PART ONE THOUSAND AND SIX
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Sunday
Quent pulled up outside the apartment, then handed Kulon the keys and turned to me. “See you in a few hours, buster,” he said with a wink and then vanished as if he’d never been there. Rubin was quick to follow, leaving me to blink at the dual disappearing act.
“I don’t know why you find that so astonishing,” Kulon grumbled, climbing out of the car and opening my door. “You can realm-step just as fast.”
“Not from a seated position like that,” I argued after getting out and turning to hold out my hand for Gerry. “How do you vanish when your butt is literally still in the chair?”
“Invisible, shrink, step. Easy-peasy.”
I squinted at him, not really thinking it was easy at all. But before I could dwell any further on it, Kulon suddenly let out a very unwelcoming growl and stepped in front of me. “What do you want, Choirmaster?” he snarled, his right hand stretched out to keep both me and Gerry behind him.
“Do you really think I’m stupid enough to attack two true gryps on your nesting world in broad daylight?” came the bored, song-like reply. “Even two hatchlings like you?”
The growl from Kulon continued to grow in volume until I put my hand on the small of Kulon’s back to remind him this wasn’t the place. “Easy, buddy,” I crooned, already building up a decent dislike for whoever Kulon was facing off with. It hadn’t completely escaped my attention that while their job was to keep me from losing my temper, I was the one trying to take things down a notch.
“Sam,” the voice then sang, not the way one of those horror movies did it where you knew you were going to die, but more upbeat and wholesome. “Can you please step out from behind your true gryps bodyguard so that I may see you?”
“Yeah, I don’t think so,” I said, trusting my friend way more than whoever this newcomer was. I then lifted my eyes to the second story of our apartment building. “And if you’re not careful, you’ll have a whole lot more than just two angry true gryps to tear you a new butthole, mister, and not all of them are my age.”
Whoever it was huffed and—from the way Kulon suddenly moved to his right—tried and failed to duck around him to reach me. “Keep your distance, Michael, and say what you came to say from back there. You will not get past me to him.”
“Very well. Sam, I’m the chosen messenger from your uncle, and He’s sent me to invite you to speak with Him. He’s given you His solemn vow that you are neither in trouble nor will anything untoward happen to you.”
I knew Dad had a lot of brothers … all of whom I’d never met. My fingers curled into Kulon’s back. “Can he hurt me if I look at him?” I had no idea what I was dealing with here. I knew from my travels that gorgons were a bad idea to look at, and if Kulon was being this cagey, I needed to know why.
“No,” Kulon admitted. “But he is the choirmaster of the Heavenly Host, so if anyone was going to cut you in half, it’d be him.” After a second, he added, “Well, he’d be second. I’d put Uriel’s capability ahead of his.”
From the double snicker I heard from the true gryps in front of me and the one in my ear, I assumed that our visitor hadn’t liked that correction.
I lifted my hand from Kulon’s back and placed it on his right hip, so that he’d know which way I was going, then stepped to that side. Geraldine, I kept behind Kulon, though she was able to peek around his arm.
Her gasp meant she’d seen the guy’s enormous emerald-green wings that he had spread partially to either side of him like a feathery cloak with a high collar. The rest of him looked like something out of ancient Rome. Silver plate mail armour with gold filigree around the edges covered his whole body from the neck down, and on his chest plate was a huge golden crucifix. He had a presence about him that looked like those sculptures where the guy was wrestling a lion barehanded without a single strand of hair falling out of place.
For whatever reason, it was only at that moment that I realised I was thinking of entirely the wrong generation of ‘uncles’, and as such, I’d forgotten all about this one …
…and more importantly, how I’d kinda been bad-mouthing him to Geraldine’s family less than an hour ago.
Ooooh, crap.
Though in my defence, I hadn’t technically bad-mouthed him. I was more … challenging the validity of his core belief. Yeah, that’d be what I’d go with if this was his way of clipping me under the ear.
“What’s he want with me?” I asked, hoping it might not be about that at all, and he was just looking for a social chit-chat.
The angel-boss/masteguy didn’t answer. Just gave me The Look.
“Crap,” I huffed under my breath and turned back to Gerry.
Only to find her pasty and trembling, staring straight at the angel. “H-H-He’s right there, r-right?” she stammered. Her breathing was erratic, and her eyes broke away from the guy to glance at me, then snapped straight back to him. “Angel. He’s an angel. A-a-a re-re-real—a real angel.”
“And you must be Sam’s plus one,” the angel smiled, lifting his already rugged handsomeness to transcendent levels. I was beginning to see why Geraldine hated the idea of me talking to pretty women. Seriously, would it hurt the guy to have some physical faults somewhere?
Oblivious to my internal monologue, the angel rolled forward in an introductory bow. “I am the Archangel Michael, Choirmaster of the Sixth Choir known as the Heavenly Host.”
“And today, a glorified errand boy,” Kulon reminded him.
Geraldine spluttered in horror, and I could have kissed Kulon for his snark.
“I am whatever He requires,” Michael sang, straightening up. Apparently, his friendliness had run its course, for he held his hand out to me and commanded, “Come, Sam. I will take you to Him.”
Since my interactions with angels were rather limited, I looked at Kulon for guidance.
He had that far-off stare that meant he was talking to one of his higher-ups before he dipped his head in either agreement or obedience and refocused on the angel. “Remember, Michael, your tricks don’t work on us. Not your speed. Not your brutality. Not even your establishment field. Before you or your Almighty can summon more angels, you’ll be overwhelmed with so many true gryps, you’ll be crushed under our body weight alone. Sam is ours, and you are no match for us. Are we clear?”
I nudged Kulon’s arm. “Why are you threatening him?”
“I’m not threatening him,” Kulon said, still glaring at Michael. “I’m reminding him of the stupidity of thinking you are anything other than fully protected at all times.”
“Okay … and why’s that relevant?”
Kulon sighed. “Because Michael has been known to go off the reservation occasionally for what he considers the greater good. Of course, he gets reprimanded for it afterwards, but then he gets his old job back because it’s the way the Almighty wants it. Meanwhile, the act itself is still done.” He stared icily at the angel. “Crossing us would be a huge mistake. Do we understand each other?”
“From your mouth to His ear,” Michael answered.
Kulon’s gaze narrowed all the more. “Exactly.”
Michael waved his hand as if he were chasing a bothersome fly. “Enough with this senseless posturing. You were ordered to turn him over to me, were you not?”
Ignoring Michael’s question, Kulon turned to me. “The Eechee has vouched for this visit, Sam, but the choice to go is yours. Contrary to this idiot’s opinion, no one’s going to make you do anything you don’t want to. Not while we’re around.”
I glanced at the angel, getting the hint that no amount of ignoring him would make him go away. “Can I walk Gerry upstairs first?”
Gerry’s grip tightened on my forearm. “I don’t want to go upstairs without you,” she said. I was about to ask why not when she added, “If I go in without you and anyone sees me, they’ll know something happened to you. How do I explain all of this when your dad and the others are trying to lie low? And if it gets back to your mom and causes her any kind of stress…” She let that sentence drift off; for my sake, I was sure.
And yeah, I could see where all of that would be bad. “Where do you want to go? Kulon can take you.”
Gerry looked at Kulon. “Could you just … drive me around for a bit? The same problem applies if anyone looks outside and sees the car. Sam can call us when he’s ready to be picked up, and we can come back together again then.”
Kulon looked at me. “This is what you want?”
I cuddled Gerry close and kissed her before guiding her into Kulon’s arms. “You two head off, first.”
I waited until the car pulled away from the curb and then turned to one of the most powerful angels in Heaven, if I was reading the subtext right.
“You have nothing to fear, Sam. He loves His family most of all.”
The angel put his hand on my shoulder, and we walked forward …
…only to stay on our street.
I looked across at him and was surprised to find him scowling darkly. “Do you NOT know how to blank your mind, boy?!” he sang angrily.
“Oh.” OH!
This guy was one of Heaven’s heaviest hitters, and the only reason he’d be telling me to clear my mind was because I was anchoring him … because I was higher up the food chain than him! Oooooh, holy crap!
“Sam!”
Right. Right. Clear head and…
…we realm-stepped away.
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((All comments welcome. Good or bad, I’d love to hear your thoughts 🥰🤗))
I made a family tree/diagram of the Mystallian family that can be found here
For more of my work, including WPs: Angel466 or an index of previous WPS here.
FULL INDEX OF BOB THE HOBO TO DATE CAN BE FOUND HERE!

First - Previous
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John stood between Honrik, Hannon, and Esrin at a small white stone marker on the back corner of the town hall. It was a small triangular column, just waist high, and on its face was an engraved depiction of some manner of warrior Tanren with very ornate plate armor and a longsword. The other two sides were just long lines of Steyrban text and a relief portrait of some other Tanren. The whole thing looked out of place in this little place, it was a finely carved monument amongst dirt roads and wooden buildings.
“This is the shrine of the god Varis and the grave of the jagal Inorik Sahwi. Varis, patron of conflict and its resolution, blesser of those who do battle with honor and those who keep their walls, both physical and mental, strong, is the patron god of the guard and of Saerna. Inorik Sahwi was the embodiment of Varis’ virtues, a leader and conqueror from Steyrbal who led the exploration and conquest of the central Kost before falling in battle against the Silanadi. This is where he, one of our great forefathers, is interred. Not in a tomb or in a fine monument like many others, but in the ground where many of his men fell too.” Esrin slowly explained, allowing John to keep up with his constant referencing of his phone.
“Uh, the Silanadi?” John hadn’t heard that one before. He knew of the Steyrbans, which were the people of this place and the area to the north and of the Banadi who were from the south and occasionally integrated into Kost, but this was a new third group.
Esrin flicked an ear as he sighed, “I have not seen any records with much detail on them. Only that they were an extinct pre-Kostian tribe similar to the Banadi but with religious reverence for water. The ancient royal libraries of Malagea might have something but it has been decades since I’ve last been to that sacred place. Regardless, the Silanadi had slain Sahwi, but that did not stop the Steyrbans. Varis had known that Sahwi and his men were worthy of his grace, so as Sahwi had honored him, Varis blessed the Steyrbans with strength and speed superior to any foe. The Silanadi were vanquished by the furious and grieving warriors of the north and were never noted again in any record since their defeat. Sahwi was found and laid into the soil and this marker was made, forever placing his name under Varis’ own. And it is upon this marker that we make our oaths under the eyes of our patron god and most blessed ancestor.”
“Roight…” John wasn’t buying into the paganism and pseudo ancestor worship, he was born and baptised under the crucifix after all, but he didn’t care to start shouting HERESY and lighting pyres either. He settled on just nodding along and giving the occasional ‘mhm’ when necessary. He can’t help but to lament that he isn’t on Earth; this shrine, while beautiful, is placed in a really lackluster setting. He supposed he was just spoiled though.
“Place your hand on the top,” Honrik instructed. John did as requested, planting his right hand on the top of the pillar. “Now repeat after me. I, John Elgar, under the light of the gods and those before me, swear steadfastness and duty to Saerna. With the blessing of Varis, I will serve my lord, defend my home, and honor my kin, until the end of my duty, whether by release of word or release in death.”
John repeated the oath but subtly exchanged gods for God and Varis for Christ. A result of his upbringing and instinctual enough that he wasn’t fully aware that he did it, or at least he didn’t want to be fully aware of it. It was one small rebellion against his sudden transplant into this strange place, a small action to retain a part of his home. The other two either overlooked it or didn’t care all that much. Kosts’ existence as the one road into rich Steyrbal has seen many different peoples move through the land so a foreign god is nothing new.
He removed his hand and looked around, apparently now a true guard sworn to the tiny village. It may be a tad bit below his scientific qualifications but he didn’t see any demand for astronomers. A bit disappointing because he was confident that he was the most learned person in that field on the planet by a very large margin. Honrik gestured for him to follow, making John disperse thoughts of his field of study and instead wonder what he was being taken to next. ________
Ildra sat outside near her father’s forge at his home finishing up a quick sewing job on a leather tunic. Normally matters of tanning and leatherwork were handled by Kulrik and any sewing in those projects was done by his wife, Sarra, but they were busier than usual and Ildra was better than her father with a thread. While she expected that someone would come looking for her father which happened often, she didn’t expect the commander and John to arrive at the forge knocking on his door. She set the tunic aside and listened in on the conversation, curious as to what they wanted.
Of course, she should have been able to guess. It was armor, always armor whenever Honrik got another new guard. This time it was John and his need for refitted gear and a new helmet. Her father was quick as always, using a rope with several lines painted onto it to measure John before scribbling down the measurements he needed on a piece of bark. The helmet part was more interesting to her though because John began drawing out what he wanted. Ildra liked a bit of good drawing and John had a knack for it so she joined the three to watch him. With speedy precision, John had began placing curved lines over another piece of bark that eventually formed a strange kind of armor she had never seen before. It was a round cap like any helmet, but the front and back edges swept upwards in the shape of an inverted roof. A brim was fixed to the shape of that edge, drooping low around the sides but rising upwards into a point on the front and back. Then a wide metal crest went over the top. John had called it a ‘morion’ and explained that it was a common helmet amongst the soldiers of his people long ago. He finished it by drawing leather straps on the depiction before handing the diagrams over to her father who looked at it as an interesting challenge.
With his equipment issues squared away for now, he was dismissed and Honrik went off to do whatever he does when he isn’t drilling his guards. “So… you’re a guard, oath and all?” Ildra questioned, not quite sure in what order Honrik did things. She was never very interested or involved in what the guard did. It was a place for the males who had talents or interests in the rougher side of life and whose families could afford one less person in the fields or hunting or crafting. It didn’t exactly make for a lot of expendable money but a lot, including food relatively often, was provided for them and if they partake in a rare battle or something similar, they got to keep whatever loot they took from the enemy. That was the real prize for them, taking a fine sword, piece of armor, or jewelry could make one quite a sum of coin if they could sell it. For hunters, the only time they could come across something so valuable as a well crafted weapon was in venturing into ancient Kostian ruins, of which there were plenty, but that took time away from hunting and such places made good dens for hyrodins. They were largely picked clean anyway from when they originally fell. A shame really, Ildra loved delving into such places, mainly for the thrill of discovery and adventure but the faint trail of a treasure was also extremely exciting.
“A guard, yes. Guarding? Not so much, not yet. I still must learn, learn tongue, learn to fight, learn everything,” his speech flow was still a bit broken, Ildra remarked, but after just a few days John was able to string words together well enough even if he still had trouble understanding the language. “But,” he paused to consult his glowing rectangle, “I have a place now and that is good.”
That was indeed quite good. There was no room for beggars and the like in Kost. Towns were too small, everyone had to manage their part so that mouths are fed and things don’t fall apart. In good times, when the caravans would pour out from Steyrbal like a river to bring back the riches of the world to the inland great cities, Kost became wealthier as a whole but succession wars in the north had prevented that for a decade. It forced the Kostians to be a little more self-sufficient than they already were to make up for the lack of access to distant goods. For most, such as her father, it was bad but for Ildra, it made her role and also her interests a little more valuable.
“Do you want to play a game?” Ildra tilted her head back towards the town hall, wanting to waste a little time before checking her snares in the evening. The sewing was nearly done and it was going to be picked up in three days so it could wait.
He raised an eyebrow, “I am curious. Lead the way.” ________
John listened as Ildra explained a chess-like game called ‘field’. He found it odd that it wasn’t actually played on a field but it was what it was. The board was still checkered but it was substantially wider and just slightly longer. More pieces too but fewer types. No queen, the king could move more but it was called a lord now, no knights, pawns were called lines and could move in any direction. He memorized all of it, not missing a detail. Overall, it was a basic strategy game. He hardly played chess either so he wasn’t bringing years of experience to crush Ildra as his family tended to play backgammon on the rare occasion that they were at a table and not playing with cards. He was confident nonetheless.
“May I ask, what is the point of this game?” John tapped on his chin as he set up his side of the board. He wondered if Ildra was going to trounce him but that thought was short lived. Instead, he would begin the actual game now before it properly started by merely engaging in conversation. It made for a great means of distraction as while talking itself generally didn’t bother many, it was an excuse to slip in some absurdity or an inane statement and that would throw off a train of thought. John liked to consider himself an artist and distraction was certainly an art.
“... to win?” She didn’t quite understand the question.
“No no, besides that. What is the point in this exercise? Who is the game for and why?”
“Oh… it was made by Steyrban nobility. Probably as an easy way to practice strategy.”
John nodded, letting Ildra go first. She seemed to want to develop the center of the board which was fine by him. “And this game is popular amongst the commonfolk?” John began setting up a defensive line.
“Maybe, I do not know. Esrin likes it; he picked it up in Malagea and taught many of us when we were children.” Ildra began setting up a move to take a couple of John’s pieces.
“Uh huh,” he moved them back using his two actions, biding his time before throwing out the sacrificial pieces that would kick things into motion. He put on a show of looking worried, trying to subtly goad her into pressing his center rather than moving her edges forward. “There is a game quite similar to this called chess. A very old game, popular as far as board games can be which is not very. A game of kings as it was called. Load of tripe, the hundreds of strategies developed by chess grandmasters with too much time on their hands is completely inapplicable to actual war, especially with gunpowder involved.”
“Gunpowder?”
“Yes, but it is irrelevant here. I do not see any weapons that use it here,” he let her think on that while waving his hand as to dismiss the idea, a thing he picked up from his grandfather. She was curious but those kinds of thoughts distracted her from the game.
Another source of distraction then came from outside, heralded by the clattering of metal and heavy boots on the wooden floors of the main room of the town hall. A deep but posh voice called out from within the building, “Lord, we of Stonekeep come with gifts and words.” Ildra’s ears popped up as John turned his head towards the door, now also distracted from the schemes of their game.
“Well, don’t just say you have something to say, speak,” Hannon’s voice responded with a slightly dismissive tone. John and Ildra all got up to listen in on what was being said now. Ildra because she was curious what the wealthiest domain in Southern Kost wanted with a tiny village on the main corridor through central Kost, and John just wanted to listen in on how Kostian officials operated.
The deeper voice spoke again, “Lord, the distinguished lord of Stonekeep and patriarch of the Ahletaryi dynasty, the honorable Haftar, has expressed his interest and generosity of offering the lords of the Kulven River and red road to lend him support in compelling the Lady of Ofturharken to reopen the Coldstone Pass. I am confident that you are aware of how ruinous the ceasing of Steyrban trade has been for all of us, so please consider Lord Haftar’s proposal.”
“Representative, how can I consider something that you do not define? What manner of support, what means of compulsion? I understand the necessity of restarting trade but how can such a thing be done against the will of a queen with far more power than us?” Hannon did a good job at not sounding annoyed, which is impressive because John had the same gripes as he did but would impulsively make his displeasure known immediately.
“It is simple, fair Lord,” the speaker from Stonekeep continued. “Haftar intends to assemble an armed host along with an envoy to speak with Lady Lah Amun of Ofturharken on the merits of opening the pass. If the soldiers at the pass don’t let them pass, our own army will show them their error. If Lady Amun finds our envoy’s words unconvincing, the army that arrived with him will surely be more compelling, especially with Lady Amun using so much of her resources trying to win Steyrbal’s succession war. Be assured that Haftar has studied the situation and with proper consideration chosen this plan as the most ideal one.”
John didn’t like the sound of that at all. Would Hannon join these strangers in possibly waging war on some other people he has never heard of? He never heard Hannon making a fuss over trade before, not anything like marching on a foreign city to demand open markets. Ildra had her ears lowered as they heard Hannon huff, likely deciding on what he wanted to do. If he agreed, would John, as green as he is, be sent as part of that contingent? The uncertainty was quickly gnawing away at him now. He didn’t want to be ‘freak accident’ed away from the back lines of one war only to be pushed off to the front lines of an alien confrontation that was essentially over money. Certainly not after being sworn in as a guard of the town just this morning.
________
​

PART NINE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-TWO
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“Gruezi, chan ich Ihne helfe?”
Fisk winced and turned, looking down at a woman with a blonde bob cut and bright blue eyes. She wore a long-sleeved turtleneck ribbed knit top, long pants, boots and a belt, all of which were black. Apart from the missing gold embellishments, the only things she needed to fit the part of a Mystallian were a cloak and a pair of elbow length gloves, and Fisk approved of her wardrobe choice.
The language wasn’t one he knew, though if he squinted hard enough, it brushed up against German. “English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Xian, Min, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Filipino, Russian, Dutch and Norwegian.” He knew several others, but that rundown usually covered the situation.
The woman smiled, somewhat impressed. “English, then,” she said, looking up at him. “I said, ‘Hello, can I help you?’”
Fisk’s smirk grew. “That obvious I’m a tourist, eh?”
“This is a small village and there are not many corporate board meetings being held here. Add in that impressive range of languages, and I have to assume you are more than likely looking for me.”
Her hubris was delightful, though under any other circumstances, she would’ve been right. “Actually, my dear, I’m looking for my cousin, and I’m led to believe he’s around here somewhere. You can’t really miss him. A seven-foot behemoth that would give the Hulk a run for his money in the muscle department.” That description pretty much covered all three of the triplets, but what could one expect when their father was the Mystallian God of Strength? “Last name Nascerdios.”
The woman’s eyes dropped to Fisk’s right hand, which he positioned to give her a clear view of the family ring.
“I don’t plan to take up much of his time.”
“This way,” she said, gesturing towards an arched doorway that looked like it might have once belonged to a church. Following her inside, the exposed stone walls with the crucifix in a darker stone definitely gave off a religious vibe, though … is that a hint of beer I can smell?
Almost certain it was, he raised his hand to cover the smile that fought for dominance on his lips. To quote Danika these days, Uncle YHWH would have a shit-fit if he knew this was what became of one of his temples.
“Something amuses you?” the woman asked in annoyance.
Fisk cleared his throat and shook his head. Nothing you would understand. “And Clifford is working in here with you?” Oh, I gotta have a ringside seat and popcorn when Uncle YHWH gets his hands on you, cuz.
“Yes, of course. His insight has been astronomical.”
No … that would be my nephew, Najma. The joke was an extremely private one, so he kept it to himself. The village was so quaint that the woman before him was just as out of place as him. “What exactly are you doing here?”
That brought her up short. “How would you get all the way here without knowing that?”
“It’s a Nascerdios thing.”
Her suspicion immediately melted into disbelief. “Really? Clifford never said a word to you? He summoned you with no explanation, and you just dropped everything and came?” she asked, skating over the whole how impossible that would be in this tiny little village in the middle of nowhere and leaping to the only solid connection she knew of: Clifford.
“Family looks out for its own,” Fisk said, needing to fill the gap the veil had created with something, though he wasn’t thrilled with the whole ‘summoning’ spin. If he came, it would be because he wanted to. Period. Only his dad, the Elder Court, and maybe— maybe his aunts and uncles. Nah, not even them. If Barris and the others wanted him, they could either come to him or ask him to come to them.
The corridor she led him down opened up into a large room with even more stonework, comprising of both established and freshly carved surfaces. “What are you doing here?” he asked, looking at the extended ceiling height and the extra-wide space that he could see no possible use for in the small village. The dimensions made it most likely a warehouse, but in a village that probably had fifty to a hundred people in it, it didn’t make sense.
“We’re building an art museum here.”
Fisk suddenly jolted to a stop. “Here?!” he asked incredulously, looking over the space once more. Sure, he could picture something of this magnitude in a city suburb somewhere…
“Here is perfect, kid,” Clifford said, crossing the floor to join them. He was shirtless with long pants and steel-capped boots and utterly covered in grey dust. His wings that stopped just a hair’s breadth above the floor, created swirling patterns in the dust that fell from him as they swayed with his movements and his face was creased with a huge grin of sheer delight.
Where he’d sprung from was anyone’s guess.
“I’m creating a slow art space,” the woman said, her eyes coming alive as the vision for her project flowed through her.
Fisk lifted his chin to look over her head at Clifford and arched an eyebrow questioningly. Clifford answered with a sharp headshake, denying he had influenced her in any way. With the rings on, it was highly credible, though back in Mystal, he’d have called bullshit. “And what’s a ‘slow’ art space when it’s at home?”
“One that is difficult to reach and thereby makes you appreciate the effort even more when you get here.”
Fisk was sure he kept his face an unreadable mask, but perhaps it wasn’t that unreadable.
“It will be!” she insisted. “Thousands of people will come here to relax and enjoy the artwork that will be brought in from all over the world at a nice, sedate pace!”
“And how do you plan on feeding and housing these masses when they come?”
“Oh, they’re not staying. They’ll visit, appreciate the landscape as well as the artwork and leave.”
“Don’t knock it, brat. I’ve seen the plans. It’ll work.”
“If you say so, cuz. Do you have a minute? I need to run something past you.”
Clifford stooped to give the woman a soft kiss on the cheek. “Gönd Si und lueged, Grazyna.”
“Pleasure meeting you, Mister Nascerdios,” the woman said while looking at Fisk. She then walked across the room and disappeared into a hidden opening that was designed to blend into the background.
“So, who’s that?” Fisk asked as soon as they were alone, his tone alone implying they were something other than working colleagues.
“The money and the dream behind the project,” Clifford answered, pushing Fisk away while stepping back.
Realising what was coming, Fisk backed up fast but still wasn’t quick enough to avoid the dust shower that came when Clifford unfurled his wings and gave himself an all-over dog-style shake. The god of stonework then breathed in the dust-filled air that had Fisk coughing and sighed blissfully. “Is there any better smell?”
“Yeah, and it’s called salt water,” Fisk jeered as soon as he was able. One last cough and he asked, “How’d this all come about?”
“I was asked to come in on the design, and once I realised what she had planned, I was all in.” With a cheeky grin, he added, “I might’ve even cut a few corners to stabilise things here and there under budget.”
With only two inches between them, Fisk still had to look up at his cousin. “I had the girls over at my place tonight,” he said, omitting Sam’s presence entirely. “And while we were rough-housing, I might’ve… sorta … accidentally thrown a glass at my display stone wall … hard enough to cave in one of the stone tiles.”
“The veneer,” Clifford said, pretty much parroting what Sam had said.
“Yeah, and I thought it was a solid wall. Since it’s my primary residence, I was wondering if you could come and have a look at it for me and see if the fake rock is structural or cheap.”
“And if it’s cheap?”
Fisk’s face fell into a scowl. “It’s the primary residence of a family member,” he spelled out. “Do you really want anyone seeing cheap-ass stonework anywhere near us? I may get dumped on as the home owner, but I have the excuse of being ignorant. You?” Fisk tched and lifted his shoulders in a casual shrug, deliberately leaving that threat unanswered. Putting it simply, if Clifford didn’t come and fix it before anyone else saw it, the reflection on him for permitting such a travesty in one of their homes would haunt him for millennia.
Clifford uttered a pain-filled sigh. “It is structural,” he said because, of course, the bastard already knew the answer! “If you make that a solid stone wall, every wall under it will need to be strengthened to support the extra weight.”
“Well, that sucks.”
Long seconds of silence were drawn out between them before Clifford sighed again. “Fine, I’ll come and fix it now.” Then, surprisingly, he snorted. “If you must know, I kinda figured you’d be turning up before long.”
“What?”
He thumbed half-heartedly at the wall that the woman had disappeared behind. “A couple of days ago, I went from discarding what I carved out of the mountain to carving twelve-by-eighteen-inch slate tiles that were precision-cut to make them as durable as possible.”
“And it never occurred to you to reach out to me, you prick? I’ve been jumping all over the fucking world trying to find you!”
“If it’s too easy, you don’t appreciate it, kid.”
The irony that Clifford was twisting the mortal woman’s vision to suit himself wasn’t lost on Fisk, and he growled in frustration.
[Next Chapter]
* * *
((All comments welcome. Good or bad, I’d love to hear your thoughts 🥰🤗))
I made a family tree/diagram of the Mystallian family that can be found here
For more of my work, including WPs: Angel466 or an index of previous WPS here.
FULL INDEX OF BOB THE HOBO TO DATE CAN BE FOUND HERE!!

