Twig font

[DEBUG][2024-04-18 13:02:56] .../vim/lsp/rpc.lua:387 "rpc.receive" { jsonrpc = "2.0", method = "textDocument/publishDiagnostics", params = { diagnostics = {}, uri = "file:///home/*****/Desktop/****/src/app/view/presentation.pug" }} [DEBUG][2024-04-18 13:02:56] .../vim/lsp/rpc.lua:284 "rpc.send" { jsonrpc = "2.0", method = "textDocument/didChange", params = { contentChanges = { { text = 'div.editorial-cover\n img(src=require("assets/img/by-peter-pivak-from-unsplash.jpg"))\n div.editorial-bullet\n p.first-line.b Your #[span.hilight-red eyes] #[br] and #[span.hilight-blue ears]\n p.second-line #[strong while you are away]\n hr\n p.font-assistant-35.title-case Let us #[strong build] and #[strong maintain]\n p.font-assistant-35.hilight-darkred.title-case #[strong your security]\n a.blue-button Get a quote\n' } }, textDocument = { uri = "file:///home/*****/Desktop/****/src/app/view/presentation.pug", version = 7 } }} [DEBUG][2024-04-18 13:02:57] .../vim/lsp/rpc.lua:387 "rpc.receive" { jsonrpc = "2.0", method = "textDocument/publishDiagnostics", params = { diagnostics = {}, uri = "file:///home/*****/Desktop/****/src/app/view/presentation.pug" }} [INFO][2024-04-18 13:03:44] .../lua/vim/lsp.lua:1875 "exit_handler" { { _on_attach = , attached_buffers = { true }, cancel_request = , commands = {}, config = { autostart = true, capabilities = { emmetCompletions = true, textDocument = { callHierarchy = { dynamicRegistration = false }, codeAction = { codeActionLiteralSupport = { codeActionKind = { valueSet = { "", "quickfix", "refactor", "refactor.extract", "refactor.inline", "refactor.rewrite", "source", "source.organizeImports" } } }, dataSupport = true, dynamicRegistration = false, isPreferredSupport = true, resolveSupport = { properties = { "edit" } } }, completion = { completionItem = { commitCharactersSupport = false, deprecatedSupport = false, documentationFormat = { "markdown", "plaintext" }, preselectSupport = false, snippetSupport = false }, completionItemKind = { valueSet = { 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25 } }, contextSupport = false, dynamicRegistration = false }, declaration = { linkSupport = true }, definition = { linkSupport = true }, documentHighlight = { dynamicRegistration = false }, documentSymbol = { dynamicRegistration = false, hierarchicalDocumentSymbolSupport = true, symbolKind = { valueSet = { 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26 } } }, hover = { contentFormat = { "markdown", "plaintext" }, dynamicRegistration = false }, implementation = { linkSupport = true }, publishDiagnostics = { relatedInformation = true, tagSupport = { valueSet = { 1, 2 } } }, references = { dynamicRegistration = false }, rename = { dynamicRegistration = false, prepareSupport = true }, semanticTokens = { augmentsSyntaxTokens = true, dynamicRegistration = false, formats = { "relative" }, multilineTokenSupport = false, overlappingTokenSupport = 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"markdown", "mdx", "mustache", "njk", "nunjucks", "php", "razor", "slim", "twig", "css", "less", "postcss", "sass", "scss", "stylus", "sugarss", "javascript", "javascriptreact", "reason", "rescript", "typescript", "typescriptreact", "vue", "svelte", "templ", "pug" }, filetypes_include = { "pug" }, flags = {}, get_language_id = , handlers = <1>{}, init_options = { userLanguages = { eelixir = "html-eex", eruby = "erb", templ = "html" } }, log_level = 2, message_level = 2, name = "tailwindcss", on_attach = , on_exit = , on_init = , on_new_config = , original_settings = { editor = { tabSize = 2 }, tailwindCSS = { classAttributes = { "class", "className", "class:list", "classList", "ngClass" }, emmetCompletions = true, lint = { cssConflict = "warning", invalidApply = "error", invalidConfigPath = "error", invalidScreen = "error", invalidTailwindDirective = "error", invalidVariant = "error", recommendedVariantOrder = "warning" }, validate = true } }, root_dir = "/home/*****/Desktop/****/src", settings = { editor = { tabSize = 2 }, tailwindCSS = { classAttributes = { "class", "className", "class:list", "classList", "ngClass" }, emmetCompletions = true, lint = { cssConflict = "warning", invalidApply = "error", invalidConfigPath = "error", invalidScreen = "error", invalidTailwindDirective = "error", invalidVariant = "error", recommendedVariantOrder = "warning" }, validate = true } }, workspace_folders = <2>{ { name = "/home/*****/Desktop/****/src", uri = "file:///home/*****/Desktop/****/src" } },  = <3>{ __tostring =  } }, handlers = , id = 1, initialized = true, is_stopped = , messages = { messages = {}, name = "tailwindcss", progress = {}, status = {} }, name = "tailwindcss", notify = , offset_encoding = "utf-16", request = , request_sync = , requests = {}, rpc = { is_closing = , notify = , request = , terminate =  }, server_capabilities = { codeActionProvider = true, colorProvider = true, completionProvider = { resolveProvider = true, triggerCharacters = { '"', "'", "`", " ", ".", "(", "[", "!", "/", ":" } }, documentLinkProvider = vim.empty_dict(), hoverProvider = true, textDocumentSync = { change = 1, openClose = true, save = { includeText = false }, willSave = false, willSaveWaitUntil = false } }, stop = , supports_method = , workspace_did_change_configuration = , workspace_folders =  }, { _on_attach = , attached_buffers = {}, cancel_request = , commands = {}, config = { autostart = true, capabilities = { textDocument = { callHierarchy = { dynamicRegistration = false }, codeAction = { codeActionLiteralSupport = { codeActionKind = { valueSet = { "", "quickfix", "refactor", "refactor.extract", "refactor.inline", "refactor.rewrite", "source", "source.organizeImports" } } }, dataSupport = true, dynamicRegistration = false, isPreferredSupport = true, resolveSupport = { properties = { "edit" } } }, completion = { completionItem = { commitCharactersSupport = true, deprecatedSupport = true, documentationFormat = { "markdown", "plaintext" }, insertReplaceSupport = true, insertTextModeSupport = { valueSet = { 1, 2 } }, labelDetailsSupport = true, preselectSupport = true, resolveSupport = { properties = { "documentation", "detail", "additionalTextEdits", "sortText", "filterText", "insertText", "textEdit", "insertTextFormat", "insertTextMode" } }, snippetSupport = true, tagSupport = { valueSet = { 1 } } }, completionItemKind = { valueSet = { 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25 } }, completionList = { itemDefaults = { "commitCharacters", "editRange", "insertTextFormat", "insertTextMode", "data" } }, contextSupport = true, dynamicRegistration = false, insertTextMode = 1 }, declaration = { linkSupport = true }, definition = { linkSupport = true }, documentHighlight = { dynamicRegistration = false }, documentSymbol = { dynamicRegistration = false, hierarchicalDocumentSymbolSupport = true, symbolKind = { valueSet = { 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26 } } }, hover = { contentFormat = { "markdown", "plaintext" }, dynamicRegistration = false }, implementation = { linkSupport = true }, publishDiagnostics = { relatedInformation = true, tagSupport = { valueSet = { 1, 2 } } }, references = { dynamicRegistration = false }, rename = { dynamicRegistration = false, prepareSupport = true }, semanticTokens = { augmentsSyntaxTokens = true, dynamicRegistration = false, formats = { "relative" }, multilineTokenSupport = false, overlappingTokenSupport = true, requests = { full = { delta = true }, range = false }, serverCancelSupport = false, tokenModifiers = { "declaration", "definition", "readonly", "static", "deprecated", "abstract", "async", "modification", "documentation", "defaultLibrary" }, tokenTypes = { "namespace", "type", "class", "enum", "interface", "struct", "typeParameter", "parameter", "variable", "property", "enumMember", "event", "function", "method", "macro", "keyword", "modifier", "comment", "string", "number", "regexp", "operator", "decorator" } }, signatureHelp = { dynamicRegistration = false, signatureInformation = { activeParameterSupport = true, documentationFormat = { "markdown", "plaintext" }, parameterInformation = { labelOffsetSupport = true } } }, synchronization = { didSave = true, dynamicRegistration = false, willSave = true, willSaveWaitUntil = true }, typeDefinition = { linkSupport = true } }, window = { showDocument = { support = true }, showMessage = { messageActionItem = { additionalPropertiesSupport = false } }, workDoneProgress = true }, workspace = { applyEdit = true, configuration = true, didChangeWatchedFiles = { dynamicRegistration = false, relativePatternSupport = true }, semanticTokens = { refreshSupport = true }, symbol = { dynamicRegistration = false, hierarchicalWorkspaceSymbolSupport = true, symbolKind = { valueSet = { 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26 } } }, workspaceEdit = { resourceOperations = { "rename", "create", "delete" } }, workspaceFolders = true } }, cmd = { "/home/*****/.local/share/nvim/mason/bin/lua-language-server" }, cmd_cwd = "/home/*****/.config/nvim", filetypes = { "lua" }, flags = {}, get_language_id = , handlers = <4>{ ["workspace/configuration"] =  }, init_options = vim.empty_dict(), log_level = 2, message_level = 2, name = "lua_ls", on_attach = , on_exit = , on_init = , on_new_config = , original_settings = { Lua = { codeLens = { enable = true }, completion = { callSnippet = "Replace" }, workspace = { checkThirdParty = false } } }, root_dir = "/home/*****/.config/nvim", settings = { Lua = { codeLens = { enable = true }, completion = { callSnippet = "Replace" }, runtime = { path = { "?.lua", "?/init.lua" }, pathStrict = true, version = "LuaJIT" }, workspace = { checkThirdParty = false, ignoreDir = { "types/nightly", "lua" }, library = { "/home/*****/.local/share/nvim/lazy/neodev.nvim/types/stable", "/usshare/nvim/runtime/lua", "/home/*****/.local/share/nvim/lazy/catppuccin/lua", "/home/*****/.local/share/nvim/lazy/indent-blankline.nvim/lua", "/home/*****/.local/share/nvim/lazy/nvim-lint/lua", "/home/*****/.local/share/nvim/lazy/mason.nvim/lua", "/home/*****/.local/share/nvim/lazy/mini.ai/lua", "/home/*****/.local/share/nvim/lazy/tokyonight.nvim/lua", "/home/*****/.local/share/nvim/lazy/lazy.nvim/lua", "/home/*****/.local/share/nvim/lazy/cmp-buffelua", "/home/*****/.local/share/nvim/lazy/LazyVim/lua", "/home/*****/.local/share/nvim/lazy/neoconf.nvim/lua", "/home/*****/.local/share/nvim/lazy/trouble.nvim/lua", "/home/*****/.local/share/nvim/lazy/cmp-path/lua", "/home/*****/.local/share/nvim/lazy/nvim-ts-autotag/lua", "/home/*****/.local/share/nvim/lazy/todo-comments.nvim/lua", "/home/*****/.local/share/nvim/lazy/nui.nvim/lua", "/home/*****/.local/share/nvim/lazy/LuaSnip/lua", "/home/*****/.local/share/nvim/lazy/plenary.nvim/lua", "/home/*****/.local/share/nvim/lazy/flash.nvim/lua", 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"/home/*****/.local/share/nvim/lazy/neoconf.nvim/types/lua" } } } }, single_file_support = true, workspace_folders = <5>{ { name = "/home/*****/.config/nvim", uri = "file:///home/*****/.config/nvim" } },  =  }, handlers = , id = 2, initialized = true, is_stopped = , messages = { messages = {}, name = "lua_ls", progress = { [2] = { done = true, percentage = 100, title = "Loading workspace" } }, status = {} }, name = "lua_ls", notify = , offset_encoding = "utf-16", request = , request_sync = , requests = {}, rpc = { is_closing = , notify = , request = , terminate =  }, server_capabilities = { codeActionProvider = { codeActionKinds = { "", "quickfix", "refactor.rewrite", "refactor.extract" }, resolveProvider = false }, codeLensProvider = { resolveProvider = true }, colorProvider = true, completionProvider = { resolveProvider = true, triggerCharacters = { "\t", "\n", ".", ":", "(", "'", '"', "[", ",", "#", "*", "@", "", "=", "-", "{", " ", "+", "?" } }, definitionProvider = true, documentFormattingProvider = true, documentHighlightProvider = true, documentOnTypeFormattingProvider = { firstTriggerCharacter = "\n" }, documentRangeFormattingProvider = true, documentSymbolProvider = true, executeCommandProvider = { commands = { "lua.removeSpace", "lua.solve", "lua.jsonToLua", "lua.setConfig", "lua.getConfig", "lua.autoRequire" } }, foldingRangeProvider = true, hoverProvider = true, inlayHintProvider = { resolveProvider = true }, offsetEncoding = "utf-16", referencesProvider = true, renameProvider = { prepareProvider = true }, semanticTokensProvider = { full = true, legend = { tokenModifiers = { "declaration", "definition", "readonly", "static", "deprecated", "abstract", "async", "modification", "documentation", "defaultLibrary", "global" }, tokenTypes = { "namespace", "type", "class", "enum", "interface", "struct", "typeParameter", "parameter", "variable", "property", "enumMember", "event", "function", "method", "macro", "keyword", "modifier", "comment", "string", "number", "regexp", "operator", "decorator" } }, range = true }, signatureHelpProvider = { triggerCharacters = { "(", "," } }, textDocumentSync = { change = 2, openClose = true, save = { includeText = false } }, typeDefinitionProvider = true, workspace = { fileOperations = { didRename = { filters = { { pattern = { glob = "/home/*****/.config/nvim/**", options = { ignoreCase = true } } } } } }, workspaceFolders = { changeNotifications = true, supported = true } }, workspaceSymbolProvider = true }, stop = , supports_method = , workspace_did_change_configuration = , workspace_folders =  } } [DEBUG][2024-04-18 13:03:44] .../vim/lsp/rpc.lua:284 "rpc.send" { id = 4, jsonrpc = "2.0", method = "shutdown"} [DEBUG][2024-04-18 13:03:44] .../vim/lsp/rpc.lua:284 "rpc.send" { id = 5, jsonrpc = "2.0", method = "shutdown"} [DEBUG][2024-04-18 13:03:44] .../vim/lsp/rpc.lua:387 "rpc.receive" { jsonrpc = "2.0", method = "@/tailwindCSS/projectsDestroyed", params = { vim.NIL }} [DEBUG][2024-04-18 13:03:44] .../vim/lsp/rpc.lua:387 "rpc.receive" { jsonrpc = "2.0", method = "textDocument/publishDiagnostics", params = { diagnostics = {}, uri = "file:///home/*****/Desktop/****/src/app/view/presentation.pug" }} [DEBUG][2024-04-18 13:03:44] .../vim/lsp/rpc.lua:387 "rpc.receive" { id = 4, jsonrpc = "2.0"} [DEBUG][2024-04-18 13:03:44] .../vim/lsp/rpc.lua:284 "rpc.send" { jsonrpc = "2.0", method = "exit"}  I hope you can help me up with this one, i don't know what else to do.
   submitted by    DefinitelyNotAnonUwU    to    neovim [link][comments]
2024.03.06 14:06 rxliuli Questions and Confusions for Mac Beginners
 
    
 
Preface
 Switched to an M2 MacBook, as a long-term Windows user, I have encountered many problems and confusions up to now. Some have been solved, while others have not yet found a solution. Here, I record and share them.
 
System
 
How to Add Fonts
 Previously, my daily font was Sarasa Gothic, which is not outstanding, but its main advantage is supporting Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese, and English in a unified style. The basic steps are similar to Windows: download the ttc file, click to open it, and wait for the verification to pass. However, this process is very slow on a Mac, so slow that I thought there was a bug.
 
How to Keep the Mac Awake with the Lid Closed When Connected to an External Display
 Although I found a bunch of answers, it turns out that all you need to do is connect to power and set the external monitor as the primary display.
 
 There is still a bug, sometimes I cannot wake it up using an external keyboard and mouse.
 
 
How to Reverse Mouse Scrolling Direction
 This was one of the very first things I was not used to, but it can be adjusted by using a tool called SCROLL REVERSER to set it to reverse.
 
Checking for Global Shortcut Key Conflicts on Mac
 I haven't found a truly viable solution, so I will continue to search for Mac's shortcut key settings through Google and asking questions.
 
How to Use Other Input Methods
 Simply download the system's input methods, then you can switch input methods using ctrl+space.
 
 Since it conflicts with the shortcut key for suggestions in vscode, I changed it to ctrl+shift+space.
 
 
Using Function Keys on Mac Without Pressing Fn
 Enable Use F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys in system preferences, ref: https://support.apple.com/102439 
 ​
 https://preview.redd.it/athbal8fnpmc1.png?width=640&format=png&auto=webp&s=9a759ce90c789625e7eff5853426546c0a791d36
 
 I found that the shortcut key for refreshing the browser page, F5, does not work...
 
 
How to Hide from Dock When Closing the Main Window of an App
 This depends on whether the app supports this behavior, for example, SSR supports minimizing to the top right corner after closing the window, but Proxifier does not support it and must occupy a place in the dock.
 
How to List and Switch Between All Windows
 Mac's command+tab can only switch applications, but not multiple windows within the same application. To switch between multiple windows of the same application, use the command+~ shortcut. To list all windows, you can use the ctrl+top shortcut, but it's not possible to switch using a shortcut, moving the right hand from the mouse to the keyboard and back to the mouse is too counterintuitive, and the sizes being different is strange.
 Using alt-tab can restore behavior similar to Windows. 
 https://preview.redd.it/h22xkdrknpmc1.png?width=2880&format=png&auto=webp&s=6ed355c028b683969365a2f2dc1f2383b34705f4
 
Disabling Right-Click Menu in Chrome
 By default, Chrome displays several integrated right-click menu items for Mac, which are not practical most of the time and need to be disabled. 
 https://preview.redd.it/xco144vonpmc1.png?width=639&format=png&auto=webp&s=e4c56ec1ee5bd716c22ceb04262d3aeb8a7c82df
 Well, it seems this issue is unsolvable, which is really unfortunate. ref: https://superuser.com/questions/1012292/
 
Changing Cursor Movement Shortcuts to Windows Style in Input
 The cursor movement shortcuts on Mac might be good, but there is obviously a significant difference from Windows. In Windows, the following keys are generally used to move the cursor:
 
 
Home/End to jump to the beginning/end of the line
 
Ctrl+Home/End to jump to the beginning/end of the text
 
Ctrl+Left/Right to jump to the beginning/end of the word
 
 All the above keys can be used in combination with Shift.
 This issue can be mitigated by configuring global keyboard mapping with Karabiner-Elements. 
 https://preview.redd.it/04jm1mwrnpmc1.png?width=1100&format=png&auto=webp&s=124744ab0e1ea9d8e1253b938d5597fc0f24eff4
 
How to Download DMG Files from Third Parties
 Not addressed yet
 
How to Kill a Specific Process
 Sometimes a background program freezes and needs to be restarted, but Activity Monitor seems unable to right-click to kill a process. Use the Linux commands ps + kill -9
 In Activity Monitor, first select the process you want to kill, then click the ⊗ in the navigation bar. 
 https://preview.redd.it/xamu4cstnpmc1.png?width=640&format=png&auto=webp&s=f1f4470cfc827f2aafb8b78796ce48d3d2765f86
 
Disabling Cmd+Shift+A Triggering "No manual entry for setting;type=a" on Mac
 In JetBrains' IDEs, Cmd+Shift+A triggers "No manual entry for setting;type=a," another example of Mac's "helpful" shortcuts. 
 https://preview.redd.it/t826qhmvnpmc1.png?width=640&format=png&auto=webp&s=43e9f4000715e013408e17aa60894d99a6ae3b14
 This can be resolved by:
 
 
Opening System Preferences => Keyboard => Shortcuts => Services
 
Disabling Text => Search man Page Index in Terminal
 
 https://preview.redd.it/eg8iiw7xnpmc1.png?width=640&format=png&auto=webp&s=8f0dda2f91025875c554dffd09d02ec164b0326e
 
Automatically Close Notifications in the Top Right Corner
 Sometimes the system pops up notifications, such as software updates, but these notifications will stay visible in the top right corner indefinitely unless actively closed, which is very annoying. I would prefer them to automatically hide like in Windows and be viewable in the notification list if needed.
 Tools like Automator seem to only set shortcuts for closing notifications and cannot automatically close system notifications after a few seconds.
 
Set Gmail Web Version as the Default System Mail Client
 The built-in mail client on Mac might be useful, but having gotten used to Gmail, I want to set Gmail as the default system mail client. This process is much more complicated than on Windows, refer to the tutorial: https://support.apple.com/102362
 
How to Synchronize Files to a Phone via USB Differentially
 The actual need is to synchronize the OneDrive and the e-book reader's directory. Surprisingly, when connecting an Android phone to a Mac, files cannot be transferred directly through Finder. It requires Google's Android File Transfer program, which does not support differential sync.
 
 This helps understand why some people dislike Mac, saying it's too closed, as its support for non-Apple products is quite poor.
 
 
Disable the Mouse Move to Bottom Right Corner to Show Notes
 
 
Open System Preferences => Search "Hot Corners" => Hot Corners
 
Remove the note trigger in the bottom right corner.
 
 https://preview.redd.it/ct1fqprynpmc1.png?width=640&format=png&auto=webp&s=6f2aad43a3ad8a8a7b830c1ff9694691bda76f62
 
Finder
 
Deleting Icons from the Desktop in Mac
 Use Command+Delete to delete the selected icon.
 
Quick Switch Between Windows
 Using Ctrl+Left/Right can switch between adjacent windows, which is very useful for quickly accessing commonly used windows during development. (Restores the old behavior similar to multiple windows, abandoning the mobile-like practice of one app covering the screen)
 
Display Hidden Files
 Command+Shift+. can temporarily toggle the display of hidden files.
 Use the following method for a permanent setting (seems not to work for file selectors triggered by browsers):
 
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool true # Show hidden files defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool false # Hide hidden files killall Finder # Restart Finder 
 
How to Paste a File Path
 Sometimes, after copying a file path, you may want to quickly open it in Finder. You can use the Command+Shift+G shortcut, then paste the path.
 
Open Terminal or VSCode in the Current Directory
 After selecting a directory, go to Finder => Services => New iTerm2 Window Here to open it.
 https://preview.redd.it/6s6r9qu4opmc1.png?width=640&format=png&auto=webp&s=89cd60097c295d0f74e7d89b564973a70fb24eef
 
 This is actually different from what was expected to open the current directory and is also relatively slow.
 
 Well, it's actually also available in the right-click context menu's submenu.
 https://preview.redd.it/46acbox6opmc1.png?width=640&format=png&auto=webp&s=80a8f909bb7e14d1c371093a6f4848560b926c44
 Opening iTerm2 for the first time will have two terminals, which appears to be a bug.
 You can use szContext to customize the context menu.
 
Changing the Default Program for Opening a File
 
 
In Finder, right-click on a file of the type you wish to change, to bring up the context menu.
 
In the menu, select the "Get Info" option.
 
In the dialog that appears, expand the "Open With" option.
 
Choose the program you want to set as the default for opening this type of file, and click on "Change All..." below.
 
 https://preview.redd.it/gxclbm69opmc1.png?width=640&format=png&auto=webp&s=e44c1b6f5287e7a0452ab814f32d88df0e91c265
 Selecting the Always Open With option when opening an application is confusing; it turns out it only applies to that specific file. 
 https://preview.redd.it/j75y4tnaopmc1.png?width=640&format=png&auto=webp&s=04144033b3fad39567d8fca7defcfcbf88bc38aa
 A better tool for this is duti, which can get or set the default program for a specific file type. This is particularly useful for batch changing the default application from Xcode to Visual Studio Code for opening certain file types.
 
# https://github.com/moretension/duti brew install duti # from https://github.com/vscode-icons/vscode-icons/blob/74220b6f8389ad5c5d9f68b2029d91460de2b374/src/iconsManifest/languages.ts#L319 filetypes=(.as .ada .prw .affect .al .ansible .g4 .any .htaccess .cls .apib .apl .applescript .adoc .asp .asm .ats .ahk .au3 .avcs .azcli .azure-pipelines.yml .bal .bat .bats .bzl .bf .bicep .bib .biml .blade.php .blitzbasic .bolt .bsq .buf.yaml .c .cal .cabal .Caddyfile .casc .cddl .ceylon .cfc .cfm .clojure .clojurescript .yml .cmake .CMakeCache.txt .cbl .ql .coffee .cfml .confluence .ckbk .cpp .h .cr .cs .css .feature .cu .pyx .dal .dart .dhall .html .diff .d .dockerfile .dtx .env .dot .dox .drl .dust .dylan .earthfile .edge .eex .es .ex .elm .erb .erl .yaml .falcon .fql .f .ftl .fs .fthtml .gspec .gml .gcode .gen .git .glsl .glyphs .gp .go .api .gd .gr .gql .gv .groovy .haml .hbs .prg .hs .haxe .hcl .helm.tpl .hjson .hlsl .hosts .http .aff .hy .hypr .icl .imba .4gl .ini .ink .iss .io .janet .java .js .jsx .jekyll .jenkins .jinja .json .jsonc .jsonnet .json5 .jl .id .k .kv .ks .kt ..kusto .tex .lat .less .flex .ly .lisp .lhs .log .lol .lsl .lua .mk .md .marko .mat .ms .mdx .mediawiki .mel .mmd .meson.build .mjml .pq .ep .mongo .mson .ne .nim .nimble .nix .nsi .nunjucks .m .mm .ml .o3 .w .things .pas .pddl .plan .happenings .pl .pl6 .pgsql .php .pine .requirements.txt .txt .dbgasm .ddl .polymer .pony .pcss .ps1 .prisma .pde .pro .rules .properties .proto .pug .pp .purs .arr .py .pyowo .qvs .qml .qs .r .rkt .cshtml .raml .re .red .res .rst .rex .tag .rmd .robot .rb .rs .san .sas .sbt .scad .scala .sce .scss .sdl .shader .sh .slang .ice .slim .ss .sn .eskip .tpl .snort .sol .rq .sqf .sql .nut .stan .bazel .do .stencil .html.stencil .st.css .styled .styl .svelte .swagger .swift .swig .link .sv .tt .teal .tt3 .tera .tf .sty .textile .JSON-tmLanguage .YAML-tmLanguage .Tiltfile .toit .toml .ttcn3 .tuc .twig .ts .tsx .typoscript .u .vb .wsf .vm .v .vhdl .vim .volt .vue .wai .wasm .wy .wgsl .wt .wl .wurst .wxml .xmake.lua .xml .xquery .xsl .bison .yang .zig) for filetype in "${filetypes[@]}" do duti -s com.microsoft.VSCode $filetype all if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then echo "Failed to set default program for $filetype" fi done 
 
How to Rename Files
 Select the file and press Enter to rename it, or choose Rename from the right-click menu.
 
How to Cut Files
 Well, it must use Command+C and then move the file with Command+Option+V. This is Mac only, even other programs on Mac support Command+X.
 Third-party enhancement tool XtraFinder does not support M1.
 
How to Create a New Finder Window with a Shortcut
 In Finder, use Command+N to create a window, unlike Ctrl+E, which can be very conveniently done with one hand.
 
How to Copy File Names in Bulk
 Well, just select multiple files with Command+C and then paste in a text editor to get the filenames, no special tools needed. ref: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1850895
 
How to Close All Finder Windows
 In a Finder window, press Option+Command+W to close all windows of the current application.
 
Applications
 
Video Player
 On Windows, PotPlayer is widely used for its power and simplicity. Since it's apparently not supported on Mac, I switched to an open-source tool iina. The control bar is a bit odd, but it's manageable with keyboard controls for progress. 
 https://preview.redd.it/xv3626fcopmc1.png?width=1480&format=png&auto=webp&s=41a084c4c2c17c918925b73c1df8f79b4afee906
 
Music Player
 Although iina also supports music playback, I found an open-source music player museeks. 
 https://preview.redd.it/03n6wzldopmc1.png?width=1000&format=png&auto=webp&s=bc4463bd7ec0949558f71f1d0e1be241bf1f119c
 
Clipboard History Management
 Use the open-source program Maccy for management, GitHub: https://github.com/p0deje/Maccy
 
How to Convert WAV+CUE to FLAC
 Use Mediahuman Audio Converter, refer to: https://www.reddit.com/audiophile/comments/s7ftf3/help_with_cue_splitter_program_for_mac/
 
What to Use for Sandboxing Tools
 Parallels can install Windows, but $80 is a bit expensive.
 Solved with utm, note that downloading Windows 11 ARM is a bit troublesome. It must be downloaded and converted using a Windows system from uup dump. Sharing a merged iso file, ref: https://pan.baidu.com/s/1wDPVJRNP27dMv2s1f74TlQ#4qx8.
 
How to Record GIFs
 Use the open-source tool kap as a substitute for ScreenToGif on Windows. It doesn't support trimming and scaling the timeline but is basically usable (especially the feature of selecting application windows, it's dumb that screen recording tools don't support it).
 
Development
 
Disable or Modify System Shortcuts on Mac
 Firstly, Ctrl+Space, which is the shortcut for switching input methods, can be modified in Shortcuts => Input Sources. 
 https://preview.redd.it/cxrj5j1hopmc1.png?width=640&format=png&auto=webp&s=629f65e76144b69224dba460ef26cace8c7d9d53
 Next, Ctrl+Command+Space, which by default brings up the emoji menu, can be changed in Shortcuts => App Shortcuts to a complex and seldom-used shortcut. 
 https://preview.redd.it/cj4a8dhiopmc1.png?width=640&format=png&auto=webp&s=92196c42dd6762bd6bd3420e10fbcc13aa09f90d
 Disable Command+Alt+M, the shortcut for minimizing the window, also in Shortcuts => App Shortcuts, change it to a complex and seldom-used shortcut. 
 Turn off Cmd+Shift+C for creating terminals, as it easily conflicts with browser shortcuts. -- Actually, this is a VSCode shortcut. 
 https://preview.redd.it/88oxq0dkopmc1.png?width=2488&format=png&auto=webp&s=dc8f4af607f64d15150f19df7da3aefac800b980
 
How to Use Shortcuts Similar to Ctrl+Home/Ctrl+End to Move the Cursor
 By default, the shortcuts on Mac for moving the cursor are:
 
 
Use Command+Up/Down to jump to the beginning/end of a line (paragraph).
 
Use Option+Left/Right to jump to the beginning of the previous word/end of the next word.
 
Use Command+Top/Bottom to jump to the beginning/end of the text.
 
 All the above keys can be combined with Shift.
 In VSCode, Command+Down is occupied by the Idea shortcut editor.action.goToDeclaration and needs to be disabled.
 
Configuring Terminal Command Line Prompt
 Use iTerm2 and oh-my-zsh.
 
Unable to Use the Run Script Feature in VSCode
 Error: The terminal process "/bin/zsh '-c', 'pnpm run dev'" failed to launch (exit code: 127).
 This is resolved after installing iTerm2 and oh-my-zsh, which is odd.
 
Automatic Merging When Pulling Code with Git Pull
 Currently, using git pull always prompts to enter a commit message, but there should be a configuration to disable this behavior.
 
git config --global branch.autosetupmerge always git config --global branch.autosetuprebase always 
 ref: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5480069/
 
 Did not take effect
 
 
Switching Tabs in VSCode
 Okay, IDEA's default Alt+Left/Right on the Windows platform conflicts with macOS's own cursor navigation. The following shortcuts can alleviate this issue:
 
 
Command+Shift+N to open a file -- this is the JetBrains IDE shortcut.
 
Command+Alt+Left/Right to move the cursor back/forward to the next position in opened files.
 
Ctrl+Tab to switch tabs (obviously, this shortcut is not very convenient to press).
 
 
Disabling Alt Key from Typing Special Characters
 Unfortunately, this issue seems to be unsolvable as well; it's a behavior of the built-in macOS input method and there's no setting to change it.
 
Strange Sound When Launching Android Studio
 Disable the sound of the emulator:
 
hw.audioInput = no hw.audioOutput = no 
 Use the following script to disable sound for all emulators:
 
#!/bin/bash find ~/.android/avd -name "config.ini" while read line do awk '!/audio/' $line > tmp rm $line mv tmp $line echo "hw.audioInput = no" >> $line echo "hw.audioOutput = no" >> $line done 
 Then clean the data and cold reboot the emulator. 
 
Modifying the Hosts File
 
sudo code /etc/hosts 
 
 ref: https://www.jianshu.com/p/752211238c1b
 
 
Disabling Automatic Creation of .DS_Store Files on Mac
 Since using a Mac, it's easy to see this file in git submissions, and its location is unpredictable, which is annoying. So, it's desired to disable it, here is the answer from chatgpt:
 You can enter the following command in the terminal to disable macOS from automatically creating .DS_Store files:
 
defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true 
 This will prevent macOS from creating .DS_Store files on network volumes. If you want to prevent macOS from creating .DS_Store files in local folders, you can enter another line of command in the terminal:
 
defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteStores true 
 To make these changes take effect, you need to log out and log back into your macOS account. If you want to re-enable the creation of .DS_Store files, you can replace "true" with "false" in the above two commands and log out and back into your system account again.
 
Configuring iTerm2 Terminal Shortcuts
 Surprisingly, the inline cursor movement shortcuts of the widely used terminal tool on Mac are not consistent with the default Mac shortcuts. The expected consistency with Mac includes:
 
 
Cmd+Left to move to the beginning of the line
 
Cmd+Right to move to the end of the line
 
Option+Left to move to the beginning of the word
 
Option+Right to move to the end of the word
 
 This requires modifying the Key Mappings Preset.
 https://preview.redd.it/d9s7coboopmc1.png?width=1016&format=png&auto=webp&s=d6367b3ca864a03812e67d956a8b36e45b673724
 
 ref: https://superuser.com/a/1157575/1078727
 
 
Disabling iTerm2's Confirmation Prompt on Close
 This option can be found in Settings => General => Closing.
 https://preview.redd.it/hly0cgtpopmc1.png?width=785&format=png&auto=webp&s=d9c66eb88a455652ab5a43f4ee090faf2cb5f673
 
The Input Method Theme in JetBrains IDE Does Not Follow the System
 Currently, the system theme is dark, but the input method theme is light. It seems to be a bug in JetBrains IDE, and the only workaround is to restart the IDE. Related issue: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-252482/
 
How to Create an ICNS Icon File
 Creating and publishing a Mac app requires using a specified icon.
 
