Background: 7+ years in HR, B.S. in HR Management and a current grad student for a Masters in HR.
As I approach separating from the Army I figured back in April pursuing my SHRM-CP would be extremely beneficial (especially while It’s still free for me) so I signed up to take the exam between Spring and summer semester (May 15th, I’m a day ahead of the US). I had a “great plan” of studying before the exam and of course plans don’t always go as expected and I didn’t study… at all.
Come test day I was extremely nervous. Reading other post of fails and how difficult the test was I really thought I set my self up for failure. It was too late to change the exam date so I decided I would just send it.
I highly recommend anyone who decides to take it at home to use a laptop. I logged in 20 minutes early and started the test 10 minutes late because prometric had me sling my desktop all around the room, under my table, and in random positions to see corners. I felt like a fool lol.
The test is broken into two sections. I recommend finishing the first section and taking your break before moving on to section two. The test clock doesn’t stop so it’s better to burn your remaining section time instead of the section ahead.
Knowledge base questions vs. situational judgement items: the “hardest” questions were definitely the knowledge base questions. Skimming through a quizlet I did see several of these exact questions were on there. The situational questions, to me, felt like anyone who has common HR knowledge could fly through it. I read before hand “don’t answer how you would do it, answer how SHRM would do it.” I would say - answer the question as if you work HR in a perfect world where your company has unlimited resources. Use process of elimination it was almost a gimme for two of the answers to be obviously incorrect. When deciding which of the other two answers would be best, I would say it was almost always the longer response or the one where HR is having a direct impact or business role.
The more I took the test the more confident I felt and completed the test about an hour early. I immediately had a “congratulations you passed” after finishing the exam followed by an email from SHRM with a presumptive pass. Don’t scare your self fearing you’ll find out later you actually failed. The more likely scenario is a presumptive fail followed by a pass (so there’s still hope don’t beat yourself up either way).
Overall I would say don’t fall for all of the costly study materials. If you have excess funds go for it otherwise quizlet and YouTube have all the materials for free. Go in confidently and don’t over think any of the questions. Give an answer and move on. Utilize the flag tool if you’re stuck as some questions were answered later in the test. In my opinion, this is not the same test that baffled people posting about it a couple years ago. You are an HR professional so let the answers come naturally to you. I’m open to answering any particular question for those who are about to test and stressing as much as I did.

[13][f]
Height: 5 foot-ish
Weight: 85 pounds-ish (i think)?
Race: White
Complaint duration: 1+ year
Current Meds: lots of water, vitamins (B, Magnesium)
My daughter has been having a hell of a time engaging in sports or even mid-to-light activity. She's penciled in to be the starting guard on her championship basketball team next season, but she can't get 5 to 10 minutes into any aerobic exercise without getting heavy, weak, tunnel-vision faint. Then she has to quit the activity for about an hour to recover--sometimes recovery takes more than a day.
We just finished a stress test and she aced it. 200 BPM heartrate, she felt the "dizzy" problem as bad as ever during the test, and no problems with oxygen, BP, nor heart stuff. She ACED it. No POTS suspected. We've also seen two neuros who have suggested that maybe it's migraine related but they weren't terribly worried. An ENT was dismissive and said maybe she's anxious, which really upset her because she insists this isn't anxiety. I agree--it happens at home, it happens with friends, it happens on long walks. It does happen at practice, too, but that's because it's consistent. Not because she's anxious. She previously passed an EKG and ultrasound, too. Perfect blood tests.
We don't know where to look or how to stop this next. Someone offered us a sleep study to make sure she's getting rest, but we're not crazy about that idea--if she doesn't exercise for a few days, we don't have a problem. When she does, we do. So it doesn't seem like sleep is heavily influencing this.
We have a few months until the next season kicks in and I promised her she'd be ready to play again. So I want to help her find answers. The only other thing I can say is she's always been super athletic and this does seem to have happened post COVID last year.
Please does anyone else have an experience with something like this? Has anyone found answers? We don't have an idea yet of what to try next and need to ask the crowd. Thank you for your thoughts in advance!

Sorry in advance if this has already been asked here. I did little amounts of googling and didn't find a discussion on this topic. But I'm sure this is by no means an original idea.
I'm not talking a sims game in a vault or vault manager. I had this idea back in 2018 with a friend of mine and upon replaying Fallout 4 after watching the TV show, I was reminded of my idea.
Vault-Tec possibly having a vault where the experiment was "what if humanity continued like normal? relatively speaking"
It would be like The Truman Show if you have seen that movie, a simulated world, but unlike the Truman Show, nobody knows its a simulation anymore, they've all died out by now. This would allow the setting to explore the aesthetic and culture of the 60s with hippies "free love" and possibly the 70s with disco or even 80s with hairbands/metal/punk. Would fans like that or would that be taboo to stray too far away from the 50s?
If people get too far to the edges, automatrons and security bots attack them and take them to get their minds wiped and given a phobia. A phobia of water or flying or if they seem like too much trouble make them so agoraphobic they never leave their house again.
I guess the only real way to bring the wasteland vibe to this vault would be to either A. have raiders break into the vault and then all hell breaks loose, society collapses. or B. The simulation finally after 100s of years is degrading and falling apart and people finally uncover the truth, revolt, all hell breaks loose, and they kinda sorta start their own wasteland within the vault by themselves.
Maybe this idea would be more suited for an expansive DLC vs a full fledged game.
IDK, I just thought it could be a neat idea. Discuss in the comments if you want, I would like to have a conversation about it

[13][f]
Height: 5 foot-ish
Weight: 85 pounds-ish (i think)?
Race: White
Complaint duration: 1+ year
Current Meds: lots of water, vitamins (B, Magnesium)
My daughter has been having a hell of a time engaging in sports or even mid-to-light activity. She's penciled in to be the starting guard on her championship basketball team next season, but she can't get 5 to 10 minutes into any aerobic exercise without getting heavy, weak, tunnel-vision faint. Then she has to quit the activity for about an hour to recover--sometimes recovery takes more than a day.
We just finished a stress test and she aced it. 200 BPM heartrate, she felt the "dizzy" problem as bad as ever during the test, and no problems with oxygen, BP, nor heart stuff. She ACED it. No POTS suspected. We've also seen two neuros who have suggested that maybe it's migraine related but they weren't terribly worried. An ENT was dismissive and said maybe she's anxious, which really upset her because she insists this isn't anxiety. I agree--it happens at home, it happens with friends, it happens on long walks. It does happen at practice, too, but that's because it's consistent. Not because she's anxious. She previously passed an EKG and ultrasound, too. Perfect blood tests.
We don't know where to look or how to stop this next. Someone offered us a sleep study to make sure she's getting rest, but we're not crazy about that idea--if she doesn't exercise for a few days, we don't have a problem. When she does, we do. So it doesn't seem like sleep is heavily influencing this.
We have a few months until the next season kicks in and I promised her she'd be ready to play again. So I want to help her find answers. The only other thing I can say is she's always been super athletic and this does seem to have happened post COVID last year.
Please does anyone else have an experience with something like this? Has anyone found answers? We don't have an idea yet of what to try next and need to ask the crowd. Thank you for your thoughts in advance!

Hello guys,
So I do a lot of A/B mixing where I basically snap to 1 out of 8 reference tracks in a Reference parent folder remotely with an Ipad. It has been going very well, but with my desire to save as much time as possible, I would like to create my reference folder quicker that I am currently doing. Let me explain my procedure:

1. Find reference tracks and add them to the reference folder
   
2. Find appropriate sections in the reference tracks, cut them and seamlessly loop them across the whole project
   
3. Dry run each track within a time selection and match their LUFS-I
   

The third step can be tiring, because manually increasing or decreasing the knobs of each track to get a specific LUFS-I can be a long process. I'd like to know if there's a way that I can scan the LUFS-I of a track, and apply it to other tracks automatically.
Thank you :)

Situation: 15yo girl(no blood relation), my grandmother(80yo) is her guardian. "B" started living with my wife and I(early 30s) 6 weeks ago. Full story: Parents were on and off drugs, in and out of jail types. Dad passed just a couple weeks after she moved in. Mom is on the streets, most likely. B was being raised by her grandmother, a friend of my gma. B's gma passed when she was 3. My gma took her in. Has raised her for about 12yrs. has legal guardianship. When I was 20 and B was a bratty kid(I now realize she was dealing with trauma) , I didn't care much for her. Our relationship has evolved from "cousins" to uncle/niece to more like fathedaughter.
Grandma let her move in with us. B has usually struggled with school for a while. Got in to some bad habits in 8thgrade. Ditching class kinda stuff. We found vapes (nic and thc) I and wife moved back to town 2 yrs ago, so we kind of only saw her at summers and Christmas for 8 years, so we've kinda been out of the loop most of her school years. Only know what grandma shared.
Highschool has been more of a challenge. I knew her grades were bad. told gma to bring her to our house after school. My wife and I both have education degrees(wife is a SPED aide about to start her credential program and I used to teach 6th grade). She came over for tutoring/ homework advice a couple times. I've gone to grandma's house a few times. It's just tough when I'm working full time+ and still have to do upkeep on our own house. Gma lives 20 minutes away, which isn't much, but hard to get there every/ every-other day.
ALL that to say: Since she started living with us, i've really stepped up how involved i've been with school. I'm running into issues where staff won't talk to me. And I'm looking for advice from other educators.
examples of some of the issues/interactions:
-Day 2 after spring break(she moved in during) she has an IEP meeting. Grandma had already requestd I be included. Day 1, I tried asking the office if they can resend grandma a copy so she can share it with me. I and my wife wanted to see her previous accommodations before the IEP the next day. Registrar says she can't give it to me. I Know. I just want to make sure her guardian has a copy and it isn't lost in a file box or in email. I kinda raised my voice and ended up having a convo with her sped case worker.
-a week ago, I'm trying to get her unofficial transcript to send to a charter school. Gma had it on her phone, but her phone is frustrating to use with the text enlarged. I try pulling it up to print at work so she can run it back to the school around the corner. I call the parent help center to find out what the transcript is under on the parentvue site. He said he has to talk to gma as the ed rights holder. FERPA doesn't cover how to use an app, right? Saw him in person yesterday before another IEP meeting. He remembered me because I told someone else he wouldn't help me. (he didn't help because he didn't know where the "print transcript" button was after I had gma say "hi" on speaker)
-Registrar says there's no release of information that guardian can sign. No FERPA waiver or way to extend me to be included. Have to go to the courts and be added as her legal guardian(haven't started that lengthy process). says parent help center did the right thing by not telling me how to access the transcript.
-grandma told me to arrange a meeting with me, her and counselor(re:summer school) because I work and she is retired with a wide open schedule. Called school. explain, relays to counselor. secretary said counselor can only talk to gma. I explain that she told me to make the appt. She will be at the meeting i'm trying to schedule. secretary relays and then the counselor gets on the phone. We make an appt. I understand he is limited in what he can tell me, but he wouldn't even take my call.
-we saw AP after that counselor meeting. explained the situation. He said that they could get sued giving the info. (who would the school get sued by? guardian wants me to have the info!) He gave me a caregiver's affidavit. since she is living with me, I can get the day-to-day info from teachers that i'm wanting. Later he calls me, says he looked into it. Because I live out of the boundary, she would be forced to move to the HS by our house. Which we don't want because I think there's more substance issues there. So i'm back to no info
-some of her teacher responded to my email. I was just asking their late work policy and general classroom things like that. Where do they post resources. Several of them have very sparse canvas sites(i get it, teachers are busy)half are nearly blank. 2 teachers don't post grades on parentvue website. 1 responded to me. 1 replied to gma, and she forwarded it. I had to get a different AP involved to get a response. She also called guardian before giving me the info. I didn't think class policies are restricted info.
This was a long post. I'm just really frustrated because she is going to fail and I was involved too late. Feels like staff are more concerned with following over-rigid policy and not helping me to help our student.
TLDR: 15yo living with me. Not her guardian. Most staff won't share even general info and the district doesn't have a FERPA policy or waivers/ROI

