Once again, my next post concerning the localized script of Cold Steel III. With this, I'll tackle the first part of Chapter 3. The points shown here are based on my sensibilities as to what lines cause issues for the dialogue, from being outright wrong to being awkward. My previous posts are listed below:

Prologue: https://www.reddit.com/Falcom/s/iU44PytvbN
Chapter 1: https://www.reddit.com/Falcom/s/cTjkFwRsAM
Chapter 2 (1/2): https://www.reddit.com/Falcom/s/973QP55DqX
Chapter 2 (2/2): https://www.reddit.com/Falcom/s/XrHBTWb0hr

Chapter 3

1:「I take it this means House Hyarms will be the only one of the Four Great Houses in attendance?」 / 「“四大”から当主が出席するのはそちらの家だけになりそうだな？」

The localization has Jusis word this an absolute. "当主" should refer to the actual head of the house. Jusis could've said: [I take it this means House Hyarms will be the only one of the Four Great Houses in with it's head attendance?]

2:「Every bit as tasty as the pancakes Tilly and I had earlier.」 / 「この前アーちゃんと食べたパンケーキに負けてないかなぁ。」

The phrasing choice of "earlier" in the localization makes this reference to a moment in Chapter 1, pretty much two months ago, strange. It feels like way too much like a direct translation of "この前," without the context. Millium could've said: [Every bit as tasty as the pancakes Tilly and I had (anything that'd make more sense) before/in Leeves/a couple months ago.]

3:「I figured Nidhoggr would be good, but the other guys are no slouches themselves.」 / 「“竜”も“連中”も悪くない。」

Random moment in the localization where refering to the jaeger corp in question as just "the dragons"/"竜" is omitted. There were no issues in any other instance. Shirley could've said: [I figured the dragons would be good, but the other guys are no slouches themselves.]

4:「The dragon lost its head, and as for the other group, well...」 / 「“竜”は頭が変わり、“彼ら”の方といえば──」

The original has it as "changed"/"変わり," not outright lost. Gareth could've said: [The dragon changed its head, and as for the other group, well...]

5:「We've got two of the strongest jaeger corps--the dragons and these jaegers in purple--battling it out...」 / 「──最強の猟兵団２つに“竜”たち、そして紫の一団……」

The localization phrases this in a different way than it should. It's denoted that "the dragons and these jaegers in purple" are emphasized as the "two strongest jager corps"; however, the original is listing the four in the scene. Sara could've said: [We've got two of the strongest jaeger corps--Zephyr and the Red Constelation--the dragons and these jaegers in purple, battling it out.]

6:「What's this big conference thing about?」 / 「『領邦会議』って何なの？」

The localization changes the clear question about the actual term she read about, just to make it sillier. Besides the fact that it even chooses to swap "council" for "conference." Juna could've said: [What's this Provincial Council thing about?]

7:「One time, some bandits captured me and held me in a stone prison...」 / 「とある小国では、山賊に捕まり一週間も岩牢へぶち込まれた事があったのお……」

The localization omits the time held captive, "one week"/"一週間." Old Man Rod could've said: [One time, some bandits captured me and held me in a stone prison for a whole week...]

8:「Speaking of which, was the Azure Knight ever retrieved?」 / 「そういえば《蒼の騎神》は軍に回収されたのよね？」

「I heard that they sealed it up so that the Noble Alliance wouldn't get their hands on it.」 / 「貴族勢力に使われないよう厳重に封印したって聞いたけど……」
Very weird way to phrase this line by the localization. Especially considering that it is also said "they sealed it" in the next line. The original already mentions the "military"/"軍." Celine could've said: [Speaking of which, was/wasn't the Azure Knight ~~ever~~ retrieved by the military?]

9:「Mastering this form is more difficult than any other. I do not know if you are even capable of such a feat, yet...」 / 「その極みは他の型よりも遠く、おぬしが“理”に至れるかは分からぬが……」

The localization lumps the meaning of reaching the "pinnacle" or "heights"/"極み" and "enlightenment"/"理" to be the same thing as "mastering"/"奥伝" the 7th form. That's simply wrong. Yun Ka-Fai's letter could've said: [Reaching the pinnacle of this form is more difficult than any other. I do not know if you are even capable of attaining "enlightenment", yet...]

10:「Not to mention, I can't imagine you'd need a third. Not at this point in your relationship, anyway♡.」 / 「それにせっかくの２人きりの機会……水を差すのは野暮というものですし♡」

The localization adds what I assume is meant to be a "threesome" joke. Sharon could've said: [Not to mention, I can't imagine you'd like me to intrude on your private time♡]

11:「My school and the cathedral are in the same district, in case you were wondering.」 / 「何しろ、女学院と大聖堂は同じサンクト地区にありますしね。」

The localization saw fit to omit the specifications of the district. Elise could've said: [My school/St. Astraia/the Girl's School and the cathedral are both in the Sankt District, in case you were wondering.]

12:「(Yes, I have. When I was accompanying the inspection team in Crossbell, I did some studying there.)」 / 「（ええ、ですがクロスベルの視察団に同行するのにあたって一通り勉強しましたから。）」

Actually, it's completely wrong. When questioned, by Rean, that she's never been to Armorica Village before, she's not supposed to have "studied in the village." Elise should've said: [Yes, I haven't. However, when I was accompanying the inspection team in Crossbell, I did some studying/read all *about it.]

13:「We have the Goddess of the Sky, but they worship something else.」 / 「彼らは空の女神と同じくらい大切にしているものがあるんだ。」

「What is it that the Nord people worship?」 / 「ノルドの民が、空の女神と同じくらい大切にしているものは？」
There isn't supposed to be a comparison that reads as if the Nord people worship "something else" instead of Aidios. Rean could've said: [They also have the Goddess of the Sky, but they worship something else equally.]

14:「He knows a lot about cooking, and he tells me all about the academy. Teehee, he's so helpful.」 / 「お料理も詳しいし、学院の事情なんかも教えてくださるの。ふふ、助かっているわ。」

「With such an amazing faculty member, Thors must really be an excellent school.」 / 「あんなに優秀な職員さんがいるなんて、トールズってやっぱり名門校なのねぇ。」
「Hahaha...(That doesn't quite seem like Celestin, but...)」 / 「ははは……（セレスタンさんはちょっと特別な気もするが……）」
The localization got this one completely wrong. How is describing Celestin as "knowledgeable about cooking" and "helpful" not like him? That response makes no sense. First, the second line should read more generalizing the compliments to the whole staff; Cattleya could've said: [With such an amazing faculty ~~member~~/members Thors must really be an excellent school.] Second, the meaning is that "Celestin is a unique case among the faculty" (in regards to being so amazing.) Rean could've said: [Hahaha... (That doesn't quite seem like anyone but Celestin...)]

15:「Huh...? (Wait, is someone outside...?)」 / 「ふむ……（そういえば部屋の外に……）」

The localization also got this one wrong. The Japanese don't come across as completely unaware. The assumption of this scene is that to Wayne is standing outside the training hall. Rean could've said: [Huh...? (Wait, the one outside would be...)]

16:「She also said she apprenticed under a female martial artist and traveled around Erebonia...」 / 「外国人の女性武術家に弟子入りして、半年も帝国を放浪していたなんて話も聞きましたが……」

The localization omits the time spent traveling, "半年." Rean could've said: [She also said she apprenticed under a female martial artist and traveled around Erebonia for six months...]

17:「Yeah, thanks to this pendant Emma made me.」 / 「ああ……エマの魔力が込められこのペンダントの力を借りてだが。」

The localization simplifies the explanation. Rean could've said: [Yeah, thanks to this pendant Emma imbued with her magic.)

18:「A monster? Wait, that's a cryptid!」 / 「魔獣──いや、魔物のたぐいか！？」

「What a nightmarish beast that cryptid was...」 / 「はぁ、まさかあんな恐ろしい魔物がいるなんて……」
The localization mistranslated "fiend"/"魔物" for "cryptid"/"幻獣." Kurt could've said: [A monster? Wait that's some kind of fiend!] Musse could've said: [What a nightmarish beast that fiend was...]

19:「After paying a visit to Professor Schmidt, Rean walked George to the station, where his train back to Roer was waiting.」 / 「シュミット博士に一言挨拶を済ませた後、北東のルーレに向かうジョルジュを駅まで見送ることにしたのだった。」

The localization removes the direction of the city. The narration could've said: [After paying a visit to Professor Schmidt, Rean walked George to the station, where his train back to Roer, in the northeast, was waiting.]

20:「I considered making a last stand there, but news of the Northern War reached me.」 / 「１年は抵抗してやろうと思ったがそこへ《北方戦役》の話が降ってきた。」

The localization removes the remark about the duration of the last stand. Aurelia could've said: [I considered making a last stand there for a year, but news of the Northern War reached me.]

21:「You'll be just fine, Towa. Now let's get this show on the road!」 / 「フフ、ハーシェル先輩ならきっと大丈夫ですよ。一緒に頑張りましょう！」

The localization changes, addressing Towa by her surname. Munk could've said: [You'll be just fine, Herschel. Now let's get this show on the road!]

22:「Not to mention, as the student council president, you were highly regarded by many of your fellow students.」 / 「もとより、士官学院の生徒会長として貴族・平民を問わず多くの学院生たちから高い信頼を受け──」

The localization omits taking social classes into account. Munk could've said: [Not to mention, as the student council president, you were highly regarded by many of your fellow students--nobles and commoners alike.]

23:「Heehee. No elegant young maiden can resist the call of beautiful lace.」 / 「ふふっ、淑女の嗜みと言えばやはりマリアージュ・クロスははずせないでしょうね。」

The localization omits the mention of the brand. Musse could've said: [Heehee. No elegant young maiden can resist the call of Mariage Cross ~~beautiful lace~~/Mariage Cross' beautiful lace.]

24:「Nothing draws a man's eye like a bit of lace...in just the right spot.」 / 「姫様から色々とプレゼントされたと聞きましたけど？」

The localization completely changes, from specifically teasing Elise to just be more of a general tease. Musse could've said: [I've heard that the princess has gifted you many such lace.]

25:「Although, I was shocked when she tried to pay for it with gunpowder.」 / 「手持ちがないからって報酬を弾薬で払おうとした時は驚いたけどね。」

The localization chooses to translate the general term for "ammunition"/"弾薬" to be specifically gunpowder. Marcus could've said: [Although, I was shocked when she tried to pay for it with ammunition/ammo/(maybe) *bullets".]

26:「How about assorted Eastern sweets?」 / 「なら……『羊羹の詰め合わせ』はどうだ？」

The localization randomly chooses to translate "yokan"/"羊羹" as just generic "eastern sweets", after having no problem doing it correctly in all other instances. Rean could've said: [How about some assorted yokan?]

27:「Well, we've basically just been making whatever we want at the Cooking Club.」 / 「ま、具体的には料理研究会と女子の有志でメニュー追加ですね。」

The localization phrases the arrangement weirdly. Juna could've said: [Well, we've (Elise, Musse and Juna) basically just decided on the menu together with the Cooking Club.]

28:「The elder? Is she the one Emma and Vita call their grandmother?」 / 「“長”──エマが“お祖母ちゃん”、クロチルダさんが“婆様”と呼ぶ人だよな？」

「I'm also worried about the 'true story' that Vita mentioned.」 / 「クロチルダさんが言っていた“真なる物語”というのもあったな。」
Again, it's made to use "Vita" instead of "Clotilde." I've already explained in previous posts how these changes can affect the dynamics of characters negatively. Rean could've said: [I'm also worried about the 'true story' that Clotilde mentioned.]

29:「From that day, Emma began training and studying as hard as she could with one goal...」 / 「『あやつの事は忘れよ』という“長”の言葉にも納得せず、その日からひたすらに修行と勉学に励んでいったわ。」

The localization removes what Roselia told Emma. Celine could've said: [From the day the Elder said 'forget all about heVita', Emma began training and studying as hard as she could with one goal...)

30:「That's the golden Spiegel the principal mentioned!」 / 「分校長が使っていた黄金のシュピーゲル……！」

The localization swaps "used" or "piloted"/"使っていた" for "mentioned." Rean could've said: [That's the golden Spiegel the principal used!]

31:「And so, Aurelia finished training the members of Class VIII...」 / 「──こうしてオーレリアはⅧ組メンバーにも（優しく）稽古を付け……」

The localization omits the joke. The narration could've said: [And so, Aurelia finished (gently) training the members of Class VIII...]

32:「Do they really need to have the conference during the Summer Festival...?」 / 「……夏至祭の時期……領邦会議もあるんですよね……」

The localization chose to phrase this as there's supposed to be reservation against these events being held at the same time. That wasn't particularly present originally. Tatiana could've said: [The Summer Festival is going to be held at the same time as Pronvicial Council...]; or: [I hear that the Provincial Council will be held together with the Summer Festival...]

33:「From what I heard, Olivier liked to play his lute under it.」 / 「ちなみに、その大橋の下でオリビエさんがリュートの弾き語りを披露したことがあるらしいんです。」

The localization puts this as if it's a 'known regular hobby'. Tita could've said: [From what I heard, Olivier played his lute under it *once.]

34:「It reminds me of the fleet. I feel like I'm home.」 / 「まるで船団に戻って来たみたいというか……これだけで里心がついちまうよ。」

「I hope our boss is doing well.」 / 「それにしても──女将さん、元気だといいんだが。」
The localization creates an awkward confusion for these lines. What would be expected is that "boss" would be the fleet's boss, but it's actually talking about the owner of the sailor bar, Miranda, by using "owner" or "landlady"/"女将さん." Leonora could've said: [I hope Miranda/the owner is doing well.]

35「Well, thanks to my mom's job, I know all about the nightlife in Raquel. Lemme know if you need any recommendations.」 / 「ま、お袋の職場だったのもあるし、夜のラクウェルなら任せろや。」

「I think it'll be an eye-opening experience for everyone, yeah?」 / 「坊ちゃんやらジャジャ馬にだっていい社会勉強になるんじゃねえか？」
「Though I might consider doing something after we're done with the field exercises.」 / 「せめて演習が終わった最終日なら引率込みで考えなくもないが。」
「Huh...? Well, aren't you a stingy one?」 / 「ハァ……？チッ、ケチくせえ野郎だな。」
The point of the line doesn't really come across that well in the localization. It sounds like the punchline to responding to Ash's proposal to allow Class VII to go out in the nightlife of Raquel is that "I'll consider doing that by myself." That couldn't be more wrong. Rena could've said: [Though I might consider chaperoning you guys after we're done with the field exercises.]

36:「The former Duke Cayenne is still under arrest and no replacement has been named.」 / 「現カイエン公は逮捕されたままで地方統括者は不在ですよね。」

Literally mistranslates "current"/"現." Altina could've said: [The current Duke Cayenne is still under arrest and no replacement has been named.]

37:「Hmph, you talk a lot for a doll. Must have a really long string in the back.」 / 「ハッ、よく喋る人形だぜ。」

Ash's line originally ends at the first clause.

38:「I hear there are some snipers who chose the Hector... but I suppose it all comes down to feeling.」 / 「正規軍の中にはヘクトルを選ぶ狙撃手もいるそうですが……まあ、要は相性ですね。」

The localization omits tthe fact that the snipers are from the army. Maya could've said: [I hear there are some snipers in the Imperial Army who chose the Hector... but I suppose it all comes down to feeling.]

39:「We need to focus on getting to Ordis.」 / 「この先はラクウェル方面──まずはオルディスの依頼に集中しよう。」

The localization removes the previous remark. Rean could've said: [This way leads to Raquel--We need to focus on getting to Ordis.]

40:「Damn. So that monster used to cozy up in there with fifty-thousand soldiers.」 / 「クク、あんな場所にあの化物が５万の兵と立て籠もったワケだ。」

The choice of "used" makes the sentence read as a characteristic beyond the single event the Japanese refers to. Ash could've said: [Damn. So that monster locked herself/cozied up in there with fifty-thousand soldiers.]

41:「During the war, the Imperial Army was at a loss after multiple failed attempts to infiltrate.」 / 「当時、帝国正規軍も攻めあぐねて頭を抱えたそうです。」

「It's fully equipped with multiple Panzer Soldats, large-class airships, and enough supplies and anti-aircraft cannons to last three years.」/ 「多数の機甲兵に大型飛行艇、３年は継戦できるだけの物資、対空砲も完備していましたから。」
In the context of "the Noble Alliance forces, after the civil war ended, barricaded themselves in Juno Naval Fortress," the localization wrongly chooses to put it as "during the war." Much the same, the second line is supposed to be talking about that single past event. Altina could've said: [It was equiped with multiple Panzer Soldats, large-class airships, and enough supplies amd anti-aircraft cannons to last three years.]

42:「(And thus a deal was struck that shifted the Northern War.)」 / 「（そんな事態を打開するために北方戦役の話が持ち上がった……）」

The localization translated this line very wrongly. The situation being "shifted" isn't the Northern War. Rean could've said: [To resolve that situation (Aurelia's barricade in Juno), the deal to set out for the Northern War was struck.]

44:「I don't see any Goliath Soldats. Do you?」 / 「ああ、そういや主力戦車だの噂の巨人機(ゴライアス)だのは見当たらねぇな？」

The localization omits the mention of the Main Battle Tanks. Ash could've said: [I don't see any Main Battle Tanks/MBTs/Achtzenhs or Goliath Soldats. Do you?]

46:「But over the past six months, we've seen some suspicious activity from both jaeger corps.」 / 「だがここ半年、帝国各地で不可解な動きをしていた各猟兵団が半月くらい前から鳴りを潜めていてな。」

「Activity that's led us to believe they're planning something for the Imperial Provincial Council in Lamare.」 / 「ール州で開かれる領邦会議に合わ・せるように。」
「Over the past six months, there haven't been any confirmed reports of jaeger corps activity within the Empire.」 / 「──ここ半月、帝国各地で活動していた複数の猟兵団の動きが確認できなくなっている模様。」
By virtue of omitting information, the localization causes this line to have the wrong information. In the first line. Wallace could've said: [But over the past half a month/two weeks, we've not seen activity from the multiple jaeger corps which, until then, had been moving suspiciously in the Empire starting six months ago.] Consequentially, it's the lack of movement so close to the Provincial Council that makes them wary. The third line straight up mistranslated "half a month"/"半月." Wallace could've said: [Over the past half a month/two weeks, there haven't been any confirmed reports of jaeger corps activity within the Empire.]

47:「Ordis has been holding the Imperial Provincial Council since yesterday. Immediately after that's done is the Summer Festival.」 / 「オルディスは明日より領邦会議、そして《夏至祭》という状況です。」

The localization outright mistranslates "tomorrow"/"明日." The Provincial Army Soldier could've said: [Ordis will hold the Imperial Provincial Council starting tomorrow. Immediately after that's done is the Summer Festival.]

49:「Looking at this view, I can see why Ordis is so famous.」 / 「さすがは《紺碧の海都》と称えられるだけはある街だな。」

「The Port City, Ordis.」 / 「《紺碧の海都》オルディスへ。」
The localization refuses to establish a term for this other name that Rean and Musse call Ordis. Given some uses of the Japanese term, it could be "Saphirl Port City"; given the name of a food item in the city, perhaps "Aquamarine Port City"; even if not the same kanji, maybe "Azure Port City." As long as it's not entirely omitted from the game.

50:「Yeah, but once we're done sightseein', we've got a monster to kill.」 / 「そんで一通り回ったら南の浜辺で手配された魔獣をブチ倒すわけか。」

The localization omits mentioning the location of the monster. Ash could've said: [Yeah, but once we're done sightseein', we've got a monster to kill on the beach to the south/southern beach/beach south of the city.]

51:「I hope Luna isn't too bored.」 / 「はっはっは、ルナたちが退屈していなければいいのだが。」

The localization singles out Luna. Lord Quinn could've said: [I hope Luna and Eclair aren't too bored.]

52:「You're in luck. With the Summer Festival going on, the town is really buzzing with activity.」 / 「夏至祭も近いので商業区は賑わっているようです。」

The localization messes up the timeframe a little. The Provincial Army Soldier could've said: [You're in luck. With the Summer Festival happening soon, the town is really buzzing with activity.]

53:「My husband doesn't like things that come from the capital.」 / 「うちは旦那様が帝都資本嫌いなんです。」

Just like in Chapter 2, a maid is made to call her "master"/"lord" her husband by virtue of the fact that the Japanese term can be used for both. Pamela could've said: [My Master/Lord doesn't like things that come from the capital.]

54:「In addition to the taverns, there's an orbment store, and a glass workshop that is popular with the duke households.」 / 「宿酒場の他に、導力器なども扱う、公爵家御用達の硝子工房などもあります。」

It's not meant to be "households "in plural; the context here is that the glass workshop is used by the Cayenne estate. Musse could've said: [In addition to the taverns, there's an orbment store, and a glass workshop that is popular with the duke household/Cayenne/duke's estate*.]

