What's better than a classic Disney Princess story? A dark and perverted one!
Before we go ahead let me tell you just how dark and perverted I am talking about here,
I am into everything but some dark fetishes that turn me on the most are rough anal, public places, degradation, humiliation, corruption, risk play, pain, unhygienic environments, claustrophobic places, voyeurism , impregnation, non-con, interfaith, rimming, toilet-play , cum-play, food-play, nose-play, jewelry, thick hair, bun drop, sexy ponytails, thick braids, even using hair to jerk off, hatefuck, misogyny, fixing a fake feminist, ripping clothes, slapping, ass to mouth, shame, contrast (social status, looks), blasphemy, Breeding, Generational Breeding/incest.
With that put of the way here is the plot,
Frozen :- Hans was Able to convince the people of Arendelle that Elsa was a witch and she was going to put the entire kingdom in an eternal winter. Anna who was powerless since people feared her of being a witch as well since she was Elsa's sister. Hans knee he can't kill both the sisters as he needed to Marry one in order to become the king. He makes a deal with Anna that if she agrees to be his wife, he will spare Elsa's life.
With that said, I would love to explore and brainstorm a completely new plot if you are interested.
I'm aiming for a long-term commitment to this roleplay, so reliability and communication are key. Let's work together to create a story that captivates us both and keeps us coming back for more.
Thanks for reading!

Here we are again in the shit stew that is the Fallowveil trailer park. We’ve got soul eating strippers, jobs that kill us, and plenty of weirdos, both the trailer trash and the potentially paranormal variety. It’s the place where even your own computer sometimes threatens to kill you. I can’t tell if I should be worried, or annoyed that all my neighbors have such irresponsible web habits. I know it’s not me that brings in all these machine wiping viruses.
So even though I got a system error that literally said “you’re useless and you should die” I’m less interested in that. Stupid thing. Like I don’t already know I’m useless. That’s not what I’m depressed about.
Well… I suppose it's tangentially related.
I hope anyone reading will forgive me. I’m feeling the sting of rejection right now. It was really stupid of me to ask. Especially now. Nobody here really likes me. They’ve only been nice to me as a courtesy because I was almost involved in a god damn shootout. And my idiot self decided that was the perfect time to push one of my few friends all the way away. Never ask your friends out on dates. It ruins everything.
So there’s this woman. I’ve talked about her in the past. Trista Ramone. She lives in the far back corner of the trailer park. You can instantly tell which unit is hers because she’s covered every square inch of the property with gardens and a rabbit hutch. The place usually has beads and colorful flags hanging on its walls as well. She’s kind of a right winger’s nightmare. I know some of those flags represent various lgbtq plus communities.
She and I have been friendly in the past. We’re both night shift workers. We crossed paths quite a bit going to and from work so we struck up a friendship over the years.
Let’s just ripped the band aid off. Recently I’ve started thinking I had… stronger feelings for Trista. I got stupid and decided to tell her about them. She wasn’t interested. I get why. We have very different lifestyles. I like meat, and she thinks the meat industry is murder. I’m not willing to give up meat, and she’s not willing to give up her beliefs. It's as simple as that. Now things are incredibly awkward with one of my closer friends and I’m still spiraling into self loathing, where I belong.
She swore up and down that she absolutely still wants to be friends with me, but I’m not sure I believe her. The look she gave me when I told her I’d like to ask her out. It looked like sadness, but a small part of me is convinced it was pity, or worse, disgust and loathing, and that small part gave me ever shuts the fuck up. But anyway, she gave me permission to write about her.
She is one of the creepy fixtures of our little neighborhood after all. She told me to make her seem as insane and scary as I possibly could and that she should get to kill me at the end. She also handed me a few of her high school yearbooks, advised me to chat with another neighbor of ours who she went to school with, and to only use creepy rumors for the rest.
Part of me is really willing to describe her as awful, but that’s just my anger. I don’t like that part of me. Trista’s not a bad person at all. She’s just weird and she doesn’t want to date me. God damn it, Petunia’s right. I need therapy.
So, I’ve told the story of the sexy, scary lady living in a polycule here in the trailer park. I think she’s got a bigger heart than she lets on. I’ve talked about the stories surrounding the Schroeder Slaughterhouse. Now let’s talk about the hippy everyone thinks is a vampire.
She’s a taller woman, maybe five-seven or eight, and she’s skinny. Her typical wardrobe is… interesting. Try to imagine your typical new-age hippy/stoner girl, wearing colorful sarongs, crop-tops, beanies, baggy sweaters, T-shirts with colorful sayings on them, sandals, boots woven from some sort of exotic plant, beaded necklaces, bracelets, a few too many piercings and some intricate tattoos. Can you picture that kind of person? Well, take that and dip them in “goth” dye. Everything is black, and contrasts to her pale white complexion, her eyes are this unusual violet color, and then make the woman wearing all that seem kind of depressed about something. That’s the look Trista has going on. Like if Wednesday Addams was forced to dress up for Hippy Day.
I’ve heard people call her an emo vampire, but as a former emo myself, she doesn’t fill out all the criteria. She doesn’t typically wear any super tight pants or cake on the eyeshadow. I guess she’s just Trista. It might sound weird (and it is) but the whole thing suits her. Her style, tattoos, and complexion all create this image of skinny vampiric waif with a mysterious past and a freaky sarcastic attitude and I found the whole thing… kinda hot.
Trista keeps to herself. She’s made the most out of her little corner of the trailer park. Like I said, she decked out her unit with garden squares, and a Rabbit pen. No idea why she’s allowed to do that. A lot of these places don’t allow pets. I heard she was also trying to put in a beehive too, but her neighbors are fighting her on that one. Our park is a bit too condensed for bees. She has a permit to grow hemp, but of course it’s not for recreational use. She treats it and uses it to weave things like handbags, clothes, and other stuff. There’s a consignment store in town that sells all kinds of things Trista has crafted herself. So she’s handy and self sufficient too. She paints, she carves wood, she weaves, she crochets, she sews, and who knows what else. She’s so good at her little crafts that apparently she’s able to support herself just selling them and working part time at the Moonlight Inn outside of town.
She’s also relatively friendly. I almost feel bad calling her weird, but here’s the thing, I’ve seen some REALLY weird shit. People jokingly call her a vampire, and she seems to embrace that, but part of me seriously wonders. The big clue is, like I mentioned, she’s completely nocturnal. She’s always asleep during the day, and every blind and curtain is drawn tight. The one time she came out during the day, she had on this full body suit with a helmet with UV glass and everything. Even then, she only showed up to give Petunia a hug, before leaving again.
That was the first time I saw Trista, come to think of it. I was kind of intrigued. It was kind of hard not to be when someone shows up to a community cookout in a freaking astronaut suit. I approached Petunia after she left.
“Who the heck was that?” I wondered.
“MASON! I’m so glad you could make it! You’ve been here about three months now! How’d that job interview go?”
“Oh. It went well. I might be doing janitorial work soon.”
“Night shift?”
“Maybe. I’m not sure.”
“If it’s the night shift, you’ll definitely meet the person who just left. That’s Trista. She’s the girl with the rabbits in the far corner. Poor girl. She’s got a really bad skin condition. Can’t let sunlight touch her.”
“Oh. Is she like… albino or something?”
“No, she’s got pigment. I don’t remember what the condition is called. I guess it started in high school or something. You’d have to ask her. And hey! If you work the night shift, you’ll probably get to chat with her!”
Petunia wasn’t wrong. I started working as a nighttime janitor for a number of local businesses. That was when I first started noticing the pale goth hippy. She rides around on a moped, with her dark hair and her sarong barely billowing behind her. I couldn’t see her face through the helmet, but she waved to me as she passed by.
The next time I saw her, she was jogging, but here’s where it gets weird. When I first stepped outside, all I saw was a blur. It actually startled me as I whipped toward it, but then there was this skinny tattooed pixie, somehow still looking like a stonehippy/vampire in jogging gear. I swear she was moving inhumanly fast when I first noticed her. That was when we introduced ourselves. She actually jogged over to say hello.
“Hey! You’re the new guy right?”
“Oh, uh, yeah. My name’s Mason!” I reached out to shake the pretty girl’s hand, like an awkward loser. She smirked and shook my hand. Her grip was weirdly strong, and a bit cold.
“I’m Trista. I’m the weirdo in the back with the rabbits.”
“Trista… oh, are you the one who has a thing with sunlight? I think Petunia mentioned you.”
“Yup! That’s me. Xerodoma pigmentosum. Sunlight hurts. I hate that it hurts.” She lamented.
“That’s gotta be rough,” I said sympathetically.
“You get used to it. You work at night?”
“Yeah. Works better for me.”
“I get that.”
And so on and so on. She’s pretty cool, with a bit of hilarious snark in there. And she secretly procured recreational weed she was willing to share. I kept working the night shift just hoping for another chance to talk to her and possibly buy a joint. Eventually she invited me over to share a joint. The inside of her place was actually pretty sparse and spartan compared to the outside. Though she was a fan of hanging beads. Most of the main room was taken up by her various crafting projects and supplies. Hemp weaves, some paintings, and even a wood carving of what I think was a rabbit, but it wasn’t anywhere near complete.
I followed her to her kitchen where she reached into the very back of her pantry and pulled out a shoebox. Inside was her stash, but there was something else which I found very strange. It was a pack of syringes and a thing I assume is to sterilize syringes. I know what you’re thinking, and that was my first thought too. It’s a poor neighborhood, the woman already smokes weed illegally, it’s not that big a shock that maybe she was involved in other drugs too. I decided not to ask at the time. We shared our joint, and we laughed, a lot. She made fun of me for being a lightweight, while I got completely hypnotized staring at the patterns of a shawl she had woven.
Months went by and we got closer, but I couldn’t forget those syringes. After a while I got worried. I’ve seen what heroine does to people. So the next time I went over to smoke and eat (vegan) pizza with her, I asked.
“Trista? Are you using anything other than weed?”
“Drugs?”
“Yeah.”
“No. Why?”
“You can tell me if you are.”
“Mason, sweetheart, I’m a stoner. I don’t fuck around with anything else and I never have.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Okay. Can I ask what that set of syringes are for?”
“Oh. In my stash box? Those are… part of my condition. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Oh. Is it like… embarrassing?”
“Yeah. So don’t ask. Can we just watch a movie?”
So I don't ask anymore. But I still have no idea what she does with those syringes. Based on what I read about that Xerodoma Pigmentosum thing she says she has, I have no clue what she would need to inject herself with.
Another time she asked me to check on her rabbits for her during the day, as her usual “sitter” had something come up. All I had to do was chop up the lettuce and carrots she left out. As I was enjoying the adorable fluffy faces, one of Trista’s neighbors, a woman named Bridget, poked her head outside her door.
“Hey. Do you know what Trista injects those rabbits with?”
“I… what?”
“I’ve seen her use syringes on those rabbits. She said she was just giving them medicine, but I swear I see her inject them every week.”
“I… I wouldn't know. She just asked me to feed them.”
“I love Trista, but that always seemed so weird. She has to know vaccines are a hoax!” I tuned the woman out after that one. My mind was on that set of syringes. Why would she be using them on rabbits? These things were her pets.
I was starting to crush on her by then. But I couldn’t help feeling weirded out by that. I was actually going to confront her, but the next time I came to visit, she was literally inside the Rabbit hutch, on her back, squealing with delight as her rabbit friends nuzzled and played with her.
“Bonnibelle! That tickles! Marcy! No chewing. Finn? Watch where you’re sticking that foot! Jake? Where are you? EEEEE Lumpy! Not the neck!”
It was as silly and adorable as it sounds. She was forced to whip herself upright when two of her little friends tried to burrow under her dress. She finally stood up with a laugh, cradling a rabbit in her arms and cooing at it.
There was just no way in hell this woman was doing anything that would hurt these animals. Bridget is a paranoid antivax weirdo anyway. If Trista was using syringes on the rabbits, I was convinced it was only for their benefit.
So life went on. I got more and more reclusive over the years. Petunia, Trista, and my next door neighbor Fred were the only things keeping me remotely connected to the outside. And so we get to now. So let’s see. What are the stories about the weird vampire woman?
Well, there’s the fact that she jogs at night, solo, in a poor neighborhood. Petunia keeps the shitty people contained and behaving for the most part, but I still wouldn’t exactly call it safe, especially for a young skinny woman. But she does it without a care in the world.
There’s one strange event that some people like to connect to this. I never knew this guy, but from what I hear he was a total weirdo who leered at anyone even remotely female. And this is despite the fact he was married. His name was Josh.
I remember him a bit. He’s the guy that Petunia chased away from one of her barbecues. Supposedly he was heard saying inappropriate things to the groups of ten year old girls that were playing in the bounce house Petunia rented. Telling them how pretty they were. Trying to coax them to take off their jackets. Police reports were filed but ultimately nothing could be proven. The guy's wife, Carole, always defends him for some reason.
But anyway, I remember hanging out with Trista one night a little over a year ago. She hadn’t gone jogging like she normally did. I asked her what was up with that.
“That weirdo, Josh has started catcalling when I pass his place. It weirds me out.”
“There aren’t other people who do that at night? I’m still shocked you jog alone.”
“Not like this. I can flip off a wolf whistler. But this guy… he keeps trying to get me to stop and talk to him, and when I don’t? He shouts about my ass. I’m gonna have to talk to Petunia about that shithead, if anybody can reign him in, it’s her.”
I’m gonna guess she never got a chance. Two days later, the whole town was awoken by sirens. I was getting ready for my shift when I heard them. I walked down the road a bit to see if I could figure out what was going on. The cops were heading toward the other side of the park, so I couldn’t see much. But I did notice Trista, in her jogging gear, skulking in the shadows. I wondered if she was in trouble. But before I could call out to her, she sprinted straight to Petunia's house and banged on the door. Petunia welcomed her inside, and that was all I saw. I still wasn’t sure what was going on, so I just shrugged and headed to work, figuring I’d text Trista later.
I didn’t learn till later that Josh was found dead. He was lying prone, face down, partly hidden by bushes at the edge of the park. His neck was cut open. He’d bled out rapidly. He had a knife in his hand, and officially it’s believed he fell on it and accidentally killed himself. There was a cocktail of drugs in his system so most people accept that explanation. But others swear they saw Trista out for her jog around the same time Josh would have been bleeding to death. She got questioned, and she swore she didn’t see anything. Without evidence, there was nothing else that could be proven.
Trista’s a friend. I know that guy was being creepy to her. So I’m happy to take her word for what happened, even if my seeing her going to Petunia’s pokes a bit of a hole in that. I can’t be sure it was Trista though. So I’m not saying a word. But if a certain creep attacked a certain lady who is rumored to be a vampire, it’s not that surprising to me that he ended up dead after bleeding to death. I’m not all that broken up about it.
I’m not the one spreading that story. Josh’s wife was the one who started the rumor. So now some people are even more convinced that the weird nocturnal hippy chick is secretly a vampire.
She’s no killer. No matter what they say. She would only have defended herself.
So that’s all the stories I’ve heard that have any credibility to them. There’s more people who swear she and Petunia perform weird rituals, and people who saw her moving “inhumanly fast” and such.
But now I have to share what I found in the yearbooks Trista gave me. I wasn’t really expecting much. I checked her senior yearbook out first. She looks about the same. Pale, goth, hippy, and sort of sad. She kind of looks even sadder in these photos if I’m being honest, but that’s high school for you. She graduated in the top half of her class, no sports or extracurriculars. I’m left wondering how she managed to go to school at the time of sun was so bad for her. I’ll have to ask her about that. So nothing really new there.
It was the yearbook from her junior year where things got really interesting. I was in shock when I found her. Trista is somehow impossible to miss, but unrecognizable all at once. She’s full of color! She wore more typical tie dye hippy attire. Bright vibrant pinks, reds, blues, greens, and yellows, in every photo, and holy shit was she busy. Captain of the soccer team, first chair flutist, president of the “green living” club and the “vegan alliance,” top ten in her class, it was all incredible. I think the main reason I didn’t recognize her was her skin. It was tan, as though she were out in the sun a lot. Furthermore there were photos of her playing sports and standing outside in bright sunlight.
It was like her disease wasn’t there, which confused me. She told me it was something called Xeroderma Pigmentosa. But that’s a genetic condition. She would have had that from birth.
I sent her a text, wondering about this.
- Hey! Just went through your yearbooks. What happened? You had color? Did you discover Linkin Park?
- My disease happened. Right at the end of Jr. year. That’s why I wasn’t there for the final class photo.
- But your disease is genetic… isn’t it?
- I guess it was dormant in me.
- So it just… happened?
- Pretty much.
- I’m sorry.
- I got over it. Mostly. It was hard. My parents were both hardcore vegan naturalists and we lived in a place that was all natural light and such, so I had to live in a shed for a bit while they built a space for me. But in my family? We kinda lean into whatever life throws at us. It took months of depression to come to terms with it. All of a sudden I couldn’t be out in the sun, and I had new dietary needs that absolutely required non-vegan sources. So I leaned into it. I was a vampire now. I can dig dark colors and “vampire style.” I could make it my own by avoiding leather. And I’d be as vegan as I possibly could.
- You’re kind of awesome.
- Damn straight. So I learned to love the night too and now, here I am.
I gained new respect for her after that. Frankly I feel kinda shitty about making fun of her for being a vampire. There might not be anything paranormally weird about her after all.
She sent me one more text telling me I should talk to a guy named Frankie. She’d gone to school with him. He’s a decent enough guy. Works in the Bicounty mall in town.
I had to wait a day or two for another of Petunia’s get togethers to talk to him.
“Hey!” I said awkwardly as I tried to figure out how to strike up conversation with someone I haven’t really spoken to in a long time. “Frankie, right?”
“Oh. Yeah. Been a while. How are you Mason? You okay after that whole thing at Red Nights?”
“I’m trying to be. Look, I’ll cut to the chase. You went to school with Trista Ramone, right?”
“Ol’ Boho Ramone? Yeah. We were sort of friendly. But I was a jerk to vegans back then. Why do you ask?”
“I’ve been hanging out with her. She’s being all mysterious.” He chuckled at that. “She said I should talk to you to learn more about her… weirdness? Everyone thinks she’s a vampire now.”
“She’s totally a vampire. I have no idea what else to call her?”
“Why do you say that?”
“What did she tell you about school?”
“Nothing. She just showed me two yearbooks. Between Junior and Senior year she went from colorful club president, to lonely vampire, because of her disease.”
“Nah man. I don’t want to talk bad about her. But she was kind of a bitch, junior year. She wasn’t just a colorful vegan. She was one of those “holier than thou” types who scoffed and talked down to anyone who dared to eat meat. Her “hippy” thing meant she never hung out with the popular girls but still, she acted like she owned the place at times. I was friends with this weird guy named Steven Jones. He was just kind of a weirdo. Skulking around in the background, you know? He HATED Trista. For a while I totally understood. I thought she was kinda stuck up. But this guy was like… irrationally enraged by that girl’s existence. I guess he tried to ask her out when he was a freshman and she politely declined. But he took that shit personally.”
“Huh. So like… why’s that matter?”
“Because Steven kept saying to anyone who gave him a second look, that he was gonna ‘ruin’ her. Never elaborated. But then the last month of school rolls around, Trista gets assaulted by an unknown assailant and a week later she’s got this new disease. Meanwhile, Steven spent a week strutting around the school looking smug, and saying ‘she got what she deserved.’ Then he disappears too. Teachers said he moved away.”
“She was assaulted?”
“Yeah. Someone in a face wrap tackled her while she was at one of her protests at the meat factory. The dude freaking BIT her.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. I was there. I came to the protest. I’ll admit I was trying to hit on Trista or one of the other girls there. But yeah. Dude dressed in all gray with a face wrap just charged in and went right for Trista. Knocked her down, bit her like a freaking zombie, then ran away before anyone could stop him. Didn’t even take his face wrap off. It was freaky, man.”
“What the actual fuck.”
“That’s what we all said. Trista needed a stitch. But while she was at the hospital, I guess she started getting more symptoms. She was out for the rest of the year. From then on, she was like she is now. Total vampire.”
“Was Steven a vampire?”
“I dunno. Probably. Little dickhead is what he is. Must have been him that attacked Trista, but nobody could prove it. Bite mark didn’t match or something. So why are you asking? You hang out with her at night right? You asking her out or something?”
“Oh. No. Just a friend.”
That was all I really learned from Frankie. It’s quite a story, and it’s full of unknowns that Trista refuses to explain. So I guess I’ll let readers be the judge. Is she a “real” vampire? Or just a weirdo? All I know is, she’s totally standing behind me right now and now I’m dead. Bleh.
I did come back to life to talk to Trista once I finished writing this. She enjoyed it. I may as well include that interaction.
I went to her place on my night off. She read my take on her and what the neighbors thought and she grinned. “Ha! I’m a total monster!” She chuckled. “So. What do YOU think, Mason? Am I a vampire?” She cocked an eye and playfully gnashes her teeth at me, making a pleasant little click.
I sighed. “No idea. You’re Trista. And… you’re my friend. I’m sorry if I made things awkward.”
She looked surprised by that. “Aw. Thanks Mason. You’re my friend too. It’s okay. I’m flattered.”
“You don’t have to explain.”
“So we’re cool?”
“Absolutely not. We’re both weird shut ins.” She laughed. It was good to hear her laugh. It made me happy.
“Yeah but I got the ‘mysterious vampire’ thing going.”
“You have dirt in your hair from rolling around with bunnies. And you’re a vegan.”
“Bite me.”
“Says the vampire.”
“You know, if I were a vampire, I could have bitten you when we both went to the slaughterhouses a few weeks ago.”
“That just makes me stupid.”
“You’re not stupid, Mason. You’re not a loser either.”
“So. You know of any other good spooky town stories that I can do next?
“Oh, sure. You ever heard the tale of Salome? She was a witch who would mash up the seeds of a Sinapis Alba plant to make a diabolical potion she’d dump on herself. They called her the ‘Witch of the Sands.’”
I’m embarrassed to admit it took me four days to realize Trista was just fucking with me. I only figured it out when I looked up Sinapis Alba and learned that mashing the seeds just makes mustard. “Salomi the sand-witch.” Well played, vampire hippy…
Sexy Neighbor
Haunted Slaughterhouse

