Drew academic dismissal

Full details at A Sighting of Will O' the Wisp (woodlarking.co.uk)
You know you hear those tales about staying out of the woods at night? What follows is a true story which happened in southern UK. It’s a bit of a read but I think you'll be glad you did when you get to the end. Sometimes, experiences can only be described as falling outside the realms of normality and it’s like you’re being given a glimpse into another world.
We had some time to kill between running errands one evening, so headed up to a high-spot overlooking the forest while we waited. It was a couple of hours after sunset and we hoped to see some wildlife that would normally get scared off during daylight.
There were road blocks on some of the lanes because of tree felling so, apart from us, the carpark was completely deserted and this viewpoint was just ours for tonight. It’s next to an old holloway, a prehistoric trackway, and the area is littered with ancient burial mounds and the remains of occupation from the Iron Age, Roman and Saxon times. This place is old.
We stopped the van and stepped out, taking in the view ahead of us. Grassy downland sloped gently towards the forest’s edge at the bottom of the hill where weak moonlight bounced off a layer of low-lying mist. Ahead, the whole woods was laid out for us to see - a large expanse of dark forest with jagged treetops visible against the slightly lighter skyline.
My husband, A, had brought a high powered torch to shine into the edges of the woods to see if any eyes lit up from the wildlife. It’s always amazing to shine a light into darkness and see the eyes of rabbits, deer, or hares shining back at you. Tonight though, there was nothing which is incredibly unusual. We could only hear distant tawny owls calling every now and again, and see the occasional silent, dark shape glide in front of us. The place felt a little uneasy, watchful.
Nearby on my left, there was an occasional creak of something rubbing, like a hanging sign being swayed by the wind. We know that patch inside out and there’s nothing there to make that noise. Besides, there wasn’t even a breeze. A half joked about it being a ghostly gibbet, and actually, that's exactly what it did sound like. There are often strange things at the woods. You sort of learn not to question it too much, and just accept things for what they are. I didn't really feel spooked, just a bit aware of it – particularly as the sound was centred at an ancient crossroads.
Sitting in the van, we listened for sounds of wildlife. Even the owls had quietened and everything became still. We sat in the silence until, suddenly, a wind whipped up from behind us from out of nowhere through the trees. As soon as it had started, it was gone. It felt odd, like something passing through. Then, back to quiet.
With our eyes tuned into the dark we sat looking over the woodland. There was a strange noise to the right, like an animal calling, but nothing recognisable. The sound was followed by snapping branches. We know most woodland animal calls but have no idea what this was. So, we just kept cool about that too. Yes, we said … probably just some kind of owl ...
A shone his torch in the direction of the sounds, only for it to go dead straight away. It had had brand new batteries that evening, and had been working perfectly when we first arrived. It’s never failed before (or since for that matter). So, the odd feeling stayed.
There were a couple of dim lights on the horizon in the distance and over to the right was a tiny section of far away road with occasional glimpses of tiny headlights or the red of tail lights briefly showing. The main view ahead was literally just darkness.
As we stared into the blackness a small light came into view near the treetops. It looked reminiscent of a glow worm, or an ember from a fire that persists into the night sky, only brighter. It moved in one direction, kind of higgledy-piggledy, and made its way slowly but with purpose.
It started from nowhere in the woods, just appeared on the left within our field of view and slowly moved to the right. Strangely, it appeared to be broadly following the route of an old trackway which only exists today in disjointed fragments of paths, and tell-tale lines of trees marching through modern day fields. The light followed the route smoothly for a while, and then stopped. When it stopped, it seemed to glow brighter.
It was unusual because it was constant and unobscured, not broken like it would be if it was carried by a walker, but high up like it was floating just above the treetops. The way it stayed constant made it seem certain it was a lot higher than the paths in the woods or it would have been obscured by the trees. This was bright, and close. It was within the area of the woodland, but not on the ground …
It was staying in one spot now. As I stared at it, I began to realise that it looked as if it was moving in a different way, swaying. I doubted myself at first because there were so few points of reference against the blank black darkness of the trees. Were my eyes playing tricks? I looked at it a little closer. Minutes passed. No doubt about it, it was swaying. I saw A reach for his glasses, and knew he was watching it too. We looked at each other. “That’s a bit weird …”
The movements looked strange, and I began to wonder more about the source of it, running through possibilities in my mind. I dismissed it being attached to a building and besides, in that direction there are only farms much further away, and on much lower ground. This was high, pretty much at the same level as us, parked up on the hill. Could it be a person carrying a torch? No. It simply wasn't moving in the right way, and besides, it was unwaveringly pointing towards us. It didn’t change angle, or dim. It just didn't fit.
We both agreed it was swaying. A big slow sway, in a large arc of several metres at least. As we stared at it, it continued swaying from left to right, right to left, left to right, like a pendulum. Rhythmic. It made no sense. Although the light looked very powerful, it wasn't illuminating anything at all. It itself was highly visible and impossible to miss, but it wasn’t illuminating any branches surrounding it, a trunk below it, or any other trees around it. There was nothing showing but the light itself.
It was a light that drew you in because it couldn't be explained away. Mesmerising. We both know these woods really well, at all times of the day and night, on the paths and further off-track. We know the terrain and the tall trees - Douglas firs, scots pine, beech and oaks. Even during the winter the path can't be seen from where we were, but the tree tops can. This light was definitely at tree canopy height, yet not suspended from the trees.
As time went on, nothing changed. We watched it for nearly half an hour. The light just continued to sway and shine unabated until, eventually, time dictated that we needed to get back on our way. A switched on the engine and the headlights ready to move and, almost instantly, the light was extinguished. There was no dimming, no hesitation - it was simply on, and then it was off. Bizarre. It was as if the connection had been severed and the moment was over.
We drove down the lane to the far end, following the edge of the woodland for nearly a mile, then turned round and drove back past where we’d been parked, and on towards our destination. As we passed the trees, especially at the area of the carpark, we looked for the light but there was simply nothing at all.
It’s taken a couple of months to process and make sense of it, but the only explanation we can come to is that the light over the woods really was a will o’ the wisp.
Full details at A Sighting of Will O' the Wisp (woodlarking.co.uk)

I was wondering if UC Merced allows this, since I did some research and found that some other people do this for other universities. Is there any chance that you are able to walk in place of another student that does not want to walk the stage for their graduation ceremony? Just wanted to see if this is allowed at UC Merced and if so, how common is it?
Context:
I am a dismissed student from UC Merced due to academic reasons, and obviously everyone wants to walk at least once in their life, so this is my long shot at it. (I'm doing this just for the experience, nothing more nothing less)

First Previous Wiki
Admiral Tenrah returned to the battle map, looking at all the various icons and routes to and from star systems. So far, the Sennes Armada was keeping its pace mostly on track. The delay due to the diplomats from the Misan Li Heptarchies no longer would matter.
King Siran had pulled back from the battlefront against the High Federation in an attempt to pivot to the Hive Union. He had won the battle, but the stragglers included the remaining leadership of the High Federation anyway, so they could continue to remain somewhat organized. The massive civil war would soon spill into a more international affair, due to the King's rhetoric. But that was entirely his fault when he so strongly advocated for the deaths of Cawlarians who had lived on planets for generations that he happened to desire.
And he would not let his name be stained with even the suggestion of a loss. The Battle Planner and Fleet Commander Annabelle Weber were also now on their way to the front, and the diplomats from the Heptarchies were tagging along. Phoebe was in discussions with them now, and supposedly there'd been a few breakthroughs on that front. Whatever she'd promised them or get them to agree to, the fleet buildup along the Hive Union's border with the Heptarchies was slowing.
The Interstellar Gathering seemed to have realized no amount of bluffing would get the High King out of war. Even if he was a proxy force aligned with them, King Siran was not valuable enough for them to risk a wider war. It was just as Tenrah had expected and had told Eyahtni, Kawtyahtnakal, and the Patriarchs when he'd met with them several days ago. Just as a young hatchling couldn't be allowed to stray too far from the nest, there was simply no sense for the Heptarchies to risk economic ruin.
Orith and those who ruled over him would shift their tone while pretending it was a natural decision, not one they'd been forced to make to align with reality.
"I must commend your tactics in the latest training exercise," Tenrah said, ruffling his feathers slightly before respectfully nodding to Annabelle.
"I am pleased to hear such high praise from you, Admiral," the woman said. She was fully dressed in her regulation spacesuit, meaning most of her face was obscured. But Tenrah wouldn't complain since it was more than prudent to be ready for anything. The next unknown ships might not be friendly.
He had also looked into the parties responsible for the lack of communication or warning of the Misan's arrival. As it turned out, general incompetence was to blame. A receiver hadn't been properly calibrated, so the transmission signal had just been noise. He'd given the officer in charge of that an earful before eventually letting up and telling him to do better. A personal visit with the Admiral was one thing. But a second personal visit was quite another.
Tenrah drew a vector toward some of the outer systems controlled by the High King. A few garrison forces were there, but they would be swept away almost instantly. What most concerned him was the shipyards in the region that received most of their metals from a select group of planets in those systems. They were rich in the metals required to forge the alloys needed in the High King's fleet.
The High Federation had been something of a dumping ground for either overthrown species or other alien species that had been deported from their homeworlds before the war broke out. This was reflected in the number of species inhabiting the worlds, each with unique names, traits, and temperaments.
"We plan on taking this path, and then splitting to conquer these systems and disable their metal exporting abilities," he explained. "Then we will move to this system."
He zoomed in more and drew a new vector from where the previous one ended. "We have intelligence that they have at least four planet crackers there. Brey will send FTL suppression satellites through portals on the outer edges, with her portals boosted by our psychic amplifier fields. we will be able to take over the system quickly, and begin the process of either disabling the planet crackers or moving them back to our territory."
"We will need to know the angles the superweapons are at before committing to the battle," Annabelle said. "Otherwise, judging by the trajectory cone you have, we can bypass them entirely and reach Siran within two weeks."
"And that is an interesting proposal. Can you lay out your plan, in that case?"
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Annabelle did so. She and Tenrah discussed the strategy's risks, and they eventually decided that such a tactic, while bold, wouldn't do what they set out to do: ensure the safety of the Cawlarians near the border. They were already trying to evacuate from the coming war front, but cities and planets were large things that took a lot of time to completely empty.
And more garrison forces, whether they were androids from Phoebe or specialized and highly trained defenders from the Union, were still moving in as the civilians evacuated. Kawtyahtnakal had established a fund for them, but many people were too stubborn to leave. Despite the looming threat of war and possible massacre, they still refused to board the passenger ships. Annabelle could respect their tenacity and courage, though she personally believed it was counterproductive.
A few encroaching splinters of Siran's fleet had already struck the evacuation forces. He'd sent around 2% of his ships away to harass all the border systems within reach in an attempt to get the Armada bogged down in defense. But with such small forces and the Union on such high alert, all of the important stations with weak shields were well within the protective layers of planetary shields in the area.
Larger garrisons than necessary were still required, of course, but Tenrah had managed to navigate the desperate concerns of the Feathers and those like them in charge of governing their planets with his natural political skill. He didn't need to ask them for favors because, as an Admiral, he alone held power over how his portion of the fleet would respond. Annabelle had witnessed that loyalty and control well within the organization of his fleet. Even at his advanced age, she continued to be impressed with his adaptability and skill at monitoring three-dimensional battle planes and fields.
She pointed to the cone of possible directions Siran was expected to take. They were generally adjacent to the border, though they would head around the left side of the territory he claimed from the Union. If he reached it, millions of lives would be lost every day. Once he broke the shields entirely, the planets would be utterly glassed down to their mantles.
She'd read up on his methods and had seen videos of them in action. Despite all her training, it still was haunting. The hivemind helped to soothe her when the unpleasant parts of command sizzled up to meet her in the middle of the night.
But they would not impede her on the field of battle. When she went to war, the hivemind suppressed all that wasn't necessary for the mission. It was their agreement, one which she'd asked of it. And being a node of the network meant that her stability was paramount, even more so than her title as Fleet Commander. For if she fell, others could take her place. Protocols ensured and demanded that.
But her place in the hivemind was what allowed it to have any strength this far out. It could form avatars and help with long-range communications, though the main mind back on Earth and Luna obviously remained disconnected from this distance.
"I would normally agree with you, Fleet Commander, but I am reminded of your tactic to use decoy hard light holograms."
"They will suspect that any ships heading right for the barrels, or close enough, are either not valued enough or are the decoys."
"Then all you have to do is make them impossible to ignore," Tenrah said. "I can lend you bombs capable of remaining armed and capable of being triggered inside of hard light holograms, even with jamming involved. Then, they will be unable to ignore them, and the explosions generated would destroy the shields in place around the planet crackers. If they fire the weapons, then the residual magnetic interference will allow us to destroy them, since the shields will be far weakened."
Annabelle could see the potential brilliance of the strategy. But it was just that- potential. In space, there were no obstacles. Without stealth fields, there was no hiding. And with hard light holograms, stealth was obviously off-limits.
They would be left approaching from angles that they would be unable to adapt to. She had her VI plot several routes but was unsatisfied, so she had Edu'frec link into the network to do it. Phoebe had been replaced after contacting a Sprilnav network to ensure she could scrub any programs that may have gotten through to her without distraction.
It would be a terrible thing for a Sprilnav AI to make it to her dreadnaught, for sure.
"We will likely need a threefold diversion at least," Annabelle said. "Maybe fourfold, if we can spare the forces, and brave any minefields that may exist."
"Well," Tenrah began. He pulled up a few schematics of the weapons her dreadnaught carried. "I believe you can solve the minefield issue from a distance, even with the lightspeed limit. After all, they can't move easily. As for the actual attack? I suggest a sixfold flower formation, with a twisting wings accent."
"You will have to show me a diagram of that," Annabelle said, grasping uselessly at the unfamiliar words. Before their integration had begun, there had been a limit to how much doctrine she could memorize.
Tenrah pulled up an image of an alien flower blooming with six petals. And then the image faded, overloading with a stylized ribbon of red shapes. The ribbons spun on their sides every thirty seconds, like corkscrews that were flatter.
"And in this case, the ribbons represent the drone formations. I can send a few carriers into the battle with fighter escorts, though we will need to keep them spread out to avoid any direct lines of sight from the planet crackers."
"I heavily doubt they will waste such shots on carriers," Annabelle said. "And if you commit more, you will overwhelm their defenses. I believe your drones are highly reflective, so only missiles and bullets can deal sufficient damage at the involved speeds and numbers we are working with here."
She tapped the diagram, shifting it by about 45 degrees.
"I believe I can fit a stealth force here, which will engage the back defenses of the planet crackers once they focus their shields frontward. I can likely get a full battlecruiser group in, and if you can press in as a wedge around 10 million kilometers above me from where I come in, and around 30 million kilometers below," Annebelle paused to draw the vectors with her hands, "Then it will aid in my ability to subdue them. It would likely shorten the battle time from a week down to four days."
"Assuming their detection satellites are not capable of seeing it."
"And we will target those too. I believe the first strike can fall on those, since the planet crackers will interfere with their ability to scan behind themselves, and such large power signatures can be noted."
"There is one more problem," Tenrah said. "We are generally working on the assumption of trying to capture these ships, yes?"
"Yes," Annabelle said.
"Then will we board them?"
"Yes, but no. Edu'frec and Phoebe's commando androids will open up the beach heads on the physical surfaces of the planet crackers, while our specialized mental warfare agents will take the fight to them in the mindscape. I assume you have your own plans in that regard?"
"It depends on how we will split the planet crackers. There are 12 in the system. Half and half?"
"That seems prudent," Annabelle replied. She selected the ones that would be most advantageous for her various gambits and strategies to work. They were closer together, which meant more capacity for coordination, mutual aid, and shielding. But it also meant a larger target, one which she could hit from many vectors without worrying about each enemy ship having a wide field of view. Some battlecruisers and cruiser groups were scattered around, but they were not enough to resist the Armada. And once Siran was robbed of a quick way to end the war, the Union would hold the upper hand, capable of committing devastating power to a fleet that remained in a system for a long time.
Yet the same was true for the Union and the Alliance. If the battle took too long, or their command positions were located, then the terrible might of the planet cracker beams would be turned upon them instead. Annabelle's dreadnaught was powerful. More so than all the ones before it. But that didn't mean she wanted to test her shields against alien planet crackers.
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Penny was talking to a group of freed slaves on Justicar. These were recent ones who still held quite a bit of trauma. They'd taken to calling her 'Liberator' despite her never identifying herself as such. It was oddly endearing and did make her feel quite a bit better. It was good to just be able to go out and help people.
She felt some perturbations in the mindscape but ignored them. Right now, she needed to ensure that the gangs couldn't continue their horrific industry. She'd taken out most of their heavy equipment and was now waiting for the Guides to finish searching.
Sirens and alarms echoed in the distance. Penny sent psychic energy into her eyes, but she was too far underground to see anything without using the energy itself instead of light to see. Justicar's mind seemed busy, so she couldn't connect with him. As time went on, Penny felt that something was wrong. It was a gut feeling that she couldn't place. But because of that, she was on edge. She made a large shield of psychic energy above them.
She held it for several minutes. Nothing happened, but Penny wouldn't let it down that quickly. Justicar still didn't respond. Her communicator rang. Kashaunta was calling.
"What's going on?" Penny asked.
"The Grand Fleet is-"
Light and heat smashed into her, easily breaking through her shields. She briefly saw tens of thousands of Sprilnav burning before the light overwhelmed her eyes. Her communicator was destroyed. The onslaught was accompanied by a monstrous level of sound. Shockwaves drilled Penny into the melting and fracturing ground, forcing her lower and lower into expanding pools of magma and liquid metal.
The city's upper layers fell upon her, crashing with great and terrible force. But Penny was now fully reinforced with psychic and conceptual energy. She erupted furiously from the rubble. The air around her burned with heat as she continued to accelerate. The armor plates now surrounding her glowed cherry red, but they were white by the time she'd reached space.
She reached the first planetary shield.
"Displace," Penny growled. She forced reality to move as she willed and to place herself where she saw fit. The Grand Fleets were high above, firing upon a small group of ships that had detached from Azeri's fleet. They seemed to be directly attacking the broken-off contingent and not Justicar itself.
So Penny increased her eyesight and analyzed the battle in both real space and the mindscape. Nilnacrawla helped her identify Justicar's targets. The massive Elder was angrier than she'd ever seen him, and his size, which was even larger than Tetelali, made that incarnation of him appear more like a god of wrath. She saw him brutally tear through groups of minds desperately running to avoid him.
She could faintly see spheres of psychic and conceptual energy area denial fields. From this distance, the flagships' strength was truly impressive. Both of them were at least ten times as powerful as Azeri's had been during their battle. It was clear both Kashaunta and Valisada had ordered upgrades.
Then, her attention came to the dreadnaught, which seemed to be at the head of the attack. Penny explored the ship with her psychic power, pushing aside all resistance. Several lasers struck her, but she ignored them, denying their impact in reality against her own.
It glowed with the fury of weapons firing. Missiles and fighters flowed out of its bays. Bullets, nukes, and lasers streamed from red-hot gun barrels. A nuke hit her but didn't explode. She ripped it apart, using the materials to add energy to her reserves.
Justicar continued to go in inside the mindscape. He tore at them like a shark at a school of minnows in a coral reef. His ravenous anger and hatred were frightening, but Penny rapidly got used to it. Calling up her own memories of the innocent people who'd been killed for no reason, Penny wrapped herself in energy and began to erase her signature from the area.
Fighters flew past her, no longer hitting her psychic shields with bullets. Lasers stopped firing at her since she'd moved from her last position, and there was no longer anything for them to track. Penny floated in the stars, with bright blooms of white fusion explosions blossoming around her. And so she moved forward. She reached a cruiser. She reached forward, teleporting past its shields, and shut down the ship's reactor by teleporting all of its fuel into the void.
Soon, a missile from Kashaunta's Grand Fleet found the vessel, and it vanished in another sphere of heat and light. Of course, it was all silent in space. Penny could only hear her heart beating and occasional warnings from Exile or Nilnacrawla at incoming attacks. Exile occupied the area in her ears, which felt weird, but it allowed him to speak without showing himself in the mindscape. Given his nature and the fact that the Grand Fleets likely had detections for speeding space entities, it would be a terrible idea for him to appear there. Nilnacrawla continued to help Penny with the mental aspects of the battle.
He processed the energy input and output that Penny was giving off in the hopes of keeping her off the sensors of the dreadnaught battlegroup. She didn't want to attract the full focus of one of those massive guns. The explosions on Justicar would have been capable of cracking apart a mountain range if not for the extensive dampening Justicar's shields had done. And she'd withstood them only because she could shunt off most of their impact into reality, leaning into her conceptual nature and the nature of Cardinality to escape certain death.
Even with her power, as high as it had ever been, the blow she was taking were the most powerful physical impacts she'd ever endured.
She also suspected Yasihaut's work in this, though she had nothing to prove. She also had to remain vigilant about the Judgment. She couldn't take overly hostile actions, so she didn't just teleport the Sprilnav in the area out of their ships. She tried it on a smaller scale, and a weak pressure from the dreadnaught made her power fail to affect them.
But those Sprilnav were still doomed to die by their commander. But Penny didn't wish to doom the Alliance and herself by taking their deaths into her own hands. And she was stained with enough blood, metaphorical and literal. The ashes of the people she'd freed had fallen away with her ascent into the atmosphere, but the gritty memory and feel of them never would.
Once again, she'd been powerless to save those who'd needed her. And if she'd had that power, what could she have really done? Would she have been forced to stand there and take it? Or could she have really fought back in a way that wouldn't be turned against her in the Judgment? And was she wrong for considering all of that during such a horrendous time, when she'd literally seen thousands of people turned to slag and ash before her very eyes just ten minutes ago?
Penny burned with shame and grief. She hated this. She hated that things always turned to this. Why couldn't the galaxy just leave people alone? Why did there have to be so much suffering? Her anger threatened to overwhelm her, but with a herculean effort from her, Nilnacrawla, and Cardi, it was beaten back.
Penny felt Justicar getting close to breaking through the shield. She sent a small jolt of power to its underside. A thick bolt of psychic lightning infused with rage leaped from her arms, shattering the shield completely and taking roughly half her power. In the dreadnaught, the antimatter reactor she could sense radiating its energy suddenly lost all coolant access.
She pushed her psychic energy into herself and her conceptual energy into words that she harmonized into existence with the force and might of her will.
"Cardinality: One to zero. Reversal."
A heap of her energy left her instantly, stopping a budding explosion from ripping the dreadnaught apart. Justicar absolutely ravaged whoever was inside that ship, including what appeared to be a leader figure in the mindscape. Penny watched Justicar smash the Elder's corpse in his jaws and tear his soul from his body before shredding it violently with a contraption that looked straight out of a horror movie.
She let the explosion go, and so it went. The dreadnaught cracked in half. The Grand Fleets, which had never stopped firing, finally broke through the shields as the circuits failed to supply them with power. Hundreds of thousands of lives winked out instantly, torn to subatomic particles by beams coming from two different flagships. Penny went straight to Kashaunta, appearing on the ship's bridge still in stealth. To their credit, her guards noticed immediately and bared their weapons at her.
The guns that were powerful enough to blast holes in skyscrapers and sturdy enough to withstand a fall from orbit with hardly a scratch unloaded their payloads into her. Penny opened her mouth, and strings of psychic energy writhed outward, wrapping themselves around the guns and wrenching them out of the claws of Kashaunta's guards while the impacts' explosions were contained by thick shields.
Kashaunta herself had already drawn her sword but hadn't moved an inch.
"Penny," she said dryly. "Welcome to my ship. I apologize for your reception."
A new shield came down on both of them, preventing their words from reaching the ears of Kashaunta's subordinates.
"Think nothing of it, Elder Kashaunta. What punishments will be given to the Grand Fleet Commander?"
"Well, technically I am not the Grand Fleet Commander of this fleet," she said. "So that is not really something I can enforce. However, the Grand Fleet Commander of the 85th Grand Fleet does wish to talk with you, Justicar, and myself about what just occurred."
"And you believe him?" she exclaimed.
"He sent transcripts of the message he sent to one Elder Solei, asking him to cease his actions before it was too late."
"Even the Alliance can make deepfakes," Penny said.
"And do you think I would be ignorant of such things, child?" Kashaunta asked. "We have ways around those. That is why we still have a society after billions of years of time to screw it all up. Deepfakes are a problem of less advanced species and cultures, not those with the tools to handle them."
"Which are AIs, which you also ban throughout the galaxy."
"Yes."
"Isn't that hypocritical?"
"Yes, it is," Kashaunta said. "You can go and complain to the Judges who decided that if you wish, though asking them to think of the children instead of preserving the power of the entire Sprilnav species will get you laughed at by a billion mouths."
Penny felt something in her mind take offense to Kashaunta's wording. It didn't feel like it was part of her, but it also did. The shock of all the lives lost hit her again, making her scowl.
"So there will be nothing done?" Penny growled.
"No. Prepare for a neutral and level-headed discussion. If you wish to have any seat at a table such as this, you will conduct yourself with decorum. You will not accuse Elder Valisada of being responsible for whichever fool did this, and you most certainly will not baselessly claim that Yasihaut is at fault for this, even if it is likely that she or her backers are. It is time you learn the lesson that all Elders have: there are always more Sprilnav. Recognize that this was a strike against you without casting aside all of your goodwill among those that matter."
"Those that matter," Penny mused. "Sometimes I forget what you are."
Kashaunta stepped forward, eyes narrowing. She let out a hiss.
"You saw a few thousand people die, and now you're back to the racism again? Grow up. People die all the time in this galaxy. You complain about the status quo. I would respect that, if you could stomach what is required to change it. Death will continue to run rampant, and you will be the reason more die no matter what you do. 760 sextillion Sprilnav, Penny. And you cry over ten thousand?
During the Source war, we sent two years olds to war. You don't get to slide back into comfortable dumb hatred of our species because of a few stupid people. Rest assured, if you ever get this Alliance-based order, you or your successors will become tyrants. There will be a human who has the power and will to start wars, and enact genocides, for functionally no reason. Need I remind you of World War Two, and World War Three? If you multiply the population of Humanity by a trillion, that means you'll get a trillion Pol Pots, or Hitlers, or Genghis Khans.
And a hell of a lot more dumb idiots in power, which ascribes most of the history of nearly every species in the galaxy. Notice how Valisada and I both fired on Solei once he decided to be an adult daycare nominee? Notice how Valisada has not fired at us, or Justicar, and is trying his best to start a constructive dialogue? People die in war, Penny. This is reality. And you cast your disdain onto me, the only Sprilnav keeping you alive in this place, because I happened to be born an Elder. But no. I'm still some alien, right? Just another dirty animal for you to kill when the Judgment ends."
Kashaunta's fury caught Penny off-guard. The Elder truly meant her words. Penny had deeply offended her, cracking open the facade she usually maintained. The smug feeling at having made Kashaunta go on such a tirade faded when she considered the circumstances. Maybe she had acted like a child. But she hadn't said anything truly deserving of such a furious tirade, had she?
Not unless her proclamation that she remembered 'what Kashaunta was' had an implication that she didn't understand. Kashaunta was a mass murderer, one who was more than willing to justify it when necessary. And she downplayed the fact that this attack was on Penny herself and on thousands of innocents on a Sprilnav planet where she was meant to be safe. This wasn't a pair of assassins in the night, slipping poison into water or dropping snakes into a bed. This was a much more insidious and terrifying evil. Penny had been powerless to stop it.
Penny knew she was right, but Kashaunta did not. Could she truly weigh her scant decades against Kashaunta's billions of years of age? Perhaps. Age was not wisdom, though it certainly could be experience. Kashaunta turned around and started to walk away. Sadly, Penny still needed her.
"I'm sorry, Kashaunta. I am... incredibly charged. I am very pissed right now. I am not apologizing for how I feel about this attack. I have every right to be upset, and I will remain so. I will not be bullied or cowed into submission, even by a thousand more tirades. There comes a point where something must be done. But if you are upset over what I said, then I would at least like an honest clarification why."
"Because you had showed me you could think like a person should. That you didn't see people's species anymore. That you were becoming less racist. And yet, when you are cut raw, you still see me as a Sprilnav Elder alone, and therefore complicit in this massacre I literally did everything I could to do stop before it worsened. You said you knew 'what I am' as if you'd forgotten that. And it is clear that you meant that you'd forgotten your belief that I am some dirty criminal Sprilnav, who deserves to be slaughtered in the dark for the crime of being born in her species.
You care more for the ash on Justicar than you do for what I have given you. Your simplistic view of reality would mean that if you could push a button to kill us Elders, you'd do it, robbing countless families of their loved ones, because you now remember 'what we are,' and are again regressing away from your previous growth."
"I am one person, Kashaunta. I don't understand why you care this much about me. But I can recognize that the message you received is one of terrible bigotry. I am suffering, every day, every week, that I remain in this god-forsaken place. It hurts for you to dismiss the people I care about, even for a moment, dying just because there are many of them. But that does not excuse what I said to you despite the death toll you carry on your own head. It was a half-truth."
Kashaunta laughed. "Do you know why I care so much about what you think, Penny? It is because you are the other aliens. All at once. The Alliance is the face of all things 'alien' in many places. Remember what conceptual energy is? Lecalicus told you, I believe. You represent more than just your own views. And if you're able to forgive a speeding space entity, but not me, then it shows that we will never have peace. That no matter what, this cycle of hatred will continue, and I will need to either build a new galaxy with aliens that don't hate us for our ancient crimes, or just figure out another way. You are the face of the rest of the galaxy, Penny. And you have just told me that you still hate me for being an Elder. After I thought you had changed."
"And you believe you are undeserving of such hatred?"
"Penny," Kashaunta said. "The Alliance didn't exist when many of these events happened. Some of your grievances are older than the mountains on Earth. You say you hate us for genocides that happened so long ago that they no longer hold any meaning. There is no compensation we can give to dead species on dead worlds. What you want is an alien species to hate and blame for all the universe's problems. Because it is easier to hate us than to confront reality. And we are the ones you have been told to hate."
"They were not small things. It was the deaths of trillions of people, Kashaunta."
"Yes. And it was wrong. I can understand that. But what do you think will happen when your Alliance, filled with people who hate us, takes over? You will see humans bombing Sprilnav schools, and the hivemind will do nothing, for it will share that hate. Acuarfar will abduct and torture us. Knowers will devour our children. And in the face of that? You would turn a blind eye, because it is too hard to solve with a simple fix. You will only propagate generational hatred, just as all the Alliances and Galactic Republics and Peace Unions did before you.
Because underneath your message of equality for all species is oppression and genocide for us, the villains in your little story. That is what happens in reality, once the benevolent dictators die. And you, who have lived with us, eaten with us, and talked with us, will sit upon your golden throne, and when I am brought before you, naked, bleeding, and in need of support, you will throw me away, because all I am to you is an Elder. That mindset is exactly what stands in the way of peace. It is why I stopped giving you aliens chances for so long. And having to argue this with you at all makes me think you may no longer be worth my effort."
More manipulation. Penny was ready to shout at her, but Nilnacrawla pulled her thoughts away from blind anger. And it did feel unnatural for her. Alien.
"This is not peace," Penny said. "This is war. And we are circumstantial allies. I will not become what you claim."
"I have sown the seeds of a thousand despots," Kashaunta said. "I recognize them when I see them because I have reaped the heads of a million more."
Penny sighed. She wanted to resist and continue arguing, but it wouldn't get her anywhere. Now that she had thought about it, she was unlikely to overturn a viewpoint set in a billion years of experiences. Perhaps Penny could explore this later, when she had time to properly process it all.
"Very well. I will go to this meeting of yours, and I will conduct myself with decorum. However, while I refuse to belittle or forget thousands of deaths, I am sorry that you feel this way."
"But you are not sorry about making me feel so."
"No," Penny replied. She suppressed her emotions more, taking the time to carefully consider her words. Kashaunta was wrong and oddly sensitive right now. Saying the wrong thing could damage far more than their mutual feelings. As much as she wanted to win this argument, Kashaunta was who she was. She was the alien dictator keeping the Alliance alive.
"We are both right in some ways, and perhaps we might be both wrong, too. This only shows how tough the road will be. We at least are consciously trying to come to an understanding. But for the billions of Alliance citizens, quintillions of aliens, and sextillions of Sprilnav? It is a gargantuan task. And... right now, I don't think it is possible."
"It isn't," Kashaunta said. "And it won't be for thousands of years. But we don't get some neat little time skip to wait and solve all of our problems for us. Change will start only when we make it."
Kashaunta was throwing her a bone, then. They both knew the argument couldn't continue right now.
"So we have an understanding, then," Penny said. "Hatred will remain, but it must be minimised. That way, cultural and social pressure will eventually stamp it out, and we may have peace."
"No. We will have a truce, which will only become peace with much more work. The Alliance is a nation that is 24 years old. Only a single generation has grown up within it. Negotiations will be hard with so many who remember the hatred. But Valisada is not like other Sprilnav. He will seek to bring a hybrid war to you and the Alliance, unless you can convince him that you truly mean to bridge the divide. You are clearly misguided, but have a genuinely good heart. That will make life hard for you. Your words today would have spelled the death of you and the Alliance, had I not established this shield around us to hide them. Out of the spirit of our friendship, I will not request a favor in return for this boon."
"Thank you, Kashaunta. Though I'm not sure I can consider you a friend."
"The fact that you bothered to listen to my side of things, in this limited aspect, despite the hurt you must feel right now, proves otherwise. I am well aware of my past crimes, Penny. I know that my emotions today were a weakness I should have been able to seal, and that you will still see me for who I was, and not who I am. I know how it sounds for me, a killer and a ruler, to be upset at being confronted. But that is how I am. I still have my pride as an Elder, and there is only so far it can be pushed. Who I was certainly would qualify as beyond evil. But to remain at the top, there are limits to how far you can swing into benevolence.
I cannot atone. Do not try to make me repay debts that you don't own. If you are ever to have more Elders on your side, whether Progenitors or otherwise, you will need to learn to deal with this. There will be people with death tolls higher than the population of the Alliance, who were once the heart of evil and are now at least acceptable. The first step will be recognizing that, yes, we are in fact friends, despite my history. Because only from friendship and understanding can hope come."
"I will think about this more. My feelings about this, and about you, have not yet solidified."
"I was wrong for what I said to you, Penny. We are both on edge, and said things that we didn't properly express. We should get our heads in order before re-entering this argument with logic instead of emotions."
"I agree. I will go and see who I can save. And I will think more about this. I freed people from slavery, and watched them die today. Respectfully, I must spend some time away from you for now."
Penny left the ship. In something near her subconscious, anger remained. When she landed in the rubble once again, she missed a small but steady stream of conceptual energy wafting into her from below.

