do love flying planes tho, so thats cool. I plan on adventuring around the world once i get my license, but after doing that for a couple years, what then? ill only be 30 but i dont see what else there is to do other than work eat shit and watch the news. With no love there is no life :(.
Also this isnt me asking for dating advice, i just want to see if im the only person feeling this way. Dont tell me to go the gym blahh blahh blahh, cuz confidence and physical attractiveness are not my issues. By all accounts Im a fun guy to be around, as long as i dont go ranting about the pacific campaign in ww2 or alexander the great or something lol, and am Handsome, some would say very handsome.
Anyone else wondering whats the point of trying?

There was a boy. I’d known him since I was 5 but it wasn’t until I was older that I truly noticed him. We were in 6th grade when we started taking an advanced math class together. I could tell he was smart, funny, and a person I’d want to be around for a long time. Middle school and all the drama that ensues during that time quickly invaded my life. My social group shifted and I found myself closer to my friend, Dakota. By the time we were in 7th grade he was tall and strong. Blond hair and a light greenish set of smart eyes. We started working together outside of school. My dad worked for his dad and I often found myself at their house. Dakota had one older brother, a younger brother, and a younger sister. I’m the oldest of four so I could handle the chaos of lots of kids in a home. I had some of my most fun memories in middle school at that home. Not just me and Dakota, but with other friends we worked with, our siblings, and family friends. Nerf gun fights, swimming in the pool, and playing manhunt on the homestead that they lived on. I developed what you could consider a crush on Dakota. And the feeling was mutual. He hinted with the not-so-subtle flirting of a 14 year old boy. Pulling my hair, taking my things, and throwing snacks were often his go-to moves.
One night at a Christmas party, us “kids” were watching a movie while the adults played games and hung out in the other room. At some point, his head ended up on my lap. I remember touching his hair, but ultimately deciding I did NOT want someone to see this and assume the worse. Another time, we were alone in the basement. The basement was the place of all our friend hangouts. The video and board games were down there, along with the nerf guns. One night we were on the couch showing each other memes from our iPod touches. We were laughing and joking, then he handed me his iPod to read the next one. Except this wasn’t a meme: it was his notes app. On the screen it said “I think you are beautiful”. I instantly blushed and tried to hide my face. “Me?.....” I looked at him, also blushing red and he nodded. I told him thank you. It was the first time any boy had told me I was beautiful. In my own eyes, I was not. I had a big tooth gap because my parents couldn’t afford braces, and I wore glasses. I don’t know what he saw, but I appreciated the flattering compliment.
We entered high school where once again, your life shifts. You are faced with new teachers, new course materials, new teammates, and new challenges. We remained close friends through this time, by taking enough classes together and being involved with the same friends. It was nearing the fall homecoming season and I was nervous about getting a date. I saw many older boys asking girls to be their dates and I wondered if I would even have one my freshman year. Leave it up to my best friend Anna to set me up.
I clearly remember it was a Sunday night and I was watching football. My mom tells me she got a text from Dakota’s mom that there was a book she needed to grab from their house. She told me I needed to go with her. Without any context, I was annoyed she was making ME drive her there since I did not want to leave home. They lived about 5 minutes away so I figured the faster we leave the quicker I can get back home. Mom told me I should brush my hair.
“Why?”
“Well because you should look a little presentable.”
“It’s fine right, we’re just grabbing a book really quick, right?”
“Yes but you don’t want to leave the house looking like you do.”
I huffed and opened our sliding glass door going outside to the car.
“You should at least put some shoes on!”
“I’m FINE, Can we just go and get this over with”
I angrily and annoyed drove/ sped down the paved road to their house, all the while questioning my mother why she really needed me to go with her.
“I don’t know, there might be something there for you.”
I had no idea what that meant. We drove to the shop on their property that this supposed book was. I stepped out of the car, barefoot on the gravel and walked into the shop. There I see Dakota, holding a sign. I frantically looked around to figure out what was going on. I see Anna crouched in a corner covering her smiling mouth. I looked at his sign and read the homecoming proposal which used lyrics and titles from Beatles songs, my favorite band.
“Oh, Dakota! Of course yes!”
I gave him an awkward hug and turned around to realize that my mother didn’t need a book at all.