PART EIGHT HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-SEVEN
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Friday
The flight from Pensacola to New York City had been … informative, to say the least. Still, it wasn’t until after the flight attendant let them know they would be descending into Teterboro Airport in just a few minutes that Tucker saw just how worried Thomas was about being back in New York City.
Nervous didn’t begin to describe the man’s behaviour. Yes, he knew Helen had dismissed Thomas last week after some infraction that he still hadn’t gotten to the bottom of due to everything imploding last Friday, but this was not the man he had hired. This was not the man who had come highly recommended and heavily decorated for bravery from his time in Afghanistan.
This man scratched at his hands periodically and then rubbed his chest, swallowing heavily. He wasn’t trembling, and the whites of his eyes weren’t showing, but it was a close thing. “What was it about that conflict with Sam’s guards that’s made you so edgy?” Tucker asked, knowing there had to be more to it than a simple ‘misunderstanding’.
“Sir, you know much of my service record has been redacted, and I can’t speak of specifics. However, you know what I achieved and what it takes to earn those achievements.”
Those ribbons and medals had been one of the main reasons Tucker had hired him. His ability to do his job well while keeping his mouth shut. His combat prowess and ability to read a room at a glance had been two others. “And?”
“I am … intimately acquainted with most enhanced interrogation techniques.” His hand went to his chest again, this time just his fingertips stroking the surface. “And Sam’s people are … something else.”
Tucker’s eyes widened. “Are you suffering PTSD?!”
Thomas snorted. “No, sir,” he huffed. “That would probably be easier to deal with, given the history of that condition. No, Sam’s people have found a brand new way to combine pain and hallucinogens to make a permanent chemical imprint on my brain of something that can’t possibly be real.”
That was so much worse than a regular beatdown. Tucker took a moment to process it. “You were captured?”
“For less than four minutes, sir. And in that four minutes, they dropped me straight into Hell.” At that, he did tremble; for all of a second. “I was trained in counter-terrorism and led an insertion team into the world's worst places, sir. We were made to resist all interrogation techniques up to and including waterboarding, sir.” He swallowed again. “What they hit me with was fast, brutal, and every time I’ve looked at my chest since, my eyes still see what I logically know isn’t there.”
“What do you see?” Tucker was curious.
Tucker shuddered. “A snake with unnaturally long fangs, writhing inside my chest to bite and kill me.”
“You see it moving?”
He nodded jerkily. “Yessir. It’s thrashing behind an invisible wall, determined to break through and finish what it started, sir.” He drew a deep breath and swallowed. “I genuinely have no idea what they did to me, sir, but it’s damned effective.” He ran his tongue across his lips, then pressed them together. Then he straightened in his seat and stared forward. “But I have sworn myself to your protection, sir, and if that means riding into the jaws of the beast again, so be it.”
It was Tucker’s turn to swallow. He didn’t know much about torture but heard of waterboarding. If what Sam’s people had done was worse, it had to be illegal. Especially on American soil. “Four full minutes, you say?”
“Yes, sir.”
Something else then occurred to him. “Why was Sam following Geraldine from a distance instead of walking with her?”
Thomas stared at a point over Tucker’s shoulder rather than meet his eyes.
“Thomas.”
“Mrs Portsmith arranged an early morning rendezvous with Geraldine four blocks from the Nascerdios’ apartment. As Geraldine reached us, I saw a shadow following her and broke away to deal with it without upsetting the ladies. Sam Nascerdios was wearing a hoodie and track pants. I didn’t recognise him until I went to grab him, and that’s when his people grabbed me.”
“You didn’t see them?”
“No, sir. They were ghosts.”
Tucker knew he meant the metaphorical kind, like spies or assassins, rather than the metaphysical ones that didn’t exist. He thought about this new information, not pleased that Geraldine had been asked to leave her apartment and walk the streets of New York alone, regardless of the time. People recognised wealth, and young women were especially vulnerable. “Exactly what time in the morning was this?”
“Sir, I…”
“What time, Thomas?”
“A little after four, sir.”
Tucker clenched his teeth and breathed in and out through his nose. Helen had Geraldine walk four blocks by herself … in the dark?! Forcing his thoughts away from that, knowing he would speak to Helen about it soon, he asked, “Do you remember anything about your attackers?” There had to be at least two if not more, to subdue someone like Thomas so thoroughly.
Thomas shook his head. “They used a voice modulator to make themselves sound inhuman, sir.”
“What did they say to you?”
“I-I was told if I ever went anywhere near Sam again with the intent to harm or even subdue him, I would have my head removed and my brains sucked out the hole left behind by my absent spine, sir. And then I was told to tremble in fear if I understood, which I absolutely did.”
Tucker swallowed heavily. Exceedingly graphic. “So, you believed them?”
“At the time, without question, sir. Whatever they did to me had me convinced I was in another place entirely, with my captors being anything but human. They even went as far as to have me believe I was hung upside-down to a crucifix, a position I was helpless to overcome. Looking back at it now, knowing I’d been released and was back in my normal reality, I cannot begin to describe the complexity level that start/stop would entail.”
“Except for the snake. That is ongoing.”
This time, Thomas’ hand flattened against his chest, right over the spot Tucker assumed the ‘snake’ resided. “Yes, sir. They called it a soul brand and told me it was to serve as a permanent reminder that they were always watching.”
“Why did Helen fire you?”
When Thomas didn’t answer, Tucker’s gaze narrowed. “I’m getting very tired of having to repeat myself, Thomas.”
“I … resigned, sir,” he stated. “As soon as I returned Mrs Portsmith to the family residence. She wasn’t pleased with the short notice, but I couldn’t stay in New York a second longer. Not after … that.” He shook his head. “And before I left, I warned Donald to avoid getting into Nascerdios' crosshairs. It’s not worth it.”
Thomas’ hand clenched into a fist which he pushed between his thigh and the seat. “I don’t blame him for being dismissive. We were both trained by the best and civilians, on the whole, are … much less problematic for us. But this, sir? This made everything I’d ever done or had done to me look like amateur hour.”
Tucker pulled out his phone and made a reminder note to have Thomas undergo a complete physical as soon as possible, including blood tests, MRIs and CAT scans. Whatever they’d done to him couldn’t stay hidden if it still affected him.
“Well, as of now, I reject your resignation, Thomas. You were not of sound mind when you made that stand verbally, and I would be remiss if I held you to it. You suffered mentally and physically whilst in my employ and were then left to shoulder those medical bills and your recovery alone. I don’t operate that way. For the last week, you were on a well-earned vacation in the … Bahamas, did I hear you say?”
At Thomas’ brief nod, Tucker continued. “Which will be fully reimbursed just as soon as you submit receipts for whatever you spent to HR. If you don’t have receipts, your credit card statements will suffice. That includes any and all means of self-medication you undertook during that time, barring illegal drugs and escorts.” He met Thomas’ surprised gaze. “Right down to a single aspirin if you took one.”
“I didn’t pay for company, sir, and I’ve never deliberately touched illegal drugs in my life; however, I did drink substantially to try and forget.”
“That will all be covered. I don’t ever hang my people out to dry.”
“Mrs Portsmith…”
“Has no say in my business decisions. You’ll stay with me. She’ll keep Donald. I’ll let him know that under no circumstances is he permitted to let Mrs Portsmith tangle with the Nascerdios or be allowed to order him to on her behalf.” Tucker arched an eyebrow, blatantly daring him to argue.
Instead, he saw Thomas fight to keep his expression neutral. “Yes, sir.”
“Officially, your resignation will be written up as a miscommunication since you never signed anything to finalise your notice. From this point forward, you’ll stay as my driver, and believe me when I say I have no intention of rocking the boat where the Nascerdios are concerned.” As he spoke, Tucker swallowed and rolled his jaw several times during their conversation and wasn’t surprised when the cabin bounced along the ground as the jet came in for a landing.
The flight attendant had taken her seat on the other side of the kitchenette to allow them privacy. Still, once the jet came to a halt, she reappeared long enough to unlock the door, push it open and step outside to allow them time to finish their conversation. “We’re home,” Tucker pointed out, though he knew Thomas was already well aware. “Can you look me in the eye and tell me you’re up to being my regular bodyguard, or should I arrange for your medical to be done today while I’m tied up at the office sorting things out?”
Thomas didn’t even blink. “I’m fully capable of doing my job, sir. However, if you know for a fact you’ll be spending the rest of the day at the office and won’t be going anywhere else, I can let HQ’s security know that you’ll be without me for that time.” Thomas then frowned. “Wait … a medical, sir?”
Tucker almost felt sorry for him, though that didn’t stop him from nodding with absolute certainty. “The most thorough one you’ve ever undergone in your life, Thomas. I want whatever they did to you found.”
Thomas breathed out slowly. “Yessir.”
[Next Chapter]
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((All comments welcome. Good or bad, I'd love to hear your thoughts 🥰🤗))
I made a family tree/diagram of the Mystallian family that can be found here
For more of my work including WPs: Angel466 or an index of previous WPS here.
FULL INDEX OF BOB THE HOBO TO DATE CAN BE FOUND HERE!!

My first teaching job after earning my doctorate in philosophy in the fall of 1998 was assistant professor of philosophy at Southern Illinois in Edwardsville (SIUE). I had been awarded my Ph.D. from Purdue University the previous spring.
My classes for the academic year were two courses in moral philosophy and critical thinking/logic allocated between the fall and the following spring semester.
I had declined a more lucrative offer from Bentley College in Waltham, Massachusetts because the teaching load was lighter at SIUE, and I had big plans to overhaul my dissertation, rewrite it and add new chapters. I planned to turn it into a compelling book. I subsequently did. Of the five books that I have authored, that first book retains a special place in my heart. It remains in print twenty-three years after publication. Becoming a Cosmopolitan: What It Means to Be a Human Being in the New Millennium: Hill, Jason D.: 9781442210417: Amazon.com: Books
I faced my logic class as a recovering atheist; someone for whom atheism was no longer an option; however, I could not quite bring my will to yield to my desires. I was a praying agnostic.
I should have been elated. I was in a great relationship. I was a newly minted Ph.D., and I was teaching in a school of my choice. Yet my heart was heavy. There was a void; an emptiness that I could not explain that lingered in the pit of my stomach. I felt impatient, a bit irritable at times, and hungry for greater meaning and purpose in life than the ones I had created for myself.
Most of my students were white, poor, and undereducated. Many of them lived in trailer parks, some without running water. There were a handful of black students from East St. Louis who sequestered themselves on one side of the room away from the white students.
Commanding the attention of the students at the beginning of each class was challenging. They were a noisy bunch who would often talked amongst themselves during class—much to my consternation. Often, I would simply stop talking and let their verbal drivel run a long course. When the background noise which was my voice had faded, they would stop talking. I would look at them for a long time and then quietly return to the material at hand. Invariably, to take advantage of their loquaciousness, I’d ask them some questions about the material they were required to have read. Invariably, they had no responses.
When one of my students, (we’ll call him, Daniel), re-handed me his exam one afternoon with a handwritten note that read: “I could choose to bring a gun to school but I suppose I will accept the D you gave on my exam,” I literally pinched my arm in my office. I did so to remind myself of the gratitude I felt that after living in the United States for (at the time) thirteen years. I felt gratitude and pride for having earned four college degrees, for becoming a university professor who had a big-name publisher interested in publishing my first book. I felt gratitude that all my dreams were coming true—and that now I would have to decide how to deal with an obstreperous kid in my class. I dug my hands into my pocket and clenched the large gold-plated crucifix I had carried as a ritual for the past year. It was a ritual meant to initiate godhead inside me. I did not know exactly how it would work; but holding the crucifix and feeling it pressed against my leg brought me a feeling of peace and utter assuredness that, for a brief while, everything would be well.
The next evening after classes were over found me in the small town of Vandalia purchasing gas for my truck before heading for the commute to St. Louis where I lived. After our next class meeting, two female students came to my office. They were nervous. They had something urgent to speak to me about. Once I assured them of confidentiality, they told me the following. They advised against going to Vandalia to purchase gas because a lot of Klan members lived there and that it was informally known to a lot of folks as Klandalia. As a black person, they did not think that it was safe for me to be there after dark. I encouraged them to continue. Most of the white students in the class—about eighty percent of them, they surmised—were in the Klan, or they came from households where parents were Klan members. They looked a bit embarrassed. They assured me they were not in the Klan. They cautioned me against a student named Daniel. He was the student who wore a skull ring. It was a Klan ring and there was a “mark” on it, they confessed, that indicated that he “had put the hurt on somebody—probably a black person.”
I’m not sure what emotions I felt that night as I lay in bed and thought of what the students had told me. I remembered the ring on Daniel’s paper as he had handed me the exam with his threatening message. I remembered a kindly warning another black professor had issued to me the week before classes began. I was to be extra conciliatory towards the students; to treat them more as clients, and not to be punitive towards any of them no matter how they might comport themselves in classes or towards me.
I slept with the crucifix on the pillow next to me that night. I did not say much of a prayer. I did not speak with God. That which I would have asked for had already been granted. Tomorrow’s unfolding would change my life in a way I could not have conceived of as yet. But I somehow felt prayers would have been superfluous. Tomorrow had already arrived.
I fell asleep quickly knowing that resilience, perseverance, and tenacity were the traits I would need to get through the year. I slept deeply that night.
The next morning, I stood by the lectern and laid down the law. In a forceful but quiet voice I told them that I would never tolerate disrespect from any of them, that I did not care who among them or their families were members of the Klan, that I had grown up in Jamaica, a very violent country, and that I had witnessed violent atrocities that would break the toughest among them in half. This was my ship. I’d have anyone who showed even a patina of disrespect towards me permanently removed from the class.
I told them they needed to refrain from referring to themselves as dumb farm kids as that was a sort of disrespect towards themselves I would not tolerate. Self-deprecation of that nature had no place in my class. Unlearn your addiction to self-evisceration, I advised them. I told them they had a humanity that they had to achieve, that it was not an endowment, that life existed as a series of continued disclosures and possibilities. You all have a not-yet-self, a self in becoming, a self on which you can pin an aspirational identity. That aspirational identity ought to be one suffused with a commitment to excellence, discipline, ambition, resilience, and perseverance.
One student asked me why she should embody those virtues when bad things would eventually happen to good persons like herself.
I responded by saying: “Bad things will happen to good people and bad people alike. Suffering is built into the nature of existence. You must cultivate your goodness because it is the source from which you will heal from the bad things that will inevitably happen to you. No one ever healed from a source of evil or character rot.”
I told them they could make a choice about how to interpret their lives. They could accept the narratives they had inherited from their families and culture; or, they could revise and modify those narratives that informed their thinking and their identities. They could decide what they wanted to become and work towards that vision.
As I uttered those words, I peered at their faces. Some looked as if they were on the verge of tears; some looked contemptuous, as if I were uttering idealistic sophomoric verbiage that had no basis in their reality. Others appeared thoughtful, and some seemed worried. I realized, too, that a significant portion of them was failing the class. Suddenly, it seemed as if some other voice took possession of me. I said: “I’ll be holding free tutorials in my office on Saturday from 10a.m to 1 p.m. I know some of you work during the week and it’s often difficult to meet during my official office hours.”
Some of them nodded. They all looked somber. I knew these extra tutorial sessions would bleed into the time I usually spent working on my book. Since I was also in a long-distance relationship with a professor at Cornell University, there would be weekends when I would not be available.
****
Three months into the tutorials we did more than review logic. My first goal was to improve their skill set in the subject and have them leverage it in other disciplines. I learned about their lives and the hardships they faced. I acknowledged their resilience, tenacity and perseverance and assured them that these were unassailable virtues.
I asked them if they had issues with receiving conceptual instructorship from a black man who was their professor given that none of them had had a black instructor before. Some admitted that they did have such issues. Their parents had taught them that black people were stupid by nature, and that white people were superior because they were white. I didn’t sound stupid, one student volunteered, so he wondered if I were an exception to the rule. I told him that I could adduce myself as evidence that what they were taught was simply wrong, but I asked them to imagine that because they practically lived in a closed system they were unable to meet the thousands of people such as myself who did exist in the world. Daniel, the student with the skull ring and the one who had written the threatening letter asked me if I disliked them as a group. He was standing by the door of the office. He had never once entered my office. The ten other students who attended the tutorials had found ways to squeeze themselves inside my small office—some sat on the floor, others in the concave of the window. I looked at him for a while. Then I told him dislike for students whose education I was responsible for was not an emotion conducive to learning. His dismissive smirk prompted me to say: “I dislike the idea of what you, you Daniel will permanently grow into if you choose to remain rooted to a belief system that posits the existence of other people as problems simply because they have immutable characteristics different than yours.”
He looked incredulous. “You asked for it by asking me what I thought,” I said.
At nights I often descended into loneliness. A void anchored itself in my chest. I prayed fervently at times. The tutorials were definitely having a marked improvement on the performance of those who chose to attend. Sadly, not one of my black students from St Louis attended the tutorials. When I gently reminded them after class about the tutorials on Saturday mornings, most smiled politely. Others said: “We’re good professor.”
I wondered what I was hoping to truly achieve in these tutorials with a pack of racists. What was my ultimate goal? I sat on my couch one evening after classes and realized I had asked God for a sign and that he had given it to me. In serving those students I was not developing a calcified heart, or becoming regretful that I had accepted a job with such stark challenges.
In those tutorials, I had stripped away every protective artifice and mask—somehow. I faced the students with my naked singularity and a degree of vulnerability. Retrospectively, I realized that God was stripping me to a thin core; that such was the only way to encounter the students with moral integrity.
Behind the carapace of indifference and toughness they exhibited, lay ugly wounds and a great deal of hurt and suffering. I was not there to be a therapist. But in being unafraid of them, and in revealing the core of who I was, they would see there was nothing to fight or resent in me in order to protect and preserve their lives. The only thing that was left shining in that core was, love; it was a universal love for the species that was the subject of my book in a very abstract form. It was a love that was able to get behind and beyond the masks and ideologies they were formed by. They were second-hand consumers of values and belief systems that they had not ratified through appraisal and with an answer to the question: do these beliefs, values and mores fit the core of who I am?
One afternoon as the tutorial was ending, I asked them to ponder a question I often asked myself and others who were willing to make themselves vulnerable to the vicissitudes of life’s challenges, and who wanted to find or even approximate their core. The question was: “Who were you before the world told you who you had to be and had to become?”
Resilience is a blessing that has to be cultivated. There were mornings when I hated attending classes, and there were Saturday mornings when I drove to the tutorials with horrific stomach cramps, a palpitating heart and sweating palms.
God had granted me grace. I knew that had I stepped into those tutorials in full professorial mode, or with a smug sense of superiority over what several regarded those students to be—village idiots and social ballasts—that I would have failed miserably in my task. But I felt that God was saving two birds with one firm and gentle touch. In stripping me to a thin core so I could reach the humanity of my students, God was also stripping away all the defense mechanisms and highly intellectualized mediating tropes that stood in the way of my fully approaching Him and knowing Him.
At the end of the academic year some of the students cried when I announced that I would be leaving to assume another teaching position. Some hugged me and wept bitterly. No one had ever spoken to them like that, one young woman said to me. To my surprise, Daniel shook my hand and thanked me for all I had done for him. With a smile on my face, I reminded him to never refer to himself as a dumb farm kid. I wished them well in their pursuits. I encouraged them to keep in touch. I handed each of the black students from East St. Louis my professional card and told them to reach out if they just needed to be in touch. I was unsentimental in my farewell.
I realized the worst in anyone can be an accident of circumstances that have not been mediated by others who have the power to alter the trajectory of a damaged life. There were redemptive moments in those tutorials. Genuflective moments. They came with the realization that when we parse through our beliefs and past actions, and we examine the suffering that we have inflicted on others, we constitute a confederacy of sinners. We are striving for redemption and reconciliation.
Why had the parents of the students (they all lived at home) permitted them to come to a black professor’s office for tutorials if they believed in the congenital inferiority of black people?
People are often drawn to the extremes in others that they lack in themselves. Perhaps the cosmopolitan in me, the lover of humanity, and the citizen of the world had found some attraction in the philosophical antipode of those sentiments: in the atavistic tribal cravings, in those who believed in some primordial form of chemical predestination and biological collectivism as insignias of moral and metaphysical superiority. I needed to be immersed in this racist paradigm to truly understand it.
When I showed a colleague Daniel’s threatening letter I was informed by the school administration that I could be assigned another class. I refused the offer. This was my cross to carry, I thought. But why should it be my cross to carry? What justification was there for any black person who had been placed in such a precarious position to participate in and transform a hostile classroom environment?
I believe that if you’re resilient in life you learn, among other things, to parentify yourself; you learn to nurture yourself and take care of your needs. Sometimes, with the help of an active moral imagination I looked upon those students and thought: There but for the grace of God go I! As I extended my moral imagination farther, I realized that if I did not tutor these students I would be writing them out of the historical process; relegating them to the dustbin of history in my own mind. Misanthropy was not an option.
I believe that on those Saturday mornings as I parked my truck and walked to my office, that I was walking to minister more to the souls of those students than I was in improving their skill set in logic. The tutorials took on a religious meaning. I had asked God to give me a sign. He gave me a task instead, one that led straight to individuals ensconced in a milieu of hatred. The ideology of hate commanded them to descend into total ignorance and hatred. It appealed to the lowest common denominator within them. I had no script, for the notes and diagrams on logic were not the scripts; they were preambles to a greater mode of being in their presence. If love, among other things, is a command to rise in the name of the best within oneself, then was I placing too much of a burden on myself by offering up myself as an incentive for them to rise to the noblest and most heroic vision in themselves that they could be taught to seek and find?
The Saturday tutorials became part of God’s gifted rituals for me to draw closer to Him while simultaneously exposing and sharing that element of the divine He imparted in me to my students.
I reasoned that if we were all made in God’s image then, somehow, I had to affirm the students surrounding me. I needed to inoculate them against a poisonous world not though proselytizing and guilt-tripping but by means of my own agency. I did not have to become anything in particular. As I mentioned, stripping myself to a thin core revealed a self that, in its nakedness would be able to fulsomely reflect the divinity that resided there. If they could see it then, perhaps, they would be moved to get outside themselves and their hermetically sealed history and move into a capacious future. Perhaps they would be motivated not just to seek an aspirational identity predicted on that which they aspired to be. I hoped they would be led to a redemptive identity, too. And hopefully the picture of the good, the true and the beautiful that I had painted as suffusing all spheres of life would be fuel for them in the days ahead as, hopefully they cultivated goodness within themselves. That cultivated goodness, I hoped, would save them from the inevitable suffering they would face in their lives, and from the charged infections of the soul that afflict anyone who judges another by any other criterion save the content of his or her character.

Bestie and I were just playing ridgeview on professional and were stuck between the mimic and onryo with ghost orbs, spirit box, and freezing breath. We weren't having any luck checking for fingerprints so we did the onryo test. We had two crucifixes, one by the dining room table (in the middle, on the floor between it and the living room) and the other in the middle of the entrance to the kitchen. We placed the three candles around the one in the dining room and it eventually blew them all out (it also blew out her lighter once previously). We waited 5-10 seconds or so and started to leave. Right before I walked out, the other crucifix in the entrance to the kitchen (that had no candles) erupted. We were both 80% or above so we assumed it was the mimic having a demon moment, but unfortunately we were wrong and it was an onryo.
The candles of course make sense for the onryo, and we've done the test multiple times (with an onryo) and it was always a near-instant burn, and always the candled crucifix. Is 10-15 seconds in the acceptable window for it to attempt the hunt after the test? And can it be a different (in range) crucifix?
edit: just want to clarify that the two crucifixes may have been venn diagrammed slightly, but not by much iirc

The Ailing Beauty / I will ride a bike tomorrow
come on quantum physicists!
write me something strange and charming
a super-pseudo-diamagnetic diagram
a quasi-synchro-trigonometric frequency
tell me where the electrons are!
​
i convince myself its magic
(or religion)
all the things i believe in but cant explain
​
mom says poetrys a dying business
& college would rather have a stem girl
someone whos down with the quarks
and integer spins
of course its a dying business!
its the problems we make for ourselves
& the way we manifest grief
the way we stand to manifest grief
(its terrible to be sad
but worse to be happy -
where are the happy poets)
​
now theyre paid to untangle theory (from method)
& no one pays us to look out the window
on the one-way train to the future
(but where will you be looking
when we reach our destination)
​
& its all computers these days - machines
whats left of the human condition
when we get to the boring utopia!
new age new invention
thats whats called progress - a way to breathe better
a victim to the diagnosis
saving the hard questions for later
for the dying businesses
& whats there to prescribe
we will tell you that god is in the atoms
​
come on poets!
lets earn our living
or at least our dying
& make magic from an electron
​
(i cant give you any good answers
but i can keep your crucifix upright
when the stem girls come for mr. christ)

Every day in October for 30 days I'm watching a different scary movie, this year all about demonic possession.
“Stigmata” seems to pose the question: If you can be possessed by the devil, what else could potentially possess you?
“Stigmata” also poses the question: What could possibly possess anyone to make this movie?
Per IMDB, “Stigmata” director Rupert Wainwright had done almost nothing but MC Hammer and NWA music videos prior to 1999, including 1991’s “Addams Groove.”
If graduating from that to feature films sounds like a classic Hollywood example of failing upward, that’s because you haven’t seen “Stigmata” yet, because in no sense is this upwards of anything.
Gabriel Byrne plays a Jesuit who travels around the world debunking miracles, presumably because the Vatican puts a lot of stock in the pure kitsch value of the assignment.
Not gonna lie, Gabriel Byrne in a priest’s collar is really doing it for me. Unfortunately there’s a movie surrounding this blessed image, like a cursed hedge of thorns.
Incidentally, according to a 2007 interview, Byrne actually spent five years in seminary before pursuing acting; presumably he dropped out after one day realizing, “Holy shit I’m Gabriel Byrne.”
Anyway, the job brings him to Pittsburgh, where Patricia Arquette is suffering from the titular stigmata. This is very surprising you see, because Patricia is an atheist who lives in a loft, fucks Patrick Muldoon, works at a combination salon and tattoo parlor, and does all sorts of other sinful 90s Indie things, up to and including sleeping under an Art Deco headboard.
So it’s quite ironic that she’s manifesting holy powers that include poltergeist activity and blackouts, during which she writes in supposed “Aramaic” on the walls; she’s possessed not by the devil but by the Holy Spirit, here to deliver some great spiritual truth to the world.
If that sounds almost conflict-free, you would be correct, so the movie interjects some tension by making us wonder whether Arquette and Byrne are going to stop talking about nailing crucifixes and ever get around to nailing anything else.
The film clearly wants them to; Byrne is almost 20 years older, but this is a movie that would have to have the concept of shame explained to it with a blackboard diagram, so they definitely weren’t counting.
That we’re supposed to believe priests really stay celibate is far less plausible than any of the other hijinx “Stigmata” has up its tattoo sleeve, by the way.
After that the plot has to resort to a Vatican conspiracy in the final act, but the secret that’s supposedly at the heart of this isn’t terribly shocking; too much for the VeggieTales crowd presumably, but that’s about it.
In his review, Roger Ebert pointed out that this movie just plain doesn’t make sense: Why are we supposed to be scared if our heroine is possessed by god? I could imagine an awesome horror movie in which god is the true monster, but “Stigmata” doesn’t have the bones for that.
Almost every other critic hated it too, but it made donkey carts of money anyway. Despite the success, Wainwright went back to mostly directing music videos, although he did get to direct Tom Welling’s turtleneck in the 2005 “The Fog” remake nobody remembers.
Well, at least this movie tried to be erudite. In light of its failure, tomorrow we’ll do a movie that succeeds at being utterly lowbrow.
Original Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwsTYQ26QDQ
Past "Stigmata" I Watcheds:
https://www.reddit.com/iwatchedanoldmovie/comments/e2bah8/i_watched_stigmata_1999/
https://www.reddit.com/iwatchedanoldmovie/comments/8ov1zc/i_watched_stigmata_1997/
Both of them liked it, so hey, takes all kinds.

I can outstrike div14 players but get mauled on the ground by div7 players. I'm on PS and know that I'm supposed to hold R2 and move right stick in the direction the player is attempting to transition, but I can't seem to stop half decent players from getting into mount , side saddle, submissions (I can defend well, just not prevent them) or crucifix. Is there some kind of diagram I can access which explains all the transitions? Or a comprehensive tutorial in-game? I'm tired of Whooping players for two and a half rounds then getting ground and pounded into oblivion.

People say you’ve got to show up to get lucky, but they leave out the part where luck runs both ways. Since I was laid off from my last job, money has gotten tight - unemployment insurance doesn’t pay nearly as much as I used to make, so my two boys agreed to get jobs at the local mega-mart to pay for their phones and games. We also have a couple of kitties who are quite accustomed to flights of Fancy Feast and the deluxe robot litter box that scoops and cleans on every visit. There’s no white picket fence, but we do have a minivan. It comes in pretty handy for a family of five.
 
You won’t find a tragic backstory on me being a single father. My wife ran off one day and we never heard from her again. I guess that’s tragic in a sense, but it’s hard to be sad when I’m pretty sure she was riding the bartender at her old job. So many late nights, so many times she came home just before or just after sunrise, until one day she didn’t. The boys miss her, but they’re getting used to it, or maybe they’re getting too old to confide in me.
 
I’m also a veteran, US Navy. No, I wasn’t a SEAL, and I never even met a guy from DEVGRU. I was an electrician’s mate, but I didn’t learn much more than how to change lightbulbs and swap outlets. When I got out, I ended up getting a job at the power plant, thanks to creative resume writing and a healthy dose of bullshit. This was back in ‘04, when people were still proud to be fighting. Maybe the manager thought it was his patriotic duty to hire me despite my lack of real qualifications. It probably helped that I had just gotten married, with one kid in a crib and another in the oven. What I’m getting at is I haven’t been unemployed in so long that I’ve been feeling lost.
 
About a week ago, I got an email from a headhunting company that asked if I wanted to interview for a position as an independent contractor doing “alternate disposal remedies”. That was probably code for trash collecting, so I agreed to the interview. No shame in being a garbageman, as long as you’re not a garbage man. The recruiter assured me this was a modern, nontraditional company, and she advised the interview would be informal and casual. That worked for me since the only suit I had was in the attic, stuffed in a box. I hadn’t worn it since my brother’s funeral, and I had no designs on working in management. What can I say, I’m a blue collar guy.
 
It was early in the evening when I pulled up for the interview with the GPS announcing my arrival at an upscale hotel. I ignored this red flag. The company probably had everyone work remotely to save on renting out office space. Inside the lobby, a sign pointed to a ballroom which I found surprisingly full. The seats were socially distanced, but I estimated at least fifty people were seated. One of the open tables near the stage was my punishment for not arriving sooner. About a minute after I got in, the lights dimmed as a projector filled an enormous screen. The slides were full of random images of middle class happiness and vague terms about financial success and being your own boss. With two red flags in two minutes, I was preparing to leave when a presenter took the stage. I don’t know a lot of wealthy people, but I do know there’s a difference between people who make money and people who have money. This guy had money. From his understated blazer to his supple leather shoes, it was obvious the biggest stress in his life was making reservations at Dorsia.
 
I don’t know where they got this guy, but he was positively electric, the sort of dude that just oozes personality. Every set of eyes was glued on him. He was clean cut and handsome, but his looks were just the start. When he started talking, even talking this nonsense, it was nothing short of amazing. I couldn’t believe he wasn’t a celebrity, like a movie star. People would pay to watch him perform.
 