Big ups to Accidentally Adopted for inspiring this white hot dumpster fire. Enjoy, or don't I have shenanigans elsewhere that need my attention.
“So we’re screwed?”
“Well, Neb, let’s go over the day's events. Pirates have boarded, they’ve blown away our communications relay, all but slaughtered us and those of us who survived are stuck in the safe room with no control over the ship, so-”
A third voice flatly interrupted the condescending tirade. “Specimen’s loose.”
“And now the specimen is loose. Yeah Neb, I think we’re screwed.”
Four scientists were all gathered in the ship's safe room. They were all that remained. Pared down from a crew of over two dozen they were the only ones that happened to be close, or perhaps lucky, enough to make it to the final bulwark.
“But we’re in the safe room. They can’t get in here, right? We just have to wait them out, wait for help?”
That question belonged to Trest, the youngest and most inexperienced of the lot. She had just earned her apprenticeship and had come to Kem’s ship wide-eyed and primed for adventure. But fate occasionally has a cruel sense of humor, so her first foray into the stars would be her last, it seemed.
Kem turned to face her, he didn’t want to be mean, he really didn’t. But the time for pleasantries and comforting lies had passed. The poor lass needed to know what they were facing so that she could make peace with whatever god it was she prayed to.
“I’ll humor you Trest,” he quipped “Let’s assume that these particular pirates are the special kind of bland that happen to be the only crew that galavants around without plasma cutters. They’ve already cut out our comms. They’ll simply steal everything of value, everything of no value, anything else not nailed down, and blow our engines. Doesn't matter if they can’t get in, there is a finite amount of oxygen in this room. With no signal or signature, we’ll be corpses before anyone even realized we were missing.”
He could see the tears begin to well in her eyes as the realization washed over her. Perhaps he could have used a little more tact in his hypothetical, but the stress of being about to be consigned to the void was weighing on him. He made a mental note to apologize to her in the afterlife.
He was also not trained or ready to deal with a blubbering intern, so he decided to distract himself with more pertinent matters.
“What are they up to out there?” He asked Wren, purposely avoiding the torrential sob storm that Trest was about to unleash.
“No idea.” Wren huffed as he tossed his tablet to the side, “After they broke the locks on the specimen’s cell, they cut the feed. We’re stuck blind and waiting now.”
Kem’s frills rippled. It was one thing to be trapped waiting for death, but to do so with no inkling as to the estimated arrival time of the Great Winged Guardian was a different beast altogether. Fortunately, or perhaps, unfortunately, the universe grew tired of its malicious malarky and decided not to leave the beleaguered scientists in bated anticipation as the muffled roar of a plasma cutter opposite the security door broke through the air.
Instinctively the four moved toward the back wall, away from their impending demise. Not that it mattered much, there really wasn’t anywhere to go. The loud thunk of the safety interlock being cut, and the scraping metal on metal of the door being pried open gave finality to the doomed researcher’s situation.
Two Korrivian pirates strode through the threshold. Their armoured carapace would be more than enough to ward off any feeble assault the biologists could muster. Their mandibles were hungry clacking at the sight of new, succulent prey.
Oh good Kem thought They’re not just the steal your stuff kind, they’re also the kill and eat you kind. And currently, he was very much hoping that they would choose to do it in that order.
So it came as a minor relief when one of the insects raised its rifle towards him. It then came as a major shock when the pirate was suddenly relieved of his weapon. And one of his arms.
The bug didn’t even have time to register the missing appendage when the stock of his former rifle became intimately acquainted with his face plate. He crumpled to the ground in a heap of twitching chitin. His associate turned to face this unexpected intrusion only to be met with the same weapon slamming down on the top of his head, shattering whatever minuscule cluster of neurons that passed for a brain it had once had.
The quartet had no time to feel any relief, however, as their would-be savoir turned out to be the thing of their nightmares set loose. It was the specimen. It stood over the pirates, skin glistening and breathing heavily, likely examining its most recent handiwork. It took a long deep breath and dropped the rifle to the floor with a loud clang. This led to Trest letting out a petrified yelp. Bad move. The specimen took notice and looked up. It scanned the petrified group of academics until its predatory eyes landed squarely on Trest. It bore its teeth and raised one of its hands, waving it back and forth violently in some aggressive hunting display.
Wren and Neb took measured steps to distance themselves from poor Trest, who appeared to have, for some reason or another, attracted the targeted ire of the bloodthirsty beast. Kem, however, was made of slightly stiffer stuff and took his role as expeditionary leader rather seriously, so he stepped between the beast and the quivering intern. After the violent display the specimen just put on he seriously doubted that this gesture would make any difference, but at least he could make a good show of it, and maybe provide the girl a few more moments of precious life.
The specimen recoiled slightly and looked almost offended. It shook its head back and forth a few times.
“Friend,” it said as it pointed a single digit toward a violently trembling Trest. “Friend sing me.”
The three others turned toward her looking for clarification on the bizarre statement. Her frills deepened with embarrassment. She had been, admittedly, more than a little unsettled to be in such close proximity to what could best be described as a walking war machine, so while running her experiments she had taken to singing hatchery rhymes softly to herself to soothe her nerves. The bizarre creature had mistakenly thought she was singing to it, though given her current precarious predicament, she thought better of correcting it.
Neb would be the voice to ask the question that now lingered in everyone’s mind. “Wait. How the hell does it know how to mimic our speech? Where could it possibly have learned that?”
The specimen it seemed had anticipated that question, or at the very least one in the same vein. It cocked its head to one side “See-know, same not same.” Its face seemed to condense, it tried to clarify, “Learn speaks. Learn space.”
“Great” Wren moaned “All it knows is gibberish.”
“No, I don’t think that it's gibberish.” Neb retorted. “I think it’s trying to communicate. I’m fairly certain we can decipher what it's trying to say if we look at it scientifically. We have to work backwards; extrapolate from incomplete data.” He began pacing as he was wont to do when faced with a particularly vexing quandary.
“Learn space is fairly obvious, it’s likely analogous to one of our schools or academies. Learn speaks is more difficult, but seeing as it was able to use the singular for Trest’s singing and used the plurality for speaking, combined with the speed at which it picked up words from our language we can reasonably surmise that it wasn’t actually learning to speak per se, but likely was learning languages, or at least something adjacent like linguistics. Same-not-same is a different challenge.” His pacing became more erratic as he fell deeper into the linguistic mystery. “Likely something that is close, but not the exact same.” His eyes lit up as the pieces began to fall into place “Something similar! See-know is a little more difficult…I think that, in conjunction with similar, we can assume it to be comprehension, or at the very least understanding.”
Neb’s tail smacked the floor with insight “Recognition! So if we combine all the data points, of course factoring in interpretation errors, I think it’s trying to say that it has pattern recognition and picked up our language because it was studying them at an academy!” Neb’s pride at deciphering the solution quickly gave way to abject terror “Wait…if it has pattern recognition…and was studying at an institution…that would mean…NO! No. Nononononononono.” He pointed a shaky phalange at the specimen “It’s a sentient! We’ve been running experiments on a sentient!” Neb collapsed to the floor, embracing himself in a fetal position at the revelation, incoherently rambling about “moral failings.”
The specimen looked slightly upset at Neb’s existential crisis “Hurt.” It said as it pointed to the whimpering mess
“No, not hurt. Stupid.” Kem hoped his simplified answer would suffice, but the empty stare he received indicated the opposite.
Though it couldn’t fully understand Kem its ability to perceive and react to change did lend weight to Neb’s theory. This gave him an idea to truely test the sentient capabilities of the specimen. He stared down the one working computational station in the room. Show time.
Kem made a gesture to the specimen to follow as he walked over to the console, and much to his surprise it dutifully followed him without any hesitation.
He booted up the translation matrix input program. The screen flickered and a crude picture of a dwelling appeared. “Speak,” Kem said.
The specimen narrowed its eyes at the image before it turned to Kem and lifted its shoulders briefly.
Kem scoffed. “You. Speak.”
It stared back at the picture for a moment, before bringing up one of its hands, moving it in a way that created an odd clicking sound. It then growled something in a strange dialect that he assumed was its mother tongue. The image changed and the specimen belted out something else.
Shit, it's figured it out. Looks like Neb was right Kem reasoned. As the specimen continued to work through the images brought up on the console, he made his way over to Neb, plucking the earpiece from his incapacitated colleague.
He made his way back to the specimen, as it was finishing up with the program, and let out a short cough to grab its attention. He offered up the earpiece and pointed to the side of his own head. The specimen took it and moved its head up and down. With some difficulty, it managed to seat the piece on its alien anatomy.
“Hello? Is this better? Is it easier to understand?” Kem asked the specimen.
Its face contorted briefly, “Yeah…yes. Better. Thank you.”
“It won’t be perfect, syntax, idioms and grammar may become distorted or incorrect, but it’s a logarithmic learning algorithm. The more we speak, the clearer it will become, you understand?”
The specimen nodded its head. “Yeah, I get it. What I don’t get, however,” Kem flinched at the sudden shift in tone from the specimen “is why we didn’t just do this off the hop. It would have made everything easier!”
This decidedly posed a problem for Kem. He could lie, and risk pissing the specimen off. Or he could tell the truth, and risk pissing the specimen off. As science is the pursuit of truth and to his core he was a scientist, he went with the latter.
“We didn’t know you were a sentient,” he said quietly.
“What?!” the specimen seemed incensed. “When you scooped me up, did you not notice the cities? The signals? The satellites? Like I get it, it’s not Star Trek-level space shit, but surely that level of civilization should have given it away.”
There was a strange silence as no one apparently wanted to answer the question. The specimen once again regarded the others in the room, all of whom had suddenly, simultaneously found the floor incredibly fascinating.
Kem sighed, the next answer may be more difficult, but seeing as thus far the specimen had been fairly amenable, he pressed on. “You were purchased.”
“WHAT!? WHY!?”
Kem’s tail flicked non-commitally. “Because grant funding has been sparse recently. To get any appreciable amount, a shattering discovery needs to be made. One of my crewmen said he “knew a guy” as it were, and it turns out his contact was good. So we pooled what little funding we got, along with some of our own savings, and purchased you, stasis pod, and all. You were billed as an exotic, unknown, apex ambush predator. Something that’s relatively difficult to get one's hands on.”
The specimen stared blankly at him for a few moments before bursting out in a fit of laughter. “Buddy, you got railroaded. I may be one of those things. But if that’s what you were paying for, you got scammed.”
“How’s that?” asked Kem.
“For starters, I ain’t apex. I could rattle off a dozen animals that would beat my ass, half of them prey, off the top of my head.” the specimen explained “Plus, not an ambush predator, there’s persistence hunting in my lineage, sure, but not something we’ve done for a long time. All in all, we’re pretty bland. I think the ‘unknown’ thing is the only category I qualify for.”
“Persistence predation? That would explain why our experimentation was going awry, we were chasing the wrong path!” Kem froze, in the excitement he had accidentally, explicitly, revealed their ethically dubious enterprise. He looked back to the specimen who seemed to have not reacted to the information.
“I do apologize. Had we known about your sentience, we wouldn’t have performed such invasive procedures.”
The specimen let out a strange snort “You call those invasive? Hell, I’ve had worse blood draws at the lab. I do wonder though, what was your end goal with all this? Surely some blood draws, and alien Xrays weren't it."
Kem gulped. This was the question he was dreading. "We...well we were going to make you as comfortable as possible, then we would have euthanized you and performed a dissection. All painless, I swear, and it was for science. I can only hope you aren't terribly cross with us. As commander of this operation I take full responsibility and can only request you direct your rage toward me."
The specimen let out a heavy breath "Oof, I'm glad it didn't come to that."
Kem glanced to the bodies of the still twitching pirates "As am I. Again, I offer my deepest apologies. Please do not harbor resentment for my crew."
The specimen waved a hand dismissively at him. "Look, other than the weird mix-up where you assumed I wasn’t a person, this whole trip has been a ride on easy street. So no, I’m not angry.”
This made very little sense to Kem, if he had been kidnapped, mistaken for a beast, and had experiments performed on him he would be more than a little miffed. So for the Nth time today, he decided to be bold. “I’ll risk overstepping, but why aren’t you at least a little mad?”
“Because this is so objectively absurd. If you had told me six months ago, that I’d be bouncing around a starship, waxing alien cockroaches to save a bunch of walking Geico ads that thought that I had the cognitive capacity of an ant and had plans to vivisect me, I would have asked if you were smoking crack cocaine, but…” The specimen gesticulated widely around the room “Here we are!”
The specimen thought for a moment. “Wait…you said stasis pod and all? Hell, it may be longer than six months, but my point stands. All of this, it’s insane.”
“Insane as it all may be,” Kem said as he wandered back to the console “Now that we’ve cleared up this, uh, unfortunate misunderstanding, I think it would be beneficial for all parties to get you back where you came from.”
He pulled up a holographic galactic map and turned back to the specimen, whose demeanor had once again shifted, this time it emanated an air of disappointment.
“Something the matter?” He asked.
“Well, it’s just that, where I’m from, this would literally be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” It paused “I was kind of hoping you’d allow me to stay, even if for just a while. A grand space adventure sounds pretty neat.” It pointed to the map “‘Sides, that might as well be written in hieroglyphs, don’t know if I could find Earth even if I was chomping at the bit for it.”
Kem thought on this, there was a lot of potential to having such a creature around. If he could somehow convince it to allow experimentation to continue, even at a reduced rate, the data provided could be invaluable, not to mention recrewing would be infinitely easier with the level of protection the specimen could offer. He prepared himself to negotiate with all the tact that he could muster, but the specimen seemed ready to do his job for him.
“I ain’t no freeloader. I’d be willing to pull my weight, hell I’d be willing to let you keep running your experiments, with the euthanasia and dissection bits off the table, of course.” It offered.
Kem was shocked. Not only was the specimen ready to work to earn its stay, but it had also willingly offered its body for science. He was practically salivating at the academic prestige, not to mention the grant funding that would roll his way. There was no chance he was going to let this opportunity slip through his webbed fingers.
“No cutting you open. Seems a reasonable compromise.” He hissed with amusement “I’m sure we can make reasonable accommodations to facilitate your stay, if you’re certain. Though if you do find yourself lacking anything, once we crew up, feel free to ask.”
“I think I'm alright. I’m a creature of few earthly comforts, all I need is the clothes on my back and-”
The specimen stopped mid-sentence, glancing down briefly at its own form. Its face twisted into one of abject horror. Realizing, seemingly for the first time, that in this entire escapade, it had been naked as the day it was hatched.
“Actually, there is one thing,” it added quickly “You guys got a towel? Bit chilly in here.”

So, due to a ton of issues I've had during my first two semesters at UMD it looks like I am at risk for academic dismissal. It's possible for me to avoid it but by a slim chance. Anyway, I wanted to know if I am academically dismissed and then reinstated in the upcoming semester would I still have the housing that I was assigned to for the upcoming semester? Would I also have to pick any classes that I have already registered for over again? And if my application is denied for reinstatement for the fall semester would I be reinstated during the spring? And if that happens how would that affect housing? And lastly, is there any way that I could take classes over the upcoming summer semester that could help me not be academically dismissed?

By that I mean that they fail to reach the minimum 2.0 requirement or, worse yet, they fail all their classes for the semester.