Before I dive in, know that I love my wife and I want to fix this. I’m posting in RelationshipAdvice for a reason. It will be a lot, but please don’t read it like an AITA post and pass judgment. I need some honest advice, and I’m miles away from my real-life support network.
The TL; DR is that my wife has (re)developed a bunch of conversational habits from hanging out with her brother. These habits leave me feeling excluded, stressed, and are messing with my work. Trying to address them has opened a whole can of worms, mainly that my wife hates my entire problem-solving style.
I’m keeping details vague in case she stumbles upon this post. Please, if you think my story doesn’t add up, or you think you know where I am and want to offer real estate advice or whatever, keep it to yourself.
We got hitched and moved in together right before before Covid hit. Started off great, but after six months of lockdowns and masks, we realized we could live anywhere in the country without paying through the nose for coastal housing. For context: I work in tech, and my wife is a performer. We met in a bar, and honestly, Covid was the wake-up call that my career hadn’t lived up to my potential, probably due to alcohol. So I accepted the reality that maybe my career isn’t going where I hoped, and isn’t likely to – and instead of chasing after it, we should downsize our expenses. I counted my blessings for having a wonderful wife instead.
I negotiated permanent remote work. We aimed to move to the low-cost state she grew up in. Her brother, who I like way more than my own family, hooked us up with a place to rent near his house. Bigger than we needed, but I was okay with it because it had space for a home office. We boxed up our lives into a truck and moved.
Here’s where it gets complicated. My wife has always been talkative, and she can be pretty dang loud. Not sure how much of this I didn’t fully realize before. When we were dating, we only saw each other a couple of days a week, and in our first place together, we never had visitors thanks to the pandemic. But when she's with her brother, she talks like she's trying to command a room full of first-graders. She also doesn’t adjust her volume when she’s close to me. I have tinnitus, and she has literally made my ears ring by talking while leaning on me
Next up. I feel like a jerk saying this, given what I know about the word ‘shrill’, but hear me out. If the two of us are in the same room, she’ll use a tone of voice that seems intended to be impossible to ignore.
Third, if I try to join the conversation, my wife will interrupt me and steamroll right over me. Part of this is because she has a strange conversational rhythm where she seems to be done talking but then BAM! She jumps back in at an even higher volume, after the pause. So if you think it’s your turn to speak, you get interrupted. She does this even when no one else is talking. She will interrupt me to finish my sentences, nearly always incorrectly. She will interrupt me to tell me I’m wrong about something, ruining my flow. She will interrupt me to take over telling a story, telling it worse by missing key facts and rambling at higher speed.
Fourth, she doesn't seem to organize her thoughts before speaking. At all. Couple with what I just mentioned, you've got her cutting off anyone who dares to chime in until she's “talked out” the subject with everything she can think of. By then, everyone else is bored and over being interrupted when they try to jump in. So, the topic just fizzles out, and she covers that up with nervous laughter.
Fifth, if I try to ask questions to follow along, she gets mad that I’m interrupting her or ruining her flow. So I’ve given up on questions. If I lose track, I either catch up or I don’t. I can’t zone out because of her volume and tone.
Sixth, after she’s been around her brother, she maintains this kind of conversational energy when it’s just us. Her brother can be just as loud, and raises his voice and talks over her right back in the moment. But when we’re in any group that does not include my wife, he’s back to an energy I can converse with. She does not switch back, not unless she hasn’t seen him for at least a week.
Seventh, their parents’ first language isn’t English, and they immediately switch to it as soon as I leave the room. If you know the language I mean, it makes every conversation sound like a fight. I figure, if they’re not including me anyway, why talk in English while I’m around? Why can’t I just leave you guys to talk? No, because then my wife gets mad that I’m a bad host, that I “hate” her brother, or calls me a “rude teenager”.
Eighth, 90% of their what they talk about are their opinions, mostly of family members, reality TV, or random AITA stuff. They just keep regurgitating the same views about people, social issues, capitalism, America, over and over. When I do get to throw in my two cents, they often react with anger. It feels like a low-effort bonding activity: like we’re constantly reaffirming the group values – and verbally punishing transgression – rather than discuss anything new. Her brother isn’t like this away from her.
However I slice this, it’s incongruent. If they want me involved by speaking English, why not let me chime in? If they think they're entertaining me, why not make sure I'm following? And if I'm supposed to zone out, why use a tone and volume that's impossible to ignore?
The impression I get is that my wife thinks my role is to be her passive audience, plain and simple.
There’s more about my job, but first, how I’ve failed to address this so far.
First, the loudness. According to both of them ‘that’s just the way we are,’ so it ain’t changing.
I haven’t addressed the tone, I can’t figure out how to without starting a fight.
Interruptions. My wife has had four levels of reactions when I have brought this up. First, she straight-up ignores it. Second, she acknowledges it, but with an eye roll like I'm just being petty. Third is to get mad, call me an asshole, or accuse me of silencing her. Fourth, she blows up and yells all kinds of crap (“you’re evil,” “you just hate my brother,” and incongruently, “you two are douche-bros together”), which after she’ll say she didn’t mean. She’ll then start crying about losing me, or even making her brother hate her. She’ll make me swear to keep reminding her. But in the moment, when she’s not upset, she’s back to eye rolling.
Rambling. My wife’s response is that I do the exact same thing, and that when I do it, it’s extremely boring. What she means is that if I’m excited by or trying to explain anything technical, she tunes out as soon as she hears a word she doesn’t understand, and stares right through my head until I stop talking. Apparently, this is ‘polite’. Asking questions, saying I'm not interested? Just rude.
How she changes her behavior around her brother. Raising it makes her mad. She has straight-up told me, “I will always pick my brother over you.” In her more honest moments, she’s admitted the thought of me developing a beef with her brother is one of her worst nightmares, so her anger is really for of that outcome, directed at me. She gets that this is counterproductive, sometimes. But this conversation is tough.
Switching in English. They forget this and slip back to ‘politeness’ rules. I have to be careful how I word ‘I have no interest in this conversation’ or ‘You don’t need to talk in English’ or they both say I’m rude and get mad.
My wife has also said she hates the way I solve relationship problems, calling it ‘patronizing hippy crap’. For instance, I ask people what their goal is in saying or doing certain thing (“What’s your intention in talking so loud?”). This immediately makes my wife mad, like she thinks I’m playing sociology professor and using brains to outsmart her. Thing is, she will say a LOT of things she doesn’t mean in an argument, and I tend to take things literally, so I need to check that she doesn’t actually mean “You’re evil”, otherwise the argument escalates for other reasons.
I feel like she retaliates for feeling like I’m trying to impose some kind of intellectual superiority over her by trying to impose some kind of “social intelligence” superiority over me. “Of course people don’t mean everything they say in fucking arguments, are you retarded?”. She’ll misinterpret what I’m saying in a way that implies I’m real dumb, then moves the conversation on before I can defend myself. All of which is exacerbated by how her habits push me out of the conversation.
Onto work problems. My job requires two things from me: hard problem-solving which needs long periods of uninterrupted focus, and rapid incident response. Being interrupted/talked to while I’m deep in work disrupts both of those. Neither my wife nor her brother (who’s a contractor) stick to regular office hours, and they both like to knock back a few during the day. Now, I have no issue with that, but I do have a problem when he comes over, starts drinking with my wife, they have loud conversations which I can hear from my office. Often from one room to another.
My wife doesn’t appreciate me complaining about this since she “should be free to enjoy her own home” and I “can easily get another job.” I’ve tried explaining to her that no, I can’t easily get a job that pays the same in this state. Either I’d have to hunt for increasingly scarce remote work, or we’d need to suck up downsizing and potentially moving away from her brother. She refuses to entertain any of this.
Things have improved slightly since I started composing this post, but only after a chaotic incident. She stormed into my office to look for something, mid-argument with her brother. In frustration, I took off for a drive to clear my head. Of course, there was an incident while I was out, I missed the notification, and got written up for it.
I’ve tried talking to her brother one-on-one. He’s a realist. Rent a private office, and get ourselves into couples therapy. My objection is straightforward: the cost of commuting, office rent, couples therapy (no cheaper here, lower quality by all accounts), on top of our current expenses, exceed what we were paying before we moved. All this because my wife won't adjust her behavior to accommodate my needs, or respect my job.
They often invite me to drink with them during lunch and sometimes suggest blowing off the rest of the day. Despite my repeated refusals, they persist, considering it polite. I find it rude and disrespectful to keep pushing. They've even labeled me as "boring”. But what really grinds my gears is when they invite me out and I decline, they think they've got a right to grill me about why. A few times, when I've had enough of their pestering, I’ll state my position more firmly, and then they’ll get real mad that I’m being “judgmental”, and think I’m better than them. So now if they invite me anywhere, I just shut it down with a simple "no" and zero explanation. Which bugs them, but at least it keeps the peace.
There are a ton of other emergent/secondary annoyances I could get into, but let's cap it at three.
One, since I’ve said they’re both being hypocritical about me being ‘judgmental’ (even though I wasn’t) in refusing to join their plans, when the majority of their conversations are judging other people: it has become a game to them to point out every time they think I’m a hypocrite. I answered my wife from another room once. She brings it up as my ‘hypocrisy’ whenever I mention she’s yelling to her brother in another room, and she’s right next to me.
I think it’s different: her yelling in the house upsets me, but my ‘hypocrisy’, she enjoys that. We aren’t trading vices. If I realize I’m upsetting my wife, I stop doing whatever it is that’s upsetting her. She seems to be telling me that she doesn’t care to adjust her behavior to stop upsetting me. And that the real problem is that I keep talking about it, rather than just quietly suffering through it.
Two I've likely developed obnoxious habits just to maintain some space in conversations with my wife, such as speaking louder to overcome interruptions.
Three, my wife will talk to me at any time, without paying any attention to what I’m doing or even whether I’m wearing noise-cancelling headphones. She’ll interrupt me whilst I’m holding a mop, vacuum, trash bag to remind me to mop, vacuum, or take out the trash. She’ll interrupt me while I’m tackling a chore to give me instructions. I don't understand them, she'll take over, do it the exact same way I was, then huff about it. She’ll interrupt me whilst I’m getting ready to remind me to take my wallet, throwing off my train of thought and making me forget what I was looking for. Which I’ll then forget. She’ll interrupt me while driving, for random observations (‘look, a cute dog!’) no matter how many times I tell her it’s dangerous.
It’s hard to explain how much more restrictive this makes my life feel. I avoid tasks that will take over 20 minutes unless my wife is out. My wife and brother both mock me for traits (lousy memory, lack of focus, disorganization) which they exacerbate with their behavior.
When my wife is away from her brother, she returns to her usual self, the woman I fell for.
My gut tells me her family has a toxic way of communicating (the rest of her family are borderline abusive), and she learnt to tone down of those tendencies while away from them. She is more at ease with that way of speaking with her brother, and she falls back to it with him – and is trying to force me to adapt to it. There’s probably a side order of some history of feeling sidelined in male-dominated groups, so she’s acting out on that trauma and making sure out-talks us both. She’s got zero patience for boredom, which is why she butts in and won’t take extra time to make sure I understand – and why she thinks my ‘long rants’ are way longer and more boring than hers.
Her view is that conversations are boring unless people are excited, and excited people interrupt and talk over each other constantly. I hate that, because a conversation just feels like a constant fight to participate. It’s draining and I’d rather not socialize at all.
She describes the way I’d rather talk – back and forth – as “pompous, like you think you’re a king who can’t be interrupted”.
I don’t have a support system here since everyone I know here is through them, and everyone back home still believes I successfully rode off into the sunset. So, Reddit, how do I better communicate my needs to my wife? Both to not lose my job, and to enjoy conversations with her?

Hey, new to the group. A while back my wife called me out on my porn addiction, after finding my browser history. I realized that I clearly have a big obsession, but I don’t think it’s with porn per se, but masturbating in general. I was masturbating pretty much every day. Even in bed next to her while she slept. Our sex life has obviously had its ups and downs, but she does try to keep me satisfied. Doesn’t matter….as soon as I’m alone I jerk off. So now here I am, 2 months in and I haven’t looked at porn, haven’t masturbated once, feeling pretty accomplished. But I still feel that having regular sex is keeping me hyper fixated on orgasming. I’m 9 days into no sex as well and am going to try a full 30 days without any orgasm or ejaculating at all. I’ve definitely been having some very vivid sexual dreams lately but all in all I think I’m doing pretty well.

Lotta sluggin'. Had breaks in-between etc. My wife says it's really fun with two Treys. Just used Ballyhoo for most SIVAps not really caring about platinum zorps and completed it and got Swingditional SIVAlity so im pretty happy with that!
Also, I think that -15 is the most amount of minutes I can play a week without my wife restricting my screen time. Not so low that I can't run public events but also not so low that I can't interrupt Trey and my wife wrestling on her bed. good job Trey so far <3
EDIT: This patrol was over the span of 8 hours but for about 2 I probably wasn't zorping(Taking care of 37 kids, jerking off to Ghalr feet etc.) and additionally it was with two separate teams because people had to leave after PukeShit to high five dmg. Things were slower because we were 6 titans(worst class in the game, buff bungo). Also I wanted more of a positive post talking about how fun the patrol was and less about Trey's new houserules. It's hard content so sorry if it makes you angry that I completed at all especially with Ballyhoo :)

Okay so a bit of backstory. My friend met a girl at the end of december 2022. They got together and married december 2023. They married in court and only had family there.
We are a very close group. We have been friends for 20+ years.
Fast forward to february of 2024. Our other friend gets married. Now this is the first time anyone gets to meet the first friends wife. Everything went fine until a month later now first friends wife phones my fiancée and tells her how she doesn't like it that my fiancée greeted my friend with a hug. My fiancée tells her its fine she won't do it again. So now we are busy making gifts for the groomsmen and bridesmaids.
I ask my friend to come pick it up by us and he says, if my fiancée is with me we should rather come to his house. So we go and drop it off and my friend is not allowed to look at my fiancée, he is looking done to the ground or at me when she is busy speaking. Then my friend drops a bomb on us that his wife is pregnant and they must just see how she feels at the time of our wedding. We are getting married in September and she is due November.
So now when we start asking for sizes and stuff to sort out the groomsmen clothes. My friend tells me, they are not going to come to the wedding.
I understand that his wife is pregnant but they are using it as an excuse. He also told me that me and my fiancée has a problem with his wife because we didn't acknowledge her when we dropped off his groomsmen gift. Which is not true because my fiancée still spoke to her about her son (not my friends child). And we tried and showed we are happy for them for having another child.
So am I the jerk and should I just apologise to my friend to keep our friendship intact.

Hello, hopefully this is the right place to ask a question like this.
I bought a new 2016 Tucson AWD SE from a Hyundai dealership on December 31, 2015. Financed it with my local credit union for 72 months. Paid it off on 4/3/23, all said and done including interest/down payments I paid $24k. KBB on it today.. for its condition (kids have roughed it up pretty good) is probably like $10-13k I'm guessing?
Recently been noticing a common issue that other Hyundai/Kia owners have noticed which is it burns through oil really quickly. Like, I topped off the tank at Jiffy Lube 1200 miles ago and then on a 3.5 hour road trip last weekend the engine just died on me. Pulled over and the oil tank was empty. Took it to another Jiffy Lube via tow truck and had it filled up and drove the rest of the way. Hyundai wants to do a very extensive oil test where we do an oil change at the dealership, drive 1000 miles, come back and do a check. Then if it's really draining quick, do an engine cleaning for $500-800, and then oil change and drive another 1000 miles and come back again and see how the level is. If it's still bad, then they will cover the replacement of the engine. The guy in the service dept at the dealership said of the 8 or so ppl he's done this for with Tucsons, all but 1 had the oil consumption issue fixed by the engine cleaning.
That's half the story from that road trip. On the way back, started hearing a loud screeching noise at the front of the car that got louder and louder. The dealership diagnosed that as a "clogged muffler" and that it needs to be replaced. The OEM muffler assembly part costs $3700 just by itself and with labor it'll be about $4000 bucks.
So far in maintenance over the last 8+ years, I've spent $4,724 not including some oil changes here and there.
I haven't liked this car. I haven't liked the long wait times at the dealership (although that might not be unique to Hyundai living in a big city..) I haven't liked the issues that have popped up: this engine oil consumption one, the door latches failing and having to be replaced one at a time over the course of a year until they were all replaced, the original muffler needing to be replaced after only 78,000 miles?
At this point, I kind of want out but I'm not sure what financially makes the best sense. Do I:

1. Pay the 4k and get the muffler assembly fixed
2. Go to a muffler shop or cheap mechanic and have them fix it with after market parts and more targeted repair (rather than replacing the whole thing)
3. Ask the dealership to just take the car as a trade in as is and get a new Hyundai

And if I fix it in scenario 1 or 2 above, do I sell it and buy a used car? Do I finance another new car? Do I lease? Or do I just hold on to the bastard and hope the oil thing gets resolved too without having to pay too much more out of pocket (I'll at least be paying the $500-800 for the engine cleaning.) It's paid off at least..
I honestly am getting more attracted to the thought of just leasing. My wife and I are not car people and are tired of feeling jerked around by mechanics and not knowing who to really trust. The thought of just paying a monthly payment and having pretty much all maintenance covered and driving a new car for a few years and then getting a new one once the 3 years is up.. sounds pretty appealing. However, it sounds like lease payments are pretty expensive lately.. $400-500 a month minimum for a newer crossoveSUV comparable to a Hyundai Tucson.
Anyway. Looking for a little guidance or a 'what would you do in my shoes' kind of response?