“Howdy, folks. I’m looking at hiring an apprentice or two to join me in the killin’ vampire business. And cousin, business is booming! These undead sumbitches are popping up out of the woodwork, and it’s my job to send them to the hell they so richly deserve. Want to join me and maybe scoop up your own riches? Hold your horses, partners. I should fill you in on the gory details before you sign on the ol’ dotted line.”
 
Vampires? This had to be a setup. I tried to spot the hidden cameras for the prank show. How many “applicants” in the room didn’t get that this was all a cruel joke? Desperate people looking for a job, and these jerks are showing us pictures of luxury cars and champagne before telling us we’re vying to be vampire hunters.
 
“Now, I know what you’re all thinking, but this here is a one hundred percent legitimate business endeavor. That’s right, this is not a personal cause for me. I’m not religious, I’m not mourning a loved one taken by Dr. Acula, I’m just making bank. It’s dangerous as all get out, but it’s worth it. I make about ten grand per contract after expenses, and I do one or two a week. I’m in such demand that I’m thinking it’s time to franchise this bad boy to let motivated go-getters light out for the territories and claim their own vampire scalps. Do you think you have what it takes?”
 
Nobody was standing up to leave or looking at their phones. He had them all locked in on this absurd proposition. Hell, I guess he had me too. Ten grand a week sounded like pretty good money, even if it was only a one time deal. My oldest kid is having a birthday soon, so I killed time earlier that day by getting him a present at the mall. I got him a flashlight. A fucking flashlight from the mall ninja store, the kind that sells throwing stars and nunchucks. The one I picked out was so cheap it didn’t even come with packaging. The clerk rang me up and stuck it in a bag after he switched it on and off a couple of times to prove it worked. Apparently they aren’t big on returns at Fantasy Emporium. I hit a new low with that purchase. What kind of a father is going to give a flashlight to a teenage boy who is dreaming about getting a Mustang and taking his girlfriend out on the town? Here you go, sport. You can make shadow puppets!
 
“So here’s how it works. A vampire is out there feeding on the living, draining them of every last drop of blood. But something happens to interrupt the kill, see? The police show up because of the noise, or the victim’s parents make their way into the basement, that sort of thing. The vampire books it before finishing the job. Next thing you know, the victim gets rushed to the hospital and survives. This is a problem.”
 
How could a person surviving an attack be a problem? For the effort these guys put into this prank, they should have spent more time coming up with a better script.
 
“You see, only so many vampires can roam in a given area. A major city can probably host half a dozen at most. The reason is pretty simple. Vampires need to stay hidden, to go undetected by the masses, to be thought of as myth. Less populated areas can be home to only one - and that one better be pretty gosh-darn migratory if he doesn’t want people figuring out what he’s doing. The most important part of a vampire attacking a human is this: they have to make sure the victim dies. If they live, if they get rushed to the hospital or just treated at home, it’s only a matter of time before they turn into vampires themselves. That’s a problem for a couple of reasons. One, as I said, is the number of vampires that can quietly exist in an area. The ocean can support a whole lot of sharks, but an inhabited beach can only host one, and only for a little while. As soon as that shark chomps on a swimmer, everyone loses their minds. It’s chaos.”
 
Okay, that made more sense, if you saw it as a problem from the vampire’s perspective. I’ll tell you this much, the guy was fun to watch. Maybe they would ask me to sign a waiver before this was added to Netflix, though I’d probably have to do something outrageous to get noticed. That’s what those prank shows are always trying to capture - people acting a fool.
 
“The other reason is new vampires are pretty stupid. They take too many chances early on because they wait to attack until they are starving, they get greedy when they finally commit to feeding, and they often end up getting filmed or providing other evidence of their existence. The worst part of all is that new vampires are sloppy. They rarely have the guts to kill their victims, which means we’re going to have a third vampire soon, at least until the new ones feed again. Guess what? We had one vampire in the area. Now we have five. Give it a month, and we’ll be at nine. You don’t have to be a mathematician to see that number’s just going to keep climbing. That’s where I step in.”
 
I never thought of it that way. In the movies, the big bad vampire is always happy to make new followers, but I guess that wouldn’t work in reality. I mean, if this sort of thing were real, which was an absurd thing to believe.
 
“I step in, generally before things go to pot. I get a heads up that a baby vamp is up and running, and I figure out where the little bastard is holed up. Then I smoke him out. Let me take a minute to share the proper way to dispose of the damned.” He made a production of glancing at his wrist. I’m not a watch guy, but I could tell it was pricey. “Tell you what, folks, let’s take a breather before we continue. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.” I had ‘em. I know, I know, it’s a bad habit.
 
The smoking area was close to the lobby, near the reserved parking for the hotel guests who are Elite Diamond Ultra members or whatever. I was a little distracted, looking at a brilliant red Corvette that was sitting in one of those spots. It was the new model with the mid-engine and the lines that made it look more Italian than American. It was powerful, it was gorgeous, it was perfect. I resisted taking a photo - didn’t want to look like a gawking tourist. Instead, I smoked in silence while holding the gift bag from the mall. I did not want to leave the flashlight unattended in our minivan since I couldn’t afford to replace the damn thing if it was stolen. A crappy gift is better than no gift and a broken window.
 
I didn’t notice the presenter standing next to me until he spoke. It spooked me a bit, if I’m being honest. I’m usually pretty good with situational awareness, but it was like he suddenly appeared, a magician sans rabbit. He stuck out a hand, and I juggled awkwardly for a second before I could shake it.
 
“My friends call me Dave. I see you noticed my rolling Prince song. If you decide this job passes the spark test, you can get one for yourself. Oh, before I forget, thank you for your service.” I gave him a look. He pointed at my chest and said, “Your shirt, Chief.”
 
I had been putting off laundry day for a while, and I grabbed the last clean shirt I could find. It was one of those cheesy and overly specific types that can only be a Father’s Day present. I’m a Navy Veteran who was born in September with a hairlip and a bad attitude. Don’t drink my beer or I’ll submarine you. Not a great look for a job interview.
 
Dave smiled. “It’s all good, my friend. The best looking people are rarely the best working people. Besides, I’m sure you boys saw plenty of scary shit in country.” Fuck. I had let my beard come in pretty heavy over the last few months to save on razor blades. He probably thought I was posing as the gray man. It was flattery, intentional or not, and a little patronizing.
 
“When we get back in from this break, do me a favor and scope the room,” Dave said. “We invited a lot of applicants, but there’s only one spot at the jetty. If you want to get in on this thing, you’ll have the chance to earn it tonight. If, that is to say, you choose to interview.” I raised an eyebrow.
 
“This isn’t my first rodeo. When the show is over, we’ll have only a handful of interview volunteers. Of those who enter the room, most won’t even attempt to finish the interview. But I’ve got a good feeling about you, Chief. I think you can do it.”
 
What could he see in me? “Thanks, I guess. By the way, I wasn’t a chief. I never made it past PO2.”
 
“Just a figure of speech,” he said. “Come on. Let’s hoist the main.” Dave walked back toward the lobby.
 
He sure could work a crowd, but one-on-one, he was awkward. I didn’t mind, it was nice to see an imperfect side to this guy. That showman persona was larger than life, and it’s not the kind of thing I can really connect with. I figured it couldn’t hurt to learn more about this endeavor. Maybe a job opportunity was here, like I could help set the stage or lug around the equipment for the next group of suckers who get taken in by this silly supernatural con. He probably would sell enchanted wooden stakes and holy water balloons for anyone who wants them. Hell, he’d probably offer to sell the crowd vampire hunting licenses.
 
When I took my seat, I did as Dave asked. Maybe half as many people came back, if that. Good. I wasn’t the only one that saw the red flags. I did a little people watching, and I got the feeling that those who were left were mostly like me, desperate for work. A few had a bit of a crazy vibe, like maybe they thought the shtick was real. I couldn’t feel too sorry for them since my delusional reason for staying was just a little more grounded in reality.
 
Dave retook the stage, and it was like he was a different man. He was back “on”, his presence filling the room and once again commanding attention, seemingly without effort. “Welcome back, everyone. Let’s touch on how to dispatch those poor souls who have been infected with vampirism.”
 
Here we go. If you buy today, you’ll get a second stake for half off and a bonus vial of holy water.
 
“In the movies,” he began, “vampires have all kinds of powers and abilities. They’re attractive, immortal, powerful, fast, and strong. In the real world, vampires don’t live forever and they don’t recoil in terror if they find you bathing in holy water with a wreath of garlic around your neck. That just makes you a victim stew. No, friends, your options are limited. Sunlight, fire, or decapitation. That’s basically it. Stake in the heart? Worthless. Crucifix? Does nothing. Silver weapons? Not unless that sword pops their head off. They cast reflections in the mirror, they don’t sleep in coffins, and they aren’t much stronger or faster than a fit human. Believe it or not, I used to be a fit human.” He paused for laughter, making the right call.
 
“I should also mention decapitation doesn’t kill them either, it just makes it so they can’t chase you down to bite you. If you cut a vampire’s head off, you’ll have to take it into the sunlight to finish it off, or burn it to ash. Otherwise, you get a snarling football that can and will bite you.” No pause this time, he was rolling.
 
“I think I covered most of the myths. Wait, I forgot to add they don’t turn into bats and they can’t fly. I guess that was so obvious I forgot to mention it. Basically, it’s almost all a bunch of baloney. I don’t know who decided on it, but I bet it’s gotten many green vampire hunters killed when they showed up with the stake and the holy water and whatnot.” Dave was one of those speakers who made you feel like he was talking directly to you. It was odd to feel singled out in such a spread out space. I knew he was scanning the room while he talked, but it also felt like he was whispering in my ear. It was unnerving, but effective. I couldn’t wait to hear more.
 
“They’ve got their own special tricks to stay alive, so to speak. Vampires have pretty fast reflexes, and they are strong, but those are relative skills, savvy? They aren’t picking up a car and throwing it at you, but if you were to try to wrestle one that was your size, you would lose. You would definitely lose.” It occurred to me the interview might include wrestling a guy who was dressed like a vampire, and the joke would be on the poor sucker who believed in this foolishness enough to grab a singlet against the in-house nosferatu champion.
 
“Vampires don’t need to ask permission to enter your house either, but they may try to talk their way in. It’s much easier to get a meal when the victim is along for the ride instead of fighting it. So when you look through the peephole and see a vampire on the other side, you should know that they don’t have to ask, but they are probably going to try anyway. They can be very persuasive. I wouldn’t say they can mesmerize you per se, but they definitely know how to toy with your emotions and bait you into acting out of your own best interests. Personally, I think they put out a pheromone that makes people more open to suggestion. That’s part of why we’re here today, to see who buckles under the pressure.” Ahh, so it was a setup, like a reality show combined with a prank show. We were being groomed to volunteer for the next round.
 
“You might be thinking I’m pretty heartless, and I don’t deny it. Sure, they’ve all got families and friends, but who do you think they victimize first? Most baby vamps are in denial, and they try to live their lives as they did before the change. They will hang out with their friends and loved ones, pretending all is well while the urge to feed grows within them until they are ravenous. They reach the tipping point and attack someone close to them, and then it’s off to the races. Best for us to put them down before they spread the contagion around.” Doubt crept into my mind. Why would Dave stand on stage and humanize these supposed monsters?
 
“You’re probably wondering how I know where to find these unholy abominations. I usually get called by the one who made them! That’s right, the vampire responsible for his offspring’s creation will call me to take care of his little accident, and pay me well to do it. It’s a self-contained cash cow, and you can help me milk it.” Dave took another look at his watch. I bet it cost more than our minivan. “Okay, as the man once said, let’s have a little less conversation and a little more action. Raise your hand if you want to interview for the position.” Most hands were raised, including mine. I was in for a penny.
 
“I love to see it, folks! Okay, keep those hands up. Now, leave them up if you’re still interested when I tell you the interview will involve coming face to face with an actual vampire.” A few hands dropped, but not many.
 
“You’re all quite bold. I like it. Leave those hands up if you’re willing to kill a vampire tonight. Remember what I said earlier, it’s not as simple as flashing them a carving of a bloke nailed to a plus sign. You’ve got to get dirty in this line of work.” More hands fell, down to maybe a dozen.
 
“Now we’re separating the wheat from the chaff. Okay, gang, last hurdle. I’m probably only hiring one of you tonight, which means you’ll have to face a vampire and kill it without being bitten, and do both with the knowledge that you might not leave here with a single dollar, let alone a job. Now who is that committed to the cause?” Six hands were still raised, counting mine. Six people who were caught hook, line, and sinker on this guy’s spiel, or were desperate enough to do anything for a payday. I guess it didn’t matter if we were true believers or not. We were in for a pound.
 
Dave dismissed the rest of the audience with appreciative parting words, then he brought the interview volunteers together in a small hurdle near the windows. He looked us each squarely in the eye and said, “Okay, let’s be honest. Who thinks this is a load of bullshit?” My gaze met with several others who must have been thinking the same.
 
One guy piped up. He was a shorter man with glasses and a perfectly shaped goatee. His shirt was neatly pressed - no tie, but I bet he had several. “I can’t speak for anyone else,” he said, “but I don’t believe vampires exist. I think this is all one big gotcha, though I’m quite sure I’ll take that ten grand if you’re offering it.”
 
Dave smiled. “I hear that all the time. Thanks for being honest. Here’s how it’s going to work. You’ll enter the interview room, one at a time. Inside will be a vampire that is chained up, and you’ll find disposal tools that may come in handy. It’s obviously dark out, so you won’t be able to use the sun, and the hotel’s sprinkler system is connected to the alarms, so you can’t burn them to a crisp. Does anyone know what that leaves?”
 
A young woman in a sundress smiled and dragged a finger across her throat. “Off with their heads,” she giggled.
 
“You get the A, missy. Remember, that doesn’t finish them off. They can still bite you, so you’ll have to secure the head before you can take a victory lap. Any other questions?” I had more than a few, but I was selfishly quiet in the hope the others would bail or fail, putting me one step closer to winning.
 
Dave designated our places in line and gave us nicknames to boot. “Peaches, you’re first. Then Stogie. Next will be Slick, then Chopper, and then Chief. Missy, you get to go last. Please wait here until your turn.” Dave and Peaches walked off together.
 
The nicknames were probably a means of protecting our identities should we refuse to sign the waivers when principal photography stopped. I passed the time with Chopper, who was roughly my age, likely named for his leather jacket. We talked about riding and cars, we talked about our families. I was too embarrassed to tell him about the birthday flashlight, so I kept that under wraps. Chopper sold his last bike to pay for his spouse’s medical bills. He kept using the term “spouse”, but I didn’t ask - not my business. I just hoped things would work out for the Chopper household.
 
Each audition took about twenty to twenty-five minutes, and then Dave would come down to snag the next in line. When Chopper left, I considered striking up a conversation with Missy, but I worried she would think I was flirting. Instead, I ran through ideas in my mind of what would make my audition stand out. Maybe instead of pretending to be scared and screaming (which most of the other applicants would do), I could do more of a scientific or curiosity-based approach. Instead of going straight for the jugular, I could talk to the vampire a bit, maybe get it to break character and laugh. That might be the thing they needed for the last part of the show, to end on a high note. Since we went up individually, the producers could edit this any way they wanted. They could make it look like I was going first, or last, or even alone. The key was to turn in a memorable performance, to break the algorithm.
 
Dave came down and walked me over to the elevator. It was one of those fancy old-fashioned ones where you shut the door yourself, closing a polished brass cage to ascend. We rose to the top floor, where the executive suites had the best views. Suites made a lot of sense - a separate room could be secured for the rest of the production team to monitor the cameras and have a measure of safety in case anyone tried to actually cut off some poor actor’s head.
 
As we stood outside of the room, Dave asked if I was nervous. I gambled. “Hey, man, can I be straight with you for a minute?”
 
“Sure thing, Chief. What’s on your mind?” He seemed calm, almost tranquil, like everything was unfolding just the way it should. I had my doubts.
 
“Well, I’m not trying to break character or anything, but if I, you know, kill this vampire, what happens to the applicant who hasn’t gone yet? The one you called Missy.” I hoped this would show me as considerate of the competition. I didn’t know what they were looking for, so I was trying to cover all the bases.
 
Dave winked at me and pushed me through the door. “Bon fortuna,” he said as the door closed behind me.
 
The room was jarringly dim. The light from the toilet was on, casting faintly into the living room beyond. I flipped the wall switch, but the bulbs had been removed. As my eyes adjusted, I could make out a shape in the middle of the room. I was looking at the vampire. Behind her was a closed door, but the lights inside were on, allowing a few rays to leak through the jamb. My mind flashed to emergency exit rows on airplanes.
 
The vampire was a blindfolded woman. She was strapped into a harness that was attached to a thick chain, though I could not see where the chain ended. She sat perfectly still, her head cocked as if she were listening intently to determine my position. A stain ran down her neck and onto her sleeveless shirt. Food coloring, most likely. I couldn’t quite place it, but I felt like I had seen her before. Then it hit me - she was probably a local actress, and I had almost certainly seen her in a commercial for a car dealership or credit union. She was barefoot with yoga shorts, so despite the harness, she had a lot on display. I guess the producers were going for a sexy/scary look, but I was indifferent to both.
 
I peeked into the bathroom to check for cameras, but my attention was quickly drawn to a note taped to the door. It read:
 
Rules:

• If you leave early, you fail.
  
• If you get bitten, you fail.
  
• If you call for help, you fail.
  
• Unless you’re planning on ripping her head off with your bare hands, you’ll need to use one of the tools that have been placed in the bedroom.
  
• You have ten minutes to complete the interview, starting from the time you entered the room. Happy hunting.
  

 
Fuck. I had wasted at least a minute. I checked the emergency exit notice for the hotel. It included a diagram of the room, showing the bedroom was straight back, behind the closed door. Okay, so all I had to do was run the vampire gauntlet and get to the back, but instead of finding chainsaws and guillotines, I would find a random C-list celebrity and his production assistants to laugh and clap and tell me how silly I looked.
 
I stepped forward to greet my adversary. “Rough night?” I asked. She smiled wide, spreading her lips to show off sharp fangs and stained teeth. She probably did her own makeup and was proud of how well it came out.
 
“Come a bit closer, hon. I’ll show you a rough night.” She gave the chain a playful rattle. “You’ll be safe enough, don’t you think?”
 
“I should warn you, I’ve got high blood pressure. Might be a gushing geyser when you snap into my Slim Jim.” I was hoping a little witty banter would work for the target audience. While I was talking, I quietly slipped off my shoes. I held the shoes in one hand and cradled the gift bag in the other.
 
“I don’t mind a guy who sprays all over the place. Come on over, baby. Don’t make me beg.” She was damn good in this role, pretty snappy on her toes.
 
I tossed my shoes to the left. They landed a couple of feet away from her. She took the bait, lunging with a speed that surprised me. Still, I didn’t hesitate. I hustled to the right, weaving around her and bursting through the bedroom door. I grinned for the host and PAs with a look of triumph.
 
The room was vacant. I sensed something was off, and I instinctively pushed deeper into the room, just as the vampire slipped in behind me, her fingers brushing against my shoulder. The sound of a loud clank filled the room as the chain snapped taught to stop her. What was this? Where were the balloons and the champagne?
 
“Clever boy,” she said. “But you’re running out of time, and you’re running out of options. What’s it going to be? Call for help or risk a bite? A big strong man like you should be no match for a tiny little thing like me.”
 
I frantically scanned the room. The disposal tools were on the dresser. The chainsaw jumped out at me first, but there was also a firefighter’s axe, a bowie knife, a hacksaw, a machete, and even a samurai sword. That one threw me off - who was going to slay the undead with a fucking katana? Maybe the guy from Fantasy Emporium would have picked that one. A plastic box, conveniently head sized, was in the far corner.
 
My breathing bordered hyperventilation. I spun between options, unable to work my way out of this corner. In my fantasy leading up to this, I was sure I would ace this whole thing, but when the rubber met the road, I was stuck. The actress was blocking the door, and I wasn’t going to grab a chainsaw to chase her around the room. I couldn’t possibly win the contest with something so obvious as trying to fight my way out.
 
“Enough games,” she said, pulling off the blindfold and glaring at me with a fury I couldn’t process, my mind racing to attribute it to a … local acting class? It just wasn’t adding up. Then she slapped the wall switch to kill the bedroom lights. “Game over, tiger.” I crept deeper in the room as I sensed her reaching for me.
 
I’ve only experienced what happened next once or twice before, during a time of extreme stress. My body went into autopilot and took action without the express written consent of Major League Baseball. My son is obsessed with those true crime shows - he wants to become a forensic detective. I reached into the gift bag and pulled out his birthday present, then I pointed the flashlight toward my adversary and switched it on, bathing her in a purplish light. An ultraviolet light.
 
The vampire shrieked and turned to run out of the room, but she tripped on the chain and fell to the floor. The flashlight shown on her exposed skin, which started to sizzle and blister. Holy fuck, this whole thing was real! Terror gripped me as I realized I had the tiger by the tail. If I didn’t play this right she would surely kill me, and probably take her time doing it. She begged, crying out in agony, a mishmash of babbled pleas that were almost pitiful. I couldn’t imagine the pain.
 
With the flashlight held on her, I picked up the machete and closed the distance. She reached over to grab my leg, but what strength she had was gone. I pressed a foot onto the harness near her shoulder blades, and whispered, “I’m so sorry.” I lifted the machete and brought it down hard, but it only sank about an inch into her neck. Her shrieks turned to muffled gurgling as she flailed on the floor. Tears streamed down my cheeks as I swung again. Such a gut-wrenchingly awful thing to do, but I had to see it through. It took maybe two dozen swings to sever the head completely. My victory at hand, I lifted my socked foot to kick her head away, but Dave’s advice about the snarling football resurfaced. Instead, I turned the bedroom lights back on and put the flashlight back in the bag. The head went into the box, though I went out of my way to avoid eye contact. I didn’t want to see if anyone was still home.
 
I entered the living room with the box and bag in tow. Dave jumped up from the couch to greet me. He was positively beaming. “I knew you could do it, Chief! Let me take a look at you, make sure she didn’t get in any nom noms before you shuffled her loose.” He gave me the once over before giving me a firm pat on the back. “I can’t believe you ever doubted yourself - you’re a natural. Say, you’d better let me hold that.” Without thinking, I extended the bag with the flashlight. Dave pulled his hand back and shook his head, nodding at the box. I passed it over, and he placed it on the end table by the couch. I slipped my shoes back on as I stared at the fruits of my labor, a severed head one room removed from its body.
 
I found myself too stunned to talk. Who was that vampire? What did I just do? Where were the other applicants? When would I get that ten thousand dollar check? Why did I agree to this whole thing? How could I possibly do this for a living? I was all questions and no answers. Dave extended a hand, and I shook it as he walked me to the door.
 
“Like I said, buddy, you did a great job, and I’m sure you’ll be a great addition to the team. Listen, we’ll be in touch. Thanks for proving me right - I can still spot a winner from a mile away.” As he was pushing me gently through the door, I regained enough composure to ask what happened to the other applicants.
 
Dave gave me a sly grin as we walked. “Well, a couple of them never went deeper than the foyer, so they went home empty handed. Of the two that made a run at it, one didn’t even make it to the bedroom. That fella with the glasses almost got his hands on that fancy sword. Now don’t worry about those two, they’ll be ready for prime time in a couple of days, just about when I’ll need more volunteers to wear the harness. By the way, you should probably stop smoking. You’ll need to be in much better shape when you turn pro. Think of this as a controlled environment where we gave her a bit of a handicap. They won’t all be this easy - next time the training wheels come off.”
 
By the time he finished talking, we were back at the elevators. With one last pat on the back, Dave and I parted ways. I stepped into the cage and began my descent.

PART FOUR HUNDRED AND NINETY-NINE
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Thursday
Thomas saw the hooded man tailing Geraldine for almost a block and was torn between intercepting the problem or staying with Mrs Portsmith. The decision was made when, after assisting Miss Portsmith into the car, he saw the would-be attacker duck into a doorway and crouch down to watch.
While he closed the door, Thomas discreetly removed his firearm and pretended to walk as quietly as he could past the doorway, with every intention of coming up behind him. Sure enough, he was still sitting in the doorway, though from the angle of his hoodie he was looking more at the ground between his knees then at the car.
Distracted worked even better for him.
He slid in behind the youth, but before he could make his move, his weapon hand was submerged in something cold and jelly-like at the same time as his head was covered and he felt himself being yanked backwards. His training kicked in and he immediately drove his free elbow into his attacker’s solar plexus, connecting with something but not the usual ribcage he was expecting.
His feet were caught and slammed together with a bone-grinding crack of his ankles, flipping him upside-down. His arms were grabbed and thrust out to either side of his head at full extension. As blood rushed to his head, he struggled to no avail, picturing himself looking like a suited man on an inverted crucifix.
“Relaaaax,” an inhuman voice purred, then the wetness of a forked tongue slid across Thomas’ throat above his tie, causing the exact opposite effect in him.
The voice chuckled as if it expected that. “Next time you come anywhere near Sam Nascerdios brandishing a weapon, I will tear your head from your shoulders and suck what little brains you have out through the hole left by your missing spine. Tremble in fear if you understand.”
Thomas was already shaking. That voice sounded like it belonged in the bowels of Hell itself! He hadn’t realised the hooded individual was Mister Wilcott or he’d have never gone anywhere near him, not that he was in any position to explain himself on that score.
That tongue then slid down between the skin of his throat and his suit shirt and tie. “A little something to remember this conversation by … in case you manage to convince yourself I’m just a hallucination.”
The tongue tips grazed the surface of his sternum, but before he could wonder if that was it, pain bloomed over his heart like an evil flower and he arched backwards, screaming into the darkness. In his career he’d been shot, stabbed, electrocuted and even tortured, and nothing compared to the agony that had him writhing helplessly against this unknown thing.
He had no idea how long it lasted. It seemed like a lifetime … maybe even a dozen lifetimes. But eventually, the agony subsided to a bone-deep burn, and he sagged, hanging limply in the restraints.
Through the aftermath, he felt himself being turned right way up with multiple hands straightening his clothes. “Can’t go back to the ladies looking like you’ve been on an all-night bender, can you, Thomas?”
It knew his name.
Thomas’ mouth moved to agree, even though his voice failed him. “Hey, come on. Suck it up, soldier. One little soul brand and you’re acting like it’s the end of the world.”
Soul brand?
He felt solid ground under his feet once more, and then the restraints were gone and he stumbled forward, his hands going out to support himself against the doorway. The clunk of metal on glass reminded him he still had the gun in his right hand and struggled to holster it, panting all the while. After a second, he whirled around and saw the closed door of the coffee shop. His eyes jumped from one shadow to the next, looking for whoever had … soul branded …?... him.
When nothing moved, he turned back to his reflection and unbuttoned his shirt over his heart, pulling the two sides apart. Nothing. He looked down at himself and gasped, for a brand had been burned into his skin in the shape of a writhing snake with its jaws wide and venom dripping from the fangs. As in a moving writhing snake.
A little something to remember this conversation by … in case you manage to convince yourself I’m just a hallucination.
The reflection had nothing, but he could see it if he used his own eyes. He brushed his shaking fingertips across the coiled disk of a snake, jerking his hand away as the snake made a snapping motion at his intruding fingers.
Is this thing alive? Can I ignore it?
He had to try. If he was to go back to work, he had to pretend nothing was wrong. Licking his lips, he buttoned his shirt and cleared his throat, making his way across to the car.
* * *
Any particular reason you used a snake, Kulon? Angus asked as he dialled the number of the real estate agent attached to a multi-million-dollar lakefront property in Tuxedo Park. The young warrior had just finished his report on the incident involving Geraldine’s former driver. It was the second such confrontation between the human and the pryde. He probably wouldn’t survive a third.
Humans are predisposed to fearing serpents, sir. Most of their religions hold the legless reptile as the epitome of evil, maybe even more so than demons themselves since they know snakes are real.
Angus chuckled to himself, wondering how many demons he could pass that viewpoint along to. Keep me apprised, he sent, hitting dial. He raised his phone to his ear and counted four pulses before the call was connected.
“Mareesha Peacock speaking,” a woman said sleepily, and Angus smirked at the early hour. Sam was right. If he’d called his other realtor before five in the morning, she’d have either ignored the call or automatically threatened to call the police. Using the internet to find a better class of realtors was already paying off.
“Good morning, Mareesha Peacock. My name is Angus Nascerdios and I have a strong interest in one of your online properties.”
Angus hadn’t planned on using the Nascerdios name, but time was now of the essence and whether he liked it or not, the name greased wheels. Despite being given Robbie’s old room, Angus hadn’t used it at all, choosing to watch TV until Sam let him know he was free to teach him how to use the internet properly. To say things had changed while he was away was an understatement, and he’d spent the last seven weeks catching up with all the other changes over the last twenty-five years. Ten minutes into his first documentary, he’d received new orders from the Eechee to find accommodation elsewhere. Which meant if he didn’t find somewhere pronto, he’d be sleeping on the roof as a rat tonight.
Hence the Nascerdios name, and the kick into high gear to find somewhere suitable.
Angus heard the shift in the realtor’s breathing as she pulled herself from her slumber to present some semblance of professionalism. “Mister Nascerdios,” she said, and with his heightened hearing, he could hear her scurrying barefoot into another room. “I’m sorry. Give me a moment to power up my computer … I just need to put you on hold for one minute…”
If you can take care of your body’s needs in under a minute, you’ll be the most expedient human female in history, he mused to himself. Nevertheless, he said, “Of course, Miss Peacock …”
“Mareesha, please. One moment.” Her hold music consisted of advertising for her company to remind him why it was worth his time to wait for her return.
Not that he would hang up if she took any longer, but out of morbid curiosity, Angus brought up the clock in the corner of the computer screen and watched the seconds tick over. At forty-three she was back. “My apologies for the delay, Mister Nascerdios. Now, which of my properties are you interested in?”
“Tuxedo Park.”
“Ahh, yes. A lovely property. Lakefront views. Twenty thousand square feet with the main house spread over three floors.”
“I read the online pamphlet, Mareesha.”
“Of course, you did, Mister Nascerdios. Would you like me to arrange a walk-through for either yourself or your agent?”
“No,” Angus said, for the site Sam had found him included a very detailed walk-through, even though the house wasn’t what drew him to the property. “Provided the view of the lake, and the privacy afforded by the trees around the property remain unchanged from when the video was taken, I’d like to put a rushed purchase on the place.”
Her sudden gasp brought a full smile to his lips. “Just to confirm, you wish to purchase the Tuxedo Park property … sight unseen?”
“And fully furnished.”
“That will add several million more to the purchase price, sir.”
“Round it up to thirty, provided I can have the keys within eight hours.”
“Sir, I am required by law to remind you that the soonest property can change hands outside a family is two weeks …”
“The property will go into my name eventually. Consider the extra rental in the meantime. I assume you can make this happen?”
“Y-Yes, sir. As soon as this call has ended, I can make a start on the temporary rental agreement in lieu of the overall purchase. I’m certain my client will be more than pleased to accept your exceptionally generous offer.”
“Send me a text of where you will be and call me on this number when you have the paperwork ready. I’ll come in and sign it as soon as I’m able.”
“Is there any particular time I should avoid, sir?”
“Not at this stage.”
“Yes, sir.”
Angus disconnected the call and sat back in his chair. The property in question wasn’t a house really. The five-bedroom annex on the other side of the tennis pavilion to house the staff would be what most considered a large house. What he’d just agreed to purchase was a three-story mansion, with the master wing overlooking the lake on a backdrop of forest quality trees.
And that latter aspect was all he was after. The view, and the knowledge that no one would be around to annoy him anytime soon.
He’d sell it on just as soon as he didn’t need it. But in the meantime, it would free up the spare room once more on Robbie’s side of the apartment. The room he didn’t particularly want in the first place.
It is done, Eechee.
Thank you, handsome.
* * *
((All comments welcome. Good or bad, I'd love to hear your thoughts 🥰🤗))
For those who would like to support my work and read two parts ahead with Patreon!
I made a family tree/diagram of the Mystallian family that can be found here
For more of my work including WPs: Angel466 or an index of previous WPS here.
FULL INDEX OF BOB THE HOBO TO DATE CAN BE FOUND HERE!!