55:「Guess what! My big brother is coming back tomorrow!」 /「あのね！今日兄ちゃんが帰ってくるんだ～っ！」

「My big brother is coming back tomorrow!」 / 「今日は兄ちゃんが帰ってくるんだよ！」
Straight up mistranslating "today"/"今日" in the localization. Luka could've said: [Guess what! My big brother is coming back today!]; And: [My big brother is coming back today!]

56:「Gramps is the ultimate craftsman. He even received the Golden Emblem.」 / 「じいちゃんは陛下から《黄綬勲章》を賜った最高の職人ですからね。」

The localization omits the line also havimg mention of the fact that the emperor is the award giver. Luther could've said: [Gramps is the ultimate craftsman. He even received the Golden Emblem from His Majesty himself.]

57:「Though, all I do nowadays is drink here!」 / 「ま、今はこの店くらいにしか卸しておらんがなぁ！」

「We get all our seafood from Rossel.」 / 「ちなみに魚介はそこのロッセルさんが卸してくれるんだ。」
The localization got this line wrong. It's not about drinking a lot, even the owner of the inn says the same, "卸して." Just as mentioned in the second line, by the tavern owner, Edmond. Old Man Rossel should've said: [Though, all I do nowadays is sell my catches here!]

57:「I need to make sure it doesn't compromise the beauty of this.」 / 「《輝き号》の魅力を損ねないよう、極力目立たないようにしたいけど……」

The localization chose to have the guy who's emamored with his new boat, and gave it it's own name, ultimately call it a "this." The Cheerful Man could've said: [I need to make sure it doesn't compromise Radiance's beauty.]

58:「I had to rid myself of some of the merchant ships my grandfather passed down to me! Aside from that little head start, I'm a self-made man!」 / 「祖父の代からの商船すらただ同然で手放すことになるなど……！」

The original isn't really about being or not being "self-made." Lord Beckford could've said: [I had to rid myself of some of the merchant ships my grandfather passed down to me as if they were worthless!]

59:「I mean, will all four of the Great Houses even participate? This truly is mindboggling.」 / 「そもそも四大の足並みすら揃うかどうか。……やれやれ、悩ませてくれる。」

The localization makes up the logic that the count would somehow still be in doubt of the participation of Great Houses with one day to go. Count Florald should've said: [I mean, will all four of the Great Houses' thoughts even be in alignment? This truly is mindboggling.]

60:「So this is a jade shell...It'd make for quite the accessory.」 / 「これがヒスイ貝か……確かに飾りに相応しいな。」

The whole point of the quest is to make "decorations"/"飾り" for the Summer Festival, and the localization decides it should be "accessory." Kurt should've said: [So this is a jade shell...It'd make for quite the decorarion.]

61:「We've lost enough men for one day.」 / 「ここで戦力を減らす意味など皆無だからな。」

The original doesn't make it sound like the Purple Jaegers already lost men against Rean and Class VII. The Purple Jaeger should've said: [There's no point in us losing our forces here today.]

62:「It's vital that we confirm if there are jaeger corps roaming the area.」 / 「この地で猟兵団が動いているのを実際に捉えたのは大きいだろう。」

The localization mistranslated this line and also makes it sound silly. None of the characters put any doubt that there are jaegers around or that the Purple Jaegers are jaegers; needing to confirm that just comes across as awkward. Patrick should've said: [It would have been great if we had actually captured those jaegers roaming the area.]

62:「This is a travesty! Does Marquis Ballad truly intend to reform the government like this?!」 / 「……信じられるか！？バラッド侯はまだ政府の改革案を受け入れるつもりらしいぞ。」

The original is about "accepting the government's reform plan"/"政府の改革案を受け入れる. Lord Beckford should've said: [This is a travesty! Does Marquis Ballad truly intend to accept the reforms of the government like this?!]

63:「We'll both be in town while the council is underway.」 / 「毎年領邦会議の時期は二人とも同じ街にいるんです。」

The original is about the lovers being in Ordis "every year"/"毎年" during the Provincial Council. Hearhcliff could've said: [We both come to town every year while the council is underway.]

64:「The next Duke Cayenne is about to be decided.」 / 「そろそろ現カイエン公にも判決が出される頃だよなぁ。」

The localizations not only mistranslate "current"/"現" but also "sentenced"/"判決が出される." Reins should've said: [The current Duke Cayenne is about to be sentenced.]

65:「Our hotel offers a taxi service.」 / 「当ホテルではラクウェルヘの送迎サービスも行っております。」

「You can enjoy the night life without worrying about the time.」 / 「鉄道のお時間を気にせず歓楽街を楽しむ事ができますよ。」
The first localized line gives the wrong idea. That would cause the second line to likely be interpreted as "Ordis' night life" when it's actually about in "Raquel"/"ラクウェル". Receptionis Harold should've said: [Our hotel offers a taxi service jto and from Raquel*.]

66:「Juna, see you later.」 / 「ユウナちゃんたち、お疲れ様ー。」

The localization singles out Juna, when it's her and Class VII. Louise could've said: [Juna and everyone/Everyone/Class VII, see you later.]

67:「Haha. Well, the three girls were so cute that I nearly--ahem, excuse me.」 / 「フフ、女の子たち３人が可愛すぎて思わず鼻血が──おっと、失敬。」

The localization leaves to the imagination, for better or for worse to some, that she got a "nosebleed"/"鼻血." Angelica could've said: [Haha. Well, the three girls were so cute that I got a nosebleed--ahem, excuse me.]

68:「There was a shooting near a school the other day...」 / 「この前なんて町のすぐ近くで撃ち合いがあって。」

The localization mistranslated "町" as "school," which doesn't have anything to do with it. Sister Olfa should've said: [There was a shooting near the city the other day...]

Mr. Winslow accused my mother of stealing his dead wife’s jewelry.
I explained it was impossible. He was welcome to search the tiny apartment I shared with my mother and aunt, he could look wherever he wanted.
“We share a tiny space,” I said. “We barely have enough room for our clothes. I don’t even know where she would hide jewelry.”
I was worried we would lose him as a client. Which would suck because cleaning his house was basically the majority of our rent cheque. But a week later he found the pearl necklace, it had somehow travelled down to his basement.
“I’m still missing the gold bangle though,” he said. “And some earrings.”
I told him I was sorry, but I had no idea. If my mom or aunt found it on their next clean, I promised they would let him know right away.
He hummed and hawed. There might’ve been a week where he hired a different maid service, but eventually he called back, asking if he could hire all three of us on-site again.
I thanked him profusely. I told him we’d keep an eye out for the missing valuables.
***
On our drive over, I had my mom and aunt practice the apology we would give him in English. Even though we didn’t steal anything, I explained we should still say sorry.
“Why?” My aunt asked. “That’s so stupid.”
“Everyone apologizes for everything in Canada. Just trust me. He will want it.”
“We need the work,” my mom said.
For a second my aunt revved up to say something else, but then let it go. We did need the work.
When we arrived, Mr. Winslow was on a phone call, watching his two large goldendoodles play in the front yard. He waved, then gestured to the front door. My mom and aunt gave small bows and carried their cleaning supplies inside.
Before I could enter, he put the phone behind his ear and approached me.
“Ida, hi. Good to see you again. Listen, don't worry about the jewelry. Water under the bridge. Hey. I’m leaving in an hour or so, and I won’t be back until late tonight. I’m wondering if you’d be interested in dog-sitting? You’ve been around Toto and Kipper. What do you think? I’d really appreciate the help.”
I never liked the way he looked at me. It was always too close, and it lingered for too long. My aunt may have been right in that he hired us back just to see me again, but I ignored the thought.
“And don’t worry, I can cover your cab back. My usual walker is just out on holiday. You can help yourself to whatever’s in the fridge. How does six hundred sound?”
I looked at his house and imagined if I would be comfortable there. Alone at night.
“I’ll make it seven-hundred. I know it's last minute. I just hate leaving them alone. Plus Toto has his medicine. You would do me a real solid.”
My apron needed adjusting so I put down my bucket. I focused on the polyester knot, keeping my gaze away from his. I really didn’t want to be doing this, but my aunt would call me stupid for refusing easy money. And frankly, so would I.
“I had plans, but I’m willing to give them up.” I said with a straight face. “Eight hundred and it’s a done deal.”
He paused for a second, observing me scrupulously. Then he found his usual, smarmy half-smile. “You’re a life saver, you know that? An Angel.”
His hand gripped my shoulder. Then patted it twice.
***
Both my mom and aunt were pleased about the extra cash, they said I deserved to make extra for all the bookkeeping I do. But they also both voiced their concerns for safety. They said they could stay with me if I wanted.
“Safety? Mamãe I’m just watching two dogs.”
My mom wiped a caked red stain off his counter. An old wine spill. “Yes, but so late in his house? You’re not worried he might … I don’t know …”
Might what? Exploit me?
I met his groundskeeper once, another immigrant contractor. Except the groundskeeper was being paid far less, because he never properly negotiated. Mr. Winslow was certainly capable of exploiting people when he wanted to, and I’m sure he would try the same on my family.
But I was different. I’d gone to school in Banniver, and I knew the little maneuvers played by the so-called “progressive people in North America.”
And Winslow knew it too.
He didn’t realize a Canadian-raised daughter organized her mom’s cleaning service. Or that she would show up on the first day as a statement. That statement being: You can’t get away with mistreating these old Brazilian women. And you certainly can’t swindle them out of the going rates in his neighborhood. I’m onto you.
I had asserted myself with this Mr. Winslow, and felt confident that I could stand my ground if he tried any bullshit.
“Mamãe I’m not worried about him. Really, I’m not. He’s a pushover.”
***
6:00PM rolled around, it was just me and the goldendoodles.
My mom and aunt were back at home, watching low-res soaps on a Macbook, but they said if I encountered anything strange—a sound, a smell, an unexpected car in the driveway—to give them a call right away.
“Mamãe, its two dogs. I’ll be fine.”
“Just keep your phone close Ida. Your auntie has sensed things in that house. Unpleasant things.”
I forgot to mention my aunt thinks of herself as an amateur medium. In the village she grew up in, she claimed she could sometimes see people who were recently deceased.
But I never really believed her. Mostly because it was also my auntie’s idea to charge families who wanted to forward messages to the very same people who were recently deceased.
“Okay mamãe, whatever you say. I’ll phone you if I get scared.”
“That house has a history Ida, you could feel it in the walls. The outside too.”
It sure does. A history of being owned by a wealthy prick.
***
The sun slinked below the overcast horizon like a dying lantern. It got dark much faster than I expected.
I kept all the lights on, and played with the dogs a bit, trying to encourage them to try piss on the shag rug. Neither did. They mostly wanted naps.
I tried napping for a bit too, but the leather couch felt like it was made of rock. I just couldn’t get comfortable.
Eventually I made myself dinner—some pasta that had been bought from Whole Foods—and ate it while scrolling on my phone.
I was just about done, ready to take my dirty plate in the sink when I first heard it.
The first explosion.
It came from the basement. A vibrating KAPOW that rattled the windows and chandelier on my floor. It sounded like someone had set off a cherry bomb.
What the hell?
I turned to the dogs who were just as scared as I was. They came whimpering with tails between their legs.
Could a pipe have burst or something?
I looked at the basement door, an area we were not instructed to clean, and then heard another explosion.
Vases shook. A painting went tilted. It sounded louder. Like full grade firework. I had lived in Rio de Janeiro, by Prianha beach, where they often launched celebratory fireworks. This was just as deafening.
I didn’t want to go down to the basement. In fact, I sat by the front door.
Both dogs huddled around me.
***
Twenty minutes passed. It had been quiet.
Out of pride I refused to call my mom—I didn’t want to admit I was scared. Instead, I spent the time going through all the rational answers in my head that could explain away the noise. Plumbing, terrorism, teen pranks … hot springs?
There were hot springs all over West Bann.
Obviously, some kind of pent-up geyser had lay dormant for a while, and it was now suddenly unleashing a ton of energy below Mr. Winslow’s house. To distract myself, I Wikipedia’d the history of West Banniver, and satisfied this theory.
During the 1850’s gold rush, West Banniver saw rapid settlement as a mining town. The proliferation of mine shafts soon led to a discovery of underground hot springs. Mayfield Briggs Ltd which was the first company to seize the opportunity as a tourist attraction…
That’s all it was. A hot spring releasing a buildup of pressure.
Then a third explosion came.
It was so loud and violent that the door to the basement flew open. I fell to the ground and covered my head as several books went flying off nearby shelves.
The dogs yipped and barked like crazy. They stood in front of me, guarding against an unseen force. A voice shrieked from the basement.
“HELP!!! HELLLLP!”
Rivets shot through my hands and knees. I was frozen to the floor.
“PLEEEEEEASE!”
It had the high-pitched desperation of someone whose life was about to end. I raised my head and listened closely to hear haggard, dusty coughing. It sounded like an old man’s cough. It echoed through the basement and into the living room. Between coughs the man continued to plead for his life.
HELLLLP!”
I had no idea who it could be or how he got down there.
Before I could think, one of the dogs shot past me, bolting down the basement steps, barking ferociously.
“Kipper!”
I tried to grab the loose leash, but I could only hold the collar of his sibling. “Kipper come back here!”
“HELLO?” The voice from below seemed to recognize my presence. “PLEASE, YOU’VE GOT TO HELP!”
I was now upright, breathing as fast as Toto was panting. I tied Toto to the thick rails on the stairs. I had to save the other dog.
Instinctually I grabbed my phone, slipped an AirPod in one ear, and dialed my mother without even looking at the screen.
“Mãe. There’s … something terrible is happening.”
My mother was suitably confused. Even more so when she heard the screaming of the man downstairs as his voice echoed in the living room. It was a cry of immense, awful pain.
After two slower, more detailed explanations of what I just heard, my mother told me to call the fire department. “Poke your head through the basement, see what’s happening. Then call the fire department.”
That made sense to me. I inched my way to the basement entrance and tried to see past the doorway. It was complete darkness. There was no light switch.
I turned the torch on my phone, and my aunt’s voice came blaring. “Get out of there Ida! I am telling you, there is darkness in that house!”
As I illuminated the dusty wooden stairs, I saw that they only lead only to more pitch black. Yup, plenty of darkness here.
There was some phone-wrestling. My mother came back on. “What is it? What did you see?”
“Don’t encourage her! Get her to leave!” my auntie yelled in the background.
I told them to pipe down because I could suddenly hear the gentle whimpering at the base of the stairs. The dog sounded close.
“Kipper come! This way! Follow my voice!”
I went down a few steps further, expecting the basement floor to appear any second, but there were only more wooden steps. How long was this staircase?
“Kipper?”
There was a flat, cold wall on my left, and no guard rail to speak of. I stepped down each step very carefully to maintain my balance, sliding my hand along the wall.
Then the wall disappeared. I flew forward.
***
I woke up lying face-first on rocky floor. My phone was cracked next to me. My mother was crying in my ear. “Ida! Ida! Oh my god! Ida!”
I looked up to see I was not at the bottom of someone’s basement. There were lights all above me. Lanterns. They were illuminating a cavernous, rocky chamber that led to many tunnels with train tracks and wooden carts. I was in the opening of a massive underground mine.
I coughed, and gave out a weak “… what?”
“Ida is that you? Are you… brrzzzzz” My mom’s voice faded.
Before I could reply, I saw the crooked form of a man in tan coveralls, shaking the immobile body of another person in coveralls next to him. In fact, there was a small row of half a dozen miners all slumped against a blasted rock wall. There were bits of granite, wood, rope, and what looked like entrails splattered all throughout.
“Oh the cruelty …” the one, standing miner said. He went from body to body and jostled each of his coworkers. “Must I find you all like this … every time?”
I crawled up to a half-standing pose and tried to see the face of the hunched over survivor.
My heart dropped.
He had no face.
The explosion which must have killed some of friends had also blasted away this man’s entire sternum, neck and skull. The miner wasn’t hunched over or leaning away with his head, he just simply … had no head.
And up there, floating right in the middle of where his face should be, were a set of eyeballs, glistening under the yellow lights.
The eyes turned to me. “Oh. Why hello. Hello there.”
Terrified, I rose to complete standing and opened both my palms in a show of total deference. “I don’t know. I don’t know who you are or what this is.”
The headless miner walked toward me. I noticed he carried a pickaxe in his right arm. He gestured with his left to where his ear would be.
“I’m sorry I can’t hear you. Had an accident.”
Despite him having no head, his voice still came from where his mouth would be. There was an earnestness in his speech, it might have had something to do with his very old-timey accent, but I still felt like he was trying to be friendly.
“Another batch of faulty dynamite. Everyone’s dead. But what else is new.”
He brought his left palm to his face, perhaps to wipe away tears, but instead his hand travelled through his nonexistent head to scratch a small portion of his back.
“Been dead for many years I’m afraid. But I’ve kept busy. Been a good man. Worked very hard for the boss upstairs.”
He gestured upwards with the pickaxe. I looked up, and out in the distance, I saw a large, ancient, set of wooden stairs that I must have fallen from. They extended far up into the mine’s ceiling and kept going.
“He’s gotten good ore from me. Good, shining, golden ore. I have a knack for it you see. The same knack that killed me so many years ago. It's probably what’s still keeping me around though.”
He came closer. I could see he had brown irises, with one of the cataracts deteriorating into milky white haze. The eyes stared at me, unblinking.
“Because I’m not done, see. This mine isn’t empty. I know there’s more gold. Much more. And it’s not all for the boss. No, I’m keeping some to myself. Don’t tell him, but I’ve been stashing a large deposit for myself. It can’t all be his of course. It’s my mine after all. Half these tunnels were dug entirely by me. So of course I deserve some. It’s only natural.”
I lifted my hand and pointed at the staircase behind him. I mouthed very big, obvious words. “I have to go back. I’m going back up those stairs.”
He shifted his body. His two eyes turned in the air as if they were still inside an invisible skull. I saw nerve endings at the back undulate and twist.
“Yes, that is the only way up.”
My heart was in my throat. At least I found some form of communication. I gestured to knee height and nervously asked if he had seen a “large, shaggy dog.”
“Ah yes. I’ve seen the pooches. They come down here sometimes. When the booms don’t scare em that is. Hahah.”
I gave a thumbs up. It felt like a ridiculous interaction with a ghost, or zombie or whatever this was, but at least it was working.
“I think I saw his little tail run over that way. They like the smell of the mineral spring.”
I turned behind to see the long tunnel he was pointing at. It was dimly lit by a chain of smaller lanterns.
I thought I saw a flutter of movement, and I would have kept looking further if it wasn’t for my aunt’s voice that suddenly exploded in my ear. “Brrrzt … Ida! If you can hear us, we are calling the police to your location. Help is coming soon! … ”
I winced and stepped back—which saved my life. I just so happened to step right out of the way of a pickaxe. It sparked the ground.
I gasped and stared at the headless miner. His eyes were shimmering with a dark focus, staring directly at mine.
“Oh I’ll help you find the dog. I’ll help you find whatever you want. But I’ll need those clean new eyes of yours first.”
He swung at my head. I ducked. He went for the backswing. I ran.
Stupidly, I ran in the opposite direction of the stairs. I ran straight into the long tunnel lined with dim lanterns.
But I couldn’t turn around. I had no idea how quick he could move. And the speed of his pickaxe felt supernatural.
The tunnel was narrow, and lined with wooden tracks, I had to skip-run-jump over the panels with immense precision to make sure I didn’t trip. Behind me, his voice chased.
“Go ahead. Run. I know where these all lead.”
I ignored the words and kept going. The tunnel bent left, then right, then left again. I ignored several exits before the tunnel spat me out into an open, cavernous room filled with dozens and dozens of minecarts.
I investigated the room for anything useful. A far opposite wall appeared to be the site of the latest digging, loose rock lay everywhere.
There was a small mineshaft holding a chained up cart. And something in the cart shimmered…
It was gold.
And not just ore either. There were bars, coins, medallions, and jewelry. Mrs. Winslow’s bangles were right on top.
I ran to the cart furthest from the entrance and ducked behind it, breathing heavily, coughing from all the dust.
The headless man emerged from the tunnel, pickaxe raised and scanning where I could have hid. “I may not be able to hear you. But I can follow footprints pretty easily hah. I know you’re in here.”
He grabbed the closest minecart available and pushed it into the tunnel entrance. With an immense show of strength, he lifted and dislodged the cart off the track, cramming it sideways, creating a massive obstacle.
I was sealed inside.
Trying to stay absolutely still, I coughed through my teeth. Lungs burning. My mom’s voice came through.
“Brrzzztt… The police should be there! I told them you were in danger! They said they sent a unit over. Maybe they broke down the front door?”
I looked up at the mine shaft next to me. If it did connect to the surface upstairs, this was my only chance.
I gave a couple good yells. “HEEEEELP!!! DOWN HERE!! HELP!”
I don’t know if it did any good, but it was better than nothing. I turned to see if the miner had heard anything.
He hadn't.
The pickaxe tapped and clanged awkwardly around minecart after minecart.
I had a bigger advantage than I thought.
Although the miner had two floating eyeballs, only the left one was really capable of seeing anything.
So I kept my distance and watched where he was going, always staying behind.
As he limped and peered around minecarts, I was able to evade him, move from behind rock piles and other carts, careful not to leave a trail in the rock dust.
It was all going well until I heard a familiar panting.
“Oh look. If it isn’t precious.”
The dog had managed to jump over the miner’s blockade. It must have heard my yells. Surprisingly, Kipper was unafraid of the headless villain, and even approached him to receive pets.
“Now why don’t you go say hello to our other friend here huh? I know she's here somewhere.”
No. Kipper. Please. Don’t.
The dog started sniffing. Within seconds he found my scent. Kipper skipped towards me like Lassie and excitedly licked my face.
“Aww there we are. Now isn’t that a good boy?”
I stood up and stared at the filthy, ash-stained coveralls. Despite the lack of teeth, I could sense a menacing grin where the mouth should be.
He wasn't going to lose sight of me now. I had nowhere to go.
So I did the thing my auntie said worked on all spirits. I fell to my knees and prayed.
“Please. I only came here for work. I’m too young to die. Let me go and I won't tell anyone that you're here.”
He stood over me. Both of his pupils started to quiver. In just a few seconds, his eyes were swimming excitedly within the space of his head.
I took off the only valuable I had. A gold necklace with a miniature version of Christ the Redeemer. A gift I had received as a teen in Rio. I held it out in my shaking hands.
“Please. Take it. Take everything.”
Suddenly both the eyeballs stared forward again, entranced by the gold.
“Well look at that. How generous. How generous of her. We should reward generosity shouldn’t we?”
***
It was hard for me to describe to the police officer how exactly I got out, because I have no idea.
The fiery pain where my eyes used to be overwhelmed my entire reality for hours. All I wanted was for it to stop.
They found me half inside a dumbwaiter bleeding to death from the gouges in my face.
I was taken to the hospital, where I would spend the next four weeks recovering.
The police did not in fact storm the house like my mom said. They waited outside for the homeowner to return. But when they heard my screams coming from the top floor, they broke the back door and eventually came to my rescue.
I’m told they did a thorough investigation but could not find any of the things I described.
The basement door led into a regular basement. It was filled with old furniture, unused decor, and paint cans. No Mine.
The dumbwaiter was also just a dumbwaiter. It wasn’t some mine shaft, and it didn’t lead any deeper than the basement. Nothing special.
There were definitely hot springs close by, but nothing close enough to damage Mr. Winslow's property. And there was an old, depleted gold mine not far away either, but it was completely abandoned, closed off, and nowhere near as big as the one I had described.
***
The police, paramedics and doctors all thought my story was some hallucination. That I had been on drugs or had some mental breakdown (even though they couldn’t find anything in me other than small traces of weed.)
Thankfully, my mother and aunt believed me. They believed every word. My aunt is the one who encouraged me to make this post, so others could hear my story.
I know it was real.
I know it was.
And Mr. Winslow is fully aware of the mine’s existence.
Putting the dots together, I realized it was likely the source of his wealth. Winslow had some control over that one headless miner down there.
Did Winslow intentionally entrap me? Was he trying to get the miner a new set of eyes? Or was it all an unfortunate accident?
I might never know.
But what I do know is that Mr. Winslow has been paying for our rent ever since the accident.
He feels “terrible about the situation” and “can’t possibly imagine” what I’ve been through.
But he knows what happened.
He knows if I really pushed, If I really forced the police, or some private investigator to look into it—they would uncover something awful. Something really really bad.
“Anything you need. Anything at all. I will cover it, Ida.” He said. “You helped me out, protected my dogs, and I will never forget it.”
He’s offered to pay for the rest of my University schooling. And once my face heals up, he’s even offered to cover for some very expensive, experimental eye-transplant. We’ll see how that goes.
“You and your family will live comfortably from now on. You’ll want for nothing. Tell me exactly what you need, And you’ll get it.”
So I told him I'd like my necklace back. It was an heirloom. I said I lost it somewhere in his house.
A few days later, he returned with the usual smug, half-crooked smirk in his voice. He brought the necklace back in a box, pretending he had bought me a new one. Except it felt exactly like my old one.
It was all shined up, completely buffed of scratches, but it weighed the same. It was my old one for sure.
When my mom saw it she asked, “did it always have it? This dedication?”
As far as I remembered, the backside of the tiny Christ the Redeemer was always plain. I fingered its shape in my hands.
“What dedication?”
The new little divots caught my nails. There was writing that was definitely not there before.
My mom described it as a curly, serif font. Like a gift for a lover.
~ You’re an angel ~
~ W ~