# 1. Prepare a single image with the maximum size of 1024x1024, rename it to icon.png; other sizes can be generated via terminal commands. # 2. Create a folder named icons.iconset either by right-clicking or using a command. mkdir icons.iconset # 3. Use the "Terminal" to quickly create image files of various required sizes. sips -z 16 16 icon.png -o icons.iconset/icon_16x16.png sips -z 32 32 icon.png -o icons.iconset/icon_16x16@2x.png sips -z 32 32 icon.png -o icons.iconset/icon_32x32.png sips -z 64 64 icon.png -o icons.iconset/icon_32x32@2x.png sips -z 128 128 icon.png -o icons.iconset/icon_128x128.png sips -z 256 256 icon.png -o icons.iconset/icon_128x128@2x.png sips -z 256 256 icon.png -o icons.iconset/icon_256x256.png sips -z 512 512 icon.png -o icons.iconset/icon_256x256@2x.png sips -z 512 512 icon.png -o icons.iconset/icon_512x512.png sips -z 1024 1024 icon.png -o icons.iconset/icon_512x512@2x.png # 4. Run the following command in the terminal to get the icon.icns file. iconutil -c icns icons.iconset -o icon.icns 
 
 Note: The icon.png image file and the icons.iconset folder should be saved in the same directory. Start the "Terminal" and switch to the same directory.
 
 
   submitted by    rxliuli    to    mac  [link]   [comments] 


2024.02.11 18:08 xHeylo A potential "Cleric" Build
I have Crunched some Numbers and I found a potential Build for a pretend Cleric that is Optimised. A 6th Level Divine Soul Sorcerer and 5th Level Celestial (Choice only for flavor) Patron. This fits under the by others Calculated estimated Level of the Rat Grinders, which was calculated to be around Level 13.
 The focus I put on here was making something that looks like a Cleric of Helio but is mechanically Stronger, especially focussing on Spirit Guardians as an AoE Spell for low level "Mob grinding".
 TL;DR Sorlocks are strong, can pose as Clerics and The Rat Grinders Spot is perfect for this Combination
 A 6th Level Sorcerer has 3 3rd Level Spell Slots and the Divine Soul Subclass has access to the Cleric Spell List, and therefore Spirit Guardians. Additionally they have 3 2nd Level Spell slots which can be Converted into 6 Sorcery Points to add to their native 6 Sorcery Point, just from their Level. For 12 Sorcery Points, which we need for Spell Slot conversions.
 The 5th Level Warlock has 2 3rd Level Warlock Spell Slots, these DO NOT MIX with other Spell Slots and can't be used for our Sorcery Spell Slots directly. Therefore we turn these Warlock Spell Slots with the Sorcerers Font of Magic Feature into Sorcery Points, gaining 3 Sorcery Points per Warlock Spell Slot, which is RAW allowed.
 ​
 We then use the Font of Magic Feature again to turn Sorcery Points into Sorcerer Spell Slots which costs us 2 + Spell Slot Level in Sorcery Points each, so we need to expand 4 additional Sorcery Points from our Pool in addition to those we got from converting the Warlock Slots.
 With our 2 new Sorcerer Spell Slots we now Cast Spirit Guardians again and take a Short Rest (1 Hour) to regain the Warlock Spell Slots so we can Convert them over to new Sorcerer Spell Slots for a new 2 castings of Spirit Guardians
 ​
 This works out to 3 times 10 Minutes of Spirit guardians from Sorcerer Slots, 4 Bonus Actions to Convert the Warlock Slots into Sorcerer Slots and 2 times 10 Minutes of Spirit Guardians.
 Then you take a 1 hour short rest and cast 2 times 10 Minutes of Spirit Guardians again, this repeat twice or three times if you want to go over 3 hours of "grinding".
 Spirit Guardians Casted at a 3rd Level (the lowest it can be casted at) deals 3d8 Radiant Damage (13.5 avg.) and half on a save. In the edge case in which you roll 1+1+1 _and_ the creature makes their Wisdom Save they take half damage, rounded down which would be exactly 1 Radiant Damage.
 Rats in 5th Edition D&D have 1d4-a Hit Points, which per DMG is on average 1 Hit Point, The same goes for Spiders in 5th Edition D&D, they also both have a +0 in Wisdom. Twig Gremlins aren't an official Creature, but for the sake of argument I will assume that like the other 2 Rat Grinder targets, they too also have 1 HP.
 This Combines into there literally being a 15ft for the Freshmen Forest Creatures impenetrable Radius is made for a combined 90 Minutes of a 3 Hour "grinding" Session that does not require any one to think or do anything, only the Sorlock has to concentrate on the Spell, so having a Picnic doesn't even seem unreasonable or just having the others do homework in that time.
 ​
 This Thematically also means that the Sorlock could either be a Poser, or just miss classified by many.
 On top if the Level Cap is 13 just add in 2 levels of Fighter for Action surge or 2 levels of Rogue for Cunning Action hide or dodge
 
   submitted by    xHeylo    to    Dimension20  [link]   [comments]


2024.01.15 18:47 CIAHerpes We found a town abandoned in the mountains. Something in it didn't want us to leave [part 1]
Three months ago, my wife and I were on our way to visit my mother-in-law, living alone far up in the White Mountains. I had been driving for five hours, and my wife, Betty, started saying she needed to use the bathroom and that she was starving. My full bladder agreed with her on the first issue, though I also had tried to make good time and get there before nightfall, when the street signs would become harder to read. I had never been to Betty’s mother’s house before, or even the county it lay in.
 I pulled over the car on the side of Main Street, looking down the center of the town. It had everything a small, rural American town usually had- quaint houses with blue siding, 24-hour diners, hardware stores and tobacco shops, liquor stores and restaurants. Majestic mountains rose all around us, and the town itself was so high that I could see for miles. The air smelt clean and sweet. Everything was here, except…
 “No people,” my wife said, as if reading my mind. I looked over at her, frowning.
 “Yeah, this is bizarre,” I said. “This place looks like it was hit by the Black Death. Where is everyone?” My wife unlocked her door and got out, pulling a cigarette from her purse and lighting it. She gave the pack to me, and I took one. My wife looked pale and thin under the late afternoon sun, her black hair and dark eyes contrasting heavily with her light, Irish skin. Lately, she seemed to have lost weight, but she wouldn’t talk about it. Every time I asked her if anything was wrong, she said no, and I could get no more response from her than that.
 The fragrant Turkish tobacco of the Camel cigarette instantly woke me up. We didn’t smoke in the car, as it was brand-new and had cost me over $25,000 that I didn’t really have. The last thing I wanted was burn marks on the seats and ashes flying everywhere.
 We walked slowly down the sidewalk, looking around, searching for the slightest signs of movement. I didn’t even see an animal, except for an occasional fly buzzing past on its way to eat garbage. I looked into the diner window, and saw plates set out on the tables. Mold grew wild on the food, strange patches of green and red and black sprouting filaments and making the dishes unrecognizable. Next to the plates, I saw cell phones and even car and house keys. All the screens on the phones looked black, as if they had been sitting there for months. A slight layer of grime and dust had settled over everything. The door stood wide open, a cheerful sign reading, “We’re open. Come in!” displayed on the front.
 “That’s gotta be a code violation,” I said, pointing inside at the disgusting plates of mold and fungus. My wife laughed, but it sounded nervous and high-pitched, almost desperate in its cadence. “Listen, Betty, do you think we should… maybe, call the police or something?” She looked at me for a long moment, then sighed.
 “I mean, I don’t know,” she said. “What crime has been committed? It’s just an empty town. Maybe everyone’s at a… funeral?” Her voice raised hopefully. I laughed.
 “And they just abandoned their shops and restaurants with no workers and moldering food? And, by the way, there’s a cop car right there,” I said, pointing. It sat on four flat tires, covered in a thick coat of dust. The tires didn’t look damaged in any way. It seems they had just lost pressure over time without anyone to care for them.
 Looking around at the other cars, I saw most were not in much better shape. Many of them had low or no air in their tires, and their windshields were covered in dirt and grime. It looked like a junkyard in the middle of a town- a junkyard that had been abandoned.
 “I’m calling the cops,” I said, pulling out my phone. I opened the screen and, of course, found I had no service. I tried sending a text to my mother, explaining the situation and telling her to call the authorities if she received it and send help immediately. I gave her the name of the town and the time.
 I figured the chances of a text going through were far better than a call, since a brief moment of service could prove sufficient to transfer the message.
 “Yeah, I’m not calling the cops.” I shook my head. “We don’t have a shred of service out here. What kind of town doesn’t have service on its own Main Street?”
 “We’re in the middle of the mountains,” Betty said. “Who the hell knows out here?” We kept walking down the street in silence. Betty went inside a few of the shops and tried flicking on the lights or looking for a phone. The electricity was apparently as dead as the town itself. I occasionally checked my phone, finding nothing had changed.
 As we walked further along, I started to give up hope that help would be coming from outside. I finished my cigarette, and Betty lit another one and gave me the pack again. I sighed and took another Camel out of the pack, lighting it and inhaling deeply. It gave me something to do, at least, and it helped take my mind off the strangeness of this town.
 Then we came up to the police station, and I choked on the smoke as I saw what lay there before us. At first, I thought some vandal had used red spray paint to put up a bizarre slogan across the front of the station. And then I saw all the flies, and smelled the copper and iron, and I realized it likely wasn’t paint at all.
 “WE FOLLOW THE BLACK SUN,” it said in huge letters, each of them nearly six-feet tall and thickly painted across the windows and walls. My wife squinted at it, tilting her head in a girlish way, her black hair falling across her face. She took a long, thin hand and pushed it aside.
 “The Black Sun?” she said. “Is that a metal band? It sounds like those Norwegian Satanists you like to listen to- what’s the name, Burzum and Darkthrone and stuff?” She started walking forwards, trying to inspect the letters more closely. I put my hand on her shoulder, and pulled her back with a little more force than I intended. She stumbled, and gave me a dirty look. “Jonny, be careful, dammit! You almost made me fall.”
 “Sorry,” I said, my heart pounding in my chest, “but don’t get close to that. I’m fairly sure that’s… blood. And it might be a crime scene. You don’t want to touch it or trample the area if it is.” She looked at me, shocked, then glanced back at the letters, seeing the flies swarming around the coagulated, sticky mess.
 “Animal blood?” she asked helpfully.
 “Yeah, sure, I guess,” I said noncommittally. “OK, let’s go back to the car and get the hell out of here. I’ve seen enough. We need to get the cops here. Whatever is going on here, it’s way beyond anything we can deal with.” I turned around quickly, taking my wife’s hand. She pulled away.
 “Don’t start getting all worked up,” she said. “We haven’t seen any indication of anything… crazy, not yet. All we know is the people are somewhere, not here, and that someone vandalized the police station. I want to keep exploring.” I looked at her, amazed. She pointed past me at an old-looking church built of stone, probably from the 1800s. It stood near the end of the small downtown area, next to thick clusters of evergreen trees. It had a plaque outside that I couldn’t make out. The doors stood wide open, and the darkness inside seemed to beckon.
 For a moment, I almost agreed with Betty; I almost said that I, too, wanted to go inside that church. I think it was what the French call, “l’appel du vide”, or the call of the void- that urge to suddenly jump when standing at the edge of a cliff, or to see if a car can go 130 miles an hour on the highway when it’s snowing. Then I shook my head quickly, as if awakening from a short dream. I looked back at Betty and laughed. There was no humor in it, however.
 “You must be crazy,” I said. “I want to get the hell out of here, now. There’s nothing to explore. Everyone’s gone, and if we keep going deeper into this, I have a feeling we’ll run into something far worse than anything we’ve yet seen.”
 “OK, how about this?” she said, making a thoughtful face, putting her finger up to her chin. “Why don’t you see if the cop car is unlocked, jump it with our car, and use whatever they have in it to call for help? They probably have a walkie-talkie or something connected to the state police network. If you really think we need a SWAT team here, then that’s probably the quickest way.”
 “No, let’s just leave,” I said, walking quickly back in the direction of our car. I saw the new Chevrolet Trailblazer off in the distance, contrasting heavily with the dirty and abandoned cars surrounding it. And then, as we got close, I saw it had four flat tires. I started running forwards, seeing the deep knife marks slicing open each of the sidewalls.
 “What in the hell…?” I said, stopping in my tracks. I looked around the town, but still saw no trace of anyone. “Why? Why would someone do this?”
 “To stop us from leaving, obviously,” my wife said, sounding unperturbed. “Look, we might be here for a while, so I’m going into that package store and grabbing a few things. Maybe some wine. And some cigarettes, because someone smoked most of mine.” She narrowed her eyes at me playfully.
 “Do you even realize what’s happening right now?” I asked, my voice rising unconsciously in anger and frustration.
 “No, do you?” she said.
 “This isn’t a joke,” I said, feeling hot and anxious. “We’re trapped here, and there’s letters written in blood, and now someone slashed our tires. Do you still think we don’t need the police?” She smiled at me.
 “You always worry too much,” she said. “Just calm down for once. Don’t have an anxiety attack on me. There’s no cell phone service to call for help if you do, remember.” That jogged something in my memory, and I looked questioningly at her.
 “Do you have any weapons on you?” I asked. “I have…” I reached in my pockets, frowning. I pulled out a small Swiss army knife. Its red surface looked dull from age, and even I thought it looked small and pathetic in my hand. “...this.” She laughed.
 “What are you going to do with that, kill a chipmunk?” she asked. “I mean, I think you can cut your nails with it, too, if you want to use a dull, crappy pair of scissors that barely cut paper.” She laughed at her own joke, then stopped when she saw the anger and fear on my face. Betty looked at me with a strange expression.
 It was hard to perturb her. She had always been different from me. When I was stressed about money or work or anything else, she would laugh it off and say I was too serious. But this seemed to be stretching the boundaries. I felt in my heart we were in danger, and she didn’t seem to notice. “Look,” she continued, sighing, “let’s go get some more cigarettes and drinks and stuff, and then maybe we can take the car over to the police cruiser and jump it. Then we can call the cops, and AAA too, and just sit here and wait for the cavalry to arrive.” I sputtered.
 “This is a brand new car!” I yelled. “I’m not driving it on the rims over there. That’s going to destroy the rotors and could damage some… other stuff.” I didn’t actually know anything about cars, and she knew it.
 “No, I think it will be fine,” she said, smiling. “But I wouldn’t get my…” Her words were cut off by a siren that started up suddenly, deafening and shrill. It seemed to vibrate the air itself, and the dead town came to life in a cacophony of noise and vibration. I saw my wife’s lips moving as she tried to scream something, but I had no idea what it was. I covered my ears with my hands, which barely helped. And then, after about ten seconds, it stopped. My ears rang, a high-pitched whine like I had just walked into a flashbang. It went away slowly, and Betty’s voice came back to me, rising from nothingness in a crescendo, until I could make out her cadence and speech again.
 “...into the siren,” she said, her face unusually serious and drawn. The sun had started to go behind the mountains now, sending long shadows streaking across the road. Soon, it would be dark, and we would likely be trapped here for the entire night- or longer. Hiking out of here was an option, and the highway was only about five miles away. These thoughts passed through my mind as I saw shadows fall over Betty, before I realized I had no idea what she said.
 “What?” I yelled.
 “I said,” she rolled her eyes at this point, “we should go towards the siren. They have electricity. They probably have a landline and maybe there’s people there,” she said, still speaking far too loudly. I guessed her ears were ringing as well.
 “OK, you don’t have to yell,” I said. “I can hear you, and I don’t want to attract… the wrong kind of attention.” She pointed at the sliced tires of my car.
 “We already have, Jonny,” she said seriously.
 “Listen, I don’t like this,” I said. “I don’t want to be trapped in some nutjob’s basement a few hours from now, chained up against a wall and covered in blood, and think back on how I should have done something different. I think the safest plan is to leave this place now, right now. Let’s just grab some drinks and cigarettes and whatever from the store and hike back towards the highway on the main route. Maybe we’ll see someone on the walk, but we’ll definitely find help on the highway.” She thought about it for a fraction of a second then nodded.
 “OK, whatever,” she said. “Let’s go.”
 ***
 The plan worked at first. Betty ran into the package store while I kept watch outside, looking up and down the street for any signs of movement. I saw nothing, but from the slashed tires, I assumed we were being watched. Whoever “they” were, they knew when we were far enough away to vandalize the car.
 A minute later, Betty came out with a plastic bag. I saw nine or ten cartons of cigarettes in it and some plastic nips of Jack Daniels. She also had Coca-Cola and some water.
 “I thought you were grabbing a pack of cigarettes,” I said, narrowing my eyes. “Ten cartons? Why do we need ten cartons for a five-mile hike?”
 “We don’t need them,” she said, “but, you know, they’re expensive down in Connecticut. Much cheaper in this town.”
 “Yeah, I guess you can’t beat free,” I said, reaching into the bag and taking out a pack. We started walking out of town in silence. I didn’t even hear an animal stir. The regular buzz of the insects that chirped and squeaked throughout the White Mountains was missing here. It gave the town a supernatural eeriness, as if we had wandered into an apocalyptic wasteland where even the crickets had died. To break the monotony, I lit a cigarette. The flick of the lighter and the soft tread of our footsteps were the only sounds we could hear for miles.
 As we got further down Main Street, the shops and houses started to thin out. Soon after we passed the church, both sides of the street had turned to forest, and only an occasional house or farm broke the endless trees. The downtown area couldn’t be more than a quarter-mile long, but this town and the surrounding forest felt like it went on forever.
 “This is really spooky,” Betty said, shattering the silence. I was glad for a break, though I felt eyes on me as she spoke, as if we had somehow violated the sanctity of a graveyard with laughter.
 “I have never experienced anything as weird as this,” I said, whispering and getting close to Betty. I noticed she also spoke in a quiet voice, and she constantly glanced behind and around. She smoked a lot of cigarettes, nervously lighting one after the other, and she drank three of the nips on the way, chasing them down with Coke. I took one myself and downed it. The burning liquid seemed to revive me somewhat and clear my head. I chugged some soda to get the taste out of my mouth.
 Betty had opened her mouth to say something else, when the screaming erupted from all around us. The sun had long disappeared behind the mountains, and we were surrounded by thick curtains of darkness. I couldn’t see more than a few feet into the forest. Betty gripped my hand tightly.
 “OK, now I am really freaked out,” she whispered into my ear. We had both stopped and stood, holding hands as shrieks echoed through the trees. The light breeze carried a smell that nearly made me gag- the smell of decay and blood. “Do you think it’s a fox or a fisher cat or something?” I shook my head silently, then leaned close to her.
 “We’re going to run,” I said. “Back towards the town. It’s a lot closer. Ready?” She nodded grimly. “Go!” We started sprinting away, our footsteps bouncing off the pavement, far too loud. The screaming drew closer and something broke through the outer boundary of the woods. With twigs crunching and branches snapping, I saw a silhouette emerge into the road to my left. The smell of rotting flesh seemed overwhelming now.
 I only saw her for a second, but I knew, in that moment, that she wasn’t human.
 It looked like a woman, or at least, like the corpse of one. But she was clearly alive in some form, running and shrieking, sending out wails of pure agony and horror. The eyes snapped onto me. I met them for a brief moment. Even in the dim light of the Moon and the stars, I could see they were pure white, without pupils or irises. And yet, they seemed to see everything, even in the deepening shadows
 Long, stringy black hair ran down over her face and down her back. Papery skin hung tightly to the skull, and the mouth hung wide open, inhumanly wide, like the tendons and ligaments holding the jaw to the skull had been cut. The huge black pit of her mouth emanated those screams constantly, as if she didn’t need to breathe.
 On the body, parts of the skin were missing. I could see the gore and bones beneath, where the thin, fragile skin had broken. Purple and black sores shone from these spots. The long, skeletal hand of the woman ended up claw-like fingers, with the nails blackened and the bones sticking out at the end of each digit.
 She ran fast, gaining on us. And she wasn’t alone. I could see dozens more bodies breaking through the tree line now, a deafening howling emanating from them as they ran. I was breathing hard by this point. I could see the first buildings of the town up ahead. We only had to make it another hundred paces, and then we could lock ourselves in and barricade the doors and windows.
 I didn’t dare look back, but I heard the screaming just behind me. I felt a soft swipe across my back, the sharp, bony fingers dragging across the shirt for a brief moment. It gave me another adrenaline rush, and I pushed myself forward with all of my will, feeling my heart beating far too fast in my chest. I began to feel light-headed and see flashes of white light every time I blinked. I knew I would pass out if I had to go much farther. I hadn’t gone running in over ten years, probably since I was in high school. But I ran for my life just the same.
 Betty was in better shape than me, and she had gained some ground. She glanced back as she sprinted down the middle of the dark street. I saw her point to the church. It stood just ahead, the doors already opened, as if waiting for us, as if it knew we would be back. She veered sharply to the right and I followed close behind, panting and sweating like a madman. The doors were so close now. The shrieking behind me had been joined by a few others. With the last of my strength, I began an all-out sprint, hoping I wouldn’t trip over something and go flying into a car. It would mean the end of me- of that, I was certain.
 We ran through the doors into the church. I turned around, and saw the creatures had gone. Their screaming cut off as soon as we had entered, and now I saw no sign of them. It was as if they had vanished.
 I shut the doors of the church just the same, turning a deadbolt to lock them. Betty had her phone out, turning on the flashlight app to help me see in the dark church. I would have to also check for auxiliary entrances, but it was a start, just the same. And then I turned, and I saw what Betty had already noticed- the desecration of this holy place.
 The statue of Jesus on his cross had been broken off at the bottom of the beam, and now hung upside down from a rope that extended to the high ceiling, dozens of feet above our heads. His face had been slashed and cut, his nose and eyes now missing, and on the front of his chest, I saw a strange symbol carved deeply into the wood with what looked like blood.
 The sigil looked like an upside-down triangle within a larger upside-down triangle, and had lines curving out of the sides of the bottom. Connected to the lines of the larger triangle, at the bottom, I saw a line curving like a J, and on the other side, another line curved like a backwards J. The lines extended outwards, curving over a V. Around the sigil sat a thick, black circle. It definitely seemed magical, like something from a medieval textbook on witchcraft.
 “That’s the sigil of Lucifer,” my wife said quietly.
 “How do you know that?” I asked, and she shrugged.
 “I read a couple books on black magic when I was a teen,” she said. “That one stuck with me for some reason. That symbol- it’s eerie. I never forgot it.” I looked over at the font at the front of the church. Instead of holy water, I saw it was filled with blood.
 “I guess no one’s crossing themselves in here today,” I said, trying to break the harsh terror that threatened to overwhelm us.
 Then, as Betty moved her light around, I realized we weren’t alone in here. People sat in the pews, their heads bowed, silently praying. Dozens of people were in here with us, yet they made no noise, and no one turned their heads to look at us or say anything. An icy chill ran down my spine. I turned to Betty and pointed at the people.
 “Yeah, I see them,” she whispered, and began to creep slowly forward. I took out my phone and turned on my light as well, moving silently a few feet behind her. I shone the light at the first pew of people and gasped.
 They all had their throats cut. A waterfall of thick, coagulated blood stained the front of their bodies. The smell hit me at once- an overwhelming odor of rotting meat and iron. I gagged, turning to retch. Betty pulled me towards the back of the church. I searched for any other entrances, locking the ancient deadbolts on the doors. We ended up going to the rectory in the back, sitting on the priest’s couch. There were no bodies in here, and no smell but the musty scent of an old building and books.
 “Well,” Betty said, turning to me, barely concealing the terror in her eyes, “it looks like we found the townspeople. Some of them, anyways.”
 I said nothing, but instead put my phone down and sat in the darkness with her, putting my arm around her while she cried.
 Part 2
 https://www.reddit.com/nosleep/comments/16ck4fn/we_found_a_town_abandoned_in_the_mountains/
 
   submitted by    CIAHerpes    to    DrCreepensVault  [link]   [comments]


2024.01.10 22:01 Mellowtron11 Pelor's Chosen- A Divine Soul Sorcerer buffer and healer build
Was making a DM NPC for a one shot for 2 new first time DND players and I was toying with the idea of making a priestly NPC (me) to help the party out on their adventure. Given that both players have never played 5E before, I wanted to help them out a bit and also not have them die in a couple hits. I say this because on my second ever 5E session, my former DND had a bunch of shadows attack the Level 1 party inside the Death House during a Curse of Strahd campaign. Two players died, and one was close to death after that encounter. I don't plan on having such strong enemies out of the gate for this one shot, which would be Wolves of Welton. But there would still be enemies like giant wolf spiders, wolves, direwolves, twig blights and maybe even a wounded Owlbear. So I thought that this character here would be a nice backup to these newbie players starting at level 2.
 Originally I was thinking of either a life or light domain cleric since there is a church to Pelor in the village. But then I thought- "Why don't I just make a Divine Soul Sorcerer focused on buffing with metamagic since I like sorcerers?" So I leaned into that idea and came up with the following character.
 Rolled stats 9 11 11 13 15 16
 • Variant human
 • STR 9
 • DEX 13+1=14
 • CON 15+1=16
 • INT 11
 • WIS 11
 • CHR 16
 • HP 9
 • AC 12
 Level 1
 • Variant Human Feat-Metamagic Adept- Twinned spell and empowered spell
 • 2 Sorcery points.
 • Cantrips-Guidance (?), Firebolt or Sacred Flame, Thaumaturgy, Light
 • Spells- Guiding bolt, Healing word
 • Free subclass Spell-Bless
 Level 2
 • HP 16
 • Font of Magic- 2 Sorcery points.
 • 4 total Sorcery points
 • Spells-mage armor
 Level 3
 • HP 23
 • 5 total sorcery points
 • Metamagic- Quickened spell and distant/extended spell
 • 2nd level spell- Aid
 Playstyle- Use Twinned spell with Mage Armor to prop up the party's AC for 2 characters. Both players are going to be high dexterity characters (ranger and rogue) so they can benefit from that spell. So can this sorcerer. Then cast Aid on the three party members for extra health if we make it to level 3.
 Combat- Start the fight off by casting the bless spell. Then apply the normal sorcerer tactics of hanging back, using cover and firing off spells from the backline. Use Twin spell on guiding bolt for extra damage, or twin healing word if one of the party members goes down or both members are low on health. The goal of this build is to keep the party buffed and in the fight for as long as possible.
 Also made a possible expanded sorcerer spell list for this character.
 1-Cure wounds, affinity spell of choice (bless in this case).
 3-Lesser restoration, prayer of healing.
 
   submitted by    Mellowtron11    to    3d6  [link]   [comments]


2024.01.06 09:53 Vegetable-Ad7090 Hello beautiful people! Need feedback for logo sketches, concepts
 
    
 
​
 "GreenRhythm" is an eco-friendly initiatives sponsor committed to promoting sustainability and environmental consciousness. They focus on integrating green practices into events, concerts, and festivals to minimize their ecological footprint. 
 ​
 I would appreciate any kind of feedback here, colors, fonts or entirely new directions, anything truly.
 Anyway this is one of my main ideas. Others include
 ~ A tree with music notes as fruits
 ~ A tree thats playing drums with its twigs as drum sticks, haha.
 Thank you for reading thus far!
 ​
 https://preview.redd.it/qvejoxo8asac1.jpg?width=406&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0f9e504a528c259482aa6ccd0819b230a1c3a3a3
 
   submitted by    Vegetable-Ad7090    to    logodesign  [link]   [comments] 


2023.12.21 19:30 elunicotomas I can't see vertical line at 120 characters
 
    
 
I can't set the right margin, i tried every option. I don't know what am I missing. Any ideas? Thanks!
 ​
 https://preview.redd.it/1n726twpyo7c1.png?width=974&format=png&auto=webp&s=53c70bea1621b6fcf93e5e4c9bd388c112f299d5
 ​
 https://preview.redd.it/663o4t8ryo7c1.png?width=1046&format=png&auto=webp&s=47082f229066a8e5e91070eb33d813701f5d42a1
 
   submitted by    elunicotomas    to    phpstorm  [link]   [comments] 


2023.12.12 04:52 TemperatureBest8164 Is Meta magic Adept OP on Sorcerers? - Maximizing Flexible Casting
** Edit: I do not believe in deleting my mistakes. I overlooked the text that indicated the Sorcery Points can only be used for metamagic after reading the part where they are adding to the maximum. Unfortunately this means that everything beyond this point pertaining to slot progression is wrong. Please be advised. Thanks to u/cahpahkah for pointing out my error.**
 Metamagic adept gives the taker 2 additional sorcery points and two metamagics. While many people discuss the power subtle or extended spell can add I noticed something that I had not seen others talk about. Normally as the class states when you get the Font of Magic feature at level 2 you may never have more sorcery points than your level. This also means you may not make a spell slot higher than your level given the font of magic flexible casting chart:
 Creating Spell Slots
 Spell Slot Level Sorcery Point Cost
 1st 2
 2nd 3
 3rd 5
 4th 6
 5th 7
 Because metamagic adept gives you additional sorcery points it can advance your slot progression beyond your current level. Below is the effective highest level spell slot with metamagic adept on a straight class sorcerer:
 Max Created Slot
 Level Spell Slot Level Advancement by Level
 1 - -
 2 2nd 1
 3 3rd 1
 4 4th 2
 5 5th 2
 6 5th 2
 7 5th 1
 8 5th 1
 9 5th -
 Beyond the extra meta magics it is clear that the extra higher level slots come in the prime playing levels so that is good but can it be abused somehow... so I looked for a list of the best upcasting spells in the game: Bless, Bane, Armor of Agathys, Aid, Hold Person, Invisibility, Tasha's Mind Whip, Fly, and Banishment.
 Lets take Armor of Agaths as an example. Many prominent optimizers have looked at this spell and concluded the best way to increase the damage of the spell is to gain resistance and double the effective hit points of the spell. What if by upcasting the spell you can get 50-100% more hit points in prime playing levels. What if you can add to that resistance to all damage?
 For this build I will go with a mark of warding human divine soul sorcerer. Stats 8/16/16/8/8/16 Mage Armor for 16 AC and Dagger for attacks. The main strategy is to cast Armor of Agathys at the highest level possible, run into melee and draw attacks. If characters run past get free attacks of opportunity. We will take transmute spell to take care of resistance issues and take warding bond at 3rd level to grant us resistance to everything with the help of a friend.
 What you will see in the charts below is that the synergy of resistance plus upcasting causes the typical output of Armor of Agathys to jump at 4th level by 140 damage dealt or about 2 disintegrates worth of damage...
 Assumptions for Calculations:
 We are going to assume all damage is in melee and the creature dealing the damage is within 5ft.
 We will use a level appropriate creature that generally does one attack to estimate the worst case output to counter the previous generous assumptions.
 Agathys Normal
 Level Hit points Dmg Output/hit Dmg Received/hit Total Dmg Output
 1 5 5 3.5(twig blight) 10
 2 5 5 4.5(goblin) 10
 3 10 10 4.5(zombie) 30
 4 10 10 5.5(Lizardfolk) 20
 5 15 15 9.0(Bugbear) 30
 6 15 15 10.0(Dire Wolf) 30
 7 20 20 10.0(Dire Wolf) 40
 8 20 20 13.0(Ogre) 40
 9 25 25 13.0(Ogre) 50
 Agaythys Upcast
 Level Hit points Dmg Output/hit Dmg Received/hit Total Dmg Output
 1 5 5 3.5(twig blight) 10
 2 10 10 4.5(goblin) 20
 3 15 15 4.5(zombie) 45
 4 20 20 5.5(Lizardfolk) 80
 5 25 25 9.0(Bugbear) 75
 6 25 25 10.0(Dire Wolf) 75
 7 25 25 10.0(Dire Wolf) 75
 8 25 25 13.0(Ogre) 50
 9 25 25 13.0(Ogre) 50
 Agathys w/ Warding Bond
 Level Hit points Dmg Output/hit Dmg Recieved/hit Total Dmg Output
 1 5 5 3.5(twig blight) 10
 2 5 5 4.5(goblin) 10
 3 20 10 4.5(zombie) 50
 4 20 10 5.5(Lizardfolk) 40
 5 30 15 9.0(Bugbear) 60
 6 30 15 10.0(Dire Wolf) 45
 7 40 20 10.0(Dire Wolf) 80
 8 40 20 13.0(Ogre) 80
 9 50 25 13.0(Ogre) 100
 Agathys Upcast w/ Warding Bond
 Level Hit points Dmg Output/hit Dmg Received/hit Total Dmg Output
 1 5 5 3.5(twig blight) 10
 2 10 10 4.5(goblin) 20
 3 30 15 4.5(zombie) 105
 4 40 20 5.5(Lizardfolk) 160
 5 50 25 9.0(Bugbear) 150
 6 50 25 10.0(Dire Wolf) 125
 7 50 25 10.0(Dire Wolf) 125
 8 50 25 13.0(Ogre) 100
 9 50 25 13.0(Ogre) 100
 So what do you think, about Metamagic Adept on lower level casters? How would you seek to abuse higher level slots on a sorcerer?
 
   submitted by    TemperatureBest8164    to    3d6  [link]   [comments]


2023.11.06 22:42 klugheit Modpack crashing all of a sudden
Hey all, I've been working on a modpack for a bit now. I don't know exactly why, but it started to crash all of a sudden. I was exparimenting with mods like Traveler's Backpack and Simply Swords, and it started crashing when I added ModMenu (I think). I don't know enough about Fabric to know exactly what's wrong, but I appreciate any help you all can give; the crash report is below. Thank you, and have a nice day!
 