Dakota was sweet. In an innocent way. He had casually asked before if we could date, but being the reserved and shy individual I was, I had always declined. After the dance, we drifted, not for any particular reason. I heard he had started dating a different girl. She was older by two years. Was I hurt? Not particularly. Was I jealous? Maybe a little more so. They went to prom together and she was definitely way prettier than me. It happens, I thought, we aren’t meant to be. A romantic relationship would definitely change our entire chemistry.
Summer came and we were out working together on his family’s farm. We spent hours in the fields, talking, singing, and sweating. Just good friends again. It was normal and felt right. We spent a week together in late July on a church trip. We worked on a homeless shelter with our youth group and had a fun yet powerful time together. My mom, dad, and brother were on this trip as well, along with many of our church friends. After the week was done on Saturday, we drove back to our town. I remember waving goodbye to his family in their Suburban as they left the church parking lot. I didn’t realize how significant that goodbye would be.
A few days went by and we had casual texting conversations about work and school starting in the next few weeks. He texted me Tuesday night that his dad really needed some help the next morning bright and early. I wanted to sleep in. He texted “Don’t worry about it, we’ll get it covered.” A decision I’d soon regret.
Wednesday morning, I go to the church with my mom to do a couple of things with her. I can’t even recall what it was. We were getting into our car when we heard loud sirens throughout our small town. Mom and I looked at each other. Sirens are never a good sign. We get in the car, curious, but praying whoever needs the ambulance is okay. My mom gets a phone call. It’s one of our family friends. She says Dakota and his older brother have been in a bad car accident. That heavy feeling that makes your heart sink to your stomach instantly hit me. “They’re okay, they’re okay, they’re okay.” I kept telling myself. The ambulance was going fast, and Dakota is strong. He’s practically invincible. My mother’s friend tells us that we should stop by Dakota’s house to grab the boys clean clothes and bring them to the emergency room. We drive in silence, except for maybe a short prayer that the boys are okay. We get to the house and my mom quickly runs up the stairs to the boys’ bedroom. I stay downstairs. I observe the dining room. Dirty laundry in the baskets. Dirty dishes on the counter. Dakota’s name on a marker board along with a list of chores to do. We speed to the emergency room in the nearby town. On the way we received a text from Dakota’s older brother, John. He said he was doing okay but he wasn’t sure about Dakota. We should be keeping their family in our prayers. The panic was rising in my throat. I had been nervous about things before. This was different. It was like a nauseating churn that started in my stomach. Like my soul was shaking out of my physical body. We got to the hospital, parked and my mom said I should stay in the car. Probably wanting to protect me from any scarring sights within the ER. I wanted to go in. Could I see him? She insisted that I stay in the car. I stayed. Frozen at first. Then rocking back and forth. My palms were shaking and itchy in the center.
“This can’t be happening. Not Dakota. He’s like my best friend. Kids don’t die. He’s too young. Too smart. He has an incredibly successful life ahead of him.”
I was eyeing the automatic door for any sign of someone that I recognized. The ten minutes I waited felt like an hour. Ten minutes of restless uncertainty. Then I see my mom. She had one of the hardest faces that I had ever seen her make. She opened the driver’s side door and I immediately asked “What’s going on. Is he ok?!”
She looks at me dead in the eyes, shaking her head, “He didn’t make it, Jasmine”
A million emotions and questions flood my brain. I started blubbering and sobbing while hitting the dashboard. “No, no, no. Why!? Why him?” My mom breaks down with me, not able to get out a single word. The family friend who delivered the phone call joins us in the car. She says Dakota’s in a better place now. I’m in a state of shock and disbelief. Hot tears will not stop streaming down my cheeks. We were silent on the way back home. I ran upstairs to my room and shut the door. I cried into a pillow for the rest of the afternoon. I skipped dinner. There was a candlelight vigil that evening at a church. I barely had the strength to go, but my mom said it would be good for me. I brought my water bottle. I ate nothing and only drank water to replenish my tears the next two days. Saturday morning, I went to a different church with my family to see Dakota’s family. The church’s youth were making survivor bracelets out of parachute cord. Dakota had made them during his depressive episodes during his 9th grade year, when we somewhat drifted. Dakota and I took Spanish class together our freshman year. One day he asked me what my favorite color was. I told him blue. The next day he gave me a blue bracelet he had made. He said he accidentally made one too small. I was instantly brought back to that moment while standing in the church with dozens of people learning how to braid the cord. When I got home, I tore apart my vanity in search for the bracelet he had made for me. I put it on my right hand. I wore the bracelet everyday for an entire year. I had a Dakota original.