I have been battling GI and Neurological issues that I believe is the result of Long Covid for the last 8 months now. It seems like every time that I recover from one issue I am inflicted with another affliction with the latest being a persistent and relentless back pain that has been going on for nearly 4 weeks.
About 6 weeks ago I tried to come off my PPI (endo diagnosed mild gastritis in Dec) and started introducing HCL, enzymes and probiotics. Shortly after, I started having pain in the center of my stomach that was sensitive to the touch. I thought it was a gallbladder attack so got an US that was unremarkable and then got a MRI which was also unremarkable. About 2 weeks later (4 wks ago) my pains migrated to my back and have been there since. It started with an intermittent burning sensation between my shoulder blades (felt like rug burn/road rash across my back). This pain has only progressed and become more persistent. The pain now alternates between a a dull ache (like a bruise from an impact across my back) and the burning sensation. I have found a vertebrae that is sensitive to the touch near the pain areas but believe this is all GI related due to all of the other issues. I now also have pains that ride up my left shoulder blade from lower rib to my left shouldetrap and neck. I also get occasional burning pains under my ribs both sides and the occasional pains below my sternum.
I can’t make sense of any of this and lost support of my GI doc with recent negative scans and he couldn’t provide a logical explanation. I was very healthy before all of this and now feel like I am going crazy or my body is just quitting on me.
Does this sound like gastritis or something else (ulcer, pancreas, etc)? If gastritis how long can it persistently last and/or is there anything I can do to ease the pain (pain level is only 2-4 but relentless)?
I greatly appreciate any feedback or advice.

Sex: Biological Female Race: (Caucasian) Age: 32 Height: 5' 2" Weight: 145lbs. Medications: Buproprian ESR 200mg & Buspirone 5mg Medical Conditions: Major Depressive Disorder with Psychotic Features and Severe/Moderate Anxiety. PTSD. Drinking & Smoking: I drink daily (after 5pm) and smoke menthols daily. (Please do not rag on me about this as my main concern is below and do not think is related). I also smoke the devils lettuce at night as it helps me stay asleep without waking multiple times a night.
A little over a week ago I got this weird looking scar formation between my breasts on my sternum. It is about 2 inches, give or take, and has what appears to be stitches scars, around 4 or 5 of them horizontally. I have had no surgeries on my chest at all ever.
Again this appeared a little over a week ago and legit looks like a scar from surgery which I have not ever had. I have had my wisdom teeth removed, tonsils removed, and endometriosis surgery but nothing on my chest. Also wanted to note, I do not wear a bra to bed. I don't know if that is important to mention.
I work from home and am a hermit so I don't go out partying and end up doing insane crazy stuff. It is just me, my husband, and son who live in the house and never have anyone over (we are serious introverts). Is there any explanations?
Photos: https://imgur.com/a/iC4dNxc https://imgur.com/a/fEqQD0z https://imgur.com/a/0tSIu6k
Thanks in advance.

Current Diagnoses: hEDS, POTS, Sjogren's, IBS
Waiting for appointments about: RA, MCAS, CCI, Hashimoto's?
Hi all, I've been having some new and worsening symptoms and I was going through old medical files to organize and compile info for upcoming appointments and I noticed a few old panels that had been done that were flagged as out of range but that I hadn't gotten an explanation for. I did some digging and I had some questions about Hashimoto's, particularly when combined with some of the new symptoms being: worsening severe chronic fatigue, a sensation of swelling in my throat, neck, and face, swelling lymph nodes on my neck and below my ears, a lingering (and worsening? hard to tell for sure, it's been gradual and isn't severe) sore throat, chest pain around sternum and pressure on chest, increased brain fog and muscle aches, and increased swelling in my joints and particularly hands, which is why I set up the appointment initially to ask about RA. I've always had issues with dry skin, temperature intolerances, and high cholesterol despite intentionally tailoring my diet to reduce cholesterol since childhood (family history of high cholesterol). However, I have always been underweight and only recently have had my weight stabilize.
Possible changes recently that could be related to the change in symptoms- I got covid quite badly in november and it took months and several rounds of medications to recover. I also had a total hysterectomy in March (left my ovaries) due to endometriosis, and most of the new symptoms (neck swelling, etc) have been increasing since then. My primary also changed my immunosuppressants from Hydroxychloroquine (Plaquenil) to Leflunomide (Arava) a weekish ago because of the continued and worsening joint pain, so I know some symptoms are worse right now due to the transition time. The suspected MCAS is also flaring currently and I was in the ER two weeks ago for anaphylaxis symptoms, so that could be the source of the sore throat?
Test results that stood out to me:
Total Cholesterol - 217mg/dL (2019), 212mg/dL (2022), 191mg/dL (2023)
LDL Cholesterol - 135mg/dL (2019), 129mg/dL (2022), 112mg/dL (2023)
Non HDL Cholesterol - 144mg/dL (2022), 129mg/dL (2023)
Free T4 - 0.57ng/dL(October 2022), 1.2ng/dL(November 2022)
Free T3 - 3.7pg/mL(November 2022)
My TSH always came back "within range"
2019 - 2, 2020 - 1.87, 2022 - 1.81
Also of note, I am 24
Autoimmune panels in 2022 came back positive for ANA, titer at 1:80 but negative for all the rest, including Sjogren's and thyroid peroxidase antibodies(<1), but I know those aren't 100% yes/no. Sjogren's just seemed to fit my symptoms best at the time (still fits, just new ones now too).
I know if you have one autoimmune, you're prone to others, so I'm thinking of asking at my next Rheumatology appointment about this and requesting another round of Lipid panels, TSH, Free T4 and T3 and autoimmune panel.
TL:DR, I'm having new symptoms that seem to match up with Hashimoto's, and stumbled across some old tests that (sort of?) fit. I'm thinking of bringing this up the next time I see a Rheumatologist. Should I, or am I reading too much into this/missing info? TIA
(Edited to add a symptom and test result I missed initially)