PART FOUR HUNDRED AND SIXTY-FIVE
[Previous Chapter] [NEXT CHAPTER] [The Beginning] [Patreon+2]
Thursday
Robbie stepped out onto a concrete path with a stone wall on his left, and a tree separating him from the sidewalk and street on his right. Directly in front of him was a man sitting in the doorway of the church, though thankfully he had his back to him, resting against the railing of the disabled ramp.
Unable to believe what he was contemplating, Robbie looked up at the cathedral. It didn’t matter which side he looked at it, it was an impressive piece of architecture that left him feeling small.
He passed the man sitting on the edge of the ramp and made his way through the crowd to the wide open central doors. As the doorway loomed overhead, he paused, staring up at the structure. He’d been a kid last time, but it still looked ridiculously big. This would’ve been a whole lot easier if his dad was still here.
He breathed through the wave of emotion that swept through him, ending the sigh on a swallow that never made it past his throat. Quiet murmuring came from within, and before he realised it was happening, his feet were walking him through the doors and into the nave.
The stained glass windows were high on every wall, showing images from Christ to the apostles. Overhead, the buttresses that connected to the white marble pillars were all crisscrossed along the ceiling, giving the gothic-style architecture beauty in every direction. For the life of him, he couldn’t say why he expected it to be different. This cathedral had stood for over a hundred and fifty years and survived everything that was ever thrown at it, so his fifteen was a drop in the bucket.
He walked forward and turned, looking up and back at the pipe organ he’d known was there. The dark stained timber was a huge contrast to the white, cream and gold that was everywhere else, but equally as spectacular. Chandeliers shining both white and golden light bathed the area in an ethereal glow.
It was as if he’d stepped straight into the middle ages.
He turned back towards the altars, realising the voices came from a group of people in the front pew talking amongst themselves in lowered, reverent voices. The priest in front of them was watching him. When eye contact was made, he smiled and spoke quietly to the group, then stood up and made his way down the aisle towards Robbie. “Can I help you, my son?” he asked.
Robbie glanced at the arches overhead once more. “It’s been years since I was in a church,” he admitted. “My dad’s funeral.”
The father smiled again as if he understood. And maybe he did. “So what brings you here today?”
“A custody negotiation.”
His friendly smile tightened and he bobbed his head slowly. “I see. You’re a wise young man to know it’s always best to seek guidance in troubling times like these. If I may ask, how old are your children?”
It took Robbie a second to realise what he was thinking. “Oh—oh, no,” he stammered, mentally comparing the two situations and knowing if it was a regular custody battle over kids, whoever tried to separate him from them would be up against the might of the Nascerdios. Which meant they’d live … if they were lucky. “That would actually be a lot easier to deal with in my family.” Not really wanting to see the confusion in the priest’s eyes, Robbie looked at the nearest prayer altar on the sidewall. Even now, a dozen or more votive candles had been lit for those who came before him. His eyes then went to the stained-glass image of Christ above the carved saint.
“Do you really think that’s what he looks like?” It was the image Robbie had always seen, but how accurate was it really? Would he even know his own distant cousin if he met him in the street?
The priest lifted his chin to see what he was looking at. “We each carry our own image of him to remind us we aren’t alone in our darkest times. The colour of the eyes or the skin is not as important as the guidance he offers us.”
One side of Robbie’s lips kicked up in amusement. It was wrong, but in that split second, he compared the priest to any other kind of company sales rep that had never really used the company’s product and drawing strong similarities. No. Bad. Bad, Robbie, he chastised himself. Not the best way to come in asking the Almighty for a favor that according to everyone was on par with asking for someone’s life savings.
“I’m sorry. A lot’s happened to me since the last time I stood in a church.”
“Would you like to talk about it?”
“It’s not like you’d remember it, anyway,” Robbie said, shaking his head sadly. He then jerked his head towards the gathering at the front. “But I’m pulling you away from your meeting…”
“I go where I am needed most, my son. Scriptures will always have their place, but nothing is more important than encouraging the return of a lost son.” The priest tilted his head. “Especially one who’s still uncertain of his place in the world.”
“Preach,” Robbie stated, as he started to roll his eyes. But then he caught himself and covered his mouth. “Sorry.”
“It’s alright. Coincidentally enough, I do happen to preach as well, when necessary. So, if the children aren’t yours, whose children is the custody battle over?”
“No kids at all. My best friend’s in a coma and my cousin says if I get him back, he’ll only be taken away from me again. So people are saying I should let him go now, while he’s at peace. But I can’t. He was there for me and I still need him.”
“I see. Are you his legal next of kin?”
Not wanting to answer that verbally as that implied Angelo was already dead, he nodded, gritting his teeth painfully.
The priest slid his hand over Robbie’s shoulder. “Have a seat, my son,” he said, gesturing to the nearest pew to Robbie’s left.
Robbie slid along the pew, making room for the priest.
“People say the hardest thing in the world is bringing a life into it and raising that life to be a good, decent person. But that’s rarely ever the case. Saying goodbye to someone you love with all your heart for the last time will always be that much harder.”
Robbie sucked in a tight breath, curling his fingers into tight fists on his knees through sheer willpower (and a little bit of shifting) he kept his eyes free of tears. “I fought to keep him here, and now he’s stuck in limbo.” He swung to look at the priest. “But he wouldn’t have been sent back to me if he wasn’t meant to stay, right?”
The priest frowned. “Are you talking about a miracle?”
“It’s weird to hear it out loud like that, but yeah, I guess I am. My friend tried to do the right thing and save a lot of people, and the bad guys killed him for it. If I hadn’t been right there…”
“You saw it?”
Robbie rolled his shoulders in an uncomfortable shrug. “I didn’t see them give him the lethal injection, but I was there soon enough afterwards to bring his body back. The problem was, his soul had already moved on.”
“You’re starting to lose me again, son.”
Robbie lifted a hand from his knee and spread his fingers wide in apology. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to dump all of this on you. Truth is, I’m just looking for a little bit of insider advice. I mean, I haven't been here in years and you talk to Him all the time. How do I actually get His attention long enough to have a conversation?”
“By believing He will hear you.”
Ironically, that fitted with what he knew of the divine. “Have you ever had a two-way conversation with Him?”
“I talk to Him all the time, and I hear His message.”
Robbie looked out over the church, trying really hard not to make the same comparison about a car salesman that he had just a minute ago. “Yeah, I kinda figured you’d say something like that. But I’ve still got to convince Him to release custody of my friend’s soul back to me. At least until he dies again.”
The priest’s eyes widened and Robbie grimaced, knowing all too well that he sounded like a crazy person. “It’s okay, Father. By the time you stand up to raise the alarm, everything I’ve said will make perfect sense to you.”
The priest hesitantly rose to his feet and edged away from him. “I don’t think I can offer you the kind of help you need, my son.”
“Yeah … it’s a Nascerdios thing anyway.”
Truer words were never spoken. Robbie didn’t know whether to be happy or disappointed that the priest’s features softened and he smiled as he had when he first approached Robbie.
“I’m sure you’ll find your way, my son,” he said, patting Robbie’s shoulder before side-stepping into the aisle. He then bowed on one knee and crossed himself, before straightening up and making his way forward once more.
“You know, the best way to have a conversation, is open your mouth and speak,” said a rich, baritone voice with a hint of song in the words.
Robbie whirled around and came face to face with a man with short brown hair, wearing gleaming silver armour with a golden outline of a crucifix on the chest plate. Over his shoulders were a pair of relaxed angelic wings, with the feathers of a peacock instead of the all-white ones that he expected to see. The wings’ dark emerald-green were repeated in his eyes.
“Who are you?”
The angel smiled, revealing a row of perfect teeth. “It may have been a long time since you entered these hallowed halls, Lord Robert, but you know very well who I am.”
Robbie did everything in his power to avoid looking at a particular marble carving inserted in a recess highlighted by a gold-leafed wall at its back. The only angel who bore peacock feathers and was accredited with single-handedly wiping out a hundred and seventy-five thousand Assyrians in a single night for threatening Jerusalem.
Michael, the Archangel of War.
“Are you here to fight me?” Because if you are, I’m gonna die. No two ways about that.
Michael snorted and shook his head. “As Commander of the Heavenly Host, that assumption is a little insulting to me, don’t you think?”
Robbie dropped his eyes to where his hand held the back of the pew. “Sorry.”
“I’m here because I happened to be the closest one to you. This church is a pocket of established belief, not unlike Heaven itself. Thus the rules of Heaven apply here. If you want to talk to the Almighty Father, He will hear you.”
“He didn’t before.” Okay, maybe he deserved the disgusted scowl Michael gave him. Even he heard the brattishness in his tone.
“Are you really still going to hold that against Him? In case you hadn’t already figured it out, things are a lot more complicated amongst the divine than we’d like the mortals to know.”
Robbie looked back at the people at the front of the church, specifically the priest who was facing them, wondering what he saw. “This is too important. I don’t want Him mad at me if I say or do anything wrong.”
“Do you care this much about Llyr’s feelings?”
The raspberry broke from Robbie’s lips before he could catch it. “No.”
Michael chuckled. “Good answer.”
“But Llyr doesn’t hold my best friend’s life over me either.”
“There is no right or wrong way to pray to the Father. You address Him, the same way you would address anyone you wanted to start a dialogue with, and say what’s on your mind. While you’re here, He will hear you, and if He deems it necessary, He will answer you. You are family, and that makes you very dear to Him.”
“What—how do I address Him?”
“Of all the titles the Almighty has, what title do you think would mean the most to Him from you?” The archangel rose smoothly to his feet. “Until our paths cross again, Lord Robert.”
“Robbie!” Robbie corrected, finally realising what Michael had called him the first time, but he was already talking to thin air.
Still, no one from the group at the front of the church paid him any mind. Almost as if he wasn’t there at all. In a place where the Almighty had his establishment field and a high ranking angel in residence.
What title do you think would mean the most to Him from you?
Probably the one he doesn’t hear very often.
Closing his eyes, Robbie whispered the words, “Are you there, Uncle YHWH?”
* * *
((Author's note: Hey guys! Thank you so much for your well-wishes last night! I'm still shaky, but as you can see - I made it to the computer! 🥰😍😁 ))
((All comments welcome. Good or bad, I'd love to hear your thoughts 🥰🤗))
For those who would like to support my work and read two parts ahead with Patreon!
I made a family tree/diagram of the Mystallian family that can be found here
For more of my work including WPs: Angel466 or an index of previous WPS here.
FULL INDEX OF BOB THE HOBO TO DATE CAN BE FOUND HERE!!

PART FOUR HUNDRED AND SIXTY-TWO
[Previous Chapter] [NEXT CHAPTER] [The Beginning] [Patreon+2]
Thursday
Robbie wasn’t entirely sure what Llyr was up to, but trusting his distant cousin had his back, he fussed in the kitchen and living room for a few minutes, buying Llyr time to get into whatever position he felt comfortable.
It wasn’t like Robbie was a leading expert in divine negotiations. For a second, he thought about bringing in his own reinforcements. Pop and Aunt Collette would drop everything to have his back, but then if they were anything like Llyr, they’d probably move in and never leave.
Robbie loved having them as family, but he also enjoyed his freedom. After his dad had died and his mother went back to working those ridiculously long shifts, Robbie had more or less been raised by his older sisters.
He pulled himself up before he began to question the motives of everything back then. He hadn’t asked for any of what happened. His dad was his hero, and it had devastated them all when he died. Memaw had come for his funeral and said some horrible, hurtful things that had him and his sisters rallying around their distraught mother.
She had then expected him to leave them and come and live with her, about him not being wanted or treated as special as he should be in a house of hormonal girls who probably couldn’t keep their legs together if their mother was anything to go by. (At the time, Robbie had thought she meant they’d be really fast runners even though her tone hadn’t been complimentary. A more recent trip down memory lane had him realising precisely why he never wanted to cross paths with her again!)
His mother hadn’t believed him when the police came knocking and arrested Jake Chevelle for pedophilia. She’d believed he’d made the whole thing up to destroy their family. That he was a spoilt boy who wouldn’t let his mother find happiness after the loss of his father. The girls swore black and blue they didn’t see anything, but that’s because Jake hadn’t been interested in them, and Robbie’d had a room to himself. If he’d shared with one or two of the girls, nothing might’ve come of it.
Or maybe it would. He was unringed at the time. So how much was fate, and how much was his attunement screwing with him, in some cases literally? Would he have ever moved into Lucas’ parents’ place if his mother hadn’t alienated him? And if not, had she really wanted to alienate him or was it outside forces making it so?
Things with her had been rocky, but he always tried to keep them upbeat when their paths crossed. Maybe now that he was ringed, he should try a little harder to reconnect and see if there was anything to be salvaged.
Yeah right, Robbie. After telling Mason you had too many irons in the fire, let’s add ten more plus a slew of nieces and nephews to reconnect with. In fact, let’s blow off Cora right now and get started on that. It’s not like Angelo’s important to you or anything.
He’d reach out one day soon. Maybe they’d still want little to nothing to do with him. Or maybe … just maybe … they didn’t.
Breathing out heavily, Robbie looked at Charlie for moral support, then went to the front door and walked outside.
And straight into a cranky FBI Shadow Director.
“If you’re going to make me wait every time we agree to meet up, we’re going to have a serious problem, Robert.”
“It’s Robbie, and I didn’t agree to a d-dang thing. We both have information the other wants, and that’s the only reason you’re here.”
“What happened the day Trevino went into a coma?”
“Angelo.”
“What?”
“Angelo. If you want information on my friend, you can at least do us the courtesy of using his first name.”
“Angelo then. What happened?”
Robbie shook his head. “No, that’s not the way this is going to go, cousin.” Cora stiffened, and Robbie shifted one foot behind the other, years of tussling with Lucas and his brothers giving him a few basics when it came to self-defence. “I want to know what Angelo meant by he was coming home. If I tell you what you want, you’ll leave and tell me nothing.”
“Don’t have a high opinion of the law do you?”
“Oh, I have all the respect in the world for the law. Feds … not so much. You tend to steamroll in, take what you want and leave everyone else picking up the pieces afterwards as you move on to something else.”
“We don’t have time to babysit people.”
“And that’s why I’m getting my information first. I have absolutely nothing planned all day today, and I’m more than happy to tell you whatever you want about Angelo because I don’t have a hidden agenda. I don’t care if you know what I know, so long as you don’t hurt Angelo in any way, shape, or form. I can’t say the same about you, can I, Shadow Director?”
Cora stared hard at him, and he met that glare without flinching. “He’ll need to go into witness protection during and after the trials. I knew the little prick was still in there, but not to what degree. Separating a witness from everything he knows is hard enough on someone who’s conscious enough to face it. But someone in Trev—Angelo’s situation, he has no reason to fight his way back to the land of the living. I told him what he needed to hear to make that happen.”
Robbie’s heart sank in his chest. “You lied to him.”
“I didn’t realise he was a displaced soul.”
“Well, now you do, so where do we go from here?”
“When his soul is reconnected to his body, he’ll testify and go into WITSEC.”
“No,” Robbie shook his head.
“Excuse me?”
“You told him he was coming home.”
“I told him what he needed to hear to fight for his place in this world.”
“A place you plan on ripping away from him just as soon as you’re done with him.”
Cora folded her arms defensively. “Nobody forced him to make the choices he made. He made them on his own.”
“People make mistakes!”
“And those mistakes lead to consequences. I’m not here to save your friend. I’m here to bring down an international slave trade that has its hooks into this country. If that means telling your friend what he wants to hear, I’ll do that all day.”
“Would you be like this if it was Nuncio in the firing line?”
“Nuncio’s smarter than that.”
“But if he wasn’t. If he’d been the one who made a mistake and was paying for it the way Angelo is. Would you be such a pitch to him?”
“He isn’t.”
“And what if it was my attunement that forced him to make his choices?”
Cora reached into the breast pocket of her jacket and removed a packet of cigarettes, tapping the base to force one to sit up. She pinched it between her lips and drew it out, pocketing the rest. “You’ve finally got my attention, kid,” she said, snapping her fingers together to create a flame which she held to her cigarette to light it. “Keep talking.”
“What if he had no choice? What if he was pushed into that, to force him into the same hospital Lady Col runs, so that I would come to her attention for the first time in generations? That this was my attunement’s way of getting me noticed by the family. Then none of this would be his fault at all, would it?”
She breathed a stream of smoke towards the ceiling. “Still not seeing how it changes the outcome.”
“Angelo’s my best friend. I swear if you won’t work with me here, I’ll take my bracelet off and force the world to give him back to me.”
“Throwing out threats is not a really good idea against a higher-ranked family member, Rob. In fact, it’s the easiest way to get your ass handed to you.”
“Robbie,” he corrected. “The number of people that call me Rob can be counted on one hand, and you’re not on that list.”
“I’m sure my broken heart will recover.”
Robbie stared at the way she delivered that line without a hint of emotion. “He was dying, that day. He wasn’t put into a coma. He was dying. But he’s my best friend and I couldn’t let him go. So I took the ring off and forced the world to give him back to me.”
“Only, his soul had already departed.”
Robbie shrugged, then nodded. “I didn’t know at the time. I forced his body to start working again, and he went into a coma.”
“You know, if his soul wasn’t sent back to you, you would’ve created the world’s first soulless zombie.”
Robbie felt the blood drain from his face and limbs. His mouth fell open, but Cora maintained her position.
“Seriously, kiddo. You got lucky. Someone looking out for you sent him back. Problem is, you’re in charge of his body, and whatever god he worships is the master or mistress of his spirit. It’s like working in two different currencies or measurements.”
“And when I touch him…?”
“You act as a temporary conduit between the two, bridging the gap.”
“So how do I make him whole?”
“Usually, the two divine that share custody come together to decide who gets to keep him.”
Robbie swung away in frustration, then turned full circle to face her again. “Angelo’s not religious.”
“A lot of people say that, but most have some micro-element of religious understanding in them. Something they reach for when all hope is lost. It doesn’t have to be much and in Trevino’s case—”
“Angelo.”
“In Angelo’s case,” she corrected with a frown. “I don’t know of too many Italians who don’t at least know what a crucifix is when things become desperate. Do you?”
“So, I have to get in touch with the Almighty of Heaven and ask him to release custody of Angelo’s spirit to me?”
Cora winced. “Souls are valuable, kid. They’re the foundation of the belief that powers us. Asking a god to give up even one, no matter how temporary, is a big ask. Most divine will want something substantial in return.”
“Like a boon.”
Cora nodded. “And probably an unspecified one at that. So, you really need to ask yourself, kid. Is this mortal worth having one of those hanging over your head?”
Robbie backed up until his shoulders bumped against the wall outside his apartment. He then braced his feet on an angle to hold himself there. “He’s my best friend,” he insisted, staring at the floor between his feet.
“Not sure who you’re trying to convince there, Robbie. Either way, now that I know you can bridge him, I don’t need to hold his hand or give him false hope anymore. You’re going to get him to tell me what I need to know about this slave ring. And when the time comes, we can have a hearing in his cell to make his testimony official.”
“And then what?”
“And then I move on to another case, kid. Whatever custody arrangement you sort out with Uncle YHWH will be between you two.”
“But even if I get him back, you’ll put him in witness protection and take him away from me.”
“Which is why you need to ask yourself if it’s worth it or not. WITSEC tries to give people a say in where they go, but it doesn’t always work that way. Maybe it might be better for everyone if, after all this is said and done, that you be the one to walk away and let Uncle YHWH reclaim him.”
Tears sprang to his eyes. “You told him he was coming home.”
“Lying to a drugged out, mortal whore to save hundreds, if not thousands of innocent lives is not exactly going to keep me awake at night. Your boy means nothing to me beyond being a witness in my case. The question is, how much does he mean to you?”
Robbie slid down the wall until he was sitting on the floor.
“I’ll leave you with that one, Robbie. In the meantime, make yourself available for when I need to interview him.”
“I w-want Angie to come home,” he insisted, though a tiny hiccup escaped in the middle as he clenched his fists into his eyes, resting his elbows on his raised knees.
“And I want the head of whichever elder knocked us all on our collective asses to be hanging off my penthouse flagpole by the time I get home tonight. But somehow, I doubt either one of us is going to get our wish, kid. The sooner you grow up and realise shit’s just going to happen, the better off you’ll be.”
After he gulped in a steadying breath and swallowed, he lowered his hands to find himself alone in the hallway. “I don’t care what you say. There has to be a way to bring him home.”
Closing his eyes once more, he slid his hands around either side of his throat and interlocked his fingers behind his neck. He might have given up hope before, but not now. That had been a horrible thing to do, and he wasn’t about to let it stay a lie. There had to be a way.
He was divine.
There had to be a way!
* * *
((All comments welcome. Good or bad, I'd love to hear your thoughts 🥰🤗))
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I made a family tree/diagram of the Mystallian family that can be found here
For more of my work including WPs: Angel466 or an index of previous WPS here.
FULL INDEX OF BOB THE HOBO TO DATE CAN BE FOUND HERE!!