Credit to Blue for the wonderful cover art of Trilvri
Thank you to:
u/SpacePaladin15 for creating the Nature of Predators universe.
u/EdibleGojid, author of Dark Cuts, for proofreading.
EmClear, aspiring author, for proofreading
You, the reader, for your support. I love reading your comments.
Please consider reading the works of my proofreaders as they’re all authors of excellent stories and be sure to check the links below for more of my work and beautiful art from members of the community.
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Memory transcription subject: Sawvek, Junior Extermination Officer
Date [standardised human time]: October 5th, 2136
Hard foam presses uncomfortably up against delicate pressure points situated across the length of my entire body, building up to an unbearable ache that makes me shift and turn against the thin mattress pad. I yank at the rough old blanket I’d taken out of storage and clutch it even tighter around my body, trying to keep out the chill. The best racks, the ones near the heating vents, had already been claimed long before I’d decided to move into the Guild House’s Barracks and it doesn’t seem likely that the current occupants will be giving up their spots any time soon.
My mind is still racing from the events of last paw, replaying the scene over and over again in my dreams and in my head. The way my brother had looked at me… That look on his face when he’d seen the real me…
My paw gives a sympathetic throb in memory, still aching from where it had met the wall, but at least I had been able to wrap it up a bit and stop the bleeding. I feel like I should take it as a small miracle that it isn't broken. More medical bills are the last thing I need right now.
I turn about in the bunk once more, rolling around in vain to try and find a comfortable position that doesn’t seem to exist. Through a conscious act of will I try to empty my mind and sleep, but the very act of trying not to think about things only brings them bubbling back up to the surface of my thoughts. My heartbeat echoes in my ears, a damnable drumming sound brought about by the exertion of my own restless tossing and turning. Out in the hallway I can hear the muffled shuffling of feet and murmurs of conversation. The Guild Hall never sleeps, and it seems that neither would I this paw.
Electing to abandon the attempt as hopeless, I cut my rest claw short and get up, venturing out into the hallway. If I can’t sleep anyway then I might as well start my waking claw early, maybe get in a little exercise. It’s not so bad when it’s self-directed, almost fun in a way. If our family had the money to support it then maybe I could have been an athlete of some variety growing up. I had always possessed something of a natural physicality.
“Stop wasting time with worthless questions about what could have been, Killer.” The voice interjects, early and active today by the sound of it. “You’ll never amount to anything more than a wild predator kept on a leash.”
There’s nothing to do but sigh and carry on. It was right after all. This is it. This is my life now.
Making my way down the hallway towards the gym I find myself walking past a row of private offices assigned to some of the more veteran officers on staff. Most are empty at this claw, their occupants either asleep or off doing other work. One room in particular catches my attention though, the one belonging to our newest PRED Team Commander.
The door leading inside is open and ajar, seemingly forgotten in the midst of more pressing business and granting me a look inside. The entire room is a mess, papers and binders strewn about everywhere with official looking documents littering the floor. A map of the city decorates the otherwise unadorned and impersonal space. On its face it hosts a variety of multicoloured pins, all connecting seemingly arbitrary locations as well as photographs of people and places from the records department. The face of the former PRED Team Commander, Vrienna, looks out at me once again with the same cruel eyes that decorate the memorial wall. Beside her photo are another pair of eyes, a pair I recognise, but not one I would have expected to see here.
Trilvri, my brother’s creepy coworker, the one who’d brought him home the night he’d drunk himself into a stupor, stares out at me from the wall. He was younger in this photo, barely of age, if even that, and dressed in a regulation space corps flight suit, but I could still recognise him. Trilvri’s eyes appear somehow more lively than when I had met him in person, though it does nothing to improve his overall disposition, looking, as they are, as if behind them resides only hatred and a feral desire to kill and rend. Come to think of it, he had mentioned he used to be in the corps hadn’t he? ‘Used to’ being the operative word. When I’d asked he hadn’t seemed particularly fond of his time in the service…
Situated as he is next to Vrienna like that, their pitch-black wool and evil-looking eyes bear a striking resemblance. It was the exact same sort of predatory expression that bore into your soul, the kind that made me feel weak and exposed, the same kind that was worn by-
“What do you think you’re doing in my office?” A voice asks from behind, nonplussed, but with a casual depth of power and authority behind it that makes me freeze on the spot.
“Commander Glagrig, Sir!” I turn about on the spot, fixed at attention in the doorway as I stare up at the man himself. “I’m sorry to intrude. I noticed someone had forgotten to close the door so I was just going to secure it.”
“I see.” Glagrig doesn’t seem to believe a word of it, but neither does he seem inclined to press the issue. “At ease. Tell me, do you recognise the man in the photo there? Have you ever seen him before?”
“No, Commander.” I lie reflexively as I shift to a parade rest, not fully knowing why, but knowing that whatever is going on I want no part of it, for me or my brother. It’s only after the fact that it occurs to me that lying might be worse than telling the truth.
“How… regrettable.” The prestige officer says plainly and I can’t tell whether he believes me or not. “If you do ever catch sight of this individual, then be sure to let me know immediately.”
“Y-Yes, Commander.” I subconsciously swallow with apprehension, hoping that he doesn’t notice. I want nothing more than to run away as quickly as I can, but I haven’t been dismissed yet.
“Junior Officer Sawvek, was it?” Glagrig carries on, looking me up and down, dissecting me with his eyes. “You have quite the interesting record on file and Officer Intalran is quite adamant about your potential. Your simulator results speak for themselves, even if they are just simulations.”
“Thank you, Commander.” I can feel myself growing dizzy as I answer with uncertainty.
“Don’t thank me,” the all-consuming void in front of me replies with no hint of warmth, “just remember that your performance is under evaluation. It’s in my interests to keep note of promising young aspirants who might someday join my team, and I would hate to see you squander your talents.”
“I-I understand, Commander.” I flick my tail in agreement, straining not to look away towards the floor.
“Dismissed.” Glagrig brushes past me as he enters his office, moving to shut the door behind himself.
“Um, Commander?” I ask just before the door shuts, feeling a beckoning call of curiosity that even the predatory prestige exterminator couldn’t crush. “If you don’t mind me asking… Why do you have all that stuff up on the wall there?”
The door opens again, just a crack, and I can feel my superiors' weighty presence bearing down on me, almost suffocating in its intensity. “It’s simply a personal matter. I have reason to believe that the prior investigation regarding the kelach incident was conducted according to… insufficient standards. The predator responsible was never found and I intend to remedy that deficiency.”
“How hard could it be to find a kelach?” I tilt my ears in confusion. “They're huge!”
“Despite initial reports,” he answers with an ominous, cold tone that sends a chill up my spine, “it may be possible that we're dealing with something far more dangerous than just a kelach.”
“T-Thank you, Commander.” I flick my tail in appreciation and the door closes.
I breathe a sigh of relief as the malevolent aura recedes. That was too close.
“And you’re a complete moron going back to ask him more questions afterwards, Killer.” The voice rises with amusement. “What? Do you want him to figure you out and turn you to cinders? Only a matter of time, Killer.”
“Ugh, shut up.” I mutter under my breath, quickly turning back around to make sure Commander Glagrig didn’t hear me, but when no reprisal comes I quickly depart. If I’m gonna be stupid I should at least try not to do so right in front of his office.
As the imminent threat of our in-house prestige exterminator dwindles so too does the energy driven by the adrenaline of the encounter. It figures that the moment I roll out of bed I want to take a nap again, but I know the moment I lie back down I’ll be back to full wakefulness in an instant. That’s just how that sort of thing works. With that in mind there’s really only one solution, a big, steaming hot cup of tea.
Making my way towards the tea machine I spot Jonsco, the feisty little primitive that mans our dispatch centre, smacking the top of the dispenser with a clenched paw while holding a mug underneath it.
“Is the tea machine fixed?” I ask as I pull out a mug from the cabinet myself.
Jonsco sighs heavily and shoots me a combative glare. “For the last time it’s not my brahking job to fix this damn tea machine! You got a problem with that then you can go pester someone else about it!”
I shrink back under the harsh rebuke. Jonsco may be small, but there was as much rage and fury condensed into that little package as anyone else in this department. Maybe more.
“I… I didn’t mean to imply…I just wanted to know if it was working again or not… Sorry.” I sputter out, feeling properly admonished as I look away towards the ground.
Jonsco looks at me quizzically, his hard glare softening somewhat as he seems to truly see me for the first time before returning to his usual scowl.
“Right…Whatever you say…” With one final smack the machine coughs and chokes, sputtering to life with a struggle, and a small trickle of freshly brewed tea begins to fill Jonsco’s cup. “The machine is on the fritz again as usual, but if you hit it just right, do a little percussive maintenance, then you can get it started again.”
“Thanks, Jonsco.” I lean back against the wall and watch as the mug slowly fills, impressed by the primitives know-how. “That's actually pretty smart of you.”
“For a ‘primitive’ right?” The words are barbed and spiteful, but lack his typical enthusiasm, more of a simple statement of fact than a real question. I couldn't exactly deny it, those had been my thoughts, and so the silence drags on awkwardly, marked only by the splash of tea falling into the steadily rising pool.
“What are you doing here at this claw anyway?” I eventually ask, dodging the question entirely. “We’ve still got at least another half-claw until our crew's shift is supposed to start.”
“I could ask you the same thing, you know?” The angry little dispatch operator retorts. “I'm here early working an overtime shift so I can afford to put food on my family's table. It's expensive feeding that many mouths. What's your excuse?”
“I had a fight with my brother…” I rub the back of my neck as I turn away abashedly, “moved out of the apartment and into the barracks full time… couldn't sleep…”
“Well then you should hurry up and work on patching things up with him.” Jonsco looks at me with an uncharacteristic hint of sympathy in his eyes. “Your family are the only ones who might actually care. This Gods-damned place is a slyther’s nest and no one here gives a speh about you or your problems. If you want my advice, you should do your best to spend as little time in this cesspool as possible.”
With his cup now full, Jobsco steps back from the machine and begins walking out towards the main hall.
“Thanks, Jonsco.” My words stop him in his tracks as he walks away from me. “I appreciate it.”
“... You're welcome.” He says after a short pause, glancing back to look at me one more time before leaving. “See you around, Sawvek.”
Taking advantage of the tea machine while it’s still mostly working, I fill up my own cup and drink deeply of the warm, fragrant beverage. The taste is bitter and unpleasant, just about the quality I would expect of this Guild Hall, but even at the first taste it’s evident that it’s been loaded with an extra strength dose of caffeine. I down the drink quickly and rinse out the cup before continuing on my journey towards the training hall. Fatigue begins to fall away as I walk, bit by bit as the drug makes its way into my bloodstream, blocking off sleep receptors and energising me. I know I’ll probably pay for it later, no amount of caffeine can actually replace sleep, but for now it feels good and I can see how some people can get addicted to the stuff.
A loud, metallic clanging emanates from the gym as I approach, something unexpected for this time of paw. No one's reserved space in the gym for this claw and not many people are industrious enough to sweat on their own initiative. Peeking my head inside the door I spy Bikim, the perfect, privileged, ‘holier than thou’ brahkass occupying the otherwise empty weight room. His irritatingly handsome face is taut with strain as he performs a series of weighted squats, his back and leg muscles straining underneath his short-cropped wool, and he pants heavily under the exertion.
I’m half tempted just to leave and go back to bed despite the fact that there’s no way I’d be getting any sleep with the tea running through my system. It’s too early in the paw to deal with Bikim’s speh. Before I can slip away unnoticed though, he spots me. I give a heavy sigh and continue my way inside. There's nothing to be done for it now. Trying to back out now would only make things worse later, a sign of weakness.
“What… Do you want… Predator?” Bikim asks between gulps of air as he reracks his weights, practically hanging off the bar to support himself on shaky legs.
“Good paw to you too, Bikim.” I say, forcing civility into my tone. “I’m here to use the equipment. Same as you. I'm allowed.”
“Whatever…” He eyes me with suspicion. “Just keep your distance… I don't want to catch any of your taint.”
“Believe me,” I flick my tail out in irritation, “I intend to.”
Looking around the room for available spots, I march my way over towards a cable machine on the opposite side of the room. Not nearly as far from Bikim as I would like, but the farthest I can get without leaving the weight area entirely. Bikim watches me all the while as I seat myself down and begin adjusting the machine. Eventually he grows tired of watching me fumble around with the machine and returns to his own exercises with a displeased flick of the tail, quite obviously judging me for my lack of experience with the equipment.
A tense sort of quiet settles over the room as we each go about our business, trying our best to ignore one another. Bikim slowly winds his way around the room, cycling from station to station to exercise all the different parts of his body in sequence before repeating it all again. He seems to bypass my corner of the room, glancing over at me with each repetition of his pattern. For myself, I stay put where I am, taking advantage of the varied exercises offered by the versatile machine to experiment with different muscle groups. Occasionally I slip up, dropping the weights with a loud clang that always draws Bikim’s ire. Every time he seems just a bit more disgruntled, a bit less patient. Eventually, the constant disruption reaches a tipping point and the pompous, self-entitled jerk walks over to confront me.
“Do you always do this?” He asks rhetorically. “If you keep slamming the weights like that you're gonna break it. Your form is speh so either fix it or lower the weight so you don't have to keep compensating. Better yet, just leave. You’ve been monopolising the cable machine for almost half a claw now. I don't know why you're even here in the first place.”
“Oh, look at Mr. Know-it-all thinking he can just go around telling us what to do, eh Killer?” The voice rises to the challenge. “Where does a guy like that who's been handed everything his whole life think he can get off with telling us how we should be doing anything?”
“Brahk off Bikim!” I don't even try to reign in the predator inside, feeling justified in letting it roam free for once. “I didn't ask for your advice and you don't get to kick me out of the weight room just because you can't wait your turn! I'm here because I don't have anywhere else to go! Ever since Intalran dragged me into this stupid Guild this brahking job has taken over my entire life! I don't even have a home to go back to anymore!”
Bikim's body tenses at my tirade and his tail flicks out aggressively like a whip.
“That's your own damn fault, predator!” He shouts back, eager for the excuse to vent his own frustrations. “Maybe if you weren't just some blood-starved beast out roaming the streets then you wouldn't be here right now! I’ve read your file! You got a history of herdless behaviour and physical altercations! Someone should have institutionalised you a long time ago, but someone took pity on you and let you slip through the cracks because of your poor dying mommy! They should have known it would come back to bite them! A normal, functional member of the herd wouldn't even think to pick a flamer up off the ground and burn another person to death with it! But you? You did it instinctively! You revelled in it!”
“You think that was easy for me!” I get up and walk towards him as I yell incredulously. “You think I asked for that to happen! You think it was fun for me to get choked out and almost eaten! That thing I burned wasn't even a person anymore! It was a predator in the middle of a feeding frenzy! So yeah, I did what I did, and you know what? It's a good thing I did! If I wasn't a freak of nature then that thing would have kept on going and kept on killing! Last I checked, preventing that sorta thing was supposed to be your job, but I had to be the one to step up! Now I have to live with the consequences of my actions every paw, knowing that I’m a Protector-damned killer that doesn't belong anywhere! Maybe you, in your infinite wisdom, would've known the perfect thing to do in that situation, but I’m not you! I’ve had to work and struggle for every little thing I have! Not just had it handed to me on a silver platter!”
“Oh, so you got me all figured out do you?” Sarcasm drips from Bikim's mouth as he looks down on me. “You don't know me. You don't know my life or what I’ve been through, how hard I’ve worked to get where I am. You just see the end product from cycles of effort and assume that it's always been that way, that it's always been that easy. It hasn't.”
“Yes, I’m sure you had it so hard growing up Bikim.” Saying it aloud almost makes me laugh. “You’re such a child of privilege that it drips off of you with every move you make and every word you say. I hate people like you, thinking that you're better than everyone else just because you were lucky enough to be born into wealth and status. Try living like the other side for a change, scrounging for every credit just so you can afford to eat, and then try to tell me how hard you had it with a full belly and a warm home!”
“You’re right, predator,” Bikim says contemptuously, “I am a child of privilege. My family has a long and decorated military tradition, my father is a captain for the space corps, a brahking hero, and I’ve reaped the benefits of that. That privilege came at a cost though, and that’s called expectations. Second best is not good enough and I've had to put in ten times the effort as anyone else my whole life just to meet standards! At least you grew up with a father who was there for you and loved you without the condition that everything you do is perfect!”
“All that talk about reading my file and you didn't even get past the first page did you?” I snap at him with a snarl. “ I didn't grow up with a father at all! He's been dead since I was in elementary school! Killed in action! I barely even remember him anymore!”
That one seems to give Bikim pause, but I’m not done yet.
“If you and your whole family are such a bunch of brahking heroes then how come you're here, working as a common garrison exterminator in a run-down backwater city like this?” I taunt. “Shouldn't you be out gallantly fighting the Arxur with one of the fleets or on a colony pacification force rather than making my life here harder than it already is?”
“That's the price for failing to meet expectations,” Bikim quiets down, drawing away from the world and into himself, “the price for knocking up a beautiful, wonderful girl right after graduation and refusing to get rid of it afterwards. You get cut off. You lose that privilege, and you do whatever you have to in order to provide and try to be a good role model for your son.”
Now that one threw me for a loop. In the short time I’ve known Bikim I’ve had a lot of thoughts about him, few of them good, but never would I have expected him to be the type to take responsibility… For anything. Still, there is one thing about his story that doesn't line up…
“Oh really?” I take a step back as I watch for his reaction closely. “I seem to recall Jonsco mentioned just the other day that your wife had left you for a Human.”
“Don't you bring that brahking primitive into this!” Bikim's anger flares in an instant before returning to a subtle simmer of regret. “We’ve just been having a… a rough patch in our relationship. I’m not giving up on us. I’ll win her back. She's just… confused and being taken advantage of! It's all that damn predators fault!” Bikim sighs and sits down on a nearby bench. “You're not the only one whose had something taken from them because of this job. You're not the only one without a home to go back to.”
Looking at Bikim now, a sad, pathetic man moping on the bench with nothing better to do on his rest claw than to try to externalise his inner pain… I find it hard to stay angry at him. He's still a narcissistic brahk ass and a complete jerk, but it's hard to truly hate someone when you actually know them. I had made quite a few assumptions about him when we first met, and he certainly hadn't helped my impression of him since, but… perhaps I was wrong to judge him so harshly?
“Nah,” the voice chortles, “he’s a piece of speh that got what he brahking deserves for being an insufferable prick.”
Overhead the intercom crackles to life and I can hear Jonsco's voice reverberating over the airwaves.
“Officers Vaesh and Sawvek please report to the briefing area for assignment. Repeat. Officers Vaesh and Sawvek please report to the briefing area for assignment.”
“Sounds like it's time for your first field assignment, Kid.” Bikim says, staring up at the intercom. “At least it gets you out of my wool. Try not to brahk it up and make the rest of us look bad.”
“Hmph.” I turn to leave, muttering to myself. “Stupid brahkass.”
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A/N - Hello! Sorry this one took a while. Like I mentioned before I got delayed working on my Ficnapping chapter as well as a crossover One-shot that's still in progress (but hopefully will be done soon). In other news we have new art of Sawvek's life-changing encounter in the Builder's Lane Bloodbath as drawn by Miglove and you can still find that and everything else Nature of Family in the new Master Post linked up above.
If you like the story then please remember to upvote, comment, and use the “!Subscribeme” function to be alerted to all new posts. I post as often as I can but real life has a tendency of getting in the way and my job makes it almost impossible to keep to any kind of schedule. Your engagement and support go a long way towards helping to keep me on track and motivated, so thank you very much for reading and I hope you'll stay tuned for next chapter!