Dakota’s brother, John, who was entering his senior year, invited many of us friends to go out to the place where the accident happened. It was a blind intersection that I had previously been weary of earlier that summer. The corn was high and there were no road signs for a yield or stop. John explained how they had just got in the truck after working the field about a half mile south and were going to take their lunch break. He said they had just started going down the road, picking up speed, when he heard a small voice tell him to put his seatbelt on. John put his seatbelt on, but Dakota didn’t. John said he felt as if there was something around the corner, but ultimately did not slow down near the intersection. A driver, going 50 miles per hour, t-boned them in the intersection. According to John, the truck rolled and Dakota was thrown through the windshield. John found his phone and quickly called 911. He found Dakota and blood was coming from his mouth. He had a large wound on his forehead where he had smashed the dashboard. John pulled him into the field of soybeans, opposite the corn, and tried performing CPR. Dakota was mumbling and sputtering blood before his breathing stopped. The paramedics pronounced him dead at the scene. They said he was internally decapitated.
The wake for Dakota was on Sunday night. I had a tough time finding the strength to go. We waited in line behind dozens of people for close to an hour. When I finally got up to him, my heart sank again. There he was. His skin was pale. His hair was not right. His mother, who was right by, said it was okay to touch him. I reached for his hair to move it how he usually wore it. As I parted it, I saw the large scar covered by gobs of makeup that the hair was covering on his forehead. I put it back.
His funeral was the next day. Monday. At 1:18PM, his birthday date. I felt sick the whole morning. My whole family got in the car and my mom was talking to my younger siblings. I was silent. I was going to one of my best friends’ funerals. The church where the funeral was held was absolutely packed. Parked cars took up the surrounding blocks. The church had multiple floors and rooms with casted video of the celebration of life. I was considered close enough to sit in the sanctuary in the front half of the pews. I sat with my gifted teacher and other friends from the gifted program. What a terrible way to end your summer. Saying hello to people you haven’t seen in a few months at a funeral. I remember the funeral. There were songs and the service was led in large by Dakota’s own mother. To this day I have no idea how she had the strength to do that. I remember a few of the songs that were sung, but I’ll never forget the sound of the casket closing. The last goodbye. The final SLAM. His face would never again have sunlight shown upon it. Never again would a person touch him, hold him, hug him.
My family tried to get out to the burial but the crowd was just too insanely large to get around. I had the final say that we could go home. I’d come back another time.
The next day, I went to the scene of the accident. It was an intersection 5 miles east of my house. Someone had put up a make-shift cross at the intersection. I brought a big University of Kansas patch from one of our gifted trips to place at the cross. He loved basketball, and especially the Jayhawks. On the back of the patch I had written “I love you”. That night, there was a big storm. I sat up straight in bed and started crying as the wind whistled by my windows. The patch.
When I woke up, I found a reason to leave home and went back out to the intersection. I ran up to the cross and found my patch wrapped tightly around the base with some old barbed wire. I burst into tears of relief. I have no idea who saved my patch.
The next two weeks were spent preparing for school and fall practice. I had decided to do tennis that fall instead of volleyball. On the first day of school, I rode the bus into the town with my school. We drove past the intersection and I burst into tears. I cried four more times that day. Each time in the class he should have been in with me. I was distraught. I have no other way to describe how absolutely depressed I was walking the halls. Teachers were not the same. There was an absence in our sophomore class. An absence on our football team. In our audition choir. In our youth group. And in me. I tried my best to get through it. I started journaling a little bit after the accident to help organize my thoughts. To remember all the little details I could about him. To write them down so they didn’t disappear.
My sophomore year was brutal. I was playing tennis in the fall with a small team of girls who helped to create a safe and calm environment for me. I spent all of my hours in the team vehicle listening to two Lifehouse albums on repeat. I’d look out the window and reflect. What was life? What was my purpose? Why did this happen?