[16:32:44] [main/INFO]: Loading Minecraft 1.20.1 with Fabric Loader 0.14.24 [16:32:45] [ForkJoinPool-1-worker-3/WARN]: The mod "switchy-proxy" contains invalid entries in its mod json: - Unsupported root entry "modmenu" at line 41 column 12 [16:32:45] [ForkJoinPool-1-worker-5/WARN]: The mod "switchy-compat" contains invalid entries in its mod json: - Unsupported root entry "modmenu" at line 44 column 12 [16:32:45] [ForkJoinPool-1-worker-5/WARN]: The mod "switchy-ui" contains invalid entries in its mod json: - Unsupported root entry "modmenu" at line 36 column 12 [16:32:45] [ForkJoinPool-1-worker-8/WARN]: The mod "switchy-cardinal" contains invalid entries in its mod json: - Unsupported root entry "modmenu" at line 34 column 12 [16:32:45] [ForkJoinPool-1-worker-3/WARN]: The mod "switchy-cardinal-ui" contains invalid entries in its mod json: - Unsupported root entry "modmenu" at line 35 column 12 [16:32:45] [ForkJoinPool-1-worker-5/WARN]: The mod "switchy-core" contains invalid entries in its mod json: - Unsupported root entry "modmenu" at line 31 column 12 [16:32:45] [ForkJoinPool-1-worker-8/WARN]: The mod "switchy-client" contains invalid entries in its mod json: - Unsupported root entry "modmenu" at line 35 column 12 [16:32:45] [ForkJoinPool-1-worker-3/WARN]: The mod "switchy-compat-ui" contains invalid entries in its mod json: - Unsupported root entry "modmenu" at line 36 column 12 [16:32:45] [main/INFO]: Loading 184 mods: - accurateblockplacement 1.2 - altorigingui 1.0.1 - apathy 2.7.1 - architectury 9.1.12 - bettercombat 1.8.2+1.20.1 - betterdeserttemples 1.20-Fabric-3.0.3 \-- org_reflections_reflections 0.10.2 - betterdungeons 1.20-Fabric-4.0.3 - betterendisland 1.20-Fabric-2.0.4 - betterfortresses 1.20-Fabric-2.0.5 - betterjungletemples 1.20-Fabric-2.0.4 - bettermineshafts 1.20-Fabric-4.0.4 - betteroceanmonuments 1.20-Fabric-3.0.3 - betterstrongholds 1.20-Fabric-4.0.3 - betterwitchhuts 1.20-Fabric-3.0.3 - bookshelf 20.1.6 - bushierflowers 0.0.3-1.20.1 - cardinal-components 5.2.2 -- cardinal-components-base 5.2.2 -- cardinal-components-block 5.2.2 -- cardinal-components-chunk 5.2.2 -- cardinal-components-entity 5.2.2 -- cardinal-components-item 5.2.2 -- cardinal-components-level 5.2.2 -- cardinal-components-scoreboard 5.2.2 \-- cardinal-components-world 5.2.2 - cloth-api 4.0.65 -- cloth-basic-math 0.6.1 -- cloth-client-events-v0 4.0.65 -- cloth-common-events-v1 4.0.65 -- cloth-scissors-api-v1 4.0.65 \-- cloth-utils-v1 4.0.65 - cloth-config 11.1.106 \-- cloth-basic-math 0.6.1 - clumps 12.0.0.3 - collective 6.82 - consolesounds 1.2.0 - continuity 3.0.0-beta.4+1.20.1 - controlling 12.0.2 - copper-horns 1.0.2 - ctov 3.3.6 - culturaldelights 0.14.11+1.20.1 \-- terraform-wood-api-v1 7.0.1 - drogstyle 1.2.0+1.20 - enchancement 1.20-7 \-- step-height-entity-attribute 1.2.0 - enchdesc 17.0.8 - enhancedblockentities 0.9+1.20 -- advanced_runtime_resource_pack 0.6.7 \-- spruceui 5.0.0+1.20 - extraorigins 1.20-3 - fabric-api 0.90.7+1.20.1 -- fabric-api-base 0.4.30+7abfd51577 -- fabric-api-lookup-api-v1 1.6.35+4d8536c977 -- fabric-biome-api-v1 13.0.12+215bbe9677 -- fabric-block-api-v1 1.0.10+92a0d36777 -- fabric-block-view-api-v2 1.0.0+92a0d36777 -- fabric-blockrenderlayer-v1 1.1.40+b3afc78b77 -- fabric-client-tags-api-v1 1.1.1+97bb207577 -- fabric-command-api-v1 1.2.33+f71b366f77 -- fabric-command-api-v2 2.2.12+b3afc78b77 -- fabric-commands-v0 0.2.50+df3654b377 -- fabric-containers-v0 0.1.63+df3654b377 -- fabric-content-registries-v0 4.0.10+57aed33f77 -- fabric-convention-tags-v1 1.5.4+a1a980da77 -- fabric-crash-report-info-v1 0.2.18+aeb40ebe77 -- fabric-data-generation-api-v1 12.3.2+d7b148e077 -- fabric-dimensions-v1 2.1.53+8536527b77 -- fabric-entity-events-v1 1.5.22+b3afc78b77 -- fabric-events-interaction-v0 0.6.1+e91849a877 -- fabric-events-lifecycle-v0 0.2.62+df3654b377 -- fabric-game-rule-api-v1 1.0.39+ae9f657a77 -- fabric-item-api-v1 2.1.27+b3afc78b77 -- fabric-item-group-api-v1 4.0.11+d7b148e077 -- fabric-key-binding-api-v1 1.0.36+fb8d95da77 -- fabric-keybindings-v0 0.2.34+df3654b377 -- fabric-lifecycle-events-v1 2.2.21+b3afc78b77 -- fabric-loot-api-v2 1.2.0+96dfa95977 -- fabric-loot-tables-v1 1.1.44+9e7660c677 -- fabric-message-api-v1 5.1.8+d7b148e077 -- fabric-mining-level-api-v1 2.1.49+b3afc78b77 -- fabric-model-loading-api-v1 1.0.2+709a987177 -- fabric-models-v0 0.4.1+9386d8a777 -- fabric-networking-api-v1 1.3.10+eeb8eb3677 -- fabric-networking-v0 0.3.50+df3654b377 -- fabric-object-builder-api-v1 11.1.2+4ee0bc6077 -- fabric-particles-v1 1.1.1+201a23a077 -- fabric-recipe-api-v1 1.0.20+b3afc78b77 -- fabric-registry-sync-v0 2.3.2+4df89eb277 -- fabric-renderer-api-v1 3.2.0+39a511ba77 -- fabric-renderer-indigo 1.5.0+39a511ba77 -- fabric-renderer-registries-v1 3.2.45+df3654b377 -- fabric-rendering-data-attachment-v1 0.3.36+92a0d36777 -- fabric-rendering-fluids-v1 3.0.27+b3afc78b77 -- fabric-rendering-v0 1.1.48+df3654b377 -- fabric-rendering-v1 3.0.7+b3afc78b77 -- fabric-resource-conditions-api-v1 2.3.6+d7b148e077 -- fabric-resource-loader-v0 0.11.9+132c48c177 -- fabric-screen-api-v1 2.0.7+b3afc78b77 -- fabric-screen-handler-api-v1 1.3.29+b3afc78b77 -- fabric-sound-api-v1 1.0.12+b3afc78b77 -- fabric-transfer-api-v1 3.3.2+1bc31aeb77 \-- fabric-transitive-access-wideners-v1 4.3.0+6c31357e77 - fabricloader 0.14.24 - fabrictailor 2.1.2 -- config2brigadier 1.2.3 \-- fabric-permissions-api-v0 0.2-SNAPSHOT - farmersdelight 1.20.1-1.4.2 - forgeconfigapiport 8.0.0 - friendlyfire 18.0.5 - friendsandfoes 1.9.8 \-- com_github_llamalad7_mixinextras 0.2.0-rc.5 - fwaystones 3.1.3+mc1.20 - hearth_and_home 1.20.1-2.0.1 - incendium 5.3.3 - indium 1.0.27+mc1.20.1 - iris 1.6.10 -- io_github_douira_glsl-transformer 2.0.0-pre13 -- org_anarres_jcpp 1.4.14 \-- org_antlr_antlr4-runtime 4.11.1 - java 17 - jei 15.2.0.27 - kiwi 11.1.1 - maxhealthfix 12.0.2 - midnightcontrols 1.8.2+1.20 -- org_aperlambda_lambdajcommon 1.8.1 \-- spruceui 5.0.0+1.20 - midnightlib 1.4.1 - minecraft 1.20.1 - modmenu 7.2.2 - mousetweaks 2.25 - notenoughanimations 1.6.4 - nullscape 1.2.3 - origins 1.10.0 -- apoli 2.9.0 -- additionalentityattributes 1.3.0+1.20.0 -- calio 1.11.0 \-- playerabilitylib 1.8.0 \-- reach-entity-attributes 2.4.0 - origins-plus-plus 2.2 - owo 0.11.2+1.20 \-- blue_endless_jankson 1.2.2 - pehkui 3.7.11+1.14.4-1.20.2 \-- kanos_config 0.4.1+1.14.4-1.19.4 - player-animator 1.0.2-rc1+1.20 - polymorph 0.49.1+1.20.1 \-- spectrelib 0.13.14+1.20.1 -- com_electronwill_night-config_core 3.6.5 \-- com_electronwill_night-config_toml 3.6.5 - puzzleslib 8.1.7 \-- puzzlesaccessapi 8.0.7 - raised 3.1.0 - respawnablepets 1.20-1 - respawninganimals 8.1.1 - searchables 1.0.2 - simplyswords 1.51.5-1.20.1 \-- spruceui 5.0.0+1.20 - sit 1.20-24 - skinlayers 1.5.4-mc1.20.1 - skyvillages 1.0.3.1-1.19.2-1.20.1 - snowrealmagic 9.0.3 - sodium 0.5.3 - styled-nicknames 1.2.1+1.20 -- fabric-permissions-api-v0 0.2-SNAPSHOT \-- player-data-api 0.2.2+1.19.3 - styledchat 2.2.3+1.20.1 -- fabric-permissions-api-v0 0.2-SNAPSHOT -- placeholder-api 2.1.3+1.20.1 -- player-data-api 0.2.2+1.19.3 \-- predicate-api 0.1.2+1.20 - switchy 2.8.4+1.20 -- switchy-cardinal 2.8.4+1.20 -- switchy-cardinal-ui 2.8.4+1.20 -- switchy-client 2.8.4+1.20 -- switchy-compat 2.8.4+1.20 -- switchy-compat-ui 2.8.4+1.20 -- switchy-core 2.8.4+1.20 -- folk_sisby_kaleido-config 0.1.0+1.1.0-beta.3 \-- server_translations_api 2.0.0+1.20 \-- packet_tweaker 0.4.0+1.19.4 \-- switchy-ui 2.8.4+1.20 - switchy-inventories 1.8.2+1.19 - switchy-proxy 1.6.1+1.20 - switchy_teleport 1.2.5+1.20 - tectonic 2.1.1 - tooltipfix 1.1.1-1.20 - twigs 3.1.0 - yungsapi 1.20-Fabric-4.0.2 \-- org_javassist_javassist 3.29.2-GA - yungsextras 1.20-Fabric-4.0.3 [16:32:45] [main/INFO]: SpongePowered MIXIN Subsystem Version=0.8.5 Source=file:/C:/Users/build/curseforge/minecraft/Install/libraries/net/fabricmc/sponge-mixin/0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5/sponge-mixin-0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5.jar Service=Knot/Fabric Env=CLIENT [16:32:45] [main/INFO]: Compatibility level set to JAVA_17 [16:32:46] [main/WARN]: Reference map 'simplyswords-fabric-refmap.json' for simplyswords.mixins.json could not be read. If this is a development environment you can ignore this message [16:32:46] [main/INFO]: Loaded configuration file for Sodium: 41 options available, 3 override(s) found [16:32:46] [main/WARN]: Reference map 'yungsextras.refmap.json' for yungsextras.mixins.json could not be read. If this is a development environment you can ignore this message [16:32:46] [main/WARN]: Reference map 'yungsextras.refmap.json' for yungsextras_fabric.mixins.json could not be read. If this is a development environment you can ignore this message [16:32:46] [main/WARN]: Error loading class: me/jellysquid/mods/sodium/client/rendevertex/formats/ModelVertex (java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: me/jellysquid/mods/sodium/client/rendevertex/formats/ModelVertex) [16:32:46] [main/WARN]: @Mixin target me.jellysquid.mods.sodium.client.render.vertex.formats.ModelVertex was not found enchancement.mixins.json:berserk.client.integration.sodium.ModelVertexMixin from mod enchancement [16:32:47] [main/WARN]: Error loading class: fcatcore/servetranslations/api/resource/language/SystemDelegatedLanguage (java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: fcatcore/servetranslations/api/resource/language/SystemDelegatedLanguage) [16:32:47] [main/WARN]: Force-disabling mixin 'features.render.entity.CuboidMixin' as rule 'mixin.features.render.entity' (added by mods [iris]) disables it and children [16:32:47] [main/WARN]: Force-disabling mixin 'features.render.entity.ModelPartMixin' as rule 'mixin.features.render.entity' (added by mods [iris]) disables it and children [16:32:47] [main/WARN]: Force-disabling mixin 'features.render.entity.cull.EntityRendererMixin' as rule 'mixin.features.render.entity' (added by mods [iris]) disables it and children [16:32:47] [main/WARN]: Force-disabling mixin 'features.render.entity.shadows.EntityRenderDispatcherMixin' as rule 'mixin.features.render.entity' (added by mods [iris]) disables it and children [16:32:47] [main/WARN]: Force-disabling mixin 'features.render.gui.font.GlyphRendererMixin' as rule 'mixin.features.render.gui.font' (added by mods [iris]) disables it and children [16:32:47] [main/WARN]: Force-disabling mixin 'features.render.world.sky.BackgroundRendererMixin' as rule 'mixin.features.render.world.sky' (added by mods [iris]) disables it and children [16:32:47] [main/WARN]: Force-disabling mixin 'features.render.world.sky.ClientWorldMixin' as rule 'mixin.features.render.world.sky' (added by mods [iris]) disables it and children [16:32:47] [main/WARN]: Force-disabling mixin 'features.render.world.sky.WorldRendererMixin' as rule 'mixin.features.render.world.sky' (added by mods [iris]) disables it and children [16:32:47] [main/WARN]: Error loading class: org/jetbrains/annotations/ApiStatus$Internal (java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org/jetbrains/annotations/ApiStatus$Internal) [16:32:47] [main/INFO]: I used the json to destroy the json [16:32:47] [main/INFO]: Searching for graphics cards... [16:32:47] [main/INFO]: Initializing MixinExtras via com.llamalad7.mixinextras.service.MixinExtrasServiceImpl(version=0.2.0-rc.5). [16:32:48] [main/INFO]: Found graphics card: GraphicsAdapterInfo[vendor=UNKNOWN, name=Parsec Virtual Display Adapter, version=DriverVersion=0.41.0.0] [16:32:48] [main/INFO]: Found graphics card: GraphicsAdapterInfo[vendor=INTEL, name=Intel(R) Iris(R) Xe Graphics, version=DriverVersion=31.0.101.4502] [16:32:49] [main/ERROR]: Mixin apply for mod cloth-client-events-v0 failed cloth-client-events-v0.mixins.json:MixinScreen from mod cloth-client-events-v0 -> net.minecraft.class_437: org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.injection.throwables.InvalidInjectionException Critical injection failure: @Inject annotation on onPreDraw could not find any targets matching 'Lnet/minecraft/class_437;method_25394(Lnet/minecraft/class_4587;IIF)V' in net.minecraft.class_437. Using refmap cloth-client-events-v0-cloth-client-events-v0-refmap.json [PREINJECT Applicator Phase -> cloth-client-events-v0.mixins.json:MixinScreen from mod cloth-client-events-v0 -> Prepare Injections -> -> handler$zol000$cloth-client-events-v0$onPreDraw(Lnet/minecraft/class_4587;IIFLorg/spongepowered/asm/mixin/injection/callback/CallbackInfo;)V -> Parse] org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.injection.throwables.InvalidInjectionException: Critical injection failure: @Inject annotation on onPreDraw could not find any targets matching 'Lnet/minecraft/class_437;method_25394(Lnet/minecraft/class_4587;IIF)V' in net.minecraft.class_437. Using refmap cloth-client-events-v0-cloth-client-events-v0-refmap.json [PREINJECT Applicator Phase -> cloth-client-events-v0.mixins.json:MixinScreen from mod cloth-client-events-v0 -> Prepare Injections -> -> handler$zol000$cloth-client-events-v0$onPreDraw(Lnet/minecraft/class_4587;IIFLorg/spongepowered/asm/mixin/injection/callback/CallbackInfo;)V -> Parse] at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.injection.struct.InjectionInfo.validateTargets(InjectionInfo.java:656) ~[sponge-mixin-0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5.jar:0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5] at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.injection.struct.InjectionInfo.findTargets(InjectionInfo.java:587) ~[sponge-mixin-0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5.jar:0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5] at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.injection.struct.InjectionInfo.readAnnotation(InjectionInfo.java:330) ~[sponge-mixin-0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5.jar:0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5] at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.injection.struct.InjectionInfo.(InjectionInfo.java:316) ~[sponge-mixin-0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5.jar:0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5] at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.injection.struct.InjectionInfo.(InjectionInfo.java:308) ~[sponge-mixin-0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5.jar:0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5] at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.injection.struct.CallbackInjectionInfo.(CallbackInjectionInfo.java:46) ~[sponge-mixin-0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5.jar:0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5] at jdk.internal.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance0(Native Method) ~[?:?] at jdk.internal.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.java:77) ~[?:?] at jdk.internal.reflect.DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.java:45) ~[?:?] at java.lang.reflect.Constructor.newInstanceWithCaller(Constructor.java:499) ~[?:?] at java.lang.reflect.Constructor.newInstance(Constructor.java:480) ~[?:?] at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.injection.struct.InjectionInfo$InjectorEntry.create(InjectionInfo.java:149) ~[sponge-mixin-0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5.jar:0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5] at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.injection.struct.InjectionInfo.parse(InjectionInfo.java:708) ~[sponge-mixin-0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5.jar:0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5] at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.transformer.MixinTargetContext.prepareInjections(MixinTargetContext.java:1329) ~[sponge-mixin-0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5.jar:0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5] at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.transformer.MixinApplicatorStandard.prepareInjections(MixinApplicatorStandard.java:1053) ~[sponge-mixin-0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5.jar:0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5] at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.transformer.MixinApplicatorStandard.applyMixin(MixinApplicatorStandard.java:395) ~[sponge-mixin-0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5.jar:0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5] at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.transformer.MixinApplicatorStandard.apply(MixinApplicatorStandard.java:327) ~[sponge-mixin-0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5.jar:0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5] at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.transformer.TargetClassContext.apply(TargetClassContext.java:421) ~[sponge-mixin-0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5.jar:0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5] at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.transformer.TargetClassContext.applyMixins(TargetClassContext.java:403) ~[sponge-mixin-0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5.jar:0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5] at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.transformer.MixinProcessor.applyMixins(MixinProcessor.java:363) ~[sponge-mixin-0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5.jar:0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5] at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.transformer.MixinTransformer.transformClass(MixinTransformer.java:234) ~[sponge-mixin-0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5.jar:0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5] at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.transformer.MixinTransformer.transformClassBytes(MixinTransformer.java:202) ~[sponge-mixin-0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5.jar:0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5] at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.launch.knot.KnotClassDelegate.getPostMixinClassByteArray(KnotClassDelegate.java:422) ~[fabric-loader-0.14.24.jar:?] at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.launch.knot.KnotClassDelegate.tryLoadClass(KnotClassDelegate.java:323) ~[fabric-loader-0.14.24.jar:?] at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.launch.knot.KnotClassDelegate.loadClass(KnotClassDelegate.java:218) ~[fabric-loader-0.14.24.jar:?] at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.launch.knot.KnotClassLoader.loadClass(KnotClassLoader.java:119) ~[fabric-loader-0.14.24.jar:?] at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:525) ~[?:?] at net.minecraft.class_6396.handler$cmo001$iris$fillSystemDetails(class_6396.java:1025) ~[client-intermediary.jar:?] at net.minecraft.class_6396.(class_6396.java:58) ~[client-intermediary.jar:?] at net.minecraft.class_128.(class_128.java:34) ~[client-intermediary.jar:?] at net.minecraft.class_128.method_24305(class_128.java:274) ~[client-intermediary.jar:?] at net.minecraft.client.main.Main.main(Main.java:164) ~[fabric-loader-0.14.24-1.20.1.jar:?] at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.game.minecraft.MinecraftGameProvider.launch(MinecraftGameProvider.java:470) ~[fabric-loader-0.14.24.jar:?] at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.launch.knot.Knot.launch(Knot.java:74) ~[fabric-loader-0.14.24.jar:?] at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.launch.knot.KnotClient.main(KnotClient.java:23) ~[fabric-loader-0.14.24.jar:?] [16:32:49] [main/ERROR]: Minecraft has crashed! net.fabricmc.loader.impl.FormattedException: java.lang.RuntimeException: Mixin transformation of net.minecraft.class_437 failed at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.FormattedException.ofLocalized(FormattedException.java:63) ~[fabric-loader-0.14.24.jar:?] at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.game.minecraft.MinecraftGameProvider.launch(MinecraftGameProvider.java:472) ~[fabric-loader-0.14.24.jar:?] at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.launch.knot.Knot.launch(Knot.java:74) ~[fabric-loader-0.14.24.jar:?] at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.launch.knot.KnotClient.main(KnotClient.java:23) ~[fabric-loader-0.14.24.jar:?] Caused by: java.lang.RuntimeException: Mixin transformation of net.minecraft.class_437 failed at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.launch.knot.KnotClassDelegate.getPostMixinClassByteArray(KnotClassDelegate.java:427) ~[fabric-loader-0.14.24.jar:?] at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.launch.knot.KnotClassDelegate.tryLoadClass(KnotClassDelegate.java:323) ~[fabric-loader-0.14.24.jar:?] at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.launch.knot.KnotClassDelegate.loadClass(KnotClassDelegate.java:218) ~[fabric-loader-0.14.24.jar:?] at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.launch.knot.KnotClassLoader.loadClass(KnotClassLoader.java:119) ~[fabric-loader-0.14.24.jar:?] at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:525) ~[?:?] at net.minecraft.class_6396.handler$cmo001$iris$fillSystemDetails(class_6396.java:1025) ~[client-intermediary.jar:?] at net.minecraft.class_6396.(class_6396.java:58) ~[client-intermediary.jar:?] at net.minecraft.class_128.(class_128.java:34) ~[client-intermediary.jar:?] at net.minecraft.class_128.method_24305(class_128.java:274) ~[client-intermediary.jar:?] at net.minecraft.client.main.Main.main(Main.java:164) ~[fabric-loader-0.14.24-1.20.1.jar:?] at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.game.minecraft.MinecraftGameProvider.launch(MinecraftGameProvider.java:470) ~[fabric-loader-0.14.24.jar:?] ... 2 more Caused by: org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.transformer.throwables.MixinTransformerError: An unexpected critical error was encountered at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.transformer.MixinProcessor.applyMixins(MixinProcessor.java:392) ~[sponge-mixin-0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5.jar:0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5] at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.transformer.MixinTransformer.transformClass(MixinTransformer.java:234) ~[sponge-mixin-0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5.jar:0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5] at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.transformer.MixinTransformer.transformClassBytes(MixinTransformer.java:202) ~[sponge-mixin-0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5.jar:0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5] at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.launch.knot.KnotClassDelegate.getPostMixinClassByteArray(KnotClassDelegate.java:422) ~[fabric-loader-0.14.24.jar:?] at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.launch.knot.KnotClassDelegate.tryLoadClass(KnotClassDelegate.java:323) ~[fabric-loader-0.14.24.jar:?] at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.launch.knot.KnotClassDelegate.loadClass(KnotClassDelegate.java:218) ~[fabric-loader-0.14.24.jar:?] at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.launch.knot.KnotClassLoader.loadClass(KnotClassLoader.java:119) ~[fabric-loader-0.14.24.jar:?] at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:525) ~[?:?] at net.minecraft.class_6396.handler$cmo001$iris$fillSystemDetails(class_6396.java:1025) ~[client-intermediary.jar:?] at net.minecraft.class_6396.(class_6396.java:58) ~[client-intermediary.jar:?] at net.minecraft.class_128.(class_128.java:34) ~[client-intermediary.jar:?] at net.minecraft.class_128.method_24305(class_128.java:274) ~[client-intermediary.jar:?] at net.minecraft.client.main.Main.main(Main.java:164) ~[fabric-loader-0.14.24-1.20.1.jar:?] at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.game.minecraft.MinecraftGameProvider.launch(MinecraftGameProvider.java:470) ~[fabric-loader-0.14.24.jar:?] ... 2 more Caused by: org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.throwables.MixinApplyError: Mixin [cloth-client-events-v0.mixins.json:MixinScreen from mod cloth-client-events-v0] from phase [DEFAULT] in config [cloth-client-events-v0.mixins.json] FAILED during APPLY at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.transformer.MixinProcessor.handleMixinError(MixinProcessor.java:638) ~[sponge-mixin-0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5.jar:0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5] at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.transformer.MixinProcessor.handleMixinApplyError(MixinProcessor.java:589) ~[sponge-mixin-0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5.jar:0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5] at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.transformer.MixinProcessor.applyMixins(MixinProcessor.java:379) ~[sponge-mixin-0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5.jar:0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5] at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.transformer.MixinTransformer.transformClass(MixinTransformer.java:234) ~[sponge-mixin-0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5.jar:0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5] at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.transformer.MixinTransformer.transformClassBytes(MixinTransformer.java:202) ~[sponge-mixin-0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5.jar:0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5] at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.launch.knot.KnotClassDelegate.getPostMixinClassByteArray(KnotClassDelegate.java:422) ~[fabric-loader-0.14.24.jar:?] at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.launch.knot.KnotClassDelegate.tryLoadClass(KnotClassDelegate.java:323) ~[fabric-loader-0.14.24.jar:?] at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.launch.knot.KnotClassDelegate.loadClass(KnotClassDelegate.java:218) ~[fabric-loader-0.14.24.jar:?] at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.launch.knot.KnotClassLoader.loadClass(KnotClassLoader.java:119) ~[fabric-loader-0.14.24.jar:?] at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:525) ~[?:?] at net.minecraft.class_6396.handler$cmo001$iris$fillSystemDetails(class_6396.java:1025) ~[client-intermediary.jar:?] at net.minecraft.class_6396.(class_6396.java:58) ~[client-intermediary.jar:?] at net.minecraft.class_128.(class_128.java:34) ~[client-intermediary.jar:?] at net.minecraft.class_128.method_24305(class_128.java:274) ~[client-intermediary.jar:?] at net.minecraft.client.main.Main.main(Main.java:164) ~[fabric-loader-0.14.24-1.20.1.jar:?] at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.game.minecraft.MinecraftGameProvider.launch(MinecraftGameProvider.java:470) ~[fabric-loader-0.14.24.jar:?] ... 2 more Caused by: org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.injection.throwables.InvalidInjectionException: Critical injection failure: @Inject annotation on onPreDraw could not find any targets matching 'Lnet/minecraft/class_437;method_25394(Lnet/minecraft/class_4587;IIF)V' in net.minecraft.class_437. Using refmap cloth-client-events-v0-cloth-client-events-v0-refmap.json [PREINJECT Applicator Phase -> cloth-client-events-v0.mixins.json:MixinScreen from mod cloth-client-events-v0 -> Prepare Injections -> -> handler$zol000$cloth-client-events-v0$onPreDraw(Lnet/minecraft/class_4587;IIFLorg/spongepowered/asm/mixin/injection/callback/CallbackInfo;)V -> Parse] at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.injection.struct.InjectionInfo.validateTargets(InjectionInfo.java:656) ~[sponge-mixin-0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5.jar:0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5] at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.injection.struct.InjectionInfo.findTargets(InjectionInfo.java:587) ~[sponge-mixin-0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5.jar:0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5] at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.injection.struct.InjectionInfo.readAnnotation(InjectionInfo.java:330) ~[sponge-mixin-0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5.jar:0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5] at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.injection.struct.InjectionInfo.(InjectionInfo.java:316) ~[sponge-mixin-0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5.jar:0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5] at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.injection.struct.InjectionInfo.(InjectionInfo.java:308) ~[sponge-mixin-0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5.jar:0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5] at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.injection.struct.CallbackInjectionInfo.(CallbackInjectionInfo.java:46) ~[sponge-mixin-0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5.jar:0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5] at jdk.internal.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance0(Native Method) ~[?:?] at jdk.internal.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.java:77) ~[?:?] at jdk.internal.reflect.DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.java:45) ~[?:?] at java.lang.reflect.Constructor.newInstanceWithCaller(Constructor.java:499) ~[?:?] at java.lang.reflect.Constructor.newInstance(Constructor.java:480) ~[?:?] at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.injection.struct.InjectionInfo$InjectorEntry.create(InjectionInfo.java:149) ~[sponge-mixin-0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5.jar:0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5] at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.injection.struct.InjectionInfo.parse(InjectionInfo.java:708) ~[sponge-mixin-0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5.jar:0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5] at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.transformer.MixinTargetContext.prepareInjections(MixinTargetContext.java:1329) ~[sponge-mixin-0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5.jar:0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5] at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.transformer.MixinApplicatorStandard.prepareInjections(MixinApplicatorStandard.java:1053) ~[sponge-mixin-0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5.jar:0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5] at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.transformer.MixinApplicatorStandard.applyMixin(MixinApplicatorStandard.java:395) ~[sponge-mixin-0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5.jar:0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5] at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.transformer.MixinApplicatorStandard.apply(MixinApplicatorStandard.java:327) ~[sponge-mixin-0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5.jar:0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5] at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.transformer.TargetClassContext.apply(TargetClassContext.java:421) ~[sponge-mixin-0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5.jar:0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5] at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.transformer.TargetClassContext.applyMixins(TargetClassContext.java:403) ~[sponge-mixin-0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5.jar:0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5] at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.transformer.MixinProcessor.applyMixins(MixinProcessor.java:363) ~[sponge-mixin-0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5.jar:0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5] at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.transformer.MixinTransformer.transformClass(MixinTransformer.java:234) ~[sponge-mixin-0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5.jar:0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5] at org.spongepowered.asm.mixin.transformer.MixinTransformer.transformClassBytes(MixinTransformer.java:202) ~[sponge-mixin-0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5.jar:0.12.5+mixin.0.8.5] at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.launch.knot.KnotClassDelegate.getPostMixinClassByteArray(KnotClassDelegate.java:422) ~[fabric-loader-0.14.24.jar:?] at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.launch.knot.KnotClassDelegate.tryLoadClass(KnotClassDelegate.java:323) ~[fabric-loader-0.14.24.jar:?] at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.launch.knot.KnotClassDelegate.loadClass(KnotClassDelegate.java:218) ~[fabric-loader-0.14.24.jar:?] at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.launch.knot.KnotClassLoader.loadClass(KnotClassLoader.java:119) ~[fabric-loader-0.14.24.jar:?] at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:525) ~[?:?] at net.minecraft.class_6396.handler$cmo001$iris$fillSystemDetails(class_6396.java:1025) ~[client-intermediary.jar:?] at net.minecraft.class_6396.(class_6396.java:58) ~[client-intermediary.jar:?] at net.minecraft.class_128.(class_128.java:34) ~[client-intermediary.jar:?] at net.minecraft.class_128.method_24305(class_128.java:274) ~[client-intermediary.jar:?] at net.minecraft.client.main.Main.main(Main.java:164) ~[fabric-loader-0.14.24-1.20.1.jar:?] at net.fabricmc.loader.impl.game.minecraft.MinecraftGameProvider.launch(MinecraftGameProvider.java:470) ~[fabric-loader-0.14.24.jar:?] ... 2 more 
 
   submitted by    klugheit    to    fabricmc  [link]   [comments]


2023.09.29 19:32 Lillian_Madwhip Lily Madwhip Must Die : Chapter 20 - Seeing Double (Again)
I don’t want to die.
 I know sometimes I act like I do, sometimes I might even say I do, but I don’t really mean it. What I really mean is that I want things to be different. Like I want to eat pizza for dinner, not tuna noodle casserole with those weird spirally noodles and Velveeta cheese microwaved onto it. I’ll still eat it, even though it feels like slugs in my mouth and tastes like vomit, because I know if I don’t it’ll be waiting for me in the morning and I’ll be expected to have it for breakfast, but I’ll say I wish I was dead so my mom and dad understand just how much I hate tuna noodle casserole.
 “I don’t know what tuna noodle casserole is,” says Dumah.
 “It’s a war crime,” I tell him.
 “I see.”
 Dumah is digging a hole. His scythe thingy apparently is like a Swiss-army scythe and can just snap shut and then snap open in the form of a shovel. When he started, I thought he was digging my grave, since his plan is apparently to just let me die.
 “What happens to angels when they die?” I ask him.
 “We don’t,” he replies, tossing another shovelful of dirt onto the pile.
 I think back to seeing Nathaniel getting split open from his chest to the top of his head and seeing all the stuff inside him. Abaddon was pretty angry about that. Or was he pretending? He could have been pretending. But Nathaniel didn’t die. Abaddon took him to that doctor and had her stitch him back together. I wonder how he’s doing. What must it feel like to not be able to die but get ripped in half like that? I bet it sucks.
 Mot answers my question by howling in pain down the street. He’s still hollering things at us but he can’t see us in his current state so he’s not really a threat. Every now and then he cries out and it sounds pained and I feel bad that he got cut open by a trident and then mauled by a Cleaner ball.
 “Then what’s the point of all this?” I ask. “Samael gets loose, hurts people, takes over the Veil, we fight him but we can’t kill him so it’s like that thing in chess games where you both got just your kings and nobody can win.”
 Dumah doesn’t answer, he just jams his shovel into the ground and scrunches it around for a bit. I can’t tell if he’s really focused on this hole he’s digging or trying to avoid answering my question.
 “Are you really focused on digging that hole or trying to not answer me?”
 He looks up for just the briefest moment. “Both.” Then goes back to avoiding the question by digging his hole.
 I wander over to the wreckage of the Cleaner ball and pull some janky metal bits out. I grab so many that I need to use my shirt to carry them, but I tore my shirt and it makes a terrible carry bag. Also, there’s a bunch of sticky blood on my clothes still from my tummy wound that looks like it’s seeping a bit. I keep forgetting I’ve got it since the pain got taken away. I never did wipe that rune off my forehead. I wish I had a mirror.
 A full-length mirror appears in the street next to me. It looks just like one my mom used to have in her walk-in closet. Of course a mirror just appears. I forget where I am sometimes. Yep, the rune is still on my forehead, crusty around the edges but wet-looking like the blood Samael wrote it with just won’t dry. Holy crap, I look like a wreck. I’m all covered with dirt and specks of blood. My eyes look really tired. Oh right, I am really tired.
 The mirror tips backward and falls flat on the road since nobody was holding it up. It shatters into a zillion million pieces. That’s seven years bad luck. Maybe luck is like Donkey Kong though and when you reach a high enough bad luck score it flips back to zero.
 Dumah looks up from his hole. “What was that noise? What are you doing over there?”
 I leave a trail of janky bits on the ground as I trot back over to him with arms full of janky bits. “I’m just collecting janky bits,” I tell him, dumping out my collection on the grass.
 “Don’t play with Cleaner parts,” he says sternly, “you could cut yourself.”
 I’m already cut though so the point is kinda moot. I try to make a Cleaner parts tower, balancing them on each other, but they’re all so weird-shaped that they don’t stay up. When that gets boring, I grab my demon-killing trident and start digging my own hole next to Dumah’s.
 “How big do we gotta make these holes?”
 Dumah wipes his forehead as if he’s sweating. “It’s not about the size of the hole, it’s about the amount of dirt.”
 He tosses the shovel onto the lawn and climbs out of his hole. The dirt pile is pretty large at this point. He does a thing with his hand like he’s measuring the dirt pile’s height even though he can’t possibly tell how high the dirt goes. Or at least, I can’t.
 After several hand motions and a glance in my direction, he nods. “This should about do it.”
 “Do what?” This trident is terrible for digging.
 He picks up his shovel, snicker-snacks it back into a little thing, and tucks it away in his robe. Then he starts grabbing handfuls of the dirt at the top of the pile and mashing them together. He grabs some more and mashes that in too. After several handfuls of mash, he rubs the sides with his bony hands and smooths it out. I think he’s making like the dirt equivalent of a snowman. A dirtman.
 I step out of my very shallow trident-hole. “Do you want me to get some sticks for the arms?” I ask him.
 He doesn’t look up. “What? No. This won’t look believable if we give it stick arms.”
 I look at his creation. It’s kinda dumpy and ugly. “It’s dirt.” I scan the horizon for enemies.
 “Ashes to ashes and dust to dust,” he says as he scoops some dirt from the bottom and packs it onto the sides at the top.
 “Right, whatever that means.”
 “For aphar thou art, and unto aphar shalt thou return.”
 He’s not wrong, I’m pretty far from home. I feel lost at sea in this place. There isn’t even a raft or a desert island to hang out on and wait for rescue. I’m swimming and the ocean is endless and there’s sharks and Cleaner balls circling.
 Dumah drops to his knees and starts molding the bottom half of the dirtperson to have a pair of stumpy legs with goofy feet. He works fast, his bone fingers clicky-clacking so fast at times that they look like blurs. I hate to say it, but I’m impressed by the amount of detail he’s put into it, but it still just looks like dirt to me.
 “It still just looks like dirt,” I tell him as he carves little toes in the goofy feet.
 “It will look more natural once you breathe life into it.”
 “I beg your pardon?”
 “Once you breathe life into it, it will take on a more natural appearance.” He finally looks up at me with his empty eye sockets. “It is you, after all.”
 That thing is me? That lumpy dirt pile? It’s barely even my height. There’s no face on it. No hair on its head. It’s not even wearing any clothes. It’s a naked, Lily-high pile of dirt with leg stumps and arms stuck to its side.
 Another thought crosses my mind. “If I breathe life into it, do I have less life?”
 “Of course not,” he replies, “your soul is a nearly endless font of life-giving energy.”
 “Are you saying I’m like a human energon cube?”
 Dumah stands up and pretends to brush stuff off his robes even though there’s nothing there. He puts his hands on his hip bones and studies his dirt Lily. After a moment, he responds. “I don’t know what an energon cube is, but sure.”
 We both just stand there quiet for a moment. The street is dark, as always. The house in front of us has a light on in the window and there’s a lady and a guy dancing together. They look young and dressed in outfits like I’ve seen in my Nana’s photo album from the 50’s. Every now and then, the lady stops looking young and becomes an old lady about my Nana’s age. When she does, the guy disappears entirely. It’s always just for a second, and then they’re dancing again, holding hands and smiling at each other.
 I smile.
 Down the street, Mot screams, “I AM ETERNAL.”
 The moment is gone. Dumah puts a hand on my shoulder and pushes me toward the dirt pile. I look back at him and he just does that nod thing adults do where they’re saying “go do it,” without using their mouths. Go do what? Do I just blow on it?
 I blow on the dirt pile. Some dirt falls off. The pile doesn’t spring to life.
 “Not like that,” Dumah says in a tone like I’m supposed to just naturally know how to breathe life into a dirt pile. “You have to breathe your essence into it.”
 Breathe my essence. Right. What the Hell does that even mean? I lean in to where maybe the dirt Lily’s ear would be. I close my eyes and take a deep breath. I think of happy thoughts. My mom and dad and Roger are celebrating my birthday. There’s a cake and it says my name on it. They’re singing the song. Well, Mom and Dad are. Roger isn’t. I count the candles. I make a wish. I wish you guys were alive again. And then I blow out the candles.
 The dirt pile’s head falls off.
 Dumah gasps loudly. “What was that?!” he shouts, gesturing at the headless pile of dirt.
 “I don’t know!” I yell back. “I was thinking happy thoughts!”
 He shoves past me and starts packing a new dirt head onto his pile. “Happy thoughts?!” he scolds me, “Who told you to think happy thoughts? Just breathe your essence into the damned thing! This isn’t Neverland, this is the Veil!”
 “So you know Peter Pan but you don’t know tuna noodle casserole, Rambo, or energon cubes?”
 “Peter and Wendy is a literary classic,” says Dumah. “I personally escorted Mr. Barrie to his final reward back in 1937.”
 I walk away and throw my hands in the air. “Whatever!” Whatever. Whatever! Seriously, whatever. “I’m not an angel, you know! I don’t know how everything works here! I don’t even know how the TV remote makes the TV turn on! I’m twelve years old and I’m still studying math and science in school! Not special math like Algebra, just math math! Math so plain it’s just called math! You can’t keep treating me like I’m one of you!”
 Dumah finishes putting the head back on his dirt pile. He brushes nothing off his robe again. Then he turns to me. “You’re right.”
 “Yeah, I know!”
 “I’m sorry.” He walks over to me and puts a bony Skeletor hand on my shoulder again. “I’m not used to dealing with children.” He pauses a moment. “Live children, that is. Take my hand and let me guide you.”
 He extends his other bony hand toward me.
 “Uh, can we like, do the guiding without the hand-holding?” I ask.
 He drops his hand. “Sure.”
 Together, we go over to the dirt Lily with its head reattached. I stand in front of it and look at its faceless head. Dumah stands behind it and hovers over the two of us.
 “Take a deep breath, like you did earlier. But before you exhale, imagine a piece of your heart breaking off and traveling to your lungs. It settles in your alveoli. It feels warm. Just a warmth sitting in your chest, waiting for you to gently --GENTLY-- breathe it out your mouth.”
 What the Hell is an alveoli? I don’t ask this, I just imagine the rest. I can feel it, like a chip of stone, a piece of my heart goes up into my lungs. It stings. I feel dizzy. Maybe I’m holding my breath too long. I should breathe it out but my chest doesn’t feel warm yet. Gotta wait for the warmth.
 Dumah watches. “What are you doing?”
 Don’t interrupt me now, I’m so close.
 There it is, a nice warm feeling. I breathe it out slowly, making sure not to breathe out my nose because then I’m just blowing life essence out all over my upper lip and shirt.
 The dirt glows softly, like every grain is turning into a firefly. I used to catch fireflies in a jar and put in some twigs and leaves and watch them climb around with their little butts softly glowing like car blinkers. Meanwhile, Roger would run around with a badminton racket yelling “Look, Lily, stardust!” and swinging at the fireflies with it. My cousin Suzie used to call them “lightning bugs”. I think “fireflies” makes more sense since they don’t shoot lightning out their butts but they do look like they got little butt fires going on.
 The dirt pile glows from top to bottom, then there’s a flash that makes me look away. When I look back, I’m looking myself in the face-- again. I suddenly have a flashback to when Samael took the form of a bloody version of me and my heart leaps in my chest.
 “Oh God!” I stumble backward and fall in the hole Dumah dug.
 Other me blinks. She’s got no eyelashes or eyebrows or hair, but she does have a brown t-shirt and pants on somehow, which I find lucky since I don’t wanna have myself running around naked in other people’s dreams. As I watch, a big, crinkly bushel of hair sprouts out of her head like in a Chia Pet commercial, falling around her face and ears.
 Other me points at me in the hole. “It fell down,” she declares.
 “Yes, it did,” Dumah says dryly.
 “We’re lucky it didn’t fall apart.”
 What’s this “it”? I’m the original! Dirt-me seems to have the mistaken idea that I’m the one made from dirt. Oh no, I’m not the one made from dirt, am I? I swear I was the one just breathing life into the other just a moment ago. No, I saw the hair sprout out of her head, she’s definitely the copy. Does she not realize she’s the copy?
 “Hey!” I yell at dirt-me, “don’t get confused! You’re the fake Lily!”
 Dirt-Lily gets a puzzled expression on her face. She feels her cheek where the scar we got from a knife-fight with Lisa Welch is. It’s actually there. I feel my cheek too. I’m pretty sure I feel a scar. Oh! But she doesn’t have the mark from Samael on her forehead!
 “Ha!” I point at her. “You don’t have Samael’s mark!”
 She feels her forehead. Then she quickly turns to Dumah. “Which one of us is the real Lily?”
 He shrugs. “You’re both real.”
 I get up and brush myself off. Unlike Dumah, I actually get dirt on me for some reason. My butt is sore. I hope I didn’t bruise my tailbone. I heard if you break your tailbone they gotta put you down like a horse with a broken leg or Old Yeller with rabies.
 “Are you being intentionally unhelpful?” Other me asks him. I was about to ask him the same thing.
 “Or are you just being Dumah?” I finish our thought. Other me looks at me and nods. I feel kinda creeped out by it. She was just a pile of dirt being molded like clay just moments ago.
 “You’re both real,” he repeats, “you--” he points at other me, “were given life just now, but you are still Lillian Alexandra Madwhip.” He glances down at me in the hole. “And so are you.”
 “Well what happens if she dies?” I ask. I climb out of my grave that is actually in some ways the place of my birth rather than my death? Don’t think too hard on it, Lily, your head may still explode.
 “When you die,” Dumah says, emphasizing the word ‘when’, “It will appear to Samael and Abaddon as if your soul goes the route of all souls, but at a certain point the assembly will recognize that this isn’t a true soul and disperse your energy into the void where it collects and is used in the formation of new life down the line.” He runs a finger bone across his forehead bone. “At least, that’s the way I believe it should work. You could very well end up reaching the judgment line with the rest and be summarily judged.”
 “What happens if I’m judged?” I’m not sure which of us asks that. Other me offers me her hand to stand up with. Her hands are clean. Mine aren’t. And yet one of us was literal dirt and one of us wasn’t. How is the dirt one cleaner than the not-dirt one?
 Once again, Dumah doesn’t answer. He just clacks his jaw shut, then adjusts his robe like someone getting ready to go out for a night on the town. “Alright. We should get going. Azrael is likely already aware that one of the Cleaners has been taken out. I don’t know where his allegiance lies, but the fact that a Cleaner was sent after us to begin with doesn’t give me much hope.”
 Other me and I look at each other and shrug. I almost want to ask her if she knows what he’s talking about, but she’s me, so I know she doesn’t. In fact, she probably was about to ask me the same thing.
 As if this is all perfectly normal, the three of us walk down the dark street in the opposite direction of Mot who continues to shout and drag himself around in his own innards. Just the angel of death and silence, me, and my dirt-copy. Yessir, perfectly normal. Half a block away, I feel a nudge on my arm. I look over at other Lily. “Hey,” she whispers, “I’m still not okay with the whole dying thing. If you were me, you wouldn’t want to die either.”
 “I am you,” I tell me-- her. I tell her. We stop together and watch Dumah slowly shuffle along. “And I don’t. Want to die that is. Here, maybe this will make you feel better.”
 I dip my finger in the still leaky stab wound from the cow pitcher and get some blood on it. I had intended to use it earlier to smudge the rune off my forehead at the risk of my whole head melting, but now I use it to draw what I remember seeing from that moment with the mirror on other me’s forehead. It doesn’t burn or glow or anything when I’m done, so I can’t tell if it actually is the same rune or a rune at all. My memories of runes and how they work feels like it’s fading, kinda like memories of TV shows I watched when I was seven.
 Other me figures out what I’m doing. “Thanks,” she says when I’m done. “But doesn’t that just mean I won’t feel pain? I’m still... you know... killable.”
 “I don’t know what anything means anymore.”
 “Me neither.”
 “Come along, you two,” Dumah calls when he realizes we’re not right behind him, “there’s a nexus at the end of every road here. From one we can reach the Focus and from there, connect with Paschar and hopefully your friend Meredith and Barrattiel, assuming she found him.”
 I also hand other me a pair of janky Cleaner parts I managed to jam together so one forms a makeshift handle and the other a jagged blade. She doesn’t ask me what it’s for because she knows. We nod at each other silently and she sticks it in her pants pocket. I can’t believe she has pants pockets. If anything gives away that she’s not really me, it’s going to be that she’s got pants with actual pockets that can hold things like janky Cleaner parts jammed into the shape of a knife.
 I am so dead.
 “We,” says other me, “we are so dead.”
 “Right.”
 We are so dead.
 
