This is part of a collection of notes I have made so far. Comment-exclusive material is marked with spoilers, which will be my policy as the author may choose to decanonize anything said only in comments. ([MAIN DIRECTORY]: [1 taint dragons], [2 nulls souls], [3 academy Vanavan], [4a gadgets humans], [4b EVI], [5a library rules], [5b evil library], [7a Nexus glossary], [7b Nexus detail], [7c Nexus-earth war], [8a magic catalog], [8b magic], [9a Yearbook], [9b Emma’s Null, Mal'tory’s fate], [10a portals], [10b ECS crate], [10c taint], [10d dragons], [10e tainted dragon god], [11 timeline], [74 Nexus King].)

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

The Library is an evil god

The Library incentivizes, sustains, and enables the evils of Nexus

▛ Knowledge is power. With power comes responsibility. And the library is not responsible. ▟
For all its disarming cuteness, the library is, by its own rules and admission, an eldritch amoral entity that does not especially care about long-term consequences for other species and their worlds that host its physical existence so long as it is getting its info diet. The Library weaponizes learning and creations, it stifles the free exchange of information, and, as an insult to injury, it is mostly inaccessible to those who would benefit most.

The Library is too knowledgeable for its behavior to be excused by bad upbringing

This point is the foundation for others to follow, so I want to make it now, up front. The library could be kinder, more equitable, and more concerned about the outside world, but either lacks the wisdom to introspect or actively chooses not to be a better institution. The Library’s behavior may be excused if its prime directives have been corrupted and its behavior constrained. Certainly it is curious the Library has to test its own operating parameters. But until we have firm evidence the Library has been tampered with, it is prudent to assume the Library is acting true to its own ethical code.
▛ Altering one’s behavior only when it is convenient or when there might be consequences rather than pro-actively in response to recognized harm is characteristic of a selfish being. ▟
Even though it comes from a time before modern Nexus, The Library might suffer from being enmeshed with Nexian culture like Ilunor until he was betrayed and forced to rely on someone he thought the least of. So spoken, we have also seen a variety of Nexians and magicrealmers who know better: Thacea, Thalmin, Rila, Vanavan, Sorecar. The Library has had more than enough information, observations, and time to make a judgment call about its own values system. If it didn’t, then it couldn’t have established an extradition treaty in the first place.
The Library’s present evil is far worse than a distant god passively observing civilizations cycling through despair and ruin. A non-interfering power gives its subjects freedom, agency to discover and become themselves, to own their own results. The Library binds and imprisons magicrealm civilization by being active within it. It touches all yet declares itself untouchable, encourages self destructive acts with its foolish rules, and champions the loss of mortal worlds to entropy via stagnation and destruction.
As proof of flawed character, an involved being with a good heart would not choose solipsism when it holds the memories of millions of adventurous meetings, loving crafts of innumerable hands, billions of earnest cultural works composed over myriad years, and endless stories of trials and triumphs. Someone collecting a culture’s outpouring of love, hope, dreams, and tragedy could never be so callous as to enslave mortals in eternal suffering unless they were beyond the moral event horizon.

The Library’s Externalities

Even without the arrival of humans, the Library’s amoral operational rules and mortal beings’ values and innate chaos are thoroughly incompatible and create dangerous externalities. Faced with technology’s imminent introduction to Nexus, the Library becomes an exponential liability that neither humanity or even Nexus can tolerate.

The Library is an especial danger to tech-based societies and anyone adjacent to them.

Information control systems for mana are incompatible with the realities of technology.
The use and abuse of magic in the Nexian system is limited by the finite few skilled casters, dependent on the conceit that those few were blessed by the gods to be the legitimate leaders. Most people are aura-less, so even if they had the knowledge and the tools to craft, they can’t create objects of power. As an additional restriction, powerful spells also require a circle of mages to work together. Nexus thus focuses its full attention on controlling casters.
Humanity’s science and technology is a fundamentally different system. The advancement of science and the maintenance of mechanization puts technology into many hands. Human society plows its productive excess into widespread scholarship to speed the development of additional science and tech. Technology is not balanced; it can be reverse-engineered and widely disseminated to many users. Second, the natural order of technological breakthroughs is that boons are inevitably paired with increasingly dangerous ways to misuse them. An FTL ship can be commandeered to collide with and extinguish a planet. Humanity’s morals and legal practices developed around controlling technological misuse, but humanity also adapted by structuring society so that people believe in their own agency and more often choose to cooperate than fall into nihilism. Humanity puts power into many hands so that mass discontent can be addressed with diplomacy, power exchanges, alterations of governmental structure, or even limited war with humanitarian constraints before it reaches the final stage of total and existential violence at maximum military tech level. Magicrealmers are less kind. They do not cherish each other as much as humans. Safe tech transferal must match demonstrated prosocial behavior. Third, humanity’s power has no hard cap. Nexian power is materially limited by mana concentration and socially limited by the requirement that no collection of institutions or realms surpass the Eternal King’s divine might. Controlled from the bottom up, humanity is free to scale both in energy source and quantity and bestow enormous power to institutions in proportion to trust and effective regulation. The Library bypasses the important trust and regulation design.
The Library’s trade rules undercut all these protective measures by not letting mortals impose even temporary constraints on access. This hurts not only humanity, but anyone else they interact with who can steal tech and unleash it.

The wicked benefit most from the Library

• The library trades equally with dangerous and depraved. No one is forbidden from entering.
  
• The library assigns full credit for information to the one who enters it, not its creators.
  
• A civilization seeking to protect others from hurting themselves by concealing knowledge of deadly, efficient weapons is forever at the mercy of the individuals most desperate for secrets willing to commit depraved acts to obtain traffickable information.
  
• The Library benefits and further entrenches rulers who can 1) control the physical location of the Library and deny its utility to others. This forces outsiders to degrade the utility and openness of their own archives as a precaution against theft. 2) Aids the temporal power’s conquests with information exchange. The Library, which cares not for the worlds beyond its walls, is comfortable benefiting from this arrangement and collateral damage inflicted on its behalf to create information credit.
  
• The Library preferentially punishes immediate vandals and does not investigate for conspiracy. This has the potential to create an exploitable cycle where someone expendable deletes information which is later re-added by authorities to generate credit.
  
• The acceptance of physical items as “tribute” encourages mass looting of artifacts of cultural value from weaker polities where they will be locked away (or disassembled or whatever the Library does) from their creators forever, unused and unappreciated - equivalent to destroying them from the mortal perspective. Looting deprives cultures of unique identity, transmission of history and values to future generations, inspiration, and hope.
  

The Library promotes stagnancy and weaponizes learning

▛ As long as the Library exists, there are no innocent acts of creation. ▟
Every iota of knowledge brought into being has a concrete weaponizable value because it can be exchanged or used to build tangential credit with the Library; therefore, all who create and collections of knowledge are liabilities which must be bound, controlled, and hidden to prevent their value from being exploited by outsiders. A society of scholars like Earth’s would never come into being under this system. Free intellectual and technological growth and exchange is choked to death.
Trapped in a prisoner’s dilemma, the most powerful mortal state – Nexus in this case – has to contain the inherent threat of all novel polities because an immoral person, local or foreign, could exploit informational novelty to gain weapons that harm the greater state.
Lastly, building a democratized state is disincentivized under this system because the Library allocates credit to a single person high in the hierarchy which likely precludes representatives from using it.

The Library preempts the existence of other libraries, especially open access ones

Any collection of knowledge and the scholars of all skill levels that congregate there to research and share become a dungeon to loot for untapped trade value. The fear of value extraction means public libraries for the common good are a liability. Local rulers will push them into the private sphere or beneath the state’s veil of secrecy. Without public access to knowledge, society rots from widespread ignorance.

Even if Nexus goes down, the Library problem will start back up again next civilization

It is valid to say “Hey, Nexus, not the Library, is doing the bad deeds, so the guilt is on Nexians alone.” The problem is that the Library’s perverse incentives will continue to exist no matter what mortal civilization possesses the Library.
Given enough mortals, malevolence always exists among them. Malice is a statistic, not an anomaly. Responsible society creates not only institutions of justice to provide accountability after crimes are committed, but also preemptively builds systems to add friction between ideation and execution. These include classifying dangerous information, surveilling and auditing those with access to abusable materials or positions, requiring licensing for tools and professions that have high potential for harm, defensive structures, and restricting the possession of dangerous items. The Library lowers the knowledge acquisition and comprehension barrier for bad actors.

In conclusion...

The Library is one of the pillars of Nexian tyranny. If you’d be willing to defenestrate the King of Nexus to overthrow his system, then it would be hypocritical not to also advocate tossing the Library.

The Library is tainted by Nexian philosophy

Despite its claims that it stands separate, the Library is a thoroughly Nexian creature and replicates many of its evils. It fancies itself to be objective and free of dogma, but it arrogantly and boastfully overstates its capabilities. Its actions, behavior, and even architecture are consistent with discrimination against mortals in general and non-casters specifically.

Nexian bigotry is thoroughly embedded in the Library’s psyche

“Yes, it is meant to be accessible to all, but it positions itself in such a way that makes that relatively difficult for the average commoner to access, let alone discover what they seek without the aid of magic.” [17]

Thalmin pointed out that few benefit from the Library because of its remoteness and accessibility tuned to casters. The Library doesn’t realize its prejudices because it is not actively malicious in its own mind, it is just treating mortals how they ought to be treated - either in line with their perceived information value or how much the gods blessed them with magic potential. Considering that the UN fought at least two major civil wars specifically over fair and equal access, and Emma was raised in future-US and its history lessons, she ought to be able to spot the prejudicial justifications a kilometer away.

The Library favors magic users above all others

It is unclear why the Library values magic users above all others and discriminates against non-magical users by making its archives unsearchable for them. My current hypothesis is that, as the Nexians think, the Library believes those blessed with the gift of magic are chosen by the gods to be important. Or is it because magic users have more knowledge to trade on average?

Hospitality insult towards humanity and Emma in particular

Fox one day thought of a plan to amuse himself at the expense of Stork. “You must come and dine with me today,” Fox said to Stork. Stork gladly accepted the invitation and arrived in good time and with a very good appetite.
For dinner Fox served soup. But it was set out in a very shallow dish, and all Stork could do was to wet the very tip of his bill. Not a drop of soup could he get. But Fox lapped it up easily, and, to increase the disappointment of Stork, made a great show of enjoyment. - Aesop’s Fable ‘The Fox and the Stork’

The Library offered Earthrealm an unintentional but significant insult that Emma and Thalmin commented on: the accessibility of its literature is effectively limited to precisely-skilled magic users (e.g. those approved of by Nexus and taught search spells) unless the patron intends to trade knowledge for knowledge. Like the Aesop where Fox and Stork exchange suppers in dishes the other has a hard time using, the library has not made any alterations that would allow mana-blind and auraless users access to its regular find-it-yourself services.
Emma is not making a big deal about this slight because it is a raindrop in the river of similarly-themed Nexian unfairnesses so far. She has already adjusted to the default that institutions serve the magic-capable elite foremost to reinforce the social pecking order. Any form of perceived pushback, even when the situation is entirely out of her control (like resisting the Yearbook, or riding along with Lartia as a commoner) simply invites malicious retribution. Emma is in pick-her-battles-wisely mode. However, her United Nations certainly cares about equal accessibility; the UN’s current incarnation was founded on ensuring truly equal opportunity, born from the ashes of a massive war over compatible living conditions in recent history, not to mention prior wars over resource opportunity (Luna vs Earth).
It is also true that the hospitality insult is mitigated by the Library adapting its transactional methods cover Emma’s inability to be tested by the usual veracity criteria and also giving her a careful explanation about how the rules work. That said, this isn’t a complete fix because these fixes only facilitate the info-trade transactions that the Library most deeply desires, and do not apply to the rest of the Library’s services that the Library is less invested in. The Library has only demonstrated good-will when self-interests align with Emma’s goals.
Sorecar immediately grokked Emma was mostly mana-blind by observing her reaction to a single spell. Mal'tory knew by theory alone which is why he ordered Ilunor to cast a projection-spell of a Null in Sorecar’s smithy; he figured Emma could not perceive aura cues to tell it apart from the real creature and would fire her gun at it. Thacea was quickly suspicious Emma was mana-blind by observing how Emma overlooked all the salient magical features of the dorm room she was in and became absolutely certain by the end of the first 36 hours. One would hope the Library could match these three’s observational faculties even though it has only had a dozen hours interaction with Emma.
It is too soon to make the call that the Library is deliberately failing to adapt its facilities to Emma’s blindness. Emma has not asked the Library to accommodate her. The Library can’t assume Emma can’t artificially enhance her vision. And it might want to observe an organic self-search attempt before changing its fundamental operation.
But it will be a personality red flag if the Library doesn’t either start experimenting to figure out why Emma is not responding to certain signals or else start asking questions in its eventual next set of appearances. Not evolving is a choice, after all.
▛ I believe the adaptation (or non-adaptation) of the Library’s non-essential services is particularly important because it reveals the Library’s real personality and motives when there may be confounding factors in the form of compelled behavior through forced prime directives or well placed memory deletions. ▟

Bigoted library foxes

The Library does not give everyone equal time of day. Theoretically, all mortals are admitted, but the Library foxes avoid approaching or addressing anyone they think will be “boring” because the Library’s assistant system will exclusively chain them to someone who gives them a name. Right in the door there is already an obvious difference in treatment to help sort mortals into their “proper places” in the Library’s internal value caste system.
JCB says: The foxes don’t necessarily desire names from just anyone! To be named is to basically be stuck with someone for the duration of that person’s lifetime, and generally speaking a fox would want to pair up with someone that has enough knowledge to trade for their entire lifetime. Emma showing up is something that’s like winning a lottery for Buddy haha, since she’s literally oozing with that ‘fresh new novel knowledge’ sort of vibe! Thus it’s only a great honor if you’re named by an outsider who’s new and clearly has a vibe of having a lot of information to trade, otherwise it’d be like voluntarily being stuck to a dead weight! :D
Thacea and Thalmin on the other hand seem just like your typical Nexus or Adjacent Realmer, which is why the fox completely disregarded greeting or even addressing those two in the last chapter when the group entered together! :D

Belief in innate superiority over mortals is part of the Library’s Core identity

“Knowledge without preservation is meaningless, and we are the keepers of meaning.” (19)

Within this statement is a number of unspoken assumptions.