I (34f) and my husband (35m) have been together since HS and have 3 kids, I've love him with my whole heart and I just wanted to be one of those married couples who last forever but now I don't think it's in the cards for us. We've weathered a lot storms and always made time for eachother and elevated our family out of poverty. But There's a serious problem, I can't fix, he's addicted to porn and no matter what I do or say, he won't stop, he just gets better at hiding it and lies straight to my face when confronted.
I didn't realize how serious this issue was, I've watched porn before and I thought it was "normal" but now I can see how damaging it is to our marriage. He prefers to watch in the bathroom and pretend sex isn't a thing.
I have a very high labito and I want sex almost every day, I am very generous in the bedroom and there isn't anything I'm not willing to do or try. But he prefers juurk off in the bathroom.
Maybe we've been together too long and he just doesn't want me anymore and I don't know what to do or how to cope with the fact that this is my life. It either have to endure his selfish porn addiction and life almost sex-free or divorce him and ruin my children's childhood. What's more selfish? I am honestly heartbroken.
His physical inability to stay hard or last longer than 1-2 minutes is making me feel resentful to my core and the man I use to be obsessed with and deeply in love with, I just feel disgust and repulsed by. He's the only man I've ever been with and now I feel like my life is wasted on someone too selfish to stop watching something that makes him physically inept. It makes no sense to me but I don't even know of I want to understand him anymore.
He can go jerk his little heart off and I can make peace with the failure of our marriage. Our potential to grow old together is down the toilet.
I should add: we did see a MD about his low labito about 5yrs ago and was told to stop watching porn, exercise and try to be initiate daily to increase stamina. He tried literally zero of those things.
I started giving him vitamins daily but he refuses to take them because he doesn't want to.
He won't go to therapy and I am on the verge of filing for divorce and moving on my life. Emotionally I feel like I've failed as a wife and logically I think he's failed as a husband.
So reddit? Am I jumping the gun? Is this even a reason to divorce?

Max and Copper Doodle are in studio as Kirk claims everyone is seemingly down on Montante. (8:40) Kirk learns of the other teams that the KMS basketball team will be playing. (10:10) Kirk plans a team practice for Saturday morning. (13:50) Reactions to Mick's performance yesterday. (18:55) The Bussin' Boys got into some trouble online for a post supporting Harrison Butker's commencement speech. (25:30) Tom Brady claims his kids were affected by the roast. (32:40) Big Cat calls in anticipation for the first KMS basketball game. (37:40) Big Cat gives his take on the Bussin' Boys and Harrison Butker. (40:38) Big Cat talks the Dozen with Kirk. (44:40) Justin found some interesting audio from the YouTube series, Candy's Land. (55:00) Jerking off used to mean something. (01:01:20) A family is not sharing their lottery winnings fairly. (01:04:50) Max has to go to Disney World for his brother's destination wedding. (01:06:28) Max has an issue with his brother's soon-to-be wife. (01:08:30) Copper Doodle has a game to determine if Coleman is gay. (01:16:50) Justin gives his take on what Apocalypse Now is. (01:19:40) Max doesn't think the world will end someday. (01:24:45) Coleman ruins Kirk's dream story. (01:27:00) Max gives an update on the martini business. (01:37:20) Frank thinks Kirk is a crybaby. (01:45:00) Justin's friends want to play golf. (01:46:10) Max asks Kirk about his take on The Eagles tour.

The rift between them has caused a lot of tension in my family and now my mom wants to be in the life of her newborn grandson but refuses to address or try to mend things with my wife.
Little history: I probably introduced them too quickly. My grandmother was in town in south Florida about to move here from Illinois for a retirement community. My wife, girlfriend at the time, came with cookies or some form of baked goods like she usually does when visiting someone as a sign of affection and respect. Where it went wrong from here I have no idea. I suppose the initial crack was when wife scheduled a skitrip for her and I to have as a 1 year of dating anniversary present. We are not rich, this is a huge gift that made sense to her since I refused to let her pay rent. Our combines salaries are barely over 120k. So wife calls mom 6 months in advance because she is a planner for the sole purpose of asking my mom to watch one of our four dogs. Wife has already paid in full for the trip. Yet Mom decides it is a great idea to instead use the opportunity to hop on and take a family trip because it is the last time the family will have for a family vacation - I am the oldest of two boys and two stepsisters, my mom married the guy she left my father for who has twin girls of his own that were in the womb during the infidelity. Anyway mom completely takes over and decides to make our one year gift a family vacation, so she books tickets for a hotel nearby. Wife is bold but at the time not bold enough to stop my mom in her tracks for overstepping a boundary. At this time she still respected my mother and kind of let herself get steamrolled.
Probably skippable Family history: Now I have always had issues with my mother, resentment for leaving my father for my stepdad behind my own fathers back and constantly trying to keep brother and I from seeing “Disneyland dad who doesn’t do any of the work but gets all the fun.” my mother was very strict growing up, always bringing us to church and making my father feel guilty for not bringing brother and I on his weekend. So mom marries stepdad age 11, divorces him around 13 after asking me advice for her relationship and i encourage her to move out. Then remarries him and moves us back into his house age 15. Here I begin rebellion and normal teeenager stuff but stepdad won’t butt in because he isn’t my “biological father” so would have my mom intervene brother and i from behind the scenes. For example, I am young and messing around on the piano because music is important and I never had any formal training and mom comes in to tell me stepdad “wants to know when the concert is going to end because it is a little annoying.” Anyway, they have me prescribed adderall at 16 and in the parking lot holding my first prescription I am told that they would like me to move out and in with my father, who had chased us every time mom and stepdad moved several miles away (5 moves from age 5-15 all in one county). Anyway, brother and I are recovering alcoholics with (my) slipups triggered from interactions or visiting my mom, which mom claims is genetics from my father alone and has nothing to do with her. Maternal grandfather, mother, and I have some nasty temper problems which certainly are exacerbated by drinking (at least mine and moms).
Skitrip revelations: Wife and I are on the way to brothers graduation in Chicago, and wife has yet to reveal to me that my mother has taken over her massive investment of a couples ski vacation and it will now be a family vacation for mom, stepdad, brother, two stepsisters who are all getting out of gradschool. On the way to the airport I am told the news by future wife of my one year surprise. So I get upset and call my mom to call it off. She obliges my request and now holds resentment against me and now wife for “ruining her last family vacation.” Fine, whatever. Mother never says a word about it for months until we are out for a distant family members birthday dinner and at a table of about 8-10 people that are having a group conversation and gets real close to my wife’s ear and tells her privately along the lines of “you deprived our family of our last family vacation.” During this time my wife is frantically tapping my leg under the table because my mom can get a little aggressive. My mom saw this and later (privately to me) mocked her for doing it to my leg under the table.
Christmas blessings: Closer to Christmas maybe 2/3 weeks later we went to go see my mom and my mom had a couple drinks in her (not an alcoholic like brother and I just very sensitive to a couple glasses of wine and occasionally some hidden sips of wine or something) and invites my wife to Christmas church and out to dinner after because the family needs photos for a Christmas card and future wife “will be the photographer for it.” Now this can easily be a nothing comment but given the way my mom had been making future wife feel, it was taken as an insult. So wife declined church and showed up to family dinner just in time for photography session to be over.
The distance: Then mom moves to a fancy house up the coast and invites us up to visit. At first it is ok to bring the 4 dogs then the day before she says they will not have dogs at the house and we can easily find a sitter. 2 Dogs don’t get along, they need to be separated always as there has been two attacks on one from the other, so we can’t trust someone to come to the house and keep them separate and we won’t board 4 dogs it’s too expensive for us. Anyway we go back and forth being invited with the dogs then they retract the offer and say pick one dog to bring and leave the others and it’s just annoying, so we say forget it and don’t go. But my brother becomes engaged and decides to throw his engagement party at my mom’s new place near the beach. Great. First all the dogs are welcome, then day before they say it is too chaotic and she will pay for a small hotel room for one night for future wife and her dogs and my one (the attack dog) can stay in a crate at the house with me but I may not leave the dog to stay with her. And no reasonable cheap hotel in the area is going to accommodate 4 dogs. Anyway wife is stressed but feels obligated to come because I am the best man and I stay at the house while she checks her dogs into the hotel. Wife had made a cheesecake and brought it up in a separate car from me, 4 hour drive by the way, and night of.. my mom says no desserts for engagement party dinner, the dessert is themed or some crazy stuff. Wife shows up to dinner a little later and very flustered because of the situation plus I had relapsed on a bottle of whiskey a couple days prior to seeing my mom. Related, I don’t know. Anyway. Mom has had a couple drinks and future wife and I are talking about having children and religion comes up. Mom asks what we were thinking of doing about baptism or not and I jokingly said (guiltily to get on my moms nerves a bit) that he would have a bris and would love it if she would come to the bar mitzvah. now my wife’s mom was forced to convert from Catholicism to Judaism for her own mother in laws acceptance for a failed marriage so wife is not religious, but it hurt my wife and reasonably so when my mom replied “oh, son, I raised you better than that.” Still no acknowlegement of fault from that comment and mom thinks wife is “overly sensitive, dramatic, and childish” for wanting an apology for it.
Weddings: Future wife becomes current wife. We had gotten engaged on our next anniversary trip she planned for us. I proposed on our bike and barge through tulip season in holland with our feet in the water of the North Sea after a picnic in the dunes. her family business manufactures photo albums for professional photographers, so aside from our families all being divorced, estranged, difficult, and us trying to save money, we did not have a wedding, we just did the paperwork within a month of the proposal. I had already decided to have a baby with her before the trip so we were trying. 2 weeks before brothers wedding in Tennessee we become pregnant, so we break news immediately as to not steal limelight from brothers expensive wedding. Mom says she will cover cost of rental car so we can save money. Ok great. She books the tiny car and we pack it and head up the Smokey mountains to the cabins we are staying at. Two cabins for grooms family, one for his mother and one for his father, ten paces from each other: they havnt spoken but twice im since divorce in 1995 but through lawyers. Grandmother, mother, stepdad, 2 stepsisters and one boyfriend stayed in mom’s side. Wife and I stay at father’s side cabin with just his wife. His Wife’s 3 daughters and family’s stayed a town away down the mountain among extended family. Anyway, beautiful wedding takes place. My wife is sent into town to collect flowers and run errands for my mom which she happily obliged to since she is a solitary person and did not want wedding day drama. Day after, we are loading our rental sedan with our bags. Mom and grandma need a ride to the airport and our flight is before theirs so they will drop off the car for us 4 hours or so after we go to the airport 5 hours from current time. We’re loading the car. Stepcousin passed out in mother’s cabin night before and needed a ride. Disorganized brunch for 20 people is trying to be made. Father’s wife’s daughter books a reservation for 10 people which include her family, her sisters, me, my wife, dad, and their mom. My stepdad had left for home at this point as he had taken his own suv instead of flying with my mom and 90 year old grandma. So mom is trying to pack grandma in the car with bags and my wife and stepcousin. At this point mother asks stepmother if she and grandma are on reservation for the brunch. Stepmom says no they are not, she wasn’t sure of their plans. Mom says under her breath “fucking assholes, so typical,” and she goes into a bit of a rage to which my stepmom says here “it’s ok I will call and add you two it’s no big deal.” So we continue packing the car and realize we won’t all fit. So my wife tells my stepcousin to go ride with my father to the restaurant 10 minutes away we will meet you there. Mom says to wife, “no you go with the father.” Wife says “no I am going to ride with my husband” mom gets close to her face with her finger and says “this is my car, you can fucking Uber!” Wife is 6 weeks pregnant at this point and it all escalated from here. wife and mother start yelling at each other swearing at each other and we get into the car, mom behind wife who was in shotgun. 2 occasions on the trip I had to stop the car because mom had taken off her seatbelt to stand over the seat and scream in my wife’s face with so much vigor that spit came on to her face multiple times. I’m trying to tell them both to behave and mom sit down shut the f up. Mom is telling wife to get the f out of the car and find a ride, she has no right to speak because she’s “new here” (dating and living together for 3 years at this point). The following brunch she apologized in a crowd with a hushed voice at a table of 20 people trying to have a group conversation again privately to my wife “I’m sorry you get so upset” and my wife told her “that is not an apology.” The following several hours in the car with grandma and stepcousin and wife were some of the most uncomfortable moments of my life. At a gas station I pulled my mom aside and said I need ther to give a huge apology, that it was so nasty and inappropriate, my brother and I are used to abusive language and aggressive behavior but to my pregnant wife and any other human being it is disgusting and unacceptable. Sitting in the car was quiet for many hours until we got to the airport. No speaking about what happened just mom happy go lucky about Tennessee and Dollywood and wife and I in shock, cousin still half in the bag from a fun wedding, grandma 90 years old probably confused about what happened.
The family groupchat: Im waiting on an apology from my mother to my wife who is extremely hurt and expressed to my mom loads of time she needs to reach out and apologize. We’re not talking until she will do so. It is bugging me and keeping me up at night. My appendix flares up and I am admitted to the hospital with emergency appendectomy. Still pregnant Wife suggests I reach out to mom to let her know what’s going on. So I text mom I’m at the hospital and will have surgery. I send a pic or something that on my end says hasn’t gone through. Mom group texts our family group with stepdad, his daughters, brother and his wife, and grandma that I am in the hospital and attaches the pic I sent of me in there. Then she continues to rave about the success of her startup company and how they got FDA approved clinical trials finally completed or some pivotal moment that made the text about her. Wife and I are in a hospital so the picture comes up on moms end as unable to have been sent. Mom assumes that my wife has blocked her phone, so mom removes my wife from the chat. Wife is rushing home to take care of the dogs at this point and is not alerted on her phone, but on everyone else’s phone it clearly reads “(mom) has removed (wife) from the chat.” Immediately I text my mom and basically say how dare you do that to her she is the one who insisted I let you know out of respect and mom responds with blah blah she did this she did that I will not have it. So I go back to the family chat and remove mother. At this point I let everyone in the chat know what my mother has done and how she refuses to take responsibility for how she made my wife feel, address her feelings, apologize or do anything at all to reach out about the wedding incident or even inquire about the wellbeing of the pregnancy for her first grandchild. Stepdad finally steps in and tells me “enough.” Grandma says “shame on you.” I am dumbfounded. This is a hush hush family that hates to have anything out in the open and likes to maintain a picture perfect image. For examples; 1) I and wife were on the family Christmas card of a photo taken at the wedding that the whole world received except for wife and I. 2)brothers alcoholism was to remain hidden from the family as was his rehab treatment and how it affected his career. Now understand that they like to keep things quiet but that is not how I want to handle my problems, these things trigger alcohol use and violent outbursts on my part that I no longer wish to live through. Now appendectomy’s are pretty simple so I recovered quickly (it don’t rupture we just took it out). But during the time I was scheduled to be under anesthesia, stepdad reaches out to wife to have a chat and clear the air. Wife waits until I come to so i can be there and I hear the conversation. He claims to be here as a middleman like a business meeting to fix things once and for all. Wife and I are like wow great. He then proceeds to double down on my moms behalf that they will not be apologizing or meet any of her demands as she had already apologized as confirmed by 90yo grandma who was in the car and my mother herself. The term he used was stalemate to describe the situation. Wife and I are shocked but she has me keep quiet to show me what he will say. He proceeds to yell at her and they were screaming at each other, again steamrolling the conversation assuring us that he was down the middle yet maintains that mom has made a sufficient apology that needs to be accepted and wife needs to grow up and move on, then wishing her luck with the baby and a nice life. Next day I call stepdad to see how it went. He reassures me that he has done all he can and everything is back to normal. At this point I call him out and tell him I was conscious and explain to him what an apology is. But there is no dialogue with this guy like there is no dialogue with my mother. He proceeds to talk loudly over me like she does and basically call me a piece of shit for the amount he and mother have done for me. I speak to him first time like I never have before by calling him a hands off father and a pussy of a man who finally reaches out while he thinks I am under anesthesia to yell at my wife then pretend it’s cool, and I basically tell him he has never done a single thing for me to try and develop me into a man or nurture me as a child into an adult, but he thinks taking me on fishing trips and ski vacations are equivalent to love and nurturing growth and development just like my mom does. I reassure him that he has no right to talk about family being that he ruined his own as well as mine and couldn’t even tell my dad to his face that it was him who was sleeping with my mom behind his back when my dad came to him very upset as a friend when he got an anonymous phone tip at work one day. Then him and my mom laughed about it in court when my dad brought it up during the divorce. We ended with swearing and I felt very happy for finally giving my true feelings to him.
The birth: Months go by and nobody has said a thing. I can’t sleep at night seeing how much love I am getting from my father and his side for the baby, and my wife’s family, then thinking about how my own mother hasn’t reached out a single time. I’m dreaming about beating up my stepdad and it’s driving me mad. So weeks before the due date I reach out to my mom begging her to clear things up and apologize to my wife. Nothing. A week later i tell her how disappointed and abandoned I feel and want her in the family. Nothing. Baby comes a couple days early. Everyone is excited. Mom texts me begging for photos and to let everyone know. I tell her my brother and two stepsisters have received photos. I ask her to please reach out to wife she still needs to make amends for what’s happened between them and all she needs to do is reach out. Mom’s responses have been defensive, derisive, projecting, playing victim and referring to herself as a kicked puppy. Telling me my wife needs to apologize to her and making the conversation about mother son instead. She is beating around the bush. And she is sending me photos of my own baby that I did not send her. Her friends are congratulating me that I did not tell. Again she is pretending that everything is ok and it is not. She asked me to apologize to her husband for what I said on the phone that day. I said ok, watch this. So I sent the guy a message that was very apologetic and not passive aggressive or backhanded comments in any way. Still my mom won’t say anything.
Now: Baby is 6 days old. He is the best thing in my life and I wish my family were involved but it seems like I am living in a fantasy world where everyone can be happy together. I can be a jerk and have a terrible relationship with my mom, but I want more than anything to just feel loved enough where she can swallow her pride and make amends with my wife. Thats it. And she asked the other day to put a family group chat so everyone can be involved… for real? I know she is stressed with a high pressure job, but it seems heartless to me. She asks what big items she can get for the baby. Mom, baby is here we have everything for a couple months already. I said the biggest thing you can do is reach out and have a heart to heart with my wife so this rift can end and we can at least be cordial if you two can’t get along. I don’t think it will happen.