It has been one hell of a journey grappling with anxious attachment. I have spent days paralyzed in bed with constant pounding headache and nonstop tears rolling down my face, thinking "oh my gosh, he has lost interest in me. This is it. This is the end." when he haven't responded in a couple hours, only for our usual weekend date to be as perfect as can be. I have spent countless hours replaying and rereading the texts I sent cause it was 'stupid' and "I'll probably get dismissed and be called an idiot cause that's what my ex did when I brought it up or playfully teased" and likewise, I have spent countless hours replaying and rereading his replies, overanalyzing every. single. word and tracking how long it takes for him to respond to my text. If it's out of his normal response time period, anxiety starts to set in and thus began my spiral into bed paralysis. If I think he use less words than he usually does or it doesn't look as long as usual, if he doesn't send an emoji like he always does then that's it. He's not interested in me anymore. Any very slight change in texting pattern and frequency then my mind goes to "that's it. This is the end.".
However, as I start to learn about anxious attachment and equip myself with tools, such as journaling to regulate, understand and process my emotions and the 5 senses method to help ground myself, I find myself in a more emotionally stable place. The progress I made, in chronological order, are as follows:
- I'm able to catch myself before I spiral. If I do spiral, I automatically start to journal and process through the emotions, reasoning with myself. I found that overtime, I'm able to rationally reason with myself better and faster. Although I still spiral sometimes, it's few and far between with each one not being as deep before I'm able to pull myself back.
- I don't literally start counting on my fingers how long it has been since he last texted and when was the last time he was active on social media.
- I have adopted the mindset of "he'll respond when he respond" as he is an awful texter (and that's a whole different story) but he never fails to get back to me before he goes to sleep or if he didn't, he'll get back to me the next morning - it's one of the few certainties I have as reassurance.
- I found myself not catastrophizing situations/ events/ texts as intensely and frequently as before. My rationality kicks into action very quickly and go "hold on...what do we know is true?" or "slow down, you are just overthinking the situation. It's not as intense as you view it."
Although in this post I have only mentioned about me, myself and I, it can't go on without acknowledging my boyfriend. Although he has just known about my anxious attachment recently, he has been nothing but respectful, open-minded, empathetic and compassionate right from the very start. Overtime, his actions and words simultaneously build my trust in him and has grown to the point where, it is, without a doubt, that he cares about me and he loves me, albeit just my gut feeling but it is a strong certain feeling with evidence to back it up. When I told him about my anxious attachment, he didn't try to 'fix' me or find a solution for me, he just listened and empathized. He didn't made it a big deal or made it become something that define who I am nor did he dismissed me. Being able to have those 'big scary talk that may make or break relationships' with him so casually while being heard and taken seriously at the same time is something I'm so grateful about.
This journey has taught me to be more compassionate about myself and love myself as much as possible. Through constantly working on healing my anxious attachment and with a walking green flag of a boyfriend by my side, I have never felt this secure and independent while feeling quite certain that my boyfriend still loves and cares for me. I feel like I can live freely and less anxiously in the present, enjoy time socializing and hanging out with friends, focus on my academic journey etc and when the weekend rolls around, I get to enjoy my time with him, being in his embrace, going on fun dates and exchanging what we had done during the week. It's the perfect balance. However, my journey is no where near done; I still have things I'm working on to better improve myself for my own sake and for my relationship's sake.
The journey to heal anxious attachment is not linear but it's filled with ups and downs. One week you might feel on top of the world, beating this AA monster down, the other you might be taking 1 step forward but 3 steps back but I believe it is still progress nonetheless and yes, I do feel like that some days as well, however I am so proud of how far I've come and I am proud of yours as well (if no one has said it yet). I truly hope this post brings you some inspiration that all the work you've put into healing your anxious attachment won't go in vain.

Shortly before 9:00 pm on October 10, 1933, Joe Groff, a Chesterton, Indiana farmer, was engrossed in a game of hearts with his neighbors when a thunderous explosion overhead shattered the tranquility of the quiet evening. Startled by the deafening sound, Joe and his companions scrambled towards a window, their gazes drawn upwards to witness the horrifying spectacle of a burning airplane disintegrating in the night sky, showering the ground below with fiery debris.
The earth shuddered as the flaming wreckage slammed into the ground. Joe and his friends raced towards the crash site, driven by the desperate hope of finding survivors. But as they drew closer, the inferno's fury pushed them back. Fred Rhode, another nearby farmer, who had also witnessed the crash, arrived to find a scene of utter devastation. Twisted fragments of the fuselage littered the field, and lying within the smoldering remains was , “a decapitated woman, her body charred, and her limbs reduced to smoldering stumps.”
"We were startled by a terrific explosion. We ran outside. We saw the plane burning in air, about 1,000 feet up. It was falling like a rock, flames shooting out on all sides. It came down faster and faster. We could hear the motor running. The plane zigzagged as if in a tail spin. Then it hit the ground with a roar and a sound I hope to never hear again. Flames shot up at least 200 feet. I heard what I thought were people crying out. We tried to throw water on the flames, but couldn’t get near enough to do any good. We had to stand on, helpless." -Joe Groff
The aircraft was identified as United Airlines Flight 23, a ten seat, twin-engine Boeing 247, bound for Chicago, Illinois. The ill-fated flight had originated in Newark, New Jersey, and made a routine refueling stop in Cleveland, Ohio. There, a pilot change occurred, and two additional passengers joined the manifest, bringing the total onboard to seven.
Now piloting the aircraft was 25-year-old Harold “Hal” Tarrant, a two year veteran of United Airlines, and his co-pilot, 28-year-old A.T. Ruby, a graduate of the University of Illinois. Hal was the son of a wealthy Illinois merchant. Recently engaged, his fiancé, Bessie, was waiting for him at the terminal in Chicago.
Also aboard was 25-year-old stewardess Alice Scribner. Alice was the daughter of a former Wisconsin state legislator. After graduating from college, she became a teacher, and later a nurse at Bellin Memorial Hospital in Wisconsin. Meeting United’s height and weight restrictions at the time, less than 123 pounds and not any taller than 5 feet 2 inches, she had joined the airline only recently. Her fiancé, Evan Terp, was also waiting for her at the airport in Chicago.
25-year-old Dorothy M. Dwyer was flying to meet her fiancée in Reno, Nevada. She was supposed to be on an earlier flight, but missed it due to a flat tire on the way to the airport in Newark. 44-year-old Emil Smith, a former army officer and grocery store owner, had also boarded in Newark, heading back home to Chicago.
Warren Burris, a radio operator for United, was one of two additional passengers picked up in Cleveland. Warren was being shuttled to Chicago to crew another flight. Also added to the manifest in Cleveland was 28-year-old Frederick Schoendorff, manager of a company that made refrigerators in Chicago.
Hal's routine radio transmission at 8:39 p.m. Central Time suggested normalcy; despite the slight drizzle over North Liberty, Indiana, the flight seemed on course. Yet, twenty minutes later, when his next scheduled check-in was due, silence echoed across the airwaves. An hour later, the airline’s station manager received a brief teletype message confirming their worst fears; Flight 23 had crashed.
Meanwhile, in Chesterton, fire crews, police, and local volunteers converged, their desperate attempts to quell the raging inferno a futile battle against the wreckage's relentless flames. As the fire burned into the night, a grim reality settled in; there were no survivors.
Evidence suggested a midair explosion had ripped the aircraft in two, sending the main fuselage, housing both the passenger cabin and cockpit, plummeting to the ground, inverted, at an estimated 150 miles per hour. Meanwhile, the severed tail section, just forward of the lavatory, fell about one-half mile from the scene of the crash, nearly entirely intact.
The bodies of Hal and his co-pilot, A.T. Ruby, were found near the airplane’s mangled cockpit. The bodies of stewardess Alice Scribner, and passengers Dorothy Dwyer and Fred Schendorf, were found nearby, amongst the wreckage of the cabin. The bodies of Emil Smith and Warren Burris weren’t found until the following morning, in the weeds about half a mile from the main section of the plane, near the tail section.
At first, it appeared to be a tragic accident; A fuel leak, possibly. Structural failure also was suggested. Some believed the plane had been struck by lightning, and there was even a theory it had been hit by a meteorite. Mounting evidence of foul play, however, led to an FBI investigation, headed by Melvin Purvis, the head of the Chicago office who would later gain fame as the G-man who “gunned down John Dillinger.”
A full-scale investigation promptly unfolded, hampered initially by the disturbing reality of looted wreckage. Drawn by morbid curiosity, onlookers from miles around had pilfered souvenirs from the crash site, hindering initial efforts. For example, the propeller of one engine was missing a blade, and investigators never found it. Decades later, in a 1999 interview as part of a project conducted by the Westchester Public Library in Chesterton, local resident Howard Johnson finally disclosed what happened to it:
“Donald Slont, who later ran Flannery’s Tavern, was on the local fire department. Of course, the fire truck went out there immediately when the alarm was sent out. When they picked up their stuff from the fire truck to come home after they had done everything that they could, one of the propellers was lying on the ground. It had broken off. Don was one of these guys that just laid his hands on anything that he could see, and he grabbed it,” Johnson recalled. “When they were investigating the thing, they couldn’t find that propeller so they thought the propeller had come off and that’s what made it crash. And here Donald had it all the time. I think it had red, white and blue stripes around it so that when the propeller turned, it looked like a circle of red, white and blue.” -Howard Johnson
United Airlines sold the remaining majority of the wreckage to a Hobart, Indiana junk dealer for $75. He hauled it away just days after the crash. However, despite the missing pieces, amidst the remaining debris agents stumbled upon several unsettling clues; Shrapnel holes were found on the inner-side of the remains of the rear lavatory door. Airline blankets stored in a cubby in the lavatory also bore the same holes.
In a bombshell development on October 14th, the FBI, after consulting with the Crime Detection Laboratory at the Northwestern University in Chicago, announced the cause of the crash was a “high-powered onboard explosive containing nitroglycerin, dynamite of high percentage strength, TNT, or some similar substance."
The meticulous examination of the wreckage pinpointed the blast zone towards the rear of the aircraft, most likely originating in the lavatory or the blanket compartment. “The investigation centered upon a piece of blanket, part of the plane’s equipment, and several pieces of the metal surface of the plane. Both had been pierced many times by small bits of metal. Only a high explosive could produce a force great enough to force metal through metal.“ This revelation transformed what was initially seen as an accident, into a confirmed act of sabotage.
In the wake of the news, a swift search for the culprit was launched, and the FBI quickly zeroed in on passenger Emil Smith. Emil, who boarded the aircraft in Newark, reportedly purchased life insurance just one day prior to the flight. The two dollar purchase promised a payout of ten thousand dollars should Emil’s plane crash. Additionally, eyewitness accounts noted him carrying several peculiar items onto the plane, including a firearm and a brown paper sack he stashed in the overhead compartment.
A thorough investigation into Emil’s background, however, revealed a seemingly normal life. The 44-year-old Army veteran, who served in Hawaii during World War I, resided with his aunt, Anna Reidl, on Argyle Street in Chicago. Previously, he co-owned and operated a grocery store with Anna until its sale in 1930. Financially secure after the sale, Smith enjoyed a leisure lifestyle filled with hunting, fishing, and attending baseball games. Anna described him as a quiet individual who often joined her in the evenings for pinochle games.
Emil’s aunt told investigators he had flown to New York City for the World Series games on October 3rd and 4th, residing at the Roosevelt Hotel on 45th Street and Madison Avenue. While his stay at the hotel was confirmed, investigators couldn't verify his attendance at the games. His activities during his remaining days in the city were also equally unclear. On October 9th, Emil purchased his plane ticket and flight insurance directly from his hotel desk. His final known movement prior to boarding the aircraft occurred at 2:10 p.m. on October 10. Emil sent a telegram to Anna reading, “Leaving New York today by plane. Everything O.K.”
During a later examination of the wreckage, Emil’s brown paper sack was recovered from among the airplane debris. The contents of the sack were never disclosed, but authorities determined it posed no threat. As a result, Emil was cleared of any involvement in the incident.
The following months saw a flurry of investigative theories, including potential "mob involvement" due to the recent travel of Joseph Keenan, an Assistant Attorney General tasked with investigating organized crime, on United Airlines just days before the crash. However, this theory was swiftly dismissed as implausible.
Pilot dissatisfaction was also explored. A United vice president relayed an indirect threat regarding potential aircraft damage if "scab" pilots were used during a labor dispute. Additionally, the brother of co-pilot A.T. Ruby reported ongoing issues with certain union members. However, after interviews with the alleged source of these threats, and confirmation that labor tensions had subsided by the time of the crash, no evidence of employee sabotage was ever found.
Also interviewed was J.J. Lavin, an American employed by the Chinese Consulate who facilitated wheat shipments from the U.S. to China. Lavin drew suspicion when FBI agents learned he was originally scheduled to be aboard the crashed flight, but had rebooked to a later one. He was reported to have made comments about a bomb causing the crash, supposedly before such information became public. Lavin denied these claims to investigators, though he acknowledged the possibility of such discussions while under the influence of alcohol. He was later eliminated as a suspect.
The investigation continued for two years. Then, on September 20, 1935, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, declared “all undeveloped leads in this case have been exhausted, and the investigation has not developed any facts which would justify presenting this matter to the United States Attorney. Therefore, this case is being closed.”
The crash of Flight 23 is known as the first proven act of air sabotage in the history of commercial aviation. In addition, the death of Alice Scribner was the first instance of a stewardess dying as a result of an airline crash. When Alice’s younger sister, Velma Scribner, walked down the aisle in 1940, she wore a “handmade peasant frock that had been imported from Paris. Described as eggshell in color, with a bodice smocked at the neckline, it was trimmed with embroidery on the sleeves and front.” The dress had been intended as Alice’s wedding gown.
In 2017, the FBI declassified 324 documents related to the investigation. Unfortunately no new leads were developed. Whoever was responsible for the crash, and their motive, remains a mystery.
Sources
Photos- https://imgur.com/a/PzaAk4z
https://simpleflying.com/united-air-lines-trip-23-cabin-crew-perspective/
https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/80-years-later-plane-bombing-remains-a-mystery/1964534/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Air_Lines_Trip_23
https://www.historynet.com/what-happened-to-ual-flight-23/
https://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/september-2011/united-flight-23-to-chicago-the-first-airline-terrorism/
https://www.nj.com/inside-jersey/2013/09/the_mysterious_crash_of_united_23.html

“Get the fuck out of my house with this ‘ old country’ shit Sylvia, I’m serious. “ I hear my dad say from the kitchen downstairs.
“I give children and idiots three warnings. That’s your first. “ It takes me a second to recognize my aunt’s voice. I’ve only met her a handful of times, and it’s nearly 2am.
“Syl, he’s right, this is crazy. I’m Roma, I’m proud, but your part of the family, and mine are two separate things. “ My mom interjects. Her voice is calm and level.
I woke up about half way through whatever is going on, and I’m fuzzy on the details, but everyone involved is three kinds of pissed.
“So you say, but just because you ignore the other side, doesn’t mean the other side ignores you. “ Aunt Syl replies, I could never quite place her accent, but it makes her statement all the more sinister.
“Might as well make that the family motto.
Syl, there are a couple dozen other kids Nikolas’ age in the family. Half of which are already hip deep in whatever is going on nowadays, you don’t need him. “ Mom isn’t pleading, but I can hear she’s worried.
“Why are we trying to reason with your crazy aunt? Time to go Syl. “ My dad isn’t worried, he’s angry.
“That’s two. “ Aunt Sylvia replies.
I hear a chair squeak then fall to the floor.
“That’s three. “ Sylvia says, her voice is cold, and I swear I could almost hear an echo.
I can hear my dad start to quietly cough, he sounds like he’s trying to talk but can’t. My heart starts to race, I don’t understand what’s going on, but I know it’s bad.
“Syl! Jesus Christ, that’s my husband. “ Mom sounds more offended than scared now. I wish I could say the same.
I stand next to my cracked door, fear beginning to take hold.
I can hear my dad start to take long wheezing breaths, I have no idea if this is a good or bad thing.
“Happy?
Now that any hope of doing this quietly is over, Nikolas and I have a long drive ahead of us. He’s 16, he has a license, yes? “ I hear Sylvia say, sudden footsteps walking up the stairs.
“No, he’s not interested in driving. You can’t take him Syl. “ my mom sounds frantic, Sylvia’s steps are measured and heavy.
“Not interested? You sure we are related? You raise soft children. “ Sylvia ends this with a dismissive laugh.
The few minutes that followed were kind of a blur, with my mom trying to convince me that I was just going to visit family, as if I didn’t just hear everything.
It's a couple hours into a long drive in a small car when my brain finally catches up to the fact that I’m awake, and going 30 miles an hour over the speed limit.
Aunt Syl sits in the driver’s seat, she’s 40 something, olive skinned with pitch-colored hair. Her style, it’s, something.
Her outfit was the middle of a Venn diagram of hippie, punk rock and carpenter. Bracelets, flannel, paisley, and enough piercings I lost count.
“Any chance of putting both hands on the wheel? “ I say, I’m mad, but I don’t even really know why.
She holds up her left arm, and I’m shocked. It’s an ancient looking blued steel prosthetic. She flexes, the clawed, almost mitten-like hand.
“Go through too many steering wheels that way. “ She says with a smirk.
“What’s going on? “ I ask, after an agonizing fifteen minutes of silence.
“You’re a big boy, so if you want the truth, I’ll give it to you. There’s a job that needs to be done, a dangerous job. And I want you to do it.
Now, I want you, not because you’re strong, or smart, or special. We have many strong, smart, special boys.
You, I want, because you’re unknown, and, little one, disposable. “ Sylvia lets this comment hang like rotten fruit.
The next hour goes in silence, at no point do I even entertain the notion this is some kind of joke. Something about this woman’s energy, about the way she carries herself, it scares the shit out of me.
We board a plane, somehow she had all of my travel documents. Even stranger is that we get escorted past the security checkpoints, into first class.
The next words I say to Sylvia are, “You have to put that out! “ as she lights up a short, yellow, hand-rolled cigarette.
She grins, taking a long drag, it smells horrible, the cheapest roughest tobacco odor I’ve encountered.
She relaxes, a cloud of thick, grey smoke forming.
I’m stunned, not a single person says anything. At first I think maybe she’s some kind of, I don’t know, mobster or something.
But that isn’t quite right. No one is looking at her in fear, no one is telling anyone else not to say anything. It’s like no one notices what she’s doing.
“How does she do this? The little boy wonders.
I don’t come offering you a thankless task Nik. I come with an opportunity. “ Sylvia says before crushing the cigarette on the arm of a chair and tossing it into the isle.
I had questions, and between the fear and the confusion I asked every one of them.
The only response she gave me was, “You’ll see when we get there. “.
She was right.
The flight lands, and after an hour or so of driving the world’s oldest pickup through the English countryside, we wind up at an old farm house, in the middle of nowhere outside of Hammersmith.
The sign outside says “ Gritt Auctions” the letters are old, bronze and tarnished, the grounds are littered with car parts, statues, and errata of every type.
Dozens, maybe even a hundred people mill about each stopping for a moment to give a suspicious look at the interloper in their midst.
Sylvia seems amused at my nervousness. I try and give the rough looking folks around me as much space as I can.
“They’re family, mostly, by blood or marriage, with a handful of lost souls and hangers on. “ She explains.
I probably should have guessed, seeing my mom’s family name on the sign, but my brain is basically nothing more than fear, anxiety and jet lag at this point.
“When do I get to know what’s going on? “ I say, waving at a cousin of some form and receive a uniquely English rude gesture in return.
My ear is ringing, and I stumble , the left side of my face burning. I’d say Syl slapped me, but it was more of a polite punch.
“Don’t whine. You’ve been stolen from your mother, treated like a dog, and judging by Robert’s attitude, rejected by your family.
I don’t want to hear whining, you angry, soft boy? “ Sylvia stops and turns toward me. I notice the people around us stop their tasks, interested in our conversation.
“No… “ I begin, not wanting to piss her off.
I don’t even see the next slap, but it puts me on my ass.
“Next one’s with the left hand.
Are you angry Nikolas? “ Sylvia looms over me like a raven.
I feel something before I get to my feet, a hot, quick flash of hatred. A context free rage at the fucked up situation I’m in.
“Answer is still no. Because to be angry, I’d have to know a God-Damned thing about what’s going on.
But my lunatic aunt just picked me up and now I’m standing in the middle of whatever the English equivalent to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre family is.
For all I know, I’m your new King. So no, I’m not angry, I’m annoyed, and maybe a bit worried my gene pool really needs some chlorine. “ I’m shocked at what I’m saying, but I see some smiles, hear a few laughs.
Sylvia’s face seems to soften slightly.
“There’s the Gritt in you. “ She says, starting to walk to an old barn.
I catch up to her as I attempt in vain to dust myself off.
Sylvia opens a small, strangely modern looking door, inside a row of lights automatically flip on.
In contrast to the rotten wood exterior, the inside of the barn looks modern, design wise it’s half way between a hospital and a car repair shop. Equipment of unknown purpose, gurneys and cages of all sizes and types surround me.
Sylvia walks to a door at the back, then pauses.
“Before I open this door, you need to understand something.
There is no fortune telling, or reading of cards here. The cloak of the traveller, the bangles of the gypsy, these are all ways of navigating the world to us. Ways to exist on the fringes of society.
The Gritt family, we trade in the unknown. We find, we collect, and we sell. And ours is no petty collection of trinkets and tools not meant for the hands of man.
Our grift, is livestock. “
The woman opens the door, and what I see, sitting, chained in one corner of the industrial cement walled cell shakes everything I thought I knew about reality.
He's six and a half feet tall, his skin a waxy yellow, and every spare inch is festooned with black stitching, rusted pieces of metal or small splinters of bone.
His face is noseless and asymmetrical, almost as if repaired or modified over and over. One eye is a small, sinister looking orb with a red pupil, the other a massive, almost reptilian thing, wildly twitching about.
He wears no shirt, but a long, grey hide Trenchcoat hangs down to his knees. I start to shake as I see it’s made from layers of stitched human skin.
He sneers at us, long, conical teeth catch the harsh halogen light.
The thing strains against the chains, but they bind him tightly enough to the wall he can barely move.
“You’re not lasting more than 4 seconds kid. Just turn the fuck around. I’ll have you slitting your wrists in the corner by nightfall. “ The thing says, it’s voice is foul, almost a physical force. Grating, rage filled, and with a lunatic edge to it that makes me question exactly how much those chains can take.
“ 3/10, Augustus, who do you think you are scaring with that limp dick of a threat? “ Sylvia says, confidently walking up to the creature.
It snaps it’s jaws with a sound like a rifle shot. No where near Sylvia, but enough to make me jump on the other side of the room.
“If I could stop being threatened and hearing my aunt talk about dicks, I’d be a huge fan. “ I say, something deep within me, pushing past the fear and lack of sleep, “And if anything feels like just telling me what’s going on instead of being vague and creepy, even better. “
The chained thing looks to me, curious. Sylvia smirks.
“Augustus is going to be forced to fight others like him until eventually he gets what’s coming to him for years of evil.
You, are going to stand next to him while he does it. “ Sylvia begins to walk away from the thing, ignoring vile threats of both the violent and carnal variety.
I try to follow her out the door and she blocks me.
“If your still sane and alive in the morning, I was right. Good luck soft boy. “ She says before closing the heavy metal door.
Without her, I feel tiny, that spark of rage is snuffed out and replaced with a cold sense of dread.
“You’re going to have to turn around sometime kid. “ The chained creature says.
I turn, slowly, resolving to make eye contact with the thing. I manage a second or two before looking away, the creature cackles, mocking me.
“Holy shit, they sent me an honest to God pussy. Whole family full of void fucked apes and they send me you?
The best part is, you don’t even get it. I can see what you’re thinking kid, I can see that tiny collection of hormones and goo you vainly call a brain going into overdrive trying to figure this out… “ Augustus starts.
The creature kept going, I don’t have an exact count but it was at least twelve hours.
I can only describe it as a verbal assault. Augustus drew from some dark wells, how it knew half of the things it did scared me as much as it’s clawed hands or, piranha-like teeth.
I lost something that night. The fears that thing drug up, the insecurities it played on, the secrets it knew, it crushed any childlike notions of safety or understanding the world I had.
Don’t take that the wrong way, I don’t mean it toughened me up. It broke any sense of confidence I had, took away any feeling of safety. That God Damned thing in the trenchcoat, changed me.
I’ve lost track of how long it’s been since I’ve slept, but I’m brought a tin plate heaped with eggs, sausage and for some twisted reason, brown beans. And realize it’s been at least a day since I’ve eaten.
I sit around an abused, graffiti carved picnic table with an eclectic combination of family I’ve never met. Syl sips a tea I can smell from ten feet away and looks at me like I’m a used car.
“I’m always right soft boy. Remember that. “ She says.
It takes a half dozen guys built like construction workers, with Sylvia following behind whispering things that wilt vegetation, to wrangle the creature into the back of an old, reinforced horse trailer.
The inside is covered in totems, runes, and other spooky looking errata. The entity becomes sluggish and disoriented as the heavy wooden doors close, and get sealed with a massive brass lock.
My mind begins to wander on the three hour trip through the back country of the UK. The sun sets, and my brain screams for sleep. That scream is silenced by the sense of mounting dread as we get closer to our destination.
We pull up to an abandoned theme restaurant, the parking lot is full, the windows are boarded, and the walls covered in graffiti. The place is huge, more the size of a small stadium than a diner.
The parking lot is full, the sputtering, sparking neon sign flashes “Faron’s Funhouse. “
It’s a few minutes outside of a town I forgot to catch the name of. We can see lights on the horizon, but there’s a feeling of wrong surrounding the building that makes them seem a million miles away.
A half dozen ‘cousins’ of mine move Augustus into a strange, almost coffin-like box made of wood, steel and glass, covered in trinkets and symbols. The thing sneers groggily from within, it’s mismatched eyes rolling in it’s skull.
I don’t hear Sylvia approach, I notice her as she smacks me in the back of the head hard enough to make my ears ring. The old, cruel woman is walking toward the doors of this meeting place.
“Eyes forward, sneer on your face, and walk like you know where you’re going. “ Are her only instructions.
For once, they’re clear and simple. What I see inside easily keeps my attention, and I’m equal parts scared and pissed off, so looking edgy and miserable is my default state.
At one point, this place was exactly what you’d think. I know you’re all expecting it to be a run down, rat infested haunted house now, but it was, stranger than that.
The place was well kept on the inside, but everything was either in use or repurposed to house the couple hundred eclectic customers milling around. In the centre, is a massive Lucite Cube, crystal clear and housing a ball pit, jungle gym and what looks to be a functional canteen, complete with a deep fryer and popcorn machine. It’s a couple hundred meters a side, and shaped like a flawed rectangle.
Smoke hangs in the air, my aunt greets old friends in a handful of different languages, I smile and nod, still trying to understand what the hell this place is.
We see Augustus being wheeled to the Lucite box, Sylvia cuts a laughing Cyrillic conversation short, and her and I make our way to the box that barely restrains the hatred and death inside.
At the other end of the Lucite Cube I see a few people dressed in blue and maroon uniforms ( if I were to guess vintage, from when this place served shitty food instead of violence.), they surround a massive, hulking, lanky thing. It’s obscured by smoke, and poor lighting, but it’s nine foot frame, and unnatural gait are clear.
The box holding Augustus sits about ten feet away from me, inside the massive cage. The front opens, my instinct is to step backward, get as much distance between me and the thing inside as possible, but instead, I’m shoved, before I can catch my balance, a workbook clad foot is in front of me.
I fall and stumble into the cage, I turn around to try and get out as fast as I can, I’m standing inches away from the creature, but I see Sylvia closing the clear, impermeable door.
It hits me then. For the first time since this ordeal started, I realize how grim things are.
Just like everyone else here, I’ve been raised on spooky shit packaged to be marketable. Little monsters, The Adams Family, Harry potter, hell let’s throw Pokemon and the like in there as it’s basically just dog fighting with a cute hat on.
And I thought what was happening to me, was somewhere on the Venn diagram of those things.
But as I see the impassive look on the face of a woman I’ve known since I was a child, ( at a distance or no.) as I’m locked in here with God knows what, I get it. I really get it.
His laughter is like an ice pick, I turn to face him, Augustus brushes himself off, casually looking around the massive arena.
“Just hit ya didn’t it, bud? “ He says, walking over to me, his steps impossibly quick, almost insect-like, “You’re not my trainer, or my wrangler, you certainly aren’t my fucking partner. “, the entity grabs my chin between two clawed fingers, “ You’re a bait dog. Something for me and that new blooded walking pun to fight over. “
My blood runs down his thumb, his grin cracks his face like a rotten melon, the monster pulls down, throwing me to the floor.
A buzzer sounds, and a three minute timer, projected in transparent red appears on the walls of the Lucite arena.
“If I’ve got to hunt you down in this shit-hole, things are going to be a lot worse for you. Stay put, bud. “ The trenchcoat clad thing says, casually walking toward the creature on the opposite side of the arena.
Closer now, I see it clearly. Inside of a pristine uniform, is a twisted attempt at the human form. The torso is lumpen, asymmetrical, but lean. It's arms nearly drag on the floor, yellow, infected looking flesh, weeping pus like a snail’s foot.
It's eyes are black caves, with just the hint of something deep within. It’s face is blank, a torn, haggard looking grey tongue runs over rotting green teeth.
The kid beside it looks around my age, he’s big though, just as confused and afraid as I am. He wears a similar uniform to the creature, but his looks, abused, torn, blood stained. Like it's been handed down from one unlucky owner to the next.
As the buzzer rings, the lanky, disgusting creature moves in a flash, tearing off the kid’s right arm and beginning to chew it.
The blood didn’t set me off, as terrible as it was. It was the three seconds between the act, and the poor kid realizing what happened that pushed me over the edge.
He started to scream, a horrible trapped animal kind of noise. He backs away from the monster beside him, gripping the crushed and torn remains of his forearm.
Augustus laughs, his trenchcoat drags on the floor, leaving a streak of blood as he walks.
“Man after my own heart.
So, I say, we split these sides of beef for two minutes then talk shop for a bit. Fuck these pretentious apes and their show. “ Augustus looks up to the massive thing. It remains impassive, gnawing on the hand.
“Don’t be like that. We both know two halves are better than one whole . Win-win for both of us“ Augustus gets a noise that sounds like an angry sewer pipe, and a dismissive wave of a long snake-like arm in response.
The thing in the trenchcoat shrugs, turning around and stalking toward me.
“You have no luck at all kid, I was going to let you go last.
But the pinworm back there wants to be a dick about things, so looks like things are getting started early. “ Augustus grins, his mouth opening shark like.
I stare down certain death, Augustus radiating fear, seeming to become more demonic with each step toward me.
From behind him, a noise.
I would have just assumed it was some part of the worm-like, filth ridden thing eating. Augustus clears up that misconception.
He turns, shaking, body language that of a wild animal.
“Was that a fucking snicker? A giggle? Are you fucking laughing at me, you literal fucking worm. “ He’s panting, hands twitching like dying insects.
He stands, inches from the other creature, dwarfed by it, teeth grinding, muscles straining.
The worm thing casually tosses the flesh bare hand toward Augustus. As it touches his coat, the arena erupts into a kind of wild, senseless, limitless violence.
It doesn’t feel like watching a fight, it’s more like a car wreck, or natural disaster. Pieces of jungle gym turn into lethal shrapnel as the blurred, filth spewing scrum destroys them.
I see the timer, 2:15. My mind starts to catch up, and I see the other kid, pale, whimpering, and trying in vain to staunch the blood spurting from his arm.
I’m running, low and likely poorly, pulling my belt from my pants, and thanking myself for actually listening when I was forced to take a first aid course for a summer job last year.
The kid is scared, he tries pushing me away, but I’m determined, and not down a couple pints of blood. I pull the belt with two hands, pull it through again and twist, it’s ugly, it’s not perfect, but the flow of blood begins to slow, then stop.
We crawl behind a prize counter, decades old candy and stuffed animals surround us as we cower. A liquid filled roar loud enough to crack the cheap glass cases fills the room.
The kid is looking rough, blood still trickling from the torn stump of his forearm. I see some plastic bags and get an idea.
I lean over to get them, and feel something strange, at first I think I pulled a muscle.
Then there is a deep, burning pain, instinctively I pull away, and turn around.
The kid is on his knees, sanity has left his eyes, a cheap hunting knife in his remaining hand he has a look of panic and determination on his face.
“We have to win. “ he says, lunging at me with the blade.
He’s slow, and I avoid it, but not by as much as I’d like. Blood runs down my back, for a moment I wonder how bad I’m hurt, but it doesn’t really matter right now.
I retreat, but the only thing keeping us from being torn apart by the whirlwind of shrapnel caused by the creatures is the counter, I can’t escape.
It's a stalemate, I’m no athlete, and the kid is built like a rugby player, but he’s missing a hand, and delirious from blood loss. I plead, I try and reason, and I dodge crazed strikes by increasingly narrow margins.
Something large, either thrown or knocked loose destroys the counter behind me. Suddenly all is chaos. I’m thrown into the kid in the uniform, plaster dust surrounds us in a grey cloud.
By the time the air clears the kid is on top of me. I have his wrist in one hand, keeping the split tip of the blade inches from my face.
The angle is too awkward, I can’t get any leverage. It’s not a stalemate, it’s a war of attrition that I’m losing.
I catch a glimpse of the two creatures. The worm thing is striking at Augustus, who stands still, limbs moving in arcing blurs deflecting the blows and tearing off chunks of foul, tainted flesh.
The tip of the knife begins to dig into my cheek. A drop of blood hits my eye.
I grab the makeshift tourniquet with a free hand and roughly yank forward. The kid on top of me screams, bloods begins to pour. Torn flesh and a gore soaked belt hit the ground.
For a moment the weight on me eases up, and I push the knife forward. But the kid, he’s too stupid or far gone to just back off. As I feel is strength start to fade, he presses himself harder.
I expect him to back off as I begin to drive the roughly sharpened back edge of the knife into his neck. But he doubles down, leaning forward, trying to press the knife toward me.
For a moment, every other fucked up thing going on around me doesn’t matter. The world is small, silent, and consists of nothing more than the image of the knife ripping away a fist sized strip from the kids neck.
He backs off when he realizes the extent of the damage. Staring at me shocked, as if just not realizing the consequences of his actions.
He dies slowly, poorly, and within inches of me. I feel no victory, no sense of being a winner, just a dark pit in the back of my mind. The loss of something that comes with taking someone’s life.
I stand, shell shocked, staring at the corpse. My safety the last thing on my mind.
The worm thing is hurt, and attempts to dive into the ball pit, but somehow, defying physics, Augustus grabs it, holding the half ton monster out with one hand.
He arcs the thing, slamming it into the floor behind him, the spray of gore and viscera rivals pyrotechnics, the force leaves a blood filled crater in the floor.
Without missing a beat Augustus starts to walk toward me, making a token effort of flicking pieces of bone and organ from himself.
I’m frozen, I know nothing I can do could stop whatever he has planned.
The creature picks up a jagged piece of lumber, and looks at the clock, “We’ve got 45 seconds of fun left kid. “ he says with a sneer.
But as he passes the counter, and sees the corpse the look of imminent violence turns into amusement.
“How’s it feel to be a child killer, bud? “, Augustus laughs, “Not that I can’t tell from the look on your face.
Fuck me, that knocked some gears loose didn’t it? “
The thing walks forward, looking me over like a collectable.
“I can’t let that go to waste, now can I? “ he slaps me lightly, “It’s going to be a fucking blast watching you break down kid, wonder what drives you nuts first, this kid being in your dreams, or the fact that, at some point I’m going to get bored and start giving you all the pain you feel you deserve? “
Of course, I made it out alive. It’d be kind of hard to have posted this if I didn’t.
But now, I sit in a dingy room in a farm house half way across the world from home. Surrounded by family and monsters, all of which seem out to get me. Being forced to risk my life in some kind of blood sport.
Maybe I’ll be back, maybe I’ll be dead by the next time I get a chance to post anything. If anyone has any help, please, post it in the comments. I’m in a dark place here and no one else seems to be on my side.