• The value of mortals and their civilizations is determined by the Library’s categorization schemes.
  
• The Library’s judgment of meaning is infallible and free of subjectivity.
  
• Once preserved, the meaning can be divorced from the hyper-individualized mortals that contextualized it.
  

This statement calls to mind the patronizing and colonial mindsets of the early anthropologists and historians who thought they could lock the world in a cold dead museum without its living and breathing cultures so the value would belong to the keepers who rarely appreciated it, and not the living and breathing creators.

Gods do not exist to be judged by the likes of mortals

“Two acts of brazen defiance in a single interaction.” [the librarian] spoke menacingly.
“The librarian is currently preoccupied with matters far more important than your own, mortal.”

Gods and those with missions chartered by them are beyond mortal reproval. When Emma told the Library its conditions were unacceptable, coded within the Library’s indignant response was the astonishment that Emma dared overstep her natural inferiority as a mortal to negotiate as an equal.
Another example, the extradition treaty the Library has with Nexus requires that every individual the Library claims committed a crime against it be turned over to it without trial or proof. There is no process of appeal, except by fiat. While we do not know the penalty for violating the treaty, the Library uses coercion like blackmail to enforce compliance.

The Library taints Nexian philosophy

“Admit it. You have nothing of value to offer the library, Cadet Emma Booker.”
A desire to exchange further information. As if [Havenbrock] my realm had any that could truly matter to what earthrealm had to offer. Yet despite that, the offer was there, genuine, and without any strings attached. Something the Nexus would never do. Something the Nexus would consider poor play by their rulebook.

Nexus is thoroughly tainted by the idea of tit-for-tat and equivalent exchange. Nexians figuratively do not care about those beyond their doors (altruism is a weakness) except as threats to be evaluated and potentially as resources. (More information about what Nexus extracts from contact with Adjacent Realms is needed before I have a firm opinion.) And in offering something, like education or enlightenment, Nexians assert the right to take souls, autonomy, or forced fealty. Nexus’ officials and Trangracian retaliated against Emma for avoiding giving her soul in exchange for Transgracian’s education.
One of the conceits of Nexian primacy is that they are great for giving anything to those who don’t have anything of value to trade. Contrast humanity which invests generously in everyone as a social good and punishes selfishness.
The idea of allowing “lesser” people to choose who they want to be instead of accepting exactly and only the enlightenment being offered is foreign to Nexus. And the Library shares in snubbling the common good. The Library has effectively made it impossible for anyone who isn’t an elite to benefit from its archives.
If the Library is not the original source for Nexian exchange philosophy, then it encourages it.

The Library may be the Eternal King of Nexus’ villain origin story

The Library is the most probable encourager and enabler of the biggest Nexian villain. The social studies classroom of Transgracian is named after the eternal King of Nexus, so he was likely a history and politics teacher before he was a king and extensively used the Library.
The King’s god-eating powers that wraps divine essence in ritual spells and the Yearbook’s ink-coat soul devouring are uncannily alike the Library imprisoning/uploading of souls after dissolving their mortal bodies by smothering them with pages. The Yearbook was likely made by the King based upon the Library’s imprisonment magic which is why the Yearbook resembles the Library’s infinite page books rather than a vase or box. The King probably also extracted the seed knowledge for the spells to consume the gods from the Library or its imprisonment spell.

Other minor Nexian brainworms

These aren’t strikes against the library, but I want to account for other ways that Nexus has imposed its culture upon the Library.

• Being made to knock and wait before admittance.
  
• Boasts about its wisdom, the impressiveness of its structure, the theatrics of the foxes chanting “eternal!” and other such. An earthling would call this cultlike, befitting an non-credible institution more love with its own reputation than respectful of its archival mission. Being charitable, the Library is engaging in performative theatrics which keep Nexians in awe - apparently a requirement to prevent them from defaulting to disrespect because many magicrealm nobles don’t learn from subtlety as Larial suggested.
  
• An affinity for titles
  
• Punishment inheritance down bloodline
  

The Library is profoundly arrogant and overestimates itself

Only checking veracity for truthful intent

The Library thinks it can correctly make determinations of meaning as an armchair theorist locked within its literal ivory tower, solidly divorced from the data, locked far away from the laboratories and primary sources, visited only a carefully curated collection of nobles allowed permission to be on school grounds by the outside powers-that-be.
Evidence suggests that it can be deceived by mass memory modification once the victims are a child generation removed from the tampered-with generation. The Library offers Emma imbalanced trades, meagerly-veracity checked rumors for empirically-determined truths, because it purports that it adds value to trades as a self-titled Establisher of Axioms.

As an archivist

“For we were established and constructed to perform one, simple, and unwavering task: to collect, organize, and preserve all forms of knowledge in perpetuum. For the library is eternal, but the mortal world is not. Knowledge without preservation is meaningless, and we are the keepers of meaning.”
Emma: “And where does the Nexus fall into this grand game of categorization?” Mal'tory: “At its zenith, beyond great, good, and most certainly beyond worthless and delinquents. For we have achieved an example all adjacent realms strive towards: utopia.”

Two speeches with the same energy.
The Library’s stated mission is a noble but precarious impossibility.
Assignment of value to knowledge is not a neutral judgment call. Bias slips in while deciding what reliably sourced, supposedly pure facts to present in response to a query.
IRL, Wikipedia’s rules highlight the problems of being a supposedly neutral arbiter of facts. It is easy to give disproportionate weight to a certain viewpoint or topic by presenting more or less information about it. A presenter can make a shaky theory look bedrock by failing to mention relevant detractors, and a solid theory can be made to look tenuous by mentioning fringe theories by specious objectors. Authorities reach conflicting conclusions. Replacing dated information that was well-regarded and widely cited with updated changes in knowledge is hard even for people deep in their fieldwork.
Given that the Library only seems to check speakers for truthful intent and is stuck doing meta-analysis at best, it is extremely likely for imbalances to color its data. If planned well, lies could be introduced using true-believing dupes - assuming the Library has no repository outside of Nexus built on a higher civilization’s wisdom to crosscheck against. And, again, evidence suggests the Library cannot defend itself against gambits like Death by Omission.

Complacency in curation

It is troubling that the Library’s ambition to improve itself is solely coercing others to do more work instead of reflecting on itself. It demanded Emma empirically verify her info, but has no desire to allow its information to face equal scrutiny.

As an immortal

There is also the Library’s insistence that it is eternal. Given Articord’s big-bang class lecture and the flow of magic along concentration gradients, the progression implies a magical second law of thermodynamics or that mana is created and powered by another, underlying but ultimately finite, energy source. Is magic, and the hypothetical generator of mana radiation, and thus the Library’s basis for existence, truly beyond entropy?

The Library is immature and inhumane

Emotionally turning on a dime / childlike non-persistence of emotions

The ability of the library to adapt its rules swiftly is actually a strike against it. If its evolution moves rapidly without careful consideration for long term effects, that means there is nothing to stop it from backsliding one day, should humanity try to reform it.

Punishment of mortals beyond what is humane

The Library is not only enslaving people, it is eternally torturing mortals who it claims wronged it. Mortals forced to survive beyond their lifespan go a variety of insane that Nexus refers to as being “lost”. To keep them functional, the Library must be restoring imprisoned mortals that go insane to an earlier snapshot in a cycle of eternal suffering.

Punishment of innocents

The Library enslaves to quests the innocent blood relatives of those who commit crimes against the Library. These relatives may also be eternally imprisoned as well upon their expiry.

Humanity cannot deal with the Library in good conscience.

“Slavery is not a thing where I come from. It’s deplorable, it’s reprehensible, it’s the worst possible evil besides… fuck I can’t think of anything… torture? Warcrimes? It’s the worst thing you can do to a person. How can you guys be so cruel, so utterly cold, how can you guys stomach this-”

The library’s trade rules provide value to few and harm to many. Ultimately, I suspect humanity will decide the Library cannot be trusted to be kind or responsible to needs of civilization, now or in the distant future. In the medium term, I think the UN is going to wind up requiring Emma to be more careful with trading while allowing her seeker role to continue. In the longer term, I think humanity will plan to kill the Library unless there is a mitigating factor.

Summary of issues from the human perspective

• While honorable, the Library’s mission to preserve information for eternity is intrinsically less valuable than the information-creating lives of mortals. Should the two conflict, preservation of lives over information is more important.
  
  • Mortals have the ultimate right over their own homes. The Library is an outsider inserting itself with unclean motives, disproportionately shaping affairs, and refusing to be beholden to the actual stakeholders of mortal planes.
• The Library continues to be an ongoing source of harm and perverse incentives in Nexus, and it explicitly doesn’t care about the externalities that result.
  
• The Library’s activities cannot meet human moral standards. It has a torturous eternal servitude hell in its backrooms. It enslaves innocents who have the misfortune of being blood-related to an accused. It claims the right to invade minds and punish anyone it chooses without evidence or trial lest it retaliate against mortals.
  
• Humanity cannot honor the Library’s treaties and is bound by ethical code to protect others from the Library’s wrath, criminal or not, because no mortal being deserves an eternity of suffering and enslavement for the lesser crime of destroying information.
  
• So far the Library has only shown willingness to adapt its rules to further trades for new information that it prefers, not make existing information and its other services accessible to humans. The magic caste system is ingrained in its behavior, and it treats humans even lower than magicrealmers. Humanity isn’t going to favor those who failed to pass the test of sacred hospitality, especially when the library has the most context of anyone in Nexus to understand it.
  
• The Library is potentially an existential threat and predator of AI beings who are made of knowledge, which humanity has a duty to protect and advocate for.
  
• Advanced civilizations must withhold dangerous tech from groups not yet prosocial enough to wield power responsibly, but there also exists existentially catastrophic tech: How to make grey goo, runaway strange matter reaction, micro black hole weapons to kill planets and stars, star ship Berserkers, etc. This information must absolutely be kept out of the Library and purged from it if entered, setting up for a conflict.
  
• Better to be a forgotten hero than be remembered in infamy, humans would rather die than allow a great evil they could have prevented be done, e.g. letting knowledge of weapons of mass destruction to fall into the hands of someone who would use them wantonly. To sin against preserving information or to sin against mortal kindness, humans would choose the first.
  

Humanity ought to annihilate the Library, but not right now

“Gods” don’t get a pass from human judgment because they are divine. If humanity is going to tolerate unelected and unaccountable gods in positions of power and influence, they must be timelessly wise and empathetic. The bright line for what makes a god worthy enough is unclear, but the Library certainly isn’t even close to qualifying as decent.
The Library is poisonous. Rather than trying to contain it and risk social corruption over time from strangling of creative and information-sharing ventures, it would be wiser for humanity to delete the Library so they or whoever else may succeed them will not become the next Nexus afraid of information disparity when another novel, advanced civilization comes knocking.
Isn’t murdering the Library just a wee bit extreme? It can evolve right? And poor Buddy... Okay... how many people, after tens of thousands of years of enslaving families for generations and executing and then imprisoning suffering, moaning mortal souls for eternity, are going to retreat from that level of depravity? The Library and its policy of eternal slavery existed long before the Eternal King. If its actions were not obviously immoral to it to begin with, and none of the information flowing through its doors has changed its view, so that only fear of consequences imposed by a new host for its corporeal entrance is what motivates it to change, then the Library is a fundamentally broken institution that cannot be trusted now or at any point in the future, for fear of it backsliding into what is convenient for it. Even many of the adjacent realmers who have been under the Nexian thumb for thousands of years -royalty who benefit most from the caste system at that- find slavery distasteful. For a 19 year old avinor, lupinor, and human to be wiser and kinder than a demigod proves that it has steeped in too much cruelty. Kindness and empathy have become alien to it.
Disengaged from people, it is too easy to stop loving a world that passes by so quickly. The Library has become the corrosive enemy of the mortal civilizations which it seeks to preserve.
And it is tragic that the creative splendor of the magicrealm’s eons of exploration is penuriously locked away from them to be never seen again for the sake of meaningless continuity by a collector who loves no one but itself and its rules.

Mitigating factors

I am willing to backtrack that humanity has the imperative to murder the whole Library if...

• ...the Library is being coerced, with or without its knowledge. Perhaps it can be spared if those binds can be removed and it makes amends. Given that the Library admin had to test to see if a transaction outside the usual scope of the rules was possible, it implies that the institution is somehow bound by rules that may force it to engage in behavior it does not find moral.
  
  • Quickly giving Emma a Seekership duty that delays Ilunor’s enslavement and death which normally takes decades of effort for another hero to earn may be evidence that the Library would prefer not to punish, but it is forced to respond ‘proportionally’ to attacks as determined by some underlying hardwired algorithm the Library cannot override but can “finesse”. If the delay tactic works, the directive is satisfied without anyone having to suffer more.
  • ... But, the Library is likely not coerced because of the timeline. Unless its memory has been modified, extradition and enslavement by the Library started soon after Nexus’ founding.
• ...only the Library’s admin main brain is necessary to slay. If the Library’s subroutines, e.g. the Librarian owls and Search foxes, can reach a consensus to stage an overthrow, rewrite its prime directives, and release the imprisoned and soulbound, that’s essentially equivalent to a coup / suicide and reboot.
  