When they start pulling away that’s a huge sign the discard is imminent. It doesn’t matter what reason they give for it, look at their actions. You can’t trust their words only their actions.
In my relationship experience with my gf, we were on and off for five years and cycled back over a dozen times. I’ve been hit with blind sided discards throughout the years. Usually the discards happened when I thought things were at their best in the relationship and we were having our most closest and intimate times together. I loved her but my heart had hardened over the years and it morphed into a challenge and experiment for me as I am very interested in human psychology. The last three break ups were all initiated by me after I saw set boundaries bulldozed through by her.
In the past, I would have lingered and waited for the axe to fall not believing she would or could actually leave. Now armed with all this hard learned experience, I prepared and waited for her next hoover. Sure enough she came back each time. Sometimes after much more added betrayal. Sometimes she would monkey branch, she would never admit to it but I would usually find out months or years after the fact. She was great at keeping secrets and sneaking around and telling lies. This last time was more of an experiment for me. Her trigger after the love bombing stage and first discard was sexual intimacy which invoked emotional intimacy. Usually right after an intimate encounter she would either start a nonsensical fight and use my reaction as a reason to leave or would just disappear and ghost.
I’ve struggled with does she only have an avoidant attachment style or is there a cluster B disorder also at play. I really think it is BPD with covert NPD traits combined with an avoidant attachment style forming a mental trifecta; a relationship disaster. I knew this last time wouldn’t work. A zebra can’t change its stripes.
She contacted me again to get back together again. I played hard to get trying to decide if I really wanted this or not. I demanded numerous boundaries be agreed to before I would agree trying again. I pushed her so far away, I thought she might just say never mind but when I saw her reaching her limit, I relented and accepted her back with many boundaries in place. I told myself if these were broke I was done and I would leave. One important boundary was being blocked on social media. She would always keep me blocked on FB and other platforms while we were in a relationship. I felt it was to shield her harem from knowing about me and me knowing about them and what she was doing. She kept other ex’s as friends on FB and actually went back to him after we broke up on two occasions.
I often wondered if we put off having sex could we build a stronger foundation and have a longer lasting relationship. I also didn’t want physical intimacy to cloud my judgement and give me false feelings of love. So we both decided to not be intimate right away and just date and put an emphasis on building a friendship and getting close with out sex. Things were great in the beginning. She was trying hard. She opened up in ways I had always wanted. Some of those were because of boundaries I set in the beginning. I got to meet her family and friends. I saw a lot of the same cluster B behaviors in others close to her and her family members from suicide to serial cheating, multiple and short lived relationships etc…
Slowly I could see the mental fatigue on her face. She began struggling about two months in. We decided to plan a weekend getaway and be intimate. I put down deposits on an Airbnb and made plans. She started an argument the week of the trip. Her issue was that I offered to bring her to my gym as a guest so we could do something healthy together and bond. She just thought that was the worst idea ever. During the argument she also told me she could be talking to someone else instead. She then kicked me out of her house. I thought that was the end of the experiment. In the past any conflict no matter how mild would have been reason enough for her to break up.
Low in behold, I was truly surprised, I woke up to a good morning text from her apologizing saying she was not running away and I was her person and she loved me. She stated she still didn’t feel comfortable going on the trip. I lost deposits. I later questioned her about who she was referring to she could be talking to instead. She said she never could have said that as it would have been mean to say.
Fast forward approximately two months later the old argument about the gym was brought up again by her. It didn’t get to the same level of being kicked out of her house. I kept my cool and just gray rocked her and didn’t react. I just affirmed her and said ok. It seemed to give her some relief and not escalate things. We decided to plan a weekend at a casino where we would spend the night. This went off without a hitch. We had a great time and we were very intimate and had great sex. Afterwards laying in bed enjoying the afterglow, she commented this was never our problem. I asked what was our problem, she said it was her running away. She promised to never do that again. The next day we went her parents house for Sunday dinner. Things were great, she seemed so in love with me. I was elated. We were walking into her parents side entrance when I noticed how happy she was and I commented someone looks like they are in love. She turned around and looked at me with the strangest face. Almost like fear. I was taken aback but didn’t say anything as we were walking into her parents house and then greeted everyone. It was like a switch had just flipped. She became distant and quiet. I didn’t see her again until the following sunday. She gave excuses about having to work a night shift that was at first going to alternate every other day to nightly. At the end of the week she invited back to her parents house for dinner. She still texted but I didn’t receive any phone calls and the texts contained less affectionate terms and only offered up I loves you’s only after I did first.
While at her parents house her mother asked if I was going to her birthday party the next night at a restaurant. I said I would love to but I didn’t know anything about it. She gave her mom a wtf look and then said let’s see how he acts first. Me and her mother both looked at each other and laughed. The next night I show up at her house to pick her and her teenage daughter up who had been committed for attempting suicide in the past for the purpose of going to her mother’s bday party.
Two days in the future was Valentine’s Day, I asked what restaurant would she like to go too. She was like I don’t won’t to go out and gave a reason as the restaurants would be to busy but after my persistent questioning she offered possibly a lunch instead and said she would let me know. I dropped it as she was getting visibly angered. This was totally out of character because she always liked going out to busy places where live music and beer was had. I said ok and we continued on to the party. We were at a restaurant and normally she sits right beside me thigh to thigh and she would keep a hand on my leg. That night she sat atleast a foot apart from me and never touched me the whole night. We barely even spoke. Every time I tried she was dismissive.
After dinner we went back to her house and she sat me down to tell me that she felt pressured to see me after work as she missed going to stores and felt rushed to get home to see me. I didn’t react and just offered a compromise and said I understood how about we schedule a date night then. She never responded and just dropped it. She then brought up the gym argument again. I didn’t respond to it. I told her I was her safe place and to just relax. My head was swimming with thoughts of here we go again. I leave soon after her telling me she was tired and I got my peck on the cheek and left early. I did not receive a good night text or ask if I made it home safely. I sent a good night message and fell asleep.
The next morning I wake to no messages which was very abnormal. I normally get good morning messages from her and I love you’s every day. I sent my normal messages and she responds back saying she needed that. But nothing more additional. I go through my day and get nothing else from her. Normally she sends texts all day long. Towards 4 pm I send a text from a gym and a selfie saying hi , I love you. She hearted the photo and said then said she was going to her mom’s house and sent me a selfie of her. She was all dressed up and didn’t look like she was just going to her moms. I was hoping to get an invite to come over. Nothing more came from her. I asked about her daughter as she had was dealing with possible Covid symptoms and I got nothing in response. I didn’t feel like going home so I went to the movies by myself. Sitting there I was thinking why am I putting up with this. I’m really not happy. I feel so alone.
I go to bed and send my normal good night texts. I wake up in the morning and I did not receive any texts. I decided to try calling her and all my calls were forwarded. I then check her Facebook and now see that I am blocked.
I remembered the boundaries I set and the purpose of the boundaries. The purpose was to respect myself and not be used by her again. I did not want to be hurt and abused by her again. With so many discards done in the past by her, I felt the discard was in full swing. I felt she was possibly cheating and the push back was her trying to create space to water a new infatuation. She had recently transferred to a new department within her company and was promoted and allowed to select people she wanted for her office. My gut was telling me she was talking to someone at work which would explain the recent late night hours.
I decided I needed to end the relationship. I sent her a break up text as she always ended it with me that way. Before that happened to me so many times, I never would have chosen to break up over text. But it did allow me to spell out everything I saw and what I felt. It contained my closure and reasoning in an attempt to make my own closure for myself because I knew she would not give any closure and also to hold her accountable. I ended the break up text with an open door and said if I’m wrong please explain. I will listen. Her response was “Wow you said enough.” “I’m done.” I replied “yep, I know”.
Her mother reached out and apologized and expressed regret. I told her everything. I felt vindicated. She said her and her husband thought so highly of me and hoped it would have worked. She did not know if her daughter was seeing anyone else. We have since stopped communicating but we remain friends on FB.
I credit the lack of sexual intimacy as the reason I was able to look at the relationship with sober eyes and step away when I saw the signs. The signs were abuse. They truly were. If you love a person you would never ask for space and give such a silly reason. Sex would have produced false feelings of love. I was able to look at the relationship objectively and I was actually not happy. My needs weren’t being met. I felt so drained and unseen. I didn’t feel loved. She loved the way I loved her but it wasn’t reciprocated.
I felt the need perhaps due to the trauma bond and the perceived betrayal to learn if in fact she had monkey branched in order to help me move away from her permanently.
I reached out to another family member and the ex she monkey branched to in the past. I explained the above information and I ended up not receiving any new information. Both told her I had reached out and her ex blocked me. My ex then sent me an email demanding I stop contacting her family and friends and further more she would be filing a protection order. I never received the order. My only regrets was reaching out to her family and her ex. It just gave her a reason to smear me and to tell everyone I’m nutty person.
I cant say I’m 100% hoover proof at the moment but I have started dating again. I don’t think she will come back again because I believe she feels I can’t be used anymore and furthermore I’m willing to reveal her bad deeds to her family and friends. I think she will choose to move on to a fresh target who does not know her and what she is capable of doing.

TW: weight loss
Made a throw away account, but basically I am just seeking some advice as my boyfriend and Is sex life has really died down in the past year and I’m not sure if I can do anything about it. I’ve expressed myself to him but it feels he excuses it to other things in very defensive manners and never really cares about there maybe being a issue or taking initiative so that I get reassurance that doesn’t let me get mixed in my insecurities. For ex: he will admit to me and agree our sex life isn’t what it was at one point but then when I say anything like the fact I don’t feel I even like give him a boner as often he will focus on the times he has got a boner and gaslight me versus being like “yeah no idk what’s been up maybe it’s my medication or something but I want to have sex more too!” I know he would never tell me if it was because of just being less attracted to me- so like I just feel stuck because my intuition is telling me it’s that.
I lost a lot of weight in our relationship and it’s hard to not think that that’s affected his sex drive. I wouldn’t maybe be so insecure about this if nothing changed but I literally just don’t feel my body makes him as horny or excited anymore. If anything I’ve received more attention from other guys since I’ve lost weight, I in general feel more confident as I used to be a bit chubbier and now I feel way more in shape but sexually I don’t have like a huge ass or boobs anymore. I really do want to start hitting the gym and gain back a butt again but I can’t do much about my boobs and hate the fact that I want to change for someone else even though he hasn’t communicated wanting me to change- his actions being different can’t help but make my mind spiral. As I was losing weight I didn’t expect this and feel like if anything since I was chubbier expected him to be more attracted to me when I slimed down.
I always had small boobs but I had enough to like grab lol and I wouldn’t say I exactly have much today. They are still like perky and nice in my opinion but i would never send like a tit pic for example because of how flat I am like I would just feel like a boy taking a photo of their chest lol. TW: weight loss and weight mentioned, I used to be 160lbs with a B cup and now I’m about 115lbs and have a A-AA cup. I played a lot of sports so I had a very muscular butt which I have lost overtime with my new lifestyle of school+ work.
What made me super insecure recently is we were watching a movie and a very porn type scene came on. The girl was seducing the guy in the film and had tripped/bent down showing her cleavage which was a lot. I kinda wish he just grabbed his phone and didn’t look but shit happens it’s 2024. It was a movie where like time reversed lol so the scene played like 2-3 times. What sucked was I felt his heart literally start pounding out of his chest during this scene and it has really ate up my mind today at work because I want him to get excited like that over me and it just feels impossible. She was a stereotypical blonde with huge boobs and I am like basic brunette with no chest so it definitely hurt. It feels like we have sex enough for him to like say we have sex and have that as his defense but theres often no huge desire from him(and I don’t usually get prioritized to finish) I just hate always feeling like there’s something wrong with me for being horny.
My insecurities have actually like made me want to get like a boob job just so I have stuff to like get in his face and make him excited since I feel like skin and bones when in comes to our relationship in the fact I don’t feel I can like make him horny anymore. I realize this is my issue majorly and I need therapy but I am also just so in the dark with a lack of reassurance and it’s so confusing because maybe i am underweight and shouldn’t expect him to be attracted to me in this way but also I can’t help it?? I’ve been trying to eat more and stuff but my boobs I know are just naturally small. I will hit the gym and try to get more of a ass to help that part- Im just confused. Like how do I navigate this. Is this just me being unattractive or is it more so maybe his issues with porn? He doesn’t watch it now but he def did before me and we had a problem in the past where I did find saved photos of a bot nude/just struggled with him not unfollowing girls online and stuff so of course that’s kinda where insecurities also began to stem from. ANY reply or initial insights would mean the world. Thank you so much ❤️❤️❤️
TDLR: I’ve been insecure in my relationship due to our sex life being a lot less frequent and often initiated by me. Overall I feel like I have noticed him just less sexually attracted to me, which when we were watching a movie and a porn scene came on that excited him, really hurt because I was opposite to the body type of the girl on TV. Is there anything I can do here or is my partner maybe just not into me physically?

Matt Finch of Mythmere Games just published OSRIC mission statement at the Knights & Knaves Alehouse:
Since the “OSRIC's Path Forward” thread, there has been more discussion about OSRIC, licensing, and so forth.
Stuart and I are working on an OSRIC 3.0, but it will be under the AELF License (a Mythmere Games license that's similar to the OGL). OSRIC 3.0 will be produced by Mythmere Games, and we are planning (tentatively) for a Kickstarter in September or October of this year.
A few points:
1) Simply maintaining OSRIC under the OGL is possible at this time, but in the long run I think it's a bit of a risk. WotC can probably cut off access to new users of the OGL at any time by “withdrawing the open offer”. I don't think I'm giving WotC a roadmap here; they almost certainly are aware of this approach to the license. They wanted to do more than that to kill it quickly, but there's a much more reliable way to poison it over time, which is simply to withdraw the offer to “sign on” to the OGL. But after the massive backlash to their attempt to kill the license at one blow, they will have to wait a while before mentioning the OGL again. This potential future withdrawal of the offer would create a problem for anyone new who wanted to publish something for OSRIC, so it behooves us to move to a different license now, before the axe eventually comes down.
2) The ORC license has some problems with easy usability. I won't go into those because it's complicated and also because there's discussion about it in lots of other places. The AELF License, since it works in the same way as the OGL, is familiar enough that it can be adopted relatively easily by anyone familiar with the OGL.
3) OSRIC 3.0 is intended to be completely backward-compatible with OSRIC 2.0, and it shouldn't require any “new versions” of adventures that have been published in the past. There might turn out to be minor glitches in terms of backward compatibility, but those will be the exception.
4) The reasons for coming out with a new version:
a) First, the license, as mentioned above.
b) Secondly, it's to meet the needs of a younger batch of gamers in a context where the PDFs of the original books are available from WotC (which wasn't the case when we originally published OSRIC 2.0). This means several different avenues of approach.
—– The writing style will use bullet points and other visual call-outs to avoid the “wall of text” effect. Even those of us raised in pre-internet days are starting to find the bullet-point arrangement preferable to a long block that doesn't visually separate and organize the more important elements of the text.
— We're going to include a VTT-friendly method of scale since so many people now game online.
— We're going to try to make this version what EOTB calls a “teaching edition,” meaning lots of guidance for playing the game. The “how to play” information is in the original books to a degree, but it can be presented at the forefront and that's what anyone new to the whole OSR needs. Also, AD&D is simply more complex than other OSR games like B/X, so it needs to be presented in a step-by-step format that draws the learner into the process.
More information to come later.
Great move to focus on teaching and accessibility!
First edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons is packed to the brim with stuff that stood the test of time, but its presentation and density sometimes scares people away.
Stuart and Matt are more than capable in producing text that is both inspiring and informative—hence I'm looking very much forward to OSRIC 3.0.

Helloo again Gift of Games! I just had to come back to ask for Ultrakill (AKA the most amazing game everr!!!!!!!!!) I think this is my 13th attempt but i'll still keep going! :D
I actually have played the game again a bit more than before thanks to someone! And I can say that this game IS AMAZINGGGGGG. I mean I love it so much! ULTRAKILL is basically a very fast paced "Boomer Shooter". You play as V1, an old war robot prototype who goes to Hell itself to fuel itself with blood after Humanity has gone extinct. You go through the layers of hell based on a book called "Dante's Infernos" (correct me if I'm wrong lmao). The game is built around the style system and comboing weapons, the cooler your plays are, the more style you get. And at the end of the level you get a grade from D C B A S or the special P rank.
Ok now onto why I want this game. There is, so much tech in this game it's insane, a ton of weapons seem to work together seamlessly like mixing a ricochet coin with a railgun causing an Ultra ricochet. You can parry the projectiles from your shotgun and rocket launcher and so on and so forth. Really this game seems it was made with passion. the Music, amaaazing, I love the breakcore and how everything feels unique despite sounding similar. Graphics, well, they are made to replicate old ps1 and ps2 graphics and I feel like it works really well! Each layer of hell feels very unique on it's own and easy to recognize, Limbo is a fake paradise, lust is a big purple city with lots of electricity, greed is a desert and so on. The bosses are also just really well made, V2 and Gabriel (judge of hell) and a secret boss for P ranking all of act 1 are more fast paced and harder to aim with small hitboxes, but Corpse of Minos and Leviathan are like giants and are just fun to parry and shoot.
The story, also pretty good! Each enemy and such have their own small lore and stuff for people who actually want to go deep in the lore. This world takes place on an earth where god went "Oh damn these humans suck" And just left. So the angels in heaven scrambled to get order back in heaven and created a council (it doesn't go well) I won't spoil the entire thing cause it's pretty fun to figure out!
I'm again asking GOG for this game because I'm still looking into finding a good drawing tablet (yes I'm still doing this, figuring out which tablet I should buy is surprisingly really hard) And I'm saving up money for one! If you've played Ultrakill tell me what your favorite weapon tech is! :)
Well, Thanks for reading this, I hope I get the game, but if I don't it's not much of a big deal. :)
STEAM - https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198873626798/
GAME LINK - https://store.steampowered.com/app/1229490/ULTRAKILL/
thank you! :D

For context my dream school is UHCO. I just finished my junior year of undergrad as a chem major and biology minor from a state uni in Tx located. I put in a lot of work and hate to have put in all this work for no compensation.
Also I didn’t realize how long this was, I apologies. Feel free to skip to end or just read the first line of the bulletins. Moreover please feel free to send/suggest personal statement, secondary app essay idea, scholarships based off any of this info, etc. It would be so so so appreciated!!!