“Get the fuck out of my house with this ‘ old country’ shit Sylvia, I’m serious. “ I hear my dad say from the kitchen downstairs.
“I give children and idiots three warnings. That’s your first. “ It takes me a second to recognize my aunt’s voice. I’ve only met her a handful of times, and it’s nearly 2am.
“Syl, he’s right, this is crazy. I’m Roma, I’m proud, but your part of the family, and mine are two separate things. “ My mom interjects. Her voice is calm and level.
I woke up about half way through whatever is going on, and I’m fuzzy on the details, but everyone involved is three kinds of pissed.
“So you say, but just because you ignore the other side, doesn’t mean the other side ignores you. “ Aunt Syl replies, I could never quite place her accent, but it makes her statement all the more sinister.
“Might as well make that the family motto.
Syl, there are a couple dozen other kids Nikolas’ age in the family. Half of which are already hip deep in whatever is going on nowadays, you don’t need him. “ Mom isn’t pleading, but I can hear she’s worried.
“Why are we trying to reason with your crazy aunt? Time to go Syl. “ My dad isn’t worried, he’s angry.
“That’s two. “ Aunt Sylvia replies.
I hear a chair squeak then fall to the floor.
“That’s three. “ Sylvia says, her voice is cold, and I swear I could almost hear an echo.
I can hear my dad start to quietly cough, he sounds like he’s trying to talk but can’t. My heart starts to race, I don’t understand what’s going on, but I know it’s bad.
“Syl! Jesus Christ, that’s my husband. “ Mom sounds more offended than scared now. I wish I could say the same.
I stand next to my cracked door, fear beginning to take hold.
I can hear my dad start to take long wheezing breaths, I have no idea if this is a good or bad thing.
“Happy?
Now that any hope of doing this quietly is over, Nikolas and I have a long drive ahead of us. He’s 16, he has a license, yes? “ I hear Sylvia say, sudden footsteps walking up the stairs.
“No, he’s not interested in driving. You can’t take him Syl. “ my mom sounds frantic, Sylvia’s steps are measured and heavy.
“Not interested? You sure we are related? You raise soft children. “ Sylvia ends this with a dismissive laugh.
The few minutes that followed were kind of a blur, with my mom trying to convince me that I was just going to visit family, as if I didn’t just hear everything.
It's a couple hours into a long drive in a small car when my brain finally catches up to the fact that I’m awake, and going 30 miles an hour over the speed limit.
Aunt Syl sits in the driver’s seat, she’s 40 something, olive skinned with pitch-colored hair. Her style, it’s, something.
Her outfit was the middle of a Venn diagram of hippie, punk rock and carpenter. Bracelets, flannel, paisley, and enough piercings I lost count.
“Any chance of putting both hands on the wheel? “ I say, I’m mad, but I don’t even really know why.
She holds up her left arm, and I’m shocked. It’s an ancient looking blued steel prosthetic. She flexes, the clawed, almost mitten-like hand.
“Go through too many steering wheels that way. “ She says with a smirk.
“What’s going on? “ I ask, after an agonizing fifteen minutes of silence.
“You’re a big boy, so if you want the truth, I’ll give it to you. There’s a job that needs to be done, a dangerous job. And I want you to do it.
Now, I want you, not because you’re strong, or smart, or special. We have many strong, smart, special boys.
You, I want, because you’re unknown, and, little one, disposable. “ Sylvia lets this comment hang like rotten fruit.
The next hour goes in silence, at no point do I even entertain the notion this is some kind of joke. Something about this woman’s energy, about the way she carries herself, it scares the shit out of me.
We board a plane, somehow she had all of my travel documents. Even stranger is that we get escorted past the security checkpoints, into first class.
The next words I say to Sylvia are, “You have to put that out! “ as she lights up a short, yellow, hand-rolled cigarette.
She grins, taking a long drag, it smells horrible, the cheapest roughest tobacco odor I’ve encountered.
She relaxes, a cloud of thick, grey smoke forming.
I’m stunned, not a single person says anything. At first I think maybe she’s some kind of, I don’t know, mobster or something.
But that isn’t quite right. No one is looking at her in fear, no one is telling anyone else not to say anything. It’s like no one notices what she’s doing.
“How does she do this? The little boy wonders.
I don’t come offering you a thankless task Nik. I come with an opportunity. “ Sylvia says before crushing the cigarette on the arm of a chair and tossing it into the isle.
I had questions, and between the fear and the confusion I asked every one of them.
The only response she gave me was, “You’ll see when we get there. “.
She was right.
The flight lands, and after an hour or so of driving the world’s oldest pickup through the English countryside, we wind up at an old farm house, in the middle of nowhere outside of Hammersmith.
The sign outside says “ Gritt Auctions” the letters are old, bronze and tarnished, the grounds are littered with car parts, statues, and errata of every type.
Dozens, maybe even a hundred people mill about each stopping for a moment to give a suspicious look at the interloper in their midst.
Sylvia seems amused at my nervousness. I try and give the rough looking folks around me as much space as I can.
“They’re family, mostly, by blood or marriage, with a handful of lost souls and hangers on. “ She explains.
I probably should have guessed, seeing my mom’s family name on the sign, but my brain is basically nothing more than fear, anxiety and jet lag at this point.
“When do I get to know what’s going on? “ I say, waving at a cousin of some form and receive a uniquely English rude gesture in return.
My ear is ringing, and I stumble , the left side of my face burning. I’d say Syl slapped me, but it was more of a polite punch.
“Don’t whine. You’ve been stolen from your mother, treated like a dog, and judging by Robert’s attitude, rejected by your family.
I don’t want to hear whining, you angry, soft boy? “ Sylvia stops and turns toward me. I notice the people around us stop their tasks, interested in our conversation.
“No… “ I begin, not wanting to piss her off.
I don’t even see the next slap, but it puts me on my ass.
“Next one’s with the left hand.
Are you angry Nikolas? “ Sylvia looms over me like a raven.
I feel something before I get to my feet, a hot, quick flash of hatred. A context free rage at the fucked up situation I’m in.
“Answer is still no. Because to be angry, I’d have to know a God-Damned thing about what’s going on.
But my lunatic aunt just picked me up and now I’m standing in the middle of whatever the English equivalent to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre family is.
For all I know, I’m your new King. So no, I’m not angry, I’m annoyed, and maybe a bit worried my gene pool really needs some chlorine. “ I’m shocked at what I’m saying, but I see some smiles, hear a few laughs.
Sylvia’s face seems to soften slightly.
“There’s the Gritt in you. “ She says, starting to walk to an old barn.
I catch up to her as I attempt in vain to dust myself off.
Sylvia opens a small, strangely modern looking door, inside a row of lights automatically flip on.
In contrast to the rotten wood exterior, the inside of the barn looks modern, design wise it’s half way between a hospital and a car repair shop. Equipment of unknown purpose, gurneys and cages of all sizes and types surround me.
Sylvia walks to a door at the back, then pauses.
“Before I open this door, you need to understand something.
There is no fortune telling, or reading of cards here. The cloak of the traveller, the bangles of the gypsy, these are all ways of navigating the world to us. Ways to exist on the fringes of society.
The Gritt family, we trade in the unknown. We find, we collect, and we sell. And ours is no petty collection of trinkets and tools not meant for the hands of man.
Our grift, is livestock. “
The woman opens the door, and what I see, sitting, chained in one corner of the industrial cement walled cell shakes everything I thought I knew about reality.
He's six and a half feet tall, his skin a waxy yellow, and every spare inch is festooned with black stitching, rusted pieces of metal or small splinters of bone.
His face is noseless and asymmetrical, almost as if repaired or modified over and over. One eye is a small, sinister looking orb with a red pupil, the other a massive, almost reptilian thing, wildly twitching about.
He wears no shirt, but a long, grey hide Trenchcoat hangs down to his knees. I start to shake as I see it’s made from layers of stitched human skin.
He sneers at us, long, conical teeth catch the harsh halogen light.
The thing strains against the chains, but they bind him tightly enough to the wall he can barely move.
“You’re not lasting more than 4 seconds kid. Just turn the fuck around. I’ll have you slitting your wrists in the corner by nightfall. “ The thing says, it’s voice is foul, almost a physical force. Grating, rage filled, and with a lunatic edge to it that makes me question exactly how much those chains can take.
“ 3/10, Augustus, who do you think you are scaring with that limp dick of a threat? “ Sylvia says, confidently walking up to the creature.
It snaps it’s jaws with a sound like a rifle shot. No where near Sylvia, but enough to make me jump on the other side of the room.
“If I could stop being threatened and hearing my aunt talk about dicks, I’d be a huge fan. “ I say, something deep within me, pushing past the fear and lack of sleep, “And if anything feels like just telling me what’s going on instead of being vague and creepy, even better. “
The chained thing looks to me, curious. Sylvia smirks.
“Augustus is going to be forced to fight others like him until eventually he gets what’s coming to him for years of evil.
You, are going to stand next to him while he does it. “ Sylvia begins to walk away from the thing, ignoring vile threats of both the violent and carnal variety.
I try to follow her out the door and she blocks me.
“If your still sane and alive in the morning, I was right. Good luck soft boy. “ She says before closing the heavy metal door.
Without her, I feel tiny, that spark of rage is snuffed out and replaced with a cold sense of dread.
“You’re going to have to turn around sometime kid. “ The chained creature says.
I turn, slowly, resolving to make eye contact with the thing. I manage a second or two before looking away, the creature cackles, mocking me.
“Holy shit, they sent me an honest to God pussy. Whole family full of void fucked apes and they send me you?
The best part is, you don’t even get it. I can see what you’re thinking kid, I can see that tiny collection of hormones and goo you vainly call a brain going into overdrive trying to figure this out… “ Augustus starts.
The creature kept going, I don’t have an exact count but it was at least twelve hours.
I can only describe it as a verbal assault. Augustus drew from some dark wells, how it knew half of the things it did scared me as much as it’s clawed hands or, piranha-like teeth.
I lost something that night. The fears that thing drug up, the insecurities it played on, the secrets it knew, it crushed any childlike notions of safety or understanding the world I had.
Don’t take that the wrong way, I don’t mean it toughened me up. It broke any sense of confidence I had, took away any feeling of safety. That God Damned thing in the trenchcoat, changed me.
I’ve lost track of how long it’s been since I’ve slept, but I’m brought a tin plate heaped with eggs, sausage and for some twisted reason, brown beans. And realize it’s been at least a day since I’ve eaten.
I sit around an abused, graffiti carved picnic table with an eclectic combination of family I’ve never met. Syl sips a tea I can smell from ten feet away and looks at me like I’m a used car.
“I’m always right soft boy. Remember that. “ She says.
It takes a half dozen guys built like construction workers, with Sylvia following behind whispering things that wilt vegetation, to wrangle the creature into the back of an old, reinforced horse trailer.
The inside is covered in totems, runes, and other spooky looking errata. The entity becomes sluggish and disoriented as the heavy wooden doors close, and get sealed with a massive brass lock.
My mind begins to wander on the three hour trip through the back country of the UK. The sun sets, and my brain screams for sleep. That scream is silenced by the sense of mounting dread as we get closer to our destination.
We pull up to an abandoned theme restaurant, the parking lot is full, the windows are boarded, and the walls covered in graffiti. The place is huge, more the size of a small stadium than a diner.
The parking lot is full, the sputtering, sparking neon sign flashes “Faron’s Funhouse. “
It’s a few minutes outside of a town I forgot to catch the name of. We can see lights on the horizon, but there’s a feeling of wrong surrounding the building that makes them seem a million miles away.
A half dozen ‘cousins’ of mine move Augustus into a strange, almost coffin-like box made of wood, steel and glass, covered in trinkets and symbols. The thing sneers groggily from within, it’s mismatched eyes rolling in it’s skull.
I don’t hear Sylvia approach, I notice her as she smacks me in the back of the head hard enough to make my ears ring. The old, cruel woman is walking toward the doors of this meeting place.
“Eyes forward, sneer on your face, and walk like you know where you’re going. “ Are her only instructions.
For once, they’re clear and simple. What I see inside easily keeps my attention, and I’m equal parts scared and pissed off, so looking edgy and miserable is my default state.
At one point, this place was exactly what you’d think. I know you’re all expecting it to be a run down, rat infested haunted house now, but it was, stranger than that.
The place was well kept on the inside, but everything was either in use or repurposed to house the couple hundred eclectic customers milling around. In the centre, is a massive Lucite Cube, crystal clear and housing a ball pit, jungle gym and what looks to be a functional canteen, complete with a deep fryer and popcorn machine. It’s a couple hundred meters a side, and shaped like a flawed rectangle.
Smoke hangs in the air, my aunt greets old friends in a handful of different languages, I smile and nod, still trying to understand what the hell this place is.
We see Augustus being wheeled to the Lucite box, Sylvia cuts a laughing Cyrillic conversation short, and her and I make our way to the box that barely restrains the hatred and death inside.
At the other end of the Lucite Cube I see a few people dressed in blue and maroon uniforms ( if I were to guess vintage, from when this place served shitty food instead of violence.), they surround a massive, hulking, lanky thing. It’s obscured by smoke, and poor lighting, but it’s nine foot frame, and unnatural gait are clear.
The box holding Augustus sits about ten feet away from me, inside the massive cage. The front opens, my instinct is to step backward, get as much distance between me and the thing inside as possible, but instead, I’m shoved, before I can catch my balance, a workbook clad foot is in front of me.
I fall and stumble into the cage, I turn around to try and get out as fast as I can, I’m standing inches away from the creature, but I see Sylvia closing the clear, impermeable door.
It hits me then. For the first time since this ordeal started, I realize how grim things are.
Just like everyone else here, I’ve been raised on spooky shit packaged to be marketable. Little monsters, The Adams Family, Harry potter, hell let’s throw Pokemon and the like in there as it’s basically just dog fighting with a cute hat on.
And I thought what was happening to me, was somewhere on the Venn diagram of those things.
But as I see the impassive look on the face of a woman I’ve known since I was a child, ( at a distance or no.) as I’m locked in here with God knows what, I get it. I really get it.
His laughter is like an ice pick, I turn to face him, Augustus brushes himself off, casually looking around the massive arena.
“Just hit ya didn’t it, bud? “ He says, walking over to me, his steps impossibly quick, almost insect-like, “You’re not my trainer, or my wrangler, you certainly aren’t my fucking partner. “, the entity grabs my chin between two clawed fingers, “ You’re a bait dog. Something for me and that new blooded walking pun to fight over. “
My blood runs down his thumb, his grin cracks his face like a rotten melon, the monster pulls down, throwing me to the floor.
A buzzer sounds, and a three minute timer, projected in transparent red appears on the walls of the Lucite arena.
“If I’ve got to hunt you down in this shit-hole, things are going to be a lot worse for you. Stay put, bud. “ The trenchcoat clad thing says, casually walking toward the creature on the opposite side of the arena.
Closer now, I see it clearly. Inside of a pristine uniform, is a twisted attempt at the human form. The torso is lumpen, asymmetrical, but lean. It's arms nearly drag on the floor, yellow, infected looking flesh, weeping pus like a snail’s foot.
It's eyes are black caves, with just the hint of something deep within. It’s face is blank, a torn, haggard looking grey tongue runs over rotting green teeth.
The kid beside it looks around my age, he’s big though, just as confused and afraid as I am. He wears a similar uniform to the creature, but his looks, abused, torn, blood stained. Like it's been handed down from one unlucky owner to the next.
As the buzzer rings, the lanky, disgusting creature moves in a flash, tearing off the kid’s right arm and beginning to chew it.
The blood didn’t set me off, as terrible as it was. It was the three seconds between the act, and the poor kid realizing what happened that pushed me over the edge.
He started to scream, a horrible trapped animal kind of noise. He backs away from the monster beside him, gripping the crushed and torn remains of his forearm.
Augustus laughs, his trenchcoat drags on the floor, leaving a streak of blood as he walks.
“Man after my own heart.
So, I say, we split these sides of beef for two minutes then talk shop for a bit. Fuck these pretentious apes and their show. “ Augustus looks up to the massive thing. It remains impassive, gnawing on the hand.
“Don’t be like that. We both know two halves are better than one whole . Win-win for both of us“ Augustus gets a noise that sounds like an angry sewer pipe, and a dismissive wave of a long snake-like arm in response.
The thing in the trenchcoat shrugs, turning around and stalking toward me.
“You have no luck at all kid, I was going to let you go last.
But the pinworm back there wants to be a dick about things, so looks like things are getting started early. “ Augustus grins, his mouth opening shark like.
I stare down certain death, Augustus radiating fear, seeming to become more demonic with each step toward me.
From behind him, a noise.
I would have just assumed it was some part of the worm-like, filth ridden thing eating. Augustus clears up that misconception.
He turns, shaking, body language that of a wild animal.
“Was that a fucking snicker? A giggle? Are you fucking laughing at me, you literal fucking worm. “ He’s panting, hands twitching like dying insects.
He stands, inches from the other creature, dwarfed by it, teeth grinding, muscles straining.
The worm thing casually tosses the flesh bare hand toward Augustus. As it touches his coat, the arena erupts into a kind of wild, senseless, limitless violence.
It doesn’t feel like watching a fight, it’s more like a car wreck, or natural disaster. Pieces of jungle gym turn into lethal shrapnel as the blurred, filth spewing scrum destroys them.
I see the timer, 2:15. My mind starts to catch up, and I see the other kid, pale, whimpering, and trying in vain to staunch the blood spurting from his arm.
I’m running, low and likely poorly, pulling my belt from my pants, and thanking myself for actually listening when I was forced to take a first aid course for a summer job last year.
The kid is scared, he tries pushing me away, but I’m determined, and not down a couple pints of blood. I pull the belt with two hands, pull it through again and twist, it’s ugly, it’s not perfect, but the flow of blood begins to slow, then stop.
We crawl behind a prize counter, decades old candy and stuffed animals surround us as we cower. A liquid filled roar loud enough to crack the cheap glass cases fills the room.
The kid is looking rough, blood still trickling from the torn stump of his forearm. I see some plastic bags and get an idea.
I lean over to get them, and feel something strange, at first I think I pulled a muscle.
Then there is a deep, burning pain, instinctively I pull away, and turn around.
The kid is on his knees, sanity has left his eyes, a cheap hunting knife in his remaining hand he has a look of panic and determination on his face.
“We have to win. “ he says, lunging at me with the blade.
He’s slow, and I avoid it, but not by as much as I’d like. Blood runs down my back, for a moment I wonder how bad I’m hurt, but it doesn’t really matter right now.
I retreat, but the only thing keeping us from being torn apart by the whirlwind of shrapnel caused by the creatures is the counter, I can’t escape.
It's a stalemate, I’m no athlete, and the kid is built like a rugby player, but he’s missing a hand, and delirious from blood loss. I plead, I try and reason, and I dodge crazed strikes by increasingly narrow margins.
Something large, either thrown or knocked loose destroys the counter behind me. Suddenly all is chaos. I’m thrown into the kid in the uniform, plaster dust surrounds us in a grey cloud.
By the time the air clears the kid is on top of me. I have his wrist in one hand, keeping the split tip of the blade inches from my face.
The angle is too awkward, I can’t get any leverage. It’s not a stalemate, it’s a war of attrition that I’m losing.
I catch a glimpse of the two creatures. The worm thing is striking at Augustus, who stands still, limbs moving in arcing blurs deflecting the blows and tearing off chunks of foul, tainted flesh.
The tip of the knife begins to dig into my cheek. A drop of blood hits my eye.
I grab the makeshift tourniquet with a free hand and roughly yank forward. The kid on top of me screams, bloods begins to pour. Torn flesh and a gore soaked belt hit the ground.
For a moment the weight on me eases up, and I push the knife forward. But the kid, he’s too stupid or far gone to just back off. As I feel is strength start to fade, he presses himself harder.
I expect him to back off as I begin to drive the roughly sharpened back edge of the knife into his neck. But he doubles down, leaning forward, trying to press the knife toward me.
For a moment, every other fucked up thing going on around me doesn’t matter. The world is small, silent, and consists of nothing more than the image of the knife ripping away a fist sized strip from the kids neck.
He backs off when he realizes the extent of the damage. Staring at me shocked, as if just not realizing the consequences of his actions.
He dies slowly, poorly, and within inches of me. I feel no victory, no sense of being a winner, just a dark pit in the back of my mind. The loss of something that comes with taking someone’s life.
I stand, shell shocked, staring at the corpse. My safety the last thing on my mind.
The worm thing is hurt, and attempts to dive into the ball pit, but somehow, defying physics, Augustus grabs it, holding the half ton monster out with one hand.
He arcs the thing, slamming it into the floor behind him, the spray of gore and viscera rivals pyrotechnics, the force leaves a blood filled crater in the floor.
Without missing a beat Augustus starts to walk toward me, making a token effort of flicking pieces of bone and organ from himself.
I’m frozen, I know nothing I can do could stop whatever he has planned.
The creature picks up a jagged piece of lumber, and looks at the clock, “We’ve got 45 seconds of fun left kid. “ he says with a sneer.
But as he passes the counter, and sees the corpse the look of imminent violence turns into amusement.
“How’s it feel to be a child killer, bud? “, Augustus laughs, “Not that I can’t tell from the look on your face.
Fuck me, that knocked some gears loose didn’t it? “
The thing walks forward, looking me over like a collectable.
“I can’t let that go to waste, now can I? “ he slaps me lightly, “It’s going to be a fucking blast watching you break down kid, wonder what drives you nuts first, this kid being in your dreams, or the fact that, at some point I’m going to get bored and start giving you all the pain you feel you deserve? “
Of course, I made it out alive. It’d be kind of hard to have posted this if I didn’t.
But now, I sit in a dingy room in a farm house half way across the world from home. Surrounded by family and monsters, all of which seem out to get me. Being forced to risk my life in some kind of blood sport.
Maybe I’ll be back, maybe I’ll be dead by the next time I get a chance to post anything. If anyone has any help, please, post it in the comments. I’m in a dark place here and no one else seems to be on my side.