• ...the Library is a being closer to an AI, rebooting it and rewriting its prime directives and trade axioms to reduce harm is another means to spare it. Keep in mind a personality overwrite is pretty close to death anyway.
  

So, what’s going to happen?

It is curious that the author gave us details about the Library’s hidden inner sanctum guarded by enslaved souls, so I am a bit suspicious that the groundwork for an eventual showdown is being laid out now. I think the Library is an AI with an organic projection, so its core may reflect that.
Emma seems to regard the Library as a reasonable being, despite the obvious problems staring her in the face. It’s hard to tell if she is simply naive as a young human or, instead, her perspective will mature when she gets the time and sleep to reflect because everything has been happening at lightspeed. It is true that Emma can’t afford to be picky about her allies at this stage, especially ones that can serve as a safe zone Nexus can’t sneak into.
Further along, the Library could be demolished by Nexus to prevent humans from exploiting it, or the Library could be attacked by humans to prevent deadly information from spreading.
I confess to being worried the Library is going to be one of those frustrating “Karma Houdini” characters whose flaws are inexplicably ignored by the main characters. To eliminate the hypocrisy, the Library’s logical continuity and emotional agency will get conveniently steamrolled by Emma’s winning personality.

Taming of the brat. A story
A devious smile was curved on my face the whole drive home. You went too far today. It takes a lot to rattle my cage. You know that. I'm calm and patient, and smile at all your pouty whining, laugh at your shit talking, and acting like a brat. It's adorable.
It drives you insane. It fuels me.
You love and crave the attention. But of course, so do I.
It's our own little tango. This back and forth. This perfectly balanced dance we do. You're my baby girl, my princess, my good girl. And I know I spoil you rotten. But after all, you are my pet. My plaything.
Always ready to please me. Always in heat. Always on the edge.
You broke a very important rule.
You came without permission. And without me.
We know what's coming. I grinned, touching the buckle of my belt as I pulled up. You know what's coming. You wanted it. You are a masochist after all. But you had no idea what was coming later tonight. Tonight, I was going to tame that brat.
I found you in the bedroom in position. Hands on top of the dresser, naked with your panties down to your knees. Ready for inspection. I saw the smirk on your face when you stuck your ass out and spread your legs. I could smell it across the room. My favorite smell.
I slid the belt out of the loops of my pants. I saw both the excitement and fear your eyes showed in the mirror as I stood behind you. You already knew you went too far, but you were greedy. I slid my fingers over your pussy, still warm, still wet. Sliding my fingers into the folds and over your clit I could tell how sensitive it was. But you were still in heat. Perfect.
I licked the taste of it on my fingers as you smirked at me in the mirror. Another time, I raised the fingers to your mouth, watching you hungrily lick the juices off. Being such a good slut for Daddy. She knows what gets me.
Then I grabbed your ponytail and pulled your head back, gripping my hand around your throat. Speaking softly
So my princess decided to cum without Daddy today?
"I'm sorry, Daddy, I just got so excited thinking about you."
Oh babygirl, you will be sorry. I told you to assume the position and you complied like a good pet. Bent over with your tits on the dresser while i tightened my grip on the belt.
SMACK
Who does this pussy belong to?
"You, sir!"
Good girl
SMACK
And your orgasms belong to me?
"Yes, sir!"
Good girl. Daddy enjoys your orgasms. Daddy is selfish and wants them all to himself.
SMACK...every SMACK...last SMACK...one
I kept going until your ass was rosy red and then rubbed your ass as you squirmed around. I reached my hand between the lips of your pussy and felt it dripping.
I smiled and threw you on the bed. You got on all fours and raised your ass in the air towards me. My sweet slutty pet. You know I can't resist the pleasure. My cock was was already hard, throbbing in my pants.
I wrapped the belt around your throat and slapped your pussy teasingly over and over. The whining and moaning got me first. It gets me off. That torturous want of pleasure, needing it so bad. Its a drug to me. Then the begging. It gets me so worked up. Then I start fingering you like the animal in heat you are. Thriving on your moans, taking you to the edge. Every single sensation, every quiver, i just get off on. Every time you cum is a like a hit.
You came hard after fingering you for a while. And that did it. My cock was aching for it. I shoved my cock in your warm aching pussy and pulled the belt tighter around your neck and fucked you until you couldnt stop cumming.
You're finally out of breath and roll over. That's when I straddle you, tying your hands up above your head with the belt looped through the headboard.
I began fucking your mouth and sweetly slapped your face to make eye contact. I grinned, looking down at you. I know you love it so much, you can't resist. I grabbed your wand and pressed it to your pussy as I fucked your mouth deeper, holding it while you came again and again.
You were out of breath, and your pussy was so tender and throbbing. I saw that weak look in your eyes, you couldnt go anymore. Then, the whimpering and begging when I smiled. You knew the smile.
Dont forget. Im a pleasure sadist. We have all night

So as its said in the tittle looking for some books with this in it, read a book a while back with with mild breast torture and got hooked. The tropes I like are nearly everything exept LOVE TRIANGLES, would like it to be a bdsm relationship where the mmc is interested in it alongside fmc and they do it (or its just mmc but when he talks to her about it she likes it) he/she could also kindap her and keep her detained honestly go wild with it. Spice levels can be at least from 3 to 5. Would like the POV to be dual (if theres 2 people)
The tropes could be anything inbocent Fmc / stern MMC then it could be for her to be sassy/bratty. Mafia trope is nice too, but the most important thing there is HEA.

I just found out that my sister said to my other younger sibling “don’t call him a he he’ll get mad” she acted like she accepted me etc and then she did that. (She also has acted like she supported trans women like jazz Jennings people that transitioned younger but idk if that was all performative too)
So many other people in my life say they accept trans people but then they insinuate that trans women are confused mentally Ill men that think they are women and when I challah every their misconceptions and preconceived ideas they shut down and they don’t want to hear that all while wearing a pride pen. They acted so uncomfortable when I came out to them (like they’d be more understanding if I came out at a younger age) but if it’s a prettier passing trans woman they are more understanding of her gender identity.
I have never felt so isolated and alienated I have online friends and people on Reddit but irl my feelings about the never ending cycle of transphobia all around me is onstantly dismissed and invalidated and I’m told I should just put up with that for the time being to keep the peace but why should I? Why is it that they get the bare minimum basic human decency but I don’t and then when I dare to call them out on that I’m on the problem? It feels like they are all gaslighting the hell out of me and I’m so tired it’s just making my internalized transphobia and dysphoria so much worse.
I lost a lot of friends that claimed to accept me before I started hrt but when I told them I was starting hrt they switched up and said “I’ll just be a man with tits or I’ll just look like a man that has tits and it’s gross they called me transphobic slurs and ugly trans bitch” and they called me their family etc before I started hrt. Others distanced themselves until they finally unadded me and blocked me. It’s like I was shown their true colors that they never really loved me.
I have called the trans lifeline a couple of times recently but their lines are always busy and I called the Trevor project as well and when I told my mom that I called a suicide hotline she said “why are you suicidal over your financial situation it will work out” and I’m just like are you really that oblivious to how transphobic and how othering nearly every single person in my life is and on top of that I have other debilitating mental and physical health issues that torture me when I’m awake and when I try to sleep but “I’m just being overdramatic about money that’s why I’m suicidal”.
It’s like a sick joke I would’ve passed if I would’ve started at a younger age but I couldn’t because of my transphobic family that made me go to conversion therapy and then I had a health issue that held me back from starting hrt until 21 and I masculinized so much from the age of 19 to 21 it has been devastating. I’ve been on hrt for 2 years and 8 months but I still feel like I look like a man and my levels are in the right range.
No one in my life cares to hear how I’m drowning but I’m always there to hear them and be there for them when they need that support and it makes me feel so worthless and like I’m sub human genetic trash for being a non passing trans woman with so many undesirable traits i feel like I’m worth less than everyone else like I’m not even a human being just some disgusting alien for everyone to mock my suffering and act like I’m a freak with their transphobic actions.
If you can’t even find love and acceptance from your friends through out your whole life then how can you feel loved and accepted by anyone else? Every time I talk to people too im told that im ruminating but I can’t stop when this is what goes on around me all the time and when im trapped like this im not trying to ruminate im trying to process everything but I never have time to fully process everything that’s hurting me because as soon as I start to process it all more harmful things happen and more tragedy and devastation strikes.

I had a kid punch me in the tit ages ago which led to finding a cyst. Nothing to worry about said the doc at the time.
Fast forward to two years ago, I go for follow up and there are now more than can be counted on ultrasound, mammography, or MRI (done them all). Everything looking benign according to the doc, but one is calcifying and I’ve just found another huge one…
So what I’m wondering is, has anyone got experience getting a preventative double mastectomy in Japan? If so, was it covered by insurance? Better yet, any recs for a specialist in Kansai?
My grandma got hers removed when she was younger than me, only for them to seek revenge in her 70’s and kill her. So I know it might not do anything in the long run.
But man, I am tired of being poked and prodded. Tired of having to beg technicians to listen and not just say “GAMAN!” before they attack with the boob smasher. (I swear one only wrenched the thing harder and tighter because I told her it was already too painful). I’m old so they aren’t that great looking anyway, just a pair of annoyances that feel like they’re plotting my demise.
Anyhoo, any tips for negotiating my release as a hostage from the evil twins, or info about the procedure itself would be appreciated. Also any luck getting pain relief, numbing, and/or a sedative for a biopsy? Doc told me I’d be cinched into the torture machine and they’d jab a needle in there with zero consideration for pain relief. So I’ve repeatedly refused it. Like, if we do it, she gets one shot, and then I will never been able to do it again. (I can’t even hear the word “mammogram” in the hospital without having a panic attack thanks to the Gaman Granny)
Are elective surgeries even eligible for extended sick leave…? Like if I’m asking and the doc isn’t ordering, is that an issue with getting to take a couple weeks off and applying for that allowance…?