Note: This is a sequel to Whittier, Alaska which can be read here
You meet such interesting people in asylums. If not for their company I might’ve lost my mind, being that I’m the only sane person in this dump. Surely it shouldn’t work that way? Talking to them should erode my grip on reality. Then again, maybe they get saner by talking to me. Mental health osmosis, you could call it.
They’re fake anyways. I don’t know why I keep imagining they have real, human minds to lose when they were never people to begin with. The doctors are the fakest of all. Acting their asses off, trying so hard to make me believe this is reality. That I’m not still trapped in the otherworld. That I actually shot my parents, and Patrick, to death.
I go through the motions because they force me, and because it’s something to do. Stimulating activities are in short supply here. I’ve read every book in the asylum’s meager library twice, and only after exhausting their equally unimpressive library of films. I don’t know why I expected anything different from a stubbornly persistent illusion. Where would that creature get more movies from? Must only have access to whatever was in Begich Tower when it was copied.
Copied, flipped and drained, a mirror image of itself stripped of light and color. The otherworld, which I entered so long ago on a whim. For no better reason than boredom. I remember Patrick once asked me “What’s North of the North Pole?” after school one day. I told him it was a nonsense question with no real answer. If only that were true. If only there really were no impossible spaces.
It is still for no better reason than boredom that I sit through these stupid sessions while that thing, whatever it is, pretends to be a psychologist picking my brain. If I attack it, then muscular orderlies in white frocks come running to pry me off the unconvincing facsimile of a bespectacled, cardigan wearing old man. There’s no way forward except to humor it, the creature sees to that very effectively.
“How do you feel?” he asks. There’s still a faint scar under his eye from our first session when I bodied him, smashing a framed picture that was on his desk and using one of the glass shards to find out if he could bleed. Just to see how detailed all of this really is. “What you’re really asking” I sardonically quipped, “is whether I’m still under the impression that this world is illusory.”
He bridged his hands in front of his mouth, spectacles at just the right angle to reflect the overhead lights, obscuring his eyes as he peered over his hands at me. “I suppose we’ve developed sufficient rapport to dispense with the niceties. Yes, that’s what I want to know. It’s coming up on the third anniversary of your arrival here and I’ve never lost hope that I may yet make headway with you.”
By headway he meant convincing me that the night I shot those grotesquely detailed, lifelike impostors, the elevator had actually returned me to the same reality I started from...and all that would imply. About Mom, Dad and Patrick. About the six other people I shot before they wrestled the gun away from me. Just a scared little girl then, before I came to understand the true banality of evil.
Evil never admits to a lie. It doubles down, then doubles down further. It’s bottomless, lies all the way down, no matter how far you go. Like a Kaufmann routine but unfathomably cruel, for the purpose of gaslighting an innocent woman into believing she’s done the unthinkable. I can only imagine the amount of energy, in whatever form, that foul entity must expend in order to keep the charade going for this long. Seamlessly, never missing a beat, every bit as detailed and self-consistent as the real world.
I might even give in, were it not for the flickering flame of hope I keep alive inside myself. A flame which ignited the moment I learned that this asylum has exactly ten floors...and an elevator. Since then I’ve endured every tiresome therapy session, all the pills, the body cavity searches and wandering hands of male orderlies in the hopes of one day gaining unsupervised access to that elevator. I won’t need it for long.
“So this...creature, which opens itself to reveal a howling dark void. The one which disguised itself as various people you knew. You imagine it would go to the trouble of fabricating an entire, perfectly realistic and convincing false reality….why?” I’ve told him already. Countless times. He asks me again not to learn from me, but so I might learn from him, or so he says. Really, he knows the answer. Because of course he’s one in the same with that thing he’s talking about. He was never anything more than another skin that it wears.
I sighed, exaggerating it a touch so that there would be no mistaking how tired of this nonsense I’ve become. “You don’t need me to explain your own game to you. Why do you bother keeping the mask on when I’ve already seen what’s under it? How frustrating that must be for you. Like a cat which can never catch mice because there’s a bell fixed to it’s collar, giving away its every movement.”
He jotted something down in a leather bound notepad. “You know” he murmured, “there’s nothing to gain by being so difficult. Your buddies have always been forthcoming with me.” Naturally, I thought. Because they’re nothing but more of his puppets. He was referring to Charles and Thomas, some of those tragically interesting people you can only meet in asylums. Or standing at street corners, wearing sandwich signs proclaiming an imminent apocalypse, I suppose.
Their delusions are truly impressive. Charles would have me believe his parents were disemboweled by mannequins who needed their organs to fill up the hollow spaces inside themselves, making their bodies more “real” so they could survive in this reality. Never a dull moment with him. Thomas on the other hand won’t shut up about supposed gremlins of some kind. Shriveled little old men as he puts it, who ride around on our shoulder from birth, slowly sucking out our “orgone”, or life energy.
To hear him tell it, this is the sole reason why humans age. He insists all of this can be proven but of course he’s conveniently not in possession of the rose quartz monocle he claims is the only way to render them visible to humans. I’ve heard all manner of fantastical delusions from the other patients at this asylum, but Charles and Thomas have them all beat. I’ve been told on more than one occasion to call them Charlie and Tom, but I’ve no intention of obliging them.
I’m sure they’d like nothing more than if I were to humanize them. To grow attached, then to eventually start trusting them as if they’re real people. As if any of this is real, or ever was. All of them just walking, talking distractions to keep me from that elevator, the only way out of this waking nightmare.
“Come now. What do you imagine the creature’s purpose to be, in deceiving you this way?” the balding, wrinkled facsimile of a human mental health professional once again asked me. Pushing, prodding, prying to get the answers he wants. Torment of course, and I said so. The thing which currently resembled a psychologist smirked, in an unusually transparent display of the pleasure I knew it must take in my suffering. How I have suffered these three years. At low points, almost coming to believe what it wants me to...that Patrick is dead by my hand.
Absurd on the face of it. Patrick often frustrated me, as little brothers are wont to do to their older sisters, but I would never do anything to hurt him. Much less my parents, who this vile emanation of the abyss would also desperately like me to believe that I murdered. No, they’re still out there somewhere, I can feel it. In actual reality, waiting for me, wondering where I’ve been all this time.
Won’t they be surprised when I emerge from that elevator back into Begich Tower, or perhaps the real world counterpart of this asylum if there is one. I’ve rehearsed it in my head so many times that I can see every detail with perfect clarity behind my closed eyelids. The thing pretending to be the arbiter of my sanity interrupts my moment of rest, asking more tedious questions it must already know the answers to.
In the ample time I’ve had to myself during these three years of involuntary confinement I’ve often tried to reverse engineer the mind of whatever it is that’s doing all of this to me. To say that it gets some sort of enjoyment from my suffering is glib and perhaps captures some portion of it, but I’ve often thought it must be part of some larger plan.
After all it’s ostensibly a conscious entity. It knew who to imitate in order to get close to me. It made them speak, in their correct voices, saying superficially plausible things that those people would say under those circumstances. There’s something like a brain at work there. But were it anything like a human’s, I should expect it to tire of all this sometime.
There must be limits it can reach in the fulfillment of it’s appetite for misery where it would retreat into whatever dimly lit burrow it crawled out of and digest all of that energy. But if those appetites are exhaustible, I’ve yet to see any indication of it.
The best explanation I’ve yet worked out on my own for why any conscious being would tirelessly inflict all of this on another person is that it’s a product of unfathomable loneliness. The sole occupant of a derelict world, abandoned by the universe, only ever a copy of ours.
How long does it have to wait in between human visitors? Years? Decades? Were I alone all that time with nobody to speak to I may well forget how to speak. I may at some point forego the use of clothing, tools and all other vestiges of my humanity. Spending all of my waking hours prowling the empty, false Earth, focused only on those buildings with an elevator and at least ten floors.
Waiting, with increasingly inhuman patience, for what I know will eventually come out of one of them. Not with malicious intent, as such. Just the very, very pent up need to be understood by another person. Probably I’d be so desperate to open myself up for another person to look inside of by that point, I wouldn’t bother to ask if they wanted to.
That’s at least a starting point for understanding how you could go from a normal human being to something like that. Assuming it was ever human I mean. The voice on the radio seemed to imply as much. She’s the other one I’ve spent many sleepless nights thinking about. The poor soul who stayed behind, even though it was within her power to leave that place, in order to help lost travelers like me escape the creature’s grasp.
I never got to thank her properly. None of her success stories ever did, I’d wager. Her reward was simply knowing that they made it out. Back to the real world of light, color and sound. Of hustle, bustle, aromas and energy. While that frustrated hollow creature with infinity inside of it scorns the loss of another fly from its web.
What would have happened, had I stayed? What did it really want from me, except to be looked into? But it had been so long since anybody looked that the insides had all been eaten away by the pain of isolation, leaving only a howling alien void. No amount of attention, by a single captive person, could repair damage of that extent.
It wouldn’t stop it from trying though. Like those obese adults who gorge on processed sugars their parents starved them of as children, if their stomachs were truly bottomless. A ravenous appetite which had grown, uncontrolled, for god knows how long since the last poor fool tried that stupid elevator ritual. For that matter, if it was never human to start with, how long has it been waiting for somebody to invent elevators?
I try not to dwell on that particular possibility too much, on account of the timescales involved and various troubling implications. I’m satisfied that I have enough to form a working knowledge of its motives. As for how that will help me escape, the more I appear to buy into this false reality it has created for me, the more freedoms I expect it will permit.
To that end, though I at times lose my temper and break character, for the most part I maintain the pretense that I’m slowly coming around to what the creature wishes me to believe. Even as it chafes me, even as I feel soiled on the inside by doing so.
“I understand you’re friendly with Tony, the maintenance man.” I made no secret of that, nor any apology. One of the first things you do in any prison is begin building the relationships you’ll need to get stuff from the outside.
“Toys, is it? Radio controlled cars, with cameras. I don’t know what enjoyment you can get from driving those indoors, but it’s been keeping you busy and seems harmless insofar as I can tell. My only concern is that you’ve been driving them into the elevators, and we need those clear to continue carrying up loads of debris from whatever project they’ve been working on in the basement.”
I asked him when that work would be finished. “I wish I could tell you. Oh, the headaches I’ve had trying to get a hold of the property management company on the phone about it. I can only ever seem to get some overworked intern who insists there’s nothing going on in this building when obviously they’ve got jackhammers down there or something because these loads of cement debris keep coming up. But listen to me telling you about my problems, for the sake of my sanity. That’s inside out, upside down and backwards, isn’t it?
He laughed. I did too in a facile, rehearsed tone carefully matched to his. It wants my belief, after all. The more sincere the belief, the better. So long as it thinks it’s getting that, I can continue my little experiments. I knew from my recollection of the original ordeal in Whittier that transmissions could cross whatever barrier separates the real world from the empty copy.
I’d placed a phone call, after all, and Dad had answered. I’d done it from my smartphone as well, which meant radio worked across the barrier. Which meant so would radio controlled cars, with remote cameras. Tony’s not a bad looking guy but I would never let him do some of the things he’s done with me, except to get my hands on those cars, and the little add on camera that sends real time footage back to your phone.
That shit’s expensive. I make it worth Tony’s trouble, insofar as there even is a “Tony”, and try not to think about what it really is that I’m making out with underneath that human shaped facade. It pretends not to know what I want with the cars. It has, so far, gone along with my requests that it operate the elevator for me.
That’s evidently something that can be done from the security room, where round the clock footage from all the cameras, inside and out, is stored to tapes that constantly over-write themselves. Should be hard drives in this day and age, but the creature doesn’t know that. It doesn’t exactly get out much.
So it was the first time I had Tony re-create the elevator ritual for me, with the little car inside. Sure enough, at step 8 the pale, dark haired young woman boards the elevator. Until then I’d never seen what happens if there’s nobody in the elevator with her. I thought maybe she’d become confused or angry, searching for whoever it was that pushed the elevator buttons.
She just stands there until the last step, when she asks where I’m going. To a little radio controlled toy car, as I drive it out of the elevator. Not a person then. Not a mind, like whatever’s keeping me here. Just...a security mechanism of some sort. To ensure that the only people who make it to the otherworld are the ones who want to be there.
Driving the little car around revealed very little. I thought it’d be stepped on right away. That it would be discovered by somebody. I’m in the otherworld, after all. So doing the elevator ritual, from here, ought to send the car back to the real Earth. That was before I realized my error.
Instead of emerging from the elevator into the hustle and bustle of normal reality, when I used the car control app to adjust the camera upwards so it could look out a window at the city skyline, there was a familiar red cross in the distance. The only striking flash of color amid a grey, permanently cloudy sky.
It couldn’t be. I sat there trying to make sense of it even as the car’s battery wore down, the strange energy sapping properties of the otherworld depleting it by a full percentage point every thirty seconds or so. If Tony did all the steps correctly in the control room, sending the elevator to all the right floors in the right order...The toy car should have come out in the real world.
It didn’t. It came out in the otherworld. Then where am I now? If that’s the otherworld on the screen, where the car is, then what world am I in? I puzzled over it even as Tony, or rather the thing pretending to be him, peppered me with questions. Wanting to know about the red crucifix.
I told him it was an easter egg in the app I was controlling the car with. That if you drove it into an elevator and performed those exact steps it would superimpose that cross on the screen when you pointed the camera to look outside. He said that seemed like an awfully specific thing to go to the trouble of hiding in there. I told him it was for a contest. Everybody who sends in a screenshot of the cross gets a month of free satellite radio, or some nonsense.
That got him to leave it alone, until I couldn’t get the first car back. I explored too far and didn’t make it back to the elevator before the battery ran out. Tony pitched a fit because of what the car cost him. Apparently the camera on the little motorized gimbal so you can remotely aim it is a premium hobbyist’s item.
I had to let him finish inside once before he’d buy a replacement. I grew up in a giant building in a frozen wasteland where the only boys looked like the scraggly wet hair you clean out of your shower drain each morning, so letting a muscular but plain looking man grunt and gasp on top of me for an hour isn’t the least pleasant use of that time imaginable, by any stretch.
He knows what he’s doing with a woman, and the two other patients he periodically indulges in ethically reprehensible trysts with presumably get a lot of benefit from that, as they keep coming back to him of their own volition. If he’s smuggling anything to them, I don’t know about it.
I was a lot more careful with the second car. I used it to nudge the first one back to the elevator after a couple of attempts, calling off the first few just to be safe when the battery hit 50%. Tony was visibly relieved to get the first car back. “You don’t need two, right? My boy would love this thing.” That’s when I learned Tony’s a single father. I’m sure he’s mentioned it to me but when I’m with him I kinda tune the world out as much as I can until he’s finished.
“Are you going to answer me?” I snapped back to reality, or what I’m meant to believe is reality, to find the ugly little psychologist staring me down. “Nevermind. Your mind is elsewhere. I can tell we’re not going to get much done in this session. What I want you to do in the interval between now and when we meet next is to draw yourself. Don’t draw this supposed ghoul you keep talking about. Try drawing yourself in everyday situations. Driving, working, riding a bike. It will help you begin to mentally acclimate yourself for a return to a normal life.”
I smiled and nodded, then took my leave. A normal life, he says. In this place. I’d really puzzled over how the radio controlled car could have come out in the otherworld, when that’s where I am, until I put it together.
First, that I never should’ve expected any other outcome from performing all the steps of the ritual in their normal order. Of course it hadn’t returned the toy car to reality. I remembered then that, three years ago, I’d done the steps in the reverse order thinking that would get me out. It might’ve, had I paid closer attention.
Still, I couldn’t get over the fact that there was another copy world I’d sent the car to. Despite already being in the otherworld! It could only mean one thing: The fucking monster thought of that. It knew what I was trying to do! It’s Tony, after all, just as much as it is the psychologist.
It created a...a false...otherworld. A copy of a copy, just in case. Just to keep everything airtight, and self-consistent. It really thought of everything! Or, it thinks it has. There’s one more thing to try. I spent the rest of the day listening to music on the shitty little rented audio players they let us check out. They come preloaded with a library of guided meditation tracks, self-help books, and classical music.
I guess because it’s in the public domain. If it was anything contemporary, the city would have to pay to use it. If there were a “city”, I mean. If it was a real organization of real people, with real life concerns like intellectual property and music licensing. Whatever. If the creature wanted me to gain a new appreciation for the classics, it’s succeeded in at least that respect.
I sat in a rocking chair by the big window, in the common area, as Estelle colored on napkins with some crayons. They always make sure to have plenty of crayons, the schizoids in particular love to draw huge complicated diagrams on the walls of their rooms. Geometric maps of the relationships between various abstract concepts, many of them with religious significance.
It hurts to watch because they’re always so certain they’re on the verge of a breakthrough. That, if they can just take what they see inside their head and put it on the outside for others to look at, we’ll all understand. We’ll herald their genius, and bring about sweeping changes in how the world is governed, certain to usher in utopia.
Makes for a fascinating wimmelbilder, if you like looking at those kinds of images. What evidently makes perfect sense to the artist as he’s drawing it just winds up looking like a confusing jumble of nonsense to me. Confusing nonsense makes for some good escapism though, as any alcoholic will tell you.
Once the sun went down, the orderlies made their rounds, tucking everybody into bed and locking the doors. I didn’t have to wait long for Tony to unlock it, slipping under the covers with me, doing all of the usual things he does. He would never force himself on anybody. I don’t think he’s that kind of guy. But he’s dipping carelessly into a captive population of emotionally unwell women, which is at least as bad, and arguably worse. It would trouble me a lot more if I thought he was real.
I stifled a gag, feeling him convulse as he came. I never forget what’s really on top of me when this happens. I’d have lost my mind from it, well and truly, were I not so singularly focused on a goal. Tonight, that goal is to do something I’ve never tried before. “You’ve still got that radio controlled car, right?” I whispered as he pulled his pants back on.
“Yeah, you crazy broad, I’ve still got both the toy cars you won’t shut up about. I thought last time was gonna be the end of it.” I made a sarcastic remark about what a sweet talker he is, then told him there was still one thing left I wanted to try. “Alright” he sighed, “but no more after this. I have my hands full carting away all that debris that keeps coming up from the basement, I’m exhausted. And I googled for the contest you talked about. There isn’t any.”
I admitted the fib. “That’s what I thought. Look, I don’t know what you believe in, but I remember what I saw on that screen. It was a cross. That might not have any special meaning for you but it does for me and my boy. I could tell even while it was happening that something messed up was going on. The guy who cleaned this hellhole before me swore up and down that it’s haunted.”
I guess it might be. A mental hospital tops the list of places where you might find ghosts with unresolved quarrels, unfulfilled ambitions or other causes for postmortem discontent. I’d have laughed it off as nonsense three years ago, before all of this began….Same way I laughed at the elevator ritual.
Now, I’m more cautious. Hard to say what’s real and what isn’t when you’re trapped in a convincing facsimile of the real world, held prisoner by something that’s been waiting countless lifetimes to stick somebody in this position and keep them there.
I always wondered why it let me anywhere near the elevator, in light of that. Now I know. Because even had I repeated the ritual, correct in every detail, I’d still not have been able to escape. It’s seen to that. It’s thought of everything...almost.
We arrive in the security room some minutes after I deposit the radio controlled car just outside the elevator on the ground floor, per the rules. The security room is just on the other side of the hallway, likely to keep down the cost of running all the cables needed for centralized control of utilities...elevator included.
“I’ll put it down as another earthquake preparedness test” he said, jotting something onto a paper service record in a spiral bound notebook. I asked if he needed to put down anything at all. “Well yeah, there’s a digital store of every instruction the system is sent that I don’t have direct access to. If that were looked at closely by the guy from the elevator company that comes by to inspect it every year, I’d have to be able to give some sort of convincing sounding reason why I sent it to all the floors in a particular order, in the early hours of the morning, several times this month.”
Given his indiscretions and what they would mean for his employability, present and future if they were discovered, Tony surprises me sometimes with his professionalism. He opened up a command line application on the ancient MS-DOS computer system that runs everything in the building. With a couple of keystrokes, the elevator doors opened.
I could see it on the security monitor but only once I went through the laborious steps of connecting my phone’s wifi to the car, and to the camera as a media source, did a picture spring up in the app. “Where are you hiding that these days?” He gestured to the phone. “Because I know they changed out the beds to a design without the horizontal supports underneath so you can’t stash anything down there.”
I revealed that I’ve been slipping it down the air vent on the second floor. “It slides down at a steep incline, coming to rest just behind a first floor vent right outside the cafeteria. The hole it screws into is worn out, the vent stays put if you don’t jostle it but it comes free without any tools too. It would make my life a lot easier if you’d just hide my phone for me when I’m not using it, you know.”
He harrumphed. “I do enough for you.” I drove the little toy car into the elevator, and Tony pressed the same key, closing the doors. “Same as the other night, then?” he asked. “Fourth floor, then second, then sixth and so on?” I shook my head. “Not tonight.” He looked over at me and raised an eyebrow. “Really? What is it this time?”
I had him send the elevator to the tenth floor first. I drove the car out, turned it around, then had him open the doors again. I then drove it into the elevator, and instructed Tony to send the elevator to the fifth floor. He didn’t cotton to what I was doing until, from the fifth floor, I had him send it back to the tenth floor.
“You’ve switched it around, haven’t you?” I didn’t answer him, focused intently on my phone as it transmitted to me continuous, live video from the vehicle. “This is the same thing you had me do last time, but in reverse. You’re gonna ask me to send it to the second floor next, then the sixth. It’s the same thing as the other night, just in the other direction.”
It meant I didn’t have to keep instructing him, which streamlined the experiment somewhat. “Do you ever wonder who the young woman is?” I ask him, referring to the pale woman with the dark hair who always gets in on the fifth floor. “One of your friends, I assumed. Estelle has hair like that. How is she getting out of her room without my help?”
I didn’t answer him. One of the nice things about Tony is that, being a man whose happiness depends heavily on other people in his life not asking too many questions about what he gets up to in this building after hours, he also has a sense of when to stop asking questions of his own. “You keep your secrets” he muttered under his breath. “This is related to that cross though, I can feel it. I shouldn’t have any part of this.”
I asked if he’s superstitious. He took umbrage. “No, I’m an orthodox Catholic. We don’t even believe in witches. There is only the power of God, and next to that the many frauds and pretenses of magic invented by men in their fruitless attempts to borrow his throne.”
I replied that if he’s so certain of that, he has nothing to be afraid of. “I didn’t say I was afraid” he grumbled, shifting uncomfortably in his seat while eyeballing the CCTV feed coming from inside the elevator, which was now on the fourth floor. Without asking me, having worked out the scheme, he sent it back to ground level after brief stops on the second, sixth and fourth floors.
It did descend to the first floor. Then it kept going. He furrowed his brow. I heard a frantic clickety clack from his keyboard as he tried to arrest the movement of the wayward elevator car, to no avail. “This doesn’t make any sense” He said. I looked over his shoulder. “This building only has one level below ground, and the elevator car just passed it. Damn thing’s still going down though.”
The security monitor began to break into static. He smacked the side of it a few times, then fiddled with the cable before returning to his efforts at the keyboard, trying to get the elevator back under control. “It’s still going down, but into what? This is ridiculous. There’s nothing else down there!”
I asked if maybe it connects to a derelict subway platform or something. He was visibly sweating now, running his fingers through his hair. “I could buy that if it stopped just under the basement or something. But it’s still going. It’s still going!!” The monitor now displayed only static. I tried controlling the little car from my phone and found it was still responsive.
However before long, that feed also began to glitch out. Hanging for a few seconds intermittently before the feed went dark, replaced by a “connection lost” message. My eyes were now wide open and my mind raced, having finally brought about an outcome to this experiment I’ve not already seen.
Down it went, through the basement. Down, down, down. But into what? Indeed, Tony. Into what. When the elevator came back without the RC car on it, we both just about shit ourselves. That’s some spooky campfire ghost story shit. When he settled down I knew he’d be mad that I lost that expensive toy again but for the time being he was too terrified to care.
“That’s it!” he shouted, standing up from his seat. “I’m out. This is some diabolical shit happening here. I regret helping you do this, I’m walking away. Don’t ever talk to me about this again, it never happened.” He blew up at me even more when I told him I wanted to ride the elevator to wherever the toy car had gone.
“Absolutely not. There’s no way. I’m going to forget what I saw and I suggest you do the same.” I reminded him I could have his job, and any hope of future employment, if I were to simply place a phone call. He narrowed his eyes. “That’s why I took this job to begin with, idiot. Nobody would believe somebody locked up in a mental hospital.”
Ah, there it is. That’s his game, the shitty fucking devil that he is. Those other girls he sees when he’s not with me...they come to him of their own accord. But if anybody else doesn’t like it and tattles, or if one of those girls has second thoughts, he plays the old “don’t listen to the crazy women” card. I wish I could say I was shocked.
“Look, Tony. It’s like I promised you. Just this one time, then never again.” He paced around, occasionally glancing over at the monitor which had been engulfed in static until the elevator rose back to ground level. “I don’t know. I don’t know, I really don’t like this. I haven’t seen anything really weird like this happen in person since the war.”
I begged him. “Just one more time. I need to know where that car went. I’ve never seen this happen before. I need to know what it means.” He withdrew a packet of cigarettes from his increasingly sweat stained work shirt and lit one, raising it to his lips with a shaking hand. “You’d better mean that. Don’t make me do this for you, then tomorrow night come back, asking me to help you cast out whatever demon you summoned. I know fucked up shit when I see it.”
He wasn’t wrong. The thing pretending to be Tony acting it’s little ass off, it was all I could do not to applaud. But I knew now that it had seen there was some way out of all this that it couldn’t paper mache over, that it couldn’t barricade or control...it would pull out all the stops to keep me from leaving.
“What is it you think is down there?” he demanded. “I’ve been good so far about humoring you with all this. I picked up on the possibility there was more to it than head games when I saw that cross on your phone, but what’s down there? You must know. That’s got to be the point of all this. You must’ve had something in mind.”
I dare not answer honestly. If I were to say I expected the real world to be on the other end of that descending elevator, somewhere deep beneath the solid cement foundation of this building, it would give up the game. Break the fourth wall, and the creature has only remained content to allow these experiments so long as I continue to appear fooled.
“I don’t know, okay? It’s just something weird all elevators do. The one in the building I used to live in behaved the same way. Begich Tower? Whittier, Alaska?” I’m certain I’ve told him some of the details of my past and how I came to be imprisoned here, omitting some of the more stomach turning bits as they were just cruel illusions anyway.
He doesn’t listen to me any more than I listen to him, it would seem. Nothing I said rang any bells, nor did it satisfy him that what he’d just seen happen could be explained in a rational way. “Listen to me Tony” I declared, holding his head in my hands. “This is going to sound crazy, but you must be prepared for that, coming from me.” He smiled and relaxed slightly.
“I suspect whatever company installed the elevator into this building maintains a network of underground maintenance access corridors, connecting all the other elevators they’re responsible for in this city.” Nonsense, but the sort of thing I would expect to hear from one of the schizos, and he ate it up. That sort of paranoid conspiracy nonsense has a timeless appeal which never has to try very hard to find an audience.
“Alright, I’m listening.” He sat before me, face illuminated from the side by the computer monitor. Flickering intermittently in time with the blinking cursor on screen, waiting at the end of his most recently typed command. I made with the shifty eyes and hand gestures to sell it. “What if they use that network for more than easy access to all their elevators? Have you been keeping up with rumors about celebrity involvement in human trafficking?”
That’s all it took. Where before he was scared and ready to back out of the whole ordeal, now I’d captured his interest. I’d tied it into something he must’ve heard a little bit about and was already politically inclined to believe. “I don’t for a minute believe anything you just said” he cautioned, “but on the off chance there’s any truth to it, I’m willing to send you down there with your phone. Just to take some pictures, then come right back up.”
I made the sign of the cross on my chest and swore I’d stay only long enough to take pictures, maybe some video to prove the tunnel network is real, then I’d get back in the elevator and return to ground level. At that stage I cared very little what he believed, or didn’t believe. If I could just get him to let me ride that elevator, I had a hunch I’d never have to explain myself to him. Or the psychologist. Or any of the other tiresomely, obviously fake people in this horrible fake world.
I ran as fast as I comfortably could, barefoot, to find the elevator doors already open for me. My gown sagged where I’d clipped the walkie talkie to it, something Tony wouldn’t let me leave without. A souvenir, I decided. A trophy, of this place I have conquered. So I don’t forget the strength I summoned, which I never knew was in me, just so I could make it to this point. So I could survive, physically and emotionally, these past three years.
I still couldn’t believe that thing was letting me escape, even as I pressed the button for the fifth floor. My stomach turned over on itself with nervous excitement. I’m going home. Right? Back to the real world. Back to Mom, Dad and Patrick. Even Patrick! Someone I never thought I’d be happy to see, but I was already tearing up as I imagined our reunion.
The young woman entered the elevator with me. I didn’t look at her. As if I’d come this far only to make a rookie mistake like looking at the young woman who gets in with you, now, in the hour of my victory. No fucking way. She got out at the tenth floor, after asking me where I was going. I ignored her of course. On at the fifth, off at the tenth? Is that normal? I couldn’t remember. It has to be. She’s a security measure, not a person.
Now the second floor. Then the sixth, then back to the second. Burned into my memory now, as I wish it had been the day I trapped myself in this place. I could’ve prevented all this had I only committed these steps to memory before I set foot on the elevator that day. I might’ve at least kept better track of the printout. There was a printout, wasn’t there?
No matter. Everything led up to this. All my hard work, heart and soul, enduring the hell of these three long years in confinement. Humoring that shriveled little troll of a doctor. Letting Tony do all sorts of things I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to forget, once I’m finally back in the real world. A tear of happiness at last escaped the duct, and rolled down my cheek.
I pressed the button for the fourth floor next, per the reversed order of steps. Then, anticipation within me mounting to an unbearable climax, I sent the elevator back down to the ground floor. I felt it lurch under me. That momentary sensation of free fall when an elevator accelerates downward slightly faster than one G.
It wouldn’t do that if it were only going from the fourth floor to the first. I jumped up and down, whooping out loud, holding onto the elevator’s internal handrail with one hand and myself with the other. It just kept going down. Three, two, one, zero….negative one. Negative two. Negative three. The numbers whipped by.
The readout over the doors could display double digit negatives because it was a generic elevator readout with three digits, suitable for the tallest possible buildings it might be installed in. So there was a third digit, the center part in the figure 8 of which now illuminated to depict a minus sign. It just kept going like that, the numbers increasing until it passed negative 99.
Continue reading

...writing it in a year was just a little too limiting.
Don't get me wrong - it was a great book, but it feels like it's a noticeably subpar when it comes to the other Stormlight books. He's set a high standard and this one just wasn't quite as good
I agree with what some people are saying- this, more than any of the other three, felt like it could afford to have some fat trimmed off. Venli's backstory added little to nothing, and he spent far too much time explaining the inter-workings of the world and all the mechanical devices. I don't need to know exactly what every switch and gem on his glove-fabrial does. That kind of information belongs in the appendix or an illustration/diagram, not in the middle of the story where it holds no narrative value. And this is coming from a dude who is fascinated by the magic system.
People think WoK was a slow read, but I got through it just fine. This book was the first in the series that really felt like it had been bogged down. Every time I read "x years ago" I let out a verbal sigh.
That's a hill I'll probably die on.
But beyond that - a lot of small details felt off to me, making the writing feel far less refined as a whole. Each individually is quite forgivable and can be explained away, but they add up. I jotted some of those down as I read:

• Cord's reverent gesture towards Syl was the catholic sign of the crucifix. Why is that a thing. Of all the exact manners to move your hand symbolically, why that? Do they crucify people in the horneater peaks?
• 'Formless' as a name just lowkey made me cringe. Felt like the pseudonym of a cliche edgelord
• Being in denial is one thing - but in this book characters are actively, willingly, and knowingly ignoring the things they know they should be doing. Literally thinking: "No." After the fifth time in one reading, it starts to feel like this is the perspective of a belligerent child. Gets tiresome
• Pattern is quirky, but insightful. In this book he's severely dumbed down in his attempts to tell a lie. "haha, naughty." Come on, give the dude more credit than that.
• Shallan's instant belief in the idea that Pattern is wholeheartedly betraying her is extremely nonsensical. Pattern can't move things in the physical realm. So exactly how does she expect him to have assassinated Ialai?
• Syl frequently explains things that the reader can easily infer. She feels a bit like a tutorial character in a video game. E.g. the 4th paragraph from the bottom of page 625. She's literally just repeating what Kaladin just explained to the reader in his own thoughts.
• In regards to gravitational latchings - "We need more practice on these, Kaladin. You don't use them as instinctively as the other two." REALLY? Because I seem to recall that one being the ONLY one he has EVER used instinctively. The other two he had to practice - but this one he used by instinct on bridge runs to deflect arrows.
• Page 635: Wit admits that Dalinar has thought further ahead than him, which feels excruciatingly unlike Wit. Not just to admit that - but to have actually not thought that far ahead.
• Page 682: Venli's first instinct to a question from one of her friends was to slap him, "even still." What's that supposed to mean? "Even still??" She might be a hateful coward in recovery, but she has never - in the past 700 pages - expressed such resentment toward those with questions. Especially since she asks questions constantly.
• Taravangian is now Odium - and one of the first things he says is "I can save them". From... what exactly? I thought the real danger was Odium. So just forfeit the contest? Or are we going to ignore all the redemptive work that has happened in Taravangian recently in favor of just saying that he's been corrupted by the shard he now bears?
• Dalinar says Kaladin is their best soldier, but not their best "killer". Who the heck is then? Jasnah?
• The Sibling is obnoxious. Humans save their life? I don't trust you. They save their life again. I hate humans. A THIRD time. You are not worthy. Good lord, get over yourself you garbage spren.

Again - loved the book - I teared up a few times - but I couldn't help but find myself more critical of this one.