Hello everyone English is not my first language, I apologize in advance for any mistakes and sorry again for the long ass story. Im (23F) and when I was 11 met my ex best friend at school. We sat in the same desk by chance and started talking thanks to our common passion for drawing, anime and video games. Our class was full of mean girls and we had several difficulties thanks to them but in all of this we were always together. We always had a special bond really, i never had with anyone else a connection so strong as with her. We were always together, drawing all day exchanging tips to improve, watching anime and playing videogames. It was our way to escape from a reality where we were the weird girls with no friend group in our town. Since when i was little my dream was (and is) to become an artist and living with my drawings. she helped me write and draw my hypothetical video games and fan fiction and I was close to her in her difficult moments, she didn’t know what her dream was but drawing was a good candidate so I was rooting up for her. But as we grew older I noticed more and more certain toxic attitudes that she had that made me reflect on our friendship, I’ll give you an example. I couldn’t have any friends other than her because of her jealousy, one time i was in the school corridor talking to other friends of mine and she grabbed my arm and pressed her nails so hard into my skin as if to stop me from talking, I answered her angrily that she could not be jealous of my friendships in this way and that she should immediately stop, she didnt answer and went back to class. I tried to integrate her but she was a very judgmental kid (and now adult )towards others, She criticized how others dressed or how they behaved, no one could laugh around her, other people laughs annoyed her because she was in a depressive state. (She never went to a psicology so i always suspected she had depression, but i dont know as im not a psycology ) and this combined with her shy and closed character did not give her much opportunity to show her best qualities that she showed with me without problems i truly thought that we would be friends forever. She also had a very troubled family that caused her a lot of trauma especially her mother, she told me that once her mother took her by the hair and dragged her out of the house because she had not finished her lunch. Finished with the preamble I will tell you the beginning of the end of our friendship. Its long sorry but i wanted to give you all the full story so you can give me a good advice in what to do. i can’t stand those who lie especially those who do not take the consequences of the mistakes they make, and she was (is) just one of those people. Everyone makes mistakes except her, she is very prideful. She told me that lying was her only way to survive her family, they always gave her punishment faaar more heavier than her mistakes, so she had become a very good liar. as you all can immagine she was not used to normal confrontation, when I wanted to talk to her in order to clarify situations that I did not like very much she gaslighted o lied. Let me give you another example: We were in my desk and she accidentally dropped a bottle of water on my computer, so far nothing bad, she didn’t do it in purpose. What made me tremendously angry was the fact that she started lying to me, about a situation i directly saw! First she told me didn’t do it and at as a second version of the story she told me that I actually dropped the bottle. The discussion continued for a few minutes, of course never apologizing and continuing to blame me. Her lies and toxic attitudes continued, but I still tried to see the good in the situation by continuing to justify her shitty behavior. Before high school I lent her my precious Nintendo to pass her in game thing from one version of a game to another, for months I accumulated points in the app on the nintendo that gave you the opportunity to pass the in game things and waited to collect them arrived at a certain score, after a few days she gave me back the console and once I got it back I noticed that all the points I had accumulated were gone. I immediately confronted her and she fucking denied it. I mean how could the be gone without me touching it? Of course she took it but the fact that she lied to me about something as stupid as points of a video game made me so angry that I decided to end the relationship on the spot. How could you fucking lie on something so stupid? To your best friend! If she wanted them she could have asked! But no, of coulse the best route was lying. Once we got to high school we already stopped talking, we enrolled in two different school, mine was in another city close to our hometown and is characterized by artistic subject, she wanted to enroll in my same institute but her parents told her that only drug addicts and failures enrolled in that institute, im serious. And we where 13. In high school I met my current best friend an angel of a girl really , and for the first two years of high school I never thought of my ex best friend. Not even once. In my third year the thought of her started to appear in my mind i dont know why, I asked the opinion of my friend group and bestie about the idea, everyone told me that i should try to contact her, people make mistakes and change, maybe she changed and wanted to contact me but her shy personality was in the way, so I contacted her. She told me how she hated me when I cut contact with her, how she always kept an eye of what i was doing and that she actually wanted to contact me but was too prideful. She also told me that she was heavily bullied and that her life was shitty, again with no friend not even a shadow of a boyfriend. I advised her to change school, she was (is) the classic person that only complains and never makes any effort to change the situation, after discussing with her numerous times how doing nothing and complaining wasnt going to improve her life and a good talk with her parents she finally decided changed school. Our school system allows the student to change course of study, but the student has to take exams in order to recover the subjects that the previous school did not teach. I talked to my professors about her situation and they allowed her to take the exams understanding of the situation, the change of school could only accur at the beginning of the school year and it was half school year, but for this situation (the heavy bulling her depressive state, the fact that she always wanted to study there ) the school gave her the blessing. I lent her all the necessary equipment, watercolors, clay, other artistic equipment in order to pass the exams not worrying about the expenses and she managed to pass all of the exams without problems. my professors were kind to her and she always drew so it wasnt a big of a problem. I introduced her to my group of friends and they integrated her beautifully, they were very kind with her and the situation was quiet for a while I was not friends with her as before but still there was a strong friendship, but i always had the vibe that she didnt change much, she was just hiding things better than before. After this first apparent period of calm the school gave the opportunity to enroll in an Erasmus project, we indicated where we wanted to go and our average grade and according to the ranking we could win the scholarship. I had been a very good student in high school and I was sure I could get in and my teachers confirmed it, I of course asked my ex best friend who was also an awesome student if she wanted to join but she said no. Many students didnt apply for economic reasons, living abroad is espensive but the scholarship paid for housing, public transport, and gave a little money monthly to help students. After a month, they said the names of the students that got accepted and I was the first. I was very excited to finally go abroad for a while and not for a week. I told tmy friends and they were all happy for me, one of my teachers also told me that a student had changed his mind and that there was a place available, and asked me if I knew someone with good grades who was interested in quickly signing up. I asked my ex-best friend again for a simple reason, she started to stay even more time at home, was often very sad and a change of perspective could only benefit her,after a few days of discussing the pros and the cons she accepted. I helped her fill out all the paperwork and we left for a few months abroad. It was a very cool experience, we shared room and i tried to get her out of her bed for months but she didnt make any new friend and she didnt explore much the new city. At the end of our high school a friend of the same group and i started looking for an appartment in the same city far from the city where our highschool was for our universities. this common friend wasnt very mature but that city has very expensive rent so sharing was the best idea. I found out that he was telling his mother that i wanted a bigger house only next to my university and not his and that was the reason we hadn’t found a house/rooms to rent yet, when he was the one often dismissing the houses for being ugly or too old. Whe didnt have the time to search for the perfect house to rent. I confronted him about this whole ridicolous situation and told him to eff of, that was the last staw i was already stressed for the house hunting and he was just making the situation more difficult. his mother even called me telling me that his son was a dumbass and pleading me to babysit him, i exploded told everything i had to say to his mother and cut contact with him. I vented about the situation to my ex best friend and she accused me of being selfish and destroying the balance of the group, thanks to me she was going to be alone again without friends because in her head everyone would start taking sides and we wouldnt be a cohesive group again, that i should make peace with our common friend being the most mature person between the two, told her my point of view, we could just hang out together alternating his presence and mine in the group and she told me that i was the one in the wrong, the group was more important and for the sake of the group i should not cut contact with him, i remained of my views and after my state she never answered me, that common friend tried to recontact me but i had no interest in becoming a babysitter for a 20 year old baby, everyone in the group told me that i was right and they were fearing that i would have to become his mother as he was veeery immature, like extremely immature. Immagine having a house or a room with a person that expect you to do everything for him, cleaning after him , god a nightmare. After graduation i lost contact with the remaining people of that group except for my high school best friend and another classmate, and my ex best friend and that common friend with a maturity of a 6 years old. Now im 23, i got my degree in Art and im not regretting cutting contacts with them, everyone in that group showed after the end of high school theire true colors so i didnt lose much. My best friend remained in contact with my ex best friend , they, as i understood dont talk much but recently she told me that my ex best friend became an hikikomori and dropped out of uni. Knowing her we started to worry for her probably degenerating mental state, she always was a very dedicated student, dropping out of uni is very out of character. So i was thinking again of contacting her. What do you guys think? Should i contact her again ? Im afraid that i will be falling in the same toxic cycle i had with her. I see a beautiful person under all the traumas and the shitty behavior, but maybe im just projecting an idealized version of her...

In my last story, a space mermaid warned against the dangers of smoking. The Darlings did not heed that warning, so now Space Whale Aesops shall ensue.
____________________________________________________
“The Darling Twins? Honestly, haven’t we all had enough of them by now?” Seneca ruminated as he tried to placate what was now the de facto triumvirate of the Ophion Occult Order.
Once again, he had been summoned to Adderwood Manor to account for his lapses in judgement, but rather than being on full public display in the Grand Hall, he instead found himself in a relatively small parlour. Across from the coffee table in front of him sat Ivy Noir, with her sister Envy to her right and her husband Erich to her left. Standing just to the side of them was the trenchcoat and fedora-wearing automaton who called himself The Mandrake. The one-eyed dream-catcher carved into his iridescent face rendered his emotions unreadable, but the spellwork pistols holstered in his belt made it clear that he was prepared to defend his employers against anything.
“I mean, this feud between them and Emrys is laughable,” Seneca went on. “They’re no threat to him now that he’s free of his chains, surely? Before there may have been a tactical element to his obsession with them, but now it’s just plain petty. Petra’s just out for revenge, and don’t get me started on the absurdity of that eldritch realtor wanting to flip their playroom. Does he think he can just relabel their torture chambers as BDSM dungeons and pass the Black Bile infestation off as some mould?”
“Seneca, I promised Emrys the Darlings, and the Covenant that we all signed binds us to fulfill that promise,” Ivy reminded him patiently, dropping a cube of sugar into her ouroboros-themed antique teacup. “You knew the Darlings better than any of us. You inducted them into the Order, you used them as assassins and bodyguards, and you let them withdraw every penny they had in your bank when they were fugitives!”
“Well, first of all, Crow, Crowley & Chamberlain is a financial institution, not a bank,” Seneca said flippantly. “Secondly, they had a numbered account and they didn’t show up in person, so the teller didn’t have the slightest idea of who they were dealing with.”
“You still could have frozen the account before they had that opportunity,” Erich stated.
Seneca made a display of languidly stirring some cream into his tea and taking a slow sip before responding.
“I’m very busy,” he claimed without an ounce of sincerity.
“You just didn’t want to get on the Darlings’ bad side,” Ivy said.
“I wasn’t aware they had a good side,” Seneca shrugged.
“There must be a paper trail we can follow,” Envy insisted. “Did the Darlings keep their assets anywhere else besides your bank?”
“Financial institution, and yes, I’m sure they have a proverbial Swiss bank account, but I haven’t the slightest notion of where to find it,” Seneca claimed. “It has come up in conversation that James invested about twenty percent of his income with me, twenty percent elsewhere, and shoved another twenty percent under their mattress. Mary enjoys being shagged on top of money, apparently. Their services commanded quite a high price on the underworld market, and sixty-plus years of compound interest have made them incredibly wealthy. They can afford to lie low for a long while.”
“Even if they can go without a paycheck indefinitely, they can’t go without killing,” Erich countered. “They need to hunt, and their egos mean they aren’t just going to cower from Emrys inside their playroom. They’re going to be out looking for victims and plotting against us, and you know what spots they’re likely to hit.”
“You’re wasting your time. James has had decades to scout out hunting grounds, and I’m sure he prepared for the possibility – no, inevitability – that he and his sister would become our enemies. He’s not going to risk showing up within a hundred miles of any of our Chapterhouses if he doesn’t need to,” Seneca said dismissively.
Ivy opened her mouth to speak, but stopped when The Mandrake took a step forward for the first time since the meeting began. He reached into his pocket and tossed a red and white pack of cigarettes with a shiny silhouette of a stag onto the coffee table.
“What is this?” Erich asked.
“Satin Stag cigarettes,” The Mandrake said flatly before shifting his gaze to Seneca. “That’s the Darlings’ brand, isn’t it, Mr. Chamberlain?”
“Um, yes. I believe I’ve seen them smoke those once or twice. What of it?” Seneca asked, failing to hide the nervousness creeping into his voice.
“These are artisanal cigarettes, and Harrowick County’s the only place you can buy them,” The Mandrake said. “That means that the Darlings, either directly or indirectly, are going to have to make the occasional sojourn back home, and the limited supply of these hand-rolled coffin nails means they can’t stock up too far in advance either. You know Harrowick County better than any of us. You know who makes these, you know who sells them. That’s how we track down the Darlings.”
“That’s preposterous. Do you really think they’d risk coming to Harrowick County rather than just switch brands?” Seneca scoffed.
“The Very Important Person at Pascal’s told me that Mary said they’ve been smoking these since they were kids, so they’re clearly pretty attached to them,” The Mandrake replied. “And somehow, I don’t think they’re the type to ever give up a bad habit.”
***
“Smoke & Mirrors ~ Fine Tobacco Products. Silvano Santoro, Proprietor. Est. 1949,” Envy read aloud as she, Seneca and The Mandrake stood outside the small, heavily fortified brick building.
Cast iron bars crisscrossed the windows and front door, which looked like it stood a decent chance of withstanding a police swat team. Security was obviously the shop’s proprietor’s key concern, as the ugly brown and yellow awning was tattered and faded, and the paint on the sign was so chipped it was barely even legible.
“How exactly does an unnoticeable and unattractive hole in the wall like this stay in business?” Envy asked.
“Repeat customers,” Seneca replied as he took a confident step towards the door. “Silvano knows me, and he doesn’t normally have a problem with me bringing guests along, but I expect both of you to be on your best behaviour!”
Envy gave him a reassuring nod, but The Mandrake continued to stoically stare at nothing with his hands in his pockets. Rolling his eyes, Seneca pressed a bulky plastic button on the antiquated door buzzer.
“Yeah, who is it?” a harsh and smoke-damaged voice demanded.
“It’s Seneca, Silvano. A pleasure to make your acquaintance again as well!” Seneca answered. “Just looking to pick up a few cases of cigars for a party, if you’ve got anything decent in stock, of course.”
“Who’s that you got with you?” Silvano asked suspiciously.
“Envy Noir, sir. I’m here on behalf of my sister Ivy, investigating a matter of considerable importance to the Ophion Occult Order,” Envy promptly introduced herself, much to Seneca’s chagrin. “The gentleman beside me is my bodyguard. Would you be so kind as to let us in?”
“Ah… of course. Just a moment, please,” Silvano replied.
“What’s he need a moment to buzz open a door for?” The Mandrake demanded, his stance immediately switching to full readiness.
“Making the place presentable for customers, I assume,” Seneca explained in exasperation.
“You mean he’s hiding evidence, or he’s running!” The Mandrake shouted.
“He’s a nonagenarian heavy smoker. He couldn’t run if his life depended on it,” Seneca insisted.
“I’ll see about that,” The Mandrake muttered.
Shoving Seneca out of the way, he kicked the door in with barely any effort. Storming into the shop, he saw a slender older man with thick white hair and rimmed glasses seated behind the front counter. His saggy, spotted skin was a living PSA against the products he peddled, and in his tobacco-stained hand, he held the receiver of an ornate rotary phone.
Staring at The Mandrake in cold fury, he calmly set the receiver back down in its cradle.
“Who were you talking to?” The Mandrake demanded.
“A client,” Silvano barked back with a shake of his head, picking up a burning cigarette from a nearby ashtray.
“Silvano, I am profusely sorry for this abject and uncouth behaviour! This being is no friend of mine, I can assure you,” Seneca asserted as he and Envy made their way inside.
“The feeling’s mutual, Chamberlain,” The Mandrake remarked. “Mr. Santoro, I apologize for the damage to the premises, but as Miss Noir has said, we’re here on urgent business.”
“Yes, that’s correct. We’ve been given to understand the Darling Twins are regular customers of yours,” Envy explained, before the smoke-saturated room sent her into a coughing spell. She fumbled around in her purse and pulled out a black N95 mask she had left over from the Pandemic.
“I’ve got plenty of regular customers,” Silvan replied defensively. “Customers who pay good money for that smoke you’re so offended by, young lady.”
“These ones have been coming here for over half a century and never aged a day,” The Mandrake said.
“That honestly doesn’t narrow it down that much,” Silvano chuckled, tapping his cigarette on his ashtray. “But yeah, I know the Darlings. What of it?”
“When was the last time they were here?” The Mandrake demanded.
“What’s it to you?” Silvano asked.
“They’re fugitives of the Order now and we want them brought in,” Envy replied, having donned her mask and mostly recovered from the smoke. “Mary Darling held a knife to my throat once in front of my sister, and later threatened to eat me alive in front of her and feed me to her pigs.”
“They were going to put me in their daughter’s doll collection,” The Mandrake muttered.
“And I have nothing but nice things to say about the Darlings, so I’m honestly not quite sure how I got dragged into this,” Seneca said. “That aside, it really would be of great help to us if you could share any information about them that you might have.”
“I don’t know what to tell you. They come in, they buy their smokes, they leave, just like most of my customers,” Silvano told them.
“But now they’re trying to lay low, so I’m guessing they’ve made some sort of arrangement with you to get their Satin Stag cigarettes without having to risk coming here in person,” The Mandrake said. “Maybe they set you up with one of their spare Retrovisions? Emrys said they had a few of those lying around, and they can use them as direct portals to their playroom.”
“Like they’d waste a fancy piece of technomancy like that on an old geezer like me. I haven’t seen them in months. Last year sometime, I think,” Silvano claimed.
The Mandrake casually strolled up to the front counter, rapping his fingers on the cheap glass display case.
“Real nice place you got here, Mr. Santoro. I mean, not really, but I’m sure you get the implication,” he said softly. “Ironic as it may be, a smoke shop isn’t exempt from municipal bylaws about smoking in public buildings and workspaces. You may not have had much trouble with local law enforcement before, but one phone call from my employers will change that real quick.”
“You think I’ve never been threatened before, punk?” Silvano asked, rising from his chair and staring him down.
“Boys, please, there’s no need for this,” Envy interjected. “Mr. Santoro, our Order has considerably more resources at its disposal than the Darlings, and we can certainly offer you a far greater reward for their capture than whatever they’re paying you for some cigarettes. You could retire; close this place down and get as far away as you like. How does that sound?”
“I’m not looking to retire, Miss. This business is all I’ve got, and it wouldn’t be good business to go around ratting out my best customers, now would it?” Silvano asked.
“It would be worse business to sacrifice everything you have to protect two customers,” The Mandrake threatened, his hands clamping down on the display cases so hard they began to creak. “Talk.”
Acknowledging him only with a furtive glance, Silvano took another drag from his cigarette and exhaled.
But this time, the smoke poured out from his mouth and nostrils without limit.
“What the hell?” The Mandrake cursed as he backed away.
Silvano pushed a button beneath the counter, putting his shop into lockdown with security shutters clamping down over every entrance point. As the smoke exuded from his body, it went limp and collapsed into a dried-out husk as the smoke coalesced into an animate form of its own, circling above them around the shop’s yellowed and textured ceiling.
“Damnit. Another egregore,” Envy muttered. “That explains his loyalties. The Darlings couldn’t eat him, but Emrys could.”
“So you’re saying we can’t negotiate it with it?” The Mandrake asked.
“Or fight it,” Envy clarified.
“In that case, it appears we’ve exhausted all our options. Time for a tactical retreat,” Seneca declared as he dashed for the now barricaded exit.
Whatever he was planning to do to get through it, the cloud of smoke cut him off before he got the chance. Rushing in through his nose and mouth, it immediately began suffocating him, sending him spasming to the ground as he choked for air.
The cloud assaulted Envy as well, but was unable to penetrate her mask.
“Godamnit, get away!” she shouted as she swatted it away from her burning eyes.
“Envy, get behind me now!” The Mandrake ordered as he drew out his pistols. “Sorry, Santoro, but you’re going to have to do a lot worse than that if you want to intimidate us!”
Seneca responded by gasping angrily and bashing his hand against the carpet.
“… A lot worse,” The Mandrake reiterated. “I may not be able to shoot you, but I will blow this health hazard you love so much to hell if you don’t tell me where I can find the Darlings!”
“There’ll be no need for that, Mr. Mandrake,” the voice of James Darling crackled in from some unseen speaker. A door off to the side slowly creaked open, revealing a Retrovision flickering with black and white static. The Mandrake wasted no time in shooting at it, but the bullets passed through the glass without causing any damage at all.
A hologram of James Darling manifested in the center of the room, a burning Satin Stag cigarette clutched neatly in his fingers. He saw Seneca suffocating on the floor, then turned his predatory and calculating gaze towards The Mandrake.
“Put the guns on the floor, and I’ll call Silvano off,” he offered.
The Mandrake didn’t seem to be the least bit tempted by this offer, but Envy tugged at his trenchcoat and gave him a commanding nudge. Reluctantly, The Mandrake tossed the guns to the carpet and placed his hands behind his head.
With only a single commanding wag of his index finger, the smoke cloud withdrew from Seneca’s lungs and collected itself above James like a thundercloud.
“No sense in killing you, Seneca. That would practically be doing Emrys a favour,” James said. “But Envy, what’s a pretty girl like you doing wearing a mask?”
“You’d better not let your sister hear you calling me that,” Envy taunted.
“Kind of you to worry, but it’s always the object of my flirtations who bear the brunt of my sister’s wrath,” James reminded her smugly. “Top-notch detective work tracking me down, Mr. Mandrake. Why don’t you walk in through the Retrovision and arrest me?”
“You knew we’d show up here looking for you. You were waiting for us,” The Mandrake growled.
“Again, brilliant detective work. You’ve truly earned that fedora,” James mocked him. “Yes, I knew you’d come here looking for us, so I’ve arranged for Mr. Santoro to set up shop inside our playroom. He was only hanging around here to set a trap for you. Let me tell you what’s going to happen. None of you, not even you, Mr. Mandrake, are going to be able to break out of this building. You can sit there and starve for all I care, or Miss Noir and The Mandrake could take their chances with us on the other side of the Retrovision. Sara Darling really would like to put you in her doll collection, Mr. Mandrake, and I can’t wait to tell Mary Darling exactly how pretty I think you are, Envy. If the two of you come across, I’ll let Seneca go and he can inform Erich and Ivy of your predicament. If they’d like to negotiate for your release, I… may be willing to consider it.”
“You’re a coward! If you’re going to threaten me, step across that screen and do it to my face!” the Mandrake ordered.
He took his hands off his head and took a step towards him, only for the acrid form of Silvano to interject itself between them. James took a casual drag from his cigarette, refusing even to flinch.
Envy took advantage of the distraction and grabbed the pair of spellwork pistols off of the floor, firing two rounds of consecrated lead into the limp body of Silvano. While the body didn’t react at all, the smoke cloud shook and screeched like a wounded animal, losing some of its integrity and dissipating across the room.
“That body’s not just a husk! Silvano’s bound to it!” Envy declared. “James, if you don’t let us go in the next thirty seconds I’ll have The Mandrake tear that body limb from limb and you’ll have to find some other cursed thoughtform to roll your cigarettes for you.”
The Mandrake looked back towards James who now, much to his satisfaction, had flinched.
“Thirty. Twenty-Nine. Twenty-Eight,” he began to count down as he theatrically cracked his knuckles.
Before James could come to a decision, a few wisps of smoke snaked their way back into Silvano’s body. They were enough to animate it like a marionette, its limbs moving jerkily as it input the code to retract the security shutters over the doors and windows.
“There, happy?” James asked facetiously. “You’re free to leave. Put those guns down.”
With a smug smile, Envy shook her head.
“Mandrake, grab that body. We’re taking him with us,” she announced.
When Silvano tried to slam the lockdown button again, Envy shot him, knocking him back into his seat. Before he was able to try a second time, The Mandrake had closed the distance between them. He grabbed him by the waist and slung him over his shoulder, impotently kicking and flailing like a toddler having a tantrum all the while.
“No!” James growled, his hologram disappearing and being replaced by countless others scattered throughout the room.
“What the hell?” Envy demanded as she fell back beside The Mandrake for protection.
“It’s a distraction! Shoot at the Retrovision! He’s coming through to get Silvano!” The Mandrake shouted.
Envy complied, firing multiple rounds at every image of James between them and the Retrovision, but all of them sailed clear through their targets. The smoke cloud suddenly condensed tightly around them, and The Mandrake made a break for the front door while he had the chance.
He was tackled from the side by someone moving at over fifty kilometers an hour, knocking him down and halfway across the room. When he looked up, he was completely surrounded by silhouettes of James bending down in the smoke to pick up Silvano. Jumping to his feet, he made his way back towards the Retrovision in the hopes of cutting James off.
Or at least, he thought that’s where he was going. The tumble to the floor and the encircling smoke had disoriented him, and he ended up tripping over Seneca, who was once again unable to stand from the sickening smoke.
James brushed by them in a blur, and Envy fired every last bullet trying to put him down. Each one either missed or succeeded only in striking Silvano, who was slung over James’ back.
The smoke retreated with them, and The Mandrake dashed after them in one final bid to keep them from escaping. They were just feet away from him before they leapt through the Retrovision, vanishing into the basement universe of the Darlings’ playroom. The Mandrake dared to reach in after them and pull them back, but his hand hit nothing but solid glass.
“Damnit!” he cursed, striking the top of the box set with his fist.
“Don’t break it!” Envy shouted. “If that Retrovision came from the Darlings’ playroom and was modified by James, it could be useful in tracking them down again!”
“It also gives them a two-way ticket to wherever we keep it!” The Mandrake shouted back.
“Oh yes, it would be a gamble taking this old girl with you. No doubt about that,” the black and white visage of James mocked them from the other side of the screen, taking a victory drag from his cigarette. “But on the other hand, it is one of my finer works. It would be a crime, an atrocity even, to destroy it.”
The Mandrake struck the box set again, but deliberately held back on damaging it.
“Mandrake, enough!” Envy commanded. “I know it’s risky, but we need it. Turn it off and pick it up. We’re getting out of this hellhole.”
“Don’t feel bad, Mr. Mandrake. I’m sure you’ll have another chance to end up in Sara Darling’s doll collection very soon,” James taunted just before The Mandrake managed to turn the Retrovision off.
“What an absolute waste of time,” he muttered as he lifted the vintage box set off the floor.
“Not entirely!” Seneca claimed, who had not only recovered from his spectral smoke inhalation but was now holding an unlit cigar. “Crow, Crowley & Chamberlain has a lien on this shop, and since Silvano just ran out on us and has thrown his lot in with the Darlings, this place and everything left in it is ours!”
He was just about to light it before Envy snatched it out of his hands.
“The Mandrake wasn’t bluffing about the municipal health bylaws,” she informed him. “From now on, this is a smoke-free building.”