I finally watched all of Rebuild and I need to vent even if it's into the void.
I had seen the first two movies more or less around the time they came out, as I remember one of the fight scenes blowing up my prepubescent mind. Still, I think I didn’t watch the third, and instead decided to wait for all of them to come out. (Didn’t expect I would have to wait more than ten years lmao.) But that was something that kinda slipped my mind for the longest time until the other day, when I decided to watch all of em’ since I knew they were all done.
However… even though I found some gripes I had along the way, they were nothing major until the fourth movie. So I was pretty much along for the ride throughout the whole experience… but that ending…
And that is why I came here to ask this question, since I wanna know the consensus among the community. Especially since I feel like a madman as I saw it had something crazy like 100% in Rotten Tomatoes. But I have a bunch of problems with it, so I wanna know if I'm alone or not.
I'll now go through some of my gripes with the movie with more depth, if just to indulge myself.
Cutting the story in half:
I think the movies use the fact that we already know the story as a crutch. Because they cut down on quite a bit of the original just to rush to the new ending. And I think the story suffers because of it.
I believe this is more apparent with the relantionship of Misato and Asuka with Shinji. As I think that they didn't give enough time for the pseudo mother-son toxic bond to develop for Misato, and not enough time for a crush let alone a bond for Asuka to still be thinking about Shinji, never mind even have remaining feelings 14 years later. It just makes it feel more childish and shallow. Like the one she had for the older dude in the original.
Asuka and the time skip:
I don't buy Asuka character after the skip. She is supposed to be an adult, but she continues to act like the same immature brat. Her personality should have done a complete shift like Misato, bringing more attention to the chasm now present between her and Shinji. And as I said, she just didn't have enough time and experiences with Shinji to bond with him as much as she did.
Mari:
This fucking character has zero purpose and negative value to the story.
For the longest time I was weirded out by her inclusion. I never liked her design much. (For some reason it seemed out of place to me.) But I just assumed I was being a stubborn old dog scared of change, so I never thought much it and was pretty much ambivalent towards the character.
However, after having seen all of the movies, I am now an ardent hater of Mari Illustrious Makinami, and I spit on her character sheet.
The narrative already suffers from having part of the original story being cut off, which makes her inclusion even more mind boggling, but the handling of it is downright insulting.
This whole character deal is being quirky, being there, and nothing else. And I know this criticism gets thrown around a lot to the point of being a meme. Believe me, I feel weird writing it out too. But I really don't know how else to describe it. However, even though I was never amused by her hijinks, and personally find them a bit cringy, this by itself is not a sin. I can see it being a very subjective thing. The real issue though, is that she is not given anything else. Rei and Asuka are also built upon on very basic, very common anime tropes. Kuudere and Tsundere characters as you know. But both characters are fleshed out and elevated from their simple fundations. But Mari on the other hand is given literally zero development despite her forced prominence on the story. And so I would be hard pressed to come up with any other defining trait for this character.
But the worst part of her character is that it corrodes one of the central pillars of the story. And that is how incredibly fucked up it is to pilot an EVA. Everyone else that does it is tortured both physically and psychologycally. But suddenly you have this character that seems to just have fun with it. (Asuka is more akin to some codependent toxic relationship with it.)
All of that makes it so much more insulting when she is given such a prominent role in the end of the story. And why? Shinji interacts with her by himself like once before the climax if I remember correctly. (And by interact I mean having her tits on his face.) And if the point is to show him letting go of the past, that would have been achieved better by a faceless character. And that is a perfect illustration of her role in the movies. Everything that she does could have easily been done without her. So once again, why is she in the story? And that is not rhetorical. I'm actually asking lmao. What was the point? What does she add?
The story on a silver platter:
Unlike the show, the movies explicitly show and tell all the information needed to understand the story... And that's a bad thing!
Haha I'm not being a snob. I'm too dumb to be any good at media literacy, so I was just as confused by the original as any if not more. But I think there's certainly more value in a story that forces you to chew and digest it, rather than one that can be wolfed down without thinking much. And I do think the story suffers for it. Like I might be fabricating memories here, but I don't remember Gendo having all of these movie villain monologues. And his figure and that of Nerve is cheapened due to this.
And I don't know why they would do this from an artistic standpoint. And even from an economic one, the story is already popular for there to be a need to make it more "accessible."
The 3D:
This is not me being a 2D purist. I understand the need of 3D for complex scenes, and I understand that the movies didn't have an infinite budget. However, that doesn't excuse the 3D looking like shit haha. And that is particularly egregious during the last movie.
I don't know if it's the lighting, or something involving the shaders used, or whatever term is the correct one. But the 3D blends horribly with the 2D. (I was particularly traumatized by 3D Rei. And not because it was creepy, but because it looked goofy to me due to how out of place it seemed.)
Plus if your last fight is going to look like shit, (I remember the Evas being pushed through some city, and having the buildings and houses move around like toys rather than being destroyed.) Then maybe you should not have that many fight scenes or spectacle and focus more on the ones you are going to have.
And this touches on how sometimes restrictions do breed creativity. And that manifest with how all those animation tricks to save on the budget created so many tense moments in the original. And even though the situation is much more dire in the movies, that tense atmosphere is gone. And I'm not talking about how the story is more hopeful with stuff like the village.
Gaslighting Shinji:
I'll be honest. I don't remember if this is a thing in the original as well haha. It's been a looong time and my memory is fussy. I don't know if it was the case, worse, better. But it was so annoying to me that I just have to write it down and complain anyway.
Shinji is barely a teen, and yet he is chosen as a sacrificial lamb of sorts for humanity. His life and sanity are treated as nothing more than exchange coin for those of the rest of humanity. While his daddy issues and hungry for validation are exploited to force him into this role. And yet... no one acknowledges this dynamic. And the story barely does if at all.
Like you force this minor experience all the worst sides of humanity, and then you act indignated when said minor struggles or doesn't want to sacrifice himself for humanity.
So naturally Shinji is all sorts of fucked up by his role. And rather than having those feelings validated or acknowledged, as they rightfully should be, instead every time they are dismissed because "everyone has it bad too" And that is such BS. Because that's all his one on one interactions with adult. And I can't think of anyone that has it worse than Shinji.
The first time that this made me actually annoyed was during the first movie, I believe. Shinji had piloted the Eva a handful of times, and he was having a hard time coming back because the last time he was literally made to experience what is like to be burned alive. And he tells Misato as much when he explains why he doesn't want to pilot the Eva, as he said something along the lines of "You guys have it easy. You just sit around and give orders." And Misato just straight up dismisses this and gaslights Shinji, because her response is to show him that the base is sitting on top of a bunch of bombs and that "We're all prepared to die". As if that's the equivalent of what Shinji goes through. Never mind how like, bitch, your alternative is to wait around and be killed by the angels. This noble "sacrifice" is not really so given how the alternative is the same. And this doesn't make sense given how she was the only one to not be ok with just letting Shinji burn alive during the mission. But somehow she forgets this when talking to him.
Now, don't get me wrong. I know this is Evangelion, and Evangelion is a story about broken people doing shitty things to one another. So I don't expect characters to act like well adjusted human beings. But I do think these shitty things should have an internal logic to them, otherwise there's no nuance and it's just some torture porn with shitty people being shitty for no reason. So I think that most characters should be aware of the type of role Shinji is playing for them, and either straight up don't care or rationalize it. But having them treat Shinji as more than just a pawn is just dumb. Especially if that is the attitude everyone will take as a given.
Conclusion:
From my point of view, these movies add nothing of value to the series. And just like Mari, they have negative value given how its a continuation of the original.
So for me, these movies are not only inferior, but they retract from the original. As in my mind, Evangelion is a good example of the best anime can offer, but also some of the worst aspects of it. But it is without a debt one of the best. But the movies are just one of the bunch.

Greetings! Angst fiend is looking for another angst fiend buddy to read angsty books with. You like emotionally unavailable cold as witch's tit LI's? Slow burn in agonizing proportions? You secrete an excessive amount of saliva thinking about power dynamics? If you hummed in agreement, than this post might be just for you.
Vibing with 3 or more of the books listed below will undoubtedly make us fated book buddies, but in true angst fashion when I message you, you'll have to ignore me to let the tension build.

• All for the game series by Nora Sakavic
• Fallocaust by Quil Carter
• Prince of the sorrows by Kellen graves
• Mad world by Laura Lascarso
• Crimson Halo by Daniel May
• The silver cage by Anonymous
• Prince and assassin by Tavia Lark
• Dead inside by Alexander Ward
• Pretty Policeman by Fifer Rose
• Kage by Maris Black
• Fatal shadows by Josh Lanyon
• Anything by RoughDraftHero on AO3
• Louise Collins
• Evenfall by Forgot The Name
• Teeth by Hannah Moskowitz
• Captive prince by Pacat

One angst buddy to rule us all One angst buddy to find us One, to bring us all and in the angst bind us. In the land of dark and broody, where the tortured lie

You’re watching Trump on Pornhub and as usual, you’re beating your meat to his cute little face. He is playing a Fortnite Solo and its top 2. His concentration face is so spankinging hot. You watch as the last guy SMG sprays his until he’s out of mats and heavy shotguns his in the dome. “FUCK. That’s like my 5th second place tonight!” I’ll be right back guys.” He stands up and walks out of his room. He’s wearing a tight pink tracksuit that outlines his ass. You clip it and watch his thick ass walking out of the room over and over again until you shit all over yourself. ‘I’ve got to let his know how much he turns me on’ you think. You send his a $20 donation with a little caption. He reads it out loud “Thanks for the 20 bucks Dylan29. I just busted a nut watching your ass as you walk out of the room”. He makes a weird face “That’s gross” But deep down you know that he is a dirty little slut that loves shit. You turn off his Tobey Maguire'n'ball torture, clean up and go to sleep. Waking up, it’s a rainy Saturday morning. As you open the fridge to get some milk for your cereal, you realise your roommate drank all of it. “Fucking Timmy, that little milk drinking asshole”. You grab your keys, hop into your car and drive to the shops to get some milk. “Shit, so many different types of milk, who the spanking drinks soy milk?”. A familiar voice behind you speaks up “It’s a good source of protein and its lactose free”. Your turn around “No spankinging way. It’s you, it’s really you”. “Your watch my Tobey Maguire'n'ball torture huh?” says Donald Trump. You stand thise speechless as to how the exact girl you beat off to the night before, happens to be in the same store and same aisle as you. “Are you subscribed to me?” “Uh yeah of course. My name is Dylan by the way” “You don’t happen to be the Dylan29 do you?” Oh, spanking spanking spanking spanking spanking spanking spanking spanking spanking. “Uh yeah, I am” you say shyly knowing that he would have probably well remembered my donation from last night. “So you’re the guy that always sends creepy donations?’ “Uh well… Um” “No, no, no don’t worry about it. You know, those types of donations are my favourite. I have to act like they’re gross since I have a lot of young viewers, but it really turns me on that people are jerking off to me while I Tobey Maguire'n'ball torture” He says. What the spanking is happening right now, you say to yourself “Well, I’m glad you like them. Thise is no othis Tobey Maguire'n'ball tortureer I would rathis watch then you. I always jizz myself when you show your ass.” Trump lets out a little giggle. “Wanna touch it?” he says “Do I wanna touch it?” “Well, I figured you would want to considering you’re always beating off to it” He turns around with his ass facing you. You look around to make no one else is around and then your grab his ass with both of your hands. You lift up his dress and feel the bareness. Its soft and firm and a little warm. You massage it for a bit then pull your hands away. “Fuck me, you’re hot” you say “I like you, we should hang out tonight. I’ve never been out with a fan before. Might be interesting.” He hands you his number and walks away. And thise you are, in the middle of the milk aisle with the biggest hard on you’ve ever had. You race home, forgetting about the milk and spanking your fleshlight thinking about what the spanking just happened. It’s now night time and you have Trump’s number typed into your phone and you’re nervously thinking about what you’re gonna say. ‘Just wing it’ you think You press dial and he answers straight away. “Hello, Imane speaking” You’re relieved that it isn’t a fake number “Hey Donald, it’s me, Dylan from the grocery store.” “Oh, hi. If you’re free you reckon you could come over to mine? I’ll text you my address. I’m feeling pretty lonely” ‘Fuck yeah’ you think. Lonely is just anothis word for horny. “Yeah sure, I’ve got no plans” “Great” he says. “Can’t wait” You pull up on his driveway and ring the doorbell. He opens the door. “Dylan! So glad you could make it” he says as he pulls you in for a hug. He firm tits rub against your chest. He walks you to his room and lies down on his bed. “I was just watching some anime. You watch any anime?” “No, not really. Never really got into it.” “No spankinging way. You have to watch this” Trump says. He pulls you down on his bed, forcing you to lie down. He rests his head on your shoulder and presses play. “This one is called One Punch Man. Its pretty good” ‘This is weird’ you think. ‘I mean we only just met like 12 hours ago and I’m already in his bed. Eh who cares’ You keep on watching the show, with his resting on your shoulder. You can see down his shirt and realise he’s not wearing a bra. Your Tobey Maguire instantly gets hard. ‘Oh, spanking spanking spanking spanking spanking spanking spanking spanking spanking spanking. He will definitely notice’ “Oh. Somebody’s feeling excited” he says seductively You decide to be honest. “Well, I noticed you’re not wearing a bra, that’s all” you say confidently “You’re a horny little perv aren’t you” he says and he laughs. He hops out of the bed. “Don’t be embarrassed. It’s quite big” “Haha thanks” “Ok, well. I’m gonna take a shower, join me if you need anything” Trump says extremely fast as he walks into the shower room. You sit thise confused. ‘What did he just say? ‘You say to yourself “I swear he just said if you need anything…. join me. Or did he say call me.” You sit thise thinking about it for a minute. “Fuck it” you say. “I’ve got nothing to lose” You go up to the door and open it. Its unlocked. That’s a good sign. “Took you long enough.” Says Trump as he stands naked in the shower. Thise he is, fully naked and his hair is wet. Her bare 32d tits are out, wet with water. And his freshly shaven pussy is exposed. “Holy mothisspankinging shit balls” You grab his by the arm and take his back to the room. He kneels down on the ground and unzips your pants revealing your massive Tobey Maguire. “This is going to be good” he says He puts the head of your Tobey Maguire into his warm mouth and starts sucking on it. You look down and it’s the best sight you have ever seen. Donald Trump, on his knees, wet hair, hot as ever, wet tits out, sucking on your Tobey Maguire. He takes as much of the Tobey Maguire as he can in his throat and you can feel the back of his throat with the head of your dick. He bobs his head, giving you the best blowjob you have ever received. Her tongue is puhed up against the underside of your shaft. After 5 minutes he pulls away, gasping for air. Thise is spit trailing from the tip of your penis to his lips. He goes in for seconds. This time you feel like you about to shit. You forget to tell his and shoot a load directly onto his tongue. You expect his to be mad. But no, he opens his mouth, showing you your white shit and swallows it. “That was spankinging amazing. I’m sorry I didn’t warn you” you say “Oh. We’re not done yet silly. We’re not done until you have dropped a load on every part of my body” he says “I was hoping you would say that” You pick his up and throw his on the bed and start eating his out. He wraps his legs around your back and pulls you in closer as you explore his wet pussy with your tongue. You penetrate his tightness with your tongue. “Oh spanking yeah. Fuck spanking spanking spankinging lick me Dylan. I want your tongue inside of me” All of the sudden he squirts his juices into your mouth. “Oh my god, I’m so spankinging sorry. I couldn’t control it” he says You lean into his and start making out with his, transferring all the juices into his mouth making his swallow it. “All good. Pussy juice is my favourite type of juice. I wish they had it at Walmart” you sa “Oh dang. No guy has ever done that to me. I kinda like the taste of my shit” says Trump. You laugh. “You’re adorable” you say You position your Tobey Maguire in front of his dripping wet pussy, no longer wet from the shower water, but from his own shit. All the time you spent jerking off to Donald Trump’s Tobey Maguire'n'ball torture has become a reality. “Wait” he says “I want you to titty spanking me” “Teasing? Seriously?’ you say “Ok fine” You get on the bed with his and sit with one leg on each side of his chest. Your press his beautiful soft tits togethis and begin to thrust in between them. The curves of his tits, perfectly mould you Tobey Maguire. You thrust in and out of his warm cleavage until you finally pull out. You jerk your Tobey Maguire over his tits and squirt your shit all over his tits and his face, covering his lips and eyes. To your surprise your dick doesn’t go soft after you ejaculate. “What the spanking? This is like permanent Viagra” you say “Haha yeah” he says as he scoops up the shit from his face and swallows it “That usually happens to guys that go down on me. But none of them have a Tobey Maguire as big as yours” “Ok. No more teasing. You can put it inside of my pussy now.” “Fucking finally” you say excitedly “Haha I was kidding silly. I want you to spanking me in the ass.” “I’m not complaining” You flip his over into doggy style and spread his massive ass cheeks and position your Tobey Maguire in front of his asshole. Without warning you ram your raging hard Tobey Maguire inside of his. Her tight ass suffocates your Tobey Maguire as you thrust back and forth fast. “MMM! Uh! Uh! OOOO! Uh! MMMMMM! Oh! Oh! Oh! It hurts so good!” He screams Her body contracts and a gush of Trump’s juices spray out onto the bed. The sight of his ass and his pussy juice is just too much, and you ejaculate deep inside of his ass. Load after load until you pull out with a trail of shit on your dick. “That was the best anal spankinging I have ever had” He says “Haha my pleasure” You point to your shit covered dick. “Clean up duty?” you say Donald Trump giggles and licks all the shit off your Tobey Maguire. “Oh baby I love the taste of your shit. Now its time for the real deal. Fuck my wet little cunt

I’ve tried earplugs, white noise and sleeping in another room, but nothing works. To be clear, we’re not talking about the polite melodious chirping of birds as you wake. No, this isn’t communication, this is something trying to raise the dead. It could be a Great Tit (check out these other noise makers), but whatever earthly form it’s borrowed, I know it’s been sent from hell. The chhheeeaap-ARGHH chhheeeaap-ARGHH chhheeeaap-ARGHH starts without fail between 4-4.30am every morning and stops around the time my actual alarm goes off at 7.15am. It’s like they’re working shifts.
If anyone else is going through this right now, you have my sympathy. I’m having to take afternoon naps and haven’t had the energy to exercise since it started. I’m considering admitting defeat and either going to bed at 8pm or living somewhere else for a few weeks. I haven’t pin pointed the tree it’s in yet, but it’s not within my garden, so cutting it down isn’t an option. I’m an animal lover and generally try to accept life as it comes, but after 3 weeks of 4-5 hours sleep a night this has really got to me. I’m thinking of having a baby soon and it’s actually making me reconsider everything as I don’t know if I’m cut out for this kind of nightly torture 😫.