We had been driving for over two hours when the nightmare began. The anomalous behavior that would affect the area started as abruptly as a lightning strike. I felt strange and dissociated. Goosebumps rose all over arms as a smell like ozone filled the air, filtering through the air vents in thick, invisible clouds.
“I am so excited to see this!” my girlfriend Alice cried happily in the passenger seat. “Do you know I have never seen a full solar eclipse before?” I glanced over, feeling nervous. Yet Alice didn’t seem affected in the slightest. I wiped my forehead, clearing the trickles of sweat that had begun forming there.
“Do you smell that?” I asked, changing the mood abruptly. Alice glanced over at me, the smile falling off her face in a space of a moment. She shook her head.
“No, smell what?” she said. I gave her a look of disbelief. The smell of ozone was so thick that I could almost taste it at the back of my throat. I repressed an urge to gag. I rolled down the windows. The breeze cleared out some of the smell, but I still caught hints of it even on the fresh currents of air that streamed through the car.
All around us, the slit wrists of the sky shone a cyanotic blue, covering the earth like a suffocating blanket. Mountain ranges loomed overhead, their sharp peaks hidden under fresh virgin snow. We planned to hike to the top of the highest peak before the solar eclipse began.
“This whole place is so… empty,” Alice said, brushing a lock of blonde hair the color of platinum over her ear. “I can’t remember the last time I saw a house.” She took out her phone. She flicked on the screen before heaving a deep sigh. “And we get absolutely no service all the way out here. You better not get injured! We won’t be able to call for help.” I laughed nervously, wondering if she had just jinxed us.
“You’re the one who’s accident-prone,” I said, starting to relax slightly. The last trace of the foul ozone smell had dissipated by now. The clean mountain air and majestic landscapes rising all around us made the place seem like some kind of wonderland, far removed from the small sufferings and agonies of daily life.
***
After another twenty minutes of driving, surrounded on all sides by dark forests filled with evergreens and shadows, we saw a faded, brown sign reading: “TO MOUNT BLOODSTONE. 5 MILES.”
“Finally!” Alice cried triumphantly, her whole expression changing into one of excitement. “I’ve never been here before, but Kaitlyn told me this place has the best view in the county!” As the mountain loomed in front of us like a crouching giant, I could see why.
It towered over all the surrounding mountains, its sharp, white peak stabbing upwards into the blue sky like a spire. Steep cliffs of light brown stone surrounded it on all sides. Untouched forests of maple, oak and pine grew thick and vibrant on Mount Bloodstone’s rocky soil.
“We still have four hours until the eclipse starts,” Alice said, looking down at her cell phone. The pavement suddenly ended, and the road turned into a snaking path of treadmarks and loose stones. My SUV handled it easily, but it was slow going. A few minutes later, we broke out through the forests and thick brush that carpeted the land. On the driver’s side stood a cliff of jutting rectangular stones and a drop of hundreds of feet to a field of massive stones far below us if I accidentally veered off the narrow road. On the passenger’s side, there were just smooth, vertical walls of hard granite.
“The parking area is supposed to be up ahead just a few miles,” Alice said excitedly. I felt sickening waves of dread passing through my stomach as I glanced out the window at the steep drop waiting only inches away on my side of the car. I wasn’t exactly terrified of heights, and I had no problem going on planes or roller coasters, but situations like this always sent butterflies fluttering through my chest and caused my feet to tingle with anxiety. It was the idea of unsecured heights, the realization that an accidental jerk of the wheel or a tire blowing out at the exact wrong moment could send us careening over the edge.
“You’re not nervous right now?” I asked. Alice only laughed.
“Nope. I trust you, Brian,” she said, putting a warm hand on my shoulder. Her soft skin reminded me of suede, unmarked and unlined. I still couldn’t believe that such a beautiful girl wanted to be with me. We had been together for three months, and it had been one of the happiest periods I could remember.
I looked over at her with love, taking my eyes off the road for a moment. Suddenly, it felt like all of the tires exploded at once, and the car began swerving wildly out of control, the steering wheel spinning wildly in my hands with a pull like a falling stone.
***
“Fuck!” I cried. Alice screamed next to me, her voice filled with mortal terror.
The SUV nearly swerved off the edge of the cliff when the metal rims caught on something and veered hard in the opposite direction. The vehicle swung hard into the rock wall on Alice’s side. There was the tortured shredding of metal, the explosion of glass. Screams filled the car, but I didn’t realize until later that they had come from my own mouth.
My head flew forward, smashing hard into the steering wheel. I immediately tasted salty blood as I bit my tongue hard. My vision went white and pain like lightning ripped its way through my forehead. Time seemed to spiral away into something strange and alien. Stunned, I sat there, not knowing what had happened.
“Brian!” Alice’s voice rang out from next to me, sounding muted and far away. I felt someone shaking my arm gently. “Brian! Can you hear me?” I blinked fast, my vision starting to return to normal. My head felt like it was being pressed in a vice. A splitting migraine ripped its way through my skull. I groaned, raising my hands to my forehead. I tried pushing on the sides of my head, as if I could keep it from splitting apart from simple willpower alone. After a few moments, the pain subsided slightly. I inhaled deeply and spit blood on the floor.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m OK,” I said, though I wasn’t sure how true that was. I pulled my fingers away from my forehead, seeing they were slick with blood. I glanced over at Alice, but other than a small cut across her cheek, she seemed totally unhurt. “What the fuck just happened?” She shook her head, uncertainty crossing her eyes.
“We had an accident,” she said, glancing down at her cell phone. She tried calling 911, putting it up to her ear. She gave me a grim look and shook her head. “There’s no cell phone towers anywhere around here. We’re going to have to walk to find help, or at least until we can find somewhere with cell phone reception.”
“An accident? With what?! The goddamned air?” A rush of adrenaline pushed the pain away temporarily. I flung the door open, stumbling out of the SUV. I looked back on the dirt road that spiraled around its way around the mountain and out of view, seeing the glint of steel. Confused, I started over in that direction.
“Wait!” Alice yelled, quickly jumping out of the vehicle and sprinting to catch up with me. “You don’t look very steady on your feet yet. Maybe you should sit down…”
“Look at this fucking shit!” I cried, pointing to what lay stretched across the road, dug slightly into the dirt. Alice’s eyes widened in understanding as she saw it too.
Someone had set up a spike strip. The gleaming spikes of metal reaching up like claws still had pieces of my shredded tires caught on their sharp points.
***
“Someone’s out to get us,” I whispered nervously, glancing both ways down the dirt road. I had no idea what to do now. We were out in the absolute middle of nowhere. I didn’t even know which direction to go, unless I wanted to try hiking back dozens of miles to the last gas station we had seen. The SUV was blocking the narrow road.
Further down, I saw a small dirt turnaround jutting off to the side. I drove the vehicle on its rims and pulled over, locking the doors. I grabbed my backpack and filled it with my water bottle, buck knife and the small amount of food we had in the car, mostly trail mix and candy. It wouldn’t last long, I knew, and the water would run out even sooner if we didn’t find a river or stream. I grabbed my Swiss army knife and lighter and put them in my pocket, just in case of emergencies.
“Which way?” Alice asked. It was a good question. This road didn’t just lead to the trail that wound its way to the top of Mount Bloodstone, after all, but also continued down the other side and potentially to civilization. I had no map, so I just shrugged and motioned forward.
“I think we should keep moving in the same direction,” I said. “The last gas station was at least twenty miles back that way. For all we know, there could be a house or another gas station much closer if we just keep going straight.” It was weak logic, and I knew I was grasping at straws, but at that moment, straws were all we had.
Alice grabbed her backpack and, side by side, we started hiking up the winding road that ascended the steep slopes of Mount Bloodstone.
***
We had been walking for nearly an hour when I noticed a strange smell wafting on the breeze. It was an overwhelming smell of ozone, thick and cloying, just like I had noticed earlier. I nearly gagged, bending over.
“Oh God, what is that?” I asked. “It’s like a chemical factory is nearby or something.” Alice just shook her head.
From the nearby forest, a cacophony of branches snapping and trees falling started reverberating all around us. When I first heard it, it sounded distant. I looked at Alice at first, wondering if it was some sort of avalanche or earthquake on another nearby mountain.
“Is that an avalanche?” I yelled as the sound rapidly increased into deafening echoes of smashing and breaking, heading in our direction. A predatory cry rang through the mountains, full of power and energy, reminding me of the roaring of some ancient Tyrannosaurus rex. It shook the ground and mixed with the noise of destruction that came at us like a tidal wave. Alice and I started sprinting blindly up the road. She tried to say something, but I couldn’t hear her over the ringing in my ears.
Whatever was causing the racket veered away from us and deeper into the woods, angling itself straight up the side of the mountain. I glanced back, seeing trees fall and branches crash. In the middle of this path of destruction, I caught a glimpse of something massive and alien. It slithered forward like a snake, hundreds of feet long. Its body was covered in soft layers of blood-red feathers that rippled gently in the breeze. A deep turquoise line of feathers ran straight down the center of its spine.
From the top of its body, two enormous wings jutted out like the wings of some enormous dragon. They had soft, pink blood vessels spiderwebbing throughout the pale gray flesh. The wings beat at the air, and the enormous feathered snake slowly flew up, its sharp, spiked tail ripping more trees out of the ground as it slammed from side to side. Within a few seconds, it gained speed, flying up and over an enormous stone cliff and out of view.
***
The world seemed to go silent as the beast disappeared, the echoes of its destruction rapidly fading off into the valleys below. Alice had gotten far ahead of me. I sprinted up to her. She turned to me, covered in sweat, her skin looking chalk-white from terror.
“Did you see it?” I asked breathlessly. She gave me a strange look.
“See what?” she said. “When the avalanche started, I ran. I didn’t see anything.” I stared at her, mouth agape.
“You didn’t look back a minute ago? There was some massive animal causing all those trees to fall. That wasn’t any avalanche,” I said. “It sounds absolutely batshit insane, but it looked like an enormous feathered serpent.”
“That’s ridiculous, Brian,” she said condescendingly. “Are you sure you’re not still suffering from hitting your head during the accident? Sometimes that kind of stuff can cause weird side effects.”
“What, are you saying I’m tripping out? I’m telling you, I saw it as certainly as I see you here in front of me right now. It was moving away from us, and I didn’t see its face, but I saw its body. It must have been two or three hundred feet long,” I said grimly, trying to convince her. Alice only sighed and glanced forward.
“We should keep going,” she said. “We’re going to want to get out of here before nightfall. It gets cold up in the mountains in April.”
“I’ve got my lighter,” I said. “I’ll start a fire if we need to. I’m not worried about that. I am worried about who the hell spiked my tires and why there’s a giant snake slithering around the mountains, though!”
But deep down, I knew Alice was right. Regardless of whatever weird shit was going on around us, we needed to keep moving. I didn’t want to be here after dusk, either, but not because I was worried about the cold or about running out of food and water.
***
“The solar eclipse is only a couple hours away,” Alice said, glancing down at her phone.
“I really don’t care,” I said glumly. I pulled out my water from the pack and took a long swallow. I held it up to the Sun and realized with growing anxiety that my water was already mostly gone.
“Why do you think someone would put spike strips on this road?” I asked. The thought had been bouncing around my head, growing louder and more insistent. I kept coming back to the same answer: to ambush, kidnap or possibly murder them. The dark woods began to feel more sinister, the shadows deeper and darker. I kept my head on a swivel, looking constantly for any signs that we were being followed.
“It’s probably just kids or teenagers screwing around,” Alice said, raising a perfectly plucked eyebrow. “I mean, who else would do something so dangerous and stupid?”
“Someone who wants to rob or kidnap someone, or maybe a serial killer looking for victims,” I responded, feeling sick. I had taken my buck knife out of my backpack and now held it tightly in my hand, my knuckles white. I felt better just holding it, even though I knew it would likely do no good against someone with a gun, and that it would do absolutely nothing against that enormous snake if it came back.
I looked into the woods stretching up the side of the mountain. Behind a nearby cluster of bushes, a pale face peeked out, something that looked mostly, but not entirely, human.
It had bone-white skin and slitted pupils in its glowing yellow eyes. Its hairless face split into a grin. Two obsidian fangs swiveled out like the teeth of a rattlesnake.
I stopped in my tracks, stuttering and pointing. Alice glanced over at me. She followed my finger and froze like a deer in the headlights.
The creature hissed as it crashed through the bushes, its jaw unhinging and jutting forward like a snake’s. Its black fangs looked as sharp as needles. Its hiss grew into a gurgle. In the trees behind it, I saw more movement, more pale faces rising up, their slitted pupils radiating hunger and bloodlust.
“Run!” I screamed, tearing off up the road without looking back to see if Alice would follow. On my left stood a drop of what must have been a thousand feet down to a babbling river far below. The only possible escape was forward.
I was already exhausted from my long hike, but I pushed myself forward with every ounce of my will until my head pounded and my vision turned white. I felt ready to collapse.
I heard rustling from a thick cluster of brush up ahead. I tried moving past it as fast as I could. I saw a pointed, reptilian head emerge from the leaves, the bone-white skin cracking as its lipless mouth split into a wide grin. Its fangs swiveled out, surrounded by dozens of smaller black teeth shaped like needles.
It leapt at me, its scaled white body soaring through the air. I felt its sharp talons of fingers rip into my chest as it knocked me down to the ground. Kicking and swearing, I tried to bring the buck knife up into the thing’s chest, but it grabbed my head and slammed it hard into the dirt road. My temple smashed into a rock with a cracking of bone. My ears rang as the world exploded into blackness. Everything spun around me- and then I was falling into eternal nothingness.
***
I woke suddenly, the migraine in my head now so bad that it felt like torrents of lava were burning their way through my skull. I groaned, blinking quickly. The sunlight streaming down from the sky made me feel weak and nauseous. I turned, retching, but my stomach had nothing but water in it. I ended up vomiting up water with pink streaks of what looked like blood in it. I raised my head, looking around.
“Welcome to Hell, buddy,” a middle-aged man with a face like a bulldog said from a few feet to my right. I glanced over at him, seeing he was tied down with coils of rope to a rough-hewn wooden bench. I realized I was situated the same way. My hands and feet were tightly tied together. I tried wriggling them free with no success. Dozens more people were situated in a line stretching off into the distance, each of them tied down to their own primitive table of rough planks.
I looked to my left, expecting to see Alice, but she wasn’t there. It was an elderly woman with an enormous purple bruise over her left temple. Her dark eyes fluttered as she stared at me with horror. More people were tied down on that side, too, all of them moving their heads and looking around with dead eyes and expressions of horror.
“They got you too, huh?” the old woman asked in a weak, strained voice. Her eyes looked faraway, as if she were already on the other side of the veil and no longer existed in her physical body.
“Where are we?” I asked. “What’s going on?”
“You’re in the town of Nocturn,” the man on my right said, his fat face quivering with fear. “From what I’ve gathered while I’ve been held prisoner here, those creatures worship the snake god, who only comes out during the solar eclipse. Apparently they feed him, and in exchange, he lets them drink his blood, which makes them immortal.”
“They’re not creatures,” the old woman said. “Those are people.” I looked at her askance. If the situation weren’t so grave, I might have even laughed.
“Those are people?” I said sarcastically. “With the slitted eyes and the forked tongues and the fangs that come out like a rattlesnake’s? I’m not sure our definition of ‘people’ is the same thing.” The woman just shook her head.
“You don’t understand,” she said. “When they drink the blood of the serpent, they change. They started just like you and me. They’re cultists.” I raised my head and looked around, realizing that we were situated in what looked like an abandoned town cut into the forest near the peak of Mount Bloodstone.
In the center, there was a church whose walls had so many holes that they reminded me of Swiss cheese. The exterior may have once been white, but it had turned gray with age. Vines and patches of dark mold grew over its wooden walls.
Houses two and three stories tall were scattered randomly around us. Trees were growing through the walls of many, their branches and roots intertwining with the collapsing structures. All the glass of the windows had long ago been smashed and turned to dust. Many of the roofs had collapsed inwards. Bird nests and streaks of dirt covered the outside.
Next to the dilapidated structures sat what looked like hundreds of cars. Some were apparently brand new, and others were so rusted and ancient that I couldn’t even tell what make or model they were. They all had ripped open tires.
“Nocturn, huh?” I asked. “Do these people actually live here? It looks like this entire town is about to fall into the earth.” I tried to think, to formulate some sort of plan. I had no idea how I could possibly escape this apparently hopeless situation. Then I felt a lump in my pocket, suddenly remembering the Swiss army knife I had put in there. I struggled with the rope, moving my hands as close as I could. After a lot of effort, I managed to pull the Swiss army knife free.
The sky had begun to go dark. With horror, I looked up, realizing the solar eclipse had begun. The Moon slowly ate the Sun, and the feathered serpent would soon be here to drink our blood in celebration.
Dozens of the transformed snake people filtered out of the collapsing houses, the church and the surrounding forest as the eclipse rapidly progressed. They moved towards us in a circle. Among the crowd of monsters, I saw a few regular people with glassy eyes and the blank expressions of true believers. One of them was Alice.
She held the hand of one of the abominations, its sharp talons wrapped in her soft fingers. When she saw me looking in her direction, she grinned. The superficial charm and charisma was gone now, revealing the cold psychopathic determination underneath.
“My father,” she said by way of explanation, looking at the abomination with clear love and adoration. “He always said I would join the holy ones, that I would be able to drink the blood of Kulkulkan. I only needed to bring my own sacrifice for the god. So thank you, Brian. Your death will allow me to rise into immortality, into eternity, into the endless procession of eclipses and feedings that will follow.”
I was too stunned to speak. My teeth chattered in terror. But I didn’t get to think about it long, for at that moment, the trees in the nearby forest started falling with a crash. An overwhelming smell of ozone filled the air, marking the coming of the strange beast.
I heard an ancient, predatory roar that ripped its way through the mountains like thunder, and then the feathered serpent’s body appeared through a patch of trees. Its blood-red feathers shimmered in the mountain breeze as its wings beat the air.
***
I quickly ran my small Swiss army knife over the rope, trying to cut my hands free, but the rope was thick and the knife dull. It was slow going, and under the stress of the moment and the wailing of Kulkulkan, it became hard to think.
As the eclipse neared its climax, the transformed snake creatures raised their heads to the sky. Their hissing grew louder as many voices mixed together, until it rose into a wailing scream. As if called by the keening of his many followers, Kulkulan broke through the edge of the forest.
He had eyes like pools of liquid flame in his enormous, monstrous face. Two nose holes like those of a snake were situated in the center of his face. His jaw unhinged, showing off hundreds of razor-sharp teeth that glittered like opal. Inside that gaping mouth, in the place of a tongue, I saw a hairless, screaming human face with black sockets for eyes. The visage hidden inside the mouth of Kulkulkan radiated pure insanity and agony, and I wondered if this was the true face of the serpent god, the face that had lived through countless eons and seen millions of eclipses.
The feathered serpent lunged at the nearest of the more than forty bound people tied to wooden planks in the shape of crude sacrificial tables. He gnashed his shimmering, opalescent fangs together with a crack like a gunshot. Then he carefully closed his enormous mouth over the first of the sacrifices, a young woman who screamed in terror as the teeth closed in around her like a bear trap.
The blood exploded from her body, covering the hairless, pale face inside the serpent’s mouth with splotches of blood. The face twisted in a silent scream, reminding me of some sort of monstrous, eyeless infant. Its toothless mouth opened, hungry and waiting.
Kulkulkan drank with a disgusting sucking sound. As his teeth pierced her vital organs, he let the warm crimson fluid stream into his hungry mouth.
I had nearly gotten my hands free by this point. Panicked, I cut as fast as I could, accidentally slicing a deep gash into my right hand, but my adrenaline was so high I barely felt it. Finally, with a surge of hope so powerful it felt like my heart might explode, I felt the rope give way. I sat up and began cutting the rope tying my legs down as Kulkulkan moved closer, feasting on the next of the victims.
The snake abominations had slowly gathered around the long body of the serpent god. As their fangs protruded like switchblades, I saw them biting deeply into the god’s flesh and drinking the black ichor that leaked out from the many wounds. The Sun flickered overhead like a dying comet as the eclipse neared its peak.
The rope holding my legs gave way and I jumped up. An animal panic ripped its way through my chest as I looked back, wondering if Kulkulkan would see one of his tributes escaping and give chase. But the snake god was distracted by his feast of fresh blood.
The eclipse had reached its zenith by this point, and the world had gone dark. The stars came out, twinkling like chips of white ice in the endless void. The wailing of the dying and the soon to die rang out like the cries of the damned from Hell.
I sprinted towards the forest. I was almost there when Alice stepped out from behind a tree, holding a large folding knife in her hand. Her eyes seemed as cold as empty space, as dark and lifeless as a black hole.
“You’re not going anywhere,” she hissed through gritted teeth. “The god must have his fill!”
She ran at me with the knife raised high. Instinctively, I jammed the Swiss army knife out in front of me, stabbing her directly in the neck. She gave a cry like a strangled rabbit. With the last of her strength, she swung the wicked blade at my arm. With a burning agony, I felt it slice deeply through the skin and muscle. Warms rivers of blood flowed down my arm, leaving ruby drops behind me on the ground of the dark forest.
Alice collapsed to the ground, kicking and seizing. She grabbed at her throat, her eyes accusing and filled with a cold, furious hatred. I sprinted past her dying body. She choked on her own blood as it frothed and bubbled through the gaping hole in her throat. The cries of the dying and the predatory screaming of the serpent god followed me down the side of Mount Bloodstone as I ran in a panic, still shell-shocked and dissociated, my head still screaming with a burning migraine from the many injuries I had suffered this day.
***
I ended up finding the dirt road and following it back the way I had come. I hiked as far as I could that day until night fell. I wanted to put as much distance between myself and Mount Bloodstone as possible.
I had a fire in the forest that night, and I kept a constant watch. I thought I caught glimpses of pale faces with slitted pupils peeking around bushes, but whenever I looked, I saw nothing. Perhaps it was just my sleep-deprived, exhausted mind suffering from too much stress and trauma. Perhaps.
I ended up reaching a gas station the next day. I felt like a man dying of thirst in the desert reaching an oasis. With thanks, I looked up to the Sun and the sky, glad to see its light burning.
At that moment, I hoped I would never see another solar eclipse again.

https://preview.redd.it/o6t3p17ernvc1.png?width=1200&format=png&auto=webp&s=b35bc3e4e69b0ea855a6a82678f9b1046a93e89b
Wow. This movie rocked!
It checks all the boxes for what a good Spy x Family story should have. And let's just say it checks the absolute SHIT out of those boxes (surprisingly, in both a figurative and literal sense. If you know, you know lmao). There are minor flaws here and there, and I would argue that checking those boxes so perfectly is somewhat of a flaw in itself, because it made the movie very predictable. BUT, ultimately, I left the theatre thoroughly satisfied and filled with that warm, wholesome feeling I get whenever I consume anything SxF. Endo and Co. knew the assignment and pleased the fans. That's all you can ask for when it comes to movie adaptations, really.
So, as a fan, consider me pleased, Endo-sensei!

------BEFORE WE GET STARTED...------

The previous paragraph was the TLDR of this post. Because this is not only a review of CODE: White, but is also an extremely detailed synopsis of the film as well (Which means spoilers ahead). So fasten your seatbelts, folks. Because when I say "extremely detailed synopsis," I truly mean it. This will probably take as long to read as it would to watch the actual movie. So yeah, you're gonna be here for a while. Last chance to leave is now.
There is a lot of shit to talk about. A lot of fun shit, a lot of wholesome shit, and a lot of actual shit (again, in a very literal sense). So let's start at the beginning, shall we?

------ONCE UPON A TIME------

OPENING SCENES. I preface things with this: Don't bring your kids to this movie. Or if you do, cover their eyes for the first two and a half minutes haha.
At the very start, a disguised Loid seduces some rando chick and kinda sorta gets to second base with her at the very least (implied in that he spreads her legs, with a scandalous shot of her victorian-style pantaloons in view, just before it cuts away). Only for him to knock her out, get some files for a spy mission, and then steal her clothes to escape with some rando guy he seduces AS HER (bro is making this woman out to be some kinda hussy for the greater good lmao). Then immediately afterwards, it cuts to Yor on an assassin mission, spraying like 10-ish gallons of blood out of man's jugular and onto a nearby wall. Yeah, it lowkey gets super suggestive and violent right from the word "go". So, uh, I repeat. Don't bring your kids to this movie. Or if you do, cover their eyes for the first two and a half minutes haha.
Anyway, they both get home at around the same time, and are greeted by Anya at the door. The narrator then exposits about the Forger family, thier situation, as well as their secrets. Including a quick explanation about Operation Strix and its target, Donovan Desmond.
MY THOUGHTS SO FAR. The spiciness placed right at the front makes for a surprisingly bizarre opening of the film. Not sure if that sets the right tone, given the wholesomeness that is to come afterwards. Especially when things don't get as sexual nor as violent ever again. But its Loid doing cool spy things and Yor doing gruesome murdery things! That's always fun, so I'll take it.
Also, I understand the necessity of getting a general audience up to speed on what the current status quo is. But I found myself wanting to fast forward past some of the exposition to get to the meat of this self-contained adventure. I don't know, maybe I was just so starved for SxF content that I just didn't want to the see stuff I already knew about... Good thing the exposition finishes as quickly as it starts!

------THE INCITING INCIDENCES------

Things then proceed by giving each character a reason to go on the adventure, by posing some sort of problem before each one of the Forgers:
LOID'S DILEMA. As Loid spies on Anya at school one day, he is called in by WISE via a letter delivered him by carrier-falcon, of all things. He is then informed by Handler that he is being replaced in carrying out Operation Strix, and is assigned to another mission entirely. Twilight objects of course, as he believes himself to be the only agent capable enough to make contact with a man as elusive and as reclusive as Donovan Desmond. Handler agrees, but states that the decision was made above rank. She also details that the one to replace Twilight, a man named Deppler, has an in with the higher ups of WISE. Which is why he is allowed to replace Twilight. Nepotism. Sylvia suggests that Twilight make more progress in Operation Strix to tide the higher ups over and convince them of keeping him on the mission.
YOR'S DILEMA. When Loid leaves the WISE base of operations, he bumps into Fiona outside, who is on her way in. The wind blows her hat away and he catches it. He hands it back to her, they have a small chat about Strix, then they part ways. Seems pretty normal. BUT little do they know, that Yor is hanging out with her coworkers on the rooftop of Berlint City Hall, and the woman spots the two of them from like 5 miles away. She even correctly recognizes the man she sees as Loid. Girl has bionic eagle vision, I guess! Much more unfortunate for her, Yor sees them from an angle that makes it appear as though they had kissed, with Fiona's face conveniently obscured by Loid's head. And of course, she panics and assumes the worst: That Loid has a secret lover.
This panic is compounded upon by the conversation the city hall gals have about the "3 signs of cheating" that men exhibit when having an affair:

He takes more business trips as a cover for his infidelity.
He changes his style of dress to better match his mistress's tastes.
He buys gifts for you as a way to ease his own guilt.

Yor spends a good chunk of the movie either feeling the need to confront Loid about the mystery woman she saw him with, panicking about being replaced by the mystery woman, or angsting over whether or not she should just let this mystery woman replace her (with the assumption that she is a failure and that Loid actually loves the mystery woman over herself). It's very predictably on-brand of her to feel this way, and it gets resolved pretty early on to boot. But we'll get to that in a bit. Also, despite this, its the WAY it gets resolved that is super fulfilling and even ROMANTIC, of all things! But again, we'll get to that soon.
ANYA'S DILEMA. When Anya was in school that day, Master Henderson brings up an annual desert-baking class/competition that has illustrious members of Eden alumni/staff as judges. He alludes that last year's first prize winner also won a Stella, which pumps Anya and Damian up for the competition. The two "friends" bicker and Anya pulls no punches, straight up calling Sy-on boi a shithead lol. She then goes home and informs her parents of the contest.
Loid wants to rig things in their favor by making the favorite dessert of Eden's Principle, who is this year's appointed judge. That dessert being an apple cake (of course an EDEN staff member would like apple-flavored somethings) called the Meremere. He decides to take Anya to Frigis, a neighboring northern country, where the Meremere originates. Yor assumes that this is a business trip and panics at the "first sign of cheating" appearing. Only to be invited as well, which quells her worries. Mama agrees to come along, and the pieces are all set!
MY THOUGHTS SO FAR. I really like how the motivations of each character for just the movie are kinda woven together. For instance, Anya's need to succeed feeds into Loid's need to keep the mission going. Its all very efficient, and to boot, it is all rooted in and reflective of what they all want individually in the source material. Loid wants to keep the family together (for the mission and "for the mission" lmao), Yor wants to do a good job as a wife and mother, and Anya wants to earn Stellas for Papa and have family fun-time while doing it. We all know that these are what the characters want. And that might be the problem...
One of my criticisms (that I have alluded to several times now) is that, as a long time viewer and reader, all of this is very predictable. The personal arcs that the characters go through in this movie have been tread upon before in the manga/anime. So I felt like this movie wasn't as fresh as an experience as I wanted it to be, since it doesn't really do anything new with the Forgers. But then again, at the end of the day, I am a fan of these characters in part BECAUSE of their established motivations. And I went to watch the movie in part to see these admittedly predictable motivations play out on the big screen. In short, established motivations come with the territory, so I'll tolerate it.
Also, if things went too far out of left-field with new or different arcs, then it would be hard to place the movie within canon, which anime movies based on a long-running series tend to do very vaguely, despite technically being non-canon. Sticking to the status quo doesn't shake up its placability within the overarching story. As a result, I'd say that the events are placable pretty much anywhere past the point where Bond comes in and before the introduction of Melinda Desmond.
So really, I myself am not quite sure of what I'm complaining about... So let's move on!

------TRAVELING SHENANIGANS------

The Forgers take a train to the northern country, and shenanigans ensue almost immediately. What occurs seems a bit random at first, but it ties into the overall plot of the movie eventually.
LOID & YOR ALONE TOGETHER. Anya wants to play cards, but is forced by Loid to study on the way there... Bummer, dad... Anya tries to escape study time by going to the bathroom, which leaves Loid and Yor alone in their cabin. Anya finds a key in the bathroom, which triggers Bond's vision of what kind of treasure it opens. The vision shows Anya marveling at the treasure as well as its location. But not what the treasure itself is.
Meanwhile, Loid laments about Anya's poor hand-writing, which Yor responds to with some encouragement. Saying that she helped Anya with her handwriting the day before. This elicits some praise from Loid about how good of a mother Yor is. Instead of accepting the compliment, she very typically turns it into self-deprecation. Though she acknowledge to herself that she may be doing well in the motherhood department, she whines about lacking in the wifehood department, AKA: the "Icha-icha" department. She then sees a young couple making out in the hall way and subconsciously makes awkward kissy lips in front of Loid! Oolala!! He cordially asks what is wrong, only for her to deflect by stating that her lipstick is uncomfortable. She deflects further by saying that Anya is taking a while to get back and hurriedly leaves the cabin in search of her daughter.
ANYA & THE TREASURE/YOR TO THE RESCUE. At this point, Anya is in the luggage hold and finds the suitcase containing the treasure. Its a piece of chocolate... She is disappointed, but panics when the two lackies that were tasked with retrieving the chocolate enter the luggage area. Anya accidentally eats the candy when she tries to hide. The men confirm that the chocolate was indeed a valuable treasure when they find it missing. Shocked, Anya flees, accidentally draws the lackies' attention, and they give chase.
The door in the next car over is jammed, so Anya and Bond get cornered. Anya cries at the top of her lungs for Mama, who unjams the door in full mama-bear mode. After Anya calls the two men meanies and chocolate thieves (and after sensing their killing intent), Yor beats up the lackies and takes Anya back to Loid. Neither of them inform Loid of this incident, as to not make him worry. Anya feels bad because SHE was, in fact, the chocolate thief...
MY THOUGHTS SO FAR. The more Yor is made to think about kissing Loid, the better.
Moving on from that though, I honestly don't, for the life of me, remember the names of the lackies. They were the comic relief villains of the movie and were pretty forgettable beyond that. It was almost as though they were designed purely to have someone for Anya to interact with and be antagonized by. Because outside of that, they don't stand out at all.