I played for several hours to try and figure out the appeal myself and now I'm event more confused. The game seems like a very simple city builder, somewhere between stong tech demo and EA game. There are other city builders with more advanced versions of almost every mechanic in this game, I don't see anything really unique about manor lords except the UE graphics. There's almost no impactful decision making other than where to place things. I don't think the game is "bad", but I certainly don't feel like it's much of a game yet, and it's certainly not some major innovation or concept everyone has been begging for. So what is it that drew so many people to this game. How did they build and maintain hype for a project like this. I assumed after everyone had a few runs at the game we would start seeing posts of people that are bored or underwhelmed, but all I see is people dismissing all complaints because it's early access. If this took 7 years of development there's no way, even with millions of dollars, that this received any timely impactful updates. It's Palworld round 2.

In my last story, a space mermaid warned against the dangers of smoking. The Darlings did not heed that warning, so now Space Whale Aesops shall ensue.
____________________________________________________
“The Darling Twins? Honestly, haven’t we all had enough of them by now?” Seneca ruminated as he tried to placate what was now the de facto triumvirate of the Ophion Occult Order.
Once again, he had been summoned to Adderwood Manor to account for his lapses in judgement, but rather than being on full public display in the Grand Hall, he instead found himself in a relatively small parlour. Across from the coffee table in front of him sat Ivy Noir, with her sister Envy to her right and her husband Erich to her left. Standing just to the side of them was the trenchcoat and fedora-wearing automaton who called himself The Mandrake. The one-eyed dream-catcher carved into his iridescent face rendered his emotions unreadable, but the spellwork pistols holstered in his belt made it clear that he was prepared to defend his employers against anything.
“I mean, this feud between them and Emrys is laughable,” Seneca went on. “They’re no threat to him now that he’s free of his chains, surely? Before there may have been a tactical element to his obsession with them, but now it’s just plain petty. Petra’s just out for revenge, and don’t get me started on the absurdity of that eldritch realtor wanting to flip their playroom. Does he think he can just relabel their torture chambers as BDSM dungeons and pass the Black Bile infestation off as some mould?”
“Seneca, I promised Emrys the Darlings, and the Covenant that we all signed binds us to fulfill that promise,” Ivy reminded him patiently, dropping a cube of sugar into her ouroboros-themed antique teacup. “You knew the Darlings better than any of us. You inducted them into the Order, you used them as assassins and bodyguards, and you let them withdraw every penny they had in your bank when they were fugitives!”
“Well, first of all, Crow, Crowley & Chamberlain is a financial institution, not a bank,” Seneca said flippantly. “Secondly, they had a numbered account and they didn’t show up in person, so the teller didn’t have the slightest idea of who they were dealing with.”
“You still could have frozen the account before they had that opportunity,” Erich stated.
Seneca made a display of languidly stirring some cream into his tea and taking a slow sip before responding.
“I’m very busy,” he claimed without an ounce of sincerity.
“You just didn’t want to get on the Darlings’ bad side,” Ivy said.
“I wasn’t aware they had a good side,” Seneca shrugged.
“There must be a paper trail we can follow,” Envy insisted. “Did the Darlings keep their assets anywhere else besides your bank?”
“Financial institution, and yes, I’m sure they have a proverbial Swiss bank account, but I haven’t the slightest notion of where to find it,” Seneca claimed. “It has come up in conversation that James invested about twenty percent of his income with me, twenty percent elsewhere, and shoved another twenty percent under their mattress. Mary enjoys being shagged on top of money, apparently. Their services commanded quite a high price on the underworld market, and sixty-plus years of compound interest have made them incredibly wealthy. They can afford to lie low for a long while.”
“Even if they can go without a paycheck indefinitely, they can’t go without killing,” Erich countered. “They need to hunt, and their egos mean they aren’t just going to cower from Emrys inside their playroom. They’re going to be out looking for victims and plotting against us, and you know what spots they’re likely to hit.”
“You’re wasting your time. James has had decades to scout out hunting grounds, and I’m sure he prepared for the possibility – no, inevitability – that he and his sister would become our enemies. He’s not going to risk showing up within a hundred miles of any of our Chapterhouses if he doesn’t need to,” Seneca said dismissively.
Ivy opened her mouth to speak, but stopped when The Mandrake took a step forward for the first time since the meeting began. He reached into his pocket and tossed a red and white pack of cigarettes with a shiny silhouette of a stag onto the coffee table.
“What is this?” Erich asked.
“Satin Stag cigarettes,” The Mandrake said flatly before shifting his gaze to Seneca. “That’s the Darlings’ brand, isn’t it, Mr. Chamberlain?”
“Um, yes. I believe I’ve seen them smoke those once or twice. What of it?” Seneca asked, failing to hide the nervousness creeping into his voice.
“These are artisanal cigarettes, and Harrowick County’s the only place you can buy them,” The Mandrake said. “That means that the Darlings, either directly or indirectly, are going to have to make the occasional sojourn back home, and the limited supply of these hand-rolled coffin nails means they can’t stock up too far in advance either. You know Harrowick County better than any of us. You know who makes these, you know who sells them. That’s how we track down the Darlings.”
“That’s preposterous. Do you really think they’d risk coming to Harrowick County rather than just switch brands?” Seneca scoffed.
“The Very Important Person at Pascal’s told me that Mary said they’ve been smoking these since they were kids, so they’re clearly pretty attached to them,” The Mandrake replied. “And somehow, I don’t think they’re the type to ever give up a bad habit.”
***
“Smoke & Mirrors ~ Fine Tobacco Products. Silvano Santoro, Proprietor. Est. 1949,” Envy read aloud as she, Seneca and The Mandrake stood outside the small, heavily fortified brick building.
Cast iron bars crisscrossed the windows and front door, which looked like it stood a decent chance of withstanding a police swat team. Security was obviously the shop’s proprietor’s key concern, as the ugly brown and yellow awning was tattered and faded, and the paint on the sign was so chipped it was barely even legible.
“How exactly does an unnoticeable and unattractive hole in the wall like this stay in business?” Envy asked.
“Repeat customers,” Seneca replied as he took a confident step towards the door. “Silvano knows me, and he doesn’t normally have a problem with me bringing guests along, but I expect both of you to be on your best behaviour!”
Envy gave him a reassuring nod, but The Mandrake continued to stoically stare at nothing with his hands in his pockets. Rolling his eyes, Seneca pressed a bulky plastic button on the antiquated door buzzer.
“Yeah, who is it?” a harsh and smoke-damaged voice demanded.
“It’s Seneca, Silvano. A pleasure to make your acquaintance again as well!” Seneca answered. “Just looking to pick up a few cases of cigars for a party, if you’ve got anything decent in stock, of course.”
“Who’s that you got with you?” Silvano asked suspiciously.
“Envy Noir, sir. I’m here on behalf of my sister Ivy, investigating a matter of considerable importance to the Ophion Occult Order,” Envy promptly introduced herself, much to Seneca’s chagrin. “The gentleman beside me is my bodyguard. Would you be so kind as to let us in?”
“Ah… of course. Just a moment, please,” Silvano replied.
“What’s he need a moment to buzz open a door for?” The Mandrake demanded, his stance immediately switching to full readiness.
“Making the place presentable for customers, I assume,” Seneca explained in exasperation.
“You mean he’s hiding evidence, or he’s running!” The Mandrake shouted.
“He’s a nonagenarian heavy smoker. He couldn’t run if his life depended on it,” Seneca insisted.
“I’ll see about that,” The Mandrake muttered.
Shoving Seneca out of the way, he kicked the door in with barely any effort. Storming into the shop, he saw a slender older man with thick white hair and rimmed glasses seated behind the front counter. His saggy, spotted skin was a living PSA against the products he peddled, and in his tobacco-stained hand, he held the receiver of an ornate rotary phone.
Staring at The Mandrake in cold fury, he calmly set the receiver back down in its cradle.
“Who were you talking to?” The Mandrake demanded.
“A client,” Silvano barked back with a shake of his head, picking up a burning cigarette from a nearby ashtray.
“Silvano, I am profusely sorry for this abject and uncouth behaviour! This being is no friend of mine, I can assure you,” Seneca asserted as he and Envy made their way inside.
“The feeling’s mutual, Chamberlain,” The Mandrake remarked. “Mr. Santoro, I apologize for the damage to the premises, but as Miss Noir has said, we’re here on urgent business.”
“Yes, that’s correct. We’ve been given to understand the Darling Twins are regular customers of yours,” Envy explained, before the smoke-saturated room sent her into a coughing spell. She fumbled around in her purse and pulled out a black N95 mask she had left over from the Pandemic.
“I’ve got plenty of regular customers,” Silvan replied defensively. “Customers who pay good money for that smoke you’re so offended by, young lady.”
“These ones have been coming here for over half a century and never aged a day,” The Mandrake said.
“That honestly doesn’t narrow it down that much,” Silvano chuckled, tapping his cigarette on his ashtray. “But yeah, I know the Darlings. What of it?”
“When was the last time they were here?” The Mandrake demanded.
“What’s it to you?” Silvano asked.
“They’re fugitives of the Order now and we want them brought in,” Envy replied, having donned her mask and mostly recovered from the smoke. “Mary Darling held a knife to my throat once in front of my sister, and later threatened to eat me alive in front of her and feed me to her pigs.”
“They were going to put me in their daughter’s doll collection,” The Mandrake muttered.
“And I have nothing but nice things to say about the Darlings, so I’m honestly not quite sure how I got dragged into this,” Seneca said. “That aside, it really would be of great help to us if you could share any information about them that you might have.”
“I don’t know what to tell you. They come in, they buy their smokes, they leave, just like most of my customers,” Silvano told them.
“But now they’re trying to lay low, so I’m guessing they’ve made some sort of arrangement with you to get their Satin Stag cigarettes without having to risk coming here in person,” The Mandrake said. “Maybe they set you up with one of their spare Retrovisions? Emrys said they had a few of those lying around, and they can use them as direct portals to their playroom.”
“Like they’d waste a fancy piece of technomancy like that on an old geezer like me. I haven’t seen them in months. Last year sometime, I think,” Silvano claimed.
The Mandrake casually strolled up to the front counter, rapping his fingers on the cheap glass display case.
“Real nice place you got here, Mr. Santoro. I mean, not really, but I’m sure you get the implication,” he said softly. “Ironic as it may be, a smoke shop isn’t exempt from municipal bylaws about smoking in public buildings and workspaces. You may not have had much trouble with local law enforcement before, but one phone call from my employers will change that real quick.”
“You think I’ve never been threatened before, punk?” Silvano asked, rising from his chair and staring him down.
“Boys, please, there’s no need for this,” Envy interjected. “Mr. Santoro, our Order has considerably more resources at its disposal than the Darlings, and we can certainly offer you a far greater reward for their capture than whatever they’re paying you for some cigarettes. You could retire; close this place down and get as far away as you like. How does that sound?”
“I’m not looking to retire, Miss. This business is all I’ve got, and it wouldn’t be good business to go around ratting out my best customers, now would it?” Silvano asked.
“It would be worse business to sacrifice everything you have to protect two customers,” The Mandrake threatened, his hands clamping down on the display cases so hard they began to creak. “Talk.”
Acknowledging him only with a furtive glance, Silvano took another drag from his cigarette and exhaled.
But this time, the smoke poured out from his mouth and nostrils without limit.
“What the hell?” The Mandrake cursed as he backed away.
Silvano pushed a button beneath the counter, putting his shop into lockdown with security shutters clamping down over every entrance point. As the smoke exuded from his body, it went limp and collapsed into a dried-out husk as the smoke coalesced into an animate form of its own, circling above them around the shop’s yellowed and textured ceiling.
“Damnit. Another egregore,” Envy muttered. “That explains his loyalties. The Darlings couldn’t eat him, but Emrys could.”
“So you’re saying we can’t negotiate it with it?” The Mandrake asked.
“Or fight it,” Envy clarified.
“In that case, it appears we’ve exhausted all our options. Time for a tactical retreat,” Seneca declared as he dashed for the now barricaded exit.
Whatever he was planning to do to get through it, the cloud of smoke cut him off before he got the chance. Rushing in through his nose and mouth, it immediately began suffocating him, sending him spasming to the ground as he choked for air.
The cloud assaulted Envy as well, but was unable to penetrate her mask.
“Godamnit, get away!” she shouted as she swatted it away from her burning eyes.
“Envy, get behind me now!” The Mandrake ordered as he drew out his pistols. “Sorry, Santoro, but you’re going to have to do a lot worse than that if you want to intimidate us!”
Seneca responded by gasping angrily and bashing his hand against the carpet.
“… A lot worse,” The Mandrake reiterated. “I may not be able to shoot you, but I will blow this health hazard you love so much to hell if you don’t tell me where I can find the Darlings!”
“There’ll be no need for that, Mr. Mandrake,” the voice of James Darling crackled in from some unseen speaker. A door off to the side slowly creaked open, revealing a Retrovision flickering with black and white static. The Mandrake wasted no time in shooting at it, but the bullets passed through the glass without causing any damage at all.
A hologram of James Darling manifested in the center of the room, a burning Satin Stag cigarette clutched neatly in his fingers. He saw Seneca suffocating on the floor, then turned his predatory and calculating gaze towards The Mandrake.
“Put the guns on the floor, and I’ll call Silvano off,” he offered.
The Mandrake didn’t seem to be the least bit tempted by this offer, but Envy tugged at his trenchcoat and gave him a commanding nudge. Reluctantly, The Mandrake tossed the guns to the carpet and placed his hands behind his head.
With only a single commanding wag of his index finger, the smoke cloud withdrew from Seneca’s lungs and collected itself above James like a thundercloud.
“No sense in killing you, Seneca. That would practically be doing Emrys a favour,” James said. “But Envy, what’s a pretty girl like you doing wearing a mask?”
“You’d better not let your sister hear you calling me that,” Envy taunted.
“Kind of you to worry, but it’s always the object of my flirtations who bear the brunt of my sister’s wrath,” James reminded her smugly. “Top-notch detective work tracking me down, Mr. Mandrake. Why don’t you walk in through the Retrovision and arrest me?”
“You knew we’d show up here looking for you. You were waiting for us,” The Mandrake growled.
“Again, brilliant detective work. You’ve truly earned that fedora,” James mocked him. “Yes, I knew you’d come here looking for us, so I’ve arranged for Mr. Santoro to set up shop inside our playroom. He was only hanging around here to set a trap for you. Let me tell you what’s going to happen. None of you, not even you, Mr. Mandrake, are going to be able to break out of this building. You can sit there and starve for all I care, or Miss Noir and The Mandrake could take their chances with us on the other side of the Retrovision. Sara Darling really would like to put you in her doll collection, Mr. Mandrake, and I can’t wait to tell Mary Darling exactly how pretty I think you are, Envy. If the two of you come across, I’ll let Seneca go and he can inform Erich and Ivy of your predicament. If they’d like to negotiate for your release, I… may be willing to consider it.”
“You’re a coward! If you’re going to threaten me, step across that screen and do it to my face!” the Mandrake ordered.
He took his hands off his head and took a step towards him, only for the acrid form of Silvano to interject itself between them. James took a casual drag from his cigarette, refusing even to flinch.
Envy took advantage of the distraction and grabbed the pair of spellwork pistols off of the floor, firing two rounds of consecrated lead into the limp body of Silvano. While the body didn’t react at all, the smoke cloud shook and screeched like a wounded animal, losing some of its integrity and dissipating across the room.
“That body’s not just a husk! Silvano’s bound to it!” Envy declared. “James, if you don’t let us go in the next thirty seconds I’ll have The Mandrake tear that body limb from limb and you’ll have to find some other cursed thoughtform to roll your cigarettes for you.”
The Mandrake looked back towards James who now, much to his satisfaction, had flinched.
“Thirty. Twenty-Nine. Twenty-Eight,” he began to count down as he theatrically cracked his knuckles.
Before James could come to a decision, a few wisps of smoke snaked their way back into Silvano’s body. They were enough to animate it like a marionette, its limbs moving jerkily as it input the code to retract the security shutters over the doors and windows.
“There, happy?” James asked facetiously. “You’re free to leave. Put those guns down.”
With a smug smile, Envy shook her head.
“Mandrake, grab that body. We’re taking him with us,” she announced.
When Silvano tried to slam the lockdown button again, Envy shot him, knocking him back into his seat. Before he was able to try a second time, The Mandrake had closed the distance between them. He grabbed him by the waist and slung him over his shoulder, impotently kicking and flailing like a toddler having a tantrum all the while.
“No!” James growled, his hologram disappearing and being replaced by countless others scattered throughout the room.
“What the hell?” Envy demanded as she fell back beside The Mandrake for protection.
“It’s a distraction! Shoot at the Retrovision! He’s coming through to get Silvano!” The Mandrake shouted.
Envy complied, firing multiple rounds at every image of James between them and the Retrovision, but all of them sailed clear through their targets. The smoke cloud suddenly condensed tightly around them, and The Mandrake made a break for the front door while he had the chance.
He was tackled from the side by someone moving at over fifty kilometers an hour, knocking him down and halfway across the room. When he looked up, he was completely surrounded by silhouettes of James bending down in the smoke to pick up Silvano. Jumping to his feet, he made his way back towards the Retrovision in the hopes of cutting James off.
Or at least, he thought that’s where he was going. The tumble to the floor and the encircling smoke had disoriented him, and he ended up tripping over Seneca, who was once again unable to stand from the sickening smoke.
James brushed by them in a blur, and Envy fired every last bullet trying to put him down. Each one either missed or succeeded only in striking Silvano, who was slung over James’ back.
The smoke retreated with them, and The Mandrake dashed after them in one final bid to keep them from escaping. They were just feet away from him before they leapt through the Retrovision, vanishing into the basement universe of the Darlings’ playroom. The Mandrake dared to reach in after them and pull them back, but his hand hit nothing but solid glass.
“Damnit!” he cursed, striking the top of the box set with his fist.
“Don’t break it!” Envy shouted. “If that Retrovision came from the Darlings’ playroom and was modified by James, it could be useful in tracking them down again!”
“It also gives them a two-way ticket to wherever we keep it!” The Mandrake shouted back.
“Oh yes, it would be a gamble taking this old girl with you. No doubt about that,” the black and white visage of James mocked them from the other side of the screen, taking a victory drag from his cigarette. “But on the other hand, it is one of my finer works. It would be a crime, an atrocity even, to destroy it.”
The Mandrake struck the box set again, but deliberately held back on damaging it.
“Mandrake, enough!” Envy commanded. “I know it’s risky, but we need it. Turn it off and pick it up. We’re getting out of this hellhole.”
“Don’t feel bad, Mr. Mandrake. I’m sure you’ll have another chance to end up in Sara Darling’s doll collection very soon,” James taunted just before The Mandrake managed to turn the Retrovision off.
“What an absolute waste of time,” he muttered as he lifted the vintage box set off the floor.
“Not entirely!” Seneca claimed, who had not only recovered from his spectral smoke inhalation but was now holding an unlit cigar. “Crow, Crowley & Chamberlain has a lien on this shop, and since Silvano just ran out on us and has thrown his lot in with the Darlings, this place and everything left in it is ours!”
He was just about to light it before Envy snatched it out of his hands.
“The Mandrake wasn’t bluffing about the municipal health bylaws,” she informed him. “From now on, this is a smoke-free building.”