I (29F) have been fond and taking care of various cats. Some are adopted, bought, or rescued. I loved them all, though I can’t say equally because they can be pretty annoying at times but I still cry if anything bad happens to one of them.
I have a neighbor(M)(40+), which is my husband’s cousin, asked me if he could adopt a cat. I said sure as long as he could take care of it. He ended up getting 3 kittens.
1 cat died after a few months due to drowning and he didn’t even made any effort to rescue it, instead he waited for another neighbor to jump in the water minutes after the cage the cat was in fell off the water. He didn’t jump due to the “water being dirty”, he said, and “it’s too deep”, he said. I didn’t say anything since I came to know the story weeks after it died.
2nd cat died due to “someone poisoned it” he said. But even before it got poisoned, the cat already has a big slash wound across its face but luckily it healed but still ended up dead due to poisoning. He did ended up telling me about what happened since he posted it on facebook about it being dead. I told him, he could’ve brought it to me since I know, at the very least, some first aids to save the poor kitty. Or he could’ve brought it to a vet, it was just a 5-7min. drive from our neighborhood.
3rd kitty often comes to our house to eat anything it can find from the counter, sink, or even from trash. It’s too skinny and always had diarrhea and I know for a fact that this kitty is very sick and isn’t gonna last long if it stayed with them. I tried talking to him about taking it back since I’m afraid and positive that same fate would come to it if that kitty stayed with him and his family. Yet he refused to give it back even after I locked the kitty in my isolation cage for medical treatment and I even start giving it good food and some medicine. I wanted to take it to the vet but he took it back to their home and I never saw it again.
2 months passed, I always had that kitty in my dream for about a week and decided to ask him about it if it’s still alive and well. Surprise, surprise…. the kitty’s dead! I’m so pissed, mad and yelling at him for not taking care of it. Even lying to my face saying that he tried bringing it to a vet but sadly it died of “heart attack” few days after he took it to the vet????? And it’s already dead for a few weeks! I was so mad I was yelling at him and calling him names while my husband tryna calm me down. I cried so much feeling guilty for all the death of those kitten just because I gave it to a heartless jerk who can’t even take care of his family and often beat his wife. I should’ve never given him a chance. Everyone was trying to make me chill but I just yelled at him until I was forced to go back inside the house where I cried for about an hour blaming him and blaming myself.
Some of my family members got sad but I was the only one who was devastated about what happened. I’m wondering if I am indeed overreacting or if me getting mad pissed at him is justified?

The internet is a strange place, inadvertently designed to bring out the best and worst in people. People can be whoever or whatever they want to be. For predators and malignant narcissists and who live in their own delusions to begin with, it's like a hunting ground. They can create whatever persona they wish, fill their victims' heads with lies and half-truths that paint them out to be someone they are not, and by the time their victim actually meets them, it's too late - they've already created an image in their mind of this perfect person the narcissist has convinced them they are, and it usually takes time before the curtain comes down, the lies fall apart, and the mask breaks away.
I'm no saint, and I've learned my own tough lessons from the internet. I grew up under not-so-great circumstances, only getting 5 years of education before I turned 18 and was largely raised by a computer screen. Along the way, I catfished a woman in her mid-20's when I was 14-16 years old. It wasn't intentional at first, I told everyone that I was in my mid-20's and I worked as a bouncer at a bar in NYC. I never meant any harm, I was just raised by a computer and spent all my time alone playing MMOs and learned quickly that if I told people how old I was, they'd stop playing with me. So a bouncer seemed like a job I could bullshit about easily enough, and I was a big dude at 6'1 260lbs so I figured I could maybe pass it off as legit if it ever got hectic.
I started playing with this woman in her 20's and her husband frequently. We became friends fast, and soon we were virtually inseparable on the game. Her marriage ended up not working out, and after they separated she told me she had feelings for me. I should've admitted I wasn't who I said I was then, but I was young and dumb and she was the only real friend I had, so I kept up the ruse. Eventually I did come clean, and she broke it off with me not long after. We stayed friends, albeit with my heart hurting pretty bad, for a few months afterwards - until she met Jack.
When she first told me about Jack, he sounded like a great catch. He had his own IT business in Canada, was a couple years older but not by much, and she was infatuated with him. Obviously I was crushed and didn't handle it well, being a practically feral teenager at the time, so not long after they started getting serious she ghosted me altogether. I was around 17 at the time, and shit started going off the rails for me. After I got out of juvie, I started drinking heavily on a near-daily basis and selling and doing drugs. This led to a lot of pathetic, inebriated, desperate attempts to contact her and apologize for how I acted.
After months of being ignored, eventually grief and regret turned to anger, and finally acceptance. When the pain passed and I came to my senses a bit, I had an epiphany and realized that if I loved her as much as I thought I did, the best thing for both of us would be to let her go. I was a high school dropout with no job, selling drugs to get by. She had 2 kids, and what kind of life could I provide for them? She made the right choice, my age and the fact I made a grown woman fall in love with a teenager not withstanding, and as bad as it hurt I realized it was selfish of me not to accept the way things were and leave her alone, so I did.
10 years or so later, I had gotten my shit together. Worked my way up from cleaning dead shit out of swimming pools, to an entry level position at an environmental consulting firm, to a Project Manager at one of the largest firms in the field in the DC area. I'd met someone, got her pregnant, and for some reason I felt a pull to contact her again. Not to rekindle an old flame, but because she had been a tremendously positive influence on my life in a time where I had few. She was the first good thing I had in my life at a time when I was sleeping on old blankets on a hard floor in an abusive home, and what I'd held onto from our time together wasn't our romantic relationship, it was the best friend I'd ever had. And something made me want to tell her that all that work she put into getting my head right wasn't in vain, and I'd finally made it out of the gutter.
So I messaged her on Facebook, and to my surprise she actually responded. We started talking again, and soon it was back to every day. When my baby mama got back on drugs and turned abusive and was putting my daughter's life in jeopardy on a near-daily basis, she was the one who convinced me I could fight for custody - that I had to fight for custody. So I did, and I won, and I've had full custody of of my daughter since she was 6 months old and for the 10 years since.
But eventually we parted ways again. I'd started seeing someone, and part of me knew I couldn't commit to another woman while I was still carrying on with her. Our relationship had started turning romantic again, and she had dropped some hints about old Jack that would come to the forefront later, but she wasn't ready to leave him and I didn't want to be that guy, so I sent her a message explaining why we had to stop talking, apologized, and ghosted her.
7 more years went by after that night. The relationship I abandoned her for soured quickly when I found out that chick was a carbon copy of my baby mama, and I quit dating to focus on my career and raising my daughter. But on the long, 2+ hour commutes each way from work, I often found myself stuck pondering the "what ifs". What if I hadn't ghosted her? What if our age gap wasn't there, and we'd never had to split up to begin with? I knew in my soul I was never going to find someone like her again, but I made peace with it. I imagined her happy life, her kids with Jack, and convinced myself I made the right choice.
Then COVID hit, and near the start of it, I stumbled on a post on reddit about this dude who sent his high school sweetheart a message many years later apologizing for how he treated her and telling her how her presence impacted him, and I thought to myself, "Hey, I did that!". So I started writing a reply, and for the first time told the story of this girl and I. I'd never told a soul about what happened with us, not even my family or closest friends. Maybe it was the stigma of having an online relationship back in those days that carried over, or maybe it was just too personal to share with my friends or family. It got long, so eventually I just decided to start a new thread. When I was done, it was so long I figured no one would ever read it, but I hit submit anyway and put my phone down and got back to work.
Well, I was wrong. People did read it - a lot of people. Soon my phone started blowing up. Thousands of comments, hundreds of DMs, people offering me book deals and asking if they could have the rights for a screenplay or have me on their podcasts. It was fucking surreal, and being generally a private person who tries to fly under the rader, it got overwhelming fast. Eventually I reached out to her again on Facebook, warned her about what happened, and apologized for putting her business out there.
She didn't respond for a couple weeks, and when she did we started talking again almost immediately. And then in mid-April 2020, she told me that she needed to talk to me. She spilled everything, and told me exactly who Jack was. How he would hack into her devices to spy on her, threaten to kill her and her partner if she ever left him, say vile things to her and her daughters, calling the young girls cunts and bitches. How he alienated all her friends and family, and kept them all isolated in the house her parents bought them that he would rarely leave.
And I felt deceived too. All those years I'd convinced myself that she was happy, that she got together with Jack and was living the life she deserved. In reality, Jack intentionally got her pregnant not long after he flew out to her state the first time. He quickly moved into her house, and refused to work or provide not only for her kids or their kids, but for the other 3 children he abandoned in Australia and Canada who he had no relationship with, with 3 different women he victimized in the same manner. When she was 8 months pregnant with their first kid, she was working nights doing hospice care while he sat on his ass playing videogames all night and talking to his ex. In 17 years, this fucking loser with 7 kids by 4 women worked a grand total of 5 weeks, quit his job, claimed he got PTSD from the experience, and somehow manipulated his way into getting SSDI for it. They survived off SSDI and her parents' charity for years.
But Jack was reading all of this, because like I mentioned earlier, he was hacking her devices and watching us talk remotely. Jack knew the jig was up, and slowly started to unravel. She told him she wanted a divorce, and that she was not going to sever her friendship with me again. And he pretended to take that well, going as far as to try to befriend and manipulate me. He tried every trick to keep her he'd done for years - telling her he was going to get help and would change first, then when that failed he made suicide threats and somehow got his therapist to call her and tell her as long as she didn't leave him he wouldn't kill himself, and then he tried to intimidate her. Eventually he went off the rails completely and sexually assaulted her when he thought she was sleeping.
She called me from her parents' house crying the night it happened, and I convinced her to file a police report. She did, and a couple weeks later Jack got removed from the home, served with a protective order, and charged for sexual abuse. This of course did nothing to stop Jack - he broke into their house a couple days later when she and the kids were out to upload a folder of revenge porn to his Google Drive under the guise of wanting to drop off a cake for her birthday.
Then the stalking started. Jack would relentlessly message her all day and night on Facebook, switching between rage, trying to garner sympathy, convince her he would change, and threatening self-harm. We later found out via a cyber forensics report that he was hacking into the laptop she had taken with her while she hid at her parents' and had been so bold as to steal her Victim Impact Statement and send it to all his World of Warcraft buddies as a joke.
And he didn't just stalk her, he came for me too. Constant unauthorized attempts to access my accounts for everything from Windows to my bank, spam calls and emails - shit, the wormy little fuck even got his friends to stalk my social media and pretend to be strangers to gaslight me. I ignored all of it, and he got desperate enough to send me a lovely message attempting to extort and blackmail she and I, claiming he had "all my posts" but wouldn't do anything with them if I called him. The tipping point for me is when he subscribed to my small YouTube channel - which had nothing on it but 3 videos of my daughter. That veiled threat wasn't lost on me.
But Jack fucked up. I don't know if he thought his insane nonsense would scare me off, or if in his delusions he really thought he was the bad mother fucker he convinced himself he was, but Jack didn't know jack about me. I'm a crazy fuck too, and while he was sitting on his fat ass playing World of Warcraft all day every day for the past couple decades, I was selling drugs and hanging with some of the grimiest mother fuckers Baltimore had to offer. I've seen and experienced a lot of real violence outside a computer monitor, and the prospect of a violent resolution to this saga didn't phase me a whole lot. I'd spent years trying to be a better person and avoid conflict, but I sure as shit wasn't afraid of it either. Leading up to this point, I was already trying to calm myself down and talk myself off the ledge and not pack my guns and drive out there to keep watch until the police did their thing and put him away, which took a lot longer than it should have - this fucking guy violated his protective order 80 times in just a couple weeks.
So I called him, and he spent the next 26 minutes crying over the phone like a drunk little bitch, while I tried my best to be kind and to talk him off the ledge. And yes, I did record it, and yes it is hysterical listening to it now in hindsight, and yes I still have the recording. Anyway, I told him he was scaring the shit out of her and the kids, and he promised to leave us alone and I told him if he could chill the fuck out I would try to talk her into giving him more access to the kids. The next day, she got an email from her first ex-husband - Jack had reached out to him with a link to my reddit post trying to get help from him to come after me, which he promptly shut down and sent to her.
The next few weeks were terrifying as Jack descended further into madness and became more scared and desperate. He knew she was gone and not coming back, and he was facing real charges and real jail time, and while Jack is a fucking moron in a lot of ways, I'm sure he knew a fat, greasy computer nerd with a sex offense conviction wasn't going to have a good time in County. Jack was a murder-suicide waiting to happen, the police were doing nothing to stop his stalking, and I felt powerless to help her. Eventually after he sent her $50 over PayPal at 4:00am with what appeared to be a suicide note, I had enough. I called the DA's office, asked them why the fuck this was being allowed to happen, and promised them I'd been taking meticulous notes and if anything happened to her I would be taking it straight to the media. The DA told me if I was going to make threats the conversation was over, but sure enough he was finally arrested not long after.
Ironically we had remained platonic friends through most of this, but the shared experience of dealing with this psycho brought us closer together and things quickly changed. We knew he wasn't going to stop when he got out of jail, I felt responsible for her safety after my stupid reddit post started this chain of events that led to Jack's unraveling, and with the world seemingly coming apart during COVID, decided if we were ever going to meet it felt like it was now or never. So I booked a plane ticket across the country, spent a week with her and her family, and a few days after I came home she flew out to visit me and meet my family.
We went into it with no expectations. I fully accepted we might not click and our relationship would go back to being platonic. For my part, I just wanted the closure of finally meeting this person who had such a profound impact on my life before COVID mutated or something and killed us all.
But we did click, and the next two weeks were life-changing. I met and cooked for her entire extended family the day after I arrived, and it went well. While I was there I got her mom's email address, and after I went home I had an idea. I knew her parents had met in DC, so I emailed her mom and asked her for a list of places that were special to her, and she told me about the church her parents had met in. I asked her to keep our conversation secret so it would be a surprise, and she did.
So when she comes out to the east coast, I take her on a tour through DC and park the car a few blocks down the street from the church. As we're walking by, she notices the church and comments on how beautiful it is.
I keep it cool and respond, "Yeah, that's a pretty important place.".
She looks at me and says, "Oh? Why's that?".
"That's where your parents met.".
She audibly gasps, giddily bounces a bit, starts to cry, and we pulled down our masks (fuckin covid) and kiss. Her reaction is easily one of the greatest memories in my life. What I didn't know at the time, was that her parents had told her about that church since she and her siblings were kids. When the church changed denominations, the church took the angel statue off the top and brought it back to her home state, and her parents had taken them to see it a few times throughout her childhood.
Anyway, getting sidetracked here, the sappy love story stuff is a different story altogether.
A month after we met for the first time, I had quit my job, sold everything I couldn't fit in my sedan, and she flew back out and drove across the country with my daughter and I.
Sounds crazy as hell, and it was, but it worked out better than it should have. I got a good job making more than I did back home right away, her kids loved me, and my daughter loved her and adjusted to her new home fast. And by the time Jack got out of jail for felony cyberstalking, sexual abuse, and Intimidation of a Witness in a Domestic Violence case, we had cameras all over the house, and I had taught my fiancee how to shoot - which she quickly became better than me at.
But Jack's time in jail didn't slow him down, and the 2-10 year suspended sentence didn't deter him at all. As a matter of fact, on his first day out one of the first things he did was start trying to hack her accounts again. He managed to con an elderly couple he knew threw World of Warcraft from a different state into letting him live with them, and from there he spent a lot of time and energy stalking us and hacking our devices to the best of his ability. He also convinced these poor, very stupid elderly people from his videogame to bankroll a lengthy, expensive divorce. Somehow a man who hadn't worked in almost 20 years managed to run us into over $50,000 in legal fees in two years. How a marriage with zero assets turned into a two year battle when both parties were officially in poverty before the divorce, or how the family courts never saw through the bullshit is beyond me.
To Jack's credit, he did a pretty good job remaining a thorn in our side. Largely due to the complete and utter ineptitude and indifference of the police and District Attorney who could and should have put a stop to his bullshit at any point in that time. Old Jack got hit with a permanent criminal stalking injunction and a 10-year protective order along with his probation, and no amount of effort on our part would get the police, DA, or probation to put a stop to it, despite mountains of evidence.
He successfully managed to draw the divorce out right up to the wedding we planned a year and a half prior, with his attorney putting in motion after motion to delay the process. With all our family and friends coming from all over the country and as far away as Japan, we accepted our wedding would just be a celebration and not an official wedding. Until the night before the wedding, she got a call from her attorney - he had made a call to the clerk's office at the court and got her to move the paperwork to finalize the divorce to the top of the pile, and she was officially divorced. Our wedding would be a real wedding after all, and despite Jack's best efforts, he lost again. We had the wedding on a remote ranch that we rented for a week, and foolishly decided to cater and decorate ourselves, which would have been a colossal undertaking without the extra 4 hours to drive into town and get our marriage certificate at the courthouse. But we pulled it off and it was everything we could have hoped for and then some, and we were officially married.
Jack of course didn't stop after the divorce was finalized. The list of shit he tried to do to us before and after that is too long to spell out in an already too long post, but here are some choice bits:
He wrote a demented letter to the oldest of his kids with her who severed her relationship with him, calling my wife and her mother "vipers and cowards" and promising we would "answer for what we've done sooner or later".
He continuously hacked our computers, miscellaneous accounts tied to our emails, and any other devices he could get into - dropping in remotely via Amazon Alexa, phones, etc.
He set up bots to send us thousands of spam emails, sign us up for dozens of international newsletters all at once, and requests for consultations for things like solar panel installations.
He told the kids vile lies about my wife and I, although the most egregious was when he used a court-ordered therapy appointment with his second oldest daughter to accuse me of distributing child porn, told the therapist I am an "evil man", and told him I wasn't safe to be around his daughters. This led to her being forensically interviewed by the police, where she spelled out what happened, but of course they did nothing.
He gave the two youngest children cell phones to sneak into our house, with Google accounts activated and location tracking turned on.
He sent packages to our house 5 times in the space of a few months, one of which was addressed to himself and contained nothing but a bag of Stevia and a pack of gum. These packages generally came to our door the day before his scheduled visitation with the kids.
During this time my bank account was hacked four times in the span of just a few months with nearly identical fraudulent charges. In each of these instances, I had completely changed my bank account information.
He filed false reports with CPS twice, alleging we were beating the children, locking them in the closet, and not feeding or bathing them. This led to a CPS agent coming to our house to investigate.
We brought all this to the police over and over as it happened, and they did nothing. The DA running the case wasted 5 months subpoenaing a fake email address that we told them when we reported it was fake and spoofed. After finding out about that, we went to the DA's office to find out what the fuck was going on. A Victim's Advocate met with us, and was horrified about how the case was handled, looked up the prosecutor assigned to the case, rolled her eyes and said "Oh...it's Stephanie", confirming what we already knew - this prosecutor was completely incompetent, an elect3d politician moonlighting as a prosecutor. She called us the next day to tell us the actual DA called a meeting and a warrant was put out for Jack's arrest. For some inexplicable reason, they pulled the warrant back, and the advocate told us it was because the DA was pursuing more serious charges.
Then, they stonewalled us. The Victim's Advocate we had met with that actually tried to help us was moved off our case, and the new one assigned refused to talk to us or return our calls. The few exchanges we had with her, she made it abundantly clear she had the DA Office's interests in mind and not ours. We decided to just stay quiet and let the process play out and hope for the best, up until we received an email on Friday night before Election Day from the Detective telling us Stephanie had closed the case. I assume she didn't want her incompetence coming to light, and didn't want to shut the case down before Election Day knowing we would be on the warpath.
Eventually, Jack caught wind that he was officially under criminal investigation, but clearly had no idea they were never going to press charges. He got quiet for a bit, until he was ultimately let off probation early. We still get the occasional reminder he's out there watching, but his fear of going back to jail and the belief it might happen cowed him a bit. So instead he harasses us through the family courts, filing constant bullshit motions with no evidence to support them, and for some reason the courts let it continue. Somehow a man who makes ~$800 from SSDI and is only paying $30 a month total to support his 3 kids with my wife is able to fund tens of thousands of dollars worth of legal proceedings every year, and no one in the family courts has ever stopped to ask how he is paying for it or why all this money isn't being spent on supporting these children.
But despite Jack's best efforts, his bullshit hasn't worked. My wife and I have been together for four years soon, and married for two. His kids call me dad and hate his guts, only seeing him because the courts force them to. I continue to advance in my career, landing two major promotions in the past 2 years and now running a division in one of the largest companies in my field in this part of the country. I just enrolled in college to go back to school and get a degree in family law with a focus on domestic violence. The most frustrating part of the whole experience with ol' Jack was having no one to turn to when all the institutions who were supposed to keep this from happening ignored us, and even though I'll be well into my mid 40's before I accomplish my new goals, I plan to advocate for domestic violence victims and do everything I can to lobby for change to these laws to keep as many people as I can from going through what my wife and I did. I learned that the only way to beat these people at their game is to play on the same field right along with them, and that's what I intend to do.
My wife went back to work too once she healed from some of the trauma, making $30 an hour as a personal assistant for a fella who's had two movies made about his life. Our kids struggled a bit with school and dealing with all their biological parents' issues, but they quickly turned it around and have been excelling. We're all happy, healthy, and doing better now than ever.
As for Jack? Well, he's pushing 50 and still spending his days alone, playing World of Warcraft and jerking off in this old couple's basement. Nothing has changed there, and now he's too fat, old, and visibly an enormous fucking loser to victimize women in the same way he did in his youth. I have no doubts he'll find another victim eventually, probably when these old weirdos bankrolling his life now finally wise up, but one thing Jack forgets is that karma is a mother fucker, and I have a giant database of evidence that I can and will send out to whoever I please to help pull that mask down and keep him from doing this to someone else. Nothing is more appealing to a potential love interest than hearing their man cry like a drunk bitch for 26 minutes to the man he claims stole his wife, while simultaneously admitting to sexually assaulting said wife.
As wonderful as it would have been for Jack to go to prison where he can't hurt anyone again, there is some catharsis knowing Jack will forever be in a prison of his own making. His children want nothing to do with him, and he'll never see them graduate or walk them down the aisle. Jack will die miserable and alone, and in his narcissistic delusion will still be blaming everyone else for the colossal failure of his life, while continuing to fail to grasp the one thread that ties all his misery together - himself.
And since he somehow manages to find and stalk most of my social media, I'd wager Jack will end up reading this too. I hope he does in all honesty. And Jack, if you are reading this, I want you to know that you can kick, flail, manipulate and lie, cry and complain until you're red in the face. None of it matters. You don't matter. You'll leave this world alone, as sad and bitter as you are now, and the world will be a better place for it.