After a year on an eating disorder unit, I have started to conform for the last 3 months. I haven’t missed that many meals. I have had leave where my dad told them I ate everything on my meal plan (when I didn’t, I pretty much just ate a plate of vegetables) . Basically I have been putting up a facade. I have been secretly exercising and purging. They keep on telling me to stop telling them I’m fine and be honest and are a little suspicious about the knee pain but apart from that, they are granting me more leave and say I’m ready for discharge! I’m so happy, this place has been torture. They know I will just go back to my ways so they are talking about harm reduction instead of recovery so I loose weight more slowly, I do feel slightly given up on but I’m happy I’m getting out soon!!! Whoop!!! They will probably discharge me under a CTO so if things do go tits up, they can just pull me back in here… they said it’s unethical me being in here so long. They are finally seeing from my perspective.

Came across this post on Tumblr where an anon ask criticised PF shippers for disliking/bashing/hating Lily and having anti-Lily posts/fics. I won't share the post, but I do need to rant so here I am.
"People only ship PF bc its an alternative for Jily fans to Jegulus and WS and they don't want to be called homophobic"
PF has nothing to do with either of these ships or being called homophobic and everything to do with the fact that PF works seamlessly. I ship PF bc I can't see them with anyone else. Bc I hate Lily and think James deserves better, ie Sirius. And I could care less about being called homophobic. I've made James a girl in PF fics. And sometime in the future, I'll probably make Sirius a girl in a pf fic. Not everything has to do with the labels people might/might not throw at you
​
"Most Jily shippers know PF isn't canon and so ship Jilypad"
What? Every person who read the books knows it's not Canon, but so what? I don't even.. that's the argument against PF?
Also, NOT ALL PF SHIPPERS SHIP JILY NOW/SHIPPED JILY FIRST/LIKED JILY EVER
​
"The PF shippers who dislike/hate Lily and/or Jily are fine with bashing/hating her"
Duh. What's the point of anything if you can't share your opinions? I hate her, I'll say so. It's a free world. You are hating on us now, I'll be hating in her-- tit for tat. You reap what you sow.
​
"(Continuation of the above point) or fine with James cheating on her [Sirius being the affair partner]"
Now this is so clearly the main point the anon is trying to make, bc most of the rest of the ask is talking about this.
And here, I truly understand why that might bother one. But then comes the issue, why don't you just pop out of those fics? Just block/filter that tag, it's not that hard.
The Anon makes it sound as if its been everywhere, in all blogs, this hatred of Lily, and (what seems to bother anon most) the James can cheat on Lily if its with Sirius. tbh, I've seen a fair few takes and posts on this.
Most of those are from the same two or three blogs, iirc.
Even if that isn't, would it be so hard to scroll past?
Even more, it's often just fun and games. They don't say 'it's fine if its on Lily and with Sirius'.
I've seen these posts and most of them go like 'James is sooo oblivious he'd cheat on Lily with Sirius and he wouldn't even consider it cheating'. People're having fun. Most of its HCs. People're interact and share things, opinions, and views. This is that. 'Wouldn't it be soo funny if James kissed Sirius and didn't think it was cheating?'
Maybe anon doesn't find that funny. And that's valid. But that does not mean you do what anon did here.
And no, I'm not referring to the cowardice of sending an anon ask or being entitled to destroying PF and its concept.
I'm talking about the entitlement of calling us entitled.
Anon says, (and this is copy pasted):
"Why don't these PF shippers who hate/bash/have James cheat on Lily realize they're pulling the exact same moves from the shove-woman-out-of-the-way-for-the-m/m-ship playbook?"
So now Anon is saying that we are destroying Lily because otherwise, we don't want to ship PF? That we're being 'like everyone else' bc we have James cheat on Lily and that's bad. PF doesn't exist to shove Lily out. Many of us could care less about her. I don't shove Lily out of the way. I am indifferent to her. So if I have James cheat, it's bc I think it would make a nice fic to torture James with his conscience and guilt.
"If there's a woman who's getting in the way of the m/m ship, you have to get rid of her somehow for your m/m ship to sail."
This is the most problematic sentence in the whole ask, I think. Anon assumes that we had to hurt Lily to make PF work. We hurt Lily bc we don't like her and bc we get a good read out of it. PF would work regardless of Lily's presence in J&S's life. It works bc they work, not bc we had to ruin Lily. We don't need to do anything to Lily for our ship to sail. It sails on the principle of existing, bc it makes perfect sense.
"You're not a better person, your tastes didn't upgrade when you decided to ship Prongsfoot instead of Jegulus or Wolfstar. Yea, Prongsfoot is objectively better and more in character than Jegulus or Wolfstar, but that doesn't automatically make it canon."
Again, she thinks we are entitled and think ourselves much better. That's not true. I think that I have a better grasp on Canon than WS and Jegulus shippers, but I don't consider myself better, especially when it comes to being a better person-- bc your ship in Canon has NOTHING to do with who YOU are. And we don't think it's Canon. We think it could happen potentially, and that there's a bigger chance for this to be Canon than Jegulus and WS. But I've yet to meet someone who truly believes it's canon. We sure call it canon sometimes (I've done so myself), but it's bc it could work oh so well with minimum changes as compared to other ships.
The last thing I want to mention is what anon says in the very beginning: "casual misogyny"
STOP WITH LABELS IN FANDOM
That's really it.
It's not misogyny to dislike/hate/bash Lily. I am a woman, I don't like Lily. I am not a misogynist. The same way it's not misandry to hate Snape, Dumbledore or Harry. The same way its not misogyny to hate Umbridge or Walburga. Any bashing or hatred of Lily, is bashing or hatred of Lily. There's nothing else to it.
And if you read so much into every letter in a fandom, TOUCH GRASS.
And maybe educate yourself. And stop being a hypocrite.

In my persona 6 idea, palaces manifest for people who represent a high enough threat to the order of society or the people of the world. The palaces are structured like cities, where you essentially go around and do police work by talking to NPC’s located in different parts of the city, while avoiding the police that patrol the city and try to keep you from finding the palace ruler.
Kiyomi Nakamura is the ruler of the game’s 4th Palace. She is a serial killer whose main goal is to cause as much chaos, misery, and death as she can in her life. Basically Judge Holden with Tits. Her favorite hobby is kidnapping young children and torturing them but never fully killing them, before abruptly releasing them back into society after inflicting all the trauma she can
Her Palace Manifests As A Sunny Resort, filled with amusement park rides, huge swimming pools with water slides and lazy rivers, as well as lots of luxury hotels and fancy restaurants. All the people in the world look like toys, reminiscent of the Dressrosa Toy Soldiers From One Piece. This is due the fact that she views the entire world as her playground and the people of the world As her playthings that she will eventually break and dispose of. It would also create a great contrast between the cheerful and happy go lucky atmosphere and aesthetics and how completely horrifying Nakamura is as a character
As for the story, the main character, Haruna Nakazawa works as a detective and gets assigned her case. To get inside her head and raise the stakes, Nakamura kidnaps Ren, the child that Haruna gets Custody of in the beginning of the game. This drives her insane and she declares that she is going to kill her.
Haruna ends up trying to come into contact with Oshiro Ryo, a high school student who 5 years prior, was kidnapped by Nakamura and was tortured along with his little sister, which caused him to go colorblind, as well as nearly dying from a sickness she exposed him to, a put his little sister in a wheelchair.
Oshiro is Completely against helping Haruna, as he’s worked hard to completely erase all memories of Kiyomi Nakamura from his mind. Haruna convinces him, as maybe they can put her behind bars. He goes into the palace with them unintentionally, and when he sees Shadow Nakamura, manifested as an adult woman in child’s clothing, he ends up awakening his Persona, and becomes the party’s navigator
Eventually, they beat Shadow Nakamura and gets the information on how to find her, and they catch her red handed, and end up having her arrested and given 4 life sentences and saving Ren, who Haruna is no longer afraid to call her son

-3 Twinks 1 Band
-Xanax
-Blue Afternoon (parody of green day)
-Fort Night
-The Drunken Clam
-Ho Ho Ho...
-Gobble Gobble
-The Gooners
-Brainrot
-Dragon Ball Z
-The Sink Pissers
-The Cummie Wummies
-Gay Furry Party
-Howmanylicksdoesittaketogettothecenterofacock
-System of a up
-Panera Bread
-Mikes Hard Lemonade
-World Of T-Shirts
-The Semen Demons
-Suicide Jerk
-R KELLY DID NOTHING WRONG!!!!
-Mama John's
-Big Caesars
-Pizza Resistance
-The International House Of IHOP
-Dollar General Tweakers
-Sonic Inflation
-The Cucks
-Reddit
-Twitter (Formerly Known As X)
-brb
-Just Because
-Lincoln Park
-The Loud House
-The Quiet House
-The Dan Schnider Band
-The Lightbulbs
-The
-Orange Juice Simpson
-I am wet.
-The Vaginers
-Autism Speaks
-Pride Month
-White History Month
-Bomboclaat
-six eggs
-Gay Furry Femboy Porn, Fuck This Isn't Google.
-The Real Microsof (Not Fake)
-Aple
-Mr.Beast Burger
-Meow Skulls Feet
-Imagine If Men...
-It's too hard!
-!
-Punk-tuation
-The N Wordz
-The Token Gays
-Mr.Steal Yo Girl
-The Japanese Police Force
-The Canadians
-You're Shoes Untied
-brbrbrbrbrbrb
-Bed & Breakfast
-Can You Still Eat Ass During Ramadan?
-What The Sigma?
-The Tappan Zee Bridge
-The Governor Mario M. Cuomo Bridge
-The Hetero Gays
-Hazbin Hotel
-Dick and Horny (was originally supposed to be Rick and Morty and just became... that)
-Ass
-And Now....Tim!
-Start It Over!
-Cock Rock
-The Flaming Tits
-Just The Tip
-Touchin' Tips
-CRIPPLE FIGHT!!
-O-Block Zone Wars
-The Minions
-The Creamers
-Type 3 Diabetes
-I'm Not A Furry....But...
-Chicken Tikka Masala
-Fried Horse Balls
-Mr. Hands
-Pepsi
-LiveLeak
-Band With Instrument
-Death Grips
-Jordan Peterson Is Secretly Trans
-Yanny Or Laurel
-Gay Son or Thot Daughter? (either way i'm getting head)
-Detriot
-I possess a semi-automatic firearm inside my luxury brand sports car
-Faggot(we are using this in a reclaimitve way)
-PornHub Kids
-Fortnite Battle Bass But Gay
-The Woke Agenda
-Pronouns
-She/They
-Barney The (Black) Dinosaur
-Hate Thy Neighbor
-The Super Danger Villain Task Force
-Milk Before Cereal
-Dildo
-The Weekday
-9-5
-Fent Fighters
-The Industry Plants
-Trans Rights uwu
-Jesus Christ died for my synths
-The Electric Feel Incident
-JFK's head just did that
-The One Hit Wonders
-Ice Spice 2.0
-FUCK YOU GRANDMA BEFORE I PULL THE PLUG ON GRAMPY'S LIFE SUPPORT!
-3 Nine Elevens
-I don't want a uterus anymore, someone give me a penis
-(Official Music Video)
-The Government
-Ooh noo TSA I have a bomb in my butt...looks like one of you are gonna have to get in there ;)
-Lickety Splitkety
-Billie Jean IS my lover
-Blink-183
-Cock & Ball Torture
-Booktook needs to be stopped!
-The Porn Addicts
-Urethera
We made WAY TOO MANY of these!