------FINALLY IN FRIGIS------

The Forgers arrive in Frigis! Anya is super excited about snow and Yor immediately builds a full snowman in like 3 seconds. But she becomes embarrassed about it as soon as Loid calls her over. Poor woman was ashamed of herself for having some fun... Anyway, they gather their things, make staying arrangements, and head for a certain restaurant to obtain the Meremere they seek.
THE RESTAURANT. They all go to a restaurant called "Rubble and Bonds," which serves the Meremere dessert. Oddly, the restaurant also only serves families. Kind of a dick move to customers with no family if you ask me, though it gets explained as to why this is the case pretty soon. Also-also Bond is left in the cold since they don't allow dogs either... The Forgers order their meals as well as the last Meremere of the day. By the way, Anya orders a chicken cutlet with peanut sauce. WITH. PEANUT SAUCE. Oh and, Bond eventually gets fed by one of the waitresses.
All is fine and dandy! But then... Yor notices that Loid is in a turtleneck sweater! He NEVER wears a turtleneck sweater!! She's his wife, after all. The woman can somehow spot his silhouette from like 5 miles off. Of course, SHE'D notice something like this too hehe. Regardless, Yor interprets this as "the second sign of cheating." In reality, Loid wore it because Frigis is known to be cold and snowy. But he's a bit warm in the sweater, and comments to himself that he perhaps overdressed for the location.
The chef/owner comes by to see if the Forgers are enjoying their meal. Loid then comments about the restaurant's peculiar name. The chef explains that the restaurant is named after a famous two-man team of fighter pilots from the last war. The display of their plane is seen just outside. He further explains that he had lost everything in the war, including his family. So he made his restaurant service only families in order to give his customers a chance to appreciate the family togetherness he had lost and rediscovered after the war (Still a dick move to customers with no family imo, but whatever). Loid internally reflects back on his own motivations as a spy, as a result.
YURI. Throughout all this deep introspection about war and family, we briefly cut to Yuri at the "Foreign Ministry" offices back in Berlint. He discovers that Yor left for Frigis for the weekend with Loi-Loi and Chihuahua girl. And so he tries to leave for Frigis as well, but is tackled to the ground by two SSS guards. I was actually surprised that they didn't need more men to do so lol. Anyway...
THE VILLAIN APPEARS. A military Colonel (who the two lackies from earlier work for), named Snidel, suddenly enters the restaurant. He breaks its family-only rule and takes the Forger's Meremere dessert for himself, claiming it as a meal of privilege for his duty as a serviceman... Anya cry.
Loid objects to this and tries to appeal to Snidel. But he ends up being challenged to a contest due to the Colonel's intrigue of him. Snidel and Loid are presented with 3 different desserts and must taste them to determine what kind of sugar is used in each dish. The person with the most correct guesses wins. The more specific the guess, the more the answer counts point-wise. If Loid wins or there is a tie, the Forgers get the dessert. Loid correctly determines the sugar types used in each dish! But Snidel determines both the types AND the amounts in grams. Papa loses because he was less specific... Anya cry.
With the game settled, Snidel eats his fill then abruptly leaves. The Forgers shrug thinking they can just come back tomorrow. But the chef says that the next shipment of Meremere ingredients comes by on Monday, just after the Forgers have to go back to Ostania... So they ask for the recipe instead, which they are reluctantly shown. Loid memorizes the recipe and they leave at once.
MY THOUGHTS SO FAR. As far as SxF villains go, Snidel is pretty good. He's not as mysterious as Donovan Desmond, he's not as hateable as Keith (the Bomb dog terrorist), he's not as complex as Billy Squire (The Red Circus leader), nor is he as much of an imposing threat as Winston Wheeler (the SSS mole within WISE). But he's pretty ruthless. And its clear that his subordinates respect his command as much as he commands their respect. He even has a peculiar way to counteract Loid's ungodly ability to disguise himself: A powerful sense of smell. But we'll get to that.
Also, the Yuri scene was a bit un-needed but overall harmless (which ironically describes him as a character to a tee lol)

------FRIGIS FAMILY FUN-TIME------

Now. This is the Slice of Life part of the movie! Which means its automatically my favorite part haha. We get to see the Forgers as a family, doing winter vacationy things, in the fashion that only the Forgers know how. Comedy ensues, of course. But also some touching moments. Particularly between Loid and Yor. Not only does Loid get genuinely romantic in this, but Yor lowkey proves why she is a good wife to Loid and not just a good mother to Anya. In short, this is where a lot of this movie's heart shines.
THE FLEA MARKET. The Forgers travel to a local flea market to gather the ingredients. Loid does so quickly, only missing two items: Orange Syrup and Cherry Liqueur. But suddenly, a local peddler woman comes by and offers to sell Loid some lipstick for his lovely wife. Remembering back to when Yor had "complained" about her lipstick, he agrees, purchases the lipstick, and gifts it to Yor. She panics, believing this to be the "third sign of cheating." She asks him to confirm whether or not this is a gift. When Loid innocently confirms that it is, she becomes concerningly distraught, to his confusion. She then slowly drags her feet away to the bathroom in order to apply her new gift...
Soon after, Anya sees a shooting gallery game at the flea market, which has a bottle of Orange Syrup as one of its prizes. One must knock it over with a cork-gun to win it as a prize. However, she discovers through telepathy that the game is rigged. Each prize has a hidden metal prop holding them up from behind. After Anya fails to knock down the syrup, Loid intervenes and gives a crack at the game. He angles his shot to have his cork ricochet off of several prizes, knocking them all over, including the syrup. This reveals the props behind the prizes, and Loid quietly advices the man running the game to play fair from now on. There he goes again, making honest men out of his enemies lol.
DRUNK YOR. After the shooting game incident, Anya gets distracted by a kiddy rollercoaster ride. She hops on, and whenever she passes by while riding it, she says something cute or dumb like, "Chi-chi! I'm back!" Loid just watches on, confused as to how slowly riding around in a circle can be this fun for her. It's at this point that Yor returns from the bathroom and Loid offers to buy her a warm drink. Yor instead slams down wad, after wad, after wad of hard-earned dalc in order to down 10 cups of wine at minimum! Determined to get a clear answer about the mystery woman, she gets drunk, yells at Loid incoherently, backs him into an alleyway, judo flips him, kabedons him while he's on the ground, then passes out on top of her thoroughly confused husband. Anya watches on from the rollercoaster ride in mild horror.
Hours pass, and Yor finally awakens. She gets embarrased and thinks to herself that her actions might have convinced Loid to divorce her. Anya picks up on this thought and remembers how Becky said that a divorce is when a mom and dad battle, with the result being the destruction of the family... Anya Panic.
THE FERRIS WHEEL (AKA MY FAVORITE PART OF THE MOVIE BECAUSE OF LOID/YOR ROMANCE). But then, a man comes by advertising for the "Icha-icha" ferris wheel ride across the way. Anya convinces her parents to take the ride without her in an attempt to prevent divorce. The girl's rash actions makes Yor realize that her gloomy and erratic behavior is causing both Loid AND Anya to worriy. And so she admits to Loid that she was acting strange because she wanted to confront him about the mystery woman. Loid clears up the misunderstanding, saying that the woman was not his lover. Although he never confirms that the woman was Fiona AND he lies by saying that the woman was a complete stranger asking for directions... Regardless, Yor is relieved but is still scared that he will divorce her.
This leads to Loid kneeling before Yor and taking her hand! Mind you, there is no "honey-trap scheming" going on in his head!! So its played straight, as though what he is about to say are his genuine feelings!!! Loid then remembers the night he put a grenade pin on her finger. He says that he made a vow to her the day they met, one he'd NEVER go back on. Remembering the grenade pin proposal as well, Yor becomes embarrassed. To the point where she slaps Loid right out of the ferris wheel gondola and onto the pavement below. He lands on his feet, like a cat, of course. Though his cheek is ballooned up and pink with swelling... Anya sees the lump and panics even more because they were "divorce-battling." They deny such notions, and so Anya asks if they were "flirt-battling" instead. To which they very typically and very vehemently deny, as well! The gag normally ends there. BUT..., and this is a VERY BIG BUT...
After Loid and Yor deny any Icha-icha, Anya's mind-reading sound effect can be heard briefly in the background. She then gives off a satisfied smirk, HEAVILY implying that she had read her parents' minds right then and there, and that they were both full of Icha-icha thoughts! The context clues are all there: Loid was blushing, both him and Yor look away from each other with awkward expressions, and Anya smirks as though she just caught them in a lie and KNOWS that Chi-chi and Ha-ha love each other for realsies, even if they themselves don't realize it. Its pretty subtle, but its clearly obvious.
CHECK. FUCKING. MATE. Too bad this is technically non-canon...
LOID LEAVES FOR A BIT. After that beautiful scene, Anya and Yor go to the hotel while Loid stays around to look for the last missing ingredient. He wants to do so alone since he will be using illegal/infiltration methods. He looks everywhere to no avail and ends up calling Frankie, who is currently rizzing up a cute girl at his smoke shop (and might I add, successfully so)! Loid's call distracts him and she politely leaves. After some bickering, Loid eventually convinces Frankie to bring him a bottle of Cherry Liqueur. Frankie then embarks on an off-screen journey to Frigis, Liqueur in hand.
Meanwhile, Anya and Yor very cutely play "Good Guys vs Bad Guys," and wait for Loid to return for some more quality time together. Mama even tucks baby in after she's tuckered out. Awwww... My heart. So FULL.
Its too bad that Snidel shoots one of his men back at his Airship base, who he quite literally sniffs out as a WISE informant. The two lackies then appear and inform Snidel that the microfilm they were looking for has been eaten by a small child. At WISE HQ, Handler is informing her agents that their mole in Frigis just died, and that they must retrieve the microfilm before Snidel and his command does. Or else war happens. Luckily, Loid is conveniently in Frigis for Operation Strix purposes and will do just that. Fiona, who is present at the briefing, voluntarily rushes off in a lovestruck mad-dash at the chance to aid her senpai.
ANYA RUNS OFF. Loid returns to the hotel empty handed, but comes back saying that there is a shop several towns over that has the Liqueur they need. He tells them to remain at the hotel as he leaves again. Anya protests after being woken up by his return, calling Chi-chi a liar because he came back later than he had promised. Loid internally reminds himself about the stakes being held over Operation Strix. About how he'll be replaced if Anya doesn't get a Stella soon. Anya reads this thought and it makes her act more urgently, now saying that she wants to come along this time. But Loid says no, and Anya depressingly walks to her room, understanding that she would get in the way... Anya Cry.
Loid feels bad about this and Yor comfortingly asks him to compromise, as the car he rented to drive to the far-off town has 5 seats. She suggests that all of them go together and for Loid to overlook Anya staying up with them for just tonight. Yor even brings up the fact that when she was raising Yuri, his happiest days were holidays because that meant no school, which meant more quality time with her. Yor insists that Anya wants just that with Loid. Especially because they are on vacation. So Loid relents and agrees to Yor's suggestion of bringing everyone along. (See, Yor? You ARE a good wife!)
Anya still Cry though. But she hug goodest boi Bond, who gives her a vision of where she can get Cherry Liqueur very close by. Determined not to get Papa replaced (which will disband the Forger family), Anya and Bond jump out of the window to go get the Liqueur by themselves.
Before Loid can call Anya over for Yor's plan, room service rings the doorbell. Surprise though! Its actually a very YANDERE Fiona, disguised as a maid and breathing very heavily from sprinting all the damn way to Frigis in what would realistically be a matter of hours (Mind you, Frankie is still slowly on his way to Frigis at this point. So Fiona just out foot-raced a whole-ass cross-country train ride). Loid speaks with Fiona out in the hall and is informed about the microfilm and Snidel, which reminds him of their encounter at the restaurant. Yor interrupts having discovered that Anya jumped the window and left a poorly written apology letter about doing so.
MY THOUGHTS SO FAR. This is the BEST section of the movie for me. Character-wise, it just gets the dynamics down so good. Yor and Loid being overtly subtle when it comes to romance, Anya and Yor being the definition of sweetness and home, and Loid just not understanding anything in regards to the ladies in his life. Its done all so effectively here as is usual.
I reiterate that this is where the heart of the film shines. The family bits. The parts where we're not worrying about the fate of the world. The moments where we just see three strangers finding for themselves a sense of belonging among one another. That, I would argue, is the essence of Spy x Family. Why we as the audience care. And this part of the movie executed that sentiment perfectly.
Especially with Yor. She really, truly IS a good wife despite how she sees herself. Its not just about satisfying your man's physical or romantic needs. Companionship and commitment count for SO MUCH more in a relationship, and Yor's approach of being a wife is proof, whether she realizes it or not. She is someone who respects, supports, and guides her husband whenever he's at a loss. She always seems to mediate the tension and hardship away within the family, with a surprising amount of wisdom to boot. And what's more, its all done very much in-character due to how pure-hearted she is portrayed as being within the source material.
Anya may be the face and the star of Spy x Family. And Loid may be its complexity as well as its depth. But this movie made me realize that Yor is definitely its heart.
(...To Be Continued in a Part 2 of this review, due to character limit restraints...
Part 2 is here: https://www.reddit.com/SpyxFamily/comments/1c8u5ba/a_review_extremely_detailed_synopsis_of_spy_x/ )

2023 NOV 8 comment and 2024 FEB 7 post combined
Diagnostic Proof of Complete Biological Living Organisms Nazca Alien Mummies - HD CT Scans of Josefina (Humanoid Reptile), Maria (Jamin Palpanensis) & Wawita, Nazca Alien Mummies - Scientific Results are presented to the Congress of Peru (11/19 2018), video links below. These examinations reveal that the construction is entirely biological with intricate detail and great complexity that would be impossible to manufacture. The reptilian skin is confirmed to be both real and seamless without sutures, without a break that would allow for assembly. Beneath the real seamless skin is a complete skeletal structure that is held together by entirely biological materials such as ligaments, tendons, muscles, not hardware or glue therefore not manufactured. It has been confirmed that those are real eggs inside the tridactyl reptile alien Josefina with real embryos visible inside the shell surrounded by a complete reproductive system which is impossible to manufacture. There are also other bodies with eggs and visible embryos. There is a complete network of tiny fragile nerves and blood vessels that branch throughout weaving deeply into the tissues which would be impossible to manufacture. The bones are hollow like a dinosaur or bird and fit together harmoniously with unique joints, not a typical ball joint socket. The lower arms and legs are singular bones instead of two which is unusual for humanoids and suggests a limited range of movement. The circular ribs are snake-like but without a sternum, without interruption, unlike anything else on the planet. There are no teeth but instead two hinged pinching plates somewhat like the beak of a bird. It may drink and swallow but perhaps not chew. The feet are similar to that of large birds. The three-fingered hands and wrist with one carpal bone are the same as theropods such as the velociraptor featured in the movie Jurassic Park. The singular collar bone also resembles that of another extinct dinosaur. It's unique that the neck is centered under the head rather than mounted at the back of the skull as with all other vertebrates on Earth. The cervical vertebra design indicates that they can swivel the head 270 degrees to look behind them and also retract the neck like a turtle as depicted by Steven Spielberg in the movie E.T.
Paleontologist Cliff Miles believes that the chest implant on Josefina may be a medical implant to stabilize the chest while the broken collar bone was healing. Others speculate that it was a communication device since it contains copper and the same rare dense metals we use in satellites such as osmium. It could act as an antenna or amplifier for wireless communication. The other bodies also have metallic implants in the chest or other areas. According to osmium-institute-italia.com/en/, "Crystalline OSMIUM is 35 times more precious than gold and has the highest value by volume of all precious metals" and "osmium has the highest density of all precious metals" and "each piece of osmium has a fingerprint that makes it unique and makes one piece unmistakable from another." Osmium is highly unlikely to be present unless it serves an important necessary function or was otherwise installed on another planet where it was more plentiful. Perhaps it "has a fingerprint" that identifies each alien on the network? The implants are bonded to the bone in an interlinked manner which is a biological process over time that only occurs in living creatures thereby conclusively proving that these bodies were living creatures.
The head displays three indentations on each side typical of native reptiles such as snakes that have these pit organ thermal radiation sensors in their face to detect heat emitted from predators and prey so as to identify them from about twenty feet away. When only a portion of the above facts are established true, that sufficiently confirms these are real aliens. Eventually, when prejudice and disinformation are finally defeated this will be universally recognized as the greatest archaeological finding in world history. Perhaps bewildering imagery until now, the presence of these Nazca tridactyl reptile aliens of Peru was fully recorded there and throughout South America in many ancient petroglyphs, pottery, and textiles as humanoid figures prominently displaying three fingers, three toes, and sometimes eggs.
Scientists assert the DNA results reveal these bodies are entirely biological and despite having familiar characteristics of life on Earth they are without any path of evolution on Earth. Convergent evolution might explain this since it involves different species at different locations developing similar or identical features so as to accomplish the same task. Another possible explanation for this is that aliens abducted a dinosaur from Earth and it evolved on their planet into a humanoid, perhaps with some genetic engineering to make this possible; then, it returned to this planet of origin in curiosity to discover where it came from or because it was selected for the mission to return here due to its biological likelihood of surviving in the place that its ancestors originated from. If scientific analysis were to conclude this theory has a probability of being true then we would have to wonder if by the same means of abduction across thousands of years humans are already colonizing other planets in significant numbers, with or without some alteration in physical development to adapt to a different alien environment. Many of those that claim to have been abducted have given the same report that the aliens observed while aboard the craft appeared human in most ways except for being hairless, bald, with no ears, just a hole where the ears would be. If that is ever proven true then it indicates we may have an ancestor in common with them that either came from here or more surprisingly came from there.
Diagnostic proof of complete biological living organisms is the video: Nazca Alien Mummies - HD CT Scans of Josefina (Humanoid Reptile), Maria (Jamin Palpanensis) & Wawita ~https://youtu.be/D7SaCfzoqIc?si=wIAUUQby6sAenksS~. For indepth analysis examine the lengthy video: Nazca Alien Mummies - Scientific Results are presented to the Congress of Peru (11/19 2018) ~https://youtu.be/V2xN41immWE?si=rHS0YB0UHiC-qgR1~. Examine more evidence at the official site: The Alien Project ~https://www.the-alien-project.com/en/~ Examine the indepth study by Paleontologist Cliff Miles: The Miles Paper ~https://www.themilespaper.com/~ Updates: https://twitter.com/NazcaMummies. Photo gallery of tridactyls and most other real aliens is here: Aliens - Tridactyl Reptilian ~https://www.pinterest.com/luminaryluminance/aliens/tridactyl-reptilian/~ Collection of videos displaying and discussing these and most other real aliens is here: Aliens ~https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtA8tEZ0F5R_0UR5KBQyEqpUfAgPAcL-f&si=nSvwc72DK3vSr-uX~