PART ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-SEVEN
Angelo had never been a religious man. In his old neighbourhood, religious belief was like the Irish’s Catholic/Protestant line. Everyone was poor, and while most of the worn-down apartments had some manner of Crucifix or Virgin Mary displayed somewhere prominent, he always thought if he ever met God, he’d punch him in the nose for allowing people to live in such poverty.
His nonna believed in him, but she’d been old. She always used to say God had a plan, and it took everything Angelo and his two older brothers had to not roll their eyes at her. Mainly because like them, Nonna was Italian, and she could still bring the three of them into line with a look. Their mother was a crackhead who paid for her fixes on her back and knees right up until the day she died.
Angelo had been two when that happened.
And in that regard, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree where he was concerned. Not so with his brothers. Rocco was the oldest. Built like a linebacker, he was the one that kept the ugliness of the street away from their front door. There was fourteen years difference between him and Rocco, so as a kid, he hadn’t realised the reason he seemed to have an invisible barrier around him where trouble was concerned, was because his big brother had made a name for himself on the street as a professional leg-breaker (amongst other things). One who believed very much in killing the messenger.
Angelo had been seventeen when Rocco was finally put away for six counts of murder in the first degree. Twenty-five to life for each to be served consecutively because he refused to drop the dime on his boss. “Don’t ever be a rat, Angie,” Rocco had always said, whenever Nonna took Angelo to visit him in Attica. “Your name is all you had coming into this world, and it’s all you’ll have going out.”
Guess I should’ve listened, he mused to himself.
His name had been stripped from him in the last year. He went from being someone to being a common household appliance.
Gianni was twenty-four when Rocco went away and died six months later trying to fill Rocco’s shoes. He was found in an alleyway with his throat slit, and no one gave a damn. No one, except him and Nonna. ( ... and Rocco. Word was, he went on a murderous rampage that got him locked in solitary confinement and another four years added to his a hundred and fifty year sentence.)
Nonna held it together for Angelo. He knew it, but he also knew he couldn’t stay in that neighbourhood. At first, he begged his grandmother to move into another suburb where they could start over, but she had adamantly refused. “My Dante, Gianni and Carina are all buried here, Angelo. If I leave, I will not be able to visit them every day, and they will get lonely.”
As it so happened (and Angelo still carried a lot of guilt over this) Nonna never lived to see the Christmas after he left home. They said she had a heart attack, but to this day, Angelo believed it was more from a broken heart. She’d had no one left in the world but him, and he’d moved away.
After burying her alongside Nonno, Angelo only came to their graves on New Year’s Eve. Every year. He’d sit at the foot of his mother's grave where he could see Nonna and Gianni's gravestones and tell them both about what he’d been up to that year. As he spoke, he would toast to all their memories over a full bottle of amaretto. (For the ladies, he’d bring flowers. His brother would be given his share of the amaretto directly from the bottle.) Then, to wipe the slate clean, he would go out and tie one on for New Years and start the cycle again at the end of the following year. Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat.
All except last year. Last year, he’d been working for Tony, and he didn’t get time off. Which in a way, was a blessing. He didn’t want to face the ghosts of his family after what he’d become.
Now, it looked like he was on his way to meet them anyway.
He knew what the tunnel of light represented. He was Italian. Of course, he knew. If anything, he was surprised to be heading in this direction. Not that he’d broken any of the ten commandments (that he knew of), but his lifestyle even before his enslavement hadn’t exactly been sterling.
As the light grew closer, he heard their harmonised voices. The light was too bright to see through, but he heard their welcoming tones.
Then, he drew slowly to a halt. The light didn’t fade, nor did it get any closer. “You are loved.” The masculine voice washed over him, somehow cocooning him in the strength of his words like a comforter. “However My Nephew still needs you, my son.”
And just like that, the tunnel, the light and all the voices vanished, and Angelo was thrust back into a world of pain.
He couldn’t breathe. It hurt to try. Like his lungs were on fire, but filling up with water at the same time. Someone was wiping his face with something cold and wet, and just when he didn’t think he could fight anymore, his lungs spasmed as if punched and another mouthful of fluids rushed to the back of his throat and poured out of his open mouth. Someone had their hand pressed into his forehead, holding his head at an uncomfortable angle, but somehow it made the fluid fall more easily from his lips.
“That’s it, buddy,” he heard Robbie say. “Get that spit out of your lungs.”
“Here,” he heard Lucas add, and the wet cloth was gently reapplied to his face. “My God, man. Look at me,” he commanded, still wiping the cloth around Angelo’s face.
I can’t! I can’t see!
“Don’t you let them win, Angie! You hang on!”
Another shiver. Another cough. Another mouthful of fluid fell out of his mouth. “Stay with us, man.”
I don’t think I have a choice, Angelo thought weakly.
The next few minutes were a blur as new voices sounded around him. Someone requested the fire brigade, which made him want to laugh. Was the building on fire on top of everything else? He saw a meme once of a town being flooded except for one house that was fully ablaze, with the caption, “Proof that things can always get worse”. Lately, that had been his motto, even though he couldn’t picture how.
Still on his side, he felt something slide between his teeth and bump against his throat, but his gag-reflex hadn’t existed in years and if anything, the pulsed suction that followed felt weird. Like he was throwing up … from his lungs.
In the gaps between the suction, he felt the cold touch of oxygen, that his lungs scrambled to get more of. From behind, he heard a ripping sound and his back suddenly goosebumped at the cold bite of air-conditioned air that went on to include his arms.
At first, he wanted to be annoyed about the destruction of his sweatshirt, until he remembered they belonged to the hospital and that he’d helped himself to it after escaping his room. Oh, shit! Did that constitute stealing? It did. It so did. But he did that before going into the light tunnel, so maybe that meant it didn’t count?
As he pondered this, he felt someone pushing something small and sticky against his chest. Then another … and another. All while the suction in his throat continued. By the end of it, he thought he felt at least half a dozen tiny things sticking to his chest, and even more on his arms and feet. And that didn’t count the two bigger ones the size of his palms. He was beginning to feel like a damned sticky noticeboard.
He didn’t even flinch as the large bore needle slid into his left arm and something forced its way into his veins. If anything, he wanted to mock them for using an alcohol swab first. Prissies, he wanted to say. No self-respecting drug addict used swabs before shooting up.
Only, he wasn’t a drug addict anymore. The weeks he’d been at the hospital had emptied most of his system, and no one seemed in a hurry to give him more. Not even sedatives. Lucas had tried to stop the doc from administering the sedative in case it worked against anything residual in his system, but the doc had over-ridden him and given him the shot.
Maybe Lucas should be a doctor. Maybe in a former life, he was.
Angelo had no interest in getting back onto the shit Tony had him on. God, no. That stuff was too much, even for him. But once this was all over, he was pretty sure he could handle the lesser stuff that he’d been on in his days before Tony. Things like special k or dust or maybe even a little bit of cotton candy from time to time if he was having enough fun.
Orrrrrr….
Maybe he should see this as a giant fucking wakeup call and walk away from that life for good. That would certainly please Robbie, but taking fun by the horns and running with it as hard as he could was all he’d ever done since he left high school. Even before Tony, he’d used sex to pay for his partying lifestyle. He knew he wasn’t a ripped pretty boy like Robbie, but he could hold his own in a lineup, and the money was good.
Something else flooded his vein, which slowed the heavy pounding of his heart and brought his whole body into a state of relaxation. Dang … now that stuff I could use by the truckload, he thought hazily to himself.
He was then rolled onto his back. However, he didn’t feel the soft mattress roll that he’d been lying on. No, this was hard. Really hard. And it suddenly dawned on him that he still couldn’t see. Everything had different depths ranging from red to black, no matter where he looked.
The suction tube was pulled back into the mouth and a larger, breathing tube inserted. “He has no gag reflex,” he heard Robbie say, and he almost wanted to puff his chest in pride.
Damn right, I don’t.
He felt himself being lifted and carried feet first from the room.
“We’ll be right behind you, buddy!” he heard Robbie call.
Instead of calming him, that actually had him panicking. Where am I going that Robbie can’t come with me?
But he just couldn’t make himself move to find out.
He heard people barking orders and thought maybe he caught a glimpse of a bright light here and there through the red. For a few seconds, he thought he tasted the glorious smoggy air of New York City, and then he was enclosed in a small space that had a pair of doors banging around his feet.
Then the sirens started up. Oh, no…
The last place he ever wanted to go back to.
The hospital.
Well … crap.
* * *
​
PART ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-EIGHT
​
((AUTHOR'S NOTE: I reached out to a fantastically wonderful person for details on how EMTs would handle this scene, and in what order things would happen. Many, many, MANY huge thanks to that anonymous NREMT for giving me the information I needed to make this as realistic as it was))
Previous Part 166
((All comments welcome))
I made a family tree/diagram of the Mystallian family that can be found here
For more of my work including previous parts or WPs: Angel466 or indexed here
FULL INDEX OF BOB THE HOBO TO DATE CAN BE FOUND HERE!!

Re-rewind
26,656 Saheel
Saheel watched as the particles from his thumb streamed hungrily into the portal. It felt like sin. A spiritual war raged inside him — on the one hand, he saw this experience as a test of character, perhaps a last hurdle before he was allowed to gain entry to heaven, but on the other, he was starting to have doubts about the whole god thing.
So he prayed, fervently, that god was real.
Once the vote had gone through, a bathroom tile with a strap fastened itself to his wrist. Little dots were carved over its surface, presumably the speakers, while a small notch on the strap could be pressed down to activate a microphone. Far more wondrous was the way it projected a beam that evaporated any shadow it fell on, and the dazzling effect of turning on seven of these units in a cramped room made Saheel shut his eyes. Even that didn't bring him darkness, because it illuminated the space behind his eyelids, treating him to a diagram of his blood vessels.
"This defies logic," said Eirlys.
Wincing, Saheel opened his eyes, but lighting everything up had only made the portal darker. When he looked at it, it was like the cells in his eyes just gave up. He turned his light off, and the others did, too, going back to torchlight. He hated the feeling of standing there, unable to see, while bones ground together and rolled over his shoe.
IT IS NO MERE DARKNESS, said Kari, shuffling around. YOU WOULD BE SIMILARLY UNABLE TO BRING THE DEAD BACK TO LIFE.
"We've made a terrible mistake, doing this," said Saheel. "We shouldn't be meddling with things we don't understand."
Eirlys grabbed his hand and squeezed it in a grip that would have been reassuring had it not been as cold as a bag of frozen peas. Without warning, she brought her lips to his ear, and he nearly punched her in shock.
"We can send the others in ahead of us," whispered Eirlys. "That's as safe as we'll get. If we oppose this and just close it... well, the audience won't be pleased."
"I don't know if I can do this," he whispered back, trembling. "This is crazy."
"So sit back and let it play out."
Haralda stepped towards the portal, her torch dying out as she got closer. She was shaking, puffing out her chest to keep her head as far back as possible, and she held out the clipboard in the same way he clutched his crucifix.
"As chairwoman, I'll be the first to step through," said Haralda. "It would be improper for harm to come to anybody else."
"Are you sure?" asked Tarquin, leaping up. "I'd be quite happy to take your place for the good of the team, wouldn't—"
Haralda cut him off with a stern look. "This isn't up for discussion."
And she walked forward, inches now away from the void. Saheel didn't envy her — what did it look like, to have the whole of her vision consumed by the emptiness of death? She froze up, as if daring something to come rushing out, but the bone fragments drifted through as lazily as ever.
“Having second thoughts?” asked Tarquin.
She shook her head.
Something was wrong. Should Saheel go? He set off, half running towards Haralda as she poked a finger through the portal, only for a twisted mass of bone to latch onto her and yank, hard, and it took her by such surprise that she fell over, her legs slipping over the fragments like wet gravel, and just as she was about to be tugged wholly into its depths, Saheel caught her by the shoe.
She hung there, suspended between the priest and whatever was pulling on the other side, and he could hear her hollering what felt like miles away. They'd nearly lost her.
Saheel dug in with his feet. Whatever was pulling her, it was strong, like arm wrestling a bear. He leaned backwards against the force to outweigh it, and found himself being lifted up as well, the veins on his arms bulging as he put all of his strength into trying to get her back. But he couldn’t get enough purchase, and he soon left the ground, hurtling himself towards that pit of darkness.
"What did I say?" Eirlys wrapped her arms around his stomach, grunting. Behind her, the others lined up, forming a train, all of them leaning back to struggle against this impossible strength. Even Kari was there, at the end, their stick thin limbs working uselessly.
The seven of them were getting pulled in, their feet slipping over the bones as they lost ground. Saheel didn't have to imagine what the portal looked like from close up anymore. What it looked like was staring into the open mouth of a gigantic shark. He could hear the bones grinding together.
"We have... to work... together..." panted Tarquin, his faux-fur coat ripping at the shoulders as he strained. "Give it all you've got! On three... one, two, three!"
In unison, they heaved, and Saheel's feet scuffed against the ground until he was able to stand.
"One, two, three!"
Saheel was flung backwards by the force of those behind him, taking him off balance. Briefly, they managed to get Haralda's head back out on this side, with only her arm still in the darkness. Her face was flushed with rage.
"Close the blasted portal!" she bellowed.
And Saheel's poor stance caught up with him. The underworld reeled him in as he scrabbled against the ground in a desperate search for friction. He managed to get his thumb in the upright position, all as innumerable particles streaked across his vision into the portal.
6👍 1👎 — MAJORITY REACHED
The portal snapped shut, like a closing eye, and they fell onto the deep layer of bones, stabbed and scratched and scraped by the jagged fragments. Saheel switched on the bathroom tile torch to chase out the shadows. Haralda sat up with a stump in place of her right arm that was gushing with blood.
She growled, face pale, and said, "My clipboard! Where's it gone?"
"THAT'S what you're worried about?" said Tarquin breathlessly. "We need to vote to heal everyone, right away. All those in favour?"
"Wait," gasped Saheel, even as his thumb started spewing a stream of light straight into the bones underneath him. "Haven't you noticed? Something's seriously wrong with this voting system! Why did the light go into the portal, and now, why is it going into these bones? Until we get an answer—"
"Whoops," said Faust, sitting guiltily with his thumb up. "Sorry."
Eirlys sighed. "Well, we've already called the vote. We have to see it through."
6👍 1👎 — MAJORITY REACHED
There was a blinding halation, brighter than even the bathroom tiles, and the bones underneath them juddered. They dislodged themselves, tearing holes through Saheel's robe as they raced to the centre of the chamber just as iron filings home in on a magnet. The sound was cacophonous, full of clinking and smashing, and he cried out, shielding his face until the floorspace of the room became spotless.
The bone pile grew, towering up towards the ceiling, twisting around itself as the pieces slotted together into a circular blob with nine depressions — the same pattern as the floor. The torsos of seven skeletons crunched out of the mess, while two of the holes remained unfilled. From the bottom sprouted a wave of flesh, sweeping over the pile like a timelapse of algae engulfing water, and Saheel gasped with horror as muscles, blood and skin knitted their way across the humanoid forms.
There it was, complete, a hellish mound of flesh and bone, the upper half of seven naked humans hanging out of it like flagpoles, and one of the humans, unmistakably a black-haired Irishman with a scraggly beard, turned and looked Saheel straight in the eyes, twenty years older than when he’d last seen him.
Sean.
Thank you, next

Chapter 1
Previous Chapter
​
After breakfast, Jacob left the dining hall and walked towards the elevator. His usual direct, quick pace was replaced by a vague meandering stroll. There was a lot on his mind today. As he entered the elevator and selected the computer lab, he was trying to formulate the best way to introduce the origin of Project Genesis to Elissa. Despite his argument with Claudia, he didn't want to hurt the girl more than he needed to.
The elevator door opened, and he stepped into a hallway lined with doors and windows. No, not girl. Jacob reminded herself that she wasn't a person, just an imitation of one. However, it was still important to affect her endocrine and neural functions as little as possible. Project Genesis was still in progress, after all, and these events would be important to record.
As he entered a room lined with computers, he admitted that there was another reason. He didn't want to hurt Claudia either. They might argue and yell, but he did love her. And maybe… just maybe, he had developed fatherly feelings for Elissa.
He sat down between two screens and, tapping and swiping, began summoning diagrams and graphs. The scientist set aside his thoughts in order to focus on the task at hand. Each window portrayed another set of data trackers in Elissa's body. Endocrine, circulatory, nervous and respiratory systems were all represented. The only thing they couldn't directly measure was her brain. While they could always scan it from the outside, same as a human brain, they didn't dare interfere directly with the unknown entity they had created, lest the miracle be terminated.
One by one, Jacob saved each set of measurements. Human or not, the revelation Elissa was about to experience would affect her deeply. In order to observe those changes, he needed to know her status before the trauma would hit. He then created a new folder, inserted the recently saved statuses, and named it… What to name it?
After a moments thought, he decided on a title. The touch screen was soundless as he input the denomination. Data Set: Time for Change.
The computer lab was plunged into darkness as he left the room.
Entering the elevator, he could not help but doubt his own actions. Did Elissa truly need to know? Was she a devious android, or in fact just a little girl?
Time for change indeed.
The door slid open, revealing behind it Elissa. When she saw him, she immediately put a large smile on her face.
“Elissa!” yelped Jacob, unprepared to meet the subject of his contemplation.
“Hi Jacob!” she greeted. “Good morning!”
“Uh, good morning to you too,” he said uncomfortably, brushing past her.
Elissa followed him. “Can I ask you something?”
“You can always ask,” Jacob replied. “Whether I answer or not is a different story.”
“So, if I was built,” she began walking backwards to maintain eye contact with him, “and I’m supposed to act like a normal human and everything…” She noticed he wasn’t returning her eye contact.
“Ok?” Jacob prompted.
“And normal people when they grow up, are supposed to get a job and have a family and stuff…”
“Right.” He turned around and entered the cafeteria.
“Then what was I supposed to do when I grow up?”
“Thought so,” Jacob poured himself another mug of coffee.
“What did you think?”
“That you’d want to know more about your origin,” Jacob replied as if it were obvious.
He still wasn’t making eye contact. Elissa realized it probably seemed obvious to him.
“No,” she argued, “I want to know about the opposite of my origin, I want to know where I’m going.”
“If you want to know where you’re going, you have to look at where you came from first.”
Elissa paused for a moment. “Oh. That makes sense.”
“Of course it makes sense, I said it,” he muttered bruskly as he sipped from his mug. “Now let’s go somewhere we can talk.”
Jacob sat down on the teachers desk, and Elissa sat in front of him on a students desk.
“Alright,” he begins, “how much do you already know?” He looked her intensely in the eye.
Elissa blinked uncomfortably. “I was built by scientists who… um… wanted to create life and… experiment on it.”
“Okay,” Jacob sipped from his mug, “That’s only half the story. You weren’t only built to satisfy the curiosity and power drive of certain inhumane scientists, although I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t a factor. You see, Project Genesis was started to mitigate a crisis.”
“Am I Project Genesis?” Elissa hesitated to refer to herself as a project.
“Project Genesis resulted in you, yes. The initial idea was that a sun-scorched surface could be navigated by an artificial human immune or resistant to radiation, while organic humans stayed safe underground.”
“Sun-scorched?”
“Sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start at the beginning.” After taking another sip, Jacob placed his mug on the desk to free his hands, holding them theatrically in the air. “The day is July 23, 2027. The sun erupts, sending a massive solar flair towards the Earth. Left unchecked, this flair would blast the surface of the planet with so much radiation that nothing could survive it except for certain extreme species of bacteria.”
“Was humanity prepared for it?”
“Oh yes. We had 6 years to prepare. The first predictions of the Flare were published in 2021. Many satellites full of electromagnets and mirrors orbited the Earth, shields against the apocalypse.”
“So the satellites stopped it?”
“No. The Flare was far more powerful than anyone had predicted, demolishing the satellites defense systems. The catastrophe was delayed for twenty-four hours.”
“So humanity wasn’t prepared.”
“I guess not. Luckily for humanity, there were some extraordinarily paranoid specimens who had spent their fortunes on radiation shielded bunkers deep underground. Up on the surface, things are going to hell. Water’s evaporating, hurricanes are destroying everything, floods are carrying stuff away. Plants are dead, which means animals are dead, which means people are dying. But below ground, people are surviving. They’re not happy, they’re not comfy, but they’re alive. This is where you come in.”
“Project Genesis.”
“Yup. See, Project Genesis had been proposed by extremists from before the Flare, as an alternative in case the satellites failed. If humanity ended up trapped below the ground, then an artificial person who wasn’t vulnerable to radiation could rebuild society, construct living spaces that we humans could live in. The thing about radiation is that it doesn’t kill immediately. In fact, people can live for many painful years before the reprieve of death. It left plenty of time to build new shelters such as this one.”
Jacob held out his hands and gestured all around.
“This place was built specifically to bring Project Genesis to fruition. It took a while, but it was done. The first scientists wanted to build robots to navigate the surface. The problem was that the surface radiation interfered so much with communication that any machine we managed to send up top would have to be completely autonomous.”
Elissa nodded. “So it needed to be able to think for itself.”
“Exactly. At first we just sent advanced AI’s, but we never heard back from them. The theory is that something in the radiation messed with their computer chips in a different way then with human brains. If you go out on the surface today, you can still find the wreckage.”
“So the Flare ended?”
“Thank God it did, 15 years ago. You would not believe how much easier it is to live when the sun isn’t actively trying to kill you. I mean, that sounds pretty stupid to you, but I’d lived all my life underground, and I still can’t get over being able to grow plants outside.”
“What about the rest of the people?”
“Right, every one else. They’ve all come out by now. We offered them help, managed to get them started farming and stuff. Funny thing is, while they accepted most of our aid, like medicine and water purifiers, most of their council decided to reject the rest of it in favor of freedom. They don’t want us techies interfering with their lives. I think that since they’ve lived around technology their whole lives in bunkers, they can’t get far away enough now that they’re finally free.”
“So the Flare started in 2027.”
“Yes.”
“And this year is 2121.”
Yeah," he answered quietly.
Elissa let that sink in. It had been 94 years since the sun had destroyed society. Everyone she knew had lived in bunkers their whole lives. So had she, come to think of it.
“You okay?” Jacob asked.
“Um, yeah.”
“Any questions?”
She looked up from the floor. “Why’d you keep trying to build me afterwards?”
“Well,” Jacob leaned back, putting his hands behind his head. “Remember human curiosity? That certainly played a part. The reason that kept us funded was that if there’s another flair, we might need a functional android immediately.”
Elissa winced at the word android. Jacob didn’t seem to notice.
“After all, without any functional satellites,” he continued obliviously, “we have no way of knowing if the sun decides to flare up again, so…” He looked down from the ceiling at an empty desk. “Elissa?”
He noticed the door was open. Jacob stared at it, took another sip of his coffee.
Devious android, right?
He was getting less sure of himself every day.
Elissa slipped outside the room, Jacob still talking obliviously. Her eyes stung slightly but she refused to start crying. She had cried enough yesterday.
So I’m the insurance, she thought bitterly. Humanity’s sun insurance.
This was the third time a revelation had destroyed her everything she thought she knew, in half as many days. It was starting to get a little annoying. The last two times she had run away in fear and horror. Now, she let her meandering feet guide her through the halls, contemplating. I guess I’ve changed a lot in the last few days.
A couple hallways later, she found herself standing outside the indoor garden. Through the window in the door, she observed the large oak tree, the fuzzy grass at its feet. The vibrant beauty of the flowers stunned her as always, the cute little insects buzzing around the petals. The scene was gorgeous, calmed Elissa’s quaking nerves. She had never really questioned why they needed a garden, why it was important to preserve this little bit of nature. Elissa’s eyes followed the tree’s outline skywards, to the bright yellow lights that illuminated the room. The old oaks branches were unnaturally still, no breeze to sway them to and fro. The view was beautiful, but it wasn’t outside. Was this the last refuge of the natural world?
“I thought I might find you here.”
Elissa turned to see Claudia standing next to her. The scientist put her arm around her daughter.
Elissa looked back at the garden. “Jacob told me about the reason I… um, about the Flare.”
“Yeah.” Claudia controlled the momentary flare of anger she felt against the man. “He’s wanted to tell you about that since forever, you know.”
“Really?”
“Yup.”
“Did you?”
Claudia considered her next words carefully. “Not yet. Maybe when you were older. I… didn’t think you were ready yet.”
There was silence. A buzzing insect bumped against the glass and flew away.
“That’s why I asked Jacob instead of you,” Elissa confessed.
“Hm?”
“I thought you loved me too much to tell me everything.”
Again, silence. Claudia pondered how to respond. After all, it was true.
Finally she patted Elissa on the back. “Come on. I want to show you something.”
“What?”
“You’ll see.”
A couple hallways later, they stood inside an elevator. Elissa noticed the floor seemed unusually dirty.
As the rumbling machine came to a stop, Claudia’s hand hovered over the door button. “You ready?” she asked, her smile almost mischievous.
“I don’t know,” Elissa replied with a giggle. Her mother’s joy was always infectious.
Claudia pushed the button. Elissa’s hair moved of its own accord as the door slid slowly open. Is that… wind? She couldn’t see a thing. Then her eyes adjusted to the light, and her jaw dropped.
Outside the door were rolling hills covered in grass, flowers interspersed among the green. A tree towered over the beauty, a strong, brown trunk supporting the swaying leaf covered branches. The colors were so vibrant, the green so… green, alive.
But these weren’t what captured Elissa’s eye. Above the gorgeous scene before her was a large, bright sheet of pure blue. She craned her neck upward, trying to take the sky in all at once. Uninterrupted blue as far as the eye could see, and in the middle of the canvas, a burning yellow eye, bringing light and warmth and life to the world. It was hard to believe that just a couple decades ago, that same eye had been a source of death and destruction.
“Do you want to step outside?” Claudia asked.
Elissa looked back at her, astonished. “Can I?”
“Yeah.”
The android immediately ran outside, taking in the world, and the feeling beneath her…
No feeling.
Elissa slowly came to a stop, looking down at her feet, daring them to feel something other than the pressure of her own weight against the plant life.
Claudia arrived beside her, and inhaled deeply. “Isn’t it lovely?”
“Yeah…” murmured Elissa, sad that she could never know the full extent of what Claudia was feeling. “Lovely.”
Claudia glanced at Elissa. “Lets go, I have something else to show you.” She began to walk forward.
“I’m good,” Elissa replied. “I’ll just...sit here.”
Claudia turned and smiled. “Come on, Elissa. This will be different.”
Reluctantly, Elissa followed. It was hard to stay sad when she was surrounded by such vibrant scenery.
“Could all this have grown in 15 years?” Elissa asked breathlessly.
“Well, not quite,” Claudia replied. “We had many specimens preserved in the lab, and the second we realized the worst was over, we set to work making sure the environment grew back as quick as possible.” Claudia raised her arms to shoulder height and turned in a circle, taking in the beauty around her. “The first few years, we fed this garden with special fertilizer to make sure they survived.”
“Its beautiful,” Elissa murmured.
Her mother nodded. “Yeah. Here, behind the tree.”
They had arrived at the large oak that dominated the landscape. Claudia sat down in the shade of the behemoth, gazing admiringly at a carving in the wood. The sculpture seemed distorted a little from the growth of the tree. Elissa sat down next to her mother and analyzed the little portrait. A circle had been chiselled in the trunk, and in the middle, a lowercase letter “t” was left in high relief.
“Do you know what that is?” Claudia whispered.
Elissa shook her head, unwilling to break the reverent silence that Claudia had created.
Claudia opened her mouth, preparing to say something, but then closed it again. “Where do I start?” she muttered. “Do you know who God is?”
Elissa nodded. “A little.”
“Well, this little thing here is called a cross, or crucifix. We use it to represent God.” She looked at Elissa. “I come here to pray, a lot. There’s no priest at the facility, so I haven’t been to Mass in years…”
“Mass?”
Claudia laughed. “I wish I had taught you all this from the start. The people in charge wouldn’t let me, but now I see that I should have taught you anyways.”
She looked back at the cross. “I know that there’s a lot going through your head right now, Elissa. But no matter what, I want you to remember that I love you, and more importantly, He loves you.”
Elissa looked at the wooden statue. The cross? The wooden statue loved her? She got the feeling there was a lot more happening here than she understood. “The statue loves me?”
Claudia smiled and kissed Elissa on the head. “You have a lot to learn, Elissa. I’ll explain it to you sometime. The statue’s nothing special, it just looks nice. Right now, just know that God loves us, and that’s a good thing.”
“Even an android.”
“Remember, you’re not just an android. And yes, I’m positive He would.”
Elissa didn’t understand.
For a moment, they sat there peacefully. Insects buzzed around them, the sun shone down, the wind blew in her ears, as Elissa contemplated the significance of the image in front of them.
She felt her hair move in the wind. Not the wind move my hair, like in the books, she thought grimly. I just feel my hair. Because I’m an android.
There really was a lot going through her head.
Elissa noticed Claudia’s lips moving silently. She was staring intensely at the image.
“What are you doing?” Elissa asked.
Claudia seemed to ignore her daughter for a couple seconds, finishing her little mantra under her breath. “What’s that, Elissa?” she asked, once she had finished.
“What were you whispering about?”
“Oh, I was talking to God.”
“To… the statue?”
“No, Elissa,” Claudia chuckled. “Like I said, the statue just looks nice. I’m talking directly to God.”
“Does he talk back?”
“Well, no. Not exactly.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Okay.” Claudia sighed and leaned back, her eyes deep in thought. “So, it helps me to think. And, if I stay a while in silence,” she paused, “and try to imagine what God would want me to do, I can come up with a solution I hadn’t thought of before.” She nodded, satisfied with her answer. “I think that’s God speaking to me.”
“He, like, puts the answer in your head?”
“Something like that, yeah.”
Silence for a moment.
“That’s creepy.”
Claudia laughed. “No, its not!”
“Its creepy,” Elissa insisted.
“Well, maybe from a certain point of view.”
The sunset was a beautiful red when they went back inside.
Over the next couple days, Elissa began to make regular visits to garden outside. She wasn’t praying, which was what Claudia had called talking to God. She just found outside really peaceful, and the statue really was intriguing in a simple sort of way. Elissa liked to lay on her back and watch the clouds through the leaves above her head. It was a strange sensation, feeling the grass under her head, and yet… not. There was something missing from the sensation, even though she couldn’t quite place it.
Kind of like the environment inside. Ever since she discovered her true nature, all the scientists seemed really nervous around her, even Jacob. Only Claudia seemed truly comfortable talking to her, and even she was off put by her colleagues attitudes.
There was something missing from her life, Elissa thought as she lay under the guardian oak. Ever since the incident, she had done nothing but lay outside and contemplate her existence. Claudia always said that if Elissa was bored, it was because she was boring, but now the little girl was forced to admit the truth: she was bored out of her mind. Shouldn’t a life changing experience like discovering you’re an android be… well, life changing?
Something needed to be done. Elissa didn’t know what, but she knew she had to do it.
Sitting up, she once again contemplated the simple sculpture in the tree. “So Claudia talks to you,” Elissa murmured out loud. “And she gets an idea, huh?” She liked thinking out loud when she was alone. Supposedly that was the first sign of insanity, but if that were the case, then Elissa was definitely raised by a psychopath.
“Well, why not?” she muttered skeptically. “Turns out, I’m a creation of man, and now that I’ve found out, absolutely nothing is happening. Also, the world got torched by the sun before I was born, and people used to have to live in deep underground bunkers, but now that the Flare’s over, we can all come out and enjoy the sunshine, and plant trees and stuff.”
She stared at the cross for a moment, enjoying the quiet after her outburst. “Nice talk,” she muttered, laying back down and closing her eyes. “Maybe things wouldn’t be so boring if I could talk with someone who A, wasn’t a scientist, and B, wasn’t a tree.”
With a sigh, she resigned herself to another afternoon of boredom.
The bunker people!
With a jolt she sat straight up, eyes wide open. “Maybe I could go live with the other people out there! All those guys who just farm and stuff, they probably have tons of things to do!”
She flopped onto her back again. “At least more than here.”
After a couple more minutes consideration, Elissa scrambled to her feet. She needed to find Claudia.
​
TalesFromGringolandia