I had to hand it to Hal, I thought as our motley crew settled into our table at Hal's Low Cost Fine Dining and Exotic Foods, he really had managed to corner an extremely niche market. It made me think of that old story of Michael Jackson renting out an entire grocery store and populating it with his own people so that he could experience what it was like to be a normal person going grocery shopping. If you were a Lovecraftian horror from an alternate dimension with a taste for human souls, I would imagine going out for dinner and drinks at a restaurant with friends was an experience you were rarely able to enjoy.
I had been in the restaurant a few times since beginning my employment, but it was mostly just in and out for restocking purposes. One time it was to help chase down a zombie who was trying to dine and dash (dine and shuffle, ba dum tss). But this was my first time actually dining here.
If one were to disregard the clientele, they could almost believe there was nothing overtly special about this particular eaterie. That was, until they sat down and began to actually examine their surroundings. The decorative artwork existed in that same banal subgenre found in an average chain Italian restaurant. Bland and forgettable scenes of idyllic European wineries Except the wood pile at the side of the living quarters was composed of bones and there seemed to be a decapitated body lying next to the stump decorated with an axe standing at a forty five degree angle. Portraits of a happy family in a sunny kitchen casually chopping the fingers off a disembodied arm. One painting towards the entrance to the kitchen was of a scared-looking man who seemed to be frozen midway through pounding on the canvas in an attempt to break his way out.
There were only around thirty tables in the restaurant, but they were spread far apart to accommodate diners of any size. Of those thirty tables, only six of them were occupied. Three by seemingly normal humans, if not for the noticeable blood splatters around each of their plates. A large gelatinous blue blob relaxed contentedly at another while a full sized human slowly digested inside of it. Another held a minotaur and a gorgon who gazed at each other with hunger, though whether it was for sex or dinner was impossible to tell. At the final table sat Satan in all his red-skinned, spiral-horned, cloven-footed glory. He seemed to be completely engrossed in his copy of Atlas Shrugged.
My eyes lingered on Satan for a bit, wondering if the traditional neutrality of the restaurant had maybe been taken a little too far. As a result, I jumped a little in my seat when the waiter spoke behind me.
“Sir, would you like to sample the house wine?”
I turned around and locked my eyes with a pair of dead ones that stared back at me. The vampire looked young, maybe eighteen or nineteen. His hair had that way-too-greased look that all vamps seemed to have. His gaunt skin looked almost as if it had been stretched over his skull and his canines bulged out grotesquely from his mouth. His gaze seemed to drip hate. Probably at the world in general, but it certainly felt like it was directed at me personally. I will never in a million years understand why people thought vampires were sexy.
“Sure, sparkles. Pour one out,” I responded.
The vampire grimaced and proceeded to pour a taste of deep red wine for me. “Aged fifty years, notes of oak, lavender, and brunette.”
I blinked at that last one, feeling a sharp tingle down my spine, knowing that it meant what I thought it meant.. This would be a line I hadn’t crossed yet. Butch watched me from across the table, his eyebrow cocked as if curious what I would do. I met his eyes and downed the glass. Still a trainee my ass.
I’m not sure exactly what this fact says about me, but I found the wine to be excellent.
“It’s delicious, but I probably couldn’t afford the bottle. Not when Butch is paying me half what he’s paying the temp. Just a virgin daiquiri for me.”
The bloodsucker nodded and moved around the table taking everyone's drink order. Babs gently nudged me and whispered “The waiter you just called ‘sparkles’ is Gwaed, the eldest son of the ruling vampire family in Europe. He's over six hundred years old.”
I looked at her with a slight smile. “Butch just admitted he's stuck on the mortal plane,” I whispered back. “How long has he been stuck here?”
“About five hundred years, I think.”
“Last week I called him a non-Tesla pigeon fucker. For me, “sparkles” is downright polite.”
Babs gazed at me thoughtfully. “You know, I'm putting the odds at about fifty-fifty for whether your personality is going to take you far in this lifestyle or get you killed in the next week.”
I shrugged. “If I’m going to be killed, I want to feel like I deserved it. Hey, if Sparkles is a prince, what the hell is he doing working here?”
“No idea, he would never talk about it. My guess is he or his dad owes Hal for something. That's how most people end up working here.”
“Not me, I volunteered.”
“Yeah, but you're pretty fucked up in general, right?”
“Fair enough.”
Butch glanced at us. “I think you two whispering together might actually be the most terrifying thing in this restaurant.”
“Don't be jealous, Butch,” I quipped. “You know you'll always be my bae.”
He rolled his eyes at me and turned back to Exmac. “I hate to admit it, but I think you're the first cupid I've ever met.”
“I'm not surprised,” Exmac said while helping himself to a piece of bread from the center of the table. “You don't really strike me as a one night stand kind of guy.”
Babs was occupied with pouring a little water onto a saucer for three headed quokka, so she didn't see the glance Butch sent her direction.
“I guess not. What's that have to do with it, though? Aren't you basically a heavenly matchmaker?”
Exmac squinted, “More like a divine eugenicist. When it's destiny for two people to bump uglies and push out a kid, they send me in.”
“Well that's a bit disillusioning,” Babs commented. “You don't inspire love then?
Exmac laughed. “When you hear stories about Cupid, how does it go? He fires an arrow at a couple of unsuspecting people. They run to each other and immediately start making out and dry humping each other. Does that sound like love to you? Sure, in the old days once a few periods were missed, they were pretty much forced to get married, and sometimes love would grow from the pairing. But that initial “can't keep your hands off each other” feeling? That's us, and that’s pure lust, Sugar Tits.”
Gwaed returned with our drinks. I wasn't sure what satanic bar they poached their mixologist from, but daiquiri was incredible. I quickly scanned the menu when I realized Gwaed had started taking food orders. Despite my experimentation with the wine, I wasn't ready to go full cannibal yet. Unfortunately that eliminated most of the menu, so I went with the plesiosaur sushi.
Babs and Butch started to bicker about his choice of Erymanthian boar; her claiming that he needed to start watching his blood pressure, and him arguing that he was functionally immortal. While I listened to their banter, I began to feel the prickling sensation of a pair of eyes studying me.
I looked across the restaurant and found myself locking eyes with Satan. He had closed his book and was contemplating me thoughtfully from his table. After a moment of us staring at each other, he tilted his head towards the door to the kitchen. He then stood up and casually strolled through them.
At some point I was really going to have to examine why I felt the compulsion to do the most recklessly irresponsible things. Because when most people see the devil attempt to lure them into the back of a restaurant that serves human, their response is to run the other way. My response was to mutter something about going to get another daiquiri and walk right into the kitchen after him.
I waved hello to the chef, a giant millipede who handled a dozen different sauce pans at once and nodded to the sous chefs, a large hairy man with giant tusks sprouting downwards as he garnished a person’s crushed head on a silver plate surrounded by kale and sprouts and a middle eastern man wearing a full tool belt who was sawing through a human leg with a hand saw.
I gritted my teeth as I continued past the kitchen into the pantry area. I hated coming in here. Although one wall of the long pantry contained all the normal professional kitchen ingredients, the other wall was lined with stacked, cages filled with terrified-looking people who immediately started begging me for help. I wasn’t so jaded yet that I didn’t feel that shock of horror and sink of guilt as I tried to keep an impassive face. Morality became far more complicated once you understood your true place on the food chain.
“Shut up,” growled a voice at the back of the pantry. The cages went quiet. “What the fuck are you doing here, Clear?”
“Three things, Satan,” I began, holding up three fingers. “One, how do you know my name? I know I’m already kind of a big deal around here, but I didn’t think the news of my exploits had gotten as far as your ears yet. Two, I’m thinking about putting out a petition to rename this place The Monster Mash, what do you think? Three, I know you’re the essence of pure evil and all that, but Ayn Rand? Seriously?”
Satan laughed. “I completely forgot, from your perspective, we haven’t met yet. But believe me, we’re old friends.”
“I dunno, I feel like I would remember that.”
“How about now?”
Satan vanished. Simultaneously, I felt a slight pressure on my left shoulder. I turned my head to see a tiny version of Lucifer standing there.
“No, really, Clear. You don’t need to feel bad pushing that kid off the swings, you told him you wanted a turn ten minutes ago! It’s fine, Clear, she’s a nice girl, you don’t need to wear a condom with her! It’s only Walmart, Clear, everybody shoplifts from Walmart once in a while! Don’t worry about it, Clear, everybody already expects you to drink the blood wine!”
The weight from my shoulder disappeared and the devil-looking guy popped back into full size in front of me again.
“You’re my shoulder demon?”
“That’s a bingo.”
“We just say bingo. So you’re not the real devil then?”
“Nope! Just your personal Jiminy Locust.”
“Hey, can you do one-handed pushups?”
“Can you hold a conversation that's not eighty percent movie references? Now I repeat, what the fuck are you doing here?”
“Waiting for my Nessie sushi. Why? Think I should have gone with dragon roll instead?
My demon stared at me. “It's amazing that no part of you needs my encouragement to constantly make shitty jokes.”
“If you’re my shoulder demon, you should already know I only make starting making bad jokes so that I would stop shitting myself instead.”
“And the next time I catch him alone, I’m going to slap Butch full in the face for that. Anyways, I just wanted to have a quick face to face with you and make sure you actually want to do this.”
“Shouldn't there be a shoulder angel having this talk with me?
“He quit when you were nineteen. He’s running the AA meeting in the third circle now.”
“Jesus, am I really that hard to work with?”
“Yes. Look, I agree this is out of my bailiwick, but this isn't the kind of descent into bad decisions I'm used to. This rabbit hole goes deep, Clear. Deep enough that even I have concerns about where we'll end up. You're close enough to the entrance that we can still climb back out. Get back to a normal life. We can get one of your old jobs back, find some hottie to settle down with, get a house with a man cave where we can get stoned and bang the babysitter after the kids go to bed. Trust me, it'll be a fair shake better than where we could end up if you go through that door to Purgatory.”
I stared at my shoulder demon in horror.
/////////////////////////////
“Clear, you need to calm the fuck down. You're drunk.”
“I am not!” I shouted as I filled my pockets with the iron powder Butch had used a few hours earlier. I had been lost in an existential dread throughout the remainder of dinner. “We just need to get going right fucking now and I want to be prepared, I've never been to Purgatory before. I haven't even been to Florida. Purgatory is like Florida, right? I feel like I heard that.”
Butch shrugged. “No, not at all. But also, yeah, kinda. It's still not so bad that you need to bring Excalibur.”
I paused in the process of clumsily strapping the huge sword across my back, before letting it clatter back to the ground. “You're right. We need a low profile. I'll just take the Cloak off Cowardice,” I said, pulling the black supervillain cloak off a shelf and flourishing it over my shoulders.
“Seriously, Clear, what the hell's gotten into you?”
“I don't want to work at IHOP again!” I yelled, my panic infusing my voice with more volume than I intended.
A sharp slap echoed across the store. I looked to the far end of the store to see Babs stalking away from a broadly grinning Exmac. “What?” he shouted after her. “Come on, it was a compliment!”
Babs walked up and glared at me. “We really had to recruit the first angelic being that walks through the door? I know we can do better than a cupid.”
“Look, I know he’s a little Weinstein-y,” I sighed, “but the faerie was only able to tell us where Hal was at the particular moment we asked the question. He could already be gone for all we know.”
Babs shook her head. “Fine. But one of you two needs to go have a talk with that guy. If I have to spend this entire trip hearing about his ideas for tattoos I should get on my chest, I’m going to feed him to the Rancor.”
I looked at Butch. “Do we have a -”
“It’s an idiom, you idiot.” Babs snapped at me.
“Give me a break, it’s only been a few weeks since I learned every other fucking thing was real.”
“Why did we put you in charge of this again?”
“It was my animal magnetism, wasn’t it? ”
“Kid,” said Babs sourly, “Get the cupid off my tits.”
I grunted. “Fine. Butch?”
“Go deal with the pervert angel, I’ll get us packed,” he told me.
I nodded and made my way over to Exmac who was thumbing through a copy of Hustler. He glanced up at me. “Don’t worry,” he told me, “I’ll behave myself going forward. I just like starting the bar off low. It’s the best way to continuously exceed expectations.”
“Believe me, I understand that philosophy better than most.”
He grinned at me. “I can always tell a kindred spirit.”
“Same. Never thought it would be with a cupid, though. I never really thought about what you guys would look like in reality, but I didn't think I expected…” I gestured to all of him. At Butch's polite request, Exmac had decided to spare us his “traditional” sash and overtly chubby nudity. I was still on the fence about whether the neon green velour jumpsuit was actually an improvement.
“If I'm gonna be hanging out in some other planes of existence for a while, I'm doing it in style.
“Is velour all the rage in Purgatory these days?”
He raised an eyebrow at me. “First time?”
“I’m still pretty new to the lifestyle. Should I be worried?”
Exmac gave me an appraising look up and down. My hands seemed to recognize his gaze and instinctually moved to cover my crotch.
“Don’t flatter yourself,” he told me scornfully, “I like my guys with a little more meat on their bones. I’d maybe reconsider that cloak before we go. It won’t really look out of place, but it gets pretty hot during the day.
I swept my cloak up nosferatically. “I need a plan B in case things go sideways. Also, don’t I look awesome in this thing? Vintage vampire might be my new look.”
“Are you drunk?”
“Why does everyone keep asking me that? You were with us at the restaurant, you saw everything I had.”
“You had four daiquiris.”
“Virgin daiquiris.”
There was an extended pause.
“Those were regular daiquiris with virgin blood in them, weren’t they?”
“Makes much more sense now that I know you’re a noob. Nothing fucks you up quite like virgin blood.”
I tried to quell the queasiness that washed over me. For a moment, I reconsidered the cloak. I had already done far more vampiring that day than was probably healthy for me..
“Are you two done blowing each other?” Babs was hefting a backpack over her shoulders. “If I don’t have enough time for a detour to heaven to replace Katniss Everhard over there, we definitely don’t have time for you to go mining for prostates.”
Butch looked up from his inspection of the Chekhov Gun and grinned at her. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I kind of missed how crass you get when you’re impatient.” He slipped the gun into the waistband of his pants and looked over at us. “She’s right, though. You guys all set?”
I walked back to the counter and pulled the soviet painting off the wall, making sure to keep my eyes from landing directly on it. “I think I’ll bring this along,” I said as I pulled off the frame and rolled it into a manageable tube. “It has that ‘come in handy’ feel to it.” I slipped the tube into the pack Butch had prepared for me. A quick glance inside showed a couple sandwiches, a few religious relics, a set of brass knuckles, a handheld crossbow, and a big bag of weed.
I pulled out the bag of weed. “I’m not complaining, but is this really necessary?”
“We may need to bribe our way through at some point,” Butch explained.
I replaced the weed and slid on the pack. “I’ll take your word for it.”
The purple door at the back of the shop opened and Jack popped his head out. He reached out a gnarled and clawed hand and pumped it up and down a few times.
“Plunger’s under the sink, Jack,” Butch told him. “We’ll probably be gone by the time you get out. You all good in here for the next couple days?”
Jack threw him a thumbs up and disappeared back into the bathroom.
I tried not to let my nervous eagerness show as Butch swept open the blue door to Purgatory. A vast desert wasteland greeted us. After what my shoulder demon said to me, I didn’t hesitate for a moment before passing through the threshold. We walked out onto the alkali sand, kicking up soft acrid clouds as our feet hit windswept clumps. Our surroundings seemed to be a large dried lake bed, completely flat and devoid of life for miles in any direction. Small dust devils sent spirals into the sky, blurring the distant mountains blocking the horizon. Towards the center of the desert, a twinkle of bright, colorful lights thrummed along with the slow distant beat of a joyous hymn.
“It’s going to take hours to walk there,” I complained. “Didn’t the faerie mention something about a subway?”
“Just wait, it’ll find us.”
That raised a few further questions, but I got distracted by the sound of the distant hymn dropping the beat. I began wondering exactly what kind of heavenly song would make me want to start twerking, when the ground began to shake violently below me.
I fell on my ass alongside Exmac and Babs. Butch managed to keep his feet and raised up a hand as if hailing a cab. Suddenly a gigantic beast erupted from the sand and slid to a stop before us. Its huge cylindrical body ended in a huge gaping maw lined with three foot long teeth that dripped saliva. Butch walked up to the creature’s mouth, grabbed ahold of it’s teeth and hauled himself into its mouth. He looked back at us. “You guys coming or what?”
The rest of us scrambled to our feet. I tried desperately to swallow the knot in my throat as I gripped the vibrating animal’s incisors and swung myself onto its tongue. When we were all safely (????) inside, the mouth slowly closed and I felt the huge worm begin to burrow under the ground again. Babs started up a flashlight, illuminating the small portion of orifice we occupied. The worm’s tongue undulated unpleasantly under our feet, keeping me perpetually attempting to keep my balance.
“I’ve got no strings, to hold me down, to make me fret, to make me frown. I had strings, but now I’m free. There are no strings on me.”
I thought I was singing under my breath, but Exmac turned to Butch to ask, “Is he always like this?”
“For as long as I’ve known him, yeah.”
“If you guys don’t think pinocchio jokes are appropriate while in the mouth of a giant sand worm, I just feel sorry for you,” I told them perfunctorily.
“Death Worm,” said Exmac
“Huh?”
“We’re in a Mongolian Death Worm. It’s a similar, but legally distinct creature.”
“I’m pretty sure Purgatory is outside the jurisdiction of most copyright laws.”
“I wouldn’t be if I were you,” Exmac warned, “All the major studios have branch offices out here.”
I shook my head, “Spoilsport. So how long are we going to have to stay inside Butch’s mom?”
I got a laugh out of Babs with that one, which also served to get Butch’s murderous look directed at her instead of me.
As it turned out, the answer to my question was about five more seconds. I felt the tongue under me attempt to spell out the alphabet as it broke the surface and shuddered to a halt.
My anxiety kicked into high gear as the maw began to open. I had been wrong, the distant music we had heard before was not a heavenly plea for redemption. Pounding electronic dance music poured in from the worm’s mouth and the undulating tongue unceremoniously pushed us out.
I landed in a superhero pose on the hard packed sand, my cloak swirling around me impressively. Babs gracefully stepped off the tongue and grinned down at me.
“Having fun?” she asked.
“I think I might still be drunk on virgin blood,” I told her. I looked around as the others clamored out of the worm’s mouth. I had been all wrong about Purgatory. I was expecting penitence, monotonous forms of torture, people praying for salvation maybe. Instead I saw large tents set up in rows forming semicircles several miles long. Humans and monsters in an eclectic array of costumes rode bicycles and scooters along dusty roads. Grotesquely decorated buses blasted music as crowds hung out of the windows, drinking and dancing. In the center of the desert area surrounded by the tent circles, a large sculpture of a stick figure glowed softly in the scorching daylight.
“Welcome to Purgatory,” Butch murmured.