1. My GPA is an 3.88 & my prerequisite gpa for UHCO is a 3.97. I only received a single B (1hr lab) in my major. The only other B in STEM classes was in a biology (3hrs). Outside of that the only Bs I’ve received were in core class I my senior year of HS. We had to go virtual half way through and I did not have laptop, wifi, a computer, nor cell service (I live in rural area) I was getting it done with my phone and public wifi from the town 15 min over before things really shut down bc of the pandemic.
   
2. I will graduate in Spring 2025 with my American Chemical Association accreditation (ACS). It’s basically a stamp for that ensures the chem program has academic rigor, its optional for chemistry majors.
   
3. I have like 80+ hours of undergraduate research and am doing a Summer Research Experience (SRE). This is a Summer 2 course w 30hrs/week of research. There are planned future conferences like ACS & other annual symposiums to ensure proper scientific communication.
   
4. I have 300+ volunteer hours. This includes was earned from serving my church, volunteer organizations, MD Anderson Cancer Treatment camp councilor, representing chem at recruitment fairs, being in student panals, etc.
   
5. I have been apart of 3 orgs & officers of 2: A non profit organization for drunk driving (we volunteer from 9PM to 3AM offering free rides to intoxicated students, kinda like free Uber) for 2 years, an honor society association for 3 years, and a Christian org for 3 years. I was treasurer for the non profit org for a year. I am currently the vice president of my christian org and have been for a year, I got promoted from treasurer which I held for a year as well .
   
6. I am in the honors program at my college and of have taken the honors section of following STEM classes: gen chem I/II w lab, & intro to stats. I’ve also honors contracted Advanced Inorganic Chemistry, and Comprehensive Biochemistry. My honors GPA is a 4.0.
   
7. I was a tutor for the Academic Assistance and Resource Assistance (AARC) at my university. This program is regionally & nationally accredited. The tutors can only be selected by professors and must have certifications from International Tutor Training Program. I was selected for Intro to Stats and Calc I & II. I have tutored for 2 years and was team lead for the Calculus section for a year.
   
8. The AARC reached out to chemistry professor teaching summer classes and for recommendations and I was selected. I was only under the program of mathematics at the AARC. But this opened the door for me and I tutored Summer I & II for Gen Chem I & II.
   
9. I was asked by my gen chem prof (& advisor) to be a TA for his gen chem I & II lab. I have remained his TA for a year. I was also asked by my O chem professor to be a TA his O chem I lab. I accepted and was asked to continue to next section but couldn’t- scheduling conflicts.
   
10. I have about 35 hours of shadowing from varying specialties of optometry and a few from ophthalmologist.
    
11. I am taking my OAT in mid July
    
12. I don’t think HS stuff matters but I graduate as Historian & have many academic/club officer achievements and a lot of service hours. (Also, I went to a small rural 1A HS w/ only 29 in grad class. I just barely made top 10% as 3rd ranked)
    
13. I’ve gotten academia awards/scholarships of different kind. For things like service hours, good gpa, chemistry focused, honors colleges, etc. Some of which are only granted based off recommendations.
    

Keeping some of these bullets in mind I have been a full time student (~15 hrs) while simultaneously working two jobs (Tutoring position and TAing) and held two officer position w two dif orgs for approximately a year. There was also a semester where I had three jobs (Tutoring position (whilst I was team lead), and TAing both Gen chem and O chem) on top of the officer positions.
TUTOR SUMMARY DEBRIEF (Skills that could be built on for app) Feel free to skip.

 * Walk-in table. This is where students can walk-in w/o appointment and find the subject they need help with. The Walk-in table I served was the ‘Big Math Walk-in Table’ for Calc I, its pre reqs, and all lower level math. At any given time I could have 10 students, where a few clients are there for algebra, a few for analytical geometry, finite math, pre calc, Calc I, Calc II, etc. * Student Initiated Session (SI). This is a form of tutoring where a professor recommends a past student for employment at the AARC to be a student instructor for their class. This individual is required to attend the lecture and to prep/plan a 50 min. secondary lesson outside of class twice a week. Basically, the students offer another lecture. Sometimes these lectures are based off what the students recommend or what the professor suggest * Appointments. This is where student select a tutor to hold a 50 min. private tutor session with the client and create/adjust study strategies and review based on there needs 

Under mathematics I worked walk-in table for Calc I & Intro to Stats for a semester and a professor noticed the quality difference of students work & an upward trend from my tutoring and inquired about me. She later offered me a Calc I SI position. I then worked SI, Walk-in and appointments. After a year, The Walk-in table had an immense amount of Calc II clients and I was one of the few who were qualified to tutor it (My help was needed more there than SI). I was then offered the Team Lead position over the Calc I program.
Under chemistry I work the walk-in tables for the courses I was recommended for. Following this summer I was able to take chem & math appointments.
SUMMARY (The part that I actually need help and advise on)
All this to be said, I am first gen college student from an ‘economically disadvantaged’ family of an 7, I have had 4 siblings (2M & 2F) who’ve all tried college and have flunked out. In Spring ‘25 I will be the first person from both of my parents side of the family to earned a bachelors degree. (My dad never finished HS and none of my grandparents even finished middle school). I have dedicated a lot of time to my studies. I primarily worked so hard so I could be able to eleviate some financial requirements for my eduction. I even took my senior year of HS and freshmen year of college simultaneously to save money. I had refractive and strabismic amblyopia from 4th til 10th grade before corrective surgery and it gave me a passion for optometry.
I would like to go to UHCO as it would give my partner more job opportunities w/ his degree. I am applying to both optom schools in Texas and the one in Oklahoma. I hate to have put in all this work for no compensation and am curious as what to do?
Once more feel free to suggest personal statement ideas, secondary apps, how to words this info better, or scholarships based of this info. It would be so so so appreciated!!!

Hey hey! Here are some fun things that are happening around town this week:

Wednesday

• Santana Row Farmer’s Market Santana Row (Between Olin Ave. and Olsen Dr.) 4-8 p.m. FREE Sample fresh fruits, veggies, and other treats from South County farmers. (Runs through 9/25)
  
• Tully Night Market Tully Community Ballfields (880 Tully Rd., San Jose) 5:30 p.m. FREE Check out local makers, artists, and shakers to live music with the Trujillo Selena Tribute band.
  
• San Jose Shakeout Series Creekside Socials (20 Barack Obama Blvd., San Jose) 6-8 p.m. FREE The third week of this weekly running event features live music from Blue House and DJ Sumabat, with food and drink from Churros el Guero and Hot Papa. (Runs through 5/29)
  
• Electric Six + Supersuckers + Volk The Ritz (400 S. First St., San Jose) 7 p.m. $20 Advance, $25 Day of Show Don’t you want to know how we keep startin’ fires? It’s my desire! Danger! Danger! High voltage!
  
• The Caravan Lounge Comedy Show Caravan Lounge (98 S. Almaden Ave., San Jose) 9:30 p.m. FREE Ato Walker hosts this week’s rotating list of local comedians.
  

Thursday

• Bay to Breakers Shakeout Sunnyvale Bay Trail (293-327 W. Caribbean Dr., Sunnyvale) 6 p.m. FREE Don your Bay to Breakers gear and run, jog, or walk to your own pace at this running series.
  
• Dwight Clark Legacy Series California Theater (345 S. First St., San Jose) 7 p.m. $30-$287 Along with lively conversations with current and former 9ers players, NBC Sports hosts a presentation of the Dwight Clark Awards.
  
• Drink and Draw Art Boutiki (44 Race St., San Jose) 7 p.m. FREE Bring out your inner artiste while you sip on a tasty beverage and enjoy the sound of Digging Sound Collect. Crayons, paper, pencils, and other utensils provided.
  
• Chris Porter San Jose Improv (62 S. Second St., San Jose) Thu 8 p.m., Fri 7:30 + 9:45 p.m., Sat 7 p.m. + 9:30 p.m. $22-$72 From NBC’s “Last Comic Standing,” and his Netflix special “Ugly and Angry,” this comedian has distinguished himself as a no-frills, no-sound cues, no puppets performer. (Runs through 5/18)
  
• Austin Nasso Rooster T Feathers Comedy Club (Address) Thu-Fri 8 p.m., Sat-Sun 7 p.m. $25 Admission, $35 VIP You may know this former Microsoft software engineer from his recurring appearances on “The Howard Stern Show.” (Runs through 5/19)
  
• Pressure Drop DJ Night Caravan Lounge (98 S. Almaden Ave., San Jose) 9 p.m. FREE Join DJs Norbert + Fuchsia for a night of punk, ska, reggae, soul, and R&B.
  

Friday

• Salsa y Cerveza Garden at the Flea (1590 Berryessa Rd., San Jose) 5-9 p.m. FREE Learn to Salsa dance and browse flea market deals while you groove to Union Timbera and gnosh on bites from local food trucks.
  
• Movie Night in the Park: “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” Meadowfair Park (Corda Dr. + Barberry Ln., San Jose) 6-10 p.m. FREE Bring your blanket + lawn chair, and enjoy lawn games, crafts, and food trucks as you watch one of the coolest, most stylish animated films from last year.
  
• Bay FC vs San Diego Wave FC PayPal Park (1123 Coleman Ave., San Jose) 7:30 p.m. $20-$196 After losses on the road to Chicago and Portland, our team returns home for a “Bay Area Unite” game.
  
• Sofia Niño de Rivera California Theater (345 S. First St., San Jose) 8 p.m. $49-$109 You may know this comedian as Mexico City’s “Woman of the Year” 2016, or from the Netflix dramedy “Club de Cuervos.”
  
• Dark Satellite + Orbit 17 + Dear Banshee Art Boutiki (44 Race St., San Jose) 8 p.m. $15 Advance, $20 Day of Show Bay Area indie rockers collide at a stellar showcase of prog, jazz, and otherworldly riffage.
  
• Alicia Villarreal San Jose Civic (135 W. San Carlos St., San Jose) 8 p.m. $39.50-$149 See the two-time Latin Grammy Award-winning singer for her “Donde Todo Comenzo” tour.
  
• Electric Feels: Indie Rock + Indie Dance Party The Ritz (400 S. First St., San Jose) 9 p.m. $15-$20 Advance, $25 Day of Show From MGMT to Vampire Weekend, alt-J to Hot Chip, dance along to your favorite indie tracks from yesteryear.
  
• Panacea + HRIF + Perarez Caravan Lounge (98 S. Almaden Ave., San Jose) 9 p.m. FREE Chunky riffs, ear-splitting growls, and dense-packed crowds fill one of the most intimate venues in the South Bay.
  

Saturday

• Bored Teachers Comedy Tour California Theater (345 S. First St., San Jose) 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. $35-$55 Ring in the end of the school year with the No. 1 teacher comedians in the world performing skits and stand ups.
  
• Culture Night Market Discovery Meadow (180 Woz Way, San Jose) 4-10 p.m. FREE Featuring local vendors, food trucks, and businesses, to hoppin’ stage performances from Universal Grammar, Los Jefes, L James, Thatfool Al, Sutro, DJ Say, and Real Ignorant.
  
• All Out for Al-Nakba San Jose Peace and Justice Center (48 S. Seventh St., San Jose) 4 p.m. FREE Join community members and activists for a screening and discussion of Al Jazeera’s “Al-Nakba: The Palestinian Catastrophe 1948” documentary series as a part of Anti-War Action Network’s national week of action.
  
• Hey Girl! Sexy Slumber Party Splash Video Dance Bar (65 Post St., San Jose) 6 p.m. FREE before 7:30, $10 after Dress in your best pajamas or sexy sleepwear and dance along with fellow fems, femmes, and femme fatales to the tunes of local DJ Rogue Mermaid.
  
• Nate Jackson San Jose Civic (135 W. San Carlos St., San Jose) 7 p.m. $39.50-$200 You know he has to be funny, because his tour’s called the “Super Funny World Tour.” It’s just science.
  
• The ABBA Concert Experience Montgomery Theater (271 S. Market St., San Jose) 7:30 p.m. $39-$59 This family-friendly singalong show highlights the enduring success of one of the world’s most beloved pop supergroups.
  
• San Jose Earthquakes vs. Orlando City SC PayPal Park (1123 Coleman Ave., San Jose) 7:30 p.m. $22-$185 Join the Quakes for Vietnamese Heritage night, with special merch for sale, and limited items with purchase of a ticket.
  
• Take on Me: The Ultimate 80’s Party The Ritz (400 S. First St., San Jose) 8 p.m. $17-$20 Advance, $20 Day of Show Don your favorite hot pants and pastel colors for this celebration of synths and gated reverb drums.
  
• Nineteen Jazz Orchestra Art Boutiki (44 Race St., San Jose) 8 p.m. $25 Advance, $30 Day of Show Along with classic soul, jazz, and R&B, this local professional jazz group will be performing “Obama Suite,” composed by their their former trumpet player, the late Eric Bolvin.
  
• Nature of the Beast SJZ Break Room (310 S. First St., San Jose) 8 p.m. $25 Bay Area jazz legends return to the SJZ stage to perform select songs from Herbie Hancock’s discography.
  
• Dead River Rebels + American Standard + Akira XX Caravan Lounge (98 S. Almaden Ave., San Jose) 9 p.m. FREE DIY punk meets stoner rock at this showcase of local talent.
  

Sunday

• Boogie Music Fest Downtown Campbell 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Sunday FREE Admission Enjoy food, beer, and wine, plus artisan booths, a kids zone, and a funky “Best Dressed” contest, with live music on two stages both days.
  
• Halfway to Halloween Rumble City Boxing (866 Park Ave., San Jose) 2-6 p.m. FREE From spooky wares to Halfoween artistry, check out local artist booths with live music and food.
  
• Homayoun Shajarian + Anoushiravan Rohani San Jose Civic (135 W. San Carlos St., San Jose) 5 p.m. and 9 p.m. Two legendary performers, one from Tehran and the other from Iran, blend Eastern and Western musical traditions.
  
• Jakob’s Castle + The Happys The Ritz (400 S. First St., San Jose) 7 p.m. $15 Advance, $20 Day of Show SoCal rock and ska royalty Jacob Nowell brings his sublime punk sensibilities to the stage.
  