Hello everyone English is not my first language, I apologize in advance for any mistakes and sorry again for the long ass story. Im (23F) and when I was 11 met my ex best friend at school. We sat in the same desk by chance and started talking thanks to our common passion for drawing, anime and video games. Our class was full of mean girls and we had several difficulties thanks to them but in all of this we were always together. We always had a special bond really, i never had with anyone else a connection so strong as with her. We were always together, drawing all day exchanging tips to improve, watching anime and playing videogames. It was our way to escape from a reality where we were the weird girls with no friend group in our town. Since when i was little my dream was (and is) to become an artist and living with my drawings. she helped me write and draw my hypothetical video games and fan fiction and I was close to her in her difficult moments, she didn’t know what her dream was but drawing was a good candidate so I was rooting up for her. But as we grew older I noticed more and more certain toxic attitudes that she had that made me reflect on our friendship, I’ll give you an example. I couldn’t have any friends other than her because of her jealousy, one time i was in the school corridor talking to other friends of mine and she grabbed my arm and pressed her nails so hard into my skin as if to stop me from talking, I answered her angrily that she could not be jealous of my friendships in this way and that she should immediately stop, she didnt answer and went back to class. I tried to integrate her but she was a very judgmental kid (and now adult )towards others, She criticized how others dressed or how they behaved, no one could laugh around her, other people laughs annoyed her because she was in a depressive state. (She never went to a psicology so i always suspected she had depression, but i dont know as im not a psycology ) and this combined with her shy and closed character did not give her much opportunity to show her best qualities that she showed with me without problems i truly thought that we would be friends forever. She also had a very troubled family that caused her a lot of trauma especially her mother, she told me that once her mother took her by the hair and dragged her out of the house because she had not finished her lunch. Finished with the preamble I will tell you the beginning of the end of our friendship. Its long sorry but i wanted to give you all the full story so you can give me a good advice in what to do. i can’t stand those who lie especially those who do not take the consequences of the mistakes they make, and she was (is) just one of those people. Everyone makes mistakes except her, she is very prideful. She told me that lying was her only way to survive her family, they always gave her punishment faaar more heavier than her mistakes, so she had become a very good liar. as you all can immagine she was not used to normal confrontation, when I wanted to talk to her in order to clarify situations that I did not like very much she gaslighted o lied. Let me give you another example: We were in my desk and she accidentally dropped a bottle of water on my computer, so far nothing bad, she didn’t do it in purpose. What made me tremendously angry was the fact that she started lying to me, about a situation i directly saw! First she told me didn’t do it and at as a second version of the story she told me that I actually dropped the bottle. The discussion continued for a few minutes, of course never apologizing and continuing to blame me. Her lies and toxic attitudes continued, but I still tried to see the good in the situation by continuing to justify her shitty behavior. Before high school I lent her my precious Nintendo to pass her in game thing from one version of a game to another, for months I accumulated points in the app on the nintendo that gave you the opportunity to pass the in game things and waited to collect them arrived at a certain score, after a few days she gave me back the console and once I got it back I noticed that all the points I had accumulated were gone. I immediately confronted her and she fucking denied it. I mean how could the be gone without me touching it? Of course she took it but the fact that she lied to me about something as stupid as points of a video game made me so angry that I decided to end the relationship on the spot. How could you fucking lie on something so stupid? To your best friend! If she wanted them she could have asked! But no, of coulse the best route was lying. Once we got to high school we already stopped talking, we enrolled in two different school, mine was in another city close to our hometown and is characterized by artistic subject, she wanted to enroll in my same institute but her parents told her that only drug addicts and failures enrolled in that institute, im serious. And we where 13. In high school I met my current best friend an angel of a girl really , and for the first two years of high school I never thought of my ex best friend. Not even once. In my third year the thought of her started to appear in my mind i dont know why, I asked the opinion of my friend group and bestie about the idea, everyone told me that i should try to contact her, people make mistakes and change, maybe she changed and wanted to contact me but her shy personality was in the way, so I contacted her. She told me how she hated me when I cut contact with her, how she always kept an eye of what i was doing and that she actually wanted to contact me but was too prideful. She also told me that she was heavily bullied and that her life was shitty, again with no friend not even a shadow of a boyfriend. I advised her to change school, she was (is) the classic person that only complains and never makes any effort to change the situation, after discussing with her numerous times how doing nothing and complaining wasnt going to improve her life and a good talk with her parents she finally decided changed school. Our school system allows the student to change course of study, but the student has to take exams in order to recover the subjects that the previous school did not teach. I talked to my professors about her situation and they allowed her to take the exams understanding of the situation, the change of school could only accur at the beginning of the school year and it was half school year, but for this situation (the heavy bulling her depressive state, the fact that she always wanted to study there ) the school gave her the blessing. I lent her all the necessary equipment, watercolors, clay, other artistic equipment in order to pass the exams not worrying about the expenses and she managed to pass all of the exams without problems. my professors were kind to her and she always drew so it wasnt a big of a problem. I introduced her to my group of friends and they integrated her beautifully, they were very kind with her and the situation was quiet for a while I was not friends with her as before but still there was a strong friendship, but i always had the vibe that she didnt change much, she was just hiding things better than before. After this first apparent period of calm the school gave the opportunity to enroll in an Erasmus project, we indicated where we wanted to go and our average grade and according to the ranking we could win the scholarship. I had been a very good student in high school and I was sure I could get in and my teachers confirmed it, I of course asked my ex best friend who was also an awesome student if she wanted to join but she said no. Many students didnt apply for economic reasons, living abroad is espensive but the scholarship paid for housing, public transport, and gave a little money monthly to help students. After a month, they said the names of the students that got accepted and I was the first. I was very excited to finally go abroad for a while and not for a week. I told tmy friends and they were all happy for me, one of my teachers also told me that a student had changed his mind and that there was a place available, and asked me if I knew someone with good grades who was interested in quickly signing up. I asked my ex-best friend again for a simple reason, she started to stay even more time at home, was often very sad and a change of perspective could only benefit her,after a few days of discussing the pros and the cons she accepted. I helped her fill out all the paperwork and we left for a few months abroad. It was a very cool experience, we shared room and i tried to get her out of her bed for months but she didnt make any new friend and she didnt explore much the new city. At the end of our high school a friend of the same group and i started looking for an appartment in the same city far from the city where our highschool was for our universities. this common friend wasnt very mature but that city has very expensive rent so sharing was the best idea. I found out that he was telling his mother that i wanted a bigger house only next to my university and not his and that was the reason we hadn’t found a house/rooms to rent yet, when he was the one often dismissing the houses for being ugly or too old. Whe didnt have the time to search for the perfect house to rent. I confronted him about this whole ridicolous situation and told him to eff of, that was the last staw i was already stressed for the house hunting and he was just making the situation more difficult. his mother even called me telling me that his son was a dumbass and pleading me to babysit him, i exploded told everything i had to say to his mother and cut contact with him. I vented about the situation to my ex best friend and she accused me of being selfish and destroying the balance of the group, thanks to me she was going to be alone again without friends because in her head everyone would start taking sides and we wouldnt be a cohesive group again, that i should make peace with our common friend being the most mature person between the two, told her my point of view, we could just hang out together alternating his presence and mine in the group and she told me that i was the one in the wrong, the group was more important and for the sake of the group i should not cut contact with him, i remained of my views and after my state she never answered me, that common friend tried to recontact me but i had no interest in becoming a babysitter for a 20 year old baby, everyone in the group told me that i was right and they were fearing that i would have to become his mother as he was veeery immature, like extremely immature. Immagine having a house or a room with a person that expect you to do everything for him, cleaning after him , god a nightmare. After graduation i lost contact with the remaining people of that group except for my high school best friend and another classmate, and my ex best friend and that common friend with a maturity of a 6 years old. Now im 23, i got my degree in Art and im not regretting cutting contacts with them, everyone in that group showed after the end of high school theire true colors so i didnt lose much. My best friend remained in contact with my ex best friend , they, as i understood dont talk much but recently she told me that my ex best friend became an hikikomori and dropped out of uni. Knowing her we started to worry for her probably degenerating mental state, she always was a very dedicated student, dropping out of uni is very out of character. So i was thinking again of contacting her. What do you guys think? Should i contact her? I see a beautiful person under all the traumas and the shitty behavior, but maybe im just projecting an idealized version of her...

As Maddy and Caroline set off home, ‘Tauret’ put her plan into action. She had seen the tanbury man get rejected, and the two of them set off home. This was her night, and they would strike tonight, with her new network. A dozen of the thousands of refugees were fanatically loyal to the greater good, and now, they worked for her. Regimental unity could be easily fractured. She had already sent a couple of hers to do the first job, and quietly killed a couple of the Tanbury men, with a dozen minthelian artifacts left behind so it was clearly them. And now the second part, retaliating for the dear honour of Tanbury.
As the two imperials entered a side alley, Maddy saw a man walk out halfway down. Neither of them had weapons, but the ones ahead did as she turned to the bookish administrator with her.
“Behind me and wait.” She said, as she backed into a corner, Caroline behind her and the two attackers in front. The woman flicked out a knife, as they both lunged forward. Maddy deflected the blade up and rammed it into one of the attacker’s throats as he staggered back, and the knife was twisted from the attacking woman’s hand, dropping to the floor. She struggled as Maddy grabbed her in a headlock, the local woman flailing wildly as she drew another dagger and tried to stab Maddy in the leg. The big minthelian blocked it, and twisted her arms, breaking her attackers neck. She dropped the corpse and turned back, looking at the bodies and then Caroline.
“Let’s go and find some guards,” Maddy suggested surprisingly casually.
//////
Colonel burton woke up in a blank cell yet again. He walked to the door; he had had enough of this.
“Oi, whatever bastard runs this place, let me out the damn box,” he shouted. “I need to get back to my men.”
//////
Staisy played her scope across the base. Tiffy and Dana were hidden a short distance ahead, and the others were with her, in a sort of firebase. The hour approached, and she looked out onto the base one last time. She scanned from guard to guard. Nearly time. The plan was simple, just start shooting at the base, and as the base counter-attacked, they would be taken by the landing parties. Falling back was not in the plan, just hold firm and wait for the boats to save them.
“Good luck everyone,” Staisy whispered, as the clock ticked over. She pulled the trigger, and the first tau guard died. It would take them a few seconds to raise the alarm, her silent lasbeams streaking through the night. She fired again, and again, dropping more guards as the shouts of alarm began. As one ran for it, she hit her in the back, another dying slumped on the panel as the klaxon began to blare. This was the cue for the praetorians to cut loose, and they did, beginning to shoot at any auxilia who moved. Sure enough, the auxilia and fire warriors began to collect, and mass to counter-attack. Tiffy and Dana waited; they would be in close combat soon as heavy emplacements began to open up on the four on the ridge. Staisy ducked as Tiffy raised her knife, ready, with Dana. The first group were about to reach the building she hid behind, and it was going to be close combat. Hopefully the boats would arrive at any moment.
//////
As Elzy dismissed Nathan Beckett, she returned to her book and sat down, seeing that Oats was seated, reading a book. She still couldn’t get a read on the girl.
“Hey Oats,” she asked curious. “What are you reading?”
//////
General Batherston had laid on an excellent dinner and invited his guests. Captain Palmer would be there, to sort out the running of a formal dinner and had selected food and wines, and Commissar Mason, the commissar who could test their fanaticism towards her rank, without shooting anyone.
Ruby was terrified. She knew psykers, and she feared them. Not these two, just the concept of them. As they arrived, she stood to greet them, and whatever security it had been decided they would bring. Ruby steeled herself, she had been trained in how to avoid the influence of psykers, as the shimmer of purple appeared around her vision.
//////
Tammy sat on a lawn chair out the front of her accommodation, the terraced house home to her, Sophy and a half dozen others. She had with her still her shattered watch, fiddling with it as she waited. Duty hours had ended five minutes before, and this was the earliest she could expect Jess to arrive. She had suggested later, but somehow had her suspicions that changing into something more off duty and having a shower first before a relaxed walk over late wasn’t within the style of a Valyrran.
//////
Lieutenant Knight walked through the town, in her black dyed praetorian uniform. She had been sent to see one of their logistics officers, by way of a trade of sorts. She had mountains of boot polish and uniform cleaner, and the full regiment had plasma guns. Lots of plasma guns.
“Excuse me,” she said to a praetorian sentry beside the HQ. “Please could I see the head of logistics.”

This is a repost,BTW
I don’t think about my law school transcript very often. I haven’t seen my transcript since the last time I had a résumé, and that was back in eighty-nine. But whenever I get one of my old law school’s fundraising things, before I hit delete I always think of the man I’ll call Professor Golding, and the D he put on my transcript.
I regretted taking Family Law almost from the start. I’d chosen it because it met all my requirements: I wasn’t going to have to write an essay, the final exam was worth one hundred percent, and most important of all, the final exam was closed book. I had no intention of practicing family law, but I loved closed book exams, because that’s how I got my best marks. Rote memorization is what I do best, and closed book exams cater to students who could memorize. Plus I liked the prof. I’d taken Civ Pro with her in first year, and it had been fun, so I thought I’d give family law a try.
But the old prof I liked went on medical leave, and the school found a replacement for the semester. He was maybe forty, and he was the male darling of the feminist movement. I’ll call him Professor Golding. I didn’t learn a lot about family law from Professor Golding, because he spent most of the time telling us about his pet theories. He believed that “all sex was rape,” because consent was a male construct, and as such, not binding on women. That didn’t make any sense to me. I wasn’t on board with his anti-porn diatribes, either. He wanted all porn banned, and the purveyors of it jailed. I wonder what he thought when PornHub came along, but that’s between him and his browser history.
For the first couple of weeks I had the sense to say nothing when Golding rambled on about his pet theories. When he actually taught law, I took notes, and the rest of the time I read materials for other courses while listening to his lectures with half an ear. I kept my head down, determined to stay out of trouble and never to comment about the nonsense he was spouting. But the thing is, I have trouble keeping my mouth shut. My mouth has gotten me into trouble my entire life. When the occasion least calls for it, I will blurt things, and one day during a family law lecture I blurted.
It was a rare occasion in our class, because our prof was teaching us something about Family Law for a change. Professor Golding was talking about custody, and how it was a myth that the mother usually gets custody. “Fifty percent of reported cases result in the father getting custody,” he said, as evidence for his thesis. Pens scratched as students took note of this important fact. But I’d worked in a law firm the previous summer, and I’d learned a little bit, and before I could stop myself, my hand went up. It was the first time I’d raised my hand in Family Law.
“But most cases don’t end in a reported decision,” my mouth said, all by itself with no help from my brain, “just a few lines of an endorsement.” My brain tried to reassert control, but it was too late. “Only the more remarkable cases get reported. Maybe the instances where fathers get custody are overreported because they are unusual and remarkable.” That was my geek brain speaking, my physics and stats brain, the part of my brain that lived in a little corner all by itself. It didn’t get along very well with the common sense part of my brain.
I knew right away that I’d fucked up, when heads turned and looked at me disgustedly. The prof didn’t answer me. Instead, he just continued his lecture. “As I was saying,” he drawled, and I felt his dismissal like a slap in the face. I resolved then and there never to open my mouth again in Family Law.
But the prof wouldn’t let it go. For a month or so, Golding tried to draw me in. He’d make a statement, and then if he wanted an easy laugh, he’d say, “but maybe I’m wrong; Mr. Calledinthe90s might have something to say.” This would draw some sycophantic titters from the students who sat in the front row, but eventually the joke got tired, and he dropped it. I really resented it, because I’m a bit sensitive to being singled out. Or rather, more than a bit sensitive. In fact, I hate it. But when he finally stopped, I was grateful, and I figured that he’d forgotten about me. But I was wrong, as I found out when I wrote the exam.
This was Golding’s first Family Law course, and I didn’t know what kind of exam he was going to set. But I followed my playbook, and I studied for Family Law final like I did for any other closed book exam: I got my hands on the old exam papers from the library, and for each question I memorized an answer. And when I say memorized, I mean exactly that. I memorized the answers that I wrote word-for-word, down to the case citations and passages from leading cases. Like I said, rote memorization is my thing. I may not be the brightest bulb in the pack, but I make use of what I’ve got, and my brain likes to memorize. It likes to be fed. So while prepping for Family Law, I fed my brain reams of case law and statutes and doctrines. When it was time for the final, I was all set.
I walked into the final totally confident. It was the last exam of third year, and I was excited to be finishing up. So far as I was concerned, it was the last exam I was ever going to write, because in those days, the bar ads were a joke. Anyone with a pulse could pass a bar exam back then, not at all like it is now. So for me, Family law was truly my final exam, my goodbye to the academic world.
When I glanced at the exam paper, I knew it was going to be a breeze. I had my answers ready for each question, and I wrote them easily and legibly. I wrote the answers in pen, with hardly a mistake or a correction, and with thirty minutes still to go I stood up, handed in my paper and left. I’d written enough exams to know that I’d written an A exam. I headed back to residence, and when my friends finished their exams we went out and got drunk.
I was still on campus a few days later when my phone rang. I picked up, and when the caller identified himself as the Registrar, I was curious, and a bit excited. I knew I’d done well, but I wondered, had I won a prize of some kind? Not the gold medal, of course; I wasn’t in the running for that, but maybe I’d won some other prize, some mark of distinct--
“There’s a question about your family law exam,” the Registrar said.
“What about it?”
“Professor Golding wants to see you in his office.”
“When?” I said.
“Now,” the Registrar said.
That was weird. Really weird. I headed out of the one-bedroom apartment in grad res where I’d lived the last three years, and walked over to the building where Golding and the other profs had their offices. I knocked on the prof’s open door. He looked up at me, a grin on his face.
“That was quite an exam you wrote,” he said, gesturing at me to close the door behind me. I closed it.
“Thanks,” I said, taking a seat opposite his desk. There was malice behind the man’s grin, but I sometimes, or rather, most times, have trouble reading people and situations, and I didn’t realize right away what was up.
“You really nailed it.”
“I worked pretty hard,” I admitted, still clueless.
“Really.” I noticed that his voice was dripping with sarcasm. I’m not good at verbal games, and so I asked him why he’d asked the Registrar to summon me to his office.
“This was a closed book exam,” he said.
“That’s why I picked it,” I said, still not getting it. But he only laughed. “I’ll bet,” he said, and he laughed some more, and it was only then that it hit me. But I wanted to make him say it. I asked again why he’d summoned me to his office. He tried to spar a bit with me, draw me out, but I kept asking him, why did you call me down? I persisted, until he came out and said what he’d been implying, that he thought that I’d cheated.
“I still have all my notes back at my place,” I said, “I’ll go get them.” I started to rise, but he stopped me.
“No need for notes. I think you’ve had enough help from notes. I don’t know how you got your notes into the exam room, but I’m not giving you a chance to get notes this time.” He passed me a single piece of paper that had three Family Law questions on it. I recognized two of them right away; they’d been on the exam. The third hadn’t been, but I’d prepped for that question, too, and knew the answer cold.
“Why don’t you try answering these questions now,” he said, a malicious smile spread all over his face.
I think Professor Golding might have had his own issues reading people. If he thought I was scared, he was very much mistaken. I wasn’t scared. I was angry, and heading quickly for one of my uncontrollable rages, for one of my furious meltdowns that have at times marred my life. If he’d been some other prof, someone who hadn’t taunted me for half a semester, maybe I would have been gentler with him. But I hated Professor Golding. I knew him for what he was: a bully. I had problems with bullies starting in grade school, and I knew bullies in all their varieties. Professor Golding was a truly cowardly bully, the kind that pushes you from behind, and then melts into the crowd so that he can’t be identified.
“Sure,” I said, “I’ll answer your questions. But first, you have to give me something in writing, something that says you think I was cheating.” Cowardly bullies like camouflage, and the best way to deal with them is to expose them.
“I will do no such thing,” he said primly. That’s when I really started to get mad. I got up, and opened his office door.
“If you’re going to accuse me of cheating, then do it openly,” I said. I was not speaking quietly. The prof’s office opened up onto a common area. There was a secretary or two, and a lot of other prof’s offices, most of them with open doors. He ordered me to close the door, but I refused. I stood in the doorway, speaking loudly, saying that if he wanted to accuse me of cheating, I wouldn't let him do it behind a closed door. He raised his voice, I raised mine, and then next thing I knew the Dean was standing there. He asked what was going on.
“Professor Golding says I cheated on the final,” I said, “but he won’t put the accusation in writing.” The Dean looked at Golding. “Is that true?”
“I was giving him another chance,” Golding said, “because his exam was too good for a closed book.”
The Dean looked at me. “I’d take that chance he’s giving you, if I were you,” he said, so I went back into Golding’s office, and sat at the desk opposite the prof. When I’d walked in, he had the look of a mall cop that had caught a shoplifter. That look was gone now, replaced by a glare of pure hatred.
“I need a pen, if you want me to write some answers,” I said. He picked up a pen and tossed it at me. I let it fall on the table in front of me. “Paper,” I said, “I’m going to need paper.” He sullenly passed me a pad. I picked it up, and tackled the first of the questions, one of the ones from the final. The answer came to me easily. I knew that my answer wasn't quite as good as what I wrote before, because my memory can hold only so much for so long. Give it another week or two, and much of it would have been lost, but the final had been only a few days ago, and almost everything was still there. I wrote quickly, not trying to make my writing neat and tidy. I finished my answer in half the time that it had taken me when I wrote the exam. When I finished, I tossed the paper back at him, and then started on the next. While I scribbled the answer to the second question, I could see from the corner of my eye that he had my exam paper in one hand, and the recent effort in the other. He was comparing them. And as he compared them, he was very still. The only sound in the room was the scratching of my pen on the paper. He hadn’t finished his review before I tossed the next answer at him, and then started on the final question.
The last question was one not included in the exam. But it was easy, really easy, a simple question on the doctrine of constructive trust. I scribbled out an answer in ten minutes, with a mostly accurate quote from Pettkus v. Becker. He was just finishing my answer to the second question when I passed over the answer to the third. He looked up at me.
“You can go now,” he said. He was dismissing me, the way he had in class, like I was of no account.
“What did you say?” My voice was tight. I was only just barely in control of myself.
“I said you can go.”
I got up and opened the door to his office. I stood there in the doorway for the second time.
“So did I cheat, Professor Golding? Am I a cheater, a big fucking cheater? Did I bring notes into the exam, Professor Golding? Are you going to call for an academic hearing? Are you gonna back up your accusation?” He told me to keep my voice down, but that only made me raise it. Then the Dean was at my elbow again.
“I never said he was cheating,” Golding said, addressing the Dean, and ignoring me.
“You are a coward. A fucking coward,” I said to him, and then I walked away, and I didn’t hear from Golding again, until I saw my transcript, with an A each in Trusts, Administrative Law and Commercial Law, and then a D, a big fat fucking D in Family Law. Like I said, Golding was a coward.
Professor Golding was hired only to teach only the one semester, and so far as I’m aware, he wasn’t invited back, probably because I wasn’t the only one who thought he was a wanker.
Maybe he gave me that D because I had a meltdown in his office and screamed the fuck word at him more than a few times. But I suspect that the D was coming my way regardless, and I’m glad that I paid for it in advance.

Frank Miller's Daredevil and the Ends of Heroism (Comics Culture) eBook : Young, Paul
This was the first honest-to-god analysis of a work of fiction I ever bought. Sure we all think about the stories we read but I had never sought out a professional look at it before. The interviews with Miller and others are really an invaluable look into his creative process, IMO.
I really recommend this book for insights not just into Daredevil, but Batman and Punisher, too.
For anyone curious, here are a lot of the parts which really stood out to me - although of course I have my own interests and you might have parts of the book you love which I just passed over. The first comic I ever remember reading and being deeply impressed by was JMS' Supreme Power. To me, the best superhero stories ask "what does it even mean to be a (super)hero?" I think Miller has some invaluable insights on this topic.