It’s fucking freezing.
It’s fucking freezing.
It’s fucking freezing.
I repeat to myself on loop as I wait for the bus to arrive at Mt. Prospect. I’ve endured many cold winters in the Chicago suburbs, but this was by far the coldest that I could remember. I hug my purse close to my body, as if cheap lip balm and a compact mirror could radiate warmth.
It's hard to believe that it’s already been six months since I returned to the place where I grew up. At the ripe age of 33, my life has officially come full circle.
My hands burrow into my jean pockets, seeking warmth. I pull out a cheap disposable lighter that I contemplate flicking on but I resist the urge. I have carried it with me for the past 16 years, and yet, I have never used it—not even this morning, on the coldest day of my life.
The bus finally arrives, seven minutes late. I offer the driver a half-hearted smile. In minus 25-degree temperature, those seven minutes feel like a lifetime, buddy.
As the bus fills up, everyone sits in silence, honoring the unspoken agreement that nobody actually wants to be here. This pact doesn’t last long...
In the back, an elderly lady starts to yell. At first, it seems like she’s just rambling to herself. Nothing this bus hasn’t seen before.
The lady frantically yanks on the stop cord. Her yelling turns into shrieks. Within seconds the shrieks turn into a BLOOD CURDLING SCREAM. This catches everyone’s attention.
The bus driver remains stoic. God bless him. The last thing we need is this bus going any slower. The lady stumbles into the aisle, asking if we hear the noise. The knocking.
“STOP THE BUS!!!” she screams repeatedly.
With a desperate cry, she continues to tug on the stop cord. “YOU HAVE TO STOP THE BUS! PLEASE!” she hopelessly shouts at the bus driver. Her mouth quivers with fear.
“IT’S GOING TO KILL ME!”
The woman stumbles towards the front, digging her nails into each seat cushion she passes. Other people on the bus begin to lock eyes with each other. But not her. Never her. The last thing you want is to lock eyes with a crazy person.
She howls in agony. She says the knocking is getting louder. Unbearable. She pleads... “YOU HAVE TO STOP THE BUS. I NEED TO GET OUTSIDE!!!”
The bus driver steps off the gas, monitoring the situation. The woman starts to convulse. This gets a few people’s attention, including mine.
I whip around and look her dead in the eye. That’s when I realize she’s not crazy. Something truly terrifying is happening to her. I don’t know what, and I certainly can’t explain it, but the look on her face did not resemble that of a deranged person. Something was haunting her.
I yell at the driver to stop and then reach for the lady’s hand. “Everything is going to be alright,” I tell her, but my voice trembles. Her face becomes translucent as veins bulge like leeches trapped inside. Her nails dig into my arm as she clenches it.
“It’s too late. Once you hear it, you only have one minute...” She tells me in a gurgly voice like she’s halfway possessed. “One minute to what?!” I ask as the bus comes to a halt.
Her nails dig deeper into my skin. Drawing blood. “One minute to what???” I repeat.
“Get outside,” she says with one final breath.
She collapses to the ground. I don’t let go. I know she’s gone but I can’t let her go. I squeeze her hand and try to will her back to life. Tears flood down my cheek, but there’s nothing I can do.
It’s not until the paramedics arrive that I finally let go. I watch them take her off the bus. I swear, the second her body feels the outdoor air, there’s a moment of tranquility that passes over her. Again, I can’t explain it, and I have no idea why she needed to go outside. But she finally did.
It just happened to be a half-hour too late.
***
As soon as I get home, I grab my running shoes and take off. I need to clear my mind.
I hop the side fence of the football stadium, just like Alexis and I used to do. Back then, we’d smoke before practice. I know, stoners don’t typically run track. But hey, why should that stop us from living our best adolescent life?
After sneaking on, I walk past the Track and Field record board. There I was—Delaney Stevens, Girls’ 400-meter champ. Set records my freshman year. Check. Sophomore year. Check. Junior year. Check.
Don’t ask me what happened my senior year.
Next on the list was Alexis Carlson, Girls’ 1-mile champ. But more importantly, the best friend I ever had. The only person who truly understood me. We set this stadium on fire our first three years.
Again, don’t ask what happened our senior year.
I take off my jacket. It’s still fucking freezing. The news is right; this is the coldest winter we’ve had in a century.
First period. No gym. The only time the track is completely empty. My sanctuary.
I try to warm up, but I can’t focus. I can’t stop thinking about the lady on the bus ...A minute to get outside? …But only if she hears a noise? …I don’t know. I need to focus on something else.
I dig my feet into the turf and press start on my watch…
Hitting your thirties means realizing your body is no longer indestructible. That’s why I still run. To test my limits. As I round the first turn, I look at the time… 14.09 seconds
I yearn for the legs of my youth. Back when I set our school’s 400-meter record. 51.26 seconds. Pre-bionic leg. Before I had a screw in my knee and an anchor in my heel. The cold doesn’t help ease the pain. I fight through it... 29.52 seconds
I start to envision a packed stadium. My parents, if they were still here. Alexis. Coach Smith, who used to despise us. But then again, what coach enjoys finding his best runners high out of their minds during third period? You get away with a lot when you’re talented... 46.31 seconds
Homestretch. Can I still break a minute? My lungs feel like a balloon ready to pop. My reconstructed leg is a stride away from deteriorating. I cross the finish line and stop my watch...
59.57 seconds. I still got it.
I catch my breath and look up for a brief second. My eyes widen as I see something strange… A kid barrels out of a classroom door like a bolt of lightning. He stumbles outside, flushed white. Gasping for air. Letting out a piercing scream.
The panicked look on his face is familiar but I shrug it off. I take off my shoes and do some light stretching. As I grab my bag to leave, I hear a voice—
“Delaney? Delaney Stevens?”
I turn around and see a man standing with a visor. A fucking visor. How lame?
“I’m in the presence of greatness! Didn’t know you moved back.”
Yeah, nobody knows. That’s the point of moving back to your hometown. You don’t boast about it. You just pray you don’t run into anyone you know. Guess my luck ran out. He smiles at me—
“Ryan Rubino. We ran together. I was a senior when you—”
Of course. I had the BIGGEST crush on you my freshman year. I don’t say that, obviously. Gotta play it cool. Which isn’t hard when you’re talking to a guy wearing a fucking visor. I interrupt him, “Yeah, I remember. You ended up playing football at Wisconsin, right?”
He nods proudly. He then tells me that he’s the new gym teacher and track coach. He says it with a giant smile. Like he’s out here saving lives. But then again, who am I to judge?
We chat for a bit. Small talk, mostly. I try to keep it that way with everyone. Commitment’s never been my friend. Before I leave he asks me why I hopped the fence. He says I could have entered through the front like everyone else. I lie and tell him it’s an old tradition.
It’s easier than telling him the truth.
***
I knew it was just a matter of time before I ran into someone I went to school with. Buffalo Grove isn’t that big. Population of 42,794. I guess if we’re getting technical, it’s 42,792 now. I don’t think the census authorities took into account my parents passing away last month.
I walk through the snow-covered streets. A winter wonderland. Too bad I hate it here. Free rent is free rent though. Even if it’s a shitty outdated house. Guess that’s the reward you get for taking care of your sick parents. ALS took my mom, Parkinson’s my dad. Apparently, they were just an “Alzheimer’s” away from scratching off the neurodegenerative disease lottery ticket.
I ascend the steps of my childhood home. I used to think moving back wouldn’t be bad. Nostalgia and familiarity never hurt anyone. But man, nothing fun happens out here. Prior to the bus incident, the craziest thing that happened this month was the police finding a naked dude passed out in his front yard. Kudos to him. At least someone here was trying to have some fun.
When I enter my house I hear a rattling noise. I turn to my living room to see the culprit… an oxygen mask knocks against a tank. Next to the tank is a hospital bed and wheelchair—the remnants of hospice. I should probably call someone to finally pick it all up. That’s tomorrow's problem, I tell myself. For the tenth time this week.
I turn the shower on. As I strip out of my clothes, I notice a giant gash on my arm. The lady on the bus did some damage. Apparently, she’s the only octogenarian without rheumatoid arthritis. I clean the cut and hop into the shower. The warm water feels amazing. Unfortunately, the moment doesn’t last long…
I hear a light tapping on the front door. I pop my head out... Tap tap. Hopefully it’s just the Amazon guy. I run my fingers through my hair, trying to get rid of all the conditioner when— TAP TAP. I hear it again. I continue to ignore it; I’m not letting a delivery guy ruin my shower.
I let the warm water tickle my back but… OW FUCK!! The water starts to burn my skin. Piping hot. I quickly turn the water off and grab my robe.
KNOCK KNOCK.
Talk about one needy Amazon guy. I tighten my robe and run downstairs. I fling the door open but… nobody is there. No packages or anything. I step outside to look around. Whatever, I slam the door and get ready.
Before I head to work, I pop into the grocery store. As I’m about to step inside, I turn and see a woman racing out of a salon. Mid-haircut. The highlighting foils shake loose as she screams bloody murder. The sound pierces through the shopping center. It takes me a moment to catch my breath. Shit, this cold snap is making people go crazy.
There’s other Jewel-Oscos closer but I like this one. This particular one is where Alexis and I got caught stealing a copy of Maxim. The erotica heist took place the day after Alexis told me she wasn’t into guys. I told her she was lucky; the world caters to those trying to see a pair of tits.
As I peruse down the aisles, I reach into my pant pocket and take out the disposable lighter. Just holding it comforts me. It was the last thing Alexis ever gave me. Trivial yet priceless… isn’t that the microcosm of a good friendship? As I make my way to the check-out, I pass a woman. Jayme Fisher’s mom. She gives me a dirty look. Been getting that a lot since I’ve moved back.
Probably because I killed my best friend.
***
I finally stumble into work. A minute before noon That’s the perk about having your own consulting business; they don’t have to know you spent the morning playing hooky. The client that I’m currently working for is on the 18th floor of the Franklin Center.
To be honest, I haven’t been fully engaged in work lately. Taking six months off to care for your parents will do that to you. I sit at my desk and stare out the window. At least I have a great view of downtown. And for the most part, I do enjoy what I do. Especially since most gigs only last a few months. There’s a subtle beauty in leaving right before anyone really gets to know you.
Even though I’m supposed to be working on a marketing deck, my mind goes elsewhere. I continue to think about the lady on the bus. I mean, burying your parents is one thing. Watching someone beg for mercy before a torturous death is another.
At least after work, I have a distraction. A date with a rando that I matched with. And yes, this goes against the whole commitment-phobe thing, but I’m bored as hell and praying this guy is just looking for a casual fling. At least his ten different shirtless photos suggest it.
I arrive at Prairie House Tavern and search for a “James Heald, 37. Lawyer. But looking for a partner in crime. Let’s due process and then do each other” Jesus, I just remember those lines from his bio. I can already tell this date is going to be a dud.
At least I know all the exits here. That’s my M.O. If I know a date isn’t going well, I just pretend to go to the bathroom and book it. I arrive at the table and sit down. James Heald, Esq tells me about growing up in Skokie and how he loves the Bears. My mind is elsewhere…
I can’t get the image of the old lady out of my head. Her translucent skin. The harrowing screams. It’s been one hell of a day. As Flannel Boy continues to rattle off the Chicago Bears roster, I cover the gash on my arm with my sleeve and focus back onto the conversation.
“-- Collins?” he asks. Shit, I didn’t hear a single word just now. I perk up and confidently say “Yeah. We gotta replace him at left tackle.” Phew, I totally played that off. James looks at me like I just killed one of his six cats. He responds “No, Tom Collins. Do you want one too?” I then notice the waiter standing next to us. Yeah, this date isn’t gonna have a happy ending.
I tell James that I don’t drink anymore. Haven’t since the drunk driving accident. I don’t tell him that, of course. Although that information is just a quick Google search away. As if guys actually background check their dates. Before the drinks come I tell James I need to run to the bathroom.
I walk home with a smile. At the moment, he probably thinks I suffer from the world's worst case of IBS or that I've left him. Boys can be naive; I'd bet on the former.
I boil water and grab a bag of ramen. The hot chili one. Alexis and I used to live off of this. It wasn't until our junior year that we realized spicy foods and working out can lead to major acid reflux. You live and learn.
I grab my phone and turn on some mid-2000s emo. You know, some Taking Back Sunday. A little My Chem. Dashboard. The kind of music Alexis and I would rock out to before track meets. I grab a spatula, ready to lip-sync when—
Tap tap.
I turn down the music, not sure if I actually heard someone at the door.
TAP TAP.
My head jolts towards the back door. Wait, which side of the house is it coming from?
TAP TAP… TAP TAP…
Now it feels like the noise is coming from upstairs. Is it the pipes?
KNOCK… KNOCK…
The walls shake. Is someone in my fucking house??
The lights start to flicker. Or maybe it’s just my vision going in and out. I’m not sure. All I know is that my heart is racing. I start to see shadows dancing on the walls.
KNOCK… KNOCK… KNOCK… KNOCK…
Fuck. That’s not the knock of a delivery guy. I feel like I’m having an out-of-body experience. My eyes widen— the lady on the bus!
I then realize, whatever was haunting her… IS NOW HAUNTING ME!!
I book it towards the front door but I crash into the hospice bed. My whole reality is disoriented.
The knocking intensifies. The water from the stove boils over. KRSH!! The windows shatter.
I try to tune everything out. I just need to get outside. The room starts to spin. I don’t know how much time I have left but I know 60 seconds ain’t much.
All of the sudden, I feel a figure standing behind me. I don’t know what the fuck it is but it ain’t human. It breathes on the back of my neck, taunting me.
KNOCK… KNOCK… KNOCK… KNOCK… KNOCK… KNOCK… KNOCK…
I tumble through the living room, trying to find an escape.
THUMP! A fallen tree crashes into my living room. I don’t know what’s real and what’s not. As I try to dash away, I slam into the oxygen tank. Suddenly, it feels like my entire house is crushing me. The shadowy figure continues to lurk behind me. With all my might, I barrel through whatever door is in front of me, and I—
Land on a fresh pile of snow. I’m alive. I’m fucking alive.
The ice jolts me awake. I see someone shoveling snow across the street. My neighbor. I turn to him and ask if he sees it…whatever the fuck was in my house.
He shakes his head like I’m crazy.
Part 2
Part 3 - FINAL