   submitted by    Lillian_Madwhip    to    Lillian_Madwhip  [link]   [comments]


2023.09.19 22:29 MjolnirPants Jerry and the Warlock: Part 23
Part 22
 Uuuuuuuuuunnnnggggghhhhhh.
 Everything hurt. And I mean everything. Did you know that the backs of your eyeballs can burn and itch? Because they can. Have you ever felt unchecked swelling in your spleen? I have. My whole world was a potpourri of pain for I don't know how long. Burning, freezing, aching, pins and needles, if there was a flavor of pain or even discomfort, I felt it.
 As centuries passed by, I gradually became aware of a sensation that was not pain or discomfort. It was actually a little pleasant. A wet, rough-yet-soft something would occasionally interrupt the agony that had become my whole world. I first noticed it stroking my chest. A hundred years later, I noticed it on my leg. A couple decades after that, it was on my other leg.
 It continued like that for some time, until I finally began to feel the squishy, warm sliminess on my face, and some instinct buried deep inside me demanded that I object to it, even though I actually liked it.
 I sputtered, my own voice sounding distant and hollow to my ears. I managed to wave my arms around, smacking them weakly into a strangely familiar rubbery flesh. There were mysteries here, questions that needed answers, and that realization forced my mind to start rebooting.
 The wet tongue -because that is what it was- swiped at my face again, filling my nostrils with an ungodly stench that was nonetheless comforting.
 "Ixy," I croaked, my voice barely functional. It could barely be called a voice, even.
 I heard the whine of an utterly inhuman voice in response. I reached out weakly and found tentacles and spider-like legs and stalks that would hold eyes or mouths. I followed them back to where they came together and began to dig my fingers in.
 The whine changed character. A little more excited, a little relieved, a little happy. Tentacles pawed at me, wrapped around me and lifted me up, pressing me into the accidental bulk where the appendages all came together. The body-but-not-a-body which was at the core of Ixy.
 They cradled me close, stroking my limbs gently as my favorite unfathomable horror whined in relief that I was alive. For my part, I was so happy to see him again that I began crying. The situation may have had something to do with that, or maybe not. I dunno, but I love the big balooka.
 I don't know how long Ixy and I clung to each other, but it didn't feel like the eternity that had preceded it. In fact, it felt like not nearly long enough. But after a bit, Ixy lowered me to the ground and moved back, letting my vision return.
 Everything was too bright, and everything had a glow to it, as if I'd just woken up. Which, I suppose, was the case. I blinked until my eyes adjusted. I found myself further back in the same cave I had teleported to. I knew it because this was the place in this afterlife where Ixy liked to rest. Sometimes, I'd find smaller, dark gray versions of ixlets here. Ixy's harem. They were obviously female, in a disturbing way. They had dog-like bodies, like the other ixlets, but with human-like breasts on their chests, four or six of them. And large... You know. Genitals. Big, swollen, pulsating genitals that Ixy would idly fondle any time he was around them.
 It was honestly kinda gross, and I'm glad there weren't any here now. I mean, the stink is something I got used to a long time ago. But the sight of one of Ixy's tentacles throbbing as he.... Ugh.
 In any event, we were in the back. A nest made out of twigs and leaves filled the bowl-shaped floor, and I was laying in the middle of it. Bones of the animals Ixy feasted on surrounded me. I sat up slowly, my head still throbbing with an intense headache.
 I was naked, and as I rubbed my face and head, I realized I was hairless as well. I looked down and... Yup. Not a hair on my body.
 Stop giggling. Yes, in fact, as you might guess, I do keep a certain part of me waxed clean. I was referring to my chest and belly which -again, stop giggling- did indeed have a perfectly respectable amount of hair on it. I mean, I wasn't in danger of getting nicknamed Sasquatch or anything, but there was usually a noticeable amount of hair there. Inanna liked most of my body hair, she just didn't like picking that particular kind of hair out of her teeth...
 My head was as smooth as the rest of me, and my eyebrows were gone as surely as my beard was.
 "Crap," I swore. The dim lighting in the cave wasn't much, but it was enough for me to see that my body was still pink and raw, the result of a recent bout of regeneration. And it had apparently been my whole body. Even the soles of my feet were tender.
 "Note to self," I croaked out loud. "Do not dumbly stand and stare the next time a nuke goes off a bare mile away. Seek cover."
 Ixy rumbled his agreement. I looked at him and thought back, and sure enough, I seemed to recall the world turning black right as the pain overwhelmed me. I remembered a pressure enclosing me and though I didn't have time to clock any odors, I was sure I knew what happened.
 "Did you save me, boy?" I asked. Tentacles wiggled excitedly. "You did, didn't you? God, you're such a good boy." Ixy shrank, from the size of a compact car to the size of a large dog and squirmed his way onto my lap. I dig my fingers in and began to give him much more vigorous scritchies, and he rumbled and growled his approval.
 ----
 After a while, I stood and walked outside of the cave. The world around was even more nightmarish than the literal afterlife of nightmares had been. The thickest trees had managed to cling to their roots, leaving blackened, charred stumps behind. They ranged from ankle-height to slightly taller than me, their tops torn off violently and the jagged breaks still smoldering.
 Most of the trees had collapsed. Black, smoking shapes, all facing the same direction covered the ground. The mists were slowly returning, creeping back into the valley where the portal had been. Everything was black or charcoal gray, all of it bathed in the blueish silver glow of a full moon and a sky full of stars. With a start, I realized that even the ever-present overcast had been burned away.
 Ixy stood right next to me, and I reached down to stroke a mouth-on-a-stalk gently. "I'm sorry boy. I hate that I had to wreck your afterlife like this."
 "W o o d s c o m e b a c k," an inhuman voice responded. I jerked in surprise and stared.
 "You spoke," I said. "Crap. That's only the second time I've heard you speak. The last time..."
 The last time, Ixy had been the size of a skyscraper, and his words had boomed over the battlefield, shaking me to my core with their sheer power and reverberating against reality itself. This time, they had been a simple comment, albeit one made in a voice no human could emulate without a whole studio full of gear.
 My mind raced, trying to figure out why Ixy shrugging off the damage I'd done to his afterlife would be as important to him as declaring his support for me to a goddess who'd counted on him supporting her in a fight to the death with me. The possibilities were... Endless and disturbing.
 "Why did you speak?" I asked. Ixy just looked at me with about half of his two dozen or so eyes and whined, leaning against my leg. I gave him some more scritchies, which made him happy. But he didn't speak again. I decided to file this away for later thought.
 I surveyed the damaged landscape for a while with him. I think it ended up being a good thing that the portal was in the middle of a bowl-shaped valley, because it served to contain the blast. Down much lower than the level that this cave set in, I could see a massive crater, at least a few thousand feet across, and a few hundred feet deep. Inside and around that crater was nothing but ash. No charred trees, not even any boulders or rocks.
 "I wonder how much radiation this made..." I said, and then I recalled that I had a Geiger counter in hammerspace. I summoned it and the instruction booklet, read for a few minutes, then turned it on. It immediately began chirping rapidly.
 "Point oh six oh six six nine curies," I muttered, then flipped pages in the instructions. I did a little math and... "twenty two forty seven rems." I flipped another page and looked that up.
 "So I should be vomiting blood and melting into a puddle of goo, right now," I finished. Ixy whined again.
 "Well, I guess that solves that mystery," I said. "My regeneration protects me from radiation sickness. Julie will be happy to hear about that, though that still leaves the issue of figuring out how to imbue someone with regeneration without giving them a full well of power."
 Ixy rumbled some more and turned a figure eight between my legs.
 "Well," I said. "I guess I should go see if the portal is still there." I didn't have high hopes of that. My whole reason for using the nuke spell was my hopes that it would destroy the portal, and the subsequent wild magic would hurt or kill Martin.
 "You coming?" I asked and Ixy bounced and writhed. He was coming.
 I summoned a pair of boots, but didn't bother with clothes. There was nothing moving around us for at least a couple miles in any direction. We stomped down the hill, making our way towards the center of the valley, a mile away.
 We had to climb down into the enormous crater before we'd even made the halfway point. That's when I went ahead and summoned some hiking gear, because it was going to be filthy work. My face and hands were covered in soot and dirt by the time we made it down the steep incline of melted glass, ash and sand.
 The going got worse inside the crater, because the ground cover simply wasn't there. The whole surface was covered in a layer of molten sand, turned to glass by the heat. My feet crunched through it with every step, sinking almost ankle deep into the rough sand below it, only occasionally finding a rock or something with good footing. As we progressed further, the glass got thicker, which made it worse at first. I'd think it was going to hold my weight, then try to step forward, only for it to shatter halfway through the step.
 Finally, the glass got thick enough to walk on. While it was rough and embedded with all sorts of stones and pebbles, it was still slick and I had to move carefully. We got down to the middle and I looked into the magical spectrum.
 The portal was still there, hovering in the air about three hundred feet above me.
 "Fuck," I muttered. I wasn't even keeping count. If nuking myself and still failing didn't qualify me for an exception, nothing did. Today was going to be a free-for-all in the cursing department.
 "Do you know if Martin survived?" I asked Ixy. Ixy just rumbled and whined. I took that to mean he did not. I wondered idly if there would be any remains if he had not, but of course, the answer was no. The heat here would have been hot enough to vaporize bones, easily.
 I looked up at the portal, thinking. It was a no-brainer, really. I should go through right now. There was nothing to keep me on this side, unless I wanted to hunt down the Wendigo and finish the job. But I didn't. Not only did I not have any particular desire to engage in that sort of retribution, I didn't see the point of it.
 "Well, are you coming with me?" I asked. Ixy shrank down even further, small enough for me to carry him in my arms. I picked him up and let him get a grip on me, hanging on under his own power. Then I lifted myself up into the air and fed power into the portal. It didn't want to open at first, so I made sure the magic was domainless and poured even more in. I could feel it leaking through to the other side, and realized that it was repairing that side, which had been broken.
 "Huh, looks like it worked, just not in the way I expected," I muttered to myself. I kept feeding in more magic until finally, it opened.
 The same scene, a mountainous coastline, appeared. I rose up to it and then slipped through.
 ----
 Inanna Williams, Where Am I?
 Inanna tumbled through the portal, finding herself a couple thousand feet above the tops of the mountains. As she fell through the biting cold air, she realized that what had first looked like a river was actually the ocean, filling in the valleys between the mountains.
 She arrested her fall with magic and checked below her. She could see the straight lines of fields cut into the forest, and a smattering of houses. So either Norway or British Columbia. Off in the distance, she could make out a peninsula or island, covered in structures. It was about twenty miles away, she guessed. She angled herself towards it and pushed against the ground with magic, turning her slow descent into a rapid flight.
 She had only gone a little ways when she heard the roar of an enormous explosion and the world lit up around her. She spun, looking back at the portal, expecting to see Jerry there, pouring magic through it, but instead, all she saw was a great gout of white-hot flames. The fiery blast extended a mile or two out from the portal, and then vanished, replaced by the stiff breeze of air being sucked back in.
 "Holy shit," she muttered. What the hell had just happened?
 She flew back to the portal, but found the magic torn beyond repair. A floating mass of magic amid desert-hot air, slowly rising away from her. Tattered and torn, she was unable to repair it enough to open it.
 "Fuck," she growled. "Fuck, fuck fuck. Dammit, Jerry, what the fuck happened?"
 She spent something close to an hour trying to tie the threads back together before she gave up. The only way to fix it would be to send magic through from the other side.
 "Fuck it," she said. "Jerry will reach out to me as soon as he comes through. Maybe I should just go see if I can get a hotel or something, to wait for him."
 She flew off towards the city she'd spotted. She flew over it, discovering that it was an island and that the city extended to the islands and mainland around it. She found the downtown area and came down in it, dismissing her weapons and armor to avoid upsetting anyone. The first sign she saw was a garish red and orange one, with "Safari Shop" written on it in a pseudo-African font. That suggested British Columbia. But then she checked the cafe with outdoor seating across the road. Kinematograf. She listened to the people talking as they ate and that cinched it. She was in Norway.
 A half hour of wandering the streets confirmed it. She saw the word 'Tromso' several times, and she thought she remembered that being the name of a city in Norway. After getting her bearings, she made her way down to a slightly more upscale area south of the main docks, where a pair of cruise ships were currently moored, along with numerous smaller vessels, mostly pleasure craft. There, she found a nice hotel and went inside.
 At the desk, the clerk greeted her. "Velkommen, hvordan kan jeg hjelpe deg?"
 She wracked her brain for one of the countless phrases Jerry had taught her, finally settling on what she hoped was the correct one.
 "Snakker du engelsk?" she asked. The clerk smiled at her. "Yes. How can I help you?"
 "I'd like to book a room, please. The nicest room you have available, for one week, starting today."
 "How many guests?"
 "Just two adults," she said.
 She didn't think she'd be here more than a day or two, but maybe Jerry might want to take a break after he found his way through the portal. Besides, hotels were generally more willing to accommodate a big spender. The clerk typed at his computer for a moment, then met her eyes again.
 "We have a master suite available for the next week, due to a late cancellation. That would be forty six thousand, seven thirty two Krone."
 "Do you accept US dollars?" she asked. "Yes," he replied right away and began typing again. "Four thousand, three forty four dollars," he said a moment later. Inanna summoned her clutch purse from hammerspace below the desk, then dug her wallet out, presenting the card with the biggest balance. He accepted it and asked for ID after running it and getting an approval.
 Inanna had a few alternate identities, and the card was actually registered to one of the Group's subsidiaries, a company that existed only to give her and Jerry corporate cards that couldn't be traced back to them. Anyone looking into it would find a realistic-looking import/export business, complete with an office in a shared corporate building, a lease on a couple ships and a professional website. The office and ships didn't actually exist, but they would look like they did to anyone not hoofing it out to physically locate them.
 Martin didn't strike her as a particularly tradecraft-savvy threat. She couldn't dismiss the possibility of him having some hacking skills; his computer back at his home was a very nice one. But she felt like he'd stick to using magic, which most of this security would not protect against. So she dug out her real ID.
 "Inanna Williams," she said. "Of Bel Air, Maryland, United States."
 "Very good," the clerk responded, scanning her ID quickly and then printing up a pair room keys. He passed them over in a folder that had cutouts for them, and was otherwise stuffed with information about the hotels amenities and activities in the surrounding area.
 "You may take the elevator to the top floor, then proceed left out of it, all the way down the hall to the very end. Your room number is six twelve. The entire suite is yours, including the balconies." He beamed at her with professional anticipation of her reaction upon seeing the room. Inanna smiled back, sure she would love it. At over six hundred bucks a night, she had damn well better love it.
 She took the elevator up to the right floor and checked out the suite. It was very nice. Very modern, spacious, and with almost all the amenities of a small, luxurious apartment. A sign next to the room phone advertised room service, though you had to order from the local restaurants. But they would plate it and bring it up. Breakfast was included, and it had won a whole string of awards, the sign assured her. It also reminded her, as had a few signs in the lobby, that it was a kid-friendly place. She idly considered bringing the whole family here for a getaway, at some point. Probably best to do it with some cruise package, really.
 She stripped her clothes off and took a shower. When she was done, she lay on the bed and wondered where Jerry was.
 ----
 Inanna Williams, Aaaaaaaalllll Byyyyyyy Myyyyyyseeeeeeeelf
 "Yes," she told the clerk. "Another week."
 "Hmmm," he said. It was the same clerk as before, Elias Karlsen. He tapped at his keyboard a bit. "I'm afraid someone else has reserved the suite for a period overlapping that stay. Perhaps we could put you in another suite? We have a junior suite available which is not quite as large, but is well-"
 He stopped as Inanna produced the stack of thousand krone bills. It was wrapped in a gold-banded strip of paper that proclaimed it to contain '100,000kr'. She flipped through the purple bills right in front of him.
 "Somebody's going to be disappointed, Elias. Who should that be? The last hotel where I waited for my husband to finish his business and join me cost as much per night as my first week cost here. I was there for a month."
 She placed the stack on the counter and the clerk quickly snatched it up. "It seems I was mistaken, Missus Williams. The other party's reservation was for the junior suite. I would be happy to extend your stay. Shall I charge it to the same card?"
 "Yes," Inanna said. She leaned against the counter and tilted her head back. A whole week of waiting, and she was getting antsy. Worrying about what happened, worrying about whether Jerry was okay, worrying about what was going on back in Ohio, worrying about her children... She'd spent most of the past week worrying, too caught up in her concerns to even explore the town.
 The clerk finished his work. "You may continue to use the same cards, Missus Williams. We greatly appreciate your business."
 Inanna smiled at him and rapped her knuckles on the counter where the stack of bills had been until she turned her back. "Word of advise, Elias? Spend it all in the next two months. Every penny."
 Elias narrowed his eyes and lowered his voice. "Are they forgeries?" he asked. Inanna shook her head. "No, but you won't want to be holding onto those particular bills in two months time." She left out the part where they'd vanish and wipe any trace of their existence from whatever financial systems they'd gone through. Elias didn't need to know all that.
 She went back to her room, took off her clothes and walked out onto the balcony. She sat down in the deck chair she had arranged to give her a good view of the air two miles above Malangseidet, where the ruined portal was.
 She wiggled her butt, getting into the most comfortable position in the chair. She dialed a local steakhouse and ordered dinner, along with three bottles of wine, to be delivered to the concierge's entry, where it would be brought up to her by the cute little blonde collegiate who blushed bright red and tried to pretend like she wasn't staring every time she wheeled the cart in to find Inanna naked.
 Then she sighed, and settled in, her eyes locked on the point. If he hadn't shown up by the time her current reservation was through, she'd call Yarm to help. And Jane, Mot, Swaim, Ningur, Kratos, Azzazu, Sharina and any other gods she could think of who might help. Once she had them all rounded up, she'd track down Martin and kill him, no reprieve, no arrest, no surrenders. Just dead, as quickly as possible. And then she'd find Jerry.
 Part 24
 
   submitted by    MjolnirPants    to    JerryandtheGoddesses  [link]   [comments]


2023.09.08 00:40 CIAHerpes We found a town abandoned in the mountains. Something in it didn't want us to leave [part 1]
Three months ago, my wife and I were on our way to visit my mother-in-law, living alone far up in the White Mountains. I had been driving for five hours, and my wife, Betty, started saying she needed to use the bathroom and that she was starving. My full bladder agreed with her on the first issue, though I also had tried to make good time and get there before nightfall, when the street signs would become harder to read. I had never been to Betty’s mother’s house before, or even the county it lay in. 
 I pulled over the car on the side of Main Street, looking down the center of the town. It had everything a small, rural American town usually had- quaint houses with blue siding, 24-hour diners, hardware stores and tobacco shops, liquor stores and restaurants. Majestic mountains rose all around us, and the town itself was so high that I could see for miles. The air smelt clean and sweet. Everything was here, except…
 “No people,” my wife said, as if reading my mind. I looked over at her, frowning.
 “Yeah, this is bizarre,” I said. “This place looks like it was hit by the Black Death. Where is everyone?” My wife unlocked her door and got out, pulling a cigarette from her purse and lighting it. She gave the pack to me, and I took one. My wife looked pale and thin under the late afternoon sun, her black hair and dark eyes contrasting heavily with her light, Irish skin. Lately, she seemed to have lost weight, but she wouldn’t talk about it. Every time I asked her if anything was wrong, she said no, and I could get no more response from her than that.
 The fragrant Turkish tobacco of the Camel cigarette instantly woke me up. We didn’t smoke in the car, as it was brand-new and had cost me over $25,000 that I didn’t really have. The last thing I wanted was burn marks on the seats and ashes flying everywhere.
 We walked slowly down the sidewalk, looking around, searching for the slightest signs of movement. I didn’t even see an animal, except for an occasional fly buzzing past on its way to eat garbage. I looked into the diner window, and saw plates set out on the tables. Mold grew wild on the food, strange patches of green and red and black sprouting filaments and making the dishes unrecognizable. Next to the plates, I saw cell phones and even car and house keys. All the screens on the phones looked black, as if they had been sitting there for months. A slight layer of grime and dust had settled over everything. The door stood wide open, a cheerful sign reading, “We’re open. Come in!” displayed on the front.
 “That’s gotta be a code violation,” I said, pointing inside at the disgusting plates of mold and fungus. My wife laughed, but it sounded nervous and high-pitched, almost desperate in its cadence. “Listen, Betty, do you think we should… maybe, call the police or something?” She looked at me for a long moment, then sighed.
 “I mean, I don’t know,” she said. “What crime has been committed? It’s just an empty town. Maybe everyone’s at a… funeral?” Her voice raised hopefully. I laughed.
 “And they just abandoned their shops and restaurants with no workers and moldering food? And, by the way, there’s a cop car right there,” I said, pointing. It sat on four flat tires, covered in a thick coat of dust. The tires didn’t look damaged in any way. It seems they had just lost pressure over time without anyone to care for them. 
 Looking around at the other cars, I saw most were not in much better shape. Many of them had low or no air in their tires, and their windshields were covered in dirt and grime. It looked like a junkyard in the middle of a town- a junkyard that had been abandoned.
 “I’m calling the cops,” I said, pulling out my phone. I opened the screen and, of course, found I had no service. I tried sending a text to my mother, explaining the situation and telling her to call the authorities if she received it and send help immediately. I gave her the name of the town and the time. 
 I figured the chances of a text going through were far better than a call, since a brief moment of service could prove sufficient to transfer the message. 
 “Yeah, I’m not calling the cops.” I shook my head. “We don’t have a shred of service out here. What kind of town doesn’t have service on its own Main Street?”
 “We’re in the middle of the mountains,” Betty said. “Who the hell knows out here?” We kept walking down the street in silence. Betty went inside a few of the shops and tried flicking on the lights or looking for a phone. The electricity was apparently as dead as the town itself. I occasionally checked my phone, finding nothing had changed. 
 As we walked further along, I started to give up hope that help would be coming from outside. I finished my cigarette, and Betty lit another one and gave me the pack again. I sighed and took another Camel out of the pack, lighting it and inhaling deeply. It gave me something to do, at least, and it helped take my mind off the strangeness of this town.
 Then we came up to the police station, and I choked on the smoke as I saw what lay there before us. At first, I thought some vandal had used red spray paint to put up a bizarre slogan across the front of the station. And then I saw all the flies, and smelled the copper and iron, and I realized it likely wasn’t paint at all.
 “WE FOLLOW THE BLACK SUN,” it said in huge letters, each of them nearly six-feet tall and thickly painted across the windows and walls. My wife squinted at it, tilting her head in a girlish way, her black hair falling across her face. She took a long, thin hand and pushed it aside.
 “The Black Sun?” she said. “Is that a metal band? It sounds like those Norwegian Satanists you like to listen to- what’s the name, Burzum and Darkthrone and stuff?” She started walking forwards, trying to inspect the letters more closely. I put my hand on her shoulder, and pulled her back with a little more force than I intended. She stumbled, and gave me a dirty look. “Jonny, be careful, dammit! You almost made me fall.”
 “Sorry,” I said, my heart pounding in my chest, “but don’t get close to that. I’m fairly sure that’s… blood. And it might be a crime scene. You don’t want to touch it or trample the area if it is.” She looked at me, shocked, then glanced back at the letters, seeing the flies swarming around the coagulated, sticky mess.
 “Animal blood?” she asked helpfully.
 “Yeah, sure, I guess,” I said noncommittally. “OK, let’s go back to the car and get the hell out of here. I’ve seen enough. We need to get the cops here. Whatever is going on here, it’s way beyond anything we can deal with.” I turned around quickly, taking my wife’s hand. She pulled away.
 “Don’t start getting all worked up,” she said. “We haven’t seen any indication of anything… crazy, not yet. All we know is the people are somewhere, not here, and that someone vandalized the police station. I want to keep exploring.” I looked at her, amazed. She pointed past me at an old-looking church built of stone, probably from the 1800s. It stood near the end of the small downtown area, next to thick clusters of evergreen trees. It had a plaque outside that I couldn’t make out. The doors stood wide open, and the darkness inside seemed to beckon. 
 For a moment, I almost agreed with Betty; I almost said that I, too, wanted to go inside that church. I think it was what the French call, “l’appel du vide”, or the call of the void- that urge to suddenly jump when standing at the edge of a cliff, or to see if a car can go 130 miles an hour on the highway when it’s snowing. Then I shook my head quickly, as if awakening from a short dream. I looked back at Betty and laughed. There was no humor in it, however.
 “You must be crazy,” I said. “I want to get the hell out of here, now. There’s nothing to explore. Everyone’s gone, and if we keep going deeper into this, I have a feeling we’ll run into something far worse than anything we’ve yet seen.”
 “OK, how about this?” she said, making a thoughtful face, putting her finger up to her chin. “Why don’t you see if the cop car is unlocked, jump it with our car, and use whatever they have in it to call for help? They probably have a walkie-talkie or something connected to the state police network. If you really think we need a SWAT team here, then that’s probably the quickest way.”
 “No, let’s just leave,” I said, walking quickly back in the direction of our car. I saw the new Chevrolet Trailblazer off in the distance, contrasting heavily with the dirty and abandoned cars surrounding it. And then, as we got close, I saw it had four flat tires. I started running forwards, seeing the deep knife marks slicing open each of the sidewalls.
 “What in the hell…?” I said, stopping in my tracks. I looked around the town, but still saw no trace of anyone. “Why? Why would someone do this?”
 “To stop us from leaving, obviously,” my wife said, sounding unperturbed. “Look, we might be here for a while, so I’m going into that package store and grabbing a few things. Maybe some wine. And some cigarettes, because someone smoked most of mine.” She narrowed her eyes at me playfully.
 “Do you even realize what’s happening right now?” I asked, my voice rising unconsciously in anger and frustration.
 “No, do you?” she said.
 “This isn’t a joke,” I said, feeling hot and anxious. “We’re trapped here, and there’s letters written in blood, and now someone slashed our tires. Do you still think we don’t need the police?” She smiled at me.
 “You always worry too much,” she said. “Just calm down for once. Don’t have an anxiety attack on me. There’s no cell phone service to call for help if you do, remember.” That jogged something in my memory, and I looked questioningly at her.
 “Do you have any weapons on you?” I asked. “I have…” I reached in my pockets, frowning. I pulled out a small Swiss army knife. Its red surface looked dull from age, and even I thought it looked small and pathetic in my hand. “...this.” She laughed.
 “What are you going to do with that, kill a chipmunk?” she asked. “I mean, I think you can cut your nails with it, too, if you want to use a dull, crappy pair of scissors that barely cut paper.” She laughed at her own joke, then stopped when she saw the anger and fear on my face. Betty looked at me with a strange expression. 
 It was hard to perturb her. She had always been different from me. When I was stressed about money or work or anything else, she would laugh it off and say I was too serious. But this seemed to be stretching the boundaries. I felt in my heart we were in danger, and she didn’t seem to notice. “Look,” she continued, sighing, “let’s go get some more cigarettes and drinks and stuff, and then maybe we can take the car over to the police cruiser and jump it. Then we can call the cops, and AAA too, and just sit here and wait for the cavalry to arrive.” I sputtered.
 “This is a brand new car!” I yelled. “I’m not driving it on the rims over there. That’s going to destroy the rotors and could damage some… other stuff.” I didn’t actually know anything about cars, and she knew it.
 “No, I think it will be fine,” she said, smiling. “But I wouldn’t get my…” Her words were cut off by a siren that started up suddenly, deafening and shrill. It seemed to vibrate the air itself, and the dead town came to life in a cacophony of noise and vibration. I saw my wife’s lips moving as she tried to scream something, but I had no idea what it was. I covered my ears with my hands, which barely helped. And then, after about ten seconds, it stopped. My ears rang, a high-pitched whine like I had just walked into a flashbang. It went away slowly, and Betty’s voice came back to me, rising from nothingness in a crescendo, until I could make out her cadence and speech again.
 “...into the siren,” she said, her face unusually serious and drawn. The sun had started to go behind the mountains now, sending long shadows streaking across the road. Soon, it would be dark, and we would likely be trapped here for the entire night- or longer. Hiking out of here was an option, and the highway was only about five miles away. These thoughts passed through my mind as I saw shadows fall over Betty, before I realized I had no idea what she said.
 “What?” I yelled.
 “I said,” she rolled her eyes at this point, “we should go towards the siren. They have electricity. They probably have a landline and maybe there’s people there,” she said, still speaking far too loudly. I guessed her ears were ringing as well.
 “OK, you don’t have to yell,” I said. “I can hear you, and I don’t want to attract… the wrong kind of attention.” She pointed at the sliced tires of my car.
 “We already have, Jonny,” she said seriously.
 “Listen, I don’t like this,” I said. “I don’t want to be trapped in some nutjob’s basement a few hours from now, chained up against a wall and covered in blood, and think back on how I should have done something different. I think the safest plan is to leave this place now, right now. Let’s just grab some drinks and cigarettes and whatever from the store and hike back towards the highway on the main route. Maybe we’ll see someone on the walk, but we’ll definitely find help on the highway.” She thought about it for a fraction of a second then nodded.
 “OK, whatever,” she said. “Let’s go.”
  The plan worked at first. Betty ran into the package store while I kept watch outside, looking up and down the street for any signs of movement. I saw nothing, but from the slashed tires, I assumed we were being watched. Whoever “they” were, they knew when we were far enough away to vandalize the car.
 A minute later, Betty came out with a plastic bag. I saw nine or ten cartons of cigarettes in it and some plastic nips of Jack Daniels. She also had Coca-Cola and some water.
 “I thought you were grabbing a pack of cigarettes,” I said, narrowing my eyes. “Ten cartons? Why do we need ten cartons for a five-mile hike?”
 “We don’t need them,” she said, “but, you know, they’re expensive down in Connecticut. Much cheaper in this town.”
 “Yeah, I guess you can’t beat free,” I said, reaching into the bag and taking out a pack. We started walking out of town in silence. I didn’t even hear an animal stir. The regular buzz of the insects that chirped and squeaked throughout the White Mountains was missing here. It gave the town a supernatural eeriness, as if we had wandered into an apocalyptic wasteland where even the crickets had died. To break the monotony, I lit a cigarette. The flick of the lighter and the soft tread of our footsteps were the only sounds we could hear for miles.
 As we got further down Main Street, the shops and houses started to thin out. Soon after we passed the church, both sides of the street had turned to forest, and only an occasional house or farm broke the endless trees. The downtown area couldn’t be more than a quarter-mile long, but this town and the surrounding forest felt like it went on forever.
 “This is really spooky,” Betty said, shattering the silence. I was glad for a break, though I felt eyes on me as she spoke, as if we had somehow violated the sanctity of a graveyard with laughter.
 “I have never experienced anything as weird as this,” I said, whispering and getting close to Betty. I noticed she also spoke in a quiet voice, and she constantly glanced behind and around. She smoked a lot of cigarettes, nervously lighting one after the other, and she drank three of the nips on the way, chasing them down with Coke. I took one myself and downed it. The burning liquid seemed to revive me somewhat and clear my head. I chugged some soda to get the taste out of my mouth.
 Betty had opened her mouth to say something else, when the screaming erupted from all around us. The sun had long disappeared behind the mountains, and we were surrounded by thick curtains of darkness. I couldn’t see more than a few feet into the forest. Betty gripped my hand tightly.
 “OK, now I am really freaked out,” she whispered into my ear. We had both stopped and stood, holding hands as shrieks echoed through the trees. The light breeze carried a smell that nearly made me gag- the smell of decay and blood. “Do you think it’s a fox or a fisher cat or something?” I shook my head silently, then leaned close to her.
 “We’re going to run,” I said. “Back towards the town. It’s a lot closer. Ready?” She nodded grimly. “Go!” We started sprinting away, our footsteps bouncing off the pavement, far too loud. The screaming drew closer and something broke through the outer boundary of the woods. With twigs crunching and branches snapping, I saw a silhouette emerge into the road to my left. The smell of rotting flesh seemed overwhelming now.
 I only saw her for a second, but I knew, in that moment, that she wasn’t human.
 It looked like a woman, or at least, like the corpse of one. But she was clearly alive in some form, running and shrieking, sending out wails of pure agony and horror. The eyes snapped onto me. I met them for a brief moment. Even in the dim light of the Moon and the stars, I could see they were pure white, without pupils or irises. And yet, they seemed to see everything, even in the deepening shadows
 Long, stringy black hair ran down over her face and down her back. Papery skin hung tightly to the skull, and the mouth hung wide open, inhumanly wide, like the tendons and ligaments holding the jaw to the skull had been cut. The huge black pit of her mouth emanated those screams constantly, as if she didn’t need to breathe.
 On the body, parts of the skin were missing. I could see the gore and bones beneath, where the thin, fragile skin had broken. Purple and black sores shone from these spots. The long, skeletal hand of the woman ended up claw-like fingers, with the nails blackened and the bones sticking out at the end of each digit.
 She ran fast, gaining on us. And she wasn’t alone. I could see dozens more bodies breaking through the tree line now, a deafening howling emanating from them as they ran. I was breathing hard by this point. I could see the first buildings of the town up ahead. We only had to make it another hundred paces, and then we could lock ourselves in and barricade the doors and windows.
 I didn’t dare look back, but I heard the screaming just behind me. I felt a soft swipe across my back, the sharp, bony fingers dragging across the shirt for a brief moment. It gave me another adrenaline rush, and I pushed myself forward with all of my will, feeling my heart beating far too fast in my chest. I began to feel light-headed and see flashes of white light every time I blinked. I knew I would pass out if I had to go much farther. I hadn’t gone running in over ten years, probably since I was in high school. But I ran for my life just the same.
 Betty was in better shape than me, and she had gained some ground. She glanced back as she sprinted down the middle of the dark street. I saw her point to the church. It stood just ahead, the doors already opened, as if waiting for us, as if it knew we would be back. She veered sharply to the right and I followed close behind, panting and sweating like a madman. The doors were so close now. The shrieking behind me had been joined by a few others. With the last of my strength, I began an all-out sprint, hoping I wouldn’t trip over something and go flying into a car. It would mean the end of me- of that, I was certain.
 We ran through the doors into the church. I turned around, and saw the creatures had gone. Their screaming cut off as soon as we had entered, and now I saw no sign of them. It was as if they had vanished.
 I shut the doors of the church just the same, turning a deadbolt to lock them. Betty had her phone out, turning on the flashlight app to help me see in the dark church. I would have to also check for auxiliary entrances, but it was a start, just the same. And then I turned, and I saw what Betty had already noticed- the desecration of this holy place.
 The statue of Jesus on his cross had been broken off at the bottom of the beam, and now hung upside down from a rope that extended to the high ceiling, dozens of feet above our heads. His face had been slashed and cut, his nose and eyes now missing, and on the front of his chest, I saw a strange symbol carved deeply into the wood with what looked like blood.
 The sigil looked like an upside-down triangle within a larger upside-down triangle, and had lines curving out of the sides of the bottom. Connected to the lines of the larger triangle, at the bottom, I saw a line curving like a J, and on the other side, another line curved like a backwards J. The lines extended outwards, curving over a V. Around the sigil sat a thick, black circle. It definitely seemed magical, like something from a medieval textbook on witchcraft.
 “That’s the sigil of Lucifer,” my wife said quietly.
 “How do you know that?” I asked, and she shrugged.
 “I read a couple books on black magic when I was a teen,” she said. “That one stuck with me for some reason. That symbol- it’s eerie. I never forgot it.” I looked over at the font at the front of the church. Instead of holy water, I saw it was filled with blood.
 “I guess no one’s crossing themselves in here today,” I said, trying to break the harsh terror that threatened to overwhelm us.
 Then, as Betty moved her light around, I realized we weren’t alone in here. People sat in the pews, their heads bowed, silently praying. Dozens of people were in here with us, yet they made no noise, and no one turned their heads to look at us or say anything. An icy chill ran down my spine. I turned to Betty and pointed at the people.
 “Yeah, I see them,” she whispered, and began to creep slowly forward. I took out my phone and turned on my light as well, moving silently a few feet behind her. I shone the light at the first pew of people and gasped.
 They all had their throats cut. A waterfall of thick, coagulated blood stained the front of their bodies. The smell hit me at once- an overwhelming odor of rotting meat and iron. I gagged, turning to retch. Betty pulled me towards the back of the church. I searched for any other entrances, locking the ancient deadbolts on the doors. We ended up going to the rectory in the back, sitting on the priest’s couch. There were no bodies in here, and no smell but the musty scent of an old building and books.
 “Well,” Betty said, turning to me, barely concealing the terror in her eyes, “it looks like we found the townspeople. Some of them, anyways.”
 I said nothing, but instead put my phone down and sat in the darkness with her, putting my arm around her while she cried.
 