(Mirror version with proper formatting)
Prologue
Let's assume that Adam never sinned, no fall of humanity ever occurred, and no fall of angelic beings ever occurred. In Genesis 1:28 you still have man's being told to be fruitful and to multiply. If we assume that there were no other humans besides Adam and Eve and that it was up to just Adam and his progeny to do the job of populating the earth, then the world's population plausibly would have consisted merely of Adam, Eve, and a very large number of their children or first-generation descendants.
Adam would have no other way of filling the earth with his offspring apart from either: A) either crude or sophisticated (e.g. IVF) methods of sexless impregnation; or B) incest. Let's be honest: if pressed on the matter, I think that most of us would say that incest is plumb bad--not bad merely after the Mosaic Law was given, as if God were so desperate to get the world populated that he outlawed incest only later in human history, but inherently bad or perhaps even abominable. So (B) was likely never to be a divine-prescribed option. As for (A), these are unnatural or “inorganic” enough for us to find it implausible that such would ever have been options. Consequently, in an unfallen universe Adam's offspring might have had gonads that lay dormant just as males' nipples do not provide milk.
But Adam did sin, humanity did fall, and death became an inevitability for Adam and Eve that would disallow their indefinitely populating the earth strictly by having more children. Based on the contrast of the ugly Genesis 19:30-38 episode and the technological wisdom of Genesis 4:17-22, I am going to assume that ancient man never came up with primitive methods of impregnation that did not rely on sex. Therefore, the popular creationist idea that the world was populated by means of incest in the early days of humanity would probably be correct.
Notice that I use the word “would” above. If in Genesis 3:21 God made clothes for Adam and Eve after the fall and if in Genesis 4 Cain is made to pay a price for the crime of murder but remains protected nevertheless, should we believe that Adam's offspring would not have been spared from the necessity of weird methods of populating the earth? Ladies and gentlemen, you can believe that the world was populated through wide-scale incest if *you* want to do so; personally, I think this idea is both morally and epistemically dubious while I also *know* that the Bible never explicitly states that incest was a means of the populating of the earth whether before Noah or immediately after him.
Gone are the days when I for one will just shrug my shoulders, throw up my hands and say, “What else can I say? It must be true because this Bible verse says X, Y and Z.” Forget that. Audit your interpretation of the said Bible passage first; only if your idea passes a rigorous re-examination should you be content to live with cognitive dissonance. In fact, an audit of both YEC and OEC begins right now....
------------------------
Here are some preliminary facts:
1 ) Adam is said to be everyone's ancestor: Acts 17:26.
2 ) Adam is said to be “the first man”: 1 Corinthians 15:45-47.
3 ) Eve is said to be “[the] mother of all living”: Genesis 3:20.
4 ) Genesis 1-3 is not meant to be a comprehensive account of the creation of the universe. Some of the many things that are not mentioned in that account are bacteria, angels, cherubs, seraphs, black holes, comets, meteors, meteorites, dwarf planets, exoplanets, etc.
So apparently there were no humans before Adam was made. Also, if any Adam-unrelated human being emerged after Adam was made, that person either has had no lasting blood line or it has crossed paths with that of Adam. Genesis 3:20, meanwhile, does not allow much realistic narrative wiggle room for the idea that humans unrelated to Adam emerged after he was made, but a small amount of wiggle room apparently exists nonetheless. This helps to allow for a hybrid account of guided evolution, teleological creation, and a late, short-lived parallel race of humans.
5 ) The following is an assumption that one may hear or encounter among the rank and file in Christendom: “The Bible has to be so simple that a child could understand it.”
This assumption is perfectly false. What does Peter say about the apostle Paul's writings in 2 Peter 3:15-16? What do we see in Acts 8:26-35 with Philip and the Kushite eunuch? We see proof that this assumption is false and naïve; that's what.
6 ) The following is an unspoken, subconscious assumption that pervades nearly all of evangelicalism and fundamentalism: “Whatever tools, wisdom and understanding that *I* have are adequate for making sense of all the Scriptures.”
This assumption is also false. For example, there are still parts of the Scriptures having a few words or phrases that even scholars do not know the precise meaning of. For example, no one can say for certainty what the Nicolaitans of Revelation 2 really believed.
Based on such faulty assumptions, and given humanity's natural inclination toward instant gratification, there will be people who gravitate toward hyperliteralism in their biblical hermeneutics. To be fair, given humanity's natural inclination toward intellectual sloppiness, half-measures and laziness, there will also be people who will slap the label of “allegory” onto this or that Scripture, without explaining how it does not contradict various grammatical, pragmatic or discursive rules, and call it a day. Both actions are mistakes.
7 ) Allegory and history are not mutually exclusive. 2 Samuel 12:1-7 (ESV):
«12 And the LORD sent Nathan to David. He came to him and said to him, “There were two men in a certain city, the one rich and the other poor. 2 The rich man had very many flocks and herds, 3 but the poor man had nothing but one little ewe lamb, which he had bought. And he brought it up, and it grew up with him and with his children. It used to eat of his morsel and drink from his cup and lie in his arms,[a] and it was like a daughter to him. 4 Now there came a traveler to the rich man, and he was unwilling to take one of his own flock or herd to prepare for the guest who had come to him, but he took the poor man's lamb and prepared it for the man who had come to him.” 5 Then David's anger was greatly kindled against the man, and he said to Nathan, “As the LORD lives, the man who has done this deserves to die, 6 and he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and because he had no pity.”
7 Nathan said to David, “You are the man! Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, ‘I anointed you king over Israel, and I delivered you out of the hand of Saul.»
Nathan delivered an allegory. The allegory was practically truthful. The allegory referred to a real person while using artistic or rhetorical flourish, as in Bathsheba's becoming a poor man's lamb. Therefore, 2 Samuel 12:1-7 furnish one of multiple proofs that the idea that Genesis 1-2 are allegorical should not be dismissed out of hand.
8 ) We know for a fact that at least some of the book of Genesis was not meant to be taken literally. For example, Genesis 3:14 (ESV) reads as follows:
«The LORD God said to the serpent,
“Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and above all beasts of the field; on your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life.»
Do you, the reader, really believe that the devil was a beast of the field and was cursed to literally crawl on his belly and to literally eat dust? If so, what then are we to make of Ephesians 2:2 or Job 1:6-12 which seem to portray the devil as someone who was free to roam the universe even after the events of Genesis 3? So it is clear that Genesis 3 is partly allegorical or partly figurative given its proximity to Genesis 1-2, those chapters plausibly do the same.*1*
8a ) The structure of this particular allegory does not seem arbitrary or random in nature. Ezekiel 28:11-19 seem to portray the devil as a cherub who was cast to the ground (verse 17); this jibes with Luke 10:18 and Revelation 12:4 (cf. Isaiah 14:12-16). Meanwhile, it should be noted that it is never established in the Scriptures whether “seraph” and “cherub” have different meanings or whether one denotes a sort or kind of what is denoted by the other. With that said, note that the word translated as “seraph” in Isaiah 6:2 is translated in Isaiah 14:29 and Isaiah 30:6 as “fiery serpent”; this is to be compared with Revelation 20:2 (ESV): «And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years,».
So regardless of whether the devil really did have a form of a winged serpent (i.e. a dragon) or wingless serpent in the garden of Eden, Genesis 3 has non-literal elements, Genesis 1-2 therefore plausibly does the same, and any allegorical elements of Genesis 1-3 will likely be similar to the reality that it represents: for example, man's being formed of dust (if allegorical) would *not* likely represent a far-removed idea such as Adam's being born of a humanoid mother but indirectly made of stardust that was made millions of years prior, as has been suggested in the past.
9 ) So Genesis 1-3 accomplish what they need to accomplish--not to provide a comprehensive and literal account of the world's creation as a contemporary science textbook would, but something else.
In Matthew 12:40 it is said that Christ will be in the heart of the earth for “three days and three nights,” despite the fact that Christ died on Friday and rose on Sunday morning for a total of less than exactly three days and three nights. So Hebrews of old simply did not share the sum of our modern commitments to semiotic precision; keep this in mind when reading about a “morning” or “evening” in Genesis 1-2. Then again, even modern man is not totally committed to speaking precisely about all temporal matters (from https://elegantmemorials.com/funeral-program-format, 04/16/24):
«Birth Date and Death Date. You can also refer to this as "Sunrise" and "Sunset"»
These facts about allegory, imprecision and discourse analysis are to be matched with the following: the observation that weird stuff occurs in 2 Peter 3, Psalm 90, and Genesis 1-2, with all passages mentioning the creation of the world. Here, for example, the number one suddenly becomes plural:
Genesis 1:9-10 (ESV): «9 And God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so. 10 God called the dry land Earth,[a] and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.»
After all, how can it be that the waters are gathered to “one place” in an *ordinary sense* when almost immediately afterward we get the plural word “seas”? Again, the number one suddenly becomes plural:
Genesis 1:26a (ESV): «Then God said, “Let us make man[a] in our image, after our likeness.»
After all, despite the use of plural “our” we remember the words of Deuteronomy 6:4 (ESV): «“Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.[a]» The number one is also plural below:
2 Peter 3:8 (ESV): «But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.»
Psalm 90:1-4 (ESV): « A Prayer of Moses, the man of God.
90 Lord, you have been our dwelling place[a]in all generations.2 Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God. 3 You return man to dust and say, “Return, O children of man!”[b]4 For a thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night.»
In fact, the number one apparently equals six:
Exodus 20:11 (ESV): «For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.»
Genesis 2:4, 7 (ESV): «These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens.»
«7 then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.»
The overall point here is this: for some reason there is a conflation of oneness and plurality in creation texts. Within this would-be conflation are multiple indications that the “‘Yom’ never means anything other than a 24-hour day” YEC claim is perfectly questionable, right along with the claim that the words “morning” and “evening” somehow emphasize Genesis 1-2's being entirely literal. (Of course, it also remains plausible that the six days of creation are six days of direct creation, with intervening intervals of indirect creation through evolution.)
So once again Genesis 1-3 accomplish what they need to accomplish--not to provide a comprehensive and literal account of the world's early history as a contemporary science textbook would, but something else.
10 ) If this were not proof enough that Ussher's chronology is incorrect and not binding, let's speak one more time about Hebrew imprecision of language, this time from Deuteronomy 4:25 (ESV):
«“When you father children and children's children, and have grown old in the land, if you act corruptly by making a carved image in the form of anything, and by doing what is evil in the sight of the LORD your God, so as to provoke him to anger,»
Apparently Biblical Hebrew was like other languages in that they all have idiosyncratic weird ways of speaking. In Deuteronomy 4 “to father” or “to beget” does not carry the meaning that we Modern English speakers would expect; instead, it seems to refer to one's becoming either a father *or* a grandfather. If you carry that principle over to the biblical genealogies that people like Ussher use to conclude that the world is 6000 years old, it is not possible to say with confidence that gaps aren't missing from those genealogies.
11 ) In Numbers 32 the tribes of Gad, Reuben and half-Manasseh took land east of the Jordan River despite that land's not belonging to a foregoing prescribed set of land allotments to national Israel west of the Jordan River; and that turned out to be morally permissible. By analogy, Genesis 1:29-30 conceivably speak of dietary conditions that were ideal without being absolutely restrictive.
12 ) Of course, many YEC apologists will use Romans 5:12-14 (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:22) to argue that death began when Adam fell. Here is what that passage says (ESV):
«12 Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men[a] because all sinned— 13 for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law. 14 Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come.»
YECs forget that the devil sinned before Adam did. Therefore, it cannot be that the word “world” in this passage means *universe* or *earth* or anything like these. Instead, this word ends up referring to humanity or the realm of humanity, if you will, as it does in 1 John 2:2 (ESV):
«He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.»
So it need only be the case in Romans 5:12-14 that the apostle Paul is talking about humanity's becoming subject to death when Adam sinned and lost access to the tree of life.
------------------------
Here is what we get when we add up the data: theoretically it could indeed be the case that there was a late, short-lived parallel race of humans. Adam was indeed the first man and along with Eve is an ancestor of everyone alive today, but his direct origins in the dust of the earth would be contrasted by a divinely-guided, evolutionary emergence of a parallel race of humans which existed for Adam's populating the earth through children's children without having to rely on incest. I am not saying that such a race existed; however, that such a race existed is possible in theory.*2*
That such a short-lived race existed is also more likely to be the case than the existence of a short-lived, parallel hybrid race of bad Watchers or fallen angels or “sons of God” and female descendants of Adam.*3* Firstly, if the Watchers produced such a race, then Adam's first male descendants still would have ended up having relatively close relatives as wives (e.g. Seth's niece). Secondly, an explanation of guided evolution toward a second human race is more parsimonious; a theory of Watchers is more or less ad hoc whereas ideas of contemporary evolutionary theory already end up supporting the likelihood of each other in various independent ways, thus establishing a larger cohesive and coherent system of thought.
Of course, some young, ham-fisted YEC apologist will dismiss this idea out of hand and accuse me of “cOMproMiSe wITH thE wORld!” This, of course, would be a mistake because creationists themselves consistently rely on extrabiblical reasoning to do biblical exegesis. After all, who believes Psalm 75:3 when it says that the earth is atop “pillars”? Who rejects Isaiah 11:12 when it says that the earth has “four corners”? Who takes Isaiah 40:22 literally when it talks about “the circle of the earth”? Who does not continue to believe that the earth both rotates and revolves when he observes that Psalm 104:5 speaks of the earth's not being moved from its foundations?
As much as people don't like it, it really is sometimes necessary to allow extrabiblical philosophy to inform one's attempts at biblical exegesis.*4* So here is a message to those creationist apologists out there who are ham-fisted in their approach: Why don't you just believe and accept what the Bible says? Again, why don't you just humbly accept what the Bible clearly says in:
2 Samuel 8:4 (ESV): «3 David also defeated Hadadezer the son of Rehob, king of Zobah, as he went to restore his power at the river Euphrates. 4 And David took from him 1,700 horsemen, and 20,000 foot soldiers. And David hamstrung all the chariot horses but left enough for 100 chariots.»
1 Chronicles 18:4 (ESV): «3 David also defeated Hadadezer king of Zobah-Hamath, as he went to set up his monument[a] at the river Euphrates. 4 And David took from him 1,000 chariots, 7,000 horsemen, and 20,000 foot soldiers. And David hamstrung all the chariot horses, but left enough for 100 chariots.»
2 Samuel 10:17-18 (ESV): «17 And when it was told David, he gathered all Israel together and crossed the Jordan and came to Helam. The Syrians arrayed themselves against David and fought with him. 18 And the Syrians fled before Israel, and David killed of the Syrians the men of 700 chariots, and 40,000 horsemen, and wounded Shobach the commander of their army, so that he died there.»
1 Chronicles 19:17-18 (ESV): «17 And when it was told to David, he gathered all Israel together and crossed the Jordan and came to them and drew up his forces against them. And when David set the battle in array against the Syrians, they fought with him. 18 And the Syrians fled before Israel, and David killed of the Syrians the men of 7,000 chariots and 40,000 foot soldiers, and put to death also Shophach the commander of their army.»?
Yeah, to just accept what the Bible clearly says is kind of hard to do *automatically* in this case, isn't it? You kind of have to do some extrabiblical philosophy or heuristics or reasoning to figure out which numbers are correct, or whether it's 40,000 horsemen or 40,000 foot soldiers, don't you? And that is the sort of thing that OECs and theistic evolutionists would point out: sometimes extrabiblical research can or must inform one's biblical exegesis, like it or not. For even when we're comparing and contrasting a Final Nun and a Zayin to make sense of the latter pair of Scriptures, we're talking Hebrew semiotics, which is not exegesis.
Addendum
Someone will claim that dinosaurs gave rise to birds and that the sequential order of Genesis 1 is incorrect on that basis. Even if some dinosaurs evolved into birds, it need only be the case that Moses or whoever Genesis 1 was only thinking about beasts that walked the earth as of the time of writing. Remember, in the meantime, that we saw earlier that Genesis 1-2 was not meant to be a comprehensive account of the creation of the world, things such as angels and cherubs not being mentioned there.
ENDNOTES
*1* Of course, at least as early as the 3rd century there was the belief that not all of Genesis 1-2 was meant to be taken literally. For example, see Origin's De Principiis, Book IV: 16-17. However, Origen would have done well to consider the modern idea that Genesis 1 describes a series of events in which the sky gradually changes from being opaque to transparent, hence the appearance of plural “lights” in on the fourth day in Genesis 1:14-18.
*2* If the idea of unrelated, post-Adamic human beings with short-lived bloodlines or genealogy is to work, then certain other things must first be in place. On Leviticus 18:23 and 20:15-16, we can't have Adam's offspring mating with animals: these other human beings have to be real humans, not soulless facsimiles or approximations or what-have-you. Ideally, there would also be other textual hints, large or small, that such human beings coexisted with Adam and his immediate family.
Let's say you tinker with a simian spermatozoon, and a simian ovum, and have one fertilize the other such that the resultant zygote's structure is just like that of the prophet Moses when he was a zygote: is this mirror Moses a human being or not? (Bear in mind that the man Jesus Christ became a human through unordinary means.) Someone will say, “No, because God hasn't breathed life into it.” Yet there is no reason to believe that this zygote, if it treated like any successful zygote is treated in IVF, will not grow and eventually be born. So this zygote seems to be a human just as much as Christ himself was a man born through unusual means.
Meanwhile, the very phrase “make man in our image” in Genesis 1:26 seems to suggest that one's having the said image is a contingent property. By analogy, I could take a single lump of clay, say “I'm going to form a statue of an elephant,” and later cause that lump of clay to have the form of an elephant, but I could just as easily use the same lump to fashion a pot that looks like a pot that I broke last week. Man himself was formed from the dust of the earth, so it becomes easier to imagine that a short-lived, parallel race of humans might have been humans that were not made in God's image. Consider this to be grounds for further research or thought.
*3* Compare Luke 3:38, Job 38:4-7, Genesis 6:1-4, Jude 1:6-7, 2 Peter 2:4-10, and Exodus 7:10-12.
*4* To be sure, it's not about haphazardly making this or that passage of literature receive a forced-fit eisegetical interpretation. It's all about a right use of abductive reasoning in different walks and matters in life.
...And speaking of matters of parsimony, let's concede the idea that light was in transit on Creation Day Four in order to make season-marking, navigation, etc. to be immediately possible for Adam on Day Six (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omphalos_hypothesis). That's fine, but there are still objects behind that light, right? If these objects were truly close, then should they not have noticeable and measurable effects on neighboring heavenly bodies to suggest proximity? Or if they're instead far away, then why shouldn't they be as far as red light shift metrics suggest?
Meanwhile, are tree rings necessary for an immediately functioning world? Presumably, they are not. Why then should someone suspend good sense or a consistent use of abductive reasoning to support a biblical interpretation that was never necessarily true in the first place?
These are some of the reasons that I for one have not subscribed to YEC for the longest time.