Got a buddy who I’ve been close to since I was 17. We’re in our mid 40s now.
I’m getting married in 2 weeks. We’re going less formally than some weddings. A dinner for family and then a separate dinner for about 25 friends.
I’ve had a lot of difficulty with some of my guy friends over the years as I have different ideas than some of them about respect etc.
Some of these difficulties have had to be resolved in stupid macho ways. But they are mostly resolved now.
But I got that one friend…who just keeps being dumb. Says dumb stuff. Looks to provoke in dumb ways. Let’s call him D for obvious reasons.
Nearly all my other guy friends are married and have kids. D is not. D always fancied himself as the stud of the group. This is not the case. He would say dumb stuff when we were younger like “I’m gonna sleep with all your future wives” etc
He’s a good looking guy and can be very charming and has had a few girlfriends. But he’s been single and circling dating app hell while living with his ex girlfriend (J) for years now.
He dumped J for some arm candy years back who then dropped him after a couple of weeks. He went crawling back to J but she was having none of it. They’re still good friends. He still wants back in - wishes he was married to J and they had a family. But it’s never gonna happen.
I’ve noticed, what I think is him getting ever more bitter of his friend’s happiness in recent times.
He was a disgrace at the last of our friend’s wedding. Generally boorish and disrespectful. And he’s often said nasty things about some of our friend’s wives behind their backs.
Last year when I told him I was buying the family home from my Dad (home ownership being something he craves but will probably never achieve) - his response was “Why? For somewhere to die in?”.
I’m often dumbfounded by people’s callousness or their inability to be happy for others so I was left speechless and didn’t rebuke him. I’ve had this kind of experience with him many times.
But I often think of D as my closest friend. He’s helped me out in the past when no one else would and I’ve always felt like I owe him.
So anyway - couple of days ago while chatting to him on messages about plans for the wedding he sent me a comedy sketch clip of a wedding couple receiving their wedding blessing from their priest.
The priest says something like -
“I now pronounce you man and wife. To be the last people each of you ever sleep with. To have children that will disappoint you and will hate you. (To the bride) To be left alone when he dies before you and to have no man want you then because you’re past it”.
My exact response was - You should keep your sad childish thoughts to yourself.
So he blew up on me - calling me humourless and mean spirited etc. And he keeps doubling down on this attitude and going through all the jerk off gears - projection, gaslighting, victim blaming and so on.
I’m on the verge of telling him to steer clear of our happy occasion. As I don’t want his bad faith, snide crap spoiling it.
He will take this very badly as he has an eggshell ego. And I doubt we will ever be the same again.
It may also be a very divisive thing among our friends. He’s very popular amongst the group and everyone gets on with him. He doesn’t show this side of himself to others as much as I’ve seen it.
It will be a noticeable exclusion and it will be commented on by everyone at the dinner.
The gossip it generates and the doubts over who is in the right (as I have no intention of spending my day recounting this sorry tale) could spoil the day as well.
But I believe I’ve reached my breaking point with him. And I think if he tries his crap when I’m in full on good faith & good cheer mode then I’ll likely lash out at him.
Am I being overly sensitive? Is this just the way dumb guys are? Should I grin & bear it or give my buddy the chop?

Legit I've had it with these people. Each one I felt wasn't enough to post here but man there have been so many I'll just throw th;em into a single post

1. Won't move back Wallace: Doors are closing on other transit users and he's just standing there with loads of room behind him. He's holding onto a handrail even though there are seats empty and his arms are outstretched. He won't move an inch so I (a smaller woman) have to duck under his arm and make room for those behind me. It's not like he has any mobility concerns that prevent him from moving back, in fact he's choosing to stand there when empty seats are behind him. This continues for 5+ stops on the crowded subway so it's not like he was getting off soon anyway
2. Purses Pam: Her purse gets its own seat even though there's a young mum with her toddler standing in the aisle. Also makes sure her cane is across the aisle so other bus riders will trip unless they see it and step over it.
3. Lying Linda: Just like Wallace, she didn't want to move back. But she told everyone it's because she was getting off next stop. After next stop, behold she's still on the train. Again and again, it's always next stop but she's still there! Others notice that she's just lying about needing to get off when she really just doesn't want to make room for others. Someone asks her to move back so she responds by stretching her arms across the aisle and grabbing both handholds on either side, and saying "why don't you make me?" Gosh these people
4. Sportsball Steve: Drunk old guy in a sports jersey staring creepily at young women on the train. He's burping, farting, and doing all sorts of gross stuff nice and loud. Puts his feet up on the seat across from him and just takes up loads of space despite the train being crowded and plenty of other riders don't have a seat. His snack wrappers are all over the floor around him
5. Mr. and Mrs. Forgot my stuff: At the bottom of a crowded escalator to the station, the wife suddenly decides she wants to find something from her husband's backpack so they stop right there in the middle after they stepped off to slowly unzip the bag and look for it. This nearly causes a pile-up from the 20+ other travelers on the same escalator who literally cannot stop and will crash into them because they're blocking the way. Legit so dangerous and lots of people could've been hurt. Like can we not walk 10 feet and then look for it? cmon now

Which ones have you run into? Why do they have to be such total jerks on public transit?

My wife was acting really friendly to my friend we are going to call him Troy when she talked to my other friends like they were trash.It was her birthday.We were in bed and she went to take a shower. Then Troy texted her so I open her phone and it’s a video of him jerking off. I grabbed all my stuff and left her. I went to my landlord and told him to cut off all my apartment utilities so she doesn’t get any water or electricity. My landlord let me have an apartment under my old onethat same night. I heard her on the phone with troy and her asking for him to come over. So I called my relatives and her relatives and friends her mom was holding a cake and everyone else had a party poper. We all entered the room to see her bent over on the bed with Troy. Troy scurried to put his pants on. Her mom screamed at her and me and my friends jumped Troy. After that my landlord tried to kick Troy and my girlfriend out they wouldn’t get out so my landlord called the cops. She is living on the streets. She keeps texting me telling me it was a mistake and to take her back in so a blocked her. I am wrong for this.

So my family has been trying to move to a better place since where we live is just currently crap to be honest. We are vietnamese and we currently live somewhere in South Carolina where there is no vietnamese community whatsoever. There is a small presence of vietnamese in central south carolina but not enough to where you can actually find someone to date. We are currently trying to move to Atlanta and have been trying since 2021 but with no luck. Because of that, I signed up for school in Houston, TX back in fall of 2021 and went to school in houston with the purpose of meeting some vietnamese girls in the vietnamese community of Houston. I never really wanted to go to college but I did it in the hopes of finding someone. During the time I was there, I met a vietnamese girl there who I dated for a while and we broke up in fall of 2022. Since then, she has graduated and has moved onto becoming an growing popular vietnamese singer for a big vietnamese american production company. I still have a bit of anger towards her. After school didn't work out, I moved back home to SC this past fall and have been here since. My main source of income is live streaming on Twitch and making youtube videos. My family and I are once again trying to move to Atlanta again and I've gotten backlash from some of my friends as they think that I'm an asshole cause I'm putting pressure on my parents by making them move to Atlanta for me to find a wife when they technically can't afford it. A decent home in atlanta costs $450,000 and more and we could only afford around $350,000. One of the realtors who was assigned to us was a vietnamese girl in Atlanta, she told us to not move since she thinks that we can't afford a home in a safe area. I'm ticked off at her because I want to move to Atlanta so that I can find a vietnamese wife and so I'm putting pressure on my parents to get them to move. I told them that I don't care if we have to live in some crappy neighborhood, I just want to live in Atlanta so that I can participate in the vietnamese community. I want to try this before I resort to my backup plan which is going back to vietnam to find someone. My friends say that I'm a huge asshole for doing this and I don't get how I am when my parents understands the situation and is trying to help me. Does it really make me a jerk for egging them on about moving and making them move for me ??

Here's a post of mine from 2017

I'm in.
Hard mode
Indefinitely
My goal is to regain, no find myself. PMO'ing since the age of 12. I'm 27 now. Porn fucked up my life. No more!
Today is one year after my attempted OD. The catalyst was my girlfriend of five years leaving me and me screwing up my career as a firefighter. I was broken then and I'm still broken now. I blame PMO and porn in general. Insanity is repeating the same cycle and expecting a different result. Time to break this cycle.
Post end
^{How naive I was}

Back story with context

I now know my addiction started with MO at the age of 5. I used to do that on a daily basis to self soothe and it didn't help that I discovered what can be done with an electric massager. See my parents got divorced the first time around about then, they remarried each other, only to get divorced again. Mom remarried a abusive alcoholic, moved to my absent father and verbally abusive stepmother, all this before turning 14. Looking back I can see I was neglected and found my own coping mechanisms. Smoking cigarettes, weed and alcohol since 13, other drugs soon followed at 16, whatever I could get my hands on.
Note all my compulsive and addictive behaviours were actively being pursued in some form or another throughout my story, I merely set the stage with the background.
At 19 I lost my virginity to a broken and hurt girl that was on average banging 4 guys a week, she literally had to take off her clothes and ask me whilst naked 'What are you waiting for?' I was so inept and socially awkward. After two hours of furiously boning because I couldn't finish, I snuck back to my room only to jerk off. I recall thinking to myself was that it? Was all the hype about that? Needles to say this girl went and 'cheated' on me after a week, left me a tad embittered.
At 21 I somehow got my first girlfriend, she had been raised by her grandparents because both her parents had tragically died in two separate freak accidents, she had proper traditional values, real wivey material. Wanted to wait until marriage. None of it mattered much to me, I knew what I wanted and at 21 it certainly wasn't a wife. She was studying nursing and I was a firefighter, we were both renting, me with friends, her in a student commune. We started occasionally sleeping over at each other, very innocently at first just making out, cuddling and talking.
post deleted
She took the sheets with to wash and made a hasty retreat, I went to work in a cold sweat, post clarity had never been so fucking surreal nor had it ever garnered so much self loathing.
What had I done.
Later that day she messaged and asked me over where she gave me a hand written letter, front and back, tear stains and little hearts. In it written how beautiful it was, how much she loves me and how no-one can ever find out.
I felt physically sick.
What had I done.
We secretly moved in together and what followed was five years of a co-dependant relationship where she grew to hate me and I went progressively deeper into the abyss of porn.
In the interim my father passed away from cancer, I DUI'd and totalled into a young married couple, got arrested, went to a 'Stress clinic' and broke up with my girlfriend out of guilt. Quickly got back together and a few months later she mercifully broke up with me. I was just so weak. Maybe she just woke from being disillusioned, maybe she grew out of her naivety, maybe my addictions just followed their natural conclusion, maybe PTSD and tragedy got the better of me. She got a new boyfriend, I almost got a restraining order. (She withdrew the case in the judges chamber's on condition I NEVER contact her again) In short succession I slept with multiple partners, a few times while blackout drunk, a few one night stands and I left a wake of pain, regret, broken hearts and shame. All consensual.
Finally I tried to OD on sleeping pills, went back to the 'Stress clinic' and whilst there someone dear called and told me that to gain my life I had to give it away. Found religion or it found me, resigned from the Fire brigade.
Footnote~ The ex got married and became a mother sometime during, heard it through the grapevine.
She'll never have to see me again as per her wishes.
Learnt about NoFap {insert original post}
I moved a couple of states over, away from everything I had broken and everyone I'd hurt. Went on a journey, forgave myself, hated myself, loathed myself, forgave myself again, went on another journey. The whole time PMO and MO came and went.
Streaks came and went. Depression stayed and dark thoughts came back like a long lost friend but I kept on crawling towards the light, towards freedom.
FFW to now
I'm cold turkey from substances and on a 18 day streak. I've come to realise you can't run from this demon and this fight is worth fighting head on. PAWS or Post-accute Withdrawal Syndrome is real and even with my longer streaks I've only been kicking the can further and further down the road by occasionally binge relapsing.
I haven't been in a relationship nor have I had sex since the fallout. Real intimacy absolutely terrifies me and I suffer from anxiety and depressive episodes.
But there's hope!
I've been seeing a life coach, exercising and spending more time with friends and family, joined a men's prayer and accountability group. To go fast go alone, to go far go with others and I'm in it for the long haul.
The penny's dropped.
I can tell something has changed.
I'm coming back to life.
3 months ago I met a girl on a online dating platform, absolutely way out of my league, someone who's beautiful inside and out. I'll be meeting her for the first time this Friday and we'll be spending the weekend together, in a social setting.
I'm excited yet apprehensive. I don't want to place her on a pedestal but I want to treat her like a queen. We're only meeting and nothing intimate will happen, both of us want to wait until we're married be it with one another or someone else. But darn I'm excited. I want to hope again. I want to love and be loved.
I want to live again.
tl:dr

1. Porn can mess you up and the abyss is deeper than you can imagine.
   
2. Addiction is not about the substance but rather underlying behaviours and coping mechanisms.
   
3. Circumstances nor your past should determine your future.
   
4. There's alway's hope!
   

Here's a post of mine from 2017

I'm in.
Hard mode
Indefinitely
My goal is to regain, no find myself. PMO'ing since the age of 12. I'm 27 now. Fucked up my life. No more!
Today is one year after my attempted suicide. The catalyst was my girlfriend of five years leaving me and me screwing up my career as a firefighter. I was broken then and I'm still broken now. I blame PMO and porn in general. Insanity is repeating the same cycle and expecting a different result. Time to break this cycle.
^{How naiive I was}

Back story with context

I now know my addiction started with MO at the age of 5. I used to do that on a daily basis to self soothe and it didn't help that I discovered what can be done with an electric massager. See my parents got divorced the first time around about then, they remarried each other, only to get divorced again. Mom remarried a abusive alcoholic, moved to my absent father and verbally abusive stepmother, all this before turning 14. Looking back I can see I was neglected and found my own coping mechanisms. Smoking cigarettes, weed and alcohol since 13, other drugs soon followed at 16, whatever I could get my hands on. Opiates, hallucinogens, psychoactives, stimulants, depressants, inhalants if it could be abused chances are I would and have, fortunately not crack or needles, it blessedly somehow never crossed my path but the rest was fair game when it did and I was always on the prowl for something new or a quick fix.
Note all my compulsive and addictive behaviours were actively being pursued in some form or another throughout my story, I set the stage with the background but nothing I've done is justifiable.
At 19 I lost my virginity to a broken girl that was on average banging 4 guys a week, she literally had to take off her clothes and ask me whilst naked 'what am I waiting for?' I was so inept and socially awkward. After two hours of furiously boning because I couldn't finish, I snuck back to my room only to jerk off. I recall thinking to myself was that it? Was all the hype about that? Needles to say this girl went and 'cheated' on me after a week, left me a tad embittered.
At 21 I somehow got my first girlfriend, 18 straight out of school she had been raised by her grandparents because both her parents had tragically died in two separate freak accidents, she had proper traditional values, real wivey material. Wanted to wait for her big day. None of it mattered much to me as I started the process to groom her over the course of 3 months. I knew what I wanted and at 21 it certainly wasn't a wife. She was studying nursing and I was a firefighter, we were both renting, me with friends, her in a student commune. We started occasionally sleeping over at each other, very innocently at first just making out, cuddling and talking.(explicit)>! Progressively I moved towards groping and heavy petting. Until one morning after a house party at my place. I woke up with a boner and her snuggling up against me. I had had enough of waiting. I won't try to sugarcoat it or gloss over it or paint it pretty.!<
She said no.
More than once.
My mind went into that blank primal space of no return, the same space it would go with porn. I forced myself on-top of her and I raped her.
She took the sheets with to wash and made a hasty retreat, I went to work in a cold sweat, post clarity had never been so fucking surreal nor had it ever garnered so much self loathing.
What had I done.
Later that day she messaged and asked me over where she gave me a hand written letter, front and back, tear stains and hearts. In it written how beautiful it was, how much she loves me and how no-one can ever find out. I felt physically sick.
We moved in together and what followed was five years of a co-dependant relationship where she grew to hate me and I went progressively deeper into the abyss of porn. Maybe she just woke from being disillusioned, maybe she grew out of her naiivety and maybe my addictions just followed their natural conclusion, maybe PTSD and tragedy got the better of me.
In the interim my father passed away from cancer, I DUI'd and totalled into a young married couple, got arrested, went to a mental institute and broke up with my girlfriend. Got back together and she mercifully broke up with me. I was just so weak. She got a new boyfriend, I almost got a restraining order. (She withdrew the case in the judges chamber's on condition I NEVER contact her again) In short succession I slept with multiple partners, a few times while blackout drunk, a few one night stands and I left a wake of pain, regret, broken hearts and shame. All consensual.
Finally I tried to OD on sleeping pills, went back to the mental institute and whilst there someone dear called and told me that to gain my life I had to give it away. Found religion, resigned from the Fire brigade.
Footnote~ The ex got married and became a mother sometime during, heard it through the grapevine. She'll never have to see me again, that was her wish and one I will gladly grant.
Learn about NoFap {insert above post}
I fled a couple of states over, away from everything I had broken and everyone I'd hurt. Went on a journey, forgave myself, hated myself, loathed myself, forgave myself again, went on another journey. The whole time PMO and MO come and go.
Streaks came and went. Depression stayed and suicidal thoughts came back like a long lost friend.
FFW to now
I'm cold turkey from substances and on a 18 day streak. I've come to realise you can't run from this demon. PAWS or Post-accute Withdrawal Syndrome is real and even with my longer streaks I've only been kicking the can further and further down the road by occasionally binge relapsing.
I haven't been in a relationship nor have I had sex since the fallout. Real intimacy absolutely terrifies me and I suffer from anxiety and depressive episodes.
But there's hope, I hope
I've been seeing a life coach, exercising and spending more time with friends and family and I've joined a men's prayer and accountability group.
The penny's dropped.
I can tell something has changed.
I'm coming back to life.
3 months ago I met a girl on a online dating platform, absolutely way out of my league, someone who's beautiful inside and out. I'll be meeting her for the first time this Friday and we'll be spending the weekend together, in a social setting.
I'm excited yet apprehensive. I don't want to place her on a pedestal but I want to treat her like a queen. We're only meeting and nothing intimate will happen, both of us want to wait until we're married be it with one another or someone else. But darn I'm excited. I want to hope again. I want to love and be loved.
I want to live again.
tl:dr

1. Porn can mess you up and the abyss is deeper than you can imagine.
2. Addiction is not about the substance but rather underlying behaviours and coping mechanisms.
3. Circumstances nor your past should determine your future.
4. There's alway's hope!