   submitted by    CIAHerpes    to    TheDarkGathering  [link]   [comments]


2023.09.08 00:36 CIAHerpes We found a town abandoned in the mountains. Something in it didn't want us to leave [part 1]
Three months ago, my wife and I were on our way to visit my mother-in-law, living alone far up in the White Mountains. I had been driving for five hours, and my wife, Betty, started saying she needed to use the bathroom and that she was starving. My full bladder agreed with her on the first issue, though I also had tried to make good time and get there before nightfall, when the street signs would become harder to read. I had never been to Betty’s mother’s house before, or even the county it lay in. 
 I pulled over the car on the side of Main Street, looking down the center of the town. It had everything a small, rural American town usually had- quaint houses with blue siding, 24-hour diners, hardware stores and tobacco shops, liquor stores and restaurants. Majestic mountains rose all around us, and the town itself was so high that I could see for miles. The air smelt clean and sweet. Everything was here, except…
 “No people,” my wife said, as if reading my mind. I looked over at her, frowning.
 “Yeah, this is bizarre,” I said. “This place looks like it was hit by the Black Death. Where is everyone?” My wife unlocked her door and got out, pulling a cigarette from her purse and lighting it. She gave the pack to me, and I took one. My wife looked pale and thin under the late afternoon sun, her black hair and dark eyes contrasting heavily with her light, Irish skin. Lately, she seemed to have lost weight, but she wouldn’t talk about it. Every time I asked her if anything was wrong, she said no, and I could get no more response from her than that.
 The fragrant Turkish tobacco of the Camel cigarette instantly woke me up. We didn’t smoke in the car, as it was brand-new and had cost me over $25,000 that I didn’t really have. The last thing I wanted was burn marks on the seats and ashes flying everywhere.
 We walked slowly down the sidewalk, looking around, searching for the slightest signs of movement. I didn’t even see an animal, except for an occasional fly buzzing past on its way to eat garbage. I looked into the diner window, and saw plates set out on the tables. Mold grew wild on the food, strange patches of green and red and black sprouting filaments and making the dishes unrecognizable. Next to the plates, I saw cell phones and even car and house keys. All the screens on the phones looked black, as if they had been sitting there for months. A slight layer of grime and dust had settled over everything. The door stood wide open, a cheerful sign reading, “We’re open. Come in!” displayed on the front.
 “That’s gotta be a code violation,” I said, pointing inside at the disgusting plates of mold and fungus. My wife laughed, but it sounded nervous and high-pitched, almost desperate in its cadence. “Listen, Betty, do you think we should… maybe, call the police or something?” She looked at me for a long moment, then sighed.
 “I mean, I don’t know,” she said. “What crime has been committed? It’s just an empty town. Maybe everyone’s at a… funeral?” Her voice raised hopefully. I laughed.
 “And they just abandoned their shops and restaurants with no workers and moldering food? And, by the way, there’s a cop car right there,” I said, pointing. It sat on four flat tires, covered in a thick coat of dust. The tires didn’t look damaged in any way. It seems they had just lost pressure over time without anyone to care for them. 
 Looking around at the other cars, I saw most were not in much better shape. Many of them had low or no air in their tires, and their windshields were covered in dirt and grime. It looked like a junkyard in the middle of a town- a junkyard that had been abandoned.
 “I’m calling the cops,” I said, pulling out my phone. I opened the screen and, of course, found I had no service. I tried sending a text to my mother, explaining the situation and telling her to call the authorities if she received it and send help immediately. I gave her the name of the town and the time. 
 I figured the chances of a text going through were far better than a call, since a brief moment of service could prove sufficient to transfer the message. 
 “Yeah, I’m not calling the cops.” I shook my head. “We don’t have a shred of service out here. What kind of town doesn’t have service on its own Main Street?”
 “We’re in the middle of the mountains,” Betty said. “Who the hell knows out here?” We kept walking down the street in silence. Betty went inside a few of the shops and tried flicking on the lights or looking for a phone. The electricity was apparently as dead as the town itself. I occasionally checked my phone, finding nothing had changed. 
 As we walked further along, I started to give up hope that help would be coming from outside. I finished my cigarette, and Betty lit another one and gave me the pack again. I sighed and took another Camel out of the pack, lighting it and inhaling deeply. It gave me something to do, at least, and it helped take my mind off the strangeness of this town.
 Then we came up to the police station, and I choked on the smoke as I saw what lay there before us. At first, I thought some vandal had used red spray paint to put up a bizarre slogan across the front of the station. And then I saw all the flies, and smelled the copper and iron, and I realized it likely wasn’t paint at all.
 “WE FOLLOW THE BLACK SUN,” it said in huge letters, each of them nearly six-feet tall and thickly painted across the windows and walls. My wife squinted at it, tilting her head in a girlish way, her black hair falling across her face. She took a long, thin hand and pushed it aside.
 “The Black Sun?” she said. “Is that a metal band? It sounds like those Norwegian Satanists you like to listen to- what’s the name, Burzum and Darkthrone and stuff?” She started walking forwards, trying to inspect the letters more closely. I put my hand on her shoulder, and pulled her back with a little more force than I intended. She stumbled, and gave me a dirty look. “Jonny, be careful, dammit! You almost made me fall.”
 “Sorry,” I said, my heart pounding in my chest, “but don’t get close to that. I’m fairly sure that’s… blood. And it might be a crime scene. You don’t want to touch it or trample the area if it is.” She looked at me, shocked, then glanced back at the letters, seeing the flies swarming around the coagulated, sticky mess.
 “Animal blood?” she asked helpfully.
 “Yeah, sure, I guess,” I said noncommittally. “OK, let’s go back to the car and get the hell out of here. I’ve seen enough. We need to get the cops here. Whatever is going on here, it’s way beyond anything we can deal with.” I turned around quickly, taking my wife’s hand. She pulled away.
 “Don’t start getting all worked up,” she said. “We haven’t seen any indication of anything… crazy, not yet. All we know is the people are somewhere, not here, and that someone vandalized the police station. I want to keep exploring.” I looked at her, amazed. She pointed past me at an old-looking church built of stone, probably from the 1800s. It stood near the end of the small downtown area, next to thick clusters of evergreen trees. It had a plaque outside that I couldn’t make out. The doors stood wide open, and the darkness inside seemed to beckon. 
 For a moment, I almost agreed with Betty; I almost said that I, too, wanted to go inside that church. I think it was what the French call, “l’appel du vide”, or the call of the void- that urge to suddenly jump when standing at the edge of a cliff, or to see if a car can go 130 miles an hour on the highway when it’s snowing. Then I shook my head quickly, as if awakening from a short dream. I looked back at Betty and laughed. There was no humor in it, however.
 “You must be crazy,” I said. “I want to get the hell out of here, now. There’s nothing to explore. Everyone’s gone, and if we keep going deeper into this, I have a feeling we’ll run into something far worse than anything we’ve yet seen.”
 “OK, how about this?” she said, making a thoughtful face, putting her finger up to her chin. “Why don’t you see if the cop car is unlocked, jump it with our car, and use whatever they have in it to call for help? They probably have a walkie-talkie or something connected to the state police network. If you really think we need a SWAT team here, then that’s probably the quickest way.”
 “No, let’s just leave,” I said, walking quickly back in the direction of our car. I saw the new Chevrolet Trailblazer off in the distance, contrasting heavily with the dirty and abandoned cars surrounding it. And then, as we got close, I saw it had four flat tires. I started running forwards, seeing the deep knife marks slicing open each of the sidewalls.
 “What in the hell…?” I said, stopping in my tracks. I looked around the town, but still saw no trace of anyone. “Why? Why would someone do this?”
 “To stop us from leaving, obviously,” my wife said, sounding unperturbed. “Look, we might be here for a while, so I’m going into that package store and grabbing a few things. Maybe some wine. And some cigarettes, because someone smoked most of mine.” She narrowed her eyes at me playfully.
 “Do you even realize what’s happening right now?” I asked, my voice rising unconsciously in anger and frustration.
 “No, do you?” she said.
 “This isn’t a joke,” I said, feeling hot and anxious. “We’re trapped here, and there’s letters written in blood, and now someone slashed our tires. Do you still think we don’t need the police?” She smiled at me.
 “You always worry too much,” she said. “Just calm down for once. Don’t have an anxiety attack on me. There’s no cell phone service to call for help if you do, remember.” That jogged something in my memory, and I looked questioningly at her.
 “Do you have any weapons on you?” I asked. “I have…” I reached in my pockets, frowning. I pulled out a small Swiss army knife. Its red surface looked dull from age, and even I thought it looked small and pathetic in my hand. “...this.” She laughed.
 “What are you going to do with that, kill a chipmunk?” she asked. “I mean, I think you can cut your nails with it, too, if you want to use a dull, crappy pair of scissors that barely cut paper.” She laughed at her own joke, then stopped when she saw the anger and fear on my face. Betty looked at me with a strange expression. 
 It was hard to perturb her. She had always been different from me. When I was stressed about money or work or anything else, she would laugh it off and say I was too serious. But this seemed to be stretching the boundaries. I felt in my heart we were in danger, and she didn’t seem to notice. “Look,” she continued, sighing, “let’s go get some more cigarettes and drinks and stuff, and then maybe we can take the car over to the police cruiser and jump it. Then we can call the cops, and AAA too, and just sit here and wait for the cavalry to arrive.” I sputtered.
 “This is a brand new car!” I yelled. “I’m not driving it on the rims over there. That’s going to destroy the rotors and could damage some… other stuff.” I didn’t actually know anything about cars, and she knew it.
 “No, I think it will be fine,” she said, smiling. “But I wouldn’t get my…” Her words were cut off by a siren that started up suddenly, deafening and shrill. It seemed to vibrate the air itself, and the dead town came to life in a cacophony of noise and vibration. I saw my wife’s lips moving as she tried to scream something, but I had no idea what it was. I covered my ears with my hands, which barely helped. And then, after about ten seconds, it stopped. My ears rang, a high-pitched whine like I had just walked into a flashbang. It went away slowly, and Betty’s voice came back to me, rising from nothingness in a crescendo, until I could make out her cadence and speech again.
 “...into the siren,” she said, her face unusually serious and drawn. The sun had started to go behind the mountains now, sending long shadows streaking across the road. Soon, it would be dark, and we would likely be trapped here for the entire night- or longer. Hiking out of here was an option, and the highway was only about five miles away. These thoughts passed through my mind as I saw shadows fall over Betty, before I realized I had no idea what she said.
 “What?” I yelled.
 “I said,” she rolled her eyes at this point, “we should go towards the siren. They have electricity. They probably have a landline and maybe there’s people there,” she said, still speaking far too loudly. I guessed her ears were ringing as well.
 “OK, you don’t have to yell,” I said. “I can hear you, and I don’t want to attract… the wrong kind of attention.” She pointed at the sliced tires of my car.
 “We already have, Jonny,” she said seriously.
 “Listen, I don’t like this,” I said. “I don’t want to be trapped in some nutjob’s basement a few hours from now, chained up against a wall and covered in blood, and think back on how I should have done something different. I think the safest plan is to leave this place now, right now. Let’s just grab some drinks and cigarettes and whatever from the store and hike back towards the highway on the main route. Maybe we’ll see someone on the walk, but we’ll definitely find help on the highway.” She thought about it for a fraction of a second then nodded.
 “OK, whatever,” she said. “Let’s go.”
 ***
 The plan worked at first. Betty ran into the package store while I kept watch outside, looking up and down the street for any signs of movement. I saw nothing, but from the slashed tires, I assumed we were being watched. Whoever “they” were, they knew when we were far enough away to vandalize the car.
 A minute later, Betty came out with a plastic bag. I saw nine or ten cartons of cigarettes in it and some plastic nips of Jack Daniels. She also had Coca-Cola and some water.
 “I thought you were grabbing a pack of cigarettes,” I said, narrowing my eyes. “Ten cartons? Why do we need ten cartons for a five-mile hike?”
 “We don’t need them,” she said, “but, you know, they’re expensive down in Connecticut. Much cheaper in this town.”
 “Yeah, I guess you can’t beat free,” I said, reaching into the bag and taking out a pack. We started walking out of town in silence. I didn’t even hear an animal stir. The regular buzz of the insects that chirped and squeaked throughout the White Mountains was missing here. It gave the town a supernatural eeriness, as if we had wandered into an apocalyptic wasteland where even the crickets had died. To break the monotony, I lit a cigarette. The flick of the lighter and the soft tread of our footsteps were the only sounds we could hear for miles.
 As we got further down Main Street, the shops and houses started to thin out. Soon after we passed the church, both sides of the street had turned to forest, and only an occasional house or farm broke the endless trees. The downtown area couldn’t be more than a quarter-mile long, but this town and the surrounding forest felt like it went on forever.
 “This is really spooky,” Betty said, shattering the silence. I was glad for a break, though I felt eyes on me as she spoke, as if we had somehow violated the sanctity of a graveyard with laughter.
 “I have never experienced anything as weird as this,” I said, whispering and getting close to Betty. I noticed she also spoke in a quiet voice, and she constantly glanced behind and around. She smoked a lot of cigarettes, nervously lighting one after the other, and she drank three of the nips on the way, chasing them down with Coke. I took one myself and downed it. The burning liquid seemed to revive me somewhat and clear my head. I chugged some soda to get the taste out of my mouth.
 Betty had opened her mouth to say something else, when the screaming erupted from all around us. The sun had long disappeared behind the mountains, and we were surrounded by thick curtains of darkness. I couldn’t see more than a few feet into the forest. Betty gripped my hand tightly.
 “OK, now I am really freaked out,” she whispered into my ear. We had both stopped and stood, holding hands as shrieks echoed through the trees. The light breeze carried a smell that nearly made me gag- the smell of decay and blood. “Do you think it’s a fox or a fisher cat or something?” I shook my head silently, then leaned close to her.
 “We’re going to run,” I said. “Back towards the town. It’s a lot closer. Ready?” She nodded grimly. “Go!” We started sprinting away, our footsteps bouncing off the pavement, far too loud. The screaming drew closer and something broke through the outer boundary of the woods. With twigs crunching and branches snapping, I saw a silhouette emerge into the road to my left. The smell of rotting flesh seemed overwhelming now.
 I only saw her for a second, but I knew, in that moment, that she wasn’t human.
 It looked like a woman, or at least, like the corpse of one. But she was clearly alive in some form, running and shrieking, sending out wails of pure agony and horror. The eyes snapped onto me. I met them for a brief moment. Even in the dim light of the Moon and the stars, I could see they were pure white, without pupils or irises. And yet, they seemed to see everything, even in the deepening shadows
 Long, stringy black hair ran down over her face and down her back. Papery skin hung tightly to the skull, and the mouth hung wide open, inhumanly wide, like the tendons and ligaments holding the jaw to the skull had been cut. The huge black pit of her mouth emanated those screams constantly, as if she didn’t need to breathe.
 On the body, parts of the skin were missing. I could see the gore and bones beneath, where the thin, fragile skin had broken. Purple and black sores shone from these spots. The long, skeletal hand of the woman ended up claw-like fingers, with the nails blackened and the bones sticking out at the end of each digit.
 She ran fast, gaining on us. And she wasn’t alone. I could see dozens more bodies breaking through the tree line now, a deafening howling emanating from them as they ran. I was breathing hard by this point. I could see the first buildings of the town up ahead. We only had to make it another hundred paces, and then we could lock ourselves in and barricade the doors and windows.
 I didn’t dare look back, but I heard the screaming just behind me. I felt a soft swipe across my back, the sharp, bony fingers dragging across the shirt for a brief moment. It gave me another adrenaline rush, and I pushed myself forward with all of my will, feeling my heart beating far too fast in my chest. I began to feel light-headed and see flashes of white light every time I blinked. I knew I would pass out if I had to go much farther. I hadn’t gone running in over ten years, probably since I was in high school. But I ran for my life just the same.
 Betty was in better shape than me, and she had gained some ground. She glanced back as she sprinted down the middle of the dark street. I saw her point to the church. It stood just ahead, the doors already opened, as if waiting for us, as if it knew we would be back. She veered sharply to the right and I followed close behind, panting and sweating like a madman. The doors were so close now. The shrieking behind me had been joined by a few others. With the last of my strength, I began an all-out sprint, hoping I wouldn’t trip over something and go flying into a car. It would mean the end of me- of that, I was certain.
 We ran through the doors into the church. I turned around, and saw the creatures had gone. Their screaming cut off as soon as we had entered, and now I saw no sign of them. It was as if they had vanished.
 I shut the doors of the church just the same, turning a deadbolt to lock them. Betty had her phone out, turning on the flashlight app to help me see in the dark church. I would have to also check for auxiliary entrances, but it was a start, just the same. And then I turned, and I saw what Betty had already noticed- the desecration of this holy place.
 The statue of Jesus on his cross had been broken off at the bottom of the beam, and now hung upside down from a rope that extended to the high ceiling, dozens of feet above our heads. His face had been slashed and cut, his nose and eyes now missing, and on the front of his chest, I saw a strange symbol carved deeply into the wood with what looked like blood.
 The sigil looked like an upside-down triangle within a larger upside-down triangle, and had lines curving out of the sides of the bottom. Connected to the lines of the larger triangle, at the bottom, I saw a line curving like a J, and on the other side, another line curved like a backwards J. The lines extended outwards, curving over a V. Around the sigil sat a thick, black circle. It definitely seemed magical, like something from a medieval textbook on witchcraft.
 “That’s the sigil of Lucifer,” my wife said quietly.
 “How do you know that?” I asked, and she shrugged.
 “I read a couple books on black magic when I was a teen,” she said. “That one stuck with me for some reason. That symbol- it’s eerie. I never forgot it.” I looked over at the font at the front of the church. Instead of holy water, I saw it was filled with blood.
 “I guess no one’s crossing themselves in here today,” I said, trying to break the harsh terror that threatened to overwhelm us.
 Then, as Betty moved her light around, I realized we weren’t alone in here. People sat in the pews, their heads bowed, silently praying. Dozens of people were in here with us, yet they made no noise, and no one turned their heads to look at us or say anything. An icy chill ran down my spine. I turned to Betty and pointed at the people.
 “Yeah, I see them,” she whispered, and began to creep slowly forward. I took out my phone and turned on my light as well, moving silently a few feet behind her. I shone the light at the first pew of people and gasped.
 They all had their throats cut. A waterfall of thick, coagulated blood stained the front of their bodies. The smell hit me at once- an overwhelming odor of rotting meat and iron. I gagged, turning to retch. Betty pulled me towards the back of the church. I searched for any other entrances, locking the ancient deadbolts on the doors. We ended up going to the rectory in the back, sitting on the priest’s couch. There were no bodies in here, and no smell but the musty scent of an old building and books.
 “Well,” Betty said, turning to me, barely concealing the terror in her eyes, “it looks like we found the townspeople. Some of them, anyways.”
 I said nothing, but instead put my phone down and sat in the darkness with her, putting my arm around her while she cried.
 
   submitted by    CIAHerpes    to    creepypasta  [link]   [comments]