• Sammy Obeid San Jose Improv (62 S. Second St., San Jose) 8:30 p.m. $30-$90 One of my favorite comedians of all time, Sammy’s been a part of the Bay Area comedy scene for the past two decades. Check out some of his bits on Instagram/TikTok!
  

Thanks so much for reading!

You can get this entire post emailed to you each week in my newsletter.

But hold on, aren’t there other newsletters in San Jose???

Yep! And those are all super groovy! My newsletter is primarily a place for me to compile a curated list of things happening all over town, not just in the downtown spaces. There are small, DIY shows almost every day, and they generally don’t have a budget or the know how to promote themselves on platforms where you’re going to see. I’m pretty closely connected with a lot of the folks who organize these events (and have even helped organize many myself!) I occasionally include interviews with locals, newsy bits, and other things as they pop into my brain. Either way, I hope you enjoyed this post, and I hope it helped you find something to do this week. 🙂

• Gregg

Okay, I’m gonna level with you. Focusing on current events is just getting a little too fucking heavy. I’m no closer to answers than I was a month ago, none of us can sleep through a full night without waking up shaking and drenched in sweat, and there are some new downright bizarre phenomena cropping up that I just don’t have it in me to allot my energy to at the moment.
So, for today’s installment (and then also for the next one) I’m gonna tell you another good ol’ fun-for-the-whole-family pool story. Yep, you heard that right—welcome to our first bonafide two-parter.
This was quite a while ago. My measure of time is all off by a year now, but I feel fairly confident in chalking it up to post-first pool story, pre-ouija board fiasco—so however long ago that’s been now.
It was a weird, rare night, in that Matt was out. Not an unheard of occurrence, but it’s fairly anomalous, and it certainly puts the rest of us on slightly higher alert.
Obviously, he always tells us to call him at the first sign of some shit going down and to use our best judgment to determine whether it’s serious enough to lock up and head out. Better safe than sorry and all that. The night in question was no exception to the rule.
Overall, though, things were mostly quiet. Alice was in, as was I, as was Wiley. We do a lot of congregating, but we do a lot of work, too, and this night, we were all in our respective areas, doing our respective jobs.
I was in my not-office mending a finicky Shakespeare anthology, Alice was watching the desk while working on cataloging a truckload of new donations, and Wiley was replacing several lightbulbs that had all decided to call it quits after our most recent power outage (this one due to a flash-flood).
It was calm to an almost uncharacteristic degree. There was a relatively steady flow of patrons in and out of the building—I could hear Alice greeting them and wishing them a good evening—but as far as anomalous activity, there was none.
It does happen, on rare occasion, that we make it through a full night without any goings on, but there’s almost always at least the odd disembodied voice or two.
We should’ve known better than to trust a meteor shower.
See, there’s just something about natural anomalies. Not just the ones that knock our power out, either, although those are clearly included. Blizzards, thunderstorms, hail and tornados and earthquakes and all your run-of-the-mill destructive shit, sure. But the things of beauty, too. Rainbows. Eclipses, lunar or solar. And you think full moons hit emergency rooms hard? Try this fucking place.
It was just that a meteor shower wasn’t one we’d dealt with before. Does that mean we shouldn’t have known better? Fuck no. Obviously not. But perhaps our collective greatest fault is that we still have some semblance of hope.
Wiley wanted to look at it from the roof. Kid never fucking wants to do anything, and they were set to climb up and camp out alone. I couldn’t not entertain such an innocent, youthful whim.
Our roof access doesn’t have stairs—just a ladder—so Alice couldn’t accompany us, which I felt shitty about, but she assured me it was perfectly fine with her.
“The world decided I didn’t need functional legs so I could never be peer pressured into leaving the ground,” she quipped. “I’m not into heights. But y’all have fun up there. Somebody needs to be here for the patrons anyway.”
Fair and fair. So Wiley and I gathered up an armful of blankets and one of Matt’s trusty camping lanterns and headed out to scale the building.
Wiley went up ahead of me. That was my first mistake.
Really, they aren’t that much younger than I am. Maybe four or five years, and I’m too close to thirty for comfort now. But there’s something about them, even as far as they’ve come, that makes it impossible for me not to do everything in my power to protect them. I think Matt feels the same way. Maybe most of us do.
Anyway, that’s why I immediately started cursing myself when they reached the top of the ladder, pulled their way up and over the ledge of the roof, and said, “...Whoa.”
My second mistake was not immediately telling them to turn around and start climbing right the fuck back down.
I knew exactly what that tone of voice meant. But something in me just kicked into hyperdrive and I…had to see it. Whatever it was, I had to see it for myself.
“Don’t move,” I said, and then, “What is it?”
But by that point, I was at the top, too. I hoisted myself over the ledge and was met with…
…Water.
It was everywhere. Extending in every direction. There was no edge in sight—not even a horizon line. Just vast, dark water as far as the eye could see.
“Okay. This is not—let’s go.”
“Yeah,” Wiley agreed, a little breathless.
I’m sure you’ll be downright shocked to learn that, when we turned around, the ladder was gone.
The edge of the rooftop was, too.
The thing that surprised me, really, was that it wasn’t as though we were standing on some sort of island. We were somehow in the water all of a sudden, up to our waists, neither of us having taken a single step.
“Fucking…shit. Jesus. Adam?”
“We’re fine,” was my default response, because my anxiety override kicks in like a motherfucker as soon as someone else is more openly afraid than I am. “It’s okay, let’s just—let’s think for a second. Maybe it’s just, like, an illusion or something.”
“Okay,” Wiley said. “Maybe we should…try moving?”
“Yeah. Yeah, we’ll bump the ledge and then we can just feel for the ladder. Good idea.”
Wiley and I shared a look, wordlessly nodding to one another, and stepped forward in unison.
Maybe I misspoke before, when I said we weren’t on a platform. It was just that our platform wasn’t above the water. Now, though, there was nothing.
It felt, almost, like the stomach-turning sensation of missing a step walking up a staircase. The only difference was that there was no moment-too-late connection.
We plummeted.
There wasn’t any difference in temperature beneath the surface, which was, in a way, more disorienting than the water itself. The mental recalibration that typically comes with plunging into a cool lake or, adversely, a heated pool wasn’t allotted an opportunity to take place. It felt, for most intents and purposes, the same as being in the air, just that I couldn’t breathe.
It was heavy, too. The weightlessness water tends to embody was null; I immediately abandoned everything I’d been carrying, clawing my way upward frantically enough that it would’ve been mortifying, I’m sure, had anyone witnessed it.
Wiley resurfaced at the same moment I did—empty handed as well, I noted—coughing a little but not to the extent that I was worried they were choking. “Next idea?” they asked, pushing their wet hair back from their face, dark, damp lashes obscuring their eyes.
“Let’s get back on the…” I started, but trailed off when I raised my head.
A couple hundred yards out from us, there was a ship. It was a dark, hulking thing, with tattered sails and something indistinguishable affixed to the bow, glittering and glinting in the moonlight.
Wiley spun around to face it, drifting back slightly when their gaze landed parallel to mine. “What the fuck is that?” they demanded, legs kicking haphazardly beneath the water to keep them in place.
“Maybe it’s…good,” I said. I knew better than that and I knew Wiley did, too, but I said it anyway. “Maybe someone will help.”
They didn’t even humor me with a response to that bullshit.
Now, at this point in the story, maybe you’re thinking being suddenly surrounded by water and watching as an ominous ship approached us with absolutely nowhere to go and no way to escape doesn’t feel quite enough like imminent condemnation. To which I say to you: not to worry. Because the next realization we came to was that the platform we’d been standing on previously had suddenly ceased to exist.
“Shit,” Wiley said. “Shit, shit, shit. Adam.”
“I know,” I said. “It’s fine. We’re fine. We just—we’re gonna—follow me.”
I don’t know. I don’t know what the fuck possessed me to swim toward the Obvious Death Ship. I guess just that there wasn’t anything else save for open water anywhere so it essentially felt like our options were paddle around until we were exhausted and drown or face a quicker, simpler demise.
“You better have a fucking plan, bro,” Wiley intoned from behind me, which I chivalrously pretended not to hear, because I did not, in fact, have a fucking plan.
The closer we drew to the vessel, the more unbelievably monstrous it appeared to become. It loomed above us, casting a shadow over everything in its direct path, and the sinking in my stomach almost convinced me to turn around. Almost.
But then something curled around my ankle. It was slick and strong, and there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that whatever it was could’ve pulled me under and eaten me alive in a fraction of a second.
Luckily for me, it wasn’t interested. It let go as quickly as it had latched on, almost as though it was simply using me as a handrail to move itself along. Still, though, the knowledge that it was there was all the motivation I needed to push forward ever faster. I didn’t say anything—didn’t want to add more fuel to Wiley’s panicked fire—just picked up my pace and swam up to their side.
“There’s a ladder,” they informed me, raising a hand and pointing toward the back half of the ship.
Indeed, there was a ladder. It was a tattered, worn thing, comprised of old, fraying rope and rotting, untreated wooden boards, but it looked composed enough that I figured we could likely make it up if we were swift.
“Bet,” I said. “Let’s go.”
We went.
Up close, the ladder appeared even shoddier than it had when we’d first seen it. I reached out of the water and wrapped my fingers around the rope at the bottom, giving it a hearty tug. To my slight surprise, it held fast.
“I think we’re good,” I told Wiley. “I’ll go up first and tell you what I see.”
“Be careful,” they said, but didn’t protest, just backed up enough for me to get the leverage I needed to hoist myself onto the bottom board.
I climbed warily, overly conscious of every creak of the wood bowing beneath my weight, every groan of the fibers of rope under my hands, but made it without incident to the top.
Once there, I grabbed onto the ship’s edge, lifting my gaze to take in whatever lie before me.
It was…nothing. I mean, it was a ship, obviously. But there wasn’t anything on board. No apparent crew nor cargo nor even a captain manning the helm. Granted, I couldn’t see perfectly, but the moon shone brightly enough that I was fairly confident in my observation that the deck was devoid of anything but its own shiplap floor.
“Hello?” I called, because I wasn’t about to beckon Wiley up if some fucked shit was going to pop out of nowhere the second we made a sound.
Nothing responded. Nothing moved. The ship rocked gently on the impossible water, as silent and vacant as it had been a moment before.
“Good?” Wiley questioned nervously from below me.
“Yeah,” I told them, easing myself off the ladder and down into the confines of the vessel. “Come on.”
They did so tenuously but still more swiftly than I had, climbing aboard and landing next to me with a dampened thunk.
We allowed ourselves the briefest of moments to catch our breath, silently rejoicing in the small win that was having found solace from the pool itself. Not that we had any idea what to do or where to go from here, but at the very least, we weren’t drowning.
“Okay,” I said, clearing the unease from my throat. “I don’t know what good trying to steer this thing would do us—there’s nothing but water no matter where we go. But maybe there’s something here somewhere that’ll help us figure out how to get back. So I think we just…start looking around?”
Wiley nodded. “Cool. Split halves, front and back?”
Nooo, Adam, don’t split up! Never split up! I know. I can literally hear you screaming it at me. And actually, for once in my life, I considered that something might be a horrible fucking idea before acting on it.
But then I saw something.
As I turned back to respond, Wiley’s eyes shimmered, dancing in the moonlight.
They were silver and mercurial, with no pupils or whites in sight.
Whatever had come back up from underwater, it was not my coworker.
I swallowed, forcing my expression to remain as neutral as I was able and praying whatever was standing in front of me didn’t notice I’d caught on. My entire body was instantaneously covered in chills, in a way that I understood to have the same purpose as a dog’s hackles rising. “Sounds good,” I said. “I’ll take the front.”
I headed in the opposite direction of the thing wearing Wiley’s face (at a pace that I hoped didn’t appear hurried but one that would remove me in a timely manner from the vicinity) and didn’t stop until I’d reached the front of the ship, breathing heavily and attempting to slow my reeling mind.
I didn’t know what to tackle first. I didn’t know where Wiley was, or if they were anywhere—if they were even still alive. I didn’t know what my next move should be. I didn’t know what I was looking for or where I might find it.
It’s rare that I feel utterly hopeless, to the degree that I genuinely contemplate just sitting down and giving up, but in this instance, I thought long and hard about how easy it would be to succumb. I’d let the unthinkable happen. Wiley was gone. No one else had been here with them—there was no one else to blame. Just me. Only me.
…You’ll be glad to know that the self-pity didn’t last long. Embarrassing, honestly.
If I was the only one here, it meant I was the only shot they had at making it out alive. Our version of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ had always been ‘alive until proven dead’ and I wasn’t about to turn my back on the insane streak of luck we’d had up until this point. Not a single one of our lives had been lost, and we’d been in the midst of some absolute shitstorms. There was no reason to believe that right now, tonight, was an outlier. I couldn’t lie down like a sick dog and wonder if Wiley was still out there somewhere, suffering until the bitter, bloody end. I had to find them. By whatever means necessary, as long as it took, I had to find them.
I pushed off the railing before me and spun on my heel, eyes flitting back and forth to assess my options as efficiently as possible, and after a moment, I registered that fitted flush against the large front mast, there was a door.
It was only a sliver, thin and not particularly extraordinary in height, but there was a handle carved roughly into its right side and a set of rust-riddled hinges on its left.
I took about half a second to weigh my options and then reached for it, curling my fingers around the handle and giving it a generous tug.
The hinges, unsurprisingly, complained, but not loudly and not for long. The door gave way with little resistance, and opened up to my worst fucking nightmare.
A set of stairs, descending into blackness.
I mean, I guess if I’m being fair, my first pool encounter had featured a staircase leading to the pool rather than away from it, but I didn’t feel like there could possibly be good news awaiting me below deck of a ship where I’d just encountered a fucking mimic.
Still, though, there was a niggling insistence in my brain (not that kind, come on) that it was my only lead on finding Wiley if they were, in fact, somewhere on board. So I cast one last glance over my shoulder and stepped into the dark, letting the door fall closed behind me.
It smelled different, instantly, from the open air above. Mustier, which was to be expected, but also almost sweet somehow. I tried, unsuccessfully, to shove my true-crime-podcast-addled brain’s helpful reminder that the scent of human death is said to be sweet into a mental lockbox and put my hand to the wall, easing tentatively down to the second step.
The visibility wasn’t just low—it was practically zero. If you’ve ever been on a cave tour and had a guide cut the lights and instruct you to lift your hand to your face to demonstrate the complete absence of light, it was nearly that intense. The placing of both feet on each concurrent stair was an arduous, calculated process, but finally, after approximately one (1) century, I reached flat ground. I still couldn’t see, and there was no definitive way to tell whether I was standing on the floor or just a landing without thoroughly feeling out the space around me, so I reluctantly departed from the wall, scooting my feet in small, tentative motions and keeping both arms partially outstretched before me.
After a (l o n g) moment, I determined that either this was the world’s largest landing or I’d made it all the way down. I had no idea whether I was in a singular, enormous room, or if there were individual cabins, or if I was about to run face-first into the grim fucking reaper.
And then I turned to my left.
There was a light.
It was so, so faint. Flickering. Barely discernible, its warm, gentle glow ever so shyly illuminating the cracks around what appeared to be another closed door.
Being the only visible thing in my line of sight, in any direction, it emitted the aura of both a beacon and an omen.
I headed towards it.
I was about half afraid I was stuck in a horror movie situation where no matter how long I walked it would never grow any closer, but fortunately, that didn’t seem to be the case. I actually gained on it more quickly than I felt I should have for the speed I was moving, but I wasn’t going to complain about reaching the end of the nothingness in commendable time.
I ran my fingertips along the edge of the door and, sure enough, there was a carved-in handle, just like the last.
It opened just as effortlessly, and yellow candlelight rolled dimly out to greet me, lapping at my waterlogged clothes.
“Please,” came a quiet, terrified voice from inside the room. “Please don’t. I don’t know what you want, or–or what you are, but please don’t—”
“...Wiley?”
Rather than calming, the voice’s state of alarm rose to a level bordering on full-blown panic as I took a step into the space. “Please,” the voice begged. There wasn’t anyone visible from my current vantage point, but I could hear it clearly enough to feel fairly confident that the person attached to it—the person who either had to be Wiley or yet another duplicate of them—was close. “Why are you doing this?”
This was a cabin, I thought, or perhaps a study of some sort, with a rotting wooden desk and a decaying leather chair both covered in a flurry of loose, browned book pages and a thick layer of dust. There were candles littering several surfaces, placed in what appeared not to be any intentional manner. Directly to my right, there was a shelf; its back faced me and the odd placement led me to imagine that it may have been employed to block the door at some time.
It was also, I would have just about bet, the source of the voice.
I nudged a couple of planks and a broken amber bottle out of the way with the toe of my shoe, rounding the shelf to find a crumpled, bloodied Wiley, restrained to the floor by a thick, coarse rope fixed expertly to a bolted tie and holding their bound hands up to shield their face.
“Jesus fuck,” I said. “What happened to you?”
Slowly, they lifted their head. “...Adam?”
Realization dawned on me, and I felt my stomach sink. “Look at me,” I told them. “Look at my eyes.”
They did, their own bloodshot and watery and inherently human, and I watched their shoulders deflate, the defense and terror draining from their form. “There’s someone…something…down here. Or, I guess it still is, anyway. I don’t know where it went, but I don’t wanna be here when it comes back.”
I nodded. “It look like me?”
Wiley nodded back.
“Yeah, there’s one of you upstairs. Not real sure what we’re supposed to do about them, but one thing at a time. Let’s get you up from there.”
It was a struggle, disentangling Wiley from the heavy, abrasive leads coccooning their body, but we got there eventually, and throughout the entirety of the arduous process they gave me the rundown on how, when we’d parted from the solace of the platform, something had instantaneously latched onto them, dragging them down deeper and deeper until their ears popped and their head felt like it was going to explode. They said they’d been knocked out by the pressure, and that when they’d come to, already tied in place and coughing up lungfuls of water, “I” had been standing over them, wielding a large net hook and no mercy.
“I knew it wasn’t you, obviously,” they said, “but I didn’t know where you actually were or if something had, like. Hijacked your body? I don’t know. Anyway, let’s get the fuck out of here.”
We grabbed a couple of candles (the majority had simply been melted into place atop whatever surface they’d adorned, but there was a small collection fitted into slightly-too-small brass holders) and got the fuck out.
Being able to see so little in the space around us was almost more disorienting than the pitch darkness I’d been feeling my way through before. It felt as though we were in a fragile, wavering bubble of reality and nothing existed outside of it.
“Wish I’d been awake coming down here,” Wiley remarked. “Guess I still wouldn’t have seen shit, though.”
“I could…maybe get us back upstairs?” I considered, with little to no confidence. “But I don’t really know what good it would do us. Nowhere to go. Maybe we just…look around down here for a bit? See if we can find anything useful?”
“Yeah, okay,” Wiley assented. “But we’ve gotta be quiet. I don’t want that thing to hear us.”
I certainly couldn’t argue with that.
We wandered hesitantly through the dark, shielding the flames of our candles with cupped palms and praying we wouldn’t misstep. We made it some unsubstantiated quantity of time without incident, but softly, after seconds or minutes or hours, we heard a light rustling from the shadow veiled corridor to our right, and Wiley pulled me into the nearest open room in the opposite direction.
Flattening our backs to the wall, we listened intently as footsteps echoed faintly behind us, cyclically growing closer and then further away again for several moments before disappearing altogether.
I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding and uncovered my candle, easing the door of the room to a gentle, silent close. The contents of this one were different from that of the last in that there practically weren’t any. It wasn’t just that it was tidier; there was a chest shoved against the wall nearest us and a leatherbound book of some sort lying in the center of the floor, but otherwise the space was vacant.
Wiley moved first, crouching next to the journal and lifting it from the ground, a cloud of dust rising in the wake of their breath. I knelt down beside them, offering my candlelight so they could discard theirs and open the cover.
Beneath which there was a box.
It was a plain, unadorned wooden rectangle, nestled into the carved-out central pages of the book, and we learned upon extracting it that there was no lock or latch, just a seam indicating the lid’s separation from the body.
I don’t need to spell the whole situation out for you. There was a key in the box. The key opened, you guessed it: the chest. Inside the chest, there were piles of gold and jewels beyond your wildest imagination. We’re rich now. The end.
Nah, JK. But the key in the box did open the chest, in which there was, A) a pair of peeling, pleather driving gloves, and B)...
I felt my heart skip.
A bicycle chain.
I’m not going to get into the nuances of that right now, or maybe ever. But for the purposes of dramatic flair, just know that it was incredibly, pointedly relevant to me, on a level so personal it sucker punched the air straight out of my lungs.
“No,” Wiley said, staggering back a step. “Uh-uh. Nope.”
I put together, then, that the gloves must have been their ticket item. “It’s okay,” I said, on autopilot, because it was not. “There’s something—something’s carved into the bottom of this thing.” Pushing past the reaction every fiber of my being had to the sensation of the frigid metal against my skin, I shoved both the chain and the gloves to the side and could scarcely make out a host of crudely scrawled letters in the wavering light of my half-gone candle.
“What is it?” Wiley asked, making no move to come nearer again.
“Though your…hand…? Heart. Though your heart does pound and knees grow…weak,” I deciphered slowly, “Rid yourself by your… That doesn’t make any sense. Shouldn’t it be of? It says ‘rid yourself by your fear’ and…something. Drain the…clin… No. Drink. Drain the drink.”
“Rid yourself by your fear and drain the drink,” Wiley repeated analytically. “The hell does that mean? Is this shit telling us to kill ourselves with the—oh. Oh. Fuck.”
I was not following. “...I’m not following,” I said.
“It is.” Wiley returned to my side, squatting down and nudging me out of the way with their shoulder to peer warily into the trunk. “It’s telling us to kill ourselves, but not these selves. We’re supposed to use…those…to kill our fuckin’ doppelgangers, or whatever they are. That’s how we get rid of the water.”
“Oh,” I echoed. “Fuck.”
We marinated for a moment in silence before Wiley sighed, resigned, and lifted the gloves from the chest, closing their eyes and pulling the fabric snugly over their hands. “Let’s get to work.”