After breakfast, Jacob left the dining hall and walked towards the elevator. His usual direct, quick pace was replaced by a vague meandering stroll. There was a lot on his mind today. As he entered the elevator and selected the computer lab, he was trying to formulate the best way to introduce the origin of Project Genesis to Elissa. Despite his argument with Claudia, he didn't want to hurt the girl more than he needed to.
The elevator door opened, and he stepped into a hallway lined with doors and windows. No, not girl. Jacob reminded herself that she wasn't a person, just an imitation of one. However, it was still important to affect her endocrine and neural functions as little as possible. Project Genesis was still in progress, after all, and these events would be important to record.
As he entered a room lined with computers, he admitted that there was another reason. He didn't want to hurt Claudia either. They might argue and yell, but he did love her. And maybe… just maybe, he had developed fatherly feelings for Elissa.
He sat down between two screens and, tapping and swiping, began summoning diagrams and graphs. The scientist set aside his thoughts in order to focus on the task at hand. Each window portrayed another set of data trackers in Elissa's body. Endocrine, circulatory, nervous and respiratory systems were all represented. The only thing they couldn't directly measure was her brain. While they could always scan it from the outside, same as a human brain, they didn't dare interfere directly with the unknown entity they had created, lest the miracle be terminated.
One by one, Jacob saved each set of measurements. Human or not, the revelation Elissa was about to experience would affect her deeply. In order to observe those changes, he needed to know her status before the trauma would hit. He then created a new folder, inserted the recently saved statuses, and named it… What to name it?
After a moments thought, he decided on a title. The touch screen was soundless as he input the denomination. Data Set: Time for Change.
The computer lab was plunged into darkness as he left the room.
Entering the elevator, he could not help but doubt his own actions. Did Elissa truly need to know? Was she a devious android, or in fact just a little girl?
Time for change indeed.
The door slid open, revealing behind it Elissa. When she saw him, she immediately put a large smile on her face.
“Elissa!” yelped Jacob, unprepared to meet the subject of his contemplation.
“Hi Jacob!” she greeted. “Good morning!”
“Uh, good morning to you too,” he said uncomfortably, brushing past her.
Elissa followed him. “Can I ask you something?”
“You can always ask,” Jacob replied. “Whether I answer or not is a different story.”
“So, if I was built,” she began walking backwards to maintain eye contact with him, “and I’m supposed to act like a normal human and everything…” She noticed he wasn’t returning her eye contact.
“Ok?” Jacob prompted.
“And normal people when they grow up, are supposed to get a job and have a family and stuff…”
“Right.” He turned around and entered the cafeteria.
“Then what was I supposed to do when I grow up?”
“Thought so,” Jacob poured himself another mug of coffee.
“What did you think?”
“That you’d want to know more about your origin,” Jacob replied as if it were obvious.
He still wasn’t making eye contact. Elissa realized it probably seemed obvious to him.
“No,” she argued, “I want to know about the opposite of my origin, I want to know where I’m going.”
“If you want to know where you’re going, you have to look at where you came from first.”
Elissa paused for a moment. “Oh. That makes sense.”
“Of course it makes sense, I said it,” he muttered bruskly as he sipped from his mug. “Now let’s go somewhere we can talk.”
Jacob sat down on the teachers desk, and Elissa sat in front of him on a students desk.
“Alright,” he begins, “how much do you already know?” He looked her intensely in the eye.
Elissa blinked uncomfortably. “I was built by scientists who… um… wanted to create life and… experiment on it.”
“Okay,” Jacob sipped from his mug, “That’s only half the story. You weren’t only built to satisfy the curiosity and power drive of certain inhumane scientists, although I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t a factor. You see, Project Genesis was started to mitigate a crisis.”
“Am I Project Genesis?” Elissa hesitated to refer to herself as a project.
“Project Genesis resulted in you, yes. The initial idea was that a sun-scorched surface could be navigated by an artificial human immune or resistant to radiation, while organic humans stayed safe underground.”
“Sun-scorched?”
“Sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start at the beginning.” After taking another sip, Jacob placed his mug on the desk to free his hands, holding them theatrically in the air. “The day is July 23, 2027. The sun erupts, sending a massive solar flair towards the Earth. Left unchecked, this flair would blast the surface of the planet with so much radiation that nothing could survive it except for certain extreme species of bacteria.”
“Was humanity prepared for it?”
“Oh yes. We had 6 years to prepare. The first predictions of the Flare were published in 2021. Many satellites full of electromagnets and mirrors orbited the Earth, shields against the apocalypse.”
“So the satellites stopped it?”
“No. The Flare was far more powerful than anyone had predicted, demolishing the satellites defense systems. The catastrophe was delayed for twenty-four hours.”
“So humanity wasn’t prepared.”
“I guess not. Luckily for humanity, there were some extraordinarily paranoid specimens who had spent their fortunes on radiation shielded bunkers deep underground. Up on the surface, things are going to hell. Water’s evaporating, hurricanes are destroying everything, floods are carrying stuff away. Plants are dead, which means animals are dead, which means people are dying. But below ground, people are surviving. They’re not happy, they’re not comfy, but they’re alive. This is where you come in.”
“Project Genesis.”
“Yup. See, Project Genesis had been proposed by extremists from before the Flare, as an alternative in case the satellites failed. If humanity ended up trapped below the ground, then an artificial person who wasn’t vulnerable to radiation could rebuild society, construct living spaces that we humans could live in. The thing about radiation is that it doesn’t kill immediately. In fact, people can live for many painful years before the reprieve of death. It left plenty of time to build new shelters such as this one.”
Jacob held out his hands and gestured all around.
“This place was built specifically to bring Project Genesis to fruition. It took a while, but it was done. The first scientists wanted to build robots to navigate the surface. The problem was that the surface radiation interfered so much with communication that any machine we managed to send up top would have to be completely autonomous.”
Elissa nodded. “So it needed to be able to think for itself.”
“Exactly. At first we just sent advanced AI’s, but we never heard back from them. The theory is that something in the radiation messed with their computer chips in a different way then with human brains. If you go out on the surface today, you can still find the wreckage.”
“So the Flare ended?”
“Thank God it did, 15 years ago. You would not believe how much easier it is to live when the sun isn’t actively trying to kill you. I mean, that sounds pretty stupid to you, but I’d lived all my life underground, and I still can’t get over being able to grow plants outside.”
“What about the rest of the people?”
“Right, every one else. They’ve all come out by now. We offered them help, managed to get them started farming and stuff. Funny thing is, while they accepted most of our aid, like medicine and water purifiers, most of their council decided to reject the rest of it in favor of freedom. They don’t want us techies interfering with their lives. I think that since they’ve lived around technology their whole lives in bunkers, they can’t get far away enough now that they’re finally free.”
“So the Flare started in 2027.”
“Yes.”
“And this year is 2121.”
Yeah," he answered quietly.
Elissa let that sink in. It had been 94 years since the sun had destroyed society. Everyone she knew had lived in bunkers their whole lives. So had she, come to think of it.
“You okay?” Jacob asked.
“Um, yeah.”
“Any questions?”
She looked up from the floor. “Why’d you keep trying to build me afterwards?”
“Well,” Jacob leaned back, putting his hands behind his head. “Remember human curiosity? That certainly played a part. The reason that kept us funded was that if there’s another flair, we might need a functional android immediately.”
Elissa winced at the word android. Jacob didn’t seem to notice.
“After all, without any functional satellites,” he continued obliviously, “we have no way of knowing if the sun decides to flare up again, so…” He looked down from the ceiling at an empty desk. “Elissa?”
He noticed the door was open. Jacob stared at it, took another sip of his coffee.
Devious android, right?
He was getting less sure of himself every day.
​
Elissa slipped outside the room, Jacob still talking obliviously. Her eyes stung slightly but she refused to start crying. She had cried enough yesterday.
So I’m the insurance, she thought bitterly. Humanity’s sun insurance.
This was the third time a revelation had destroyed her everything she thought she knew, in half as many days. It was starting to get a little annoying. The last two times she had run away in fear and horror. Now, she let her meandering feet guide her through the halls, contemplating. I guess I’ve changed a lot in the last few days.
A couple hallways later, she found herself standing outside the indoor garden. Through the window in the door, she observed the large oak tree, the fuzzy grass at its feet. The vibrant beauty of the flowers stunned her as always, the cute little insects buzzing around the petals. The scene was gorgeous, calmed Elissa’s quaking nerves. She had never really questioned why they needed a garden, why it was important to preserve this little bit of nature. Elissa’s eyes followed the tree’s outline skywards, to the bright yellow lights that illuminated the room. The old oaks branches were unnaturally still, no breeze to sway them to and fro. The view was beautiful, but it wasn’t outside. Was this the last refuge of the natural world?
“I thought I might find you here.”
Elissa turned to see Claudia standing next to her. The scientist put her arm around her daughter.
Elissa looked back at the garden. “Jacob told me about the reason I… um, about the Flare.”
“Yeah.” Claudia controlled the momentary flare of anger she felt against the man. “He’s wanted to tell you about that since forever, you know.”
“Really?”
“Yup.”
“Did you?”
Claudia considered her next words carefully. “Not yet. Maybe when you were older. I… didn’t think you were ready yet.”
There was silence. A buzzing insect bumped against the glass and flew away.
“That’s why I asked Jacob instead of you,” Elissa confessed.
“Hm?”
“I thought you loved me too much to tell me everything.”
Again, silence. Claudia pondered how to respond. After all, it was true.
Finally she patted Elissa on the back. “Come on. I want to show you something.”
“What?”
“You’ll see.”
A couple hallways later, they stood inside an elevator. Elissa noticed the floor seemed unusually dirty.
As the rumbling machine came to a stop, Claudia’s hand hovered over the door button. “You ready?” she asked, her smile almost mischievous.
“I don’t know,” Elissa replied with a giggle. Her mother’s joy was always infectious.
Claudia pushed the button. Elissa’s hair moved of its own accord as the door slid slowly open. Is that… wind? She couldn’t see a thing. Then her eyes adjusted to the light, and her jaw dropped.
Outside the door were rolling hills covered in grass, flowers interspersed among the green. A tree towered over the beauty, a strong, brown trunk supporting the swaying leaf covered branches. The colors were so vibrant, the green so… green, alive.
But these weren’t what captured Elissa’s eye. Above the gorgeous scene before her was a large, bright sheet of pure blue. She craned her neck upward, trying to take the sky in all at once. Uninterrupted blue as far as the eye could see, and in the middle of the canvas, a burning yellow eye, bringing light and warmth and life to the world. It was hard to believe that just a couple decades ago, that same eye had been a source of death and destruction.
“Do you want to step outside?” Claudia asked.
Elissa looked back at her, astonished. “Can I?”
“Yeah.”
The android immediately ran outside, taking in the world, and the feeling beneath her…
No feeling.
Elissa slowly came to a stop, looking down at her feet, daring them to feel something other than the pressure of her own weight against the plant life.
Claudia arrived beside her, and inhaled deeply. “Isn’t it lovely?”
“Yeah…” murmured Elissa, sad that she could never know the full extent of what Claudia was feeling. “Lovely.”
Claudia glanced at Elissa. “Lets go, I have something else to show you.” She began to walk forward.
“I’m good,” Elissa replied. “I’ll just...sit here.”
Claudia turned and smiled. “Come on, Elissa. This will be different.”
Reluctantly, Elissa followed. It was hard to stay sad when she was surrounded by such vibrant scenery.
“Could all this have grown in 15 years?” Elissa asked breathlessly.
“Well, not quite,” Claudia replied. “We had many specimens preserved in the lab, and the second we realized the worst was over, we set to work making sure the environment grew back as quick as possible.” Claudia raised her arms to shoulder height and turned in a circle, taking in the beauty around her. “The first few years, we fed this garden with special fertilizer to make sure they survived.”
“Its beautiful,” Elissa murmured.
Her mother nodded. “Yeah. Here, behind the tree.”
They had arrived at the large oak that dominated the landscape. Claudia sat down in the shade of the behemoth, gazing admiringly at a carving in the wood. The sculpture seemed distorted a little from the growth of the tree. Elissa sat down next to her mother and analyzed the little portrait. A circle had been chiselled in the trunk, and in the middle, a lowercase letter “t” was left in high relief.
“Do you know what that is?” Claudia whispered.
Elissa shook her head, unwilling to break the reverent silence that Claudia had created.
Claudia opened her mouth, preparing to say something, but then closed it again. “Where do I start?” she muttered. “Do you know who God is?”
Elissa nodded. “A little.”
“Well, this little thing here is called a cross, or crucifix. We use it to represent God.” She looked at Elissa. “I come here to pray, a lot. There’s no priest at the facility, so I haven’t been to Mass in years…”
“Mass?”
Claudia laughed. “I wish I had taught you all this from the start. The people in charge wouldn’t let me, but now I see that I should have taught you anyways.”
She looked back at the cross. “I know that there’s a lot going through your head right now, Elissa. But no matter what, I want you to remember that I love you, and more importantly, He loves you.”
Elissa looked at the wooden statue. The cross? The wooden statue loved her? She got the feeling there was a lot more happening here than she understood. “The statue loves me?”
“Would the statue love an android?”
Claudia smiled and kissed Elissa on the head. “You have a lot to learn, Elissa. I’ll explain it to you sometime. The statue’s nothing special, it just looks nice. Right now, just now that God loves us, and that’s a good thing.”
“Even an android.”
“Remember, you’re not just an android. And yes, I’m positive He would.”
Elissa didn’t understand.
For a moment, they sat there peacefully. Insects buzzed around them, the sun shone down, the wind blew in her ears, as Elissa contemplated the significance of the image in front of them.
She felt her hair move in the wind. Not the wind move my hair, like in the books, she thought grimly. I just feel my hair. Because I’m an android.
There really was a lot going through her head.
Elissa noticed Claudia’s lips moving silently. She was staring intensely at the image.
“What are you doing?” Elissa asked.
Claudia seemed to ignore her daughter for a couple seconds, finishing her little mantra under her breath. “What’s that, Elissa?” she asked, once she had finished.
“What were you whispering about?”
“Oh, I was talking to God.”
“To… the statue?”
“No, Elissa,” Claudia chuckled. “Like I said, the statue just looks nice. I’m talking directly to God.”
“Does he talk back?”
“Well, no. Not exactly.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Okay.” Claudia sighed and leaned back, her eyes deep in thought. “So, it helps me to think. And, if I stay a while in silence,” she paused, “and try to imagine what God would want me to do, I can come up with a solution I hadn’t thought of before.” She nodded, satisfied with her answer. “I think that’s God speaking to me.”
“He, like, puts the answer in your head?”
“Something like that, yeah.”
Silence for a moment.
“That’s creepy.”
Claudia laughed. “No, its not!”
“Its creepy,” Elissa insisted.
“Well, maybe from a certain point of view.”
The sunset was a beautiful red when they went back inside.
Over the next couple days, Elissa began to make regular visits to garden outside. She wasn’t praying, which was what Claudia had called talking to God. She just found outside really peaceful, and the statue really was intriguing in a simple sort of way. Elissa liked to lay on her back and watch the clouds through the leaves above her head. It was a strange sensation, feeling the grass under her head, and yet… not. There was something missing from the sensation, even though she couldn’t quite place it.
Kind of like the environment inside. Ever since she discovered her true nature, all the scientists seemed really nervous around her, even Jacob. Only Claudia seemed truly comfortable talking to her, and even she was off put by her colleagues attitudes.
There was something missing from her life, Elissa thought as she lay under the guardian oak. Ever since the incident, she had done nothing but lay outside and contemplate her existence. Claudia always said that if Elissa was bored, it was because she was boring, but now the little girl was forced to admit the truth: she was bored out of her mind. Shouldn’t a life changing experience like discovering you’re an android be… well, life changing?
Something needed to be done. Elissa didn’t know what, but she knew she had to do it.
Sitting up, she once again contemplated the simple sculpture in the tree. “So Claudia talks to you,” Elissa murmured out loud. “And she gets an idea, huh?” She liked thinking out loud when she was alone. Supposedly that was the first sign of insanity, but if that were the case, then Elissa was definitely raised by a psychopath.
“Well, why not?” she muttered skeptically. “Turns out, I’m a creation of man, and now that I’ve found out, absolutely nothing is happening. Also, the world got torched by the sun before I was born, and people used to have to live in deep underground bunkers, but now that the Flare’s over, we can all come out and enjoy the sunshine, and plant trees and stuff.”
She stared at the cross for a moment, enjoying the quiet after her outburst. “Nice talk,” she muttered, laying back down and closing her eyes. “Maybe things wouldn’t be so boring if I could talk with someone who A, wasn’t a scientist, and B, wasn’t a tree.”
With a sigh, she resigned herself to another afternoon of boredom.
The bunker people!
With a jolt she sat straight up, eyes wide open. “Maybe I could go live with the other people out there! All those guys who just farm and stuff, they probably have tons of things to do!”
She flopped onto her back again. “At least more than here.”
After a couple more minutes consideration, Elissa scrambled to her feet. She needed to find Claudia.

previously: https://www.reddit.com/Wholesomenosleep/comments/d537bq/dakota_son_part_4/
*
The day we got home, Sara was jumping up and down. She took my bags inside in record time. “Girl, how much coffee did you have?” I asked as she zipped past me.
Mother came out and hugged Jen. “You brought him back alive.”
“I did give you my word,” Jen reminded her.
Mother laughed. “I know Sean loves you, but know this family loves you too. You’re always welcome here.”
Jen smiled. “Thanks, that means a lot.” She turned to me. “Sean, will you hook me up with one last kiss?”
“There will never be one last kiss,” I whispered as our lips met.
Jen leaned close to murmur into my ear. “I should probably go. I need to try to resist the urge to tear your clothes off in front of your mom.”
I watched her drive away, already missing her. I walked in the house to the sound of Sara’s squealing. “I want details—where did you go? Was it magical?”
I ignored her and turned on the television, kicking my feet up on the sofa. “Jen would kick my ass.” I was so in love, I never wanted the feeling to end. With Jen, the deep emotional connection was so powerful, so sacred. It was a moment that belonged only to us.
Sara pouted. “Come on, seriously?”
I chuckled because there was no way in hell I was ever going to tell her anything. “It was special.” I suddenly noticed something out of the corner of my eye. “What is that?” I asked, referring to a light green pickup parked in the driveway. I’d been so infatuated with Jen, I’d completely blocked out the new vehicle.
“My truck,” Sara answered, as if it wasn’t a big deal.
I rolled my eyes. “It’s hideous.” I figured that was the point; let Sara pick out a car without my input so I would never want to drive it.
As fall crept in, trees dying all around us in preparation for the frigid cold of winter, I felt only hope. “What are your thoughts on cryogenics?” Jen asked, over coffee, at a random, anonymous, corporate-owned coffee shop two cities away. One of the joys of having a car was that, although we couldn’t leave the state of North Dakota without considerable effort, we could at least make every road trip an adventure.
I took a sip of my mocha. I’m one of those people who can’t stomach plain black coffee. “You mean like freezing your body? Definitely not. I don’t want my family to pay rent to store my body in hope that one day, when a cure was found, they might be able to bring me back to life.” My main issue was the science. There was no record of anyone being brought back, not even as a test. It was just another way for loved ones to hold on to false hope.
Jen took a sip of tea. “For the record, I agree.”
There was not a lot to do in North Dakota. We would go to movies or fast food joints just to be alone to talk. Over soda and nuggets, we would discuss college plans, world travel, and the future.
​
During the months that Jen and I spent so much time together, Sara filled her days with research projects. Her papers were akin to college thesis material. She kept in touch with Diego, bouncing ideas off him and combining his vast knowledge of advanced mathematical theory and physical sciences with her own knowledge of chemical equations and biological science. With his help, she wrote over a dozen articles on ways to revolutionize the pharmaceutical industry by thinking outside the box in terms of the creation of new medicinal compounds. Her articles were taken up by at least four scientific journals, an impressive achievement she hoped would land her a college scholarship. She would be going into her senior year with a weighted 4.8 GPA and over two years’ worth of transferable college credits. Sara kept busy, and she seemed happy about it. But Jen and I never left her out.
Jen made a point of inviting Sara over with me for the first sleepover we’d had at her place. I was super excited because I would be sleeping in Jen’s bed. Or so I’d thought.
Sara was carrying both of our suitcases as we got out of Mom’s van. “I wonder why Diego has to sleep on the sofa when their house has so many guest rooms?”
“It’s the sofa of shame,” I muttered.
I glanced to Sara, who grimaced in agreement. Before we could even ring the bell, Suzanna appeared in the doorway. “Jen will escort you to your rooms.”
“Our rooms?” I asked.
“Yes. Rooms.”
I heard Diego yell something indistinct in Spanish from indoors. Suzanna threw up her hands in exasperation as she moved back to let us pass with as little welcome and grace as possible.
It was clear Jen’s parents had been arguing prior to our arrival. Suzanna immediately hustled Sara up to her room. A few moments later Sara trotted back down the stairs, looking like she was having trouble keeping a straight face.
I frowned in enquiry.
Sara leant close, keeping her voice down. “It’s a nice room, but I’m to have a shower, not a bath, and I need to sleep on top of my covers, using a sheet below me and between me and the blankets.”
Jen gave her a conspiratorial look. “Did she explain the rule where you need to line up your toothbrush an inch from the bathroom toiletry ledge? I can loan you a ruler if you want to get it just right.”
“Oh my God, I could’ve screwed up so badly, there. Thanks for the heads-up.” Sara was already laughing. Her eyes met Diego’s.
He shook his head and mouthed, I’m so sorry. Sitting on the afore-mentioned sofa of shame, Diego wore a black fitted T-shirt that showed off the better parts of physique as well as the worst; he had deep scars on his upper arms. During my time in the hospital, I’d seen burn victims. Although the burns on Diego’s arms were many years old, I could still see where the skin grafts had been put into place. On one arm, the scar tissue was partially obscured by a crucifix tattoo.
Diego pulled Sara close in a way that was making me a little uncomfortable. But as Sara turned and kissed his cheek, her smile was ecstatic. “Let’s get out the whiteboard. I can’t wait to show Sean and Jen all our progress!” Sara paused as she stood up. “Did you have a chance to go over my latest chemical theories? The judges for the Hayama Grant will want to see as much actual chemistry-based evidence as possible, and we’re up against people who have actual labs.”
“It’s a Japanese fellowship grant,” Diego explained to me and Jen.
“You want to study in Japan?” I asked Sara.
“I want to win the respect of their scientific community and possibly work there one day.” She held out her hand to Diego. “Right, partner?”
“Indeed,” he said as he completed the high-five.
While they got busy setting up all her materials, I took a seat with Jen on the sofa. “This is creepy, right?”
Jen shrugged. “She makes him happy. He deserves to be happy.” Her voice suddenly trailed off too quiet for me to hear more than two muttered words.
“What nightmares?” I asked.
“You don’t want to know.”
I did, but didn’t get a chance to follow up. Sara and Diego rolled out a large dry-erase board which was covered in massive diagrams. Letters and numbers danced across lines and shapes. My eyes went wide. “Oh, holy crap… what am I even looking at?”
Sara’s smile was so energetic. “You’re looking at a new way of creating and manufacturing antibiotics. Our theory is going to revolutionize the pharmaceutical industry.”
Jen rolled her eyes. “No, your theory is going to get buried under heaps of corporate red tape so that big pharmaceutical companies don’t lose money.”
Diego shot his daughter a look. “Jen, please, Sara worked very hard on her presentation.”
“I’m sorry.” Jen smiled and gave a mock bow. “Sara, please take my words as a compliment. Haters only hate the true revolutionaries.”
“Thank you. Now, let me give you the background of the current broad-spectrum production system...”
I felt horrible. Sara was so passionate, but all I could hear was a random series of words. I struggled to remain alert. On occasion, I could hear Diego prompting her with this fact or that, and then he said something that was clearly a compliment because her face lit up, and her next utterance shattered through my mental fog.
“Thank you, Dad.” She froze in place, face white, meeting my astonished glance and then Jen’s. “I mean Diego. Thank you, Diego.”
Jen laughed. “Ever think about trading? You can live here with my dad, and I can live with Sean.”
A rare smile emerged on Suzanna’s face. “You and Sara, with your matching personalities.” She shook her head. “I would still be trading one hard-headed little girl for another.”
Things relaxed a while and Diego ordered pizza. Jen and I played video games. Diego and Sara talked while surfing the web on her laptop. I didn’t see Suzanna anywhere, but that wasn’t a bad thing.
That night, I slept in Jen’s room as promised. We went to bed a little after midnight, but we didn’t get around to having sex. We were too distracted by the sound of Sara and Diego laughing. We both crept down to look, peering into the front room from the hallway. “Oh my God, the nail went through her hand!” Sara shouted.
Diego moved his arm from the back of the couch to wrap it around Sara’s shoulders. “Once you make the choice to stick your hands in the box, you really just have to go for it.”
I rubbed my temples. “Is your dad hitting on my sister? And are they watching a horror movie and laughing like it’s a cartoon?”
Jen watched as Diego refilled the bowl of popcorn. “She’s flirting with him just as much as he’s flirting with her.”
“And this doesn’t bother you?” Jen took a moment to answer. “Granted, I’d be upset if I walked in on your sister and my dad in bed. But for now, no, it doesn’t bother me.”
“I guess you’re right.”
We went back to Jen’s bed. I awoke at around three in the morning, desperate for a glass of water. I passed by the bathroom door which was slightly ajar, allowing a crack of light to illuminate the otherwise dark hallway. I could hear sharp breathing. My curiosity got the better of me, so I peered in through the crack. Diego sat backward on a chair as Sara prepared an injection. He winced in pain as the needle penetrated his flesh. I quickly moved away. I went to the kitchen and got my water. But when I passed the room a second time, I heard sobbing, and it wasn’t the sound of Sara crying. I stopped again at the crack in the door, concerned. Sara held Diego, rocking him in her arms. His back was facing the door. “There is no blood,” she soothed him. “There are no bodies. You are home. You are safe.”
I managed to stifle my gasp, not at all prepared for how badly disfigured Diego’s body was. The skin grafts were so poorly executed I could still see the third-degree burns. Large, dark scars cut through his throbbing muscles. Most horrifying were those places where the embedded metal seemed to be wasting his flesh. I quickly returned to bed. I held Jen close as I put my bipap back on, struggling to catch my breath.
Jen winced up at me, her eyes scrunched and bleary. “Sean, are you alright?”
“I’m fine. Everything’s fine. Let’s try to get some sleep.”
The next day I kissed Jen goodbye early, having loaded Sara’s truck. “We could have stayed longer,” Sara pointed out as we made our way home. I knew Sara would have wanted to at least stay for breakfast, but I was too freaked out.
“What happened in the bathroom?” I asked, once she’d hit a long straight road. “I wasn’t prying but I went to get water and saw you sticking him with something.”
“Diego has caustic wounds from the shrapnel,” she explained. “If he doesn’t get his surgery soon, he’ll be in a wheelchair before he’s fifty.”
“How old is Diego?”
“He turned forty-five this year.”
“You’re best friends with a guy who’s forty-five?”
Sara gave me a disgusted look. “Diego needs a friend.”
I exhaled slowly, remembering what I’d seen. “I’m sorry.”
“Diego gets real bad PTSD. His episodes can be brought on by the pain. The first time I witnessed it, I have to admit it was pretty scary. He started screaming out at the movie theatre.”
My mouth was hanging open. I tried imagining Jen having to deal with that. “What?” “It’s the reason why he’s as medicated as he is. When he meets with clients, he has to take large amounts of valium. What you saw my injecting into his back were his emergency antibiotics.” Sara paused to sniff and snatch a takeout napkin from the pile in the pocket inside her door. “Do you know what it’s like to hold someone who you genuinely believe might not make it through the night?”
I had no answer. In some ways, I wished I could be doing the holding, not being the one that needed to be held. But that was a talk for another time. I stared out the window. “Does Jen know about her father’s PTSD?”
“Yeah, course she does. When his episodes happen at home, she’s mainly the person who stays with him. As you’ve seen, things can get pretty intense.”
“What about his wife?”
“No clue. For all Diego knows, she hides in the bedroom till she thinks it’s safe to come out and check on him.”
“What happens if no one’s around?”
“It runs its course until he blacks out.”
“That’s pretty terrifying.”
“You think?”
“Sara, I’m not the enemy, okay?” I glared across at her, hoping she’d feel my annoyance even as she kept her eyes on the road. Seeing her face crumple, I softened up a few notches in the space of a second. “Sorry, it’s hard for me to imagine living with constant nightmares. Does he go to a support group?”
“He did back in Texas. But in North Dakota there aren’t many resources for disabled veterans, even at the VA hospital. There’s so little known about the science of PTSD. When Diego was first examined in the North Dakota VA, he was diagnosed as schizophrenic. They tried…” Sara was crying so hard she had to pull over. “They tried putting him on anti-psychotics, for God’s sake.”
I blinked, wondering how behind the times some of these ‘expert’ institutions were.
“PTSD is mental, physical, tactile, and emotional. It leaves a physical change in the brain. It’s not just a bunch of nightmares and flashbacks gone wild.”
I reached over to put my hand on her knee. “I hear you. I really do.”
Sara gave me a brief, wavering, lop-sided smile. “I know. But I can’t talk about this anymore. I just want to get home. I’m pretty tired.”
​
next:
https://www.reddit.com/Wholesomenosleep/comments/dd9wzi/dakota_son_part_6/