2023.09.06 17:10 CIAHerpes We found a town abandoned in the mountains. Something in it didn't want us to leave [part 1]
Three months ago, my wife and I were on our way to visit my mother-in-law, living alone far up in the White Mountains. I had been driving for five hours, and my wife, Betty, started saying she needed to use the bathroom and that she was starving. My full bladder agreed with her on the first issue, though I also had tried to make good time and get there before nightfall, when the street signs would become harder to read. I had never been to Betty’s mother’s house before, or even the county it lay in. 
 I pulled over the car on the side of Main Street, looking down the center of the town. It had everything a small, rural American town usually had- quaint houses with blue siding, 24-hour diners, hardware stores and tobacco shops, liquor stores and restaurants. Majestic mountains rose all around us, and the town itself was so high that I could see for miles. The air smelt clean and sweet. Everything was here, except…
 “No people,” my wife said, as if reading my mind. I looked over at her, frowning.
 “Yeah, this is bizarre,” I said. “This place looks like it was hit by the Black Death. Where is everyone?” My wife unlocked her door and got out, pulling a cigarette from her purse and lighting it. She gave the pack to me, and I took one. My wife looked pale and thin under the late afternoon sun, her black hair and dark eyes contrasting heavily with her light, Irish skin. Lately, she seemed to have lost weight, but she wouldn’t talk about it. Every time I asked her if anything was wrong, she said no, and I could get no more response from her than that.
 The fragrant Turkish tobacco of the Camel cigarette instantly woke me up. We didn’t smoke in the car, as it was brand-new and had cost me over $25,000 that I didn’t really have. The last thing I wanted was burn marks on the seats and ashes flying everywhere.
 We walked slowly down the sidewalk, looking around, searching for the slightest signs of movement. I didn’t even see an animal, except for an occasional fly buzzing past on its way to eat garbage. I looked into the diner window, and saw plates set out on the tables. Mold grew wild on the food, strange patches of green and red and black sprouting filaments and making the dishes unrecognizable. Next to the plates, I saw cell phones and even car and house keys. All the screens on the phones looked black, as if they had been sitting there for months. A slight layer of grime and dust had settled over everything. The door stood wide open, a cheerful sign reading, “We’re open. Come in!” displayed on the front.
 “That’s gotta be a code violation,” I said, pointing inside at the disgusting plates of mold and fungus. My wife laughed, but it sounded nervous and high-pitched, almost desperate in its cadence. “Listen, Betty, do you think we should… maybe, call the police or something?” She looked at me for a long moment, then sighed.
 “I mean, I don’t know,” she said. “What crime has been committed? It’s just an empty town. Maybe everyone’s at a… funeral?” Her voice raised hopefully. I laughed.
 “And they just abandoned their shops and restaurants with no workers and moldering food? And, by the way, there’s a cop car right there,” I said, pointing. It sat on four flat tires, covered in a thick coat of dust. The tires didn’t look damaged in any way. It seems they had just lost pressure over time without anyone to care for them. 
 Looking around at the other cars, I saw most were not in much better shape. Many of them had low or no air in their tires, and their windshields were covered in dirt and grime. It looked like a junkyard in the middle of a town- a junkyard that had been abandoned.
 “I’m calling the cops,” I said, pulling out my phone. I opened the screen and, of course, found I had no service. I tried sending a text to my mother, explaining the situation and telling her to call the authorities if she received it and send help immediately. I gave her the name of the town and the time. 
 I figured the chances of a text going through were far better than a call, since a brief moment of service could prove sufficient to transfer the message. 
 “Yeah, I’m not calling the cops.” I shook my head. “We don’t have a shred of service out here. What kind of town doesn’t have service on its own Main Street?”
 “We’re in the middle of the mountains,” Betty said. “Who the hell knows out here?” We kept walking down the street in silence. Betty went inside a few of the shops and tried flicking on the lights or looking for a phone. The electricity was apparently as dead as the town itself. I occasionally checked my phone, finding nothing had changed. 
 As we walked further along, I started to give up hope that help would be coming from outside. I finished my cigarette, and Betty lit another one and gave me the pack again. I sighed and took another Camel out of the pack, lighting it and inhaling deeply. It gave me something to do, at least, and it helped take my mind off the strangeness of this town.
 Then we came up to the police station, and I choked on the smoke as I saw what lay there before us. At first, I thought some vandal had used red spray paint to put up a bizarre slogan across the front of the station. And then I saw all the flies, and smelled the copper and iron, and I realized it likely wasn’t paint at all.
 “WE FOLLOW THE BLACK SUN,” it said in huge letters, each of them nearly six-feet tall and thickly painted across the windows and walls. My wife squinted at it, tilting her head in a girlish way, her black hair falling across her face. She took a long, thin hand and pushed it aside.
 “The Black Sun?” she said. “Is that a metal band? It sounds like those Norwegian Satanists you like to listen to- what’s the name, Burzum and Darkthrone and stuff?” She started walking forwards, trying to inspect the letters more closely. I put my hand on her shoulder, and pulled her back with a little more force than I intended. She stumbled, and gave me a dirty look. “Jonny, be careful, dammit! You almost made me fall.”
 “Sorry,” I said, my heart pounding in my chest, “but don’t get close to that. I’m fairly sure that’s… blood. And it might be a crime scene. You don’t want to touch it or trample the area if it is.” She looked at me, shocked, then glanced back at the letters, seeing the flies swarming around the coagulated, sticky mess.
 “Animal blood?” she asked helpfully.
 “Yeah, sure, I guess,” I said noncommittally. “OK, let’s go back to the car and get the hell out of here. I’ve seen enough. We need to get the cops here. Whatever is going on here, it’s way beyond anything we can deal with.” I turned around quickly, taking my wife’s hand. She pulled away.
 “Don’t start getting all worked up,” she said. “We haven’t seen any indication of anything… crazy, not yet. All we know is the people are somewhere, not here, and that someone vandalized the police station. I want to keep exploring.” I looked at her, amazed. She pointed past me at an old-looking church built of stone, probably from the 1800s. It stood near the end of the small downtown area, next to thick clusters of evergreen trees. It had a plaque outside that I couldn’t make out. The doors stood wide open, and the darkness inside seemed to beckon. 
 For a moment, I almost agreed with Betty; I almost said that I, too, wanted to go inside that church. I think it was what the French call, “l’appel du vide”, or the call of the void- that urge to suddenly jump when standing at the edge of a cliff, or to see if a car can go 130 miles an hour on the highway when it’s snowing. Then I shook my head quickly, as if awakening from a short dream. I looked back at Betty and laughed. There was no humor in it, however.
 “You must be crazy,” I said. “I want to get the hell out of here, now. There’s nothing to explore. Everyone’s gone, and if we keep going deeper into this, I have a feeling we’ll run into something far worse than anything we’ve yet seen.”
 “OK, how about this?” she said, making a thoughtful face, putting her finger up to her chin. “Why don’t you see if the cop car is unlocked, jump it with our car, and use whatever they have in it to call for help? They probably have a walkie-talkie or something connected to the state police network. If you really think we need a SWAT team here, then that’s probably the quickest way.”
 “No, let’s just leave,” I said, walking quickly back in the direction of our car. I saw the new Chevrolet Trailblazer off in the distance, contrasting heavily with the dirty and abandoned cars surrounding it. And then, as we got close, I saw it had four flat tires. I started running forwards, seeing the deep knife marks slicing open each of the sidewalls.
 “What in the hell…?” I said, stopping in my tracks. I looked around the town, but still saw no trace of anyone. “Why? Why would someone do this?”
 “To stop us from leaving, obviously,” my wife said, sounding unperturbed. “Look, we might be here for a while, so I’m going into that package store and grabbing a few things. Maybe some wine. And some cigarettes, because someone smoked most of mine.” She narrowed her eyes at me playfully.
 “Do you even realize what’s happening right now?” I asked, my voice rising unconsciously in anger and frustration.
 “No, do you?” she said.
 “This isn’t a joke,” I said, feeling hot and anxious. “We’re trapped here, and there’s letters written in blood, and now someone slashed our tires. Do you still think we don’t need the police?” She smiled at me.
 “You always worry too much,” she said. “Just calm down for once. Don’t have an anxiety attack on me. There’s no cell phone service to call for help if you do, remember.” That jogged something in my memory, and I looked questioningly at her.
 “Do you have any weapons on you?” I asked. “I have…” I reached in my pockets, frowning. I pulled out a small Swiss army knife. Its red surface looked dull from age, and even I thought it looked small and pathetic in my hand. “...this.” She laughed.
 “What are you going to do with that, kill a chipmunk?” she asked. “I mean, I think you can cut your nails with it, too, if you want to use a dull, crappy pair of scissors that barely cut paper.” She laughed at her own joke, then stopped when she saw the anger and fear on my face. Betty looked at me with a strange expression. 
 It was hard to perturb her. She had always been different from me. When I was stressed about money or work or anything else, she would laugh it off and say I was too serious. But this seemed to be stretching the boundaries. I felt in my heart we were in danger, and she didn’t seem to notice. “Look,” she continued, sighing, “let’s go get some more cigarettes and drinks and stuff, and then maybe we can take the car over to the police cruiser and jump it. Then we can call the cops, and AAA too, and just sit here and wait for the cavalry to arrive.” I sputtered.
 “This is a brand new car!” I yelled. “I’m not driving it on the rims over there. That’s going to destroy the rotors and could damage some… other stuff.” I didn’t actually know anything about cars, and she knew it.
 “No, I think it will be fine,” she said, smiling. “But I wouldn’t get my…” Her words were cut off by a siren that started up suddenly, deafening and shrill. It seemed to vibrate the air itself, and the dead town came to life in a cacophony of noise and vibration. I saw my wife’s lips moving as she tried to scream something, but I had no idea what it was. I covered my ears with my hands, which barely helped. And then, after about ten seconds, it stopped. My ears rang, a high-pitched whine like I had just walked into a flashbang. It went away slowly, and Betty’s voice came back to me, rising from nothingness in a crescendo, until I could make out her cadence and speech again.
 “...into the siren,” she said, her face unusually serious and drawn. The sun had started to go behind the mountains now, sending long shadows streaking across the road. Soon, it would be dark, and we would likely be trapped here for the entire night- or longer. Hiking out of here was an option, and the highway was only about five miles away. These thoughts passed through my mind as I saw shadows fall over Betty, before I realized I had no idea what she said.
 “What?” I yelled.
 “I said,” she rolled her eyes at this point, “we should go towards the siren. They have electricity. They probably have a landline and maybe there’s people there,” she said, still speaking far too loudly. I guessed her ears were ringing as well.
 “OK, you don’t have to yell,” I said. “I can hear you, and I don’t want to attract… the wrong kind of attention.” She pointed at the sliced tires of my car.
 “We already have, Jonny,” she said seriously.
 “Listen, I don’t like this,” I said. “I don’t want to be trapped in some nutjob’s basement a few hours from now, chained up against a wall and covered in blood, and think back on how I should have done something different. I think the safest plan is to leave this place now, right now. Let’s just grab some drinks and cigarettes and whatever from the store and hike back towards the highway on the main route. Maybe we’ll see someone on the walk, but we’ll definitely find help on the highway.” She thought about it for a fraction of a second then nodded.
 “OK, whatever,” she said. “Let’s go.”
 ***
 The plan worked at first. Betty ran into the package store while I kept watch outside, looking up and down the street for any signs of movement. I saw nothing, but from the slashed tires, I assumed we were being watched. Whoever “they” were, they knew when we were far enough away to vandalize the car.
 A minute later, Betty came out with a plastic bag. I saw nine or ten cartons of cigarettes in it and some plastic nips of Jack Daniels. She also had Coca-Cola and some water.
 “I thought you were grabbing a pack of cigarettes,” I said, narrowing my eyes. “Ten cartons? Why do we need ten cartons for a five-mile hike?”
 “We don’t need them,” she said, “but, you know, they’re expensive down in Connecticut. Much cheaper in this town.”
 “Yeah, I guess you can’t beat free,” I said, reaching into the bag and taking out a pack. We started walking out of town in silence. I didn’t even hear an animal stir. The regular buzz of the insects that chirped and squeaked throughout the White Mountains was missing here. It gave the town a supernatural eeriness, as if we had wandered into an apocalyptic wasteland where even the crickets had died. To break the monotony, I lit a cigarette. The flick of the lighter and the soft tread of our footsteps were the only sounds we could hear for miles.
 As we got further down Main Street, the shops and houses started to thin out. Soon after we passed the church, both sides of the street had turned to forest, and only an occasional house or farm broke the endless trees. The downtown area couldn’t be more than a quarter-mile long, but this town and the surrounding forest felt like it went on forever.
 “This is really spooky,” Betty said, shattering the silence. I was glad for a break, though I felt eyes on me as she spoke, as if we had somehow violated the sanctity of a graveyard with laughter.
 “I have never experienced anything as weird as this,” I said, whispering and getting close to Betty. I noticed she also spoke in a quiet voice, and she constantly glanced behind and around. She smoked a lot of cigarettes, nervously lighting one after the other, and she drank three of the nips on the way, chasing them down with Coke. I took one myself and downed it. The burning liquid seemed to revive me somewhat and clear my head. I chugged some soda to get the taste out of my mouth.
 Betty had opened her mouth to say something else, when the screaming erupted from all around us. The sun had long disappeared behind the mountains, and we were surrounded by thick curtains of darkness. I couldn’t see more than a few feet into the forest. Betty gripped my hand tightly.
 “OK, now I am really freaked out,” she whispered into my ear. We had both stopped and stood, holding hands as shrieks echoed through the trees. The light breeze carried a smell that nearly made me gag- the smell of decay and blood. “Do you think it’s a fox or a fisher cat or something?” I shook my head silently, then leaned close to her.
 “We’re going to run,” I said. “Back towards the town. It’s a lot closer. Ready?” She nodded grimly. “Go!” We started sprinting away, our footsteps bouncing off the pavement, far too loud. The screaming drew closer and something broke through the outer boundary of the woods. With twigs crunching and branches snapping, I saw a silhouette emerge into the road to my left. The smell of rotting flesh seemed overwhelming now.
 I only saw her for a second, but I knew, in that moment, that she wasn’t human.
 It looked like a woman, or at least, like the corpse of one. But she was clearly alive in some form, running and shrieking, sending out wails of pure agony and horror. The eyes snapped onto me. I met them for a brief moment. Even in the dim light of the Moon and the stars, I could see they were pure white, without pupils or irises. And yet, they seemed to see everything, even in the deepening shadows
 Long, stringy black hair ran down over her face and down her back. Papery skin hung tightly to the skull, and the mouth hung wide open, inhumanly wide, like the tendons and ligaments holding the jaw to the skull had been cut. The huge black pit of her mouth emanated those screams constantly, as if she didn’t need to breathe.
 On the body, parts of the skin were missing. I could see the gore and bones beneath, where the thin, fragile skin had broken. Purple and black sores shone from these spots. The long, skeletal hand of the woman ended up claw-like fingers, with the nails blackened and the bones sticking out at the end of each digit.
 She ran fast, gaining on us. And she wasn’t alone. I could see dozens more bodies breaking through the tree line now, a deafening howling emanating from them as they ran. I was breathing hard by this point. I could see the first buildings of the town up ahead. We only had to make it another hundred paces, and then we could lock ourselves in and barricade the doors and windows.
 I didn’t dare look back, but I heard the screaming just behind me. I felt a soft swipe across my back, the sharp, bony fingers dragging across the shirt for a brief moment. It gave me another adrenaline rush, and I pushed myself forward with all of my will, feeling my heart beating far too fast in my chest. I began to feel light-headed and see flashes of white light every time I blinked. I knew I would pass out if I had to go much farther. I hadn’t gone running in over ten years, probably since I was in high school. But I ran for my life just the same.
 Betty was in better shape than me, and she had gained some ground. She glanced back as she sprinted down the middle of the dark street. I saw her point to the church. It stood just ahead, the doors already opened, as if waiting for us, as if it knew we would be back. She veered sharply to the right and I followed close behind, panting and sweating like a madman. The doors were so close now. The shrieking behind me had been joined by a few others. With the last of my strength, I began an all-out sprint, hoping I wouldn’t trip over something and go flying into a car. It would mean the end of me- of that, I was certain.
 We ran through the doors into the church. I turned around, and saw the creatures had gone. Their screaming cut off as soon as we had entered, and now I saw no sign of them. It was as if they had vanished.
 I shut the doors of the church just the same, turning a deadbolt to lock them. Betty had her phone out, turning on the flashlight app to help me see in the dark church. I would have to also check for auxiliary entrances, but it was a start, just the same. And then I turned, and I saw what Betty had already noticed- the desecration of this holy place.
 The statue of Jesus on his cross had been broken off at the bottom of the beam, and now hung upside down from a rope that extended to the high ceiling, dozens of feet above our heads. His face had been slashed and cut, his nose and eyes now missing, and on the front of his chest, I saw a strange symbol carved deeply into the wood with what looked like blood.
 The sigil looked like an upside-down triangle within a larger upside-down triangle, and had lines curving out of the sides of the bottom. Connected to the lines of the larger triangle, at the bottom, I saw a line curving like a J, and on the other side, another line curved like a backwards J. The lines extended outwards, curving over a V. Around the sigil sat a thick, black circle. It definitely seemed magical, like something from a medieval textbook on witchcraft.
 “That’s the sigil of Lucifer,” my wife said quietly.
 “How do you know that?” I asked, and she shrugged.
 “I read a couple books on black magic when I was a teen,” she said. “That one stuck with me for some reason. That symbol- it’s eerie. I never forgot it.” I looked over at the font at the front of the church. Instead of holy water, I saw it was filled with blood.
 “I guess no one’s crossing themselves in here today,” I said, trying to break the harsh terror that threatened to overwhelm us.
 Then, as Betty moved her light around, I realized we weren’t alone in here. People sat in the pews, their heads bowed, silently praying. Dozens of people were in here with us, yet they made no noise, and no one turned their heads to look at us or say anything. An icy chill ran down my spine. I turned to Betty and pointed at the people.
 “Yeah, I see them,” she whispered, and began to creep slowly forward. I took out my phone and turned on my light as well, moving silently a few feet behind her. I shone the light at the first pew of people and gasped.
 They all had their throats cut. A waterfall of thick, coagulated blood stained the front of their bodies. The smell hit me at once- an overwhelming odor of rotting meat and iron. I gagged, turning to retch. Betty pulled me towards the back of the church. I searched for any other entrances, locking the ancient deadbolts on the doors. We ended up going to the rectory in the back, sitting on the priest’s couch. There were no bodies in here, and no smell but the musty scent of an old building and books.
 “Well,” Betty said, turning to me, barely concealing the terror in her eyes, “it looks like we found the townspeople. Some of them, anyways.”
 I said nothing, but instead put my phone down and sat in the darkness with her, putting my arm around her while she cried.
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   submitted by    CIAHerpes    to    ZakBabyTV_Stories  [link]   [comments]


2023.09.06 17:09 CIAHerpes We found a town abandoned in the mountains. Something in it didn't want us to leave [part 1]
Three months ago, my wife and I were on our way to visit my mother-in-law, living alone far up in the White Mountains. I had been driving for five hours, and my wife, Betty, started saying she needed to use the bathroom and that she was starving. My full bladder agreed with her on the first issue, though I also had tried to make good time and get there before nightfall, when the street signs would become harder to read. I had never been to Betty’s mother’s house before, or even the county it lay in.
 I pulled over the car on the side of Main Street, looking down the center of the town. It had everything a small, rural American town usually had- quaint houses with blue siding, 24-hour diners, hardware stores and tobacco shops, liquor stores and restaurants. Majestic mountains rose all around us, and the town itself was so high that I could see for miles. The air smelt clean and sweet. Everything was here, except…
 “No people,” my wife said, as if reading my mind. I looked over at her, frowning.
 “Yeah, this is bizarre,” I said. “This place looks like it was hit by the Black Death. Where is everyone?” My wife unlocked her door and got out, pulling a cigarette from her purse and lighting it. She gave the pack to me, and I took one. My wife looked pale and thin under the late afternoon sun, her black hair and dark eyes contrasting heavily with her light, Irish skin. Lately, she seemed to have lost weight, but she wouldn’t talk about it. Every time I asked her if anything was wrong, she said no, and I could get no more response from her than that.
 The fragrant Turkish tobacco of the Camel cigarette instantly woke me up. We didn’t smoke in the car, as it was brand-new and had cost me over $25,000 that I didn’t really have. The last thing I wanted was burn marks on the seats and ashes flying everywhere.
 We walked slowly down the sidewalk, looking around, searching for the slightest signs of movement. I didn’t even see an animal, except for an occasional fly buzzing past on its way to eat garbage. I looked into the diner window, and saw plates set out on the tables. Mold grew wild on the food, strange patches of green and red and black sprouting filaments and making the dishes unrecognizable. Next to the plates, I saw cell phones and even car and house keys. All the screens on the phones looked black, as if they had been sitting there for months. A slight layer of grime and dust had settled over everything. The door stood wide open, a cheerful sign reading, “We’re open. Come in!” displayed on the front.
 “That’s gotta be a code violation,” I said, pointing inside at the disgusting plates of mold and fungus. My wife laughed, but it sounded nervous and high-pitched, almost desperate in its cadence. “Listen, Betty, do you think we should… maybe, call the police or something?” She looked at me for a long moment, then sighed.
 “I mean, I don’t know,” she said. “What crime has been committed? It’s just an empty town. Maybe everyone’s at a… funeral?” Her voice raised hopefully. I laughed.
 “And they just abandoned their shops and restaurants with no workers and moldering food? And, by the way, there’s a cop car right there,” I said, pointing. It sat on four flat tires, covered in a thick coat of dust. The tires didn’t look damaged in any way. It seems they had just lost pressure over time without anyone to care for them.
 Looking around at the other cars, I saw most were not in much better shape. Many of them had low or no air in their tires, and their windshields were covered in dirt and grime. It looked like a junkyard in the middle of a town- a junkyard that had been abandoned.
 “I’m calling the cops,” I said, pulling out my phone. I opened the screen and, of course, found I had no service. I tried sending a text to my mother, explaining the situation and telling her to call the authorities if she received it and send help immediately. I gave her the name of the town and the time.
 I figured the chances of a text going through were far better than a call, since a brief moment of service could prove sufficient to transfer the message.
 “Yeah, I’m not calling the cops.” I shook my head. “We don’t have a shred of service out here. What kind of town doesn’t have service on its own Main Street?”
 “We’re in the middle of the mountains,” Betty said. “Who the hell knows out here?” We kept walking down the street in silence. Betty went inside a few of the shops and tried flicking on the lights or looking for a phone. The electricity was apparently as dead as the town itself. I occasionally checked my phone, finding nothing had changed.
 As we walked further along, I started to give up hope that help would be coming from outside. I finished my cigarette, and Betty lit another one and gave me the pack again. I sighed and took another Camel out of the pack, lighting it and inhaling deeply. It gave me something to do, at least, and it helped take my mind off the strangeness of this town.
 Then we came up to the police station, and I choked on the smoke as I saw what lay there before us. At first, I thought some vandal had used red spray paint to put up a bizarre slogan across the front of the station. And then I saw all the flies, and smelled the copper and iron, and I realized it likely wasn’t paint at all.
 “WE FOLLOW THE BLACK SUN,” it said in huge letters, each of them nearly six-feet tall and thickly painted across the windows and walls. My wife squinted at it, tilting her head in a girlish way, her black hair falling across her face. She took a long, thin hand and pushed it aside.
 “The Black Sun?” she said. “Is that a metal band? It sounds like those Norwegian Satanists you like to listen to- what’s the name, Burzum and Darkthrone and stuff?” She started walking forwards, trying to inspect the letters more closely. I put my hand on her shoulder, and pulled her back with a little more force than I intended. She stumbled, and gave me a dirty look. “Jonny, be careful, dammit! You almost made me fall.”
 “Sorry,” I said, my heart pounding in my chest, “but don’t get close to that. I’m fairly sure that’s… blood. And it might be a crime scene. You don’t want to touch it or trample the area if it is.” She looked at me, shocked, then glanced back at the letters, seeing the flies swarming around the coagulated, sticky mess.
 “Animal blood?” she asked helpfully.
 “Yeah, sure, I guess,” I said noncommittally. “OK, let’s go back to the car and get the hell out of here. I’ve seen enough. We need to get the cops here. Whatever is going on here, it’s way beyond anything we can deal with.” I turned around quickly, taking my wife’s hand. She pulled away.
 “Don’t start getting all worked up,” she said. “We haven’t seen any indication of anything… crazy, not yet. All we know is the people are somewhere, not here, and that someone vandalized the police station. I want to keep exploring.” I looked at her, amazed. She pointed past me at an old-looking church built of stone, probably from the 1800s. It stood near the end of the small downtown area, next to thick clusters of evergreen trees. It had a plaque outside that I couldn’t make out. The doors stood wide open, and the darkness inside seemed to beckon.
 For a moment, I almost agreed with Betty; I almost said that I, too, wanted to go inside that church. I think it was what the French call, “l’appel du vide”, or the call of the void- that urge to suddenly jump when standing at the edge of a cliff, or to see if a car can go 130 miles an hour on the highway when it’s snowing. Then I shook my head quickly, as if awakening from a short dream. I looked back at Betty and laughed. There was no humor in it, however.
 “You must be crazy,” I said. “I want to get the hell out of here, now. There’s nothing to explore. Everyone’s gone, and if we keep going deeper into this, I have a feeling we’ll run into something far worse than anything we’ve yet seen.”
 “OK, how about this?” she said, making a thoughtful face, putting her finger up to her chin. “Why don’t you see if the cop car is unlocked, jump it with our car, and use whatever they have in it to call for help? They probably have a walkie-talkie or something connected to the state police network. If you really think we need a SWAT team here, then that’s probably the quickest way.”
 “No, let’s just leave,” I said, walking quickly back in the direction of our car. I saw the new Chevrolet Trailblazer off in the distance, contrasting heavily with the dirty and abandoned cars surrounding it. And then, as we got close, I saw it had four flat tires. I started running forwards, seeing the deep knife marks slicing open each of the sidewalls.
 “What in the hell…?” I said, stopping in my tracks. I looked around the town, but still saw no trace of anyone. “Why? Why would someone do this?”
 “To stop us from leaving, obviously,” my wife said, sounding unperturbed. “Look, we might be here for a while, so I’m going into that package store and grabbing a few things. Maybe some wine. And some cigarettes, because someone smoked most of mine.” She narrowed her eyes at me playfully.
 “Do you even realize what’s happening right now?” I asked, my voice rising unconsciously in anger and frustration.
 “No, do you?” she said.
 “This isn’t a joke,” I said, feeling hot and anxious. “We’re trapped here, and there’s letters written in blood, and now someone slashed our tires. Do you still think we don’t need the police?” She smiled at me.
 “You always worry too much,” she said. “Just calm down for once. Don’t have an anxiety attack on me. There’s no cell phone service to call for help if you do, remember.” That jogged something in my memory, and I looked questioningly at her.
 “Do you have any weapons on you?” I asked. “I have…” I reached in my pockets, frowning. I pulled out a small Swiss army knife. Its red surface looked dull from age, and even I thought it looked small and pathetic in my hand. “...this.” She laughed.
 “What are you going to do with that, kill a chipmunk?” she asked. “I mean, I think you can cut your nails with it, too, if you want to use a dull, crappy pair of scissors that barely cut paper.” She laughed at her own joke, then stopped when she saw the anger and fear on my face. Betty looked at me with a strange expression.
 It was hard to perturb her. She had always been different from me. When I was stressed about money or work or anything else, she would laugh it off and say I was too serious. But this seemed to be stretching the boundaries. I felt in my heart we were in danger, and she didn’t seem to notice. “Look,” she continued, sighing, “let’s go get some more cigarettes and drinks and stuff, and then maybe we can take the car over to the police cruiser and jump it. Then we can call the cops, and AAA too, and just sit here and wait for the cavalry to arrive.” I sputtered.
 “This is a brand new car!” I yelled. “I’m not driving it on the rims over there. That’s going to destroy the rotors and could damage some… other stuff.” I didn’t actually know anything about cars, and she knew it.
 “No, I think it will be fine,” she said, smiling. “But I wouldn’t get my…” Her words were cut off by a siren that started up suddenly, deafening and shrill. It seemed to vibrate the air itself, and the dead town came to life in a cacophony of noise and vibration. I saw my wife’s lips moving as she tried to scream something, but I had no idea what it was. I covered my ears with my hands, which barely helped. And then, after about ten seconds, it stopped. My ears rang, a high-pitched whine like I had just walked into a flashbang. It went away slowly, and Betty’s voice came back to me, rising from nothingness in a crescendo, until I could make out her cadence and speech again.
 “...into the siren,” she said, her face unusually serious and drawn. The sun had started to go behind the mountains now, sending long shadows streaking across the road. Soon, it would be dark, and we would likely be trapped here for the entire night- or longer. Hiking out of here was an option, and the highway was only about five miles away. These thoughts passed through my mind as I saw shadows fall over Betty, before I realized I had no idea what she said.
 “What?” I yelled.
 “I said,” she rolled her eyes at this point, “we should go towards the siren. They have electricity. They probably have a landline and maybe there’s people there,” she said, still speaking far too loudly. I guessed her ears were ringing as well.
 “OK, you don’t have to yell,” I said. “I can hear you, and I don’t want to attract… the wrong kind of attention.” She pointed at the sliced tires of my car.
 “We already have, Jonny,” she said seriously.
 “Listen, I don’t like this,” I said. “I don’t want to be trapped in some nutjob’s basement a few hours from now, chained up against a wall and covered in blood, and think back on how I should have done something different. I think the safest plan is to leave this place now, right now. Let’s just grab some drinks and cigarettes and whatever from the store and hike back towards the highway on the main route. Maybe we’ll see someone on the walk, but we’ll definitely find help on the highway.” She thought about it for a fraction of a second then nodded.
 “OK, whatever,” she said. “Let’s go.”
 ***
 The plan worked at first. Betty ran into the package store while I kept watch outside, looking up and down the street for any signs of movement. I saw nothing, but from the slashed tires, I assumed we were being watched. Whoever “they” were, they knew when we were far enough away to vandalize the car.
 A minute later, Betty came out with a plastic bag. I saw nine or ten cartons of cigarettes in it and some plastic nips of Jack Daniels. She also had Coca-Cola and some water.
 “I thought you were grabbing a pack of cigarettes,” I said, narrowing my eyes. “Ten cartons? Why do we need ten cartons for a five-mile hike?”
 “We don’t need them,” she said, “but, you know, they’re expensive down in Connecticut. Much cheaper in this town.”
 “Yeah, I guess you can’t beat free,” I said, reaching into the bag and taking out a pack. We started walking out of town in silence. I didn’t even hear an animal stir. The regular buzz of the insects that chirped and squeaked throughout the White Mountains was missing here. It gave the town a supernatural eeriness, as if we had wandered into an apocalyptic wasteland where even the crickets had died. To break the monotony, I lit a cigarette. The flick of the lighter and the soft tread of our footsteps were the only sounds we could hear for miles.
 As we got further down Main Street, the shops and houses started to thin out. Soon after we passed the church, both sides of the street had turned to forest, and only an occasional house or farm broke the endless trees. The downtown area couldn’t be more than a quarter-mile long, but this town and the surrounding forest felt like it went on forever.
 “This is really spooky,” Betty said, shattering the silence. I was glad for a break, though I felt eyes on me as she spoke, as if we had somehow violated the sanctity of a graveyard with laughter.
 “I have never experienced anything as weird as this,” I said, whispering and getting close to Betty. I noticed she also spoke in a quiet voice, and she constantly glanced behind and around. She smoked a lot of cigarettes, nervously lighting one after the other, and she drank three of the nips on the way, chasing them down with Coke. I took one myself and downed it. The burning liquid seemed to revive me somewhat and clear my head. I chugged some soda to get the taste out of my mouth.
 Betty had opened her mouth to say something else, when the screaming erupted from all around us. The sun had long disappeared behind the mountains, and we were surrounded by thick curtains of darkness. I couldn’t see more than a few feet into the forest. Betty gripped my hand tightly.
 “OK, now I am really freaked out,” she whispered into my ear. We had both stopped and stood, holding hands as shrieks echoed through the trees. The light breeze carried a smell that nearly made me gag- the smell of decay and blood. “Do you think it’s a fox or a fisher cat or something?” I shook my head silently, then leaned close to her.
 “We’re going to run,” I said. “Back towards the town. It’s a lot closer. Ready?” She nodded grimly. “Go!” We started sprinting away, our footsteps bouncing off the pavement, far too loud. The screaming drew closer and something broke through the outer boundary of the woods. With twigs crunching and branches snapping, I saw a silhouette emerge into the road to my left. The smell of rotting flesh seemed overwhelming now.
 I only saw her for a second, but I knew, in that moment, that she wasn’t human.
 It looked like a woman, or at least, like the corpse of one. But she was clearly alive in some form, running and shrieking, sending out wails of pure agony and horror. The eyes snapped onto me. I met them for a brief moment. Even in the dim light of the Moon and the stars, I could see they were pure white, without pupils or irises. And yet, they seemed to see everything, even in the deepening shadows
 Long, stringy black hair ran down over her face and down her back. Papery skin hung tightly to the skull, and the mouth hung wide open, inhumanly wide, like the tendons and ligaments holding the jaw to the skull had been cut. The huge black pit of her mouth emanated those screams constantly, as if she didn’t need to breathe.
 On the body, parts of the skin were missing. I could see the gore and bones beneath, where the thin, fragile skin had broken. Purple and black sores shone from these spots. The long, skeletal hand of the woman ended up claw-like fingers, with the nails blackened and the bones sticking out at the end of each digit.
 She ran fast, gaining on us. And she wasn’t alone. I could see dozens more bodies breaking through the tree line now, a deafening howling emanating from them as they ran. I was breathing hard by this point. I could see the first buildings of the town up ahead. We only had to make it another hundred paces, and then we could lock ourselves in and barricade the doors and windows.
 I didn’t dare look back, but I heard the screaming just behind me. I felt a soft swipe across my back, the sharp, bony fingers dragging across the shirt for a brief moment. It gave me another adrenaline rush, and I pushed myself forward with all of my will, feeling my heart beating far too fast in my chest. I began to feel light-headed and see flashes of white light every time I blinked. I knew I would pass out if I had to go much farther. I hadn’t gone running in over ten years, probably since I was in high school. But I ran for my life just the same.
 Betty was in better shape than me, and she had gained some ground. She glanced back as she sprinted down the middle of the dark street. I saw her point to the church. It stood just ahead, the doors already opened, as if waiting for us, as if it knew we would be back. She veered sharply to the right and I followed close behind, panting and sweating like a madman. The doors were so close now. The shrieking behind me had been joined by a few others. With the last of my strength, I began an all-out sprint, hoping I wouldn’t trip over something and go flying into a car. It would mean the end of me- of that, I was certain.
 We ran through the doors into the church. I turned around, and saw the creatures had gone. Their screaming cut off as soon as we had entered, and now I saw no sign of them. It was as if they had vanished.
 I shut the doors of the church just the same, turning a deadbolt to lock them. Betty had her phone out, turning on the flashlight app to help me see in the dark church. I would have to also check for auxiliary entrances, but it was a start, just the same. And then I turned, and I saw what Betty had already noticed- the desecration of this holy place.
 The statue of Jesus on his cross had been broken off at the bottom of the beam, and now hung upside down from a rope that extended to the high ceiling, dozens of feet above our heads. His face had been slashed and cut, his nose and eyes now missing, and on the front of his chest, I saw a strange symbol carved deeply into the wood with what looked like blood.
 The sigil looked like an upside-down triangle within a larger upside-down triangle, and had lines curving out of the sides of the bottom. Connected to the lines of the larger triangle, at the bottom, I saw a line curving like a J, and on the other side, another line curved like a backwards J. The lines extended outwards, curving over a V. Around the sigil sat a thick, black circle. It definitely seemed magical, like something from a medieval textbook on witchcraft.
 “That’s the sigil of Lucifer,” my wife said quietly.
 “How do you know that?” I asked, and she shrugged.
 “I read a couple books on black magic when I was a teen,” she said. “That one stuck with me for some reason. That symbol- it’s eerie. I never forgot it.” I looked over at the font at the front of the church. Instead of holy water, I saw it was filled with blood.
 “I guess no one’s crossing themselves in here today,” I said, trying to break the harsh terror that threatened to overwhelm us.
 Then, as Betty moved her light around, I realized we weren’t alone in here. People sat in the pews, their heads bowed, silently praying. Dozens of people were in here with us, yet they made no noise, and no one turned their heads to look at us or say anything. An icy chill ran down my spine. I turned to Betty and pointed at the people.
 “Yeah, I see them,” she whispered, and began to creep slowly forward. I took out my phone and turned on my light as well, moving silently a few feet behind her. I shone the light at the first pew of people and gasped.
 They all had their throats cut. A waterfall of thick, coagulated blood stained the front of their bodies. The smell hit me at once- an overwhelming odor of rotting meat and iron. I gagged, turning to retch. Betty pulled me towards the back of the church. I searched for any other entrances, locking the ancient deadbolts on the doors. We ended up going to the rectory in the back, sitting on the priest’s couch. There were no bodies in here, and no smell but the musty scent of an old building and books.
 “Well,” Betty said, turning to me, barely concealing the terror in her eyes, “it looks like we found the townspeople. Some of them, anyways.”
 I said nothing, but instead put my phone down and sat in the darkness with her, putting my arm around her while she cried.
 ​
 ​
 Part 2
 https://www.reddit.com/nosleep/comments/16ck4fn/we\_found\_a\_town\_abandoned\_in\_the\_mountains/
 
   submitted by    CIAHerpes    to    nosleep  [link]   [comments]