Okay, I’m gonna level with you. Focusing on current events is just getting a little too fucking heavy. I’m no closer to answers than I was a month ago, none of us can sleep through a full night without waking up shaking and drenched in sweat, and there are some new downright bizarre phenomena cropping up that I just don’t have it in me to allot my energy to at the moment.
So, for today’s installment (and then also for the next one) I’m gonna tell you another good ol’ fun-for-the-whole-family pool story. Yep, you heard that right—welcome to our first bonafide two-parter.
This was quite a while ago. My measure of time is all off by a year now, but I feel fairly confident in chalking it up to post-first pool story, pre-ouija board fiasco—so however long ago that’s been now.
It was a weird, rare night, in that Matt was out. Not an unheard of occurrence, but it’s fairly anomalous, and it certainly puts the rest of us on slightly higher alert.
Obviously, he always tells us to call him at the first sign of some shit going down and to use our best judgment to determine whether it’s serious enough to lock up and head out. Better safe than sorry and all that. The night in question was no exception to the rule.
Overall, though, things were mostly quiet. Alice was in, as was I, as was Wiley. We do a lot of congregating, but we do a lot of work, too, and this night, we were all in our respective areas, doing our respective jobs.
I was in my not-office mending a finicky Shakespeare anthology, Alice was watching the desk while working on cataloging a truckload of new donations, and Wiley was replacing several lightbulbs that had all decided to call it quits after our most recent power outage (this one due to a flash-flood).
It was calm to an almost uncharacteristic degree. There was a relatively steady flow of patrons in and out of the building—I could hear Alice greeting them and wishing them a good evening—but as far as anomalous activity, there was none.
It does happen, on rare occasion, that we make it through a full night without any goings on, but there’s almost always at least the odd disembodied voice or two.
We should’ve known better than to trust a meteor shower.
See, there’s just something about natural anomalies. Not just the ones that knock our power out, either, although those are clearly included. Blizzards, thunderstorms, hail and tornados and earthquakes and all your run-of-the-mill destructive shit, sure. But the things of beauty, too. Rainbows. Eclipses, lunar or solar. And you think full moons hit emergency rooms hard? Try this fucking place.
It was just that a meteor shower wasn’t one we’d dealt with before. Does that mean we shouldn’t have known better? Fuck no. Obviously not. But perhaps our collective greatest fault is that we still have some semblance of hope.
Wiley wanted to look at it from the roof. Kid never fucking wants to do anything, and they were set to climb up and camp out alone. I couldn’t not entertain such an innocent, youthful whim.
Our roof access doesn’t have stairs—just a ladder—so Alice couldn’t accompany us, which I felt shitty about, but she assured me it was perfectly fine with her.
“The world decided I didn’t need functional legs so I could never be peer pressured into leaving the ground,” she quipped. “I’m not into heights. But y’all have fun up there. Somebody needs to be here for the patrons anyway.”
Fair and fair. So Wiley and I gathered up an armful of blankets and one of Matt’s trusty camping lanterns and headed out to scale the building.
Wiley went up ahead of me. That was my first mistake.
Really, they aren’t that much younger than I am. Maybe four or five years, and I’m too close to thirty for comfort now. But there’s something about them, even as far as they’ve come, that makes it impossible for me not to do everything in my power to protect them. I think Matt feels the same way. Maybe most of us do.
Anyway, that’s why I immediately started cursing myself when they reached the top of the ladder, pulled their way up and over the ledge of the roof, and said, “...Whoa.”
My second mistake was not immediately telling them to turn around and start climbing right the fuck back down.
I knew exactly what that tone of voice meant. But something in me just kicked into hyperdrive and I…had to see it. Whatever it was, I had to see it for myself.
“Don’t move,” I said, and then, “What is it?”
But by that point, I was at the top, too. I hoisted myself over the ledge and was met with…
…Water.
It was everywhere. Extending in every direction. There was no edge in sight—not even a horizon line. Just vast, dark water as far as the eye could see.
“Okay. This is not—let’s go.”
“Yeah,” Wiley agreed, a little breathless.
I’m sure you’ll be downright shocked to learn that, when we turned around, the ladder was gone.
The edge of the rooftop was, too.
The thing that surprised me, really, was that it wasn’t as though we were standing on some sort of island. We were somehow in the water all of a sudden, up to our waists, neither of us having taken a single step.
“Fucking…shit. Jesus. Adam?”
“We’re fine,” was my default response, because my anxiety override kicks in like a motherfucker as soon as someone else is more openly afraid than I am. “It’s okay, let’s just—let’s think for a second. Maybe it’s just, like, an illusion or something.”
“Okay,” Wiley said. “Maybe we should…try moving?”
“Yeah. Yeah, we’ll bump the ledge and then we can just feel for the ladder. Good idea.”
Wiley and I shared a look, wordlessly nodding to one another, and stepped forward in unison.
Maybe I misspoke before, when I said we weren’t on a platform. It was just that our platform wasn’t above the water. Now, though, there was nothing.
It felt, almost, like the stomach-turning sensation of missing a step walking up a staircase. The only difference was that there was no moment-too-late connection.
We plummeted.
There wasn’t any difference in temperature beneath the surface, which was, in a way, more disorienting than the water itself. The mental recalibration that typically comes with plunging into a cool lake or, adversely, a heated pool wasn’t allotted an opportunity to take place. It felt, for most intents and purposes, the same as being in the air, just that I couldn’t breathe.
It was heavy, too. The weightlessness water tends to embody was null; I immediately abandoned everything I’d been carrying, clawing my way upward frantically enough that it would’ve been mortifying, I’m sure, had anyone witnessed it.
Wiley resurfaced at the same moment I did—empty handed as well, I noted—coughing a little but not to the extent that I was worried they were choking. “Next idea?” they asked, pushing their wet hair back from their face, dark, damp lashes obscuring their eyes.
“Let’s get back on the…” I started, but trailed off when I raised my head.
A couple hundred yards out from us, there was a ship. It was a dark, hulking thing, with tattered sails and something indistinguishable affixed to the bow, glittering and glinting in the moonlight.
Wiley spun around to face it, drifting back slightly when their gaze landed parallel to mine. “What the fuck is that?” they demanded, legs kicking haphazardly beneath the water to keep them in place.
“Maybe it’s…good,” I said. I knew better than that and I knew Wiley did, too, but I said it anyway. “Maybe someone will help.”
They didn’t even humor me with a response to that bullshit.
Now, at this point in the story, maybe you’re thinking being suddenly surrounded by water and watching as an ominous ship approached us with absolutely nowhere to go and no way to escape doesn’t feel quite enough like imminent condemnation. To which I say to you: not to worry. Because the next realization we came to was that the platform we’d been standing on previously had suddenly ceased to exist.
“Shit,” Wiley said. “Shit, shit, shit. Adam.”
“I know,” I said. “It’s fine. We’re fine. We just—we’re gonna—follow me.”
I don’t know. I don’t know what the fuck possessed me to swim toward the Obvious Death Ship. I guess just that there wasn’t anything else save for open water anywhere so it essentially felt like our options were paddle around until we were exhausted and drown or face a quicker, simpler demise.
“You better have a fucking plan, bro,” Wiley intoned from behind me, which I chivalrously pretended not to hear, because I did not, in fact, have a fucking plan.
The closer we drew to the vessel, the more unbelievably monstrous it appeared to become. It loomed above us, casting a shadow over everything in its direct path, and the sinking in my stomach almost convinced me to turn around. Almost.
But then something curled around my ankle. It was slick and strong, and there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that whatever it was could’ve pulled me under and eaten me alive in a fraction of a second.
Luckily for me, it wasn’t interested. It let go as quickly as it had latched on, almost as though it was simply using me as a handrail to move itself along. Still, though, the knowledge that it was there was all the motivation I needed to push forward ever faster. I didn’t say anything—didn’t want to add more fuel to Wiley’s panicked fire—just picked up my pace and swam up to their side.
“There’s a ladder,” they informed me, raising a hand and pointing toward the back half of the ship.
Indeed, there was a ladder. It was a tattered, worn thing, comprised of old, fraying rope and rotting, untreated wooden boards, but it looked composed enough that I figured we could likely make it up if we were swift.
“Bet,” I said. “Let’s go.”
We went.
Up close, the ladder appeared even shoddier than it had when we’d first seen it. I reached out of the water and wrapped my fingers around the rope at the bottom, giving it a hearty tug. To my slight surprise, it held fast.
“I think we’re good,” I told Wiley. “I’ll go up first and tell you what I see.”
“Be careful,” they said, but didn’t protest, just backed up enough for me to get the leverage I needed to hoist myself onto the bottom board.
I climbed warily, overly conscious of every creak of the wood bowing beneath my weight, every groan of the fibers of rope under my hands, but made it without incident to the top.
Once there, I grabbed onto the ship’s edge, lifting my gaze to take in whatever lie before me.
It was…nothing. I mean, it was a ship, obviously. But there wasn’t anything on board. No apparent crew nor cargo nor even a captain manning the helm. Granted, I couldn’t see perfectly, but the moon shone brightly enough that I was fairly confident in my observation that the deck was devoid of anything but its own shiplap floor.
“Hello?” I called, because I wasn’t about to beckon Wiley up if some fucked shit was going to pop out of nowhere the second we made a sound.
Nothing responded. Nothing moved. The ship rocked gently on the impossible water, as silent and vacant as it had been a moment before.
“Good?” Wiley questioned nervously from below me.
“Yeah,” I told them, easing myself off the ladder and down into the confines of the vessel. “Come on.”
They did so tenuously but still more swiftly than I had, climbing aboard and landing next to me with a dampened thunk.
We allowed ourselves the briefest of moments to catch our breath, silently rejoicing in the small win that was having found solace from the pool itself. Not that we had any idea what to do or where to go from here, but at the very least, we weren’t drowning.
“Okay,” I said, clearing the unease from my throat. “I don’t know what good trying to steer this thing would do us—there’s nothing but water no matter where we go. But maybe there’s something here somewhere that’ll help us figure out how to get back. So I think we just…start looking around?”
Wiley nodded. “Cool. Split halves, front and back?”
Nooo, Adam, don’t split up! Never split up! I know. I can literally hear you screaming it at me. And actually, for once in my life, I considered that something might be a horrible fucking idea before acting on it.
But then I saw something.
As I turned back to respond, Wiley’s eyes shimmered, dancing in the moonlight.
They were silver and mercurial, with no pupils or whites in sight.
Whatever had come back up from underwater, it was not my coworker.
I swallowed, forcing my expression to remain as neutral as I was able and praying whatever was standing in front of me didn’t notice I’d caught on. My entire body was instantaneously covered in chills, in a way that I understood to have the same purpose as a dog’s hackles rising. “Sounds good,” I said. “I’ll take the front.”
I headed in the opposite direction of the thing wearing Wiley’s face (at a pace that I hoped didn’t appear hurried but one that would remove me in a timely manner from the vicinity) and didn’t stop until I’d reached the front of the ship, breathing heavily and attempting to slow my reeling mind.
I didn’t know what to tackle first. I didn’t know where Wiley was, or if they were anywhere—if they were even still alive. I didn’t know what my next move should be. I didn’t know what I was looking for or where I might find it.
It’s rare that I feel utterly hopeless, to the degree that I genuinely contemplate just sitting down and giving up, but in this instance, I thought long and hard about how easy it would be to succumb. I’d let the unthinkable happen. Wiley was gone. No one else had been here with them—there was no one else to blame. Just me. Only me.
…You’ll be glad to know that the self-pity didn’t last long. Embarrassing, honestly.
If I was the only one here, it meant I was the only shot they had at making it out alive. Our version of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ had always been ‘alive until proven dead’ and I wasn’t about to turn my back on the insane streak of luck we’d had up until this point. Not a single one of our lives had been lost, and we’d been in the midst of some absolute shitstorms. There was no reason to believe that right now, tonight, was an outlier. I couldn’t lie down like a sick dog and wonder if Wiley was still out there somewhere, suffering until the bitter, bloody end. I had to find them. By whatever means necessary, as long as it took, I had to find them.
I pushed off the railing before me and spun on my heel, eyes flitting back and forth to assess my options as efficiently as possible, and after a moment, I registered that fitted flush against the large front mast, there was a door.
It was only a sliver, thin and not particularly extraordinary in height, but there was a handle carved roughly into its right side and a set of rust-riddled hinges on its left.
I took about half a second to weigh my options and then reached for it, curling my fingers around the handle and giving it a generous tug.
The hinges, unsurprisingly, complained, but not loudly and not for long. The door gave way with little resistance, and opened up to my worst fucking nightmare.
A set of stairs, descending into blackness.
I mean, I guess if I’m being fair, my first pool encounter had featured a staircase leading to the pool rather than away from it, but I didn’t feel like there could possibly be good news awaiting me below deck of a ship where I’d just encountered a fucking mimic.
Still, though, there was a niggling insistence in my brain (not that kind, come on) that it was my only lead on finding Wiley if they were, in fact, somewhere on board. So I cast one last glance over my shoulder and stepped into the dark, letting the door fall closed behind me.
It smelled different, instantly, from the open air above. Mustier, which was to be expected, but also almost sweet somehow. I tried, unsuccessfully, to shove my true-crime-podcast-addled brain’s helpful reminder that the scent of human death is said to be sweet into a mental lockbox and put my hand to the wall, easing tentatively down to the second step.
The visibility wasn’t just low—it was practically zero. If you’ve ever been on a cave tour and had a guide cut the lights and instruct you to lift your hand to your face to demonstrate the complete absence of light, it was nearly that intense. The placing of both feet on each concurrent stair was an arduous, calculated process, but finally, after approximately one (1) century, I reached flat ground. I still couldn’t see, and there was no definitive way to tell whether I was standing on the floor or just a landing without thoroughly feeling out the space around me, so I reluctantly departed from the wall, scooting my feet in small, tentative motions and keeping both arms partially outstretched before me.
After a (l o n g) moment, I determined that either this was the world’s largest landing or I’d made it all the way down. I had no idea whether I was in a singular, enormous room, or if there were individual cabins, or if I was about to run face-first into the grim fucking reaper.
And then I turned to my left.
There was a light.
It was so, so faint. Flickering. Barely discernible, its warm, gentle glow ever so shyly illuminating the cracks around what appeared to be another closed door.
Being the only visible thing in my line of sight, in any direction, it emitted the aura of both a beacon and an omen.
I headed towards it.
I was about half afraid I was stuck in a horror movie situation where no matter how long I walked it would never grow any closer, but fortunately, that didn’t seem to be the case. I actually gained on it more quickly than I felt I should have for the speed I was moving, but I wasn’t going to complain about reaching the end of the nothingness in commendable time.
I ran my fingertips along the edge of the door and, sure enough, there was a carved-in handle, just like the last.
It opened just as effortlessly, and yellow candlelight rolled dimly out to greet me, lapping at my waterlogged clothes.
“Please,” came a quiet, terrified voice from inside the room. “Please don’t. I don’t know what you want, or–or what you are, but please don’t—”
“...Wiley?”
Rather than calming, the voice’s state of alarm rose to a level bordering on full-blown panic as I took a step into the space. “Please,” the voice begged. There wasn’t anyone visible from my current vantage point, but I could hear it clearly enough to feel fairly confident that the person attached to it—the person who either had to be Wiley or yet another duplicate of them—was close. “Why are you doing this?”
This was a cabin, I thought, or perhaps a study of some sort, with a rotting wooden desk and a decaying leather chair both covered in a flurry of loose, browned book pages and a thick layer of dust. There were candles littering several surfaces, placed in what appeared not to be any intentional manner. Directly to my right, there was a shelf; its back faced me and the odd placement led me to imagine that it may have been employed to block the door at some time.
It was also, I would have just about bet, the source of the voice.
I nudged a couple of planks and a broken amber bottle out of the way with the toe of my shoe, rounding the shelf to find a crumpled, bloodied Wiley, restrained to the floor by a thick, coarse rope fixed expertly to a bolted tie and holding their bound hands up to shield their face.
“Jesus fuck,” I said. “What happened to you?”
Slowly, they lifted their head. “...Adam?”
Realization dawned on me, and I felt my stomach sink. “Look at me,” I told them. “Look at my eyes.”
They did, their own bloodshot and watery and inherently human, and I watched their shoulders deflate, the defense and terror draining from their form. “There’s someone…something…down here. Or, I guess it still is, anyway. I don’t know where it went, but I don’t wanna be here when it comes back.”
I nodded. “It look like me?”
Wiley nodded back.
“Yeah, there’s one of you upstairs. Not real sure what we’re supposed to do about them, but one thing at a time. Let’s get you up from there.”
It was a struggle, disentangling Wiley from the heavy, abrasive leads coccooning their body, but we got there eventually, and throughout the entirety of the arduous process they gave me the rundown on how, when we’d parted from the solace of the platform, something had instantaneously latched onto them, dragging them down deeper and deeper until their ears popped and their head felt like it was going to explode. They said they’d been knocked out by the pressure, and that when they’d come to, already tied in place and coughing up lungfuls of water, “I” had been standing over them, wielding a large net hook and no mercy.
“I knew it wasn’t you, obviously,” they said, “but I didn’t know where you actually were or if something had, like. Hijacked your body? I don’t know. Anyway, let’s get the fuck out of here.”
We grabbed a couple of candles (the majority had simply been melted into place atop whatever surface they’d adorned, but there was a small collection fitted into slightly-too-small brass holders) and got the fuck out.
Being able to see so little in the space around us was almost more disorienting than the pitch darkness I’d been feeling my way through before. It felt as though we were in a fragile, wavering bubble of reality and nothing existed outside of it.
“Wish I’d been awake coming down here,” Wiley remarked. “Guess I still wouldn’t have seen shit, though.”
“I could…maybe get us back upstairs?” I considered, with little to no confidence. “But I don’t really know what good it would do us. Nowhere to go. Maybe we just…look around down here for a bit? See if we can find anything useful?”
“Yeah, okay,” Wiley assented. “But we’ve gotta be quiet. I don’t want that thing to hear us.”
I certainly couldn’t argue with that.
We wandered hesitantly through the dark, shielding the flames of our candles with cupped palms and praying we wouldn’t misstep. We made it some unsubstantiated quantity of time without incident, but softly, after seconds or minutes or hours, we heard a light rustling from the shadow veiled corridor to our right, and Wiley pulled me into the nearest open room in the opposite direction.
Flattening our backs to the wall, we listened intently as footsteps echoed faintly behind us, cyclically growing closer and then further away again for several moments before disappearing altogether.
I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding and uncovered my candle, easing the door of the room to a gentle, silent close. The contents of this one were different from that of the last in that there practically weren’t any. It wasn’t just that it was tidier; there was a chest shoved against the wall nearest us and a leatherbound book of some sort lying in the center of the floor, but otherwise the space was vacant.
Wiley moved first, crouching next to the journal and lifting it from the ground, a cloud of dust rising in the wake of their breath. I knelt down beside them, offering my candlelight so they could discard theirs and open the cover.
Beneath which there was a box.
It was a plain, unadorned wooden rectangle, nestled into the carved-out central pages of the book, and we learned upon extracting it that there was no lock or latch, just a seam indicating the lid’s separation from the body.
I don’t need to spell the whole situation out for you. There was a key in the box. The key opened, you guessed it: the chest. Inside the chest, there were piles of gold and jewels beyond your wildest imagination. We’re rich now. The end.
Nah, JK. But the key in the box did open the chest, in which there was, A) a pair of peeling, pleather driving gloves, and B)...
I felt my heart skip.
A bicycle chain.
I’m not going to get into the nuances of that right now, or maybe ever. But for the purposes of dramatic flair, just know that it was incredibly, pointedly relevant to me, on a level so personal it sucker punched the air straight out of my lungs.
“No,” Wiley said, staggering back a step. “Uh-uh. Nope.”
I put together, then, that the gloves must have been their ticket item. “It’s okay,” I said, on autopilot, because it was not. “There’s something—something’s carved into the bottom of this thing.” Pushing past the reaction every fiber of my being had to the sensation of the frigid metal against my skin, I shoved both the chain and the gloves to the side and could scarcely make out a host of crudely scrawled letters in the wavering light of my half-gone candle.
“What is it?” Wiley asked, making no move to come nearer again.
“Though your…hand…? Heart. Though your heart does pound and knees grow…weak,” I deciphered slowly, “Rid yourself by your… That doesn’t make any sense. Shouldn’t it be of? It says ‘rid yourself by your fear’ and…something. Drain the…clin… No. Drink. Drain the drink.”
“Rid yourself by your fear and drain the drink,” Wiley repeated analytically. “The hell does that mean? Is this shit telling us to kill ourselves with the—oh. Oh. Fuck.”
I was not following. “...I’m not following,” I said.
“It is.” Wiley returned to my side, squatting down and nudging me out of the way with their shoulder to peer warily into the trunk. “It’s telling us to kill ourselves, but not these selves. We’re supposed to use…those…to kill our fuckin’ doppelgangers, or whatever they are. That’s how we get rid of the water.”
“Oh,” I echoed. “Fuck.”
We marinated for a moment in silence before Wiley sighed, resigned, and lifted the gloves from the chest, closing their eyes and pulling the fabric snugly over their hands. “Let’s get to work.”