I didn’t have an answer. I bottled it up. It seemed that a lot of my class who weren’t very close with Dakota had a lot easier time going back to their normal lives. I was missing a friend. There was a contact in my phone from whom I’d never received another text. I had unfinished business. We had talked all summer about how our math class and Spanish II classes would be so fun this year. The bracelet I wore everyday was getting a stark tan line.
The semester rolled on. One of my other close friends moved to Colorado. And my last best friend, Anna, was in her own self-discovery phase. She wasn’t as close to Dakota and I was more or less a depressed teen at that time. I cried at school. In the bathrooms. In the locker room or a small music practice room. Am I just that sensitive? Why is no one else dealing with this grief like I am? I tried to distract myself with various activities. It worked for the most part. In the spring, I went out for softball. I loved softball. I had been playing it for years. I even had helped “assistant coach” a little girls rec league with Dakota and his family a few summers beforehand. Softball was hard but I needed the challenge. I worked hard at the sport and found myself on the varsity team after multiple players were out for the season due to injury or illness. In the last regular season game, on May 9th on our home field, I broke my leg. I had a high impact with the catcher while trying to steal home. The ump called me safe and we won the game by a run rule as I crumpled to the ground. I remember thinking I could stand up, but the weirdest tingling started down my leg around my knee. My coach carried me off the field like a baby. I pulled my helmet off and one tear slid down my cheek. They put me on a stretcher while the athletic trainer checked my knee.
“Yep, you fractured a bone. We should get you in to the ER for an X-ray”
“Fracture? Like my bone broke?”
“Yes that’s what a fracture is”
I started sobbing. Not from the pain. From the overwhelming feeling of becoming an invalid for an uncertain amount of time. I slid in the back of my mom’s vehicle as we drove down to the county ER. We got there, I was still in uniform. Just hysterical. I had no idea what was going on as I had never had an injury like this before. The ER lady took X-rays of my right leg. The images came back and showed a tibial plateau fracture. I wouldn’t be walking for a while. They helped cut me out of my softball pants and sent me home with lots of pain killers. The next few days I spent vomiting from the strong norco drug. I had a surgery a few days later where they placed hardware in my knee and put me in a straight-leg brace. I was miserable. It was hot and scratchy and I had my finals coming up. I went back to school the next Wednesday or Thursday to collect some class work to do at home. As I lived on the downstairs couch for close to three weeks I found myself asking again “Why did this happen?” I finished the school year by doing my final projects and giving my German foreign exchange student friend a final hug. I remember thinking “This is a nicer way to say goodbye to someone forever”.
I couldn’t walk for most of the summer and I started painful physical therapy. I was frequenting 3 times a week for a long while to build back my strength and relearn to walk. As soon as I was weight-bearing, I started working outside again. Doing what I could with one crutch. Dakota’s dad hired me to help manage the field workers and I could do some wood stacking decently enough. On the 1 year anniversary of Dakota’s death, I went to the gravesite for a small ceremony. It was the first time I had been there. The intersection where he died was my frequent mourning spot, almost daily on my drive to and from school. The gravestone was large and obviously very expensive. It has a beautiful picture of him and the quote “You got this”, that he used often as a self-reassuring phrase. At some point after the 1-year, I stopped wearing the bracelet he made me. Was it time to let go? How long does one mourn?
The rest of my high school journey was tainted with the memories of him and the phantom memories of where I imagined him being. At my graduation, we had an honorary memorial and scholarship dedicated to him and his character. Then I went to college. I was already dating who would become my husband a number of years later.
Years have passed. There is no happy ending. I'm still here. Aging. Growing older while I can still see the face of my 15 year old friend. He isn’t growing. He’s in the ground. Resting. It feels like a lifetime until I can see him again. I’ve had dreams of him. Unprompted visions of him were prevalent for about 2 years after he passed. You would think this story would get easier after the number of times I’ve played in my head over all of these years. But it hasn’t. I’m in the acceptance stage of grief. I’ve lived life, gotten married, laughed again, and see a bright future for myself. Though I do often think, Where would Dakota be now? Would we have become closer friends? Would he be married? He would have made a good father.