We had been driving for over two hours when the nightmare began. The anomalous behavior that would affect the area started as abruptly as a lightning strike. I felt strange and dissociated. Goosebumps rose all over arms as a smell like ozone filled the air, filtering through the air vents in thick, invisible clouds.
“I am so excited to see this!” my girlfriend Alice cried happily in the passenger seat. “Do you know I have never seen a full solar eclipse before?” I glanced over, feeling nervous. Yet Alice didn’t seem affected in the slightest. I wiped my forehead, clearing the trickles of sweat that had begun forming there.
“Do you smell that?” I asked, changing the mood abruptly. Alice glanced over at me, the smile falling off her face in a space of a moment. She shook her head.
“No, smell what?” she said. I gave her a look of disbelief. The smell of ozone was so thick that I could almost taste it at the back of my throat. I repressed an urge to gag. I rolled down the windows. The breeze cleared out some of the smell, but I still caught hints of it even on the fresh currents of air that streamed through the car.
All around us, the slit wrists of the sky shone a cyanotic blue, covering the earth like a suffocating blanket. Mountain ranges loomed overhead, their sharp peaks hidden under fresh virgin snow. We planned to hike to the top of the highest peak before the solar eclipse began.
“This whole place is so… empty,” Alice said, brushing a lock of blonde hair the color of platinum over her ear. “I can’t remember the last time I saw a house.” She took out her phone. She flicked on the screen before heaving a deep sigh. “And we get absolutely no service all the way out here. You better not get injured! We won’t be able to call for help.” I laughed nervously, wondering if she had just jinxed us.
“You’re the one who’s accident-prone,” I said, starting to relax slightly. The last trace of the foul ozone smell had dissipated by now. The clean mountain air and majestic landscapes rising all around us made the place seem like some kind of wonderland, far removed from the small sufferings and agonies of daily life.
***
After another twenty minutes of driving, surrounded on all sides by dark forests filled with evergreens and shadows, we saw a faded, brown sign reading: “TO MOUNT BLOODSTONE. 5 MILES.”
“Finally!” Alice cried triumphantly, her whole expression changing into one of excitement. “I’ve never been here before, but Kaitlyn told me this place has the best view in the county!” As the mountain loomed in front of us like a crouching giant, I could see why.
It towered over all the surrounding mountains, its sharp, white peak stabbing upwards into the blue sky like a spire. Steep cliffs of light brown stone surrounded it on all sides. Untouched forests of maple, oak and pine grew thick and vibrant on Mount Bloodstone’s rocky soil.
“We still have four hours until the eclipse starts,” Alice said, looking down at her cell phone. The pavement suddenly ended, and the road turned into a snaking path of treadmarks and loose stones. My SUV handled it easily, but it was slow going. A few minutes later, we broke out through the forests and thick brush that carpeted the land. On the driver’s side stood a cliff of jutting rectangular stones and a drop of hundreds of feet to a field of massive stones far below us if I accidentally veered off the narrow road. On the passenger’s side, there were just smooth, vertical walls of hard granite.
“The parking area is supposed to be up ahead just a few miles,” Alice said excitedly. I felt sickening waves of dread passing through my stomach as I glanced out the window at the steep drop waiting only inches away on my side of the car. I wasn’t exactly terrified of heights, and I had no problem going on planes or roller coasters, but situations like this always sent butterflies fluttering through my chest and caused my feet to tingle with anxiety. It was the idea of unsecured heights, the realization that an accidental jerk of the wheel or a tire blowing out at the exact wrong moment could send us careening over the edge.
“You’re not nervous right now?” I asked. Alice only laughed.
“Nope. I trust you, Brian,” she said, putting a warm hand on my shoulder. Her soft skin reminded me of suede, unmarked and unlined. I still couldn’t believe that such a beautiful girl wanted to be with me. We had been together for three months, and it had been one of the happiest periods I could remember.
I looked over at her with love, taking my eyes off the road for a moment. Suddenly, it felt like all of the tires exploded at once, and the car began swerving wildly out of control, the steering wheel spinning wildly in my hands with a pull like a falling stone.
***
“Fuck!” I cried. Alice screamed next to me, her voice filled with mortal terror.
The SUV nearly swerved off the edge of the cliff when the metal rims caught on something and veered hard in the opposite direction. The vehicle swung hard into the rock wall on Alice’s side. There was the tortured shredding of metal, the explosion of glass. Screams filled the car, but I didn’t realize until later that they had come from my own mouth.
My head flew forward, smashing hard into the steering wheel. I immediately tasted salty blood as I bit my tongue hard. My vision went white and pain like lightning ripped its way through my forehead. Time seemed to spiral away into something strange and alien. Stunned, I sat there, not knowing what had happened.
“Brian!” Alice’s voice rang out from next to me, sounding muted and far away. I felt someone shaking my arm gently. “Brian! Can you hear me?” I blinked fast, my vision starting to return to normal. My head felt like it was being pressed in a vice. A splitting migraine ripped its way through my skull. I groaned, raising my hands to my forehead. I tried pushing on the sides of my head, as if I could keep it from splitting apart from simple willpower alone. After a few moments, the pain subsided slightly. I inhaled deeply and spit blood on the floor.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m OK,” I said, though I wasn’t sure how true that was. I pulled my fingers away from my forehead, seeing they were slick with blood. I glanced over at Alice, but other than a small cut across her cheek, she seemed totally unhurt. “What the fuck just happened?” She shook her head, uncertainty crossing her eyes.
“We had an accident,” she said, glancing down at her cell phone. She tried calling 911, putting it up to her ear. She gave me a grim look and shook her head. “There’s no cell phone towers anywhere around here. We’re going to have to walk to find help, or at least until we can find somewhere with cell phone reception.”
“An accident? With what?! The goddamned air?” A rush of adrenaline pushed the pain away temporarily. I flung the door open, stumbling out of the SUV. I looked back on the dirt road that spiraled around its way around the mountain and out of view, seeing the glint of steel. Confused, I started over in that direction.
“Wait!” Alice yelled, quickly jumping out of the vehicle and sprinting to catch up with me. “You don’t look very steady on your feet yet. Maybe you should sit down…”
“Look at this fucking shit!” I cried, pointing to what lay stretched across the road, dug slightly into the dirt. Alice’s eyes widened in understanding as she saw it too.
Someone had set up a spike strip. The gleaming spikes of metal reaching up like claws still had pieces of my shredded tires caught on their sharp points.
***
“Someone’s out to get us,” I whispered nervously, glancing both ways down the dirt road. I had no idea what to do now. We were out in the absolute middle of nowhere. I didn’t even know which direction to go, unless I wanted to try hiking back dozens of miles to the last gas station we had seen. The SUV was blocking the narrow road.
Further down, I saw a small dirt turnaround jutting off to the side. I drove the vehicle on its rims and pulled over, locking the doors. I grabbed my backpack and filled it with my water bottle, buck knife and the small amount of food we had in the car, mostly trail mix and candy. It wouldn’t last long, I knew, and the water would run out even sooner if we didn’t find a river or stream. I grabbed my Swiss army knife and lighter and put them in my pocket, just in case of emergencies.
“Which way?” Alice asked. It was a good question. This road didn’t just lead to the trail that wound its way to the top of Mount Bloodstone, after all, but also continued down the other side and potentially to civilization. I had no map, so I just shrugged and motioned forward.
“I think we should keep moving in the same direction,” I said. “The last gas station was at least twenty miles back that way. For all we know, there could be a house or another gas station much closer if we just keep going straight.” It was weak logic, and I knew I was grasping at straws, but at that moment, straws were all we had.
Alice grabbed her backpack and, side by side, we started hiking up the winding road that ascended the steep slopes of Mount Bloodstone.
***
We had been walking for nearly an hour when I noticed a strange smell wafting on the breeze. It was an overwhelming smell of ozone, thick and cloying, just like I had noticed earlier. I nearly gagged, bending over.
“Oh God, what is that?” I asked. “It’s like a chemical factory is nearby or something.” Alice just shook her head.
From the nearby forest, a cacophony of branches snapping and trees falling started reverberating all around us. When I first heard it, it sounded distant. I looked at Alice at first, wondering if it was some sort of avalanche or earthquake on another nearby mountain.
“Is that an avalanche?” I yelled as the sound rapidly increased into deafening echoes of smashing and breaking, heading in our direction. A predatory cry rang through the mountains, full of power and energy, reminding me of the roaring of some ancient Tyrannosaurus rex. It shook the ground and mixed with the noise of destruction that came at us like a tidal wave. Alice and I started sprinting blindly up the road. She tried to say something, but I couldn’t hear her over the ringing in my ears.
Whatever was causing the racket veered away from us and deeper into the woods, angling itself straight up the side of the mountain. I glanced back, seeing trees fall and branches crash. In the middle of this path of destruction, I caught a glimpse of something massive and alien. It slithered forward like a snake, hundreds of feet long. Its body was covered in soft layers of blood-red feathers that rippled gently in the breeze. A deep turquoise line of feathers ran straight down the center of its spine.
From the top of its body, two enormous wings jutted out like the wings of some enormous dragon. They had soft, pink blood vessels spiderwebbing throughout the pale gray flesh. The wings beat at the air, and the enormous feathered snake slowly flew up, its sharp, spiked tail ripping more trees out of the ground as it slammed from side to side. Within a few seconds, it gained speed, flying up and over an enormous stone cliff and out of view.
***
The world seemed to go silent as the beast disappeared, the echoes of its destruction rapidly fading off into the valleys below. Alice had gotten far ahead of me. I sprinted up to her. She turned to me, covered in sweat, her skin looking chalk-white from terror.
“Did you see it?” I asked breathlessly. She gave me a strange look.
“See what?” she said. “When the avalanche started, I ran. I didn’t see anything.” I stared at her, mouth agape.
“You didn’t look back a minute ago? There was some massive animal causing all those trees to fall. That wasn’t any avalanche,” I said. “It sounds absolutely batshit insane, but it looked like an enormous feathered serpent.”
“That’s ridiculous, Brian,” she said condescendingly. “Are you sure you’re not still suffering from hitting your head during the accident? Sometimes that kind of stuff can cause weird side effects.”
“What, are you saying I’m tripping out? I’m telling you, I saw it as certainly as I see you here in front of me right now. It was moving away from us, and I didn’t see its face, but I saw its body. It must have been two or three hundred feet long,” I said grimly, trying to convince her. Alice only sighed and glanced forward.
“We should keep going,” she said. “We’re going to want to get out of here before nightfall. It gets cold up in the mountains in April.”
“I’ve got my lighter,” I said. “I’ll start a fire if we need to. I’m not worried about that. I am worried about who the hell spiked my tires and why there’s a giant snake slithering around the mountains, though!”
But deep down, I knew Alice was right. Regardless of whatever weird shit was going on around us, we needed to keep moving. I didn’t want to be here after dusk, either, but not because I was worried about the cold or about running out of food and water.
***
“The solar eclipse is only a couple hours away,” Alice said, glancing down at her phone.
“I really don’t care,” I said glumly. I pulled out my water from the pack and took a long swallow. I held it up to the Sun and realized with growing anxiety that my water was already mostly gone.
“Why do you think someone would put spike strips on this road?” I asked. The thought had been bouncing around my head, growing louder and more insistent. I kept coming back to the same answer: to ambush, kidnap or possibly murder them. The dark woods began to feel more sinister, the shadows deeper and darker. I kept my head on a swivel, looking constantly for any signs that we were being followed.
“It’s probably just kids or teenagers screwing around,” Alice said, raising a perfectly plucked eyebrow. “I mean, who else would do something so dangerous and stupid?”
“Someone who wants to rob or kidnap someone, or maybe a serial killer looking for victims,” I responded, feeling sick. I had taken my buck knife out of my backpack and now held it tightly in my hand, my knuckles white. I felt better just holding it, even though I knew it would likely do no good against someone with a gun, and that it would do absolutely nothing against that enormous snake if it came back.
I looked into the woods stretching up the side of the mountain. Behind a nearby cluster of bushes, a pale face peeked out, something that looked mostly, but not entirely, human.
It had bone-white skin and slitted pupils in its glowing yellow eyes. Its hairless face split into a grin. Two obsidian fangs swiveled out like the teeth of a rattlesnake.
I stopped in my tracks, stuttering and pointing. Alice glanced over at me. She followed my finger and froze like a deer in the headlights.
The creature hissed as it crashed through the bushes, its jaw unhinging and jutting forward like a snake’s. Its black fangs looked as sharp as needles. Its hiss grew into a gurgle. In the trees behind it, I saw more movement, more pale faces rising up, their slitted pupils radiating hunger and bloodlust.
“Run!” I screamed, tearing off up the road without looking back to see if Alice would follow. On my left stood a drop of what must have been a thousand feet down to a babbling river far below. The only possible escape was forward.
I was already exhausted from my long hike, but I pushed myself forward with every ounce of my will until my head pounded and my vision turned white. I felt ready to collapse.
I heard rustling from a thick cluster of brush up ahead. I tried moving past it as fast as I could. I saw a pointed, reptilian head emerge from the leaves, the bone-white skin cracking as its lipless mouth split into a wide grin. Its fangs swiveled out, surrounded by dozens of smaller black teeth shaped like needles.
It leapt at me, its scaled white body soaring through the air. I felt its sharp talons of fingers rip into my chest as it knocked me down to the ground. Kicking and swearing, I tried to bring the buck knife up into the thing’s chest, but it grabbed my head and slammed it hard into the dirt road. My temple smashed into a rock with a cracking of bone. My ears rang as the world exploded into blackness. Everything spun around me- and then I was falling into eternal nothingness.
***
I woke suddenly, the migraine in my head now so bad that it felt like torrents of lava were burning their way through my skull. I groaned, blinking quickly. The sunlight streaming down from the sky made me feel weak and nauseous. I turned, retching, but my stomach had nothing but water in it. I ended up vomiting up water with pink streaks of what looked like blood in it. I raised my head, looking around.
“Welcome to Hell, buddy,” a middle-aged man with a face like a bulldog said from a few feet to my right. I glanced over at him, seeing he was tied down with coils of rope to a rough-hewn wooden bench. I realized I was situated the same way. My hands and feet were tightly tied together. I tried wriggling them free with no success. Dozens more people were situated in a line stretching off into the distance, each of them tied down to their own primitive table of rough planks.
I looked to my left, expecting to see Alice, but she wasn’t there. It was an elderly woman with an enormous purple bruise over her left temple. Her dark eyes fluttered as she stared at me with horror. More people were tied down on that side, too, all of them moving their heads and looking around with dead eyes and expressions of horror.
“They got you too, huh?” the old woman asked in a weak, strained voice. Her eyes looked faraway, as if she were already on the other side of the veil and no longer existed in her physical body.
“Where are we?” I asked. “What’s going on?”
“You’re in the town of Nocturn,” the man on my right said, his fat face quivering with fear. “From what I’ve gathered while I’ve been held prisoner here, those creatures worship the snake god, who only comes out during the solar eclipse. Apparently they feed him, and in exchange, he lets them drink his blood, which makes them immortal.”
“They’re not creatures,” the old woman said. “Those are people.” I looked at her askance. If the situation weren’t so grave, I might have even laughed.
“Those are people?” I said sarcastically. “With the slitted eyes and the forked tongues and the fangs that come out like a rattlesnake’s? I’m not sure our definition of ‘people’ is the same thing.” The woman just shook her head.
“You don’t understand,” she said. “When they drink the blood of the serpent, they change. They started just like you and me. They’re cultists.” I raised my head and looked around, realizing that we were situated in what looked like an abandoned town cut into the forest near the peak of Mount Bloodstone.
In the center, there was a church whose walls had so many holes that they reminded me of Swiss cheese. The exterior may have once been white, but it had turned gray with age. Vines and patches of dark mold grew over its wooden walls.
Houses two and three stories tall were scattered randomly around us. Trees were growing through the walls of many, their branches and roots intertwining with the collapsing structures. All the glass of the windows had long ago been smashed and turned to dust. Many of the roofs had collapsed inwards. Bird nests and streaks of dirt covered the outside.
Next to the dilapidated structures sat what looked like hundreds of cars. Some were apparently brand new, and others were so rusted and ancient that I couldn’t even tell what make or model they were. They all had ripped open tires.
“Nocturn, huh?” I asked. “Do these people actually live here? It looks like this entire town is about to fall into the earth.” I tried to think, to formulate some sort of plan. I had no idea how I could possibly escape this apparently hopeless situation. Then I felt a lump in my pocket, suddenly remembering the Swiss army knife I had put in there. I struggled with the rope, moving my hands as close as I could. After a lot of effort, I managed to pull the Swiss army knife free.
The sky had begun to go dark. With horror, I looked up, realizing the solar eclipse had begun. The Moon slowly ate the Sun, and the feathered serpent would soon be here to drink our blood in celebration.
Dozens of the transformed snake people filtered out of the collapsing houses, the church and the surrounding forest as the eclipse rapidly progressed. They moved towards us in a circle. Among the crowd of monsters, I saw a few regular people with glassy eyes and the blank expressions of true believers. One of them was Alice.
She held the hand of one of the abominations, its sharp talons wrapped in her soft fingers. When she saw me looking in her direction, she grinned. The superficial charm and charisma was gone now, revealing the cold psychopathic determination underneath.
“My father,” she said by way of explanation, looking at the abomination with clear love and adoration. “He always said I would join the holy ones, that I would be able to drink the blood of Kulkulkan. I only needed to bring my own sacrifice for the god. So thank you, Brian. Your death will allow me to rise into immortality, into eternity, into the endless procession of eclipses and feedings that will follow.”
I was too stunned to speak. My teeth chattered in terror. But I didn’t get to think about it long, for at that moment, the trees in the nearby forest started falling with a crash. An overwhelming smell of ozone filled the air, marking the coming of the strange beast.
I heard an ancient, predatory roar that ripped its way through the mountains like thunder, and then the feathered serpent’s body appeared through a patch of trees. Its blood-red feathers shimmered in the mountain breeze as its wings beat the air.
***
I quickly ran my small Swiss army knife over the rope, trying to cut my hands free, but the rope was thick and the knife dull. It was slow going, and under the stress of the moment and the wailing of Kulkulkan, it became hard to think.
As the eclipse neared its climax, the transformed snake creatures raised their heads to the sky. Their hissing grew louder as many voices mixed together, until it rose into a wailing scream. As if called by the keening of his many followers, Kulkulan broke through the edge of the forest.
He had eyes like pools of liquid flame in his enormous, monstrous face. Two nose holes like those of a snake were situated in the center of his face. His jaw unhinged, showing off hundreds of razor-sharp teeth that glittered like opal. Inside that gaping mouth, in the place of a tongue, I saw a hairless, screaming human face with black sockets for eyes. The visage hidden inside the mouth of Kulkulkan radiated pure insanity and agony, and I wondered if this was the true face of the serpent god, the face that had lived through countless eons and seen millions of eclipses.
The feathered serpent lunged at the nearest of the more than forty bound people tied to wooden planks in the shape of crude sacrificial tables. He gnashed his shimmering, opalescent fangs together with a crack like a gunshot. Then he carefully closed his enormous mouth over the first of the sacrifices, a young woman who screamed in terror as the teeth closed in around her like a bear trap.
The blood exploded from her body, covering the hairless, pale face inside the serpent’s mouth with splotches of blood. The face twisted in a silent scream, reminding me of some sort of monstrous, eyeless infant. Its toothless mouth opened, hungry and waiting.
Kulkulkan drank with a disgusting sucking sound. As his teeth pierced her vital organs, he let the warm crimson fluid stream into his hungry mouth.
I had nearly gotten my hands free by this point. Panicked, I cut as fast as I could, accidentally slicing a deep gash into my right hand, but my adrenaline was so high I barely felt it. Finally, with a surge of hope so powerful it felt like my heart might explode, I felt the rope give way. I sat up and began cutting the rope tying my legs down as Kulkulkan moved closer, feasting on the next of the victims.
The snake abominations had slowly gathered around the long body of the serpent god. As their fangs protruded like switchblades, I saw them biting deeply into the god’s flesh and drinking the black ichor that leaked out from the many wounds. The Sun flickered overhead like a dying comet as the eclipse neared its peak.
The rope holding my legs gave way and I jumped up. An animal panic ripped its way through my chest as I looked back, wondering if Kulkulkan would see one of his tributes escaping and give chase. But the snake god was distracted by his feast of fresh blood.
The eclipse had reached its zenith by this point, and the world had gone dark. The stars came out, twinkling like chips of white ice in the endless void. The wailing of the dying and the soon to die rang out like the cries of the damned from Hell.
I sprinted towards the forest. I was almost there when Alice stepped out from behind a tree, holding a large folding knife in her hand. Her eyes seemed as cold as empty space, as dark and lifeless as a black hole.
“You’re not going anywhere,” she hissed through gritted teeth. “The god must have his fill!”
She ran at me with the knife raised high. Instinctively, I jammed the Swiss army knife out in front of me, stabbing her directly in the neck. She gave a cry like a strangled rabbit. With the last of her strength, she swung the wicked blade at my arm. With a burning agony, I felt it slice deeply through the skin and muscle. Warms rivers of blood flowed down my arm, leaving ruby drops behind me on the ground of the dark forest.
Alice collapsed to the ground, kicking and seizing. She grabbed at her throat, her eyes accusing and filled with a cold, furious hatred. I sprinted past her dying body. She choked on her own blood as it frothed and bubbled through the gaping hole in her throat. The cries of the dying and the predatory screaming of the serpent god followed me down the side of Mount Bloodstone as I ran in a panic, still shell-shocked and dissociated, my head still screaming with a burning migraine from the many injuries I had suffered this day.
***
I ended up finding the dirt road and following it back the way I had come. I hiked as far as I could that day until night fell. I wanted to put as much distance between myself and Mount Bloodstone as possible.
I had a fire in the forest that night, and I kept a constant watch. I thought I caught glimpses of pale faces with slitted pupils peeking around bushes, but whenever I looked, I saw nothing. Perhaps it was just my sleep-deprived, exhausted mind suffering from too much stress and trauma. Perhaps.
I ended up reaching a gas station the next day. I felt like a man dying of thirst in the desert reaching an oasis. With thanks, I looked up to the Sun and the sky, glad to see its light burning.
At that moment, I hoped I would never see another solar eclipse again.

Hey guys. I’m brand new here. Last Tuesday I woke up and had following since then. One trip to ER where all they did was give me IV fluids and Pepcid and said probably ulcer. I have a gut feeling it’s an HH.
Does the following sound familiar?

Pain and presure directly below sternum.
Feel full after 1 glass of water or small meal. -Burp comes up after anytime I swallow food or liquid.
feeling of lump in throat/ chest
slightly more difficult swallowing saliva
increased saliva production
lost about 70% or my energy or motivation
shortness of breath and get winded super easy.

I am healthy 39 and my only other health issue is long history of reflux I take nexium 2x day for already.
Called my GI today and 1st available is August. Called two more same wait.
Any recommendations how to get them to take this more seriously.
I am utterly miserable. It is impossible to escape. Do you get used to these symptoms it’s all I can think about for 2 weeks now.