2023.08.14 21:18 MjolnirPants Martin and the Summoning
Martin Comdiemster. 
 Imagine being saddled with that name your whole life. Imagine what it would be like to be a thirteen year old gay boy and be called 'cum dumpster' by your fellow students in middle school. Imagine the bullying. Imagine being shoved into lockers on a weekly basis. Imagine being shoulder-checked every time you passed one of three dozen boys in the hall. Imagine being followed home, four or five times a year and be beaten into a bloody, bruised mess. Just because.
 Imagine the transition to high school, with the teachers sniggering every time they heard your name. Imagine the other students rolling their eyes every time they observed your mannerisms, the slight lisp, the effeminate movement, the markers of your identity that you just couldn't seem to rid yourself of. Imagine your lead bully, Sid Macon, getting even more vicious, openly calling you a 'faggot' while even the other gay boys laughed at your frustrated reactions.
 Now imagine what would happen when you got caught by the school bullies in eleventh grade kissing Oscar Castillo, his hand down your pants. Imagine what would happen if they took a picture of the two of you, and then kept posting that picture to social media and even printing it out with a caption and taping it up around school.
 Imagine that caption read 'Cum Dumpster living up to his name.'
 Finally, imagine trying to reach out to Oscar, only to be rebuffed as he told you that the only reason he kissed you in the first place was to see if you'd live up to your name.
 If you can wrap your head around all of that, if you can put yourself in Martin's shoes, then perhaps you can understand why a twenty-two-year-old Martin found himself kneeling nude before a complex summoning circle in his basement, drawn in the blood of his beloved family pet, Buster the golden retriever. Because if you can imagine all of that, you can understand why Martin did it.
 Revenge.
 ----
 Martin swayed on his knees, dipping both hands in the bowl of blood and smearing them down his own chest.
 "Agasaya," he chanted. "Agasaya, lord of war. Lust of blood and thrill of death. Agasaya. Agasaya, lord of war. Lust of blood and thrill of death..."
 He could feel the magic. His neck hairs rose through the thick smearing of congealing blood. His skin crawled as if the blood were flowing up his body. His dick, squeezed between his thighs, stood as erect now as it had been for the past two hours. Rock hard and black and blue from the endless pressure of blood. The chill in the room sank into his bones, despite the heater chugging along right next to him. And of course, he could see the occasional small droplet lift up from the circle on the floor. Those droplets were his clock.
 They came a few seconds apart. Each one slowly rose straight up, trailing a thin tendril of blood behind it. As it reached the apogee, it separated from the tendril, which collapsed back into the blood on the floor. The drop then flew up, splashing against the ceiling.
 As Martin's eyes rose up, his chant continuing, he could see the clear shape of the summoning circle. The complex runes, inscribed between the inner and outer circles. The pentagram that filled the inner circle. The symbols of Agasaya -the curved lines representing scimitars and bows- filled the hollows of the pentagram. Every single detail was now complete on the ceiling, which meant the moment was near.
 Most people would not attempt something so foolhardy as this. But Martin knew he could do it. Every exercise in magic he had ever attempted, ever since he had attended that seminar at eighteen and wowed the presenter and audience with his first ever attempt at an evocation. The wizard had called for a volunteer, and Martin's raised hand had drawn his eye. Five minutes later, a dove made of flame had flown out of his hands, up to the scaffolding of the theater and exploded into a multicolored light show. He still had the business card the wizard had given him, along with a promise to tutor him free of charge.
 Since then, he had mastered many tricks on his own. The tutelage of the wizard, as tempting an offer as it had been, had been unnecessary. Martin consumed every book he could find on the subject of working the magic that had so recently returned to the world. He had made fire and ice and lighting. He had figured out how to teleport himself, at least within his own line of sight. He had brought dead plants back to life. He had even summoned an imp, once.
 This was the next step. A demon. A former god, stripped of his power and driven to insanity by the loss. The most powerful being he could summon, short of a god. The most powerful being he could control, bar none. But more importantly, this particular demon. Agasaya, former god of war. The one who, according to his research, would know the location of what he sought.
 He could feel the magic suddenly ramp up in intensity as the newest drop form and reached up. His skin tingled. His dick throbbed painfully. His hair tried to fly out of his scalp. He watched the drop slowly stretch up, and he could see it vibrating. This was it, the final drop.
 "Agasaya!" he cried, raising his voice with no fear of being overheard, two levels below the ground.
 "Agasaya I summon thee!" he called as the drop broke free. It hung in the air, seeming to fly up in slow motion, glittering in the light of a hundred candles as it flew. Martin watched it finally reach its destination and explode into a thousand tiny droplets, filling in the last hole in the design on the ceiling. 
 The room thrummed with power. It was like hearing the growl of a tiger right behind him, filling Martin's chest with a sense of dread that he knew wasn't his own. Tiny sparks arced between the floor and anything metal in the room, all of the useless junk stored down here piled to one side to make room for his circle.
 An otherworldly light filled the room. It illuminated, while somehow being black. Martin watched the odd, shadowy light play over the wall and pile of junk across the circle from him. And then reality warped inside the circle. Martin caught a glimpse of swirling eddies of glowing mists, multicolored and behaving strangely. It was chaos, but not the chaos of flowing gasses or liquids. It was the chaos of a battlefield, clashing arms and screams and cries of agony.
 Out of that chaos stepped a figure. Tall and muscular, with thick horns that almost touched the eight-foot ceiling. Brownish-red scales, mottled with black, covered its body. A pair of wings erupted from its back, and as it turned to face Martin, he realized with a slight flush of embarrassment that it, too, had an enormous hard-on. Only this creature's dick was not human-shaped. It was enormously thick at the base, tapering to a more proportional girth at the tip, which was itself conical. The length was covered in fleshy barbs that angled back. The whole thing was just over a foot long, and Martin saw a tiny drop of clear fluid drip from the tip.
 "Agasaya," Martin gasped, finding himself out of breath. He could feel the change as his body finally relaxed after hours of tension. His erection died in a wash of relief, despite the post-pubescent allure of the creature before him. 
 "I am," the demon rumbled in an otherworldly pair of voices. One was basso, deep and menacing, the other a rich baritone. Both spoke at the exact same moment, but Martin could still, somehow, distinguish them.
 "Who are you, little boy?" Agasaya asked, bending at the waist to peer closer at Martin. A thrill of fear shot through him as the imposing creature drew closer, but Martin trusted his circle.
 "My name is Marty," he said.
 "And why have you summoned me, Marty?" Agasaya asked. The way he said the name reminded Martin of the way he said 'pizza', his favorite food, when he was so hungry his stomach ached. He swallowed the lump in his throat in order to answer.
 "Power," he said. "I want to know where to find the Font of Wrath. And I want your help to drink from it."
 Agasaya snarled at him, exposing multiple rows of razor-sharp teeth like shark fangs. "Why would I tell you such a thing, boy?"
 "Because I can command you to," Martin answer. He picked up the knife next to him and used it to cut the back of his left hand. He extended the hand over the outer ring and clenched his fist until a drop of blood fell from it, mixing with the blood of the sacrifice.
 The demon growled, recognizing what Martin was doing as he began to focus, exerting himself once again. Martin's limbs trembled, but his will was absolute. He pictured the necessary patterns in his mind, pushing magic through them. It was binding magic, a geas. One of the most powerful spells he knew, alongside the summoning itself.
 "I will rip your limbs off and consume them, then cauterize the wounds with hellfire so that I may fuck your wriggling torso to death, insolent child!" Agasaya roared, but Martin ignored him, pushing through the spell. When the magic had built up to the point that he felt he could no longer take it, he released it.
 It left his body in another drop of blood, rushing into the circle and changing it. The air began to glow with a blueish light, a light that flowed around the edges of the circle and then into the demon.
 Agasaya's growls and threats ceased. Instead, the demon stood there, panting.
 "You are quite powerful, for one so young," the demon gruffly admitted.
 "I know," Martin said. He pushed himself shakily to his feet, then reached out and smeared the circle, breaking the binding. This was the moment of truth. Agasaya's admission was no proof of his spell's effectiveness. The only proof was a test. Either Martin had succeeded, or he was about to experience a prolonged, bloody death.
 Agasaya stepped forward, looming over him. His breath bellowed like that of a raging bull, a hot wind that came and went rhythmically. It stole the chill out of Martin's limbs as it washed over him. 
 But the demon did not attack. A smile crept over Martin's face, and he felt himself grow stiff again. Not for thoughts of doing anything with the enormous, powerful demon, of course. It was pure victory. Excitement. Anticipation.
 "Take me to the Font of Wrath," he said. Agasaya extended a hand. "Yes, master," he growled.
 ----
 The sun had completely set by the time Oscar made it out to his usual parking spot in the lot of the plumbing store out on the one-twenty-five. Oscar bumped his car door shut with his butt and hoisted the cases of beer, walking into the woods to meet with his friends. His phone rang as he crossed into the treeline, but his hands were full, so he ignored it. Maybe they'd hear it ringing and come help.
 He walked for fifteen minutes, his footing practiced and sure in the deep shadows, moving my memory of the path until he found the trash-built pavilion. There was a camping lantern hanging from the hook above the table, and the DM screen was up, so he knew he wasn't the first one out here, but nobody else was in evidence.
 "Hola chicas!" he called. "I brought refreshments!" He sat the cases down next to the cooler and opened the top. There was ice in it already, so he tore open one cardboard case and began moving cans of beer into it. He could barely close the lid, once the last one went it.
 He found the insulated blanket they kept for the backup case and wrapped it around the second, tossing the empty cardboard of the first onto the cold ashes of last week's bonfire. Dungeons and Dragons in the woods was one of his favorite aspects of life after high school, second only to Scott Bryan, player of Grognar the Ranger and the cutest little flirt to have moved to his little bumfuck corner of Ohio like, ever.
 Voices in the distance announced the return of whomever had beaten him here, so he grabbed a beer from the cooler and cracked it, taking his customary seat and pulling the folder containing his character sheet out of his back pocket.
 Orlando and Steph stepped into the light, the rotund duo giggling at each other.
 "Your shirt's buttoned wrong," Oscar said to Stephanie by way of greeting. She glanced down to see that she had misaligned the buttons, and had an open slot at the uneven bottom. The traces of dead leaves and twigs in her hair made it clear that her and her fatty boyfriend had decided to bump uglies while awaiting the other.
 Shit, Oscar thought. Given his own memories of fooling around with Orlando in high school, they probably showed up early just for the chance to fuck in the woods.
 Orlando walked over as Steph adjusted her shirt to fist bump Oscar. "You ready for the dracolich, man?"
 "I was born ready," Orlando replied with a grin. He'd been looking forward to this encounter for a while, now.
 "I wanna start right away," Steph said. "As soon as Mitch gets here. We can start prepping while we wait for Scott and Katy to show up."
 "Katy's not coming," Orlando told her. "She had her date with Sid tonight." Steph made a face, which Oscar found understandable. Nobody liked Sid. The guy was a born bully. Captain of the football team in high school and an inveterate suck-up to the school officials, he was the kind of guy who would choke you out and then call it a joke. What Katy saw in him was anyone's guess.
 "Well, still," Steph said. "Have either of you talked to Mitch?"
 Oscar remembered his missed phone call and checked it. "Uhh, yeah, he called me like three minutes ago," he said. There was a voicemail there, so he hit the icon for it and pressed the phone to his ear.
 "Hey, Oscar. I'm on my way now. I just pulled in and saw you walking into the woods, do you think you could- What the fuck? Holy shit, Ma-AAAAAAAAAHHHHH!"
 The voicemail ended on the scream. 
 "What the hell was that?" Orlando asked as Oscar jerked the phone away from his ear in response to the piercing shriek.
 "I don't know... Mitch left me a message, but then he suddenly screamed and it cut off."
 Steph's eyes went wide. "Oh shit, do you think he got into an accident?"
 "He said he just pulled into the parking lot at the plumbing store," Oscar said, then something occurred to him.
 "I didn't hear him scream while I was walking in. He was, like, a couple hundred feet behind me. I should have heard him scream."
 "Maybe he was fucking with you," Steph said. "You know, pressing the phone to his mouth and screaming quietly?"
 "It didn't sound like-" Oscar started to say, but a loud, sudden rustling in the woods interrupted him. He looked around to see the dead leaves flying in a circle around the pavilion.
 "What the fuck?" he muttered as Orlando and Steph stared at the weird wind. The speed picked up, sticks and stone and dirt getting picked up as well, making a wall of debris around them. 
 "I don't-" Orlando started to say, but then he stopped, snapping into a pose with his arms straight out. He floated up into the air, and then he began to... Fold in on himself. His torso crunched together, compressing down into a tight ball. His arms and legs bent at the wrong angles, filling the air with the sickening crackle of snapping bones. Blood splattered to the ground as Orlando simply folded in on himself.
 The whole horrifying process took just a few seconds, after which the bloody ball that used to be Oscar's friend fell to the ground. He gasped in shock, unable to form words even as his mouth worked.
 Steph screamed. She pushed out the loud wail for a long moment, until Oscar actually wondered if she needed to breath. But instead of stopping, she pushed it out more and more, trailing off until it was nothing more than a choked wheeze. Oscar stared at her as seemed to struggle with... Nothing. Her limbs jerked, as if she was trying to yank them free of the air around her. 
 "Steph!" Oscar finally managed to gasp. He jumped to his feet and tried to grab her, to get out of here, but when he tugged on her arm, he found her utterly immobile.
 "Steph, come on!" he cried, giving her arm another yank. To his surprise, it came off, launching a massive spray of blood across the pavilion.
 "What the fuck?!" he choked as he fell on his ass, still grasping the grisly trophy. He reflexively threw it away, just in time to see Steph's other arm tear itself free.
 "Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit!" Oscar cried, scrambling to his feet. He got his legs underneath him just in time to see Steph's rib cage explode out, flinging organs across the pavilion to be swept up in the maelstrom outside.
 Oscar turned and ran, heedless of the winds. They pushed him over as he left the pavilion, but he tumbled forwards, his momentum from the run carrying him through. He scrambled back to his feet and bolted through the woods as fast as he could go.
 His hear raced, his pulse pounding in his ears as he ran. "Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit," he repeated, a litany against the terror that filled him.
 He made the treeline and turned, running for his car. As he reached the parking lot, another car in it shut off its lights and the door opened.
 "Oscar?" Scott asked as he climbed out, then he looked to his left and gasped. Oscar unconsciously followed his gaze, still running for his car, and saw what had surprised him. Pieces of a body lay strewn about a smoking, melted patch of asphalt. They were blackened by heat, but Oscar recognized a hand, a foot, and what might have once been a head.
 "Get the fuck out of here!" he cried to Scott.
 "What happened?!" Scott demanded, still frozen in place.
 "Go!" Oscar wailed, but it was too late. Scott was abruptly jerked into the air, arms and legs spread-eagle. Oscar fumbled for his keys as Scott's shoes flew off, followed by pants and underwear.
 "Oh shit, oh shit!" he wailed, pulling the keys from his pocket and struggling to find the fob to unlock the car.
 Scott grunted, then screamed. His stomach expanded weirdly, then his chest did the same, making the same loud crackle as Orlando had made. His scream was abruptly cut off, and he grunted again, then again. As quickly as it began, he fell to the ground, limp. Oscar could see a pool of blood forming between his legs as more blood poured from his mouth.
 The two puddles had not yet reached when Oscar found the fob and hit the unlock button. He scrambled into the car and got the key into the ignition.
 "Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit..." he repeated to himself as he started the engine and threw the car into gear. He punched the gas, bouncing over the curb stop and onto the grass, where he spun the wheel to the left. 
 He got onto the road and angled the car Northwest, back towards Bethel. He punched the gas and quickly put distance behind him. He panted, hyperventilating as his mind finally caught up with what had just happened. Mitch, Orlando, Steph and Scott... They were all dead. Killed by some unimaginable force. There would be police and investigations and maybe arrests. Maybe they'd think Oscar did it. He didn't know how to explain what he'd just seen.
 He passed the high school and slowed down, knowing the cop would force him to sit through the process of writing him a ticket before letting him speak about what had happened. Tickets were how the police funded themselves in this po-dunk little burg.
 He cruised down the road at a sedate forty five, almost hoping to see a police car. When he got into town, he decided not to slow down to meet the thirty-five speed limit. It was worth getting a ticket.
 But it was also only a couple blocks to Main St and the turn to get to the police station. He made the right and pulled into the parking lot, then stopped to collect himself. 
 "Shit," he said. He could see Orlando's body, folding in on itself like the world's most gruesome origami. He could see Steph, being ripped apart by an unseen force. He saw Scott, his body distending, like it had been inflated until he popped.
 With shaking hands, he shut the car off and pulled the keys. He climbed out of the car and began to walk towards the brownstone building. He was halfway there when something seized his ankle and tripped him.
 Oscar ate asphalt, too shaken to get his hands up to catch him. A bright light flashed in his eyes as his face struck the ground and his panic returned with a vengeance.
 "No no no no!" he cried as he kicked his legs desperately and scrambled to get to his feet. The police station was right there!
 "Help!" he cried as something seized his other ankle. He looked down, but saw nothing there.
 "Help me!" he screamed, and then he was consumed in agony as his feet and ankles were crushed flat against the ground. He screamed again, a high-pitched, wordless wail of agony.
 His wrists were seized and pressed down to the ground, and then a fresh wave of pain rushed through him as they, too were smashed flat. He cried out as loud as he could as he watched four puddles of blood form around him.
 His knees went next, making his screams even louder. His head lolled back, and he could see the entrance to the police station through a strange, milky haze. Nobody was coming.
 His elbows followed, the agony at such a level that it barely made a difference. His throat was raw, and his scream had turned harsh and breathy, but he continued to find the breath to make it, so he kept screaming.
 He barely recognized his hips flattening out. His eyes were full of tears and his vision going black around the edges. He noticed his stomach being crushed because his intestines leaped out of him, falling around him in great loops of bloody meat.
 The last thing he felt was a pressure on his chest. Then blackness consumed him, and with it came a reprieve from the pain.
 ----
 Corporal Ben Olsen of the Bethel Village Police Department noticed the car sitting there at the edge of the parking lot on his way in to his morning shift. He didn't think much of it, at first, unsure of why it caught his attention.
 He went to the locker room and got into his uniform, then reported to Sergeant Blaine for briefing. They went over the night's events, with Ben taking notes, and then they were done. He stopped to fill up his thermos with coffee and met his partner, Chris, at the doors.
 "You ready for another exciting day of small town police action?" Chris asked, his favorite greeting. Ben smirked. "Cross your fingers that we find a meth lab."
 "I'm hoping for a murder," Chris said. "Wait, that doesn't sound right..."
 Ben laughed as they walked to their patrol car. "Dude, nothing you say ever sounds right. If you ever snap and go on a killing spree, the Chief is gonna tell the news crews 'I knew there was something off about that guy'."
 Chris laughed back. "I just want a little excitement, you know?" 
 "Go sign up for Cincinnati PD then," Ben said. "Shit, we're close enough you wouldn't even have to move. It's less than an hour's drive."
 "Yeah, well, I don't want that much excitement," Chris said. "Hey, what's up with that car? The red Nissan?"
 Ben glanced over to where Chris was looking. It was the same car that caught his eye on the way in. "I dunno," he said, eying it. Closer now, he could see why it had stood out. The driver's side door was ajar.
 "Let's take a look," Chris said. "Run the plate."
 Ben nodded and together, they walked over to it. Chris ran the plate, calling up dispatch to do it as they walked around, noticing nothing out of place except for the open door. Ben pulled the door open and looked inside.
 "There's blood on the seat," he said, grabbing his radio. "Dispatch, this is Six-Two, here on site with Six-One in the department parking lot. I've got what looks like a ten-five or a ten-five-A here. Car's parked at the edge of the lot with the driver's side door ajar and there's blood on the seat and steering wheel.
 "Copy that, Six-Two. Billy and Tiff are on their way out to assist." The door opened before she even finished speaking and a pair of officers jogged out. "Thanks, Dispatch," Ben said. He turned to meet them. He hadn't gone far before his foot caught on something and he fell. He caught himself in what felt like mud.
 "What the fuck?" he asked as his immediate vicinity began to change. Milky mists rose from the ground, fading away as they climbed into the sky, and revealing a horrifying scene beneath.
 Ben scrambled to get to his radio again with hands that were suddenly covered in congealing blood. "Dispatch, this is Six-Two," he said in a tremulous voice as he took in the scene around him.
 "We've got a ten-eighteen, probably ten-twenty-eight-A. I need a coroner and an ambulance at the station."
 "Six-Two, can you confirm that ten-twenty-eight-A?" Ben scrambled away from the remains as Chris rushed to help him to his feet. 
 "Roger, Dispatch. There's a body here, and it's smooshed flat. It was invisible until I tripped over it. This is some really freaky shit, Dispatch."
 "Copy that, Six-Two. The Chief's on his way out, too."
 Ben stared down at the body as the other two officers arrived. A moment later, Chief Edwards walked up.
 "Holy shit," he muttered. "Holy shit."
 "You can say that again," Tiff said. "What the fuck are we gonna do with this?"
 The Chief heaved a sigh. "Tape it off. Olsen, call up forensics and get them out here. You're gonna need to give them samples yourself, you're covered in... Whoever this is."
 "Plate came back registered to one Oscar Castillo, twenty one, from down in Hamerville," Chris said.
 "Shit," Edwards replied. "I know his old lady."
 "Should we make the call?" Billy asked. The Chief just shook his head. "No, not till we have an identity. See if you can find an intact finger or palm to collect prints from. We'll have the lab type him, but a genetic match will take a couple days, even if he's in the system, which is unlikely. We might have to do a comparative match to his mother." He sighed again. "Shit," he muttered. This was the first murder they'd had in years.
 He grabbed his own radio and pressed the button. "Mary, this is Allen. Do me a favor and look up and call the Divine Crisis Management Group. There's a card in the rolodex, or you can google it. It's their main, eight-hundred number."
 Ben glanced over at Chris. "I guess you got your wish, man."
 
   submitted by    MjolnirPants    to    JerryandtheGoddesses  [link]   [comments]


2023.07.19 23:15 kudelk0va help me find an old horror game pls:)
Hello, me and my dad are looking for an old scary game we used to play around 2011-2015. 
 The game was hella scary with a grizzly bear with bloodied teeth staring at you from the title. Basically the game was about some young scout boys that decided upon camping in some random forest, later on they get lost and i think that you play as the local sheriff/ their skip that is trying to find them while also not bringing attention to yourself since dangerous grizzly bears are lurking around. You get spawned in a dark forest, like literally dark, the screen is black and the only thing you can see is just you and the lost scout you have to get to (i think that the scouts were blond lanky boys wearing hats not sure tho)ˇ So while youre trying to get to the scout you have to watch out for twigs, that will make sound and lure the bears closer, for puddles, that will also make a sound that wil alert the bears of your presence, but mainly beware of the grizzlies. Sound was also very important in that game, you had to have vňyour volume on max so you could hear the bears grunting or perhaps even moving towards you. You can also collect some items like crackers to lure the bears away from you or a trumpet to scare the bears away. These items also had light shinning at them in a circle. But the items were very dangerous to take since they were always close to two or three bears near you. 
 Once you get to the boy, you will be spawn in a trolley-kind of thing? I dont know what it was but i know it had wheels and there was this guy that offered you another useful items to survive and recover the scouts succesfully. There was a chicken you could sacrife and use as a bait, there was another brunette scout that you could sacriface and use as a bait (there are also bear traps in which you can get caught too), there was an oil lamp that allowed you to see more and i also vividly rememeber a pile of shit you could buy to smush all over you so the bears wont smell you out even close to them. 
 Then progressively, the levels got harder and harder. I remember starting in a forest and ending in a cave, i dont know if we got further than that. I also think that on the main page was written grizzly in bloody fonts and there was metal music in the background, im not sure if the music is there for 100%, maybe im just tweaking, but it was a very old game with cheap graphics that you could play online for free. 
 If any of yall recognize this game, then please write the name of it down bellow. Thank you for reading allat :)))
 
   submitted by    kudelk0va    to    u/kudelk0va  [link]   [comments]


2023.07.14 03:21 redllamas Advice on method for serving Google Fonts for multi-language site
Hi everyone, I need some advice on how we should host fonts on our multi-language site. I cannot decide between sticking with Google Fonts CDN, or self-hosting and optimizing the font loading.
 For context, I work in-house with a site with content in 14 languages (including Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Thai, Russian, the rest use latin or latin-ext characters). The site is being renewed, due for release soon, so we're testing and making the final adjustments.
 To maintain the type design across all regions, early on we opted for Noto Sans and its family members for the languages mentioned above (JP, KR, SC, Thai). We also use some symbols from the Material Symbols set.
 One thing that stands out is the performance impact of serving Noto Sans through the Google Fonts CDN, which adds a payload of around 3MB.
 My goal is to reduce this performance impact on the site (alongside image optimization, minification etc.) This drag on performance is messing with our core web vitals, especially on mobile.
 The site is on Drupal, using Varnish cache, no CDN, and maintained by a local agency with experience in Drupal but not much experience in multi-lingual sites. For what it's worth, we're in Japan, so the agency is not so nuanced with latin (or non-JP) typefaces.
 From my research, there are some key themes that we basically have a hypothesis on, but I'd like some advice and experience of how that works in the real world, so here I go:
 
 
Performance To my understanding, there are a few issues here. Google Fonts does more on their side to improve and optimize, whereas we will do our best to optimize, but cannot dedicate as much time or resources. 
 
Caching: Google CDN loading = cached once a day, vs. local hosting = cached for duration of user's cache setting. In theory, self-hosting wins on this count.
 
HTTP requests: Google Fonts means an HTTP request and downloading the payload, whereas self-hosting means downloading from the web server. In theory, self-hosting wins here.
 
No CDN: Google Fonts should win in theory here, because they are Google and we don't have a CDN, meaning different times for users in different locations.
 
 
Legal compliance/GDPR A court in Munich, Germany said in January 2022 that use of Google Fonts constitutes a violation of GDPR since Google collects IPs when receiving the HTTP request for the font. Of course it is better to err on the side of compliance and follow best practices for data privacy, which implies self-hosting Google Fonts is better, however I have a few concerns: 
 
Not yet widely adopted, and I don't know if this will be a domino effect kinda thing. (Remember when France and Austria decided Google Analytics is illegal?)
 
Maybe Google Fonts will anonymize IPs in the future, but who knows? (I guess IP collection is why Google Fonts is free in the first place)
 
Our site serves users in regions outside of Europe, so I want to stick to one method if possible. If that means self-hosting fonts, we should do that for non-EU regions as well.
 
 
Ease of setting: This might be something more specific to us, but since the agency maintains the Drupal installation, we need to request them to upload and deploy assets like fonts and make edits to Drupal twig template files. Sticking with Google Fonts is easiest for all, since they just need to  the files and add the CSS. Self-hosting the fonts means we need to instruct them what to do, when to deploy, and go back and forth with them for testing.
 
Optimizations Self-hosting Google Fonts requires some optimization to get close to the performance of Google Fonts CDN. This includes: 
 
subsetting fonts based on the required "unicode-range:" already defined in the Google fonts CSS 
 
 to prioritize loading
 
base64 encoding and storing it in localStorage to reduce blocking time
 
 
 Overall, self-hosting Google Fonts feels like the best choice for data privacy and reducing the data payload, but feels like we'd be fighting a losing battle to keep it light and fast, which is our main goal, leading to core web vital and hopefully SEO improvements. 
 Hope you can share your experience or advice, thanks!
 
   submitted by    redllamas    to    webdev  [link]   [comments]


2023.06.12 16:15 CryptoNaut1000 Installing ProtonVPN CLI on Ubuntu Server
I am setting up ProtonVPN CLI on an Ubuntu Server (headless installation). The installer wants to pull tons of dependencies, Among others, X11-commons.
 I don't understand why we need those desktop dependencies? Is it save to suppress their installation?
 sudo apt install protonvpn-cli Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree... Done Reading state information... Done The following additional packages will be installed: adwaita-icon-theme at-spi2-core cpp cpp-11 dbus-x11 dconf-gsettings-backend dconf-service dialog dns-root-data dnsmasq-base fontconfig fontconfig-config fonts-dejavu-core gcc-11-base gir1.2-nm-1.0 gsettings-desktop-schemas gtk-update-icon-cache hicolor-icon-theme humanity-icon-theme javascript-common libatk-bridge2.0-0 libatk1.0-0 libatk1.0-data libatspi2.0-0 libauthen-sasl-perl libavahi-client3 libavahi-common-data libavahi-common3 libbluetooth3 libcairo-gobject2 libcairo2 libclone-perl libcolord2 libcups2 libdata-dump-perl libdatrie1 libdconf1 libdeflate0 libdrm-amdgpu1 libdrm-intel1 libdrm-nouveau2 libdrm-radeon1 libencode-locale-perl libepoxy0 libfile-basedir-perl libfile-desktopentry-perl libfile-listing-perl libfile-mimeinfo-perl libfont-afm-perl libfontconfig1 libfontenc1 libgck-1-0 libgcr-base-3-1 libgdk-pixbuf-2.0-0 libgdk-pixbuf2.0-bin libgdk-pixbuf2.0-common libgl1 libgl1-amber-dri libgl1-mesa-dri libglapi-mesa libglvnd0 libglx-mesa0 libglx0 libgraphite2-3 libgtk-3-0 libgtk-3-bin libgtk-3-common libgtkd-3-0 libharfbuzz0b libhtml-form-perl libhtml-format-perl libhtml-parser-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl libhttp-cookies-perl libhttp-daemon-perl libhttp-date-perl libhttp-message-perl libhttp-negotiate-perl libice6 libio-html-perl libio-socket-ssl-perl libio-stringy-perl libipc-system-simple-perl libisl23 libjbig0 libjpeg-turbo8 libjpeg8 libjs-jquery libjs-sphinxdoc libjs-underscore liblcms2-2 libllvm11 libllvm15 liblwp-mediatypes-perl liblwp-protocol-https-perl libmailtools-perl libmpc3 libndp0 libnet-dbus-perl libnet-http-perl libnet-smtp-ssl-perl libnet-ssleay-perl libnm0 libnma-common libnma0 libpango-1.0-0 libpangocairo-1.0-0 libpangoft2-1.0-0 libpciaccess0 libphobos2-ldc-shared98 libpixman-1-0 libpkcs11-helper1 librsvg2-2 librsvg2-common libsecret-1-0 libsecret-common libsecret-tools libsensors-config libsensors5 libsm6 libteamdctl0 libthai-data libthai0 libtie-ixhash-perl libtiff5 libtimedate-perl libtry-tiny-perl liburi-perl libvte-2.91-0 libvte-2.91-common libvted-3-0 libwayland-client0 libwayland-cursor0 libwayland-egl1 libwebp7 libwww-perl libwww-robotrules-perl libx11-protocol-perl libx11-xcb1 libxaw7 libxcb-dri2-0 libxcb-dri3-0 libxcb-glx0 libxcb-present0 libxcb-render0 libxcb-shape0 libxcb-shm0 libxcb-sync1 libxcb-xfixes0 libxcomposite1 libxcursor1 libxdamage1 libxfixes3 libxft2 libxi6 libxinerama1 libxkbcommon0 libxkbfile1 libxml-parser-perl libxml-twig-perl libxml-xpathengine-perl libxmu6 libxpm4 libxrandr2 libxrender1 libxshmfence1 libxt6 libxtst6 libxv1 libxxf86dga1 libxxf86vm1 network-manager network-manager-openvpn network-manager-openvpn-gnome network-manager-pptp openvpn perl-openssl-defaults ppp pptp-linux python3-dialog python3-dnspython python3-gnupg python3-proton-client python3-protonvpn-nm-lib python3-requests-toolbelt python3-xdg session-migration tilix tilix-common ubuntu-mono x11-common x11-utils x11-xserver-utils xdg-utils 
 
   submitted by    CryptoNaut1000    to    ProtonVPN  [link]   [comments]


2023.06.10 06:57 rdk67 Spring Day 81: Sweetness Remembered
(This is a nonviolent text.)
 Life! Exclamation point! Today’s speaker is made of clock parts and possesses encyclopedic knowledge about the nature of natural life. Life! Exclamation point! Though biographies in the back of conference programs won’t ever tell the whole story, they tempt us with the true face of authority. Today’s speaker – Life! – is made of clock parts, probably a grandfather clock to begin with, young for its age, but then he started slapping on extra clock parts, moved by an urge he couldn’t explain, until the function of tolling the hour was more of a hobby, a weekend pass-time, compare to what all those precision instruments were up to on a regular basis. As a vision on stage, the speaker’s machinations were there for all to see – the whirring of gears and belts, the clanking of chains. Where his heart chakra was thought to manifest, swung a pendulum.
 The nature of natural life is not an easy expertise to build a vocation around – Life! Exclamation point! – but what a sentence to say aloud. At this point in the address, one of the speaker’s mainsprings uncoils where his belly button would normally be. He uses the longer of his hands to poke it back into place without breaking stride, continues: What is a natural life? More to the point, what is a natural lifespan? Who better to know than me! He points to himself when he says this, does a quick spin in place, revealing the dozens of differently styled clock faces that cover the surface of his body, continues: I’m after the author’s natural lifespan, like to pretend I’m playing along, but the whole time, I’m thinking about his natural lifespan. Hmm, hmm, I wonder why? Ha! // The author changes the subject – today’s speaker thinks of something else.
 When you discover someone living an unnatural lifespan, you seek to find out why. Not that the reason is the point – not by a longshot – but call me curious. Maybe they tripped at the right moment and tumbled past the grave. Maybe they did a few extra calisthenics before the cock crowed. Or – perish the thought – they succumbed to an unholy pact at a vulnerable moment. I have taken it upon myself to sniff them out – and when he says this, the regulators above his eyes both arch significantly. And what then? We usually have a quiet chat before I recite my speech and complete my visit. It isn’t personal, I begin – time sometimes wells up, spills over its banks, and floods the village. If we could avoid such catastrophe, we should – don’t you agree? The time nature intends, through natural lifespans, would never, let’s be honest, flood a valley.
 And what, then, would I do? Proprietary information! hoots today’s speaker from the stage, does another quick spin, stage lights flickering off his crystals, his gleaming metals. About the author’s natural lifespan – oh, you thought I’d forgotten! Were you 18 when you first died? Had it happened before then? Were you but a child under-supervised? Under-supervision-ed, we might say. Remember the day? You rode a toy out into the street, and a car’s front bumper rushed forward to kiss you on the left side of your head, the temple, a stone flung by the age of automobiles. Don’t you remember? Of course you do – the passionate screeching of tires, as those around you stopped and turned to look, surprise gradually replaced by horror at what they knew happened but couldn’t bear to see. You thought you survived – didn’t you? – but thereafter, what appeared on your left temple? A knotted cist so prominent, people stopped you and asked what happened. You saw exactly two physicians over the next 10 years, both telling you not to worry about it, and so you didn’t. You didn’t! When you probed the spot with your fingers, it felt like a rounded room, a shelter built by something trying to survive. As for that 18-year-old involved in that off-road motor vehicle accident – nominee number two, let’s call it – true, you were far more aware of mortality by then, but your own? You climbed aboard a 3-wheeled vehicle that could travel at more than 50mph, completely lacking a seatbelt, headrest, or protective frame – without a helmet, boots, or jacket – and the brakes were less than half there that fateful day, a means of slowing down – a vehicle that would be rendered illegal to operate within a matter of years of the accident . . . the accident . . . remember the accident? August, you were traveling off-road to do farm work, the cornfield you were riding beside with several rows chopped out for silage, and on impulse, you decided to turn into the field to see where it went, then really opened her up because of the green blur of all that corn. Did you secretly expect the drainage ditch? Was this more of a suicide mission? Over the side you went, face first into the opposite bank, and if anyone was wondering – the effect was not of pain but of the lights going out all at once. Imagine the nature of reality that allows for: the inevitability of the crash, followed by all the lights going out – this is really happening – followed by some utterly absent experience, like a film editor cutting in a blankness where reality normally insists scenes of existence should be. The film projectionist would have been instructed to fast-forward through this part of the film, such that no time seems to pass, and the next thing we know, he is trying to push a 3-wheeler out of a drainage ditch. That thing weighing more than he does, and he’s trying to heave it above his head, up and out of the drainage ditch. What had he become? What time-wise tricks were in play? He finally gave up trying to free torment from its channel, staggered through the field toward the truck, face covered in blood, never went to the hospital. When the story is recounted later by his dad, the story became how dad fixed the 3-wheeler by prying the front wheel out of the frame with his truck and a chain. Can you imagine that chain now? They called it a log chain, and the links were cast iron. It was completely covered in rust.
 The author knows all this already, receives a spiritual visitation during the writing of the phrase suicide mission, wondering if he’s okay. Yes, he replies, knowing this particular metaphysical weather report has a lot of ground to cover. Today’s guest speaker picks at one of his stems in a distracted way, lets the matter rest, inquires about whether – uh-hum! – he might be permitted to carry on. The author gets up, refills his coffee, returns to one of the picnic tables arrayed in front of the derelict peace church where he lives. He is surrounded by millions of individual affirmations of life, many of which are visibly in bloom or going to seed. A bumble bee flies by. A yellowish bug with zigzags on either side ambles up, its antennae twice as long as its body, tapping at the world in front of it. Among the local insect population, it’s regarded as a savant.
 Uh-hum! How many more brushes with death would the author experience before it finally took? There was the time a few years later, same farm but different brother, taking turns firing a handgun at a target. This would be the last time he would fire a gun for any reason, was it not? They climb into the brother’s wedge-shaped sports car, named after the grasping part of a bird of prey, and into fate’s hands did fly. The car was totaled, the two of them, without seatbelts or airbags, unhurt inside the crumpled remnants of the crash, mere inches from winding up once more inside drainage infrastructure, this one built by municipal authority, and therefore of a substance that would have been altogether worse on an unsuspecting traveler headed straight down. Yes, you might have been saved from becoming the remains of the day – but by what?
 The child who caused the crash, the one who pulled out in front of that bird of prey, barely old enough to drive, who had two younger passengers inside with him, taking them out for ice cream maybe – that young driver sat nearby while police sorted out the story. He was crying on the side of the road like he would never stop, like he had identified the crash as the latest in a series of personal failings that would stretch into the future of his adulthood like a hot blacktop road and which, at every stop along the way, tragic suffering would be the font of consolation. Was this the way reality was supposed to work? The author recognized the boy as himself at an earlier age, bent down beside him, put a hand on his shoulder, and said, you will be okay. No one was hurt, and the rest can be replaced – your heart is true, and your soul will find its relief.
 Ah, yes, the crash, says the author – ah, yes, the crash. Ah, yes, the crash, says the author – ah, yes, the crash. Ah, yes, the crash, says the author – ah, yes, the crash. The late days of spring may be the most forgotten of the year. If we aren’t anticipating summer – it’s still spring? – then we’re longing for those moments when the world was still opening its mouth, and then its eyes, and then its hands. The trees are all open by now, those late-arriving sycamores even filling out their leaves, such that the twigs and branches are all mildly bowed by the extra weight. After spring assumes its labor, the rest of the season finds its dedication, and I imagine the beads of water rising through capillaries beneath the wood – call it a space program – and a sweetness spreads throughout the tubular organisms we call trees. Late spring – sweetness remembered.
 Life! Exclamation point! Chronobiology knows nature has much to say about what is cyclical, when, and for how long – much less to say about the natural length of one’s existence. Is death something one develops a knack for? The next notable death in the author’s life occurred a few years later – the death that would make dying into a full-time vocation. And where again do we find the author? Beside a drain. This one introducing the age of indoor plumbing, as the author lay on the floor of a friend’s bathroom, his life flashing before his eyes, as he vomits into a toilet. This time the world does not go dark all at once but feels like fuses blowing out, like a timed demolition, flashing like a string of firecrackers across the structural frame of a building, and a voice not his own telling the author: you’ll be okay, ride it out, remain present, you’ll be okay.
 Would he though? For this fourth death, another blank spot appeared, no two – two instances of nothingness, orbiting each other, during which time, during which time, during which time – perhaps language hasn’t the proper security clearance to convey the negotiations that must have taken place to bring about a return to the living. The author remembers his friend opening the bathroom door, before which she would have been knocking and calling his name. When the door struck him in the back, and he came back to life, had he landed in the place where that drain did lead? While his friend cleaned up the bathroom floor with a towel, he sat on a bed with his hands covering his face. The hideousness he’d just passed through was the abbreviated version of what was to come – he knew the drill by now. The knot on his forehead was gone.
 Destiny had finally shown him to his home, gave him a tour of the place, before scraping him off the floor, then setting up a series of baffling crises – from autumn 2002 to May 2003 – that would occupy the author’s attention for decades to come. The will toward dying had finally brought the world to life, and the mind of the universe was both ecstatic and enraged about it. Down there, at the bottom of the drain, they were fighting a global war on terror, war on terror, war on terror, and if wars on terror sum up preferred formulations of self-annihilation – symbol of invocation: fighting a reflection – then perhaps the author’s presence was meant to form a mirror-in-mirror infinity from which sustainable futures would emerge. Welcome to Mirror World! Where reflectivity gives us an evolutionary future! Where a universal narrative unfolds!
 The author is making me write this, I must confess, but to everyone’s surprise, I am forcing the author to make me! The author is mine! And the author wrote that, too, I must additionally confess, and the two of us go around and around like this – symbol of invocation: two snails having sex in midair. The flatness and hardness we associate with reflectivity is something we will all outgrow eventually, and the hologram of hyper-reality will appear within our being like a flying saucer, and we will all be both abductees and witnesses, shown around the universe in style. Too much to ask? The last such alien contact – the insinuation of verbal and mathematical language into the genome of big-brained primates – gave us the keys to earthly reality. We are now exiting the stone age, evolving the means to make benevolence a fixture of human life.
 The author made me write that, too, and even though I am just as surely making him write this, we must admit the mutability within the fabric of reality was not won without a struggle. The author faced death 11 times that year, faced death the next year, and the year after that. Each point along the way wanted to finish what the others couldn’t, and soon death felt like an echo, and in that moment of not really distinguishing the source and the reflection – when they both look somewhat the same – he could tell life and death were likewise difficult to discern. Life! Exclamation point! Are you merely an extension of entropy? A quicker way of dissipating the heat from a rocky-bodied planetoid like the earth? And if you are, then is life really just another form of death? But death! Didn’t you show us the way? Wasn’t dying the source of the cure?
 Today’s speaker made me write that, just as I made him think it. And as thoughts passed from gear to gear around his body – as cuckoos sprang forth through tiny doors at various angles – as a series of chimes and tones issued forth from the stage like the ringing of a bell, if the bell could tell time and was tolled by committee – then the river of the natural lifespan, subject of such grand speculation in a previous incarnation, could now take its course. Perhaps indeed valleys would flood, but such is the natural origin of certain fertile fields. Springtime couldn’t agree with me more, its will toward abundance glad to splay its fingers before another epic growing season. As the author considers ways to wind up this report – knowing such lived truth inspires concern – whether death equals life or life equals death, he reasserts a will toward world peace.
 Peace. 
 