Again, I have no answers to these questions that I suppose may eternally sit with me. I do have some answers though. I’ve learned how to not take people for granted. I’ve learned how to recognize depressive symptoms and how to be a listening ear for someone who feels hopeless. I’ve learned how to find purpose in helping people. I’ve learned patience. Sometimes patience is agonizing, which means the reward is definitely worth the wait.

Welcome to the Reverse: 1999 Daily Questions Megathread!

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• This depends on how much time you have to dedicate to re-rolling. In general, all three of the beginner banner characters are great, and you have options of doing shortelonger re-rolls, as per this guide.

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I played V Rising a little, shortly after it came out in early access and thought I would wait for them to complete it before I jumped back in. Since the 1.0 release I've just started again.
I cannot figure out for the life of me how to unlock castle structures now. I'm stuck on the quest to upgrade my castle heart which I need 50 floors and 4 servant coffins to complete (to unlock castle walls and foundations). The Wiki (which doesn't seem to have been updated in years) says I need to make a stone coffin which I need to make a waygate which that tells me I need to complete the 'building a castle quest'? Like WTF?
So how do you build a stone coffin to build servant coffins so that I can build an actual castle structure now?
I remember having castle walls in EA but now it seems way more vague and confusing than it needs to be.

This is very long even after summarizing my experience.
I bounced the idea of making a throwaway account back and forth, but I settled posting on my main because I want to look back on this post in the future. Like a diary of sorts on my experience with all of this grief. Due to this, I have to be somewhat vague to avoid accidentally doxxing myself to family/friends.
Quick background: My dad has not been physically healthy for a long time. He smoked a lot while I was growing up. Had an unhealthy diet and stopped being active when he got older. He had a huge list of different health problems and has had many prescriptions (that he didn't take). He also had a cynical and negative attitude most of the time. I found some prescriptions for depression so he probably had that as well.
 
A few years ago, my dad suffered a stroke so my mother became his primary caretaker. He recovered after rehabilitation... for the most part. His mobility and fine motor skills were drastically reduced. His speech was alright, but I could tell it was different. His mind, from what I could tell, was still there. I remember him expressing frustration at one of the Dark Souls games because he couldn't beat some boss. I never said this out loud to anyone, but I worried that there would be a time that he won't ever get to. I pushed the thought out of my mind. I didn't want to think about it.
Since the stroke, he stopped playing video games and doing many things he used to enjoy. When I visited every week or so, he was either asleep, shuffling up and down the hallway to 'stay fit', or at the table getting his shots or being fed. This was the 'new normal', and it was this way for a while.
Over time, he became distressingly thin and it was hard to see my once strong dad wither away before my eyes. For the past few weeks, he was sleeping so much. My mom told me that he couldn't go out and check the mail anymore as he was too much of a fall risk.
I... I regret pushing the uncomfortable and stressful feelings out of my head for so long... as if ignoring it and pretending that everything was fine was going to make it fine. It was only when I noticed that he was mostly in bed asleep that I started to become very stressed. Reality was getting harder to ignore as other things in my life at the time were going wrong all at once. The stress made me act in a way that I am not proud of. I had to get emergency therapy and medication. Both things seemed to help get me away from the crisis.
 
I got a text from my mother a day later from my therapy session. She discovered that my dad was 'acting weird', so she called emergency services and he was rushed to the hospital. They found a blood clot in his brain, they operated on him, and now he was in the ICU. I went to go see him.
He looked worse than I've ever seen him, but he was alive and he was talking even though he had difficulty saying certain words, phrases, his birth year... ect. . My mother asked him who I was, and he said my name confidently. I'm guessing he might have had some memory loss if she asked him that.
My mother told me to ask him how he was doing, and I curtly responded to her along the lines of, 'I can see that he's not doing well'. My dad turned his head to the side away from me and I immediately felt deep regret. I asked how he was feeling instead of how he was doing, as if the word change made things different. He said that he was fine. Don't worry about it.
When my mother left the ICU to do... something, I squeezed his hand, told him I love him. I'm not sure if he heard me... because he started to say how loud the hospital was. ...I couldn't bring myself to say it again for some God awful reason... probably because my mother walked back in. I always had issues talking about my feelings out loud. My immediate family always has. Another regret I now have. I stuck around for about an hour.