We had been driving for over two hours when the nightmare began. The anomalous behavior that would affect the area started as abruptly as a lightning strike. I felt strange and dissociated. Goosebumps rose all over arms as a smell like ozone filled the air, filtering through the air vents in thick, invisible clouds.
“I am so excited to see this!” my girlfriend Alice cried happily in the passenger seat. “Do you know I have never seen a full solar eclipse before?” I glanced over, feeling nervous. Yet Alice didn’t seem affected in the slightest. I wiped my forehead, clearing the trickles of sweat that had begun forming there.
“Do you smell that?” I asked, changing the mood abruptly. Alice glanced over at me, the smile falling off her face in a space of a moment. She shook her head.
“No, smell what?” she said. I gave her a look of disbelief. The smell of ozone was so thick that I could almost taste it at the back of my throat. I repressed an urge to gag. I rolled down the windows. The breeze cleared out some of the smell, but I still caught hints of it even on the fresh currents of air that streamed through the car.
All around us, the slit wrists of the sky shone a cyanotic blue, covering the earth like a suffocating blanket. Mountain ranges loomed overhead, their sharp peaks hidden under fresh virgin snow. We planned to hike to the top of the highest peak before the solar eclipse began.
“This whole place is so… empty,” Alice said, brushing a lock of blonde hair the color of platinum over her ear. “I can’t remember the last time I saw a house.” She took out her phone. She flicked on the screen before heaving a deep sigh. “And we get absolutely no service all the way out here. You better not get injured! We won’t be able to call for help.” I laughed nervously, wondering if she had just jinxed us.
“You’re the one who’s accident-prone,” I said, starting to relax slightly. The last trace of the foul ozone smell had dissipated by now. The clean mountain air and majestic landscapes rising all around us made the place seem like some kind of wonderland, far removed from the small sufferings and agonies of daily life.
***
After another twenty minutes of driving, surrounded on all sides by dark forests filled with evergreens and shadows, we saw a faded, brown sign reading: “TO MOUNT BLOODSTONE. 5 MILES.”
“Finally!” Alice cried triumphantly, her whole expression changing into one of excitement. “I’ve never been here before, but Kaitlyn told me this place has the best view in the county!” As the mountain loomed in front of us like a crouching giant, I could see why.
It towered over all the surrounding mountains, its sharp, white peak stabbing upwards into the blue sky like a spire. Steep cliffs of light brown stone surrounded it on all sides. Untouched forests of maple, oak and pine grew thick and vibrant on Mount Bloodstone’s rocky soil.
“We still have four hours until the eclipse starts,” Alice said, looking down at her cell phone. The pavement suddenly ended, and the road turned into a snaking path of treadmarks and loose stones. My SUV handled it easily, but it was slow going. A few minutes later, we broke out through the forests and thick brush that carpeted the land. On the driver’s side stood a cliff of jutting rectangular stones and a drop of hundreds of feet to a field of massive stones far below us if I accidentally veered off the narrow road. On the passenger’s side, there were just smooth, vertical walls of hard granite.
“The parking area is supposed to be up ahead just a few miles,” Alice said excitedly. I felt sickening waves of dread passing through my stomach as I glanced out the window at the steep drop waiting only inches away on my side of the car. I wasn’t exactly terrified of heights, and I had no problem going on planes or roller coasters, but situations like this always sent butterflies fluttering through my chest and caused my feet to tingle with anxiety. It was the idea of unsecured heights, the realization that an accidental jerk of the wheel or a tire blowing out at the exact wrong moment could send us careening over the edge.
“You’re not nervous right now?” I asked. Alice only laughed.
“Nope. I trust you, Brian,” she said, putting a warm hand on my shoulder. Her soft skin reminded me of suede, unmarked and unlined. I still couldn’t believe that such a beautiful girl wanted to be with me. We had been together for three months, and it had been one of the happiest periods I could remember.
I looked over at her with love, taking my eyes off the road for a moment. Suddenly, it felt like all of the tires exploded at once, and the car began swerving wildly out of control, the steering wheel spinning wildly in my hands with a pull like a falling stone.
***
“Fuck!” I cried. Alice screamed next to me, her voice filled with mortal terror.
The SUV nearly swerved off the edge of the cliff when the metal rims caught on something and veered hard in the opposite direction. The vehicle swung hard into the rock wall on Alice’s side. There was the tortured shredding of metal, the explosion of glass. Screams filled the car, but I didn’t realize until later that they had come from my own mouth.
My head flew forward, smashing hard into the steering wheel. I immediately tasted salty blood as I bit my tongue hard. My vision went white and pain like lightning ripped its way through my forehead. Time seemed to spiral away into something strange and alien. Stunned, I sat there, not knowing what had happened.
“Brian!” Alice’s voice rang out from next to me, sounding muted and far away. I felt someone shaking my arm gently. “Brian! Can you hear me?” I blinked fast, my vision starting to return to normal. My head felt like it was being pressed in a vice. A splitting migraine ripped its way through my skull. I groaned, raising my hands to my forehead. I tried pushing on the sides of my head, as if I could keep it from splitting apart from simple willpower alone. After a few moments, the pain subsided slightly. I inhaled deeply and spit blood on the floor.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m OK,” I said, though I wasn’t sure how true that was. I pulled my fingers away from my forehead, seeing they were slick with blood. I glanced over at Alice, but other than a small cut across her cheek, she seemed totally unhurt. “What the fuck just happened?” She shook her head, uncertainty crossing her eyes.
“We had an accident,” she said, glancing down at her cell phone. She tried calling 911, putting it up to her ear. She gave me a grim look and shook her head. “There’s no cell phone towers anywhere around here. We’re going to have to walk to find help, or at least until we can find somewhere with cell phone reception.”
“An accident? With what?! The goddamned air?” A rush of adrenaline pushed the pain away temporarily. I flung the door open, stumbling out of the SUV. I looked back on the dirt road that spiraled around its way around the mountain and out of view, seeing the glint of steel. Confused, I started over in that direction.
“Wait!” Alice yelled, quickly jumping out of the vehicle and sprinting to catch up with me. “You don’t look very steady on your feet yet. Maybe you should sit down…”
“Look at this fucking shit!” I cried, pointing to what lay stretched across the road, dug slightly into the dirt. Alice’s eyes widened in understanding as she saw it too.
Someone had set up a spike strip. The gleaming spikes of metal reaching up like claws still had pieces of my shredded tires caught on their sharp points.
***
“Someone’s out to get us,” I whispered nervously, glancing both ways down the dirt road. I had no idea what to do now. We were out in the absolute middle of nowhere. I didn’t even know which direction to go, unless I wanted to try hiking back dozens of miles to the last gas station we had seen. The SUV was blocking the narrow road.
Further down, I saw a small dirt turnaround jutting off to the side. I drove the vehicle on its rims and pulled over, locking the doors. I grabbed my backpack and filled it with my water bottle, buck knife and the small amount of food we had in the car, mostly trail mix and candy. It wouldn’t last long, I knew, and the water would run out even sooner if we didn’t find a river or stream. I grabbed my Swiss army knife and lighter and put them in my pocket, just in case of emergencies.
“Which way?” Alice asked. It was a good question. This road didn’t just lead to the trail that wound its way to the top of Mount Bloodstone, after all, but also continued down the other side and potentially to civilization. I had no map, so I just shrugged and motioned forward.
“I think we should keep moving in the same direction,” I said. “The last gas station was at least twenty miles back that way. For all we know, there could be a house or another gas station much closer if we just keep going straight.” It was weak logic, and I knew I was grasping at straws, but at that moment, straws were all we had.
Alice grabbed her backpack and, side by side, we started hiking up the winding road that ascended the steep slopes of Mount Bloodstone.
***
We had been walking for nearly an hour when I noticed a strange smell wafting on the breeze. It was an overwhelming smell of ozone, thick and cloying, just like I had noticed earlier. I nearly gagged, bending over.
“Oh God, what is that?” I asked. “It’s like a chemical factory is nearby or something.” Alice just shook her head.
From the nearby forest, a cacophony of branches snapping and trees falling started reverberating all around us. When I first heard it, it sounded distant. I looked at Alice at first, wondering if it was some sort of avalanche or earthquake on another nearby mountain.
“Is that an avalanche?” I yelled as the sound rapidly increased into deafening echoes of smashing and breaking, heading in our direction. A predatory cry rang through the mountains, full of power and energy, reminding me of the roaring of some ancient Tyrannosaurus rex. It shook the ground and mixed with the noise of destruction that came at us like a tidal wave. Alice and I started sprinting blindly up the road. She tried to say something, but I couldn’t hear her over the ringing in my ears.
Whatever was causing the racket veered away from us and deeper into the woods, angling itself straight up the side of the mountain. I glanced back, seeing trees fall and branches crash. In the middle of this path of destruction, I caught a glimpse of something massive and alien. It slithered forward like a snake, hundreds of feet long. Its body was covered in soft layers of blood-red feathers that rippled gently in the breeze. A deep turquoise line of feathers ran straight down the center of its spine.
From the top of its body, two enormous wings jutted out like the wings of some enormous dragon. They had soft, pink blood vessels spiderwebbing throughout the pale gray flesh. The wings beat at the air, and the enormous feathered snake slowly flew up, its sharp, spiked tail ripping more trees out of the ground as it slammed from side to side. Within a few seconds, it gained speed, flying up and over an enormous stone cliff and out of view.
***
The world seemed to go silent as the beast disappeared, the echoes of its destruction rapidly fading off into the valleys below. Alice had gotten far ahead of me. I sprinted up to her. She turned to me, covered in sweat, her skin looking chalk-white from terror.
“Did you see it?” I asked breathlessly. She gave me a strange look.
“See what?” she said. “When the avalanche started, I ran. I didn’t see anything.” I stared at her, mouth agape.
“You didn’t look back a minute ago? There was some massive animal causing all those trees to fall. That wasn’t any avalanche,” I said. “It sounds absolutely batshit insane, but it looked like an enormous feathered serpent.”
“That’s ridiculous, Brian,” she said condescendingly. “Are you sure you’re not still suffering from hitting your head during the accident? Sometimes that kind of stuff can cause weird side effects.”
“What, are you saying I’m tripping out? I’m telling you, I saw it as certainly as I see you here in front of me right now. It was moving away from us, and I didn’t see its face, but I saw its body. It must have been two or three hundred feet long,” I said grimly, trying to convince her. Alice only sighed and glanced forward.
“We should keep going,” she said. “We’re going to want to get out of here before nightfall. It gets cold up in the mountains in April.”
“I’ve got my lighter,” I said. “I’ll start a fire if we need to. I’m not worried about that. I am worried about who the hell spiked my tires and why there’s a giant snake slithering around the mountains, though!”
But deep down, I knew Alice was right. Regardless of whatever weird shit was going on around us, we needed to keep moving. I didn’t want to be here after dusk, either, but not because I was worried about the cold or about running out of food and water.
***
“The solar eclipse is only a couple hours away,” Alice said, glancing down at her phone.
“I really don’t care,” I said glumly. I pulled out my water from the pack and took a long swallow. I held it up to the Sun and realized with growing anxiety that my water was already mostly gone.
“Why do you think someone would put spike strips on this road?” I asked. The thought had been bouncing around my head, growing louder and more insistent. I kept coming back to the same answer: to ambush, kidnap or possibly murder them. The dark woods began to feel more sinister, the shadows deeper and darker. I kept my head on a swivel, looking constantly for any signs that we were being followed.
“It’s probably just kids or teenagers screwing around,” Alice said, raising a perfectly plucked eyebrow. “I mean, who else would do something so dangerous and stupid?”
“Someone who wants to rob or kidnap someone, or maybe a serial killer looking for victims,” I responded, feeling sick. I had taken my buck knife out of my backpack and now held it tightly in my hand, my knuckles white. I felt better just holding it, even though I knew it would likely do no good against someone with a gun, and that it would do absolutely nothing against that enormous snake if it came back.
I looked into the woods stretching up the side of the mountain. Behind a nearby cluster of bushes, a pale face peeked out, something that looked mostly, but not entirely, human.
It had bone-white skin and slitted pupils in its glowing yellow eyes. Its hairless face split into a grin. Two obsidian fangs swiveled out like the teeth of a rattlesnake.
I stopped in my tracks, stuttering and pointing. Alice glanced over at me. She followed my finger and froze like a deer in the headlights.
The creature hissed as it crashed through the bushes, its jaw unhinging and jutting forward like a snake’s. Its black fangs looked as sharp as needles. Its hiss grew into a gurgle. In the trees behind it, I saw more movement, more pale faces rising up, their slitted pupils radiating hunger and bloodlust.
“Run!” I screamed, tearing off up the road without looking back to see if Alice would follow. On my left stood a drop of what must have been a thousand feet down to a babbling river far below. The only possible escape was forward.
I was already exhausted from my long hike, but I pushed myself forward with every ounce of my will until my head pounded and my vision turned white. I felt ready to collapse.
I heard rustling from a thick cluster of brush up ahead. I tried moving past it as fast as I could. I saw a pointed, reptilian head emerge from the leaves, the bone-white skin cracking as its lipless mouth split into a wide grin. Its fangs swiveled out, surrounded by dozens of smaller black teeth shaped like needles.
It leapt at me, its scaled white body soaring through the air. I felt its sharp talons of fingers rip into my chest as it knocked me down to the ground. Kicking and swearing, I tried to bring the buck knife up into the thing’s chest, but it grabbed my head and slammed it hard into the dirt road. My temple smashed into a rock with a cracking of bone. My ears rang as the world exploded into blackness. Everything spun around me- and then I was falling into eternal nothingness.
***
I woke suddenly, the migraine in my head now so bad that it felt like torrents of lava were burning their way through my skull. I groaned, blinking quickly. The sunlight streaming down from the sky made me feel weak and nauseous. I turned, retching, but my stomach had nothing but water in it. I ended up vomiting up water with pink streaks of what looked like blood in it. I raised my head, looking around.
“Welcome to Hell, buddy,” a middle-aged man with a face like a bulldog said from a few feet to my right. I glanced over at him, seeing he was tied down with coils of rope to a rough-hewn wooden bench. I realized I was situated the same way. My hands and feet were tightly tied together. I tried wriggling them free with no success. Dozens more people were situated in a line stretching off into the distance, each of them tied down to their own primitive table of rough planks.
I looked to my left, expecting to see Alice, but she wasn’t there. It was an elderly woman with an enormous purple bruise over her left temple. Her dark eyes fluttered as she stared at me with horror. More people were tied down on that side, too, all of them moving their heads and looking around with dead eyes and expressions of horror.
“They got you too, huh?” the old woman asked in a weak, strained voice. Her eyes looked faraway, as if she were already on the other side of the veil and no longer existed in her physical body.
“Where are we?” I asked. “What’s going on?”
“You’re in the town of Nocturn,” the man on my right said, his fat face quivering with fear. “From what I’ve gathered while I’ve been held prisoner here, those creatures worship the snake god, who only comes out during the solar eclipse. Apparently they feed him, and in exchange, he lets them drink his blood, which makes them immortal.”
“They’re not creatures,” the old woman said. “Those are people.” I looked at her askance. If the situation weren’t so grave, I might have even laughed.
“Those are people?” I said sarcastically. “With the slitted eyes and the forked tongues and the fangs that come out like a rattlesnake’s? I’m not sure our definition of ‘people’ is the same thing.” The woman just shook her head.
“You don’t understand,” she said. “When they drink the blood of the serpent, they change. They started just like you and me. They’re cultists.” I raised my head and looked around, realizing that we were situated in what looked like an abandoned town cut into the forest near the peak of Mount Bloodstone.
In the center, there was a church whose walls had so many holes that they reminded me of Swiss cheese. The exterior may have once been white, but it had turned gray with age. Vines and patches of dark mold grew over its wooden walls.
Houses two and three stories tall were scattered randomly around us. Trees were growing through the walls of many, their branches and roots intertwining with the collapsing structures. All the glass of the windows had long ago been smashed and turned to dust. Many of the roofs had collapsed inwards. Bird nests and streaks of dirt covered the outside.
Next to the dilapidated structures sat what looked like hundreds of cars. Some were apparently brand new, and others were so rusted and ancient that I couldn’t even tell what make or model they were. They all had ripped open tires.
“Nocturn, huh?” I asked. “Do these people actually live here? It looks like this entire town is about to fall into the earth.” I tried to think, to formulate some sort of plan. I had no idea how I could possibly escape this apparently hopeless situation. Then I felt a lump in my pocket, suddenly remembering the Swiss army knife I had put in there. I struggled with the rope, moving my hands as close as I could. After a lot of effort, I managed to pull the Swiss army knife free.
The sky had begun to go dark. With horror, I looked up, realizing the solar eclipse had begun. The Moon slowly ate the Sun, and the feathered serpent would soon be here to drink our blood in celebration.
Dozens of the transformed snake people filtered out of the collapsing houses, the church and the surrounding forest as the eclipse rapidly progressed. They moved towards us in a circle. Among the crowd of monsters, I saw a few regular people with glassy eyes and the blank expressions of true believers. One of them was Alice.
She held the hand of one of the abominations, its sharp talons wrapped in her soft fingers. When she saw me looking in her direction, she grinned. The superficial charm and charisma was gone now, revealing the cold psychopathic determination underneath.
“My father,” she said by way of explanation, looking at the abomination with clear love and adoration. “He always said I would join the holy ones, that I would be able to drink the blood of Kulkulkan. I only needed to bring my own sacrifice for the god. So thank you, Brian. Your death will allow me to rise into immortality, into eternity, into the endless procession of eclipses and feedings that will follow.”
I was too stunned to speak. My teeth chattered in terror. But I didn’t get to think about it long, for at that moment, the trees in the nearby forest started falling with a crash. An overwhelming smell of ozone filled the air, marking the coming of the strange beast.
I heard an ancient, predatory roar that ripped its way through the mountains like thunder, and then the feathered serpent’s body appeared through a patch of trees. Its blood-red feathers shimmered in the mountain breeze as its wings beat the air.
***
I quickly ran my small Swiss army knife over the rope, trying to cut my hands free, but the rope was thick and the knife dull. It was slow going, and under the stress of the moment and the wailing of Kulkulkan, it became hard to think.
As the eclipse neared its climax, the transformed snake creatures raised their heads to the sky. Their hissing grew louder as many voices mixed together, until it rose into a wailing scream. As if called by the keening of his many followers, Kulkulan broke through the edge of the forest.
He had eyes like pools of liquid flame in his enormous, monstrous face. Two nose holes like those of a snake were situated in the center of his face. His jaw unhinged, showing off hundreds of razor-sharp teeth that glittered like opal. Inside that gaping mouth, in the place of a tongue, I saw a hairless, screaming human face with black sockets for eyes. The visage hidden inside the mouth of Kulkulkan radiated pure insanity and agony, and I wondered if this was the true face of the serpent god, the face that had lived through countless eons and seen millions of eclipses.
The feathered serpent lunged at the nearest of the more than forty bound people tied to wooden planks in the shape of crude sacrificial tables. He gnashed his shimmering, opalescent fangs together with a crack like a gunshot. Then he carefully closed his enormous mouth over the first of the sacrifices, a young woman who screamed in terror as the teeth closed in around her like a bear trap.
The blood exploded from her body, covering the hairless, pale face inside the serpent’s mouth with splotches of blood. The face twisted in a silent scream, reminding me of some sort of monstrous, eyeless infant. Its toothless mouth opened, hungry and waiting.
Kulkulkan drank with a disgusting sucking sound. As his teeth pierced her vital organs, he let the warm crimson fluid stream into his hungry mouth.
I had nearly gotten my hands free by this point. Panicked, I cut as fast as I could, accidentally slicing a deep gash into my right hand, but my adrenaline was so high I barely felt it. Finally, with a surge of hope so powerful it felt like my heart might explode, I felt the rope give way. I sat up and began cutting the rope tying my legs down as Kulkulkan moved closer, feasting on the next of the victims.
The snake abominations had slowly gathered around the long body of the serpent god. As their fangs protruded like switchblades, I saw them biting deeply into the god’s flesh and drinking the black ichor that leaked out from the many wounds. The Sun flickered overhead like a dying comet as the eclipse neared its peak.
The rope holding my legs gave way and I jumped up. An animal panic ripped its way through my chest as I looked back, wondering if Kulkulkan would see one of his tributes escaping and give chase. But the snake god was distracted by his feast of fresh blood.
The eclipse had reached its zenith by this point, and the world had gone dark. The stars came out, twinkling like chips of white ice in the endless void. The wailing of the dying and the soon to die rang out like the cries of the damned from Hell.
I sprinted towards the forest. I was almost there when Alice stepped out from behind a tree, holding a large folding knife in her hand. Her eyes seemed as cold as empty space, as dark and lifeless as a black hole.
“You’re not going anywhere,” she hissed through gritted teeth. “The god must have his fill!”
She ran at me with the knife raised high. Instinctively, I jammed the Swiss army knife out in front of me, stabbing her directly in the neck. She gave a cry like a strangled rabbit. With the last of her strength, she swung the wicked blade at my arm. With a burning agony, I felt it slice deeply through the skin and muscle. Warms rivers of blood flowed down my arm, leaving ruby drops behind me on the ground of the dark forest.
Alice collapsed to the ground, kicking and seizing. She grabbed at her throat, her eyes accusing and filled with a cold, furious hatred. I sprinted past her dying body. She choked on her own blood as it frothed and bubbled through the gaping hole in her throat. The cries of the dying and the predatory screaming of the serpent god followed me down the side of Mount Bloodstone as I ran in a panic, still shell-shocked and dissociated, my head still screaming with a burning migraine from the many injuries I had suffered this day.
***
I ended up finding the dirt road and following it back the way I had come. I hiked as far as I could that day until night fell. I wanted to put as much distance between myself and Mount Bloodstone as possible.
I had a fire in the forest that night, and I kept a constant watch. I thought I caught glimpses of pale faces with slitted pupils peeking around bushes, but whenever I looked, I saw nothing. Perhaps it was just my sleep-deprived, exhausted mind suffering from too much stress and trauma. Perhaps.
I ended up reaching a gas station the next day. I felt like a man dying of thirst in the desert reaching an oasis. With thanks, I looked up to the Sun and the sky, glad to see its light burning.
At that moment, I hoped I would never see another solar eclipse again.

Explanation of lump below the sternum