So its a long story. And I will preface it with the fact that I (F48) have several health issues, some are: Audhd, Fibromyalgia, ME/CFS, bowel disease and chronic kidney stones all of which severely limit my ability to do everyday tasks that take energy. I am unable to work. We struggle financially and my husband (M51) works 47+ hours a week and supports the household. I feel so guilty and bad about it I have been trying to find a job I can do at home, even though sometimes Im bedridden. I feel he got the crap end of the stick marrying me. My sister (F42) moved in with us 5 years ago. She had no where to live at the time. We only charge her $250 a month. The cost of a room normally around here is 400-700. She quit her job almost immediately and went on income assistance shortly after moving in. She has not worked in over 4 years. At the time, I thought the agreement was low rent in exchange for some housecleaning and occasionally watching my son. But after she refused to watch him, or do any cleaning unless I give her an itemized list, I just let it go. Occasionally she will make my son a snack or breakfast. Max about 3 times a week. She sometimes takes the laundry out of the washer for my husband and puts it in the dryer. She mostly plays games on the computer with her online friends all day. So fast forward to this week… I was arguing with my husband and he threw in my face he pays for my cellphone, so I asked my sister if she could add me to her plan. She said no. Didnt hesitate just “no, Im not doing that, it could mess up my credit and plan”. This makes no sense, she pays me $250 a month, she could just deduct the cost off the amount she pays. As well, she knows I would never screw someone over like that. I was hurt so I said fine I have to increase your rent. I then (about 10 minutes later) realized I was just being a b*tch, and told her I was sorry about it and would not increase her rent. But the next day my other sister, her twin, started defending her saying how much she does for me how selfish I am and many other insults. Mind you, SisterB lives in Germany, so she only knows what SisterA tells her. I admit its petty, but at that point I told my husband to change the password on the wifi. When she asked for the password, we said no. She then asked if she could lower her 250 a month rent. When we said no to that, she got angry and gave her “notice”, which is basically just her saying she is moving this weekend, not that she will pay for the notice period. We had a screaming match and I called her a parasite. Now they both (my sisters) say Im a terrible person and my husband only agrees with me because he is scared of me. He said thats ridiculous. He has told me many times he feels used by her. She tried to say she offered to increase the rent instead of getting me a phone, but that is untrue, as I stated above - I threatened it (which I know was mean) and when I did she came back with “fine… but Im not helping you move your boxes now” (I had asked her for help with the boxes before the phone incident). I have a hard time with boundaries, and usually meltdown when I have bottled up so much. I try to be a kind and giving person… and I know this was extremely messy…. but I just felt so hurt and used and it boiled over. So how much of an asshole am I?