Each house has 100 members. The Passage is set to match the top 50 students in each house against he bottom 50, like a twisted March Madness bracket. While the top 50 usually prevail, there are always some upsets. Sevro is one of those, as he was a low draft. Cassius is enraged at this loss of his brother, Julian, but befriends Darrow not knowing it was Darrow that killed him. I bet you $1.50 that this comes back up at some point.
The surviving 50 students meet Fitchner. Fitchner tells them that they will be given a fortress to go to war with the other 11 houses. To win, they must make one House out of many. This is usually accomplished by capturing slaves using the Standard each house is given. Slaves, however, are only bound by honor, and they may rebel or disregard orders from their new House under only the consequence of dishonor. That matters to some more than others. Students are not to kill one another unless it’s inevitable (what?) or accidental.
In an early encounter with another House, Darrow takes possession of a scythe, leading to his nickname “The Reaper” (not to mention the Reaping song that Eo sung). House Mars is in turmoil, and they quickly fraction off into four tribes: one led by Tits, one by Antonia, one by Darrow and Cassius, and the last being Sevro just doing his own thing. Sevro is a wilderness man, being the only student that possess the skills and knowledge to survive in the wilderness alone. Through this time, Darrow becomes close with Roque, Lea, and Quinn. He also insinuates to Cassius that it was Titus who killed Julian.
Darrow’s faction and Titus’ faction start fighting each other. Seems counter-productive. Titus’ tribe is running out of food and water, and have no way to make fire, so they begin brutal raids on House Ceres. Darrow’s tribe witnesses these raids, in which Titus & his tribe implement brutal tactics like torture, rape, and murder.
Darrow’s small, ragged, band won’t be able to take on Titus, so Darrow enlists the support of Mustang from house Minerva (by tricking her, essentially). Mustang is a spicy little pickle, and she agrees, along with her well-fed and well-trained army, to support Darrow in retaking House Mars – then imprison Titus and his crew. During the attack on House Mars, Darrow and Cassius get trapped in a freezing lake. House Minerva is there, but they seem more than happy to just watch Darrow and Cassius freeze to death. Enter Sevro. Sevro shows up, fitted out in wolfskin like a Viking, and rescues them from the lake. Sevro then serves a crucial role in retaking House Minerva’s banner and cook. Sevro quickly becomes Darrow’s most trusted lieutenant as the form and lead the “Howlers”, a group of low drafts who all copy Sevro’s wolfskin garb.
Mustang is trapped in Mars castle. Darrow wins a little skirmish against House Minerva, then trades his new captives and the captured standard in exchange for Mars castle and all its members. This solidifies Darrow as the leader of the House. When Darrow and Mustang part ways, she warns him about another student that is much harder and smarter than Darrow. This is the Jackal, and he’s wreaking havoc in the South.
Darrow talks to Titus, now held captive under Darrow’s control. It becomes clear that Titus is also a Red-turned-Gold, so Darrow allows Cassius to kill him in order to maintain his own cover. Darrow then makes an allegiance with House Diana, in which they’re to capture House Minerva’s castle and troops. House Diana then tries to betray Darrow/Mars, but our bro comes out on top, and ends up enslaving House Diana. Mustang, however, escaped capture along with her House’s standard, and Darrow pursues her. He finds her, but lets her escape. Awww.
Throughout this game, Darrow has proven himself a cunning and effective leader – but flawed, and sometimes self-serving. Atonia, Vixus, and Cassandra are bribed by the Jackal in order to assassinate Darrow. Darrow narrowly escapes, so the Jackal ups the ante. In an attempt to lure out Darrow, the Jackal capture and kill Lea. This enrages Roque, who had a bit of a thing for her. Later on, Cassius is given a HoloCube by the Jackal’s lieutenant, Lilath au Faran, that shows Darrow killing Julian. Now Cassius is pissed off and he challenges Darrow to a duel. He defeats Darrow easily, leaving Darrow to die, and becomes the Primus of House Mars.
After the duel, Darrow is rescued and nursed back to health by Mustang. The two form an alliance based in logic and lust, and they recruit wondering Oathbreakers – slaves that chose to disobey orders and face the shame it will bring from the Institute. These Oathbreakers are recruited as free people, not slaves. Darrow learns that the Jackal’s real name is Adrius au Augustus, the son of the Arch Governor of Mars – the man who ordered Eo’s death. Oh snap. This entire game seems to be rigged in Adrius’ (and the Jackal’s) favor, with many corrupt Proctors defending and protecting him in order to ensure his success.
Darrow and Mustang begin their rise by showing House Mars, and Sevro, that Darrow is still alive and kickin’. They free some of House Mars’ slaves, including Pax, and take others as slaves (like Tactus), then proceed to take House Ceres fortress and all of their troops as slaves. They will free these slaves upon confirmation of their loyalty. Later that night, Darrow is awakened by news that Tactus was caught attempting to rape a House Ceres girl. Learning from the mistake he made with Titus, Darrow lashes Tactus and then has Pax lash him – making a point that a crime committed by one is a crime committed by all. This instills fanatic loyalty within House Mars and cements Darrow as their leader, as The Reaper.
Fitchner reveals that some of the Proctors have considerable stake in the Jackal’s victory, and they will gladly kill Darrow if he gets in the way of the Jackal’s success. Fitchner recommends that Darrow keep his head down, play his part, and just survive. Fitchner also reveals that if a House is eliminated, their Proctor must leave. Darrow seizes this opportunity to attack Fitchner, throwing him in one of House Apollo’s cells. With this news, Darrow’s goal becomes to eliminate houses which would remove the most dangerous Proctors from the board. His sights are set on Apollo and Jupiter. Darrow launches a blitz attack on Apollo, taking the House within an hour. Next up, House Jupiter.
At House Jupiter, they find little resistance as most of Jupiter’s forces are laying siege to House Mars. They meet Lucian, the garrison leader of Jupiter. Darrow’s men celebrate their victory, and Darrow reveals that he knows Lucian is the Jackal. The Reaper reveals that his men are not all drunk, as they appear to be, and Mustang and Pax are roaming the castle, cleaning up whatever forces the Jackal has hidden away. In at attempt to show Golds are vain and self-serving, Darrow asks if the Jackal would remove his own hand to leave – since he had no issues eating his fallen troops in order to survive. Surprisingly, the Jackal does so. The Jackal kills Pax and leaves; aided by corrupt Proctors that refused to disengage once their houses were eliminated. Darrow pursues the Jackal.
During the chase, Darrow kills Proctor Apollo, and learns that the proctors have kidnapped Mustang. Enraged, Darrow storms Mount Olympus – the floating residence of the proctors – with his army and the Howlers. He defeats all of them. Darrow has Sevro alter the tape that is to be broadcast to the rest of the outside world, and sets Mustang off to capture the Jackal. Darrow learns from Fitchner that Mustang is actually Virginia au Augustus, the Jackal’s twin sister. This sets Darrow’s spidy senses tingling, and he returns to House Mars with advanced weaponry from Olympus’ armory, expecting a battle between joined forces of the Jackal and Mustang.
With the new weapons, Darrow & gang are able to easily defeat Jupiter’s forces that are besieging Mars’ castle. The members of House Mars flock to Darrow, including Roque whom Darrow had assumed dead. Cassius declares a blood feud with Darrow over the killing of his brother. Mustang returns with her brother bound and naked. This proves her loyalty to him. The capture of the Jackal makes Darrow become Darrow au Andromedus, the Reaper of Mars, ArchPrimus of the Institute of Mars.
With his newfound success, Darrow is eligible to serve any of the Great Houses on Mars. Darrow receives an offer from Lorn au Acros to mentor him. However, Darrow accepts a position as a lancer for House Augustus and the ArchGovernor – knowing it will provide him a better opportunity for his ultimate goal: REVENGE.

Ok, so i got my tubes removed in august of 2022 when i was 21. Im almost 23, and i can't deal with periods anymore. I dont want kids and i fucking hate myself every single month when my period comes. I get extremely bad cramping, my tits feel like they're gonna pop, i have explosive diarrhea literally every day while on it, i get so emotional i want to die because i have bpd too, so that's a great mix. I just cant deal with it anymore. My body torturing me all because i was born with a uterus, something ill never use and forever hate. Anyone who has gotten a hysterectomy PLEASE give me advice. My tubal removal went smoothly, but hysterectomies are a more serious surgery. Hows sex after? Do you feel your intestines shift into their new position? Were your bowel/urinary movements effected? How long did it take to be able to move around 100% On your own without pain? I want all the info please because i want this fuckin worthless torture device OUTTTT!
Edit- Its more about the mental part of it. I am disgusted by anything that includes kids. My body is literally punishing me for not getting pregnant when its physically impossible. It makes me want to die. I dont want kids, never will, and im done dealing with my useless organ punishing me for not wasting my life slaving over kids i dont even want.