Note: This entry is an amalgamation of ideas and writing. Lots of it is my own, but some is taken verbatim, or paraphrased from other places. And I didn’t use any quotes or parenthetical citations because this is not meant for publication. Here are my sources:
The W.A.S.T.E. Group Reading of V. from 2000 and 2001. Link: https://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0010 Pynchon Character Names: A Dictionary by Patrick Hurley A Companion to V. by J. Kerry Grant Pynchon Notes: https://pynchonnotes.openlibhums.org/ Orbit Journal: https://orbit.openlibhums.org/

Plot

​
Chapter 4
In which Esther gets a nose job
The novel picks up from where we left off in Chapter 2, with a curiously un-numbered section: -It is the following night after members of the Whole Sick Crew witnessed McClintic Sphere playing with his band at the V-Note. -Esther Harvitz has been traveling by bus to visit Dr. Shale Schoenmaker: her current lover. She is portrayed as a tourist in this section, and seems to be off in her own world with her New Age reading material and paranoid daydreams about telepathy. -The section ends as Esther meets Schoenmaker and begins undressing.
Section I (Flashback to 1917)
-Schoenmaker is introduced as a seventeen year old ‘grease monkey’ working on fighter jets during World War I. -He falls in love with a fighter by the name of Evan Godolphin. -Disaster strikes when Evan crashes his plane and cripples his body badly. This event wrecks Schoenmaker emotionally to such an extent that he offers to have the doctors use his own cartilage to help the crippled pilot. This offer is rejected by a doctor called Halidom, who chooses to introduce inert matter into Evan’s living face. The problem with this idea is that all of the improvement will fall apart in about six months. -Schoenmaker has some emotional issues as a result of all this drama, and begins seeing himself as being just as inanimate as the tools he uses as a mechanic. -His state of “emotional limbo” ends when he inquires about how to become a doctor. His love for the damaged Godolphin and his hate for the butchery of Halidom move him to become a mechanic of the human face.
Section II (Flashback to September, 1956)
-The initial link between Esther and Schoenmaker is revealed: It was Stencil. Stencil had been hunting V. and researching Evan Godolphin. But Schoenmaker denied everything and it was a dead end. Stencil introduces Esther to Schoenmaker. -Esther is treated to some simple pre-operative procedures for a nose job. She takes this session with a childish, giggly attitude. -We are introduced to Schoenmaker’s assistants: Irving and Trench
(Page break. One week later)
-No more giggles. This side of the section is packed with sexual innuendos and deals Esther a bout of excruciating pain. The scene is reminiscent of a "Dr. Benway" routine from William S. Burroughs. -The operation is described in very technical blow-by-blow terms with various specific tools and drugs mentioned by name. I would imagine the average reader skimming through this section quickly due to lack of familiarity. -The pain transforms into something spiritual, as we are told that Esther would later recall that she attained a mystical experience similar to an Eastern religion in which “the highest condition we can attain is that of an object - a rock”
Section III (One week later)
-Esther is healing from the procedure. She is now sexually attracted to Schoenmaker, “as if [he] had located and flipped a secret switch or clitoris somewhere inside her nasal cavity.” -Schoenmaker easily seduces the increasingly-passive Esther into their first act of sex, and sings her a song of praise.
Chapter 5
In which Stencil nearly goes West with an alligator
Section I
-Benny Profane and Angel Mendoza have been down in the sewers chasing one single pinto-colored alligator well into the night. -What follows is a general description of the Alligator Patrol, the bums that work as employees, and the manager, Zeitsuss. - Zeitsuss really cares about the patrol, but has been having to deal with severe budget cutbacks and trouble with the FCC. He gives the workers enthusiastic and unrealistic pep talks, which the workers don’t object to because they feel bad for him. Zeitsuss is one of the poor innocent preterite, just like they are. - Back to the present with Profane and Angel. Bung the foreman shows up at a manhole for a report, and notices that Angel is drunk. The get into a scuffle and Angel bites his leg. Profane is alone in the sewer with the alligator. - The story goes off on a tangent in which we learn a sewer story about something historical (and probably fairly apocryphal) that happened in this same sewer location: The story of Fairing’s Parish. - Father Fairing thought the world was going to end, and decided to start teaching rats about Roman Catholicism since he figured it would be them that would eventually inherit the Earth. - What we see of his journals stem back as far as November 23, 1934. They mainly explain some of the problems that arise in educating and converting the rats. - We are told of a rat named Veronica (and referred to as V.) that is very enthusiastic about the faith. According to something Profane had heard, “[she] was the only member of [Fairing’s] flock that [he] felt to have a soul worth saving.” - All of a sudden, Profane sees light ahead and its source is unclear.- The section ends with Profane (seemingly) shooting the alligator, but not without apologizing first.
Section II
-Gouverneur (“Roony”) Winsome is sitting in his apartment smoking tobacco. His wife, Mafia, is in the bedroom antagonizing their cat (Fang). - We get a little backstory on Roony, and his occupation with Outlandish Records. He spends a lot of his time hunting for new unusual music to promote. - His attempts to find unusual sounds for Outlandish records brings him to the attention of the CIA. - We now learn that another member of The Whole Sick Crew is present in the house: Charisma. He is basically crawling around buried in a blanket for the duration of the chapter. Notable actions he takes are inquiring as to the whereabouts of Fu, and petting Mafia on the leg. - Some backstory on Mafia is presented. She is referred to as an “authoress” whose books follow a theory that is commonly compared with that of Ayn Rand. - Rachel Owlglass calls and speaks to Winsome on the phone. She inquires as to the whereabouts of Paola Maijstral and Stencil. - The scene switches to Rachel’s place as the phone conversation ends. Rachel catches Esther trying to sneak out wearing Rachel’s raincoat. - Pig Bodine shows up at Rachel’s door with Fu, ready to start drinking and have a party. Like Rachel, he is also looking for Paola. - A lot of attention is paid to the FM radio, and the identities of the characters in the hillybilly songs are described. - Abruptly, Pig asks Rachel: “What do you think of Sartre’s thesis that we are all impersonating an identity?” - Stencil calls and we learn that he has been shot in the buttock while undercover as a worker for Zeitsuss’ alligator patrol. (He was really there to hunt clues about V. in regards to her incarnation within Father Fairing’s rat, Veronica.) - Stencil is rescued by the rest of the Whole Sick Crew, and Rachel says something that makes Stencil feel old (He is 56).

Speculation about specific dates mentioned:

Zeitsuss’ former plotter, V.A. (“Brushhook”) Spugo claims “to have slain forty-seven rats with a brushhook under the summer streets of Brownsville, NYC on 13 August 1922”
^^ This is a veiled reference to the 'Brownsville Affray,' in which a company of black soldiers was accused of armed riot on the summer streets of Brownsville, Texas on 13 August 1906.
A journal entry of Father Fairing’s is dated as November 23 1934.
^^ On 23 November 1955, Territory of Cocos Islands were transferred from the United Kingdom to the Commonwealth of Australia.
This is a weak connection – but it’s a potential clue to the weird way that alligators are referred to as crocodiles and cocodrilos or “cocos” interchangeably in this book. This historical transfer of the Territory of Cocos Islands takes place one month prior to the opening of V.

V. theory

Note: This extremist theory of mine applies to all Pynchon’s work. Not just V.
You can always tell how evil or ominous something is in Pynchon by the number of V-shaped symbols within the word or name. This means not only V’s, but also A’s, M’s, W’s, and X’s. I dunno about N’s, K’s and Y’s, R’s. At least, I haven’t noticed those words seeming to have been purposely placed as indicators of evil, inanimateness, or ominous notions.
This theory loses some steam when you take into account the fact that 'neutral' words like "have" and "even" are used, though. I can't seriously state that those words are very evil sounding. Even still, intuition tells me that Pynchon took notice every time the letter was used.
A possible link: Think back to Schoenmaker’s surgical technique of “allografts”. Consider Merriam Webster’s definition of a similarly spelled word: Allograph
– any of the abstract units of the phonetic system of a language that correspond to a set of similar speech sounds (as the velar \k\ of cool and the palatal \k\ of keel) which are perceived to be a single distinctive sound in the language
Main Entry: all-
Variant(s): or allo- Function: combining form Etymology: Greek, from allos other -- more at ELSE 1 : other : different : atypical 2 allo- : isomeric form or variety of (a specified chemical compound) 3 allo- : being one of a group whose members together constitute a structural unit especially of a language
Main Entry: al·lo·graft Pronunciation: 'a-l&-"graft Function: noun Date: 1961 : a homograft between allogeneic individuals - allograft transitive verb
^^Could there be a connection here? Maybe the more likely situation is that ideas that correspond to words that use the V-shape just have some sort of “inherent vice” about them. Example: Voldemort, villain, violence, inconvenience.
Another thing: You sort of have to bite your lip to even pronounce the letter V. It’s painful compared to pronouncing the letter “B”
A list of words from these chapters that incorporate the letter V. :
evening covenant next nervous V.A. (“Brushhook”) Spugo coeval divide Vatican driver vibrating havoc Evan ivory silver devil navy gravity eve vocation conservative driven Irving even vestibule malevolent Chivas Regal Scotch Volkswagen favorites Leavenworth Levi’s overture Tchaikovsky love lover restorative ravages involvement voluptuous enclave conversion Gouverneur “Roony” Winsome

A list of V. allusions:

- Shape of the words in the chapter heading
- Obsessively frequent usage of the V-shaped number 7 - The shape of a nose on the face, as well as the shape of a nose as it extends outward to the tip. - Schoenmaker’s paraboloid light - One character has a pointed beard - Esther has a crosstown bus driver. Any mentions of crosses are V. references (Further example: Profane meets disfigured pariahs at a crossroads) (This would include the crucifix that Fairing would carry, and the dark stain shaped like a crucifix) - A columella meets an upper lip at 90-degrees - Scissors - Right-angled saw - A cat is named Fang (shape) - The crazy angles and turns that Profane encounters in the sewer would create V’s. - Schoenmaker says: “Now ve shorten das septum” - The paper cone in the radio - The silk kerchief - “the square confines of the park” - Evan’s lapel - Evan’s plane falls like a kite - The triangular wedge of septum

Underwater Themes

Pynchon is interested in lost underwater cities. Here’s a list of possible links to the theme in the book so far: 1. Scungille Farm: This is a very important one. This refers to Stencil's dossiers which are largely "impersonation and dream." The word "nacreous" may be one of several links in our text to Henry Adams. And “mother of pearl” will show up in future chapters. 2. Godolphin: This name includes the word “dolphin” 3. Porpentine: "Porpentine" seems almost an adjectival application of the noun "porpoise." (but it actually means "hedgehog.") … But underwater stuff is being hinted at 4. Waldetar's imaginations about the submerged city now populated with fish. 5. The word fish is used twice as a verb and twice as a noun. 6. Sharkskin suits are mentioned twice.

Analysis of Character Names:

Andy – common name Augustine – Obviously refers to St. Augustine of Hippo, whose prolific writing addressed, among other things, politics – appropriate for this rat that could someday become the mayor of New York. Bartholomew – It’s not a Simpsons reference. This Bartholomew refers to one of two (or both) saints from the first and twelfth centuries that inspired cultic followings in England – appropriate for the British Fairing. The first century Bartholomew is the patron saint of tanners and those who work with skins, because he is said to have been martyred by flaying. This, too, is appropriate as Fairing skins and eats some of the rats. Bung the foreman – Bung means anus. His name would carry the same vulgar force as asshole. This is an appropriate name for a boss who only gives orders. Charisma - Like winsome, charisma denotes charm at one level. But the word is much stronger, describing pronounced magnetism. This quality seems absent from what little we see of the character (largely silent, wrapped in a blanket). In Christian theology, the term appears as charism, an endowment or extraordinary power given by the Holy Spirit. Eigenvalue – Webster’s dictionary defines eigenvalue as “one of those special values of a parameter in an equation for which the equation has a solution.” We are given his first name later in the book, which has mathematical significance. But I should avoid spoilers. Fang – V. shape of a fang, and it’s a common enough name for a cat Fu – Seems an obvious racial identifier for a character with a large stock of Chinese jokes. May be a connection to Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu novels (Pynchon commonly refers to them). It’s also just a common surname. Evan Godolphin – There was a metaphysical poet named Sidney (!) Godolphin. The name contains the word “God” … Maybe it’s a Waiting for Godot reference (doubt it). There’s a Pynchon Notes article from 1983 called “Godolphin – Goodolphin – Goodol 'phin – Goodol 'Pyn – Good ol 'Pym: A Question of Integration” that links Evan Godolphin to a name in a Jules Verne book, as well as Poe’s “Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket” Also: Note the word “dolphin” within the name – See my tenuous “underwater theory” for how this might fit in Mrs. Grosseria – The name derives from the Spanish word groseria, meaning “grossness,” “vulgarity,” or “stupidity.” She is only mentioned as the owner of a television that an unnamed character watches all day. Halidom – The name basically means “sacred.” It’s interesting that it comes up directly after sporadic mention is made of Profane (See: The Sacred and the Profane by Mircea Eliade). Maybe he’s called that because he holds his own ideas as sacred. The name becomes somewhat ironic in that Schoenmaker enters medicine with noble goals, but falls prey to the same ideas of surgical arrogance that animated Halidom and led to the mutilation of Godolphin. Esther Harvitz – The name identifies her racially as a Jewish person. The Book of Esther portrays its eponymous heroine as a savior of the Jewish race. The name may have a personal source. Jules Siegel claims that Pynchon accompanied him hitchhiking to Michigan to visit Siegel’s then girlfriend Esther Schreier (So… feed that tidbit to the vultures of biographical criticism out there)
----------(104) Esther was thrilled. It was like waiting to be born and talking over with God, calm and businesslike, exactly how you wanted to enter the world.----------
Esther has chosen to be reborn by the aegis of a new God. Her old one left her as a big-nosed preterite in this world, even while telling her she was his chosen, elect. The Biblical Esther could be said to have hidden her ethnicity from her husband until the fulcrum of the kings favor had shifted to her through a wild chain of events. His power and his affection for her saved her race through a last minute unmasking of her heritage. The turn-about in the story of Esther is akin to the turn-about in the story of the drunken elephants in the arena of Alexandria: Soul-to-Soul. Did God have a hand in the outcome? Esther is a "cultural convert." She has chosen a new nativity, and it ain’t Jewish. Are Jews (the big nosed ones) ugly? Esther wants to be pretty. She has changed gods.
Pappy Hod – This character does have a legal first name, but I don’t think it’s been mentioned yet. His first name is a common one … but still may be worth looking into the actual meaning of if you want to couple it with the potentially kabbalistic meaning of his last name. Pappy is a “common nickname of all older men who live and work among younger persons.” Hod means “a device to carry something” or “a vessel for holding liquid” (maybe refers to his being a heavy drinker). The combination of Pappy and the sense of hod would mean “old drunk.” Also, there was a guy named Vincent “Pappy” Serio that invented a sailboat called the HOD (“Hampton One-Design”) in 1934. If this were a true connection, it’d connect Pappy to his life as a career sailor. But yeah, Hod means majesty or glory and it symbolizes the thighs on the anthropomorphized tree of life (kabbalah stuff).
Irving – Schoenmaker calls her this “by virtue of some associative freak”. We are told that Schoenmaker had tattooed thousands of freckles on Irving. The “associative freak” is the song “Pig Tails and Freckles” by Irving Berlin. Although the “present” chapters of V. take place in the mid-1950s, the 1963 publication date adds credence to this reference: “Pig Tails and Freckles” appeared on the popular 1962 album Mr. President (Irving Berlin).
Manfred Katz – The combination of Byronic hero (Manfred) with a very common Jewish surname could be read ironically, or it could be a celebration of the preterite (the heroism of the everyday).
Ling – means bell or chime
Mississippi - Ojibwe word misi-ziibi ("Great River").
Angel Mendoza – Spanish name
Paola Maijstral – “small master” . Maijstral is the Maltese equivalent of “mistral,” which derives ultimately from the Latin magister, or “master,” but the immediate meaning of mistral is a cold northerly wind that blows in squalls toward the Mediteranean coast of Southern France. The maijstral blows once every three days, which maybe underscores its relation to the trinity. St. Paul was shipwrecked on Malta, and his name kinda sounds like Paola. There is more I could get into with Paola's last name, but can't without risking spoilers.
Rachel Owlglass – Owlglass is the English word for Eulenspiegel, the medieval German jester (OED). This meaning may have more meaning when tied to Rachel’s father’s first name. The OED also defines Owlglass as “the prototype of roguish fools or any buffoons.” Again – this may be more useful for Rachel’s father (Not sure whether he’s been mentioned in the text yet). The name Rachel, of course, begins with the biblical reference. Rachel was Benjamin’s mother (There are maternal aspects to the relationship of Rachel and Benny.) Interestingly, the biblical Rachel died just after giving birth to Benjamin and naming him. The only definition for the word "rachel" in the OED glosses it as a “light tannish color.” (and if you doubt that Pynchon would be this familiar with the OED, check out page 12 of his preface to Slow Learner) A historical example taken from an 1887 advertisement mentions its use in identifying the color of face powder: one color is for fair skin, one for dark skin, and rachel is for use “by artificial light.” Given Rachel’s introduction as living wholly in a world of inanimate objects, the first of which is her MG, it seems fair to read the name as an inanimate marker. In this sense, we can read Owlglass (“jester”) as a marker of the animate.
Paul – named for St. Paul the epistle writer (shipwrecked on Malta on the way to his trial in Rome)
Benny Profane – His first name is biblical. It means “son of the right hand”. “bene” is the prefix in benevolent ("well-intentioned") Some see a reference to Benzedrine, but I doubt it. Benny is a lazy person, and I just don’t follow the notion of the association with uppers. The word profane suggests an "estrangement from things sacred," irreverence toward the sacred, and someone "not initiated into the inner mysteries". Looking at the name as a whole, we might discern two primary, although contradictory possibilities: Benny from the Latin bene ("quite or very"), doubling or emphasizing his profanity; Benny from the Italian bène ("good"), creating an apparent contradiction. Either reading highlights Profane's membership in the vast preterite class - all those not chosen for salvation. The latter reading, combining goodness and profanity, is consistent with Pynchon's ubiquitous concern, sympathy, and empathy for the preterite.
Rodriguez – Just a common name
Shale Schoenmaker – The OED offers two especially useful definitions of shale: “an outer husk or covering” and “an example of something without value.” Schoenmaker comes from the German verb schön machen, meaning “to make someone or something look nice. The name is formed on German occupational names: Hutmacher (“hat maker”), Schumacher (“shoe maker”), for example. Thus the name means one who improves the appearance of the outer husk or one who prettifies that which has little value – appropriate for a cosmetic surgeon.
Schwartz – That this character in Mafia Winsome’s novel is described as “a weak, Jewish psychopath” and given a Jewish name is a reflection of her own anti-Semitism. Schwartz is also German for “black,” emphasizing another target of her racism.
Herbert Stencil – a stencil is a pattern, or device to create a pattern. Stencil’s name is appropriate for someone who seeks to impose structure on the potential chaos of experience. Stencil is what he does. The name Herbert does not seem to offer any similar associations. It became popular toward the end of the 19th Century; it’s ordinary for someone born in 1901. Someone once made a claim that Freud’s “The Psychotic Dr. Schreber” contains a character named Stencil, but I can't find the evidence of that and haven't looked into it closely
Sidney Stencil – Sidney means “Wide Island: south of the water”. It could be used as a name for a girl or a guy. This isn’t the only father in Pynchon’s bibliography named Sidney.
Teresa – probably named for Teresa of Avila, sixteenth-century Spanish mystic, writer, and reformer.
Trench – There are three possibilities for this name. The OED defines the noun trench as “a cut, scar, furrow, or deep wrinkle in the face.” As a verb, trench means to cut, carve, or gash. Either of those meanings could be appropriate for a cosmetic surgeon’s assistant. We might also read trench as a synonym for gutter, a place frequently occupied by this character’s mind.
V.A. (“Brushhook”) Spugo – The surname seems to derive from the Russian root spug- (“terror”). In the context of the description, his brushhook inspired terror in the rats he slew with it.
Veronica – this mysterious 'V-rat' is named by Fairing after the disputed Saint Veronica. Unlike the other rats, who are named for accepted saints, Veronica’s name and identity have been questioned for years: the name comes from vera icon (true image) and was most likely invented for the fabled woman said to have wiped Christ’s face when he fell on the way to Calvary.
Gouverneur “Roony” Winsome – Unlike the first Whole Sick Crew trio we meet in the novel (Raoul, Slab, and Melvin), each of these names is odd, producing an effect opposite to grounding the odd within the ordinary. The strangeness of these names taken together makes them all seem ordinary, much like the crew itself. We have little evidence that Winsome is what his name implies – charming. Of course, the word winsome suggests charm that is childlike or naïve. This may suggest the basic immaturity of the crew. // It could derive from The Education of Henry Adams, where Adam’s friend Roony Lee, son of Robert E. Lee, appears. The “southern” connection is clear. The spelling of “Gouverneur” suggests a French association, but there is no textual support for this. More likely, the name Gouverneur refers to Gouverneur Morris (1752-1816), a signer of The Articles of Confederation, who, like Winsome, lived in New York.
Mafia Winsome – probably a caricature of Ayn Rand. On one hand, it’s a simple contradiction, a name combining violence and charm. On the other hand, each part of the name describes her: Mafia describes the mercenary nature of her “theory”, Winsome, her popularity as a writer of vulgar romance novels.
Zeitsuss – The literal translation from German would yield “sweet time” (süss [“sweet”] and Zeit [“time”]. Since Zeitsuss aspires to be a union organizer, the name may refer to a proletarian age of milk and honey that could come through unionizing. On the other hand, the name could refer to the phrase “taking one’s sweet time,” possibly referring to the negative interpretations of unions. Or maybe the name’s just meant to be comical

Thoughts

It’s alluded to that Esther and Stencil had some sort of relationship (?) prior to her fling with Schoenmaker. Stencil really doesn’t sound like good ‘boyfriend material’. It’s just hard to imagine and sort of funny to consider.
During the surgical procedure, Esther’s moment of religious epiphany about the highest spiritual state being that of an rock recalls Mildred holding that rock to her chest in Chapter III. The secret switch in Esther’s nasal cavity recalls the electrical switch that Bongo-Shaftsbury has on his arm which allows him to change his personality at will. It also calls to mind the switch that Fergus uses to merge his body with the television.
Mafia wears falsies: Another case of the inanimate invading the animate.
The dirty joke/anecdote about Speedy Gonzalez refers to the actual origin of that Looney Tunes character. The rest of the apocryphal rat stories in the chapter were made up by Pynchon. Fairing sets his parish up between 86th and 79th Street – Is there any significance for the specific location? Could it be possible that Pynchon actually knew where the highest populations of rats would’ve been?
Veronica (the rat) expresses a desire to be a nun, as does Victoria Wren
The unlucky number 13 has come up five times in our reading so far. All (except for maybe one) were likely placed there deliberately.
Schoenmaker’s backstory serves to humanize him a little, but it is not an excuse for his actions in the present: His tendency to “retreat to a diametric opposite rather than any reasonable search for a golden mean” is not good. Idealists like Schoenmaker will destroy the human race.
Father Fairing carries a copy of Knight’s Modern Seamanship. This references a book that a character possesses in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
The scene with Schoenmaker and Irving in the operating room parodies Victor and Igor from Dr. Frankenstein. (“Quiet, schlep!”)
Profane talks to a seagull and an alligator, but they can’t respond. Father Fairing talks to rats, and they can respond. They argue with him about Religion, History, and Philosophy.

Specific colors

Colors are deliberately used over and over again as indicators of different things in this book, but I can’t put my finger on exactly what. There are patterns. I especially notice it with green, red, black, and white. I noticed one sentence in which Schoenmaker is said to use green soap and iodine – This was done to insert the “green and magenta” color scheme that Pynchon uses so often (in all his books, most notably GR). I read a paper on this from Pynchon Notes stating that green and magenta make white. And here’s the link: https://pynchonnotes.openlibhums.org/articles/abstract/10.16995/pn.374/
White – always refers to evil Red –the red balloon from Ch. 2 and the red face from Ch. 3 Green – very peculiar, unsettling usage of green. He seems to use it purposely in many cases where the color could've just as easily been something else. Sphere’s baby spot… the lights in Profane’s environment as he runs around in Chapter 2 and the lights that appear in his dream a few pages later, the ALLIGATOR PATROL lettering, Charisma’s blanket Black – I counted 15 references to black in terms of the color of clothing alone in our reading so far (!) I don’t know what this is meant to signify. Could be an indicator of the preterite? I believe Pynchon alludes to this phenomenon of black clothing in V. within another of his books, but that would be hard to prove.

Questions

1. What do you make of the reappearance of the word "delinquent" in the first three paragraphs? How could wind be delinquent? The first appearance of this word occurs when Trench is described as a "juvenile delinquent" in Chapter 2. Here’s a reminder of the last sentence of Chapter 2: “Outside the wind had its own permanent gig. And was still blowing.”
   
2. Which Eastern religion is it of which the highest condition that one can attain is that of an object? Does this really exist?
   
3. Does anyone else think that the similarity of the words "allograft" and "allograph" might be worth noting? "V" is an allograph. It, the allograph, is a very basic component in the transition from the verbal to a written society. It represents graphically a sound made by a human mouth. It is an abstraction, and as such, by some of the logic of GR, a pornography. Does Pynchon see himself as a pornographer?
   
4. Why is Chapter 5 called “In which Stencil nearly goes West with an alligator” ...?
   
5. Did Profane really shoot Stencil!? Did the fact the he was wearing a waterproof suit and mask make him resemble an alligator, or was he simply hit by the shotgun ricochet?
   
6. What do you think of Sartre's thesis that we are all impersonating an identity… ? Well?! What do you think about it? Is Pig really just repeating talk that he heard at The Rusty Spoon, as Rachel suspects? Does the placement of this question tie in with those 8 impersonations from Chapter III?
   

Or is it just a delicious pun: Bodine assuming the identity of a Rusty Spoon intellectual by questioning the assumption of identities.

1. It’s nice that the Whole Sick Crew can rally together and help a friend in need (Stencil). Do you think they really love each other? Why do you think they’re called the Whole Sick Crew, anyway? What does the word “Whole” mean in this context? What about “Sick”? As far as I can tell, “Sick” only started being a slang word for “Cool” around 1983.

Some people (maybe they're joking) think that it could be a pun on some socks that used to be popular from a company called Holsic: "Holsic Crew Socks"

1. What's the deal with that great green Hudson's Bay Company blanket that Charisma wears?

Lastly,

Thanks for giving me the opportunity to be involved with this Group Reading. I hope I didn't go too far overboard with this long post, and my weird unlikely theories.
As far as I know, this is only the 2nd online group reading that has been done on V. (Correct me if I'm wrong).
Here's an interesting excerpt on our story so far from the W.A.S.T.E. Group Reading from 20 years ago:
"The moon continues to be Benny's spherical predominance, heavenly compulsion. (P's use of light in V. is not as complicated as in GR, but the moonlight, sunlight, flash and flashing photo film light, green light, pink light and soon... is worth noting). At that critical point when Angel, drunk on the job, goes up through the manhole, leaving Benny solo, note that the pink light of the sky is crescented by the manhole cover. In terms of the calendar time of the plot here, Angel and Geronimo have been on Patrol longer than anyone else, three months longer in fact, and it seems that the Great Sewer Scandal of 1955, which caused the department to get conscientious and call for volunteers, broke while they were on patrol. I can't say this for sure,but I think it is a reasonable assumption, and I can provide some evidence of this. The tax calendar in Chapter Six etc. The volunteers get to carry the guns and shoot the Alligators. This may be one of the things that lure these bums, non-union workers discharged from the Services, to go fishing with dynamite or volunteer to kill alligators and rats with shotguns. They work in pairs, one bum, one employee?
Ever see that Monty Python episode, the one where they hunt mosquitoes with rockets?
In any event, Benny is on a different calendar altogether. We can construct the calendar thus far from Chapters 1-6. Don't have time to do this now, but Benny is on a different time, Benny's idiosyncratic moon calendar affects the world he inhabits. Turn back to Chapter One part V. It is January 1956, but it is not Winter, but a spell of false Spring. The yo-yo thing again, Dave Monroe's diagram, but I'll get to that up and down east and west. Benny goes Downtown (leaving Paola at 34st Street, with Rachel's address, a job connection, she'll take the IRT up the West side and end up living with Rachel--contrast Rachel/Esther with Fina), to Our Home flop and uptown to get a newspaper, find a job. He goes uptown to stay with Fina and ends up back downtown at the end of Chapter Six. He wakes up very early in the AM and decides to yo-yo bum on the Shuttle, the Shuttle goes back and forth, cross town or east and west. On the Shuttle he is visited, as he is prone to, on a lunar basis, unspecific waves of horniness, emerging from these spells he wishes he could rotate his head through the full 360 degrees. The Spring, the false Spring turns to a tourist's Summer, as the affluent commuters, most of them from the Burbs, bring in the Summer (the sun, as in GR is Olympian, the Rocket's, affluence, power, control). And after they are all in their work stations, the residents emerge, bringing with them the Fall. The time is also here,the clock that is, is measured by the transits of the Shuttle. Benny will end up going up town and out to Riverside to hunt women, where he will fall in the frozen grass, Winter again, the False Spring seems to be over.