Part 5
Gerard, God
Somewhere in time and space
He watched the passers-by as they moved about, following their daily routines, unaware of the fate that would shortly befall them. This was the time that fascinated Him the most. The moments before they finally understood that The Threat was here.
It was a sort of last hurrah, He thought. They didn't know it, but Gerard could nonetheless sense a sort of joi de vivre, a liveliness that simply didn't exist in prior times, and couldn't possibly exist in future ones. He watched mothers dote lovingly over their children, watched children hurl themselves into play with abandon, watched addicts take in their drugs like a drowning man would gulp for air. They might not known that there was no tomorrow for most of them, but they nonetheless seemed to put just a little bit of extra effort into everything.
Eventually, it came to an end, of course. It always did, no matter how many times He watched it. He saw happiness and mundanity give way to pain and suffering. Laughter was replaced by the screams of the dying. Life was replaced by death. The world replaced by destruction.
He sighed, leaving this timeline. He never watched the arrival of The Threat twice in the same timeline. There was nothing for Him to learn that way. His power was immense and total. He only had to witness The Threat once in each timeline to understand it.
Worst of all was the knowledge. The knowledge that He would only be able to save a single timeline. That all others would fall into ruin, destroyed and left to rot away. Only one could survive; the one that He chose. He could stop The Threat only once, for doing so would require Him to remain. Ever vigilant, ever ready to stop any recurrence.
He had to choose which timeline. That task was less than He feared, for now he knew that there were an infinite number of them. He could choose one with the right qualities, one whose nature would aid Him in His work. He realized then that He would, once He had chosen the proper timeline, finally watch The Threat come twice. Once, when He reviewed that timeline prior to choosing. And again, when He would stop it.
And stop it, He would. No other outcome was acceptable. He had already sacrificed too much. His mortality, His life, His happiness, His very soul itself. He had wrought Himself into a weapon, to strike down The Threat, and He would fulfill that purpose, no matter what.
----
Jerry Williams, Godslayer
Nibiru
We were sharks, swimming and darting among a school of fish. Gods and devas fled, screaming in terror as we flew through the swirling, chaotic energies that should have driven us -or at least my wife and daughter- mad within seconds. They had thought that their realm protected them.
Little did they know, we were already mad.
Inanna and I flanked a group of fleeing gods, preventing them from leaving this world, extending their essence into manifested bodies somewhere in one of the countless material worlds, or simply crossing the energy that was the core of their beings into the Spirit World. Here, in Nibiru, our divinities and demi-divinities gave us access to unlimited power. We seized it and wove nets with which to entrap those minor gods who could not find escape elsewhere, and had huddled here in fear of our coming.
As the group fled, we sped up, curving our course, which caused them to curve theirs, fearful of drawing too close to either of us. We moved slowly, carefully, angling them where we wanted them to go.
It wasn't long before the gaping maw of the Grandfather of the Gods came into view. Ixlublotl, the primordial god, the originator of divinity. The gods we herded realized their peril and turned to flee back the opposite direction, but there they found Aaina, burning towards them, screaming in rage and bristling with offensive energies.
Trapped, they had no choice. They attacked us. Emotions and thoughts, energy and matter, all of it flew at us in an orgy of sudden violence that churned the substrate of this world into a screaming chaos. All three of us linked our magics into a shield; a half-sphere of anti-magic that absorbed their attacks, sending the energy of which they were made back into into the swirling chaos around us.
They threw everything they had at us, a desperate last stand, driven by necessity and panic. All of it crashed against our defenses, the resulting streamers of magic filling the space around us with an all but impenetrable cloud. Hidden by that cloud, Ixy closed in.
By the time they realized that it was too late, it was over.
Ixy's physical body, that cloud-wrapped cacophony of maw-stalks, eye-stalks, spider-like legs and whipping tentacles, currently the size of a skyscraper, swept in, mouths snapping up the energies that were the cores of our quarry.
We came together when it was done. Inanna created a haven for us, allowing us to release the magic that held our bodies in stasis and protected us from the wild magic all around. It was a copy of our house, something she'd come up with a while back and shown to me with great pride. I had loved it, of course.
I sank into the loveseat with Inanna next to me as Aaina took the recliner.
"That's most of them," Aaina said.
"About thirty more," I replied. "And then we can start the next phase."
"Do either of you have any doubts about what we're doing?" she asked. I could see the indecision in her eyes. She was so young, and such a good girl. My heart broke at having dragged her into such dirty business.
"No," Inanna answered, her voice hard and confident.
"Yes," I added. "But at the end of the day, this is what needs doing."
Aaina looked back and forth between us, then nodded. None of us smiled.
----
Emily Windham, Wizard, Artificer
Fremont, Nebraska, at the corner of E 4th Ave and N Main St
Emily turned just in time to see the massive troll hit Jim Carmichael with a shoulder, sending the trooper flying before angling at her with no change in speed.
Acting on pure instinct, she conjured a wall of force between them. The troll slammed into it, shattering the magics that held it together with raw force, but the wall did its job, stopping the warrior in his tracks.
Emily snatched the rune-engraved knife off her belt and surged forward, jumping at the last second to put her in range of the troll's huge neck. The blade plunged in, and she released a quick burst of magic that made her legs and off hand sticky, allowing her to cling to the thing, too close for it to use its battleaxe on her.
She ripped the knife out and plunged it in again and again as the barbarian roared in pain and indignation at being hurt so badly by a foe so tiny. Emily grabbed his beard, yanking hard to bring his eyes to hers as she slammed the knife in and twisted, the magic in the blade telling her when it found his windpipe and carotid artery.
Blood sprayed, coating her face and shoulders. The troll's roars were cut off in a gurgling, breathy hiss. He stumbled, then fell. Emily rode him down, her eyes locked onto his, watching all hopes of victory, or even survival, fade from them. She lost herself in those eyes, in the mystery that was this troll's life, ending right before her. She saw the regrets, the crushed hopes, the shame of defeat and wondered at the context.
The impact as they hit the ground broke the spell.
Emily released the magic and stood up, instincts trained into her by the security troops and war wizards making her search for more threats before she could even process what had just happened. But there were no more threats. That had been the last one.
Greg Ramirez walked towards her, his rifle barrel pointed down, hanging from the sling in front of his armor and all the various attachments that he and the security troops referred to as their 'battle rattle'.
"Nice work," he said, eyeing the troll, who continued to gasp for air, the sound of his labored breaths reminding Emily of a pig squealing. She looked down, searching for that orgasmic feeling her bio-dad had so desperately wanted her to share with him, but not finding it. All she found was a sense of satisfaction, yet even that was too much.
Years of therapy, of telling her story to trained clinicians and listening to and internalizing their advice. All of it had helped her make friends and move among the normal people, but it had never erased that feeling of satisfaction. This was the fourth time she'd killed a sentient being, and each time, she felt the exact same way. It was a victory.
Her maudlin thoughts were interrupted by the bark of Greg's rifle. The troll's head jerked and deformed, a splattering of blood coming out as a .277 fury round drilled a hole straight through his temples. She glanced up to find Greg still eyeing her.
"You did good," he said, his expression showing some concern.
"I liked it," she said quietly, her eyes turning back.
"You liked killing him?" Greg asked. Emily nodded, wondering if she'd always be fucked up.
"I killed him," Greg said. "And I damn sure liked it."
Emily turned back, eyeing him with some interest. Greg was, in many ways, the opposite of her. Cool, confident, charming and just all-around well-adjusted. She hadn't ever imagined that he wound enjoy something like this.
"It means I won," he explained. "It means that big, badass motherfucker showed up here trying to bully us, and take whatever he wanted from us, and little old me stood up and said 'no', and when he tried to force the issue, I took his life away. It feels like justice. It feels like one less motherfucker trying to kill me and my friends. Damn straight I liked it."
Emily smiled. She didn't realized she had smiled until Greg smiled back.
"I read your psych eval," he went on. "I know you think you're fucked in the head, but I'm gonna tell you right now, you're not. You're a warrior, that's it. Bloodlust isn't a bad thing, if it can be controlled. Enjoying killing isn't a bad thing, if you're killing the people that need killing. Give yourself a break, girl."
He clapped her on the shoulder, then took the back of her head with his free hand and pressed her forehead to his.
"I'm gonna recommend you be allowed to join the war wizard roster. You're all trained up, you're prepared for it, and from what I've seen today, you're a fucking natural."
Without waiting for a response, he let her go and turned away, grabbing the radio fob on his armor and squeezing it.
"Black Lead, this is Black-Two Actual. All raiders at the target site are neutralized. We're commencing a sweep now, will report back in thirty mikes."
Emily smiled at his back as he walked away. A part of her reflected that he was a natural leader, knowing exactly what to say to her in that moment. Another part didn't care, because it worked. She glanced down at the troll again, and didn't see a victim.
She saw a victory.
----
Kathy Evenson, Professional
Somewhere in the ruins of an ancient city in the Seventh World
Kells shifted nervously as Kathy continued to cut chits from the electrical panel lid with the magical laser emerging from her fingertip. He held his machete, really a short sword, in one hand, and his dagger in the other.
"We really shouldn't be much longer, Kath," he said. Kathy had explained to him the difference between Kath and Kathy, and even hinted at the things she'd done while possessed by Pissface and calling herself 'Kath', and even gone into some detail about how much she hated the nickname. Kells hadn't cared. He simply agreed with her, then continued to call her 'Kath'.
And the truth was, she really didn't mind that much.
She wasn't quite sure why, though she could hazard a guess. The man was disarming to a great degree. He presented himself as a dirty wanderer, a simple, violent man who shouldn't be trusted as far as you could throw him. But within just a few minutes of meeting him, she'd seen the intelligence in his eyes and words. She had seen the integrity in his negotiations with her, and the ethics that had turned him protective when the Searchers had appeared.
And despite that protectiveness, he still managed to avoid being patronizing. When she'd told him how she planned to get his chits, he had warned her of the dangers, then agreed to come along without hesitation when she didn't change her mind. Kells was a good man, she thought, and if a good man wanted to call her Kath, she supposed she could let him reclaim the name from the hell it had once represented.
"It won't be much longer," she said. She already had over seven hundred, and this plate would bring her to eight hundred. She only needed five or six more. This deep in the ruins, there was an untouched electrical box on almost every building. Some had been corroded, but most were surprisingly intact.
As she cut the final strip into chits, a roar sounded. It was a gurgling, rasping roar, unlike anything she had ever heard before. Or rather, the first one had been unlike anything she had ever heard before. This was the third time she'd heard it, and it sounded closer than the last two.
"That's no good sign, right thur," Kells said.
Kathy finished, dumping the little squares of galvanized steel into her bag and standing up.
"Come on," she said. "We'll go a couple blocks away from whatever that was before I cut the next one."
"Aye," Kells agreed, his head swiveling on his shoulders as he followed her down the alley. Kathy took note of how spooked he was. He seemed more nervous here than he had with the Searchers right in front of him. She supposed that might have something to do with the nature of the threats. The Searchers were, regardless of power and reputation, mere humans. Whereas whatever was making that roar was clearly some sort of monster.
She led him six blocks in a direction away from the roar before she stopped to examine the buildings. They had moved into a downtown area, which was one of the reasons she had stopped. The buildings here were closer together, which should make the rest of her task quicker. She found a good cover and ripped the little padlock off, then pulled it open and off its hinges.
A mass of spiders rushed out of the electrical box. She jerked her hand away, but they ignored her, scurrying down the wall and vanishing into the cracks between the bricks, safe once again in enclosed darkness.
She began to cut as Kells again stood watch.
She hadn't even made it halfway through the panel when another roar sounded, even closer than the last, and from a different direction.
"Call it," Kells said. "Call it now, Kath. Better ye collect some more later on than deal with the beast makin' them sounds."
"What kind of beast?" Kathy asked. She kept cutting, but glanced up and around, not seeing anything but filthy, dilapidated alleys.
"Walkers, they call 'em," Kells said. "Like great spiders, but rottin' away, with bones stickin' out an' flesh hangin' off th'legs."
"Great spiders?" Kathy asked. "How big?"
"Bigger'n a building."
"You've seen them yourself?" Kathy asked.
"Only once," Kells said, his voice growing quieter. He seemed to be done speaking for a moment, staring around. But after a few seconds, he continued.
"Friend o'mine, name o' Gil. We used t'work together, he an' I. I were real new to runnin' a caravan crew back then, about ten years back. Gil were an old hand at it, though. Took me under 'is wing and taught me th'roads, as it were.
"Anyways, we'd taken a pair o' contracts. Rough ones, with a tight timetable. Merchants needed t'get to Freeman's Port post-haste. One faster'n th'other. Gil took that one, left me with the easier one, though that weren't t'say it were an easy job.
"We was in Craster's Holdfast at th'time, an smack in between there an' Freeman's Port were an ancient ruin. Big one, 'bout the size o' this'un, in fact. Normally, it took about a week t'travel between the two places, but if one were brave or foolhardy enough, they could cut through th'ruins an' make it in five days.
"Well, old Gil had that in mind. We left together, an' at th'place where ye normally would turn north t'go around the ruins, he led his caravan on straight. I prayed fer their safety that night, but never really believed anything would happen. Gil were an experienced caravaner, an' tougher'n anyone else I'd ever met.
"Two days later, we was walkin' this ridgeline north o'the ruins when somethin' called out t'me. Not sure what, exactly. I started lookin' south, scannin' the ruins, an' sure enough, I found Gil's caravan, walking down a wide road between th'largest buildings. They was movin' at quite a clip, I hav'ta say.
"I were tickled pink, at first. Because we'd made near as good a time as they had, despite movin' almost a day's north to skirt th'ruins. But as I watched, I realized that they weren't just travelin', they was runnin'."
Kells sighed, his eyes distant and full of old regrets.
"That's when I saw one. A great Walker, striding out o' th'deepest part o' th'ruins. The way it moved were like nothin' I ever seen before. It crawled along th'sides o' the ruins themselves, like a spider almost, but always with two or three feet on th'ground.
"It came fer th'caravan, and fell on 'em in a slaughter. I watched it breathe fire down on 'em, stompin' men flat with its feet an' scooping 'em up with its great claws."
He sighed again, then looked down. He tucked his sword under his armpit and used his hand to rub his eyes for a moment, before taking the blade up again.
"Killed 'em all, it did. Erry single one, as I live an' breath. An' when it were done, it went around, stompin' th'bodies flat. Never ate one, jes did all it could t'make sure that not a single survivor lived t'tell the tale. I were shook something fierce, I tell ya. Took me own caravan down off the ridge, t'avoid bein' spotted. We ended up arriving a day late, but to this day, I thank me lucky stars we made it at all."
Another sigh came, and Kathy heard the cracks in his voice as he continued on.
"Not Gil, though. Nor any o'them what worked for him, or th'merchant what hired him. A few years later, I worked up th'courage t'take a couple o'men into the ruins, t'find the bodies. I found bones dressed in Gil's clothes. I took his sword, which had survived, an' is th'one I carry to this day. I think Gil'd be pleased to know his blade had saved me life, quite a few times since."
Kathy finished cutting the cover up and stood to put her hands on Kells' shoulder.
"Thank you for telling me that," she said, her voice gentle. "I can tell it's an important story to you."
Kells nodded and sniffed once, then jerked his head in the direction away from the most recent roar. "I still think we should get out o' here, Kath," he said. "I'll face down the Searchers an' be happy o' a good death, should they take me. But them Walkers... They ain't warriors ye can face an' die with honor. One o'them things finds us, there ain't no fightin' it. We jes' die screaming, th'only consolation coming when it's all over."
Kathy weighed his words carefully. Kells knew this world far better than she did. And while she knew her own abilities far better than anyone here, she had to be mindful not to be too arrogant. Kells had told her how a single Walker had slaughtered an entire caravan of experienced fighters, led by an experienced leader.
"Okay," she said. She handed the bag to Kells. "There should be about eight hundred and fifty chits in there. You can count them out later, and I'll trust your count. After I find what I'm looking for, I'll collect the rest and we'll settle up."
"Good call," Kells said. He tied the bag off to his belt and walked to the corner of the building, peeking around. When he was satisfied, he nodded. Kathy joined him, and together, they made a beeline to the edge of the ruins.
They had made it about halfway out when another roar sounded, this one right on top of them. A rumbling crash sounded from her right, and Kathy turned to see rubble falling to the ground as something massive rose off the ground, two blocks over.
"Stars an' stones," Kells swore, then shouted "Run!"