Miller's problem with Spider-Man was all the angst. "All my reservations about the character are in how he talks 'cause his visual is still very confident, and very strong - it's just that he never stops whining." Spidey's self-pity, his penchant for martyrdom, and his borderline masochistic self-neglect attracted fans' identification but also made his life more or less a continual nightmare. Even worse, it made his success as a superhero hard for Miller to swallow. Spider-Man's trademark heckling of villains during fights only made his effectiveness less believable:
"I don't believe that Spider-Man would last two weeks [as a crime fighter] the way he's conceived. In order to have power over the criminals, you would have to be that rotten; [criminals] would have to accept him as almost one of them... Daredevil has to reach the point where when he walks into a room. they're terrified of him. because he has to be accepted as a force they'll respect. That isn't done much in comic books; it's around in other kinds of fiction. I'm more comfortable with that; I don't see him as being happy go lucky when he's up against a bunch of guys with guns."
[...]
Miller would probably have incited comparisons to Batman in the fan press simply by transforming Daredevil into a grittier, more deterministic series, but Miller openly stressed the parallel in his Daredevil-era interviews. In 1981, Miller draws an explicit contrast between Daredevil and Batman: "Daredevil . . . operates on a basic motive of love for seeking out justice. . . . [Batman] is punishing those who killed his parents. Batman's focus is on the criminal, Daredevil's is on the victim."27 Critics picked up on Miller's concern with Daredevil's motives, as well as the productive task of measuring them against those of the Batman. Reviewing Miller's work thus far in the Comics Journal in 1982, Ed Via wrote that Miller had made Daredevil "first and foremost a moralist, a person with a strong sense of fairness and . . . compassion, someone whose actions were as directly in line with his convictions as humanly possible."28 Even Daredevil's scuffles with criminals differed from Batman's in that they were performances rather than acts of vengeance:
"I see Matt Murdock as being a grown man and Daredevil as almost being a boy. . . . He believes in everything he's doing and he works very hard at it, but part of him just gets off on jumping around buildings."29 "I'm also trying to develop him as a guy with a terrific sense of humor, who scares criminals and has a great time doing it. Like [Steve Ditko's DC character] the Creeper, he laughs and laughs and laughs, and thinks [to himself], 'Jeez, they're buying it!'"30
Miller's favorite means of exposing his hero's antic side was to send Daredevil to Josie's Bar, a fictional dive where New York's entire population of petty thieves seems to turn up every night. Digging for clues to various cases, DD inevitably sparks fights that trash the place, hurling thugs through the front window while Josie protests (for the umpteenth time) that she just had it repaired. Sometimes he even orders a drink first, but as Miller points out, it's always a glass of milk. The milk (and the milk moustache it leaves behind) comically telegraphs Matt's wholesomeness compared to the hardened types guzzling whiskey and beer all around him, but it also underscores Miller's description of DD as Matt's boyish side, the inner child that "comes alive" while playing superhero.31
Ultimately, however, the contrast Miller once drew between the borderline psychotic Batman and the psychologically healthy Daredevil sounds like an overstatement of the argument, fronted by the Village Voice in 1965 (and echoed in Esquire the following year), that "Marvel Comics are the first comic books to evoke, even metaphorically, the Real World."32 By those lights, "real world" referentiality meant that Marvel heroes dealt openly with persecution, neuroses, and family squabbles and turned out to be their own worst enemies nearly as often as protagonists did in postwar literary fiction.
By contrast, DC didn't raise any schlemiels, with the possible exception of Clark Kent, whose inferiority complex is all an act to keep people from noticing that, but for the eyeglasses and the hunched shoulders, he looks exactly like Superman. DC stories followed the logic of such classical storytelling modes as the epic or the chronicle, where decision making is an exponent of action instead of a process inflected by character subtleties and every action thus taken is world-historical in importance. Its editors exiled strong emotion, anxiety, mortality, and other everyday complexities to the infamous imaginary stories of the fifties and early sixties.
This means of distinguishing Silver Age Marvel heroes from those of DC hits a snag, however, when we stack Batman's origin up against that of Spider-Man or Daredevil. The emotional crux of all three is the Spidey triumvirate of all-too-human gut reactions: guilt, shame, and a desire for revenge. Indeed, the most obvious precedent for Daredevil's origin is the first version of Batman's origin story in DC's Detective Comics #33 (December 1939), in which an anonymous street thug robs and shoots Bruce Wayne's parents before young Bruce's eyes. Batman's origin sets underexamined precedents for many origin stories from Marvel's Silver Age: dead parent, angry child, costume chosen to strike fear into what the Batman of 1939 touts as a "superstitious, cowardly lot" of evildoers, an initial state of helplessness igniting the desire to bulk up and do right. Not unlike the death of Jack Murdock in Daredevil's case, Bruce Wayne's extraordinary childhood loss forges Batman's determination to avenge that loss on all criminals everywhere forever after and to transform himself into a steroidal, bat-eared Sherlock Holmes.
Miller brought the Punisher, then Marvel's most homicidal lead character, into the comparison to develop a pet point about Daredevil's singularity: his duty to the legal system, for better or worse. In 1981, when Richard Howell asked Miller point blank, "Is Daredevil Marvel's Batman?" Miller answered that, no, "the Punisher is Marvel's Batman."33 Miller argued that, unlike the Batman, whose parents' murder catalyzed every major life decision he made from then on, the death of Battlin' Jack did not have as "big an effect on [Matt] as his father's life, and he is his father's son, being a natural born fighter."34 The Punisher, by contrast, shares not only Batman's desire to murdered loved ones but also his will to stop killers and drug dealers in their tracks. He exceeds Batman's mission only in that he executes the bad guys on the spot.
The Punisher, Miller tells Howell, is "Batman without the impurities. The side of Batman that makes him spare the criminals is something that's added on. It's not part of the basic concept of his character. . . . Daredevil's basic concept is very dissimilar. I see Daredevil as someone who operates on a basic motive of love for seeking out justice."35
This was not to say, however, that the Punisher's use of deadly force made him less heroic to Miller than Daredevil or Batman were. The Punisher is a hero, Miller says, but "I don't consider him a role model. The main difference between him and Daredevil is Daredevil's sense of responsibility to the law. The Punisher is an avenger; he's Batman without the lies built in."36
The "lies" Miller mentions refer in part to Batman's vow never to kill; he wields a gun only two or three times in his entire first forty-five years in print, due in each case to editorial inattention. While the no-kill rule probably helped keep Batman out of trouble with parents worried over comics' influence on young children, it exacerbated the tension between his desire for justice and his sense that the legal system is inadequate to the task of collaring mass murderers and rooting out corruption. If Batman's prime motive is to champion justice in the legal sense, to quash anarchy and restore social order, then why does he have such contempt for the police and the legal system except insofar as they can help him achieve his goals?
[...]
The ambivalence about due process expressed here stems in part from Miller's decision to make Daredevil a character whose convictions don't necessarily match his own: "I don't necessarily believe that Daredevil's right about everything he says. The character is built on very strong basic principles, and it would have been a terrible violation of those principles . . . to let Bullseye die. Daredevil has to believe that the law will work in every instance, but I'm allowed to believe differently."17 Miller had much tougher critiques of Daredevil-style liberalism waiting up his sleeve, including the bleeding-heart psychiatrists in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns who claim that Two-Face and the Joker (the Joker, for crying out loud) can be rehabilitated and an unforgettable throwaway joke about liberal hypocrisy in the same book, in which a Central Casting suburbanite tells a reporter that he doesn't believe in Batman's brand of vigilante justice but then snorts that he himself would "never live in the city." But to paint Miller as a legal or social conservative would not be accurate, at least not at this point in his career. Satirically, in fact, Miller plays the entire political field, broiling John Ashcroft and George W. Bush in The Dark Knight Strikes Again (2001–2) for exploiting the Twin Towers' destruction to further their own political agenda (and while these men were doing exactly that in the aftermath of 9/11, no less).
The Daredevil run, though, is less a satire of Matt's position, or anyone else's, than it is a Brechtian experiment in which Miller draws sympathy to Murdock's point of view while examining it with a microscope at the same time, pushing harder and harder on the question of whether justice is served if lives are left at risk, while putting just as much pressure on the opposing question of whether preventive justice deserves to be called justice at all.
[...]
Matt's reaction to the death of Elektra is to bully Heather into the submissive role that Elektra couldn't play. Miller attributes to Matt not a single thought balloon to suggest that he is aware of the toll his bullying takes on her, while Miller continually draws the reader's attention to that toll via Matt's glib condescension and Heather's devastated reactions to it. The soundness of Daredevil's judgment is now more questionable than ever. Does his heroism stem from a neurotic urge to control everything around him, and is that neurosis reaching a tipping point? After all, we see him suffer a nearly dissociative breakdown when he convinces himself in #182 that Elektra somehow survived her own murder. The splash page of that issue still chills me with its full-face close-up of Matt in a cold sweat, staring into our eyes, as if pleading with us to believe something we know to be utterly false just because he believes it: "SHE'S ALIVE." By #189, only seven issues later, his demeaning paternalism has driven his new fiancée straight to the bottle.
In spite of the ugliness of Matt's abuse, and the emphasis Miller places on that ugliness, it's difficult for me to decide whether terrorizing Heather this way makes Daredevil less heroic or more heroic in Miller's definition. Miller has often spoken about the archetypical hero as something other than human, as dismissive of what others think they need as Matt is of Heather's feelings. When Miller discusses The Dark Knight Strikes Again!, which he and interviewer Gary Groth agree is nearly a parody of superhero comics, he emphasizes Batman's abstract quality, born of the kind of social isolation that Stick enforces on Matt: If Batman's "motto is striking terror" into the hearts of criminals, then "Batman can only be defined as a terrorist. . . . I don't want you to like this guy." "My feeling about Batman is that he's similar [to James Bond] in that you'd want him to be there when you're being mugged, but you wouldn't want to have dinner with him. The way he cheers Hawkman on as he crushes Luthor's skull . . . For me, [such scenes demonstrate] the idea [of Batman] coming into its own without the bullshit on top of it being a socially acceptable role model and all of that."23
Matt's disregard for Heather's emotional state during the Glenn Enterprises affair further clarifies Miller's sense of the heroic impulse: it is prosociety but deeply antisocial, convinced that Right and Wrong are real and unchanging standards but dangerously solipsistic in its interpretation of how to achieve Right at the expense of Wrong. The true hero, according to Miller, is, compared to "normal" human beings at least, a pathological narcissist. Daredevil, with unwavering faith in his own judgment, performs "necessary" services for a culture whether it asks for them or not, while those who are under his protection see him as unfathomable at best and terrifying at worst. But even if Miller thrills to his own extrication of the "lies" and "bullshit" from the Batman persona a few years later, in Daredevil he employs dramatic irony to relate the high cost, to both individuals and their community, of the uncompromising, take-no-prisoners heroism that Americans think they want. "Dirty Harry . . . is a profoundly, consistently moral force," Miller tells Kim Thompson, but that wouldn't keep him out of jail for "administering the 'Wrath of God' on murderers who society treats as victims.
An authoritative study of Jack Kirby, Charles Hatfield has suggested that Marvel Comics distinguished itself in the 1960s in part by placing new stress on the tension intrinsic to superhero comics between the hero's desire for justice and the extralegal means by which she or he pursues it.25 I would add that Marvel's Silver Age stories place the stress primarily on the plotting opportunities provided by this tension, as in the case of Spider-Man, whose good deeds only draw the ire of a public (understandably) suspicious of ununiformed law enforcement.
Miller further develops the "upstanding vigilante" paradox from a cliché of the genre into a philosophical dialectic that, though sometimes decried as fascistic, cannot be reduced to an unironic plea for authoritarian rule. The superheroic fantasies on display in 300, the Sin City graphic novels, The Dark Knight Strikes Again!, and even the controversial Holy Terror cast a clear eye on the paradox of the specifically American fascination with the superheroic ideal. All pose to the reader the implicit question, Is this really what you want? Considering the consistency of this theme dating back to Daredevil,
I think of the pre-9/11 Frank Miller as less conservative than libertarian, a posthippie refugee of the 1960s who disdains the everyone-is-special relativism of grade-school participation trophies and liberal humanism but shares with the conscientious objector and the bra burner a fervency for personal liberty: "I'm no middle-of-the-roader, but I find that people who tend to follow any party line, of the left or right, tend to all end up saying the same thing, which is 'Do what I tell you.' Quit those habits I don't like, don't use the words I don't like, don't draw the pictures I don't want my children to see. . . . So yeah, I have a very jaundiced view toward most authority."26 In any event, Miller's focus on Daredevil's unflagging moral code, and his attention to how a relentless diet of violence might change that code into an ideological prison, allows him to explore the upstanding vigilante figure from multiple angles—the broadly liberal defense of constitutional protection for criminals and victims alike; the broadly conservative ideal of defending one's own body, family, and property without impediment from the state—without readily disclosing his personal politics.
[...]
Slowly and steadily, Miller was maneuvering out of Code territory into the world of frankly adult themes and pressing harder and harder on the contradictions on which a traditional concept of heroism depends. Miller's The Dark Knight Returns steps even further into that world even as it sets up new "walls" to push against, namely, the postsixties culture of liberal humanism and so-called moral relativism. Miller's Batman has all of Daredevil's desire for justice but lacks any of DD's concern for the civil rights of the alleged perpetrators; indeed, if Daredevil's primary concern is with the victims, as Jim Shooter taught Miller, then Batman's primary concern is with crushing the perps. And he gets called on it throughout The Dark Knight Returns by loads of liberal-sounding talking heads who claim that Two-Face and the Joker were actually turned into supervillains by Batman's example, that even convicted homicidal maniacs deserve a second chance, and so forth.
What Miller has done is to take Daredevil's line of legal thinking regarding the rights of criminal defendants, the same line that made him save Bullseye from being mashed on the subway tracks, and put it in the mouths of comic-relief characters such as the brain surgeons and psychologists who try to make Two-Face a productive member of society again. Miller's Batman, by contrast, is an epic hero who refuses to mistake good for evil or vice versa, and he gets to define on his own what each term means. Miller's Matt Murdock refuses such a metaphysical view of good and evil as all-or-nothing opposites on idealist grounds of a different sort. Matt believes that obscured innocence and hidden guilt have to be brought to light intellectually by finding proof and testing it, while Batman, who was at one time represented as a detective at heart, relies entirely on instinct when Miller has the reins.
To be fair, Miller presents the crudeness of Batman's worldview as a serious problem and has even done so in the midst of a conflict that seemed to many Americans to draw the brightest possible line between the national Us and a foreign Them. DC had already published the first issue of Miller and the colorist Lynn Varley's Dark Knight sequel, Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again!, when al-Qaeda operatives commandeered the planes that destroyed the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, an event that, Miller told Groth, made it impossible to leave Batman's catchphrase about "striking terror into the hearts" of evildoers unannotated. As I've mentioned, Batman's dialogue in The Dark Knight Strikes Again!—even the dialogue written before 9/11—makes the ugliness of his philosophy unmistakable: "Striking terror. Best part of the job."
Groth even points out to Miller that one Batman speech, in which he refers to American capitalists and the federal government as "tyrants" and promises that he and his team will "strike like lightning and . . . melt into the night like ghosts," sounds uncannily like "the point of view of radical Islamists" toward the United States.13 Miller doesn't take such a crack at the obvious bad guys, however. Rather, he immediately pounces on the political reaction to the bad guys and how the George Bushes, Dick Cheneys, and John Ashcrofts of the world use crises like 9/11 for their own purposes. They stand in for the heroes we think we need in tumultuous times but slip the bounds of law at every turn—and Miller attempts to reduce our sympathy for them. This Miller, chastened by the 9/11 attacks but ever the shrewd critic of the media that deliver such disasters to us, digs into the fascistic politics of superhero comics, the news media's role in sensationalizing global politics and inciting fanatical nationalism, and the real-world politics of vigilante justice all at once. He claims comics as a space to explore what "heroism" means—and not necessarily to him but rather to contemporary US culture. If the one who "saves" us from tyranny, even the tyranny of our own leaders, claims he has to act like a terrorist to do it, do we even want to be saved?
At the same time, both Miller's comics and his interviews have long scrutinized the insolubility of the paradox—heroism is necessary to restore order, but it's also authoritarian in its purest form, even fascistic—as a necessary evil. Batman seems the purer Miller "hero" in that Batman's sense of justice is unencumbered by any complicating factors. He metes it out as he sees fit, on the basis of an Old Testament version of righteousness: you take my eye, I'll take yours, score settled. This hero is no model for quotidian life, but as in such classical Hollywood Westerns as John Ford's The Searchers (1956), the frontier will remain forever a chaotic wilderness without him. Only Ford's half-wild hero Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) can save his niece from hostile Comanche in post–Civil War Texas, but his intense race hatred makes him a relic, unfit to cross the threshold into the orderly world of law, family, and home that his very wildness has helped bring to the western frontier.
The civic-minded Daredevil would be welcome in any such home, but for the later Miller especially, that taste for civilization and its rules reads as an "impurity," a liberal-humanist streak within traditional superheroism that Miller once talked about strictly in terms of character type (it's the difference between Batman and his "purer" doppelgänger, the Punisher) but that lately he describes as a moral fault, without any of the irony he mustered up a decade ago. There are signs dating back to 1986's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns that this irony was ambivalent anyway, considering the extent to which Batman adopts the Western hero's ruthless stance when taming the "frontier" of racialized criminals, right down to trading in the Batmobile for a horse.
The progressive reverence with which Miller's comics after Daredevil treat that definition of heroism has everything to do with 9/11 and the scale of twenty-first-century global terrorism as Miller has processed it since The Dark Knight Strikes Again!. Back in 2003, he told Groth, "For at least the foreseeable future, [9/11 is] the whole point of my work. I'm going to play around with doing some propagandizing,"15 but this sentiment did not prevent him from making the US government's reaction to the disaster a target for satire in his second Dark Knight story or lambasting the Bush administration for branding disagreement with its policies as providing solace to terrorists. By contrast, the Fixer, the costumed hero of Miller's frankly propagandistic graphic novel Holy Terror (Legendary Comics, 2011), doesn't care whether he gets thrown out of the house or not; his lot is to make the world safe for civilization, American style, not to inhabit it, and he likes it that way. The Fixer, a behemoth who shares a name with a character that Miller created for his high school newspaper's comics page, kills terrorists like a sledgehammer breaks pavement. There's no second-guessing motives or anything else; as far as the Fixer is concerned, if you're Muslim, you've got a bomb strapped to your midsection, so there's no danger that he will smash the wrong face.
Unsurprisingly, the character originally at the center of Holy Terror was Batman. Finally, Miller had freed the character of its impurities. To do that, he also had to burn off the "impurities" of the fundamentalist foe by painting al-Qaeda as representatives of all Islam and all Muslims and playing on every Arab stereotype he could scratch onto his Bristol board, from big noses to using Evil English to express delight in the torture and murder of "infidels." He has matched such images with political commentaries on National Public Radio, his personal blog, and elsewhere that show none of the critical distance that once made his work as jarring and energizing intellectually as the best Dashiell Hammett novel you've ever read. Our terrorist enemy, Miller has said, is "pernicious, deceptive and merciless and wants nothing less than [our] total destruction." Never mind that the majority of victims of al-Qaida and now ISIS are, in fact, Muslims.16
The hardline right position that Miller takes in Holy Terror differs so dramatically from that expressed in interviews dating back to the early 1980s that one has to wonder if he's been replaced by a Life Model Decoy from Nick Fury's supply closet. But Holy Terror was a critical disaster, prompting fans and critics alike to swear off any future Miller work and even to claim that his comics have rallied around a "sexist, fascist" flagpole since as far back as The Dark Knight Returns and possibly even before. Spencer Ackerman echoes the most scathing reviews when he writes in Wired, "Frank Miller doesn't do things halfway. One of the true comic-book greats, he's created several of the most extraordinary stories ever to grace the art form. So perhaps it's fitting that now he's produced one of the most appalling, offensive and vindictive comics of all time.
[...]
I can't subscribe to such uses of Miller's Batman to evaluate Miller's own character. Critics have been mistaking the positions Miller examines in his comics for his own convictions for decades. Indeed, Miller would agree with every one of Kevin's criticisms of Batman and even offer an aesthetic justification for this portrayal that depends on a dramatic irony that is difficult to locate, precisely because superhero comics have always traded in absolutes; criticism of those absolutes would understandably be less obvious to a dedicated reader of superhero comics, not to mention a nonreader convinced of superheroes' intrinsic lack of sophistication, than to someone interested in exploring or exploding the limits of the Batman mythos. Now, however, it not only looks like Miller has given away his critical distance; he also wants everyone to know it and to decide for themselves whether what he's done is worthless as a result, as comics or as political activism.
Back in 1998, discussing 300 with Christopher Brayshaw in the Comics Journal, Miller acknowledges the historical irony of Greece, the epitome of civil organization and intellectualism in the ancient West, needing a nation-state of cold-blooded warriors to fight its battles. In another context, he tells Brayshaw, he might have invited readers to ponder that irony and consider its paradoxical relationship to the development of democratic ideals.19 He does not do so in this context, however. For Miller, 300 is all about the necessity of saving civilization—Western civilization—from barbarism. The three hundred Spartans did what was necessary; they lost the battle, badly, but without their sacrifice, discipline, and utterly unambiguous worldview, we would apparently still be living in mud huts today.
Even with 300, though, Miller argues that he's playing around just a tiny bit with our tendency to collapse heroes with role models. Miller makes Leonidas admirable but not likable and renders most of the other 299 Spartans as less admirable and even less likable. But maybe, Miller has said not only about the Spartans but about the Punisher, Batman, and Superman, cultures need guys like that, and I do mean guys—the reckless male narcissists who can't or won't make subtle distinctions between good and evil—to do the dirty work of "preserving civilization as we know it." Usually, as in The Dark Knight Returns and The Dark Knight Strikes Again! and to a certain extent the noir riff on Dante's Inferno that is Sin City, Miller lets us sit with that ugly possibility, lets us squirm at our own enjoyment and/or disgust. He forces us to wonder if peace and forward movement are ever possible without the bright lines between good and evil and at the same time makes us ponder whether by drawing those lines, we put our humanity at risk. The generous way to interpret what Miller says here is that, like Hitchcock, he's casting doubt on the very notion of heroism that rules superhero comics, that is, the fantasy that superheroes could do what they do and yet remain "ordinary" people. Miller turned Batman into a living symbol of the fear that criminals should feel when threatened by "good," at least in a Platonist universe, but don't. However, when it's no longer comics, the First Amendment, or aesthetic complexity at stake but national security, take-no-prisoners tactics—in art as well as war—look to Miller like the only way to go.
[...]
In what I want to believe is a triumph of Miller the listener over the absolutist Miller who sneers at the same First Amendment he once sacrificed his industry goodwill to defend, Miller now refuses to comment further on his anti-Occupy rant. Perhaps he thinks it all speaks for itself, or perhaps he has accepted certain tenets of his critics just as he graciously (and legitimately, it seems) accepted the differing opinions of Groth and other interviewers as recently as a decade ago. Either way, he has stopped talking much about politics of any stripe. His blog is now abandoned due to "computer problems," Miller says, glowering during an interview for a Wired profile when Sean Howe suggests he find "a better technician" to fix it. "I will," Miller says, after a long silence.22
Look back on Daredevil's nemeses from the '79–'82 run with Miller's current anti-Islamicism in mind, though, and watch the ambiguities and nuances of his first major achievement get harder to pinpoint. Bullseye is a psychopath, complete with brain damage caused by cancer to guarantee it. Elektra is irredeemable despite her ostensibly clean bill of mental health: "The feeling I've been trying to get across is that she's betrayed something. She was meant to be something better than she is."23 But once you've fallen from grace, that's it. Some people are evil, through and through—think of the "reformed" Harvey Dent/Two-Face in The Dark Knight Returns, whose ruined mind no amount of reconstructive surgery can repair—and they must be punished, locked away for good, dismissed, disposed of. There's no other way to get the cancer out of society. Miller dates the rising scale of violent crime in Daredevil back to his getting mugged and robbed in New York: "The experience filled me with anger, and that translated right into my comics."24 As he got angrier, however, the struggle over right and wrong that plagued Daredevil seemed to get a lot less interesting to him than staking an unwavering claim to right.
Howe shrewdly characterizes Miller's use of secondary characters as a kind of misdirection: "Daredevil's dastardly supporting cast allowed Miller to have it both ways by making Daredevil's barrage of kicks and punches look reasonable in comparison."25 The bleak view on Miller's career would paint it as a slow but momentous roll past such apologies for superheroic vigilantism and into the stark light of the Fixer's gleeful, openly sadistic rampages, a development that Howe connects to Miller's personal victimization by crime prior to plotting Batman: The Dark Knight Returns:
"As Miller's career was taking off, the everyday violence in Manhattan at the time was taking its toll. "New York is no longer fit for human habitation," Miller told one friend. After enduring three robberies in the course of a month, he and [the colorist and his then-girlfriend Lynn] Varley decided to escape to LA. While she went out west to search for a home, he stayed behind to set up more work to get them out of debt. He had a check in his pocket when, once again, someone tried to rob him. "Frank just went berserk on the guy," Varley says. "He didn't hit him or anything, he just went so berserk the guy backed off and ran away. We were on edge."26
Such anger floats to the surface of his work with a bang in 1986, the year I graduated from high school, with not one but two smash-hit stories about characters that didn't belong to him: Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Miller's most lauded Daredevil story, Daredevil: Born Again, his 1986 return to the Daredevil series, penciled by David Mazzucchelli.
[...]
It's a hell of a second coming for a character whose series stubbornly still bore a Comics Code seal. I won't fault Miller for the anger of that story today any more than I did when I read Born Again at seventeen; on the contrary, I still believe there's not much point in going through adolescence in the United States without some rebel-themed mass culture to embrace for the sole reason that your parents would hate it. Still, I marvel at how much Miller's perspective on his audience had changed between 1983's "Roulette" and the Born Again story line in 1985–86.
According to Howe's account of Marvel in the eighties, Miller's inspiration for Born Again was losing everything himself. Ramped up on the success of Ronin and eager to get away from the city that fostered at least one person's transformation into a real-life vigilante ("one Bernard Goetz is enough"), Miller moved to Los Angeles, found himself dead broke, and decided to pitch a new Daredevil story that started with Matt Murdock in similar straits.28 No doubt it was satisfying to create a world in which a bloated mob boss—somebody, anybody—could actually be held accountable for downturns of fortune, instead of such mundane external forces as random robberies or astronomically high rent. But Born Again also recommends interpretations of Miller's work as reflective of his worldview, making it more difficult to give him the benefit of the doubt when he says he is investigating the justification of defensive violence rather than sponsoring it.

[...]

Howdy, after some poor grades this semester I don’t believe I’ll be making the 2.0 mark for my overall GPA this semester.
I’ve been on academic probation in the past and believe that returning under a 2.0 leads to automatic dismissal from my major without the possibility of appeal.
I currently have about 80 hours and just don’t know what to expect being majorless with that many hours. Can anyone give any insight as to what I can do? I know most majors don’t allow you to apply if you’re above 60.

After drying off I changed into the clothes Arora had been kind enough to lend me. Now dressed and no longer soaked in blood I felt refreshed, rejuvenated, and ready to get to work. I had come up with a simple but hopefully effective plan. Basically, if I could get her to spend some time with me I could give her a different impression of humanity. Finally ready I opened the door where I was surprised to see Arora waiting for me. **“Have you been standing there this whole time?”** **“No… maybe, you sure took your time”** **“Let me guess, you didnt want to leave the dangerous human unattended, right?”** **“Captain wanted me to take you to the bridge after you got yourself cleaned up. She wants to plan our next move and for some reason wants your input”** Not wanting to keep my host waiting I nodded and followed her down to the very end of the hall to a similar pair of large double doors just like the pirates. The doors opened as we drew closer, allowing starlight to shine through from the large glass dome that encased the entire room. Just in front of the door sat a large chair, I assumed was for the captain, that overlooked all the ship's control consols and was sat in front of a large rectangular table where Nar and the others were gathered around.