That night I went to work and spoke to a coworker about how worried I was, but at the time... I felt fairly confident that he was going to recover, go back home soon, and find a 'new normal'. After work, I thought about visiting... but the emotional toll and poor sleep made me exhausted and I slightly struggled to drive home, so I went to bed early which I now... very deeply regret.
 
A few hours later while I slept, my mother texted that he suffered a seizure and now wouldn't open his eyes and he wasn't being responsive. There was a large... event (keeping it vague) happening at work that I was assigned for, so I told her that I wasn't sure that I would be able to come right away since I might not be replaceable. I let my supervisors know, and they said they could cover for me... telling me that 'that's what they're for'.
When I arrived at the hospital... shit. I thought he couldn't look any worse than what he did yesterday. Now, his eyes were closed, mouth agape... snoring, and occasionally making hiccup like noises a few times every hour or so. It didn't feel real and it looked wrong. It was then that my poor decision to get some sleep really hit me. If I had gone right after work, that would have been the last time I saw him alive and talking. ...Of course, I didn't know that at the time, but I should have known better.
My mother, who was very tired, asked me to stay in the hospital. To be honest, I kind of wanted to bail. I didn't want to see him like this... but I was already guilty about not visiting after work and me leaving would devastate my mom... so I stayed around ten or so hours so my mom could get some sleep. While I was there, I sat in a chair nearby, watched some YouTube, Discord'd my partner, and watched some graphs I couldn't understand. By then, the hospital had all these different leads attached to my father's head that was measuring all sorts of different things. The graph looked almost flat with some bumps. I looked online and saw that these bumps should be more like hills.
... I also regret not asking my partner if they wanted to be in the hospital with me, as my father was also their father-figure after their own dad died around a decade ago. I feel like ass and that I am an ass.
...Even when I had the room to myself and my dad, I still couldn't get myself to talk to him. I know it was a stupid thing to think now (given the timeline of events), but at the time it felt like I would be talking to myself... that he wouldn't be able to hear me anyways. That I was just going to cause myself more unnecessary stress on top of actual stress. At least I did at times hold his hand. Squeezed it. Wishing he would open his eyes.
Of course, in hindsight, I read that sometimes patients in comas do sometimes hear their loved ones talking to them. ...I very much regret not doing so. I was in denial. I should have done what some of the stories I read did. Talk to him. Reminisce about all the good times we had. That I loved him. Now I worry he left this world not knowing how much I love him... or left him wondering if I ever did.
When my mom got back, the hospital staff began the difficult discussion of either moving him to hospice care and focus on comfort since his labs were getting worse and he was showing no signs of improvement... or, if it was alright... move him to more advanced life-support... such as inserting a tube down his neck or something. My mind was checking out. My mother asked me what I thought, and I instantly thought of how my dad just... slept all the time now. Didn't express any future goals. No longer had any hobbies. If this was me, I wouldn't want them to work on me anymore just for me to go back to do... seemingly nothing.
Though, to be fair, I did try to talk about these things (wishes, funeral, ect.) to my dad a long time ago, but he didn't want to approach the subject at all and kept dismissing both my mother and I. Guess I'm more like my dad than I thought. My partner thinks he felt too scared to talk about such things.
My mother told me that it was now my turn to go home to sleep. ...Yet another thing that I now regret, as a few hours later... he died. She later told me that before he died, he opened his eyes and looked at her, but didn't say anything. I read that hearing and touch were some of the last things to go... of course... after the bloody fact. I had all this time over the years and didn't prepare myself at all. I wish I knew what he was thinking, if he was really seeing my mother, or saw something else... or was wondering where I went.
I'm conflicted. I want to be there to see him go, but I know if he looked at me and then died, I would be seriously fucked up. ...Now I think it would be better to have just... been there when it was time. Again, in hindsight... I should have suggested my mother to tell hospital staff to give him at least one more day. To give him at least more of a chance. More reget... what's one more regret on top of a pile of regrets?
My life partner tells me that they absolutely knew that I would eventually beat myself up over all of this, and says that with the information I had at the time, I did the best I could. I wish I could believe them.