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2023.05.06 09:51 KnightBreeze What I've Become: Ravings of a Monster 2
So, forward, sorry it took me so long to post the next chapter, but I figured I'd hold off on doing just that until after I had finished my second book. Then, I'd post the whole first book, piecemeal style every week like I promised previously.
 Little did I know that the next book would take me five years to finish.
 But it's okay, it's out right now, and you can buy both right this second! The first is called What I've Become, and the second is called Nightmare of the Past. They're both really, really good, and only $3.99 U.S. if you want to get the whole story faster. Plus, the second book is, like, twice the size of the first, so you've got quite a bit of great content to chew through. Please take a second to think about purchasing my book.
 Now, with the second book out of the way, I'll be dropping chapters like clockwork. Every Saturday, I guarantee you that you'll see something from me. I mean, the whole book's finished, there's no work to be done on my end. Even set a timer on my phone so I can remember to do it.
 One more thing to note, though. In the book, there is a point where I show someone talking to the main character, but he doesn't hear her immediately. You'll know it when you see it, it's where she shouts ENOUGH!! at him. Now, I show the slow realization in the book with different font sizes. But I can't do that here (Or if I can, I have no clue how), so if you want the real experience, you're going to need to buy the book.
 But enough spoilers, let's just sit back, and see how this turns out...
 First Previous Next
 Why? Just… why? Why do I have to be so stupid? I asked myself as the screams of the freaking shadow monsters closed in on me. They were everywhere at this point. Not only behind me, but to either side of me, clear evidence that they were not only gaining on me, but toying with me. At least, that was the only reason I could come up with for why I was still alive.
 I didn’t even know what these things were. Not really, anyway. Yeah, they looked like my nightmares, but that didn’t mean that I knew what they were. They didn’t seem to leave a corpse to study, for instance, just a pile of dirt and sticks, as evidenced by the one I had dropped earlier. There was no freaking way that was natural, but then again, I already had plenty of evidence that they weren’t in any way ‘natural’. After all, it wasn’t natural for nightmares to take physical form, and hunt you down.
 I couldn’t blame this on a terrible dream, either. I already knew I was awake, seeing as how I had already taken a nasty tumble, which had given me a gash on my forehead and had inflicted just enough pain to let me know that this was very, very real.
 Even as I ran, though, I couldn’t help but ponder on just how strange this was. The forest was pretty large, but I still should have seen some kind of sign that these things were here. But no, the forest had been fairly quiet each night, and during the day I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of the things. Yeah, they were probably nocturnal, but you’d think that I would have seen at least a hint of their presence, especially since it sounded like I had a freaking legion on my tail.
 There was no way that a group this big left no sign of its passing. If they ate like normal living creatures, they should have easily stripped the forest bare in a matter of weeks, I thought as I vaulted over another log. Does that mean that they don’t eat? That they’re not even alive? …They only leave behind dirt and twigs, so that would make sense, in a bizzarro, fantasyland sort of way. But how would they move? What powers them? Please don’t tell me that they’re some kind of golem, and I’ve managed to stumble on-crap!
 My thought was cut short as my enhanced eyes saw one of the beasts leap out at me from the edge of my vision, and my body reacted in kind. Without even thinking about it, my claws were out, and I was diving to avoid the swipe that would have removed my head. I quickly righted myself and struck out at it, attempting to put it off-balance while I kept running. I didn’t even intend to hit anything, but I felt my claw connect in a gratifying way anyway, which if I still had the facial muscles for the action, would have left me grinning like a maniac.
 I didn’t stick around to see how much damage I had done though, and a good thing, too, because right after I started running again I heard several dull thuds and piercing screams behind me, which let me know just how close the other nightmares had come to taking my head off.
 I ignored them, though, as I ignored the gnawing hunger in the pit of my stomach, and the little voice in my head that had kept warning me all day that I was doing something stupid. Because, and let’s be honest here, you haven’t done one intelligent thing all day today. You could have just let the bird-thing lie there, but nooooo, you had to play the hero! I thought to myself as I ducked underneath another branch. Because of that lapse in common sense, you let your pig get taken by an animal, and then weird bird soldiers invaded your home while you were out trying to find something else to eat. Not even sure how that turned into being chased by nightmares made flesh, but it certainly can be chalked up to you not leaving well enough alone, butting your big, fat, stupid head into things that aren’t your problem!
 I shook my head as I vaulted over another log, my breath coming out in harsh, shallow gasps as I tried to put as much distance between me and shadowy death as possible. So help me, if I survive this I’m going to turn that tree into freaking toothpicks...
 Without warning, I plowed through some thick foliage and came running out of the woods, a huge, expansive field before me. Off in the distance I could see a huge mountain overshadowing the whole valley, as well as the beautiful, full moon that hung right behind it. The long grass was up to my groin, and I could feel the alien growth whip at my legs as I ran through the field. The night ahead of me was quiet… Too quiet… I came to a stop, turned, and immediately noticed the multitude of red eyes staring at me out of the forest that I had once called my home.
 I was tired, though... So very, very tired. I hadn’t had dinner yet, and it was way past my bedtime. More importantly, though, I was tired of running. I was tired of hiding. I was tired of being so freaking alone. With a guttural growl, I crouched low, my claws bursting from my fingertips as I stared down the monsters that had been chasing me in my dreams, and had apparently followed me out to the waking world as well.
 “Well? Come on! You afraid that I’ll bite back!?” I tried to say, my voice hoarse and screechy in my ears. As much as I would have liked to say something that defiant, those weren’t the actual words that came out of my mouth. I didn’t have lips anymore, after all, and my vocal cords were no longer suited to any kind of speech, much less something as complicated as the English language. Anyone who spoke English could have probably guessed what I had been trying to say, but only after I had repeated it several times.
 That didn’t matter, though. In fact, very little mattered to me at that point. My struggles to survive, the people that had died on the way here, the hope of ever seeing family I had left behind again, all completely pointless in the face of the slavering, shifting, shadowy nightmares that stepped out from the woods. As one, they tilted back their heads, and let out a long, triumphant scream.
 Yeah, there’s no way these things are natural, I thought as I took a few steps back to keep them from surrounding me.
 There was no hope of that, though, there were just too many of them. The forest seemed to boil as nightmare after nightmare left the shadows of the woods, their claws flexing ominously as their wide, terrifying mouths gnashed at me, clearly anticipating turning me into a red smear on this alien plain.
 As they slowly surrounded me, I looked around, strangely calm as I realized that it was finally my time to die. I’m sorry, guys… Looks like I can’t keep our promise… I thought as the nightmares closed in on me.
 But just because my death was certain, didn’t mean that I was going to go down without a fight.
 I jumped straight up, letting the beasts run into each other underneath me. Time seemed to slow down like it had before. Like it always had done ever since I woke up on that blasted ship.
 It was a useful phenomenon, though. The geek inside of me whispered that it was probably the implants in my head accelerating my ability to process information, to give me plenty of time to plan out each of my moves in detail.
 The monster inside me, however, reached out and casually sliced one of the nightmares in half as I came down on its shoulders.
 I let that part take control at that point. There was a time when I had wrestled with it, that insane part of me, the programming that those freaks on that spaceship had shoved into my head, but now it served me. I did not question it as my body hopped from beast to beast, neatly slicing two more in half, their collapsing bodies leaving nothing but dust and twigs as I kept moving atop the sea of monstrosities. I was no longer caged as I had been when I had been under the control of those bug aliens, watching as some insane monster used my own body to murder anything in its way. No… instead, I was the handler, my hands on the leash of the most deadly attack dog ever made.
 An attack dog that was all too happy to have something to kill.
 I continued like this for what seemed like hours, hopping from form to form, swinging wildly to take out as many as possible, but I knew I couldn’t keep this up forever. I was tired, and not fed properly. Even with my enhanced reflexes and ability to slow my perception of time to a crawl, I could still feel my movements becoming sluggish and imprecise. It was no surprise, then, when I slipped off of one and landed on my ankle wrong.
 I wasn’t worried about the bone breaking, as I already knew it was made of some kind of metal, and would be more likely to bend or deform before it broke. I was lucky that neither of those things happened, but that luck did not stop the muscle around the bone from becoming damaged, slowing me down even further. If I added to this the fact that I was now at ground level with the things, it became abundantly clear that I had reached the end of my rope.
 I saw the claw swipe coming ages before it actually reached me. I could easily calculate exactly how long it would take before it cut into my shoulder, and exactly how much damage it would do, I was just too slow to do anything about it, or any of the other attacks that were aimed at my naked, vulnerable body. So, instead of trying to block, or even move out of the way, I concentrated instead on taking out as many as I could before my wounds overcame me.
 Another three down, and another scratch, this one traveling up my back, digging into my flesh. I hardly noticed it, though. I was aware of the pain only in the same way that a drowning man is aware of the fact that the moon exists.
 Another three fell as something pierced my leg. It broke off, leaving something stuck in my calf, but I ignored it as I ripped one of the beasts in half, its form turning into dirt and twigs in my hands.
 A claw brushed the top of my head, and I could feel more blood trickle downward, staining my skin red, but I kept on fighting. Finally, something managed to grab me, and I felt it hurl me through the air. Time was still moving at a crawl for me, however, and I could see each and every monster as it passed. I reached out and swiped at as many as I could, but I already knew that it wouldn’t be enough.
 I bounced a couple of times in the soft, springy turf, before a hidden boulder finally stopped my journey. It hurt, but I could tell that the tumble through the grass had slowed me to the point where I hadn’t broken anything upon impact. The hit had still left me winded, though, so it was with shaky hands that I pushed myself up, before I slowly rose to my feet. The beast was still screaming in my brain, urging me to charge, to tear them to pieces, and leave nothing in my wake. The sane, rational part of my mind knew better, though. There was less of them now, but still far too many to even think about taking out by myself. I was ready to go now, but the weak, cowardly part of my brain slowed down time for me again, and with nothing better to do to pass the time, I counted their number. Sixty-nine… seventy-two… seventy-five. How many were there before? I wondered idly to myself.
 It didn’t matter, though. I was hurt, and hurt bad. Regardless of how many I took down, even if I somehow managed to kill them all, there was no way I was going to walk away from this.
 I was already dead. My body just didn’t know it, yet.
 With a defiant snarl, I lunged at my nightmares, slowed somewhat by whatever was still lodged in my leg, as well as the damage the other one had sustained when I had fallen. Time was still moving at a crawl, though, so it was like I was struggling through molasses, each step a monumental achievement as I slowly inched towards my impending doom.
 As much as I wanted to just let time start again, and get it over with, though, I found myself pushing the implants harder, making this moment stretch longer and longer. After a few, relative minutes of this, the world seemed to have stopped entirely, and the only thing that was moving was the large, blue streak of lightning that illuminated the entire night sky. Strange… I don’t remember seeing any clouds earlier today… I thought as sat there, completely motionless, frozen in that moment. I wasn’t completely still though, and with almost painful slowness, I inched towards my targets, my claws slicing through three more monsters so slowly that I could see the moment the shadows fell away, leaving behind a mannequin of dirt, sticks and rocks that rained slowly to the earth.
 As impressive as the implants were, though, and as much as I stretched out this moment, there was nothing I could do but watch as one of the beast’s claws aimed straight for my throat.
 To the nightmares, I’m sure that everything was moving quick and easy, and they were probably overjoyed that they could finally put an end to me.
 To me, it was as if death had finally caught up with me, and as I stared into his cowled, skeletal face, all I could think of was how relieved I was that this was finally over.
 I’m sorry, Valerie… I thought as my eyes closed, finally ready to accept my fate as I let time resume its normal pace.
 There was a loud, confusing mixture of sounds and, instead of a searing pain, then a lightness as my head parted from my shoulders, I felt as if the mother of all giants had punched me right in the gut. I was flying again, my limbs splayed out in every direction as I cartwheeled through the air, bouncing almost comically on the springy grass before I finally skidded to a halt. I coughed a little, my tongue working furiously to clear my mouth of the dirt and grass I had managed to pick up during my journey as I tried to get the world around me to stop spinning.
 When the world did resolve into something I could understand, I had to slap myself once, just to make sure that what I was seeing wasn’t caused by a concussion or something.
 One of those bird aliens was standing in front of the small army of nightmares right where I had been only moments before, the area directly around it scorched clean of anything living. It wasn’t looking at me as it lifted that beautiful, yet terrifying war scythe in its hands, the blade glowing the same color of red as the electricity that sparkled and crackled around the bird’s form, and for just the briefest of seconds, I thought I saw the nightmares flinch as the bird alien brought its scythe down and thrust it point first into the dirt.
 There was a brilliant explosion of light, and I could feel the force of the blast in my bones. Red lightning arced out from the alien, frying some of the monsters, and blasting others back in a display of power that would have made freaking Superman sit up and take notice. All at once my brain shut down, and I knew that, had I been on the wrong end of that, there wouldn’t have been anything left of me to wonder what just happened. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope… I thought as I unsteadily got to my feet.
 Despite the fact that, just seconds ago I had been fully prepared to meet my maker, fear began to shoot through my entire being, and a need to be anywhere else suddenly took hold of me. Deep down, I knew that I was panicking, and that my fear was probably unfounded, but as I watched more bird-like aliens descend on the group of nightmares, their beaks and talons glowing with destructive energies that I had no names for, all I could think about was what they would do to me if they managed to get their claws on me.
 Without even thinking about it, without even realizing what I was doing, I turned and ran. I could hear the sounds of battle behind me, the screams of the aliens as they fought the monsters, but all I could think about was how I could put as much distance between myself and these inhuman titans. I was slowed down by my injuries, though, so it took me far longer than I would have liked to reach the treeline.
 Something called out behind me as the darkness of the forest closed around me, and I could easily guess based on the tone, direction, and distance that the voice was probably aimed at me, but I ignored it. In fact, it only made me put even more effort into getting away as fast as possible, my speed increasing ever so slightly as the shouts behind me became more frantic.
 I was in full panic mode by this point, and frankly I was concentrating far more on the ‘running’ part of running away that I failed to fully register what the ‘away’ part was doing. This turned out to be a rather foolish decision, as I didn’t even notice that I had reached another break in the forest.
 I did notice the fast, deep river, however, though not nearly in time to stop myself from running right off of the raised bank, my arms and legs continuing to pump for a full four seconds before I realized what had happened. This proved especially detrimental, since by that point I was already fully submerged, and was rapidly being swept downstream.
 For some inane reason, I decided that some more panic was in order, and promptly inhaled a lungful of water. I started hacking as I came to the surface, my arms flailing even more as I desperately tried to put my old swimming merit badge to good use, but that one bob to the surface seemed to be about all the buoyancy I could muster as I was quickly swept under again. Come on, you know how to swim! I thought as I slowed down, my arms attempting to follow the strokes that had been drilled into my head by my Uncle Jerry, but unfortunately it seemed like my body had finally reached its limit.
 I was wounded, tired and, quite frankly, terrified. All that my attempt at a calm breaststroke seemed to amount to was a little floundering, before I promptly sank to the bottom like a rock, the most likely cause of this being the metal in my arms and legs. I tried once more, desperate to not let this be my grave as my lungs burned with the need to take a breath, but all I managed was a pitiful thrash before my lungs started working on their own, betraying me and filling my insides with the cold water that surrounded me. As darkness quickly filled my vision, I faintly felt something rough and sharp grab my shoulders, and I felt myself being pulled upwards, but that hardly mattered to me by this point.
 Whatever caught me can have me… was my last thought before unconsciousness claimed me.
 * * *
 I was alone, running through the smothering darkness, hoping against hope that I could reach my destination unhindered. I needed to reach her, but I knew this wouldn't be the case as the skittering steps behind me increased in volume, letting me know that my death was only seconds behind me. I doubled my speed, hoping that I could put some distance between myself and… Them, but I didn’t have any real hope in this endeavor
 They were always too fast, hunting me with unknown weapons and a nameless dread, filling me with a terror so profound that it transcended simple fear and became something new entirely. I felt something pierce my calf, and I fell with a shout, my limbs suddenly feeling weak as something roughly picked me up, and threw me onto my back. The surface I was lying on was hard, probably metal, which only served to further increase my terror. “Please… just let me go…” I whimpered pitifully.
 As if in response to my plea, a light came on above me, but the illumination did not reveal an angel, savior, or any kind of mercy. Instead, all I saw were those accursed, metal arms, each holding a blade, or needle, or drill of some kind. As they slowly approached, an insect-like face suddenly popped into view, and I tried to ward it off in panic, only to discover that my arms seemed to be missing. I tried to kick out, only to find that They had taken those too.
 I heard voices somewhere just beyond my sight, but what They said was beyond my understanding. I had to escape, but as I watched in horror as one of those blades slowly made its way towards me, inching ever closer to my paralyzed eye, I knew that there was no way out.
 Without any warning, the blade lunged downward, impaling my cornea on its cold, metallic edge. As I screamed in pain and horror, I felt the world around me change again. This time, I was back inside that loathsome tank, suspended in a weird, viscous goo, with something metal over my mouth and nose. I could breathe, but at the same time I felt like I was drowning, and I found that I would have preferred the sweet embrace of death over this terrible torture.
 They were here, too, watching me while They took notes on Their devices, seemingly unconcerned with my pain and distress. I could see other tanks behind Them, ones with humans in them, others with monsters, and some with something in-between the two. In desperation, I hammered at the tank walls, begging Them to let me go, pleading with Them to have some compassion.
 As one of Them came closer, the world shifted once again, and I found myself alone in the darkness. Or, at least, I thought I was alone. A sound behind me challenged that assumption, causing me to whip around, only to be confronted with a nightmare.
 It was similar to what They had turned me into, only far larger and more grotesque. Its claws dripped with a vile ichor, and its maw was open, eager to swallow me whole. I started to run, well aware of the ponderous footsteps behind me, coming closer with each passing second. “Please! Somebody! Anybody!” I screamed as it finally caught me in its claws. I could hear it laughing, its monstrous voice tinged with insanity as it turned me in its huge hands to look me in the face. “Why are you doing this to me?” I shouted at it, hoping that I could stall it for a few seconds longer.
 It just looked at me, then continued to laugh. “I'm not the one doing this, monster,” it said.
 The world around me changed again, and I glanced around, noting a few, human-made houses. My heart lept as I found myself outside my house, only to have that hope shattered when I looked down, and saw the mangled corpse at my feet. I don’t know why I lifted my hands, possibly to check, possibly to try and help despite the fact that he was clearly dead, but none of that mattered when I caught sight of my own, mutated claws, and I realized that they were covered in blood.
 “Why would you make me do this? I'm not a monster!” I screamed in horror.
 “You are now,” I heard the beast whisper in my ear.
 I shook my head in disbelief and fell to my knees at the corpse, dispair wrapping around me like a thick blanket. I could hear voices all around me, some I knew, others I didn’t, but they all said the same things.
 “Monster.”
 “Horror.”
 “Killer.”
 “Enough.”
 “Murderer.”
 “Beast.”
 “Thing.”
 “Enough!”
 “This is only the beginning you know.”
 “You belong to us, now.”
 “You are our plaything.”
 "Why don’t we have some fun?” I felt my head wretched up by some unknown force, my eyes moved on their own to look down the familiar street, filled with familiar people, all looking at me with horror in their eyes. “Maybe kill everything you know and love?” the voice echoed through me, filling me with terror as it forced me to my feet. I fought as hard as I could, but it was all in vain as I took a single step forward, then another, then another, the terror of what I was about to do filling me until I couldn’t even breathe. The lack of oxygen mattered little to whatever controlled me, and all I could do was watch in horror as I raised a claw, my eyes locked on the quivering, fearful shape of Valerie.
 She was staring directly at me, her voice echoing through the silence, pleading with me not to do this, but as much as I tried, I couldn’t stop myself as my claw came down in what was sure to be a killing blow.
 “ENOUGH!”
 A bright light suddenly pierced the darkness, silencing the voices, and burning away the horrors that had already begun to play out in front of me. I found that I had regained the ability to move, so I turned towards the light, dreading what new terror was in store for me.
 I saw a moon, far larger and more beautiful than any moon I had ever seen. As I watched, the moon started to move closer, Its light banishing my fear, and filling me with something I didn't have a name for. It was something alien, but somehow, I felt like I had experienced this somewhere before. As the moon got closer, I was finally able to place a name to the glorious feeling.
 Peace.
 A shadow slowly formed on the face of the moon, its figure distinctly bird-like in shape. It got closer, eventually leaving the moon behind to stand in front of me, the moon rising quickly to leave both of us behind. As the moon rose, the shadows around the bird fell away, revealing something familiar, yet still quite alien.
 She was one of those bird-aliens. In fact, I had seen her before, her scythe in her hand as she had wielded terrible powers against a nameless foe. I wasn’t sure why I thought this creature in front of me was a female, but something deep down said I was right about this. Her bearing could only be described as regal, each move filled with a grace that no one on earth could ever match.
 She was also shorter than me, but not by much. If you included the dark blue crest on her head, she was taller than my six feet, but those were only feathers, and probably didn’t count. The rest of her feathers were a deep, black color, while her beak, fingers and the parts of her legs not covered in feathers or metal were all a brilliant, luminescent white, with the sole exception being the black, tattoo-like markings that adorned her beak. Her black armor was covered in bright, white etchings, all of which seemed to glow with some unearthly light, while her eyes seemed to be like two teal jewels sparkling in the night sky. On the front of her armor I could see a perfectly round, white circle painted there, its meaning lost on me as her crest seemed to droop ever so slightly.
 I had no way of knowing the meaning of her drooping crest, or the look she was giving me, but somehow I could feel the sorrow that seemed to radiate from her.
 “Who are you?” I asked, strangely unafraid of this new arrival.
 She didn't answer at first. Instead, she just continued to look at me, her teal gaze filled with compassion as those beautiful eyes seemed to see straight into my soul. I felt uncomfortable, as if I was somehow coming up short to her expectations, but nothing about her seemed to tell me that. On the contrary, all I felt was a deep, abiding compassion, and somewhere underneath, an anger that seemed to boil just below the surface.
 As quickly as I had seen it, the fury passed, and I felt the world around me change again. This time, I was at home, in my bed. I felt safe as my comforter was pulled up around my neck, the soft pillow and bed beneath me feeling like the lightest, fluffiest cloud imaginable. I tried to sit up, but a single hand on my chest stopped me, followed quickly by a soft, melodic voice. “There will be time for that later. For now, a gift. The gift of the dreamless. Sleep, and finally rest from your cares. Take comfort in knowing that you are safe, now.”
 Her voice had a strange, musical quality to it. I could also tell that she wasn't speaking in my language, but somehow I could understand the meaning behind those words. How the heck does that work? I thought to myself as my eyes got heavier.
 I could hear her nearby, her voice humming a soft, unknown tune as my mind started to slip off. The world was fading, and my last, conscious thought was about how strange my room looked in the moonlight. Before I knew it, though, I had fallen into a deep, dreamless sleep.
 * * *
 I woke with a start, my head pounding, and my body feeling like one large bruise. My legs especially seemed to be quite painful, but not nearly as painful as I thought they should be. Why am I still alive? I thought as I sat up from where I was lying.
 I nearly jumped out of my skin, though, when a nice, thick blanket slid off of me as I became upright. I looked down in confusion, noting the patchwork pattern of the cloth in utter disbelief. A...what? I thought intelligently as I stared down at the impossible cloth.
 My sense of smell, tired of being ignored for so long, burst down the door of my consciousness and slapped a status report on my brain's desk. My brain took a good, long look at it before finally handing it over to me in confusion.
 I smelled fish fillet.
 Not just any fillet, either. This smelled just like salmon, rubbed down with a mixture of salt, garlic and rosemary, then fried gently over a slow flame. Knowing that none of those ingredients existed on this planet, I turned my head towards the heavenly scent, only to see something that I refused to believe.
 I got up and went to the entrance of my cave, just to make sure that it was really my cave, but stopped when I became aware of the bandages covering my body. I took a few seconds to take stock of myself, ignoring the impossibilities that were in my cave as I tried to figure out what happened to me. A quick peek under each of the white cloths only yielded more questions, however. I was bruised, badly at that, but that seemed to be the only thing wrong with me. My wounds had already closed, and were apparently well on their way to recovery, despite the severity of some of them.
 Shaking my head to try and clear it of the fog that had enveloped it, I made my way back to the entrance of my cave, got down on all fours, then crawled forward and stuck my head out of the hole. Yup, there's the tree and... a ladder? I thought in disbelief. There, standing braced against the cliff face, was a fifteen foot tall ladder. I could tell right off the bat that it would allow me easier access to my lair, though I was still confused as to why it was there in the first place.
 I looked back inside the cave, my mind reeling with confusion. There was a professional-looking cooking spit and grill sitting over my fire pit, while some distance behind it I could see a hole that had been drilled into the wall, into which a stick had been inserted which had one of those weird light stones that the birds had, filling the cave with a soft, white light. Next to the fire pit I could see a wide assortment of cooking utensils, pots, pans, and spices, and a little bit further past those I could see a small, wooden stool.
 More importantly, however, was the fish fillet that sat on a metal plate next to the fire. It was a simple meal, sure, but as I picked it up, along with the strangely shaped silverware that sat on the mat next to it, I felt that it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
 As I examined the wonderful sight in front of me, I noticed something white where the plate had once sat. A quick glance allowed me to identify it as a piece of paper, neatly folded, as if waiting for me to pick it up. Carefully setting down the plate again, I picked up the paper and unfolded it, revealing a picture of a sun, a moon, then a sun. Below that were two bird-like creatures with crowns on their heads, as well as a rough caricature of myself. Our arms were raised, and it appeared that I was shaking the wing of the smaller one.
 A drop of water suddenly landed on the page, and I looked up, confused about where it came from. When I couldn't see anything, I looked back down at the page, then carefully put it down. Think about that later, I thought as I brought my attention back to the fish at my side. I gently cut into it with the provided knife, then took a bite, taking special care not to shear through the metal fork with my razor-sharp fangs.
 As the flavor exploded in my mouth, I broke down completely, weeping at the kindness that I was shown.
 I'm gonna give that freaking tree a medal.
 Sometimes… you're right. Sometimes everyone really is out to get you. Sometimes the whole world is trying to stomp you into the dirt, trying its best to kill you, trying to break you, turn you into something not worth saving.
 Sometimes, you're wrong.
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   submitted by    KnightBreeze    to    HFY  [link]   [comments]


2023.05.06 05:12 faithsurewhynot apt full-upgrade uninstalling proxmox-ve
EDIT: Was missing the main debian package repository. 
 My system is running Debian 11 with Proxmox-ve (package version 7.4-1, web ui reports version 7.0-11). Attempting to apt full-upgrade creates a package transaction that removes zfs utils, some mesa packages, audio packages, among many other things, and all proxmox packages, except it does install libproxmox-rs-perl. I have. absolutely no idea why this is happening. How can I fix this? I'm using the no-subscription repository.
 
~# apt full-upgrade Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree... Done Reading state information... Done Calculating upgrade... Done The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required: alsa-topology-conf alsa-ucm-conf attr bridge-utils ceph-common ceph-fuse cifs-utils corosync criu cstream dconf-gsettings-backend dconf-service dtach ebtables faketime fontconfig fontconfig-config fonts-dejavu-core fonts-font-awesome fonts-glyphicons-halflings gdisk genisoimage glib-networking glib-networking-common glib-networking-services glusterfs-client glusterfs-common gsettings-desktop-schemas gstreamer1.0-libav gstreamer1.0-plugins-base gstreamer1.0-plugins-good gstreamer1.0-x hdparm i965-va-driver ibverbs-providers idn ifupdown2 intel-media-va-driver ipset iptables javascript-common libaa1 libaacs0 libanyevent-http-perl libanyevent-perl libaom0 libappconfig-perl libapt-pkg-perl libarchive13 libasound2 libasound2-data libass9 libasync-interrupt-perl libasyncns0 libauthen-pam-perl libavahi-client3 libavahi-common-data libavahi-common3 libavc1394-0 libavcodec58 libavfilter7 libavformat58 libavutil56 libbabeltrace1 libbdplus0 libblas3 libbluray2 libboost-context1.74.0 libboost-coroutine1.74.0 libboost-iostreams1.74.0 libboost-program-options1.74.0 libboost-thread1.74.0 libbs2b0 libcaca0 libcairo-gobject2 libcairo2 libcdparanoia0 libcephfs2 libcfg7 libchromaprint1 libcmap4 libcodec2-0.9 libcorosync-common4 libcpg4 libcrypt-openssl-bignum-perl libcrypt-openssl-random-perl libcrypt-openssl-rsa-perl libcups2 libdatrie1 libdav1d4 libdbi1 libdconf1 libdeflate0 libdevel-cycle-perl libdigest-bubblebabble-perl libdrm-amdgpu1 libdrm-common libdrm-intel1 libdrm-nouveau2 libdrm-radeon1 libdrm2 libdv4 libdw1 libev-perl libfaketime libfdt1 libfftw3-double3 libfile-chdir-perl libfile-readbackwards-perl libfilesys-df-perl libflac8 libflite1 libfontconfig1 libfuse3-3 libgdk-pixbuf-2.0-0 libgdk-pixbuf2.0-bin libgdk-pixbuf2.0-common libgfapi0 libgfchangelog0 libgfortran5 libgfrpc0 libgfxdr0 libgl1 libgl1-mesa-dri libglapi-mesa libglib2.0-0 libglib2.0-data libglusterd0 libglusterfs0 libglvnd0 libglx-mesa0 libglx0 libgme0 libgnutlsxx28 libgomp1 libgoogle-perftools4 libgpgme11 libgraphite2-3 libgsm1 libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-0 libgstreamer1.0-0 libguard-perl libgudev-1.0-0 libharfbuzz0b libibverbs1 libiec61883-0 libigdgmm11 libinih1 libio-multiplex-perl libio-stringy-perl libip6tc2 libipset13 libiscsi7 libjack-jackd2-0 libjbig0 libjemalloc2 libjpeg62-turbo libjs-bootstrap libjs-extjs libjs-jquery libknet1 liblapack3 libldb2 libleveldb1d liblilv-0-0 liblinux-inotify2-perl libllvm11 liblzo2-2 libmfx1 libmime-base32-perl libmp3lame0 libmpg123-0 libmysofa1 libnet-dbus-perl libnet-dns-perl libnet-dns-sec-perl libnet-ip-perl libnet1 libnetaddr-ip-perl libnetfilter-conntrack3 libnetfilter-log1 libnfnetlink0 libnl-3-200 libnl-route-3-200 libnorm1 libnozzle1 libnspr4 libnss3 libnuma1 libnvpair3linux liboath0 libogg0 libopenjp2-7 libopenmpt0 libopus0 liborc-0.4-0 libpango-1.0-0 libpangocairo-1.0-0 libpangoft2-1.0-0 libpciaccess0 libperl4-corelibs-perl libpgm-5.3-0 libpixman-1-0 libpocketsphinx3 libpostproc55 libprotobuf23 libproxmox-acme-perl libproxmox-acme-plugins libproxmox-backup-qemu0 libproxmox-rs-perl libproxy1v5 libpulse0 libpve-access-control libpve-apiclient-perl libpve-cluster-api-perl libpve-cluster-perl libpve-common-perl libpve-guest-common-perl libpve-http-server-perl libpve-rs-perl libpve-storage-perl libpve-u2f-server-perl libpython3.9 libqb100 libqrencode4 libquadmath0 libquorum5 librabbitmq4 librados2 librados2-perl libradosstriper1 libraw1394-11 librbd1 librdmacm1 librrd8 librrds-perl librsvg2-2 librsvg2-common librubberband2 libsamplerate0 libsdl1.2debian libsensors-config libsensors5 libserd-0-0 libshine3 libshout3 libsmbclient libsnappy1v5 libsndfile1 libsodium23 libsord-0-0 libsoup2.4-1 libsoxr0 libspeex1 libsphinxbase3 libspice-server1 libsratom-0-0 libsrt1.4-gnutls libssh-gcrypt-4 libstatgrab10 libstring-shellquote-perl libswresample3 libswscale5 libtag1v5 libtag1v5-vanilla libtalloc2 libtcmalloc-minimal4 libtdb1 libtemplate-perl libtevent0 libthai-data libthai0 libtheora0 libtie-ixhash-perl libtiff5 libtwolame0 libu2f-server0 libudfread0 libunwind8 liburcu6 liburing1 libusbredirparser1 libuuid-perl libuutil3linux libv4l-0 libv4lconvert0 libva-drm2 libva-x11-2 libva2 libvdpau-va-gl1 libvdpau1 libvidstab1.1 libvisual-0.4-0 libvorbis0a libvorbisenc2 libvorbisfile3 libvotequorum8 libvpx6 libvulkan1 libwavpack1 libwayland-client0 libwbclient0 libwebp6 libwebpmux3 libx11-xcb1 libx264-160 libx265-192 libxcb-dri2-0 libxcb-dri3-0 libxcb-glx0 libxcb-present0 libxcb-randr0 libxcb-render0 libxcb-shm0 libxcb-sync1 libxcb-xfixes0 libxdamage1 libxfixes3 libxml-libxml-perl libxml-twig-perl libxml-xpathengine-perl libxrender1 libxshmfence1 libxslt1.1 libxv1 libxvidcore4 libxxf86vm1 libyaml-0-2 libyaml-libyaml-perl libz3-4 libzfs4linux libzmq5 libzpool5linux libzvbi-common libzvbi0 lxc-pve lxcfs lzop mesa-va-drivers mesa-vdpau-drivers mesa-vulkan-drivers novnc-pve numactl ocl-icd-libopencl1 pocketsphinx-en-us proxmox-archive-keyring proxmox-backup-client proxmox-backup-file-restore proxmox-backup-restore-image proxmox-kernel-helper proxmox-mini-journalreader proxmox-widget-toolkit pve-cluster pve-docs pve-edk2-firmware pve-firewall pve-i18n pve-lxc-syscalld pve-qemu-kvm pve-xtermjs python3-ceph-argparse python3-cephfs python3-gpg python3-jwt python3-ldb python3-prettytable python3-protobuf python3-rados python3-rbd python3-samba python3-talloc python3-tdb qrencode rrdcached rsync samba-common samba-common-bin samba-dsdb-modules samba-libs shared-mime-info smartmontools smbclient socat spiceterm sqlite3 uidmap va-driver-all vdpau-driver-all vncterm xdg-user-dirs xfsprogs xsltproc zfs-zed zfsutils-linux zstd Use 'apt autoremove' to remove them. The following packages will be REMOVED: proxmox-ve pve-container pve-ha-manager pve-manager qemu-server The following NEW packages will be installed: libproxmox-rs-perl The following packages will be upgraded: libpve-access-control libpve-common-perl libpve-rs-perl pve-firewall zfs-zed 5 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 5 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 0 B/2,219 kB of archives. After this operation, 7,354 kB disk space will be freed. Do you want to continue? [Y/n] W: (pve-apt-hook) !! WARNING !! W: (pve-apt-hook) You are attempting to remove the meta-package 'proxmox-ve'! W: (pve-apt-hook) W: (pve-apt-hook) If you really want to permanently remove 'proxmox-ve' from your system, run the following command W: (pve-apt-hook) touch '/please-remove-proxmox-ve' W: (pve-apt-hook) run apt purge proxmox-ve to remove the meta-package W: (pve-apt-hook) and repeat your apt invocation. W: (pve-apt-hook) W: (pve-apt-hook) If you are unsure why 'proxmox-ve' would be removed, please verify W: (pve-apt-hook) - your APT repository settings W: (pve-apt-hook) - that you are using 'apt full-upgrade' to upgrade your system E: Sub-process /usshare/proxmox-ve/pve-apt-hook returned an error code (1) E: Failure running script /usshare/proxmox-ve/pve-apt-hook 
 This system was originally installed by installing Debian 11 then installing proxmox on top of it, because I was reinstalling from an accidental wipe of my root partition and I didn't want to completely wipe the SSD and the VM disks that were in the zpool.
 
   submitted by    faithsurewhynot    to    Proxmox  [link]   [comments]


http://swiebodzin.info


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