Okay, I’m gonna level with you. Focusing on current events is just getting a little too fucking heavy. I’m no closer to answers than I was a month ago, none of us can sleep through a full night without waking up shaking and drenched in sweat, and there are some new downright bizarre phenomena cropping up that I just don’t have it in me to allot my energy to at the moment.
So, for today’s installment (and then also for the next one) I’m gonna tell you another good ol’ fun-for-the-whole-family pool story. Yep, you heard that right—welcome to our first bonafide two-parter.
This was quite a while ago. My measure of time is all off by a year now, but I feel fairly confident in chalking it up to post-first pool story, pre-ouija board fiasco—so however long ago that’s been now.
It was a weird, rare night, in that Matt was out. Not an unheard of occurrence, but it’s fairly anomalous, and it certainly puts the rest of us on slightly higher alert.
Obviously, he always tells us to call him at the first sign of some shit going down and to use our best judgment to determine whether it’s serious enough to lock up and head out. Better safe than sorry and all that. The night in question was no exception to the rule.
Overall, though, things were mostly quiet. Alice was in, as was I, as was Wiley. We do a lot of congregating, but we do a lot of work, too, and this night, we were all in our respective areas, doing our respective jobs.
I was in my not-office mending a finicky Shakespeare anthology, Alice was watching the desk while working on cataloging a truckload of new donations, and Wiley was replacing several lightbulbs that had all decided to call it quits after our most recent power outage (this one due to a flash-flood).
It was calm to an almost uncharacteristic degree. There was a relatively steady flow of patrons in and out of the building—I could hear Alice greeting them and wishing them a good evening—but as far as anomalous activity, there was none.
It does happen, on rare occasion, that we make it through a full night without any goings on, but there’s almost always at least the odd disembodied voice or two.
We should’ve known better than to trust a meteor shower.
See, there’s just something about natural anomalies. Not just the ones that knock our power out, either, although those are clearly included. Blizzards, thunderstorms, hail and tornados and earthquakes and all your run-of-the-mill destructive shit, sure. But the things of beauty, too. Rainbows. Eclipses, lunar or solar. And you think full moons hit emergency rooms hard? Try this fucking place.
It was just that a meteor shower wasn’t one we’d dealt with before. Does that mean we shouldn’t have known better? Fuck no. Obviously not. But perhaps our collective greatest fault is that we still have some semblance of hope.
Wiley wanted to look at it from the roof. Kid never fucking wants to do anything, and they were set to climb up and camp out alone. I couldn’t not entertain such an innocent, youthful whim.
Our roof access doesn’t have stairs—just a ladder—so Alice couldn’t accompany us, which I felt shitty about, but she assured me it was perfectly fine with her.
“The world decided I didn’t need functional legs so I could never be peer pressured into leaving the ground,” she quipped. “I’m not into heights. But y’all have fun up there. Somebody needs to be here for the patrons anyway.”
Fair and fair. So Wiley and I gathered up an armful of blankets and one of Matt’s trusty camping lanterns and headed out to scale the building.
Wiley went up ahead of me. That was my first mistake.
Really, they aren’t that much younger than I am. Maybe four or five years, and I’m too close to thirty for comfort now. But there’s something about them, even as far as they’ve come, that makes it impossible for me not to do everything in my power to protect them. I think Matt feels the same way. Maybe most of us do.
Anyway, that’s why I immediately started cursing myself when they reached the top of the ladder, pulled their way up and over the ledge of the roof, and said, “...Whoa.”
My second mistake was not immediately telling them to turn around and start climbing right the fuck back down.
I knew exactly what that tone of voice meant. But something in me just kicked into hyperdrive and I…had to see it. Whatever it was, I had to see it for myself.
“Don’t move,” I said, and then, “What is it?”
But by that point, I was at the top, too. I hoisted myself over the ledge and was met with…
…Water.
It was everywhere. Extending in every direction. There was no edge in sight—not even a horizon line. Just vast, dark water as far as the eye could see.
“Okay. This is not—let’s go.”
“Yeah,” Wiley agreed, a little breathless.
I’m sure you’ll be downright shocked to learn that, when we turned around, the ladder was gone.
The edge of the rooftop was, too.
The thing that surprised me, really, was that it wasn’t as though we were standing on some sort of island. We were somehow in the water all of a sudden, up to our waists, neither of us having taken a single step.
“Fucking…shit. Jesus. Adam?”
“We’re fine,” was my default response, because my anxiety override kicks in like a motherfucker as soon as someone else is more openly afraid than I am. “It’s okay, let’s just—let’s think for a second. Maybe it’s just, like, an illusion or something.”
“Okay,” Wiley said. “Maybe we should…try moving?”
“Yeah. Yeah, we’ll bump the ledge and then we can just feel for the ladder. Good idea.”
Wiley and I shared a look, wordlessly nodding to one another, and stepped forward in unison.
Maybe I misspoke before, when I said we weren’t on a platform. It was just that our platform wasn’t above the water. Now, though, there was nothing.
It felt, almost, like the stomach-turning sensation of missing a step walking up a staircase. The only difference was that there was no moment-too-late connection.
We plummeted.
There wasn’t any difference in temperature beneath the surface, which was, in a way, more disorienting than the water itself. The mental recalibration that typically comes with plunging into a cool lake or, adversely, a heated pool wasn’t allotted an opportunity to take place. It felt, for most intents and purposes, the same as being in the air, just that I couldn’t breathe.
It was heavy, too. The weightlessness water tends to embody was null; I immediately abandoned everything I’d been carrying, clawing my way upward frantically enough that it would’ve been mortifying, I’m sure, had anyone witnessed it.
Wiley resurfaced at the same moment I did—empty handed as well, I noted—coughing a little but not to the extent that I was worried they were choking. “Next idea?” they asked, pushing their wet hair back from their face, dark, damp lashes obscuring their eyes.
“Let’s get back on the…” I started, but trailed off when I raised my head.
A couple hundred yards out from us, there was a ship. It was a dark, hulking thing, with tattered sails and something indistinguishable affixed to the bow, glittering and glinting in the moonlight.
Wiley spun around to face it, drifting back slightly when their gaze landed parallel to mine. “What the fuck is that?” they demanded, legs kicking haphazardly beneath the water to keep them in place.
“Maybe it’s…good,” I said. I knew better than that and I knew Wiley did, too, but I said it anyway. “Maybe someone will help.”
They didn’t even humor me with a response to that bullshit.
Now, at this point in the story, maybe you’re thinking being suddenly surrounded by water and watching as an ominous ship approached us with absolutely nowhere to go and no way to escape doesn’t feel quite enough like imminent condemnation. To which I say to you: not to worry. Because the next realization we came to was that the platform we’d been standing on previously had suddenly ceased to exist.
“Shit,” Wiley said. “Shit, shit, shit. Adam.”
“I know,” I said. “It’s fine. We’re fine. We just—we’re gonna—follow me.”
I don’t know. I don’t know what the fuck possessed me to swim toward the Obvious Death Ship. I guess just that there wasn’t anything else save for open water anywhere so it essentially felt like our options were paddle around until we were exhausted and drown or face a quicker, simpler demise.
“You better have a fucking plan, bro,” Wiley intoned from behind me, which I chivalrously pretended not to hear, because I did not, in fact, have a fucking plan.
The closer we drew to the vessel, the more unbelievably monstrous it appeared to become. It loomed above us, casting a shadow over everything in its direct path, and the sinking in my stomach almost convinced me to turn around. Almost.
But then something curled around my ankle. It was slick and strong, and there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that whatever it was could’ve pulled me under and eaten me alive in a fraction of a second.
Luckily for me, it wasn’t interested. It let go as quickly as it had latched on, almost as though it was simply using me as a handrail to move itself along. Still, though, the knowledge that it was there was all the motivation I needed to push forward ever faster. I didn’t say anything—didn’t want to add more fuel to Wiley’s panicked fire—just picked up my pace and swam up to their side.
“There’s a ladder,” they informed me, raising a hand and pointing toward the back half of the ship.
Indeed, there was a ladder. It was a tattered, worn thing, comprised of old, fraying rope and rotting, untreated wooden boards, but it looked composed enough that I figured we could likely make it up if we were swift.
“Bet,” I said. “Let’s go.”
We went.
Up close, the ladder appeared even shoddier than it had when we’d first seen it. I reached out of the water and wrapped my fingers around the rope at the bottom, giving it a hearty tug. To my slight surprise, it held fast.
“I think we’re good,” I told Wiley. “I’ll go up first and tell you what I see.”
“Be careful,” they said, but didn’t protest, just backed up enough for me to get the leverage I needed to hoist myself onto the bottom board.
I climbed warily, overly conscious of every creak of the wood bowing beneath my weight, every groan of the fibers of rope under my hands, but made it without incident to the top.
Once there, I grabbed onto the ship’s edge, lifting my gaze to take in whatever lie before me.
It was…nothing. I mean, it was a ship, obviously. But there wasn’t anything on board. No apparent crew nor cargo nor even a captain manning the helm. Granted, I couldn’t see perfectly, but the moon shone brightly enough that I was fairly confident in my observation that the deck was devoid of anything but its own shiplap floor.
“Hello?” I called, because I wasn’t about to beckon Wiley up if some fucked shit was going to pop out of nowhere the second we made a sound.
Nothing responded. Nothing moved. The ship rocked gently on the impossible water, as silent and vacant as it had been a moment before.
“Good?” Wiley questioned nervously from below me.
“Yeah,” I told them, easing myself off the ladder and down into the confines of the vessel. “Come on.”
They did so tenuously but still more swiftly than I had, climbing aboard and landing next to me with a dampened thunk.
We allowed ourselves the briefest of moments to catch our breath, silently rejoicing in the small win that was having found solace from the pool itself. Not that we had any idea what to do or where to go from here, but at the very least, we weren’t drowning.
“Okay,” I said, clearing the unease from my throat. “I don’t know what good trying to steer this thing would do us—there’s nothing but water no matter where we go. But maybe there’s something here somewhere that’ll help us figure out how to get back. So I think we just…start looking around?”
Wiley nodded. “Cool. Split halves, front and back?”
Nooo, Adam, don’t split up! Never split up! I know. I can literally hear you screaming it at me. And actually, for once in my life, I considered that something might be a horrible fucking idea before acting on it.
But then I saw something.
As I turned back to respond, Wiley’s eyes shimmered, dancing in the moonlight.
They were silver and mercurial, with no pupils or whites in sight.
Whatever had come back up from underwater, it was not my coworker.
I swallowed, forcing my expression to remain as neutral as I was able and praying whatever was standing in front of me didn’t notice I’d caught on. My entire body was instantaneously covered in chills, in a way that I understood to have the same purpose as a dog’s hackles rising. “Sounds good,” I said. “I’ll take the front.”
I headed in the opposite direction of the thing wearing Wiley’s face (at a pace that I hoped didn’t appear hurried but one that would remove me in a timely manner from the vicinity) and didn’t stop until I’d reached the front of the ship, breathing heavily and attempting to slow my reeling mind.
I didn’t know what to tackle first. I didn’t know where Wiley was, or if they were anywhere—if they were even still alive. I didn’t know what my next move should be. I didn’t know what I was looking for or where I might find it.
It’s rare that I feel utterly hopeless, to the degree that I genuinely contemplate just sitting down and giving up, but in this instance, I thought long and hard about how easy it would be to succumb. I’d let the unthinkable happen. Wiley was gone. No one else had been here with them—there was no one else to blame. Just me. Only me.
…You’ll be glad to know that the self-pity didn’t last long. Embarrassing, honestly.
If I was the only one here, it meant I was the only shot they had at making it out alive. Our version of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ had always been ‘alive until proven dead’ and I wasn’t about to turn my back on the insane streak of luck we’d had up until this point. Not a single one of our lives had been lost, and we’d been in the midst of some absolute shitstorms. There was no reason to believe that right now, tonight, was an outlier. I couldn’t lie down like a sick dog and wonder if Wiley was still out there somewhere, suffering until the bitter, bloody end. I had to find them. By whatever means necessary, as long as it took, I had to find them.
I pushed off the railing before me and spun on my heel, eyes flitting back and forth to assess my options as efficiently as possible, and after a moment, I registered that fitted flush against the large front mast, there was a door.
It was only a sliver, thin and not particularly extraordinary in height, but there was a handle carved roughly into its right side and a set of rust-riddled hinges on its left.
I took about half a second to weigh my options and then reached for it, curling my fingers around the handle and giving it a generous tug.
The hinges, unsurprisingly, complained, but not loudly and not for long. The door gave way with little resistance, and opened up to my worst fucking nightmare.
A set of stairs, descending into blackness.
I mean, I guess if I’m being fair, my first pool encounter had featured a staircase leading to the pool rather than away from it, but I didn’t feel like there could possibly be good news awaiting me below deck of a ship where I’d just encountered a fucking mimic.
Still, though, there was a niggling insistence in my brain (not that kind, come on) that it was my only lead on finding Wiley if they were, in fact, somewhere on board. So I cast one last glance over my shoulder and stepped into the dark, letting the door fall closed behind me.
It smelled different, instantly, from the open air above. Mustier, which was to be expected, but also almost sweet somehow. I tried, unsuccessfully, to shove my true-crime-podcast-addled brain’s helpful reminder that the scent of human death is said to be sweet into a mental lockbox and put my hand to the wall, easing tentatively down to the second step.
The visibility wasn’t just low—it was practically zero. If you’ve ever been on a cave tour and had a guide cut the lights and instruct you to lift your hand to your face to demonstrate the complete absence of light, it was nearly that intense. The placing of both feet on each concurrent stair was an arduous, calculated process, but finally, after approximately one (1) century, I reached flat ground. I still couldn’t see, and there was no definitive way to tell whether I was standing on the floor or just a landing without thoroughly feeling out the space around me, so I reluctantly departed from the wall, scooting my feet in small, tentative motions and keeping both arms partially outstretched before me.
After a (l o n g) moment, I determined that either this was the world’s largest landing or I’d made it all the way down. I had no idea whether I was in a singular, enormous room, or if there were individual cabins, or if I was about to run face-first into the grim fucking reaper.
And then I turned to my left.
There was a light.
It was so, so faint. Flickering. Barely discernible, its warm, gentle glow ever so shyly illuminating the cracks around what appeared to be another closed door.
Being the only visible thing in my line of sight, in any direction, it emitted the aura of both a beacon and an omen.
I headed towards it.
I was about half afraid I was stuck in a horror movie situation where no matter how long I walked it would never grow any closer, but fortunately, that didn’t seem to be the case. I actually gained on it more quickly than I felt I should have for the speed I was moving, but I wasn’t going to complain about reaching the end of the nothingness in commendable time.
I ran my fingertips along the edge of the door and, sure enough, there was a carved-in handle, just like the last.
It opened just as effortlessly, and yellow candlelight rolled dimly out to greet me, lapping at my waterlogged clothes.
“Please,” came a quiet, terrified voice from inside the room. “Please don’t. I don’t know what you want, or–or what you are, but please don’t—”
“...Wiley?”
Rather than calming, the voice’s state of alarm rose to a level bordering on full-blown panic as I took a step into the space. “Please,” the voice begged. There wasn’t anyone visible from my current vantage point, but I could hear it clearly enough to feel fairly confident that the person attached to it—the person who either had to be Wiley or yet another duplicate of them—was close. “Why are you doing this?”
This was a cabin, I thought, or perhaps a study of some sort, with a rotting wooden desk and a decaying leather chair both covered in a flurry of loose, browned book pages and a thick layer of dust. There were candles littering several surfaces, placed in what appeared not to be any intentional manner. Directly to my right, there was a shelf; its back faced me and the odd placement led me to imagine that it may have been employed to block the door at some time.
It was also, I would have just about bet, the source of the voice.
I nudged a couple of planks and a broken amber bottle out of the way with the toe of my shoe, rounding the shelf to find a crumpled, bloodied Wiley, restrained to the floor by a thick, coarse rope fixed expertly to a bolted tie and holding their bound hands up to shield their face.
“Jesus fuck,” I said. “What happened to you?”
Slowly, they lifted their head. “...Adam?”
Realization dawned on me, and I felt my stomach sink. “Look at me,” I told them. “Look at my eyes.”
They did, their own bloodshot and watery and inherently human, and I watched their shoulders deflate, the defense and terror draining from their form. “There’s someone…something…down here. Or, I guess it still is, anyway. I don’t know where it went, but I don’t wanna be here when it comes back.”
I nodded. “It look like me?”
Wiley nodded back.
“Yeah, there’s one of you upstairs. Not real sure what we’re supposed to do about them, but one thing at a time. Let’s get you up from there.”
It was a struggle, disentangling Wiley from the heavy, abrasive leads coccooning their body, but we got there eventually, and throughout the entirety of the arduous process they gave me the rundown on how, when we’d parted from the solace of the platform, something had instantaneously latched onto them, dragging them down deeper and deeper until their ears popped and their head felt like it was going to explode. They said they’d been knocked out by the pressure, and that when they’d come to, already tied in place and coughing up lungfuls of water, “I” had been standing over them, wielding a large net hook and no mercy.
“I knew it wasn’t you, obviously,” they said, “but I didn’t know where you actually were or if something had, like. Hijacked your body? I don’t know. Anyway, let’s get the fuck out of here.”
We grabbed a couple of candles (the majority had simply been melted into place atop whatever surface they’d adorned, but there was a small collection fitted into slightly-too-small brass holders) and got the fuck out.
Being able to see so little in the space around us was almost more disorienting than the pitch darkness I’d been feeling my way through before. It felt as though we were in a fragile, wavering bubble of reality and nothing existed outside of it.
“Wish I’d been awake coming down here,” Wiley remarked. “Guess I still wouldn’t have seen shit, though.”
“I could…maybe get us back upstairs?” I considered, with little to no confidence. “But I don’t really know what good it would do us. Nowhere to go. Maybe we just…look around down here for a bit? See if we can find anything useful?”
“Yeah, okay,” Wiley assented. “But we’ve gotta be quiet. I don’t want that thing to hear us.”
I certainly couldn’t argue with that.
We wandered hesitantly through the dark, shielding the flames of our candles with cupped palms and praying we wouldn’t misstep. We made it some unsubstantiated quantity of time without incident, but softly, after seconds or minutes or hours, we heard a light rustling from the shadow veiled corridor to our right, and Wiley pulled me into the nearest open room in the opposite direction.
Flattening our backs to the wall, we listened intently as footsteps echoed faintly behind us, cyclically growing closer and then further away again for several moments before disappearing altogether.
I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding and uncovered my candle, easing the door of the room to a gentle, silent close. The contents of this one were different from that of the last in that there practically weren’t any. It wasn’t just that it was tidier; there was a chest shoved against the wall nearest us and a leatherbound book of some sort lying in the center of the floor, but otherwise the space was vacant.
Wiley moved first, crouching next to the journal and lifting it from the ground, a cloud of dust rising in the wake of their breath. I knelt down beside them, offering my candlelight so they could discard theirs and open the cover.
Beneath which there was a box.
It was a plain, unadorned wooden rectangle, nestled into the carved-out central pages of the book, and we learned upon extracting it that there was no lock or latch, just a seam indicating the lid’s separation from the body.
I don’t need to spell the whole situation out for you. There was a key in the box. The key opened, you guessed it: the chest. Inside the chest, there were piles of gold and jewels beyond your wildest imagination. We’re rich now. The end.
Nah, JK. But the key in the box did open the chest, in which there was, A) a pair of peeling, pleather driving gloves, and B)...
I felt my heart skip.
A bicycle chain.
I’m not going to get into the nuances of that right now, or maybe ever. But for the purposes of dramatic flair, just know that it was incredibly, pointedly relevant to me, on a level so personal it sucker punched the air straight out of my lungs.
“No,” Wiley said, staggering back a step. “Uh-uh. Nope.”
I put together, then, that the gloves must have been their ticket item. “It’s okay,” I said, on autopilot, because it was not. “There’s something—something’s carved into the bottom of this thing.” Pushing past the reaction every fiber of my being had to the sensation of the frigid metal against my skin, I shoved both the chain and the gloves to the side and could scarcely make out a host of crudely scrawled letters in the wavering light of my half-gone candle.
“What is it?” Wiley asked, making no move to come nearer again.
“Though your…hand…? Heart. Though your heart does pound and knees grow…weak,” I deciphered slowly, “Rid yourself by your… That doesn’t make any sense. Shouldn’t it be of? It says ‘rid yourself by *your fear’ and…*something. Drain the…clin… No. Drink. Drain the drink.”
“Rid yourself by your fear and drain the drink,” Wiley repeated analytically. “The hell does that mean? Is this shit telling us to kill ourselves with the—oh. Oh. Fuck.”
I was not following. “...I’m not following,” I said.
“It is.” Wiley returned to my side, squatting down and nudging me out of the way with their shoulder to peer warily into the trunk. “It’s telling us to kill ourselves, but not these selves. We’re supposed to use…*those…*to kill our fuckin’ doppelgangers, or whatever they are. That’s how we get rid of the water.”
“Oh,” I echoed. “Fuck.”
We marinated for a moment in silence before Wiley sighed, resigned, and lifted the gloves from the chest, closing their eyes and pulling the fabric snugly over their hands. “Let’s get to work.”