Hi Courtney! I'm a huge fan of your channel and I've been watching you for a while now, and I would just die if you read my story! It's gonna be a little longer since I don't want to miss any important details. Also tag warning for some serious topics (drug use and pedophelia)
Okay so, let's start back in 2012. My mom worked in the NICU taking care of little premature babies. (I had been 6 weeks early, which inspired my mom) I was 11 at the time that she met her ex-husband, my ex-stepdad. We can just call him B (for bastard lol). They worked together, he was funny and stole her heart. Well at the time he was going through a divorce but lived in a house twenty minutes from where we were living at the time. B had told my mom that things were over with his ex for sure (he told his ex wife at that time that he wanted to work on things! She was so blindsided by the divorce papers!) <--- of course we didn't know about any of that until recently End of 2012 comes, he marries my mom and my older sister move in with him and his 7 year old son in this three bedroom house. Two rooms upstairs and a master bedroom downstairs. Now of the top two rooms, my ex stepbrother (lets call him C) had the larger room, while my older sister (who was high school age, I think she was a senior) and I shared the other room and slept in bunk beds.
Now C had a problem with sleeping in his room at night. He would tell us about how he was afraid of the closet (the closet also had a tiny door that led up to the attic). Ever since he was little it was always the same problem. C was simply terrified of something in the house. He had an experience where someone woke him up and warned him that there was a spider, he started screaming and sure enough they found a brown recluse spider under his bed.
Then my mom gets pregnant and gives birth to my little brother, H. My sister had moved out pretty much as soon as possible. B was awful. He would belittle us and talk down to us, constantly try to make everyone feel stupid around him- he had to be the smartest one around at all times. He was an asshole, and he would say rude stuff and then complain that we were taking him too serious and he was just being sarcastic. That we 'didn't get his sense of humor'. And for a while, he had my mom wrapped right around his finger. He was manipulating her from the very beginning. He even treated her like shit most of the time. 8th grade all the way through the end of my senior year I endured his treatment every day. I had to be careful about what I said at all times, about who came over, about being too loud at night. If my room was messy, he would take a garbage bag and take all of my stuff- I had to 'earn' back my stuff.
When the baby was born they had to do renovations on the house. There was a ton of attic space, so they ended up breaking into it- a game room leading to two bedrooms and a bathroom. This was when things went from humanly hellish to supernaturally chaotic. During the renovations before any walls went up and it was mostly just wood and plastic, C and I had seen a dark shadow of a man pass behind a plastic tarp- and it was so clear because the sunlight was coming from the other side. When I checked there was no body there. Once everything was completed the feeling changed.
My room ended up being on the other end of the opened up attic.
At the time I was watching a lot of Supernatural- so my spooked ass started putting salt barriers on my bedroom door (which guess what! Yeah! It was one of those attic bedrooms!) and also on my window too. My mom and B would ridicule me for this but I stand by my decisions to this day!
This was mostly because of the feelings you would get in the game room. Even if you were just passing through. There were always eyes on you- especially when your back was turned. I never ever walked through that room without the light on. I didn't even sleep with the light off in my room. When I would I would get really bad sleep paralysis,
One of the worst ones I was laying on my stomach with my head turned to the side. I opened my eyes and I was utterly frozen. At first I know it's just sp, so I try to stay calm and take deep breaths but then I start to feel this pressure starting down on my feet. It feels like two hands grabbing my ankles and pressing down. Then the hands move up my body and then there's more pressure- like someone's whole body is crawled over top of me. It gets closer and closer to my head. All the while I'm trying to scream but I can't open my mouth so it's just coming out as quiet whimpers. I can feel it breathing on my neck and then in my ear. That's when it finally stopped and I jerked up and immediately turned on the light. I remember just crying for a while. At the time B had made it impossible to trust my mom- and they would've just gotten mad at me for waking them up.
There was another night where I had been up late, probably 3 or 4 in the morning and I was drawing or something just sitting on my bed. All of the sudden I hear 4 distinct knocks from INSIDE my closet! No joke I shit bricks. There was no rational explanation. Because there was siding on our house that was damaged and it would make noise but it was always specific like a scraping/tapping. But this was a knock, like someone is at your door with your DoorDash meal type knock. I always tried to rationalize what was happening. Make excuses for the weird stuff.
Then one summer, my cousin had come up from another state to stay with us. We spent a lot of time in my room, just hanging out. One day, we're both up there just chilling when all of the sudden I notice something under my door.
Someone was walking back and forth in front of the bedroom door. You could even hear the floor creaking on the other side. You could see the shadow pass to the right and then to the left. I remember locking my door and calling my mom to see if it was an actual human, nope. She ended up sending B up there (of course this made him mad for some reason) to verify that there was no person up there. Basically they just said we were being kids with overactive imaginations but I can tell you right now there was no rational explanation for that experience.
A lot of the time at that house you could feel constant eyes on you, mostly in the attic. Like always- at all times, someone or something was watching.
There were also times when there was a sort of 'mimic' situation where you could think you heard something upstairs but you really didn't; one time my sister went to pick up our dog- and she thought she heard the dog crying upstairs, she started to go up and get her when her boyfriend who was there at the time stopped her because the dog crate was downstairs in my moms room AND GUESS WHO WAS IN THE CRATE and NOT upstairs.
There was also one time I was babysitting my younger siblings and it was pretty late when I heard giggling upstairs. Thinking it was my brother, I went up to reprimand him and basically tell him to go to sleep but when I entered his room- he was dead asleep. Like fully passed out. I just shut the door and quietly went back downstairs. Nope nope nope.
B ended up doing work out of state- I was like 20 ish and moved back in with my mom and the kids. What was weird that during this time I didn't really have a lot of paranormal experiences. Once or twice you would hear weird things or my cat would get tiffed up staring at blank corners of the room. It was mostly really nice when he wasn't there.
A few years ago we ended up having to leave that house. B as it turns out had gotten himself addicted to meth and also started downloading explicit photos of underage girls (11-13 approx.) I was at the house when the police came and everything. He's still not in jail btw which is such bull. When it first happened, my mom reached out to B's ex wife to talk to her.
Turns out from the moment B and his ex bought this house, she immediately noticed negativity. Weird things and scary things that would happen. We sort of deduced that HE was the one bringing that negative energy into the house, which totally made sense because most of the extreme haunting stuff was happening WHILE HE WAS THERE. So yeah I blame him because he is a disgusting demon himself.
Anyway that's all I've got for now- thank you so much for reading! Love you girl!

The world was a boozy whirl of lights and sounds. Images, broken and fragmented, came and went. Voices, laughter, screaming. The ground pitched like the deck of a tempest-tossed ship, and he felt heavy, as though the ground were pulling him to it. C’mere, Dommy. He fell, lay on the pavement, and pushed himself up again, staggering like a drunk on his way home. His head spun, his body ached, and things seemed blurry, like half-formed images glimpsed underwater.
It was the light blue hour before dawn and Dom was…somewhere. He should have recognized the stores and street signs around him, but he didn’t. His head felt like it was stuffed with cotton, and a sense of confusion gripped him so strongly that he was beginning to panic. Where was he? What happened?
The world spun away again and the next thing he knew, he was lying in a heap of garbage bags, used needles, and rubbish. He came awake with a jerk and sat up so fast that a bolt of pain jammed into his skull. He winced and pressed his hand to his forehead. He felt hot, clammy.
Something was seriously wrong.
Somehow he got to his feet again and started walking. The sun was up now and the streets were filled with people. They all sneered in disgust as he passed, and he wrapped his arms around his chest like a baby comforting itself. He was getting cold. His muscles were sore. Tears streamed down his face and he wanted to cry.
Going on instinct alone, Dom made his way back home and climbed the steps to his apartment. Exhaustion swept over him and he sagged against the door as he dug in his pocket for the keys. They shook in his hand and he had to focus really hard to get the key into the lock.
Inside, he collapsed onto the couch and his eyelids instantly drooped. He was so weary that he couldn’t lift his head, couldn’t form a single coherent thought. Dom felt himself starting to sink, and snapped his eyes open with a start. Something in his soul told him that if he slept, he would die.
He couldn’t help it, though. He was falling, tumbling, hands reaching up from hell to grab him. His eyes fluttered closed again and the world started to go dark, his heart slamming in fear. He tried to fight, but the pull of darkness was too strong, too alluring. Why was he fighting? Why not just…give up? Hadn’t he thought of killing himself before? Didn’t he hate his life and himself? What was there to fight for? A wife? Kids? A community that loved and respected him? Shit, affordable groceries?
No.
There was nothing.
He had nothing and was nothing.
A sense of peace blossomed from the darkness, and suddenly death didn’t seem so scary. In fact, it was warm…inviting.
It was life that was cold and hateful. Not death.
Death accepted you no matter who you were. It didn’t reject you…it didn’t ignore you. If you sought it, you would find it, and if you embraced it, it would embrace you.
With that thought in mind, Dom gave up.
And died.
***
Bruce Kenner, captain of the 5th Albany precinct, sat behind his desk on the morning of June 28 and lazily leafed through a stack of files as he sipped from a mug of coffee. A roughly built man with a dark goatee and graying blonde hair, he looked more like a small town southern sheriff than a low level public works functionary. In fact, he tended to act like it too. He liked to hunt, fish, and drink beer on his off time. Albany wasn’t a big city, but it was big enough that you never got a fucking break. Run here, run there, arrest this asshole, investigate that asshole. By the time Friday rolled around, he was so ready for the peace and tranquility of a fishing trip he could taste it.
Already this Monday morning, he was looking forward to another one.
Over the weekend, three kids went missing in the Pine Hills and Washington Park area, bringing the total for that summer up to eight. All were teenagers, all were troubled. Most were boys, but two were girls.
Troubled kids run away all the time. They might be gone a few days, sulking at a friend’s house over something their father or mother did, but they’d eventually come home. None of these kids had come back yet and from what he knew, a few of them weren’t the runaway types. They were shits at school and caused problems, but they had no reason to up and leave. Hell, Bruce himself raised hell as a kid, but he always found his way back home, even if he spent the previous night dying in a field from Mad Dogg 20/20 poisoning.
One or two kids going missing…okay, it happens. Eight? Over a span of four weeks?
Yeah, something was wrong here.
But what?
There was nothing on any of these kids. No one saw them, no one knew anything - one minute they were here, the next they weren’t. What could he or anyone else do with that?. The public broke cops’ balls all the time, but if you don’t have evidence, you don’t have evidence. What do you want? Door to door searches? Roadblocks? Dogs and helicopters? Yeah, then when you actually do it, they cry fascism. Guess I’ll just use my Spidey Senses.
Bruce wished he had spidey senses. He wanted to find these kids as much as anyone, and he was starting to get pissed off that he couldn’t. He took another sip from his mug and read on. The latest kids to go missing were three boys between the ages of fourteen and eighteen.
They were all white, all thin (except for one). If there was a serial killer in town - and Bruce hoped to fuck there wasn’t - he had a type. What, black kids aren’t good enough to kill, cannibalize, and wear like a skin suit? They should charge him with a hate crime for discrimination.
That way he’d actually stay locked up.
The door opened and Vanessa Rodregiez, his deputy, came in. A tall, shapely Hispanic woman with dark eyes and a mouth poised always on the edge of a smile, she wore her black hair in a ponytail that would look stern and severe on anyone else, but on her, looked childlike. She was twenty-seven and had been on the force for three years, but you could be forgiven for thinking her much younger. “Bright and early, I see,” she said with a grin.
Bruce grumbled.
Vanessa held down the fort during the graveyard shift, acting to the night as he acted to the day. She was young and full of energy, which clashed with Bruce, who was old and just wanted to be left alone. Despite their differences, Bruce loved her like a kid sister…an annoying kid sister he wanted to throat punch sometimes.
“You missed all the fun last night,” she said and parked her butt on the edge of Bruce’s desk. He glared at her, but she ignored him.
“Good,” he said. Then: “What happened?”
“Big fight outside of Club Vlad,” she said. “It looked like a WorldStar video.”
For a moment, Bruce was lost. “Club what?”
“Club Vlad,” Vanessa said. “Where the Fuze Box used to be.”
Ah, right. The Fuze Box was an Albany landmark, a night club for punks…or goths…or someone. Certainly not for Bruce Kenner. It was small, dingy, and always had people in black waiting outside. On Friday and Saturday nights, it blasted strange music with lyrics about fighting The Man. Kids had been fighting the Man since before Bruce was even born and they hadn’t beaten him yet. Kudos to them for still trying.
Last year, The Fuze Box closed down and someone else bought it. It reopened last month and looked more or less the same: Posers, shitty music, and spiked hair. So much spiked hair. “Place is still a pain in the ass,” Bruce said.
“Yep,” Vanessa chirped. “It doesn’t know what it wants to be now. One minute they play nightcore, the next EDM. It’s all over the place.”
Bruce raised a quizzical brow.
“Not that I’ve ever been there in my free time,” Vanessa said in a tone that suggested she had,
Bruce gave a judgemental hum.
“Anyway,” Vanessa went on, “you see we have some new missing persons?”
Sighing, Bruce sat back in his chair. “Yeah. I did.”
“People are starting to ask questions,” Vanessa warned.
That brought a terse smile to Bruce’s weathered face. “Maybe they’ll solve it then.”
“Ha, fat chance,” Vanessa said. She got up and stretched. “Anyway, I’m bushed. Here’s my…” she trailed off and looked at her empty hands. “Damn, where’s my report? I just had it?” She turned in a confused circle as if she might be able to spot her report making a break for it. “Huh,” she said. She left the office and came back a moment later holding a folder. “Found it,” she grinned.
Bruce just looked at her.
“Um…here it is.”
He didn’t take it.
Her smile faltered. She carefully sat it on top of the files Bruce was looking at.
And his hands.
“I’ll just leave that right here.” She patted it for good measure.
“Thank you,” Bruce said.
“Okay. Night.”
“Goodnight,” Bruce said as she left through a shaft of morning sunlight. Alone, Bruce sat her report aside and went back to the missing kids. This case was giving him a headache and it wasn’t even nine. With a deep sigh, he slumped back in his chair and drummed his fingers on the armrests.
Was it Saturday yet?
He could really use a fishing trip.
***
Dom came awake in the cold purple twilight with a shocked gasp like a man coming up seconds before drowning. His eyes strained from his sweaty face and his mouth hung slack, twisted in a gruesome parody of The Scream. His mind was muddled, murky - he didn’t know where he was or even who he was, but he knew this,.
He couldn’t breathe.
He opened and closed his mouth like a fish, but his lungs did not fill with air. A great, unseen weight seemed to bear down on his chest, and panic gripped him. He tried to move, but his arms refused to heed his brain’s command. The weight seemed heavier, all over, crushing him like a bug. Confusion filled him and he started to pant.
Without warning, his bowels and bladder loosened, and horrible wetness filled his pants. He tried to sit up, but his body felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. His chest rose and fell with the frantic labor of his breath, but his lungs remained inert. A cry of fear bubbled up inside of him, but escaped his mouth only as a breathy groan.
A bust of adrenaline shot through him and he tried to stand, but succeeded only in falling off the couch instead, landing face first against the cold tile floor. He felt his nose crunch, but the pain was muted.
Dom thought he lost consciousness after that, but wasn’t sure. His next memory was of shivering so violently that his teeth clacked together. A phantom chill - perhaps from the floor - had settled into his bones, and was colder than he had ever been in his life, colder even than the time he fell into a snowbank and got lost when he was two. Shudders racked his body, and though he tried to turn over, he was too fucking heavy. It was like every muscle in his body had turned to dead weight. Fragmented thoughts swirled in his head, faint colors in the dark, but he couldn’t put any of them together.
With great effort, he managed to push himself slightly up, but a wave of lightheadedness crashed over him and he lowered his head once more. He stopped trying and simply lay there. Shortly, his eyes began to burn and he realized that he wasn’t blinking. Jesus Christ, he wasn’t blinking.
For some strange reason, that brought a fresh bout of panic. He started to hyperventilate, but his lungs still wouldn’t work. He wasn’t blinking…he wasn’t breathing…what was happening to him?
A whimper burst from his throat and he started to cry.
He must have cried himself to sleep, because he woke sometime later to the most intense headache he’d ever had. It felt like something was eating his brain from the inside out. He was sore all over, and could feel his muscles twitching, as though a thousand living things were burrowing through his body. A cramp shot down his right leg, and the toes of his left foot curled involuntarily. Slowly, his jaw clenched closed, and the muscles in his neck began to strain…then to burn. His panic turned to terror, and Dom wiggled across the floor like a worm, his limbs screaming in red agony and his brain filling with heat. He somehow wound up on his right side, and his arms curled slowly up to his chest, crossing at the wrists like a mummy. He tried to pull them apart, but the slightest movement sent waves of excruciating pain cutting through his body. His knees began to draw up to his stomach, and his fingers clenched tightly.
Cramps and spasms attacked every muscle in his body. He screamed through his teeth and shook, resembling a man in the electric chair as 40,000 volts of justice coursed through him. The pain grew gradually, getting worse and worse as minutes ticked by like hours. Higher, higher, higher - he clenched his eyes closed and shrieked as it became unbearable. Disjointed thoughts flashed through his mind - prayers, threats, curses, Jesus fucking…FUCK.
What was happening? God, what was happening to him? Was it fentanyl? He’d seen videos of people high on fentanyl, and they leaned in weird positions. He didn’t do drugs but maybe he ingested it somehow.
His panic may have returned if all of his muscles hadn’t picked that moment to contract as one. His eyes bulged from their sockets and his jaw unclenched just enough for him to utter a high. Agonized scream that echoed through his empty apartment like thunder.
A human being can only take so much before giving out. When the pain reached a crescendo, and Dom mercifully sank into consciousness once more. The sun rose and cascaded through the apartment’s sole window, falling over his huddled form. Slowly, it tracked across the sky before setting again. As the last rays disappeared behind the horizon, Dom’s eyes opened. The pain of the night before was blessedly gone, replaced by a feeling of numbness - the cool ash after the hot fire. His thoughts were slow and thick like molasses, but he could actually think again. Nightmare memories flooded back to him, but he wasn’t sure they were real. He was lying on his side, his arms wrapped around his chest as if for warmth, and his teeth lightly chattered against the icy chill. He was so cold that he didn’t want to move, but he couldn’t stay here forever. He needed help. He needed…
A shower.
Yeah, a hot shower. That would warm him up.
Gritting his teeth, he slowly sat up, ready for a burst of pain.
But none came.
He did, however, feel heavy. Getting to his feet, he stumbled and nearly fell, catching himself against the counter. His limbs had no feeling. It’s like they weren’t even there. Head hung, Dom tried to catch his breath, but it felt like he wasn’t breathing at all. His eyelids drooped closed and he felt like he was going to fall down. Summoning all the might he could, he shuffled into the bathroom with the stiff gait of an old man. He snapped the light on, and cold, white brilliance filled the space, blinding him.
Leaning heavily against the sink, he gripped the cold porcelain. Suddenly, he was afraid of looking into the mirror. He was sure that whatever reflection he saw, it would be of something else, something monstrous.
Dom lifted his head and faced the glass.
His heart shrank.
The man in the mirror was him but different. His skin was white as milk, lacking all color whatsoever save for the ugly purple patch on the left side. IResembling a giant bruise, it started at the temple and extended down to the slope of his neck, disappearing beneath his T-shirt. He gingerly lifted the shirt, and moaned when he saw that his entire left side was discolored, the purple edged with a puffy shade of pink. His sallow skin clung tight to his ribcage, and his hip bones stuck out so much it looked painful. Back in the mirror, his cheeks were sunken, hollow, and his eyes were a hazy, dishwater gray. His skull seemed bigger, his hair longer. Dom wanted to whip his head away from the phantom before him, to never see it again, but he was transfixed.
There was no way that thing was -
Dom looked away, cutting that thought off before it could finish.
A shower.
He needed a shower.
Slowly, stiffly, Dom undressed, peeling off his shirt and his soiled pants. He dropped them in a heap on the floor and stepped under the spray. He could feel the water pounding against him, but it provided no heat. It was neither hot nor cold. It was simply there.
Dom pressed his head to the slick shower wall and stood there for a long time. He was spent, tired, and fried - he had no more emotions left to give. He got out after a little while, dried off, and put on a clean pair of shorts. He settled into bed and lay there with his hands folded over his chest and his eyes open. They felt gritty, dry. His stomach felt bloated, gassy. He was drowsy now, the weight of the past two days (or was it two weeks?) coming down on him all at once. He closed his eyes and fell asleep.
He was still asleep - but aware - when the knocking on his door started the next morning. Time was funny in this state of being, fast and jerky but also slow and echoing. Keys rattled the knob turned. The landlord came in with a cop. They saw him on the bed, laid out like a corpse for a viewing, and the cop radioed in a code 35. Soon, cops were all around him, making noise and touching things. He had the vague sense of discomfort and embarrassment at the intrusion. A baling man in a suit stood over him, a cop who looked like a redneck beside him. “He didn’t die here,” the medical examiner said.
The cop looked at him questioningly. Dom caught the name KENNER on his name tag.
“See this?” the M.E. said and gestured to Dom’s face. “That’s livor mortis. When you die, your blood pools at the lowest point. If you’re on your left side, for example, it pools on the left.”
Kenner looked at Dom and then back to the M.E. “Someone moved him?”
“Looks like it,” the M.E. said.
“When did he die?”
The M.E. examined Dom as though he were nothing more than a side of beef. “At a glance? Three days. I won’t have a better answer until I open him up.”
Dom was still awake when they put him into a body bag and zipped it up. He felt a stirring of fear beneath the cold numbness, but he was too tired to worry about it now.
Later, he thought.
He would panic later.
For now, Dom slept.