 
I spent some time clearing his room (mostly clothes) while my mom worked on the paperwork part of everything to make room for some of the junk. Before all this, she was preparing my old room for a guest who was going to be there for a while, so there was a lot of junk in my old room that had been building over the years since I moved out. While digging around in his drawers, I found a metal container that had miscellaneous documents in it... and an envelope dated in 1994 that said 'open in case of my death', signed dad... it had a lock of his hair. I ugly cried. I showed my mom... who seemed to not be very interested in what I found. I got very annoyed and later hid the container. I will find a solution on how to display this hair safely later.
Much later on sometime around the viewing on a different day, she told me that on the way to the ICU when staff was rolling him on the stretcher, he kept 'reaching behind him' to make sure my mom was there and following. ...This both distressed and angered me, as if I had known this story before... I would have said to give him life support. This made me and still makes me bitter. It will probably make me bitter for a really long time.
Me and my mother's coping mechanisms are not the same. She uses hard work, religion, and her very wide network of friends and family to help her through. I want to take things slow, mostly confide in strangers online, and I'm not particularly religious. ...I want to believe in an afterlife and that my father, despite all of his flaws, is in a 'good place' now. I really do... but I can't without some sort of proof. I want so badly the comfort to believe that once my own time comes, I will see my family again... but I can't. I don't even know if his ghost is floating around watching us cry. I just know that he's gone and not coming back.
I admit, while nice to have... I don't care about the assets or money. If I was told I would get my dad back if I said no to these things, I would.
The viewing. ...Well, I knew it was my dad in the coffin and the mortuary guy did a good job of making him look 'like he was sleeping', I kept hearing people say. ...I didn't take his hand this time, as I rather remember the feel of his living hand than his dead one. The coffin I picked out for him was perfect. No regrets there, at least. My mom used an early picture of him when I was young, then a much older picture of my dad when he was a young man. It deadass looked like three different men there. My dad didn't age gracefully.
The funeral itself was wonderful. I don't usually record things, but I recorded as much as I could as I know my memory of it is going to fade. This got me thinking into VHS to digital preservation, something that I wanted to do years ago but didn't because of time, money, and then I forgot about it. Well, VHS is degrading and I fear I don't have much time left. My father is in some of those tapes. I have to preserve them before it's too late.
Ah, I deviated a bit. Sorry.
After the service, well, I can't get into too much detail but for the burial itself, it was just me and my partner watching the coffin get lowered into the ground. I recorded that too. My mother; however, had... other priorities and thus wasn't at the burial, which made me really mad and I was venting to my partner. We weren't allowed to get close as the burial dudes were using heavy machinery. There was a strange sense of 'final' once I saw his coffin disappear.
...His loss very much hurts, I assure you... but I'm glad his body is finally resting in a good place. At first, he didn't want to go to the hospital. Then when he got stable, staff was discussing bringing him downstairs out of ICU. Seizure. ...Then before he was moved upstairs to hospice, he died. He seemingly didn't want to go anywhere anymore. I wish I knew what he wanted, if he wanted to stay as long as he could or to... let him go. I know he said to 'not worry about it', but that's all I can do. For weeks I've been stressed. My heart hurts sometimes. I'm depressed, though honestly I think unsubscribing isn't an option for me anymore... my dad didn't go out that way, and if some of these legends are correct... if I do, I might not be able to... 'see him again', or my mother... or my partner once they all go. Or something like that.
If anyone wants to give advice, it's welcomed. I mostly made this post to get my thoughts out onto... something. Then, one day, I'll go back in my post history and read this. Future me, I hope you're in a better place... because right now it sucks. I keep crying on and off and would rather eat and sleep. I nearly gained all my weight back. I haven't played any video games. I don't want to go anywhere, but I have to go make money. ...Life can't wait for me. My partner depends on me.
I'm starting to rant, and I could go on, but I better cut this short and get some sleep. Thank you for reading this far.
Daddy, I don't know if there's an afterlife or what and I know you weren't really religious either, but I hope... hell, I pray that you know that I love you. If you remember me by the time I die, I'll come find you. If that's how all this works, anyways, because I have no idea.