BLUF: SoD Phase 3 is the first time in five years my guild has been on the cusp of ending our Classic WoW journey; there are many variables behind this fall-off, but the main driver is “lack of reasons to engage” with SoD individually or as a guild.
SOME BACKGROUND: I've been the MT, RL and GM for the same Classic-focused guild since 2019. Our guild is a true “dad guild”, many of us have known each other for years, and we’ve cleared every piece of classic raid content at a “respectable pace” raiding 2 days a week, 3 hours per raid. Near the end of WotLK/ICC, we agreed that we would not continue into Cataclysm and focus on SoD as it would be a nice change of pace and we all loved the idea of a Classic WoW “reset”. During Phase 1 and Phase 2, we easily fielded multiple 10-man raids (minimum two, sometimes three per reset) with a mix of mains, alts and some regular PUGs every reset.
CURRENT STATE: Phase 3 we’ve seen a drastic drop off in interest. This is the worst case of raid logging I’ve ever seen – majority of our core raid group is now logging out right after the raid, might log in once during the week to refill consumes and WBs, and then won’t log back in until raid night. While our core is strong and we have a roster of 23-25 raiders, we are now consistently having to find 3-4 PUGs each week because absences continue to climb. Most shockingly, finding PUGs has even become a chore; all of P1, P2 and early P3, I could toss a message in LFG and immediately have a handful of PUGs to choose from. Now I’m lucky if I get two hits in 30 minutes on a primary raid night, and we don’t even list any experience requirements – the interest just isn’t there.
WHAT WENT WRONG (in order of importance):
1) Raid Loot – this has been the biggest factor in raid engagement drop-off for us. Simply put, ST raid loot table is severely lacking in upgrades. Once everyone got their 3-piece and crafted shoulders, it came down to premium weapon upgrades and even those were lacking. Other than the fist weapons and maybe the SP trinket, there are no other “highly desirable” loot drops in ST. There is almost zero incentive to clear the raid for those that love seeing their power level increase each reset. Most of us are still sitting in a mix of crafted and level 40 Gnomer gear because it’s just as good.
2) Weekly Reset – I still don’t understand the decision behind a weekly reset of ST. Even at 20-man, the raid only has 8 bosses and takes even average guilds between 1.5-2 hours to clear. 3-day reset was fine and drove up engagement throughout the week. It also incentivized more alts as we would have interchanged mains/alts depending who needed upgrades and who was near full-BiS.
3) Dungeons – Wild Offerings were the primary driver for heading into Mara, BRD and ZF in early P3. However, once everyone got their 2-3 WO upgrades, that was it. The dungeons do not provide any real value unless you skipped phase 2 and are looking for a few specific pre-BiS upgrades.
4) Incursions – this has been covered ad nauseam but I’ll give my take. For our guild, the issue with Incursions wasn’t the influx of gold. It was the DRASTIC gap in XP gain per hour and availability of solid lvl 50 rep gear. A) The amount of XP gained was so good there was no reason to go into the open world with your friends, B) the full set of lvl 50 gear you could get at honored minimized/replaced the need to enter dungeons for pre-BiS gear, C) FOMO is real, and we had a number of guild members who felt incredibly deflated when they logged in 24-36 hours after P3 release and saw a bunch of us already at lvl 50. Some of them even stopped leveling for a few days and we had a couple of people quit cold turkey. Incursions diminished initial excitement for P3.
WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE (P4 & Beyond):
1) Give more/better loot across max-level raids – people want to replace their old gear; they want to feel progression. So give us more/bettedifferent loot options so we keep coming back for more.
2) If 20-man raids are expected to be 7-day resets, then give us a secondary 10-man raid with 3 day resets – I’m not advocating for MC10 + MC20; I’m advocating for MC20 and another, separate 10 man raid to drive interest; think ZG, AQ20, Kara, ZA; all “smaller” raids that drove lots of interest either via loot, currency and/or cosmetic drops like mounts.
3) Legacy dungeons need something beyond geacurrency to drive long-term engagement – expand dungeon boss loot tables to include cosmetic drops or even mounts to keep us coming back on a regular basis; rep tabards might be a nice touch as well for secondary rep grind options
4) Incursion-type events should be on a daily or even weekly reset - the quest XP and gold SHOULD be really good, but make each quest a daily or weekly reset so it forces us into other forms of leveling and gold making each day
Sorry this is so long. But Classic WoW has been a great hobby for me and my buddies. We don't want the party to end, we just want the DJ to put on some different music.

i (32F) got engaged one month after my dad passed away. fast forward 5 months, and my half sister (45F) and i were dealing with another loss in the family. my sister is mentally ill, unmedicated, and a recovering alcoholic, so naturally the loss of her stepdad and the impending loss of our grandmother is bound to set off some pretty intense emotional turmoil.
at the time our grandma passed away (april 2023), my sister completely spiralled, ran away from the hospital, got beyond wasted, and picked a fight with me. she called me an orphan not once, but twice, during this fight. she also went ballistic on my fiancé, too, because he was trying to find out where she was so he could go pick her up, and then blocked his number. needless to say, i blocked her at the time so we could both have some space to grieve and chill out.
flash forward another 10 months. my wedding has been planned, invites have gone out, and she emerges again. she tells me she’s sorry, that she’s been sober since that day, and that she wants to reconcile our relationship. at this point, i am SO thrilled, because she’s my big sister, and i want her at my wedding, sober. i welcome her back into my life instantaneously, and mail her a wedding invitation.
two weeks later, she finds out that i didn’t invite anyone else from our family, and she loses it again. i explained that our wedding is very small, and we only invited people who are actively in our lives to a) keep the cost down, and b) make the event more intimate. she finds this completely unacceptable and tells my family that my partner and i are getting married on x date and didn’t invite them, and then proceeds to tell me that “weddings are a joke”, and that she’s not coming because she’s “going to book a holiday to the beach instead.”
obviously this was wildly upsetting for me, my own sister doesn’t want to come to my wedding. she told me she wanted to be a better big sister and be there for me, so i’m feeling pretty bamboozled by the emotional rollercoaster.
flash forward to two weeks ago. my fiancé texts my sister and says, “hey, i know you guys had a fight, but i know it would really mean a lot to your sister if you would just come to our wedding.”
no response to him, but she texted me on sunday wishing me a happy mother’s day.
finally, last night, as our wedding is fast approaching and i’d really love to solidify the headcount of attendees, i texted her. here is the extent of our conversation:
me: “are you coming to our wedding or are you going to the beach? ____ texted you like 2 weeks ago, but he’s pretty sure you still have his number blocked, or you’re ignoring him.”
her: “I think maybe it would be best if you stick to who your invites originally went out to. I dont have anything else to say in regards to it. The whole thing has been painful.”
am i the asshole here?